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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART

BY

H. TAINE

PROFESSOR OF ÆSTHETICS AND OF THE HISTORY OF ART IN THE
ÉCOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS, PARIS.

TRANSLATED BY

JOHN DURAND

_Second Edition, Thoroughly Revised by the Translator_

NEW YORK

HOLT & WILLIAMS

1873




PUBLISHERS' NOTE.


The now famous name of Taine was first introduced to the American
public by the issue, in 1865, of a small imported edition of this
work. That edition has long been out of print here and in Europe. That
the book is now re-issued may be subject of special satisfaction to
those who already possess the Author's "_Ideal in Art_" "_Art in the
Netherlands_" and "_Art in Greece_" as this work (now published in a
style uniform with others named) is properly the forerunner of them
all; containing, as it does, the principles laid down in the Author's
first course of lectures, and constantly referred to in the later
courses which now form the books before alluded to.

In preparing this edition for the press, the translator, by bringing
to bear the experience gained in the later works, has made it a great
improvement on the previous edition.




PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.


The translation herewith presented to the reader consists of a course
of Lectures delivered during the winter of 1864, before the Students of
Art of the _École des Beaux Arts_ at Paris, by H. Taine, _Professeur
d'Esthétique et d' Histoire de l'Art_ in that institution.

These lectures, as a system of Æsthetics, consist of an application of
the experimental method to art, in the same manner as it is applied
to the sciences. Whatever utility the system possesses is due to this
principle. The author undertakes to explain art by social influences
and other causes; humanity at different times and places, climate,
and other conditions, furnish the facts on which the theory rests. The
artistic development of any age or people is made intelligible through
a series of historical inductions terminating in a few inferential
laws, constituting what the title of the book declares it to be--_the
philosophy of art._

Such a system seems to possess many advantages. Among others, it
tends to emancipate the student of art, as well as the amateur, from
metaphysical and visionary theories growing out of false theories and
traditional misconceptions; he is not misled by an exclusive adherence
to particular schools, masters, or epochs. It also tends to render
criticism less capricious, and therefore less injurious; dictating no
conventional standard of judgment, it promotes a spirit of charity
towards all works. As there is no attempt to do more than explain art
according to natural laws, the reader must judge whether, like all
systems assuming to bring order out of confusion, this one fulfils its
mission.

Readers familiar with M. Taine's able and original work on English
literature _(Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise)_ will recognize
in the following pages the same theory applied to art as is therein
applied to literature.

J. D.

LONDON, _November 9,_ 1865.




PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.


Since the publication of the first edition of the "_Philosophy of Art_"
seven years ago, in London, its author has become deservedly popular,
and especially in this country. His writings are sought for, read and
translated both in England and on the continent of Europe, and it would
be but refining gold to say aught in his praise. Like every man of
genius he has, as time moves on, improved in his order of thought and
in his wonderfully artistic style. His latest work, "_On Intelligence_"
ranks him as high among thinkers, as his former works among men of
letters.

The present edition is a careful revision of the former one, and
amounts, indeed, to a new translation. Were either to be compared
with the original, no change of sense could probably be detected. The
present edition, however, being much more literal, the translator
considers it an improvement, and hopes that it will be found more
worthy of its gifted author, the publishers, his indulgent critics, and
the public generally.

J. D.

SOUTH ORANGE, N. J. _January,_ 1873.




CONTENTS.


PART I.

ON THE NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

§ I.

Object of this Study--The Method employed--The search for Aggregates on
which the Work of Art depends.

First Aggregate, the Entire Production of the Artist--Second Aggregate,
the School to which he belongs; examples, Shakespeare, Rubens. Third
Aggregate, Contemporary Society; examples, Greece, Spain, in the
Sixteenth Century.

Conditions determining appearance and character of Works of Art;
examples, Greek Tragedy, Gothic Architecture, Dutch Painting, French
Tragedy--Comparison of Climate and Natural Productions with a Moral
Temperature, and its effect--Application of this method to Italian Art.

Objects and method of Æsthetics--Opposition of the Historic and
Dogmatic Methods--Laws--Sympathy for all Schools--The Analogy between
Æsthetics and Botany, and between the Natural and the Moral Sciences 19

§ II.

What is the Object of Art--The Research Experimental and not
Ideal--Comparisons and Eliminations of Works of Art sufficient.

Division of the Arts into two groups--On the one hand, Painting,
Sculpture and Poesy; and, on the other, Architecture and Music.
First group--Imitation apparently the end of Art--Reasons for this
derived from ordinary experience, and from the lives of great men;
Michael Angelo, Corneille--Reasons derived from the History of Art and
Literature; Pompeii and Ravenna--Classic Style under Louis XIV., and
Academic Style under Louis XV 39

§ III.

Exact Imitation not the end of Art--Illustrations derived from
Casting, Photography, and Stenography--Comparison between Denner
and Van Dyck--Certain Arts purposely Inexact--Comparison between
Antique Statues and Draped Figures in the Churches of Naples and
Spain--Comparison between Prose and Verse--The Two Iphigenias of Goethe

§ IV.

Relationships of Parts the true object of Imitation--Illustrations
derived from Drawing and Literature . . 58

§ V.

A Work of Art not confined to Imitating Relationships of
Parts--Modification of the Principle in the greatest Schools; Michael
Angelo, Rubens--The Medici Tomb--The 'Kermesse.'

Definition of Essential Character: Examples of the Lion and the
Netherlands.

Importance of Essential Character; Nature imperfectly expressing it,
Art supplies her place--Flanders in the time of Rubens, and Italy in
the time of Raphael.

Artistic Imagination--Spontaneous Impressions, and their power of
Transformation.

Retrospect; successive steps of the Method, and Definition of a Work of
Art 62

§ VI.

Two Parts in this Definition--How Music and Architecture enter into
it--Opposition of the first and second group of Arts--The first copies
Organic and Moral Dependencies; the second combines Mathematical
Dependencies.

Mathematical Relationships perceived by the sense of sight--Different
classes of these Relationships--Principle of Architecture.

Mathematical Relationships perceived by the sense of Hearing--Different
classes of these Relationships--Principle of Music--The second
Principle of Music, Analogy of the Sound and the Cry--Music, on this
side, enters into the first group of Arts.

The definition given is applicable to all the Arts 83

§ VII.

The Value of Art in Human Life--Selfish Acts for the preservation
of the Individual--Social Acts tending to preserve the
Species--Disinterested Acts having for object the contemplation of
Causes and Essentials--Two ways for attaining this end; Science and
Art--Advantages of Art 89

PART II.

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

§ I.

General Law for the Production of the Work of Art--First Formula--Two
sorts of Proof, one of Experience, and the other of Reasoning 95

§ II.

General Exposition of the Action of Social Mediums--The Development
of the Plant compared with the Development of Human Activity--Natural
Selection 97

§ III.

The Action of a Moral Temperature--The Influence of Melancholy and
Cheerful States of Mind--The Artist is saddened by his personal share
of misfortune--By the melancholy ideas of his contemporaries--By his
aptitude for defining the salient character of objects, which here is
sadness--He finds suggestions and enlightenment only in melancholy
subjects--The Public comprehends only melancholy subjects.

An inverse case, state of prosperity and general joy--Intermediate
cases 105

§ IV.

Real and Historical cases--Four Epochs, and four leading Arts 117

§ V.

Greek Civilization and Antique Sculpture--Comparison of Greek manners
with those of contemporaries--The City--The Citizen--Taste for War--The
Athlete-Spartan Education--The Gymnasium in other parts of Greece.

Conformity of Customs with Ideas--Nudity--Olympic Games--The Gods
perfect Human Figures.

Birth of Sculpture; Statues of Athletes and of Gods--Why Statuary
sufficed for the Artist's Conceptions--Immense Number of Statues 119

§ VI.

The Civilization of the Middle Ages, and Gothic Architecture.

Decline of Antique Society--Invasions of Barbarians--Feudal
Excesses--Universal Misery.

Distaste for Life--Exalted Sensibility--The Passion of Love--Power of
the Christian Religion..

Birth of Gothic Architecture--The Cathedral--Universality of Gothic
Architecture 138

§ VII.

French Civilization in the Seventeenth Century, and Classic Tragedy.

The Courtier--Ruling Taste--Tragedy--The Aristocratic Sentiments of
Society--Importation of French Tragedy into other European Countries 154

§ VIII.

Contemporary Civilization and Music--The French Revolution--Effect of
Civil Equality, Machinery, and the Comforts of Existence--Decay of
Traditional Authority.

The Representative Man--Development of Music--Its Origin in Germany and
Italy; and its Dependence on Modern Sentiments.

Universality of Music 168

§ IX.

The Law of the Production of Works of Art--The Four Terms of the
Series--Practical Application of the Law to a Study of all the Arts and
of every Literature. 180

§ X.

Application of the Law to the Present--The Social Medium renewing
itself constantly, Art renews itself--Hopes for the Future 186




ON THE NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.


GENTLEMEN:

In commencing this course of lectures I wish to ask you two things
of which I stand in great need: in the first place, your attention;
afterwards, and especially, your kind indulgence. The warmth of
your reception persuades me that you will favor me with both. Let
me sincerely and earnestly thank you beforehand. The subject with
which I intend to entertain you this year is the history of art, and,
principally, the history of painting in Italy. Before entering on the
subject itself, I desire to indicate to you its spirit and method.




I.


The principal point of this method consists in recognizing that a
work of art is not isolated, and, consequently, that it is necessary
to study the conditions out of which it proceeds and by which it is
explained.

The first step is not difficult. At first, and evidently, a work of
art--a picture, a tragedy, a statue--belongs to a certain whole, that
is to say, to the entire work of the artist producing it. This is
elementary. It is well known that the different works of an artist
bear a family likeness, like the children of one parent; that is to
say, they bear a certain resemblance to each other. We know that every
artist has his own style, a style recognized in all his productions.
If he is a painter, he has his own coloring, rich or impoverished;
his favorite types, noble or ignoble; his attitudes, his mode of
composition, even his processes of execution; his favorite pigments,
tints, models, and manner of working. If he is a writer, he has his
own characters, calm or passionate; his own plots, simple or complex;
his own dénouements, comic or tragic, his peculiarities of style, his
pet periods, and even his special vocabulary. This is so true, that a
connoisseur, if you place before him a work not signed by any prominent
master, is able to recognize, to almost a certainty, to what artist
this work belongs, and, if sufficiently experienced and delicate in his
perceptions, the period of the artist's life, and the particular stage
of his development.

This is the first whole to which we must refer a work of art. And here
is the second. The artist himself, considered in connection with his
productions, is not isolated; he also belongs to a whole, one greater
than himself, comprising the school or family of artists of the time
and country to which he belongs. For example, around Shakespeare,
who, at the first glance, seems to be a marvellous celestial gift
coming like an aerolite from heaven, we find several dramatists of a
high order--Webster, Ford, Massinger, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Beaumont
and Fletcher--all of whom wrote in the same style and in the same
spirit as he did. There are the same characters in their dramas as
in Shakespeare's, the same violent and terrible characters, the same
murderous and unforeseen occurrences, the same sudden and frenzied
passions, the same irregular, capricious, turgid, magnificent style,
the same exquisite poetic feeling for rural life and landscape, and
the same delicate, tender, affectionate ideals of woman.

In a similar way Rubens is to be judged. Rubens apparently stands
alone, without either predecessor or successor. On going to Belgium,
however, and visiting the churches of Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, or
Antwerp, you find a group of painters with genius resembling his.
First, there is Crayer, in his day considered a rival; Seghers, Van
Oost, Everdingen, Van Thulden, Quellin, Hondthorst, and others, with
whom you are familiar, Jordaens, Van Dyck--all conceiving painting in
the same spirit, and with many distinctive features, all preserving a
family likeness. Like Rubens, these artists delighted in painting ruddy
and healthy flesh, the rich and quivering palpitation of life, the
fresh and sensuous pulp which is diffused so richly over the surface of
the living being, the real, and often brutal types, the transport and
abandonment of unfettered action, the splendid lustrous and embroidered
draperies, the varying hues of silk and purple, and the display of
shifting and waving folds. At the present day they seem to be obscured
by the glory of their great contemporary; but it is not the less true
that to comprehend him it is necessary to study him amidst this cluster
of brilliants of which he is the brightest gem--this family of artists,
of which he is the most illustrious representative.

This being the second step, there now remains the third. This family
of artists is itself comprehended in another whole more vast, which
is the world surrounding it, and whose taste is similar. The social
and intellectual condition is the same for the public as for artists;
they are not isolated men; it is their voice alone that we hear at
this moment, through the space of centuries, but, beneath this living
voice which comes vibrating to us, we distinguish a murmur, and, as it
were, a vast, low sound, the great infinite and varied voice of the
people, chanting in unison with them. They have been great through this
harmony, and it is very necessary that it should ever be so. Phidias
and Ictinus, the constructors of the Parthenon and of the Olympian
Jupiter, were, like other Athenians, pagans and free citizens, brought
up in the _palæstra,_ exercising and wrestling naked, and accustomed
to deliberate and vote in the public assemblies; possessing the same
habits, the same interests, the same ideas, the same faith; men of
the same race, the same education, the same language; so that in all
the important acts of their life they are found in harmony with their
spectators.

This harmony becomes still more apparent if we consider an age nearer
our own. For example, take the great Spanish epoch of the sixteenth
and a part of the seventeenth centuries, in which lived the great
painters, Velasquez, Murillo, Zurbaran, Francisco de Herrera, Alonzo
Cano, and Morales; and the great poets, Lope de Vega, Calderon,
Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Don Luis de Leon, Guilhem de Castro,
and so many others. You know that at this time Spain was entirely
monarchical and Catholic; that she had over-come the Turks at Lepanto;
that she planted her foot in Africa and maintained herself there; that
she combated the Protestants in Germany, pursued them in France and
attacked them in England; that she subdued and converted the idolaters
of the new world, and chased away Jews and Moors from her own soil;
that she purged her own faith with autodafés and persecutions: that
she lavished fleets and armies, and the gold and silver of her American
possessions, along with her most precious children, the vital blood of
her own heart, upon multiplied and boundless crusades, so obstinately
and so fanatically, that at the end of a century and a half she fell
prostrate at the feet of Europe, but with such enthusiasm, such a
burst of glory, such national fervor, that her subjects, enamored of
the monarchy in which their power was concentrated, and with the cause
to which they devoted their lives, felt no other desire than that of
elevating religion and royalty by their obedience, and of forming
around the Church and the Throne a choir of faithful, militant, and
adoring supporters. In this monarchy of crusaders and inquisitors,
preserving the chivalric sentiments and sombre passions, the ferocity,
intolerance, and mysticism of the middle ages, the greatest artists
are the very men who possessed in the highest degree the faculties,
sentiments, and passions of the public that surrounded them. The most
celebrated poets--Lope de Vega and Calderon--were military adventurers,
volunteers in the Armada, duellists and lovers, as exalted and as
mystic in love as the poets and Don Quixotes of feudal times; they were
passionate Catholics and so ardent that, at the end of their lives,
one became a familiar of the Inquisition, others became priests, and
the most illustrious among them--the great Lope de Vega--fainted on
saying Mass, at the thought of the sacrifice and martyrdom of Jesus.
Everywhere may be found similar examples of the alliance, the intimate
harmony existing between an artist and his contemporaries; and we may
rest assured that if we desire to comprehend the taste or the genius
of an artist, the reasons leading him to choose a particular style of
painting or drama, to prefer this or that character or coloring, and to
represent particular sentiments, we must seek for them in the social
and intellectual conditions of the community in the midst of which he
lived.

