The Beautiful Necessity | Page 2

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 convicted me of every conceivable
error his work would still remain the greatest justification and
confirmation of my fundamental 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

I
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 architecture 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 phenomenal 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 various arts are
colors, each distinct, yet merging one into another--poetry into music;
painting into decoration; decoration becoming sculpture;
sculpture--architecture, and so on.
In such a spectrum of the arts each one occupies a definite place, and
all together form a series of which music and architecture 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 opposites" would be something as follows. According to
the Hindu-Aryan theory, Brahma, that the world might be born, fell
asunder into man and wife--became in other words _name and form_[A]
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 manifestation, 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 time and space enter in varying proportion, either
actually or by implication. Poetry and the drama are allied to music
inasmuch 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 arrested 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 represented 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