View the scanned original illustrations
WE lived for two or three centuries with a feeling that the Italian Renaissance brought us back, for our consolation, into the lost path of ancient art, and that before the Renaissance and outside of it there was nothing but barbarism and confusion. When our need to love them caused us to regard passionately the work left by the artists who, in the last days of the Middle Ages, preceded the Italian dawn, we misunderstood and slandered Italy. We reproached her for the influence that she exercised upon the peoples of the Occident; we refused to see that these peoples, after the temporary exhaustion of their spiritual resources, had to submit to the common law and demand of newer elements that which would fertilize their mind. We are so made that it is very difficult for us to place ourselves outside of history in order to consider it from afar, and so, too easily, we attribute a definitive value to the feelings which our present desires dictate to us. The need for the absolute, in which He our suffering and our strength and our glory, is also something that we refuse to recognize in men who took a different path from our own in order to satisfy that need.
WE lived for two or three centuries with a feeling that the Italian Renaissance brought us back, for our consolation, into the lost path of ancient art, and that before the Renaissance and outside of it there was nothing but barbarism and confusion. When our need to love them caused us to regard passionately the work left by the artists who, in the last days of the Middle Ages, preceded the Italian dawn, we misunderstood and slandered Italy. We reproached her for the influence that she exercised upon the peoples of the Occident; we refused to see that these peoples, after the temporary exhaustion of their spiritual resources, had to submit to the common law and demand of newer elements that which would fertilize their mind. We are so made that it is very difficult for us to place ourselves outside of history in order to consider it from afar, and so, too easily, we attribute a definitive value to the feelings which our present desires dictate to us. The need for the absolute, in which He our suffering and our strength and our glory, is also something that we refuse to recognize in men who took a different path from our own in order to satisfy that need.
When
men have invoked the spirit of their own race in order to condemn the influence
of Italy because of the errors into which she led imitators unworthy to
assimilate her teaching, it was in reality Michael Angelo or Titian who was
being accused of belonging to his own race and of not having been born in the
thirteenth century in northern Europe. If we listened to the Italian heroes, it
was because they, came at the hour when our instinct required them. The spirit
of the north and of the Occident had flowed back upon the Italy of the Middle
Ages, menacing her individuality and at the same time introducing into her the
elements that were indispensable for her resurrection. It was necessary that
the energy of Italy should assume an appearance of insurrection in order to
reject everything that she did not recognize as human and constant in those
elements which she received from abroad, and in order that she might give back
to the north the impetus which she had received from the north, at the hour
when the latter should call for her aid. If the imprint which she left upon the
north was a deep one, if it still remains, it is that the great effort put
forth in the Middle Ages by the peoples across the Alps and the Rhine had
almost exhausted them. And it is also that Italy brought to the world an
instrument of investigation that had lain forgotten for twelve centuries and to
which our fragment of humanity had still to resort in order not to succumb.
With its last breath, the social rhythm, which had found its realization in the
Occidental Commune and which had expressed itself with such a coherent and
anonymous force through the Cathedral and the Nibelungen Lied, was now
demanding of the individual that he arise from the midst of the crowds to
subject the work of the crowds to his criticism, and to discover in them, in
himself, and in the external universe the materials of a new rhythm in which
the crowds might one day define themselves, recognize themselves, and find
again, for a century or for an hour, the sense of collective action.
The
invention of printing did not, as Victor Hugo said, kill the architecture of
the ogive. At most it hastened its death slightly. When Gutenberg invented the
press, Masaccio and the van Eycks had for ten or fifteen years been pointing
out to the painters their new path, and in France all the churches which were
being built were so strained in their effect that the architectural elements
were rushing to dissociation. Nicolas Froment, Jehan Foucquet, and Enguerrand
Charonton were beginning to paint. The invention of printing was due to the
same causes as was the decadence of the art that built the edifices in which
the whole crowd had a share. The decomposition of architectural unity
corresponded with the work of analysis which was beginning to divide the social
body, and the liberation of the arts and sciences and the irresistible and
sudden rise of sculpture, painting, music, literature, and printing announced
the substitution of individual research for the great spontaneous creation in
which the newly aroused and magnificent energy of the peoples had for two or
three hundred years been summarizing their needs.
