Anthony M. Ludovici

“ Mountains and lonely woods and angry seas, in all periods of Greek literature, so far from calling out a sublime sense of mystery and awe, raise images of terror and repulsion, of power divorced from beauty and alien to art. Homer, when for the moment he pauses to describe a place, chooses one in which the hand of man is visible; which he has reclaimed from the wild, made orderly, subdued to his own use. Up to the last days of Greek antiquity man has not yet learnt so to lose himself in the boundless life of Nature, as to find a contemplative pleasure in her wilder and more majestic scenes. ”

“ Only in an age like our own could this ridiculous travesty of an artist pass for an artist. It is only in our age that his neurotic touchiness could possibly be mistaken for strength and vigour; and yet there are hundreds of his kind among the painters and sculptors of the day.
Many a student's call to Art, at present, is merely a reminder, on the part of Nature, that he should cultivate restraint and forbearance, and should go in for commerce; for there is a whole universe between such a man and the artist of value. Not that sensitiveness is absent in the real artist ”

“ It often happens, even in our days, that another world is pictured as by no means a better world, [45] and the healthy and optimistic layman may feel a certain thankfulness to Life and to Humanity. It is then once more that he turns to the artist who has felt the same in a greater degree, who can give him this thing—be it a corner of Life or of Humanity—who can snatch it from the eternal flux and torrent of all things into decay or into death, and who can carve or paint it in a form unchanging for him, in spite of a world of Becoming, of Evolution, and of ebb and flow. ”

“ If in the Europe, and especially in the England of to-day, everybody has a right to every judgment and to every joy; if a certain slavish truthfulness to nature and reality, rawness and ruggedness, have well-nigh wrecked higher aspirations, and if everybody can press his paltry modicum of voice, of thought, of draughtsmanship, of passion and impudence to the fore, and thus spread his portion of mediocrity like dodder over the sacred field of Art ”

“ Long before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the very principles that were at the base of European life and aspirations—the principle of the depravity of man, the principle of liberty for liberty's sake, the principle of the pursuit of general truth; and finally, the principle that experience —that is to say, a direct appeal to nature—was the best method of furnishing the mind—all these principles had been leading steadily to one conclusion, and this conclusion Rousseau was the first to embody in his energetic and fulminating protest against culture, tradition, human power and society. ”

“ Aiming at a general truth for all, he is reduced to naked reality, to Nature as it was before God's Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and this is his world of facts, stripped of all that higher men have put into them. This man of science without Art, is gradually reducing us to a state of absolute ignorance; for while he takes from us what we know about things, he gives us nothing in return. How often do we not hear people who are influenced by his science, exclaim that the more they learn the less they feel they know. ”

“ This same feeling, I believe, partly explains the tendency to realism in Greek art. And it is precisely to this tendency to realism that I think it is now high time to call attention, after all the fulsome praise which has for ages been lavished upon the products of the Hellenic spirit.
When you turn to the granite statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhet in the Louvre, or to the lions of Gebel Barkal in the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum, you are conscious of a sensation of great strangeness, of humiliating unfamiliarity, of almost incalculable distance. ”

“ The gradual growth in the importance of the human body and of the Pagan type, in the Renaissance painters, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, with whom there can no longer be any question of convalescence, the rapid return to a healthy life-affirming type, and the ultimate triumph of this type in the very heart of the Vatican—the headquarters of the greatest negative religion on earth,—these are the facts which make the art of this age so admirable and so thrilling.
It represents the greatest stand which Europe has ever made against the denial of life, humanity and beauty ”

“ Many people imagine that Greek sculpture—to take that salient province again—deliberately avoided truth to Nature, and aimed at some utterly conventional thing called the ideal. Nothing could be more mistaken. The whole aim of Greek sculpture was to reproduce the living man or woman, and the sublime of its execution was attained only when the carving seemed instinct with life—a life not merely of the limbs, but a life of the soul, which informed the countenance, and was felt to be controlling every limb. ”

“ Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who, after contemplating it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them both hope and courage.
The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them the apotheosis of their type. ”

“ Turning, now, to Painting and Sculpture, what is it precisely that we see?
In this branch of Art, chaos and anarchy are scarcely the words to use. The condition is rather one of complete and hopeless dissolution. There is neither a direction, a goal, nor a purpose. Slavish realism side by side with crude conventions, incompetence side by side with wasted talent, coloured photography side by side with deliberate eccentricity, and scientific principles applied to things that do not matter in the least: these are a few of the features which are noticeable at a first glance. ”

“ It is with us to be the modest handmaiden of Art, working in secrecy until all its ugliness can be collected, transfigured, and used for the purpose of man's exaltation by the artist. It may be useful for our science-slaves, working behind the scenes of Life, to know that the sky is merely our limited peep into an infinite expanse of ether—whatever that is. ”

“ No people, any portion of which had been capable of producing the Apollo of Tenea, could have avoided it; but that it preponderates in realism, the evidence of history, alone, apart from that of our own senses, proves beyond a doubt.
The appreciation which it has met with at the hands of almost all Europeans of all ages, and particularly at the hands of the Renaissance realists, shows how general its appeal has been; and no art which has been so very much above Nature as to apotheosize the particular values of a particular people at its zenith, has ever made such a general appeal. ”

“ All great ruler-art, then, is, as it were, a song of praise, a magnificat, appealing only to those, and pleasing only those, who feel in sympathy with the values which it advocates. And that is why all art of any importance, and of any worth, must be based upon a certain group of values—in other words, must have a philosophy or a particular view of the world as its foundation. ”

“ Imagine the jubilation, the feeling of power and the sense of extreme relief that must have filled the hearts of the ancient New Zealanders, when the first great Maori artist arose and said to his brothers and sisters that it was the god of the forests, Tane Mahuta, with his tall trees that had wrenched the sky by force from mother Earth, where once upon a time he used to crush her teeming offspring to death. ”

“ What constitutes the artistic beauty in a painted landscape, then, is the mood, the particular human quality, that the artist throws into it. As the French painters say, a landscape is a state of the soul; and unless the particular mood or idea with which the artist invests a natural scene have some value and interest, and be painted in a commanding or ruler manner, it is a mere piece of superfluous foolery, which may, however, find its proper place on a great railway poster or in an estate agent's illustrated catalogue. ”

“ For even outsiders and plain men in the street must be beginning to have more than an inkling of the chaos and confusion which now reigns in other spheres besides the Fine Arts. It must be apparent to most people that, in every department of modern life where culture and not calculation, where taste and not figures, where ability and not qualifications, are alone able to achieve anything great—that is to say, in religion, in morality, in law, in politics, in music, in architecture, and finally in the plastic arts, precision and government are now practically at an end. ”

“ It is separating Art from Life, and it is relegating it to a sphere—a Beyond—where other things, stronger than Art, have already been known to die. The notion of art for art's sake can only arise in an age when the purpose of Art is no longer known, when its relation to Life has ceased from being recognized, and when artists have grown too weak to find the realization of their will in their works. ”

“ It is the absence of Art. It is a sign that the simplifying, ordering and transfiguring power of the artist has not been successful, and that chaos, disorder and complexity have not been overcome.
Ugliness of form in Art, therefore, will tend to become prevalent in democratic times; because it is precisely at such times that a general truth for all is believed in, and, since reality is the only truth which can be made common to all, democratic art is invariably realistic, and therefore, according to my definition of the beautiful in form, ugly. ”

“ With Nietzsche's concept of Art before me I feel as if I had left the arts of the present day many thousand leagues behind, and it is almost a hardship to be obliged to return to them. For unless most of that which is peculiar to this age be left many thousand leagues to the rear, all hope of making any headway must be abandoned.
We live in a democratic age. It is only natural, therefore, that all that belongs to the ruler should have been whittled down, diluted, and despoiled of its dignity ”

