ON THE PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.
I.
Having investigated the nature of the work of art, there now remains
a study of the law of its production. This law, in general terms, may
be thus expressed:--_A work of art is determined by an aggregate which
is the general state of the mind and surrounding circumstances._ I
have stated this principle in the foregoing section, and have now to
establish it.
This law rests on two kinds of proof: the one that of experience, and
the other that of reason. The former consists of an enumeration of the
many instances in which the law verifies itself. Some of these I have
already presented to you, and others will soon follow. One may assert,
moreover, that no case is known to which the law is not applicable; it
is strictly so to those hitherto examined, and not merely in a general
way, but in detail; not only to the growth and extinction of great
schools, but again to all the variations and oscillations to which
art is subject. The second order of proof consists in showing this
dependence to be not only rigorous in point of fact, but, again, that
it is so through necessity. We will accordingly analyze what we have
called the general state of the mind and surrounding circumstances;
we shall seek, according to the ordinary standard of human nature the
effects which a like state must produce on the public, on artists, and
consequently on works of art. Hence we draw a forced connection and a
definite concordance, and we establish a necessary harmony which we had
observed as simply fortuitous. The second proof _demonstrates_ what the
first had averred.
II.
In order to make this harmony apparent let us resume a comparison
already of service to us, that between a plant and a work of art, and
note the circumstances in which a plant, or a species of plant, say
the orange, may be developed and propagated in a certain soil. Let
us suppose all kinds of grain and seed borne by the wind and sown at
random; on what conditions can those of the Lorange germinate, become
trees, blossom, yield fruit, spread, and cover the ground with a
numerous family?
Many favorable circumstances are essential to this end. And at first
the soil must be neither too light nor too meagre: otherwise, the roots
lacking depth and grasp, the tree would fall at the first gale of wind.
Next, the soil must not be too dry; otherwise the tree will wither
where it stands deprived of the moisture of springs and streams.
Moreover, the climate must be warm; or the tree, which is delicate,
will freeze, or at least droop, and never put forth sprouts; the summer
must be long, in order that the fruit, which is slow in ripening, may
fully mature; and the winter mild, so that January frosts may not blast
or shrivel the oranges that remain green on its branches. Finally,
the soil must not be too favorable for other plants, lest the tree,
left to itself, might be stifled by the competition and infringement
of a more vigorous vegetation. When all these conditions concur, the
little orange will grow, become mature, and produce others again to
reproduce themselves. Storms will undoubtedly occur, stones fall, and
browsing goats will destroy certain plants; but on the whole, in spite
of accidents which kill individuals, the species will be propagated,
cover the ground, and in a few years display a nourishing grove of
orange trees. All this is to be seen in the admirably sheltered gorges
of Southern Italy, in the environs of Sorrento and Amain, on the
shores of the gulfs, and in the small, watered valleys, freshened by
streams descending from the mountains, and caressed by the beneficent
breezes of the sea. This concourse of circumstances was necessary in
order to produce those beautiful round tops, those lustrous domes of a
bright deep green, those innumerable golden apples, and that exquisite
fragrant vegetation which, in mid-winter, makes this coast the richest
and loveliest of gardens.
Let us now reflect on the manner in which things moved in this example.
We have just observed the effect of circumstances and of physical
temperature. Strictly speaking, these have not produced the orange;
the seeds were given, and these alone contained the vital force. The
circumstances described, however, were necessary in order that the
plant might flourish and be propagated; had these failed, the plant
likewise would have failed.
Accordingly, let the temperature be different, and the species of plant
will be different. Suppose conditions entirely opposite to those just
mentioned; take the summit of a mountain swept by violent winds, with a
thin scanty soil, a cold climate, a short summer, and snow during the
winter; not only will the orange not thrive here, but the greater part
of other trees will perish. Of all the seeds scattered haphazard by the
wind only one will survive, and you will see but one species to endure
and be propagated, the only one adapted to these severe conditions; the
fir and the pine will cover the lonely crags, the abrupt precipices,
and long, rocky ridges, with their stiff colonnades of tall trunks and
vast mantles of sombre green, and there, as in the Vosges, in Scotland
and in Norway, you may travel league after league, under silent arches,
on a carpet of crisp leaves, among gnarled roots obstinately clinging
to the rocks, the domain of the patient energetic plant which alone
subsists under the incessant attacks of gales, and the hoar-frosts of
long winters.
We may accordingly regard temperature and physical circumstances
as _making a choice_ amongst various species of trees, all owing a
certain species to subsist and propagate, to the exclusion, more or
less complete, of all others. Physical temperature acts by elimination
and suppression, in other words, by _natural selection._ Such is the
great law by which we now explain the origin and structure of diverse
existing organisms--a law as applicable to moral as to physical
conditions, to history as well as to botany and zoology, to genius and
to character, as well as to plant and to animal.
In short, there is a _moral_ temperature, consisting of the general
state of minds and manners, which acts in the same way as the other.
Properly speaking, this temperature does not produce artists; talent
and genius are gifts like seeds; what I mean to say is, that the same
country at different epochs probably contains about the same number
of men of talent, and of men of mediocrity. We know, in fact, through
statistics, that in two successive generations nearly the same number
of men are found of the requisite stature for the conscription and the
same number of men too small for soldiers. In all probability, it is
with minds as with bodies. Nature is a sower of men, and putting her
hand constantly in the same sack, distributes nearly the same quantity,
the same quality, the same proportion of seed. But in these handfuls
of seed which she scatters as she strides over time and space, not all
germinate. A certain moral temperature is necessary to develop certain
talents; if this is wanting, these prove abortive. Consequently, as
the temperature changes, so will the species of talent change; if it
becomes reversed, talent will become reversed, and, in general, we may
conceive moral temperature as _making a selection_ among different
species of talent, allowing only this or that species to develope, to
the exclusion more or less complete of others. It is through some such
mechanism that you see developed in schools at certain times and in
certain countries the sentiment of the ideal, that of the real, that
of drawing and that of color. There is a prevailing tendency which
constitutes the spirit of the age. Talent seeking to force an outlet
in another direction, finds it closed; and the force of the public
mind and surrounding habits repress and lead it astray, by imposing on
it a fixed growth.
III.
The foregoing comparison may serve you as a general indication; let us
now enter into details, and study the action of the moral temperature
on works of art.
For the sake of greater clearness we will take a very simple case,
that of a certain mental condition, in which melancholy predominates.
This supposition is not arbitrary, for such a condition has frequently
occurred in the life of humanity: five or six centuries of decadence,
depopulation, foreign invasion, famine, pests, and aggravated misery,
are amply sufficient to produce it. Asia experienced such a state of
things in the sixth century before Christ, and Europe in the period of
the first ten centuries of our own era. In times like these men lose
both courage and hope, and regard life as a burden.
Let as contemplate the effect of such a mental condition, together with
the circumstances which engender it, on the artists of an epoch like
this. We admit that nearly the same number of melancholy and joyous
temperaments, as well as a mixture of both, are met in this as at other
times; how and in what sense does the prevailing situation effect their
transformation?
It must be borne in mind that the misfortunes that afflict the public
also afflict the artist; he is one of the flock, and he suffers as
the rest suffer. For example, if invasions of barbarians occur, and
pests, famines, and calamities of all sorts prolonged for centuries and
spread over the entire country; not only one, but countless miracles,
would be necessary to save him harmless in the general inundation. On
the contrary, it is probable, and even certain, that he will have his
share of public misfortune; that he will be ruined, beaten, wounded,
and led into captivity like others; that his wife, children, relatives
and friends will share the common fate, and that he will suffer and be
subject to fears on their account, as well as on his own. During this
long-continued flood of personal misery he will, if he is gay, become
less gay, and, if melancholy, still more melancholy. This is the first
effect of his social medium.