What
drew our attention toward Italy for so long a time, what made us misunderstand
the work of individualization which was going on at the same time in France, in
Germany, in Flanders, in England, and in Spain, was that this work in the north
and in the west was performed without a halt, because the statue descended from
the niche and the painting from the stained-glass window without the artist's
ceasing to look at the abandoned temple, even while he moved away from it. In
Italy, on the contrary, the individualization of the creative energies found
admirable tools ready to hand for the work of self-assertion. And there were
men for the task, those who for two centuries had been prepared by civil war
and by the violence of their passions, even as they had been prepared for this
search for their personal law by the character of the soil which had been
forming them since the beginning of their history. All the peoples of Europe
gave way before Italy's investigation or adopted it, for the reason that Italy
undertook her investigation with a mind freer and more mature than theirs. If
they did not always understand the conclusions that were reached, it is not
Italy that should be held responsible. Moreover, we are young, and we still
look to the future. What she gave us of life will live again when we live
again.
This
more or less gradual or more or less brutal passage from collective expression
to individual expression was not new. History is like a heart that beats—like a
fist that opens and closes. At certain hours, popular energy, having reached
its summit and requiring full freedom of action, demands momentary
concentration into a vast symphonic ensemble of all the moral, religious, and
social ideas which, before that time, had been scattered among a few minds that
were ahead of their time. This is the prodigious moment when the certitude of
living in the absolute and of fixing it in our souls produces a flash of
lightning amid the expanse of darkness, and it is this that lifts up a whole
people to the unknown god dwelling within it, while it remains all unconscious
of what has occurred. This is the wonderful moment when the individual effaces
himself, when all the members of a crowd react at the same time to external
forces, when great buildings spring forth from the earth, willed by all, built
by all, and subordinating to their social function all the isolated expressions
through which men only a day before were seeking to define themselves
separately. Egypt, in its ensemble, reached this hour several times in the
course of its long life and was able to prolong the hour more than any other
people because it was Egypt that opened history and because she proceeded
slowly in almost absolute isolation ; but even so there were centuries of doubt
and hesitation at intervals, and of analysis that is obscure to us because we
are too far away to comprehend it perfectly. Chaldea undoubtedly knew this
hour, India—nearer to us—lived through it in her frightful intoxication. It was
the frenzied and ecstatic dream of Islam. China tried to prolong it within
herself for three thousand years. Greece swept rapidly through her hour and
left her trace of fire across history. The earliest Doric temples reveal the
rapid rise toward this summit of domination which was reached by the anonymous
sculptor of Olympia and by Aeschylus at the same time, while Phidias began to
lean toward its other slope.
But the
anonymous sculptor of Olympia and Phidias were already powerfully characterized
individuals. Amid the procession of the people marching toward the Parthenon,
the voice of Aeschylus, one of the most pious voices, was heard above the
others, and in his brain he bore Prometheus, who was to attempt to ravish the
flame from the altar. Since the beginning of history, never had the individual
so strongly claimed the right to place his thought at the service of men who
did not understand him. By way of these implacable successions of analyses and
syntheses [The Saint-Simonians called them critical and organic periods.] which
the evolution of the mind imposes upon us like voyages through hell and
sojourns in Paradise, we achieve partial syntheses and partial analyses which
correspond to momentary triumphs of classes or of tendencies in the social
organism. The Greek synthesis, which doubtless attained its strongest
expression at some time between the poems of Homer and the Medean wars, was a
short stage in the course of the long analysis which separated the decline of
the old Oriental civilizations from the obscure beginnings of the modern
civilizations. But it was the decisive stage which determined the future.
In any
case, the philosophic and aesthetic activity in which it culminated seemed
forever to dissociate the elements of human energy, and when it had introduced
into the world the terrible ferments of reason and liberty, the world seemed
condemned never to recover the profound harmony in which all men meet and in
which the social rhythm submerges all the individual rhythms. It is true that
painting has revealed to us almost nothing of what the soul of the ancients
confided to it as it wandered in search of itself; and yet painting is par
excellence the plastic instrument of the individual, through its infinite
suppleness, its obedience to every change of direction, to every leap, to every
flash of light, to every shadow of the mind as well as through its faculty for
binding together the most complex relationships. Sculpture is still a social
art which has to produce in space a block closed on all sides—it must therefore
respond to clearly constructed philosophic ideas, and when it was torn from the
temple, it could not do otherwise than betray to us the disquietude, the doubt,
the dispersion and irremediable disorder of the social body itself; it could
not fail to let us foresee the coming of a new world, even though it did not
indicate to us the true direction of that world. Be that as it may, the
Hellenic analysis so disintegrated the old world that it seemed to be going
down forever, and it had to appeal first to the Jews and then to the barbarians
in order that, in a new territory, it might once more lay the foundation for a
social rhythm, which did not culminate until seventeen centuries after the time
of the Parthenon—with the Commune of the Occident, the French cathedral, the
popular poems of Germany, and the market of the Flemings.
