Chapter III: Appendix: Greek Speaks for Itself (1)

Mosaic of etymology—Ecclesiastical sphere—Diet, posies
and programs—Geography, zoology, politics—Pharmacies and
surgery—Schools and composition—Apology and epitaph 129

NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT

Ownership not of the essence of beauty as of
good—Perception sufficient for the enjoyment of the
beautiful—No new faculty required—Pleasure is normal life
consciously localized—Esthetic Enjoyment in the simple
apprehension, not in judgment or inference as such—Fact
not of the essence of esthetic enjoyment, which is had
in fiction too—_Causa Exemplaris_—Imagination, source of
originality—Aristotle’s principles: creation, motivation,
unity, universality 134

A FORWARD-LOOKING LESSON IN LITERATURE 159

ART PRINCIPLES IN LITERATURE

PART FIRST

ART IN THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

I

ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

1. INDIVIDUALISM AND RESPONSIBILITY

A group was standing before a futurist or cubist picture. The group did not know what the picture was all about, but one spoke up in defense of the bewildering work: “Well, after all, art is a language, and why shouldn’t a man be permitted to speak his own language?” A bystander, not daring to address strangers, made answer under his breath: “If art is a language, this artist is talking to himself.” Maudlin, incoherent remarks, disjointed utterances, and in general talking to one’s self, all that, does not pass for high art among men, but for something quite different. To talk to one’s self is the extreme of individualism in conversation; to ignore the world addressed through artistic composition is the triumph of individualism in art.

The abrupt break with all tradition in every art, and the untrammeled expression of the individual, have worked out to the inevitable and bizarre conclusions which a like rebellion has brought about in religion and morals. Every man his own dogmatist; every man his own moralist; that is the individualism which has divided mankind into multitudinous sects and has made millions of moral, unmoral and immoral moralists eager for legislation of infinite variety without any fixed principles to enforce the observance of even one law. Conscience, the executive impulse of all legislation, used to be the voice of God, but individualism has made it anything from a survival of the fittest or an economic standard, through countless varieties all the way to a Freudian complex.

Individualism has run amuck in art from classicism to cubism. It is a barren day which does not produce a new system of religion or morals, and only the occurrence of earthquake, war, fire or some other tremendous upheaval keeps our journals from recording some new theory of art, some Tomism, Dickism or Harryism. Art for art’s sake has been given an individualistic interpretation and has produced the same rich crop, as the individualistic cry, every man his own dogmatist and moralist, has produced—a rich crop of weeds.

If ever an individual could pursue his blissful way oblivious of the existence of a surrounding universe, surely he may not do so now when the universe impinges upon him every moment through ticker, telephone, wireless and unlimited “extras.” There is, however, no such thing as unrestricted individualism. Of God alone can be predicated existence for its own sake. Everybody his own dogmatist means ultimately everybody his own god. Art for art’s sake, interpreted in an individualistic sense, would not only destroy art but would destroy the world. Art for art’s sake should read art for everybody’s sake and for the sake of God, and such a reading will be infinitely better for art’s sake.

It was an Irish colleen, accepting matrimony as a complete submergence of individuality, who replied to a friend dwelling on the dangers of a long ocean trip to be taken by the new bride and groom: “And why should I be afraid, sure ’tis his loss if anything happen to me now!” She was the counterpart of the Irish lad who sang under similar circumstances, “I’m not myself at all.” There you have the complete altruism resulting from the perfect union of matrimony. There is the antithesis of individualism, and such matrimonial communism is far better for every one than any cry of “wife for wife’s sake” or “husband for husband’s sake.”

It is quite evident that no artist can exempt himself from responsibility as though his art were a deity. If a picture or statue or poem would be an incentive to murder or suicide, the artist must stay his hand. He may not manufacture bombs for soul destruction, no matter how artistic the container, even if someone else is to supply the detonator. A lie in beautiful language is a more ugly lie. Recent pretended upholders of the Volstead law have printed an emphatic warning on compounds of their manufacture: “Do not add such an ingredient or this compound will violate the law.” May an artist naïvely dissociate himself from responsibility by stating: “Do not add human nature to my art-product or you will violate the law”? Were the artist a real creator, he would have to forecast results and be dominated by a purpose. Nor may the artist, like God, permit evil, because no artist has omnipotence and infinite wisdom and justice and mercy, governing the permission of evil and guaranteeing good as the final result. May a man who owns a wild tiger of surpassing beauty, trusting in the right of property, parade down a crowded thoroughfare with his jungle pet tethered to a thread?

