It is not unusual at present to meet this sentence: ‘The art and poetry of the future will be scientific.’ Those who say this assume extraordinarily conceited attitudes, and consider themselves unmistakably as extremely progressive and ‘modern.’ I ask myself in vain what these words can mean. Do the good people who mean so well by science imagine that sculptors will in the future chisel microscopes in marble, that painters will depict the circulation of the blood, and that poets will display in rich rhymes the principles of Euclid? Even this would not be science, but merely a mechanical occupation with the external apparatus of science. But this will surely not occur. In the past a confusion between art and science was possible; in the future it is unimaginable. The mental activity of man is too highly developed for such an amalgamation. Art and poetry have emotion for their object, science has knowledge. The former are subjective, the latter objective. The former work with the imagination, i.e., with the association of ideas directed by emotion; the latter works with observation, i.e., with the association of ideas determined by sense-impressions, of which the acquisition and reinforcement are the work of attention. Province, object, and method in art and science are so different, and in part so opposed, that to confuse them would signify a retrogression of thousands of years. One thing only is correct: the images issuing from the old anthropomorphic conception, the allusions to obsolete states of things and ideas which Fritz Mauthner has called ‘dead symbols’—all this will disappear from art. I think that in the twentieth century it will no longer occur to any painter to compose pictures like Guido Reni’s Aurora in the Rospigliosi Palace, and that a poet would be laughed at who should represent the moon looking amorously into a pretty girl’s room. The artist is the child of his times, the conception dominant in the world is his also, and in spite of all his tendency to atavism his method of expression is that with which contemporary culture furnishes him. No doubt the art of the future will avoid more than hitherto the great errors in universally recognised doctrines of science, but it will never become science.
The feelings of pleasure which a man receives from art result from the gratification of three different organic inclinations or tendencies. He needs the incitement which the variety offers him; he takes pleasure in recognising the originals in the imitations; he represents to himself the feelings of his fellow-creatures, and shares in them. He finds variety in works transporting him into wholly different scenes from those he knows, and which are familiar to him. The pleasurable feeling of recognition he obtains by the careful imitations of familiar realities. His sympathy makes him share with lively personal emotions every strongly and clearly expressed emotion of the artist. There will always be in the future, as heretofore, amateurs of works of imagination, which transport the reader or spectator into remote times and countries, or relate extraordinary adventures; others will prefer works in which the faithful observation of the known will prevail; the most refined and the most advanced will find pleasure only in those in which a soul, with its most secret feelings and thoughts, reveals itself. The art of the future will not be wholly romantic, wholly realistic, or wholly individualistic, but will appeal from first to last as much by its story to curiosity, as by imitation to the pleasure of recognition, and by the externalism of the artist’s personality to sympathy.
Two tendencies which have long been rivals will presumably contend still more violently in the future for supremacy, viz., observation and the free flight of imagination, or, to speak more briefly, though more inaccurately, realism and romanticism. Good artists, doubtless, in consequence of their higher mental development, will always be more prone and more apt accurately to perceive and accurately to interpret the phenomena of the world. But the crowd will no less certainly demand of artists in the future something different from the average reality of the world. Among creators, the desire for realism will exist, as among recipients, the need of romanticism. For—and this seems to be an important point—the task of art in the coming century, will be to exert over men that charm of variety which reality will no longer offer, and which the brain cannot relinquish. All that is called ‘picturesque’ will necessarily disappear more and more from the earth. Civilization ever becomes more uniform. The distinctive is felt as an inconvenience by those who are marked by it, and got rid of. Ruins delight a foreigner’s eye, but they inconvenience the native, and he sweeps them away. The traveller is disgusted at seeing the beauty of Venice profaned by steamers, but for the Venetian it is a benefit to cover long distances quickly for ten centesimi. Soon the last Redskin will wear a frock-coat and tall hat; the regulation railway buildings will display their prosaic outlines and hues along the great wall of China and under the palm-trees of Tuggurt in the Sahara; and Macaulay’s celebrated Maori will no longer contemplate the ruins of Westminster, but a trashy imitation of the palace at Westminster will serve as a Maori House of Parliament. The unique Yosemite Park, which the Americans in their very wise foresight wish to preserve intact in its prehistoric wildness, will not satisfy the craving for something new, different, picturesque, romantic, which humanity demands, and the latter will claim from art what civilization—clean, curled, and smart—will no longer offer.
I can now sum up in a few words my prognosis. The hysteria of the present day will not last. People will recover from their present fatigue. The feeble, the degenerate, will perish; the strong will adapt themselves to the acquisitions of civilizations, or will subordinate them to their own organic capacity. The aberrations of art have no future. They will disappear when civilized humanity shall have triumphed over its exhausted condition. The art of the twentieth century will connect itself at every point with the past, but it will have a new task to accomplish—that of introducing a stimulating variety into the uniformity of civilized life, an influence which probably science alone will be in a position to exert, many centuries later, over the great majority of mankind.
[CHAPTER II.]
THERAPEUTICS.
Is it possible to accelerate the recovery of the cultivated classes from the present derangement of their nervous system?
I seriously believe it to be so, and for that reason alone I undertook this work.
No one, I hope, will think me childish enough to imagine that I can bring degenerates to reason by incontrovertibly and convincingly demonstrating to them the derangement of their minds. He whose profession brings him into frequent contact with the insane knows the utter hopelessness of attempting by persuasion or argument to bring them to a recognition of the unreality and morbidness of their delusions. The only result attained is that they regard the physician either as an enemy and persecutor, and fiercely hate him, or as a blockhead devoid of reason on whom they vent their derision.