It is this presence of the love of the beautiful that everywhere accompanies the Greek race and their descendants, and imparts what we may call the Hellenic instinct of form. And in this sense of form born of the love of beauty lies the secret of the immortal art of the Greeks, whether as presented in sculpture, architecture, painting, or letters.
The survival of a certain Hellenic religious feeling in the Italian people after centuries of a superimposed Christianity has already been treated of in the previous essay. I desire here to speak of Carducci as affording an example—perhaps one among many, but I know none better—of the restoration of the Greek love of form to modern letters, and so as illustrating what we may designate as the classic realism.
No term has been more abused of late years than this word—realism. Become the watchword of schools of “realists” in every branch of art and literature, it has been reduced at last to a service as empty of meaning as was ever the vaguest idealism empty of reality.
The tendency of the age has been unquestionably one of ultimation; everything presses into the plane of outermost effect. We have seemed to be no more satisfied with the contemplation of intangible ideals: we rest content only with what hand can touch and eye rest upon. The “power in ultimates” is the display of force characteristic of this age of the world. The forces physical and mental have been always there: it has taken a time like the present, an age of inventive frenzy filled with a yearning for the doing and trying of things long dreamt of, to give vent to these hidden forces.
This tendency to ultimation, the seeking expression of inmost emotions and conceptions in material embodiments, has characterized of late years every form of mental activity.
Religion exemplifies it in the impatience the people exhibit at fine analyses of doctrines and laborious attempts at creed-patching, at the same time that they are ready to engage in schemes of benevolence and social reform unparalleled in the history of the past. They would fain substitute a religion of doing for a religion of believing; and so impatient are they of the restrictions of dogma that they resent inquiry into the quality or inward motive of the doing, or even into its moral effect in the long run, so only some “good work” be done and done quickly.
We see the same tendency in music and the drama wonderfully illustrated in the whole conception and effort of the Wagnerian school. Expression is everything. The question is not—Is the thing in itself noble, but is the expression of it complete, unhindered by previous conventionalities? Is nothing kept back, or left to the imagination, but everything, rather, brought out into the actuality of sound, of color, of living performers, and material accessories?
The Ibsen drama, the Tourguenief and Tolstoi school of novelists, not to speak of Zola and his followers in France, writers like Capuana and Verga in Italy, and, although in a quite different vein, Howells among novelists and Whitman among poets in America, have aimed chiefly to give a faithful account of life as it is seen. Some have come dangerously near the assertion that by some mysterious law the bold doing ennobles even a commonplace motive, and that a regard for truth is enough whether there be any beauty behind it or not.
The power realised in full and free expression is one of the most exquisite delights known to man. We of a northern race who, according to the saying of our French neighbor, “take our pleasures sadly,” do so because of a hereditary conviction of the sanctity of the unexpressed. We have therefore been slowest in arriving at these efforts towards realism, or the untrammelled giving forth of the inward self into outward embodiment. That pure externalism of the southern or Greek nature which sought its highest satisfaction in a visible embodiment of the divine in art, and which distinguishes still the Roman from the Saxon religious nature, has been regarded as verging on the sinful. It is not strange that a tendency so long suppressed when once set free should rush even into lawless extremes, and that an age or school of writers tasting the delights of this liberty for the first time should be loth to resign it and be ready rather to sacrifice all to its further extension. It is quite in accordance with this theory that puritan America should have given birth to Walt Whitman, who, with all his lawlessness, is in many respects the most of a Greek that modern literature can show.
To what extremes this delight has sought indulgence is shown not more plainly in Zola and his school above mentioned than in the whole contemporary school of French pictorial art. We see here how form, as expression, indulged in for its own sake, apart from a due consideration of the substance within the form, becomes itself monstrous and vicious. This is the essentially immoral element in art—the licentious worship of form, or of external shape, regardless of an internal soul or motive.