Art, taken as art, and in itself, goes neither forward nor backward. The transformations of poetry are but the undulations of the Beautiful, useful to human movement. Human movement,—another side of the question that we certainly do not overlook, and that we shall attentively examine farther on. Art is not susceptible of intrinsic progress. From Phidias to Rembrandt there is onward movement, but not progress. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are absolutely nothing to the metopes of the Parthenon. Retrace your steps as much as you like, from the palace of Versailles to the castle of Heidelberg, from the castle of Heidelberg to Notre-Dame of Paris, from Notre-Dame of Paris to the Alhambra, from the Alhambra to St. Sophia, from St. Sophia to the Coliseum, from the Coliseum to the Propylæons, from the Propylæons to the Pyramids; you may recede into ages, you do not recede in art. The Pyramids and the Iliad stand on the fore plan.
Masterpieces have a level, the same for all,—the absolute.
Once the absolute reached, all is said. That cannot be excelled. The eye can bear but a certain quantity of dazzling light.
Thence comes the assurance of poets. They lean on posterity with a lofty confidence. "Exegi monumentum," says Horace. And on that occasion he insults bronze. "Plaudite, cives," says Plautus. Corneille, at sixty-five years, wins the love (a tradition in the Escoubleau family) of the very young Marquise de Contades, by promising her to send her name down to posterity:—
"Chez cette race nouvelle,
Où j'aurai quelque crédit,
Vous ne passerez pour belle
Qu'autant que je l'aurai dit."
In the poet and in the artist there is the infinite. It is this ingredient, the infinite, which gives to this kind of genius the irreducible grandeur.
This amount of the infinite in art is not inherent to progress. It may have, and it certainly has, duties to fulfil toward progress, but it is not dependent on it. It is dependent on no perfections which may result from the future, on no transformation of language, on no death or birth of idioms. It has within itself the immeasurable and the innumerable; it cannot be subdued by any occurrence; it is as pure, as complete, as sidereal, as divine in the heart of barbarism as in the heart of civilization. It is the Beautiful, diverse according to the men of genius, but always equal to itself. Supreme.
Such is the law, scarcely known, of Art.