Chapter I. Racial Aesthetics

The time of the virtuosi seems to be nearing an end. We have grown tired of repeatedly allowing ourselves to be merely allured and bedazzled. We have had enough of the nervous showmanship of recent decades. We hate the technical display of everything which is called art. We feel that the period of intellectualism as a phenomenon which arrogated to itself the possession of cultural validity, lies in its death throes. We believe that the prophets who announce it as the wave of the future—as the ultimate end of our European culture—are already spokesmen of an obsolete past. These men, inwardly exhausted, had already lost their faith before they thought and wrote. Therefore, their philosophy and their view of history must also end in unbelief. Death and material power greedily consume their works. The weak are broken, while the strong feel their faith, and resistance grows.

The retreat from theoretical materialism in science and art can be regarded as inwardly completed. The pendulum is already swinging in the opposite direction. The direction of our spirit begins—in contrast to both currents—gradually to become clear again.

The time of the aesthetes with their prolific works is here. Revisionist and culturally and racially superior works are being produced. The intellectual power of these works is overwhelming. The great literature of the past is being revived. Alien works of past and present are being rejected. The general public honours Schiller, Kant and Schopenhauer. Still, there are limitations to their works. We are cautious of these not because we fail to find the profoundest thoughts in their works, but because we can no longer use them in their entirety for the study of art. Their limitations are clear. They look only to Greek art for inspiration, and they all speak of the possibility of a universal aesthetics. If they would accept the fact of racial differences in art, then on their theoretical thought—the thought which we describe as the philosophy of the 18th century—we would have an acceptable base on which to build. Their thought could seize the art products of their own peoples. This contradiction between philosophical theory and concrete practice is present in Goethe, Schiller and Schopenhauer. The great fault of all 19th century aesthetics was that it was not likened to the works of the artists; it merely dissected works of art. The philosophers did not discern that Goethe’s admiration of the Asiatic Laokoon was one thing, and Faust’s Nordic deeds something fundamentally quite different. Goethe’s Nordic instinct was strong, but he fell into the trap of believing that the Hellenes were artistically superior to the Nordic art forms.

The starting point of the aesthetics of dissection was a false one, for it failed to rationalise a philosophy of art. The 19th century aesthetics has not awakened a lucid Nordic racial consciousness. Nor has it given us a sense of direction. What it has given us is Greek—most often late, corrupted Greek—art as a standard for European art.

Much was made of an aesthetics and a philosophy of history for the allegedly superior orient. Eventually, we rejected the orient as a concept, as we realised that these peoples had conflicting, often mutually exclusive, cultures and art. Today, it has become modern to speak again of the west. We can speak of the west much more easily than we can speak of the orient. However, more emphasis must be placed on the role of the Nordic races here.

Heretofore, those philosophers who have written about the aesthetic condition, or the establishing of values in art, have bypassed the fact of a racial ideal of beauty. This ideal relates to the physical appearance of the racial types and to the race’s supreme value. In this respect it is evident that if the nature of art is to be discussed, then the pure physical representation, for example, of a Greek, must have a different effect upon us than, for instance, the portrait of a Chinese emperor. Every outline receives a different function in China than in Hellas and, without which, recognition of the racially conditioned formative will be neither interpreted nor aesthetically enjoyed. Every work of art has a spiritual content. Along with its formal treatment, this can only be understood on the basis of different race souls. Our former aesthetics are thus—in spite of much that is individually correct—to be regarded as operating entirely in a vacuum. In this respect the native and truly conscious artist has always proceeded in a racially formative way, and has outwardly embodied truly spiritual qualities through the utilisation of those racial types which surrounded him and which have become bearers of certain racial peculiarities. However much Hellas appears related to us in so many things, the Greek had a sense of things that is entirely different from our own Teutonic thought—or from the Roman or the Indian. This pattern of thought determined the rhythm of his life. This was an aesthetic value. Beauty was the measure of Hellenic life in the symposium. Beauty was the all motivating theme of the Iliad. The Greek search for beauty continued long after the decline of the world of the polis. So strong was its search that when a poor disintegrated Greece faced a Roman general whose presence awoke a remembrance of its own former ancestors, Titus Quinctius Flamininus was treated, because of his dignity and beauty, as a national hero. Athens celebrated him as one of its own great men. This was a mark of the profound Greek longing for the heights of life, even during decline. If we wish to understand Hellas, we temporarily ignore our own supreme value—character. A truly beautiful person could be honoured after his death as a demigod in Hellas. Even the half Greek Egestans erected a monument to the man held to be the most beautiful Greek in the struggle against the Carthaginians and made sacrifices to him. Sometimes the Hellenes spared an opponent if he impressed them with his beauty. For such beauty seemed to them to be a share of divinity, godlikeness. Plutarchos has left us a touching tale of such worship of beauty. Even the Persian general Masistios, killed by the Greeks, was, after his beauty had been observed, carried around by the Greek warriors for general admiration. The Greeks said of Xerxes that his beauty justified him on all counts as the ruler of his people. Outward appearance was—in spite of many bad experiences—regarded as the reflection of a noble soul. For the Greek the hero was always beautiful, and this meant that he was of a racial type.

The Greek as hero appears, for example, in almost the same shape, not only in Hellenic plastic art but also in petty art such as vase painting. With his slim body, the hero simultaneously provides the type of ideal modern beauty, although in his profile the Greek is more gently formed than the later Teuton. Alongside great Hellenic art, one must study the vase paintings of Exikias, Klitias, Nikosthenes, to observe how these show, for example:

Ajax and Achilles at the games

Castor with his horse

the Hydras of Charitaios with the Amazons

the blond wife of Euphronios on the Orpheus dish which is particularly reminiscent of Gretchen

the magnificent Aphrodite with the goose

the Neapolitan crater of Aristophanes and Ergines,

and so on. On thousands of vases and craters we find a constantly recurring racial type which changes only a little here and there, and clearly attests to the beauty and greatness of the Greeks and their excitement at what was heroic, beautiful and great. But a conscious racial contrast exists alongside this: for example, in the representation of Silenus, of satyrs and centaurs. Thus the (Inselionic) Phineus bowl contains three embodiments of masculine lewdness with all its attributes. The heads of the three are round and pudgy, the foreheads swollen as if with dropsy, the noses short and snubby, the lips puffy. This is exactly how Andokides describes Silenus, portraying him as hairy with a long beard and, in the profile drawing, the thick fleshy neck was also visible. The same type appears brilliantly represented by Kleophrades whose truly Greek Bacchante provides in figure and skull line a completely conscious spiritual racial antithesis. Nikosthenes likewise portrays the wineskin carrying Silenus as a virtual half animal, half idiot caricature, while Euphronios has left behind a Silenus dish which ideally represents the snubnosed, hairy negroid eastern racial type. Evident, then, are these two great opposites; the slim, powerful, aristocratic Hellene, and the short stunted bestial Silenus who unquestionably belongs to the race subjected by the Greeks or to the types of imported slaves.

With increasing infiltration of Asiatic blood, figures also appear in painting which at twenty paces distance are to be recognised as Semitic and Jewish. A bowl of the Eos master, for example, shows us a Semitic trader with a sack on his back, while on the early lower Italian Phineus crater, a harpy is represented so that its head and hand motions can be admired in nature on the Kurfurstendamm today.

On thousands of vases and art objects ranging from Asia Minor to the wall paintings of Pompeii, the fact can be proved that, over the course of eight centuries, the consciously willed artistic and aesthetic impression of a hero or an ardently possessed man is conceived and represented racially. With the progressive bastardising of the Greeks, human misshapen figures appear with spongy limbs and ill shaped heads. The racial chaos of a period of progressive democratisation goes hand in hand with artistic decline. No longer did a soul exist which could express itself. There is no longer a type which embodies the soul. Henceforth we find merely the man of Hellenism, a creature who can have neither aesthetic effect nor an inspirational one, because the race soul, style forming, of the Hellenes had died. Things degenerated to such a point that the blond haired Achaeans of Pindar formed something unique in the Mediterranean. From the beginning of the 5th century the treatise Physiognomika, by Admantios, said of the Hellenes that

They were particularly tall in stature, with firm white skin, and had well formed feet and hands, powerful of neck, with brown hair which was gently and softly waved. They had square faces, fine lips, straight noses and powerful eyes with a powerful glittering gaze. They were a people with the most beautiful eyes in the world.

Homeros and his creations were also Nordically conditioned like those in the plastic art of Greece. Telemachos tore himself away from his mother, the blue eyed daughter of Zeus who sent him a favourable sailing wind. When Menelaus’s destiny is foretold to him, he is prophesied a godlike life which will lead him to the ends of the earth, to the Elysian fields where the hero Rhadamanthos the Bold dwells. Only with a head of golden locks could Hölderlin picture the genius of Greece. Homeros, as a man conscious of his being a master, avows:

For the resolute man always conducts best to a conclusion

Every work, even if he approaches from afar as a stranger.

However, Thersites, a hostile, misshapen traitor, appeared to confront the blind hero. Clearly Thersites was the embodiment of the hither Asiatic spies in the Greek army. These traitors were the forerunners of our Berlin and Frankfurt pacifists. Homeros described the brothers of Thersites, the Phoenicians, as:

Swindlers, bringing with them countless trinkets in a dark ship.

Thus, Homeros created racial spiritual art and, at the same time, gave birth to those images which were later set up in honour of the blue eyed daughter of Zeus. He guided the brush of painters and gave a racial form to the alien antihero.

Silenus is not a characteristically depicted thickset figure, as our art historians attempt to persuade us, but the plastic representation of the peculiarities of an alien race soul as this appeared to the Greeks. The emergence of the later phallic cult and the debauched Bacchic festivals demonstrated the late Dionysian disintegration. This was caused by the emergence of the racially eastern oriental types who had, heretofore, been regarded as dull and limited.

This adjustment of racial type is seen in the elephantine strength of Sokrates. Platon glorified the hair splitter. In the Platonic dialogues Sokrates declared that a written paper roll could entice him away from the most beautiful natural surroundings. In the midst of the extroverted Grecian worldview, this was an admission of the dullest pedantry, yet Sokrates was an example of the spiritual racial strength of genius. However strong his moral philosophy was, Sokrates still failed in the field of aesthetics because of his insistence on universalism. In the devout and beautiful Greek life of old, struggle seemed to be an eternal natural law to the Hellenes in which Pallas Athena herself served. A new epoch of Greek history did not begin with Sokrates, but with him a completely different man entered Hellenic life. Admittedly, he inherited the sacred traditions of Athens, of Homeros, of the tragedians, of Perikles and the builders of the Acropolis. Admittedly, he took part himself as a soldier in the struggles for political power, but, nevertheless, Sokrates is the ungenial—although noble—brave man of another non Greek race. He lived in a time when Athens had embarked on false paths, wherein its once aristocratic democracy in which only Greeks, never foreigners, could participate, had begun its slide down into the abyss of chaos. Under the tyranny of the demagogues the great Alkibiades was banished and the entire Athenian army perished before Syracuse, and almost all other conquests were lost. The triumphant aristocrats then made the democrats drink poison by the hundreds. Later, they met the same fate themselves. Aristophanes mocked ancient tradition. The new teachers, Gorgias, Protagoras, and so on, took pride in the new, naked, beautiful forms. Then the alien man, characterised a thousand times in Greek literature, stepped to the fore. The new alien race unfolded its degenerate values, shaping Greek culture. The Greek values of sobriety and heroism were replaced. Sokrates substituted dialectics for substance, the ugly for the beautiful, and academic discussion for heroism. Beyond this, he sought the good in itself, preached the community of the good, and gathered around him a disputing new Greek generation.

Once Perikles, as lord of Athens, had to beg the court for its indulgence in granting civil rights to his son born of his foreign wife. This was granted him in an exceptional case. This strict racial law, made under Perikles himself, vanished with the progressive impoverishment of the blood of Athens. But it was Sokrates, the non Greek, who, in a time of decomposition, gave it a death blow. The idea of a community of the good resulted in a new human classification, not according to races and peoples, but according to individual man. With the collapse of Athenian racial democracy, Sokrates became the international social democrat of his day. His personal courage and cleverness gave his racially destructive teaching its self advertising blessing. It was his disciple, Antithenes, the son of a hither Asiatic slave woman, who then drew so many conclusions from Sokrates’s ideas and ventured forth to preach the destruction of all barriers between races and peoples in the name of human progress.

It was because of Platon that Sokrates was immortalised, and is, even today, honoured by armchair great men. Greek genius must recognise Platon as the man who, in the midst of a great decomposition, represented sober prudence. He loved this man, Sokrates, and so created an eternal monument for him. Platon placed the words of his own soul in the mouth of Sokrates. Thus, the true Sokrates vanished from the world. Only a few passages in Platon truly refer to him. In the Phaedon, for example, Platon relates that Sokrates had admitted that he possessed no aptitude for investigation of organic events. The true nature of things for Sokrates therefore consisted ultimately not in their investigation by observation, but in our thinking about them. One should not ruin one’s eyes by viewing things to excess. If man wishes to discover whether the earth is flat or round then it does not suit him to carry on research. Rather, he should ask: What does reason say of this? Is it rational to conceive the earth as the centre of the universe? While Platon certainly invented this passage, it fits the same Sokrates who turned his gaze away from a racially beautiful Greece in order to talk of a universal abstract mankind, a brotherhood of the good. Here he turned away from the sun of observation to look at the shadows of dogma. As the Jewish dogma has corrupted religion, so Platon’s scientific method, hostile to life, has corrupted European philosophy. Aristoteles was its systematic diffuser, and Hegel its last great pupil. Logic is the science of god, said Hegel. These words are an affront to a truly Nordic religion. It is the antithesis of all that is truly German and all that was truly Greek. These words are truly Socratic. It is not surprising therefore that university professors have canonised Hegel along with Sokrates.

Beauty of soul and beauty of physical appearance certainly do not always coincide. But with Sokrates this was the case. Through an environment where Eros and the Nordic racial beauty of blond Aphrodite ruled, passed the same ideal of beauty, forming and shaping the real Greek world. The ideal was always the slim, white skinned and blond creature—from Dionys of Euripides to the dear little blond heads in Aristophanes’s The birds. In the midst of all this, the uncouth type of the satyr appears like the symbol of what is alien. In the new, Asiatic Greek world, beauty vanished. The ugly and all that is repellent to the eye replaced natural beauty in later Greek art. The preaching of the rational good was the parallel phenomenon of Greek racial and spiritual disintegration. The philosophical good then destroyed the racial good as the idea of beauty. Heroic ideas no longer supported the state and social life. The greatest symbol of this new, hostile, racially unconscious chaotic group—the antithesis of the Hellenic racial soul—was Sokrates.

Viewed from this aspect of historical development, such a genius as Platon appears to have squandered his entire spirit on this man and presents him with immortality. Platon was essentially an aristocrat, an Olympian fighter, a formative artist, and a profound thinker. At the end of his life he wished to save his people racially by enacting a powerful constitution. None of this was Socratic; it was the last great flowering of the Hellenic spirit. Praxiteles later formulated a protest against all Socraticism. This was the swansong of Nordic Greek racial beauty. In art this was paralleled by the creation of the magnificent Nike of Samothrace. But Sokrates remained a symbol of decline. Hellas disappeared in racial chaos. In place of the proud Athenians the universally despised hither Asians populated the provinces. The Greeks allowed these characterless racial inferiors to educate them. They drove the true Greeks away when they tired of them.

Sokrates triumphed while Hellas perished. Healthy human understanding had destroyed genius in one last great hour. What was ugly became the norm; true beauty was only the good.

When Sokrates stood before his judges, he said: Athens has never had a greater servant than I. The humility and modesty of the messenger of the gods—as he called himself—nevertheless had its other side. Sokrates knew that Greece was disintegrating.

From the same spirit as Sokrates once embodied, the western aesthetes of a humanistic late period was also born. Like Sokrates, they looked for the man, not the Greek or the Teuton, not the Jew or Chinese. They discovered so called universal laws and preached of an aesthetic mood and contemplation because the originators of these ideas had lost every sensitivity for the spiritually racial will. In their enthusiasm for the Acropolis, our classicists forgot that here they were dealing with one side of Nordic man. Greek Nordic man was not necessarily the present Nordic German man. Where the Greek Nordic man viewed things formally and created separate works of plastic art, the Nordic Teuton created forcefulness of soul and richness of reference. Where the Greek turned racially heroic motion into rest, the later Nordic brother, driven by another formative will, transformed inertia into movement. Where the Greek generalised, the Gothic and the Romantic man personified. The delightful, rustling lines of the three women on the gable of the Parthenon and the Nike of Samothrace nevertheless strike a special chord within us. The profound impression is with us today because we are witness to a spiritually racial relationship laid bare. If the theoreticians of the 18th and 19th centuries had become conscious of this fact, they would not have admired the formally competent but boring Lao Tse. He would not be the starting point of a universal aesthetics. They would not have made the formal aspect of the Parthenon into a measure of absolute judgement for art. They have even overlooked what was full bloodedly created in Hellas. As a result, the artistically spiritual evaluation of both Greek and Nordic European art was falsified. So even today we see the figures of Hellas and Germania in false perspective.

Only for aesthetes who carry on aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics and not for the sake of art and of life, is a line nothing other than a line, mere ornamentation. But for every artist it is—consciously or subconsciously—function, the carrier of an achievement. It is linked to a definite material. In mankind, the various racial types are the embodiment of definite spiritual essences which condition, spiritually and racially, the coloured linear totality describing them. When Velasquez wished to make a contrast to a tiny blond haired Infanta, he placed alongside her a female dwarf, that is, one of those bastard types with which Spain is overpopulated. Everything stunted and slavish on earth is perpetuated for eternity in art from Velasquez to Zuloaga in these wretched squint eyed cripples. Sancho Pancha is the racial type of the purely dark eastern man—superstitious, incapable of culture, unimaginative, materialistic. Such a type of man is loyal up to a certain point, but mostly he is merely subservient. Sancho is not a fat man, but a concentrated racially spiritual entity. These masters also distort, in a tragically comic way, our Nordic knights. Such mockery, under an alien sun, is a convulsive excess. Even today, in the ancient aristocratic circles of Castile, Nordic skin is held to be a sign of noble ancestry.

The contours of the Greek Silenus correspond to the drawing of the Spanish Sancho and the Spanish dwarfs. Beyond this we find the carriers of the same stunted spiritual nature given similar shape all over Europe.

The peoples of the west are a consequence of racial mixtures and inferior systems of political education. Each of them, however, has received what is essential in formative state powers from the Nordic stratum, and, as a result, received the formative powers of the entire culture. Linked very closely with this fact is the determining Nordic ideal of beauty which often has great effect in regions where the Nordic blood has since almost completely been vanquished. The idea of the hero throughout the whole of Europe is to be equated with a tall slim figure, with bright flashing eyes, high forehead, with powerful, but not excessive, muscles. An image of the hero linked with an undersized, broad shouldered, bow legged, thick necked and low foreheaded man represents an impossibility even when types like Ebert have floated to the surface of life.

As we move to the post Roman period, we find the racial art motif again. If one looks at the heads of the Staufer kings, the memorial at Magdeburg, the head of Heinrich II, one sees racial soul art. Witness, again, the way in which Rethel represents the face of Charlemagne and the Frankian king’s enemy Widukind. One reads what ancient France has to say about Roland, what Wolfram relates about Parsifal, and he knows that these works represent, inwardly and outwardly, a close interweaving of the spiritual and racial. Again and again we see the Nordic racial form expressed as great art. However, a change in the type of hero as a form can be established. Earlier, the hero had personality and led his people into battle. The real person thus became a symbol in so doing. Today, another new dynamic has developed; the will of the great leader directs millions from the centre. Accordingly, in art forms, the head alone is drawn into prominent position. This representation symbolically shows what is significant, what is essential, for Germanic man. The forehead, nose, eyes, teeth and chin all become bearers of the will, of the direction of ideas. The movement from the static to the dynamic is discernible here. At this point, Nordic western art separates from the Greek ideal.

Schiller once wrote:

In plain words, man plays only where he is man in the full meaning of the term, and he is only a complete man where he plays .....

The unity of the material compulsion of natural laws and the spiritual coercion of moral laws brought two heretofore diverse worlds together, and, of this combination the first true freedom was born. Animated by this spirit, the new art forms extinguished the features of the old ideal. Simultaneously, the will emerged. The new form rests in itself, a completely closed creation unfolding as if it were from beyond, from space, without investigation, without resistance.

Beauty, conditioned by type, as an external static of the Nordic race is what is Grecian, while the racially peculiar beauty as an inner dynamic is the spiritual adjustment of the Nordic west. The face of Perikles and the head of Frederick the Great are but two symbols signifying the breadth of race soul—of a racial ideal of beauty.

It is shameful, but nevertheless a fact, that while there are numerous aesthetics, the unavoidable prerequisites of aesthetics in general, the representation of the development of racial ideals of beauty, has not yet been written. Outlines in this respect are so far to be found only in H. F. K. Günther’s Rassenkunde, and in Schultze Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse. Laymen, scholars of art, indeed artists themselves pass through the galleries without truly seeing anything. They read European and Chinese poems equally without seeing the true essence of either art form, because they seek only universal laws. Nonetheless, and without recognition, the Nordic soul soars upwards. To experience this feeling one needs only to cast his gaze at one of the most dignified works of European painting, such as the Eyck Triptych with the singing children. The Eycks repeat again and again and again the same ideal picture of Nordic man, from draft form to the soaring heights of their later works. Their work in inner form is the equal to our racial soul. The beautiful Nordic racial types are examples of Germanic racial beauty in its purest form. The Nordic ideal of man shows a deeply furrowed, manly countenance like the face of god. A similar spirit is shown in the Eyck heads in the Berlin museum. And, in reaching into the same depths, one sees that the god, through whom Michael Angelo awakens Adam, is the same head of god seen in the Van Eyck work, although Michael Angelo could not have had the slightest inkling of the Eyck creation. The same head appears—even if altered through spiritual tension—on the figure of Moses trembling with rage. To represent figures of high power was possible to the Netherlander as well as the Italian only if they used the Nordic ideal. Neither Jan van Eyck nor Michael Angelo could embody their ideal of nobility, strength and dignity through a face of Jewish race. One only has to imagine a face with hooked nose, drooping lip, beady black eyes and woolly hair, in order to realise the artistic impossibility of embodying the European god through a Jewish head—let alone through a Jewish figure. This one recognition alone should be sufficient to convince one of the necessity of totally rejecting the inner idea of the god of Jewry which forms its essence with the Jewish exterior. Our soul has been infected by the Jewish spirit in this respect. The means for this were the bible and the church of Rome. With their help, the desert demon became the god of Europe. Whoever opposed this god was burned or poisoned. Western man only saved himself through his art. In picture and in stone he created his own god, in spite of the tragic struggle. To realise an inner beauty in colour and marble, and to place this entire richness in the service of a spirit; to embody a god, indeed, as beauty, only the European artist has been able. One need only look at Michael Angelo’s Sibyls, his Jeremiah, his slaves, his boys or his Lorenzo to encounter the Nordic spiritually racial creed.

Virtually the same ideal of beauty was what guided Titian through his whole life. His Heavenly and earthly love and Venus (Berlin) gave us a type of woman. This is also shown to us in the women on the Parthenon gable who were also the women who once came with the Germanic conquerors over the Alps. Titian’s Flora, his Holy family (Munich) repeat the same language. Giorgione, as a fellow Venetian, created in his Venus a virtual classical work of Nordic female beauty. Palma Vechio, another Venetian, found pleasure in nothing so much as in blonde, blue eyed, tall women, as in his Three sisters in Dresden. This ideal beauty was so strongly stamped that dark women had their hair dyed blonde in order to appear beautiful.

Yet another great Nordic Italian must be mentioned here: Dante. His ideal of beauty is also Germanic conditioned, and finds perhaps its most direct expression in his Stone Canzoni. And when Dante meets King Manfred in purgatory, he writes:

I turned and looked him straight in the face,

Blond he was, beautiful and noble of appearance .....

From here it is only a step to Rubens. He admittedly overemphasised the fleshy, but the structure of his women is nevertheless determined throughout by the Nordic racial type, which, as once in Greece, is placed in contrast to the short, bull necked, low browed, round headed Fauns.

Rembrandt was well versed in the bible, or, more correctly, he read the bible itself little, but studied the Netherlands’ folk’s book, the Trouringh by Jacob Cats. He held to its descriptions on almost all occasions, and believed himself under an obligation to paint many Jewish heads in order to represent the biblical stories correctly. As soon as Rembrandt treated things seriously, he abandoned his interest in the Amsterdam ghetto. The father of The prodigal son (Petersburg) was divested of all Jewish attributes. He is a tall, old, Nordic man with intellectual, kindly hands. The regularity of the Nordic Italian artist was alien to Rembrandt as he did not seek to represent our thinking in atmosphere, tone colour symphonies and mystique. Nevertheless, his Christ in Emmaus (Paris) is likewise of Nordic sensitivity, as are the portraits of His mother (Petersburg). The splendid figure of Danae shows that Rembrandt could not represent true beauty other than as it hovered before the soul of Giorgione. One of the most sensitive portraits by Rembrandt is called Jewish bride, and it is compelling to have to affirm that even here every feature of Jewish beauty is lacking, replaced by robust, yet tender, Nordic feeling.

Raphäel’s portraits not only show manly beautiful, powerful figures, as our philosophers of art have assured us, but they are embodiments of the same Nordic race soul that we see in the youthful self portrait by Raphäel. A keen observer has correctly remarked that the Jesus child of the Sistine Madonna is frankly heroic in gaze and posture (Wölfflin). That is aptly expressed except that the fundamental ground is lacking as to why the apparent Jewish family had an heroic look to it. Here, only composition and colour distribution, not inwardness and dedication, are determining. These are the prerequisites to the success of a formative will, once again, the racial ideal of beauty. To see in place of the blond haired, light skinned Jesus child a blue black, woolly haired, brown skinned Jew boy would be an impossibility. Equally, we cannot think of a Jewish Mother of god or saint, even if the latter had the noble face of an Offenbach or Disraeli. The medium of expression of our soul has always been our Nordic racial art. It was the so called Christian churches which first gave us the possibility for such expression. But it must be remarked that, in this respect also, everything great has been realised despite the ancient biblical nature. A following of the old biblical spirit through a literal embodiment in art would have awakened only revulsion and derisive laughter. Had we followed Jewish Roman teachings of racial art types, we would never have had the beautiful Madonna of Holbein in Darmstadt, Raphäel’s women, or Botticelli’s figures.

