Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 12

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 12

Such a principle has been sought in pleasure, and the first of arts has seemed that which gives the most vivid joys. But we have proved that the object of art is not pleasure:--the more or less of pleasure that an art procures cannot, then, be the true measure of its value.

This measure is nothing else than expression. Expression being the supreme end, the art that most nearly approaches it is the first of all.

All true arts are expressive, but they are diversely so. Take music; it is without contradiction the most penetrating, the profoundest, the most intimate art. There is physically and morally between a sound and the soul a marvellous relation. It seems as though the soul were an echo in which the sound takes a new power. Extraordinary things are recounted of the ancient music. And it must not be believed that the greatness of effect supposes here very complicated means. No, the less noise music makes, the more it touches. Give some notes to Pergolese, give him especially some pure and sweet voices, and he returns a celestial charm, bears you away into infinite s.p.a.ces, plunges you into ineffable reveries. The peculiar power of music is to open to the imagination a limitless career, to lend itself with astonishing facility to all the moods of each one, to arouse or calm, with the sounds of the simplest melody, our accustomed sentiments, our favorite affections. In this respect music is an art without a rival:--however, it is not the first of arts.

Music pays for the immense power that has been given it; it awakens more than any other art the sentiment of the infinite, because it is vague, obscure, indeterminate in its effects. It is just the opposite art to sculpture, which bears less towards the infinite, because every thing in it is fixed with the last degree of precision. Such is the force and at the same time the feebleness of music, that it expresses every thing and expresses nothing in particular. Sculpture, on the contrary, scarcely gives rise to any reverie, for it clearly represents such a thing and not such another. Music does not paint, it touches; it puts in motion imagination, not the imagination that reproduces images, but that which makes the heart beat, for it is absurd to limit imagination to the domain of images.[126] The heart, once touched, moves all the rest of our being; thus music, indirectly, and to a certain point, can recall images and ideas; but its direct and natural power is neither on the representative imagination nor intelligence, it is on the heart, and that is an advantage sufficiently beautiful.

The domain of music is sentiment, but even there its power is more profound than extensive, and if it expresses certain sentiments with an incomparable force, it expresses but a very small number of them. By way of a.s.sociation, it can awaken them all, but directly it produces very few of them, and the simplest and the most elementary, too,--sadness and joy with their thousand shades. Ask music to express magnanimity, virtuous resolution, and other sentiments of this kind, and it will be just as incapable of doing it, as of painting a lake or a mountain. It goes about it as it can; it employs the slow, the rapid, the loud, the soft, etc., but imagination has to do the rest, and imagination does only what it pleases. The same measure reminds one of a mountain, another of the ocean; the warrior finds in it heroic inspirations, the recluse religious inspirations. Doubtless, words determine musical expression, but the merit then is in the word, not in the music; and sometimes the word stamps the music with a precision that destroys it, and deprives it of its proper effects--vagueness, obscurity, monotony, but also fulness and profundity, I was about to say infinitude. I do not in the least admit that famous definition of song:--a noted declamation.

A simple declamation rightly accented is certainly preferable to stunning accompaniments; but to music must be left its character, and its defects and advantages must not be taken away from it. Especially it must not be turned aside from its object, and there must not be demanded from it what it could not give. It is not made to express complicated and fact.i.tious sentiment, nor terrestrial and vulgar sentiments. Its peculiar charm is to elevate the soul towards the infinite. It is therefore naturally allied to religion, especially to that religion of the infinite, which is at the same time the religion of the heart; it excels in transporting to the feet of eternal mercy the soul trembling on the wings of repentance, hope, and love. Happy are those, who, at Rome, in the Vatican,[127] during the solemnities of the Catholic worship, have heard the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolese, on the old consecrated text! They have entered heaven for a moment, and their souls have been able to ascend thither without distinction of rank, country, even belief, by those invisible and mysterious steps, composed, thus to speak, of all the simple, natural, universal sentiments, that everywhere on earth draw from the bosom of the human creature a sigh towards another world!

Between sculpture and music, those two opposite extremes, is painting, nearly as precise as the one, nearly as touching as the other. Like sculpture, it marks the visible forms of objects, but adds to them life; like music, it expresses the profoundest sentiments of the soul, and expresses them all. Tell me what sentiment does not come within the province of the painter? He has entire nature at his disposal, the physical world, and the moral world, a churchyard, a landscape, a sunset, the ocean, the great scenes of civil and religious life, all the beings of creation, above all, the figure of man, and its expression, that living mirror of what pa.s.ses in the soul. More pathetic than sculpture, clearer than music, painting is elevated, in my opinion, above both, because it expresses beauty more under all its forms, and the human soul in all the richness and variety of its sentiments.

