[65]
[65] The Philosophy of Art. By H. Taine. New York: Leypoldt &;
Holt. 1867.
We are glad of a chance to introduce to our readers one of the
works of a great writer. Though not yet[66] widely known in this
country, M. Taine has obtained a very high reputation in Europe.
He is still quite a young man, but is nevertheless the author of
nineteen goodly volumes, witty, acute, and learned; and already
he is often ranked with Renan, Littre, and Sainte-Beuve, the
greatest living French writers.
[66] That is, in 1868.
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was born at Vouziers, among the grand
forests of Ardennes, in 1828, and is therefore about forty years
old. His family was simple in habits and tastes, and entertained
a steadfast belief in culture, along with the possession of a
fair amount of it. His grandfather was sub-prefect at Rocroi, in
1814 and 1815, under the first restoration of the Bourbons. His
father, a lawyer by profession, was the first instructor of his
son, and taught him Latin, and from an uncle, who had been in
America, he learned English, while still a mere child. Having
gone to Paris with his mother in 1842, he began his studies at
the College Bourbon and in 1848 was promoted to the ecole
Normale. Weiss, About, and Prevost-Paradol were his
contemporaries at this institution. At that time great liberty
was enjoyed in regard to the order and the details of the
exercises; so that Taine, with his surprising rapidity, would do
in one week the work laid out for a month, and would spend the
remainder of the time in private reading. In 1851 he left
college, and after two or three unsatisfactory attempts at
teaching, in Paris and in the provinces, he settled down at Paris
as a private student. He gave himself the very best elementary
preparation which a literary man can have,--a thorough course in
mathematics and the physical sciences. His studies in anatomy and
physiology were especially elaborate and minute. He attended the
School of Medicine as regularly as if he expected to make his
daily bread in the profession. In this way, when at the age of
twenty-five he began to write books, M. Taine was a really
educated man; and his books show it. The day is past when a man
could write securely, with a knowledge of the classics alone. We
doubt if a philosophical critic is perfectly educated for his
task, unless he can read, for instance, Donaldson's "New
Cratylus" on the one hand, and Rokitansky's "Pathological
Anatomy" on the other, for the sheer pleasure of the thing. At
any rate, it was an education of this sort which M. Taine, at the
outset of his literary career, had secured. By this solid
discipline of mathematics, chemistry, and medicine, M. Taine
became that which above all things he now is,--a man possessed of
a central philosophy, of an exact, categorical, well-defined
system, which accompanies and supports him in his most distant
literary excursions. He does not keep throwing out ideas at
random, like too many literary critics, but attaches all his
criticisms to a common fundamental principle; in short, he is not
a dilettante, but a savant.
His treatise on La Fontaine, in 1853, attracted much attention,
both the style and the matter being singularly fresh and
original. He has since republished it, with alterations which
serve to show that he can be docile toward intelligent
criticisms. About the same time he prepared for the French
Academy his work upon the historian Livy, which was crowned in
1855. Suffering then from overwork, he was obliged to make a
short journey to the Pyrenees, which he has since described in a
charming little volume, illustrated by Dore.
His subsequent works are a treatise on the French philosophers of
the present century, in which the vapid charlatanism of M. Cousin
is satisfactorily dealt with; a history of English literature in
five volumes; a humorous book on Paris; three volumes upon the
general theory of art; and two volumes of travels in Italy;
besides a considerable collection of historical and critical
essays. We think that several of these works would be interesting
to the American public, and might profitably be translated.
Some three or four years ago, M. Taine was appointed Professor in
the ecole des Beaux Arts, and we suppose his journey to Italy
must have been undertaken partly with a view to qualify himself
for his new position. He visited the four cities which may be
considered the artistic centres of Italy,--Rome, Naples,
Florence, and Venice,--and a large part of his account of his
journey is taken up with descriptions and criticisms of pictures,
statues, and buildings.
