Part 4 (1/2)
[Footnote 1: Vernon Lee, _Belcaro_.]
XVIII.
THROUGH ART TO FAITH.
There are few books more difficult to estimate than those in which M.
Huysman sets forth the story of a conversion generally supposed to bear no very distant resemblance to his own. It would be easy to find excellent reasons for a somewhat sweeping condemnation of his work, and others as excellent for a most cordial approval; and, indeed, we find critics more than usually at variance with one another in its regard. To be judged justly, these books must be judged slowly. The source of perplexity is to be found in the fact that the author, who has recently pa.s.sed from negation to Catholicism, carries with him the language, the modes of thought, the taste and temper of the literary school of which he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. _En Route_, and its sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism and faith. ”The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau,” and according as the critic centres his attention too exclusively on one or the other, such will his judgment be.
That his works have commanded attention, and awakened keen interest among members of the most varying and opposite schools of thought, is an undeniable fact which at all events proves them to be worth careful consideration.
The story of a soul's pa.s.sage from darkness to light, of its wanderings, vacillations, doubts, and temptations, must necessarily exercise a strong fascination over all minds of a reflective cast: ”The development of a soul!” says Browning, ”little else is worth study. I always thought so; you, with many known and unknown to me, think so; others may one day think so.” [1] It is from this attraction of soul to soul that the _Pilgrim's Progress_, together with many kindred works, derives its spell; and indeed it is to this that all that is best and greatest in art owes its power and immortal interest. Here, however, is one reason why _The Cathedral_ [2] can never be so attractive as _En Route_, ministering as it does but little to that deepest and most insatiable curiosity concerning the soul and its sorrows. It portrays but little perceptible movement, little in the way of violent revulsion and conflict; the spiritual growth which it registers is mostly underground, a strengthening and spreading of the roots. It deals with a period of quiet healing and convalescence after a severe surgical operation; with the ”illuminative” stage of conversion--for there is scarcely any doubt that the three volumes correspond to the ”purgative,” ”illuminative,”
and ”unitive” ways respectively.
Between pulling down and building up--both sensational processes, especially the former--there intervenes a sober time of planning and surveying, a quiet taking of information before entering on a new campaign of action. When the affections have been painfully and violently uprooted from earth, then first is the mind sufficiently free from the bias of pa.s.sion and base attachments to be instructed and illuminated with profit in the things concerning its peace, and to be prepared for the replanting of the affections in the soil of Heaven. The arid desert, with its seemingly aimless wanderings, intervenes between the exodus from Egypt and the entrance into the Land of Promise.
Dealing with this stage of the process of conversion, _The Cathedral_ is comparatively monotonous and barren of spiritual incident. What removes it still further from all chances of anything like popularity in this country is the extent to which it is occupied with matters of purely archaeological and artistic interest, and more especially with the mystical symbolism of the middle ages as chronicled in every detail of the great Cathedral of Chartres. Little as may be the enthusiasm for such lore in France, it is far less in England, where the people have for three centuries been out of all touch with the Catholic Church, and therefore with whatever modic.u.m of mediaevalism she still preserves as part of her heritage from the past. Architecturally we appreciate our dismantled cathedrals to some extent, but their symbolism is far less understood than even the language and theology of the schools, while the study of it meets as much sympathy as would the study of heraldry in a modern democracy. Yet we may say that the bulk of the book consists of an inventory of every symbolic detail in architecture, in sculpture, in painting, in gla.s.s-colouring, to be found at Chartres; to which is added a careful elaboration of the symbolism of beasts, flowers, colours, perfumes, all very dreary reading for the uninitiated, and to be criticized only by the expert.
Little scope as the plan of the book offers for any variety or display of character, being mainly occupied with erudite monologue, put sometimes into the mouth of Durtal, sometimes into that of the Abbe Plomb, yet the personalities of these two, as well as those of Geversin, Madame Bavoil, and Madame Mesurat, stand out very vividly, and make us wish for that fuller acquaintance with them which a little more movement and incident would have afforded.
But what will give most offence, and tend to alienate a certain amount of intelligent and valuable sympathy, is the violence, and even the coa.r.s.eness, with which the author, or at least his hero, handles, not only the opinions, but the very persons of those from whom he differs; the intemperance of his invective, the narrow intolerance and absolute self-confidence with which he sits in judgment on men and things.
