(logo) Web Moving Images Texts Audio Software Education Patron Info About IA (navigation image) Home American Libraries | Canadian Libraries | Universal Library | Project Gutenberg | Children's Library | Biodiversity Heritage Library | Additional Collections *Search:* Advanced Search *Anonymous User* (login or join us ) Upload See other formats Full text of "Art and scholasticism with other essays " The Philosophy of Art Marital* I Hi . A A THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Being "Art et Scholastique" by Jacques Maritain, translated by the Rev. John O Connor, S.T.P. with an introduction by Eric Gill O.S.D. PRINTED & PUBLISHED AT S. DOMINIc s PRESS, DITCHLING, SUSSEX. 87*92 A/ M2 INTRODUCTION THE English people,heatedbytheburden, "the White Man s Burden," of over-pro duction, needs a cooling medicine. This book is such a medicine, the more needed be cause in the natural course of events the cooling down would be, as it shows abundant signs of being, a mere collapse. The factory system of production, upon which modern industrialism is built, was the natural material manifestation of the line of thought made paramount by the triumph with which the trader emerged from the war of causes called the Protestant Reformation, and by the defeat of Humility which turned out to be the main achievement of the Renaissance. Such industrialism is indeed the Beauty, so to call it with one s thumb to one s nose, to which their Goodness and Truth proceed the Unchastity which is proper bed-fellow to their Disobedience and Vainglory ! But, unfortunately, our national vice of hypocrisy, our aptitude for self-deception, our dislike, nay, our refusal of logical thought, our respect for respectability combine to develop that habit of compromise of which we are so absurdly proud. Faced by the appalling results of industrialism,with misery and ugliness upon every side, we are still trying to live by bread alone; we arestill refusing to see that weare hurt by our fall from that pinnacle of the Temple of God upon which, with however precarious a balance, we stood; we are still covetously sur veying all the kingdoms of the world ! A book about Art would seem to be an in effectual drug with which to combat so mortal a disease, and we do not put it forward with any too sanguine a viewof itspower to purge, to move the bowels of Repentance, to quicken a desire for the Kingdom of Heaven. England has perhaps made too irrevocable an alliance with Hell. Nevertheless, a little Truth humbly assimilated would in due course leaven the whole lump of the soul,and a man who makes tidy one corner-cupboard of his mind is well on the way to a whole house in order. Only let it be really his Mind that is thus tidied up and not merely his stomach. Now there is more than a little truth inthis book and moreover the subject, Art, does in fact embrace a much wider range of human activities than is commonly supposed, for the whole business of Making is involved. This is one of the worst symptoms of our disease : that 11 we have made Art the province of a specially cultured few and have made the common workman responsible only for doing and not at all for making ; for of no factory article can it be said that such and such a man made it the most that can be said is that the article is the result of a number of rs\zn doing what they were told. The artist has thus become puffed up with the notion of his intellectual superi ority, while the workman has lost all appetite for anything but the amusements he can pur chase in his spare time. Art embraces all Mak ing and there should be no need to talk about it. But that blissful state wherein all things are well made and none are called "works of art" is only recoverable by a total abandonment of our present worship of Riches and Empire and by an acceptance of the philosophy of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience instead. That is the great meri t of this book. Its aes thetic is based four-square upon the Rock of a philosophy wholly philosophic, wholly Christian, and therefore wholly Catholic. It is not the idiosyncratic theorizing of someone, however learned and sympathetic. It is simply an exposition of what may justly be said to be implicit in the teaching of the accredited doc tors of the Church . in ART AND THE SCHOOLMEN I. THE Schoolmen have written no special treatise entitled "Philosophy of Art." The which is doubtless a result of the rough pedagogic discipline to which medieval phil osophers were subjected ; busy as they were with delving and rummaging in all directions in the problems of the schools, they were little troubled at leaving whole tracts unexplored between those deep mine shafts that they sank. Nevertheless, we rind they had a theory of Art, both deep and well thought out ;but we have to lookfor itamongausteredisquisitionsonsome logical problem "Is Logic a liberal Art?" or one of moral Theology "How is the virtue ot Prudence at once intellectual and moral &\$- tinguished from Art which is an intellectual virtue?" In thesedissertations, in which thenruureof Art is only studied by the way, the question is of Art in general, from the art of the Shinb! kier to the art of the Grammarian and the i cian; there is no question as to the fine arts in i cular, the consideration of which do-- "rbr- mally"interest the questioner. It is to I > eta- physicof the Ancientsthatonemust _> -je what they thought of the Beautiful, and thence go forward to encoun ter Art, & see what comes from the union of these two terms. Such a pro cess, even if it put us out, will at least yield a use ful lesson, by making us alive to theerror in the "Aesthetic" of modern philosophers, which in art considers only thefinearts, and treatsoniy of the beautiful with regard to art, and so runs the risk of vitiating at once both the idea of Art and the idea of the Beautiful. Itispossible,tberefore, by gathering together and working afresh the material made ready by the Schoolmen, to build up a rich and complete theory of Art. We would only point out here a few of the features of such a theory , deprecating the dogmatic attitude which that would im pose on our humble essay, and hoping that in spite of their inadequacy these reflections con cerning Ground about \.\\z maxims of the School men may draw attention to the usefulness of a resort to the wisdom of the ancients, as well as to the possible interest of a conversation between philosophers and artists, in an epoch when all feel the need of extrication from the boundless intellectual disarray inherited from the nine teenth century, and of rediscovering the spiri tual conditions oi honest labour. II. THE SPECULATIVE ORDER AND THE PRACTICAL ORDER. THE understanding has certain virtues whosewho/e and sole- end is to knot. They belong to the speculative order. Such are: the understanding of Principles, which, when we have gathered from ourserrsi- tive experience the ideas of Being, of Cause, of End, and so forth, show us at once through the effects of the living light which is in us by nature the self-evident truths on which all our knowledge hangs, Science,which induces knowledge by demonstration, by assigning causes; Wisdom, 1 which fixes our gazeon first causes, by which the mind grasps all things in the higher unity of simple apprehension. I. We speak hereof Wisdom <y perfect ion em contetnplantis,et mode of knowledge, Metaphysic ideo sistit in intellectu, et ita and Theology. The Schoolmen finis eorum in hoc estcognitio distinguish a higher wisdom, intellectus. Sed contemplatio wisdom by mode of inclination Sanctorum, quae est Catholic- or. of connaturality vpitA things orum, est propter amorem divine. This wisdom, which ipsius,scilicet contemplati Dei: is one of the Gifts of the Holy idcirco, non sistit in fine ulti- Ghost, does not stop at know- mo in intellectu per cogni- ing, but it knows by loving tionem, sed transit ad afFectum and for loving. "Contempla- per amorera." Alb. Magnus, :io Philosophorum est propter dt Adhaer. Deo, cap. ix. These speculative virtues perfect the under standing in its most proper function, in theacti- vity in which it is entirely itself; for the under standing, as such, aims only at knowing. The understandingacts,and its very act is,absolutely speaking, \\feparexcellence; butitisan/w/ztf/z- e nl act which stays entirely within itself for that perfecting, and by which, with boundless voracity, it takes hold on Being, and draws it to itself, eats and drinks it, "so as itself to become, in a certain manner, all things." So the specula tive order is the understanding s own order ; it is at home therein. No matter about the good or the evil of the subject, its needs or its con veniences; it enjoys Being and sees that alone. The/>nz<7//Yz/order stands over against the speculative order, because therein man tends towards other things than knowing only. If he knows,it is not that he may rest in the truth, and there find fruition ; it is that he may make use ^#//j of his knowledge in view of some work or some deed. 2 2. Finis practicae est opus, quia siderant causam veritatis secun- etsi practici, hoc est operativi, dum se et propter se,sed ordin- intendant cognoscere v e r i- ando ad finem operationis, sive tatem, quomodo se habeat in applicando ad aliquod deter- aliquibus rebus, non tamen minatum tempus." S. Thomas, quaerunt earn tanquam ulti- in lib. II Metaph., lect. z. mum finem. Non enim con- (Aristotle, {Met., I-II, c. I, 995 b 21.) Art belongs to the practical order. It is set to wards action, not towards the pure inwardness of knowing. There are, it is true, speculative arts which are at the same time sciences, logic for instance: these scientific arts perfect the speculative, not the practical intelligence ; but the sciences in question retain in their me f hod something of the practical, and are arts only inasmuch as they connote a work to be done a work in this instance quite inward to the understanding, itself aim ing only at knowledge and consisting of setting our concepts in order, for the construction of a proposition or course of reasoning. 3 It very well remains then, that whenever art is found, one finds action or operation to co-ordinate work to be done. III. MAKING AND DOING. UNDERSTANDINGorreasonisa faculty perfectly one in its being, but working in quite different ways according as it knows for the sake of knowing or knows for the sake of doing. 3-Cf. John of Saint-Thomas, theol., t.VI, q. 62, disp. 16, a. Cursus phllos.y t. I. Log. II a P., 4, p. 476-477. q. I, pp. 190 225 ; Cursus The speculative understanding will only have its perfect and infinitely abounding joy in the intuitive vision of the divine essence; it is by the intellect that man will then possess beati tude \gaudium de veritate. Here below it rarely disports itself in absolute freedom except in the case of the Seer, theologian, or metaphysician, orof the pure Scientist. In the great majority of cases the reason works in thepractical order and for the various ends of human action. But the practical order itself is divided into two entirely distinct domains,which were called by the ancients the domain of Doing (agibite, irpctATToV) , and that of Making (factibile, TTOHJTOV) . Doing, in the restricted sense in which the Schoolmen understood the word, consists in the free use, qua free, of our faculties, or in the exercise of our free-will considered not in rela tion to things themselves or the works which we produce, but purely in relation to the use which we make of our liberty. This use flows from our human Appetite pro perly so-called, or our Will, which of itself does not tend to the truth, but solely andjealously to the good of man, that aloneexistingfor the ap petite which satisfies desire or love and adds to the being of the subject. This use is good if con- formed to the law of human acts and to the true end of all human life; and if it is good, the man who acts is himself good in the pure and simple sense. ThusDoing is ordered to the common end of all human life, and is hound up with the perfec tion peculiar to the essence of mankind. The domain of Action is the domain of Morality or of thegoodman assuch. Prudence,the virtue of the practical understanding which puts Action right, growswholly and solely inside the human boundary. Queen of the moral virtues, noble and born to command, because it measures our acts by a last end which is God Himself loved above all, it keeps nevertheless a tang of wretch edness because it has for material the crowd of needs and circumstances and traffickings in which human fever tosses, and because it im pregnates with human nature every thing it touches. As opposed to Doing, the Schoolmen define Making as productive action, considered not in relation to the use which we thereby make of o u r 1 i b er t y , b u t p u r el y in relation to the thing pro duced or to the work taken by itself. This productive action is what it ought to be, is good in its order, if i t conform to the rules and the peculiar end of the work to be produced ; and the effect to which it tendsif itisgood, is that this work be good in itself. Thus Making is ordered to such and such a particular end, taken in itself and self-sufficing, not to the common end of human life, and it is related to the proper good or perfection, not of the man who works, but of the work effected. The domain of Making is the domain of Art, in the most universal meaning of the word. Art, which straightens out Makingandnot Doing, stands outside the human boundary; it has an end, rules, values, which are not those of man, but those of the work to be produced. For Art this work is every thing, she owns but one law the exigencies and the welfare of the work. Hence the tyrannical &all-absorbingpower of Art, and also its astonish ing power of assuage ment; it frees one from the human; it settles the artifex, artist or craftsman, in a world apart, fenced, bounded, detached, where it puts man s strength and man s intelligence and man s time at the service of a thing which he is making. That is true of everv art: slackness of living and /- of willingstopat thedoorof every workshop. But if Art is not human in its aim, it is human, essentially human, in itsmannerofacting. Itis a man s work that has to be done, it must have the mark of man : animal rationale. The work of Art has been thought out before being made, it has been kneaded and prepared, moulded, brooded, ripened inamzjwzbetore paesing into matter. And there it will keep for ev er the colour and the savour of the mind. Its formal element, that which constitutes it in its category and makes it what it is,is its regulation by the understanding. 4 By whatsoeverlittle this formal element fails, by so much the reality of Art falls away. T\\t work to be done \soi\\y the material of Art, \tehrm\srightreason. Recta ratio factibilium. Let us say, to endeavour to render in English this strong Aristotelian and 4. Artistic labour is properly nomy St. Thomas encloses the human labour as opposed to social problem, beast labour or machinelabour. When the labour becomes That is why human produc- inhuman or sub-human, because tion in its normal state is the the artistic character fades from product of a craftsman, and de- it, and the material gets the mands in consequence strict upper hand of the man, it is individual appropriation, for natural that the material factors th- artist as such cannot be a of civilization, left to them- sharer: on the plane of moral selves, should tend to Coin- aspirations the use of goods munism and the death of pro- must be common, but on the duction, in the teeth of the plane of production these very excess of proprietarism same goods must be held in and productivism due to the private ownership; between dominance oi\.\&factibile. the two branches of this anti- scholastic definition, that Art is the right deduc tion from things to be made* IV. THAT ART IS AN INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE. Let us now sum up what the scholastics taught about Artin general, considered in theartistor in the craftsman and as something of himself. 1 . Art is before all th ings intellectual i n cate gory, its action consists in impressing an idea upon a material : therefore it resides in the un derstanding of the artifex^ or as they say, it is subjectivised therein. Itisacertain^tf///yof this understanding. 2. The ancients called habitus (e?) certain qualities of a kind apart, which are essentially static dispositions perfecting along the line of its nature the subject in which they dwell. 6 5. Prudence on the contrary is stance), which dispose thd therightdeduction from acts to subject unto evil. The Latin be positedf/wte ratio aglblllum ) word habitus is much less ex- and Science is the right de- pressive than the Greek word duction from objects of specu- *; still it would be pedantic lation (recta ratio speculablllum). to use this latter term freely. 6. So as to simplify our treatise Thus, in the absence of a con- we speak here only of the habi- venient English equivalent, wfi tus which perfect the subject; must allow ourselves to make there are also habitual dis- use of the word habitus, apolo- positions (such as vices, for in- gising for its heaviness. 10 Health, beauty, are habitus of the body, sancti fy ing grace is a habitus (supernatural) of the soul; 7 other habitus inhere in the faculties or powers of the soul, and as it is the nature of the latter to tend to action, the habitus which abide therein perfect them in their very dynamic, are operative habitus: such are the intellectual and the moral virtues. We acquire this last sort of habitus by use and wont; 8 but wemust not on thataccountconfuse the habitus with habit in the modern sense of the word, that is with mechanical bentand routine ; habitus is quite the contrary of habit so understood. 9 Habit, which witnesses to the weight of matter, has its seat in the nerve cen tres. The operative habitus , which evinces the activity of the mind, has its principal seat only in an immaterial faculty, in the understanding or the will. When, for instance, the under- standing,originally indifferent to knowing this 7. These habitus, which perfect Ghost) which are infused and the essence itself, not the facul- not acquired. ties, are called entitati Ve habitus. 9. It is because he did not make this distinction that M. 8. We speak here of the natural Ravaisson, in his celebrated habitus, not of the supernatural thesis on Habit, poured such (infused moral virtues, theo- dense Leibnitzian fumes over logical virtues,gifts of the Holy the thought of Aristotle. II rather than that, proves a truth unto itself, it disposes its own activity in a certain manner, it calls up in itself a quality which proportions and commensurates it with such and such an object of speculation, which uplifts and fixes it in regard to this object, it acquires the habitus of a science. The habitus are an in most summon- in gup of the living spontaneities,vital develop ments which make the soul better in a given order and swell it into crowded action \turgentia uberaanimae, as John of S. Thomas calls them. And only the living (that is to say, minds which alone are perfectly alive) can acquire them, be cause only they are capable of raising the level of their being by their own activity; they have also, in their enriched faculties, secondary prin ciples of action which they use at will, and which render easyand delightful to them that which is arduous in itself. Habitus are like patents of metaphysical no bility and, just like inborn gifts, they constitute an inequality among men. The man who pos sesses a habitus has in himaquality which no thing can supplant or compensate; heis,bycom parison with him who has it not, like a man ar moured in steel compared to a man stark naked : but in this case the armour is alive 6c spiritual. 12 So then t\\t habitus properly so called is stable andpermanent (difficile mobilis] by very reason of the object which specific sit: itis thusdistin- guished from simple disposition, as opinion, for instance. 10 The object, by relation to which it perfects the subject,is itself unchangeable(such is infallible truth of demonstration for the habi- tus of Science) and it is on this object that the quality developed in the subject bears. Hence the strength and rigidity of the habitus, hence their susceptibility all that swerves from the straight line of their object galls them hence their intransigence what concession could thevallowPThevarefixed in an absolute hence > J their social inconvenience. Men of the world, polished on allfacets, love not the man vthabitus with his asperities. Art \mhabitus of the practical understanding. 3. This habitus is a virtue ; that is to say a quality which overcoming the original i n deter mination of the intellectual faculty,sharpening and tempering at once the point of its activity, carries it with regard to a definite object to a cer tain maximum of perfection, therefore ofo iterative effectiveness. Every virtue being thusdetermined 10. Cf. CAJETAN, in II-II, q.iyi, a. 2. 13 to the ultimate of which the power is capable, 11 and every evil being a lack and a weakness, vir tue cannot but tend to good : it is impossible to use a virtue for ill-doing; it is essentially habitus operativus boni. The existence of such a virtue in the work man is necessary to the well-being of the work, for the manner of action follows the disposition of the agent, and as one is one does To the work to be done, that it may turn out well, there must answer in the soul of the workman a disposition which creates between the one and the other that sort of conformity and inmost proportion which theschoolmen call "connaturality ;" Logic, M usic, Architecture, engraft on the logician the syllogism, on the musician, har mony, on the architect, balance of masses. By virtue of the Art abiding in them, they are in some way their work before it is done ;they are conformed to it that by them it may be formed. B u t if A rt i s a virtue of the practical intelli gence, and if every virtue tends exclusively to good (that is to Truth, in the case of a virtue of the understanding), one has to conclude thence 1 1 . ARISTOTLE, De Caelo, lib. I. 13. Ibid., a. 2, ad I. Unum- quodque enlm quale est, talia 1 2. Sum. theol., I-II, q. 5 5, a. 3. operatur. that Art as such (I say Art, and not artist, for he often works against his art) is never wrong and connotes infallible rightness. Otherwise it would not be a habitus properly so called, stead~ fast by its very nature. The schoolmen discussed at length this in fallible rightness of art, and more generally the virtues of the practical intelligence (Prudence in theorderot Doing, Art in the order of Mak ing). Howcan theintelligence be rendered infallibly true in the domain of the individual andof thecontingent? They answered by the fundamental distinction of the truthofthe speculative intelligence^ which consists in know ing conformably to w hat is, andof the truth of the practical intelligence, which consists in ^//r- ecting conformably to what ought to be accord ing to the rule and measure of the thing to be done; 14 if there is no science other than that of the "needs must", if there is no infallible truth in thecognitionconcerningthat which maybe other than it is, there can be infallible truth in 14. Cf. CAJF.TAN, in I-II, q-57, tivus operis faciendi, et regula- a.5,rf</3 ;John of Saint Thomas, tivus. Et sic ejus veritas non est Cursustheol.y t.VI,q.62,disp.l6, penes esse, sed penes id quod a. 4, p. 467: "Proprie enim in- deberet esse justa regulam, et tellectus practicus est mcnsura- mensuram talis rei regulandae" the direction, there can bearf, asthereis/>r//^/- encc, in dealing with the contingent. But thisinfallibility of Art concernsonly the formal element of operation, that is to say, the regulation of the work by the mind. Should the artist s hand falter, should his in strument give way, should the material betray him, the defect which thus creeps in to the re- sult,into theeventus, in no way affects the art itself and only proves that the artist has failed hisart: from the instant that the artist, in the sentence passed by his intelligence, has set down the rule and the measure which suit the given case, there is not in him any error, that is, any false direction. The artist who has the/ia- bitusvt art and the hand which trembles Che ha rhabito dell 1 arte e man che trema - produces an imperfect work but keeps a faultless virtue. So it is in the moral order, the event may be tray, but the deed done according to the rules of prudence shall not, therefore, have been less infallibly right. Although extrinsic- ally and on the side of the material it connotes contingenceandfallibility,artin itself, thatis to say on the side of form, and of the regulation which comes from the mind, does not waver like opinion, it is rooted in certitude. 16 Thence it follows that manual skill is no part of art, but only a material and extrinsic rendition; the labour thanks to which the vir tuoso who "fiddles"acquiresagility of fingers, does not itself increase his art, and does not en gender any special art; it only removes a physi- :al obstacle to the practice of the art, nongenerat lovam arttm sedtollit impedimentum exercitiiejus : Io irt abides entirely on the side of the mind. 4. The better to define its nature,the an- :ientscompared it to Prudence, which is also i virtue of the practical intelligence. By distinguishing and contrasting in this way Art ind Prudence, they put their finger on a vital point in the psychology of human acts. (a) Art, we have already said, is on the plane ( of Making: Prudence is ontheplaneof Doing. It finds out and applies the means of achieving our moral ends, which themselves are subord inate to the last end of all human life, that is to say, to God . Metaphorically it is,if you will, an art, but i t is the art of fiittotum bcne viuere 15. John of Saint Thomas, Civ. Del, lib. IV. cap. 2 1). Curs. Thil. t. 1. Log. II a P., Cf. on this point Aristotle, ]. i, a. 5, p. 213. Eth. Nic. lib. VI.; St. Thomas, 1 1 6. This is Saint Augustine s Sum. tkeol. II-II, q. 47, a. 2, lefinition of virtue, ars recte ti- ad. I; I-II, q. 21, a. 2, ad 2; Vendi, the art of right living (de q. 57, a. 4, ad $. which only the saints had in its fullness, 17 toge ther with supernatural prudence, and above all, with the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, which moves them to things divine according to a divine mode^ and makes them act under the very governance of the Spirit of God, and of His loving Art, giving them eagle s wings to help them walk the ground : as sumentpennasut aqui lae, current^ etnon labor abunt, ambulabunt, elnon deficient. Art is not concerned with our life, but only with such or such particular and ex tra-human ends which it regards as its term. Prudence works for the well-being of him 17. "If tis works of art you want, will they not go in front of Phidiaswho model inhuman clay the likeness of even the the Face of God?" ( P. Gar- deil, Les dans du Sain t-E sprit dans les Saints Dominicains. Le- coffre, 1903. Introd.p.23-24). 1 8. Isaias, xl. 31. "Ubi non z surde notandum," adds John of St. Thomas (Cursus theoL, t. VI, q. 70, disp. 1 8, a. I, p. 576) "pennas aquilae promitti, non tamen dicitur quod vola- bunt, sed quod current, et am- bulabunt,scilicet tamquam ho mines adhuc in terra viventes, acti tamen, et moti pennis aquilae, quae desuper descen- dit, quia dona Spiritus, etsi in terra exerceantur, et actionibus consuetis videantur fieri, tamen pennis aquilae ducuntur, quae superiorum spirituum ac dono- rum communicatione moven- tur et regulantur ; et tantura differunt, qui virtutibus ordi- nariis exercentur, ab his qui donis Spiritus sancti aguntur, quantum qui solia pedibus laborando ambulant,quasi pro- prio studio et industria regu- lati; vel qui pennis aquilae, superiori aura inflatis moven- tur, et currunt in via Dei, quasi sine ullo labore." 