This is a department of criticism which, we may as well frankly
acknowledge, is far better appreciated on the continent of Europe
than in England or America. Over the English race there passed,
about two centuries ago, a deluge of Puritanism, which for a time
almost drowned out its artistic tastes and propensities. The
Puritan movement, in proportion to its success, was nearly as
destructive to art in the West, as Mohammedanism had long before
been in the East. In its intense and one-sided regard for
morality, Puritanism not only relegated the love for beauty to an
inferior place, but contemned and spat upon it, as something
sinful and degrading. Hence, the utter architectural impotence
which characterizes the Americans and the modern English; and
hence the bewildered ignorant way in which we ordinarily
contemplate pictures and statues. For two centuries we have been
removed from an artistic environment, and consequently can with
difficulty enter into the feelings of those who have all this
time been nurtured in love for art, and belief in art for its own
sake. These peculiarities, as Mr. Mill has ably pointed out, have
entered deep into our ethnic character. Even in pure morals there
is a radical difference between the Englishman and the inhabitant
of the continent of Europe. The Englishman follows virtue from a
sense of duty, the Frenchman from an emotional aspiration toward
the beautiful The one admires a noble action because it is right,
the other because it is attractive. And this difference underlies
the moral judgments upon men and events which are to be found
respectively in English and in continental literature. By keeping
it constantly in view, we shall be enabled to understand many
things which might otherwise surprise us in the writings of
French authors.
We are now slowly outgrowing the extravagances of Puritanism. It
has given us an earnestness and sobriety of character, to which
much of our real greatness is owing, both here and in the mother
country. It has made us stronger and steadier, but it has at the
same time narrowed us in many respects, and rendered our lives
incomplete. This incompleteness, entailed by Puritanism, we are
gradually getting rid of; and we are learning to admire and
respect many things upon which Puritanism set its mark of
contempt. We are beginning, for instance, to recognize the
transcendent merits of that great civilizing agency, the drama;
we no longer think it necessary that our temples for worshipping
God should be constructed like hideous barracks; we are gradually
permitting our choirs to discard the droning and sentimental
modern "psalm-tune" for the inspiring harmonies of Beethoven and
Mozart; and we admit the classical picture and the undraped
statue to a high place in our esteem. Yet with all this it will
probably be some time before genuine art ceases to be an exotic
among us, and becomes a plant of unhindered native growth. It
will be some time before we cease to regard pictures and statues
as a higher species of upholstery, and place them in the same
category with poems and dramas, duly reverencing them as
authentic revelations of the beauty which is to be found in
nature. It will be some time before we realize that art is a
thing to be studied, as well as literature, and before we can be
quite reconciled to the familiar way in which a Frenchman quotes
a picture as we would quote a poem or novel.
Artistic genius, as M. Taine has shown, is something which will
develop itself only under peculiar social circumstances; and,
therefore, if we have not art, we can perhaps only wait for it,
trusting that when the time comes it will arise among us. But
without originating, we may at least intelligently appreciate.
The nature of a work of art, and the mode in which it is
produced, are subjects well worthy of careful study. Architecture
and music, poetry, painting and sculpture, have in times past
constituted a vast portion of human activity; and without knowing
something of the philosophy of art, we need not hope to
understand thoroughly the philosophy of history.
In entering upon the study of art in general, one may find many
suggestive hints in the little books of M. Taine, reprinted from
the lectures which he has been delivering at the ecole des Beaux
Arts. The first, on the Philosophy of Art, designated at the head
of this paper, is already accessible to the American reader; and
translations of the others are probably soon to follow. We shall
for the present give a mere synopsis of M. Taine's general views.
