discontent with life--appeared yet later in modern art. This feeling,
which at the commencement of the present century was expressed only
by exceptional men: by Byron, by Leopardi, and afterwards by Heine,
has latterly become fashionable and is expressed by most ordinary and
empty people. Most justly does the French critic Doumic characterise
the works of the new writers: ... _c’est la lassitude de vivre,
le mépris de l’époque présente, le regret d’un autre temps aperçu
à travers l’illusion de l’art, le gout du paradoxe, le besoin de
se singulariser, une aspiration de raffinés vers la simplicité,
l’adoration enfantine du merveilleux, la séduction maladive de la
rêverie, l’ébranlement des nerfs,--surtout l’appel exaspéré de
la sensualité_ (_Les Jeunes_, René Doumic).[97] And, as a matter
of fact, of these three feelings it is sensuality, the lowest
(accessible not only to all men but even to all animals), which forms
the chief subject-matter of works of art of recent times.
From Boccaccio to Marcel Prévost, all novels, poems, and verses
invariably transmit the feeling of sexual love in its different
forms. Adultery is not only the favourite, but almost the only theme
of all the novels. A performance is not a performance unless, under
some pretext, women appear with naked busts and limbs. Songs and
romances--all are expressions of lust idealised in various degrees.
A majority of the pictures by French artists represent female
nakedness in various forms. In recent French literature there is
hardly a page or a poem in which nakedness is not described, and in
which, relevantly or irrelevantly, their favourite thought and word
_nu_ is not repeated a couple of times. There is a certain writer,
Remy de Gourmont, who gets printed and is considered talented. To
obtain an idea of the new writers, I read his novel, _Les Chevaux
de Diomède_. It is a consecutive and detailed account of the sexual
connections some gentleman had with various women. Every page
contains lust-kindling descriptions. It is the same in Pierre Louÿs’
book, _Aphrodite_, which met with success; it is the same in a
book I lately chanced upon, Huysmans’ _Certains_, and with but few
exceptions it is the same in all French novels. They are all the
productions of people suffering from erotic mania. And these people
are evidently convinced that as their whole life, in consequence
of their diseased condition, is concentrated on amplifying various
sexual abominations, therefore the life of all the world is similarly
concentrated. And these people, suffering from erotic mania, are
imitated throughout the whole artistic world of Europe and America.
Thus, in consequence of the lack of belief and the exceptional manner
of life of the wealthy classes, the art of these classes became
impoverished in its subject-matter and has sunk to the transmission
of the feelings of pride, discontent with life, and above all of
sexual desire.
CHAPTER X
_Loss of comprehensibility. Decadent art. Recent French art.
Have we a right to say it is bad? The highest art has always
been comprehensible to normal people. What fails to infect
normal people is not art._
In consequence of their unbelief, the art of the upper classes became
poor in subject-matter. But besides that, becoming continually more
and more exclusive it became at the same time continually more and
more involved affected and obscure.
When a universal artist (such as were some of the Greek artists
or the Jewish prophets) composed his work he naturally strove to
say what he had to say in such a way that his production should be
intelligible to all men. But when an artist composed for a small
circle of people placed in exceptional conditions, or even for a
single individual and his courtiers--for popes, cardinals, kings,
dukes, queens, or for a king’s mistress--he naturally only aimed
at influencing these people, who were well known to him and lived
in exceptional conditions familiar to him. And this was an easier
task, and the artist was involuntarily drawn to express himself
by allusions comprehensible only to the initiated and obscure to
everyone else. In the first place, more could be said in this way;
and secondly, there is (for the initiated) even a certain charm in
the cloudiness of such a manner of expression. This method, which
showed itself both in euphuism and in mythological and historical
allusions, came more and more into use, until it apparently at last
reached its utmost limits in the so-called art of the Decadents.
It has come, finally, to this: that not only are haziness,
mysteriousness, obscurity, and exclusiveness (shutting out the
masses) elevated to the rank of a merit and a condition of poetic
art, but even incorrectness, indefiniteness, and lack of eloquence,
are held in esteem.
Théophile Gautier, in his preface to the celebrated _Fleurs du
Mal_, says that Baudelaire as far as possible banished from poetry
eloquence, passion, and truth too strictly copied (“_l’éloquence, la
passion, et la vérité calquée trop exactement_”).
And Baudelaire not only did this, but maintained this thesis in his
verses, and yet more strikingly in the prose of his _Petits Poèmes
en Prose_, the meanings of which have to be guessed like a rebus and
remain for the most part undiscovered.
The poet Verlaine (who followed next after Baudelaire, and was also
esteemed great) even wrote an _Art poétique_, in which he advises
this style of composition:--
_De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose._
_Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint._
* * * * *
And again:--
_De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée
Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours._
_Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin,
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym ...
Et tout le reste est littérature._[98]
After these two comes Mallarmé, considered the most important of the
young poets, and he plainly says that the charm of poetry lies in our
having to guess its meaning--that in poetry there should always be a
puzzle:--
_Je pense qu’il faut qu’il n’y ait qu’allusion_, says he. _La
contemplation des objets, l’image s’envolant des rêveries suscitées
par eux, sont le chant: les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose
entièrement et la montrent; par là ils manquent de mystère; ils
retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu’ils créent._
Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du
poème, qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer,
voilà le rêve. _C’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le
symbole: évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d’âme,
ou, inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d’âme, par
une série de déchiffrements._
... _Si un être d’une intelligence moyenne, et d’une preparation
littéraire insuffisante, ouvre par hasard un livre ainsi fait et
prétend en jouir, il y a malentendu, il faut remettre les choses à
leur place._ Il doit y avoir toujours énigme en poésie, _et c’est
le but de la littérature, il n’y en a pas d’autre,--d’évoquer les
objets_.--_Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire_, Jules Huret, pp. 60,
61.[99]
Thus is obscurity elevated into a dogma among the new poets. As the
French critic Doumic (who has not yet accepted the dogma) quite
correctly says:--
_Il serait temps aussi d’en finir avec cette fameuse “théorie de
l’obscurité” que la nouvelle école à élevée, en effet à la hauteur
d’un dogme._--_Les Jeunes, études et portraits_, René Doumic.[100]
But it is not only French writers who think thus. The poets of
all other countries think and act in the same way: German, and
Scandinavian, and Italian, and Russian, and English. So also do
the artists of the new period in all branches of art: in painting,
in sculpture, and in music. Relying on Nietzsche and Wagner, the
artists of the new age conclude that it is unnecessary for them to
be intelligible to the vulgar crowd; it is enough for them to evoke
poetic emotion in ‘the finest nurtured,’ to borrow a phrase from an
English esthetician.
In order that what I am saying may not seem to be mere assertion, I
will quote at least a few examples from the French poets who have led
this movement. The name of these poets is legion. I have taken French
writers because they, more decidedly than any others, indicate the
new direction of art and are imitated by most European writers.
Besides those whose names are already considered famous, such as
Baudelaire and Verlaine, here are the names of a few of them: Jean
Moréas, Charles Morice, Henri de Régnier, Charles Vignier, Adrien
Remacle, René Ghil, Maurice Maeterlinck, G. Albert Aurier, Rémy de
Gourmont, Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique, Georges Rodenbach, le comte
Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. These are Symbolists and Decadents.
Next we have the “Magi”: Joséphin Péladan, Paul Adam, Jules Bois, M.
Papus, and others.
Besides these there are yet one hundred and forty-one others whom
Doumic mentions in the book referred to above.
Here are some examples from the work of those of them who are
considered to be the best, beginning with that most celebrated man,
acknowledged to be a great artist worthy of a monument--Baudelaire.
This is a poem from his celebrated _Fleurs du mal_:--
No. XXIV
_Je t’adore à l’égal de la voûte nocturne,
O vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne,
Et t’aime d’autant plus, belle, que tu me fuis,
Et que tu me parais, ornement de mes nuits,
Plus ironiquement accumuler les lieues
Qui séparent mes bras des immensités bleues._
_Je m’avance à l’attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts,
Comme après un cadavre un chœur de vermisseaux,
Et je chéris, ô bête implacable et cruelle,
Jusqu’à cette froideur par où tu m’es plus belle!_[101]
And this is another by the same writer:--
No. XXXVI
_DUELLUM_
_Deux guerriers ont couru l’un sur l’autre; leurs armes
Ont éclaboussé l’air de lueurs et de sang.
Ces jeux, ces cliquetis du fer sont les vacarmes
D’une jeunesse en proie à l’amour vagissant._
* * * * *
_Les glaives sont brisés! comme notre jeunesse,
Ma chère! Mais les dents, les ongles acérés,
Vengent bientôt l’épée et la dague traîtresse.
O fureur des cœurs mûrs par l’amour ulcérés!_
* * * * *
_Dans le ravin hanté des chats-pards et des onces
Nos héros, s’étreignant méchamment, ont roulé,
Et leur peau fleurira l’aridité des ronces.
Ce gouffre, c’est l’enfer, de nos amis peuplé!
Roulons-y sans remords, amazone inhumaine,
Afin d’éterniser l’ardeur de notre haine!_[102]
To be exact, I should mention that the collection contains verses
less comprehensible than these, but not one poem which is plain
and can be understood without a certain effort--an effort seldom
rewarded, for the feelings which the poet transmits are evil and very
low ones. And these feelings are always, and purposely, expressed
by him with eccentricity and lack of clearness. This premeditated
obscurity is especially noticeable in his prose, where the author
could speak clearly if he wanted to.
Take, for instance, the first piece from his _Petits poèmes en
prose_:--
_L’ÉTRANGER_
_Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis? ton père, ta mère, ta
sœur, ou ton frère?_
_Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère._
_Tes amis?_
_Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce
jour inconnu._
_Ta patrie?_
_J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située._
_La beauté?_
_Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle._
_L’or?_
_Je le hais, comme vous haïssez Dieu._
_Et qu’aimes-tu done, extraordinaire étranger?_
_J’aime les nuages ... les nuages qui passent ... là bas, ... les
merveilleux nuages!_[103]
The piece called _La Soupe et les nuages_ is probably intended to
express the unintelligibility of the poet even to her whom he loves.
This is the piece in question:--
_Ma petite folle bien-aimée me donnait à dîner, et par la fenêtre
ouverte de la salle à manger je contemplais les mouvantes
architectures que Dieu fait avec les vapeurs, les merveilleuses
constructions de l’impalpable. Et je me disais, à travers ma
contemplation: “Toutes ces fantasmagories sont presque aussi belles
que les yeux de ma belle bien-aimée, la petite folle monstrueuse aux
yeux verts.”_
_Et tout-à-coup je reçus un violent coup de poing dans le dos, et
j’entendis une voix rauque et charmante, une voix hystérique et comme
enrouée par l’eau-de-vie, la voix de ma chère petite bien-aimée, qui
me disait, “Allez-vous bientôt manger votre soupe, s.... b.... de
marchand de nuages?”_[104]
However artificial these two pieces may be, it is still possible with
some effort to guess at what the author meant them to express, but
some of the pieces are absolutely incomprehensible--at least to me.
_Le Galant Tireur_ is a piece I was quite unable to understand.
_LE GALANT TIREUR_
_Comme la voiture traversait le bois, il la fit arrêter dans le
voisinage d’un tir, disant qu’il lui serait agréable de tirer
quelques balles pour_ tuer _le Temps. Tuer ce monstre-là, n’est-ce
pas l’occupation la plus ordinaire et la plus légitime de chacun?--Et
il offrit galamment la main à sa chère, délicieuse et exécrable
femme, à cette mystérieuse femme à laquelle il doit tant de plaisirs,
tant de douleurs, et peut-être aussi une grande partie de son génie._
_Plusieurs balles frappèrent loin du but proposé; l’une d’elles
s’enfonça même dans le plafond; et comme la charmante créature riait
follement, se moquant de la maladresse de son époux, celui-ci se
tourna brusquement vers elle, et lui dit: “Observez cette poupée,
là-bas, à droite, qui porte le nez en l’air et qui a la mine si
hautaine. Eh bien! cher ange_, je me figure que c’est vous.” _Et
il ferma les yeux et il lâcha la détente. La poupée fut nettement
décapitée._
_Alors s’inclinant vers sa chère, sa délicieuse, son exécrable femme,
son inévitable et impitoyable Muse, et lui baisant respectueusement
la main, il ajouta: “Ah! mon cher ange, combien je vous remercie de
mon adresse!”_[105]
The productions of another celebrity, Verlaine, are not less
affected and unintelligible. This, for instance, is the first poem in
the section called _Ariettes oubliées_:
“_Le vent dans la plaine_
_Suspend son haleine._”--FAVART.
_C’est l’extase langoureuse,
C’est la fatigue amoureuse,
C’est tous les frissons des bois
Parmi l’étreinte des brises,
C’est, vers les ramures grises,
Le chœur des petites voix._
_O le frêle et frais murmure!