One can follow these examples through the entire history of western art. Certainly there is often a mixture with other, western Mediterranean, eastern Alpine and Dinaric types, but, again and again, the Nordic racial beauty comes to the fore great and dominant, as the ideal and guiding star. Scarcely one in a thousand among us is shaped completely in accordance with this ideal. The appearance of many often is not in accord with the hereditary picture. The longing, however, which created and shaped, sought always to review itself in the same direction. One needs only to look at the head of Leonardo Da Vinci, at the self portrait of Tintoretto (Paris), the self portrait of the youthful Dürer ..... it is the same racial soul which we see confronting us.

The 19th century shows here, as in all things, a certain interruption since other problems—landscape, and so on—appeared in the foreground. In Germany, Uhde and Gebhard sought to continue in the sense of realisation of Nordic beauty, but they remained embedded in the past. They lacked the thrusting power of genius. Hans von Marées made efforts to adjust to the Greek form and tortured himself. In searching for beauty during his whole life he broke down—not surprising for he was half Jewish. Feuerbach also tried while living in the south. He, too, failed despite his material. The emergence of the city accelerated the work of racial destruction. The night cafes of the asphalt men were turned into studios. Theoretical, bastardised dialectics became the accompanying prayer of more and more new trends. We saw the racial chaos of Germans and Jews. Street families, alienated from nature, appeared on the scene. The result was bastard art.

Vincent van Gogh, a broken man filled with longing, wandered forth to paint. He wished to return to the earth. His Peasant figure at work was really modern, the heart of modern art which neither the Renaissance nor the Dutch school nor the Greeks could have done. He tortured himself for this ideal and vowed that if he had possessed the power earlier, then he would have painted holy figures. These would have been men like the first Christians. Today he would perish with this idea. He painted without thinking. He painted without racial spirit. His insane choices included: cabbages, lettuces, seemingly in order to calm himself down ..... And Vincent painted apple trees, cabbages and paving stones of the streets. Finally he became absolutely insane.

Gaugin sought ideal beauty in the south seas. He painted the race of his black women friends, melancholy nature, leaves rich in colour and the seas. He too was inwardly disintegrated like all of those who travelled the whole world seeking a lost beauty, whether their names be Böcklin, Feuerbach, Van Gogh or Gaugin. Eventually, this generation grew tired of its search and gave itself up to chaos.

Picasso once copied the old masters with the greatest care and painted powerful pictures in between—one of them hangs in Moscow—in order to finally offer his Theory—illustrations in bright and dark coloured clay squares to a directionless public. The journalistic parasites seized greedily upon this new sensation, and grew enthused over a new epoch in art. But what Picasso still shamefacedly concealed behind geometric artifices, appeared openly after the world war with arrogant boldness. The bastard claimed to represent in his bastard miscarriages produced by spiritual syphilis, an infantilism as the expression of the soul. One should study long and attentively, for instance, the Self portraits of such as Kokoschka, in order—when confronted with this art of idiots—to grasp the horrible inner life of it.

An idiotic self portrait of Kokoschka!

Hanns Heinz Ewers tells a short story of a boy who was so unnatural of disposition as to take a special delight in people sick with elephantiasis. Our European intellectuality finds itself in an identical condition today which, through Jewish pens, worships the Kokoschka, Chagalls and Pechsteins as the leaders of the Art of the future. Features of degeneracy are already apparent, as, for instance, with Schwalbach, who risks representing Jesus as flat footed and bow legged. Louis Corinth shows a certain robustness, but this master butcher of the brush also disintegrated into clay corpse coloured bastardy: a Berlin under Syrian influence!

Impressionism, originally carried by strong painting talents, was once the battle cry of an all disintegrating intellectualism. The atomist’s study of the world also atomised colour. Natural science, dulled in understanding, found its outflow in the practitioners and theoreticians of impressionism. The Mythless world also created a Mythless art of sensuality. Men who wished inwardly to escape from this desolation collapsed. Van Gogh is a tragic example of unsatisfied longing gone insane. Gaugin is another tragic example of the attempt to make oneself free of intellectualism. Only those such as Paul Signacs went on painting, unhindered and unconcernedly pasting their colour pieces together.

These men stood helplessly in their present. Their opponents, likewise without misgivings, had their backs to the future. The Homeric destiny which had once been promised to Böcklin had already been decided. To hang the Isle of the dead upon one’s wall today has become an inward impossibility. The play of the nymphs in the waves forces a material upon us which we simply can no longer bear. The women with Grecian blue gowns under the poplars, along the dark stream; Flora striding through the field, the girl harp player on green earth—these are things which signify for us an artistic absurdity.

Böcklin’s powerful originality is as it breaks forth eternally in his many works. But a generation of eclectics who, repelled by the atomistic teachings of the 19th century, looked back at the 16th century, felt Böcklin in his very weakness to be a refuge of German fantasy. The efforts to preserve for us this side of his nature have been of touching loyalty. Excessive fantasy had, however, to a great extent, not mastered life but rather, it galvanised antique models. It has taken hold forcefully and in a deceptive move of the media of representation. Böcklin is most powerful when he abandons allegories. Today, we think with the same lack of appreciation for many classical attempts, just as we wonder at Jacob Burkhardt who, in all seriousness, made art evaluating studies on the basis of imitation of Renaissance buildings of his own day. Such men, who surrounded themselves with furniture and pictures of the great times which represented, in a magical way, the birth of modern man in the Renaissance culture, had not any really great incentive to bring about the rebirth of man. Even if they knew this intuitively, they feared a positive conflict with the impressionist Zeitgeist. They withdrew from life and practised their talent on unfit objects.

The entire tragedy of a Mythless time is also shown in the ensuing decades. Intellectualism was no longer desired. The endless colour dissections were despised. Proper feeling led to a seeking for release, expression and power. The consequence of this great tension was the abortion called expressionism. An entire generation cried out for expression but it had nothing at all to express. It cried out for beauty but it no longer had any ideal of beauty. It wished to reach creativity in life but it had lost every real formative power. Then expressionism became the mode and thus, instead of creating a new force, style forming, the downward trend continued. Inwardly undisciplined, primitive art was swallowed up by a corrupted generation. There was excessive praise of Japan and China, and all serious European Nordic art was attributed to Asia.

Great talents like Cézanne and Hodler were defeated in their struggle for a new style, despite all attempts by their pupils to cling to these two as the standard bearers of a new will, and despite all attempts by literary critics to fabricate intellectual props under the effort.

Thus a beer cellar mysticism alternated with cerebrism, cubism and linear chaos, until people became tired of all this and attempted again—vainly—to escape with the new wave of objectivity.

The essence of all this chaotic development lies in the loss of that supreme ideal of beauty which, in so many forms and strivings, has been the supporting foundation of all European art creation. The democratic, racially destructive, doctrines and the folkish eliminating metropolis united with the deliberate Jewish work of decomposition. The result was that not only ideologies and ideas of state collapsed, but also the art of the Nordic west.

Here we have arrived at one of the profoundest criteria for every study of art, but one which all academic aesthetes have always overlooked; indeed they have hardly suspected it.

Aesthetics is, among other things, concerned with judgements of taste. It demands that a work of art should not only please one man but find universal recognition. The search for this universal law of taste has overheated heads for centuries. As a result, a prerequisite of all polemics has been disregarded: A work of art can only please if it moves within the framework of an organically bounded ideal of beauty. Kant (Kritik der Urteilskraft, page 17), gave the definition that:

Beauty is a form of purposefulness of an object insofar as this is viewed without the idea of its having a purpose.

Here Kant expressed a profound thought, but he drew the mistaken conclusion that one must assume a common aesthetic sense. This aesthetic sense rests on a purely human mode of perceptive powers, that is, on the mental condition, and is universally communicable. With this, Kant deflected his search at a critical moment in a fateful direction. The beauty of the Venus of Giorgione has effect upon us as unconsciously purposeful. Every other truly racial beauty, that is, beauty that is conditioned by an organic soul, has the same effect. As a logical conclusion from the first Kantian perception, we recognise that the demand for universal validity of a judgement of taste denies the possibility of a racial ideal of beauty. Therefore, it extends only to those circles which, consciously or unconsciously, carry within their heart the same idea of beauty.

Once we recognise this fundamental fact, we necessarily deny all prior aesthetic theories. Then and then only is the way prepared for a theory of the beautiful which finds the aesthetic related to the organic soul. We thus deny any atomistic individualistic aesthetics.

In the effort to separate the aesthetic object from all nonaesthetic elements, the content is always separated from the form in order to obviate the eternal mingling of moral sermons and aesthetics. This necessary difference in methodology is not complete in itself. We must never overlook the most important of all things—the great spiritual content of Nordic Germanic art. The choice or separation of certain elements of spiritual content is for us a formative, entirely artistic, process. But since this was forgotten in the face of the one sided glorification—still falsely spread—of Greek art, an essential component of western art has been allowed simply to fall to one side. Surprise should not be expressed if the average citizen then fabricates a moral art from what has been left.

This consequence appeared because the German aesthetes, fixedly staring at Hellenic art, declared that aesthetics is only concerned with beauty, that is, with the condition of easy freedom from moral necessities, mechanical pressure and spiritual tension. But this Greek beauty was only one—perhaps static—element of Hellenic life. However much we may debate whether it is architecture, sculpture, the epic or the tragedy which is the greatest legacy of Hellas, it is beyond doubt that inward and outward plastic art has been the beginning of the end of all Greek artistic activity. In Sophoclean tragedy this static plastic art is preserved. Even in the horrid works of Euripides, destiny appears less an inward state and development than as an interweaving of incomprehensible conditions and outwardly destructive essence. This same beauty in the art was a sin against the spirit of Europe. Our art was from the very beginning not adapted to a beauty based upon plastic, but upon spiritual movement. This means that it was not the external condition that became form, but the spiritual value in its struggle with other values or opposing forces. Through the choice of content as a standard giving impetus to the work of art, while conditioning its form, Nordic art is significantly adapted more to the personality and its enlightenment than was the Hellenistic. The highest work of western art is therefore not what is most beautiful but what best penetrates to our spiritual being, our souls. It is this factor of strong inward motive power that does not belong to Greek aesthetics. Rather, it is embodied in the Nordic west as a problem of form, and at the same time without relation to what is purely rational or moral.

As in many other cases, Schiller displayed the correct insight out of instinct, and despite his prejudices for Greek art, although he did fail to draw the appropriate conclusions. He wrote:

How much attention we pay in aesthetic judgements to power rather than to its direction; how much to freedom than to conformity is sufficiently revealed by the fact that we prefer to see power and freedom expressed at the expense of conformity rather than, conversely, at the expense of the former. Aesthetic judgement contains in this more that is true than one usually believes. Clearly, vices which give evidence of strength of will reveal a greater disposition to true moral freedom than virtues which borrow support from natural inclination, because it costs a rascal only a single victory over himself to turn all the consequence and strength of will which he wastes upon evil, to good.

These words proclaim openly one side of the explanation. Why, for instance, are figures like Richard III and Iago able to have an aesthetic effect upon us? They have effect because of the power an inner law has upon us. Without that inner light we are tempted to make absurd moralising judgements. It is the power of this inner strength which reconciles us with everything. However, this has been so not only since Shakespeare, but it has been thus since the beginning of German art. The Song of the Nibelungen is the result of the power of true creativity in western art. This great story moves the soul and frees the spirit. Even in its poorest form it still shows perfected artistry of the highest order.

I know that objections will be raised against the comparison of the Song of the Nibelungen with the Iliad because the historical development of the Greek and German people were not simultaneous. Nevertheless, a comparison is possible if one follows the eternal laws of form. If the Song of the Nibelungen is considered great enough to contrast with an artistic composition which is different from, but equal to, the Iliad, then we also find ourselves in disagreement with the Goethe who gave the assurance that one should not allow one’s enjoyment of the great German epic to be diminished by comparing it with the Grecian: Too great a measuring rod was brought away from Homeros.

The Iliad and the Song of the Nibelungen are often enough compared with each other, but only after long reflection by the Germanists, and only after an opinion that was long in coming from the Hellenists. The result of such comparison heretofore has always been that the Iliad stood far above the German poem. The worst that could be said of the Iliad was that it was quite violent.

Today it is customary to reject these views which were born of a belief in the universal validity of Greek art canons. To admit that a work of art can present strong personalities means it was produced by a formative creative power of identical intensity. It is shaped differently from the Hellenic, but it is equal to it, especially in artistic quality.

When we bring before our mind’s eye the richness and living sculpture of the Iliad, the diverse ways, for example, in which Agamemnon stirred up his army leaders to battle and the recurrent descriptions of individual combats, then, by comparison, German heroic poetry does not seem so well defined. The latter’s technique is often clumsy. The descriptions repeat themselves here and there. These repeats are, apparently, later minstrel additions. The Song of the Nibelungen was never formally polished. Despite all this, the Nibelungen live, inwardly, a far more vivid life. Their deeds flow from the inward strength of will and struggle. They act according to an inner logic and a definite spiritual attitude. The interweaving of actions, born out of personal inwardness, intensifies the tragic contrast which leads to catastrophe.

From the start, it is naturally necessary to guard against the temptation of wishing to disparage Homeros as a creative artist. He shaped a world of gods for the Greek people which set the pattern for hundreds of years of racial artistry. But Homeros’s artistic attitude did not correspond to our own nature. His figures moved in the middle sphere of the human. They did not descend to mysterious spiritual depths. They showed no longing for the ultimate heights. Actions were not formed by an iron will. The characters do not appear as expressions of the divine powers of will of man himself. They are, rather, determined by externals.

When, after a struggle lasting ten years, Troy had finally fallen, the cause of this conflict between peoples, a lady, was also freed. Helen appeared in the midst of the combatants. Homeros did not describe her beauty. Rather, he paid more attention to the impression she made upon her surroundings. The warriors who lost friends and brothers, who had suffered a thousand privations—they all found that it had been worth the cost, to have shed streams of blood for this woman, for this beauty. Such an attitude is truly Greek: whether Helen was inwardly worth being placed at the centre point of a drama between peoples, is unimportant. It is probably the case that the woman probably had felt just as much at ease with Paris as in the king of Sparta’s bed. No kind of sorrow about her fate is recorded.

A beautiful courtesan is thus the cause of war between two peoples. It is amazing that a woman was considered to be reason enough for war. Perhaps there are similar situations to be found elsewhere in history, but here a poet uses this fact as the foundation for a powerful work. Thus, in the choice of spiritual content, he already reveals a creative form which is entirely opposed to our nature. The demon working within is lacking or is pushed consciously to one side. Form and beauty appear in its place.

Just as the smallness and seclusion of the Greek polis allowed the ordinary citizen a clear vision of the conditions which determined his life without placing an unbalanced demand on his capacity of judgement, so the Greek spirit is also shown of clear capacity for demarcation in art. This certainty of artistic aim is revealed just as much in Iktinos and Kallikrates as it is in Phidias, Homeros and Platon. Nothing remains without clear outline, except that less is unexpressed. Everything takes shape—if one may so put it—in a concentrated form, and clarified with an enlightening objectivity. Once this has been completely successful, then the Greek did not become tired of transforming endlessly the basic theme found in the most varied way. This is a peculiarity which Goethe often praised in his talks with Eckermann.

There is nothing more magnificent than the manner in which Homeros elevates nature to an art form. We encounter no lengthy descriptions of nature. Rather he uses an atmospheric content, reflecting a mood, of the available material compressed into words. This wonderful, concise form used by Homeros has been the magic with which he has repeatedly held the centuries under his spell. It dominates all his works and breathes in all the details. It is a thing of everlasting youth and ever present immortality.

Its uniqueness lies in its creative power of being able to look away from descriptions of nature, of immediately humanising them, of bringing them closer to us through powerfully portrayed likeness. Homeros always described the Achaeans themselves as bronze armoured. Achilles passed through his siege works as the agile runner, Hector walked with his bushy helmet waving before the gates of Troy; Hera, the fiery eyed goddess, courted Zeus; the Greek ships were exhaustively described by only two words: dark and arched. All this has an affect like the brush strokes of a great painter, who with one movement, compels the colour and line of a creature onto the canvas. This is form in its highest perfection. This is the joyous message of the Greeks. If Goethe made up a composite word, for example, morgenschon (in his poem Heidenroslein)—he used this form only once, then here the same artistic law is shown as that which formed the spiritual breath of Hellenic life.

The Germanic poet selected and shaped in a different way. The spiritual content which is formed is not the person but a personality developed and determined by will. External events are only an occasion for the expression and consequence of a character—not its cause—or of the complete embodiment of the inward direction of the human will. Honour and loyalty appear in all forms as the motivating force at the beginning of Nordic art. Gudrun is carried off like Helen, but she does not surrender herself. She prefers service as a maid to a life in dishonour, although Hartmut, in his manliness and knightliness, represented an unequally greater, and more artistically based, cause for devotion than the sorrowful Paris. But beauty, and, above all, the pride and loyalty of the king’s daughter, provided us with a satisfying artistic motif sufficient to cause the bloody battle on the Wulpensande to be fought. The tragedy of the Nibelungen is rooted in this inward justification: the inward character as the supreme value. If the personality of Siegfried had been portrayed as a good for nothing like Paris, the wifely love of Brünnhilde would not have been comprehensible to us. Her demonic womanly loyalty would have been credible to none. None of us would find the betrayal not only of the brothers but of all Burgundians understandable, human or artistically satisfying, if the figure of Siegfried had been represented as the dying god of spring, as a moon or sun god. At the moment when he appeared in a poem, as a personality he became content to be shaped.

If perfect geniality is to be embodied anywhere, then it is here. Wherever Siegfried appears, all hearts fly to him. Where he could help, he placed himself without hesitation, selflessly and trustingly, in the service of chosen friends. Through love he invites—by the manner of his wooing Brünnhilde—guilt upon himself. And through this guilt he perishes.

His adversary, Hagen, is a mixture of avarice and unconditional manly loyalty, a figure who, in its giant schematic delineation, represented artistically the strongest counterpart to the radiant Siegfried. He represented a type of unconditional courage which, in conclusion, thanks to Hagen’s consistency until his death, reconciled us with much of what he had violated. The encounter of Kriemhilde with Hagen and Volker at the court of Etzel is one of the most dramatic poetic images which can be conceived. The night watch by the two companions and the song of the minstrel are examples of splendid, manly poetry.

With tragic necessity, the different natures conflict with one another as guilt and expiation, and give birth to new guilt, as honour fights against honour, loyalty against loyalty. This allegory embodies itself in a human character that is the powerful creation of Nordic Germanic nature as it appears from the very beginning, larger than life, in Germanic art.

These forces, whether loving or fighting, are the material with which a great poetic synthesis has emerged. It is completely useless to debate how many hands have worked on the Song of the Nibelungen because it is clear that many poems have become one work.

The latest researchers assert that the figure of Rüdiger was the final addition added by a fifth poet. Nevertheless, this one was a great artist. In the whole world of literature one will search in vain for a personality of such simple inner greatness as that embodied in Margrave Rüdiger. One is compelled to recognise the spiritual force and power that exist in this new character. Foremost stands the oath of loyalty to his queen, the pledging of his manly honour which must triumph over all other forms. He faced old friends, guests whom he has guided around the land and to whom he has guaranteed protection. He faced even the betrothed of his only daughter. So Rüdiger took death consciously upon himself with an iron will, although, with the defencelessness of Etzel and Kriemhilde, a strong temptation still grew to break his word. The idea of honour became the force that motivated all his actions. One should also consider in this reference the figure of Achilles, one of the most glittering heroic embodiments of all times, but who, because of a personal affront, left his entire people without a leader. Consider then the Margrave Rüdiger, who, before his battle to the death, presented his shield to an opponent in order to confront him in full armour. One can estimate the gulf which exists here between figure and content.

The souls of two peoples of a different type are at work, both of whom transformed nature into art. The one allowed its men to weep and laugh, love, hate and perform heroic deeds, but it did not make the will into an all motivating power; it left out personality as the shaping phenomenon, and it applied all love to the outer world. With word or chisel, it created a wondrous weapon to convey beauty; on the other hand, Nordic art dipped into the profoundest depths of the human will and mustered all powers of the soul into an inward, artistically conditioned whole, without granting formal beauty the decisive weight.

Even the greatest works of men show a weak spot—even the Song of the Nibelungen. The relationship of Siegfried to Brünnhilde was not so completely well grounded in the present version as it was in the old traditions. This relationship found its final interpretation in the Edda. The Lay of Siegfried’s death is one of the greatest expressions of Germanic nature. It is the song of love, loyalty, hatred and revenge.

One must cease regarding these poets of our very early history as clumsy verse makers, as is the usual case. Despite all the patronising recognition by our experts on aesthetics, there are great characters in these poems. We must recognise these authors among the ranks of the world’s greatest creative artists. Only an artist creates true characters, living personalities. Thus, figures which have remained a timeless allegory of our nature through the course of centuries, can only be the result of artistic genius and formative power.

No nobler hero will ever stand

in earth’s sunshine than you alone, Siegfried.

We understand Goethe when he says:

Homeros writes with a purity before which one is awestruck

— a remark which, in fact, refutes his other avowals about harmony. We believe we possess an appreciation of artistic self control and of the epic greatness of Homeros. We are correct if we think of the powerful creation of the Song of the Nibelungen as great art. If Homeros has been recognised as one of the greatest artists of all times and of all peoples, then it is time also to think of the Song of the Nibelungen in the same way.

Thus, as allegories of folkish art, the two epics stand facing one another. One turns more toward the inner birth of clear form. The other wrestles with the tragic epic of spiritual struggle. Homeros mastered the material, the poets of the Song of the Nibelungen—and the creators of all Germanic poems—the spiritual content. These different aims are conditioned by temperament and reflections. Great works of art of different cultures cannot be measured with one and the same standard. Therefore one needs different philosophies of art for each in order to do justice to each essential type. Just as one cannot approach Michael Angelo with the standard used by Phidias, neither can one use just one standard when contrasting the Hellenic epic with the German.

We will enter into individual details later. Previous reflections, however, now lead to another fact which is not only universally overlooked by aesthetes, but which is flatly denied by them: the existence of the aesthetic will. The denial of such a will is perhaps the most shameful chapter of German aesthetics. There is significant evidence to prove that European artists have struggled to achieve spiritual content and form. The professors of aesthetics have ignored this fact. It was a dogma that art was only concerned with apparent feelings, a nebulous kind of beauty, rising, untouched by life, from the dusty studies of scholars. For the sake of morality the will was lined with a protective shield that protected it from such lunacy.

Richard Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck:

They know that those like us look neither to the right nor left, neither forward nor backward. Time and the world are indifferent to us and only one thing determines us—the necessity for the releasing of our own will.

Balzac confessed in Cousin Bette:

Constant work is the law of art as of life, for art is idealised creation. The great artists, the complete poets, await neither command nor inspiration. They give birth today, tomorrow, always. From this follows the habit of labour, this constant knowledge of the difficulties which maintain them in permanent concubinage with the Muse, with the creative power.

Such thoughts, unfortunately, have not reached the ears of our philosophers of aesthetics. It is high time to establish the presence of the creative aesthetic will. It exists in both artists and those who comment on their art. In becoming aware of the choice of spiritual content, and in the longing of the will, the essence of the Nordic western concept of beauty is revealed. It cannot be understood through biology. It can only be intimated.

The essence of human existence is, bodily and spiritually, an ever renewed assimilation of material penetrating from the outside and being manufactured by our will. The formative will and the spirit seize the environment and the inner world. Such a formative process is mostly done through perception, but it may also be codetermined by an act of the will, whether this leads to the saint, researcher, thinker, statesman or artist. Every form is a deed. Every action is essentially a discharging of will. Our research into the psychology of art is almost exclusively concerned with how we appreciate and how we contemplate art. They believe this research is proper and justified, but we know that we must go beyond their research if we are to uncover the artistic will. Before motor sensory, emotional and intellectual influences of a work of art can be discussed, our point of departure must be clearly established.

The law of perpetual motion is valid not only in the physical, but also in the spiritual, realm. It appears to us as self evident that the heroic will is restless and creates more of itself. Our scholars make special efforts to uncover the initial energy of a religious or political phenomenon. Huge volumes are written in order to link the thought structure of our times with particular thinkers of the past. This activity by professors of philosophy is, even itself, frequently regarded as philosophy, so important does it appear. Systems of aesthetics are also exactly investigated and documented. Art and artists have been almost completely forgotten in the process. A special aesthetics will have to be constructed for them which will study the Nordic west. It may gaze at the southeast, or up into the clouds, and apply our standards of value to all European art.

What was it that drove Beethoven to rush around Vienna during a storm?—to suddenly stand still, forgetful of the world?—to beat out a rhythm with his fists? What was it that compelled the impoverished Rembrandt to stand at his canvas until he literally collapsed? What occasioned Da Vinci to investigate the secrets of the human form? What drove Ulrich van Ensingen to make plans for his churches? Precisely, it was nothing other than artistic, aesthetic will. It is a power which, alongside the heroic and moral, must be recognised as a primal riddle if we wish to move beyond the level of our high school teachers of aesthetics. Nowhere has the upsurge of the will in art appeared so distinctly as in the Nordic west. We must emphasise this with the utmost clarity because the great sinful act of the 19th century was in omitting this fact.

Inwardly, the Greek participated in an act of will at the hour of the birth of his art. There is a Greek legend which tells about an artist who loved his work so passionately that his love transformed dead stone into full blooded life. The creed of a universally shaping aesthetic will is laid down in this myth. The paintings on the Parthenon, Greek dance and the lost Greek music (from which all other Muses derive their name) made audible the thunder of the will much earlier than it appeared in our own times.

Aesthetic sensitivity signifies a feeling of joy. Aesthetic mood is contemplation devoid of wishes, devoid of desires, in which the pure subject of perception arises in unblemished objectivity. So runs Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s teaching of aesthetics. Ninety nine out of a hundred philosophers of art have since written in the same way. Forming the basis of their judgement was the dogma which condemned our entire aesthetics to barrenness: the incredible assertion that an aesthetic will did not exist. Otherwise embittered opponents found themselves united with this. The fact is that behind every work of art, just as behind a religious creed, there is an active force at work. This fact has been generally overlooked. This absurd assertion by our aesthetes had reference to outlook, to ideas, to concepts, to dissections of the feeling of beauty. It ignored the fact that a shaping will lies at the bottom of every art creation. It is concentrated in the work and it necessitates a powerful action of the soul. Without such a will, all our other efforts are in vain.

