GEEMER BAILLIEEE'S LIBRARY
OF

CONTEMPORANEOUS

PHILOSOPHY.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.
BY H. TAINE.

The following Works, translated from the French,
mil be published in this Library:—
PAUL

JANET. — Contemporaneous

Materialism.

Study of the System of Dr. Buckner,

H. TAINE. — English Positivism.

Study on J.

Stuart Mill.

H. TAINE. —English Idealism.

Study on Thomas

Carlyle.

CH. DE BEMUSAT.—Religious Philosophy.
AUG-. LAUGEL.—-The Problems of Nature.

THE

PHILOSOPHY OP ART.
BY

H. TAINE
* « m
PROFESSOR OF AESTHETICS AND OF THE HISTORY OF ART IN THE
ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS, PARIS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, AND
By

THE

REVISED

AUTHOR.

LONDON:
H. BAILLIERE, PUBLISHER, 219 REGENT STREET.
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F. E. BAILLIEEE,

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PARIS:

MADRID:

GEEMEE BAILLIEEE,

BAILLY BAILLIEEE,

RUE

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PLAZA DEL PRINCBPE D'ALFONSO.

The right of translation is reserved.

LONDON
PEINTKD

BY

SPOTTISWOODE

NEW-STKEET SQUARE

AND

CO.

PREFACE.

THE translation herewith presented to the
reader consists of a course of Lectures delivered during the winter of 1864, before
the Students of Art of the Ecole des Beaux
Arts at Paris, by H. Taine, Professeur
d'Esthetique et d'Histoire de i'Art in that institution.
These lectures, as a system of ^Esthetics,
consist of an application of the experimental
method to art, in the same manner as it is
applied to the sciences. Whatever utihty
the system possesses is due to this principle-

VI

PREFACE.

The author undertakes to explain art by
social influences and natural causes; the
experience of humanity, climate, and other
conditions of a similar character furnish the
facts on which the theory rests. The artistic development of any age or people is
made intelligible through a series of demonstrations terminating in a few practical
precise laws, constituting what the title of
the book declares it to be, the philosophy, of
art
Such a system seems to possess many
advantages. Among others it tends to emancipate the student of art, as well as the
amateur, from metaphysical and sentimental
theories growing out of personal sentiment
or traditional fancies; he is not misled by
an exclusive appreciation of particular
schools, masters, and epochs. It also tends
to render criticism less capricious and therefore less injurious; dictating no standard

vii

PREFACE.

of judgment, it promotes a spirit of charity
towards all works. As there is no attempt
to do more than explain art according to
natural laws, the reader must judge whether,
like all systems assuming to bring order out
of confusion, this one fulfils its mission.
Eeaders familiar with M. Taine's able
and original work on English literature
(Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise) will
recognise in the following pages the same
theory applied to art as is therein applied
to literature.
J.D.
LONDON : November 9, 1865.

CONTENTS.

PART I.
NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.
CHAPTER I.
PRINCIPLES AND METHOD—ELEMENTS OF THE WORK
OP ART.

The Aggregate Productions of an Artist—The School to
which he belongs; Shakespeare, Eubens—Contemporary
Society; Greece, Spain, in the Sixteenth Century—Conditions determining appearance and character of Works
of Art; Greek Tragedy, Gothic Architecture, Dutch
Painting, French Tragedy—Comparison of Climate and
Natural Productions with a Moral Temperature, and its
effect—Application of this method to Italian Art—
Objects and method of a System of ^Esthetics—Opposition of the Historic and Dogmatic Methods—Laws—
Sympathy for all Schools — The Analogy between
^Esthetics and Botany, and between the Natural and
the Moral Sciences
Page 1

X

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER II.
THE OBJECT OF ART—IMITATION.

Facts, and not Ideal Conceptions, necessary—Imitation apparently the end of Art—Reasons for this derived from
ordinary experience, and from the lives of great men;
Michael Angelo, Corneille—Reasons derived from the
History of Art and Literature; Pompeii and Ravenna—
Classic Style under Louis XIV., and Academic Style
under Louis XV
Page 22

CHAPTER III.
IMITATION—continued.
Exact Imitation not the end of Art—Illustrations derived
from Casting, Photography, and Stenography — Comparison between Denner and Van Dyck—-Certain Arts
purposely Inexact—Comparison between Antique Statues
and Draped Figures in the Churches of Naples and Spain
— Comparison between Prose and Verse — The Two
Iphigenias of Goethe
.
.
*
.
.
.
35

CHAPTER IV.
IMITATION—continued.
Relationships of Parts the true object of Imitation—Illustrations derived from Drawing and Literature .
. 41

CONTENTS.

xi

CHAPTER V.
ESSENTIAL CHARACTER.

A Work of Art not confined to Imitating Relationships of
Parts—Modification of the Principle in the greatest
Schools; Michael Angelo, Rubens—The Medici Tomb
—The i Kermesse '—Definition of Essential Character ;
Examples of the Lion and the Netherlands—Importance
of Essential Character; Nature imperfectly expressing
it, Art supplies her place—Elanders in the time of
Rubens, and Italy in the time of Raphael—Artistic
Imagination—Spontaneous Impressions, and their power
of Transformation—Retrospect 5 successive steps of the
Method, and Definition of a Work of Art . * Page 45
CHAPTER VI.
MUSIC AND AECHITECTUEE.

These two Arts dependent on Mathematical Relationship
—The Principle of Architecture—The Principle of Music
—The Analogy between a Musical Note and a Cry—All
Arts comprehended in the foregoing definition of Art 65
CHAPTER VII.
THE YALUE OF AET IN HUMAN LIFE.

Analysis of Human Effort—Selfish Acts concerning the
Preservation of the Individual—Social Acts relating to
the Conservation of the Species—Disinterested Actions
devoted to the Contemplation of Creative and Permanent
Causes—Science and Art—The Advantages of Art
71

xii

CONTENTS.

PART II.
PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL LAW FOR THE PRODUCTION OF THE WORK
OF ART.
First Formula—Two sorts of Proof, one of Experience, and
the other of Ratiocination
.
.
.
Page 77

CHAPTER H.
THE < MILIEU.'

The Development of the Plant compared with the Development of Human Activity—Natural Selection .
. 80

CHAPTER III.
THE

c

MILIEU

'—continued.

The Action of a Moral Temperature

.

. 8

CHAPTER IV.
THE

' MILIEU '—continued.

The Influence of Melancholy and Cheerful States of Mind
•—•Intermediate Cases
88

xiii

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER V.
HISTORICAL EPOCHS.

Four Epochs, and four leading Arts

.

.

Page 99

CHAPTER VI.
THE GREEK PERIOD.

Greek Civilisation — The City—The Citizen—Taste for
War—The Athlete—Spartan Education—The Gymnasium in other parts of Greece—Conformity of Customs
with Ideas—Nudity—Olympic Games—The Gods perfect Human Figures—Birth of Sculpture; Statues of
Athletes and of Gods — Why Statuary sufficed for the
Artist's Conceptions—Immense Number of Statues 101
CHAPTER VII.
THE MEDIEVAL EPOCH.

The Civilisation of the Middle Ages, and Gothic Architecture—Decline of Antique Society—Invasions .of Barbarians—Feudal Excesses—Universal Misery—Distaste
for Life—Exalted Sensibility—The Passion of Love—
Power of Religion—Birth of Gothic Architecture—The
Cathedral—Universality of Gothic Architecture . 119
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CLASSIC EPOCH.

French Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century-=-The
Courtier — Ruling Taste—Tragedy — The Aristocratic
Sentiments of Society—Importation of French Tragedy
into other European Countries
. . . .
134

Xiv

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER IX.
THE MODERN EPOCH.

The French Eevolution—Effect of Civil Equality, Machinery, and the Comforts of Existence — Decay of
Traditional Authority—The Eepresentative Man—Development of Music—Its Origin in Germany and Italy j
and its Dependence on Modern Sentiments—Universality
of Music
Page 147

CHAPTEE X.
SUMMARY.

The Law of the Production of Works of Art—The Four
Terms of the Series—Practical Application of the Law
to a Study of all the Arts and of every Literature . 158

CHAPTEE XI.
THE PRESENT.

Application of the Law to the Present—The Milieu renewing itself constantly, Art renews itself—Hopes for the
Future
164

PART I.
ON THE NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART

THE

PHILOSOPHY OF ART.
CHAPTER I.
PRINCIPLES AND METHOD.—ELEMENTS OF THE
WORK OF ART.
The Aggregate Productions of an A r t i s t — T h e School to
which he belongs; Shakespeare, Rubens—Contemporary
Society; Greece, Spain, in the Sixteenth Century—Conditions determining the appearance and character of Works
of Art j Greek Tragedy, Gothic Architecture, Dutch
Painting, French Tragedy—Comparison of Climate and
Natural Productions with a Moral Temperature, and its
effect—Application of this Method to Italian Art—
Objects and Method of a system of ^Esthetics—Opposition of the Historic and Dogmatic Methods—Laws—
Sympathy for all Schools—The Analogy between
^Esthetics and Botany, and between the Natural and the
Moral Sciences.

GENTLEMEN,—The subject on which I propose to engage your attention this year, is
the history of art, and principally the history of painting in Italy.
B2

4

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

Before entering on this division of the
subject, I desire to indicate to you the spirit
and method of the course.

The basis of the method herein set forth,
consists in recognising that a work of art is
not an isolated production, and that it is necessary to study the conditions out of which
it proceeds, and by which it is explained.
The first step is not a difficult one. A
work of art—a picture, a tragedy, or a
statue—evidently belongs to a group (ensemble) composed of all the works of the
artist producing it. This is an elementary
step. It is well known that the different
works of an artist bear a family likeness,
like the children of one parent; that is to
say, all possess marked resemblances. We
know that every artist has his own style, a
style recognisable throughout his productions. If he is a painter, he has his own
colouring, rich or impoverished; his fa-

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

5

vourite conceptions, vulgar or refined ; his
attitudes and rules of composition, even processes of execution; his favourite pigments,
tints, models, and manner of working. If
he is a writer, he has his own characters,
calm or passionate; his own plots, simple or
complex; his own denouements, comic or
tragic, and even a special vocabulary This
is so true, that a connoisseur placed before
an original work not signed by any prominent master, will be able to inform you with
nearly absolute certainty by whom the work
is executed, and, if sufficiently experienced
and delicate in his perceptions, the period of
the artist's life, and the particular stage of
his development to which the work belongs.
Such is the first consideration necessary
to bestow upon a work of art. And here is
the second. The artist himself, considered
in connection with his productions, is not
isolated; he also belongs to a group (ensemble), one greater than himself, comprising
the school or family of artists of the time

6

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AKT.

and country to which he belongs. For example, around Shakespeare, who, at the first
glance, seems to be a marvellous celestial
gift coming like an aerolite from heaven,
we find several dramatists of a high order
-—Webster, Ford, Massinger, Marlowe, Ben
Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, all of
whom wrote in the same style and in the
same spirit. There are the same characters
in their dramas as in Shakespeare's, the same
terrible types of passion, the same bloody
unforeseen catastrophes, the same sudden and
violent outbursts, the same irregular, capricious, overflowing, magnificent style, the
same exquisite poetic feeling for rural life
and landscape, and the same delicate, tender,
affectionate ideals of woman.
In a similar way Eubens is to be judged.
Eubens apparently stands alone, without
either predecessor or successor. On going
to Belgium, however, and visiting the
churches of Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, or
Antwerp, you find a group of painters with

ISTATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

7

genius resembling his. First, there is Grayer,
in his clay considered a rival; Seghers, Van
Cost, Everdingen, Van Thulden, Quellin,
Hondthorst, and others, with whom you are
familiar, Jordaens, Van Dyck—all conceiving painting in the same spirit, and, with
many distinctive features, all preserving a
family likeness. Like Eubens, these artists
delighted in painting ruddy and healthy
flesh, the glow and palpitation of life, pulpy,
rich, redundant forms, living types, and often
brutal ones, the spirit and ease of unfettered
action, splendid and lustrous embroidered
stuffs, the changing tints of silks and satins,
and the confused masses and careless folds
of drapery. At the present day they seem
to be obscured by the glory of their great
contemporary; but it is not the less true
that to comprehend him it is necessary to
study him amidst this cluster of brilliants,
of which he is the brightest gem—this family
of artists, of which he is the most illustrious
representative.

8

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

This being the second step, there now
remains the third. This family of artists
is itself comprehended in another group
[ensemble) yet more vast, which consists of
the society around it, a society possessing
tastes and sympathies confoffnable with its
own. The social and intellectual condition
of a community is the standard of that of
artists ; they do not live in it isolated men ;
we listen only to their voices beyond the
gulf of ages, but, along with their sonorous
tones vibrating in our ears, comes a low,
deep reverberation, which is the grand, infinite, and united voice of the people singing
in harmony with them. Artists have become great, solely through this accord. And
it is well that it should be so. Phidias and
Ictinus, the constructors of the Parthenon
and of the Olympian Jupiter, were, like
other Athenians, pagans and free citizens,
brought up in the palcestra, exercising and
wrestling naked, and accustomed to deliberate and vote in the public assemblies ; pos-

NATURE OF THE WOEK OF ART.

9

sessing the same habits, the same interests,
the same ideas, the same faith; men of the
same race, the same education, the same
language; so that in all the important acts of
their life they recognised themselves as part
of the multitude of which their audience was
composed.
This concordance becomes still more apparent in considering an epoch not so remote
from our own. For example, take the great
Spanish epoch of the sixteenth and a part of
the seventeenth centuries, in which lived the
great painters, Velasquez, Murillo, Zurbaran,
Francisco de Herrera, Alonzo Cano, and
Morales; and the great poets, Lope de Vega,
Calderon, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Don
Luis de Leon, Guilhem de Castro, and so
many others. You know that at this time
Spain was entirely monarchical and Catholic;
that she had overcome the Turks at Lepanto ;
that she planted her foot in Africa and
maintained herself there; that she combated
the Protestants in Germany, pursued them
B 3

10

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

in France and attacked them in England;
that she subdued and converted the idolaters
of the new world, and chased away Jews
and Moors from her own soil; that she
purged her faith with auto-da-fes and persecutions ; that she lavished fleets and armies,
and the gold and silver of her .American
possessions, along with her most precious
children, the vital blood of her heart, upon
multiplied and boundless crusades, so obstinately and so fanatically, that at the end
of a century and a half she fell prostrate at
the feet of Europe, but with so much enthusiasm, such glory, such national fervour, that
her subjects, enamoured of the monarchy in
which their power was concentrated, and
with the cause to which they devoted their
lives, cherished no desire but that of being
obedient to religion and royalty, and of forming around the Church and the Throne a choir
of faithful, militant, and adoring supporters.
In this monarchy of crusaders and inquisitors, preserving the chivalric sentiments and

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

11

sombre passions, the ferocity, intolerance,
and mysticism of the middle ages, the greatest artists are the very men who possessed
in the highest degree the faculties, sentiments, and passions of the public that surrounded them. The most celebrated poets,
Lope de Vega and Calderon, were military
adventurers, volunteers in the Armada, duellists and lovers, as exalted and as mystic in
love as the poets and Don Quixotes of
feudal times; they were passionate Catholics,
and so ardent that, at the end of their lives,
one became a familiar of the Inquisition,
others became priests, and the most illustrious, the great Lope de Vega, fainted on
saying mass, at the thought of the sacrifice
and martyrdom of Jesus. Everywhere may
be found similar examples of the alliance,
the intimate harmony existing between an
artist and his contemporaries ; and we may
rest assured, that if we desire to comprehend
the taste or the genius of an artist, the reasons leading him to choose a particular style

12

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

of painting or drama, to prefer this or that
character or colouring, and to represent
particular sentiments, we must seek for them
in the social and intellectual conditions of
the community in the midst of which he
lived.
We have accordingly to state this law :
that, in order to comprehend a work of art,
an artist or a group of artists, we must
clearly comprehend the general social and
intellectual condition of the times to which
they belong. Herein is to be found the
final explanation ; herein resides the primitive cause determining all that follows
it. This truth, gentlemen, is confirmed by
experience. If we pass in review the principal epochs of the history of art, we find
the arts appearing and disappearing along
with certain accompanying social and intellectual conditions. For example, Greek
tragedy, that of iEschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides, appears at the time when the
Greeks were victorious over the Persians ;

