abstract art must live and let live, and the wrangle as to which is the
most perfect, the purest kind of art, is as sterile and futile as the
dispute over prose and poetry, opera and chamber music, tragedy and
comedy.
III
The problem, however, of photographic reproduction and of imagination
still awaits a satisfactory solution. We have seen that no objection
whatsoever can be raised against the marvellous representative detail
of, say, Jan Van Eyck's "Jan Arnolfini and His Wife." Nor can we
explain the joy and love expressed in the picture by reference merely
to the forms and colours in abstraction from the objects and persons.
For that would be transforming the living and individual unity of
artistic vision into the abstract schemata of scientific thought. And
art is not science, although it might very well express the delights
and struggles of the scientist. But, on the other hand, there are
pictures which, at any rate, appear to represent objects with the
same accuracy and detail as Jan Van Eyck, and yet definitely fail to
rank as works of art. They may often give us pleasure, they are often
informative, but a little introspection reveals that that pleasure
is due to our being reminded of something that is not itself in the
picture, and that the information is not about our emotion but about an
historical or a scientific fact. Similarly with the photograph which
has still greater precision of scientific (not artistic) observation,
and for that very reason is artistically still more jejune and barren.
But there is yet another visual product which is neither photographic
nor artistic "reproduction," namely, imaginative representation.
From internal as well as external evidence we can infer that certain
pictures were painted by the artist "out of his head," and others from
"the models," and we find that artists like Velasquez, who painted
masterpieces from the model, often failed miserably in their attempts
at imaginative work.[19] Of course, it is doubtful how far this
distinction can be carried; for we have no direct proof that many of
the most realistic pictures were not pure inventions, and that much
of the apparently imaginative work, such as Blake's, was not simply
composite memory. Imagination is just as dangerous and ambiguous a term
as reproduction.
[19] Cf. "La Couronnement de la Vierge." A voluminous mass
of pompous clothing floating on some well-fed babies'
heads.
These, then, are the "facts" to be explained. On the one hand, we
have undeniably a reality of perception and photography which is not
that of art but often extraordinarily akin to it; on the other hand,
we have a visual art which divides itself into three groups, each
of which _qua_ art is of equal value: realistic, imaginative, and,
thirdly, formal, decorative, or abstract art. What is desired is some
synthetic conception which will make intelligible the similarities
and differences and contradictions dwelling in these, at any rate,
superficially different kinds of vision.
Behind the conception of thinkers like J. A. Symonds there always lay
the photographic reality which was the common reality of everyone, and
supplied all the materials for the artist's reality: the framework
of forms and colours, of objects and persons. It was regarded from
the æsthetic point of view as rather a nightmare, for it was so
unemotional, so much the same all through, so unpliable. And the
explanation of art was that it consisted of this same reality, but as
seen through the temperament of the artist and, therefore, somehow, by
some mysterious wizardy, coloured with emotion, electrified into all
kinds of subjective illuminations, a fascinating mirage. Or instead of
the word temperament one substituted the phrase creative imagination.
This means substantially the same thing, but it leads us away a bit
further from photographic reality, widening the gulf between the two.
We cannot create the outer world, but we can create an inner world of
imagination, and actually bring into our life something intimately new,
shedding a light of its own that never was on sea or land. Drive this
argument a little further and we arrive at Cubism and Futurism.
This is the philosophical view which dominates most art criticism
of to-day, and probably quite rightly so. It is fairly safe, and it
"corresponds to the facts" with tolerable accuracy. It is sufficiently
eclectic not to offend either an ardent philosophical realism or an
ardent idealism. And it does not fall into the error of condemning
one kind of art and exalting another, although our æsthetic taste
when unprejudiced by theory proclaims both kinds equally delightful.
This, however, is no reason why we should not attempt to deepen the
theory with a view to giving it a closer organic unity and explaining
facts which it does not seem at present to take into account. Needless
to say, we may get entangled and strike out on a wrong track. For
thinking, like everything else, is experimental.
