Google This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world's books discoverable online. It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover. Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the publisher to a library and finally to you. Usage guidelines Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing tliis resource, we liave taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying. We also ask that you: + Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes. + Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. + Maintain attributionThe Google "watermark" you see on each file is essential for in forming people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it. + Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liabili^ can be quite severe. About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http: //books .google .com/I 103 I HISTORY OF ART ANCIENT ART X ELIE FAURE HISTORY OF ART ANCIENT ART Translated from the French by WALTER PACK Illustrated from Photographs Selected by the Author HARPER 0- BEOTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXXI 292456 History of Art — Ancient A «it *•• ; *. '. I {tîb^ynght, 1921, bi* Haiper & Brother» Printed in the United States of America L-V To My Wife Pompeian mosaic {Atiueiim of Naples), TABLE OF CONTENTS Tranbiatoii'b Pbbtack ii Intboduition to the FiRBT French Edition (1908) . . . ivii Preface to the New Editiom (IOSO) xxxr I. Before Histort 3 II. EOTPT 81 III. The Ancient Orient 78 IV. The Sources of Greek Art 118 V, Phidias 149 Yl. The Dose of Mankind 187 \1I, Intoutb Greece 299 VIII. Rome «OS Alpbareticai. Index 305 Stwoftic Tahu» 307 SioNS AND Abbreviations 309 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE A RT history is, in its essentials, the history of ZJk man, for no one can write the story of art in -A- ^ more than a superficial way without following out the relation of each school to the ideas of its period and its people. But it is even more than that : it is the history of the development of man as revealed by his art. Elie Faure, in the present history, pursues this idea with a fidelity and an understanding that it has never received till now. Indeed, one may almost say that such a work aS this could not have been written earlier, for it has been only gradually that we have come to understand the relation of art to the character and surroundings of the races it represents. Various works on isolated artists and schools have dealt with their subject from this standpoint, but there existed no survey of the world's art as a whole until the four volumes of this series were written. The professional, whether critic, teacher, or artist, will find in these pages the fullest application of the modem theory of history (for the governing idea here is one that goes beyond the limits of art history), while the layman will follow the epic of man's development in company with a passionate lover of beauty who has the gift of commimicating his enthusiasm. It is a fallacy to believe that a book for the general reader X TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE sbould dilute the ideas of works addressed to spe- cialists. The contrary is true: to meet the needs of persons bf diverse interests, more intensity of idea is required, more breadth of scope, than is demanded of a treatise for specialists, whose .concern with their subject will cause them to overlook dryness and diffuseness if a valuable theory is established or new facts are arrived at. For a comparison of the older and the newer views of art history, the reader can scarcely be referred to anything clearer than M. Faure's own discussion in the preface to the new edition of this work (page xxxv). His brief reference there to the synoptic tables at the back of each volume may be supplemented by the assurances received from various close students <^ the special schools and epochs, who agree in vouching for the thoroughness with which this most objective com- pilation of names and dates has been made. A refer- ence chart is thus constantly before the reader, serving him as a road map does a traveler. The text of most art histories does little more than amplify such tables. The characteristic which distinguishes Elie Faure's History of Art is that it shows the mass of facts func- tionally — as the living brain and heart of mankind. The loyalty with which, in the preface mentioned, M. Faure defends the work of the archseologist is due in part to his appreciation of the material that the searchers for detail have placed at his disposal, ibtless in part also to the fact that he himself the labor of obtaining the first-hand informa- i which the history and interpretation of art TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xi are built. At no one place, however (and one need not fear to lay too much stress on this point), does he fall into the error of imagining that an assembling of facts is history. Even when writing of arts like the Egyptian and the Greek, as to which his study on the historic sites has given him a special authority, even when treating of the Gothic period, as to which his knowledge is so profound as to make Mr. Have- lock Ellis apply the word "unsurpassable" to the chapters of this history on Gothic art — ^his modem understanding of his task causes him to refer con- stantly to the philosophy, social life, and ideals of the people under examination, and not to their art atone. He goes farther, and by a series of dramatic confrontations makes us realize the differences among the arts and their debt to one another. Thus, in the pages on the Gothic he has before his eyes the color of Mohanmiedan art which was of such importance to western Europe when its returning crusaders brought back to the glassmakers of the cathedrals their mem- ories of the Orient. Yet M. Faure's main guide in this part of his study is the life of the mediaeval com- mune; he shows its relation to the appearance or nonappearance of great cathedrals in the French cities and its use as a basis for an explanation of the differ- ence between English and French Gothic. We are thus relieved in very large measure from the tyranny of taste and of arbitrary assertion that plays so large a part in most art writing. In the present volume, again, the rise and decline of Greek art are not treated as matters that have xii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE been permanently decided by experts; neither does the author justify his statements in terms of aesthetics to be followed only by those persons who have had a special experience in the arts. The sources of Greek art are studied with a view of allowing anyone inter- ested in the subject to see the reason for the "focus" that would' be produced when the elements of the light were fused, the golden period is considered with relation to the ideas of philosophy and liberty which had so great an effect on the arts, and as Greece turns to the Dusk of Mankind (with which variant of Wag- ner's word " Gotterdammerung " M. Faure entitles his chapter on the decline), we are again shown, in the ideas at work in the race, the reasons for the new phases of its art — and not simply told that one statue is later or worse than another, or involved in technical intricacies from which we only escape with the classic "de gustibus.