PERNICIOUS INFLUENCE OF MATERIALIST IDEAS.

One reads in the section “Paris Mail,” of the Illustrated World, of December 19, 1868:

“Carmouche wrote more than two hundred comedies and ‘vaudevilles,’ and, at most, our time will know only his name. The fact is that dramatic glory, which arouses so much covetousness, is terribly fleeting. Unless an author has produced exceptional masterpieces, he is condemned to see his name fall into oblivion as soon as he ceases to be in the breach. Even during the struggle, the majority are unaware of his existence. Indeed, the public, when reading the playbill, attends only to the title of the play; it cares little for the name of the one who wrote it. Let the reader try to remember who wrote such or such a charming work whose memory has stayed with him. Almost always he will find himself unable to name it. And the further we advance, the more this will be so, since preoccupations of a material order increasingly take precedence over artistic concerns. “Precisely on this subject, Carmouche used to tell a typical anecdote. Conversing, he said, with my secondhand bookseller about his little trade, he expressed himself thus: ‘This is not going badly, sir, but it is changing; the items that sell are no longer the same as before. Formerly, when a young man of 18 appeared before me, nine times out of ten it was in search of a rhyming dictionary; today, it is to ask me for a manual of stock-exchange operations.’”

Preoccupations of a material order take precedence over artistic concerns; but how could it be otherwise, when the greatest efforts are made to concentrate all of man's thoughts on carnal life and to destroy in him every hope, every aspiration that goes beyond this existence? Such a consequence is logical, inevitable, for one who sees nothing outside the narrow circle of the ephemeral present life. When the creature perceives nothing behind it, nothing ahead of it, nothing above it, on what can it concentrate its thoughts except on the point where it finds itself? What is sublime in art is the poetry of the ideal, which transports us out of the cramped sphere of our activities. But the ideal hovers precisely in that extra-material region into which one penetrates only by thought; which corporeal sight cannot pierce, but which the imagination conceives. Now, what inspiration can the spirit draw from the idea of nothingness? The painter who had seen only the foggy sky, the arid and monotonous steppes of Siberia, and who believed the whole Universe to be there, could he conceive and describe the brilliance and richness of tones of tropical nature? How would you have your artists and your poets transport you to regions which they do not see with the eyes of the soul, which they do not understand, and in which they do not even believe?

The spirit can only identify itself with what it knows or believes to be the truth, and that truth, though of a moral order, becomes for it a reality which it expresses all the better the better it feels it. If to the understanding of the thing it joins the flexibility of talent, it causes its own impressions to be transmitted to the souls of others. But what impressions can he who has none provoke in others?

For the materialist, reality is the Earth; his body is everything, for beyond it there is nothing more, since his own mind is extinguished with the disorganization of matter, like fire with its fuel. He cannot, therefore, with the language of art, express anything but what he sees and feels. Now, if he sees and feels only tangible matter, that alone is possible for him to express. He can draw nothing from where he sees only the void. If he ventures into a world he does not know, he enters it as a blind man and, despite the efforts he employs to raise himself to the diapason of idealism, he remains at ground level, like a bird without wings. The decadence of the arts, in this century, resulted inevitably from the concentration of thoughts upon material things, a concentration which, in its turn, is the result of the absence of all belief, of all faith in the spirituality of the being. The century merely reaps what it has sown. He who sows stones cannot reap fruit. The arts will not emerge from the torpor in which they lie except through a reaction in the direction of spiritualist ideas.