We have therefore to lay down this rule: that, in order to comprehend
a work of art, an artist or a group of artists, we must clearly
comprehend the general social and intellectual condition of the times
to which they belong. Herein is to be found the final explanation;
herein resides the primitive cause determining all that follows it.
This truth, gentlemen, is confirmed by experience. In short, if we pass
in review the principal epochs of the history of art, we find that
the arts appear and disappear along with certain accompanying social
and intellectual conditions. For example, the Greek tragedy--that
of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides--appears at the time when the
Greeks were victorious over the Persians; at the heroic era of small
republican cities, at the moment of the great struggle by which
they acquired their independence and established their ascendency
in the civilized world; and we see it disappearing along with this
independence and this vigor when a degeneracy of character and the
Macedonian conquest delivered Greece over to strangers. It is the
same with Gothic architecture, developing along with the definitive
establishment of feudalism in the semi-renaissance of the eleventh
century at the period when society, delivered from brigands and
Normans, began to consolidate, and disappearing at the period when
the military system of petty independent barons, with the manners and
customs growing out of it vanished near the end of the fifteenth
century, on the advent of modern monarchies. It is the same with
Dutch painting, which flourished at the glorious period when,
through firmness and courage, Holland succeeded in freeing herself
from Spanish rule, combated England with equal power, and became
the richest, freest, most industrious, and most prosperous state in
Europe: and we see it declining at the commencement of the eighteenth
century, when Holland, fallen into a secondary rank, leaves the first
to England, reducing itself to a well-ordered, safely administered,
quiet, commercial banking-house, in which man, an honest _bourgeois,_
could live at ease, exempt from every great ambition and every grand
emotion. It is the same, finally, with French tragedy appearing at
the period when a noble and well-regulated monarchy, under Louis
XIV., established the empire of decorum, the life of the court, "the
pomp and circumstance" of society, and the elegant domestic phases
of aristocracy; disappearing when the social rule of nobles and the
manners of the antechamber were abolished by the Revolution.

I would like to make you more sensible by a comparison of this effect
of the social and intellectual state on the Fine Arts. Suppose you
are leaving the land of the south for that of the north; you perceive
on entering a certain zone a particular mode of cultivation and a
particular species of plant: first come the aloe and the orange; a
little later, the vine and the olive; after these, the oak and the
chestnut; a little further on, oats and the pine, and finally, mosses
and lichens. Each zone has its own mode of cultivation and peculiar
vegetation; both begin at the commencement, and both finish at the
end of the zone; both are attached to it. The zone is the condition
of their existence; by its presence or its absence is determined
what shall appear and what shall disappear. Now, what is this zone
but a certain temperature; in other words, a certain degree of heat
and moisture; in short, a certain number of governing circumstances
analogous in its germ to that which we called a moment ago the social
and intellectual state?

Just as there is a physical temperature, which by its variations
determines the appearance of this or that species of plant, so is
there a moral temperature, which by its variations determines the
appearance of this or that species of art. And as we study the physical
temperature in order to comprehend the advent of this or that species
of plants, whether maize or oats, the orange or the pine, so is it
necessary to study the moral temperature in order to comprehend the
advent of various phases of art, whether pagan sculpture or realistic
painting, mystic architecture or classic literature, voluptuous music
or ideal poetry. The productions of the human mind, like those of
animated nature, can only be explained by their _milieu._

Hence the study I intend to offer you this season, of the history of
painting in Italy. I shall attempt to lay before your eyes the mystic
_milieu,_ in which appeared Giotto and Beato Angelico, and to this end
I shall read passages from the poets and legendary writers, containing
the ideas entertained by the men of those days concerning happiness,
misery, love, faith, paradise, hell, and all the great interests of
humanity. We shall find documentary evidence in the poetry of Dante,
of Guido Cavalcanti, of the Franciscans, in the Golden Legend, in the
Imitation of Jesus Christ, in the Fioretti of St. Francis, in the
works of historians like Dino Campagni, and in that vast collection
of chroniclers by Muratori, which so naively portray the jealousies
and disturbances of the small Italian republics. After this I shall
attempt to place before you in the same manner the pagan _milieu_
which a century and a half later produced Leonardo da Vinci, Michael
Angelo, Raphael and Titian, and to this end I shall read, either from
the memoirs of contemporaries--Benvenuto Cellini for instance--or from
the diverse chronicles kept daily in Rome and in the principal Italian
cities, or from the despatches of ambassadors, or, finally, from the
descriptions of fêtes, masquerades, and civic receptions, which are
remarkable fragments, displaying the brutality, sensuality, and vigor
of society, as well as the lively poetic sentiment, the love of the
picturesque, the great literary sentiment, the decorative instincts,
and the passion for external splendor which at that time are seen as
well among the people and the ignorant crowd as among the great and the
lettered.

Suppose now, gentlemen, we should succeed in this undertaking, and
that we should be able to mark clearly and precisely the various
intellectual conditions which have led to the birth of Italian
painting--its development, its bloom, its varieties and decline.
Suppose the same undertaking successful with other countries, and other
ages, and with the different branches of art, architecture, sculpture,
painting, poetry, and music. Suppose, that through the effect of all
these discoveries, we succeed in defining the nature, and in marking
the conditions of existence of each art, we shall then have a complete
explanation of the Fine Arts, and of all in general; that is to say, a
philosophy of the Fine Arts--what is called an _æsthetic_ system. This
is what we aim at, gentlemen, and nothing else. Ours is modern, and
differs from the ancient, inasmuch as it is historic, and not dogmatic;
that is to say, it imposes no precepts, but ascertains and verifies
laws. Ancient Æsthetics gave, at first, a definition of beauty, and
declared, for instance, that the beautiful is the expression of the
moral ideal, or rather is the expression of the invisible, or, rather
still, is the expression of the human passions; then starting hence,
as from an article of a code, they absolved, condemned, admonished,
and directed. It is my good fortune not to have such a formidable
task to meet. I do not wish to guide you--it would embarrass me too
much. Besides, I say with all humility, that, as to precepts, we have
as yet found but two: the first is to be born a genius, an affair of
your parents, and not mine; and the second, which implies much labor
in order to master art, which likewise does not depend on me, but
on yourselves. My sole duty is to offer you facts, and show you how
these facts are produced. The modern method, which I strive to pursue,
and which is beginning to be introduced in all the moral sciences,
consists in considering human productions, and particularly works of
art, as facts and productions of which it is essential to mark the
characteristics and seek the causes, and nothing more. Thus understood,
science neither pardons nor proscribes; it verifies and explains. It
does not say to you, despise Dutch art because it is vulgar, and prize
only Italian art; nor does it say to you despise Gothic art because
it is morbid, and prize only Greek art. It leaves every one free to
follow their own predilections, to prefer that which is germane to
one's temperament, and to study with the greatest care that which
best corresponds to the development of one's own mind. Science has
sympathies for all the forms of art, and for all schools, even for
those the most opposed to each other. It accepts them as so many
manifestations of the human mind, judging that the more numerous they
are, and the more antithetical, the more they show the human mind in
its innumerable and novel phases. It is analogous to botany, which
studies the orange, the laurel, the pine, and the birch, with equal
interest; it is itself a species of botany, applied not to plants, but
to the works of man. By virtue of this it keeps pace with the general
movement of the day, which now affiliates the moral sciences with
the natural sciences, and which, giving to the first the principles,
precautions, and directions of the second, gives to them the same
stability, and assures them the same progress.




II.


I wish to apply at once this method to the first and principal
question by which a course of æsthetics is opened out, and which
is a definition of art. What is art, and in what does its nature
consist? Instead of establishing a formula, I wish to familiarize you
with facts, for facts exist here as elsewhere--positive facts open to
observation; I mean _works_ of _art_ arranged by families in galleries
and libraries, like plants in an herbarium, and animals in a museum.
Analysis may be applied to the one as to the others; a work of art
may be investigated generally, as we investigate a plant or an animal
generally. There is no more need of discarding experience in the first
case than in the second; the entire process consists in discovering,
by numerous comparisons and progressive eliminations, traits common
to all works of art, and, at the same time, the distinctive traits by
which works of art are separated from other productions of the human
intellect.

To this end we will, among the five great arts of poetry, sculpture,
painting, architecture, and music, set aside the last two, of which
the explanation is more difficult, and to which we will return
afterwards; we shall at present consider only the three first. All, as
you are aware, possess a common character, that of being more or less
_imitative_ arts.

At the first glance, it seems that this is their principal character,
and their object is imitation as exact as possible. For it is plain
that a statue is meant to imitate accurately a really living man; that
a picture is intended to portray real persons in real attitudes, the
interior of a house and a landscape, such as nature presents. It is no
less evident that a drama, a romance, attempts to represent faithfully
characters, actions, and actual speech, and to give as precise and as
accurate a picture of them as is possible. When, accordingly, the image
is inadequate or inexact, we say to the sculptor, "This breast or this
limb is not well executed;" and to the painter, "The figures of your
background are too large--the coloring of your trees is faulty;" and we
say to the author, "Never did man feel or think as you have imagined
him."

But there are other proofs, still stronger, and first, every-day
experience. When we behold what takes place in the life of an artist,
we perceive that it is generally divided into two sections. During
the first, in the youth and maturity of his talent, he sees things as
they are, and studies them minutely and earnestly; he fixes his eyes
on them; he labors and worries to express them, and he expresses them
with more than scrupulous fidelity. Arriving at a certain moment of
life, he thinks he understands them thoroughly and discovers no more
novelty in them; he casts aside the living model, and with certain
prescribed rules which he has picked up in the course of his experience
he forms a drama or a romance, a picture or a statue. The first epoch
is that of natural feeling; the second that of mannerism and decline.
If we penetrate the lives of the greatest men, we rarely fail to
discover both. In the life of Michael Angelo, the first period lasted
a long time, a little less than sixty years; all the works belonging
to it disclose the sentiment of force and heroic grandeur. The artist
is imbued with it; he has no other thought. His numerous dissections,
his countless drawings, the unremitted analysis of his own heart, his
study of the tragic passions and of their physical expression, are
for him but the means of manifesting outwardly the militant energy
with which he is carried away. This idea descends upon you from every
corner of the great vault of the Sistine chapel. Enter the Pauline
chapel alongside of it, and contemplate the works of his old age--the
Conversion of St. Paul, the Crucifixion of St. Peter; consider even
the Last Judgment, which he painted in his seventy-seventh year.
Connoisseurs, and those who are not, recognize at once that the two
frescoes are executed according to prescribed rules; that the artist
possessed a certain number of forms, which he used conventionally;
that he multiplied extraordinary attitudes, and ingeniously contrived
foreshortenings; that the lively invention, naturalness, the great
transport of the heart, the perfect truth peculiar to his first works,
have, at least in part, disappeared from the abuse of technique and
the force of routine; and that if he is still superior to others, he is
greatly inferior to himself.

The same comment may be made on another life--that of our French
Michael Angelo, Corneille. In the first years of his life, Corneille
was likewise struck by the feeling of force, and of moral heroism.
He found it around him in the vigorous passions bequeathed by the
religious wars to the new monarchy; in the daring acts of duellists;
in the proud feeling of honor which still carried away the devotees
of feudalism; in the bloody tragedies which the plots of princes and
the executions of Richelieu furnished as spectacles for the court; and
he created personages like _Chimène_ and the _Cid._ like _Polyeucte_
and _Pauline,_ like _Cornélie, Sertorius, Émilie,_ and _les Horaces._
Afterwards he produced _Pertharite, Attila,_ and other feeble works, in
which the situations merge into the horrible, and generous emotions
lose themselves in extravagance. In this period the living models he
once contemplated no longer had a social setting; at least he no longer
sought them, he failed to renew his inspiration. He was governed by
prescribed rules due to the memory of processes which he had formerly
found in the heat of enthusiasm, literary theories, dissertations and
distinctions on theatrical catastrophes and dramatic licenses. He
copied and exaggerated himself; learning, calculation and routine shut
out from him the direct and personal contemplation of powerful emotions
and of noble actions; he no longer created, but manufactured.

It is not alone the history of this or that great man which proves to
us the necessity of imitating the living model, and of keeping the eye
fixed on nature, but rather the history of every great school of art.
Every school (I believe without exception) degenerates and falls,
simply through its neglect of exact imitation, and its abandonment
of the living model. You see it in painting, in the fabricators of
muscles and exaggerated attitudes who succeeded Michael Angelo; in
the sciolists of theatrical decorations and in the brawny rotundities
which have followed the great Venetians; and in the boudoir and alcove
painters which closed the French school of art of the eighteenth
century. The same thing occurs in literature, with the versifiers and
rhetoricians of the Latin decadence; with the sensual and declamatory
playwrights closing the bright period of the English drama, and
with the manufacturers of sonnets, puns, witticisms, and bombast of
the Italian decline. Among these I will cite two striking examples.
The first is the decline of sculpture and painting in antiquity,
of which you obtain a vivid impression by visiting Pompeii, and
afterwards Ravenna. At Pompeii the painting and sculpture belong to
the first century of the present era; at Ravenna the mosaics are of
the sixth century, about the times of the Emperor Justinian. In this
interval of five centuries art becomes irremediably corrupt, and its
degeneracy is wholly due to the neglect of the living model. In the
first century the pagan manners and tastes of the _palestra_ still
existed. Men wore their vestments loose and cast them off easily,
frequented the baths, exercised in a state of nudity, witnessed
the combats of the circus, ever contemplating sympathetically and
intelligently the active movements of the living body. Their sculptors
and painters, surrounded by nude and half-nude forms, were capable of
reproducing them. Accordingly, you will see on the walls of Pompeii,
in the little oratories and in the inner courts, beautiful dancing
females, spirited, supple young heroes, with manly chests, agile
feet, every posture and form of the body rendered with an ease and
accuracy to which the most elaborate study of the present day cannot
attain. During the following five hundred years everything gradually
changes. Pagan manners, the use of the _palestra,_ and the love of
the nude, disappear. The body is no longer exposed, but concealed
under complicated drapery, and under a display of lace, purple, and
oriental magnificence. People no longer esteem the wrestler and the
youthful gymnast,[1] but the eunuch, the scribe, the monk, and the woman.
Asceticism gains ground, and with it a love for listless reverie,
hollow disputation, scribbling and wrangling. The worn-out babblers
of the Lower Empire replace the valiant Greek athletes and the hardy
combatants of Rome. By degrees the knowledge and study of the living
model are interdicted. People have discarded it. Their eyes rest only
on the works of ancient masters, and they copy these. Soon copies
are only made of copies, and again copies of these, so that each
generation recedes a step from the original type. The artist ceases to
have his own idea and his own feeling, and becomes a copying machine.
The Fathers declare that he must invent nothing, but must adhere to
lineaments prescribed by tradition and sanctioned by authority. This
separation of the artist from the living model brings art to the
condition in which you see it at Ravenna. At the end of five centuries,
artists can only represent man in two ways--seated and standing; other
attitudes are too difficult, and are beyond their capacity. Hands and
feet appear rigid as if fractured, the folds of drapery are wooden,
figures seem to be mannikins, and heads are invaded by the eyes. Art is
like an invalid sinking under a mortal consumption; it is languishing,
and about to expire.

