The Philosophy of Art

Marital*

I Hi .

A A
 THE
PHILOSOPHY OF ART
Being "Art et Scholastique" by
Jacques Maritain, translated by the
Rev. John O Connor, S.T.P. with an
introduction by Eric Gill O.S.D.

A/

M2

PRINTED & PUBLISHED AT S. DOMINIc s PRESS,

DITCHLING, SUSSEX.

87*92
 INTRODUCTION
English people,heatedbytheburden,

THE White Man s Burden," of over-pro

"the

duction, needs a cooling medicine. This

book is such a medicine, the more needed be
cause in the natural course of events the cooling
down would be, as it shows abundant signs of
being, a mere collapse.
The factory system of production, upon
which modern industrialism is built, was the
natural material manifestation of the line of
thought made paramount by the triumph with
which the trader emerged from the war of
causes called the Protestant Reformation, and
by the defeat of Humility which turned out to
be the main achievement of the Renaissance.
Such industrialism is indeed the Beauty, so to
call it with one s thumb to one s nose, to which
their Goodness and Truth proceed the
Unchastity which is proper bed-fellow to their
Disobedience and Vainglory !

But, unfortunately, our national vice of

hypocrisy, our aptitude for self-deception, our
dislike, nay, our refusal of logical thought, our
respect for respectability combine to develop
that habit of compromise of which we are so

absurdly proud. Faced by the appalling results

of industrialism,with misery and ugliness upon
every side, we are still trying to live by bread
alone; we arestill refusing to see that weare hurt
by our fall from that pinnacle of the Temple of
God upon which, with however precarious a
balance, we stood; we are still covetously sur
veying all the kingdoms of the world !

A book about Art would seem to be an in

effectual drug with which to combat so mortal
a disease, and we do not put it forward with
any too sanguine a viewof itspower to purge,
to move the bowels of Repentance, to quicken
a desire for the Kingdom of Heaven. England
has perhaps made too irrevocable an alliance
with Hell. Nevertheless, a little Truth humbly
assimilated would in due course leaven the
whole lump of the soul,and a man who makes
tidy one corner-cupboard of his mind is well on
the way to a whole house in order. Only let it
be really his Mind that is thus tidied up and not
merely his stomach.
Now there is more than a little truth inthis
book and moreover the subject, Art, does in
fact embrace a much wider range of human
activities than is commonly supposed, for the
whole business of Making is involved. This is
one of the worst symptoms of our disease : that

11
we have made Art the province of a specially
cultured few and have made the common
workman responsible only for doing and not at
allfor making ; for of no factory article can it be
said that such and such a man made it the
most that can be said is that the article is the
result of a number of rs\zn doing what they
were told. The artist has thus become puffed
up with the notion of his intellectual superi
ority, while the workman has lost all appetite
for anything but the amusements he can pur
chase in his spare time. Art embraces all Mak
ing and there should be no need to talk about it.
But that blissful state wherein all things are
well made and none are called "works of is
art"

only recoverable by a total abandonment of our

present worship of Riches and Empire and by
an acceptance of the philosophy of Poverty,
Chastity, and Obedience instead.
That is the great meri t of this book. Its aes
thetic is based four-square upon the Rock of
a philosophy wholly philosophic,
wholly
Christian, and therefore wholly Catholic. It is
not the idiosyncratic theorizing of someone,
however learned and sympathetic. It is simply
an exposition of what may
justly be said to be
implicit in the teaching of the accredited doc
tors of the Church .

in
 ART AND THE SCHOOLMEN
I.

Schoolmen have written no special

THE
The
treatise entitled "Philosophy of Art."
which is doubtless a result of the rough
pedagogic discipline to which medieval phil
osophers were subjected busy as they were
;

with delving and rummaging in all directions

in the problems of the schools,
they were little
troubled at leaving whole tracts unexplored
between those deep mine shafts that they sank.
Nevertheless, we rind they had a theory of Art,
both deep and well thought out ;but we have to
lookfor itamongausteredisquisitionsonsome
logical problem "Is
Logic a liberal Art?"
or one of moral Theology "How is the virtue

otPrudence at once intellectual and moral &\$-

tinguished from Art which is an intellectual
virtue?"

In thesedissertations, in which thenruureof

Art is only studied by the way, the question is of
Art in general, from the art of the Shinb! kier
to the art of the Grammarian and the cian;
i

there is no question as to the fine arts in i

cular, the consideration of which do-- "rbr-

mally"interest
the It is to
questioner. I
>

eta-

physicof the Ancientsthatonemust _>

-je
what they thought of the Beautiful, and thence
go forward to encoun ter Art, & see what comes
from the union of these two terms. Such a pro
cess, even if it put us out, will at least yield a use
ful lesson,by making us alive to theerror in the
of modern philosophers, which in
"Aesthetic"

art considers only thefinearts, and treatsoniy

of the beautiful with regard to art, and so runs
the risk of vitiating at once both the idea of Art
and the idea of the Beautiful.
Itispossible,tberefore, by gathering together
and working afresh the material made ready by
the Schoolmen, to build up a rich and complete
theory of Art. We would only point out here a
few of the features of such a theory deprecating
,

the dogmatic attitude which that would im

pose on our humble essay, and hoping that in
spite of their inadequacy these reflections con
cerning Ground about \.\\z maxims of the School
men may draw attention to the usefulness of a
resort to the wisdom of the ancients, as well as to
the possible interest of a conversation between
philosophers and artists, in an epoch when all
feel the need of extrication from the boundless
intellectual disarray inherited from the nine
teenth century, and of rediscovering the spiri
tual conditions oi honest labour.
 II.
THE SPECULATIVE ORDER AND
THE PRACTICAL ORDER.
understanding has certain virtues
THE whosewho/e and sole- end is to knot.
They
belong to the speculative order.
Such are: the understanding of Principles,
which, when we have gathered from ourserrsi-
tive experience the ideas of
Being, of Cause, of
End, and so forth, show us at once through
the effects of the living light which is in us by
nature the self-evident truths on which all
our knowledge hangs, Science,which induces
knowledge by demonstration, by assigning
causes; Wisdom, which fixes our gazeon first
1

causes, by which the mind grasps all things in

the higher unity of simple apprehension.

I. We speak hereof Wisdom <y perfect ion em contetnplantis,et

mode of knowledge, Metaphysic ideo sistit in intellectu, et ita
and Theology. The Schoolmen finis eorum hoc estcognitio
in

distinguish a higher wisdom, intellectus.Sed contemplatio

wisdom by mode of inclination Sanctorum, quae est Catholic-
or. of connaturality vpitA things orum, est propter amorem
divine. This wisdom, which ipsius,scilicet contemplati Dei:
isone of the Gifts of the Holy idcirco, non sistit in fine ulti-
Ghost, does not stop at know- mo in intellectu per cogni-

ing, but it knows by loving tionem, sed transit ad afFectum

and for loving. "Contempla- per amorera." Alb. Magnus,
:io Philosophorum est propter dt Adhaer. Deo, cap. ix.
 These speculative virtues perfect the under
standing in its most proper function, in theacti-
vity in which it is entirely itself; for the under
standing, as such, aims only at knowing. The
understandingacts,and its very act is,absolutely
speaking, \\feparexcellence; butitisan/w/ztf/z-
e nl act which stays entirely within itself for

that perfecting, and by which, with boundless

voracity, it takes hold on Being, and draws it to
itself, eats and drinks it, as itself to become,
"so

in certain manner,
a all
things."
So the specula
tive order is the understanding s own order it ;

is at home therein. No matter about the good

or the evil of the subject, its needs or its con

veniences; it
enjoys Being and sees that alone.
The/>nz<7//Yz/order
stands over against the
speculative order, because therein man tends
towards other things than knowing only. If he
knows,it is not that he may rest in the truth, and
there find fruition it is that he may make use
;

^#//j of his knowledge in view of some work

or some deed. 2
2. Finis practicae est opus, quia siderant causam veritatis secun-
etsi practici, hoc est operativi, dum se et propter se,sed ordin-
intendant cognoscere v e r i- ando ad finem operationis, sive

tatem, quomodo se habeat in applicando ad aliquod deter-

aliquibus rebus, non tamen minatum tempus."
S. Thomas,
quaerunt earn tanquam ulti- in lib. II Metaph., lect. z.

mum finem. Non enim con- (Aristotle, {Met., I-II, c. I,

995 b 21.)
 Art belongs to the practical order. It is set to
wards action, not towards the pure inwardness
of knowing.
There are, it is true, speculative arts which
same time sciences, logic for instance:
are at the
these scientific arts perfect the speculative, not
the practical intelligence but the sciences in;

question retain in their me fhod something of the

practical, and are arts only inasmuch as they
connote a work to be done a work in this instance
quite inward to the understanding, itself aim
ing only at knowledge and consisting of setting
our concepts in order, for the construction of a
3
proposition or course of reasoning. It very well
remains then, that whenever art is found, one
finds action or
operation to co-ordinate work
to be done.

III.
MAKING AND DOING.
UNDERSTANDINGorreasonisa
faculty perfectly one in its being, but
working in quite different ways according as it
knows for the sake of knowing or knows for the
sake of doing.
3-Cf. John of Saint-Thomas, theol., t.VI, q. 62, disp. 16, a.
Cursus phllos.y t. I.
Log. II a P., 4, p. 476-477.
q. I, pp. 190 225 ; Cursus
 The speculative understanding will only
have its perfect and infinitely abounding joy in
the intuitive vision of the divine essence; it is
by the intellect that man will then possess beati
tude \gaudium de veritate. Here below it rarely
disports itself inabsolute freedom except in the
case of the Seer, theologian, or metaphysician,
orof the pure Scientist. In the great majority of
cases the reason works in thepractical order and
for the various ends of human action.
But the practical order itself is divided into
two entirely distinct domains,which were called
by the ancients the domain of Doing (agibite,
,
irpctATToV)
and that of Making (factibile, TTOHJTOV).

Doing, in the restricted sense in which the

Schoolmen understood the word, consists in
thefree use, quafree, of our faculties, or in the
exercise of our free-will considered not in rela
tion to things themselves or the works which
we produce, but purely in relation to the use
which we make of our liberty.
This use flows from our human Appetite pro
perly so-called, or our Will, which of itself does
not tend to the truth, but solely andjealously to
the good of man, that aloneexistingfor the ap
petitewhich satisfies desire or love and adds to
the being of the subject. This use is good if con-
formed to the law of human acts and to the true
end of all human life; and if it is good, the man
who acts is himself good in the pure and simple
sense.

ThusDoing is ordered to the common end of

allhuman life, and is hound up with the perfec
tion peculiar to the essence of mankind. The
domain of Action isthe domain of Morality or
of thegoodman assuch. Prudence,the virtue of
the practical understanding which puts Action
right, growswholly and solely inside the
human
boundary. Queen of the moral virtues, noble
and born to command, because it measures our
acts by a last end which is God Himself loved
above all, it keeps nevertheless a tang of wretch
edness because it has for material the crowd of
needs and circumstances and traffickings in
which human fever tosses, and because it im
pregnates with human nature every thing it
touches.
As opposed to Doing, the Schoolmen define
Making as productive action, considered not in
which we thereby make of
relation to the use
o u r 1 b er t y b u t p u r el y in relation to the
i
,
thing pro
duced or to the work taken itself.
by
This productive action iswhat it ought to be,
is
good in its order, if i t conform to the rules and
the peculiar end of the work to be produced ;

and the effect to which it tendsif itisgood, is

that this work be good in itself. Thus Making is
ordered to such and such a particular end, taken
in itself and self-sufficing, not to the common
end of human life, and it is related to the proper
good or perfection, not of the man who works,
but of the work effected.
The domain of Making is the domain of Art,
in the most universal meaning of the word.

Art, which straightens out Makingandnot

Doing, stands outside the human boundary; it
has an end, rules, values, which are not those of
man, but those of the work to be produced. For
Art this work is every thing, she owns but one
law the exigencies and the welfare of the work.
Hence the tyrannical &all-absorbingpower
of Art, and also its astonish ing power of assuage
ment; it frees one from the human; it settles the
artifex, artist or craftsman, in a world apart,
fenced, bounded, detached, where it puts man s

strength and man s intelligence and man s time

atthe service of a thing which he is making.
That is true of everv art: slackness of living and
/-

of willingstopat thedoorof every workshop.

But if Art is not human in its aim, it is human,
essentially human, in itsmannerofacting. Itis
aman s work that has to be done, it must have
the mark of man animal rationale.:

The work of Art has been thought out before

being made, it has been kneaded and prepared,
moulded, brooded, ripened inamzjwzbetore
paesing into matter. And there keep for
it will

ev er the colour and the savour of the mind. Its

formal element, that which constitutes it in its
category and makes it what it is,is its regulation
4
by the understanding. By whatsoeverlittle this
formal element fails, by so much the reality of
Art falls away. T\\t work to be done \soi\\y the
material of Art, \tehrm\srightreason. Recta
ratiofactibilium. Let us say, to endeavour to
render in English this strong Aristotelian and
4. Artistic labour is
properly nomy St. Thomas encloses the
human labour opposed to
as socialproblem,
beast labour or machinelabour. When the labour becomes
That is
why human produc- inhuman or sub-human, because
tion in normal state is the
its the artistic character fades from
product of a craftsman, and de- it,and the material gets the
mands in consequence strict upper hand of the man, it is
individual appropriation, for natural that the material factors
th- artist as such cannot be a of civilization, left to them-
sharer: on the plane of moral selves, should tend to Coin-
aspirations the use of goods munism and the death of pro-
must be common, but on the duction, in the teeth of the
plane of production these very excess of proprietarism
same goods must be held in and productivism due to the
private ownership; between dominance oi\.\&factibile.
the two branches of this anti-
scholastic definition, that Art is the right deduc
tionfrom things to be made*

IV.
THAT ART IS AN INTELLECTUAL
VIRTUE.
Let us now sum up what the scholastics taught
about Artin general, considered in theartistor
in the craftsman and as something of himself.
1 Art is before all th ings intellectual n cate
. i

gory, its action consists in impressing an idea

a material therefore it resides in the un
upon :

derstanding of the artifex^ or as they say, it is

subjectivised therein. Itisacertain^tf///yof
this understanding.
2. The ancients called habitus (e?) certain
qualities of a kind apart, which are essentially
static dispositions
perfecting along the line of
6
its nature the
subject in which they dwell.
5. Prudence on the contrary is stance), which dispose thd
therightdeduction from acts to subject unto evil. The Latin
be positedf/wte ratio aglblllum ) word habitus is much less ex-
and Science is the right de- pressive than the Greek word
duction from objects of specu- *; still it would be pedantic
lation (recta ratio speculablllum). to use this latter term freely.
6. So simplify our treatise
as to Thus, in the absence of a con-
we speak here only of the habi- venient English equivalent, wfi
tus which perfect the must allow ourselves to make
subject;
there are also habitual dis- use of the word habitus, apolo-
positions (such as vices, for in- gising for its heaviness.

10
Health, beauty, are habitus of the body, sancti
fy ing grace
is a habitus
(supernatural) of the
7
soul; other habitus inhere in the faculties or

powers of the soul, and as is the nature of the

it

latter to tend to action, the habitus which abide

therein perfect them in their very dynamic, are

operative habitus: such are the intellectual and

the moral virtues.
We acquire this last sort of habitus by use and
wont; but wemust not on thataccountconfuse
8

the habitus with habit in the modern sense of

the word, that is with mechanical bentand
routine habitus is quite the contrary of habit
;

9
so understood. Habit, which witnesses to the
weight of matter, has its seat in the nerve cen
tres. The operative habitus which evinces the ,

activity of the mind, has its principal seat only

in an immaterial faculty, in the understanding
or the will. When, for instance, the under-
standing,originally indifferent to knowing this

7. These habitus, which perfect Ghost) which are infused and

the essence itself, not the facul- not acquired.
ties, are called entitati Ve habitus. 9. It is because he did not
make this distinction that M.
8. We speak here of the natural Ravaisson, in his celebrated
habitus, not of the supernatural thesis on Habit, poured such
(infused moral virtues, theo- dense Leibnitzian fumes over
logical virtues,gifts of the Holy the thought of Aristotle.

II
rather than that, proves a truth unto itself, it
disposes its own activity in a certain manner, it

callsup in itself a quality which proportions

and commensurates it with such and such an

object of speculation, which uplifts and fixes it

in regard to this object, it acquires the habitus of
a science. The habitus are an in most summon-
in gup of the living spontaneities,vital develop
ments which make the soul better in a given
order and swell it into crowded action \turgentia
uberaanimae, as John of S. Thomas calls them.
And only the living (that is to say, minds which
alone are perfectly alive) can acquire them, be
cause only they are capable of raising the level
of their being by their own activity; they have
also, in their enriched faculties, secondary prin

ciples of action which they use at will, and

which render easyand delightful to them that
which is arduous in itself.
Habitus are like patents of metaphysical no
bility and, just like inborn gifts, they constitute
an inequality among men. The man who pos
sesses a habitus has in himaquality which no

thing can supplant or compensate; heis,bycom

parison with him who has it not, like a man ar
moured in steel compared to a man stark naked :

but in this case the armour is alive 6c spiritual.

12
 So then t\\t habitus properly so called is stable

andpermanent (difficile mobilis] by very

reason
ofthe object which specific
sit: itis thusdistin-
guished from simple disposition, as opinion, for
10
instance. The object, by relation to which it
perfects the subject,is itself unchangeable(such
is infallible truth of demonstration for the habi-

tus of Science) and it is on

this object that the

quality developed in the subject bears. Hence

the strength and rigidity of the habitus, hence
their susceptibility all that swerves from the

straight line of their object galls them hence

their intransigence what concession could
thevallowPThevarefixed
>

J
inan absolute hence
their social inconvenience. Men of the world,
polished on allfacets, love not the man vthabitus
with his asperities.
Art \mhabitus of the practical understanding.
3. This habitus is a virtue that is to say a ;

quality which overcoming the original i n deter

mination of the intellectual faculty,sharpening
and tempering at once the point of its activity,
carries it with regard to a definite object to a cer
tain maximum ofperfection, therefore ofo iterative
effectiveness. Every virtue being thusdetermined

10. Cf. CAJETAN, in II-II, q.iyi, a. 2.

13
 11
to the ultimate of which the power is capable,
and every evil being a lack and a weakness, vir
tue cannot but tend to good it is impossible to :

use a virtue for ill-doing; it is

essentially habitus
operativus boni.
The existence of such a virtue in the work
man is necessary to the well-being of the work,
for the manner ofactionfollows the disposition of
the agent, and as one is one does To the work to
be done, that it may turn out well, there must
answer in the soul of the workman a disposition
which creates between the one and the other
that sort of conformity and inmost proportion
which theschoolmen call "connaturality ;"

Logic, M usic, Architecture, engraft on the

logician the syllogism, on the musician, har
mony, on the architect, balance of masses. By
virtue of the Art abiding in them, they are in
some way their work before it is done ;they are
conformed to it that by them it may be formed.
B u t if A rt i s a virtue of the practical intelli

gence, and if every virtue tends exclusively to

good (that is to Truth, in the case of a virtue of
the understanding), one has to conclude thence

1 1 .
ARISTOTLE, De Caelo, lib. I. 13. Ibid., a. 2, ad I. Unum-
quodque enlm quale est, talia

1 2. Sum. theol., I-II, q. 5 5, a. 3. operatur.

thatArt as such (I say Art, and not artist, for he
often works against his art) is never wrong and
connotes infallible rightness. Otherwise it
would not be a habitus properly so called, stead~
fast by its
very nature.
The schoolmen discussed at length this in
falliblerightness of art, and more generally the
virtues of the practical intelligence (Prudence
in theorderot Doing, Art in the order of Mak

ing).
Howcan theintelligence be rendered
infallibly true in the domain of the
individual
andof thecontingent? They answered by the
fundamental distinction of the truthofthe
speculative intelligence^ which consists in know
ing conformably to w
hat is, andof the truth of
the practical intelligence, which consists in ^//r-
ecting conformably to what ought to be accord
ing to the rule and measure of the thing to be
14
done; if there is no science other than that of
the "needs must", if there is no infallible truth
in
thecognitionconcerningthat which maybe
other than it is, there can be infallible truth in

14. Cf. CAJF.TAN, in I-II, q-57, tivus operis faciendi, et regula-

a.5,rf</3 ;John of Saint Thomas, tivus. Et sic ejus veritas non est

Cursustheol.y t.VI,q.62,disp.l6, penes esse, sed penes id quod

a. 4,
p. 467: "Proprie enim in- deberet esse justa regulam, et
tellectus practicus est mcnsura- mensuram talis rei regulandae"
the direction, there can bearf, asthereis/>r//^/-
encc, in dealing with the contingent.
But thisinfallibility of Art concernsonly
the formal element of operation, that is to say,
the regulation of the work by the mind.
Should the artist s hand falter, should his in
strument give way, should the material betray
him, the defect which thus creeps in to the re-
sult,into theeventus, in no way affects the art
itself and only proves that the artist has failed
hisart: from the instant that the artist, in the
sentence passed by his intelligence, has set
down the rule and the measure which suit the
given case, there is not in him any error, that is,
any false direction. The artist who has the/ia-
bitusvt art and the hand which trembles Che
1

ha rhabito dell arte e man che trema - produces

an imperfect work but keeps a faultless virtue.
So it is in the moral order, the event may be
tray, but the deed done according to the
rules of prudence shall not, therefore, have
been less infallibly right. Although extrinsic-
ally and on the side of the material it connotes
contingenceandfallibility,artin itself, thatis
to say on the side of form, and of the regulation
which comes from the mind, does not waver
like opinion, it is rooted in certitude.

16
 Thencefollows that manual skill is no
it

part of art, but only a material and extrinsic

rendition; the labour thanks to which the vir
tuoso who "fiddles"acquiresagility of fingers,
does not itself increase his art, and does not en

gender any special art; it only removes a physi-

:al obstacle to the practice of the art, nongenerat
Io
lovam arttm sedtollit impedimentum exercitiiejus :

irt abides
entirely on the side of the mind.
4. The better to define its nature,the an-

:ientscompared it to Prudence, which is also

i virtue of the
practical intelligence. By
distinguishing and contrasting in this way Art
ind Prudence, they put their finger on a vital
point in the psychology of human acts.
(a) Art, we have already said, is on the plane
(
ofMaking: Prudence is ontheplaneof Doing.
It and applies the means of achieving
finds out
our moral ends, which themselves are subord
inate to the last end of all human life, that is to
say, to God .
Metaphorically it is,if you will,
an art, but i t isthe art of fiittotum bcne viuere

15. John of Saint Thomas, Civ. Del, lib. IV. cap. 2 1).
Curs. Thil. t. 1. Log. II a P., Cf. on this point Aristotle,
]. i,
a. 5, p. 213. Eth. Nic. lib. VI.; St. Thomas,
1
1 6. This is Saint Augustine s Sum. tkeol. II-II,
q. 47, a. 2,
lefinition of virtue, ars recte ti- ad. I; I-II, q. 21, a. 2, ad 2;
Vendi, the art of right living (de q. 57, a. 4,
ad $.
 17
which only the saints had in its fullness,
toge
ther with supernatural prudence, and above all,
with the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, which
moves them to things divine according to a
divine mode^ and makes them act under the very
governance of the Spirit of God, and of His
loving Art, giving them eagle s wings to help
them walk the ground as sumentpennasut aqui :

lae, current^ etnon laborabunt, ambulabunt, elnon

deficient. Art is not concerned with our life,
but only with such or such particular and ex
tra-human ends which it regards as its term.
Prudence works for the well-being of him
17. "If tis works of art you aquilae, quae desuper descen-
want, will they not go in front dit, quia dona Spiritus, etsi in
of Phidiaswho model inhuman terra exerceantur, et actionibus

clay the likeness of even the consuetis videantur fieri, tamen

the Face of God?" ( P. Gar- pennis aquilae ducuntur, quae
deil, Les dans du Sain t-E sprit superiorum spirituum ac dono-
dans les Saints Dominicains. Le- rum communicatione moven-
coffre, 1903. Introd.p.23-24). tur et regulantur ; et tantura
1 8. Isaias, xl. 31. "Ubi non differunt, qui virtutibus ordi-
z surde notandum," adds John nariis exercentur, ab his qui
of St. Thomas (Cursus theoL, donis Spiritus sancti aguntur,
t.VI, q. 70, disp. 1 8, a. I, p. quantum qui solia pedibus
576) "pennas aquilae promitti, laborando ambulant,quasi pro-
non tamen dicitur quod vola- prio studio et industria regu-
bunt, sed quod current, et am- lati; vel qui pennis aquilae,

bulabunt,scilicet tamquam ho superiori aura inflatis moven-

mines adhuc in terra viventes, tur, et currunt in via Dei, quasi
acti tamen, et moti pennis sine ullo labore."