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

13

in the heroic era of small republican cities,
when they conquered their independence
and established their ascendency in the
civilised world ; and we see it disappearing
along with this independence and this vigour,
when a degeneracy of character and the
Macedonian conquest delivered the Greeks
over to strangers. It is the same with
Gothic architecture, developing along with
the definitive establishment of feudalism in
the semi-renaissance of the eleventh century,
at the period when society, delivered from
brigands and Normans, began to consolidate,
and disappearing at the period when the
military system of petty independent barons,
with the social and intellectual traits accompanying it, vanished near the end of the
fifteenth century, on the advent of modern
monarchies. It is the same with Dutch
painting, which flourished at «the glorious
period when, through firmness and courage,
Holland succeeded in freeing herself from
Spanish rule, combated England with equal

14

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

power, and became the richest, freest, and
most prosperous state in Europe ; and we
see it declining at the commencement of the
eighteenth century, when Holland, fallen
into a secondary rank, leaves the first to
England, reducing itself to a well-ordered,
safely-administered, quiet, commercial banking-house, in which man, an honest bourgeois^ could live at ease, exempt from every
great ambition and every grand emotion.
It is the same, finally, with French tragedy,
appearing at the period when a noble and
well-regulated monarchy, under Louis XIV.,
established the empire of decorum, the life
of the court, ' the pomp and circumstance' of
society, and the elegant domestic phases of
aristocracy ; disappearing when the social
rule of nobles and the manners of the antechamber were abolished by the Eevolution.
Allow me to use a comparison, in order to
impress more strongly on your minds the
effect of an intellectual and social milieu on
the Fine Arts. Suppose you are leaving the

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

15

land of the south for that of the north;
you perceive on entering a certain zone a
particular mode of cultivation and a particular species of plant: first come the aloe
and the orange; a little later, the vine
and the olive; after these, the oak and
the chestnut; a little further on, oats and
the pine, and finally, mosses and lichens.
Each zone has its own mode of cultivation
and peculiar vegetation; both begin at the
commencement, and both finish at the end of
the zone ; both are attached to it. The zone
is the condition of their existence; by its
presence or its absence is determined what
shall appear and what shall disappear. Now,
what is this zone but a certain temperature;
in other words, a certain degree of heat and
moisture; in short, a certain number of
governing circumstances analogous to what
we have just entitled the general social,
and intellectual state of a community ? Just
as there is a physical temperature, which by
its variations determines the appearance of

16

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

this or that species of plant, so is there
a moral temperature, which by its variations determines the appearance of this
or that species of art. And as we study
the physical temperature in order to comprehend various species of plants, whether
maize or oats, the orange or the pine, so
is it necessary to study the moral temperature in order to comprehend the appearance of various phases of art, whether
pagan sculpture or realistic painting, mystic
architecture or classic literature, voluptuous
music or ideal poetry. The productions
of the human mind, like those of animated
nature, can only be explained by their
milieu.
Hence the study I propose for you this
season, of the history of painting in Italy.
I shall attempt to revive for your contemplation the mystic milieu, in which appeared
Giotto and Beato Angelico, and to this end
I shall read passages from the poets and
legendary writers, containing the ideas en-

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

17

tertained by the men of those days concerning happiness, misery, love, faith, paradise,
hell, and all the great interests of humanity.
We shall find documentary evidence in the
poetry of Dante, of Guido Cavalcanti, of
the Franciscans, in the Golden Legend, in
the Imitation of Jesus Christ, in the Fioretti
of St. Francis, in the works of historians
like Dino Campagni, and in that vast collection of chroniclers by Muratori, which so
naively portray the jealousies and disturbances of the small Italian republics. After
this I shall attempt to place before you
in the same manner the pagan milieu,
which a century and a half later produced
Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Eaphael,
and Titian, and to this end I shall read,
either from the memoirs of contemporaries
—Benvenuto Cellini for instance—or from
the diverse chronicles kept daily in Home and
in the principal Italian cities, or from the
despatches of ambassadors, or, finally, from
the descriptions of fetes, masquerades, and

18

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

civic receptions, which are remarkable
fragments, displaying the brutality, sensuality, and vigour of society, as well as
the lively poetic sentiment, the love of the
picturesque, the great literary sentiment, the
decorative instincts, and the passion for external splendour which characterised the
people of that epoch.—the ignorant multitude, as well as the great and the cultivated.
Suppose now, gentlemen, that we succeed
in this investigation, and happen to define
clearly and precisely the various intellectual
causes and conditions favouring the birth of
Italian painting—its development, culmination, different manifestations and decay.
Suppose the same research successful with
other countries, and with other ages, and
with the different branches of art, architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and
music. Suppose, through all these discoveries, we succeed in defining nature, and in
marking the conditions of existence of each

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

19

art, we then possess a complete explanation of the Fine Arts, and of art in
general; that is to say, a philosophy of the
Fine Arts—what is called an aesthetic system.
This very system is our aim, gentlemen.
It is modern, and differs from the ancient,
inasmuch as it is historic, and not dogmatic ; that is to say, it imposes no precepts, but ascertains and verifies laws.
Ancient aesthetic systems put forth definitions of beauty, declaring, for instance, that
the beautiful is the expression of the moral
ideal, or the expression of the invisible, or,
again, the expression of human passions ;
then starting from these, as if from the
articles of a code, they absolved, condemned,
admonished, and directed. It is my good
fortune not to have such a task before me.
It is not my province to direct you—it
would be a serious embarrassment. Besides,
I say to myself, there are only two precepts yet discovered of real value ; the first
enjoining you to be born with genius,

20

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART,

which is an affair of your parents, and not
mine; and the second enjoining devoted
labour in order to master your art, which
likewise does not depend on me, but on
yourselves. My duty is simply to expose
facts to you, and show you how these facts
are produced. The modern method, which
I strive to pursue, and which is beginning
to be introduced in all moral sciences,
consists in considering human productions,
and particularly works of art, as facts and
productions of which it is essential to mark
the characteristics and seek the causes;
and nothing beyond this. Thus understood,
science neither pardons nor proscribes; she
states facts and explains them. She does
not say to you, despise Dutch art because
it is vulgar, and confine yourself to Italian
art; nor despise Gothic art because it is
morbid, and confine yourself to Greek art.
She leaves every one free to follow their
own predilections, to prefer what is conformable to personal temperament, and to

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

21

study attentively that which best corresponds to the development of one's own intellect.
As to aesthetic science, she has
sympathies for every form of art, and for
every school—even for those the most opposed to each other. She accepts them as so
many manifestations of human intelligence,
judging that the more numerous they are,
and the more contradictory, the more they
display the new and numerous phases of
man's genius. ^Esthetic science is like
botany, in which the orange, the laurel,
the pine, and the birch, are of equal interest ; it is a kind of botanical method, applied not to plants, but to the works of man,
Under this heading it follows the general
movement of the day, which is gradually
approximating the moral sciences and the
natural sciences, and which, giving to the
first the principles, precautions, and tendencies of the latter, communicates to them the
same stability, and assures them the same
progress.

22

THE PHILOSOPHY OP ART.

CHAPTER II.
THE OBJECT OP AET.—IMITATION.
Facts, and not Ideal Conception) necessary—Imitation apparently the End of Art—"Reasons for this derived from
ordinary experience, and from the lives of great men;
Michael Angelo, Corneille—Reasons derived from the
History of Art and Literature; Pompeii and Ravenna—
Classic Style under Louis XIV, and Academic Style
under Louis XV.

I WISH to apply this method at once to the
first and the principal question, meeting one
at the threshold of a course on aesthetics,
namely, a definition of art. What is art, and
in what does its nature consist ? Instead of
dictating a formula, I shall appeal to you with
facts, for facts exist here as elsewhere—positive facts open to observation; I mean works
of art arranged by families in galleries and

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

23

libraries, like plants in an herbarium, and animals in a museum. Analysis may be applied
to one as well as to the other. It is as allowable
to investigate a work of art as it is to investigate a plant or an animal. There is no more
need of discarding experience in the first
case than in the second; the entire process
consists in discovering, by numerous comparisons and progressive eliminations, traits
common to all works of art, and, at the
same time, distinctive traits, by which works
of art are separated from other productions
of the human intellect.
For this purpose we will, among the five
great arts of poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music, set aside the last two,
of which the explanation is more difficult,
and to which we will return afterwards ; we
will at present limit our attention to the
others. All, as you are aware, possess a
common character; they are more or less
arts of imitation.
At first glance, it seems as if this was

24

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

essentially their character, as if it was their
object to render the most exact imitation
possible. It is plain that a statue is meant
to imitate accurately an animated human
form, that a picture is intended to portray
real persons in real attitudes, house interiors
and landscape, such as nature provides. It
is no less evident that a drama or romance
attempts to represent faithfully characters,
actions, and conversations, and to furnish as
vivid and as accurate impressions of them as
is possible. When, accordingly, the image
is inadequate or inexact, we say to the
sculptor, 'This breast or this limb is not
well executed;' and to the painter, ' The
figures of your background are too large—
the colouring of your trees is not true;' and
we say to the author, ' Never did man feel
or think as you have just described him.'
There are proofs, however, still stronger ;
and first, every-day experience. On examining attentively an artist's career, we perceive,
generally, two distinct epochs in it. During

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

25

the first, in youth and in the maturity of his
talent, he studies things in themselves, and
studies them minutely and anxiously; he
keeps his eyes always fixed on them, labouring
over them, and tormenting himself to express
them, which he does with scrupulous and even
exaggerated fidelity. After passing a certain
point in his life, he thinks he is sufficiently
familiar with these objects, and is unable to
detect anything new in them; he sets aside
the living model, and, with certain conventional rules derived from experience, he produces drama, romance, picture, or statue,
as the case may be. The first epoch is
that of true sentiment; the second, that of
mannerism and decline. On studying the
lives of the greatest men we rarely fail
to discover both. In the life of Michael
Angelo, the first period lasted a long time,
but little less than sixty years; all the
works belonging to it display a sentiment
of power and heroic grandeur. The artist
is possessed with this sentiment; his rec

26

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

veries never extend beyond it. His numerous dissections, his countless drawings, his
constant introspection, his study of the tragic
passions and their physical expression, are for
him simply the means of manifesting externally the militant energy with which he is enamoured. This idea descends upon you from
every corner of the great vault of the Sistine
chapel. Enter the Pauline chapel alongside
of it, and contemplate the works of his old
age—the Conversion of St. Paul, the Crucifixion of St. Peter, and even the Last Judgment, which he painted in his seventy-seventh
year. Connoisseurs, and those who are not,
recognise at once that the two frescoes are
executed according to prescription; that the
artist possessed a certain number of forms,
which he used conventionally ; that he multiplied extraordinary attitudes, and ingeniously
contrived foreshortenings ; that the lively invention, the natural flow, the grand impulses
of the heart, the perfect truth of his first
work, have disappeared, at least in part, under

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

27

the abuse of process and the rule of craft;
and that if he is still superior to others, he is
greatly inferior to himself.
The same comment may be made on another life, that of our French Michael Angelo,
Corneille. In the first years of his career
Corneille was likewise absorbed by the sentiment of power, and of moral heroism. He
found it around him in the vigorous passions
bequeathed by the religious wars to the new
monarchy, in the audacious acts of duellists,
in the proud sentiment of honour animating
still feudal breasts, in the bloody tragedies
which the plots of princes and the executions
of Eichelieu furnished as spectacles for the
court, and he created personages like Chimene
and the Cid> like Polyeucte and Pauline, like
Cornelie, Sertorius, Emilie, and les Horaces,
Afterwards he produced Pertharite, Attila>
and other feeble works, in which the situations merge into the horrible, and generous
emotions lose themselves in extravagance.
In this period the living models he once conc 2

28

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

templated, no longer appeared on the social
stage; at least he no longer sought for them
there, in order to renew his inspiration. He
worked according to a system due to resources struck out in the heat of enthusiasm, according to literary theories, dissertations, and the subtleties of stage effect and
dramatic license. He both copied and exaggerated himself; science, calculation and
routine supplanted close personal study of
intense emotion and of valiant action; he
no longer created, but manufactured.
It is not merely the history of this or that
great man which demonstrates the necessity
of imitating the living model, and of keeping the eye fixed on nature, but the history
of every great school of art. Every school
(I believe without exception) degenerates
and falls, simply through its neglect of exact
imitation, and its abandonment of the living
model. You see it in painting, in the fabrication of enormous muscles and exaggerated attitudes by artists succeeding Michael Angelo,

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

29

in the craving for theatrical display and redundant forms by those that copied the
great Venetians, and in the works of the
boudoir and alcove painters of the close of
the French school of the eighteenth century.
The same thing is apparent in literature, with
the versifiers and rhetoricians of the Latin
decadence, with the sensual and declamatory playwrights closing the bright period of
the English drama, and with the composers
of sonnets and concetti, and in the affectations of the Italian decline. Among these I
will cite two striking examples. The first
is the decline of sculpture and painting in
antiquity, of which you obtain a vivid impression by visiting Pompeii, and afterwards
Eavenna. At Pompeii the painting and
sculpture belong to the first century of the
present era; at Eavenna the mosaics are of
the sixth century, about the times of the
Emperor Justinian. In this interval of five
centuries art becomes irremediably corrupt,
and its degeneracy is wholly due to the

30

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

neglect of the living model. In the first
century the pagan manners and tastes of the
palestra still existed. Men wore their vestments loose and cast them off easily, frequented the baths, exercised in a state of
nudity, attended the circus, ever enjoying
sympathetically and intelligently the active
movements of the living body. Their sculptors and painters, surrounded by nude and
half-nude forms, were capable of reproducing them. Accordingly, you will see on
the walls of Pompeii, in the little oratories
and in the inner courts, beautiful dancing
females, manly, supple young heroes, vigorous breasts, agile feet, every posture and
form of the body rendered with an ease and
accuracy to which the most elaborate study
of the present day cannot attain. During
the following five hundred years, everything
gradually changes. Pagan life, with the
habits of the palestra, and the appreciation
of the nude, disappears. The body is no
longer exposed, but concealed under com-

2STATUKE OF THE WOKK OF AKT.

31

plicated drapery, and a display of lace,
purple, and oriental magnificence. People
no longer esteem the wrestler and the youthful gymnast,* but the eunuch, the scribe,
the monk, and woman. Asceticism gains
ground, and with it a love for listless reverie,
hollow disputation, and endless scribbling.
The tedious babblers of the Lower Empire
replace the valiant Greek athletes and the
hardy combatants of Eome. By degrees
the knowledge and study of the living
model are interdicted. People lose sight of
it. Their eyes rest only on the works of
ancient masters, and they copy these. Soon
copies are only made of copies, and again
copies of these, so that each generation
recedes a step from the original type. The
artist ceases to have his own ideas and personal sentiment, and becomes a copying
machine. The Fathers proclaim that he
must invent nothing, but must adhere to
lineaments prescribed by tradition and sanc-

32

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

tioned by authority, This separation of the
artist from the living model brings art to the
condition in which you see it at Eavenna.
At the end of five centuries, artists can only
represent man in two ways—seated and
standing; other attitudes are too difficult,
and are beyond their capacity. Hands and
feet appear rigid as if fractured, the folds of
drapery are wooden, figures seem to be
mannikins, and heads are invaded by the
eyes. Art is like an invalid sinking under
a mortal consumption ; it is languishing and
about to expire.
In a different branch of art amongst ourselves, and in a neighbouring century, we
find again a similar decline, and brought
about by similar causes. In the age of Louis
XIV., literature attained to a perfect style,
a style beyond example, pure, chaste, and
judicious ; dramatic art, especially, created a
language and a style of versification deemed
by all Europe a masterpiece of the human
intellect. This is due to the fact of writers

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

33

finding their models around them and constantly observing them. The language of
Louis XIV. was perfect, displaying a dignity,
eloquence, and gravity truly royal. We
know by the letters, despatches, and memoirs of the court personages of that time,
that an aristocratic tone, sustained elegance,
proper expression, dignified manners, and a
ready command of the choicest terms, were
as common to courtiers as to monarch; so
that the writer frequenting their society, had
but to draw on his memory and experience
in order to obtain the very best materials of
his art.
At the end of a century, between Eacine
and Delille, a great change takes place.
These discourses and these verses excite so
much admiration, that, instead of maintaining observation of living examples, authors
confine themselves to a study of the tragedies that pictured them. They did not
select men as their models, but writers.
They adopted a conventional language, an
c 3

34

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

academic style, a mythological parade, an
artificial system of versification, and a standard approved vocabulary extracted from
good authors. It is at this epoch that the
intolerable style, infecting the end of the
last century, and the beginning of this, appears ; a kind of jargon, where rhyme anticipates rhyme, where they dare not mention
things by their proper names, where a
cannon is designated by a periphrasis, and
the sea is called Amphitrite; where the imprisoned thought shows no accent, no truth,
no life, seeming to emanate from the lips
of pedagogues capable of nothing but presiding over a factory of Latin metres.
The conclusion seems to be, then, the
necessity of keeping the eyes fixed on Nature in order to imitate her as closely as
possible, and that the object of art is complete, exact imitation.