How could the painter, the poet, the man of letters, the musician attach their names to durable works, when, for the most part, they themselves do not believe in the future of their labors; when they do not perceive that the law of progress, an invincible force that sweeps the Universes along the road of the infinite, asks of them more than faded copies of the masterly creations of the artists of bygone times! Everyone remembers the Phidiases, the Apelleses, the Raphaels, the Michelangelos, luminous beacons that stand out from the obscurity of the centuries gone by, like resplendent stars amid deep darkness; but who will remember to note the glow of a lamp struggling against the brilliance of the sun on a summer's day? The world has marched with giant strides since historical times; the philosophies of primitive peoples gradually transformed themselves. The arts, which rest upon the philosophies that are their idealized consecration, also had to modify and transform themselves. And it is mathematically certain to say that, without belief, the arts lack vitality, and that every philosophical transformation necessarily brings about a parallel artistic transformation.

In all epochs of transformation, the arts decline, because the belief on which they lean does not suffice for the enlarged aspirations of Humanity, and because, the new principles not yet being adopted by the great majority of men, the artists dare to explore, only in a hesitant manner, the unknown mine that opens beneath their steps.

During the primitive epochs, in which men knew only material life, in which Philosophy divinized nature, Art sought, above all, perfection of form. Bodily beauty was then the cardinal quality; art applied itself to reproducing and idealizing it. Later, Philosophy entered upon a new path; men, progressing, recognized that above matter there was a creating and organizing power, which rewarded the good, punished the wicked, and made charity a law. A new world, the moral world, was built upon the ruins of the ancient world. From that transformation was born a new art which made the soul throb beneath the form, and joined to plastic perception the expression of sentiments which the ancients did not know. The idea lived beneath the matter; but it took on the severe forms of the Philosophy by which art was inspired. To the tragedies of Aeschylus, to the marbles of Milo, succeeded the descriptions and the paintings of the physical and moral tortures of the reprobate. Art rose; it took on a grandiose and sublime character, yet still somber. It is entirely contained, in effect, in the painting of the hell and the heaven of the Middle Ages, in that of eternal sufferings, or of a beatitude very distant, placed so high that it seems to us almost inaccessible; it is perhaps for this reason that it touches us so little when we see it reproduced on canvas or in marble. Today too, no one would dare to contest it, the world is in a period of transition, solicited violently by obsolete habits, precarious beliefs of the past, and new truths, which are progressively unveiled to it.

Just as Christian art succeeded pagan art, transforming it, Spiritist art will be the complement and the transformation of Christian art. Spiritism, indeed, shows us the hereafter in a new light, and more within our reach. Through it, happiness is closer to us, it is at our side, in the Spirits who surround us and who have never ceased to be in relation with us. The abode of the elect, that of the condemned, are no longer isolated; there is incessant solidarity between heaven and the Earth, between all the worlds of all the Universes; bliss consists in the mutual love of all creatures who attain perfection, and in a constant activity, with the aim of instructing and leading to that same perfection those who have fallen behind. Hell is in the very heart of the guilty one, who has in remorse his punishment, no longer, however, eternal, and to the wicked one who takes the path of repentance there appears anew hope, the sublime consolation of the wretched. What inexhaustible sources of inspiration for art! What masterpieces of every genre the new ideas will give rise to, through the reproduction of the so multiplied and varied scenes of spirit life! Instead of representing cold and inanimate remains, one will see a mother having at her side her beloved daughter in her radiant and ethereal form; the victim forgiving his executioner; the criminal fleeing in vain from the spectacle, continually reborn, of his culpable actions! the isolation of the egoist and of the proud one, amid the multitude; the bewilderment of the spirit who returns to spiritual life, etc., etc. And, if the artist wishes to rise above the terrestrial sphere, to the superior worlds, true Edens where the advanced Spirits enjoy the happiness they have conquered, or, if he desires to reproduce some aspects of the inferior worlds, true hells where the passions reign supreme, what moving scenes, what scenes throbbing with interest will present themselves to him! Without doubt, Spiritism opens to art an entirely new field, immense and as yet unexplored. When the artist comes to reproduce with conviction the spirit world, he will draw from that source the most sublime inspirations, and his name will live in the centuries to come, because, over the preoccupations of a material and ephemeral order of the present life, he will set the state of the future and eternal life of the soul.