Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 10

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 10

At the highest point of moral grandeur, Socrates expires:--you have before your eyes no longer any thing but his dead body; the dead face preserves its beauty, as long as it preserves traces of the mind that animated it; but little by little the expression is extinguished or disappears; the face then becomes vulgar and ugly. The expression of death is hideous or sublime,--hideous at the aspect of the decomposition of the matter that no longer retains the spirit,--sublime when it awakens in us the idea of eternity.

Consider the figure of man in repose: it is more beautiful than that of an animal, the figure of an animal is more beautiful than the form of any inanimate object. It is because the human figure, even in the absence of virtue and genius, always reflects an intelligent and moral nature, it is because the figure of an animal reflects sentiment at least, and something of soul, if not the soul entire. If from man and the animal we descend to purely physical nature, we shall still find beauty there, as long as we find there some shade of intelligence, I know not what, that awakens in us some thought, some sentiment. Do we arrive at some piece of matter that expresses nothing, that signifies nothing, neither is the idea of beauty applied to it. But every thing that exists is animated. Matter is shaped and penetrated by forces that are not material, and it obeys laws that attest an intelligence everywhere present. The most subtile chemical a.n.a.lysis does not reach a dead and inert nature, but a nature that is organized in its own way, that is neither deprived of forces nor laws. In the depths of the earth, as in the heights of the heavens, in a grain of sand as in a gigantic mountain, an immortal spirit shines through the thickest coverings. Let us contemplate nature with the eye of the soul as well as with the eye of the body:--everywhere a moral expression will strike us, and the forms of things will impress us as symbols of thought. We have said that with man, and with the animal even, the figure is beautiful on account of the expression. But, when you are on the summit of the Alps, or before the immense Ocean, when you behold the rising or setting of the sun, at the beginning or the close of the day, do not these imposing pictures produce on you a moral effect? Do all these grand spectacles appear only for the sake of appearing? Do we not regard them as manifestations of an admirable power, intelligence, and wisdom? And, thus to speak, is not the face of nature expressive like that of man?

Form cannot be simply a form, it must be the form of something. Physical beauty is, then, the sign of an internal beauty, which is spiritual and moral beauty; and this is the foundation, the principle, the unity of the beautiful.[109]

All the beauties that we have just enumerated and reduced compose what is called the really beautiful. But, above real beauty, is a beauty of another order--ideal beauty. The ideal resides neither in an individual, nor in a collection of individuals. Nature or experience furnishes us the occasion of conceiving it, but it is essentially distinct. Let it once be conceived, and all natural figures, though never so beautiful, are only images of a superior beauty which they do not realize. Give me a beautiful action, and I will imagine one still more beautiful. The Apollo itself is open to criticism in more than one respect. The ideal continually recedes as we approach it. Its last termination is in the infinite, that is to say, in G.o.d; or, to speak more correctly, the true and absolute ideal is nothing else than G.o.d himself.

G.o.d, being the principle of all things, must for this reason be that of perfect beauty, and, consequently, of all natural beauties that express it more or less imperfectly; he is the principle of beauty, both as author of the physical world and as father of the intellectual and moral world.

Is it not necessary to be a slave of the senses and of appearances in order to stop at movements, at forms, at sounds, at colors, whose harmonious combinations produce the beauty of this visible world, and not to conceive behind this scene so magnificent and well regulated, the orderer, the geometer, the supreme artist?

Physical beauty serves as an envelope to intellectual and moral beauty.

What can be the principle of intellectual beauty, that splendor of the true, except the principle of all truth?

Moral beauty comprises, as we shall subsequently see,[110] two distinct elements, equally but diversely beautiful, justice and charity, respect and love of men. He who expresses in his conduct justice and charity, accomplishes the most beautiful of all works; the good man is, in his way, the greatest of all artists. But what shall we say of him who is the very substance of justice and the exhaustless source of love? If our moral nature is beautiful, what must be the beauty of its author! His justice and goodness are everywhere, both in us and out of us. His justice is the moral order that no human law makes, that all human laws are forced to express, that is preserved and perpetuated in the world by its own force. Let us descend into ourselves, and consciousness will attest the divine justice in the peace and contentment that accompany virtue, in the troubles and tortures that are the invariable punishments of vice and crime. How many times, and with what eloquence, have men celebrated the indefatigable solicitude of Providence, its benefits everywhere manifest in the smallest as well as in the greatest phenomena of nature, which we forget so easily because they have become so familiar to us, but which, on reflection, call forth our mingled admiration and grat.i.tude, and proclaim a good G.o.d, full of love for his creatures!