*^ A feature of the history, which, the English reader will recognize with the four volumes before him, is the scoi>e of the work. It is one of the proofs of its right to represent the modern idea of art. Beginning with the accessions to our knowledge a century ago, when important Greek works came to northern Europe, we have for a hundred years been extending the boundaries of the art considered classic. The mas- terpieces of Japan, China, and India have been reach- ing us only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The last of the exotic arts to affect Europeans has been that of the African sculptors. No other history approaches that of M. Faure in its full and clear TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xiii study of the contribution of these more lately recog- nized arts to the widening of our horizon and to the changes in our understanding which they have caused. It is not alone that the art of the last half centuty is different from that of earUer times because it is built on a wider base, but that to-day we see the whole of the past with new eyes. As our thought evolves there will unquestionably be further changes in our estimate of the past, but the summary resulting from the present work may confidently be expected to hold its rank as an important one in the history of the subject. For we have here the ideas of a period of intense research and criticism, and a point in that period when our thought has attained at least a temporary tranquillity through its grasp of the new elements at its command and through an outlook on art that represents the creative men of the epoch. It is to be doubted whether later critics will differ, to a radical d^ree, from the judgment of the Renais- sance to which M. Faure points in his volume on that period, for the great critical activity of the last half century has been specially occupied with the Renais- sance, and M. Faure knows well the results of this study. Perhaps it will be around the volume on Modem Art that later discussion will mainly center, for here the currents of interpretation sometimes issue from conflicting sources. M. Faure's analysis, however, must have a permanent interest, for it is based on too deep an understanding of the political and social structure of the European countries ever to be entirely superseded. It is the philosophy of a xiv TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE man whose role în the drama of his time is em'iched by the great breadth of his activities and who has drawn on them all in his writing on art— the central interest of his. career. Elie Faure is a physician, and the scientist's knowledge and point of view is to be traced in his History of Art as well as in his masterly essay on Lamarck. He is one of the founders of the Université Populaire and one of its lecturers. The thought on social questions which informs those books by M. Faure that treat of economic and racial evolution, of ethics and of war, recurs when he writes of art, or rather he looks on all of these things as inextricably mingled. As we reach his pages on the later nineteenth cen- tury and the twentieth (for the last volume carries us to the art produced since the war), we find the author giving not only the original judgments that characterize his history from its beginning, but trans- mitting to us the ideas of the artists themselves, for as a result of his personal acquaintance with many of the chief workers of his time, he is enabled to s{>eak not only of them but for them. And yet the tone of these pages is but little different from that of the remainder of the work; the arts of the past have been so alive for the writer that his words seem to come most often from one who had seen the work produced. While searching untiringly for the facts of history and presenting their essentials in the order and relationship that the most modem scholarship has made available, the idea behind the TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xv whole work must (as M. Faure himself explains in the preface to the new edition before cited) be tinged with the personality of the writer and by the character of his time. "The historian who calls himself a scientist simply utters a piece of folly/' In these* matters judgment is inevitable, for to write the history of art one must make one's decisions as to what it is. The writing of it is in itself a work of art — as the style of Elie Faure is there to prove. Only one who feels the emotions of art can tell others which are the great works and make clear the collective poem formed by their history. It is precisely because EUe Faure is adding something to that poem that he has the right to tell us of its meaning. Walter Pack. INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST FRENCH EDITION (1909) ART, which expresses life,' is as mysterious as life. I \ It escapes all formulas, as life does. But the ■*- ■^ need of defining it pursues us, because it enters everj" hour of our existence, aggrandizing the aspects of that existence by its more elevated forms or dis- honoring them by its lower forms. No matter how distasteful it is for us to make the effort to hear and to observe, it is impossible for us not to hear and to see, it is impossible for us to refrain wholly from form- ing some kind of opinion of the world of appearances — the meaning of which it is precisely the mission of art to reveal to us. Historians, moralists, biologists, and metaphysicians — all those who demand of life the secret of its origins and its purposes — are sooner or later compelled to ask why we recognize ourselves xviii INTRODUCTION in the works which manifest life. But the too restricted limits of biology, of metaphysics, of morality, and of history compel us to narrow the field of our vision when we enter the moving immensity of the poem that man sings, forgets, and has begun again to sing and to forget ever since he has been man. It matters not which of these studies has interested us, the feeling for beauty will be found to be identical in all of them. And without doubt it is this feeling that dominates them and draws them on to that possible unity which is the goal of human activity and which alone makes that activity real. It is only by Ustening to the heart that one can speak of art without belittling it. We are all, in some measure, partakers of the truth, but we cannot know truth itself, unless we desire passionately to seek it out and, having found it, feel the enthusiasm to pro- claim it widely. Only he who permits the divine voices to sing within him knows how to respect the mystery of the work which inspired him to induce other men to share in his emotion. Michelet did not betray the Gothic workmen or Michael Angelo, because he himself was consumed by the passion which uplifts the nave of the cathedrals and that other passion which unchains its storm in the vaults of the Sistine. Baudelaire was a great poet because he penetrated to the central hearth from which the spirit of the heroes radiates in force and in light. Moreover, if the ideas of Taine did not die with him, it is because his artist's nature is greater than his will and because his dogmatic stiffness is continually over- INTRODUCTION xix flowed by the incessantly renewed wave of sensations and of images. Taine came at the hour when we learned that our own destiny was bound up with the acts of those who have preceded us on life's road and even with the very structure of the earth from which we spring. He was, therefore, in a position to see the form of our thought issue from the mold of history. "Art sums up life." It enters us with the strength of our soil, the color of our sky, through the atavistic preparation which determines it, as well as through the passions and the will of men — which it defines. For the expres- sion of our ideas, we employ the materials which oiu* eyes can see and our hands touch. It is impossible that Phidias, the sculptor who lived in the South, in a clearly defined world, and Rembrandt, the painter who lived in the mist of the North, amid a floating world — two men separated by twenty centuries during which humanity lived, suffered, and aged — should use the same words. Only, it is necessary that we should recognize ourselves in Rembrandt as well as in Phidias. Not until we have expressed in some sort of language the appearance of the things about us do