Part 10

, Aph. 47: "Even the beauty of a race or family, the pleasantness and kindness of their whole demeanour, is acquired by effort; like genius, it is the final result of the accumulated labour of generations. There must have been great sacrifices made to good taste; for the sake of it, much must have been done, and much refrained from--the seventeenth century in France is worthy of admiration in both ways; good taste must then have been a principle of selection, for society, place, dress, and sexual gratification, beauty must have been preferred to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence. Supreme rule:--we must not 'let ourselves go,' even when only in our own presence.--Good things are costly beyond measure, and the rule always holds, that he who possesses them is other than he who acquires them. All excellence is inheritance; what has not been inherited is imperfect, it is a beginning."

[63] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 245: "'Beauty,' therefore, is, to the artist, something which is above order of rank, because in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites; and achieved without a feeling of tension." See also Hegel, _Vorlesungen über Æsthetik_, Vol. I, pp. 130, 144.

7. The Meaning of Ugliness of Form and of Ugliness of Content in Art.

Ugliness in Art, therefore, is Art's contradiction.[67] It is the absence of Art. It is a sign that the simplifying, ordering and transfiguring power of the artist has not been successful, and that chaos, disorder and complexity have not been overcome.

Ugliness of form in Art, therefore, will tend to become prevalent in democratic times; because it is precisely at such times that a general truth for all is believed in, and, since reality is the only truth which can be made common to all, democratic art is invariably realistic, and therefore, according to my definition of the beautiful in form, ugly.

In this matter, I do not ask you to take my views on trust. A person who will seem to you very much more authoritative than myself--a man who once had the honour of influencing Whistler, and who, by the bye, is also famous for having flung down the Colonne Vendôme in Paris-- once expressed himself quite categorically on this matter.

At the Congress of Antwerp in 1861, after he had criticized other artists and other concepts of art, this man concluded his speech as follows: "By denying the ideal and all that it involves, I attain to the complete emancipation of the individual, and finally to democracy. Realism is essentially democratic."[68]

As you all must know, this man was Gustave Courbet, of whom Muther said that he had a predilection for the ugly.[69]

Artists infected with the pure or the corrupt layman's view of Art, as described in the previous section, and artists obsessed by the Christian or scientific notion of truth, will consequently produce ugly work. They will be realists, or Police-artists, and consequently ugly.

But how can content- or subject-ugliness be understood? Content- or subject-ugliness is the decadence of a type.[70] It is the sign that certain features, belonging to other peoples (hitherto called ugly according to the absolute biological standard of beauty of a race), are beginning to be introduced into their type. Or it may mean that the subject to be represented does not reveal that harmony and lack of contrasts which the values of a people are capable of producing. In each case it provokes hatred, and this "hatred is inspired by the most profound instinct of the species; there is horror, foresight, profundity, and far-reaching vision in it--it is the profoundest of all hatreds. On account of it art is _profound_."[71]

The hatred amounts to a condemnation of usurping values, or of discordant values; in fact, to a condemnation of dissolution and anarchy, and the judgment "ugly" is of the most serious import.

Thus, although few of us can agree to-day as to what constitutes a beautiful man or woman, there is still a general idea common to us all, that a certain regularity of features constitutes beauty, and that, with this beauty, a certain reliable, harmonious, and calculable nature will be present. Spencer said the wisest thing in all his philosophy when he declared that "the saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying."[72]

For beauty in any human creature, being the result of a long and severe observance by his ancestors of a particular set of values, always denotes some definite attitude towards Life; it always lures to some particular kind of life and joy--as Stendhal said, "Beauty is a promise of happiness"--and as such it seduces to Life and to this earth.

This explains why beauty is regarded with suspicion by negative religions, and why it tends to decline in places where the sway of a negative religion is powerful. Because a negative religion cannot tolerate that which lures to life, to the body, to joy and to voluptuous ecstasy.

It is upon their notion of spiritual beauty, upon passive virtues, that the negative religions lay such stress, and thus they allow the ugly to find pedestals in their sanctuaries more easily than the beautiful.

[67] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 252.

[68] A. Estignard, _Gustave Courbet_ (Paris, 1896), p. 118.

[69] _Geschichte der Malerei_, Vol. III, p. 204.

[70] _W. P._, Vol. II, pp. 241, 242, 245. See also T. I.,