Cela gazouille et susurre,
Cela ressemble au cri doux
Que l’herbe agitée expire ...
Tu dirais, sous l’eau qui vire,
Le roulis sourd des cailloux._
_Cette âme qui se lamente
En cette plainte dormante,
C’est la nôtre, n’est-ce pas?
La mienne, dis, et la tienne,
Dont s’exhale l’humble antienne
Par ce tiède soir, tout bas?_[106]
What “_chœur des petites voix_,” and what “_cri doux que l’herbe
agitée expire_,” and what it all means, remains altogether
unintelligible to me.
And here is another Ariette:--
VIII.
_Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable._
_Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune._
_Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées._
_Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune._
_Corneille poussive
Et vous, les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres,
Quoi done vous arrive?_
_Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable._[107]
How does the moon seem to live and die in a copper heaven? And
how can snow shine like sand? The whole thing is not merely
unintelligible, but under pretence of conveying an impression it
passes off a string of incorrect comparisons and words.
Besides these artificial and obscure poems there are others which
are intelligible, but make up for it by being altogether bad both
in form and in content. Such are all the poems under the heading
_La Sagesse_. The chief place in these verses is occupied by a very
poor expression of the most commonplace Roman Catholic and patriotic
sentiments. For instance, one meets with verses such as this:--
_Je ne veux plus penser qu’ à ma mère Marie,
Siège de la sagesse et source de pardons,
Mère de France aussi DE QUI NOUS ATTENDONS
INÉBRANLABLEMENT L’HONNEUR DE LA PATRIE._[108]
Before citing examples from other poets, I must pause to note the
amazing celebrity of these two versifiers, Baudelaire and Verlaine,
who are now accepted as being great poets. How the French, who had
Chénier, Musset, Lamartine, and above all Hugo,--and among whom quite
recently flourished the so-called Parnassians: Leconte de Lisle,
Sully-Prudhomme, etc.--could attribute such importance to these two
versifiers who were far from skilful in form and most contemptible
and commonplace in subject-matter, is to me incomprehensible. The
life-conception of one of them, Baudelaire, consisted in elevating
gross egotism into a theory and replacing morality by a cloudy
conception of beauty--especially artificial beauty. Baudelaire had
a preference, which he expressed, for a woman’s face painted rather
than in its natural colour, and for metal trees and a theatrical
imitation of water rather than real trees and real water.
The life-conception of the other, Verlaine, consisted in weak
profligacy, in confession of moral impotence, and, as an antidote
to that impotence, in the grossest Roman Catholic idolatry. Both
moreover were quite lacking in naïveté, sincerity, and simplicity,
and both overflowed with artificiality, forced originality, and
self-assurance. So that in their least bad productions one sees more
of M. Baudelaire or M. Verlaine than of what they were describing.
But these two indifferent versifiers form a school, and lead hundreds
of followers after them.
There is only one explanation of this fact: it is that the art of the
society in which these versifiers lived is not a serious, important
matter of life, but a mere amusement. And all amusements grow
wearisome by repetition. And in order to make wearisome amusement
again tolerable it is necessary to find some means to freshen it up.
When, at cards, ombre grows stale, whist is introduced; when whist
grows stale, écarté is substituted; when écarté grows stale, some
other novelty is invented, and so on. The substance of the matter
remains the same, only its form is changed. It is the same with this
kind of art. The subject-matter of the art of the upper classes
growing continually more and more limited--it has come at last to
this, that to the artists of these exclusive classes it seems as if
everything has already been said and that to find anything new to say
is impossible. And therefore to freshen up this art they look out for
fresh forms.
Baudelaire and Verlaine invent such a new form, furbish it up
moreover with hitherto unused pornographic details, and--the critics
and the public of the upper classes hail them as great writers.
This is the only explanation of the success not of Baudelaire and
Verlaine only, but of all the Decadents.
For instance, there are poems by Mallarmé and Maeterlinck which have
no meaning, and yet, for all that or perhaps on that very account,
are printed by tens of thousands, not only in various publications
but even in collections of the best works of the younger poets.
This, for example, is a sonnet by Mallarmé:--
_A la nue accablante tu
Basse de basalte et de laves
A même les échos esclaves
Par une trompe sans vertu._
_Quel sépulcral naufrage (tu
Le sais, écume, mais y baves)
Suprême une entre les épaves
Abolit le mât dévêtu._
_Ou cela que furibond faute
De quelque perdition haute
Tout l’abîme vain éployé_
_Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traîne
Avarement aura noyé
Le flanc enfant d’une sirène._[109]
(“Pan,” 1895, No. 1.)
This poem is not exceptional in its incomprehensibility. I have
read several other poems by Mallarmé, and they also had no meaning
whatever. I give a sample of his prose in Appendix II. There is a
whole volume of this prose, called _Divagations_. It is impossible to
understand any of it. And that is evidently what the author intended.
And here is a song by Maeterlinck, another celebrated author of
to-day:--
_Quand il est sorti,
(J’entendis la porte)
Quand il est sorti
Elle avait souri ..._
_Mais quand il rentra
(J’entendis la lampe)
Mais quand il rentra
Une autre était là ..._
_Et j’ai vu la mort,
(J’entendis son âme)
Et j’ai vu la mort
Qui l’attend encore ..._
_On est venu dire,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
On est venu dire
Qu’il allait partir ..._
_Ma lampe allumée,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
Ma lampe allumée
Me suis approchée ..._
_A la première porte,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
A la première porte,
La flamme a tremblé ..._
_A la seconde porte,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
A la seconde porte,
La flamme a parlé ..._
_A la troisième porte,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
A la troisième porte,
La lumière est morte ..._
_Et s’il revenait un jour,
Que faut-il lui dire?
Dites-lui qu’on l’attendit
Jusqu’à s’en mourir ..._
_Et s’il m’interroge encore
Sans me reconnaître?
Parlez-lui comme une sœur.
Il souffre peut-être ..._
_Et s’il demande où vous êtes
Que faut-il répondre?
Donnez-lui mon anneau d’or
Sans rien lui répondre ..._
_Et s’il veut savoir pourquoi
La salle est déserte?
Montrez-lui la lampe éteinte
Et la porte ouverte ..._
_Et s’il m’interroge alors
Sur la dernière heure?
Dites lui que j’ai souri
De peur qu’il ne pleure ..._[110]
(“Pan,” 1895, No. 2.)
Who went out? Who came in? Who is speaking? Who died?
I beg the reader to take the trouble to read through the samples I
cite in Appendix III of the celebrated and esteemed young poets:
Régnier, Griffin, Verhaeren, Moréas, and Montesquiou. It is important
to do so in order to form a clear conception of the present position
of art, and not to suppose as many do that Decadentism is an
accidental and transitory phenomenon. To avoid the reproach of having
selected the worst verses, I have copied out of each volume the poem
which happened to stand on page 28.
All the other productions of these poets are equally unintelligible,
or can only be understood with great difficulty and then not fully.
All the productions of those hundreds of poets, of whom I have
named a few, are the same in kind. And among the Germans, Swedes,
Norwegians, Italians, and us Russians, similar verses are printed.
And such productions are printed and made up into book-form, if not
by the million then by the hundred-thousand (some of these separate
works sell in tens of thousands). For type-setting, paging, printing
and binding these books, millions and millions of working days are
spent--not less, I think, than went to build the Great Pyramid. Nor
is this all. The same is going on in all the other arts: millions
and millions of working days are being spent on the production of
equally incomprehensible works in painting, in music, and in drama.
Painting not only does not lag behind poetry in this matter, but
rather outstrips it. Here is an extract from the diary of an amateur
of art,[111] written when visiting the Paris exhibitions in 1894:--
“I was to-day at three exhibitions: the Symbolists’, the
Impressionists’, and the Neo-Impressionists’. I looked at the
pictures conscientiously and carefully, but again felt the same
stupefaction and ultimate indignation. The first exhibition, that of
Camille Pissarro, was comparatively the most comprehensible, though
the pictures were out of drawing, had no content, and the colourings
were most improbable. The drawing was so indefinite that you were
sometimes unable to make out which way an arm or a head was turned.
The subject was generally, ‘_effets_’--_Effet de brouillard_, _Effet
du soir_, _Soleil couchant_. There were some pictures with figures,
but without subjects.
“In the colouring, bright blue and bright green predominated. And
each picture had its special colour with which the whole picture
was, as it were, splashed. For instance in ‘A Girl guarding Geese’
the special colour is _vert de gris_, and dots of it were splashed
about everywhere: on the face, the hair, the hands, and the clothes.
In the same gallery--‘Durand-Ruel’--were other pictures: by Puvis de
Chavannes, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, who are all Impressionists.
One of them, whose name I could not make out,--it was something
like Redon,--had painted a blue face in profile. On the whole face
there is only this blue tone, with white-of-lead. Pissarro has a
water-colour all done in dots. In the foreground is a cow entirely
painted with various-coloured dots. The general colour cannot be
distinguished, however much one stands back from, or draws near
to, the picture. From there I went to see the Symbolists. I looked
at them long without asking anyone for an explanation, trying to
guess the meaning; but it is beyond human comprehension. One of the
first things to catch my eye was a wooden _haut-relief_, wretchedly
executed, representing a woman (naked) who with both hands is
squeezing from her two breasts streams of blood. The blood flows
down, becoming lilac in colour. Her hair first descends and then
rises again and turns into trees. The figure is all coloured yellow,
and the hair is brown.
“Next--a picture: a yellow sea on which swims something which is
neither a ship nor a heart; on the horizon is a profile with a halo
and yellow hair, which changes into the sea, in which it is lost.
Some of the painters lay on their colours so thickly that the effect
is something between painting and sculpture. A third exhibit was
even less comprehensible: a man’s profile; before him a flame and
black stripes--leeches, as I was afterwards told. At last I asked a
gentleman who was there what it meant, and he explained to me that
the _haut-relief_ was a symbol, and represented ‘_La Terre_.’ The
heart swimming in a yellow sea was ‘_Illusion perdue_,’ and the
gentleman with the leeches was ‘_Le Mal_.’ There were also some
Impressionist pictures: elementary profiles, holding some sort of
flowers in their hands; in monotone, out of drawing, and either quite
blurred or else marked out with wide black outlines.”
This was in 1894; the same tendency is now even more strongly
defined, and we have Böcklin, Stuck, Klinger, Sasha Schneider, and
others.
The same thing is taking place in the drama. The play-writers give us
an architect who, for some reason, has not fulfilled his former high
intentions, and consequently climbs on to the roof of a house he has
erected and tumbles down head foremost;[112] or an incomprehensible
old woman (who exterminates rats), and who, for an unintelligible
reason, takes a poetic child to the sea and there drowns him;[113] or
some blind men, who, sitting on the seashore, for some reason always
repeat one and the same thing;[114] or a bell of some kind, which
flies into a lake and there rings.[115]
And the same is happening in music--in that art which more than any
other one would have thought should be intelligible to everybody.
An acquaintance of yours, a musician of repute, sits down to the
piano and plays you what he says is a new composition of his own or
of one of the new composers. You hear the strange, loud sounds, and
admire the gymnastic exercises performed by his fingers, and you see
that the performer wishes to convey to you that the sounds he is
producing express various poetic strivings of the soul. You see his
intention, but no feeling whatever except weariness is transmitted
to you. The execution lasts long, at least it seems very long to you
because you do not receive any clear impression, and involuntarily
you remember the words of Alphonse Karr, “_Plus ça va vite, plus ça
dure longtemps._”[116] And it occurs to you that perhaps it is all
a mystification; perhaps the performer is trying you--just throwing
his hands and fingers wildly about the key-board in the hope that you
will fall into the trap and praise him, and then he will laugh and
confess that he only wanted to see if he could hoax you. But when at
last the piece does finish, and the perspiring and agitated musician
rises from the piano obviously anticipating praise, you see that it
was all done in earnest.
The same thing takes place at all the concerts with pieces by Liszt,
Wagner, Berlioz, Brahms, and (newest of all) Richard Strauss, and the
numberless other composers of the new school, who unceasingly produce
opera after opera, symphony after symphony, piece after piece.
The same is occurring in a domain in which it seemed hard to be
unintelligible--in the sphere of novels and short stories.
Read _Là-Bas_ by Huysmans, or some of Kipling’s short stories, or
_L’annonciateur_ by Villiers de l’Isle Adam in his _Contes Cruels_,
etc., and you will find them not only “_abscons_” (to use a word
adopted by the new writers) but absolutely unintelligible both in
form and in substance. Such, again, is the work by E. Morel, _Terre
Promise_, now appearing in the _Revue Blanche_, and such are most of
the new novels. The style is very high-flown, the feelings seem to be
most elevated, but you can’t make out what is happening, to whom it
is happening, and where it is happening. And such is the bulk of the
young art of our time.
