Chapter III: Decadents and æsthetes (2)

The stigmata of degeneracy known as zoöphilia, or excessive love for animals, is strongly shown in him. When he wishes particularly to edify himself he runs ‘to contemplate the beautiful eyes of the seal, and to distress himself over the mysterious sufferings of these tender-hearted animals shown in their basin, brothers of the dogs and of us.’[301] The only educator that M. Barrès admits is--the dog. ‘The education which a dog gives is indeed excellent!... Our collegians, overloaded with intellectual acquisitions, which remain in them as notions, not as methods of feeling, weighted by opinions which they are unable thoroughly to grasp, would learn beautiful ease from the dog, the gift of listening, the instinct of their “I.”’[302] And it must not be imagined that in such passages as these he is quizzing himself or mocking the Philistine who may by inadvertence have become a reader of the book. The part played by two dogs in the novel testifies that the phrases quoted are meant in bitter earnest.

Like all the truly degenerate, M. Barrès reserves for the hysterical and the demented all the admiration and fraternal love which he has not expended on seals and dogs. We have already mentioned his enthusiastic regard for poor Marie Bashkirtseff. His idea of Louis II. of Bavaria is incomparable. The unfortunate King is, in his eyes, an _insatisfait_ (_L’Ennemi des Lois_, p. 201); he speaks of ‘his being carried away beyond his native surroundings, his ardent desire to make his dream tangible, the wrecking of his imagination in the clumsiness of execution’ (p. 203). Louis II. is ‘a most perfect ethical problem’ (p. 200). ‘How could this brother of Parsifal, so pure, so simple, who set the prompting of his heart in opposition to all human laws--how could he suffer a foreign will to interfere in his life? And it really seems that to have drawn Dr. Gudden under water was his revenge upon a barbarian who had wished to impose his rule of life upon him’ (p. 225). It is in such phrases that M. Barrès characterizes a madman, whose mind was completely darkened, and who for years was incapable of a single reasonable idea! This impudent fashion of blinking a fact which boxed his ears on both sides; this incapacity to recognise the irrationality in the mental life of an invalid, fallen to the lowest degree of insanity; this obstinacy in explaining the craziest deeds as deliberate, intentional, philosophically justified and full of deep sense, throw a vivid light on the state of mind in the Decadent. How could a being of this kind discern the pathological disturbance of his own brain, when he does not even perceive that Louis II. was not ‘an ethical problem,’ but an ordinary mad patient, such as every lunatic asylum of any size contains by dozens?

We now understand the philosophy and moral doctrine of the Barrès type of the ‘cultivators of the “I.”’ Only one word more on their conduct in practical life. The hero of the _Jardin de Bérénice_, Philippe, is the happy guest of Petite Secousse, in the house which her last lover had left to her. After some time he wearies of the latter’s ‘educational influence’; he leaves her, and strongly advises her to marry his opponent in the election--which she does. ‘The enemy of the laws,’ an anarchist of the name of André Maltère, condemned to prison for several months for a newspaper article eulogizing a dynamite attempt, has become, by his trial, a celebrity of the day. A very rich orphan offers him her hand, and the ‘little princess’ her love. He marries the rich girl, whom he does not love, and continues to love the ‘little princess,’ whom he does not marry. For this is what the ‘culture of his “I”’ exacts. To satisfy his æsthetic inclinations and to ‘act’ by word and pen, he must have money, and to relieve the needs of his heart he must have the ‘little princess.’ After some months of marriage he finds it inconvenient to dissimulate his love for the ‘little princess’ before his wife. He allows her then to guess at the needs of his heart. His wife understands philosophy. She is ‘comprehensive.’ She goes herself to the ‘little princess,’ takes her to the noble anarchist, and from this moment Maltère lives rich, loved, happy, and satisfied between heiress and mistress, as becomes a superior nature. M. Barrès believes he has here created ‘a rare and exquisite type.’ He deceives himself. The cultivators of the ‘I,’ like the Boulangist Philippe and the anarchist André, meet by thousands in all large towns, only the police know them under another name. They call them _souteneurs_. The moral law of the brave anarchist has long been that of the gilded Paris prostitutes, who from time immemorial have kept ‘_l’amant de cœur_,’ at the same time as the ‘other,’ or the ‘others.’

Decadentism has not been confined to France alone; it has also established a school in England. We have already mentioned, in the preceding book, one of the earliest and most servile imitators of Baudelaire--Swinburne. I had to class him among the mystics, for the degenerative stigma of mysticism predominates in all his works. He has, it is true, been train-bearer to so many models that he may be ranked among the domestic servants of a great number of masters; but, finally, he will be assigned a place where he has served longest, and that is among the pre-Raphaelites. From Baudelaire he has borrowed principally diabolism and Sadism, unnatural depravity, and a predilection for suffering, disease and crime. The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the ‘Æsthetes,’ the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.

Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works. Like Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose rose-coloured silk hats and gold lace cravats are well known, and like his disciple Joséphin Péladan, who walks about in lace frills and satin doublet, Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present time because it offends his sense of the beautiful; but this is only a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about. It is asserted that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi-heraldic symbol of the Æsthetes. This anecdote has been reproduced in all the biographies of Wilde, and I have nowhere seen it denied. But is a promenade with a sunflower in the hand also inspired by a craving for the beautiful?

Phasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is a proof of honourable independence to follow one’s own taste without being bound down to the regulation costume of the Philistine cattle, and to choose for clothes the colours, materials and cut which appear beautiful to one’s self, no matter how much they may differ from the fashion of the day. The answer to this cackle should be that it is above all a sign of anti-social ego-mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify vanity, or an æsthetical instinct of small importance and easy to control--such as is always done when, either by word or deed, a man places himself in opposition to this majority. He is obliged to repress many manifestations of opinions and desires out of regard for his fellow-creatures; to make him understand this is the aim of education, and he who has not learnt to impose some restraint upon himself in order not to shock others is called by malicious Philistines, not an Æsthete, but a blackguard.

It may become a duty to combat the vulgar herd in the cause of truth and knowledge; but to a serious man this duty will always be felt as a painful one. He will never fulfil it with a light heart, and he will examine strictly and cautiously if it be really a high and absolutely imperative law which forces him to be disagreeable to the majority of his fellow-creatures. Such an action is, in the eyes of a moral and sane man, a kind of martyrdom for a conviction, to carry out which constitutes a vital necessity; it is a form, and not an easy form, of self-sacrifice, for it means the renunciation of the joy which the consciousness of sympathy with one’s fellow-creatures gives, and it exacts the painful overthrow of social instincts, which, in truth, do not exist in deranged ego-maniacs, but are very strong in the normal man.

The predilection for strange costume is a pathological aberration of a racial instinct. The adornment of the exterior has its origin in the strong desire to be admired by others--primarily by the opposite sex--to be recognised by them as especially well-shaped, handsome, youthful, or rich and powerful, or as preeminent through rank or merit. It is practised, then, with the object of producing a favourable impression on others, and is a result of thought about others, of preoccupation with the race. If, now, this adornment be, not through mis-judgment but purposely, of a character to cause irritation to others, or lend itself to ridicule--in other words, if it excites disapproval instead of approbation--it then runs exactly counter to the object of the art of dress, and evinces a perversion of the instinct of vanity.

The pretence of a sense of beauty is the excuse of consciousness for a crank of the conscious. The fool who masquerades in Pall Mall does not see himself, and, therefore, does not enjoy the beautiful appearance which is supposed to be an æsthetic necessity for him. There would be some sense in his conduct if it had for its object an endeavour to cause others to dress in accordance with his taste; for them he sees, and they can scandalize him by the ugliness, and charm him by the beauty, of their costume. But to take the initiative in a new artistic style in dress brings the innovator not one hair’s breadth nearer his assumed goal of æsthetic satisfaction.

When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in ‘æsthetic costume’ among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule or their wrath, it is no indication of independence of character, but rather from a purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to make a sensation, justified by no exalted aim; nor is it from a strong desire for beauty, but from a malevolent mania for contradiction.

Be that as it may, Wilde obtained, by his buffoon mummery, a notoriety in the whole Anglo-Saxon world that his poems and dramas would never have acquired for him. I have no reason to trouble myself about these, since they are feeble imitations of Rossetti and Swinburne, and of dreary inanity. His prose essays, on the contrary, deserve attention, because they exhibit all the features which enable us to recognise in the ‘Æsthete’ the comrade in art of the Decadent.

Like his French masters, Oscar Wilde despises Nature. ‘Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.’[303]

He is a ‘cultivator of the Ego,’ and feels deliciously indignant at the fact that Nature dares to be indifferent to his important person. ‘Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope’ (p. 5).

With regard to himself and the human species, he shares the opinion of Des Esseintes. ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong’ (p. 202).

His ideal of life is inactivity. ‘It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody rather than to do something’ (p. 65). ‘Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes.... People ... are always coming shamelessly up to one ... and saying in a loud, stentorian voice, “What are you doing?” whereas, “What are you thinking?” is the only question that any civilized being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.... Contemplation ... in the opinion of the highest culture, is the proper occupation of man.... It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams’ (pp. 166-168). ‘The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make one’s self useful’ (p. 175). ‘From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has “nothing to say.” But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message that he can do beautiful work’ (p. 197).

Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In a very affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith Wainwright, designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of several people, he says: ‘He was a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age. This remarkable man, so powerful with “pen, pencil, and poison,”’ etc. (p. 60). ‘He sought to find expression by pen or poison’ (p. 61). ‘When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles”’ (p. 86). ‘His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked’ (p. 88). ‘There is no sin except stupidity’ (p. 210). ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all’ (p. 179).

He cultivates incidentally a slight mysticism in colours. ‘He,’ Wainwright, ‘had that curious love of green which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals’ (p. 66).

But the central idea of his tortuously disdainful prattling, pursuing as its chief aim the heckling of the Philistine, and laboriously seeking the opposite pole to sound common-sense, is the glorification of art. Wilde sets forth in the following manner the system of the ‘Æsthetes’: ‘Briefly, then, their doctrines are these: Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.... The second doctrine is this: All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to Art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium [?] it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject matter.[304] To us who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.... It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy....’[305] (pp. 52-54). The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy’ (p. 65).

On this third point--the influence of art on life--Wilde does not refer to the fact, long ago established by me, that the reciprocal relation between the work of art and the public consists in this, that the former exercises suggestion and the latter submits to it.[306] What he actually wished to say was that nature--not civilized men--develops itself in the direction of forms given it by the artist. ‘Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace, curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art’ (p. 40). If he simply wished to affirm that formerly fog and mist were not felt to be beautiful, and that the artistic rendering of them first drew to them the attention of the multitude, nothing could be said in contradiction; he would have propounded just a hackneyed commonplace with misplaced sententiousness. He asserts, however, that painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists have painted fogs--a statement so silly as to require no refutation. It is sufficient to characterize it as artistic mysticism. Lastly, Wilde teaches the following: ‘Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important in the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong’ (pp. 210, 211).

Thus the doctrine of the ‘Æsthetes’ affirms, with the Parnassians, that the work of art is its own aim; with the Diabolists, that it need not be moral--nay, were better to be immoral; with the Decadents, that it is to avoid, and be diametrically opposed to, the natural and the true; and with all these schools of the ego-mania of degeneration, that art is the highest of all human functions.

Here is the place to demonstrate the absurdity of these propositions. This can, of course, be done only in the concisest manner. For to treat fully of the relation of the beautiful to morals and truth to Nature, of the conception of aim in artistic beauty, and of the rank held by art among mental functions, it would be necessary to expound the whole science of æsthetics, on which the somewhat exhaustive text-books amount to a considerable number of volumes; and this cannot be my purpose in this place. Hence I shall of necessity only recapitulate the latest results in a series of the clearest and most obvious deductions possible, which the attentive reader will be able without difficulty to develop by his own reflection.

The ‘bonzes’ of art, who proclaim the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake,’ look down with contempt upon those who deny their dogma, affirming that the heretics who ascribe to works of art any aim whatsoever can be only pachydermatous Philistines, whose comprehension is limited to beans and bacon, or stock-jobbers with whom it is only a question of profit, or sanctimonious parsons making a professional pretence of virtue. They believe that they are supported in this by such men as Kant, Lessing, etc., who were likewise of the opinion that the work of art had but one task to perform--that of being beautiful. We need not be overawed by the great names of these guarantors. Their opinion cannot withstand the criticism to which it has been subjected during the last hundred years by a great number of philosophers (I name only Fichte, Hegel and Vischer), and its inadequacy follows from the fact, among others, that it allows absolutely no place for the ugly as an object of artistic representation.

Let us remind ourselves how works of art and art in general originated.

That plastic art originally sprang from the imitation of Nature is a commonplace, open justly to the reproach that it does not enter deeply enough into the question. Imitation is without doubt one of the first and most general reactions of the developed living being upon the impressions it receives from the external world. This is a necessary consequence of the mechanism of the higher activity of the nervous system. Every compound movement must be preceded by the representation of this movement, and, conversely, no representation of movement can be elaborated without at least a faint and hinted accomplishment of the corresponding movement by the muscles. Upon this principle depends, for example, the well-known ‘thought-reading.’ As often, therefore, as a being (whose nervous system is developed highly enough to raise perceptions to the rank of representations) acquires knowledge, _i.e._, forms for itself a representation of any phenomenon whatever comprising in itself a more or less molar form of movement (molecular movements, and, _a fortiori_, vibrations of ether are not directly recognised as changes of position in space), it has also a tendency to transform the representation into a movement resembling it, and hence to imitate the phenomenon, in that form, naturally, which, with its means, it is capable of realizing. If every representation be not embodied in perceptible movement, the cause is to be traced to the action of the inhibitive mechanism of the brain, which does not permit every representation at once to set the muscles into activity. In a state of fatigue inhibition is relaxed, and, in fact, all sorts of unintentional imitations make their appearance, as, for example, symmetrical movements, such as the left hand involuntarily and aimlessly makes of those executed by the right hand in writing, etc. There is also a rare disease of the nerves[307] hitherto observed chiefly in Russia, and especially in Siberia, there called _myriachit_, in which inhibition becomes completely disorganized, so that the diseased persons are forced at once to imitate any action seen by them, even if it be disagreeable or pernicious to them. If, for example, they see someone fall, they are compelled to throw themselves also to the ground, even if they are standing in a muddy road.

