Our August issue contained the reproduction of a very remarkable article, taken from the journal
Le Droit, on the disastrous consequences of materialism from the point of view of legislation and social order; the
Patrie, July 30
th, 1868, gave an account of a work on the influence of spiritualism in the arts. These two articles are the corollary and the complement of each other: in the first one the dangers of materialism for society are proven, and in the second one demonstrates the necessity of spiritualism, without which the arts and poetry are precluded from their vital element.
Indeed, the sublime of art and poetry is to speak to the soul, to raise our thought above the matter that embraces us, and from which we constantly aspire to leave; but to make the strings of the soul vibrate, one must have a soul that vibrates in unison. How can someone who only believes in matter be inspired and become the interpreter of thoughts and feelings that are outside of matter? His ideal does not come out of the down-to-earth, and it is cold, because it speaks neither to the heart nor to the soul, but to the material senses alone. The beautiful ideal is not in the material world; it is therefore necessary to seek it in the spiritual world, that is the light to the blind; the inability to reach it has created the realistic school that does not leave this world, because that is where its entire horizon is; since the true beautiful being is beyond the reach of certain artists, they declare that the beautiful is ugly. The fable of the fox, with the severed tail, remains still a truth.
The period when religious faith was enthusiastic and sincere is also the period when religious art produced the most beautiful masterpieces; the artist identified himself with his subject, because he saw it with the eyes of the soul and understood it; it was his own thought that he represented; but as the faith was gone, the inspiring genius was gone with that. We should therefore not be surprised if religious art is today in full decline; it is not the talent that is lacking, it is the feeling.
It is the same with the ideal in all things; works of art only captivate when they make people think. We can admire the plastic talent of the artist, but it cannot arouse a thought that does not exist there; he paints a world that he neither sees, feels nor understands; thus, he sometimes falls into the grotesque; one feels that he is aiming for the effect, and has contrived to create something new by torturing the form: that is all.
The same can be said of modern music; it makes a lot of noise; it requires great agility of the fingers and throat from the performer, a real dislocation; it moves the fibers of the ear, but not those of the heart. This tendency of art towards materiality has perverted the taste of the public, whose finesse of the moral sense is dulled.
[2]Mr. Chassang's work is the application of these ideas to art in general, and to Greek art, in particular. We are pleased to reproduce what the author of the critique in the
Patrie says about it, because it is a further proof of the strong reaction that is taking place in favor of the spiritualist ideas, and because, as we have said, any defense of rational spiritualism paves the way for Spiritism, that is its development, by combating its most tenacious adversaries: materialism and fanaticism.
Mr. Chassang is the author of the story of Apollonius of Tyana, that we reported in the Spiritist Review, October 1862.
“This book, of a very special character, was not produced during the recent debates on materialism, and it is certainly independently of the author's will that circumstances have given it a sort of topicality. In writing it, Mr. Chassang did not intend to do the work of a metaphysician, but of a simple literary man. Nevertheless, as the great questions of metaphysics are eternally on the agenda, and any literary work truly worthy of the name always presupposes some philosophical principle, this book, of a very decided spiritualist inspiration, is in correlation with the concerns of the moment.Mr. Chassang leaves to others the refutation of materialism from a pure philosophical point of view. His thesis is entirely aesthetic. What he intends to prove is that literature and art are not less interested than moral life in the success of spiritualist doctrines. Just as materialism depletes poetry from life and takes the cruel pleasure of disenchanting man, by depriving him of all hope, all consolation amid the sufferings that besiege him, so it ruthlessly cuts off from literature and art what it calls illusions and lies, and under the pretext of truth, proclaiming realism, it turns into a law for artists and writers to express only what is.Spiritualist doctrines, on the contrary, open life to noble aspirations in all directions: they entertain man with the future and immortality; they tell the poet and the artist that there is a beautiful ideal of which the most beautiful human creations are only pale reflections, and whoever wants to charm their contemporaries and live for posterity must keep their eyes on that.After having developed this aspect from a general point of view, in his introduction, Mr. Chassang seeks the proof in the most beautiful of literatures and in the greatest of the arts that have aroused the admiration of men, in the literature and in the art of the ancient Greeks. For that demonstration, a rigorous and didactic order is rather to be avoided than to be sought; so, after the introduction that sets out the principles, it is not followed by closely united and methodically linked chapters, but by isolated studies that all relate to the same subject, inspired by the same feeling, and converge to the same goal. The book thus has both unity in the whole and variety in the parts.It is first a treatise on what the author aptly calls popular spiritualism among the ancients, that is, the beliefs of the Greeks and Romans in the destiny of souls after death. He shows that if, among those beliefs, there are obvious errors, all these errors, nevertheless, rest in the hope of another life. Doesn't the cult of the dead implicitly contain a profession of spiritualistic faith? The last victory of materialism would be to suppress it, and its followers should logically come to this; otherwise, what is the use of raising the stone from the tomb? What good does it do, particularly, to surround the grave with respect, if there is nothing behind it? So says Mr. Chassang."Octave Sachot.”
[1] 1 vol. in-12; 3.50 francs at Messrs. Didier and Co., 35 quai des Augustines.
[2] See the Spiritist Review, December 1860, and January 1861: Pagan art, Christian art and Spiritist art
