between stimuli and stimuli, between _natural_ and _conventional_
signs. The former are held to have a constant effect upon all; the
latter only upon a limited circle. In their belief, signs employed
in painting are natural, those used in poetry conventional. But the
difference between them is at the most only one of degree. It has
often been said that painting is a language understood by all, while
with poetry it is otherwise. Here, for example, Leonardo found one
of the prerogatives of his art, "which hath not need of interpreters
of different tongues as have letters," and it pleases man and beast.
He relates the anecdote of that portrait of the father of a family
"which the little grandchildren were wont to caress while they were
still in swaddling-clothes, and the dogs and cats of the house in like
manner." But other anecdotes, such as those of the savages who took the
portrait of a soldier for a boat, or considered the portrait of a man
on horseback to be furnished with only one leg, are apt to shake one's
faith in the understanding of painting by sucklings, dogs and cats.
Fortunately, no arduous researches are necessary to convince oneself
that pictures, poetry and all works of art only produce effects upon
souls prepared to receive them. Natural signs do not exist; because
all are equally conventional, or, to speak with greater exactness,
_historically conditioned._
[Sidenote: _The surmounting of variety._]
Granting this, how are we to succeed in causing the expression to be
reproduced by means of the physical object? How obtain the same effect,
when the conditions are no longer the same? Would it not, rather, seem
necessary to conclude that expressions cannot be reproduced, despite
the physical instruments made for the purpose, and that what is called
reproduction consists in ever new expressions? Such would indeed be the
conclusion if the varieties of physical and psychical conditions were
intrinsically insurmountable. But since the insuperability has none
of the characteristics of necessity we must on the contrary conclude
that reproduction always occurs when we can replace ourselves in the
conditions in which the stimulus (physical beauty) was produced.
Not only can we replace ourselves in these conditions as an abstract
possibility, but as a matter of fact we do so continually. Individual
life, which is communion with ourselves (with our past), and social
life, which is communion with our like, would not otherwise be
possible.
[Sidenote: _Restorations and historical interpretation._]
As regards the physical object, palæographers and philologists,
who _restore_ to texts their original physiognomy, _restorers_ of
pictures and of statues and other industrious toilers strive precisely
to preserve or to restore to the physical object all its primitive
energy. These efforts are certainly not always successful, or are
not completely successful, for it is never or hardly ever possible
to obtain a restoration complete in its smallest details. But the
insurmountable is here only present accidentally and must not lead us
to overlook the successes which actually are achieved.
_Historical interpretation_ labours for its part to reintegrate in
us the psychological conditions which have changed in the course of
history. It revives the dead, completes the fragmentary, and enables us
to see a work of art (a physical object) as its author saw it in the
moment of production.
A condition of this historical labour is tradition, with the help of
which it is possible to collect the scattered rays and concentrate them
in one focus. With the help of memory we surround the physical stimulus
with all the facts among which it arose; and thus we enable it to act
upon us as it acted upon him who produced it.
Where the tradition is broken, interpretation is arrested; in this
case, the products of the past remain silent for us. Thus the
expressions contained in the Etruscan or Mexican inscriptions are
unattainable; thus we still hear discussions among ethnographers as
to whether certain products of the art of savages are pictures or
writings; thus archæologists and prehistorians are not always able
to establish with certainty whether the figures found on the pottery
of a certain region, and on other instruments employed, are of a
religious or profane nature. But the arrest of interpretation, as that
of restoration, is never a definitely insurmountable barrier; and the
daily discoveries of new historical sources and of new methods of
better exploiting the old, which we may hope to see ever improving,
link up again broken traditions.
We do not wish to deny that erroneous historical interpretation
sometimes produces what may be called _palimpsests,_ new expressions
imposed upon the ancient, artistic fancies instead of historical
reproductions. The so-called "fascination of the past" depends in part
upon these expressions of ours, which we weave upon the historical.
Thus has been discovered in Greek plastic art the calm and serene
intuition of life of those peoples, who nevertheless felt the universal
sorrow so poignantly; thus "the terror of the year 1000" has recently
been discerned on the faces of the Byzantine saints, a terror which is
a misunderstanding, or an artificial legend invented later by men of
learning. But _historical criticism_ tends precisely to circumscribe
fancies and to establish exactly the point of view from which we must
look.
By means of the above process we live in communication with other men
of the present and of the past; and we must not conclude because we
sometimes, and indeed often, meet with an unknown or an ill-known,
that therefore, when we believe we are engaged in a dialogue, we are
always speaking a monologue; or that we are unable even to repeat the
monologue which we formerly held with ourselves.