People who grew up in the first half of this century, admiring
Goethe, Schiller, Musset, Hugo, Dickens, Beethoven, Chopin, Raphael,
da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Delaroche, being unable to make head or
tail of this new art, simply attribute its productions to tasteless
insanity, and wish to ignore them. But such an attitude towards
this new art is quite unjustifiable because, in the first place,
this art is spreading more and more, and has already conquered for
itself a firm position in society similar to that occupied by the
Romanticists in the third decade of this century; and secondly and
chiefly because, if it is permissible to judge in this way of the
productions of the latest form of art, called by us Decadent art,
merely because we do not understand it, then remember, there are
an enormous number of people--all the labourers and many of the
non-labouring folk--who, in just the same way, do not comprehend
those productions of art which we consider admirable: the verses of
our favourite artists--Goethe, Schiller, and Hugo; the novels of
Dickens, the music of Beethoven and Chopin, the pictures of Raphael,
Michael Angelo, da Vinci, and so forth.
If I have a right to think that great masses of people do not
understand and do not like what I consider undoubtedly good because
they are not sufficiently developed, then I have no right to deny
that perhaps the reason why I cannot understand and cannot like the
new productions of art is merely that I am still insufficiently
developed to understand them. If I have a right to say that I, and
the majority of people who are in sympathy with me, do not understand
the productions of the new art simply because there is nothing in
it to understand and because it is bad art, then with just the same
right the still larger majority, the whole labouring mass, who do not
understand what I consider admirable art, can say that what I reckon
as good art is bad art and there is nothing in it to understand.
I once saw the injustice of such condemnation of the new art with
especial clearness, when in my presence a certain poet, who writes
incomprehensible verses, ridiculed incomprehensible music with gay
self-assurance; and shortly afterwards a certain musician, who
composes incomprehensible symphonies, laughed at incomprehensible
poetry with equal self-confidence. I have no right and no authority
to condemn the new art on the ground that I (a man educated in the
first half of the century) do not understand it; I can only say
that it is incomprehensible to me. The only advantage the art I
acknowledge has over the Decadent art lies in the fact that the art
I recognise is comprehensible to a somewhat larger number of people
than present-day art.
The fact that I am accustomed to a certain exclusive art and can
understand it, but am unable to understand another still more
exclusive art, does not give me a right to conclude that my art
is the real, true art, and that the other one, which I do not
understand, is an unreal, a bad art. I can only conclude that art,
becoming ever more and more exclusive, has become more and more
incomprehensible to an ever-increasing number of people, and that,
in this its progress towards greater and greater incomprehensibility
(on one level of which I am standing, with the art familiar to me),
it has reached a point where it is understood by a very small number
of the elect, and the number of these chosen people is becoming ever
smaller and smaller.
As soon as ever the art of the upper classes separated itself from
universal art, a conviction arose that art may be art and yet be
incomprehensible to the masses. And as soon as this position was
admitted it had inevitably to be admitted also that art may be
intelligible only to the very smallest number of the elect, and
eventually to two, or to one, of our nearest friends, or to oneself
alone. Which is practically what is being said by modern artists:--“I
create and understand myself, and if anyone does not understand me so
much the worse for him.”
The assertion that art may be good art, and at the same time
incomprehensible to a great number of people, is extremely unjust
and its consequences are ruinous to art itself; but at the same time
it is so common, and has so eaten into our conceptions, that it is
impossible sufficiently to elucidate the whole absurdity of it.
Nothing is more common than to hear it said of reputed works of art,
that they are very good but very difficult to understand. We are
quite used to such assertions, and yet to say that a work of art is
good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as
saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people
can’t eat it. The majority of men may not like rotten cheese or
putrefying grouse, dishes esteemed by people with perverted tastes;
but bread and fruit are only good when they are such as please the
majority of men. And it is the same with art. Perverted art may not
please the majority of men, but good art always pleases everyone.
It is said that the very best works of art are such that they cannot
be understood by the masses, but are accessible only to the elect who
are prepared to understand these great works. But if the majority
of men do not understand, the knowledge necessary to enable them to
understand should be taught and explained to them. But it turns out
that there is no such knowledge, that the works cannot be explained,
and that those who say the majority do not understand good works
of art, still do not explain those works, but only tell us that in
order to understand them one must read, and see, and hear, these same
works over and over again. But this is not to explain, it is only
to habituate! And people may habituate themselves to anything, even
to the very worst things. As people may habituate themselves to bad
food, to spirits, tobacco, and opium, just in the same way they may
habituate themselves to bad art--and that is exactly what is being
done.
Moreover it cannot be said that the majority of people lack the
taste to esteem the highest works of art. The majority always
have understood, and still understand, what we also recognise as
being the very best art: the epic of Genesis, the Gospel parables,
folk-legends, fairy-tales, and folk-songs, are understood by all.
How can it be that the majority has suddenly lost its capacity to
understand what is high in our art?
Of a speech it may be said that it is admirable, but incomprehensible
to those who do not know the language in which it is delivered.
A speech delivered in Chinese may be excellent, and may yet
remain incomprehensible to me if I do not know Chinese; but what
distinguishes a work of art from all other mental activity is
just the fact that its language is understood by all, and that
it infects all without distinction. The tears and laughter of a
Chinaman infect me just as the laughter and tears of a Russian; and
it is the same with painting and music, and also poetry, when it is
translated into a language I understand. The songs of a Kirghiz or
of a Japanese touch me, though in a lesser degree than they touch a
Kirghiz or a Japanese. I am also touched by Japanese painting, Indian
architecture, and Arabian stories. If I am but little touched by a
Japanese song and a Chinese novel, it is not that I do not understand
these productions, but that I know and am accustomed to higher works
of art. It is not because their art is above me. Great works of art
are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to
everyone. The story of Joseph, translated into the Chinese language,
touches a Chinese. The story of Sakya Muni (Buddha) touches us.
And there are, and must be, buildings, pictures, statues, and
music, of similar power. So that if art fails to move men it cannot
be said that this is due to the spectators’ or hearers’ lack of
understanding; but the conclusion to be drawn may be, and should be,
that such art is either bad or is not art at all.
Art is differentiated from activity of the understanding, which
demands preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge (so that
one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing geometry), by the fact
that it acts on people independently of their state of development
and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, or of forms,
infects any man, whatever his plane of development.
The business of art lies just in this: to make that understood and
felt which in the form of an argument might be incomprehensible and
inaccessible. Usually it seems to the recipient of a truly artistic
impression that he knew the thing before, but had been unable to
express it.
And such has always been the nature of good, supreme art; the
_Iliad_, the _Odyssey_; the stories of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph; the
Hebrew prophets, the psalms, the Gospel parables; the story of Sakya
Muni, and the hymns of the Vedas: all transmit very exalted feelings,
and are nevertheless quite comprehensible now to us, educated or
uneducated, as they were comprehensible to the men of those times
long ago, who were even less educated than our labourers. People
talk about incomprehensibility; but if art is the transmission of
feelings flowing from man’s religious perception, how can a feeling
be incomprehensible which is founded on religion, that is, on man’s
relation to God? Such art should be, and has actually always been,
comprehensible to everybody, because every man’s relation to God
is one and the same. This is why the churches and the images in
them were always comprehensible to everyone. The hindrance to an
understanding of the best and highest feelings (as is said in the
Gospel) does not at all lie in deficiency of development or learning,
but on the contrary in false development and false learning. A good
and lofty work of art may be incomprehensible, but not to simple,
unperverted peasant labourers (all that is highest is understood by
them)--it may be and often is unintelligible to erudite, perverted
people destitute of religion. And this continually occurs in our
society, in which the highest feelings are simply not understood.
For instance, I know people who consider themselves most refined
and who say that they do not understand the poetry of love to one’s
neighbour, of self-sacrifice, or of chastity.
So that good, great, universal, religious art may be incomprehensible
to a small circle of spoilt people, but certainly not to any large
number of plain men.
Art cannot be incomprehensible to the great masses only because it is
very good,--as artists of our day are fond of telling us. Rather we
are bound to conclude that this art is unintelligible to the great
masses only because it is very bad art, or even is not art at all. So
that the favourite argument (naïvely accepted by the cultured crowd),
that in order to feel art one has first to understand it (which
really only means habituate oneself to it), is the truest indication
that what we are asked to understand by such a method is either very
bad, exclusive art, or is not art at all.
People say that works of art do not please the people because they
are incapable of understanding them. But if the aim of works of art
is to infect people with the emotion the artist has experienced, how
can one talk about not understanding?
A man of the people reads a book, sees a picture, hears a play or
a symphony, and is touched by no feeling. He is told that this is
because he cannot understand. People promise to let a man see a
certain show; he enters and sees nothing. He is told that this is
because his sight is not prepared for this show. But the man knows
for certain that he sees quite well, and if he does not see what
people promised to show him he only concludes (as is quite just) that
those who undertook to show him the spectacle have not fulfilled
their engagement. And it is perfectly just for a man who does feel
the influence of some works of art, to come to this conclusion
concerning artists who do not, by their works, evoke feeling in him.
To say that the reason a man is not touched by my art is because he
is still too stupid, besides being very self-conceited and also rude,
is to reverse the rôles, and for the sick to send the hale to bed.
Voltaire said that “_Tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre
ennuyeux_”;[117] but with even more right one may say of art that
_Tous les genres sons bons, hors celui qu’on ne comprend pas_, or
_qui ne produit pas son effet_,[118] for of what value is an article
which fails to effect what was intended?
Mark this above all: if only it be admitted that art may be
unintelligible to anyone of sound mind and yet still be art, there is
no reason why any circle of perverted people should not compose works
tickling their own perverted feelings, and comprehensible to no one
but themselves, and call it “art,” as is actually being done by the
so-called Decadents.
The direction art has taken may be compared to placing on a large
circle other circles, smaller and smaller, until a cone is formed,
the apex of which is no longer a circle at all. That is what has
happened to the art of our times.
CHAPTER XI
_Counterfeits of art produced by: Borrowing; Imitating;
Striking; Interesting. Qualifications needful for production
of real works of art, and those sufficient for production of
counterfeits._
Becoming ever poorer and poorer in subject-matter and more and more
unintelligible in form, the art of the upper classes in its latest
productions has even lost all the characteristics of art and has
been replaced by imitations of art. Not only has upper-class art
in consequence of its separation from universal art become poor
in subject-matter and bad in form, that is, ever more and more
unintelligible,--it has in course of time ceased even to be art at
all and has been replaced by counterfeits.
This has resulted from the following causes. Universal art arises
only when some one of the people having experienced a strong emotion
feels the necessity of transmitting it to others. The art of the rich
classes on the other hand arises not from the artist’s inner impulse,
but chiefly because people of the upper classes demand amusement and
pay well for it. They demand from art the transmission of feelings
that please them, and this demand artists try to meet. But it is a
very difficult task, for people of the wealthy classes spending their
lives in idleness and luxury desire to be continually diverted by
art; and art, even the lowest, cannot be produced at will, but has to
generate spontaneously in the artist’s inner self. And therefore, to
satisfy the demands of people of the upper classes, artists have had
to devise methods of producing imitations of art. And such methods
have been devised.
These methods are those of (1) borrowing, (2) imitating, (3) striking
(producing effects), and (4) interesting.
The first method consists in borrowing whole subjects, or merely
separate features, from former works recognised by everyone as being
poetic, and in so re-shaping them with sundry additions that they
should have an appearance of novelty.
Such works, evoking in people of a certain class memories of artistic
feelings formerly experienced, produce an impression similar to art,
and provided only that they conform to other needful conditions
they pass for art among those who seek for pleasure from art.
Subjects borrowed from previous works of art are usually called
poetic subjects. Objects and people thus borrowed are called poetic
objects and people. Thus in our circle all sorts of legends, sagas,
and ancient traditions, are considered poetic subjects. Among
poetic people and objects we reckon maidens, warriors, shepherds,
hermits, angels, devils of all sorts, moonlight, thunder, mountains,
the sea, precipices, flowers, long hair, lions, lambs, doves, and
nightingales. In general all those objects are considered poetic
which have most frequently been used by former artists in their
productions.
