According to a certain class of thinkers, among whom I find Guyau and
other men of note, art is destined partially to replace religion in
our lives. But with what are you going to replace religion itself in
art? For the religious feeling, whenever it existed, gave art an
element of thoroughness which the desire for pleasure and interest,
even for æsthetic pleasure and interest, does not supply. An immense
fulness of energy is due to the fact that beautiful things, as
employed by religion, were intended to be beautiful all through,
adequate in the all-seeing eye of God or Gods, not merely beautiful on
the surface, on the side turned towards the glance of man. For, in
religious art, beautiful things are an oblation; they are the best
that we can give, as distinguished from a pleasure arranged for
ourselves and got as cheap as possible. Herein lies the impassable
gulf between the church and theatre, considered æsthetically; for it
is only in the basest times, of formalism in art as in religion, of
superstition and sensualism, that we find the church imitating the
theatre in its paper glories and plaster painted like marble. The
real, living religious spirit insists on bringing, as in St Mark's, a
gift of precious material, of delicate antique ornament, with every
shipload. The crown of the Madonna is not, like the tragedy queen's,
of tinsel, the sacrament is not given in an empty chalice. The priest,
even where he makes no effort to be holy as a man, is at least sacred
as a priest; whereas there is something uncomfortable in the sense
that the actor is only pretending to be this or the other, and we
ourselves pretending to believe him; there is a thin and acid taste in
the shams of the stage and in all art which, like that of the stage,
exists only to the extent necessary to please our fancy or excite our
feelings. Why so? For is not pleasing the fancy and exciting the
feelings the real, final use of art? Doubtless. But there would seem
to be in nature a law not merely of the greater economy of means, but
also of the greatest output of efficacy: effort helping effort, and
function, function; and many activities, in harmonious interaction,
obtaining a measure of result far surpassing their mere addition. The
creations of our mind are, of course, mere spiritual existences,
things of seeming, akin to illusions; and yet our mind can never rest
satisfied with an unreality, because our mind is active, penetrative
and grasping, and therefore craves for realisation, for completeness
and truth, and feels bruised and maimed whenever it hits against a
dead wall or is pulled up by a contradiction; nay, worst of all, it
grows giddy and faint when suddenly brought face to face with
emptiness. All insufficiency and shallowness means loss of power; and
it is such loss of power that we remark when we compare with the
religious art of past times the art which, every day more and more, is
given us by the hurried and over-thrifty (may I say "Reach-me-down"?)
hands of secularism. The great art of Greece and of the Middle Ages
most often represents something which, to our mind and feelings, is as
important, and even as beautiful, as the representation itself; and
the representation, the actual "work of art" itself, gains by that
added depth and reverence of our mood, is carried deeper (while
helping to carry deeper) into our soul. Instead of which we moderns
try to be satisfied with allowing the seeing part of us to light on
something pleasant and interesting, while giving the mind only
triviality to rest upon; and the mind goes to sleep or chafes to move
away. We cannot live intellectually and morally in presence of the
idea, say, of a jockey of Degas or one of his ballet girls in
contemplation of her shoe, as long as we can live æsthetically in the
arrangement of lines and masses and dabs of colour and interlacings of
light and shade which translate themselves into this _idea_ of jockey
or ballet girl; we are therefore bored, ruffled, or, what is worse, we
learn to live on insufficient spiritual rations, and grow anæmic. Our
shortsighted practicality, which values means while disregarding ends,
and conceives usefulness only as a stage in making some other
_utility_, has led us to suppose that the desire for beauty is
compatible, nay commensurate, with indifference to reality: the _real_
having come to mean that which you can plant, cook, eat or sell, not
what you can feel and think.
This notion credits us with an actual craving for something which
should exist as little as possible, in one dimension only, so to
speak, or as upon a screen (for fear of occupying valuable space which
might be given to producing more food than we can eat); whereas what
we desire is just such beauty as will surround us on all sides, such
harmony as we can live in; our soul, dissatisfied with the reality
which happens to surround it, seeks on the contrary to substitute a
new reality of its own making, to rebuild the universe, like Omar
Khayyam, according to the heart's desire. And nothing can be more
different than such an instinct from the alleged satisfaction in
playing with dolls and knowing that they are not real people. By an
odd paradoxical coincidence, that very disbelief in the _real_
character of art, and that divorce betwixt art and utility, is really
due to our ultra-practical habit of taking seriously only the
serviceable or instructive sides of things: the quality of beauty,
which the healthy mind insists upon in everything it deals with,
getting to be considered as an idle adjunct, fulfilling no kind of
purpose; and therefore, as something detachable, separate, and
speedily relegated to the museum or lumber-room where we keep our
various shams: ideals, philosophies, all the playthings with which we
sometimes wile away our idleness. Whereas in fact a great work of art,
like a great thought of goodness, exists essentially for our more
thorough, our more _real_ satisfaction: the soul goes into it with all
its higher hankerings, and rests peaceful, satisfied, so long as it is
enclosed in this dwelling of its own choice. And it is, on the
contrary, the flux of what we call real life, that is to say, of life
imposed on us by outer necessities and combinations, which is so often
one-sided, perfunctory, not to be dwelt upon by thought nor penetrated
into by feeling, and endurable only according to the angle or the
lighting up--the angle or lighting up called "purpose" which we apply
to it.