Camille Saint-Saëns, Guest Blogger

I have always loved Camille Saint-Saëns as a composer. But there is also much to marvel at in his prose.

These two passages come from his essay "The Ideas of M. Vincent D'Indy" from Outspoken Essays on Music (translated to English in 1922 by Fred Rothwell):

Art came into being on the day that man, instead of being solely concerned with the utility of an object he had made, concerned himself with its form, and made up his mind that this form should satisfy a need peculiar to human nature, a mysterious need to which the name of "aesthetic sense " has been given.

Afterwards form was enriched by ornament, or decoration, which serves no other purpose than to satisfy this aesthetic sense. Subsequently it became man's desire to reproduce the form of his fellow beings, human and animal, and he began to do this--as a child still does—-by a stroke or line. This line does not exist in nature.

Here is the starting point in the radical difference between nature and art; art is destined not to reproduce nature literally, but to suggest an idea of nature. This principle, badly interpreted, gives rise to the aberrations which manifest themselves at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants.

It is by virtue of this principle that the most insignificant sketch gives an impression of art which will never be supplied by the finest photograph, however "artistic."

It is also on this account that the purists are mistaken when they attack "imitative music." Real imitative music would consist of the green-room noises by which a life-like imitation is given in the theatre to thhe wind and the rain and the various other sounds of nature. So-called imitative music does not imitate, it suggests. Composers have described storms, but there is not one that is like any of the rest. The singing of birds, which offends certain persons in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, is there imitated in very imperfect fashion; it is this very facct that constitutes its charm.

And a few pages later:

Everything is relative, we are told. This is true, though only within certain limits which cannot be overstepped. After a severe frost, a temperature of twelve degrees above zero seems stiflingly hot; on returning from the tropics, you shiver with cold at eighteen degrees above zero. There comes a limit, however, beyond which both cold and heat disorganise the tissues and render life impossible.

The dissonance of yesterday, we are also told, will be the consonance of tomorrow ; one can grow accustomed to anything. Still, there are such things in life as bad habits, and those who get accustomed to crime, come to an evil end. . . .

It is impossible for me to regard scorn of all rules as being equivalent to progress, by which word we generally mean improvement. The true meaning of the word—progressus—is a going forward, but the end or object is not stated. There is such a thing as the progress of a disease, and this is anything but improvement.

The more civilization advances, the more the artistic sense seems to decline: a grave symptom. We have already said that art came into existence on the day when man, instead of being solely preoccupied with the utility of an object, began to concern himself with its form.

More and more at the present time does attention to utility assume the foremost place ; we do away with all adornment and trouble ourselves nothing about form. The need to know is being substituted for the need to believe and to admire; and since what we know is insignificant compared with what we do not know, there is an immense field open to the human intellect.