But, it is said, is it not the aim of the poet to excite pity and terror? Yes; but at first in a certain measure; then he must mix with them some other sentiment that tempers them, or makes them serve another end. If the aim of dramatic art were only to excite in the highest degree pity and terror, art would be the powerless rival of nature. All the misfortunes represented on the stage are very feeble in comparison with those sad spectacles which we may see every day. The first hospital is fuller of pity and terror than all the theatres in the world. What should the poet do in the theory that we combat? He should transfer to the stage the greatest possible reality, and move us powerfully by shocking our senses with the sight of frightful pains. The great resort of the pathetic would then be the representation of death, especially that of the greatest torture. Quite on the contrary, there is an end of art when sensibility is too much excited. To take, again, an example that we have already employed, what constitutes the beauty of a tempest, of a shipwreck? What attracts us to those great scenes of nature? It is certainly not pity and terror,—these poignant and lacerating sentiments would much sooner keep us away. An emotion very different from these is necessary, which triumphs over us, in order to retain us by the shore; this emotion is the pure sentiment of the beautiful and the sublime, excited and kept alive by the grandeur of the spectacle, by the vast extent of the sea, the rolling of the foaming waves, and the imposing sound of the thunder. But do we think for a single instant that there are in the midst of the sea the unfortunate who are suffering, and are, perhaps, about to perish? From that moment the spectacle becomes to us insupportable. It is so in art. Whatever sentiment it proposes to excite in us, must always be tempered and governed by that of the beautiful. If it only produces pity or terror beyond a certain limit, especially physical pity or terror, it revolts, and no longer charms; it loses the effect that belongs to it in exchange for a foreign and vulgar effect.
For this same reason, I cannot accept another theory, which, confounding the sentiment of the beautiful with the moral and religious sentiment, puts art in the service of religion and morals, and gives it for its end to make us better and elevate us to God. There is here an essential distinction to be made. If all beauty covers a moral beauty, if the ideal mounts unceasingly towards the infinite, art, which expresses ideal beauty, purifies the soul in elevating it towards the infinite, that is to say, towards God. Art, then, produces the perfection of the soul, but it produces it indirectly. The philosopher who investigates effects and causes, knows what is the ultimate principle of the beautiful and its certain, although remote, effects. But the artist is before all things an artist; what animates him is the sentiment of the beautiful; what he wishes to make pass into the soul of the spectator is the same sentiment that fills his own. He confides himself to the virtue of beauty; he fortifies it with all the power, all the charm of the ideal; it must then do its own work; the artist has done his when he has procured for some noble souls the exquisite sentiment of beauty. This pure and disinterested sentiment is a noble ally of the moral and religious sentiments; it awakens, preserves, and develops them, but it is a distinct and special sentiment. So art, which is founded on this sentiment, which is inspired by it, which expands it, is in its turn an independent power. It is naturally associated with all that ennobles the soul, with morals and religion; but it springs only from itself.
Let us confine our thought strictly within its proper limits. In vindicating the independence, the proper dignity, and the particular end of art, we do not intend to separate it from religion, from morals, from country. Art draws its inspirations from these profound sources, as well as from the ever open source of nature. But it is not less true that art, the state, religion, are powers which have each their world apart and their own effects; they mutually help each other; they should not serve each other. As soon as one of them wanders from its end, it errs, and is degraded. Does art blindly give itself up to the orders of religion and the state? In losing its liberty, it loses its charm and its empire.
Ancient Greece and modern Italy are continually cited as triumphant examples of what the alliance of art, religion, and the state can do. Nothing is more true, if the question is concerning their union; nothing is more false, if the question is concerning the servitude of art. Art in Greece was so little the slave of religion, that it little by little modified the symbols, and, to a certain extent, the spirit itself, by its free representations. There is a long distance between the divinities that Greece received from Egypt and those of which it has left immortal exemplars. Are those primitive artists and poets, as Homer and Dedalus are called, strangers to this change? And in the most beautiful epoch of art, did not Æschylus and Phidias carry a great liberty into the religious scenes which they exposed to the gaze of the people, in the theatre, or in front of the temples? In Italy as in Greece, as everywhere, art is at first in the hands of priesthoods and governments; but, as it increases its importance and is developed, it more and more conquers its liberty. Men speak of the faith that animated the artists and vivified their works; that is true of the time of Giotto and Ciambuë; but after Angelico de Fiesole, at the end of the fifteenth century, in Italy, I perceive especially the faith of art in itself and the worship of beauty. Raphael was about to become a cardinal;[119] yes, but always painting Galatea, and without quitting Fornarine. Once more, let us exaggerate nothing; let us distinguish, not separate; let us unite art, religion, and country, but let not their union injure the liberty of each. Let us be thoroughly penetrated with the thought, that art is also to itself a kind of religion. God manifests himself to us by the idea of the true, by the idea of the good, by the idea of the beautiful. Each one of them leads to God, because it comes from him. True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the infinite. So, independently of all official alliance with religion and morals, art is by itself essentially religious and moral; for, far from wanting its own law, its own genius, it everywhere expresses in its works eternal beauty. Bound on all sides to matter by inflexible laws, working upon inanimate stone, upon uncertain and fugitive sounds, upon words of limited and finite signification, art communicates to them, with the precise form that is addressed to such or such a sense, a mysterious character that is addressed to the imagination and the soul, takes them away from reality, and bears them sweetly or violently into unknown regions. Every work of art, whatever may be its form, small or great, figured, sung, or uttered,—every work of art, truly beautiful or sublime, throws the soul into a gentle or severe reverie that elevates it towards the infinite. The infinite is the common limit after which the soul aspires upon the wings of imagination as well as reason, by the route of the sublime and the beautiful, as well as by that of the true and the good. The emotion that the beautiful produces turns the soul from this world; it is the beneficent emotion that art produces for humanity.
LECTURE IX.
THE DIFFERENT ARTS.
Expression is the general law of art.—Division of arts.—Distinction between liberal arts and trades.—Eloquence itself, philosophy, and history do not make a part of the fine arts.—That the arts gain nothing by encroaching upon each other, and usurping each other's means and processes.—Classification of the arts:—its true principle is expression.—Comparison of arts with each other.—Poetry the first of arts.
A résumé of the last lecture would be a definition of art, of its end and law. Art is the free reproduction of the beautiful, not of a single natural beauty, but of ideal beauty, as the human imagination conceives it by the aid of data which nature furnishes it. The ideal beauty envelops the infinite:—the end of art is, then, to produce works that, like those of nature, or even in a still higher degree, may have the charm of the infinite. But how and by what illusion can we draw the infinite from the finite? This is the difficulty of art, and its glory also. What bears us towards the infinite in natural beauty? The ideal side of this beauty. The ideal is the mysterious ladder that enables the soul to ascend from the finite to the infinite. The artist, then, must devote himself to the representation of the ideal. Every thing has its ideal. The first care of the artist will be, then, whatever he does, to penetrate at first to the concealed ideal of his subject, for his subject has an ideal,—in order to render it, in the next place, more or less striking to the senses and the soul, according to the conditions which the very materials that he employs—the stone, the color, the sound, the language—impose on him.
So, to express the ideal of the infinite in one way or another, is the law of art; and all the arts are such only by their relation to the sentiment of the beautiful and the infinite which they awaken in the soul, by the aid of that high quality of every work of art that is called expression.
Expression is essentially ideal: what expression tries to make felt, is not what the eye can see and the hand touch, evidently it is something invisible and impalpable.