vindicating the independence, the proper dignity, and the particular end
of art, we do not intend to separate it from religion, from morals, from
country. Art draws its inspirations from these profound sources, as well
as from the ever open source of nature. But it is not less true that
art, the state, religion, are powers which have each their world apart
and their own effects; they mutually help each other; they should not
serve each other. As soon as one of them wanders from its end, it errs,
and is degraded. Does art blindly give itself up to the orders of
religion and the state? In losing its liberty, it loses its charm and
its empire.
Ancient Greece and modern Italy are continually cited as triumphant
examples of what the alliance of art, religion, and the state can do.
Nothing is more true, if the question is concerning their union; nothing
is more false, if the question is concerning the servitude of art. Art
in Greece was so little the slave of religion, that it little by little
modified the symbols, and, to a certain extent, the spirit itself, by
its free representations. There is a long distance between the
divinities that Greece received from Egypt and those of which it has
left immortal exemplars. Are those primitive artists and poets, as Homer
and Dedalus are called, strangers to this change? And in the most
beautiful epoch of art, did not AEschylus and Phidias carry a great
liberty into the religious scenes which they exposed to the gaze of the
people, in the theatre, or in front of the temples? In Italy as in
Greece, as everywhere, art is at first in the hands of priesthoods and
governments; but, as it increases its importance and is developed, it
more and more conquers its liberty. Men speak of the faith that animated
the artists and vivified their works; that is true of the time of Giotto
and Ciambue; but after Angelico de Fiesole, at the end of the fifteenth
century, in Italy, I perceive especially the faith of art in itself and
the worship of beauty. Raphael was about to become a cardinal;[119] yes,
but always painting Galatea, and without quitting Fornarine. Once more,
let us exaggerate nothing; let us distinguish, not separate; let us
unite art, religion, and country, but let not their union injure the
liberty of each. Let us be thoroughly penetrated with the thought, that
art is also to itself a kind of religion. God manifests himself to us by
the idea of the true, by the idea of the good, by the idea of the
beautiful. Each one of them leads to God, because it comes from him.
True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the
infinite. So, independently of all official alliance with religion and
morals, art is by itself essentially religious and moral; for, far from
wanting its own law, its own genius, it everywhere expresses in its
works eternal beauty. Bound on all sides to matter by inflexible laws,
working upon inanimate stone, upon uncertain and fugitive sounds, upon
words of limited and finite signification, art communicates to them,
with the precise form that is addressed to such or such a sense, a
mysterious character that is addressed to the imagination and the soul,
takes them away from reality, and bears them sweetly or violently into
unknown regions. Every work of art, whatever may be its form, small or
great, figured, sung, or uttered,--every work of art, truly beautiful or
sublime, throws the soul into a gentle or severe reverie that elevates
it towards the infinite. The infinite is the common limit after which
the soul aspires upon the wings of imagination as well as reason, by the
route of the sublime and the beautiful, as well as by that of the true
and the good. The emotion that the beautiful produces turns the soul
from this world; it is the beneficent emotion that art produces for
humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[112] _Recherches sur l'Art Statuaire._ Paris, 1805.
[113] Paris, 1815, in folio, an eminent work that will subsist even when
time shall have destroyed some of its details.
[114] Since reprinted under the title of _Essais sur l'Ideal dans ses
Applications Pratiques_. Paris, 1837.
[115] Translation of Plato, vol. xii., _Timaeus_, p. 116.
[116] _Orator:_ "Neque enim ille artifex (Phidias) cum faceret Jovis
formam aut Minervae, contemplabatur aliquem a quo similitudinem duceret;
sed ipsius in mente insidebat species pulchritudinis eximia quaedam, quam
intuens, in eaque defixus, ad illius similitudinem artem et manum
dirigebat."
[117] _Raccolta di lett._ _Sulla pitt._, i., p. 83. "_Essendo carestia e
de' buoni giudici e di belle donne, io mi servo di certa idea che mi
viene alla mente._"
[118] "A picture representing a broken glass over several subjects
painted on the canvas, by which the eye is deceived."
[119] Vassari, _Vie de Raphael_.
LECTURE IX.
THE DIFFERENT ARTS.
Expression is the general law of art.--Division of
arts.--Distinction between liberal arts and trades.--Eloquence
itself, philosophy, and history do not make a part of the fine
arts.--That the arts gain nothing by encroaching upon each
other, and usurping each other's means and
processes.--Classification of the arts:--its true principle is
expression.--Comparison of arts with each other.--Poetry the
first of arts.