In a different branch of art amongst ourselves, and in a neighboring
century, we find again a similar decline, and brought about by
similar causes. In the age of Louis XIV., literature attained to a
perfect style, to a purity, to a precision, to a sobriety of which
we have no example; dramatic art, especially, created a language and
a style of versification deemed by all Europe a masterpiece of the
human intellect. This is due to the fact of writers finding their
models around them and constantly observing them. The language of
Louis XIV. was perfect, displaying a dignity, eloquence, and gravity
truly royal. We know by the letters, despatches, and memoirs of the
court personages of that time, that an aristocratic tone, sustained
elegance, propriety of terms, dignified manners, and the art of correct
speaking, were as common to courtiers as to monarch; so that the writer
frequenting their society, had but to draw on his memory and experience
in order to obtain the very best materials of his art.

[Footnote 1: ἔφηβος.]




III.


Is this true in every particular, and must we conclude that absolutely
exact imitation is the end of art?

If this were so, gentlemen, absolutely exact imitation would produce
the finest works. But, in fact, it is not so. In sculpture, for
instance, casting is the process by which a faithful and minute
impression of a model is obtained, and certainly a good cast is not
equal to a good statue. Again, and in another domain, photography
is the art which completely reproduces with lines and tints on a
flat surface, without possible mistake, the forms and modelling of
the object imitated. Photography is undoubtedly a useful auxiliary
to painting, and is sometimes tastefully employed by cultivated and
intelligent men; but after all, no one thinks of comparing it with
painting. And finally, as a last illustration, if it were true that
exact imitation is the supreme aim of art, let me ask what would be the
best tragedy? the best comedy? the best drama? A stenographic report
of a criminal trial, every word of which is faithfully recorded. It
is clear, however, that if we sometimes encounter in it flashes of
nature and occasional outbursts of sentiment, these are but veins of
pure metal in a mass of worthless dross; it may furnish a writer with
materials for his art, but it does not constitute a work of art.

Some may possibly say, that photography, casting, and stenography are
mechanical processes, and that we ought to leave mechanism out of the
question, and accordingly limit our comparisons to man's work. Let us,
therefore, select works by artists conspicuous for minute fidelity.
There is a canvas in the Louvre by Denner. This artist worked
microscopically, taking four years to finish a portrait. Nothing in his
heads is overlooked--the finest lines and wrinkles, the faintly mottled
surface of the cheeks, the black specks scattered over the nose, the
bluish flush of imperceptible veins meandering under the skin, nor the
reflection of objects in the vicinity on the eye. We are struck with
astonishment. This head is a perfect illusion; it seems to project
out of the frame. Such success and such patience are unparalleled.
Substantially, however, a broad sketch by Van Dyck is a hundredfold
more powerful. Beside, neither in painting nor in any other art are
prizes awarded to deceptions.

A second and stronger proof, that exact imitation is not the end of
art, is to be found in this fact, that certain arts are purposely
inexact. There is sculpture, for instance. A statue is generally
of one color, either of bronze or of marble; and again, the eyes
are without eyeballs. It is just this uniformity of tint, and this
modification of moral expression, which completes its beauty. Examine
corresponding works, in which imitation is pushed to extremity. The
churches of Naples and Spain contain draped statues, colored; saints in
actual monastic garb, with yellow earthy skins, suitable to ascetics,
and bleeding hands and wounded sides characteristic of the martyred.
Alongside of these appear madonnas, in royal robes, in festive dresses,
and in bright silks, crowned with diadems, wearing precious necklaces,
brilliant ribbons, and magnificent laces, and with rosy complexions,
glittering eyes, and eyeballs formed of carbuncles. By this excess
of literal imitation, the artist gives no pleasure, but repugnance,
often disgust, and sometimes horror.

It is the same in literature. The best half of dramatic poetry, every
classic Greek and French drama, and the greater part of Spanish and
English dramas, far from literally copying ordinary conversation,
intentionally modify human speech. Each of these dramatic poets makes
his characters speak in verse, casting their dialogue in rhythm, and
often in rhyme. Is this modification prejudicial to the work? Far from
it. One of the great works of the age, the "Iphigenia" of Goethe, which
was at first written in prose and afterwards re-written in verse,
affords abundant evidence of this. It is beautiful in prose, but in
verse what a difference! The modification of ordinary language, in the
introduction of rhythm and metre, evidently gives to this work its
incomparable accent, that calm sublimity, that broad, sustained tragic
tone, which elevates the spirit above the low level of common life, and
brings before the eye the heroes of ancient days--that lost race of
primitive souls--and, among them, the august virgin, interpreter of the
gods, custodian of the laws, and the benefactress of mankind, in whom
is concentrated whatever is noble and good in human nature, in order to
glorify our species and renew the inspiration of our hearts.




IV.


It is essential, then, to closely imitate something in an object;
but not everything. We have now to discover what imitation should
be applied to. Anticipating an answer to this, I reply, "To the
relationships and mutual dependence of parts." Excuse this abstract
definition--I will make my meaning clearer to you.

Imagine yourselves before a living model, man or woman, with a pencil,
and a piece of paper twice the dimensions of your hand, on which to
copy it. Certainly, you cannot be expected to reproduce the magnitude
of the limbs, for your paper is too small; nor can you be expected to
reproduce their color, for you have only black and white to work with.
What you have to do is to reproduce their _relationships,_ and first
the proportions, that is to say, the relationships of magnitude. If
the head is of a certain length, the body must be so many times longer
than the head, the arm of a length equally dependent on that, and
the leg the same; and so on with the other members. Again, you are
required to reproduce forms, or the relationships of position: this or
that curve, oval, angle, or sinuosity in the model must be repeated
in the copy by a line of the same nature. In short, your object is to
reproduce the aggregate of relationships, by which the parts are linked
together, and nothing else; it is not the simple corporeal appearance
that you have to give, but the _logic_ of the whole body.

Suppose, in like manner, you are contemplating some actual character,
some scene in real life, high or low, and you are asked to furnish
a description of it. To do this you have your eyes, your ears, your
memory, and, perhaps, a pencil, to dot down five or six notes--no
great means, but ample for your purpose. What is expected of you is,
not to record every word and motion, all the actions of the personage,
or of the fifteen or twenty persons that are figured before you,
but, as before, to note proportions, connections, and relationships;
you are expected, in the first place, to keep exactly the proportion
of the actions of the personage, in other words, to give prominence
to ambitious acts, if he is ambitious, to avaricious acts, if he is
avaricious, and to violent acts, if he is violent; after this, to
observe the reciprocal connection of these same acts; that is to
say, to provoke one reply by another, to originate a resolution, a
sentiment, an idea by an idea, a sentiment, a preceding resolution,
and moreover by the actual condition of the personage; in addition to
that, still by the general character bestowed on him. In short, in
the literary effort, as in the pictorial effort, it is important to
transcribe, not the visible outlines of persons and events, but the
aggregate of their relationships and interdependencies, that is to say,
their logic.

As a general rule, therefore, whatever interests us in a real
personage, and which we entreat the artist to extract and render, is
his outward or inward logic; in other terms, his structure, composition
and action.

We have here, as you perceive, corrected the first definition given;
it is not cancelled, but purified. We have discovered a more elevated
character for art, which thus becomes intellectual, and not mechanical.




V.


Does this suffice us? Do we find works of art simply confined to a
reproduction of the relationships of parts? By no means, for the
greatest schools are justly those in which actual relationships are
most modified. Consider, for example, the Italian school in its
greatest artist, Michael Angelo, and, in order to give precision to
our ideas, let us recall his principal work, the four marble statues
surmounting the tomb of the Medicis at Florence. Those of you who
have not seen the originals, are at least familiar with copies of
them. In the figures of these men, and especially in the reclining
females, sleeping or waking, the proportions of the parts are certainly
not the same as in real personages. Similar figures exist nowhere,
even in Italy. You will see there young, handsome, well-dressed men,
peasants with bright eyes and a fierce expression, academy models
with firm muscles and a proud bearing; but neither in a village nor at
festivities, nor in the studios of Italy or elsewhere, at the present
time or in the sixteenth century, does any real man or woman resemble
the indignant heroes and the colossal despairing virgins which this
great artist has placed before us in this funereal chapel. Michael
Angelo found these types in his own genius and in his own heart. In
order to create them it was necessary to have the soul of a recluse,
of a meditative man, of a lover of justice; the soul of an impassioned
and generous nature bewildered in the midst of enervated and corrupt
beings, amidst treachery and oppression, before the inevitable
triumph of tyranny and injustice, under the ruins of liberty and of
nationality, himself threatened with death, feeling that if he lived
it was only by favor, and perhaps only by a short respite, incapable
of sycophancy and of submission, taking refuge entirely in that
art by which, in the silence of servitude, his great heart and his
great despair still spoke. He wrote on the pedestal of his sleeping
statue--"Sleep is sweet, and yet more sweet is it to be of stone, while
shame and misery last. Fortunate am I not to see--not to feel. Forbear
to arouse me! Ah! speak low!"

This is the sentiment which revealed to him such forms. To express
it, he has changed the ordinary proportions; he has lengthened the
trunk and the limbs, twisted the torso upon the hips, hollowed out the
sockets of the eyes, furrowed the forehead with wrinkles similar to
the lion's frowning brow, raised mountains of muscles on the shoulder,
ridged the spine with tendons, and so fastened the vertebras that it
resembles the links of an iron chain strained to their utmost tension
and about to break.

Let us consider, in like manner, the Flemish school; and in this
school the great Fleming, Rubens, and one of the most striking of
his works, the "Kermesse." In this work, no more than in those of
Michael Angelo, will you find an imitation of ordinary proportions.
Visit Flanders, and observe the types of mankind about you, even
at feastings and revellings, such as the fêtes of Gayant, Antwerp,
and other places. You will see comfortable-looking people eating
much and drinking more; serenely smoking, cool, phlegmatic bodies;
dull-looking, and with massive, irregular features, strongly resembling
the figures of Teniers. As to the splendid brutes of the "Kermesse,"
you meet nothing like them! Rubens certainly found them elsewhere.
After the horrible religious wars, this rich country of Flanders,
so long devastated, finally attained peace and civil security. The
soil is so good, and the people so prudent, comfort and prosperity
returned almost at once. Everybody enjoyed this new prosperity and
abundance; the contrast between the past and the present led to the
indulgence of rude and carnal instincts let loose like horses and
cattle after long privation in fresh, green fields, abounding in the
richest pasture. Rubens himself was sensible of them; and the poetry
of gross, sumptuous living, of satisfied and redundant flesh, of
brutal, inordinate merry-making, found a ready outlet in the shameless
sensualities and voluptuous ruddiness, in the whiteness and freshness
of the nudities of which he was so prodigal. In order to express all
this in the "Kermesse" he has expanded the trunk, enlarged the thighs,
twisted the loins, deepened the redness of the cheeks, dishevelled
the hair, kindled in the eyes a flame of savage, unbridled desire,
unloosed the demons of disorder in the shape of shattered glasses,
overturned tables, holdings and kissings, a perfect orgie, and the
most extraordinary culmination of human bestiality ever portrayed upon
canvas.

These two examples show you that the artist, in modifying the
relationships of parts, modifies them understandingly, purposely, in
such a way as to make apparent the _essential character_ of the object,
and consequently its leading idea according to his conception of it.
This phrase, gentlemen, requires attention; this _essential character_
is what philosophers call the _essence_ of things; and because of this
they say that it is the aim of art to manifest the _essence_ of things.
We will not retain this term essence, which is technical, but simply
state that it is the aim of art to manifest a predominant character,
some salient principal quality, some important point of view, some
essential condition of being in the object.

We here approach the true definition of art, and accordingly need to
be perfectly clear. We must insist on and precisely define essential
character. I would premise at once that it is _a quality from which
all others, or at least most other qualities, are derived according to
definite affinities._ Grant me again this abstract definition: a few
illustrations will make it plain to you.

The essential character of a lion, giving him his rank in the
classifications of natural history, is that of a great flesh-eater;
nearly all his traits, whether physical or moral, as I am about to
prove to you, are derived from this trait as their fountain-head.
First, there are physical traits: his teeth move like shears; he has
a jaw constructed to tear and to crush; and necessarily, for, being
carnivorous, he has to nourish himself with, and prey upon, living
game; in order to manoeuvre this formidable instrument he requires
enormous muscles, and for their insertion, temporal sockets of
proportionate size. Add to the feet other instruments, the terrible
contractile claws, the quick step on the extremity of the toes, a
terrible elasticity of the thighs acting like a powerful spring, and
eyes that see best at night, because night is the best hunting-time. A
naturalist, pointing to a lion's skeleton, once said to me, "There is a
jaw mounted on four paws."

The moral points of the lion are likewise in harmony. At first,
there is the sanguinary instinct--the craving for fresh flesh, and a
repugnance for every other food; next, the strength and the nervous
excitement through which the lion concentrates an enormous amount of
force at the instant of attack and defence; and on the other hand, his
somniferous habits, the grave, sombre inertia of moments of repose,
and the long yawnings after the excitement of the chase. All these
traits are derived from his carnivorous character, and on this account
we call it his essential character.

Let us now consider a more difficult case, that of an entire country,
with its innumerable details of structure, aspect, and cultivation;
its plants, animals, inhabitants, and towns; as, for example, the Low
Countries. The essential character of this region is its _alluvial_
formation; that, is to say, a formation due to vast quantifies of
earth brought down by streams and deposited about their mouths. From
this single term spring an infinity of peculiarities, summing up the
entire nature of the country, not only its physical outlines, what it
is in itself, but again the intellectual, moral, and physical qualities
of its inhabitants, and of their works. At first, in the inanimate
world, come its moist and fertile plains, the necessary consequence
of numerous broad rivers and vast deposits of productive soil. These
plains are always green, because broad, tranquil, and sluggish streams,
and the innumerable canals so easily constructed in soft, flat ground,
maintain perennial verdure. You can readily imagine, and on purely
rational principles, the aspect of such a country--a dull, rainy sky,
constantly streaked with showers, and even on fine days veiled as if
by gauze with light vapory clouds rising from the wet surface, forming
a transparent dome, an airy tissue of delicate, snowy fleeces, over
the broad verdant expanse stretching out of sight and rounded to the
distant horizon. In the animated kingdom these numerous luxuriant
pastures attract countless herds of cattle, who recline tranquilly on
the grass, or ruminate over their cud, and dot the flat green sward
with innumerable spots of white, yellow, and black. Hence the rich
stores of milk and meat, which, added to the grains and vegetables
raised on this prolific soil, furnish its inhabitants with cheap and
abundant supplies of food. It might well be said that in this country
water makes grass, grass makes cattle, cattle make cheese, butter,
and meat; and all these, with beer, make the inhabitant. Indeed, out
of this fat living, and out of this physical organization saturated
with moisture, spring the phlegmatic temperament, the regular habits,
the tranquil mind and nerves, the capacity to take life easily
and prudently, unbroken contentment and love of well-being, and,
consequently, the reign of cleanliness and the perfection of comfort.
These consequences extend so far as even to affect the aspect of towns.
In an alluvial country there is no stone; building material consists
of terra-cotta bricks, and tiles. Rains being frequent and heavy,
roofs are very sloping, and as dampness lasts a long time, their fronts
are painted and varnished. A Flemish town, therefore, is a net-work
of brown or red edifices always neat, occasionally glittering and
with pointed gables; here and there rises an old church constructed
of shingle or of rubble; streets in the best of order run between two
scrupulously clean lines of sidewalk. In Holland the sidewalks are laid
in brick, frequently intermingled with coarse porcelain: domestics may
be seen at an early hour in the morning on their knees cleaning them
off with cloths. Cast your eyes through the dazzling window-panes;
enter a club-room decked with green branches, with its floor powdered
with sand constantly renewed; visit the taverns, brightly painted,
where rows of casks display their brown rotund sides, and where the
rich yellow beer foams up out of glasses covered with quaint devices.
In all these details of common life, in all these signs of inward
contentment and enduring prosperity, you detect the effects of the
great underlying characteristic which is stamped upon the climate and
the soil, upon the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom, upon man
and his works, upon society and the individual.

