POPULAR AND ESOTERIC CHARACTER

From Titian painting becomes more and more esoteric. So , too poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic [he views the Gothic as the dawn of our culture} per sehad been esoteric from its very beginnings - witness Dante and Wolfram. The Masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to the average memeber of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the phrase "art for all." But Faustian [he uses this term to mean the essential nature of Western culture] art is not, and by very essence cannot be, "for all." If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space - the space through which alone, according to Kant, things are.

Consider our sciences too. Every one of them, without exception, has besides its elementarygroundwork certain "higher" regions that are inaccessible to the layman - symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity and directional energy. Indeed, we may take the craving forwide effect as a sufficient index by itself of the commencing and already perceptible decline of Western science. That the sever esoteric of the Baroque age is felt now as a burden, is a symptom of sinking strength and of the dulling of that distance-sense confesed the limitation with humility. For us, the polarity of expert and layman has all the significance of a high symbol, and when the tension of this distance is beginning to slacken, there the Faustian life is fading out."