A _resume_ of the last lecture would be a definition of art, of its end
and law. Art is the free reproduction of the beautiful, not of a single
natural beauty, but of ideal beauty, as the human imagination conceives
it by the aid of data which nature furnishes it. The ideal beauty
envelops the infinite:--the end of art is, then, to produce works that,
like those of nature, or even in a still higher degree, may have the
charm of the infinite. But how and by what illusion can we draw the
infinite from the finite? This is the difficulty of art, and its glory
also. What bears us towards the infinite in natural beauty? The ideal
side of this beauty. The ideal is the mysterious ladder that enables the
soul to ascend from the finite to the infinite. The artist, then, must
devote himself to the representation of the ideal. Every thing has its
ideal. The first care of the artist will be, then, whatever he does, to
penetrate at first to the concealed ideal of his subject, for his
subject has an ideal,--in order to render it, in the next place, more or
less striking to the senses and the soul, according to the conditions
which the very materials that he employs--the stone, the color, the
sound, the language--impose on him.
So, to express the ideal of the infinite in one way or another, is the
law of art; and all the arts are such only by their relation to the
sentiment of the beautiful and the infinite which they awaken in the
soul, by the aid of that high quality of every work of art that is
called expression.
Expression is essentially ideal: what expression tries to make felt, is
not what the eye can see and the hand touch, evidently it is something
invisible and impalpable.
The problem of art is to reach the soul through the body. Art offers to
the senses forms, colors, sounds, words, so arranged that they excite in
the soul, concealed behind the senses, the inexpressible emotion of
beauty.
Expression is addressed to the soul as form is addressed to the senses.
Form is the obstacle of expression, and, at the same time, is its
imperative, necessary, only means. By working upon form, by bending it
to its service, by dint of care, patience, and genius, art succeeds in
converting an obstacle into a means.
By their object, all arts are equal; all are arts only because they
express the invisible. It cannot be too often repeated, that expression
is the supreme law of art. The thing to express is always the same,--it
is the idea, the spirit, the soul, the invisible, the infinite. But, as
the question is concerning the expression of this one and the same
thing, by addressing ourselves to the senses which are diverse, the
difference of the senses divides art into different arts.
We have seen, that, of the five senses which have been given to
man,[120] three--taste, smell, and touch--are incapable of producing in
us the sentiment of beauty. Joined to the other two, they may contribute
to the understanding of this sentiment; but alone and by themselves they
cannot produce it. Taste judges of the agreeable, not of the beautiful.
No sense is less allied to the soul and more in the service of the body;
it flatters, it serves the grossest of all masters, the stomach. If
smell sometimes seems to participate in the sentiment of the beautiful,
it is because the odor is exhaled from an object that is already
beautiful, that is beautiful for some other reason. Thus the rose is
beautiful for its graceful form, for the varied splendor of its colors;
its odor is agreeable, it is not beautiful. Finally, it is not touch
alone that judges of the regularity of forms, but touch enlightened by
sight.
There remain two senses to which all the world concedes the privilege of
exciting in us the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful. They seem to
be more particularly in the service of the soul. The sensations which
they give have something purer, more intellectual. They are less
indispensable for the material preservation of the individual. They
contribute to the embellishment rather than to the sustaining of life.
They procure us pleasures in which our personality seems less interested
and more self-forgetful. To these two senses, then, art should be
addressed, is addressed, in fact, in order to reach the soul. Hence the
division of arts into two great classes,--arts addressed to hearing,
arts addressed to sight; on the one hand, music and poetry; on the
other, painting, with engraving, sculpture, architecture, gardening.
It will, perhaps, seem strange that we rank among the arts neither
eloquence, nor history, nor philosophy.
The arts are called the fine arts, because their sole object is to
produce the disinterested emotion of beauty, without regard to the
utility either of the spectator or the artist. They are also called the
liberal arts, because they are the arts of free men and not of slaves,
which affranchise the soul, charm and ennoble existence; hence the sense
and origin of those expressions of antiquity, _artes liberales_, _artes
ingenuae_. There are arts without nobility, whose end is practical and
material utility; they are called trades, such as that of the
stove-maker and the mason. True art may be joined to them, may even
shine in them, but only in the accessories and the details.
Eloquence, history, philosophy, are certainly high employments of
intelligence; they have their dignity, their eminence, which nothing
surpasses, but rigorously speaking, they are not arts.