Through these innumerable effects, you judge of the importance of this
essential character. It is this which art must bring forward into
proper light, and if this task devolves upon art, it is because nature
fails to accomplish it. In nature, this essential character is simply
dominant; it is the aim of art to render it predominant. It moulds
real objects, but it does not mould them completely: its action is
restricted, impeded by the intervention of other causes; its impression
on objects bearing its stamp is not sufficiently strong to be clearly
visible. Man is sensible of this deficiency, and to remove it he has
invented art.

Let us again take up Rubens' "Kermesse." These blooming merry wives,
these roystering drunkards, these busts and visages of burly unbridled
brutes, probably found counterparts in the carousals of the day.
Over-nourished and exuberant nature aimed at producing such gross forms
and such coarse manners, but she only half accomplished her task; other
causes intervened to stay this excess of a carnal jovial energy. There
is, at first, poverty. In the best of times, and in the best countries,
many people have not enough to eat, and fasting, at least partial
abstinence, misery, and bad air, all the accompaniments of indigence,
diminish the development and boisterousness of native brutality. A
suffering man is not so strong, and more sober. Religion, law, police
regulations, and habits due to steady labor, operate in the same
direction; education does its part. Out of a hundred subjects who,
under favorable conditions, might have furnished Rubens with models,
only five or six, perhaps, could be of any service to him. Suppose now
that these five or six figures in the actual festivities which he might
have seen were lost in a crowd of people more or less indifferent and
common; consider again, that at the moment they came under his eye
they exhibited neither the attitude, the expression, the gestures,
the abandonment, the costume, or the disorder requisite to make this
teeming excitement apparent. Through all these draw-backs nature called
art to its aid; she could not clearly distinguish the character; it was
necessary that the artist should supplement her.

Thus is it with every superior work of art. While Raphael was painting
his "Galatea," he wrote that, beautiful women being scarce, he was
following a conception of his own. This means that, looking at human
nature from a certain point of view, its repose, its felicity, its
gracious and dignified sweetness, he found no living model to express
it satisfactorily. The peasant or laboring girl who posed for him,
had hands deformed by work, feet spoiled by their covering, and eyes
disordered by shame, or demoralized by her calling. His "Fornarina" has
drooping shoulders, a meagre arm above the elbow, a hard and contracted
expression.[1] If he painted her in the Farnesini Palace, he completely
transformed her, developing a character in his painted figure of which
the real figure only contributed parts and suggestions.

Thus the province of a work of art is to render the essential
character, or, at least, some capital quality, the predominance of
which must be made as perceptible as possible. In order to accomplish
this the artist must suppress whatever conceals it, select whatever
manifests it, correct every detail by which it is enfeebled, and recast
those in which it is neutralized.

Let us no longer consider works but artists, that is to say, the way in
which artists feel, invent, and produce: you will find it consistent
with the foregoing conception of the work of art. There is one gift
indispensable to all artists; no study, no degree of patience, supplies
its place; if it is wanting in them they are nothing but copyists and
mechanics. In confronting objects the artist must experience _original
sensation_; the character of an object strikes him, and the effect
of this sensation is a strong, peculiar impression. In other words,
when a man is born with talent his perceptions--or at least a certain
class of perceptions--are delicate and quick; he naturally seizes and
distinguishes, with a sure and watchful tact, relationships and shades;
at one time the plaintive or heroic sense in a sequence of sounds, at
another the listlessness or stateliness of an attitude, and again the
richness or sobriety of two complimentary or contiguous colors. Through
this faculty he penetrates to the very heart of things, and seems to be
more clear-sighted than other men. This sensation, moreover, so keen
and so personal, is not inactive--by a counter-stroke the whole nervous
and thinking machinery is affected by it. Man involuntarily expresses
his emotions; the body makes signs, its attitude becomes mimetic;
he is obliged to figure externally his conception of an object;
the voice seeks imitative inflections, the tongue finds pictorial
terms, unforeseen forms, a figurative, inventive, exaggerated style.
Under the force of the original impulse the active brain recasts
and transforms the object, now to illumine and ennoble it, now to
distort and grotesquely pervert it; in the free sketch, as in the
violent caricature, you readily detect, with poetic temperaments, the
ascendency of involuntary impressions. Familiarize yourselves with the
great artists and great authors of your century; study the sketches,
designs, diaries, and correspondence of the old masters, and you will
again everywhere find the same inward process. We may adorn it with
beautiful names; we may call it genius or inspiration, which is right
and proper; but if you wish to define it precisely you must always
verify therein the vivid spontaneous sensation which groups together
the train of accessory ideas, master, fashion, metamorphose and employ
them in order to become manifest.

We have now arrived at a definition of a work of art. Let us, for a
moment, cast our eyes backward, and review the road we have passed
over. We have, by degrees, arrived at a conception of art more and more
elevated, and consequently more and more exact. At first we thought
that the object of art was to _imitate sensible appearances._ Then
separating material from intellectual imitation, we found that what
it desired to reproduce in sensible appearances is the _relationships
of parts. _ Finally, remarking that relationships are, and ought to
be, modified in order to obtain the highest results of art, we proved
that if we study the relationships of parts it is _to make predominant
an essential character._ No one of these definitions destroys its
antecedent, but each corrects and defines it. We are consequently
able now to combine them, and by subordinating the inferior to the
superior, thus to sum up the result of our labor:--"The end of a work
of art is to manifest some essential or salient character, consequently
some important idea, clearer and more completely than is attainable
from real objects. Art accomplishes this end by employing a group of
connected parts, the relationships of which it systematically modifies.
In the three imitative arts of sculpture, painting, and poetry, these
groups correspond to real objects."


[Footnote 1: See the two portraits of the "Fornarina," in the Sciarra
and the Borghese palaces.]




VI.


That established, gentlemen, we see, on examining the different
parts of this definition, that the first is essential and the second
accessory. An aggregate of connected parts is necessary in all art
which the artist may modify so as to portray character; but in every
art it is not necessary that this aggregate should correspond with
real objects; it is sufficient that it exists. If we therefore meet
with aggregates of connected parts which are not imitations of real
objects, there will be arts which will not have imitation for their
point of view. This is the case, and it is thus that architecture and
music are born. In short, besides connections, proportions, moral and
organic dependencies, which the three imitative arts copy, there are
mathematical relationships which the two others, imitating nothing,
combine.

Let us, at first, consider the mathematical relationships perceived by
the sense of sight. Magnitudes sensible to the eye may form amongst
each other aggregates of parts connected by mathematical laws. For
instance, a piece of wood or stone may have geometrical form, that of
a cube, a cone, a cylinder, or a sphere, which establishes regular
relationships of distance between the different points of its outline.
Furthermore, its dimensions may be quantities mutually related in
simple proportions which the eye can seize readily; height, may be
two, three, or four times greater than thickness or breadth: this
constitutes a second series of mathematical relationships. Finally,
many of these pieces of wood or stone may be placed symmetrically
on the top or by the side of each other, according to distances and
angles mathematically combined. Architecture is established on this
aggregate of connected parts. An architect conceiving some dominant
character, either serenity, simplicity, strength, or elegance, as
formerly in Greece or Rome, or the strange, the varied, the infinite,
the fantastic, as in Gothic times, may select and combine connections,
proportions, dimensions, forms, and positions--in short, the
relationships of materials, that is to say, certain visible magnitudes
in such a way as to display the character aimed at.

By the side of magnitudes perceived by sight there are magnitudes
perceived by the hearing,--I mean the velocities of sonorous
vibrations; and these vibrations being magnitudes may also form
aggregates of parts connected by mathematical laws. In the first place,
as you are aware, a musical sound is composed of continuous vibrations
of equal velocity, and this equality already places between them
a mathematical relationship; in the second place, two sounds being
given, the second may be composed of vibrations, two, three, or four
times the rapidity of the first; accordingly, there is between these
two sounds a mathematical relationship, which is figured by placing
them at an equal distance from each other on the musical stave. If,
consequently, instead of taking two, we take a number of sounds, and
place them at equal distances,--we form a scale, which scale is the
gamut, all the sounds being thus bound together according to their
relative position on the gamut. You can now establish these connections
either between successive or simultaneous sounds, the first order of
sounds constituting melody, and the second harmony. This is music: it
has two essential parts, based, like architecture, on mathematical
relationships, which the artist is free to combine and modify.

Music, however, possesses a second property, and this new element gives
it a peculiar quality and no ordinary scope. Besides its mathematical
qualities, sound is analogous to the cry, and by this title it directly
expresses with unrivalled precision, delicacy and force, suffering,
joy, rage, indignation--all the agitations and emotions of an animated
sensitive being, even to the most secret and most subtle gradations.
From this point of view it is similar to poetic declamation, furnishing
a specific type of music, called the music of expression, like that of
Gluck and the Germans, in opposition to the music of melody, that of
Rossini and the Italians. Let the composer's point of view be what it
may, the two styles of music are nevertheless related to each other,
sounds always forming aggregates of parts linked together at once by
their mathematical relationship and by the correspondence which they
have with the passions and the various internal states of the moral
being. The musician, therefore, who conceives a certain salient,
important feature of things, let it be sadness or joy, tender love or
passionate rage, any idea or sentiment whatever, may freely select and
combine in such a way in these mathematical and moral relationships as
to manifest the character which he has conceived.

All the arts are thus included in the definition above presented. In
architecture and music, as in sculpture, painting, and poetry, it is
the object of a work of art to manifest some essential character, and
to employ as means of expression an aggregate of connected parts, the
relationship of which the artist combines and modifies.




VII.


Now that we know the nature of art, we can comprehend its importance.
Previously we were only sensible of its effect; it was a matter of
instinct, and not of reason: we were conscious of respecting and
esteeming art, but were not qualified to account for our respect and
esteem. Our admiration for art can now be justified, and we can mark
its place in the order of life.

Man, in many respects, is an animal endeavoring to protect himself
against nature and against other men. He is obliged to provide himself
with food, clothing, and shelter, and to defend himself against
climate, want, and disease. To do this he tills the ground, navigates
the sea, and devotes himself to different industrial and commercial
pursuits. Furthermore, he must perpetuate his species, and secure
himself against the violence of his fellow-men; to this end, he forms
families and states, and establishes magistracies, functionaries,
constitutions, laws, and armies. After so many inventions and such
labor, he is not yet emancipated from his original condition; he is
still an animal, better fed and better protected than other animals;
he still thinks only of himself, and of his kindred. At this moment
a superior life dawns on him--that of contemplation, by which he
is led to interest himself in the creative and permanent causes on
which his own being and that of his fellows depend, in the leading
and essential characters which rule each aggregate, and impress their
marks on the minutest details. Two ways are open to him for this
purpose. The first is Science, by which, analyzing these causes and
these fundamental laws, he expresses them in abstract terms and precise
formula; the second is Art, by which he manifests these causes and
these fundamental laws no longer through arid definitions, inaccessible
to the multitude, and only intelligible to a favored few, but in a
sensible way, appealing not alone to reason, but also to the heart and
senses of the humblest individual. Art has this peculiarity, that it is
at once _noble_ and _popular,_ manifesting whatever is most exalted,
and manifesting it to all.




PART II.

ON THE PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.




I.

Having investigated the nature of the work of art, there now remains
a study of the law of its production. This law, in general terms, may
be thus expressed:--_A work of art is determined by an aggregate which
is the general state of the mind and surrounding circumstances._ I
have stated this principle in the foregoing section, and have now to
establish it.

This law rests on two kinds of proof: the one that of experience, and
the other that of reason. The former consists of an enumeration of the
many instances in which the law verifies itself. Some of these I have
already presented to you, and others will soon follow. One may assert,
moreover, that no case is known to which the law is not applicable; it
is strictly so to those hitherto examined, and not merely in a general
way, but in detail; not only to the growth and extinction of great
schools, but again to all the variations and oscillations to which
art is subject. The second order of proof consists in showing this
dependence to be not only rigorous in point of fact, but, again, that
it is so through necessity. We will accordingly analyze what we have
called the general state of the mind and surrounding circumstances;
we shall seek, according to the ordinary standard of human nature the
effects which a like state must produce on the public, on artists, and
consequently on works of art. Hence we draw a forced connection and a
definite concordance, and we establish a necessary harmony which we had
observed as simply fortuitous. The second proof _demonstrates_ what the
first had averred.




II.

In order to make this harmony apparent let us resume a comparison
already of service to us, that between a plant and a work of art, and
note the circumstances in which a plant, or a species of plant, say
the orange, may be developed and propagated in a certain soil. Let
us suppose all kinds of grain and seed borne by the wind and sown at
random; on what conditions can those of the Lorange germinate, become
trees, blossom, yield fruit, spread, and cover the ground with a
numerous family?

Many favorable circumstances are essential to this end. And at first
the soil must be neither too light nor too meagre: otherwise, the roots
lacking depth and grasp, the tree would fall at the first gale of wind.
Next, the soil must not be too dry; otherwise the tree will wither
where it stands deprived of the moisture of springs and streams.
Moreover, the climate must be warm; or the tree, which is delicate,
will freeze, or at least droop, and never put forth sprouts; the summer
must be long, in order that the fruit, which is slow in ripening, may
fully mature; and the winter mild, so that January frosts may not blast
or shrivel the oranges that remain green on its branches. Finally,
the soil must not be too favorable for other plants, lest the tree,
left to itself, might be stifled by the competition and infringement
of a more vigorous vegetation. When all these conditions concur, the
little orange will grow, become mature, and produce others again to
reproduce themselves. Storms will undoubtedly occur, stones fall, and
browsing goats will destroy certain plants; but on the whole, in spite
of accidents which kill individuals, the species will be propagated,
cover the ground, and in a few years display a nourishing grove of
orange trees. All this is to be seen in the admirably sheltered gorges
of Southern Italy, in the environs of Sorrento and Amain, on the
shores of the gulfs, and in the small, watered valleys, freshened by
streams descending from the mountains, and caressed by the beneficent
breezes of the sea. This concourse of circumstances was necessary in
order to produce those beautiful round tops, those lustrous domes of a
bright deep green, those innumerable golden apples, and that exquisite
fragrant vegetation which, in mid-winter, makes this coast the richest
and loveliest of gardens.

