But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning!
Theoretical culture must it seems bring along with it practical culture,
and yet the latter must be the condition of the former. All improvement
in the political sphere must proceed from the ennobling of the
character. But, subject to the influence of a social constitution still
barbarous, how can character become ennobled? It would then be necessary
to seek for this end an instrument that the state does not furnish, and
to open sources that would have preserved themselves pure in the midst
of political corruption.
I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended that
have engaged me up to the present time. This instrument is the art of
the beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal models.
Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all
that is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the
arbitrary will of man. The political legislator may place their empire
under an interdict, but he cannot reign there. He can proscribe the
friend of truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade the artist, but he
cannot change art. No doubt, nothing is more common than to see science
and art bend before the spirit of the age, and creative taste receive
its law from critical taste. When the character becomes stiff and
hardens itself, we see science severely keeping her limits, and art
subject to the harsh restraint of rules; when the character is relaxed
and softened, science endeavors to please and art to rejoice. For whole
ages philosophers as well as artists show themselves occupied in letting
down truth and beauty to the depths of vulgar humanity. They themselves
are swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential vigor and
indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious fight,
and issue triumphant from the abyss.
No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if he
is its disciple or even its favorite! Let a beneficent deity carry off
in good time the suckling from the breast of its mother, let it nourish
him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to grow up and arrive at
virility under the distant sky of Greece. When he has attained manhood,
let him come back, presenting a face strange to his own age; let him
come, not to delight it with his apparition, but rather to purify it,
terrible as the son of Agamemnon. He will, indeed, receive his matter
from the present time, but he will borrow the form from a nobler time
and even beyond all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable unity.
There, issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the
source of all beauty, which was never tainted by the corruptions of
generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it in dark eddies.
Its matter may be dishonored as well as ennobled by fancy, but the
ever-chaste form escapes from the caprices of imagination. The Roman had
already bent his knee for long years to the divinity of the emperors,
and yet the statues of the gods stood erect; the temples retained their
sanctity for the eye long after the gods had become a theme for mockery,
and the noble architecture of the palaces that shielded the infamies of
Nero and of Commodus were a protest against them. Humanity has lost its
dignity, but art has saved it, and preserves it in marbles full of
meaning; truth continues to live in illusion, and the copy will serve to
re-establish the model. If the nobility of art has _survived_ the
nobility of nature, it also goes before it like an inspiring genius,
forming and awakening minds. Before truth causes her triumphant light to
penetrate into the depths of the heart, poetry intercepts her rays, and
the summits of humanity shine in a bright light, while a dark and humid
night still hangs over the valleys.
But how will the artist avoid the corruption of his time which encloses
him on all hands? Let him raise his eyes to his own dignity, and to law;
let him not lower them to necessity and fortune. Equally exempt from a
vain activity which would imprint its trace on the fugitive moment, and
from the dreams of an impatient enthusiasm which applies the measure of
the absolute to the paltry productions of time, let the artist abandon
the real to the understanding, for that is its proper field; But let the
artist endeavor to give birth to the ideal by the union of the possible
and of the necessary. Let him stamp illusion and truth with the effigy
of this ideal; let him apply it to the play of his imagination and his
most serious actions, in short, to all sensuous and spiritual forms;
then let him quietly launch his work into infinite time.
But the minds set on fire by this ideal have not all received an equal
share of calm from the creative genius—that great and patient temper
which is required to impress the ideal on the dumb marble, or to spread
it over a page of cold, sober letters, and then intrust it to the
faithful hands of time. This divine instinct, and creative force, much
too ardent to follow this peaceful walk, often throws itself immediately
on the present, on active life, and strives to transform the shapeless
matter of the moral world. The misfortune of his brothers, of the whole
species, appeals loudly to the heart of the man of feeling; their
abasement appeals still louder: enthusiasm is inflamed, and in souls
endowed with energy the burning desire aspires impatiently to action and
facts. But has this innovator examined himself to see if these disorders
of the moral world wound his reason, or if they do not rather wound his
self-love? If he does not determine this point at once, he will find it
from the impulsiveness with which he pursues a prompt and definite end.
A pure, moral motive has for its end the absolute; time does not exist
for it, and the future becomes the present to it directly; by a
necessary development, it has to issue from the present. To a reason
having no limits the direction towards an end becomes confounded with
the accomplishment of this end, and to enter on a course is to have
finished it.
If, then, a young friend of the true and of the beautiful were to ask me
how, notwithstanding the resistance of the times, he can satisfy the
noble longing of his heart, I should reply: Direct the world on which
you act towards that which is good, and the measured and peaceful course
of time will bring about the results. You have given it this direction
if by your teaching you raise its thoughts towards the necessary and the
eternal; if, by your acts or your creations, you make the necessary and
the eternal the object of your leanings. The structure of error and of
all that is arbitrary must fall, and it has already fallen, as soon as
you are sure that it is tottering. But it is important that it should
not only totter in the external but also in the internal man. Cherish
triumphant truth in the modest sanctuary of our heart; give it an
incarnate form through beauty, that it may not only be in the
understanding that does homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly
grasp its appearance. And that you may not by any chance take from
external reality the model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not
venture into its dangerous society before you are assured in your own
heart that you have a good escort furnished by ideal nature. Live with
your age, but be not its creation; labor for your contemporaries, but do
for them what they need, and not what they praise. Without having shared
their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and bend
under the yoke which they find it as painful to dispense with as to
bear. By the constancy with which you will despise their good fortune,
you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice that you submit
to their sufferings. See them in thought such as they ought to be when
you must act upon them; but see them as they are when you are tempted to
act for them. Seek to owe their suffrage to their dignity; but to make
them happy keep an account of their unworthiness: thus, on the one hand,
the nobleness of your heart will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your
end will not be reduced to nothingness by their unworthiness. The
gravity of your principles will keep them off from you, but in play they
will still endure them. Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is
by their taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In vain
will you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their actions;
but you can try your moulding hand on their leisure. Drive away caprice,
frivolity, and coarseness from their pleasures, and you will banish them
imperceptibly from their acts, and at length from their feelings.
Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great, noble, and
ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of perfection, till
appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.