Some forty years ago a stupid but highly cultured--_ayant beaucoup
d’acquis_--lady (since deceased) asked me to listen to a novel
written by herself. It began with a heroine who in a poetic white
dress, and with poetically flowing hair, was reading poetry near some
water in a poetic wood. The scene was in Russia, but suddenly from
behind the bushes the hero appears, wearing a hat with a feather
_à la Guillaume Tell_ (the book specially mentioned this) and
accompanied by two poetical white dogs. The authoress deemed all this
highly poetic, and it might have passed muster if only it had not
been necessary for the hero to speak. But as soon as the gentleman in
the hat _à la Guillaume Tell_ began to converse with the maiden in
the white dress, it became obvious that the authoress had nothing to
say, but had merely been moved by poetic memories of other works,
and imagined that by ringing the changes on those memories she could
produce an artistic impression. But an artistic impression, that is
to say, infection, is only received when an author has in the manner
peculiar to himself experienced the feeling which he transmits, and
not when he passes on another man’s feeling previously transmitted
to him. Such poetry from poetry cannot infect people, it can only
simulate a work of art, and even that only to people of perverted
esthetic taste. The lady in question being very stupid and devoid of
talent, it was at once apparent how the case stood; but when such
borrowing is resorted to by people who are erudite and talented and
have cultivated the technique of their art, we get those borrowings
from the Greek, the antique, the Christian or mythological world,
which have become so numerous, and which particularly in our day
continue to increase and multiply, and are accepted by the public as
works of art if only the borrowings are well mounted by means of the
technique of the particular art to which they belong.
As a characteristic example of such counterfeits of art in the realm
of poetry, take Rostand’s _Princesse Lointaine_, in which there is
not a spark of art, but which seems very poetic to many people, and
probably also to its author.
The second method of imparting a semblance of art is that which
I have called imitating. The essence of this method consists in
supplying details accompanying the thing described or depicted. In
literary art this method consists in describing in the minutest
details the external appearance, the faces, the clothes, the
gestures, the tones, and the habitations, of the characters
represented, with all the occurrences met with in life. For instance
in novels and stories, when one of the characters speaks we are told
in what voice he spoke and what he was doing at the time. And the
things said are not given so that they should have as much sense
as possible, but as they are in life, disconnectedly, and with
interruptions and omissions. In dramatic art, besides such imitation
of real speech, this method consists in having all the accessories
and all the people just like those in real life. In painting
this method assimilates painting to photography and destroys the
difference between them. And strange to say this method is used also
in music: music tries to imitate, not only by its rhythm but also by
its very sounds, the sounds which in real life accompany the thing it
wishes to represent.
The third method is by action, often purely physical, on the outer
senses. Work of this kind is said to be “striking,” “effective.” In
all arts these effects consist chiefly in contrasts; in bringing
together the terrible and the tender, the beautiful and the hideous,
the loud and the soft, darkness and light, the most ordinary and the
most extraordinary. In verbal art, besides effects of contrast there
are also effects consisting in the description of things that have
never before been described. These are usually pornographic details
evoking sexual desire, or details of suffering and death evoking
feelings of horror, such, for instance, as when describing a murder,
to give a detailed medical account of the lacerated tissues, of the
swellings, of the smell, quantity, and appearance of the blood. It
is the same in painting: besides all kinds of other contrasts, one
is coming into vogue which consists in giving careful finish to one
object and being careless about all the rest. The chief and usual
effects in painting are effects of light and the presentation of the
horrible. In the drama the most common effects, besides contrasts,
are tempests, thunder, moonlight, scenes at sea or by the seashore,
changes of costume, exposure of the female body, madness, murders,
and death generally: the dying person exhibiting in detail all the
phases of agony. In music the most usual effects are a _crescendo_,
passing from the softest and simplest sounds to the loudest and
most complex crash of the full orchestra; a repetition of the same
sounds _arpeggio_ in all the octaves and on various instruments; or
for the harmony, tone, and rhythm, to be not at all those naturally
flowing from the course of the musical thought but such as strike
one by their unexpectedness. Besides these, the commonest effects in
music are produced in a purely physical manner by strength of sound,
especially in an orchestra.
Such are some of the most usual effects in the various arts, but
there yet remains one common to them all, namely, to convey by
means of one art what it would be natural to convey by another: for
instance, to make music describe (as is done by the programme music
of Wagner and his followers), or to make painting, the drama, or
poetry, induce a frame of mind (as is aimed at by all the Decadent
art).
The fourth method is that of interesting (that is, absorbing the
mind) in connection with works of art. The interest may lie in
an intricate plot--a method till quite recently much employed in
English novels and French plays, but now going out of fashion and
being replaced by realism, that is, by detailed description of some
historic period or some branch of contemporary life. For example,
in a novel interest may consist in a description of Egyptian or
Roman life, the life of miners, or that of the clerks in a large
shop. The reader becomes interested, and mistakes this interest for
an artistic impression. The interest may also depend on the very
method of expression; a kind of interest that has now come much into
use. Both verse and prose, as well as pictures, plays, and music,
are constructed so that they must be guessed like riddles, and this
process of guessing, again, affords pleasure and gives a semblance of
the feeling received from art.
It is very often said that a work of art is very good because it
is poetic, or realistic, or striking, or interesting; whereas not
only can neither the first, nor the second, nor the third, nor the
fourth, of these attributes supply a standard of excellence in art,
but they have not even anything in common with art.
Poetic--means borrowed. All borrowing merely recalls to the reader,
spectator, or listener, some dim recollection of artistic impressions
received from previous works of art, and does not infect with feeling
experienced by the artist himself. A work founded on something
borrowed, like Goethe’s _Faust_ for instance, may be very well
executed and be full of mind and every beauty, but because it lacks
the chief characteristic of a work of art--completeness, oneness,
the inseparable unity of form and content expressing the feeling
the artist has experienced--it cannot produce a really artistic
impression. In availing himself of this method the artist only
transmits the feeling received by him from a previous work of art;
therefore every borrowing, whether it be of whole subjects or of
various scenes, situations, or descriptions, is but a reflection of
art, a simulation of it, but not art itself. And therefore, to say
that a certain production is good because it is poetic,--that is,
resembles a work of art,--is like saying of a coin that it is good
because it resembles real money.
Equally little can imitation, realism, serve, as many people suppose,
as a measure of the quality of art. Imitation cannot be such a
measure, for the chief characteristic of art is the infection of
others with the feelings the artist has experienced, and infection
with a feeling is not only not identical with description of the
accessories of what is transmitted, but is usually hindered by
superfluous details. The attention of the receiver of the artistic
impression is diverted by all these well-observed details, and they
hinder the transmission of feeling even when it exists.
To value a work of art by the degree of its realism, by the accuracy
of the details reproduced, is as strange as to judge of the nutritive
quality of food by its external appearance. When we appraise a work
according to its realism, we only show that we are talking, not of a
work of art but of its counterfeit.
Neither does the third method of imitating art--by the use of what is
striking or effective--coincide with real art any better than the two
former methods, for in effectiveness (the effects of novelty, of the
unexpected, of contrasts, of the horrible) there is no transmission
of feeling but only an action on the nerves. If an artist were to
paint a bloody wound admirably, the sight of the wound would strike
me, but it would not be art. One prolonged note on a powerful organ
will produce a striking impression, will often even cause tears,
but there is no music in it, because no feeling is transmitted.
Yet such physiological effects are constantly mistaken for art by
people of our circle, and this not only in music but also in poetry,
painting, and the drama. It is said that art has become refined. On
the contrary, thanks to the pursuit of effects, it has become very
coarse. A new piece is brought out and accepted all over Europe,
such, for instance, as _Hanneles Himmelfahrt_,[119] in which play the
author wishes to transmit to the spectators pity for a persecuted
girl. To evoke this feeling in the audience by means of art, the
author should either make one of the characters express this pity
in such a way as to infect everyone, or should describe the girl’s
feelings correctly. But he cannot or will not do this and chooses
another way, more complicated in stage management but easier for the
author. He makes the girl die on the stage; and still further to
increase the physiological effect on the spectators, he extinguishes
the lights in the theatre, leaving the audience in the dark, and to
the sound of dismal music shows how the girl is pursued and beaten
by her drunken father. The girl shrinks--screams--groans--and falls.
Angels appear and carry her away. And the audience, experiencing
some excitement while this is going on, are fully convinced that
this is true esthetic feeling. But there is nothing esthetic in such
excitement, for there is no infection of man by man, but only a
mingled feeling of pity for another and of self-congratulation that
it is not I who am suffering: it is like what we feel at the sight of
an execution, or what the Romans felt in their circuses.
The substitution of effect for esthetic feeling is particularly
noticeable in musical art--that art which by its nature has an
immediate physiological action on the nerves. Instead of transmitting
by means of a melody the feelings he has experienced, a composer
of the new school accumulates and complicates sounds, and by now
strengthening now weakening them, he produces on the audience a
physiological effect of a kind that can be measured by an apparatus
invented for that purpose.[120] And the public mistake this
physiological effect for the effect of art.
As to the fourth method--that of interesting--it also is frequently
confounded with art. One often hears it said, not only of a poem,
a novel, or a picture, but even of a musical work, that it is
interesting. What does this mean? To speak of an interesting work of
art means either that we receive from a work of art information new
to us, or that the work is not fully intelligible and that little by
little, and with effort, we arrive at its meaning and experience a
certain pleasure in this process of guessing it. In neither case has
the interest anything in common with artistic impression. Art aims
at infecting people with feeling experienced by the artist. But the
mental effort necessary to enable the spectator, listener, or reader,
to assimilate the new information contained in the work, or to guess
the puzzles propounded hinders this infection by distracting him. And
therefore the interest of a work not only has nothing to do with its
excellence as a work of art, but rather hinders than assists artistic
impression.
We may, in a work of art, meet with what is poetic, and realistic,
and striking, and interesting, but these things cannot replace the
essential of art--feeling experienced by the artist. Latterly, in
upper-class art most of the objects given out as being works or
art are of the kind which only resemble art and are devoid of its
essential quality--feeling experienced by the artist. And for the
diversion of the rich such objects are continually being produced in
enormous quantities by the artisans of art.
Many conditions must be fulfilled to enable a man to produce a real
work of art. It is necessary that he should stand on the level of
the highest life-conception of his time, that he should experience
feeling and have the desire and capacity to transmit it, and that
he should moreover have a talent for some one of the forms of
art. It is very seldom that all these conditions necessary to the
production of true art are combined. But in order--aided by the
customary methods of borrowing, imitating, introducing effects,
and interesting--unceasingly to produce the counterfeits of art
which pass for art in our society and are well paid for, it is only
necessary to have a talent for some branch of art; and this is very
often to be met with. By talent I mean ability: in literary art
the ability to express one’s thoughts and impressions easily, and
to notice and remember characteristic details; in graphic arts to
distinguish and remember lines, forms, and colours; in music to
distinguish the intervals and to remember and transmit the sequence
of sounds. And a man in our time if only he possesses such a talent
and selects some speciality, may after learning the methods of
counterfeiting used in his branch of art,--if he has patience and if
his esthetic feeling (which would render such productions revolting
to him) be atrophied--unceasingly to the end of his life turn out
works which will pass for art in our society.
To produce such counterfeits, definite rules or recipes exist in each
branch of art. So the talented man, having assimilated them, may
produce such works _à froid_, cold-drawn, without feeling.
In order to write poems, a man of literary talent needs only
these qualifications: to acquire the knack, conformably with the
requirements of rhyme and rhythm, of using, instead of the one
really suitable word, ten others meaning approximately the same;
to learn how to take any phrase which to be clear has but one
natural order of words, and despite all possible dislocations still
to retain some sense in it; and lastly, to be able, guided by the
words required for the rhymes, to devise some semblance of thoughts,
feelings, or descriptions, to suit these words. Having acquired these
qualifications, he may unceasingly produce poems--short or long,
religious, amatory, or patriotic, according to the demand.
If a man of literary talent wishes to write a story or novel, he
need only form his style--that is, learn how to describe all that he
sees--and accustom himself to remember or note down details. When he
has accustomed himself to this, he can, according to his inclination
or the demand, unceasingly produce novels or stories--historical,
naturalistic, social, erotic, psychological, or even religious, for
which latter kind a demand and fashion begins to show itself. He can
take subjects from books or from the events of life, and can copy the
characters of the people in his book from his acquaintances.
And such novels and stories, if only they are decked out with
well-observed and carefully noted details, preferably erotic ones,
will be considered works of art, even though they may not contain a
spark of feeling experienced.
To produce art in dramatic form, a talented man, in addition to
all that is required for novels and stories, must also learn to
furnish his characters with as many smart and witty sentences as
possible, must know how to utilise theatrical effects, and how to
entwine the action of his characters so that there should be no
long conversations, but as much bustle and movement on the stage as
possible. If the writer is able to do this, he may produce dramatic
works one after another without stopping, selecting his subjects from
the reports of the law courts, or from the latest society topic, such
as hypnotism, heredity, etc., or from deep antiquity, or even from
the realms of fancy.
In the sphere of painting and sculpture it is still easier for the
talented man to produce imitations of art. He need only learn to
draw, paint, and model--especially naked bodies. Thus equipped he
can continue to paint pictures, or model statues, one after another,
choosing subjects according to his bent: mythological, or religious,
or fantastic, or symbolic; or he may depict what is written about in
the papers: a coronation, a strike, the Turko-Grecian war, famine
scenes; or, commonest of all, he may just copy anything he thinks
beautiful--from naked women to copper basins.