But the art _par excellence_, that which surpa.s.ses all others, because it is incomparably the most expressive, is poetry.

Speech is the instrument of poetry; poetry fashions it to its use, and idealizes it, in order to make it express ideal beauty. Poetry gives to it the charm and power of measure; it makes of it something intermediary between the ordinary voice and music, something at once material and immaterial, finite, clear, and precise, like contours and forms the most definite, living and animated like color, pathetic and infinite like sound. A word in itself, especially a word chosen and transfigured by poetry, is the most energetic and universal symbol. Armed with this talisman, poetry reflects all the images of the sensible world, like sculpture and painting; it reflects sentiment like painting and music, with all its varieties, which music does not attain, and in their rapid succession that painting cannot follow, as precise and immobile as sculpture; and it not only expresses all that, it expresses what is inaccessible to every other art, I mean thought, entirely distinct from the senses and even from sentiment,--thought that has no forms,--thought that has no color, that lets no sound escape, that does not manifest itself in any way,--thought in its highest flight, in its most refined abstraction.

Think of it. What a world of images, of sentiments, of thoughts at once distinct and confused, are excited within us by this one word--country!

and by this other word, brief and immense,--G.o.d! What is more clear and altogether more profound and vast!

Tell the architect, the sculptor, the painter, even the musician, to call forth also by a single stroke all the powers of nature and the soul! They cannot, and by that they acknowledge the superiority of speech and poetry.

They proclaim it themselves, for they take poetry for their own measure; they esteem their own works, and demand that they should be esteemed, in proportion as they approach the poetic ideal. And the human race does as artists do: a beautiful picture, a n.o.ble melody, a living and expressive statue, gives rise to the exclamation--How poetical! This is not an arbitrary comparison; it is a natural judgment which makes poetry the type of the perfection of all the arts,--the art _par excellence_, which comprises all others, to which they aspire, which none can reach.

When the other arts would imitate the works of poetry, they usually err, losing their own genius, without robbing poetry of its genius. But poetry constructs according to its own taste palaces and temples, like architecture; it makes them simple or magnificent; all orders, as well as all systems, obey it; the different ages of art are the same to it; it reproduces, if it pleases, the cla.s.sic or the Gothic, the beautiful or the sublime, the measured or the infinite. Lessing has been able, with the exactest justice, to compare Homer to the most perfect sculptor; with such precision are the forms which that marvellous chisel gives to all beings determined! And what a painter, too, is Homer! and, of a different kind, Dante! Music alone has something more penetrating than poetry, but it is vague, limited, and fugitive. Besides its clearness, its variety, its durability, poetry has also the most pathetic accents. Call to mind the words that Priam utters at the feet of Achilles while asking him for the dead body of his son, more than one verse of Virgil, entire scenes of the _Cid_ and the _Polyeucte_, the prayer of Esther kneeling before the Lord, the choruses of _Esther_ and _Athalie_. In the celebrated song of Pergolese, _Stabat Mater Dolorosa_, we may ask which moves most, the music or the words. The _Dies irae, Dies illa_, recited only, produces the most terrible effect. In those fearful words, every blow tells, so to speak; each word contains a distinct sentiment, an idea at once profound and determinate. The intellect advances at each step, and the heart rushes on in its turn. Human speech idealized by poetry has the depth and brilliancy of musical notes; it is luminous as well as pathetic; it speaks to the mind as well as to the heart; it is in that inimitable, unique, and embraces all extremes and all contraries in a harmony that redoubles their reciprocal effect, in which, by turns, appear and are developed, all images, all sentiments, all ideas, all the human faculties, all the inmost recesses of the soul, all the forms of things, all real and all intelligible worlds!

FOOTNOTES:

[120] Lecture 6.

[121] See the _Gorgias_, with the _Argument_, vol. iii. of our translation of Plato.

[122] There is a _Provincial_ that for vehemence can be compared only to the _Philipics_, and its fragment on the infinite has the grandeur and magnificence of Bossuet. See our work on the _Thoughts of Pascal_, 4th Series, _Literature_, vol. i.

[123] See the _Jupiter Olympien_ of M. Quatremere de Quincy.

[124] Allusion to the _Magdeleine_ of Canova, which was then to be seen in the gallery of M. de Sommariva.

[125] See the _Tempest_ of Haydn, among the pianoforte works of this master.

[126] See lecture 6.

