In an age of moral confusion, these circumstances may lead to a strange

shifting of rôles. The critic, feeling that something in the artist has

escaped him, may labour to put himself in the artist’s place. If he

succeeded, the result would only be to make him a biographer; he would

be describing in words the very intuitions which the artist had rendered

in some other medium. To understand how the artist felt, however, is not

criticism; criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for.

Its function may be chiefly to awaken certain emotions in the beholder,

to deepen in him certain habits of apperception; but even this most

æsthetic element in a work’s operation does not borrow its value from

the possible fact that the artist also shared those habits and emotions.

If he did, and if they are desirable, so much the better for him; but

his work’s value would still consist entirely in its power to propagate

such good effects, whether they were already present in him or not. All

criticism is therefore moral, since it deals with benefits and their

relative weight. Psychological penetration and reconstructed biography

may be excellent sport; if they do not reach historic truth they may at

least exercise dramatic talent. Criticism, on the other hand, is a

serious and public function; it shows the race assimilating the

individual, dividing the immortal from the mortal part of a soul.

[Sidenote: Need of knowing and loving the subject rendered.]

Representation naturally repeats those objects which are most

interesting in themselves. Even the medium, when a choice is possible,

is usually determined by the sort of objects to be reproduced.

Instruments lose their virtue with their use and a medium of

representation, together with its manipulation, is nothing but a

vehicle. It is fit if it makes possible a good rendition. All

accordingly hangs on what life has made interesting to the senses, on

what presents itself persuasively to the artist for imitation; and

living arts exist only while well-known, much-loved things imperatively

demand to be copied, so that their reproduction has some honest

non-æsthetic interest for mankind. Although subject matter is often said

to be indifferent to art, and an artist, when his art is secondary, may

think of his technique only, nothing is really so poor and melancholy as

art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. If any remnant

of inspiration or value clings to such a performance, it comes from a

surviving taste for something in the real world. Thus the literature

that calls itself purely æsthetic is in truth prurient; without this

half-avowed weakness to play upon, the coloured images evoked would have

had nothing to marshall or to sustain them.

[Sidenote: Public interests determine the subject of art, and the

subject the medium.]

A good way to understand schools and styles and to appreciate their

respective functions and successes is to consider first what region of

nature preoccupied the age in which they arose. Perception can cut the

world up into many patterns, which it isolates and dignifies with the

name of things. It must distinguish before it can reproduce and the

objects which attention distinguishes are of many strange sorts. Thus

the single man, the hero, in his acts of prowess or in his readiness,

may be the unit and standard in discourse. It will then be his image

that will preoccupy the arts. For such a task the most adequate art is

evidently sculpture, for sculpture is the most complete of imitations.

In no other art can apprehension render itself so exhaustively and with

such recuperative force. Sculpture retains form and colour, with all

that both can suggest, and it retains them in their integrity, leaving

the observer free to resurvey them from any point of view and drink in

their quality exhaustively.

[Sidenote: Reproduction by acting ephemera.]

The movement and speech which are wanting, the stage may be called upon

to supply; but it cannot supply them without a terrible sacrifice, for

it cannot give permanence to it expression. Acting is for this reason an

inferior art, not perhaps in difficulty and certainly not in effect, but

inferior in dignity, since the effort of art is to keep what is

interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal, and this ideal

is half frustrated if the representation is itself fleeting and the

rendering has no firmer subsistence than the inspiration that gave it

birth. By making himself, almost in his entirety, the medium of his art,

the actor is morally diminished, and as little of him remains in his

work, when this is good, as of his work in history. He lends himself

without interest, and after being Brutus at one moment and Falstaff at

another, he is not more truly himself. He is abolished by his creations,

which nevertheless cannot survive him.

[Sidenote: High demands of sculpture.]

Being so adequate a rendering of its object, sculpture demands a perfect

mastery over it and is correspondingly difficult. It requires taste and

training above every other art; for not only must the material form be

reproduced, but its motor suggestions and moral expression must be

rendered; things which in the model itself are at best transitory, and

which may never be found there if a heroic or ideal theme is proposed.

The sculptor is obliged to have caught on the wing attitudes momentarily

achieved or vaguely imagined; yet these must grow firm and harmonious

under his hand. Nor is this enough; for sculpture is more dependent than

other arts on its model. If the statue is to be ideal, _i.e._, if it is

to express the possible motions and vital character of its subject, the

model must itself be refined. Training must have cut in the flesh those

lines which are to make the language and eloquence of the marble.

Trivial and vulgar forms, such as modern sculpture abounds in, reflect

an undisciplined race of men, one in which neither soul nor body has

done anything well, because the two have done nothing together. The

frame has remained gross or awkward, while the face has taken on a tense

expression, betraying loose and undignified habits of mind. To carve

such a creature is to perpetuate a caricature. The modern sculptor is

stopped short at the first conception of a figure; if he gives it its

costume, it is grotesque; if he strips it, it is unmeaning and pitiful.

[Sidenote: It is essentially obsolete.]