The
Renaissance owes its name to the fact that it expressed an hour of our history
analogous to that one of which Euripides and Praxiteles lived the first and
most decisive moments. Only, we are better able to grasp the plastic
manifestations of it. There remains to us something else than the dissolving
and sacred thought of the philosophers who affirmed its character—Rabelais,
Montaigne, and Erasmus, in whom Socrates and his disciples would not have
recognized themselves, but who, in the reverse sense, and in their relation
with the mediaeval world, played the role that Socrates and his disciples had
played respecting the ancient world. There remains to us something else than
the anarchic architecture to which it gave rise in Italy. It has left us
painting, an individual work, it is true, but objective, even so, and one that
could not endure except that it express a living continuity in the brain of the
artist, and no longer, like the arts that precede it, in the anonymous instinct
of a collectivity. It is especially through painting that we know why the
Renaissance was necessary to us and why we love it. We know why we shall not
cease to be grateful to the great individuals who gathered up into their soul
the soul of the crowds that had disappeared, in order to transmit their hopes
to the crowds that were to come. For it is they who pass on the torch. It is
they who are the bond of union between the general needs that men no longer
feel and the general needs that they will feel again one day—between the
organism of yesterday and the organism of to-morrow. They are in themselves a
crowd, and the continuity of sentiment that bound men to men found its refuge
in their hearts. The Michael Angelo of the Sistine, Rubens, Rembrandt, and
Velasquez are, more clearly than the writers, the scientists, or the
philosophers, the individual symphonies which, in critical periods, collected
the elements of the people's symphony that, for the moment, had been scattered to
all the winds of sensation and the mind. One can love them with a love equal to
that which one feels for the abandoned temple. Between a cathedral window and a
picture by Titian there is the distance that separates an admirable voice in
the most beautiful popular choir from a symphony by Beethoven.
It is
this that gives to those who arise here and there, to hold up the columns of
the temple with their titanic effort, the appearance of being in radical
opposition to their surroundings. They seem ill adapted to the society in which
they are because they have within them the grand rhythm—invisible to the blind
multitudes—of the adaptations to come. They broke dead rhythms to create new
rhythms. They are the more solitary the higher they rise and the more complex,
universal, permanent, and profound, are the elements of life that are brought
into activity by the symphonies which they hear in the silence of their hearts.
But
since a social synthesis is the secret goal of their effort, since men are
joyful when their purpose is realized, since pessimism occurs only in the rare
minds that suffer through their loneliness, and since optimism is the fruit of
communion among men, how is it that when this divine communion has been
achieved, how is it, I repeat, that men cannot safeguard it? The reason is that
no society could resist the general stagnation which the maintenance of this
communion would bring about. The reason is that life is nothing else but
effort. And the balance of the elements that compose it is never a static
realization, but always a tendency; or at least, the instant in which the
balance is effected is too imperceptible for us to be able to arrest it
otherwise than through the works which spring forth at that moment from our
hearts.
This
dynamic equilibrium, ever destroyed, ever restored, which it is impossible to
maintain but which engenders a hope that we cannot stifle, this repose which we
pursue with the desire of attaining it and with the presentiment that we shall
lose it immediately, could not be prolonged unless the social organs adapt
themselves in a spontaneous, close, and yet mobile manner to economic .and
moral conditions whose evolution never ceases. But very soon there comes a
moment when the appearance of new peoples and new methods, of unforeseen
discoveries, and of currents of external ideas disturbs the balance of the
scales, when one of the organs tends to grow at the expense of the other, when
the narrow egoism of one class, of one caste, or of some particular group of
individuals gains possession of the work of the others for its own profit, and
arouses, among those others, isolated forces which will sprout little by little
in minds adapted to the search for the law of a new equilibrium. The unequal
distribution of wealth, the needs that it develops, and the groupings of
interests that it necessarily creates have doubtless been, up to the present,
the most visibly active factor of the social dissociations which we observe in
history. At the same time, through the aristocracies of culture which it helped
to form, it was preparing the ground for the future associations of the very
elements that it separated one from another. It has always been believed that
luxury exercised a favorable influence on the development of art. In reality, the
relationship which certainly exists between luxury and art has given to wealth
the advantage of a role that it has never possessed. The intellectual forces of
a people are born of the effort from which spring, with these forces, the
wealth of individuals, and the power of radiation, and expansion of the
collectivity. At the hour when these forces become conscious of themselves,
architecture is dead and sculpture dies. If the aristocracies of wealth avail
themselves of the flowering of literature and more especially of painting, it
is also they who bring the arts into contempt, even as the acquiring of riches
destroys the power of a people by raising up around it organs of isolation and
defense which end by crushing it. The only wealth of mankind is action.
