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.
[1] Grote, History of Greece—Boeckh, Political Economy of the Athenians—Wullon, Slavery in Antiquity.
[2] The Frogs of Aristophanes; the Cock of Lucian.
[3] Their proper name was wall-piercers.
[4] Thucydides, Book I. See the divers expeditions of the Athenians between the peace of Cimon and the Peloponnesian war.
[5] Xenophon. The Lacedemonian Republic, passim.
[6] The Dialogues of Plato. The Clouds of Aristophanes.
[7] The Lacedemonians adopted this custom about the 14th Olympiad.—Plato.
[8] Herodotus.
[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.
[1] Rome, thirty years B. C, by Victor Durny.
[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.
[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.
[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.