Let us now reflect on the manner in which things moved in this example.
We have just observed the effect of circumstances and of physical
temperature. Strictly speaking, these have not produced the orange;
the seeds were given, and these alone contained the vital force. The
circumstances described, however, were necessary in order that the
plant might flourish and be propagated; had these failed, the plant
likewise would have failed.

Accordingly, let the temperature be different, and the species of plant
will be different. Suppose conditions entirely opposite to those just
mentioned; take the summit of a mountain swept by violent winds, with a
thin scanty soil, a cold climate, a short summer, and snow during the
winter; not only will the orange not thrive here, but the greater part
of other trees will perish. Of all the seeds scattered haphazard by the
wind only one will survive, and you will see but one species to endure
and be propagated, the only one adapted to these severe conditions; the
fir and the pine will cover the lonely crags, the abrupt precipices,
and long, rocky ridges, with their stiff colonnades of tall trunks and
vast mantles of sombre green, and there, as in the Vosges, in Scotland
and in Norway, you may travel league after league, under silent arches,
on a carpet of crisp leaves, among gnarled roots obstinately clinging
to the rocks, the domain of the patient energetic plant which alone
subsists under the incessant attacks of gales, and the hoar-frosts of
long winters.

We may accordingly regard temperature and physical circumstances
as _making a choice_ amongst various species of trees, all owing a
certain species to subsist and propagate, to the exclusion, more or
less complete, of all others. Physical temperature acts by elimination
and suppression, in other words, by _natural selection._ Such is the
great law by which we now explain the origin and structure of diverse
existing organisms--a law as applicable to moral as to physical
conditions, to history as well as to botany and zoology, to genius and
to character, as well as to plant and to animal.

In short, there is a _moral_ temperature, consisting of the general
state of minds and manners, which acts in the same way as the other.
Properly speaking, this temperature does not produce artists; talent
and genius are gifts like seeds; what I mean to say is, that the same
country at different epochs probably contains about the same number
of men of talent, and of men of mediocrity. We know, in fact, through
statistics, that in two successive generations nearly the same number
of men are found of the requisite stature for the conscription and the
same number of men too small for soldiers. In all probability, it is
with minds as with bodies. Nature is a sower of men, and putting her
hand constantly in the same sack, distributes nearly the same quantity,
the same quality, the same proportion of seed. But in these handfuls
of seed which she scatters as she strides over time and space, not all
germinate. A certain moral temperature is necessary to develop certain
talents; if this is wanting, these prove abortive. Consequently, as
the temperature changes, so will the species of talent change; if it
becomes reversed, talent will become reversed, and, in general, we may
conceive moral temperature as _making a selection_ among different
species of talent, allowing only this or that species to develope, to
the exclusion more or less complete of others. It is through some such
mechanism that you see developed in schools at certain times and in
certain countries the sentiment of the ideal, that of the real, that
of drawing and that of color. There is a prevailing tendency which
constitutes the spirit of the age. Talent seeking to force an outlet
in another direction, finds it closed; and the force of the public
mind and surrounding habits repress and lead it astray, by imposing on
it a fixed growth.




III.

The foregoing comparison may serve you as a general indication; let us
now enter into details, and study the action of the moral temperature
on works of art.

For the sake of greater clearness we will take a very simple case,
that of a certain mental condition, in which melancholy predominates.
This supposition is not arbitrary, for such a condition has frequently
occurred in the life of humanity: five or six centuries of decadence,
depopulation, foreign invasion, famine, pests, and aggravated misery,
are amply sufficient to produce it. Asia experienced such a state of
things in the sixth century before Christ, and Europe in the period of
the first ten centuries of our own era. In times like these men lose
both courage and hope, and regard life as a burden.

Let as contemplate the effect of such a mental condition, together with
the circumstances which engender it, on the artists of an epoch like
this. We admit that nearly the same number of melancholy and joyous
temperaments, as well as a mixture of both, are met in this as at other
times; how and in what sense does the prevailing situation effect their
transformation?

It must be borne in mind that the misfortunes that afflict the public
also afflict the artist; he is one of the flock, and he suffers as
the rest suffer. For example, if invasions of barbarians occur, and
pests, famines, and calamities of all sorts prolonged for centuries and
spread over the entire country; not only one, but countless miracles,
would be necessary to save him harmless in the general inundation. On
the contrary, it is probable, and even certain, that he will have his
share of public misfortune; that he will be ruined, beaten, wounded,
and led into captivity like others; that his wife, children, relatives
and friends will share the common fate, and that he will suffer and be
subject to fears on their account, as well as on his own. During this
long-continued flood of personal misery he will, if he is gay, become
less gay, and, if melancholy, still more melancholy. This is the first
effect of his social medium.

On the other hand, if the artist is raised among melancholy companions,
the ideas he receives in infancy, with those acquired afterwards,
are melancholy. The dominant religion, accommodating itself to the
lugubrious order of things, teaches him that the earth is a place
of exile, the world a prison-house, life an evil, and that all that
concerns him is to deserve to get out of it. Philosophy, forming its
morality according to the lamentable spectacle of man's degeneracy,
proves to him that it would have been better for him not to have
been born Ordinary conversation teems with only mournful events,
the invasion of a province, the destruction of some monument, the
oppression of the weak, and civil wars among the strong. Daily
observation reveals to him only images of discouragement and grief,
beggars, and cases of starvation, a bridge left to decay, abandoned,
crumbling houses, fields going to waste, and the black walls of
dwellings ravaged by fire. All these impressions sink deep in his mind
from the first year of his life to the last, incessantly aggravating
whatever melancholy sentiment arises out of his own misfortunes.

They aggravate him so much the more proportionately to the intensity
of his artistic feeling. What makes him an artist is the practice of
imitating the essential character of things, the salient points of
objects; other men only see portions, while he sees the whole and the
spirit of them. And as in this case the salient characteristic is
melancholy, he accordingly perceives nothing else. Moreover, through
this excess of imagination and this instinct of exaggeration peculiar
to artists, he amplifies and expands it to the utmost; he becomes
impregnated with it, and charges his work with it, so that he commonly
sees and paints things in much darker colors than would be employed by
his contemporaries.

It must be added also that he finds them of great assistance to
him in his work. You know that a man who paints or writes remains
not alone face to face with his canvas or his writing-desk. On the
contrary, he goes out and talks to people and looks about him; he
listens to the hints of his friends or rivals, and seeks suggestions
in books and from surrounding works of art. An idea resembles a
seed: if the seed requires, in order to germinate, develope and
bloom, the nourishment which water, air, sun and soil afford it, the
idea, in order to complete and shape itself into form, requires to be
supplemented and aided by other minds. Accordingly, in these epochs
of melancholy, what sort of suggestions are other minds capable of
furnishing? Only melancholy ones, for only on this side do men labor.
As their experience provides them only with painful sensations and
sentiments, they can only note the shades of difference, and record
discoveries made on the path of suffering: the heart is the only field
of observation, and if this is filled with sorrow, sorrow is all
that men contemplate. They are, therefore, conscious only of grief,
dejection, chagrin and despair. If the artist demands instruction of
them this is all the return they can make. To seek in them any idea
or any information on the different kinds or different expressions of
joy would be labor lost; they can only furnish what they possess. For
this reason let him attempt to portray happiness, cheerfulness, or
gayety, and he stands alone, deprived of all support, left to his own
resources, and which in an isolated man amounts to nothing. His labor
will likewise be stamped with mediocrity. On the other hand, when he
would paint melancholy sentiments his century would come to his aid.
He finds materials prepared for him by preceding schools; he finds a
ready-made art, consisting of known processes and a beaten track. A
church ceremony, a piece of furniture, a conversation, suggests to him
a form, a color, a phrase, or a character still unknown to him; his
work, to which millions of unknown co-laborers have contributed, is
all the more beautiful, because, in addition to his own labor and his
own genius, it embodies the labor and genius of surrounding society,
and of generations that have gone before it.

There is still another reason, and the strongest of all, which draws
him to melancholy subjects; it is that his work, once exposed to the
public eye, finds appreciation only as it expresses melancholy ideas.
Men, indeed, can only comprehend sentiments analogous to those they
have themselves experienced. Other sentiments, no matter how powerfully
expressed, do not affect them; the look with their eyes, but the heart
is dormant and directly their eyes are averted. Imagine a man losing
his fortune, country, children, health and liberty, one manacled in
a dungeon for twenty years, like Pellico or Andryane, whose spirit
by degrees is changed and broken, and who becomes melancholy and a
mystic, and whose discouragement is incurable; such a man entertains
a horror of cheerful music, and has no disposition to read Rabelais;
if you place him before the merry brutes of Rubens, he will turn aside
and place himself before the canvases of Rembrandt; he will enjoy only
the music of Chopin and the poetry of Lamartine or Heine. The same
thing happens to the public and to individuals; their taste depends
on their situation; their sadness gives them a taste for melancholy
works; cheerful productions are accordingly repudiated, and the artist
is censured or neglected. Now an artist composes mostly in order to
obtain appreciation and applause; this is his ruling passion. Hence,
therefore, betides other causes, his ruling passion, added to the
pressure of public opinion, leads him, pushes him, and constantly
brings him back to the expression of melancholy, and barring the ways
to him which would lead him to the portrayal of gayety and happiness.

Through this series of obstacles every passage would be closed for
works of art manifesting joy. If an artist overcomes one obstacle,
he is arrested by others. If he meets with joyous natures he will
be saddened _by_ their personal misfortunes. Education and current
conversation fill their minds with gloomy ideas. The artists' faculties
by which they detach and amplify the leading traits of objects, will
find for their exercise none but melancholy ones. The experience and
labor of others provide them with suggestions and are co-operative only
in melancholy subjects. Finally, the earnest and decisive will of the
public allows them to produce only melancholy subjects. Consequently,
the class of artists and their works suitable for the expression of
gayety and joyousness disappear, or end by becoming reduced to almost
nothing.

Consider, now, the opposite case, that of a general condition of
cheerfulness. That occurs in renaissance epochs, when order, wealth,
population, comfort, prosperity, and useful and beautiful discoveries
are constantly increasing. By reversing its terms the analysis we have
just made is applicable word for word; the same process of reasoning
proves that the works of art of such a period will all, more or less,
express a joyous character.

Consider, now, an intermediary case, that is to say, a commingling of
this or that phase of joy or sadness, which is the ordinary condition
of things. By a proper modification of terras, the analysis is equally
pertinent; the same reasoning demonstrates that works of art express
corresponding combinations, and a corresponding species of joy and
melancholy.

Let us conclude, therefore, that in every simple or complex state, the
social medium, that is to say, the general state of mind and manners,
determines the species of works of art in suffering only those which
are in harmony with it, and in suppressing other species, through a
series of obstacles interposed, and a series of attacks renewed, at
every step of their development.




IV.


Let us now leave supposed cases, simplified to give clearness to
the exposition, and take up real ones. You will see in glancing at
the most important of a historical series, a verification of the
law. I will select four which are the four great cycles of European
civilization--Greek and Roman antiquity, the feudal and Christian
middle ages, the well-regulated aristocratic monarchies of the
seventeenth century, and the industrial democracies of the present day,
directed by the sciences. Each of these periods has its own art, or
some department of art peculiar to it, either sculpture, architecture,
the drama or music, or some determined phase of each of these
great arts; in every case a distinct, singularly rich and complete
vegetation, which, in its leading features, reflects the principal
traits of the art and the nation. Let us, accordingly, consider turn
the different soils, and we shall that all produce different flowers.




V.

About three thousand years ago there appeared on the shores and islands
of the Ægean Sea a remarkably handsome, intelligent race, viewing life
in quite a new way. It did not allow itself to be absorbed by a great
religious conception like the Hindoos and Egyptians, nor by a great
social organization like the Assyrians and Persians, nor by great
industrial and commercial usages after the fashion of the Phoenicians
and Carthagenians. Instead of a theocracy and a hierarchy of caste, and
instead of a monarchy and a hierarchy of functionaries and of great
trading and commercial establishments, the men of that race had an
invention of their own called the city, which city, in sending forth
branches, gave birth to others of the same description. One of these,
Miletus, produced three hundred towns, and colonized the entire coast
of the Black Sea. Others did the same, the Mediterranean Sea being
encircled with a garland of flourishing cities, extending from Cyrene
to Marseilles, along the gulfs and promontories of Spain, Italy,
Greece, Asia Minor and Africa.

What was the life of this city?[1] A citizen performed but little
manual labor; he was generally supported by his subjects and
tributaries, and always served by slaves. The poorest man in the place
had one to keep house for him. Athens counted four for each citizen;
and lesser cities, like Ægina and Corinth, possessed from four to five
hundred thousand. Servants, of course, abounded. The citizen, however,
needed but little help. Like all the finely-built races of the south,
he was abstemious, a meal consisting of three or four olives, a bit of
garlic, and the head of a fish.[2] His wardrobe consisted of sandals,
a small shirt, and a large mantle, like that of a shepherd. His house
was a narrow, frail, ill-constructed tenement, into which robbers
could penetrate by piercing the walls,[3] and which he only used for
sleeping; a bed and two or three beautiful vases were the principal
articles of furniture. The citizen had few wants, and he passed the day
in the open air.

How did he dispose of his leisure? Serving neither king nor priest,
he was, as far as he was concerned, free and sovereign in the city.
He elected his own pontiffs and magistrates, and he himself, in
turn, could be elected to sacerdotal and other offices; whether
blacksmith or currier, he judged the most important political cases
in the tribunals, and decided the gravest of affairs of state in the
assemblies; his occupation consisted, substantially, of public business
and war. To be a politician and a soldier was a part of his duty; other
pursuits were of little importance to him; the attention of a free man,
in his opinion, ought to be applied to these two employments. And he
was right, for, at that time, human life was not protected as it is in
ours; human societies had not acquired the stability which they now
have. Most of these cities, built and scattered along the Mediterranean
shores, were surrounded by barbarians eager to prey upon them; the
citizen was obliged to be under arms, like the European of the present
day in Japan and in New Zealand; if not, Gauls, Libyans, Samitites
and Bithynians would soon have pitched their camps amid the ruins
of battered walls and devastated temples. Besides all this, these
cities were inimical to each other. The rights of war were atrocious;
a vanquished city was often devoted to destruction; a wealthy noted
man might any day see his dwelling in ashes, his property pillaged,
his wife and daughters sold to recruit places of prostitution; he
himself, and his sons, enslaved, would be buried in mines, or compelled
by the lash to turn a mill. With such perils before him it is natural
for a man to be interested in affairs of state, and be qualified for
battle: he has to become a politician under penalty of death. Ambition,
however, and love of glory are equal stimulants. Every city aspired to
reduce or humble every other city, to acquire vassals, to conquer or to
make profitable the persons of others.[4] The citizen passed his life
in the public thoroughfares, discussing the best means for preserving
and aggrandizing his city, canvassing its alliances, treaties, laws and
constitution; now listening to orators, and again acting as one himself
up to the very moment of going aboard his vessel in order to wage war
in Thrace or in Egypt, against other Greeks, against the barbarians, or
against the Great King.

