Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 11

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 11

combated the doctrine of the laureate, and defended the cause of ideal beauty. It is impossible to demonstrate more decidedly, by the entire history of Greek sculpture, and by authentic texts from the greatest critiques of antiquity, that the process of art among the Greeks was not the imitation of nature, either by a particular model, or by several, the most beautiful model being always very imperfect, and several models not being able to compose a single beauty. The true process of the Greek art was the representation of an ideal beauty which nature scarcely possessed more in Greece than among us, which it could not then offer to the artist. We regret that the honorable laureate, since become a member of the Inst.i.tute, pretended that this expression of ideal beauty, if it had been known by the Greeks, would have meant _visible beauty_, because ideal comes from [Greek: eidos], which signifies only, according to M. Emeric David, a form seen by the eye.

Plato would have been much surprised at this exclusive interpretation of the word [Greek: eidos]. M. Quatremere de Quincy confounds his unequal adversary by two admirable texts, one from the _Timaeus_, where Plato marks with precision in what the true artist is superior to the ordinary artist, the other at the commencement of the _Orator_, where Cicero explains the manner in which great artists work, in referring to the manner of Phidias, that is to say, the most perfect master of the most perfect epoch of art.

"The artist,[115] who, with eye fixed upon the immutable being, and using such a model, reproduces its idea and its excellence, cannot fail to produce a whole whose beauty is complete, whilst he who fixes his eye upon what is transitory, with this perishable model will make nothing beautiful."

"Phidias,[116] that great artist, when he made the form of Jupiter or Minerva, did not contemplate a model a resemblance of which he would express; but in the depth of his soul resided a perfect type of beauty, upon which he fixed his look, which guided his hand and his art."

Is not this process of Phidias precisely that which Raphael describes in the famous letter to Castiglione, which he declares that he followed himself for the Galatea?[117] "As," he says, "I am dest.i.tute of beautiful models, I use a certain ideal which I form for myself."

There is another theory which comes back, by a circuit, to imitation: it is that which makes illusion the end of art. If this theory be true, the ideal beauty of painting is a _tromp-l'oeil_,[118] and its master-piece is the grapes of Zeuxis that the birds came and pecked at.

The height of art in a theatrical piece would be to persuade you that you are in the presence of reality. What is true in this opinion is, that a work of art is beautiful only on the condition of being life-like, and, for example, the law of dramatic art is not to put on the stage pale phantoms of the past, but personages borrowed from imagination or history, as you like, but animated, endowed with pa.s.sion, speaking and acting like men and not like shades. It is human nature that is to be represented to itself under a magic light that does not disfigure it, but enn.o.bles it. This magic is the very genius of art. It lifts us above the miseries that besiege us, and transports us to regions where we still find ourselves, for we never wish to lose sight of ourselves, but where we find ourselves transformed to our advantage, where all the imperfections of reality have given place to a certain perfection, where the language that we speak is more equal and elevated, where persons are more beautiful, where the ugly is not admitted, and all this while duly respecting history, especially without ever going beyond the imperative conditions of human nature. Has art forgotten human nature? it has pa.s.sed beyond its end, it has not attained it; it has brought forth nothing but chimeras without interest for our soul.

Has it been too human, too real, too nude? it has fallen short of its end; it has then attained it no better.

Illusion is so little the end of art, that it may be complete and have no charm. Thus, in the interest of illusion, theatrical men have taken great pains in these latter times to secure historical accuracy of costume. This is all very well; but it is not the most important thing.

Had you found, and lent to the actor who plays the part of Brutus, the very costume that of old the Roman hero wore, it would touch true connoisseurs very little. This is not all; when the illusion goes too far, the sentiment of art disappears in order to give place to a sentiment purely natural, sometimes insupportable. If I believed that Iphegenia were in fact on the point of being immolated by her father at a distance of twenty paces from me, I should leave the theatre trembling with horror. If the Ariadne that I see and hear, were the true Ariadne who is about to be betrayed by her sister, in that pathetic scene where the poor woman, who already feels herself less loved, asks who then robs her of the heart, once so tender, of Theseus, I would do as the young Englishman did, who cried out, sobbing and trying to spring upon the stage, "It is Phedre, it is Phedre!" as if he would warn and save Ariadne.