IV
1. The very first observation to be made is that ordinary vision is not
photographic: it is shot through and through with emotional elements
which are part and parcel of every concrete colour and form that is
seen. The photographic reality is obtained by a process of thinning
down, so that only the skeleton of similarities remains. It consists of
a consciousness of general facts--this is a tree, it has leaves with
clearly delineated edges, underneath it is a brown and white cow.
2. Nevertheless, even if the normal man in the street were to depict
precisely the semi-emotional reality which he sees, it would not
necessarily be a work of art. The Royal Academy is a convincing proof
of this fact. But this is not because the normal man's vision is
essentially different from that of the artist; the reason is just the
opposite: his seeing is borrowed from the artist, it is second-hand
property. Considered in connection with the co-ordinated arrangement
of the ordinary man's life this borrowed vision is absolutely correct
and in its place, just as is his borrowed knowledge of science,
mathematics, history. But if he tries to isolate it and put it apart in
a frame, claiming for it an original independent value, it immediately
becomes false, pretentious, sentimental. It still, however, is not
photographic: it is an emotion out of place. There is, of course, also
in Academy pictures a great deal of photography, that is to say of
general statement.
3. The artistic disvalue of such statements lies not in the fact that
they are reproductive and "true to nature," but in the deliberate
stripping of all emotional content. So far from giving a completer
and truer account of reality, the photograph gives a thoroughly
impoverished account.[20] It must not, however, be inferred that art
should assist or take the place of, say, geological drawings, because
these drawings are intentionally confined to similarities and general
facts.
[20] The cinematograph drama might become genuine art,
because one can look through the generality of the
photograph into the human imaginative synthesis. It
is on a par with a photograph of a picture or of a
building.
4. The conception of the "creative imagination" is liable to lapse
into a false kind of mysticism. Imagination is always about reality.
Rembrandt possessed a marvellous imagination, yet for that very reason
he has considerably increased and enhanced the human consciousness of
reality. In the same way the interior of a beautiful church evokes
and deepens our consciousness of religious emotion, and, therefore,
of the profound significance of life. And it is not the life of some
abstract mysticism, but of man in the travail of history. All art is
imaginative, but it is equally real and objective, it adds to our
consciousness of the world in which we live. We need not even object to
the metaphor about holding the mirror up to nature, for we cannot see
ourselves except in a mirror.
It might be possible, therefore, to overcome the apparent distinction
between "painting from the model" and "out of one's head," and to
show that they are both the same kind of activity. There is no doubt
that imaginative work has its roots in ordinary perception; even the
creator of pure designs is using lines and colours which are visible,
and he gets his suggestions from the external world. And even though
in the process of creating the artist seems to move away from external
reality into his inner being, the created product is definitely about
external reality. The Cenotaph in Whitehall _is_ our mourning over the
dead: Goya's etchings _The Disasters of War are_ part of our concrete
consciousness of war. Blake, too, where he is not lost in impossible
symbolism, is always referring back to life.
On the other side, every piece of ordinary perception is shot through
with imagination, as with emotion. The mind is not a _tabula rasa_,
but a most marvellous and intricate activity. And there is another
explanation possible of the difference between the art, say, of
Velasquez and of Fra Angelico than that the one was reproductive, the
other the work of fantasy. At the time of Velasquez the whole interest
and value of life centred round man and pre-eminently round the life
of kings and nobles. On these people was focussed the emotional
imagination of the age. To Fra Angelico the world was altogether
different; its quintessential value lay outside it in our experience
after death: this life was but a preparation for the next, and art
was as it were the imaginative anticipation of the loveliness of
heaven. Nevertheless, this anticipation spoke in terms of the most
refined delights of this world, and the pæan to heaven was but a pæan
to the beauty of life. Or if one may diverge from the artist to an
appreciator of art, it is clear from Mr. Clive Bell's book, _Art_,
that at the back of his mind there is a mystical metaphysics, a sort of
conviction that the objects and events of this muddled material world
are contemptible, and that we must seek for the reality of realities
in some aloof inhuman state of consciousness. This is his third and in
many ways most interesting preoccupation.