But why all these truisms? Because individualism in art aims in principle and production not only to free art from restrictions but even to exempt the artist from responsibility. The artist may not talk to himself unless he can find a South Sea island where there is neither man nor God. Nor is it a deadening of his artistic impulse for the artist to be ruled by high purposes, but rather it is a stimulus and an inspiration. Eschylus and Sophocles have a sublimer beauty than Euripides because the earlier dramatists recognized more fully and kept better in view the religious purposes of Athenian drama. Euripides, wishing to cater more to theatric effects, succeeded in being more emotional and in achieving a realistic but transient interest, the hectic flush that marks decay and death in twilight and autumn and sinister disease. Is the marked revival of Euripides within recent years a sign of decadence?

The Madonnas of Italian art received from the painter a solemn beauty not only because they depict Divine maternity, but even too because they were to grace a religious shrine and to constitute part of a religious service. That may be one reason why the Madonnas of Italy are far superior to the prettiness and sentimentality of more recent Madonnas which are painted for private homes and for ephemeral interest.

The purpose of the artist is one thing and the purpose of art is another thing. The purpose of a watch is to keep time whatever purpose the watch-maker may have. It is likely, however, that if he makes the watch for his mother, he will produce better results than if he worked for his usual wage or than if he functioned as part of a machine, having no clearly defined ulterior purpose. So an artist will be inspired in painting, in sculpture, in music, in all arts, to elicit better his full powers and to achieve finer results when he toils for a cathedral than when he works for a cabaret. Noble responsibility conscientiously recognized and fulfilled is no check, but rather a spur to the artist.

“Art for art’s sake” may, however, be taken to mean, “Embody beauty wherever found, or realize to the full your ideal,” and such a meaning is excellent and fruitful unless excessive individualism insists upon expressing its own perverted ideas of beauty and its own eccentric ideals. When Horace said, “Let justice be done though the heavens come crashing down,” a line that might be rendered, “Justice for justice’s sake,” he was far from advocating the explosion of a bomb by some Roman anarchist whose idea of justice was to bring all to a dead level of ruin. The progressive improvement in the realization of art-ideals may be very well illustrated from the career of Horace. Horace gradually worked himself free from the conventionality and baseness of his epodes and earlier satires, experienced the cleansing process of true humor in later satires, took fire at the moral degeneracy of Rome in the initial odes of the third and last book of his first edited lyrics. There the _sæva indignatio_ of Horace brought him within distant sight of sublimity. His progress in philosophy weighted the wings of his song but dowered him with the crystal and clean wisdom of his epistles, of which it has been said one need not blot out a single line. Had Horace retained the youthful vehemence of the republican amid the enervating peace of the new empire, he might have followed Dante and Milton from lyric beauty to epic sublimity, or might have risen with Shakespeare and Molière from song to comedy or even to tragedy, but his hedonistic sleekness and his excessive self-consciousness kept his ripened philosophy in brief letters, when a more vigorous mentality with the help of philosophy might have converted his ennobled power of satire into comedy or transformed the lyric portraits of his early days into tragedy or epic story.

II

ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL

2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM

Modern art has not followed Horace very far. It has broken with conventionality as Horace did with the _clichés_ of Alexandria, but it has not yet entered upon the path of right philosophy. The _Spoon River Anthology_, a typical specimen from the individualistic school of what might be called localists or village gossips, is in the epode-stage of Horace, the stage of personalities, lubricity and garlic gruesomeness. Hopes might be entertained that _Spoon River_ and _Main Street_ and other individualistic photographs would progressively improve with Horace except for one sad deficiency: Horace had humor and laughed at others, and even at himself; modern individualists are so heavily armored with the seriousness of their own views, that they don’t even smile. To imagine the New Art laughing is impossible; if the New Art had humor and laughed, it would cease to be New Art and would join the larger brotherhood of art uncapitalized. Had the new artists a sense of humor, it would probably be their death sentence. In the course of time they might catch sight of their own art products, whether of painting or of poetry.

Is it not an indication of individualism that so many recent novels are biographies, that the stage is not holding up the mirror to life but applying the scalpel to an ulcer? The biography or personal views of Scott and Shakespeare cannot be discovered in their works. The modern pamphleteer distributes his paradoxes among various mouthpieces whose only difference is in name, and this is called a play, when it is in reality propaganda. There are probably now no less than 100,000 college graduates turning college escapades and flirtations into chapters, which their authors consider typical of life because the incidents were individually experienced. And, as the long stories of the day are biographies or problems and as the drama is a diagnosis of diseases, in the same way many of the short stories are pathological, but all are tending to be individualistic. The artist makes his own subjective experience the full measure of his artistic expression and seems to imagine that his own peculiarities are good art because he sincerely expresses what he feels. Individual nature is not human nature.