18 who acts, adbonum operantis ; Art works for the good of the work done, adbonitmQperis, and all that turnsitaside from thisaimadulteratesand diminishes it. The moment the Artist works well just as the moment the Geometer de monstrates "it matters little that he be glad or sorry." 19 If he is vexed or jealous, he sins as man, but does not sin as artist. 20 Art nowise cares that the artist be good in his own act as man, it would care rather that the work pro duced, if that were possible, should itself make on its own plane a perfect use of its activity; 21 but human art does not produce works which are self-moving. God alone makes this kind, 19. Sum. theol.,\-\\, q. 57, a. 3. I, 133 sq.) contrasted the in- jj.j - feriority of Italian art "which 20. Ibid., q. 21, a. 2, ad z. ,../..., . . limits itself almost entirely to 21. "Et ideoad artem non re- the ma ki n g of lifeless things, quiritur, quod artifex bene mot j on i ess an d goo d to look operetur, sed quod bonum at from without," with the opus facial : requiretur autcm SU p er iority of German art, magis, quod ipsum artificiatum whose bent in everyage has been bene operetur, sicut quod cul- to ma ^ e WO rks which move tellus bene incideret, vel serra (watches and clocks, hydraulic bene secaret, si proprie hprum mac hines, and so forth), this esset agere, et non magis agi g rea t man,who shone in every- quia non habent dominium sui thing except aesthetics, had a actus." Sum. theol., I-II, q. 57, dim glimpse of a certain truth, a. 5, ad. I. but unfortunately confused the When Leibnitz ( Bedencken clock s motion from within with von Aufrichtung, etc., Klopp, that of a living being. and so the saints are truly and to theletter His masterpiece as Master Workman. Next, as the artist is man before he isartist, one easily foresees conflicts in him which will bring to handgrips Art and Prudence his virtue as Craftsman and his virtue as Man. Doubtless Prudence herself , who always judgesin particular cases,will not apply tohim the same rules as to the labourer or the merch ant, and will not ask Rembrandt or Leon Bloy to make works which voillsell, to secure material comfort to their families. He must none the less have a certain heroism to keep h imself constantly in the straight line of Doing, and not sacrifice his imperishablesubstance to the devouringidol inhissoul. In truth such con flicts cannot be done away with, unless a deep humility maketheartistsotosay, unconscious ofhis art, orthe almighty unction of wisdom give to all that is in him the slumber and the peace of love. Fra Angelico knew nothing of these inward contrarieties. Itremains nevertheless that the pure artist, taken abstractly as such ..reduplicative ut sic ., is something entirely unmoral. (b) Prudence does not perfect the intelli gence without presupposing that the will is 20 straight in its line of human appetite, that is to say, in regard to its own wellbeing, which is the wellbeing of the whole man : 22 indeed its only business is to determine the means in regard to such human concrete ends already willed. She presupposes then that the appetite is well dis posed as regards these ends. Art, on the contrary,perfects the intelligence without presupposing the Tightness of the will in its own line of human appetite,the ends Art aims at being outside the line of human well- being. Moreover, "the movement of the appe tite which corrupts thejudgment of prudence does not corrupt thejudgment of Art any more than that of geometry ," 23 That is why Art gives only the power of well-doing (facultas boni operis), and not the custom of well-doing. 24 The artist, if he wills, is free not to use or to abuse his art, as the grammarian, if he wills, can commit a barbarism ;the virtue of Art which isin himis not therefore less perfect, and according to the celebrated saying of Aristotle, 25 who would have understood, without doubt, the fantasies 22. Sum. tkeol.y I-II, q-57, a. 4. ties really depends on the will 23. Aristotle, Ethic. Nic., lib. in its proper dynamism of Vl.Cf. Cajetan, in I-II, q. 58, human appetite. Cf. Sum. theol. a. 5. I-II,q. 57,3. I ; q. 21, a. 2,ad 2. 24. The act of // our facul- 25. Eth. $Qc., lib. VI, cap. 5. 21 of Erik Satie, the artist who sins against his art is not blamed if he sins wilfully, as if he sinned unwittingly, whereas the man who sins against prudenceorjustice isblamedmore ifhesinswit- fully than if he sins unwittingly. The Ancients noted upon this that Art & Prudence both have \.Q judge first and Wfl/tfWafterwards, but that the principal business of Art is toj udge, while the principal deed of prudence is to command. Perfectio artis con sis tit injudicando* (c) Lastly, Prudence havingfor material, not a thing to be done, an object determined in existence, but the mere use wh ich the subject makes of its liberty, has no sure and predeter mined ways or set rules. Its fixed point is the right end to which the moral virtues tend, and of which it has to settle the just mean. But in order to attain this end, and to apply the univer sal principles of moral science, precepts, and counsels to the particular action to be done, there are no ready made rules ; for this action is wrapped up in a net of circumstances which in dividualise it, and make a really new case every 26. Sum. 6ia,II-II,q.47,a.8. he alone goes on to perfection "Poor master is he," wrote in art whose judgment surpasses Leonardo da Vinci, "whose his work." work surpasses his judgment; 22 time. 27 In each of these cases, and, above all, when for instance it has to determine the exact measure of two virtues which have to be prac- ised at the same time, firmness and gentleness, humility and magnanimity, mercy and truth, and so forth, there will be a particular means of shaping oneself to the end. It is the business of Prudence to find this means,using ways or rules subordinate to the will, which chooses according to the incidence of circumstances and occasions, themselves contingent and not pre-determined, and not to be certainly fixed and absolutely determined by thejudgment or free will of the Prudent Man ; and these rules the schoolmen called for this reason regulae arbitrariae. Special for each special case, the ruling of Prudence is none the less certain and infallible, as has been said above, because the truth of the prudentialjudgmentdependsupon the rightintention (per conformitatem adappe- titumrectum) and not upon the event; and sup posing the recurrenceof another case, or infi nity of cases, at all points identical with a given 27. "Eaquaesunt ad finem in sitatem personarum et nego- rebus humanis non sunt de- tiorum."S;. terminata, sed multipliciter 3.15. divcrsificantursecundum diver- case, it is strictly the same ruling imposed on this one which should be imposed upon them all ; but there never will be a single moral case entirely identical with another. 23 Hence it is clear that no science can take the place of Prudence, for science, no matter how casuistically complicated one may imagine it, has none but general and settled rules. It is clear also why Prudence, in order to strengthen itsjudgment, needs must resort to this groping and manifold exploration which the Ancients called consilium (deliberation or counsel) . Art, on the contrary, having for mat- eri al a thing to be made, proceeds by certain and settled way sj -yz^hxt would seem to be nothing else than a certain ordering by reason as to how human acts shall arrive by settled means at a settled end." 29 The Schoolmen maintained this constantly after Aristotle, and they make the possession of fixed rules an essential property of art as such. We shall put forward later on some remarks on the subject of these fixed rules 28. It goes without saying ually as to the modalities of that before the precepts of the conduct to be followed accord- moral huv all cases are identical ing to the said precepts. in the sense that these precepts 29. ST. THOMAS, in Toster. must always be obeyed. But Analjt. lib. I. lectio l a , I. moral cases still differ individ- 2 4 in the case of the fine arts. Let us recall here that the Ancients treated of the virtue of Art considered in itself and in all its generality, and not in any one of its species, so that the simplest example of Art so considered, that in which at once is realised the generic concept of Art, should be sought for in the mechanic arts. The art of the ship-builder or the clock-maker has for its proper end an invariable and universal end determined by reason, to allow a man to go on the water, or to tell him the time of day the thing to be made, a ship or a clock, being it self only a material to be moulded to this end. And for this there are fixed rules, themselves determined by reason in view of the said end, and of a certain average of conditions. The effect produced is doubtless individual, and in cases where the material of the art is particularly liable to decay, as in Medicine, or in Agriculture, or in the military Art, in order to apply its fixed rules it must use contingent rules (regulaearbitrariae)^2Cf\& also a kind of prudence; it must also resort to deliberation, to the consilium. But Art none the less is left to draw itsfirrnness from its rational and universal rules, not from ti\zcoftsiliuiri\ and the rectitude of its judgment is not gauged, as in the case of 25 Prudence, by circumstances and happenings, but by the certain and determined grooves peculiar to itself. 30 This is why certain arts can be sciences practical sciences like Medicine or Surgery (which the Salamanca Theologians irreverently bracketed with the barber s art, ars chirurgico-barbifica] , or even speculative sciences like Logic. 5. To sum up, Art is more exclusively intel lectual than Prudence. Whereas Prudence has for subject the practical intelligence insofar as it presupposes the right will Z.K& depends there from, 31 Art takes no account of the proper good of the will, and of the ends which it follows along its line of human appetites; and if it sup poses a certain rectitude in the appetite, 32 this is still in relation to some ends properly so-called. As a Science it is rivetted to an object (object to be made, it is true, not to be contemplated). It is only accidentally that it uses the roundabout way of deliberation and counsel. Although it produces individual acts and effects, it does not judge, except accessorily, from circumstantial contingencies; so, less thanPrudence, itlooks 30. JoHNOFST.THOMAS,Car/a/ ordine ad voluntatem rectam. theol., t. VI, q. 62, disp.i6, a. Sum. theol., I-II, q. 56, a. 3. 4, p. 470. 32. See VI, Les Ingles de 3l.-Intellectus practicus in FArt, pp. 66 and 67. 26 at the individuation of actions and the hicet nunc. In a word, if in the way of its material, which is contingent, it runs with Prudence rather than with Science, according to its formal ratio and qua virtue, it runswiththeScience and the habitus of the speculative intelligence rather than with Prudence: arsmagisconvenit cum habitibus speculates in ratione virtutif, quam cum prudential The Scientist is an Intellectual who demonstrates: the Artist is an Intellectual who does things: the Prudent Man is an intelli gent Voluntary Agent who acts well. Such, in its principal features, is the idea the Schoolmen formed of Art. Not only in Phidias and Praxiteles, butin thejoinerand the black smith of our villages,they recognised an intrin sic development of the reason, a nobility of the understanding. The virtue of the artifex was not in their eyesstrength of muscle orsupple- ness of fingers, or the rapidity of gesture timed by the stop-watch and" Tay/ortsed;"nor yet was it that pure empiric agility which grows in the memory and the animal reason (thecogitative) ; which imitates art, and which art indeed abso- 33. JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, op. 34. Sum. theo!., I-II, q. 57, a. /., p. 470. 4, ad 2. lutely needs, 35 but which remains in i tself ex trinsic to art. It was a virtue of the intelligence, and it endowed the humblest artisan with a cer tain perfection of spirit. The craftsman in the normal type of human developmentandin acivilisation reallyhumane represents the average man. If Christ willed to je a craftsman of a little country town, it is be cause he willed to take on the ordinary condi tion of mankind. SG The medieval doctors did not, like many of our introspective psychologists, study only the townsman or the scholar or the student : they took thought for the great commonalty of mankind. But doing this, they still studied their Master. Considering the art or the acti vity proper to the "artifex," they considered the activity which the Lord exercised during all His hidden life; they considered also, in a certain manner,the activity even of the Father; for they knew that the virtue of Art is properly 35. Cf. ARISTOTLE, CMetaph., conversatur, convenientissira- lib. i,c. i; St. Thomas, lect. um est ut se eis in conversat- 1 I, 20-22; ST. THOMAS, Sum. ione conformet. . . . Et ideo tkeol., II-II, q. 47, a. 3, ad 3; convenientissimum fuit, ut q. 49, a. i, #</ i ; CAJETAN, in Christus in cibo et potu com- I-II, q. 57, a. 4; in II-II, q. muniter sc sicut alii haberet. 47, a. 2. Sum. theol., III, q. 40, a. 2. 36. Qui autem cum aliquibus 28 predicated of God, as Goodness and Justice, 3r and that the Son, in practising His poor man s trade, was still the image of the Father, and of His action which ceases not: 38 "Phitippe,qui videt Me, i)idet et Patrem. Itiscurioustonotethat in their classifica tions the ancients gave no separate place to what we call thefine arts. 39 They divided the arts into servile and liberal according- as thev j demanded bodily labour or not, 40 or rather (for this division,which goes further than we think, was taken from the very concept of art, recta ratio factibilium} according as the work to be 37. Sum. contra Gent., lib. i cap. 93. 38. And even,one may say in a sense,of His divine humility: "There is another thing set ting the soul on fire with the Iqve of God, that is the divine humility. . . . For God Al mighty submits Himself to individual angels and holy souls as if He were the bond servant of each one and each of them His God. To prove this, He will go about ministering unto them saying in the 8 1st Psalm:/ fuTpe said,yc are Gods. . . Now this humility is caused by the superabundance of the goodness, the nobility of God, as a tree is bowed down by the multitude of its fruits ..." Opusculum de ^Beatitudine, St. Thomae adscriptum, cap. II. 39. Sooth to say the division of the arts into fine arts and applied arts, important though it otherwise be, is not what the logicians call an "essential" division; it is taken from the end pursued, and one and the same art can very well follow at once utility and beauty. Such is par excellence the case in architecture. 40. Sum. tkeol., I-II, q. 57, a. 3, ad 3. made was in one case an effect produced upon matter (factibile properly so-called) in the other a pure spiritual construction abiding in the soul. 41 On that count Sculpture and Painting were part of theservilearts, 42 and Music ofthe liberal arts,where she neighboured with Arith metic and Logic: for the Musician intellectu ally arranges the sounds in his soul, as the Arith metician arranges numbers, and the Logician concepts ; oral or instrumental expression, which in the fluid succession of sonorous mat ter pours out the buildings thus achieved with in the mind, being only an extrinsic conse quence and a simple medium of these arts. In the powerfully social structure of medi eval civilisation the artist ranked only as crafts man, and every sort of anarchic development was barred to his individualism, because the natural, social discipline imposed on him from without certain limiting conditions. 43 He did 41. JOHN OF ST. THoMAS,Cr/. which the order imposes that theol., t. VI, q. 62, disp. 1 6, a. he best shows the excellence of 4, p. 474. his art. The modern artist on 42. See Appendix A. the contrary seems to look up- 43. The craftsman is subject on limiting conditions laid to the order y and it is by taking down by the order as a sacri- into account, in turning out legious assault upon his liberty his work, the conditions, the as a master of beauty. This limitations, and the obstacles incapacity for answering to the 30 not work for worldly people and merchants but for the faithful, of whom it was his mission to foster the prayer, to instruct the intelligence, to delight the soul and the eyes. O matchless time, when a candid people was moulded to beauty, without even being aware, as perfect religious ought to pray without knowing that they pray ! 44 when doctors and imagemakers taught the poor for love, and the poor relished their schooling because they were all of the same royal race born of water and of the Holy Ghost. Then they created more beautiful things, settled exigencies of a work to which one harks back to the be done denotes in reality in material world and the other the artist a weakness of the art to the metaphysical or spiritual itself taken in its generic sense; world. From this point of view but it appears also as an escape it seems that modern art, since from the despotic and transcen- its rupture with the crafts, is dent exigencies of the Beauty tending in its own way to the which the artist has conceived same claim of absolute inde- in his heart. It is also a re- pendence, of aseity, as modern markable sign of the sort of philosophy, conflict which we point out 44. "This holy man," relates later on, the conflict between Cassian speaking of St. Antony, the "ratio" of Art and the "said this superhuman and "ratio" of Beauty in the fine heavenly word concerning arts. The artist must be strong prayer: There is no prayer per- beyond the ordinary to realise feet, if the religious himself the perfect harmony between notices that he is praying" Cas- these two formal elements, of sian., Coll. IX, cap. 31. and worshipped themselvesless. The blessed lowliness in which the artist was set uplifted his strength and his freedom. The Renaissance was to drive the artist silly and make him the most unfortunate of men at the very time when the world wasgettinglesshabitablefor him by shewing him his own greatness and letting loose upon him that fierce Beauty which the Faith had held spell-bound and drawn after her, docile, tied by one of our Lady s apron strings. 45 V. ART AND BEAUTY. St.Thomas,who was as simple as he was wise, defined the beautiful as that which being seen pleases, id quodvisum placet?* These four words say all that is needed : vision, that is to say, in tuitive knowledge^ zndjoy. The Beautiful is that 45. In Greece at the great temperance and "infused" period of classic art, reason a- temperance, lone maintained art in tern- 46. Sum. theol., I,q. 5, a. 4,adl. perance and wonderful har- St. Thomas here intends to mony. By comparing the con- give a definition only from the ditions of art at Athens with effect. It is when he declares those of art in the 1 2th and the three elements of the I 3th centuries, one can in beautiful that he gives its some way appreciate the dis- essential definition, tinction between "natural" which givesjoy,notalljoy,butjoy in knowing; not the joy proper to the act of knowing, but a joy abounding and overflowing from this act because of the object known. If a thing uplifts and delights the Soul by the very fact of being granted to its intuition, it is good to lay hold of, it is beautiful. 47 Beauty is essentially an object of the intelli gence, for that which knows in the full sense of the word is the intelligence, which alone is open to the infinity of Being. The birthplace of Beauty is the intellectual world wherefrom it comes down. But in a certain manner also itfalls under the grasp of the senses, in the measure in which with man they serve the intelligence, and are themselves capable of enjoyingknow- ledge : "among all the senses it is only with sight and hearing that beauty has relations, be cause these two senses are above othersmaxime cognoscitivi^ most knowledgeable." 48 The share of the senses in the perception of beauty is even made unmeasurable with us by the fact that our understanding is not intuitive like that of the angels ; it sees doubtless but on condition of ab- 47. Adrationempulchriperti- appetitus. Sum. theol., I-II,q net, quod in ejus aspectu 27, a. I, ad 3. seu cognitione quietetur 48. % Ibid. 33 stractinganddiscursing; in man sensitive know ledge alone possesses in perfection the intui- tiveness necessary to the perception of the beautiful. Thusman may doubtless enjoypurely intellectual beauty, but the beauty connatural \.Q man is that which touches the understanding with delight through the senses and their intui tion. Such also is thebeautypropertoArt, which works upon sensiblematerial soastogivejoy to the mind. Thus would it persuade itself that paradise is not lost. It has the relish of the earth- lyparadise because it restores, for an instant, the peace and delectation at once of understanding and of sense. If beauty delights the understanding it is be cause it is in essence a certain excellence or per fection in the proportionof things to the under standing. Hence the three conditionslaid down for it by St.Thomas : 49 integrity, because the un derstanding loves being; proportion, because the understandinglovesorder and unity; last and above all, splendour or clarity, because the understanding loves light and intelligibility. -A certain shining quality is in fact according to all the ancients the essential character of beauty 49. Sum. theo!.,l. q. 39. a. 8. 34 clantas estde rationepulchritudinis luxpulchri- jicat,quia sine luce omnia suntturpia^- bu t i t is a sunburst of intelligibility : splendor veriszid. the Platonists, splendor or<//#/>said St. Augustine, who adds that"unity is the form of all beauty," 53 splendor formae, said St. Thomas in his precise metaphysical language : for the "forma," that is to say, the principle which makes the proper pe rfection of all that is, which upbuilds and completes things in their essence and in their qualities, which is, in a word, if one may so say, Being, purely such, or the spiritual essence of all reality, is above all the proper principle of intelligibility, the proper clarity of all things. Thus we may well say every form is a footprint Dr a ray of the Creative Intelligence impressed .ipon the heart of the created being . Besides all :>rder and all proportion is for the rest a work of ntelligence. Therefore,to say with the School- nen that beauty is \htshining out of form over the veil-proportioned parts of matter is equal to say- ng that it is the lightening of intelligence over natter intelligently arranged. The understand- 0. ST. THOMAS, Comment, in 52. De vera l^f/ig., cap. 41. 5. de Dh ln. Nomin, lect. vi. 53. Of use. de Tulchro et Bono, 1. ST. THOMAS, Comment, in attributed to Albertus Magnus saint., Ps. XXV, 5. or to St. Thomas. 35 ing enjoys the beautiful because in it itfinds and recognises itself, and gets contact with its own light. And this is so true, that those such as Francis of Assisi most note and relish the beauty of things, who know that they come forth from an intelligence, and refer them back to their Author. Without doubt all sensuous beauty demands a certain delectation of the eye itself or of the ear or of the imagination; but there is no beauty unless the intelligencealso in some way rejoires. A beautiful colour u baptise< the eye" as a strong perfume dilates the nostril: but of these two "forms" or qualities colour alone is called beautiful, because being received as the perfume is not, through a sense capable o: disinterested knowledge, 51 it can be, even by its purely sensuous lustre, a matter of joy for the understanding. For the rest, the higher man raises his culture, the more spiritual becomes the glory of the form which transports him. All the same, it behoves us to note that in the beautiful which we have called connatural to man, and which is proper to human art, this splendour of the form, however purely intelli gible it may be in itself, is grasped in the sensitive 54. Visus et audltui RATIONI q. 27, a. I, ad 3. DESERVIENTES. SltM. tbeo!., I-II, and bythe sensitive, and not apart from it. Intui- tiorrof artistic beauty thusstands at the opposite palefrom the abstraction of scientific truth. For it is through theveryapprehension of sense that here below the light of being pierces to the understanding. The understanding then, absolved from all effort at abstraction,enjoys without labour and without discursion . It is dispensed from its or dinary toil, it has not to disentangle theintell- igi ble from the material in which it is buried, in order to go, step by step, over its different attributes ; as the stag at the well-spring it has nothing to do but drink; it drinks the clarity of Being. Set in the intuition of sense,it is flooded with intellectual light given to it in a flash, in :he very sensuous in which it basks and which t does not grasp sub ratione veri\ but rath er sub ationedelectabilis^ by the blissful impregnation vhich the light produces in it, and by thcen- uing joy in the appetite, which springs out,as o its proper object,towards every well-being of hesoul.Onlyin second intention willit analyse, nore or less well, by reflection the causes of this .yy Thus, although beauty belongs to the meta- ;. Sec Appendix B. 37 physic truth in this sense, that every burst of intelligibility in things takes for granted some conformity with the intelligence which is the cause of things,nevertheless the beautiful is not asort of truthbut a sort of good ; 53 theperception of the beautiful is related to knowledge, but so as to contribute itself "as bloom is added unto youth ;"itis lessakind of knowledge than a kind ofdelectation. Beauty is essentially delectable. That is why, by its very nature and qua beau tiful, it moves desire and produces love, it has a unitive force, whereas truth as such only en lightens. " Omnibus igitur estpulchrum et bonum desiderabileetamabileetdiligibile" (to all there fore is the beautiful and good desirable and lovable and delectable) . 57 It is for her beauty that Wisdom is beloved, 68 and it is for itself that all beauty is loved at first, even if thereafter the infirm flesh is caught in the snare. Love in its turn produces ecstasy, that is to say, it puts the lover outsidehisego; ecstasy which thesoul 56. "The beautiful is a certain Divin tjtymin., cap. 4; Saint species of good." Cajetan, in Thomas, lect. 9. Let us go on I-II,q. 27, a. I. (Cf. the saying calling the Arcopagite-i-n. virtue of St. Thomas quoted higher of secular prescription him up, note 47.) Wherefore the whom modern criticism calls Greeks said in a single word the pseudo- Denys. KaXoKayaQla. 58. "I am fallen in love with 57. Denys the Areopagite, De His beauty." Wisdom^m. 2. 