It is not the lonely spirit, striving by Art for redemption into Nature, that can frame the Art-work of the Future; only the spirit of Fellowship, fulfilled by Life, can bring this work to pass. But yet the lonely one can prefigure it to himself; and the thing that saves his preconception from becoming a mere idle fancy, is the very character of his striving,-his striving after Nature. The mind that casts back longing eyes to Nature, and therefore goes a-hungering in the modern Present, sees not alone in Nature's great sum-total, but also in the human nature that history lays before it, the types by whose observing it may reconcile itself with life in general. It recognises in this nature a type for all the Future, already shown in narrower bounds; to widen out these bounds to broadest compass, rests on the imaginative faculty of its nature-craving instinct.
Two cardinal moments of his development lie clear before us in the history of Man: the generic national, and the unnational universal. If we still look forward to the Future for the completion of the second evolutionary step, yet in the Past we have the rounded-off conclusion of the first set clear as day before our eyes. To what a pitch man once- so far as, governed by generic ancestry, by community of mother-tongue, by similarity of climate, and the natural surroundings of a common fatherland, he yielded himself unconsciously to the influence of Nature-to what a pitch man once was able to unfold himself beneath these welnigh directly moulding influences, we have certainly full reason to acknowledge with most heartfelt thanks. It is in the natural customs of all peoples, so far as they embrace the normal man, and even of those decried as most uncultured, that we first learn the truth of human nature in its full nobility, and in its real beauty. Not one true virtue has any Religion soever taken into itself as its god's command, but it was already self-included in these natural customs; not one genuine idea of human right has the later civilised State developed-though, alas, to the point of complete distortion!-but it already found its sure expression in them; not one veritable discovery for the common weal has later Culture made her own-with arrogant ingratitude!-but she derived it from the fruits of the homely understanding of the stewards of those customs.
But that Art is not an artificial product,-that the need of Art is not an arbitrary issue, but an inbred craving of the natural, genuine, and uncorrupted man,-who proves this in more striking manner than just these Peoples? Nay, whence shall our uneasy 'spirit' derive its proofs of Art's necessity, if not from the testimony of this artistic instinct and its glorious fruits afforded by these nature-fostered peoples, by the great Folk itself? Before what phenomenon do we stand with more humiliating sense of the impotence of our frivolous culture, than before the art of the Hellenes? To this, to the art of the darlings of all-loving Nature, of those fairest children whom. the great glad Mother holds up to us before the darksome cloud of modern modish culture, as the triumphant tokens of what she can bring forth,-let us look far hence to glorious Grecian Art, and gather from its inner understanding the outlines for the Art-work of the Future! Nature has done all that she could do,-she has given birth to the Hellenic people, has fed it at her breast and formed it by her mother-wisdom; she sets it now before our gaze with all a mother's pride, and cries to wide mankind with mother-love: 'This have I done for you; now, of your love for one another, do ye that which ye can!'
Thus have we then to turn Hellenic art to Human art; to loose from it the stipulations by which it was but an Heilenic and not a Universal art. The garment of Religion, in which alone it was the common Art of Greece, and after whose removal it could only, as an egoistic, isolated art-species, fulfil the needs of Luxury-however fair-but no longer those of Fellowship,-this specific garb of the Hellenic Religion, we have to stretch it out until its folds embrace the Religion of the Future, the Religion of Universal Manhood, and thus to gain already a presage of the Art-work of the Future. But this bond of union, this Religion of the Future, we wretched ones shall never clasp the while we still are lonely units, howe'er so many be our numbers who feel the spur towards the Art-work of the Future. The Art-work is the living presentation of Religion ;-but religions spring not from the artist's brain; their only origin is from the Folk.-
Let us then-without a spark of egoistic vanity, without attempting to console ourselves with any kind of self- derived illusion, but honestly and lovingly and hopefully devoted to the Art-work of the Future-content ourselves to- day by testing first the nature of the art-species which, in their shattered segregation, make up the general substance of our modern art; let us sharpen our gaze for this examination by glancing at Hellenic art; and thereafter let us draw a bold and confident conclusion anent the great and universal Art-work of the Future!
