of which the accompanying sheets are a specimen, on the terms stated
in the enclosed paper; that is that you should defray the expenses of
printing, etc., and divide the profits with the author.[13] Should you
object to this arrangement, be kind enough to tell me on what terms,
short of the author's entire risk, you would be inclined to engage in
it.
[13] This work, a commentary by Taafe on Dante, was
printed, like _Adonais_, at Pisa by a printer who used
the types of Didot, the celebrated French typefounder.
Byron interested himself in the book, and it was
subsequently published by John Murray. Professor
Dowden printed the middle paragraph of this letter.
The more considerable portion of this work will consist of the comment.
I have read with much attention this portion, as well as the verses,
up to the eighth Canto; and I do not hesitate to assure you that the
lights which the annotator's labours have thrown on the obscurer
parts of the text are such as all foreigners and most Italians would
derive an immense additional knowledge of Dante from. They elucidate
a great number of the most interesting facts connected with Dante's
history of his times; and everywhere bear the mark of a most elegant
and accomplished mind. I know you will not take my opinion on Poetry,
because I thought my own verses very good, and you find that the public
declare them to be unreadable. Show this to Mr. Procter, who is far
better qualified to judge than I am. There are certainly passages
of great strength and conciseness; indeed the author has sacrificed
everything to represent his original truly, in this latter point pray
observe the great beauty of the typography; they are the same types as
my elegy on Keats is printed from.
You cannot do me a greater favour than in making some satisfactory
arrangement with the author. Of course I cannot expect, nor do I wish,
that you should undertake any thing that should not fairly promise
to promote your own interest. But pray allow my recommendation to
overbalance, if your determination should be in equilibrium. I feel
persuaded that I am recommending a most excellent work, and one without
which the history and the spirit of the age of Dante as relates to him
will never be understood by the English students of that astonishing
poet.
Dear sir, your obliged and obt. servt.,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Pisa, June 16, 1821.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART
By HOWARD HANNAY
I
Ever since Plato reluctantly condemned art on the ground that it was
mere imitation of superficial outward appearances the problem of art
has been disputed on this basis. Plato did not allow the artist any
initiative except to imitate, and his conception of ideal beauty had
no connection with the activities of the poet, painter, and sculptor:
it was not concerned with æsthetic beauty, but with intellectual and
moral fitness and perfection. Aristotle gave a slightly different
interpretation to the work of the artist, defining it as a description
of the possible as contrasted with history which determines what has
actually happened. Plotinus introduced the element of the ideal: the
artist does not so much imitate natural reality as externalise an
archetype existing in his mind or soul. Plotinus partly identified art
with Plato's ideal beauty.
These three alternative views constitute the starting-point for the
three chief divergent explanations of art which have been developed
during the last two thousand years. In modern terminology they would
be designated as theories of art, respectively as "reproduction,"
as "imagination," as "idealisation." The extent of their mutual
discrepancy varies according to the exact meaning attached to the
last two conceptions, imagination and idealisation. For instance,
if the latter ultimately amounts to selecting certain particularly
attractive real forms and events, it is virtually merely an eclectic
process of reproduction. Imagination, again, may be regarded simply as
a composite memory. Samuel Butler said, "Imagination is mainly memory,
but there is a small percentage of creation of something out of nothing
with it." It is only in so far as imagination is creative that it is
different in kind from reproduction, from perception and history. And
if idealisation is not a selection of given realities but a making
articulate of an inner vision it also is a kind of imagination, only it
is confined to the pleasantly beautiful, the attractive. The importance
of all three definitions tends to be diminished when, as is often the
case with modern theories, the chief emphasis is laid on the feeling
or emotional element in art. Natural objects and real events can
presumably excite emotion as much as imaginative creations, and this
fact appears to lend a new value to the act of reproduction. The centre
of interest is transferred from the knowledge content to the feeling of
the subject and the knowledge content, the consciousness of the object
is regarded simply as a cause which brings about that for which art
exists, viz., emotion. The aim of reproduction is no longer intrinsic,
but falls outside in the resultant subjective feeling. But this
means a somewhat arbitrary distinction between the emotion and the
representation. In actual concrete experience the two are so closely
linked together that they appear almost identical: the emotion inheres
in the representation. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as an instance
of cause and effect: it is not analogous to the process of a pin and
the ensuing prick, where the cause, the pin, is quite distinct from and
independent of the feeling of pain. Mere associations of ideas are,
on the other hand, nearer to the cause and effect sequence. A certain
scent recalls a whole chapter of one's past history. Mr. Bosanquet's
portmanteau reminds him of Florence.[14] For this reason a tendency
is apparent to connect emotion more definitely with imaginative and
idealistic art. Mere reproduction is cold and bald and only evokes
an emotion by a fortuitous association of ideas: whereas the genuine
product "expresses" or contains the emotion; and in doing so it is
thought that it inevitably alters the "natural" or "historical" fact,
distorting, transmuting it.