In the realm of art we experience a development parallel to a religious outlook on the world. A racial soul instinct creates works of a gifted, uncaptivated kind. It takes a far reaching hold on its environment, and autocratically alters its lines of power. When Wotan was dying and we sought new forms, Rome appeared on the scene. When the Gothic had ended its lifeline, Roman law and humanist priests of art appeared who sought to cripple us by application of new standards of value. With the rediscovery of Platon and Aristoteles, with the first discoveries of Hellenic works of art, the Nordic spirit, during a time of searching, seized upon the newly found art but with it also its late Roman falsification.

We know that the ancient Greek ideal of beauty did not correspond to the Nordic, that it was predominantly the blood of its blood. Nevertheless, this Greek beauty was particularly an evidence of a sheltered culture. Among a divided, individualistic people, the Greek idea of art provided a certain stability, a common Myth. Physical beauty has never been the highest value of the Nordic west as has the formative will which manifests itself as honour and duty (Frederick and Bismarck), as drama of soul (Beethoven, Shakespeare) and, as concentrated atmosphere (Leonardo, Rembrandt). This will in art, bristling with power, was presented in the 15th century with an aesthetic standard originating from a completely different environment. The Renaissance shows the struggle between instinct and the new idea in art just as with the reformers in the religious domain. After the 16th century, pulsating with life, in north Italy, and the penetration of the Baroque, the apparent highest Greek value gained more and more in importance. The results of research into Greek antiquities (gems, vases, various paintings and portraits) showed that they were made under the auspices of a universal aesthetics. Greek forms were evaluated as purely human. Then arises the doctrine of contemplation devoid of will, followed by the denial of the aesthetic will. The Greek Myth of harmony and willed repose overshadowed the Germanic instinct—the urge to powerful personal confessions of faith and the unleashing of will. This split has lasted up to the present and only modestly do new outlooks appear now and then.

Although our aesthetics had demonstrably drawn standards from Hellas, it proudly believed it could assume that its main features were universally purely human. As in state of life, so also in academic art, two archetypes of cultural life were accepted: individualism and universalism. This was a spiritual orientation which explained the ego and its interests as the starting and final point of thought and action, and which also wished to arrange this same ego into the laws of universality. The dangerous thing in this seemingly illuminating classification of types consisted in causing the universal to evaporate into the infinite. Universalism, only superficially splendid, led first to the international world church, to the world state, and later, to the Marxist International, and also to the democratic humanity of today. Universalism as a basic archetype of life is thus just as barren as individualism. The result, in the event of victory of one or other of these two outlooks on the world, must necessarily be chaos. Individualism gladly wraps itself in the universalist cloak which presents itself as good, moral and harmless. The matter is represented differently when both individualism and universalism are related to one another. Ego, race and people are the prerequisite of its existence. Each signifies the sole possibility of its secular salvation. But simultaneously, the generality which coincides with race and people finds its organic limitation. Individualism and universalism are, for themselves, straight lines into eternity. Related to race and people, they are rhythmically flowing powers, alternating forward and backward, standing in the service of racial commandments, making creation possible. This universal dynamic interpretation of life must also find its counterpoint in the study of western art.

In art, there are thus three organic prerequisites to this study upon which, in the future, all European aesthetics must be based if the latter wishes to be a serviceable link in the life of the awakening Nordic west. There are:

The Nordic racial ideal of beauty; the inner dynamic of European art, hence, content as a problem of form; and the recognition of an aesthetic will. These assumptions seem to lead us to discussions concerning the consequences of inward adjustment to the problem of art and to the popularised notion of Schopenhauer’s teaching on the will. Until this is overcome, there can be no talk of clarification—not only in matters of art—and the essence of the aesthetic condition can be seen to be understood neither instinctively nor consciously.

Kant’s words, now unfortunately reduced to triviality, that the starry heavens above us and the moral law within us constitute our existence without relationship to cause and effect, reveal a deep affirmation to a view of the world based on polarities and to a dynamic feeling of life. In reality, no true European has ever been able to exist creatively outside this basic presupposition, although in many, the longing for the elimination of opposites—for rest, for a static view of life, and for monism—has been enormously strong. Nothing is more typical of this longing and nothing proves the impossibility of monism for us more clearly than the case of Arthur Schopenhauer the Romantic, who believed he could master the full blooded dynamism of his nature with the flexible sword of reason. He broke down in the attempt. His explanation of the world as related to the will divorced him from the Indian thought which he believed he could equate with his own, even though the Indians did not regard salvation as an act of the will, but of cognition. Schopenhauer’s powerful monistic attempt at a representation of the world as will and idea, however, disclosed a procedure, the knowledge and evaluation of which is fundamental for our outlook on the world, and, no less, for our comprehension of the nature of our art.

Object and subject are necessary correlations to one another. Here is the point: the perception of a polarity. The point from which Schopenhauer proceeds. From here, he turns, on the one side, against dogmatic idealism which does not regard the principle of causality as a characteristic of man, but as an essential quality of the thing in itself which brings forth the object. On the other hand, he rejects that materialism which makes efforts to represent conceptual activity on the part of the subject as the result of forms and effects of matter.

It is the great fault of materialism that it proceeds from what is objective because the object is preconditioned by the subject and its forms of viewing things, and thus, is not an absolute. Equally well, one could regard matter as a modification of the perception of the subject. Thus Schopenhauer places himself between dogmatic realism and dogmatic idealism. He took his starting point neither from the subject nor from the object, but from the idea as first act of consciousness. He agreed with Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of space, time and causality, as pure, that is, nonempirical, categories of the mind which make experience possible. All his efforts in the first book of his principal work move directly toward proving this: that, if one regards matter as a thing in itself and attempts to explain the subject from this, then flaccid materialism results. If, on the other hand, one sees the subject as an absolute, then idealism results. If one separates object and subject, dualism results. If one asserts that both are one and the same, Spinozaism results. All these are dogmatic outlooks, against which we only know object and subject as two correlates, that is, being / object.

We possess two intellects; the understanding—the capacity for perception of the causal connection (which we have in common with animals)—and reason, the capacity for abstraction (which is given to us alone). The function of the understanding is the formation of perceptions—the activity of reason, in forming concepts from which develop our language, science and our entire cultural spectrum.

Reason is feminine in nature; It can only give after it has received. This points to the basic dogma of the Schopenhauerian philosophy: reason is a function of the brain. The world is unmasked as a phenomenon of the brain. Thinking is thus a process of separation similar to that of the secretion of saliva.

The work of reason consists in providing knowledge of abstract judgements. Knowing means to have such judgements in the power of its spirit for involuntary reproduction which have their sufficient degree of perception of any something outside them. The object is thus idea as it appears to us in the conceptual forms of time, space and causality. Everything is in these forms and everything comes through them. As a result, the view of the world is strictly closed off and a loophole seems to have been left nowhere so that one might ascend or reach down to a primal ground. But Schopenhauer finds yet another side of the world. Surveying our reason, past and future, and the certain death of the consciousness, the question must be raised as to the whither and whence of man, as to the nature of time and the individual consciousness. Schopenhauer, who previously gave the assurance that the entire world was through and through idea, breaks out of his self imposed limits.

But what drives us to investigate is particularly that it does not satisfy us to know that we have ideas, that they are such and such, and have a connection with this and that law of which general expression is each time the principle of causation. We wish to know the significance of these ideas. We ask whether this world is nothing other than idea, in which case it would pass over us like an insubstantial dream, unworthy of our attention; or whether it may nevertheless be something different, something in addition, and what this actually may be!

No one up to now has been able to give more than a purely negative answer, an answer which was completely abstract, devoid of content and limited—The nous of Anaxagoras, the Ãtman of the Indians, the thing in itself of Kant. Schopenhauer now unveiled this thing in itself as the inner essence known to us in the most intimate way as the will. One cannot arrive at it from idea, as it is far more than an essence, and is fully alien to its laws and forms. The will can only be intuitively perceived. Man would like to regard the movements and actions of his body in the same way as the alterations of other objects in relation to cause, stimuli and motive. But he would only understand their effects as a connection to every other effect that appears to him with a corresponding cause. But this is not so, for the word will gives him the key to his own phenomenon, reveals to him the importance, shows him the inner driving force of his nature, of his activity, of his movements.

The subject is thus given its body in a twofold way: In the first way it is idea, object among objects. It is subject to certain laws. In another way it is revealed through what is known directly to each, which is what the word will describes. And:

Every act of the will is simultaneously an act of bodily motions, not as if the one may be cause, the other effect, but they are one and the same brought to consciousness in a diverse manner. The action of the body is nothing other than the more objective action of the will appearing in perception.

I perceive the will not as something whole and perfect but only individual acts performed in time. I thus cannot imagine the will. It is without time and space. It is independent of ideas. The will is not subject to the principle of causation. It is groundless. It has the same essence in all phenomena. According to Kant this all belongs to the thing in itself. As such, it is free, yet, as a phenomenon, it is unfree, predetermined. Freedom thus lies behind us, never revealed in actions. It follows from this that our empirical character, as it approaches us in our actions, is unfree and unalterable. It represents the objective form of objects that are intelligible. The empirical character behaves to the intelligible as phenomenon to the thing in itself. In its most profound form, the will objectifies itself in the sexual instinct, in an unconditional will to reproduce. It is an eternal wishing and striving which, after brief satisfaction, is driven anew by lust, following these devilish characteristics unceasingly and remorselessly.

Not only in man does the will approach us as the thing in itself; it is the driving momentum in the whole of nature. In fact, it objectifies itself most perfectly of all in man. If we observe the powerful, restless urgency with which the waters hasten into the depths, the persistence with which the magnet turns again and again toward the north pole, the violence with which the poles of electricity strive to reunite and which—particularly like those of human wishes—are heightened by opposition; when we see the crystal rapidly and suddenly shoot upwards, then it will—according to Schopenhauer—cost no great effort of the imaginative power, even from a great distance, to recognise our own nature, dimly and tacitly, but no less illuminatingly than the manner in which the first rays of dawn share the sunlight with full midday. That is the will.

Accordingly, there are various stages of objectification of the will seen in the forms of Platon. They are those middle sections which are inserted between the two worlds: idea and will. These two forces establish an otherwise incomprehensible mutual relationship. Thus it is a plurality without a principle of plurality. At the lowest stage, the universal forces of nature—gravity, impenetrability, rigidity, elasticity, electricity and magnetism—display themselves. They are also, like our own will, groundless, and, like the latter, only their individual phenomena are subject to the principle of causation. They are a QVALITAS OCCVLTA. At a higher stage of the objectifications of the will, we see the individuality appear more and more with man and beast, chiefly with the former. It is here that the essence of the universe is revealed. The struggle for existence causes the will to make itself manifest. The universal struggle in nature is visibly revealed in the animal world which has the vegetable world for its nourishment, and in which in turn every animal becomes the prey and food of another. An animal can only maintain its existence through the constant elimination of a stranger—so that the will to live, without exception, consumes itself ..... until, at last, the human race regards nature as a product for its use. Fearful and insane is this power which—through so much diversity and expenditure of strength and so much feeling of sexual happiness, cleverness and activity—has only an ephemeral and fleeting feeling of happiness in copulation and the satisfaction of satiation to offer as a counterbalance. Effort and reward stand in no direct ratio to one another. Everywhere, Schopenhauer sees universal privation, ceaseless effort, constant pressure, endless struggle .....

Only a blind will could find itself in such a predicament. In inorganic nature the entire struggle proceeds of its own accord. This struggle is based on the unalterable laws of cause and effect. In the plant kingdom, movements follow stimulation, that is, causes call forth effects which are not identical. Finally, motive and perception appear as conductors of our animal actions. All this occurs legitimately. No place is left for freedom of reason. Reason and ideas are subordinate organs.

The world as idea has sprung from the will! In spite of Schopenhauer’s initial reservation against asserting a causal continuity, here causality appears, even if cloaked. The results are as follows: reason is only a reflex, that is, it is a feminine capacity through and through. It is conditioned by the notions which are determined necessarily through perceptions. Reason is thus uncreative. We are unfree. Our actions are necessarily determined through motives, be they actual or imaginary. Our intelligible character is shaped behind men. This character lies outside of necessity. It is innate in life and it is unalterable. Thus it is subject to the principle of causation.

Our reason, underdeveloped and captive though it may be, may elevate itself and conquer our demonic will through an excess of intelligence as a potent subject of perception. We may overcome the fearful power of the will. We see this in the genius of the true artist, who, freed of his will, is able to represent pure nature objectively. It occurs as well in the phenomenon of saintliness, a condition in which reason is successful in transforming passing aesthetic forgetfulness into permanent willless contemplation. The saint sees through the illusion of the world and denies the will to live.

The end of man, despite his efforts and torments, is nothingness. Schopenhauer wrote:

Before us remains, at all events, only nothingness. But that which strives against this dissolution into nothingness, namely, our nature, is indeed only the will to life ..... But if we turn our gaze away from our own need and look to those who have overcome the world, those in whom the will arrives at full self knowledge, then we find only a transition from wishing, to fearing, to the unknown. Instead of unsatiated hope we find peace which is higher than all reason. A total oceanic calm of the heart such as Raphäel and Corregio represented. Only perception is left, the will has vanished. But we then gaze with deeper and more painful longing upon this condition, alongside which our sorrowfulness and hopelessness, by contrast, appears fully exposed. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, contemplation is the only thing which can console us. If we, on the one side, suffer endless sorrow and enduring lamentation as the phenomenon of the will of the world; and on the other side we are able with elimination of the will, to see the world dissolve and only empty nothingness remain before us, we shall accept it willingly. What remains after total elimination of the will, for those who are still driven by it, is obviously nothingness. But conversely, to those in whom the will has turned away and has denied itself, this apparently real world of ours with all its suns and milky ways—is nothingness.

It does not fall within the scope of this book to discuss Schopenhauer’s entire philosophy, but only to emphasise those points which might be helpful for a judgement of the laws of life as they are expressed in ideology, science and art.

The central notion of the Schopenhauerian philosophy, the will, must be singled out at the start. It is represented as what is known and what is given to each of us directly. But if the word will is spoken, then in the consciousness of every mind still not hypnotised by Schopenhauer, there appears in the most intimate sense the familiar principle beyond interpretation which, despite inborn egoism, often speaks within us. It has, many times in the history of peoples, produced indescribably powerful figures. We think of the spiritual power of the German mystics, such as Luther; the dedicated lives of many men fighting for an idea; the figure of the overcomer of the world from Nazareth—in short, all the personalities who have represented free will as opposed to tyranny. We may think of them when we seek the essence within us, which is described by the word will, and is said to be known to us in the most intimate sense. But the more we read of Schopenhauer, all the more does it appear that this idea of the will must be false and childish. In fact, the will is completely different from all other phenomena. It is groundless and mysterious. It is a powerful and aimless urge which stumbles from desire to desire. It is alive within man and beast. It is revealed in plant and stone. It causes the water to thunder down the rocks. It causes the magnet to draw iron and the plant to shoot upward. It causes a man to be attracted by a woman and one creature to destroy another.

The will, then, which is assumed to be a unity, forces its way through a proliferation of ideas into a diverse physical world. It calls forth its objectification and kindles at its highest stage a light—the intellect—which is completely dependent on it and born to its service. It looks in all directions for reward, always showing obedience to its master. It outlines the world as idea. We experience the strange fact that the brain—which is the prerequisite for the ideas of time and space—arises in time and space, so that it is simultaneously both subject and object of idea. This recalls the old riddle as to which came first, the chicken or the egg.

Schopenhauer actually completed his philosophy in the first book of his principal work. He showed there that everything could be reduced to idea, that all time, space and causality had the conditional prerequisite that we are completely unfree. He left no door open to the reason, that subordinate organ, and restricted its entire capacity to idea. As a result, all his later philosophy follows this doctrine.

But the will, which otherwise so purposefully calls forth its objectivity, (why it does so remains an eternal secret) committed an indiscretion which is all the less understandable as the assurance is expressly given that the functions of the body are everywhere measured throughout by the will. The brain is provided with an excess of intellect. Some men suddenly rebel, abandon this thing in itself and see through the disastrous will, and then exist as pure subjects of the perception creating eternal works of art, becoming saints. We do not know the origin of the power of the tertiary organ, the intellect, to suddenly enforce obedience upon its invincible tyrant, the will. We do not know, but without his assertion, the disciple of Schopenhauer does not agree unconditionally to objectification of aesthetics, ideology, and so on.

What is essential above all is the recognition that the phenomenon of having linked the natural and metaphysical into a uniform monistic system has been made possible here with the interplay of two completely different interpretations of what is to be understood by will. I have not found this idea expressed adequately anywhere. Admittedly, Rudolf Haym, in his study of Schopenhauer, very energetically rejects the will as the principal explanation of nature. J. Volkelt elaborates the contradiction in the interpretation of will, but wishes to uphold the supremacy of the will. K. Fischer is woefully inadequate in his explanation of the will. Houston Stewart Chamberlain completely rejects the doctrine of the will (falling into another extreme). It seems to me that universally too little weight has been placed on the dual use of the term.

Some years before publication of his principal work, Schopenhauer had regarded the will as something great and holy. He says this:

My will is absolute, standing above all corporeality and above nature. It is holy in origin, and its holiness is without limitations.

But later his idea of the will recognised its metaphysical power. The will took on shimmering colours and, like a chameleon, it was blended in permanently throughout Schopenhauer’s entire work.

Schopenhauer is of the opinion that it is for acts of the will that we are responsible for that which we can alone be made responsible, since the intellect is a gift of god and nature. The will is used here in the sense that is directly contrary to the will, as it ordinarily appears in Schopenhauer. Normally it is an aimless and unalterable egoistic instinct.

When Schopenhauer sets up the world as a purposeful whole in which everything relates to everything else in an incomprehensible harmony, this again does not agree with the concept of a blind will. His expedient qualification that the will is, in fact, irrational, yet acts as if it were rational, is far too unsatisfactory.

If ideas are to represent stronger or weaker objectification of the will, then a measuring capacity will be attributed to an aimless entity insofar as the more it grows objective, the more differentiated it becomes.

Any teleological version of nature is abandoned in Schopenhauer’s system. I understand a human action as such only when I realise its purpose, that is, only when I presuppose creative will striving for an aim. But if I see nature as striving constantly for aims as much unconsciously as purposeful, then I presuppose an ordering principle, irrespective of how it was created, in advance of any insane, blind, aimless will.

One thing must be understood clearly. With the one word will, two fundamentally different concepts must be described. The one alludes to a principle opposed to the whole of nature with its striving directed solely and simply at self preservation; the other characterises the essence of egoism. In short, we must distinguish will and instinct. Will is always the opposite of instinct, and not identical with it, as Schopenhauer seemed to teach. The difference between will and instinct is not quantitative but qualitative. If I feel that here Schopenhauer was right—that an animal lust directed completely at the senses and subconsciously appearing within the circle of consciousness unassailably dominates and reveals its entire purpose particularly in its existence and its assertiveness—so can I, if I am a poet, also conceive a similar instinct in the plant and mineral realms.

I cannot make poetic analogy into the foundation of a philosophical conception of the world. I cannot do this rationally either without being caught up in a vicious circle. I am forced to establish that the other factors work against desire, other factors that embody other principles. Reason is coextensive and conterminous with this principle. It alone can overcome the yoke of blind instinct. It must be partially or totally conditioned through the brain, but it is not produced by it. An organ simply cannot conceive itself.

I am forced to admit that my will is divided into two parts: sensuously instinctive and supersensuously willed. These are the two souls which Faust felt within his breast. Only a blind dogmatism can represent these two separate principles as one and the same. If Goethe heard, completely softly, but very perceptively, a voice which told him what was to be done and what should be avoided, then it was passion which forced him into the opposite direction. The moral side of man accordingly rests upon a categorical moral law which rules within him. Otherwise, moral prayers would be a source of laughter, and both Christ and Kant would seem to have been really stupid men. Must and Can presuppose each other. Without freedom there is no feeling of responsibility, no morality, no spiritual culture.

In conclusion, Schopenhauer turns himself upside down. If instinct—which stirs so powerfully, discerned by the tertiary reason—suddenly whispers softly and begins benignly to purr, then this is a consequence which much have caused him headaches at times. The flexible sword of reason cannot solve world conflict through cognition alone. Either one proceeds from the factual and recognises the possibility of victory of the will over instinct, or one makes a violent sweep and declares the whole world to be unfree and, as a result, gives up every possibility of purification. The former is the viewpoint taken by Christ, Da Vinci, Kant, Goethe; the latter is that of the Indians and Schopenhauer. But the latter somehow allowed a single appearance in the world of freedom as the sole exception. The You shall, over which so much derision is generally unleashed, appeared in conclusion as DEVS EX MACHINA. A moral power suddenly appears in chaotic, aimless instinct and the moral world order, upon which Schopenhauer justifiably lays much weight, was saved. Otherwise, Schopenhauer’s original will recognises only the physical, not the moral, sphere.

Thus Schopenhauer, when he teaches the denial of the will, also includes the denial of instinct and affirmation of the will. But this is an illogical aspect of the whole system, and it tears it apart completely. What Schopenhauer taught, with zeal and energy, was that instinct formed the essence of the universe and of man, and that it was identical with the will. What he admitted with joy, but which was incompatible with his system, was that the will is, at the same time, morally redeeming, that outside instinct and tertiary understanding man still represents something quite different. The moral will, as it appears in the last book of the World as will and idea, denies the entire teaching of his first books, and Schopenhauer later admitted in a letter, when pressed by troublesome inquiries, that the matter was naturally a kind of miracle .....

This compulsive monistic view of the world is torn apart, and no amount of time will bind it together again. What Schopenhauer said later about individuality being rooted in the thing in itself and its transitoriness is beautiful, and does all honour to his overcoming of self, but, however, it does not accord with his everlasting derision about self. He says (letter of March 1st, 1859):

It follows that individuality does not rest solely on the principle of individuation and is therefore not mere appearance. It is rooted in the thing in itself, in the will of the individual, for a man’s character is, itself, individual. But how deeply the roots go, belongs to questions for which I do not accept responsibility.

So writes the man who claimed that he had found the philosopher’s stone, and the principle of world unity, and who despised everyone who did not unconditionally concede that this was so.

If instinct, veiled as will, is to represent a principle of unity, then it is not the unity of the entire man but only one aspect of him, the natural. Schopenhauer undertook to carry this through in a brilliant manner. That he interpreted instinct as the predominant principle is not materialistic, but it is certainly naturalistic monism.

Comparisons are often made between a man and his teachings. We frequently discover glaring contrasts between the two. It is true enough that this man, who in all seriousness regarded himself as the founder of a religion and preached denial of the world, lived a seemingly comfortable life as an established patrician. He was afflicted with a grotesque anxiety about his health and well being. Because of an unpleasant dream and out of fear of cholera, he left Berlin. He lived in Frankfurt on the ground floor of a house so he could save himself quickly in case of fire. When visiting, he always carried his own drinking glass with him so that he did not expose himself to the dangers of infections from dirty cups. Here, his own will makes its appearance with a vehemence amounting almost to sickliness. Schopenhauer was possessed by an almost demonic fear of death. He was also possessed by a brutal egoism and filled with a fury when anyone opposed him. He was, at the same time, a worldwide intellect in whose inspired insight and illumination of spirit thousands of spiritual revelations were captured. He had an amazing insight into many problems and wrote in a German style of splendour, colour and clarity as only a few among the very great can.

On the other hand, he had only rarely felt that quietly perceptible voice of which Goethe and Kant spoke. It appeared merely as an indefinable longing. He was unable to grasp the subtlety of Schleiermacher or the greatness of Fichte. He was oppressed and stifled by a boundless presumption and spoke only with malicious delight about the weaknesses of those he encountered in life.

The description of a man who cannot be compared in some clever book but is an image of nature with all its contradictions suits none better than Arthur Schopenhauer. Certainly, the contrast between instinct, insight and will was seldom concealed so widely in one heart. At an advanced age he noted with satisfaction that his sexual instinct had weakened, and from then on his words about fame noticeably diminished in favour of a fundamental pessimism. At age 70 he wrote:

The fact that the old testament sets life at from 70 to 80 years would trouble me little, but Herodotos also says the same in two passages. There is more to it. Only the holy Upanishad says twice: The life of a man is 100 years ..... that is a consolation.

Schopenhauer had earlier deeply felt the inward conflict of his two natures. His principal work was not written—as many superficial philosophers assert—by an onlooker at the theatre of life, as a participant in the grip of a demon. Otherwise with his intellect he would easily have discerned the discordant parts of his work which were, in fact, the reflection of his real experience. Since Schopenhauer often felt himself writhe in the thrall of a powerful instinct, so the surrounding world also seemed to him irrevocably given up to this. As he saw his own intellect expand, so he allowed the yoke of instinct to be theoretically stripped away from his path. Just as he himself possessed only a powerless feeling of foreboding as far as free will was concerned, so the moral order of the world only made a shameful appearance at the end. Schopenhauer preached as man’s longing that the recognition of instinct could alone lead to its overcoming. But he himself, in spite of all insight, was unable to realise it. If such an intelligence as his could not achieve this, then his imposing personal creed, the World as will and idea, is automatically self judging. Schopenhauer had not seen or, from sickly adherence to a dogmatic outlook, had not wished to admit that even a theoretically profound philosophy cannot on its own help abate the appearance of a factor over which all truly great men have been disposed: the will mastering or overcoming impulse. If Buddha recognised instinct as bringing suffering, then this is only one side of a man’s nature; but when he conquers it through vital action, then the act of willing is the other. If Christ acted against the generation of vipers, if he took death upon himself for the sake of an idea, then this is the effect of a principle of freedom opposed to the mere life instinct which no argumentation can abolish, and which is certainly founded on instinct alone.

The independent conscience is the way Goethe understood it—making its appearance like a moral sunrise, a principle which Schopenhauer believed he had overcome while he smuggled it into instinct in order to then allow both to shine through.