Except in disease and fatigue, the action of inhibition is suspended only when the excitation produced in the nervous system by an impression is strong enough to vanquish it. If this impression is disagreeable, or menacing, the movements set loose by it are those of defence or flight. If, on the contrary, the impression is pleasant, or if it is surprising without being disquieting, then the reaction of the organism against it is a movement without objective aim, most frequently a movement of imitation. Hence, among healthy men possessed of well-working inhibitory mechanism in their nervous system, this movement does not appear with every phenomenon, but only with such as strike it forcibly, fix its attention, engage and stimulate it--in a word, cause an emotion. Activity of imitation (and the plastic arts are at bottom nothing but residuary traces of imitative movements) has consequently an immediate organic aim, viz., the freeing of the nervous system from an excitation set up in it by some visual cause. If the excitation is not caused by the sight of any external phenomenon, but by an internal organic state (_e.g._, sexual _erethism_), or by a representation of an abstract nature (_e.g._, the joy of victory, sorrow, or longing), it likewise transforms itself, it is true, into movements; but these are naturally not imitative. They embody no motor representation, but are in part such as have for their sole end the relaxing of the nerve-centres overcharged with motor impulsions, as in the dance, in outcries, song and music, and in part such as disburden the centres of ideation, like declamation, lyric and epic poetry. If artistic activity is frequently exercised and facilitated by habit, it no longer requires emotions of extraordinary strength to provoke it. As often, then, as man is excited by such external or internal impressions as demand no action (conflict, flight, adaptation), but reach his consciousness in the form of a mood, he relieves his nervous system of this excitation through some kind of artistic activity, either by means of the plastic arts or by music and poetry.

Hence imitation is not the source of the arts, but one of the media of art; the real source of art is emotion. Artistic activity is not its own end, but it is of direct utility to the artist; it satisfies the need of his organism to transform its emotions into movement. He creates the work of art, not for its own sake, but to free his nervous system from a tension. The expression, which has become a commonplace, is psycho-physiologically accurate, viz., the artist writes, paints, sings, or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.

To this primary end of art--the subjective end of the self-deliverance of the artist--a second must be added, viz., the objective end of acting upon others. Like every other animal living in society and partly dependent upon it, man has, in consequence of his racial instinct, the aspiration to impart his own emotions to those of his own species, just as he himself participates in the emotions of those of his own species. This strong desire to know himself in emotional communion with the species is sympathy, that organic base of the social edifice.[308] In advanced civilization, where the original natural motives of actions are partly obscured and partly replaced by artificial motives, and the actions themselves receive an aim other than the theoretical one proper to them, the artist is, it is true, not limited to sharing his emotions with others, but creates his work of art with the accessory purpose of becoming famous--a wish springing none the less from social instincts, since it is directed towards obtaining the applause of his fellow-creatures, or even of earning money, a motive no longer social, but purely egoistic. This vulgarly egoistic motive is still the only one influencing the countless imitators who practise art, not from original strong desire, and as the natural and necessary mode of expressing their emotions, but whose artistic activity is caused by the envy with which they regard the success of others in art.

Once we have established, as a fact, that art is not practised for its own sake alone, but that it has a double aim, subjective and objective, viz., the satisfaction of an organic want of the artist, and the influencing of his fellow-creatures, then the principles by which every other human activity pursuing the same end is judged are applicable to it, _i.e._, the principles of law and morality.

We test every organic desire to see whether it be the outcome of a legitimate need or the consequence of an aberration; whether its satisfaction be beneficial or pernicious to the organism. We distinguish the healthy from the diseased impulse, and demand that the latter be combated. If the desire seeks its satisfaction in an activity acting upon others, then we examine to see if this activity is reconcilable with the existence and prosperity of society, or dangerous to it. The activity imperilling society offends against law and custom, which are nothing but an epitome of the temporary notions of society concerning what is beneficial and what is pernicious to it.

Notions healthy and diseased, moral and immoral, social or anti-social, are as valid for art as for every other human activity, and there is not a scintilla of reason for regarding a work of art in any other light than that in which we view every other manifestation of an individuality.

