Perhaps the best way of expounding my reasons will be to follow the
process by which I reached them; for so far from having started with
the theory of Diotima, I found the theory of Diotima, when I re-read
it accidentally after many years' forgetfulness, to bring to
convergence the result of my gradual experience.
* * * * *
Thinking about the Hermes of Olympia, and the fact that so far he is
pretty well the only Greek statue which historical evidence
unhesitatingly gives us as an original masterpiece, it struck me that,
could one become really familiar with him, could eye and soul learn
all the fulness of his perfection, we should have the true
starting-point for knowledge of the antique, for knowledge, in great
measure, of all art.
Yes, and of more than art, or rather of art in more than one relation.
Is this a superstition, a mere myth, perhaps, born of words? I think
not. Surely if we could really arrive at knowing such a masterpiece,
so as to feel rather than see its most intimate organic principles,
and the great main reasons separating it from all inferior works and
making it be itself: could we do this, we should know not merely what
art is and should be, but, in a measure, what life should be and might
become: what are the methods of true greatness, the sensations of true
sanity.
It would teach us the eternal organic strivings and tendencies of our
soul, those leading in the direction of life, leading away from death.
If this seems mere allegory and wild talk, let us look at facts and
see what art is. For is not art inasmuch as untroubled by the
practical difficulties of existence, inasmuch as the free, unconscious
attempt of all nations and generations to satisfy, outside life, those
cravings which life still leaves unsatisfied--is not art a delicate
instrument, showing in its sensitive oscillations the most intimate
movements and habits of the soul? Does it not reveal our most
recondite necessities and possibilities, by sifting and selecting,
reinforcing or attenuating, the impressions received from without;
showing us thereby how we must stand towards nature and life, how we
must feel and be?
And this most particularly in those spontaneous arts which, first in
the field, without need of adaptations of material or avoidance of the
already done, without need of using up the rejected possibilities of
previous art, or awakening yet unknown emotions, are the simple,
straightforward expression, each the earliest satisfactory one in its
own line, of the long unexpressed, long integrated, organic wants and
wishes of great races of men: the arts, for instance, which have given
us that Hermes, Titian's pictures, and Michael Angelo's and Raphael's
frescoes; given us Bach, Gluck, Mozart, the serener parts of
Beethoven, music of yet reserved pathos, braced, spring-like strength,
learned, select: arts which never go beyond the universal, averaged
expression of the soul's desires, because the desires themselves are
sifted, limited to the imperishable and unchangeable, like the
artistic methods which embody them, reduced to the essential by the
long delay of utterance, the long--century long--efforts to utter.
Becoming intimate with such a statue as the Olympian Hermes, and
comparing the impressions received from it with the impressions both
of inferior works of the same branch of art and with the impressions
of equally great works--pictures, buildings, musical compositions--of
other branches of art, becoming conversant with the difference between
an original and a copy, great art and poor art, we gradually become
aware of a quality which exists in all good art and is absent in all
bad art, and without whose presence those impressions summed up as
beauty, dignity, grandeur, are never to be had. This peculiarity,
which most people perceive and few people define--explaining it away
sometimes as _truth_, or taking it for granted under the name of
_quality_--this peculiarity I shall call for convenience' sake
harmony; for I think you will all of you admit that the absence or
presence of harmony is what distinguishes bad art from good. Harmony,
in this sense--and remember that it is this which connoisseurs most
usually allude to as _quality_--harmony may be roughly defined as the
organic correspondence between the various parts of a work of art, the
functional interchange and interdependence thereof. In this sense there
is harmony in every really living thing, for otherwise it could not live.
If the muscles and limbs, nay, the viscera and tissues, did not adjust
themselves to work together, if they did not in this combination
establish a rhythm, a backward-forward, contraction-relaxation,
taking-in-giving-out, diastole-systole in all their movements, there
would be, instead of a living organism, only an inert mass. In all
living things, and just in proportion as they are really alive (for in
most real things there is presumably some defect of rhythm tending to
stoppage of life), there is bound to be this organic interdependence
and interchange. Natural selection, the survival of such individuals
and species as best work in with, are most rhythmical to, their
surroundings--natural selection sees to that.