Æsthetics

Front matter

I

STHETICS.

EUGENE VER.ON.

Introduction

are addressed to the ear, have for their domain, and also for their instruments, the infinite multiplicity of sounds.

The principles, upon which each of the two groups reposes, find their explanation, therefore, in the two sciences pertaining to the study of the organs of sight and hearing — namely, optics and acoustics. The explanation is far from being complete, for a large number of problems still remain unsolved ; but from what we already know, we may be allowed to guess at future discoveries. And at least we can indicate the general directions with a great degree of certainty.

The explanation of the cerebral phenomena of what is commonly called the moral influence of art, is not so far advanced, and in most cases we are compelled to content ourselves with pure empiricism. Upon this point ^Esthetics is perforce limited to the statement and registration of facts, and to their classification in the order most probable. So far, then, it ceases to be a science in the complete sense of the word.

However, we are able to deduce from the observation of these facts, a principle of the utmost importance ; which is, that outside the material conditions that relate to optics and acoustics, that which dominates in a work of art and gives it its special character, is the personality of its author. Ontology disappears to give place to man. The realisation of the eternal and unchanging Beauty of Plato is cast aside. The^ value of the work of art rests entirely upon the degree of energy with which it manifests the intellectual character and aesthetic impressions of its author. The only rule imposed upon it, is the necessity for a

INTRODUCTION.

vu certain conformity with the mode of thinking and feeling of the public to which it appeals. Not that such conformity can itself add to or take from the intrinsic value of the work. It is easy to understand that, in theory, a poem may express sentiments or ideas which, although they are incomprehensible to the contemporaries of the author, are not on that account the less worthy of the admiration of some more enlightened period or country. But as a matter of fact, it is certain that such a want of harmony often causes a work to fall rapidly into oblivion.

Happily cases of this nature are very uncommon, and the danger is much less to be feared by the artist than by the thinker. It is very rare, we may even say impossible, for an artist to be much before his time. Without going so far as to admit, as some have done, that he must necessarily be a simple echo, an iEolian harp played upon by every breath of contemporary emotion — it is certain that for a multitude of reasons which we have not space to enumerate, the artist and the poet, above all men, live the life of those among whom they are placed ; and consequently it is only in exceptional cases that they are exposed to the danger which we have indicated.

An artist of true feeling has but to abandon himself to his emotion and it will become contagious, and the praise that he deserves will be awarded to him. So long as he shall observe the positive rules that spring from the physiological necessities of our organs, and which alone are certain and definitive, he need never trouble himself about academic traditions and receipts. He is free, absolutely free in his own province, on the one condition of absolute

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sincerity. He must seek only to express the ideas, sentiments, and emotions proper to himself, and must copy no one.

As there is no such thing as abstract art, Vart en soi, because absolute beauty is a chimera,1 so neither is there any definitive and final system of ^Esthetics. All the various formulas by which at various times it has been imprisoned— idealism, naturalism, realism, and such like, are nothing but different ways of looking at art, which is not entirely contained in any one of them. Each of them may recommend itself to certain individual or national temperaments ; but it is absurd to force them upon natures to which they are repugnant. It is quite as ridiculous to condemn Flemish or Dutch art in the name of Greek sculpture, as to go through the reverse process, and to refuse all praise to Phidias because he is not Rembrandt. Courbet, too, is legitimate. We may be allowed to prefer one to the other, according to our natural attraction and affinities ; but ^Esthetics has no more right to exclude either the one or the other, than we have to import passion and partiality into a question of science.

Is this equal to saying, with certain philosophers, that the freedom of art is the freedom of indifference ; that for it one system of direction is as good as another ; and that it knows no law but the infinite variety of individual caprice ? To answer this question in the affirmative, would be both an exaggeration and a mistake. The artist, as we have said

1 "We shall have to demonstrate that the principle of Beauty, absolute or relative, is quite insufficient to account for the complexity of artistic manifestations.

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IX before, lives the life of his own time and country, and so he is naturally led by the inspirations therein existing. Now, in spite of all the changes in human civilization — it is obvious that science, so long retarded by the pursuit of insoluble problems and the ontology of the theologians, has at last transferred its investigation from things of heaven to things of earth. It has substituted the direct study of things, facts, and living beings, for the fantastic explanations of metaphysicians, and of ancient and modern mythology. After wasting century after century in seeking for answers to the enigmas that puzzled it in the actions of gods and imaginary entities, it was obliged, in order to explain the physical and moral world, to take direct account of nature and of man. Man became a perpetual subject of observation for his own sake ; and to have given this new direction to the investigation of science, is surely one of the chief glories of the nineteenth century.