Greece was in all these respects a soil singularly favourable to

sculpture. The success there achieved was so conspicuous that two

thousand years of essential superfluity have not availed to extirpate

the art. Plastic impulse is indeed immortal, and many a hand, even

without classic example, would have fallen to modelling. In the middle

ages, while monumental sculpture was still rudely reminiscent,

ornamental carving arose spontaneously. Yet at every step the

experimental sculptor would run up against disaster. What could be seen

in the streets, while it offered plenty of subjects, offered none that

could stimulate his talent. His patrons asked only for illustration and

applied ornament; his models offered only the smirk and sad humour of a

stunted life. Here and there his statues might attain a certain

sweetness and grace, such as painting might perfectly well have

rendered; but on the whole sculpture remained decorative and infantile.

The Renaissance brought back technical freedom and a certain

inspiration, unhappily a retrospective and exotic one. The art cut

praiseworthy capers in the face of the public, but nobody could teach

the public itself to dance. If several great temperaments, under the

auspices of fashion, could then call up a magic world in which bodies

still spoke a heroic language, that was a passing dream. Society could

not feed such an artificial passion, nor the schools transmit an

arbitrary personal style that responded to nothing permanent in social

conditions. Academies continued to offer prizes for sculpture, the nude

continued to be seen in studios, and equestrian or other rhetorical

statues continued occasionally to be erected in public squares. Heroic

sculpture, however, in modern society, is really an anomaly and

confesses as much by being a failure. No personal talent avails to

rescue an art from laboured insignificance when it has no steadying

function in the moral world, and must waver between caprice and

convention. Where something modest and genuine peeped out was in

portraiture, and also at times in that devotional sculpture in wood

which still responded to a native interest and consequently kept its

sincerity and colour. Pious images may be feeble in the extreme, but

they have not the weakness of being merely æsthetic. The purveyor of

church wares has a stated theme; he is employed for a purpose; and if he

has enough technical resource his work may become truly beautiful: which

is not to say that he will succeed if his conceptions are without

dignity or his style without discretion. There are good _Mater

dolorosas_; there is no good _Sacred Heart_.

[Sidenote: When men see groups and backgrounds they are natural

painters.]

It may happen, however, that people are not interested in subjects that

demand or allow reproduction in bulk. The isolated figure or simple

group may seem cold apart from its natural setting. In rendering an

action you may need to render its scene, if it is the circumstance that

gives it value rather than the hero. You may also wish to trace out the

action through a series of episodes with many figures. In the latter

case you might have recourse to a bas-relief, which, although durable,

is usually a thankless work; there is little in it that might not be

conveyed in a drawing with distinctness. As some artists, like Michael

Angelo, have carried the sculptor’s spirit into painting, many more,

when painting is the prevalent and natural art, have produced carved

pictures. It may be said that any work is essentially a picture which is

conceived from a single quarter and meant to be looked at only in one

light. Objects in such a case need not be so truly apperceived and

appropriated as they would have to be in true sculpture. One aspect

suffices: the subject presented is not so much constructed as dreamt.

[Sidenote: Evolution of painting.]

The whole history of painting may be strung on this single thread—the

effort to reconstitute impressions, first the dramatic impression and

then the sensuous. A summary and symbolic representation of things is

all that at first is demanded; the point is to describe something

pictorially and recall people’s names and actions. It is characteristic

of archaic painting to be quite discursive and symbolic; each figure is

treated separately and stuck side by side with the others upon a golden

ground. The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in the annalist;

only those perceptions are allowed to stand which have individual names

or chronicle facts mentioned in the story. But vision is really more

sensuous and rich than report, if art is only able to hold vision in

suspense and make it explicit. When painting is still at this stage, and

is employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach the maximum of decorative

splendour. Whatever sensuous glow finer representations may later

acquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical; Titians, Murillos,

or Turners are _colourists in representation_, and their canvases would

not be particularly warm or luminous if they represented nothing human

or mystical or atmospheric. A stained-glass window or a wall of tiles

can outdo them for pure colour and decorative magic. Leaving decoration,

accordingly, to take care of itself and be applied as sense may from

time to time require, painting goes on to elaborate the symbols with

which it begins, to make them symbolise more and more of what their

object contains. A catalogue of persons will fall into a group, a group

will be fused into a dramatic action. Conventional as the separate

figures may still be, their attitudes and relations will reconstitute

the dramatic impression. The event will be rendered in its own language;

it will not, to be recognised, have to appeal to words. Thus a symbolic

crucifixion is a crucifixion only because we know by report that it is;

a plastic crucifixion would first teach us, on the contrary, what a real

crucifixion might be. It only remains to supply the aerial medium and

make dramatic truth sensuous truth also.

[Sidenote: Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.]

To work up a sensation intellectually and reawaken all its passionate

associations is to reach a new and more exciting sensation which we call

emotion or thought. As in poetry there are two stages, one pregnant and

prior to prose and another posterior and synthetic, so in painting we

have not only a reversion to sense but an ulterior synthesis of the

sensuous, its interpretation in a dramatic or poetic vision. Archaic

painting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the prose

of design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour and

technical feeling—that expression of candour and satisfaction which may

pervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness and

dislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting must

proceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression

is almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the

articulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting as

Tintoretto’s or Paolo Veronese’s records impressions as a cultivated

sense might receive them. It glows with visible light and studies the

sensuous appearance, but it contains at the same time an intelligent

expression of all those mechanisms, those situations and passions, with

which the living world is diversified. It is not a design in spots,

meant merely to outdo a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience,

meant to outshine the reality.