“ Such a man, after he has contemplated the ruler-artist's work, may rush headlong to the nearest river and drown himself. His despair may be so great when he realizes the impossibility of ever reaching the heights he has been contemplating, that he may immolate himself on the spot. Only thus can the world be purged of the many-too-many.
"Unto many life is a failure," says Zarathustra, "a poisonous worm eating through into their heart. These ought to see to it that they succeed better in dying. ”

“ For having established the fact that the purpose of the graphic arts is to determine the values beautiful and ugly, it would only remain for us to urge all artists to advocate that absolute subject-beauty with all the eloquence of line and colour that our concept of Art-form would allow, and all the problems of Art would be solved.
But we can postulate no such absolute in subject-beauty. "Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth." ”

“ It is only in democratic ages, or ages of decline, when instincts become disintegrated, that beauty in Art is synonymous with a lack of simplicity, of order and of transfiguration. I have shown, however, that the second kind of beauty, or democratic beauty, is of an inferior kind to that of the first beauty, or Ruler beauty, because, while the former takes its root in the will to live, the latter arises surely and truly out of the will to power. ”

“ This art of life which takes as a fundamental principle that every joy is bought by some sacrifice, is strange and archaic now. The people it reared communicate little to our age, as their statues will prove if you look at them; the art it created leaves modern spectators cold; and yet, as every great legislator and artist should know, it is precisely upon the principle with which the Egyptian people of the fourth dynasty were reared, and with which the splendid statue of King Khephrën was carved, that all great life and art repose. ”

“ As men who were still able to believe in a Man-God, and were still convinced of the power of man-wrought miracles, how could they associate realism or that principle of manufacture whereby a man deliberately suppresses his will to art and makes himself subservient to nature—how could they associate this with Life,—Life which to these dwellers on the Nile was inextricably bound up with the hand, the thought, the will, and the power of man? ”

“ I can but assure you that the more you read about it in the works of men like Wilkinson, Petrie and Brugsch-Bey, the more convinced you will become of its transcendental superiority. And if, in praising their art above that of any other nation, I have been forced to deal all too hastily with their morals and their State, it is simply because I can conceive of no such perfect art being possible, save as the flower of the noble and man-exalting values which I find at the base of the Egyptian Pyramid. ”

“ Wherever one may turn, wherever one inquires, one will discover that, at the present day, however few and weak the commanders may be, there is among the vast majority of people an insatiable thirst to obey, to find opinions ready-made, and to believe in some one or in some law. The way the name of science is invoked when a high authority is needed—just as the Church or the Bible used to be invoked in years gone by—the love of statistics and the meekness with which a company grows silent when they are quoted ”

“ There must have been great sacrifices made to good taste; for the sake of it, much must have been done, and much refrained from —the seventeenth century in France is worthy of admiration in both ways; good taste must then have been a principle of selection, for society, place, dress, and sexual gratification, beauty must have been preferred to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence. Supreme rule:—we must not 'let ourselves go,' even when only in our own presence.—Good things are costly beyond measure, and the rule always holds, that he who possesses them is other than he who acquires them. ”

“ It may be difficult for us to picture how great the rejoicings must have been which followed upon every fresh ordering and arranging of the universe, every fresh interpretation of the world in the terms of man.
Perhaps only a few people to-day, who are beginning to cast dubious glances at Life, and to question even the justification of man's existence, may be able to form some conception of the thrill that must have passed through an ancient community, when one of its higher men uprose and ordered and adjusted Life for them, and, in so ordering it, transfigured it. ”