II. ARTISTIC MAN, AND ART AS DERIVED DIRECTLY FROM HIM.
1. MAN AS HIS OWN ARTISTIC SUBJECT AND MATERIAL.
MAN'S nature is twofold, an outer and an inner. The senses to which he offers himself as a subject for Art, are those of Vision and of Hearing: to the eye appeals the outer man, the inner to the ear.
The eye apprehends the bodily form of man, compares it with surrounding objects, and discriminates between it and them. The corporeal man and the spontaneous expression of his sensations of physical anguish or physical well-being, called up by outward contact, appeal directly to the eye; while indirectly he imparts to it, by means of facial play and gesture, those emotions of the inner man which are not directly cognisable by the eye. Again, through the expression of the eye itself, which directly meets the eye of the beholder, man is able to impart to the latter not only the feelings of the heart, but even the characteristic activity of the brain; and the more distinctly can the outer man express the inner, the higher does he show his rank as an artistic being.
But the inner man can only find direct communication through the ear, and that by means of his voice's Tone. Tone is the immediate utterance of feeling and has its physical seat within the heart, whence start and whither flow the waves of life-blood. Through the sense of hearing, tone urges forth from the feeling of one heart to the feeling of its fellow: the grief and joy of the emotional-man impart themselves directly to his counterpart through the manifold expression of vocal tone; and where the outer corporeal-man finds his limits of expressing to the eye the qualities of those inner feelings of the heart he fain would utter and convey, there steps in to his aid the sought-for envoy, and takes his message through the voice to hearing, through hearing to the feelings of the heart.
Yet where, again, the direct expression of vocal tone finds its limits of conveying the separate feelings of the heart in clear and sharply outlined definition to the sympathies of the recipient inner man, there enters on the scene, through the vehicle of vocal tone, the determinative utterance of Speech. Speech is the condensation (5) of the element of Voice, and the Word is the crystallised measure of Tone. In Speech, feeling conveys itself by ear to feeling, but to that likewise to be condensed and crystahlised feeling to which it seeks to bring itself in sure and unmistakable understanding. It is thus the organ of that special feeling which reasons with itself and yearns for others' understanding,-the Intellect.-For the more vague and general feeling the immediate attributes of Tone sufficed. This general feeling therefore abode by Tone, as its adequate and materially contenting utterance; in the quantitative value of its compass it found the means of, so to say, accenting its own peculiar qualities in their universal bearings. But the definite need which seeks by Speech to gain an understanding is more decided and more pressing; it abides not in contentment with its physical expression, for it has to differentiate its own subjective feeling from a general feeling, and therefore to depict and to describe what Tone gave forth directly as the expression of this general feeling. The speaker has therefore to take his images from correlative but diverse objects, and to weld them with each other. In this mediate and complex process he has to take a wider field; and, under pressure of his quest for comprehension, he accelerates this process by the utmost brevity of his lingering over Tone, and by complete abandonment of its general powers of expression. Through this enforced renunciation, through this giving up of all delight in the physical element of his own utterance-at least of that degree of pleasure which the corporeal- and the emotional-man experience in their method of expression,-the intellectual-man attains the faculty of giving by means of his speech-organ that certain utterance in seeking which the former found their bounds, each in his own degree. His capability is unlimited: he collects and sifts the universal, parts and unites according to his need and pleasure the images which all his senses bear him from the outer world; he binds and looses the particular and general even as he judges best, in order to appease his own desire for a sure and intelligible utterance of his feelings, his reflections, or his will. Yet he finds once more his limit where, in the agitation of his feelings, in the living pulse of joy or the violence of grief,-there, where the particular and arbitrary draw back before the generality and spontaneity of the feeling that usurps his heart; where from out the egoism of his narrowed and conditioned personal sensations he finds himself again amid the wide communion of all-embracing world-emotions, a partaker in the unconditioned truth of universal feeling and emotion; where, finally, he has to subordinate his individual selfwill to the dictates of Necessity, be it of grief or joy, and to hearken in place of commanding,-he craves for the only adequate and direct expression of his endlessly enhanced emotion. Here must he reach back once more to the universal mode of utterance; and, in exact proportion as he has pressed forward to his special standpoint, has he now to retrace his steps and borrow from the emotional man the physical tones of feeling, from the corporeal man the physical gestures of the body. For where it is a question of giving utterance, immediate and yet most certain, to the highest and the truest that man can ever utter, there above all
