profound than extensive, and if it expresses certain sentiments with an
incomparable force, it expresses but a very small number of them. By way
of association, it can awaken them all, but directly it produces very
few of them, and the simplest and the most elementary, too,--sadness and
joy with their thousand shades. Ask music to express magnanimity,
virtuous resolution, and other sentiments of this kind, and it will be
just as incapable of doing it, as of painting a lake or a mountain. It
goes about it as it can; it employs the slow, the rapid, the loud, the
soft, etc., but imagination has to do the rest, and imagination does
only what it pleases. The same measure reminds one of a mountain,
another of the ocean; the warrior finds in it heroic inspirations, the
recluse religious inspirations. Doubtless, words determine musical
expression, but the merit then is in the word, not in the music; and
sometimes the word stamps the music with a precision that destroys it,
and deprives it of its proper effects--vagueness, obscurity, monotony,
but also fulness and profundity, I was about to say infinitude. I do not
in the least admit that famous definition of song:--a noted declamation.
A simple declamation rightly accented is certainly preferable to
stunning accompaniments; but to music must be left its character, and
its defects and advantages must not be taken away from it. Especially it
must not be turned aside from its object, and there must not be demanded
from it what it could not give. It is not made to express complicated
and factitious sentiment, nor terrestrial and vulgar sentiments. Its
peculiar charm is to elevate the soul towards the infinite. It is
therefore naturally allied to religion, especially to that religion of
the infinite, which is at the same time the religion of the heart; it
excels in transporting to the feet of eternal mercy the soul trembling
on the wings of repentance, hope, and love. Happy are those, who, at
Rome, in the Vatican,[127] during the solemnities of the Catholic
worship, have heard the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolese, on the
old consecrated text! They have entered heaven for a moment, and their
souls have been able to ascend thither without distinction of rank,
country, even belief, by those invisible and mysterious steps, composed,
thus to speak, of all the simple, natural, universal sentiments, that
everywhere on earth draw from the bosom of the human creature a sigh
towards another world!
Between sculpture and music, those two opposite extremes, is painting,
nearly as precise as the one, nearly as touching as the other. Like
sculpture, it marks the visible forms of objects, but adds to them life;
like music, it expresses the profoundest sentiments of the soul, and
expresses them all. Tell me what sentiment does not come within the
province of the painter? He has entire nature at his disposal, the
physical world, and the moral world, a churchyard, a landscape, a
sunset, the ocean, the great scenes of civil and religious life, all the
beings of creation, above all, the figure of man, and its expression,
that living mirror of what passes in the soul. More pathetic than
sculpture, clearer than music, painting is elevated, in my opinion,
above both, because it expresses beauty more under all its forms, and
the human soul in all the richness and variety of its sentiments.
But the art _par excellence_, that which surpasses all others, because
it is incomparably the most expressive, is poetry.
Speech is the instrument of poetry; poetry fashions it to its use, and
idealizes it, in order to make it express ideal beauty. Poetry gives to
it the charm and power of measure; it makes of it something intermediary
between the ordinary voice and music, something at once material and
immaterial, finite, clear, and precise, like contours and forms the most
definite, living and animated like color, pathetic and infinite like
sound. A word in itself, especially a word chosen and transfigured by
poetry, is the most energetic and universal symbol. Armed with this
talisman, poetry reflects all the images of the sensible world, like
sculpture and painting; it reflects sentiment like painting and music,
with all its varieties, which music does not attain, and in their rapid
succession that painting cannot follow, as precise and immobile as
sculpture; and it not only expresses all that, it expresses what is
inaccessible to every other art, I mean thought, entirely distinct from
the senses and even from sentiment,--thought that has no forms,--thought
that has no color, that lets no sound escape, that does not manifest
itself in any way,--thought in its highest flight, in its most refined
abstraction.
Think of it. What a world of images, of sentiments, of thoughts at once
distinct and confused, are excited within us by this one word--country!
and by this other word, brief and immense,--God! What is more clear and
altogether more profound and vast!
Tell the architect, the sculptor, the painter, even the musician, to
call forth also by a single stroke all the powers of nature and the
soul! They cannot, and by that they acknowledge the superiority of
speech and poetry.
They proclaim it themselves, for they take poetry for their own measure;
they esteem their own works, and demand that they should be esteemed, in
proportion as they approach the poetic ideal. And the human race does as
artists do: a beautiful picture, a noble melody, a living and expressive
statue, gives rise to the exclamation--How poetical! This is not an
arbitrary comparison; it is a natural judgment which makes poetry the
type of the perfection of all the arts,--the art _par excellence_,
which comprises all others, to which they aspire, which none can reach.