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

35

CHAPTEE III.
IMITATION—continued.
Exact Imitation not the end of Art—Illustrations derived
from Casting, Photography, and Stenography •— Comparison "between Denner and Van Dyck—Certain Arts
purposely inexact—Comparison between Antique Statues
and Draped Figures in the Churches of Naples and Spain
—Comparison "between Prose and Verse — The Two
Iphigenias of Goethe.

Is this true in every particular, and must we
conclude that absolutely exact imitation is
the end of art ?
If this were so, gentlemen, absolutely exact
imitation would produce the finest works.
But, in fact, it is not so. In sculpture, for
instance, casting is the process by which a
faithful and minute impression of a model is
obtained, and certainly a good cast is not

36

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART,

equal to a good statue. Again, and in another domain, photography is the art which
completely reproduces with lines and tints on
a flat surface, without possible mistake, the
forms and modelling of the object imitated.
Photography is undoubtedly a useful auxiliary
to painting, and is sometimes tastefully employed by cultivated and intelligent men;
but after all no one thinks of comparing it
with painting. And finally, as a last illustration, if it were true that exact imitation is
the supreme aim of art, let me ask what
would be the best tragedy? the best comedy?
the best drama? A stenographic report of
a criminal trial, every word of which is faithfully recorded. It is clear, however, that if
we sometimes encounter in it flashes of nature
and occasional outbursts of sentiment, these
are but veins of pure metal in a mass of
worthless dross; it may furnish a writer with
materials for his art, but it does not constitute
a work of art.
Some may possibly say, that photography,

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

37

casting, and stenography are mechanical processes, and that we ought to leave mechanism
out of the question, and accordingly limit our
comparisons to man's work. Let us, therefore, select works by artists conspicuous for
minute fidelity. There is a canvas in the
Louvre by Denner. This artist worked microscopically, taking four years to finish a
portrait. Nothing in his heads is overlooked
—the finest lines and wrinkles, the faintlymottled surface of the cheeks, the black specks
scattered over the nose, the bluish flush of
imperceptible veins meandering under the
skin, nor the reflection of objects in the vicinity on the eye. Such a work strikes us
with astonishment. This head is a perfect
illusion; it seems to project out of the frame.
Such success and such patience are unparallelled. Substantially, however, a broad sketch
by Van Dyck is a hundredfold more powerful. Beside, neither in painting nor in any
other art are prizes awarded to deceptions.
Further and stronger proof of exact imita-

38

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

tion not being the end of art is to be found
in this fact, that certain arts are purposely
inexact. There is sculpture, for instance.
A statue is generally of one colour, either of
bronze or of marble; and again, the eyes are
without eyeballs. It is just this uniformity of
tint, and this modification of expression, which
secures its beauty. Examine corresponding
works, in which imitation is pushed to extremity. The churches of Naples and Spain
contain draped statues, coloured; saints in
actual monastic garb, with yellow earthy
skins, suitable to ascetics, and bleeding hands
and wounded sides characteristic of the crucified. Alongside of these appear madonnas,
in royal robes, in f&te dresses, and in bright
silks, crowned with diadems, wearing precious
necklaces, brilliant ribbons, and magnificent
laces, and with rosy complexions, glittering
eyes, and eyeballs formed of carbuncles. With
this excess of literal imitation, the artist excites no pleasure, but, on the contrary, repugnance, and frequently horror.

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

39

It is the same in literature. In the best
class of dramatic poetry, in the classic Greek
and French theatre, and in the greater number of Spanish and English dramas, far from
literally copying ordinary conversation, their
authors purposely and deliberately modify it.
These dramatic poets make their characters
speak in verse, casting their dialogue inrhythm,
and often in rhyme. Is this falsification prejudicial to the work ? Far from it. One of
the great works of the age, the ' Iphigenia '
of Goethe, which was at first written in prose
and afterwards re-written in verse, affords
abundant evidence of this. It is beautiful in
prose, but in verse how different! The modification of ordinary language, in the introduction of rhythm and metre, evidently gives to
this work its incomparable accent, that severe
sublimity, and lofty, sustained tragic tone,
which elevates the spirit above the low level
of common life, and brings before the eye
visions of the heroes of ancient days—that
lost race of primitive souls—and, among

40

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

them, the august virgin, interpreter of the
gods, custodian of the laws, and the benefactress of mankind, in whom is concentrated
whatever is noble and good in human nature,
in order to glorify our species and renew
the inspiration of our hearts.

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

41

CHAPTER IV.
IMITATION—continued.
Belationships of Parts the true object of Imitation—Illustrations derived from Drawing and Literature.

IT is essential, then, to closely imitate something in an object; but not everything. We
have now to discover what imitation should
be applied to. Anticipating an answer to
this, I reply, ' To the relationships and mutual
dependence of parts.' Excuse this abstract
definition : I will make my meaning clearer
to you.
Imagine yourselves before a living model,
man or woman, with a pencil, and a piece of
paper twice the dimensions of your hand, on
which to copy it. Certainly, you cannot be
expected to reproduce the size of the original,

42

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

for your paper is too small ; nor can you be
expected to reproduce the colour, for you
have only black and white to work with.
What you have to do is to reproduce its
relationships, and first, proportions, that is to
say, the relationships of size. If the head is
of a certain length, the body must be so many
times longer than the head, the arm of a
length equally dependent, and the leg the
same; and so on with the other members.
Again, you are required to reproduce forms,
or the relationships of position : this or that
curve, oval, angle, or sinuosity in the model
must be represented in the copy by lines of
like significance. . In short, your object is to
reproduce a totality of relationships, a union
of parts, not a simple corporeal appearance,
but the logic of the body.
Suppose, in like manner, you are contemplating some actual character, some scene in
real life, high or low, and you are asked to
furnish a description of it. To do this you
have your eyes, your ears, and your memory,

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

43

and, perhaps, a pencil, to dot down five or
six notes-—no great means, but ample for
your purpose. What is expected of you is,
not to record every word and motion, all the
actions of the personage, or of the fifteen or
twenty persons that have figured before you,
but, as before, to note proportions, connections, and relationships ; you are expected, in
the first place, to maintain exact proportion
in the actions of the personage, in other
words, to give prominence to ambitious acts,
if he is ambitious, to avaricious acts, if he
is avaricious, and to violent acts, if he is
violent ; after this, to observe the reciprocal effect of these acts; that is to say, to
provoke one reply with another, to make
resolutions, sentiments, and ideas emanate
from resolutions, sentiments, and ideas, and
especially from the situation in which the
personage is placed, and again, from the
general character bestowed on him. In short,
in the literary effort, as in the pictorial effort,
it is important to transcribe, not the obvious

44

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

details of events and characters, but the
ensemble of their relationships and dependencies ; that is to say, their logical arrangement.
As a general rule, therefore, whatever interests us in a real personage, and which we
entreat the artist to extract and render, is
his outward or inward logic; in other terms,
his structure, composition, and order of parts
and action.
We have here, as you perceive, corrected
the first definition given; it is not cancelled,
but purified. We have discovered a loftier
aim for art, which thus becomes the work of
intelligence, and no longer merely that of the
hand.

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

45

CHAPTER V.
ESSENTIAL CHARACTER.
A Work of Art not confined to imitating Relationships of
Parts—Modifications of the principle in the greatest
schools; Michael Angelo, Rubens—The Medici Tomb—
—The ' Kermesse'—Definition of Essential Character;
Examples of the Lion and the Netherlands—Importance
of Essential Character; Nature imperfectly expressing it,
Art supplies her place—Flanders in the time of Rubens,
and Italy in the time of Raphael—Artistic Imagination—
Spontaneous Impressions and their power of Transformation—Retrospect; successive steps of the Method, and
Definition of a "Work of Art.

this suffice us ?, Do we find works of
art limited to a reproduction of the relationships of parts ? By no means, for the greatest
works of art are just those in which these
relationships are most modified. Consider,
for example, the Itahan school in the person
of its greatest artist, Michael Angelo. Fix
DOES

46

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

your attention on his masterpiece, the four
marble statues surmounting the tomb of the
Medicis at Florence. Those of you who
have not seen the originals, are at least familiar with copies of them. In the figures
of these men, and especially in the reclining
figures of the females, sleeping or waking,
the proportions of the parts are certainly
not the same as in real personages. Similar
figures exist nowhere, even in Italy. Tou
see in Italy young, handsome, well-dressed
men, peasants with bright eyes and a fierce
expression, academy models with firm muscles and a proud bearing ; but neither in the
villages nor at the f6tes, nor in the studios of
Italy, or of any other land, at the present time
or in the sixteenth century, can mail or
woman be found resembling the indignant
heroes and the colossal despairing virgins
which this great artist has placed before us
in this funereal chapel. Michael Angelo
found these types in his own breast; they
are conceptions of his own genius. Such

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

47

creations are due to the solitary meditations
of a recluse, of a lover of justice, to a passionate generous nature lost amidst corruption and degradation, encountering on
all sides treachery, oppression, triumphant
tyranny, and irremediable injustice ; one
astray amid the ruins of liberty and of
country, himself threatened with death, and
feeling that if he lived it was only by favour,
and perhaps only for a short respite ; alike
incapable of sycophancy and of submission;
his only refuge being the art by which, in
the silence of servitude, his great desponding
soul could still express itself. He wrote on
the pedestal of his sleeping statue—' Sleep
is sweet, and yet more sweet is it to be of
stone, while shame and misery last. Fortunate am I not to see—not to feel. Forbear
to arouse me! A h ! speak in whispers !' ,
This is the sentiment out of which such
forms were evolved. In order to express it
he has changed ordinary proportions; he
has lengthened the trunk and the limbs,

48

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

twisted the torso upon the hips, hollowed
out the sockets of the eyes, farrowed the
forehead with wrinkles similar to the lion's
frowning brow, raised mountains of muscles
on the shoulder, ridged the spine with tendons, and so fastened the vertebras that it
resembles the links of an iron chain strained
to their utmost tension and about to break.
Let us consider the Flemish school from a
similar point of view; and in this school the
great Fleming, Eubens, and one of the most
striking of his works, the ' Kermesse.' In this
work, no more than in those of Michael
Angelo, will you find an imitation of ordinary proportions. Visit Flanders, and observe
the types of mankind about you, even at
feastings and revellings, such as the fetes of
Gayant, Antwerp, and other places. You
will see comfortable-looking people eating
much and drinking more; serenely smoking,
cool, phlegmatic bodies ; grave-looking, and
with massive, irregular features, strongly resembling the figures of Teniers. As to the

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

49

splendid brutes of the ' Kermesse,' you meet
with them nowdiere! Eubens certainly derived these from other sources. After the
horrible religious wars of Flanders, this rich
country, so long devastated, finally attained
peace and civil security. The soil is so good,
and the people so prudent, comfort and
prosperity returned almost at once. Everybody luxuriated in this new-found abundance ; the contrast between the past and the
present incited the fullest indulgence of rude,
corporeal instincts, just as horses and cattle
after long fasting revel in fresh, green fields,
abounding in the richest pasture. Eubens
himself was stirred by all this; and the
poetry of this gross, sumptuous living, of this
satiated sensuality, of this brutal, gigantic
merry-making, found a ready outlet in the
shameless, voluptuous, ruddy nudities that
sprung into being beneath his prolific brush.
In order to express in the ' Kermesse ' the
sentiment of this life, he has expanded the
trunk, enlarged the thighs, twisted the loins,
D

50

THE PHILOSOPHY OP ART.

deepened the redness of the cheeks, disheveled the hair, kindled in the eyes a flame
of savage, unbridled desire, unloosed the
demons of disorder in the shape of shattered
glasses, overturned tables, howlings and
kissings; in short, displaying a perfect
orgie, and the most extraordinary culmination of human bestiahty ever portrayed upon
canvas.
These two examples show you that the
artist, in modifying relationships of parts,
modifies them understandingly, purposely, in
such a way as to make apparent the essential
character of the object, and consequently its
leading idea according to his conception of it.
This phrase, gentlemen, requires attention;
this essential character is what philosophers
call the essence of things; and because of
this they say that it is the aim of art to
manifest the essence of things. We will not
retain this term essence, which is technical,
but simply state that it is the aim of art
to manifest a predominant character, some

NATUEE OF THE WOEK OP AET.

51

salient principal quality, some important
point of view, some essential condition of
being in the object.
We here approach the true definition of
art, and accordingly need to be perfectly
clear. We must insist on and precisely define
essential character.
I would premise at
once that it is a quality from which all
others, or at least most other qualities, derive
according to determined affinities (liaisons
fixes). Grant me again this abstract definition : a few illustrations will make it plain
to you,
The essential character of a lion, giving
him his rank in the classifications of natural
history, is that of a great flesh-eater; nearly
all his traits, whether physical or moral, as I
am about to prove to you, derive from this
as from their fountain-head. First there are
his physical traits: his teeth operate like
shears; he has a jaw constructed to tear and
to crush; and necessarily, for, being carnivorous, he has to nourish himself with, and
3> 2

52

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

prey upon, living game ; in order to work
this formidable crushing instrument he requires enormous muscles, and for their insertion, temporal sockets of proportionate size.
Add feet armed with terrible contractile
claws, a quick step on the extremity of the
toes, thighs darting the body like a powerful
spring, and eyes that see best at night, because night is the best time for him to hunt;
A naturalist, pointing to a lion's skeleton,
once said to me, ' There is a jaw mounted
on four paws.'
The moral points of the Hon are likewise
in harmony. First, there is the sanguinary
instinct—the craving for fresh flesh, and a
repugnance for every other food; next, the
strength and the nervous excitement through
which the lion concentrates an enormous
amount of force at the instant of attack and
defence ; and, on the other hand, his somniferous habits, the grave, sombre inertia of
moments of repose, and the long yawns after
the excitement of the chase. All these

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

53

traits derive from his carnivorous character,
and on this account we call it his Essential
character.
Let us now consider a more difficult case,
that of an entire country, with its innumerable details of structure, aspect^ and cultivation ; its plants, animals, inhabitants, and
towns; as, for example, the Low Countries.
The essential character of this region is its
alluvial formation; that is to say, a formation due to vast quantities of earth brought
down by streams and deposited about their
mouths. From this single term spring an
infinity of peculiarities, summing up the entire nature of the country ; and not alone its
physical exterior, what the country is in
itself, but again the intellectual, moral, and
physical qualities of its inhabitants and of
their works. First, in the inanimate world,
come its moist and fertile plains, the necessary consequence of numerous broad rivers
and vast deposits of productive soil. These
plains are always green, because broad, tran-

54

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

quil, and indolent streams, and the innumerable can&is so easily constructed in soft, flat
ground, maintain perennial verdure. You
can readily imagine, and on purely rational
principles, what must be the aspect of such a
country—a dull, rainy sky, constantly crossed
with showers, and even on fine days veiled
as if by gauze with light vapoury clouds
rising from the wet surface, and forming a
transparent dome of airy, delicate, snowy
fleeces, underneath which the eye ranges
undisturbed over the boundless verdant expanse to the distant horizon. In the animated kingdom these numerous luxuriant
pastures attract countless herds of cattle,
who recline tranquilly in the grass, or ruminate over their cud, and dot the flat green
sward with innumerable spots of white, yellow, and black. Hence the rich stores of
milk and meat, which, added to the grains
and vegetables raised on this prolific soil,
furnish its inhabitants with cheap and abundant supplies of food. It might well be said

NATUKE OF THE WORK OF ART.