And first it must be determined what a work of art is. Leaving
for a while music and architecture out of consideration, it will
be admitted that poetry, painting, and sculpture have one obvious
character in common: they are arts of IMITATION. This, says
Taine, appears at first sight to be their essential character. It
would appear that their great object is to IMITATE as closely as
possible. It is obvious that a statue is intended to imitate a
living man, that a picture is designed to represent real persons
in real attitudes, or the interior of a house, or a landscape,
such as it exists in nature. And it is no less clear that a novel
or drama endeavours to represent with accuracy real characters,
actions, and words, giving as precise and faithful an image of
them as possible. And when the imitation is incomplete, we say to
the painter, "Your people are too largely proportioned, and the
colour of your trees is false"; we tell the sculptor that his leg
or arm is incorrectly modelled; and we say to the dramatist,
"Never has a man felt or thought as your hero is supposed to have
felt and thought."
This truth, moreover, is seen. both in the careers of individual
artists, and in the general history of art. According to Taine,
the life of an artist may generally be divided into two parts. In
the first period, that of natural growth, he studies nature
anxiously and minutely, he keeps the objects themselves before
his eyes, and strives to represent them with scrupulous fidelity.
But when the time for mental growth ends, as it does with every
man, and the crystallization of ideas and impressions commences,
then the mind of the artist is no longer so susceptible to new
impressions from without. He begins to nourish himself from his
own substance. He abandons the living model, and with recipes
which he has gathered in the course of his experience, he
proceeds to construct a drama or novel, a picture or statue. Now,
the first period, says Taine, is that of genuine art; the second
is that of mannerism. Our author cites the case of Michael
Angelo, a man who was one of the most colossal embodiments of
physical and mental energy that the world has ever seen. In
Michael Angelo's case, the period of growth, of genuine art, may
be said to have lasted until after his sixtieth year. But look,
says Taine, at the works which he executed in his old age;
consider the Conversion of St. Paul, and the Last Judgment,
painted when he was nearly seventy. Even those who are not
connoisseurs can see that these frescos are painted by rule, that
the artist, having stocked his memory with a certain set of
forms, is making use of them to fill out his tableau; that he
wantonly multiplies queer attitudes and ingenious
foreshortenings; that the lively invention, the grand outburst of
feeling, the perfect truth, by which his earlier works are
distinguished, have disappeared; and that, if he is still
superior to all others, he is nevertheless inferior to himself.
The careers of Scott, of Goethe, and of Voltaire will furnish
parallel examples. In every school of art, too, the flourishing
period is followed by one of decline; and in every case the
decline is due to a failure to imitate the living models. In
painting, we have the exaggerated foreshorteners and
muscle-makers who copied Michael Angelo; the lovers of theatrical
decorations who succeeded Titian and Giorgione and the degenerate
boudoir-painters who followed Claucle and Poussin. In literature,
we have the versifiers, epigrammatists, and rhetors of the Latin
decadence; the sensual and declamatory dramatists who represent
the last stages of old English comedy; and the makers of sonnets
and madrigals, or conceited euphemists of the Gongora school, in
the decline of Italian and Spanish poetry. Briefly it may be
said, that the masters copy nature and the pupils copy the
masters. In this way are explained the constantly recurring
phenomena of decline in art, and thus, also, it is seen that art
is perfect in proportion as it successfully imitates nature.
But we are not to conclude that absolute imitation is the sole
and entire object of art. Were this the case, the finest works
would be those which most minutely correspond to their external
prototypes. In sculpture, a mould taken from the living features
is that which gives the most faithful representation of the
model; but a well-moulded bust is far from being equal to a good
statue. Photography is in many respects more accurate than
painting; but no one would rank a photograph, however exquisitely
executed, with an original picture. And finally, if exact
imitation were the supreme object of art, the best tragedy, the
best comedy, and the best drama would be a stenographic report of
the proceedings in a court of justice, in a family gathering, in
a popular meeting, in the Rump Congress. Even the works of
artists are not rated in proportion to their minute exactness.
