Before returning to our point of departure, here is a résumé:
Two sorts of emotions share in the shaping of the aesthetic sense:
emotions of a genesial nature, and all the other emotions whatsoever,
in a proportion which varies infinitely with each man. The first are
those which we feel when confronted with the perfect representation
of our racial type. Apollo is beautiful, because he is the human
male in all its purity. For the majority of men, every adventitious
idea being rigorously excluded, the sight of the marble is agreeable
because it evokes desire, either directly or, according to the sex,
by counter-evocation. Stendhal's saying will be remembered: "Beauty
is a promise of happiness." The sensualistic philosophy which enabled
him to make this definition was not stupid. We shall be obliged to
return to it, with science as a point of support. In short, it was
then for the purpose of describing the "promise of happiness," that
the word "beauty" was invented. And this word has been successively
applied to everything that promised men the realization of one of their
increasingly numerous and complex desires. Later, the emotional need
having become extremely developed, it was also applied to all causes
of emotion, even terrible or sanguinary; but these varied emotions,
which make up the very life of man, have a goal--like the sense of
smell in the emperor-moth. They penetrate us to make us remember that
our one duty, as living creatures, is to conserve the species. Whatever
sense they may have struck first, they recoil from it towards the
centre of general sensibility. I think of those romantic lovers seen
enveloped by the storm, possessing each other furiously, or of the
gentle emotion of Tibullus, _quam juvat immites_.... The horrible,
stupid, savage tragedies which delighted the Greeks and the French of
the _ancien régime_ were philters, and nothing more. If the great poets
(like women, great poets have neither taste nor sense of disgust) had
not taken the trouble to rethink the stories of Orestes, of Thyestes,
of Polynices, we would deem these to be the delirious ravings of a
society in its infancy or in its final decay. Not one of Racine's
tragedies but has been played a hundred times in the criminal court by
loathsome actors. You will find, if you look for them, in the special
treatises of Ball and of Binet, and in popular works, examples of the
transformation of any sensation whatsoever into sexual act. Here there
are no categories, the field is unlimited. Men have been known for whom
the smell of rotten apples gave strong and necessarily sexual emotions.
Schiller always kept a stock in his table drawer; but, as he possessed
a refractory passage in which the emotional currents were in large part
broken, he made verses, when he had inhaled them, instead of making
love.
Here, then, we have a whole class of men in whom the emotions,
arrested halfway, are transformed into intelligence, into aesthetic
taste, into religious feeling, into morality, into cruelty, according
to the environment and the circumstances, and according to an
exceedingly obscure system of dynamics. It may even be said that this
transformation of the emotions takes place, more or less, in all men.
The emotions may chance also to react almost equally in all directions,
a notable part travelling towards the genital centres while enough
remains _en route_ to produce a great philosopher, a great artist, a
great criminal. Love seems peculiarly connected with cruelty, either
by its absence or by its excess. The mimetic of cruelty is precisely
that of sexual love. Duchenne of Boulogne has proved that by his
experiments. In types of men like Torquemada or Robespierre, the
emotions do not reach the genital sense. They encounter an obstacle
which shunts them off towards another centre. Instead of being
transformed into the need for reproduction, they are transformed into
the need for destruction. But there is the Neronian type and there
is the Sadie type, in which sexuality and cruelty become exasperated
simultaneously and are intertangled. There are men capable of stronger
emotional shocks than other men. Though divided and distributed towards
two goals, the current remains strong enough to produce acts of great
intensity. The same phenomenon, though in a less sinister form, appears
when intellectual power comes into play simultaneously with genital
power. Every man capable of emotion is capable of love, and at the same
time, either of cruelty, of intellectuality, or of religious sentiment;
but the emotional current is sometimes entirely absorbed by one of the
human activities, and we have one variety of extreme types, the other
variety being furnished by men of a great emotional receptivity and,
consequently, of a great diversity of aptitudes.
But let us keep to the human average, and to the question of
aesthetics. According to the quantity withdrawn from the emotional
current, we shall, for example, have a spectator who retains from the
tragedy its entire content of pure, robust beauty--who will go away in
a state of intellectual emotion, less sensible to the murder than to
the curve of the arm that struck the blow; to the curses and terrors,
than the musical form which limits them, encloses them, gives them
life. We shall also have a spectator who, in spite of a few glimmerings
of intellectual emotion, leaves the theatre very much as he might a
boxing-match or a bull-fight. There are the two extremes. One man,
looking at a perfect statue, enjoys the grace of the curves, thinks:
what a beautiful work! The other cries: what a beautiful woman! Between
these two types there is a whole series of shading. For the man of
average type, the idea of beauty scarcely exists. He will judge the
work of art according to the intensity or the quality of his emotion.