55

that in this country water makes grass, grass
makes cattle, cattle make cheese, butter, and
meat; and all these, with beer, make the inhabitant. Indeed, out of this fat living, and an
organisation saturated with moisture, spring
a phlegmatic temperament, the regular
habits, the tranquil mind and nerves, a
capacity to take life easily and prudently,
unbroken contentment and love of wellbeing, and, consequently, the reign of cleanliness and the rule of comfort. These influences extend so far as even to affect the
aspect of towns. In an alluvial country
there is no stone ; building material consists
of terra-cotta, bricks, and tiles. Eains being
frequent and heavy, the houses are built with
steep roofs, and as dampness lasts for a long
time their fa9ades are painted and varnished.
A Flemish town, therefore, is a maze of
brown and red gable-roofed edifices, always
neat, and occasionally glittering, with here
and there an old church constructed of
shingle or of rubble, and with streets in the

56

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

best of order running between two scrupulously clean lines of sidewalk. In Holland
the sidewalks are laid in brick, frequently
intermingled with coarse porcelain : domestics may be seen at an early hour in the
morning on their knees cleaning them off
with cloths. Cast your eyes through the
bright window-panes; enter a club-room
decked with green branches, and with its
floor powdered with sand constantly renewed ; visit the taverns, brightly painted,
and filled with rows of casks, displaying
their brown rotund sides, and where the rich
yellow beer foams up out of glasses covered
with quaint devices. In all these details of
common life, in all these signs of inward
contentment and enduring prosperity, you
detect the effects of the great underlying
characteristic which is stamped upon • the
climate and the soil, upon the vegetable
kingdom and the animal kingdom, upon man
and his works, upon society and the individual.

NATURE OF THE WOEK OF AET.

57

Through its innumerable effects, you judge
of the importance of this essential character.
It is this which art must bring forward into
proper light, and if this task devolves upon
art it is because nature fails to accomplish it.
In nature this essential character is simply
dominant; it is the aim of art to render it
predominant. It moulds real objects, but it
does not mould them completely : its action
is restricted, impeded by the intervention of
other causes; its impression on objects bearing
its stamp is not sufficiently strong to be
clearly visible. Man is sensible of this deficiency, and to remove it he has invented art.
Let us, for illustration, again take up
Bubens' ' Kermesse.' These blooming merry
wives and superb drunkards—all the busts
and rubicund visages of these riotous overfed
animals—probably had their counterparts in
the c fatness of these pursy times.' Nature,
in her exuberance, might well aspire to
produce such gross forms and such coarse
manners, but she only half accomplished her
D 3

58

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

task; other causes intervened to stay this
excess of a carnal joyous energy. There is
poverty, for instance. In the best of times, and
in the best countries, many people fail to get
sufficient food, consequently fasting, or at
least partial abstinence, misery, and bad air,
all the accompaniments of indigence, oppose
the development and impetuosity of innate
brutality. A suffering man is not so strong,
and he is more restrained. Eeligion, law,
police regulations, and habits due to steady
labour, operate in the same direction ; education also contributes its mite. Out of a
hundred of the creatures of that day who,
under favourable conditions, might have
furnished Bubens with models, only five or
six, perhaps, could be of any service to him.
Suppose now that these five or six figures in
the actual fetes he witnessed were confused
with others of a more or less ordinary and
mediocre stamp, and again, that at the
moment they came under his eye they exhibited neither the attitude, the expression,

NATUKE OF THE WORK OF ART.

59

the gestures, the fury, the costume, or the
disorder requisite to make this teeming excitement apparent. All these insufficiencies
indicate that nature is obliged to summon
art to aid her; unable to mark the character
of the scene with sufficient distinctness, it is
necessary for the artist to take her place.
So it is with every superior work of art.
While Eaphael was painting his ' Galatea,' he
wrote that, beautiful women being scarce, he
was following out a conception of his own.
This signifies that, forming a certain idea of
human nature, composed of joyousness,
serenity, and a noble dignified sweetness, he
could obtain no living model satisfactorily
meeting these requirements. The peasant
girl or the labouring girl that posed for him,
had hands deformed by work, feet spoiled
by their covering, and eyes disordered
by shame, or showing the effects of her degrading profession. In the portrait of the
' Fornarina,' the shoulders fall too suddenly,
while the arm above the elbow is meagre,

60

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AKT.

and the expression is wanting in intelligence.*
If he painted from her in the Farnesini Palace,
he completely transformed her, developing a
character in his painted figure of which the
real figure only contributed parts and suggestions.
Thus the province of a work of art is to
render essential character, or, at least, some
capital quality, the predominance of which
must be made as perceptible as possible. In
order to accomplish this the artist must suppress whatever conceals it, select whatever
manifests it, correct every detail by which it
is enfeebled, and recreate those by which it
is nullified.
Let us no longer consider works but artists,
that is to say, the way in which artists feel,
invent, and produce: you will find it consistent with the foregoing conception of the
work of art. There is one gift indispensable
to all artists ; no study, no degree of patience,
* See the two portraits of the l Fornarina/ in the Sciarra
and the Borghese palaces.

NATUEE OF THE WOEK OF AET.

61

atones for i t ; if it is wanting in them they
are nothing but copyists or mechanics. In
confronting objects the artist must experience
original sensation; the character of objects
strikes him powerfully, and the result must
be a strong, deep, personal impression. In
other words, when talent is born in an artist,
his perceptions, or at least, a certain class of
perceptions, are delicate and prompt; he seizes
with watchful infallible tact every shade of
difference and every relationship, and distinguishes one from the other naturally, it may
be plaintive or heroic tones in a sequence of
sounds, again either listless or spirited attitudes, and again the richness or soberness of
two complimentary or contiguous colours.
By this faculty he is able to penetrate to the
very heart of things, and seems to be more
clear-sighted than other men. This sensation,
moreover, so keen and so personal, is not inactive ; the shock is communicated to the
whole nervous and thinking machinery. Man
involuntarily expresses his emotions; the

62

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

body makes signs, his attitude becomes mimetic, he is obliged to figure externally his
conception of an object; the voice seeks imitative inflections, the tongue finds pictorial
terms, sudden surprises, a descriptive, characteristic, exaggerated style. Under the force
of the original impulse the active brain recasts
the object, now to illumine and ennoble it,
now to distort and grotesquely pervert it; in
the bold free sketch, as well as in the violent
caricature, you readily detect, with poetic
temperaments, the ascendency of uncontrollable impressions. Familiarise yourselves with
the great artists and great authors of your
century, study the sketches, designs, diaries,
and correspondence of the old masters, and
in all will the same inward process be apparent to you. Let the phenomenon be called
by any beautiful name you please, whether
genius or inspiration, which is right and proper;
but if you wish to define it precisely you must
always designate the vivid spontaneous sensation which groups together a body of ac-

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

63

cessory ideas to alter, amend, metamorphose,
and employ, in order to make itself manifest.
We have now arrived at a definition of a
work of art. Let us for a moment cast
our eyes backward and review the road we
have passed over. We have, by degrees,
arrived at a conception of art more and
more elevated, and consequently more and
more exact. At first we thought that art
aimed solely at an imitation of the visible
exterior of things. Next, separating mechanical imitation from intelligent imitation,
we found that what we wish to reproduce
in the visible exterior of things is the relationships of parts. Finally, remarking that
relationships are, and ought to be, modified
in order to obtain the highest results of art,
we proved that if we study the relationships
of parts it is to make predominant an essential
character. No one of these definitions destroys its antecedent, but each corrects and
defines it. We are consequently able now
to combine them, and by subordinating the

64

THE PHILOSOPHY OP AKT,

inferior to the superior, thus to sum up the
result of our labour :—' The end of a work
of art is to manifest some essential, salient
character, consequently some important idea,
clearer and more completely than is attainable from real objects. Art accomplishes
this end by employing a group (ensemble)
of connected parts, the relationships of which
she systematically modifies. In the three
imitative arts of sculpture, painting, and
poetry, these groups correspond to real objects.'

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

65

CHAPTER VI.
MUSIC AND ARCHITECTURE.
These two Arts dependent on Mathematical Relationships
—The Principle of Architecture—The Principle of Music
—The Analogy between a Musical Note and a Cry—All
Arts comprehended in the foregoing definition of Art.

ON examining the foregoing definition more
carefully, we find the first part of it essential, and the second accessory. Although
every art must consist of a group of interdependent parts, which the artist may modify
so as to express character, every art does not
require this group to correspond with real
objects; the existence of a system of interdependent parts is all that is necessary./
When, accordingly, we meet with a system of
this kind, not derived from real objects, then

66

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

do we find arts not born of imitation. This
is the case with architecture and music.
Apart from organic and moral relationships,
outside of the liaisons, proportions, and other
dependencies appertaining to the three imitative arts, there are mathematical relationships,
the combination of which is the province of
the two arts that do not spring from imitation.
Let us first consider mathematical relationships appreciable through the organ of sight.
Size, grandeur, magnitude, are qualities to
which the eye is sensitive ; these may form a
group of interdependent parts according to
mathematical law. For instance, a piece of
wood or stone possesses geometrical form,
either that of a cube, a cone, a cylinder, or a
sphere, which establishes regular relationships of distance between the different points
of its outline. Furthermore, dimensions may
consist of simple proportions mutually related, which the eye seizes readily; height,
for instance, being two, three, or four times

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

67

greater than thickness or breadth: this constitutes a second series of mathematical relationships. Finally, several pieces of wood or
stone may be placed on the top or by the side
of each other, symmetrically, according to
distances and angles mathematically combined, all of which series form a group of
interdependent parts, and upon which is
established the art of architecture. An architect conceiving some dominant character,
either serenity, simplicity, strength, or elegance, as formerly in Greece or Eome, or the
strange, the varied, the infinite, the imaginative, as in Gothic times, selects and combines
proportions, dimensions, forms, and positions;
in short, fashions the relationships of materials, the visible qualities of size, in such a
way as to display the character aimed at.
By the side of qualities to which the eye
is sensitive, are similar qualities recognisable
by the ear; for instance, the rapidity of
sonorous vibrations. The more or less rapid
evolution of sound is a quality kindred to

68

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

those of magnitude, size, etc. and likewise
consists of parts associated according to
mathematical law. In the first place, a
musical sound is composed of continued
vibrations of equal rapidity, which already
implies a mathematical relationship ; in the
second place, two sounds being given, the
second may be composed of vibrations, two,
three, or four times the rapidity of the first;
accordingly, there is between these two
sounds a mathematical relationship, which is
figured by placing them at an equal distance
from each other on the musical stave. If,
instead of taking two, we take a number
of sounds, and place them at equal distances
apart, we form a scale, w^hich scale constitutes the gamut, all the sounds being thus
bound together according to their relative
position on the gamut. You can now form
combinations (liaisons) of sounds, successive
or simultaneous, the first order of sounds
constituting melody, and the second harmony.
This is music: it has two essential parts,

XATURE OF THE WORK OF AET.

69

based, like architecture, on mathematical relationships, which the artist is free to combine and modify.
Music, however, possesses a second property, which endows it with peculiar virtue
and an extraordinary grasp.
Besides its
mathematical properties, sound is the analogue of a cry. Under this head it conveys,
with unrivalled precision, delicacy, and force,
moods of suffering, joy, rage, indignation—
every species of agitation or emotion an animated sensitive being is capable of, even to
the most secret and most subtle gradations.
From this point of view it is similar to poetic
declamation, furnishing a. specific type of
music called the music of expression, like that
of Gluck and the Germans, in opposition to
the melodious school of Eossini and the Italians. Whatever a composer's point of view
may be, every musical work springs from
these two sources, both forming groups of
sound, linked together according to mathematical law, and in correspondence with the

70

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

passions and diverse states of the moral being.
The musician, therefore, who conceives a certain salient important character, whether joyous or mournful, the tenderest love or extremest rage, any idea or sentiment whatever,
may freely select and combine sounds in mathematical and moral union to manifest it.
All the arts are thus included in the definition above presented. In architecture and
music, as in sculpture, painting, and poetry,
it is the object of a work of art to manifest
some essential character, and to employ as
means of expression a group of associated
parts, the relationship of which the artist
combines and modifies.

NATURE OF THE WORK OF ART.

71

CHAPTER VII.
THE VALUE OF ART IN HUMAN LIFE.
Analysis of Human Effort—Selfish Acts concerning the
Preservation of the Individual—Social Acts relating to
the Conservation of the Species—Disinterested Actions
devoted to the Contemplation of Creative and Permanent
Causes—Science and Art—The Advantages of Art.

W E are now familiar with the nature of art,
and are able to comprehend its importance.
Previously we were only sensible of its effect;
it was a matter of instinct, and not of reason :
we were conscious of respecting and esteeming art, but were not qualified to account for
our respect and esteem. Our admiration for
art can now be justified, and we can mark its
place in the order of human functions.
Man, in many respects, is an animal endeavouring to protect himself against nature

72

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

and against other men. He is obliged to
provide himself with food, clothing, and
shelter, and to defend himself against climate,
want, and disease. To do this he tills the
ground, navigates the sea, and devotes himself to different industrial and commercial
pursuits. Furthermore, he must perpetuate
his species, and secure himself against the
violence of his fellow-men ; to this end, he
forms families and states, and creates magistracies, functionaries, constitutions, laws, and
armies. After so much labour and such invention he is not yet emancipated from his
original condition ; he is still an animal, better
fed and better protected than the rest, but
so far, only thinking of himself, and of others
of his own stamp. At this moment a superior life dawns on him—that of contemplation, leading him to study the creative and
permanent causes on which his own being and
that of his fellows depend, as well as the essential predominant character which distinguishes
every group of objects and beings, and which

PRODUCTION OF THE WOEK OF ART.

73

imprints itself on their minutest details. Two
ways are open to him for this purpose. The
first is Science, by which, disengaging these
causes and these fundamental laws, he expresses them in abstract terms and precise
formulas ; the second is Art, by which he
manifests these causes and these fundamental
laws no longer through arid definitions, inaccessible to the multitude, and only intelligible to a favoured few, but sensuously, appealing not alone to reason, but to the heart
and senses of the humblest individual. Art is
conspicuous for this—it is at once a noble and
popular ministrant, manifesting whatever is
most exalted, and manifesting this to all.

E

PART II.
ON THE PRODUCTION OF THE WORK
Of ART.

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

CHAPTER

77

I

GENERAL LAW FOR THE PRODUCTION OF THE
WORK OF ART.
First Formula—Two sorts of Proof, one of Experience, and
the other of Ratiocination.

investigated the nature of the work
of art, there now remains a study of the
law of its production. This law, in general
terms, may thus be expressed :—A work of
art is determined by a condition of things,
combining all surrounding social and intellectual influences. I have stated this principle in the foregoing section, and have now
to prove it.
This law rests on two kinds of proof: one

HAVING

78

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

of experience, and the other of ratiocination.
The former consists of an enumeration of the
many instances in which the law verifies itself. Some of these I have already presented
to you, and others will soon follow. One
may assert, moreover, that no case is known
to which the law is not applicable; it is
strictly so to those hitherto examined, and
not merely in a general way, but in detail,
not only to the growth and extinction of
schools, but again to all the variations and
oscillations to which art is subject.
The
second order of proof consists in showing
this dependence to be not only rigorous in
point of fact, but, again, that it is so through
necessity. We will accordingly analyse what
we have called surrounding social and intellectual influences, and, following the usual
course of human agencies, trace the effect of
said influences on the public, on artists, and
consequently on works of art. We come to
this conclusion, that there is a fixed con-

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

79

cordance between them, a compulsory
union [liaison fovcee\ and that, instead of
regarding this as a simple accident, we establish it as a necessary harmonious result.
The first having stated the law, the second
demonstrates it.

80

THE PHILOSOPHY OP AET.

CHAPTER II.
THE ' MILIEU.'
The Development of the Plant compared with the Development of Human Activity—Natural Selection.