5. Each of the three definitions of art referred to at the beginning
of this essay, those of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, sets up claims
which must be satisfied if we do not want to be continually dogged by
their importunate ghosts. One of the strongest objections to Plato's
premise that the artist imitates is that it does not allow any element
of novelty. It is true that in the physical act of painting the
artist reproduces his vision, and that this act requires considerable
technical accomplishment. But throughout the principal, all-powerful,
radiating influence is the vision. This cannot correctly be called
reproductive; it is just the unmediated consciousness of something,
and of that something for the first time. For instance, the artist
apparently works with a limited number of colours just as the musician
with notes; but out of these he produces entirely new colours in
combination (colours are never really out of combination), just as the
musician produces literally new sounds. And this production is not a
mere abstract physical fact, it is emotional and can contain the whole
significance of a given period of history. The seeing of the colours
and the emotional impulse coincide: it is an act of creation. Nor do
the colours belong, so to speak, merely to the artist's palette and
canvas, they are seen out there "in nature." It is a new vision of
nature. It is, however, futile for the man in the street, when he
sees the picture for the first time, to refer back to his own past
experience, because this is a new experience, a new vision. At the same
time, although the picture is hung up indoors in a room or gallery,
the vision pierces, as it were, right through the canvas and walls and
comes to a halt out there in the mysterious and infinite world. We have
seen that this process of consciousness is undoubtedly imaginative,
even if the completed product is almost historically real. It is not
a mere statement of fact, but it always includes facts, surrounding
them with concrete living individuality. Further, it always contains
an element of the ideal, of aspiration, not of an abstract schematised
Utopia or stereotyped moralising, but of a pulsating individual love
and hate. In all art, even in the most realistic, this is transparent.
It is, in a sense, the goodwill bending over the present and dreaming
of the future.
Briefly, pictorial and plastic art is the creation of the visual
feeling or emotional consciousness of the human mind. As such it is
inseparably bound up in real objects, actions, and events. Remove it
(speculatively in thought) and you get the bare though magnificent
framework of science and the stark matters-of-fact of history.
PROSE AND MORTALITY
By J. C. SQUIRE
In recent years several editors have put together anthologies of
English prose passages, among them Mr. S. L. Edwards (_An Anthology of
English Prose_; Dent), Messrs. Broadus and Gordon (_English Prose_;
Milford), Mr. Treble (_English Prose_; Milford), and Professor Cowl
(_An Anthology of Imaginative Prose_; Simpkin). Only the last of these
books has much in common with the "treasury"[21] now presented by Mr.
Logan Pearsall Smith. There are many kinds of good prose, of which
Samuel Butler's is one, Jane Austen's another, Cowley's another: but
the last two of these authors do not appear, and the first is only here
by favour. A few exceptions are made, presumably owing to personal
predilections or a feeling that such and such a great prose name
should not be omitted. Swift is an instance. His prose, the faithful
reflection of his mind, has many qualities, but it is out of place
here. Generally speaking, to satisfy Mr. Pearsall Smith, in his present
capacity, it is not enough--in fact, it is not anything--that prose
should be adequate to its purpose, neat, easy, vivacious, well-knit.
It must be prose on what by common consent is the highest level of
prose, prose impeccably written, and prose with a dignity, a richness,
a sonority or a sweetness of flow that rival the attributes of great
poetry. Almost all his examples come into this category: he has no room
here for the most vigorous pages of Scott or the most amusing chapters
of Dickens. His extracts are to be detachable jewels, gorgeous or
exquisite. On his fly-leaf he quotes Keats:
[21] _A Treasury of English Prose. Edited by Logan Pearsall
Smith. Constable. 6s. net._
"I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this
manner--let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy
or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it,
and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it,
and dream upon it: until it becomes stale--But when will it do so?
Never--When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect
any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post
towards all the two-and-thirty Palaces. How happy is such a voyage of
conception, what delicious diligent indolence!"