Aristotle has described poetry as the universal in the concrete. The “new poets” give the individual in the concrete. Homer, Shakespeare, the true poets, plumb to the depths of the human heart; they voice ripened experience and enshrine mellow wisdom, and so appeal to all men of all times. Much of the new poetry ostentatiously disdains tradition and rejects the wisdom of the ages in discarding its dress. You may see the rouge on the cheek and the freckle on the nose, but as far as life and experience and heart are concerned, most of the new poetry is pitiably young and callous. Meticulous recording of disconnected and unrelated novelties is no adequate substitute for the warmth and depth of life crystallized by the ardent gaze of the true poet out of his experience. New poetry is contemporaneous with the invention and use of the Kodak and has all the responsibility and profundity of that instrument.

Individualism has come to such a pass in modern art that everything in it is resolving itself into pure emotionalism, and that an emotionalism which does not belong to art at all. Degenerates are the products of civilization; they are decayed exotics. “The higher the organism, the more noisome the decay,” a science professor used to say when paying his respects to diseased metaphysics. As only a believer can blaspheme luridly, so when an artist goes wrong, he goes wrong hideously. A pistol in the hands of a marksman gone mad is more destructive than in the hands of a savage. Colors, sounds, shapes, fair words and gorgeous imaginings are instruments of degradation and death if they are a finer veneer over what is false. Individual vagaries and whims, no matter how unusual, will not have the permanence of art because they are based on no principles, but devised simply to startle. Degrade the appeal of beauty to a spinal thrill and your artist will pander to concupiscence.

It is noteworthy that Homer’s worst lapse in story-telling takes place among the luxurious Phæacians, ancient prototypes of degeneracy. Homer may have felt justified artistically because he was depicting the non-Grecian world through whose monsters and marvels Odysseus was passing and making the first collection of sailors’ yarns. But Homer shocked even the pagan world and set an unhappy precedent. Lucian and Ovid, Petronius and Apuleius and the Byzantine eroticists made what was incidental in Homer their chief concern and practice. They perverted fiction into calculated suggestiveness.

That depraved and sensual theory of story-telling was, however, more Aristophanic than Homeric, despite the single unfortunate precedent in the _Odyssey_. The tradition of Greek and Latin comedy was carried on by the medieval troubadours and by the story-tellers who catered to the decadent nobility of Italy and France. They retorted on their clerical censors and stimulated jaded appetites, substituting in shameless intrigues priests and nuns for the pagan gods. It was and is the glory of Scott that he broke away from these evil traditions which made the novel a hateful thing to our forefathers. Scott deserted the continental school of novelists and their English imitators, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, the last of all Byron. Scott gave up the satirical purposes which handed on in fiction the vulgar devices of low comedy. He went to history, to chivalry, to healthy men and women and created romances, not pathological studies. English, Irish and American fiction for a whole century yielded to the healthy and bracing impulse of Scott, but the younger novelists in vogue today in England, Ireland and America have gone back to the continental type, individual, pathological biographical problems, forsaking Scott’s revival through balladry of the best Homeric manner, where men “drank delight of battle with their peers far on the ringing plains of Troy.”

The individualist must emancipate himself by the contemplation of nature. Pathological specimens, freakish oddities, all the surface impressions of the local colorists are not nature any more than a face contorted with a toothache is a man’s likeness. Such exceptional exhibitions cannot form the enduring basis of art. Personal experience must be widened by length of time, by merging into the stream of wisdom, flowing freighted from the past, or must, in exceptional cases, be won quickly by that intense and probing comprehension of genius, which seems almost Divine intuition. Excessive individualism, like the latest fashion, will be quaint and incongruous on the morrow. Homer lives eternal because through strange names and strange language and strange costumes we see our own sun and fields and ocean and sky and put our fingers on a pulse which registers the beat of a heart throbbing as ours.

III

ART AND HUMAN NATURE

1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT

A serious defect in most modern art movements is that they start from art; they are modifications of previous art movements. True art movements start from human nature. When perfection in any art is standardized, when tradition and conventionality prevail, and the artist has originality enough to chafe at the restraints of classicism but not originality enough to reveal finer ideals through classic expression, his temptation is to rebel at conventionalities and to deem himself original because he is unconventional. He wishes to be different from other artists and seeks for the difference by discarding the traditional medium rather than by improving his own personal message. He prefers to be different and even original by cutting his ginger-bread into the shape of automobiles and air-planes instead of going back to mother’s classic make and blending his ingredients into a new creation, a creation which will make fresh appeal even in former animal shapes or in the traditional ginger-bread cart-wheels.