Neither in painting nor in any other art do we give the
precedence to that which deceives the eye simply. Every one
remembers how Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes so
faithfully that the birds came and pecked at them; and how,
Parrhasios, his rival, surpassed even this feat by painting a
curtain so natural in its appearance that Zeuxis asked him to
pull it aside and show the picture behind it. All this is not
art, but mere knack and trickery. Perhaps no painter was ever so
minute as Denner. It used to take him four years to make one
portrait. He would omit nothing,--neither the bluish lines made
by the veins under the skin, nor the little black points
scattered over the nose, nor the bright spots in the eye where
neighbouring objects are reflected; the head seems to start out
from the canvas, it is so like flesh and blood. Yet who cares for
Denner's portraits? And who would not give ten times as much for
one which Van Dyck or Tintoretto might have painted in a few
hours? So in the churches of Naples and Spain we find statues
coloured and draped, saints clothed in real coats, with their
skin yellow and bloodless, their hands bleeding, and their feet
bruised; and beside them Madonnas in royal habiliments, in gala
dresses of lustrous silk, adorned with diadems, precious
necklaces, bright ribbons, and elegant laces, with their cheeks
rosy, their eyes brilliant, their eyelashes sweeping. And by this
excess of literal imitation, there is awakened a feeling, not of
pleasure, but always of repugnance, often of disgust, and
sometimes of horror So in literature, the ancient Greek theatre,
and the best Spanish and English dramatists, alter on purpose the
natural current of human speech, and make their characters talk
under all the restraints of rhyme and rhythm. But we pronounce
this departure from literal truth a merit and not a defect. We
consider Goethe's second "Iphigenie," written in verse, far
preferable to the first one written in prose; nay, it is the
rhythm or metre itself which communicates to the work its
incomparable beauty. In a review of Longfellow's "Dante,"
published last year, we argued this very point in one of its
special applications; the artist must copy his original, but he
must not copy it too literally.
What then must he copy? He must copy, says Taine, the mutual
relations and interdependences of the parts of his model. And
more than this, he must render the essential characteristic of
the object--that characteristic upon which all the minor
qualities depend--as salient and conspicuous as possible. He must
put into the background the traits which conceal it, and bring
into the foreground the traits which manifest it. If he is
sculpturing a group like the Laocoon, he must strike upon the
supreme moment, that in which the whole tragedy reveals itself,
and he must pass over those insignificant details of position and
movement which serve only to distract our attention and weaken
our emotions by dividing them. If he is writing a drama, he must
not attempt to give us the complete biography of his character;
he must depict only those situations which stand in direct
subordination to the grand climax or denoument. As a final
result, therefore. Taine concludes that a work of art is a
concrete representation of the relations existing between the
parts of an object, with the intent to bring the essential or
dominating character thereof into prominence.
We should overrun our limits if we were to follow out the
admirable discussion in which M. Taine extends this definition to
architecture and music. These closely allied arts are
distinguished from poetry, painting, and sculpture, by appealing
far less directly to the intelligence, and far more exclusively
to the emotions. Yet these arts likewise aim, by bringing into
prominence certain relations of symmetry in form as perceived by
the eye, or in aerial vibrations as perceived by the ear, to
excite in us the states of feeling with which these species of
symmetry are by subtle laws of association connected. They, too,
imitate, not literally, but under the guidance of a predominating
sentiment or emotion, relations which really exist among the
phenomena of nature. And here, too, we estimate excellence, not
in proportion to the direct, but to the indirect imitation. A
Gothic cathedral is not, as has been supposed, directly imitated
from the towering vegetation of Northern forests; but it may well
be the expression of the dim sentiment of an unseen,
all-pervading Power, generated by centuries of primeval life amid
such forests. So the sounds which in a symphony of Beethoven are
woven into a web of such amazing complexity may exist in
different combinations in nature; but when a musician steps out
of his way to imitate the crowing of cocks or the roar of the
tempest, we regard his achievement merely as a graceful conceit.
Art is, therefore, an imitation of nature; but it is an
intellectual and not a mechanical imitation; and the performances
of the camera and the music-box are not to be classed with those
of the violinist's bow or the sculptor's chisel.