"Distilled Prose," "grand and spiritual passage": the editor gives no
other explanation than this second-hand one, but that is enough.
We must grant Mr. Pearsall Smith his ground, but on that ground
every reader is sure--as an anthologist's readers always will
be--occasionally to quarrel with him. His earlier selections, from
the Bible, Donne, and Jeremy Taylor, could not, I think, have been
better. He was bound to fill a good deal of his space with the
seventeenth-century religious writers. He does not overlook South; and
he gives a numerous and glittering selection from Milton, one of the
few English writers who have contrived to keep their singing-robes
about them, with whatever effort, when writing about every sort of
mundane subject. He has found almost everything that he could have
wanted in the writers of the eighteenth century, and he gives many
perfect passages from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Landor. But to
some of the Victorian writers, and to some of our contemporaries
(though he has quarried some exquisite things from unlikely places)
he does, if he will allow me to say so, less than justice. We could
have spared some of the eleven pages of Emerson for the sake of some
of the best paragraphs of Ruskin, who is given only two pages. The
single extract from Cardinal Newman (whose _Idea of a University_
should have been searched) does not represent him, and no single
extract could. There are two--there might well have been more--extracts
from Mr. Doughty's _Wanderings in Arabia_. The passage from Samuel
Butler is more sustained than Butler's wont, but scarcely worthy of
inclusion, though the reader would appreciate in any surroundings
his last sentence, "I am not very fond of Milton, but I admit that
he does at times put me in mind of Fleet Street." Mr. Shaw appears
and Henry James; there are good extracts from Mr. Santayana and Mr.
Lowes Dickinson. But Mr. Conrad's works--both his Reminiscences
and his novels--should have yielded many more than two pieces, and
some admirable modern writers of coloured, musical, and affecting
prose are omitted altogether. Mr. Hardy is a curious omission. Mr.
Chesterton, as a rule, troubles too little to be a good subject for
this anthologist; the journalist and the tumbler are always breaking
in; the poet appears arm-in-arm with the politician, an exasperating
contiguity. But I think that exploration would have been rewarded even
had our collector gone no farther than the splendid last pages of
_The Short History of England_. From Mr. Hudson's books, especially
from _A Crystal Age_ and _Far Away and Long Ago_, passages, I think,
could have been taken which would have competed respectably with many
that are here; Mrs. Meynell's essays and Mr. Bertrand Russell's last
book should be drawn on; and where is Mr. Belloc? Rupert Brooke said
that Mr. Belloc had a better prose style than any man alive. I should
not dispute that: it is a clear, a precise, an economical style that
serves admirably all the diverse uses to which its owner puts it. And
it often rises, always quietly, where some poignant thing is clearly
seen, into sentences of noble beauty. These are liable to occur almost
anywhere; for instance, in a digression during an article on strategy.
Possibly because he began his career with public facetiousness about
"purple patches" he often seems to allow a promising passage to break
its back because he will not seem artificial or affected. He fetters
his consciously-exercised powers and he can seldom let himself go, as
it were, unconsciously. In his books it would therefore be far more
easy to find short passages than long ones of the kind included in
this anthology; for any other sort of prose anthology his work should
be thoroughly ransacked. Nevertheless there are long ones. My memory
is that there are certainly several in _The Four Men_ and in the books
of essays. To hunt for examples which one will have no room to quote
would be tiresome; there is a long passage in _The Absence of the Past_
which begins:
There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
noblest of replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will
suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such
a house; Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were
men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with
their own. And the house where she moved is there, and the street in
which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with
her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the
rooms she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light
and movement and grace and beatitude.
But it is a stupid thing to spend much time talking about the omissions
from a good book; only less so than it would be to complain that it is
one sort of book and not another sort. Mr. Pearsall Smith set out to
collect prose passages of a certain, the most poetical and resounding,
kind; and he has made an admirable and a learned choice. A perusal of
his specimens confirms in me an opinion previously formed as to the
nature of this kind of prose in English. It is that we have a canonical
style for such prose, and that such prose most frequently arises from
meditation on a definable kind of subject.