XVII
THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE AND ART
This brief exposition of the method by which is obtained the
reintegration of the original conditions in which the work of art
was produced, and consequently reproduction and judgement are made
possible, shows how important is the function fulfilled by historical
research in relation to artistic and literary works which is what is
usually called _historical criticism_ or method in literature and art.
[Sidenote: _Historical criticism in literature and art. Its
importance._]
Without tradition and historical criticism the enjoyment of all or
nearly all the works of art produced by humanity would be irrevocably
lost: we should be little more than animals, immersed in the present
alone, or in the most recent past. It is fatuous to despise and laugh
at one who reconstitutes an authentic text, explains the sense of
forgotten words and customs, investigates the conditions in which an
artist lived, and accomplishes all those labours which revive the
qualities and the original colouring of works of art.
Sometimes a depreciatory or negative judgement is passed upon
historical research because of the presumed or proved inability of such
researches, in many cases, to give us a true understanding of works
of art. But it must be observed, in the first place, that historical
research does not only fulfil the task of helping to reproduce and
judge artistic works: the biography of a writer or of an artist, for
example, and the study of the customs of a period, have an interest of
their own, that is to say, extraneous to the history of art, but not to
other forms of historiography. If allusion be made to those researches
which do not appear to have interest of any kind, nor to fulfil any
purpose, it must be replied that the historical student must often
reconcile himself to the useful but inglorious function of a collector
of facts. These facts remain for the time being formless, incoherent
and meaningless, but they are preserves or mines for the historian of
the future and for whosoever may afterwards want them for any purpose.
In the same way in a library, books which nobody asks for are placed
on the shelves and catalogued, because they may be asked for at some
time or other. Certainly, just as an intelligent librarian gives the
preference to the acquisition and cataloguing of those books which he
foresees may be of more or better service, so intelligent students
possess an instinct as to what is or may more probably be of use among
the material of facts which they are examining; while others less
well endowed, less intelligent or more hasty in producing, accumulate
useless rubbish, refuse and sweepings, and lose themselves in details
and petty discussions. But this appertains to the economy of research,
and does not concern us. It concerns at most the master who selects the
subjects, the publisher who pays for the printing, and the critic who
is called upon to praise or to blame the research workers.
On the other hand, it is clear that historical research directed to
illuminate a work of art does not alone suffice to bring it to birth
in our spirit and place us in a position to judge it, but presupposes
taste, that is to say, an alert and cultivated imagination. The
greatest historical erudition may accompany a gross or otherwise
defective taste, a slow imagination, or, as they say, a cold hard heart
closed to art. Which is the lesser evil, great erudition with defective
taste, or natural taste and much ignorance? The question has often been
asked, and perhaps it will be best to deny that it has any meaning,
because one cannot tell which of two evils is the less, or what exactly
that means. The merely learned man never succeeds in entering into
direct communion with great spirits; he keeps wandering for ever about
the outer courts, the staircases and antechambers of their palaces; but
the gifted ignoramus either passes by masterpieces to him inaccessible,
or instead of understanding works of art as they really are, invents
others with his fancy. Now, the labour of the former may at least serve
to enlighten others; but the genius of the latter remains altogether
sterile in relation to knowledge. How then can we in a certain respect
fail to prefer the conscientious learned man to the inconclusive though
gifted man, who is not really gifted, if he resign himself and in so
far as he resigns himself, to his inconclusiveness?
[Sidenote: _Literary and artistic history. Its distinction from
historical criticism and from the æsthetic judgement._]
We must accurately distinguish _the history of art and literature_
from those historical labours where works of art are used, but for
extraneous purposes (such as biography, civil, religious and political
history, etc.), and also from historical erudition directed to the
preparation of the æsthetic synthesis of reproduction.
The difference of the first two is obvious. The history of art and
literature has the works of art themselves as its principal subject;
those other labours invoke and interrogate works of art, but only
as witnesses from whom to discover the truth of facts which are not
æsthetic. The second difference to which we have referred may seem less
profound. It is, however, very great. Erudition directed to illuminate
the understanding of works of art aims simply at calling into existence
a certain internal fact, an æsthetic reproduction. Artistic and
literary history, on the other hand, does not appear until after such
reproduction has been obtained. It implies, therefore, a further stage
of labour.
Like all other history, its object is to record precisely such facts
as have really taken place, in this case artistic and literary facts.
