RELIGION AND ART.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 51, 18 April 1874, Page 9

RELIGION AND ART.

Ik a debate in the French Assembly upon the estimates for the department of the Minister for Instruction, Worship, an I the Fine Arts, Deputy Gavardie spoke thus of the decadence of Art in Fr.incß : — "Gentlemen," he said, " the old artists, those who have thrown so great a splendor over the history of art, the artists of the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, of whose namea I need not remiud you, were — and some among us rcay be surprised to hear it, but it is nevertheless true— theologians before they were artists." They were n:>t doctors in Canon Law, but they had begun by seeking the true expression of art, that without which art become? something mercantile and a mere trade. Technical skill is certainly not lackiug in our day ; tha progress of the physical sciences has placed marvellous means of execution in the hands of artiste What have they mile of them ? They lack the inspiration of faith which animated the intelligence, the hands, tliß hearts of tho artists of whom I just no*v spike, ml .v'uo had studied at that profound so irej tie fcruo notions of art, for iv the domain of intelligence everything is connected. How coine3 it Unit in the present day we have no great writers, no g-eut po3ts ; th it at thia moment fchere are no great men of letters in Fivuica ? (Djnials on tlio Left.) I know that we have had them ; but do you know in what their strength consisted — the strength of those whoso mines you now invoke? Do you know wheuce thoy derived tluii* nupiritiin*? They had religious and monarchical inspirations, and Viator Hu;o first among them." The Left laughed ironically, but cnuld not deny this, for the early writings of the author of Odes et Ballades are there to prove it. Still insisting on tho ncoe-sily of a high order of s'ndy as part of the education of a true tirtist, ho referred to tho want of dignity and elevation in the art of tie present day, and said :— " Wo cannot walk through our streets anl squares and promenades without meeting with very vulgar types of beauty (exclamations and loud laughter on the Left) — often gentlemen — and the expression lam about to use will not be metaphorical — with marble maidens (fillet de marbre), who display rather too in icviously. . . . (' Hear, hear, from Deputy Pc.-in and others.) I thank my honorable colleague for demanding silence on my behalf, but I know not hoar he will receive the expression I am about to use; I will s.-iy that those statutes are rather too Republican in their stylo; and at this you not.J not ba astonished, /or they are sans culottes."