Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/275

Rh its new conception of art and of life by temporally misjudging the beauties and the truths of the preceding age.

The consciousness of æsthetic pleasure and its expression are of tardy growth. A fifteenth-century scholar like Fazio, trying to vent his artistic admiration, does not get beyond the language of commonplace wonder. The very notion of artistic beauty is still wanting. The æsthetic sensation caused by the contemplation of art is lost always and at once either in pious emotion or a vague sense of well-being.

Denis the Carthusian wrote a treatise, De venustate mundi et pulchritudine Dei. The difference of the two words of the title at once indicates his point of view: true beauty only appertains to God, the world can only be venustus—pretty. All the beauties of creation, he says, are but brooks flowing from the source of supreme beauty. A creature may be called beautiful in so far as it shares in the beauty of the divine nature, and thereby attains some measure of harmony with it. As a starting-point of æsthetics, this is large and sublime, and might well serve as a basis for the analysis of all particular manifestations of beauty. Denis did not invent his fundamental idea: he founds himself on Saint Augustine and the pseudo-Areopagite, on Hugues de Saint Victor and Alexandre de Halès. But as soon as he tries really to analyse beauty, the deficiency of observation and expression is apparent. He borrows even his examples of earthly beauty from his predecessors, especially from Hugues and Richard de Saint Victor: a leaf, the troubled sea with its changing hues, etc. His analysis is very superficial. Herbs are beautiful, because they are green; precious stones, because they sparkle; the human body, the dromedary and the camel, because they are appropriate to their purpose; the earth, because it is long and large; the heavenly bodies, because they are round and light. Mountains are admirable for their enormous dimensions, rivers for the length of their course, fields and woods for their vast surface, the earth for its immeasurable mass.

Medieval theory reduced the idea of beauty to that of perfection, proportion and splendour. Three things, says Saint Thomas, are required for beauty: first, integrity or perfection, because what is incomplete is ugly on that account; next, true proportion or consonance; lastly, brightness, because