The conditions for culture, says Nietzsche, are most favorable during the decadence of a warrior aristocracy, just as the reins are being loosened but before exhaustion has become all-complete. French Rococo is the art of just such an aristocracy, which, though it had rallied briefly during the reign of Louis XV, received its death-blow in the Fronde and was definitely on the decline. The French army had been reformed to privilege the authority of the king; feudal liberties were being steadily chipped away; absolute monarchy was in the ascendant.
Fragonard’s most famous painting bears the marks of an aristocratic taste which pursues intellectual and cultural refinement as compensation for lost power. The theme is pleasure, but pleasure treated with devotion, with an almost religious reverence. The lady is illuminated from above by a shaft of light that pierces the darkness. She is, at least on the surface, artificial, civilized, shown not only in the perfection of her figure, her exquisite dress, the luxurious red upholstery of the swing, the lattice just visible beneath her left arm, the statues done in classical motifs (Eros stands to the far left, presiding over the scene; on his pedestal are — worshippers? victims?), but also in the contrast between these things and the gnarled, knotted, twisted trees, representative of the wilderness, above and behind her. (The two trees in the background, within her shaft of light, are straight; like the lady, they are Nature subject to the artistic will of man.) She is an urban nymph, a dryad of the park rather than the forest. Two men bear witness to her glory. The first is her husband, sitting comfortably — perhaps “complacently” would better suit the case — on a bench to the bottom right; the second, her lover, is hidden in the bushes to the left. Both are servants of her pleasure. The husband happily pulls her swing, unaware that she is cheating him. More interesting is the position of the lover. He lies prostrate on the ground — because he has almost been knocked down by the swing? or in an attitude of worship? His posture reminds me of Renaissance paintings in which Roman soldiers cower before the risen Christ as He steps from the tomb. For him, the beloved is a divine revelation. The lady casts a glance in his direction: cool, bemused, supercilious; haughtily, she flings her shoe, an “accident” which pleases the lover while affirming her power — the shoe which to him is the bliss of passion encouraged is to her a trifling thing, easily thrown away. The cult of Amour is still strong in Fragonard. The power of pleasure and the pleasures of power are displayed in the lover and the beloved, respectively, calling to mind Nietzsche’s remark on the period:
In the eighteenth century, the strongest and most well-constituted kind of man, comparatively speaking, could still be found in precisely the sphere which Rousseau had most vigorously opposed — the kind of man in whom the grand passions were still intact, the passion for power, the passion for pleasure, the passion for (and ability to) command.
The connection between pleasure, power, and aristocracy is made also by Tolstoy but with the opposite valuation. “People of the upper classes, more and more frequently encountering the contradictions between beauty and goodness, put the ideal of beauty first, thus freeing themselves from the demands of morality. . . . It is this supplanting of the ideal of what is right by the ideal of what is beautiful, i.e. of what is pleasant, that is the fourth consequence, and a terrible one, of the perversion of art in our society.” Fragonard, his mark. The gentle lines, a hairsbreadth from non-existence, speak to boundaries made pliable, morals disregarded; the soft colors are unserious. It is a laughing, mocking, dreaming art. Neo-Classicism, already gaining traction in 1767 and soon to be dominant first under Louis XVI and then, especially, during and after the Revolution, excoriated the Rococo style as the product of an effete, decaying upper class. Hardening and straightening the lines, muting colors, it strove through rigorous symmetry to promote moral retrenchment. Later, Impressionism will melt what is solid in bourgeois virtue as Rococo had done for the virtues of the aristocracy, and through many of the same means.
What his immediate successors sought to fix, Fragonard dispersed in the air. The girl on her swing is bathed in light; her airiness, the carefree weightlessness of the swing, make her light twice over; finally, she is light in the old sense of the term: loose, promiscuous. Her femininity is synonymous with laughter, triviality, grace, wit, pleasure — everything that makes for ease. The men have it harder, as befits devotees. Her husband is in darkness: he is ignorant and out of favor, bereft of the light both of Truth and the Fair. The lover is but half-illumined; he must still contend with the darkness of Nature, which, behind the cultivated beauty of the French garden, is wild, perilous, just as the passion of lust, lurking beneath the gentility of aristocratic manners, overwhelms. He must brave dangers of which the beloved is unaware, including the moral danger of deliberate evil and, not least of all, the danger of the beloved herself. She is evil by nature not choice; the darkness, the wild undergrowth, is hers, always threatening to encroach the boundaries of that bright civilization of which she is the apogee. Her branches reach toward the heights; her roots, into darkest depths. Here, the Socratic equation (happiness = reason = virtue) is undone: happiness, the whole world of light-soaked feminine pleasure, all beautiful colors and soft lines, is intertwined with immorality and dependent on sensuality. The lady, a mortal goddess, resplendent in her egotism, tempts to wickedness with a clean conscience. At the extremes of evil are innocence, purity, joy.
Dislike the last sentence, of course, but loved this one: "The power of pleasure and the pleasures of power " Poetic, alliterative, true.