And lastly, in distinguishing art from science, Taine remarks,
that in disengaging from their complexity the, causes which are
at work in nature, and the fundamental laws according to which
they work, science describes them in abstract formulas conveyed
in technical language. But art reveals these operative causes and
these dominant laws, not in arid definitions, inaccessible to
most people, intelligible only to specially instructed men, but
in a concrete symbol, addressing itself not only to the
understanding, but still more to the sentiments of the ordinary
man. Art has, therefore, this peculiarity, that it is at once
elevated and popular, that it manifests that which is often most
recondite, and that it manifests it to all.
Having determined what a work of art is, our author goes on to
study the social conditions under which works of art are
produced; and he concludes that the general character of a work
of art is determined by the state of intellect and morals in the
society in which it is executed. There is, in fact, a sort of
moral temperature which acts upon mental development much as
physical temperature acts upon organic development. The condition
of society does not produce the artist's talent; but it assists
or checks its efforts to display itself; it decides whether or
not it shall be successful And it exerts a "natural selection"
between different kinds of talents, stimulating some and starving
others. To make this perfectly clear, we will cite at some length
Taine's brilliant illustration.
The case chosen for illustration is a very simple one,--that of a
state of society in which one of the predominant feelings is
melancholy. This is not an arbitrary supposition, for such a time
has occurred more than once in human history; in Asia, in the
sixth century before Christ, and especially in Europe, from the
fourth to the tenth centuries of our era. To produce such a state
of feeling, five or six generations of decadence, accompanied
with diminution of population, foreign invasions, famines,
pestilences, and increasing difficulty in procuring the
necessaries of life, are amply sufficient. It then happens that
men lose courage and hope, and consider life an evil. Now,
admitting that among the artists who live in such a time, there
are likely to be the same relative numbers of melancholy, joyous,
or indifferent temperaments as at other times, let us see how
they will be affected by reigning circumstances.
Let us first remember, says Taine, that the evils which depress
the public will also depress the artist. His risks are no less
than those of less gifted people. He is liable to suffer from
plague or famine, to be ruined by unfair taxation or
conscription, or to see his children massacred and his wife led
into captivity by barbarians. And if these ills do not reach him
personally, he must at least behold those around him affected by
them. In this way, if he is joyous by temperament, he must
inevitably become less joyous; if he is melancholy, he must
become more melancholy.
Secondly, having been reared among melancholy contemporaries, his
education will have exerted upon him a corresponding influence.
The prevailing religious doctrine, accommodated to the state of
affairs, will tell him that the earth is a place of exile, life
an evil, gayety a snare, and his most profitable occupation will
be to get ready to die. Philosophy, constructing its system of
morals in conformity to the existing phenomena of decadence, will
tell him that he had better never have been born. Daily
conversation will inform him of horrible events, of the
devastation of a province, the sack of a town by the Goths, the
oppression of the neighbouring peasants by the imperial
tax-collectors, or the civil war that has just burst out between
half a dozen pretenders to the throne. As he travels about, he
beholds signs of mourning and despair, crowds of beggars, people
dying of hunger, a broken bridge which no one is mending, an
abandoned suburb which is going to ruin, fields choked with
weeds, the blackened walls of burned houses. Such sights and
impressions, repeated from childhood to old age (and we must
remember that this has actually been the state of things in what
are now the fairest parts of the globe), cannot fail to deepen
whatever elements of melancholy there may be already in the
artist's disposition.
The operation of all these causes will be enhanced by that very
peculiarity of the artist which constitutes his talent. For,
according to the definitions above given, that which makes him an
artist is his capacity for seizing upon the essential
characteristics and the salient traits of surrounding objects and
events. Other men see things in part fragmentarily; he catches
the spirit of the ensemble. And in this way he will very likely
exaggerate in his works the general average of contemporary
feeling.
