IMPRESSIONISM [152-3]

Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our "Late" Culture. There is an impresionistic mathematic, which frankly and with intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of number- "bodies," aggregates, and the multi-dimensional geometry. There is again an impressionistic physics which "sees" in lieu of bodies systems of mass-ponts--units that are evidently no more than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.

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Is Impressionism (in the curren tnarrow sense) a creationg of the nineteenth century? Has paiting lived, after all, tow centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived in the [p 154] character of the new episode, that in the nineteenth century (i.e. beyond the 1800 frontier and in "Civilization") succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, choosing the word Plein-air to designate its special characteristic. The materialism of a Western cosmopolis blew into the ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker--a brief flicker of two generations, for twith the generation of Manet all was eneded again. I have characterized the noble green of Grünewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Prostestant world-feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new colour scale stand for irreligion. From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the eath. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated; there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. Rousseau's tragically correct prophecy of a "return to Nature" fulfils itslef in this dying art--the senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a workman, not a creator...

PERGAMUM AND BAYREUTH: THE END OF ART [p 155+]

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[157]Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is not, indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair for the decadent detected at once. For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour, and this was just what Wagner achieved with three bars. .....

[p 158] [Comparison with Alexandria] There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells--the "Literary Man" in the Poet's place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organized as a " phase of art-history," thinking and feeling and forming as industiral art. ... all is pattern-work. .. the Last Act of all Cultures.