root of the evil, the spiritual and moral confusion of Europe. In art there was nothing but the defeated; and the overthrow can be read in all its phases by the falling curve of the European graph. Even the first shocks, which escaped the notice of the unsuspecting victims or possibly looked like the accomplishments of the precious individual personality, were recorded on the graph, with the precision of a seismograph, as symptoms of disease. Every development after the mighty rise of the nineteenth century, indeed this rise itself with its wealth of heroism, pointed to the coming catastrophe. In 1912 I foretold it in a little book, Wohin Treiben Wir, and I do not think it required great wisdom. Every work of the times, the successful as well as the unsuccessful, indicates the decay. The successful, because it lifts itself above the masses, and becomes an illegible logarithm to them; the unsuccessful because it sinks in the masses. At times the successful, and the imposing array of successful works, is a picture of decay. If art is to be the pictorial edifice of mankind, then the continued deformation of the pictorial, even the most genial deformation, can only signify the disruption of mankind. In the house which should be there for all, there is a place finally for only one individual. The rest look upon it as a curiosity, as art, and move on.
The rôle of German art corresponds to the rôle of Germany. There culture had already been for a long time the matter of a few personalities: peaks with slight connexion to one another. They rise out of the desolate soil, and they seem to benefit by loneliness. In loneliness the insatiable wish grows on them to assemble mankind about them. It is the Germans who have felt the tragedy of a dehumanized art and have fought passionately against it. Either they were able to bring such an enormous clarity into the latent German mysticism that suddenly our whole forest of legend shone magically; and then the mysticism became a monument which no one can pass without being deeply affected, although its phenomenal character precludes every notion of active participation by the masses. Or the grasp of a genius usurps what is denied the masses through lack of tradition, and then a gifted man seems capable of recovering in a work the advantages of happier peoples and improving upon them. Then the threatening aberrations of the rest of the world show up through this one German. This one becomes a haven for all the efforts of the others who are dismembering the cosmos, and he offers the world the perfect order of a new