Art is a social institution. If not by the people, art is of the people, and certainly for the people. When Greek literary art grew conventional in its different forms, the artists went back to the people for another medium to be transfigured by art. Ruskin has called architecture a “glorified roof.” The sonata is a glorified folk melody; epic is glorified folk lore; and Greek drama is a glorified folk song, as Elizabethan drama is a glorified folk chronicle. Both dramas have their roots in the religious services of the people. Homer told us about the public he had, but the nineteenth century would not trust his word until Schliemann dug up the great halls where Demodokos and his fellows told the people their own folk stories in a glorified, artistic form. Greek lyric and Greek pastoral were as public as Greek oratory, Greek choruses, temples and statuary. It was left for Roman conquerors to begin the segregation of art into the cold storage of the modern millionaire and of the modern museum.

The permanence of Greek art is based upon that public appeal. Art is long because it embodies nature, and most of all human nature. Homer has appealed to man, woman and child for thousands of years. His human nature is our human nature despite external differences of every kind. Homer himself was aware of the appeal of nature in art. On the shield of Achilles, he marveled at the field which grew black behind the plowing, a marvel of Homer’s close study of nature as well as an expression of his ideal for art. Nature is a language all can understand and human nature is a language all must and do understand. When lament was made over the body of Patroklos, the elegy of Briseis stirred all, “and thereon the women wailed, in semblance for Patroklos, but each for her own woe.” Similar is the appeal of art where in semblance of something else, each sees what belongs to self. Aristotle in seeking to explain the characteristic pleasure of art ascribes it to _mimesis_ or re-presentation in another medium. Such staging, he says, not only robs the terrifying of its terrors but enables all to understand and reason to the nature of each art product. Such understanding and reasoning mean surely something more than the mere recognition of photographic accuracy and likeness. If we may press the meaning of the Greek word used for reason, the process of art enjoyment is similar to the syllogistic process which involves an appeal to a general statement. The process is one which recognizes the general in a particular case, as the grief of Briseis found an echoing grief in every heart.

Whether Aristotle and this interpretation of him is correct or not, it is evident that art must generalize. Art must select, both by choice of the artist and by the limitations of his medium. Art does not photograph, because it has no sensitive plate for its medium. The photographer’s art largely precedes the camera and consists in selecting that pose and that expression, out of many, which is yours. The camera is nature, controlled by mechanism, and is not art. If the photographer or painter or sculptor photographed you in some passing spasm, we should not learn and reason that it was you. The spasm was realism and fact, but it was peculiar and individual; it was not you whom we have known and generalized from experience. In such a case, Aristotle says shrewdly, we might get artistic pleasure from the workmanship or colors, that is, from the medium and the mechanics of art, but we should have no artistic pleasure from the soul and substance of the art product because the product found no prototype in our experience, because we could not define it or generalize it. Art selects. It cannot give everything, and if it would be true, it must give what all may understand; it must give what is generally true, and what is generally true of all men is human nature.

Selective idealism has usually the advantage of being intelligible, but it labors under the disadvantage of becoming merely intelligible. It gives the truth, but through familiarity the beauty or artistic appeal of the truth has been dulled and tarnished, or, like the dandelion, until a Lowell gives it a new luster, its very commonness leaves us unmoved. We enjoy human nature in Homer because he was the creator of sleeping winds and of rosy-fingered dawns and of the mother’s smile alight through tears. A modern who would transfer these same touches to his own composition would leave us cold. He too must create; he must be personal, but he must not be individual. Personality is the knowing and loving principle, and looks to the many with its thoughts and wishes. Individuality is the principle of separation and isolation and is looking inward, not outward. When the artist, therefore, creates and gives his own winds or dawn or mother love, he should speak to us in his own concrete embodiments of nature, and of human nature, using a language man understands. If selective idealism tends to become merely intelligible and unappealing, individualism tends to become unintelligible and to mystify.

The poet, the novelist, the painter have more depth than silver nitrate on a photographic plate. Artists do not simply mirror nature; they do not catch at the odd or freakish. That is photography, not creation. Horace did not give us a moving picture of a falling tree, but he saw the humor and human interest of that “sorry log.” Burns did not give us an anatomical study of the typhus-carrier on a lady’s bonnet in a kirk, making it crawl upon ourselves and sending us after the kerosene can and bath tub, but Burns soared away, from that sight with Horatian humor and Horatian human nature, into the immortal lines, “O wad some power the giftie gie us.” The artist who confounds the generalized mental attractiveness found in true art with the shock of nerves or the tickling of concupiscence or with misguided realism, will not produce things of beauty. He gets a thrill, but it is not the permanent, undying thrill of art, not the thing of beauty, which is a joy forever.

IV

ART AND HUMAN NATURE

2. REALISM AND REALITY

At an exhibition in New York City there was displayed a picture of an ocean wave upon the crest of which the artist had nailed a real bar of soap. The first idea of the spectator was to consider this peculiar product an advertisement, but it seems to have been intended as a serious, if perverted, attempt at art. If the artist was not slyly proposing the caricature of excessive realism, the cake of soap will serve well as a parable for those artists who do not distinguish between realism and reality.

