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.]
ON THE NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.
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.
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.
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
Relationships of Parts the true object of Imitation—Illustrations derived from Drawing and Literature.
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.
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.
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.
PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.
General Law for the Production of the Work of Art—First Formula—Two sorts of Proof, one of Experience, and the other of Reasoning.
General Exposition of the Action of Social Mediums—The Development of the Plant compared with the Development of Human Activity—Natural Selection.
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.
Real and Historical cases—Four Epochs, and four leading Arts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Application of the Law to the Present—The Social Medium renewing itself constantly, Art renews itself—Hopes for the Future.
[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.
[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."
[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.