On the other hand, if the artist is raised among melancholy companions,
the ideas he receives in infancy, with those acquired afterwards,
are melancholy. The dominant religion, accommodating itself to the
lugubrious order of things, teaches him that the earth is a place
of exile, the world a prison-house, life an evil, and that all that
concerns him is to deserve to get out of it. Philosophy, forming its
morality according to the lamentable spectacle of man's degeneracy,
proves to him that it would have been better for him not to have
been born Ordinary conversation teems with only mournful events,
the invasion of a province, the destruction of some monument, the
oppression of the weak, and civil wars among the strong. Daily
observation reveals to him only images of discouragement and grief,
beggars, and cases of starvation, a bridge left to decay, abandoned,
crumbling houses, fields going to waste, and the black walls of
dwellings ravaged by fire. All these impressions sink deep in his mind
from the first year of his life to the last, incessantly aggravating
whatever melancholy sentiment arises out of his own misfortunes.
They aggravate him so much the more proportionately to the intensity
of his artistic feeling. What makes him an artist is the practice of
imitating the essential character of things, the salient points of
objects; other men only see portions, while he sees the whole and the
spirit of them. And as in this case the salient characteristic is
melancholy, he accordingly perceives nothing else. Moreover, through
this excess of imagination and this instinct of exaggeration peculiar
to artists, he amplifies and expands it to the utmost; he becomes
impregnated with it, and charges his work with it, so that he commonly
sees and paints things in much darker colors than would be employed by
his contemporaries.
It must be added also that he finds them of great assistance to
him in his work. You know that a man who paints or writes remains
not alone face to face with his canvas or his writing-desk. On the
contrary, he goes out and talks to people and looks about him; he
listens to the hints of his friends or rivals, and seeks suggestions
in books and from surrounding works of art. An idea resembles a
seed: if the seed requires, in order to germinate, develope and
bloom, the nourishment which water, air, sun and soil afford it, the
idea, in order to complete and shape itself into form, requires to be
supplemented and aided by other minds. Accordingly, in these epochs
of melancholy, what sort of suggestions are other minds capable of
furnishing? Only melancholy ones, for only on this side do men labor.
As their experience provides them only with painful sensations and
sentiments, they can only note the shades of difference, and record
discoveries made on the path of suffering: the heart is the only field
of observation, and if this is filled with sorrow, sorrow is all
that men contemplate. They are, therefore, conscious only of grief,
dejection, chagrin and despair. If the artist demands instruction of
them this is all the return they can make. To seek in them any idea
or any information on the different kinds or different expressions of
joy would be labor lost; they can only furnish what they possess. For
this reason let him attempt to portray happiness, cheerfulness, or
gayety, and he stands alone, deprived of all support, left to his own
resources, and which in an isolated man amounts to nothing. His labor
will likewise be stamped with mediocrity. On the other hand, when he
would paint melancholy sentiments his century would come to his aid.
He finds materials prepared for him by preceding schools; he finds a
ready-made art, consisting of known processes and a beaten track. A
church ceremony, a piece of furniture, a conversation, suggests to him
a form, a color, a phrase, or a character still unknown to him; his
work, to which millions of unknown co-laborers have contributed, is
all the more beautiful, because, in addition to his own labor and his
own genius, it embodies the labor and genius of surrounding society,
and of generations that have gone before it.
There is still another reason, and the strongest of all, which draws
him to melancholy subjects; it is that his work, once exposed to the
public eye, finds appreciation only as it expresses melancholy ideas.
Men, indeed, can only comprehend sentiments analogous to those they
have themselves experienced. Other sentiments, no matter how powerfully
expressed, do not affect them; the look with their eyes, but the heart
is dormant and directly their eyes are averted. Imagine a man losing
his fortune, country, children, health and liberty, one manacled in
a dungeon for twenty years, like Pellico or Andryane, whose spirit
by degrees is changed and broken, and who becomes melancholy and a
mystic, and whose discouragement is incurable; such a man entertains
a horror of cheerful music, and has no disposition to read Rabelais;
if you place him before the merry brutes of Rubens, he will turn aside
and place himself before the canvases of Rembrandt; he will enjoy only
the music of Chopin and the poetry of Lamartine or Heine. The same
thing happens to the public and to individuals; their taste depends
on their situation; their sadness gives them a taste for melancholy
works; cheerful productions are accordingly repudiated, and the artist
is censured or neglected. Now an artist composes mostly in order to
obtain appreciation and applause; this is his ruling passion. Hence,
therefore, betides other causes, his ruling passion, added to the
pressure of public opinion, leads him, pushes him, and constantly
brings him back to the expression of melancholy, and barring the ways
to him which would lead him to the portrayal of gayety and happiness.
Through this series of obstacles every passage would be closed for
works of art manifesting joy. If an artist overcomes one obstacle,
he is arrested by others. If he meets with joyous natures he will
be saddened _by_ their personal misfortunes. Education and current
conversation fill their minds with gloomy ideas. The artists' faculties
by which they detach and amplify the leading traits of objects, will
find for their exercise none but melancholy ones. The experience and
labor of others provide them with suggestions and are co-operative only
in melancholy subjects. Finally, the earnest and decisive will of the
public allows them to produce only melancholy subjects. Consequently,
the class of artists and their works suitable for the expression of
gayety and joyousness disappear, or end by becoming reduced to almost
nothing.
Consider, now, the opposite case, that of a general condition of
cheerfulness. That occurs in renaissance epochs, when order, wealth,
population, comfort, prosperity, and useful and beautiful discoveries
are constantly increasing. By reversing its terms the analysis we have
just made is applicable word for word; the same process of reasoning
proves that the works of art of such a period will all, more or less,
express a joyous character.
Consider, now, an intermediary case, that is to say, a commingling of
this or that phase of joy or sadness, which is the ordinary condition
of things. By a proper modification of terras, the analysis is equally
pertinent; the same reasoning demonstrates that works of art express
corresponding combinations, and a corresponding species of joy and
melancholy.
Let us conclude, therefore, that in every simple or complex state, the
social medium, that is to say, the general state of mind and manners,
determines the species of works of art in suffering only those which
are in harmony with it, and in suppressing other species, through a
series of obstacles interposed, and a series of attacks renewed, at
every step of their development.
IV.
Let us now leave supposed cases, simplified to give clearness to
the exposition, and take up real ones. You will see in glancing at
the most important of a historical series, a verification of the
law. I will select four which are the four great cycles of European
civilization--Greek and Roman antiquity, the feudal and Christian
middle ages, the well-regulated aristocratic monarchies of the
seventeenth century, and the industrial democracies of the present day,
directed by the sciences. Each of these periods has its own art, or
some department of art peculiar to it, either sculpture, architecture,
the drama or music, or some determined phase of each of these
great arts; in every case a distinct, singularly rich and complete
vegetation, which, in its leading features, reflects the principal
traits of the art and the nation. Let us, accordingly, consider turn
the different soils, and we shall that all produce different flowers.
V.
About three thousand years ago there appeared on the shores and islands
of the Ægean Sea a remarkably handsome, intelligent race, viewing life
in quite a new way. It did not allow itself to be absorbed by a great
religious conception like the Hindoos and Egyptians, nor by a great
social organization like the Assyrians and Persians, nor by great
industrial and commercial usages after the fashion of the Phoenicians
and Carthagenians. Instead of a theocracy and a hierarchy of caste, and
instead of a monarchy and a hierarchy of functionaries and of great
trading and commercial establishments, the men of that race had an
invention of their own called the city, which city, in sending forth
branches, gave birth to others of the same description. One of these,
Miletus, produced three hundred towns, and colonized the entire coast
of the Black Sea. Others did the same, the Mediterranean Sea being
encircled with a garland of flourishing cities, extending from Cyrene
to Marseilles, along the gulfs and promontories of Spain, Italy,
Greece, Asia Minor and Africa.
What was the life of this city?[1] A citizen performed but little
manual labor; he was generally supported by his subjects and
tributaries, and always served by slaves. The poorest man in the place
had one to keep house for him. Athens counted four for each citizen;
and lesser cities, like Ægina and Corinth, possessed from four to five
hundred thousand. Servants, of course, abounded. The citizen, however,
needed but little help. Like all the finely-built races of the south,
he was abstemious, a meal consisting of three or four olives, a bit of
garlic, and the head of a fish.[2] His wardrobe consisted of sandals,
a small shirt, and a large mantle, like that of a shepherd. His house
was a narrow, frail, ill-constructed tenement, into which robbers
could penetrate by piercing the walls,[3] and which he only used for
sleeping; a bed and two or three beautiful vases were the principal
articles of furniture. The citizen had few wants, and he passed the day
in the open air.