The ultra-realist forgets that art is a creation, the making of another world. The artist cannot really create what he puts into his new world of sight or hearing or imagination, of color, of sound, of words. If he could actually make something new, not based on nature or on human nature, he would do so on the penalty of being unintelligible. Neither should he go to the other extreme and not leave the world of reality at all. He may not eat his cake and have it. If what he takes from actuality is not merged fully into his art form, he tries to give us fact and fiction, history and art, in the same product, and he nails a piece of soap on a painted wave.

Aristotle insists above all on probability in art, or motivation, as it is now commonly called. A probable or well-motived impossibility, he says, is more artistic and pleasing than an improbable, that is, an unmotived fact. For a like reason he demands that fiction be more philosophical than history. We accept a chronicle of facts without necessarily being aware of their causal connections. In the realms of art the connection must be established. This principle, so fruitful for art, is not to be understood as justifying or approving that school of subjective novelists which is parsimonious in happenings but diffuse in reasoning and gives us a maximum of discussion with a minimum of incident. Aristotle is thinking more of the people who witness the drama. The spectators want the motivation and plausibility of action rather than that of logic. The soliloquy has gone from the stage; the printed soliloquy should be curtailed in the novel. A true understanding of motivation will send all artists back to nature and to human nature for those incidents which are the springs of action and do not require lengthy logic to labor at their explanation. Homer is completely lacking in logical refining. Incident leads to feeling and talk, which gives rise to further incident. Action, feeling and character, Aristotle’s trinity of art subjects, are mingled and detailed, and the story moves on in a way plausible and pleasing to Homeric audiences. When Homer runs short of motivation, he does not resort to logic; he refers the causality to the gods, as modern writers refer all insoluble problems to evolution, which puts hardly more restrictions upon imagination than Homeric mythology.

The artist must transfer his product wholly to the world of art. Sculptured horses must not neigh, nor painted flowers give perfume, but neighing and scents may be suggested even in stone, and in lines by art happenings, which all may read running if the artist will use the language of human nature. He should paint his cake of soap in, not nail it on. If the exigencies of the story demand it, costumes of the night or costumes of bathing may be in place, but it is nailing on a cake of soap, it is outraging probabilities, to force a story into a setting or to adopt a style of dress or of undress simply for the sake of producing a shock. That is the shock of reality, not of art and beauty. Should the dramatist have an excellent quartet and stop the play in order to give a song, he is nailing on a piece of soap, which may be magnificent soap, but it is not art.

Why is the so-called realism depressing? Why is the Russian novelist left for the connoisseur but is caviar to the general? Is it the presence or absence of evil? Hardly that. Homer’s stories are full of evil and of death; Sophocles’ _King Œdipus_ and the _Prometheus_ of Eschylus are surcharged with evil, but they do not depress. Euripides, on the other hand, and Lucian have more alleged realism and are depressing, even when they cause a smile. The realist is cynical, and cynics do not soar off into the world of art, but keep tethering themselves to the real world. They do not lose themselves in their story because they are always thinking of keeping some one’s nose against their grindstone. Why should the optimistic moralizing of Polyanna be resented by critics any more than the cynic moralizing of Shaw or of _Main Street_? The cheerful idiot and the purblind dyspeptic are depressing in real life, especially when they are moralizing, but in and out of art we can laugh at the idiot, while we squirm at the assumed superiority of the cynic. The moralizing is a cake of soap.

Shakespeare is not depressing and Homer is not depressing. They do not blink the facts of life, and beyond the humor and humanity which saves them and their audience, they lose themselves in their story. The evil they depict is true evil, so recognized, in their art-world. It is, besides, evil called for by their story, not lugged in for a moral or to exemplify a theory of art. They know that drab is not the only color in life. They know that bright things are as real as black things, but they are not illustrating a theory but giving us a story. We pass with them into a fictitious world, and the things which depress the denizens of that world do not depress us if we are not brought back to reality by stumbling on a cake of real soap, not integrated with the story.

The sight of his dog Argos made the heart of Odysseus sink. Even for those who think ugliness the only reality, Argos was covered with realities and squatted on reality. He depressed his master but he does not depress us. He lies upon Main Street and has a Polyanna wag to his tail. His optimism and his pessimism are, however, not tacked on. “And lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears, Argos, the hound of Odysseus.... Despised he lay (his master being afar) in the deep dung of mules and swine.... There lay the dog Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now when he was aware of Odysseus standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not the strength to draw. But Odysseus looked aside and wiped a tear.” Argos is the ideal dog of a far away master; “who has lost his dominion,” as Eumæus, the shepherd of Odysseus, says. Argos registers the fate of his master. We feel, but we do not feel depressed. It is human; it is all inevitable; it is real as life but perfectly idealized by perfect transfer to the realm of art. Eumæus gives us the morality of it, the truth of it, but he is far from moralizing, either pessimistically or optimistically. Argos is the dog Schneider that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle could not find to recognize him; he is the picture in brief of his master’s fate. Eumæus is as free from all obtrusive soap as Argos himself. The dog’s fate is ascribed to the careless women who “are no more inclined to honest service when their masters have lost dominion, for Zeus takes away the half of a man’s virtue when the day of slavery comes upon him.”

