Neoclassicism

“ Like the grandees of the Classical Renaissance, they degraded art, which is a religion, to upholstery, a menial trade. They patronised craftsmen who looked not into their hearts, but into the past—who from the court of the Kalif brought pretty patterns, and from classical antiquity elegant illusions, to do duty for significant design. They looked to Greece and Rome as did the men of the Renaissance, and, like them, lost in the science of representation the art of creation. ”

“ The latter half of the eighteenth century was, throughout Europe, a period of revolt against the old ideas, the outworn bonds of mediæval society. In art and literature the older system, with its elaborately planned rules and formulas, is technically called "classicism"; and the outburst against it established "romanticism," the spirit of desire, the longing for higher things, an impulse which ruled the intellectual world for generations, and which many critics still believe to be the chief hope for the future. ”

“ Whatever may be said of the inferiority of the ancients to the moderns in natural and mechanical science, which no one is disposed to question, or even in the realm of literature, which may be questioned, there was one department of knowledge to which we have added nothing of consequence. In the realm of art they were our equals, and probably our superiors; in philosophy, they carried logical deduction to its utmost limit. ”

“ It is true that the main stress of neoclassical thought had rested on the fundamental likeness of all men in all ages, and had sought an ideal and universal norm in morals, conduct, and art. But there had always been counter currents making for a recognition of the inescapable differences among various races and individuals. ”

“ Why then does186 modernity in art arouse, not only in old Europe, but also, and perhaps more, in young America, so much diffidence and mistrust? Why do we, notwithstanding the attempts which modern artists make to emulate the ancients or to create new things, turn to the past when we want to possess or enjoy something really beautiful? May this contradiction be the effort of a last surviving prejudice? For centuries, man was educated to consider all antique things, only because they were antique, preferable to modern ones. ”

“ Libraries were burned, but models of ancient style survived to incite to new creation. Anarchy prevailed, but new states arose on the ruins of the old provinces. Men passed away, but not the fruits of the earth, nor the relics of genius. The new races gave a new impulse, when fairly established, to agriculture, to commerce, and to art. The fall of the empire was the destruction of fortunes and of farms, the change of masters, the dissolution of the central power of emperors, the breaking up of proconsular authority, the dissipation of conventionalities and fashions ”

“ As we advance, the impress of grandeur of thought, and energy of purpose, becomes obscured. This in part is no doubt owing to the decline of power to represent; but the decay of internal nobleness in the subject appears to have at least kept pace with the fall of material art; and, in the words of Pliny, when there were no longer images of mind, the lineaments of form also degenerated.
From a careful examination of the imperial busts,—for the jealous fears of these tyrants soon forbade any others to be sculptured—we derive our best knowledge of the Roman school. ”

“ It could gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alternately strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic inanity; the men of the Renaissance could, if they influenced it at all, influence the antique only for evil; they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and if we conscientiously seek for the spiritual improvements brought by them into antique types, we shall see that they consist in spoiling their perfect proportions; in making necks longer and muscles more prominent; in rendering more or less flaccid, or meagre or coarse, the grand and delicate forms of antique art. ”

“ A future race, born perhaps of our own, but having perchance no bond of origin with us, will succeed us in the empire of the planet. These new spirits of the earth will ignore or despise us. The monuments of our arts, should they discover vestiges of them, will have no meaning for them. Rulers of the future, whose mind we can no more divine than the palaeopithekos of the Siwalik Mountains was able to forecast the trains of thought of Aristotle, Newton, and Poincaré. ”

“ Yet in these gnarled times, the classical spirit would be so inimical to the spirit of modern business that when all its ramifications have been followed through we learn that classicism would be nothing other than howling rebellion. ”

“ The Revolution in America, soon followed by that in France, is the historical sign of the passing of the aristocratic spirit of classicism. Freedom, equality, the destruction of the bondage that had held the common people back from education and advancement, these are the new ideas. In literature as in life a reaction broke out against the formal, stilted, unemotional style of classicism. ”

“ The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the Dead Sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world. ”

“ Until we understand more or less completely how in the dim centuries of the later Empire and early middle age the great transformation of Græco-Roman into mediæval art was accomplished, we cannot quite understand the Renaissance itself, nor even the form which the whole modern art of Europe has come in the course of centuries to assume. ”

“ Mentally, we are now told that the men of the Old Stone Age, ugly as most of them must have been, had as large brains as ours; and he would be a bold man who should claim that we are intellectually equal to the Athenians or superior to the Romans. ”

“ Decadence, then, leaves us with a choice between Ersatz and retour. Ersatz demands ingenuity, and there is much ingenious work being done. Retour means classicism. It is not unlikely that the next phase of European thought will be a classical era, a turn away from the recent religion of "pure creation." A classical era, roughly, is one which strives to organize what resources are at hand, rather than find new resources. ”