It is easily conceivable that the emotion expressed by the artist in his work may proceed from a morbid aberration, may be directed, in an unnatural, sensual, cruel manner, to what is ugly or loathsome. Ought we not in this case to condemn the work and, if possible, to suppress it? How can its right to exist be justified? By claiming that the artist was sincere when he created it, that he gave back what was really existing in him, and for that reason was subjectively justified in his artistic expansion? But there is a candour which is wholly inadmissible. The dipsomaniac and clastomaniac are sincere when they respectively drink or break everything within reach. We do not, however, acknowledge their right to satisfy their desire. We prevent them by force. We put them under guardianship, although their drunkenness and destructiveness may perhaps be injurious to no one but themselves. And still more decidedly does society oppose itself to the satisfaction of those cravings which cannot be appeased without violently acting upon others. The new science of criminal anthropology admits without dispute that homicidal maniacs, certain incendiaries, many thieves and vagabonds, act under an impulsion; that through their crimes they satisfy an organic craving; that they outrage, kill, burn, idle, as others sit down to dinner, simply because they hunger to do so; but in spite of this and because of this, it demands that the appeasing of the sincere longings of these degenerate creatures be prevented by all means, and, if needs be, by their complete suppression. It never occurs to us to permit the criminal by organic disposition to ‘expand’ his individuality in crime, and just as little can it be expected of us to permit the degenerate artist to expand his individuality in immoral works of art. The artist who complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal who actually commits it. It is a question of the intensity of the impulsion and the resisting power of the judgment, perhaps also of courage and cowardice; nothing else. If the actual law does not treat the criminal by intention so rigorously as the criminal in act, it is because criminal law pursues the deed, and not the purpose; the objective phenomenon, not its subjective roots. The Middle Ages had places of sanctuary where criminals could not be molested for their misdemeanours. Modern law has done away with this institution. Ought art to be at present the last asylum to which criminals may fly to escape punishment? Are they to be able to satisfy, in the so-called ‘temple’ of art, instincts which the policeman prevents them from appeasing in the street? I do not see how a privilege so inimical to society can be willingly defended.

I am far from sharing Ruskin’s opinion that morality alone, and nothing else, can be demanded of a work of art. Morality alone is not sufficient. Otherwise religious tracts would be the finest literature, and the well-known coloured casts of sacred subjects turned out wholesale in Munich factories would be the choicest sculpture. Excellence of form maintains its rights in all the arts, and gives to the finest creation its artistic value. Hence the work need not be moral. More accurately, it need not be designed expressly to preach virtue and the fear of God, and to be destined for the edification of devotees. But between a work without sanctified aim and one of wilful immorality there is a world of difference. A work which is indifferent from a moral point of view will not be equally attractive or satisfying to all minds, but it will offend and repel no one. An explicitly immoral work excites in healthy persons the same feelings of displeasure and disgust as the immoral act itself, and the form of the work can change nothing of this. Most assuredly morality alone does not give beauty to a work of art. But beauty without morality is impossible.

We now come to the second argument with which the Æsthetes wish to defend the right of the artist to immorality. The work of art, they say, need only be beautiful. Beauty lies in the form. Hence the content is a matter of indifference. This may be vice and crime; but it cannot derogate from the excellences of form if these be present.

He alone can venture to advance such principles who is without the least inkling of the psycho-physiology of the æsthetic feelings. Everyone who has studied this subject in the least knows that two kinds of the beautiful are distinguished--the sensuously-beautiful and the intellectually-beautiful. We feel those phenomena to be beautiful, the sense-perception of which is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure--_e.g._, a particular colour, perhaps a pure red, or a harmony; nay, even a single note with its severally indistinguishable but synchronous overtones. The researches of Helmholtz[309] and Blaserna[310] have thrown light on the cause of the feeling of pleasure connected with certain acoustic perceptions, while those of Brücke[311] have led to similar results with regard to the mechanism of the feelings of pleasure following optical impressions. It is a question of discernment by the sensory nerves of definite simple numerical relations in the vibrations of matter or of ether. We know less concerning the causes of the pleasures connected with smell and touch; yet here also it seems to be a question of more or less strong impressions, hence equally of quantities--_i.e._, of numbers. The ultimate cause of all these feelings is that certain modes of vibrations are in accord with the structure of the nerves, are easy for them and leave them in order, while other modes disturb the arrangement of the nerve particles, often costing the nerves an effort, often dangerous to their existence or at least their functioning, to restore them to their natural order. The former will be felt as pleasure, the latter as discomfort, and even as pain. With the sensuously-beautiful there can be no question of morality, for it exists as perception only, and does not rise to the rank of representation.

