Léon Hennique Novel

The Absolute remains forever beyond our grasp, alive only in our yearning. But isn’t it in the chimerical, in the impossible, that all our humanity’s noble reality dwells? Contentment with the finite betrays unmistakable impotence, for such contentment itself spawns the fatigue that saps our strength, each satisfaction another step towards death. Don’t we feel it in our very marrow, that death comes to us piecemeal, through a thousand small surrenders? If we could but steel our will towards the Eternal and Immense, towards the infinite and Absolute, death would touch us no more than a shadow touches stone—a trifling accident, powerless against the soul’s perpetual life. Here stands Lord Glanvill’s truth, that epigraph to Poe’s Ligeia which floods us like a living truth, with miraculous, divine pride: “And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

One scarcely needs metaphysics here—common reflection will do—to grasp that this impossible dream undergirds everything, the bedrock beneath all our certainties, instinctive and physical alike. The child lives so wholly in the absolute that, before education’s corrupting hand intervenes, it knows nothing of the relative; and the grown man, however grim or comforting his beliefs, schemes and strives as if immortal, feeling in his bones that his truest self persists in his offspring, in works of hand or mind, in echoes of his voice, even in his name chiselled on stone. Thus ancient Egypt consecrated life’s every energy to preparing the soul’s repose in death, its glory in the tomb that resurrection would fling wide—denying the void even in its seeming victory.

Yet in the pure domain of spirit, our souls’ living unity in the Absolute shines forth triumphant—the One and Eternal routing the manifold and fleeting. The moment we rescue our essence from the hamster-wheel of daily cares—forever finishing, forever beginning anew—by devoting ourselves to some abiding pursuit of thought, time itself dissolves. Sleep and waking blur into the single high purpose we have made our reason for being. The book, the artwork, the musical phrase, pure thought itself—I mean even before it takes form—all these eternalise the Self. Through them we shake off contingency’s shackles, and the instant it breaks free, the human Self springs back—like a bent sapling loosed to find its natural line—towards the Absolute’s hearth, the metaphysical sphere of Ideas, to God¹⁵.

Religions, Legends, Traditions, Philosophies—these are the most luminous emanations flowing from the Absolute to us, and the most irrefutable surges of our souls back towards the Absolute—that dream which holds us captive even as it eludes our grasp.

These same Philosophies, Traditions, Religions and Legends are the shared and only wellsprings of Art—that Art which, in the words of Pythagoras and Plato, sings to the lyre alone.

I cannot imagine anyone disputing this claim, sanctioned as it is by reason a priori and consecrated by history. Still, let us put Reason and History briefly to the question. History will bring us to the conditions of art in our own time—the very subject of this book.

The Beautiful has been debated to exhaustion. Definition upon definition has been ventured. It will serve us well to revisit them here, in the vital inventory assembled by M. de Goncourt:

“… The Beautiful! the splendour of the true… Plato, Plotinus… the quality of the idea revealing itself through symbolic form… a product of the idealising faculty… perfection dimly apprehended… the Aristotelian marriage of order and grandeur… What do I know?… The Beautiful—is it the Ideal? Yet the Ideal, traced to its root, εἴδω, I see, is nothing but the Beautiful rendered visible… Is it reality rescued from irregularity and accident? Is it the fusion, the concord of existence’s twin principles—idea and form, the essence of reality, visible and invisible made one?… Does it dwell in Truth?… But which Truth?… In imitating the beauty of beings, things, bodies? But what manner of imitation?… imitation through selection or through elevation? imitation stripped of particularity, without the iconic stamp of personality—man, not a man—imitation after some collective model of perfections? Is it beauty transcending true beauty… ‘pulchritudinem quae est supra veram…’ nature glorified anew? What, then, is the Beautiful? objectivity or subjectivity’s infinity? Goethe’s expressiveness? The individual element, the natural, the characteristic championed by Hirsch and Lessing? Man superadded to nature, in Bacon’s phrase? Nature filtered through personality, the individuality of sensation?… Or the Platonism of Winckelmann and Saint Augustine?… Is it one or many, absolute or manifold? The supreme expression of the boundless and indefinable? A droplet from God’s ocean, according to Leibnitz… for the Ironists, a counter-creation, a human reconstruction of the universe, divine handiwork replaced by something more human, more attuned to the finite self—open war on God!… A propaedeutic to morality, Fichte’s notion: Beauty as utility! The Dream of the True! The Beautiful! But hold—who can say it even exists? Does it inhabit objects or our minds? The idea of Beauty—perhaps it’s nothing but an immediate, unreasoning, personal sentiment. Who can say?…”¹⁶

The Dream of Truth. One could easily reduce to this formula even the most wayward definitions of Beauty. Every one of them—Fichte’s included—imagines a beyond where souls, escaping their dismal uncertainties, bask in clarity, in festive light, in an illumination of the spirit through those senses alive to the delights of line and shade, sound and modulation. Whether confined to this realm of spiritualised senses or, as Fichte would have it, extended to consciousness itself, what is this sensual-spiritual pleasure but Truth radiating through symbols—Truth freed from Abstraction’s dry bones and perfected in the raptures of Dream? Dream: that Beyond where the blinding Affirmation withdraws into shadow, sparing our sight whilst gaining in depth and those distant reverberations that lure the spirit ever further into mystery.

