The Commonwealth of Art

$5.00

And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David , Michal Soul s daughter looked through a window , and she king Do rot leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised hurt in her heart.

Michal, according to the distinguished musicologist. Dr. Curt Sachs, is the prototype of classicism in art. She typifies the idea of restraint, the notion that everything has its own place, its own season, David, an artist who creates his own flowing, uninhibited patterns, is, on the other hand, the ancestral romantic. Expressing himself in spontaneous and flamboyant style, lie ignores the

classical canons which reduce motion to stillness and prune exuberant life into selective and fastidious forms.

Before tracing Dr. Sachs’s compact story of the allegorical Michal and David, as told in Part One of the hook, the reader might plunge into the first two or three chapters of Part Two, “The Nature of Style,” thus acquainting himself with the terms and concepts which regulate the historical section. German-trained scholars, as the world knows, are often persuaded of the semantic: necessity to invent new words for dog-eared ideas; and while Dr. Sachs never turns up anything quite so fancy, for “romantic and “classical. as Max Verworu’s ”physioplastic" and “ideoplastie,” he does try. with some reason, to pin down old terms which, through much usage, have come to have more than one meaning — the discussion of ethos and pathos, for instance.

Some creative generations, as Dr. Sachs shows, have been overwhelmingly classical: “ethical,” abstract, geometric. ideal, symmetric, serene, universal. Such, by and large, and not counting the laggards and prophets, were the generations of Pericles, of the first Gothic builders, and of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Then David dances, as in the baroque age of Domitian, or the late Gothic era, with its divine improvising, or in the seventeenth century, when Monteverdi wrote the first “grand ” opera with expressionistie music for the new baroque stages. These alternating seasons of romantic reaction can he described by antitheses: “pathetic,” naturalistic, realistic, asymmetrical, immoderate—ami usually local.

Siding now with Michal and now with David, the artist has kept, his aesthetic balance through giant cycles and the alternation of phases, none of which, as summed up in Part Three, “ The Fate of Style.” has had much connection with political history — although isolated romantics show up during national crises. There is nothing to worry about when either Michal or David is in the ascendant. On the contrary, the shifting about is a sign of continuing life. The time to worry is when — as possibly now they travel together in front of the ark and compete for applause from a public which has lost all feeling for the historical styles.

MACKINLEY HELM