V

ART AND THE DIVINE

1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART

The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has aroused the interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer, the variety, artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery gave the news a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph of the spade, which Schliemann converted into the best of historians. Dig in your back-yard, and you can read its past in the layers before your eyes. Make a cross-section of the country, and successive deposits will tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the earth, and the buried fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal the history of the world. Grave-digging is the most productive occupation to which science, art and even commerce can now be vocationally guided.

What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of the past in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it was belief in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb repeats the truth that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which were temples as well as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from which Schliemann actually shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds were also temples as well as tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic churches with their tiny _loculi_ for the relic of a saint keep still the memory of the days when persecuted Christians found the Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as of escape from the persecutor.

The caves of Cro-Magnon and Aurignac and other ancient deposits in France and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s art. The man was no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful drawing have astonished every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible to light, should have been so decorated has puzzled observers. Reinach calls the pictures early “magic,” painting of animals to capture them. But there are paintings of men as well as of bisons and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as saying that it seems to be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer pleasure of the drawing is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that the professor has no real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has recently asserted the religious origin of these pictures. They would seem to be the earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves were temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar, the sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other accompaniments of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a belief in a continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these caves may easily be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling animals has destroyed them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art is even longer than Longfellow imagined.

If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a commonplace in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the following statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s _Dictionary of Religion_: “The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of Assyrian and Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of the two nations.” “The history of art in Greece is throughout its course intimately connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all denying. Religion and art are united, in music and song, from the dances of savages to the Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies; in painting, from the early caveman to the modern man; in sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up at Troy to the idol statues of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls of buried Mycenæ and Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal rings, in the ornaments and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory, from the prayers of the priest in the _Iliad_, to the fulminations of the prophet and the eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory we find Demosthenes and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching upon religious motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of revelation, in liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and in the mighty story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton must stage their events upon the background of a Divine Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic cathedral.

Aquinas gave in his _Summa_ a synthesis of all science; Dante gave in his _Divina Comedia_ a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the Gothic cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in one structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual interaction of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly religion held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection” in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the dusty wreckage of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s imagination is needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous structure, under whose myriad statuary of serious saints and grotesque gargoyles, you pass through carved portals into the spacious aisles over which arches leap aspiringly. The painter fascinates you with the story of many colors in the windows. The weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry curtaining the walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with cunning fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy, the sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.

The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The missal on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on illuminated parchment of the religious and monastic life which produced it, by its patience, learning, devotion, silent application, and scrupulous exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,” says an authority, “without detecting a false line or irregular interlacement.” Near the missal of the Gothic cathedral would be found a jeweled chalice, like that of Ardagh, with three hundred and fifty-four distinct pieces, classic and rich in all kinds of ornament. Baldwin Brown was surely right in declaring: “It is probable that nothing more artistically beautiful has ever been seen than the Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral is the crowning glory of a deeply religious age.

VI

ART AND THE DIVINE

2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION

The history of art from its lowest manifestations to its highest gives evidence of its union and intimacy with religion. The fact is admitted, and might easily be confirmed by the very way in which religious movements violently reacted against art. Hebraism knew the power of art over its followers, and Hebraic antagonism to sculpture and painting served to give religious impulse freer outlet in Hebrew poetry and oratory and other literature. The Bible is the supreme illustration of the influence of religion upon literary art. Islamism opposed art, but gradually succumbed to its influence at least in architecture. That Islam has not yielded more to art is an evidence of arrested civilization, as well as of baser and more sensual religious feelings. Puritanism, the intensest form of Protestantism, opposed art in all its manifestations, but Puritanism either diverted art energy to poetry and literature or provoked excesses by its attempt to check the natural impulses of art, and Puritanism finally yielded to art. It is clear then that religious opposition to art serves but to show more strikingly the union of religion and art. The religion that opposes art must direct the art impulse into other channels or the religion degenerates. By their nature religion and art are congenial.