When the other arts would imitate the works of poetry, they usually err,
losing their own genius, without robbing poetry of its genius. But
poetry constructs according to its own taste palaces and temples, like
architecture; it makes them simple or magnificent; all orders, as well
as all systems, obey it; the different ages of art are the same to it;
it reproduces, if it pleases, the classic or the Gothic, the beautiful
or the sublime, the measured or the infinite. Lessing has been able,
with the exactest justice, to compare Homer to the most perfect
sculptor; with such precision are the forms which that marvellous chisel
gives to all beings determined! And what a painter, too, is Homer! and,
of a different kind, Dante! Music alone has something more penetrating
than poetry, but it is vague, limited, and fugitive. Besides its
clearness, its variety, its durability, poetry has also the most
pathetic accents. Call to mind the words that Priam utters at the feet
of Achilles while asking him for the dead body of his son, more than one
verse of Virgil, entire scenes of the _Cid_ and the _Polyeucte_, the
prayer of Esther kneeling before the Lord, the choruses of _Esther_ and
_Athalie_. In the celebrated song of Pergolese, _Stabat Mater Dolorosa_,
we may ask which moves most, the music or the words. The _Dies irae, Dies
illa_, recited only, produces the most terrible effect. In those fearful
words, every blow tells, so to speak; each word contains a distinct
sentiment, an idea at once profound and determinate. The intellect
advances at each step, and the heart rushes on in its turn. Human speech
idealized by poetry has the depth and brilliancy of musical notes; it is
luminous as well as pathetic; it speaks to the mind as well as to the
heart; it is in that inimitable, unique, and embraces all extremes and
all contraries in a harmony that redoubles their reciprocal effect, in
which, by turns, appear and are developed, all images, all sentiments,
all ideas, all the human faculties, all the inmost recesses of the soul,
all the forms of things, all real and all intelligible worlds!
FOOTNOTES:
[120] Lecture 6.
[121] See the _Gorgias_, with the _Argument_, vol. iii. of our
translation of Plato.
[122] There is a _Provincial_ that for vehemence can be compared only to
the _Philipics_, and its fragment on the infinite has the grandeur and
magnificence of Bossuet. See our work on the _Thoughts of Pascal_, 4th
Series, _Literature_, vol. i.
[123] See the _Jupiter Olympien_ of M. Quatremere de Quincy.
[124] Allusion to the _Magdeleine_ of Canova, which was then to be seen
in the gallery of M. de Sommariva.
[125] See the _Tempest_ of Haydn, among the pianoforte works of this
master.
[126] See lecture 6.
[127] I have not myself had the good fortune to hear the religious music
of the Vatican. Therefore, I shall let a competent judge, M. Quatremere
de Quincy, speak, _Considerations Morales sur les Destination des
Ouvrages de l'Art_, Paris, 1815, p. 98: "Let one call to mind those
chants so simple and so touching, that terminate at Rome the funeral
solemnities of those three days which the Church particularly devotes to
the expression of its grief, in the last week of Lent. In that nave
where the genius of Michael Angelo has embraced the duration of ages,
from the wonders of creation to the last judgment that must destroy its
works, are celebrated, in the presence of the Roman pontiff, those
nocturnal ceremonies whose rites, symbols, and plaintive liturgies seem
to be so many figures of the mystery of grief to which they are
consecrated. The light decreasing by degrees, at the termination of each
psalm, you would say that a funeral veil is extended little by little
over those religious vaults. Soon the doubtful light of the last lamp
allows you to perceive nothing but Christ in the distance, in the midst
of clouds, pronouncing his judgments, and some angel executors of his
behests. Then, at the bottom of a tribune interdicted to the regard of
the profane, is heard the psalm of the penitent king, to which three of
the greatest masters of the art have added the modulations of a simple
and pathetic chant. No instrument is mingled with those accents. Simple
harmonies of voice execute that music; but these voices seem to be those
of angels, and their effect penetrates the depths of the soul."
We have cited this beautiful passage--and we could have cited many
others, even superior to it--of a man now forgotten, and almost always
misunderstood, but whom posterity will put in his place. Let us
indicate, at least, the last pages of the same production, on the
necessity of leaving the works of art in the place for which they were
made, for example, the portrait of Mlle. de Valliere in the _Madeleine
aux Carmelites_, instead of transferring it to, and exposing it in the
apartments of Versailles, "the only place in the world," eloquently says
M. Quatremere, "which never should have seen it."
LECTURE X.
FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Expression not only serves to appreciate the different arts, but
the different schools of art. Example:--French art in the
seventeenth century. French poetry:--Corneille. Racine. Moliere.
La Fontaine. Boileau.--Painting:--Lesueur. Poussin. Le Lorrain.
Champagne.--Engraving.--Sculpture:--Sarrazin. The Anguiers.
Girardon. Pujet.--Le Notre.--Architecture.
We believe that we have firmly established that all kinds of beauty,
although most dissimilar in appearance, may, when subjected to a serious
examination, be reduced to spiritual and moral beauty; that expression,
therefore, is at once the true object and the first law of art; that all
arts are such only so far as they express the idea concealed under the
form, and are addressed to the soul through the senses; finally, that in
expression the different arts find the true measure of their relative
value, and the most expressive art must be placed in the first rank.
If expression judges the different arts, does it not naturally follow,
that by the same title it can also judge the different schools which, in
each art, dispute with each other the empire of taste?
There is not one of these schools that does not represent in its own way
some side of the beautiful, and we are disposed to embrace all in an
impartial and kindly study. We are eclectics in the arts as well as in
metaphysics. But, as in metaphysics, the knowledge of all systems, and
the portion of truth that is in each, enlightens without enfeebling our
convictions; so, in the history of arts, while holding the opinion that
no school must be disdained, that even in China some shade of beauty can
be found, our eclecticism does not make us waver in regard to the
sentiment of true beauty and the supreme rule of art. What we demand of
the different schools, without distinction of time or place, what we see
in the south as well as in the north, at Florence, Rome, Venice, and
Seville, as well as at Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Paris,--wherever there
are men, is something human, is the expression of a sentiment or an
idea.
A criticism that should be founded on the principle of expression, would
somewhat derange, it must be confessed, received judgments, and would
carry some disorder into the hierarchy of the renowned. We do not
undertake such a revolution; we only propose to confirm, or at least
elucidate our principle by an example, and by an example that is at our
hand.
There is in the world a school formerly illustrious, now very lightly
treated:--this school is the French school of the seventeenth century.
We would replace it in honor, by recalling attention to the qualities
that make its glory.
We have worked with constancy to reinstate among us the philosophy of
Descartes, unworthily sacrificed to the philosophy of Locke, because
with its defects it possesses in our view the incomparable merit of
subordinating the senses to the mind, of elevating and ennobling man. So
we profess a serious and reflective admiration for our national art of
the seventeenth century, because, without disguising what is wanting to
it, we find in it what we prefer to every thing else, grandeur united to
good sense and reason, simplicity and force, genius of composition,
especially that of expression.
France, careless of her glory, does not appear to have the least notion
that she reckons in her annals perhaps the greatest century of humanity,
that which embraces the greatest number of extraordinary men of every
kind. When, I pray you, have politicians like Henry IV., Richelieu,
Mazarin, Colbert, Louis XIV. been seen giving each other the hand? I do
not pretend that each of them has no rival, even superiors. Alexander,
Caesar, Charlemagne, perhaps excel them. But Alexander has but a single
contemporary that can be compared with him, his father Philip; Caesar
cannot even have suspected that Octavius would one day be worthy of
him; Charlemagne is a colossus in a desert; whilst among us these five
men succeed each other without an interval, press upon each other, and
have, thus to speak, a single soul. And by what officers were they
served! Is Conde really inferior to Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar; for
among his predecessors we must not look for other rivals? Who among them
surpasses him in the extent and justness of his conceptions, in
quickness of sight, in rapidity of manoeuvres, in the union of
impetuosity and firmness, in the double glory of taker of cities and
gainer of battles? Add that he dealt with generals like Merci and
William, that he had under him Turenne and Luxemburg, without speaking
of so many other soldiers who were reared in that admirable school, and
at the hour of reverse still sufficed to save France.
What other time, at least among the moderns, has seen flourishing
together so many poets of the first order? We have, it is true, neither
Homer, nor Dante, nor Milton, nor even Tasso. The epic, with its
primitive simplicity, is interdicted us. But in the drama we scarcely
have equals. It is because dramatic poetry is the poetry that is adapted
to us, moral poetry _par excellence_, which represents man with his
different passions armed against each other, the violent contentions
between virtue and crime, the freaks of fortune, the lessons of
providence, and in a narrow compass, too, in which the events press upon
each other without confusion, in which the action rapidly progresses
towards the crisis that must reveal what is most intimate to the heart
of the personages.