By this reckoning, a work achieves art only when it begins where it appears to end—when its symbolism becomes a trembling portal whose harmonious hinges shake the whole soul awake to Mystery. Not merely stirring one faculty of our compound nature, not spirit alone nor senses alone, but revealing through a form so perfect it dissolves itself, leaving in the tremor of Thought only the vague and spellbinding presence—spellbinding and sovereign, sovereign and fertile—of some divine emanation of the Infinite. For in such ideal work, form serves merely as bait for sensual appetite: the senses, charmed and intoxicated, recognise those primal lines and sounds, those authentic forms that genius finds in communion with Nature, whilst the spirit roams free. Art thus conceived does more than unveil the Infinite—it becomes the Poet’s passage into it. Plunging deeper than any Philosophy, prolonging the revelations of Gospel, it is light calling to light, as one flame kindles a thousand in the sleeping vaults of a crystal cavern. Art knows what the artist knows not.^(TN)

Art is religious by nature, by its very essence. It springs to life in the shadow of Revelations, breathing life into them through intimate union, and proclaiming their death when it breaks free. Cast out on its own, it wanders through dark regions where it often burns brighter—harbinger of a new Revelation—than it ever did shackled to those temporary errors that corrupt the eternal truths of a dying faith.

This is the iron law of artistic evolution. Crack open History anywhere—no need to dig deep—and everywhere you will find Religions spawning Arts: the one drawing from the other the graces of worship, whilst Art blooms around Religion like proof of life itself. Judaea possessed Poetry and architecture solely through the Bible and Solomon’s Temple. Egypt’s death-obsessed religion produced architecture and sculpture only through its tombs—those temples to Isis in all but name—its Pyramids, Sphinxes, and bas-reliefs where Humanity appears condemned to endless repetition: a single type with hieratic features and ritual gestures, prostrate before divine Death. To justify the colossal splendours of their civic architecture, the Egyptians fused godhead with kingship—their palaces were simply temples by another name. Their literature? Wholly sacerdotal. The same principle operates, with local variations, in Persia, Assyria, amongst Hindus and Chinese. Greek Polytheism and Art—poetry, architecture, sculpture—were indivisible. The Iliad and Odyssey are professions of faith, though perhaps a faith already nodding off. It springs awake and blazes forth in Aeschylus with the terrible flash of thunderbolts striking the Christ-Prometheus. It turns irritable in Aristophanes. Finds its equilibrium in Sophocles. Loses itself in Euripides, that poet of the recurring hour in humanity’s great cycles, when, having shed its first fervours, tumbled from the sweeping enthusiasms of its dawn, alienated from ancient symbols left to gather dust, half-paralysed yet sharpened by doubt, stripped of self-mastery and the old confidence in its powers of comprehension, humanity learns to live by the heart, throwing itself into passionate dramas where it readily discovers a parallel synthesis—humbler but more piercing, infinitely more wrenching—of those spiritual dramas now perhaps exhausted, perhaps forgotten. Greek faith would blaze up one last time in sunset glory with the Alexandrian philosophers and poets, though with more yearning than certainty, more regret than hope. Imagination has sold itself short through emotional habit; the Great Greek Imagination has squandered its miraculous fertility, luxuriating instead in exquisite subtleties and precious refinements—but the sacred shiver is gone. Here is enlightened decadence, a second childhood conscious of childhood’s charms, its prophetic innocence, its knack for making its beliefs come true. Yet this second childhood remains senile, barren, and art would desert it—lucky, then, that ancient civilisation, propped up by artifice, stands ready to crumble. Rome tells the same story, though Art and Religion embrace there with less sincerity than in Greece—doubtless because the race, lacking native roots, subsists on traditions handed down by rote rather than discovered through revelation.