As a
matter of fact, the influence of Italy was arrested when Italy had become the
house of pleasure for Europe, as the influence of Greece had come to an end at
the moment when Athens, grown rich, was no longer considered good for anything
by those who had just conquered her save to teach them and to amuse them. That
was enough. To France, who was broken by war and whose formidable effort had
twisted and dislocated the limbs and the backbone of the great ogival nave,
Italy had indicated a path of regeneration. And along this path France was to
gather up powerful instruments with which to emancipate herself. To the
Shakespearean cycle she had furnished an inexhaustible treasury of sensations,
ideas, and images, a mirror which the breath of the north blurred so that the
soul of its poets should not be able to find in it the limits of its mystery.
She had prepared the way for the all-powerful hero of painting who was to
appear in Flanders at the beginning of the seventeenth century and was to stir
the whole world by opening the gates of the modern epoch. He did so when he
poured into the single mold of southern rhythms the abounding matter of the
flat countries where the mist and the rain take on the color of the sun. And
although the protest that the reformers made against the moral dissolution of
Italy gave to Germany's political insurrection a character of antagonism toward
the Renaissance of the south, it was the example of Italy which permitted them,
later on, to arouse the individual forces that were needed by their country.
The
search for social equilibriums occurs in space—across the face of the earth, as
well as in time—throughout the course of history; and the conditions of that
search change according to the economic and geographical circumstances which
rendered it indispensable. The countries of the north of Europe, in their
relation with the countries of the south, had to experience a reaction which
may fairly be compared with that which the Jewish people had attempted against
the influence of the Greek people. The exaltation of the intellectual and
sensual qualities of men gave way suddenly before the qualities which had been
insisted upon by the Jewish prophets. This is, at least, an outline of the
significance which, in the mind of those thinkers who expressed it, is to be
attributed to the movements of which we have been speaking, movements which are
too complex and too profound for us to be able to gather up their political and
social meaning into a single formula. The universal character of primitive
Christianity and its demand for an inner discipline imposed on the barbarians
of the north and the west of Europe bonds which were necessary for the
restraining and utilization of their unemployed energy. The Reformation, in its
turn, or at least the movement that culminated in the Reformation, permitted
them to recover their personality, which was being compromised in the course of
time by the progressive invasion of Latin idealism, and to free their economic
activity from the domination of Rome. If the outer form which the religious and
political powers of Germany gave to the agitation for reform stifled the
spiritual powers released by the Renaissance, it was to revive with the great
music in the genius of the north, which had been freed and enabled to pour its
formidable life into the soul of the men of the future.
Whatever
the violations of the innocence of man committed by Catholicism and the
Protestant sects, we must accept them as necessary social secretions from
which, during centuries, the man of the south and the man of the north have
derived what they needed for the establishment of a balance with the natural
and moral surroundings in which their life was passed. The individualism in
matters of passion of the southern peoples imposed upon them the need for a
social frame work of a powerfully hierarchic character; in this all their
unrest and all their inner conflicts could find an exact solution and, in case
of need, appeal for the support of an immutable force from without. The
naturally social character of the peoples of the north, where the harder
struggle for existence and the more continuous effort render man necessary to
man at every moment, called for a lever from within which should stir the moral
nature. In the century when the Germanic genius and the Italian genius expanded
m a supreme burst of energy, we shall see the painters who represent the two
countries considering form from almost opposite points of view. On the one hand
there are frescoes on the walls, made to be seen by all. On the other hand, we
find isolated works, belonging to brotherhoods or ordered by donors. On the one
hand, we find artists more powerfully individualized because the multitude
around them is anarchic and passionate, and they unite the spirit which is
scattered through the crowd by raising up an ideal, generalizing a hierarchic
image of nature. On the other hand, artists who are scarcely liberated from the
collective instinct of the Middle Ages divide up the common spirit by
particularizing all the aspects of nature which they see confused and in detail
and all on the same plane. Rubens, the man of the north and a Catholic, will
bring about a momentary harmony between the soul of Michael Angelo and the soul
of Dürer.