Above the sensuously-beautiful stands the intellectually-beautiful, no longer consisting of mere perceptions, but of representations, of concepts and judgments, with their accompanying emotions elaborated in the unconscious. The intellectually-beautiful must also awaken feelings of pleasure, to be perceived as beautiful; and, as above explained, with feelings of pleasure are united, in healthy, fully-developed human beings equipped with the social instinct (altruism), only those ideas the content whereof is conducive to the existence and prosperity of the individual being, society, or species. Now, that which is favourable to the life and prosperity of the individual and of the species is precisely that which we call moral.

From this it results by an iron necessity that a work which awakens no feelings of pleasure cannot be beautiful, and that it can awaken no feelings of pleasure if it is not moral, and we arrive at the final conclusion, that morality and beauty are in their innermost essence identical. It were not false to assert that beauty is statical repose, and morality beauty in action.

This is only apparently contradicted by the fact that what is incontestably ugly and bad may also be agreeable, and hence awaken feelings of pleasure. The mental process set up by percepts and ideas is not, in this case, so simple and direct as with respect to the beautiful and the good. Associations sometimes of a highly complex nature must first be put into activity, finally, however, to lead to the single great result, viz., the awakening of feelings of pleasure. The well-known Aristotelian catharsis, purging or purification, explains how tragedy, though it offers the spectacle of pain and ruin, finally produces an agreeable effect. The representation of deserved misfortune awakens ideas of justice, a moral, agreeable idea; and even that of unmerited misfortune gives rise to pity, in itself a feeling of pain, though, in its quality of a racial instinct, beneficial and therefore not only moral, but, in its final essence, agreeable. When Valdez, in his famous picture of the _Caridad de Sevilla_, shows us an open coffin in which lies the corpse of an arch-bishop in full vestments, swarming with worms, this spectacle is in itself undeniably repulsive. Nevertheless it permits us at once to recognise the emotion which the painter wished to express, viz., his feeling of the nothingness of all earthly possessions and honours, the frailty of man in the face of the primeval power of Nature. It is the same emotion embodied by Holbein in his ‘Dance of Death,’ not so profoundly and passionately as by the Spaniard with his stronger feelings, but with self-mockery and bitterness. The same emotion is heard, somewhat less gloomily and with more of a melancholy resignation, in Mozart’s _Requiem_. In the idea of the contrast between the insignificance of individual life and the vastness and eternity of Nature, there mingles itself an element of the sublime, of which the idea, as the choicest form of activity in the highest brain-centres, is united with feelings of pleasure.

Another circumstance in the plastic arts has to be considered. In works of sculpture and painting a broad separation is possible between the form and the content, between the sensuous and the moral. A painting, a group, may represent the most immoral and most criminal incident; nevertheless, the individual constituent parts--the atmosphere, the harmonies of colour, the human figures--may be beautiful in themselves, and the connoisseur may derive enjoyment from them without dwelling on the subject of the work. The engravings in the _Editions des fermiers généraux_ of the last century, the works in marble and bronze of the pornographic museum at Naples, are, in a measure, repulsively immoral, because they represent unnatural vice. In themselves, however, they are excellently executed, and are accessible to a mode of contemplation which disregards their idea and keeps in view only the perfection of their form. Here, therefore, the impression of the work of art is a mixture of disgust for the subject treated, and enjoyment of the beauty of the several figures and their attitudes--painted, drawn, or modelled. The feeling of pleasure may preponderate, and the work, in spite of its depravity, produce, not a repellent, but an attractive effect. It is the same in nature. If that which is pernicious and frightful is sometimes felt to be beautiful, it is because it contains certain features and elements which have no cogent reference to the frightful or pernicious character of the whole, and can hence in themselves operate æsthetically. The hammer-headed viper is beautiful on account of its metallic lustre; the tiger for its strength and suppleness; the foxglove (_Digitalis_) for its graceful form and rich rosy hue. The noxiousness of the snake does not lie in its copper-red dorsal bands, nor the terribleness of the beast of prey in its graceful appearance, nor the danger of the poisonous plant in the form and colour of its blossoms. In these cases the sensuously-beautiful outweighs the morally-repulsive, because it is more immediately present, and, in the collective impression, allows the feelings of pleasure to predominate. The spectacle of the display of strength and resolution is equally a beautiful one, on account of the ideas of organic efficiency awakened by it. Would this, however, be thought beautiful if one could see how an assassin overpowers a victim who is resisting violently, hurls him to the ground and butchers him? Certainly not; for before such a picture it is no longer possible to separate the display of strength, beautiful in itself, from its aim, and to enjoy the former regardless of the latter.