As a matter of fact, this is rather a defect of style and expression than of the inner sentiment. It is part and parcel of the realist temper to blurt out the thought in all the clothing or nakedness with which it first surges up into consciousness, before it has been submitted to the censors.h.i.+p of reason; in a word, to do its thinking aloud, or on paper; to give utterance not to the tempered and mature judgment--the last result of refinement and correction, but to display the whole process and working by which it was reached. As it is part of M. Zola's art to linger lovingly over each little horror of some slaughter-house scene, until the whole lives for us again as in a cinematograph, so M. Huysman, engaged in the portrayal of a spiritual conflict, spares us no link in the chain of causes by which the final result is produced; he bares the brain, and exposes its workings with all the scientific calmness of the vivisector.
Whether we like or dislike this realism, we must allow for it in forming our judgment on these volumes, nor must we treat as final and approved opinions what are often the mere spontaneous suggestions and first thoughts of the mind, the oscillations through which it settles down to rest. Over and over again we shall find that Durtal subsequently raises the very objection to his own view that was on our lips at the first reading of it.
But even making such allowance, it none the less remains a matter of regret that one who, with perhaps some justice, considers that in point of art-appreciation ”the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public,” and chides them for ”their incurable lack of artistic sense,” who speaks of ”the frightful appet.i.te for the hideous which disgraces the Church of our day,” who himself in many ways, in a hundred pa.s.sages of sublime thought, of tender piety, of lyrical poesy, has proved beyond all cavil his delicacy of sentiment, his exquisite niceness in matters of taste, his reverence for what is chaste and beautiful, should at times be so deplorably unfaithful to his better instincts, so forgetful of the close and inseparable alliance between restraint and elegance. What can be weaker or uglier, more unbecoming an artist, more becoming a fish-wife, than his description of Lochner's picture of the Virgin: ”The neck of a heifer, and flesh like cream or hasty-pudding, that quivers when it is touched;” or of the picture of St. Ursula's companions, by the same hand: ”Their squab noses poking out of bladders of lard that did duty for their faces;” not to speak of the characterization of a ”Sacred Heart” too revolting to reproduce? Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with ”muck, wine-sauce, and mud,” it is difficult not to answer with a _tu quoque_ as far as this word-painting is concerned--difficult not to see here some morbid and ”frightful appet.i.te for the hideous” struggling with the healthy appet.i.te for better things.
However lame and ridiculous an artist's utterance may be, yet there is a certain reverence sometimes due to what he is endeavouring to say, and even to his desire to say it. We do not think it very witty or tasteful or charitable to laugh at a man because he stammers; still less do we overwhelm him with the coa.r.s.est abuse. One may well shudder at most presentments of the Sacred Heart, but even apart from all consideration for the artist, a certain reverence for the idea there travestied and unintentionally dishonoured, should forbid our insulting what after all is so nearly related to that idea, and in the eyes of the untaught very closely identified with it.
But an occasional trespa.s.s of this kind, however offensive, is not enough to detract materially from the value of so much that is meritorious; nor again will that outspoken treatment of delicate topics (less observable in _The Cathedral_ than in _En Route_), which makes the book undesirable for many cla.s.ses of readers, prevent its due appreciation on the part of others--unless we are going to put the Sacred Scriptures on the Index. In this vexed question, M. Huysman takes what seems the more robust and healthy view, but he appears to be quite unaware how many difficulties it involves; and consequently lashes out with his usual intemperance against the contrary tradition, which is undeniably well represented. It is not as though the advocates of the ”flight” policy in regard to temptations against this particular virtue were ignorant of the general principle which undoubtedly holds as regards all other temptations, and bids us turn and face the dog that barks at our heels. This counsel is as old as the world. But from the earliest time a special exception has been made to it in the one case of impurity by those who have professedly spoken in the light of experience rather than of _a priori_ inference. Both views are encompa.s.sed with difficulty, nor does any compromise suggest itself.
What seems to us one of the most interesting points raised by the story of Durtal's spiritual re-birth and development is the precise relation between the Catholic religion and fine art.
