Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/501

Rh is precisely what has been steadily dying out from modern art, as the physical sciences have more and more imposed their sway upon our ways of thinking and our habits of life. The true function of the artist, as of the metaphysician, is to seek the reason and essence of things. But while to the philosopher this reason and essence are revealed in a principle, in a general conception, to the artist they are revealed in a concrete form, as individual beauty. Both are seekers after truth; but the beautiful is the splendor of the true, and the sense of beauty is the light of the intellect. Materialism quenches that light. All that the artist now usually aims at is to copy exactly, to reproduce phenomena. And here, indeed, he attains some measure of success, especially if the phenomena be of the lupanarian order. Well has Mr.Ruskin pronounced the art of our own time to be "a poor toy, petty or vile." Perhaps its portraits are its most valuable achievement. But their value is rather historical than artistic; they tell their own tale about the men and women of the age. What that tale is, a distinguished French painter not long ago pointed out. They are the abstract and brief chronicle, he observed, in which is written the spiritual history of our century. During the first half of it, the neck is thrown back, the head is upturned toward heaven, as if in quest of some ideal vision. As we draw toward our own days the neck contracts, the head sinks nearer the shoulders, as though by the instinctive movement of a bull gathering himself up for the combat. It is because the battle of life has become more intense, because the mind is concentrated upon the material interests of the world. The habit of thought—curious verification of a law of Darwin's—has transformed the physical habit. A most delicate and sensitive intellect—to whom British philistinism, with its "certitude de mauvais goût," has largely paid the homage of its contumely and scorn—notes the same fact in his own way. The substitution of the laws of dead matter for the laws of the moral nature, the subjection of the soul to things, "écraser I'homme spirituel, dépersonalizer l'homme" is, as Amiel discerned, the dominant tendency of the times. It appears to me that if you survey the civilized world you find everywhere the same tokens. Everywhere I note the practical triumph of that earth-to-earth philosophy which will see nothing beyond experience, which shuts off the approach of science to all that can not be weighed and measured. Everywhere literature and art are losing themselves in the most vulgar sensuousness. Look throughout Europe, and what, in every country, are the great majority of the educated classes, who give the tone to the rest? Skeptics in religion, doubters in ethics, given over to industrialism, and to the exact sciences which minister to it, respecting nothing but accomplished fact and palpable force, with nerves more sensitive than their hearts, seeking to season the platitude of existence by a more or less voluptuous æstheticism, a more or less prurient hedonism. Such are the men of this new ago. The intellectual atmosphere