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is a vessel filled with precious things which is held together by the iron hand of a robust individuality. Now that this stricture has burst, all parts, beautiful as they are, lie scattered among one another. His personality did not suffice for a perfectly rounded work, and his philosophy was the tragic dream of a despairing seeker. The will, in whose splintered assertions and upon whose occurrences the genial world spirit plays its ingenious melodies, can only be genial itself. But the will, which to him is only a groundless, aimless, blind urge, is a purely animal instinct. The former is a principle creative of value; the latter is uncreative, destructive. The former reveals to us the positive in human nature; the latter reveals the negative side. All great artists and saints are filled by the first. They have formed it in practice as a work of art and as life. Through it and through reason, with its formation of ideas, it has directed instinct into paths where it found its allotted place as a material of creativity. Arthur Schopenhauer also wished to take this path, and failed because his intellect lacked the will. This is the tragedy of his life and work. As such a tragedy, Schopenhauer will always be accorded our respect, but as the example of an heroic—in its powerful, truly European—struggle for the essence of this world, he gambled everything on one card and failed. But Schopenhauer, when completely divorced from Indian thought, admitted that the highest a man could attain was an heroic course of life. This is a particularly Nordic creed such as cannot be more beautifully found elsewhere. Therefore, Arthur Schopenhauer belongs to us.

This critique of Schopenhauer’s philosophy seems particularly important for what I wish to say in this book. Today, his writings are found not only on the tables of professors, but also upon those of businessmen and, thanks to their glittering style of persuasive art, have found their way into wide circulation. The notion of will is, as a result, current in all places, and is certainly now mostly regarded in the Schopenhauerian sense as a blind urge even if another interpretation unconsciously accompanies it. It is necessary to subject this conception of the will to a brief investigation and to reveal its self contradiction, or to interpret it as instinct and nothing else. The will must be grasped in its original purity as a principle of freedom working against egoistic impulses, as Kant and Fichte believed, if one wishes to clearly reestablish a foundation for a Nordic vital feeling. But this critique is also of fundamental importance to the understanding of European art and its spiritual effect. If I speak of a view of art which does not reject the will, then I do not wish to maintain the impossible assertion that art must have effect upon impulse, instinct upon Schopenhauer’s will, but that works of art, and especially a definite group of them, do not turn toward the subject of perception immersed in contemplative mood, but aim particularly at the awakening of a spiritual activity of a will.

One of the most important insights into the nature of everything human is the recognition of the fact that man is a creature that shapes. At the basis of all his spiritual and rational activity lies striving for change. And only in this manner can he gain power over his environment, and grasp it as a unity. He also uses his powers to form his own inwardness, projecting this outward as religion, morality, art, scientific ideas and philosophy. Five propensities live in man; each demands an answer:

1-In art he seeks outward and inward form;

2-in science, he seeks the truth in correlating judgement with natural phenomena;

3-from religion he desires a penetrating supersensuous symbol;

4-in philosophy he demands harmony of willing and perceiving;

5-in morality he creates for himself the necessary guiding principles of action.

Each time a man enters one of these five regions, another formative and active will makes itself known. This striving of will and perception is not to be discerned from the whole of nature. There are tendencies which face instinct and its satisfaction either indifferently (science, philosophy), or draw both into the realm of their formative activity. One must distinguish between these different attitudes of spiritual power which go back to reason and will and unite in the soul, in personality, and which signify the Myth of a race. The differentiation can be performed naively unconsciously or philosophically consciously. In whatever manner and from whatever colourful emphasis of individual inclination this proceeds, it depends also on the multifariousness, the rich diversity of a culture as the expression of a race of definite soul.
 

Space is simultaneity: the essence of time is a sequence. Space is only conceivable as rest; time measurable only by motion. A static artistic soul will therefore always prefer the spatial arts and emphasise a spiritual juxtaposition to the other arts more than sequence and separation. Again, a dynamic creative power will seek to realise all qualities of external and inward motion in its art, that is, to master the arts of time (music, drama) and also represent development and growth in the spatial arts. It will make efforts into one moment. Therefore, for example, the painting of the west is, in the first place, portraiture. This signifies that the highest inward motion must be charmed into a necessary spatial form: the dynamic of Da Vinci and Michael Angelo was so shaped, and such a dynamic is always to be equated with the unleashing of will.

These reflections are fundamental for grasping the essence of antiquity and of the past in general. If one has recognised that Hellas was artistically static, then Europe represented a will of dynamic art. The consequences of this different spiritual orientation were two types of style which I wish to call the Objectivity style and the Personality style.

Every serious student of the laws of art has seen himself compelled to recognise at least a duality of creation. As was established in a discussion of the Schopenhauerian notion of the will, the latter’s metaphysical doctrine was shattered by an unnatural mixture of two tendencies in the act of willing. Instinct and will oppose the intellect on a common front; in fact, both are a form of willing, but in divergent directions. Artistic creation as such is admittedly always a free style, but here a primordial formative will separates artists into at least two groups according to strength. This is not a new discovery. One kind of art has been called Apollonian, the other Dionysian. These terms attempted to describe both differences in mood and differences in style of artistic creation. But it was basically false to transfer these concepts, inseparably linked with the Hellenic spirit, to the art of other peoples. Nordic western art is never solely Apollonian, that is, serene, balanced, harmoniously formal, and never solely Dionysian, that is, solely sensually excited, ecstatic. One cannot even find the German words to capture the full spirit of Hellenic art. A German must personally view Kallikrates, Phidias, Praxiteles, Homeros and Aeschylos, the Greek ancestral cults and Bacchic games, grave memorials and beliefs in immortality, in order to grasp what the Apollonian and Dionysian styles intended to convey.

Schiller attempted to interpret the duality of art creation (restricted solely to poetry) as naive and sentimental. As a result, he strayed down many a blind alley and was compelled to describe both Homeros as well as Shakespeare as naïve poets. His acute understanding, however, saved him from a complete impasse. Even if he held firm to the rigid dogma of aesthetic contemplation in each of his essays, there is nevertheless rooted there a quantity of sharp observations which reveal our essential Nordic nature. Every German ought to be familiar with his Aesthetic letters, Concerning the naive and sentimental art of poetry, Concerning charm and dignity, Concerning the pathetic, Thoughts on the use of the common and the base in art, and so on.

The customary division into an idealistic and naturalistic style is neither formally enlightening nor otherwise revealing. Germanic art has always been both. Da Vinci, who recommended that his pupils even study the dirty marks on a wall, and who at the same time drew the head of Christ and Dürer; who with microscopic faithfulness painted a tiny hair or the wing of a bird, created Death, knight and devil, and the Little passion—both were idealists and naturalists simultaneously. Rembrandt was not frightened away by a description of human bestiality, yet he created The prodigal son. Grünewald spares no representation of tortures while alongside this he also painted The resurrection. Goethe wrote The Blocksberg witches sabbath and the CHORVS MYSTICVS. European art was never idealising in the saccharine sense familiar to us. It was never anxious to avoid or to soften nature. The formative path of western artists lay far more through nature, and before nature was finally surpassed it had been given ruthless expression.

It was not an ideal of harmonious beauty in the sense of antiquity which prevailed in Europe, but the ideal of a new aesthetic will ruthlessly embodying itself.

If he wishes to reveal the nature of our art, one cannot write a mere philosophy of the beautiful and harmonious. He cannot apply the standards learned in antiquity. The concept of the beautiful must—in order to be used generally—receive an enlarged meaning. For us what is beautiful in the Nordic racial ideal must consist in the inner radiance of a meaningful will working on material things.

The beauty of the Ninth symphony of Beethoven is fundamentally different from the beauty of a Greek temple. Rembrandt’s head of Titus (in Petersburg) reveals a different kind of beauty of the soul than the Apollo of Praxiteles.

Greek beauty consisted in the shaping of the body, while Germanic beauty consists in the shaping of the soul. The one signifies outward balance, the latter inward law. The one is, as a result, an objective; the other is a personal style.

The descriptive term typifying and individualising style has often been used. Since research is usually not carried out more far reachingly, then one may be of the opinion that the artist looked more away from incidentals and saw only the great features of character. The individualising artist particularly loves such whims and personal peculiarities. Through observation the problem of style is only grasped as a method and not as an artistic necessity. One can read page after page on how one artist pursued one, then another, style in order to work in his spirit. But it is mostly omitted that it is a matter of inward events, so many profound scholars come to the conclusion that Faust is the result of individualising, and at the same time, a typifying, style.

The inner development of personality cannot be grasped in this manner. If personality, individuality and subjectivity are set up as one and the same, then confusion is the inevitable consequence.

The typifying and individualising styles are not two methods which men from all peoples have used according to their need, but objective and personal styles are essential laws of artistic creation among particular peoples and, in a narrower sense, of individual artists themselves. Identical words are never like coins of identical value. Depending on context one must agree concerning the predominant meaning of a term, and, if possible, choose more specific words for other shadings. Personality (will plus reason) is a power representing the spiritual in man opposed to the material. In a narrower sense it is the inward and ceaselessly active force of his inward essence, the primordial riddle of the Germanic soul. Persona (instinct plus understanding) is the body of man and his interests. Individuality signifies the indivisible union here on earth of person and personality. Individual treatment refers to this unity, a personal treatment by a personality.

Our object is always the world. The strength of the objectivity of art is dependent on the strength and diversity of these attitudes.

He who found fundamental differences between the objective and subjective directions of creativity saw himself occasioned, through his investigations (which were not pursued further) to contrast with objectivity only subjectivity, that is, arbitrariness or a mood based upon feelings opposed without power, style forming, to the object value. Therefore many philosophers—in order to protect the great artists from this interpretation—also described crystal clear objectivity as their essence—as the sole measuring rod of the highest art. It is now necessary to cast away the dogma of the universal validity of the measuring rod of objectivity.

Goethe once made a remark that it was his opinion that something objective in nature corresponded to every personal will, that is, that every personal artistic act of will could be transformed into an objective conformity, into an organic law, and that its counterpart could be found there. This completely fixed, personal alignment to the world of matter led to the great inward organic deeds of the Romantic and Gothic eras, although the two stand quite alone in their inner unity. This self evident feeling, when confronting the cathedrals of Rheims, Ulm and Straßburg, has long caused us to overlook what violence has been done in these works to the stone material. We have not paid heed to what great formative power of penetration, what strong inner artistic power must have belonged to these artists in order to render such brittle material serviceable to an idea. It must, therefore, be made clear. It had still not occurred to other peoples to create glittering, pointed designs out of stone, and build towers with these blocks. The block of stone, the relief, the massive sculpture earlier signified the art of monumental sculptors. In the Gothic era a new spirit appeared. And yet, the Straßburg cathedral is: it stands there, as if having grown out of the ground. It has an objective effect. A remarkable state of affairs is revealed here. The weightiest artistic personality everywhere carries form with it as gravity, that is, it carries a living law with it. If, after several violent attempts artists discovered the means of mastering the material, then a work of art is, in the end, an organically effective creation. True personality at first hostilely faces the object to be altered, then the latter is forced to answer to a formal will. When this occurs, personality style is the result.

The subjectivist is not dominated by a direction of will (not even in an individual work) but by inward and outward contingencies. Subjectivism signifies in every respect, and on every domain, the violent mastery both of the personality and of the object. It is often a charming playfulness or repellent misshapenness—from the aspect of form—and a sensuous teasing, lunatic anarchy or unrestrained lust—as feeling—that is made manifest without an inner or outer law, without inner or outer form. Subjectivism as a philosophic, as well as a purely artistic problem, is the result of an inward barrenness of the racial crossing of a people, of an individuality, of a whole epoch of time in general, or, as an ultimate end, the reflection of spiritually racial collapse.

Static and dynamic art nowhere stand so clearly contrasted as in Greek and Gothic architecture. With all Nordic architecture these creations form the sharpest possible contrasting expressions of the formative will. The Gothic signifies the attempt—undertaken in seriousness only once in the entire history of architecture—to shape a spatial art out of a metaphysical feeling of time. The essence of time is conditioned by one direction in contrast to the three dimensions of space. The Gothic knows only a succession of forms, a striving in but one direction. It is therefore involved in a struggle with the material; with the stone block, with horizontal load and vertical support, and with the space requiring media, the surface of the walls, the roof. Gothic is therefore the fulfilment of a longing which knows only forward motion. It is the first embodiment in stone of the dynamic western soul, such as painting later attempted to reembody, but which could only completely realise itself in music and, occasionally, in drama. From this universal viewpoint, Gothic is already in its highest degree—personal. It is the eternal, irrational will of the west in the time conditioned form of one of its rhythmically recurring upward flights.

It is self evident that the Greek temple was also the expression of a people’s sensitivity and therefore, in a certain sense, the expression of a personality. But if, by personality, we usually understand a contrast to what is material—an aggressively active and restless striving to reshape material into an equation for innermost will and formative artistic powers—then we can trace little evidence of this will in the Greek temple. The Greek temple, admittedly built in honour of a god, also contained a statue of this god. This inner space, sanctified as a holy place, was not the most essential feature but merely the total outward form. The entire building is felt, from the first, to be a piece of plastic art. In fact it is as a self contained cubic shaped space. The Greek temple stands in isolation. It reveals no essential relationship to its classical Doric building but is the most perfected self contained rhythmisation of space. In the dimensions of the individual parts the dimensions of the whole are concealed. No line, no embellishment points beyond the temple form itself. All is refined, to be grasped by viewing or even experienced as a function. Load and support are expressed in the clearest manner and stand in perfect equilibrium to one another.

The whole building is three layered: the roof load with frieze and architrave, the supporting series of pillars and the broad projecting foundation for the steps. Because the entire work is conceived as one piece, the classical Doric pillar, for example, is without a base. If the Greek looked for individual features, then a base would have been utilised—as it was later, during the time of the Ionic and the Renaissance. In Doric times, however, the entire substructure formed the basis for the entire row of pillars and the attendant load. The load of the roof is supported at individual points by the pillars. Like bolsters, so to speak, the Doric capital pushed itself in, following in its circumference the mathematical line of force, down to its last guiding line which represented the most gifted creation of a style created by a will that aimed at objectivity. The character of the support of the pillar is indicated through a slight swelling of the shaft. The horizontal plane of the load is stressed again by the triple division of the architrave, while the overhang of the cornice moulding is realised by the eaves. Above it, the overhang of the cornice moulding is represented by the eaves. The unhindered termination of the cymatium rises into the air with a gentle sweep. On the gable corners and point the acroterias stand as resting points. For reasons of static and formal representation the corner pillars are strengthened somewhat and bent inward. From experiences of perspective the pillars are not placed strictly horizontal. We find everywhere an artistic will striving for expression of what is objective and, simultaneously, with formal giftedness. The fluctuation of the ratios of the pillar arrangements, the introduction of richer decoration in the gable fields; on the friezes, the lightening of the Ionic—all of this has not essentially altered the Greek leitmotiv. Through the course of half a millennium, clear, free Greek genius had repeatedly reshaped the basic principle of architecture. Its perfected form has left behind unmistakable traces everywhere.

It is not an inward urge—indeed, scarcely anything is personal in our sense—which speaks from the stones. Hardly anything subjective is expressed in it. It is the spirit of artistic objectivity, born only once in the world in such perfection.

The Gothic naturally represents realistic prerequisites, a technically clear law of construction. Attempts have even been made to explain it from purely engineering considerations. But to the Germanic spirit—the Gothic belongs to the German epoch of the Nordic west—in contrast to the spirit in Germany itself which began consciously in the 18th century but only today awakens to clear awareness—the new technical innovations such as the pointed arch, flying buttress and fluted vaulting were really only means for the realisation of a new will. They were not a goal in and of themselves. This new will seized, in an authoritarian manner, the available forms. It is understandable if our gracefully posturing artists, philosophers and aesthetes whined about the rough violence shown to Greek beauty.

The individual column, a seemingly compact support, loses its independence as a separate part. Together with others, it is used in a cluster of uprights and, where possible, pushed upward. The capital of this cluster is not to be regarded as a bolster for taking over a load. It signifies only a rhythmical beat in the flow of lines. It is essentially the emphasising of the attachment of the richly drawn pointed arch. A dynamic function was developed from a purely static base.

All technical advantages of the new method of building are clearly recognised. The possibility of spanning over unequally great spaces with an identical height of the arch, to apply the vaulting pressure by fluted vaults on only a few points, then to have this caught up by flying buttresses and the strong piers—this illustrates how this completely new play of forces creates other constructional foundations, and demands solutions, and can only be judged from the aspect of spiritually technical originality which is unconcerned with Greek standards. When Schopenhauer asserted that the essence of architecture consisted in expressing as clearly as possible the mutual ratio between load and support, that this occurs best of all through the horizontal and the vertical, he revealed that he was completely under Greek influence. In the Gothic, the play of pressure and counterpressure is far more alive and varied than in Greek temple construction. Viewed in this way, the Greek solution is impoverished and limited, more static than dynamic, a condition of rigidity with less flowing line. The Gothic architect is conscious of harmonious, tangible and unimposed rhythm. Thus we have, for example, the connecting lines between the crown and the attachment point of the arch in the middle nave, and the lines which lead from one base to the capital of the adjacent pillar cluster. These always form parallels. The first mentioned line always strikes with its elongation at the foot of the pillar in the aisle. The same considerations occur in the design of the side facade and of the entire outer building. It is thus beyond doubt that the purely objective aspect of the layout was never neglected, otherwise how could the towers have risen into the air? But nevertheless, this was all only a means to an end. For all material was subordinated to a definite will. This will flew away from earth. It wished to know nothing further about the pressure of horizontal load. It wished primarily to overcome all earthly gravity, to express not a functional construction of the material but the effect of a completely determined movement of soul. It did not seek for models. It authoritatively took available material, tested it, and then imprinted its seal upon it; it was personality. Through the oblique transfer of forces we find the first possibility of realising this idea. From sectioned buttresses, richly conceived, an arch thrusts upward. The upward rising line is guided by the pointed roof. Finally it takes over at the tower, which, through the most sensitive designs, becomes ever new and ever lighter, fleeing upward into the air. The last impression of a load is called forth by the surfaces of the tower spire. Therefore, here, all work is directed toward shaping it as slimly as possible. Finials are placed on the profile in order to interrupt the line which relates to load. The surface itself is broken through or replaced completely by vertically placed volatisations, as in the Antwerp cathedral. The tenacious will has been applied here, bringing the gravity pull of the earth under its command. It cannot be measured by our era which today moves on without ever understanding the marvellous Gothic creations. Only a few stand with homage before the evidences of the mighty, much maligned middle ages which were truly Germanic in many ways. If a truly great faith is ever again to enter into our hearts, then the Gothic soul will also awaken again in a new form. At present it enthuses only in other spheres.

The dispute concerning the nature of the Gothic has ended. Its foundations were laid in Nordic France. At that time, the ancestors of the Huguenots had not yet been driven out. At that time the guillotine had still not shed any precious Nordic blood. At that time a European rhythm still prevailed in the kingdom of the Franks. But slowly, the elements of the Romantic Mediterranean and the Alpine races of the southeast pushed forward to be mixed with the Germanic, creating those Frenchmen who reached their peak in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some great men still look back today at the vanished past with a longing. These are the men of perishing blood.

But even if northern France was still almost completely Germanic in the middle ages, certain differences between French Gothic and German Gothic had already taken shape. Admittedly, Notre Dame at Paris rose upward mightily as did the cathedrals at Rheims and Amiens. All are built according to the same basic type. They are triple naved with sexagonal choirs and picturesque choir aisles. They all have two towers. All these buildings contain a triple division in the principal facade porches, rose windows and king’s gallery. All have the usual horizontal division lines.

The Gothic idea did not completely achieve a breakthrough. In Germany we see from the start the greatest diversity. The choir soon became hexagonal. Some were built four sided. The dimensions deviate greatly from one another. Hall churches appear with naves of equal height, like the beautiful Elizabeth church in Marburg. Ulrich von Ensingen built five nave cathedrals and provided them with only one tower, as in Ulm. More rapidly than in France, the arch became increasingly pointed. The walls disappeared almost completely. The portal was elevated through lighter gables. The facade’s horizontal lines were removed. The middle structure between the towers was narrowed. Finally nothing was left other than a striving upwards, and this was repeated everywhere. The profiles speak of it. The added sculptures followed the architectural line. A pointed work deriding the gravity of stone spanned the walls. Like a mighty symphony the lights flooded into the halls. Their unreal flashing allows the last remainder of the world to vanish.

The Gothic, distinct from the Greek temple, attained its high point in interior construction. The great windows with stained glass paintings replaced the constricting walls, and counteracted, through their colours and lighting effects, the feeling of narrow confinement. Here also, motion was consciously conveyed in the calm space; thus the feeling of time in a spatial art. The play of sunlight through bright panes is, in its nobility, the opposite of the colour effect; the Parthenon, for example, had nothing other than surface tones which stood out spatially one from another. This world feeling of the Gothic building has been attributed to the forest longings of the Teutons—Chateaubriand even saw in this the spirit of Christianity—although the latter was and still is the bitterest enemy of the Germanic feeling for nature. The columns represented the tree trunks; the pointed arch, the foliage; and the windows the sky peeping through. Undoubtedly, there is something true in this interpretation, except that here cause and effect are confused. The columns and so on are not new realisations of the forest but allude to the same irrational essence which once sought the dark waving woods and looked through them into endless distances. This essence created the Gothic flying buttress and the mystic play of colours from the same world feeling.

Thus even the inner space of the Gothic cathedral became change and correlation, not lines and spatial shaping returning into themselves, and the same holds true for the exterior structure.

The Greek temple was a plastic creation to be viewed from all sides, standing soberly closed off and independent in itself. The Gothic cathedral spiralled upward out of a swarm of little gabled houses, using the latter as measuring rod of its size with the little houses and their inhabitants leaning on the common creation of their soul. Let those who wish laugh at this, but for me the essence of two souls speaks here: harmony of the outward individualisation and the inward striving of the dynamic personality. I considered it quite vulgar to lay bare the cathedrals of Cologne, Ulm, and so on, in order to view them better. In doing this, we had proceeded from the Greek, not the Nordic, spirit. We had committed a sin against ourselves. After the deed was done the eyes of the desolators were opened. How they want to rebuild the little houses!

The personal spirit, type forming, of the 13th and 15th centuries was given voice in poetry, stone and wood, making its appearance on beds cabinets, trunks and staircases. It attempts to be simultaneously intimate and diverse. It is also a hymn to civic individuality. Walther von der Vogelweide sang his unconstrained songs of freedom. Wolfram von Eschenbach and Meister Gottfried composed German melodies. Other media expressed the German soul: The chisel and the brush were later replaced by the organ and the orchestra.

Hellenic culture reached its peak in a plastic art of which architecture was only a part. Everything was subordinated to this plastic viewpoint. Greek sculpture turned itself almost exclusively toward the person of man. Man as body was the motif for centuries, attaining its highest perfection in literally thousands of works.

The objective will governed here. Everything self willed is suppressed. Everything irrational is guided back to simple conditions; all folds and creases are smoothed; all excesses eliminated. The Greek league of youth, the Ephebia, created its art here. Thus the works stand in long succession up to Phidias, Skopas and Praxiteles, and, even in its most subjective imitators—as at Pompeii—Greek art remained formally intact. This certainty of form is both the strength and weakness of the Greeks. It was strong as long as the Hellenes remained preserved from many false paths. It was weak when it lost the inner strength of the will. Every movement is changed into repose; even a wrestling match became a balanced adjustment of equilibrium. This is almost a complete rejection of personality. One often has the feeling that this form and superior self control springs from a certain feeling of fear. The much praised serenity of Greek art did not exhaust its essence. A subterranean feature of melancholy passed through the Greek soul but it was—in this case happily—not strong enough to influence artistic creation. The Greek sense of proportion was occasionally broken, as in the Dionysian Bacchanalia, wherein complete attention was diverted to the bath house, feasts, and so on.

Where the phallus was openly displayed as a symbol in the Late Greek style we have evidence of self disintegration. The Greeks displayed the will to such an extent in the combating of instinct, that, in the creation of art, the superior reason took over the leading role. Hence the objectivity of the Hellenic is established. This, also, is the origin of our dogmas of aesthetic mood devoid of will.

In the entire old testament we find no trace of belief in immortality, unless it be the reflection of the proven outward effect of the Persians on the Jews during the banishment. The Jewish aim is the creation of a paradise on earth. For this purpose, as is stated in the later holy books, the righteous (that is, the Jews) will creep into the promised land from their graves all over the world, emerging through holes bored in the earth by unknown forces solely for them. The Targum, the Midraschim, and the Talmud describe with delight this magnificent state of affairs in the expected paradise. The chosen people will then rule over the entire world. All other peoples will become its slaves. They will die and be born again in order to go anew to hell. The Jews, however, will not go there, but will lead a blessed life on earth. Jerusalem will be rebuilt in the most splendid way. The sabbath boundaries will be set with jewels and pearls. If anyone should have debts to pay, then he will need only tear a pearl from the hedge and he will become free of all obligations. Fruit will ripen every month, grapes will grow as large as an entire room, grain will grow of its own accord, the wind will blow the corn together, and the Jews will only need to shovel up the meal. Eight hundred varieties of roses will grow in the gardens, and streams of milk, balsam, honey and wine will flow through Palestine. Every Jew will possess a tent over which a golden vine will grow on which thirty pearls will hang. Under every vine will stand a table with jewels. In this paradise 800 kinds of flowers will bloom. In the midst the Tree of Life will grow, radiating 500,000 kinds of taste and scent. Seven clouds will lie over the tree, and the Jews will knock its branches so that its magnificent perfume is wafted from one end of the world to the other.

This land of milk and honey grew with religious sanction and then celebrated its rebirth in Jewish Marxism with its splendid future state. The greed of the Jews exists because of their bankrupt theology, whether of the past or present. At the same time, they almost completely lack a truly spiritual and artistic creativity. The primary religious element is lacking. The outward belief in immortality has been given only a superficial adjustment to an essentially alien outlook. It has never been an inwardly determined driving force.

For this reason, Jewish art will never be personal and will never attain a really objective style, revealing only technical skill and subjective ostentation destined for outward effect and mostly linked with coarse obtrusiveness, if not utterly based on immortality. In Jewish art we have almost the sole example of how an ancient group—one cannot really call them a people—which has lived in many great cultures has been unable to overcome animal instinct. Jewish art is almost unique in that it is related only to instinct. It awakens neither aesthetic self forgetfulness nor the human will. It merely—at its best—gives vent to technical judgement or it arouses only subjective feeling.