Art, also, becomes ever more and more inclined to extend itself in the same direction. It is gradually withdrawing itself further and further from mythology and metaphysics, to which it was faithful so long as civilization set it an example of fidelity. This fact accounts for the ever-growing predominance of expression and of the pourtrayal of the passions and sentiments, so marked a characteristic of contemporary art. It also explains why landscape painting — that is, the painting of human emotions in the presence of the works of nature — has, for the last forty years, occupied a position of daily increasing importance. The sameAliing, again, is the cause of the transformation that life and movement have wrought in contemporary sculpture,

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making Carpeaux and Dalou the chief favourites of the public.

All this is as much as to say that art, always human in its point of departure, which is the manifestation of the ideas and emotions of mankind, became equally so in its subjects and in its final aim. Instead of representing the forms of the gods, or celebrating them in verse ; instead of devoting itself to a symbolism that could never end in anything better than a dry subtlety : it applied itself, with visible effort, to re-enter the pure field of humanity, in which alone from that time it was able to awaken those sympathies without which neither talent nor genius are preserved from oblivion ; and which, also, is the only one wherein the artist draws immediately upon the sincere and profound emotions that excite his own desire and power to create.

This movement has, of course, found an energetic and violent opponent in tradition, which, with us, possesses peculiar power on account of the organization of our academies and of our official teaching. This retrograde force exercises a most fatal influence over our art progress, especially as those of us who are subject to it, are, for the most part, unconscious of its existence. Young and without any philosophic education, these unconscious students find the schools and their surroundings impregnated with a multitude of academic prejudices, that taking hold of them, stereotype their ideas before they have ever thought in earnest about such things, or have formed any personal convictions. They unwittingly become enlisted from the very first in the official phalanx ; and it is only the exceptionally independent and powerful intellects that are able

INTRODUCTION.

xi either to resist this pressure at the beginning, or to escape from it at a later period. Our aim, then, is to denounce as strongly as our opportunities permit, this crushing of the future under the past, of liberty under dogmatism. We refuse to be bound by the narrow and antiquated rules which frustrate every attempt at emancipation ; we repudiate the haughty and contemptuous criticism that, under pretext of protecting “good taste and calm doctrines,” succeeds in discouraging every attempt at independence — a defensive criticism, which is,* as M. Cuvillier-Fleury termed it, nothing but the open tyranny of academic doctrine and jealous impotence.

Our intention is to defend and uphold in every possible way the thesis which M. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc has taken for the text of all his writings ; namely, that without independence we can have neither art nor artists.

All the great art epochs have been epochs of liberty. In the time of Pericles as in that of Leo. X., in the France of the thirteenth century as in the Holland of the seventeenth, artists were able to work after their own fancies. No aesthetic dogmas confused their imaginations, no official corporations claimed any art dictatorship, or thought themselves responsible for the direction taken by the national taste.

In these great epochs, Art was truly national. Men’s intellects, when left to follow their own devices, naturally worked out the particular kinds of art with which they had most sympathy; or rather they found them without search, by their own spontaneous movement, without other guide or rule than the instinctive preferences of the race as a whole.

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This peculiar similarity between instincts when left to themselves, explains the close sympathy that subsists between the works produced by different men during the great periods of art ; whilst, at the same time, freedom is made manifest by the characteristic whose place nothing else can supply — namely, individual originality.

Men whose lives belong to the same period are generally influenced by the same set of facts. The sources of inspiration afford hut little variety. Sometimes a single idea or sentiment is impressed upon a, whole generation. But each man interprets it after his own fashion, after the fulness of his own personal inspiration, and according to the measure of his own genius.

This is the source of the infinite variety in unity — variety of expression in unity of sentiment — which is the mark of certain periods. In fact, the artist is never ■ more powerful or more inspired, than when he finds himself in perfect accord with the age in which he lives ; and art is never greater, than when it marches with the ideas and sentiments that influence a whole condition of society.

Now this universality of art and of artistic sentiment, at a certain moment in their intellectual evolution among the great majority of nations, is of the most capital importance in the history of the manifestations of human intelligence. The Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Chinese, and Japanese, all possessed spontaneous forms of art, which, springing from the inmost feelings of the nation, have the appearance of being equally understood and appreciated by every individual of the race. Something of the same kind is to be

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xm found in France during the Middle Ages, and in Italy during the period of the Renaissance.

