Let us have no more flaunting of these equivocal and noisy titles, naturalism, realism, and so forth! Art is Nature, yes, in the first place; but Nature verified and registered, weighed—judged, in a word, before the tribunal of a discernment which analyses, and a reason which rectifies and restores her. Art is a reparation of the failures and forgetfulness of Reality. It is the immortalisation of mortal things by a wise process of elimination, not by a blind and servile worship of their defective and perishable qualities. At all costs and against all comers, then, let us preserve our splendid École de Rome, whose archives bear such names as those of David, Ingres, Flandrin, Regnault, Duret, Hérold, Halévy, Berlioz, Bizet—none of which, as far as I am aware, warrant the scornful pity under which some people would fain wither a dynasty already over a century old.
Let us put forth all our strength to defend the sacred retreat which shelters our growing artist, frees him from premature anxiety concerning his daily bread, and forewarns and forearms him, not against the temptation to mere money-getting only, but against the vulgar triumphs of a paltry and evanescent popularity.
THE ARTIST AND MODERN
SOCIETY
THE immense extension of social relations in modern times has had considerable influence on artistic life and work; an influence which, if I mistake not, has done more harm than good.
Formerly, and not so very long ago either, an artist, like a man of learning, was held, and justly so, to be a member of one of the great corporations of intellectual workers. He was looked on as a sort of recluse, whose retreat was sacred from disturbance. Men would have hesitated to tear him from the silence and meditation without which the conception and production of healthy work which will withstand the onslaught of Time—that merciless judge who "never spares aught he did not help to make"—becomes difficult, if not utterly impossible.
Nowadays, the artist is no longer his own master. He belongs to the world at large. He is worse than its target. He is its prey. His own personal and productive life is almost entirely absorbed, swamped, squandered, in so-called social obligations, which gradually stifle him in that network of sham and barren duties which go to make up many an existence devoid of serious object or high motive. In a word, society eats him up.