In poetry this separation of the form from the content is far less possible than in the plastic arts. The word can hardly in itself produce an effect of sensuous beauty by its auditory or visual image, even if it presents itself rhythmically regulated and strengthened by the more expressive double sound of a rhyme. It operates almost solely by its content, by the representations which it awakens. Hence it is hardly conceivable that one can hear or read a poetical exposition of criminal or vicious facts, without having present at each word a representation of its content, and not of its form--_i.e._, of its sound. In this case, therefore, the impression can no longer be a composite one, as at the sight of a finely-painted portrayal of a repulsive incident, but must be purely disagreeable. The pictures of Giulio Romano, to which Pietro Aretino dedicated his _Sonetti lussuriosi_, may be found beautiful by the admirers of the effeminate style of that pupil of Raphael; the sonnets are only the more disgusting. Who would experience feelings of pleasure from the perusal of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Andrea de Nercia or Liseux? Only one species of human beings--that of the degenerate with perverted instincts. Portrayals of crime and vice in art and literature have their public; that we well know. It is the public of the gaols. Besides dismally sentimental books, criminals read nothing so willingly as stories of lust and violence;[312] and the drawings and inscriptions with which they cover the walls of their cells have, for the most part, their crimes as subjects.[313] But the healthy man feels himself violently repelled by works of this kind, and it is impossible for him to receive an æsthetic impression from them, be their form never so conformable to the most approved rules of art.

In yet another case it is possible for that which is most ugly and vicious in artistic portrayal to operate in the direction of the morally beautiful. This is when it allows us to recognise the moral purpose of the author and betrays his sympathetic emotion. For that which we, consciously or unconsciously, perceive behind every artistic creation is the nature of its creator and the emotion from which it sprang, and our sympathy with, or antipathy for, the emotion of the author has the lion’s share in our appreciation of the work. When Raffaelli paints shockingly degraded absinthe-drinkers in the low drinking dens of the purlieus of Paris, we clearly feel his profound pity at the sight of these fallen human beings, and this emotion we experience as a morally beautiful one. In like manner we have not a momentary doubt of the morality of the artist’s emotions when we behold Callot’s pictures of the horrors of war, or the bleeding, purulent saints of Zurbaran, or the monsters of Breughel van der Hölle, or when we read the murder scene in Dostojevsky’s _Raskolnikow_.[314] These emotions are beautiful. Sympathy with them gives us a feeling of pleasure. Against this feeling the displeasure caused by the repulsiveness of the work cannot prevail. When, however, the work betrays the indifference of the author to the evil or ugliness he depicts, nay, his predilection for it, then the abhorrence provoked by the work is intensified by all the disgust which the author’s aberration of instinct inspires in us, and the aggregate impression is one of keenest displeasure. Those who share the emotions of the author, and hence are with him attracted and pleasurably excited by what is repugnant, diseased and evil, are the degenerate.

The Æsthetes affirm that artistic activity is the highest of which the human mind is capable, and must occupy the first place in the estimation of men. How do they manage to establish this assertion from their own standpoint? Why should I place a high value on the activity of a fellow who with rapture describes the colours and odours of putrid carrion; and why should I bestow my especial esteem on a painter who shows me the libidinousness of a harlot? Because the amount of artistic technique involved is difficult? If that is to be the decisive point, then, to be logical, the Æsthetes must place the acrobat higher than the artist of their species, since it is much more difficult to learn the art of the trapezist than the rhyming and daubing which constitutes the ‘art’ of the Æsthetes. Is it to be on account of sensations of pleasure given by artists? First of all, those artists over whom the Æsthetes grow so enthusiastic create in the healthy man no pleasure, but loathing or boredom. But granted that they do provide sensations, the first inquiry must then be of what sort these sensations are. Every sensation, even if we for the moment find it agreeable, does not inspire us with esteem for the person to whom we are indebted for it. At the card-table, in the public-house and the brothel, a base nature may procure sensations the intensity of which those offered by any work of the Æsthetes is far from being able to rival. But even the most dissolute drunkard does not in consequence hold the keepers of these places of his pleasures in specially high esteem.

The truth is that the claim of the highest rank for art advanced by the Æsthetes involves the complete refutation of their other dogmas. The race estimates individual activities according to their utility for the whole. The higher this develops itself, the more exact and profound is the understanding it acquires of that which is really necessary and beneficial to it. The warrior, who in a low grade of civilization rightly plays the most prominent part, because society must live, and to this end must defend itself against its enemies, recedes to a more humble position as manners become more gentle, and the relations between peoples cease to resemble those between beasts of prey, and assume a human character. Once the race has attained in some degree to a clear comprehension of its relation to nature, it knows that knowledge is its most important task, and its profoundest respect is for those who cultivate and enlarge knowledge--_i.e._, for thinkers and investigators. Even in the monarchical state, which, conformably with its own atavistic nature, gauges the importance of the warrior by the standard of primitive men (and in the present condition of Europe, in the presence of the scarcely restrained fury for war, among a whole series of nations, the _raison d’être_ for this atavism cannot, alas! be contested), the scholar, as professor, academician, counsellor, is a constituent part of the governmental machine, and honours and dignities fall far more to his lot than to the poet and artist. The enthusiasts of the latter are youths and women--_i.e._, those components of the race in whom the unconscious outweighs consciousness; for artist and poet address themselves first of all to emotion, and this is more easily excited in the woman and the adolescent than in the mature man; their accomplishments are, moreover, more accessible to the multitude than those of the scholar whom almost the best alone of his time can follow, and whose importance is in general fully appreciated only by a few specialists, even in our days of the popularization of science by the press. State and society, however, seek to compensate him for the evasion of this reward, by surrounding him with official forms of high esteem.