That such a statement should be true of so many different races of mankind, cannot be attributed to mere chance. Chance is far too convenient an explanation ; besides, it has the disadvantage of really explaining nothing. Chance is not even an hypothesis ; it is a mere negation. There is no chance in history. Eveiy event, small or great, is but part of a continuous chain. Some of the links may escape our notice, but, nevertheless, the chain exists.

Art, considered from a psychological point of view, is nothing but the spontaneous expression of certain conceptions of things, which follow logically from the combination of the moral and physical influences to which different races are subject, with the original or acquired tendencies and aptitudes of each separate race.

It is an interpretation of the sentiments to which this melange gives birth ; a more or less literal, or more or less ideal interpretation, according as the nations in question give the first place to the material reality of things or to the habits and predilections of the race. But, whatever the result of such mixture may be, it is certain that the two primitive elements, reality and personality, are never wanting— in spite of the contrary theories that would reduce art either to the condition of photographic plagiarism, or to mere conjectural restoration of so-called ideal types.

We need not here insist upon these considerations, because we have sufficiently developed them in the pages that follow. We will content ourselves with saying that every form of xiv

INTRODUCTION.

art has some better raison d'etre than mere accident ; a remark which applies even to periods of decadence.

When does an art cease to be national — that is, common to every individual of a race or country ? When does that universality of taste, which is the dominant characteristic, of the great art epochs, disappear? — a disappearance which is one of the chief marks of decadence.

It disappears, when art ceases to be the sincere and spontaneous expression of the general sentiments; when, instead of directly interpreting the impressions and true emotions of all, or, at least, of the great majority, it attempts to give an analysis of its own methods of work, and makes such mere technical methods the ultimate aim of its labour — losing sight of the vital principle of art, sincerity and spontaneity of emotion.

Such a sign of decadence is fatal, by reason of the law that forbids the superior races of mankind to dwell too long upon any such spectacles. The moment must come when the sentiments or ideas that have inspired a form of civilization and an art, lose their useful effect and their fertile powers ; and when the intellect finds itself condemned for a time to mere imitation and reproduction.

It is no longer the anterior sentiment or idea itself that is imitated and reproduced; it is its expression, the form by which it is interpreted, and which is thenceforth empty and inanimate.

But we soon grow weary of mere imitation, because it affords no food for our intellect. In order to stir up our languishing sensations, expression must be exaggerated as much as possible. Free rein is given to the most aban-

INTRODUCTION.

xv cloned developments of individual caprice. Art becomes an exercise of the same kind and of the same value as the contortions of mountebanks, who care only to astonish the public with the exhibition of the suppleness of their joints.

The public may be divided into two unequal categories : the dilettanti , who pretend to derive some peculiar and subtle pleasure from such gymnastics, because they wish, above all things, to be considered superior to their neighbours ; and those who are not dilettanti — that is to say, ninety-nine out of every hundred of the population — who, caring nothing for such subtleties, leave art to take care of itself, and disregard the efforts it makes to draw their attention by premeditated singularities.

If, under such conditions, we do come across a small number of artists who are skilful enough to find yet a few grains of gold in the exhausted mine ; or who are so far in advance of their time as to have discovered some new source of poetry : these stand a good chance of never being noticed amid the general indifference.

These are but inevitable consequences. We have no right either to complain of, or to be surprised at them.

But the same law that condemns the progressive races of mankind to ever- recurring exhaustion of ideas and sentiments, in order that they may be continually replenished and corrected by others newer and more advanced — must, as the logical result of its application, cause dead forms of civilization to be followed by living ones ; and, for similar reasons, must give birth to new forms of art appropriate to the new forms of civilization.

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This, no doubt, is what would have taken place, were it not that, beside this law of progress, we find another absolutely contrary to it, that, fighting against it, in most cases reduces it to impotence. While part of a community is ever pushing on in its search for the best ; the other part, under the influence of education, self-interest, habit, intellectual inertia and fear of the unknown, repudiates everything that is new.

Now the preponderance must belong, for a time at least, to those who represent the earlier civilization. They receive strength from every social, political or administrative item of organization. Accomplished facts, too — in judicial language, called “ precedents,” — tell in their favour, while their opponents can rest only upon their aspirations, at first vague and incomplete, and always without the sanction that comes from experience. Against the intellectual forms of thought created by the glories of the past, they can only oppose the more or less uncertain glimmers of a problematic future. They are condemned to find themselves confronted with everything in our social systems which is established, fixed, an “ institution.”