How did he dispose of his leisure? Serving neither king nor priest,
he was, as far as he was concerned, free and sovereign in the city.
He elected his own pontiffs and magistrates, and he himself, in
turn, could be elected to sacerdotal and other offices; whether
blacksmith or currier, he judged the most important political cases
in the tribunals, and decided the gravest of affairs of state in the
assemblies; his occupation consisted, substantially, of public business
and war. To be a politician and a soldier was a part of his duty; other
pursuits were of little importance to him; the attention of a free man,
in his opinion, ought to be applied to these two employments. And he
was right, for, at that time, human life was not protected as it is in
ours; human societies had not acquired the stability which they now
have. Most of these cities, built and scattered along the Mediterranean
shores, were surrounded by barbarians eager to prey upon them; the
citizen was obliged to be under arms, like the European of the present
day in Japan and in New Zealand; if not, Gauls, Libyans, Samitites
and Bithynians would soon have pitched their camps amid the ruins
of battered walls and devastated temples. Besides all this, these
cities were inimical to each other. The rights of war were atrocious;
a vanquished city was often devoted to destruction; a wealthy noted
man might any day see his dwelling in ashes, his property pillaged,
his wife and daughters sold to recruit places of prostitution; he
himself, and his sons, enslaved, would be buried in mines, or compelled
by the lash to turn a mill. With such perils before him it is natural
for a man to be interested in affairs of state, and be qualified for
battle: he has to become a politician under penalty of death. Ambition,
however, and love of glory are equal stimulants. Every city aspired to
reduce or humble every other city, to acquire vassals, to conquer or to
make profitable the persons of others.[4] The citizen passed his life
in the public thoroughfares, discussing the best means for preserving
and aggrandizing his city, canvassing its alliances, treaties, laws and
constitution; now listening to orators, and again acting as one himself
up to the very moment of going aboard his vessel in order to wage war
in Thrace or in Egypt, against other Greeks, against the barbarians, or
against the Great King.
To reach this point, they had systematized a peculiar discipline. As
there were no industrial facilities in those days, the machinery of
war was unknown. War was a combat between man and man; consequently,
the essential thing to insure victory was not to transform soldiers
into marshalled automatons, as in our day, but to render each soldier
the most resistant, the strongest, and the most agile body possible;
in short, a highly-tempered gladiator, capable of the utmost physical
endurance.
To this end, Sparta which, about the eighth century, gave the example
and the impulse to all Greece, had a very complicated and no less
efficacious military system. She herself was a camp without walls,
situated, like our camps in Kabyle, amidst enemies and a conquered
people, wholly military, and devoted to attack and self-defence. In
order to have a perfect military, it was necessary to have a splendid
race; it was managed as in stock-breeding. All deformed children were
deprived of life. The law, moreover, prescribed the age for marriage
and selected the most suitable time and circumstances for proper
breeding. An old man happening to have a young wife was obliged to give
her over to a young man in order to have a good healthy offspring. A
middle-aged man having a friend whose beauty and character he admired,
might give him the use of his wife.[5] After having constituted the
race, they shaped the individual. Young men were enrolled, drilled,
and accustomed to live in common like a troop of children. They were
divided into two rival bands, who inspected each other, and fought
together with their feet and their fists. They slept in the open
air, bathed in the cool waters of the Eurotas, went marauding, ate
sparingly, fast and badly, rested on beds of rushes, drank nothing but
water, and endured every inclemency of climate. Young girls exercised
in the same manner, and the matured were restricted to almost the same
routine. The rigor of this antique discipline was undoubtedly less, or
was mitigated, in other cities; nevertheless, with these mitigations,
the same road conducted to the same end. Young people passed the
greater part of the day in the gymnasia, wrestling, jumping, boxing,
racing, pitching quoits; fortifying and rendering supple their naked
muscles. It was their aim to produce strong, robust bodies, the most
beautiful and the nimblest possible, and no system of education ever
succeeded better in obtaining them.[6]
These peculiar customs of the Greeks gave birth to peculiar ideas.
In their eyes the ideal man was not the man of thought, or a man of
delicate sensibility, but the naked man, the man of a fine stock and
growth, well-proportioned, active and accomplished in all physical
exercises. This mode of thinking was manifested by a variety of traits.
In the first place, whilst the Carians and the Lydians around them, and
their barbarian neighbors generally, were ashamed to appear naked, they
stripped without embarrassment in order to wrestle and run races.[7]
The young girls of Sparta were in the habit of exercising almost
naked. You will perceive that gymnastic exercises had suppressed, or
at least transformed, modesty. In the second place, the great national
festivals of the Greeks, the Olympian, Pythian, and Nemean games,
consisted of a display and triumph of the naked figure. The youth of
the first families resorted to these from all parts of Greece, and
from the remotest Grecian colonies. They, prepared themselves for them
a long time beforehand by special training and the severest labor,
and there, under the eyes and applause of the whole nation, stripped
of their clothing, they wrestled, boxed, pitched quoits, and raced
on foot or in the chariot. Victories of this class, which we of the
present day leave to a Hercules in a circus, they regarded as of the
first importance. The victorious athlete in the foot-race gave his
name to the Olympiad; his praises were chanted by the greatest poets;
Pindar, the most illustrious lyric poet of antiquity, sang only of
chariot races. On returning to his native city the victorious athlete
was received in triumph, and his strength and agility became the pride
of the place. One of these, Milo of Crotona, who was invincible at
wrestling, was chosen general, and led his fellow-citizens to battle,
clad in a lion's skin and armed with a club like Hercules, to whom he
was compared. It is related that a certain Diagoras saw his two sons
crowned on the same day, and was carried around by them in triumph
before the assembled multitude. Deeming a like happiness too great for
one mortal, the people cried out to him. "Die, Diagoras, for thou
canst not now become a god!" Diagoras, suffocated with emotion, did
indeed expire in the arms of his children. In his eyes, as in the eyes
of all Greece, to see his sons possessing the most vigorous fists and
the nimblest legs was the height of terrestrial bliss. Whether this
be truth or legend, such a judgment proves the excessive degree of
admiration entertained by the Greeks for the perfection of the human
form.
On this account they were not afraid to expose it before the gods on
solemn occasions. They had a formal system of attitudes and actions,
called _orchestrique,_ which regulated and taught them beautiful
postures of the sacred dances. After the battle of Salamis the tragic
poet Sophocles, then fifteen years old, and celebrated for his beauty,
stripped himself of his clothing in order to dance and chant the pæan
before the trophy. One hundred years later, Alexander, on passing
through Asia Minor to contend with Darius, cast aside his garments,
along with his companions, for the purpose of honoring the tomb of
Achilles with races. But the Greeks went still further; they considered
the perfection of the human form as attesting divinity. In a town in
Sicily a young man of extraordinary beauty was worshipped, and after
death, altars were erected in his honor.[8] In Homer, which is the
Grecian Bible, you will find everywhere that the gods had a human body
which the flesh-lance could pierce, flowing red blood, instincts,
passions and pleasures similar in every respect to our own, and to such
an extent that heroes become the lovers of goddesses, and gods beget
children of mortal mothers. Between Olympus and the earth there is no
abyss; they descend from, and we ascend to, it; if they surpass us,
it is because they are exempt from death, because their wounds heal
quicker, and they are stronger, handsomer and happier than we. In other
respects, they eat, drink and quarrel as we do, all enjoying the same
senses, and employing the same corporeal functions. Greece has so well
worked out its model of the beautiful human animal that it has made its
idol of it, and glorifies it on earth, by making a divinity of it in
heaven.
