Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/285

Rh. Now this scrupulous realism, this aspiration to render exactly all natural details, is the characteristic feature of the spirit of the expiring Middle Ages. It is the same tendency which we encountered in all the fields of the thought of the epoch, a sign of decline and not of rejuvenation. The triumph of the Renaissance was to consist in replacing this meticulous realism by breadth and simplicity.

The art and literature of the fifteenth century in France and in the Netherlands are almost exclusively concerned with giving a finished and ornate form to a system of ideas which had long since ceased to grow. They are the servants of an expiring mode of thought. Now, the literature and the art of a period in which artistic creation is almost limited to mere paraphrasing of ideas fully thought out, will differ widely from each other in their value for future ages. Let us consider roughly, for a moment, the impression left upon us, on the one hand, by the literature of the fifteenth century, and on the other hand by its painting. Villon and Charles d’Orléans apart, most of the poets will appear superficial, monotonous and tiresome. Always allegories with insipid personages and hackneyed moralizing, always the same themes repeated to satiety: the sleeper in the orchard, who, in a dream, sees a symbolic lady; the walk at daybreak in the month of May; the “debate” on a love case; in short, an exasperating shallowness, cloying romanticism, vapid imagery. We shall rarely glean a thought there which is worth being remembered, or an expression which dwells in our memory. The artists, on the other hand, are not only very great, like Van Eyck, Foucquet, or the unknown who painted “The Man with the Glass of Wine,” but nearly all, even the mediocre ones, arrest our attention by each detail of their work and hold us by their originality and freshness. Yet their contemporaries admired the poets much more than the artists. Why was the flavour lost in the one case and preserved in the other?

The explanation is that words and images have a totally different æsthetic function. If the painter does nothing but render exactly, by means of line and colour, the external aspect of an object, he yet always adds to this purely formal reproduction something inexpressible. The poet, on the contrary, if he only aims at formulating anew an already expressed