_Initiation and training_, we have returned to those wretched words,
for we also had recognised that without initiation and training there
could be no real enjoyment of art. But, looking not at this brief,
transitional, and topsy-turvey present, but at the centuries and
centuries which have evolved, not only art, but the desire and habit
thereof, we have seen what Tolstoi refused to see, namely, that
wherever and whenever (that is to say, everywhere and at all times
save these present European days) art has existed spontaneously, it
has brought with it that initiation and training. The initiation and
training, the habit of understanding given qualities of form, the
discrimination and preference thereof, have come, I maintain, as a
result of practical utility.
Or rather: out of practical utility has arisen the art itself, and the
need for it. The attention, the familiarity which made beauty
enjoyable had previously made beauty necessary. It was because the
earthenware lamp, the bronze pitcher, the little rude household idols
displayed the same arrangements of lines and surfaces, presented the
same patterns and features, embodied, in a word, the same visible
rhythms of being, that the Greeks could understand without being
taught the temples and statues of Athens, Delphi or Olympia. It was
because the special form qualities of ogival art (so subtle in
movement, unstable in balance and poignant in emotion that a whole
century of critical study has scarce sufficed to render them familiar
to us) were present in every village tower, every window coping, every
chair-back, in every pattern carved, painted, stencilled or woven
during the Gothic period; it was because of this that every artisan of
the Middle Ages could appreciate less consciously than we, but far
more deeply, the loveliness and the wonder of the great cathedrals.
Nay, even in our own times we can see how, through the help of all the
cheapest and most perishable household wares, the poorest Japanese is
able to enjoy that special peculiarity and synthesis of line and
colour and perspective which strikes even initiated Westerns as so
exotic, far-fetched and almost wilfully unintelligible.
I have said that thanks to the objects and sights of everyday use and
life the qualities of art could be perceived and enjoyed. It may be
that it was thanks to them that art had any qualities and ever existed
at all. For, however much the temple, cathedral, statue, fresco, the
elaborate bronze or lacquer or coloured print, may have reacted on the
form, the proportions and linear rhythms and surface arrangements, of
all common useful objects; it was in the making of these common useful
objects (first making by man of genius and thousandfold minute
adaptation by respectful mediocrity) that the form qualities came to
exist. One may at least hazard this supposition in the face of the
extreme unlikeliness that the complexity and perfection of the great
works of art could have been obtained solely in works so necessarily
rare and few; and that the particular forms constituting each separate
style could have originated save under the repeated suggestion of
everyday use and technique. And can we not point to the patterns grown
out of the necessities of weaving or basket-making, the shapes started
by the processes of metal soldering or clay squeezing; let alone the
innumerable categories of form manifestly derived from the mere
convenience of handling or using, of standing, pouring, holding,
hanging up or folding? This much is certain, that only the manifold
application of given artistic forms in useful common objects is able
to account for that very slow, gradual and unconscious alteration of
them which constitutes the spontaneous evolution of artistic form; and
only such manifold application could have given that almost automatic
certainty of taste which allowed the great art of the past to continue
perpetually changing, through centuries and centuries, and adapting
itself over immense geographical areas to every variation of climate,
topography, mode of life, or religion. Unless the forms of ancient art
had been safely embodied in a hundred modest crafts, how could they
have undergone the imperceptible and secure metamorphosis from
Egyptian to Hellenic, from Greek to Græco-Roman, and thence, from
Byzantine, have passed, as one great half, into Italian mediæval art?
or how, without such infinite and infinitely varied practice of minute
adaptation to humble needs, could Gothic have given us works so
different as the French cathedrals, the Ducal Palace, the tiny chapel
at Pisa, and remained equally great and wonderful, equally _Gothic_,
in the ornament of a buckle as in the porch of Amiens or of Reims?
Beauty is born of attention, as happiness is born of life, because
attention is rendered difficult and painful by lack of harmony, even
as life is clogged, diminished or destroyed by pain. And therefore,
when there ceases to exist a close familiarity with visible objects or
actions; when the appearance of things is passed over in perfunctory
and partial use (as we see it in all mechanical and divided labour);
when the attention of all men is not continually directed to shape
through purpose, then there will cease to be spontaneous beauty and
the spontaneous appreciation of beauty, because there will be no need
for either. Beauty of music does not exist for the stone-deaf, nor
beauty of painting for the purblind; but beauty of no kind whatever,
nor in any art, can really exist for the inattentive, for the
over-worked or the idle.