But let us keep to the human average, and to the question of aesthetics. According to the quantity withdrawn from the emotional current, we shall, for example, have a spectator who retains from the tragedy its entire content of pure, robust beauty—who will go away in a state of intellectual emotion, less sensible to the murder than to the curve of the arm that struck the blow; to the curses and terrors, than the musical form which limits them, encloses them, gives them life. We shall also have a spectator who, in spite of a few glimmerings of intellectual emotion, leaves the theatre very much as he might a boxing-match or a bull-fight. There are the two extremes. One man, looking at a perfect statue, enjoys the grace of the curves, thinks: what a beautiful work! The other cries: what a beautiful woman! Between these two types there is a whole series of shading. For the man of average type, the idea of beauty scarcely exists. He will judge the work of art according to the intensity or the quality of his emotion. It gives him pleasure, or it leaves him cold, and that is all. It is this average type that determines success in art, the average type must be pleased. Its emotion must be stirred.
The representatives of the aesthetic caste also judge a work of art by the emotion it gives them, but this emotion is of a quite special order. It is the aesthetic emotion. For them those works alone that are capable of communicating the aesthetic thrill or emotion belong to art, to the category of beauty. Thus are excluded from art utilitarian, moralizing, social works possessing any purpose whatsoever outside this precise and exclusive goal, aesthetic emotion; also works of too sexual a type, whose appeal to genital exercise is over-direct, though they, too, respond—in their case with excessive clarity—to men's primitive notion of artistic beauty. In this way has been formed that aesthetic category which, eternally instable, ranging from realism to idealism (a certain idealism), from sentimentalism to brutality, from religious feeling to sensuality, remains, nevertheless, a closed garden.
Art is, then, that which gives a pure emotion,—that is to say, an emotion without vibrations beyond a limited group of cells. It is that which invites to neither virtue nor patriotism, nor debauch, nor peace, nor war, nor laughter, nor tears, nor anything other than art itself. Art is impassible, and as an old Italian poet said of love, non piange, nè ride. There is nothing about it either rational, or just, or consistent with any truth. It is a matter of the manners and customs of an intellectual caste. Born of an imperfection in the nervous system, the idea of beauty has picked up, on the way, all sorts of rules, prejudices, beliefs, habits, and it has constructed itself a canon whose form, without being absolute, fluctuates at any given moment between certain limits only. The restriction is necessary. All refined men of an epoch agree on the idea of beauty. To-day, for example, there are certain touchstones: Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rodin, Monet, Nietzsche. To admit that you are not moved by the Hands, by Hérodiade, by Eve, by the Cathédrales, by Zarathoustra, is to admit that you are devoid of aesthetic sensibility. But works of quite another tone were formerly admired by the same human group. From Ronsard to Victor Hugo, the principle of beauty was sought in imitation. Artists imitated the classics, the Italians, the Spaniards, the English. In the last century, it was the effort after originality; and this produced even a few years ago an excess of false notes, but a music less flat, on the whole, than that which had so long wearied the Muses. Not that the artist imitated less, but he did so in the illusion of creating something new, and illusion is almost always productive. France is, moreover, the country where the idea of beauty has undergone the greatest number of variations, since it is peopled by an animated, eager race always attentive to what is happening and ready to make the acquaintance of everything strange and new, reserving the right to laugh at this novelty, if it does not suit their temperament.
Our aesthetic sense, then, has its caprices. But, historically variable, it is consistent enough at any given moment. There is an aesthetic caste to-day. There was always one, and the history of French literature is little more than the catalogue raisonné of the works successively chosen by this caste. Successes are shaped in the street. Glory issues from cénacles. As there are no examples to the contrary, this clearly must be admitted to be a fact—also this, that the cénacles become disgusted with the glories that escape them, and start running the streets. A fact is always legitimate, since it is always logical; but we can always oppose to it the repugnances of our own sensibility, or of a group of sensibilities. That is the way of the crowd when led by certain educated mediocrities, who make good lawyers, since they hate the house which they are fighting, and which does not recognize them. To the often obscure reputation established by the aesthetic group, we see, then, incessantly opposed the celebrities of success. It is easy to dupe the people by showing them, on the one hand, the poor solitary lamp; on the other, the harsh glare of globes and the mad riot of tulips.
