Henry van de Velde: Notes from the Trip to Greece

If someone comprehends a problem intellectually and reasonably, one must assume that the course of their thinking will resonate with the mental life of other nations and races that share a kindred process of thought. If someone influences the forces of their fantasy, it is certain that their mental activity will be valued exclusively within their own nation and race. What logical reasoning has established as a unified and universally applicable law will be experienced in an infinitely varied multiplicity through the workings of fantasy. The influence of reason reaches to the ends of the earth; the expression of fantasy is barely understood and appreciated beyond borders. To one who aims their will towards universality, there is no choice: they will influence the forces of reason.
Fantasy in art ― a fantastic artistic creation. I accept it as snacks for five o'clock, as a conversation with a lady who offers it to me, as her words, which I listen to with the most convinced face in the world, a face that yet does not wish to say anything but that all of it is completely indifferent to me. My hostess expects nothing else; she knows that one must accept conversation and snacks in this way.
The problem: do we still live in a time when people sustain themselves with snacks and tea conversations, or ― and this signifies the same ― with the fantastic creations of art? When I compare fantasy in art with indulging in treats and conversations with beautiful ladies ― I do not visit others for tea ― I am saying that personally I do not deny this fantasy and voluntary works of art all value, yet I believe that humanity today feels less caste-like and does not attend tea parties.
Whoever eats too much sugar must soon go to the dentist ― I was always taught this when I was still a child; and then I became afraid of doctors and understood. Therefore, we share with ourselves fantasy in art and all fantastic creations just as little as sugar. Two pieces in black coffee; just enough of a supplement of fantasy that reasoned conception of the problem allows.
Reason ― black coffee. I already foresee the objection to reason that arises against Black coffee, but the French scholar Lebourneau has provided proof that consuming coffee refines the race. Reason refined man even before he knew coffee. It is already present in a child before he is allowed to consume stimulating drinks.
To reason logically: that is old and new. It leads to the ultimate consequences and not to a nourishing milieu. The style that strives to reason must be modern; the concept of antiquity was no different. Did the Greeks not indulge in snacks and did they not attend five o'clock teas? Surely they took conversing with ladies just as lightly as we do today.
Art and the spirit of antiquity are accessible only to those who approach them through simple reason. The simple concepts of antiquity had no influence on us, and we recognized them as such only when we began to reason ourselves. Who is able to enjoy the charm of reasonable conception and knows the beauties of such a conception, is driven towards antiquity and Greece. One sets out as a modern person, in a flannel suit, with a yellow suitcase and yellow shoes, and this sign of modernity accompanies him like hotel labels on his suitcase. It proclaims whence the traveler comes. The way there is not at all straight; it bends; it curves into a detour that leads into the Middle Ages, halfway.
Gothicism: the first mirror in which our reasonable conception reflects, casts an image onto the silver mirrors of the Greek archipelago.
The Middle Ages grasp problems through the forces of reason. However, it happened that this will for reason and this gift of understanding things reasonably was burdened by a millennia-old tradition full of dark religious customs. God, the virgin as the mother, and paradise, in which lived just as many saints and angels as devils and evil spirits in hell, were the weights that hung upon that will for reason.
Gothic cathedrals, town halls, belfries; all of these seem to be conceived so reasonably, just like the lace of that epoch. As the thread winds through these laces from beginning to end, so reason comes alive in all works of architecture. Around the center of the needle and around the loop of lace, the thread winds and twists; around the nails of the cross and around the sacred symbols, the reason of the Gothic artist of cathedrals twists and weaves.
Whence comes it that the Christian builder could erect his god and his faith right between himself and his reason? That is the wedge that creeps between the wheels, and it is enough of a straw to stop the machine. Cathedrals and town halls; purely rational, clearly thought out organisms, amid the bustling activities; their memory connects to these organisms. Full of reason, polished like jewels; let us remember Amiens. Full of the influence of the era and the wealth of ancient legends; remember Reims, Rouen, and Paris.