[14] _Three Lectures on Æsthetics_, p. 49.
The applicability of these various theories appears on the surface, at
any rate, to differ according to the different arts. No one can be a
thorough-going realist with regard to music, which is so indisputably
a self-contained independent construction. It may be debatable whether
music expresses experiences which are not of music, but music certainly
does not imitate or reproduce them unless they are in the first place
sounds, and for the most part they are not. The problem, therefore, is
not whether music reproduces but whether it "expresses" anything except
itself. Literature, again, can only directly imitate conversations
between people: for the rest it can only reproduce indirectly either
by symbolising or expressing. The symbol is purely arbitrary, it is
entirely a referring to something other than itself. Letters of the
alphabet have become symbolical. The expression, on the other hand,
contains something of the object expressed, it carries a world in
itself and of its own. Literature is admittedly expression, and here
the problem takes the form of a contrast between history and fiction,
whether at bottom literature only expresses historical fact (realism)
or imagined fact, the possible.
Painting and sculpture are for the æsthetic theorist in many ways the
most complex of the arts. As has been pointed out, neither music nor
literature can be said to reproduce directly if they reproduce at all,
because they employ a different medium, namely, sounds and words. But
painting and sculpture apparently employ as a medium the very objects
to be reproduced or expressed, viz., colours and lines. In literature
the word refers to a reality that seemingly is not itself a word. In
painting the picture and the reality can apparently be "matched" so
that here literally the picture imitates reality. Outside and around
us are already colours and forms, but there are no words, and only the
crudest sounds. And so painting is easily regarded as _par excellence_
the imitative or reproductive art, and of all arts to have the easiest
and most direct criterion: resemblance to external reality.
II
These are the premises with which the realists and the romanticists,
cubists, futurists, etc., start. They all assume rather naïvely the
existence of an immediately perceived natural reality of given colours
and forms. Their divergence is in their views as to the activity of the
artist in respect of this natural reality. The realist considers that
the painter's function is to transcribe it, to copy it on to canvas.
He may select certain aspects which appeal to him, in fact he paints
a particular scene exactly because that scene gives him more pleasure
than others. But his creativeness is limited to this selection of given
scenes and to their skilful and accurate reproduction.
The opponents of this view (and they include the majority of persons
who have any serious acquaintance with painting) maintain that the
essential element in a picture is not its resemblance to something
else, but its intrinsic interest, and, this being the case, so long
as the painting contains and conveys an emotion that is inherent in
its line and colour it does not matter if there is not a literal
resemblance to real objects. In fact, it is thought that the very
effort to express a subjective mood centring round an external
situation, to project one's own imaginative life into that which
itself has no life, inevitably results in a certain distortion of the
natural reality, in a deliberate emphasising of certain features. The
line vibrates with feeling, the colour is grouped and blended so as to
conform to the emotion of the individual mood, irrespective of whether
"out there" the artist can actually "see" such an arrangement. The
photograph has tended strongly to confirm this theory. Back in the
eighties J. A. Symonds wrote, "The artist cannot avoid modifying his
imitation of the chosen object by the impression of his own subjective
quality. Human art is unable to reproduce nature except upon such
terms as these. It cannot draw as accurately as the sun does by means
of the photographic camera. Art will never match the infinite variety
and subtlety of nature; no drawing or painting will equal the primary
beauties of the living model ... yet art has qualities derived from the
intellectual selective imaginative faculties of man which more than
justify its existence." Walter Pater went a step further and asserted
that "Art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while
in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from
the form and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it
is the constant aim of art to obliterate it."
The cubist and futurist art theories are a logical development of
certain implications contained in arguments such as these: they are an
attempt to make pictorial and plastic art identical with what music
is supposed to be to get rid altogether of the irrelevant incubus
of representation. They are quite distinct from the explanation
often advanced for the primitive simplificatory character of
Post-Impressionist art. The latter retains and is not a bit afraid of a
representative content; it merely advocates a revolt from tradition and
from the inclusion of facts which we know to be there in the objects
depicted without actually seeing or perceiving them. Its purpose is
not a musical elaboration of our vision, but a clarification and
purging of it of all derivative and merely intellectual elements. Hence
the stress laid on the art and vision of the child and the primitive.
There is no doubt, however, that the explanations offered of the art of
Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne gradually led to the cubist theory. It
was felt that not only were these artists breaking away from tradition
in order to attain clearness and directness of vision, but that their
vision was expressive rather than representative. "Primitive art, like
the art of children, consists not so much in an attempt to represent
what the eye perceives as to put a line round a mental conception
of the object. Like the work of the primitive artist, the pictures
children draw are often extraordinarily expressive."[15]
[15] Catalogue, Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Grafton
Galleries, 1910-11, pp. 11-12.