It gives him pleasure, or it leaves him cold, and that is all. It is
this average type that determines success in art, the average type must
be pleased. Its emotion must be stirred.
The representatives of the aesthetic caste also judge a work of art
by the emotion it gives them, but this emotion is of a quite special
order. It is the aesthetic emotion. For them those works alone that
are capable of communicating the aesthetic thrill or emotion belong to
art, to the category of beauty. Thus are excluded from art utilitarian,
moralizing, social works possessing any purpose whatsoever outside this
precise and exclusive goal, aesthetic emotion; also works of too sexual
a type, whose appeal to genital exercise is over-direct, though they,
too, respond--in their case with excessive clarity--to men's primitive
notion of artistic beauty. In this way has been formed that aesthetic
category which, eternally instable, ranging from realism to idealism
(a certain idealism), from sentimentalism to brutality, from religious
feeling to sensuality, remains, nevertheless, a closed garden.
Art is, then, that which gives a pure emotion,--that is to say, an
emotion without vibrations beyond a limited group of cells. It is
that which invites to neither virtue nor patriotism, nor debauch, nor
peace, nor war, nor laughter, nor tears, nor anything other than art
itself. Art is impassible, and as an old Italian poet said of love,
_non piange, nè ride_. There is nothing about it either rational, or
just, or consistent with any truth. It is a matter of the manners
and customs of an intellectual caste. Born of an imperfection in the
nervous system, the idea of beauty has picked up, on the way, all sorts
of rules, prejudices, beliefs, habits, and it has constructed itself
a canon whose form, without being absolute, fluctuates at any given
moment between certain limits only. The restriction is necessary.
All refined men of an epoch agree on the idea of beauty. To-day, for
example, there are certain touchstones: Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rodin,
Monet, Nietzsche. To admit that you are not moved by the _Hands_, by
_Hérodiade_, by _Eve_, by the _Cathédrales_, by _Zarathoustra_, is
to admit that you are devoid of aesthetic sensibility. But works of
quite another tone were formerly admired by the same human group.
From Ronsard to Victor Hugo, the principle of beauty was sought in
imitation. Artists imitated the classics, the Italians, the Spaniards,
the English. In the last century, it was the effort after originality;
and this produced even a few years ago an excess of false notes, but a
music less flat, on the whole, than that which had so long wearied the
Muses. Not that the artist imitated less, but he did so in the illusion
of creating something new, and illusion is almost always productive.
France is, moreover, the country where the idea of beauty has undergone
the greatest number of variations, since it is peopled by an animated,
eager race always attentive to what is happening and ready to make the
acquaintance of everything strange and new, reserving the right to
laugh at this novelty, if it does not suit their temperament.
Our aesthetic sense, then, has its caprices. But, historically
variable, it is consistent enough at any given moment. There is an
aesthetic caste to-day. There was always one, and the history of
French literature is little more than the _catalogue raisonné_ of the
works successively chosen by this caste. Successes are shaped in the
street. Glory issues from _cénacles_. As there are no examples to the
contrary, this clearly must be admitted to be a fact--also this, that
the _cénacles_ become disgusted with the glories that escape them,
and start running the streets. A fact is always legitimate, since it
is always logical; but we can always oppose to it the repugnances of
our own sensibility, or of a group of sensibilities. That is the way
of the crowd when led by certain educated mediocrities, who make good
lawyers, since they hate the house which they are fighting, and which
does not recognize them. To the often obscure reputation established by
the aesthetic group, we see, then, incessantly opposed the celebrities
of success. It is easy to dupe the people by showing them, on the one
hand, the poor solitary lamp; on the other, the harsh glare of globes
and the mad riot of tulips.
But the people have little need of encouragement. They go quite
naturally towards that which dazzles them. This also is a fact, and
this also is legitimate. The public, led by cunning shepherds, does
wrong to despise the confused gleam of the stars; but the aesthetic
caste does wrong to laugh at the people's pleasures. It also does
wrong when it monopolizes certain words and refuses to call works of
art those compositions which, no less than those which they themselves
admire, have as their aim to stir emotion. It is a question of quality,
not of essence. The aesthetic caste suffers less from seeing a poor
thing applauded, than a real work disdained. Its judgment, so sure
in scenting false art, suddenly weakens, and is angered, because a
votary of the popular taste does not incline before its admirations.
It is always a mistake to appeal to justice; but it is madness to
appeal to the justice of a social group. We should abandon all that;
and shut ourselves up in an opinion as in a tower. It would be easier
to cut the throats of a hundred fanatical admirers of _Quo Vadis_?
than to convince them, and far less fatiguing. Literary justice is
an absurdity. It supposes emotional parity among men belonging to
different physiological categories. A work is beautiful for those whom
it moves. Sensibility is incorruptible--popular sensibility as well as
that of the _cénacles_. It is as incorruptible as taste and as smell.