Let us look at the Jewish artists. We can begin with the Psalms, which alternately chatter with fear, exult terror, or revengefully foam at the mouth. Thanks to Luther’s poetry, this often sounds beautiful. We then find the groaning Gebirol, the lustful David ben Solomon and the contemporary degenerate Heinrich Heine. Look at Kellermann who worships Mammon or Schnitzler the sensual seeker. Felix Mendelssohn was led toward Bach by Zelter after many barren years, although the Jews now extol his alleged virtues. At best his creations are technically formally correct. Look at Mahler who flew toward the heights, but who finally had to Jewify, expecting to create the ultimate from a thousand voiced choir. Let us look at the massive overexaggeration of the circuslike theatre of Reinhard Goldman. Let us examine the Jewish wonder children at the piano or violin, and what do we find? Technique, sham, affectation, quantity, virtuosity—in short, everything one could ask for except true genius and creative power. With its hereditary alienation from European nature, the whole of Jewry made itself into the promoter of black art in all domains.

It was already proved by Duhring that the commandment to set up no gods for the nation can be traced back to the complete Jewish incapacity for formative art. This is likewise the reason why it could be an effective prohibition over thousands of years. The contemporary despairing attempts by Jewish artists to prove their talents through futurism, expressionism, and new objectivity are a living witness to this old fact. Individual attempts to create a higher culture should not be denied, but Jewry, as a whole, lacks a soul from which really great values are born.

When, as in our times, Jewish artists take a significant place in artistic life, this is an unmistakable sign that we have fallen away from the right path: that within us—it is to be hoped only temporarily—an essential spiritual power has been buried under cultural rubbish. The art of Islam is also almost purely subjective. All the murmuring of the splashing picturesquely constructed wellsprings; all the leafy shade; all the brightness of shimmering colour; all the candle lighting of the Alhambra and all the confusing line play of the wall decorations of the palaces—all these things cannot conceal the inner spiritual poverty of the race.

Such greatness as Islam has left to us on its passage through the world—the massive cupolas of the Caliphs’ graves, the meditations on Greek wisdom, the fairy tales full of fantasy—are today recognised by us as borrowings from alien spirits. Some have their origins in Greece, some in Iran and others in India. A system which had no metaphysical religion could not be really creative. Even if the Arabic Beyond was not based on the idea of an earthly paradise—on establishing a firm place in the world, as with the Jews—the substance of the ideas would be essentially the same. That this barrenness of soul is paired with an inflexible faith alters nothing. We can only recognise the Arabic culture as partially individualistic, but not as original or creative.

We have shown, and will continue to show, that the longings of most other peoples are interrelated. Viewed in this way, Lao Tse approximates the ideas of Jajnavalkya, Christ, and the great men of Europe, different as they all are from one another. Forces are at work which, although living spatially close, were inwardly nevertheless worlds apart from one another.

Remote from Islam lies conformity to the objective as well as to the personal. Just as Islam has created neither a great epic nor a great music, so has it also created no racial form of architecture. It has borrowed all architectural ideas from the Aryan Persians. It has exhibited no really legitimate new forms as true expressions of the soul. From what we have learned from history and archaeology, the Arab has merely imitated other, higher cultures.

However, the Arab subjectivity did create the horseshoe arch. The horizontal beam carrying the casing for the placing of the ordinary arch rested on the projections of the pillar or of the pier. After its removal, there resulted a very perceptible projection which was then simply filled in with mortar. As a result, the arch received a form unconditioned by any kind of static necessity. However, this was not the expression of an inwardly formative will. It was inartistic arbitrariness. This new form was repeated in the arch line, then the cloverleaf arch was invented, followed by the arch with a projecting stone tongue, and so on. The different varieties can be studied. In the mosque at Cordova, at Elashar, in the minaret at Kait Bai, at the Barkuk mosque at Cairo, at the Meshkehmeh mosque at Bulak, and in the cloister church in Segovia. Additionally, in many buildings, one arch attachment strikes on the apex of the other, creating the most impossible variations of arches, beehive buildings, and so on. The diverse, richly entwined, often strictly Islamic ornamentations, wall designs and lattice work came almost entirely from Persia. Old Iranian fabric designs and illuminated manuscripts provided the models.

The baseless Doric column was adapted from the Iranian Aryan building techniques and art. This principle is then prostituted in the hall of the famed Alhambra. Completely apart from the fact that the pillars have mostly been taken from other buildings and have had to be balanced by abutments of varied strength and height, the arches tower, doubled above each other. The pillars scarcely seem able to bear the pressure, and virtually push holes in the arches.

The essence of Islamic architecture is revealed in the oft praised arabesque. It is the most beautiful style that the Arabs created. It is not true architecture, however, but mere decorative art. An arbitrary spirit is revealed here. The ornamentation covers the entire wall. It is directionless and can be elongated on all sides or closed off at will. If Greek decor was terminated in a fixed space, composed with a determined surface limitation—if, in Gothic work, everything subordinated itself to the earth escaping vertical direction and, as a result, was made subject in every case to an external law as a consequence of an inward striving for a goal—then, in the arabesque, expressionless immoderation prevails. The best instinct for what is valuable in Islamic architecture has been shown by scenery painters of the operetta or speciality theatre. This was a suitable domain for decorative trifling and directionless overindulgence.

It is necessary to single out this alien essence. Today we can do this with justice, for, by exact study of purely technical building methods, we receive a means which we can use also to pass judgement on other expressions of Islamic style. Our philosophers should cease seeing a Magian soul in the arabesque, cease rediscovering in it something akin to the Faustian nature striving toward the infinite. Much which Islam has left behind is certainly better than as described, but then, it is also revealed, as proven in documents, that the real creators of this architectural legacy were not Arabs. The Arabic science—the cultivation of Greek philosophy—did not evolve in the hands of the Arabs. Rather, it was carried on almost exclusively by Arabic speaking Persians. For example, the mosque of the Prophet at Medina was erected by foreign artisans. El Walid had to send to Byzantium for artists and engineers to build in Jerusalem. The Greeks erected the wonder of the world at Damascus.

In Egypt, the Arabs discovered a rich Coptic architecture. The beautiful construction of many buildings there originated with Coptic engineers. A Coptic artist built the Ibn Tulun mosque. It was he who used the pointed arch consciously for the first time. The model for this arch was provided by the marble gate in the Nahassin quarter which had earlier stood on the Norman church of saint Jean d’Acre. One must take note of all this in order to gain a correct insight into the different influences. Sassanids, Coptics and Greeks provided the foundation. Then Arabic whimsicality took over with a decorative overindulgence.

It may now be understood why the copying of these Arabic elements—the cloverleaf arch, keel arch, arabesque, and so on—will never, at any time, find acceptance with us. They are alien to us and should always remain separated from us. They are evidence of an alien soul to which none of the concepts of art, personality or objectivity style are to be applied.

Between directionless artistic subjectivism and the inwardly organic style of personality authoritatively mastering the material, there is a graded succession of artist and orientations of art. Many artists are gifted with tendencies for what is higher, without, however, being able to guide this gift into an artistically well rounded perfection. Others search untroubled into normal life, to describe, paint and stylise out of pure formative joy. The union of person and personality given here on earth directs and possesses us.

We must establish an intermediary stage between subjectivism and personality art, that is, the transition from arbitrariness to inner law. Let us name these domains the individual style, in which something organic is emphasised but where a limitation is also revealed. Such designations—this must be expressly underlined—are methodologically necessary in order to grasp a life which is ever in flux. We can only perceive something when we see it as form, even when the outlines are not rigid but may be plastically removed.

The love of what is individual is an outstanding feature of Europe. To discover this, we only need to cast a fleeting glance at Nordic poetry, architecture, sculpture and paintings. Gothic stonemasons and woodcarvers, the landscape painters of all districts, the artists of the monastic bibles, the inventors of the Gothic script, the narrators of strange stories—all of these show a striving for expression. For every energetic expression there is a form given by a thousand hands. The same spirit lives in the hundreds of painters of Holland. It is alive in all the artists of old France, and, even today, it finds a new imprint on isolated individualities.

Peter Paul Rubens belongs to this domain, as one of its first great men. No one doubts that great treasures of powerful electrifying fantasy have seen the light of the world through him. How he dealt with it, what material, what spiritual content is applied, how the direction of its treatment was determined—these things show us an artist standing almost exactly in the middle, between subject and personality. His whole work is directed at sensuous nature with its thousand colours and forms, with its joys and fears. We find the stepladder of our mortal individuality expressed in the delicacy of his portrait of Isabella Brandt. We see it also in the lustful possession of the great Kirmes—from the sensual lust for life of his nymphs, to the drunken Silenus, to the sorrowful cry of the damned as they fall down into Hell. The themes are always new and alive with an artistic objectivity conscious of its goal. But nowhere does Rubens succeed in a creation which can illuminate either this entire earthly joy or earthly sorrow as an allegory. Nowhere does he give evidence of the success of a great, true, inner, supernatural vision, although Rubens often attempted it. His great canvas of Christ ascending to heaven, the saviour, who, standing on the globe of the world, treads upon the head of the serpent; the Apocalyptic dragons and other monsters; the massed clouds; the rejoicing angels and the fluttering, shimmering garments—all of these signified an unequalled application of material and fantasy, but they are only unsuccessful attempts. The greater the scope of his works became, the less we see their spiritual thrusting power. Rubens’s Descents into Hell—master works of life, mobility and composition—nevertheless show only outward exuberance, but are persuasive in making credible a secret supernatural power by an outward application of strength.

Rembrandt soared above this world with works in which a smiling conquest of the world and a shattering despair have guided his brush. Rubens’s last work was of himself in shining armour, a saint George slaying the dragon. Rubens lived a rich existence as a man. He was honoured as a great artist by an entire world. He displayed the untroubled refinement of individuality. Rembrandt withdrew completely into himself and surveyed the world—unsentimentally but filled with deepest premonitions—as a material which is to be overcome. Rubens’s work is a powerful symphony of life in all its forms. The power of worldly existence is its content. In his greatest works all the symbols—found in the treasury of Greek legend and in the apocalyptic parables—are pushed aside and, with which the insane life of his environment formed the foundation for the Kirmes in the Louvre. Whoever has stood before this work sees in a moment what took Schopenhauer his entire life to describe: the power of blind instinct. Without allegory, life itself has been represented here. The gluttons and drunkards, the whores and lechers, the singers and drunken women dancers all repeat one and the same song, that of the unbridled beast. The artistic power which flung this, so to speak, with a jolt onto the canvas, is unique in its manner. The individual, without any restraints, had become the content and art form of Rubens.

Similarly, but less powerfully, Frans Hals reveals himself laughingly and mockingly as he brought life onto the canvas with a broad brush. Inspired by the same spirit, but filled with unequal dramatic impetus, is Adrian Brouwer, an artist who died too early. His descriptions of the instinctively individual often remind one of Rubens’s Kirmes. He allows us to discern an artist, who, had he lived a longer life, would perhaps have mastered his material. He might have formed an inwardly dramatic life from Holland’s genre painting.

Another artist whose works we could describe unhesitatingly as being of an individual style is Lorenzo Bernini. This last great sculptor—the architect of the colonnades of saint Peter’s Square—was honoured by an entire generation as one of its greatest artistic geniuses. We would also admire him except for his rather mediocre design of the entrance to the Sistine, and except for his perceptible sensual note (for example, with Amor and Psyche), and except for his exaggerated use of charming materials. These are signs of adaptation to the taste of the broad masses, or signify, at least, a prostitution of his innermost creative power.

Like Rubens—a man of the greatest fantasy and mastery of his material, a master in utilisation of all methods and artifices of painting and materials—Bernini lacked that greatness of soul and mysterious magic which emanates from the works of a Da Vinci or Rembrandt or from the creations of Meister Erwin.

Now we must write a few words about the Baroque period and its meaning. Our histories of art speak about the Masters of the Baroque era as representatives of a singular direction of art and spirit. However, these interpretations are in error and are useless unless we are able to define the essence of the term Baroque. In contrast to the spirit of the Renaissance which sought only harmony, the Baroque era was a search for expression. Apart from the fact that they did not search only for expression, the great men of the Renaissance—Da Vinci, Donatello, Masaccio—one cannot make this statement about their art. For whatever is it supposed to mean, when it is said that Michael Angelo is Baroque? Are Velasquez, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Rubens and Hals? Are their works Baroque in spirit? Great differences appear which cannot be expressed with one word. If a fundamental unity has not previously been attained by means of a clear differentiation there is, at least, a plurality contained in a notion.

We see the Gothic from an unequally greater distance than we see the period of the Baroque. We grasp its uniform striving for a goal clearly. In spite of this, very different accompanying elements and assertions are to be recorded with its evaluation. In fact, the Baroque is a new wave of spirit which is to be valued not only in its temporal length, the extent of flight and power, but particularly in its depth laden with value. Here, the measuring rod drawn from the essence of our art will prove itself particularly fruitful. We have already seen the results in Gothic art, with its effective strength of artistic personality, of individuality, of subjectivism.

One rightly sees in Michael Angelo the artist who most visibly breaks with all the aesthetic precepts of Greece. His art exhibits no appeasement of passion in his balanced form. Rather, one sees the unleashing of passion through personality, through a personal will in art. His works stand before us as a wild and conscious protest against Hellas. This man, who spoke neither Greek nor Latin, created The Slaves, Moses, The Medici Tombs and The Sibyls and Prophets. They reveal such richness of soul and such knowledge, that Goethe could say that, after Michael Angelo, nature no longer pleased him since he could not gaze upon it with such great eyes as the genius. Michael Angelo created for himself a law which he alone followed. He alone was able to master his material. Rembrandt went to work in exactly the same personal way, and Shakespeare was equally great.

In the life work of these men we find the stepladder from crass individuality to perfected inspiration. Rembrandt’s Monk in a Cornfield, his heads of Jews, his drawings of neglected corners and of men, are works which master life in all its heights and depths, ranging from the Couple in Bed to The Hundred Gulden Note. His imitators and lesser contemporaries remained rooted in the individual sphere. The power of concentration he showed in the outline and construction of Michael Angelo’s saint Peter was a mere outward application of energy. His vestibule in the Vatican library, ignoring all architectural limitations, with its pilasters of broken work and wild guiding of lines, was a unique subjective outbreak, but one which, with many others, became a permanent principle. Groups of heaped up columns and flighty cornices appear; decorative cornices are knocked in the walls; gables are perforated and filled with scrolls; towers and facades are profiled with rounded forms, and mighty volutes strive to the centre of the building. Il Gesu, Maria della Salute and a hundred other buildings bear witness not only to great assertions of strength but also to a styled will which is determined only in the individual manner of a painter. Later, these forms were plunged deeper into the sphere of subjectivism.

The Jesuit counterreformation used tin radiance, paper tinsel, plaster garlands covered over with gilt and other follies to blind the masses. Art became a means to reconquer hearts lost through the Reformation. Individual popes had given aid to great art for their own splendour and for the splendour of Rome. They had little real delight in these creations. Jesuit inspired artists worked sensuous, powerful, willed painting. They perfected artistic lack of restraint, and this became known as the Jesuit style of art.

The sitting column, the paste and stucco coullisses of such as S. J. Pozzo, are classic models for those who would study artistic crimes. Unfortunately. these abortions are still found all over Europe. The lofty flight of the Gothic had ended. Raceless Rome had triumphed over the Nordic spirit in architecture. Protestantism, on the other hand, falling into the other extreme, allowed an impoverishment to enter its houses of god which made the heart grow cold. The heart had been heretofore sensuously overheated in the Jesuit churches by gold, tin and incense.

The era of the Baroque is to be equated in its greatest representatives with the innermost will of the creators of the cathedrals of Ulm, Straßburg, Rheims, Leon, Compiègne, and Köln, except that this spirit made use of other means. If, in the 13th and 14th centuries, architecture was the medium dominating everything and embodying the deepest longing; in the 16th and 17th, it was sculpture and painting that dominated. It was supported by musical spirit. The chisel and brush appeared in place of the compass and carpenter’s square. If, in the 13th century, one could justly speak of a uniformly directed personal western soul, so now one could talk of individual personalities who indeed were outstanding more in a portrait than in the building of a cathedral over many years and by many hands.

In the same way that the Gothic at last betrayed itself by creating playful vaulting artifices and fish bubble designs, also did the Baroque commit suicide with its incompetent imitations of Michael Angelo. The feeling of life carried Meister Erwin and Rembrandt to the supreme heights, while below, the wills of thousands were not strong enough to follow.

What is essential is the recognition that autocratic mastery of materials forms the basis of the Gothic as it did the Baroque. But while the one era carried out its heaven storming plans, the other remained a quiet spiritual concentration. A further step occurred when poetry and music in a new Gothic baroque wave of art aided the Nordic and German nature to achieve its deepest expressions.

What we have called German or Nordic western art is here revealed in its inner structure. Its goal is the embodiment of supreme spiritual action expressed through new means and in a continuous new form. From subjective attitudes and individual creations (that is, unities) a new spiritualising of the world developed which, after it had unfolded its splendour, sank back into shapelessness ready for recasting.

We have experienced this three times; at the time of the Gothic, in Baroque art, and at the time of Goethe, whose posthumous influence is still felt. This is the life pulse of Europe, a pulse which beats more rapidly and dramatically than that of other peoples. We hold in suspicion the present widespread lamentation which announces the cultural decline of the west. These harbingers of disaster pay no attention to the increasing pulsebeat of our Nordic culture. They believe we have breathed our last. If other peoples do not seem to possess this rhythm, but have left behind a single lifeline, then this still says nothing about our law of life. Men who, with predilection, use the example of a flowering and withering plant, should pursue this analogy somewhat further before it can be of use to us. A searing autumn wind blows through our present cultural world. Whoever feels himself an old man will find many reasons to imagine the coming winter as his last. Whoever has lost faith recognises impassionate understanding as simultaneously ruler and shaper. But whoever has recognised not China’s many thousand year old intake of breath, but the powerful pulsebeat of Europe as a uniqueness belonging only to him, looks with a much more different vision into the past and future than the preachers of our predestined decline! The Gothic period ended in the desolation of the guild system, and with the mastersingers languishing in dullest sobriety. The Baroque period turned itself inside out in a thousand insanities.

Today, after an enormously aimless use of old forms, we are presently witnessing an equally directionless anarchy exhaust itself furiously. We have still not reached the ebb. But, as happened three times in the past, Europe also draws a new breath for a fourth time. No one yet knows what means for the renewed turning inward of our life will be the right ones. But in all events, they will be used to link us to what is eternal, so that we are able to experience the birth of a truly new form.

The second half of the 19th century was, as far as architecture and the arts were concerned, a period of a hitherto unknown shapeless adaptation of all previous forms. Authorities of all periods, designs from all centuries and paintings from the works of all peoples, decorated the work place of the architect. Imitation dominated all the art and architecture of the period.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, technical development moved forward with an unsuspected speed, requiring more and more newer factories, railway stations, power stations, and so on, so that no time remained for an artistic development to match the new era’s requirements. It was no longer possible to control the new problems dispassionately, so things moved devoid of direction along the well worn paths of old. We began building those frightful looking railway stations, factories and warehouses with cast Greek colonnades and acanthus leaves, complete with imitations of Moorish, Gothic and Chinese forms. Many were capped by the crudest iron constructions. Even today, the whole of Europe is covered with the products of an unprecedented decline in art. When a new generation wished to become violently personal, the ill reputed youthful style appeared. Its crimes against art have been observed with astonishment from Paris to Moscow and Budapest. This controversy still rages unhindered in many places today. The creative power was broken because it had become distorted ideologically and artistically by alien standards. It was no longer equal to the new demands of life.

The renewed enthusiasm for the Gothic, experienced around the turn of the 20th century, produced as its consequence those new Gothic churches and city halls. This revealed the impossibility of using Gothic forms in contemporary creations. Our present world feeling is no longer a vertical striving away from the world. It is a desire for strength and expression, but not in the form of the old Gothic will.

The personal Gothic style, even if it arose from the primal Germanic character, reflected a definite kind of feeling prevailing only then. Our era must use its own building blocks in the erection of monumental structures. Water towers need powerful enclosed forms. Simple gigantic masses are required for grain silos. Our factories must be given a weighty shape. Scattered business buildings are to be concentrated into single giant houses of labour. Electric generating works, with their various apparatus, are to be spread over the earth. The buildings of a large factory which were thrown together haphazardly in the past, will be moved together organically to an inner community. The Moorish railway stations are to be pulled down. A resounding song of iron and stone is heard in new rhythms. And while disillusion followed behind disillusion, real creative joy passed through the world. A generation of architects, conscious of honour, began to understand the new questions of life and to struggle for expression stated according to time and essence. The lack of restraint still possible in the other arts found, in architecture, its regulating law through utility and economic consideration as end and purposes.

Technical expediency seems to be the prerequisite of all architecture. The Gothic form is forever surpassed. But the Gothic soul struggles, as those who are not blind can see, for a new realisation. We have made steps toward using new, heretofore untried, solutions to modern architectural problems, especially of the multistorey buildings, the skyscrapers. The frightening aspects of American art, with its skyscrapers with Renaissance style, Gothic gables, and Baroque designs, and with absolutely soulless engineering techniques—which even in America are approaching their end—have caused us to overlook the fundamental questions which our life demands. One stone colossus after another replaced the old houses of America. The churches, which heretofore had been the highest buildings, lie in the greatest neglect in the midst of a giant pile of stones. New York was built without an inner standard of value or organic measuring rod. The Gothic architect knew very well that he could not place a church and town hall alongside one another. The size of the one building would have eliminated the size of the other, robbed the height of its necessary measuring rod. American haste and necessity were free of these reflections. But the experiences gained have resulted in demands of an unavoidable kind for Europe.

Along with the problem of a building with a broader foundation, we are striving to move onward and upward from the new vertical styling. We are at work on a powerful block which, with its own side wings, forms a building system in itself. It will develop its own standards. For this reason we will require an elementary law which will say that no new building can be erected in an environment dominated by multistory buildings. The same will hold true for buildings which rise upward from a small area. Only in this way can spatial rhythm and inner strength be realised.

Thus we hold that to use Gothic external forms is an impossibility. The Gothic inner will and its laws of construction can only be newly experienced if a true architecture of the future is to appear.

Greek architectural forms are, as elaborated, of objectively functional nature. A Greek kymation is the alpha of all unconfined cornice ending. If a horizontal load is to be taken up by a stone pillar, then the Doric capital, the Doric pillar shaft with its fluting, with its gentle swelling, reproduces the course of the line of strength with almost mechanical faithfulness. The form of the abacus will also be amenable to only a few alterations. These forms of Greek style are eternally subjective and have rightly raised claims for use. If one wishes to give expression to these gently felt transitions between load and support, the Renaissance believed it could do this. Classicism of the 19th century thought that it was the first to do it properly. In the course of the last decades, an inward retreat and reversal has also taken place. The search of the modern Gothicist does not soar upward through the clouds. Rather, it is directed at massive labour. Like Faust, he drains swamps and, after he has apparently been immersed without salvation in the swamp of Classicism and Anarchy, he sees more clearly what he wishes: Ennoblement, intellectuality, inspiration of the roughest labour.

There is still one final thing which gives us the justification to claim the basic forms of ancient Greek architecture to be applicable. Something goes back to prehistoric times and links objectivity with natural growth and what is racial as well as personal. The fact is that wherever the culture of the Mediterranean races prevailed, we can establish the round style of building as their basic architectural type. This is the basic type of the Etruscan house and of the pre Nordic fortresses on Sardinia, and of the primal fortress of Tiryns. But in the north, the rectangular building arose. Even from the times of the Megalith culture onward, buildings exist which have rectangular outlines along with porch and posts. This is the primary type of the later Attic house and the Greek temple. The houses at Haldorf, Neuruppin, in Brandenburg, and the houses of the stone age, are the primary images which were carried by the Nordic tribes into the Danube valley, to Moravia, to Italy, to Greece, and above all to the fortresses in Baalbek. From the 8th century B.C. onward Germanic Grecian houses appeared on the rubble of the old round fortresses of pre Indogermanic Tiryns. The Nordic rectangular buildings arose according to this basic principle. The kings’ houses at Mykenai were built following this design as were those in Troy. The Nordic men appeared everywhere as conquerors and creators. Blond Menelaus, reported by Homeros, belonged to the fortress of Alkinoos, which Odysseus in the Odyssey saw built with posts. The great Achaean kings, Atreus and his fellows, who stretched out their hands toward the coasts of Asia Minor, were the builders of the Trojan palaces. The basic ideas of Greek architecture were of essence with Germanic feeling. The Romantic—in reality, Germanic throughout—and the Gothic cathedral have remained—independent of the time linked form—true to these ideas. The principles which form the basis of both forms signify the essence of the Nordic interpretation of space. In Italy—where the Nordic current, even as it passed over the entire land as in Greece, moved around Etruscan centres so that these frequently remained untouched—we experience the counterstruggle against the rectangular shaping. It passed from the round Etruscan house over the horseshoe construction up to the outlines of the Roman villas of Pompeii. The true origin of the round houses is the racial Myth of the Mediterranean peoples. It has little to do with architecture per se.

The aboriginal matriarchy of the pre Nordic Mediterranean peoples was symbolised by the swamp or the swamp plants and swamp animals; that is, the symbols of the widespread indiscriminate sexual intercourse. Isis and Mother Nature were represented as sitting amidst the reeds of the swamp. Artemis and Aphrodite were worshipped in reeds and swamp. The original Etruscan house arose from this same symbolic reed. The stalks of reeds were stuck in a circle in the ground and the canes were fastened together above. This form was then imitated in stone. The first cult of the mother, the swamp cult, was thus the same symbolism as the dwelling hut of the mother worshipping Italian prehistoric people. The struggle is particularly revealed later in the disputes between the central principle and basilical principle of church building. The great cupola architecture of the original saint Peters—which was later altered to basilical—shows this idea of the ancient round house. Admittedly, the Nordic formative power later mastered this principle; however, it has always remained basically alien to us. The round construction limits vision on all sides. It is directionless, and is basically free on all sides. In the deepest sense of the three dimensional spatial concept, a round building cannot convey a real spatial feeling at all, not even if it is shaped by a very great artistic hand.

In contrast to the Mediterranean peoples with their animal mixed images of god, the Nordic Greeks—in whom we can often better view our essence than in the Germanic antiquities almost completely destroyed by the monks—carried a free, undemonic image of the gods in their hearts. As Karl Schuchhardt remarked, the god was established where the first ray of the sun illuminated a peak. Wherever there were free peaks to the east, the Nordic man placed his god. Nordic gods lived on Mount Athos, Olympos, the Parnassos, the Helikon and, in the north on the Wodansberg and Donarberg. Where there were no mountains the tree tops took their place. The Zeus oak, the sacred oaks of the Teutons, were cut down by Bonifacius. In place of these murdered oaks we now find the Romantic bells and the Gothic church towers. These caught the first rays of the divine sun in their dizzy heights. The watchman on his tower became their servant and interpreter. When the finials on the towers glowed red, this glitter awoke those same feelings of sublimity as in the past when the peoples of Homeros looked up at Olympos, or when Old Germanics gathered in the tall oak glades at sunrise.

