The new beauty through the look of František Xaver Šalda

At the threshold of the twentieth century, a new aesthetic consciousness emerged in Europe, which opposed the traditional notion of the place and role of the artist in public life. Winner of this consciousness in the middle of Czech symbolism became the professor of Romance at the Prague University František Xaver Šalda, who lived from 1867 to 1937. Even as Editor of the Free Directions Magazine, Šalda created a name for a significant theoretician of the Cultural and Historical School of Literature. His ideas go beyond the limits of literature: with the means of all arts, he wishes to achieve a new type of culture that would enliven social life in the spirit of Christian humanism. His views Šalda exposes in the published in 1903 essay "Genesis and Nature of New Beauty". In it he formulates the characteristics of the young art. A sure and unmistakable mark that the "new beauty" always and everywhere recognizes is that it never attempts to win the audience's favor with flattery, lives its own inner life, and as any real value expresses itself, relies only to himself, devoted entirely to his inner idea, his inner rhythm and law. The new art and the new beauty are most unmistakably recognizable in that they are deprived of all cunning, do not intrude and seek no favor. Every new beauty and every new art has conquering virtues: self-confidence, integrity, intolerance, struggle and exclusivity. They rush into the world not to get a warm place alongside old art and old beauty, but to conquer all of life - not from vanity or arrogance but because they are deeply and firmly convinced that they are the bearers of truth about life and about the future and that they will make the world accept and understand this truth, which he either did not know until now, or he has neglected it: without this inherent faith, there can be no new art. This belief is its essential root, its mysterious mystical root, stuck in the very center of ecumenical life: it lives on it and rests on it.

image source

According to Šalda, the new beauty and new art always arise in such a way that, despite the resistance of historians or theorists, judged that nothing new can be born, since all the beauty and art has already passed that they have exhausted closed in a boundary beyond which he can not walk, despite all attempts to falter a great and bravely creative heart appears, which in spite of everything succeeds in achieving the seemingly impossible. Thus the theorists have decided that in our century of utilitarianism and positivism there can no longer be a lyric that expresses a mystical love for God that the very feeling itself has already died together with various other forms of a past culture that it represented - but here comes Paul-Marie Verlaine and shows the impossible. In his book "Wisdom" there is such an accelerated pulse, so passionate flight, a softened tenderness, such a burning obedience to the resurgent senses, such a simplicity of heart, and so dazzling whirlwinds of nerves and feelings that he despite the impossible environment and precisely because of his disgust from it creates a new mystical poetry with the same inner qualities and the same psychic power as the great mystic-erotic and religious Spanish poetry possessed, and yet with today's taste and today's sensitivity to the pain, love and horror for most soulful midnight and first quietly spiritual dawn. Or, all the theoreticians agree that between painting and sculpture there are persistent, immutable and insurmountable boundaries that in life there are passions and feverish states that sculpture can not express and which, according to the laws of aesthetics, must remain a perimeter of painting - but here comes Born not to cross, but to jump far beyond the boundaries established by lazy brains. He creates plastic poetry with amazingly sensual radiance and feverish sensitivity, plastic storms of delight and horror, bodies that vibrate with passions and their convulsions, as the air vibrates from light and the air of sounds, manages to sense the very shades of life, its magnetic breath and smoke: it sculpts what was thought to be the only one of the painter.

So the real creator - continues Šalda- never seeks beauty, but something fundamentally different and basically always the same: more life, more honesty, more truth, more power, more rhythm, more legality and logic, more pain and delight, than has been so far in art. As a second important point in the characterization of the creative spirit, Šalda points out that the genius always does not care to justify his appearance in the past as well as his fusion with him: he creates, driven by mystical love to the last second, by gratitude to the overflowing of fullness a moment of the present, totally and unconditionally devoted to his enchantment, obeying him, merging with him in his secret, without worrying about the consequences. That is why new art and new beauty are always totally devoted to modernity, moreover, they are actually the only present, the fullest, the most real and the most true reality that exists. If I have to tell you as much as possible how today's aesthetic feelings of new art differ from the aesthetic feeling of old art from our grandfathers' generation, how it is differently organized by him, I can only answer this: it differs from this that in him slowly, but certainly disappears the difference between dream and life, between truth and beauty, between poetry and health, between fantasy and logic - that it is more unified and more organic, that it is the result of a higher synthesis and with larger arches and more musical chords, vital space. Old art was exploited precisely by the piquancy of these contrasts, by the romantic dualism of life unity and fragmentation-that was the source of his pathos and his poetry-while the new art is already built and increasingly built on unity, the normality, on the integrity of life: it seeks to heal the old, unhealed wounds that old art has further eradicated and subdued as it uses them as a material and prerequisite for creativity. We now feel and see that even during the beginning and the early boom of old art and old culture, this dualism has not been overcome, and once infiltrated into it, it has given birth to decay, death, and doom.

Another, no less important than the previous scars and in fact their hidden result, which always unmistakably characterizes the new beauty and new art and is their greatest inspiration, is as follows: new art and new beauty always focus on the whole and always strive for life in its entirety, endeavor to encompass, fill, illuminate and re-create all life without breaking it or himself. Deep in the heart of each new art, it is inscribed that the artistic work is not a copy and reproduction of reality, but something immeasurably greater and more significant, that it is a parable of the glory, beauty and indecision of life. How strange the sound of Šalda's reflections about the artistic experience of an age far away from ours a century ago! This cult of functionality, technique and machine, this admiration for the purpose of human action in science, social life, art - were brought to absurd after only a decade. The first gas attacks during the First World War allayed the illusion that scientific achievements and technical advances in themselves are also advances in human prosperity. But the time of the Šalda is a time of great anticipation: the literature expects words with maximum internal tension and maximum charge, the artist expects to depict the peak states of the human soul, and the poet expects to have something to say and through silence to make people silence to speak the springs and wells of the night, and to silence in their mysterious language all that man can not express with his rhetorical thiras. Thus, new beauty and new art imply and require the reader's, the viewer's, and the listener's cooperation to achieve through the complicity of the audience the secret of our purpose on this Earth.