Thus he goes, he runs, he seeks. What does he seek? Certainly this man,
such as I have portrayed him, this solitary, gifted with an active
imagination, always traveling through the great desert of mankind, has a
higher end than that of a mere observer, an end more general than the
fugitive pleasure of the passing event. He seeks this thing which we may
call modernness, for no better word to express the idea presents itself.
His object is to detach from fashion whatever it may contain of the
poetry in history, to draw the eternal from the transitory. If we glance
at the exhibitions of modern pictures, we are struck with the general
tendency of the artists to dress all their subjects in ancient costumes.
That is obviously the sign of great laziness, for it is much easier to
declare that everything in the costume of a certain period is ugly than
to undertake the work of extracting from it the mysterious beauty which
may be contained in it, however slight or light it may be. The modern is
the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent, the half of art, whose
other half is the unchanging and the eternal. There was a modernness for
every ancient painter; most of the beautiful portraits which remain to
us from earlier times are dressed in the costumes of their times. They
are perfectly harmonious, because the costumes, the hair, even the
gesture, the look and the smile (every epoch has its look and its
smile), form a whole that is entirely lifelike. You have no right to
despise or neglect this transitory, fleeting element, of which the
changes are so frequent. In suppressing it you fall by necessity into
the void of an abstract and undefinable beauty, like that of the only
woman before the fall. If instead of the costume of the epoch, which is
a necessary element, you substitute another, you create an anomaly which
can have no excuse unless it is a burlesque called for by the vogue of
the moment. Thus, the goddesses, the nymphs, the sultans of the
eighteenth century are portraits morally accurate.