18
who acts, adbonum operantis ; Art works for the

good of the work done, adbonitmQperis, and all

that turnsitaside from thisaimadulteratesand
diminishes it. The moment the Artist works
well just as the moment the Geometer de
monstrates matters little that he be glad
"it

19
or sorry." is vexed or jealous, he sins as
If he
20
man, but does not sin as artist. Art nowise
cares that the artist be good in his own act as
man, it would care rather that the work pro
duced, if that were possible, should itself make
21
on own plane a perfect use of its activity;
its

but human art does not produce works which

are self-moving. God alone makes this kind,
contrasted the in-
19. Sum. theol.,\-\\, q. 57, a. 3. I, 133 sq.)
jj.j - feriority of Italian art "which
20. Ibid., q. 21, a. 2, ad z. ,../..., . .

limits itself almost entirely to

21. ideoad artem non re-
"Et
the ma ki n g of lifeless things,
artifex bene mot on an d good to look
quiritur, quod j i ess

operetur, sed quod

bonum at from without," with the
opus facial requiretur autcm
:
SU p er iority of German art,
magis, quod ipsum artificiatum whose bent in everyage has been
bene operetur, sicut quod cul- to ma ^ e WO rks which move
tellus bene incideret, vel serra
(watches and clocks, hydraulic
bene secaret, si proprie hprum mac hines, and so forth), this
esset agere, et non magis agi
g rea t man,who shone in every-
quia non habent dominium
sui
thing except aesthetics, had a
actus." Sum. theol., I-II, q. 57, dim glimpse of a certain truth,
a. 5, ad. I. but unfortunately confused the
When Leibnitz Bedencken clock s motion from within with
(

von Klopp, that of a living being.

Aufrichtung, etc.,
and so the saints are truly and to theletter His
masterpiece as Master Workman.
Next, as the artist is man before he isartist,
one easily foresees conflicts in him which will

bring to handgrips Art and Prudence his

virtue as Craftsman and his virtue as Man.
Doubtless Prudence herself who always
,

judgesin particular cases,will not apply tohim

the same rules as to the labourer or the merch
ant, and will not ask Rembrandt or Leon Bloy
to make works which voillsell, to secure material
comfort to their families. He must none the
less have a certain heroism to keep h imself

constantly in the straight line of Doing, and

not sacrifice his imperishablesubstance to the
devouringidol inhissoul. In truth such con
flicts cannot be done
away with, unless a deep
humility maketheartistsotosay, unconscious
ofhis art, orthe almighty unction of wisdom
give to all that is in him the slumber and the
peace of love. Fra Angelico knew nothing of
these inward contrarieties.
Itremains nevertheless that the pure artist,
taken abstractly as such ..reduplicative ut sic is
.,

something entirely unmoral.

(b) Prudence does not perfect the intelli
gence without presupposing that the will is

20
straight in line of human appetite, that is to
its

to its own wellbeing, which is the

say, in regard 22
wellbeing of the whole man indeed its only :

business is to determine the means in regard to

such human concrete ends already willed. She
presupposes then that the appetite is well
dis

posed as regards these ends.

Art, on the contrary,perfects the intelligence
without presupposing the Tightness of the will
in its own line of human appetite,the ends Art
aims at being outside the line of human well-
being. Moreover, "the movement of the appe
tite which corrupts thejudgment of prudence
does not corrupt thejudgment of Art any more
than that of geometry 23 That is why Art gives
,"

only the power of well-doing (facultas boni 24

operis), and not the custom of well-doing.
The
artist, if he wills, is free not to use or to abuse his
art, as the grammarian, if he wills, can commit
a barbarism ;the virtue of Art which isin himis
not therefore less perfect, and according to the
celebrated saying of Aristotle, 25 who would
have understood, without doubt, the fantasies
22. Sum. tkeol.y I-II, q-57, a.
4. ties really depends on the will
23. Aristotle, Ethic. Nic., lib. in its
proper dynamism of
Vl.Cf. Cajetan, in I-II, q. 58, human appetite. Cf. Sum. theol.
a. a. 2.
q. 21, 2,ad
5. I
I-II,q. 57,3. ;

24. The act of // our facul- 25. Eth. $Qc., lib. VI, cap. 5.

21
of Erik Satie, the artist who sins against his art
is not blamed if he sins wilfully, as if he sinned

unwittingly, whereas the man who sins against

prudenceorjustice isblamedmore ifhesinswit-
fully than if he sins unwittingly.
The Ancients
noted upon this that Art & Prudence both have
\.Q
judge first and Wfl/tfWafterwards, but that
the principal business of Art is toj udge, while
the principal deed of prudence is to command.
Perfectio artis con sis tit injudicando*
(c) Lastly, Prudence havingfor material,
not a thing to be done, an object determined in
existence, but the mere use wh ich the subject
makes of its liberty, has no sure and predeter
mined ways or set rules. Its fixed point is the
right end to which the moral virtues tend, and
of which it has to settle the just mean. But in
order to attain this end, and to apply the univer
sal
principles of moral science, precepts, and
counsels to the particular action to be done,
there are no ready made rules for this action is
;

wrapped up in a net of circumstances which in

dividualise it, and make a really new case every
26. Sum. he alone goes on to perfection
6ia,II-II,q.47,a.8.
master is he," wrote
"Poor in art whose judgment surpasses
Leonardo da Vinci, "whose his work."

work surpasses his judgment;

22
 27
time. In each of these cases, and, above all,
when for instance it has to determine the exact
measure of two virtues which have to be prac-
ised at the same time, firmness and gentleness,

humility and magnanimity, mercy and truth,

and so forth, there will be a particular means of
shaping oneself to the end. It is the business
of Prudence to find this means,using ways or
rules subordinate to the will, which chooses

according to the incidence of circumstances

and occasions, themselves contingent and not
pre-determined, and not to be certainly fixed
and absolutely determined by thejudgment or
free will of the Prudent Man and these rules
;

the schoolmen called for this reason regulae

arbitrariae. Special for each special case, the
of Prudence is none the less certain and
ruling
infallible, as has been said above, because the
truth of the prudentialjudgmentdependsupon
the rightintention (per conformitatem adappe-
titumrectum) and not upon the event; and sup
posing the recurrenceof another case, or infi
nity of cases, at all points identical with a given

27. "Eaquaesunt ad finem in sitatem personarum et nego-

rebus humanis non sunt de- tiorum."S;.
terminata, sed multipliciter 3.15.
divcrsificantursecundum diver-
case, it is strictly the same ruling imposed on
this one which should be imposed upon them
all but there never will be a single moral case
;
23
entirely identical with another.
Hence it is clear that no science can take the
place of Prudence, for science, no matter how
casuistically complicated one may imagine it,
has none but general and settled rules.
It is clear also why Prudence, in order to

strengthen itsjudgment, needs must resort to

this groping and manifold exploration which
the Ancients called consilium (deliberation or
counsel) Art, on the contrary, having for mat-
.

eri al a thing to be made,

proceeds by certain and
settled way sj -yz^hxt would seem to be nothing
else than a certain ordering by reason as to how
human acts shall arrive by settled means at a
29
settled The Schoolmen maintained this
end."

constantly after Aristotle, and they make the

possession of fixed rules an essential property
of art as such. We
shall put forward later on
some remarks on the subject of these fixed rules
28. It goes without saying ually as to the modalities of
that before the precepts of the conduct to be followed accord-
moral huv all cases are identical ing to the said precepts.
in the sense that these precepts 29. ST. THOMAS, in Toster.
must always be obeyed. But lib. I. lectio l
a
I.
Analjt. ,

moral cases still differ individ-

24
in the case of the fine arts. Let us recall here
that the Ancients treated of the virtue of Art
considered in itself and in all its generality, and
not in any one of its species, so that the simplest
example of Art so considered, that in which
at once is realised the generic concept of Art,
should be sought for in the mechanic arts. The
art of the ship-builder or the clock-maker has
for its proper end an invariable and universal
end determined by reason, to allow a man to go
on the water, or to tell him the time of day the
thing to be made, a ship or a clock, being it
self only a material to be moulded to this end.
And for this there are fixed rules, themselves
determined by reason in view of the said end,
and of a certain average of conditions.
The effect produced is doubtless individual,
and in cases where the material of the art is
particularly liable to decay, as in Medicine, or
inAgriculture, or in the military Art, in order
to
apply its fixed rules it must use contingent
rules (regulaearbitrariae)^2Cf\& also a kind of

prudence; it must also resort to deliberation,

to the consilium. But Art none the less is left to
draw itsfirrnness from its rational and universal
rules, not from ti\zcoftsiliuiri\ and the rectitude
of its judgment is not gauged, as in the case of

25
Prudence, by circumstances and happenings,
but by the certain and determined grooves
30
peculiar to itself. This is why certain arts can
be sciences practical sciences like Medicine
or Surgery (which the Salamanca Theologians
irreverently bracketed with the barber s art,
ars chirurgico-barbifica] or even speculative
,

sciences like Logic.

5. To sum up, Art is more exclusively intel
lectual than Prudence. Whereas Prudence has
for subject the practical intelligence insofar as
it
presupposes the right will Z.K& depends there
31
from, Art takes no account of the proper good
of the will, and of the ends which it follows
along its line of human appetites; and if it sup
32
poses a certain rectitude in the appetite, this is
still in relation to some ends
properly so-called.
As a Science it is rivetted to an object (object to
be made, it is true, not to be contemplated). It
is
only accidentally that it uses the roundabout
way of deliberation and counsel. Although it
produces individual acts and effects, it does not
judge, except accessorily, from circumstantial
contingencies; so, less thanPrudence, itlooks
30. JoHNOFST.THOMAS,Car/a/ ordine ad voluntatem rectam.
theol., t. VI, q. 62, disp.i6, a. Sum. theol., I-II, q. 56, a. 3.
4, p. 470. 32. See VI, Les Ingles
de
3l.-Intellectus practicus in FArt, pp. 66 and 67.

26
at the individuation of actions and the hicet
nunc. In a word, if in the way of its material,
which is contingent, it runs with Prudence
rather than with Science, according to itsformal
ratio and qua virtue, it runswiththeScience
and the habitus of the speculative intelligence
rather than with Prudence: arsmagisconvenit
cum habitibus speculates in ratione virtutif, quam
cum prudential The Scientist is an Intellectual
who demonstrates: the Artist is an Intellectual
who does things: the Prudent Man is an intelli
gent Voluntary Agent who acts well.
Such, in its
principal features, is the idea the
Schoolmen formed of Art. Not only in Phidias
and Praxiteles, butin thejoinerand the black
smith of our villages,they recognised an intrin
sic
development of the reason, a nobility of the
understanding. The virtue of the artifex was
not in their eyesstrength of muscle orsupple-
ness of fingers, or the rapidity of gesture timed

by the stop-watch and" Tay/ortsed;"nor yet was

it that
pure empiric agility which grows in the
memory and the animal reason (thecogitative) ;

which imitates art, and which art indeed abso-

33. JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, op. 34. Sum. theo!., I-II, q. 57, a.

/., p. 470. 4, ad 2.
 35
lutely needs, but which remains in i tself ex
trinsic to art. It was a virtue of the intelligence,
and it endowed the humblest artisan with a cer
tain perfection of spirit.
The craftsman in the normal type of human
developmentandin acivilisation reallyhumane
represents the average man. If Christ willed to
je a craftsman of a little country town, it is be
cause he willed to take on the ordinary condi
SG
tion of mankind.
The medieval doctors did not, like many of
our introspective psychologists, study only
the townsman or the scholar or the student :

they took thought for the great commonalty

of mankind. But doing this, they still studied
their Master. Considering the art or the acti

vity proper to the "artifex," they considered

the activity which the Lord exercised during
all His hidden life;
they considered also, in a
certain manner,the activity even of the Father;
for they knew that the virtue of Art is properly
35. Cf. ARISTOTLE, CMetaph., conversatur, convenientissira-
lib. i,c. i; St.
Thomas, lect. um est ut se eis in conversat-
1 I, 20-22; ST. THOMAS, Sum. ione conformet. . . . Et ideo
tkeol., II-II, q. 47, a. 3, ad 3; convenientissimum fuit, ut

q. 49, a. i, #</ i ;
CAJETAN, in Christus in cibo et potu com-
I-II, q. 57, a. 4; in II-II, q. muniter sc sicut alii haberet.

47, a. 2. Sum. theol., III, q. 40, a. 2.

36. Qui autem cum aliquibus

28
 3r
predicated of God, as Goodness and Justice,
and that the Son, in practising His poor man s

trade, was still the image of the Father, and of

His action which ceases not: 38 "Phitippe,qui
videt Me, i)idet et Patrem.
Itiscurioustonotethat in their classifica
tions the ancients gave no separate place to
what we call thefine arts. 39 They divided the
arts into servile and liberal according- as thev
j

demanded bodily labour or not, 40 or rather (for

this division,which goes further than we think,
was taken from the very concept of art, recta
ratiofactibilium}
according as the work to be
37. Sum. contra Gent., lib. i
goodness, the nobility of God,
cap. 93. as a tree is bowed down by the
38. And even,one may say in multitude of its fruits ..."
a sense,of His divine humility: Opusculum de ^Beatitudine, St.
"There is another thing set Thomae adscriptum, cap. II.
ting the soul on fire with the 39. Sooth to say the division
Iqve of God, that is the divine of the arts into fine arts and
humility. For God Al
. . .
applied arts, important though
mighty submits Himself to it otherwise be, is not what
individual angels and holy the logicians call an "essential"
souls as if He were the bond division; it is taken from the
servant of each one and each of end pursued, and one and the
them His God. To prove this, same art can very well follow
He will go about ministering at once utility and beauty.
unto them saying in the 8 1st Such is par excellence the case
Psalm:/ fuTpe said,yc are Gods. . . in architecture.
Now this humility is caused 40. Sum. tkeol., I-II, q. 57, a.

by the superabundance of the 3, ad 3.

made was in one case an effect produced upon
matter (factibile properly so-called) in the other
a pure spiritual construction abiding in the
soul.
41
On that count Sculpture and Painting
42
were part of theservilearts, and Music ofthe
liberal arts,where she neighboured with Arith
metic and Logic: for the Musician intellectu
ally arranges
the sounds in his soul, as the Arith
metician arranges numbers, and the Logician
concepts oral or instrumental expression,
;

which in the fluid succession of sonorous mat

ter pours out the buildings thus achieved with
in the mind, being only an extrinsic conse

quence and a simple medium of these arts.

In the powerfully social structure of medi
eval civilisation the artist ranked only as crafts
man, and every sort of anarchic development
was barred to his individualism, because the
natural, social discipline imposed on him from
without certain limiting conditions. He did
43

41. JOHN OF ST. THoMAS,Cr/. which the order imposes that

VI, q. 62, disp. 1 6, a.

theol., t.
4, p. 474.
42. See Appendix A.
43. The craftsman is subject
to the order y and it is by taking
into account, in turning out
his work, the conditions, the
limitations, and the obstacles
he best shows the excellence of
his art. The modern artist on
the contrary seems to look up-
on limiting conditions laid
down by the order as a sacri-
legious assault upon his liberty
as a master of beauty. This
incapacity for answering to the

30
not work for worldly people and merchants but
for the faithful, of whom it was his mission to
foster the prayer, to instruct the intelligence,
to delight the soul and the eyes. matchless O
time, when was moulded to
a candid people

beauty, without even being aware, as perfect

religious ought to pray without knowing that
44
they pray when doctors and imagemakers
!

taught the poor for love, and the poor relished

their schooling because they were all of the
same royal race born of water and of the Holy
Ghost.
Then they created more beautiful things,
of a work to
settled exigencies which one harks back to the
be done denotes in reality in material world and the other
the artist a weakness of the art to the metaphysical or spiritual
itself taken in its generic sense; world. From this point of view
but appears also as an escape
it it seems that modern art, since
from the despotic and transcen- its rupture with the crafts, is

dent exigencies of the Beauty tending in its own way to the

which the artist has conceived same claim of absolute inde-
in his heart. It is also a re- pendence, of aseity,
as modern
markable sign of the sort of philosophy,
conflict which we point out 44. "This holy man," relates
later on, the conflict between Cassian speaking of St. Antony,
the of Art and the
"ratio" "said this superhuman and
of Beauty in the fine
"ratio"
heavenly word concerning
arts.The artist must be strong prayer: There is no prayer per-

beyond the ordinary to realise feet, if the religious himself

the perfect harmony between notices that he is praying" Cas-
these two formal elements, of sian., Coll. IX, cap. 31.
and worshipped themselvesless. The blessed
lowliness in which the artist was set uplifted
his strength and his freedom. The Renaissance
was to drive the artist silly and make him the
most unfortunate of men at the very time
when the world wasgettinglesshabitablefor
him by shewing him his own greatness and
letting loose upon him that fierce Beauty which
the Faith had held spell-bound and drawn after
her, docile, tied by one of our Lady s apron
45
strings.

V.
ART AND BEAUTY.
St.Thomas,who was as simple as he was wise,
defined the beautiful as that which being seen
pleases, id quodvisum placet?* These four words
say all that is needed vision, that is to say, in
:

tuitive knowledge^
zndjoy. The Beautiful is that
45. In Greece at the great temperance and "infused"

period of classic art, reason a- temperance,

lone maintained art in tern- 46. Sum. theol., I,q. 5, a. 4,adl.
perance and wonderful har- St. Thomas here intends to

mony. By comparing the con- give a definition only from the

ditions of art at Athens with effect. It is when he declares
those of art in the 1 2th and the three elements of the
I 3th centuries, one can in beautiful that he gives its

some way appreciate the dis- essential definition,

tinction between "natural"
which givesjoy,notalljoy,butjoy in knowing;
not the joy proper to the act of knowing, but a
joy abounding and overflowing from this act
because of the object known. If a thing uplifts
and delights the Soul by the very fact of being
granted to its intuition, it is good to lay hold of,
47
it is beautiful.

Beauty is essentially an object of the intelli

gence, for that which knows in the full sense of
the word is the intelligence, which alone is
open to the infinity of Being. The birthplace of
Beauty is the intellectual world wherefrom it
comes down. But in a certain manner also itfalls
under the grasp of the senses, in the measure
in which with man they serve the intelligence,
and are themselves capable of enjoyingknow-
ledge :
"among
all the senses it is
only with
sight and hearing that beauty has relations, be
cause these two senses are above othersmaxime
cognoscitivi^ most knowledgeable." The share
48

of the senses in the perception of beauty is even

made unmeasurable with us by the fact that our
understanding is not intuitive like that of the
angels it sees doubtless but on condition of ab-
;

47. Adrationempulchriperti- appetitus. Sum. theol., I-II,q

net, quod in ejus aspectu 27, a. I, ad 3.
seu cognitione quietetur 48. Ibid.
%

33
stractinganddiscursing; in man sensitive know
ledge alone possesses in perfection the intui-
tiveness necessary to the perception of the
beautiful. Thusman may doubtless enjoypurely
intellectual beauty, but the beauty connatural \.Q
man is that which touches the understanding
with delight through the senses and their intui
tion. Such also is thebeautypropertoArt, which
works upon sensiblematerial soastogivejoy to
the mind. Thus would it persuade itself that
paradise not lost. It has the relish of the earth-
is

lyparadise because it restores, for an instant, the

peace and delectation at once of understanding

and of sense.
If beauty delights the understanding it is be
cause itis in essence a certain excellence or
per
fection in the proportionof things to the under

standing. Hence the three conditionslaid down

49
for it
by St.Thomas :
integrity, because the un
derstanding loves being; proportion, because
the understandinglovesorder and unity; last
and above all, splendour or clarity, because the
understanding loves light and intelligibility. -A
certain shining quality is in fact according to all
the ancients the essential character of beauty

49. Sum. theo!.,l. q. 39. a. 8.

34
clantas estde rationepulchritudinis
luxpulchri-
jicat,quia sine luce omnia suntturpia^- bu t i t is a
sunburst of intelligibility splendor veriszid. the:

Platonists, splendor St. Augustine,

or<//#/>said

who adds that"unity is the form of all beauty," 53

splendorformae, said St. Thomas in his precise

metaphysical language for the :

"forma," that is

to say, the principle which makes the proper

pe rfection of all that is, which upbuilds and
completes things in their essence and in their
qualities, which is, in a word, if one may so say,
Being, purely such, or the spiritual essence of
reality, is above
all all the proper principle of

intelligibility, the proper clarity of all things.

Thus we may well say every form is a footprint
Dr a
ray of the Creative Intelligence impressed
.ipon the heart of the created being
Besides all .

and all proportion

:>rder is for the rest a work of

ntelligence. Therefore,to say with

the School-
nen that beauty is \htshining out ofform over the
veil-proportionedparts of
is
equal to say-
matter

ng that it is the lightening intelligence over

of
natter intelligently arranged. The understand-

0. ST. THOMAS, Comment, in 52. De vera l^f/ig., cap. 41.

5. de Dh ln.
Nomin, lect. vi. 53. Of use. de Tulchro
et Bono,

1. ST. THOMAS, Comment, in attributed to Albertus Magnus

saint., Ps. XXV, 5.

or to St. Thomas.

35
ing enjoys the beautiful because in it itfinds and
recognises itself, and gets contact with its own
light. And this is so true, that those such as
Francis of Assisi most note and relish the
beauty of things, who know that they come
forth from an intelligence, and refer them back
to their Author. Without doubt all sensuous
beauty demands of the eye
a certain delectation
itself orof the ear or of the imagination; but
there is no beauty unless the intelligencealso in
some A beautiful colour u
way rejoires. baptise<

the eye" as a strong perfume dilates the nostril:

but of these two "forms" or qualities colour
alone is called beautiful, because being received
as the perfume is not, through a sense capable o:
51
disinterested it can be, even
knowledge, by its
purely sensuous lustre, a matter of joy for the
understanding. For the rest, the higher man
raises his culture, the more spiritual becomes
the glory of the form which transports him.
All the same, it behoves us to note that in the
beautiful which we have called connatural to
man, and which is proper to human art, this
splendour of the form, however purely intelli
gible it may be in itself, is grasped in the sensitive
54. Visus et audltui RATIONI q. 27, a. I, ad 3.
DESERVIENTES. SltM. tbeo!., I-II,
and bythe sensitive, and not apart from it. Intui-
tiorrof artistic beauty thusstands at the opposite
palefrom the abstraction of scientific truth.
For it is through theveryapprehension of sense
that here below the light of being pierces to the
understanding.
The understanding then, absolved from all
effort at abstraction,enjoys without labour and
without discursion It is dispensed from its or
.

dinary has
toil, it not to disentangle theintell-

igi ble from the material in which it is buried,

in order to
go, step by step, over its different
attributes as the stag at the well-spring it has
;

nothing to do but drink; it drinks the clarity of

Being. Set in the intuition of sense,it is flooded
with intellectual light given to it in a flash, in
:he very sensuous in which it basks and which
t does not
grasp sub ratione veri\ but rath er sub
ationedelectabilis^ by the blissful impregnation
vhich the light produces in it, and by thcen-
uing joy in the appetite, which springs out,as
o its proper object,towards
every well-being of
hesoul.Onlyin second intention willit analyse,
nore or less well, by reflection the causes of this
.yy
Thus, although beauty belongs to the meta-
;. Sec Appendix B.

37
physic truth in this sense, that every burst of
for granted some
intelligibility in things takes
conformity with the intelligence which is the
cause of things,nevertheless the beautiful is not
53
asort of truthbut a sort of good theperception ;

of the beautiful is related to knowledge, but so

as to contribute itself bloom is added unto
"as

youth ;"itis lessakind of knowledge than a kind

ofdelectation. Beauty is
essentially delectable.
That is why, by its very nature and qua beau
tiful, it moves desire and produces love, it has
a unitive force, whereas truth as such only en
lightens.
"

Omnibus igitur estpulchrum et bonum

desiderabileetamabileetdiligibile" (to all there
fore the beautiful and good desirable and
is
57
lovable and delectable) It is for her beauty .

68
that Wisdom is beloved, and it is for itself that
all
beauty is loved at first, even if thereafter the
infirm flesh is caught in the snare. Love in its
turn produces ecstasy, that is to say, it puts the
lover outsidehisego; ecstasy which thesoul
56. "The beautiful is a certain Divin tjtymin., cap. 4;
Saint

species of good." Cajetan, in Thomas, lect. 9. Let us go on

I-II,q. 27, a. I.
(Cf. the saying calling the Arcopagite-i-n. virtue
of St. Thomas quoted higher of secular prescription him
up, note 47.) Wherefore the whom modern criticism calls

Greeks said in a single word the pseudo- Denys.

