The arts and Spiritism

Was there perchance an epoch in which more poets existed, more painters, sculptors, men of letters, and artists of every kind? an epoch in which poetry, painting, sculpture, whatever the art, has been received with more disdain? Everything is in a state of stagnation! and nothing, except what is connected to the positivist fury of the century, has a chance of being favorably appreciated.

Without doubt there are still some friends of the beautiful, the great, the true; but, alongside them, how many profaners, whether among the practitioners or among the amateurs! There are no more painters; there are only amateurs! It is not glory that is pursued! it comes at too slow a pace for our hurried generation. To see fame and the aureole of talent crown an existence in its decline, what is this? A chimera, good at most for the artists of the past. Then one had time to live; today, only to enjoy! One must, therefore, arrive, and promptly, at fortune; one must make a name by an original production, by intrigue, by all the means more or less avowable with which civilization overwhelms the peoples who touch upon an immense progress forward or a decadence without remission. What does it matter if the celebrity won disappears as rapidly as the existence of the ephemeral! What does the brevity of the brilliance matter!… It is an eternity if that time sufficed to acquire fortune, the key to pleasures and to the dolce far niente!

It is the courageous struggle with trial that makes talent; the struggle with fortune enervates and kills it!

Everything falls, everything totters, because there is no more belief!

Do you think that the painter believes in himself? Yes, at times he reaches that point; but, in general, he believes only blindly, only in the enthusiasm of the public, and he takes advantage of it until a new caprice comes to carry elsewhere the torrent of favors that was flowing into him!

How is one to make religious or mythological pictures that touch and move, when the beliefs in the ideas they represent have disappeared?

One has talent, one sculpts the marble, one gives it the human form; but it is always a cold and insensible stone: there is no life! Beautiful forms, but not the spark that creates immortality!

The masters of antiquity made gods, because they believed in those gods. Our present sculptors, who do not believe in them, make only men. But, let faith come, however illogical and without a serious aim, and it will engender masterpieces; if reason guides them, there will be no limits it cannot reach! Immense fields, wholly unexplored, open themselves to the present youth, to all those whom a powerful sentiment of conviction impels toward a path, whatever it may be. Literature, architecture, painting, history, all will receive from the Spiritist goad the new baptism of fire, necessary to give vitality to expiring society; because, in the heart of all those who accept it, there will be placed an ardent love for Humanity and an unshakable faith in its destiny. An artist, Ducornet. n [1]

[see Louis Joseph César Ducornet.]