Chapter II (2)

The amount of activity devoted by men to religion and æsthetics may appear at first sight useless and even harmful; but it must be recognized that humanity is always possessed of a surplus which must be expended in some way or other. Prayer and religious exercises, regarded as occupations simply, are of the least harmful of pastimes, are of the least vain of the various forms of distraction. Prayer and the church have hitherto been the art and theatre of the poor. No doubt art and prayer cannot be made to constitute alone the whole of life; mystics have believed that it is practical life that is the diversion, and that the serious element in things is religious contemplation. Precisely the opposite is true: preoccupation with art and metaphysics should dominate human life, but not absorb it. Religion in especial, with its myths, is too generously compounded of illusion and downright fiction to be made the centre of life; religion is a radiant coloured cloud that wreaths the summit of the mountain. If we climb up into it we perceive that it is empty and sombre within, that it is a cloud, damp and cold like other clouds and radiant only from below.

[Sidenote: Æsthetic element in religion.]

The poetry of religion may survive the dogmatism of religion; as articles of faith, religious ideas are to-day anachronisms; as practical and philosophical conceptions they are like all works of art, in a measure imperishable. Who, asks Lange, could wish to refute a Mass of Palestrina or accuse the Madonna of Raphael of error? Religions have inspired literary and artistic labours—products which will survive them at least in part, and will constitute ultimately their best justification. What remains of the Crusades to-day? Among the best things that they gave us must be counted certain flowers that they brought back with them and propagated among us, for example, Damascus roses, and certain colours and perfumes which have survived the great rising of Europe against Asia in support of certain ideas and passions which are to-day forever extinct.

[Sidenote: Defects of æsthetic side of religion.]

Looked at from a certain point of view, priests are the artists of the people, but the genuine artist ought to move with the times, understand new motives and not repeat indefinitely, from generation to generation, the same musical or poetical theme. The feeble side of religious aæsthetics is that its repertoire of incident and mystery is severely limited, that it has repeated itself for centuries. It must enlarge the number of its pieces, must abandon those it has. Nothing could be better than to assemble for the purpose of experiencing in common an emotion at once aæsthetic and serious, seeing and hearing something beautiful; but it is impossible that this emotion should be indefinitely prolonged by a repetition of the same stimulus. Rites are irreconcilable with the double aim of art: variety and progress in the expression of the emotions themselves. Sooner or later the rudimentary art of ritual must give place to genuine and progressive art, just as the instinctive and eternally monotonous architecture practised by bird and insect has become the infinitely varied architecture which has produced and will produce masterpieces of the most varied kind, from Notre Dame de Paris to the Alhambra.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the sermon.]

In general, men gather together to listen. Conferences, sermons, songs are the most permanent features in religious cult. They will probably exist in some form or other in future associations as in those of the past. One point will become increasingly important in every spoken word addressed to the people, and that is the instructive aspect of what is said; if one is to address the people, one must teach them something. Well, there are three kinds of instruction, scientific, literary and moral, or metaphysical. The first will have to be more and more generously given, not only in school but wherever adults congregate. The two other sorts may be given simultaneously by lectures. The most interesting elements in many sermons and conferences are the texts and citations brought to the hearers’ attention by the speaker. The choice of these texts, the manner in which they are expounded and introduced to the comprehension of the multitude, constitute the value of the sermon. In other words, the best sermon consists simply in the reading and exposition of some choice page from a good book. In Germany, in England, in the Indies preachers of certain liberal sects choose their texts indifferently from among the whole number of the sacred books of humanity. A still more liberal epoch may be conceived, when texts will be selected not only from among the writings of the poets of ancient times but also from among the writings of men of genius of all times; every great work will be read and commented on as a sacred book. The most complete expression of the so-called religious sentiment, apart from the vast Hindu or Jewish epochs, is, after all, to be found in certain profane masterpieces, from the works of Plato and Marcus Aurelius to Kant’s “Hymn to Duty”; from the dramas of Æschylus to the “Hamlet” of Shakespeare, to the “Polyeucte” of Corneille, and the “Contemplations” of Victor Hugo.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the prophet.]

Religious prophets, like priests, will be replaced by great poets, great metaphysicians, great men of science. Each of us will be able to choose our prophet, to prefer the genius which is best adapted to our personal intelligence and best serves as an intermediary between us and the eternal truth, and each of us will be in the last resort our own priest.[126]

[126] “Prophecy is not dead, it flourishes under another name.
Religious reforms, emancipation from oppressive authority, war
against corrupt institutions, religious poetry, philosophy of
history—are all represented under various titles in the modern
world. The old trunk has branched again simply.” (M. Albert
Réville, p. 229, _Prolégomènes de l’Histoire des religions_.)

[Sidenote: Music.]