KaXoKayaQla. 58. am fallen in love with
"I

57. Denys the Areopagite, De His beauty." Wisdom^m. 2.

38
experiences, in lesser degree ,when it is
smitten
with the beauty of a work of art,and in its pleni
tude, when it is drunk up like the dew by the
oeauty of God. And concerning God59 Himself,
iccording to Denys the Areopagite, one must
3e bold to say that He in some sort suffers the

ecstasy of love because of the abundance of His

Dounty, which impels Him to shed throughout
ill
things a share of His splendour. But His own
ove causes the beauty of what He loves, while
>ur own love is caused by the beauty of what we
ove.
What the ancients said about the beautiful
to be taken in the most formal sense so as
>ught

avoid materialising their thought into any

ver-narrow specification. There is not only
ne way but a thousand and ten thousand
ways
1 which the notion of
integrity, or perfection,
r achievement can be realized. The absence

f head or arm is a lack of

integrity very notice-
ble in a woman, and very slightly noticeable
\ no matter how disappointed M.
a statue,
-avaisson may have been at not being able to
mplete the Venus deMilo. The least sketch of
i Vinci, let alone of
Rodin, is more final than
lemostfinishedBouguereau.AndifaFuturist
T)e Dijin. 10.
5.9. Nomin., cap. 4; St. Thomas, lect.
thinks fit to give only one eye, or a quarter of an
eye, to the lady whom he is portraying, no one
denies his right to do so, one only asks that is
thewhole crux that thisquarter eye be all the
eye n ceded by th e said lad y in thegmen case.
It is the same with proportion, fitness, or har

mony. They vary according to their objects or

their aims. The right proportion of a man is not
the same as that of the child. Figures built up
according to the Greek or the Egyptian Canon
are perfectly proportioned in their kind. But
Rouault s jolly fellows are also perfectly pro
portioned in their kind. Integrity and propor
60
tion have no absolute significance, and must be
understood sole ly in relation to th e aim of the
work, which is to induce the splendour of form
60. Note that the conditions human organism is something
of the beautiful are much fixed and invariably laid down.
more narrowly determined in But the beauty of the art-work
nature than in art, the end of not being of the object
that
natural beings and the clarity represented, Painting and
of form which may shine in Sculpture are no wise bound
them being themselves much to the determinateness or the
more narrowly determined imitation of such a type. The
than those of art-works. For art of ancient heathendom
instance, in nature there is a considered itself bound only
perfect type(whether we know by reason of an extrinsic con-
it or not) in the bodily dition, because it used above

proportions of man or woman, all to represent the gods of an

because the natural end of the anthropomorphic religion.

4
upon the matter.
Lastly and especially, this lustre of the form
itself,which is the essential of beauty, has an in
finity of different ways of shining
on the mate
the sensuous lustre of the colour or of
rial. It is

the modelling, the intelligible clarity of an ara

besque, or of balance of masses, of activity or
of movement ; it is the glint upon things of a
human thought or of a divine thought ; it is

above all the deep splendour of the soul that

shines through, of the soul, the principle ofani-
mal life and strength or the principle of spiri
tual life, of sorrow, and of passion. There is yet
a loftier splendour, that of grace, but the Greeks
knew it not.
Beauty then is by no means conformity with
a certain idealand
unchangeable type, in the
sense understood by those whoconfuse the true
and the beautiful, knowledge and delectation ;
who will have it, that in order to apprehend
beauty man discovers "through the vision of
the material wrappings,""the
ideas,""through
unseen essence of things," and their
"necessary
61
:ype,"
St. Thomas was as far removed from
:his
pseudo-Platonism as he was from the ideal-
stragfair of Winckelmannand of David. There
ii. Cf. LAMENNAIS, de f^frfet dti Beau, ch. II.
is
beauty for him as soon as the shining of any
form whatsoever upon properly proportioned
material results in the well-being of the intelli
gence, and he takes care to warn us that in a cer
tain way beauty is relative relative not to the

dispositions of the subject in the sense in which

the moderns understand relativity, but to the
peculiar nature and end of the thing, and to the
formal conditions under which it is
grasped.
Pulchritudo quodammodo diciturper respectum ad
aliquid. . . .
(beauty is in some way predicated
2
with regard to something else) f aliaenimest
pulchritudo spiritusetalia corporis,atque alia hujus
etillius cor
ports (for one is the beauty of spirit,
and another the beauty of body, and one of this
and another of that body) 63 and beautiful asmay
;

be a created thing, it may appear beautiful to

some and not to others, because it is not beauti
ful except under certain aspects, which some
discern and others see not at all; it is thus"beau-
62. "Beauty
and health and health is the right proportion
so on are somehow bespoken of limbs and of colours. And
with regard to something: be- therefore one is the beauty of
cause a certain blending of the one, another of another." St.

humours causes health in a Thomas, Comment, in Tsa/m.,

boy, which it does not in an Ps. XLIV, 2.
old man; for one thing may 63. ST. THOMAS. Comment, in
be health to a lion which is lib. de Dijln.
3^omit!.,cap. iv,
death to a man. Wherefore lect. 5.
 "

tiful in one place and not in another.

If this be so, it is because beauty belongs to
the order of transcendental ^\\3.t is to say, of con
cepts which overpass every limit of kind or
category, and do not allow themselves to be en
closed in any classification, because they suck
up every thing and reappear every where. Like
the one, the true, and the good, beauty is Being
itself taken from a certain point of view, it is a

property of Being; it is not an accident super-

added to Being,it only adds to Being a relation of
reason, it is
Being, inasmuch as Being delights
an intellectual nature by its mere intuition.

Thus every thing is beautiful, as every thing is

good, at least in certain relationships. And as
Being every v/here present and everywhere
is

different, so Beauty is scattered everywhere and

varies in every place. Like Being and the other
transcendentals, it is
essentially analogical^ that
is to
say, it calls itself by different names, subdi-
versaratione, of the different subjects of which
it is
predicated: each sort of being win its own
vvayjisgtf^initsown way, is beautiful m its own
way.
Analogical concepts are spoken properly of
jod, in Whom
the perfection which they
lesignate exists in a formal eminent fashion,

43
in a pure and infinite condition. Godis thear
64
"sovereign analogue,"
and they are found in
things only as a broken prismatic glimpse ofthe
65
face of God. So Beauty is one of the divine
names.
God is beautiful. He is the most beautiful
of all beings, because, as set forth by Denys the
66
Areopagite and St. Thomas, His Beauty is
without change orvicissitude,without increase
or diminution ; and because it is not like that of
things, which all have a particularised beauty,
particulatampulchrhudimm^ sicut etparticulatam
naturam (a particularised beauty as also a parti-

64. The analogates (analoga only in a certain relation; what

analogata) of an analogous \sbeautiful simply can be good or
concept (analogum analogans) true also only in a certain re
are the different things in lationship. . . . This is
why
which this concept realises it beauty, truth, goodness (moral
self, and with which it agrees. good) reign over distinct
65. In God alone all these spheres of human activity, in
perfections are identical in which it would foe vain to
their formal ratio; in Him deny a priori the possibility of
Truth is
Beauty, is Goodness, conflict, under the pretext
is Unity, and they are Him that the transcendentals are
self.On the contrary,in things indissolubly bound up with
here below truth, beauty good one another : a metaphysical
ness and the rest are as true but
principle perfectly
pects of be-in g distinct according needing clear comprehension.
to their formal ratio; and what 66. De Din
<

s>inis Nominibus>

is
simply true (absolutely speak cap. 4, lect. 5 W 6 of the

ing) can be good or beautiful Commentary of St. Thomas.

cularised nature) He is beautiful by Himself
.

and in Himself, beautiful absolutely^

He is surpassingly beautiful (superpule her]
because in the perfectly simple unity of His
nature pre-exists in amannerpassingexcellent
the wellspring of all beauty.
He is Beauty itself, because he gives beauty
to all created beings, according to the property
of each, and because He
is the cause of all uni

son and all clarity. Indeed every form, that is

to sayevery light, is certain irradiation com
"a

ing out of the primal clarity", sharing in the

"a

divine clarity." And every unison, or every

harmony, every concord,every friendship and

every union whatsoever between beings comes
forth from the divineBeauty, the primitive and

supereminent type of all unison, which likens

all
things to one another, and calls them all
unto itself, well deserving therein "the name
of KaAo? which derives from calling". Thus the
"beauty
of the creature is none other than a
similitude of the divine Beauty shared among
and, moreover, every form being a
things,"

principle of being and everyunison or harmony

being a preserver of being, we can say that the
Beauty of God is the cause of the Being of all
that is. Ex
dhinapulchritudme esse omnium deri-
 iiatur
In the Trinity, St. Thomas adds, 63 the name
of Beauty is properly attributed to the Son. As
to effective integrity or perfection, He has

truly and perfectly in Himself, without any

diminution, the nature of the Father. As to due
proportion orconsonance, He is the express and
perfect likeness of the Father andthatisthe ;

proportion which belongs to the image as such;

Lastly, as to clarity, He is the Word, which is
the light andsplendour of intelligence, "perfect
word, nothing lacking, and so to say the art of
69
God Almighty."
Beauty then belongs to the transcendental
and metaphysical order. That is why it tends to
carry the soul beyond created things. Speak
ing of the instinctfor Beauty, is this," writes
"it

thepoefaccursed,to whom modern art owes that

itrecovered theconsciousness of the essentially
metaphysical character & despotic spirituality
of Beauty, is this
undying instinct for the
"it

beautiful which makes us look upon the Earth

and its shows as a hint, as a confidential message
from Heaven. The unquenchable thirst for
all that lies beyond what life reveals is the most

67. ST. THOMAS, ibid., lect. 5. 69. ST. AUGUSTINE, De Doctr.

68. Sum. tbeol., I, q. 39 a. 8. Christ., I, 5.

46
 is at once
living proof of our immortality. It
through poetry and beyond poetry, through
and beyond music, that the soul catches sight of
fhesplendours which reign behind the tomb;
and when an exquisite poem brings the tears to
the eyelids, these tearsare not the proof of ex
cessive enjoyment, they are far rather the sign
of an irritated melancholy, of an importunity
of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imper
fect, which would jump all intervention, and
snatch, even here on earth, an unveiled para
70
dise."

As soon as one touches a transcendental,one

touches Being itself, a likeness of God, an abso
lute, the nobility and joy of our life one enters
;

the domain of the spirit. It is remarkable how

men do not really communicate with one
another except by passing through Being or
oneof its properties. In that way alone canthey
escape from the individuality in which matter
encloses them. If they stay on the plane of
their sensual needs and their sentimental self,

:hey may tell one another what tales they like,

diey do not understand one another.
They
watch without seeing one another,each one in-
initely solitary, for all that labour or pleasure
o. BAUDELAIRE, L\4rt
romantiyue.

47
fastens them
together. But touchGoodorLove,
liketheSaints,touchTruth,likeAristotle,touch
Beauty ,like Dante or Rach or Giotto, then con
tact is
up, souls commingle. Men are not
set

really united save by the spirit, light alone

brings them- together, "intellectualia et ration-
aim omniacongregans, et indestructibilia
71
faciens".

Art in general tends to make a work. But

certain arts tend tomake a beautiful work, and
there they differ essentially from all the others,
The work at which all the other arts labour is
itself ordered to man s utility, it is therefore a
mere means and it is altogether inside a deter
;

mined material kind. The work at which the

fine arts labour is ordered unto Beauty inas ;

much as it is beautiful, it is an end, an absolute,

self-sufficing ; and if,in so far as it is a work to b
made, it is material and bonded to a kind,
inasmuch as it is beautiful it belongs to the
kingdom of the mind, and is swallowed up in
transcendence and the infinity of Being.
The fine arts thus stand out in the genus-art
man stands out in t\\Qgenus animal. And like
man himself they resemble an horizon where
71. DENTS THE AREOPAGITE, (St. Thomas, lect. 4.)
*De DiYtn. Nomin., cap. 4.

48
mtter and spirit meet. They have a spiritual
)ul. Hence their many distinctive properties,
heir contact with the beautiful modifies in
urn certain characteristics of art in general,
Dtably in what concerns the rules of art, as we
iall
try to show on the other hand, it
;
betrays
id carries to a kind of excess other generic
tarks of artistic virtue, above all its character
:

intellectuality and its likeness to the specul-

ive virtues.
There is a singular analogy between the fine
ts and wisdom. They, like it, are ordained to
}
object which goes beyond man, and is valua-
e in itself, unlimited in its amplitude; for
eautylike Being is infinite. They are dis-
iterested, desired for their own sake, truly
uble,because their work taken in itself is not
3ne to be used as a means, but to be enjoyed as
i
end, being a veritable/n/tf, aliquid ultimum
i
Their whole worth is spiritual,
delectabile.
idtheir mode of being is contemplative. For

contemplation is not their act, as it is the act

wisdom, still the fine arts aim at produci ng
lelight of the understanding, that is to say, a
rtof contemplation, and
they imply also in
of contemplation, wherefrom
e artist a sort
e beautv of the work should redound. That is

49
why it is possible to apply to them, with all due
proportion, what St. Thomas says
of wisdom,
72
when he compares it to play "The contem:

plation of wisdom is
readily compared to
play,
because of two things which arefound inplay.
The first is that play is delectable, and the com-
templation of wisdom hath the greatest de-
ligh tfulness, according to what Wisdom says
of herself in Ecclesiasticus: My breath is sweete.
thanhomy. The second is that the operations
of play arenot ordained toanythingelse,but
are sought after for their own sake. It is the
same with the delightfulness of wisdom. This
is
why Divine Wisdom compares her delight-
fulness to play My delight was every day playin
:

in His sight through the round of the earth" 3

But Art always abides essentially in the ordc
of M
aking, and it is by slave work on a materi;
that it glimpses the joy of the spirit. Thence
for the artist a
strange and pathetic condition,
image of man s condition in the
itself the

world, where he must go in and out among

bodies, and live with spirits. Though blamin;
the old poets who made the
godhead envious
Aristotle owns that
they were right in saying
72. Opusc.
(
LXVIII, in libr.
75. Troz-erln, vni. 30-1.
oetii ds Hcbdom.
hat to alone is reserved the right and proper
it

is not a human
wnership of wisdom. "It

ossession, for in many ways the nature of man

n
To produce beauty belongs in the
5 servile."

line way God alone by true ownership, and

to
the condition of the artist is more human and
:

;ss
lofty than that of the metaphysician, it is
Iso more discordant and more sorrowful be-
ause his activity does not abide altogether in
le pure immanence of spiritual operations,
nddoes not in itself consist in contemplation,
utin making. Without having either the
ght or the nourishment of wisdom, it is beset
r
ith the hard exigencies of the
intelligence
id the speculative life, and condemned to all
ic servile miseries of temporal practice and
reduction.

brother Leo, little sheep of God, even

"O

lough a friar minor should speak the tongue

angels and should raise up a man four days
jad, write down that that is not the perfect
"

.7
Were the Artist to enclose in his work the
holelightof heaven and thewholegraceof
e primal Garden, he would not have
perfect
y because he is on the track of wisdom and
;

lib. I, c. b.
,, 2,982
runs after the fragrance of its perfumes, but
possesses it not.
Were the Philosopher to know
all the intelligible reasons and all the virtues of

Being, he would not have perfectjoy because ;

his wisdom is human. Were the Theologian tc

know all the analogies of the divine processions
and all the reasons for the actions of Christ,
he would not have the perfectjoy because ;

his wisdom has a divine origin, but a human

measure, and a human voice.
"Ah, voices! die then, dying that you be!"

The Poor an d Peacemakers alone have per

fect joy, because they possess wisdom and con

templation par excellence, in thesilenceof

creatures and in the voice of Love united ;

without intermediary to self-existing Truth,

they know "the sweetness which God gives,
75
and tjie delightful taste of the Holy Spirit."
This is what made St. Thomas say, speaking
sometime before his death about his unfinishe
Summai It seems to me like straw mihi videti.
utpalea? H
uman straw are the Parthenon anc
Notre Dame of Chartres, the Sixtine Chapel
and the Mass in D, which will be burned at th
last day. "There is no relish in creatures." Th
Middle Ages knew this order of things. The
75. RUYSBROEK, (Vie de T^uysbrofk Hello, p. LII).

5?
 lenaissance shattered After three centuries
it.

if unbelief,
prodigal art has made it her aim to
the last end of man, his Bread and Wine, the
>e

unsubstantial mirror of beatific Beauty. In

eality t has only wasted its substance.
i And the
starvingfor beatitude, who kept asking
>oet

orn art the mystical fullness which God alone

an give, has merely emptied himself into the
igean abyss.The silence of Rimbaud probably
larks the end of a secular apostasy. In any case,
:

clearly means that it is folly to seek in art the

ords of life eternal and rest for the heart of
lan ;
and that the artist, so as not to break in
ieces his art or his soul, must
simply be, qua
rtist, what art wants him to be a good work-
tan.
ut lo, the modern world, which had promised
/ery thing to the artist, will presently leave
;m no more than the bare means of livelihood.
ownded on the two principles against nature of
fertility of money and of \hs finality of the
1

eful, multiplying without any possible Irrriit

.

needs and
<>th

servitude,destroyingtheleisure
the soul,
withdrawing the ffi*4Mdfift!&Jfr
:
)m the ruling which it to the
proportioned
<

dsof the human and imposingon

entity,
in the
panting of the machine and the accel-
i
crated movement of matter,the modern world
stamps upon human activity a measure gen
uinely inhuman and adirection genuinely
diabolical for the fin al end of all this delirium
:

is to keep man from remembering his God,

Dum nil perenne cogitat,
Seseque culpis illigat.
By logical consequence he ought to treat as
useless, and therefore as reprobate, all that on
any title whatsoever bears the imprint of the
spirit.
"A Patrician order in deeds, but a truly
democratic barbarism of thought, behold the
inheritance of the times that be upon us; the
dreamer, the speculative mind, may manage t
keep themselves afloat at the cost of their se
curity or well-being; place, success, or glory
shallreward the suppleness ofthemountebanl
more than ever,to a degree unknown to the
iron age, poverty and loneliness shall be the
76
wages of the prowess of hero or saint."
Persecuted like the seer and almost like the
saint, perhaps at last the artist will come to
know his brethren, and find again his true
vocation for in a certain way of speaking he
;
i

not of this world, being, the moment he work

76. Charles MAURRAS, rdvenir de f Intelligence.

54
 beauty,in the way which leads right souls
)r to
rod and manifests to them unseen things
irough the seen. Rare then as may be those
-ho shall not will to please the Beast and shift
ith the wind, it shall be in them, from the sole
ct of their exercising a disinte res ted activity ,
lat the h uman race will live.

VI.
THE RULES OF ART
HE whole formal element of art con
r sists in the regulation which

upon the material. Moreover it is of

ie essence of art,
according to the Ancients,
it
stamps

have settled rules, viae certae et determinatae.

This term, settled rules, calls up in us evil
: emories ;
we think of the three unities and
he rules of Aristotle." But it is from the
.

enaissance, with its superstition of the ant-

ueand its stuffed Aristotle, and not from the
hristian Aristotle of our doctors, that come
e cut and dried rules of the
grammarians of
e
grand siecle. The settled rules of which the
hoolmen spoke are not conventional impera-
es
imposed from without upon art, they are
r

e
working grooves of art itself, of the work-

55
 77

ing reason high and hidden grooves. And

every artist well knows that,
without this in
tellectual form mastering the material, his art
78
would be but a hodge-podge of sensuality.
Still some explanati ons here seem necessary.
77. Technique may be said to from coming out clearly. On
be the body of these rules, the contrary, to say that they
but only provided we wid have aided the unfolding oi
en and uplift the ordinary originality, would be infinitely
meaning of the word techni truer."

que: in fact, there is a question "It would be,"

he cries

not only of material processes, again, "quite

a novel event ir

but also and especially of the in the history of the arts thai

intellectual ways and means of a critic should become a poet

working, which the artist uses a real upsetting of all
psychii
to attain the end of his art. laws, a monstrosity! thi On
These are settled way? ,like paths contrary, all great poets b;
traced beforehand through an nature become critics. I pit;
impenetrable thicket. But they the poets whose sole guide i

have to be discovered. And instinct; I think them incom

the higher among them, those plete. In. the spiritual life o
which touch most nearly the great poets there comes infalli

individuality of the work bly a crisis when they want t<

spiritually conceived by the analyse their art, to discove

artist, are strictly proper to him the obscure laws by virtue c
and are found by one alone. which they have been pro
78. is
"It
evident," cries d active, and to draw fror

Baudelaire, "that rhetorics and that study a series of precept

prosodies are not tyrannies whose godlike goal is infalli

wantonly invented, but a bility in poetic production.

1

collection of rules demanded would be a prodigy that

by the very organisation of criticturn poet, and it is iir

the spiritual essence; and possible that a poet shoul

never have prosodies or not conceal a critic."

rhetorics hindered originality

romantique ) .

5.6
 In all that concerns art in general, mechanical
r and liberal art, one is
servile as well as fine
ound to understand that the rules in question
renothinginfact,if they arenotin their vital
nd spiritual state in a habitus or virtue of the in-
dligence,which is properly the virtue of art.
By the habitus or virtue of art uprising from
within his mind, the artist is a master who uses
jles according to his aims; it is as maladroit to

nagine him as apprenticed to the rules as to

ike a workman as apprenticed to his tools,

roperly speaking he owns them and is not

wned by them he is not held by them ,it is he
;

ho holds, through them, material and reality;

r

idattimes,atthesovereign momentwhen the

Deration of genius in art looks like a miracle of
od in nature, he will act, not against the rules,
it outside and above them,
according to a
gher rule and a more hidden order. So let us
terpret the saying of Pascal :"True eloquence
mghs at eloquence, true morality laughs at
i

oralizing, to laugh at philosophy is truly to

lilosophize" by
this racy gloss of the most
i
rannical andmostjacobinof theheadsof the

:ademy: "Sivousnevo
79
; inture, ellese/itffr-tf de vous."

A saying of the painter David.

 As we have above pointed out, there is a
rooted incompatibility between
egalitarianism.
o The modern world shudders
at //^/ta.r,whatever they be,and one could write
a very curious history of the progressive expulsion

of habitus by the revolution of to-day. This history

should go back pretty far into the past. One
might see in it it is always"the fish s head that
stinks theologians like Scotus, Occam,
first"

andeven Suarez as the first to mishandle the

most aristocratic of these strange essences,
namely the gifts of the Holy Ghost to say
nothing of the infused moral virtues. Presently
the theological virtues and sanctifying grace
will be filed away and planed down by Luther,
then by the Cartesian theologians.In time
comes the turn of the natural /z^/^j;Descartes
in his levelling ardour attacks even the genus

general issimum of which the damned are a por

tion, and denies the real existence of qualities
and of accidents.
Everyone then is bitten by the calculating
machine; everyone then thinksof nothing bu
method. And Descartes imagines method as
an easy and infallible means of bringing to the
truth "those who have not studied" and the
 80
nan in Leibnitz last of all invents
the street.
-.

logic and alanguage whose most wonderful 8l

)roperty save you the trouble of thinking.
is to

rhen we come at last to find that the age of

ight has
lost
spiritual head. its

Th mmethodor rules ^ regarded as a mass of

^ormulae andprocesses self-acting and serving the
v
iindas orthopedic and mechanical equipment^ tend

very where in the modern world to supplant

he habitus, because method is for all, whereas
abitus are only for some now it is not to be :

dmitted that the attainment of supernal joy

hall depend on a virtue which some possess
o. Cf. even the title which at a dialogue in French, which
escnrtes at first thought of he unfinished, having for
left

ving to the treatise to which title- "The Search after

ic Discourse on ^Method is a Truth in the light of nature,
eface: Projection of a
"The which all alone and without
ntyersal Science which shall borrowing aid from Religion or
:
:se nature to its highest degree Philosophy determines
the opin

perfection. In addition, Di- ions which a man should have

itrics,Meteors, and Gcome- concerning all those things
which
y, wherein the most curious can occupy his thoughts, and
atters, which the author has penetrates even the secrets of
the
en able to select so as to most curious Sciences"
ve proof of the universal 8 1 . "That the mind may be
:ence which he propounds, dispensed from thinking dis
: treated in such guise that tinctly upon things themselves,
n those who have ne^er studied yet that none the less all things
tn
may understand" Some may come right." Gerh.,
ars later doubtless about ?/*//., VII.
f
i Descartes was working

59
and others have not; consequently beautiful
th ings must be made easy.
XaAe-rra ra /caXa. The Ancients thought that
truth is
beauty is difficult and that
difficult,that
strait is the
way and; that, to overcome the
difficulty and the loftiness of the object, it is
absolutely necessary that an intrinsic strength
and uplifting, that is to say a habitus, be deve
loped in the subject. The modern conception
of method and rules would therefore have
appeared to them a flagrant absurdity. Accord
ing to their principles rules are of the essence of
art, but on condition that the /foA tar be formed

asalivingrule. Without it they are nothing.

Plank the finished theoretical knowledge of
all the rules of art
upon an energetic don who
works 1 5 hours a day, but in whom l\\zhabitus
does not sprout, you will never make an artist
of him, and he will forever remain infinitely
further away from art than the child or the
savage endowed with a simple natural gift let :

this be said in excuse for the over-naive or over

naughty admirers of n egro art. For the moder
artist the problem is set quite
senselessly be
tween the senile decay of academic rules and
the primitiveness of the natural gift in the on
;

art is not yet,

except in potentiality, in the
Dther it no more at all; art exists only in the
is

living intellectuality
of the habitus.
In our days the natural gift is readily taken
r
or the art itself, especially if it is covered up
vvith facile veneering and voluptuous fumb-

ing; all the same the natural gift is only acon^-

iition prerequisite to art, or a natural inchoat-
on of the artistic habitus. This spontaneous
lisposition evidently indispensable; but
is

,vithout a culture and a discipline which the

incients required to belong and patient and
lonest, it will never grow into art properly so
:alled. Thusproceeds from a spontaneous,
art
nstinct just like love, and it must be cultivated
ike friendship. That is because art is a virtue,
ike friendship.
St. Thomas bids us mark that the natural
lispositionsby which one individual differs
rom another belong to the corporealside 82 they ;

nvolve our sensitive faculties, and above all the

magination, grand purveyor of art which
hus appears as the gift par excellence by which
neis born artist and which the poets readily
uake their master faculty, because it is so close-
7 bound
up with the activity of the creative
Uellect, that they do not always know how to
J. Sum. theol., I-II, 51, a. i.