In order to reconstitute the image we may take an abstract

representation or hieroglyphic and gradually increase its depth and its

scope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, he

adds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant

rendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their

texture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From a

representation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures

by furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the

artist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of a

whole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose

their separate emphasis, in order to be like flowers in a field or trees

in a forest. They become elements, interesting chiefly by their

interplay, and shining by a light which is mutually reflected.

[Sidenote: Essence of landscape-painting.]

When this transformation is complete the painting is essentially a

landscape. It may not represent precisely the open country; it may even

depict an interior, like Velasquez’s Meninas. But the observer, even in

the presence of men and artificial objects, has been overcome by the

medium in which they swim. He is seeing the air and what it happens to

hold. He is impartially recreating from within all that nature puts

before him, quite as if his imagination had become their diffused

material substance. Whatever individuality and moral value these bits of

substance may have they acquire for him, as for nature, incidentally and

by virtue of ulterior relations consequent on their physical being. If

this physical being is wholly expressed, the humanity and morality

involved will be expressed likewise, even if expressed unawares. Thus a

profound and omnivorous reverie overflows the mind; it devours its

objects or is absorbed into them, and the mood which this active

self-alienation brings with it is called the spirit of the scene, the

sentiment of the landscape.

Perception and art, in this phase, easily grow mystical; they are

readily lost in primordial physical sympathies. Although at first a

certain articulation and discursiveness may be retained in the picture,

so that the things seen in their atmosphere and relations may still be

distinguished clearly, the farther the impartial absorption in them

goes, the more what is inter-individual rises and floods the individual

over. All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objects

threaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, and

profound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces,

that it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There cease

to be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences in

nature.

[Sidenote: Its threatened dissolution.]

An artist, however, cannot afford to forget that even in such a case

units and divisions would have to be introduced by him into his work. A

man, in falling back on immediate reality, or immediate appearance, may

well feel his mind’s articulate grammar losing its authority, but that

grammar must evidently be reasserted if from the immediate he ever

wishes to rise again to articulate mind; and art, after all, exists for

the mind and must speak humanly. If we crave something else, we have not

so far to go: there is always the infinite about us and the animal

within us to absolve us from human distinctions.

Moreover, it is not quite true that the immediate has no real diversity.

It evidently suggests the ideal terms into which we divide it, and it

sustains our apprehension itself, with all the diversities this may

create. To what I call right and left, light and darkness, a real

opposition must correspond in any reality which is at all relevant to my

experience; so that I should fail to integrate my impression, and to

absorb the only reality that concerns me, if I obliterated those points

of reference which originally made the world figured and visible. Space

remains absolutely dark, for all the infinite light which we may declare

to be radiating through it, until this light is concentrated in one body

or reflected from another; and a landscape cannot be so much as vaporous

unless mists are distinguishable in it, and through them some known

object which they obscure. In a word, landscape is always, in spite of

itself, a collection of particular representations. It is a mass of

hieroglyphics, each the graphic symbol for some definite human sensation

or reaction; only these symbols have been extraordinarily enriched and

are fused in representation, so that, like instruments in an orchestra,

they are merged in the voluminous sensation they constitute together, a

sensation in which, for attentive perception, they never cease to exist.

[Sidenote: Reversion to pure decorative design.]

Impatience of such control as reality must always exercise over

representation may drive painting back to a simpler function. When a

designer, following his own automatic impulse, conventionalises a form,

he makes a legitimate exchange, substituting fidelity to his

apperceptive instincts for fidelity to his external impressions. When a

landscape-painter, revolting against a tedious discursive style, studies

only masses of colour and abstract systems of lines, he retains

something in itself beautiful, although no longer representative,

perhaps, of anything in nature. A pure impression cannot be

illegitimate; it cannot be false until it pretends to represent

something, and then it will have ceased to be a simple feeling, since

something in it will refer to an ulterior existence, to which it ought

to conform. This ulterior existence (since intelligence is life

understanding its own conditions) can be nothing in the end but what

produced that impression. Sensuous life, however, has its value within

itself; its pleasures are not significant. Representative art is

accordingly in a sense secondary; beauty and expression begin farther

back. They are present whenever the outer stimulus agreeably strikes an

organ and thereby arouses a sustained image, in which the consciousness

of both stimulation and reaction is embodied. An abstract design in

outline and colour will amply fulfil these conditions, if sensuous and

motor harmonies are preserved in it, and if a sufficient sweep and depth

of reaction is secured. Stained-glass, tapestry, panelling, and in a

measure all objects, by their mere presence and distribution, have a

decorative function. When sculpture and painting cease to be

representative they pass into the same category. Decoration in turn

merges in construction; and so all art, like the whole Life of Reason,

is joined together at its roots, and branches out from the vital

processes of sensation and reaction. Diversity arises centrifugally,

according to the provinces explored and the degree of mutual checking

and control to which the various extensions are subjected.

[Sidenote: Sensuous values are primordial and so indispensable.]