It is true that very great artists and poets, admitted pioneers, whose influence is recognised as lasting, likewise receive their share of the official honours disposed of by the organized commonwealth as such, and these exceptional men obtain a more brilliant reward than any investigator or discoverer; for together with the common distinctions shared by them with the latter, they possess the wide popularity which the investigator and discoverer must dispense withal. And why is the artist sometimes placed, even by persons of good and serious minds, on a level with, or even above, the man of science? Because these persons value the beautiful more than the true, emotion more than knowledge? No; but because they have the right feeling that art is equally a source of knowledge.

It is so in three ways. Firstly, the emotion evoked by the work of art is itself a means of obtaining knowledge, as Edmund R. Clay, James Sully, and other psychologists have seen, without, however, dwelling on the important fact. It constrains the higher centres to attend to the causes of their excitations, and in this way necessarily induces a sharper observation and comprehension of the whole series of phenomena related to the emotion. Next, the work of art grants an insight into the laws of which the phenomenon is the expression; for the artist, in his creation, separates the essential from the accidental, neglects the latter, which in nature is wont to divert and confuse the less gifted observer, and involuntarily gives prominence to the former as that which chiefly or solely occupies his attention, and is therefore perceived and reproduced by him with especial distinctness. The artist himself divines the idea behind the structure, and its inner principle and connection, intelligible but not perceivable, in the form, and discloses it in his work to the spectator. That is what Hegel means when he calls the beautiful ‘the presence of the idea in limited phenomenon.’ By means of his own deep comprehension of natural law, the artist powerfully furthers the comprehension of it by other men.[315] Finally, art is the only glimmer of light, weak and dubious though it be, which projects itself into the future, and gives us at least a dream-like idea of the outlines and direction of our further organic developments. This is not mysticism, but a very clear and comprehensible fact. We have seen above[316] that every adaptation--_i.e._, every change of form and function of the organs--is preceded by a representation of this change. The change must first be felt and desired as necessary; then a representation of it becomes elaborated in the higher or highest nerve-centres, and finally the organism endeavours to realize this representation. This process repeats itself in the same way in the race. Some state is disturbing to it. It experiences feelings of discomfort from this state. It suffers from it. From this results its desire to change the state. It elaborates for itself an image of the nature, direction and extent of this change. According to the older, mystic phrase, ‘it creates for itself an ideal.’ The ideal is really the formative idea of future organic development with a view to better adaptation. In the most perfect individuals of the species it exists earlier and more distinct than in the average multitude, and the artist ventures with uncertain hand to make it accessible to sense through the medium of his work of art long before it can be organically realized by the race. Thus art vouchsafes the most refined and highest knowledge, bordering on the marvellous, viz., the knowledge of the future. Not so definitely, of course, nor so unequivocally, does art express the secret natural law of being and becoming as science. Science shows the present, the positive; Art prophesies the future, the possible, though stammeringly and obscurely. To the former Nature unveils her fixed forms; to the latter she grants, amidst shudderings, a rapid, bewildered glimpse of the depths where what is yet formless is struggling to appear. The emotion from which the divining work of art springs is the birth throe of the quick and vigorous organism pregnant with the future.[317]

This art of presentiment is certainly the highest mental activity of the human being. But it is not the art of the Æsthetes. It is the most moral art, for it is the most ideal, a word only meaning that it is parallel with the paths along which the race is perfecting itself--nay, coincides with these.

By the most diverse methods we have always attained the same result, viz., it is not true that art has nothing in common with morality. The work of art must be moral, for its aim is to express and excite emotions. In virtue of this aim it falls within the competence of criticism, which tests all emotions by their utility or perniciousness to the individual or the race; and if it is immoral, it must be condemned like every other organic activity opposed to this aim. The work of art must be moral, for it is intended to operate æsthetically. It can only do this if it awakens feelings of pleasure, at least ultimately; it provides such, only if it includes beauty in itself; but beauty is in its essence synonymous with morality. Finally, the highest work of art can, from its inmost nature, be none other than moral, since it is a manifestation of vital force and health, a revelation of the capacity for evolution of the race; and humanity values it so highly because it divines this circumstance.