But the people have little need of encouragement. They go quite naturally towards that which dazzles them. This also is a fact, and this also is legitimate. The public, led by cunning shepherds, does wrong to despise the confused gleam of the stars; but the aesthetic caste does wrong to laugh at the people's pleasures. It also does wrong when it monopolizes certain words and refuses to call works of art those compositions which, no less than those which they themselves admire, have as their aim to stir emotion. It is a question of quality, not of essence. The aesthetic caste suffers less from seeing a poor thing applauded, than a real work disdained. Its judgment, so sure in scenting false art, suddenly weakens, and is angered, because a votary of the popular taste does not incline before its admirations. It is always a mistake to appeal to justice; but it is madness to appeal to the justice of a social group. We should abandon all that; and shut ourselves up in an opinion as in a tower. It would be easier to cut the throats of a hundred fanatical admirers of Quo Vadis? than to convince them, and far less fatiguing. Literary justice is an absurdity. It supposes emotional parity among men belonging to different physiological categories. A work is beautiful for those whom it moves. Sensibility is incorruptible—popular sensibility as well as that of the cénacles. It is as incorruptible as taste and as smell. It was formerly imagined that there was such a thing as taste—an absolute taste worshipped in a temple. Nothing is more ridiculous, nothing more tyrannical. Let us leave men to seek their pleasure freely. Some want to have their feelings harrowed, others their spleen banished, still others their heart pierced. Different instruments are needed for each of these operations. Art is a form of surgery whose case is well equipped, and a pharmacopeia filled with vials of every form and odour.
People talk very seriously—that is, without laughing—of initiating the people to art. In less vague terms, corresponding to a certain scientific reality, this would mean so shaping the physiology of men in general, that emotion, instead of reaching the genital centre, spreads towards the aesthetic centre. The enterprise is not of the easiest. Poor people! How it is made game of, and how stupid, in their goodness of heart, are its intellectual masters! These really believe that taste for painting, for music, for poetry, is learned like orthography or geography! And suppose it could be, and suppose a few admirations had been imparted to a few workmen. What does it matter that the people do not admire what we admire? They would have the same right to ask us to share their enthusiasms. There is no absolute aesthetic. That which moves us is beautiful; but we can be moved only in the measure of our emotional receptivity, and according to the state of our nervous system. Insensibility to what we call beauty,—a very complex idea, the moment we leave the human form,—would seem, on the whole, to be merely the sign of a healthy organism, of a normal brain, in which the nervous currents go straight to their goal, without turning aside. But this simple state is rare. All men are capable of receiving certain aesthetic emotions, and all are eager for them; but almost no man is concerned with the quality of this emotion. The important thing is to be moved. No other monument since the cathedrals—perhaps since the pyramids—has so' stirred human sensibility as the Eiffel Tower. Confronted with all that junk reared on high, stupidity itself became lyric, fools meditated, wild asses dreamed. From those heights swept down, as it were, a storm of emotions. An attempt was made to divert it, but it was too late. Success had arrived. The more admiration a work receives, the more beautiful it becomes for the multitude. It becomes beautiful and almost alive. Emotional waves, starting from it, come, like combers, to break upon a people drunk and panting. The whole organism holds carnival. Stupid and beautiful, the genius of the species smiles in the shade.
Such is the social rôle of art. It is immense. There is an Australian bird which builds, as its nest, a big cabin where it spreads all the shining pebbles it finds. The male, amid the mosaic, dances a grave minuet before his troubled companion. This is art surprised at its obscure birth—at the very moment of its intimate association with the expansion of the genital instinct. A red pebble gives an emotion to a bird, and this emotion heightens its desire. Such is the social rôle of art. The people—and by the people, I here mean the mass of men—must admire. They must experience aesthetic emotions, must quiver with long nervous vibrations, must have rich and complicated loves; but, what matters it whence comes the cloud, so long as it rains!
I have merely wished to show the legitimacy of all aesthetic emotion, whatever its source, and of all success, whatever its quality; but I shall be readily believed if I confess that I retain my preferences for a certain form of art, for a certain expression of beauty. I depart in this respect from the common sentiment, that I do not believe it useful to generalize opinions, to teach admirations. To force admiration is almost as wicked as to force an entrance. It is for each man to procure himself the emotion he needs, and the morality which suits him. Apuleius's ass wanted to crop roses, because by so doing he would resume the human form. It is a very good idea to crop roses. It is one way to achieve freedom.
1901.
[1] At the Hôtel de Bourgogne, while at Giénégaud his rival Pradon's play was received with great applause.