Let us dare to say what we think, that, in our opinion, AEschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, together, do not equal Corneille; for none of
them has known and expressed like him what is of all things most truly
touching, a great soul at war with itself, between a generous passion
and duty. Corneille is the creator of a new pathetic unknown to
antiquity and to all the moderns before him. He disdains to address
common and subaltern passions; he does not seek to rouse terror and
pity, as demands Aristotle, who limits himself to erecting into maxims
the practice of the Greeks. Corneille seems to have read Plato, and
followed his precepts:--he addresses a most elevated part of human
nature, the noblest passion, the one nearest virtue,--admiration; and
from admiration carried to its culmination he draws the most powerful
effects. Shakspeare, we admit, is superior to Corneille in extent and
richness of dramatic genius. Entire human nature seems at his disposal,
and he reproduces the different scenes of life in their beauty and
deformity, in their grandeur and baseness. He excels in painting the
terrible or the gentle passions. Othello is jealousy, Lady Macbeth is
ambition, as Juliet and Desdemona are the immortal names of youthful and
unfortunate love. But if Corneille has less imagination, he has more
soul. Less varied, he is more profound. If he does not put upon the
stage so many different characters, those that he does put on it are the
greatest that can be offered to humanity. The scenes that he gives are
less heart-rending, but at once more delicate and more sublime. What is
the melancholy of Hamlet, the grief of King Lear, even the disdainful
intrepidity of Caesar, in comparison with the magnanimity of Augustus
striving to be master of himself as well as the universe, in comparison
with Chimene sacrificing love to honor, especially in comparison with
Pauline, not suffering even at the bottom of her heart an involuntary
sigh for the one that she must not love? Corneille always confines
himself to the highest regions. He is by turns Roman and Christian. He
is the interpreter of heroes, the chanter of virtue, the poet of
warriors and politicians.[128] And it must not be forgotten that
Shakspeare is almost alone in his times, whilst after Corneille comes
Racine, who would suffice for the poetical glory of a nation.
Racine assuredly cannot be compared with Corneille for dramatic genius;
he is more the man of letters; he has not the tragic soul; he neither
loves nor understands politics and war. When he imitates Corneille, for
example, in Alexander, and even in Mithridates, he imitates him badly
enough. The scene, so vaunted, of Mithridates exposing his plan of
campaign to his sons is a morsel of the finest rhetoric, which cannot be
compared with the political and military scenes of Cinna and Sertorius,
especially with that first scene of the Death of Pompey, in which you
witness a counsel as true, as grand, as profound as ever could have been
one of the counsels of Richelieu or Mazarin. Racine was not born to
paint heroes, but he paints admirably man with his natural passions, and
the most natural as well as the most touching of all, love. So he
particularly excels in feminine characters. For men he has need of being
sustained by Tacitus or holy Scripture.[129] With woman he is at his
ease, and he makes them think and speak with perfect truth, set off by
exquisite art. Demand of him neither Emilie, Cornelie, nor Pauline; but
listen to Andromaque, Monime, Berenice, and Phedre! There, even in
imitating, he is original, and leaves the ancients very far behind him.
Who has taught him that charming delivery, those graceful troubles, that
purity even in feebleness, that melancholy, sometimes even that depth,
with that marvellous language which seems the natural accent of woman's
heart? It is continually repeated that Racine wrote better than
Corneille:--say only that the two wrote very differently, and like men
in very different epochs. One has two sovereign qualities, which belong
to his own nature and his times, a _naivete_ and grandeur, the other is
not _naive_, but he has too much taste not to be always simple, and he
supplies the place of grandeur, forever lost, with consummate elegance.
Corneille speaks the language of statesmen, soldiers, theologians,
philosophers, and clever women; of Richelieu, Rohan, Saint-Cyran,
Descartes, and Pascal; of mother Angelique Arnaud and mother Madeleine
de Saint-Joseph; the language which Moliere still spoke, which Bossuet
preserved to his last breath. Racine speaks that of Louis XIV. and the
women who were the ornament of his court. I suppose that thus spoke
Madame, the amiable, sprightly, and unfortunate Henriette; thus wrote
the author of the _Princesse de Cleves_ and the author of _Telemaque_.
Or, rather, this language is that of Racine himself, of that feeble and
tender soul, which passed quickly from love to devotion, which uttered
its complaints in lyric poetry, which was wholly poured out in the
choruses of _Esther_ and _Athalie_, and in the _Cantiques Spirituels_;
that soul, so easy to be moved, that a religious ceremony or a
representation of _Esther_ at Saint-Cyr touched to tears, that pitied
the misfortunes of the people, that found in its pity and its charity
the courage to speak one day the truth to Louis XIV., and was
extinguished by the first breath of disgrace.