these things exist for us and retain their appearance. If art were nothing more than a reflection of societies, which pass like shadows of clouds upon the earth, we should ask no more of art than that it teach us history. But it recounts man to us, and, through him, the universe. It goes beyond the moment, it lengthens the duration of time, it widens th^ comprehension of man, and ex- XX INTRODUCTION tends the life and lîmît of the universe. It fixes moving eternity in its momentary form. In recounting man to us, art teaches us to know and understand ourselves. The strange thing is that there should be any need for art to do this. Tol- stoi's book ^ meant nothing else. He came at a pain- ful moment when, strongly fortified by the results of our research work, but bewildered bv the horizons which it opened, we perceived that our effort was becoming diffused, and sought to compare the results attained in order to unite in a common faith and march forward. We think and believe what we need to think and to believe, and it is this which gives to our thoughts and beliefs, throughout our historj-, that indestructible foundation of humanity which they all have. Tolstoi said what it was necessary to say at the moment when he said it. Art is the appeal to the instinct of communion in men. We recognize one another by the echoes it awakens in us, which we transmit to others by our enthusiasm, and which resound in the deeds of men throughout all generations, even when those genera- tions may not suspect it. If, during the hours of depression and lack of comprehension only a few of us hear the call, it is that in those hours we alone possess the idealistic energy which later is to reanimate the heroism asleep in the multitudes. It has been said that the artist is sufficient unto himself. That is not true. The artist who says so is infected with an evil pride. The artist who believes it is not an * Tolstoi. What is Art f INTRODUCTION xxi artist. If he had not needed the most universal of our languages, the artist would not have created it. He would dig the ground to get his bread on a desert island. No one has more need of the presence and approbation of men. He speaks because he feels their presence around him, and lives in the hope — sometimes despaired of but never relinquished — that they will come at last to understand him. It is his function to pour out his being, to give as much as he can of his life, to demand of others that they also give him as much as they can of themselves, to realize with them — in an obscure and magnificent collabora- tion — a harmony all the more impressive that a greater number of lives have participated in it. The artist, to whom men give everj'thing, returns in full measure what he has taken from them. Nothing touches us except what happens to us or what can happen to us. The artist is ourselves. He has behind him the same depths of humanity, whether enthusiastic or depressed; he has about him the same secret nature, which each of his steps broadens. The artist is the crowd, to which we all belong, which defines us all, with our consent or despite our resistance. He has not the power to gather up the stones of the house which he builds us (at the risk of crushing in his breast and of tearing his hands), on any road save that on which we travel at his side. He must suffer from that which makes our suffering, and we must make him suffer. He must feel our joys and he must derive them from us. It is necessary that he live our griefs and our inner victories, even when we do not feel them. xxîi INTRODUCTION The artist can feel and dominate his surroundings only when he considers them as a means of creation. Only then does he give us those permanent realities which all acts and all moments reveal to those who know how to see and how to live. These realities survive the changes in human society as the mass of the sea survives the agitations of its surface. Art is always a "system of relations," Mid a synthetic sys- tem. This is true even of primitive art, which shows the passionate pursuit of an essential sentiment, despite its indefatigable accumulation of detail. Every image symbolizes in brief the idea which the artist creates for himself of the unlimited world of sensa- tions and forms. Every image is an expression of his desire to bring about in this world the reign of that order which he knows how to discover m it. Art has been, since its most humble origins, the realization of the presentiments of certain men — who answer the needs of all men. Art has forced the world to yield to it the laws which have permitted us to establish progressively the sovereignty of our mind over the world. Emanating from humanity, art has revealed to humanity its own intelligence. Art has defined the races; alone it bears the testimony of their dra- matic effort. If we want to know what we are, we must understand what art is. Art initiates us into certain profound realities whose actual possession would enable humanity to bring about, within and around, itself the supreme harmony which is the fugitive goal of its endeavor; we do not desire such possession, however, as its effect would INTRODUCTION xxiii be to kill movement and thereby kill hope. Art is surely something infinitely greater than it is imagined to be by those who do not understand it. Perhaps also it is more practical than is thought by many of those who feel the force of its action. Bom of the association of our sensibihty and our experience, formed in order that we may be the masters of our- selves, it has, at all events, nothing of that disinter- ested aloofness to which Kant, Spencer, and Guyau himself attempted to limit to its sphere. All the images in the world are useful instruments for us, and the work of art attracts us only because we rec- ognize in it the formulation of our desire. We admit freely that objects of primary utility — our clothing, our furniture, our vehicles, our roads, our houses — seem to us beautiful when they serve their purpose adequately. But we stoutly persist in placing above — that is, outside of Nature, the supe- rior organisms in which she proclaims herself — our bodies, our faces, our thoughts, the infinite world of ideas, of passions, and of the landscapes in which these organisms Uve,and by which they are mutually defined — so that we are unable to separate them. Guyau did not go far enough when he asked himself if the most useful gesture were not the most beautiful, and with him we recoil from the decisive word as if it would stifle our dream. Yet we know our dream to be imper- ishable, since we shall never attain that realization of ourselves which we pursue unceasingly. Let me quote a sentence uttered by him among all men whose intelligence was freest, perhaps, from any material xxîv INTROI>ÛCTION limitation: "Is it not the function of a beautiful body," saîd Plato, "is it not its utility which demon- strates to us that it is beautiful? And everything which we find beautiful — faces, colors, sounds, pro- fessions — are not all these beautiful in the measure that we find them useful?