To reach this point, they had systematized a peculiar discipline. As
there were no industrial facilities in those days, the machinery of
war was unknown. War was a combat between man and man; consequently,
the essential thing to insure victory was not to transform soldiers
into marshalled automatons, as in our day, but to render each soldier
the most resistant, the strongest, and the most agile body possible;
in short, a highly-tempered gladiator, capable of the utmost physical
endurance.

To this end, Sparta which, about the eighth century, gave the example
and the impulse to all Greece, had a very complicated and no less
efficacious military system. She herself was a camp without walls,
situated, like our camps in Kabyle, amidst enemies and a conquered
people, wholly military, and devoted to attack and self-defence. In
order to have a perfect military, it was necessary to have a splendid
race; it was managed as in stock-breeding. All deformed children were
deprived of life. The law, moreover, prescribed the age for marriage
and selected the most suitable time and circumstances for proper
breeding. An old man happening to have a young wife was obliged to give
her over to a young man in order to have a good healthy offspring. A
middle-aged man having a friend whose beauty and character he admired,
might give him the use of his wife.[5] After having constituted the
race, they shaped the individual. Young men were enrolled, drilled,
and accustomed to live in common like a troop of children. They were
divided into two rival bands, who inspected each other, and fought
together with their feet and their fists. They slept in the open
air, bathed in the cool waters of the Eurotas, went marauding, ate
sparingly, fast and badly, rested on beds of rushes, drank nothing but
water, and endured every inclemency of climate. Young girls exercised
in the same manner, and the matured were restricted to almost the same
routine. The rigor of this antique discipline was undoubtedly less, or
was mitigated, in other cities; nevertheless, with these mitigations,
the same road conducted to the same end. Young people passed the
greater part of the day in the gymnasia, wrestling, jumping, boxing,
racing, pitching quoits; fortifying and rendering supple their naked
muscles. It was their aim to produce strong, robust bodies, the most
beautiful and the nimblest possible, and no system of education ever
succeeded better in obtaining them.[6]

These peculiar customs of the Greeks gave birth to peculiar ideas.
In their eyes the ideal man was not the man of thought, or a man of
delicate sensibility, but the naked man, the man of a fine stock and
growth, well-proportioned, active and accomplished in all physical
exercises. This mode of thinking was manifested by a variety of traits.
In the first place, whilst the Carians and the Lydians around them, and
their barbarian neighbors generally, were ashamed to appear naked, they
stripped without embarrassment in order to wrestle and run races.[7]
The young girls of Sparta were in the habit of exercising almost
naked. You will perceive that gymnastic exercises had suppressed, or
at least transformed, modesty. In the second place, the great national
festivals of the Greeks, the Olympian, Pythian, and Nemean games,
consisted of a display and triumph of the naked figure. The youth of
the first families resorted to these from all parts of Greece, and
from the remotest Grecian colonies. They, prepared themselves for them
a long time beforehand by special training and the severest labor,
and there, under the eyes and applause of the whole nation, stripped
of their clothing, they wrestled, boxed, pitched quoits, and raced
on foot or in the chariot. Victories of this class, which we of the
present day leave to a Hercules in a circus, they regarded as of the
first importance. The victorious athlete in the foot-race gave his
name to the Olympiad; his praises were chanted by the greatest poets;
Pindar, the most illustrious lyric poet of antiquity, sang only of
chariot races. On returning to his native city the victorious athlete
was received in triumph, and his strength and agility became the pride
of the place. One of these, Milo of Crotona, who was invincible at
wrestling, was chosen general, and led his fellow-citizens to battle,
clad in a lion's skin and armed with a club like Hercules, to whom he
was compared. It is related that a certain Diagoras saw his two sons
crowned on the same day, and was carried around by them in triumph
before the assembled multitude. Deeming a like happiness too great for
one mortal, the people cried out to him. "Die, Diagoras, for thou
canst not now become a god!" Diagoras, suffocated with emotion, did
indeed expire in the arms of his children. In his eyes, as in the eyes
of all Greece, to see his sons possessing the most vigorous fists and
the nimblest legs was the height of terrestrial bliss. Whether this
be truth or legend, such a judgment proves the excessive degree of
admiration entertained by the Greeks for the perfection of the human
form.

On this account they were not afraid to expose it before the gods on
solemn occasions. They had a formal system of attitudes and actions,
called _orchestrique,_ which regulated and taught them beautiful
postures of the sacred dances. After the battle of Salamis the tragic
poet Sophocles, then fifteen years old, and celebrated for his beauty,
stripped himself of his clothing in order to dance and chant the pæan
before the trophy. One hundred years later, Alexander, on passing
through Asia Minor to contend with Darius, cast aside his garments,
along with his companions, for the purpose of honoring the tomb of
Achilles with races. But the Greeks went still further; they considered
the perfection of the human form as attesting divinity. In a town in
Sicily a young man of extraordinary beauty was worshipped, and after
death, altars were erected in his honor.[8] In Homer, which is the
Grecian Bible, you will find everywhere that the gods had a human body
which the flesh-lance could pierce, flowing red blood, instincts,
passions and pleasures similar in every respect to our own, and to such
an extent that heroes become the lovers of goddesses, and gods beget
children of mortal mothers. Between Olympus and the earth there is no
abyss; they descend from, and we ascend to, it; if they surpass us,
it is because they are exempt from death, because their wounds heal
quicker, and they are stronger, handsomer and happier than we. In other
respects, they eat, drink and quarrel as we do, all enjoying the same
senses, and employing the same corporeal functions. Greece has so well
worked out its model of the beautiful human animal that it has made its
idol of it, and glorifies it on earth, by making a divinity of it in
heaven.

Out of this conception statuary is born, and we can mark every
moment of its growth. On the one hand, an athlete, once crowned, was
entitled to a statue; crowned a third time, he was awarded an iconical
statue--that is to say, an effigy bearing his portrait. On the other
hand, the gods being only human forms, more serene and more perfect
than others, it was natural to represent them by statues. For that
purpose there is no need of a forced dogma. The marble or bronze effigy
is not an allegory, but an exact image; it does not give to the god
muscles, bones, and a heavy covering which it has not; it represents
the reclothing of flesh which covers it, and the living form which is
its substance. It suffices, in order to be a truthful portrait, that it
should be the most beautiful, and reproduce the immortal calm by which
the god is exalted above mortals.

The statue is now blocked out--is the sculptor qualified to produce
it? Dwell a moment on his preparation. Men in those days studied the
body naked and in action, in the baths, in the gymnasia, in the sacred
dances and at the public games; they observed and preferred such forms
and such attitudes as denoted vigor, health, and activity; they
labored with all their might to impress on it these forms and to shape
it to these attitudes. For three or four hundred years they were thus
correcting, purifying, developing their idea of physical beauty. It is
not surprising that they finally discovered the ideal type of the human
form. We of the present day that are familiar with it owe our knowledge
of it to them. When Nicholas of Pisa and other early sculptors at
the end of the Gothic period abandoned the meagre, bony, and ugly
forms of hieratic tradition, it was because they took an example from
Greek bas-reliefs, preserved or exhumed; and if to-day, forgetting
our distorted and defective bodies, as plebeians or thinkers, we wish
to find again some type of the perfect form, it is in these statues,
monuments of a noble, unoccupied, gymnastic life, that we must seek our
instruction.

Not only the form of it is perfect, but again, which is unique, it
suffices for the thought of the artist. The Greeks, having assigned
to the body a dignity of its own, were not tempted, like the moderns,
to subordinate it to the head. A chest breathing healthily, a trunk
solidly resting on the thighs, a nervous supple leg impelling the
body forward with ease; they did not occupy themselves solely with
the breadth of a thoughtful forehead, with the frown of an irritated
brow, or the turn of a sarcastic lip. They could limit themselves to
the conditions of perfect statuary, which leaves the eye without an
iris, and the head without expression; which prefers quiet personages,
or those occupied by insignificant action; which commonly employs
only a uniform tint, either of marble or cf bronze; which leaves the
picturesque to painting, and abandons dramatic interest to literature;
which, confined to, but ennobled by, the nature of its materials
and its limited domain, avoids the representation of details, of
physiognomy, of the casualties of human agitation, in order to detach
the pure and abstract form, and thus illuminate the sanctuaries with
motionless, peaceful, august effigies in which human nature recognized
its heroes and its gods.

Statuary, accordingly, is the central art of Greece; other arts are
related to it, accompany it, or imitate it. No other art has so well
expressed the national life; no other was so cultivated or so popular.
In the hundred small temples around Delphi, in which the treasures of
the cities were kept, "a whole world of marble, gold, silver, brass,
and bronze, twenty different bronzes, and of all tints, thousands of
glorified dead in irregular groups, seated and standing, radiated the
veritable subjects of the god of light."[9] When Rome, at a later day,
despoiled the Greek world of its treasures, this vast city possessed a
population of statues almost equal to that of its living inhabitants.
At the present time, after so many centuries and such devastation, it
is estimated that more than sixty thousand statues have been discovered
at Rome and in its surrounding Campagna. A like harvest of sculpture
has never been seen, such a prodigious abundance of flowers,--a display
of flowers so perfect, a growth so natural, so continuous and varied.
You have just seen the cause of it, in digging up the earth layer by
layer, and in observing that all the foundations of the human soil,
institutions, manners, ideas, have contributed to sustain it.



[Footnote 1: Grote, _History of Greece--_Boeckh, _Political Economy of
the Athenians_--Wullon, _Slavery in Antiquity._]

[Footnote 2: The Frogs of Aristophanes; the Cock of Lucian.]

[Footnote 3: Their proper name was wall-piercers.]

[Footnote 4: Thucydides, Book I. See the divers expeditions of the
Athenians between the peace of Cimon and the Peloponnesian war.]

[Footnote 5: Xenophon. The Lacedemonian Republic, _passim. _]

[Footnote 6: The Dialogues of Plato. The Clouds of Aristophanes.]

[Footnote 7: The Lacedemonians adopted this custom about the 14th
Olympiad.--Plato.]

[Footnote 8: Herodotus.]

[Footnote 9: Michelet.]




VI.


This military organization common to all the cities of antiquity
at length had its effect,--a sad effect. War being the natural
condition of things, the weak were over-powered by the strong, and,
more than once, one might have seen formed states of considerable
magnitude under the control or tyranny of a victorious or dominant
city. Finally one arose, Rome, which, possessing greater energy,
patience, and skill, more capable of subordination and command, of
consecutive views and practical calculations, attained, after seven
hundred years of effort, in incorporating under her dominion the
entire basin of the Mediterranean and many great outlying countries.
To gain this point she submitted to military discipline, and, like a
fruit springing from its germ, a military despotism was the issue.
Thus was the Empire formed. Towards the first century of our era, the
world, organized under a regular monarchy, seemed at last to have
attained to order and tranquillity. It issued only in a decline. In
the horrible destruction of conquest cities perished by hundreds and
men by millions. During an entire century the conquerors themselves
massacred each other, and the civilized world having lost its free
men, lost the half of its inhabitants.[1] Citizens, converted into
subjects, and no longer pursuing noble ends, abandoned themselves to
indolence and luxury, refused to marry and to have children. Machinery
being unknown, and the hand the only instrument of labor, the slaves,
whose lot it was to provide for the pleasures, pomp, and refinements
of society, disappeared under a burden too heavy for them to bear.
At the expiration of four hundred years the enervated, depopulated
empire had not sufficient men or energy to repel the barbarians. The
barbarous wave entered, sweeping away the dykes; after the first, a
second, then a third, and so on for a period of five hundred years.
The evils they inflicted cannot be described: people exterminated,
monuments destroyed, fields devastated, and cities burnt; industry,
the fine arts, and the sciences mutilated, degraded, forgotten; fear,
ignorance, and brutality spread everywhere and established. They were
complete savages, similar to the Hurons and Iroquois suddenly encamped
in the midst of a cultivated and thinking world like ours. Imagine a
herd of wild bulls let loose amid the furniture and decorations of a
palace, and after this another herd, so that the ruins left by the
first perished under the hoofs of the second, and, scarcely installed
in disorder, each troop of brutes had to arouse itself in order to
battle with its horns a bellowing, insatiable troop of invaders. When
at last, in the tenth century, the last horde had made its lair and
glutted itself, men seemed to be in no better condition. The barbarian
chiefs becoming feudal barons, fought amongst themselves, pillaging
peasants and burning their crops, robbing the merchants, and wantonly
robbing and maltreating their miserable serfs. The land remained waste,
and provisions became scarce. In the eleventh century forty out of
seventy years were years of famine. A monk, Raoul Glaber, relates that
it got to be common to eat human flesh; a butcher was burnt alive for
exposing it for sale in his stall. Add to this universal poverty and
filth, and a total neglect of the simplest of hygienic principles, and
you can well understand how leprosy, pests, and epidemics, becoming
acclimated, raged as if upon their native soil. People degenerated
to the condition of the anthropophagi of New Zealand, to the ignoble
brutality of the Papuans and Caledonians, to the lowest depths of the
human cesspool, seeing that reminiscences of the past trenched on the
misery of the present, and since some thinking heads, still reading
the ancient language felt in a confused way the immensity of the fall,
the whole depth of the abyss into which the human species had been
engulphed for a thousand years.

You may divine the sentiments which such a condition of things, so
extreme and so lasting, implanted in people's breasts. At first there
was weakness, disgust of life, and the deepest melancholy; "the
world," said a writer of that day, "is nothing but an abyss of vice and
immodesty." Life seemed a foretaste of hell. Many withdrew from it,
and not alone the poor, the feeble, and women, but sovereign lords,
and even kings; such as possessed delicate and noble natures preferred
the tranquillity and monotony of the cloister. On the approach of the
year one thousand a general belief in the extinction of the world
prevailed, and many, seized with fright, made over their property
to churches and convents. On the other hand, and coupled with this
terror and despondency, there arose an extraordinary degree of nervous
exaltation. When men are very miserable they become excitable, like
invalids and prisoners; their sensibility increases, and acquires a
feminine delicacy; their heart is filled with caprices, agitations
and despondency, excesses and effusions from which they are free in a
healthy state. They depart from moderate sentiments which alone can
maintain continuous masculine action. They indulge in re very, burst
into tears, sink down on their knees, become incapable of providing for
themselves, imagine infinite sweet and tender transports, yearning to
diffuse the excessive refinements and enthusiasm of their over-wrought
intemperate imaginations; in short, they are prone to love. Hence, we
see them developed with an enormous exaggeration, a passion unknown
to the stern and virile souls of antiquity, namely, the chivalric
mystic love of the middle ages. The calm rational love of wedlock was
subordinated to the ecstatic and unruly love encountered outside of
wedlock. Its subtleties were carefully defined and embodied in the
maxims of tribunals presided over by ladies. It was decreed there
that "love could not exist between spouses," and that "love could
refuse nothing to love.[2] Woman was no longer considered as flesh
and blood like man, but was converted into a divinity; man was only
too well compensated in the privilege of adoring: and serving her.
Human love was regarded as a celestial sentiment leading to divine
love and confounded with it. Poets transformed their mistresses into
supernatural virtue, and implored them to guide them through the
empyrean to the tabernacle of God. You can easily appreciate the hold
the Christian faith derived from such sentiments. Disgust for the
world, a tendency to ecstacy, habitual despair and infinite craving
for tender sympathy, naturally impelled men to a doctrine representing
the earth as a vale of tears, the present life a period of trial,
rapturous union with the Divinity as supreme happiness, and the love
of God as the first of duties. Morbid or trembling sensibility found
its support in the infinitude of terror and of hope, in pictures of
flaming pits and eternal perdition, and in conceptions of a radiant
paradise and of ineffable bliss. Thus supported, Christianity ruled all
souls, inspired art, and gave employment to artists. "Society," says a
contemporary, "divested itself of its old rags in order to clothe its
churches in robes of whiteness." Gothic architecture accordingly made
its appearance.