[127] I have not myself had the good fortune to hear the religious music of the Vatican. Therefore, I shall let a competent judge, M. Quatremere de Quincy, speak, _Considerations Morales sur les Destination des Ouvrages de l'Art_, Paris, 1815, p. 98: "Let one call to mind those chants so simple and so touching, that terminate at Rome the funeral solemnities of those three days which the Church particularly devotes to the expression of its grief, in the last week of Lent. In that nave where the genius of Michael Angelo has embraced the duration of ages, from the wonders of creation to the last judgment that must destroy its works, are celebrated, in the presence of the Roman pontiff, those nocturnal ceremonies whose rites, symbols, and plaintive liturgies seem to be so many figures of the mystery of grief to which they are consecrated. The light decreasing by degrees, at the termination of each psalm, you would say that a funeral veil is extended little by little over those religious vaults. Soon the doubtful light of the last lamp allows you to perceive nothing but Christ in the distance, in the midst of clouds, p.r.o.nouncing his judgments, and some angel executors of his behests. Then, at the bottom of a tribune interdicted to the regard of the profane, is heard the psalm of the penitent king, to which three of the greatest masters of the art have added the modulations of a simple and pathetic chant. No instrument is mingled with those accents. Simple harmonies of voice execute that music; but these voices seem to be those of angels, and their effect penetrates the depths of the soul."

We have cited this beautiful pa.s.sage--and we could have cited many others, even superior to it--of a man now forgotten, and almost always misunderstood, but whom posterity will put in his place. Let us indicate, at least, the last pages of the same production, on the necessity of leaving the works of art in the place for which they were made, for example, the portrait of Mlle. de Valliere in the _Madeleine aux Carmelites_, instead of transferring it to, and exposing it in the apartments of Versailles, "the only place in the world," eloquently says M. Quatremere, "which never should have seen it."

LECTURE X.

FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Expression not only serves to appreciate the different arts, but the different schools of art. Example:--French art in the seventeenth century. French poetry:--Corneille. Racine. Moliere.

La Fontaine. Boileau.--Painting:--Lesueur. Poussin. Le Lorrain.

Champagne.--Engraving.--Sculpture:--Sarrazin. The Anguiers.

Girardon. Pujet.--Le Notre.--Architecture.

We believe that we have firmly established that all kinds of beauty, although most dissimilar in appearance, may, when subjected to a serious examination, be reduced to spiritual and moral beauty; that expression, therefore, is at once the true object and the first law of art; that all arts are such only so far as they express the idea concealed under the form, and are addressed to the soul through the senses; finally, that in expression the different arts find the true measure of their relative value, and the most expressive art must be placed in the first rank.

If expression judges the different arts, does it not naturally follow, that by the same t.i.tle it can also judge the different schools which, in each art, dispute with each other the empire of taste?

There is not one of these schools that does not represent in its own way some side of the beautiful, and we are disposed to embrace all in an impartial and kindly study. We are eclectics in the arts as well as in metaphysics. But, as in metaphysics, the knowledge of all systems, and the portion of truth that is in each, enlightens without enfeebling our convictions; so, in the history of arts, while holding the opinion that no school must be disdained, that even in China some shade of beauty can be found, our eclecticism does not make us waver in regard to the sentiment of true beauty and the supreme rule of art. What we demand of the different schools, without distinction of time or place, what we see in the south as well as in the north, at Florence, Rome, Venice, and Seville, as well as at Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Paris,--wherever there are men, is something human, is the expression of a sentiment or an idea.

A criticism that should be founded on the principle of expression, would somewhat derange, it must be confessed, received judgments, and would carry some disorder into the hierarchy of the renowned. We do not undertake such a revolution; we only propose to confirm, or at least elucidate our principle by an example, and by an example that is at our hand.

There is in the world a school formerly ill.u.s.trious, now very lightly treated:--this school is the French school of the seventeenth century.

We would replace it in honor, by recalling attention to the qualities that make its glory.

We have worked with constancy to reinstate among us the philosophy of Descartes, unworthily sacrificed to the philosophy of Locke, because with its defects it possesses in our view the incomparable merit of subordinating the senses to the mind, of elevating and enn.o.bling man. So we profess a serious and reflective admiration for our national art of the seventeenth century, because, without disguising what is wanting to it, we find in it what we prefer to every thing else, grandeur united to good sense and reason, simplicity and force, genius of composition, especially that of expression.