The same holds entirely true at the dawn of modern civilisation. All art in the Middle Ages is Christian through and through—from the Primitives’ frescoes to cathedral spires, from Dante to Palestrina. The Renaissance corrupts this marriage of Religion and Art, threatens to tear them asunder—which is to say that Christianity itself falls into corruption, grows anaemic, hovers at death’s door, and needs nothing less than the Reformation’s cruel bloodletting to regain a pulse. Yet even this restored life is a life at war, and besides, the hours of sweet Christian beauty have been all too brief. The Middle Ages—”enormous and delicate”¹⁷—that blue-black vista receding through the centuries, appears to us as a tragic wasteland broken by oases: chivalrous and poetic during the Crusades, yet hideous under the reign of so many craven bandits calling themselves Kings; all fire and blood during the Inquisition. A long night, in sum, shot through with radiant meteors, extravagant in darkness and light alike: heroes are few, but they hold whole peoples in their grip; ideas are scarce, but countless multitudes acclaim and enact them; teachers of doctrine are rare, yet disciples abound… — Come the seventeenth century in France¹⁸, Catholicism and Protestantism—grafts on the great Christian trunk—both draw what little life remains to them from that first, far-off surge of sap. Rivalry keeps the two sects ornamentally alive: their mutual loathing preserves in each a jealous clutch on its own peculiar share of truth. Catholicism above all, as the more literal heir to Christian rites, steels itself against further encroachment by that spirit of innovation which Protestantism has supposedly embraced as its guiding principle—that “free examination,” a compass that finds north in every direction! The Catholic sect calcifies in its worship of the past, yet from this very renunciation of youth draws something like a supernatural vigour, a second wind, near-claims upon the future, or at least undisputed dominion over the present. With startling nimbleness, it contrives to prop itself upon two forces one might have thought most proof against its influence—forces Christianity has always either mastered (in one case) or fought (in the other): Royalty and the Renaissance. Art, the vital sign of its life, was slipping away: through concessions, it holds on. Temporal Power alone can furnish the defensive strength it lacks. The Church becomes that Power’s very justification, mining from Holy Scripture a ruthless Politics whilst keeping the lion’s share for itself. And built upon this balance—rickety perhaps, contrary to nature, and doomed to fail—there came nonetheless a magnificent moment: the moment of its supremacy. Here we must always return to discover the sure principles of pure French prose—certainly diminished since Rabelais, but all the firmer for it. This is the language I admire in Le Discours de la Méthode and the Méditations, in the Oraisons funèbres and Sermons, in Télémaque, the Caractères, the Fables, the Tragedies and Comedies, and above all in the Pensées—but equally in the minor writings of that truly admirable age, admirable for what it achieved, however bitterly we may reflect on what it failed to achieve. Catholicism, having weathered that awkward business of seizing Authority—by what machinations!—appeared to swell with pride in the life-giving powers of Truth. Channelling the Renaissance torrent into the Christian stream, it created in literature a magnificent double current, unified despite its duality, ardently mystical even in its pagan reveries. (The other arts, admittedly, dozed—except among Protestant peoples, where the hot blood of the Reformation prolonged, though perhaps debasing, their artistic vitality.) The goal was nothing less than to win for Catholic genius the universal empire of minds—and for this task, that genius summoned forth admirable powers. While sacred orators sang Christian legends, drew out every last consequence from dogmatic premises, and extracted from the most rarefied theological speculation a complete Christian psychology, morality and politics, the poets cast the light of the Cross backwards through time to illuminate pagan ages. Christian spirit gazed at its own reflection in ancient mists and quickened them to life. Thus we witnessed old Corneille resurrect Rome’s heroes, whilst through Racine’s enchantment, the stately peoples of Sophocles and Euripides rose from the dust. Yet only the costume and storyline remained antique: the souls were converts, newly baptised. No historical reconstruction this—rather beautiful chimeras, what André Chénier would later desire, “ancient verses on modern thoughts”, homelands of the imagination. Augustus, a Christian; Andromache, a catechumen; Phaedra, a penitent… And surely Corneille and Racine erected Athalie and Polyeucte¹⁹—like twin columns of a triumphal arch through which the whole century processes—precisely to embody this deeper meaning of their work? The double achievement was complete: poets had reclaimed the great pagan fables to dedicate them to Christ—just as the Popes had done in Rome, transforming temples into basilicas, whilst doctors of the triumphant Religion had reformed all public and private life by the boundless expansion of a single, inexhaustible principle. — Yet barely was the work finished than its brevity became apparent. It was scarcely human, being so austere, so tightly bounded. The spirit chafed—perhaps without quite grasping why—at the banishment of harmony and colour for their own sake, apart from or beyond the purely intellectual sense of words. It took its revenge for this tyranny of precise meaning by over-refining it into the Italian concetti and Spanish gongorisms of a Saint-Amand or a Théophile. This ready-made answer to everything that an unchanging religion provided cut brutally short the Poets’ burning quest for a Faith more soothing and satisfying, perhaps loftier, certainly broader and more tender than this fortress-Catholicism, closer too to the Absolute. It stifled those intuitions, those hopes, those flights of spirit, all those dreams which, though never lost to Truth in the end, are always Beauty’s gain and form the truest homeland of genius—a homeland that a younger Creed, confident of longer life, would have kept hovering about itself rather than pronouncing anathema upon it. Granted, the official Creed as it stood protected and supported literature, maintaining it in an atmosphere of nobility—rather official itself, but not without grandeur. Yet this guarantee of unity, which morally obliged everyone to base all efforts on the religious cornerstone, entailed an anxiously narrow care not to transgress Dogma’s conclusions, or at least counselled staying in those middling regions where independence runs least risk: in Corneille’s robust heroism, Racine’s psychology of passion, Molière’s everyday moral rigour, La Bruyère’s minute and sparkling observation, La Fontaine’s sly worldly wisdom. Even in these temperate zones one might provoke the wrath of unbending Theology—remember how Bossuet speaks of Molière! And at this zenith of triumph, wasn’t Theology right to proscribe the Theatre? (If it went too far—well, that’s triumph’s splendid failing!) Wasn’t it bound to eye the stage jealously, as a rival temple, a blasphemous parody of sacred spectacle and ritual, the seed of some future religion, a worldly cult, a revival of Paganism—a wholly carnal worship of beautiful forms made doubly dangerous by Art and Passion’s devilish glamour, a collective prostitution glorified? Catholicism could only view with mistrust this glorification of human feelings, being itself the superhumanly austere glorification of the soul purged of passions. But apotheoses endure only for reason’s brief moment. This iron discipline already sensed and foretold its own decay: we guard so jealously only what we fear to lose. Bossuet’s sublime but merciless vigilance—he who was Catholicism’s Aeschylus—finds its explanation in Fénelon’s accommodations, where conscience seems to unbend, almost to go soft, losing its sense of upright bearing for fear of forgetting livelier grace, the sweetness of letting go, the charm of leniency. Yet this vigilance could destroy neither the cause nor the effect of such accommodations: reaction is a law against which genius itself is powerless. The world had grown weary of its enforced solemnity—and so it would laugh for an entire century, explode in feverish mirth, pausing only to sneer in the seventeenth century’s wake, to sneer and sometimes heavily philosophise throughout that age of Voltaire and d’Alembert, of Parny and Volney, of the Lettres Persanes and L’Esprit des Lois—that eighteenth century, first a stagnant pool, then a raging torrent, melting-pot of the seventeenth’s ruined grandeurs.