61
distinguish the two gifts. But the virtue of art
isa perfecting of the spirit, so well does it stamp
on thehuman essence a character incomparably
deeper than is done by natural dispositions.
But when all is said and done, it may happen
that the way in which education cultures the
natural dispositions may atrophy the spontan
eous gift instead of developing the habitus,
especially if this way is material and all rotten
with tricks and rules of thumb, or again if it is
theoretical and speculative instead of being
operative for thepractical understanding, the
;

wellspring of the rules of art, works by setting

up an effect in being, not by proving or demon
strating; and often those who have the best
grasp of the rules of an art are least capable of
formulating them. Here one must deplore
from this point of view the substitution (begun
by Colbert, finished by the revolution) of scho
lastic and academic teaching for indentured
83
apprenticeship. From the very fact that art is
;

virtue of the practical understanding,the mod<

of teaching which naturally suits it is appren

tice education, the working novitiate under a
master and face to face wi th the real thing, not
lectures given out by professors; and in sooth
83. See Appendix C.

62
he very notion of & fine-art school^ especially
n the sense in which the modern state under-
tands the word, discloses a lack of understand
ing
of things as deep as the idea for instance of a
igher course of virtue. Hence the insurrection
if a Cezanne
against the school and the pro-
essors, a revolt above all really aimed at a bar-
conception of artistic training.
>arous

It follows therefore that art, being an in-

ellectual habitus^ implies, necessarily and in
very case, -^formation si the mind which shall
ut the artist in possession of settled working
ules.No doubt, in certain exceptional cases,
84
be individual effort of the artist, of a Giotto
instance, or of a Moussorgsky, may suffice
:>r

3 him alone to bring about this formation of

he mind. One may even say concerning what is
lost spiritual in art
synthetic intuition, the
onception of the work to be done springing
om the via inventionis or effort of in vention,
u "Then Giotto came ; animals that he found in the
at Florentine, who was born country;! in such a way that
: the lonely hills
peopled only after many studies he
surpassed
:th goats and other not only the masters of his
beasts,
ling that the face of nature time but also those of many
like unto art, set himself to
bygone centuries. .
(Leo-
. ."

iw on the rocks the nardo da Vinci, Textes choisist

postures
t of the goats he tended
published by Peladan, Paris,
1 afterwards of all the 1907.)

63
demanding solitude, and notlearned from
without, that the artist, inwhat touches the fine
edge and higher life of his art, forms and uplifts
himself all by himself, alone.
The nearer one gets to this spiritual edge of
art, the more the viae determinatae along which
one travels will be peculiar and personal to the
8
artist,and so laid as to be manifest to one alone.
Perhaps from this point of view we in our time
when we are so cruelly experiencing all the
evils of anarchy, run the risk of labouring
under some illusion as to the nature and extent
of the results which may be expected from the
return to the traditions of craftsmanship. Yet.
for the immenseshareofnationalanddiscursiv
labour which art connotes, the tradition of
discipline and education by masters and the
continuity in time of human collaboration, in
word, the way of discipline, is absolutely nece
sary, whether we deal with technique proper
so called, or with the material means without
which there is no art, or wi th the whole con
ceptual and rational provisioning command
eered and convoyed by certain arts (notably

8 i>.
This is Very well expressed Zu erfinden, zu beschliesaen
be Kucnstler oft alhap;
in those lines of Goethe, in
rrr-tL 7 */t i j*r J L Denies Wirkcns zu geniesse
Wilhelm Muster s Wanderjahrv Eile freudig zum Verein!

64
i and especially classic art)
e fine arts or
htly with the indispensable maintenance of a
1vel of culture sufficiently high in the average
and craftsmen for it is absurd to ask
<artists ;

(ch of them to be an "original genius."

Now let us add, so as to get the thought of
.Thomas in its entirety, 87 that in all discipline
; d in all teaching the master only helps from
^
thout the principle of immanent activity
nich is in the disciple. Under this aspect
tiching becomes part of the great idea of the
{;
cooperativa naturae: while certain arts take
-Id on their material to subdue it, and
1
impose
i it a form which it must needs receive
>on

1 :e the art of a Michael Angelo torturing the

i irble as a
tyrant, other arts indeed, because
t eir material is nature itself, lay hold on their
r iterial to do it service, and to help it to attain
8 Man cannot do without a now that everyone is left to
r;ter. But in the anarchic himself, has many unknown
c ditions which characterize pupils for whom he is not
t world that we have with responsible, and his dull and
mastery extends
v the
power of the master, involuntary
I
ig unrecognised, has simply far beyondworkshop, even
his
1 )me less
profitable to the into regions where his though;
f il and more tyrannical. cannot be understood." (Car/
Since to-day everyone osites estkctiyues,z\o\\ of 1846.)
v ts to reign, no one knows
to rule himself," once 87. Cf. Sum. tbeol., I, q. 117,
v ad
te Baudelaire. "A
master, a. i
; Ibid., ad i et 3.

65
a form or perfection which cannot be acquired
except by the activity of an inward principle;
these are arts which "co-operate with nature:
with bodily nature, like medicine, with spir-
itualnature,liketeaching (orlikethe art of
spiritual direction) These arts operate solely
.

by providing the inward principle which is in

the subject with the means and the aids which
it
employ s to produce the given effect. It is th
inward principle^ the intellectual light present
in the disciple, which is, in the acquirement c
science and art, the cause or principal agent.
Hence in the more particular matter of the
fine arts, their contact with Beingand thetra
scendent creates for them quite a special con
dition in art-rules.
First and foremost they are subject to a lau
of renovation, and so of change, unknown to t
other arts, at least under the same heading.
Beauty is of infin ite embrace, like Being.
But the work as such, realised in the material
genere, and it
in a certain category, /// a/iquo is

impossible that one category should exhaust

transcendental. Outside the artistic genre tc
which the work belongs, there are still endl<

ways of being a beautiful work.

66
 Thus one feels a sort of conflict between the
ranscendence of beauty and the material
imitation of the work to be made, between the
c rmal idea of
beauty, splendour of Being and
fall the transcendentals together, and the
Drmal idea of #r/, the narrow business of works
3 be made. No art-form, however perfect,
an contain in itself the whole of Beauty, as the
irgin encompassed her Creator. The artist
r

ices a shoreless and lonely sea. No sail, no . . .

lil, nor any fertile islet and the mirror he

. . . .

olds up to that sea is no larger than his heart.

The genius, the art creator, is he who finds a
b8
analogue of the beautiful, a new way of
"uo

tting the clarity of the form shine out upon

material. The work which he makes and
ic

hich as such is in a certain category,is thence-

rth inanew
category and calls for newrules
mean for a new adaptation of the primary and
89
ernal rules and even for the use ofviae
rtae et determinatae hitherto untried, and dis-

mcerting to start with.

At the moment the contemplative activity
touch with the transcendental, which con-

See Note 64. make

disciplines to are
.

clear,
These rules, which it be- only immutable when taken
to the
gs various artistic formally and analogically.

RhGiS
BESJ-. MAJ-
COLLEGB
 stitutes the proper life of the arts of Beauty ant
of theirrules, isevidentlyintheascendant. Bu
it is almost inevitable that talent, skill,
pure
technique, the merely operative activity nativ
to the genus art, should little by little getthe

upper hand, when a man will no longer busy

himself save with exploiting what has oncefc
all been found; rules hitherto alive and spiri

tual will then become materialised, and this

art form will end in exhaustion renovation ;

will be needed. Pray Heaven that a genius tur

up to work it! For the rest, even in this case

renovation will possibly lower the general
level of the art; mean while it remains the coi
dition of the budding and blooming of the
90
greatest masterpieces. From Bach to Beeth-
90. Thence it surely follows possesses the virtue of art,
t

that the philosopher and the practical and operative, not

t

critic may well and ought speculative virtue. A phil

well to judge of the value of sopher, if his
system is false,
artistic schools by the truth or known, for then he cannot j
the falsehood, the good or the truth except by accident,
evil influenceof their princi- artist, if his system is false, c

pies. But to judge the artist or be something and somethi

the poet himself, these consid-
erations are radically insuffic-
ient; here it behoves above
great; for he can create bea.
in spiteof his system, and
of
spite of the inferiority
t

all to discern whether one art-form which he practb

is
dealing with an artist, with From the point of view of i

a poet, with a man who really work done there is more s

68
,)ven and from Beethoven to Wagner one may
:hink that art in general, the form or the genus
)f art,
dropped in quality, in spirituality, in
nirity. But who would be bold to say that any
)f these three men is less great than the other?
tis
quite true that there is no necessary pro
gress in art, that tradition and discipline are the
:onditions of the very existence of art among
nen, and true nurses of originality and that ;

he fevered speeding up, which modern in-

lividualism, with its itch for revolution in the
nediocre, imposesupon the succession of art
arms, of schoolscome to nothing, of childish
ioods,is the symptom of the worst intellectual
nd social decadence. Nevertheless art has a
idical need of novel
ty like nature it has times ;

ad seasons.
Art does not, as does Prudence,
presuppose a
Jtting right of the appetite, that is of the
Dwer of willing and of loving, in relation to

ic
truth(and therefore more or of the poet, let us
always
inline in a rom- beware of misreading the vir-
"classic")

tic who has the habitus than tue that be in him, and
may
a classic who has it not. thus offending something
hen we speak of the artist naturally sacred.
the last end of man or on the moral plane. 9l All
the same it presupposes (as Cajetan explains),
that the appetite tends straight to the proper en
of art^ in such guise that the principle, thetrut
of the practical understanding lies not along con

formity with the thing^ but along conformity with

the right appetite rules the domain of
, Making i

well as that of Doing.

In the fine arts the general end of art is
Beauty. But the work tobe made is notjusta
simple material to be ordered to this end, like i

clock which one makes with the aim of showin

the time of day, or a ship built wi th the aim of
going on the water. Beingacertainindividua
and original realisation of Beauty, the work
which the artist sets about making is for him ;

end in itself; not the general end of his art, but

the particular end which conditions h is prese
operation, and in view of which all the means
must be regulated. Now, to
judge aright of th
individual end, that is to conceive the work tc
03
be made, reason alone is not sufficient, a gooi
disposition of the appetite i s necessary for
each ;

one judges of his particular ends according t<

what he actually is himself a man is, so hi

: "as

91. See above, pages 20-22. 93. See Appendix D,

92. InI-H,q. 57, a. ^ ad 3.

70
 nd seems."
94
Hence we may conclude that
vith the Painter,the Poet, the Musician the
irtue of art, which resides in the understand-

ng, must not only overflow into the sensitive

icultiesand the imagination, but mustalso
emand that the whole appetitive faculty of
be artist, h is passions and h is will, be orientated
awards the general aim of art, that is towards
leauty.
If all the artist s powers of desire and
motion are not radically rectified and uplifted
y relation with the Beautiful, whose
trans-
sndence and immateriality are superhuman,
icmere living of hislife and thejog-trot of the
nses and the routine of art itself will cheapen

isconception. The artist must love, he must

>ve
Beauty so that his virtue
, may be indeed,
..
ARISTOTLE, Etk.Nic., lib. the one hand of the moral
[, c.y, 1114 a 32. Cf. Com- disposition of the appetite
nt. de St.
Thomas, lect. 1 3 ; (Cf. CAJETAN, he. /.),
on the
m. theol., I,
q.83, a. \,ad^. other hand of art taken ac-
VVhen St. Thomas teaches cording as factibilia are not
"

un. theol., I-II,

q. 58, 2..$, ad related to art as principles,
hat"the
principles of works but only as material" (ibid.j\.
art are not judged by us 65, a.l, <?</

4). This is not

11 or according to the dis-
ill the case in the fine arts. Ends
j
lion
of our appetite, as are are in fact principles of the
ends which are the
prin- practical order, and the
work
les of morals, but only to be made has in the fine
3ugh consideration of the arts the dignity of a veritable
;on," he is thinking on end.
according to the word of St. Augustine, ordo
95
amoris; so that Beauty may become second
nature to him, and put her heart into his by
affection, so that his works spring from h is
heart and from his inmost parts, as from his
lucid spirit. This right love is the rule above
all rules.

But it presupposes the intelligence; and it

is for the maintenance of its light in the soul,
thatthisloveisnecessary and tending to ;

wards theBeautiful it tends towards that whic

isfraught with delight to the intelligence.
Lastly, because in the fine arts the work itse
to be made is, qua beautiful, an end, and becaus
this endissomethingabsolutely individual,
quite unique, there is for the artist every time;
new and unique way of conforming himself t(
the end, and therefore of regulating the matei
ial. Hence a remarkable analogy between fine
art and Prudence.
No doubt art still keeps her viae certae et
determinatae; the proof is that all the works of
the same artist or the same school are signed
with the same sure and certain characters.
But the artist must apply the rules of his art
95. In the book <De Moribus Ecclesiae, chap. 15. "Virtue is

love in order."
with prudence, counsel, good sense and clear
vision, with circumspection, precaution, de
liberation, industry, remembrance, foresight,
understanding, and divination; he must use
prudential and not predetermined rules settled
according to the contingencies of cases; he
must apply them in a manner always new and
impossible to foresee: on this condition alone
his ruling is infallible. picture, "said Degas,
"A

is athing which demands as much rakishness,

oguery, and viciousness as the perpetration of
)6
i crime." For different reasons, and because
)f the transcendence of their object, the fine
irts thus partake, as do the chase or the military
irt, of the virtues of governance.
Thisartistic prudence, thiskind of spiritual
ensitivenessin dealing with the material

:orresponds in the operative order to the con-

emplative activity and proper life of art in
ealingwith thebeautiful. Inso farasthe
cademic rule prevails over this prudence, the
nearts return to the generic type of art and to
s inferior species, the mechanical arts.
.
Quoted by M. Etienne Charles in the T^naissance de
1rtfran(ais, April, 1918.

73
 VII.
THE PURITY OF ART
we actually seek from art, wrote
WHAT sought
Smile Clermont,
from
what the Greeks
everything else, sometimes
97
"is

from wine, most often from the celebration of

mysteries: ravishment, intoxication. In the
great bacchic madness of these mysteries we
find the exact counterpart of our highest reach
of emotion in art, something out of Asia. But
98
for theGreeks art was quite another thing . . . .

The effect it aimed at was not to perturb the

soul, but to purify it,which precisely the con is

trary ; Art purifies the passions,according to the

celebrated and generally ill-interpreted expres
sion of Aristotle. And there is no doubt that
our immediate need today is to purify the idea
of Beauty. ..."
As well on the side of art in general as on
the side of beauty it is the understanding (as the
^

97. LOUISE CLERMONT, Emik shadows a dionysiac art ha

Clermont, sa vie, son ceuvre, not lingered on,such as Goetln

Grasset, 1919. seems to picture in the secern
98. In so far as apollinism part of Faust, with the
Phor
reigns supreme in Greek art. kiades and the Kabires stirrin:
Still it would be curious to in the classic night of Wai
investigate whether in the purgis.

74
schoolmen teach in thousands of ways) which
holds the primacy in art work. They keep
reminding us that thefirst principle of all the
of man is reason.** We may add that,
\-orks
when they make Logic the liberal art par ex
cellence and,in a sense,the first analogate of art,

they show us in every art a sort of fellowship

with Logic.
There all is order and loveliness,
100
Wealth, quiet, ease, no more, no less.
If, in architecture, all useless patchwork is

jgly, if,
in religious art, swagger and sham are
because they are illogical, both in
lateful, it is
:hemselves always, and in particular in relation
o their religious
usage for it is profoundly
:

llogical that falsehood should serveto decorate

hehouseofGod: 101 Deus non eget nostro men-
9.
"

Reason is the first

prin- from space." (fMon coeur mis

iple of all the works of man." a nu.}

r.
THOMAS, Sum. theol., I-II, None the less, the relation
58,3.2. of the arts with Logic is much
oo. Baudelaire writes again:
deeper and more universal
All that is beautiful and than their relation to the
able is the result of reason science of Number,
id calculation," (Udrt rom- 101. Cf. Maurice Denis, Let
tiyue); and once more: Nouvelles Directions de FArt
Vlusic gives the notion of chretlen (Conferences de la
ace. So do all the arts more Revue des Jeunes, ^th Feb.
less; since they are number, 1919): Every falsehood is un-
d number is a translation bearable in the temple of truth.
daclo. "Ugly
in art,"
said Rodin, "is all that is

that smiles without motive, that is

false, all
mannered without reason, that prances and
curvets, that is but the show of beauty and of
102
grace, all that tells a lie." ask you," adds "I

Mau rice Denis, 103 "

to paintyour characters
in such guise that they lookpainted^ being sub
ject to the laws of painting so that they aim not
at deceiving my eye or my mind the truth of ;

art consists in the

conformity of the work with
its means and its end." Which is to
say with the
Ancients, that the trueness of art depends on
order and conformity to the rules of art and
therefore every rule of art must be logical.
Therein lies its trueness. It must in some sort be
steeped Logic not in the pseudo-logic of
in :

l05
bareideas, butin the veritable logic, thelogic
of the living structure, of nature s inmost geo-

102. PAUL GSELL, Rodin. logic and regularity.

Thi

103. Syrnbolisme et f
Le Art zenithal upthrust of its col

religieux moderne, Revue des

umns and the parabolic curv<

IO Nov. pp. of its horizontal lines and floor

Jeunes, 1918,
balance the de
516-7. apparent
104. JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, formation of lines and plant
Curs, theol., t. VI, 62, disp. in the visual perception, am
q.
16, a. 4, p. 467. perhaps also secure greatc
known that the the
105. It is stability against ^seismi
Parthenon not geometrically
is oscillations of the Attic crus

regular. It obeys a much higher

netry. A Gothic cathedral is as much a marvel
)f logic as theSumma of even
St. Thomas;

lamboyant Gothic remains the enemy of all

eneer, and the luxuriance in which it spends
r

tself is exactly that of the ornate and dressed-

ip syllogisms of the logicians of the period,

/irgil, Racine,
Poussin are logical; so is Shake-
peare. And even Baudelaire! Chateaubriand
snot.
The medieval architects did not restore "in

manner of Viollet-le-Duc.
he style," after the
f the choir of a romanesque church was des-
royed by they rebuilt it Gothic and
fire,

bought no more about it. Butin thecathedral

f Mans look at the harmony and the tran-
ition, the sudden so self-reliant soaring into
plendour: there is living logic like that of th&
ontour-map of the Alps, or the anatomy of
umankind.
The perfection of virtue in art consists, ac-
JU
ording to St. Thomas, in the act of udging.
"

.s to manual
dexterity, it is a condition requi
te but extrinsic to art. It is for aft, even while

necessitv,an
* abiding menace, inasmuch as it is

ways in danger of substituting the guidance

muscular habi tuation for the guidance of
6. See above, page 22.

77
the intellectual habitus,, and of letting the work
escape from the influence of art. For there is
an art impulse which, by physical and real im
pression reaching to the very motivefaculty of the
limbs , goes on, from the understanding which
is the seat of art, to move the hand and cause "to

107
shine" in the work an artistic
"formality."
Thus a spiritual virtue may pass into an awk
ward stroke.
Hence the charm which one finds in the
awkwardness of the primitives. In itself this
awkwardness has nothing charming whatever,
it offers no attraction where art is
rudimentary,
as with the candid time-server Rousseau, and
it even becomes merely hateful, when it is the
least bit desired for its own sake, or "precious.
But with the primitives it was a sacred weak
ness, by which one glimpsed the subtle intel
108
lectuality of art.
Manlives so much in the senses^ it is so hard
for him to keep up to the level of the under

standing, that one may question if in art, as in

social life, the advance of material means and
of scientific technique, though good in itself,
be not in fact an ill as regards the average estate
107. JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, 108. See Appendix E.
ibid., pp. 472-473-

78
of art and civilisation. In this sphere and be
yond a certain measure, what removes a hin
drance takes away a strength, what removes a
difficulty
takes away a greatness.
When, on a visit to a museum, one passes
Tom the rooms of the Primitives to those of
Renaissance art, where science and material
ieftness are much more considerable, the foot

iteps
on to the floor, but the soul comes a crop
per. She had been walking on the everlasting
:iills, now she finds herself on thefloor of a

:heatre a magnificent one for that matter. In

:he sixteenth
century Falsehood took the
naster s chair in painting, which then started

oving science for its own sake, and wanting to

^ivethe illusion of nature, and to make believe
:hat in front of a
picture we are before the scene
)r
subject depicted, not before a picture.
The great classics succeeded in purging art
)f this falsehood ; realism, and in a sense im
pressionism, have played with it. Does cubism
n our
day represent, in spite of its enormous
leficiencies, the stilltoddling and squalling
nfancy of an art pure once more ? The barbaric
ogmatism of its theorists compels most grave
loubtand apprehension, lest the new school be
triving to rid itself radically of naturalist
imitation, only to stagnate in "foolish question
10
ings", by denying the primary conditions
\vhichessentiallydistinguish Painting from
the other arts, from Poetry or Logic for in
stance. Meanwhile one ascertains from some
of the artists painters, poets, musicians espec
ially that criticism has quartered up to re

cently at the sign of theCube (an astonishingly

expansible cube) , as the most respectable effort
at logical coherence, at the simplicity and

purity of means which are the proper constit

uent of veracity in art. All the best people
today
are asking for the classic; I know nothing in
contemporary production more sincerely
than the music of Satie. "No more ritua
classic

charms, repetitions, dubiousendearments,

fevers, misty
J
exhalations. Never does Satie
up the mud. It is the poetry of childhood
stir

brought back by a master technician."

Cubism propounds in rather violent mann<

the question of imitation in art. Art as such do*

not consist in imitating, but in making, com-
1
09. These "foolish question- itself. (Cf. St. Thomas Comnit
are those which arising
ings"
in ep. ad Titum, III, 9;
within a certain science or the text of St. Paul: stu

discipline w ould contradict the quaestiones devita.)

r

primary conditions implied 110. JEAN COCTEAU, Lt

in this science or discipline el P Arkqiiin.

80
 Dosing, or constructing,
andthat according to
he laws of the obj ect itself to be set up in being
whether it be ship, house, carpet, coloured
loth or carven block). This exigency of its
eneric concept throws into the shade every-

lingelsein Art; and to give

for its essential
m
the representation of the real is to destroy
.
Plato, with his theory of imitation in many
111
ades and of illusionist poetry, misunder-
andslike all extreme intellectuals the proper
itureof art; whencehisscorn of poetry: itis
c >ar that if art were a means of knowing^ would
112
b
furiously inferior to geometry.
But if art as art knows not imitation, the
fisarts, as ordered unto Beauty, have a cer-
t; i relation with
,, imitation, else hard enough
ulefine.

>-
n Plato s
Republic, Book X. and with falsehood which in-
,l i
have been too long
"We tends to deceive. A painting is

;
act omed to consider truth conformed with its truth,
"yli from the mere point of with Truth itself, when it says
F-"

fie of imitation. On the well what it has to say and

,

ry, there is no paradox fulfils its ornamental role."

- m -ritainingthat/;w/r-/V/y Maurice Denis, op. cit.-p. 526.
s
mymous with falsehood,
 When Aristotle wrote(speaking of the
primary causes of poetry), "Imitation is natu
ral tomen from childhood. ., man is the
. .

most imitative of animals, he acquires his

earliest cognitions by imitation, and
everyone
has joy in imitations a proof is found in works
;

of art for the very things which we see with

:

pain,we rejoice to contemplate in their exacted

images, such as, for instance, the forms of the
worst beasts and of dead bodies this comes ;

from the fact that the act of learning is all that

is most agreeable not only to
philosophers but
13
also to other men. . . he was laying down
.,"

a specific condition imposed on the fine arts, a

condition grasped at their very origin. But hei
we ought to take Aristotle in a mostformal sem^
If the philosopher, according to h is ordinary
method,goes straight to the primitiveinstanc
i would be a complete mistakejust to stop
t

there, and to keep for ever for the word imitati

itsvulgar meaning of exact reproduction or
representation of a given reality. The man
oft
reindeer age, when he was drawing animal
forms on the cave wall, was doubtless moved
most of all by the pleasure of reproducingan

113. ARISTOTLE, Toetica, IV, 14.48 b 5-14.

82
 with exactitude.
m But since then the
object
thin. Let
of imitation has grown singularly
>oy

as endeavour to sharpen the edge of this idea

limitation in art.