Thus have the Gothic and Hellenic styles been close in our spiritual and artistic experience. But we do not think of allowing the resultant new possibilities to lie unused or to link them forever to time bound forms and techniques. On the contrary, we affirm the flow of life, the diversity of spiritual conditions and times. Over and beyond this, we feel the blessing of the mysterious powers of life binding us and, in this case, especially one in particular; the feeling of space which binds us to the same, eternal forms of representation.

Personality and Objectivity have been differentiated. I confess that it is misleading to speak today about Personality when every immature individual applies this notion unconcernedly to himself, and every leading authority demands it of the future, of the peoples and of the state. It is simultaneously a type and the sire of a type. Despite this, it is clear that the coming form of our existence in the world will flow out on all domains. As is always the case, it can be created only by a few great individual men. The fear of being excoriated by those without taste or style has occasioned many a serious man to reject his true self, his personality and his ideals. Nevertheless, he must become his true self.

In the individual consciousness (the ego) individualism and universalism are contained. The individualistic epoch which passes today in dangerous convulsions has again strengthened the universalistic doctrine. These unnatural ideas necessarily produce forms, repellent of life, against which individualism revolts and which, if necessary, it violently suppresses. Unrestricted individualism and boundless universalism mutually condition each other. Only through the concept of the people as folk and race, as expression—or, if one wishes, as parallel phenomenon—of a definite soul does the one as well as the other principle receive a limitation of an organic physical nature. A clear soul and a consciousness of an always active, spiritual, willed essence signifies true personality. This is and remains the deepest experience of the west, and no false shame must hinder the treatment of this question—without which ultimately nothing can be traced back to its foundation.

Just as today efforts are being made to build up state and economy after the collapse of economic individualism from individualistic ideas—against which the National Socialist idea appears born as the organic and fruit bearing vision of the future—so western soul and art signifies an eternal effort to give expression to the feeling of loneliness and infinity. The sense of infinity is found in the Gothic, in the self sublimating music, in the endless garden perspective of Lenotre, in the half dark of Rembrandt, and in infinitesimal calculation.

The feeling of loneliness and infinity is undoubtedly a characteristic of western nature. In the theatre one can discern a reference to this in the third act of Tristan—if one closes his eyes and places himself in the situation of the lonely man. High on a rocky cliff, above him blue infinity, before him an eternity of space, his body wounded, his insides full of painful torture, near to timelessness, Tristan’s soul longs for something infinitely far off, an idea which on earth is personalised in Isolde. In the midst of this desolation, the tones of a shepherd’s flute can be heard from somewhere in a self willed rhythm remote from the world, exactly expressing what cannot be described in any words born of reason. Wagner worked on Tristan in Venice, alone, deliberately secluded, separated from Mathilde with suicidal thoughts in his heart.

Consider another picture. Hans Sachs lived in the midst of the greatest Philistinism. At the beginning of act three of The Mastersinger he passes into loneliness. Yet he is not alone there. Around him are thousands of people in living carnival mood, in a picturesque city, happy pairs as lovers and, among them, his own protege. All of these cry out joyously to our great Sachs. Cries of applause resound. In the midst of this activity he stands there smiling, rich, but nevertheless lonely, in isolation, and utters words concerning what is eternal in art. His ideas are incomprehensible to many. They are only words about the German Masters. Again, there is this feeling of infinity but expressed in a way that is completely different from Tristan. In Tristan Wagner created harmony of the outward and inward; with Hans Sachs there is contrast.

What is it that calls forth this feeling of infinity, abandonment and loneliness? What is that feeling which we encounter so strongly imprinted on no other race and culture soul known to us? There have been sufficient references to the manifold differences in the souls of peoples and to the eternal restlessness of Faustian natures and to their feeling of infinity, but we still have not been brought to real consciousness. The Indian had a feeling of eternity and this is ancient Aryan property. But the later Indian floated in the all soul. He longed only for total dissolution. His infinity consisted in the recognition of the equality of all phenomena as related to the all soul. He could not have felt loneliness in our sense. He saw himself everywhere and nowhere.

The Faustian man penetrates into the infinite, profoundest depths, but he is essentially solitary ..... But that is only possible because he experiences inwardly an immortality unique only to himself. He elevates himself from an environment as a person, because he is personality. He senses his immortal unique soul. That soul is an eternally active master which searches for strength, time, and spacelessness. It is released from all that is earthbound. It is completely unique. That is the secret of the Germanic Nordic soul, the primal phenomenon, as Goethe would call it, beyond which we no longer seek, perceive or explain anything and which we should only respect in order to permit it to take its place within us.

The idea of the eternal personality is the strongest declaration of struggle against this world of appearances. The Indian, after he had distinguished between world and soul, rejected the former as deceit and mere appearance, attributing true reality only to the latter. The soul, the Ãtman, the self, was, according to him, the only one. The Ãtman was fully and completely contained in a drop of water, in an animal, in a man. It was identical in all creatures of this world as something ageless yet young, as the primordial miracle. From this feeling of universality drifting into infinity, the difference of the races of man and spirit were overlooked. Earthbound diversities were regarded as delusions. They were declared, with the greatest spiritual power, to be nonexistent. That also are you is the Indian doctrine of the soul. It was boundless expansion following upon a philosophic intention never previously existent.

Philosophising reason presses at all times toward binding the manifoldness of this world into a unity. It seeks to form experiences from observations and unity from diversity. India was predominantly philosophically oriented. It placed redemption not in a religiously willed transformation, but in an act of perception. Whoever saw through the appearance of this world was redeemed. This fundamental philosophic mood teaches that a multiplicity of souls—an idea which emerges in later times in the Samkhyam system—is wholly unacceptable in a philosophic sense. It is blasphemy. As such, it would also appeal to every philosopher who was inclined only toward perception. The philosophy of reason as such will always aim at the monism of Indian or the material worshipping kind.

The religious soul of the west is opposed to this outlook. This time we are seeking ideas in harmony with the teaching of Jesus: that is, the assertion of the eternal personality in the face of an entire world. It comes, in its individual manifestation, from something unknown which rises within us—in innermost elevation—like the shadow of a memory. It has an unknown task to perform here on earth: to discharge its mission and to return again to its primordial essence. Every personality is a unity without end. That is the religious will as contrasted with philosophical monism. The monist stands alone in the universe. He returns home to what, in the language of religion, is called the father. What awakens philosophic resistance is religious experience.

For this reason Jesus, in spite of all Christian churches, signifies a pivotal point in our history. He became the god of the Europeans. Up to the present he appeared in a repellent distortion.

If this concentrated feeling of personality which built Gothic cathedrals and inspired a Rembrandt portrait penetrated more clearly into the consciousness of the general public, a new wave of culture would begin. But the prerequisite for this is the overcoming of the former statutory values of the Christian churches.

The dignity of personality has nothing to do with the person. Otherwise the most worldly and materialistic men would believe in a personal immortality with all their power. But the latter desire only the extension of their animality into infinity. The greatness of Egypt, for example, is overestimated. Pyramids and mummification are not the expression of an otherworldly feeling of eternity. They are but a crass assertion of existence. The reason why Egypt became so incomprehensibly rigid was that everything was placed or forced into the service of this world. It was a state composed of officials and clerks. This also has its own kind of greatness, but of a totally different kind than that which the Romantics attempt to assert about Egypt.

In the ancient Indian doctrine, the concept of personal immortality is to be included. For if as plant, animal or man, I am yet always an ego—a self—that will be reborn, then something unalterable is assumed in which something alters reality. The concept of Karma, invested with many mysteries of the Buddhist philosophy, does not enlighten us here. The known parable of work and wagon is crassly materialistic and rests upon falsely concluded analogies. It is the heart of our heart which is reborn to our faith. The doctrine of the migration of souls is therefore understood as a parable. If I recognise that I am bound here to forms of viewing things without which nothing is really conceivable to me (time, space, causality) then I would also not be able to grasp the truest answer, for it now presupposes completely different forms of outlook. If I speak about personal immortality and am confronted with the logical conclusion of the Beyond, of accepting an ever larger mass of personalities, that all immortal personalities could thus increase—a hair raising idea—or that a completely fixed number of immortal personalities exist who realise themselves in eternal recurrence, then the observation must be made that here notions are mixed. They arise in us under other conditions. We know nothing of the laws of the other world kingdom! Laws which have validity here—even the notion of here and there must be rejected—are inapplicable in other conditions.

In the idea of personality, the metaphysical problem is condensed. Every man feels a number of formative possibilities within himself. He knows that many of his dispositions change and that other capabilities have, or could have, unfolded. Nevertheless, he recognises himself again in every new deed. He knows that the structural lines of his essential nature remain the same. He sees himself as facing an apparently unconditional law. This inescapability from oneself and, again, the certainty of being a self, is the cause of the recognition of the freedom of will and the recognition of inflexible laws which dwell in a man.

Jesus was of the opinion that a thistle could not bear fruit. Thus, an evil man could not do good works. Nevertheless, he demanded inward transformation. Luther wrote a book about the lack of freedom of the will and the freedom of the Christian man. Goethe spoke his primary words. Schopenhauer denied free will but reintroduced the moral order of the world.

For all Europeans, the last secret is contained in the concept of personality. Simultaneously, the conflict between freedom and unfreedom is, for us, only conditional. If we look away from purely external, mechanical influences which have effect upon us as organic creatures—this influence is smuggled dishonestly into the treatment of the problem of personality—then the grounds of dispute lie in that we judge ourselves in different situations from different viewpoints. If we feel the unfreedom of our nature, the unconditional urge to act in a specific way and not otherwise, then we unconsciously split our ego into two parts and feel the one burden upon us. Instead of saying to ourselves that we, as personalities, will ourselves to act so that this effect is an inner feeling developing through time and according to external experience, each has created for himself his own law. That he created this law is the freedom of his personality. This recognition fits in exactly with the teachings of Meister Eckehart.

Therefore, things are not as Schopenhauer teaches. He taught that the empirical and intelligible character are two phenomena which exist outside the individual personality as universal empirical and moral world order, or, that accidental coincidence makes up a man, as the Indian Karma doctrine also asserts. When German folkish lore pronounces that each man is the smith of his luck, when Goethe speaks of the creative strength of a genius, and when Eckehart demands that each must become one with himself, these ideas are all fundamentally the same. It is the peculiar Germanic adjustment to the age old problem of man.

The idea of the immortal personality is not only a poetic creation. It is the highest religious flight which does not come into conflict with the strongest critique of perception. In the inorganic world the question as to a why, as to a purpose, is senseless. But life—organic reality—cannot be grasped otherwise. Everywhere there is a realisation of something that is always conditioned by a goal. Life is thus striving for a goal through unconscious purposefulness. Every creature receives instincts, which serve this quest for a goal. The belief in immortality breaks out again and again and directs us inwardly. This shows that it is a power given to us and one which already represents our immortality. A great natural scientist and thinker, Karl Ernst von Baer, declared in answer to the question about the essence of life:

As self development does not consist uniformly in the attainment of a fixed form, but the organs are prepared for future use and the materials are constantly altered for self formation, then the most general character of the life process seems to me to be striving for a goal. We will then not seek for the spatial seat of life, as the life process can only take its course in the viewing of time. To comprehend how natural life consists in striving for goals, necessities, and compulsively pursued aims, seems to me the true task of natural research.

Here we are faced with a test of character. Are we in the position of interpreting full blooded racial life and its laws as an allegory of what is eternal or not? Can we experience our will to seek immortality as a means striving for a goal? Can we feel that, as life here already eliminates space, it also lies beyond the usual causality, that it still has permanency even after the removal of time?

A parallel example which clarifies the relationship even more distinctly is shown in the doctrine of predestination. It has taught the western world nothing more than that god is in our bosom. This is not the opposite of the ego but is the self. Self determines goals through essential types. In the Jewish Syrian Roman world of ideas, which tears personality and god apart and opposes them hostilely, the idea of predestination became an ideal outlook which degraded man, condemning him to rebirth as a slave.

In the doctrine of predestination one creature was chosen forever by the spirit of an arbitrary creator while the other was damned for eternity. The why remained a mystery known only to the instructing magician. Here we experience anew the catastrophe that occurs when a completely fixed idea is assimilated by an alien mode of thought. Intellectual and spiritual bastardisation is then the inevitable consequence. The high respect that the Germanic personality has toward other races was deflected by alien races. The plastic possibilities of our essence are misdirected, causing much to perish which could have blossomed in accordance with its intrinsic nature. God be thanked that Augustinus’s monstrous doctrine of predestination has exerted no really lasting influence. This is an unconscious sign that our Nordic nature was not wholly abandoned to Eternal Rome.

Only in strictly Jewish church Christianity does the separation of personality from god still live on, although the figure of Jesus demands this unity. Indeed, Jesus demanded this unity in a manner that is wholly unprecedented in history. He called for an absolute personality which lives freely according to its own law, as the master over the person. However, this signifies the strongest possible contrast to the doctrine of living of personality to the fullest, as our fashionable speech puts it. This guarantees mastery over life, not powerlessness of action. If one adds that this freedom is organically bounded by race and people, then we have before us the eternal prerequisite of every true to type cultural epoch of the west. The idea of the authoritative personality and the doctrine of predestination are closely linked with the concept of destiny.

Here, two incompatible world outlooks confront each other: the ancient Indian and the hither Asiatic. The Indian as a spiritual aristocrat attributed his earthly fate only to himself. If one asked an Indian who was born blind why he believes he has to endure this punishment, then he will answer that it is because he has done evil in an earlier life. Consequently, he must suffer a misfortune in accordance with his deeds. This completely logical idea eliminates externals completely, denies autocratically and, in particular, what we, who have grown up within the circle of church influences, are accustomed to describe as merciless fate. This emphasising of the responsibility outward is the unblessed legacy for which we have to thank the form of Christianity which brought the hither Asiatic world of ideas with it to Europe.

While the Homeric age still lived in communion with itself and the universe, Greek inner life was undermined by external upheavals. In tragedy, personality and destiny therefore appeared in a dualistic manner. Innocent or guilty men are subject to the intrusion of external forces as, for example, in Oedipus. On top of this misery, yet another thing happened that split the soul. An alleged representative of god appeared. He taught the subjugation of the soul and the suppression of the human personality. Man was no longer responsible for his destiny and he was reduced to a condition of subservient humility.

Again, what was Germanic appeared in a dual antithesis toward these two types. It did not arrogate the right of declaring nonexistent the physical universe and its laws. Nordic ideas knew nothing of Semitic fatalism or Syrian fate or magical delusion. It linked ego and destiny and declared them to be simultaneously existing facts, without inquiring concerning the causality of both parts. The relationship of the Germanic peoples to the notion of destiny here was completely the same as it was in the later representation by Luther. It taught the existence of natural laws and personal freedom. The Nordic idea of spiritual conduct in the universe coincided with Kant’s perceptively critical investigations concerning the kingdoms of freedom and natural necessity.

Perhaps nowhere is this essential harmony of everything Nordic German revealed more clearly than in the comparison of the very oldest Germanic sagas and songs with Kantian thought.

Teutons fought Teutons, both sides believing that they had to fight for their freedom and honour. And the Germanic singer closes his song of destiny:

Curse struck us, Brother, I had to kill you,

It will stay eternally unforgotten, hard is the saying of the Norns.

Here the Norns appear as the allegory of an unfathomable, and yet intuitively felt, necessity of cosmic law. The fighting Teutons seized this destiny and followed it without lamenting as free men. The sons of the Norland, Hamdir and Sorli, who rode to the court of the king of the Goths, Ermanerick, to avenge the death of their sister, knew that they also rode to their death as they lent themselves consciously and freely in service for the family honour. They fought until the last drop of blood. Sorli’s last words were:

Well have we fought, we stand on the corpses of the Goths,

On those fallen in arms, like eagles on the branches.

Good honour is ours, if the end comes today:

None lives through the night, if the Norns have spoken.

These words are of an heroic, unsentimental self confidence which finds its likeness in splendid heroic disposition only in the other Germanic songs, notably in the ancient Hildebrandlied. Father and son confronted one another; the homeward returning warrior and the protector of his hearth. The father recognised the son. However, the son saw in the father’s welcoming words only a trick and incited the old hero. The father tolerated this until his son accused him of dishonourable disposition.

In fulfilment of the self created law of honour, old Hildebrand saw the ruling destiny as an idea which reaches back to the profoundest Germanic mystery and the uncreated soul which he felt to be god—personal destiny. But at the same time, the heroic solution of the Hildebrandlied instructs the same as Kant on the supreme height of philosophic prudence. This was the realm of freedom and the realm of nature. These two were separated everywhere, but man belongs to both simultaneously. Kant showed belief in the sublimity of human nature, the consciousness of the value of the personality in the face of a terrible external power. L. Wolff notes correctly that the god called upon by Hildebrand is not the god of Christianity who apparently holds his mild protecting hand over all the faithful. Through this Christian god the grasp of destiny has become, on the one side individualistic egocentric, and on the other side logical, leaning toward the doctrine of predestination. The old Hildebrandlied—as motif—later appeared among all peoples, although often in falsifications which suppressed what is essential in the whole drama. In these songs the father only learns after he has done the deed that he has slain his own son, or, he recognises him and after a short jousting, rides home peaceably to his wife Ute. Here, Christian influence eliminating the ideas of honour are very clearly discernible.

Yet another aspect is shown by these Germanic songs—like the old version of the Waltharilied, the Tale of Aldwin, Thuriskind and all the others—that honour calls forth no conflicts. Rather, in the struggle upon earth, honour solved these conflicts. Germanic life became problematic only when new values were accorded attention equal to the highest Germanic values of honour, freedom, pride and courage. This conflict, which pierced the heart of Europe, has remained, up to the present, the most significant reason that we do not have a soul style, folkish culture and national state. Love and Christianity have not mended this Germanic self laceration. Instead, they are the cause of the struggle and the agony. For even at the time of the folkish wandering, the divided Germanic tribes felt their enmity with sorrow:

Curse struck us, Brother, I had to kill you

sings the old Gothic minstrel. Theodoric then seemed once again to guarantee a Germanic unity until the Franks formed the Reich as a political clamp. Thus, the tragic conflict goes on. The possibility of enhancing the idea of personal honour, clan honour and family honour through a general Germanic consciousness of honour was—thanks to Roman Christianity—supplanted. Destiny and personality stand—according to Germanic comprehension—in constant reciprocal effect, and every truly Nordic drama will, in some kind or form, link outward events with inward character values, never allowing them to run unlinked to one another. This holds true just as much in the Song of the Nibelungen as in Faust and Tristan. A sugary aesthetics has also misunderstood this great drama and viewed it only from the standpoint of the enraptured Isolde. This, the greatest work of Wagner, is not a drama of love but of honour. Because Tristan feels that his irrepressible love for the bride of his king and friend is dishonourable, he remains distant from her. He then wishes to drink the death potion when he recognises the impossibility of becoming the master of his love. As the truest of the true he cast away this notion of honour which was the centre of his life and abandoned himself to his passion. It represented an inexplicable, unsolved riddle symbolised through the love potion (Minnetrank). The inner high point of the drama is this moment, when Mark and Tristan stand opposite one another—not the Liebestod which signifies an end—while the king musingly asks the truest of the true why he abandoned honour.

And these sounds from the orchestra penetrate grievously into the metaphysical feeling as if they inquired after the deepest question of Germanic essence: how the highest of all in honour could become honourless. This is something which is impossible and yet seemed irrevocably proven. This last question, in spite of the symbolic interpretation, remains without an answer. Tristan dies from his deed. He consciously takes death upon himself and tears the bandage from his bleeding wounds. He dies from the outward injury from one who is inviolable to him. Tristan dies of a conflict of honour, Isolde, of love’s grief. This is Germanic destiny, and the Germanic overcoming of life through art. To shape all this into a form signifies the highest peak of the art of personality.

A view arose in the 19th century linked to the natural philosophers of the 18th century and outside the churches which, uncritical on all sides, made efforts to place the whole of man into some mechanistic natural law. This clumsy, materialistic attempt to preach an inescapable economic law can today be regarded as dead. However, in its place—through Spengler—another alluring outlook has taken its place. It is represented in the Faustian man and, gifted with considerable persuasive powers, it is the so called morphological view of history. These historical teachers set up causality and destiny correctly as two noncoincidental ideas. They likewise further refute—in harmony with Germanic essence, loudly and openly—the Semitic fatalism which recognises all causation as unalterable. But they place the idea of destiny in so called culture cycles. These cycles are certainly historically proven without—and here arises the dangerous error—examining the racially organic of these culture cycles. According to Spengler, such a cultural cycle descends out of the misty distance into a piece of earth like the holy ghost. Those belonging to it experience an heroic era, an intellectually cultural height, civilised decomposition and decline. Deductions concerning our future are drawn from these assertions. Irreversibility is represented as the essence of this new concept of destiny. In the end, we are confronted by the unexpected fact that Spengler has succeeded in introducing both the naturalistic Marxist as well as Magian hither Asiatic concepts under a Faustian protective mantle. This inhuman doctrine of human causation lies in the ranks of purely mechanical causality. The doctrine of irreversibility must subject us to a fate. Spengler is not aware of the real Faustian Alone, I will. He does not see racially spiritual forces shape worlds. Rather, he invents abstract schemes—destiny—to which we have to subject ourselves. Logically in its conclusion, this doctrine denies race, personality, personal value and every really culture promoting impulse—in a word, the heart of the heart of Germanic man.

Nevertheless Spengler’s work was great and good. It broke in like a hail storm, cracked rotten branches, and fertilised the longing fruitless earth. If he is really great, then he should rejoice at this: to make things fruitful—even if it be through error—is the highest mark one can aim for. But now the racially spiritual awakening has grown far beyond the doctrine of Morphology. It has found its way home to the primordial eternal words and, over epochs of confusion, greets men and art of past times as the living present.

Our previous digression was necessary because it established that it is not the feeling of eternity and infinity which is essential, but that personality, within similarly conditioned individuals, represents the ultimate primal phenomenon of all artistic creation. The perspective on infinity by Lenotre and the dark mysteries of Rembrandt are not something merging into infinity but, among other things, they represent a tension of soul. It is remarkable how little heed the systematisers pay to the rhythm which all great artists of Europe followed half consciously, half instinctively. Their art does not run in a line from the material to the infinite. It returns to the self. It concentrates the spiritual powers always anew in order to flow them out fresh again. At the moment when Beethoven shaped tonal images in the highest peaks, near to sublimation, a jubilant scherzo suddenly intruded. In the midst of motives rejective of the world, a splendid struggling will resounds. These are not restraints but the life rhythm of western art. The scherzo of a Beethoven, the final concluding deed of the hundred year old Faust, the heroic greatness of Wagner’s Siegfried, the smiling conquest of tragedy by Hans Sachs, the mysticism of Meister Eckehart and his richly active life, can only be understood if every rigid monism is rejected. To thrust human volition into boundlessness as the western soul is a fundamental attempt to weave nebulous Syrian magic into the culture of Europe.

The music of Bach and Beethoven is not the highest attainable stage of elevation of soul, but it signifies the breakthrough of an unequalled spiritual power which does not merely strip off material bonds—that is only the negative side—but expresses something completely fixed, even if this cannot always be outlined in black and white. The Germanic conquest of the world is not boundless expansion but enhanced forcefulness—that is, willed action—the sweet sacred accord, to which Schubert attributed omnipotence.

The will is the soul imprint of clear sighted energy. Thus it belongs to the aim setting mode of observation, while instinct is linked with the causal mode of thought. Even today, with the resolute willed ego comprising every area of psychological study, the aesthetic will is denied. In this connection it is, if not the strongest, then it is certainly the most comprehensive, expression of the human will. Artistic creation is the conscious transformation of material through a unity bound through fixed forms in every art. If the other directions of the will have only one characteristic feature—the material—it is art that lays claim to substance and content. In the broadest sense, our entire formative appropriation of world and ego is a willed artistic activity. The mythical images of a god riding through the air in his thunder wagon and the marble Pallas Athena are both, in essence, consequences of the same formative activity. The idea of the law of the conservation of energy presupposes similar formative powers of soul.

An example is the Prodigal son. This is a picture from Rembrandt’s last year. He painted it in a condition of deepest poverty and despair. It was found after his death under a pile of rubbish. Here we see past life—concentrated into one moment—in the ruthless naturalistic representation of the kneeling sinner. From this ragged figure emanates a calm and enlightening victory over all that is frightening. Infinite love speaks from the visage of the kneeling father. Here, merciless naturalism with all its contingencies, and individual expressions and the perfect overcoming of nature, confront one another as in few portraits in the whole world of painting. Purely formal in draughtsmanship and technique, everything runs from undetermined darkness upon the old man who, alone, is flooded with a gentle light. His visage and his arms, the whole range of tones from deepest brown, red and yellow find, here, their light filled high point. The viewer’s eyes halt here and focus on that point. Simultaneously the highest enhancement of the spiritual stepladder is present—from the onlooker’s lack of participation to the deepest devotion to liberating, elevating redemption.

The formative spiritual activity which took place in Rembrandt has been continued in the souls of the two men, the son and the father. Here he has shown the successful reshaping of emotion into free action. Moral freedom has experienced an artistic mode of expression. Out of a moralising allegory has come an artistic experience. For here we are not instructed that it is sinful to act in the manner that the son has done; humility is not preached to us and forgiveness is not recommended, but the free redeeming act of a man is presented and brought—with all means of formative penetration—into a most vital consciousness, just as the ancient myths did this with nature. Out of the same condition of soul in which Rembrandt found himself, a Schopenhauer would have laid down the profoundest notions about the nothingness of the world, Christ would have taught forgiveness of all those evilly disposed toward us, and Shakespeare would have written a shattering drama. But Rembrandt could only speak with his brush. It was a spiritual need in a completely fixed direction. It was not of a philosophical, not of a moral nature, but of an artistic nature.

For decades, Dostoyevsky’s works have stood at the centre of the most bitter disputes. Literature condemned his descriptions of horror and vice. They blamed his anxiety making effect on the incomprehensible conditions of the Russian soul. Some have praised Dostoyevsky’s characters as the prophets of a new religion. Some saw the sole measure of value in the apparently humanely meaningful: others, in ruthless naturalism.