38 experiences, in lesser degree ,when it is smitten with the beauty of a work of art,and in its pleni tude, when it is drunk up like the dew by the oeauty of God. And concerning God Himself, iccording to Denys the Areopagite, 59 one must 3e bold to say that He in some sort suffers the ecstasy of love because of the abundance of His Dounty, which impels Him to shed throughout ill things a share of His splendour. But His own ove causes the beauty of what He loves, while >ur own love is caused by the beauty of what we ove. What the ancients said about the beautiful >ught to be taken in the most formal sense so as avoid materialising their thought into any ver-narrow specification. There is not only ne way but a thousand and ten thousand ways 1 which the notion of integrity, or perfection, r achievement can be realized. The absence f head or arm is a lack of integrity very notice- ble in a woman, and very slightly noticeable \ a statue, no matter how disappointed M. -avaisson may have been at not being able to mplete the Venus deMilo. The least sketch of i Vinci, let alone of Rodin, is more final than lemostfinishedBouguereau.AndifaFuturist 5.9. T)e Dijin. Nomin., cap. 4; St. Thomas, lect. 10. thinks fit to give only one eye, or a quarter of an eye, to the lady whom he is portraying, no one denies his right to do so, one only asks that is thewhole crux that thisquarter eye be all the eye n ceded by th e said lad y in thegmen case. It is the same with proportion, fitness, or har mony. They vary according to their objects or their aims. The right proportion of a man is not the same as that of the child. Figures built up according to the Greek or the Egyptian Canon are perfectly proportioned in their kind. But Rouault s jolly fellows are also perfectly pro portioned in their kind. Integrity and propor tion have no absolute significance, 60 and must be understood sole ly in relation to th e aim of the work, which is to induce the splendour of form 60. Note that the conditions human organism is something of the beautiful are much fixed and invariably laid down. more narrowly determined in But the beauty of the art-work nature than in art, the end of not being that of the object natural beings and the clarity represented, Painting and of form which may shine in Sculpture are no wise bound them being themselves much to the determinateness or the more narrowly determined imitation of such a type. The than those of art-works. For art of ancient heathendom instance, in nature there is a considered itself bound only perfect type(whether we know by reason of an extrinsic con- it or not) in the bodily dition, because it used above proportions of man or woman, all to represent the gods of an because the natural end of the anthropomorphic religion. 4 upon the matter. Lastly and especially, this lustre of the form itself, which is the essential of beauty, has an in finity of different ways of shining on the mate rial. It is the sensuous lustre of the colour or of the modelling, the intelligible clarity of an ara besque, or of balance of masses, of activity or of movement ; it is the glint upon things of a human thought or of a divine thought ; it is above all the deep splendour of the soul that shines through, of the soul, the principle ofani- mal life and strength or the principle of spiri tual life, of sorrow, and of passion. There is yet a loftier splendour, that of grace, but the Greeks knew it not. Beauty then is by no means conformity with a certain idealand unchangeable type, in the sense understood by those whoconfuse the true and the beautiful, knowledge and delectation ; who will have it, that in order to apprehend beauty man discovers "through the vision of ideas,""through the material wrappings,""the unseen essence of things," and their "necessary :ype," 61 St. Thomas was as far removed from :his pseudo-Platonism as he was from the ideal- stragfair of Winckelmannand of David. There ii. Cf. LAMENNAIS, de f^frfet dti Beau, ch. II. is beauty for him as soon as the shining of any form whatsoever upon properly proportioned material results in the well-being of the intelli gence, and he takes care to warn us that in a cer tain way beauty is relative relative not to the dispositions of the subject in the sense in which the moderns understand relativity, but to the peculiar nature and end of the thing, and to the formal conditions under which it is grasped. Pulchritudo quodammodo diciturper respectum ad aliquid. . . . (beauty is in some way predicated with regard to something else) f 2 aliaenimest pulchritudo spiritusetalia corporis,atque alia hujus etillius cor ports (for one is the beauty of spirit, and another the beauty of body, and one of this and another of that body) ; 63 and beautiful asmay be a created thing, it may appear beautiful to some and not to others, because it is not beauti ful except under certain aspects, which some discern and others see not at all; it is thus"beau- 62. "Beauty and health and health is the right proportion so on are somehow bespoken of limbs and of colours. And with regard to something: be- therefore one is the beauty of cause a certain blending of the one, another of another." St. humours causes health in a Thomas, Comment, in Tsa/m., boy, which it does not in an Ps. XLIV, 2. old man; for one thing may 63. ST. THOMAS. Comment, in be health to a lion which is lib. de Dijln. 3^omit!.,cap. iv, death to a man. Wherefore lect. 5. tiful in one place and not in another. " If this be so, it is because beauty belongs to the order of transcendental ^\\3.t is to say, of con cepts which overpass every limit of kind or category, and do not allow themselves to be en closed in any classification, because they suck up every thing and reappear every where. Like the one, the true, and the good, beauty is Being itself taken from a certain point of view, it is a property of Being; it is not an accident super- added to Being,it only adds to Being a relation of reason, it is Being, inasmuch as Being delights an intellectual nature by its mere intuition. Thus every thing is beautiful, as every thing is good, at least in certain relationships. And as Being is every v/here present and everywhere different, so Beauty is scattered everywhere and varies in every place. Like Being and the other transcendentals, it is essentially analogical^ that is to say, it calls itself by different names, subdi- versaratione, of the different subjects of which it is predicated: each sort of being win its own vvayjisgtf^initsown way, is beautiful m its own way. Analogical concepts are spoken properly of jod, in Whom the perfection which they lesignate exists in a formal eminent fashion, 43 in a pure and infinite condition. Godis thear "sovereign analogue," 64 and they are found in things only as a broken prismatic glimpse of the face of God. 65 So Beauty is one of the divine names. God is beautiful. He is the most beautiful of all beings, because, as set forth by Denys the Areopagite and St. Thomas, 66 His Beauty is without change orvicissitude,without increase or diminution ; and because it is not like that of things, which all have a particularised beauty, particulatampulchrhudimm^ sicut et particulatam naturam (a particularised beauty as also a parti- only in a certain relation; what \sbeautiful simply can be good or true also only in a certain re lationship. . . . This is why beauty, truth, goodness (moral good) reign over distinct spheres of human activity, in which it would foe vain to deny a priori the possibility of conflict, under the pretext that the transcendentals are indissolubly bound up with one another : a metaphysical principle perfectly true but needing clear comprehension. 66. De < Di n s>inis Nominibus> cap. 4, lect. 5 W 6 of the Commentary of St. Thomas. 64. The analogates (analoga analogata) of an analogous concept (analogum analogans) are the different things in which this concept realises it self, and with which it agrees. 65. In God alone all these perfections are identical in their formal ratio; in Him Truth is Beauty, is Goodness, is Unity, and they are Him self. On the contrary,in things here below truth, beauty good ness and the rest are as pects of be-in g distinct according to their formal ratio; and what is simply true (absolutely speak ing) can be good or beautiful cularised nature) . He is beautiful by Himself and in Himself, beautiful absolutely^ He is surpassingly beautiful (super pule her] because in the perfectly simple unity of His nature pre-exists in amannerpassingexcellent the wellspring of all beauty. He is Beauty itself, because he gives beauty to all created beings, according to the property of each, and because He is the cause of all uni son and all clarity. Indeed every form, that is to say every light, is "a certain irradiation com ing out of the primal clarity", "a sharing in the divine clarity." And every unison, or every harmony, every concord,every friendship and every union whatsoever between beings comes forth from the divineBeauty, the primitive and supereminent type of all unison, which likens all things to one another, and calls them all unto itself, well deserving therein "the name of KaAo? which derives from calling". Thus the "beauty of the creature is none other than a similitude of the divine Beauty shared among things," and, moreover, every form being a principle of being and everyunison or harmony being a preserver of being, we can say that the Beauty of God is the cause of the Being of all that is. Ex dhinapulchritudme esse omnium deri- iiatur In the Trinity, St. Thomas adds, 63 the name of Beauty is properly attributed to the Son. As to effective integrity or perfection, He has truly and perfectly in Himself, without any diminution, the nature of the Father. As to due proportion orconsonance, He is the express and perfect likeness of the Father ; andthatisthe proportion which belongs to the image as such; Lastly, as to clarity, He is the Word, which is the light andsplendour of intelligence, "perfect word, nothing lacking, and so to say the art of God Almighty." 69 Beauty then belongs to the transcendental and metaphysical order. That is why it tends to carry the soul beyond created things. Speak ing of the instinctfor Beauty, "it is this," writes thepoefaccursed,to whom modern art owes that it recovered theconsciousness of the essentially metaphysical character & despotic spirituality of Beauty, "it is this undying instinct for the beautiful which makes us look upon the Earth and its shows as a hint, as a confidential message from Heaven. The unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond what life reveals is the most 67. ST. THOMAS, ibid., lect. 5. 69. ST. AUGUSTINE, De Doctr. 68. Sum. tbeol., I, q. 39 a. 8. Christ., I, 5. 46 living proof of our immortality. It is at once through poetry and beyond poetry, through and beyond music, that the soul catches sight of fhesplendours which reign behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings the tears to the eyelids, these tearsare not the proof of ex cessive enjoyment, they are far rather the sign of an irritated melancholy, of an importunity of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imper fect, which would jump all intervention, and snatch, even here on earth, an unveiled para dise." 70 As soon as one touches a transcendental,one touches Being itself, a likeness of God, an abso lute, the nobility and joy of our life ; one enters the domain of the spirit. It is remarkable how men do not really communicate with one another except by passing through Being or oneof its properties. In that way alone canthey escape from the individuality in which matter encloses them. If they stay on the plane of their sensual needs and their sentimental self, :hey may tell one another what tales they like, diey do not understand one another. They watch without seeing one another,each one in- initely solitary, for all that labour or pleasure o. BAUDELAIRE, L\4rt romantiyue. 47 fastens them together. But touchGoodorLove, liketheSaints,touchTruth,likeAristotle,touch Beauty ,like Dante or Rach or Giotto, then con tact is set up, souls commingle. Men are not really united save by the spirit, light alone brings them- together, "intellectualia et ration- aim omniacongregans, et indestructibilia faciens". 71 Art in general tends to make a work. But certain arts tend to make a beautiful work, and there they differ essentially from all the others, The work at which all the other arts labour is itself ordered to man s utility, it is therefore a mere means ; and it is altogether inside a deter mined material kind. The work at which the fine arts labour is ordered unto Beauty ; inas much as it is beautiful, it is an end, an absolute, self-sufficing ; and if,in so far as it is a work to b made, it is material and bonded to a kind, inasmuch as it is beautiful it belongs to the kingdom of the mind, and is swallowed up in transcendence and the infinity of Being. The fine arts thus stand out in the genus-art man stands out in t\\Qgenus animal. And like man himself they resemble an horizon where 71. DENTS THE AREOPAGITE, (St. Thomas, lect. 4.) *De DiYtn. Nomin., cap. 4. 48 mtter and spirit meet. They have a spiritual )ul. Hence their many distinctive properties, heir contact with the beautiful modifies in urn certain characteristics of art in general, Dtably in what concerns the rules of art, as we iall try to show ; on the other hand, it betrays id carries to a kind of excess other generic tarks of artistic virtue, above all its character : intellectuality and its likeness to the specul- ive virtues. There is a singular analogy between the fine ts and wisdom. They, like it, are ordained to } object which goes beyond man, and is valua- e in itself, unlimited in its amplitude; for eautylike Being is infinite. They are dis- iterested, desired for their own sake, truly uble,because their work taken in itself is not 3ne to be used as a means, but to be enjoyed as i end, being a veritable/n/tf, aliquid ultimum i delectabile. Their whole worth is spiritual, id their mode of being is contemplative. For contemplation is not their act, as it is the act wisdom, still the fine arts aim at produci ng lelight of the understanding, that is to say, a rtof contemplation, and they imply also in e artist a sort of contemplation, wherefrom e beautv of the work should redound. That is 49 why it is possible to apply to them, with all due proportion, what St. Thomas says of wisdom, when he compares it to play : 72 "The contem plation of wisdom is readily compared to play, because of two things which arefound inplay. The first is that play is delectable, and the com- templation of wisdom hath the greatest de- ligh tfulness, according to what Wisdom says of herself in Ecclesiasticus: My breath is sweete. thanhomy. The second is that the operations of play arenot ordained toanythingelse,but are sought after for their own sake. It is the same with the delightfulness of wisdom. This is why Divine Wisdom compares her delight- fulness to play : My delight was every day playin in His sight through the round of the earth" 3 But Art always abides essentially in the ordc of M aking, and it is by slave work on a materi; that it glimpses the joy of the spirit. Thence for the artist a strange and pathetic condition, itself the image of man s condition in the world, where he must go in and out among bodies, and live with spirits. Though blamin; the old poets who made the godhead envious Aristotle owns that they were right in saying 72. Opusc. LXVIII, in libr. 75. Troz-erln, vni. 30-1. ( oetii ds Hcbdom. hat to it alone is reserved the right and proper wnership of wisdom. "It is not a human ossession, for in many ways the nature of man 5 servile." n To produce beauty belongs in the line way to God alone by true ownership, and : the condition of the artist is more human and ;ss lofty than that of the metaphysician, it is Iso more discordant and more sorrowful be- ause his activity does not abide altogether in le pure immanence of spiritual operations, nddoes not in itself consist in contemplation, utin making. Without having either the ght or the nourishment of wisdom, it is beset r ith the hard exigencies of the intelligence id the speculative life, and condemned to all ic servile miseries of temporal practice and reduction. "O brother Leo, little sheep of God, even lough a friar minor should speak the tongue angels and should raise up a man four days jad, write down that that is not the perfect .7 " Were the Artist to enclose in his work the holelightof heaven and thewholegraceof e primal Garden, he would not have perfect y ; because he is on the track of wisdom and ,, lib. I, c. 2,982 b. runs after the fragrance of its perfumes, but possesses it not. Were the Philosopher to know all the intelligible reasons and all the virtues of Being, he would not have perfectjoy ; because his wisdom is human. Were the Theologian tc know all the analogies of the divine processions and all the reasons for the actions of Christ, he would not have the perfectjoy ; because his wisdom has a divine origin, but a human measure, and a human voice. "Ah, voices! die then, dying that you be!" The Poor an d Peacemakers alone have per fect joy, because they possess wisdom and con templation par excellence, in thesilenceof creatures and in the voice of Love ; united without intermediary to self-existing Truth, they know "the sweetness which God gives, and tjie delightful taste of the Holy Spirit." 75 This is what made St. Thomas say, speaking sometime before his death about his unfinishe Summai It seems to me like straw mihi videti. utpalea? H uman straw are the Parthenon anc Notre Dame of Chartres, the Sixtine Chapel and the Mass in D, which will be burned at th last day. "There is no relish in creatures." Th Middle Ages knew this order of things. The 75. RUYSBROEK, (Vie de T^uysbrofk Hello, p. LII). 5? lenaissance shattered it. After three centuries if unbelief, prodigal art has made it her aim to >e the last end of man, his Bread and Wine, the unsubstantial mirror of beatific Beauty. In eality i t has only wasted its substance. And the >oet starvingfor beatitude, who kept asking orn art the mystical fullness which God alone an give, has merely emptied himself into the igean abyss.The silence of Rimbaud probably larks the end of a secular apostasy. In any case, : clearly means that it is folly to seek in art the ords of life eternal and rest for the heart of lan ; and that the artist, so as not to break in ieces his art or his soul, must simply be, qua rtist, what art wants him to be a good work- tan. ut lo, the modern world, which had promised /ery thing to the artist, will presently leave ;m no more than the bare means of livelihood. ownded on the two principles against nature of 1 e fertility of money and of \hs finality of the . eful, multiplying without any possible Irrriit <>th needs and servitude,destroyingtheleisure the soul, withdrawing the ffi*4Mdfift!&Jfr : )m the ruling which proportioned it to the < dsof the human entity, and imposingon i in the panting of the machine and the accel- crated movement of matter,the modern world stamps upon human activity a measure gen uinely inhuman and adirection genuinely diabolical : for the fin al end of all this delirium is to keep man from remembering his God, Dum nil perenne cogitat, Seseque culpis illigat. By logical consequence he ought to treat as useless, and therefore as reprobate, all that on any title whatsoever bears the imprint of the spirit. "A Patrician order in deeds, but a truly democratic barbarism of thought, behold the inheritance of the times that be upon us; the dreamer, the speculative mind, may manage t keep themselves afloat at the cost of their se curity or well-being; place, success, or glory shallreward the suppleness ofthemountebanl more than ever,to a degree unknown to the iron age, poverty and loneliness shall be the wages of the prowess of hero or saint." 76 Persecuted like the seer and almost like the saint, perhaps at last the artist will come to know his brethren, and find again his true vocation ; for in a certain way of speaking he i not of this world, being, the moment he work 76. Charles MAURRAS, rdvenir de f Intelligence. 54 )r beauty,in the way which leads right souls to rod and manifests to them unseen things irough the seen. Rare then as may be those -ho shall not will to please the Beast and shift ith the wind, it shall be in them, from the sole ct of their exercising a disinte res ted activity , lat the h uman race will live. VI. THE RULES OF ART r HE whole formal element of art con sists in the regulation which it stamps upon the material. Moreover it is of ie essence of art, according to the Ancients, have settled rules, viae certae et deter minatae. This term, settled rules, calls up in us evil : emories ; we think of the three unities and he rules of Aristotle." But it is from the . enaissance, with its superstition of the ant- ueand its stuffed Aristotle, and not from the hristian Aristotle of our doctors, that come e cut and dried rules of the grammarians of e grand siecle. The settled rules of which the hoolmen spoke are not conventional impera- r es imposed from without upon art, they are e working grooves of art itself, of the work- 55 ing reason high and hidden grooves. 77 And every artist well knows that, without this in tellectual form mastering the material, his art would be but a hodge-podge of sensuality. 78 Still some explanati ons here seem necessary. 77. Technique may be said to from coming out clearly. On be the body of these rules, but only provided we wid en and uplift the ordinary meaning of the word techni que: in fact, there is a question not only of material processes, but also and especially of the intellectual ways and means of working, which the artist uses to attain the end of his art. These are settled way? ,like paths traced beforehand through an impenetrable thicket. But they have to be discovered. And the higher among them, those which touch most nearly the individuality of the work spiritually conceived by the artist, are strictly proper to him and are found by one alone. 78. "It is evident," cries Baudelaire, "that rhetorics and prosodies are not tyrannies wantonly invented, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organisation of the spiritual essence; and never have prosodies or rhetorics hindered originality the contrary, to say that they have aided the unfolding oi originality, would be infinitely truer." "It would be," he cries again, "quite a novel event ir in the history of the arts thai a critic should become a poet a real upsetting of all psychii laws, a monstrosity! On thi contrary, all great poets b; nature become critics. I pit; the poets whose sole guide i instinct; I think them incom plete. In. the spiritual life o great poets there comes infalli bly a crisis when they want t< analyse their art, to discove the obscure laws by virtue c which they have been pro d active, and to draw fror that study a series of precept whose godlike goal is infalli bility in poetic production. 1 would be a prodigy that critic turn poet, and it is iir possible that a poet shoul not conceal a critic." romantique . ) 5.6 In all that concerns art in general, mechanical r servile as well as fine and liberal art, one is ound to understand that the rules in question renothinginfact,if they arenotin their vital nd spiritual state in a habitus or virtue of the in- dligence,which is properly the virtue of art. By the habitus or virtue of art uprising from within his mind, the artist is a master who uses jles according to his aims; it is as maladroit to nagine him as apprenticed to the rules as to ike a workman as apprenticed to his tools, roperly speaking he owns them and is not wned by them ; he is not held by them ,it is he r ho holds, through them, material and reality; idattimes,atthesovereign momentwhen the Deration of genius in art looks like a miracle of od in nature, he will act, not against the rules, it outside and above them, according to a gher rule and a more hidden order. So let us terpret the saying of Pascal :"True eloquence mghs at eloquence, true morality laughs at i oralizing, to laugh at philosophy is truly to lilosophize" by this racy gloss of the most i rannical andmostjacobinof theheadsof the :ademy: "Sivousnevo ; inture, ellese/itffr-tf de vous." 79 A saying of the painter David. As we have above pointed out, there is a rooted incompatibility between egalitarianism. The modern world shudders o at //^/ta.r,whatever they be,and one could write a very curious history of the progressive expulsion of habitus by the revolution of to-day. This history should go back pretty far into the past. One might see in it it is always"the fish s head that stinks first" theologians like Scotus, Occam, andeven Suarez as the first to mishandle the most aristocratic of these strange essences, namely the gifts of the Holy Ghost to say nothing of the infused moral virtues. Presently the theological virtues and sanctifying grace will be filed away and planed down by Luther, then by the Cartesian theologians.In time comes the turn of the natural /z^/^j;Descartes in his levelling ardour attacks even the genus general issimum of which the damned are a por tion, and denies the real existence of qualities and of accidents. Everyone then is bitten by the calculating machine; everyone then thinksof nothing bu method. And Descartes imagines method as an easy and infallible means of bringing to the truth "those who have not studied" and the nan in the street. 80 Leibnitz last of all invents -. logic and alanguage whose most wonderful )roperty is to save you the trouble of thinking. 8l rhen we come at last to find that the age of ight has lost its spiritual head. Th mmethodor rules ^ regarded as a mass of ^ormulae and processes self-acting and serving the v iindas orthopedic and mechanical equipment^ tend very where in the modern world to supplant he habitus, because method is for all, whereas abitus are only for some : now it is not to be dmitted that the attainment of supernal joy hall depend on a virtue which some possess o. Cf. even the title which at a dialogue in French, which he left unfinished, having for title- "The Search after Truth in the light of nature, which all alone and without borrowing aid from Religion or Philosophy determines the opin ions which a man should have concerning all those things which can occupy his thoughts, and penetrates even the secrets of the most curious Sciences" 8 1 . "That the mind may be dispensed from thinking dis tinctly upon things themselves, yet that none the less all things may come right." Gerh., ?/*//., VII. escnrtes at first thought of ving to the treatise to which ic Discourse on ^Method is a eface: "The Projection of a ntyersal Science which shall : :se nature to its highest degree perfection. In addition, Di- itrics, Meteors, and Gcome- y, wherein the most curious atters, which the author has en able to select so as to ve proof of the universal :ence which he propounds, : treated in such guise that n those who have ne^er studied tn may understand" Some ars later doubtless about f i Descartes was working 59 and others have not; consequently beautiful th ings must be made easy. XaAe-rra ra /caXa. The Ancients thought that truth is difficult,that beauty is difficult and that strait is the way ; and that, to overcome the difficulty and the loftiness of the object, it is absolutely necessary that an intrinsic strength and uplifting, that is to say a habitus, be deve loped in the subject. The modern conception of method and rules would therefore have appeared to them a flagrant absurdity. Accord ing to their principles rules are of the essence of art, but on condition that the /foA tar be formed asalivingrule. Without it they are nothing. Plank the finished theoretical knowledge of all the rules of art upon an energetic don who works 1 5 hours a day, but in whom l\\zhabitus does not sprout, you will never make an artist of him, and he will forever remain infinitely further away from art than the child or the savage endowed with a simple natural gift : let this be said in excuse for the over-naive or over naughty admirers of n egro art. For the moder artist the problem is set quite senselessly be tween the senile decay of academic rules and the primitiveness of the natural gift ; in the on art is not yet, except in potentiality, in the Dther it is no more at all; art exists only in the living intellectuality of the habitus. In our days the natural gift is readily taken r or the art itself, especially if it is covered up vvith facile veneering and voluptuous fumb- ing; all the same the natural gift is only acon^- iition prerequisite to art, or a natural inchoat- on of the artistic habitus. This spontaneous lisposition is evidently indispensable; but ,vithout a culture and a discipline which the incients required to belong and patient and lonest, it will never grow into art properly so :alled. Thus art proceeds from a spontaneous, nstinct just like love, and it must be cultivated ike friendship. That is because art is a virtue, ike friendship. St. Thomas bids us mark that the natural lispositions by which one individual differs rom another belong to the corporealside ; 82 they nvolve our sensitive faculties, and above all the magination, grand purveyor of art which hus appears as the gift par excellence by which neis born artist and which the poets readily uake their master faculty, because it is so close- 7 bound up with the activity of the creative Uellect, that they do not always know how to J. Sum. theol., I-II, 51, a. i. 61 distinguish the two gifts. But the virtue of art is a perfecting of the spirit, so well does it stamp on thehuman essence a character incomparably deeper than is done by natural dispositions. But when all is said and done, it may happen that the way in which education cultures the natural dispositions may atrophy the spontan eous gift instead of developing the habitus, especially if this way is material and all rotten with tricks and rules of thumb, or again if it is theoretical and speculative instead of being operative ; for thepractical understanding, the wellspring of the rules of art, works by setting up an effect in being, not by proving or demon strating; and often those who have the best grasp of the rules of an art are least capable of formulating them. Here one must deplore from this point of view the substitution (begun by Colbert, finished by the revolution) of scho lastic and academic teaching for indentured apprenticeship. 83 From the very fact that art is ; virtue of the practical understanding,the mod< of teaching which naturally suits it is appren tice education, the working novitiate under a master and face to face wi th the real thing, not lectures given out by professors; and in sooth 83. See Appendix C. 62 he very notion of & fine-art school^ especially n the sense in which the modern state under- tands the word, discloses a lack of understand ing of things as deep as the idea for instance of a igher course of virtue. Hence the insurrection if a Cezanne against the school and the pro- essors, a revolt above all really aimed at a bar- >arous conception of artistic training. It follows therefore that art, being an in- ellectual habitus^ implies, necessarily and in very case, -^formation si the mind which shall ut the artist in possession of settled working ules. No doubt, in certain exceptional cases, be individual effort of the artist, of a Giotto 84 :>r instance, or of a Moussorgsky, may suffice 3 him alone to bring about this formation of he mind. One may even say concerning what is lost spiritual in art synthetic intuition, the onception of the work to be done springing om the via inventionis or effort of in vention, u "Then Giotto came ; animals that he found in the at Florentine, who was born country;! in such a way that : the lonely hills peopled only after many studies he surpassed :th goats and other beasts, not only the masters of his ling that the face of nature time but also those of many like unto art, set himself to bygone centuries. . . ." (Leo- iw on the rocks the postures nardo da Vinci, Textes choisis t t of the goats he tended published by Peladan, Paris, 1 afterwards of all the 1907.) 63 demanding solitude, and notlearned from without, that the artist, inwhat touches the fine edge and higher life of his art, forms and uplifts himself all by himself, alone. The nearer one gets to this spiritual edge of art, the more the viae determinatae along which one travels will be peculiar and personal to the artist,and so laid as to be manifest to one alone. 8 Perhaps from this point of view we in our time when we are so cruelly experiencing all the evils of anarchy, run the risk of labouring under some illusion as to the nature and extent of the results which may be expected from the return to the traditions of craftsmanship. Yet. for the immenseshareofnationalanddiscursiv labour which art connotes, the tradition of discipline and education by masters and the continuity in time of human collaboration, in word, the way of discipline, is absolutely nece sary, whether we deal with technique proper so called, or with the material means without which there is no art, or wi th the whole con ceptual and rational provisioning command eered and convoyed by certain arts (notably 8 i>. This is Very well expressed Zu erfinden, zu beschliesaen in those lines of Goethe, in be Kucnstler oft alhap; rrr-tL 7 */t i j*r J L Denies Wirkcns zu geniesse Wilhelm Muster s Wanderjahrv Eile freudig zum Verein! 64 i e fine arts and especially classic art) or htly with the indispensable maintenance of a 1 vel of culture sufficiently high in the average <artists and craftsmen ; for it is absurd to ask ( ch of them to be an "original genius." Now let us add, so as to get the thought of .Thomas in its entirety, 87 that in all discipline ; d in all teaching the master only helps from ^ thout the principle of immanent activity nich is in the disciple. Under this aspect tiching becomes part of the great idea of the { ; cooperativa naturae: while certain arts take 1 -Id on their material to subdue it, and impose i >on it a form which it must needs receive 1 :e the art of a Michael Angelo torturing the i irble as a tyrant, other arts indeed, because t eir material is nature itself, lay hold on their r iterial to do it service, and to help it to attain 8 Man cannot do without a now that everyone is left to r;ter. But in the anarchic himself, has many unknown c ditions which characterize pupils for whom he is not t world that we have with responsible, and his dull and v the power of the master, involuntary mastery extends I ig unrecognised, has simply far beyond his workshop, even 1 )me less profitable to the into regions where his though; f il and more tyrannical. cannot be understood." (Car/ Since to-day everyone osites estkctiyues,z\o\\ of 1846.) v ts to reign, no one knows to rule himself," once 87. Cf. Sum. tbeol., I, q. 117, v te Baudelaire. "A master, a. i ; Ibid., ad i et ad 3. 6 5 a form or perfection which cannot be acquired except by the activity of an inward principle; these are arts which "co-operate with nature: with bodily nature, like medicine, with spir- itualnature,liketeaching (orlikethe art of spiritual direction) . These arts operate solely by providing the inward principle which is in the subject with the means and the aids which it employ s to produce the given effect. It is th inward principle^ the intellectual light present in the disciple, which is, in the acquirement c science and art, the cause or principal agent. Hence in the more particular matter of the fine arts, their contact with Beingand thetra scendent creates for them quite a special con dition in art-rules. First and foremost they are subject to a lau of renovation, and so of change, unknown to t other arts, at least under the same heading. Beauty is of infin ite embrace, like Being. But the work as such, realised in the material in a certain category, /// a/iquo genere, and it is impossible that one category should exhaust transcendental. Outside the artistic genre tc which the work belongs, there are still endl< ways of being a beautiful work. 66 Thus one feels a sort of conflict between the ranscendence of beauty and the material imitation of the work to be made, between the c rmal idea of beauty, splendour of Being and fall the transcendentals together, and the Drmal idea of #r/, the narrow business of works 3 be made. No art-form, however perfect, an contain in itself the whole of Beauty, as the r irgin encompassed her Creator. The artist ices a shoreless and lonely sea. . . . No sail, no lil, nor any fertile islet . . . . and the mirror he olds up to that sea is no larger than his heart. The genius, the art creator, is he who finds a "uo analogue b8 of the beautiful, a new way of tting the clarity of the form shine out upon ic material. The work which he makes and hich as such is in a certain category,is thence- rth inanew category and calls for newrules mean for a new adaptation of the primary and ernal rules 89 and even for the use ofviae rtae et determinatae hitherto untried, and dis- mcerting to start with. At the moment the contemplative activity touch with the transcendental, which con- . See Note 64. disciplines to make clear, are These rules, which it be- only immutable when taken gs to the various artistic formally and analogically. RhGiS BESJ-. MAJ- COLLEGB stitutes the proper life of the arts of Beauty ant of theirrules, isevidentlyintheascendant. Bu it is almost inevitable that talent, skill, pure technique, the merely operative activity nativ to the genus art, should little by little getthe upper hand, when a man will no longer busy himself save with exploiting what has oncefc all been found; rules hitherto alive and spiri tual will then become materialised, and this art form will end in exhaustion ; renovation will be needed. Pray Heaven that a genius tur up to work it! For the rest, even in this case renovation will possibly lower the general level of the art; mean while it remains the coi dition of the budding and blooming of the greatest masterpieces. 90 From Bach to Beeth- 90. Thence it surely follows possesses the virtue of art, t that the philosopher and the practical and operative, not t critic may well and ought speculative virtue. A phil well to judge of the value of sopher, if his system is false, artistic schools by the truth or known, for then he cannot j the falsehood, the good or the truth except by accident, evil influence of their princi- artist, if his system is false, c pies. But to judge the artist or be something and somethi the poet himself, these consid- great; for he can create bea. erations are radically insuffic- in spite of his system, and ient; here it behoves above spite of the inferiority of t all to discern whether one art-form which he practb is dealing with an artist, with From the point of view of i a poet, with a man who really work done there is more s 68 ,)ven and from Beethoven to Wagner one may :hink that art in general, the form or the genus )f art, dropped in quality, in spirituality, in nirity. But who would be bold to say that any )f these three men is less great than the other? tis quite true that there is no necessary pro gress in art, that tradition and discipline are the :onditions of the very existence of art among nen, and true nurses of originality ; and that he fevered speeding up, which modern in- lividualism, with its itch for revolution in the nediocre, imposes upon the succession of art arms, of schoolscome to nothing, of childish ioods,is the symptom of the worst intellectual nd social decadence. Nevertheless art has a idical need of novel ty ; like nature it has times ad seasons. Art does not, as does Prudence, presuppose a Jtting right of the appetite, that is of the Dwer of willing and of loving, in relation to ic truth(and therefore more or of the poet, let us always inline "classic") in a rom- beware of misreading the vir- tic who has the habitus than tue that may be in him, and a classic who has it not. thus offending something hen we speak of the artist naturally sacred. the last end of man or on the moral plane. 9l All the same it presupposes (as Cajetan explains), that the appetite tends straight to the proper en of art^ in such guise that the principle, thetrut of the practical understanding lies not along con formity with the thing^ but along conformity with the right appetite , rules the domain of Making i well as that of Doing. In the fine arts the general end of art is Beauty. But the work tobe made is notjusta simple material to be ordered to this end, like i clock which one makes with the aim of showin the time of day, or a ship built wi th the aim of going on the water. Beingacertainindividua and original realisation of Beauty, the work which the artist sets about making is for him ; end in itself; not the general end of his art, but the particular end which conditions h is prese operation, and in view of which all the means must be regulated. Now, to judge aright of th individual end, that is to conceive the work tc be made, 03 reason alone is not sufficient, a gooi disposition of the appetite i s necessary ; for each one judges of his particular ends according t< what he actually is himself : "as a man is, so hi 91. See above, pages 20-22. 93. See Appendix D, 92. InI-H,q. 57, a. ^ ad 3. 70 nd seems." 94 Hence we may conclude that vith the Painter,the Poet, the Musician the irtue of art, which resides in the understand- ng, must not only overflow into the sensitive icultiesand the imagination, but mustalso emand that the whole appetitive faculty of be artist, h is passions and h is will, be orientated awards the general aim of art, that is towards leauty. If all the artist s powers of desire and motion are not radically rectified and uplifted y relation with the Beautiful, whose trans- sndence and immateriality are superhuman, icmere living of hislife and thejog-trot of the nses and the routine of art itself will cheapen isconception. The artist must love, he must >ve Beauty , so that his virtue may be indeed, .. ARISTOTLE, Etk.Nic., lib. the one hand of the moral [, c.y, 1114 a 32. Cf. Com- disposition of the appetite nt. de St. Thomas, lect. 1 3 ; (Cf. CAJETAN, he. /.), on the m. theol., I, q.83, a. \,ad^. other hand of art taken ac- VVhen St. Thomas teaches cording as " factibilia are not un. theol., I-II, q. 58, 2..$, ad related to art as principles, hat"the principles of works but only as material" (ibid.j\. art are not judged by us 65, a.l, <?</ 4). This is not 11 or ill according to the dis- the case in the fine arts. Ends j lion of our appetite, as are are in fact principles of the ends which are the prin- practical order, and the work les of morals, but only to be made has in the fine 3ugh consideration of the arts the dignity of a veritable ;on," he is thinking on end. according to the word of St. Augustine, ordo amoris; 95 so that Beauty may become second nature to him, and put her heart into his by affection, so that his works spring from h is heart and from his inmost parts, as from his lucid spirit. This right love is the rule above all rules. But it presupposes the intelligence; and it is for the maintenance of its light in the soul, thatthisloveisnecessary ; and tending to wards theBeautiful it tends towards that whic isfraught with delight to the intelligence. Lastly, because in the fine arts the work itse to be made is, qua beautiful, an end, and becaus this endissomethingabsolutely individual, quite unique, there is for the artist every time; new and unique way of conforming himself t( the end, and therefore of regulating the matei ial. Hence a remarkable analogy between fine art and Prudence. No doubt art still keeps her viae certae et determinatae; the proof is that all the works of the same artist or the same school are signed with the same sure and certain characters. But the artist must apply the rules of his art 95. In the book <De Moribus Ecclesiae, chap. 15. "Virtue is love in order." with prudence, counsel, good sense and clear vision, with circumspection, precaution, de liberation, industry, remembrance, foresight, understanding, and divination; he must use prudential and not predetermined rules settled according to the contingencies of cases; he must apply them in a manner always new and impossible to foresee: on this condition alone his ruling is infallible. "A picture, "said Degas, is a thing which demands as much rakishness, oguery, and viciousness as the perpetration of i crime." )6 For different reasons, and because )f the transcendence of their object, the fine irts thus partake, as do the chase or the military irt, of the virtues of governance. Thisartistic prudence, thiskind of spiritual ensitivenessin dealing with the material :orresponds in the operative order to the con- emplative activity and proper life of art in ealingwith thebeautiful. Inso farasthe cademic rule prevails over this prudence, the nearts return to the generic type of art and to s inferior species, the mechanical arts. . Quoted by M. Etienne Charles in the T^naissance de 1rtfran(ais, April, 1918. 73 VII. THE PURITY OF ART WHAT we actually seek from art, wrote Smile Clermont, 97 "is what the Greeks sought from everything else, sometimes from wine, most often from the celebration of mysteries: ravishment, intoxication. In the great bacchic madness of these mysteries we find the exact counterpart of our highest reach of emotion in art, something out of Asia. But for the Greeks art was quite another thing 98 . . . . The effect it aimed at was not to perturb the soul, but to purify it,which is precisely the con trary ; Art purifies the passions,according to the celebrated and generally ill-interpreted expres sion of Aristotle. And there is no doubt that our immediate need today is to purify the idea of Beauty. ..." As well on the side of art in general as on the side of beauty ^ it is the understanding (as the 97. LOUISE CLERMONT, Emik shadows a dionysiac art ha Clermont, sa vie, son ceuvre, not lingered on,such as Goetln Grasset, 1919. seems to picture in the secern 98. In so far as apollinism part of Faust, with the Phor reigns supreme in Greek art. kiades and the Kabires stirrin: Still it would be curious to in the classic night of Wai investigate whether in the purgis. 74 schoolmen teach in thousands of ways) which holds the primacy in art work. They keep reminding us that the first principle of all the \-orks of man is reason.** We may add that, when they make Logic the liberal art par ex cellence and,in a sense,the first analogate of art, they show us in every art a sort of fellowship with Logic. There all is order and loveliness, Wealth, quiet, ease, no more, no less. 100 If, in architecture, all useless patchwork is jgly, if, in religious art, swagger and sham are lateful, it is because they are illogical, both in :hemselves always, and in particular in relation o their religious usage : for it is profoundly llogical that falsehood should serveto decorate hehouseofGod: 101 Deus non eget nostro men- 9. " Reason is the first prin- from space." (fMon coeur mis iple of all the works of man." a nu.} r. THOMAS, Sum. theol., I-II, None the less, the relation 58,3.2. of the arts with Logic is much oo. Baudelaire writes again: deeper and more universal All that is beautiful and than their relation to the able is the result of reason science of Number, id calculation," (Udrt rom- 101. Cf. Maurice Denis, Let tiyue); and once more: Nouvelles Directions de FArt Vlusic gives the notion of chretlen (Conferences de la ace. So do all the arts more Revue des Jeunes, ^th Feb. less; since they are number, 1919): Every falsehood is un- d number is a translation bearable in the temple of truth. daclo. "Ugly in art," said Rodin, "is all that is false, all that smiles without motive, that is mannered without reason, that prances and curvets, that is but the show of beauty and of grace, all that tells a lie." 102 "I ask you," adds Mau rice Denis, 103 " to paintyour characters in such guise that they lookpainted^ being sub ject to the laws of painting so that they aim not at deceiving my eye or my mind ; the truth of art consists in the conformity of the work with its means and its end." Which is to say with the Ancients, that the trueness of art depends on order and conformity to the rules of art and therefore every rule of art must be logical. Therein lies its trueness. It must in some sort be steeped in Logic : not in the pseudo-logic of bareideas, l05 butin the veritable logic, thelogic of the living structure, of nature s inmost geo- 102. PAUL GSELL, Rodin. logic and regularity. Thi 103. Le Syrnbolisme et f Art zenithal upthrust of its col religieux moderne, Revue des umns and the parabolic curv< Jeunes, IO Nov. 1918, pp. of its horizontal lines and floor 516-7. balance the apparent de 104. JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, formation of lines and plant Curs, theol., t. VI, q. 62, disp. in the visual perception, am 16, a. 4, p. 467. perhaps also secure greatc 105. It is known that the stability against the ^seismi Parthenon is not geometrically oscillations of the Attic crus regular. It obeys a much higher netry. A Gothic cathedral is as much a marvel )f logic as theSumma of St. Thomas; even lamboyant Gothic remains the enemy of all r eneer, and the luxuriance in which it spends tself is exactly that of the ornate and dressed- ip syllogisms of the logicians of the period, /irgil, Racine, Poussin are logical; so is Shake- peare. And even Baudelaire! Chateaubriand snot. The medieval architects did not restore "in he style," after the manner of Viollet-le-Duc. f the choir of a romanesque church was des- royed by fire, they rebuilt it Gothic and bought no more about it. Butin thecathedral f Mans look at the harmony and the tran- ition, the sudden so self-reliant soaring into plendour: there is living logic like that of th& ontour-map of the Alps, or the anatomy of umankind. The perfection of virtue in art consists, ac- ording to St. Thomas, in the act of j udging. " JU .s to manual dexterity, it is a condition requi te but extrinsic to art. It is for aft, even while necessitv,an abiding menace, inasmuch as it is * ways in danger of substituting the guidance muscular habi tuation for the guidance of 6. See above, page 22. 77 the intellectual habitus,, and of letting the work escape from the influence of art. For there is an art impulse which, by physical and real im pression reaching to the very motive faculty of the limbs , goes on, from the understanding which is the seat of art, to move the hand and cause "to shine" in the work an artistic "formality." 107 Thus a spiritual virtue may pass into an awk ward stroke. Hence the charm which one finds in the awkwardness of the primitives. In itself this awkwardness has nothing charming whatever, it offers no attraction where art is rudimentary, as with the candid time-server Rousseau, and it even becomes merely hateful, when it is the least bit desired for its own sake, or "precious. But with the primitives it was a sacred weak ness, by which one glimpsed the subtle intel lectuality of art. 108 Man lives so much in the senses^ it is so hard for him to keep up to the level of the under standing, that one may question if in art, as in social life, the advance of material means and of scientific technique, though good in itself, be not in fact an ill as regards the average estate 107. JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, 108. See Appendix E. ibid., pp. 472-473- 78 of art and civilisation. In this sphere and be yond a certain measure, what removes a hin drance takes away a strength, what removes a difficulty takes away a greatness. When, on a visit to a museum, one passes Tom the rooms of the Primitives to those of Renaissance art, where science and material ieftness are much more considerable, the foot iteps on to the floor, but the soul comes a crop per. She had been walking on the everlasting :iills, now she finds herself on thefloor of a :heatre a magnificent one for that matter. In :he sixteenth century Falsehood took the naster s chair in painting, which then started oving science for its own sake, and wanting to ^ivethe illusion of nature, and to make believe :hat in front of a picture we are before the scene )r subject depicted, not before a picture. The great classics succeeded in purging art )f this falsehood ; realism, and in a sense im pressionism, have played with it. Does cubism n our day represent, in spite of its enormous leficiencies, the still toddling and squalling nfancy of an art pure once more ? The barbaric ogmatism of its theorists compels most grave loubtand apprehension, lest the new school be triving to rid itself radically of naturalist imitation, only to stagnate in "foolish question ings", 10 by denying the primary conditions \vhichessentiallydistinguish Painting from the other arts, from Poetry or Logic for in stance. Meanwhile one ascertains from some of the artists painters, poets, musicians espec ially that criticism has quartered up to re cently at the sign of theCube (an astonishingly expansible cube) , as the most respectable effort at logical coherence, at the simplicity and purity of means which are the proper constit uent of veracity in art. All the best people today are asking for the classic; I know nothing in contemporary production more sincerely classic than the music of Satie. "No more ritua charms, repetitions, dubiousendearments, fevers, misty exhalations. Never does Satie J stir up the mud. It is the poetry of childhood brought back by a master technician." Cubism propounds in rather violent mann< the question of imitation in art. Art as such do* not consist in imitating, but in making, com- 1 09. These "foolish question- itself. (Cf. St. Thomas Comnit ings" are those which arising in ep. ad Titum, III, 9; within a certain science or the text of St. Paul: stu discipline w r ould contradict the quaest iones devita.) primary conditions implied 110. JEAN COCTEAU, Lt in this science or discipline el P Arkqiiin. 80 Dosing, or constructing, andthat according to he laws of the obj ect itself to be set up in being whether it be ship, house, carpet, coloured loth or carven block). This exigency of its eneric concept throws into the shade every- lingelsein Art; and to give for its essential m the representation of the real is to destroy . Plato, with his theory of imitation in many ades 111 and of illusionist poetry, misunder- andslike all extreme intellectuals the proper i tureof art; whencehisscorn of poetry: itis c >ar that if art were a means of knowing^ would b furiously inferior to geometry. 112 But if art as art knows not imitation, the fisarts, as ordered unto Beauty, have a cer- ,, t; i relation with imitation, else hard enough ulefine. >- n Plato s Republic, Book X. and with falsehood which in- ,l i "We have been too long tends to deceive. A painting is ; act omed to consider truth conformed with its truth, "yli from the mere point of with Truth itself, when it says F-" fie of imitation. On the well what it has to say and , ry, there is no paradox fulfils its ornamental role." - m -ritainingthat/;w/r-/V/y Maurice Denis, op. cit.-p. 526. s mymous with falsehood, When Aristotle wrote(speaking of the primary causes of poetry), "Imitation is natu ral to men from childhood. . . ., man is the most imitative of animals, he acquires his earliest cognitions by imitation, and everyone has joy in imitations ; a proof is found in works of art : for the very things which we see with pain,we rejoice to contemplate in their exacted images, such as, for instance, the forms of the worst beasts and of dead bodies ; this comes from the fact that the act of learning is all that is most agreeable not only to philosophers but also to other men. . . .," 13 he was laying down a specific condition imposed on the fine arts, a condition grasped at their very origin. But hei we ought to take Aristotle in a most formal sem^ If the philosopher, according to h is ordinary method,goes straight to the primitiveinstanc i t would be a complete mistakejust to stop there, and to keep for ever for the word imitati its vulgar meaning of exact reproduction or representation of a given reality. The man oft reindeer age, when he was drawing animal forms on the cave wall, was doubtless moved most of all by the pleasure of reproducingan 113. ARISTOTLE, Toetica, IV, 14.48 b 5-14. 82 object with exactitude. m But since then the >oy of imitation has grown singularly thin. Let as endeavour to sharpen the edge of this idea limitation in art. The fine arts aim at producing,by the objects hey make, joy or delight of the understanding >y means of the intuition of sense. ( The goal >f painting, said Poussin, is delight. ) Thisjoy s not thejoy of the mere act of knowing,joy of mowledgejoy of truth. It is ajoy which over- lows from that act, when the object on which t bears is excellently proportioned to the intel- igence. Thus thisjoy presupposes knowing, and the lore there is of knowledge, or of things pres- nted to the understanding, the vaster will be be possibility of joy ; this is why Art, in so far s ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its 14. Or, with greater pro- and undoubtedly dating back ibihty,by the wish to indicate 3000 years B.C it would \ object with the help of an seem that the art of drawing eogram,perhaps with magical began by being writing and tent; for these drawings, by answering to hieroglyphic, :ing necessarily in darkness, ideographic, or even heraldic nnot have been made to be preoccupations, quite foreign oked at. In a general way to aesthetic; preoccupation may be concluded especi- with the beautiful not coming y from the study of the in until much later. sa vases recently discovered 83 object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and as //zz/Tg^butittakesthemalsoasmakingknown other things than themselves, that is to say as signs. And the thing signified may itself be a sign in turn, and the more the work of art is laden with significance (butspontaneousand intuitively grasped, not hieroglyphic signi ficance), the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty. The beauty of a picture or of a statue is thus incom parably richer than that of a carpet, of a Vene tian glass, or of an amphora. In this sense Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Music, even Dancing are imitative arts, that is to say arts which realise the beauty of the work and procurejoy to the soul by making use of imitation, or in giving back, by means of cer tain sensible signs, something other than those signs spontaneously present to the mind. Pzni- t mg imitates, with colours and surface forms, things ready-made outside us; Music imitates with sounds and rhythms (Dance with rhythir alone) "the manners", as Aristotle says, m and the movements of the soul, the unseen 115. ARISTOTLE, Toetica, I, 1447, a 28. 84 world which stirs in us. With this reservation as to the difference in the object signified, Pain ting imitates no more than M usic, and Music i nitates no less than Painting understanding "imitation" precisely in the meaning-just laid down. But thejoy engendered by the beautiful, not consisting formally in the mere act of knowing the real, or in the act of conformity with what is, does hot depend upon the per- r ection of the imitation as a reproduction of :he real, or on the exactness of the representa- ion. Imitation as reproduction or representa- ion of the real, in other words imitation taken Materially^ is only a means, not an end . Imita- :ion is related to artistic activity as is manual ikill, but no more than the latter does it con- titute artistic activity. And the things which ire made present to the soul through the sen- ible signs of art by rhythms, sounds, lines, olours, forms, masses, words, measures, hymes, images, all the approximate material of rt are themselves only a material element of he beauty of the work, just like the signs in uestion ; they are remote material, if one may 3 say,which the artistdisposesandon which he as to flash the radiance of a form, the light of 85 Being. To set before oneself the perfection of imitation materially considered, would therefore be tofollowthelead of what is purely materialin the work of art, and to concentrate on servile imitation. Now this servile imitation is abso lutely foreign to art. 116 The essential is not that the representation be exactly conformed with a given reality, it is that through the material elements of the beauty of the work should clearly shine, supreme and whole, the clarity of a form; of a form, and therefore of some one truth: in that sense the great word of the Platonists, splendor "oeri splendour of truth abides for ever. BIT if thejoy of the beautiful work comes from some one truth, it does not come from the truth of the imitation as reproduction of things, it comes from the perfection with which the work expresses or manifests the form (in the meta physical sense of this word) ; it comes from the truth of the imitation as manifestation of a form, Behold theformula of imitation in art: ex pression or manifestation, in a harmoniously 1 1 6. (C&zanne) "asked me strong. "Yes", retorted Cez what the fanciers thought of anne, "if is horribly like him. Rosa Bonheur. I told him they (Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cez generally agreed that the anne, Paris, Cres, 1919). Labour eur C^jvernais is very proportioned work, of some principle of f n- elligibility which shines forth from it. This is :he bearing on art of the joy of imitation. Thisit s too which gives art its value of universality. What makes the purity of the true classic is ;uch a subordination of matter to the light of he form, thus manifested, that no material Clement arising from the things or from the ubject shall be admitted into the work, unless trictly required as support or vehicle of this ight, no material element which should result n overweighting or "debauching" the eye the arorthemind. Comparein thisregard,in the irder of thought, Aristotle and St. Thomas Vquinaswith Luther or Jean Jacques Rous- eau ; in the order of art, Gregorian melody or 3ach s music with the music of Wagner or itravinsky. In the presence of a work of beauty, the mderstanding, as we have already pointed out, ejoices without misgiving. If therefore Art nan ifests or expresses in a material a certain adiation of Being, a certain form, a certain oul, a certain truth ("You are sure to end by wning up" said Carriere to someone whose iortrait he was making) , it does not produce in ie soul a conceptual and discursive expression 87 of the same. It is thus that Art sus; Crests with- o o out properly making known, and expresses what our ideas cannot express. Ah, ah, ah, crie; Jeremiah, O Lord God! behold, Iknow not h jK /: speak. 111 But where speech stops, song begins, the exultation of the mind bursting into voice. 118 Moreover, in the case of the arts which appealtosight (painting, sculpture) ortothe intelligence (poetry), a stricter need of imita tion or of signification comes to be imposed from without upon art, from the nature of the faculty in play. In fact this faculty must needs have enjoyment, by title in chief if it is the understanding, by secondary and instrumenta title if it is the visual faculty. 11D Vision and un- derstanding,beingsupremelycognoscitiveam bearing on the object, cannot taste of joy it th^ do not know 7 expressly the object signified to them. So eye and understanding insist on per ceiving or recognising in the work a definite thing or thought. And if the artist did not re spond to this exigency, he would sin, by a sort of idealist giddiness, against the subjective or 117. JEREMIAH, I, 6. ministerially; that is why th ll 8. ST.THOMAS, Comment, in artist is so superior to it an, Tsa/rn., Prologue. handles it so freely; still it i 119. Sensuous delectation it- required. self is required in art only 88 Psychologic conditions which art has to satisfy. That is the peril of over-bold excursions, noble >therwise though they be, to the Cape of Good iope, the peril of a poetry which "teases eter- uty" by wilfully clouding over the idea under Imsof imagery disposed with exquisite feel- ig. When, in his horror of impressionism or aturalism, a cubist declares that a picture ught to bey tfj-/rf.r beautiful turned upside own, like a cushion, he is asserting a very jrious return (and a very useful one, if rightly .ken) to the laws of absolute constructive )herence for art in general 120 ; but he forgets )th thesubjective conditions and the highest agencies of the beautiful in painting. Still it remains true, that if one understood "imitation" reproduction or exact copy of the ?/, m one would be bound to say that outside 13. It is by virtue of these "The true way of finding out 1 s that, according to Baude- if a picture is melodious is to 1 c s remark, "seen at a dis- look at it from far enough a- t :c too great for analysis or way to discern neither the e i understanding of the subject nor the lines. If it is Si ect, a picture of Delacroix melodious, it already has a v at once imprint on the meaning, and has already s ( arich, happy or melancholy found a place in the repertory u "ession." (Curiosites estheti- of remembrance." <i> Salon, 1855.) Baudelaire 121. See Appendix F. u :s elsewhere (lbid.jp. 92) : the art of the mapmaker or that of the anatom ical draughtsman there is no imitative art. In thatsense, deplorable though his writings may be elsewhere, Gauguin, in affirming that one must give up making what one sees, laid do wr a primary truth put in practice from the begin ning by the masters. m Cezanne, in a saying deeper and truer to type, expressed the same truth: "Whatwe must do, is Poussin overag- ain after Nature. That is everything". 123 The imitative arts do not aim at copy ing the appear ancesof Nature, nor at portraying "the ideal, but at making a beautiful object by manifesting a form with the help of sensible signs. As to this form, the human artist or poet, whose intelligence is not the cause of things as is the Divine intelligence, cannot draw it fortl all complete from hiscreative mind, but goes to fetch it first and foremost from the immense treasury of created things, from sensitive nature as well as from the world of souls, and from the inner worldof his own soul. From this point of view he is first and foremost a ma who sees deeper than others and who discovei in theconcretespiritualradiances, which 122. Cf. Louis DIMIER, His- XIX sihle (Paris, Delagravc toire 4e la Teinture franfaise au 123. Sec Appendix G. :hers are unable to discern. m But to make lese radiances shine in hisworkand so to be uly docile and faithful to the unseen Spirit hich plays in things, he can, and he even ight in some measure to deform, to rebuild, ; transfigure the material appearance of .ture. Even in a portrait which is "a perfect ceness,"in Holbein s drawings for instance, i is always a form engendered in the artist s lindand veritably born in that mind which Expressed by the work, true portraits being nthing else than "the ideal reconstruction of teindividualnature." 125 Art then remains at bottom essentially con- s uctiveand creative. Itisthefaculty of pro- ccing, doubtless not out of nothing, but out c pre-existing matter, a new creature, an ori- ial being, capable on its own part of stirring 1 2 soul of a man. This new creature is the fruit c a spiritual marriage, which conjoins the a ivity of the artist to the passivity of a given r terial. i . "The artist, on the con- Nature" (#0<#, Entretiens re- 11 ", sees: that is," explained unis par Paul Gsell, Paris, in, in a happy expression, Grasset, 1911). eye engrafted on his heart r < > deeply in the bosom of 125. See Appendix H. 9 1 Thence proceeds the feeling in the artist of his especial dignity. He is like a partner with God in the making of beauteous works, in developingthepovversput intohimby the Creator for "every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights; " and in making use of created material, he creates in the second degree, so to speak. Oper- atlo artls fundatur super operationem naturae, et haec super creatlonem: "Art s manner of work i ng is founded upon nature s manner of work ing, and nature s manner upon creation." Artistic creation does not copy Divine ere. tiori, it carries it on. And just as the sign man ual and image of God appears in His creature 126. Cf. Sum. theoL, I, q. 45, ing into the invincible pew a. 8. The capacity of matter of the primal Agent, to for obeying the human artist, raised by His action to t who draws from it effects supernatural order or to dec superior to all it could yield of miracle. "I went down under the action of physical the house of the potter,and agents.provides the theologians he was making his work up (cf. St.Thomas, Compendium the wheel And t tfoo/ogiae,c2.p. 104; Garrigou- word of the Lord was ms Lagrange, de 1(evelafione, t. I, known to me,saying:Can 1 1 p. 377) with the profoundest make thee as this potter m; analogy of the obedlential power eth, O house of Israel? As t which is in things and in souls clay in the hand of the pott with regard to God, and even so art thou in my ha; which delivers them even to O house of Israel." (Jeremi the very bottom of their be- XVIII, 6). ( en so upon the work of art the human mark stamped, the full mark, both sensitive and < iritual, not merely that of the hands, but of it whole soul. Before the work of art goes irth, by a transitive action, from the art into te material, the very conception of the art nist have gone forth within the soul, by an i imanent and vital action, like the procession c the mental word. Processus artis est duplex, s licet artis a corde artificis et artificiatorum ab d e: "the procession of art is twofold, to wit, cart from the soul of the artificer, and of the a -works from the art". m It the artist studies and fosters nature as nchasandmuch more than the works of the n.sters, it is not in order to copy her but to I) e himself upon her. This is also why it is not e )ughforhim to be the pupil of the masters; h must be God s pupil, for God knows the b Idingrulesof beautiful works. 128 Natureis o :ssential import to the artist, only because i: CC,ST.THOMAS,//S/., as she works" ars imitafur ^- !> 3> z - naturam IN SUA OPERATIONK. : The ancient adage Ars This is how St.Thomas applies tm ur Naturam does not the adage to medicine, which ni "art imitates nature by is certainly not an "imitative reducing her", but rather art YSaw. tfieol.,l,(\. 1 1 7, a. i). "* mitates nature by working 93 she is a derivative from the art of God in things ratio artis divinae indita re bus," the scheme of divine art breathed into things." The artist, whether he knows it or not, is con sulting God, when he looks closely atthings. They exist but for a moment fora mo ment, but how fine ! He s a dullard at his own art, who findeth fault with Thine. 129 Nature is thus the prime mover and theprirm regulator of the artist, and not at all a headline for servile tracery. Ask the true painters, how they have need of her. They fear her and reven her, but with the fear of the child, not of the slave. They imitate her, but with an imitation truly filial^ and obey ing the creative agility of the mind, not with literal and servile imitation Coming back from a winter walk, Rouault told me that by looking at the country under sunlit snow, he had come to understand how to paint the white trees of springtime. "The model," said Renoir 1SO on his part, "is only there to show me the light, to let me venture things which I could not invent without 129. Paul Claudel, La Messe i 30. The saying is related 1 la-bas. "Even as your art is M. Albert ANDRE, in his r grand-child unto God," said cent volume on Renoir. Dante. 94 iim . . . And he drops me on my paws, if lact he goat too much with him." Such is the free- lorn of the sons of the Creator. A rt has to defend itself not only against the llurement of manual dexterity and against crvileimitation. Still other alien elements hreaten its purity. For instance, the beauty to v hich it tends produces delectation, but it is he lofty delectation of the mind, which is uite the contrary of what is called pleasure, or ; ie pleasant tickling of the sensitive side; and : art seeks to please^ it falls below itself, and ecomes a liar. Similarly, its effect is to pro- uce emotion, but if it aims at emotion, at the ffective phenomenon, the stirring of the pas- ons, it becomes adulterate, and lo ! another lement of untruth pervades it. Thisisastrue f music as of the other arts. No doubt music as this property, that signifying with its ly thms and its sounds the very emotions of le soul cantare amantis est^ tis lovers sing, i producing emotion it produces precisely hat it showsforth. But this production is not s goal, no more than is a representation or a scription of emotions. Theemotionswhich makes present to the soul by sounds and y thms, are the material with which it should give us the heartfelt joy of a of rational order, of the clarity of Being. It is thus that,like tragedy,it purifies the passions, 1 by developing them in the measure and in the order of beauty, by attuning them to the under standing, in a harmony which every where els fallen nature knows not. If we give the name of thesis to every inten tion extrinsic to the work itself, when the thought which animates this intention does not act upon the work by means of the artistic habitus instrumentally moved, but sets itself beside \h\$ habitus in order to act itself directly upon the work; then the work is not produced entirely by theartistic habitus orentirely by the thought thus actuated, but partly by one and partly by the other, as a boat drawn by two men. In this sense every thesis, whether it means to demonstrate or to stir, is in art a for eign importation and hence an impurity. Suci a thesis lays down for art, in its proper sphere, that is to say in the very production of the work a rule and an end which is not its own, it pre vents the work of art from going out from the artist s soul with the spontaneity of a perfect 131. Cf. ARISTOTLE, Tolitica, VIII, 7, 1341 b 40; Toetica, VI, 1449 b 27. uit, it betrays a misgiving, a duality bet ween i e artist s understanding and his sensibility, hich are precisely what art wants conjoined. hereisMt -fmnGustaveMoreau. There is i me too, it seems, in the symbolic system for Ahich the author of Theories keeps his prefer- c ces. 132 Because it makes the beauty of the \:>rkconsistinitspowertostormtheafFections, t is system aims too much at the onlooker, and atheemotion to be produced in him. lam C ite willing to acknowledge the mastery of t * object which the artist has conceived a i which he sets before my eyes, I then give n -self up without reserve to the emotion viich proceeds, within both him and me, fi m the selfsame beauty, from the selfsame ti nscendental, from that which we have in cinmon. But I refuse to submit to the mastery olin art which calculates means of suggestion fcthecaptivation of my sub-consciousness, I re stan emotion which a man s will would im- pce upon me. The artist must be as objective as iesage,in thesensethathemustnotthink otheonlooker except togivehimbeauty,as the sa -thinksof the listener only in ordertogive hi i truth. The builders of the cathedrals set no > 3 See Appendix J. 97 sort of thesis before themselves. They were, according to the fmesayingofDulac, "men W!T did not know themselves." 133 They wished nei ther to demonstrate the seemliness of Christiar dogma, nor to suggest by any artifice a Christia emotion. They just believed, and as they were, they wrought. Their work revealed the Trutl of God, but without doing it of set purpose, an j ust because it did not do it of set purpose. VIII CHRISTIAN ART )Y the words Christian Art we do not mean Church Art, which is Art specific by an object, an aim, and settled rules, an merely an outstanding and peculiar point of applied Christian Art. We understand by Christian Art the Art which wears the stamp of Christianity. In thissense Christian Artis not a certain species of the genus art; we do n speak of Christian Art, as we do of poetic or pictorial, of ogival or byzantine Art; a young man does not say to himself, I am going to wo at Christian Art, as he would say, I am going to work at agriculture ; there is no school whe o you learn Christian Art. m Christian Art is 133. Lettres de Marie-Charles 6 fevrier 1896. f )u!uc, Bloud, 1905; Icttre du 134. See Appendix K. denominated from the subject wherein it in heres and the spirit whereout it springs: we say "Christian Art" or "a Christian s Art," as we s iV "bee s art" or"man s art" ;so that theground which Christian Art has in common with Art non-Christian ^analogical or quasi-analogical rather thangeneric. It is the art of redeemed mankind. It is planted in the Christian soul by :he marge of the living waters, beneath the sky }f theTheological Virtues, amid the breath- ngs of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit. Natural it s that it should bear Christian fruit. If you want to do a Christian work,&? a ^hristian^ and try to do a work of beauty into vhich you put your heart; do not try to "do the Christian." Do not essay the vain and odious enterprise if sundering in yourself the artist from, the Christian. If you are really Christian, and if our art is not isolated from your soul by some esthetic system, they are one. But apply only he artist to the work ;just because theyare one, ic entire work will belong to the one as to the :her. Do not separate your art from your faith, as ould be done by a politician of untruth. But ave distinct what is distinct. Do not strive to 99 confuse forcibly what life conjoins so well. If you made your aesthetic an article of faith, you would spoil your faith. If you made your devo tion a canon of artistic workmanship, or if you turned your concern for edification into a de partment of your artistry, you would spoil your art. The artist s whole soul pervades and regu lates his work, but it must pervade and regulate it by the artistic habitus alone. In this, art brooks no divided allegiance. She suffers no foreign element to intervene as her assessor and to mingle in the production of the work a stranger s ruling. Tame her, and she will do all you wish. Force her, she will do nothing good. The Christian work of art must have the artist free, qua artist. Still, the work will not be Christian, its beauty will not wear the inmost reflex of the clarity of grace, unless it overflows from a hear) possessed by grace. For the artistic habitus, which pervades and rules it without inter mediary, presupposes the right orientation of appetite bearing on the beauty of the work. And if the beauty of the work is Christian, it is because the artist s appetite comports itself truly towards such beauty, and because in his 100 soulChristispresentthroughlove. Thequality of the work in this case is the gushing of love from which it goes forth, which sets in motion artistic virtue like some instrument. Thus it is by reason of an inward exaltation that art is Christian, and it is through love that this exal tation comes about. Hence it follows that the work will be Chris tian in the exact measure in which the love is living. Make no mistake, it is love in its very act, it is contemplation, that is here essential. The Christian w r ork of art must have the artist holy, quaman. 1 1 would have him possessed by love. Then let him do what he will. Where the work rings less purely Christian is where something has failed from the pureness of the love. 135 Art de mands much quietness i$3.i& Fra Angelico, and to paint the things of Christ you must abide in Christ; this is the only word of his we have, and how far removed from system It would thus be vain to look for a technique or a style or a system of rules or a manner of working, which should be proper to Christian Art. The art which buds and grows from chris tianised mankind may rightfully admit an in- r 35. See Appendix L. 101 finity of such art-forms, but they will all have 2 family likeness and will all differ substantially from non-Christian art-forms; as the flora of the mountains differs from the flora of the plains. Look at the Liturgy, the transcendent outstanding type of Christian art-forms; the Spirit of God Himself has fashioned it, to take His pleasure there. 13 Beautiful things are scarce. What exception al conditions must be taken for granted before civilization can join together, and in the same man, Art and contemplation ! Beneath the weight of a nature which ever resists and unceasingly falls away, Christianity has pushe> its sap all over Art and throughout the world, but it has not succeeded, save in the Middle Ages (and then amid what difficulties and backslidings !) , in forming an art unto itself, any more than a world unto itself; and that is not surprising. Classic Art has produced many Christian and admirable works. Yet can 136. "Even as the body of harmony of heaven," writ Jesys Christ was born of the St. Hildegarde in the adm: Holy Ghost from the integrity able letter to the chapter of the Virgin Mary, so also Mayence in which she vi the Canticle of praise is dicates the freedom of sacr rooted in the Church by the chant (Migne, col. 221). Holy Ghost according to the we say that taken by itself this art-form pos sesses the original atmosphere of the Christian climate? It is an exotic form transplanted. If in the midst of the unspeakable catastro phes called down by the modern world, there be a time to come, however brief,of pure Chris tian springtide, a Palm Sunday for the Church, from poor earth a brief hosanna to the Son of David, it is lawful to hope that those years :nay see, together with a wondrous radiation of Catholic spirituality and intellectuality, a ?econd spring, to the joy of men and angels, of /eritably Christian artistry. Already such art ;eems heralded in the individual stirrings, ;uccessively through the last half-century, of i few noble artists and poets, some of whom ank among the greatest. StilUet us not attempt unyoke and isolate it, by premature and .cademic stress, from the great movement of ontemporary art. 13T It will not emerge and 37. It is curious to see how means, or the standardised 1 its boldest ventures con- ideography in expression. If mporary art betrays a wish we examine from this stand- ) recover all the characteristics point the miniatures of the " primitive art (even in its Scivias of Saint Hildegarde, idest examples), whether as as reproduced in the fine gards simplicity, the con- compilation of Dom Baillet ruction of the work, free- ("The miniatures of the >m and reasonableness of Scivias preserved at the Wiesha- 103 will not impose itself as Christum Art unless ii springs spontaneously from a common rejuv enation of both art and hoiinessin the world. Christianity does not make Art easy. It de- privesitofmanyfacilechannels,itbarsitscours in many places, but only to put it on a higher plane. Even while creating these wholesome difficulties, it exalts it from within and ac quaints it with a hidden beauty lovelier than light; it gives it what the artist needs most, simplicity, the peace of awe and of loving- kindness, the innocence which makes matter docile and brotherly to men. den Library," 1st number of vol. XIX of Monuments et Me moires of the A cad. des Inscr. et Betffs-Lettres, 1912), we discover very suggestive ana logies with certain contem porary efforts, for instance with the cubist perspectives. But these analogies are quite material; the inward motive is entirely different. All that is sought by most "advanced" moderns in the chill night of a calculated anarchy, was possessed naturally by the primitives, in the peace of in ward order. Change the so the inward motive, and p the light of faith and reas in place of the exasperation the senses (and sometimes unwisdom besides), and y are in the presence of an capable of high spiritual c velopment. In this sense and spite of being in other asp: at the antipodes of Christian! contemporary art approac much nearer to Christian than does the art of the a demies. 104 IX ART AND MORALS THE artistic habitus concerns itself only vith the work to be made. Doubtless it cid mi ts consideration of objective con- .itions practical use, destination, and so orth which the work should satisfy (a statue :iade for pray ing before is different from a arden statue) , but it is because this consider- tion concerns the beauty itself of the work; work which were not adapted to thesecondi- ons would lack in that respectproportion of eauty. The sole aim of art is the work itself nd the beauty thereof. But for the man who labours, the work to s made comes itself within the line of morals, idunderthisheaditisbut ameans. If the tist took for the final goal of his labour, and lerefore for beatitude, the end of his art or i e beauty of the work, he would be an ido- ter pure and simple. 138 It is then absolutely 8. The testimony of a poet Art as to his last end, he con- jealously artistic as Baude- eludes with the following e is most interesting on passage : "An unrestrained s point. In his article on taste for form drives to mon- Tagan School, where he strous and unconscionable dis- \vs in striking language, orders. Engulfed by the fierce v great an aberration it is passion for the beautiful, the man to order himself to strange, the comely, or the 105 necessary for the artist, qua man, to labour for other than his work and for something better O beloved. God is infinitely more lovable than Art. God isjealous. MelaniedelaSaletteusedto say : "The rule of divine love is merciless. Lov is a veritable immolator ; he wills the death of all that is not he." Woe to the artist of divided heart ! Blessed Angelico would have left his painting in the lurch with out hesitation, to gc and mind the geese, if obedience had requirec Thenceforward a creative flood welled from his peaceful bosom. God left him that, becauf he had renounced it. Art has no rights against God . There is no good contrary to God, nor contrary to the fina picturesque (for there are de- against images. I can feel i grees in these things), the all St. Augustine s remorse notions of the Just and the regards the immoderate pl< True are disappearing. The sure of the eyes. So great frantic passion for Art is an the danger, that I can put all-devouring canker; and, as with the suppression of the complete absence of the cause. Art mania is on a ] Just and the True in art is with the misuse of the mi equivalent to the absence of The erection of either of th art, the whole man vanishes; two supremacies engenders the excessive specialisation of fatuation, hardness of he; one faculty ends up in nothing- and boundless egotism " ness. I can understand the rage pride " (BAUDELAI of iconoclasts and Moslems L drt romantique.} 106 iood of human life. Art Is free in its domain, lit its domain is subordinate. Moreover "if an ; t turn out objects which men cannot use Hthout sin, the artist who makes such works < is himself, because he offers directly to others le occasion of sinning; it is as if one made iols for idolatry. Asto the artsof which men ( n use the works well or ill, they are lawful, d yet, if there are any of which the works are ] t to evil use/)/ the greatest number of cases, t ey ought, though lawful in themselves, to be t tirpatedfrom the city by the office of the ] mct^secundum documenta Plaionts -accord- iyfotheteachingof Plato." 59 Fortunately for 1 2 Rights of Man, our beautiful cities have no I ince; and all that works to idolatry and I cury, in dressmaking or in letters, goes un- hdered of Plato. Art, because it is in man and since its good is n t man s good, is therefore subject to extrinsic r ;ulation, which is laid upon it in the name of a 2nd higher and more necessary than its own. I 1 with the Christian this regulation goes v hout constraint, because the immanent erof charity makes it connatural to him, a because the law is become his inward 1 ST. THOMAS, Sum. theol., II-II. q. 169, a. 2, ad 4. 107 leaning : the spiritual man is not under the law To him one can say, ama et fac quod vis if you love, you may do what you will, you wiL never wound love. A work of art which wounds God, wounds the man himself, and having nothing more for his delight, at once loses for him the whole ratio of beauty. According to Aristotle, 14 there is a doublt good in multitude, in an army for instance: one good is in the multitude itself, as the orde of the army; the other apart from the multi tude, as the good of the commander. This latter good is better; becauseuntothisthe other is ordained the order of the army exi - ing so as to realise the good of the chief, that is the captain s will to victory. H1 Hence we deduce that the contemplative, being direct! ordered to the "common good apart" of the whole universe, that is to God, serves better than anyone else the common welfare of the human multitude ; for the "common intrins 140. Met.,\. XII, c. x, 1075 tate his quae sunt ad fin ; a 1 5. St. Thomas, lect. 1 2. Cf. ordo autem exercitus est p- - Sum. tkeol., I-II, q. ill, a. 5, ter bonum ducis adimp - ad I. dum, scilicet ducis volunt; \ in victorias consecutione 141. "Magis est bonum exerci- ST.THOMAS, Commentary o e tus in duce, quam in ordine: passage cited by Aristotle, quia finis potior est in boni- Cathala, 2630. 108 g )d" of this multitude., the common social \\ Ifare, depends on the "common good apart," \\ ich is superior to it. It will be the same, a; ligically and in due proportion, with all tl se metaphysicians or artists, whose activity tc ches the transcendental order, Truth or B luty, and who have some share in wisdom, n natural wisdom only. Leave the artist to h art, he serves the city better than the en- gi eer and the merchant. fhisdoesnotmean thatheshould ignore tr city, neither as man, which is more than 01 ious, nor even as artist. The question for hi i is not to know if he must open his work to al hehuman currents which flow towards his htrt, and pursue in making the work such or su i particular human aim : the sole master for hi i here is the individual case, and all party sp it would be unseemly as detrimental to the sp itaneity of art. For the artist the whole be ness is not to be a weakling ; to wield an art su ciently robust and right to master its mate- rit n every case, without losing any of its pitch or 5 purity, and to aim, in the very doing of the w< <;, at the work s sole well-being, without be g troubled or put off by the human ends in 109 As a matter of fact, art became isolated in the nineteenth century, only because of the dis couraging meanness of its environment ; its normal condition is altogether different. Aes chylus, Dante, Cervantes did not create in airtight compartments. Besides, there cannot really be a purely gratuitous work of art the universe excepted. Not only is our deed of artistic creation ordered to an ultimate human end, whether True God or idol, but it is im possible, on account of the human environ ment which touches that deed on every side, that it have no concern for certain proximate human ends; the workman works for wages, and the most aloof of artists is some little whit concerned to play upon souls and to serve an idea, be it but an aesthetic idea. What is needed is the perfect practical dis crimination between the aim of the workman and the aim of the work (finis operantis and finis operis the Schoolmen called them) : thus the workman works for a wage, but-the work is planned and launched into existence with sole reference to its own particular good, not a all with reference to wages; thus the artist works for every human intention he pleases, but the work in itself is made, constructed, an< no I it together for its own beauty and for nothing <;e. It is a monstrous error to suppose that the (ndour or purity of art-work depends upon a 1 eak with the animating and motive princi- jesof the human being, upon drawing the line 1 :tween art and desire or lov e. No, it depends vonthe force of the engendering principle of 1 e work, or upon the strength of art-virtue. This tree said : I will be purely tree and bear } :re fruit. Therefore I will not grow in ground tat is not tree, nor in Provencal or Vendeean "\ :ather, but only in tree-weather. Put me Mere the air cannot reach me. Many questions would answer themselves, i vve distinguished between Art itself and its r iterial or subjective conditions. Art is an a purtenance of man, how should it not depend i on thedispositionsof the subject wherein it i icres? They do not constitute, but they con- c:ionateArt. Thus, for instance, Art as such is superior t time and place,it transcends, like the intel- 1 ence, every limitation of nationality, and f is its measure in the infinite amplitude of 1 luty alone. Like Science, Philosophy, Civi- 1 ition,by its very nature and by its very object in it is universal. But Art has not its home in an angelic intel ligence, it is subjectivised in a soul which is the substantial form of a living body; and this substan tial form, by its natural needof learning and of perfecting itself by degrees and with difficulty, turns the animal it inhabits into an animal by nature political. In this way Artis fundamentally dependent on all that city and race, spiritual tradition and history bring to the body and the intelligence of mankind. By reason of its subject and of its roots it is of a particular age and of a particular country. I That is why in the history of free peoples the eras of cosmopolitanism are times of intel lectual bastardy. The most universal and mosi humane works are those which bear most openly thehall-marks of their country. 142 Th age of Pascal and Bossuet was an age of vigor ous nationalism. When France, at the time of 142. Andre Gide writes ad- Voltaire or Montaigne, th mirably: "By nationalising Descartes or Pascal? wl itself a literature takes its more Russian than Dostoie place and finds its significance sky? and what more univers in the concert of humanity. . . . ly human than these writers What more Spanish than Cer- (Reflexions sur Fdllemag vantes? more English than Nouv. Revue franf., 1st Ju Shakespeare? more Italian than 1 9 1 9.) Dante? more French than 112 ^luny s amazing victories of peace, and in St. jouis s reign, spread over Christendom an in- sllectual radiance most authentically French, ien it was that the world knew the purest and eest International of the mind, and themost niversal culture. 14 Thus it would appear that a certain kind of ationalism political and territorial n ationa- ;m is the natural safeguard of plain living id high thinking, andsoof the very univer- :lityof intelligence and art; whereas another : rt of nationalism, metaphysical and religious utionalism, that which culminated in the J chteanand Hegelian deification of the 13. Charles Maurras (An- tiea, xn) wrote, with refer- c e to the Athenians: "The j losophic spirit, the readi- r s to conceive the universal i med all their arts, and c ;fly sculpture, poetry, ar- c ;ecture, and eloquence. As s n as they yielded to this t iency, they entered into ppetual communion with n ikind. In the great classic e :h, the dominant charac- t tic of all Greek art is e :r intellectuality or hu- n ity and these alone. By ti means the marvels that came to perfection on the Acropolis became common property, common models, and common nutriment; the classic or Attic style is more univer sal in proportion as it is more severely Athenian, and Atheni an too of a period and a taste most completely purged of every foreign influence. At the glorious moment, when she was herself and herself alone, Attica was the human race." The French genius, in modern times, furnishes an alogous characteristics. nation does,by its effort to enslave the undei standing (in its very aim and essence and not merely in itsmaterialconditions) tothephysic logy of a race or the in terests of a state, j eopardi; the existence of art and of every virtue of the mind. All our values depend upon the nature of our God. Now Godis a Spirit. To progress which means, for every nature, to tend to its Begin ning 144 is therefore to pass from the sensuou to the rational, and from the rational to the spiritual, and from the less spiritual to the mo spiritual ; to civilise is to spiritualise. In this process material progress may take part, in the measure in which it allows man leisure of soul. But if it is used only to serve th will to power and to pamper a cupidity whic opens an unfathomable maw concupiscentla est injinita^ concupiscence is infinite I4t> it drags back the world ever faster into chaos; that is its manner of tending to its beginning. At the very roots of the human city is the need of art : "No one," says St. Thomas, afte: Aristotle, " can live without delight. That \\ 144. ST. THOMAS, in 11 Sent*, 145. Sum. the!., I-II, q. > d. l8,q. 2, 2. a. 4. why he who is deprived of spiritual delights goes over to carnal delights." 146 Art teaches men the delights of the spirit, and because it is itself sensuous and fitted to their nature, it can the better guide them to th ingsnobler than itself. Thusit plays in natural life theisame part, if one may say so, as the graces of sense" in the spiritual life ; and from /ery far off, all unconsciously, it prepares the luman race for contemplation (thecontemplar- ionof the Saints), of which thespiritual lelightfulness surpasses all delight, 147 and ;eems to be the end of man s activities. For vherefore servile work and commerce, if not hat the body being provided with the neces- aries of life be made meet for contemplation ? Vherefore the moral virtues and prudence, if otto bring about the quieting of the passions nd the inward peace, which contemplation eeds? Wherefore the whole governance of i vil life, if not to secure the outward peace ecessary to contemplation ? So that rightly ) isidered all the functions of human life seem to 1.6. Sum. theol., II-II, q. 35, 147. Sum. tkeol., I-II, q. 3, a. 4,^2. Cf.EtA.Nif., VIII, 4. :t 6;X,6. be at the service of those who contemplate the Truth. I48 If one were seeking, not indeed to make an impossible classification of artists and of mast pieces, but to comprehend the normal hierar chy of various types of art,it could only be doi from this human point of view of their specia civilising value, or of their degree of spiritu ality. Thus one would descend from the beau of the revealed Scriptures and of the Liturgy to that of the writings of the mystics, then to art properly so-called: spiritual fullness of medieval art, rational balance of Hellenic arn classic art, passional balance of Shakespearea art. . . Itsimaginativeandverbal wealthsustai in Romanticism the concept of art, despite il inward lack of balance and its intellectual 148. "A-l hanc etiam [sc. ad bus passionum, ad quam ] contemplationem] omnes aliae venitur per virtutes mor ; operationes humanae ordinari et per prudentiam, etquie > videntur, sicut ad finem. Ad exterioribus passionibus, I perfectionem enim contem- quamordinatur totumregii i plationis requi ritur incolumi- vitas civilis, ut sic, si r : tas corporis, ad quam ordinan- considerentur, omnia hurr i tur artificialia omnia quae sunt officia servire videantur i necessaria ad vitam. Requiri- templantibus veritatem.". tur etiam quies a perturbation!- contra (jent., lib. Ill, cap. 3 116 penury. With naturalism and realism the con cept disappears completely. 14! In the magnificence of Julius II and Leo X tiiere was much more than a noble love of glory and beauty; whatever vanity went with it, it was penetrated by a pure ray of the Spirit who has never failed the Church. This great Contemplative, instructed by the gift of Knowledge, has deep discernment of all :hat the human heart needs, she knows the jniquevalueof Art. Thisis why shehasso .veil protected it in the world. Much more, she las summoned it unto the opus T)ei, and she equires it to compound perfumes of great ^rice, to be shed by her upon the head and feet )f her Master. Ut quid perditio is fa wherefore his waste? say the philanthropists. Shegoes m embalming the body of her Beloved Whose leath she shows forth each day, donee vem af, mtilHecome. 4.9. We are speaking here of have been classified or have ic realism which produces classified themselves as "real- rv tle or abject copies of nature, ists" only in virtue of some represented for instance by literary theory. They are not leissonnier in one sphere realists in the sense adumbra- id by Zola in another. Artists ted here, and they partake on ch as Courbet, Manet, Degas the contrary of classic art. 117 Do you think that God (Who "is called the Zealot," says Denys the Areopagite, "because He has love and zeal for all that is" 150 ) deals scornfully with artists and the fragile beauty which issues from their hands? Remember what He says of the men whom He Himself set apart for sacred art: "Behold the Lord hat called by name Beseleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur,of the tribe of Judah ; and hath filled him with the spirit of God, with wisdor and understanding and knowledge and all learning ; to devise and to work in gold, and silver and brass, and in engraving stones, andi carpenter s work ; whatsoever can be devised artificially, He hath given in his heart; Ooli; also the son of Achisamech, of the tribe of Da Both of them hath He instructed with wisdor to do carpenter s work and tapestry, and em broidery in blue and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, and fine linen, and to weave all things and to in vent all new things." 151 We have already pointed out the general opposition between Art and Prudence. In t case of the fine arts, this opposition is further intensified by the very transcendence of theii object. 150 . De Div. dfymin., cap. iv. 151. Exodus, xxxv, 30-35. uB On the plane of his art, the artist is subject to akindof asceticism, which may at times demand heroic sacrifice. He must be funda mentally right-minded concerning the aim of \rt, perpetually on guard not only against the :ommon-place allurement of facility and ;uccess, but against a crowd of subtler tempt- itions and against the least slackening of his nward effort, since the habitus lessen by the nere cessation of the act, 152 and much more by :very loose activity which does not propor- ionately correspond with their intensity. 103 He lust pass through seasons of darkness; he must urify himself continually ; hemustof hisown ee will abandon fertile tracts for the arid and :i e perilous. In a certain order, and from a spec- 1 1 point of view, in the order of making, and from ie point of view of the beauty of the work, he must e humble and magnanimous, prudent, up- ght, strong, temperate, simple, pure, ingen- >z. Sum. theol., I-II, q. 43, redditur homo minus aptus ad 3. "Cum igitur homo cessat bene judicandum; et quando- i usu intellectualis habitus, que totaliter disponituradcon- ;urgunt imaginationes ex- trariura; et sic per cessationem ;meae, et quandoque ad con- ab actu diminuitur vel etiam .rium ducentes; ita quod corrumpitur intellectualis ha- i per frequeri tern usum intel- bitus." tuaHs habitus quodammodo 53. lbld. y q. 42, a. 3. :cidantur,vel comprimantur, uous. All these virtues, which the Saints hav< simpliciter, purely and simply and on the plane of the Sovereign Good, the Artist must have secundum quid^ in a certain relation, on a plane apart, praeter-human if not inhuman. Thusl: may well and freely take the moralising tone, when he talks or writes on art, knowingclear that hehasa virtuetokeep. "Weharbouran angel, whom we grieve continually. Weougl to be the guardians of this angel. Have thy virtue in safe-keeping But if this analogy creates in him a special nobleness and accounts for the admiration which he enjoy samong men, there is still the risk that it lead him wretchedly astray, and make him treasure and set his heart upon a graven image, ubi aerugo et tinea demolitur^ where rust and moth consume. Ontheotherhand the prudentman assucl" judging every thing from the angle of moralit and with regard to human welfare, ignores absolutely all that belongs to Art. Doubtless h can j udge and he ough t well toj udge the work of art in so far as it involves morality, 1 he has no right toj udge i t as a work of art. 154. JEANCOCTEAU, Le Ccqet 155. See Appendix M. 1 2O 155 Art-work is the subject of a singular conflict f virtues. Prudence, which considers it in its slation with morality, is better entitled to the ameof virtue than is Art ; lij6 for like every loral virtue it makes the man who acts a good i an pure and simple. But Art, in so far as it draws nigher to the jeculative virtues, and thus captures more of itellectual splendour, is a habitus in itself no- ler ; simpliciter loquendo, ilia virtus nobilior est, iaehabetnobiliusobjectum\ " simply speaking, lat virtue is the nobler, which has the nobler bject." Prudence is superior to Art with :gard to man. Looked at purely and simply, rt at least that which aiming at Beauty has speculative character is metaphysically )ove Prudence. 157 When he disapproves of a work of art, the /udent man, securely basedon his moral vir- e, is firmly persuaded that he is defending ;;ainst the artist a sacred good, the good of ). Cf. Sum. theol., I-II, q. simpliciter, sed quoad hoc; < a. 3; II-II, q. 4.7, a. 4. quinimo virtutes intellectuales ". Cf. Sum. theol., I-II, q. speculativae, ex hoc ipso quod a. 3, act I : "Quod autem non ordinantur ad aliud, sicut ^ utes morales sunt magis utile ordinatur ad finem, sunt i :ssariaeadvitam humanam, digniores. . . ." r i ostendit eas esse nobiliores 121 mankind ; and he looks upon the artist as a child of alunatic. Perched upon his intellect ual habitus^ the artist is sure that he is defendin a good no less sacred, that of Beauty, and he would seem to overwhelm the prudent man with the sentence of Aristotle : Vita quaeest secundum speculationem est melior quam quae sec- undumhominem^ " the life in accord with specu ation is better than the life in accord with man." 158 The prudent man and the artist therefore find it hard to understand each other. On the other hand the contemplative and the artist, both perfected by an intellectual habitus which weds them to the transcendental orde are in a position to sympathise. They have tc the like enemies. The contemplative, havin for object the causa altissima from which everything else depends, knows the place am the value of art, and understands the artist. The artist as such cannot j udge the contem plative, but he can guess at his greatness. If truly love Beauty, and if some moral vice chain not his heart to dullness, goingoverto the side of the contemplative he will recog nise Love and Beauty. 158. Eth. Nic., X, 8; Cf. Sum. tkeol., II-II, q. 47, a. I 5. 122 Besides, by sheerloyalty to his art the artist :nds unconsciously to pass beyond it ; as a ant, without knowing why, guides its stem wards the sun, so he is orientated, however wly his haunt,towards the Subsistent Beauty hose sweetness the Saints taste in a light accessible to art or reason. "Neither paint- g nor sculpture, "said Michael An gelo in his d age, " shall have any more charm for the : ul that turns towards this Love Divine, Who < tens His arms on the cross to welcome us." Look at St. Catherine of Siena, that apis i ^umentosa (busy bee) , who was the counsel- ]: of a Pope and of Princes of the Church, i rrounded by artists and poets whom she is I inging with her to Paradise. Perfectly pru- c nt, but enthroned far above Prudence, j iging all things by Wisdom, for Wisdom i architectonic to all the intellectual virtues , a d Prudence is her servant, as the door- J^eper to the King, 1: the Saints are free as t : Spirit. The wise man, like God, is inter- e ed in the strivings of every form of life. Of fineperception,scorningnone, Our common day he will not shun; Hisheart, though born contemplative, J . Sum. tfieol., I-II, q. 66, a. 5. 123 To man s work none the less he ll give. . . Thus Wisdom, beholding from God s poii of view, which equally commands the sphere of Doing and of Making, alone can perfectly attune Art and Prudence. Adam sinned because he fell away from contemplation; thenceforward division came upon mankind. To turn away from Wisdom and from con templation, and to aim lower than God, is for a Christian civilisation the primary cause of every disorder. 160 It is especially the cause of this godlessdivorce of Art from Prudence, which we discern at the epochs when Christ ians no longer have the strength to carry the integration of their wealth. Nodoubtthatu why we saw Prudence sacrificed to Art at the time of the Italian Renaissance, in a civilisa tion which nolongeraspired beyondhuman istic Virtu ,&r\& why we saw Art sacrificed to Prudence in the nineteenth century, in thos< right-minded circles which aspired no higher than Respectability. 160. On this subject see the Cuestiones misticas, Salama remarks of the wise theologian 1916. Arintero 7 O.P., in his treatise 124 >PENDIX A. ARTIST AND CRAFTSMAN. [See Page 30, Note 42.] fT is curious to mark that in the time of Leonardoda Vinci neither the reason ofthis *" classification, nor the rank thus assigned to ] inting wasanylonger understood. Leonardo isntionsitonly withlively indignation. "It is nth justice that painting complains of not be- i 5 reckoned in the number of the liberal arts, i "she is a true child of nature, she works though te eye, the noblest of our senses." (Texfes crisis, Paris, 1907. 355.) He often returns i on this question, of which he treats the tridents with remarkable sophistic earnestness, < d he sharply attacks the poets, asserting that tsirartismuch inferior to that of painters, t cause poetry devises wordsfor the ear, where- apainting devises for the eye, and "by true snilitudes." "Take a poet describing the I mty of a lady to her lover, take a painter r >resenting the same lady, you will see which ^iy nature will draw the amorous judge." ( ^., 368). Sculpture on the contrary "is not 125 a science,but a mechanical art which engender sweat and bodily fatigue in its operator "The proof that this is true," he adds (in a passage which well shows to what silliness great genius may give way at times), "is that the sculptor, in order to do his work, uses the strength of his arm and strikes and fashions th marble or other hard stone whence shall come the figure, which is as if enclosed there, a quite mechanical labour which throws him continually into asweat, covers him with dusl and rubbish and makes his face pasty and all floury with marble dust, like a baker s boy. So spattered with little splinters, he looks as if covered with snowflakes and hisfilthydwellir is full of rubbish and stone dust. It is quite otherwise with a painter, according to what they tell of celebrated artists. At his ease he si before his work, he is well dressed and he hole a very light brush dipped in delicate colour. He is as well attired as he pleases, his dwelling filled with charming panels, is well-seen ; oft he gets music played to him or various beautil works read to him, to which, without any no of hammer or other uproar, he listens with great pleasure." (Ibid. , 37 9.) At this period the "artist" distinguished 126 limself from the craftsman, and so began to ookdown upon him. But whereas the painter vasalreadyan"artist,"thesculptorhadremain- c 3 a craftsman. However, he also was to attain apidly to the dignity of "artist." Colbert, /hen he finally sets up the Royal Academy of ainting and Sculpture, will register and onsecrate in the official manner the results of lis evolution. The word artist, we may note in passing, has most eventful history. An artist, or artien, was .first a master of arts (the arts comprising icliberal arts and philosophy) : "Then when Pantagrueland Panurgecame ito the hall, all these schoolboys, artiens, and ichelors began to clap their hands, as their urvyhabitis."(Rabelais,P^^/^g-r^/II,c. 18.) Verily I do deny That canonist or legist Be wiser than the artist. (farce de Guillerme. Anc. Theatre francois, :,p.2 39 .) Those whom we call artists today were then i tisans. Les artizans bien subtils Animent de leurs outilz L airain, le marbre, le cuyvre. (J. Du Bellay, Les deux Marguerites^) 127 Peintre, poete ou aultre artizan. (Montaigne, III, 25.) Later the word artist itself becomes synoi ymous with artisan; "Artisan or artist, artife , opifex,"saysNicotin his Dictionary. "Thii s which all good workmen and artists set befo themselves in this art (of distillation)." (Par XX VI,4.) The name of artist is specially gn ;i to one who works at the great art (i.e. ,alchen ) oreven at magic; in theeditionof 1694, the Dictionary of the Academy mentions that tl; word "is used particularly of those who wor in magic. "It is only in the 1 762 edition of tl" Dictionary of the Academy that the word artist figures in the sense which it has in our time, as opposed to the word artisan; thebre between the fine arts and the trades is then consummated even in the language. This rupture was the outcome of change supervening on the structure of society and especially of the rise of the middle class. 128 / PENDIX B. * THE t:F]RCEPTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND KANT S AESTHETIC k li [See Page 37, Note 5 5.] r ^ A|~~^HIS question of the perception of the beautiful by the intelligence, using 10? , J . & , 6 i the senses as instruments, deserves an CJiaustive analysis, such as,it seems to us, has / to seldom attracted the subtilty of the philo- , sohers. Kantmadeplay with it in his Critique ".of f udgment. Unfortunately the straightfor- ""w. d, interesting, and at times profound ob- , se ations to be found in this Critique (much ^m -e frequently than in the other two) are ;t ! : Wi ped and vitiated by his craze for system and :; syj metry, and above all by fundamental errors in by the subjectivism of his theory of know- ec e. ne of the definitions of the beautiful which K.C ; gives demands attentive examination. 1 2 Beautiful," he says, "is what pleases uni- 129 versally without concept" * Taken as-it stands this definition seems inadmissible, in fact th< beautiful pleases "universally", only inasmu i as it addresses the intelligence before all; and how could our intelligence enjoy without exerting itself, or exert itself without produ< ing some concept, no matter how confused a i indeterminate? t The Kantian definition rui the risk of introducing an enormous error, ai making us forget the essential relation with 1 1 intelligence which beauty bespeaks. This is how the theory blossomed out with Schoper hauer and his disciples into an anti-intellect- *The "concept" is for him elsewhere a form imposet 7 the judgment on the given "sensible," and constitutes s given "sensible" either as an object of cognition, or as i object of appetition by the will. tSee on this point the very remarkable pages of Baude c (L* Art romantique, pp. 213 ff.), where, speaking of the rev 5 called up in him by the overture of Lohengrin, which coinc i in a striking fashion with those which the same piece had - gested to Liszt, as well as the points of the programn 5 as redacted by Wagner, unknown to the poet, he shows t "true music suggests analogous ideas to quite different bra: The concept of which we speak may otherwise be n * more general still and much more indistinct; at times its s to be confined to a scarcely perceptible idea in which e mind, in a confused and summary way, merely suggests to the particular work intended or in contemplation, and th< partment of art to which it belongs. 130 ilist deification of music. Still it recalls in its ay the much more correct expression of St. homzs^id quodvisum placet,\.\\zt which pleases / i;ig seen, that is, being the object of intuition. . ven in virtue of this last definition the percep- t:>nof the beautiful is not, as the school of bibnitz- Wolff would have it, a confused c nception of the perfection of the thing, or of i conformity with an ideal type. (Cf. Kant s ( itique of Judgment, Analytic of the Beautiful, If the spontaneous production of any con- c pt, however confused, vague, obscure it be, East necessarily, it seems, accompany theper- c 3tion of the beautiful, it is not its formal con- si tuent: the very splendour or light of the form si ning in the beauteous object is not presented tchemindby a concept or by an idea, but n her by the object of sense intuitively seized, ir vhich passes, as through an instrumental case, this light of a form. So one might say at sast this seems to us the only possible way of ir ^rpreting St. Thomas s saying, thatin the p< ception of the beautiful the intelligence is, b^ leans of tJie sensuous intuition itself, con- fr ited with an intelligibility which shines fc h (flowing in the last analysis, like all intel- ligibili ty, from the primary intelligibility of the divine Ideas), but which,just in so far as i gives out the joy of the beautiful, is not detac - able nor separable from its sensuous matrix,a 1 consequently does not produce intellectual knowledge actually expressible in a concept Contemplating the object in the intuition of sense, the understanding enjoysapresence t ; radiating presence of an intelligible which does not itself reveal itself just as it is. Shoul< t turn away from sense in order to abstract and reason, it turns away from itsjoy, and loses co tact with that radiance. Thus one apprehend how it does not occur to the understanding- except secondarily and by reflection to abstract from the particular sensible, on whi its contemplation is centred, the intellig ible reasons for itsj oy ; one sees also how the beautiful may be a wonderful tonic to the und standing, without at all developing its powe: abstraction or of ratiocination; and how the perception of the beautiful is accompanied h that curious feeling of intellectual fullness b which it seems to us to be big with a superioi knowledgeof the object in contemplation, a knowledge which yet leaves us powerless to express it and to seize it in our ideas and mak 132 matter of scientific study. Thus Music makes 5 enjoy Being, as indeed do the other arts, for iat matter; but it does not make Being known us, and it is absurd to make it a substitute for i etaphysic. Thusthejoy of artistic contem- 1 ation is kj&fafove all things intellectual ?a\& ^e must even affirm with Aristotle (Poetica, ix, ; 1 45 1 ,b 6) that "poetry is a thing more philo- s phical and more serious than history,because j Ctry isconcerned rather with theuniversal, 2 d history only with the particular." Andyet : i artistic contemplation the apprehension of t suniversalor the intelligibletakes place with ct discourse of reason oreffort at abstraction.* Moreover,if the very act ofperception of the bautiful happens without this discourse or ! : ebrt at abstraction, the conceptual discursive n ly still have an incalculable share in ihepre- p -ation of that act. In fact, like the very virtue >: o art, taste (or the aptitude for discerning b mty and judging it) , while presupposing an r: ii ate gift, is developed by education and K v/ The capital error of the neo-Hegelian aesthetic of Benedetto ft C :e, who also is a victim of modern subjectivism ("the beau- tii does not belong to things". . . Esthetique , Paris, 1904^. 93), lit n not seeing that artistic contemplation, for all its intuitive- " ne is none the less Intellectual above all. Aesthetic should be is at ice intuitivist and intellectualist. teaching, especially by the study and rationa explanation of works of art. Besides, other things being equal, the more the understand ing is informed of the rules, the processes, th difficulties of art, and especially of the end pursued and the intentions of the artist, the better prepared it is to receive into itself by means of the intuition of sense the intelligib resplendence emanating from the work, and thus to taste, that is spontaneously to perceiv its beauty. Thus it is, that friends of the artis who know his meaning as the angels knov the ideas of theCreator,enjoy his works infinitely better than the public; thus itisth the beauty of certain works is a hidden beam accessible only to a few, It is said that the eye and the ear grow ace tomed to novel relationships. Rather is it th intelligence that accepts these relationships s soon as it has understood to what end, and fo what sort of beauty they are ordered, thus p paring itself for the better enjoyment of the work which embodies them, Again we may remark that Kant is right i looking upon emotion ("the excitation oft vitalforces") asaposteriorandconsecutive t in theperception of the beautiful (Qp.cit^ 134 ) . But the first and the essential fact for him j the "aesthetic j udgment," (which has in is system only a quite subjective value) ; for us : is the intuitive joy of the intelligence (and ^condarily of the senses) ; or to speak less suc- inctly and more exactly, it is the joy of the ppetite, * ("to the ratio of the beautiful be- )nsthatin the sieht or cognition whereof o o o ic appetite is at rest"), it is the satisfying of our ower of desire reposing in the proper good of ic cognoscitive power which is perfectly and armoniously set going by the intuition of the Dutiful. (CLSumma theol. I-II,q. I i,a. \,ad "The perfection and the end of every other : culty is contained in theobject of the appeti te faculty, as is the proper in the common.") . outlessthisjoy is a "sentiment" (gaudium in i e "intellective appetite" or will, i.e. joy j -operly so called, in which "we are sharers nth the angels. "/<&/., q. 31, a. 4,^3.) How- ( er, that is a question of a quite special senti- i ent which depends purely on knowing^ and of t e happy fullness which asensitive intuition } oduces in the understanding. Emotion in t ^ ordinary sense of the word, the actuation ( sensibility, the producing an affective state Joy is essentially a joy of the appetitive faculty. 135 of soul, the development of passions and feel ings other than this intellectual joy is only an effect absolutely normal of thissamejoy, emotion thus is posterior, if not in time atleas in the nature of things, to the perception of the beautiful and remains extrinsic to what formally constitutes that perception. It is curious to note that the subjectivist "venom" (asMattiussicallsit) introduced by Kant into modern thought has almost inevit ably driven the philosophers, despite Kant him self, to look in emotion for the essential of aesthetic perception. This is how it is that Kantian subjectivism has borne its latest fruit in the theory of the TLinfuhlung of Lipps and Volkelt, which reduces the perception of the beautiful to a projection or infusion of our emotions and sentiments into the object. (Cf. M. de Wulf, L oeuvre a 1 art et la beaute^ Annal of the Institute of Philosophy at Lou vain: vo iv, 1 920, pp. 421 ff. ) 136 APPENDIX C. ON ACADEMIC TRAINING [See Page 62, Note 83.] IT is known that the French royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was established in 1663. We may mention here the recent work of vl. A. Vaillant on the Theory of Architecture Paris, 1919). On this subject of academicism, s also on the generic notion of Art, the thesis f the author, who is inspired by a somewhat arrow but very right-minded positivism, falls i very happily with the views of the School- len. "It was in the reign of Louis XIV," rites M. Vaillant, "that the teaching of the le arts began to take on the scholastic char ter which we know so well today. . . One ustrecognize that (at that date) the academic fluence was very strong, though as yet by no : eans harmful. The reason for this was that e empirical methods of the master crafts- J sn and their ancient customs maintained 1 "ir vigour up to the suppression of the cor- ] rations, According as these methods and 137 customs began to die out, the results of the training fell away. For the doctrine which is the soul of Art was naturally contained in the traditions in the manner in which the artist received and assimilated and responded to his commission " "So long as apprenticeship was the means of training artists and craftsmen, the need of theoretic instruction was not felt. With the architects, in particular, there was method . It arose naturally from the master s example and from familiar collaboration in his pro fessional life ; as the Lruredes Metiers of Etienm Boileau shows so well. When mere instructioi was substituted for the living and varied action of the master, a serious mistake was made." "The academic rupture with the daubers of paint and the marble-masons marble-polishers brought no gain to either art or artist ; while it took away from the workman his wholesome contact with superiority and excellence. The academicians gained nought of independence and they lost not only the technique but the intelligent organisation of art-labour/ One of the consequences of this divorce wa the disappearence of the technique of the colour-grinder. In course of time they lost the 138 feeling for those chemical reactions, to which colours and pigments are liable by their blend ing, as well as for the n-ature of their mediums and the mode of laying-on. "Van Eyck s pict ures, five centuries old, have still the freshness of their prime. Can modern pictures," asks M. Vaillant, "hope to keep their youth so long?" "How modern painting grows leaden !" answers M.Jacques Blanche, speaking of Manet. "Barely a few years, and the most bril liant picture is calcined, destroyed. We are admiring ruins, ruins of yesterday. You don t k.now what le Linge was when it first appeared ! [ should have thought I had myself to blame Dr to bewail the state of my eyesight, if for five /ears I had not been looking on at the destruct- on of a masterpiece, the Trajan of Delacroix it the Rouen museum. I have seen it tarnish .nd crack, and now it is nothing more than a >rownmess. . . ." (Jacques-Emile Blanche, ^ropos depeintre, de David a Degas ^ Pari 51919). Augustin Cochin writesin turn: "The cademic training created" (or rather created ito a sole and universal law) "by the ency clo- aedists from Diderot to Condorcet, has killed opular art dead in one generation a pheno- lenon possibly unique in history. School- J39 mastering instead of workshop-training, makinglearn instead of makingdo, explaining instead of pointing out and correcting, there is the whole reform devised by the philo sophers and imposed by the Revolution. They who stood aloof have survived, but as rocks battered by the seas of banality and ignorance, not as giant trees in the forest." (Les Societes de Pensee,inthe Correspondent of Feb. roth, 1920.) 140 APPENDIX D THE CONCEPTION OF THE WORK AND THE 3VLEANS OF ART [See Page 70, Note 93.] TH E conception of the work is some thing quite different from the simple choice of subject (the subject is only he material si this conception and there are for he artist or the poet even certain advantages roethe expounds this very well in receiving bis material from outside) ; it also something uite different from an abstract idea, an intel- :ctual theme or athesis which the artist may ave in view. Goethe was asked what idea he ad wanted to set forth in the Tasso. "What ea?" said he, "do I know? IhadTasso slife, I id my own . . . don t be always thinking iat all would be lost, if one could not discover the back of a work some idea or some abstract ought. You havej ust asked me what idea I .ve tried to embody in my Faust. As if I knew could tell, myself ! From heaven, across the )rld, down into hell there is an explanation i /oumusthaveone; but that is not the idea, it 141 is the march of the action. . ." (Goethe s Conversa tions with Eckermann, 6th May, 1 827.) Lastly, the conception of the work is neither its worked-out proj ection nor its plan of con struction (which is already a realisation in the mind). It is a simple view (simple, although virtually very rich in multiplicity) of the work to be made grasped in its individual soul, a view which is like a spiritual germ or a seminal ratio of the work (taking after what M. Bergson calls intuition and dynamic schema) , a view interest ing not only the intelligence but also the imagi nation and the feeling of the artist, and resp onding to a certain unique shade of emotion and sympathy ; and because of that it is some thing impossible to express in concepts. What painters call their vision of things plays here an essential part. This conception of the work,which depends upon the whole spiritual and sensitive essence of theartist and above all upon the rectification of his appetite in regard to Beauty, and which bears upon the end of the operation, one might say that it is, in relation to Art, as the intention of the ends of the moral virtues is in relation to Prudence. The conception of the work belongs to a different order from the means, the outlets of 142 ealisation, which are the proper domain of the irtue of Art, j ust as the means to attaining the :nds of the moral virtues are the proper domain > the virtueof Prudence. And it is in each >articular case the fixed point toward which he artist orders the means which art puts into lispossession. M.Blanche tells us that "the meansare very thingin painting." (De Davida Degas, >. 151.) Let us be clear. The means are the roper domain of the artistic habitus; in this jnse we can accept his formula. But means xist only in relation to an end, and the means /hich "are every thing" would themselves be ot/iing, without the conception or vision they md to realise and on which hangs the whole peration of the artist. Evidently the higher this conception is, the lore chance is there of the means being defect- r e. Of such deficiency of means in proportion the loftiness of the conception is there not an ninent example in Cezanne ? If he is so great, he has upon contemporary art so overmaster- g an influence, it is because he has brought in conception or a vision of a higher quality s little sensation, as he called it himself to hich his meansremained disproportionate. H3 Thence his complaints of not being able to realise "Try to see a little, Monsieur Voll- ard, the modelling escapes me !" and his touching regret for "not being Bouguereau; he at any raterea/ised, and "developed his personality." 144 to PPENDIX E. ol IEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE AND THE CLUMSINESS OF THE PRIMITIVES [See Page 78, Note 108.] A RCHITECTURE too affords some f-\ remarkable examples of this primacy ^ accorded by medieval art to the intel- ctual and spi ritual structure of the work at le expense of material correctness, in regard i which the tool-chest and the theoretic lowledge of our ancient builders were very (adequate. In medieval architecture " one irdly anywhere meets geometrical correct- iss : no rectilinear alignment, never a crossing right angles nor a symmetrical balance, regularities andpentimenfiat every turn. Be- ies, centering of the vaults had to be spec- lly prepared for each bay, even in the best instructed buildings of medieval art. The irves, notably those of the arches of the vaul- ig, are no more correct than the alignmen ts the divisions of the bays. Neither is their mmetry of balance any truer. The keystones 145 K are notfound in the middle of the arches ore the vault, sometimes they are decidedly out of place The right side of a building is never, so to speak, symmetrical with the left side... Still almost every thing in this art is well studied, though far from being exacting in correctness. Perhaps it is owing to this constructional innocence that the sincerity and the naturalness of this architecture abide so full of charm..." (A. Vaillant, Theoriede r Architecture -, p. 1 1 9 and p. 364.) The same author notes that at the period ii question building plans could not be done on paper, as they are today, and t hat the only av lable drawing paper was rare and costly velli which was saved up and washed to be used again, and that it was accordingly "chiefly b means of the reduced model, that the work projected was represented in its essential ele ments. About details no one troubled before the moment at which they had to takeshape. when one had exact knowledge of the scale, and used known rules and elements. It waso, the job i the place of labour, that the solution of all theproblemsof construction wassoug and found and that the various difficulties we surmounted. The same still holds good for 14-6 the workmen of our day; with this difference, that deprived of education and apprenticeship :heir experience is but a coarse routine." "When one thinks of the enormous quan- :ity of paper required for thestudy and prepar- itionof the building of our modern edifices, Df the calculations indispensable to the elabo- ation of our least plans, one is dumbfoundered it the height of intellectual power, at the ex- ent of memory, and the massiveness of talent )f the master-workmen and clerks-of-the- ,vorks of those times, who knew how to put up :hese vast and splendid buildings, inventing :very day and perfecting without end. The >ower of medieval art is extraordinary, not- vithstanding a science that was slight and Toping." The clumsiness of the primitive painters is ot due solely to the inadequacy of their ma- erial means. It is due also to what one might all in them a kind of intellectualist realism. lere we draw attention to the remarkable :udy of M.Maurice Denis on the Gaucherie the Primitives. "Theirgauc/ierie," he writes eryjustly, "consists in painting objects after ie common knowledge they have of them, istead of painting them, like the moderns, 147 after a preconceived idea of the picturesque or the aesthetic." "The Primitive . . . prefers reality to the ap pearance of reality. Rather than resign hims< to the malformations of perspective which d> not interest his virgin eye, he conforms the imag of things to the notion of them which he has. "(Ma rice Denis, Theories ; Paris.) 148 APPENDIX F. REPRODUCTION OR EXACT COPY OF THE REAL [See Page 89, Note 121.] [N point of fact it is awkward to settle in what precisely consists this imitation-copy , though its concept seems so clear to minds r hich work along the simplified lines of the opular imagination. Is it the imitation or copy of what the thing is i itself and of its intelligible type? But that a matter of concept, not of sensation, some- dng not seen nor handled, which art in con- quence cannot reproduce. Is it the imitation copy of the sensations produced in us by the ling ? But these sensations impinge upon msciousness only after refraction through an : ward atmosphere of memories and emotions, id are besides incessantly varying, in a flux herein all things lose their shape and contin- illy intermingle ; so that from the standpoint pure sensation one must say, with the Fu- rists, that " a running horse has not four legs it twenty, that our bodies penetrate the set- H9 tees whereon we sit, and the settees pen etrate our bodies; that the motor-bus keeps dashing into the houses it passes, while the houses on their part keep flinging themselves at the bus andmeltingintoit ..." The exact copy or reproduction of nature is thus shown to be a matter impossible of at tainment, a concept which vanishes as one tries to grasp it. In practice it resolves itself into the idea of such a representation of the object, as is afforded by the photograph or the cast; or rather, since these mechanical proces ses do themselves give results which are "false to our perception, it works out to the idea of such a representation, as can create illusion and deceive our senses (and this, moreover, is no longer a copy pure and simple, but a trumpery counterfeit) , in a word it works out to the idea ofthatnaturalisticjugglery which isunrelate to any art but that of theMusee Grevin. 1.50 PPENDIX G. HE CONFLICT BETWEEN NATURE AND THE IMAGINATION [See Page 90, Note 123.] V Jf AU RICE Denis for his part stated in V/ 1 perfectly correct terms the same truth, * -*- when he wrote : "Recollect that a pture, before being any sort of anecdote, is in c ;ence a plane surface covered over with co- lirs put together in a given order." (Art et ^itique, Aug. 23, 1 890.) Again, Cezanne said: "I wanted to copy I iture, I did not get so far. But I was pleased vth my self when I found out that the sun, for it tance, could not be reproduced \ but had to be ;> rtresented by something else. . . . by colour." (. aurice Denis, Theories.) "You must not paint from Nature" said in his tin, in asally which needs understanding, that sc ipulous observer of nature, M.Degas. (A ss mg related by J. E.Blanche, De David a L:as.) In fact," remarks Baudelaire, "all good di ughtsmen and true draw from the image in . their brain and not from Nature. If you addu : the admirable sketches of Raphael, Watteau and many others, we say they are notes, very detailed it is true, but still mere notes. When true artist has arrived at the actual execution f his work, the model would be to him more a hindrance than ahelp. It even happens that men like Daumier and M.Guys, long accus tomed to use their memory and to store it wil images, find that in the presence of the mode and the crowd of detail it involves,their prin pal faculty is put out and as it were paralysed "There then arises a conflict between the wish to see all, to forget nothing,and the facu r of remembrance which is wont to drink in eagerly the general colour and the silhouette the arabesque of the contour. An artist with perfect feeling for form, but accustomed to u his memory and his imagination first and for most, finds himself therefore assailed as it w ; by a riot of details all demanding justice wit the fury of a mob gone mad on absoluteequali . All manner of justice mustneedsbeoutrage | allharmony destroyed, slaughtered; manys triviality becomes an enormity; many apett point becomes domineering. The more the artist inclines impartially to detail, the more ic anarchy augments. Be he short-sighted or ng-sigh ted, any kind of hierarchy or subor- .nation disappears." (UArtromantique,) .", - r\ f. : -.4%-.: PPENDIX H. HE IMITATION OF NATURE AND CLASSIC ART [SeePagegi, Note 125.] ~J "^ HE considerations which we present in the text enable us to harmonise two sets of apparently contradictory ex- jessions, which one finds artists using. Gauguin and Maurice Denis, for instance, < ists who (like many others in the "young 153 school") are very scrupulous thinkers, will tell you that "what is most to be deplored ... is the idea that Art is thtcopy of something" (Theories p. 28) ; to think that Art consists in copying or exactly reproducing things is to pervert the meaning of Art (Ibid, p. 3 6) . "To copy"is taker here in the proper sense of the word, it means imitation materially understood and, as itwere aiming at causing illusion to the eye. Ingres, on the contrary, or Rodin, more pas sionate and 1 ess keen of understanding, will tel you that you must "copy quite earnestly, quite dully, you must copy servilely what is before your eyes. "(Amaury-Duval,Z/ <7/^//i?r^ Z^rd j > . "In all things obey nature and never pretend tc command her. My only ambition is to be ser vilely faithful to her." (PaulGsell, J?W/). . . Thewords"copy"and"servilely"are used her in a very incorrect sense; in reality it is not a question of servilely imitating the object but c what is quite different, of manifesting with th greatest faithfulness, cost what it will in "de parture from form," the form or ray of intelli gibility of which the glint is caught in thereal, M. Ingres, as M. Denis so judiciously makes clear (Theories, pp. 8 6-9 8), intended to copy th beauty which he discerned in nature by going to tl 154 t-eeks and Raphael; * "bethought," says ^naury-Duval, "that he was copying nature f us in copying her as he saw her;" and he was t j first to "make monsters" according to the s: r mgof Odilon Redon. Rodin for his part oly attacked (and how justly!) those who pre- tudto "embellish" or "idealise" nature by a thetic rules of thumb, and to portray her "at as she is, but as she ought to be." And he hi to admit that he accused, accentuated, ex- a Derated, so as to represent not only "the ex- t<ior"but"thespiritalso, which certainlyis itilf agood part of nature," the spirit, an- o ier word for what we call the "form. " .