Let us observe the growth of the new Gothic edifice. In opposition to
the religions of antiquity, which were all local, belonging to castes
or to families, Christianity is a universal religion which appeals
to the multitude, and summons all men to salvation. It was necessary
accordingly for this new edifice to be very large and capable of
containing the entire population of any one city or district--the
women, the children, the serfs, the artisans, and the poor as well as
the nobles and sovereigns. The small _cella_ which contains the statue
of the Greek god, and the portico where the procession of free citizens
was displayed, were not sufficient for this immense crowd. An enormous
vault was required, lofty naves multiplied and crossed by others, and
measureless arches and colossal columns; generations of workmen flocked
in crowds for centuries to labor here for the salvation of their souls,
displacing mountains before the monument could be completed.

The men who enter here have sorrowing souls, and the ideas they come
in quest of are mournful. They meditate on this miserable life, so
troubled and confined by such an abyss, on hell and its punishments,
endless, measureless and unintermittent, on the sufferings and passion
of Christ crucified, and those of persecuted and tortured saints and
martyrs. Listening to such religious teaching, and under the burden of
their own fears, they could ill accommodate themselves to the simple
beauty and joyous effect of pure light; the clear and healthy light
of day is accordingly excluded; the interior of the edifice remains
subject to cold and lugubrious shadow; light only comes in transformed
by stained glass into purple and crimson tints, into the splendors of
topaz and amethyst, into the mystic gleams of precious stones, into
strange illuminations, seeming to afford glimpses of paradise.

Delicate over-excited imaginations like these are not content with
simple architectural forms. And first, form in itself is not sufficient
to interest them. It must be a symbol of and designate some august
mystery. The edifice with its transverse naves represents the cross
on which Christ died; its circular window with its brilliant petals
figures the rose of eternity, the leaves of which are redeemed souls;
all the dimensions of its parts correspond to sacred numbers. Again,
these forms in their richness, strangeness, boldness, delicacy and
immensity, harmonize with the intemperance and curiosity of a morbid
fancy. Vivid sensations--manifold, changing, bizarre and extreme--are
necessary to such souls. They reject the column, the horizontal and
transverse beams, the round arch, in short, the solid construction,
balanced proportions, and beautiful simplicity of antique architecture;
they do not sympathize with those noble creations that seem to have
been born without pain and to last without effort, which attain to
beauty the same time as to life, and the finished excellence of which
needs neither addition nor ornament.

They adopt for type, not the plain half-circle of the arcade, or
the simple angle formed by the column and the architrave, but the
complicated union of two curves intersected by each other, forming the
ogive. They aspire to the gigantic, covering square acres of ground
with piles of stone, binding pillars together in monstrous columns,
suspending galleries in the air, elevating arches to the skies, and
stage upon stage of belfry until their spires are lost in the clouds.
They exaggerate the delicacy of forms; they surround doors with
series of statuettes, and festoon the sides with trefoils, gables and
gargoyles; they interlace the tortuous tracery of mullions with the
motley hues of stained glass; the choir seems to be embroidered with
lace, while tombs, altars, stalls and towers are covered with mazes of
slender columns and fringes of leaves and statues. It seems as if they
wished to attain at once infinite grandeur and infinite littleness,
seeking to overwhelm the mind on either side, on the one hand with
the vastness of a mass, and on the other with a prodigious quantity
of details. Their object was evidently to produce an extraordinary
sensation; they aimed to dazzle and bewilder.

Proportionately, therefore, to the development of this style of
architecture, it becomes more and more paradoxical. In the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, the age of the flamboyant Gothic of Strasburg,
Milan, York, Nuremburg, and the Church of Brou, solidity seems to
have been wholly abandoned for ornament. At one time it bristles with
a profusion of multiplied and superposed pinnacles; at another its
exterior is draped with a lacework of mouldings. Walls are hollowed
out, and almost wholly absorbed by windows; they lack strength, and
without the buttresses raised against them the structure would fall;
ever disintegrating, it is necessary to establish colonies of masons
about them constantly to repair their constant decay. This embroidered
stonework, more and more frail as it ascends the spire, cannot sustain
itself; it has to be fastened to a skeleton of iron, and as iron rusts,
the blacksmith is summoned to contribute his share towards propping up
this unstable, delusive magnificence. In the interior the decoration is
so exuberant and complex, the groinings so richly display their thorny
and tangled vegetation, and the stalls, pulpit, and railings, swarm
with such intricate, tortuous, fantastic arabesques, that the church
no longer seems to be a sacred monument, but a rare example of the
jewellers art. It is a vast structure of variegated glass, a gigantic
piece of filigree work, a festive decoration as elaborated as that of
a queen or a bride; it is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited
woman, similar to the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate
and morbid poesy denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the
feverish, violent, and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of
knights and monks.

For this architecture, which has lasted four centuries, is not confined
to one country or to one description of edifice; it is spread over
all Europe, from Scotland to Sicily, and is employed in all civil and
religious and public and private monuments. Not only do cathedrals and
chapels bear its imprint, but fortresses, palaces, costumes, dwellings,
furniture, and equipments. Its universality, accordingly, expresses
and attests the great moral crisis, at once morbid and sublime, which,
during the whole of the middle ages, exalted, and at the same time
disordered, the human intellect.


[Footnote 1: _Rome, thirty years B. C,_ by Victor Durny.]

[Footnote 2: Andre le Chapelain.]




VII


Human institutions, like living bodies, are made and unmade by their
own forces; and their health passes away or their cure is effected
by the sole effect of their nature and their situation. Among these
feudal chiefs who ruled and plundered men in the middle-ages one was
found in each country, stronger, more politic, and better placed than
others, who constituted himself conservator of public order; sustained
by public sentiment, he by degrees weakened and subdued, subordinated
and rallied the others, and, organizing a systematic obedient
administration, became under the name of king the head of the nation.
Towards the fifteenth century, the barons, formerly his equals, were
only his officers, and towards the seventeenth century they were simply
his courtiers.

Note the significance of this term. A courtier is a member of the
king's court; that is to say, a person charged with some function or
domestic duty in the palace--either chamberlain, equerry, or gentleman
of the antechamber--receiving a salary, and addressing his master with
all the deference and ceremonial obsequiousness proper to such an
employment. But this person is not a valet, as in oriental monarchies,
for his ancestor, the grandfather of his grandfather, was the equal,
the companion, the peer of the king; and on this account he himself
belongs to a privileged class, that of noblemen. He does not serve
his prince solely through personal interest; his devotion to him is a
point of honor. The prince in his turn never neglects to treat him with
consideration. Louis XIV. threw his cane out of the window in order not
to be tempted to strike Lauzun, who had offended him. The courtier is
honored by his master, and regarded as one of his society. He lives in
familiarity with him, dances at his balls, dines at his table, rides
in the same carriage, sits in the same chairs, and frequents the same
_salon._ From such a basis court life arose; first in Italy and Spain,
subsequently in France, and afterwards in England, in Germany, and in
the north of Europe. France was its centre, and Louis XIV. gave to it
its principal _éclat._

Let us study the effect of this new state of things on minds and
characters. The kings _salon_ is the first in the country, and is
frequented by the most select society; the most admired personage,
therefore, the accomplished man whom everybody accepts for a model, is
the nobleman enjoying familiarity with his sovereign. This nobleman
entertains generous sentiments; he believes himself of a superior
race, and he says to himself, _noblesse oblige._ He is more sensitive
than other men on the point of honor, and freely risks his life at the
slightest insult. Under Louis XIII. four thousand noblemen were killed
in duels. Contempt of danger, in the eyes of this nobleman, is the
first obligation of a soul nobly born. The dandy, the worldling, so
choice of his ribbons, so careful of his perruque, is ready to encamp
in Flanders mud, and expose himself to bullets for hours together at
Neerwinden. When Luxembourg announces that he is about to give battle,
Versailles is deserted; all these young perfumed gallants hasten off
to the army as if they were going to a ball. Finally, and through a
remnant of the spirit of ancient feudalism, our nobleman regards the
monarch as his natural legitimate chief: he knows he is bound to him,
as the vassal formerly was to his suzerain, and at need will give
him his blood, his property, and his life. Under Louis XYI. noblemen
voluntarily placed themselves at the king's disposal, and on the 10th
of August many were slain in his behalf.

But they are nevertheless courtiers, that is to say, men of the world,
and in this respect perfectly polite. The King himself sets them an
example. Louis XIV. even doffed his hat to a chambermaid, and the
Memoirs of St. Simon mention a duke who saluted so frequently that he
was obliged to cross the courts of Versailles bareheaded. The courtier,
for the same reason, is accomplished in all that appertains to good
breed-ins; language never fails him in difficult circumstances; he
is a diplomat, master of himself, an adept in the art of disguising,
concealing, flattering and managing others, never giving offence, and
often pleasing. All these qualifications and these sentiments proceed
from an aristocratic spirit refined by the usages of society; they
attain to perfection in this court and in this century. Anybody of
the present time disposed to admire the choice flowers of this lost
and delicate species need not look for them in our equalized, rude
and mixed society, but must turn to the elegant, formal, monumental
parterres in which they formerly flourished.

You can imagine that people so constituted must have chosen pleasures
appropriate to their character. Their taste, indeed, like their
persons, was noble; for they were not only noble by birth, but also
through their sentiments; and correct because they were educated to
practise and respect what was becoming to them. It was this taste
which, in the seventeenth century, fashioned all their works of
art--the serious, elevated, severe productions of Poussin and Lesueur,
the grave, pompous, elaborate architecture of Mansart and Perrault,
and the stately symmetrical gardens of LeNotre. You will find its
traces in the furniture, costumes, house decoration, and carriages of
the engravings and paintings of Perelle, Sebastian Leclerc, Eigaud,
Nanteuil, and many others. Versailles, with its groups of well-bred
gods, its symmetrical alleys, its my theological water-works, its
large artificial basins, its trimmed and pruned trees modelled into
architectural designs, is a masterpiece in this direction; all its
edifices and parterres, everything belonging to it, was constructed
for men solicitous about their dignity, and strict observers of the
recognized standard of social propriety. But the imprint is still
more visible in the literature of the epoch. Never in France or in
Europe has the art of fine writing been carried to such perfection.
The greatest of French authors, as you are aware, belong to this
epoch--Bossuet, Pascal, La Fontaine, Molière, Corneille, Racine, La
Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, La Bruyère, Bourdalone, and
others. Great men not only wrote well, but almost everybody; Courier
asserted that a chambermaid of those days knew more about style than
a modern academy. In fact, a good style at that time pervaded the
air, people unconsciously inhaling it; it prevailed in correspondence
and in conversation; the court taught it; it entered into the ways of
people of the world. The man who aimed to be polished and correct in
deportment, got to be so likewise in the attributes of language and
of style. Among so many branches of literature there is one, tragedy,
which reached a singular degree of perfection, and which more than
all the rest furnishes at that time the most striking example of the
concordance which links together man and his works, manners and the
arts.

The general features of this tragedy first claim attention; they are
all calculated to please noblemen and members of the court. The poet
does not fail in the blandishment, of truth, which by its nature is
often crude; he allows no murders on the stage; he disguises brutality
and repudiates violence, such as blows, butcheries, yells, and groans,
everything that might offend the senses of a spectator accustomed to
moderation and the elegancies of the _salon._ For the same reason he
excludes disorder, never abandoning himself to the caprices of fancy
and imagination like Shakespeare; his plan is regular, he admits no
unforeseen incidents, no romantic poesy. He elaborates his scenes,
explains entrances, graduates the interest of his piece, prepares
the way for sudden turns of fortune, and skilfully anticipates and
directs dénouements. Finally, he diffuses throughout the dialogue,
like a uniform brilliant varnish, a studied versification composed
of the choicest terms and the most harmonious rhymes. If we seek the
costume of this drama in the engravings of the time we find heroes
and princesses appearing in furbelows, embroideries, bootees, swords
and plumes--a dress, in short, Greek in name, but French in taste and
fashion; such as the king, the dauphin, and the princesses paraded in,
to the music of violins, at the court performances of ballets.

Note, moreover, that all his personages are courtiers, kings and
queens, princes and princesses of royal blood, ambassadors, ministers,
officers of the guard, _menins,_[1] dependants and confidants. The
associates of princes are not here, as in ancient Greek tragedy,
slaves of the palace and nurses born under their master's roof, but
ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and gentlemen of the antechamber,
charged with certain duties in the royal household; we readily detect
this in their conversational ability, in their skill in flattery, in
their perfect education, in their exquisite deportment, and in their
monarchical sentiments as subjects and vassals. Their masters, like
themselves, are French noblemen of the seventeenth century, proud
and courteous, heroic in Corneille and noble in Racine; they are
gallants with the ladies, faithful to their name and race, capable of
sacrificing their dearest interests and strongest affections to their
honor, and incapable of uttering a word or an act which the most rigid
courtesy would not authorize. Iphigenia, in Racine, delivered up by her
father to her executioners, does not regret life, weeping like a girl,
as in Euripides, but thinks it her duty to obey her father and her king
without a murmur, and to die without shedding a tear, because she is a
princess. Achilles, who in Homer stamps, still unappeased, on the body
of the dying Hector, feeling like a lion or wolf, as if he would "eat
the raw flesh" of his vanquished antagonist, is, in Racine, a Prince of
Condé, at once brilliant and seductive, passionate concerning honor,
devoted to the fair, impetuous, it is true, and irritable, but with
the reserved vivacity of a young officer who, even when most excited,
maintains good breeding and never stoops to brutality. All these
characters are models of polite address, and show a knowledge of the
world never at fault. Head, in Racine, the first dialogue of _Oreste_
and _Pyrrhus,_ and the whole of the part of _Acomat_ and of _Ulysse;_
nowhere is greater tact or oratorical dexterity apparent; nowhere
more ingenious compliments and flatteries, exordiums so well poised,
such a quick revelation, such an ingenious adjustment, such a delicate
insinuation of appropriate motives. The wildest and most impetuous
lovers--_Hippolyte, Britannicus, Pyrrhus, Oreste,_ and _Xipharès_
--are accomplished cavaliers who turn a madrigal and bow with the
utmost deference. However violent their passions may be, _Hermione,
Andromaqne, Boxane,_ and _Bérénice,_ preserve the tone of the best
society. _Mithridate, Phèdre,_ and _Athalie,_ when expiring, express
themselves in correct periods, for a prince has to be a prince to the
last, and die in due form. This drama might be called a perfect picture
of the fashionable world. Like Gothic architecture, it represents a
positive complete side of the human mind, and this is why, like that,
it has become so universal. It has been imported into, or imitated by,
along with its accompanying taste, literature, and manners, every court
of Europe--in England, after the restoration of the Stuarts; in Spain,
on the advent of the Bourbons; and in Italy, Germany, and Russia, in
the eighteenth century. We are warranted in saying that at this epoch
France was the educator of Europe; she was the source from which was
derived all that was elegant and agreeable, whatever was proper in
style, delicate in ideas, and perfect in the art of social intercourse.
If a savage Muscovite, a dull German, a stolid Englishman, or any
other uncivilized or half-civilized man of the North quit his brandy,
pipe, and furs, his feudal or hunting or rural life, it was to French
_salons_ and to French books he betook himself, in order to acquire the
arts of politeness, urbanity, and conversation.