Thus, G.o.d is the principle of the three orders of beauty that we have distinguished, physical beauty, intellectual beauty, moral beauty.

In him also are reunited the two great forms of the beautiful distributed in each of these three orders, to wit, the beautiful and the sublime. G.o.d is, _par excellence_, the beautiful--for what object satisfies more all our faculties, our reason, our imagination, our heart! He offers to reason the highest idea, beyond which it has nothing more to seek; to imagination the most ravishing contemplation; to the heart a sovereign object of love. He is, then, perfectly beautiful; but is he not sublime also in other ways? If he extends the horizon of thought, it is to confound it in the abyss of his greatness. If the soul blooms at the spectacle of his goodness, has it not also reason to be affrighted at the idea of his justice, which is not less present to it?

G.o.d is at once mild and terrible. At the same time that he is the life, the light, the movement, the ineffable grace of visible and finite nature, he is also called the Eternal, the Invisible, the Infinite, the Absolute Unity, and the Being of beings. Do not these awful attributes, as certain as the first, produce in the highest degree in the imagination and the soul that melancholy emotion excited by the sublime?

Yes, G.o.d is for us the type and source of the two great forms of beauty, because he is to us at once an impenetrable enigma and still the clearest word that we are able to find for all enigmas. Limited beings as we are, we comprehend nothing in comparison with that which is without limits, and we are able to explain nothing without that same thing which is without limits. By the being that we possess, we have some idea of the infinite being of G.o.d; by the nothingness that is in us, we lose ourselves in the being of G.o.d; and thus always forced to recur to him in order to explain any thing, and always thrown back within ourselves under the weight of his infinitude, we experience by turns, or rather at the same time, for this G.o.d who raises and casts us down, a sentiment of irresistible attraction and astonishment, not to say insurmountable terror, which he alone can cause and allay, because he alone is the unity of the sublime and the beautiful.

Thus absolute being, which is both absolute unity and infinite variety,--G.o.d, is necessarily the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the completed ideal of all beauty. This is the marvellous beauty that Diotimus had caught a glimpse of, and thus paints to Socrates in the _Banquet_:

"Eternal beauty, unbegotten and imperishable, exempt from decay as well as increase, which is not beautiful in such a part and ugly in such another, beautiful only, at such a time, in such a place, in such a relation, beautiful for some, ugly for others, beauty that has no sensible form, no visage, no hands, nothing corporeal, which is not such a thought or such a particular science, which resides not in any being different from itself, as an animal, the earth, or the heavens, or any other thing, which is absolutely identical and invariable by itself, in which all other beauties partic.i.p.ate, in such a way, nevertheless, that their birth or their destruction neither diminishes nor increases, nor in the least changes it!... In order to arrive at this perfect beauty, it is necessary to commence with the beauties of this lower world, and, the eyes being fixed upon the supreme beauty, to elevate ourselves unceasingly towards it, by pa.s.sing, thus to speak, through all the degrees of the scale, from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others, from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until from thought to thought we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the beautiful itself, until we end by knowing it as it is in itself.

"O my dear Socrates," continued the stranger of Mantinea, "that which can give value to this life is the spectacle of the eternal beauty....

What would be the destiny of a mortal to whom it should be granted to contemplate the beautiful without alloy, in its purity and simplicity, no longer clothed with the flesh and hues of humanity, and with all those vain charms that are condemned to perish, to whom it should be given to see face to face, under its sole form, the divine beauty!"[111]

FOOTNOTES:

[103] If one would make himself acquainted with a simple and piquant refutation, written two thousand years ago, of false theories of beauty, he may read the _Hippias_ of Plato, vol. iv. of our translation. The _Phaedrus_, vol. vi., contains the veiled exposition of Plato's own theory; but it is in the _Banquet_ (_Ibid._), and particularly in the discourse of Diotimus, that we must look for the thought of Plato carried to its highest degree of development, and clothed with all the beauty of human language.

[104] See the _Hippias_.

[105] First _Ennead_, book vi., in the work of M. B. Saint-Hillaire, on the _School of Alexandria_, the translation of this morsel of Plotinus, p. 197.

[106] Winkelmann has twice described the Apollo, _History of Art among the Ancients_, Paris, 1802, 3 vols., in 4to. Vol. i., book iv., chap.

iii., _Art among the Greeks_:--"The Apollo of the Vatican offers us that G.o.d in a movement of indignation against the serpent Python, which he has just killed with arrow-shots, and in a sentiment of contempt for a victory so little worthy of a divinity. The wise artist, who proposed to represent the most beautiful of the G.o.ds, placed the anger in the nose, which, according to the ancients, was its seat; and the disdain on the lips. He expressed the anger by the inflation of the nostrils, and the disdain by the elevation of the under lip, which causes the same movement in the chin."--_Ibid._, vol. ii., book iv., chap. vi., _Art under the Emperors_:--"Of all the antique statues that have escaped the fury of barbarians and the destructive hand of time, the statue of Apollo is, without contradiction, the most sublime. One would say that the artist composed a figure purely ideal, and employed matter only because it was necessary for him to execute and represent his idea. As much as Homer's description of Apollo surpa.s.ses the descriptions which other poets have undertaken after him, so much this statue excels all the figures of this G.o.d. Its height is above that of man, and its att.i.tude proclaims the divine grandeur with which it is filled. A perennial spring-time, like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, clothes with lovable youth the beautiful body, and shines with sweetness over the n.o.ble structure of the limbs. In order to feel the merit of this _chef-d'oeuvre of art_, we must be penetrated with intellectual beauty, and become, if possible, the creatures of a celestial nature; for there is nothing mortal in it, nothing subject to the wants of humanity. That body, whose forms are not interrupted by a vein, which is not agitated by a nerve, seems animated with a celestial spirit, which circulates like a sweet vapor in all the parts of that admirable figure. The G.o.d has just been pursuing Python, against which he has bent, for the first time, his formidable bow; in his rapid course, he has overtaken him, and given him a mortal wound. Penetrated with the conviction of his power, and lost in a concentrated joy, his august look penetrates far into the infinite, and is extended far beyond his victory. Disdain sits upon his lips; the indignation that he breathes distends his nostrils, and ascends to his eyebrows; but an unchangeable serenity is painted on his brow, and his eye is full of sweetness, as though the Muses were caressing him. Among all the figures that remain to us of Jupiter, there is none in which the father of the G.o.ds approaches the grandeur with which he manifested himself to the intelligence of Homer; but in the traits of the Apollo Belvidere, we find the individual beauties of all the other divinities united, as in that of Pandora. The forehead is the forehead of Jupiter, inclosing the G.o.ddess of wisdom; the eyebrows, by their movement, announce his supreme will; the large eyes are those of the queen of the G.o.ds, orbed with dignity, and the mouth is an image of that of Bacchus, where breathed voluptuousness. Like the tender branches of the vine, his beautiful locks flow around his head, as if they were lightly agitated by the zephyr's breath. They seem perfumed with the essence of the G.o.ds, and are charmingly arranged over his head by the hand of the Graces. At the sight of this marvel of art, I forget every thing else, and my mind takes a supernatural disposition, fitted to judge of it with dignity; from admiration I pa.s.s to ecstasy; I feel my breast dilating and rising, like those who are filled with the spirit of prophecy; I am transported to Delos, and the sacred groves of Syria,--places which Apollo honored with his presence:--the statue seems to be animated as it were with the beauty that sprung of old from the hands of Pygmalion. How can I describe thee, O inimitable master-piece? For this it would be necessary that art itself should deign to inspire my pen. The traits that I have just sketched, I lay before thee, as those who came to crown the G.o.ds, put their crowns at their feet, not being able to reach their heads."

[107] See the last part of the _Banquet_, the discourse of Alcibiades, p. 326 of vol. vi. of our translation.

[108] We here have in mind, and we avow it, the Socrates of David, which appears to us, the theatrical character being admitted, above its reputation. Besides Socrates, it is impossible not to admire Plato listening to his master, as it were from the bottom of his soul, without looking at him, with his back turned upon the scene that is pa.s.sing, and lost in the contemplation of the intelligible world.

[109] We are fortunate in finding this theory, which is so dear to us, confirmed by the authority of one of the severest and most circ.u.mspect minds:--it may be seen in Reid, 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 23. The Scotch philosopher terminates his _Essay on Taste_ with these words, which happily remind us of the thought and manner of Plato himself:--"Whether the reasons that I have given to prove that sensible beauty is only the image of moral beauty appear sufficient or not, I hope that my doctrine, in attempting to unite the terrestrial Venus more closely to the celestial Venus, will not seem to have for its object to abase the first, and render her less worthy of the homage that mankind has always paid her."

[110] Part iii., lecture 15.

[111] Vol. vi. of our translation, p. 816-818

LECTURE VIII

ON ART.

Genius:--its attribute is creative power.--Refutation of the opinion that art is the imitation of nature.--M. Emeric David, and M. Quatremere de Quincy.--Refutation of the theory of illusion. That dramatic art has not solely for its end to excite the pa.s.sions of terror and pity.--Nor even directly the moral and religious sentiment.--The proper and direct object of art is to produce the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful; this idea and this sentiment purify and elevate the soul by the affinity between the beautiful and the good, and by the relation of ideal beauty to its principle, which is G.o.d.--True mission of art.

Man is not made only to know and love the beautiful in the works of nature, he is endowed with the power of reproducing it. At the sight of a natural beauty, whatever it may be, physical or moral, his first need is to feel and admire. He is penetrated, ravished, as it were overwhelmed with the sentiment of beauty. But when the sentiment is energetic, he is not a long time sterile. We wish to see again, we wish to feel again what caused us so vivid a pleasure, and for that end we attempt to revive the beauty that charmed us, not as it was, but as our imagination represents it to us. Hence a work original and peculiar to man, a work of art. Art is the free reproduction of beauty, and the power in us capable of reproducing it is called genius.

What faculties are used in this free reproduction of the beautiful? The same that serve to recognize and feel it. Taste carried to the highest degree, if you always join to it an additional element, is genius. What is this element?

Three faculties enter into that complex faculty that is called taste,--imagination, sentiment, reason.

These three faculties are certainly necessary for genius, but they are not sufficient for it. What essentially distinguishes genius from taste is the attribute of creative power. Taste feels, judges, discusses, a.n.a.lyzes, but does not invent. Genius is, before all, inventive and creative. The man of genius is not the master of the power that is in him; it is by the ardent, irresistible need of expressing what he feels, that he is a man of genius. He suffers by withholding the sentiments, or images, or thoughts, that agitate his breast. It has been said that there is no superior man without some grain of folly; but this folly, like that of the cross, is the divine part of reason. This mysterious power Socrates called his demon. Voltaire called it the devil in the body; he demanded it even in a comedian in order to be a comedian of genius. Give to it what name you please, it is certain that there is a I-know-not-what that inspires genius, that also torments it until it has delivered itself of what consumes it; until, by expressing them, it has solaced its pains and its joys, its emotions, its ideas; until its reveries have become living works. Thus two things characterize genius; at first, the vivacity of the need it has of producing, then the power of producing; for the need without the power is only a malady that resembles genius, but is not it. Genius is above all, is essentially, the power of doing, of inventing, of creating. Taste is contented with observing, with admiring. False genius, ardent and impotent imagination, consumes itself in sterile dreams and produces nothing, at least nothing great. Genius alone has the power to convert conceptions into creations.

If genius creates it does not imitate.

But genius, it is said, is then superior to nature, since it does not imitate it. Nature is the work of G.o.d; man is then the rival of G.o.d.

The answer is very simple. No, genius is not the rival of G.o.d; but it is the interpreter of him. Nature expresses him in its way, human genius expresses him in its own way.

Let us stop a moment at that question so much discussed,--whether art is any thing else than the imitation of nature.

Doubtless, in one sense, art is an imitation; for absolute creation belongs only to G.o.d. Where can genius find the elements upon which it works, except in nature, of which it forms a part? But does it limit itself to the reproduction of them as nature furnishes them to it, without adding any thing to them which belongs to itself? Is it only a copier of reality? Its sole merit, then, is that of the fidelity of the copy. And what labor is more sterile than that of copying works essentially inimitable on account of the life with which they are endowed, in order to obtain an indifferent image of them? If art is a servile pupil, it is condemned never to be any thing but an impotent pupil.