But, it is said, is it not the aim of the poet to excite pity and terror? Yes; but at first in a certain measure; then he must mix with them some other sentiment that tempers them, or makes them serve another end. If the aim of dramatic art were only to excite in the highest degree pity and terror, art would be the powerless rival of nature. All the misfortunes represented on the stage are very feeble in comparison with those sad spectacles which we may see every day. The first hospital is fuller of pity and terror than all the theatres in the world. What should the poet do in the theory that we combat? He should transfer to the stage the greatest possible reality, and move us powerfully by shocking our senses with the sight of frightful pains. The great resort of the pathetic would then be the representation of death, especially that of the greatest torture. Quite on the contrary, there is an end of art when sensibility is too much excited. To take, again, an example that we have already employed, what const.i.tutes the beauty of a tempest, of a shipwreck? What attracts us to those great scenes of nature? It is certainly not pity and terror,--these poignant and lacerating sentiments would much sooner keep us away. An emotion very different from these is necessary, which triumphs over us, in order to retain us by the sh.o.r.e; this emotion is the pure sentiment of the beautiful and the sublime, excited and kept alive by the grandeur of the spectacle, by the vast extent of the sea, the rolling of the foaming waves, and the imposing sound of the thunder. But do we think for a single instant that there are in the midst of the sea the unfortunate who are suffering, and are, perhaps, about to perish? From that moment the spectacle becomes to us insupportable. It is so in art. Whatever sentiment it proposes to excite in us, must always be tempered and governed by that of the beautiful. If it only produces pity or terror beyond a certain limit, especially physical pity or terror, it revolts, and no longer charms; it loses the effect that belongs to it in exchange for a foreign and vulgar effect.

For this same reason, I cannot accept another theory, which, confounding the sentiment of the beautiful with the moral and religious sentiment, puts art in the service of religion and morals, and gives it for its end to make us better and elevate us to G.o.d. There is here an essential distinction to be made. If all beauty covers a moral beauty, if the ideal mounts unceasingly towards the infinite, art, which expresses ideal beauty, purifies the soul in elevating it towards the infinite, that is to say, towards G.o.d. Art, then, produces the perfection of the soul, but it produces it indirectly. The philosopher who investigates effects and causes, knows what is the ultimate principle of the beautiful and its certain, although remote, effects. But the artist is before all things an artist; what animates him is the sentiment of the beautiful; what he wishes to make pa.s.s into the soul of the spectator is the same sentiment that fills his own. He confides himself to the virtue of beauty; he fortifies it with all the power, all the charm of the ideal; it must then do its own work; the artist has done his when he has procured for some n.o.ble souls the exquisite sentiment of beauty.

This pure and disinterested sentiment is a n.o.ble ally of the moral and religious sentiments; it awakens, preserves, and develops them, but it is a distinct and special sentiment. So art, which is founded on this sentiment, which is inspired by it, which expands it, is in its turn an independent power. It is naturally a.s.sociated with all that enn.o.bles the soul, with morals and religion; but it springs only from itself.

Let us confine our thought strictly within its proper limits. In vindicating the independence, the proper dignity, and the particular end of art, we do not intend to separate it from religion, from morals, from country. Art draws its inspirations from these profound sources, as well as from the ever open source of nature. But it is not less true that art, the state, religion, are powers which have each their world apart and their own effects; they mutually help each other; they should not serve each other. As soon as one of them wanders from its end, it errs, and is degraded. Does art blindly give itself up to the orders of religion and the state? In losing its liberty, it loses its charm and its empire.

Ancient Greece and modern Italy are continually cited as triumphant examples of what the alliance of art, religion, and the state can do.

Nothing is more true, if the question is concerning their union; nothing is more false, if the question is concerning the servitude of art. Art in Greece was so little the slave of religion, that it little by little modified the symbols, and, to a certain extent, the spirit itself, by its free representations. There is a long distance between the divinities that Greece received from Egypt and those of which it has left immortal exemplars. Are those primitive artists and poets, as Homer and Dedalus are called, strangers to this change? And in the most beautiful epoch of art, did not aeschylus and Phidias carry a great liberty into the religious scenes which they exposed to the gaze of the people, in the theatre, or in front of the temples? In Italy as in Greece, as everywhere, art is at first in the hands of priesthoods and governments; but, as it increases its importance and is developed, it more and more conquers its liberty. Men speak of the faith that animated the artists and vivified their works; that is true of the time of Giotto and Ciambue; but after Angelico de Fiesole, at the end of the fifteenth century, in Italy, I perceive especially the faith of art in itself and the worship of beauty. Raphael was about to become a cardinal;[119] yes, but always painting Galatea, and without quitting Fornarine. Once more, let us exaggerate nothing; let us distinguish, not separate; let us unite art, religion, and country, but let not their union injure the liberty of each. Let us be thoroughly penetrated with the thought, that art is also to itself a kind of religion. G.o.d manifests himself to us by the idea of the true, by the idea of the good, by the idea of the beautiful. Each one of them leads to G.o.d, because it comes from him.

True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the infinite. So, independently of all official alliance with religion and morals, art is by itself essentially religious and moral; for, far from wanting its own law, its own genius, it everywhere expresses in its works eternal beauty. Bound on all sides to matter by inflexible laws, working upon inanimate stone, upon uncertain and fugitive sounds, upon words of limited and finite signification, art communicates to them, with the precise form that is addressed to such or such a sense, a mysterious character that is addressed to the imagination and the soul, takes them away from reality, and bears them sweetly or violently into unknown regions. Every work of art, whatever may be its form, small or great, figured, sung, or uttered,--every work of art, truly beautiful or sublime, throws the soul into a gentle or severe reverie that elevates it towards the infinite. The infinite is the common limit after which the soul aspires upon the wings of imagination as well as reason, by the route of the sublime and the beautiful, as well as by that of the true and the good. The emotion that the beautiful produces turns the soul from this world; it is the beneficent emotion that art produces for humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[112] _Recherches sur l'Art Statuaire._ Paris, 1805.

[113] Paris, 1815, in folio, an eminent work that will subsist even when time shall have destroyed some of its details.

[114] Since reprinted under the t.i.tle of _Essais sur l'Ideal dans ses Applications Pratiques_. Paris, 1837.

[115] Translation of Plato, vol. xii., _Timaeus_, p. 116.

[116] _Orator:_ "Neque enim ille artifex (Phidias) c.u.m faceret Jovis formam aut Minervae, contemplabatur aliquem a quo similitudinem duceret; sed ipsius in mente insidebat species pulchritudinis eximia quaedam, quam intuens, in eaque defixus, ad illius similitudinem artem et manum dirigebat."

[117] _Raccolta di lett._ _Sulla pitt._, i., p. 83. "_Essendo carestia e de' buoni giudici e di belle donne, io mi servo di certa idea che mi viene alla mente._"

[118] "A picture representing a broken gla.s.s over several subjects painted on the canvas, by which the eye is deceived."

[119] Va.s.sari, _Vie de Raphael_.

LECTURE IX.

THE DIFFERENT ARTS.

Expression is the general law of art.--Division of arts.--Distinction between liberal arts and trades.--Eloquence itself, philosophy, and history do not make a part of the fine arts.--That the arts gain nothing by encroaching upon each other, and usurping each other's means and processes.--Cla.s.sification of the arts:--its true principle is expression.--Comparison of arts with each other.--Poetry the first of arts.

A _resume_ of the last lecture would be a definition of art, of its end and law. Art is the free reproduction of the beautiful, not of a single natural beauty, but of ideal beauty, as the human imagination conceives it by the aid of data which nature furnishes it. The ideal beauty envelops the infinite:--the end of art is, then, to produce works that, like those of nature, or even in a still higher degree, may have the charm of the infinite. But how and by what illusion can we draw the infinite from the finite? This is the difficulty of art, and its glory also. What bears us towards the infinite in natural beauty? The ideal side of this beauty. The ideal is the mysterious ladder that enables the soul to ascend from the finite to the infinite. The artist, then, must devote himself to the representation of the ideal. Every thing has its ideal. The first care of the artist will be, then, whatever he does, to penetrate at first to the concealed ideal of his subject, for his subject has an ideal,--in order to render it, in the next place, more or less striking to the senses and the soul, according to the conditions which the very materials that he employs--the stone, the color, the sound, the language--impose on him.

So, to express the ideal of the infinite in one way or another, is the law of art; and all the arts are such only by their relation to the sentiment of the beautiful and the infinite which they awaken in the soul, by the aid of that high quality of every work of art that is called expression.

Expression is essentially ideal: what expression tries to make felt, is not what the eye can see and the hand touch, evidently it is something invisible and impalpable.

The problem of art is to reach the soul through the body. Art offers to the senses forms, colors, sounds, words, so arranged that they excite in the soul, concealed behind the senses, the inexpressible emotion of beauty.

Expression is addressed to the soul as form is addressed to the senses.

Form is the obstacle of expression, and, at the same time, is its imperative, necessary, only means. By working upon form, by bending it to its service, by dint of care, patience, and genius, art succeeds in converting an obstacle into a means.

By their object, all arts are equal; all are arts only because they express the invisible. It cannot be too often repeated, that expression is the supreme law of art. The thing to express is always the same,--it is the idea, the spirit, the soul, the invisible, the infinite. But, as the question is concerning the expression of this one and the same thing, by addressing ourselves to the senses which are diverse, the difference of the senses divides art into different arts.

We have seen, that, of the five senses which have been given to man,[120] three--taste, smell, and touch--are incapable of producing in us the sentiment of beauty. Joined to the other two, they may contribute to the understanding of this sentiment; but alone and by themselves they cannot produce it. Taste judges of the agreeable, not of the beautiful.

No sense is less allied to the soul and more in the service of the body; it flatters, it serves the grossest of all masters, the stomach. If smell sometimes seems to partic.i.p.ate in the sentiment of the beautiful, it is because the odor is exhaled from an object that is already beautiful, that is beautiful for some other reason. Thus the rose is beautiful for its graceful form, for the varied splendor of its colors; its odor is agreeable, it is not beautiful. Finally, it is not touch alone that judges of the regularity of forms, but touch enlightened by sight.

There remain two senses to which all the world concedes the privilege of exciting in us the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful. They seem to be more particularly in the service of the soul. The sensations which they give have something purer, more intellectual. They are less indispensable for the material preservation of the individual. They contribute to the embellishment rather than to the sustaining of life.

They procure us pleasures in which our personality seems less interested and more self-forgetful. To these two senses, then, art should be addressed, is addressed, in fact, in order to reach the soul. Hence the division of arts into two great cla.s.ses,--arts addressed to hearing, arts addressed to sight; on the one hand, music and poetry; on the other, painting, with engraving, sculpture, architecture, gardening.

It will, perhaps, seem strange that we rank among the arts neither eloquence, nor history, nor philosophy.

The arts are called the fine arts, because their sole object is to produce the disinterested emotion of beauty, without regard to the utility either of the spectator or the artist. They are also called the liberal arts, because they are the arts of free men and not of slaves, which affranchise the soul, charm and enn.o.ble existence; hence the sense and origin of those expressions of antiquity, _artes liberales_, _artes ingenuae_. There are arts without n.o.bility, whose end is practical and material utility; they are called trades, such as that of the stove-maker and the mason. True art may be joined to them, may even shine in them, but only in the accessories and the details.

Eloquence, history, philosophy, are certainly high employments of intelligence; they have their dignity, their eminence, which nothing surpa.s.ses, but rigorously speaking, they are not arts.

Eloquence does not propose to itself to produce in the soul of the auditors the disinterested sentiment of beauty. It may also produce this effect, but without having sought it. Its direct end, which it can subordinate to no other, is to convince, to persuade. Eloquence has a client which before all it must save or make triumph. It matters little, whether this client be a man, a people, or an idea. Fortunate is the orator if he elicits the expression: That is beautiful! for it is a n.o.ble homage rendered to his talent; unfortunate is he if he does not elicit this, for he has missed his end. The two great types of political and religious eloquence, Demosthenes in antiquity, Bossuet among the moderns, think only of the interest of the cause confided to their genius, the sacred cause of country and that of religion; whilst at bottom Phidias and Raphael work to make beautiful things. Let us hasten to say, what the names of Demosthenes and Bossuet command us to say, that true eloquence, very different from that of rhetoric, disdains certain means of success; it asks no more than to please, but without any sacrifice unworthy of it; every foreign ornament degrades it. Its proper character is simplicity, earnestness--I do not mean affected earnestness, a designed and artful gravity, the worst of all deceptions--I mean true earnestness, that springs from sincere and profound conviction. This is what Socrates understood by true eloquence.[121]

As much must be said of history and philosophy. The philosopher speaks and writes. Can he, then, like the orator, find accents which make truth enter the soul, colors and forms that make it shine forth evident and manifest to the eyes of intelligence? It would be betraying his cause to neglect the means that can serve it; but the profoundest art is here only a means, the aim of philosophy is elsewhere; whence it follows that philosophy is not an art. Without doubt, Plato is a great artist; he is the peer of Sophocles and Phidias, as Pascal is sometimes the rival of Demosthenes and Bossuet;[122] but both would have blushed if they had discovered at the bottom of their soul another design, another aim than the service of truth and virtue.

History does not relate for the sake of relating; it does not paint for the sake of painting; it relates and paints the past that it may be the living lesson of the future. It proposes to instruct new generations by the experience of those who have gone before them, by exhibiting to them a faithful picture of great and important events, with their causes and their effects, with general designs and particular pa.s.sions, with the faults, virtues, and crimes that are found mingled together in human things. It teaches the excellence of prudence, courage, and great thoughts profoundly meditated, constantly pursued, and executed with moderation and force. It shows the vanity of immoderate pretensions, the power of wisdom and virtue, the impotence of folly and crime.

Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus undertake any thing else than procuring new emotions for an idle curiosity or a worn-out imagination; they doubtless desire to interest and attract, but more to instruct; they are the avowed masters of statesmen and the preceptors of mankind.

The sole object of art is the beautiful. Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns this. It is often constrained to make concessions to circ.u.mstances, to external conditions that are imposed upon it; but it must always retain a just liberty. Architecture and the art of gardening are the least free of arts; they are subjected to unavoidable obstacles; it belongs to the genius of the artist to govern these obstacles, and even to draw from them happy effects, as the poet turns the slavery of metre and rhyme into a source of unexpected beauties. Extreme liberty may carry art to a caprice which degrades it, as chains too heavy crush it. It is the death of architecture to subject it to convenience, to _comfort_. Is the architect obliged to subordinate general effect and the proportions of the edifice to such or such a particular end that is prescribed to him? He takes refuge in details, in pediments, in friezes, in all the parts that have not utility for a special object, and in them he becomes a true artist. Sculpture and painting, especially music and poetry, are freer than architecture and the art of gardening. One can also shackle them, but they disengage themselves more easily.

Similar by their common end, all the arts differ by the particular effects which they produce, and by the processes which they employ. They gain nothing by exchanging their means and confounding the limits that separate them. I bow before the authority of antiquity; but, perhaps, through habit and a remnant of prejudice, I have some difficulty in representing to myself with pleasure statues composed of several metals, especially painted statues.[123] Without pretending that sculpture has not to a certain point its color, that of perfectly pure matter, that especially which the hand of time impresses upon it, in spite of all the seductions of a contemporaneous[124] artist of great talent, I have little taste, I confess, for that artifice that is forced to give to marble the _morbidezza_ of painting. Sculpture is an austere muse; it has its graces, but they are those of no other art. Flesh-color must remain a stranger to it: there would nothing more remain to communicate to it but the movement of poetry and the indefiniteness of music! And what will music gain by aiming at the picturesque, when its proper domain is the pathetic? Give to the most learned symphonist a storm to render. Nothing is easier to imitate than the whistling of the winds and the noise of thunder. But by what combinations of harmony will he exhibit to the eyes the glare of the lightning rending all of a sudden the veil of the night, and what is most fearful in the tempest, the movement of the waves that now ascend like a mountain, now descend and seem to precipitate themselves into bottomless abysses? If the auditor is not informed of the subject, he will never suspect it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of science and genius, sounds cannot paint forms. Music, when well guided, will guard itself from contending against the impossible; it will not undertake to express the tumult and strife of the waves and other similar phenomena; it will do more: with sounds it will fill the soul with the sentiments that succeed each other in us during the different scenes of the tempest.

Haydn will thus become[125] the rival, even the vanquisher of the painter, because it has been given to music to move and agitate the soul more profoundly than painting.

Since the _Laoc.o.o.n_ of Lessing, it is no longer permitted to repeat, without great reserve, the famous axiom,--_Ut pictura poesis_; or, at least, it is very certain that painting cannot do every thing that poetry can do. Everybody admires the picture of Rumor, drawn by Virgil; but let a painter try to realize this symbolic figure; let him represent to us a huge monster with a hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, and a hundred ears, whose feet touch the earth, whose head is lost in the clouds, and such a figure will become very ridiculous.

So the arts have a common end, and entirely different means. Hence the general rules common to all, and particular rules for each. I have neither time nor s.p.a.ce to enter into details on this point. I limit myself to repeating, that the great law which governs all others, is expression. Every work of art that does not express an idea signifies nothing; in addressing itself to such or such a sense, it must penetrate to the mind, to the soul, and bear thither a thought, a sentiment capable of touching or elevating it. From this fundamental rule all the others are derived; for example, that which is continually and justly recommended,--composition. To this is particularly applied the precept of unity and variety. But, in saying this, we have said nothing so long as we have not determined the nature of the unity of which we would speak. True unity, is unity of expression, and variety is made only to spread over the entire work the idea or the single sentiment that it should express. It is useless to remark, that between composition thus defined, and what is often called composition, as the symmetry and arrangement of parts according to artificial rules, there is an abyss.

True composition is nothing else than the most powerful means of expression.

Expression not only furnishes the general rules of art, it also gives the principle that allows of their cla.s.sification.

In fact, every cla.s.sification, supposes a principle that serves as a common measure.