Organisation, both internal and adaptive, marks the dignity and

authority which each art may have attained; but this advantage,

important as is must seem to a philosopher or a legislator, is not what

the artist chiefly considers. His privilege is to remain capricious in

his response to the full-blown universe of science and passion, and to

be still sensuous in his highest imaginings. He cares for structure only

when it is naturally decorative. He thinks gates were invented for the

sake of triumphal arches, and forests for the sake of poets and deer.

Representation, with all it may represent, means to him simply what it

says to his emotions. In all this the artist, though in one sense

foolish, in another way is singularly sane; for, after all, everything

must pass through the senses, and life, whatever its complexity, remains

always primarily a feeling.

To render this feeling delightful, to train the senses to their highest

potency and harmony in operation, is to begin life well. Were the

foundations defective and subject to internal strain there could be

little soundness in the superstructure. Æsthetic activity is far from

being a late or adventitious ornament in human economy; it is an

elementary factor, the perfection of an indispensable vehicle. Whenever

science or morals have done violence to sense they have decreed their

own dissolution. To sense a rebellious appeal will presently be

addressed, and the appeal will go against rash and empty dogmas. A keen

æsthetic sensibility and a flourishing art mark the puberty of reason.

Fertility comes later, after a marriage with the practical world. But a

sensuous ripening is needed first, such as myth and ornament betray in

their exuberance. A man who has no feeling for feeling and no felicity

in expression will hardly know what he is about in his further

undertakings. He will have missed his first lesson in living

spontaneously and well. Not knowing himself, he will be all hearsay and

pedantry. He may fall into the superstition of supposing that what gives

life value can be something external to life. Science and morals are

themselves arts that express natural impulses and find experimental

rewards. This fact, in betraying their analogy to æsthetic activity,

enables them also to vindicate their excellence.

CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART

[Sidenote: Art is subject to moral censorship.]

It is no longer the fashion among philosophers to decry art. Either its

influence seems to them too slight to excite alarm, or their systems are

too lax to subject anything to censure which has the least glamour or

ideality about it. Tired, perhaps, of daily resolving the conflict

between science and religion, they prefer to assume silently a harmony

between morals and art. Moral harmonies, however, are not given; they

have to be made. The curse of superstition is that it justifies and

protracts their absence by proclaiming their invisible presence. Of

course a rational religion could not conflict with a rational science;

and similarly an art that was wholly admirable would necessarily play

into the hands of progress. But as the real difficulty in the former

case lies in saying what religion and what science would be truly

rational, so here the problem is how far extant art is a benefit to

mankind, and how far, perhaps, a vice or a burden.

[Sidenote: Its initial or specific excellence is not enough.]

That art is _prima facie_ and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It is

a spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. Yet the function

of ethics is precisely to revise _prima facie_ judgments of this kind

and to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far as

they can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life and desire,

wisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to

pour into the supreme mixture. The extent to which æsthetic values are

allowed to colour the resultant or highest good is a point of great

theoretic importance, not only for art but for general philosophy. If

art is excluded altogether or given only a trivial rôle, perhaps as a

necessary relaxation, we feel at once that a philosophy so judging human

arts is ascetic or post-rational. It pretends to guide life from above

and from without; it has discredited human nature and mortal interests,

and has thereby undermined itself, since it is at best but a partial

expression of that humanity which it strives to transcend. If, on the

contrary, art is prized as something supreme and irresponsible, if the

poetic and mystic glow which it may bring seems its own complete

justification, then philosophy is evidently still prerational or,

rather, non-existent; for the beasts that listened to Orpheus belong to

this school.

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and

æsthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so. Intoxication is a

sad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown

yourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat

fooled by yesterday’s joys and somewhat lost in to-day’s vacancy. The

man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to

elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. He is vexed

at conditions of excellence that make him conscious of his own

incompetence and failure. Rather than consider his function, he

proclaims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of revenging

itself is to excommunicate the world.

It is in the world, however, that art must find its level. It must

vindicate its function in the human commonwealth. What direct acceptable

contribution does it make to the highest good? What sacrifices, if any,

does it impose? What indirect influence does it exert on other

activities? Our answer to these questions will be our apology for art,

our proof that art belongs to the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial worth.]

When moralists deprecate passion and contrast it with reason, they do

so, if they are themselves rational, only because passion is so often

“guilty,” because it works havoc so often in the surrounding world and

leaves, among other ruins, “a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed.” Were

there no danger of such after-effects within and without the sufferer,

no passion would be reprehensible. Nature is innocent, and so are all

her impulses and moods when taken in isolation; it is only on meeting

that they blush. If it be true that matter is sinful, the logic of this

truth is far from being what the fanatics imagine who commonly propound

it. Matter is sinful only because it is insufficient, or is wastefully

distributed. There is not enough of it to go round among the legion of

hungry ideas. To embody or enact an idea is the only way of making it

actual; but its embodiment may mutilate it, if the material or the

situation is not propitious. So an infant may be maimed at birth, when

what injures him is not being brought forth, but being brought forth in

the wrong manner. Matter has a double function in respect to existence;

essentially it enables the spirit to be, yet chokes it incidentally. Men

sadly misbegotten, or those who are thwarted at every step by the times’

penury, may fall to thinking of matter only by its defect, ignoring the

material ground of their own aspirations. All flesh will seem to them

weak, except that forgotten piece of it which makes their own spiritual

strength. Every impulse, however, had initially the same authority as

this censorious one, by which the others are now judged and condemned.