There it drooped in melancholy alongside his aged king—that caricature of majesty, more symbol than man, more convention than flesh, drawing what lustre he possessed from time-worn traditions. His only virtue lay in accepting his peculiar fortune: to be a shadow ringed by brilliance. How ironically his title of Sun King echoes through history! Symbol indeed, this Most Christian, Most Catholic monarch who plucked his final passion from the very Huguenots he had hounded from the realm. Thus did Catholic excess meet Protestant austerity halfway—for Protestant she [Madame de Maintenon] remained, Scarron’s widow, whatever her professed conversion. Protestant in deportment and manner, Protestant in thought and spirit, Protestant to the marrow. What perverse providence that this grim attendant to a dying century should bear the name of France’s most ribald versifier! All that was basest in the age of Louis XIV finds its flowering in the scheming personage, the hushed dominion, the frigid scribblings of Madame de Maintenon. Through her, it seems, a cause already rotten sealed its own defeat. In her, a century’s vast enterprise of pure reason dwindled to the pettiest calculations, to paltry pedagogical nostrums—a tepid trickle seeking to stem tomorrow’s tide, even as that mighty current, once flowing free in generous torrents but now grown weary of scouring barren shingle, prepared to fester in its own depths before bursting, at the storm’s appointed hour, through banks made narrow by neglect, swollen drop by drop with each generation’s toll. — By the dawn of the eighteenth century, Catholic Christianity had spent its force. The medieval legends awaited their faithful. Those intriguing Cartesian fallacies had already become mere historical curiosities. What remained? Condillac and Laplace lived and wrote alongside Voltaire, yet chronology can deceive: their hour had not struck. The day belonged to Voltaire—which is to say, to vacancy itself.

They speak of “the age of Voltaire”, just as he spoke of “the age of Louis XIV”. Very well. Perhaps both epochs truly deserve to be summed up in these two names—and if Louis XIV strikes us as carved from wood, Voltaire is moulded from mud. Thank God it’s old hat to call that celebrated champion of wit an imbecile²⁰. But to take his work as the voice of his century—there’s a bitter irony, all the more savage for being so justified. This colossal œuvre amounts to nothing. Add it to humanity’s achievements or strike it from the record—the sum remains unchanged, not by a jot. Nothing in poetry, nothing in prose, nothing in science. On the credit side, Voltaire leaves us precisely nothing. On the debit side, he has his revenge: the blast of emptiness he unleashed has blighted everything in its path. An epidemic of nothingness! Not a scrap of literature for an entire century!—save for a few sharp wits towards the close: but can we honestly call Diderot’s scribbling on every subject under the sun literature? Or Chamfort’s barbs? Or the table-talk of Rivarol and the Prince de Ligne? Breaking free from religious belief failed to unlock that harmony and colour the previous century’s poets had pined for when they gazed back wistfully at the troubadours’ innocence—that freedom a Racine or La Fontaine would sometimes snatch for themselves. The eighteenth century positively relished its own sterility, withering imagination through sheer coldness of heart. Even Beaumarchais, even Marivaux, even the Abbé Prévost—for all their protestations of feeling—had too much of that cleverness that kills poetry, and too little freedom. Led by Voltaire, every would-be poet of the age grovelled in the dust before the dictates of the prosody police and rhetoric brigade. Even when Shakespeare burst upon him, Voltaire remained stone-blind!

