Some pure lovers of art, affected by a preoccupation which in its way has its dignity and nobleness, discard this formula, "Art for progress," the Beautiful Useful, fearing lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble lest they should see attached to the fine arms of the Muse the coarse hands of the drudge. According to them, the ideal may become perverted by too much contact with reality. They are solicitous for the sublime if it is lowered as far as humanity. Ah, they are mistaken.
The useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, increases it. The application of the sublime to human things produces unexpected chefs-d'œuvre. The useful, considered in itself and as an element combining with the sublime, is of several kinds; there is the useful which is tender, and there is the useful which is indignant. Tender, it refreshes the unfortunate and creates the social epopee; indignant, it flagellates the wicked, and creates the divine satire. Moses hands the rod to Jesus; and after having caused the water to gush from the rock, that august rod, the very same, drives the vendors from the sanctuary.
What! art should grow less because it has expanded? No. One service more is one more beauty.
But people cry out: To undertake the cure of social evils; to amend the codes; to denounce the law to the right; to pronounce those hideous words, "bagne," "galley-slave," "convict," "girl of the town;" to control the police-registers; to contract the dispensaries; to investigate wages and the want of work; to taste the black bread of the poor; to seek labour for the work-girl; to confront fashionable idleness with ragged sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance; to open schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to preach the multiplication of spelling-books; to proclaim the equality of the sun; to ameliorate the food of intellects and of hearts; to give meat and drink; to claim solutions for problems and shoes for naked feet,—that is not the business of the azure. Art is the azure.
Yes, art is the azure; but the azure from above, from which falls the ray which swells the corn, makes the maize yellow and the apple round, gilds the orange, sweetens the grape. I repeat it, one service more is one more beauty. At all events, where is the diminution? To ripen the beet-root, to water the potatoes, to thicken the lucern, the clover, and the hay; to be a fellow-workman with the ploughman, the vine-dresser, and the gardener,—that does not deprive the heavens of one star. Ah, immensity does not despise utility, and what does it lose by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or electric lighten less splendidly the depth of the clouds because it consents to perform the office of pilot to a bark, and to keep always turned to the north the small needle that is trusted to it, the huge guide? Is the aurora less magnificent, has it less purple and emerald, does it undergo any decrease of majesty, of grace and radiancy, because, foreseeing the thirst of a fly, it carefully secretes in the flower the drop of dew which the bee requires?
Yet, people insist: To compose social poetry, human poetry, popular poetry; to grumble against the evil and for the good; to promote public passions; to insult despots; to make rascals despair; to emancipate man before he is of age; to push souls forward and darkness backward; to know that there are thieves and tyrants; to clean penal cells; to empty the pail of public filth,—what! Polyhymnia, sleeves tucked up to do such dirty work? Oh, for shame!
Why not?
Homer was the geographer and the historian of his time, Moses the legislator of his, Juvenal the judge of his, Dante the theologian of his, Shakespeare the moralist of his, Voltaire the philosopher of his. No region, in speculation or in real fact, is shut to the mind. Here a horizon, there wings; right for all to soar.
For certain sublime beings, to soar is to serve. In the desert not a drop of water,—a horrible thirst; the wretched file of pilgrims drag along overcome. All at once, in the horizon, above a wrinkle in the sands, a griffin is seen soaring, and all the caravan cry out, "There is water there!"
What thinks Æschylus of art as art? Certainly, if ever a poet was a poet, it is Æschylus. Listen to his reply. It is in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes, line 1039. Æschylus speaks:—