[Sidenote: But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.]

If a practice can point to its innocence, if it can absolve itself from

concern for a world with which it does not interfere, it has justified

itself to those who love it, though it may not yet have recommended

itself to those who do not. Now art, more than any other considerable

pursuit, more even than speculation, is abstract and inconsequential.

Born of suspended attention, it ends in itself. It encourages sensuous

abstraction, and nothing concerns it less than to influence the world.

Nor does it really do so in a notable degree. Social changes do not

reach artistic expression until after their momentum is acquired and

their other collateral effects are fully predetermined. Scarcely is a

school of art established, giving expression to prevailing sentiment,

when this sentiment changes and makes that style seem empty and

ridiculous. The expression has little or no power to maintain the

movement it registers, as a waterfall has little or no power to bring

more water down. Currents may indeed cut deep channels, but they cannot

feed their own springs—at least not until the whole revolution of

nature is taken into account.

In the individual, also, art registers passions without stimulating

them; on the contrary, in stopping to depict them it steals away their

life; and whatever interest and delight it transfers to their expression

it subtracts from their vital energy. This appears unmistakably in

erotic and in religious art. Though the artist’s avowed purpose here be

to arouse a practical impulse, he fails in so far as he is an artist in

truth; for he then will seek to move the given passions only through

beauty, but beauty is a rival object of passion in itself. Lascivious

and pious works, when beauty has touched them, cease to give out what is

wilful and disquieting in their subject and become altogether

intellectual and sublime. There is a high breathlessness about beauty

that cancels lust and superstition. The artist, in taking the latter for

his theme, renders them innocent and interesting, because he looks at

them from above, composes their attitudes and surroundings harmoniously,

and makes them food for the mind. Accordingly it is only in a refined

and secondary stage that active passions like to amuse themselves with

their æsthetic expression. Unmitigated lustiness and raw fanaticism will

snarl at pictures. Representations begin to interest when crude passions

recede, and feel the need of conciliating liberal interests and adding

some intellectual charm to their dumb attractions. Thus art, while by

its subject it may betray the preoccupations among which it springs up,

embodies a new and quite innocent interest.

[Sidenote: It is liberal.]

This interest is more than innocent, it is liberal. Not being concerned

with material reality so much as with the ideal, it knows neither

ulterior motives nor quantitative limits; the more beauty there is the

more there can be, and the higher one artist’s imagination soars the

better the whole flock flies. In æsthetic activity we have accordingly

one side of rational life; sensuous experience is dominated there as

mechanical or social realities ought to be dominated in science and

politics. Such dominion comes of having faculties suited to their

conditions and consequently finding an inherent satisfaction in their

operation. The justification of life must be ultimately intrinsic; and

wherever such self-justifying experience is attained, the ideal has been

in so far embodied. To have realised it in a measure helps us to realise

it further; for there is a cumulative fecundity in those goods which

come not by increase of force or matter, but by a better organisation

and form.

[Sidenote: and typical of perfect activity.]

Art has met, on the whole, with more success than science or morals.

Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experience

as yet can offer; and the most lauded geniuses have been poets, as if

people felt that those seers, rather than men of action or thought, had

lived ideally and known what was worth knowing. That such should be the

case, if the fact be admitted, would indeed prove the rudimentary state

of human civilisation. The truly comprehensive life should be the

statesman’s, for whom perception and theory might be expressed and

rewarded in action. The ideal dignity of art is therefore merely

symbolic and vicarious. As some people study character in novels, and

travel by reading tales of adventure, because real life is not yet so

interesting to them as fiction, or because they find it cheaper to make

their experiments in their dreams, so art in general is a rehearsal of

rational living, and recasts in idea a world which we have no present

means of recasting in reality. Yet this rehearsal reveals the glories of

a possible performance better than do the miserable experiments until

now executed on the reality.

When we consider the present distracted state of government and

religion, there is much relief in turning from them to almost any art,

where what is good is altogether and finally good, and what is bad is at

least not treacherous. When we consider further the senseless rivalries,

the vanities, the ignominy that reign in the “practical” world, how

doubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an

excellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man’s ambition

is consistent with every other man’s and even favourable to it! It is

indeed so in art; for we must not import into its blameless labours the

bickerings and jealousies of criticism. Critics quarrel with other

critics, and that is a part of philosophy. With an artist no sane man

quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child’s eyes. As nature,

being full of seeds, rises into all sorts of crystallisations, each

having its own ideal and potential life, each a nucleus of order and a

habitation for the absolute self, so art, though in a medium poorer than

pregnant matter, and incapable of intrinsic life, generates a semblance

of all conceivable beings. What nature does with existence, art does

with appearance; and while the achievement leaves us, unhappily, much

where we were before in all our efficacious relations, it entirely

renews our vision and breeds a fresh world in fancy, where all form has

the same inner justification that all life has in the real world. As no

insect is without its rights and every cripple has his dream of

happiness, so no artistic fact, no child of imagination, is without its

small birthright of beauty. In this freer element, competition does not

exist and everything is Olympian. Hungry generations do not tread down

the ideal but only its spokesmen or embodiments, that have cast in their

lot with other material things. Art supplies constantly to contemplation

what nature seldom affords in concrete experience—the union of life and

peace.

