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THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
EPISODES FROM AN UNWRITTEN HISTORY
THE nOI.DEN PERSON IN THE HEART
ARCHITECTURE AND DEMOCRACY
A PRIMER OF HIGHER SPACE
FOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTAS
PROJECTIVE ORNAMENT
ORACLE
THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY
Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture
SECOND EDITION
by CLAUDE BRAGDON, F.A.I.A.
NEW YORK ALFRED • A • KNOPF mcmxxii
COPYRIGHT, 1910, 1922, BY CLAUDE BKAGDON
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06( up, eleotrotvped, and printed ty the Vail-BaXlou Co., Binohamton, S. 7.
Paper /urnia/ied by Henry Lindenmeyr d Sons, New York,
Bound by H. Wolff Eetate, New York.
MANUTAOTUBSD IK THB VKITBD STATES 07 AMBRIOA
"Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity"
— Emerson
CONTENTS
I The Art of Architecture 12
II Unity akd Polarity 29
III Changeless Change 43
IV The Bodily Temple 64 V Latent Geometry 76
VI The Arithmetic of Beauty 91
VII Frozen Music 10 i
Conclusion iio
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The Beautiful Necessity was first published in 1910. Save for a slim volume of privately printed verse it was my first book. I worked hard on it. Fifteen years elapsed between its begin- ning and completion; it was twice published serially — written, rewritten and tre-written — before it reached its ultimate incar- nation in book form.
Confronted now with the opportunity to revise the text again, I find myself in the position of a surgeon who feels that the oper- ation he is called upon to perform may perhaps harm more than it can help. Prudence therefore prevails over my passion for dissection: warned by eminent examples, I fear that any injec- tion of my more mature and less cocksure consciousness into this book might impair its unity — that I "never could recapture the first fine careless rapture."
The text stands therefore as originally published save for a few verbal changes, and whatever reservations I have about it shall be stated in this preface. These are not many nor im- portant: The Beautiful Necessity contains nothing that I need repudiate or care to contradict.
Its thesis, briefly stated, is that art in all its manifestations is an expression of the cosmic life, and that its symbols constitute a language by means of which this life is published and repre- sented. Art is at all times subject to the Beautiful Necessity of proclaiming the world order.
In attempting to develop this thesis it was not necessary (nor as I now think, desirable) to link it up in so definite a manner
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10 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
with theosophy. The individual consciousness is colored by the particular medium through which it receives truth, and for me that medium was theosophy. Though the book might gain a more unprejudiced hearing, and from a larger audience, by the removal of the theosophic "color-screen," it shall remain, for its removal now might seem to imply a loss of faith in the funda- mental tenets of theosophy, and such an implication would not be true.
The ideas in regard to time and space are those commonly current in the world until the advent of the Theory of Rela- tivity. To a generation brought up on Einstein and Ouspen- sky they are bound to appear "lower dimensional." Merely to state this fact is to deal with it to the extent it needs to be dealt with. The integrity of my argument is not impaired by these new views.
The one important influence that has operated to modify my opinions concerning the mathematical basis of the arts of space has been the discoveries of Mr. Jay Hambidge with regard to the practice of the Greeks in these matters, as exemplified in their temples and their ceramics, and named by him Dynamic Symmetry.
In tracing everything back to the logarithmic spiral (which embodies the principle of extreme and mean ratios) I consider that Mr. Hambidge has made one of those generalizations which reorganizes the old knowledge and organizes the new. It would be only natural if in his immersion in his idea he overworks it, but Mr. Hambidge is a man of such intellectual integrity and thoroughness of method that he may be trusted not to warp the facts to fit his theories. The truth of the matter is that the entire field of research into the mathematics of Beauty is of such richness that wherever a man plants his meta- physical spade he is sure to come upon "pay dirt." The
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION II
Beautiful Necessity represents the result of my own pros- pecting; Dynamic Symmetry represents the result of his. If at any point our findings appear to conflict, it is less likely that one or the other of us is mistaken than that each is right from his own point of view. Be that as it may, I should be the last man in the world to differ from Mr. Hambidge, for if he con- victed me of every conceivable error his work would still re- main the greatest justification and confirmation of my funda- mental contention — that art is an expression of the world order and is therefore orderly, organic; subject to mathematical law, and susceptible of mathematical analysis.
CLAUDE BRAGDON
Rochester, N. Y.