As for the celebrated prose writers in his circle, they all played at literature without producing any: natural history (Buffon), legal philosophy (Montesquieu), absolutely everything (Diderot). One man alone breaks the mould, but Rousseau belongs no more to the eighteenth century than Chateaubriand does: Rousseau, Goethe and Chateaubriand herald the nineteenth. Music? A blank.²¹ Painting flounders in an unsettling, enchanting half-light—more dusk than dawn. Modern Imagination destroyed itself by trying to stay earthbound, to do without God. This time, to breathe life back into Imagination, fate would need weapons other than fresh Revelation. It would guide minds back to religious feeling, through sheer exhaustion with a mirth that had whipped itself into numbness. (This in the age that threw around the word “sensitive” like confetti, even unto sadism.) Rousseau’s tearful outpourings would give his contemporaries back their very Christian taste for weeping through awe at scientific breakthroughs, as Newton and Laplace would startle minds into relishing the grandest speculations, into taking themselves seriously again (if only because it was fashionable), into debating gravitational theory between courses at their little suppers; through the cataclysm of Revolution and Terror, which would restore both the appetite for heroism and the sense of life’s fragility to these hearts grown tender again, these minds grown earnest again. Then could flourish, alongside Condillac and Goethe, the great theosophical school of de Maistre and de Bonald, and the great literary school of Chateaubriand. Twin currents drawing minds towards religion (Christian in spirit more than Catholic in doctrine) and towards Beauty would light up the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Yet this stirring of minds, sincere though it may be, cannot erase the deep scars left by a whole century of denial and emptiness. The world has been sceptical too long to shake off the habit. This return to Christianity has something staged about it, rather like Napoleon’s charade of piety when he threw open the churches and took the imperial crown from papal hands. Here, will comes before faith—perhaps even replaces it. The dawn of the nineteenth century stands alone in humanity’s great chronicle. For the first time, Art breathes life into religions rather than drawing life from them. The medieval legends that France had left for foreign poets to mine for masterpieces spring back to life. At first, they are rough sketches—who cares about accuracy, so long as the overall effect rings true enough and strikes a pleasing note? But standards will rise. Chateaubriand’s historical whimsy is worlds away from Hugo’s; and Hugo’s from Flaubert’s, more distant still. We are living in the past now, utterly steeped in it, and Auguste Comte’s chilling truth holds sway: “The living are increasingly ruled by the dead.” These poet-litterateurs who fashioned Romanticism lead such artificial lives that their convictions never leave the page for the real world. Pen in hand, they turn Christian, pagan, even Mohammedan at will. They collect religions like curios, and so this grotesque possibility emerges: one can now speak of Religion without giving Truth a second thought! I feel no longing for that delightful Jeunes-France moment. To my mind, they are all rather too much like human shells stripped of heart and soul, striking grand attitudes in flowing robes, gestures empty of genuine feeling. Truth be told, they care about everything except what matters. On the subject of human destiny, they offer only the haziest elegiac mutterings, still reeking of the vapid century that spawned them. Even Lamartine, their finest, cannot quite forget his readings of Dorat and Parny, and won’t hesitate to lift half a line from Thomas! What makes their theatrical posturing all the more pointless is that these poets’ impersonal minds house only the vaguest generalities; they sport a moth-eaten philosophical costume that’s threadbare yet somehow holds together, and instead of yielding entirely to the newly spruced-up religious garb, they strike a bargain—half of one, half of the other. The minds of that era truly wore motley! Not that this troubles them. They revel in their stage properties. The brooding look, the doom-laden glance—all the rage. They have perfected the art of cold-blooded passion. The abnormal has become the norm, and arch-villains—really just arch-cowards—pass for heroes worthy of love and acclaim. But again, it’s all in the head; nobody actually follows suit, and your typical Romantic, in his real or sham domestic arrangements, remains a law-abiding citizen perfectly at ease with the civil code. Still, they all strike those grandiose poses—Spanish, Italian, theatrically choreographed. Their historical models come with certified dates, documented mannerisms, authentic costumes: so they dress the part, speak the language, write in period style. The living souls of this fantastical hour sport profiles straight from medallions—or rather, carefully arranged to match them—aping historical figures so perfectly they fool even themselves. Indeed, this century seems to have lived, in its first half, a purely historical existence. And look—could this be the key?—it’s the century of historians, of Thierry and Michelet. There lies both its glory and its failing. This fascination with the past is splendid, but what’s built on the rubble of dead ages remains a splendid corpse unless a vibrant faith in what’s to come transforms it into a beacon for the dark road ahead. Can life’s compass point only backward? This obsession with yesterday betrays a failure to shoulder today or shape tomorrow.

The historical sense is—inevitably, by its very nature, since we only have history when we have lived long enough—the hallmark of an ageing race, a badge of decline. It stirs to life with the critical faculty, at that crucial moment in a society’s life when spontaneous creativity must be bridled. Soon enough, we are judging everything through history’s lens, even the day’s events, which we document obsessively whilst feeling no immediate stake in them: they are too new! They want for time’s distance, for the patina of ages. All the better for our grandchildren: they will wrangle passionately over accidents we note with a shrug, just as we pontificate over the affairs of a century past. And so the generations roll on, careless of where they are headed, forever glancing backwards like routed armies who fear the pursuer more than they seek the unknown sanctuary ahead. Yet here’s the rub: we love our pursuer—history’s deathless multitude of the dead. But what treacherous affection! This endless brooding over our forebears’ works leaves us no time to build anything ourselves: we will hand down little more than fodder for our descendants’ dissertations. Besides, this unseemly rush to enter history—which is to say, death—sounds the death knell of civilisations. Certainly, it was through history, at this century’s dawn, that Religion and Art—once indivisible in the heyday of Latin culture—came unstuck. And just as certainly, the Romantic age, for all its signal services to Art, remains—having dithered childishly between sham religion, reactionary philosophy, and sheer indifference—an age when Thought slumbered in its cradle.