“ We have above characterized the Renaissance as a time in which a “new man” found himself living in a “new universe.” But the old world of mediæval science, culture, and conventional manners had by no means been entirely outgrown and discarded. Periods of history do not “leave their low-vaulted past” as easily as a man may throw away his coat. Mediæval science and theology still remained, not only as a background but also as an aggressive social factor everywhere. Mediæval scholasticism was something with which the Renaissance had always to reckon. ”

“ Does anybody at last understand, will anybody understand what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph,... Hitherto there has been only this great war: there has never yet been a more decisive question than the Renaissance,—my question is the question of the Renaissance:—there has never been a more fundamental, a more direct and a more severe attack, delivered with a whole front upon the centre of the foe. ”

“ Either our civilisation will abate its aspirations to the level of the mediocrity which it is capable of producing in art, destroying in itself the remembrance of and regret for those ancient civilisations which created so many beautiful things; or it will have to put itself into a position to satisfy not only the æsthetic needs of the masses, but also those of the more cultured and refined strata of society. ”

“ What remains of Roman greatness even, except in laws and literature and renovated statues? Remember there is an undeviating uniformity in the past history of nations. What is the simple story of all the ages?—industry, wealth, corruption, decay, and ruin. What conservative power has been strong enough to arrest the ruin of the nations of antiquity? Have not material forces and glories been developed and exhibited, whatever the religion and morals of the fallen nations? ”

“ This critic, then, would not confine the terms classic and classicism to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates, i.e., in which the respect for authority, the love of order and decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for strangeness and novelty. ”

“ This was not accomplished by placing before the inferior race a higher ideal of life for imitation, but by a mingling of the blood of the nations—a transfusion into Gallic veins of the germs of a higher living and thinking—thus making them heirs to the great civilizations of antiquity. ”

“ It is nothing to the point whether the civilization of which all people boasted, and in which they trusted, was superior or inferior to that which has subsequently been achieved by the Gothic races. The question is, Did these arts and sciences produce an influence sufficiently strong to conserve society? That they polished and adorned individuals cannot be questioned. Did they infuse life into the decaying mass? Did they prolong political existence? Did they produce valor and moral force among the masses? Did they raise a bulwark capable of resisting human degeneracy or barbaric violence? ”

“ The position we have taken up towards classical antiquity is at bottom the profound cause of the sterility of modern culture; for we have taken all this modern conception of culture from the Hellenised Romans. We must distinguish within the domain of antiquity itself: when we come to appreciate its purely productive period, we condemn at the same time the entire Romano-Alexandrian culture. But at the same time also we condemn our own attitude towards antiquity, and likewise our philology. ”

“ The monster of the Renaissance, like his Roman ancestor, has no organic life, no suggestion of reality, and therefore no impressiveness comparable to that of the grotesque creature of the Gothic carver. ”

“ Curious, isn't it, when one comes to think of it, that the riper civilization has grown, the more perishable its records have become? The Chaldeans and Egyptians used bricks, and the Greeks and Romans made more or less use of stone and bronze, for writing. If the race were destroyed to-day and the earth should be visited, say, from Mars, five hundred years later or even less, our books would have perished, and the Roman Empire be accounted the latest and highest stage of human civilization. ”

“ Material greatness gave patronage to art and science. Art and science did not corrupt the people until they had also become corrupted. But prosperity produced idleness, pride, and sensuality, by which science, art, and literature became tainted. The corruption spread. Society was undermined, and the arts fell with the people, except such as ministered to a corrupt taste, like demoralizing pictures and inflammatory music. Why did not the arts maintain the severity of the Grecian models? Why did philosophy degenerate to Epicureanism? ”

“ The learned, who were chiefly in the possession of this knowledge, and who were incapable of distinguishing themselves by works of their own, claimed for the ancients an unlimited authority, and with great appearance of reason, since they are models in their kind. Maintaining that nothing could be hoped for the human mind but from an imitation of antiquity, in the works of the moderns they only valued what resembled, or seemed to bear a resemblance to, those of the ancients. ”

“ In this age of boundless prosperity, where were the great poets, where the historians, where the writers on political economy, where the moralists? For one hundred years there were scarcely ten eminent men in any department of literature whose writings have come down to us. There was the most marked decay in all branches of knowledge, except in that knowledge which could be utilized for making money. The imperial régime cast a dismal shadow over all the efforts of independent genius, on all lofty aspirations, on all individual freedom. ”

“ The implicit confidence of the neo-classicists in the art of Roman antiquity as the embodiment of all true principles of architectural design, and their unquestioning belief that mediæval art was wholly false in principle and barbaric in character, have seldom been more naïvely expressed. ”

“ Without undertaking to decide if the genius of Antiquity, as displayed by individuals, can justly claim supremacy, it would be easy to show that the ancient plane of civilization never reached our common level. The people were ignorant, vicious, and poor, or degraded to abject slavery,—itself the sum of all injustice and all vice. ”

“ We regard as a decided mistake the revived classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There is our own museum; the best, I suppose, that could be done in the way of revival; the work of an architect whom the first judges deemed a man of genius. ”