I
To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own time must, I think,
be more interesting than any other. The sentimental, the scholastic, the
speculative temperament may look before or after with longing or regret;
but that sanity of mind which is practical and productive must find its
most agreeable sensations in the data to which it is intimately and
inexorably related. The light upon Greek literature and art for which we
study Greek history, the light upon Roman history for which we study
Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very exact proportion
as we study them for our ends. To every man and every nation that really
breathes, true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one's self, with
an emotion of equivalent intensity to the emotion of patriotism
celebrated in Scott's familiar lines, This is my own, my native era and
environment. Culture is impossible apart from cosmopolitanism, but
self-respect is more indispensable even than culture. French art alone
at the present time possesses absolute self-respect. It possesses this
quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree; but it possesses it,
and in virtue of it is endued with a preservative quality that saves it
from the emptiness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism. It
has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and
inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It
has escaped also that almost abject worship of classic models which
Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy--not to speak
of its echoes elsewhere. It has always stood on its own feet, and,
however lacking in the higher qualities of imaginative initiative, on
the one hand, and however addicted to the academic and the traditional
on the other, has always both respected its æsthetic heritage and
contributed something of its own thereto.
Why should not one feel the same quick interest, the same instinctive
pride in his time as in his country? Is not sympathy with what is
modern, instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patriotism?
Neglect of other times in the "heir of all the ages" is analogous to
chauvinism, and indicative of as ill-judged an attitude as that of
provincial blindness to other contemporary points of view and systems of
philosophy than one's own. Culture is equally hostile to both, and in
art culture is as important a factor as it is in less special fields of
activity and endeavor. But in art, as elsewhere, culture is a means to
an actual, present end, and the pre-Raphaelite sentiment that dictates
mere reproduction of what was once a genuine expression is as sterile as
servile imitation of exotic modes of thought, dress, and demeanor is
universally felt to be. The past--the antique, the renaissance, the
classic, and romantic ideals are to be used, not adopted; in the spirit
of Goethe, at once the most original of modern men and the most
saturated with culture, exhibited in his famous saying: "Nothing do I
call my own which having inherited I have not reconquered for myself."
It would indeed be a singular thing were the field of æsthetics the only
one uninvaded by the scientific spirit of the time. The one force
especially characteristic of our era is, I suppose, the scientific
spirit. It is at any rate everywhere manifest, and it possesses the best
intellects of the century. _A priori_ one may argue about its hostility,
essential or other, to the artistic, the constructive spirit; but to do
so is at the most to beat the air, to waste one's breath, to Ruskinize,
in a word. Interest in life and the world, instead of speculation or
self-expression, is the "note" of the day. The individual has withered
terribly. He is supplanted by the type. Materialism has its positive
gospel; it is not at all the formulated expression of Goethe's "spirit
that denies." Nature has acquired new dignity. She cannot be studied too
closely, nor too long. The secret of the universe is now pursued through
observation, as formerly it was through fasting and prayer. Nothing is
sacred nowadays because everything receives respect. If absolute beauty
is now smiled at as a chimera, it is because beauty is perceived
everywhere. Whatever is may not be right--the maxim has too much of an
_ex cathedra_ sound--but whatever is is interesting. Our attitude is at
once humbler and more curious. The sense of the immensity, the
immeasurableness of things, is more intimate and profound. What one may
do is more modestly conceived; what might be done, more justly
appreciated. There is less confidence and more aspiration. The artist's
eye is "on the object" in more concentrated gaze than ever heretofore.
If his sentiment, his poetry, is no longer "inevitable," as Wordsworth
complained Goethe's was not, it is more reverent, at any rate more
circumspect. If he is less exalted he is more receptive--he is more
alive to impressions for being less of a philosopher. If he scouts
authority, if even he accepts somewhat weakly the thraldom of dissent
from traditional standards and canons, it is because he is convinced
that the material with which he has to deal is superior to all canons
and standards. If he esteems truth more than beauty, it is because what
he thinks truth is more beautiful in his eyes than the stereotyped
beauty he is adjured to attain. In any case, the distinction of the
realistic painters--like that of the realists in literature, where,
also, it need not be said, France has been in the lead--is measurably to
have got rid of solecisms; to have made, indeed, obvious solecisms, and
solecisms of conception as well as of execution, a little ridiculous. It
is, to be sure, equally ridiculous to subject romantic productions to
realistic standards, to blind one's self to the sentiment that saturates
such romantic works as Scott's and Dumas's, or Géricault's and Diaz's,
and is wholly apposite to its own time and point of view. The great
difficulty with a principle is that it is universal, and that when we
deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality is an impossible
ideal. Scott and Géricault are, nowadays, in what we have come to deem
essentials, distinctly old-fashioned. It might be well to try and
imitate them, if imitation had any salt in it, which it has not; or if
it were possible to do what they did with their different inspiration,
which it is not. Mr. Stevenson is, I think, an example of the danger of
essaying this latter in literature, just as a dozen eminent painters of
less talent--for no one has so much talent as Mr. Stevenson--are
examples in painting. But there are a thousand things, not only in the
technic of the romanticists but in their whole attitude toward their art
and their material, that are nowadays impossible to sincere and
spontaneous artists. Details which have no importance whatever in the
_ensemble_ of the romantic artist are essential to the realist. Art does
not stand still. Its canons change. There is a constant evolution in its
standards, its requirements. A conventional background is no more an
error in French classic painting than in tapestry; a perfunctory scheme
of pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz's splendid forest
landscapes; such phenomena in a work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would
jar, because, measured by the standards to which modern men must,
through the very force of evolution itself, subscribe, they can but
appear solecisms. In a different set of circumstances, under a different
inspiration, and with a different artistic attitude, solecisms they
certainly are not. But, as Thackeray makes Ethel Newcome say, "We belong
to our belongings." Our circumstances, inspiration, artistic attitude,
are involuntary and possess us as our other belongings do.
In Gautier's saying, for instance, "I am a man for whom the visible
world exists," which I have quoted as expressing the key-note of the
romantic epoch, it is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a
spectacle simply--significant, suggestive or merely stimulant, in
accordance with individual bent. Gautier and the romanticists generally
had little concern for its structure. To many of them it was indeed
rather a canvas than a spectacle even--just as to many, if not to most,
of the realists it is its structure rather than its significance that
altogether appeals; the romanticists in general sketched their ideas and
impressions upon it, as the naturalists have in the main studied its
aspects and constitution, careless of the import of these, pictorially
or otherwise. Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why
so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import?
Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of
"documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy,
comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's
"Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is
indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present
general æsthetic attitude and inspiration, and must share not only the
romanticists' impatience with academic formulæ and conventions, but the
realists' devotion to life and the world as they actually exist. The
future may be different, but we are living in the present, and what is
important is, after all, to live. It is also so difficult that not to
take the line of least resistance is fatuity.