[Sidenote: The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society.]

[Sidenote: Plato’s strictures: he exaggerates the effect of myths.]

The ideal, however, would not come down from the empyrean and be

conceived unless somebody’s thought were absorbed in the conception. Art

actually segregates classes of men and masses of matter to serve its

special interests. This involves expense; it impedes some possible

activities and imposes others. On this ground, from the earliest times

until our own, art has been occasionally attacked by moralists, who have

felt that it fostered idolatry or luxury or irresponsible dreams. Of

these attacks the most interesting is Plato’s, because he was an artist

by temperament, bred in the very focus of artistic life and discussion,

and at the same time a consummate moral philosopher. His æthetic

sensibility was indeed so great that it led him, perhaps, into a

relative error, in that he overestimated the influence which art can

have on character and affairs. Homer’s stories about the gods can

hardly have demoralised the youths who recited them. No religion has

ever given a picture of deity which men could have imitated without the

grossest immorality. Yet these shocking representations have not had a

bad effect on believers. The deity was opposed to their own vices; those

it might itself be credited with offered no contagious example. In spite

of the theologians, we know by instinct that in speaking of the gods we

are dealing in myths and symbols. Some aspect of nature or some law of

life, expressed in an attribute of deity, is what we really regard, and

to regard such things, however sinister they may be, cannot but chasten

and moralise us. The personal character that such a function would

involve, if it were exercised willingly by a responsible being, is

something that never enters our thoughts. No such painful image comes to

perplex the plain sense of instinctive, poetic religion. To give moral

importance to myths, as Plato tended to do, is to take them far too

seriously and to belittle what they stand for. Left to themselves they

float in an ineffectual stratum of the brain. They are understood and

grow current precisely by not being pressed, like an idiom or a

metaphor. The same æsthetic sterility appears at the other end of the

scale, where fancy is anything but sacred. A Frenchman once saw in

“Punch and Judy” a shocking proof of British brutality, destined further

to demoralise the nation; and yet the scandal may pass. That black

tragedy reflects not very pretty manners, but puppets exercise no

suasion over men.

[Sidenote: His deeper moral objections.]

To his supersensitive censure of myths Plato added strictures upon music

and the drama: to excite passions idly was to enervate the soul. Only

martial or religious strains should be heard in the ideal republic.

Furthermore, art put before us a mere phantom of the good. True

excellence was the function things had in use; the horseman knew the

bridle’s value and essence better than the artisan did who put it

together; but a painted bridle would lack even this relation to utility.

It would rein in no horse, and was an impertinent sensuous reduplication

of what, even when it had material being, was only an instrument and a

means.

This reasoning has been little understood, because Platonists so soon

lost sight of their master’s Socratic habit and moral intent. They

turned the good into an existence, making it thereby unmeaning. Plato’s

dialectic, if we do not thus abolish the force of its terms, is

perfectly cogent: representative art has indeed no utility, and, if the

good has been identified with efficiency in a military state, it can

have no justification. Plato’s Republic was avowedly a fallen state, a

church militant, coming sadly short of perfection; and the joy which

Plato as much as any one could feel in sensuous art he postponed, as a

man in mourning might, until life should be redeemed from baseness.

[Sidenote: Their rightness.]

Never have art and beauty received a more glowing eulogy than is implied

in Plato’s censure. To him nothing was beautiful that was not beautiful

to the core, and he would have thought to insult art—the remodelling of

nature by reason—if he had given it a narrower field than all practice.

As an architect who had fondly designed something impossible, or which

might not please in execution, would at once erase it from the plan and

abandon it for the love of perfect beauty and perfect art, so Plato

wished to erase from pleasing appearance all that, when its operation

was completed, would bring discord into the world. This was done in the

ultimate interest of art and beauty, which in a cultivated mind are

inseparable from the vitally good. It is mere barbarism to feel that a

thing is æsthetically good but morally evil, or morally good but hateful

to perception. Things partially evil or partially ugly may have to be

chosen under stress of unfavourable circumstances, lest some worse thing

come; but if a thing were ugly it would _thereby_ not be wholly good,

and if it were _altogether_ good it would perforce be beautiful.

To criticise art on moral grounds is to pay it a high compliment by

assuming that it aims to be adequate, and is addressed to a

comprehensive mind. The only way in which art could disallow such

criticism would be to protest its irresponsible infancy, and admit that

it was a more or less amiable blatancy in individuals, and not _art_ at

all. Young animals often gambol in a delightful fashion, and men also

may, though hardly when they intend to do so. Sportive self-expression

can be prized because human nature contains a certain elasticity and

margin for experiment, in which waste activity is inevitable and may be

precious: for this license may lead, amid a thousand failures, to some

real discovery and advance. Art, like life, should be free, since both

are experimental. But it is one thing to make room for genius and to

respect the sudden madness of poets through which, possibly, some god

may speak, and it is quite another not to judge the result by rational

standards. The earth’s bowels are full of all sorts of rumblings; which

of the oracles drawn thence is true can be judged only by the light of

day. If an artist’s inspiration has been happy, it has been so because

his work can sweeten or ennoble the mind and because its total effect

will be beneficent. Art being a part of life, the criticism of art is a

part of morals.