It should be noted that the early Post-Impressionists were artists
first and theorists afterwards, and they did not themselves produce
the theories which attempt to explain their art. The later men, on
the other hand, appear to have consummated a remarkable marriage of
philosophical reflection and artistic expression. Their art is the
conscious execution of their argument. There is no _a priori_ objection
to this luminous rationality. The only essential is that the argument
should be correct. Therefore, while one cannot condemn the art of Van
Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne on the ground that the explanatory theories
subsequently put forward are fallacious, a great many of the cubist
experiments live or fall with their theory.
While Cubism and Futurism had a similar origin they very soon parted
ways, and each followed the light of its own peculiar interpretation.
The difference of opinion concerned not the departure from
verisimilitude to persons and natural objects, about which both were
in agreement, but the content and character of the expression. The
futurists wanted, so to speak, programme music, the cubists pure music
without any taint of worldly and literary associations. It is curious
that these two movements which started so near together should diverge
to either extreme, Cubism to enshrine itself in a pure inhuman emotion
which possesses an absolutely divine "in itselfness," but is totally
unrelated to the rest of life, and can, therefore, only be ejaculated
about, and Futurism "to introduce brutally life into art, to combat the
old ideal æsthetic, static, decorative, effeminate, precious, cynical
that loathed action."[16] Cubism is fugitive, mystical, averse to
science and the world of raw human passion. Futurism is explosive with
mundane energy; it is not merely a theory of art, literature, music, it
is a new orientation embracing the whole of life; "on every question,
in Parliament, in communal councils, and in the market-places, men are
divided into lovers of the past (_passatisti_) and futurists." Yet it
is not so much the whole of life that the futurists wish to express as
that part of it which is peculiarly modern, its movement, its flux, its
dynamism. Any theory of a disruptive, hurly-burly aspect is grist to
the mill of Futurism. With what acclamation will Professor Einstein's
relativism be greeted: except that space should be angular rather than
gracefully curved! And it is again curious how the extremes tend to
meet. The Futurist's state, _nous aspirons à la création d'un type
inhumain en qui seront aboli la douleur morale, la bonté, la tendresse
et l'amour_.[17] Man must become metallic, mechanical, and dynamical.
Mr. Clive Bell aspires (if only in art) after an inhuman emotion
crystallised in abstract plastic form, in intricate relations of
masses: a sort of divine mathematical matter.
[16] _Noi Futuristi!_ Milan, 1917.
[17] _Le Futurisme_, by Maxinetti and others. 1911.
Recently an interesting controversy has taken place in the _Burlington
Magazine_ between Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. D. S. Maccoll on the question
of representative and abstract or purely decorative form. Mr. Maccoll
stands for the older school of J. A. Symonds; Mr. Roger Fry would
assimilate pictorial art to music and deprive it altogether of a world
outside itself. Both are in agreement as to art being non-photographic,
and as to the existence parallel with or prior to visual emotional art
of a photographic visual consciousness. Art, they both admit, is not
reproductive; to reproduce is the function of photography and of the
photographic side of our minds.
Art is temperamental, the expression in line and colour of emotion. But
while Mr. Maccoll thinks that the emotion lies mainly in the rhythm
of the objects represented, Mr. Fry considers that we are wrong in
concerning ourselves either with the ideas and sentiments of the artist
or with his interpretation of objects. We must appreciate and judge
a drawing solely according to the degree of beauty the lines set up
among themselves. Mr. Maccoll shrewdly points out that Mr. Fry and his
school always lay great emphasis on "mass," "volume," "plasticity,"
etc., which are definitely characters of objects and, therefore,
representative. It is possible, however, to go further: even a line and
a colour are natural objects, and if we are able to find enjoyment in
simple arrangements of lines and colours, why should we not find equal
enjoyment in trees and clouds and hills and people? Stated thus these
are generalities, but so are lines and colours: in a picture, however,
or a decoration they are endowed with individual life, with a unique
tone and significance.
In order to be absolutely logical, neither Mr. Roger Fry nor Mr. Clive
Bell should attempt to describe or explain a picture at all. It is a
world in a watertight compartment entirely severed and shut off from
the ordinary world. It either throws us into an ecstasy or it does not,
but these ecstasies are so many discrete units, and if they differ
we cannot articulate the difference. We ought not, for instance, to
describe early Italian art as ascetically religious, Botticelli as
pagan and lyrical, Hogarth as satirical. For this would be ascribing
to art a content extracted from life, it would be turning art into
literature. Even literature, however, at its best is devoid of meaning.
"In great poetry," writes Mr. Clive Bell, "it is the formal music that
makes the miracle. The poet expresses in verbal form an emotion but
distantly related to the words set down." And he quotes Shakespeare's
poetry as an instance of this great meaningless word music. This surely
is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole theory.