Eloquence does not propose to itself to produce in the soul of the
auditors the disinterested sentiment of beauty. It may also produce this
effect, but without having sought it. Its direct end, which it can
subordinate to no other, is to convince, to persuade. Eloquence has a
client which before all it must save or make triumph. It matters little,
whether this client be a man, a people, or an idea. Fortunate is the
orator if he elicits the expression: That is beautiful! for it is a
noble homage rendered to his talent; unfortunate is he if he does not
elicit this, for he has missed his end. The two great types of political
and religious eloquence, Demosthenes in antiquity, Bossuet among the
moderns, think only of the interest of the cause confided to their
genius, the sacred cause of country and that of religion; whilst at
bottom Phidias and Raphael work to make beautiful things. Let us hasten
to say, what the names of Demosthenes and Bossuet command us to say,
that true eloquence, very different from that of rhetoric, disdains
certain means of success; it asks no more than to please, but without
any sacrifice unworthy of it; every foreign ornament degrades it. Its
proper character is simplicity, earnestness--I do not mean affected
earnestness, a designed and artful gravity, the worst of all
deceptions--I mean true earnestness, that springs from sincere and
profound conviction. This is what Socrates understood by true
eloquence.[121]
As much must be said of history and philosophy. The philosopher speaks
and writes. Can he, then, like the orator, find accents which make truth
enter the soul, colors and forms that make it shine forth evident and
manifest to the eyes of intelligence? It would be betraying his cause to
neglect the means that can serve it; but the profoundest art is here
only a means, the aim of philosophy is elsewhere; whence it follows that
philosophy is not an art. Without doubt, Plato is a great artist; he is
the peer of Sophocles and Phidias, as Pascal is sometimes the rival of
Demosthenes and Bossuet;[122] but both would have blushed if they had
discovered at the bottom of their soul another design, another aim than
the service of truth and virtue.
History does not relate for the sake of relating; it does not paint for
the sake of painting; it relates and paints the past that it may be the
living lesson of the future. It proposes to instruct new generations by
the experience of those who have gone before them, by exhibiting to them
a faithful picture of great and important events, with their causes and
their effects, with general designs and particular passions, with the
faults, virtues, and crimes that are found mingled together in human
things. It teaches the excellence of prudence, courage, and great
thoughts profoundly meditated, constantly pursued, and executed with
moderation and force. It shows the vanity of immoderate pretensions, the
power of wisdom and virtue, the impotence of folly and crime.
Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus undertake any thing else than
procuring new emotions for an idle curiosity or a worn-out imagination;
they doubtless desire to interest and attract, but more to instruct;
they are the avowed masters of statesmen and the preceptors of mankind.
The sole object of art is the beautiful. Art abandons itself as soon as
it shuns this. It is often constrained to make concessions to
circumstances, to external conditions that are imposed upon it; but it
must always retain a just liberty. Architecture and the art of gardening
are the least free of arts; they are subjected to unavoidable obstacles;
it belongs to the genius of the artist to govern these obstacles, and
even to draw from them happy effects, as the poet turns the slavery of
metre and rhyme into a source of unexpected beauties. Extreme liberty
may carry art to a caprice which degrades it, as chains too heavy crush
it. It is the death of architecture to subject it to convenience, to
_comfort_. Is the architect obliged to subordinate general effect and
the proportions of the edifice to such or such a particular end that is
prescribed to him? He takes refuge in details, in pediments, in friezes,
in all the parts that have not utility for a special object, and in them
he becomes a true artist. Sculpture and painting, especially music and
poetry, are freer than architecture and the art of gardening. One can
also shackle them, but they disengage themselves more easily.
Similar by their common end, all the arts differ by the particular
effects which they produce, and by the processes which they employ. They
gain nothing by exchanging their means and confounding the limits that
separate them. I bow before the authority of antiquity; but, perhaps,
through habit and a remnant of prejudice, I have some difficulty in
representing to myself with pleasure statues composed of several metals,
especially painted statues.[123] Without pretending that sculpture has
not to a certain point its color, that of perfectly pure matter, that
especially which the hand of time impresses upon it, in spite of all the
seductions of a contemporaneous[124] artist of great talent, I have
little taste, I confess, for that artifice that is forced to give to
marble the _morbidezza_ of painting. Sculpture is an austere muse; it
has its graces, but they are those of no other art. Flesh-color must
remain a stranger to it: there would nothing more remain to communicate
to it but the movement of poetry and the indefiniteness of music! And
what will music gain by aiming at the picturesque, when its proper
domain is the pathetic? Give to the most learned symphonist a storm to
render. Nothing is easier to imitate than the whistling of the winds and
the noise of thunder. But by what combinations of harmony will he
exhibit to the eyes the glare of the lightning rending all of a sudden
the veil of the night, and what is most fearful in the tempest, the
movement of the waves that now ascend like a mountain, now descend and
seem to precipitate themselves into bottomless abysses? If the auditor
is not informed of the subject, he will never suspect it, and I defy him
to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of science and genius,
sounds cannot paint forms. Music, when well guided, will guard itself
from contending against the impossible; it will not undertake to express
the tumult and strife of the waves and other similar phenomena; it will
do more: with sounds it will fill the soul with the sentiments that
succeed each other in us during the different scenes of the tempest.