Insofar as the Dostoyevskian men are Russian types and lay claim to validity as models of a new soul, we must react with the strongest objections against such a presumption. It is not acceptable if aesthetes, who apparently make efforts to strictly separate the aesthetic object from the nonaesthetic, complain that in reading Raskolnikov—in Crime and punishment—one experiences being softened in all fibres and crushed, squashed. Clearly in Dostoyevsky the heroic and moral object is confused with the aesthetic.

The fact is that purely physical effects of moral men are investigated while the formative strength, the aesthetic will, of the poet remained unheeded. Consequently, The crucifixion by Grünewald would also have to be rejected as harmful because people fainted in front of it. In that painting we are spared nothing that is terrible, and the anciently sanctified aesthetic balance is ruthlessly attacked by this greatest work of old German paintings. But we should not feel the individual heroes or sacrifices, only the power which created them!

It was the principal mistake of the majority of aesthetes, that, in studying the characters of a drama or a painting, they pushed their own petty feelings and anxieties into the foreground, while ignoring the artistic power which created the works. The figures are alive—be they crippled or upright, good or bad—so long as we recognise the inner necessity of ourselves from the subject matter. The suppression both of desire and noble stirrings of will does not occur in European art in order to make room for instinct for play. It is much deeper interpretation of artistic willing. I should not enjoy a work of art perfunctorily in the equilibrium of all spiritual powers. I should observe a creative formative power. My satisfaction does not consist in seeing appearances but having experienced the essence of the work. I must feel this essence manifest through appearances, summoned up within me. Aliosha, Dimitri or Ivan Karamasov do not interest me so much as the strength which motivated each of them through the organic creation, visible through human creative nature which makes its way into our heart. If I am to regard these figures as a life ideal, then it is a completely different matter. If we set up the critical measure, then we do not affirm how strongly our aesthetic freedom has remained preserved, nor, if the characters are healthy or rotten, but only if they have a necessary effect. But here new aesthetic differentiations are applied. While we feel a ruthless will behind the wretched Prince Myshkin as a moral unity, we see behind Thomas Buddenbrooks only a pen chewing aesthete in the lamplight, torturing his brain with nerve exciting problems. Myshkin’s epileptic attack is an inward convulsion. The disastrous tooth loss of the wretched Buddenbrooks is mere bad luck, wearisomely prepared, but nevertheless just plain bad luck. And while the behaviour of the crazed idiot, Myshkin, at the corpse of his lover, signifies a spiritually necessary collapse, Thomas Buddenbrooks, executed by Thomas Mann on the paving stones, makes an impression on us as unpleasant as it is comic.

Our study of Dostoyevsky now leads to another question already fleetingly touched upon: How does it happen that repellent, indeed corrupt, characters can have an aesthetic effect? Or, how does it happen that works of art which deal with an external form that in no way corresponds to the ideal of beauty of the peoples, of the artist, and also teach no values such as we would demand from the moral aspect, nevertheless often awaken a powerful aesthetic impression? Schiller’s answer, that we instinctively lay more emphasis on power than on conformity, touches on the essence of truth but does not explain it. For what seizes hold of us particularly is the inner law of the aesthetic condition, even if it represents an adoptive word or even a hostile value.

The figure of Shylock cannot please us as such since the thought of him contradicts our spiritual precepts. Seldom does a creation impress us in the same degree as this figure, because it is racially spiritually perfect in itself. It is outwardly conditioned, encompassing all Jewish racial features from the rock pictures of Egypt up to Trotsky. Spiritually, Shylock portrays the essence of the old testament ideal—as well as the essence of the figures from the Talmud—up to the modern Wall Street banker. This thousand year old organism represented in Shylock is also the new creation of the Jewish essence—just as the Margrave Rüdiger and Faust represented the Nordic. Shylock acts as he must; once brought forward he necessarily has an effect on us as a further evidence of the aesthetic will of the artist. The surmise by Schiller, that in great criminals we are impressed by the strength which, in its magnitude, reveals the possibility of a sudden alteration of character, is thus at fault here. Shylock can never transform himself. His body follows a commandment which, in the unalterability of his nature, has a similar effect as the law which prescribes his course. Shylock is thus both an individual as well as a type, both a Jew and Jewry as a whole. The same holds of Mephistopheles whose aesthetic impression likewise rests neither on beauty nor upon strength but on his inner necessity; on the artistic act which created him. Purely personal without becoming types are Richard II, Iago and Franz Moor. While the artist openly identifies himself with the heroic values represented by Rüdiger or Faust, he faces the others as a purely spiritually willed form. These figures in particular—also Hille Robbe, Peregrandet and Tartuffe—prove to us that, in the last analysis, we must seek the roots of aesthetic creation as well as those of aesthetic experience.

A middle position between Siegfried and Shylock is taken by the works in which the artist does not form his own supreme value in a struggle against other forces or places, but in which he has openly attempted to bring a borrowed soul life into expression with its ultimate consequences. Here, the most disturbing problem of western art history has become visible; the sufferings of Christ with their culmination in the crucifixion.

With the church doctrine that Jesus consciously sacrificed himself for the whole of mankind, his martyrdom was described where possible to render evident the power of dedication. His sacrificial death elevated the idea of humility as a highest value, that is, subservient self abandoning love devoid of will. The recognition of this value was the characteristic of the medieval church. It also became the adoptive value of the western artist who, in his creations, sought to bring himself into harmony with it. As the symbol of special piety there arose thousands of crucifixions which subordinated the figure of Christ to the doctrine of humility. The smiling blond child who often gazed at the world with unhesitant heroism was transformed into a broken down figure tortured by pain, with distorted features and suppurating wounds. The feeling of total collapse, of despair, of sacrificial death, became the medieval counterpart to the self evident heroism of a Rüdiger, a Hildebrand, a Dietrich or a Siegfried. The greatest work of this kind which elevated this adoptive church value into an allegory is the Isenheim Altar. This work is the logical conductor of the ideal of humility embodied in an artistic will which, in upward soaring power, is unequalled in world history. The crucifixion, as traditionally depicted, borders on a sickly excess of tension, both of material and of penetrative power by an artistic will. The many stab wounds on the body of the martyred Christ, and Mary sinking into a hypnotic sleep, represent the high points of Christian art. But the entire work reveals the true artistic will in the resurrection, in which a remarkable renewed transformation takes place. From the dark Jesus on the cross comes a luminous, slim, blond, risen Christ. In a mystical circle of colour he raises himself into the air again, incomparable to the symbolisation of the willless condition of collapse.

Since this great achievement, the adoptive value of the west has more and more lost its thrusting power. Crucifixion and resurrection become almost purely decorative, occasions of beautiful colour and light effects. The theme is exhausted, the inner drive to shape the crucifixion is lacking in the present day world—along with the feeling of form. A crucifixion in the true sense as Grünewald painted it—as art work and creed—can today neither be painted, carved, set to music nor written. Even the adoptive value has been given up. But an old, yet new, theme has appeared in this respect: Jesus the hero—not the flayed to pieces, not the magically vanished of later Gothic, but the unique, simple personality. The creation of this new heroic image is still not completed; but in Rüdiger and in Meister Eckehart, it was already outlined in advance.

The classical German aesthetics from Winckelmann to Schopenhauer began with the work of art itself—even if only from the late Grecian. But this neglect of real life could not satisfy lastingly. The new aesthetes therefore transferred aesthetics, following the entire movement of the times more and more toward the feelings of the recipient of art, and, according to temperament, each of them discovered other experiences in himself. He then constructed a new but once more universal aesthetics. Thus aesthetics became more and more a part of psychology, the alleged ascience of knowledge of the soul. Alongside this, the sensualist conquered the ground step by step, which, in the face of the universally material worshipping views of the last decades, likewise could not be questioned. Art became a counterpiece of the purely economic mode of thought since, as was said, its forms had the striving to provide the richest possible content with a minimum expenditure of strength. The feeling of pleasure in art appeared as a result of an easing of mental activity. The subconscious irrational was disposed of in a stopgap measure. Aesthetic feeling rested on inward imitation, on motor sympathy. Finally Müller and his adherents found, in the enjoyment of art, a general enhancement of the life promoting feeling, thus moving very near to the essential recognitions, but always remaining caught up in mere psychology which caused them to overlook what is objective in the given art work. Groos went the same way. We have to thank Kulpe for an exact investigation into the associative values. In spite of his retention of the psychological mode of observation, he nevertheless directed his attention to art and demanded the dissection of the beautiful into its constituent parts. Similarly, Volkelt demanded norms in art according to which one has to judge if one wishes to bring forth aesthetically pleasing effects. Other aesthetes aimed at the fathoming of beauty as an ideal quality of art objects. A Gothic cathedral consists of stones, a melody of tones. Neither stones nor tones are what is beautiful. Beauty adheres to the material where one cannot observe it with his senses. The beautiful consists not merely in the sum of the qualities of the individual parts but beyond this something determined. It is virtually independent of the parts.

This thing, released from the factual, aesthetic appearance, signifies the essence of the aesthetic object which arouses dual feelings of fantasy; feelings of empathy and feelings of participation. As a result, Witasek is on the way to an interpretation of art which has become widely diffused, that is, the so called empathy aesthetics. This school of thought was, in fact, largely founded by Lipps. According to him, the aesthetic condition is a feeling of joy which is to be attributed to the comfort of the soul, in the sense that the soul easily grasps everything which appears pleasant to it. The beautiful signifies life activity, whereas ugliness is the denial of life. Therefore, the beautiful awakens feelings of joy whereas ugliness brings us displeasure. Here, an empathy already exists enhancing itself through delight with he who enjoys and a sadness with those who mourn. The possibility of empathy is dependent on approval on the part of one who enjoys art. Our own strength or longing must find its counterpart in the art work. Later, Lipps shifted his aesthetic investigations more and more to the subjective, and declared that every properly observed expression exists only in the observer himself:

All this is the placing of oneself into another. The individual strangers whom I know are objectified ..... multiplicities of myself. Multiplicities of one’s own ego, in short, are the products of empathy.

Aesthetic enjoyment is a form of spiritual self satisfaction. Passivity and activity of the material become feeling experience. Heaviness, hardness, and so on, lose their objectivity and receive lyrical qualities of the ego:

The necessity in the objects ..... is felt into them and, according to their origin, is nothing other than the necessity experienced in us of our judgement ..... The objects are not ..... necessitating or necessitated, only I am this.

As a result, conditions are turned upside down. The attempts to perfect, to enlarge the psychological theory of empathy, to merge it together with classical aesthetics, have been numerous. Nowhere is the recognition more clear than in the dogmatic denial of the folkish racially conditioned will. This recognition alone forms the bridge from the object to the subject; from the formative will of the artist—as the highest expression of strength—to the formative will of the recipient of art. This fact is nowhere more clearly proven than in music. This art is devoid of material. It has only spiritual content and form. Its means of representation are rhythms of time. Its legitimacy is tested by time. In his study, which must be regarded as one of the profoundest treatises on the essence of music, Schopenhauer declares that the effect of this art is so unique because it directs itself directly at the innermost heart, at the will. Here Schopenhauer has seen this correctly, without noticing that, as a result, he destroys both his philosophic system as well as his aesthetic creed. The blind will is set up in contrast to itself as the holiest stirring of soul, since every work of art signifies the conquest of everything impulsive. The effect of music as the greatest artistic experience on the will is represented by a thinker who, with virtually hypnotising eloquence, had described the essence of the aesthetic condition as contemplation.

If we listen to real music it does not mean that we sink into contemplativeness, not even into sweet dreams. Through the universal medium of tonal shapes, we experience a formative will and a formative structure of composition. But this means even more to feel the formative powers awaken in the slumbering listener. It is similar for the artist. Music—and with it every other art—is a reinterpretation of the world. It is a representation of the soul—from the uttermost stillness of a Brother Angelico and Raabe to the wildness of a Michael Angelo and a Beethoven. The artist proceeds from the inward to the outward. The recipient moves from the outward—from the created work—to what is inward in order to arrive at the experience which pervaded the artist in the primal creation of his work. That is the sole true circulation of aesthetic feeling. It is the supreme task of the work of art to enhance the formative power of our soul; to strengthen its freedom in the face of the world; indeed, to overcome the world.

What does it mean if, after visiting a portrait gallery, a man believes that he has aesthetically contemplated nature? Does this not say that power slumbering within him has been awakened, a power which was not sufficiently strong for a personal activity in the direction of artistic creation? To many men this spiritual experience comes only after leaving a work of art, that is, after the elimination of material phenomena. And what is it supposed to mean: that an artist has had an effect upon others? Does that mean anything other than that a formative will was awakened which, until then, had slumbered and could only be awakened by an impact of a special kind? I naturally do not speak here of imitation of technique. Our entire capacity for remembrance could be drawn into this study. For example, it is true that a special sound or rustle has called forth an inner upheaval, as, for example, a grenade explosion which buried a soldier and caused a nervous shock, so that a similar sound years later calls forth the same mental and physical effect. A formative power clearly exists, which, in connection with philosophy and aesthetics, deserves to be thoroughly considered.

This leads us to the cognate of the beautiful—the sublime. The sublime is another phenomenon which awakens a disinterested mode of observation, but which is not the beautiful. This mode of observation is not calm or playful, but mobile.

Equilibrium, the harmony of the powers of disposition, only appears because of, and after, a conflict. If we simply see ourselves placed before something great, something unlimited and formless, then our imaginative power is incapable of seeing this as a whole. As creatures of the senses we feel ourselves diminutive and, through this feeling, another sentiment rises within us which says that we are infinitely more than mere creatures of sense, for it is indeed we who are aware of this limited side of ourselves.

Bold overhanging rocks, thunderous clouds, hurricanes and the lashed up ocean are forces of nature. Against nature our physical powers seem infinitely small. But when we immerse ourselves in a study of this powerful phenomenon, we then experience an elevation of our spiritual powers. We discover in ourselves a completely different capacity to resist which gives us the courage to be able to reconcile ourselves with a seemingly all powerful nature. Thus the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own destiny. One must follow the religious notions resulting from this, which lead to honour and respect, to a religion such as Eckehart believed. This feeling of the sublime is thus called forth through a discomfort which leads us to become conscious of our human superiority. Then we pass over into a feeling of joy. It all ends in a calm, disinterested contemplation. In conclusion, an equilibrium is established among our powers of disposition, not only between imaginative power and understanding, but also between imaginative power and reason:

Sublimity is that which directly pleases through resistance against the interests of the senses.

The sublime arises through a certain differentiation in that we transfer the feeling which reason awakens in us to the object. While the beautiful demands the representation of a certain quality of the object, the sublime consists

merely in the relation in which the sensuous is judged in the representation of nature for a possible supersensuous use of the same where applicable.

Accordingly in art, as Kant asserts, the sublime can only appear in the struggle of the moral will against the sensual. If the moral will as such is dispassionate, signifying only the good sentiments, then its appearance must take on the form of effect. If the idea of good makes its appearance then it is in the form of enthusiasm. This enthusiasm is not moralistic but sublime. As Kant says:

Ideal men appear in art as bearers of this feeling. They are the actual heroes of the tragic drama. They become heroes of freedom and martyrs, granting the sublime the upper hand over sensuousness. The sublime has a relationship to intellectual and rational ideas.

These remarks clarify Kant’s views concerning two mental states which, distinguished from the instinctive, allow us to feel a harmony among our inward vital powers, placing us in a condition of involuntary contemplation. As far as the derivation of aesthetic judgements is concerned, that is, justification of their outlook, this is not the place to devote much time to them. However, it is important that Kant allows things to be held as beautiful:

because in the face of nature one observes the same in forms, and could pose various questions in viewing the same. On the other hand, the sublime in nature is improperly so called and is only a foundation of the mode of thought of human nature. To become conscious of this allows the comprehension of an otherwise formless and unpurposive object.

These elaborations reveal to us that the same conflict existed in Kant as in Schiller: they cannot deny emotion in the face of the great figures of drama, but, with remarkable stubbornness, they wish to continually return to their conclusions as to harmony of mental powers, instead of recognising the spiritually willed experience and the awakening of the active spiritual power as the essence of the aesthetic condition. Only hesitantly did our thinkers wish to allow sublimity to be held as valid in art. They took their examples only from nature because they experienced the feeling of sublimity merely as a reaction.

Let us stand facing a Gothic cathedral. Here we feel a massive overwhelming greatness. But these cathedrals are nevertheless deeds. They are a human art creation of the most powerful type. They are the artistic representation of a sublime feeling. Thus here, creation and emotion go back to their source. What impels me to respect is, in the last analysis, the knowing of myself to be one with the personality, the people, the man, the formative strength which reveals itself.

It is tempting at this point to insert a long digression on the creeds of artists concerning creation and experience since it is characteristic of guild aesthetics. Guild aesthetics overlooked these things, although it provides the essential foundations for all studies of art. This would enlarge the circumference of this chapter so much, however, that only a few allusions can be made here.

For example, in his correspondence we see Hector Berlioz as an artist striding through all heights and depths. He is everywhere action, experience. After listening to one of his own compositions he related to his friend Ferrand that he could have cried out, so colossal and terrible was the effect upon him. He remarked contentedly that, as listener, he became as pale as death with emotion. From Lyons, Berlioz writes longingly:

I believe I would become insane if I were to hear my music again.

He wrote in ecstasy to R. Kreutzer:

Oh Genius! What then shall I do, if one day I wish to describe passions? I shall not be understood, for they have not even greeted with garlands the author of the most glorious work, nor carried him around with triumph, nor thrown themselves on their knees before him.

In 1856 he admonished Theodor Ritter:

Keep the 12th of January in your memory! That is the day you have approached the miracle of great dramatic music for the first time. You have received the first premonition of the sublimity of Glück. I will never forget that your artistic instinct has unhesitatingly paid homage with rapture to this genius who was still unknown to you. Yes, indeed, be convinced that whatever people who possess half a passion say, there are two great higher divinities of our art: Beethoven and Gluck.

Berlioz will now perhaps be called excessively sympathetic, even proud. However much all his powers of will were applied toward creation, the seemingly sober Flaubert expressed himself likewise:

For an artist, there is only one way: sacrifice everything for art! For 14 years I have worked like a mule. I have lived my entire life in the service of will, with exclusion of my other passions which I locked into cages, and which I went to alone occasionally to inspect. You are fortunate, you lyricists, you have an outlet for your verses. If something torments you, you spew out a sonnet and that lightens your heart. But we poor devils, we prosaic ones, to whom every personality is refused—above all, myself—think of all the bitterness which falls back upon our souls, on all the moral phlegm which grips us by the throat.

Scarcely anyone has described the hour of birth of a great work so beautifully as Nietzsche:

Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear notion of what poets in strong eras called inspiration? Revelation is in the senses that something that is an indescribable certainty and freedom, something that becomes visible, something perceptible to the ear, something which shakes and overturns one’s innermost heart ..... one hears, one seeks not; one takes, one asks not who gives here; like a flash of lightning an idea appears, with necessity, unhesitatingly in form. I have never had a choice. A rapture whose enormous tension realises itself in a torrent of tears, by which the stride now involuntarily storms forward, then becomes slow; a perfect being outside of oneself ..... a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomiest does not take effect as contrast but as conditioned, as challenged, as a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light ..... All occurs in the highest degree involuntarily, but as in a storm of feeling of freedom, of unconditionality, of godliness.

This is the unleashing of the same essence which once caused Lenau to proclaim after a performance of Fidelio:

Then I was again seized by a storm of feelings and for two hours certainly the happiest man on earth ..... when I think back to such enjoyments, then the courage fails me to dispute with destiny!

And Beethoven himself, the man who, by his works, conclusively shattered the foundations of aesthetics aiming at contemplation and harmony. He expressed himself as follows to the young musician Louis Schlosser:

Your wish to ask me from whence I take my ideas? That is something I cannot say with reliability. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly. I could grasp them with my hands, in the freedom of nature, in the woods, on walks, in the stillness of the night, in the early morning. I am stimulated by moods which poets set to words but which I set to music—ringing, roaring, storming, until they finally stand before me in tones.

After listening to the E flat from the B flat Major Quartet, Opus 130, Beethoven said to Holz:

Never has my own music made such an impression on me; even feeling myself back to this piece always costs me a tear.

Nevertheless, he then goes on to protest against all sentimentality and impulsive show of emotion when on the 15th of August, 1812, he writes to Bettina von Arnim:

I have expressed my opinion to Goethe as to the reason why applause has an effect upon such as us, and that by a man like him we wish to be heard with the intellect. Emotion is fit only for women in drawing rooms: with a man, music must strike fire from the spirit.

This was evidence of the Germanic conquest of nature.

Finally, what would the greatest poet among the Germans and the most sensitive diffuser of their soul say about the attempt to destroy the sublimity of the heart as a result of the artist’s life being degraded to a disintegrating nothingness? Hölderlin himself had already suffered from these men at a time when they still did not rule as almighty citizens over our life. Even Hyperion, in his search for great souls, had to confirm that they had become only barbaric through diligence, science, indeed even through their religion. Craftsmen, thinkers, priests, title bearers, were what Hyperion found—but no men, only piecework without unity of soul, without inner drive, without totality of life. Thus even virtues appeared as a glittering evil and he was shattered to discover that these men even wished to elevate their narrowness of mind into a law for the whole. What would Hölderlin have felt at a later time, when art slid down from the heights of the theoretically conceded inducing of contemplation as a neutral domain to the level of furtherance of the digestion, or of increasing foreign tourism, of the Bacchanalia of noise technology? Once, he wished to present the genius of Greece to his Diotima, and was only able to give birth to a song of lamentation of a wounded mind. Today his work would be the sole cry of despair—or of attack—even more the outpourings of a glowing innermost torment of will. But the beauty which Hölderlin felt as religion was not the contemplative satiety of our philosophising doctors, but the highest enhanced totality of life; a bundle of all elevations of soul tied together for a brief moment; of all longings of the heart; of all sinew cords of the will. And Hölderlin’s poems were a tiny radiant rising of the supreme values of life and a divine longing for the distant: a summons to the giant heart of the world. He knew what he said when he wrote about the clever givers of advice.

In this way one can pass through the longing, creating and experiencing of all real artists of the west. Everywhere at the beginning stands the concentrated artist’s will, ready to become master of a great display, to knead it, to shape, to bring forth a new creation and then, in this dissolution of the aesthetic will—in accord with the total willing—to prepare his bliss.

This deep willed artistic power is faced particularly by a hostile assertion, delivered again and again by our modern aesthetes with predilection: the view that there exists an unmoralistic or amoralistic spirit. This view, which is obviously of purely individualistic nature, goes back to the attempted loosening of the artistic will from the essence of the will generally. One does not err in discerning there a feature of the impure Mediterranean race, which is spread particularly by the Jewish literary guild. Nordic Germanic art attacks, from the beginning, this assertion as a lie on the basis of spiritual content alone. One should read Wagner’s letters to Liszt in order to measure how deeply true race separates itself from asphalt intellectualism. One should also take note of Beethoven’s words:

Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived. I want to lower my head and kneel upon his grave. Mozart’s greatest work remains the Magic Flute. Here he first revealed himself as a German Master. Don Giovanni has a completely Italian style and, along with this, our sacred art ought never to allow itself to be degraded to the folly of such a scandalous subject.

Only on the foundation of this character have the great creations of the Germanic west arisen: the cathedrals as well as the dramas and symphonies. The greatest conscious sensual attempt to awaken this sublime will is with Wagner’s music drama. Wagner declared dance, music and poetry to be one art, and attributed the fragmentation of his times to the fact he believed that each one of the three arts had been isolated. They had arrived at the last boundaries of the capacity for expression and had distorted themselves.

Beethoven’s absolute music led the Master to this recognition, as we see in the 9th Symphony with its unprecedented use of voice. The music alone lacks the moral will. Its isolation signifies chaos or empty program music. Drama, alienated from music and dance—the most perfected shaping of lyricism—necessarily arrives after its loosening from the other arts, and only in the written tragedy which before could not be represented. This was Goethe’s failure, just as it was the failure of his successors. The dance was originally only real and full blooded as the national dance. It was linked to folkish music and song. It became—thanks to this release—a motion of the legs alienated from nature without spiritual content and real rhythm. Wagner therefore saw the art work of the future in the union of the three arts.

Wagner fought against a completely plebianised world and triumphed. The cultural work of Bayreuth remains forever beyond question. Nonetheless, a retreat begins today from the basic teachings of Wagner, against the assertion that dance, music and the poetic art are forever bound in the manner proclaimed by him; against the assertion that Bayreuth was, in fact, the unchangeable perfection of the Aryan mystery. Two facts show us that the form of the Wagnerian music drama has not always been completely successful—as in Tristan and Isolde and the Meistersinger. He also created a drama which reached out so high that it must fail: Ring of the Nibelungen. This proves that, just by the linking of word and music, the dance is mastered in its general form as a dramatic gesture.

The word, in addition to its innate musicality, is always the bearer of a thought or feeling. However much one would like to regard language bearing thought as a nonaesthetic mode of expression, it is nevertheless the precondition of every real drama. Its clarity and possibility of comprehension determine the height and width of the auditorium. The technique of language is held to be the prerequisite of every great aesthetic representation. The formative will of the poet emerged only through the medium of language. As long as the word describes a human conflict, relates an event or mediates a thought process, it is not furthered by music. Any accompanying music destroys the medium of the transference of the will and thoughts. This is revealed in the narration by Tristan in the first act, in Wotan’s dialogues with Brünnhilde, in Alberich’s curse and in the song of the Norns in the prelude to the Twilight of the gods. Everywhere that there is the medium of a thought structure, the orchestra steps in the way. The same holds for almost all crowd scenes: In powerful swelling up tonal pictures, the assertions of the people vanish completely. The public only hears inarticulated loud outcries and sees only upraised hands. This does not lead to form, but to chaos. One should compare, for example, the beginning of Egmont with Brunnhilde’s arrival at the castle in Burgundy. Goethe’s crowd scene shows the greatest plastic liveliness. A few words from the left and the right represent the thoughts and the mood of whole human classes. The community in Egmont gives to this individual a real penetrating strength. A musical accompaniment during this mass scene would rob it of every measure of character.

Apart from the expectation that Brünnhilde reveal her secrets of soul before the assembled people, her gestures—accompanied by music—develop in the word tone drama into a constricting scene which is not criticised solely out of enthusiasm for the will of Wagner. Here the tone has killed the word.