IN order to make this harmony apparent let
us resume a comparison already of service
to us, that between a plant and a work of
art, and note the circumstances in which a
plant, or a species of plant, say the orange,
developes and propagates itself in a given
plot of ground. Supposing the seeds of all
plants borne by the wind and sown at random ; on wThat conditions does the orange
germinate, become a tree, blossom, yield fruit,
spread, and cover the ground with a numerous family ?
Many favourable circumstances are essen-

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

81

tial to this end. First, the soil must be
neither too light nor too meagre, for, the
roots lacking depth or grasp, the tree falls
at the first puff of wind. Next, the soil
must not be too dry, otherwise the tree
withers where it stands deprived of the moisture of springs and streams. Moreover, the
climate must be warm, or the tree, which is
delicate, is frozen or droops, and never puts
forth sprouts ; the summer must be long, in
order that the fruit, which is slow to ripen,
may fully mature, and the winter mild, so
that January frosts may not blast or shrivel
the backward fruit still lingering on its
branches. Finally, the soil must not be
too favourable for other plants, lest the tree,
left^to itself, succumb in its competition with
others, and be overpowered by a more
vigorous vegetation. When all those conditions meet the orange sprig grows, becomes
adult, and reproduces others again to reproduce themselves. Storms will undoubtedly
occur, stones fall, and browsing goats destroy
E 3

82

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

many plants; but on the whole, in spite of
accidents, the species propagates, covers the
ground, and in a few years displays a flourishing grove of orange trees. All this is to be
seen in the admirably sheltered gorges of
Southern Italy—in the environs of Sorrento
and Amalfi—on the shores of the gulfs, and
in the small, well-watered valleys, freshened
by streams descending from the mountains,
and caressed by the gentle breezes of the
Mediterranean. All these circumstances were
necessary in order to produce those beautiful
clusters of green, lustrous domes, those innumerable golden apples, and that exquisite
fragrant vegetation which, in mid-winter,
makes this coast the richest and loveliest of
gardens.
Let us now reflect a moment over the
operation of things in this example. We
have just observed the effect of circumstances
and of physical temperature. Strictly speaking, these have not produced the orange ; the
seeds were given, and these alone contained

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

83

the vital force. The circumstances described,
however, were necessary in order that the
plant might flourish and propagate; had
these failed, the plant likewise would have
failed.
Accordingly, let the temperature be different, and the species of plant will be
different. Suppose conditions entirely opposite to those just mentioned; take the
summit of a mountain swept by violent
winds, with a thin scanty soil, a cold climate,
a short summer, and snow during the winter;
not only will the orange not thrive here, but
a large number of other trees will perish. Of
all the seeds scattered haphazard by the wind
only one will survive, and but one species,
the fir, or pine, endure and propagate, the
only one adapted to these severe conditions.
This species will cover the lonely crags,
abrupt precipices, and long rocky ridges of
this mountain with stiff colonnades of tall
trunks, and vast mantles of sombre funereal
green. Hence, in the Vosges, in Scotland

84

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

and in Norway, the traveller plods along,
league after league, under dark, silent arches,
on a carpet of smooth, sharp leaves, and
among gnarled roots obstinately clinging to
the rocks, the domain of the patient energetic plant which alone subsists in these
regions, opposing incessant attacks of gales,
and the frosts of long and gloomy winters.
We may accordingly regard temperature
and physical circumstances as making a
choice amongst various species of trees, allowing a certain species to subsist and propagate,, to the exclusion, more or less complete,
of others. Physical temperature acts by
elimination and suppression, in other words,
by natural selection. Such is the great law
by which we now explain the origin and
structure of diverse existing organisms—a
law as applicable to moral as to physical
conditions, to history as well as to botany
and zoology, to genius and to character, as
well as to plant and to animal.

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

85

CHAPTER III.
THE

' MILIEU '—continued.

The Action of a Moral Temperature.

is accordingly a moral temperature,
consisting of the general social and intellectual influences of a community, which acts
in the same manner. Properly speaking,
this temperature does not produce artists, for
talent and genius are gifts like the vital force
of seeds; what I mean to say is, that the
same country at different epochs probably
contains about the same number of men of
talent, and the same number of men of mediocrity.
We know, in fact, through the
statistics of the conscription, that in two successive generations the same number of men
of the requisite stature for soldiers are found,
THERE

86

THE PHILOSOPHY OP ART.

and the same number of men too small. In
all probability, it is with minds as with
bodies. Nature being a sower of men, and
constantly putting her hand in the same
sack, distributes over the soil regularly, and
in turn, about the same proportionate quantity and quality of seed. But in the handfuls she scatters as she strides over time and
space, not all germinate. A certain moral
temperature is necessary to develope certain
talents ; if this is wanting, these prove abortive.
Consequently, as the temperature
changes, so will the species of talent change ;
if it turns in an opposite direction talent follows : so that, in general, we may conceive
moral temperature as making a selection
among different species of talent, allowing
only this or that species to develope itself, to
the exclusion more or less complete of others.
It is through some such mechanism that certain schools of art, and certain countries at
certain periods, develope sentiments respectively of the ideal, of the real, of drawing,

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

87

and of colour. There is a prevailing tendency which constitutes the spirit of the age.
Whatever talent strives to push forward in
other directions, finds the issues closed; public taste or intelligence, and surrounding
social influences, press in upon it, check it,
and force it to deviate, limiting it to a certain kind and form of development.

88

THE PHILOSOPHY OP AKT.

CHAPTER IV.
THE

' MILIEU '—continued.

The Influence of Melancholy and Cheerful States of Mind
—Intermediate Cases.

THE foregoing comparison may serve you as
a general indication ; let us now enter into
details, and study the action of the moral
temperature on works of art.
For the sake of greater clearness we will
suppose a simple case, that of a certain mental condition, in which melancholy predominates. This supposition is not arbitrary, for
such conditions have frequently occurred in the
life of humanity: five or six centuries of decadence, depopulation, foreign invasion, famine,
pests, and aggravated misery, are amply sufficient to produce it. Asia experienced such

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

89

a state of things in the sixth century before
Christ, and Europe in the period of the first
ten centuries of our own era. In times like
these men lose both courage and hope, and
regard life as a burden.
Let us contemplate the effect of such a
mental condition, together with the circumstances which engender it, on the artists of
an epoch like this. Admitting that in these
times about as many melancholy as joyous
temperaments, and others of an average
between these, are encountered as at other
times, how and in what sense does the prevailing situation effect their transformation ?
It must be borne in mind that the misfortunes that afflict the public also afflict the
artist; he is one of the flock, and he suffers
as the rest suffer. If, for example, invasions
of barbarians occur, and pests, famines, and
every other species of calamity; and these
endure for centuries, and spread over the
entire country; not only one, but countless
miracles, would be necessary to save him

90

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AKT.

harmless in the general inundation. On the
contrary, it is probable, and even certain,
that he has his share of public misfortune;
that he is ruined, beaten, wounded, and
imprisoned, like others ; that his wife, children, relatives, and friends share the common
fate, and that he suffers and is subject to
fears on their account, as well as on his own.
During this long-continued flood of misery
with which he has to contend, his temperament, if cheerful, becomes less so, and, if
melancholy, still more melancholy. Such is
the first effect of the milieu.
On the other hand, he is born amidst
contemporaries of a melancholy disposition;
hence, the ideas he receives in infancy, with
those acquired afterwards, are melancholy.
The dominant religion, accommodating itself
to the lugubrious order of things, teaches
him that the earth is a place of exile, the
world a prison-house, life an evil, and that
all that concerns him is to deserve to get out
of it. Philosophy, constructing its theories

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OP ART.

91

according to the lamentable spectacle of
man's degeneracy, proves to him that it
would have been better for him not to have
been born. Ordinary conversation brings
him only mournful materials, such as the
invasion of a province, the destruction of
some monument, the oppression of the weak,
and civil wars among the strong. Daily
observation reveals to him images of discouragement and affliction, beggars, and cases
of starvation, a bridge left to decay, abandoned, crumbling houses, fields going to
waste, and black walls of dwellings ravaged
by fire. All these make deep impressions
on his mind, and from the first year of his
life to the last, incessantly aggravate whatever
melancholy sentiment arises out of his own
misfortunes.
And they aggravate it so much the more
proportionately to the intensity of his artistic
feeling. What makes him an artist is the
practice of imitating the essential character
of things, the salient points of objects; other

92

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

men only see portions, while he grasps at
once their order and spirit. And as in this
case the salient characteristic is melancholy,
he accordingly perceives nothing else. Moreover, through excess of imagination and the
instinct peculiar to artists, he amplifies and
expands it to the utmost; he becomes impregnated with it, and charges his work with
it, so that he commonly sees and paints
things in much darker colours than would
be employed by his contemporaries.
It must be added also that he finds them
of great assistance to him in his work. You
know that a man who paints or writes is not
a fixture before his canvas or at his writingdesk. On the contrary, he goes out and talks
to people and looks about him; he listens
to the hints of his friends or rivals, and seeks
suggestions in books and from surrounding
works of art. Ideas resemble seeds: if a
seed, in order to root itself and mature, requires the nourishment of water, air, sun and
soil, an idea, in order to perfect itself, needs

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

93

the accretions and supplementary assistance
derived from contiguous minds. Accordingly, in these epochs of melancholy what
sort of suggestions are neighbouring minds
capable of furnishing?
Only melancholy
ones, for only on this side do men labour.
As their experience provides them only with
painful sensations and sentiments, they can
only note the shades of difference, and record
discoveries made on the path of suffering:
the heart is the only field of observation, and
if this is filled with sorrow, sorrow is all that
men contemplate.
Accordingly they are
solely wise in the ways of grief, dejection,
chagrin, and despair. If the artist demands
instruction of them this is all the return they
can make. To seek ideas or information
concerning different aspects or different expressions of joy would be time lost; they
furnish him with the best they have. For
this reason let him attempt to portray happiness, cheerfulness, or gaiety, and he stands
alone3 deprived of all support, left to his own

94

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

powers, which in an isolated man are feeble.
The result of all this is, his work is mediocre.
Let him, on the contrary, attempt representations of melancholy emotions, and he receives assistance from everybody. He finds
materials prepared for him by preceding
schools ; he finds a ready-made art, consisting of known processes and a beaten track.
A church ceremony, a piece of furniture,
a conversation, suggests a form, a colour, a
phrase, a character hitherto wanting to him ;
his work, to which millions of unknown colabourers have contributed, is all the more
beautiful, because, in addition to his own
labour and his own genius, it embodies the
labour and genius of surrounding society and
of generations that have gone before it.
Still another reason, and the strongest of
all, inclines him towards melancholy subjects ;
his work, once exposed to the public eye, finds
appreciation only as it expresses melancholy
ideas. Men, indeed, only comprehend sentiments analogous to those they have them-

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selves experienced. Other sentiments, no
matter how powerfully expressed, do not
affect them ; they look with their eyes, but
no response coming from the heart, they turn
their eyes away. Imagine a man losing fortune, country, children, health, and liberty—
one manacled in a dungeon for twenty years,
like Pellico or Andryane, whose feelings are
gradually depressed, and whose spirit is
broken, and who becomes melancholy and a
mystic, and whose discouragement is incurable ; such a man entertains a horror of cheerful music, and has no disposition to read
Eabelais ; if you place him before the merry
brutes of Eubens, he will turn aside and place
himself before the canvases of Eembrandt;
he will enjoy only the music of Chopin and
the poetry of Lamartine or Heine. The same
thing happens to the public and to individuals;
their taste depends on their mood ; their afflictions give them a taste for melancholy
works; cheerful productions are accordingly
repudiated, and the artist is censured or neg-

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lected. Now an artist composes mostly in
order to obtain appreciation and applause;
this is his dominant passion. Hence his dominant passion, independent of other causes,
added to the pressure of public opinion, forces
him, turn which way he will, to adhere to the
expression of melancholy, ever barring the
paths that would otherwise lead him to the
portrayal of gaiety and happiness.
In consequence of this series of obstacles,
the outlet for works of art manifesting cheerfulness is closed. If an artist overcomes one
obstacle, he is arrested by others. If naturally genial spirits cross his path, they are
saddened by their gloomy experiences. Education and current conversation fill their
minds with gloomy ideas. The faculties employed by artists to disengage and amplify
the leading traits of objects, find none but
melancholy ones on which to exercise themselves. The experience and labour of others
provide them only with suggestions and cooperation in a melancholy vein. Finally, the

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decisive, boisterous will of the public allows
them to produce only melancholy subjects.
In consequence of this, the class of artists
and the species of work suitable for the
expression of gaiety and joyousness disappear, or end by becoming reduced to almost
nothing.
Consider, now, the opposite case, that of a
general condition of cheerfulness. Such a
condition of things occurs in renaissance
epochs, when order, wealth, population, comfort, prosperity, and useful and beautiful discoveries are constantly increasing. By reversing its terms the analysis we have just
made is applicable word for word; the same
process of reasoning proves that the works
of art of such a period will all, more or less,
express a joyous character.
In considering an intermediary state, that
is to say. a commingling of this or that phase
of joy or sadness, which is the ordinary condition of things, and by a proper modification
of terms, the analysis is equally pertinent;
F

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the same reasoning demonstrates that works
of art express corresponding combinations,
and a corresponding species of joy and melancholy.
Our conclusion is accordingly this :—In
every simple or complex condition of things,
the milieu, that is to say, the general social
and intellectual state, determines the species
of works of art; it permits only those which
are conformable to it, and suppresses other
species, through a series of obstacles interposed, and a series of attacks renewed, at
every step of their development.

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CHAPTER V.
HISTORICAL EPOCHS.
Four Epochs, and four leading Arts.

supposititious cases, thus simplified
in order to make my meaning clear to you,
we will take up real ones: a glance at the
most important of a series of historical
epochs will show you a verification of the
law. I will select the four great cycles of
European civilisation—namely, Greek and
Eoman antiquity, the feudal and Christian
middle ages, the well-regulated aristocratic
monarchies of the seventeenth century, and
the industrial democracies of the present
day, directed by the sciences. Each period
has its own art, or some department of art
peculiar to it, either sculpture, architecture,
LEAVING

F2

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the drama or music, or some determined
phase of each of these great arts; or again,
speaking figuratively, a distinct, singularly
rich, complete, peculiar vegetation, which,
in its leading features, reflects the principal
traits of the art and the nation. Let us,
accordingly, consider in turn the different
soils, and we shall see that all produce different flowers.

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CHAPTEE VI.
THE GREEK PERIOD.
Greek Civilisation—The City—The Citizen—Taste for
War—The Athlete—Spartan Education—The Gymnasium in other parts of Greece—Conformity of Customs
with Ideas—Nudity—Olympic Games—The Gods perfect Human Figures—Birth of Sculpture; Statues of
Athletes and of Gods—Why Statuary sufficed for the
Artist's Conceptions—Immense Number of Statues.

three thousand years ago there appeared on the shores and islands of the
iEgean sea a remarkably handsome intelligent race, regarding life altogether from a
new and peculiar point of view. This race
did not suffer itself to be mastered by a great
religious conception like the Hindoos and
Egyptians, nor by a vast social organisation
like the Assyrians and Persians, nor by great
ABOUT

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industrial and commercial practices after the
fashion of the Phoenicians and Carthagenians.
In the place of a theocracy or a hierarchy of
caste, and of a monarchy or a hierarchy of
functionaries and of great trading and commercial establishments, the men of that race
had an invention of their own, called the
city, which city, in sending forth branches,
gave birth to others of the same description.
One of these, Miletus, produced over three
hundred towns, and colonised the entire
coast of the Black Sea. Others did the
same, the Mediterranean Sea being encircled
with a garland of flourishing cities, extending
from Gyrene to Marseilles, along the gulfs
and promontories of Spain, Italy, Greece,
Asia Minor, and Africa.
What was the life of this city ? A citizen
performed but little manual labour; he was
generally supported by his subjects and tributaries, and always served by slaves. The
poorest man in the place had one in his house.
Athens counted four for each citizen; and

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lesser cities, like iEgina and Corinth, possessed
from four to five thousand. Servants, of
course, abounded. The citizen, however,
needed but little help. Like all the finelybuilt races of the south, he was abstemious, a
meal consisting of three or four olives, a bit
of garlic, and the head of a fish.5^ His
clothing was sandals, a kind of small shirt,
and a large mantle, like that of a shepherd.
His house was a small ill-constructed tenement, into which robbers could penetrate by
piercing the walls,f and which he only used
for sleeping; a bed and two or three beautiful vases were the principal articles of furniture. The citizen had few wants, and he
passed the day in the open air.
How did he occupy himself? Serving
neither king nor priest, he was free in the city
and sovereign as part of the community. He
elected his own pontiffs and magistrates, and
could himself be elected to sacerdotal and
* Aristophanes, the Frog's; Lucien, the Cock's,
t Their proper name was wall-piercers.