For the production of musical art the talented man needs still less
of what constitutes the essence of art, that is, feeling wherewith
to infect others; but on the other hand he requires more physical,
gymnastic labour than for any other art, unless it be dancing. To
produce works of musical art he must first learn to move his fingers
on some instrument as rapidly as those who have reached the highest
perfection; next he must know how in former times polyphonic music
was written, must study what are called counterpoint and fugue;
and, furthermore, he must learn orchestration, that is, how to
utilise the effects of the instruments. But once he has learned all
this, the composer may unceasingly produce one work after another:
whether programme-music, opera, or song (devising sounds more or less
corresponding to the words), or chamber music, that is, he may take
another man’s themes and work them up into definite forms by means of
counterpoint and fugue; or, what is commonest of all, he may compose
fantastic music, that is, he may take a conjunction of sounds which
happens to come to hand, and pile every sort of complication and
ornamentation on to this chance combination.
Thus in all realms of art counterfeits of art are manufactured to a
ready-made, prearranged recipe, and these counterfeits the public of
our upper classes accept for real art.
And this substitution of counterfeits for real works of art was the
third and most important consequence of the separation of the art of
the upper classes from universal art.
CHAPTER XII
_Causes of production of counterfeits. Professionalism.
Criticism. Schools of art._
In our society three conditions co-operate to cause the production
of objects of counterfeit art. They are (1) the considerable
remuneration of artists for their productions and the professionalism
which this has produced among artists, (2) art criticism, and (3)
schools of art.
While art was as yet undivided, and only religious art was valued
and rewarded while indiscriminate art was left unrewarded, there
were no counterfeits of art or, if any existed, being exposed to the
criticism of the whole people they quickly disappeared. But as soon
as that division occurred, and the upper classes acclaimed every kind
of art as good if only it afforded them pleasure, and began to reward
such art more highly than any other social activity, a large number
of people immediately devoted themselves to this activity and art
assumed quite a different character and became a profession.
And as soon as this occurred the chief and most precious quality of
art--its sincerity--was at once greatly weakened and eventually quite
destroyed.
The professional artist lives by his art and has continually to
invent subjects for his works, and does invent them. And it is
obvious how great a difference must exist between works of art
produced on the one hand by men such as the Jewish prophets, the
authors of the Psalms, Francis of Assisi, the authors of the _Iliad_
and _Odyssey_, of folk-stories, legends, and folk-songs, many of whom
not only received no remuneration for their work but did not even
attach their names to it, and, on the other hand, works produced
by court poets, dramatists, and musicians, receiving honours and
remuneration; and later on by professional artists who lived by the
trade, receiving remuneration from newspaper editors, publishers,
impresarios, and in general from the agents who come between the
artists and the town public--the consumers of art.
Professionalism is the first condition of the diffusion of false,
counterfeit art.
The second condition is the growth in recent times of art criticism,
that is, the valuation of art not by everybody, and above all not by
plain men, but by erudite, that is, by perverted and at the same time
self-confident individuals.
A friend of mine, speaking of the relation of critics to artists,
half-jokingly defined it thus: “Critics are the stupid who discuss
the wise.” However partial, inexact, and rude this definition may be,
it is yet partly true, and is incomparably juster than the definition
which considers critics to be men who can explain works of art.
“Critics explain!” What do they explain?
The artist, if a real artist, has by his work transmitted to others
the feeling he experienced. What is there, then, to explain?
If a work is a good work of art, then the feeling expressed by the
artist--be it moral or immoral--transmits itself to other people.
If transmitted to others, then they feel it and all interpretations
are superfluous. If the work does not infect people, no explanation
can make it contagious. An artist’s work cannot be interpreted.
Had it been possible to explain in words what he wished to convey,
the artist would have expressed himself in words. He expressed it
by his art, only because the feeling he experienced could not be
otherwise transmitted. The interpretation of works of art by words
only indicates that the interpreter is himself incapable of feeling
the infection of art. And this is actually the case for, however
strange it may seem to say so, critics have always been people less
susceptible than other men to the contagion of art. For the most part
they are able writers, educated and clever, but with their capacity
for being infected by art quite perverted or atrophied. And therefore
their writings have always largely contributed, and still contribute,
to the perversion of the taste of that public which reads them and
trusts them.
Art criticism did not exist--could not and cannot exist--in societies
where art is undivided, and where, consequently, it is appraised by
the religious conception of life common to the whole people. Art
criticism grew, and could grow, only on the art of the upper classes
who did not acknowledge the religious perception of their time.
Universal art has a definite and indubitable internal
criterion--religious perception; upper-class art lacks this, and
therefore the appreciators of that art are obliged to cling to
some external criterion. And they find it in “the judgments of the
finest-nurtured,” as an English esthetician has phrased it, that
is, in the authority of the people who are considered educated; nor
in this alone, but also in a tradition of such authorities. This
tradition is extremely misleading, both because the opinions of “the
finest-nurtured” are often mistaken, and also because judgments
which were valid once cease to be so with the lapse of time. But the
critics, having no basis for their judgments, never cease to repeat
their traditions. The classical tragedians were once considered
good, and therefore criticism considers them to be so still. Dante
was esteemed a great poet, Raphael a great painter, Bach a great
musician--and the critics, lacking a standard by which to separate
good art from bad, not only consider these artists great, but regard
all their productions as admirable and worthy of imitation. Nothing
has contributed, and still contributes, so much to the perversion
of art as these authorities set up by criticism. A man produces a
work of art, expressing in his own peculiar manner, like every true
artist, a feeling he has experienced. Most people are infected by
the artist’s feeling, and his work becomes known. Then criticism,
discussing the artist, says that the work is not bad, but all the
same the artist is not a Dante, nor a Shakespeare, nor a Goethe, nor
a Raphael, nor what Beethoven was in his last period. And the young
artist sets to work to copy those held up for his imitation, and he
produces not only feeble works but false works, counterfeits of art.
Thus, for instance, our Púshkin writes his short poems, _Evgéni
Onégin_, _The Gipsies_, and his stories--works all varying in
quality, but all true art. But then, under the influence of false
criticism extolling Shakespeare, he writes _Borís Godunóv_, a cold,
brain-spun work, and this production is lauded by the critics, set up
as a model, and imitations of it appear: _Mínin_ by Ostróvski, and
_Tsar Borís_ by Alexéy Tolstóy, and such imitations of imitations as
crowd all literatures with insignificant productions. The chief harm
done by the critics is this, that themselves lacking the capacity to
be infected by art (and that is the characteristic of all critics,
for did they not lack this they could not attempt the impossible--the
interpretation of works of art), they pay most attention to, and
eulogise, brain-spun invented works, and set these up as models
worthy of imitation. That is the reason they so confidently extol, in
literature, the Greek tragedians, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare,
Goethe (almost all he wrote), and, among recent writers, Zola and
Ibsen; in music, Beethoven’s last period, and Wagner. To justify
their praise of these brain-spun invented works, they devise entire
theories (of which the famous theory of beauty is one); and not only
dull but also talented people compose works in strict deference to
these theories; and often even real artists, doing violence to their
genius, submit to them.
Every false work extolled by the critics serves as a door through
which the hypocrites of art at once crowd in.
It is solely due to the critics, who in our times still praise rude,
savage, and, for us, often meaningless works of the ancient Greeks:
Sophocles, Euripides, Æschylus, and especially Aristophanes; or,
of modern writers, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare; in painting,
all of Raphael, all of Michael Angelo, including his absurd “Last
Judgment”; in music, the whole of Bach, and the whole of Beethoven,
including his last period,--thanks only to them, have the Ibsens,
Maeterlincks, Verlaines, Mallarmés, Puvis de Chavannes, Klingers,
Böcklins, Stucks, Schneiders; in music, the Wagners, Liszts,
Berliozes, Brahmses, and Richard Strausses, etc., and all that
immense mass of good-for-nothing imitators of these imitators, become
possible in our day.
As a good illustration of the harmful influence of criticism, take
its relation to Beethoven. Among his innumerable hasty productions
written to order, there are, notwithstanding their artificiality of
form, works of true art. But he grows deaf, cannot hear, and begins
to write invented, unfinished works, which are consequently often
meaningless and musically unintelligible. I know that musicians
can imagine sounds vividly enough, and can almost hear what they
read, but imaginary sounds can never be the same as real ones, and
every composer must hear his production in order to perfect it.
Beethoven however could not hear, could not perfect his work, and
consequently published productions which are artistic ravings. But
criticism, having once acknowledged him to be a great composer,
seizes on just these abnormal works with special gusto and searches
for extraordinary beauties in them. And, to justify its praises
(perverting the very meaning of musical art), it attributed to music
the property of describing what it cannot describe. And imitators
appear--an innumerable host of imitators of these abnormal attempts
at artistic productions which Beethoven wrote when he was deaf.
Then Wagner appears, who at first in critical articles praises just
Beethoven’s last period, connecting this music with Schopenhauer’s
mystical theory that music is the expression of Will--not of
separate manifestations of will objectivised on various planes, but
of its very essence--which is in itself as absurd as this music
of Beethoven. And afterwards he composes music of his own on this
theory, in conjunction with another still more erroneous system of
the union of all the arts. After Wagner yet new imitators appear,
diverging yet further from art: Brahms, Richard Strauss, and others.
Such are the results of criticism. But the third condition of the
perversion of art, namely, art schools, is almost more harmful still.
As soon as art became, not art for the whole people but for a rich
class, it became a profession; as soon as it became a profession,
methods were devised to teach it; people who chose this profession
of art began to learn these methods, and thus professional schools
sprang up: classes of rhetoric or literature in the public schools,
academies for painting, conservatoires for music, schools for
dramatic art.
In these schools art is taught! But art is the transmission to others
of a special feeling experienced by the artist. How can this be
taught in schools?
No school can evoke feeling in a man, and still less can it teach him
how to manifest it in the one particular manner natural to him alone.
But the essence of art lies in these things.
The one thing these schools can teach is how to transmit feelings
experienced by other artists in the way those other artists
transmitted them. And this is just what the professional schools do
teach; and such instruction not only does not assist the spread
of true art but, on the contrary, by diffusing counterfeits of art
does more than anything else to deprive people of the capacity to
understand true art.
In literary art people are taught how, without having anything they
wish to say, to write a many-paged composition on a theme about which
they have never thought and, moreover, to write it so that it should
resemble the work of an author admitted to be celebrated. This is
taught in schools.
In painting the chief training consists in learning to draw and paint
from copies and models, the naked body chiefly (the very thing that
is never seen, and which a man occupied with real art hardly ever has
to depict), and to draw and paint as former masters drew and painted.
The composition of pictures is taught by giving out themes similar to
those which have been treated by former acknowledged celebrities.
So also in dramatic schools--the pupils are taught to recite
monologues just as tragedians, held to be celebrated, declaimed them.
It is the same in music. The whole theory of music is nothing but
a disconnected repetition of those methods which the acknowledged
masters of composition made use of.
I have elsewhere quoted the profound remark of the Russian artist
Bryulov on art, but I cannot here refrain from repeating it, because
nothing better illustrates what can and what can not be taught in the
schools. Once when correcting a pupil’s study, Bryulóv just touched
it in a few places, and the poor dead study immediately became
animated. “Why, you only touched it a _wee bit_, and it is quite
another thing!” said one of the pupils. “Art begins where the _wee
bit_ begins,” replied Bryulóv, indicating by these words just what is
most characteristic of art. The remark is true of all the arts, but
its justice is particularly noticeable in the performance of music.
That musical execution should be artistic, should be art, that is,
should carry infection, three chief conditions must be observed.
There are many others needed for musical perfection: the transition
from one sound to another must be interrupted or continuous; the
sound must increase or diminish steadily; it must be blended with one
and not with another sound; the sound must have this or that timbre,
and much besides,--but take the three chief conditions: the pitch,
the time, and the strength of the sound. Musical execution is only
then art, only then infects, when the sound is neither higher nor
lower than it should be, that is, when exactly the infinitely small
centre of the required note is taken; when that note is continued
exactly as long as is needed; and when the strength of the sound
is neither more nor less than is required. The slightest deviation
of pitch in either direction, the slightest increase or decrease
in time, or the slightest strengthening or weakening of the sound
beyond what is needed, destroys the perfection and consequently the
infectiousness of the work. So that the feeling of infection by
the art of music, which seems so simple and so easily obtained, is
a thing we receive only when the performer finds those infinitely
minute degrees which are necessary to perfection in music. It is
the same in all arts: a wee bit lighter, a wee bit darker, a wee
bit higher, lower, to the right or the left--in painting; a wee bit
weaker or stronger in intonation, a wee bit sooner or later--in
dramatic art; a wee bit omitted, over-emphasised, or exaggerated--in
poetry, and there is no contagion. Infection is only obtained when
an artist finds those infinitely minute degrees of which a work of
art consists, and only to the extent to which he finds them. And it
is quite impossible to teach people by external means to find these
minute degrees: they can only be found when a man yields to his
feeling. No instruction can make a dancer catch just the tact of the
music, or a singer or a fiddler take exactly the infinitely minute
centre of his note, or a sketcher draw of all possible lines the
only right one, or a poet find the only meet arrangement of the only
suitable words. All this is found only by feeling. And therefore
schools may teach what is necessary in order to produce something
resembling art, but not art itself.