Out of this conception statuary is born, and we can mark every
moment of its growth. On the one hand, an athlete, once crowned, was
entitled to a statue; crowned a third time, he was awarded an iconical
statue--that is to say, an effigy bearing his portrait. On the other
hand, the gods being only human forms, more serene and more perfect
than others, it was natural to represent them by statues. For that
purpose there is no need of a forced dogma. The marble or bronze effigy
is not an allegory, but an exact image; it does not give to the god
muscles, bones, and a heavy covering which it has not; it represents
the reclothing of flesh which covers it, and the living form which is
its substance. It suffices, in order to be a truthful portrait, that it
should be the most beautiful, and reproduce the immortal calm by which
the god is exalted above mortals.
The statue is now blocked out--is the sculptor qualified to produce
it? Dwell a moment on his preparation. Men in those days studied the
body naked and in action, in the baths, in the gymnasia, in the sacred
dances and at the public games; they observed and preferred such forms
and such attitudes as denoted vigor, health, and activity; they
labored with all their might to impress on it these forms and to shape
it to these attitudes. For three or four hundred years they were thus
correcting, purifying, developing their idea of physical beauty. It is
not surprising that they finally discovered the ideal type of the human
form. We of the present day that are familiar with it owe our knowledge
of it to them. When Nicholas of Pisa and other early sculptors at
the end of the Gothic period abandoned the meagre, bony, and ugly
forms of hieratic tradition, it was because they took an example from
Greek bas-reliefs, preserved or exhumed; and if to-day, forgetting
our distorted and defective bodies, as plebeians or thinkers, we wish
to find again some type of the perfect form, it is in these statues,
monuments of a noble, unoccupied, gymnastic life, that we must seek our
instruction.
Not only the form of it is perfect, but again, which is unique, it
suffices for the thought of the artist. The Greeks, having assigned
to the body a dignity of its own, were not tempted, like the moderns,
to subordinate it to the head. A chest breathing healthily, a trunk
solidly resting on the thighs, a nervous supple leg impelling the
body forward with ease; they did not occupy themselves solely with
the breadth of a thoughtful forehead, with the frown of an irritated
brow, or the turn of a sarcastic lip. They could limit themselves to
the conditions of perfect statuary, which leaves the eye without an
iris, and the head without expression; which prefers quiet personages,
or those occupied by insignificant action; which commonly employs
only a uniform tint, either of marble or cf bronze; which leaves the
picturesque to painting, and abandons dramatic interest to literature;
which, confined to, but ennobled by, the nature of its materials
and its limited domain, avoids the representation of details, of
physiognomy, of the casualties of human agitation, in order to detach
the pure and abstract form, and thus illuminate the sanctuaries with
motionless, peaceful, august effigies in which human nature recognized
its heroes and its gods.
Statuary, accordingly, is the central art of Greece; other arts are
related to it, accompany it, or imitate it. No other art has so well
expressed the national life; no other was so cultivated or so popular.
In the hundred small temples around Delphi, in which the treasures of
the cities were kept, "a whole world of marble, gold, silver, brass,
and bronze, twenty different bronzes, and of all tints, thousands of
glorified dead in irregular groups, seated and standing, radiated the
veritable subjects of the god of light."[9] When Rome, at a later day,
despoiled the Greek world of its treasures, this vast city possessed a
population of statues almost equal to that of its living inhabitants.
At the present time, after so many centuries and such devastation, it
is estimated that more than sixty thousand statues have been discovered
at Rome and in its surrounding Campagna. A like harvest of sculpture
has never been seen, such a prodigious abundance of flowers,--a display
of flowers so perfect, a growth so natural, so continuous and varied.
You have just seen the cause of it, in digging up the earth layer by
layer, and in observing that all the foundations of the human soil,
institutions, manners, ideas, have contributed to sustain it.
[Footnote 1: Grote, _History of Greece--_Boeckh, _Political Economy of
the Athenians_--Wullon, _Slavery in Antiquity._]
[Footnote 2: The Frogs of Aristophanes; the Cock of Lucian.]
[Footnote 3: Their proper name was wall-piercers.]
[Footnote 4: Thucydides, Book I. See the divers expeditions of the
Athenians between the peace of Cimon and the Peloponnesian war.]
[Footnote 5: Xenophon. The Lacedemonian Republic, _passim. _]
[Footnote 6: The Dialogues of Plato. The Clouds of Aristophanes.]
[Footnote 7: The Lacedemonians adopted this custom about the 14th
Olympiad.--Plato.]
[Footnote 8: Herodotus.]
[Footnote 9: Michelet.]
VI.
This military organization common to all the cities of antiquity
at length had its effect,--a sad effect. War being the natural
condition of things, the weak were over-powered by the strong, and,
more than once, one might have seen formed states of considerable
magnitude under the control or tyranny of a victorious or dominant
city. Finally one arose, Rome, which, possessing greater energy,
patience, and skill, more capable of subordination and command, of
consecutive views and practical calculations, attained, after seven
hundred years of effort, in incorporating under her dominion the
entire basin of the Mediterranean and many great outlying countries.
To gain this point she submitted to military discipline, and, like a
fruit springing from its germ, a military despotism was the issue.
Thus was the Empire formed. Towards the first century of our era, the
world, organized under a regular monarchy, seemed at last to have
attained to order and tranquillity. It issued only in a decline. In
the horrible destruction of conquest cities perished by hundreds and
men by millions. During an entire century the conquerors themselves
massacred each other, and the civilized world having lost its free
men, lost the half of its inhabitants.[1] Citizens, converted into
subjects, and no longer pursuing noble ends, abandoned themselves to
indolence and luxury, refused to marry and to have children. Machinery
being unknown, and the hand the only instrument of labor, the slaves,
whose lot it was to provide for the pleasures, pomp, and refinements
of society, disappeared under a burden too heavy for them to bear.
At the expiration of four hundred years the enervated, depopulated
empire had not sufficient men or energy to repel the barbarians. The
barbarous wave entered, sweeping away the dykes; after the first, a
second, then a third, and so on for a period of five hundred years.
The evils they inflicted cannot be described: people exterminated,
monuments destroyed, fields devastated, and cities burnt; industry,
the fine arts, and the sciences mutilated, degraded, forgotten; fear,
ignorance, and brutality spread everywhere and established. They were
complete savages, similar to the Hurons and Iroquois suddenly encamped
in the midst of a cultivated and thinking world like ours. Imagine a
herd of wild bulls let loose amid the furniture and decorations of a
palace, and after this another herd, so that the ruins left by the
first perished under the hoofs of the second, and, scarcely installed
in disorder, each troop of brutes had to arouse itself in order to
battle with its horns a bellowing, insatiable troop of invaders. When
at last, in the tenth century, the last horde had made its lair and
glutted itself, men seemed to be in no better condition. The barbarian
chiefs becoming feudal barons, fought amongst themselves, pillaging
peasants and burning their crops, robbing the merchants, and wantonly
robbing and maltreating their miserable serfs. The land remained waste,
and provisions became scarce. In the eleventh century forty out of
seventy years were years of famine. A monk, Raoul Glaber, relates that
it got to be common to eat human flesh; a butcher was burnt alive for
exposing it for sale in his stall. Add to this universal poverty and
filth, and a total neglect of the simplest of hygienic principles, and
you can well understand how leprosy, pests, and epidemics, becoming
acclimated, raged as if upon their native soil. People degenerated
to the condition of the anthropophagi of New Zealand, to the ignoble
brutality of the Papuans and Caledonians, to the lowest depths of the
human cesspool, seeing that reminiscences of the past trenched on the
misery of the present, and since some thinking heads, still reading
the ancient language felt in a confused way the immensity of the fall,
the whole depth of the abyss into which the human species had been
engulphed for a thousand years.