A man who, after having acquired the requisite historical erudition,
reproduces in himself and tastes a work of art, may remain simply
a man of taste, or at the most express his own feeling with an
exclamation of praise or condemnation. This does not suffice for
the making of a historian of literature and art. Something else is
needed, namely, that a new mental operation succeed in him the simple
reproduction. This new operation is in its turn an expression: the
expression of the reproduction; the historical description, exposition
or representation. There is this difference, then, between the man of
taste and the historian: the first merely reproduces in his spirit the
work of art; the second, after having reproduced it, represents it
historically, or applies those categories by which, as we know, history
is differentiated from pure art. Artistic and literary history is
therefore _a historical work of art founded upon one or more works of
art._
The name "artistic" or "literary" critic is used in various senses:
sometimes it is applied to the scholar who devotes his services to
literature; sometimes to the historian who reveals the works of art of
the past in their reality; more often to both. By critic is sometimes
understood in a more restricted sense he who judges and describes
contemporary literary works, and by historian, he who treats of those
less recent. These are linguistic uses and empirical distinctions,
which may be neglected; because the true difference lies between
_the scholar, the man of taste_ and _the historian of art._ These
words designate three successive stages of work, each one independent
relatively to the one that follows, but not to that which precedes. As
we have seen, a man may be a mere scholar, and possess little capacity
for understanding works of art; he may even both be learned and possess
taste, yet be unable to portray them by writing a page of artistic and
literary history. But the true and complete historian, while containing
in himself both the scholar and the man of taste as necessary
pre-requisites, must add to their qualities the gift of historical
comprehension and representation.
[Sidenote: _The method of artistic and literary history._]
The theory of artistic and literary historical method presents problems
and difficulties, some common to the theory of historical method in
general, others peculiar to it, because derived from the concept of art
itself.
[Sidenote: _Criticism of the problem of the origin of art._]
History is commonly divided into human history, natural history, and
the mixture of both. Without! examining here the question of the
solidity of this distinction, it is clear that artistic and literary
history belongs in any case to the first, since it concerns a spiritual
activity, that is to say, an activity proper to man. And since this
activity is its subject, the absurdity of propounding the historical
problem of the _origin_ of _art_ becomes at once evident. We should
note that by this formula many different things have in turn been
included on many different occasions. _Origin_ has often meant _nature_
or _character_ of the artistic fact, in which case an attempt was
made to deal with a real scientific or philosophic problem, the very
problem in fact which our treatise has attempted to solve. At other
times, by origin has been understood the _ideal genesis,_ the search
for the reason of art, the deduction of the artistic fact from a first
principle containing in itself both spirit and nature. This is also
a philosophical problem, complementary to the preceding, coinciding
indeed with it, although it has sometimes been strangely interpreted
and solved by means of an arbitrary and semi-imaginary metaphysic.
But when the object was to discover further exactly in what way the
artistic function was _historically formed,_ the result has been the
absurdity which we have mentioned. If expression be the first form of
consciousness, how can we look for the historical origin of what is not
a product of nature and is presupposed by human history? How can we
assign a historical genesis to a thing which is a category by means of
which all historical processes and facts are understood? The absurdity
has arisen from the comparison with human institutions, which have been
formed in the course of history, and have disappeared or may disappear
in its course. Between the æsthetic fact and a human institution
(such as monogamic marriage or the fief) there exists a difference
comparable with that between simple and compound bodies in chemistry.
It is impossible to indicate the formation of the former, otherwise
they would not be simple, and if this be discovered, they cease to be
simple and become compound.
The problem of the origin of art, historically understood, is only
justified when it is proposed to investigate, not the formation of
the artistic category, but where and when art has appeared for the
first time (appeared, that is to say, in a striking manner), at what
point or in what region of the globe and at what point or epoch of its
history; when, that is to say, not the origin of art, but its earliest
or primitive history is the object of research. This problem forms
one with that of the appearance of human civilization on the earth.
Data for its solution are certainly wanting, but there yet remains
the abstract possibility of a solution, and certainly tentative and
hypothetical solutions abound.
[Sidenote: _The criterion of progress and history._]
Every representation of human history has the concept of _progress_ as
foundation. But by progress must not be understood the imaginary _law
of progress_ which is supposed to lead the generations of man with
irresistible force to some unknown destiny, according to a providential
plan which we can divine and then understand logically. A supposed law
of this sort is the negation of history itself, of that accidentality,
that empiricity, that contingency, which distinguish concrete fact
from abstraction. And for the same reason, progress has nothing to do
with the so-called law of _evolution,_ which, if it mean that reality
evolves (and it is only reality in so far as it evolves or becomes),
cannot be called a law, and if it be given as a law, becomes identical
with the law of progress in the sense just described. The progress
of which we speak here is nothing but _the very concept of human
activity,_ which, working upon the material supplied to it by nature,
conquers its obstacles and bends it to its own ends.