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municipal functions ; whether blacksmith of
currier, he judged the most important political
cases in the tribunals, and decided the gravest
of affairs of state in the assemblies ; his occupation consisted substantially of public business and war. It was his pride to be a politician and a soldier; other pursuits were of little
importance to him ; a free man, in his opinion,
ought to devote himself exclusively to these.
And he was right. Human life in those days
was not protected as it is in ours ; society had
not acquired the same stability. Most of
those cities were planted wide apart on the
Mediterranean shores, and were surrounded
by barbarians eager to prey upon them ; the
citizen was obliged to be under arms constantly, like the European of the present day
in Japan and in New Zealand ; if not, Gauls,
Libyans, Samnites, and Bithynians would soon
have pitched their camps amid the ruins of
battered walls and devastated temples. Besides all this, these cities were inimical to
each other. The rights of war were atrocious :

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a vanquished city was often devoted to destruction ; a wealthy noted man might any
day see his dwelling in ashes, his property
pillaged, and his wife and daughters sold to
recruit places of prostitution, while his sons
and himself would be sold as slaves and
buried in mines, or compelled by the lash to
turn the stones of a grist-mill. With such
perils before him it is natural for a man to be
interested in affairs of state, and be qualified
for battle ; he has to become a politician
under penalty of death. Ambition, however,
and love of glory are equal stimulants. Every
city aspired to reduce or subject every other
city, to conquer or to make profitable the
persons of others.* The citizen passed his
life in the public thoroughfares, discussing the
best means for preserving and aggrandising
his city, canvassing its alliances, treaties, laws,
and constitution; now listening to orators,
* Thucydides, Book I. See the divers expeditions of
the Athenians between the peace of Oimon and the Peloponnesian war.
p 3

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and again acting as one himself up to the very
moment of going aboard his vessel in order
to wage war in Thrace or in Egypt, against
other Greeks, against the barbarians, or
against the Great King.
In order to qualify themselves for all this,
they developed a peculiar system of discipline. As there were no industrial facilities
in those days, the machinery of war was unknown. War consisted of a combat betwixt
man and man; consequently, in order to
ensure victory, it was no object to transform
soldiers into accurate automatons as in our
day, but to render each soldier the most
resistant, strongest, and most agile body
possible ; in short, a highly-tempered gladiator, capable of the utmost physical endurance. To this end, Sparta, about the eighth
century, set Greece an example, giving her
an impulse by perfecting a very complicated
and no less efficacious military system. Sparta
herself was a camp without walls, situated,
lik^ our camps in Kabyle, amidst enemies

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and a conquered people, wholly military, and
devoted to attack and self-defence. To construct a fine race was the first thing necessary
in order to obtain fine men; they managed
to breed men as we breed horses. All deformed children were deprived of life. The
law prescribed the age for marriage and the
most suitable time and circumstances to engender the species. An old man with a
young wife was obliged to introduce to her
a young man in order to obtain progeny of
good constitution.- Any other man, if he
had a friend whose beauty and character
pleased him, might loan him his wife.*
After thus manufacturing the race, they
shaped the individual. Young men were
enrolled, exercised, and accustomed to live
together in common; they were divided
into two rival bands, constantly watching
each other, and contending together with
the foot or the fist. They slept in the open
* Xenoplion. The Lacedemonian Republic; passim.

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air, bathed in the cool waters of the Eurotas,
ate sparingly, fast and badly, rested on beds
of rushes, drank nothing but water, and endured every inclemency of climate. Young
girls exercised in the same manner, and were
restricted to almost the same routine. The
rigour of this antique discipline was undoubtedly less or was mitigated in other
cities ; nevertheless, with its modifications,
the same road conducted to the same end.
Young people passed the greater part of the
day in the gymnasia, wrestling, jumping,
boxing, racing, pitching the discus, fortifying
and rendering supple their naked muscles.
It was their aim to produce strong, robust
bodies, the most beautiful and the most
capable possible, and no system of education
ever succeeded better in obtaining them.*
These peculiar customs of the Greeks gave
birth to peculiar ideas. In their eyes the
ideal man was not the man of thought, or a
* The Dialogues of Plato. The Clouds of Aristophanes.

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man of delicate sensibility, but the naked
man, the man of a fine stock, erect, wellproportioned, active and accomplished in all
physical exercises. A multitude of instances
demonstrate that such was their way of thinking. In the first place, whilst the Carians
and the Lydians, and their barbarian neighbours generally, were ashamed to appear
naked, they stripped without embarrassment
in order to wrestle and run races.* The
young girls of Sparta were in the habit of
exercising almost naked. You will perceive
in these instances that gymnastics had suppressed, or at least transformed, modesty.
In the second place, the great national festivals of the Greeks, the Olympian, Pythian, and
jSTemean games, consisted of a display and triumph of the naked figure. The youth of the
first families resorted to these from all parts
of Greece, and from the remotest Grecian
colonies. They prepared for them a long
* The Lacedemonians adopted this custom about the 14th
Olympiad.—Plato.

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time beforehand by special training and the
severest labour. Here, under the eyes of the
whole nation, and greeted with its applause,
they wrestled, boxed, pitched the discus, and
performed their foot and chariot races entirely
divested of clothing. Victories of this class,
which we of the present day leave to a Hercules in a circus, they regarded as of the first
importance. The victor in the foot race gave
his name to the Olympiad; his praises were
chanted by the greatest poets; the song of
Pindar, the most illustrious lyric poet of antiquity, was wholly devoted to the triumph
of charioteers. On returning to his native
city the victorious athlete was received in
triumph, and his strength and agility became
the pride of the place. One of these, Milo
of Crotona, who was invincible at wrestling,
was chosen general, and led his fellow-citizens
to battle, clad in a lion's skin and armed with
a club like Hercules, to whom he was compared. It is related that a certain Diagoras
saw his two sons crowned on the same day,

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and was carried around by them in triumph
before the assembled multitude. Deeming
such an honour too great for one mortal, the
people cried out to him, ' Die, Diagoras, for
thou canst not now become a god !' Diagoras, suffocated with emotion, did indeed expire in the arms of his children. In his eyes,
as in the eyes of all Greece, to see his sons
possessing the most vigorous fists and the
nimblest legs was the height of terrestrial
bliss. Whether this be truth or legend, such
a judgment proves the excessive degree of
admiration entertained by the Greeks for
the perfection of the human form.
On this account they were not afraid to
expose it before the gods on solemn occasions.
They had a formal system of attitudes and
actions, called orchestral, which regulated
the sacred dances, and at the same time
taught their beautiful postures. After the
battle of Salamis the tragic poet Sophocles,
then fifteen years old, and celebrated for his
beauty, stripped himself in order to dance

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and chant the pgean before the trophy. One
hundred years later Alexander, on passing
through Asia Minor to contend with Darius,
cast aside his garments, along with his companions, for the purpose of honouring the
tomb of Achilles with races. But the Greeks
went still further; they considered the perfection of the human form as attesting divinity. In a town in Sicily a young man of
extraordinary beauty was worshipped, and
after death altars were erected in his honour.*
In Homer, which is the Grecian Bible, the
gods throughout possess human forms, flesh
which lances can pierce, flowing red blood,
instincts, passions, and pleasures, similar in
every respect to our own, and to such an
extent that heroes become the lovers of goddesses, and gods beget children of mortal
mothers. Between Olympus and the earth
there is no yawning gulf; the gods descend
and mortals ascend; if they surpass us it is
* Herodotus.

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because they are exempt from death, because
their wounds heal quicker, and they are
stronger, handsomer, and happier than we.
In other respects, they eat, drink, and
quarrel as we do, all enjoying the same
senses, and employing the same corporeal
functions. Greece so thoroughly wrought out
its conception of the beautiful human animal
as to make an idol of it, and in order to
glorify it on earth, they made a divinity of
it in heaven.
Out of this conception statuary is born.
We can distinguish every step of its progress.
On the one hand, an athlete, once crowned,
was entitled to a statue; crowned a second
time he was awarded an iconical statue—that
is to say, an effigy bearing his portrait. On
the other hand, the gods' being only human
forms, more serene and more perfect than
others, it was natural to represent them by
statues. No forced interpretation of dogma is
necessary to enlighten us on this point. The
marble or bronze effigy is not allegorical, but

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an exact image ; it does not lend to the god
muscles, bones, and a ponderous covering
which he does not possess, but represents the
actual flesh and breathing form which constitute his substance; it suffices, in order
to be a truthful portrait, if it is the most
beautiful, and if it reproduces the immortal
calm by which the god is exalted above
mortals.
The statue is now blocked out — is the
sculptor qualified to produce it? Dwell a
moment on his preparation for this task.
Men in those days studied the body naked
and in action, in the baths, in the gymnasia, in the sacred dances and at the public
games. They could distinguish and select
such forms and such attitudes as denoted
vigour, health, and activity; they laboured
with all their might to give it these forms
and place it in these attitudes. For three or
four hundred years they were thus correcting,
purifying, developing their ideas of physical
beauty. It is not surprising therefore that

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they finally discovered the ideal type of the
human form. We of the present day that
are familiar with it owe our knowledge of it
to them. When Nicholas of Pisa and other
early modern sculptors at the end of the
Gothic period abandoned the meagre, bony,
and ugly forms of hieratic tradition, it was
because they obtained better ones from Greek
bas-reliefs, then in existence or recently exhumed. Again, if we, forgetting our distorted or defaced bodies born of plebeians
or of philosophers, wish to obtain accurate
notions of a perfect form, it is to Greek
statues, the monuments of a noble, careless,
gymnastic existence, that we are obliged to
go for them.
Not only is the form of the statue perfect,
but again, which is unique, it suffices for the
artist's conceptions. The Greeks, having assigned to the body a dignity of its own, were
not tempted, like the moderns, to subordinate
it to the head. They were interested in a
breast attesting sound respiration, a trunk

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solidly resting on the thighs, a nervous supple
leg impelling the body forward with ease ;
they did not occupy themselves solely with
the breadth of a thoughtful forehead, with
the frown of an irritated brow, or the turn of
a sarcastic lip. They could limit themselves
to the conditions of perfect statuary, which
leaves the eye without an iris, and the head
undisturbed by expression; which prefers
tranquil, occupied characters, to insignificant
action; which commonly employs a single
tint, either of marble or of bronze; which
leaves the picturesque to painting, and abandons dramatic interest to literature; which,
confined to, but at the same time ennobled
by, the nature of its materials and its limited
domain, avoids representing special features,
irregularities, and agitations of the human
organism, in order to disengage pure abstract
form, and thus make the sanctuary glow with
the luminous, august, impassible effigies in
which human nature recognised its gods and
heroes.

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Statuary, accordingly, is the art par excellence of Greece ; other arts relate to it, are
associated with it, or imitate it. No other art
has so well expressed the national life; no
other was so cultivated or so popular. In
the hundred small temples around Delphi, in
which the treasures of the cities were guarded,
there was an ' entire population of marble,
gold, silver, brass, and bronze; of the latter
twenty different kinds and tints ; grouped
without order, seated and standing, all glittering and veritable subjects of the god of
light.' * When Rome, at a later day, despoiled the Greek world of its treasures, this
vast city possessed a population of statues
almost equal to that of its living inhabitants.
At the present time, after so many centuries
of devastation, it is estimated that more than
sixty thousand statues have been exhumed
at Eome and in its surrounding Campagna.
Never has the world seen such a blooming

* Michelet.

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period of sculpture, such a prodigious display
of its flowers, so perfect, so enduring, so varied, and of such natural development.
The causes of this development you have
just ascertained, in exploring the soil that
produced it layer by layer, and in remarking
that all the strata of human society, its constitutions, customs, and ideas, provided the
conditions for its nourishment.

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CHAPTER VII.
THE MEDIEVAL EPOCH.
The Civilisation of the Middle Ages, and Gothic Architecture—Decline of Antique Society—Invasions of Barbarians—Feudal Excesses—Universal Misery—Distaste
for Life—Exalted Sensibility—The Passion of Love—
Power of Religion—Birth of Gothic Architecture—The
Cathedral—Universality of Gothic Architecture.

IN the course of time the military organisation common to all the cities of antiquity
produced its eflfect; it ran its course to a
melancholy end. War being the natural
condition of things, the weak were overpowered by the strong. States of considerable magnitude frequently arose, subjected
to or tyrannised over by victorious or preponderating cities. Finally one of these,

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Home, appeared, possessing greater energy,
patience, and ability, and better qualified
than the rest for subordination and command,
for persistent views and practical foresight.
She succeeded, after seven hundred years of
effort, in subjecting to her dominion the
entire basin of the Mediterranean and several vast surrounding districts. In order to
attain this end, Eome yielded herself to
military law, and as the fruit springs from
the seed, a military despotism was the natural * consequence. Thus was the Empire
formed. Towards the end of the first century
of our era, society seemed at last to have
attained to order and tranquillity. In reality
it was nothing but decay and decline. In
the horrible strife by which nations had
been overcome, cities perished by hundreds
and men by millions. During an entire century the conquerors themselves massacred
each other, and the civilised world having
lost its free men, lost the half of its inhabitants. Citizens, converted into subjects, and

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no longer pursuing noble ends, abandoned
themselves to indolence and luxury, refusing
to marry, and ceasing to raise up children.
Machinery being unknown and the hand the
only instrument of labour, the slaves, whose
lot it was to provide for the pleasures, pomp,
and refinements of society, disappeared under a burden too heavy for them to bear.
At the expiration of four hundred years the
enervated, depopulated empire had no men
and no energy left to repel barbarians. The
flood of invaders consequently broke in
upon them, sweeping away all barriers;
after the first there came another, and again
another, and so on for a period of five
hundred years more. The evils they inflicted cannot be described. Communities
were exterminated, monuments were destroyed, fields were devastated, and towns
were burnt; art and science were degraded
and forgotten, and industry ruined; fear, ignorance, and brutality reigned supreme. The
barbarians were complete savages, similar
a

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to the Hurons and Iroquois encamped in
the midst of a cultivated civilised world
like ours. Imagine a herd of wild bulls
let loose amidst the furniture and decorations of a palace, and after this another
herd, their hoofs destroying what the first
had left, and both these scarcely installed
amidst the ruins, * obliged to arouse and
oppose fresh swarms of bellowing greedy
invaders. When, at last, the tenth century
came and the last horde had made its lair
and glutted itself, men seemed to be in no
better condition. The barbarian chiefs becoming feudal barons, fought amongst themselves, pillaging peasants and burning their
crops, robbing the merchants, and wantonly
maltreating their miserable serfs. The land
remained waste, and provisions became scarce.
In the eleventh century forty out of seventy
years were years of famine.
A monk,
Eaoul Glaber, relates that it got to be common to eat human flesh; a butcher was
burnt alive for exposing it for sale in his stall.