It was formerly imagined that there was such a thing as taste--an
absolute taste worshipped in a temple. Nothing is more ridiculous,
nothing more tyrannical. Let us leave men to seek their pleasure
freely. Some want to have their feelings harrowed, others their spleen
banished, still others their heart pierced. Different instruments are
needed for each of these operations. Art is a form of surgery whose
case is well equipped, and a pharmacopeia filled with vials of every
form and odour.
People talk very seriously--that is, without laughing--of initiating
the people to art. In less vague terms, corresponding to a certain
scientific reality, this would mean so shaping the physiology of men in
general, that emotion, instead of reaching the genital centre, spreads
towards the aesthetic centre. The enterprise is not of the easiest.
Poor people! How it is made game of, and how stupid, in their goodness
of heart, are its intellectual masters! These really believe that taste
for painting, for music, for poetry, is learned like orthography or
geography! And suppose it could be, and suppose a few admirations had
been imparted to a few workmen. What does it matter that the people
do not admire what we admire? They would have the same right to ask
us to share their enthusiasms. There is no absolute aesthetic. That
which moves us is beautiful; but we can be moved only in the measure of
our emotional receptivity, and according to the state of our nervous
system. Insensibility to what we call beauty,--a very complex idea,
the moment we leave the human form,--would seem, on the whole, to be
merely the sign of a healthy organism, of a normal brain, in which the
nervous currents go straight to their goal, without turning aside. But
this simple state is rare. All men are capable of receiving certain
aesthetic emotions, and all are eager for them; but almost no man is
concerned with the quality of this emotion. The important thing is
to be moved. No other monument since the cathedrals--perhaps since
the pyramids--has so' stirred human sensibility as the Eiffel Tower.
Confronted with all that junk reared on high, stupidity itself became
lyric, fools meditated, wild asses dreamed. From those heights swept
down, as it were, a storm of emotions. An attempt was made to divert
it, but it was too late. Success had arrived. The more admiration a
work receives, the more beautiful it becomes for the multitude. It
becomes beautiful and almost alive. Emotional waves, starting from
it, come, like combers, to break upon a people drunk and panting. The
whole organism holds carnival. Stupid and beautiful, the genius of the
species smiles in the shade.
Such is the social rôle of art. It is immense. There is an Australian
bird which builds, as its nest, a big cabin where it spreads all the
shining pebbles it finds. The male, amid the mosaic, dances a grave
minuet before his troubled companion. This is art surprised at its
obscure birth--at the very moment of its intimate association with the
expansion of the genital instinct. A red pebble gives an emotion to a
bird, and this emotion heightens its desire. Such is the social rôle of
art. The people--and by the people, I here mean the mass of men--must
admire. They must experience aesthetic emotions, must quiver with long
nervous vibrations, must have rich and complicated loves; but, what
matters it whence comes the cloud, so long as it rains!
I have merely wished to show the legitimacy of all aesthetic emotion,
whatever its source, and of all success, whatever its quality; but I
shall be readily believed if I confess that I retain my preferences for
a certain form of art, for a certain expression of beauty. I depart in
this respect from the common sentiment, that I do not believe it useful
to generalize opinions, to teach admirations. To force admiration
is almost as wicked as to force an entrance. It is for each man to
procure himself the emotion he needs, and the morality which suits
him. Apuleius's ass wanted to crop roses, because by so doing he would
resume the human form. It is a very good idea to crop roses. It is one
way to achieve freedom.
1901.
[1] At the Hôtel de Bourgogne, while at Giénégaud his rival Pradon's
play was received with great applause.
[2] Bayle. And Racine, recognizing his adversary's craft, said: "The
whole difference between me and Pradon is that I know how to write."
[3] In another essay, _Women and Language_, I have considered the
lie as the mark of man as opposed to the animal. The superiority of
a race, of a group of living beings, is in direct ratio to its power
of falsehood--that is to say, reaction against reality. The lie is
only the psychological form of the Vertebrate's reaction against its
environment. Nietzsche, anticipating science, says: "The lie is a
condition of life."
[4] There is a presentiment of this in Montesquieu's remark, recently
published; it is conformity that constitutes beauty _Æsthetics_. Father
Buffier has defined beauty as the assembling of the commonest elements.
When his definition is explained, it is excellent. Father Buffier says
that beautiful eyes are those resembling the greatest number of other
eyes; the same with the mouth, the nose, etc. It is not that there are
not a great many more ugly noses than beautiful ones, but that the
former are of many different sorts, and that each sort of ugly noses is
much smaller in number than the beautiful sort. It is as if, in a crowd
of a hundred men, there were ten dressed each in a different colour; it
is the green that would predominate.