Such conception of progress, that is to say, of human activity
applied to a given material, is the _point of view_ of the historian
of humanity. No one but a mere collector of unrelated facts, a mere
antiquary or inconsequent annalist, can put together the smallest
narrative of human doings unless he have a determined point of
view, that is to say, a personal conviction of his own regarding the
facts whose history he has undertaken to relate. No one can start
from the confused and discordant mass of crude facts and arrive at
the historical work of art save by means of this apperception, which
makes it possible to carve a definite representation in that rough and
formless mass. The historian of a practical action should know what is
economy and what is morality; the historian of mathematics, what is
mathematics; the historian of botany, what is botany; the historian
of philosophy, what is philosophy. If he does not really know these
things, he must at least have the illusion of knowing them; otherwise
he will not even be able to delude himself into believing that he is
writing history.
We cannot here expand the demonstration of the necessity and
inevitability of this subjective criterion in every narrative of human
affairs (which is compatible with the utmost objectivity, impartiality
and scrupulousness in dealing with data of fact and indeed forms a
constitutive element in these virtues), in every narrative of human
doings and happenings. It suffices to read any book of history to
discover at once the point of view of the author, if he be a historian
worthy of the name and know his own business. There are liberal and
reactionary, rationalist and catholic historians, who deal with
political or social history; for the history of philosophy there
are metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist and spiritualist
historians. Purely historical historians do not and cannot exist.
Were Thucydides and Polybius, Livy and Tacitus, Machiavelli and
Guicciardini, Giannone and Voltaire, wholly without moral and political
views; and, in our time, was Guizot or Thiers, Macaulay or Balbo,
Ranke or Mommsen? And in the history of philosophy, from Hegel, who
was the first to raise it to a great height, to Ritter, Zeller,
Cousin, Lewes and our Spaventa, was there one who did not possess his
conception of progress and his criterion of judgement? Is there one
single work of any value on the history of Æsthetic which has not
been written from this or that point of view, with this or that bias
(Hegelian or Herbartian), from a sensationalist or from an eclectic
or some other point of view? If the historian is to escape from the
inevitable necessity of taking a side, he must become a political or
scientific eunuch; and history is not an occupation for eunuchs. Such
would at most be of use in compiling those great tomes of not useless
erudition, _elumbis atque fracta,_ which are called, not without
reason, monkish.
If, then, a concept of progress, a point of view, a criterion, be
inevitable, the best to be done is not to try and escape from it,
but to obtain the best possible. Every one tends to this end when he
forms his own convictions, seriously and laboriously. Historians who
profess to wish to interrogate the facts without adding anything of
their own to them are not to be trusted. This is at best the result
of ingenuousness and illusion on their part: they will always add
something of their own, if they be truly historians, even without
knowing it, or they will only believe that they have avoided doing
so because they have conveyed it only by hints, which is the most
insinuating, penetrative and effective of methods.
[Sidenote: _Non-existence of a single line of progress in artistic and
literary history._]
Artistic and literary history cannot dispense with the criterion of
progress any more easily than other history. We cannot show what a
given work of art is, save by proceeding from a conception of art, in
order to fix the artistic problem which the author of such work of art
had to solve, and by determining whether or no he has solved it, or by
how much and in what way he has failed to do so. But it is important
to note that the criterion of progress assumes a different form in
artistic and literary history to that which it assumes (or is believed
to assume) in the history of science.
It is customary to represent the whole history of knowledge by one
single line of progress and regress. Science is the universal, and
its problems are arranged in one single vast system or comprehensive
problem. All thinkers labour upon the same problem as to the nature of
reality and of knowledge: contemplative Indians and Greek philosophers,
Christians and Mohammedans, bare heads and turbaned heads, wigged heads
and college-capped heads (as Heine said); and future generations will
weary themselves with it, as ours has done. It would take too long to
inquire here if this be true or not of science. But it is certainly
not true of art; art is intuition, and intuition is individuality, and
individuality does not repeat itself. To conceive of the history of the
artistic production of the human race as developed along a single line
of progress and regress would therefore be altogether erroneous.