Ought he, on the other hand, to reproduce with scrupulous exactness the manners and customs of another time, to give to the facts and the characters their proper coloring and their original and primitive costume? This is the problem. Hence arise two schools and two opposite modes of representation. In the age of Louis XIV., for example, the Greeks and Romans are conceived in the likeness of Frenchmen. Since then, by a natural reaction, the contrary tendency has prevailed. Today the poet must have the knowledge of an archeologist, and possess his scrupulous exactness, and pay close attention, above all, to local color, and historic verity has become the principal and essential aim of art.
Truth here, as always, lies between the two extremes. It is necessary to maintain, at the same time, the rights of art and these of the public, to have a proper regard for the spirit of the epoch, and to satisfy the exigencies of the subject treated. These are the very judicious rules which the author states upon this delicate point.
The subject should be intelligible and interesting to the public to which it is addressed. But this end the poet or the artist will attain only so far as, by his general spirit, his work responds to some one of the essential ideas of the human spirit and to the general interests of humanity. The particularities of an epoch are not of true and enduring interest to us.
If, then, the subject is borrowed from remote epochs of history, or from some far-off tradition, it is necessary that, by our general culture, we should be familiarized with it. It is thus only that we can sympathize with an epoch and with manners that are no more. Hence the two essential conditions; that the subject present the general human character, then that it be in relation with our ideas.
Art is not designed for a small number of scholars and men of science; it is addressed to the entire nation. Its works should be comprehended and relished of themselves, and not after a course of difficult research. Thus national subjects are the most favorable. All great poems are national poems. The Bible histories have for us a particular charm, because we are familiar with them from our infancy. Nevertheless, in the measure that relations are multiplied between peoples, art can borrow its subjects from all latitudes and from all epochs. It should, indeed, as to the principal features, preserve, to the traditions, events, and personages, to manners and institutions, their historic or traditional character; but the duty of the artist, above all, is to place the idea which constitutes its content in harmony with the spirit of his own age, and the peculiar genius of his nation.
In this necessity lies the reason and excuse for what is called anachronism in art. When the anachronism bears only upon external circumstances it is unimportant. It becomes a matter of more moment if we attribute to the characters, the ideas, and sentiments of another epoch. Respect must be paid to historic truth, but regard must also be had to the manners and intellectual culture of one’s own time. The heroes of Homer themselves are more than were the real personages of the epoch which he presents; and the characters of Sophocles are brought still nearer to us. To violate thus the rules of historic reality, is a necessary anachronism in art. Finally, another form of anachronism, which the utmost moderation and genius can alone make pardonable, is that which transfers the religious or moral ideas of a more advanced civilization to an anterior epoch; when one attributes, for example, to the ancients the ideas of the moderns. Some great poets have ventured upon this intentionally; few have been successful in it.
The general conclusion is this: “The artist should be required to make himself the cotemporary of past ages, and become penetrated himself with their spirit. For if the substance of those ideas be true, it remains clear for all time. But to undertake to reproduce with a scrupulous exactness the external element of history, with all its details and particulars,—in a word, all the rust of antiquity, is the work of a puerile erudition, which attaches itself only to a superficial aim. We should not wrest from art the right which it has to float between reality and fiction.”
This first part concludes with an examination of the qualities necessary to an artist, such as imagination, genius, inspiration, originality, etc. The author does not deem it obligatory to treat at much length this subject, which appears to him to allow only a small number of general rules or psychological observations. The manner in which he treats of many points, and particularly of the imagination, causes us to regret that he has not thought it worth while to give a larger space to these questions, which occupy the principal place in the majority of æsthetical treatises; we shall find them again under another form in the theory of the arts.
[The next number will continue this translation through the treatment of the Symbolic, Classic, and Romantic forms of art.]