(which is sometimes comical and expressed nonsensically), Joseph Reinach is obliged to acknowledge that his hero was lacking in artistic feeling in his famous Salons, because Diderot appreciated most of all those pictures which offered possibilities of literary dissertation,[1] and Brunetière could say that Diderot's Salons were the corruption of criticism, because he discussed works of art in them as if they were books.[2]
The impotence of speech is due to the fact that art flourishes best on mystery, half shades and indeterminate outlines; the more speech is methodical and perfect, the more likely is it to eliminate everything that distinguishes a masterpiece; it reduces the masterpiece to the proportions of an academic product.
As a result of this preliminary examination of the three highest achievements of the mind, we are led to believe that it is possible to distinguish in every complex body of knowledge a clear and an obscure region, and to say that the latter is perhaps the more important. The mistake made by superficial people consists in the statement that this second part must disappear with the progress of enlightenment, and that eventually everything will be explained rationally in terms of the little science. This error is particularly revolting as regards art, and, above all, perhaps, as regards modern painting, which seeks more and more to render combinations of shades to which no attention was formerly paid on account of their lack of stability and of the difficulty of rendering them by speech.[3]
B. (1) In ethics, the part that can be expressed easily,
- ↑ J. Reinach,Diderot, pp. 116–117, 125–127, 131–132.
- ↑ Brunetière, Évolution des genres, p. 122. Elsewhere he calls Diderot a philistine, p. 153.
- ↑ It is to the credit of the impressionists that they showed that these fine shades can be rendered by painting; but some few among them soon began to paint according to the formulas of a school, and then there appeared a scandalous contrast between their works and their avowed aims.
