and similar monsters; and surely no rules of art can demand the continued perpetration of such absurdities, in painting or sculpture, even as symbols.
In my opinion, then, there can be no high art, as there is no truth and no real significance, in external forms unknown to anatomy and physiology; truth in art must not be divorced from truth in science, nor the truly beautiful from nature. The exterior should translate, as it were, the interior; and, whether we study the human or the animal figure, from the point of view of surgery, art, or philosophical anatomy, the natural type, the laws of structure and growth, the correlation and the organic harmony of parts, should in every case lie at the foundation. The idealism of ancient art is, I believe, a pretense of the moderns; their ideal is the real, magnified by the imagination. The modern ideal of much that is considered high art is too often the impossible, the absurd, the monstrous, the incomprehensible.
The conscientious and real artist, though he may be ignorant of, despises not anatomy; it is only the superficial and the conceited who fancy that it is a laudable and independent spirit which allows imagination, under the pretense of symbolism, unguided by knowledge, to dictate the rules of art. Albert Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Jean Cousin, were well versed in anatomy; it would have been better had the genius and imagination of Raphael and other great artists been tempered by an accurate knowledge of the real.
Herbert Spencer says, "Only when genius is married to science can the highest results be achieved"; to which Mr. Benjamin adds, in his essay already quoted, "But such science should be the intense study of nature even more than of art."
In our day, when reason is supreme, the thinking world can not be made to believe that progress means evil, even though it modify ideas of things once considered sacred and beyond reason; and any belief, practice, sentiment, or influence, which can not bear the light of reason, and hence can not be said to be founded on truth, deserves to be removed as a bar to human progress.
It has been said, and no doubt truly, that as knowledge increases, the imagination decreases; in such an event our ideal will soon become the real, without exaggeration, and nature and art will no longer be divorced, even in appearance. Increasing intelligence is the great and never-ceasing iconoclast which breaks to pieces the images created by imperfect knowledge of facts.
This is about the sum of the arguments in favor of symbols, once suggestive of the good and the sacred, but since proved to be fallacious and founded on error, namely, that those who originated and used them for purposes of good believed them to be true and beautiful, and therefore that for all time, or at the present time, they are worthy of imitation and belong in the realm of high art.
Must we, then, give up our saints, angels, and devils, and other