April, 1922
THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE
ONE of the advantages of a thorough assimilation of what may be called the theosophic idea is that it can be applied with advantage to every department of knowledge and of human activity: like the key to a cryptogram it renders clear and simple that which before seemed intricate and obscure. Let us apply this key to the subject of art, and to the art of architec- ture in particular, and see if by so doing we may not learn more of art than we knew before, and more of theosophy too. "' The theosophic idea is that everything is an expression of the Self — or whatever other name one may choose to give to that immanent unknown reality which forever hides behind all phe- nomenal life — but because, immersed as we are in materiality, our chief avenue of knowledge is sense perception, a more exact expression of the theosophic idea would be: Everything is the expression of the Self in terms of sense. Art, accordingly, is the expression of the Self in terms of sense. Now though the Self is one, sense is not one, but manifold: and therefore there are arts, each addressed to some particular faculty or group of faculties, and each expressing some particular quality or group of qualities of the Self. The white light of Truth is thus broken up into a rainbow-tinted spectrum of Beauty, in which the var- ious arts are colors^ each distinct, yet merging one into another — poetry into musig; painting into decoration; decoration becom- ing sculpture; sculpture — architecture, and so on.
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THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE 13
In such a spectrum of the arts each one occupies a definite ^ 1 r place, and all together form a series of which music^ad^atchir tecture._are-the- -two— extremes. That such is their relative position may be demonstrated in various ways. The theosophic explanation involving the familiar idea of the "pairs of op- posites" would be something as follows. According to the Hindu-Aryan theory, Brahma, that the world niight be born, fell asunder into man and wife — became in other words name and form.* The two universal aspects of name and form are what philosophers call the two "modes of consciousness," one of time, and the other of space. These are the two gates through which ideas enter phenomenal life ; the two boxes, as it were, that contain all the toys with which we play. Everything, were we only keen enough to perceive it, bears the mark of one or the other of them, and may be classified accordingly. In such a classification music is seen to be allied to time, and architecture to space, because music is successive in its mode of manifesta- tion, and in time alone everything would occur successively, one thing following another; while architecture, on the other hand, impresses itself upon the beholder all at once, and in space alone all things would exist simultaneously. Music, which is in time \ alone, without any relation to space;, and architecture, which is in space alone, without any relation to time, are thus seen to stand at opposite ends of the art spectrum, and to be, in a sense, the only "pure" arts, because in all the others the elements of both
* The quaint Oriental imagery here employed should not blind the reader to the precise scientific accuracy of the idea of which this imagery is the vehicle. Schopenhauer says: "Polarity, or the sun- dering of a force into two quantitively different and opposed activ- ities striving after re-union, ... is a fundamental type of almost all the phenomena of nature, from the magnet and the crystal to man himself."
14 THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY
time and space enter in varying proportion, either actually or by implication. Poetry and the drama are allied to music in- asmuch as the ideas and images of which they are made up are presented successively, yet these images are for the most part forms of space. Sculpture on the other hand is clearly allied to architecture, and so to space, but the element of action, suspended though it be, affiliates it with the opposite or time pole. Painting occupies a middle position, since in it space instead of being actual has become ideal — three dimensions being expressed through the mediumship of two — and time enters into it more largely than into sculpture by reason of the greater ease with which complicated action can be indicated : a picture being nearly always time aTrested in midcourse as it were — a moment transfixed.
In order to form a just conception of the relation between music and architecture it is necessary that the two should be conceived of not as standing at opposite ends of a series repre- sented by a straight line, but rather in juxtaposition, as in the ancient Egyptian symbol of a serpent holding its tail in its mouth, the head in this case corresponding to music, and the tail to architecture; in other ■^rds, though in one sense they are the most widely separated^Lthe arts, in another they are the most closely related. ^^
Music being purely in time ano^^hitecture being purely in space, each is, in a manner and tolfcdegree not possible with any of the other arts, convertible into nhe other, by reason of the correspondence subsisting between intervals of time and inter- vals of space. A perception of this may^^ve inspired the fa- mous saying that architecture is frozen rmmc, a poetical state- ment of a philosophical truth, since that which in music is ex- pressed by means of harmonious intervals of time and pitch, successively, after the manner of time, may be translated into
THEARTOFARCHITECTURE 15
corresponding intervals of architectural void and solid, height and width.
In another sense music and architecture are allied. They alone of all the arts are purely creative, since in them is pre- sented, not a likeness of some known idea, but a thina-in-itself brought to a distinct and complete expression of its nature. Neither a musical composition nor a work of architecture depends for its effectiveness upon resemblances to natural sounds in the one case, or to natural forms in the other. Of none of the other arts is this to such a degree true: they are not so much creative as re-creative, for in them all the artist takes his subject ready made from nature and presents it anew according to the dictates of his genius.