The true artist feels and profoundly admires nature; but every thing in nature is not equally admirable. As we have just said, it has something by which it infinitely surpa.s.ses art--its life. Besides that, art can, in its turn, surpa.s.s nature, on the condition of not wishing to imitate it too closely. Every natural object, however beautiful, is defective on some side. Every thing that is real is imperfect. Here, the horrible and the hideous are united to the sublime; there, elegance and grace are separated from grandeur and force. The traits of beauty are scattered and diverse. To reunite them arbitrarily, to borrow from such a face a mouth, eyes from such another, without any rule that governs this choice and directs these borrowings, is to compose monsters; to admit a rule, is already to admit an ideal different from all individuals. It is this ideal that the true artist forms to himself in studying nature. Without nature, he never would have conceived this ideal; but with this ideal, he judges nature herself, rectifies her, and dares undertake to measure himself with her.

The ideal is the artist's object of pa.s.sionate contemplation.

a.s.siduously and silently meditated, unceasingly purified by reflection and vivified by sentiment, it warms genius and inspires it with the irresistible need of seeing it realized and living. For this end, genius takes in nature all the materials that can serve it, and applying to them its powerful hand, as Michael Angelo impressed his chisel upon the docile marble, makes of them works that have no model in nature, that imitate nothing else than the ideal dreamed of or conceived, that are in some sort a second creation inferior to the first in individuality and life, but much superior to it, we do not fear to say, on account of the intellectual and moral beauty with which it is impressed.

Moral beauty is the foundation of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art disengages it, and gives to it forms more transparent. On this account, art, when it knows well its power and its resources, inst.i.tutes with nature a contest in which it may have the advantage.

Let us establish well the end of art: it is precisely where its power lies. The end of art is the expression of moral beauty, by the aid of physical beauty. The latter is only a symbol of the former. In nature, this symbol is often obscure: art in bringing it to light attains effects that nature does not always produce. Nature may please more, for, once more, it possesses in an incomparable degree what makes the great charm of imagination and sight--life; art touches more, because in expressing, above all, moral beauty, it addresses itself more directly to the source of profound emotions. Art can be more pathetic than nature, and the pathetic is the sign and measure of great beauty.

Two extremes are equally dangerous--a lifeless ideal, or the absence of the ideal. Either we copy the model, and are wanting in true beauty, or we work _de tete_, and fall into an ideality without character. Genius is a ready and sure perception of the right proportion in which the ideal and the natural, form and thought, ought to be united. This union is the perfection of art: _chefs-d'oeuvre_ are produced by observing it.

It is important, in my opinion, to follow this rule in teaching art. It is asked whether pupils should begin with the study of the ideal or the real. I do not hesitate to answer,--by both. Nature herself never offers the general without the individual, nor the individual without the general. Every figure is composed of individual traits which distinguish it from all others, and make its own looks, and, at the same time, it has general traits which const.i.tute what is called the human figure.

These general traits are the const.i.tutive lineaments, and this figure is the type, that are given to the pupil that is beginning in the art of design to trace. It would also be good, I believe, in order to preserve him from the dry and abstract, to exercise him early in copying some natural object, especially a living figure. This would be putting pupils to the true school of nature. They would thus become accustomed never to sacrifice either of the two essential elements of the beautiful, either of the two imperative conditions of art.

But, in uniting these two elements, these two conditions, it is necessary to distinguish them, and to know how to put them in their place. There is no true ideal without determinate form, there is no unity without variety, no genus without individuals, but, in fine, the foundation of the beautiful is the idea; what makes art is before all, the realization of the idea, and not the imitation of such or such a particular form.

At the commencement of our century, the Inst.i.tute of France offered a prize for the best answer to the following question: _What were the causes of the perfection of the antique sculpture, and what would be the best means of attaining it?_ The successful compet.i.tor, M. Emeric David,[112] maintained the opinion then dominant, that the a.s.siduous study of natural beauty had alone conducted the antique art to perfection, and that thus the imitation of nature was the only route to reach the same perfection. A man whom I do not fear to compare with Winkelmann, the future author of the _Olympic Jupiter_,[113] M.

Quatremere de Quincy, in some ingenious and profound disquisitions,[114]