The play of shadow and light that quivers and lives on these stones of cathedrals shares its life with the stone and, more certainly, with the divine stone figures, all those believing kings and their pious queens. Since then the cathedral has acted as a book. It is the one that instructs all who cannot read. It itself continually more and more fades, dissolves, and the marvelous core that lives within it dies. Reason has consciously relinquished death.
The sad, burdensome wall of our heaven urged it towards reason. Thousands of stone gods, saints, and apostles, wise and foolish virgins could not achieve as much in our unfortunate west as a single ray of light in those blessed lands, in Attica and in Egypt. Down there is the play of light and shadow like in love, a blissful play and the chasing of yellow and blue butterflies. Here it is the play of shadow and light like a red cargo ship on a black canal.
The art of Gothic, I have already said, is halfway on the road. The goal is a consequent development and the wonderful play of love-drunk butterflies.
The Brenner railway; sleeping car; gloves made of natural leather; dark flannel; suitcase and shoes of light yellow leather. Milan and Genoa. It is not a direct route, but it is possible to take into account the excursion, like from the Middle Ages to antiquity; and between the most absurd dome and the most perfect buildings, the blue sky stretches into the distance.
There are more rational domes than the Milan Cathedral; but there is no more fitting example of a fantastic artistic creation. The Milan Cathedral. Like a great shell, cast by a fantastic wave in the middle of the city. I understand what excitement such an incident must have evoked in the local population; how much cult surrounded this gift. In this marvelous work all their dreams of a thousand and one nights, their dreams of the wealth and delights of the Orient, found embodiment. Since then, its excitement has always been revitalized at the sight of this dome. Every morning it shines anew and brightly like pink mother-of-pearl; every morning the celebration is renewed and evokes the memory of the marvel; in the square, which the dome governs and which it darkens powerfully, whirls in the soft, fragrant air the circle of dancing girls with flowers, the throng of flitting butterflies and golden shimmering beetles. Every noon the dome is bathed in silver. Around the flower beds of the square, a wedding procession walks in radiant white, with princes in shining silver armor, with horses in shimmering steel armor, with princesses and merry jesters dressed in light yellow silk. Every evening the colorful garment of the mighty dome turns amethyst; under the mightily resounding dome of the serious, golden sky strides in black and dark violet the funeral procession with the body of a king who fell in some battle during the days of the Sforzas, Viscontis, Lodovico Moro. Gazing at the mighty dome, the Milanese brings to life every day anew his dreams, celebrations, and sorrows. ― Only thus is it possible to enjoy the dome, its exterior.
Snacks and five o’clock. New faces, new surroundings. The deck with American women of striking profiles, whose features testify that such an eye truly sees, that such a nose smells, that such a mouth knows how to kiss. Fewer snacks and less tea. The rhythm of their speech increases the penetrative power of their conversation, but distractedly I only listen to what they say.
I see the islands rising ...
Like a body shedding its covering, so the islands reveal themselves to my gaze; as they emerge from the water, they live and breathe like women's bodies. To the point of improbability that they could be anything else, these islands evoke the memory of living bodies of women. Whenever I see one of them reappear, a kind of dread and internal astonishment seizes me, such as the first fisherman who dared to venture into the open sea must have felt. It was he who brought the news that he had seen Venus rising from the sea. It seems to me that I hear him recounting the miracle he beheld outside, to which those who anxiously awaited his return listen with astonishment in a circle. I affirm what the fisherman recounted; it was Venus, not the islands of Hydra and Aigina.
I can confirm in the future from my own experiences the admissibility of all mythological legends; and what the deck steward explains there, that the islands of Sevilka, Rinaro, Amorgo, and Naxos appear in the distance, is all just foolish lies and deception.