France, careless of her glory, does not appear to have the least notion that she reckons in her annals perhaps the greatest century of humanity, that which embraces the greatest number of extraordinary men of every kind. When, I pray you, have politicians like Henry IV., Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, Louis XIV. been seen giving each other the hand? I do not pretend that each of them has no rival, even superiors. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, perhaps excel them. But Alexander has but a single contemporary that can be compared with him, his father Philip; Caesar cannot even have suspected that Octavius would one day be worthy of him; Charlemagne is a colossus in a desert; whilst among us these five men succeed each other without an interval, press upon each other, and have, thus to speak, a single soul. And by what officers were they served! Is Conde really inferior to Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar; for among his predecessors we must not look for other rivals? Who among them surpa.s.ses him in the extent and justness of his conceptions, in quickness of sight, in rapidity of manoeuvres, in the union of impetuosity and firmness, in the double glory of taker of cities and gainer of battles? Add that he dealt with generals like Merci and William, that he had under him Turenne and Luxemburg, without speaking of so many other soldiers who were reared in that admirable school, and at the hour of reverse still sufficed to save France.

What other time, at least among the moderns, has seen flourishing together so many poets of the first order? We have, it is true, neither Homer, nor Dante, nor Milton, nor even Ta.s.so. The epic, with its primitive simplicity, is interdicted us. But in the drama we scarcely have equals. It is because dramatic poetry is the poetry that is adapted to us, moral poetry _par excellence_, which represents man with his different pa.s.sions armed against each other, the violent contentions between virtue and crime, the freaks of fortune, the lessons of providence, and in a narrow compa.s.s, too, in which the events press upon each other without confusion, in which the action rapidly progresses towards the crisis that must reveal what is most intimate to the heart of the personages.

Let us dare to say what we think, that, in our opinion, aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, together, do not equal Corneille; for none of them has known and expressed like him what is of all things most truly touching, a great soul at war with itself, between a generous pa.s.sion and duty. Corneille is the creator of a new pathetic unknown to antiquity and to all the moderns before him. He disdains to address common and subaltern pa.s.sions; he does not seek to rouse terror and pity, as demands Aristotle, who limits himself to erecting into maxims the practice of the Greeks. Corneille seems to have read Plato, and followed his precepts:--he addresses a most elevated part of human nature, the n.o.blest pa.s.sion, the one nearest virtue,--admiration; and from admiration carried to its culmination he draws the most powerful effects. Shakspeare, we admit, is superior to Corneille in extent and richness of dramatic genius. Entire human nature seems at his disposal, and he reproduces the different scenes of life in their beauty and deformity, in their grandeur and baseness. He excels in painting the terrible or the gentle pa.s.sions. Oth.e.l.lo is jealousy, Lady Macbeth is ambition, as Juliet and Desdemona are the immortal names of youthful and unfortunate love. But if Corneille has less imagination, he has more soul. Less varied, he is more profound. If he does not put upon the stage so many different characters, those that he does put on it are the greatest that can be offered to humanity. The scenes that he gives are less heart-rending, but at once more delicate and more sublime. What is the melancholy of Hamlet, the grief of King Lear, even the disdainful intrepidity of Caesar, in comparison with the magnanimity of Augustus striving to be master of himself as well as the universe, in comparison with Chimene sacrificing love to honor, especially in comparison with Pauline, not suffering even at the bottom of her heart an involuntary sigh for the one that she must not love? Corneille always confines himself to the highest regions. He is by turns Roman and Christian. He is the interpreter of heroes, the chanter of virtue, the poet of warriors and politicians.[128] And it must not be forgotten that Shakspeare is almost alone in his times, whilst after Corneille comes Racine, who would suffice for the poetical glory of a nation.

Racine a.s.suredly cannot be compared with Corneille for dramatic genius; he is more the man of letters; he has not the tragic soul; he neither loves nor understands politics and war. When he imitates Corneille, for example, in Alexander, and even in Mithridates, he imitates him badly enough. The scene, so vaunted, of Mithridates exposing his plan of campaign to his sons is a morsel of the finest rhetoric, which cannot be compared with the political and military scenes of Cinna and Sertorius, especially with that first scene of the Death of Pompey, in which you witness a counsel as true, as grand, as profound as ever could have been one of the counsels of Richelieu or Mazarin. Racine was not born to paint heroes, but he paints admirably man with his natural pa.s.sions, and the most natural as well as the most touching of all, love. So he particularly excels in feminine characters. For men he has need of being sustained by Tacitus or holy Scripture.[129] With woman he is at his ease, and he makes them think and speak with perfect truth, set off by exquisite art. Demand of him neither Emilie, Cornelie, nor Pauline; but listen to Andromaque, Monime, Berenice, and Phedre! There, even in imitating, he is original, and leaves the ancients very far behind him.