Apart from poetry and eloquence, the most religious of the arts, the most capable of inspiring the multitude with an elevated sympathy has been, and will be music. Wagner was not absolutely wrong in his notion that music will be the religion of the future, or, at least, the cult of the future. We do not speak of instrumental music only, but also and in especial of vocal music, of choruses such as are often met with in Germany, in which many voices unite in producing the same chant, in beating the same rhythm which has been regulated in advance by genius. Thus conceived, music is truly religious and socially significant.[127]

[127] Music at the present day forms a part of the cult; but
either it is supplied by members of the faithful, in which
event it is sufficiently bad, for the majority of the faithful
are ignorant of music; or it is provided by mercenaries,
and it is then more commonly good, but is generally ill
chosen. Musical education will one day probably be much more
wide-spread than it is to-day; it would not be more difficult,
and would always be more useful, to teach children the elements
of music than to teach them the mystery of the Incarnation.
More than that, if religious music were chosen not only from
so-called sacred works but from the works of classical masters
generally, one might be certain of hearing good music, varied
in style and movement, and capable of pleasing all those in
whom the æsthetic sense is developed.

[Sidenote: Kinship of æsthetic and religious sentiment.]

For the rest, almost every art is reconcilable with the gravity of religious sentiment, for every art at its best awakens, no less than poetry and music, a contemplative and philosophical mood. One may agree with Strauss that religion will gradually be transmuted into art, and even at the present day profane art and sacred art are rather different than opposed. These differences will always subsist; it is evident that a _pas redoublé_, for example, can never be the symbol of a really profound idea of nature or of humanity or of the infinite. Religious æsthetics, even though it becomes continuously larger and more tolerant, will exclude to the end certain inferior forms of art.

[Sidenote: Necessary reforms in lay art.]

If art is to take the place of religion, it must progress in certain directions, not only in its forms but in its material methods of appeal. Note how much better church services are presented, from the point of view of hygiene, than art exhibitions are. Moderation is practised in the matter of light; the rooms are large and well supplied with fresh air, are of an almost constant temperature; and the æsthetic services are restful rather than exhausting. Compare with all this the entertainment given in concert halls and theatres, where multitudes are packed together under unnecessarily brilliant lights, where the spectators are wrought up and excited and exhausted in a hundred ways and pass out, finally, fatigued, enfeebled, nervously keyed up, and pursued by a host of sensual images. Church architects are infinitely more conversant with hygiene than those who build our theatres; they understand that if the heavens are to be shut out at all, space enough must be shut in to give the heart and chest room to expand. Among the Greeks, where art really did form a sort of religion, the theatres were open to the sky so that the spectators might really repose in body while they gave up their minds to be played upon by the poet.

[Sidenote: In religious art.]

Just as existing profane art must undergo certain transformations before it can be expected fully to satisfy a sane and well-balanced nature, so religious art, if it is to be true to its highest tendencies, must transform itself, must rid itself of precisely the elements which to-day seem distinctively to constitute it, namely its marvellous subject-matter and conventional handling. The marvellous in art was long necessary, as we have seen, to capture men’s attention; contemporaneous art does not need to make this appeal. All art took its rise from convention, from ceremonial, but has enfranchised itself by degrees. It might even be established as a general law that the more perfect, the more expressive, arts become—the more, that is to say they seek precisely to body forth the sentiment of the artist; and the more expressive they are the less conventional and less pompous they must be. Amplification and exaggeration are suppressed. The artist occupies toward his emotions the same relation that the translator of a great work does to his text: his translation will be regarded nowadays as perfect in proportion as it is close, as it follows the text, line by line and word by word; formerly the tradition was otherwise, and every translator felt himself obliged to amplify. Art possesses _great_ means of inspiring emotion, but not _gross_ means. Public speakers at the present day make much less frequent use of gesture; the actor no longer steps out on the stage in the cothurnus; the language of verse is approaching the language of ordinary life; music is breaking away from the conventions of counterpoint. What is true of the diverse arts is true also of religious æsthetics, which will one day abandon the fictitious ornaments and vain ceremonies of ritualism. If an æsthetic expression of some profound sentiment is to be true and durable, it must itself be profound, must be like what it expresses, must be murmured rather than articulate. What renders certain verse eternal is its simplicity: the more overcharged an art is the more caducous it proves, like the architecture of the Jesuit style, which is to-day so ridiculous, with its gilding and false ornaments. Ceremonies, properly so called, will become more and more simple in religious or moral associations; the day will come, no doubt, when they will not be employed at all except to celebrate the three great events of human life: birth, marriage, and death; nay, perhaps they will disappear altogether as emotion becomes too profound to be translated by any objective device, by any conventional ceremony whatever.

“Une larme en dit plus que vous n’en pourriez dire.”

In cemeteries the tombs of distinguished people may be recognized by their simplicity, by their freedom from conventional ornament. A marble slab under a wreath of flowers is enough to produce upon the passer-by a more vivid impression than crosses, burning lamps, images of the saints, infantine gewgaws, and ridiculous inscriptions. Eternal enigmas need not be supplied with excess of language; they are quite capable of making themselves heard without raising their voices. The silence of the stars is more impressive than speech, and the highest religious instruction could not do better than teach men to listen to such science. Meditation, which, after all, is recommended by every religion, implies the negation of rite.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Enjoyment of natural beauty.]