Like the backs of gigantic creatures, these manifestations rise from the sea. They silently follow one another; they want to flee from our proximity and sail off into the distance before our intrusive curiosity. Between each, a stream of radiant light shines golden towards us. They themselves are darker, more realistic, closer to us. This wealth they throw before us as a toll, so that we do not disturb their journey and mystery.
My first contact with antiquity took place in Syracuse. Three strong Doric columns from the ancient temple of Minerva, embedded in the outer wall of the Church of San Giovanni. To me, they embody the idea of antiquity, how it lives shackled in the present; in this presence, which connects to it without understanding, without respect, barely with noticeable benefit, like the three Greeks appeared to me, like a constellation, with nobility, strength, and reason. From them, this style grows. Like them, vibrant as they are, despite all that binds them "long dead, lives bound for centuries like in a prison.
Long ago and yet again for the second time, the Greeks would have been free had humanity never brought repeatedly with the same foolish patience to all buildings it erects since the death of antique beauty the stupid mortar of its boring, cowardly, weak thoughts, its exhausted, hypocritical, corrupted customs. Reason is captured and bound in the life of our days like the Doric columns in that Church of San Giovanni. And still, children are born who will be tired, weak, cowardly, hypocritical, and corrupted. Each of them will drag their share of mortar to the construction of today, each will help prolong its duration.
On the steps of the Greek theater in Syracuse. The spirit from which Greek art arose is not dead, although fools want it to be recognized as its last manifestation in classical art. Surely, in our midst, its beat is as alive and unused as it was among the Irish thousands of years ago. It will live as long as humanity is capable of understanding just a single object, just a single thing reasonably. Fools may say that the spirit from which Greek art arose has died. The spirit that created this theater, its wonderfully logical conception, today, when all ornamentation is removed, appears even more logical; that is the same spirit that invented the remarkably perfect cabin window on the steamer that brought me here, that spirit which discovered the electric bulb and Auer's glass bell, the spirit that created the butter knife, which we use on board and whose origin the steward revealed to me, pointing to the factory mark of Solingen's "twins." Some elements of modern life have never seemed so nice to me as here, when I compare them with this theater, which has seen Aeschylus and Pindar. Every smallest detail in the conception of the whole corresponds precisely to an internal necessity. The same laws participated in this creation that guided our engineers in the construction of their machines, the skeletons of ocean steamers. Modern life has its beauties; at my first contact with antiquity, this truth became certainty for me.
From the place where I stand, high on the side in the amphitheater, I see how all lines of the rows of steps radiate from a single point and spread in semicircles, like a net driven by the current. And as these lines attempt to separate from one another, relations are constantly formed anew, which multiply the perspectival image; and when from the original chaos emerges the perfect profile of the depth of the entire terrace, it is like a song that joyfully rises to the sky. Are they truly lines that sing, or is it our soul that trembles and resonates like a string when a tone sounds through the space for which it is tuned? Then our soul would be able to embody within itself all perfection of relations and we could think only the best of it.
In Greece, the stones tremble and shake, as in our land do the leaves on trees. These stones live so strongly that we feel a kind of restlessness in their midst, as if suddenly all eyes in the surrounding crowd were turned upon us. They do not need either reliefs or sculptures for life; they draw it from their marvelous, firm, tight connection. In Mycenae, between the two parallel, smooth walls of Atreus's treasury, I felt, trembling, a life alive as that of the forest, and I do not remember ever being more strongly moved and in deeper excitement.
To the right of Aigina. The wind blows and the sea is violet. In the opalescent sparkling sky hangs and floats a narrow blue strip. From the path I climbed to see Athens for the first time, I see below a multitude of travelers. Baedecker's, Meyers, white waistcoats, red ties, blue glasses, and panamas. Here on the other side, however, a white dot sparkling in the mass of blue, a bright crystal, the crystal of Greek culture!
The Pantheon.