Lastly, our author reminds us that a man who writes or paints
does not remain alone before his easel or his writing-desk. He
goes out, looks about him, receives suggestions from friends,
from rivals, from books, and works of art whenever accessible,
and hears the criticisms of the public upon his own productions
and those of his contemporaries. In order to succeed, he must not
only satisfy to some extent the popular taste, but he must feel
that the public is in sympathy with him. If in this period of
social decadence and gloom he endeavours to represent gay,
brilliant, or triumphant ideas, he will find himself left to his
own resources; and, as Taine rightly says, the power of an
isolated man is always insignificant. His work will be likely to
be mediocre. If he attempts to write like Rabelais or paint like
Rubens, he will get neither assistance nor sympathy from a public
which prefers the pictures of Rembrandt, the melodies of Chopin,
and the poetry of Heine.
Having thus explained his position by this extreme instance,
signified for the sake of clearness, Taine goes on to apply such
general considerations to four historic epochs, taken in all
their complexity. He discusses the aspect presented by art in
ancient Greece, in the feudal and Catholic Middle Ages, in the
centralized monarchies of the seventeenth century, and in the
scientific, industrial democracy in which we now live. Out of
these we shall select, as perhaps the simplest, the case of
ancient Greece, still following our author closely, though
necessarily omitting many interesting details.
The ancient Greeks, observes Taine, understood life in a new and
original manner. Their energies were neither absorbed by a great
religious conception, as in the case of the Hindus and Egyptians,
nor by a vast social organization, as in the case of the
Assyrians and Persians, nor by a purely industrial and commercial
regime, as in the case of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians.
Instead of a theocracy or a rigid system of castes, instead of a
monarchy with a hierarchy of civil officials, the men of this
race invented a peculiar institution, the City, each city giving
rise to others like itself, and from colony to colony reproducing
itself indefinitely. A single Greek city, for instance, Miletos,
produced three hundred other cities, colonizing with them the
entire coast of the Black Sea. Each city was substantially
self-ruling; and the idea of a coalescence of several cities into
a nation was one which the Greek mind rarely conceived, and never
was able to put into operation.
In these cities, labour was for the most part carried on by
slaves. In Athens there were four or five for each citizen, and
in places like Korinth and Aigina the slave population is said to
have numbered four or five hundred thousand. Besides, the Greek
citizen had little need of personal service. He lived out of
doors, and, like most Southern people, was comparatively
abstemious in his habits. His dinners were slight, his clothing
was simple, his house was scantily furnished, being intended
chiefly for a den to sleep in.
Serving neither king nor priest, the citizen was free and
sovereign in his own city. He elected his own magistrates, and
might himself serve as city-ruler, as juror, or as judge.
Representation was unknown. Legislation was carried on by all the
citizens assembled in mass. Therefore politics and war were the
sole or chief employments of the citizen. War, indeed, came in
for no slight share of his attention. For society was not so well
protected as in these modern days. Most of these Greek cities,
scattered over the coasts of the Aigeian, the Black Sea, and the
Mediterranean, were surrounded by tribes of barbarians,
Scythians, Gauls Spaniards, and Africans. The citizen must
therefore keep on his guard, like the Englishman of to-day in New
Zealand, or like the inhabitant of a Massachusetts town in tho
seventeenth century. Otherwise Gauls Samnites, or Bithynians, as
savage as North American Indians, would be sure to encamp upon
the blackened ruins of his town. Moreover, the Greek cities had
their quarrels with each other, and their laws of war were very
barbarous. A conquered city was liable to be razed to the ground,
its male inhabitants put to the sword, its women sold as slaves.
Under such circumstances, according to Taine's happy expression,
a citizen must be a politician and warrior, on pain of death. And
not only fear, but ambition also tended to make him so. For each
city strove to subject or to humiliate its neighbours, to acquire
tribute, or to exact homage from its rivals. Thus the citizen
passed his life in the public square, discussing alliances,
treaties, and constitutions, hearing speeches, or speaking
himself, and finally going aboard of his ship to fight his
neighbour Greeks, or to sail against Egypt or Persia.