What now is the explanation of this close and continuous union of art and religion, found everywhere and in all ages? Taine and his school, led astray by some details in the artist’s subject matter, have tried to explain art by environment; but environment is an explanation absurd in itself, and cannon be adequate for an ubiquitous fact which transcends all environment. The theorists who ascribe the origin of art to play and the deploying of superfluous energies liken, with Herbert Spencer, the art impulse to the acts of a kitten playing with a ball. Play may be partly an excess of energy, but not all energy is artistic, and animal play is the stirring of appetite, bearing but a slight, superficial resemblance to man’s early strivings for artistic expression. How many games are imitative and made more attractive by art! From the very first, mind enters into early and even child art, and at the last the devotion of the artists to their ideals in the higher manifestations of art, a devotion quite unlike play, shows that the art impulse is essentially different from the instinctive impulse of the kitten, which pounces on a rat as it pounced on a ball of wool.[1]

Another school, striving to explain the connection between art and religion, takes a directly opposite view to the play theory. Fear and magic are, according to these authors, the controlling factors. The difficulty in this theory is the utterly selfish element in the fear and magic impulse, whereas the art impulse is disinterested and unselfish. Besides, religious belief precedes the fear and magic propitiation of offended powers. The voodoo and the hoodoo mark degradations of religious impulses. Impulses in harmony with man’s nature may go down as well as up, and even should we suppose that the unselfish impulse of art, which finally becomes the evidence and glory of man’s highest civilization, could be traced back to the sordid details of selfish superstition, why should such an ugly duckling evolve into a fair swan? Devolution and degradation are easier than evolution. Why did the art impulse take the narrow, upward path and shun the broad way down to perdition?

The perfection of the oak must have been in the potency of the acorn. The oak could not come from a peanut, nor can all the powers of sun, rain and soil or any other factor of the environment evolve the fruit of the peanut vine into the majesty of the oak. We can explain by an extrinsic cause the stunting of an oak or the rotting of an oak, but we cannot account for the existence of the oak—except by an acorn. We may find perhaps a thwarted or corrupted art tendency in superstitious fear and its products, but that element of fear could not write a poem or compose a sonata or rear a Gothic cathedral. The perfection reached by the art product must have been in the potency of the first artistic impulse in germ.

Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art impulse just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent in the acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It requires brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no animal has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its nest displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown conclusively the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the creature possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of the child displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate shaping of means to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet to the latest have found the making or interpreting of pictures a measure of intellectual power. They are right. Art is rationalized pigments or sounds or words with their images or some other rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey Robinson in _Mind in the Making_ says that we are wrong in rationalizing the past to make up our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing another past for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr. Robinson should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize correctly and should give us something better than universal skepticism with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with the religious tendency in being rational and intellectual.

Art and religion strive for high ideals; they are disinterested and unselfish. LaFarge says to Saint Gaudens: “That work is not worthy of you,” and Saint Gaudens picks up a hammer and smashes the sculpture. That is an instance paralleling the heroic following of religious ideals with like sacrifices. Was it fear of bogies or love of their dead which filled so many tombs with precious articles? Believing in immortality, Egyptians and Myceneans gave to the dead what was most precious, and what was most precious was the finest art in the costliest material. Love keeps graves green: fear erects a crematory.

Art and religion are personal and emotional. Each has its own proper expression. Of religion the expression is worship and of art it is concrete embodiment of the ideal, and in both cases the expression is intimately personal and permeated with feeling. Art is more sensible and so more emotional because its expression must be presented to the senses or at least to the imagination. Religion whose primary expression is an act of the will, need not of its nature be attended with emotion or external display but it usually is, and feeling and expression commonly help to the fuller expression of religion. The rapture of art and the ecstasy of religion, though differing in much, have also much in common.

In their social appeal art and religion are akin. The artist and the saint have their hours of solitary contemplation. St. Peter at Pentecost, describing the religious ecstasy of the inspired apostles, cried out: “These are not drunk as you suppose,” and, continuing, he quoted the prophet Joel: “Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.” In the forming of their visions and dreams saint and artist are alike, though the substance of their visions differ. They are alike also in their impulse to give their visions expression and to influence men with them. Religion is apostolic and art is social, and that is why in history they have gone forth so often hand in hand to subdue the world. Whole nations had to conspire to erect the Egyptian pyramids, the tower of Babel, the temples of Israel, of Rome, of Greece and of the Orient, and the Gothic cathedrals. Only a union of art and religion could produce such stupendous results. Patriotism and the state have at times come near to these great effects, when patriotism or love of country assumed the nature of religion. To produce these national monuments a lasting cause as well as a cause of wide appeal was necessary. Here again art and religion are akin. Art is long, and religion is immortal.