** Let our idealism be reassured! It is only by a long accumulation of emotion and of will that man reaches the point on life's road where he can recognize the forms which are useful to him. It is this choice alone, made by certain minds, which will determine fpr the future, in the instincts of multitudes, what is destined to pass from the domain of sp>eculation into the domain of practice. It is our general development, it is the painful but constant purification of our intelligence and of our desire, which create and render necessary certain forms of civilization — which positive minds translate into the direct and easy satisfaction of all their material needs. What is most useful to man is the idea. The beautiful form, whether it be a tree or a river, the breasts of a woman or her sides, the shoulders or arms of a man, or the cranium of a god — the beautiful form is the form that adapts itself to its function. The idea has no other role than that of defining the form for us. The idea is the lofty outlook and the infinite extension in the world and in the future of the most imperious of our instincts. It sums up and proclaims this instinct as the flower and the fruit sum up the plant, prolong it and perpetuate it. Every being, even the lowest, contains within himself, at INTRODUCTION xxv least once in his earthly adventure — when he loves — all the poetry of the world. And he whom we call the artist is the one among living beings who, in the presence of miiversal life, maintains «the state of love in his heart. The obscure and formidable voice which reveals to man and to woman the beauty of woman and man, and impels them to make a decisive choice so that they may perpetuate and perfect their species, never ceases to resound in the artist, strengthened and multiplied by all the voices and the murmurs and the sounds and the tremblings which accompany it. That voice — ^he is forever hearing it, every time that the grasses move, every time that a violent or graceful form proclaims its life along his pathway. He hears it as he follows, from the roots to the leaves, the rise of the sap from under the earth to the trunks and the branches of the trees, every time that he looks at the sea rising and falling as if to respond to the tide of billions of life-cells that roll in it, every time that the fructi- fying force of heat and rain overwhelms him, every time that the generating winds repeat to him that human hymns are made up of the calls to voluptu- ousness and hope with which the world is filled. He seeks out the forms which he foresees, as a man or an animal in the grip of love seeks them. His desire passes from one form to another, he compares them pitilessly, and from his comparisons there springs forth, one day, the superior form, the idea whose recollection will weigh on his heart so long as he has not imparted his own life to it. He suffers until xxvi INTRODUCTION death, because each time that he has made a form fruitful, brought an idea to light, the image of another is bom in him, and because his hope, never wearied of reaching out for what he desires, can only be bom of the despair at not having attained his desire. He suffers; his tyrannical disquietude often makes those around him suffer. But around him, and fifty cen- turies after him, he consoles millions of men. The work he will leave behind him will assure an increase of power to those who can understand the logic and the certitude of his images. In listening to him, men will enjoy the illusion which he enjoyed for a moment — the illusion, often formidable but always ennobling, of absolute adaptation. ^ It is the only divine illusion! We give the name of a god to the form which best interprets our desire — sensual, moral, individual, social, no .matter what, — our vague desire to comprehend, to utilize life, cease- lessly to extend the limits of the intelligence and the heart. With this desire we invade the lines, the pro- jections, and the volumes which proclaim this form to us, and it is in the meeting with the powerful forces that circulate within the form that the god reveals himself to us. From the impact of the spirit that animates the form with the spirit that animates us, life springs forth. We shall never be able to utilize it unless it responds wholly to those obscure move- ments which dictate our own actions. Rodin sees quivering in the block of marble a man and a woman knotted together by their arms and their legs, but we shall never understand the tragic necessity for INTRODUCTION xxvii such an embrace if we do not feel that an inner force, desire, mingles the hearts and the flesh of the bodies thus welded together. When Carrière wrests from the matter of the universe a mother giving the breast to her child, we shall not understand the value of that union if we do not feel that an inner force, love, dic- tates the bending of the torso and the curve of the mother's arm, and that another inner force, hunger, buries the infant in her bosom. The image that expresses nothing is not beautiful, and the finest senti- ment escapes us if it does not directly determine the image which shall translate it. The pediments, frescoes, and epics, the symphonies, the loftiest archi- tectures, all the sweep of liberty, the glory and the irresistible power of the infinite and living temple which we erect to ourselves, are in this mysterious accord. In every case, it is this agreement which defines all the higher forms of the testimonies to confidence and faith which we have left on our long road. It defines all our idealistic effort, which no finalism — in the "radical" ^ sense which the philosophers are giving to the world — has directed. Our idealism is no other thing than the reality of our mind. The necessity of adaptation creates it and maintains it in us, that it may be increased and transmitted to our children. It exists as a possibility at the foundation of our original moral life, as the physical man is contained in the distant protozoan. Our research for the abso- lute is the indefatigable desire for the repose that ^ H. Bergson. Creative EvoltUion, xxviîî INTRODUCTION would result from our decisive triumph over the group of blind forces which oppose our progress. But, for our salvation, the farther we go, the more distant the goal becomes. The goal of life is living, and it is to ever-' moving and ever-renewing life that our ideal leads us. When we follow the march of time and pass from one people to another, the forms of that ideal seem to change. But what changes, basically, is the needs of a given time or the needs of given peoples whose future alone can show, across the variations of appear- ances, the identity of their nature and the character of their usefulness to us. Scarcely have we left the Egypto-Hellenic world* before we see, stretching before us like a plain, the kingdom of the mind. The temples of the Hindoos and the cathedrals break into its frontiers, the cripples of Spain and the poor of Hol- land invade it without introducing even one of those types of general humanity through which the first artists had defined our needs. What does it matter? The great dream of humanity can recognize, there again, the effort toward adaptation which has always guided it. Other conditions of life have appeared, different forms of art have made us feel the necessity for understanding them in order to direct us in the path of our best interests. Real landscape, the life of the people, and the life of the middle class, arrive and powerfully characterize the aspects of every day, into which our soul, exhausted with its dream, may retire and refresh itself. The appeal of misery and despair, even, is made, that we may get back to our- selves, know ourselves, and strengthen ourselves. INTRODUCTION xxix If we turn to the Egyptians, to the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Hindoos, the French of the Middle Ages, the Italians, and the Dutch, one after the other, it is that we belong now to one group of surroundings, now to one epoch, now to one minute, even of our time or of our life, which has need of a given people more than of another one. When we are cold we seek the sun; we seek the shadow when we are warm. The great civilizations which have formed us are each entitled to an equal share of our gratitude, because we have successively asked of each the things we lacked. We have lived tradition when it was to our interest to live it, and have accepted revolution when it saved us. We have been idealists when the world was abandoning itself to discouragement or was fore- seeing new destinies, realists when it seemed to have found its provisional