In France, and, it must be acknowledged, in every European country, modern education is founded almost entirely upon the imitation of the past ; that is to say, so far as art is concerned. The instinct of progress has always had to fight against the organized forces of society, in the Universities as much as elsewhere. And, if we should feel any astonishment, it should be excited by the fact that this instinct possesses sufficient vitalit}r to save it from complete annihilation by the numerous enemies ranged against it.

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Among such enemies, the most powerful, beyond all contradiction, is the Academie des Beaux- Arts. The talented men who constitute this body, are all the more dangerous to the cause of art in that they so thoroughly believe that they render good service. This sincerity is the root of all their strength. If they openly proclaimed themselves enemies of progress, they would very soon be reduced to impotence. But no — they really do desire above all things the development of art ; and they devote themselves heart and soul to the promotion of this end. But, unfortunately, they believe that such development is only rendered possible by the diligent study of the art of former days ; and the reasoning upon which they found their opinions is of the most specious kind.

Where has Art ever been more brilliant than in the Greece of Pericles, or in Italy during the Renaissance ? Nowhere ; there can be but the one answer. Where, then, can wre find better models than the masterpieces of those two favoured nations ? Why should individual effort be wasted in looking for that which was found long ago ? Study, then, without ceasing, the productions of these admirable geniuses who have never been surpassed ; and, when you have made yourself acquainted with all their secrets, then you may be able to trust to your own powers, and produce masterpieces in your turn — if nature has given you brains enough !

In consequence of simple, easily understood arguments such as these, all the teaching of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts is directed to the continual reiteration of what has been done by the artists of dead forms of

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civilization, until its pupils become almost incapable to produce anything but more or less unsuccessful pas - ticcios.

The same reasoning governs the decisions of the juries at the competitions and the annual exhibitions. Crosses, prizes and medals are given to those artists who have most closely followed the orthodox models.

Again — under the influence of the same arguments, the administration only purchases such works as are got up in accordance with academic formulas, and gives commissions only to those men who are known to keep within the same rules; the rules of high art, of the “grand style,” which alone receive encouragement from any administration which would keep itself respectable.

These facts explain how Ingres has become the official prototype of artistic perfection for the France of the nineteenth century; and how M. Cabanel has become its apostle, and, at the same time, the chief judge of the artists and the born president of all the juries.

We see why young men who enter the school with the strongest instincts of independence and sincerity, rarely leave it otherwise than cabanellisecl — slaves to routine, emasculated, and lost to art. Instead of consulting their own sentiments, obeying their own impressions, following the spontaneous lead of their own tastes, preferences, and aptitudes, by which alone they might come to be artists or poets — they do all they can to stifle the voice of their own nature that they may hear that of their masters. They torture themselves in order to become convinced that progress consists in galvanizing ancient art ; and that the only

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xix possible originality is to be found in pasticcios after the Greeks or Italians.

This is the price they pay for the eulogiums of the juries, the favours of the administration, the commissions for the State, and the admiration of the moutons of Panurge ! And when once they have chosen this path, they are kept tightly to it by a series of moral and pecuniary considerations that never permit them to recover their liberty.

This despotic influence of the State, and of the official world generally, over art, is very much to be deplored. But if sympathetic and earnest judges were to be found among the public, artists might turn to them for support to resist the terrible pressure from above.

But no ; the public of to-da}^ does not trouble itself about such matters ; and why ? Shall it be said it is so because it has become incapable of poetic feeling ? Because art has no longer any place amid the contending interests of the time? Because science has killed admiration, and industry has destroyed imagination and sentiment? Certainly not. The public of the nineteenth century, which chooses to consider itself sceptical and blase, is, like the public of every other time or country, open to every form of poetry, to every kind of sincere and truthful art ; but it finds it impossible to feel any enthusiasm for the composite art which the authorised organs of official taste commend so loudly. It is quite willing to admire the Greeks and the Romans, in their proper time and place; but it does not see any good reason why French art should be entirely sacrificed to these ancients. And, great though its respect for the luminaries of the art Areopagus may be,

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it never carries this so far as to find in the facile adaptations of these gentlemen an equivalent for that art of which it has a dim foresight ; which would satisfy its latent aspirations ; and which would open up springs of emotion, the possession of which it does not now suspect.