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Add to this universal poverty and filth, and
a total neglect of the simplest of hygienic
principles, and you can well understand how
leprosy, pests, and epidemics, becoming acclimated, raged as if upon their native soil.
People degenerated to the condition of the
anthropophagi of ISFew Zealand, to the ignoble
brutality of the Papous and Caledonians, to
the very lowest stages of human degradation.
Eeminiscences of the past only served to increase the misery of the present; the few reflecting minds who still read the ancients were
the only ones at all capable, and this vaguely,
of appreciating the depth of the vast abyss
into which the human species had been falling
for a thousand years.
You may divine the sentiments which
such a condition of things, so extreme and
so lasting, generated in people's breasts.
On the one hand there was universal depression, distaste for life, and the deepest
melancholy; ' the world,' said a writer of
that day, ' is nothing but a sink of sin and
G 2

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corruption.' Life seemed to furnish a foretaste of hell. Many withdrew into retirement ; and not alone the poor, the feeble,
and women, but sovereign lords, and even
kings ; such as possessed delicate and noble
natures preferred the tranquillity and monotony of the cloister. On the approach of
the year one thousand a general belief in the
extinction of the world prevailed, and many,
seized with fright, made over their property
to churches and convents. On the other
hand, and coupled with this terror and despondency, there arose an extraordinary
degree of nervous susceptibility. When men
are very miserable they become excitable,
like invalids and prisoners; sensibility increases, acquiring a sort of feminine delicacy;
they entertain caprices, oscillate between
violence and despair, and display excesses
and effusions of sentiment from which
they are free in a healthy state; they no
longer entertain moderate sentiments consistent with steady virile action. They

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indulge in revery, burst into tears, sink down
on their knees, and become incapable of
providing for themselves; they work themselves into transports of exquisite tenderness and ecstatic delight, and yearn to give
form and substance to the enthusiastic conceptions of their overwrought intemperate
imaginations; in short, they are qualified
for the dominion of love. Hence there appears in these days a passion exaggerated
beyond all bounds, and unknown to the
grave and virile souls of antiquity, namely,
the chivalric mystic love of the middle ages.
The calm rational love of wedlock was
subordinated to the ecstatic and unruly love
encountered outside of wedlock. Its subtleties were carefully defined and embodied in
the maxims of tribunals presided over by
ladies. It was decreed that 'love could
not exist between spouses,' and that c love
could refuse love nothing.'* Woman was
no longer considered as flesh and blood like
* Andre le Cliapelain,

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man, but was converted into a divinity,
while man was only too well compensated
in the privilege of adoring and serving her.
Human love was regarded as a celestial
sentiment leading to divine love and confounded with it. Poets transformed their
mistresses into supernatural virtues, and implored them to guide them through the
empyrean to the tabernacle of God. You
can easily appreciate the hold the Christian
faith derived from such sentiments. Distaste
for society, ecstatic visions, despondency,
and infinite yearnings for tender sympathy,
naturally inclined men to a doctrine representing the earth as a vale of tears, the present life a period of trial, rapturous union
with the Divinity as supreme happiness,
and the love of God as the first of duties.
Sensibility, coloured with grief or always
stimulated, found its aliment in the extremes
of terror and of hope, in pictures of flaming
gulfs and eternal perdition, and in conceptions of a radiant paradise and of ineffable

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delights. Thus supported, Christianity ruled
all minds, inspired art, and gave employment to artists. Gothic architecture accordingly made its appearance; 'society,' says
a contemporary, 'divested itself of its old
rags in order to clothe its churches in robes
of whiteness.5
Let us observe the growth of the new
Gothic edifice. In opposition to the religions
of antiquity, which were all local, belonging
to castes or to families, the Christian religion
addresses itself to the multitude, and summons all men to salvation. It was necessary
accordingly for this new edifice to be very
large and capable of containing the entire
population of any one city or district—the
women, the children, the serfs, the artisans,
the rich, the poor, and the great. The
small cella once occupied by the Greek god,
and the portico devoted to the processions of
free citizens, were not sufficiently capacious
to accommodate this immense crowd. An
enormous structure was required, lofty naves

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

multiplied and crossed with others, and
measureless arches and colossal columns ;
mountains had to be levelled by generations of workmen flocking for centuries to
it to labour for the salvation of their souls
before the monument could be completed.
The men who frequent it are saddened,
and the ideas they come in quest of, mournful.
They meditate over their miserable
existence, full of trouble and bounded with
a gulf, over hell and its endless punishments,
over the sufferings and passion of Christ
crucified, and those of persecuted and tortured saints and martyrs. Listening to such
religious teaching, and supporting the burden of their own fears, they could ill accommodate themselves to the simple beauty and
joyous effect of pure light; the broad invigorating light of day is accordingly excluded ; the interior of the edifice remains
sombre and lugubrious ; all the light that
penetrates through its openings is transformed into purple and crimson tints and

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129

the tints of topaz and amethyst, into strange
mystic flickering hues, seeming to afford
glimpses of the splendours of paradise.
Delicate over-excited imaginations like
these are not content with simple architectural forms. And first, form in itself
is not sufficient to interest them. It must
be a symbol of and designate some august
mystery. The edifice with its transverse
naves represents the cross on which Christ
died; its circular window with its brilliant
petals figures the rose of eternity, all the
leaves of which are redeemed souls ; all the
dimensions of its parts correspond to sacred
numbers. Again, these forms in their richness, strangeness, boldness, delicacy, and
immensity, harmonise with the intemperance
and curiosity of a morbid fancy. Vivid
sensations—frequent, bizarre, varied and extreme—are necessary for such minds. They
reject the column, the horizontal and transverse beams, the round arch ; in short, the
solid construction, balanced proportions, and
G 3

130

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AST.

beautiful simplicity of antique architecture;
they manifest no sympathy for those noble
creations that seem to have been born
and to last without effort, whose beauty
and existence are inseparable, and the
inherent excellence of which needs no
addition and requires no ornament.
The principle they adopt is not the plain
half-circle of the arcade or the simple angle
formed by the column and the architrave,
but the comphcated union of two curves
intersected by each other, forming the ogive.
They aspire to the gigantic; they cover square
acres of ground with masses of stone, bind
pillars together in monstrous columns, suspend galleries in the air, elevate arches to
the skies, and stage upon stage of belfry
until their spires are lost in the clouds.
They refine on the delicacy of forms ; they
surround doors with series of statuettes, and
festoon walls with trefoils, gables, and gargoyles ; they intermingle the tortuous tracery
of mullions with the motley hues of stained

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glass ; the choir seems to be embroidered
with lace, while tombs, altars, stalls, and
towers are covered with mazes of slender
columns and fringes of leaves and statues. It
seems as if they wished to attain at once
infinite grandeur and infinite littleness, seeking to overwhelm the mind on either side, on
the one hand with the vastness of a mass, and
on the other with a prodigious quantity of
details. Their object was evidently to produce an extraordinary sensation ; they aimed
to dazzle and bewilder.
Proportionately, therefore, to the development of this style of architecture, it becomes
more and more paradoxical. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the age of the
flamboyant Gothic of Strasburg, Milan, York,
Nuremburg, and the Church of Brou, solidity
seems to have been wholly abandoned for
ornament. The cathedral sometimes bristles
with a profusion of pinnacles, and its exterior
is draped with a lacework of mouldings;
walls are hollowed out, and almost wholly

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

absorbed by windows; they lack strength,
and, without the buttresses raised against
them, would fall; ever disintegrating, it is
necessary to establish colonies of masons
about them constantly, to repair their constant decay. The embroidered stonework,
more and more frail as it ascends the spire,
cannot sustain itself; it has to be fastened to
a skeleton of iron, and as iron rusts, the blacksmith is summoned to contribute his share
towards propping up this unstable, delusive
magnificence. In the interior the decoration
is so exuberant and complex, the groinings
so richly display their luxurious tangled vegetation, and the stalls, pulpit, and railings, so
many intricate, tortuous, fantastic arabesques,
that the church no longer seems to be a sacred monument, but rather a rare example of
the jeweller's art. It is a vast structure of
variegated glass, a gigantic piece of filigree
work, a splendid fete costume, as laboriously
trimmed as that of a queen or a bride; it
is a dress due to nervous,7 over-excited,

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feminine imaginations, as were the extravagant costumes of the day, the delicate morbid
poesy of which denotes in its excess the
unnatural sentiments, disordered brain, and
feverish, impotent aspiration of an epoch to
which we owe the development of the
knight and the monk.
This style of architecture, which has lasted
for four centuries, is not confined to one
country or to one description of edifice ; it
is spread over all Europe, from Scotland to
Sicily, and is employed in all civil and religious and public and private monuments.
Not only do cathedrals and chapels bear its
imprint, but fortresses, palaces, costumes,
dwellings, furniture, and equipments. Its
universality accordingly attests the great
moral crisis, at once morbid and sublime,
which, during the whole of the middle
ages, exalted, and at the same time disordered the human intellect,

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE CLASSIC EPOCH.
Frencli Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century—The
Courtier — Ruling Taste—Tragedy — The Aristocratic
Sentiments of Society—Importation of French Tragedy
into other European Countries.

institutions, like human bodies,
make and unmake themselves through their
own forces ; health or unhealthiness in either
is due to the nature of their organisation and
their situation. Among the feudal chiefs of the
middle ages that ruled men and plundered
them, one in every country, stronger, more
politic, and better placed than others, constituted himself a conservator of public order ;
sustained by public sentiment, he by degrees
weakened and subdued, or else controlled
HUMAN

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135

and attached to himself the others, and, organising a systematic obedient administration, became under the name of king the
head of the nation. Towards the fifteenth
century, the barons, who were formerly the
equals of the king, became his officers, and
towards the seventeenth century they were
simply his courtiers.
Note the significance of this term. A
courtier is a member of the king's court;
that is to say, a person charged with some
function or domestic duty in the palace—
either chamberlain, equerry, or gentleman
of the antechamber—receiving a salary,
and addressing his master with all the deference and ceremonial obsequiousness proper
to such an employment. But this person is
not a valet, as in oriental monarchies, for his
ancestor, the grandfather of his grandfather,
was the equal, the companion, the peer of
the king; and on this account he himself
belongs to a privileged class, that of noblemen. He does not serve his prince solely

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

through personal interest; his devotion to
him is a point of honour. The prince in his
turn never neglects to treat him with consideration. Louis XIV. threw his cane out
of the window, in order not to be tempted to
strike Lauzun, who had offended him. The
courtier is honoured by his master, and regarded as one of his society. He lives in
familiarity with him, dances at his balls, dines
at his table, rides in the same carriage, sits
in the same chairs, and frequents the same
salon. From such a basis court life arose ;
first in Italy and Spain, subsequently in
France, and afterwards in England, in Germany, and in the north of Europe. France
was its centre, and Louis XIV. gave to it its
principal eclat
Let us study the effect of this new state of
things on minds and characters. The king's
salon is the first in the country, and is fre-*
quented by the most select society; the
admired personage, therefore, the accomplished man whom everybody accepts for a

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137

model, is the nobleman enjoying familiarity
with his sovereign. This nobleman entertains
generous sentiments; he believes himself of a
superior race, and he says to himself, noblesse
oblige. He is more sensitive than other men
on the point of honour, and freely risks his
life at the slightest insult. Under Louis XIII.
four thousand noblemen were killed in duels.
Contempt of danger in the eyes of this nobleman is the first of obligations. The dandy, the
worldling, so choice of his ribbons, so careful
of his perruque,is ready to encamp in the mud
of Flanders and expose himself to bullets for
hours together at Neerwinden. When Luxembourg announces that he is about to give
battle, Versailles is deserted ; all these young
perfumed gallants hasten off to the army
as if they were going to a ball. The nobleman, furthermore, through a remnant of the
spirit of ancient feudalism, regards the
monarch as his natural legitimate chief: he
knows he is bound to him, as the vassal
formerly was to his suzerain, and at need will

138

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

give him his blood, his property, and his life.
Under Louis XVI. noblemen voluntarily
placed themselves at the king's disposal, and
on the 10th of August many were slain on
his behalf. •
But they are nevertheless courtiers, that is
to say, men of the world, and in this respect perfectly polite and polished men.
The King himself sets them an example.
Louis XIV. even doffed his hat to a chambermaid, and the Memoirs of St. Simon mention a duke who saluted so frequently that
he was obliged to cross the courts of Versailles bareheaded. The courtier for the
same reasons is accomplished in all that appertains to good breeding; language never
fails him in difSScult circumstances ; he is a
diplomat, master of himself, an adept in the
art of dissembling ; he can mollify, flatter,
and manage others ; he never gives offence,
and often pleases. All these qualifications
and these sentiments proceed from an aristocratic spirit tempered by social attrition ;

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they attain to perfection in this court and
in this century. Anybody of the present
time disposed to admire the choice flowers of
this lost and delicate species, need not look
for them in our equalised, rude, and mixed
society, but must turn to the elegant, formal,
monumental parterres in which they formerly
flourished.
Yon can imagine that people so constituted must have chosen pleasures appropriate
to their character. Their taste, indeed, like
their persons, was noble ; for they were not
only noble by birth, but also through their
sentiments, and correct because they were
educated to practise and respect what was
becoming to them. It was this taste which,
in the seventeenth century, fashioned all
their works of art—the serious, elevated,
severe productions of Poussin and Lesueur,
the grave, pompous, elaborate architecture
of Mansart and Perrault, and the stately
symmetrical gardens of Lenotre. You will
find its traces in the furniture, costumes,

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THE PHILOSOPHY .OF ART.

house decoration, and carriages of the
engravings and paintings of Perelle, Sebastian Leclerc, Eigaud, Nanteuil, and many
others. Versailles with its groups of wellbred gods, its symmetrical alleys, its mythological water-works, its "artificial basins, its
clipped trees modelled into architectural
designs, is a masterpiece in this direction ; all
its edifices and parterres, everything belonging to it, was constructed for men keenly
sensitive to their dignity and strict observers
of the recognised standard of social propriety. But the imprint is still more visible
in the literature of the epoch. Never in
France or in Europe has the art of fine
writing been carried to such perfection.
The greatest of French authors, as you are
aware, belong to this epoch—Bossuet, Pascal^
La Fontaine, Moliere, Corneille, Eacine, La
Eochefoucauld, Madame de S^vigne, Boileau,
La Bruyere, Bourdaloue, and others. Not only
were these men good writers, but everybody
else; Courier asserted that a chambermaid

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of those days knew more about style than a
modern academy. In fact, a good style
filled the atmosphere; people unconsciously
inhaled it; it was diffused in correspondence
and in conversation ; the court taught i t ; it
was one of the details of daily experience.
The man who aimed to be polished and correct in deportment, got to be so likewise in
the attributes of language and of style.
Among so many branches of literature there
is one, tragedy, which reached a singular
degree of perfection, and which more than
all the rest furnishes the most striking example of the concordance apparent between
man and his works and a certain social
condition and the arts.
The general features of this tragedy first
claim attention ; they are calculated to please
noblemen and members of the court. The
poet takes pains to remove the coarseness
of reality; he allows no murders on the
stage; he disguises brutality and repudiates
violence, such as blows, butcheries, yells, and

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

groans, everything that might offend the
senses of a spectator accustomed to moderation and the refinement of the salon. For
the same reason he excludes all confusion
and disorder, never abandoning himself to
the caprices of fancy and imagination like
Shakespeare; his plan admits of no unforeseen incidents, no romantic poesy. He
elaborates his scenes, explains entrances,
graduates the interest of his piece, prepares
the way for sudden turns of fortune, and
skilfully anticipates and directs denouements.
Finally, he polishes all this with a clear,
uniform dialogue, displaying a'masterly versification composed of the choicest terms
and the most harmonious rhyme. In respect to the costume of this drama, the engravings of the time show us heroes and
princesses appearing in furbelows, embroideries, bootees, swords and plumes—a dress,
in short, Greek in name, but French in taste
and fashion; such as the king, the- dauphin,
and the princesses paraded in, to the music

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of violins, at the court performances of
ballets.
We must also remark this, that all his
characters are court personages, kings and
queens, princes and princesses of royal blood,
ambassadors, ministers, officers of the guard,
menins* dependants and confidants.
The
associates of princes are not here, as in
Greek tragedy, slaves of the palace, nurses
born under their master's roof, but ladies-inwaiting, equerries, and gentlemen of the
antechamber, charged with certain duties in
the royal household ; we readily detect their
superior language, their skill in flattery, their
perfect education and exquisite deportment,
and the monarchical sentiments of subjects
and vassals. Their masters, like themselves,
are noblemen of the seventeenth century,
proud and courteous, heroic in Corneille and
noble in Eacine ; they are gallant to ladies,
faithful to their name and race, capable of
* Foster-brother, school-companion,* or other intimate
of this class.

144

THE PHILOSOPHY OP ART.

sacrificing their dearest interests and strongest affections to their honour, and incapable
of allowing a word or an act incompatible
with the severest prescriptions of decorum.
Iphigenia, in Eacine, delivered up by her
father to her executioners, does not regret
life, weeping like a girl, as in Euripides, but
thinks it her duty to obey her father and her
king without a murmur, and to die without
shedding a tear, because she is a princess.
Achilles, who in Homer stamps, still unappeased, on the body of the dying Hector,
feeling like a lion or wolf, as if he would
c
eat the raw flesh? of his vanquished antagonist, is, in Eacine, a Prince of Conde, at
once brilliant and seductive, passionate concerning honour, devoted to the fair, impetuous, it is true, and irritable, but with the
teeming vivacity of a young officer who,
even when most excited, maintains good
breeding and never stoops to brutality. All
these characters are models of polite address,
and show a knowledge of the world never

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145

at fault. Read, in Racine, the first dialogue
of Oreste and Pyrrhus, and the whole of the
part of Acomat and of Ulysse; nowhere is
greater tact or oratorical dexterity apparent;
nowhere more ingenious compliments, more
insinuating flattery; such an appropriate
exordium, so quick an insight into motives, and such complete mastery of striking
arguments so cunningly devised and developed with such subtlety. The most impetuous, the wildest lovers — Hippolyte,
Britannicus,
Pyrrhus,
Oreste, and Xiphares—are accomplished cavaliers who turn
a madrigal and bow with the utmost
politeness. However violent the passions of
Hermione, Andromaque, Roxane, and Berenice, they preserve the tone of the best
society. Mithridate, Phedre, and Athalie,
when expiring, express themselves in correct
periods, for a prince has to be a prince to the
last, and die in due form. This drama might
be called a perfect picture of polite society.
Like Gothic architecture, it represents a poll

146

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

sitive complete side of the human intellect,
and this is why, like that, it has become so
universal. It has been imported into or imitated, along with its accompanying taste,
literature, and manners, by every court of
Europe—in England, after the restoration of
the Stuarts ; in Spain, on the advent of the
Bourbons; and in Italy, Germany, and Eussia,
in the eighteenth century. We are warranted
in saying that at this epoch France was the
educator of Europe ; she was the source
from which was derived all that was elegant
and agreeable, whatever was proper in style,
delicate in idea, and perfect in the art of
social intercourse. If a savage Muscovite, a
dull German, a stolid Englishman, or any other
civilised or half-civilised man of the North
quit his brandy, pipe, and furs, his feudal or
hunting or rural life, it was to French salons
and to French books he betook himself, in
order to acquire the arts of politeness, urbanity, and conversation.

