The need of Fashion is thus the diametrical antithesis of the need of Art; for the artistic need cannot possibly be present where Fashion is the lawgiver of Life. In truth, the endeavour of many an enthusiastic artist of our times could only be directed to rousing first that necessary Need, from the standpoint and by the means of Art; yet we must look on all such efforts as vain and fruitless. The one impossibility for Mind is, to awaken a real need:-to answer to an actual present need, man always has the speedy means to hand, but never to evoke it where Nature has withheld it, where its conditionments are not contained in her economy. But if the craving for art-work does not exist, then art-work is itself impossible and only the Future can call it forth for us, and that by the natural begettal of its conditionments from out of Life.
Only from Life, from which alone can even the need for her grow up, can Art obtain her matter and her form; but where Life is modelled upon Fashion, Art can never fashion aught from Life. Straying far away from the necessity of Nature, Mind wilfully-and even in the so-called 'common' life, involuntarily-exercises its disfiguring influence upon the matter and the form of Life; in such a manner that Mind, at last unhappy in its separation, and longing for its healthy sustenance by Nature and its complete re-union with her, can no more find the matter and the form for its assuagement in actual present life. If, in its striving for redemption, it yearns for unreserved acknowledgment of Nature, and if it can only reconcile itself with her in her faithfulest portrayal, in the physical actuality of the Art-work: yet it sees that this reconciliation can nevermore be gained by acknowledgment and portrayal of its actual surroundings, of this Fashion-governed parody of life. Involuntarily, therefore, must it pursue an arbitrary course in its struggle for redemption by Art; it must seek for Nature-which in sound and wholesome life would rush to meet it-amid times and places where it can recognise her in less, and finally in least, distortion. Yet everywhere and everywhen has natural man thrown on the garment, if not of Fashion, still of Custom ("Sitte") The simplest and most natural, the fairest and the noblest Custom is certainly the least disfigurement of Nature,- nay, her most fitting human garb. But the copying and reproduction of this Custom,-without which the modern artist can never manage to effect his portraiture of Nature,-is still, in face of modern Life, an irreclaimably arbitrary and purpose-governed dealing; and whatsoever has been thus formed and fashioned by even the honestest striving after Nature, appears, so soon as e'er it steps before our present public life, either a thing incomprehensible, or else another freshly fangled Fashion.
In truth we have nothing for which to thank this mode of striving after nature, within the bounds of modern life and yet in contrast to it, but Mannerism and its ceaseless, restless change. The character of Fashion has once more unwittingly betrayed itself in Mannerism; without a shred of consequent coherence with actual life, it trips up to Art with just the same despotic orders as Fashion wields on Life; it bands itself with Fashion, and rules with equal might each separate branch of art. Beneath its serious mien it shows itself-almost as inevitably as does its colleague-in utmost ridicule. Not only the Antique, the Renaissance and Middle Ages, but the customs and the garb of savage races in new-discovered lands, the primal fashions of Japan and China, from time to time usurp as "Mannerisms," in greater or in less degree, each several department of our modern art. Nay, with no other effect than that of an insufficient stimulus, our lightly veering 'manner of the day' sets before the least religiously disposed and most genteel of theatre-goers the fanaticism of religious sects; (4) before the luxurious un-nature of our fashionable world the naïvety of Swabian peasants; before the pampered gods of commerce the want of the hungering rabble.
Here, then, does the artist whose spirit strives to be reknit with Nature see all his hopes thrust forward to the Future, or else his soul thrust back upon the mournful exercise of resignation. He recognises that his thought can only gain redemption in a physically present art-work, thus only in a truly art-demanding, i.e. an art-conditioning Present that shall bring forth Art from its own native truth and beauty; he therefore sets his hopes upon the Future, his trust upon the power of Necessity, for which this Work of the Future is reserved. But in face of the actual Present, he renounces all appearing of the Art-work upon the surface of this present, i.e. in public show; and consequently he quits publicity itself; so far as it is ruled by fashion. The great United Art-work, which must gather up each branch of art to use it as a mean, and in some sense to undo it for the common aim of all, for the unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected human nature,-this great United Art-work he cannot picture as depending on the arbitrary purpose of some human unit, but can only conceive it as the instinctive and associate product of the Manhood of the Future. The instinct that recognises itself as one that can only be satisfied in fellowship, abandons modern fellowship-that conglomerate of self-seeking caprice-and turns to find its satisfaction in solitary fellowship with itself and with the manhood of the Future,-so well as the lonely unit can.
6. STANDARD FOR THE ART-WORK OF THE FUTURE.
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!"