Thus it is that the obstinate perseverance of academies and administrations in trying to resuscitate the dead, has had the natural consequence of destroying the living ; and that their efforts to persuade the public that the3^ are the promoters of the only true art, have ended in falsifying the aesthetic sentiments of artists, and in obliterating, for the lime, those of laymen.

Under present conditions these fatal results are inevitable. Societies that elect their own members, and corporate bodies, no matter how great the individual merit of the men who compose them, are inevitably hostile to progress, for the simple reason that every such society forms a collective and eclectic set of doctrines for its own use ; and these in time come to be looked upon as possessed of unchanging truth, exclude every kind of independence and originality, and oppose themselves in turn and with unshaken confidence, to all the revolts and manifestoes of individual genius.

Little improvement is possible so long as there exist bodies allowed to wield any kind of authority over matters of intellect.

No further proofs of this are necessary. Every man gifted with a true perception of artistic requirements, has been instant in protest against the despotism of academic classicism. Gustave Planche and Viollet-le-Duc have shown

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xxi that to its baneful influence are to be attributed the great majority of the evils that beset French art. All artists of unfettered mind have striven energetically against it. I can not do better than refer all who desire to acquire an accurate knowledge, so far as the future is concerned, of this vitally important question, to the works of these two writers, especially to those of the latter. I will here quote a page from Montalembert, which treats of this subject, and which is doubly interesting, both from the vivid indignation that has inspired it, and from the fact that the writer of it was himself an academician.

In an article upon the religious art of France, he places among those who are chiefly responsible for its debasement “ the theorists and practicians of the classic tradition.”

“ Were I obliged,” he says, “ only to take account of the value, influence, and popularity of their works and doctrines, I should in truth, have no need to give more than a bare mention of their names. But, as they occupied nearly all the official posts and monopolised the influence of government ; as they entrenched themselves in a citadel, from which they revenged themselves for the general reprobation poured out upon such of their number as ventured to do active work, by affecting to despise the talents of those who had cast off their yoke, and from which those who produced nothing did their best to prevent others from doing any more than themselves ; and as, above all, they were able to control the state funds devoted to the education of art students : — no hesitation or half-heartedness must be shown in attacking their stronghold, in breaching a supremacy which is an insult to France, until public indignation and contempt shall be

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raised to such a pitch that these relics of a former age he driven from the power they have abused. We have one consolation in the fact that, although they may still do mischief, ruin many hopeful careers, and destroy the seeds of many precious aspirations, their reign is inexorably drawing to a close. They will not be allowed much longer to wither the blossom of the future with their pernicious breath, or to warp the genius of youth worthy of a better fate. Publicity will bring these gambols of expiring classicism to an end ; gambols which would be grotesque, were it not for their lamentable effects. The competitions for the prize of Rome will be their death. We shall not long submit to the tyranny of men who have gravely announced that the subjects for the competition in this year of Grace, 1837, are Apollo guarding the flocks of Admetus and Marius brooding over the ruins of Carthage l ”

We need change nothing in this description except the date.

To sum up : there are hut three ways open to art — the imitation of previous forms of art ; the realistic imitation of actual things; the manifestation of individual impressions.

The first method is the academic method. It has for its more or less latent principle, the negation of progress and even of all intellectual change ; and its practice consists in compelling young men of the nineteenth century to think and feel like those of the time of Pericles or Leo. X. Now, as this is impossible, it follows that the great majority of the artists who are subjected to such a system, find it much simpler to give up any attempt either to think or feel, and

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xxiii to content themselves with the study of processes, the application of formulas, and the elaboration of pasticcios. Emotion, conviction, sincerity, spontaneity — everything in fact that constitutes true art, is eliminated at a blow. The natural and logical effect of university and academy teaching, except where it here and there finds itself confronted with invincible natures, is to form — not artists, but translators.

When hatred of such tyranny leads to the opposite extreme, realism is the result ; but neither is this art, though it leads up to it. The realistic theory, when pushed to an extreme, reduces the artist to the condition of a mere copyist. The perfection at which he aims, is that of complete and absolute illusion. The perfect artist, from this point of view, would be he who sees everything in the same way as the ordinary run of people ; and who shall succeed in depicting objects as faithfully as photography would do if it could reproduce colour as well as form. The final aim of such a theory would be to give man all the precision of machinery, and all its indifference.