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CHAPTER IX.
THE MODERN EPOCH.—MUSIC.
The French Kevolution—Effect of Civil Equality, Machinery, and the Comforts of Existence—Decay of Traditional Authority—The Representative. Man—Development of Music—Its Origin in Germany and Italy; and
its Dependence on Modem Sentiments—^Universality
of Music.

brilliant society did not last; its very
development caused its dissolution. The
government being absolute, ended in becoming negligent and tyrannical; and, besides
this, the king bestowed the best offices and
the greatest favour only on such of the nobles
of- his court as enjoyed his intimacy. This
appeared unjust to the bourgeoisie and the
people, who, having greatly increased in
THIS

H2

148

THE PHILOSOPHY OP AET.

numbers, wealth, and intelligence, felt their
power augment in proportion to the growth
of their discontent. The French Eevolution
was accordingly their work; and after ten
years of trial they established a system of democracy and equality, in which, according to
a fixed order of promotion, all civil employments were ordinarily accessible to everybody. The wars of the empire and the contagion of example gradually spread this system
beyond the frontiers of France, and whatever may be local differences and temporary delays, it is now evident that the tendency
of the whole of Europe is to imitate it. The
new construction of society, coupled with
the invention of industrial machinery, and
the great abatement of rudeness in manners
and customs, changed the condition as well
as the character of man. Henceforth, man
is exempt from arbitrary measures, and is
protected by a good police. However lowly
born, all careers are open to him ; an enormous increase of useful articles places

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149

within reach of the poorest, conveniences
and pleasures of which, two centuries ago,
the rich were entirely ignorant. Again, the
rigour of authority is mitigated, both in
society and in the family; a father is now
the comrade of his children, and the citizen
has become the equal of the noble. Human
life, in short, displays a lesser degree of
misery, and a lighter degree of oppression.
Opposed to this, however, we see ambition
and cupidity spreading their wings. Accustomed to comfort and luxuries, and obtaining here and there glimpses of happiness,
man begins to regard happiness and comfort
as his due. The more he obtains the more
exacting he becomes, and the more hi^
pretensions surpass his acquisitions.
The
practical sciences also having made great
progress, and education being diffused, the
mind is free, and surrenders itself up to bold
conceptions; hence it happens that men,
abandoning the traditions which formerly
regulated their beliefs, deem themselves

150

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

capable, through intellect alone, of attaining to the highest truths. Questions of
every kind are agitated, moral, political, and
religious; men are groping their way in
every direction. For fifty years past this
strange conflict of systems and sects has been
going on, each tendering us new creeds and
perfect theories of happiness.
Such a state of things is of serious consequence on minds and ideas. The representative man, that is to say, the character
who occupies the stage, and to whom the
spectators award the most interest and
sympathy, is the melancholy, ambitious
dreanier—Bene, Faust, Werther, and Manfred
—a being with a restless unsatisfied heart,
agitated with vague conceptions and incurably miserable. And he is miserable for
two reasons. In the first place, he is oversensitive, too easily affected by the lesser
evils of life ; ' his appetite for sweet victuals
is too enormous,' he is too much accustomed
to comforts, he has not undergone the half

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boorish, half feudal education of our ancestors. He has not been roughly handled by
his father, whipped at college, obliged to
maintain respectful silence in the presence
of great personages, and had his mental
growth retarded by domestic discipline.
He has not been compelled, as in ancient
times, to use his own arm and sword to
protect himself, to travel on horseback, and
to sleep in disagreeable lodgings. In the soft
atmosphere of modern comfort, and indulging
sedentary habits, he has got to be delicate,
nervous, and excitable, less capable of accommodating himself to the modes of life
which exact effort and impose trouble.
On the other hand, he is sceptical. Society and religion both being disturbed—in
the midst of a pMe-m^le of doctrines and an
irruption of new theories—his precocious
judgment, too rapidly instructed, and too
soon unbridled, precipitates him early and
blindly off the beaten track made smooth
for his fathers by habit, and which they

152

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AST.

have trodden, led on by tradition and
governed by authority. All the signposts
that have served as guides for thought
are removed, and he abandons himself to
the vast and unknown field before him;
impelled by almost superhuman ambition
and curiosity he darts off in the pursuit of
absolute truth and infinite happiness. Love,
glory, knowledge, power, such as we find
these in this world, do not satisfy him ; his
intemperate desires, irritated by abortive
conquests and by the satiety of enjoyment,
leave him at length prostrate amid the ruins
of his own nature, his jaded impotent imagination providing him no longer with exalted
visions of the coveted unknown, or sustaining
the vague phantoms that elude his grasp in
the present. This is the evil which has been
styled the great disease of the age. Forty
years ago it was in full force, and even
underneath the seeming frigidity or gloomy
impassibility of the practical mind of the
present day it is still apparent.

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I have no leisure to point out the innumerable effects of this mental condition on works
of art. You may trace it in the great development of the lyrical, sentimental, and
philosophical poetry of France, Germany9
and England; again, in the corruption and
enrichment of language and in the invention
of new classes of characters in literature,
apparent in all the great modern writers,
from Chateaubriand to Balzac, from Goethe
to Heine, from Cowper to Byron, and from
Alfieri to Leopardi. You will find analogous
symptoms in the arts of design if you observe their forced, exaggerated and painfully archeological style, their aim at dramatic effect, psychological expression, and local
fidelity; again, if you remark the confusion
of ideas which has embroiled schools and
injured processes; if you fix your attention
on the countless gifted minds animated with
fresh emotions and opening new roads to
them; and if you analyse the profound
sympathy for scenery which has given birth
H 3

154

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

to a complete and original landscape art.
But there is another art, Music, which has
suddenly reached an extraordinary development. This development is one of the
salient characteristics of our epoch, and the
dependence of .this on the modern mind, the
ties by which they are connected, I shall
endeavour to point out to you.
This art was born, and necessarily, in two
countries where people sing naturally, Italy
and Germany. It, was gestating for a century and a half in Italy, from Palestrina to
Pergolese, as formerly painting from Giotto
to Massaccio, discovering processes and feeling its way in order to acquire its resources.
At the commencement of the eighteenth
century it suddenly burst forth, with Scarlatti,
Marcello, and Handel. This is a most remarkable epoch. Painting ceased to flourish,
and in the midst of political stagnation,
voluptuous, effeminate customs prevailed, furnishing an assembly of sigisbes, Lindors and
'fine ladies' for the roulades and tender

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155

sentimental scenes of the opera. Grave, ponderous Germany, the latest in acquiring selfconsciousness, now succeeds in displaying
the severity and grandeur of its religious
sentiment, its profound musical knowledge,
and its vague melancholy instincts in the
sacred music of Sebastian Bach, anticipating
the evangelical epic of Klopstock. In the
old and in the new nation the reign and
expression of sentiment is beginning. Between the two, half-Germanic and halfItalian, is Austria, blending together the
spirit of each, producing Haydn, Gluck,
and Mozart. Music now becomes cosmopolite and universal on the confines of that
great mental convulsion styled the French
Eevolution, as formerly painting under the
impulse of the great intellectual revival
known under the name of the Eenaissance.
We need not be astonished at the appearance of this new art, for it corresponds to
the appearance of a new genius—that of
the ruling morbid, restless, ardent character

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

I have attempted to portray for you.
It
is to this spirit that Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Weber formerly addressed themselves, and to which Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and
Verdi are now striving to accommodate
themselves.
Music is the organ of this over-refined
excessive sensibility and vague boundless
aspiration ; it is expressly designed for this
service, and no art so well performs its task.
And this is so because, on the one hand,
music is founded on a more or less remote
imitation of a cry which is the natural,
spontaneous, complete expression of passion,
and which, affecting us through a corporeal
stimulus, instantly arouses involuntary sympathy, so that the delicate, nervous spirit
tremblingly alive to emotion, finds in it its
impulse, its echo, and its ministrant. On
the other hand, founded on relationships of
sounds which represent no living organism,
and which, especially in instrumental music,
seem to be the reveries of an incorporeal

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157

soul, it is better adapted than any other art
to express fleeting thoughts, vague dreams,
objectless limitless desires, the grand and
melancholy turmoil of an agitated breast
aspiring to everything and attaching itself
to nothing. This is why, along with the
discontent, the agitations, and the hopes of
modern democracy, music has left its natal
countries and diffused itself over all Europe;
and why you see at the present time the most
complicated symphonies attracting crowds
in France, where, thus far, the national
music has been reduced to the song and
the melodies of the Vaudeville.

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

CHAPTER

X.

SUMMARY.
The Law of the Production of Works of Art—The Four
Terms of the Series—Practical Application of the Law
to a Study of all the Arts and of every Literature.

THE foregoing illustrations, gentlemen, seem
to me sufficient to establish the law governing the character and creation of works of
art. And not only do they establish it, but
they accurately define it. In the beginning
of this section I stated that the work of art is
determined by a condition of things consisting
of all surrounding social and intellectual influences. We may now advance another
step, and note precisely in their order each
link of the chain, connecting together cause
and effect.

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

159

In the various illustrations we have considered, you have remarked first, a general
situation, in other words, a certain universal
condition of good or evil, one of servitude
or of liberty, a state of wealth or of
poverty, a particular form of society, a
certain species of religious faith ; in Greece,
the free martial city, with its slaves ; in the
middle ages, feudal oppression, invasion, and
brigandage, and an exalted phase of Christianity ; the court life of the seventeenth century ; the industrial democracy of the nineteenth, guided by the sciences; in short, a
group of circumstances controlling man, and
to which he is compelled to resign himself.
This situation developes in man corresponding desires, distinct aptitudes, and special
sentiments—physical activity, a tendency to
revery; here, a rude and there a refined life;
sometimes warlike propensities, again whimsical fancies, a love of pleasure, and a
thousand other complex and varied peculiarities. In Greece we see physical perfection

160

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

and a balance of faculties which no excess of
manual or central activity disturbs; in the
middle ages, the intemperance of excited
imaginations, and the extremes of a feminine
sensibility ; in the seventeenth century, the
polish and good-breeding of society and
aristocratic elegance; and in modern times,
the grandeur of unchained ambitions and
the restlessness of unsatisfied yearnings.
Now, this group of sentiments, aptitudes,
and desires, constitutes, when concentrated
in one person and powerfully displayed by
him, the representative man, that is to say, a
model character to whom his contemporaries
award all their admiration and all their sympathy ; there is, for instance, in Greece, the
naked youth, of a fine race and accomplished
in all bodily exercise ; in the middle ages, the
ecstatic monk and the amorous knight; in the
seventeenth century, the perfect courtier; and
in our days, the melancholy insatiable Faust
or Werther.
Moreover, as this personage is the most

PRODUCTION OP THE WORK OF ART.

161

captivating, the most important and the most
conspicuous of all, it is he whom artists present to the public, now concentrated in an
ideal personage, when their art, like painting,
sculpture, the drama, the romance or the
epic, is imitative; now, dispersed in its elements, as in architecture and in music, where
art excites emotions without incarnating
them. All their labour may be summed up
as follows : they either represent this character or address themselves to i t ; the symphonies of Beethoven and the ' storied windows ' of cathedrals are addressed to it, and
it is represented in the Niobe group of antiquity and in the Agamemnon and Achilles
of Racine. All art, therefore, depends on it,
since it is devoted either to the embodiment
of this spirit or to ministering to its pleasure.
A general situation, provoking tendencies
and special faculties ; a representative man,
embodying these predominant tendencies
and faculties ; sounds, forms, colours, or language giving this character sensuous form,

162

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AET.

or which comport with the tendencies and
faculties comprising it, such are the four
terms of the series ; the first involves the
second, the second the third, and the third
the fourth, so that the slightest variation of
either involves a corresponding variation in
those that follow, and reveals a corresponding
variation in those that precede it, permitting
abstract reasoning in either direction in an
ascending or descending scale of progression.* As far as I am capable of judging,
this formula embraces everything. If, now,
we insert between these diverse terms the
accessory causes occurring to modify their
effects ; if, in order to explain the sentiments
of an epoch, we add an examination of race
to that of milieu; if, in order to explain the
works of art of any age, we consider, besides
the prevailing tendencies of that age, the
* This law may he applied to the study of all literatures
and to every art. The student may begin with the fourth
term, proceeding from this to the first, strictly adhering to
the order of the series.

PRODUCTION" OF THE WORK OF ART.

163

particular period of the art, and the particular sentiments of each artist, we shall then
derive from the law not only the great revolutions and general forms of man's imagination, but, again, the differences between
national schools, the incessant variations of
styles, and the original characteristics of the
works of every great master. Thus followed
out, such an explanation will be complete,
since it furnishes at once the general traits
of each school, and the distinctive traits
which, in this school, characterise individuals.
We are about to enter upon this study in
relation to Italian art; it is a long and
difficult task, and I have need of your attention in order to pursue it to the end.

164

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

CHAPTER XI.
THE PRESENT.
Application of the Law to the Present—The Milieu renewing itself constantly, Art renews itself—Hopes for
the future.

proceeding further, gentlemen, there
is a practical conclusion due to our researches, and which is applicable to the present order of things.
You have observed that each situation produces a certain intellectual condition followed
by a corresponding class of works of art. This
is why every new situation must produce a
new state of mind, and consequently a new
class of works, and therefore why the milieu
of the present day must produce its works as
BEFORE

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

165

the milieux that have gone before it. This
is not a simple supposition based on the
eagerness of expectation; it is the result of
a law resting on the authority of experience
and on the testimony of history. When a
law is once established it is good for all
time; the liaisons of things in the present
accompany liaisons of things in the past and
in the future. Accordingly, it need not be
said in these days that art is exhausted. It is
true that certain schools no longer exist and
can no longer be revived; that certain arts
languish, and that the future upon which
we are entering does not promise to furnish
the aliment that these require. But art itself, the faculty of perceiving and expressing
the dominant character of objects, is as enduring as the civilisation of which it is the
best and earliest fruit. What its forms will
be, and which of the five great arts will provide the vehicle of expression of future sentiment, we are not called upon to decide ; we
have the right to affirm that new forms will

166

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART.

arise, and an appropriate mould be found in
which to cast them. We have only to open
our eyes to see a change going on in the
condition of men, and consequently in their
minds, so profound, so universal, and so rapid
that no other century has witnessed the like of
it. The three causes that have formed the
modern mind continue to operate with
increasing efficacy. You are all aware that
discoveries in the positive sciences are multiplying daily ; that geology, organic che
mistry, history, entire branches of physics
and zoology, are contemporary productions ;
that the growth of experience is infinite, and
the applications of discovery unlimited ; that
means of communication and transport,
cultivation, trade, mechanical contrivances,
all the elements of human power, are
yearly spreading and concentrating beyond all expectation.
None of you are
ignorant that the political machine works
smoother in the same sense ; that communities, becoming more rational and hu-

PRODUCTION OF THE WORK OF ART.

167

mane, are watchful of internal order, protecting talent, aiding the feeble and the
poor; in short, that everywhere, and in
every way, man is cultivating his intellectual
faculties and ameliorating his social condition. We cannot accordingly deny Hhat
men's habits, ideas, and condition transform
themselves, nor reject this consequence, that
such renewal of minds and things brings
along with it a renewal of art. The first
effect of this revolution was the glorious
Erench school of 1830 ; it remains for us to
witness the second—the field which is open
to your ambition and your labour. On its
very threshold, you have a right to augur
well of your century and of yourselves; for
the patient study we have just terminated
shows you that to produce beautiful works,
the sole condition necessary is that which
the great Goethe indicated : ' Fill your mind
and heart, however large, with the ideas and
sentiments of your age, and the work will
follow.'

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