War (and politics as subsidiary to it) was then the chief pursuit
of life. But as there was no organized industry, so there were no
machines of warfare. All fighting was done hand to hand.
Therefore, the great thing in preparing for war was not to
transform the soldiers into precisely-acting automata, as in a
modern army, but to make each separate soldier as vigorous and
active as possible. The leading object of Greek education was to
make men physically perfect. In this respect, Sparta may be taken
as the typical Greek community, for nowhere else was physical
development so entirely made the great end of social life. In
these matters Sparta was always regarded by the other cities as
taking the lead,--as having attained the ideal after which all
alike were striving. Now Sparta, situated in the midst of a
numerous conquered population of Messenians and Helots, was
partly a great gymnasium and partly a perpetual camp. Her
citizens were always in training. The entire social constitution
of Sparta was shaped with a view to the breeding and bringing up
of a strong and beautiful race. Feeble or ill-formed infants were
put to death. The age at which citizens might marry was
prescribed by law; and the State paired off men and women as the
modern breeder pairs off horses, with a sole view to the
excellence of the off-spring. A wife was not a helpmate, but a
bearer of athletes. Women boxed, wrestled, and raced; a
circumstance referred to in the following passage of
Aristophanes, as rendered by Mr. Felton:--
LYSISTRATA.
Hail! Lampito, dearest of Lakonian women.
How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend!
How fair thy colour, full of life thy frame!
Why, thou couldst choke a bull.
LAMPITO.
Yes, by the Twain;
For I do practice the gymnastic art,
And, leaping, strike my backbone with my heels.
LYSISTRATA.
In sooth, thy bust is lovely to behold.
The young men lived together, like soldiers in a camp. They ate
out-of-doors, at a public table. Their fare was as simple as that
of a modern university boat-crew before a race. They slept in the
open air, and spent their waking hours in wrestling, boxing,
running races, throwing quoits, and engaging in mock battles.
This was the way in which the Spartans lived; and though no other
city carried this discipline to such an extent, yet in all a very
large portion of the citizen's life was spent in making himself
hardy and robust.
The ideal man, in the eyes of a Greek, was, therefore not the
contemplative or delicately susceptible thinker but the naked
athlete, with firm flesh and swelling muscles. Most of their
barbarian neighbours were ashamed to be seen undressed, but the
Greeks seem to have felt little embarrassment in appearing naked
in public. Their gymnastic habits entirely transformed their
sense of shame. Their Olympic and other public games were a
triumphant display of naked physical perfection. Young men of the
noblest families and from the farthest Greek colonies came to
them, and wrestled and ran, undraped, before countless multitudes
of admiring spectators. Note, too, as significant, that the Greek
era began with the Olympic games, and that time was reckoned by
the intervals between them; as well as the fact that the grandest
lyric poetry of antiquity was written in celebration of these
gymnastic contests. The victor in the foot-race gave his name to
the current Olympiad; and on reaching home, was received by his
fellow-citizens as if he had been a general returning from a
successful campaign. To be the most beautiful man in Greece was
in the eyes of a Greek the height of human felicity; and with the
Greeks, beauty necessarily included strength. So ardently did
this gifted people admire corporeal perfection that they actually
worshipped it. According to Herodotos, a young Sicilian was
deified on account of his beauty, and after his death altars were
raised to him. The vast intellectual power of Plato and Sokrates
did not prevent them from sharing this universal enthusiasm.
Poets like Sophokles, and statesmen like Alexander, thought it
not beneath their dignity to engage publicly in gymnastic sports.