The teaching of the schools stops where the _wee bit_ begins--
consequently where art begins.
Accustoming people to something resembling art, disaccustoms them to
the comprehension of real art. And that is how it comes about that
none are more dull to art than those who have passed through the
professional schools and been most successful in them. Professional
schools produce an hypocrisy of art precisely akin to that hypocrisy
of religion which is produced by theological colleges for training
priests, pastors, and religious teachers generally. As it is
impossible in a school to train a man so as to make a religious
teacher of him, so it is impossible to teach a man how to become an
artist.
Art schools are thus doubly destructive of art: first, in that they
destroy the capacity to produce real art in those who have the
misfortune to enter them and go through a seven or eight years’
course; and secondly, in that they generate enormous quantities of
that counterfeit art which perverts the taste of the masses and
overflows our world. In order that born artists may know the methods
of the various arts elaborated by former artists, there should
exist in all elementary schools such classes for drawing and music
(singing) that, after passing through them, every talented scholar
may, by using existing models accessible to all, be able to perfect
himself in his art independently.
These three conditions--the professionalisation of artists, art
criticism, and art schools--have had this effect: that most people in
our times are quite unable even to understand what art is, and accept
as art the grossest counterfeits of it.
CHAPTER XIII
_Wagner’s “Nibelungen Ring” a type of counterfeit art. Its
success, and the reasons thereof._
To what an extent people of our circle and time have lost the
capacity to receive real art, and have become accustomed to accept
as art things that have nothing in common with it, is best seen from
the works of Richard Wagner, which have latterly come to be more and
more esteemed not only by the Germans but also by the French and the
English as the very highest art revealing new horizons to us.
The peculiarity of Wagner’s music, as is known, consists in this,
that he considered that music should serve poetry, expressing all the
shades of a poetical work.
The union of the drama with music, devised in the fifteenth century
in Italy for the revival of what they imagined to have been the
ancient Greek music-drama, is an artificial form which had, and
has, success only among the upper classes, and among them only
when gifted composers such as Mozart, Weber, Rossini, and others,
drawing inspiration from a dramatic subject, yielded freely to the
inspiration and subordinated the text to the music, so that in their
operas the important thing to the audience is merely the music on a
certain text, and not the text at all, which latter even when it was
utterly absurd, as for instance in the _Magic Flute_, still does not
prevent the music from producing an artistic impression.
Wagner wishes to correct the opera by letting music submit to the
demands of poetry and unite with it. But each art has its own
definite realm, which is not identical with the realm of other
arts but merely comes in contact with them; and therefore if the
manifestations, I will not say of several but even of two arts--the
dramatic and the musical--be united in one complete production,
then the demands of the one art will make it impossible to fulfil
the demands of the other, as has always occurred in the ordinary
operas, where the dramatic art has submitted to, or rather yielded
place to, the musical. Wagner wishes that musical art should submit
to dramatic art and that both should appear in full strength. But
this is impossible, for every work of art, if it be a true one, is
an expression of the intimate feelings of the artist, which are
quite peculiar to him and not like anything else. Such is a musical
production and such is a dramatic work, if they be true art. And
therefore, in order that a production in the one branch of art should
coincide with a production in the other branch, it is necessary that
the impossible should happen: that two works from different realms of
art should be absolutely exceptional, unlike anything that existed
before, and yet should coincide and be exactly alike.
And this cannot be, just as there cannot be two men, or even two
leaves on a tree, exactly alike. Still less can two works from
different realms of art, the musical and the literary, be absolutely
alike. If they coincide, then either one is a work of art and the
other a counterfeit, or both are counterfeits. Two live leaves cannot
be exactly alike but two artificial leaves may be. And so it is with
works of art. They can only coincide completely when neither the one
nor the other is art, but both are only cunningly devised semblances
of it.
If poetry and music may be joined, as occurs in hymns, songs, and
_romances_--(though even in these the music does not follow the
changes of each verse of the text as Wagner wants to, but the song
and the music merely produce a coincident effect on the mind)--this
occurs only because lyrical poetry and music have, to some extent,
one and the same aim: to produce a mental condition, and the
conditions produced by lyrical poetry and by music can, more or
less, coincide. But even in these conjunctions the centre of gravity
always lies in one of the two productions, so that it is one of
them that produces the artistic impression while the other remains
unregarded. And still less is it possible for such union to exist
between epic or dramatic poetry and music.
Moreover, one of the chief conditions of artistic creation is the
complete freedom of the artist from every kind of preconceived
demand. And the necessity of adjusting his musical work to a work
from another realm of art is a preconceived demand of such a kind as
to destroy all possibility of creative power; and therefore adjusted
works of this kind are and must be, as has always happened, not works
of art but only imitations of art, like the music of a melodrama,
titles of pictures, illustrations to books, and librettos to operas.
And such Wagner’s productions are. A confirmation of this is
to be seen in the fact that Wagner’s new music lacks the chief
characteristic of every true work of art, namely, such entirety and
completeness that the smallest alteration in its form would disturb
the meaning of the whole work. In a true work of art--poem, drama,
picture, song, or symphony--it is impossible to extract one line, one
scene, one figure, or one bar from its place and put it in another,
without infringing the significance of the whole work, just as it is
impossible without infringing the life of an organic being to extract
an organ from one place and insert it somewhere else. But in the
music of Wagner’s last period, with the exception of certain parts
of little importance which have an independent musical meaning, it
is possible to make all kinds of transpositions, putting what was in
front behind and _vice versâ_, without altering the musical sense.
And the reason why these transpositions do not alter the sense of
Wagner’s music is because the sense lies in the words and not in the
music.
The musical score of Wagner’s later operas is like what would result
should one of those versifiers--of whom there are now many, with
tongues so broken that they can, on any theme to any rhymes in any
rhythm, write verses which sound as if they had a meaning--conceive
the idea of illustrating by his verses some symphony or sonata of
Beethoven, or some _ballade_ of Chopin, in the following manner. To
the first bars of one character, he writes verses corresponding in
his opinion to those first bars. Next come some bars of a different
character, and he also writes verses corresponding in his opinion
to them, but with no internal connection with the first verses,
and moreover without rhymes and without rhythm. Such a production,
without the music, would be exactly parallel in poetry to what
Wagner’s operas are in music, if heard without the words.
But Wagner is not only a musician, he is also a poet, or both
together; and therefore, to judge of Wagner one must know his poetry
also--that same poetry which the music has to subserve. The chief
poetical production of Wagner is the _Nibelungen Ring_. This work
has attained such enormous importance in our time and has such
influence on all that now professes to be art, that it is necessary
for everyone to-day to have some idea of it. I have carefully read
through the four booklets which contain this work, and have drawn up
a brief summary of it, which I give in Appendix III. I would strongly
advise the reader (if he has not perused the poem itself, which would
be the best thing to do) at least to read my account of it, so as
to have an idea of this extraordinary work. It is a model work of
counterfeit art so gross as to be even ridiculous.
But we are told that it is impossible to judge of Wagner’s works
without seeing them on the stage. The Second Day of this drama, which
as I was told is the best part of the whole work, was given in Moscow
last winter and I went to see the performance.
When I arrived the enormous theatre was already filled from top to
bottom. There were Grand-Dukes, and the flower of the aristocracy, of
the merchant class, of the learned, and of the middle-class official
public. Most of them held the libretto, fathoming its meaning.
Musicians--some of them elderly, grey-haired men--followed the music,
score in hand. Evidently the performance of this work was an event of
importance.
I was rather late, but I was told that the short prelude with
which the act begins was of slight importance and that it did not
matter having missed it. When I arrived, an actor sat on the stage
amid decorations intended to represent a cave and before something
which was meant to represent a smith’s forge. He was dressed in
trico tights, with a cloak of skins, wore a wig and an artificial
beard, and with white, weak, genteel hands (his easy movements and
especially the shape of his stomach and his lack of muscle revealed
the actor) beat an impossible sword with an unnatural hammer in a way
in which no one ever uses a hammer; and at the same time, opening
his mouth in a strange way, he sang something incomprehensible. The
music of various instruments accompanied the strange sounds which
he emitted. From the libretto one was able to gather that the actor
had to represent a powerful dwarf who lived in the cave, and who was
forging a sword for Siegfried, whom he had reared. One could tell he
was a dwarf by the fact that the actor walked all the time bending
the knees of his trico-covered legs. This dwarf, still opening his
mouth in the same strange way, long continued to sing or shout.
The music meanwhile runs over something strange, like beginnings
which are not continued and do not get finished. From the libretto
one could learn that the dwarf is telling himself about a ring a
giant had obtained and which the dwarf wishes to procure through
Siegfried’s aid, while Siegfried wants a good sword, on the forging
of which the dwarf is occupied. After this conversation or singing
to himself has gone on rather a long time, other sounds are heard
in the orchestra, also like something beginning and not finishing,
and another actor appears with a horn slung over his shoulder and
accompanied by a man running on all fours dressed up as a bear, whom
he sets at the smith-dwarf. The latter runs away without unbending
the knees of his trico-covered legs. This actor with the horn
represented the hero, Siegfried. The sounds which were emitted in the
orchestra on the entrance of this actor were intended to represent
Siegfried’s character and are called Siegfried’s _leit-motiv_. And
these sounds are repeated each time Siegfried appears. There is one
fixed combination of sounds, or _leit-motiv_, for each character,
and this _leit-motiv_ is repeated every time the person whom it
represents appears; and when anyone is mentioned the _motiv_ is heard
which relates to that person. Moreover each article also has its own
_leit-motiv_ or chord. There is a _motiv_ of the ring, a _motiv_ of
the helmet, a _motiv_ of the apple, a _motiv_ of fire, spear, sword,
water, etc.; and as soon as the ring, helmet, or apple is mentioned,
the _motiv_ or chord of the ring, helmet, or apple, is heard. The
actor with the horn opens his mouth as unnaturally as the dwarf,
and long continues in a chanting voice to shout some words, and in
a similar chant Mime (that is the dwarf’s name) makes some reply to
him. The meaning of this conversation can only be discovered from
the libretto; and it is that Siegfried was brought up by the dwarf
and therefore, for some reason, hates him and always wishes to kill
him. The dwarf has forged a sword for Siegfried, but Siegfried is
dissatisfied with it. From a ten-page conversation (by the libretto),
lasting half-an-hour and conducted with the same strange openings
of the mouth and chantings, it appears that Siegfried’s mother gave
birth to him in the wood, and that concerning his father all that is
known is that he had a sword which was broken, the pieces of which
are in Mime’s possession, and that Siegfried does not know fear, and
wishes to go out of the wood. Mime however does not want to let him
go. During the conversation the music never omits, at the mention of
father, sword, etc., to sound the _motiv_ of these people and things.
After these conversations fresh sounds are heard--those of the god
Wotan--and a wanderer appears. This wanderer is the god Wotan. Also
dressed up in a wig, and also in tights, this god Wotan, standing in
a stupid pose with a spear, thinks proper to recount what Mime must
have known before, but what it is necessary to tell the audience. He
does not tell it simply, but in the form of riddles which he orders
himself to guess, shaking his head (one does not know why) that he
will guess right. Moreover, whenever the wanderer strikes his spear
on the ground, fire comes out of the ground, and in the orchestra the
sounds of spear and of fire are heard. The orchestra accompanies the
conversation, and the _motivs_ of the people and things spoken of
are always artfully intermingled. Besides this the music expresses
feelings in the most naïve manner: the terrible by sounds in the
bass, the frivolous by rapid touches in the treble, and so forth.
The riddles have no meaning except to tell the audience what the
_nibelungs_ are, what the giants are, what the gods are, and
what has happened before. This conversation also is chanted with
strangely opened mouths and continues for eight libretto pages, and
a correspondingly long time on the stage. After this the wanderer
departs and Siegfried returns and talks with Mime for thirteen pages
more. There is not a single melody the whole of this time, but
merely intertwinings of the _leit-motivs_ of the people and things
mentioned. The conversation shows that Mime wishes to teach Siegfried
fear and that Siegfried does not know what fear is. Having finished
this conversation, Siegfried seizes one of the pieces of what is
meant to represent the broken sword, saws it up, puts it on what is
meant to represent the forge, melts it, and then forges it and sings:
“Heiho! heiho! heiho! Ho! ho! Aha! oho! aha! Heiaho! heiaho! heiaho!
Ho! ho! Hahei! hoho! hahei!” and Act I finishes.