stability. We have not asked for more reserve from passionate races or more ardor from positive races, because we have understood the necessity of passion and the necessity of the positive spirit. It is we who wrote the immense book wherein Cervantes has recounted our generous enthusiasm and our practical common sense. We have followed one or the other of the great currents of the mind, and we have been able to invoke arguments of almost equal value to justify our inclinations. What we call idealistic art, what we call realistic art, are momen- tary forms of our eternal action. It is for us to seize the immortal moment when the forces of conserva- tion and the forces of revolution in life marry, for the realization of the equilibrium of the human soul. XXX INTRODUCTION Thus, whatever the form in which a thing is offered to us, whether true now or true in our desire, or true both in its immediate appearance and in its possible destinies, the object by itself and the fact by itself are nothing. They count only through their infinitely numerous relationships with infinitely complex sur- roundings. And it is these relationships, never twice the same, which translate universal feelings of an infinite simplicity. Each fragment of the work, because it is adapted to its end, however humble that end may be, must extend itself in silent echoes through- out the whole of the depth and breadth of the work. Its sentimental tendencies are, in reality, secondary: "Beautiful painting," said Michael Angelo, "is religious in itself, for the soul is elevated by the effort it has to make to attain perfection and to mingle with God; beautiful painting is a reflection of that divine perfec- tion, a shadow from the brush of God ... !" Idealistic or realistic, a thing of the present day or of general conditions, let the work live, and in order to live, let it be one, first of all! The work which has not this oneness dies, like the ill-formed creatures which the species, evolving toward higher destinies, must eliminate little bv little. The work which is one, on the contrary, lives in the least of its frag- ments. The breast of an ancient statue, a foot, an arm, even when half devoured by subterranean mois- ture, quivers and seems warm to the touch of the hand, as if vital forces were still modeling it from within. The unearthed fragment is alive. It bleeds like a wound. Over the gulf of the centuries, the • INTRODUCTION xxxi mind finds its relations with the pulverized debris, it animates the organism as a whole with an existence which is imaginary, but present to our emotion. It is the magnificent testimony to the human importance of art, engraving the effort of our intelligence on the seats of the earth, as the bones we find there trace the rise of our material organs. To realize unity in the mind and to transmit it to the work is to obey that need of general and durable order which our universe imposes on us. The scientist expresses this order by the law of continuity, the artist by the law of harmony, the just man by the law of solidarity. These three essential instruments of our human adaptation — science, which defines the relations of fact with fact; art, which suggests the rela- tions of the fact with man; and morality which seeks the relations of man with man — establish for our use, from one end of the material and spiritual world to the other, a system of relations whose permanence and utility demonstrate its logic to us. They teach us what serves us, what harms us. Nothing else matters verj' greatly. There is neither error nor truth, neither ugliness nor beauty, neither evil nor good outside of the use in human problems which we give to our three instruments. The mission of our sensibility, of our personal intelligence, is to establish the value of them, through searching out, from one to the other, the mysterious passages which will permit us to grasp the continuity of our effort, in order to comprehend and accept it as a whole. By so doing we shall, little by little, utilize what we call error, ugliness, and evil. xxxii INTRODUCTION • as means to a higher education and realize harmony in ourselves, that we may extend it about us. Harmony is a profound law, which goes back to primitive unity, and the desire for it is imposed on us by the most general and the most imperious of all the realities. The forms we see live only through the transitions which unite them. And by these tran- sitions the human mind can return to the common • source of the forms, just as it can follow the nourishing current of the sap starting from the flowers and the leaves to go back to the roots. Consider a landscape stretching back to the circle of the horizon. A plain covered with grasses, with clump of trees, a river flow- ing to the sea, roads bordered with houses, villages, wandering beasts, men, a sky full of light or of clouds. The men feed on the fruit of the trees and on the meat and milk of the beasts, which yield their fur and their skins for clothing. The beasts live on grasses and leaves, and if the grasses and the leaves grow it is because the sky takes from the sea and the rivers the water which it spreads upon them. Neither birth nor death — life, permanent and confused. All aspects of matter interpenetrate one another, general energy is in flux and reflux, it flowers at everv moment, to wither and to reflower in endless metamorphoses; the symphony of the colors and the symphony of the murmurs are but little else than the perfume of the inner symphony which issues from the circulation of forces in the continuity of forms. The artist comes, seizes the universal law, and renders us a world complete, whose elements, characterized by INTRODUCTION xxxiii their principal relations, all participate in the harmoni- ous accomplishment of the ensemble of its functions. Spencer saw the bare heavenly bodies escaping from the nebulae, solidifying, little by little, the water con- densing on their surface, elementary life arising from the water, diversifying its appearances, every day lift- ing higher its branches, its twigs, its fruits, and, as a spherical flower opens to give its dust to space, the heart of the world expanding in its multiplied forms. But it seems that an obscure desire to return to its origins governs the universe. The planets, issue of the sun, cannot tear themselves from its encircling force, though they seem to want to plunge back into it. Atom solicits atom, and all living organisms, coming from the same cell, seek living organisms to make that cell again through burying themselves in each other. . . . Thus the just man contents himself with living, thus the scientist and thé artist delve into the world of forms and feelings and cause their consciousness to retrace its steps along the road which that world traveled, to pass from its ancient homo- geneity to its present diversity. And thus, in a heroic effort, they re-recreate primitive unity. Let the artist, therefore, be proud of his life of illumination and of pain. Of these heralds of hope he plays the greatest role. In every case he can attain this role. Scientific activity, social activity bear within themselves a signification sufficiently defined for them to be self-sufficient. Art touches science through the world of forms, which is the ele- ment of its work, it enters the social plane by addressing xxxiv INTRODUCTION itself to our faculty of love. There are great savants who cannot arouse emotion in us, men of great honesty who' cannot reason. There is no hero of art who is not at the same time (through the sharp and long conquest of his means of expression) a hero of knowl- edge and a human hero of the heart. When he feels living within him the earth and space and all that moves and all that lives, even all that seems dead — to the verj' tissue of the stones — how could it be that he should not feel the life of the emotions, the passions, the sufferings of those who are made as he is? Whether he knows it or not, whether he wants it or not, his art is of a piece with the work of the artists of yesterday and the artists of to-morrow; it reveals to the men of to-day the solidarity of their effort. All action in time, all action in space have their goal in his action. It is his place to affirm the agreement of the thought of Jesus, of the thought of Newton, and of the thought of Lamarck. And it is on that account that Phidias and Rembrandt must recognize each other and that we must recognize ourselves in them. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION (1920) I HAVE been on the point of suppressing the pages which serve as an Introduction to the first edition of this book. I judged tliem — I still judge them —boyish and tearful in their philosophy, and obscure and badly written as well. I have given up my inten- tion. After all, those pages represent a moment of myself. And since I have attempted to express that moment, it no longer belongs to me. Perhaps one ought to write works composed of several volumes in a few months, their documenta- tion once finishes! and the ideas they represent having been thoroughly set in order. The unity of the work would gain thereby. But the ensemble of the worker's effort would doubtless lose. Every time he thinks be has been mistaken, a living desire awakens in him, which pushes him on to new creations. In reality, each writer writes only one book, each painter paints only one picture. Every new work is destined, in the mind of its author, to correct the preceding one, to complete the thought — which will not be com- pleted. He does this work over and over again. xxxvi PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION wherever his sensation or thought was rendered imper- fectly in the preceding work. WTien man interro- gates and exerts himself, he does not really change. He only rids his nature of what is foreign to it, and deepens that portion that is his own. Those who bum their work before it is known, because it no longer satisfies them, are credited with great courage. I ask myself whether there is not still greater courage in admitting that one has not always been what one has become, in becoming what one is not yet, and in permitting to remain alive the material and irrefutable witnesses of the variations of one's mind. I have, therefore, no more suppressed the Iniroduc- tion of this volume than the chapters which follow it, where, however, ideas will also be found that I have great difficulty in recognizing to-day.' I cannot change the face that was mine ten years ago. And even if I could, should I exchange it for the one that is mine at the present day? I should lose, doubtless, for it is less young now. And who knows if one does not hate — just because one is older — the signs of youth in one's mind, as one disdains — because one regrets them — the remembrances of youth in one's body? In any case, hateful or not, one cannot modify the features of a face without at the same time destroy- ing the harmony of the old face, and thereby com- promising the features of the future face. For the irp»>ntpr nnpf of the ideas which we think constitute Ihat I have introduced into this new cditioa — additions neither add to nor subtract from anything from the of the work. They bear almost eidusivdy on the PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xxxvii our present truth have as their origin precisely those which we believe constitute our past error. When we consider one of our early works, the passages which strike us the most are those which we love least. Soon we see no more than these; they fascinate us; they mask the entire work. On closing the book again they still pursue us; we ask ourselves why, and the result is — however little our courage — that we open roads for ourselves which we had not suspected. Thus it is that the critical spirit, made sharp and subtle by the disappointments and sufferings of one's intellectual development, becomes, little by little, the most precious, and doubtless the most active, auxiliary of the creative spirit itself. I am a "self-taught" man. I confess it without shame and without pride. This first volume, which weighs on me, has served at least to inform me that if I was not yet, at the moment when I wrote it, out of the social herd, I was already repelled from entering the philosophic herd. The fact is that preconceived notions of aesthetics were so far from presiding over my education in art that it is my emotions as an artist which have led me, progressively, to a phil- osophy of art which becomes less and less dogmatic. In many of these old pages there will be found traces of a finalism which, I hope, has almost disappeared from my mind. The reason is that I have evolved with the forms of art themselves, and that, instead of imposing on the idols I adored a religion, I have asked these idols to teach me religion. All, in fact, revealed the same one to me, as well as the fact that xxxvîii PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION it was quite impossible to fix it precisely, because it is universal. I have had to make an effort in order to reach a harmonious conception of the plastic pK)em in which men commune. Even now it remains an undemon- strable, an intuitive, even a mystical, conception, if you like to call it that. Yet, in consideration of the effort expended, I hope that I may be pardoned the didactic solemnity of the beginning of my book. It is the mark of the thirtieth year, among those, at least, who have not the privilege of being free men at twenty and slaves at forty. When analysis begins to corrode one's early illusions, one draws oneself together, one wants to keep them intact, one defends oneself against the new illusions which are outlining them- selves; one insists on remaining faithful to ideas and images, to means of expression that are no longer a part of one. One surrounds oneself with a hard mold which hampers one's movements. Is not that, in all «esthetic and moral evolutions of the past and the • present, exactly the passage from the first instinctive ingenuousness to the free discovery of a second ingen- uousness, exactly such a passage as we see in the stiffness of all archaisms? If I am not mistaken in this, I should be very well pleased if the tense char- acter of the beginning of my book corresponded even a little to the tenseness of the first and most innocent among the builders of temples, the painters of tombs, and the sculptors of gods. I have been reproached with having written not a "History of Art," but rather a sort of poem concern- PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xxxîx ing the history of art. This reproach has left me wondering. I have asked myself what, outside of pure and simple chronology, the recital of inner events could be, when the material expression of those events consists entirelv of affective elements. In the sense in which the historians understand historj-, synoptic tables suffice, and I have prepared them. There is no history except that summed up by these tables which is not, fatally, submitted to the interpretation of the historian.