You may divine the sentiments which such a condition of things, so
extreme and so lasting, implanted in people's breasts. At first there
was weakness, disgust of life, and the deepest melancholy; "the
world," said a writer of that day, "is nothing but an abyss of vice and
immodesty." Life seemed a foretaste of hell. Many withdrew from it,
and not alone the poor, the feeble, and women, but sovereign lords,
and even kings; such as possessed delicate and noble natures preferred
the tranquillity and monotony of the cloister. On the approach of the
year one thousand a general belief in the extinction of the world
prevailed, and many, seized with fright, made over their property
to churches and convents. On the other hand, and coupled with this
terror and despondency, there arose an extraordinary degree of nervous
exaltation. When men are very miserable they become excitable, like
invalids and prisoners; their sensibility increases, and acquires a
feminine delicacy; their heart is filled with caprices, agitations
and despondency, excesses and effusions from which they are free in a
healthy state. They depart from moderate sentiments which alone can
maintain continuous masculine action. They indulge in re very, burst
into tears, sink down on their knees, become incapable of providing for
themselves, imagine infinite sweet and tender transports, yearning to
diffuse the excessive refinements and enthusiasm of their over-wrought
intemperate imaginations; in short, they are prone to love. Hence, we
see them developed with an enormous exaggeration, a passion unknown
to the stern and virile souls of antiquity, namely, the chivalric
mystic love of the middle ages. The calm rational love of wedlock was
subordinated to the ecstatic and unruly love encountered outside of
wedlock. Its subtleties were carefully defined and embodied in the
maxims of tribunals presided over by ladies. It was decreed there
that "love could not exist between spouses," and that "love could
refuse nothing to love.[2] Woman was no longer considered as flesh
and blood like man, but was converted into a divinity; man was only
too well compensated in the privilege of adoring: and serving her.
Human love was regarded as a celestial sentiment leading to divine
love and confounded with it. Poets transformed their mistresses into
supernatural virtue, and implored them to guide them through the
empyrean to the tabernacle of God. You can easily appreciate the hold
the Christian faith derived from such sentiments. Disgust for the
world, a tendency to ecstacy, habitual despair and infinite craving
for tender sympathy, naturally impelled men to a doctrine representing
the earth as a vale of tears, the present life a period of trial,
rapturous union with the Divinity as supreme happiness, and the love
of God as the first of duties. Morbid or trembling sensibility found
its support in the infinitude of terror and of hope, in pictures of
flaming pits and eternal perdition, and in conceptions of a radiant
paradise and of ineffable bliss. Thus supported, Christianity ruled all
souls, inspired art, and gave employment to artists. "Society," says a
contemporary, "divested itself of its old rags in order to clothe its
churches in robes of whiteness." Gothic architecture accordingly made
its appearance.
Let us observe the growth of the new Gothic edifice. In opposition to
the religions of antiquity, which were all local, belonging to castes
or to families, Christianity is a universal religion which appeals
to the multitude, and summons all men to salvation. It was necessary
accordingly for this new edifice to be very large and capable of
containing the entire population of any one city or district--the
women, the children, the serfs, the artisans, and the poor as well as
the nobles and sovereigns. The small _cella_ which contains the statue
of the Greek god, and the portico where the procession of free citizens
was displayed, were not sufficient for this immense crowd. An enormous
vault was required, lofty naves multiplied and crossed by others, and
measureless arches and colossal columns; generations of workmen flocked
in crowds for centuries to labor here for the salvation of their souls,
displacing mountains before the monument could be completed.
The men who enter here have sorrowing souls, and the ideas they come
in quest of are mournful. They meditate on this miserable life, so
troubled and confined by such an abyss, on hell and its punishments,
endless, measureless and unintermittent, on the sufferings and passion
of Christ crucified, and those of persecuted and tortured saints and
martyrs. Listening to such religious teaching, and under the burden of
their own fears, they could ill accommodate themselves to the simple
beauty and joyous effect of pure light; the clear and healthy light
of day is accordingly excluded; the interior of the edifice remains
subject to cold and lugubrious shadow; light only comes in transformed
by stained glass into purple and crimson tints, into the splendors of
topaz and amethyst, into the mystic gleams of precious stones, into
strange illuminations, seeming to afford glimpses of paradise.
Delicate over-excited imaginations like these are not content with
simple architectural forms. And first, form in itself is not sufficient
to interest them. It must be a symbol of and designate some august
mystery. The edifice with its transverse naves represents the cross
on which Christ died; its circular window with its brilliant petals
figures the rose of eternity, the leaves of which are redeemed souls;
all the dimensions of its parts correspond to sacred numbers. Again,
these forms in their richness, strangeness, boldness, delicacy and
immensity, harmonize with the intemperance and curiosity of a morbid
fancy. Vivid sensations--manifold, changing, bizarre and extreme--are
necessary to such souls. They reject the column, the horizontal and
transverse beams, the round arch, in short, the solid construction,
balanced proportions, and beautiful simplicity of antique architecture;
they do not sympathize with those noble creations that seem to have
been born without pain and to last without effort, which attain to
beauty the same time as to life, and the finished excellence of which
needs neither addition nor ornament.
They adopt for type, not the plain half-circle of the arcade, or
the simple angle formed by the column and the architrave, but the
complicated union of two curves intersected by each other, forming the
ogive. They aspire to the gigantic, covering square acres of ground
with piles of stone, binding pillars together in monstrous columns,
suspending galleries in the air, elevating arches to the skies, and
stage upon stage of belfry until their spires are lost in the clouds.
They exaggerate the delicacy of forms; they surround doors with
series of statuettes, and festoon the sides with trefoils, gables and
gargoyles; they interlace the tortuous tracery of mullions with the
motley hues of stained glass; the choir seems to be embroidered with
lace, while tombs, altars, stalls and towers are covered with mazes of
slender columns and fringes of leaves and statues. It seems as if they
wished to attain at once infinite grandeur and infinite littleness,
seeking to overwhelm the mind on either side, on the one hand with
the vastness of a mass, and on the other with a prodigious quantity
of details. Their object was evidently to produce an extraordinary
sensation; they aimed to dazzle and bewilder.
Proportionately, therefore, to the development of this style of
architecture, it becomes more and more paradoxical. In the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, the age of the flamboyant Gothic of Strasburg,
Milan, York, Nuremburg, and the Church of Brou, solidity seems to
have been wholly abandoned for ornament. At one time it bristles with
a profusion of multiplied and superposed pinnacles; at another its
exterior is draped with a lacework of mouldings. Walls are hollowed
out, and almost wholly absorbed by windows; they lack strength, and
without the buttresses raised against them the structure would fall;
ever disintegrating, it is necessary to establish colonies of masons
about them constantly to repair their constant decay. This embroidered
stonework, more and more frail as it ascends the spire, cannot sustain
itself; it has to be fastened to a skeleton of iron, and as iron rusts,
the blacksmith is summoned to contribute his share towards propping up
this unstable, delusive magnificence. In the interior the decoration is
so exuberant and complex, the groinings so richly display their thorny
and tangled vegetation, and the stalls, pulpit, and railings, swarm
with such intricate, tortuous, fantastic arabesques, that the church
no longer seems to be a sacred monument, but a rare example of the
jewellers art. It is a vast structure of variegated glass, a gigantic
piece of filigree work, a festive decoration as elaborated as that of
a queen or a bride; it is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited
woman, similar to the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate
and morbid poesy denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the
feverish, violent, and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of
knights and monks.
For this architecture, which has lasted four centuries, is not confined
to one country or to one description of edifice; it is spread over
all Europe, from Scotland to Sicily, and is employed in all civil and
religious and public and private monuments. Not only do cathedrals and
chapels bear its imprint, but fortresses, palaces, costumes, dwellings,
furniture, and equipments. Its universality, accordingly, expresses
and attests the great moral crisis, at once morbid and sublime, which,
during the whole of the middle ages, exalted, and at the same time
disordered, the human intellect.
[Footnote 1: _Rome, thirty years B. C,_ by Victor Durny.]
[Footnote 2: Andre le Chapelain.]
VII
Human institutions, like living bodies, are made and unmade by their
own forces; and their health passes away or their cure is effected
by the sole effect of their nature and their situation. Among these
feudal chiefs who ruled and plundered men in the middle-ages one was
found in each country, stronger, more politic, and better placed than
others, who constituted himself conservator of public order; sustained
by public sentiment, he by degrees weakened and subdued, subordinated
and rallied the others, and, organizing a systematic obedient
administration, became under the name of king the head of the nation.
Towards the fifteenth century, the barons, formerly his equals, were
only his officers, and towards the seventeenth century they were simply
his courtiers.
