The Ugly in the language of the arts has many diverse significations. It is in these shades and variable proportions that it affects our subject, but the depicting of repulsive things, foreign to morality, to sentiment and to passion, has no right to exist in æsthetics. It may be possible to cure a vice by showing its hideousness. But does this warrant such exciting of the disgust of the senses? It is an outrage to the worship of the Beautiful, without compensation of any kind.
There can be no advantage to humanity in exhibiting the hideousness of disease or the monstrosities of certain natural phenomena! Open to them the museums of comparative anatomy, but close the galleries consecrated to the fine arts! There exist also monstrosities which are not included in these categories; they present no moral danger, but are disagreeable and repulsive to good taste. They consist of fantastic forms, in accordance with the spirit of an inferior civilization, reminding one of the misshapen and gigantic prehistoric animals, whose bones astound us, and which disappeared from our globe that man might appear.
Among cultivated contemporaries these eccentricities spring from an inclination toward originality, caprice, grotesque taste; from a similar impulse to that which directs literature toward burlesque and parodies, and the plastic arts toward caricature. Such productions may please some distinguished and intelligent natures which cannot have been highly favored in the distribution of the delicacies of sentiment and the exquisite graces of wit. In a word, the art indulging in this class of manifestations acts according to the mode simpliste. I borrow this term from Charles Fourier, and I say once for all, that by it I mean not the entire, but the almost exclusive predominance of one or the other of the modalities of the human being. Here the simplisme being altogether intellectual, while it is inferior to manifestations in which the being expands harmoniously, it wounds no essential in the synthesis of the me; while a predomination of the sensual to the same degree is most pernicious to that which delights in it and antipathetic to those who do not live solely in the material aspects of existence.
Existing among the elements of æsthetics, as the faculties of man, are certain dependencies, connections, affinities, penetrations, which render an abstraction of one of them almost impossible. Thus I have anticipated allusions to the Beautiful in considering the Good. By thus connecting them, the better to distinguish them, I have reached the conclusion that moral evil should never be manifested in the arts unless with the view of redressing it. In this case the better its real characteristics are studied, the more strongly they are accentuated throughout, the more successful the work will be from the plastic point of view, and the more power it will have to repel those inward wrongs which it denounces, and this even though the intention of the artist should not touch this result.
The Beautiful.
The Beautiful Purifies the Emotions.
At first glance, it might seem the privilege of each one to say, "The Beautiful is that which appears to me as such." I believe in this regard, that the most capable artist, should he be also the most perfect logician, would never be able to persuade sainted and simple ignorance that it should not remain firmly grounded upon faith in its own impressions.
Place Hugo, Mercié, Bonnat, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Joncières in the presence of simple countrymen--or, what is worse still, of inferior artists and critics, of pretentious amateurs--and you will see by what supercilious, incredulous gestures, being incapable of argument, this satisfied ignorance will repel all assertions of the great authorities.
Should we, therefore, disregard this reluctance to recognize the features of the Beautiful in great works? We must at least deduce from it the fact that the effect of art depends upon some relation between the observer and the thing observed.
Notwithstanding the reality of the beauties of such or such a work, in the eyes of many appreciators, the subjectivity of each observer should remain decisive, vis-à-vis to himself, as long as he cannot be convinced by the authority of a law; and, finally, it is imperative that his comprehension of that law should be rendered possible by preliminary studies. On the contrary, shall that which has been recognized as beautiful by the initiated ever since artists created, and enlightened criticism discussed and judged it, appear now before uncultivated criticism as without authority?