The fine arts aim at producing,by the objects

hey make, joy or delight of the understanding
means of the intuition of sense. ( The goal
>y

painting, said Poussin, is delight. ) Thisjoy

>f

snot thejoy of the mere act of knowing,joy of

mowledgejoy of truth. It is ajoy which over-
lows from that act, when the object on which
t bears is excellently proportioned to the intel-
igence.
Thus thisjoy presupposes knowing, and the
is of
lore there knowledge, or of things pres-
nted to the understanding, the vaster will be
be possibility ofjoy this is why Art, in so far
;

s ordered to
Beauty, does not, at least when its
14. Or, with greater pro-
ibihty,by the wish to indicate
\
object with the help of an
eogram,perhaps with magical
tent; for these drawings,
:ing necessarily in
darkness,
nnot have been made to be
oked at. In a general way
may be concluded especi-
y from the study of the
sa vases
recently discovered
and undoubtedly dating back
3000 years B.C it would
seem that the art of drawing
began by being writing and
by answering to hieroglyphic,
ideographic, or even heraldic
preoccupations, quite foreign
to aesthetic; preoccupation
with the beautiful not coming
in until much later.

83
object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor
at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and
as //zz/Tg^butittakesthemalsoasmakingknown
other things than themselves, that is to say as
signs. And the thing signified may itself be a
sign in turn, and the more the work of art is
laden with significance (butspontaneousand
intuitively grasped, not hieroglyphic signi
ficance), the vaster and the richer and the higher
will be the possibility of joy and beauty. The

beauty of a picture or of a statue is thus incom

parably richer than that of a carpet, of a Vene
tian glass, or of an amphora.

In this sense Painting, Sculpture, Poetry,

Music, even Dancing are imitative arts, that is
to say arts which realise the beauty of the work
and procurejoy to the soul by making use of
imitation, or in giving back, by means of cer
tain sensible signs, something other than those

signs spontaneously present to the mind. Pzni-

t
mg imitates, with colours and surface forms,
things ready-made outside us; Music imitates
with sounds and rhythms (Dance with rhythir
m
alone) "the manners", as Aristotle says,
and the movements of the soul, the unseen

115. ARISTOTLE, Toetica, I, 1447, a 28.

84
world which stirs in us. With this reservation
as to the difference inthe object signified, Pain
ting imitates no more than M
usic, and Music
initates no less than Painting understanding
"imitation"
precisely in the meaning-just laid
down.
But thejoy engendered by the beautiful,
not consisting formally in the mere act of
knowing the real, or in the act of conformity
with what is, does hot depend upon the per-
r
ection of the imitation as a reproduction of
:he real, or on the exactness of the representa-
ion. Imitation as reproduction or representa-
ion of the real, in other words imitation taken
Materially^ is only a means, not an end Imita-
.

activity as is manual
:ion is related to artistic

ikill, but no more than the latter does it con-

titute artistic
activity. And the things which
ire made present to the soul through the sen-
ible signs of art
by rhythms, sounds, lines,
olours, forms, masses, words, measures,
hymes, images, all the approximate material of
are themselves
only a material element of
rt

he beauty of the work, just like the

signs in
uestion they are remote material, if one
;
may
3
say,which the artistdisposesandon which he
as to flash the radiance of a form, the
light of

85
Being. To set before oneself the perfection of
imitation materially considered, would therefore
be tofollowthelead of what is purely materialin
the work of art, and to concentrate on servile
imitation. Now this servile imitation is abso
116
lutely foreign to art.
The essential is not that the representation
be exactly conformed with a given reality, it is

that through the material elements of the

beauty of the work should clearly shine,
supreme and whole, the clarity of aform; of a
form, and therefore of some one truth: in that
sense the great word of the Platonists, splendor
splendour of truth
"oeri abides for ever. BIT
if thejoy of the beautiful work comes from
some one truth, it does not come from the truth
of the imitation as reproduction of things, it comes
from the perfection with which the work
expresses or manifests theform (in the meta
physical sense of this word) it comes from the;

truth of the imitation as manifestation of aform,

Behold theformula of imitation in art: ex
pression or manifestation, in a harmoniously
1 1 6.
(C&zanne) "asked me strong. retorted Cez "Yes",

what the fanciers thought of anne, "if is horribly like

him.

Rosa Bonheur. I told him they (Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cez

generally agreed that the anne, Paris, Cres, 1919).
Laboureur C^jvernais is
very
proportioned work,
of some principle of f n-
which shines forth from it. This is
elligibility
:he bearing on art of the joy of imitation. Thisit
s too which gives art its value of universality.

What makes the purity of the true classic is

;uch a subordination of matter to the light of
he form, thus manifested, that no material
Clement arising from the things or from the
ubject shall be admitted into the work, unless
as support or vehicle of this
trictly required
ight, no material
element which should result
n overweighting or "debauching" the eye the
arorthemind. Comparein thisregard,in the
of thought, Aristotle and St. Thomas
irder

Vquinaswith Luther or Jean Jacques Rous-

eau in the order of art, Gregorian melody or
;

3achs music with the music of

Wagner or
itravinsky.
In the presence of a work of beauty, the
mderstanding, as we have already pointed out,
ejoices without misgiving. If therefore Art
nan ifests or expresses in a material a certain
adiation of Being, a certain form, a certain
oul, a certain truth are sure to end
("You by
wning up"
said Carriere to someone whose
iortrait he was making) it does not produce in
,

ie soul a
conceptual and discursive expression

87
of the same. It is thus that Art sus;
ooCrests with-
out properly making known, and expresses
what our ideas cannot express. Ah, ah, ah, crie;
Jeremiah, O Lord God! behold, Iknow not h jK /:
111
speak. But where speech stops, song begins,
118
the exultation of the mind bursting into voice.
Moreover, in the case of the arts which
appealtosight (painting, sculpture) ortothe
intelligence (poetry), a stricter need of imita
tion or of signification comes to be imposed
from without upon art, from the nature of the
faculty in play. In fact this faculty must needs
have enjoyment, by title in chief if it is the
understanding, by secondary and instrumenta
11D
the visual faculty.
title if it is Vision and un-
derstanding,beingsupremelycognoscitiveam
bearing on the object, cannot taste of joy it th^
do not know expressly the object signified to
7

them. So eye and understanding insist on per

ceiving or recognising in the work a definite
thing or thought. And if the artist did not re
spond to this exigency, he would sin, by a sort
of idealist giddiness, against the subjective or
is why th
117. JEREMIAH, I, 6. ministerially; that
ll 8. ST.THOMAS, Comment, in artist is so superior to it an,

Tsa/rn., Prologue. handles it so freely; still it i

119. Sensuous delectation it-

required.
self is
required in art only

88
Psychologic
conditions which art has to satisfy.
That is the peril of over-bold excursions, noble
>therwise
though they be, to the Cape of Good
iope, the peril
of a poetry which "teases eter-
uty" by wilfully clouding
over the idea under
Imsof imagery disposed with exquisite feel-
in his horror of impressionism or
ig. When,
aturalism, a cubist declares that a picture
ught to bey tfj-/rf.r beautiful turned upside
own, like a cushion, he is asserting a very
jrious return (and a very useful one, if rightly

.ken) to the laws of absolute constructive

120
)herence for art in general but he forgets ;

)th thesubjective conditions and the

highest
agencies of the beautiful in painting.
Still it remains true, that if one understood
"imitation"
reproduction or exact copy of the
m one would be bound to
?/, say that outside
13. It is
by virtue of these "The true way of finding out
s
according to Baude- if a melodious is to
1
that, is
picture
1 c s remark, "seen at a dis- look at it from far enough a-
:c too the
great for analysis or discern neither
t
way to
e i
understanding of the subject nor the lines. If it is

picture of Delacroix already has a

Si
ect, a melodious, it
v at once
imprint on the meaning, and has already
s(
arich, happy or melancholy found a place in the repertory
u of
"ession."
(Curiosites estheti- remembrance."
<i>

Salon, 1855.) Baudelaire 121. See Appendix F.

u :s elsewhere (lbid.jp. 92) :
the art of the mapmaker or that of the anatom
ical draughtsman there is no imitative art. In
thatsense, deplorable though his writings may
be elsewhere, Gauguin, in affirming that
one must give up making what one sees, laid do wr
a primary truth put in practice from the

ning by the masters.

m Cezanne, in a begin
saying
deeper and truer to type, expressed the same
truth: "Whatwe must do, is Poussin overag-
123
ain after Nature. That is everything". The
imitative arts do not aim at copy ing the appear
ancesof Nature, nor at portraying "the ideal,
but at making a beautiful object by manifesting
a form with the help of sensible signs.
As to this form, the human artist or poet,
whose intelligence is not the cause of things as
is the Divine
intelligence, cannot draw it fortl
all
complete from hiscreative mind, but goes
to fetch it first and foremost from the immense

treasury of created things, from sensitive

nature as well as from the world of souls, and
from the inner worldof his own soul. From
this point ofview he is first and foremost a ma
who sees deeper than others and who discovei
in theconcretespiritualradiances, which

122. Cf. Louis DIMIER, His- XIX sihle (Paris, Delagravc

4e la Teinture franfaise au
toire 123. Sec Appendix G.
 :hers areunable to discern. But to make m
lese radiances shine in hisworkand so to be

uly docile and faithful to the unseen Spirit

hich plays in things, he can, and he even
ight in some measure to deform, to rebuild,
;

transfigure the material appearance of

.ture. Even in a portrait which is perfect "a

ceness,"in Holbein s drawings for instance,

i is
always a form engendered in the artist s
lindand veritably born in that mind which
Expressed by the work, true portraits being
nthing else than "the ideal reconstruction of
125
teindividualnature."
Art then remains at bottom essentially con-
s uctiveand creative. Itisthefaculty of pro-
ccing, doubtless not out of nothing, but out
pre-existing matter, a new creature, an ori-
c

ial
being, capable on its own part of stirring
1 2 man. This new creature is the fruit
soul of a

spiritual marriage, which conjoins the

c a

a
ivity of the artist to the passivity of a given
r terial.
i . "The
artist, on the con- Nature" (#0<#, Entretiens re-
11
",
sees: that is," explained unis par Paul Gsell, Paris,
in, in a happy expression, Grasset, 1911).
eye engrafted on his heart
r <
>

deeply in the bosom of 125. See Appendix H.

91
 Thence proceeds the feeling in the artist of
his especial dignity. is like a He
partner with
God in the making of beauteous works, in
developingthepovversput intohimby the
Creator for "every perfect gift is from above
and comes down from the Father of lights;
"

and in making use of created material, he

creates in the second degree, so to speak. Oper-
atlo artls
fundatur super operationem naturae, et
haec super creatlonem: "Art s manner of work
i
ng is founded upon nature s manner of work
ing, and nature s manner upon creation."
Artistic creation does not copy Divine ere.
tiori, it carries it on.And just as the sign man
ual and image of God appears in His creature
126. Cf. Sum. theoL, I, q. 45, ing into the invincible pew
a. 8. The capacity of matter of the primal Agent, to
human
for obeying the artist, raised by His action to t
who draws from it effects supernatural order or to dec
superior to all it could yield of miracle. went down
"I

under the action of physical the house of the potter,and

agents.provides the theologians he was making his work up
(cf. St.Thomas, Compendium the wheel And t

104; Garrigou-
tfoo/ogiae,c2.p. word of the Lord was ms
Lagrange, de 1(evelafione, t. I, known to me,saying:Can 1 1

p. 377) with the profoundest make thee as this potter m;

analogy of the obedlential power eth, O house of Israel? As t

which is in things and in souls clay in the hand of the pott

with regard to God, and even so art thou ha;
in my
which delivers them even to O house of Israel."
(Jeremi
the very bottom of their be- XVIII, 6).
(

upon the work of art the human mark

en so
stamped, the full mark, both sensitive and
iritual, not merely that of the hands, but of
<

it whole soul. Before the work of art

goes
irth, by a transitive action, from the art into
te material, the very conception of the art
nist have gone forth within the soul, by an
i imanent and vital action, like the procession
cthe mental word. Processus artis est duplex,
s licet artis a corde
artificis et artificiatorum ab
d e: "the
procession of art is twofold, to wit,
cart from the soul of the artificer, and of the
a -works from the art".
m
It the artist studies and fosters nature as
nchasandmuch more than the works of the
n.sters, it is not in order to copy her but to
I) e
himself upon her. This is also why it is not
e
)ughforhim to be the pupil of the masters;
h must be pupil, for God knows the God s
128
b beautiful works. Natureis
Idingrulesof
o :ssential
import to the artist, only because
i: as she ars imitafur
CC,ST.THOMAS,//S/., works"

^- !> 3>
z - naturam IN SUA OPERATIONK.
:
The ancient adage Ars This is how St.Thomas applies
tm ur Naturam does not the adage to medicine, which
ni imitates nature is
certainly not an "imitative
"art
by
her", but rather art YSaw. tfieol.,l,(\.
1 1
7, a. i).
reducing
"*
mitates nature
by working

93
she is a derivative from the art of God in

things ratio artis divinae indita re bus," the

scheme of divine art breathed into things."
The artist, whether he knows it or not, is con
sulting God, when he looks closely atthings.
They exist but for a moment fora mo
ment, but how fine !

He s a dullard at his own art, who findeth

129
fault with Thine.
Nature is thus the prime mover and theprirm
regulator of the artist, and not at all a headline
for servile tracery. Ask the true painters, how

they have need of her. They fear her and reven

her, but with the fear of the child, not of the
slave. They imitate her, but with an imitation

truly filial^ and obey ing the creative agility of

the mind, not with literal and servile imitation
Coming back from a winter walk, Rouault
told me that by looking at the country under
sunlit snow, he had come to understand how
to paint the white trees of springtime. "The
1SO
model," said Renoir on his part, only "is

there toshow me the light, to let me venture

things which I could not invent without

129. Paul Claudel, La Messe i

30. The saying is related 1

la-bas. "Even as your art is M. Albert ANDRE, in his r

grand-child unto God," said cent volume on Renoir.

Dante.

94
iim And he drops me on my paws, if lact
. . .

he goat too much with him." Such is the free-

lorn of the sons of the Creator.
A rt has to defend itself not only against the
llurement of manual dexterity and against
crvileimitation. Still other alien elements
hreaten its purity. For instance, the beauty to
v hich it tends produces delectation, but it is
he lofty delectation of the mind, which is
uite the contrary of what is called pleasure, or

pleasant tickling of the sensitive side; and

;

ie
:
art seeks to please^ it falls below itself, and
ecomes a liar. Similarly, its effect is to pro-
uce emotion, but if it aims at emotion, at the
ffective phenomenon, the
stirring of the pas-
ons, it becomes adulterate, and lo another !

lement of untruth pervades it. Thisisastrue

f music as of the other arts. No doubt music
as this
property, that signifying with its
ly thms and its sounds the very emotions of
le soul cantare amantis est^ tis lovers sing,
i

producing emotion it produces precisely

hat it showsforth. But this
production is not
s
goal, no more than is a representation or a
scription of emotions. Theemotionswhich
makes present to the soul sounds and
by
y thms, are the material with which it should
give us the heartfelt joy of a
of rational order, of the clarity of Being. It is
thus that,like tragedy,it purifies the passions, 1

by developing them in the measure and in the

order of beauty, by attuning them to the under
standing, in a harmony which every where els
fallen nature knows not.
If we give the name of thesis to every inten
tion extrinsic to the work itself, when the

thought which animates this intention does

not act upon the work by means of the artistic
habitus instrumentally moved, but sets itself
beside \h\$ habitus in order to act itself directly
upon the work; then the work is not produced
entirely by theartistic habitus orentirely by
the thought thus actuated, but partly by one
and partly by the other, as a boat drawn by
two men. In this sense every thesis, whether it
means to demonstrate or to stir, is in art a for
eign importation and hence an impurity. Suci
a thesis lays down for art, in its proper sphere,
that is to say in the very production of the work
a rule and an end which is not its own, it pre
vents the work of art from going out from the
artist s soul with the spontaneity of a perfect

131. Cf. ARISTOTLE, Tolitica, VIII, 7, 1341 b 40; Toetica,

VI, 1449 b 27.
 uit, it betrays a misgiving, a duality bet ween
e artist s understanding and his sensibility,
i

hich are precisely what art wants conjoined.

hereisMt -fmnGustaveMoreau. There is
i me too, it seems, in the symbolic system for
Ahich the author of Theories keeps his prefer-
132
c ces. Because it makes the beauty of the
\:>rkconsistinitspowertostormtheafFections,
t is
system aims too much at the onlooker, and
atheemotion be produced in him. lamto

C ite acknowledge the mastery of

willing to
object which the artist has conceived
*
t

a i which he sets before my eyes, I then give

n -self up without reserve to the emotion
viich proceeds, within both him and me,
fi m
the selfsame beauty, from the selfsame
ti from that which we have in
nscendental,
cinmon. But refuse to submit to the mastery
I

olin art which calculates means of

suggestion
fcthecaptivation of my sub-consciousness, I
re stan emotion which a man s will would im-

pce upon me. The artist must be as objective

iesage,in thesensethathemustnotthink
as

otheonlooker except togivehimbeauty,as the

sa -thinksof the listener only in ordertogive
hi truth. The builders of the cathedrals set no
i

>

3 See Appendix J.

97
sort of thesis before themselves. They were,
according to the fmesayingofDulac, "men W!T
did not know themselves." 133 They wished nei
ther to demonstrate the seemliness of Christiar
dogma, nor to suggest by any artifice a Christia
emotion. They just believed, and as they were,

they wrought. Their work revealed the Trutl

of God, but without doing it of set purpose, an
j
ust because it did not do it of set purpose.

VIII
CHRISTIAN ART
the words Christian Art we do not
mean Church Art, which is Art specific
)Y
by an object, an aim, and settled rules, an
merely an outstanding and peculiar point of
applied Christian Art. We
understand by
Christian Art the Art which wears the stamp
of Christianity. In thissense Christian Artis
not a certain species of the genus art; we do n
speak of Christian Art, as we do of poetic or
pictorial, of ogival or byzantine Art; a young
man does not say to himself, I am going to wo
at Christian Art, as he would say, I am going
to work at agriculture
o ; there is no
school whe
learn Christian Art.
m
Christian Art is
you
133. Lettres de Marie-Charles 6 fevrier 1896.
f
)u!uc, Bloud, 1905; Icttre du
K.
134. See Appendix
denominated from the subject wherein it in
heres and the spirit whereout it springs: we say
"Christian Art" or "a Christian s Art," as we
siV "bee s or"man s
art" ;so that theground art"

which Christian Art has in common with Art

non-Christian ^analogical or quasi-analogical
rather thangeneric. It is the art of redeemed
mankind. It is planted in the Christian soul by
:he marge of the living waters, beneath the sky
}f theTheological Virtues, amid the breath-

ngs of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit. Natural it

s that it should bear Christian fruit.

If you want to do a Christian work,&? a

^hristian^ and try to do a work of beauty into
vhich you put your heart; do not try to "do the
Christian."

Do not essay the vain and odious enterprise

if
sundering in yourself the artist from, the
Christian. If you are really Christian, and if
our art is not isolated from your soul by some
esthetic system, they are one. But
apply only
he artist to the work ;just because
theyare one,
ic entire work will belong to the one as to the
:her.
Do not separate your art from your faith, as
ould be done by a politician of untruth. But
ave distinct what is distinct. Do not strive to

99
confuse forcibly what life conjoins so well. If
you made your aesthetic an article of faith, you
would spoil your faith. If you made your devo
tion a canon of artistic workmanship, or if you
turned your concern for edification into a de
partment of your artistry, you would spoil your
art.
The artist s whole soul pervades and regu
lates his work, but it must pervade and regulate
it
by the artistic habitus alone. In this, art brooks
no divided allegiance. She suffers no foreign
element to intervene as her assessor and to
mingle production of the work a
in the

stranger ruling. Tame her, and she will do

s

all
you wish. Force her, she will do nothing
good. The Christian work of art must have the
artist free, qua artist.
Still, the work will not be Christian, its

beauty will not wear the inmost reflex of the

it overflows from a hear)
clarity of grace, unless
possessed by grace. For the artistic habitus,
which pervades and rules it without inter
mediary, presupposes the right orientation of
appetite bearing on the beauty of the work.
And if the beauty of the work is Christian, it
is because the artist s
appetite comports itself
truly towards such beauty, and because in his

100
soulChristispresentthroughlove. Thequality
of the work in this case is the gushing of love
from which it goes forth, which sets in motion
artistic virtue like some instrument. Thus it is
by reason of an inward exaltation that art is
Christian, and it is through love that this exal
tation comes about.
Hence it follows that the work will be Chris
tian in the exact measure in which the love is
living. Make no mistake, it is love in its very
act, it is
contemplation, that is here essential.
The Christian w ork of art must have the artist
r

holy, quaman.
would have him possessed by love. Then
1 1

let him do what he will. Where the work

rings
less
purely Christian is where something has
failed from the 135
Art de
pureness of the love.
mands much quietness i$3.i& Fra Angelico, and to
paint the things of Christ you must abide in Christ;
this is the
only word of his we have, and how
far removed from system
would thus be vain to look for a
It
technique
or a style or a
system of rules or a manner of
working, which should be proper to Christian
Art. The art which buds and
grows from chris
tianised mankind
may rightfully admit an in-
35. See
r

Appendix L.

101
finity ofsuch art-forms, but they will all have 2
family likeness and will all differ substantially
from non-Christian art-forms; as the flora of
the mountains differs from the flora of the
plains. Look at the Liturgy, the transcendent
outstanding type of Christian art-forms; the
Spirit of God Himself has fashioned it, to take
His pleasure there. 13
Beautiful things are scarce. What exception
alconditions must be taken for granted before
civilization can join together, and in the
same man, Art and contemplation Beneath !

the weight of a nature which ever resists and

unceasingly falls away, Christianity has pushe>

its
sap all over Art and throughout the world,
but it has not succeeded, save in the Middle
Ages (and then amid what difficulties and
backslidings !) in forming an art unto itself,
,

any more than a world unto itself; and that is

not surprising. Classic Art has produced
many Christian and admirable works. Yet can
the body of writ
136. "Even as harmony of heaven,"

Jesys Christ was born of the St. Hildegarde in the adm:

Holy Ghost from the integrity able letter to the chapter

of the Virgin Mary, so also Mayence in which she vi
the Canticle of praise is dicates the freedom of sacr
rooted in the Church by the chant (Migne, col. 221).
Holy Ghost according to the
we say that taken by itself this art-form pos
sesses the original atmosphere of the Christian
climate? It is an exotic form transplanted.
If in the midst of the unspeakable catastro

phes called down by the modern world,

there
be a time to come, however brief,of pure Chris
tian springtide, a Palm Sunday for the Church,
from poor earth a brief hosanna to the Son
of David, it is lawful to hope that those years

:nay see, together with a wondrous radiation of

Catholic spirituality and intellectuality, a
?econd spring, to the joy of men and angels, of
/eritably Christian artistry. Already such art
;eems heralded in the individual stirrings,
;uccessively through the last half-century, of
ifew noble artists and poets, some of whom
ank among the greatest. StilUet us not attempt
unyoke and isolate it, by premature and
.cademic stress, from the great movement of
13T
It will not emerge and
ontemporary art.
37. It is curious to see how means, or the standardised
1 its boldest ventures con- ideography in expression. If
mporary art betrays a wish we examine from this stand-
) recover all the characteristics point the miniatures of the
"

primitive art (even in its Scivias of Saint Hildegarde,

idest examples), whether as as reproduced in the fine
gards simplicity, the con- compilation of Dom Baillet
ruction of the work, free- ("The miniatures of the
>m and reasonableness of Scivias preserved at the Wiesha-

103
will not Christum Art unless ii
impose itself as
from a common rejuv
springs spontaneously
enation of both art and hoiinessin the world.