Mr. Clive Bell defines art as significant form. At first sight it would
appear as though the delimitations set up by the reduction of art to
abstract form were swept away by the admission of "significance" which
might include in its range the whole world. But the significance is
indescribable except in terms of form itself. Hence there is a certain
justification in Mr. Maccoll's contention that Mr. Clive Bell really
means "insignificant form." In his reply Mr. Bell falls back on the
conception of emotion. The significance is emotional, it is not only
incommunicable except by means of the actual work of art, but is
also totally unrelated to life in general: it is an intelligible and
self-contained department of its own, and does not require the liaison
work of the critical guide and commentator.
The fact is that in their most legitimate preoccupation of ensuring
that the work of art shall be a world in itself, a unity whose
essential significance and content does not lie outside itself in a
world of which it is merely a superfluous copy, but is firmly grasped
and held in its imaginative synthesis so that the content is identical
with the form. Messrs. Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Co. have gone
absolutely to the other extreme and deprived the work of art of all
content and significance; they have rendered it a discrete unit instead
of an individual unit. Now, there is only one mental activity which
deals with discrete units, and that is mathematics. Hence we can detect
a gradual assimilation in their critical terminology to the language of
mathematics and physics. The mysticism of art is becoming the mysticism
of planes, angles, cubes, surfaces and relations of lines and masses.
But Mr. Clive Bell has another and equally legitimate preoccupation. He
has observed that he experiences the same kind of pleasure from a fine
piece of architecture, a specimen of pottery, a decoration on a carpet,
as from a painting inside a frame which ostensibly refers to people and
objects existing independently outside the frame. And he concludes that
all these works must admit of reduction to a common denomination, they
all have that in common which induces us to call them works of art.
Obviously as architecture is non-representative in the ordinary sense,
we must excogitate a general definition which does not necessitate
representation. And so by a simple classificatory abstracting process
he arrives at the formula of "significant form."
Now this expressly refers only to pictorial art and does not pretend to
be a definition of music, literature, dancing, etc. These, however, all
come under the heading of art, and any formula for any single branch of
art must contain something of the universal essence of art in general.
This cannot lurk in the conception of form, because by form Mr. Bell
means not the logical concept, but the spatial physical image. It must,
therefore, inhere in the conception of significance. Pictorial art is
something significant expressed in the medium of spatial form. But here
we come up against the first preoccupation of eschewing all so-called
literary content. The significance of Rembrandt's dramatic masterpiece,
for instance, "Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery," must consist
in the relation of the colours and lines to each other and not in its
intensely dramatic human expression, which is an illegitimate literary
association of ideas. The significance is wrapt up in the abstract
spatial image and, therefore, so far from defining the essence of all
art, including literature and music, it will not even cover dramatic
representational painting. In his preoccupation of including decorative
art in his definition Mr. Bell has excluded all other kinds of art, and
has simply universalised the idiosyncrasy of decorative art.
He has not, however, really achieved that, because even decorative
art has what Mr. Bell would call a literary significance. No one can
seriously reflect upon Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architecture without
admitting how profoundly they are charged with historical meaning, and
that it is precisely this meaning which differentiates them and gives
them their individuality. They are the spirit of their respective ages,
caught up and embodied in what by an abstractive process of thought we
refer to as abstract form. Actually it is only abstract when thought of
apart from a particular instance: in any given instance, _e.g._, the
Cenotaph in Whitehall, it is as concrete and individual as an ordinary
picture or statue: it is a manifestation and expression of the human
mind in a particular set of circumstances.
The foregoing analysis brings out two facts. The new art of abstract
significant form is not, strictly speaking, anything new: it is as
old, if not older, than representational art, and it is equally
pregnant with literary meaning. Until quite recently, however, it has
never been condensed into the form of a picture and surrounded with
a frame; it has almost without exception been connected with objects
of utility. This does not detract from its value in the slightest; it
may mean that abstract art will outlive the picture; it is simply a
statement of historical fact. Nor can we draw the immediate inference
that abstract art is inappropriate in a frame. Certainly the contrary
would be inappropriate: that is to say, if we built a house in the form
of an Assyrian lion or made a hearthrug after Rembrandt's picture of
an old woman. But it is significant that the cubist and futurist art
has so far exercised a far greater and more beneficial influence in
the direction of curtains, upholstery, and dresses than of pictures.
Moreover, one of the leading English apostles of futurist art, Mr.
Wyndham Lewis, is beginning to realise the immense field which lies
open to him in the sphere of architecture, and is growing impatient
with the limitations and narrow confines of the picture frame.[18]
[18] _The Caliph's Design._ The Egoist Ltd. A brilliant
piece of destructive writing.