Upon the question I had come to the theatre to decide, my mind was
fully made up, as surely as on the question of the merits of my
lady acquaintance’s novel when she read me the scene between the
loose-haired maiden in the white dress and the hero with two white
dogs and a hat with a feather _à la Guillaume Tell_.
From an author who could compose such spurious scenes, outraging all
esthetic feeling, as those which I had witnessed, there was nothing
to be hoped; it may safely be decided that all that such an author
can write will be bad, because he evidently does not know what a true
work of art is. I wished to leave, but the friends I was with asked
me to remain, declaring that one could not form an opinion by that
one act, and that the second would be better. So I stopped for the
second act.
Act II, night. Afterwards dawn. In general the whole piece is crammed
with lights, clouds, moonlight, darkness, magic fires, thunder, etc.
The scene represents a wood, and in the wood there is a cave. At the
entrance to the cave sits a fourth actor in tights, representing
another dwarf. Dawn appears. Enter the god Wotan, again with a spear
and again in the guise of a wanderer. Again his sounds, together with
fresh sounds of the deepest bass that can be produced. These latter
indicate that the dragon is speaking. Wotan awakens the dragon. The
same bass sounds are repeated, growing yet deeper and deeper. First
the dragon says, “I want to sleep,” but afterwards he crawls out of
the cave. The dragon is represented by two men: it is dressed in a
green scaly skin, and waves a tail at one end while at the other it
opens a kind of crocodile’s jaw that is fastened on and from which
flames appear. The dragon (who is meant to be dreadful, and may
appear so to five-year-old children) utters some words in a terribly
bass voice. This is all so stupid, so like what is done in the booth
at a fair, that it is surprising that people over seven years of age
can witness it seriously; yet thousands of quasi-cultured people sit
and attentively hear and see it, and are delighted.
Siegfried with his horn reappears, as does Mime also. In the
orchestra the sounds denoting them are emitted, and they talk about
whether Siegfried does or does not know fear. Mime goes away, and a
scene commences which is intended to be most poetic. Siegfried, in
his tights, lies down in a would-be beautiful pose and alternately
keeps silent and talks to himself. He ponders, listens to the singing
of birds, and desires to imitate them. For this purpose he cuts a
reed with his sword and makes a pipe. The dawn grows brighter and
brighter; the birds sing. Siegfried tries to imitate the birds. In
the orchestra is heard the imitation of birds, alternating with
sounds corresponding to the words he speaks. But Siegfried does not
succeed with his pipe-playing, so he plays on his horn instead. This
scene is unendurable. Of music, that is, of art serving as a means to
transmit a state of mind experienced by the author, there is not even
a suggestion. There is something that is absolutely unintelligible
musically. In a musical sense a hope continually arises, followed by
disappointment, as if a musical thought were commenced only to be
broken off. If there are something like musical beginnings, these
beginnings are so short, so encumbered with complications of harmony
and orchestration and with effects of contrast, are so obscure and
unfinished, and what is happening on the stage meanwhile is so
abominably false, that it is difficult even to perceive these musical
snatches, let alone to be infected by them. Above all, from the very
beginning to the very end and in each note, the author’s purpose is
so audible and visible that one sees and hears neither Siegfried nor
the birds, but only a limited self-opinionated German of bad taste
and bad style, who has a most false conception of poetry, and in the
rudest and most primitive manner wishes to transmit to me these false
and mistaken conceptions of his.
Everyone knows the feeling of distrust and resistance always evoked
by an author’s evident predetermination. A narrator need only to say
in advance, “Prepare to cry,” or “to laugh,” and you are sure neither
to cry nor to laugh. But when you see that an author prescribes
emotion at what is not touching but only laughable or disgusting, and
when you see moreover that the author is fully assured that he has
captivated you, a painfully tormenting feeling results similar to
what one would feel if an old, deformed woman put on a ball-dress and
smilingly coquetted before you, confident of your approbation. This
impression was strengthened by the fact that around me I saw a crowd
of three thousand people, who not only patiently witnessed all this
absurd nonsense but even considered it their duty to be delighted
with it.
I somehow managed to sit out the next scene also, in which the
monster appears to the accompaniment of his bass notes intermingled
with the _motiv_ of Siegfried; but after the fight with the monster,
and all the roars, fires, and sword-wavings, I could stand no more of
it, and escaped from the theatre with a feeling of repulsion which
even now I cannot forget.
Listening to this opera, I involuntarily thought of a respected,
wise, educated, country labourer--one, for instance, of those wise
and truly religious men whom I know among the peasants,--and I
pictured to myself the terrible perplexity such a man would be in
were he to witness what I was seeing that evening.
What would he think if he knew of all the labour spent on such
a performance, and saw that audience, those great ones of the
earth,--old, bald-headed, grey-bearded men, whom he had been
accustomed to respect--sit silent and attentive, listening to and
looking at all these stupidities for five hours on end? Not to speak
of an adult labourer, one can hardly imagine even a child of over
seven occupying himself with such a stupid, incoherent fairy tale.
And yet an enormous audience, the cream of the cultured upper
classes, sits out five hours of this insane performance, and goes
away imagining that by paying tribute to this nonsense it has
acquired a fresh right to esteem itself advanced and enlightened.
I speak of the Moscow public. But what is the Moscow public? It is
but a hundredth part of that public which while considering itself
most highly enlightened, esteems it a merit so to have lost the
capacity of being infected by art that not only can it witness this
stupid sham without being revolted, but can even take delight in it.
In Bayreuth, where these performances were first given, people who
considered themselves finely cultured assembled from the ends of the
earth, spent, say, £100 each to see this performance, and for four
days running went to see and hear this nonsensical rubbish, sitting
it out for six hours each day.
But why did people go, and why do they still go to these
performances, and why do they admire them? The question naturally
presents itself: How is the success of Wagner’s works to be explained?
That success I explain to myself in this way: thanks to his
exceptional position in having at his disposal the resources of a
king, Wagner was able to command all the methods for counterfeiting
art which have been developed by long usage, and employing these
methods with great ability he produced a model work of counterfeit
art. The reason why I have selected his work for my illustration is,
that in no other counterfeit of art known to me are all the methods
by which art is counterfeited--viz., borrowings, imitations, dramatic
effects, and interest--so ably and powerfully united.
From the subject borrowed from antiquity, to the clouds and the
risings of the sun and moon, Wagner in this work has made use of all
that is considered poetic. We have here the sleeping beauty, and
nymphs, and subterranean fires, and dwarfs, and battles, and swords,
and love, and incest, and a monster, and singing-birds: the whole
arsenal of the poetic is brought into action.
Moreover everything is imitative: the decorations are imitated and
the costumes are imitated. All is just as, according to the data
supplied by archæology, they would have been in antiquity. The very
sounds are imitative, for Wagner, who was not destitute of musical
talent, invented just such sounds as imitate the strokes of a hammer,
the hissing of molten iron, the singing of birds, etc.
Furthermore, in this work everything is in the highest degree
striking in its effects and in its peculiarities: its monsters, its
magic fires, and its scenes under water; the darkness in which the
audience sit, the invisibility of the orchestra, and the hitherto
unemployed combinations of harmony.
And besides, it is all interesting. The interest lies not only
in the question who will kill whom, and who will marry whom, and
who is whose son, and what will happen next?--the interest lies
also in the relation of the music to the text. The rolling waves
of the Rhine--now how is that to be expressed in music? An evil
dwarf appears--how is the music to express an evil dwarf?--and how
is it to express the sensuality of this dwarf? How will bravery,
fire, or apples, be expressed in music? How are the _leit-motivs_
of the people speaking to be interwoven with the _leit-motivs_ of
the people and objects about whom they speak? And the music has a
further interest. It diverges from all formerly accepted laws, and
most unexpected and totally new modulations crop up (as is not only
possible but even easy in music having no inner law of its being);
the dissonances are new, and are allowed in a new way--and this, too,
is interesting.
And it is this poeticality, imitativeness, effectfulness, and
interestingness which, thanks to the peculiarities of Wagner’s talent
and to the advantageous position in which he was placed, are in
these productions carried to the highest pitch of perfection, which
so act on the spectator, hypnotising him as one would be hypnotised
who should listen for several consecutive hours to maniacal ravings
pronounced with great oratorical power.
People say, “You cannot judge without having seen Wagner performed at
Bayreuth: in the dark, where the orchestra is out of sight concealed
under the stage, and where the performance is brought to the highest
perfection.” And this just proves that we have here no question of
art, but one of hypnotism. It is just what the spiritualists say. To
convince you of the reality of their apparitions they usually say,
“You cannot judge; you must try it, be present at several séances,”
that is, come and sit silent in the dark for hours together in the
same room with semi-sane people and repeat this some ten times over,
and you shall see all that we see.
Yes, naturally! Only place yourself in such conditions, and you
may see what you will. But this can be still more quickly attained
by getting drunk or smoking opium. It is the same when listening
to an opera of Wagner’s. Sit in the dark for four days in company
with people who are not quite normal, and through the auditory
nerves subject your brain to the strongest action of the sounds
best adapted to excite it, and you will no doubt be reduced to an
abnormal condition and be enchanted by absurdities. But to attain
this end you do not even need four days; the five hours during which
one “day” is enacted, as in Moscow, are quite enough. Nor are five
hours needed; even one hour is enough for people who have no clear
conception of what art should be, and who have concluded in advance
that what they are going to see is excellent, and that indifference
or dissatisfaction with this work will serve as a proof of their
inferiority and lack of culture.
I observed the audience present at this representation. The people
who led the whole audience and gave the tone to it were those who had
previously been hypnotized and who again succumbed to the hypnotic
influence to which they were accustomed. These hypnotized people,
being in an abnormal condition, were perfectly enraptured. Moreover
all the art critics, who lack the capacity to be infected by art and
therefore always especially prize works like Wagner’s opera where
it is all an affair of the intellect, also with much profundity
expressed their approval of a work affording such ample material for
ratiocination. And following these two groups went that large city
crowd (indifferent to art, with their capacity to be infected by it
perverted and partly atrophied), headed by the princes, millionaires,
and art patrons, who, like sorry harriers, keep close to those who
most loudly and decidedly express their opinion.
“Oh yes, certainly! What poetry! Marvellous! Especially the birds!”
“Yes, yes! I am quite vanquished!” exclaim these people, repeating
in various tones what they have just heard from men whose opinion
appears to them authoritative.
If some people do feel insulted by the absurdity and spuriousness of
the whole thing, they are timidly silent, as sober men are timid and
silent when surrounded by tipsy people.
And thus, thanks to the masterly skill with which it counterfeits
art while having nothing in common with it, a meaningless, coarse,
spurious production finds acceptance all over the world, costs
millions of roubles to produce, and assists more and more to pervert
the taste of people of the upper classes and their conception of art.
CHAPTER XIV
_Truths fatal to preconceived views are not readily
recognised. Proportion of works of art to counterfeits.
Perversion of taste and incapacity to recognise art. Examples._
I know that most men--not only those considered clever, but even
those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most
difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems--can
very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it
be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they
have formed, perhaps with much difficulty--conclusions of which
they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they
have built their lives. And therefore I have little hope that what
I adduce as to the perversion of art and taste in our society will
be accepted or even seriously considered. Nevertheless, I must state
fully the inevitable conclusion to which my investigation into the
question of art has brought me. This investigation has brought me
to the conviction that almost all that our society considers to
be art, good art, and the whole of art, far from being real and
good art and the whole of art, is not even art at all, but only a
counterfeit of it. This position, I know, will seem very strange and
paradoxical; but if we once acknowledge art to be human activity by
means of which some people transmit their feelings to others (and
not a service of Beauty, or a manifestation of the Idea, and so
forth), we shall inevitably have to admit this further conclusion
also. If it is true that art is an activity by means of which one
man having experienced a feeling intentionally transmits it to
others, then we have inevitably to admit further that of all that
among us is termed art (the art of the upper classes)--of all those
novels, stories, dramas, comedies, pictures, sculptures, symphonies,
operas, operettas, ballets, etc., which profess to be works of art,
scarcely one in a hundred thousand proceeds from an emotion felt by
its author, all the rest being but manufactured counterfeits of art,
in which borrowing, imitation, effects, and interest, replace the
contagion of feeling. That the proportion of real productions of art
is to the counterfeits as one to some hundreds of thousands or even
more, may be seen by the following calculation. I have read somewhere
that the artist painters in Paris alone number 30,000; there will
probably be as many in England, as many in Germany, and as many in
Russia, Italy, and the smaller states combined. So that in all there
will be in Europe, say, 120,000 painters; and there are probably
as many musicians and as many literary artists. If these 360,000
individuals produce three works a year each (and many of them produce
ten or more), then each year yields over a million so-called works
of art. How many then must have been produced in the last ten years,
and how many in the whole time since upper-class art broke off from
the art of the whole people? Evidently millions. Yet who of all the
connoisseurs of art has received impressions from all these pseudo
works of art? Not to mention all the labouring classes who have no
conception of these productions, even people of the upper classes
cannot know one in a thousand of them all, and cannot remember those
they have known. These works all appear under the guise of art,
produce no impression on anyone (except when they serve as pastimes
for the idle crowd of rich people), and vanish utterly.