^ What is true of the history of man's actions is infinitely more so of the history of his ideas, his sensations, and his desires. I cannot conceive a history of art otherwise than made up of a poetic transposition, not as exact, but as living as possible, of the plastic poem conceived by humanity. I have attempted that transposition. It is not my place to sav whether I have succeeded with it. To state the question a little differently, it seems to me that history should be understood as a symphony. The description of the gestures of men has no interest for us, no use, no sense even, if we do not try to seize on the profound relationships of these gestures, to show how they link together in a chain. We must try, especially, to restore their dynamic character, that unbroken germination of nascent forces engendered by the ceaseless play of the forces of the past on the forces of the present. Every man, every act, every work is a musician or an instrument in an orchestra. One cannot regard, it seems to me, the cymbal player or the triangle player as of the same importance as the 'Or rather, what history is there that the historian does not interpret? xl PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION violoncellos or of the mass of violins. The historian is the leader of the orchestra in that symphony which the multitudes compose with the collaboration of the artists, the philosophers, and the men of action. The historian's role is that of making clear the essential characters, to indicate their great lines, to make their volumes stand out, to contrast their lights with their shadows, to shade off the passages and harmonize the tones. It is so for the art-historian far more than for the historian of action — because the importance of action registers itself automatically in its results and traces, whereas the importance of a work of art is an affair of appreciation. The historian should be partial. The historian who calls himself a scientist simply utters a piece of folly. I do not know, nor he either, any measuring instrument which shall permit him to graduate the respective importance of Leochares and Phidias, of Bernini and Michael Angelo. It seems that this is admitted with regard to literary history, and that no one thinks of getting wrought up if the historian of letters forgets Paul de Kock, voluntarily or not, to dilate upon Balzac. Neither is anyone surprised if the professor at the Sorbonne, writing a history of France, gives more importance to the gestures of Napoleon than to those of Clarke or Maret. The purists protest only when the partiality of sentiment intervenes to judge Napoleon, Clarke, or Maret. They do not realize that the mere statement of facts already supposes a choice made by men as a whole or by the events themselves, before the historian begins to intervene. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xli When the question is one of contemporary history, the part of the orchestra leader is much more arduous to perform. The view of the facts as seen from a distance, the more or less strong or persistent influence of the events on minds, the memory that they have left, all these impose on him who writes a commentary of the past, certain summits, certain depressions, visible to all. And to recreate a living organism from them he need do no more than join them with a curve. From nearer by, intuition alone decides, and the courage to make use of it. So much the worse for him who does not dare and cannot leave to the future the task of saying whether he has done well or ill in dealing with the works and the men of his time, as an artist does with the light and shade which he distributes on the object. It is possible that, from the orthodox point of view of history, it is a heresy to affirm that the slightest study by Renoir, the slightest water color by Cézanne belongs much more effectively to the history of art than the hundred thousand canvases exhibited in ten years in all the salons of painting. And, notwithstanding, one must risk that heresy. The poet of the present makes the history of the future. Let us go farther. The gesture of a hungry man who stretches out his hand, the words that a woman murmurs in the ear of the passer-by on some ener- vating evening, and the most infinitesimal human gesture have a much more important place in the his- tory of art itself than the hundred thousand canvases in question, and the associations of interest which try xlii PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION to impose them on the public. The orchestral multi- tude brings into prominence the playing of artists like Cézanne and Renoir, and it is they, in turn, who make clear to us the value of the multitude, which is com- posed, only to an insignificant degree, of the mass of mediocre works. Amid them its voice arises like a cry in a silence full of indiscreet mimicry and excessive gesture. Our orchestra takes its elements from the widely scattered manners and customs, from the whole of their action on the evolution and exchange of ideas; it is in the discoveries, the needs, the social conflicts of the moment, the obscure and formidable upheavals that love and hunger provoke in the depths of collective life and the hidden springs of the individual conscience. I am quite willing to mention even the movement called "artistic," which'floats on the surface of his- tory by means of institutes, schools, and official doc- trines, like a rouge badly applied to a woman's face. ,It plays its little part in the great plastic symphony wherein Renoir and Cézanne in our time, for example, like Rubens and Rembrandt in another, play the most illustrious role. But it is only by indirect means that the spirit created in the crowds by this, "artistic" movement, reacts on each new affirmation of a great artist — ^who is unaware of practically all its manifes- tations. I think that if the risk is greater for the modern historian who gives prominence to Cézanne on^ HoTi^ir [n his narrative, his attempt is as legiti- n the "scientific" point of view as — for the of the past— the custom of quite candidly >re importance to Phidias than to Leochares. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xliii The fact is that we have been for more than a cen- tury — smce Wmckelmann approximately — far too much inclined to tolerate a growing confusion between art history and archaeology. One might as well confuse literature and grammar. It is one thing to describe, by their external character, the monuments that man has left on his joiuney, to measure them, to define their functions and style, to locate them in place and time — it is another thing to try to tell by what secret roots these monuments plunge to the heart of races, how they sum up the most essential desires of the races, how they form the recognizable testimony to the sufferings, the needs, the illusions, and the mirages which have hollowed out in the flesh of all men, living and dead, the bloody passage from sensa- tion to mind. It is thus that in wanting to write a history that should not be a dry catalogue of the plastic works of man, but a passionate narrative of the meeting of his curiosity and education with the forms that lie in his path, I may have committed — ^I have committed — errors of archaeology. Although I know worse errors, and although I have not failed to commit some of these besides, I will not go so far as to say that I do not regret them. Archaeology has been profoundly useful. By seek- ing and finding original sources, by establishing family likenesses, filiations, and the relationships of works and of schools, little by little, in the face of the diver- sity in the form of the images (from which so many warring schools of aesthetics have been inspired to create silly exclusivisms), archaeology has defined the xliv PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION original analogy of these works and schools and the almost constant parallelism of their evolution. Every- where, behind the artist, it has aided us to rediscover the man. Those among us, who have to-day become capable of entering into immediate communion with the most unexpected forms of art, evidently do not take note that such communion is the fruit of a long» previous education, for which archaeology is doubtless the best preparation, however convinced of the fact it is itself. Those who rise up with the greatest con- tempt against the insensibility of the archaeologist are probably those who owe him the greater part, if not of their sensibility, at least of the means which have permitted them to refine it. To-day we laugh at the worthy persons who grant scarcely a pitying look at the lofty spirituality of Egyptian statues, or who recoil in disgust before the grandiose bestiality of Hindu bas-reliefs. Notwithstanding, there were artists who jelt like those same worthy persons. I should not affirm that Michael Angelo would not have shrugged his shoulders before an Egyptian colossus, and I am quite sure that Phidias would have thrown Rembrandt's canvases into the fire. Archaeology, in plastics, is classification in zoology. Unknown to itself, it has fundamentally recreated the great inner unity of the universal forms and permitted the uni- versal man to affirm himself in the domain of the mind. That this universal man will one day realize himself in the social realm is a thing I shall beware of maintaining, although it is a possible thing. But that some men, among the great diversity of the idols. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xlv can seize upon the one god who animates them all, is a thing as to which I may be permitted, I hope, to rejoice with them. Doubtless I shall even try soon to draw forth from the idols some of the features of this god.^ But not here. The scope is not broad enough. And I hope my reader is too impatient to approach the recital of the adventures which I have tried to relate for him, to consent to pick its flower before we have had the joy of breathing its perfume together. However, I should not like to have the slightest mis- understanding exist between him and me, as we stand at the threshold of this book. I have already warned him that I scarcely recognized myself in these opening pages of a work already old. They constitute, more- over, an obscure and often common plea for the utility of art. I want to dissipate the ambiguity. I have not ceased to think that art is useful. I have even strengthened my feeling as to that fK)int. Not only is art useful, but it is, without the least doubt, the only thing that is, after bread, really useful to us all. Before bread, perhaps, for if we eat, it is really that we may keep up the flame which permits us to absorb — that we may recast it and spread it forth — the world of beneficent illusions which reveals itself and modifies itself, without a break, around us. From the caveman's or the lakeman's necklace of bones to the image d^Ejnnal tacked to the wall of the country tavern, from the silhouette of the aurochs dug in the wall of the grotto in Perigord to the ikon of the bed- ^The Spint of the Forms (forthcoming). xlvi PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION room before which the muzhik keeps his lamp burn- ing, from the war dance of the Sioux to the "Heroic Symphony," and from the graven design tinted, with vermilion and emerald hidden in the night of the hypogées to the gigantic fresco which shines in splendor in the festival hall of Venetian palaces, the desire to arrest in a definite form the fugitive appear- ances wherein we think to find the law of our universe, as well as our own law, and through which we keep alive in ourselves energy, love, and effort — is mani- fested with a constancy and a continuity which have never abated. Whether this be in dance or song, whether it be in an image or in the narrative recited to a circle of auditors, it is always the pursuit of an inner idol — which we think, each time, to be the final pursuit and which we never end. Philosophers, in speaking of this "disinterested play," affirm the irresistible need, which has urged us from the earliest times, to externalize the secret cadences of our spiritual rhythm in sounds or in words, in color or in form, in gesture or in steps. But the need asserts itself from this point of view as, on the contrary, the most imiversally interested of the deeper functions of the mind. Moreover, all games in them- selves, even the most childish, are attempts to establish order in the chaos of confused sensations and senti- ments. Man in his movement thinks that he adapts himself unceasingly to the surrounding world in its movement. And he believes that this adaptation takes place through the fleeting certitude he has of describing it forever in the intoxication of expression, PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xlvii as soon as he imagines that he has grasped a phenom- enon as a whole. Thus, what is most useful to men is play. The love of play, and the search for it, and the ardent curiosity which is a condition of play, create civilization. The civilizations — I should have said, those oases sown the length of time or dispersed in space, now alone, now interpenetrating, fusing at other times, attempting schemes, one after another, for a imanimous spiritual understanding among men — a possible, probable understanding, but one that is undoubtedly destined, if it be realized, to decline, to die, to seek within itself and around it the elements of a renewal. A civilization is a lyric phenomenon, and it is by the monuments which it raises and leaves after it that we appreciate its quality and its grandeur. It is defined to the extent that it imposes itself upon us through an impressive, living, coherent, and durable stvle. What men understand almost unanimously as "civilization" at the present hour has nothing at all to do with it. The tool of industry — the railroad, the machine, electricity, the telegraph — is only a tool. Whole peoples can employ it for immediate and mate- rially interested purposes, without any opening up in them, by that employment, of the deep springs of attention and emotion, of the passion for understand- ing, and the gift for expressing which alone lead to the great aesthetic style wherein a race communes for a moment with the spirit of the universe. From this point of view the Egypt of five thousand years ago, the China of five centuries ago are more civilized can, thank-s to these tools, make up vaster sympho- nies, more mixed and conipUcated witli influences and echoes, and served bj- a far greater number of instruments. But "moral progress," like "œsthetic progress." is merely bait which the social philosopher offers to the simple man in order to incite and increase his effort. Evil, error, ugliness, and folly will always, in the development of a new style, play tlieir indis- PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xlix pensable role as a real condition of imagination, of meditation, of idealism, and of faith. Art is a light- ning flash of harmony that a i>eople or a man conquers from the darkness and the chaos which precede him, follow him, necessarily surround him. And Prome- theus is condemned to seize the fire only that he may light up for a second the living wound in his side and the calm of his brow. ANCIENT ART Vezere at EyziEs Chapter I. BEFORE HISTORY riHE dust of Ijones, primitive weapons, coal, and buried wood — the old human as well as solar energy — come down to 5 tangled like roots in the fermentation of the dampness under the earth. The earth is the giver of life and the murderess, the dif- fused matter whieli drinks of death to nourish life. Living things are dissolved by her, dead things move in her. She wears down the stone, siie gives it the golden pallor of ivory or of bone. Ivory and bone before they are devoured become rough as stone at her touch. The wrought flints have the appearance of big triangular teeth ; the teeth of the engulfed mon- sters are like pulpy tubercles ready to sprout. The skulls, the vertebrie, and tiie turtle shells have the gentle and somber pafina of the old sculptures with 4 ./ANCIENT ART their quality.'trf. absoluteness. The primitive engrav- ings reseniH)«-iliose fossii imprints which have revealed to us the'-QJtture of the shell formations, of the plants Austria (Cuveni