[Sidenote: Importance of æsthetic alternatives.]

Maladjustments in human society are still so scandalous, they touch

matters so much more pressing than fine art, that maladjustments in the

latter are passed over with a smile, as if art were at any rate an

irresponsible miraculous parasite that the legislator had better not

meddle with. The day may come, however, if the state is ever reduced to

a tolerable order, when questions of art will be the most urgent

questions of morals, when genius at last will feel responsible, and the

twist given to imagination will seem the most crucial thing in life.

Under a thin disguise, the momentous character of imaginative choices

has already been fully recognised by mankind. Men have passionately

loved their special religions, languages, and manners, and preferred

death to a life flowering in any other fashion. In justifying this

attachment forensically, with arguments on the low level of men’s named

and consecrated interests, people have indeed said, and perhaps come to

believe, that their imaginative interests were material interests at

bottom, thinking thus to give them more weight and legitimacy; whereas

in truth material life itself would be nothing worth, were it not, in

its essence and its issue, ideal.

It was stupidly asserted, however, that if a man omitted the prescribed

ceremonies or had unauthorised dreams about the gods, he would lose his

battles in this world and go to hell in the other. He who runs can see

that these expectations are not founded on any evidence, on any

observation of what actually occurs; they are obviously a _mirage_

arising from a direct ideal passion, that tries to justify itself by

indirection and by falsehoods, as it has no need to do. We all read

facts in the way most congruous with our intellectual habit, and when

this habit drives us to effulgent creations, absorbing and expressing

the whole current of our being, it not merely biasses our reading of

this world but carries us into another world altogether, which we posit

instead of the real one, or beside it.

Grotesque as the blunder may seem by which we thus introduce our poetic

tropes into the sequence of external events or existences, the blunder

is intellectual only; morally, zeal for our special rhetoric may not be

irrational. The lovely Phoebus is no fact for astronomy, nor does he

stand behind the material sun, in some higher heaven, physically

superintending its movements; but Phoebus is a fact in his own region, a

token of man’s joyful piety in the presence of the forces that really

condition his welfare. In the region of symbols, in the world of poetry,

Phoebus has his inalienable rights. Forms of poetry are forms of human

life. Languages express national character and enshrine particular ways

of seeing and valuing events. To make substitutions and extensions in

expression is to give the soul, in her inmost substance, a somewhat new

constitution. A method of apperception is a spontaneous variation in

mind, perhaps the origin of a new moral species.

The value apperceptive methods have is of course largely representative,

in that they serve more or less aptly to dominate the order of events

and to guide action; but quite apart from this practical value,

expressions possess a character of their own, a sort of vegetative life,

as languages possess euphony. Two reports of the same fact may be

equally trustworthy, equally useful as information, yet they may embody

two types of mental rhetoric, and this diversity in genius may be of

more intrinsic importance than the raw fact it works upon. The

non-representative side of human perception may thus be the most

momentous side of it, because it represents, or even constitutes, the

man. After all, the chief interest we have in things lies in what we can

make of them or what they can make of us. There is consequently nothing

fitted to colour human happiness more pervasively than art does, nor to

express more deeply the mind’s internal habit. In educating the

imagination art crowns all moral endeavour, which from the beginning is

a species of art, and which becomes a fine art more completely as it

works in a freer medium.

[Sidenote: The importance of æsthetic goods varies with temperaments.]

How great a portion of human energies should be spent on art and its

appreciation is a question to be answered variously by various persons

and nations. There is no ideal _à priori_; an ideal can but express, if

it is genuine, the balance of impulses and potentialities in a given

soul. A mind at once sensuous and mobile will find its appropriate

perfection in studying and reconstructing objects of sense. Its

rationality will appear chiefly on the plane of perception, to render

the circle of visions which makes up its life as delightful as possible.

For such a man art will be the most satisfying, the most significant

activity, and to load him with material riches or speculative truths or

profound social loyalties will be to impede and depress him. The

irrational is what does not justify itself in the end; and the born

artist, repelled by the soberer and bitterer passions of the world, may

justly call them irrational. They would not justify themselves in his

experience; they make grievous demands and yield nothing in the end

which is intelligible to him. His picture of them, if he be a dramatist,

will hardly fail to be satirical; fate, frailty, illusion will be his

constant themes. If his temperament could find political expression, he

would minimise the machinery of life and deprecate any calculated

prudence. He would trust the heart, enjoy nature, and not frown too

angrily on inclination. Such a Bohemia he would regard as an ideal world

in which humanity might flourish congenially.

[Sidenote: The æsthetic temperament requires tutelage.]

A puritan moralist, before condemning such an infantile paradise, should

remember that a commonwealth of butterflies actually exists. It is not

any inherent wrongness in such an ideal that makes it unacceptable, but

only the fact that human butterflies are not wholly mercurial and that

even imperfect geniuses are but an extreme type in a society whose

guiding ideal is based upon a broader humanity than the artist

represents. Men of science or business will accuse the poet of folly,

on the very grounds on which he accuses them of the same. Each will seem

to the other to be obeying a barren obsession. The statesman or

philosopher who should aspire to adjust their quarrel could do so only

by force of intelligent sympathy with both sides, and in view of the

common conditions in which they find themselves. What ought to be done

is that which, when done, will most nearly justify itself to all

concerned. Practical problems of morals are judicial and political

problems. Justice can never be pronounced without hearing the parties

and weighing the interests at stake.