The characteristic differences between music and architec- ture are the same as those which subsist between time and space. Now time and space are such abstract ideas that they can be dealt with best through their corresponding correlatives in the natural world, for it is a fundamental theosophic tenet that nature everywhere abounds in such correspondences; that nature, in its myriad forms, is indeed the concrete presentment of abstract unities. The energy which ever5rwhere animates form is a type of time within space; the mind working in and through the body is another expression of the same thing. Correspondingly, music is dynamic, subjective, mental, of one dimension; while architecture is static, objective, physical, of three dimensions; sustaining the same relation to music and the other arts as does the human body to the various organs which compose, and consciousnesses which animate it (it being the reservatory of these organs and the vehicle of these conscious- nesses) ; and a work of architecture in like manner may and sometimes does include all of the other arts within itself. Sculpture accentuates and enriches, painting adorns, works of
l6 THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY
literature are stored within it, poetry and the drama awake its echoes, while music thrills to its uttermost recesses, like the very spirit of life tingling through the body's fibres.
Such being the relation between them, the difiference in the nature of the ideas bodied forth in music and in architecture becomes apparent. Music is interior, abstract, subjective, speaking directly to the soul in a simple and universal language whose meaning is made personal and particular in the breast of each listener: "Music alone of all the arts," says Balzac, "has power to make us live within ourselves." A work of architec- ture is the exact opposite of this: existing principally and pri- marily for the uses of {he body, it is like the body a concrete organism, attaining to esthetic expression only in the recon- ciliation and fulfilment of many conflicting practical require- ments. Music is pure beauty, the voice of the unfettered and perpetually evanishing soul of things; architecture is that soul imprisoned in a form, become subject to the law of causality, beaten upon by the elements, at war with gravity, the slave of man. One is the Ariel of the arts ; the other, Caliban.
Coming now to the consideration of architecture in its his- torical rather than its philosophical aspect, it will be shown how certain theosophical concepts are applicable here. Of these none is more familiar and none more fundamental than the idea of reincarnation. By reincarnation more than mere physical re-birth is meant, for physical re-birth is but a single manifestation of that universal law of alternation of state, of animation of vehicles, and progression through related planes, in accordance with which all things move, and^as it were, make music — each cycle complete, yet part of a larger cycle, the in- carnate monad passing through correlated changes, carrying
THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE 17
along and bringing into manifestation in each successive arc of the spiral the experience accumulated in all preceding states, and at the same time unfolding that power of the Self peculiar to the plane in which it is momentarily manifesting.
This law finds exemplification in the history of architecture in the orderly flow of the building impulse from one nation and one country to a different nation and a different country : its new vehicle of manifestation; also in the continuity and increasing complexity of the development of that impulse in manifesta- tion ; each "incarnation" summarizing all those which have gone before, and adding some new factor peculiar to itself alone; each being a growth, a life, with periods corresponding to child- hood, youth, maturity and decadence; each also typifying in its entirety some single one of these life-periods, and revealing some special aspect or power of the Self,
For the sake of clearness and brevity the consideration of only one of several architectural evolutions will be attempted : that which, arising in the north of Africa, spread to southern Europe, thence to the northwest of Europe and to England — the architecture, in short, of the so-called civilized world.
This architecture, anterior to the Christian era, may be broadly divided into three great periods, during which it was successively practiced by three peoples: the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. Then intervened the Dark Ages, and a new art arose, the Gothic, which was a flowering out in stone of the spirit of Christianity. This was in turn succeeded by the Renaissance, the impulse of which remains to-day unexhausted. In each of these architectures the peculiar genius of a people and of a period attained to a beautiful, complete and coherent utterance, and notwithstanding the considerable intervals of time which sometimes separated them they succeeded one another
l8 THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY
logically and inevitably, and each was related to the one which preceded and which followed it in a particular and intimate manner.
The power and wisdom of ancient Egypt was vested in its priesthood, which was composed of individuals exceptionally qualified by birth and training for their high office, tried by the severest ordeals and bound by the most solemn oaths. The priests were honored and privileged above all other men, and spent their lives dwelling apart from the multitude in vast and magnificent temples, dedicating themselves to the study and practice of religion, philosophy, science and art — subjects then intimately related, not widely separated as they are now. These men were the architects of ancient Egypt: theirs the minds which directed the hands that built fhose time-defying monuments.
The rites that the priests practiced centered about what are known as the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries. These con- sisted of representations by means of symbol and allegory, under conditions and amid surroundings the most awe-inspiring, of those great truths concerning man's nature, origin and destiny of which the priests — in reality a brotherhood of initiates and their pupils — were the custodians. These ceremonies were made the occasion for the initiation of neophytes into the order, and the advancement of the already initiated into its successive de- grees. For the practice of such rites, and others designed to im- press not the elect but the multitude, the great temples of Egypt were constructed. Everything about them was calculated to induce a deep seriousness of mind, and to inspire feelings of awe, dread and even terror, so as to test the candidate's fortitude of soul to the utmost.