Art reaches its highest and most perfect expression in the sublime. Here religion does not walk hand in hand with art, but bears art on high and gives to art some of its own divinity by endowing the artistic expression with sublimity. The literature of the Bible attained to heights which writers of other nations could not dream of nor ambition. Genesis sets poets and all artists upon a lofty eminence. By the revelation of creation, the imagination and the vision of the artist became coterminous almost with that of the Creator. Newton’s theory of gravitation which shepherded the starry hosts of the universe into one obedient flock, gives us a realization of the effect of Genesis upon the world’s imagination. The creation _motif_ in literature emancipating man’s imagination, enlarging the boundaries of vision, and dowering the artist with sublimity, deserves a treatise by itself and a history worthy of its greatness.

Art and religion are united in fact, so history teaches; art and religion are akin, so the study of their attributes reveals. What then is the only and full explanation of that fact and of that harmony? Philosophers hold that the only and the full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the mind and reality, which is called truth, is found in the fact that both mind and reality are reproductions in creation of God’s truthful knowledge of Himself. Ethicists hold that the only and full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the will and law, which is called moral good, is found in the fact that both will and law are reproductions in the finite of God’s love of Himself. So philosophers must hold that the full and only explanation of the harmony subsisting between the soul and art, which is called the expression of the beautiful, is found in the fact that like the innate tendency to truth and good, the tendency to beauty is a reproduction of God’s contemplation of Himself. Creation, as has often been declared, is a manifestation of the art of God, a mimetic presentation in finite matter and spirit of the infinite ideal. All advance in truth and virtue is an approach to divine truth and goodness, and all true progress in art is an approach to divine beauty. “Filled with enthusiasm,” says De Wulf in _L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté_, “before the greatness of the artist’s power, Dante Alighieri compares it to that of Omnipotence:

“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’

(_Inferno_, XI, 103).

“Art is the grand-child of God because it is the offspring of man’s creative power as man himself has come from the hands of God.”

VII

ART AND THE DIVINE

3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE

The fact that religion and art are connected is abundantly established by history. The naturalness of that connection is made clear by the many traits art and religion possess in common. As philosophers have argued to the existence of God from the fact that the universal belief in His existence can be accounted for satisfactorily on no other supposition; as philosophers also argue to the immortality of the soul from man’s universal and inevitable tendency to unending existence, so in like manner, it may be argued that since always and everywhere the art impulse is connected in its origin and growth with religion, that impulse too, like belief in God and desire of immortality and conscience for law and tendency to truth, is a projection of the divine upon humanity, not the anthropomorphism of God but the theomorphism of man. The structure of our eye, made to respond to light, justifies us in concluding there is light. The nature of the soul, which can respond to infinite beauty, justifies us in concluding there is infinite beauty. He who said, “Let there be light,” said also, “Let us make man after our own image and likeness.”

An explanation of the nature of these two human acts of art and religion will disclose more analogies while revealing essential differences. Religion is a virtue of the will, a habit developed by the free act of man, a virtue which culminates in worship of God as the supreme being. The impulse of art has not been analyzed as fully and as satisfactorily as the virtue of religion, but from Aristotle’s analysis in the _Poetics_, through the Neo-Platonists and the Scholastics down to Kant and his followers, there is common agreement that the tendency to beauty does not belong to the inclination towards good, actuating appetite and will, but that the enjoyment of beauty is a function of the perceptions, the imagination, and the mind. The admitted disinterestedness of the art impulse is the paramount and irresistible evidence that it differs essentially from the self-seeking tendency of will and appetite which cannot be indifferent to good, since good is the very cause and condition of the appetite’s existence. The enjoyment of a painted fruit is akin to the enjoyment of verified theory or of a triumphant conclusion, and not like the satisfaction felt in the ownership of the painting of fruit or in the actual craving or eating of the fruit.

It is evident, therefore, why a man may be artistic without being religious. There is no more difficulty in understanding why an artist is not a saint than in knowing that conscience is one thing and acting up to it another thing. Improvement in art does not always mean improvement in morals or in religion, any more than to know is to will. Nor, on the other hand, will the evil of an artist or of his work be evidence against the divinity of art. The divine origin of conscience and the natural law is evident in the vice of the sinner as in the virtues of the saint. The essential difference between art and religion shows also that the school in which the prophet is Ruskin, the school which finds a religion in the beauty of world or of art, is incorrect in its teaching. Love and fear are the mainsprings of action, the incentives to virtue. Beauty may grace the attraction of good; it cannot take the place of good in virtue and religion. Estheticism is not asceticism. Francis of Assisi was a poet and a saint, Francesca da Rimini enjoyed poetry, might have been a poet, but was not always a saint, and many a Francisco and Francesca may be found neither artistic nor religious, as many are talented without being virtuous and virtuous without being talented.

Despite the sad lack of harmony between the beauty of their art and the virtue of their lives, artists have nevertheless always been revered. The honor of their art has won them in their lapses a gentleness of treatment not accorded to less favored mortals. They are fallen angels if they fall.