But the
world will have to wait for him for a hundred years Until we reach him and
despite the incessant borrowing from Italy of the peoples of the north despite
the fact that Italy sought from the colorists ot Flanders advice the evidence
of which is less easy to discover, there was, between the spirit of the north
and the spirit of the south, u kind of antagonism which was necessary to the
effort of the world and which, doubtless, will not disappear until the day
when, the unity of Europe having been effected, more numerous and widely
separated groups will confront their desires. The thin landscapes of the south,
their transparence,, the sober and precise lines which arrest them in the
intelligence and which engender in us clear ideas and essential relationships
permitted the great Italians to create an intellectual interpretation of nature
which, from the sculptors of Egypt to Michael Angelo, and from Phidias to
Titian, has changed only in appearance, and tends to summarize universal life
in the human form, as purified as the mind itself from the accidental
surroundings which limit, and imperfections which encompass, it. The landscapes
of the north, engulfed in mists and buried under leaves, are marked by a
confusion which disturbs us with vague sensations of a tangle of
images—powerless to organize themselves into ideas. And this was the force that
opened to the artists of the northern countries the gates of a mystery in which
the forms float and seek one another and make it impossible for sentiment to
eliminate and to choose. The men of one group, by reducing nature to an
arbitrarily settled harmony, raised man up to be a god; the other group mingled
men with life in general by considering nature as a blind symphony in which
consciousness is lost in the whirl of sounds, forms, and colors. Hence the spiritual
exaltation of those who, the better to seize the higher destiny of man, forgot
his misery and their own suffering and saw him forever ascending; hence the
humanity of those who, each time that they turned toward man, saw him cradled
by the fraternal wave of matter, of ideas, and of movements. The
anthropomorphism of the one group and the pantheism of the other have given to
our mind the two poles of its power, between which it is perhaps condemned to
move eternally and from which it derives desire and doubt, but also the will to
action.
And
what does doubt matter, and what does it matter that the desire is never
quenched! What does it matter if we feel, escaping from us at every moment,
that monstrous truth which we think to grasp at every moment and which
ceaselessly flows out of us and beyond us, because it is living just as we are
and because we create it every day and condemn it to death by the mere fact
that we have wrested it from ourselves! What does it matter that there should
be, from age to age, broken voices which tell us that we shall never know
everything! That is our glory. Each time that we set to work, we know
everything, because at the moment of creation there flow into us all the living
forces of the world which we invoke and epitomize for the illumination of our
spirit and the guidance of our hand. If our love for the Renaissance is so
intoxicating, it is that our love consented to suffer in order to bring forth
from the night those moving truths whose exhaustless power of creation we are
barely beginning to perceive to-day, and this again is because they are
inseparable from all the truths that ever were and all that are still to come.
We shall not forget those invincible men who, when all the powers leagued
together to bar their way, when their books were burned and their crucibles
were smashed, when the ax and the sword were raised against them and the fagots
were prepared for them around the stake, did not recoil from the task of
discovering facts and ideas which each day broke down the equilibrium of soul
that they acquired so painfully, and who kept alive in themselves the effort
necessary for other conquests. We shall not forget that when humanity,
exhausted by the crisis of love through which it had just lived, uttered a cry
of anguish, they hastened to lift up and console that love. We shall not forget
that at the same hour, when a finger, which had until then pressed upon
invisible lips, was lifted at some place, Keppler and Copernicus, with a single
gesture, pushed back the sky beyond the very limits of the dream and of
intuition; Columbus and Magellan opened up the great routes of the earth in
order that it might be placed within our hands like a weapon of combat; Vésale
and Michael Servetus seized upon the initial movements of life within our
entrails; Shakespeare freed from theological uses the boundless poem that we
bear within our hearts; Rabelais, Erasmus, and Montaigne affirmed that force is
eternal and that doubt is necessary; Cervantes wrested the life of our idealism
from all the evil paths of disappointments and mirages; and Italian art was
slowly dying from the effort it had had to make in order to introduce order
into the mind, and through order freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment