THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE
Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN
JEAN DELVILLE (PORTRAIT).
Frontispiece.
THE
NEW MISSION OF ART
A STUDY OF IDEALISM IN ART
By Jean Delville
"The mission of Art in the world is so mighty
that it should be cherished with care and
encouraged to the utmost ol our power,
striving with all our being to keep it pure;
it would be a deed as great before God as
useful to man to lead Art back to the inex-
haustible fount from which it ought never to
have wandered." p.-f.g. lacuria.
"the harmonies of existence."
Translated by
FRANCIS COLMER,
with Introductory Notes by
Clifford Bax and Edward Schure.
London : Francis Griffiths
34, Maiden Lane, Strand
1910
N'/
5
To
The Members of the
" ORPHEUS " ART-CIRCLE
this Translation is
dedicated
The Prayer of a Magician
O God of Light in whom all worlds are one,
An atom from that fierce and fiery place
Wherein men stray, behold before Thy Pace
My soul, an eagle mounting to the sun.
The blood-stained idols of an erring race,
The clouds of evil that men's hearts have done,
Roll on beneath me to that hour when none
That brought to birth no beauty shall win grace.
O God, Who gazing on the perfect whole
Smiles at our loveliness of form or soul
As gradually the prisorjed self escapes,
Beyond all time, division, change, or death,
Thou art the immortal essence of all shapes
And earth of Thine eternity— a breath !
JEAN DELVILLE
(Translated by CLIFFORD BAX)
Contents
THE PRAYER OF A MAGICIAN
JEAN DELVILLE, BY CLIFFORD BAX
INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON "THE NEW
MISSION OF ART," BY EDOUARD
SCHURE . . . . . .
PREFACE
I THE OUTLOOK OF MODERN ART
II THE NATURE OF IDEALISM I THE
THREEFOLD HARMONY
III THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY
IV THE IMPORTANCE OF THEORY
V THE MYSTERY OF FORM
VI THE SPIRITUALISING OF ART
VII THE ART OF THE FUTURE . .
VIII THE RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND
STATE TO ART
APPENDIX TO C. VIII — A REVIVAL OF
SACRED ART : THE BEURON SCHOOL
IX THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF ART
X THE CREED AND THE CRITICS
XI IDEALISM IN ART '. SOME MISTAKEN
NOTIONS
INDEX
PAGE
vii
xiii
XIX
xxxiii
3
ii
27
36
48
61
74
86
104
121
145
163
183
List of Illustrations
(i) Jean Delville (Portrait) . . Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
(2) L'Ecole de Platon (J. Delville) .. I
(3) L'Ange (Fernand Khnopff) . . 16
(4) L'Homme Dieu (J. Delville) .. 49
(5) Les Soeurs d'Illusion . . . . 64
(6) Promethee (J. Delville) . . • • 97
(7) The Virgin of S. Maur (Beuron
School) . . . . . . 112
(8) U Amour des Ames (J. Delville) . . 145
JEAN DELVILLE
THE AUTHOR of the following treatise
will be known by name to very few
of his English readers, yet the book
reveals a personality so distinguished that
those hitherto unacquainted with M. Delville's
work may care to know something of the
writer. The few to whom he is already known
will be found among those who, possessing an
interest in the arts, have lived a considerable
time in Brussels or in Glasgow. In the former,
because M. Delville is an artist of renown in
his own country : in the latter, because about
eight years ago he was appointed to the chief-
professorship in the Glasgow School of Art.
He worked there for half-a-dozen years and
with such personal success that when he returned
to Brussels and instituted the " Atelier Delville"
a large number of his former pupils went oversea
to follow him.
The world of art is hardly less variously
peopled than the wider world of politics and
affairs. No painter, no writer, can ever please
all artists, and M. Delville, especially, by his
unflinching adherence to idealism, has encoun-
tered for many years much ridicule or abuse
from the supporters of other schools. It is
unfortunate that so small a number of men
is capable of avoiding an extreme. No sooner
is a certain style grown over-ripe than the
next generation, dismissing the entire school
xiv Jean Delville
as misguided, errs yet more markedly in the
opposite direction. Here in England at the
moment we read articles by men who declare
that Burne-Jones knew nothing of his art or
that there is nothing of sublimity in the work
of Tennyson. In place of those formerly accepted
and over-praised, they exalt some trifling fellow
who, though deficient in a thousand ways, has
yet no trace of the particular weakness which
overcame the giant they would depose.
For reaction, useful as a corrective influence,
is nearly always excessive, and its devotees
quite readily mistake their own backwater for
the full main-stream of art. Incapable of
improving upon the achievements of a bygone
school, they choose out themes and methods
which were most likely rejected as unworthy
by the painters they despise. The excessive
praise of Whistler is now subsiding, but in its
place has arisen the cult of those who consider
clear colour to be the brand-mark of the
commonplace, fair form the delight of an inferior
taste. Nor do these bubble-movements lack
believers among those who are fearful lest they
should be stigmatised as unprogressive, for
most men — critics or craftsmen — are carried
along by the taste of their time, and few are
those who, standing aside from the immediate,
work on in the great traditions.
Of such is M. Delville. Faults he has, but
not the faults of our time. There is no affectation
Jean Delville xv
in his work : no superficial, catchpenny display
of skill. With him, the picture has again
become of more importance than the painter.
For he is a poet, a thinker, a man who cares
greatly for the welfare of the world.
The eminent French poet who penned the
introductory note to this book has shown how
unavoidably a painter communicates his
" Weltanschauung " to his work, and every
phase of M. Delville's mind is thus reflected.
In early youth he was a materialist, and the
dusty paintings of that period which hang
from the walls of his studio would merit praise
from some of those who call themselves,
euphemistically, " rationalists." Indeed, if
anyone should search the great studio he might
disinter examples of many contemporary
methods. For even in the earliest of his student-
days M. Delville possessed a facility so astonish-
ing that before he had been working at the
School of Art in Brussels for more than a week,
the professor set up his canvas as an object-
lesson to the assembled students. In after-
years the paintings he produced readily reflected
the rapid changes of his mind.
For he did not rest easy in materialism, and,
having experimented with spiritism, in spite
of the usual chicanery he discovered what he
considered overwhelming evidence of dis-
incarnate existence. The pictures which
accompany this phase are more terrible than
xvi Jean Delville
beautiful — vast, lurid, and awful. During
a few years he followed the faint stars of
spiritism until they had brought him to
the limitless horizon of theosophy, and it
is to the inspiration of this world-old wisdom
that his latter and important work is due.
His adherence to that scheme of thought has
cost him much, for in Belgium the Ecclesiastical
Party, which is dominant, regards theosophy
as a formidable menace, and has opposed him
repeatedly. But M. Delville was born a fighter,
and never flinches in his loyalty to a philosophy
which is strangely abused and misunderstood.
A keen student of contemporary science, an
eloquent and fiery speaker, one who writes
prose with vigour and verse with a rare beauty,
he is well able to defend his convictions with a
widely-cultured mind and with a range of ability
that compels respect.
Unfortunately, he shares with Rossetti a
dislike of exhibiting his work, but the annual
exhibitions at Brussels have occasional examples.
A stately picture, called " L'Ecole de Platon '
was exhibited some years ago at Milan, where
it won the Gold Prize. Most of M. Delville's
work is on a very large scale — indeed, his
preliminary sketches are usually the size of
most large pictures. A vast composition,
which is named " L'Homme-Dieu," and repre-
sents a multitude of men and women surging
up, with gestures half exultant, half despairing,
Jean Delville xvii
to the enaureoled Christ, occupies an entire
wall in his " atelier." Yet he has said that he
would like to re-paint it as large again if he
could put it in a church.
At present in his private studio, at Forest,
a country suburb of Brussels, he is preparing
a series of frescoes which are to decorate the
walls of the Palais de Justice. Perhaps the
designs for this national work are the most
powerful and most complete examples of
idealistic art which he has yet achieved, and
it is safe to predict that the Belgians of the
future will not regret the choice of the
commissioners.
M. Delville was born in 1867 ; he never
studied his art except in the school at Brussels,
although when his student-days were over he
spent some two years in Rome — a city which
he felt to be strangely familiar, thus offering a
theme for speculation to the believer in palin-
genesis. His manner of life is simple, as befits
a mystic ; the vegetarian may number him
in the list of the enlightened ; and his pleasures
are those of the intellect. Often might a friend,
having walked through the little garden, come
into the house to find him absorbed in a brilliant
rendering of some Wagnerian masterpiece, or
studying with the firmest concentration some
recent work on evolution or biology. In these
days, when life is losing continually more and
more of its ancient dignity, when occultism,
AI
xviii Jean Delville
above all else, has fallen into the hands of
commercial, unreligious, and vulgar persons,
it is an inspiration to receive the friendship of
a man like M. Delville, whose life is worthy of
his great religion, who retains not a little of
the grandeur which caused the occultists of old
time to be so greatly honoured, who realizes
the wonder of existence, the sublimity of the
universe, and the potential godhead of man.
Almost alone he is combatting, year after year,
the inane but popular painting of our time,
setting forth in daily life and in some of the best
of the Belgian reviews that conception of art
which he formulates in the present work. It
is with deep interest that we who are his allies
will watch the reception given to it in England.
It is a book which proclaims, not a new and
unrelated art, but the necessity of applying
some new inspiration to the incomparable
traditions of the past : a book which opposes
all that is commonly praised in the art of our
period ; a book which we who are with him
can only regard as the work of a great man who
writes in a trivial and materialistic age.
C. B.
Introductory Note to
44 The New Mission of Art "
By Edouard Schure
THIS is the book of a true young man ;
a book of courage and nobility, a sign
of light in times of darkness. The work
of a thinker, artist, and one inspired, a testimony
to his knowledge, enthusiasm, and faith, it is
designed to be a work of initiation and
renovation.
It is not the first time that the attempt
has been made nowadays to deduce the laws
of Beauty from esoteric teaching, that is,
from the eternal philosophy in the depths of
the soul, in order to cast the horoscope of con-
temporary art. But it is the first time that a
painter has done so, one, moreover, unattached
to any party, church, or school, with the delight-
ful ingenuousness of a pure soul, a manly spirit,
and an upright conscience.
" The Mission of Art," by Jean Delville, is
an exposition of perfect Idealism according to
universal Theosophy. This requires explanation.
The nineteenth century began with that
great awakening in literature and art which it
has been agreed to term Romanticism. An
instinctive reaction against academic conven-
tions, it was at once a return to nature, and
a sincere and splendid advance towards the
heights of the Ideal. It produced works of genius,
xx Introductory
but it was not given to it to influence our civili-
sation by a work of fruitful education or definite
construction, because it was not built on firm
foundations. Romanticism was Idealism without
Idea. By that I do not mean to say that the
poets and creative artists of the first half of the
century, among whom are to be numbered
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Vigny, Ingres,
Delacroix, and Theodore Rousseau, were not
inspired in their great works by lofty ideas.
I merely affirm that they were not governed
and guided, in their general conception of Art,
by a clear and broad synthesis. Let me be
understood. Neither the poet or artist ought
to be professed philosophers, but they need, in
order to exercise their functions to their fullest
extent, to live in an atmosphere of organic
philosophy and a living religion — unless they
are strong enough to create a philosophy and
religion for themselves, moulding to it through
strife and sorrow the children of their thought
—as is the case with the few Titans, Lucifers,
and Prometheuses of Art. Romanticism had
neither this atmosphere nor these giant creators-
Hence its uncertainty and weakness. Without
a compass, without a rallying point, it was
soon disintegrated and driven out of its course.
In proportion as the influence of the Kantian
and Hegelian philosophy, by which indirectly
it was governed, began to wane, in proportion
as its place was taken by the Positivism of
Introductory xxi
Auguste Comte and all his disciples, so Roman-
ticism wavered and fell back in confusion before
the triumph of Naturalism and its mongrel
followers.
Whether the artist wish it or no, whether
he denies it or not, all art, whatever it may
be, corresponds to a philosophy. Instinctively
or consciously his method is governed by a
certain way of looking at nature and considering
man. Naturalism is the assertion of appearances,
the faith in instinct, in the fecundity of physical
life pure and simple, as Zola declares with
such honest simplicity. The naturalism in
favour at present exactly reflects the material-
istic teaching of philosophy. Now, not only
has this naturalism deplorably narrowed the
horizon of thought, but, as Jean Delville justly
observes, " it atrophies the ideal creative powers
in the artist's soul by snapping the links that
bind it to the spiritual world."—" Nature,"
says the author of The Mission of Art again,
" is a mingling of enchantment and terror, of
ecstasy and awe. The monstrous intermingles
with the divine. It is a wonderful chaos of
secret splendours." The poet, as far as he is
at all worthy of the name, will ever return to
thought, which implies choice, to sentiment,
which presupposes a minimum of moral and
spiritual life. But what will the artist, sculptor,
or painter do, without any other guide than
animal instinct or love of appearances ? We
xxii Introductory
have seen the results ; we see them still.
" They have blown up Parnassus," says the
young artist initiate who has written this
book, " and from the fragments of the sacred
hill they have begun to hew unsightly abor-
tions/'
If naturalism in art corresponds to material-
istic pantheism in philosophy, impressionism,
its bastard offspring, corresponds to absolute
scepticism and tosses between extremes like
a wreck drifting upon the sea. Impressionism
springs from a dim perception of the insufficiency
of naturalism as a source of inspiration. It
throws itself into impression to escape from
the tyranny of appearances. But, lacking
intellectual principles, it escapes it only to fall
under the tyranny of sensation and extravagant
fancy. Sometimes it delights in a brutal realism
turning the painter into a photographer, and
causing the stage to become nothing more than
a cinematograph of life. Sometimes it gets
lost in a vague mysticism without form and
without idea. Nay more, for hungering after
originality, wishing to shock the eye and twist
the nerves, it plunges finally into a perverse
pursuit of the Ugly.
Shakespeare, that learned occultist, who
understood nature and the human soul so well,
beside whom our poor psychologists are but
ignorant apprentices, Shakespeare gives to the
diabolic powers that hover about mankind to
Introductory xxiii
urge it on to evil a terrible weapon. That
weapon is the aesthetic creed of the Ugly.
" Fair is foul, and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air." *
So sing the witches in Macbeth dancing upon
the heath, where soon they will weave round
the hero a dark spell, which will cause the red
spectre of murder to rise in his soul.
" Fair is Foul ! " This arcanum of witchcraft,
which is the black magic of evil, has been used
as a proverb by the whole school of amorphism
and debased and decadent sestheticism, which
makes a wrong and distorted application of it
without understanding its baneful effects.
Naturalism, realism, impressionism — variations,
shades, perversions of the same evil — absence
of principles and ideal in the artist. By expelling
the ideal from art, the pretended naturalism
has misunderstood and profaned nature.
Because, considered on its magnificent entirety,
nature is an evolution towards Beauty as
humanity is an ascent towards the Ideal.
Only one ought to divine the inner meaning of
nature and humanity, and not servilely copy
their appearance and deformity. Yes, Art
imitates Nature, but does so in order to complete
it. And that is how it happens that Nature,
insulted and profaned by short-sighted careless
advocates of naturalism, has avenged herself
by causing them to mistake Ugliness for Beauty.
* Macbeth I. i.
xxiv Introductory
Thanks to this confusion, the better of them
have become dangerous madmen, and the others
mischievous fools. And as a result contemporary
art has lost its strength, and become over-
whelmed by the disorder and anarchy which
we see.
But in the midst of this witches' Sabbath
of grotesque and droll apparitions, there arose,
some twenty years ago, an idealist reaction of
which few people, even to-day, suspect the
influence and import. For, to estimate the force
of this undercurrent, it must be known whence
it comes. Jean Delville explains it very rightly,
and there is not the least exaggeration in the
following words as decided as they are carefully
weighed : " The idealist truth is about to
conquer the modern world with a methodical
positive certainty, which nothing can resist,
since it is the luminous sign of the true evolution
of the spirit, the mediating power which must
re-establish the equilibrium between the past,
present, and future."
How has that movement been carried on in
the domain of the plastic arts ? To the honour
of art and artists it must be said that it was
through the painters that this glorious upward
tendency was first set on foot, and that simul-
taneously in England and France. Everyone is
now acquainted, through the remarkable book
of M. Robert de la Sizeranne, with the renais-
sance of Contemporary English Painting, of
Introductory xxv
which the chief representatives are Rossetti,
Watts, Holman Hunt, Herkomer, Millais, and
Burne-Jones. At the same time two French
painters of genius were assembling a young
and fearless group around the banner of idealist
art. I speak of Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave
Moreau. The former effected it by his broad
simplicity, persuasive steadfastness, and winning
gentleness ; the latter with more pride and
peculiarity, but with a rare concentration and
intensity, appreciated only in one of the elect.
In spite of all national and individual differences,
there may be observed among all these French
and English painters a common effort. A
return to the severity of line, a search for
distinctive characteristics, of beauty through
harmonious composition, a profound aspira-
tion towards poetry, and a worship of the ideal.
Criticism, which is not usually the halting
follower of genius, decided, after a hesitation
due to its dignity, to tread in the path of the
artists. Nevertheless art criticism, and I speak
of the better kind, has brought to light the
failings of philosophers and thinkers who ought
to shed light on the idealist renaissance, and
who contribute rather to obscure it.
We will take only two aesthetic writers, two
of the most celebrated and most talked of :
Ruskin and Tolstoi. In spite of their many
numerous merits, neither of them perceives the
essential.
xxvi Introductory
With his refined sense of art and its educa-
tional mission, it is not a utilitarian and vacillat-
ing eclectic like Ruskin who can point out to
us the future path of art. In spite of his religion
of beauty he cannot do it, because he does not
comprehend its sublime origin, its generation
through the Ideal and the Mother-Idea. His
torch burns neither with sufficient clearness
nor at a proper altitude.
Nor, indeed, is it the great and venerable
recluse of Iasnaia Poliana who can guide us
in this direction. Tolstoi, in fact, admits no
other principle of art but the moral. He does
not understand the essential value of Beauty,
the harmony of Idea and Form, that is to say,
the supreme principle of Art and its true power
of expansion. Was it in truth worth the trouble,
after writing great novels and powerful works
concerned with morality to stoop to deny
Sophocles, Beethoven, and Wagner, and to
reduce art to a sermon for the use of Russian
peasants ? And to think that there are Western
circles where these Boeotian fancies are received
like Holy Scripture ! It is but another striking
proof of our intellectual abasement, of the
futility of our art, and the poverty of our
criticism. Inspiration cannot be commanded,
and genius is the most beautiful gift of God.
It comes when it wills, and when it must. But
it can be prevented from coming by destroying
the hearths and temples of humanity, as it
Introductory xxvii
may be attracted by preparing for it a cradle
and a refuge.
How, then, is the right way to be discovered ?
Which is the safe path ? Where lead those
fertile uplands whose pinnacles are bathed in
dazzling light ? Salvation will follow from two
things — the first of which is concerned with
individuals, and the latter with our institutions
of public education — in the knowledge of how
to discipline the Soul and of a return to Prin-
ciples. By these words I am far from summing
up the noble exposition of Jean Delville, but
I shall at least have imprinted a motto on the
banner he unfolds and indicated the goal at
which he aims.
" The artist needs," says this young painter,
convinced of the power of the Soul and the
Idea, " more learning and sensibility — he must
receive initiation. He owes this to himself
in order to develop his intellectual and spiritual
being." And later : " The people are only
truly great before God and before Art by reason
of the spirituality which emanates from their
works. . . . My hope is to see the point
of view of artists raised, and of seeing them
definitely engaged themselves in the evolution
of the human ideal, so that their individual
psychology, becoming more luminous, shall
glow more brightly in their works."
So much for discipline ; let us come to
principles. I said above that Romanticism had
xxviii Introductory
been Idealism without Idea, that is, without
eternal and universal Principles. The new Art
will be Idealism with Idea. That is to say, it
will proceed from the perfect science which is
itself derived from complete knowledge of
Oneself, in a word from that Theosophy which
is such a transcendent Biology.
In opposition to the conventional and fossil-
ising eclecticism of academies, to an animal-
like naturalism, to an ephemeral impressionism,
Jean Delville places Idealist Art entire and
absolute, which conforms to the two great
scientific laws of selection and synthesis. He
condenses it into three principles : —
(i.) Spiritual Beauty (La Beaute spirituelle) ,
which requires lofty conception, Idea ;
(ii.) Plastic Beauty (La Beaute plastique),
by which is meant the perfection of
forms with a character at once typical
and individual ;
(iii.) Technical Beauty (La Beaute technique),
which is the realizing of the two
former in a perceptible form.
It is not enough to be acquainted with each
of these principles in its extent and depth, and
wishing to apply all three to a work of art. Its
hierarchy and genesis must likewise be known.
It must be grasped that the first among them
—spiritual beauty— is the essential, central,
and generating principle in particular. This
it is that engenders the second, as the second
Introductory xxix
engenders the third. It is from Idea, by way of
Sentiment and Sensation, that a work of art
arises in the artist's spirit. On the receptive
hearer, the intelligent spectator, the contrary
effect is produced. He will rise from Sensation
to Sentiment, and from that to the Idea, and
he will only attain the true aesthetic emotion
at their final point, when he embraces Sentiment
and Sensation in the primordial and final unity
of the Idea. So that it is ever the Idea which
remains the generating point of Beauty. It
engenders the Form which moulds Matter, as
the Spirit creates the Soul, and the Soul fashions
the Body. It is because Materialism holds a
contrary view that it is radically false, philoso-
phically, artistically, and socially unsound.
What makes every real work of art of interest
is that it reproduces the mystery of Creation
which operates in the Microcosm as in the
Macrocosm, in Man as in the Universe. It shows
us likewise the Involution of spirit within matter,
and the Evolution of matter in the direction
of spirit. But the artist has no need of these
formulae. It is enough for him to recognize
by intuition and experience the hierarchy of
the generating Principles of Beauty. For so
the great ones worked and ever will work.
To demonstrate the fecundity of these vital
principles would necessitate a long development
and all the detail of technical applications to
architecture and music, those symbolic and
xxx Introductory
generalizing arts, to sculpture, painting, and
poetry, those living and human arts, and finally
to their synthesis — the drama. In fact to create
a transcendent system of aesthetics it would be
necessary to return again to Number, at once
the source of Form and Harmony.
Jean Delville wished only to give in this
book the higher principles of the plastic arts,
those which the painter and sculptor need to
illuminate their consciousness and put life
into their work. He has done so as an artist
and philosopher. Some idealists, perhaps, will
not hold the same view with regard to certain
special points. For my part, while sharing his
philosophy, I should be less severe than he on
landscape-painting, and I should hesitate to
banish from art national colour, while wishing
that it should be through inspiration as universal
as possible. But all without exception will
admire with me the Mother-Ideas which flash
with such brilliance throughout these pages,
and the mighty regenerating breath that
emanates from them. There is one admirable
passage upon " the nude, which brings us face
to face with the enigma of life, which incor-
porates universal ideas, and reveals to us the
meaning of nature." Michael Angelo, Leonardo
de Vinci, and Raphael, would shake him by
both hands. There are others in the vein of
Juvenal upon " the adultery of art with
materialism," upon " aesthetes without aesthetics,
Introductory xxxi
dandified triflers, wild irresponsibles, incom-
petent impostors, and sneering eclectics." This
book seems written in a single burst, under an
impulse so prolonged and impervious that the
author never even thought of dividing it into
chapters.* I do not know what is most striking
in this work, at once so youthful and so mature,
so nervous and so powerful — whether the artist's
soul, so enthralled by eternal Beauty which
can be felt palpitating in every line, or the
spirit of the initiated philosopher, which rises
so easily and naturally towards divine principles,
or the proud courage of the young warrior of
the ideal, who flings himself into the midst
of the combat, fearless of blows and wounds,
with the flaming sword of speech and the shield
of faith. If we were timorous enough to recom-
mend prudence to him, he would reply proudly :
" The artist who is not conscious of a divine
power making his human power fruitful of
Beauty, and who, in the depths of his being,
does not feel the God of Love and Harmony
vibrate with which worlds and races of men
vibrate, the same is unworthy of civilisation."
Artists and poets, youthful believers in Life
and the Ideal, read this book. You will discover
therein new paths leading to the secret places
of Beauty and torches to light your way. It
announces the dawn of an era " when Art will
be consecrated by Metaphysics and Initiation."
* This has been done in the present edition.
xxxii Introductory
On the one hand this breviary of Beauty
is a plain synthesis of the whole evolutionary
process in aesthetics during the nineteenth
century. It represents its closing period. On
the other it brings before our eyes something
that seems like a white road, between a colon-
nade of marble, leading from a huge pylon and
flanked by propylaea towards the Temple of
perfect Art — which, let us hope, will be that
of the twentieth century.
EDOUARD SCHURE.
Preface
THIS book does not claim to be a literary
essay or a treatise of philosophical analysis.
It does not aim, as so many others
have done, at giving a cut-and-dried recipe for
a masterpiece by means of the theory of
uniformity, but it desires to urge the unfettered
personality of the artist towards a higher
Comprehension of Art and a purer Conception
of Beauty.
In writing it I believe that I have fulfilled
my plain and honest duty as an artist.
I think that in an age, and in a country,
in which materialism in art is still supreme this
book comes in good time, and will awaken the
conscience dulled by various pursuits to the
true power of Art, that is to say, its mission to
humanity.
Materialism is the artist's foe, because it
wastes or destroys in him the ideal and creative
powers of his being. The genius of art is not
to be reconciled to the ignoble attitude of
materialism.
The laws of life are not merely physical laws ,
they do not dwell in the instinct, but in the spirit,
whence they cause the being to be evolved.
The experimental proofs of the existence and
survival of the soul have been scientifically
established.
Modern Esthetics ought not to neglect the
consequences of those proofs. It is indispensable
A2
xxxiv Preface
that the artist should know that ideas, figures,
sentiments, emotions, sensations, are by no
means simple movements of organic matter
or mechanical vibrations. He must understand
the ideal part that his soul and his spirit play
in the divine mystery of Nature.
There has been much philosophising about
art. For the most part, superficial writers on
aesthetics have only dealt vaguely with this
profound and difficult subject, which requires
something beyond taste and learning —
initiation !
And with respect to this I wish it to be
observed that the use in this book of the terms
spirit, soul, idea, instinct, astral, mental,
spiritual, divine, etc., is by no means the
result of an artificial or chance terminology.
These words signify conditions and faculties
of being, of perceptible realities, and I am
well acquainted with the part which these
unseen powers and conditions play in the
mysterious moulding of the aesthetic concept.
For more than ten years I have devoted precious
hours to the illuminating study of occult
psychology, not merely in a speculative, but
in an experimental, direction. I am conscious
of the value and importance of these words.
This book, then, is not the result of fancy.
It is dedicated chiefly to the artists of Belgium,
above all to those who are young, since they
are nearer the future. And I could say to
Preface xxxv
them that if there is more art in Nature than
in a School, there is also more art in the Ideal
than in Nature.
The soul of a nation, capable at times of
strength and grandeur, is nevertheless slow
in following the great evolutionary tendencies
of the human spirit. The national materialism
still weighs too heavily upon it. But a people
is only truly great before God and before Art
in consideration of the spirituality which is
exhibited in its works.
The races which produce great artists are those
where not only physical beauty is met with,
but where beauty is found in the heart and
in the soul.
Unless I am much deceived, national soul
is, I believe, superior to the national character
(temperament). At bottom of every race there
is something very pure, very bright, and very
strong. But it still slumbers, as thought
stupefied by the fog of materialism which
surrounds it.
The age possesses good painters, good
sculptors. It has no great artists.
Why?
Because its artistic powers, that is to say,
its vigorous capacity for painting and sculpture,
have not been put at the service of the Ideal,
Spirit, and Beauty.
And, in saying that, observe that I am not
attempting to extol a literary or philosophical
xxxvi Preface
art, which would be foolish and wrong. Long
ago artists like Chenavard and Wiertz showed
the hollowness of their extravagant art, as well
as the decayed schools in which Form was no
longer a matter of importance.
I dream of seeing the standpoint of artists
raised, and of seeing them return once for all to
the evolution of the human ideal, so that their
individual knowledge of the soul, becoming more
luminous, may glow with purer lustre in their
works. Has any one seriously reflected on the
fresh and luxuriant blossoming of art, which
may originate, on the threshold of the twentieth
century, from the idealist mode of thought ?
That is the aim of my very humble effort : to
awaken latent faculties, so as to broaden, by
making it more spiritual, the basis of artistic
growth.
Perhaps it is well that this ardent desire for
regeneration should come from a simple artist.
Perhaps, too — and it is my own opinion —
it would have been more effectual if another
than I — someone of more authority — had
endeavoured to initiate this.
I have waited for that man. He has not
come. I have endeavoured humbly to be that
man, since no one would raise his voice in the
name of pure Beauty.
Who, then, will venture to reproach me with
having been impatient in my desire for the Ideal
through Nature, and Beauty through Light ?
Preface xxxvii
I do not know what welcome will be given
to this book that pleads for Spirituality by
artists or the general public.
But I venture to say, without pride and
conscious of my inferiority, that neither Ruskin,
with his inconsistent and refined eclecticism,
nor Tolstoi, in spite of his good intentions,
rendered futile by such sad lack of aesthetic
culture, and not even Peladan,* so lucid in
his metaphysics, but whose idealism is too
aristocratic, or occasionally too lenient to
antiquated conventions, have presented a clear
conception of Art as being evolved agreeably
to all the creative energies, both psychic and
natural, of the harmonies of existence.
If some narrow-minded critics, governed by
paltry prejudice, should declare that it is not
well for the artist to take up the pen, common
sense must ask them who then has the right
to impose limits on the way in which the
faculties should be manifested.
If others likewise, confining their interest
to some particular locality, and disliking the
universal principle of Idealism, protest, in the
name of what they call " national art," what
does it matter !
The Future will reply to them.
JEAN DELVILLE.
* Josephin Peladan, a novelist and writer on art. He is an idealist,
but broad-minded in his views. His chief works are : " I.e Vice Supreme " ;
" Comment on devient Mage," " Comment on devient Artiste," and the
tragedies " Babylon," " La Prometheide," and " CEdipe et le Sphinx."
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New Mission of Art
B
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i
The Outlook of Modern Art
Influence of Nature Study on Art — Narrow View of Realism and Impres-
sionism— Lack of Conscious Effort — Genius is not " Unconscious "
— False notions of Art have obscured its Mission — Absence of Beauty
in Modern Art.
IN no age of humanity, at no period of the
history of Art, have the works of Nature
been more loved, studied, felt, and
better appreciated, seemingly, by our poets,
our men of science, and our artists. Certainly
they have exercised over modern minds, and
over the sensitivity of human beings, on the
whole, often a fruitful influence, from certain
points of view, but since we are so under the
spell of visible things, so confined in our percep-
tions to objects near at hand, we are forgetful
of their concealed, mysterious, and divine
meaning.
Accustomed to the emotion of the moment,
which in this world seems to be enough, the
modern eye can no longer see the ideal significa-
tion of natural forms.
For the painter — and contemporary criticism
strongly encourages him in these narrow ideas
— creation is nothing more than a superficial
panorama of pleasurable sights. Impressionism,
the school of those who are weak and guided
by instinct, has proved that, as far as it is
4 The Outlook
concerned, Realism amounts to a few invariable
simple tricks of the palette and that the
moments of eternity which it pretends to know
how to place on the canvas are confined to an
aimless and sorry display of fireworks, which
have only resulted in the negation of Form,
on which all images of Life must depend !
The eye of the realist painter looks out upon
Nature to receive a mechanical impression, like
an animal : he looks without seeing ! His gaze
wanders over objects casually. Wherever there
is every beauty in Nature, he only sees a
pretext for optical vibrations. A kind of
amorphous pantheism, steeping his intellectual
powers in the emotional unconsciousness of
instinct and confusing aesthetic emotion with
that of the animal, has made the artist a
haphazard being ; that is to say, one whose
characteristics as an individual have become
that of a whole class. His vision is that of one
who looks on a thing for the first time ; his
feelings are of the same kind : like those of a
dog or cat ! But the peculiar nature of the
artist, his power of selection, which ought to
enable him to see and feel differently to the
average man, are warped or destroyed by the
debasing pantheism of his intellectual degrada-
tion.
To the realistic school Nature has ceased to
be a revelation. Even those who, in the name
of Isis, frantically wave the red flag of Life and
of Modern Art 5
Realism, are, without suspecting it, profaning
Nature, ever so inscrutable and so fertile !
The Naturalism of the present time, so
insulting to Nature, has broken the bonds which
unite it to the spiritual world. The threefold
love of Life, the Ideal, and God, is so narrowed
in the soul of the modern artist, the love of
Beauty has so completely escaped his under-
standing, that genius scarcely now illuminates
any work.
Criticism — whose mission would be so noble if
it were capable of accomplishing it — has become
the apologist for the lack of conscious effort.
" Genius is unconscious," it does not cease to
echo in the willing ears of mighty public opinion.
Vinci, that mighty mind, Vinci, the most
theoretical of artists, and the most artistic of
learned men — unconscious ! ^Eschylus, the
Titanic conceiver of that " Prometheus " in which
he formulates the most conscious of symbols —
unconscious ! Newton, discovering the laws
of astronomy— unconscious ! The ingenious
and bewildering inventor of the astrological
clock of Strasburg Cathedral — unconscious !
Raphael, the graceful and sublime composer of
" The School of Athens " — unconscious ! Bach,
the mathematician of harmony, Wagner, ex-
pounding his musical theories — unconscious ! *
* Wagner's literary works, including " Oper und Drama," " Ueber
das Dirigiren," " Das Judenthum in der Musik," were published at Leipzig
in 1871 in nine thick volumes.
6 The Outlook
Are all these sublime spirits, who could seize
a portion of the Universal Light, whence
streams the life of the whole, shedding its
radiance on the multitudes unable to perceive
it, unconscious ? *
That is where the lack of idealism, or the
lack of knowledge, must lead.
Genius in art, the ideal in art, not being
conceived as the penetration of spirit into life,
it is natural and inevitable that aethestic
conception and execution should become
corrupted.
That mighty faculty, which allows the
philosopher to arrange his ideas, and the
artist to use precision and a sense of form
in the creation of his images, is not, think our
modern chroniclers and lovers of cheap art, a
necessity to the craftsman.
A painter has but to open his eyes, and the
miracle of a work of art will be evolved uncon-
sciously ! The Will, that mighty creative force
which is to be observed in all men of genius,
and developed in them more than in most
human beings, need not be brought into play.
Artists, you are only organisms which perform
their functions ! You must be satisfied with that
since the petty critics declare it.
But Vinci has said : " Painting is the greatest
mental labour, since necessity compels the painter's
* " All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate . . .
and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one" (Oscar Wilde.
" Intentions;' p. 100).
of Modern Art 7
spirit to fuse itself with the very spirit of nature,
and become the interpreter between nature and
art, studying it to perceive the causes which make
objects visible to us and under what laws."
Is not this clear and admirable exposition
of Vinci's attitude towards art a theme for
ridicule to the petty critics, who at the present
time cumber the daily papers with their ill-
digested and foolish opinions ?
And how few artists will not shrug their
shoulders when they read this definition by
the author of " The Adoration of the Magi "
and the subtle " Gioconda " ?
Contemporary ideas of art, praised by dilet-
tanti, and put into practice by the up-to-date
date student, have so overwhelmed the soul in
its chaos and so stifled the consciousness, that
it will take some time before the heart is again
opened to the stirring emotions of pure Beauty.
Acting in opposition to the fundamental
forces of their nature, yielding to the yoke
imposed by the false ideas of the day, artists,
for the most part, have lost their native qualities
and the moral strength which constitute the
essence of their individuality. They will fall
very short of their true destiny as artists,
because they have allowed themselves to come
under the spell of a baneful creed of art.
Thrown into this world " by a decree of the
supreme powers," as Baudelaire has said,
coming in order to create with their work a
8 The Outlook
Sign — for a work of art is a sign, a perishable
sign representing an imperishable idea, an
immortal sentiment — they have lost sight of
the real reason of their existence, nay more,
their mission !
They have indeed lost sight of themselves.
They do not know their real worth, not taking
into account the mystery of which they are the
living incarnations amid society.
They have ended by believing — it has been
dinned into them in every tongue ! — that the
heart which beats in their breast, the brain
which throbs in their temples, their hands, the
precious hands that create, that their whole
being, in fact, are bound by the same condition
of life and the same faculties as those of the
chimney-sweep or shoemaker.
The artist has to some extent become a
creature of society. Sad to say, he is no longer
an individual in the true psychological sense.
True individualism will be eclectic. To place
in one's library the " Divina Commedia " by
the side of " L'Assommoir " * is to offer proof
of a deplorable weakness of character, and to
admire equally the vulgar trash of an Ensor f
and the graceful forms of a Burne-Jones is to
compromise the lofty sentiment of Beauty and
Art by a criminal lack of good taste.
* Zola's novel, well known in its dramatised version as " Drink."
f J. Ensor, a Belgian painter, exhibitor at the " Cercle des Vingt."
He is an eccentric painter, loving strange combinations of colour and
inconsequent fancies. He is represented in the Brussels Gallery by " The
Lampman."
of Modern Art 9
It is from this preoccupation with feeling
or perceiving like the majority, the mob, from
that eager interest in the general, that those
execrable paradoxes have emanated which have
given rise to the phrase " The Socialising of Art,"
" The Democratising of Art."
Realism, by reason of its low affinities, must
accompany this degraded view of art. We have
reached that stage. The exhibitions, open to
works defying every possible law, are with us
to prove that art, when it is not based on the
immutable principles of Beauty, can give birth
to ugly and senseless things, and bring the Art
of our divine Masters very low indeed.
The true ideal view of art, the only one
which Art needs to live for and evolve, has been
deserted to the advantage of the most foolish
abominations of realism. They have made
caricatures instead of delineating character.
Under the pretext of colour and lighting, there
has arisen Impressionism, that neurotic malady
affecting hand and eye, and in the name of
originality they have begun to paint prison cells
in order to mingle what is horrible with what is
unusual.
Our exhibitions, both those held every three
years and others, are flagrant examples of a
shameful degradation, if we may venture to
confess what is evident. There is, too, the
inevitable result which must strike at the very
roots of the existence, generally speaking, of
io The Outlook
modern art. The absence of idealism in a work
is a blemish. Where there is no idealism, there
is only something imperfect or meaningless,
and that is why pictures of interiors, flowers,
still-life, or landscape, will never be the subjects
of true art.*
* Brussels is the real centre of Art in Belgium. Excellent triennial
exhibitions are held at Ghent, and other towns, as Liege, Tournay, Namur,
Mons, and Spa, also have periodical exhibitions. The realism of the Belgian,
Baron Henri Leys (1815-1869), and that of the Frenchman, Courbet, had
a strong influence on modern Belgian art. Under that influence at Brussels
was founded the " Free Society of Fine Arts " and the " Cercle des Vingt,"
which introduced into its exhibitions works by the greatest foreign artists,
however widely differing in aim and method, thus inculcating the principle
of " individuality in art."
II
The Nature of Idealism : the
Threefold Harmony
Idealism Spiritualises Art — Influence on Consciousness of Spiritual Vibra-
tions— Threefold base of Idealism : Beauty of Idea, Form, and
Execution — Choice of Artist not restricted by Idealism — Close study
of Nature necessitated by it — Impressionism the Poetry of the
Moment : Its Fallacy — He who has an Ideal not therefore an
Idealist — Principle of Selection in Nature — Pure Beauty only found
in the realm of the Ideal — Materialism of Modern Art — Limitations
of Landscape — Evolution of a Work of Art — Sensation, Emotion,
Conception.
IDEALISM and ART are the same thing.
But the Ideal has been separated from
Art, nay, it has been expelled from it !
As idealism in philosophy is equilibrium in
ideas or the constant search for psychic perfec-
tion, so idealism in art is its sublimation, the
introduction of Spirituality into Art.
The Idea, in the metaphysical or occult
sense, is Force, the universal and divine force
which moves worlds, and its movement is the
supreme rhythm whence springs the harmonious
working of Life.
Where there is no thought, there is no life,
no creation. The modern western world has
become unconscious of this tremendous power
of the Ideal, and Art inevitably has thus
become degraded. This ignorance of the
creative forces of thought has, nevertheless,
obscured and diverted towards materialism all
modern judgment. Materialism does not know
how ideas and thoughts vibrate, and how these
12 The Nature of Idealism :
vibrations impinge on the consciousness of the
individual.
And yet these vibrations, though invisible to
the greater part of mankind, are able to exercise
an astounding influence over the mentality of
human beings, and thus assist in their evolution.
Before works of genius the human consciousness
receives mental and spiritual vibrations, which
are generated by the force of the idea reflected.
The more elevated, pure, and sublime a work
is, the more the inner being, coming into
contact with the ideal vibration emanated from
it, will be raised, purified, and made sublime.
The artist who is not ideal, that is to say, the
artist who does not know that every form must
be the result of an idea, and that every idea
must have its form, the artist, in short, who
does not know that Beauty is the luminous
conception of equilibrium in forms, will never
have any influence over the soul, because his
works will be really without thought, that is,
without life.
The Idea is the emotion of the Spirit as
Emotion is the reflex of the Soul.
But the emotions should be brought into
harmony. The artist, for instance, should not
feel that nervous, physical, instinctive, vibration
produced by the lower nature. Those emotions
do not offer sufficient security to give assurance
of the emotional and impulsive higher part.
I have seen silly people moved to tears before
The Threefold Harmony 13
the most trifling things, and remain stolid before
masterpieces or impressive sights. I have seen
artists fall into an ecstasy before " pierrettes "
by Willette,* or a pig more or less well painted,
and jest at the tremendous conceptions of a
Michael Angelo !
We see that emotion, in order to be real,
must come from above, and ought always to be
purely ideal.
It will not be a coarse and unhealthy
emotion, like that displayed by the realist,
impressionist, and amorphous schools, which
will influence the artist in the elaboration of
his work. It is against those very schools, which
are destroying contemporary art, and whose
victims are numberless, that the Idealist view
of art is attempting to bring about a reaction.
It is against this unintellectual, inharmonious,
debased, and revolutionary art, in which the
elements of materialism are supreme, and where
the essential dignity of Art is roughly thrust
aside, that the Idealist is taking his stand and
asserting himself.
In opposition to this art, so lacking in the
ideal, where eclecticism barely conceals its
shameless favouring of commonplace tendencies,
as incongruous as they are fruitless, where
empty fancy alone replaces the science of art,
the idealist tendency upholds the principles of
* Willette (b. 1857), a prominent French caricaturist and black and
white artist. An ideal delineator of the " risque " side of contemporary life.
14 The Nature of Idealism :
selection and construction, arranged on this
basis of artistic perfection : —
Beauty of Idea (La Beaute spirituelle) .
Beauty of Form (La Beaute plastique).
Beauty of Execution (La Beaute technique).
And all those who have not been able to pene-
trate the mystery of art, who do not perceive
its divine mission, and who do not understand
the sublime origin of Beauty, will argue in vain
against this truth.
We defy anyone who should attempt to refute
or deny the value of the three terms which
constitute, in our eyes, the comprehensive
unity of a work of art to demonstrate a theory
of art as overwhelming and as thorough in
which, as in ours, all theories should be contained
or a tendency so predominant and perfect which
should summarise, as ours does, all that is best
in all others.
We do not hesitate to affirm that anyone
who shall understand the exact import of our
proposition will be convinced that it formulates
what is the very essence of art, and that there
is no other by which the personality of the
artist can be evolved in a clearer way.
By Beauty of Idea (Beaute Spirituelle) is to
be understood a lofty conception of the subject,
this of itself being a means of artistic idealism.
Then follows the conception of beautiful, noble,
and great things. The choice of a high theme,
so that the painter should not be over-careful
The Threefold Harmony 15
in the mere tricks of his brush, which should
never be the end, but the means. That is Idea
in a work.
By Beauty of Form (Beaute plastique) is
meant the striving after perfection of Form !
the choice of the most beautiful, the purest,
most perfect, and most expressive forms. To
reject as far as possible in one's work all that
does not aid in the harmony of line, and to
accept nothing misshapen or ugly. Ugliness is
only permissible in art under synthetic or
symbolic forms. It appears as an accident of
nature, which can only be transferred into a
work in its finest aspects, when the typical
becomes- merged in what is individual ! *
By Beauty of Execution (Beaute technique)
we mean the refinement of one's craft to such
a point that it does not predominate in the
work to the harm of the expression. The
painter ought to make his brush a wonderful
instrument, in order to understand how best
to realise his conception ; technical skill, being
the means, ought to be put at the service of
the two preceding terms in order to approach
Perfection. Every piece of handicraft that does
not realise any ideal is an inferior work, a dead
work. The process matters little ; only the
technical and personal quality of its application
is of importance.
* Watts' pictures of " Mammon " and " The Minotaur " are examples
of symbolic ugliness.
16 The Nature of Idealism :
Idealists have been reproached heedlessly
enough with being " exclusive," and with
wishing to impose certain subjects on the artist.
And we have protested each time that we
conveniently could, declaring that selection is
legitimate, and conforms to the mysterious laws
of nature.
The idealist theory of art imposes no subject ;
it leaves to the artist every liberty to create,
but urges him to work by a system to a loftier
result.
The hierarchy of art is based on the hierarchy
of being. Every true evolution is a victory over
temperament and instinct. The artist who
cannot master the fatal forces of his lower self,
so as to consciously bend them to his service,
will never know the genius of Perfection, the
very soul of Art !
The difference which lies between the
Idealist tendency and the ordinary schools is
that it is based upon a truth drawn from the
splendid JVfystery of Life, and the well-head of
the purest masterpieces, and that it adapts the
glorious examples of the Past to the evolu-
tionary impulses of the Future, in order to
maintain Art in the high spheres of human
idealism, whence it cannot descend without
falling into decay. Idealism should represent
beauty in science, and science in beauty.
I know that most people absurdly think that
idealism in art is but an empty puff of pale
I 'ange (fernand khnopf.)
u e pagt r .
The Threefold Harmony 17
smoke veiling the artist's sight, and causing
him to see Nature through the mist of a book-
man's dreams in which the images of life are
fashioned, and that the idealist artist disdains
to go to eternal prolific Nature. We have often
said how false this supposition is, and how,
on the contrary, idealism demands that Nature
should be doubly studied, seeking to penetrate,
not only into its mere objective aspect, but also
into the mystic essence of its synthetic meaning.
The work of art in which there does not
vibrate a harmonious combination of all the
elements which constitute life and the ideal
will only be an elementary work. What will
always cause the inferiority of landscape is that
it will only be able to translate impressions.
Now the poetry of Nature has other mysteries
than those which the realist landscape-painters
invariably show us, too limited as they are
in their scenes of country life, reduced to the
mere problem of natural light, whence has
sprung that modern puerile impressionism so
justly criticised by Chavannes * : " The Impres-
sionists are the poets of the Moment (Poetes de
* Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) was the son of a mining engineer
at Lyons. He was bred to his father's profession, but after a visit to Italy
he determined to devote himself to art. He attached himself for a short
time to Scheffcr, Delacroix, and Couture, but he was of the opinion that
he gained little from any of them. His early work was loudly decried by
the critics, but he found warm defenders in Theophile Gautier and Theodore
de Banville. In 1861 he produced a great impression with " Peace " and
" War," one of which was purchased for the museum at Amiens. These
pictures inaugurated a great series of decorative works which won for him
a unique position in French art. Chief among them were two emblematical
paintings at Marseilles, the " Ludus Pro Patria " at Amiens, " The Sacred
Grove " and " The Vision of the Antique " at Lyons, the series of " The
18 The Nature of Idealism :
I'Ephemere). Observe that their ideal rests upon
a natural contradiction, and can never be absolutely
realised ; they pretend to fix the passing moment,
the fleeting aspect of things. Now things, in their
superficial aspect, are so changing that before an
effect has time to take place it has already ceased
to exist."
Why are some critics heard strangely
reproaching the idealist movement with a
pretended " exclusiveness," which protests with
good reason at the heart-breaking increase of
landscapes and their accessories : " There are
as many ideals as there are artists," they cry,
with a logic which M. Prudhomme would
assuredly envy.
Evidently every artist has his ideal. The
ideal of one will lie in painting a pan of roast
chestnuts, another in conscientiously painting
a litter of pigs, while another will elevate his
soul, as a man and an artist, towards an ideal
of beauty. Then every artist, whether he is a
Life of St. Genevieve " and " The Old Age of St. Genevieve " in the
Pantheon at Paris, and the great hemicycle at the Sorbonne symbolical
of Science, Art, and Letters. In some respects his position among French
painters is somewhat analagous to that of the Pre- Raphaelites in England,
but he was without their romantic sentiment. His compositions were
profoundly influenced by his study of the antique, and aimed at simplicity
of idea and dignity of design. He was distinguished especially from the
classical school which preceded him by the rich landscape setting in which
his figures were placed and his decorative treatment of natural objects.
The realist school charged him with ignoring Nature ; he contended that
it was from Nature that he drew his inspiration. His works were mostly
intended to decorate large buildings, and were conceived on a vast scale.
They are often spoken of as frescoes ; but Chavannes did not attempt
fresco-painting, preferring to paint with oil on canvas which was afterwards
applied to the wall, his scheme of colour being subdued in order to har-
monize with the architectural environment.
The Threefold Harmony 19
student of nature or realism, is an idealist too !
On this assumption, directly a painter covers a
bit of canvas with some tubes of paint, or a
sculptor moulds a lump of clay with his fingers,
they are justified in calling themselves idealists.
That is an argument which it is no use
attempting to controvert. In the eyes of many
good people there is no question that Francois
Coppee is as much of a poet as Baudelaire !
But few people suspect that nature is itself,
in principle, and in fact, very exclusive. In
every rank of life, whether vegetable, animal,
or human, there is to be found a selective
hierarchy. Observe, for instance, how exclusive
the bee is in the choice of the flowers from which
it gets its spoil. O you of the pantheistic-
eclectic school, will you find fault with it for
that ? No, because you know that it is seeking
a rare and precious substance which every
flower does not possess in the same degree.
Well, the idealist is something like a bee, who,
in obedience to Nature's laws, chooses this
and rejects that.
Puvis de Chavannes, who always uses the
lofty language of the Great Masters, has not
said in vain : " Nature contains everything, but
in a confused way. It must be formed of all that
is the residt of chance or accident, of all that is
for the moment inexpressive ; that is to say,
which does not tend to alter our thoughts. In
a word, we may say that Art completes what
20 The Nature of Idealism :
Nature roughly outlines, and speaks the word
which the vastness of Nature is stammering."
Baudelaire himself perceived this with
terrible clearness, when he said : "Although
the universal principle be one, Nature never
completes anything."
That fine thought is a truth. It passes
judgment on the impressionist view of nature,
and supports artistic idealism.
Pure Beauty, pure Harmony, only dwell in
the world of the Ideal.
A truth that modern critics, and even the
majority of artists, fail to understand is that
Art is the incarnation of the Idea, of the Word,
under the forms of Nature. It is because they
do not understand this definition that most
of them lose their way in the barren discussions
of the schools, and that artists — the Belgians,
above all ! — wallow in their artistic materialism
which limits life to the objective world. If Art,
speaking from the point of view of socie-1
does not aim at spiritualising the grossness of
popular ideas, it is right to ask what is its real
utility, or rather the reason for its existence.
What intellectual emotion can be aroused by
a pile of draperies, or a still-life subject,
whether they are " flambes " or not ? How can
the mind feel elevated before fish or oysters,
a bulldog, or a donkey's head, soiled linen,
the patches on the trousers of a workman or
peasant, and what thoughts are likely to arise
The Threefold Harmony 21
before a landscape more or less well painted ?
A landscape, an element of decoration, may
make us dream for the moment, and dreaming
is ever an inferior condition of the soul !
We have always been amused at the bourgeois
who surrounds himself with landscapes to
view the country at his ease because he knows
it. They are the favourite ornaments of good
dining-rooms. From the sensational point of
view what comprises the charm of landscape in
Nature is the perpetual and elusive movement
of light over objects.
The landscape, especially the landscape of the
realist painter, is the art of the uncultured
bourgeoisie.
In a landscape we do not get beyond the
fleeting and personal side of impression* Every
admirer of painted scenery is ever a possible
bourgeois, who only feels the wish to journey
in imagination to some nook of nature. I speak,
be it understood, of those invariable common-
place daubs of paint where the artist has merely
busied himself in imitating the particular
* Perhaps Landscape possesses an inner mystic significance which has
not yet been fully comprehended. The Irish poet, A.E., himself a painter
of imaginative landscape, says : " A great landscape is the expression of
a mood of the human mind as definitely as music or poetry is. The
artist is communicating his own emotions. There is some mystic signifi-
cance in the colour he employs ; and then the doorways are opened, and
we pass from sense into soul. We are looking into the soul when we look
at a Turner, Corot, or a Whistler. ... No one can say how far,
Turner, in his search after light, had not journeyed into the lost Eden,
and he himself may have been there most surely at the last when his
pictures had become a blaze of incoherent light." (" On Art and Literature,' '
1907).
22 The Nature of Idealism :
imperfections of some piece of scenery. Strictly
speaking, I am in favour of an imaginative
landscape, when it presents to my eyes the
enchantments of fairyland. The works of the
Englishman, Turner, are, in this connection,
a magnificent revelation. The ineffaceable
impression of his fantastic landscapes still
glows in my soul, but what a pity that this
visionary had to confine his faculties to atmos-
pheric glories alone ! I can picture to myself
with enthusiasm what a wonderful and potent
artist he would have been had he known how
to combine his visions of magical landscapes
with the power of figure composition !
I have said already, and I like to repeat
it, that Landscape is only possible and tolerable
in art so far as it serves as background to some
human action. The scenic illusions of the stage
are a proof of what I advance.
Never did landscape receive a higher poetic
significance than in the Elysian Fields in
Gliick's " Orpheus," because never has it so
artistically fulfilled its part as a background.
In that case, landscape was what it ought
always to be — the pictured space across which
the human form moves. A great lesson in art
is to be derived from this sublime scene. Gliick
shows himself there to be not only a great
musician, but also a great painter.
Landscape means background. The painter
who paints a landscape under the pretence
The Threefold Harmony 23
of merely practising his palette or by way of a
study will be doing right. He will be wrong every
time he exhibits this acrobatic feat of his brush.
Landscape, as far as pictures are concerned,
is one of the illegitimate forms of Art. And,
further, it is the product of a decadence. In
fact, landscape entered the province of art
at the time when the great Italian art was
falling into decay. Gradually those less skilled
diminished the representation of the human
form in their increasing pictures of Nature,
and nowadays the incapable have allowed it
to completely disappear. It may be said that
a work of art strictly begins by being a Sensation
— a physical, inferior, realist state ; an Emotion
— a middle state in which the soul is moved,
and sentiment awakened ; a Conception — a
loftier, ideal, and spiritual state. What is
sensation then ? For the most part artists and
critics do not know what it is. They say very
evasively, defining it in general terms, that it
is " the vibration of our whole being," without
knowing either how or from where this vibra-
tion comes.
From a physiological, as well as psychological,
point of view, sensation is that sensitive force
of which the nerve cells are the conducting
threads. It is by Sensation that the sense
perceptions of the body are communicated to
the Consciousness. But by what are Life and
Will communicated to this Consciousness ?
24 The Nature of Idealism :
By the centre of emotion in a being : the
heart. Through the heart indeed we feel
sensations of pleasure or grief, because pure
sensation is here still belonging to the state
of instinct, a pleasure or a grief being uncon-
scious of or outside our will. In the emotional
centre, the heart, which draws its fluctuations
from these elements of life which are ever
shifting and allied to the soul, we reach the state
of emotion. By means of it are manifested
sentiment, the passions, love, hatred, etc.
Finally we reach the mental and spiritual state ;
that is, the region of inspiration. Through that
are gained the perceptions of truth or false-
hood, beauty and ugliness, etc. A materialist
writer on art, Gabriel Seailles, has formulated
a great artistic truth without suspecting the
occult reality of what it conveys : " An image
is the sensation spiritualised." It is sensation,
which, penetrating the higher kinds of vibra-
tions, is transformed to such a degree that it
becomes perception.
It is then that there is accomplished what
is termed, with regard to a philosopher, the
association of ideas, and with regard to an
artist, the formation of images ; it is then that
Sensation is transformed into Emotion, and
becomes, under the complicated action of the
spiritual forces set in motion, thought and will.
That is where creation begins, and the point
whence the work takes shape. The organ which
The Threefold Harmony 25
serves for the psychic transmission of thought
is the brain. Needless to say, these forces
perform their functions with the organs more
quickly than one can write about them. Without
attempting to explain here how the vibrations
of thought act on the matter of the brain, it
is sufficient to say that the idea is transmitted
with the rapidity of lightning.
According to the hierarchy of creative
vibrations, the work is evolved in the true
artist by Idea, Image, and Form. The idea
is the mental connexion ; the image is the
astral connexion ; the form is the physical
connexion. The physical corresponds with
sensation ; the astral corresponds with emotion ;
the mental corresponds with inspiration.
The man who is an artist is then impelled,
impassioned, or inspired according to the centre
which acts on his consciousness ; that is to
say, he is at different times under the low
domination of instinct, the body ; under the
intermediate influence of sentimental emotion,
passion, the soul ; and under the higher inspira-
tion of spirit, the psychic being, the life of
intellect and will. The work, considered for
the sake of analogy as a kind of being, will
have, as man has, a Body, Soul, and Spirit. It
will possess, then, three harmonious influences
forming its vital unity, namely, a plastic Form,
a pure Emotion or lofty Sentiment, and an
Idea. To be complete, proportionately to its
26 The Nature of Idealism
origin, a work of art should show the twofold
action of involution through the Idea to the
Form, and evolution of the Form towards the
Idea.
Ill
The Principle of Beauty
To attain Perfection, Art must express Beauty — Artistic Laws do not
interfere with the Artist's Personality — The Artist dependent on
Beauty — Beauty an Absolute Principle — Necessity for studying the
Laws of Cosmic Ideas — The Art of the Future an Art of lofty Emotion
and Reason — The Law of Beauty the Law of Life — Life is Harmony,
Harmony is Beauty — The Harmony of Sound and of Form — The
Physical and Mental phases of Nature — The Mirror of the Divine —
Modern Ugliness : Academic, Realistic, Amorphous.
ON no pretext can it be denied that the
essential end of Art is Perfection, which
is nothing more than Beauty expressed
by means and pure conceptions of everything
ugly. This does not mean that Perfection will
be found under the limitations of an ideal
based upon an immutable formula and process.
The first condition of a work is that it shall
be beautiful. But beautiful how, and in what
way ? Beautiful in itself, the eclectic school
will invariably reply ; that is, all those who
have only a poor comprehension of art, and
who do not know upon what mysterious and
sublime foundations the whole theory of art is
reared. A work of art, to deserve that rare
term, must be beautiful in a threefold way, or
it will not be so at all. I know that to demand
this requires an equilibrium and a harmony
in the creative powers of the artist very rarely
met with in this age, taking into consideration
the material tendency of modern ways of
thought, and the weakness of artists in striving
towards perfection. One often hears it said
by superficial people, and I have often seen
28 The Principle
it written too, that it is dangerous for the
development of personality to lay down
principles for artistic creation. From that,
say they, spring conventions (poncifs) and
schools. There is no absolute Ideal, shouts
one side ; there is no absolute Beauty, shouts
another. Now the disastrous error of the
conventional schools simply rests in wishing
that principle should replace the artist's
personality , which must inevitably result in
an absurd generalisation ; that is, a " poncif."
What constitutes the absurdity and poverty
of true conventional art is the principle of
uniformity in composition and execution. But
to deny the laws of art on account of an error,
either of a special or general character, formu-
lated by a school that has gone astray is to
fall into the same absurdity ! There exists
a Law of Art, as there exists a Universal Law,
mother of all other laws. To deny the existence
of Laws is nothing more or less than proving
oneself to be insane, or unconscious, which
comes almost to the same thing. Beauty has
its absolute ideal, as mathematics has its
absolute number. Just as the mighty harmony
of the physical and moral world indicates
and reveals to us the evidence of an immutable
wisdom, of principles and eternal laws, and
of an infinitely active creative intelligence
forming the Absolute, so in the same way
Art has its absolute principle.
of Beauty 29
Many eminent writers and philosophers, who
are still victims to the great illusion of our
modern materialistic individualism, believe that
beauty depends on the individual artistic
genius alone. To them beauty exists only so
far as personality makes it manifest, and
outside personality beauty has no existence.
They declare consequently that there is no
ideal absolute beauty at all. According to
this untoward theory, well designed to develop
the vanity of art and destroy the love of the
Beautiful, it is not the artist who depends on
Beauty, but Beauty which depends on the
artist ! And that is equivalent to saying that
man does not depend on Life, but Life depends
on man, or that it is not Law that causes
phenomena, but that phenomena is the cause
of Law. As a mistaken idea of metaphysics,
a mistaken idea of art criticism, we must deplore
all its manifold consequences.
It is not difficult to understand that if
there exists an absolute principle of universal
equilibrium by which the probelm of contra-
diction is solved, there exists also an absolute
principle of Beauty, which is beyond all imper-
fections. Beauty could not be the unconscious
consequence of the play of our fancy, whether
that of genius or not. The creative intelligence
of the artist is not set in motion by the mere
accident of the action of the brain, outside the
ideal world.
30 The Principle
The artist, in order to evolve, will have
to extend the study of nature to the great laws
of cosmic Ideas. That knowledge will urge him
to penetrate the mystery and hidden meaning
in the forms of the visible World.
He will have thereafter a clearer conception
of Life. In accordance with Truth, by the
light of esoteric Science, he will perceive more
clearly the splendours of the Divine, the
splendours of the Universe, and the splendours
of Man ; that is, eternal Harmony and Beauty.
The artist in his art, as the sage in his science,
must be in agreement with the harmony of
the world.
As matter is a unity, so Beauty is a unity,
though manifested by a different kind of vibra-
tion. It is the duty of the artist to seek this
Beauty through the various degrees in which
its appearance undergoes alteration.
The Art of the Future will inevitably be an
art of lofty emotion and lofty reason, or it will
be nothing at all. " The artist of the future,''
says Peladan, " will be he who shall consciously
have established an agreement between his psychic
personality and universal science, in just harmony
with Life and the Ideal."
The Law of the Beautiful, which in itself
comprises the whole evolution of art, is the
same, to use an analogy, as that which governs
Life. Pure Beauty reflects the essence of the
World. To anlayse Beauty ; that is, to seek
of Beauty 31
for its principles, is to endeavour to learn the
causes and laws of universal mystery.
Beauty is the synonym of Truth.
God, or, for greater clearness, the Universal
sum of Essence, the eternal principle of that
which has, is, and will be, is manifested in Art by
the same laws as those by which He exhibits His
external aspect in Nature or the physical plane.
The idea of God corresponds to the idea of
supreme Harmony, which agrees with the idea
of Unity. Life is neither unconscious in its
creation, nor spontaneous in its evolution.
Life is Harmony ; Harmony is Beauty !
Concerning vision as much as hearing,
harmony does not belong exclusively to the
domains of music or sound. As sounds are
produced by the vibrations of the air, colours
are produced by the vibrations of ether. It
is impossible to put harmony and rhythm in an
exclusive category. Rhythm, or harmony,
exists as much in the world of forms as in that
of sound. In music we hear harmony ; in
plastic art we see harmony.
Universal Harmony, the divine law of Equili-
brium, which is in beings and things, will be
perceived in different but analogical methods
of idealism, as real, alive, and perceptible,
in the works of a Pheidias or De Vinci, as in
those of a Beethoven or a Wagner.
For between the sound and form there is
a mystic communion that the study of magical
32 The Principle
incantations will especially enable one to
perceive and understand.
The creative power of the World is expressed
by Form. The divine mirage of created life,
it reveals to our spiritual gaze the mystery
of art, for Nature is not art, but art is concealed
in Nature like a supernatural treasure. Genius
lies in seeing the glitter of this treasure through
the physical density of matter.
The realist or impressionist artist is only
in touch with the physical plane of Nature,
the lower objective plane.
The idealist artist, generally speaking, and
genius, in particular, are in touch with the
mental plane, the superior subjective plane.
That is why artists of genius are seers, that
there are exceptions, and that mere craftsmen
are innumerable !
The ideal is in us, and we are in the ideal.
The spirit seeks or guesses at the spirit of
Nature, which is the secret beauty of things,
the essential image beneath the image of sub-
stance, the subjective form under the objective
form, the unseen in the seen.
Human thought, reflecting God and Nature,
is evolved in a similar way to this. Natural
selection, which affects both the vegetable and
animal planes, is concerned likewise with
humanity or the plane of the ideal.
Occult cosmogony teaches that the physical
universe is the materialisation of the fluid
of Beauty 33
universe. In fact all forms of Nature pre-exist
in a fluid state before existing in a state of
objective matter. The great cosmic problem,
as far as natural phenomena (phenomenisme
natnrant) is concerned, can have no other
explanation, and as long as positive science
refuses to recognise this elementary and experi-
mental truth, it will not unravel the secrets
of matter, which, with such childish pride, it
thinks that it has defined !
The creative powers which are manifested
in Nature are not limited to the laws of physical
activity alone, based upon the illusory relation
of our five organic senses.
But we may henceforth declare, in spite of
the blind protest of narrow minds, that what
we call Reality is no more Truth than it is
Beauty, of which it only contains the mysterious
and divine germs.
The origin of the Beautiful is the origin of
Creation, and the origin of Creation is God !
Beauty is the daughter of the Absolute. It is
its most harmonious plastic emanation. It
is the soul of Form, the reflection of the Essence
in the Substance. It is the truth of Essence
in the falsity of Matter, since, as a lucid philoso-
pher has put it, external forms exist, but are
not.
He who through the real forms can see the
combination of the three powers, the three
states, the three mysterious equilibriums, he
D
34 The Principle
alone will understand life and the secret of its
aesthetic growth, he alone will understand the
power of Art !
Art, like Life, has its origin in God. Like
science, Art reveals God. Beauty is the Mirror
of God.
Every work that does not cause God to be
felt is an abortion, the lees of all that is imperfect,
the ashes of empty technique, a labour false
and useless. Whether it be expressed through
Evil or Good, through sin or prayer, Beauty
must be either the sullied mirror or the open
stainless sky, o'er which is wafted the terrible
and sublime thrills of the Divine.
But how degrading to modern art is the
impertinence of inferior artists who abuse form
in every possible way in their clumsy abomina-
tions, their endeavours to be archaic, and their
feeble imitations of early times when art could
still only stammer !
It is in Ugliness, which is stamped on all the
strange grimaces of elementary expression, all
dark forms of animalism, the pitiable imprint
of some embryonic mystery, that degenerate
imaginations, artists who have gone astray,
and degraded minds, take refuge.
For the conventional ugliness of academies
they have substituted the ugliness of realism
and finally the ugliness of amorphousness.
A barren infatuation, induced by the bad
taste, or the errors of a few idle aesthetics or
of Beauty 35
artists, lacking balance, has brought about a
return to the dark days of art by degrading the
human form, and thus confusing the expression
of moral beauty with its most pitiful elements.
This grotesque retrogressive idealism, which
is the negation of art and its evolutionary
impulse, results in corrupting the artist's
personality or making him return to his child-
hood.
IV
The Importance of Theory
Harmony of the Natural, the Human and the Divine — Animal Perception
of Colour — Colour a Medium of Expression, not an End — Objections
to Idealist Theory — Need for Theory in order to conceive " The
Universal " — Every Genius is a Theorist — What is the Beautiful ? —
Shortcomings of Academic and Scientific Methods — The Poetry of
Things and the Poetry of Ideas — The Salvation of ./Esthetics—
The Artist must follow the Living Tradition, not the Dead.
A WORK of idealism, then, is that in which
the three great Words of Life are brought
into harmony : the Natural, the
Human, the Divine. To reach that degree of
artistic merit — which is not attained at the first
attempt, I am quite convinced ! — there must
be found in the work the purest idea within the
scope of the mind, the most beautiful form in
the whole range of things that have shape,
and the most perfect technique in the execution.
Without idea, the work fails in its intellectual
mission ; without form, it fails in its mission
towards nature ; without technique, it fails to
reach perfection. No wise critic, no thoughtful
lover of art, no intelligent artist, will gainsay
with any show of reason this tendency of idealism,
which is pre-eminent over every other formula
of the schools, because it is that of Art as a
whole, of almighty Art ; and nothing will
prevail against it either now or at any future
time. The true character of a work of idealism
is to be found in the equilibrium which governs
its production ; that is, in preventing either the
idea, form, or technique from predominating
to the detriment of one or other of the three
The Importance of Theory 37
essential terms ; but that they should always
be balanced as far as possible agreeably in
proportion to their respective value. I think
it may be of use to cite examples with regard
to this. Wiertz,* a man of impulsive imagination
(imaginatif — impulsif), that is, almost insane
according to pathology, has confusedly expressed
his often commonplace ideas in chaotic forms,
and with a deplorable technique. With Wiertz
the imagination in its degree of instinct held
sway to the point of vertigo,fand for form
allowed him only the ugliness of his fantastic
and extravagant Homeric battles.
As an example of a different kind, I will
mention De Braeckeleer,f a man of small
* Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) occupies a unique place in the history
of Belgian art. Owing to his dislike for parting with his paintings, he long
remained little known outside his own country, and, though possessed
of strong individuality, left behind him no followers. He early came under
the spell of Rubens, and the great aim of his life was to rival the works
of that master. His genius was of such an eccentric nature that his work
was curiously uneven. Always fantastic and extravagant, he was often
dominated by a great and noble impulse, as in his huge canvases, " The
Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus," " The Triumph
of Christ," " The Revolt of Hell," and " The Last Cannon," but at other
times he descended to what was meretricious and sensational. Some of
his work, as " Hunger, Madness, and Crime," " Buried Alive," " The
Thoughts of aSevered Head," are the productions of a morbid and neurotic
fancy. Not content with oil as a medium for painting large canvases
he set to work to discover a medium for himself. He eventually painted
most of his works in a lustreless medium, which he termed " peinture
mate," very coarse in quality, and looking at a distance like a rude tapestry.
He endured considerable poverty, but, with the exception of portraits,
refused to paint for money. " Keep your gold," on one occasion he said,
" it is the murderer of art." His works are all gathered, as in his lifetime,
under one roof in the " Musee Wiertz " at Brussels.
t H. de Braeckeleer, a Belgian painter, a pupil of Leys, the leader of
the Realist School. His subjects are mostly interiors painted in warm
golden tones. He is represented in the Brussels gallery by "A
Geographer," " The Interior of a Farm," and " A Shop."
38 The Importance
intellect bordering on degeneracy, who only
knew how to look at things with the eye of an
animal ; that is, according to the receptive
power of the optic nerves rendered more or
less active by the work of digestion. If a cow,
in its ruminating state, could paint, it would be
the finest of colourists, its retina then possessing
an extraordinary visual sensibility. This peculi-
arity explains why the realist painters who
excel in colour are generally great eaters and
drinkers ; and of limited intelligence. And
with respect to this I invite my brother painters
to make a little experiment, which will not fail
to edify them : While fasting, or nearly so,
paint some object, solely from an objective
point of view, and then repaint the same object
during the process of digestion, after a heavy
meal. Compare the two studies with regard
to their colour, and tell me if that done under
the influence of digestion will not be richer and
more glowing than the other !
It must be understood that what results
from this particular condition will be in propor-
tion to the optic power of the retina. The
painter who is not a colourist will not any the
more possess the gift of colour, but his eye,
influenced more or less by organic action, by
that portion of vital force which circulates in
the organ, conveyed by the blood globules and
induced by the process of digestion, will be
better enabled to seize the appearance of colour.
of Theory 39
I allow myself to make this observation, based
upon a theory, which, although of a physiolo-
gical nature, proves clearly that colour — as far
at least as it is understood by the realists,
spottists, and dottists — is not by any means
a faculty depending on the artist's genius.
This disconcerting theory proves likewise that
colour must never be the painter's end, but his
means of expression, and it is this that Dela-
croix,* a great, but intellectual, colourist, has
so forcibly demonstrated in his works and
expatiated upon in his writings. Ever new
theories, those will thoughtlessly cry who seem
not to have observed that man cannot open his
mouth or take up his pen without theorising !
In science, theory is often derived from
natural phenomena, but it may be said that
in art phenomena emanates from theory.
The unknown sublime creator of the Venus of
Milo, to reach that degree of beauty, had to
theorise as much, I presume, as the ingenious
mechanician Edison had to do in order to
produce his phonograph.
Laws and principles exist everywhere in
Nature. The law or the principle is not by any
* Eugene Delacroix (179S— 1863x; was one of the leaders of the French
historical and romantic school. He refused on principle to go to Italy
lest the old masters, either in spirit or manner, should impair his originality
and self-dependence. He appears to have been one of the first modern
painters to concern himself scientifically with the reactions of comple-
mentary colours, for he is said to have made observations on them as early
as 1825, anticipating the complete exposition of Chevreul. He had quantities
of little wafers of each colour, with which he tried colour effects. He was
thus the forerunner of " pointillisme."
4° The Importance
means synonymous with the formula. Life is
the expression of law. Without law there is
no life. The genius is not he who discovers
the formula but the law. Whilst the formula
limits and narrows the field of artistic creation,
the law enlarges, broadens, throws light upon
it. The formula is the barrier which closes ;
the law is the infinite which opens. And the
infinite is not disorder or chaos, but the geometry
of ideas wherein the mental compass of genius
measures the relations of God with the world.
A theory is good or bad according to the
source whence it originates. If, for example,
it emanates from antiquated artists, frozen
beneath the icy breath of an academic clique,
then, and only then, it is dead before it is born.
Thence assuredly nothing ideal or living can
come ! But if the theory is formed in the name
of an evolutionary intellectual impulse, in the
full sunlight of a clear and powerful vision, why
be suspicious of it and treat it with contempt ?
The stock phrases habitually used as objections
to the idealist theory in particular are : " Does
the nightingale theorise ?" " Has a bird a theory
with regard to the construction of its nest?"
" Do bees theorise ? " And in this way puerilities
are piled up, without it being seen that to
establish a comparison between the mechanical
function of the animal and the creative faculty
of man is utter folly. What should we say of
a musician who warbled for ever two or three
of Theory 41
identical notes, although it were under the
brightest of moons in springtime ? We will not
press it. But in what way may it be answered ?
Has the " Treatise on Painting," by De Vinci,
who laid down theories even with regard to
technical rules, prevented the works of that
glorious master from shedding their lustre
through the ages ? Has theory aged him ?
No. It makes him grow ever younger, and
future generations will only bow lower to
him !
A fruitful and expansive theory does not
pretend to do more than to instil into art
an evolutionary process, and to offer to the
artist's comprehension an orientation favourable
to the development of his latent powers. Theory
which pretended to give talent or genius to
those who had it not would be merely foolish.
Now, idealism, as much as theory, is an orienta-
tion— an ascending orientation !
Plato, whom many read, but few understand,
has said clearly that the duty of the soul is
to conceive " The Universal." Now, to conceive
the universal, it is necessary to understand
the law, the principle. But the simpleness of
common philosophy, and the lack of familiarity
in the modern mind with the terminology of
metaphysics, has caused many critics and artists,
confusing the law with the formula or the
principle with the system, to fall into an
absurd passion at an imaginary obstacle.
42 The Importance
The mark of genius is the knowledge of how
to find laws and how to apply them to its
inspirations and whatever it produces.
Pythagoras must seem terribly dull to those
who never will understand his theory of
Numbers, a theory on which mathematics and
geometry have been built. Was not Wagner,
that tremendous innovator, a passionate
theorist ? And so were Goethe and Baudelaire.
Was there a more learned theorist than Leonardo
de Vinci ? Does not the anarchist, so particu-
larly vehement in his denial of everything,
the ardent foe of every principle, of every law,
enunciate theories in order to compass the means
of destruction ? Whether speaking or writing,
affirmatively or negatively, theories must still
be advanced ; to deny eclecticism, or to defend
it, is to continue to theorise.
In fact, inferior minds are ever scared by
theory, and this aversion to everything theore-
tical is one of the sad symptoms of our time.
It is through this that modern times have,
unfortunately, become so painfully certain that
man is powerless to discover the Truth or the
Absolute, a certainty which produces that
vague intellectual stupidity, noticed by
Wronski,* the colossal esoteric mathematician,
the unrecognised and little known author of
* Hoene de Wronski in 1811 announced a general method of solving
all equations, giving formulae without demonstration. In 1817 the Academy
of Sciences of Lisbon offered a prize for the demonstration of Wronski's
formulas. It was given for the refutation of them.
of Theory 43
" The Reformation of Human Knowledge." In
the province of contemporary fine art for the
most part this intellectual stupidity is un-
deniable. It is owing to it that they have
come to consider as superfluous Style, Propor-
tion, Idea, and all that aids in the search of
ideal beauty. When we think of the Greek
artists passing through a real initiation, before
realising works of such imperishable beauty,
we are right in believing that theory can bring
about the purification of aesthetics. Compare
the artists of old with their theories with those
of the present day who have none ! " Admire
the beautiful " is a formula of eclecticism which
is far too vague. The tradesman will fall into
an ecstasy before the most ridiculous productions
under the pretence that he admires everything
beautiful ! The essential thing is to know how
to discern what is beautiful from what is not,
in Nature as in the Work. These are the very
rudiments of aesthetics. They cannot be avoided,
unless one would remain in a condition of
mediocrity in which the understanding is
warped.
Between the retina and the spirit there is
the same difference as there is between looking
and seeing. Painters like Seurat and Signac,*
* Both Seurat (d. 1890) and Signac are prominent Impressionists and
exponents of the " pointilliste " method. The former is said to have been
the first to carry into practice the systematic decomposition of colour by
this method, which consists in the intimate juxtaposition of dots of colour.
With regard to their theory see an article by Signac, " D'Ettgdne Delacroix
au Neo-Impressionisme." (Revue Blanche, 1898).
44 The Importance
in spite of their analytical qualities, will remain
ineffective. The impressionist creed has proved
so far that when the painter's eye is disconnected
from his soul, his spirit, and the Ideal, he will
only be, however rational his process, a barren
craftsman and not an artist. The scientific
painters have forsaken Beauty as much as
those who paint academically. Both are the
slaves of method, and remain without inspira-
tion, without ideal.
The characteristic of modern schools which
borrow their theories from pantheistic material-
ism, is that they only seek the poetry of Things,
life only being apparent to them through the
senses or its external aspect, whilst idealism
tends to perfection by the search and assertion
of the poetry of Ideas. The idealists affirm
the power of Life, but, having a fuller con-
sciousness, they have a deeper, more perfect,
holier, purer, and more divine conception of
Life.
To be impatient at the spiritualising of art
is to be wanting in clearness of thought. For
the lover of art, the artist and the philosopher,
who can see a little further than their noses,
the elevation of the Notion can rescue Art
from the degenerating influence of materialism.
It is the duty of every initiate, of every real
lover of art, of every undoubted artist, to work
for the Salvation of ^Esthetics. " As a first
condition of this Salvation," says Peladan,
of Theory 45
" those who excel in technique must recognise
the rule of esthetics, and the idealists must be
infallible in technique ; otherwise they will not
fulfil their great mission as the saviours of light."
The duty of present artists will be for the time
not to give themselves up to false traditions,
nor too much to the Realism that surrounds
them, in order that they may reach a point of
equilibrium with regard to technique, form,
and idea.
If masterpieces seem to have an air of relation-
ship about them it is because the masters knew
how to subordinate their Personality to the unify-
ing light of the true Tradition; that is, the whole
of the great laws of aesthetics. The artist who
is at the same time possessed of high sensibility
and high discernment, and goes to Italy, is
better enabled to understand the influence of
tradition, which keeps the artist's conception
in the higher spheres without allowing him to
descend to the commonplace or to individual
mediocrity, without his personality suffering
by its free expansion. There is a dead and a
living tradition. The dead is that which, anni-
hilating in the work the creative personal force,
substitutes for it the uninspired smooth applica-
tion of school formulae ; the living is that which
is in eternal accord with the evolution of art
in general and with the evolution of personality
in particular, ^schylus, Sophocles, Pheidias,
Michael Angelo, Raphael, De Vinci, in the same
46 The Importance
way as Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau,*
Burne-Jones, Watts, f and Wagner are of the
living tradition ; while Bandinelli, Lebrun,
Canova, Chenavard, Navez, Bouguereau,
Gallait,! and so many others, are of the dead.
The first are the great classics, the second are
governed by conventions. The great classics
are those who are greatly inspired ; the con-
ventional are those whom inspiration has for-
saken. Among human beings, endowed with
* Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) (French), endeavoured in every way
to foster Idealism in Art. He regarded his duties as a professor in the
" Ecole des Beaux Arts " as a real apostleship. He endeavoured, by
assimilating the traditions of the past, to create for himself a new tongue
in which to give utterance to the deepest emotions of the soul. He revived
old myths and rejuvenated old symbols to represent under their imagery
the moral struggles of humanity. He bequeathed his house, containing
about 8,000 of his works, to the State.
t " He believes in a great priesthood of arts If anyone
suggested that before a man ventured to paint pictures or to daub with
plaster he should be initiated with some awful rites in some vast
and crowded national temple, should swear to work worthily before some
tremendous altar or over some symbolic flame, Millais would have laughed
heartily at the idea, and Leighton also. But it would not seem either
absurd or unreasonable to Watts." — G. K. Chesterton on " Watts."
t Bandinelli (1487-1595), Florentine School; historical subjects-
Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), French School; historical ind religious
subjects. Mme. Lebrun (1755-1842), French School ; portraits, landscape,
and history. Anotonio Canova (1757-1882), sculptor. A. W. Bouguereau
(b. 1825), French School ; subjects taken from the antique and invested
with a certain modern sentimentality. Gallait (1810-1887), Belgian;
mainly historical subjects of a sentimental character. He was for a long
time the leader of public taste in Brussels. Theophile Gautier wrote of him :
" M. Gallait has all the gifts that may be acquired by taste, judgment, and
determination. His art is that of a man of tact, of a skilled painter happy
in his dramatic treatment, but superficial." P. J. Chenavard, French School
(b. 1808), a pupil of Ingres. A typical painter of the conventional school of
the early part of the nineteenth century. His art was not without elevation
of thought, but very weak in the rendering of it. He had ideas, but his
method of expressing them was frigid and uninspired. F. J. Navez (b. 1787),
Belgian, pupil of David, and painted absurd compositions in the style of
his master. He was, however, an excellent portrait painter, there being a
strong analogy between his work and that of Raeburn.
of Theory 47
intelligence and will set in motion by their
ideal forces, there is a fatality which calculates,
weighs, and measures their thoughts, words,
and acts. Genius is the individuality in which
are most perfectly harmonised the Ego and the
Universal, personality, and tradition.
The creative intelligence of the artist cannot
be separated from the ideal world.
V
The Mystery of Form
Art Evolved from Line the Essence of Form — Form the Mystery of the
Physical World — Cult of Form indicative of High State of Civilisation
— Aid of Music in Comprehension of Form — Intervention of the Spirit
necessary for the Comprehension of Beauty — Style should be neither
Academic nor Anarchical, but in Harmony with the Artist's Soul —
" The Beautiful is the Ugly " : Misconception with regard to the
Phrase — Greek Ideals — Need for Initiation — Productions of Genius
not Spontaneous — Moral Significance of Nudity — It Reveals the true
sense of Nature — Is the Alpha and Omega of ^Esthetics — Art can be
regenerated by a study of the Nude — It evokes Humanity and the
whole Beauty of Life.
ART began with Design, with Line, and
Line is the very essence of Form. It
is important, I think, often to remember
this at a time like ours when works most lacking
in form pass as archetypes of schools called
" Free." j The decadence of Art can be seen
in the carelessness or incapability of artists
ignorant of design, and if nowadays the Ugly
has taken the place of the Beautiful in the arts,
it is, we may be certain, because the abstract
and vital sense of Form has been lost. Is not
Line the basis of all Architecture, of all Sculp-
ture ? In the works of Nature Line is the
signature of God. Line, let us never forget, is
the symbolical expression of the mysterious
relations which exist between Spirit and
Matter. Line or Form is the mystery of the
physical world, the mystery of Art, the mystery
of Beauty. It is only when civilisations reach
the maturity of their intellectual power that
t The " Societe Libre " was founded in 1868, the " Libre Esthetique,"
a continuation of the Twenty Club, in 1894.
l'homme dieu (j. delville).
[To face page 49.
The Mystery of Form 49
the cult of Form is developed and spread,
because the comprehension of Form always
necessitates in a people, if not a complete
education, a high state of mental development.
A great and sublime mystery links the Idea
with the Form.
It may be said that if music, considered as
social magnetism, helps towards solidarity of
life in rising civilisations, as well as in their
intellectual refinement, it is still nothing more
than a marvellous means of preparing the race,
the people, for an aesthetic comprehension of
Form. Music is the method of expression which
best corresponds to the unconscious sensibility
of the crowd, but Form, less vague and further
separated from the inferior condition where the
impression is received through the nerves, will
ever remain in a select sphere corresponding
best with the clear perceptions of the few.*
The great Goethe has said : " The soul conveys
into a design a portion of its essential being, and
the most profound secrets of creation are precisely
those which, with regard to its basis, rest upon
design and form." And has not Goethe also
said that design is " the most moral of things
requiring skill?" If I recall the fine phrase
of that sublime spirit it is in order that the
capital importance which men of the greatest
* With regard to the subject of Music, see Pater's Essay on Giorgione
written on the text that " all art constantly aspires to the condition of
music." Design may be compared with music when form and colour are
combined in arbitrary decoration.
50 The Mystery
genius attach to the plastic arts may be under-
stood, and it proves that if the plastic arts
do not instantaneously act upon the crowd,
it is because the crowd, devoid of consciousness
and culture, is psychologically incapable of
raising itself sufficiently to comprehend what
is difficult. It is obvious that Architecture,
Sculpture, and Painting, the three arts which
express Form in its different aesthetic aspects,
and from which emanate such a wealth of
idealism that they always necessitate the
immediate intervention of the spirit in order
to be understood, ought to cause the soul of
the artist to be elated. The grandeur of their
calling ought especially also to make them
appreciate how necessary it is that they should
have a lofty conception of their mission, what
strength they should put into their studies,
extending them even to Science and Philosophy,
so as not to stoop to the compromises which
mark the decadence by which modern art is
being overwhelmed.
The great error of the academic schools,
whence came such painters as Chenavard,
David,* and Lebrun, was in imposing a style
which was invariable and fitted to every condi-
tion of plastic art to the detriment of individual
* Jacques Louis David (Freuch, 1748-1825) was the leader of the
French Classical School. He used to say : " I wish that my works may
have so completely an antique character that if it were possible for an
Athenian to return to life they might appear to him to be the production
of a Greek painter." It has been said of his works that they are " coloured
statuary."
of Form 51
genius. Certainly a work without style is yet
a work on the border of realisation, but when
it is in a certain style (stylee), it should be so
in accordance with the personal condition of
the soul and spirit, and with the peculiar
character of the conception itself. Style is
then elevated to something that idealises —
the most difficult mode of aesthetic expression
to realise, but the most noble. Many dabblers
in Art have been influenced to such an extent
by conventional faulty ideas, and have become
such advocates of amorphism and lack of
form, as to declare style a thing to be despised
and old-fashioned, crying in every tone that Art
should be anarchical, without science, principles,
or rules, and that, after all, the first attempts
that were made, whether in painting or sculpture
however formless or ugly, were as much art
as La Samothrace,*- the Ilissus, or the Saint
Anne ! Realism and impressionism shouted
victory, because the leaders of these baneful
schools threw wide the doors of the Sanctuary
to give admittance to the barbarians of the
brush and chisel. It became the home of the
incapable and inferior, of vagabonds and
mountebanks, and such as, profiting by the
opportunity, adapted to it their pushing and
avaricious natures.
• The well-known Nike, or statue of Victory, from Samothrace in the
Louvre. A wonderful study of a figure in rapid motion The head and arms
and part of the wings are now wanting. It was set up by Demetrius
Poliorketes, b.c. 306.
52 The Mystery
The Beautiful is the Ugly ! This foolishness
has triumphed over Art. It has led to a false
view of aesthetics, the misdirection of talents,
and the corruption of the understanding. Since
it has come into fashion we have seen the
modern studios producing all the most dis-
heartening and repulsive work that the errors
of a decaying art give birth to. The artist, in
order to conform to the instinct of his age, has
had to seek the accidents of Nature, in order to
free himself from " old formulae ' and seem
original in the eyes of the multitude, which is
as foolish as it is full of admiration, and to
this moment as convinced as the artist that
the beautiful is the ugly ! Taine, a clear and
keen-sighted critic, has cried in vain : " True,
the ugly is beautiful, but the beautiful is much
more beautiful I " He was too clear and too
simple. One of the ancients could not have
expressed himself better, with more justice
and irony. Parnassus rather has been blown
up, and from the debris of the sacred mountain
they have set themselves to hew grotesque
abortions.
O Athens, if thou couldst see in what depths
the artists of the present age have caused the
Sacred Form to wallow, of which thou wert
the sublime parent, and ye, mountains of
marble, who wait till ye are quarried to serve
some time or other as materia), for works
revolting in their baseness and ugliness, ye
of Form 53
would tremble with shame and anger under
the Hellenic glory of your bright azure skies !
O Greece, radiant with thine ideals, who
couldst combine perfection of body with calm
understanding, render divine the joyous and
harmonious beauty of youth, and perceive
through the splendour of form the mystery of
rhythm and abstruse meaning of gesture,
who didst know how to regulate Life and the
Ideal, weigh Spirit and Matter, make repose
god-like and movement sublime, who couldst
balance in such proportions all parts of the
human form, from head to toe, and made man
" strong as a soldier of Pericles, and fair as a
disciple of Plato " ; thou, O Greece, towards
whom genius in ecstacy turns its gaze, if thou
couldst behold the terrible phantasmagoria of
our unbridled exponents of art, thou wouldst
believe that we had returned to a state of
primitive barbarism and consider that Art in
this world had come to an end !
In an age characterised by a harmony
between the occult sciences and the arts,
ancient Greece formed the aesthetic conception
of the ideal man. A divine perfection of the
human form was attained. That genius for
beauty was the result of the teaching revealed
by the esoteric doctrine of the temples, when
the Magi initiated artists into the Mysteries.
The Magi knew that the influence on society
of Beauty, which is a real element of happiness
54 The Mystery
and virtue, consists in elevating the soul of the
multitude by awaking in it an eternal sense of
harmony. The happiest peoples have the most
beautiful art. Goethe was right to say of the
Greeks that they had made of life a most
beautiful dream. It was through their power of
vision that the veil before the Unseen fell aside
before the young artists, philosophers, and
poets. And then they could see in the fluid
and transparent splendour of the Universal
Soul the archetypal forms of the pure Idea
evolving and the living perfect images of the
Spirit. The world of spirit and intelligence,
where the beings of Love and Light lead an
existence truly divine, was revealed to them.
And from that supreme contemplation of the
invisible and immortal life the artist seers
returned dazzled and illuminated for ever.
In their serene and ineffaceable ecstacy they
had received the great secret of Beauty.
Pheidias possessed that secret ; he, too, had
seen into the Light of Form, that pure and
subtle element of the essence of Life, that
inexhaustible Well of ideas and forms. And
with this reflection of the Divine in the angelic
intelligence of the Eternal Masculine and Eternal
Feminine he infused beauty into his sublime
marvels, as Pericles by its means shed splendour
on the State and Sophocles on the Theatre.
It was thus, through the vision of the initiate
into the living realms of Immortality, the bright
of Form 55
regions of glorified spirits where the real being
becomes apparent, freed from the many
impurities of the physical body, that material
image of moral ugliness and psychic imper-
fection, thus, I say, that Plato discovered the
wonderful formula of the aesthetic creed :
" Beauty is the splendour of Truth."
It is thus that everyone who has been
inspired, every genius, and all those who have
received initiation, have proved that Nature
is not truly such as it appears at the first
glance ; that it is so only in its most objective,
most imperfect, aspect, and that when con-
sidered from a material point of view it is
debased, in the sense that it is the negative
pole of the universal Spirit. For physical
Nature is the most obscure term of the involu-
tion of Spirit, and the harmonies of matter,
on which are founded the physical laws, are
only confusing illusions compared with the
more perfect harmonies of the Spirit.
We must not look upon the Venus of Milo
as a spontaneous creation, the result of fancy,
any more than the lyre of Orpheus, which is
the musical adaptation of the sacred Septenary
taught by the Egyptian priests. The ages of
strength and beauty are at the same time
those of Intelligence and Wisdom.
The divine perfection of Form in ancient
Greece ought to make us observe more clearly
that in the works nowadays which are based on
56 The Mystery
nature all that is of importance is the problem
of primordial forms and the divine genesis of
infinite perfection.
They knew, those old sages, that Beauty is
eternal, imperishable, and that it is the agency
by which the light of the ideal is transmitted
to human beings, and which, by the ugliness
of vice or evil, they continually obscure. And
that is why they suffered the sublime reflection
of the divine principle to glow through the
human form. Through their secret learning
they knew that the law of beauty and form
is the soul which, by a rational process, and
in proportion to its stage of evolution, creates
the bodily form which manifests it.
The creative forces of nature, like the creative
forces of the spirit, tend directly to Beauty.
The imperfections of the individual alone
contrive continually to lead astray and corrupt
the normal evolution of these creative forces
in their universal striving towards Beauty.
The nude alone brings us face to face with
the enigma of life. Real nudity in a work
of art inculcates also a teaching of high morality.
What does it matter if, as its adversaries
prudishly declare, it does not conform to
the social conventions of modern daily life !
The nude will not the less remain one of the
purest mediums of Beauty, and great artists
will not the less perceive its ideal and positive
value.
of Form 57
It is childish to think that trousers, aprons,
blouses, shoes, and dresses are fit subjects for
art and capable of elevating the soul. Clothes
generally, and modern clothes in particular,
merely show the ceaseless insane caprices of
fashion, changing from day to day, incongruous,
grotesque, ridiculous, since clothes have become
the enemy of the natural shape of the human
body, instead of being a covering which should
preserve its harmony and rhythm.
It is by the nude alone that the artist can
express the essential character of life, the
impersonal ideas, universal beliefs, and general
sentiments of humanity. The nude, I must
repeat, reveals the true sense of nature. And
nature has never been so reverenced and
studied as in the art of Greece. It appears there
in its double manifestation of the real and ideal,
in the reality of its ideal character. In it we
ever observe the clearly defined tendency of
harmony, style, and proportion to meet, through
the constant stud}/ and aesthetic observation
of nature, in an ideal type, which does not
mean a settled type (type convenu), as is too
often wrongly supposed. Artists in those days
studied the natural and spiritual laws of Beauty
as now we study the laws of the so-called exact
sciences.
To them art was not a conventional and
systematic rule, but the reason of aesthetics
consisted, in their eyes, in the positive and
58 The Mystery
abstract study of Beauty, that force at once
natural and ideal, and which, whatever sceptics
think, is one of the great problems of spirit.
The human body is the noblest ornament.
The nude is the alpha and omega of aesthetics.
All the science possessed by the artist is
summarized in it. It is fitted to express the most
subtle and most profound emotions of the soul.
It is furthermore by the study of the nude
that the fine arts when falling into decay
are regenerated. The great revivals of art,
in fact, are due to the study of the nude. Without
the least wishing to depreciate the value of the
Byzantine and Gothic periods, whose symbols
of expression were based upon the religious
theme of good and evil, and whose sombre
splendour was well calculated to arouse emotion,
it may be said that they had lost the sense of
the harmony of Beauty, because they rejected
the nude. Certainly Cimabue, Giotto, Orcagna,
and, above all, the gentle visionary Fra Angelico,
remain great in their Christian mysticism, but
they did not comprehend — they could not do
so, dominated as they were by the Spirit of
the time — that bodily beauty is not incom-
patible with that of the soul. It is only with
Botticelli, Leonardo de Vinci, and Michael
Angelo, that is, with the renewed study of form,
that the nude reappeared in its great plastic
and spiritual significance, and the Renaissance
was developed in the full glory of its idealism.
of Form 59
The nude has the high quality of being
synthetic, universal. Its representation evokes
the unity of beings ; that is to say, all earthly
souls are united and form a living being.
The nude can, therefore, drive from the heart
the crowd of ideas of social and psychic harmony,
destroying thus the instinct for separation and
differentiation which divides men. By evoking
Man it evokes Humanity, and the whole beauty
of Life, not life as we moderns understand it,
so neurotic, feverish, and filled with unhealthy
excitement, but the great universal life, which
makes fruitful the spirit and the earth, makes
both the stars and the soul glow with light,
causes space to vibrate, which palpitates in
the substance as in the essence, which rules
and moves the universe, beings, and things,
mortals or immortals, in the infinite rhythm
and mystery of Eternity, the divine macrocosm
and human microcosm, from which the universal
Beauty is ever shed and reflected, woven of
Love, Wisdom, and Light.
And when the artist has become conscious
of this Beauty, when it has appeared to him in
its unfading and divine splendour, he will
understand its mission. He will learn, in fact,
that this beauty which he seeks in the body, in
forms, is the same as that which is manifested
in sentiments and ideas, and that his duty as an
artist will be to make it glow in its purest
form, as the spark is struck from an unseen
60 The Mystery of Form
pebble, through the degradation and grossness
in which it has been imprisoned. And then
upon a mass of imperfections, realisms, and
short-lived ugliness, he will build a purer art.
He will save art from the frenzy of anarchy
and the petrification of academies. He will be
of those who return to the point — the point
of equilibruim ! — in the name of indestructible
and radiant Beauty, which the foolish and
incapable have grievously profaned, in the
name, goodness knows, of what wretched
instinct or antiquated convention. For the
artist who is not conscious of a divine force
making his human powers fruitful with Beauty,
and who, in the depth of his being, does not
perceive the God of Love and Harmony move
in the breath which sways worlds and men,
is unworthy to belong to civilisation. His
works will be abortions. His talent, if he has
any, will be wasted.
VI
The Spiritualising of Art
Signs of a New Age — The Science of the Ideal — The Spiritualising of
Science and Art — Disregard of Form in Modern Art — Realism based
on a Philosophic Error — Distinction between the Dreamer and the
Idealist — Music in Beauty of Form — Need for Spirituality in the
Artist — Art cannot result from sensation alone — Comprehension
" the Reflex of Creation " — The Beautiful in Art superior to the Beau-
tiful in Nature — The Individual Ideal leads up to the ideal — The
Artist an Alchemist when inspired by the Spirit — The Beautiful is
not one Form, but a harmony of Forms — It is Truth made manifest
in the Form by the Idea — The duty of the Artist to reveal Beauty to
Mankind — Art a Divine Force.
L
ET the modern artist not forget that a
new age is beginning, that the Idea is
returning to the earth, and that a purer,
fairer, race is about to inhabit the world !
Day by day the end of materialism is being
achieved. Science is forcibly being evolved
and transformed before the revelations of the
other world. The psychic sciences are arrayed
against the physical sciences, and set the occult
proof against that of materialism. The occult
sciences, the lofty teaching of theosophy, and
experimental spiritualism, are setting out to
conquer the future and, on the threshold of a
new age, are about to establish the Science of
the Ideal ; that is, the synthesis of science,
religion, and philosophy.
Above the overthrow of materialism, so
fatally crushing to the soul and spirit, already
soars, in the redeeming light, the mysterious
transformation of thought. If truth, scientifi-
cally, is the harmony of facts, then spiritual
62 The Spiritualising
facts, proving the Immortality of the Soul,
fall into harmony spontaneously to form truth,
which already rises to confront negation.
With this spiritualising of Science, there
goes on, side by side with it, the spiritualising
of Art. Just as materialism is a monstrous
abortion of modern philosophy, so realism,
its poisonous outcome, is in aesthetics an actual
anomaly, a case of flagrant degeneration in
the fine arts. We may seek in vain for an
extenuating circumstance which would excuse
the schools of realism or naturalism by con-
sidering them as an inevitable and healthy
reaction against the slavishness of the conven-
tional school, the old-fashioned dealer in recipes
and " poncifs." There can never be any excuse
for ugliness, whatever be the school that praises
or produces it. Ugliness cannot be the object
of the fine arts.
Nowhere in the history of the epochs of art,
that is, in those of civilisation, can one find
such a sheer fall into the shallows of the trivial
and commonplace as that brought about by the
contemporary school of realism.
If the better work of a few great spirits
had not been able to resist the many evils of
its corrupted state, it might be said, without
fearing to exaggerate too much, that Art to-day
seemed to have quitted the sphere of Form.
They have replaced creative genius by
sculptors without ability to conceive, soulless,
of Art 63
without the power of abstraction, often even
without intelligence, who make sculpture riot
in marble and bronze in every species of debased
Form, either taking a cast from nature, or feebly
and foolishly making a rough suggestion of it
— a kind of wild nightmare in plaster.
One will stupidly endeavour to reproduce
the superficial imperfections of the skin, while
another tries to give his sculpture the shapeless
appearance of kneaded mud.
With respect to those painters, without
idealism, and without idea, whose whole art
is contained in a tube of colour, and whose
complete lack of sense is barely concealed by
the clever trickery of touch, who only look in
a work of art for the reproduction of object
for object, and thing for thing, their eyes only
observe the phenomena of atmosphere. They
are tubes of colour which are emptied mechani-
cally on the canvas.
These colourists, lacking the conception of
form and the perception of the ideal image,
have brought about a reaction in art. Their
painting rests upon their digestion, and their
consideration of colour only rests upon the
part played by the eye, indifferent as they are
to everything appertaining to the spirit. The
nude, when, with sensual brush, they profane
it, becomes fleshly. Beneath their eyes and
fingers, animalism is transfused into every-
thing. These are the traders in " bits." Neither
64 The Spiritualising
kind seek for Beauty, but only for things
material, whether they be misshapen, common-
place, or vulgar. Taking it as a whole, the
realist and impressionist period will be held
as that which pauperised and prostituted the
fine arts.
Since Proudhon,* a celebrated sociologist,
but as commonplace in his views on art as he
is mistaken in his philosophy, and who
formulates a gross error in a piece of stupid
sophistry : " Since all things are equal, there
is nothing ugly!" artists and critics have
considered the back of a nude female to be
equal in beauty to De Vinci's " Head of Saint
Anne."
Realism, the very negation of art, springs
from a philosophic mistake confusing Life
with Substance. It perishes when that error
is swept away. But new artists have arisen,
to renovate philosophy and art by means of
idealism. These men know that the spirit
descends into form, form into matter, and that
without form matter expresses nothingness ;
that is, something which has no reality. They
know, in accordance with truth, that matter
is the extreme limit to which the spirit of
Beauty can be reflected, and that it is in
physical substance that it appears to our eyes
under its most shadowy and elusive aspect.
* Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), French writer on Socialism
and leader of opinion in the Revolution of 1848. Author of the famous
paradox, " La Propriety, c'est le vol."
^
O
D
PS
D
o
of Art 65
This idealist conception of art, in order to
avoid confusion, can be made still more precise.
Art, contrary to the simple notion of some
people, does not waver between the real and
" the dream," but between the real and the
ideal. The difference which lies between " the
dream " and the ideal may perhaps be expressed
thus : " The dream is the unconscious and
instinctive feeling of confused aspirations ; the
ideal is the ordered aspiration of the harmonious
will."
Art, then, is neither the slave of the real
or ' the dream." Art is that balancing force
which brings the rational into harmony with
the spiritual, emotion with reason, and the
natural with the supernatural. Nature is
a medley of enchantment and terror, of
ecstasy and awe. The monstrous is mingled
with the divine. It is an astounding chaos of
hidden glories.
Man is the Genius, the conscious and recep-
tive intelligence of mental, spiritual vibrations,
who from material elements will extract the
pure essence, the typical form, the initial idea.
In the same way as the musician of genius
translates the harmonies of invisible space
into natural sounds, the painter, the sculptor,
can translate the harmony of typical forms
which are in the invisible plastic light, living
prisms of divine beauties, in which are refracted
the splendours of the universal soul.
66 The Spiritualising
Do we know, indeed, whether the Harmony
of Form does not correspond to, or is not
actually, musical vibration rendered objec-
tive ? * Music is to be found in beauty of
form as mathematics in clearness of thought.
But before the sublime faculty of inner sight
is attained, before the power of making the
material spiritual is gained, the artist must
become spiritual himself. Then will inspiration
alone consist in making the idea enter into the
form, and realisation in giving form to the idea.
One does not become an idealist by the study
or imitation of the art of bygone masters, but
by idealising, spiritualising, one's psychic being.
Before understanding or attaining to the
purification of form, the artist ought to endea-
vour to purify his soul. The beauty of a work
does not depend merely on objective talent or
technical gift, but also on the psychic beauty
which emanates from its creator. An impure
soul, a base and evil heart, a perverted intellect,
a narrow mind, cannot belong to such as
Pheidias, Angelico, De Vinci, Michael Angelo,
Beethoven, Bach, or Wagner, since Beauty
is the divine aspect of the human Soul, and
the human Soul is God within God.
Art is the memory of the divinity within
Man. The work rises to perfection when the
will, that divine energy of thought, gains the
* Science has proved that waves of sound affect material objects,
so as to give rise to infinite variety of form.
of Art 67
victory over the lower nature which is guided
by instinct. The artist's calling, so degraded
now by the selfish and eager desire to satisfy
personal vanity, could be raised even to the
rank of apostleship if artists were fully conscious
of the grandeur of Art.
Let us never forget, if we wish to avoid a
common mistake, that Sensation of itself can
never conceive a work of true art. Sensation
is not creative thought. The poetry of images,
the sense of forms and colours, the life of
things, in short, are found in Spirit, but not in
what is properly called Sensation. The vital
vibration of Sensation acts evidently on intel-
lectual or psychic centres, but the result of
that sensation will ever be in proportion to
the capacity and power of our ideality. Two
persons of equal nervous sensibility, but differing
in their spiritual nature, if brought before the
same impressive sight, will not express their
sensations with the same degree of power.
Without spirit nature does not exist for
man. As looking does not mean seeing, so
feeling does not mean comprehension.
Now, comprehension, as someone has loftily
expressed it, " is the reflex of creation."
It is the sum of our ideal conceptions which
enables nature to be felt or expressed with more
or less power.
If in the creation of a work it were Sensation
that alone could perceive and judge as well
68 The Spiritualising
as the sight (which is false, on another ground,
since it is not the organ that approves or
passes judgment), what should we think of
Beethoven, who lost the sense of hearing, the
very organ of musical sensation, and to whom
the world of sound was henceforth closed ?
But we know that, starting from the moment
of his deafness, the musical genius of Beethoven
grew and developed with an extraordinary
intensity. He composed the ninth symphony,
his most complex work both with regard to
its orchestration and conception !
Let the physiologist who believes in automatic
action reply ! He cannot.
But those who understand the mysteries of
psychic man know that what constituted the
potential ideal of the musician, in short his real
inner being, did not need the physical sensation
of music for the purpose of expression or
creation in the conditions in which it was
placed.
We are not, it will be observed, endeavouring
to prove the uselessness of Sensation, but to
show that Sensation, instead of being the
beginning and end of a work of art, is only a
means towards it.
The Beautiful in Art, compared with the
beautiful in nature, is superior to it. Art and
Imitation are as wide apart as the poles.
One of the fundamental characteristics of Art
is that it is the manifestation of mental emotion.
of Art 69
The language of Imitation is the language of
servitude. Art belongs essentially to the
power of expression, and not to that of imita-
tion or impression. By this we do not mean
to say that the artist should withhold himself
from the contemplation and study of Nature,
which affords art the profusion of its materials !
The artist seeks and finds throughout nature
the universal potentialities of the creative
essence. Every true artist should have his own
personal ideal, but he must never be unmindful,
unless he would stultify himself, that above
his ideal is enthroned the ideal, more perfect
and more absolute than his own, towarde
which he ever moves, as he adapts the creativs
effort of his own personality to its laws. The
great artists are those who have a logical
intuition of these laws. They do not despise
theories when they are logical ; they make
use of them. But the inferior artist is the slave
of theory.
A work ought naturally to be the fruit of
many sensations, many impressions, many
thoughts, but all these elements are to be
co-ordinated, regulated by a superior force,
by a law or theory derived from that law,
otherwise the work will be artificial, confused,
and perishable. Yes, all things serve as material
for great work, provided that the Spirit is there
which governs and co-ordinates all things.
The artist is a kind of alchemist. Art is a
70 The Spiritualising
species of occult chemistry. Lead can be
turned into gold, but the laws which bring about
this wonderful transmutation must be under-
stood. Just as the magician by the radiation
of his will brings under his sway the wanderings
and formless forces of astral space, so the artist,
guided by his genius, brings into order the
imperfect images of life by infusing into them
the system of his thought.
The Beautiful, a Platonic mystic has said,
is not one special form, but the harmony of forms.
Between the creative wisdom of nature and
the form created by nature there is a vast
difference.
The Beautiful, considered in its ideal sense,
is not an illusion. Beauty is Truth made
manifest in the Form by the Idea. When
the artist draws beauty from ugliness, purity
from impurity, perfection from imperfection,
order from disorder, he reveals Truth, the
Divine, to humanity. The Beautiful, the True,
the Good agree one with the other.
The glory of Art is to know how to make
the eyes of profane humanity perceive these
three sublime harmonies. The ordinary man,
we must repeat, by himself only observes
what is immediately perceptible through his
senses. He, therefore, sees Nature under her
ugliest aspect. It is the mission of Art to make
him perceive the Beauty that lies behind things.
And this Beauty is not a fiction ; it exists,
of Art 71
it is real. It is not an illusion, but an essential
and invisible reality which escapes the superficial
glance of the crowd.
Let the artist and poet, whom a regrettable
misunderstanding keeps aloof from the soul
of mankind, which happily is intuitive and
devoid of prejudice, communicate to it the
ideal, the divine sense, of this Beauty, in order
that it should likewise turn from the Universal
Ugliness, of which it is the unconscious and
pardonable abettor ! And for that communion
to take place there is no need to specially
produce a " social art," than it is necessary
to create a " select art ' (art d'elite). Art
must not be the slave of doctrinal speculation,
or descend to the level and inclinations of a
particular class. Art must have a universal
meaning. The artist is he who, through the
thousand forms of universal life, seeks out the
supreme expression of Beauty for those who,
whether poor or wealthy, know how to perceive
and understand it in his work.
In the heart of every individual slumbers
an artist, a poet, which we must know how to
awaken. A spring of beauty and wisdom is
ever ready to rise up from the depths of his
being. Man is never absolutely incomplete.
If his dormant faculties often prevent him from
opening the eyes of his soul to the artistic
raptures of the world and art, it is the kindly
duty of the artist, the chosen person in whose
72 The Spiritualising
soul beauty is ever alive, to open them and pass
before them pure ideas under harmonious
images.
The simple man is nearer to beauty than
he thinks. But if light, sound, colour, form,
and idea are not understood by him in their
harmonious sense, and natural and ideal
relation, the sentiment of unity, the life of all
beauty, escapes him.
Now, it is by means of Art that the aesthetic
perceptions are developed. And human beings
are not made artistic by the conventional
Academic school, which only sees in the work
the object of an artificial arrangement of the
figure, its subjects being posturers, nor by the
Realist-Impressionist school, which considers
that work should be devoted to the imitation
of nature. One shows us body without soul,
the other things without idea.
The art of the idealist creates things of beauty
which are possible, and whose inner life radiates
from their action, form, and colour.
The idealist conception alone, emanating from
the artist free to create a world of beauty
moulded to his ideal, thought, and emotion,
can communicate to mankind, by making it
capable of perceiving it, that divine power
which binds together things, souls, and spirits
of the visible and invisible world, and enables
it to perceive the creative Wisdom, which is
the Ideal.
of Art 73
Art is by no means a vain whim of man,
due to the accident of selfish pride. Art is
one of the great forces that God has implanted
in the creature. It is our imperfections, our
instincts, our want of light, which too often,
alas, degrade Art to our own level, our own
ugliness, errors, and darkness.
Without any wish to be identified with
Tolstoi's creed of art, so poor and uncouth in
too many ways, I am bound to admire and
approve of this noble phrase of the venerable
apostle of Russia : " Art is not an enjoyment,
a pleasure, an amusement : art is a mighty
thing. It is a vital organ of humanity which
conveys the conceptions of reason into the domain
of sentiment."
VII
The Art of the Future
Struggle between Spiritualism and Materialism — Future of Art dependent
on that of Science, Religion, and Philosophy — Art will cease to be
" National " — Influence of Idealism on Modern Thought — Art con-
secrated by Metaphysics — Reconciliation between Science and
Religion — The Mission of Art to cause what is Comprehensible to be
Perceived — Influence of Art on Society — Art apparently doomed by
Modern Positivism — The Course of Art parallel to that of Science —
The Artist should show that his Work results from a High Ideal —
The Art of the Future will be based on the Triple Formula of Idealism
— Impressionism lacking in real ^Esthetic Emotion — Need of a clearly
denned view of ^Esthetics — The Art of the Future will be that of
Universal Love and Brotherhood — Art is intended to purify Mankind.
WHAT an enthralling problem, how con-
ducive to thought and able to stimulate
the artistic intellect, is the endeavour
to learn what Art will be to-morrow, what its
ruling influence will be, and from what unknown
springs it will draw the magic life of future
visions ! Many critics, such as think, philo-
sophers, and lovers of art, uneasy about the
future, and not perceiving any regular solution,
have been, and still are, haunted by the dis-
quieting wish to know the destiny of Art, or
at least to conceive a logical view^of its process
of evolution.
Owing to its spiritual essence Art is seen
to be so closely joined to the psychic condition
of mankind that it is necessary to begin with
studying and understanding throughout its
evolutionary growth the mysterious motive
power of ideas, and to determine the degrees
in which ideas are projected into the intellectual
jealms of our times. Now the age in which we
The Art of the Future 75
live, which will shortly upon the dial of the
revolving centuries mark the hour of a universal
redemption in the province of thought, is
hampered by two mighty currents of hostile
mode of thought, Materialism and Spiritualism,
both of which impetuously roll their waves
towards the future ocean of the Human Spirit,
in which each assumes that it will be the
positive element of truth.
Which of these forces will overcome the other
in its triumphant struggle ?
Before we can know what the Art of to-morrow
will be, we must ascertain what Science, Re-
ligion, and Philosophy will be in the future.
The revival of civilisations is in reality a
problem the solution of which is to be found
in the occult or supernatural depths of existence.
The present troubled period which precedes
the advent of the Spirit in this world, whose
reign will transform the human soul by directing
its vital and intellectual forces towards clearer
perceptions, is characteristic.
Just as nations will sweep away their natural
boundaries, and all moral and intellectual
barriers, so art will break free from nationality.
Art must not flourish merely as an ornamental
adjunct to one centre. If certain schools show
that they depend on natural surroundings and
a science of nature restricted and peculiar to
themselves, is there any reason to think that
the artist cannot and ought not to see and feel
76 The Art of
otherwise than through the eyes and senses
of his fellow-countrymen as a body ? The
painters who lack vision must inevitably depend
on one sky, one earth, one climate, one atmos-
phere, one type. They represent, indeed, what is
called " national " art. And for the evolution
of personal talent I know nothing worse than
this narrow feeling of nationality. For the
theory of environment (theorie du milieu)
advocated by official art patronage has become
a political principle, which requires the national
stamp, as in matters of buying and selling. Its
advocates and such as desire " nationalism '
in art fear too much a loss of originality, as
though real originality did not essentially dwell
in the creative personality of the artist, in the
ideal individual quality !
Great artists and all great men, for the most
part, instead of being bound by the prejudices
and limitations of the environment in which
they may be placed, prove superior to it,
separating themselves from it, and passing be-
yond it in the full display of their emancipated
personality, give free scope to the aspirations
of an ideal more in harmony with the dreams
of all mankind.
In the act of creation, the man, the artist,
the thinker, ought to vibrate in sympathy with
and on behalf of humanity, and not according
to the mode of thought of the place in which
he happens to be.
the Future 77
What is termed " national genius " or " generic
genius " (genie de l'espece) is too often only
the lamentable affection that a race exhibits
towards its instincts. The underlying spirit
of the race has sufficient power in itself, without
needing to magnify drawbacks and build
principles upon them. What is the relative
worth of native environment compared with
infinity of soul ? Did Holland give Rembrandt
his magic vision ? Did Germany create Wagner's
"Parsifal"? And if the sky, the soil, the climate,
gave birth to the art of Pheidias, Michael
Angelo and De Vinci, how is it that Greece and
Italy, whose sky and soil, atmosphere and climate,
have not changed, do not produce works of equal
value ? Art belongs rather to the realm of
ideas than to physical divisions of the Earth.
Those who are accustomed to watch with
spiritual eyes the events of the world see that
a Spiritual Force of a providential kind now
soars above the plane of human intellect, and
that its occult beams pierce the troubled depths
of men's hearts, penetrating them with a faint
but salutary light.
Yes, we bear within us, in the dark depths
of our conscience, the supernatural germs of
a new humanity which will have grasped the
mystery of life or its immediate relations to
the Other World.
For the truths of idealism, there is no reason
to disguise it, have begun to conquer the world
78 The Art of
of modern thought with a methodical and
positive sureness, which nothing can resist,
since it is the bright sign of the true evolution
through the Spirit, the mediating power which
must readjust the balance between the past,
present, and future.
Art, which has hitherto been hampered by
the contrary methods in which materialism
gives it encouragement, kept in the lower
sphere of a degraded spiritual state and within
national boundaries, Art will assume propor-
tions of which few have little suspicion !
Art has received the consecration of Meta-
physics. It already bears within it the new life :
the renaissance of the Ideal. This will be its
fruit.
It is necessary to state precisely the particular
redeeming character of the present movement
of idealism in art and of Idealism generally.
It is necessary to clearly and concisely explain
the civilising mission of Art, the destiny of light
which guides the artist and summarises, by
the very nature of its glow, the ideal world
which humanity bears in its heart. It is likewise
necessary to remark on the moral effect which
a work of art produces upon people, upon the
crowd, the moral influence of Art, more con-
ducive of health and peace than that of Politics.
Reason and Understanding will reign in
every sphere. Passions and sentiments will be
synthetically balanced. Rationalism, shorn of its
the Future 79
strength, will be definitely overthrown by the
triumph of Science, conscious of mysteries
revealed, but as yet unintelligible and unfamiliar.
Science and Religion ought to be reconciled,
to be the complements of one another and
remain indissoluble. This reconciliation must
necessarily take place. It will be the supreme
action of the rule of the Spirit. The absurd
and harmful antagonism between Science and
Religion. has already begun to grow weaker.
Man does not know anything of himself.
The powers or forces which constitute his
individuality have not been created by him ;
but he can, by the purifying influence of his
will or subservience to his passions, either
strengthen or destroy these forces.
The man of genius, he who is essentially
creative, is inspired. A higher power, an
occult force, act in and through him.
Now the same law takes effect in the universal
as in the individual. We have tried to indicate
this law in order that the sceptical reader may, by
means of his logical intuition, understand the pos-
sibility of mystery or the action of the universal
Spirit in mankind in the present and inthefuture.
We said just now that, before knowing what
the Art of to-morrow will be, we must find out
what Science and Philosophy will be, because
Art is the element which, most immediately
and in a way that has most social influence,
reflects their essential character. The Mission
80 The Art of
of Art is to cause what is comprehensible to be
perceived. In that lies the whole of aesthetics.
Art is not a fantasy of the human imagination,
nor the caprice of a few idlers ; it is an extra-
ordinary effort of the divine faculties of man.
Art is a sublime necessity which is brought
about and developed in accordance with the
progress of civilisation. It is neither above or
below other manifestations of the spirit : it
results from them and completes them.
Through the infinite veil, behind which the
unseen work of the Great Unknown is carried
on, Beauty sheds its light, quivering with the
divine radiance, the wondrous effect of the
mystic harmony of essence and substance, of
which works of art are the objective suggestions,
in proportion to the mental capacity of the
artist, inspired to receive them. It is sufficient
to reflect for a moment upon the strange
phenomenon of the artistic vocation to become
assured that Art has a definite reason for its
being, and that it consequently plays an
important part in idealising society.
Certain short-sighted thinkers, ever advancing
hypotheses, and whose pessimism is only the
sad result of their ignorance of everything
which concerns the secrets of life, have assumed
the doom of Art to be at hand, bewildered as
they are in the midst of the present confusion
of so many schools of such opposite teaching.
To their purblind gaze, this confusion, evident
the Future 81
but momentary, is a sure sign that the positivist
spirit of the age cannot be reconciled to the
aesthetic imagination ! They have never dreamt
of asking themselves if the age — the coming
age — would really be positivist or spiritualist,
and if the Science of the future would be the
same as that of to-day !
That is where, there alone, and nowhere else,
the very roots of the problem are to be found,
and whence conclusions may be drawn. Art
— we use the word in its widest sense — pursues
a parallel and like direction to that of Science.
Often, indeed, they clasp hands.
Art has been sufficiently degraded by Theory,
being said to be idle, and aesthetics to be merely
instinctive and fortuitous ! The petty theorists
about " temperament ' praise the art of idle
daubers who load their palettes with the matter
derived from their impure instincts and the
disorder due to their natural imperfections.
Critics and artists have gone arm in arm by
the path strewn with the debaucheries of
their " temperament," confident that they were
marching along the highway of Art !
Although we do not wish to insist that
each painter and sculptor, before setting about
a masterpiece, should write his little treatise
on aesthetics, it is at least necessary that he
should show that his work is the result neither
of mere calculation nor of chance, but the ideal,
emotional, conscious outpouring of his soul,
Sz The Art of
his thought, raised to the level of a subject,
inspired by some noble thought. Betwixt the
artist's life and death his Work alone remains
below. And this work, to be worthy of its name,
must not be the outcome of his instinct and
fancy, but the supreme effort of his soul,
through his will and love, towards Beauty.
It is not necessary that the artist's instinct or
method should be observable in his work, but
his whole consciousness alone ; that is to say,
his aspiration concentrated on an ideal of
perfection. Is it not more noble for the artist
to exhibit in his work, not merely his selfish
and vain ' personality," but his honest love
for the Beautiful ? For through this Love alone
the divine ray of genius is made manifest.
Yes, the artist, if he would gaze into the
divine brightness of Absolute Beauty, must
crystallize the immortal principle of his being.
At once intuitive and sensitive, through the
mysterious faculties which are the very condi-
tion of his creative life, he can then attain
perfection, for which otherwise there exists
but a vague and painful longing, and from
which the external life, that depending on the
senses alone, is far away.
But the time has come when the Fine Arts,
regenerated through Synthesis and penetrating
into the boundless regions of the Other World,
will at last become " the incorporation of the
Idea, the Word, in Forms of Nature."
the Future 83
The triple formula — Beauty of Idea, Beauty
of Form, and Beauty of Execution — which forms
the fundamental principle of idealist art, and
over which vague criticism will never prevail,
will not have been uttered in vain. It will be
the basis of the Art of the future.
Idealism, in art, in philosoph}7, and even
in politics, is the mighty and everlasting
movement towards the Better. We venture to
prophesy that the artistic creed of the future,
far from deteriorating, carefully preserved from
all that is romantic or academic, from naturalism
and impressionism, will no longer be the product
of the spontaneous instinct of superficial
temperaments. It will become the harmonious
concentration of the individual artistic faculties
and creative powers towards a complete art,
a harmony of form and intellect, worthy of
human beings that have undergone a moral
and spiritual evolution.
A higher conception of Beauty and Life
ought to form in the artist's soul side by side
with a healthier and clearer manifestation of
Emotion and Idea.
Impressionism, which is only a neurotic
realism or naturalism, has not been able to
inspire art with the real aesthetic emotion.
Fact, instinct, sentiment, the spontaneous,
the fleeting, the immediate, the instantaneous,
the ail-but, the relative, those are the only
themes of art which it has introduced into its
84 The Art of
process. It is the school of Objectivity and
Illusion. Separating the Ideal from Nature,
and Thought from Life, this school has become
barren. A false conception of Nature, a false
conception of Life, a false conception of Art —
such is the sum of the realist, naturalist, and
impressionist views of art.
Believing mental emotion, ideal emotion,
to be of no use, the majority of modern painters
instead of getting into communion with Nature,
have distorted it (de-naturie).
Much talent has been frittered away and lost
for want of a clearly defined view of aesthetics
and a mental inspiration. Many, rinding them-
selves possessed of real technical powers, have
only been able to utilise them in the representa-
tion of trivial and inferior things. The fact has
been too often ignored that just as the universal
and cosmic laws are the primordial conditions
of the whole natural, moral, and psychic
evolution of mankind, so in art the law of the
Beautiful is the condition of all perfection, of
all idealism. Artists at present, diverted from
their natural powers, unconscious of their
natural strength, contemptuous or afraid of
pure idealism, do not know how to adjust
nervous sensitivity, the psychological condition
of the modern race, to a lofty artistic expression.
Let us henceforward strive to facilitate the
natural evolution of Art by proclaiming the
power of the Ideal.
the Future 85
Without wishing to encroach on the province
of sociology, we may affirm, with our gaze
fixed on the progress towards the Best (le
Meilleur-Devenir), that the society of the
future, whose clear shadow can already be seen
on the broad luminous horizon of the new age,
will possess an art where universal Love and
human Brotherhood, the relations of Nature
to the Absolute, of the Invisible to the Visible,
of Matter to Spirit, will be the subjects that
will occupy the new-born ingenuity of the
Artist.
Artistic creation will proceed wholly upon
a higher level, whence everything distorted or
debased will be logically banished, since the
form will then be adequate to the thought.
The immediate Mission of Art is to purify
man. Deprive art of this mission, and there
remains to it only a barren imagery, able only
to interest the puerile soul of some idle virtuoso
or the commercial instinct of dealers, who find
in the wares of art something which may satisfy
their sordid lust for gold.
VIII
The Relations of Church and
State to Art
(i)
No utility in Uninspired Art — " Christian Art " the product of Religious
Materialism — Modern Religion prohibits Initiation into Sacred
Things — Transmission of the Universal Wisdom — Its ability to
achieve the Unity of Religions — The Fundamental Spirit of Chris-
tianity— Wisdom of East and West derived from a Common Source
— Key to the Secret Doctrine withheld by, and Beauty discoun-
tenanced by, the Church — Indissolubility of Art and Religion —
" Christian Art " debased as long as its Source of Inspiration is
corrupt.
" A RT, like Science, can enlighten the human
-£a» consciousness." It must never be made a
pretext for diversion or an easy method
of securing pleasure, and when it appeals to the
senses, that is to say, when it limits sensation
to the empty objects of grosser life, without
raising the spirit to the vision of the higher
life, when, in short, art does not remind the
human soul of the inner and divine aspirations
of Love, Charity, and Light, then it is better
to stamp it out, since it is then the cause of
a great and deplorable loss of energy both to
the individual and the community. Art which
has no thought, which does not purify, and
which, in a word, does not raise the soul above
the vain shows of earth is an art which has no
utility.
It may satisfy the limited understanding of
the inferior, it may satisfy the sordid personal
vanity of artists without ideal, whose name
Church, State and Art 87
is legion, but such an art will never lead towards
the true goal of Art.
It dwells outside the artistic consciousness ;
and among the different kinds of perverted or
decayed art there is one we must remark upon.
It concerns that religious materialism which even
now we still venture to call " Christian Art."
We know that the part played by the con-
temporary Church has been pitiable, not to
say culpable. Modern Religion, whose orthodox
and realistic mysticism has caused a material
conception of the Gospel Mystery, is seen to
be contradictory to the pure Christian ideal,
since it has cast out of its bosom esoteric
initiation into sacred things — its very basis.
It is the Initiation of the Universal Wisdom,
which is, nevertheless, ever alive and never can
be destroyed, for though rejected by the creeds
of fanaticism and hide-bound orthodoxy, in
order to assure the maintenance of the preroga-
tives of the Church, it rinds a noble asylum
in the enlightened communion of rare spirits,
whose Christianity is that of Christ, the divine
initiator of immortal theosophies. This it is
which is destined to bring about profound
changes in the social and religious order of the
world. This, too, is the same mystic and
scientific doctrine, in which Diotime * (that
* Diotime, a Greek priestess of Mantinea, is mentioned by Plato in
the " Banquet." She is said to have influenced Socrates in his theories
with regard to Love and Beauty.
88 The Relations of Church
extraordinary woman of the ancient world,
in the history of mystic philosophy coming
earlier than the pure victim of S. Cyril, the
beautiful Hypatia), secretly initiated Socrates,
a doctrine which is found, as though trans-
mitted by initiation, in the poet of the Divine
Comedy, Dante, seventeen centuries after the
great Egyptian initiates revealed it to the
philosophers of Greece.
In the history of philosophic teaching, the
Universal Wisdom is that which shines with the
purest radiance. Successive generations of
eastern and western initiators have trans-
mitted it through alternating periods of light
and darkness to modern times, and it is to-day
to be found in two powerful bodies of doctrine,
' Martinism ' and the Theosophical Society,
the first representing the western tradition, the
second coming from India, through the august
and immemorial initiation of Brahminism, but
both perfectly united in their teaching.
Whatever the orthodox may think, it is
through this that the great principle of the
Unity of Religion will be established in the
world, because it is precisely in the realisation
of that principle that the divine elements of
the universal brotherhood are found, which
holds humanity as an actual Living Being ;
that is, that individuals, peoples, and races,
are members of one body : Humanity. And
this esoteric Wisdom is nothing else than
and State to Art 89
philosophic Gnosticism, revealed according to
the need of the age for the spirits of truth and
love, which, in the heart of the unseen, watch
over the destiny of the human race. Our
gratitude is also due to the intelligence of
light incarnated on earth, and whose mission
is to shed their light upon human science,
religion, literature, and art, each time they
slip back and fall into materialism.
Rama, Krishna, Moses, Hermes, Orpheus,
Pythagoras, Plato, Manu, and our Master
Jesus Christ, the early fathers of the Church,
St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Irenaeus, St.
John and the Apostles, were the most brilliant
and powerful teachers of the Science of the
divine mysteries. The pure mystic Christology
of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Hindoos, Persians,
and Greeks, who were cognizant before the
coming of Christ of the Symbol of the Cross,
proves, indeed, that this Universal Wisdom or
Ancient Wisdom, as it is usually called, is a
revealed science, whose unity is clearly to be
seen beneath the apparent divergences, due to
adaptations to place and period, of great
religions based on an esoteric teaching.
We must not then sever, as obscure and
subtle theologians have done, the Christian
teaching from this Science of the Soul, the
science of sciences, the true Science of the
Ideal, nor consider it from a sectarian point
of view in the light of a heresy, at the risk
90 The Relations of Church
of displacing the axis of civilisation or
causing the spiritual evolution of beings to go
astray.
Gnosticism or Universal Wisdom is really,
indeed, the pure and fundamental spirit of
Christianity. All Christian theories, Catholic
or Protestant, have sprung from it, corrupted
or partly mutilated.
St. Pantaenus,* Athenagoras, Origen, know-
ing it to have come from the temples of Thebes,
Memphis, and Sals, inculcated its lofty teach-
ing. The works of Abbot Trithemius,f Saint
Denys the Areopagite, St. Thomas Aquinas,
the admirable Ruysbroeck, £ St. Angela of
Foligno, and St. Francis of Assisi, are impreg-
nated with it. St. Augustine, one of the classic
Christian writers, has said : " What is now
termed the Christian religion existed in ancient
times, nor has it ceased to exist from the beginning
* Pantaenus was head of the catechetical school at Alexandria (180—
202 a.d.), and the teacher of Clement of Alexandria and Origen. He is
said to have originally been a Stoic, and was sent as a missionary to
" India " or Yemen. His commentaries on various books of Scripture are
lost.
f John Trithemius, Abbot of Spanheim, taught chemistry to Para-
celsus. He is the author of tracts on the " elixir vitae," the " Poligrapkta,''
the first important work on cryptography (1500), and the " Chronicon"
of Spanheim (1506).
% John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), the father of mysticism in the
Netherlands. His doctrines were rather practical than speculative. He is
chiefly occupied with the means whereby the " unto mystica " is to be
attained, whereas Eckhardt, who greatly influenced him, dwells on the
union as an ever-present fact. He lived in seclusion with his little com-
munity at Vauvert, and died as first prior of the Convent at Groenendael.
He has been confused with William of Rubruk, a Franciscan Friar, who
wrote a narrative of Asiatic travel in the thirteenth century.
and State to Art 91
of the human race to the days when Christ came
upon earth." *
In short, primitive mysticism, that is to
say, such as existed before modern orthodox
theology, is this universal philosophy, which
contains the Christian truths, and which is
furthermore the primordial spiritual substance
of the cults of East and West.
Between the " Imitation of Jesus Christ '
and the " Bhagavad-Gitd ' there only exist
differences of terminology. The form and
imagery change ; the essentials are the same.
It is the same Word of spiritual life. The
Christian and Hindoo adepts, through their
profound enlightenment, found in it the one
source. The Brahmin of India and the Christian
of Europe, in spite of time and space, vibrate
as one soul with the harmony of the universal
Truth. By what right does the pride of the
Catholic Church wish to shatter the spiritual
harmony of two worlds ? By whose authority ?
In the name of whom ? In the name of what ?
In the name of Christ ? Christ is not called
the Pope. Christ is called Love and Light.
The Spirit of God, the universal Word, sheds
its light on all humanity. In this lies the
disagreement between the secret doctrine and
* St. Augustine wrote a treatise on the Beautiful — now lost — in
which he appears to have reproduced Platonic ideas under a Christian guise.
He taught that Unity is the form of all Beauty (" omnis porro pulchritu-
dinis forma unitas est "). Infinite goodness, truth, and beauty are the
attributes of the Deity, and communicated by Him to all things.
92 The Relations of Church
Catholic dogma, for Buddha is the Christ of
the East as Christ is the Buddha of the West.
The present Church, veiling it in obscurity,
refuses to admit this truth, which, when the
day comes for purity to be preferred to power,
it must end by embracing. It has driven again
into the darkness the light of divine knowledge.
The light will consume it in its unquenchable
flame.
This light, vibrating with Love and know-
ledge, is already growing larger, not in order to
destroy dogmas, but to vivify them, to
illuminate them, to render them more trans-
lucid, and, out of the black petrified mass which
they have become, to make a glorious diamond
of dazzling psychic light, able to bring about a
new rebirth of the human race.
Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity,
who is but a new revelation of the divine
Wisdom, of the Science of Mysteries, said of
the disputants of the Pharisaical priesthood :
" Woe unto ye who have grasped the key of
knowledge and, not having penetrated into its
sanctuary yourselves, have yet closed it unto
others."*
The narrowness and poverty of ignorant
devotion , the inability to understand the
meaning of the ritual of the Roman Church, the
continual Popish transformations in the per-
formance of the Mass, falsifyings, errors of all
*S. Luke xi. 52.
and State to Art 9
o
kinds, have made religion, both in practice and
understanding, not the realisation of the great
ideal of universality through Love and Science,
but the political organisation of a materialised
faith.
In the darkness of Roman orthodoxy divine
Christianity has long gasped for breath, and
the policy of the Papacy has been to take away
the keys in order to keep the much needed
truth closely locked up.
Now this same religion, which has banished
the sacred knowledge, has ended by reprobating
Beauty.
Since its munificent and productive patronage
of art during the Renaissance, the Church has
forsworn any interest in it. Since then religious
art has day by day deteriorated. The imagery
of contemporary Christianity is as trivial as
it is possible to conceive. It is a perfect expres-
sion of nothingness in art. The artists of
" Christian art " have debased religious inspira-
tion with the grossest and most puerile elements
of bigotry. It is the reign of absolute common-
place insipidity.
The spirit of the Church no longer compre-
hends the Ideal, and Christian art has become
one of its shames. It borders on sacrilege. Its
degradation is complete.
The religious spirit is now incapable of con-
ceiving Beauty. It lies in the bondage of obsolete
conventions and realism of an inferior kind.
94 Church, State and Art
The scandalised hypocrisy which the Church
cast upon the nude is the very origin of its
artistic decay. It was bound to come to this
impoverished state. The veiling of spiritual
truth was bound to lead to the veiling of the
most sacred of forms : the human form !
The cramping of the psychic faculties naturally
brought about the annihilation of religious
inspiration. Distortion of religion gave birth
to ugliness in art. Religions have the art they
deserve.
Art and Religion are indissoluble. The Princes
of the modern Church should never forget it.
Instead of allowing Christian temples to be
profaned by the banal monstrosities and
hideous eye-sores of the School of St. Luc, that
manufactory of sacrilege, the high dignitaries
would be better fulfilling their spiritual duty
by entrusting the Sacred Images to the genius
of inspired artists.
It can be seen that the conception of " reli-
gious " or " Christian " art cannot be revived
from its ashes, if its source of inspiration is
corrupted by the dogmatic and conventional
conceptions of the contemporary Church.
Religious art will be replaced in the future by
the universal idealist Art, the sign of a new
spirituality.
The Relations of Church and
State to Art
(ii)
State neglect of Art — Modern Rulers lacking in the " aesthetic sense " —
Art Patronage in the Nineteenth Century — Changed character of
Royalty — The Reign of Mediocrity — Degradation of the Artist —
Renaissance Passion for Art — Monarchs and Republics culpable
alike — Art neither an Aristocracy nor Democracy.
BUT it is not the princes of the Church
alone who deliver art over to inferiority
and ugliness. Modern Kings likewise
in this respect have proved themselves unworthy.
If the princes of Religion have deformed the
aesthetics of religion, the princes of the State,
at the same time, have forsaken the worship
of the Beautiful. Seeing no longer that the
artist, like the thinker and man of science, is
the glory of a nation, they have in a petty and
commercial spirit left Art to take care of itself.
Modern kings are not true kings. The disciples
of Prudhomme, their dynastic principles seeming
to aim at the perpetuation of a reign of intel-
lectual mediocrity, they never raise the eye of
the spirit beyond decorous financial specula-
tion, or trivial diplomatic jugglery. When a
prince lowers the nobility of his soul to the
stagnant level of commercialism, he falls from
his giddy height and no longer deserves the
prestige due to his race. The genealogical
ties of the ruling houses has long lost its sap,
and on its dry branches grows only withered
fruit. Oligarchs are irremediably tainted with
96 The Relations of Church
the first symptoms of decay ; the venerable
mottoes on their escutcheons are like the mock-
ing voices of a dead past, when they claimed the
right to rule the world. Alas, the bright blue
blood of Royalty that once mantled their
brow with such pride, fit for the purest jewels
of heroic idealism, is terribly discoloured,
leaving wrinkles of age upon their sunken
temples. For, if the physical is the image of the
moral, these two principles of human vitality
are found among our illustrious degenerates
in a degree almost approaching zero. It is
enough to look for a little upon their effigies,
to see very clearly the darkness that enveloped
their brainless skulls and soulless bodies. With
them thought is no longer what it should be,
that is to say, the undying passion for know-
ledge or meditation ; the soul is no longer
that inexhaustible well-head of splendid enthu-
siasm. Absorbed selfishly in its own powers,
participating no longer in the mystic poetry
of universal life, the intellect, instead of becom-
ing refined, is dulled, loses that sixth sense,
the aesthetic sense, and becomes incapable of
feeling that ideal thrill, of which the aesthetic,
the great lovers of art, are so proud. And then
inevitably follows the destruction of that
intellectual Paradise where the bright flowers
of a pure taste flourish.
The individual races which are debased,
kept in subjection, thrown back on themselves
PROMETHEE (j. DELVILLE).
f To fact pair q-j.
and State to Art 97
like sickly plants, that can no longer erect
themselves in the light which has caused them
to spring from the soil, become insensible to
high human inspirations, particularly such as
arise directly through special impulses, as Art
does.
When the French Revolution traced with
bloody fingers the prophetic symbol of the
emancipation of the people, and in the terrors
of its lightning the Mene-Tekel-Phares of the
aristocracy blazed out, the ferocious activity
of its thousand guillotines seems to have
exhausted for ever the blood of the fallen
theocracy. All the glory, character, and wit
that past generations had bequeathed to them
seems to have perished in the revolutionary
storm of '93. Indeed from that time no monarch
has known how to rise to anything extra-
ordinary either in act or thought. Offspring
of Italy, the land of masterpieces, Napoleon
preserved in his dark conqueror's soul one of
those great lights which enabled him to hold
the art work of his time in respect ; a bright
constellation of artists arose from the Napoleonic
era. But after that, for anything like royal
encouragement in matters of art, there was
nothing, until France was plunged in the
decadence of that curious empire, when Bona-
parte, obsessed by the majestic phantom of
the old imperial eagle, did not dare to neglect
artists altogether, and bestowed on them the
gS The Relations of Church
foolish patronage of a sensualist, better able
to appreciate obscenity than a real work of
art. In fact, after vainly going through the
commonplace sovereigns of the nineteenth cen-
tury, it seems that the only prince who appre-
ciated his artistic mission was Ludwig II. of
Bavaria, " the only true King of that age in
which Kings were of such little account," as
Verlaine justly remarked. Without the lavish
aid of that warm-hearted enthusiast, that quick
imagination, Wagner, poor, abused, unknown,
misunderstood, would never have realised the
cycle of his mighty conceptions. Without
Ludwig II. the temple of Bayreuth would not
have come into being, and the genius of Wagner
would never have reached its fulfilment, crushed
by the enmity of his contemporaries which is
the great disgrace of that time I And that is all.
After the glorious " madness " of the Bavarian
prince, no royal personage has given new lustre
to the gold and diamonds upon his inspired
brow. Constitutional kings no longer know how
to be heroes. Complete stupefaction seems to
have absolutely destroyed in them all senti-
ments of dignity — or glory. They have not
even the excuse of gilded misery, and keep
their magnificence for the hideous official
ceremonial in which they are pleased to exhibit
their growing unpopularity. In this, indeed,
they are true to their part of government
puppets, for the modern king does not make
and State to Art 99
laws : he submits, he proposes ; he no longer
acts. His duties are automatic, humiliating,
abstract, ineffective : it is sovereignty in its
most absurd form ! The purple is changed to
a frock-coat, the sceptre to a walking-stick,
and the crown to a top-hat. In such royal guise
M. Prudhomme easily takes flesh, and can at
his ease use his civil list profitably in commercial
enterprises, without at all needing to interest
himself in spiritual matters. It would be a
marvel if it were otherwise : it belongs to the
category of moral destiny. A king whose govern-
ment is in the hands of lawyers, manufacturers
and the monied classes, whose interests are
mainly centred in common political intrigue,
must, if he wishes to dwell in peace, become
mediocrity to some extent. A constitutional
king — -huge irony of modern greatness — is an
ill-rewarded slave seated upon a gilded chair.
The chief puppet of some ministers who are
recruited by election from the lower depths
of the ambitious bourgeoisie, bound to deny
himself the slightest initiative, he acts according
to the whim of those who pull the wires. His
whole interest in art is represented by a Ministry
of Fine Arts, whose business it is to acquire at a
huge price the wildest freaks of worthless art, and
leave true artists with their works and projects
to perish of hunger. Indeed it is an under-
stood thing that the artist who cannot leave
his high probity and outspoken independence
ioo The Relations of Church
behind in his studio, to knock like a beggar
at the side door of the government office, will
never receive any official recognition — unless
maybe at the point of death, or, long after that
has taken place, on his tombstone.
The part of Maecenas played by modern
potentates is lamentable and worthless, and
when we see in the terrible jumble of the
triennial exhibitions the mark put upon their
acquisitions, it is hard to know whether to
laugh or weep.
These Boeotians of high rank, the costly
ornaments of inglorious kingdom or empire,
are — it can be easily proved — beggars who
cling to the trappings of state like Harpagon
to his gold, and seriously profess an incurable
scepticism for everything that bears any
resemblance to art. This deplorable poverty
of intellect, and degenerate spirit, is the effect
of minds contaminated by speculations on
the money market. Rothschild has come to
dominate their thought, their palaces, and
their whole being. They are the strange votaries
of the Golden Calf, around which whirls in a
demoniac frenzy, in our times of universal
pauperism, the Saturnalia of capitalism. Ah !
the princes of the Renaissance — we bow low
to them — took part in commerce too, and
sometimes even descended to make raids on
the Bank, but the money, in the hands of these
cultured enthusiasts, was made the means of
and State to Art 101
realising their artistic aims. They utilised
their diplomacy and trade in aid of their eager
passion for the Beautiful, and commerce and
manufacture never rendered their great souls
incapable of noble deed or thought. A prince's
revenue was the true public treasury, from
which all those who pursued science or art
drew what they needed for their labours.
The Borghese, Urbans, and Medici, Popes
and Emperors, Kings, Dukes, and Nobles,
were the great admirers of human genius, whose
palaces were turned into Temples in which
artists officiated. Before the sovereignty of
Art, they knew how to put off the sovereignty
of rank ; this pure-blooded aristocracy, with
whom " action " was " the sister of dreaming,"
placed the aristocracy of thought above their
own.
The princes of those days, full of that magnifi-
cent pride from which spring noble passions
and great races, dwelt amid the luxury of art,
liberal, easy of access, with imperial splendour,
like eagles intoxicated with the light, and if
they could rise from their splendid sepulchres
would not admit the bourgeois monarchs of
the present day even among their condottieri
or train of menials. Can there be found among
the awful tribunal of those who sway the sceptre
in these latter days one man who, like Julius II.,
is capable of uttering such a cry as this : " /
would drain my blood and cut short my years
102 The Relations of Church
to give them to Michael Angelo ! ' It was not
mere admiration, it was divine love. Genius,
in these days of splendid image-worshippers,
fired the spirit, heart, and soul, as to-day Money
pollutes, and renders them base and servile.
On all sides the sacred flame was fanned whence
sprung immortal works, and the great ones of
the earth suffered the impetuous breath of
human thought to sweep intoxicatingly through
their palaces. A thrill of aesthetic ecstasy
animated monarchs and wondering peoples.
It was the Reign of the Beautiful. Now it is
the Reign of Mediocrity.
In the palaces of the world the kings shine,
and intrigue in secret, with that dangerously
growing concourse of social murmurings, their
empty bulk alone acting as a threat. And
how sad it is, amid this evolutionary progress,
these increasing social complications, this grow-
ing passion for art, this intellectual impulse,
which is slowly and painfully, but very surely,
making headway among the people, these new
forces which are about to rule the world, to
see in complete contrast the supineness of kings,
their littleness, their narrow outlook, the spell
of their prestige, and their weak rule ending
in moral wretchedness, complete and final !
He will not here play the demagogue desiring
the end of one regime in order that an inept
" social art " may prevail. Proudhon and his
great paradox have long been overwhelmed
and State to Art 103
by the later judgments of those who have a
purer comprehension of art ; that is to say,
those who straitly affirm that art is neither
an aristocracy nor democracy, but that it is
Art, that mighty emotion for the Beautiful
under its manifold variety of form, attainable
by all those who know how to love it. And not
more than a barren Monarchy could we excuse
a Republic that allowed men like D'Aurevilly *
and Villiers-de-l'Isle Adam f to die in destitu-
tion, while its mighty commerce showered
wealth on political quackery and buffoonery.
But are Art and State ever to remain at
opposite poles, the absolute antithesis of one
another, and will future assemblies and law-
makers, like those of to-day, and like our modern
Kings, be invertebrate and empty-headed
bourgeois, whose pitiable shades will never
move across the stage of history, without
exciting the derision of peoples and artists ?
* Baxbey d'Aurevilly was a novelist of great power and originality,
all his work being marked by genius of a rare kind. He wrote " Les Diabo-
liques," " Les Prophetes," " Le Chevalier Des Touches." He died in
poverty about 1895. See an article on him by Edmund Gosse in " The
Pageant" (1897).
f Count Villiers de LTsle Adam (1838-1889), French poet and drama-
tist. Inaugurator of the Symbolist movement. " La Revolte " appeared
in 1870 ; " Contes Cruels," a volume of short stories, in 1880 ; and his
last play, " Axel," was published after his death in 1890. A romantic
idealist, he had considerable influence on younger French writers.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII
A Revival of Sacred Art— The
Beuron School
TH E unexpected spectacle, amid the
decadence of modern Christian Art, of
a religious artistic revival comes as a
surprise and pleasure to all those who deplore
the way in which Catholic sanctuaries are
profaned by imagery of the most puerile kind.
For a long time, we know, religious art had
become commonplace and absolutely lacking
in artistic feeling. And it must be confessed
that the contemptuous epithet bondieuseries
which has been commonly applied to the
tasteless and inappropriate decoration of
modern churches was well deserved. The
unanimous outcry of all those that have pre-
served the sense of beauty in face of the treason
against art committed by such as profane the
profession which has been so blindly entrusted
with the decoration of our sacred buildings
did not seem able, in spite of its vehemence,
to bring to life again within the Church anything
of the beauty of former days. The artistic
instinct of religion seemed indeed to have
utterly perished, and so flagrant was its poverty
of conception that it might have been thought
that religious feeling would never again recover
its proper expression.
In this degeneration of sacred art can there
not be perceived, as we do not hesitate to afhrm,
A Revival of Sacred Art 105
a proof of the weakening of the mystic senti-
ment, an impoverishment of spiritual life.
The counterblow given to it by the evolution
of modern ideas, the growth of naturalism,
the manifold theories of the emancipation of
the individual in art, the incoherence and
uncertainty which prevail in contemporary
thought, have they not all contributed to
relegate to the shades of a past which has
become embarrassing and of no further use
the glories and immortal example given to
generations by the Primitives ? Mystic art, it
might well be thought, had lost connection
with great tradition, and the ugliness of the
present day, like that of a barbarous age,
triumphantly displayed its vandalism in the
Catholic shrines. There was reason then to
regret, in the name of outraged Beauty, the
pure and solemn splendour of an artistic past
inspired by an almighty faith. Certainly we
must take into account the bad taste and
iconoclastic tendencies of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries when
seeking the causes which brought about the
decadence of sacred Art ; but, however that
may be, there is reason to deplore the influence,
direct or indirect, of naturalistic theories. Yet
if there is an art which should not be under
the influence of wholly imitative principles it
is surely sacred art, whose aim is not to repro-
duce perceptible objects, but rather to inspire
106 A Revival of Sacred Art :
the soul with piety and devotion. Sacred art
dwells in a region of its own, beyond the con-
tingencies of the moment, in the mystery and
perfection of its symbols, in moral grandeur,
and the exaltation of the mystic drama. And
this region is so essentially sacred, that a
French writer whose name is a synonym for
scepticism, M. Anatole France, speaks of it
in the preface to his " Noces corinthiennes "
in these terms : "I deal in this drama with
serious and delicate matters — of matters of
religion. I have redreamt the dream of the
faith of ages ; I have given myself up to the
illusion of living beliefs. It would have been
too wanting in the sense of harmony to treat
what is pious with impunity. I have a sincere
respect for sacred things.
No one will deny that the harmonious region
of mystic apotheoses ought to have a solemn,
hieratic, and ideal art, an art filled with peace
and holiness in which form and colour are
subordinated to the profound requirements
of the liturgy, to the plastic exigencies of dogma.
Now, instead of compositions adequate to the
intellectual loftiness of their theme we see the
devotional Christianity of the Church com-
promised by deliberate outrages on Beauty.
If the standard of faith is to be judged by the
degree of artistic inspiration shown by the
Church to-day, mysticism, it must be confessed,
has fallen into decay. In setting this result
The Beuron School 107
down to external influences alone, those appear
much to be blamed who have submitted to
it in so passive and prejudicial a way. Religion,
speaking in an aesthetic sense, must not allow
itself to be controlled by the ever-changing
play of schools and theories.
From a strictly religious and liturgical point
of view, there is no artistic evolution possible
in the fundamental and essential principles of
Christian art, which are order and splendour.
The character of liturgical art has been deter-
mined by the Primitives. It was only necessary
to continue them by traditional principles.
The type of mystic beauty having been formu-
lated by that tradition, I mean the aesthetic
and technical principles of religious decorative
art, the Church had only to perpetuate them
on the great lines laid down by them, since
nothing prevented their being adapted to the
present day.
It is because the Primitives have been
deserted, the purity and splendour of their
example despised, the mysterious power that
links together Art and Religion misunderstood,
that the source of inspiration has become
defiled. Cimabue, Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico
are the eponyms of Christian Art. They are the
immaculate source of Christian aesthetic in-
spiration, because they reflect, in true proportion,
the pure intermingling of the tradition of Graeco-
Latin art, inherent in the very origin of the
108 A Revival of Sacred Art :
religion of the west — Christianity. Outside
that tradition Christian Art cannot but lose its
beauty, its grandeur, and its mission, and sink
fatally into the most deplorable exhibition of
perverted taste.
Sacred Art has no point of contact with the
formless and fanciful productions of the profane
schools. It is wholly concerned with expressing
to the senses what, from a mystic point of view,
appears to be absolute and eternal, the bases
of the whole spirit of synthesis, the foundations
of all aesthetic unity. It demands nothing from
the individual because it proceeds from a
collective and universal condition of the soul
springing from the emotional breath of the sen-
timental life. Just as Esoterics possesses a vision-
ary Metaphysics whose theories are based on the
direct vision of invisible verities, so Religion
has its aesthetic creed consisting of principles
created by the superior psychic nature of
religious experiences. Mystic beauty is neces-
sarily superior to natural beauty because it
expresses at the same time the perfection of
moral beauty. That is why liturgic splendour
is never found in a purely realistic composition.
It is a divine and not a human art. Unity is
its end. Hierarchy and hieratism are the
only possible means of expression because it
should express, not merely the manifestations
of individual life, but above all the magnifi-
cence of the Christian Virtue equally with the
The Beuron School 109
adoration of its followers. Sanctity, the highest
degree of inward evolution, the pinnacle of
moral beauty, needs a plastic representation
arising from a clear and simple harmony, which
abhors " movement which displaces line." Order,
in what is geometrically ideal and visibly
harmonious, constitutes the indispensable
decorative element in works of sacred art.
Ruskin said very rightly in " The Seven
Lamps of Architecture " : " Symmetry is not
an abstract quality." Indeed symmetry is
a natural law whose manifestation is to be
found in all forms — visible or invisible — in the
universe. The beauty of perceptible forms
results from that symmetry. It is the signature
of the divine order in nature. Now, since the
object of religion is the search for order and the
divine, is it surprising that sacred art, in its
monumental and decorative expression, should
endeavour to draw nearer to the plastic essence
of nature by the geometric laws of Beauty ?
This, judging by the works they have already
achieved, has been perfectly understood by
the monastic artists of the Beuron School*
and it is no exaggeration to say that they have
restored to the great art of religious decoration
* The community of Beuron was founded at Beuron in Germany, by
the Arch-Abbe Naure VVolter (died in 1890). The Beuron School was created
by the R. P. Desire Lenz with the object of reviving sacred art by the
idealist view of a?sthetics. The School has already produced quite remark-
able works, notably : The Chapel of St. Maur, near Sigmaringen ; the
decoration of the Churcfr of the Holy Vigrin, at Stuttgart, in the Abbey of
Emmaiis, near Prague ; and in the Convent of St. Benoit, on Monte
Cassino, near Naples.
no A Revival of Sacred Art :
its proper form and rediscovered the source of
which the Church seemed to have lost all trace.
The reproduction of their frescoes and bas-reliefs
bears remarkable testimony to the high sense
of decorative treatment which guides them
equally with the pure comprehension of form
which inspires them in their superb impulse of
revival. Their aim can be perceived in their
works, which is to realise the great principle
of religious art by uniting the love of rhythm
which characterises Greek aesthetics with the
sentimental harmonies of the Christian drama.
Pheidias and Fra Angelico should be the chief
inspiration of their idealism. Owing to the
universality of its principles Idealism is ever to
be met with, because Beauty partakes of Unity.
Whether Pagan or Christian, great art is always
religious. Idealism necessarily produces beauty,
because it is the very expression of great art.
In proof of this I mention the Virgin (Vierge
hieratique) which adorns the portal of that
wonderful chapel of St. Maur, reared by the
Beuron School on the rocks of the Danube
valley, and which has been well compared —
a wholly relative comparison, be it under-
stood, but grounded rightly on the perfect
harmony of its architectural proportions and
decorative treatment — to a little Christian
Parthenon. All the austere artistic effort of
the Beuron School seems to be summarised in
this wonderful and mysterious image, beautiful
The Beuron School hi
with the irresistible beauty of a perfect thing.
It is only a knowledge of the geometry of
aesthetics, the knowledge of exact proportion,
measurement, and number, of which Plato
speaks, which could have realised such per-
fection in the agreement of the whole and its
parts. The example which the monk artists of
Beuron give there to contemporary art is great
and significant.
From the simple linear ornament to the
composition of the fresco, everything in this
noble work is eloquent of harmony and beauty.
It is the pure splendour of simplicity, the con-
dition of perfect equilibrium between matter
and spirit which the artist has reached, due to
his respect for a wise tradition and a lofty
emotion. That tradition, we repeat, is the only
one suited to the decoration of sacred buildings,
and, if it does not wish to degenerate still
further, modern sacred art must become
impregnated with it. By following it, the
Benedictine artists who know how to apply
it with proper taste and intelligence will return
to the primitive cradle of the art displayed in
the catacombs, which owed its freshness pre-
cisely to the agreement between the tradition
of the ancients and the Christian ideal. Out
of the spiritualism of those two tendencies
there should arise a new form of art in which
beauty of form would be conjoined with nobility
of sentiment.
ii2 A Revival of Sacred Art :
The Virgin of the Chapel of St. Maur agrees
with the liturgic representation of the Early
Church, which holds her at the same time to
be seated on the throne of divine Wisdom.
Such as the artist has painted her, with so sure
a taste, and such proper feeling for mural
treatment, would she have appeared in the
sacred presentment of the Virgin ; that is to
say, according to the Scriptures : The beauty
of order is in Me for all eternity.
This Virgin especially, as well as the head
of Christ, represent indeed the aesthetic ideal
which governs sacred art, and we know few
works that are superior or equal to them. In
our eyes they are worthy of being classed with
the noblest expressions of Beauty and Perfec-
tion which sought to fix the ideal type in which
should be manifested the union between the
essence of what is human and what is divine.
It is only by proportion, purity of design, and
beauty of line that these ideal types can express
in art their dogmatic grandeur. For Line, as
Peladan says, is the immutable theology of Form.
All sacred art aims immediately at the decora-
tive objectivity of the divine character of
Beauty. The Benedictine painter bases himself
upon that beauty, and seeks the eternal type
in the human form. Ugliness is incompatible
with the ideal of perfection which Christianity
sets up. Besides, if history is to be believed,
the saints, both men and women, were, speaking
THE VIRGIN OF S. MAUK (BEURON SCHOOL).
'ill . pUg? 112.
The Beuron School 113
generally, physically beautiful. Do not nearly
all the lives of the Saints remark on the admira-
tion felt by their judges and butchers when they
beheld the beauty of the martyrs ?
Christianity cannot remain insensible to the
beauty of human perfection. This is what the
Christian artists of the Beuron School under-
stand, and that is why, we are glad to think,
they are endeavouring, by setting a good
example, to bring about a reaction against
what is commonplace and in bad taste, and,
in a word, against the clerical ugliness of sacred
images which have become the terrors of the
sanctuary. For it must be confessed that it
is the clerical conception of religious sentiment
that has brought about the profane treatment
of modern sacred art. So that it is with a
real feeling of friendship and artistic brother-
hood that artists welcome the endeavour of the
Beuron School to bring about a revival. The
place which the religious sense occupies in
modern civilisation is still sufficiently prominent,
it must be allowed, for it to endeavour to express
itself in a form of art worthy at least of the
powerful current of spirituality which Christian
thought has sent throughout the West. In the
hands of the artists of Beuron the decoration of
the churches will be raised to the high level
of the moral unity of the Christian life, which
of necessity must produce in art line and colour,
as well as technical unity, which alone allow
ii4 A Revival of Sacred Art :
the harmonious treatment of the vast decorative
schemes requisite for the architectural breadth
of edifices consecrated to the religion of a people.
If the historical evolution of art is considered,
we are met with the undeniable fact that
decorative painting, properly speaking, is
really an essentially Christian art, in the
sense that it is, of all plastic arts, the most
fitted for the external display of sentiments
and ideas. Is it surprising then that in the very
bosom of religion there should be again exhibited
an artistic impulse under its most legitimate
form ? We have grown accustomed nowadays
to consider sacred art as definitely dead, and
to look upon every attempt to revive it as an
anachronism. As defenders of Beauty under
whatever form it may be expressed, it is our
duty to welcome, on occasion, every endeavour
that is made towards Beauty.
That endeavour, none can doubt who have
seen their works, has been successfully accom-
plished by the Beuron School. It corresponds,
moreover, to a general tendency of art at the
present day. Whilst contemporary art is
struggling at this moment to shake off the errors
of the schools that rely on instinct and imitation
and is endeavouring to rise to the conception
of general ideas through the form of that
great decorative art, of which Puvis de
Chavannes was the forerunner in France, these
solitary monks are likewise striving laboriously
The Beuron School 115
in the silence of their monasteries to give a
new birth to their religious ideal by means of
a nobler form of art and one with a new meaning.
Knowing what element of beauty their original
resources could supply, and the method of
expression allowed to them by Hellenic and
Byzantine traditions of sacred art, the Beuron
School has managed to evolve a sustained style,
full of grace and dignity, suitable to the religious
life of our times and worthy of modern inspira-
tion.
In these days when religious beliefs themselves,
governed by the law which determines the evolu-
tion of the conscience and profiting by the
acquisitions of modern learning, have assumed
a more philosophic and scientific guise than
belonged to those of the Middle Ages, which
were too exclusively devotional and ascetic,
there is wanted a treatment of sacred subjects
which should be better informed, better
balanced, free from the crudities of the Gothic
period, and in which mystic emotion should
be under the control of the laws of knowledge,
wisdom and reason. Formerly the works pro-
duced in the monastic studios were executed
stiffly and mechanically according to the con-
ventions and style peculiar to the different
Orders. The artist was completely controlled
and fettered by the rigid and narrow applica-
tion of the principle of the division of work.
The manual of the liturgic artist, the monk
ti6 A Revival of Sacred Art :
Theophilus, was the unchangeable and uniform
creed of art, conforming to the expression of
the ascetic vision of the age, impregnated with
the violent reaction on which the new Christian
faith was founded against the physical beauty
of paganism. The Beuron School does not
consider it necessary to continue to propagate
that early error, which in the course of time
brought about the debasement of form, and
caused sacred art to lose the sense of harmony
and proportion. And if it has chosen to return
to the purely Greek and Byzantine sources of
Christian Art, it is to properly apply the decora-
tive beauty of tradition to the symbolical
exigencies of the liturgy, confident that Hellen-
ism, owing to the rationalism of its artistic
principles,will preserve their art from becoming
commonplace and ugly, by restoring it
to grandeur and elevation of style. Moreover,
were not the works of Pheidias, Polycleitos,
Zeuxis, Apelles, and Lysippus, the prototypes
which served as guides to the early Christian
artists ? And has not the tradition of the
technique of decoration been borrowed from
the ancient world ? The genius of Greece is
always being encountered at the basis of
religious art.
A magnificent example is presented to us by
the frieze of Flandrin * which so affords so
* Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) was, like Chavannes, a native
of Lyons, and, like him also, is famous chiefly for his monumental decora-
tive paintings. His early difficulties were removed by his taking, in 1832,
The Beuron School 117
harmonious a decoration to the Church of St.
Vincent de Paul at Paris. Does not this master-
piece, one of the most important works of
modern art, unfortunately too little known,
and which criticism has not appreciated at its
proper value, owe the wonderful arrangement
of its line and perfect decorative unity pre-
cisely to the fusion of its pure Hellenism with
the gentle austerity of Christian sentiment ?
And since we have naturally come to speak
of the masterly work of Flandrin, may we be
allowed to take advantage of it to offer here
a friendly warning to the Beuron School ?
In all art, the danger to be avoided is conven-
tion ; that is to say, the frigid application of
formulae, which results in a " poncif." In a word,
it is inevitably death to personal inspiration
or emotion, owing to the absence of direct
contact with forms of nature. To speak frankly,
there is an omission which weighs upon modern
Christian art with all the weight of the prejudice
which gave it birth : it is the absolute proscrip-
tion of the study of the nude, the observation
of the human body, God's masterpiece in nature !
the Grand Prix de Rome, and he soon acquired a reputation by several
important works mostly of religious subjects. In 1838 he was commissioned
to decorate the Church of St. Severin at Paris, and from that time onward
he was continually engaged in similar work. His chief works are at St.
Germain-des-Pres, at Paris, in the Church of St. Paul at Nimes, in that of
St. Vincent de Paul at Paris, and in the Church of Amay at Lyons. Regard-
ing painting as the vehicle of the expression of spiritual sentiment, Flandrin
perhaps paid too little regard to the technical qualities of his art. His work
is austere and cold, and though it is customary to compare him with
Fra Angelico, his creations lack the joy and purity of the early master.
He died of small-pox at Rome.
n8 A Revival of Sacred Art :
It has always been a great mistake to suppose
that the representation of ideas in art takes
no account of the study of living forms. The
two unshakeable bases of aesthetics are Nature
and the Ideal. The attempt to follow the laws
of ideal beauty, without giving heed also to the
laws of natural beauty, results in a " poncif "
and " pastiche." The traditional methods and
formulae requisite for the technical application
of a difficult art ought to be put at the service
of the creative instinct and individual inspira-
tion. To continually endeavour to conciliate
the experience of tradition with the renewal
of creative power is not only the duty, but the
right, of every true artist devoted to great art.
However right and proper the decorative treat-
ment may be to express a general idea, nothing
must suffer individual inspiration to be sup-
pressed. If, therefore, the Beuron School,
while remaining faithful to the principles of
a legitimate tradition, desires to carry out
successfully its attempt to give a new life to
sacred art, it must not embody its ideal in too
rigid a formula. It will then be the better
able to work in harmony with the inviolable
laws of change, and not remain stationary in
a too exclusive imitation of the past, and so
adapt its art with due balance and proportion
to the changes of the spiritual sentiment of
religion. Egyptian art, itself, liturgic and
sacerdotal as it was, underwent changes in
The Beuron School 119
the aesthetic expression of ideas. It began
to degenerate from the moment that its archi-
tects, painters, and sculptors began to servilely
copy, without infusing them with the inner life
which renews external appearances, the scale
and proportions which had been bequeathed
by a powerful sacerdotal tradition.
The artists of the Beuron School, while
basing the form of the figure on the impersonal
nature of the Greek cult of rhythm as well as
Byzantine sacerdotalism, significant on their
part of a true sense of beauty, should aim more
at individualising their heads. Thus, the
irresistible beauty of symmetry, one of the
essential elements of harmony, will be rendered
more complete by the irresistible charm of the
expression of type. That is, too, what all the
great masters of sacred art, Giotto, Cimabue,
Fra Angelico, etc., were accustomed to do.
Without forgetting that the treatment of sacred
subjects depends on the formula so clearly
enunciated by Denys the Areopagite : " When
we bow down in worship to an Image, we bow
down to the prototype represented by that Image,"
the religious painter is right in seeking among
the forms of natural life for an ideal prototype.
Certainly we are somewhat inclined to take the
Benedictine artists of Beuron severely to task
for being rather too anxious to emulate the
Greek monks of Mount Athos, and regret that
the Guide to Sacred Art by Giorgos Marcos, a
120 A Revival of Sacred Art
Byzantine monk, should serve as their text-
book. But it is not the less true that remarkable
works have issued from the monastic studios
of Beuron, and that from this time forward
sacred art of a more or less renovated kind is
actually existing. The ecclesiastical authorities
have been shown how churches ought to be
decorated, of which they have been strangely
ignorant for so long, to the disgrace of the
dignity of their worship and the dignity of art.
IX
* The Social Influence of Art
" Of all social forces which have power to
assist in the uplifting of a people, there is none
perhaps of greater importance than Art."
Annie Besant.
Harmony the Secret of the Universe and the State — Art reveals Harmony
— Birth of Social Intelligence marked by creation of an Image —
Perception of Beauty inseparable from Mentality — Evolution of Art
corresponds with Social Progress — Superficial view of /Esthetics —
Social Energy aims at Perfect Harmony — Social Problems solved by
the Cult of Beauty — ^Esthetic Sense the great force of true Spiritual
Life — Beauty perceived through the Imagination, rather than
through the Senses — Inferior Artists afraid of Great Art — Great Art
does not Imitate, but conquers, Matter — Art must illumine Society,
not reflect it — New Era in Belgian Art — Beauty and Utility not In-
compatible— The Artist represents Public Thought — The Mission
of Art is to represent Ideas — Ideas of Past Ages reflected in their
Monuments — ^Esthetics a Social Benefit.
AN illustrious disciple of Plato, and an
influential friend moreover of Pheidias,
the great law-giver Pericles, on one
occasion at Athens allowed this wise and pro-
found saying to fall from his lips, which seems
the living echo of the Pythagorean doctrine :
" Touch not the bases of Music ; you would
touch the very foundations of the State."
In these words Pericles formulated the social
principle of Art, the essence of which is Harmony,
that is, Beauty.
The statesman and the artist in him reminded
Greece that what constitutes one of the first
elements of the moral and intellectual harmony
of a civilisation is the feeling for the Beautiful,
* This chapter is from a paper by M. Delville, entitled " Le Principe
Social de I' Art," contributed to " La Belgique," April, 1907.
122 The Social Influence
or, more clearly, the direct action of that
wonderful feeling upon the soul in the forma-
tion of human societies.
Order and harmony, no one can reasonably
deny, are very prominent social virtues. The
universe only exists by harmony, and the
important formula, " order from chaos," is
one of the most formidable affirmations of the
divinity of Harmony in the primordial genesis
of the world. If harmony is the essence of
things, if it is the great balancing force which
vibrates at the core of worlds and in the core
of the smallest atom, if it is, in one word, the
secret of the universe, it ought, therefore, to be
the essence and secret of the State likewise.
Now, it is Art which makes man most directly
sensible of the fundamental existence of
harmony, that universal harmony before which
modern materialism is forced finally to stammer
its admiration in despair.
The social principle of art may already be
traced from the earliest ages of humanity, in
the dark periods when the nascent civilisations
scarcely emerge from the night of time. The
most undeniable document, the most positive
proof of the advent of intelligence in primitive
man, and of the aesthetic element which enters
into his composition, the very sign of the evi-
dence of the mental light in the human animal,*
* See, for what more especially deals with the esoteric teaching of
human evolution or human genealogy : " The Mystery of Evolution," by
Jean Delville, Lamertin, Brussels.
of Art 123
do we not find in this fact, revealed by geology
and anthropology, that the appearance of social
intelligence among mankind dates from that
wonderful moment when he learnt how to carry
his feeling for the beautiful into an image,
derived from the forms of the life around him ?
Yes, it was indeed by tracing on the raw
material, the outline of a living or inanimate
object, the memory of whose beauty he desired
to perpetuate and which had made its impres-
sion upon his intelligence, that prehistoric
man, at the dawn of the human race, revealed
the social and intellectual principle of Art.
Now, it has been remarked by the great
English biologist, Huxley, that in all the
numerous kinds of species no animal has endea-
voured to reproduce an image of aught that
surrounded him. Art is unknown to animals.
Art, then, is, indeed, the undeniable sign of
intelligence and wit in man. As soon as man
could think, he was an artist.
Just as primitive man expressed his ideas
by means of imagery, so in the world of imagery
people become conscious of ideas.
The feeling for the beautiful is inseparable
from the mental conscience. One of the char-
acteristics of the psychology of the child, one
which marks an important stage in the develop-
ment of his intelligence, is the growing interest
that he takes in the image. There again we
have a proof that the aesthetic idea cannot be
124 The Social Influence
separated from the mental evolution of man,
and that art plays a vital part in human life.
The evolution of the aesthetic sense always
corresponds to increased social consciousness,
to refined sensibility. The whole history of
art shows us how it works hand in hand with
human progress. Wherever in the world the
germs of civilisation have been found, those
germs have been manifested under one of the
forms of art.
The domain of aesthetics constitutes a social
factor of a truly harmonious psychic influence.
Imagination is a real power in man. Without
imagination man can create nothing and invent
nothing.
The artistic faculties are not derived from
instinct, but, on the contrary, from spirit.
Art is one of the proper activities of the Spirit.
That manifestation of human Intelligence which
is termed artistic genius is not, then, an artificial
product, a fantasy, a superfluity which has
but a relative and distant connection with the
ethical development of society. Artistic genius
is inherent in the phenomena of life, as beauty
is inherent in the manifestation of the universe.
It is because they forget that Art is a civilising
force, the roots of which are deeply buried in
the origins of the human soul, that most states-
men to-day, and such as represent the popular
power, adopt generally a mean and superficial
view of aesthetics.
of Art 125
Likewise, because they have forgotten the
essence of aesthetics and the mission of art in
the world, the majority of artists to-day put
their talents at the service of inferior emotions
and ugliness.
Of what use, then, are the schools of Fine
Arts, in which the beauty of Form is taught,
if social life ceases to be impregnated with
this beauty and if artists themselves turn their
talents in the direction of the ugly and common-
place ?
Of what use are museums, if they are crowded
with works in which bad taste predominates,
and from which the artist's intelligence is
absent ?
A great English writer on aesthetics and
socialism, John Ruskin, spoke truly when he
wrote : " The ugly must be fought even to the
life, and, after being banished from its own
dreams, must be expelled from reality."
Indeed, aesthetic ideas could always be
applied to social ideas. Writers on socialism
ought at the same time to be cognisant of
art, if they wish to become perfect organisers
of human life.
The beautiful is inseparable from social life.
The search for social happiness of necessity
causes beauty to flourish.
Wretched and barbarous peoples, we know,
have no art. The social harmony is not com-
plete— it is not possible, I may say, without
126 The Social Influence
the manifestation of art, which is the flower
and joy of the world.
Why is that ? Because the Beautiful is
intimately allied with the Good ; because the
Beautiful is the visible form of universal Love.
The social and moral world are the same
thing. Art has its share in both.
Thus an immense responsibility weighs on
the statesman, the writer on socialism, and
at the same time the artist.
On one side, when the powers of the state
do not encourage the most elevated expression
of art, they do harm to one of the vital forces
of the spirit ; on the other side, when artists
are satisfied with representing something
inferior and trivial, they compromise art, and
fail in their ideal and social duty.
This idea of (esthetic duty from a social
point of view must seem paradoxical.
However, it is easy to understand that this
duty is based upon the social principle of art
itself, and that the social principle of beauty
assumes a powerful aspect when we know how
to disengage it from the depths of the activities
in which it is hidden under the accumulation
of external appearances.
If in society we take account of the collective
effort in the differing manifestation of intellec-
tual energy, we are struck by this : —
The doctor, though a professional man, fulfils
his social duty by fighting against Disease.
of Art 127
The statesman fulfils his by fighting against
Misery.
The lawyer, or the magistrate, fights against
Injustice.
The advocate does his duty by fighting for
the Right.
The duty of the Savant is to fight against
Ignorance.
Add together these sensible energies, which
really constitute, not mere lucrative professions,
but harmonizing activities, fighting against
ignorance, misery, disease, injustice, against
all the discordant elements that disturb social
harmony, working, that is, towards the realiza-
tion of a maximum of Beauty in the world,
and you will see that the end and function
of all human effort, all social energy, all
professional activity, is to realise the greatest
possible sum of harmony, of beauty. Moral
Beauty and aesthetic Beauty complete one
another.
Beauty is the culminating phenomenon among
the phenomena of life, since it contains in
itself the immanence and the infinitude of
Perfection, the end of the whole cosmic and
human Evolution.
Looked at from this point of view, it becomes
easy indeed to understand the value of the
social principle of Beaut}*' and of Art, which
seems at the same time to be a principle of
evolution and perfection.
128 The Social Influence
To desire that the world should be beautiful,
that life should be beautiful, to wish that the
fine arts should shed their calm inspiring lustre
on society, is to desire the Good of humanity.
If, then, the splendid and barren fortunes
which are the disgrace of certain wealthy
persons could be utilised in producing the
greatest social Beauty, could advance, that is,
the living Art of a people, an immense stride
would be made in human progress.
It was a subtle philosopher and very observant
psychologist who said : " Perhaps the cult of
beautiful things is the surest guide to the solution
of social problems." And, indeed, from the
contemplation of beautiful things spring joy
and happiness. They that show admiration
are good. Great artists, in spite of their vicissi-
tudes, have had happy lives.
Wherever a man, or a people, have nothing
to admire, they grow blase and become boorish.
So, then, we may say that aesthetic admira-
tion is to be included among the catalogue of
social remedies.
Every time that a man finds himself face to
face with a great work of art, he seems to grow
in stature, a kind of inner light renders his
consciousness more receptive, he experiences
the delightful and disturbing sensation of being
enriched with intelligence, goodness, and love.
This is because the very nature of aesthetic
emotion does not constitute merely a pleasure,
of Art 129
but the elevation of life, morally and spiritually.
Unconsciously, the vibration of the feeling of
admiration has awakened in him one of the
spiritual principles of his inner being, for it
is not on the senses alone that the sentiment
of beauty depends, but it is the spirit that
perceives Beauty, Harmony, and vibrates in
agreement with them !
This, I am aware, will seem somewhat
romantic to such as have a materialistic and
physiological view of art, completely ignoring
the occult psychology of man, since it is just
their incurable ignorance of occultism which
characterises the " esthetes du protoplasme."
To most people art means sensuality. They
only expect from art an agreeable visual
sensation, in the physical sense of the word.
And when, despite themselves, they feel in
their heart all the mystery appertaining to a
work in which some artist of genius has known
how to render visible the mysterious power of
the spirit, they turn a deaf ear to that supreme
revelation which art breathes on their blunted
consciousness.
So many modern psychologists endeavour
unsuccessfully to define the nature of aesthetic
emotion because their arguments are based
upon purely physical data. The result has been
a veritable materialisation of art, and artists,
imbued with baneful theories, think that they
do well to appeal only to the incoherence of
J
130 The Social Influence
their lower nature. This phase, fortunately,
is drawing to a close. In spite of everything,
the conception of art is becoming more elevated
and new aspirations are appearing. Psycholo-
gists and philosophers are beginning to declare
that " the cesthetic sense is the great force of true
spiritual life." Truly, art is the working of
spirit on matter.
The harmonies of nature correspond to the
harmonies of existence.
Art is the expression of mysterious affinities.
If it is true that the plastic arts display
to us material beauties by means of the senses,
it is truer still that the aesthetic pleasure
derived from the contemplation of these
beauties affects the soul, the spirit, much more
than the senses themselves. The aesthetic
sense is an inner faculty of man, a faculty
which permits him to feel again in the presence
of material beauty psychic and non-material
impressions.
The object of art, then, is rather to cause
man to perceive the essential reality of things.
And the immateriality of things can be only
perceived and understood by the immaterial
principle of intelligence and spirit.
If, as certain critics of art still imagine, the
sense of beauty depended merely on physical
sensation, the coarsest and most sensual natures
would be the greatest artists and surest
critics.
of Art 131
Now, it is not difficult to recognize that
the contrary is the case. Are not, moreover,
those persons, in whom imagination as a rule
has power over the senses — for Imagination is
a superior faculty to the senses — those that show
themselves most ready, not only in their percep-
tion of the manifold and subtle aspects of the
beautiful, but likewise in creating it ?
Since it is averred that the artist is improved
by his art, and that his art has an elevating
influence on the human soul, is it not, therefore,
indispensable to endeavour unceasingly to raise
the level of Art, and should not artists strive
to reach a higher level of sensibility ?
The artist, instead of seeking an easy success
in the mere mechanical production of works
almost identical and in which the creative
activities of the spirit are no longer to be
distinguished, would do better both as an artist
and man of intelligence in attempting to bring
about the proper evolution of his art.
True artists are not those who paint or
produce sculpture to gratify an instinctive
pleasure in sculpture or painting. True artists,
whether they be painters, sculptors, architects,
or musicians, are those who have discovered
how to construct for themselves an ideal of
Beauty with the spiritual energies of their
being and the natural forces of life. Like the
mystics, who, by dint of the ideal they looked
to, ended by discovering in themselves " that
132 The Social Influence
wonderful power of transformation by which
man himself become that which he worships,"
so true artists reflect in their works the ideal
which they have placed before them.
Most artists have a vulgar and flippant
view of art. Their psychology exactly reflects
the middle-class ideas to which, with a com-
promising facility, they complaisantly adapt
themselves. Those are rare who have the courage
to sacrifice their artistic egoism on the altar
of art to resume it in the hey-day of success.
Mediocre artists, like the vulgar, instinctively
avoid great art because they find that it needs
too much unselfishness. They are afraid of it
— as a fool is afraid in the presence of a man
of genius.
How many artists are there who understand
the social and human import of their vocation,
and who say, as Schiller so neatly put it :
" Beauty should be brought forward as a necessary
condition of mankind I "
There are many men who paint pictures,
and many who produce sculpture, whose hands
are not illumined by the great pure light of
Art, whose souls remain unexalted by the
love of Beauty.
Is it not rather by employing ideal themes
raised above inferior and commonplace con-
tingencies that artists will exert a much
wider influence on the moral life of the
people ?
of Art 133
Michelet said truly : " The birth of genius
is a type of social birth. The soul of a man of
genius, that visibly divine soul, since it creates
like God, is the inner state on which should be
modelled the outer state, in order that it should
be divine likewise."
Nothing will prevent art from generally
playing in society more and more the part of
an educational force, conscious of its mission.
The time has come to infuse society with
art, the ideal, and the beautiful. Society now-
a-days tends to depend too much upon instinct.
It is saturated with materialism, sensualism,
and commercialism.
Modern art has been used too much as a
pretext for all the impure and neurotic ugliness
of the times. The prevalence of uninspired
realistic and imitative productions — whether
impressionist or not — is the disturbing result
of what was otherwise a salutary reaction
against the old academic formulae.
Too many mediocre artists take advantage
of the confused ideas of the day, and the concep-
tion of art, with its splendid plastic and ideologic
possibilities, is seriously compromised thereby.
" Modernism," instead of being a broadening,
a more complete expansion of all the artistic
faculties in the domain of universal beauty,
has really become a levelling and narrowing
influence. Naturalism, that great artistic
calamity, does not understand Nature. It
134 The Social Influence
has only imitated ugly and material things.
Those who still claim acquaintance with her,
and those — a little ashamed of her — who hide
under the mask of impressionism, are wanting
in clairvoyance. They do not see indeed that
pictural ideology, the great decorative and monu-
mental idealism, is beyond any academic
servitude, is a wholly modern art, and which
even ought to be considered as the synthetic
and social art of the future. The symbol of
modern times is thought, as the sign of future
times will be spirit. All evolution of human
activities contend with the effort being made
to free mankind from the inert fatality of
matter. The only true glory of this world is
the knowledge that, by victory over matter,
we draw nearer to wisdom, truth, and beauty.
Matter has no real existence beyond the oppor-
tunity it affords us of struggling against its
attraction and illusion. Every chef d'ceuvre
is not an imitation of, but a victory over,
matter. This is not a paradox. It is the key
to the whole of creation, to all evolution. It
is, too, the very sense of Art, the vital element
of which should be Thought in its manifold and
varied plastic expression.
Rodin, the most modern of artists, is the most
thoughtful (le plus penseur) . And as he is the most
thoughtful, so he has the greatest plastic power!
Thought, therefore, whatever certain flippant
sensualists and unthinking academicians may
of Art 135
say, far from being incompatible with the
exigencies of the visual plasticity of art, is, on
the contrary, its true vital and creative element.
Has the profound thought of De Vinci
paralysed his technical power ? Never. On
the contrary, plastic perfection is exhibited
in the works of the great Florentine with a
magic greater as his thought is more subtle
and profound. It is not true, therefore, that
realism alone brings about Realisation.
How long is it that the artist has been dull-
souled and ignorant ? Since realism has for-
bidden him to have a brain and imagination.
But times are changed.
In face of an sestheticism lacking health and
vigour, without aim, without ideal, which has
too long kept its place merely to satisfy the fads
of a snobbish " elite " at feud with the bour-
geoisie, it is consoling to know that ideas of
art are becoming broader. A new generation,
scornful at once of " flamingatisme " and
" libre-esthetisme," those two aspects of art
so devoid of greatness and beauty, is daily
asserting its creative desires turned in the
direction of the great symbols of life and
human ideas.
To narrowly and selfishly foster one's own
" personality " in the hothouses of " estheti-
comanie," or wallow brutishly in the sensual
sloth of a national antiquated tradition, what
can be less likely to produce a Beauty possessed
136 The Social Influence
of power ! The true Moderns are not those
who, with a shameless perversity, are pleased
with contemporary things through degraded
notions of art. The true Moderns are those
who, understanding in short the plastic value
of Ideas, know that art ought to illumine the
soul of society instead of being content with
reflecting it. True aesthetic culture, really
modern art, lies in that. And that is the
renaissance of great Art.
Very significant symptoms of artistic intellec-
tuality have triumphantly appeared on all sides
— in England, Germany, France, Be^ium, and
Holland.
With regard to what more particularly
concerns our country,* whose growing intellec-
tual evolution is daily tending to widen the
artistic horizon, it may be said that what
Chauvinistic criticism still calls " Flemish
Painting " is becoming more and more an
obvious anachronism. What constitutes the
glory of the painting of the past, the traditional
splendours of the early Flemings and the
period of Rubens, is continued wretchedly
enough in the guise of a realism that lacks its
grandeur. If the so-called " Flemish Painting "
is still carried on in a dull, lifeless way by
certain landscape, animal, and genre painters
wanting in soul and intelligence, it is no less
true that, in spite of old-fashioned prejudices,
* Belgium.
of Art 137
the artistic genius of the Belgian race has for
some time assumed a new aspect and more
elevated expression.
This tendency is in no way accidental or
foreign to the temperament of the race. It is,
on the contrary, a national phenomenon, which
is manifesting itself naturally, because Belgium,
freed at last from the grip of historical domina-
tions which drained her personal vigour, is
again becoming conscious of her strength, of
her true regenerated personality as a race.
Belgian Art is about to take flight anew to
a loftier sphere. All the immense and rich fund
of imagination and idealism so stored with
pictorial genius, choked and paralysed, and for
so long under the incubus of an easy-going feeble
psychology, will when the time comes emerge
with an impetus which will cause surprise.
Sculpture, which has not had to submit, as
has been the case with painting, to the tyranny
of the " Flemish " tradition, has already proved
that the Belgian view of art can rise to the
most sublime and powerful creations. It is
the same with literature, which likewise not
having to drag with it the paralysing weight
of a Flemish tradition, has leapt, with splendid
and powerful strokes of the wings, into the
world of ideas. Painting, the most character-
istic expression of the Belgian soul, its native
gift, is about to improve in its turn. And it will
be surprising to behold how wealthy are the
138 The Social Influence
resources of pictorial genius, when it is definitely
attempting to realise something broader and
more ideal.*
The themes of plastic representation are
renewed under the form of great decorative
art, and painting, adapting even the ancient
myths to its living ideas, again assumes its
monumental and social function.
Camille Mauclair, in his remarkable study on
" The Symbolic Painting of the Future," has
likewise eloquently claimed the supreme rights
of art with regard to imagination and ideology,
showing all the new elements of beauty that
social life and modern thought bring to the
realization of great art.
And, indeed, new and splendid harmonies
of colour and line can be created by the symbo-
lisation of modern ideas and be applied to the
necessities of artistic ornamentation.
Art is in accord with the exigencies of all ages
and all nations, and all ages and all nations are
capable of expressing themselves in their art.
Incompatibility only exists in the personal
powerlessness of adapting one and the other.
Narrow utilitarians have stupidly rejected
the beauty of the useful, as if those two elements
of social activity were incompatible likewise.
Now they are inseparable ; for what impartially
* This, too, is what one of our most learned writers on art, M. Fierens-
Gevaert, has been at pains to show, with rare eloquence and enlightened
enthusiasm, in his recent course of lectures on " Art in the Nineteenth
Century : its Expression in Belgium."
of Art 139
contributes to utility must inevitably realise
the beautiful.
It is from a more perfect conception even
of utility and a purer conception of beauty that
more harmonious groupings of mankind will
be formed and states become beautified.
Just as art must be re-established in the heart,
brain, soul of artists and all men, so also must
the social principle of art be recognised likewise.
Artists, like poets, are only useful to humanity
so far as they cause by their Art the highest
thoughts, the highest sentiments, the highest
aspirations, to be more easily perceived.
In the hierarchy of the higher national
forces, the Artist, like the Savant, represents
public Thought (la Pensee publique).
The multitude, whatever some may say, is
moved by great things, because the emotions
of the multitude are pure and healthy. It is
enough to display before it things beautiful
and sublime, to cause the multitude, without
proper comprehension analytically speaking, to
be touched by them. It is clear that there exists
a popular " instinct," but I am much more
certain that this anonymous force which is
so termed is by no means an absolutely obscure
and blind force, and that the soul of the multi-
tude is illumined by the inner light of intuition.
What a mysterious and profound faculty
indeed is this immense intuition of a people !
How strangely analogous it is to genius !
140 The Social Influence
The multitude understands genius, and
genius understands the multitude. Between that
collective consciousness and that individual con-
sciousness there exists a mighty affinity.
The link which binds together the soul of
genius and the soul of the multitude is the
divine perception of the Beautiful. It is Art
in its social manifestation.
A truth too easily overlooked is that the
mission of all the arts consists in the represen-
tation of Ideas.
"Metaphysics!" those who at present
represent " panbeotisme " will scornfully reply.
No one, however, who is at all conscious of
aesthetic phenomena will deny that the repre-
sentative arts, such as Architecture, Painting,
Sculpture, show us the hidden travail of Ideas,
imprisoned in the materialist conception of
art. Now, there is no better example for a people
than that in which is shown objectively the
influence of the artistic creation which civilised
man has at his disposal. Humanity knows
how to derive from this example of beauty
clearly springing from matter considerable
moral energy, because the dignity of the human
being is measured, not only by the quality of
his actions, but also by the degree of creative
force of which he feels himself capable.
The mystery of art is felt by the multitude
in the same degree as creative power emanates
from the production of the artist.
of Art 141
It is in face of the realisation of beauty
that the profound feeling for Construction,
an intellectual faculty inherent in the human
type, is revealed and confirmed.
Man is essentially a constructor and creator
in the widest, most ideal, and most aesthetic
sense, and the arts generally are the external
evidences of his innate construction and
creative powers. The whole surface of the
planet offers us the spectacle of human creation
changing in its sense of the beautiful. Even
among the ruins of extinct civilisations there
still lingers, like an everlasting enchantment,
amid the chaos of time-worn stones, the genius
of the creative power of beauty, an undying
flower of human intelligence.
The Ideas incarnated in beautiful forms do
not, then, perish, since we find the essence of
them again in the material vestiges of the Past.
Truly, therefore, the mission of all the arts
consists in the representation of Ideas.
Popular art, then, is again concerned with
one of the most harmonious activities of life,
since the construction and beautifying of
human states offers men a magnificent oppor-
tunity of exhibiting, in visible splendour and
harmony, the essential Ideas which govern the
construction and divine creation of worlds.
Ancient India, Chaldea, Egypt, Persia,
Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Middle Ages,
the Renaissance, are perpetuated in the memory
142 The Social Influence
of modern peoples, thanks to what they have
left us of art, public art, art in its social mani-
festation.
The beauty and grandeur of those mighty
aspects of the soul, which we call ancient
civilisations, is still displayed in their remains.
Art, indeed, enters into the very life of a
civilisation, into its civil and religious life, with
the energy and pantheistic beauty of a natural
force. The soul and thought of a people is
impressed on its monuments, from the soul of
the Ancient East, so full of splendour and
metaphysics, as exhibited in her colossal
palaces and temples, to the Christian and
devotional soul of the West, transfused in the
sombre majesty of its religious and civil
monuments.
It seems that a mysterious and splendid force
is ever urging great peoples to stamp the
wealth of their intelligence and activities on
a form of beauty.
In all great cities there spring from the
earth, as though by a kind of lasting artistic
miracle, gorgeous and massive edifices, which
sum up the splendour of an epoch, the visible
aspect of its Ideas.
Who will one day tell us the profound
psychology of the monument ?
Who will tell us the secret of that creative power
of Art, that innate need of Beauty in human
societies, ever apparent in the inexhaustible
of Art 143
imagination of the artist, the artisan, and who
will be able to transform the need into a Fairy,
the Fairy of ^Esthetics !
The artist and artisan, exercising upon
matter the inventive impulse of their imagina-
tion, and at the same time making it conform
to the necessities of space and time, are only
making the human Idea manifest itself in
forms.
Beauty, indeed, is a higher social need.
All substances, gold, silver, stone, silk, paint,
wood, marble, iron, etc., which receive the
double impress, mental and manual, of the
^Esthetic Will, are used to gratify this social
need of Beauty.
Every excavation made in the vast empire
of buried ruins brings to light, to the growing
wonder of modern peoples, the glorious example
of human effort towards the Beautiful, thus
bearing witness that art is an activity of
man's spirit that cannot be checked and cannot
be exhausted. Whatever may be the particular
character of race or age, whatever may be
its standard of social evolution, the constructive
and artistic genius of humanity shows itself.
That original genius can be seen as well
in the primitive decayed lake-dwellings as in
the splendour of the architecture of Babylon.
The same innate power in man is revealed
by the obscure and patient pile-builders of the
lake cities as by the Assyrians who hewed,
144 Tne Social Influence of Art
in the Chaldean quarries, their tremendous
monolithic marble blocks.
To build, to adorn, to decorate, what won-
drous powers of human intelligence !
Thus the phenomenon of aesthetics, con-
tinually to be seen in the private and public
life of societies, far from causing the public
powers and States of the present and future
to be indifferent, ought to be hailed as a social
benefit and as one of the noblest aspects of
human activity.
Can they take into account the utility
of the existence of a body like that of the
International Institute of Public Art ? * Can
they answer its appeal by helping not to increase
the ugliness which threatens modern life, by
waiting for Beauty to spring up everywhere,
and for Harmony to become something like
a State Religion !
* It will not be out of place here to recall that the" International
Institute of Public Art " has been founded in Brussels by a Belgian artist,
M. Eugene Broerman, to whom belongs the honour of having been able
to get together, as a protest against the degradation of Public Beauty, an
influential group of leading international personalities, whose aim is to
struggle against the indifference and ignorance of the powers that be in
matters appertaining to social aesthetics. By a unanimous vote passed at
the last Congress of Public Art at Liege, in 1903, an important inter-
national illustrated review of public art has been set on foot at Brussels,
and will shortly appear, sumptuously produced and ably edited.
\
L'AMOUK DES AMES (j. DELVILLE).
[To /ace page 145.
X
The Creed and the Critics
Analogy between works of Genius — The Atavism of Tradition — Personality
of the Artist unhampered by Tradition — The Artist not a Creator,
but a Discoverer — Art creates the Artist — Great Thinkers and Great
Artists obey the same Laws — Ignorance of Modern Criticism —
Destruction of the Harmonising Social Influence of Art — Corrupt
Art indicative of Corrupt Morality — Idealism the Continuation of
" Naturism " — Art an Emotion and an Instinct — No Definite Style
prescribed by Idealism — Style the Signature of the Individual, the
Impress of the Soul, the Real Presence of Beauty — Bond between
Science and Art — Danger of " Art for Art's Sake " — Indestructibility
of Beauty.
A TRUTH, that many artists foolishly
despise, because they do not understand,
or pretend to be ignorant of, since it
is easier to create " novelty " than " beauty,"
is the fruitful influence of Tradition, that
golden chain spoken of by Homer, the Initiate,
which creates a bond between men of genius,
though of a dissimilar nature, here below,
though as far apart as the poles, and separated
by centuries, as Wagner and iEschylus for
example.
Who has not been struck by the mysterious
analogy between immortal works of genius ?
The relationship between masterpieces suggests
the remarkable influence of heredity. The
different phases of evolution, which alone
classifies them and which contributed to bring
them forth, has never been able to destroy
this relationship, which I am willing to call the
atavism of tradition. But this Tradition, if
K
146 The Creed and
I may further insist upon it, does not extinguish
individuality, does not restrict personal evolu-
tion. It is not a Procrustean bed which the
personality is forcibly made to fit. Instead
of being the revenge of age on all that is young
and vigorous, Tradition is the result of experi-
ence, the sum of centuries of knowledge ; it
is the same eternal truth soaring on high, the
cyclic unity round which revolves the perpetual
motion of human genius.
All the masters comprehended — " compre-
hension is the reflex of creation," as Villiers has
said! — or knew of the abyss that lies between
reality and art, and that the artist must leap
this abyss with his thought if he wishes his
work to be. Beauty has no being where nature
and spirit are not linked in the harmony which
governs their seeming contrast.
Yes, in a work the harmony of the senses
and thought should be perfect. The artist who
does not know how to find in himself the inter-
mediate manifestation between his instinct and
his consciousness will never completely attain
to a masterpiece.
And this is as precise as the mathematical
sanctity of numbers : just as the expansion
of a principle in substance produces life, the
expression of an idea in form produces beauty.
Neither the artist nor inventor create : they
discover or re-discover pre-existing laws, inde-
pendently of their intellectual power, but
the Critics 147
which they explain or manifest according to
the receptive value of their personality.
There exist somewhere, around us, without
or within us, in the depths of the unseen world,
spheres where are formed the eternal images
reflected in our intellects, and which the artist
or poet filch from Mystery by the magic power
of their imagination, that mysterious divine
faculty which must be known in order to be
in tune with the harmony of the World.
" The Artist does not create Art, but he
throws into confusion its divine harmony in
society when Art does not make the artist.
Now, for Art to make the Artist the Science of
Art must exist, and this last plays the part of
a religion or synthesis of sciences."
Clear logic and plain truth like this statement
by Saint Yves d'Alveydre * no one would
venture to deny without danger of going astray !
Furthermore, these words are of greater value
when we consider that they come neither from
a professional critic nor unreliable virtuoso.
Far from being an impostor, he who said it
was one of those rare transcendental beings
who have nestled against the bosom of the
Sphinx to hear the heart of mystery beat the
better.
When such a man speaks it is because he
has something to say, and the words he utters
* St. Yves d'Alveydre, an eminent writer on esoteric philosophy,
lately dead. An important work by him is " La Mission des Juifs."
148 The Creed and
always shed light ; which indeed never happens
when the growing swarms of aesthetics try to
debase the dignity of Art to their mean compre-
hension and low bourgeois taste.
The broad paraphrase of Saint Yves, there
is no doubt, is intended to appeal to the
weakened understanding of contemporary
artists and critics. Both, stained with the
mire of a confused and barren system of art,
can, nevertheless, if they take the trouble to
think about it, gain some insight from it, and
be thus again enabled to tread the fair avenues
that wind around the vast and splendid gardens
of Art.
These few lines, indeed, extracted from a
weighty work on esoteric sociology and full
of learned philosophy, and which it would be
well if some of our smart writers would use as
their daily paper or keep at their bedside,
solve nearly the whole problem of Esthetics.
I know that some will argue in the face of
its clear masterly logic, being convinced before-
hand that it is in no way necessary to try
to settle this problem, and that it is better to
go on instinctively daubing canvases which are
of the least possible utility to the human race.
Others, as dull, will call in question the
competence of an esoteric in matters of art,
and argue that the artist need not receive
laws from anybody, after the manner of
Nature, which, it may be said parenthetically,
the Critics 149
reverently fulfils the laws prescribed by God !
It may be observed, nevertheless, that the ideas
of great thinkers agree with those of great
artists. This is because, consciously or intui-
tively, they are filled with the same light,
and their genius, though different in character,
tends towards the same goal.
Do not the " Organon " and the Parthenon,
using different methods of expression, lay down
the same sovereign laws for science and beauty ?
Do not the Sistine Chapel and the Divine
Commedia utter the same word of the immensity
of the other world ? Are not Plato and Raphael
essentially saying the same thing ? And does
not the same ideal influence glow in Wagner's
Parsifal and Lacuria's " Harmonies of Exist-
ence ? "
But if there exists such an obvious identity
of thought between men of genius, of the same
power but differing in their method of expression,
can we doubt that the same luminous breath
— the Divine Breath — wafts, to the mystic
and absolute goal of perfection and beauty,
the creative spirit of the most precious of beings :
the thinkers and artists !
The reason is because, above the whirlwind
and chaos of error, the sacred Ideal which they
venerate guides them and holds before the
eye of the soul the sacred torch of Tradition,
in order to light them in their progress towards
Truth.
150 The Creed and
And it is above all in our time of civilised
barbarism and intellectual darkness, in which
the anarchical negation of principles is so
supreme, that we can more easily see the
shining path traced by the bright elect of the
human ideal on the dawn-tinged sky of the
ages. If I insist so much on the perfect analogy
between the various views that great men have
of all that has reference to the essential mission
of aesthetics, it is in order to warn the reader
against that inevitable puerile objection which
is always employed by the dull-witted, and
which claims that a philosopher, whether an
initiate or not, ought not to intrude into the
" business " of Art !
To-day all that is settled, one way or another,
by the trivial criticism of the papers. And woe
to the artist who does not side with their
views ! Woe to him who dares to make a wry
face at the fine dish of artistic hash which is
daily prepared ! They will know how to make
him swallow all the venom of their backbiting
and the poison of their malice !
Indeed, the legion of critics — I say legion
because the number of petty critics is equivalent
to the incalculable number of failures — forms
its judgment, not on the artistic principles of
the great masters, nor on those of great thinkers,
but are content like sheep to follow stupidly
that polluted stream of chance or caprice known
as the vogue. These trivial critics, and with
the Critics 151
them, the whole brainless company of impostors,
are in fact ignorant of the Goal and the Mission
of Art.
Ignorant of the sublime raison d'etre that
gives them the mysterious Law of Beauty as
their guide, instead of seeking the Truth they
only indulge in idle claptrap. Should a work
or line of thought come under their notice
conveying any suggestion of a higher life,
or whose form or conception possesses an ideal
significance, it will escape their dull stolid minds,
and they will prefer the stupid ugliness of some
painting in which, amid tricks of the palette
and vulgarity of conception, no idealism is
apparent !
With the soul hermetically closed to the
sacred things of Beauty, and urged by some
morbid instinct or other towards the ugly
and commonplace, these critics, whose paltry
opinions exercise such a dangerous influence
on the public mind, never hesitate to decry
the idealist creed with its synthesis and uni-
versality, proclaiming as it does the ideal of
plastic form, that is to say, of abstract beauty,
and able to regenerate Art, in order to extol
the creed of individualism, naturalism, and
nationalism, which are calculated to bring about
the absolute degradation of Art.
Between the productions of idealism, carried
out by a hand at once cunning and sensitive,
and where country, place, time, race, and
152 The Creed and
things are lost sight of that they may be found
again in the universal significance of their
characterisation, under the living idealism of
synthesis, and the productions of realism and
impressionism in which all the essential aesthetic
qualities are wanting, so as to leave room for
a clever and speedy process, delicacy of touch,
and sparkle (flamingdtisnie) of colour, the minor
critics, with their narrow views, are in no doubt
which to acclaim !
Between Rembrandt,* that arch-magician
(Kabbaliste) of painting, whom some simple
folk still rate as a realist, who transfigured
beings and things under the magic influence of
his inner sight, and Hals, that merry rascal,
the painter of revellers and swash-bucklers,
that wonderfully skilful delineator of nothing-
ness, the buyers of art do not hesitate in their
choice !
And it is under the remarkable excuse that
a painter ought to paint that they prefer the
craftsman to the artist ! It is true that these
gentlemen have never asked themselves on
what ground Raphael is an inferior painter to
Jordaens,f or Vandyck, a greater painter than
De Vinci. We are inclined to think that their
ideas on this head would be extremely diverting.
Until they can explain this, they will continue
to drag Art and artist down to their own level.
* Rembrandt (1607-1669), Dutch ; Franz Hals (1584-1666), Flemish.
t Jacob Jordaens (1594-1678), Flemish painter, pupil of Rubens ;
religious and mythical subjects.
the Critics 153
For these are they who cause the confusion in
aesthetics which marks our age. Esthetics
without aesthetics, genteel triflers, foes of
harmony, noisy demagogues, upholders of
instinct, wild irresponsibles, incompetent
quacks, sneering eclectics, amateur judges,
idle daubers, wretched failures, wrongheaded
artists, and foolish critics — these form the
heterogeneous mass which represents the
miserable idea of art at the present day. I
have already said above, and I repeat it here
again, that we may form a clear judgment
with regard to the intellectual and moral
standard of a people, a race, or an age, from
its art. How will the future judge us ? Alas,
to look at the mournful display at our triennial
shows, those great official fairs, to see the
majority of our private drawing-rooms, those
shows on a small scale, where we are free
to exhibit the marvels of painting in all the
confusion arising from a spurious " individual-
ism ' ' in art, to behold the general stupor and
complete lack of power which most works
exhibit, it is not difficult to form an opinion,
with a sorrowful glance, of the condition of
soul and spirit in this age of materialism.
In fact there is no longer thought, style, or
technique ! No Beauty either in idea, or form,
or execution ! We see that Art no longer creates
the artist, but that it is the artist who wishes
to create Art. And in the judicious phrase
i54 The Creed and
of Saint Yves d'Alveydre, it is clear that " the
artist is throwing into confusion the divine
harmony of Art in society, when Art does not
make the artist ! "
Art withers and dies when the idea of Per-
fection, which is the condition of our psychic
life and even of that of our works, is absent.
Every time that Art falls into decay and becomes
puerile, it is because the part played by the
artistic genius of a race or age undergoes a
change simultaneously with the corruption of
its moral genius. Now — and so much the worse
for those who do not perceive it — we are
passing through such a period of depression.
It was inevitable. Like all that deviates from
the mighty impulse towards harmony, from
that living love of unfading and fertile Beauty,
all that rebels against that universal movement
which forms the flux and reflux of eternal
and divine laws bearing within themselves the
elements of durable creations, all that runs
counter to order, which is the consciousness
of the world and our being, Modern Art,
degraded by its illicit intercourse with material-
ism, bears within it the seeds of death.
There have been men, crabbed theorists,
who, unconscious of the errors of an incomplete
and materialistic philosophy, have proclaimed
the absolute freedom of instinct, denying
principles, theories, laws, denying, in short,
the science of Art ! Rightly aiming at a reaction
the Critics 155
against the barren conventions of academic
training, but overstepping in their ardour
the limits of legitimate reaction, it followed
that these men, though in a different way,
fell into the same mistake. The impressionist
school, which at the present is supreme, excel-
lent though it may be in intention, since it
has managed to clean the mud from the palette,
has confined the practice of art to degrading
trivialities by restricting the powers of the
artist. Born with the taint of realism, these
good people assume that a picture should take
the place of a mirror, and should repeat natural
objects with the most absolute fidelity. That
is the business of the inferior.
Exhibitions and museums of modern art
afford a painful commentary on this subject,
and one is as much overcome with nausea by
the shameless perpetrations of men like Ensor,
Monet,* Seurat, and Gauguin, who, under the
pretence of freedom in art, with the silly
approbation of ignoramuses, frame the most
shocking studio daubs, as by the photographic
"cliches" of Meissonnier and Van Beers ! f
The disgust has become so symptomatic and
so general that a reaction has arisen among
* Claude Monet and Gauguin, both French Impressionist painters.
Monet (b. 1840) may be termed the leader and founder of the school, since
its name is said to have been derived from a landscape of his entitled " An
Impression." His work is solely landscape.
t Meissonnier (1815-91), French, historical and military subjects,
mostly on small scale and of elaborate finish. Van Beers, Belgian, delineator
of feminine coquetry.
156 The Creed and
new literary centres. Ill-distinguished from
" Naturalism," and with its feet still clogged
with the mire out of which Zola moulded
material for his novels, " Naturism "is a
logical evolution, of which " idealism " is the
central continuation or culminating point. In
this mystic pantheism, in the limbs of which
the ' naturists ' seem still plunged, it is easy
to recognise the beginnings of a definite move-
ment towards complete Idealism. One of them
has already proclaimed the necessity of
"harmony," of "proportion" The divine
sense of natural objects corresponds with the
aesthetic sense of most people, in spite of the
gross prejudice in which they still persist, of
thinking that it is necessary to know how to
incarnate the national aspirations of a people
in order that art should become " heroic,"
or be the synthetic expression of life.
It is idealist art, above all, that soars above
limitations, that truly realises life in all its
fulness, since it enables the Universal to be seen
in the individual. This definition, however,
must not be confused with the allegorical
expression of the idea. If form without idea
is of small value in art, idea without form is
not worth much more. The artist is he who
produces depth of feeling, and knows how to
transmit this feeling into the domain of the
will : one is impossible without the other.
First there is the state of passive emotional
the Critics 157
receptivity, and then that of active intellectual
conceptivity. From these two functions
working in harmony springs the work of idealist
art. The artist allows the powerful instincts
which move the natural world to sink into his
heart, and absorbs into his soul the powerful
ideas which move the spiritual world. The work
of art is at once an emotion and an instinct.
Separated, or allowed to run riot, these two
divine movements become, one of them amor-
phous, the other conventional. Someone has
said that Art is Nature continuing her work
in the Spirit. We might reverse the definition
and say : Art is the Spirit continuing its work
in Nature. Inspiration is not, as some pretend,
the dazzled bewilderment of the Spirit, but the
supreme moment of the harmonious concen-
tration of the emotional and intellectual
faculties, which constitutes Will. And Genius
is nothing more than this ! Analyze the best
masterpieces and, if they are only the product
of a spontaneous instinct, you will observe
this mistake or untruth which underlies con-
temporary psychology.
Superficial critics have thought, either through
simplicity, or puerile malice, that idealist art
pretended to lay down the inviolable formula
and deliberate tyranny of an impersonal style.
We must protest with all our strength against
this way of misrepresenting our intentions,
and denying again the existence of a definite
158 The Creed and
style. If idealism assumes the need of style,
as being one of the means by which a work of
art may attain perfection, it does not therefore
mean to impose any particular style, which
would be to absurdly fall into the trap set by
the schools that the wings of the artist may
be clipped.
Style is the signature of the individual, the
impress of the soul, the spirit. It always indicates
the dominating quality of the artist perceptible
beneath the plastic writing of form. It indicates
what degree of psychic elevation the personality
that manifests it has reached. But since style
is the absolute reflection of a condition of soul
or spirit, it is to the artist's advantage to seek
the moral and intellectual perfection of his ego*
If style is the same as the man, then the
more a man rises, the more elevated will his
style become ! Now, idealism invokes style,
because it knows that it is the real presence of
beauty in form. There can be no beauty
without style — no style without beauty.
Style is, moreover, the synthetising element
which is the product of the science of aesthetics,
and that science consists, as far as the artist
is concerned, in considering the laws of concep-
tion with regard to the laws of life. The science
of art, possessed by all the great masters, does
not destroy life, but illuminates it. Science has
* The Ego is not understood here in the narrow egotistical sense that
Maurice Barres wrongly gives to it.
the Critics 159
never even paralysed the creative idealism
of the artist. Of this Leonardo de Vinci and
Goethe are striking proofs. The study of the
laws of the universe, far from checking the
exercise of the aesthetic faculties, affords them
a wider field in their search for the ideal.
Behind the birth of worlds shines the secret
light of the spiritual universe. All men of genius
have known it. To great minds there is no chaos ;
everything is linked together and perfect.
Pheidias was a true philosopher familiar with
deep metaphysical problems. He is in some
ways the Plato of sculpture. The great artists
of the Italian Renaissance assiduously studied
the Platonic philosophy, and the splendour of
Medicean palaces was enhanced by their learned
converse.
How can the study of the laws of natural
phenomena check aesthetic emotion ? Has the
mathematical investigation of universal motion
prevented De Vinci, " the man of all ideas and
all emotions," as Arsene Houssaye terms him,
from reproducing the movements of the human
soul ? Science is the matrix of the Ideal !
Shakespeare, there is little doubt, was
acquainted with magic science, and escaped
being burnt as a sorcerer. The great tragedian
possessed, indeed, the secrets of the Kabbala,
the most wonderful of human knowledge.
Taine on one occasion used a fine phrase :
" The relationship which links art to science is
i6o The Creed and
an honour to both ; it is a glory for the latter
to furnish beauty with its chief supports, and
for the former to rest its noblest constructions
upon truth." In fact the analogy of relationship
exists in perfection between Art, Science, and
Religion.
By speaking in this way I do not mean to
confuse them, which would be utter nonsense,
but I dare to affirm, without fear of contra-
diction, that artistic intelligence should not
be the exclusive mechanical belonging of a
single profession, and that artists who are only
" painters " never rise above the common level
of fools. Art is not a trade ; the artist is not
an artisan.
Has not even the insane Chardin,* the very
type of a painter of subordinate details, been
forced to admit : " When I paint a violin or
a saucepan, I am still only a professional painter,
but when I paint a face, then only am I an
artist."
Into the difficult task of realising beauty
there passes unceasingly the breath of the living
spirit, which ever gains new strength whereso-
ever it finds it. The theory of art for art's sake,
beautiful in itself, necessary in itself, and
defensible whenever unskilled popular writers
attack it to the gain of speculations which are
outside the province of aesthetics, can never be
* Jean Baptiste Chardin (1701-1779), French genre painter ; painted
scenes of a domestic character, allegorical subjects, and fruit.
the Critics 161
considered as absolute and may become a
danger. Rigorously applied it lowers art to the
mechanical technique of narrow conceptions.
The artist must be universal. If he confines
his creative power to a piece of cleverness, or
a landscape, he weakens his personality, and
is usually likely to degenerate.
We will close with that hypocritical admission
which some artists, and some inferior critics,
make, which pretends that the facial expression
of a monkey is as proper for artistic treatment
as the mask of Olympian Jove ! Be it observed
that idealist art is a synonym for Beauty !
In the sphere of conceptions Beauty is the
immediate reflection of the divine world, and
every work unilluminated by it will be dead
and null.
And what we affirm will last as long as our
strength allows us to cry aloud to all the deaf
and all the blind who hear without listening,
and look without seeing !
There is nothing true but Beauty. To strive
towards it is to project oneself into the very
substance of its laws of light. To believe in
it, to believe in its existence, its reality, is
to come into closer communion with the wisdom
of the world.
Like Truth, Beauty causes the divine principle
which slumbers in the depths of our imperfect
nature to again become quick within us. To
manifest it is the most eager, pacific, and earnest
162 The Creed and the Critics
delight of the soul. In the same way as prayer,
it causes all the energies of the spirit and heart
to vibrate.
The demon of war may pass over the world
with its trail of horror, and Beauty will not
perish. For it can no more be destroyed than
the stars, from which it borrows its resplendent
harmony.
And though the red rain of barbarism fall
upon the abodes of mortality, there will ever
blossom anew, in the sunrise of a loving dawn,
the great dream of Order and new-born Beauty I
XI
Idealism in Art : Some Mistaken
Notions
Ignorance of Materialism — Form the Sister of Number — Physical Ugliness
expressive of Moral Ugliness — Ugliness advocated under the pretext
of Emotion — Harmony the Highest Emotion — Separation of pure
from impure by agency of the Spirit — Instinct due to the obscuring
of Spirit — Ugliness the Animal Sign of Instinct — Distinction between
Nature and Matter — Idealist Artists close students of Nature — The
Artist must strive towards the Harmony of the Individual — Beauty
is Unity in Variety — Idealism confused with Conventionalism —
Idealism does not pretend to regulate Inspiration — It demands
moral beauty — It rescues the Artistic Temperament from Materialism
— It is not antagonistic to the Physical Universe — The Domain of
Ugliness limited, that of Beauty infinite — -Idealism developes Style
and Personality alike — " Style is the Soul " — Importance of Choice of
Subject — Synthetic Nature of Idealism — Idealist Genius " super-
conscious."
IF BEAUTY were not the divine impress
of the spirit upon matter, and if our
senses were not the instruments by which
the soul works this transformation, perceptible
only to our thought, how should we explain
in a rational way the astounding prestige of
aesthetic magic — of Art ? Whence could a
work of art derive its power of enchantment,
if not from the ideal source of the divine principle
which illumines the depths of the human being,
and if the heart of Mystery did not actually
beat in the bosom of Art ?
Considered in its metaphysical sense Beauty
is one of the manifestations of the Absolute
Being. Emanating from the harmonious
radiance of the divine plane, it traverses the
intellectual plane in order to further irradiate
164 Idealism in Art :
the plane of nature, where it is quenched in
the darkness of matter. Matter, in itself, has
neither proper form or beauty, but it is the
passive primordial element, in which the beauty
of the spirit, traversing another element, the
astral element, is reflected and made external.
The great error of the realist or materialist
theory is due to its absolute ignorance of what,
in theosophical language, is called the generating
ray of the Image of God in Man traversing the
three principles of Being.
I know that many strong-minded people, in
their calm and self-satisfied contempt of the
Other World, who meet lofty mysteries with
idle negation, and who, nevertheless, at the
decisive moment of death, brought face to face
with the nothingness in which they have made
themselves believe, tremble and despair, I
know that for them this theosophical phrase
only contains words void of sense and reality ?
But the mystery — the evidence of its occult
genuineness can be obtained — which creates
and generates forms in Nature and Being, which
organises them in accordance with the laws of
order, proportion, and harmony — the Word —
" the exemplary form of created things," as
St. Thomas says, " determining and formulating
Form, that Form which renders the world in-
telligible " — has it been understood, has it even
been suspected by such as gaze at and listen
to Life through the mists of instinct alone ?
Some Mistaken Notions 165
Did they ever guess that Harmony is the Soul
of the World, and that — all honour to aesthetic
reasoning! — it exists — that Form is the sister
of Number ?
However, just as the root of the soul is to
be found in the centre of Nature, so Form has
its root in Number, since Number is the funda-
mental law of all created things.
Hugo, whose genius, when not dominated
by the light and shade of his Romanticism,
sometimes rose to metaphysical heights, saw
this clearly : " The Infinite is an exactitude.
The profound word Number is the basis of human
thought ; it is, to our intelligence elemental ; it
signifies harmony as well as mathematics. Number
is revealed to Art by Rhythm, which is the heart-
beat of the Infinite."
Is it, as some superficial thinkers believe it
to be, speculative, superannuated, and vain ?
No. It is eternal !
All Form is the union of Essence with Sub-
stance. All Form is Thought. The world of
ideas becomes the world of forms. In the
imposing symbolism of forms expressing realities
in which the Word- Image is the secret inter-
pretation of the language of Beauty, the work
of creation appears like a permanent trans-
mission of Rhythm to Form ; that is to say,
the production of living forms in the realms
of nature, or, better still, Rhythm in its true
state inscribed in a material form.
166 Idealism in Art :
Form is explanatory. It is the great revealer
of meanings. There is always an agreement
between Form and Expression. Each thing,
each being, has an exact form corresponding
with what it is destined for, or according to its
degree of evolution. The destiny of mankind
is measured out — O wonder of the ignorant! —
because it is governed by the laws of number.
The physiognomist and astrologer, more positive
than is supposed, know it, and, better still,
prove it.
No, nothing indubitably will transmit the
rhythm of a statue by Pheidias into the body
of a gorilla. No ignoble idea, no trivial senti-
ment, could be expressed by a form that had
good rhythm. Physical ugliness always repre-
sents moral ugliness.
Numbers,' Ideas, Forms, that is the analogical
mystery of the whole of creation ! The Bible
— why not quote it since it utters what is
true ? — says : " God ordered all things by
weight and measure." And the whole of nature,
from the atom to the universe, is a demonstra-
tion of this. One of the immortal masters of
modern hermetics has proclaimed, moreover,
that these beautiful words are also just, and that
the wonders of the natural world are a symbolic
system of mercies and glories. They are not
chance definitions.
The hazy-minded advocates of impressionism,
vague-minded and vague-sighted, would profit
Some Mistaken Notions 167
by knowing that the generation of numbers is
analogous to the association of ideas with the
production of forms. Face to face with life
they would have a worthier and surer artistic
consciousness. But they prefer — it is easier,
no doubt — to disparage this life which is con-
tinued afar into the infinite and above into
the world beyond further than they suspect;
this life which vibrates, not with passing
moods, but with the tremendous thrills of the
Invisible ; this life about which they speak with
such literary ostentation and of which they do
not know the occult principles which generate
it ; this life which they debase, I say, through
I know not what vague or superficial instinct,
which, sadly enough, procures for them their
fleeting emotions. Their artistic creed has
confined the influence of emotion to things
which are obscure, formless, crude, and wanting
in harmony. They thus propagate the mysticism
of Ugliness under the pretext of Emotion.
Now, there is no loftier emotion than that
of Harmony.
And Harmony, whether we like it or not,
has been, is, and will ever be, Proportion and
Equilibrium. Harmony is Perfection. When
there is no Perfection, there cannot truly be
Genius. Genius does not proceed from instinct,
but from the Spirit. There is no inspiring
force in instinct, the Spirit alone inspires. That
is why all great works of art are willed. The
168 Idealism in Art :
Spirit makes use of the will. Contrary to instinct,
the ideal function of the Spirit is to separate
the pure from the impure, and this wonderful
creative function, instead of attacking individual
initiative, instead of leading to loss of per-
sonality, gives to the artist a power more
conscious of itself.
Woe to the artist who has never found it
necessary to meditate upon the mystery of
his art ! Woe to him, for he will never see the
glorious blossoming of the human ideal arising
from the chaotic darkness of instinct, and will
never know the splendours of the true life !
" He who has never wateied with his tears
the bread that he eats, he who, with anguished
heart, has not through long sleepless nights
remained seated in sorrow on his bed, such
a one will never know you, Heavenly Powers ! '
once exclaimed Goethe.
All instinctive emotions are due to the
clouding of the Spirit.
All Ugliness is the animal sign of Instinct.
Artists who make ugliness their favourite theme
are dominated by instinct, and have lost the
memory of the divine ray in the soul. They
suffer, for the most part, from a particular
kind of madness or a particular kind of
perversity. Every time that one makes a con-
cession towards, or tolerates, ugliness, that
is to say, whatever lacks form, or is misshapen,
a bond is entered into with the lower regions
Some Mistaken Notions 169
of the astral plane, wherein lurk the forms of
lower beings and inorganic things, and where
the phantasmagoria of elementals ever streams !
What makes one despair is the ignorance
that the artist and critic display when con-
fronted by the mental phenomenon of Art.
How many know that the Mission of Art is
a mission of Light ?
"Art" protests the seer Zanoni, in the great
Rosicrucian novel of Bulwer Lytton, " profane
not thus that glorious word. What nature is to
God, art should be to man ; a sublime, beneficent,
fertile, and inspired creation. That wretch may
be a painter, but an artist never ! And for you,
who aspire to be a painter, has not that art, whose
progress you would hasten, its magic power ?
Ought you not, after a prolonged study of beauty
in the past, to be able to grasp new and ideal
forms of beauty in the future ? Do you not see
that for the poet as for the painter great art seeks
the true and abhors the real ? Ought one not to
treat nature as a master, and not follow it like
a slave ? Has not art, which is truly noble and
great, the future and the past for its province ?
What is a picture, then, but the concrete representa-
tion of the invisible ?
11 Are you discontented with the world ? This
world was never made for genius, which must,
to exist, create another for itself. By two outlets
we escape from the petty passions and terrible
calamities of earth — both lead us to heaven and
i7° Idealism in Art :
rescue us from hell — Art and Science. But art
is more divine than science. Science makes
discoveries, art creates . . . Astronomy which
numbers the stars cannot add an atom to the
universe ; a universe by a poet can be evolved
from an atom. The chemist, with his substances,
can cure the infirmities of the human body ; the
painter, the sculptor, can give to the human form
divine and eternal youth which sickness cannot
destroy or the ages wither."
In order to penetrate it, then, in the mighty
interests of Art, Nature must appear as other
than matter. Nature is a spirit, the spirit
of the Universe, of which matter and the
elements compose the body. Nature can feel,
and is capable of suffering and sorrow, whilst
matter cannot feel. We can, and we ought, in
aesthetics as in philosophy, to distinguish Nature
from the Real.
I know that many will not accept this distinc-
tion, which they will hold to be too subtle,
but I must warn them that for the simple
illusion of the senses it is not enough to deny
this truth of cosmogony, that the universal
plastic force, which shapes the visible world,
is independent of the physical forces of matter,
that lowest degree of the involution of the Spirit.
The notion of the Real and the Spiritual, we
may now clearly say, has been perverted, on
the one side by a petrifying positivism, and
on the other by an inconsistent spiritualism.
Some Mistaken Notions 171
Art has been governed by two contradictory
influences at the same time. Hence the chaos
at the present time : realism which deals with
allegory, and impressionism which concerns
itself with symbolism, in which Beauty is
rejected or misconceived, because the har-
monious relations of life and the ideal are
unknown to it.
With the idealist artist it is the eye that
looks and the spirit that sees. If it is the eye,
the most wonderful and translucent of organs,
which establishes a connection between the
external world and himself, it is the spirit
which reveals light and form to his consciousness.
Can it be said, finally, that idealism, as some
opinionated people of weak understanding
suggest, is mistaken in its views of life ? There
are, indeed, no greater lovers of Nature than
the idealist artists, since they see her under
her twofold aspect, the most trivial spectacle
of the physical world becoming for them a
world of ideas. Material images, real forms,
fill not only their eyes but their intelligence
too. They not only see in Nature the matter
of created things ; they perceive what is
expressed in forms, namely, Intelligence. The
elements of which the external world is com-
posed are used by the idealist to recreate and
rediscover an ideal world in his thought. The
ideal he knows to be the logical vision of his
thought towards harmony, Beauty. Certain
172 Idealism in Art :
aesthetic writers, philosophising upon art in
a fanciful and impulsive manner, declare
harmony to be a proposition and beauty an
illusion. To make a distinction between harmony
and beauty is a fundamental mistake. There
is no beauty without harmony, no harmony
without beauty. Instead of being an illusion,
an abstraction, Beauty is the very realising of
the Ideal.
As Love is characterised by Charity, so
Beauty is characterised by Spirit. Spirit,
holding the balance between Will and Intelli-
gence, is inseparable from Beauty. The genius
of Art is expressed by the genius of Nature,
which, by virtue of the principles of evolution
and selection which governs it, ever tends
towards Beauty. It is the genius of Nature
which the artist ought to seek behind the
confused appearance of the real. His soul
should enter into communion with it, if he
wishes to find the ideal. For the ideal is nearer
to man than he thinks. Unfortunately he
does not know how to seek it, and since he does
not find it he denies its existence. We are
thus led to conclude that the weaknesses of a
work are due to weaknesses of thought, to
something lacking in the soul, to an infirmity
of a real or psychic nature. There exists, in
fact, in the sensibility of one and the other
flagrant discords. And it is usually in the
name of these native or accidental, psychic
Some Mistaken Notions 173
or physiological, discords, that impressionist
critics and artists reprobate the fundamental
laws of aesthetics. This undoubtedly gives rise
to that deplorable individualism in art which
is at bottom merely the idle indulgence which
mediocre and unskilful artists allow themselves.
It is usually overlooked that the Ego of each
individuality, as the esoteric physiognomy
clearly indicates, has different aspects, either
contradictory or complementary. Man, in
fact, has, so to speak, four temperaments. There
are these four moral psychological contra-
dictions which it is his business to harmonise
and balance one against the other. In every
man there is manifested, in different degrees,
a lymphatic, sanguine, nervous, and bilious
temperament, and it is only when these four
different sides of his individuality are brought
into harmony that the man becomes perfect
and evolved. Lack of balance is due to the
abnormal preponderance of one of these aspects
over the others. This is what makes a man's
nature objective, subjective, passive, or active.
The harmony of the individual is the psycholo-
gical end towards which the artist should strive.
There is no other individualism.
All great artists know that Art, without
belonging to analytical science, without being
bound by conventional rules or barren precepts,
contains a science whose laws are naturally
fixed by the supreme logic of beauty. They
174 Idealism in Art :
know also that beauty, in order to be different
according to the idiosyncrasy of the masters,
is not the less governed by a mysterious unity,
which centralises things similar, and which is
its greatness and strength, realising a sovereign
formula : Unity in Variety.
I say again that to give up aesthetics
to the caprices of individual sensibility, to
deliver it over to the idle fancies of the in-
competent, to all kinds of degenerate influences,
constitutes the great mistake of contemporary
eclecticism.
Many have attempted to oppose the idealist
tendency with arguments as vain as ridiculous.
Some coolly wish to confuse it with the con-
ventional school. People may be found who
at the very name of idealism give a melancholy
shrug of the shoulders and assume quaint airs
of repulsion. They say — without believing it !
— that the name conceals a superannuated
assembly of Buddhist priests laying down
automatically with square and compass inviol-
able rules and calmly drawing up a table of
recipes for the use of wise artists — something
like the chrestomathy of the perfect scholar !
They have argued against this wide and liberal
tendency without understanding it. Conse-
quently their argument is practically nothing
more than a clumsy tissue of prejudices.
We are forced to cry aloud, with all the
strength of our lungs, that the idealist creed
Some Mistaken Notions 175
of art, in spite of its apparent dogmatism, is
not a doctrine to induce narrowness ; on the
contrary, it affords an impetus to the artist's
personality, which remains unfettered, com-
pletely unfettered, as far as it can be before the
imposing logic of art, which contains a science
of harmonies in which reason is mingled with
emotion, and in which law amplifies sensation.
It is wholly the development of personality
in the direction of loftier conceptions, of per-
sonality which perceives more clearly the
great possibilities of art. It brings the artist
back, not to preconceived forms, not to decaying
academic ideas, but to the ideal and eternal
principle of art. Just as science makes clear
to us that general laws govern the relations
between man and the elements, so idealist art,
correctly defined, proves that there are laws
governing the relations of nature to art. It is
about these laws that personality with its ideas,
sentiments, and sensations, performs its
evolutions.
The sign of great art is Beauty. The sign
of Beauty is Harmony. The sign of Harmony
is Unity.
In concentrating in his spirit and will his
manifold various vital sensations, which should
be, not confused or fanciful, but vigorous,
clear, and distinct, the artist will be enabled
to perceive aesthetic unity, without which there
is no perfection possible.
176 Idealism in Art :
Unity is one of the great secrets of the
beautiful. Unity is the very soul of style,
and since style is personality in its most subtle
expression, the more personality is evolved,
morally and spiritually, the more enlightened
will the artist become through the idea of unity.
Does this mean that idealism consists in
sacrificing everything to thought ? That would
be absurd. It refuses nothing to the senses.
It devotes them to higher ends by rendering
them more subtle. Between sensation and
temperament is placed notion.
It in no way subordinates the subject to
the painting, or the painting to the subject.
Neither does it place style above idea. It does
not pretend to regulate inspiration. It enriches
and fortifies it, revealing its power by its union
with the absolute. Idealism rejects none of
the artistic faculties. It harmonises and welds
them together. It aims at concentrating and
complementing faculties tending in diverse
directions. It desires the synthesis of the
divine word, of the human word, of nature's
word.
Idealism lays down a hard and fast condi-
tion : Moral Beauty. It rejects the black magic
of art, which consists in spiritualising what
is evil. It has an educational and general
socialising influence, quite apart from any
particular scheme of socialism. It knows
nought, for instance, of aristocracies or
Some Mistaken Notions 177
democracies. It sees humanity in the immense
vitality of its ideal growth. If the artist would
become conscious of that, his personality must
be purified and elevated. He must likewise
know how to bring his life into harmony with
natural and occult bond which links the sense
to the soul, and soul to the spirit.
The duty of modern idealism will be to rescue
the artistic temperament from the fatal scourge
of materialism, to save personality from the
dangers inherent in the worship of uncompre-
hended matter, to lead it away from the degrad-
ing appeal of the ugly, in order to guide it,
definitely, to the pure regions of an art which
proclaims a spirituality about to be made
manifest. It can do it, it must do it, without
needing to have recourse to the imaginings of
morbid dreams, to superficiality, and all the
wretched unnatural creations of diseased minds
and the baneful stupefying of the intellect, the
disgrace and misery of art !
What is the artist, then, whether he be
painter, sculptor, poet, or musician, if he be
not the man who seeks to recover the traces
of that invisible world of harmony and beauty,
that spiritual world whence his struggling soul
has preserved, throughout its period of gloom
and intuition, a reflected radiance ; that is to
say, the ideal and divine attraction.
From this progress of art and the artist to
transcendental heights must it then be assumed
M
178 Idealism in Art :
that idealism recoils in disdain from physical
nature ? Certainly not. Idealism attracts life,
all life, to itself, by spiritualising it, by pro-
jecting its form and colour on the splendours
of the spiritual world, of which the artist
possesses the inner interpretation. Between the
material passiveness of the object, and the
lively suggestion of sensation, the idealist allows
the harmonising energy of conception to move
within him. The principle of his work does not
consist, as it has been falsely thought, in a
cold delineation of the abstract from which
emotion is excluded. Idealist art must not then
be libelled by having the mystico-burlesque
nightmares of certain incompetent painters
attributed to it, such as revive the rudimentary
deformities of early times, and fall back
miserably into an amorphous and incoherent
past, in which protoplasm is confused with
larva
The obvious end of idealist art is the purifica-
tion of art.
The modern art movement, if it would
voyage to the bright horizons of the ideal,
must struggle against the continual encroach-
ments of the ugly, no matter beneath what mark
this is hidden : whether beneath the hypo-
critical pretence of symbolism, characterisation,
impressionism or realism, those inferior methods
of expression by which those who dally with it
are led astray.
Some Mistaken Notions 179
It has not been sufficiently observed that
the domain of ugliness is confined to narrow
limits, whilst that of pure beauty is infinite.
The former holds art captive and forces it to
breathe an impure atmosphere, and is the aethe-
tics of darkness. Art then falls a prey to the
lower influences of the astral world, which act
upon the ready imagination of the artist un-
conscious of the phenomena. The other renders
active all the latent powers of the higher
influences. Into the now unclouded imagination
peers, if I may so express it, the third eye,
which receives the reflection of a world become
spiritualised . . . Must it be ever re-
peated that beauty depends no more on sensi-
bility than on a cunning ordering of accepted
rules.
Idealism does not lay down a particular
style. It developes the personal style side
by side with the development of personality.
It has been said : " Style is the Man " ; it
should have been : " Style is the Soul." Style
is the imprint of the soul coming in contact
with Essence and Substance. Through the soul
the spirit descends to matter ; matter ascends
to the spirit through the soul.
If I insist on the mediating influence of the
soul, it is because it is a folly to wish to bring
spirit and matter into immediate connection.
That is why Idealism does not aim at the
awful sublimity of an ideology without emotion
180 Idealism in Art :
and does not demand the extinction of emo-
tional forces.
What it proclaims and realises is the indivi-
duality of the artist seeking synthetically a
supreme accord with plastic harmony, moral
harmony, and intellectual harmony !
Can beauty be reasonably detached from
the idea expressed in the work, and is the choice
of " subject," which is ever in relation to the
personal worth of the artist, an additional
and needless preoccupation, and one that may
be neglected ? The theory of " no matter
what " borders dangerously on depravity. It
enfeebles the artist. It lessens the importance
of his function. It falsifies his aim. It strangles
his thought and brings the fertile and idealising
principle within him to a standstill. The
species of eclectico — sceptic pantheism which
finds beauty everywhere — especially where it
is not — on the ground that beauty in art is
on an equal footing with and in no way different
to beauty in nature, results in degrading art
as much the opposite theory of originality,
that intrusive originality under cover of which
are produced such absurd and grotesque
abortions.
Let us pass on.
We know : neither one or the other have
hitherto conceived a harmonious notion of
nature and art, nor have they known how to
understand the mutual relationship between
Some Mistaken Notions 181
the real and the ideal image. That is precisely
the synthetising power of idealism in art ; it
possesses the sense of universal harmony and
the sense of divine harmony. It knows — it
has the desire too — that before there can be
the desire of creating the wing of a seraph,
there must be ability to draw the wing of a
swallow. Nature and the ideal are not in oppo-
sition. Truth and beauty are not irreconcilable.
Logically the two are different, but they are
linked by extraordinary points of resemblance.
Those who remain the slaves of instinct will
never guess the secret that these similarities
reveal. Someone has well said: " Idealism soars
aloft to a complete synthesis." Has it not reached
those heights when art can be illumined by the
magic and stupendous magnificence of Beauty ?
It is here, indeed, that the artist learns how
to realise the law of infinite relationship, the
philosophy of line and of colour, their universal
significance, the inner meaning of gesture,
the power of ideas and of form, the motion of
the body and of the soul, the connection between
the visible and invisible, the communion of
beings and things, and the sublime mathematics
of eternal harmonies.
Here finally the regenerated artist discovers
a power of aesthetic expression proportioned to
the sublimity of his aspirations and thoughts.
Here finally the whole glorious life of art is
unrolled in its majesty.
182 Idealism in Art
The time has arrived when genius will no
longer be unconscious. The genius of the
idealist will, we boldly prophesy, be super-
conscious.
And what will this super consciousness be ?
An abstract sensibility ? An intellectual
orthodoxy ? A psychic pedantry ? Will it
involve closed eyes, systematically closed, to
the bright blossoms of life, or mean that the
heart and senses should become atrophied,
voluntarily atrophied, when confronted with
the enormous and ineffable palpitation of the
world ?
No, it will be nothing so insane. But it will
be the knowledge that life is not limited to the
senses and that it is extended into the splen-
dours and forces of the Invisible, where it will
be purified in the inevitable Ideal.
And that will be — in the work !
INDEX
A.E. on landscape painting, note, 21
Academic School present Body
without Soul, 72
" Adoration of the Magi, The" (De
Vinci), 7
jEschylus, 5, 45, 145
..Esthetics, Peladan on Salvation
of, 44
need of a clearly defined view,
84
Alexandrian School, 90
Ancient Wisdom, The, see Universal
Wisdom
Apelles, 116
Art, completes Nature, xxiii. ;
influence of Nature study on, 3 ;
In Belgium, note, 10 ; aspires to
condition of Music, 49 ; a species
of occult chemistry, 70 ; a
Divine Force, 73 ; a vital organ
of Humanity, 73 ; consecrated
by Metaphysics, 78 ; its course
parallel to that of Science, 81 ;
threatened by Positivism, 80 ;
its mission to cause what is
comprehensible to be perceived,
80 ; to purify mankind, 85 ;
indissolubly bound to Religion,
94 ; neglected by the State, 95 ;
patronage of in France, 97 ; in
Bavaria, 98 ; patronage of at
the Renaissance, 100, 101 ; nei-
ther aristocratic or democratic,
103 ; its influence on Society,
121-144 ; the revealer of Har-
mony to Mankind, 122 ; un-
known to animals, 123 ; super-
ficial views of statesmen as to,
124 ; evolution of correspondent
to Social progress, 124 ; the
working of Spirit upon Matter,
130 ; must overcome Matter,
not imitate it, 134 ; must
illumine and not reflect Society,
136 ; its mission to represent
Ideas, 141 ; creates the Artist,
147 ; modern degradation of,
153 ; when corrupt significant of
a corrupt morality, 154 ; its
mission a mission of light, 169
Art of the Future, Peladan on, 30 ;
dependent on future of Science,
Religion and Philosophy, 75 ;
to be based on the triple formula?
of Idealism, 83
Art, work of, must represent an
Idea, 8 ; has Body, Soul, Spirit,
25 ; imperfect without Beauty,
27 ; at once an emotion and an
instinct, 157
" Art for Art's Sake," fallacy of
theory, 160
Artist, Initiation necessary to,
xxvii., xxxiv. ; lack of great
artists at present time, xxxv. ;
high calling of, 7 ; loss of in-
dividuality by, 8 ; the revealer
of Beauty to mankind, 72 ; un-
importance of his environment,
77 ; should show that his work
is not the result of chance, 81 ;
distortion of Nature by modern
artists, 84 ; degradation of by
the State, 99 ; mysticism of the
Primitive, 107 ; social responsi-
bility of, 126 ; inferior artists
afraid of great art, 132 ; the
representative of Public Opinion,
139 ; a discoverer not creator,
146 ; created by Art, 147 ; great
artists and great thinkers akin,
149 ; must strive towards the
Harmony of the Individual, 173
Athenagoras, 90
Athos, Mt., the monks of, 119
Bach, 5, 66
Bandinelli, note, 46
Banville, Theodore de, 17
Barres, Maurice, 158
Baudelaire, on the Artist, 7, 19 ;
on the limitations of Nature,
20,42
Bavaria, art, patronage in by Lud-
wig II., 98
Bayreuth, Wagner's theatre at, 98
" Beautiful, The, is the Ugly " :
fallacy of the dictum, 52
Beauty : Spiritual, Plastic, Techni-
cal, xxviii. ; absence of in
modern Art, 8 ; threefold char-
acter of 14, 27 ; absolute prin-
ciple of, 29 ; the synonym of
Truth and Harmony, 30 ; the
reflection of the Essence in the
Substance, 33 ; Beauty in Art
superior to Beauty in Nature,
68 ; the harmony of Forms, 70 ;
discountenanced by the Church,
93 ; resulting from the Sym-
metry of Nature, 109 ; percep-
tion of inseparable from Men-
tality, 124 ; its influence on
Social problems, 128 ; perceived
184
Index
through the Imagination rather
than through the Senses, 130 ;
a necessary condition of man-
kind, 132 ; not incompatible with
utility, 138 ; A Society to protest
against degradation of Public
Beauty, 144 ; ignorance of art
critics as to, 151 ; necessary to
all subjects for artistic treat-
ment, 161 ; indestructibility of,
162 ; is Unity in Variety, 174 ;
its domain infinite, 179
Beers, Van, note, 155
Beethoven, 31, 66 ; his deafness
and ninth symphony, 68
Belgian Art, new era in, 136, 137 ;
note, 10
Besant, Annie, quoted, 121
Beuron School, The, a revival of
religious Art, 109 ; foundation
of, note, 109 ; study of Greek and
Christian tradition by, 110 ; a
reaction against ecclesiastical
ugliness, 113 ; influence of By-
zantine and Gothic Art on, 116
Bhagavad-Gita, 91
Botticelli, 58
Bouguereau, A. W., note, 46
Braeckeleer, De, note, 37
Brahminism in harmony with
Christianity, 91
Broerman, Eugene, 144
Brussels, Art Societies at, note, 10
Buddha, the Christ of the East, 92
Bulwer Lytton, his " Zanoni "
quoted, 169
Burne-Jones, xiv., xxv., 8, 46
Byzantine Art, 58 ; influence on
the Beuron School, 116
Canova, note, 46
" Cercle des Vingt," 10, 48
Chardin, note, 160
Chavannes, Puvis de, xxv. ; chief
works of, note, 17 ; his criticism
of Impressionism, 18 ; on Art and
Nature, 19, 46, 114
Chenavard, xxxvi. ; note, 46, 50
Chesterton, G. K., on Watts, 46
Chevreul, his theory anticipated by
Delacroix, note, 39
Choice of subject, importance of,
Delacroix, 181
Christ, the Buddha of the West, 92
Christian Art, the product of re-
ligious materialism, 87 ; to be
replaced by Universal Idealist
Art, 94 ; revival of by Beuron
School, 104-120 ; not to be de-
pendent on imitative principles,
105; should be hieratic and ideal,
106, 108 ; Order indispensable
to, 109 ; Ugliness incompatible
with, 112 ; opposed to the nude,
117
Christian mystics, 89, 90
Christianity, in harmony with
Brahmanism, 91
Church, The, hostile to Initiation,
87 ; early Fathers of, 89, 90 ;
Key to Secret Doctrine with-
held by, 93 ; Beauty discoun-
tenanced by, 93
Cimabue, 58, 107, 119
Colour, not dependent on the genius
of the artist, 39 ; theory of
Delacroix as to, 39
Colour-sense, possessed by animals,
38 ; influence of digestion on, 38
Comprehension, the reflex of Crea-
tion, 67
Conception, the Ideal and Spiritual
stage, 23
Consciousness of Genius, 5
Consciousness, influence of spiritual
vibration on, 11
Coppee, 19
Corot, 21
Courbet, 10
Couture, 17
Criticism, modern, ignorant of Law
of Beauty, 151 ; exalts crafts-
man above the artist, 152
Dante, an initiate, 88
D'Aurevilly, Barbey, destitution of,
his works, note, 103
David, J. L., his love of the an-
tique, note, 50
Delacroix, his theories, the fore-
runner of " pointillisme," note, 39
" Democratising of Art, The," 9
Design, the foundation of art, 48 ;
compared with Music, 49
Diotime, 87
" Divina Commedia, The," 8, 88, 149
Eckhardt, 90
Edison, 39
Emotion, the middle stage of a
work of Art, 23
Ensor, J., vulgarity of, note, 8, 155
" Fair is Foul," xxiii.
Fierens-Gevaert, lectures on 19th
century Art, 188
Flandrin Hippolyte, his works, note,
116,117
" Flemish Painting," an anachron-
ism, 136
Form, Beauty of, 15 ; expressive
of creative power of the world,
Index
18*
32 ; its connection with the
Idea, 49 ; the product of sound
waves, 66 ; the union of Essence
with Substance, 165 ; the sister
of Number, 165
Fra Angelico, 58, 66, 107, 110, 119
France, Art patronage in, 97
France, Anatole, 100
Gallait, note, 46
Gauguin, note, 155
Gautier, Theophile, 17 ; opinion
of Gallait, 46
Genius, its productions not spon-
taneous, 55 ; Michelet on, 133 ;
analogy between men of, 145
Germany, Beuron School in, 109
" Gioconda," 7
Giorgos Marcos, 119
Giotto, 58, 107, 119
Gliick, 22
Gnosticism akin to Universal Wis-
dom, 88 ; the fundamental spirit
of Christianity, 90
Goethe, 42 ; on Form and Design,
49 ; on the Greeks, 54 ; quoted,
168
Gothic Art, 58
Greek Idealism, 53, 57
" Guide to Sacred Art, The;' 119
Hals, Franz, note, 152
" Harmonies of Existence, The," 149
Harmony, the essence of the social
influence of Art, 121 ; the secret
of the Universe and the State,
121 ; the highest Emotion, 167
Herkomer, xxv.
Hermes, 89
Holman Hunt, xxv.
Homer, an initiate, 145
Houssaye, Arsene, 159
Hugo, Victor, on Number, 165
Huxlev, Prof., 123
Hypatia, 88
Idea, Beauty of, 14 ; connection
with Form, 49
Ideas of past ages reflected in their
Monuments, 142, 143
Ideal, The Science of the, 61 ;
superior to all individual ideals,
69
Idealism, Threefold nature of,
xxviii. ; present in every true
w 1. 1 k of Art, 10 ; means the spiri-
tualising of Art, 11 ; a synonym
for Art, 11 ; reaction against
Realism and Impressionism, 13 ;
Threefold principle of, 14 ;
Artist unfettered by, 16 ; de-
mands study of Nature, 17, 171 ;
not exclusive , 19 ; is the har-
mony of the Natural, the Human,
and the Divine, 36 ; not to be
confused with " dreaming," 65 ;
influence on modern thought, 78 ;
the continuation of Naturism,
156 ; does not insist on a definite
style, 158 ; confused with Con-
ventionalism, 174 ; does not
regulate Inspiration, 176 ; de-
mands " moral beauty," 176 ;
rescues the artist from material-
ism, 178 ; not antagonistic to the
physical Universe, 178 ; its
synthetic nature, 181; its " super-
consciousness," 182
" Ilissus, The," 51
Image, An, is Sensation spiritual-
ised, 24 ; the invention of, the
dawn of social intelligence, 123
" Imitation of Jesus Christ, The"
91
Impressionism, corresponds to
scepticism, xxii. ; a pursuit of
the Ugly, xxii. ; results in the
negation of Form, 4 ; a neurotic
malady, 9 ; the Poetry of the
Moment : its fallacy, 18 ; lacking
in real aesthetic emotion, 83
Initiation, necessary for the artist,
xxvii., xxxiv. ; of Greek artists,
54
" International Institute of Public
Art, The," 144
Jesus Christ, 89, 92
Jordaens, note, 152
Julius, II. ; his admiration of
Michael Angelo, 101
Kings, modern, lacking in " aesthe-
tic sense," 96 ; inglorious char-
acter of, 99, 100
Krishna, 89
Lacuria, 149
Landscape-painting, xxx. ; only
translates impressions, 17, 21 ;
A.E. on, note, 21 ; an element of
decoration, 21 ; a background,
22 ; an illegitimate form of
Art, 23
" L'Assommoir," 8
Lebrun, note, 46, 50
" L'Ecole de Platon," xvi.
Lenz, R. P. Desire, founder of the
Beuron School, 109
Leys, Baron Henry, influence on
Belgian Art, 10
" L' Homme- Dieu" xvi.
" Libre Esthetique," 48
N
i86
Index
Life confused with Substance, 64
Line, the essence of Form, 48 ; the
immutable theology of Form, 112
Ludwig II. of Bavaria, patronage
of Wagner, 98
Lysippus, 116
" Macbeth " quoted, xxiii.
Magi, The, their initiation of the
artist, 53
" Mammon," 15
Manu, 89
Martinism, 88
Materialism, erroneous view of
Art, xxix. ; future overthrow of,
61 ; its struggle with Spiritual-
ism, 75
Mauclair, Camille, 138
Meissonier, note, 155
Memphis, 98
Michael Angelo, xxx., 13, 45, 58,
66, 77
Michelet, on Genius, 133
Millais, Sir J. E., xxv. ; note, 46
" Minotaur, The," 15
Mission of Art, The, a mission of
Light, 169
Monet, Claude, founder of Im-
pressionist School, note, 155
Moreau, Gustave, xxv., 46 ; his
aims and work, note, 46
Moses, 89
Music, its aid in the aesthetic com-
prehension of Form, 49 ; the
basis of social harmony, 121
Musical vibration, correspondent to
harmony of Form, 66
" Mystery of Evolution, The," by
Jean Delville, 122
Mysticism, Christian, 89, 90
Napoleon I., his patronage of
Art, 97
Napoleon III., patronge of Art, 98
" National " Art, xxx., _xxxvii. ;
doomed in the future, 75, 76
Naturalism, atrophies the creative
powers of the artist, xxi. ; corre-
sponds to materialistic panthe-
ism, xxii. ; debasing influence on
Art, 5
Nature, an evolution towards
Beauty, xxiii. ; principle of selec-
tion in, 19 ; Puvis de Chavannes
and Baudelaire on Incomplete-
ness of, 19 ; a medley of enchant-
ment and terror, 65 ; to be dis-
tinguished from the Real, 170
Naturism, an evolution from
Naturalism towards Idealism,
156
Navez, note, 46
Newton, Sir Isaac, 5
Nike, statue of, from Samothrace,
51
" Noces corinthiennes," 100
Nude, The, its moral significance,
56 ; expresses the true sense of
Nature, 57 ; the Alpha and
Omega of /Esthetics, 58 ; its
study can regenerate Art, 58 ;
neglected by the Primitives, 58 ;
studied by artists of Renais-
sance, 58 ; its synthetic quality,
59 ; it evokes Humanity, 59 ;
made fleshly by Realism, 63 ;
studv of, opposed by Christian
Art,117
Occultism of Rembrandt, 152 ;
of Shakespeare, 159
Orcagna, 58, 107
" Orfeo," scenic poetry of, 22
" Organon, The," 149
Origen, 90
Orpheus, 89
the lyre of, 55
Palais de Justice, Brussels, xvii.
Paracelsus, 90
" Parsifal" 77, 149
Parthenon, The, 149
Pater, W., 49
Peladan, Josephin, character of
his Idealism, note, xxxvii. ; on
the Art of the Future, 30 ; on
the Salvation of ^Esthetics, 45 ;
on Line, 112
Pericles, 53, 54, 121
Pheidias, 31, 45, 54, 66, 77, 110,
116, 121, 159, 166
Plato, 53, 55, 87, 89, 111, 121, 149
" Poets of the Moment," the Im-
pressionists, 18
Polycleitos, 116
Primitive artists, eponyms of Chris-
tian Art, 113
" Promethus Vinctus," 5
Proudhon, his sophism on the Ugly,
64 ; his famous paradox, note,
64, 102
Pythagoras, 42, 89
Rama, 89
Raphael, xxx., 5, 45, 152
Real, The, to be distinguished from
the Natural, 170
Realism, its ignorance of the
Divinity in Man, 164
Realist-Impressionist School pre-
sent Things without Idea, 72
Index
187
" Reformation of Human Know-
ledge, The," 42
Religion, future reconciliation with
Science, 79
Rembrandt, 77 ; the Kabbaliste of
painting, note, 152
Renaissance passion for Art, 100—2
Rhvthm of Form, 31
Rodin, 134
Romanticism, an advance towards
Idealism, xix. ; Idealism with-
out Idea, xix. ; lacking in a clear
synthesis, xx. ; overthrown by
Naturalism and Positivism, xxi.
Rosicrucian romance of " Zanoni,"
169
Rossetti, xvi.
Rubens, 136
Ruskin, John, his failure to per-
ceive the essential in Art, xxv.,
xxxvii. ; on Symmetry, 109 ; on
the Ugly, 125
Ruysbroeck, John, father of Flemish
mysticism, note, 90
Sacred Art, see Christian Art
Sais, 90
" Samothrace, La," note, 51
Scheffer, 17
Schiller on Beauty, 132
" School of Athens, The," 5
Science, future reconciliation with
Religion, 79 ; the matrix of the
Ideal, 159
Seailles, Gabriel, quoted, 24
Sensation, and Sentiment steps
towards the Idea, xxix. ; rela-
tion to Consciousness, 23 ; the
first stage in work of Art, 23 ;
only a means towards a work of
art,' 68
Seurat, Impressionist method of,
note, 43, 155
" Seven Lamps of Architecture,
The" 109
Shakespeare, occultism of, xxii.,
159
Signac, Impressionist theory of, 43
Sistine Chapel, 149
Sizeranne, Robert de la, xxi v.
Social Art, no necessitv for, 71
" Socialising of Art, The," 9
Societe Libre," 10, 48
Society, influence of Art on, 80
Socrates initiated by Diotime, 88
Sophocles, 45, 54
Spiritualising of Science, 62
St. Angela of Foligno, 90
" St. Anne " (De Vinci), 51, 64
St. Augustine, affirms Christianity
to have existed before Christ, 90 ;
his lost treatise on the Beautiful,
note, 91
St. Clement of Alexandria, 89
St. Denys the Areopagite, 90 ; on
Image- worship, 119
St. Francis of Assisi, 90
St. Irenaeus, 89
St. Luc, School of, 94
St. Maur, Chapel of, 110
St. Pantaenus, note, 90
St. Thomas Aquinas, 90 ; quoted,
164
St. Vincent de Paul, Church of,
Frieze at, 117
St. Yves d'Alveydre, on Art and
the Artist, note, 147 ; quoted, 154
State, The, neglect of Art by, 95
Strasburg Cathedral, astrological
clock at, 5
Style, an idealising quality, 51 ;
no definite style demanded by
Idealism, 158 ; the signature of
the individual, 158
" Style is the Soul," 179
Symbolic painting of the Future,
138
Symmetry, a natural law, 109
Taine, on the Ugly and the
Beautiful, 52 ; on the relation-
ship of Art and Science, 159
Technique, Beauty of, 15
" Temperament," theories as to, 81
Temperament of Man fourfold, 173
Thebes, 90
Theophilus, the monk, his manual
on Art, 116
Theory, necessity for, 39 ; idle
objections to, 40 ; able to purify
Art, 43
Theosophical Society, The, 88
Tolstoi', concerned only with the
morality of Art, xxvi., xxxvii. ;
conception of Art, 73
Tradition, the Living and the Dead,
45 ; Artists of, 45, 46 ; subordina-
tion of personality to, 45 ; in-
fluence of, 145 ; the atavism of,
145 ; personality of artist un-
fettered by, 146
Trithemius, Abbot of Spanheim,
note, 90
Turner, J. M. W., A.E. on, note, 21
his limitations, 22
Type, Importance of, 119
Ugliness, symbolic, examples of,
note, 15 ; Academic and Realist,
34 ; non-existence of according
to Proudhon, 64 ; Ruskin on,
i88
Index
125 ; physical ugliness expres-
sive of moral ugliness, 166 ;
propagated under the pretext of
Emotion, 167 ; the animal sign
of Instinct, 168 ; its domain
limited, 179
Universal, The, Plato on, 41
Universal Brotherhood, influence
on future Art. 85
Universal Wisdom, The, able to
achieve the unity of Religion,
88 ; its transmission to modern
times, 88 ; akin to Gnosticism,
89 ; the fundamental spirit of
Christianity, 90
Utility, lacking in uninspired Art,
86
Vandyck, 152
Venus of Milo, 39, 55
Verlaine, opinion of Ludwig II., 98
Villiers de LTsle Adam, Count, his
writings and influence, note, 103 ;
quoted, 146
Vinci, Leonardo de, xxx., 5 ;
dictum of, 31 ; his " Treatise on
Painting," 41, 45, 58, 66, 77,
135, 152, 159
" Virgin of St. Mam, The," 110,
112
Wagner, Richard, note, 5, 31, 42,
46, 66, 77 ; aided by Ludwig II.,
98, 145, 149
Watts, G. F., xxv., 15 ; belief in
Priesthood of Art, 46
Whistler, xiv., 21
Wiertz, A., xxxvi. ; ugliness ex-
hibited in his works, 37 ; chief
works and method, note, 37
Wilde, Oscar, quoted, 6
Willette, his " Pierrettes," note, 13
Wronski, Hoene de, his mathemati-
cal formula?, note, 42
" Zanoni," quotation from, 169
Zeuxis, 116
Zola, on Naturalism, xxi., 8, 156
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