[Footnote 1: Foster-brother, school-companion, or other intimate of
this class.]




VIII.


This brilliant society did not last; it was its own development
which caused its dissolution. The government being absolute, ended
in becoming negligent and tyrannical; and, besides this, the king
bestowed the best offices and the greatest favor only on such of the
nobles of his court as enjoyed his intimacy. This appeared unjust to
the _bourgeoisie_ and to the people, who, having greatly increased
in numbers, wealth and intelligence, felt their power augment in
proportion to the growth of their discontent. The French Revolution was
accordingly their work; and after ten years of trial they established
a system of democracy and equality, in which, according to a fixed
order of promotion, all civil employments were ordinarily accessible
to everybody. The wars of the empire and the contagion of example
gradually spread this system beyond the frontiers of France, and
whatever may be local differences and temporary delays, it is now
evident that the tendency of the whole of Europe is to imitate it. The
new construction of society, coupled with the invention of industrial
machinery, and the great abatement of rudeness in manners and customs,
has changed the condition as well as the character of man. Henceforth,
man is exempt from arbitrary measures, and is protected by a good
police. However lowly born, all careers are open to him; an enormous
increase of useful articles, places within reach of the poorest,
conveniences and pleasures of which, two centuries ago, the rich were
entirely ignorant. Again, the rigor of authority is mitigated, both
in society and in the family; a father is now the companion of his
children, and the citizen has become the equal of the noble. Human
life, in short, displays a lesser degree of misery, and a lighter
degree of oppression.

But, as a counterpart of this, Ave see ambition and cupidity spreading
their wings. Accustomed to comfort and luxuries, and obtaining here and
there glimpses of happiness, man begins to regard happiness and comfort
as his due. The more he obtains, the more exacting he becomes, and the
more his pretensions exceed his acquisitions. The practical sciences
also having made great progress, and instruction being diffused,
liberated thought abandons itself to all daring enterprises; hence it
happens that men, relinquishing the traditions which formerly regulated
their beliefs, deem themselves capable, through intellect alone, of
attaining to the highest truths. Questions of every kind are mooted,
moral, political and religious; men seek knowledge by groping their
way in every direction. For fifty years past we behold this strange
conflict of systems and sects, each tendering us new creeds and perfect
theories of happiness.

Such a state of things has a wonderful effect on minds and ideas.
The representative man, that is to say, the character who occupies
the stage, and to whom the spectators award the most interest and
sympathy, is the melancholy, ambitious dreamer--René, Faust, Werther
and Manfred--a yearning heart, restless, wandering and incurably
miserable. And he is miserable for two reasons. In the first place he
is over-sensitive, too easily affected by the lesser evils of life; he
has too great a craving for delicate and blissful sensations; he is
too much accustomed to comfort; he has not had the semi-feudal and
semi-rustic education of our ancestors; he has not been roughly handled
by his father, whipped at college, obliged to maintain respectful
silence in the presence of great personages, and had his mental growth
retarded by domestic discipline; he has not been compelled, as in
ancient times, to use his own arm and sword to protect himself, to
travel on horseback, and to sleep in disagreeable lodgings. In the soft
atmosphere of modern comfort and of sedentary habits, he has become
delicate, nervous, excitable, and less capable of accommodating himself
to the course of life which always exacts effort and imposes trouble.

On the other hand, he is skeptical. Society and religion both being
disturbed--in the midst of a pêle-mêle of doctrines and an irruption
of new theories--his precocious judgment, too rapidly instructed,
and too soon unbridled, precipitates him early and blindly off the
beaten track made smooth for his fathers by habit, and which they
have trodden, led on by tradition and governed by authority. All the
barriers which served as guides to minds having fallen, he rushes
forward into the vast, confusing field which is opened out before his
eyes; impelled by almost superhuman ambition and curiosity he darts off
in the pursuit of absolute truth and infinite happiness. Neither love,
glory, knowledge nor power, as we find these in this world, can satisfy
him; the intemperance of his desires, irritated by the incompleteness
of his conquests and by the nothingness of his enjoyments, leaves
him prostrate amid the ruins of his own nature, without his jaded,
enfeebled, impotent imagination being able to represent to him the
_beyond_ which he covets, and the unknown _what_ which he has not.
This evil has been styled the great malady of the age. Forty years
ago it was in full force, and under the apparent frigidity or gloomy
impassibility of the positive mind of the present day it still subsists.

I have not the time to show you the innumerable effects of a like state
of mind on works of art. You may trace them in the great development of
the lyrical, sentimental and philosophical poetry of France, Germany
and England; again, in the corruption and enrichment of language and
in the invention of new classes and of new characters in literature;
in the style and sentiments of all the great modern writers, from
Chateaubriand to Balzac, from Goethe to Heine, from Cowper to Byron,
and from Alfieri to Leopardi. You will find analogous symptoms in the
arts of design if you observe their feverish, tortured and painfully
archeological style, their aim at dramatic effect, psychological
expression, and local fidelity; if you observe the confusion which has
befogged the schools and injured their processes; if you pay attention
to the countless gifted minds who, shaken by new emotions, have opened
out new ways; if you analyze the profound sympathy for scenery which
has given birth to a complete and original landscape art. But there
is another art, Music, which has suddenly reached an extraordinary
development. This development is one of the salient characteristics of
our epoch, and the dependence of this on the modern mind, the ties by
which they are connected, I shall endeavor to point out to you.

This art was born, and necessarily, in two countries where people
sing naturally, Italy and Germany. It was gestating for a century and
a half in Italy, from Palestrina to Pergolese, as formerly painting
from Giotto to Massaccio, discovering processes and feeling its
way in order to acquire its resources. At the commencement of the
eighteenth century it suddenly burst forth, with Scarlatti, Marcello
and Handel. This is a most remarkable epoch. Painting at this time
ceased to nourish in Italy, and in the midst of political stagnation,
voluptuous, effeminate customs prevailed, furnishing an assembly of
sigisbés, Lindors and amorous ladies for the roulades and tender
sentimental scenes of the opera. Grave, ponderous Germany, at that time
the latest in acquiring self-consciousness, now succeeds in displaying
the severity and grandeur of its religious sentiment, its profound
knowledge, and its vague melancholy instincts in the sacred music of
Sebastian Bach, anticipating the evangelical epic of Klopstock. Tn the
old and in the new nation the reign and expression of _sentiment_ is
beginning. Between the two, half-Germanic and half-Italian, is Austria,
conciliating the two spirits, producing Haydn, Gluck and Mozart. Music
now becomes cosmopolite and universal on the confines of that great
mental convulsion of souls styled the French Revolution, as formerly
painting under the impulse of the great intellectual revival known
under the name of the Renaissance. We need not be astonished at the
appearance of this new art, for it corresponds to the appearance of a
new genius--that of the ruling, morbid, restless, ardent character I
have attempted to portray for you. It is to this spirit that Beethoven,
Mendelssohn and Weber formerly addressed themselves, and to which
Meyerbeer, Berlioz and Verdi are now striving to accommodate themselves.

Music is the organ of this over-refined excessive sensibility and
vague boundless aspiration; it is expressly designed for this service,
and no art so well performs its task. And this is so because, on the
one hand, music is founded on a more or less remote imitation of a cry
which is the natural, spontaneous, complete expression of passion, and
which, affecting us through a corporeal stimulus, instantly arouses
involuntary sympathy, so that the tremulous delicacy of every nervous
being finds in it its impulse, its echo, and its ministrant. On the
other hand, founded on relationships of sounds which represent no
living form, and which, especially in instrumental music, seem to be
the reveries of an incorporeal soul, it is better adapted than any
other art to express floating thoughts, formless dreams, objectless
limitless desires, the grandiose and dolorous mazes of a troubled heart
which aspires to all and is attached to nothing. This is why, along
with the discontent, the agitations, and the hopes of modern democracy,
music has left its natal countries and diffused itself over all Europe;
and why you see at the present time the most complicated symphonies
attracting crowds in France, where, thus far, the national music has
been reduced to the song and the melodies of the Vaudeville.




IX.


The foregoing illustrations, gentlemen, seem to me sufficient to
establish the law governing the character and creation of works of
art. And not only do they establish it, but they accurately define
it. In the beginning of this section I stated that _the work of art
is determined by an aggregate which is the general state of the mind
and surrounding manners._ We may now advance another step, and note
precisely in their order each link of the chain, connecting together
cause and effect.

In the various illustrations we have considered, you have remarked
first, a _general situation,_ in other words, a certain universal
condition of good or evil, one of servitude or of liberty, a state of
wealth or of poverty, a particular form of society, a certain species
of religious faith; in Greece, the free martial city, with its slaves;
in the middle ages, feudal oppression, invasion and brigandage, and
an exalted phase of Christianity; the court life of the seventeenth
century; the industrial and studied democracy of the nineteenth, guided
by the sciences; in short, a group of circumstances controlling man,
and to which he is compelled to resign himself.

This situation developes in man corresponding needs, distinct
_aptitudes_ and _special sentiments_--physical activity, a tendency
to revery; here rudeness, and there refinement; at one time a martial
instinct, at another conversational talent, at another a love of
pleasure, and a thousand other complex and varied peculiarities. In
Greece we see physical perfection and a balance of faculties which no
manual or cerebral excess of life deranges; in the middle ages, the
intemperance of over-excited imaginations and the delicacy of feminine
sensibility; in the seventeenth century, the polish and good-breeding
of society and the dignity of aristocratic _salons_; and in modern
times, the grandeur of unchained ambitions and the morbidity of
unsatisfied yearnings.

Now, this group of sentiments, aptitudes and needs, constitutes, when
concentrated in one person and powerfully displayed by him, _the
representative man,_ that is to say, a model character to whom his
contemporaries award all their admiration and all their sympathy;
there is, for instance, in Greece, the naked youth, of a fine race and
accomplished in all bodily exercise; in the middle ages, the ecstatic
monk and the amorous knight; in the seventeenth century, the perfect
courtier; and in our days, the melancholy insatiable Faust or Werther.

Moreover, as this personage is the most captivating, the most important
and the most conspicuous of all, it is he whom artists present to the
public, now concentrated in an ideal personage, when their art, like
painting, sculpture, the drama, the romance or the epic, is imitative;
now, dispersed in its elements, as in architecture and in music,
where art excites emotions without incarnating them. All their labor,
therefore, may be summed up as follows: they either represent this
character, or address themselves to it; the symphonies of Beethoven
and the "storied windows" of cathedrals are addressed to it; and it
is represented in the Niobe group of antiquity and in the Agamemnon
and Achilles of Racine. _All art, therefore, depends on it,_ since the
whole of art is applied only to conform to, or to express it.

A general situation, provoking tendencies and special faculties;
a representative man, embodying these predominant tendencies and
faculties; sounds, forms, colors, or language giving this character
sensuous form, or which comport with the tendencies and faculties
comprising it, such are the four terms of the series; the first carries
with it the second, the second the third, and the third the fourth,
so that the slightest variation of either involves a corresponding
variation in those that follow, and reveals a corresponding variation
in those that precede it, permitting abstract reasoning in either
direction in an ascending or descending scale of progression.[1] As far
as I am capable of judging, this formula embraces everything. If, now,
we insert between these diverse terms the accessory causes occurring
to modify their effects; if, in order to explain the sentiments of
an epoch, we add an examination of race to that of the social medium;
if, in order to explain the works of art of any age, we consider,
besides the prevailing tendencies of that age, the particular period of
the art, and the particular sentiments of each artist, we shall then
derive from the law not only the great revolutions and general forms
of man's imagination, but, again, the differences between national
schools, the incessant variations of various styles, and the original
characteristics of the works of every great master. Thus followed out,
such an explanation will be complete, since it furnishes at once the
general traits of each school, and the distinctive traits which, in
this school, characterize individuals. We are about to enter upon this
study in relation to Italian art; it is a long and difficult task, and
I have need of your attention in order to pursue it to the end.


[Footnote 1: This law may be applied to the study of all literatures
and to every art. The student may begin with the fourth term,
proceeding from this to the first, strictly adhering to the order of
the series.]




X.


Before proceeding further, gentlemen, there is a practical and personal
conclusion due to our researches, and which is applicable to the
present order of things.

You have observed that each situation produces a certain state of
mind followed by a corresponding class of works of art. This is why
every new situation must produce a new state of mind, and consequently
a new class of works; and therefore why the social medium of the
present day, now in the course, of formation, ought to produce its own
works like the social mediums that have gone before it. This is not
a simple supposition based on the current of desire and of hope; it
is the result of a law resting on the authority of experience and on
the testimony of history. From the moment a law is established it is
good for all time; the connections of things in the present, accompany
connections of things in the past and in the future. Accordingly,
it need not be said in these days that art is exhausted. It is true
that certain schools no longer exist and can no longer be revived;
that certain arts languish, and that the future upon which we are
entering does not promise to furnish the aliment that these require.
But art itself, which is the faculty of perceiving and expressing the
leading character of objects, is as enduring as the civilization of
which it is the best and earliest fruit. What its forms will be, and
which of the five great arts will provide the A'ehicle of expression
of future sentiment, we are not called upon to decide we have the
right to affirm that new forms will arise, and an appropriate mould
be found in which to cast them. We have only to open our eyes to see
a change going on in the condition of men, and consequently in their
minds, so profound, so universal, and so rapid that no other century
has witnessed the like of it. The three causes that have formed the
modern mind continue to operate with increasing efficacy. You are
all aware that discoveries in the positive sciences are multiplying
daily; that geology, organic chemistry, history, entire branches of
physics and zoology, are contemporary productions; that the growth of
experience is infinite, and the applications of discovery unlimited;
that means of communication and transport, cultivation, trade,
mechanical contrivances, all the elements of human power, are yearly
spreading and concentrating beyond all expectation. None of you are
ignorant that the political machine works smoother in the same sense;
that communities, becoming more rational and humane, are watchful of
internal order, protecting talent, aiding the feeble and the poor;
in short, that everywhere, and in every way, man is cultivating his
intellectual faculties and ameliorating his social condition. We cannot
accordingly deny that men's habits, ideas and condition transform
themselves, nor reject this consequence, that such renewal of minds and
things brings along with it a renewal of art. The first period of this
evolution gave rise to the glorious French school of 1830; it remains
for us to witness the second--the field which is open to your ambition
and your labor. On its very threshold, you have a right to augur well
of your century and of yourselves; for the patient study we have
just terminated shows you that to produce beautiful works, the sole
condition necessary is that which the great Goethe indicated: "Fill
your mind and heart, however large, with ideas and sentiments of your
age, and work will follow."


THE END.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Philosophy of Art, by Hippolyte Taine