III. A feeling for nature was, in the beginning, an important element in the composition of the religious sentiment. Hindu ascetics went up into the valleys of the Himalayas, St. Antoine went into the desert at Thebes, St. Bruno went to La Grande Chartreuse, in search of something more than simple solitude; they all of them experienced an ill-defined need to eke out monotony of contemplation by admiration of the beautiful in nature; a need to fill the void of ecstasy with harmonious and powerful sensations. They were unconscious poets, painters without hands, astronomers without special knowledge, and their sentiment for nature made part of their religious sentiment; the profane mingled with the divine, and they ascribed to God alone the intense emotion that forest and mountain summit had given rise to in them. To-day, the æsthetic sentiment exists apart from religious sentiment; although every æsthetic sentiment of an especially elevated kind is both contemplative and philosophical, it contains no suggestion of any particular religion: no tabernacle can roof in heaven; æsthetic sentiment is foreign to the definite and anthropomorphic notion of a personal God. When we contemplate nature we have no sense of communion with the personality of God; the artist has definitively supplanted the religious hermit. The power of theological sentiment has weakened; the power of sympathy for nature has increased.

[Sidenote: Should be cherished.]

This sense of natural beauty, which is so strong in many men at the present day, is destined to a much greater future. Like æsthetic faculties generally, a sense for the beauty of nature must be cultivated and developed by a well-directed education. No germ of it apparently is to be found in certain cases among the peasantry, where a mechanical habit of life has dulled the emotions, nor among dwellers in cities, in whom antagonistic tastes have been developed. A genuine Parisian cares little for the country; he can pass an hour or two in the fields, as he might in the Bois de Boulogne. An open-air landscape would not so readily appeal to him as a picture of it in a gold frame; his eye is not educated for dealing with the dimensions of nature.

[Sidenote: The most wholesome form of enjoyment.]

Of all æsthetic sentiments, love of nature possesses the advantage of being the one which, even though pushed to excess, does not disturb the equilibrium of body and mind. Love of nature is the sole emotion which is absolutely hygienic. One may die of an exaggerated love of the theatre, of music and so forth; one simply becomes healthy from an exaggerated love of nature. Air and light! The Greeks were right, were they not? to philosophize in the open air, in gardens and groves. A ray of sunlight sometimes helps one more to understand the world than an eternity of meditation in some gray room in the midst of open volumes.[128]

[128] Every library reading room ought to open on a garden
where one could read and write on fine days in the open air.
For all men whose labour is physical—for example, for a
factory hand—the proper recreation is repose in the open
air, and, if need be, intellectual labour in the open air.
For men who work with their minds, the proper recreation is
bodily exercise in the open air, in the sunlight. For children
every holiday ought to be spent in the country. Lighted
rooms, children’s entertainments in the house even on Sunday
afternoons, theatrical representations, are, hygienically
speaking, absurdities. All boarding-schools, moreover, ought to
be beyond the city limits and if possible on some commanding
height. If there existed in France, as in Germany for example,
great colleges in country districts hard by forests, or still
better, in the highlands of Dauphiny or the Pyrenees, such
places would ultimately be adopted by the better classes for
their children’s education, and thus might be combated the
degeneracy of the middle class, which is so much more rapid in
France than elsewhere, because the custom of restricting the
number of children interferes with natural selection.

[Sidenote: Superior to enjoyment of human art.]

Compare the appeal that nature makes to the æsthetic sense with that made by human art, and you will at once perceive the superiority of the former. Art, even great art, even that which seems closest to the truth, can never be more than a very insufficient representation of the real world, because it is forced to a selection; it is forced to ignore nine-tenths of life in order to set in a clear light what is extreme, what appeals to laughter or to tears. Average human life is neither ridiculous nor tragic; life, as it appears in art, is generally one or the other. The reason is that art subordinates truth to interest, while life is truth. Thence results the movement toward pessimism in art, and in especial in modern art; the more masterly the artist is, the more he will be inclined to seek for the ridiculous or the melancholy aspects of life; his aim is to move pity or mirth, and existence in his pages must take the form of tragedy or comedy. To live too exclusively in the world of art is to live in a factitious environment as if one should pass one’s whole existence in a theatre. The most beautiful poem, the most beautiful work of art, contains pitfalls which one must avoid. The imagination usually plays with loaded dice. Whoever lives too exclusively on human art becomes, therefore, a little unhealthy, a little unbalanced. The great source of æsthetic appeal is and should be nature, which is always sincere, always shows for what it is, without deception and ornament. A higher æsthetic culture will increase one’s sensibility to natural beauty, and it is in a contemplation of the cosmos that æsthetic sentiment, and a purified religious sentiment, will find it possible most completely to coincide. The emotion that arises from the contemplation of a landscape, of a sunset, of a stretch of blue sea, of a snow-capped mountain outlined against the sky, or even the blue dome of the sky itself, is absolutely pure, sane, neither too depressing, nor too immoderately gay. In the presence of nature one’s æsthetic sensibilities become the means of refreshing and resting one instead of fatiguing one—nature smiles but never grimaces; and its smile penetrates the soul as the sunlight penetrates the eye; and if nature has its moods of sadness, they contain a touch of the infinite which enlarges the heart. The immensity of nature and of the all-enveloping heavens becomes, for those who feel it, a constant source of a certain stoical serenity.