In reply to this it is usually said that without this enormous number
of unsuccessful attempts we should not have the real works of art.
But such reasoning is as though a baker, in reply to a reproach that
his bread was bad, were to say that if it were not for the hundreds
of spoiled loaves there would not be any well-baked ones. It is true
that where there is gold there is also much sand; but that cannot
serve as a reason for talking a lot of nonsense in order to say
something wise.
We are surrounded by productions considered artistic. Thousands of
verses, thousands of poems, thousands of novels, thousands of dramas,
thousands of pictures, thousands of musical pieces, follow one after
another. All the verses describe love, or nature, or the author’s
state of mind, and in all of them rhyme and rhythm are observed. All
the dramas and comedies are splendidly mounted and are performed by
admirably trained actors. All the novels are divided into chapters;
all of them describe love, contain effective situations, and
correctly describe the details of life. All the symphonies contain
_allegro_, _andante_, _scherzo_, and _finale_; all consist of
modulations and chords, and are played by highly-trained musicians.
All the pictures, in gold frames, saliently depict faces and sundry
accessories. But among these productions in the various branches
of art there is in each branch one among hundreds of thousands not
only somewhat better than the rest, but differing from them as a
diamond differs from paste. The one is priceless, the others not
only have no value but are worse than valueless for they deceive and
pervert taste. And yet externally they are, to a man of perverted or
atrophied artistic perception, precisely alike.
In our society the difficulty of recognising real works of art is
further increased by the fact that the external quality of the work
in false productions is not only no worse, but often better, than
real ones; the counterfeit is often more effective than the real,
and its subject more interesting. How is one to discriminate? How
is one to find a production in no way distinguished in externals
from hundreds of thousands of others intentionally made precisely to
imitate it?
For a country peasant of unperverted taste this is as easy as it is
for an animal of unspoilt scent to follow the trace he needs among
a thousand others in wood or forest. The animal unerringly finds
what he needs. So also the man, if only his natural qualities have
not been perverted, will without fail select from among thousands of
objects the real work of art he requires--that infecting him with the
feeling experienced by the artist. But it is not so with those whose
taste has been perverted by their education and life. The receptive
feeling of these people is atrophied, and in valuing artistic
productions they must be guided by discussion and study, which
discussion and study completely confuse them. So that most people in
our society are quite unable to distinguish a work of art from the
grossest counterfeit. People sit for whole hours in concert-rooms
and theatres listening to the new composers, consider it a duty
to read the novels of the famous modern novelists and to look at
pictures representing either something incomprehensible or just the
very things they see much better in real life; and, above all, they
consider it incumbent on them to be enraptured by all this, imagining
it all to be art, while at the same time they will pass real works
of art by not only without attention, but even with contempt, merely
because in their circle these works are not included in the list of
works of art.
A few days ago I was returning home from a walk feeling depressed,
as sometimes happens. On nearing the house I heard the loud singing
of a large choir of peasant women. They were welcoming my daughter,
celebrating her return home after her marriage. In this singing, with
its cries and clanging of scythes, such a definite feeling of joy
cheerfulness and energy was expressed, that without noticing how it
infected me I continued on my way towards the house in a better mood
and reached home smiling and quite in good spirits. That same evening
a visitor, an admirable musician famed for his execution of classical
music and particularly of Beethoven, played us Beethoven’s sonata,
Opus 101. For the benefit of those who might otherwise attribute my
judgment of that sonata of Beethoven to non-comprehension of it, I
should mention that whatever other people understand of that sonata
and of other productions of Beethoven’s later period, I, being
very susceptible to music, understand equally. For a long time I
used to attune myself to delight in those shapeless improvisations
which form the subject-matter of the works of Beethoven’s later
period, but I had only to consider the question of art seriously,
and to compare the impression I received from Beethoven’s later
works with those pleasant, clear, and strong, musical impressions
which are transmitted, for instance, by the melodies of Bach (his
arias), Haydn, Mozart, Chopin (when his melodies are not overloaded
with complications and ornamentation), and of Beethoven himself in
his earlier period, and above all, with the impressions produced
by folk-songs,--Italian, Norwegian, or Russian,--by the Hungarian
_csárdäs_, and other such simple, clear, and powerful music, and the
obscure, almost unhealthy, excitement from Beethoven’s later pieces
which I had artificially evoked in myself, was immediately destroyed.
On the completion of the performance (though it was noticeable that
everyone had become dull) those present, in the accepted manner,
warmly praised Beethoven’s profound production and did not forget
to add that formerly they had not been able to understand that last
period of his, but that they now saw he was really then at his very
best. And when I ventured to compare the impression made on me by the
singing of the peasant women--an impression which had been shared by
all who heard it--with the effect of this sonata, the admirers of
Beethoven only smiled contemptuously, not considering it necessary to
reply to such strange remarks.
But for all that the song of the peasant women was real art
transmitting a definite and strong feeling, while the 101st sonata
of Beethoven was only an unsuccessful attempt at art, containing no
definite feeling and therefore not infectious.
For my work on art I have this winter read diligently, though with
great effort, the celebrated novels and stories, praised by all
Europe, written by Zola, Bourget, Huysmans, and Kipling. At the same
time I chanced on a story in a child’s magazine, by a quite unknown
writer, which told of the Easter preparations in a poor widow’s
family. The story tells how the mother managed with difficulty to
obtain some wheat-flour, which she poured on the table ready to
knead. She then went out to procure some yeast, telling the children
not to leave the hut and to take care of the flour. When the mother
had gone, some other children ran shouting near the window, calling
those in the hut to come to play. The children forgot their mother’s
warning, ran into the street, and were soon engrossed in the game.
The mother, on her return with the yeast, finds a hen on the table
throwing the last of the flour to her chickens, who were busily
picking it out of the dust of the earthen floor. The mother, in
despair, scolds the children, who cry bitterly. And the mother begins
to feel pity for them--but the white flour has all gone. So to mend
matters she decides to make the Easter cake with sifted rye-flour,
brushing it over with white of egg and surrounding it with eggs.
“Rye-bread which we bake is as good as a cake,” says the mother,
using a rhyming proverb to console the children for not having an
Easter cake made with white flour. And the children, quickly passing
from despair to rapture, repeat the proverb and await the Easter cake
more merrily even than before.
[Illustration: “THE DAY OF JUDGMENT”
_A painting by V. M. Vasnetsóv in Kief Cathedral
An example of a sort of picture Tolstoy disliked_]
Well! the reading of the novels and stories by Zola, Bourget,
Huysmans, Kipling, and others, handling the most harrowing
subjects, did not touch me for one moment, and I was provoked with
the authors all the while as one is provoked with a man who considers
you so naïve that he does not even conceal the trick by which he
intends to take you in. From the first lines you see the intention
with which the book is written, the details all become superfluous,
and one feels dull. Above all, one knows that the author had no other
feeling all the time than a desire to write a story or a novel, and
so one receives no artistic impression. On the other hand I could
not tear myself away from the unknown author’s tale of the children
and the chickens, because I was at once infected by the feeling
the author had evidently experienced, re-evoked in himself, and
transmitted.
Vasnetsóv is one of our Russian painters. He has painted
ecclesiastical pictures in Kief Cathedral, and everyone praises
him as the founder of some new, elevated kind of Christian art. He
worked at those pictures for ten years, was paid tens of thousands
of roubles for them, and they are all simply bad imitations of
imitations of imitations, destitute of any spark of feeling. And this
same Vasnetsóv drew a picture for Turgénev’s story “The Quail” (in
which it is told how a son pitied a quail that he had seen his father
kill) showing the boy asleep with pouting upper lip, and above him,
as a dream, the quail. And this picture is a true work of art.
In the English Academy of 1897 two pictures were exhibited together;
one of which, by J. C. Dollman, was the temptation of St. Anthony.
The Saint is on his knees praying. Behind him stands a naked woman
and animals of some kind. It is apparent that the naked woman pleased
the artist very much, but that Anthony did not concern him at all;
and that so far from the temptation being terrible to him (the
artist) it is highly agreeable. And therefore if there be any art in
this picture, it is very nasty and false. Next in the same book of
academy pictures comes a picture by Langley, showing a stray beggar
boy, who has evidently been called in by a woman who has taken pity
on him. The boy, pitifully drawing his bare feet under the bench,
is eating; the woman is looking on, probably considering whether he
will not want some more; and a girl of about seven, leaning on her
arm, is carefully and seriously looking on, not taking her eyes from
the hungry boy and evidently understanding for the first time what
poverty is, and what inequality among people is, and asking herself
why she has everything provided for her while this boy goes barefoot
and hungry? She feels sorry and yet pleased. And she loves both the
boy and goodness.... And one feels that the artist loved this girl,
and that she too loves. And this picture, by an artist who, I think,
is not very widely known, is an admirable and true work of art.
I remember seeing a performance of _Hamlet_ by Rossi. Both the
tragedy itself and the performer who took the chief part are
considered by our critics to represent the climax of supreme dramatic
art. And yet, both from the subject-matter of the drama and from the
performance, I experienced all the time that peculiar suffering which
is caused by false imitations of works of art. And I lately read of a
theatrical performance among a savage tribe--the Voguls. A spectator
describes the play. A big Vogul and a little one, both dressed in
reindeer skins, represent a reindeer-doe and its young. A third
Vogul, with a bow, represents a huntsman on snow-shoes, and a fourth
imitates with his voice a bird that warns the reindeer of their
danger. The play is that the huntsman follows the track that the doe
with its young one has travelled. The deer run off the scene and
again reappear. (Such performances take place in a small tent-house.)
The huntsman gains more and more on the pursued. The little deer
is tired and presses against its mother. The doe stops to draw
breath. The hunter comes up with them and draws his bow. But just
then the bird sounds its note, warning the deer of their danger. They
escape. Again there is a chase and again the hunter gains on them,
catches them, and lets fly his arrow. The arrow strikes the young
deer. Unable to run, the little one presses against its mother. The
mother licks its wound. The hunter draws another arrow. The audience,
as the eye-witness describes them, are paralysed with suspense; deep
groans and even weeping are heard among them. And from the mere
description I felt that this was a true work of art.
[Illustration:
A sketch illustrating Turgenev’s story,
“THE QUAIL”
_By V. M. Vasnetsóv_]
What I am saying will be considered irrational paradox at which
one can only be amazed; but for all that I must say what I think,
namely, that people of our circle, of whom some compose verses,
stories, novels, operas, symphonies, and sonatas, paint all kinds
of pictures and make statues, while others hear and look at these
things, and again others appraise and criticise them all: discuss,
condemn, triumph, and generation after generation raise monuments
to one another--that all these people, with very few exceptions,
artists, and public, and critics, have never (except in childhood and
earliest youth, before hearing any discussions on art) experienced
that simple feeling familiar to the plainest man and even to a child,
that sense of infection with another’s feeling--compelling us to
rejoice in another’s gladness, to sorrow at another’s grief, and to
mingle souls with another--which is the very essence of art. And
therefore these people not only cannot distinguish true works of art
from counterfeits, but continually mistake for real art the worst and
most artificial, while they do not even perceive works of real art,
because the counterfeits are always more ornate, while true art is
modest.
CHAPTER XV
The quality of art, considered apart from its
subject-matter--_The sign of art: infectiousness.
Incomprehensible to those whose taste is perverted. Conditions
of infection: Individuality; Clearness; Sincerity._
Art, in our society, has become so perverted that not only has bad
art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what
art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about
the art of our society it is, therefore, first of all necessary to
distinguish art from counterfeit art.
There is one indubitable sign distinguishing real art from its
counterfeit--namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without
exercising effort, and without altering his standpoint, on reading,
hearing, or seeing another man’s work experiences a mental condition
which unites him with that man and with other people who are also
affected by that work, then the object evoking that condition is a
work of art. And however poetic, realistic, striking, or interesting,
a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that
feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of
spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who
are also infected by it).
It is true that this indication is an _internal_ one, and that there
are people who have forgotten what the action of real art is, who
expect something else from art (in our society the great majority are
in this state), and that therefore such people may mistake for this
esthetic feeling the feeling of diversion and a certain excitement
which they receive from counterfeits of art. But though it is
impossible to undeceive these people, just as it may be impossible
to convince a man suffering from colour-blindness that green is not
red, yet, for all that, this indication remains perfectly definite to
those whose feeling for art is neither perverted nor atrophied,
and it clearly distinguishes the feeling produced by art from all
other feelings.