G.o.d has not chosen to save men by logic; so neither has He chosen to save them by fine art. If the ”election” of the Apostolic Church counted but few scribes or philosophers among its members--and those few admitted almost on sufferance--we may also be sure that the followers of the Galilean fishermen were not as a body distinguished by a fastidious criticism in matters of fine art. In after ages, when the Church a.s.serted herself and moulded a civilization more or less in accordance with her own exigencies and ideals, it is notorious how she made philosophy and art her own, and subjected them to her service; but whether in so doing she in any way departed from the principles of Apostolic times is what interests us to understand.
There is certainty no more unpardonable fallacy than that of ”Bible Christians,” who a.s.sume that the Church in the Apostolic age had reached its full expansion and expression, and therefore in respect of polity, liturgy, doctrinal statement and discipline must be regarded as an immutable type for all ages and countries; from which all departure is necessarily a corruption. They take the flexible sapling and compare it with aged knotty oak, and shake their heads over the lamentable unlikeness: ”That this should be the natural outgrowth of that! _O tempora, O mores!_”
Like every organism, in its beginning, the Church was soft-bodied and formless in all these respects; but she had within her the power of fas.h.i.+oning to herself a framework suited to her needs, of a.s.suming consistency and definite shape in due time. The old bottles would not serve to hold the new wine, but this did not mean that new bottles were not to be sought. Because the philosophy, the art, the polity of the age in which she was born were already enlisted in the service of other ideas and inextricably a.s.sociated with error in the minds of men, it was needful for her at first to dissociate herself absolutely from the use of instruments otherwise adaptable in many respects to her own ends, and to wait till she was strong enough to alter them and use them without fear of scandal and misinterpretation.
The Church is many-tongued; but though she can deliver her message in any language, yet she is not for that reason independent of language in general. There is no way to the human ear and heart but through language of some kind or another. It is not her mission to teach languages, but to use the languages she finds to hand for the expression of the truths, the facts, the concrete realities to which her dogmas point. This does not deny that one language may not be more flexible, more graphic than any other, more apt to express the facts of Heaven as well as those of earth. It only denies that any one is absolutely and exclusively the best.
It is no very great violence to include rhetoric, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, ritual, and every form of decorative art in the category of language and to bring them under the same general laws, since even philosophy may to a large extent be treated in the same way.
Christ has not commissioned His Church to teach science or philosophy, nor has He given her an infallible _magisterium_ in matters of fine art.
She uses what she finds in use and endeavours with the imperfect implements, the limited colours, the coa.r.s.e materials at her disposal to make the picture of Christ and His truth stand out as faithful to reality as possible; and--to press the ill.u.s.tration somewhat crudely--as what is rightly black, in a study in black and white, may be quite wrongly black in polychrome; so what the Church approves according to one convention, she may condemn according to another. May we not apply to her what Durtal says of our Lady: ”She seems to have come under the semblance of every race known to the middle ages; black as an African, tawny as a Mongolian;”--”she unveils herself to the children of the soil ... these beings with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, hardly able to express themselves”? The more we study the visions and apparitions with which saints have been favoured and the revelations which have been vouchsafed to them, the more evident is it that they are spoken to in their own language, appealed to through their own imagery.
Indeed, were it not so, how could they understand? Our Lady is the all-beautiful for every nation, but the type of human beauty is not the same for all. The Madonna of the Ethiopian might be a rather terrifying apparition in France or Italy.
There is no art too rough or primitive, or even too vulgar, for the Church to disdain, if it offers the only medium of conveying her truth to certain minds. Though custom has made it cla.s.sical, her liturgical language, whether Latin or Greek, when first a.s.sumed, was that of the mob--about as elegant as we consider the dialects of the peasantry. She did not use plain-chaunt for any of those reasons which antiquarians and ecclesiologists urge in its favour now-a-days, but because it was the only music then in vogue. Even to-day the breeziest popular melodies in the East are suggestive of the _Oratio Jeremiae_. Her vestments (even Gothic vestments!) were once simply the ”Sunday best” of the fas.h.i.+on of those days. If to-day these things have a different value and excellence, it is in obedience to the law by which what is ”romantic” in one age becomes ”cla.s.sical” in the next, or what is at first useful and commonplace becomes at last ceremonial and symbolic; and by which the common tongue of the vulgar comes by mere process of time to be archaic and stately. To ”create” ancient custom and ritual on a sudden, or to resuscitate abruptly that which has lapsed into oblivion, is, to say the least, a very Western idea, akin to the pedantry of trying to restore Chaucer's English to common use. _Nascitur non fit_, is the law in all such matters.