You ascend the steps to the Propylaea as if the path led to the brain of humanity. Here shines the Parthenon, its most beautiful thought, robed in form. Naively and simply, the thought which the mind and soul of the Greek people brought to reality, like a flower lifting its bloom to the light. The Greek temple ― what a childish concept. Two and two are four; that is its essence; but among numbers and their sum lies the entire infinity of finest nuances, which created from the abstract sum a living organism.
The structure of a Gothic house resembles an example that is at most just a little more difficult than two and two; but among its units and their sum swarm divine and legendary, powerful and real beings; all live to the detriment of the whole and waste the life of the construction.
The Greek temple lives from the whole work, which dies without a trace and selflessly in the whole. In the Greek temple, reason discovered the essential, those columns and all the other parts. The Greek gods did not position themselves between this reason and the artistic emotional stimulus that sought its improvement. Between the beam of the original megaera from the days of Homer and the slender columns of the Parthenon, not a bit of fantastic caprice crept in. That is the normal course of always the same phenomenon that lasted for centuries. And the Greeks, who had more gods than we, did not let themselves be led astray during this whole time from their consistent activity, which even today appears as a symbol of one of the noblest concepts of humanity.
The column; its development; it took a thousand years before it was completed. The beam becomes divided stones, the structure changes, the span of the column changes, and yet one cannot observe any caprice in this transformation. The development of the event proceeds in the sense of the axiom I established in another context: that all matter strives for its dematerialization. Genius and temperament of races decide its art and means.
I will now say something that sounds like a paradox: The Greeks worked on the transformation of the column ― and on other parts of the temple ― until they completely stopped existing.
This column of the Greeks exists now only in our museums, unexpressive, frozen, without meaning. But up there on the Acropolis, those that have remained standing teach that they no longer exist, that they no longer bear the burden, or much rather, that this function no longer exists, that they have dispersed among themselves according to entirely different laws than those that seem to have built them here, and even there where the surfaces of two stones converge at burning timbers. They clearly proclaim that the columns no longer stand around the Parthenon, but that in the meantime, mighty, perfect races have arisen, which bear within themselves life, space, sun, sea, and mountains, night and stars.
The spacing of the columns changed for so long that the silhouette between the two acquired such a form that will be perfect for eternity. What sounds paradoxical to the ear may have a convincing effect on the eye itself. Every element on the Parthenon and the whole mass aimed at a separate resolution.
To provide evidence of this right on the spot: I should have the taste for it; but it melted away just as quickly. After all, down here below the Acropolis, Duncan dances and poses for photographs for "Woche" on the stone tiles of the Theater of Dionysus. Her arms, shoulders, legs, my ladies, remain still her arms, shoulders, legs ― especially her legs distract me, which in the Greek dance have dematerialized just as much as the parts of the Parthenon. Loïe Fuller has more right than she to dance on this sacred ground. In her dance lives a part of the Greek soul. The Greek soul and Greek dance continue to live in her dance.
Program: To know the meaning, form, purpose of all things in the modern materialistic world with the same clarity with which the Greeks, among many others, knew the meaning, form, and purpose of the column. It is not easy today to find the exact meaning and exact form for the simplest things. It will still take a long time before we know the exact form of a table, a chair, a house.
Religious, capricious, sentimental creations of fantasy, these are parasitic plants. As soon as the cleansing work is completed, as soon as the true form of things emerges into daylight, then let us strive with the same patience, with the same spirit and logic as the Greeks for the improvement of this form. It seems to me that in our land, to the same extent as among the Greeks, artistic sensitivity has been developed; less developed and weaker is our sense of perfection.
But under what social regimes shall we partake in the same joyful, clarified calm we need for work and serious efforts? The answer: Shall we expect from a social program what can allegedly spring merely from our own depths? To think reasonably, to cultivate artistic sensitivity; anyone can do this today within themselves; it is only a matter of having many such individuals to create a new social atmosphere.

Translated by Jiří Foustka.