Even writers acclaimed as the most devout Christians never quite capture the living pulse of the faith they hymn. With de Bonald, despite his patent sincerity, there’s something dead—or at least moribund—in that frigid tone, that soporific prose. Joseph de Maistre cuts a different figure entirely, that towering poet. His style throbs with life, all fire—though fire more than light, burning rather than illuminating. His ideas outrun their Christian moorings and surge back towards Old Testament severity, channelling Tertullian’s harsh, grace-less tragedy, envisioning a Christianity more Pauline than Johannine, armed with rhetoric that takes no prisoners. His world, propped on the executioner’s scaffold, is not Christ’s world. With Chateaubriand, real mysticism notwithstanding, we have arrived at the age of Christian aestheticism. This is religiosity, not religion; literature, not faith. The genius of Christianity, he calls it. His words say so, but not his heart: he would wax just as lyrical about the genius of paganism. He’s hunting for purple passages, for arias. How readily he soars—and how splendidly!—into raptures where Revelation has no place, where Nature alone commands worship. And René is meant to be an episode in Le Génie du Christianisme! Mark the Poet’s technique, it betrays his mind. He treats Eudore and Cymodocée as Fénelon does Telemachus and Calypso, with that detached admiration no true believer would feel. It’s not merely the gap in genius but the gulf in feeling that makes reading Chateaubriand after Dante like stepping from high summer into winter’s depths. For Dante believes, and the Divine Comedy is a work of faith militant, where nothing serves mere ornament, where form clings to substance like armour to the body; in Le Génie du Christianisme and Les Martyrs, it billows like court dress. Scattered through Lamartine’s Harmonies, our most lyrical poet’s fervour may deceive us momentarily; but peer closer, and here too we find a nebulous mysticism that slops over Christianity’s edges into thoroughly pagan sensuality, where eros matters more than faith. The Méditations and Harmonies aren’t so much hymns to a living creed as its gorgeous threnody. Like Chateaubriand, Lamartine slips into the past tense whenever religion requires precision; what remains present and vital in both is simply humanity’s perennial passion. To sum up: what they all lack, these philosophers and poets, is what believers call the sense of Christ’s real presence. The Gospel’s beauty moves them more than its truth, and their successors will chase Beauty elsewhere, proclaiming—some in sorrow, some with a shrug—that Truth doesn’t exist.

Before launching this sketchy yet overlong survey of how Religion and Art have danced together, I claimed that Religion—enriched by Legend, Tradition, and Philosophy—is Art’s wellspring, that Art is religious at its core. Yet having watched an attempt at reconciliation—perhaps honest, certainly brief—between Religion and Art, we now see them splitting in what looks like a final separation. What are we to make of this?

Is the eighteenth century upon us again? Are we sliding back into that hideous, hateful age—incapable of gravity, able only to pedantically preach doctrines of death whilst hiccupping through its infamous laughter? That age which drove out the very feeling of veneration—the only fruitful sentiment—from humanity’s most legitimate objects of reverence; which left the divine idea to moulder in the sacred ark where Descartes had so rashly confined it; and which, after a century’s gestation, brought forth two offspring: one laughable—the Encyclopaedia; the other terrible—the Revolution? No —everything tells against it. The men of our time, even those who consummate the divorce I speak of, bear none of the marks that damn the eighteenth century’s men to our contempt. These are noble thinkers, genuine scholars. If the idea of God strikes them dumb, at least it draws neither laughter nor blasphemy. They tremble at the things they discuss. They even cherish Unity—that divine hallmark—and openly rejoice to see the sciences converging once more into Science under their eager hands, returning to that primal unity which bore fruit. How utterly different the eighteenth century’s spirit of division—its only spirit!—with its compulsion to shrink everything to its own paltry scale. Our contemporaries see broadly. They hold man in enlightened regard, yet don’t make him the measure of all things. They know much and wear it lightly. Pascal said: “I can only approve those who seek in anguish.” Our scholars and thinkers seek, and are at least grave. Their sincerity thrums through their work, and if we must respect those who show respect, then we cannot toss off lightly the names of the nineteenth century’s luminaries, though they are, alas! far from singing in unison: Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Auguste Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot…

But why—how—do we not find these geniuses gathered round the altar of a Revelation proclaimed as the wellspring of all truth? How did they drift from it, or why did it cast them off? And why—how—in the dubious, anguished silence of truth’s appointed guardians, does the word that cuts through the world’s darkness come only from these poets, philosophers and scientists? What has made the genius of art and the genius of science abandon the Gospel?

The answer forces itself upon us—terrible—and I give it trembling. I tell myself again: Art, bound intimately to Revelations, manifests their life and, by leaving them, attests their death. Then it strikes out alone into dark regions where it often shines more brightly—herald of some new Revelation—than when it was shackled to those temporary errors that corrupt the eternal truths of decrepit Revelations. Not that Art proves ungrateful to the venerable Nurse whose milk and care gave it strength. But Art is young and she is old; she drivels and dodders whilst Art speaks.

I certainly lack the audacity to forecast what will be. In today’s confused tangle of regrets and longings that vex both mind and heart, only one affirmation remains possible, and it’s vague: we live in transitional times. “We pass from mystery to mystery,” as Carlyle says, and the brightest gleam of hope on thought’s horizon is that pure science has regained its rightful precedence over history—which hovers uncertainly between science and literature.