Christianity does not make Art easy. It de-

privesitofmanyfacilechannels,itbarsitscours
in many places, but only to put it on a higher

plane. Even while creating these wholesome

difficulties, it exalts it from within and ac

quaints it with a hidden beauty lovelier than

light; gives it what the artist needs most,
it

simplicity, the peace of awe and of loving-

kindness, the innocence which makes matter
docile and brotherly to men.

den Library,"
1st number of ward order. Change the so

vol. XIX of Monuments et the inward motive, and p

Me moires of the Acad. des Inscr. the light of faith and reas
et Betffs-Lettres, 1912), we in place of the exasperation
discover very suggestive ana the senses (and sometimes
logies with certain contem unwisdom besides), and y
porary efforts, for instance are in the presence of an
with the cubist perspectives. capable of high spiritual
c

But these analogies are quite velopment. In this sense and

material; the inward motive spite of being in other asp:
is
entirely different. All that at the antipodes of Christian!
is sought by most "advanced"
contemporary art approac
moderns in the chill night of much nearer to Christian
a calculated anarchy, was than does the art of the a

possessed naturally by the demies.

primitives, in the peace of in

104
 IX
ART AND MORALS
artistic habitus concerns itself only

THE vith the work to be made. Doubtless it

cid mi ts consideration of objective con-
.itions practical use, destination, and so
orth which the work should satisfy (a statue
:iade for
pray ing before is different from a
arden statue) but it is because this consider-
,

tionconcerns the beauty itself of the work;

work which were not adapted to thesecondi-
ons would lack in that respectproportion of

eauty. The sole aim of art is the work itself

nd the beauty thereof.
But for the man who labours, the work to
s made comes itself within the line of morals,
idunderthisheaditisbut ameans. If the
tist took for the final
goal of his labour, and
lerefore for beatitude, the end of his art or
e
beauty of the work, he would be an ido-
i

138
ter
pure and simple. It is then
absolutely
8. The testimony of a poet Art as to his last end, he con-
Baude-
jealously artistic as eludes with the following
interesting on
e is most "An unrestrained
passage :

s
point. In his article on taste for form drives to mon-
Tagan School, where he strous and unconscionable dis-
\vs in striking
language, orders. Engulfed by the fierce
v
great an aberration it is passion for the beautiful, the
man to order himself to strange, the comely, or the

105
necessary for the artist, qua man, to labour for
other than his work and for something O better
beloved. God is infinitely more lovable than
Art.
God isjealous.
MelaniedelaSaletteusedto
: "The is merciless. Lov
rule of divine love
say
is a veritable immolator he wills the death of ;

all not he." Woe to the artist of divided

that is

heart Blessed Angelico would have left his

!

painting in the lurch with out hesitation, to gc

and mind the geese, if obedience had requirec
Thenceforward a creative flood welled from
his peaceful bosom. God left him that, becauf
he had renounced it.
Art has no rights against God There is no .

good contrary to God, nor contrary to the fina

picturesque (for there are de- against images. I can feel i

grees in these things), the all Augustine s remorse

St.
notions of the Just and the regards the immoderate pl<

True are disappearing. The sure of the eyes. So great

frantic passion for Art is an the danger, that I can put
all-devouring canker; and, as with the suppression of
the complete absence of the cause. Art mania is on a ]

Just and the True in art is with the misuse of the mi

equivalent to the absence of The erection of either of th
art,the whole man vanishes; two supremacies engenders
the excessive specialisation of fatuation, hardness of he;
"

one faculty ends up in

nothing- and boundless egotism
"

ness. I can understand the rage pride (BAUDELAI

of iconoclasts and Moslems L drt romantique.}

106
iood of human life. Art Is free in its domain,
lit its domain is subordinate. Moreover "if an
;t turn out
objects which men cannot use
Hthout sin, the artist who makes such works
is himself, because he offers
directly to others
<

le occasion of sinning; it is as if one made

iols for
idolatry. Asto the artsof which
men
( n use the works well or ill, they are lawful,
d yet, if there are any of which the works are

]
t number of cases,
to evil use/)/ the greatest
t
ey ought, though lawful in themselves, to be
t
tirpatedfrom the city by the office of the
]
mct^secundum documenta Plaionts -accord-
59

iyfotheteachingof Plato." Fortunately for

1 2
Rights of Man, our beautiful cities have no
I
ince; and all that works to idolatry and
cury, in dressmaking or in letters, goes un-
I

hdered of Plato.
Art, because it is in man and since its good is
n man s good, is therefore subject to extrinsic
t

r
;ulation, which is laid upon it in the name of

higher and more necessary than its own.

a 2nd

I 1 with the Christian this regulation goes

v hout constraint, because the immanent
erof charity makes it connatural to him,
a because the law is become his inward
1
ST. THOMAS, Sum. theol., II-II. q. a. ad
169, 2, 4.

107
leaning the spiritual man
: is not under the law
To him one can say, ama et fac quod vis if

you love, you may do what you will, you wiL

never wound love. A work of art which
wounds God, wounds the man himself, and
having nothing more for his delight, at once
loses for him the whole ratio of beauty.
14
According to Aristotle, there is a doublt
good in multitude, in an army for instance:
one good is in the multitude itself, as the orde
of the army; the other apart from the multi
tude, as the good of the commander. This
latter good is better; becauseuntothisthe
other is ordained the order of the army exi -

ing so as to realise the good of the

H1
chief, that
isthe captain s will to victory. Hence we
deduce that the contemplative, being direct!
ordered to the "common good apart" of the
whole universe, that is to God, serves better
than anyone else the common welfare of the
human multitude ;
for the "common intrins
140. Met.,\. XII, c. x, 1075 tate hisquae sunt ad fin ;

-
a 1
5. St. Thomas, lect. 1 2. Cf. ordo autem exercitus est p-
-
Sum. tkeol., I-II, q. ill, a. 5, ter bonum ducis adimp
ad I. dum, scilicet ducis volunt; \

in victorias consecutione

141. bonum exerci-

"Magis est ST.THOMAS, Commentary o e

tus in duce, Aristotle,

quam in ordine: passage cited by
quia finis potior est in boni- Cathala, 2630.

108
g
of this multitude., the common social
)d"

\\ Ifare,
depends on the "common good apart,"
\\ ich is
superior to it. It will be the same,
a;
ligically and in due proportion, with all

tl se
metaphysicians or artists, whose activity
tc ches the transcendental order, Truth or

B luty, and who have some share in wisdom,

n natural wisdom only. Leave the artist to
h he serves the city better than the en-
art,

gi
eer and the merchant.
fhisdoesnotmean thatheshould ignore
tr
city,
neither as man, which is more than
01 ious, nor even as artist. The
question for
hi is not to know if he must
i
open his work to
al hehuman currents which flow towards his

htrt, and pursue in making the work such or

su i
particular human aim the sole master for :

hi i herethe individual case, and all party

is

it would be
sp unseemly as detrimental to the
sp itaneity of art. For the artist the whole
be ness is not to be a weakling to wield an art
;

su and right to master its mate-

ciently robust
rit n
every case, without losing any of its pitch
or 5
purity, and to aim, in the very doing of the
at the work s sole
well-being, without
w<
<;,

be
g troubled or put off by the human ends in

109
 As a matter of fact, art became isolated in
the nineteenth century, only because of the dis
couraging meanness of its environment ; its
normal condition is altogether different. Aes
chylus, Dante, Cervantes did not create in
airtight compartments. Besides, there cannot
really be a purely gratuitous work of art the
universe excepted. Not only is our deed of
artistic creation ordered to an ultimate human

end, whether True God or idol, but it is im

possible, on account of the human environ
ment which touches that deed on every side,
that it have no concern for certain proximate
human ends; the workman works for wages,
and the most aloof of artists is some little
whit concerned to play upon souls and to
serve an idea, be it but an aesthetic idea.
What is needed is the perfect practical dis
crimination between the aim of the workman
and the aim of the work (finis operantis and
finis operis the Schoolmen called them)
thus:

the workman works for a wage, but-the work

is
planned and launched into existence with
sole reference to its own particular good, not a
with reference to wages; thus the artist
all

works for every human intention he pleases,

but the work in itself is made, constructed, an<

no
I
it
together for its own beauty and for nothing
<;e.

It is a monstrous error to suppose that the

(ndour or purity of art-work depends upon a
1 eak with the animating and motive princi-
jesof the human being, upon drawing the line
1:tween art and desire or lov e. No, it depends
vontheforce of the engendering principle of
1e work, or
upon the strength of art-virtue.
This tree said I will be purely tree and bear
:

:re fruit. Therefore I will not

} grow in ground
tat is not tree, nor in Provencal or Vendeean

:ather, but only in tree-weather. Put me

"\

Mere the air cannot reach me.

Many questions would answer themselves,
i vve
distinguished between Art itself and its
r iterial or
subjective conditions. Art is an
a
purtenance of man, how should it not depend
i on
thedispositionsof the subject wherein it
iicres? They do not constitute, but they con-
c:ionateArt.
Thus, for instance, Art as such is superior
t time and
place,it transcends, like the intel-
1
ence, every limitation of nationality, and
f is its measure in the infinite
amplitude of
luty alone. Like Science, Philosophy, Civi-
1

ition,by its very nature and by its very object

1

in
 it is universal.
But Art has not its home in an angelic intel
ligence, it is subjectivised in a soul which is
the substantial form of a living body; and this
substan tial form, by its natural needof learning
and of perfecting itself by degrees and with
difficulty, turns the animal it inhabits into an
animal by nature political. In this way Artis
fundamentally dependent on all that city and
race, spiritual tradition and history bring to
the body and the intelligence of mankind. By
reason of its subject and of its roots it is of a
particular age and of a particular country. I

That is why in the history of free peoples

the eras of cosmopolitanism are times of intel
lectual bastardy. The most universal and mosi
humane works are those which bear most
openly thehall-marks of their country.
142
Th
age of Pascal and Bossuet was an age of vigor
ous nationalism. When France, at the time of
142. Andre Gide writes ad- Voltaire or Montaigne, th
nationalising Descartes or Pascal? wl
mirably: "By

itself a literature takes its more Russian than Dostoie

place and finds its significance sky? and what more univers
in the concert of humanity. . . .
ly human than these writers
What more Spanish than Cer- (Reflexions sur Fdllemag
vantes? more English than Nouv. Revue franf., 1st Ju
Shakespeare? more Italian than 1
9 1 9.)
Dante? more French than

112
^luny amazing victories of peace, and in St.
s

reign, spread over Christendom

jouis s an in-
sllectual radiance most authentically French,
ien it was that the world knew the purest and
eest International of the mind, and themost
14
niversal culture.
Thus it would appear that a certain kind of
political and territorial
ationalism n ationa-
;m is the natural safeguard of plain living
high thinking, andsoof the very univer-
id

:lityof intelligence and art; whereas another

:rt of nationalism,
metaphysical and religious
utionalism, that which culminated in the
Jchteanand Hegelian deification of the
13. Charles Maurras (An- came to perfection on the
tiea, xn) wrote, with refer- Acropolis became common
c e to the Athenians: "The common models, and
property,
j losophic spirit, the readi- common nutriment; the classic
r s to conceive the universal or Attic style is more univer
i med all their arts, and sal in proportion as it is more
c ;fly
sculpture, poetry, ar- severely Athenian, and Atheni
c ;ecture, and
eloquence. As an too of a period and a taste
s n they yielded to this
as most completely purged of
t entered into
iency, they every foreign influence. At
ppetual communion with the glorious moment, when
n ikind. In the
great classic she was herself and herself
e :h, the dominant charac- alone, Attica was the human
t tic of all Greek art is race." The French genius, in
e :r
intellectuality or hu- modern times, furnishes an
n and these alone. By
ity alogous characteristics.
ti means the marvels that
 nation does,by its effort to enslave the undei

standing (in its very aim and essence and not

merely in itsmaterialconditions) tothephysic
logy of a race or the in terests ofa state, j eopardi;
the existence of art and of every virtue of the
mind.
All our values depend upon the nature of
our God.
Now Godis a Spirit. To progress which
means, for every nature, to tend to its Begin
144
ning is therefore to
pass from the sensuou
to the rational,and from the rational to the
spiritual, and from the less spiritual to the mo
spiritual ; to civilise is to spiritualise.
In this process material progress may take
part, in the measure in which it allows man
leisure of soul. But if it is used only to serve th
will to power and to pamper a cupidity whic
opens an unfathomable maw concupiscentla
I4t>

est injinita^ concupiscence is infinite it

drags back the world ever faster into chaos;

that is its manner of tending to its beginning.
At the very roots of the human city is the
need of art "No one," says St. Thomas, afte:
:

Aristotle, can live without delight. That \\

"

144. ST. THOMAS, in 11 Sent*, 145. Sum. the!., I-II, q. >

d. l8,q. 2, 2. a. 4.
why he who is deprived of spiritual delights 146
goes over to carnal delights."
Art teaches men the delights of the spirit,
and because it is itself sensuous and fitted to
their nature, it can the better guide them to
th ingsnobler than itself. Thusit plays in natural
life theisame
part, if one may say so, as the
graces of sense" in the
spiritual life and from ;

far off, all unconsciously, it prepares the

/ery
luman race for contemplation (thecontemplar-
ionof the Saints), of which thespiritual
147
lelightfulness surpasses all delight, and
;eems to be the end of man s activities. For
vherefore servile work and commerce, if not
hat the body being provided with the neces-
aries of life be made meet for contemplation ?
Vherefore the moral virtues and prudence, if
otto bring about the quieting of the passions
nd the inward peace, which contemplation
eeds? Wherefore the whole governance of
ivil life, if not to secure the outward
peace
ecessary to contemplation ? So that rightly
)isidered all thefunctions of human seem to
life

1.6. Sum. theol., II-II, q. 35, 147. Sum. tkeol., I-II, q. 3, a.

4,^2. Cf.EtA.Nif., VIII, 4.
:t
6;X,6.
be at the service of those who contemplate the
I48
Truth.
If one were seeking, not indeed to make an
impossible classification of artists and of mast
pieces, but to comprehend the normal hierar
chy of various types of art,it could only be doi
from this human point of view of their specia
civilising value, or of their degree of spiritu
ality.
Thus one would descend from the beau
of the revealed Scriptures and of the Liturgy
to that of the writings of the mystics, then to
art properly so-called: spiritual fullness of
medieval art, rational balance of Hellenic arn
classic art, passional balance of Shakespearea
art. Itsimaginativeandverbal wealthsustai
. .

in Romanticism the concept of art, despite il

inward lack of balance and its intellectual

148. "A-l hanc etiam [sc. ad bus passionum, ad quam ]

contemplationem] omnes aliae venitur per virtutes mor

;

operationes humanae ordinari et per prudentiam, etquie >

videntur, sicut ad finem. Ad exterioribus passionibus,

I

perfectionem enim contem- quamordinatur totumregii

i

plationis requi ritur incolumi- vitas ut si r :

civilis, sic,
tas corporis, ad
quam ordinan- considerentur, omnia hurr i

tur artificialia omnia quae sunt officia servire videantur i

necessaria ad vitam. Requiri- templantibus veritatem.".

tur etiam quies a perturbation!- contra lib. Ill, cap. 3

(jent.,

116
 realism the con
penury. With naturalism and
14!

cept disappears completely.

In the magnificence of Julius II and Leo X
tiiere was much more than a noble love of glory
and beauty; whatever vanity went with it, it
was penetrated by a pure ray of the Spirit who
has never failed the Church.
This great Contemplative, instructed by the
gift
of Knowledge, has deep discernment of all
human heart needs, she knows the
:hat the

jniquevalueof Art. Thisis why shehasso

.veil
protected world. Much more, she
it in the
las summoned it unto the opus T)ei, and she

equires it to compound perfumes of great

^rice, to be shed by her upon the head and feet
)f her Master. Ut wherefore
quidperditio is fa
his waste?
say the philanthropists. Shegoes
m embalming the body of her Beloved Whose
leath she shows forth each
day, donee vem af,
mtilHecome.

4.9. We are speaking here of have been classified or have

ic realism which produces classified themselves as "real-
rv tle or abject copies of nature,
only in virtue of some
ists"

represented for instance by literary theory. They are not

leissonnier in one sphere realists in the sense adumbra-
id by Zola in another. Artists ted here, and they partake on
ch as Courbet, Manet, the contrary of classic art.
Degas

117
 Do you think that God (Who "is called the
Zealot," says Denys the Areopagite, "because

He has love and zeal for all that is"

150
)
deals

scornfully with and the fragile beauty

artists
which issues from their hands? Remember
what He says of the men whom He Himself
set apart for sacred art: "Behold the Lord hat
called by name Beseleel, the son of Uri, the
son of Hur,of the tribe of Judah and hath ;

filled him with the spirit of God, with wisdor

and understanding and knowledge and all
learning ; to devise and to work in gold, and
silver and brass, and in engraving stones, andi
carpenter s work whatsoever can be devised
;

artificially, He hath given

in his heart; Ooli;
also the son of Achisamech, of the tribe of Da
Both of them hath He instructed with wisdor
todo carpenter s work and tapestry, and em
broidery in blue and purple, and scarlet twice
dyed, and fine linen, and to weave all things
and to in vent all new things." 151
We have already pointed out the general
opposition between Art and Prudence. In t
case of the fine arts, this opposition is further
intensified by the very transcendence of theii

object.
150 De Div.
.
dfymin., cap. iv. 151. Exodus, xxxv, 30-35.

uB
 On the plane of his art, the artist is subject
toakindof asceticism, which may at times
demand heroic sacrifice. He must be funda
the aim of
mentally right-minded concerning
\rt, perpetually on guard not only against the
:ommon-place allurement of facility and
;uccess, but against a crowd of subtler tempt-
itions and against the least slackening of his
nward effort, since the habitus lessen by the
nere cessation of the act, and much more by
152

:very loose activity which does not propor-

ionately correspond with their intensity. He
103

lust pass through seasons of darkness; he must

urify himself continually ; hemustof hisown

ee will abandon fertile tracts for the arid and
:i e perilous. In a certain order, andfrom a spec-
1 1
point of view, in the order of making, andfrom
ie he must
point of view of the beauty ofthe work,
e humble and magnanimous, prudent, up-
ght, strong, temperate, simple, pure, ingen-
Sum. theol., I-II, q. 43,
>z. redditur homo minus aptus ad
3. "Cum igitur homo cessat bene judicandum; et quando-
i

usu intellectualis habitus, que totaliter disponituradcon-

;urgunt imaginationes ex- trariura; et sic per cessationem
;meae, et quandoque ad con- ab actu diminuitur vel etiam
.rium ducentes; ita
quod intellectualis ha-
corrumpitur
i
per frequeri tern usum intel- bitus."

tuaHs habitus quodammodo

53. lbld. y q. 42, a. 3.
:cidantur,vel comprimantur,
uous. All these virtues, which the Saints hav<

simpliciter, purely and simply

and on the plane
of the Sovereign Good, the Artist must have
secundum quid^ in a certain relation, on a plane
apart, praeter-human if not inhuman. Thusl:
may well and freely take the moralising tone,
when he talks or writes on art, knowingclear
that hehasa virtuetokeep. "Weharbouran

angel, whom we grieve continually. Weougl

to be the guardians of this angel. Have thy
virtue in safe-keeping
But if this analogy creates in him a special
nobleness and accounts for the admiration
which he enjoy samong men, there is still the
risk that it lead him wretchedly astray, and
make him treasure and set his heart upon a
graven image, ubi aerugo et tinea demolitur^
where rust and moth consume.
Ontheotherhand the prudentman assucl"

judging every thing from the angle of moralit

and with regard to human welfare, ignores

absolutely that belongs to Art. Doubtless h

all

can j udge and he ough t well toj udge the

work of art in so far as it involves morality, 155 1

he has no right toj udge t as a work of art.

i

154. JEANCOCTEAU, Le Ccqet 155. See Appendix M.

1 2O
 Art-work is the subject of a singular conflict
f virtues. Prudence, which considers it in its
slation with morality, is better entitled to the
lij6
ameof virtue than is Art for like
every ;

loral virtue it makes the man who acts a good

i an pure and simple.
But Art, in so far as it draws nigher to the
jeculative virtues, and thus captures more of
itellectual splendour, is a habitus in itself no-
ler ; simpliciter loquendo, ilia virtus nobilior est,
"

iaehabetnobiliusobjectum\ simply speaking,

lat virtue is the nobler, which has the nobler

bject."
Prudence is superior to Art with
:gard to man. Looked at purely and simply,
at least that which
rt
aiming at Beauty has
speculative character is
metaphysically
157
)ove Prudence.
When he disapproves of a work of art, the
/udent man, securely basedon his moral vir-
e, is firmly persuaded that he is defending

;;ainst the artist a sacred good, the good of

). Cf. Sum. theol., I-II, q. simpliciter, sed quoad hoc;

a. virtutes intellectuales
3; II-II, q. 4.7, a. 4. quinimo
<

Cf. Sum. theol., hoc ipso quod

speculativae, ex
".

I-II, q.
a.
3, act I : "Quod autem non ordinantur ad aliud, sicut
^ utes morales sunt magis utile ordinatur ad finem, sunt
i
:ssariaeadvitam humanam, digniores. . . ."

r i

ostendit eas esse nobiliores

121
mankind and he looks upon the artist as a
;

child of alunatic. Perched upon his intellect

ual habitus^ the artist is sure that he is defendin

a good no less sacred, that of Beauty, and he

would seem to overwhelm the prudent man
with the sentence of Aristotle Vita quaeest :

secundum speculationem est melior quam quae sec-

undumhominem^ the life in accord with specu
"

ation is better than the life in accord with

158
man."

The prudent man and the artist therefore

find it hard to understand each other. On the
other hand the contemplative and the artist,
both perfected by an intellectual habitus
which weds them to the transcendental orde
are in a position to sympathise. They have tc
the like enemies. The contemplative, havin
for object the causa altissima from which
everything else depends, knows the place am
the value of art, and understands the artist.
The artist as such cannot udge the contem j

plative, but he can guess at his greatness. If

truly love Beauty, and if some moral vice
chain not his heart to dullness, goingoverto
the side of the contemplative he will recog
nise Love and Beauty.
158. Eth. Nic., X, 8; Cf. Sum. tkeol., II-II, q. 47, a. I
5.

122
 Besides,by sheerloyalty to his art the artist
:ndsunconsciously to pass beyond it as a ;

ant, without knowing why, guides its stem

wards the sun, so he is orientated, however
wly his haunt,towards the Subsistent Beauty
hose sweetness the Saints taste in a light
accessible to art or reason. "Neither paint-

"said Michael An
g nor sculpture, gelo in his
d age, shall have
"

any more charm for the

: turns towards this Love Divine, Who
ul that
<

His arms on the cross to welcome

tens us."

Look at St. Catherine of Siena, that apis

i
^umentosa (busy bee) , who was the counsel-
]: of a Pope and of Princes of the Church,
i rrounded by artists and poets whom she is
I
inging with her to Paradise. Perfectly pru-
c
nt, but enthroned far above Prudence,

j iging all things by Wisdom, for Wisdom

i architectonic to all the intellectual virtues ,

a d Prudence is her
servant, as the door-
1:

J^eper to the King, the Saints are free as

t :
Spirit. The wise man, like God, is inter-
e ed in the strivings of every form of life.
Of fineperception,scorningnone,
Our common day he will not shun;
Hisheart, though born contemplative,
J . Sum. tfieol., I-II, q. 66, a. 5.

123
 To man s work none the less he ll give. . .

Thus Wisdom, beholding from God s poii

of view, which equally commands the sphere
of Doing and of Making, alone can
perfectly
attune Art and Prudence.
Adam sinned because he fell away from
contemplation; thenceforward division came
upon mankind.
To turn away from Wisdom and from con
templation, and to aim lower than God, is for
a Christian civilisation the primary cause of
160
every disorder. It is
especially the cause of
this godlessdivorce of Art from Prudence,
which we discern at the epochs when Christ
iansno longer have the strength to carry the
integration of their wealth. Nodoubtthatu
why we saw Prudence sacrificed to Art at the
time of the Italian Renaissance, in a civilisa
tion which nolongeraspired beyondhuman
why we saw Art sacrificed to
istic Virtu ,&r\&
Prudence in the nineteenth century, in thos<

right-minded circles which aspired no higher

than Respectability.

160. On this subject see the Cuestiones misticas, Salama

remarks of the wise theologian 1916.
Arintero 7 O.P., in his treatise

124
>PENDIX A.

ARTIST AND CRAFTSMAN.

[See Page 30, Note 42.]
fT is curious to mark that in the time of

Leonardoda Vinci neither the reason ofthis

*"

classification, nor the rank thus assigned to

] inting wasanylonger understood. Leonardo
is
isntionsitonly withlively indignation. "It

nth justice that painting complains of not be-

i
5 reckoned in the number of the liberal arts,
i "she is a true child of nature, she works
though
te
eye, the noblest of our senses."
(Texfes
crisis, Paris, 1907. 355.) He often returns
i on this question, of which he treats the
tridents with remarkable sophistic earnestness,
he sharply attacks the poets, asserting that
<
d

tsirartismuch inferior to that of painters,

poetry devises wordsfor the ear, where-
t cause

apainting devises for the eye, and "by true

snilitudes." "Take a
poet describing the
I
mty of a
lady to her lover, take a painter
r
>resenting
the same lady, you will see which
^iy nature will draw the amorous judge."
( ^.,
368). Sculpture on the contrary not "is

125
 a science,but a mechanical art which engender
sweat and bodily fatigue in its operator
proof that this is true," he adds (in a
"The

passage which well shows to what silliness

great genius may give way at times), that
"is

the sculptor, in order to do his work, uses the

strength of his arm and strikes and fashions th
marble or other hard stone whence shall come
the figure, which is as if enclosed there, a

quite mechanical labour which throws him

continually into asweat, covers him with dusl
and rubbish and makes his face pasty and all
floury with marble dust, like a baker s boy. So
spattered with little splinters, he looks as if
covered with snowflakes and hisfilthydwellir
is full of rubbish and stone dust. It is
quite
otherwise with a painter, according to what
they tell of celebrated artists. At his ease he si
before his work, he is well dressed and he hole
a very light brush dipped in delicate colour.
He is as well attired as he pleases, his dwelling
filled with charming panels, is well-seen oft ;

he gets music played to him or various beautil

works read to him, to which, without any no
of hammer or other uproar, he listens with
great pleasure." (Ibid. , 37 9.)
At this period the "artist" distinguished

126
limself from the craftsman, and so began to
ookdown upon him. But whereas the painter
vasalreadyan"artist,"thesculptorhadremain-
c a craftsman. However, he also was to attain
3

apidly to the dignity of "artist." Colbert,

/hen he finally sets up the Royal Academy of
ainting and Sculpture, will register and
onsecrate in the official manner the results of
lis evolution.
The word artist, we may note in passing, has
most eventful history. An artist, or artien, was
.first a master ofarts (the arts comprising
icliberal arts and philosophy) :

"Then when Pantagrueland Panurgecame

ito the hall, these schoolboys, artiens, and
all

ichelors began to clap their hands, as their

urvyhabitis."(Rabelais,P^^/^g-r^/II,c. 18.)
Verily I do deny
That canonist or legist
Be wiser than the artist.