Moliere is, in comparison with Aristophanes, what Corneille is, in
comparison with Shakspeare. The author of _Plutus_, the _Wasps_, and the
_Clouds_, has doubtless an imagination, an explosive buffoonery, a
creative power, above all comparison. Moliere has not as great poetical
conceptions: he has more, perhaps; he has characters. His coloring is
less brilliant, his graver is more penetrating. He has engraved in the
memory of men a certain number of irregularities and vices which will
ever be called _l'Avare_ (_the Miser_), _le Malade Imaginaire_ (the
_Hypochondriac_), _les Femmes Savantes_ (the _Learned Women_), _le
Tartufe_ (the _Hypocrite_), and _Don Juan_, not to speak of the
_Misanthrope_, a piece apart, touching as pleasant, which is not
addressed to the crowd, and cannot be popular, because it expresses a
ridicule rare enough, excess in the passion of truth and honor.
Of all fabulists, ancient and modern, does any one, even the ingenious,
the pure, the elegant Phaedrus, approach our La Fontaine? He composes his
personages, and puts them in action with the skill of Moliere; he knows
how to take on occasion the tone of Horace, and mingle an ode with a
fable; he is at once the most naive, and the most refined of writers,
and his art disappears in its very perfection. We do not speak of the
tales, first, because we condemn the kind, then, because La Fontaine
displays in them qualities more Italian than French, a narrative full of
nature, malice, and grace, but without any of those profound, tender,
melancholy traits, that place among the greatest poets of all time the
author of the _Two Pigeons_ (_Deux Pigeons_), the _Old Man_
(_Vieillard_), and the _Three Young Persons_ (_Gens_).
We do not hesitate to put Boileau among these great men. He comes after
them, it is true, but he belongs to their company: he comprehends them,
loves them, sustains them. It was he, who, in 1663, after the _School of
Women_ (_l'Ecole des Femmes_) and long before the _Hypocrite_ (_le
Tartufe_), and the _Misanthrope_, proclaimed Moliere the master in the
art of verse. It was he who, in 1677, after the failure of _Phedre_,
defended the vanquisher of Euripides against the successes of Pradon. It
was he who, in advance of posterity, first put in light what is new and
entirely original in the plays of Corneille.[130] He saved the pension
of the old tragedian by offering the sacrifice of his own. Louis XIV.
asking him what writer most honored his reign, Boileau answered, that it
was Moliere; and when the great king in his decline persecuted
Port-Royal, and wished to lay hands on Arnaud, he encountered a man of
letters, who said to the face of the imperious monarch,--"Your Majesty
in vain seeks M. Arnaud, you are too fortunate to find him." Boileau is
somewhat wanting in imagination and invention; but he is great in the
energetic sentiment of truth and justice; he carries to the extent of
passion taste for the beautiful and the honest; he is a poet by force
of soul and good sense. More than once his heart dictated to him the
most pathetic verses:
"In vain against the Cid a minister is leagued,[131]
All Paris for Chimene the eyes of Rodrique," etc.
* * * * *
"After a little spot of earth, obtained by prayer,
Forever in the tomb had inclosed Moliere," etc.
And this epitaph of Arnaud, so simple and so grand:[132]
"At the feet of this altar of structure gross,
Lies without pomp, inclosed in a coffin vile,
The most learned mortal that ever wrote;
Arnaud, who in grace instructed by Jesus Christ,
Combating for the Church, has, in the Church itself,
Suffered more than one outrage and more than one anathema," etc.
* * * * *
"Wandering, poor, banished, proscribed, persecuted;
And even by his death their ill-extinguished rage
Had never left his ashes in repose,
If God himself here by his holy flock
From these devouring wolves had not concealed his bones."[133]
These are, I think, poets sufficiently great, and we have more of them
still: I mean those charming or sublime minds who have elevated prose
to poetry. Greece alone, in her most beautiful days, offers, perhaps,
such a variety of admirable prose writers. Who can enumerate them? At
first, Rabelais and Montaigne; later, Descartes, Pascal, and
Malebranche; La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere; Retz and Saint-Simon;
Bourdaloue, Flechier, Fenelon, and Bossuet; add to these so many eminent
women, at their head Madame de Sevigne; while Montesquieu, Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Buffon are still to come.[134]