Yet this unveiling was alike the final annihilation of the collective Artwork: for its bond of union had been that very garment of Religion. While the contents of the common mythical religion, the traditional subject of Dramatic art, were employed to point the poet's moral, developed to fit his purpose, and finally disfigured by his selfwilled fancy, the religious belief had already disappeared completely from the life of the Folk-fellowship, now only linked by political interests. This belief however, the honour paid to national Gods, the sure assumption of the truth of primal race-traditions, had formed the bond of all community. Was this now rent and hooted as a heresy, at least the core of that religion had come to light as unconditioned, actual, naked Man; but this Man was no longer the associate man, united by the bond of racial fellowship: only the absolute, egoistic, solitary unit, - man beautiful and naked, but loosed from the beauteous bond of brotherhood.
From here on, from the shattering of the Greek religion, from the wreck of the Grecian Nature-State, and its resolution into the Political State,-from the splintering of the common Tragic A rtwork,-the manhood of world-history begins with measured tread its new gigantic march of evolution, from the fallen natural kinsmanship of national community to the universal fellowship of all mankind. The band which the full-fledged Man, coming to consciousness in the national Hellenian, disrupted as a cramping fetter- with this awakened consciousness-must now expand into a universal girdle embracing all mankind. The period from that point of time down to our own to-day is, therefore, the history of absolute Egoism; and the end of this period will be its redemption into Communism. (29)
The art which has taken this solitary, egoistic, naked Man, the point of departure of the said world-historical period, and set him up before us as a beauteous monument of admonition-is the art of Sculpture, which reached its height exactly at the time when the conjoint human art-work of Tragedy declined from its meridian.-
The beauty of the human body was the foundation ot all Hellenic Art, nay even of the natural State. We know that with the noblest of Hellenic stems, the Doric Spartans, the healthiness and unmarred beauty of the newborn child made out the terms on which alone it was allowed to live, while puling deformity was denied the right of life. This beauteous naked man is the kernel of all Spartanhood: from genuine delight in the beauty of the most perfect human body, that of the male, arose that spirit of comradeship which pervades and shapes the whole economy of the Spartan State. This love of man to man, in its primitive purity, proclaims itself as the noblest and least selfish utterance of man's sense of beauty, for it teaches man to sink and merge his entire self in the object of his affection. And exactly in degree as woman, in perfected womanhood, through love to man and sinking of herself within his being, has developed the manly element of that womanhood and brought it to a thorough balance with the purely womanly, and thus in measure as she is no longer merely man's beloved but his friend-can man find fullest satisfaction in the hove of woman. (30)
The higher element of that love of man to man consisted even in this: that it excluded the motive of egoistic physicalism. Nevertheless it not only included a purely spiritual bond of friendship, but this spiritual friendship was the blossom and the crown of the physical friendship. The latter sprang directly from delight in the beauty, aye, in the material, bodily beauty of the beloved comrade; yet this delight was no egoistic yearning, but a thorough stepping out of self into unreserved sympathy with the comrade's joy in himself involuntarily betrayed by his life-glad, beauty-prompted bearing. This love, which had its basis in the noblest pleasures of both eye and soul-not like our modern postal correspondence of sober friendship, half businesslike, half sentimental-was the Spartan's only tutoress of youth, the never aging instructress alike of boy and man, the ordainer of the common feasts and valiant enterprises; nay, the inspiring helpmeet on the battlefield. For this it was that knit the fellowships of love into battalions of war and forewrote the tactics of death-daring, in rescue of the imperilled or vengeance for the slaughtered comrade, by the infrangible laws of the soul's most natural necessity.-
The Spartan who thus directly carried out in Life his purely human, communistic artwork, instinctively portrayed it also in his Lyric; that most direct expression of joy in self and life, which hardly reached in its impulsive (nothwendig) utterance to Art's self-consciousness. In the prime of the Doric State, the Spartan Lyric bent so irresistibly towards the original basis of all Art, the living Dance, that- characteristically enough !-it has scarcely handed down to us one single literary memento of itself; precisely because it was a pure, physical expression of lovely life, and warded off all separation of the art of Poetry from those of Dance and Tone. Even the transitional stage from the Lyric to the Drama, such as we may recognise in the Epic songs, remained a stranger to the Spartans; and it is sufficiently significant, that the Homeric songs were collected in the Ionic, not the Doric dialect. Whereas the Ionic peoples, and notably in the event, the Athenians, developed themselves into political States under influence of the liveliest mutual intercourse, and preserved in Tragedy the artistic representation of the religion which was melting out of Life: the Spartans, as a shut-off inland people, kept faithful to their old-hellenic character, and held their unmixed Nature-state, as a living monument of art, against the changeful fashionings of the newer life of politics. Whatever in the hurry and confusion of the destructive restlessness of these new times sought rescue or support, now turned its gaze toward Sparta. The Statesman sought to scrutinise the forms of this primeval State, to convey them artificially to the political State of his day; while the Artist, who saw the common artwork of the Tragedy sloughing and crumbling before his very eyes, looked forth to where he might descry the kernel of this artwork, the beauteous old-hellenic (31) man, and preserve it for his art. As Sparta towered up, a living monument of older times: so did the art of Sculpture crystallise in stone the old-hellenic human being which she had recognised within this living monument, and garner up the lifeless monument of bygone beauty for coming times of quickening barbarism.
But when Athens turned its eyes to Sparta, the worm of general egoism was already gnawing its destructive path into this fair State too. The Peloponnesian War had dragged it, all unwilling, into the whirlpool of the newer times; and Sparta had only been able to vanquish Athens by the very weapons which the Athenians had erewhile made so terrible and unassailable to it. Instead of their simple iron-bars-those tokens of contempt for money, as compared with human worth-the minted gold of Asia was heaped within the Spartan's coffers; leaving behind the ancient, frugal "public mess," he retired to his sumptuous banquet between his own four walls; and the noble love of man to man-whose motive had been an even higher one than that of love to woman-degenerated, as it had already done in the other Hellenic states, into its unnatural counterpart.