Kinship of æsthetic and religious sentiment.
For the rest, almost every art is reconcilable with the gravity of religious sentiment, for every art at its best awakens, no less than poetry and music, a contemplative and philosophical mood. One may agree with Strauss that religion will gradually be transmuted into art, and even at the present day profane art and sacred art are rather different than opposed. These differences will always subsist; it is evident that a pas redoublé, for example, can never be the symbol of a really profound idea of nature or of humanity or of the infinite. Religious æsthetics, even though it becomes continuously larger and more tolerant, will exclude to the end certain inferior forms of art.
Necessary reforms in lay art.
If art is to take the place of religion, it must progress in certain directions, not only in its forms but in its material methods of appeal. Note how much better church services are presented, from the point of view of hygiene, than art exhibitions are. Moderation is practised in the matter of light; the rooms are large and well supplied with fresh air, are of an almost constant temperature; and the æsthetic services are restful rather than exhausting. Compare with all this the entertainment given in concert halls and theatres, where multitudes are packed together under unnecessarily brilliant lights, where the spectators are wrought up and excited and exhausted in a hundred ways and pass out, finally, fatigued, enfeebled, nervously keyed up, and pursued by a host of sensual images. Church architects are infinitely more conversant with hygiene than those who build our theatres; they understand that if the heavens are to be shut out at all, space enough must be shut in to give the heart and chest room to expand. Among the Greeks, where art really did form a sort of religion, the theatres were open to the sky so that the spectators might really repose in body while they gave up their minds to be played upon by the poet.
In religious art.
Just as existing profane art must undergo certain transformations before it can be expected fully to satisfy a sane and well-balanced nature, so religious art, if it is to be true to its highest tendencies, must transform itself, must rid itself of precisely the elements which to-day seem distinctively to constitute it, namely its marvellous subject-matter and conventional handling. The marvellous in art was long necessary, as we have seen, to capture men’s attention; contemporaneous art does not need to make this appeal. All art took its rise from convention, from ceremonial, but has enfranchised itself by degrees. It might even be established as a general law that the more perfect, the more expressive, arts become—the more, that is to say they seek precisely to body forth the sentiment of the artist; and the more expressive they are the less conventional and less pompous they must be. Amplification and exaggeration are suppressed. The artist occupies toward his emotions the same relation that the translator of a great work does to his text: his translation will be regarded nowadays as perfect in proportion as it is close, as it follows the text, line by line and word by word; formerly the tradition was otherwise, and every translator felt himself obliged to amplify. Art possesses great means of inspiring emotion, but not gross means. Public speakers at the present day make much less frequent use of gesture; the actor no longer steps out on the stage in the cothurnus; the language of verse is approaching the language of ordinary life; music is breaking away from the conventions of counterpoint. What is true of the diverse arts is true also of religious æsthetics, which will one day abandon the fictitious ornaments and vain ceremonies of ritualism. If an æsthetic expression of some profound sentiment is to be true and durable, it must itself be profound, must be like what it expresses, must be murmured rather than articulate. What renders certain verse eternal is its simplicity: the more overcharged an art is the more caducous it proves, like the architecture of the Jesuit style, which is to-day so ridiculous, with its gilding and false ornaments. Ceremonies, properly so called, will become more and more simple in religious or moral associations; the day will come, no doubt, when they will not be employed at all except to celebrate the three great events of human life: birth, marriage, and death; nay, perhaps they will disappear altogether as emotion becomes too profound to be translated by any objective device, by any conventional ceremony whatever.
“Une larme en dit plus que vous n’en pourriez dire.”
In cemeteries the tombs of distinguished people may be recognized by their simplicity, by their freedom from conventional ornament. A marble slab under a wreath of flowers is enough to produce upon the passer-by a more vivid impression than crosses, burning lamps, images of the saints, infantine gewgaws, and ridiculous inscriptions. Eternal enigmas need not be supplied with excess of language; they are quite capable of making themselves heard without raising their voices. The silence of the stars is more impressive than speech, and the highest religious instruction could not do better than teach men to listen to such science. Meditation, which, after all, is recommended by every religion, implies the negation of rite.