388
PARTISAN
REVIEW
spirit, into the aristocratic salons of Munich had not memory pointed
to a Jewish scholar whose archaistic theory of myth was put to the
uses of reaction.
Dr. Chaim Breisacher is described as a person of fascinating
ugliness and as a polyhistor who could talk about anything and every–
thing. His major concern is "philosophy of culture," but his ideas
are decidedly "anti-cultural," in so far as he views the whole history
of civilization as nothing but a process of decline from cult to culture.
For culture is to him only a mocking caricature of archaic cults. He
concentrates all his attacks on "progress"-a term of deepest con–
tempt on
his
lips. Thus he declares it to be the peak of modem arro–
gance for people to shrug their shoulders at the flat painting of
ancient times, as
if
the development toward perspective art were
really a step forward instead of a mere means of producing illusion,
a technique that suits the mob. It is true that the art of the ancients
lacks the dimension of perspective, but that is not because they were
incapable of producing such trick effects. The fact is that they
would have considered them vulgar. And Breisacher employs the
same argument in discussing the development of music. Here too he
denounces the change from monody to harmony, generally taken as
a sure sign of progress, to be an acquisition of barbarism.
His interest seems to be centered on the theory of decline as
such. Polyphonic music becomes the object of his conservative pro–
tection as soon as he discusses the transition to the harmonic chordal
principle and the instrumental music of the last two centuries. This
stage was again the decline of the great art of counterpoint, which had
had nothing to do with the prostitution of feeling, so common in
modem music. In this general curve of decline he also places the
music of Bach, who as the inventor of the well-tempered clavichord
developed the possibility of understanding notes ambiguously and
exchanging them enharmonically.
Breisacher's cultural harangue reaches its climax when the dis–
cussion shifts to the field of religion, touching thereupon
his
own
sphere of origin, the Jewish people and its spiritual history. Prophets
and psalmists represent for him an already decayed stage of religion
in which every contact with the fundamental realities of ritual has
been lost. The "theology" of the prophets or psalmists no longer had
