ÉTIENNE GILSON
1884–1978
The Arts of the Beautiful
Étienne Gilson was one of the most renowned scholars of the twentieth century. He was born in Paris in 1884 and lived to be ninety-four, dying in France in 1978. He was educated at the Lycée Henry IV, the premier preparatory school of France, and at the Sorbonne; by the time he was thirty-four he was the leading scholar of medieval history in France. By the time he was fifty he was the leading scholar of his subject in the world. He taught both in Paris and Toronto, where he established a school of medieval studies, his teaching consisting usually of a course of lectures; from these he wrote his books. There were many of those, all of them marked by his astonishing clarity of thought; indeed there is no thinker that I know of whom it is easier, and more fruitful, to follow—whether you always agree with his conclusions or not. A large, gruff man, Gilson possessed an instrument, in his pen, of the most consummate delicacy; he has been compared to that Zen master, also a chef, who cut meat for his dishes without effort because, as he said, “I cut at the joints.”
I would not hesitate to recommend any book of Étienne Gilson’s to a reader curious to experience the best Roman Catholic philosophical thought of our time. I have chosen The Arts of the Beautiful because it is not only an example of Gilson’s own art at its best, but also because of the novel things that it says.
Gilson was eighty-one when the book was published; he had delivered the series of lectures on which it is based a year or two before. The book is clearly the work of an old man. It is spare, there is no wasted effort in it, no unnecessary words. This wise old man is intent on telling us something that we ought to have known and consequently that he ought not to have had to go to the trouble to tell us; but he must, because we do not know it, and it is true. For him, no other reason is needed.
That something he wishes to tell us, or to remind us of, is that art is making. Gilson does not beat around the bush; the first paragraph of the introduction begins thus:
In the Encyclopédie française we find this quotation by the historian Lucien Febvre: ‘Assuredly, art is a kind of knowledge.’ The present book rests upon the firm and considered conviction that art is not a kind of knowledge or, in other words, that it is not a manner of knowing. On the contrary, art belongs in an order other than that of knowledge, namely, in the order of making … From beginning to end, art is bent upon making.
Now most people do not agree with Gilson, although he is right. It is true enough that what the artist makes is, or can be, an object of knowledge; we can know a great deal about a painting or a poem, to say nothing of knowing about the painter’s or the poet’s life. But knowing about a self-portrait of Rembrandt is very far from being able to paint it, which is to say to make it. Nor is it sufficient to know how Rembrandt painted: how he arranged his subjects, how he mixed his pigments, how he applied them to the canvas, which he had also prepared in his special way. Knowing all that will not permit you to paint like Rembrandt, to make what he made.
To paint like Rembrandt, you must have made the things that he made—paintings, etchings, and other works of art. Rembrandt, like all great artists, knew this perfectly well, whether or not he ever said it; we know that, because we know that he never stopped making things as long as he lived. The idea, in fact, of an artist who knows how to make but does not make is a contradiction in terms.
I do not mean to belittle criticism. Knowing about art is an important kind of knowledge. But making a work of art is more important. It is also essentially mysterious. Why are the great artists great? I don’t think we can ever say why. The Greeks made a myth out of the notion of inspiration, and a myth is something, according to an old definition, that is so true that it could never happen. At any rate, no one has ever actually seen anyone being inspired. But some human beings make better—more beautiful—things than others, and a very few men and women are truly great makers. The things that they make have a meaning and importance that endures for a very long time, even forever, and those things have a kind of life that in one sense, although not in another, is higher than that of human beings.
Those are a few of the things that Gilson says in The Arts of the Beautiful. He says many other things as well that are worth digging out. His was a remarkable mind; he was a great maker of books, even though his books are not works of art per se, that is, they are themselves in the realm of truth, not that of beauty.
JAMES JOYCE
1882–1941
Dubliners
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the son of a couple who were at first prosperous. But Joyce’s father was an angry, blustering man who drank too much (as Joyce described in many of his stories). So the family’s fortunes soon foundered. By the time he was ten Joyce had become the son of a poor man, and he himself remained a poor man all of his life.
Besides poverty, Joyce also had other ills to contend with. He suffered from several kinds of eye diseases; between 1917 and 1930 he endured a series of twenty-five operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts; and he was for short stretches during this period totally blind. He and Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he lived throughout most of his life and whom he finally married, had a daughter who was mentally ill, and this illness disturbed Joyce greatly. In addition, his works, although admired by the literati, were not popular successes during his lifetime; indeed, most of them were banned for long periods, and he had great difficulty getting them published. Despite these problems and troubles, Joyce was essentially a happy man who kept up his spirits and never stopped working. Some of his most hilarious passages were written during the worst times of his life.
He wrote the stories that were collected under the title Dubliners (1914) during the first years of the last century. All of these stories show an acute, observing eye, but one of them, “The Dead,” is among the finest stories ever written. The story was written in Trieste, where Joyce and Nora were living, around the year 1910. Joyce had recently been told—although it was a false report—that Nora had been loved by another man, and he felt betrayed. In addition, he was sentimentally overwhelmed, while living so far from home, by his memories of Irish hospitality. He combined these two feelings in “The Dead,” which described a party at Christmastime in Dublin some years before. Many characters are introduced but the focus is on the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, and his wife Gretta. There is singing and dancing. Gabriel makes an awkward speech about hospitality, but his eyes never leave Gretta, whom he finds that he loves and desires more than ever. At the end of the story he learns something about her he has never known. Her heart was broken years before, he now realizes, by a boy who died for her, or so she thought, and his own heart is broken as he lies beside her in the night, watching her as she sleeps and thinking of all the living and the dead. This last scene of “The Dead” is one of the purest of all literary experiences; for concentrated feeling it is hard to name anything that is its equal.