Note the significance of this term. A courtier is a member of the
king's court; that is to say, a person charged with some function or
domestic duty in the palace--either chamberlain, equerry, or gentleman
of the antechamber--receiving a salary, and addressing his master with
all the deference and ceremonial obsequiousness proper to such an
employment. But this person is not a valet, as in oriental monarchies,
for his ancestor, the grandfather of his grandfather, was the equal,
the companion, the peer of the king; and on this account he himself
belongs to a privileged class, that of noblemen. He does not serve
his prince solely through personal interest; his devotion to him is a
point of honor. The prince in his turn never neglects to treat him with
consideration. Louis XIV. threw his cane out of the window in order not
to be tempted to strike Lauzun, who had offended him. The courtier is
honored by his master, and regarded as one of his society. He lives in
familiarity with him, dances at his balls, dines at his table, rides
in the same carriage, sits in the same chairs, and frequents the same
_salon._ From such a basis court life arose; first in Italy and Spain,
subsequently in France, and afterwards in England, in Germany, and in
the north of Europe. France was its centre, and Louis XIV. gave to it
its principal _éclat._
Let us study the effect of this new state of things on minds and
characters. The kings _salon_ is the first in the country, and is
frequented by the most select society; the most admired personage,
therefore, the accomplished man whom everybody accepts for a model, is
the nobleman enjoying familiarity with his sovereign. This nobleman
entertains generous sentiments; he believes himself of a superior
race, and he says to himself, _noblesse oblige._ He is more sensitive
than other men on the point of honor, and freely risks his life at the
slightest insult. Under Louis XIII. four thousand noblemen were killed
in duels. Contempt of danger, in the eyes of this nobleman, is the
first obligation of a soul nobly born. The dandy, the worldling, so
choice of his ribbons, so careful of his perruque, is ready to encamp
in Flanders mud, and expose himself to bullets for hours together at
Neerwinden. When Luxembourg announces that he is about to give battle,
Versailles is deserted; all these young perfumed gallants hasten off
to the army as if they were going to a ball. Finally, and through a
remnant of the spirit of ancient feudalism, our nobleman regards the
monarch as his natural legitimate chief: he knows he is bound to him,
as the vassal formerly was to his suzerain, and at need will give
him his blood, his property, and his life. Under Louis XYI. noblemen
voluntarily placed themselves at the king's disposal, and on the 10th
of August many were slain in his behalf.
But they are nevertheless courtiers, that is to say, men of the world,
and in this respect perfectly polite. The King himself sets them an
example. Louis XIV. even doffed his hat to a chambermaid, and the
Memoirs of St. Simon mention a duke who saluted so frequently that he
was obliged to cross the courts of Versailles bareheaded. The courtier,
for the same reason, is accomplished in all that appertains to good
breed-ins; language never fails him in difficult circumstances; he
is a diplomat, master of himself, an adept in the art of disguising,
concealing, flattering and managing others, never giving offence, and
often pleasing. All these qualifications and these sentiments proceed
from an aristocratic spirit refined by the usages of society; they
attain to perfection in this court and in this century. Anybody of
the present time disposed to admire the choice flowers of this lost
and delicate species need not look for them in our equalized, rude
and mixed society, but must turn to the elegant, formal, monumental
parterres in which they formerly flourished.
You can imagine that people so constituted must have chosen pleasures
appropriate to their character. Their taste, indeed, like their
persons, was noble; for they were not only noble by birth, but also
through their sentiments; and correct because they were educated to
practise and respect what was becoming to them. It was this taste
which, in the seventeenth century, fashioned all their works of
art--the serious, elevated, severe productions of Poussin and Lesueur,
the grave, pompous, elaborate architecture of Mansart and Perrault,
and the stately symmetrical gardens of LeNotre. You will find its
traces in the furniture, costumes, house decoration, and carriages of
the engravings and paintings of Perelle, Sebastian Leclerc, Eigaud,
Nanteuil, and many others. Versailles, with its groups of well-bred
gods, its symmetrical alleys, its my theological water-works, its
large artificial basins, its trimmed and pruned trees modelled into
architectural designs, is a masterpiece in this direction; all its
edifices and parterres, everything belonging to it, was constructed
for men solicitous about their dignity, and strict observers of the
recognized standard of social propriety. But the imprint is still
more visible in the literature of the epoch. Never in France or in
Europe has the art of fine writing been carried to such perfection.
The greatest of French authors, as you are aware, belong to this
epoch--Bossuet, Pascal, La Fontaine, Molière, Corneille, Racine, La
Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, La Bruyère, Bourdalone, and
others. Great men not only wrote well, but almost everybody; Courier
asserted that a chambermaid of those days knew more about style than
a modern academy. In fact, a good style at that time pervaded the
air, people unconsciously inhaling it; it prevailed in correspondence
and in conversation; the court taught it; it entered into the ways of
people of the world. The man who aimed to be polished and correct in
deportment, got to be so likewise in the attributes of language and
of style. Among so many branches of literature there is one, tragedy,
which reached a singular degree of perfection, and which more than
all the rest furnishes at that time the most striking example of the
concordance which links together man and his works, manners and the
arts.
The general features of this tragedy first claim attention; they are
all calculated to please noblemen and members of the court. The poet
does not fail in the blandishment, of truth, which by its nature is
often crude; he allows no murders on the stage; he disguises brutality
and repudiates violence, such as blows, butcheries, yells, and groans,
everything that might offend the senses of a spectator accustomed to
moderation and the elegancies of the _salon._ For the same reason he
excludes disorder, never abandoning himself to the caprices of fancy
and imagination like Shakespeare; his plan is regular, he admits no
unforeseen incidents, no romantic poesy. He elaborates his scenes,
explains entrances, graduates the interest of his piece, prepares
the way for sudden turns of fortune, and skilfully anticipates and
directs dénouements. Finally, he diffuses throughout the dialogue,
like a uniform brilliant varnish, a studied versification composed
of the choicest terms and the most harmonious rhymes. If we seek the
costume of this drama in the engravings of the time we find heroes
and princesses appearing in furbelows, embroideries, bootees, swords
and plumes--a dress, in short, Greek in name, but French in taste and
fashion; such as the king, the dauphin, and the princesses paraded in,
to the music of violins, at the court performances of ballets.
Note, moreover, that all his personages are courtiers, kings and
queens, princes and princesses of royal blood, ambassadors, ministers,
officers of the guard, _menins,_[1] dependants and confidants. The
associates of princes are not here, as in ancient Greek tragedy,
slaves of the palace and nurses born under their master's roof, but
ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and gentlemen of the antechamber,
charged with certain duties in the royal household; we readily detect
this in their conversational ability, in their skill in flattery, in
their perfect education, in their exquisite deportment, and in their
monarchical sentiments as subjects and vassals. Their masters, like
themselves, are French noblemen of the seventeenth century, proud
and courteous, heroic in Corneille and noble in Racine; they are
gallants with the ladies, faithful to their name and race, capable of
sacrificing their dearest interests and strongest affections to their
honor, and incapable of uttering a word or an act which the most rigid
courtesy would not authorize. Iphigenia, in Racine, delivered up by her
father to her executioners, does not regret life, weeping like a girl,
as in Euripides, but thinks it her duty to obey her father and her king
without a murmur, and to die without shedding a tear, because she is a
princess. Achilles, who in Homer stamps, still unappeased, on the body
of the dying Hector, feeling like a lion or wolf, as if he would "eat
the raw flesh" of his vanquished antagonist, is, in Racine, a Prince of
Condé, at once brilliant and seductive, passionate concerning honor,
devoted to the fair, impetuous, it is true, and irritable, but with
the reserved vivacity of a young officer who, even when most excited,
maintains good breeding and never stoops to brutality. All these
characters are models of polite address, and show a knowledge of the
world never at fault. Head, in Racine, the first dialogue of _Oreste_
and _Pyrrhus,_ and the whole of the part of _Acomat_ and of _Ulysse;_
nowhere is greater tact or oratorical dexterity apparent; nowhere
more ingenious compliments and flatteries, exordiums so well poised,
such a quick revelation, such an ingenious adjustment, such a delicate
insinuation of appropriate motives. The wildest and most impetuous
lovers--_Hippolyte, Britannicus, Pyrrhus, Oreste,_ and _Xipharès_
--are accomplished cavaliers who turn a madrigal and bow with the
utmost deference. However violent their passions may be, _Hermione,
Andromaqne, Boxane,_ and _Bérénice,_ preserve the tone of the best
society. _Mithridate, Phèdre,_ and _Athalie,_ when expiring, express
themselves in correct periods, for a prince has to be a prince to the
last, and die in due form. This drama might be called a perfect picture
of the fashionable world. Like Gothic architecture, it represents a
positive complete side of the human mind, and this is why, like that,
it has become so universal. It has been imported into, or imitated by,
along with its accompanying taste, literature, and manners, every court
of Europe--in England, after the restoration of the Stuarts; in Spain,
on the advent of the Bourbons; and in Italy, Germany, and Russia, in
the eighteenth century. We are warranted in saying that at this epoch
France was the educator of Europe; she was the source from which was
derived all that was elegant and agreeable, whatever was proper in
style, delicate in ideas, and perfect in the art of social intercourse.