Haydn will thus become[125] the rival, even the vanquisher of the
painter, because it has been given to music to move and agitate the soul
more profoundly than painting.
Since the _Laocoon_ of Lessing, it is no longer permitted to repeat,
without great reserve, the famous axiom,--_Ut pictura poesis_; or, at
least, it is very certain that painting cannot do every thing that
poetry can do. Everybody admires the picture of Rumor, drawn by Virgil;
but let a painter try to realize this symbolic figure; let him represent
to us a huge monster with a hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, and a
hundred ears, whose feet touch the earth, whose head is lost in the
clouds, and such a figure will become very ridiculous.
So the arts have a common end, and entirely different means. Hence the
general rules common to all, and particular rules for each. I have
neither time nor space to enter into details on this point. I limit
myself to repeating, that the great law which governs all others, is
expression. Every work of art that does not express an idea signifies
nothing; in addressing itself to such or such a sense, it must penetrate
to the mind, to the soul, and bear thither a thought, a sentiment
capable of touching or elevating it. From this fundamental rule all the
others are derived; for example, that which is continually and justly
recommended,--composition. To this is particularly applied the precept
of unity and variety. But, in saying this, we have said nothing so long
as we have not determined the nature of the unity of which we would
speak. True unity, is unity of expression, and variety is made only to
spread over the entire work the idea or the single sentiment that it
should express. It is useless to remark, that between composition thus
defined, and what is often called composition, as the symmetry and
arrangement of parts according to artificial rules, there is an abyss.
True composition is nothing else than the most powerful means of
expression.
Expression not only furnishes the general rules of art, it also gives
the principle that allows of their classification.
In fact, every classification, supposes a principle that serves as a
common measure.
Such a principle has been sought in pleasure, and the first of arts has
seemed that which gives the most vivid joys. But we have proved that the
object of art is not pleasure:--the more or less of pleasure that an art
procures cannot, then, be the true measure of its value.
This measure is nothing else than expression. Expression being the
supreme end, the art that most nearly approaches it is the first of all.
All true arts are expressive, but they are diversely so. Take music; it
is without contradiction the most penetrating, the profoundest, the most
intimate art. There is physically and morally between a sound and the
soul a marvellous relation. It seems as though the soul were an echo in
which the sound takes a new power. Extraordinary things are recounted of
the ancient music. And it must not be believed that the greatness of
effect supposes here very complicated means. No, the less noise music
makes, the more it touches. Give some notes to Pergolese, give him
especially some pure and sweet voices, and he returns a celestial charm,
bears you away into infinite spaces, plunges you into ineffable
reveries. The peculiar power of music is to open to the imagination a
limitless career, to lend itself with astonishing facility to all the
moods of each one, to arouse or calm, with the sounds of the simplest
melody, our accustomed sentiments, our favorite affections. In this
respect music is an art without a rival:--however, it is not the first
of arts.
Music pays for the immense power that has been given it; it awakens more
than any other art the sentiment of the infinite, because it is vague,
obscure, indeterminate in its effects. It is just the opposite art to
sculpture, which bears less towards the infinite, because every thing in
it is fixed with the last degree of precision. Such is the force and at
the same time the feebleness of music, that it expresses every thing and
expresses nothing in particular. Sculpture, on the contrary, scarcely
gives rise to any reverie, for it clearly represents such a thing and
not such another. Music does not paint, it touches; it puts in motion
imagination, not the imagination that reproduces images, but that which
makes the heart beat, for it is absurd to limit imagination to the
domain of images.[126] The heart, once touched, moves all the rest of
our being; thus music, indirectly, and to a certain point, can recall
images and ideas; but its direct and natural power is neither on the
representative imagination nor intelligence, it is on the heart, and
that is an advantage sufficiently beautiful.