Without
faith, the artist prefers the body itself to the feelings which animate
it--the polished limbs of a Venus to the brow of a Madonna! The
intellect alone can never soar to the regions of eternal truth, to the
Absolute; it must be aided by the heart in its daring flight. Faith and
love are the snowy and glittering wings of true artistic excellence.
When the soul is full of the bliss of beauty, the feeling of its
happiness urges the artist on to the necessity of imparting it,--while
his heart is wrapt in the vision of the Absolute, he would fain build
for his joyous thoughts an eternal abode with his fellow men, that they
too might see the steppings of the All Fair, and so be cheered and
stimulated in these their gloomy days of evil.
Thus it cannot be denied that religion alone gives depth and sublimity
to the creations of art, because it alone gives faith and hope in the
Infinite. If we are often astonished to see the springs of artistic
inspiration so rapidly exhausted in many men of genius of our own epoch,
it is because of their overwhelming egotism and limited subjectivity,
because the worship of the finite replaces that of the infinite, because
religion has become for them a mere memory of childhood. To recover
their blighted fertility of imagination, they must again become as
little children, again betake themselves to the shady and lonely way
leading to the temple of God.
In proof of this position, we constantly find that men gifted,
sensuously, with acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet who do not
receive it with a pure heart, never comprehend it aright; but making it
a mere minister to their desires, a mere seasoning of sensual pleasures,
sink until all their creations take the same earthly stamp, and it is
seen and felt that the heavenly sense of beauty has been degraded into a
servant of lust.
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