If a savage Muscovite, a dull German, a stolid Englishman, or any
other uncivilized or half-civilized man of the North quit his brandy,
pipe, and furs, his feudal or hunting or rural life, it was to French
_salons_ and to French books he betook himself, in order to acquire the
arts of politeness, urbanity, and conversation.
[Footnote 1: Foster-brother, school-companion, or other intimate of
this class.]
VIII.
This brilliant society did not last; it was its own development
which caused its dissolution. The government being absolute, ended
in becoming negligent and tyrannical; and, besides this, the king
bestowed the best offices and the greatest favor only on such of the
nobles of his court as enjoyed his intimacy. This appeared unjust to
the _bourgeoisie_ and to the people, who, having greatly increased
in numbers, wealth and intelligence, felt their power augment in
proportion to the growth of their discontent. The French Revolution was
accordingly their work; and after ten years of trial they established
a system of democracy and equality, in which, according to a fixed
order of promotion, all civil employments were ordinarily accessible
to everybody. The wars of the empire and the contagion of example
gradually spread this system beyond the frontiers of France, and
whatever may be local differences and temporary delays, it is now
evident that the tendency of the whole of Europe is to imitate it. The
new construction of society, coupled with the invention of industrial
machinery, and the great abatement of rudeness in manners and customs,
has changed the condition as well as the character of man. Henceforth,
man is exempt from arbitrary measures, and is protected by a good
police. However lowly born, all careers are open to him; an enormous
increase of useful articles, places within reach of the poorest,
conveniences and pleasures of which, two centuries ago, the rich were
entirely ignorant. Again, the rigor of authority is mitigated, both
in society and in the family; a father is now the companion of his
children, and the citizen has become the equal of the noble. Human
life, in short, displays a lesser degree of misery, and a lighter
degree of oppression.
But, as a counterpart of this, Ave see ambition and cupidity spreading
their wings. Accustomed to comfort and luxuries, and obtaining here and
there glimpses of happiness, man begins to regard happiness and comfort
as his due. The more he obtains, the more exacting he becomes, and the
more his pretensions exceed his acquisitions. The practical sciences
also having made great progress, and instruction being diffused,
liberated thought abandons itself to all daring enterprises; hence it
happens that men, relinquishing the traditions which formerly regulated
their beliefs, deem themselves capable, through intellect alone, of
attaining to the highest truths. Questions of every kind are mooted,
moral, political and religious; men seek knowledge by groping their
way in every direction. For fifty years past we behold this strange
conflict of systems and sects, each tendering us new creeds and perfect
theories of happiness.
Such a state of things has a wonderful effect on minds and ideas.
The representative man, that is to say, the character who occupies
the stage, and to whom the spectators award the most interest and
sympathy, is the melancholy, ambitious dreamer--René, Faust, Werther
and Manfred--a yearning heart, restless, wandering and incurably
miserable. And he is miserable for two reasons. In the first place he
is over-sensitive, too easily affected by the lesser evils of life; he
has too great a craving for delicate and blissful sensations; he is
too much accustomed to comfort; he has not had the semi-feudal and
semi-rustic education of our ancestors; he has not been roughly handled
by his father, whipped at college, obliged to maintain respectful
silence in the presence of great personages, and had his mental growth
retarded by domestic discipline; he has not been compelled, as in
ancient times, to use his own arm and sword to protect himself, to
travel on horseback, and to sleep in disagreeable lodgings. In the soft
atmosphere of modern comfort and of sedentary habits, he has become
delicate, nervous, excitable, and less capable of accommodating himself
to the course of life which always exacts effort and imposes trouble.
On the other hand, he is skeptical. Society and religion both being
disturbed--in the midst of a pêle-mêle of doctrines and an irruption
of new theories--his precocious judgment, too rapidly instructed,
and too soon unbridled, precipitates him early and blindly off the
beaten track made smooth for his fathers by habit, and which they
have trodden, led on by tradition and governed by authority. All the
barriers which served as guides to minds having fallen, he rushes
forward into the vast, confusing field which is opened out before his
eyes; impelled by almost superhuman ambition and curiosity he darts off
in the pursuit of absolute truth and infinite happiness. Neither love,
glory, knowledge nor power, as we find these in this world, can satisfy
him; the intemperance of his desires, irritated by the incompleteness
of his conquests and by the nothingness of his enjoyments, leaves
him prostrate amid the ruins of his own nature, without his jaded,
enfeebled, impotent imagination being able to represent to him the
_beyond_ which he covets, and the unknown _what_ which he has not.
This evil has been styled the great malady of the age. Forty years
ago it was in full force, and under the apparent frigidity or gloomy
impassibility of the positive mind of the present day it still subsists.
I have not the time to show you the innumerable effects of a like state
of mind on works of art. You may trace them in the great development of
the lyrical, sentimental and philosophical poetry of France, Germany
and England; again, in the corruption and enrichment of language and
in the invention of new classes and of new characters in literature;
in the style and sentiments of all the great modern writers, from
Chateaubriand to Balzac, from Goethe to Heine, from Cowper to Byron,
and from Alfieri to Leopardi. You will find analogous symptoms in the
arts of design if you observe their feverish, tortured and painfully
archeological style, their aim at dramatic effect, psychological
expression, and local fidelity; if you observe the confusion which has
befogged the schools and injured their processes; if you pay attention
to the countless gifted minds who, shaken by new emotions, have opened
out new ways; if you analyze the profound sympathy for scenery which
has given birth to a complete and original landscape art. But there
is another art, Music, which has suddenly reached an extraordinary
development. This development is one of the salient characteristics of
our epoch, and the dependence of this on the modern mind, the ties by
which they are connected, I shall endeavor to point out to you.
This art was born, and necessarily, in two countries where people
sing naturally, Italy and Germany. It was gestating for a century and
a half in Italy, from Palestrina to Pergolese, as formerly painting
from Giotto to Massaccio, discovering processes and feeling its
way in order to acquire its resources. At the commencement of the
eighteenth century it suddenly burst forth, with Scarlatti, Marcello
and Handel. This is a most remarkable epoch. Painting at this time
ceased to nourish in Italy, and in the midst of political stagnation,
voluptuous, effeminate customs prevailed, furnishing an assembly of
sigisbés, Lindors and amorous ladies for the roulades and tender
sentimental scenes of the opera. Grave, ponderous Germany, at that time
the latest in acquiring self-consciousness, now succeeds in displaying
the severity and grandeur of its religious sentiment, its profound
knowledge, and its vague melancholy instincts in the sacred music of
Sebastian Bach, anticipating the evangelical epic of Klopstock. Tn the
old and in the new nation the reign and expression of _sentiment_ is
beginning. Between the two, half-Germanic and half-Italian, is Austria,
conciliating the two spirits, producing Haydn, Gluck and Mozart. Music
now becomes cosmopolite and universal on the confines of that great
mental convulsion of souls styled the French Revolution, as formerly
painting under the impulse of the great intellectual revival known
under the name of the Renaissance. We need not be astonished at the
appearance of this new art, for it corresponds to the appearance of a
new genius--that of the ruling, morbid, restless, ardent character I
have attempted to portray for you. It is to this spirit that Beethoven,
Mendelssohn and Weber formerly addressed themselves, and to which
Meyerbeer, Berlioz and Verdi are now striving to accommodate themselves.
