The artist must transfer his product wholly to the world of art. Sculptured horses must not neigh, nor painted flowers give perfume, but neighing and scents may be suggested even in stone, and in lines by art happenings, which all may read running if the artist will use the language of human nature. He should paint his cake of soap in, not nail it on. If the exigencies of the story demand it, costumes of the night or costumes of bathing may be in place, but it is nailing on a cake of soap, it is outraging probabilities, to force a story into a setting or to adopt a style of dress or of undress simply for the sake of producing a shock. That is the shock of reality, not of art and beauty. Should the dramatist have an excellent quartet and stop the play in order to give a song, he is nailing on a piece of soap, which may be magnificent soap, but it is not art.
Why is the so-called realism depressing? Why is the Russian novelist left for the connoisseur but is caviar to the general? Is it the presence or absence of evil? Hardly that. Homer’s stories are full of evil and of death; Sophocles’ King Œdipus and the Prometheus of Eschylus are surcharged with evil, but they do not depress. Euripides, on the other hand, and Lucian have more alleged realism and are depressing, even when they cause a smile. The realist is cynical, and cynics do not soar off into the world of art, but keep tethering themselves to the real world. They do not lose themselves in their story because they are always thinking of keeping some one’s nose against their grindstone. Why should the optimistic moralizing of Polyanna be resented by critics any more than the cynic moralizing of Shaw or of Main Street? The cheerful idiot and the purblind dyspeptic are depressing in real life, especially when they are moralizing, but in and out of art we can laugh at the idiot, while we squirm at the assumed superiority of the cynic. The moralizing is a cake of soap.
Shakespeare is not depressing and Homer is not depressing. They do not blink the facts of life, and beyond the humor and humanity which saves them and their audience, they lose themselves in their story. The evil they depict is true evil, so recognized, in their art-world. It is, besides, evil called for by their story, not lugged in for a moral or to exemplify a theory of art. They know that drab is not the only color in life. They know that bright things are as real as black things, but they are not illustrating a theory but giving us a story. We pass with them into a fictitious world, and the things which depress the denizens of that world do not depress us if we are not brought back to reality by stumbling on a cake of real soap, not integrated with the story.
The sight of his dog Argos made the heart of Odysseus sink. Even for those who think ugliness the only reality, Argos was covered with realities and squatted on reality. He depressed his master but he does not depress us. He lies upon Main Street and has a Polyanna wag to his tail. His optimism and his pessimism are, however, not tacked on. “And lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears, Argos, the hound of Odysseus.... Despised he lay (his master being afar) in the deep dung of mules and swine.... There lay the dog Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now when he was aware of Odysseus standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not the strength to draw. But Odysseus looked aside and wiped a tear.” Argos is the ideal dog of a far away master; “who has lost his dominion,” as Eumæus, the shepherd of Odysseus, says. Argos registers the fate of his master. We feel, but we do not feel depressed. It is human; it is all inevitable; it is real as life but perfectly idealized by perfect transfer to the realm of art. Eumæus gives us the morality of it, the truth of it, but he is far from moralizing, either pessimistically or optimistically. Argos is the dog Schneider that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle could not find to recognize him; he is the picture in brief of his master’s fate. Eumæus is as free from all obtrusive soap as Argos himself. The dog’s fate is ascribed to the careless women who “are no more inclined to honest service when their masters have lost dominion, for Zeus takes away the half of a man’s virtue when the day of slavery comes upon him.”
V
ART AND THE DIVINE
1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART
The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has aroused the interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer, the variety, artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery gave the news a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph of the spade, which Schliemann converted into the best of historians. Dig in your back-yard, and you can read its past in the layers before your eyes. Make a cross-section of the country, and successive deposits will tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the earth, and the buried fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal the history of the world. Grave-digging is the most productive occupation to which science, art and even commerce can now be vocationally guided.
What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of the past in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it was belief in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb repeats the truth that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which were temples as well as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from which Schliemann actually shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds were also temples as well as tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic churches with their tiny loculi for the relic of a saint keep still the memory of the days when persecuted Christians found the Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as of escape from the persecutor.
The caves of Cro-Magnon and Aurignac and other ancient deposits in France and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s art. The man was no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful drawing have astonished every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible to light, should have been so decorated has puzzled observers. Reinach calls the pictures early “magic,” painting of animals to capture them. But there are paintings of men as well as of bisons and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as saying that it seems to be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer pleasure of the drawing is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that the professor has no real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has recently asserted the religious origin of these pictures. They would seem to be the earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves were temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar, the sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other accompaniments of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a belief in a continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these caves may easily be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling animals has destroyed them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art is even longer than Longfellow imagined.
If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a commonplace in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the following statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s Dictionary of Religion: “The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of Assyrian and Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of the two nations.” “The history of art in Greece is throughout its course intimately connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all denying. Religion and art are united, in music and song, from the dances of savages to the Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies; in painting, from the early caveman to the modern man; in sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up at Troy to the idol statues of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls of buried Mycenæ and Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal rings, in the ornaments and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory, from the prayers of the priest in the Iliad, to the fulminations of the prophet and the eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory we find Demosthenes and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching upon religious motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of revelation, in liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and in the mighty story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton must stage their events upon the background of a Divine Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic cathedral.