Humanity has discovered in its scientific achievements tangible reasons for self-congratulation. If this pride smacks of childishness, if it tends to lapse into vanity, perhaps we must accept this as the inevitable sediment lurking at the bottom of every human vessel. Or perhaps humanity’s breakneck plunge into the unknown, its compulsion to push ever faster, ever further, has warped and corrupted its powers of thought. In that case, by what only seems a paradox to the casual observer, this mad humanity finds its saving grace in its poets—in their inspired pilgrimage back to the wellsprings of all truth, to those primordial faiths that spawned religions now themselves extinct, to the inexhaustible source of ancient mysteries, to that enigmatic procession of the Three Kings who journeyed from the vast reaches of Asia, bearing myrrh, gold and frankincense, to bestow divinity upon a child in a manger.

Here lies the defining hallmark of the new Literature: this burning desire to marry Truth with Beauty, this longed-for wedding of Faith and Joy, of Science and Art. The eighteenth century pronounced such a union impossible. The seventeenth century forced it through sheer will, pressing Art into servitude when it can breathe only in freedom. Romanticism tried to fake it through sleight of hand, with a recklessness—criminal if it weren’t so naive—towards thought itself, which it scattered about like loose change when thought’s true place is at the very heart of things. Naturalism sought to shrink this union down to the paltry dimensions of brute matter, which it took to be the sole province of both Art and Thought. But we—we dream of achieving this magnificent union in all its splendour, boldly and expansively, by placing Thought, Science, Faith and Truth at the centre, from which radiant core the manifestations of Integral Art shall stream forth like life-giving rays to the glorious periphery.

Yet our thirst for the absolute finds no satisfaction at Christianity’s wells. Are we mistaken, or have they indeed run dry?

They appear parched to us, though it would be both rash and unfair to pronounce them permanently so. Christianity harbours within itself astonishing powers of renewal: perhaps the Evangelist merely sleeps and shall soon awaken.

That great Catholic writer Ernest Hello, blessed with uncanny prophetic insight, seemed to glimpse in a future now almost upon us the dawn of a new evangelical triumph. He writes:

“Between the eighteenth century and what I call the twentieth—should it begin tomorrow—earth’s clock strikes a slow and terrible hour, the hour of transition: this is our terrible nineteenth century. Half-awake, still groggy from its nightmares, it neither possesses nor grasps; but it yearns, it yearns, it yearns, O Lord, as the world has never yearned before…”

How true! This yearning is both its curse and its crown. But why can’t it find what it craves in the Church that once nursed its ancestors? Why, when this century—as hungry for Beauty as it is parched for Truth—turns in its distress to that Church where its forebears found illumination and life, does it meet only petty rules and rigid conventions, stripped of those living graces that once brought whole nations to their knees before the priest’s outstretched arms? Why have the cathedral naves grown so cold? Why has the great ship’s captain abandoned his helm, retreating to that shabby halfway house that’s neither Temple nor dwelling—that sacristy where Religion seems to thrive more than at altar or pulpit, but with a degraded, musty vitality, reduced to minding tawdry earthly treasures hawked for coin? What has become of Catholicism’s inner fire—and I won’t even mention Protestantism, that pale imitation of civic religion that leaves both heart and mind unsatisfied—what has become of its essential virtue, that for two centuries now it has failed to show us genius and Sanctity joined in blessed union? All well and good that the Curé d’Ars and Benedict Labre have been canonised; we can “chalk this up” to the sheer momentum of Christianity’s superhuman architecture—the heart is always last to fail. But only genius creates and perpetuates: where is our St Anselm? Our St Thomas Aquinas? How can the seventeenth century’s greatest theologians be merely great theologians and not saints? How is it that this century’s most celebrated Catholic names conjure up only the worldly memory of eloquent barristers who, when all was said and done, possessed neither true learning nor simplicity and amounted to little more than sincere speechmakers?

And from another, equally troubling angle: why does the Church tolerate, why does it foster that obscene travesty of religious art, that blend of vulgarity and witlessness? Why are the glorious medieval basilicas defiled by bleeding hearts that belong on butchers’ signs and madonnas that could double as hairdressers’ window dummies? Why does the organ itself—born of a mystical union between genius and holiness—stoop to blaring theatrical tunes and operatic melodies between psalms caterwauled by the cracked voices of sullen, depraved choir boys, while at the altar unfolds the Mystery that strikes terror and love into the hearts of angels?