Music is the organ of this over-refined excessive sensibility and
vague boundless aspiration; it is expressly designed for this service,
and no art so well performs its task. And this is so because, on the
one hand, music is founded on a more or less remote imitation of a cry
which is the natural, spontaneous, complete expression of passion, and
which, affecting us through a corporeal stimulus, instantly arouses
involuntary sympathy, so that the tremulous delicacy of every nervous
being finds in it its impulse, its echo, and its ministrant. On the
other hand, founded on relationships of sounds which represent no
living form, and which, especially in instrumental music, seem to be
the reveries of an incorporeal soul, it is better adapted than any
other art to express floating thoughts, formless dreams, objectless
limitless desires, the grandiose and dolorous mazes of a troubled heart
which aspires to all and is attached to nothing. This is why, along
with the discontent, the agitations, and the hopes of modern democracy,
music has left its natal countries and diffused itself over all Europe;
and why you see at the present time the most complicated symphonies
attracting crowds in France, where, thus far, the national music has
been reduced to the song and the melodies of the Vaudeville.
IX.
The foregoing illustrations, gentlemen, seem to me sufficient to
establish the law governing the character and creation of works of
art. And not only do they establish it, but they accurately define
it. In the beginning of this section I stated that _the work of art
is determined by an aggregate which is the general state of the mind
and surrounding manners._ We may now advance another step, and note
precisely in their order each link of the chain, connecting together
cause and effect.
In the various illustrations we have considered, you have remarked
first, a _general situation,_ in other words, a certain universal
condition of good or evil, one of servitude or of liberty, a state of
wealth or of poverty, a particular form of society, a certain species
of religious faith; in Greece, the free martial city, with its slaves;
in the middle ages, feudal oppression, invasion and brigandage, and
an exalted phase of Christianity; the court life of the seventeenth
century; the industrial and studied democracy of the nineteenth, guided
by the sciences; in short, a group of circumstances controlling man,
and to which he is compelled to resign himself.
This situation developes in man corresponding needs, distinct
_aptitudes_ and _special sentiments_--physical activity, a tendency
to revery; here rudeness, and there refinement; at one time a martial
instinct, at another conversational talent, at another a love of
pleasure, and a thousand other complex and varied peculiarities. In
Greece we see physical perfection and a balance of faculties which no
manual or cerebral excess of life deranges; in the middle ages, the
intemperance of over-excited imaginations and the delicacy of feminine
sensibility; in the seventeenth century, the polish and good-breeding
of society and the dignity of aristocratic _salons_; and in modern
times, the grandeur of unchained ambitions and the morbidity of
unsatisfied yearnings.
Now, this group of sentiments, aptitudes and needs, constitutes, when
concentrated in one person and powerfully displayed by him, _the
representative man,_ that is to say, a model character to whom his
contemporaries award all their admiration and all their sympathy;
there is, for instance, in Greece, the naked youth, of a fine race and
accomplished in all bodily exercise; in the middle ages, the ecstatic
monk and the amorous knight; in the seventeenth century, the perfect
courtier; and in our days, the melancholy insatiable Faust or Werther.
Moreover, as this personage is the most captivating, the most important
and the most conspicuous of all, it is he whom artists present to the
public, now concentrated in an ideal personage, when their art, like
painting, sculpture, the drama, the romance or the epic, is imitative;
now, dispersed in its elements, as in architecture and in music,
where art excites emotions without incarnating them. All their labor,
therefore, may be summed up as follows: they either represent this
character, or address themselves to it; the symphonies of Beethoven
and the "storied windows" of cathedrals are addressed to it; and it
is represented in the Niobe group of antiquity and in the Agamemnon
and Achilles of Racine. _All art, therefore, depends on it,_ since the
whole of art is applied only to conform to, or to express it.
A general situation, provoking tendencies and special faculties;
a representative man, embodying these predominant tendencies and
faculties; sounds, forms, colors, or language giving this character
sensuous form, or which comport with the tendencies and faculties
comprising it, such are the four terms of the series; the first carries
with it the second, the second the third, and the third the fourth,
so that the slightest variation of either involves a corresponding
variation in those that follow, and reveals a corresponding variation
in those that precede it, permitting abstract reasoning in either
direction in an ascending or descending scale of progression.[1] As far
as I am capable of judging, this formula embraces everything. If, now,
we insert between these diverse terms the accessory causes occurring
to modify their effects; if, in order to explain the sentiments of
an epoch, we add an examination of race to that of the social medium;
if, in order to explain the works of art of any age, we consider,
besides the prevailing tendencies of that age, the particular period of
the art, and the particular sentiments of each artist, we shall then
derive from the law not only the great revolutions and general forms
of man's imagination, but, again, the differences between national
schools, the incessant variations of various styles, and the original
characteristics of the works of every great master. Thus followed out,
such an explanation will be complete, since it furnishes at once the
general traits of each school, and the distinctive traits which, in
this school, characterize individuals. We are about to enter upon this
study in relation to Italian art; it is a long and difficult task, and
I have need of your attention in order to pursue it to the end.
[Footnote 1: This law may be applied to the study of all literatures
and to every art. The student may begin with the fourth term,
proceeding from this to the first, strictly adhering to the order of
the series.]
X.
Before proceeding further, gentlemen, there is a practical and personal
conclusion due to our researches, and which is applicable to the
present order of things.
You have observed that each situation produces a certain state of
mind followed by a corresponding class of works of art. This is why
every new situation must produce a new state of mind, and consequently
a new class of works; and therefore why the social medium of the
present day, now in the course, of formation, ought to produce its own
works like the social mediums that have gone before it. This is not
a simple supposition based on the current of desire and of hope; it
is the result of a law resting on the authority of experience and on
the testimony of history. From the moment a law is established it is
good for all time; the connections of things in the present, accompany
connections of things in the past and in the future. Accordingly,
it need not be said in these days that art is exhausted. It is true
that certain schools no longer exist and can no longer be revived;
that certain arts languish, and that the future upon which we are
entering does not promise to furnish the aliment that these require.
But art itself, which is the faculty of perceiving and expressing the
leading character of objects, is as enduring as the civilization of
which it is the best and earliest fruit. What its forms will be, and
which of the five great arts will provide the A'ehicle of expression
of future sentiment, we are not called upon to decide we have the
right to affirm that new forms will arise, and an appropriate mould
be found in which to cast them. We have only to open our eyes to see
a change going on in the condition of men, and consequently in their
minds, so profound, so universal, and so rapid that no other century
has witnessed the like of it. The three causes that have formed the
modern mind continue to operate with increasing efficacy. You are
all aware that discoveries in the positive sciences are multiplying
daily; that geology, organic chemistry, history, entire branches of
physics and zoology, are contemporary productions; that the growth of
experience is infinite, and the applications of discovery unlimited;
that means of communication and transport, cultivation, trade,
mechanical contrivances, all the elements of human power, are yearly
spreading and concentrating beyond all expectation. None of you are
ignorant that the political machine works smoother in the same sense;
that communities, becoming more rational and humane, are watchful of
internal order, protecting talent, aiding the feeble and the poor;
in short, that everywhere, and in every way, man is cultivating his
intellectual faculties and ameliorating his social condition. We cannot
accordingly deny that men's habits, ideas and condition transform
themselves, nor reject this consequence, that such renewal of minds and
things brings along with it a renewal of art. The first period of this
evolution gave rise to the glorious French school of 1830; it remains
for us to witness the second--the field which is open to your ambition
and your labor. On its very threshold, you have a right to augur well
of your century and of yourselves; for the patient study we have
just terminated shows you that to produce beautiful works, the sole
condition necessary is that which the great Goethe indicated: "Fill
your mind and heart, however large, with ideas and sentiments of your
age, and work will follow."
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Philosophy of Art, by Hippolyte Taine