Their conceptions of divinity were framed in accordance with
these general habits. Though sometimes, as in the case of
Hephaistos, the exigencies of the particular myth required the
deity to be physically imperfect, yet ordinarily the Greek god
was simply an immortal man, complete in strength and beauty. The
deity was not invested with the human form as a mere symbol. They
could conceive no loftier way of representing him. The grandest
statue, expressing most adequately the calmness of absolutely
unfettered strength, might well, in their eyes, be a veritable
portrait of divinity. To a Greek, beauty of form was a
consecrated thing. More than once a culprit got off with his life
because it would have been thought sacrilegious to put an end to
such a symmetrical creature. And for a similar reason, the
Greeks, though perhaps not more humane than the Europeans of the
Middle Ages, rarely allowed the human body to be mutilated or
tortured. The condemned criminal must be marred as little as
possible; and he was, therefore, quietly poisoned, instead of
being hung, beheaded, or broken on the wheel.
Is not the unapproachable excellence of Greek statuary--that art
never since equalled, and most likely, from the absence of the
needful social stimulus, destined never to be equalled--already
sufficiently explained? Consider, says our author, the nature of
the Greek sculptor's preparation. These men have observed the
human body naked and in movement, in the bath and the gymnasium,
in sacred dances and public games. They have noted those forms
and attitudes in which are revealed vigour, health, and activity.
And during three or four hundred years they have thus modified,
corrected and developed their notions of corporeal beauty. There
is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that Greek
sculpture finally arrived at the ideal model, the perfect type,
as it was, of the human body. Our highest notions of physical
beauty, down to the present day, have been bequeathed to us by
the Greeks. The earliest modern sculptors who abandoned the bony,
hideous, starveling figures of the monkish Middle Ages, learned
their first lessons in better things from Greek bas-reliefs. And
if, to-day, forgetting our half-developed bodies, inefficiently
nourished, because of our excessive brain-work, and with their
muscles weak and flabby from want of strenuous exercise, we wish
to contemplate the human form in its grandest perfection, we must
go to Hellenic art for our models.
The Greeks were, in the highest sense of the word, an
intellectual race; but they never allowed the mind to tyrannize
over the body. Spiritual perfection, accompanied by corporeal
feebleness, was the invention of asceticism; and the Greeks were
never ascetics. Diogenes might scorn superfluous luxuries, but if
he ever rolled and tumbled his tub about as Rabelais says he did,
it is clear that the victory of spirit over body formed no part
of his theory of things. Such an idea would have been
incomprehensible to a Greek in Plato's time. Their consciences
were not over active. They were not burdened with a sense of
sinfulness. Their aspirations were decidedly finite; and they
believed in securing the maximum completeness of this terrestrial
life. Consequently they never set the physical below the
intellectual. To return to our author, they never, in their
statues, subordinated symmetry to expression, the body to the
head. They were interested not only in the prominence of the
brows, the width of the forehead, and the curvature of the lips,
but quite as much in the massiveness of the chest, the
compactness of the thighs, and the solidity of the arms and legs.
Not only the face, but the whole body, had for them its
physiognomy. They left picturesqueness to the painter, and
dramatic fervour to the poet; and keeping strictly before their
eyes the narrow but exalted problem of representing the beauty of
symmetry, they filled their sanctuaries and public places with
those grand motionless people of brass, gold, ivory, copper, and
marble, in whom humanity recognizes its highest artistic types.
Statuary was the central art of Greece. No other art was so
popular, or so completely expressed the national life. The number
of statues was enormous. In later days, when Rome had spoiled the
Greek world of its treasures, the Imperial City possessed a
population of statues almost equal in number to its population of
human beings. And at the present day, after all the destructive
accidents of so many intervening centuries, it is estimated that
more than sixty thousand statues have been obtained from Rome and
its suburbs alone.
In citing this admirable exposition as a specimen of M. Taine's
method of dealing with his subject, we have refrained from
disturbing the pellucid current of thought by criticisms of our
own. We think the foregoing explanation correct enough, so far as
it goes, though it deals with the merest rudiments of the
subject, and really does nothing toward elucidating the deeper
mysteries of artistic production. For this there is needed a
profounder psychology than M. Taine's. But whether his theory of
art be adequate or not, there can be but one opinion as to the
brilliant eloquence with which it is set forth.
June, 1868. |