Why is Catholic literature so utterly worthless—worse than worthless, positively nauseating even to the most forgiving critic? Why does the Catholic establishment rebuff any genuine talent that tries to rekindle the inspiration which once made the Church the natural home of artists—loudly in the case of M. Barbey d’Aurevilly, with deafening silence for M. Paul Verlaine? Is this truly the same Church that sheltered literature and all the arts and philosophies in its medieval sanctuary? One is tempted to reply: “No, this is no longer that Church. This is merely the funeral spectre of what once lived in joyous glory. And here’s the deeper truth behind both that life and this death. Revelations depend on human genius to interpret them, and survive only as long as they provide the atmosphere genius needs to live and flourish. Now genius, being God’s shadow, shares His creative nature. Within any Revelation, its creative scope is necessarily limited to establishing logical structures and codifying doctrine. Christian genius therefore thrived magnificently—what a splendid life that illuminates all history!—whilst dogmas still needed it for their proclamation and definition, whilst it still had the noble work of forging, in the Creed, the marriage of Divine and human Reason, whilst it still bore that sublime commission: revealing to humanity what new light the Revelation brought. Once that work was done and that commission discharged, Genius and Revelation became incompatible. Perhaps Revelation already survives beyond its time, having no fresh word for the world. At the very least, it no longer needs genius, which has become a dangerous ally—forever in love with novelty, forever burning to create. Defending established truths simply isn’t enough for genius. The most touching proof of genius’s inability to accept this lesser role lies close at hand. Lamennais’s sincerity is beyond doubt, and when he branded with fire, in the first volume of De l’indifférence en matière de religion, the great evil and fault of his age, he hit the mark. But as the pages mounted, genius began to strain against its shackles, grew restless with this ban on creation that had become Dogma’s first commandment to its priests, and almost innocently, through sheer natural momentum, Lamennais tumbled into heresy. Since then, anyone who has made their mark in the Church has attracted suspicion. ‘Perhaps Christianity lies entombed in Saint Thomas’s Summa.’ That’s what one wants to say. This answer may be wrong. As I have said, we may yet see the great Sleeper rise from what looks like the sleep of death. Then we will believe, and how joyfully we will cry hosanna! But for now, our very honesty—this needed saying—alienates us from a Credo that strikes us as merely its own ghost, and we think we honour its original spirit by going beyond it. Used to seeing Beauty shine through every living Religion, recognising Beauty as both Truth’s guardian and herald, we ask Beauty alone—since the Religions have cast her out—what Truth she should illuminate. As poets and thinkers, we listen to the mysterious winds rising from the depths of phenomena, and we seek light and life wherever they may be found, even in history’s dark corners, if they hold more life and light than this present twilight that seems to marshal the dance of death.

We seek Truth through Beauty’s harmonious laws, drawing from her all metaphysics—for the harmony of hues and sounds mirrors the harmony of souls and worlds—and all morality too; after all, our very word “honesty” springs from “honestus,” meaning “beautiful.” Though the certainties of Religion have failed us—we remain grateful nonetheless for that noble piety which cradled and purified our childhood—we now press hard upon the traces of ancient Traditions, reaching back to before History’s birth, to those mysterious Legends that nomadic peoples, exiles all, carry through our anxious modern world that hears but cannot comprehend them. We gather up the teachings of great Thinkers, Magi and Metaphysicians, those heroes of the human spirit; we shall venture further still along the paths they blazed; we shall study too at the altar of ancient Cults, mining from each its hidden grain of eternal gold. And when faith’s joy sets our souls ablaze with enthusiasm, we shall celebrate this mystical rapture through Art’s Sacrifices and Festivals. For some, this joy springs from genius’s intuition when confronting Nature: they let sing through their work the sumptuous simplicity of eternal forms and feelings, of line and countenance. Others require the full arsenal of human knowledge—those nimble hands that seize Truth in its hiding places—and these, as devoted servants of the Gospel of Correspondences and the Law of Analogy, offer up vast syntheses, rendering melodious and luminous those Mysteries glorified in Fiction’s Reality, each according to their intellectual strength and sincerity of heart. Yet for all alike, Art has ceased to be that trivial entertainment which past generations merely tolerated and which those to come would still demand. All consider themselves ordained to an unshakeable priesthood: they are the high celebrants of Truth’s sacred rites and righteous Joy. This joy—though it may occasionally smile upon wit and brilliant mirth—remains grave at heart: its sole path leads to the Absolute, its sole sustenance is Eternity. With austere discrimination it selects its lineage from the past; with proud defiance it beckons the future; towards the present it harbours deep disdain, seeking rarified air to breathe. How it shudders before our modern temples of Art, those theatres consecrated to Integral Art’s supreme flowering yet so wretchedly unworthy of the honour! How it suffers at books trapped in ephemeral concerns—it who beneath all fleeting surfaces seeks, as the magnet seeks iron, the unchanging core; it whose most fervent sincerity echoes that human cry resounding from sacred heights: “Irrequietum cor meum, Domine, donec requiescat in Te!” [“Restless is my heart, O Lord, until it finds its rest in Thee!”]

TN: This final paradox is the culmination of Morice’s entire meditation on art as a mystical practice. In context, it suggests that true art operates as a kind of divine conduit that transcends the artist’s conscious intention or understanding. Throughout the passage, Morice has been building towards this idea: art begins where it seems to end, form must dissolve itself to reveal the Infinite, and the artwork becomes a “trembling portal” to Mystery. The artist, then, is not so much a creator as a medium—someone who, through “communion with Nature,” channels primordial truths that exceed their own comprehension. This echoes a Romantic and Symbolist conviction that the greatest art contains revelations beyond what the artist consciously put there. Just as the crystal cavern holds infinite potential fires waiting to be awakened, the artwork contains depths of meaning that surprise even its maker. The artist may craft the form, but the Truth that radiates through it—that “divine emanation of the Infinite”—flows from a source beyond human knowledge. It’s a humbling vision: the artist as servant rather than master of their art, creating vessels for mysteries they themselves cannot fully fathom. In this sense, art becomes almost oracular—speaking truths through the artist rather than from them.