\11 the same we must remark that the "de- It was therefore not only a. form ingenuously grasped in the re but it was also an artificial ideal unconsciously impregnat- inhis mind and his vision, that M. Ingres tried to manifest. T nee it was that, judging his intentions from his works, Bau- . dcire attributed to Ingres principles entirely opposed to those w!:h the painter professed: "I shall be understood by all th:, who have compared the manners of drawing of the pr:ipal masters, when I say that the drawing of M. Ingres is thirawing of a man with a system. He thinks that nature ; sh Id be corrected, amended; that happy pleasant trickery ;:. dc: on purpose for the pleasure of the eyes is not only a :; rij: but a duty. We have been saying until now that nature sh d be interpreted, translated as a whole, and with all her -" lo, ; but in the works of the master in question there is often ;;C cuiing, craft, violence, and sometimes trickery and guile," ;i (C osites esthetiques.) partures from form" wrought by the painter o the sculptor are oftenest the quite spontaneous effects of a personal "vision," much more than the result of pondered reflection. By a pheno menon which psychologists would have no trouble in explaining they heartily and steadil thi nk they are copying nature, just when they are expressing in the material a secret which nature has whispered to their souls. "If I have altered any thing from nature," said Rodin, "il was without any misgiving at the moment.Th feeling which influenced my vision showed m naturejust as I have copied her. . . .If I had wanted to modify what I saw and make it mor beautiful, I would have turned out nothing good." This is why "one may say that all the innovators since Cimabue," having the same solicitude for more faithful interpretation, have equally "made up their minds to submit to nature." (y . E. Blanche ^Propos de Peintre, David a Degas.} Thus the artist in order to imitate, transforr (according to the saying of Toppfer, an ami able and garrulous forbear, who has on this subject, in his Menus Propos, many judicious remarks) ,but usually he does not notice that is transforming. This somevv hat natural illu- < >n, this disparity between what the artist i akes and what he thinks he is making, would j rhaps explain the singular gap which can be fjnd between the great art itself of the Graeco- ] itin classics, so filially free towards nature, r d their ideology , so flatly naturalist at times. ( ompare, for instance, th e story of the grapes c Zeuxis.) Only such an ideology, let us con- f.s, could not fail to hold over their art, if they s ckened it ever so li ttle, a serious threat of i turalism. In fact, from the Greek idealism, \ lich sets out to copy an ideal headline from r ture, one sli ps by a quite simple transition ( ippily pointed out by the author ^Theories] i o a naturalism which copies nature herself i ier haphazard materiality. Thus the realist e i-trap dates from ancient times ^ as M . Jacqu es 1 mche says ; yes, but from the baser side of atiqueart. Medieval art has been safe-guarded in this r pect by its sublime ingenuousness, its humi- 1 r ,and also by the hieratic traditions which c ne to it from the Byzantines, so that it or- c larily keeps at the spiritual level to which t : later classic art attains only on its mountain I iks ; the art of the Renaissance on the con- 157 trary has allowed itself to be gravely contami nated. Is it not strange to discover a mind so great ; Leonardo da Vinci apologising for painting with humiliating arguments: "Ithappenec with a painting of a father of a family, that the grandchildren went to caress it, though they were still in bib and tucker, and even the dog and the cat of the house did the same: and it was a wondrous sight to see. " "I saw once a painting which deceived the dog by its resem blance to its master, and the animal made muc ado about this picture. I have also seen dogs bark and try to bite painted dogs ; and a monke do a thousand silly things to apainted monke] and also swallows fly and perch upon the paintedbarswhichwereportrayedon thewin do ws of the building." "A painter makes a pi < tu re, and whoever sees it immediately yawns and that happens every time that the eye resfc upon the painting, which has been made on purpose for this." (Textes choisis^ Peladan, 357>3 62 >3 6 3-) Thank God, Leonardo lived painting othe wise thanhesawit, though in him"is finally established the aesthetic of the Renaissance, expression through the subject" (M . Denis, 158 "Maries) ; and although it be true to say of imwith M. Andre Suares, "He seems to live )rkno vvledge only and much less for creation . . Vhenever he studies and observes, he is the I; 1 ve of nature. Assoon as he in vents, he is the lave of his ideas; theory stifles in him the bur- ingplay of creation. Though born of the ame, most of hisfigures are lukewarm and 3me are frozen." (Le voyage du Condottiere.} In ny case it is ideas like this in which he took elight, that, codified afterwards by academic caching, compelled the modern artist to react id to become too conscious of his creative berty with regard to nature ("Nature is only a ictionary," Delacroix readily kept repeating), -sometimes at the cost of the candour of his ision, which calculation and analysis put in opardy, to the very great detriment of art. One cannot insist too much in this connec- on on the distinction already pointed out (see Appendix D) between the vision of theartist r his invention, his conception of the work, and \e means of execution or of realisation which e uses. On the side of vision or conception, igenuousness, spontaneity,candour, which is iconscious of itself,istheartist srnost precious ft; a gift unique and preeminent, which 59 Goethe looked upon as "daemonic," so much seemed tohim gratuitous and beyond analysis If this gift gives place to a system or a calcu lation, to a party cry of "style," like that with which Baudelaire reproached Ingres, or like what one discovers among certain Cubists, th ingenuous "deformation, "which proceeds from spiritual fidelity to theform which shine in things and to their hidden life, is supersede by artificial "deformation," by deformation i the baser sense of the word, that is to say, by violence or falsehood; and art by so much withers. On the contrary,on the side of the means,i s reflection, conscientiousness, and skill that are required ; between the conception and tb work done there is alarge interval the privs domain of art and its means filled in by ap y of pondered combinations which make reali - tion the "result of conscientious and patient conducted logical process" (Paul Valery ) and of a prudence always on the watch. It w thus that the Venetians skilfully substituted for the magic of the sun the "equivalent ma; : of colour,"and thatCezanne too renders the light of the sun by modulations of colour. (Theories.} ^ 1 60 If the "deformations" due to the vision or Dnception of the artist come to him come in le very measure in which his art is truly alive -with a pure and as it were instinctive spon- ineity, theremay yet be otherswhich depend n the means of art ; and these are studied and ilculated. You will find in theworksof the masters, and in those of Rembrandt, the great- it of all, many examples of similar transfor- lations, deformations, abbreviations, re-ar- mgements conscientiously carried out. The orksof the Primitives are full of them, be- nise they thought more of signifying objects factions than representing their appearances. i the same order of ideas Goethe took the pportunity afforded by a print of Rubens to ve old Eckermann a useful lesson. (Conversa- .ns of Goethe with Ecltermann^ Aug.i8,i827.) oethe shows this print to Eckermann, who italogues all the beauties. "All these objects represented here," asked oethe, "the flock of sheep, the haycart, the )rses, the workmen going home, from what le are they lighted? " "They get the light om one side and cast their shadows towards einterior of the picture. The workmen go- 5 home are especially in full light; and this 161 L produces an excellent effect. . . ." "But how did Rubens introduce his fine effect?" "By making these figures stand out lightly on a dark background." "But how is this dark background obtained? "By the mass of shadow which the group o trees casts in the direction of the figures. But what is the matter now ? " I added quite sur prised; "the figures cast their shadow towards the interior of the picture, the group of trees o the contrary casts its shadow towards us ! The light comes from two opposite sides ! Surely that is altogether against nature ?" "That is just what isin question, "said Goeth smiling slightly. "There Rubens shows himself grea t and proves that his free spirit is above nature and can deal with her as befits his lofty aim. The double light is most certainly i violence, and you can always say that it is against nature ; but if it is against nature, I immediately add that it is above nature; I say that it is a bold stroke of the master, who sho\ with genius that art is not entirely subject to the necessities imposed by nature and that it has its own laws. . . . The artist is in a double r lation with nature: he is at once her master an 162 her slave. He is her slave in this sense, that he has to act through earthly means to make him self understood; heishermasterin thissense, that he subdues these earthly means and makes tiem serve his high intentions. The artist wants to speak to the world by an harmonious whole; but this whole hedoesnotfind in nature; it is the fruit of his own mind when, if you will, his mind is fertilised by breathing of breath divine. If we glance with only slight attention at this picture, everything seems so natural to us, that we think it simply copied from nature. But it is not so. So fine a picture has never been seen in nature, any more than has a iandscapeof Poussin or of Claude Lorrain, which seems to us quite natural, but which we look for in vain in real life." 163 APPENDIX J. SYMBOLISM AND THE AIM OF ART [See Page 97, Note 132.] SYMBOLISM, Maurice Denis wrote recently, "is the art of interpreting and o evoking a state of mind by relating colours and shapes. These relationships, invented or borrowed from nature, become signs or sym bols of those states of mind : they havepovver to suggest them. . . . The Symbol aims "^en gendering forthwith in the soul of the onlooker the <whole range of human fee ling by means of the gamut of colours and form,or,say, of sensatior to which the gamut corresponds". . . and, aft< quoting this passage from Bergson : tte fhe aim of Art is to lull the active or rathe the resisting powers of our personality andso bring us to a state of perfect docility, in which we realise the idea suggested, or sympathise with the sentiment expressed," Maurice Den goes on: "With all our blurred remembrance thus classified, all our subconscious forces set going, the work of art worthy of the name set up in us a mystic state or at least a state analog- 164 >us to mystic vision, and in some measure ren ters the heart sentient of God." Barring the use here of the word "mystic" which it were seemly to leave to its proper use nd wont), it is quite true that Art resultsm rousing in us affective states of mind, but this , not Art s end or aim: a slight shade of differ- nce, if you like, but one of extreme impor- mce. All is off the lines if we take for the end /hat is only ^joint-result or repercussion; as also "we make of them/ itself (the production of work in which the splendour of 2iform shines utupon proportioned matter) a simple means }f evoking in others a state of mind, an emo- on). The small quarrel we pick with M. Maurice )enis does not blind us to the depth or the uth of many of the ideas which he develops i his remarkable articles. In particular one mnot too much insist on the importance of mt very simple principle, since the Renaiss- ice so often forgotten, which he makes the elodic key of his teaching: expression in art oceedsfrom the work itself and the means em- oyed and not from the subject portrayed. The noringof this principle, to which thebygone iage-makers were so spon taneously faithful, 1 6; and to which their works owed at once so much daring and so much nobleness is one of the causes of the frost-bitten decrepitude of modern religious Art. APPENDIX K. ON SACRED ART [ See Page 98, Note 1 34. ] THERE is no school that teaches Christian Art, in the sense in whichw have here defined " Christian Art." the other hand there may very well be schools that teach Church Art^ or Sacred A rt^ which, given its proper object, has its own rules. The School of Sacred Art (planned not on the lines of the academy but on those of the studio for apprenticeship and production) , which Des- vallieres and Maurice Denis have founded lat< 166 /, embodies from this standpoint an essay nat aims high. May it meet, in those circles r here commissions grow, with the support of r hich it has need, and so may it help efficac- ) isly to lift Church Art out of the decay on r hich it has fallen! Of this decay we say nothing here, there ould be too much to say. Only let us quote lese lines of Marie-Charles Dulac: "There one thing which I would like and which I ray for; that everything beautiful be recov- ed for God and serve His praise. All that e see in creatures and in creation must be ought back to Him, and my sorrow is to see "is Spouse, our holy mother the Church app- elled in hideousness. All her outward man- sstation is so ugly, she that is so fair within ; r ery effort is to make a fright of her ; at th e itset her body was bare, made over to beasts ; ien artists set their souls on her adornment, : >xt vanity, and last of all the trade, butts in, ; id so caparisoned, she is given up to ridicule, his is another kind of beast, less noble and oreevilthanthelion. . . ." (Letter of June =:th, 1897.) "They are satisfied with a dead work. . . As "the understanding of art, theyareinthe 167 lower deeps. I am not speaking now of public taste ; and I notice that hopeless lack of under standing as early as the period of Michael Angelo, of Rubens, in the Netherlands, where I cannot possibly find any sign of soul-life in those gross carcases. Mark you, I do not refer so much to the volume of their output, but to the complete lack of interior life, and that jus after a period which saw such a goodly widen ing of the heart, in which the heart spoke out so freely ; oh ! that there should have been thei a harkingback to the gross viands of Pagan ism, till we get to the sheer unseemliness of LouisXIV." "But as you know, tis not the artist that makes the artist, tis those who pray. And those who pray get only what they ask for; nowadays noone hints to them to seek beyon c I quite well guess how light may break; for if we look at the modern Greeks who copy the stiffimages of bygone times, the Protestants who make nothing, and the Latins who make nothing that matters, I judge that in very de< the Lord is not served by the manifestation of the Beautiful, nor praised by the Fine Artsin proportion to the graces He keeps to their account, and that there has even been sin in re- 168 acting what was holy and to our hand and tak- ng up with what was sullied." (Letter of May i3th, 1898.) On the same subject see the Essay of the bbe M.z\ r3.u&,ImageriereligieuseetArtpopuI- ilre, and the study of M . Alexandre Cingria, La Decadence de / ArtSacre ( Editor of Cahiers vaudois, Lausanne) . APPENDIX L. CHRISTIAN ART AND THE GIFTS OF THE CHRISTIAN SOUL [See Page ioi,Note 135.] T" TE do not say that before he can make a y\l Christian work, the artist must be a saint fit for canonisation or a mystic who las attained to thetransforming union. We do ;ay that by rights sainthood and my stic con- emplation in the artist are the end to which of hemselves tend the formal exigencies of the , Christian work as such ; and we say that in effect a work isChristian, in proportion as there passes through the soul of the artist in what manner and with what shortcoming may be a derivation from the life which makes the saint and the contemplative. These are self-evident truths, the simple application of the eternal principle: operatio sequitur esse, the action is measured by the be ing. "There is the whole matter," Goethe used to say, "one must be something in order to be able to do something." Leonardo da Vinci illustrated this same principle by some very curious remarks: "The painter with heavy hands will make the hands even so in his works and will reproduce his own bodily defect, un less by long study he guards against so doing. . If he is ready of speech and quick in action, his figures will be of like character. If the master be devout, then his personages will have wry necks; if he be lazy, his figures will image lazi ness to the life. . . . Each characteristic of his painting is a characteristic of the painter." (Texfes choisis, Peladan,4i5 and 422.) "How is it," asks Maurice Denis, in a very remarkable address delivered to the Amis des Cathedrales (December 16,1913)," that 170 :alented artists, whose faith too was pure and ively, such as Overbeck and certain pupils }f Ingres should have produced works which aardly stir our religious feeling? " The answer is not far to seek. First it might DC that this lack of emotion arose simply from a defect on the part of the art-virtue itself,which isquite a different thing from talent or school ing. In the second place, to speak quite pre- :isely,faith and piety in theartist donot amount to a guarantee that the work shall produce a Christian emotion. Such a result invariably depends upon some element of contemplation, however defective ; while contemplation itself implies, according to the theologians, not only the virtue of Faith, but also the influence of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. Finally and above all, there may be present, as for in stance in the caseof the systematic principles of scholarship,^n?/7/^d7?//tf, obstacles forbid ding the art to be moved instrumentally andup- lifted by the whole soul. For here the art-virtue and the supernatural virtues of the Christian joul are not all that matters ; the one must also be under the influence of the others, and this xcurs naturally, though on condition that no oreign element make hindrance, Far from the 171 religious emotion stirred in us by the Primitive resulting from some studious artifice, it is the due working of the naturalness and freedom with which those nurslings of Holy Church let their soul slide into their art. But how comes it that artists so lackin g in devotion, as were many of those in the four teenth and fifteenth centuries, have produced works of intense religiousfeeling? At first, these artists, however paganising, remained in their mental structure immeasur ably more imbued with faith than our shallow psychology can think. Were they not still quite close to the heart of the tumultuous and pas sionate, yet heroically Christian Middle Age, whose impress upon our civilisation four cen turies of modern culture have not been able to efface? They might let themselves go in the wildest jocosity, they kept within, still quite alive, the vis impressa of the medieval Faith, and not of the Faith only, but also of those Gift of the Holy Ghost which had such free andful play during the Christian Ages. So that it might be maintained without rashness that th "free-revellers" mentioned, out of Boccaccio, by Maurice Denis, worked out to something more really "mystic," in presence of a picture 172 o be painted, than many a pious man in our hri veiled times. Later on, itisjust precisely the Christian uiality that begins to alter in their works. Ere t turnsinto mere humanism, mere nature in Raphael and even as early as Leonardo, it is no onger more than a"grace of sense" in Botticelli :>r Filippo Lippi ; and its gravity and depth ibideonly as long as the great Primitives of the luattro cento, Cimabue and Giotto, or later rVngelico, who can, because he is a saint, show the whole light of his inward heaven through in art in him grown already less austere. Indeed and in truth it needs a pretty far journey back into the Middle Age, earlier even than the exquisite tendernesses of St. Francis, to come at the purest period of Christian Art. Where else than in the carvings and stained glass of our cathedrals can one tind better real ised the perfect balance between a powerfully intellectual hieratic tradition without which >acred art cannot exist and that free out spoken sense of reality which beseems Artby the Law of Liberty ? No later interpretation attains, for instance, to the truly sacerdotal and theological sublimity of the scenes of the Nativity (Choirof Notre Dame de Paris, windows of Tours, Sens, Chartres, etc., pom- fur inpraesepio^ idest corpus Christi super a/tare) , or of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin (Senlis) , as they were conceived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (Cf. EmileMale, fArt religieux du XIII siecle en France; Dom Louis Baillet,Z/f Couronnementde la Sainte Viergt Van Onzen Tijd, Afl. XII, 1 9 1 o.) Moreover, in those days Art sprang from a race energised to the full by Baptism. Maurice Denis very rightly emphasises the auroral freshness of the Primitives, and rightly attri butes to this auroral freshness the emotion that we feel in presence of their works. But all grea art is of the day-spring, and not all great art is Christian, save in the very broad sense in whicl we can say that everything true comes from th Holy Spirit and every thing beautiful is tendin, towards Christ. If the freshness of the Primi tives uplifts the heart to the Living God, it is because that freshness is unique in quality, far superior to any other. It is a Christian fresh ness, as it were an infused virtue of young-e ye virginity of mind and filial can dour, face to face with the creations of the Blessed Trinity ; in Art it isj ust the sign-manual of the Faith and of the Seven Gifts pervading and uplifting For this reason it is right with Maurice Denis to speak thus of the Primitive: "There is nothing pagan, nothing platonist, nothing idealist either in his aesthetic or in his art. He c ves with all his heart the reality of God." For this reason too it is vain for M. Gaston Latouche to keep on saying that the ceiling of :he chapel of the chateau at Versailles seems to lim as truly religious as the vaulting at Assisi. ouvenet will go on failing to exist before Giotto so long as a dour "classical" fanaticism roes on failing to triumph over the Christian 75 APPENDIX M. CONFLICTS BETWEEN ART ANE PRUDENCE [See Page 120, Note 155.] THENCE so much difference of opini i between the Man of Prudence and th Artist,on the subject,for instance,of t : representation of the nude. In a well-seen ac demy the one, preoccupied merely with the subject portrayed, sees nothing but animalisi and thereafter he is apprehensive, and right!) so, for his own and other people s ; the other, centred on the work itself, sees nothing but th formal aspect of beauty. MauriceDenis(L^/ ; , Feb. i, 1920), points to the case of Renoir, ai rightly insists upon the beautiful pictorial serenity of his figures. Yet this serenity of woi - manship was not incompatible in the pain ter himself with a strong sensuality of vision. (A I what ought to be said, if it were not Renoir ir question,but that great navvying faun, Rodii I However it be with this particular proble , on which the Middle Ages were severe, and 1 ; Renaissance monstrous lax (even in Church 176 .ecoratfon) , it remains that in a general way Catholicism alone is in a position to reconcile n! >erfectly both Art and Prudence,because of the iniversality, the very Catholicity of her wis- ( m, which embraces the whole realm of the ctual: thatis why Protestants accuse her of rnmorality,and humanistsof rigorism, thus > -earing well-balanced witness to the divine :: uperiority of her standpoint. "What is morally and mentally magnificent boutCatholicism," wrote Barbeyd Aurevilly, ere voicing in splendid fashion the artist s ointofview,"isthatitiswide,comprehensive, nbounded, embracing human nature whole nd in its diverse spheres of action, and that, :: bove what it embraces, it unfurls still the great iaxim: Woe to him that taketh scandal! In atholicism is nothing prudish, priggish, pe- antic, fidgety. These things it leaves to the j lam virtues, to the sleek Pharisaisms. Catho- I cism loves the arts and puts up with their udacities without blenching. . .. For unclean linds there are shocking indecencies in Mich el Angelo s picture (The Lastyudgmenf]^^ i more than onecathedral may befound things, hich would have made a Protestant cover his : ves with Tartuffe s moral pocket-handker- 177 chief. Does Catholicism condemn and reject, and has it effaced them ? Have not the greatest and most saintly Popes protected the artists, who did the things which Protestant austerity would have held, and has held, in horror as so many sacrileges?. . . . Catholically speaking, artists rank below ascetics,but they are not asce tics, they are artists. Catholicism admits a hierarchy in merits, but does not mutilate man kind. . . . Nor is the artist & police-inspector of ideas. When he has created something real, in depicting it he has achieved his task." However, as most men are not moulded to artistic culture, Prudence, with reference to many a fine work of art, is rightly apprehensive for the multitude. So Catholicism, knowing what wounds original sin hasinflicted upon our nature, and how evil is found, as it were, in the majority of the human species, and being bound besides to have concern for the well- being of the many, has in certain cases (cf. page 1 06 above) to preclude art, in the name oi the higher interests of human welfare, from liberties which in themselves would belawful. In this, no doubt, the golden mean is hard to keep. Butanyhow to goin dread of art, to shun it and get it shunned is assuredly no solution. 178 It were devoutly to be wished that the Catholics of our day should bear in mind that the Church and the Church alone has succeeded in moulding the people unto beauty, at the same time protecting them from the "depravation" whichPlato and Jean Jacques Rousseau lay at the doors of Art and Poetry. r\