Who has taught him that charming delivery, those graceful troubles, that purity even in feebleness, that melancholy, sometimes even that depth, with that marvellous language which seems the natural accent of woman's heart? It is continually repeated that Racine wrote better than Corneille:--say only that the two wrote very differently, and like men in very different epochs. One has two sovereign qualities, which belong to his own nature and his times, a _navete_ and grandeur, the other is not _nave_, but he has too much taste not to be always simple, and he supplies the place of grandeur, forever lost, with consummate elegance.

Corneille speaks the language of statesmen, soldiers, theologians, philosophers, and clever women; of Richelieu, Rohan, Saint-Cyran, Descartes, and Pascal; of mother Angelique Arnaud and mother Madeleine de Saint-Joseph; the language which Moliere still spoke, which Bossuet preserved to his last breath. Racine speaks that of Louis XIV. and the women who were the ornament of his court. I suppose that thus spoke Madame, the amiable, sprightly, and unfortunate Henriette; thus wrote the author of the _Princesse de Cleves_ and the author of _Telemaque_.

Or, rather, this language is that of Racine himself, of that feeble and tender soul, which pa.s.sed quickly from love to devotion, which uttered its complaints in lyric poetry, which was wholly poured out in the choruses of _Esther_ and _Athalie_, and in the _Cantiques Spirituels_; that soul, so easy to be moved, that a religious ceremony or a representation of _Esther_ at Saint-Cyr touched to tears, that pitied the misfortunes of the people, that found in its pity and its charity the courage to speak one day the truth to Louis XIV., and was extinguished by the first breath of disgrace.

Moliere is, in comparison with Aristophanes, what Corneille is, in comparison with Shakspeare. The author of _Plutus_, the _Wasps_, and the _Clouds_, has doubtless an imagination, an explosive buffoonery, a creative power, above all comparison. Moliere has not as great poetical conceptions: he has more, perhaps; he has characters. His coloring is less brilliant, his graver is more penetrating. He has engraved in the memory of men a certain number of irregularities and vices which will ever be called _l'Avare_ (_the Miser_), _le Malade Imaginaire_ (the _Hypochondriac_), _les Femmes Savantes_ (the _Learned Women_), _le Tartufe_ (the _Hypocrite_), and _Don Juan_, not to speak of the _Misanthrope_, a piece apart, touching as pleasant, which is not addressed to the crowd, and cannot be popular, because it expresses a ridicule rare enough, excess in the pa.s.sion of truth and honor.

Of all fabulists, ancient and modern, does any one, even the ingenious, the pure, the elegant Phaedrus, approach our La Fontaine? He composes his personages, and puts them in action with the skill of Moliere; he knows how to take on occasion the tone of Horace, and mingle an ode with a fable; he is at once the most nave, and the most refined of writers, and his art disappears in its very perfection. We do not speak of the tales, first, because we condemn the kind, then, because La Fontaine displays in them qualities more Italian than French, a narrative full of nature, malice, and grace, but without any of those profound, tender, melancholy traits, that place among the greatest poets of all time the author of the _Two Pigeons_ (_Deux Pigeons_), the _Old Man_ (_Vieillard_), and the _Three Young Persons_ (_Gens_).

We do not hesitate to put Boileau among these great men. He comes after them, it is true, but he belongs to their company: he comprehends them, loves them, sustains them. It was he, who, in 1663, after the _School of Women_ (_l'Ecole des Femmes_) and long before the _Hypocrite_ (_le Tartufe_), and the _Misanthrope_, proclaimed Moliere the master in the art of verse. It was he who, in 1677, after the failure of _Phedre_, defended the vanquisher of Euripides against the successes of Pradon. It was he who, in advance of posterity, first put in light what is new and entirely original in the plays of Corneille.[130] He saved the pension of the old tragedian by offering the sacrifice of his own. Louis XIV.

asking him what writer most honored his reign, Boileau answered, that it was Moliere; and when the great king in his decline persecuted Port-Royal, and wished to lay hands on Arnaud, he encountered a man of letters, who said to the face of the imperious monarch,--"Your Majesty in vain seeks M. Arnaud, you are too fortunate to find him." Boileau is somewhat wanting in imagination and invention; but he is great in the energetic sentiment of truth and justice; he carries to the extent of pa.s.sion taste for the beautiful and the honest; he is a poet by force of soul and good sense. More than once his heart dictated to him the most pathetic verses:

"In vain against the Cid a minister is leagued,[131]

All Paris for Chimene the eyes of Rodrique," etc.

"After a little spot of earth, obtained by prayer, Forever in the tomb had inclosed Moliere," etc.

And this epitaph of Arnaud, so simple and so grand:[132]