This occurred because it was dogmatically asserted that during the music drama, the music must not cease for a moment. However much this is justified in the seizures of leadership at the beginning of the Rheingold, in the second and third act of Tristan and in the third act of the Meistersinger a barrier is formed, preventing the word from guiding one into the soul of Tristan, Mark and Hans Sachs. Beethoven’s music for Egmont is the deepest of all music drama. But this music would not enthral the listener to such an extent if the conflicts between Egmont and Orange or between Egmont and Alba were accompanied by the orchestra.

Along with the dance, drama is the sole art in which the living man is the means of representation. It has the task not only of having dramatic effect in time but also spatially through gestures. Motion is a function of space and time. It is the one form of viewing capacity in which a definite relationship of one part to another is established. The effect expressed in words demands unconditionally a strong outward movement of the entire man. The speed of alteration in space corresponds to the tempo of inner experience. In spoken drama it is possible to establish these space time relations unhindered. One’s natural rhythm and motives (kinetic factor) are awakened by the spoken drama.

For a long time the importance of motive factor had been exaggerated when sensualist psychological aesthetics ruled the field. The classical reaction, however, pushed it again much too far into the background. Without a doubt, this motive—the awakening of man—is the external expression of the highest willed instinct. The trumpets which sounded the attack and the Hohenfriederberger march, to whose sounds millions have gone to their death, show how much the heroic sound can produce a will which transforms itself kinetically into the highest bodily tensions of energy. To this same inspiring drama belongs the rhythm of the true national dance. To these sounds the people concerned answer spiritually and emotively. Time and space also stand in a fixed relationship here which is not hampered by other factors. But if the music joins the word drama and the word dance music, not during shorter sequences of time, but lastingly, then it is that artistic discords arise unavoidably. The old opera in which a hero announces his flight and yet stands still for ten minutes has been dismissed laughingly. But in Wagner’s drama the inner harmony between word content and physical conduct is often frequently hindered by the music. When, for example, Brünnhilde suddenly sees Siegfried at Günther’s court and passionately approaches him, the words of her song hinder the course of the movement. Moreover, Siegfried must ward her off by gesturing in slow motion, so to speak. This holds true of most scenes in Rheingold between the gods and the giants.

If, in these cases, the music disturbs, as if bound to the songs, to the ebbing of a spiritual motive, then the word cannot follow the speed of the dance. The latter must thus allow a falsification to please, a case which certainly seldom appears in music drama.

These observations do not signify a criticism of unimportant things. They are aimed at some essential which Wagner and every opera singer has certainly painfully felt. It has been asserted that the three acts are not compatible but, irrespective of how they may have stood to one another in earlier times, the law of necessary form can be disregarded by none of them without artistic damage for they are not in fact one art. An attempt to wed these arts forcefully destroys spiritual rhythm and prevents emotive expression and impression. Wagner, whose entire art work is a continuous and enormous outpouring of will, frequently gets in his own way. In a strange paradox, some of Wagner’s greatest strengths are also weaknesses. The majority of participants in the Wagnerian music drama unconsciously feel this without being able to explain their feeling of being ill at ease. Wagner’s incomparable, impressive mystical heroic passages predominate yet also override some of the previously established relationships between time and space. These remarks are in no way intended to denigrate Wagner’s work. It created life and that is decisive. It was also a blessing that the previously isolated arts have been unified, and have thereby actually fortified one another. Perhaps one day another great man will come, one who will reach into contemporary life and, with regard to the newly experienced inner law of the three arts, present us with a new form of word tone drama using Egmont and Tristan as models.

The essence of all Nordic western art has been revealed in Richard Wagner. It shows that the Nordic soul is not contemplative, that it does not lose itself in an individualistic psychology. Rather, it experiences the willed cosmic spiritual laws, and shapes our art spiritually architectonically. Richard Wagner is one of those artists in whom three factors coincide, each of which form a part of our entire artistic life: the Nordic ideal of beauty as it appears outwardly in Lohengrin and Siegfried, linked to deepest feeling for nature; the inner will of man in Tristan and Isolde; and the struggle for the highest value of Nordic western man: heroic honour, linked with inner truthfulness. This inner ideal of beauty is realised in Wotan, in King Mark and in Hans Sachs. Conversely, Parsival is a strongly emphasised weakening of the will in favour of an adoptive value.

Here Wagner’s soul life coincides with the deepest undertones of great European men. I will not record their names again.

The highest one can attain is an heroic course of life

confessed even Schopenhauer. This strength of the heroic will is the mysterious medium which has directed all our thinkers, researchers and artists. It is the spiritual content and longing in the greatest works of the west from Count Rüdiger up to Eroica, Faust and Hans Sachs. It is the strength which determines everything. The ultimate goal of western art creation is the awakening of the spirit. This recognition stands as remote from the alienation from life by our classicism as from the superficial sensuous art and formalism of today. It compromises both and goes into the depths with them where they find all that was created from the essence of the Nordic western soul.

What is shown in an unleashing of will among the greatest is also the essential commandment for all other true artists of the west. This commandment applies equally to those whose spiritual driving power does not reveal an equally strong, although identically directed, formative will. The result is unique. It is the agreeable, the intimate, the humorous.

I have yet to find the products of other races—indeed, even of related groups of peoples—which can be described with these words: A little Gothic gabled house with dormer windows and small frames, the alcoves, carved doors, the inlaid trunks and chests and the painted wood panels. Rooms with low ceilings which look into the neighbour’s kitchen. Add to these the stories by Gottfried Keller, the poems by the pastor Worike who loved the birds so much and wished to have all his possessions together with him in one narrow room; the poems of Raabe, the art of Dickens, the paintings of Cranach—everywhere we find the quietly working Germanic personality taking effect in its essence as pleasant and agreeable. As Raabe wrote,

In the narrowest ring

Many a worldwide thing.

But the quietness of these artists is nevertheless not the same as classical repose. Certainly in all that is Germanic there also exists a deep longing for the oceanic calm of the heart. For hundreds of years Germanic men have wandered over the Alps. The eyes of countless generations have been turned towards Hellas. But nothing is more superficial than to say that the German seeks his lost essence, his lost model of conduct and his lost sense of harmony. No! The longing for rhythm, the expression of a strong willed soul always forms the basis, and reveals this search as a longing not only for the unveiling of one’s own essence but for its imprint of a seeking after its complimentary elaboration. The eternally searching and active Nordic man seeks repose and is often inclined to value it higher than everything else. But once he has gained it by struggle he does not allow it to capture him. He seeks, researches and shapes further. No rest! wrote Beethoven in 1801 to Wegeler. I know of no other rest than sleep, and it causes me woe enough that I must devote to it more than otherwise. And if he is quiet then it nevertheless wells up further in the depths, always ready to be transformed into active, creative outflow. Germanic art is deep and active, the will given form. Dickens gilds men and the world with eternal, but with a completely and absolutely un Grecian, beauty. His sense of inward beauty is a play of will, first darker, then brighter and vividly toned, but always linked with effervescent action. Bleak House is perhaps the most precious fruit of this art, of an even more penetrating atmosphere than David Copperfield. Even under the pleasant fact of Raabe an active longing seethes in Abu Telfan which swells up in Die Innerste in a dramatic crescendo. No so very profound, although stronger in pathos, is C. F. Mayer’s poetry as in the soul searching Die Richterin, The Monk’s Wedding, and Jurg Renatsch. Keller, like a Gothic wood carver, planned out his eccentric figures, cut remarkable folds in their faces, and then sent them out into the unsentimental world. It is the fullness of life which is produced by the Germanic soul, culminating in such artists as Hermann Löns who heard the soul of the earth speak within himself. It is this natural mystical side which is just as perceptible in Löns as in Goethe’s

On every treetop is rest .....

and

Twilight sinks down from above.

In the most concise description, eternal willing is present, eternal movement is concealed, and the werewolves act just as much according to their innermost will for spiritual racial freedom as a Faust who must fathom the entire world. Again, Raabe, living in outward quietude, was a true Hungerpastor, hungry for world wisdom. Look up to the stars! he instructs. Pay heed to the alleys is the echoing rejoinder. He sees true harmony not only in oceanic calm, but also in the furious storm which drags men with it, and gives his hero Robert Wolf the watchword on his path through life: Forward, even in chains! Through Gottfried Keller’s creations, which seem to stand so clearly demarcated in the warm sun, flows the perceptible undercurrent of a self evident heroism. Julia und Romeo und dem Dorfe is such a piece of unsoftened greatness, and Frau Regula Amrain is an example of inward pride. The girl who sits weaving her wedding linen and works her love into it, sings that if her husband will not fight for his Fatherland, then her wedding linen should become a shroud. And the shepherd who high above in the mountains builds ever anew his hut destroyed by avalanches and tolerantly looks on, declares: If the avalanche of servitude falls upon my country, then I will myself set fire to the homestead and move out into the wide world. The Nordic man in middle class garb is a humorist. Admittedly, there is a growling and lamenting in his depths, but the effervescence is checked by a conscious self control and gilded by human understanding. Goethe could be just as much a humorist as Leonardo or Shakespeare. Cervantes is not a humorist as many still believe. But profound humorists like Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Busch, even Charles Dickens and Spitzweg, nevertheless belong in the gentle thundering of the European essence. They are serene points of rest on dark ground. The forest is still movement, rustling rhythm, play of light and shadow, clear guiding of lines and dark mystery. As a folkish unit the people are struggling, triumphing, defeated, laughing and mourning. Their life goes down in cascades or flows in broad streams. And nevertheless, it is a water which reflects character. Thus the quietness of storm and Raabe and Keller belong alongside the greatness of Goethe and Wagner; the smiling tragedy of Busch alongside the pathos of Schiller. A dark undercurrent of the blood and soul binds them all, and even the quietest of them sounds the German song of eternal becoming and struggle for being.

In no other living artist is this mystical natural expression of the will shaped more imposingly than in Knut Hamsun. No one knows why, with great effort, the farmer Isak cultivates one piece of land after another in godforsaken regions, or why his wife has joined him and gives birth to his children. But Isak follows an inexplicable law. He carries on a fruitful quest out of a mystical primal will. At the end of his existence he will certainly look back in astonishment at the harvest of his activity. The Growth of the Soil is the great present day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal primordial form. Nordic man can be heroic even behind the wooden plough. Every stirring of his muscle bears fruit. Benoni, Mack the merchant, Baroness Edvarda and Glan the huntsman—each personality has received an inner law breathed into it from the beginning and acts accordingly. It does seemingly incompatible things—yet these acts are nevertheless self evident. One does not even need to explain them psychologically. Their exterior is itself the inner will. The vibrating of our will with the strength which created everything is the actual aesthetic experience. Vagabonds appears as a counterpiece to the character of Isak, immersed in the earth. In the same medium Hamsun, in a mysterious natural insight, describes the laws of the universe and of the soul. Once again the characters are peasants, fishermen, merchants, in whom a world is reflected. Through travel, through unsatisfied longings, they lose contact with Mother Earth whose blessing is no longer with them. They move from place to place, exchanging activities and loving. But since the roots are torn out of the strength giving earth, the blossoms also die. So they live their lives—Edvart, August, Lovise Margrets—without knowing why and without direction. They are symbols of decline, transition in the best case, experimental fragments of mankind, arriving at new forms and types, but unable to create values or gain honour. They live as the past for the past has captured them, self evidently and mysteriously. Yet the Nordic spirit is never fully repressed or lost.

And finally that longing! It is longing which drives an artist’s heart to creation in exactly the same way that it sends explorers out on journeys of discovery. The entire German Romantic movement is just as inconceivable without the sense of longing as was once the Gothic. Hölderlin is the greatest among the artists of longing in our times. This primal element of his nature always breaks through irrespective of whether he sees the dream image of Hellas as embodied in Diotima or sings his Song to the Germans. A Hölderlin would not at all grasp what was meant if one were to speak in his presence of contemplation. On our side we would have understood nothing about him if we had not experienced the aesthetically willed longing element of his creations in the depths of our own vital longing. It is this primal urge which also created two products of the contemporary German value creating literature: Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum and Erwin Kolbenheyer’s Paracelsus. The bells which resound from the village on the Weser and accompany Cornelius Friebott through the world are the expression of the longing for space, for ploughland, for the use of inborn creative powers. These bells of longing from Lippoldsberg also ring out, mourning the death of he who sought to awaken the folkish spirit of all racially Nordic Germans, no matter where they live and even if from a formal technical aspect there are some things to be regretted in Volk ohne Raum. Its portrayal of the human character may lag somewhat behind Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdotter—whose character representations, for example of Erland Nikulaussohn, are masterworks. The primal longing is absent in the Norwegian authoress, whereas it is evident in every page of Grimm’s work. The more her characters speak about faith and theology, the more the reader comes to believe that her intentions are attempts to transfer her ideas into the innermost heart of figures who do not appear as carriers of basic feelings of life. And it is here, where Kolbenheyer, returning into the middle ages, draws close to Grimm. Kolbenheyer makes the eternal wanderer speak to the god on the cross:

There is no other people like this, which has no gods and yet eternally desires to see god.

He takes the weary Christ, who lies begging at the wayside, in his strong arms and carries him through the German lands. The wretched, tormented figure of Christ inhales the strong breath of this German genius and becomes stronger and more powerful. He then speaks about the Germans:

They do not recognise me any more, for they have only tongues for their eternal gods which carry the seal of death. Everything else seems small to them. But they see me. This people’s blood still has so much that is pristine, primordial in its source, flowing through its veins! They must be thus because they are men who are filled with longing .....

From this world vision the great searcher Paracelsus arises from the poet’s imagination and stands on the threshold of two great epochs, gazing beyond both with a longing toward a time when word no longer stands against word, altar against altar. This will must be fitted into the primal laws of life.

Does anyone believe that a Kolbenheyer could have written his great work out of mere artistic enjoyment and because he himself is a man filled with a tremendous longing? And does anyone not believe that they understand his work who have not felt the same power of longing grow within them? Whoever believes that has not only not understood this novel, but has not even remotely grasped the essence of Germanic art. They grasped neither Ulrich von Ensingen nor Meister Erwin nor the poet of Faust nor the creator of Hyperion. Since they possessed this feeling, none of them wished that the result of their creations be contemplation; not that thought! He conceived of things in a purely intellectual way. Such thinkers awake a longing for the willed side of our nature, away from the dullness of ordinary feeling. We expand it in one direction, holding it high and, in this production of strength, create an active spiritual life.

It is a significant world historical fact that however religious the European of earlier times was, however much a religious longing is again occurring (admittedly still concealed for many, but nevertheless in many places deep), however many mystics and devout men the west produced—absolute religious genius or completely autocratic embodiments of the divine in one man, is something that Europe still does not possess. However richly talented, however powerful and surpassing in forms it was, until the present, we have still not created a religious form worthy of us. Neither Francis of Assisi, Luther, Goethe nor Dostoyevsky are founders of a religion for us. No Jajnavalkya, Zarathustra, Lao Tse, Buddha or Jesus has arisen in Europe.

Europe’s religious search was poisoned at the source by an alien raced format. Its first mythological epoch is nearing its end. Western man could no longer think, feel or pray in forms which were true to his type. After a violent, unsuccessful defence he was saddled with the substitute belief of the church which had been forced upon him. A rich treasury of legend flowered on the stony ground of the Jewish Roman dogmas. Magnificent figures with intuition and the reshaping of the true Jesus were cast against the rigid Syrian superficialities. Heroes were convinced to fight and to die for their adoptive beliefs. The deeds of the rich merchant’s son from Assisi were not creative. Neither were these deeds an aristocratic overcoming of the world like the action of the Indian who smilingly laid himself in a grave he had dug. They were only a denial of the world and the suppression of the self. That is the tragic song of all European saints. It is a purely nihilistic side of western religious life. The European could not have positive creative effect on the world that was true to his racial type. Whenever he attempted it, as in the shape of the blessed master Eckehart, the church values vanished and dissipated. Even the promise of a new religion easily overcame the alien church, although it had to build and grow under its ban. This apostle of the Germans died before he could fully and consciously instruct the people in the new religion.

So Europe then went down and physically subjugated the world and universe. But the spiritual search, which was not truly religious, but only Roman Jewish, displaced the equilibrium of the religious and artistic will. India’s hymns of antiquity are less art products than religious philosophical creeds. China’s images of the gods remain as a grotesque distortion of nature or are elevated to mere forms of stylisation and normalisation. Greece became an abstract form for us. In Europe alone art became a true medium of overcoming the world: a religion in itself. Whereas Egypt’s paintings were mere compositions of draughtsmanship, Grünewald’s The crucifixion, a Gothic cathedral, a self portrait by Rembrandt, a fugue by Bach, the Eroica of Beethoven, the CHORVS MYSTICVS in Goethe’s Faust, are all allegories of a completely new soul, of a constantly active soul to which Europe alone has given birth.

Wagner longed for folkish art as a symbol. The common original source of the individual arts appeared to him to proclaim a new epoch.

We are not at first able to create this religion of the future, because we are still only isolated, lonely ones. A work of art is the living representation of religion, but religions are not invented by the artist, they only arise from the people.

Once Wagner wanted this: an art as religion. Alone with Lagarde he later struggled as an individual against the entire bourgeois capitalistic world of the Alberichs and, with his talent, felt he undertook a task in the service of his people. He did not say in a state of collapse: I no longer understand the world. Rather, he wished to create another world. He had a premonition of a new, awakening life. Against him stood a world press which had sold itself out, a sated Philistinism, an era completely devoid of ideals. Even if the people of our times felt themselves estranged from the forms of the Bayreuth idea or unsympathetic to it, this idea has been the real source of life in the midst of a barbaric time. In all states where there lived men who confronted life not only by aesthetics and uncreative protests, Bayreuth found harmonising souls. While the oft acclaimed social poets maintained only a pathetic existence, the inner value of Bayreuth still rises as a guide to our times. It still gives life, reaching beyond into the future of the coming German Reich.

Gerhart Hauptmann merely gnawed at the rotten roots of the 19th century middle classes and constructed theatrical pieces from newspaper reports. He educated himself, then abandoned the struggling social movement. He was aestheticised to our values in the steamy Galician circles of the Berliner Tageblatt. He mimed the posture of Goethe before the photographers. Then, in 1918, after the victory of the bourgeoisie, he allowed himself to be set up before the German people by the financial press as their greatest poet. Inwardly worthless, Hauptmann and his circle are unfruitful disintegrators of a time to which they inwardly belong. In none of them—neither in the Sudermanns or Wedekinds, certainly even less so in the later swarm of Mann, Kaiser, Werfel, Hansenclever and Sterheim—did a true protest flame up in the heart.

Although Marxist Socialism failed politically, it was able to abort the Germanic renewal movement. Although this movement struggled for artistic expression, it was betrayed and falsified by this arrogant Marxist Hebrew literary guild. All these workers’ poets died inwardly before the power of money and its slaves. These poets only pretended to fight. They are all intellectual upstarts who became well endowed and human as soon as they were allowed to eat at the table of the princes of money. The revolutionary features of Die Rauber, of Kabale und Liebe, indeed even of Wilhem Tell, are not to be traced in the 19th century. The creation of the prostitute Lulu is the highest to which these poets could attain. But in order to suppress what was truly daring and struggling, the princes of money formed a cartel with Jewish theatre directors and press lords. The latter praised everything that is insolent, corrupt, artificial, impotent and crippled. It fought ever more resolutely and consciously against every true renewal of the world as it once had against Richard Wagner. For they knew that what is great means the death of what is small. A new value, once recognised, obliterates what is worthless.

In this greatest struggle we live and breathe today more than ever. We can no longer shut ourselves off and become forgetful of the world or from the flow of life. We, in fact, can no longer do this since we know that an entire International confronts with deadly hostility the new values of the awakening race soul. At the head of this stands a host of bastard artists. Barbusse, Sinclair, Unamuno, Ibanez, Maurois, Shaw and their publishers worked in the closest collaboration with Mann, Kaiser Fulda, and their newspaper clique. They ensure praise, translation and performances for each other. The entire world press publicises three months in advance the great revelation that Thomas Mann is writing a new novel. Each reports through the mouth of the other how Thomas Mann rests, how he thinks and how he works—whether in closed room or in the open air, whether in the morning or the evening. This resolute, contemporary Philistinism decays in its living body in spite of all the hymn singers in the media of Jewish advertising. It murmurs about mankind and about peace between the peoples, and about justice. But it has not an ounce of true full blooded humanity to impart. It has made peace with the powers which regarded the world war as their business. It writes in newspapers which mock the true right of a nation to the intrinsic expression of its essence. Stagnant like political democracy itself are its psalmists—George Bernard Shaw and his clique and others—who, year by year, only suck out our life substance. Despite their failures to develop a culture or a value, they kick their opponents like a donkey.

There is some possible excuse for the failures of the 19th century—the fact that its men stood in the midst of a rushing torrent of awakening industrialism. They, like many others in other times, were overwhelmed by what is new. They felt the old values tremble, but who could censure them if they saw no sunrise—but perished? But the 20th century revealed men who were arrogant enough to appear as prophets of a new system. Today, we see that everything which they preached was bloated carrion in whose strength they did not themselves believe. Ibsen and Strinberg struggled honourably until their death. The last contemporary prophets of Democracy and Marxism have no belief in others and they carry no personal values within themselves. They now root around in Chinese, Greek and Indian literature for forms. Witness the world of Klabund, Hoffmansthal, Hansenclever, Reinhardt! Such writers merely polish and copy the literature of blacks from Timbuctoo. They then set before their public a new beauty and a new rhythm of life.

That is the essence of the intellectuality of today, the modern drama, the modern theatre, modern music! A stink of corpses emanates from Paris, Vienna, Moscow and New York. The parasitic Jew mingles with the scum of all peoples. Bastards are the heroes of the times. Whores and naked dance reviews under black management were the art form of the November democracy. The end, the total plague of the soul, seemed imminent.

The millionfold host of workers in mines and those before the flames of the blast furnaces were enslaved and robbed. They experienced want and suffered from all the terrors of an obtrusive new machine rulership. Yet they would not surrender. They fought. They sought for a leader figure, but found none. It is shattering to have to admit that, at the head, were grime covered but powerful figures led by—as long as it was not dangerous—Jewish lawyers and traitors who were financed by large banks. The worker poets were unable to give birth to one genuine fighter. No knight was found in the struggling army of workers, neither in life nor in art.

Bebel remained a little sergeant his whole life long. Hauptmann did not progress beyond Die Weber and Kollegen Crampton. In this fact alone we find the proof that Marxism was not a real German, not a real western, movement of freedom, for a movement true to its racial type creates its heroic figures as its supreme value. But in place of a Nordic racial literature came a cowardly rabble of Marxist leaders who allowed themselves to be bought by anyone who had the money. In place of a totality, class stepped forward as a Jewish value. The German worker forgot that one may not betray folk and Fatherland, but must conquer; but under Jewish leadership he destroyed both.

The new awakening workers’ movement—National Socialism—will need to prove that it is in a position to present the German worker and the entire people not only with a workable political idea but also with an ideal of the beauty of masculine strength and will. Our supreme spiritual value will prevail over all others. We will create the prerequisite for an organic art which produces life. In all towns and cities of Germany we can already see the potential of acceptance of our ideas. The faces which gaze forth from the war memorials, from under their steel helmets, have everywhere a similarity which can only be described as mystical: a steep furrowed brow, a strong straight nose with angular frame, a firmly closed mouth with the deep fissures of a tensioned will. The widely spread eyes look straight ahead, as into the distance, and into eternity. The willed manliness of the front soldier is distinguished from the ideal of beauty of earlier times. The inner strength has become clearer than it was at the time of the Renaissance or during the Baroque period. This new beauty is also a racially intrinsic image of the beauty of the German worker, of the present day struggling Germans as a whole. But in order to prevent this life giving allegory from arising, conquering morphium sick bastards in Jewish workers’ newspapers and periodicals paint us with crippled and distorted faces. They fashion woodcuts in which idiocy and epilepsy are supposed to represent will. Meanwhile, the churches helplessly order more The crucifixions or more Lambs of god.

But nothing is of avail; the betrayal of 1918 has begun to avenge itself on the traitors. By looking at death in battles; out of the struggle, wretchedness and misery, a new generation strives upward. This generation sees before its eyes an old yet new ideal of beauty that is true to type, a beauty which is animated by a true to type creative will. The future belongs to us.

Behind the old aesthetic values, a new extra-aesthetic value system arises. The personality conditions the man and his aesthetics, and these enhance one another. A true personality always interacts with the racial supreme value. For example, a slave is given a certain life form by his personality which has accepted unconditional subjection. The superior man has a superior personality and these interact. A bastard screams his obscenities and these are part of, and interact with, his personality.

In the midst of the collapse of 1918 the new generation of Germany sought a new art, but with the knowledge that such could not be born until a new supreme value could be established over the whole of life—until it shall have taken possession of us. It is no accident that the world war has not yet found its poets. However emotionally stirring individual songs may be, folk and Fatherland as values both suddenly appeared among us. Only in the midst of battles was the German Myth awakened. Those who experienced it most strongly are covered by the sod or the billowing waves of the sea. The others fell into the mire of the collapse. The majority lost their faith in fighting at all for anything that was of value. Today, however, what is universally personal comes from the individual. The need of the times engraves it onto the heart of every German. Even the smallest sacrifice in the world war signified sacrifice for 80 million Germans. These 80 million alone—through the community of the sacrifices made for them—belong together forever along with their children and their descendants. The abstract enthusiasm before the war for the Fatherland is today, in spite of all earlier parliaments, a real mystic experience. This experience will, and must, be enhanced by a self evident feeling of reality. Moreover, this feeling signifies that the atoms of the peoples, the individual souls, have gradually begun to adjust themselves toward identity of mind. Personalities who further this with all their strength, year by year, will then by natural necessity be pushed to the fore. And whatever shape political life may continue to take, the hour of the birth of the poet of the world war has come! He knows with all others that the two million dead German heroes are the real living, that they gave their lives for nothing other than the honour and freedom of the German people, that in this deed lies the sole source of our spiritual rebirth, and that this is the sole value under which all Germans can live without contradiction. This German poet will then, with a strong hand, drive out the worms from our theatres; he will make fruitful the musicians with a new heroic music, and guide the chisel of the sculptor. The heroic memorials and memorial groves will be shaped through a new generation to create places of pilgrimage to a new religion, where German hearts can be formed anew again and again in the sense of a new Myth. Then will the world be born again through art.