“ Nietzsche's works are, however, full of the evidences of an artistic temperament.
Who but an artist, knowing the joy of creating, for instance, could have laid such stress upon the creative act as the great salvation from suffering and an alleviation of life? [7] Who but an artist could have been an atheist out of his lust to create?
"For what could be created, if there were Gods!" cries Zarathustra. (7)
But, above all, who save an artist could have elevated taste to such a high place as a criterion of value, and have made his own personal taste the standard for so many grave valuations? ”

“ No one seems to feel nowadays that a picture, like a sonnet, like a sonata, and like a statue, if it claim attention at all, should claim the attention of all those who are most deeply concerned with the problems of Life, Humanity, and the Future; and that every breath of Art comes from the lungs of Life herself, and is full of indications as to her condition. ”

“ In architecture, which, like music, has for some reason or other always seemed to Europeans to be less intimately connected with the thought and will of man than the graphic arts, an un-Catholic spirit was preparing its road to triumph. When I say un-Catholic, I mean emancipated from the law and order of the Universal Church. [20] And in the Gothic edifice, from its early stages to its development into the flamboyant style, all the impossibilities, all the terrible self-immolations imposed by the Christian ideal upon man, begin to make themselves openly felt. ”

“ We can detect nothing in this greatest scientific achievement of the last century which seriously resists or opposes our heritage in the realm of the religious spirit. In their fundamentals, the two are one; And when we take them both to task, and try to discover their influence upon the world, we wonder not so much why Art is so bad, but why Art has survived at all. ”

“ Even the hand of man—of the artist—in a painted landscape, got to be a thing of the past. Realism—because it most conscientiously repeated that unconstrained and anarchical spirit which the romantic age loved to detect in matted weeds, in tangled and impenetrable coppices, in thick festoons of parasitic plants, in unhandseled brambles and in babbling brooks—became the ruling principle. Classical influence alone was able for a while to resist too rapid a decline ”

“ It is on this account that many sincere and refined natures turn reluctantly away from Art altogether nowadays, and begin to doubt whether it serves any good purpose in the world at all. They grow weary of the humbug of the studios, the affectation of gushing amateurs, and the snobbery of the lionizing disciple of one particular school, and doubt the honesty even of his leader. They grow timid and renounce all judgment in Art, wondering whether any of it really matters. ”

“ The most convincing artists are those who make harmony ring out of every discord, and who benefit all things by the gift of their power and their inner harmony: in every work of art they merely reveal the symbol of their inmost experiences—their creation is gratitude for their life. ”

“ For it was then that man's strongest instinct became creative in man's highest product—the artist—and the discovery was made that the world, although "without form" and "void," as a fact, could be simplified and made calculable and full of form and attractions, as a valuation, as an interpretation, as a spiritual possession. With the world at a distance from him, unfamiliar and unhuman, man's existence was a torment. ”

“ While, therefore, the artist, as Nietzsche understood him, scarcely exists at all to-day, another breed of man has come to the fore in the graphic arts, whose very weakness is his passport, who makes no claims at establishing new values of beauty, and who contents himself modestly with exhibiting certain baffling dexterities, virtuosities and tricks, which at once amaze and delight ordinary spectators or Art-students, simply because they themselves have not yet overcome even the difficulties of a technique. ”

“ But the people I have just described have only a skin, and any itch upon it they call Art.
No lasting good, no permanent value can come of these irascible people who will be avenged on all that they call beauty, "right away"; who will, so to speak, "pay beauty out," and who cannot contain themselves in its presence. They can but help to swell the ranks of the incompetent, and even if they are successful, as they sometimes are nowadays, all they do is to wreck the sacred calling in which they are but pathological usurpers. ”

“ Confining myself strictly to Nietzsche's æsthetic, I have been content merely to show that the highest Art, or Ruler Art, and therefore the highest beauty,—in which culture is opposed to natural rudeness, selection to natural chaos, and simplicity to natural complexity,—can be the flower and product only of an aristocratic society which, in its traditions and its active life, has observed, and continues to observe, the three aristocratic principles,—culture, selection and simplicity. ”