(farce de Guillerme. Anc. Theatre francois,

:,p.2 39 .)
Those whom we call artists today were then
i tisans. Les artizans bien subtils
Animent de leurs outilz
L airain, le marbre, le cuyvre.
(J. Du Bellay, Les deux Marguerites^)

127
 Peintre, poete ou aultre artizan.

(Montaigne, III, 25.)

Later the word artist itself becomes synoi
ymous with artisan; "Artisan or artist, artife ,

opifex,"saysNicotin his Dictionary. "Thii s

which all
good workmen and artists set befo
themselves in this art (of distillation)." (Par
XX VI,4.) The name of artist is specially gn ;i

to one who works at the great art (i.e. ,alchen )

oreven at magic; in theeditionof 1694, the

Dictionary of the Academy mentions that tl;
word used particularly of those who wor
"is

in magic. "It
is
only in the 1 762 edition of tl"

Dictionary of the Academy that the word

artist figures in the sense which it has in our

time, as opposed to the word artisan; thebre

between the fine arts and the trades is then
consummated even in the language.
This rupture was the outcome of change
supervening on the structure of society and
especially of the rise of the middle class.

128
 / PENDIX B.

*
THE
t:F]RCEPTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL
AND KANT S AESTHETIC
k
li [See Page 37, Note 5 5.]
r
of the
^
A|~~^HIS question of the perception
beautiful byJ
the intelligence,
& using
6
10? ,
. ,

i the senses as instruments, deserves an

such as,it seems to us, has
CJiaustive analysis,
/ to seldom attracted the subtilty of the philo-
, sohers. Kantmadeplay with it in his Critique
f
".of udgment. Unfortunately the straightfor-
and at times profound ob-
""w.
d, interesting,
,
found in this Critique (much
se ations to be
^m -e frequently than in the other two) are
Wi ped and vitiated by his craze for system and
:
;t
!

:;

syj metry,
and above all by fundamental errors
in
by the subjectivism of his theory of know-
ec e.

which
ne of the definitions of the beautiful
K.C
gives ; demands attentive examination.
1 2 Beautiful," he what pleases uni-
"is
says,

129
 *

versally without concept" Taken as-it stands

this definition seems inadmissible, in fact th<

beautiful pleases "universally", only

inasmu i
as it addresses the intelligence before all; and
how could our intelligence enjoy without
exerting itself, or exert itself without produ<
ing some concept, no matter how confused a i
indeterminate? t The Kantian definition rui
the risk of introducing an enormous error, ai
making us forget the essential relation with 1 1

intelligence which beauty bespeaks. This is

how the theory blossomed out with Schoper
hauer and his disciples into an anti-intellect-

*The "concept"
is for him elsewhere a form imposet 7

the judgment on the given "sensible," and constitutes s

given "sensible" either as an object of cognition, or as i

object of appetition by the will.

tSee on this point the very remarkable pages of Baude c

(L* Art romantique, pp. 213 ff.), where, speaking of the rev 5

called up in him by the overture of Lohengrin, which coinc i

-
in a striking fashion with those which the same piece had
to well as the points of the programn
5
gested Liszt, as
asredacted by Wagner, unknown to the poet, he shows t

music suggests analogous ideas to quite different bra:

"true

The
concept of which we speak may otherwise be
n *

more general still and much more indistinct; at times its s

to be confined to a scarcely perceptible idea in which e

mind, in a confused and summary way, merely suggests to

the particular work intended or in contemplation, and th<

partment of art to which it belongs.

130
 ilist deification of music. Still it recalls in its

ay the much more correct expression of St.

homzs^id quodvisum placet,\.\\zt which pleases
/
i;ig seen,
that is, being the object of intuition.
. ven in virtue of this last definition the percep-
the beautiful is not, as the school of
t:>nof

bibnitz- Wolff would have it, a confused

c
nception of the perfection of the thing, or of
i
conformity with an ideal type. (Cf. Kant s
itique of Judgment, Analytic of the Beautiful,
(

If the spontaneous production of any con-

c pt, however confused, vague, obscure it be,
East necessarily, it seems, accompany theper-
c 3tion of the beautiful, it is not its formal con-
si tuent: the
very splendour or light of the form
si
ning in the beauteous object is not presented
tchemindby a concept or by an idea, but
n her by the object of sense intuitively seized,
ir vhich
passes, as through an instrumental
case, this light of a form. So one might say
at sast this seems to us the
only possible way of
ir
^rpreting St. Thomas s saying, thatin the
p< ception of the beautiful the intelligence is,
b^ leans of tJie sensuous intuition itself, con-
fr ited with an which
intelligibility shines
fc h (flowing in the last analysis, like all intel-
 from the primary intelligibility of
ligibili ty,
the divine Ideas), but which,just in so far as i

gives out the joy of the beautiful, is not detac

-

able nor separable from its sensuous matrix,a 1

consequently does not produce intellectual

knowledge actually expressible in a concept
Contemplating the object in the intuition of
sense, theunderstanding enjoysapresence t ;

radiating presence of an intelligible which

does not itself reveal itselfjust as it is. Shoul< t

turn away from sense in order to abstract and

reason, it turns away from itsjoy, and loses co
tact with that radiance. Thus one apprehend
how it does not occur to the understanding-
except secondarily and by reflection to
abstract from the particular sensible, on whi
itscontemplation is centred, the intellig
ible reasons for itsj oy ; one sees also how the
beautiful may be a wonderful tonic to the und
standing, without at all developing its powe:
abstraction or of ratiocination; and how the
perception of the beautiful is accompanied h
that curious feeling of intellectual fullness b
which it seems to us to be big with a superioi
knowledgeof the object in contemplation, a
knowledge which yet leaves us powerless to
express it and to seize it in our ideas and mak

132
 matter of scientific study. Thus Music makes
enjoy Being, as indeed do the other arts,
5 for
iat matter; but it does not make Being known
us, and it is absurd to make it a substitute for
i
etaphysic. Thusthejoy of artistic contem-
1 kj&fafove all things intellectual ?a\&
ation is

^e must even affirm with Aristotle (Poetica, ix,

; 45 1 ,b 6) that "poetry is a thing more philo-

1

s
phical and more serious than history,because
j Ctry
isconcerned rather with theuniversal,
2 d
history only with the particular." Andyet
contemplation the apprehension of
:

i artistic
tsuniversalor the intelligibletakes place with
ct discourse of reason oreffort at abstraction.*
Moreover,if the very act ofperception of the
bautiful happens without this discourse or
!

: ebrt at abstraction, the conceptual discursive

n ly still have an incalculable share in ihepre-
p -ation of that act. In fact, like the very virtue
>:

o art, taste (or the aptitude for discerning

b mty and judging it) while presupposing an
,

ate gift,
developed by education and
r:
ii is
K v/
The capital error of the neo-Hegelian aesthetic of Benedetto
ft
C who also is a victim of modern subjectivism
:e, beau-
("the
tii does not belong to things".
Esthetique , Paris, 1904^. 93),
. .

lit n not
seeing that artistic contemplation, for all its intuitive-
"

ne is none the less Intellectual above all. Aesthetic

should be
is at ice intuitivist and intellectualist.
teaching, especially by the study and rationa
explanation of works of art. Besides, other
things being equal, the more the understand
ing is informed of the rules, the processes, th
of art, and especially of the end
difficulties

pursued and the intentions of the artist, the

better prepared it is to receive into itself
by
means of the intuition of sense the intelligib
resplendence emanating from the work, and
thus to taste, that is spontaneously to perceiv
its
beauty. Thus it is, that friends of the artis
who know his meaning as the angels knov
the ideas of theCreator,enjoy his works
infinitely better than the public; thus itisth
the beauty of certain works is a hidden beam
accessible only to a few,
It is said that the
eye and the ear grow ace
tomed to novel relationships. Rather is it th
intelligence that accepts these relationships
s

soon as it has understood to what end, and fo

what sort of beauty they are ordered, thus p
paring itselffor the better enjoyment of the
work which embodies them,
Again we may remark that Kant is right i

looking upon emotion ("the excitation oft

t
asaposteriorandconsecutive
vitalforces")
in theperception of the beautiful (Qp.cit^

134
 )
. But the first and the essential fact for him
j the "aesthetic j udgment," (which has in
for us
is
system only a quite subjective value) ;

:is the intuitive joy of the intelligence (and

suc-
^condarily of the senses) or to speak less ;

inctly and more exactly, it is the

joy of the
*
ppetite, the ratio of the beautiful be-
("to

)nsthatin
o the sieht
o or cognition
o whereof
ic appetite is at rest"), it is the satisfying of our
ower of desire reposing in the proper good of
ic
cognoscitive power which is perfectly and
armoniously set going by the intuition of the
Dutiful. (CLSumma theol. I-II,q. I i,a. \,ad
"The
perfection and the end of every other
:

culty is contained in theobject of the appeti

te faculty, as is the proper in the common.")
.
outlessthisjoy is a "sentiment"
(gaudium in
i e "intellective
appetite"
or will, i.e.
joy
j -operly so called, in which "we are sharers
nth the angels. q. 31, 4,^3.) How-
"/<&/.,
a.

(
er, that is a question of a quite special senti-
i ent which depends purely on knowing^ and of
t e
happy fullness which asensitive intuition
}
oduces in the understanding. Emotion in
t ^
ordinary sense of the word, the actuation
sensibility, the producing an affective state
(

essentially a joy of the appetitive faculty.

is
Joy

135
of soul, the development of passions and feel
ings other than this intellectual joy is only an
effect absolutely normal of thissamejoy,
emotion thus is
posterior, if not in time atleas
in the nature of things, to the perception of
the beautiful and remains extrinsic to what
formally constitutes that perception.
It is curious to note that the subjectivist
"venom"
(asMattiussicallsit) introduced by
Kant into modern thought has almost inevit
ably driven the philosophers, despite Kant
him self, to look in emotion for the essential of
aesthetic perception. This is how it is that
Kantian subjectivism has borne its latest fruit
in the theory of the TLinfuhlung of Lipps and
Volkelt, which reduces the perception of the
beautiful to a projection or infusion of our
emotions and sentiments into the object. (Cf.
M. de Wulf, L oeuvre a art et la beaute^ Annal
1

of the Institute of Philosophy at Lou vain: vo

ff.
iv, 1
920, pp. 421 )

136
APPENDIX C.

ON ACADEMIC TRAINING
[See Page 62, Note 83.]

is known that the French royal Academy

and Sculpture was established
ITof Painting
in
1663.
We may mention here the recent work of
vl.A. Vaillant on the Theory of Architecture
Paris, 1919). On this subject of academicism,
s also on the
generic notion of Art, the thesis
f the author, who is inspired by a somewhat
arrow but very right-minded positivism, falls
i
very happily with the views of the School-
len. was in the reign of Louis XIV,"
"It

rites M. Vaillant, "that the teaching of the

le arts began to take on the scholastic char
ter which we know so well today. . . One
ustrecognize that (at that date) the academic
fluence was very strong, though as yet by no
:
eans harmful. The reason for this was that
e
empirical methods of the master crafts-
J sn and their ancient customs maintained
1
vigour up to the suppression of the cor-
"ir

]
rations, According as these methods and

137
customs began to die out, the results of the
training fell away. For the doctrine which is
the soul of Art was naturally contained in the
traditions in the manner in which the artist
received and assimilated and responded to his
"

commission
"So
long as apprenticeship was the means
of training artists and craftsmen, the need of
theoretic instruction was not felt. With the
architects, in particular, there was method .

It arose naturally from the master s example

and from familiar collaboration in his pro
fessional life as the Lruredes Metiers of Etienm
;

Boileau shows so well. When mere instructioi

was substituted for the living and varied action
of the master, a serious mistake was made."
"The academic
rupture with the daubers of
paint and the marble-masons marble-polishers
brought no gain to either art or artist while it
;

took away from the workman his wholesome

contact with superiority and excellence. The
academicians gained nought of independence
and they lost not only the technique but the
intelligent organisation of art-labour/
One of the consequences of this divorce wa
the disappearence of the technique of the
colour-grinder. In course of time they lost
the

138
 to which
feeling for those chemical reactions,
colours and pigments are liable by their blend
their mediums
ing, as well as for the n-ature of
and the mode of laying-on. "Van Eyck s pict
ures, five centuries old, have still the freshness
of their prime. Can modern pictures," asks M.
Vaillant, keep their youth so long?"
"hope
to
"How modern
painting grows leaden !"

answers M.Jacques Blanche, speaking of

Manet. "Barely a few years, and the most bril
liant picture is
calcined, destroyed. are We
admiring ruins, ruins of yesterday. You don t
k.now what le Linge was when it first appeared !

[should have thought I had myself to blame

Dr to bewail the state of
my eyesight, if for five
/ears I had not been looking on at the destruct-
on of a masterpiece, the Trajan of Delacroix
it the Rouen museum. I have seen it tarnish
.nd crack, and now it is nothing more than a
>rownmess.
. .
(Jacques-Emile Blanche,
."

^ropos depeintre, de David a Degas Pari 51919).

^

Augustin Cochin writesin turn: "The

cademic training created" (or rather created
ito a sole and universal
law) "by the ency clo-
aedists from Diderot to Condorcet, has killed

opular art dead in one generation a pheno-

lenon possibly unique in history. School-

J39
mastering instead of workshop-training,
makinglearn instead of makingdo, explaining
instead of pointing out and correcting, there
is the whole reform devised the
by philo
sophers and imposed by the Revolution. They
who stood aloof have survived, but as rocks
battered by the seas of banality and ignorance,
not as giant trees in the forest." (Les Societes de
Pensee,inthe Correspondent of Feb. roth,
1920.)

140
APPENDIX D

THE CONCEPTION OF THE WORK

AND THE 3VLEANS OF ART
[See Page 70, Note 93.]
E conception of the work is some
TH thing quite different from the simple
choice of subject (the subject is only
he material si this conception and there are for
he artist or the poet even certain advantages
roethe expounds this very well in receiving
bis material from outside) it also something ;

uite different from an abstract idea, an intel-

:ctual theme or athesis which the artist may
ave in view. Goethe was asked what idea he
ad wanted to set forth in the Tasso. "What
ea?" said he, "do I know? IhadTasso slife, I
id my own don t be always thinking
. . .

would be lost, if one could not discover

iat all

the back of a work some idea or some abstract

ought. You havej ust asked me what idea I

.ve tried to
embody in my Faust. As if I knew
could tell, myself From heaven, across the
!

)rld, down into hell an explanation

there is
i
/oumusthaveone; but that is not the idea, it

141
is the march ofthe action. . ."
(Goethe s Conversa
tions with Eckermann, 6th May, 1 827.)
Lastly, the conception of the work is neither
its worked-out proj ection nor its plan of con
struction (which already a realisation in the
is

mind). simple view (simple, although

It is a

virtually very rich in multiplicity) of the work

to be made grasped in its individual soul, a view
which is like a spiritual germ or a seminal ratio
of the work (taking after what M. Bergson calls
intuition and dynamic schema) a view interest ,

ing not only the intelligence but also the imagi

nation and the feeling of the artist, and resp
onding to a certain unique shade of emotion
and sympathy and because of that it is some
;

thing impossible to express in concepts. What

painters call their vision of things plays here
an essential part.
This conception of the work,which depends
upon the whole spiritual and sensitive essence
of theartist and above all upon the rectification
of his appetite in regard to Beauty, and which
bears upon the end of the operation, one might
say that it is, in relation to Art, as the intention
of the ends of the moral virtues is in relation to
Prudence. The conception of the work belongs
to a different order from the means, the outlets of

142
 which are the proper domain of the
ealisation,
irtue of Art, j ust as the means to attaining the
:nds of the moral virtues are the proper domain
>

the virtueof Prudence. And it is in each

>articular case the fixed
point toward which
he artist orders the means which art puts into
lispossession.
M.Blanche tells us that "the meansare
very thingin painting." (De Davida Degas,
>.

151.) Let us be clear. The means are the

roper domain of the artistic habitus; in this
jnse we can accept his formula. But means
xist
only in relation to an end, and the means
/hich every thing" would themselves be
"are

ot/iing,
without the conception or vision
they
md to realise and on which hangs the whole
peration of the artist.
Evidently the higher this conception is, the
lore chance is there of the means
being defect-
e. Of such of means
r
in
deficiency proportion
the loftiness of the conception is there not an
ninent example in Cezanne ? If he is so great,
he has upon contemporary art so overmaster-
g an influence, it is because he has brought in
conception or a vision of a higher quality
s little
sensation, as he called it himself to
hich his meansremained
disproportionate.

H3
Thence his complaints of not being able to
realise"Try
to see a little, Monsieur Voll-

ard, the modelling escapes me !"and his

touching regret for "not being Bouguereau;
he at any raterea/ised, and "developed his
personality."

144
to
PPENDIX E.

ol

IEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE AND

THE CLUMSINESS OF THE
PRIMITIVES
[See Page 78, Note 108.]

A RCHITECTURE too affords some

f-\ remarkable examples of this primacy
^accorded by medieval art to the intel-
ctual and spi ritual structure of the work at
le
expense of material correctness, in regard
i
which the tool-chest and the theoretic
lowledge of our ancient builders were very
(adequate. In medieval architecture one
"

irdly anywhere meets geometrical correct-

iss no rectilinear
:
alignment, never a crossing
right angles nor a symmetrical balance,
regularities andpentimenfiat every turn. Be-
ies, centering of the vaults had to be spec-

lly prepared for each bay, even in the best

instructed buildings of medieval art. The
notably those of the arches of the vaul-
irves,
more correct than the alignmen ts
ig, are no
the divisions of the bays. Neither is their

mmetry of balance any truer. The keystones

145 K
are notfound in the middle of the arches ore
the vault, sometimes they are decidedly out
of place The right side of a building is
never, so to speak, symmetrical with the left
side... Still almost every thing in this art is
well studied, though far from being exacting
in correctness. Perhaps it is
owing to this
constructional innocence that the sincerity
and the naturalness of this architecture abide
so full of charm..."
(A. Vaillant, Theoriede
r Architecturep. 9 and p. 364.)
-,
1 1

The same author notes that at the period ii

question building plans could not be done on
paper, as they are today, and t hat the only av
labledrawing paper was rare and costly velli
which was saved up and washed to be used
again, and that it was accordingly "chiefly b
means of the reduced model, that the work
projected was represented in its essential ele
ments. About details no one troubled before
the moment at which they had to takeshape.
when one had exact knowledge of the scale,
and used known rules and elements. It waso,
thejob i the place of labour, that the solution
of all theproblemsof construction wassoug
and found and that the various difficulties we
surmounted. The same still holds good for

14-6
the workmen of our day; with this difference,
that deprived of education and apprenticeship
:heir experience is but a coarse routine."
"When one thinks of the enormous
quan-
:ity
of paper required for thestudy and prepar-
itionof the building of our modern edifices,
Df the calculations indispensable to the elabo-
ation of our least plans, one is dumbfoundered
it the
height of intellectual power, at the ex-
ent of memory, and the massiveness of talent
)f the master-workmen and clerks-of-the-
,vorks of those times, who knew how to put
up
:hese vast and splendid buildings, inventing

:very day and perfecting without end. The

>ower of medieval art is
extraordinary, not-
vithstanding a science that was slight and
Toping."
The clumsiness of the primitive painters is
ot due solely to the inadequacy of their ma-
erial It is due also to what one
means. might
all them a kind of intellectualist realism.
in
lere we draw attention to the remarkable
:udy of M.Maurice Denis on the Gaucherie
"Theirgauc/ierie," he writes
the Primitives.
in
eryjustly, "consists
painting objects after
ie common knowledge they have of them,
istead of painting them, like the moderns,

147
after a preconceived idea of the picturesque
or the aesthetic."
Primitive
"The
prefers reality to the ap
. . .

pearance of reality. Rather than resign hims<

to the malformations of perspective which d>

not interest his virgin eye, he conforms the imag

ofthings to the notion of them which he has. "(Ma
rice Denis, Theories; Paris.)

148
APPENDIX F.

REPRODUCTION OR EXACT COPY

OF THE REAL
[See Page 89, Note 121.]

point of fact it is awkward to settle in

what
precisely consists this
imitation-copy
[N
though concept seems so clear to minds
its
,

r
hich work along the simplified lines of the
opular imagination.
Is it the imitation or copy of what the thing is
iitself and of its intelligible type? But that
a matter of concept, not of sensation, some-

dng not seen nor handled, which art in con-

quence cannot reproduce. Is it the imitation
copy of the sensations produced in us by the
ling ? But these sensations impinge upon
msciousness only after refraction through an
: ward atmosphere of memories and emotions,
besides incessantly varying, in a flux
id are
herein all things lose their shape and contin-
illyintermingle so that from the standpoint
;

pure sensation one must say, with the Fu-

rists, that a running horse has not four legs
"

it
twenty, that our bodies penetrate the set-

H9
tees whereon we sit, and the settees pen etrate
our bodies; that the motor-bus keeps dashing
into the houses it passes, while the houses on
their part keep flinging themselves at the bus
andmeltingintoit ..."

The exact copy or reproduction of nature

is thus shown to be a matter
impossible of at
a
tainment, concept which vanishes as one
tries to grasp In practice it resolves itself
it.

into the idea of such a representation of the

object, as is afforded by the photograph or the
cast; or rather, since these mechanical proces
ses do themselves give results which are "false
to our perception, it works out to the idea of
such a representation, as can create illusion and
deceive our senses (and this, moreover, is no

longer a copy pure and simple, but a trumpery

counterfeit) in a word it works out to the idea
,

ofthatnaturalisticjugglery which isunrelate

to any art but that of theMusee Grevin.

1.50
 PPENDIX G.

HE CONFLICT BETWEEN NATURE

AND THE IMAGINATION
[See Page 90, Note 123.]
V
Jf
AU RICE Denis for his part stated in
V/ 1 perfectly correct terms the same truth,
* -*-
when he wrote :"Recollect that a

pture, before being any sort of anecdote, is in

c ;ence a
plane surface covered over with co-
lirs
put together in a given order." (Art et
^itique, Aug. 23, 1 890.)
Again, Cezanne said: wanted to copy
"I

I iture, I did not so far. But I was

get pleased
vth my self when I found out that the sun, for
it
tance, could not be reproduced\ but had to be
rtresented
by something else.
;>

colour."
. . .
by
(.
aurice Denis, Theories.)
"You must not
paintfrom Nature" said in his
tin, in asallywhich needs understanding, that
sc
ipulous observer of nature, M.Degas. (A
related by J. E.Blanche, De David a
ss
mg
L:as.)
remarks Baudelaire,
In fact,"
good "all

di
ughtsmen and true draw from the image in .
their brain and not from Nature. If you addu :

the admirable sketches of Raphael, Watteau

and many others, we say they are notes, very
detailed it is true, but still mere notes. When
true artist has arrived at the actual execution f

his work, the model would be to him more a

hindrance than ahelp. It even happens that
men like Daumier and M.Guys, long accus
tomed to use their memory and to store it wil
images, find that in the presence of the mode
and the crowd of detail it involves,their prin
pal faculty is put out and as it were paralysed
"There then arises a conflict between the

wish to see all, to forget nothing,and the facu r

of remembrance which is wont to drink in

eagerly the general colour and the silhouette
the arabesque of the contour. An artist with
perfect feeling for form, but accustomed to u
his memory and his imagination first and for
most, finds himself therefore assailed as it w ;

by a riot of details all demanding justice wit

the fury of a mob gone mad on absoluteequali .

All manner ofjustice mustneedsbeoutrage |

allharmony destroyed, slaughtered; manys

triviality becomes an enormity; many apett
point becomes domineering. The more the
artist inclines
impartially to detail, the more
 ic
anarchy augments. Be he short-sighted or
ng-sigh ted, any kind of hierarchy or subor-
.nation disappears." (UArtromantique,)
-
.", :
r\ f. -.4%-.:

PPENDIX H.

HE IMITATION OF NATURE AND

CLASSIC ART
[SeePagegi, Note 125.]

~J
"^ HE considerations which we present
in the text enable us to harmonise two
sets of apparently contradictory ex-
jessions, which one finds artists using.
Gauguin and Maurice Denis, for instance,
<

ists who (like many others in the "young

153
school")
are very scrupulous thinkers, will tell

you that most to be deplored ... is the

"what is

idea that Art is

thtcopy of something" (Theories
p. 28) ; to think that Art consists in copying or
exactly reproducing things is to pervert the
meaning of Art (Ibid, p. 3 6) "To copy"is taker
.

here in the
proper sense of the word, it means
imitation materially understood and, as itwere
aiming at causing illusion to the eye.
Ingres, on the contrary, or Rodin, more pas
sionate and ess keen of understanding, will tel
1

you that you must "copy quite earnestly, quite

dully, you must copy servilely what is before
>

your eyes. "(Amaury-Duval,Z/ Z^rd j <7/^//i?r^ .

all
things obey
"In nature and never pretend tc
command her. My only ambition is to be ser
vilely faithful to (PaulGsell, J?W/).
her." . .

Thewords"copy"and"servilely"are
used her
in a very incorrect sense; in reality it is not a

question of servilely imitating the object but c

what is quite different, of manifesting with th
greatest faithfulness, cost what it will in "de
parture from form," the form or ray of intelli
gibility of which the glint is caught in thereal,
M. Ingres, as M. Denis so judiciously makes
clear (Theories, pp. 8 6-9 8), intended to copy th

beauty which he discerned in nature by going to

tl

154
 *
t-eeks and Raphael; "bethought," says
^naury-Duval, he was copying nature
"that

f us in copying her as he saw her;" and he was

t j first to "make monsters" according to the
mgof Odilon Redon. Rodin for his part
r
s:

oly attacked (and

how justly!) those who pre-
tudto or "idealise" nature by
"embellish"

a thetic rules of thumb, and to portray her

as she is, but as she ought to be." And he
"at

hi to admit that he accused, accentuated, ex-

a Derated, so as to represent not only "the ex-

t<ior"but"thespiritalso,
which certainlyis
itilf
agood part of nature," the spirit, an-
o ier word for what we call the "form.
"

.\11 the same we must remark that the "de-

It was therefore not only a. form ingenuously grasped in the

re but it was also an artificial ideal unconsciously impregnat-

inhis mind and his vision, that M. Ingres tried to manifest.

T nee it was that, judging his intentions from his works, Bau-
.
dcire attributed to Ingres principles entirely opposed to those
w!:h the professed: shall be understood by all
"I
painter
th:, who have compared the manners of drawing of the
pr:ipal masters, when I say that the drawing of M. Ingres is
thirawing of a man with a system. He thinks that nature
;
sh Id be corrected, amended; that happy pleasant trickery
;:. dc: on purpose for the pleasure of the eyes is not only a
:; rij: but a duty. We have been saying until now that nature
interpreted, translated as a whole, and with all her
sh d be
-"

lo, but in the works of the master in question there is often

;

;;C cuiing, craft, violence, and sometimes trickery and guile,"

;i
(C osites
esthetiques.)
partures from form" wrought by the painter o
the sculptor are oftenest the quite spontaneous
effects of a personal "vision," much more than
the result of pondered reflection. By a pheno
menon which psychologists would have no
trouble in explaining they heartily and steadil
thi nkthey are copying nature, just when they
are expressing in the material a secret which
nature has whispered to their souls. "If I have
altered any thing from nature," said Rodin, "il

was without any misgiving at the moment.Th

feeling which influenced my vision showed m
naturejust as I have copied her. . . .If I had
wanted to modify what I saw and make it mor
beautiful, I would have turned out nothing
good."
This is why "one may say that all the
innovators since Cimabue," having the same
solicitude for more faithful interpretation,
have equally "made up their minds to submit
to nature." (y E. Blanche^Propos de Peintre,
.

David a Degas.}
Thus the artist in order to imitate, transforr
(according to the saying of Toppfer, an ami
able and garrulous forbear, who has on this
subject, in his Menus Propos, many judicious
remarks) ,but usually he does not notice that
is
transforming. This somevv hat natural illu-
<

>n,
between what the artist
this disparity
i and what he thinks he is making, would
akes

jrhaps explain the singular gap which can be

fjnd between the great art itself of the Graeco-
]itin classics, so
filially free towards nature,
r d their ideology so flatly naturalist at times.
,

( ompare, for instance, th e story of the grapes

c
Only such an ideology, let us con-
Zeuxis.)
could not fail to hold over their art, if
f.s, they
s ckened it ever so li ttle, a serious threat of

i turalism. In fact, from the Greek idealism,

\ lich sets out to copy an ideal headline from
r ture,one sli ps by a quite simple transition
( ippily pointed out by the author ^Theories]
i o a naturalism which copies nature herself
i ier haphazard materiality. Thus the realist
e
i-trap datesfrom ancient times as Jacqu es^ M .

1 mche says ; yes, but from the baser side of

atiqueart.
Medieval art has been safe-guarded in this
r
pect by its sublime ingenuousness, its humi-
1
,and also by the hieratic traditions which
r

c ne to it from the Byzantines, so that it or-

c
larily at the spiritual level to which
keeps
later classic art attains
only on its mountain
t :

I iks ;
the art of the Renaissance on the con-

157
trary has allowed itself to be gravely contami
nated.
Is it not strange to discover a mind so great ;

Leonardo da Vinci apologising for painting

with humiliating arguments: "Ithappenec
with a painting of a father of a family, that the
grandchildren went to caress it, though they
were still in bib and tucker, and even the dog
and the cat of the house did the same: and it
was a wondrous sight to see.
"

saw once a "I

painting which deceived the dog by its resem

blance to its master, and the animal made muc
ado about this picture. I have also seen dogs
bark and try to bite painted dogs and a monke ;

do a thousand silly things to apainted monke]

and also swallows fly and perch upon the
paintedbarswhichwereportrayedon thewin
do ws of the building." painter makes a pi
"A <

tu re, and whoever sees it immediately yawns

and that happens every time that the eye resfc
upon the painting, which has been made on
purpose for this." (Textes choisis^ Peladan,
357>3
62 6 3-)
>3

Thank God, Leonardo lived painting othe

wise thanhesawit, though in him"is finally
established the aesthetic of the Renaissance,
expression through the subject" (M .
Denis,

158
"Maries) ;
and although it be true to say of
imwith M. Andre Suares, seems to live
"He

)rkno vvledge only and much less for creation . .

Vhenever he studies and observes, he is the

ve of nature. Assoon as he in vents, he is the
I;
1

lave of his ideas; theory stifles in him the bur-

ingplay of creation. Though born of the
ame, most of hisfigures are lukewarm and
3me are frozen." (Le voyage du Condottiere.} In
ny case it is ideas like this in which he took
elight, that, codified afterwards by academic
caching, compelled the modern artist to react
id to become too conscious of his creative

berty with regard to nature ("Nature

is
only a
ictionary,"
Delacroix readily kept repeating),
-sometimes at the cost of the candour of his
ision, which calculation and analysis put in

opardy, to the very great detriment of art.

One cannot insist too much in this connec-
on on the distinction already pointed out (see
Appendix D) between the vision of theartist
r his invention, his
conception of the work, and
\e means of execution or of realisation which

e uses. On the side of vision or

conception,
igenuousness, spontaneity,candour, which is
iconscious of itself,istheartist srnost precious
ft; a gift
unique and preeminent, which

59
Goethe looked upon as "daemonic," so much
seemed tohim gratuitous and beyond analysis
If this gift gives place to a system or a calcu
lation, to a party cry of "style," like that with
which Baudelaire reproached Ingres, or like
what one discovers among certain Cubists, th
ingenuous "deformation, "which proceeds
from spiritual fidelity to theform which shine
in things and to their hidden life, is supersede
by artificial "deformation," by deformation i

the baser sense of the word, that is to say, by

violence or falsehood; and art by so much
withers.
On the contrary,on the side of the means,i s

reflection, conscientiousness, and skill that

are required between the conception and tb
;

work done there is alarge interval the privs

domain of art and its means filled in by ap y
of pondered combinations which make reali -

tion the "result of conscientious and patient

conducted logical process" (Paul Valery )
and of a prudence always on the watch. It w
thus that the Venetians skilfully substituted
for the magic of the sun the "equivalent ma; :

of colour,"and thatCezanne too renders the

light of the sun by modulations of colour.
(Theories.}
^

1 60
 If the due to the vision or
"deformations"

of the artist come to him come in

Dnception
le very measure in which his art is truly alive
-with a pure and as it were instinctive spon-
ineity, theremay yet
be otherswhich depend
n the means of art and these are studied and
;

ilculated. You will find in theworksof the

masters, and in those of Rembrandt, the great-
it of all,
many examples of similar transfor-
lations, deformations, abbreviations, re-ar-
mgements conscientiously carried out. The
orksof the Primitives are full of them, be-
they thought more of signifying objects
nise
factions than representing their appearances.
i the same order of ideas Goethe took the

pportunity afforded by a print of Rubens to

ve old Eckermann a useful lesson. (Conversa-

of Goethe with Ecltermann^ Aug.i8,i827.)

.ns

oethe shows this print to Eckermann, who

italogues all the beauties.
"All these objects represented here," asked
oethe, "the flock of
sheep, the haycart, the
)rses, the workmen going home, from what
"

leare they lighted? "They get

the light
om one side and cast their shadows towards
einterior of the picture. The workmen go-
5 home are especially in full light; and this

161 L
produces an excellent effect. . . ."

"But how did Rubens introduce his fine

effect?"

"By making these figures stand out lightly

on a dark background."
"But how is this dark background obtained?
"By
the mass of shadow which the group o
trees casts in the direction of the figures. But
what is the matter now ? I added quite sur
"

prised; "the figures cast their shadow towards

the interior of the picture, the group of trees o
the contrary casts its shadow towards us The !

light comes from two opposite sides Surely !

that is altogether against nature ?"

"That is
just what isin question, "said Goeth
smiling slightly. "There Rubens shows
himself grea t and proves that his free spirit is
above nature and can deal with her as befits his
lofty aim. The double light is most certainly i

violence, and you can always say that it is

against nature but if it is against nature, I
;

immediately add that it is above nature; I say

that it is a bold stroke of the master, who sho\
with genius that art is not entirely subject to
the necessities imposed by nature and that it
has its own laws. The artist is in a double r
. . .

lation with nature: he is at once her master an

162
her slave. He is her slave in this sense, that he
has to act through earthly means to make him
self understood; heishermasterin thissense,
that he subdues these earthly means and makes
tiem serve his high intentions. The artist
wants to speak to the world by an harmonious
whole; but this whole hedoesnotfind in nature;
it is the fruit of his own mind when, if
you will,
his mind is fertilised by breathing of breath
divine. If we glance with only slight attention
at this
picture, everything seems so natural
to us, that we think it
simply copied from
nature. But it is not so. So fine a picture has
never been seen in nature, any more than has a
iandscapeof Poussin or of Claude Lorrain,
which seems to us quite natural, but which
we look for in vain in real life."

163
APPENDIX J.

SYMBOLISM AND THE AIM OF ART

[See Page 97, Note 132.]

Maurice Denis wrote

recently, "is the art of interpreting and o
SYMBOLISM,
evoking a state of mind by relating colours
and shapes. These relationships, invented or
borrowed from nature, become signs or sym
bols of those states of mind they havepovver :

to suggest them. The Symbol aims "^en

. . .

genderingforthwith in the soul of the onlooker the

range of humanfee ling by means of the

<whole

gamut of colours and form,or,say, of sensatior

to which the gamut corresponds". and, . . aft<

quoting this passage from Bergson :

tte
fhe aim of Art is to lull the active or rathe
the resisting powers of our personality andso
bring us to a state of perfect docility, in which
we realise the idea suggested, or sympathise
with the sentiment expressed," Maurice Den
goes on: "With all our blurred remembrance
thus classified, all our subconscious forces set
going, the work of art worthy of the name set
up in us a mystic state or at least a state analog-

164
 mystic vision, and in some measure ren
>us to
ters the heart sentient of God."

Barring the use here of the word "mystic"

which it were seemly to leave to its proper use
nd wont), it is quite true that Art resultsm
rousing in us affective states of mind, but this
,not Art s end or aim: a slight shade of differ-
nce, if you like, but one of extreme impor-
mce. All is off the lines if we take for the end
/hat is
only ^joint-result or repercussion; as also
make of them/ itself (the production of
"we

work in which the splendour of 2iform shines

utupon proportioned matter) a simple means
}f evoking in others a state of mind, an emo-

on).
The small quarrel we pick with M. Maurice
)enis does not blind us to the
depth or the
uth of many of the ideas which he develops
ihis remarkable articles. In particular one
mnot too much insist on the importance of
mt very simple principle, since the Renaiss-
ice so often forgotten, which he makes the
elodic key of his teaching: expression in art

oceedsfrom the work itself and the means em-

oyed and notfrom the subject portrayed. The
noringof this principle, to which thebygone
iage-makers were so spon taneously faithful,

1 6;
and to which their works owed at once so
much daring and so much nobleness is one of
the causes of the frost-bitten decrepitude of
modern religious Art.

APPENDIX K.

ON SACRED ART
[
See Page 98, Note 1
34. ]

is no school that teaches

Christian Art, in the sense in whichw

THERE have here defined Christian Art."
"

the other hand there may very well be schools

that teach Church Art^ or Sacred rt^ which, A
given its proper object, has its own rules. The
School of Sacred Art (planned not on the lines
of the academy but on those of the studio for
apprenticeship and production) which Des- ,

vallieres and Maurice Denis have founded lat<

166
/, embodies from this standpoint an essay
nat aims high. May it meet, in those circles
r
here commissions grow, with the support of
r
hich it has need, and so may it help efficac-
)
isly
to lift Church Art out of the decay on
r
hich it has fallen!
Of this decay we say nothing here, there
ould be too much to say. Only let us quote
lese lines of Marie-Charles Dulac: "There

one thing which I would like and which I

ray for; that everything
beautiful be recov-
ed for God and serve His praise. All that
e see in creatures and in creation must be
ought back to Him, and my sorrow is to see
Spouse, our holy mother the Church app-
"is

elled in hideousness. All her outward man-

sstation is so
ugly, she that is so fair within ;
ery effort is to make a fright of her at th e
r
;

itset her
body was bare, made over to beasts ;

ien artists set their souls on her adornment,

vanity, and last of all the trade, butts in,

:
>xt

;
id so caparisoned, she
is
given up to ridicule,
his is another kind of beast, less noble and
oreevilthanthelion. (Letter of June
. . ."

=:th, 1897.)
"They
are satisfied a dead work.
with As . .

"the
understanding of art, theyareinthe

167
lower deeps. I am not speaking now of public
taste and I notice that hopeless lack of under
;

standing as early as the period of Michael

Angelo, of Rubens, in the Netherlands, where
I cannot
possibly find any sign of soul-life in
those gross carcases. Mark you, I do not refer
so much to the volume of their output, but to
the complete lack of interior life, and that jus
after a period which saw such a goodly widen

ing of the heart, in which the heart spoke out

so freely oh that there should have been thei
;
!

a harkingback to the gross viands of Pagan

ism, till we get to the sheer unseemliness of
LouisXIV."
"But as not the artist that
you know, tis

makes the artist, tis those who pray. And

those who pray get only what they ask for;
nowadays noone hints to them to seek beyon c
I quite well guess how light may break; for if
we look at the modern Greeks who copy the
stiffimages of bygone times, the Protestants
who make nothing, and the Latins who make
nothing that matters, I judge that in very de<

the Lord is not served by the manifestation of

the Beautiful, nor praised by the Fine Artsin
proportion to the graces He keeps to their
account, and that there has even been sin in re-

168
 acting what was holy and to our hand and tak-
ng up with what was sullied." (Letter of
May i3th, 1898.)
On the same subject see the Essay of the
bbe M.z\ r3.u&,ImageriereligieuseetArtpopuI-
ilre, and the study of M
Alexandre Cingria,
.

La Decadence de / ArtSacre (
Editor of Cahiers
vaudois, Lausanne) .

APPENDIX L.

CHRISTIAN ART AND THE GIFTS

OF THE CHRISTIAN SOUL
[See Page ioi,Note 135.]
T" TE do not say that before he can make a
Christian work, the artist must be a
y\l
saint fit for canonisation or a mystic who
las attained to
thetransforming union. do We
by rights sainthood and my stic con-
;ay that

emplation in the artist are the end to which of

hemselves tend the formal exigencies of the

,
Christian work as such and we say that in ;

effect a work isChristian, in proportion as there

passes through the soul of the artist in what

manner and with what shortcoming may be
a derivation from the life which makes the
saint and the contemplative.
These are self-evident truths, the simple
application of the eternal principle: operatio
sequitur esse, the action is measured by the be
ing. "There is the whole matter," Goethe used
to say, "one must be something in order to be
able to do Leonardo da Vinci
something."
illustrated this same principle by some very
curious remarks: "The painter with heavy
hands will make the hands even so in his works
and will reproduce his own bodily defect, un
less by long study he guards against so doing. .

If he is ready of speech and quick in action, his

figures will be of like character. If the master
be devout, then his personages will have wry
necks; if he be lazy, his figures will image lazi
ness to the life. Each characteristic of his
. . .

is a characteristic of the
painting painter."

(Texfes choisis, Peladan,4i5 and 422.)

"How is it,"
asks Maurice Denis, in a very
remarkable address delivered to the Amis des
Cathedrales (December 16,1913),"
that

170
:alented artists, whose faith too was pure and

ively,
such as Overbeck and certain pupils
}f Ingres should have produced works which
"

aardly stir our religious feeling?

The answer is not far to seek. First it might
DC that this lack of emotion arose simply from a
defect on the part of the art-virtue itself,which
a different thing from talent or school
isquite
ing.
In the second place, to speak quite pre-
:isely,faith
and piety in theartist donot amount
to a
guarantee that the work shall produce a
Christian emotion. Such a result invariably

depends upon some element of contemplation,

however defective while contemplation
;

itself
implies, according to the theologians, not
only the virtue of Faith, but also the influence
of the Seven Gifts of the
Holy Ghost. Finally
and above all, there may be present, as for in
stance in the caseof the systematic principles

scholarship,^n?/7/^d7?//tf, obstacles forbid

of

ding the art to be moved instrumentally andup-

lifted
by the whole soul. For here the art-virtue
and the supernatural virtues of the Christian
joul are not all that matters ; the one must also
beunder the influence of the others, and this
xcurs naturally, though on condition that no
oreign element make hindrance, Far from the

171
religious emotion stirred in us by the Primitive
resulting from some studious artifice, it is the
due working of the naturalness and freedom
with which those nurslings of Holy Church
let their soul slide into their art.
But how comes it that artists so lackin g in
devotion, as were many of those in the four
teenth and fifteenth centuries, have produced
works of intense religiousfeeling?
At first, these artists, however paganising,
remained in their mental structure immeasur
ably more imbued with faith than our shallow
psychology can think. Were they not still quite
tumultuous and pas
close to the heart of the
Middle Age,
sionate, yet heroically Christian
whose impress upon our civilisation four cen
turies of modern culture have not been able to
efface? They might let themselves go in the
wildest jocosity, they kept within, still quite
alive, the vis impressa of the medieval Faith,
and not of the Faith only, but also of those Gift
of the Holy Ghost which had such free andful
play during the Christian Ages. So that it
might be maintained without rashness that th
"free-revellers" mentioned, out of Boccaccio,

by Maurice Denis, worked out to something

more really "mystic," in presence of a picture

172
o be painted, than many a pious man in our
hri veiled times.
Later on, itisjust precisely the Christian
uiality
that begins to alter in their works. Ere
tturnsinto mere humanism, mere nature in
Raphael and even as early as Leonardo, it is no
onger more than a"grace of sense" in Botticelli
Filippo Lippi and its gravity and depth
:>r
;

ibideonly as long as the great Primitives of the

luattro cento, Cimabue and Giotto, or later
rVngelico, who can, because he is a saint, show
the whole light of his inward heaven
through
in art in him grown already less austere.
Indeed and in truth it needs a pretty far
journey back into the Middle Age, earlier even
than the exquisite tendernesses of St. Francis,
tocome at the purest period of Christian Art.
Where else than in the carvings and stained
glass of our cathedrals can one tind better real
ised the
perfect balance between a powerfully
intellectual hieratic tradition without which
cannot exist
>acred art and that free out
spoken sense of reality which beseems Artby
the Law of
Liberty ? No later interpretation
attains, for instance, to the truly sacerdotal and

theological sublimity of the scenes of the

Nativity (Choirof Notre Dame de Paris,
windows of Tours, Sens, Chartres, etc., pom-
fur inpraesepio^ idest corpus Christi
super a/tare) ,

or of the Coronation of the Blessed

Virgin
(Senlis) as they were conceived in the twelfth
,

and thirteenth centuries. (Cf. EmileMale,

fArt religieux du XIII siecle en France; Dom
Louis Baillet,Z/f Couronnementde la Sainte Viergt
Van Onzen Tijd, Afl. XII, 1
9 1
o.)
Moreover, in those days Art sprang from a
race energised to the full by Baptism. Maurice
Denis very rightly emphasises the auroral
freshness of the Primitives, and rightly attri
butes to this auroral freshness the emotion that
we feel in presence of their works. But all grea
art is of the day-spring, and not all great art is

Christian, save in the very broad sense in whicl

we can say that everything true comes from th
Holy Spirit and every thing beautiful is tendin,
towards Christ. If the freshness of the Primi
tives uplifts the heart to the Living God, it is
because that freshness is unique in quality, far
superior to any other. It is a Christian fresh
ness, as it were an infused virtue of young-e ye
virginity of mind and filial can dour, face to
face with the creations of the Blessed Trinity ;

in Art it isj ust the sign-manual of the Faith

and of the Seven Gifts pervading and uplifting
 For this reason it is right with Maurice
Denis to speak thus of the Primitive: "There

is
nothing pagan, nothing platonist, nothing
idealisteither in his aesthetic or in his art. He
c ves with all his heart the reality of God."
For this reason too it is vain for M. Gaston
Latouche to keep on saying that the ceiling of
:he chapel of the chateau at Versailles seems to
lim as truly religious as the vaulting at Assisi.
ouvenet will go on failing to exist before
Giotto so long as a dour "classical" fanaticism
roes on failing to triumph over the Christian

75
APPENDIX M.

CONFLICTS BETWEEN ART ANE

PRUDENCE
[See Page 120, Note 155.]
so much difference of opini i

Man of Prudence and th

THENCE between the
Artist,on the subject,for instance,of t :

representation of the nude. In a well-seen ac

demy the one, preoccupied merely with the
subject portrayed, sees nothing but animalisi
and thereafter he is apprehensive, and right!)
own and other people s the other,
so, for his ;

centred on the work itself, sees nothing but th

formal aspect of beauty. MauriceDenis(L^/ ;

Feb. i, 1920), points to the case of Renoir, ai

rightly insists upon the beautiful pictorial
serenity of his figures. Yet this serenity ofwoi
-

manship was not incompatible in the pain ter

himself with a strong sensuality of vision. (A I

what ought to be said, if it were not Renoir ir

question,but that great navvying faun, Rodii I

However it be with this particular proble ,

on which the Middle Ages were severe, and 1 ;

Renaissance monstrous lax (even in Church

176
 .ecoratfon) , it remains that in a general way
Catholicism alone is in a position to reconcile
n! >erfectly
both Art and Prudence,because of the
iniversality,
the very Catholicity of her wis-
m,
( which embraces the whole realm of the
ctual: thatis why Protestants accuse her of

rnmorality,and humanistsof rigorism, thus

-earing well-balanced witness to the divine
>

::
uperiority of her standpoint.
"What is
morally and mentally magnificent
boutCatholicism," wrote Barbeyd Aurevilly,
ere voicing in splendid fashion the artist s

ointofview,"isthatitiswide,comprehensive,
nbounded, embracing human nature whole
nd in
its diverse
spheres of action, and that,
::
bove what it embraces, it unfurls still the great
iaxim: Woe to him that taketh scandal! In
atholicism is nothing prudish, priggish, pe-
antic, fidgety. These things it leaves to the
j
lam virtues, to the sleek Pharisaisms. Catho-
I
cism loves the arts and puts up with their
udacities without blenching. .. For unclean
.

linds there are shocking indecencies in Mich

el
Angelo s picture (The Lastyudgmenf]^^
imore than onecathedral may befound things,
hich would have made a Protestant cover his
ves with Tartuffe s moral
:

pocket-handker-

177
chief.Does Catholicism condemn and reject,
and has it effaced them ? Have not the greatest
and most saintly Popes protected the artists,
who did the things which Protestant austerity
would have held, and has held, in horror as so
many sacrileges?. . . .
Catholically speaking,
artists rank below ascetics,but they are not asce
tics, they are artists. Catholicism admits a

hierarchy in merits, but does not mutilate man

kind. . . . Nor is the artist & police-inspector of
ideas. When he has created something real, in
depicting he has achieved his task."
it

However, as most men are not moulded to

artistic culture, Prudence, with reference to

many a fine work of art, is rightly apprehensive

for the multitude. So Catholicism, knowing
what wounds original sin hasinflicted upon
our nature, and how evil is found, as it were, in
the majority of the human species, and being
bound besides to have concern for the well-
being of the many, has in certain cases (cf.
page 1 06 above) to preclude art, in the name oi
the higher interests of human welfare, from
liberties which in themselves would belawful.
In this, no doubt, the golden mean is hard to
to shun
keep. Butanyhow to goin dread of art,
it and
get it shunned is
assuredly no solution.

178
 It were devoutly to be wished that the
Catholics ofour day should bear in mind that the
Church and the Church alone has succeeded
in moulding the people unto beauty, at the
same time protecting them from the
"depravation"
whichPlato and
Jean Jacques Rousseau
lay at the doors
of Art and
Poetry.
r\