[Sidenote: Æsthetic values everywhere interfused.]

A circumstance that complicates such a calculation is this: æesthetic

and other interests are not separable units, to be compared externally;

they are rather strands interwoven in the texture of everything.

Æsthetic sensibility colours every thought, qualifies every allegiance,

and modifies every product of human labour. Consequently the love of

beauty has to justify itself not merely intrinsically, or as a

constituent part of life more or less to be insisted upon; it has to

justify itself also as an influence. A hostile influence is the most

odious of things. The enemy himself, the alien creature, lies in his own

camp, and in a speculative moment we may put ourselves in his place and

learn to think of him charitably; but his spirit in our own souls is

like a private tempter, a treasonable voice weakening our allegiance to

our own duty. A zealot might allow his neighbours to be damned in

peace, did not a certain heretical odour emitted by them infect the

sanctuary and disturb his own dogmatic calm. In the same way practical

people might leave the artist alone in his oasis, and even grant him a

pittance on which to live, as they feed the animals in a zoological

garden, did he not intrude into their inmost conclave and vitiate the

abstract cogency of their designs. It is not so much art in its own

field that men of science look askance upon, as the love of glitter and

rhetoric and false finality trespassing upon scientific ground; while

men of affairs may well deprecate a rooted habit of sensuous absorption

and of sudden transit to imaginary worlds, a habit which must work havoc

in their own sphere. In other words, there is an element of poetry

inherent in thought, in conduct, in affection; and we must ask ourselves

how far this ingredient is an obstacle to their proper development.

[Sidenote: They are primordial.]

The fabled dove who complained, in flying, of the resistance of the air,

was as wise as the philosopher who should lament the presence and

influence of sense. Sense is the native element and substance of

experience; all its refinements are still parts of it existentially; and

whatever excellence belongs specifically to sense is a preliminary

excellence, a value antecedent to any which thought or action can

achieve. Science and morals have but representative authority; they are

principles of ideal synthesis and safe transition; they are bridges

from moment to moment of sentience. Their function is indeed universal

and their value overwhelming, yet their office remains derivative or

secondary, and what they serve to put in order has previously its

intrinsic worth. An æsthetic bias is native to sense, being indeed

nothing but its form and potency; and the influence which æsthetic

habits exercise on thought and action should not be regarded as an

intrusion to be resented, but rather as an original interest to be built

upon and developed. Sensibility contains the distinctions which reason

afterward carries out and applies; it is sensibility that involves and

supports primitive diversities, such as those between good and bad, here

and there, fast and slow, light and darkness. There are complications

and harmonies inherent in these oppositions, harmonies which æsthetic

faculty proceeds to note; and from these we may then construct others,

not immediately presentable, which we distinguish by attributing them to

reason. Reason may well outflank and transform æsthetic judgments, but

can never undermine them. Its own materials are the perceptions which if

full and perfect are called beauties. Its function is to endow the parts

of sentience with a consciousness of the system in which they lie, so

that they may attain a mutual relevance and ideally support one another.

But what could relevance or support be worth if the things to be

buttressed were themselves worthless? It is not to organise pain,

ugliness, and boredom that reason can be called into the world.

[Sidenote: To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.]

When a practical or scientific man boasts that he has laid aside

æsthetic prejudices and is following truth and utility with a single

eye, he can mean, if he is judicious, only that he has not yielded to

æsthetic preference after his problem was fixed, nor in an arbitrary and

vexatious fashion. He has not consulted taste when it would have been in

bad taste to do so. If he meant that he had rendered himself altogether

insensible to æsthetic values, and that he had proceeded to organise

conduct or thought in complete indifference to the beautiful, he would

be simply proclaiming his inhumanity and incompetence. A right

observance of æsthetic demands does not obstruct utility nor logic; for

utility and logic are themselves beautiful, while a sensuous beauty that

ran counter to reason could never be, in the end, pleasing to an

exquisite sense. Æsthetic vice is not favourable to æsthetic faculty: it

is an impediment to the greatest æsthetic satisfactions. And so when by

yielding to a blind passion for beauty we derange theory and practice,

we cut ourselves off from those beauties which alone could have

satisfied our passion. What we drag in so obstinately will bring but a

cheap and unstable pleasure, while a double beauty will thereby be lost

or obscured—first, the unlooked-for beauty which a genuine and stable

system of things could not but betray, and secondly the coveted beauty

itself, which, being imported here into the wrong context, will be

rendered meretricious and offensive to good taste. If a jewel worn on

the wrong finger sends a shiver through the flesh, how disgusting must

not rhetoric be in diplomacy or unction in metaphysics!

[Sidenote: They flow naturally from perfect function.]

The poetic element inherent in thought, affection, and conduct is prior

to their prosaic development and altogether legitimate. Clear,

well-digested perception and rational choices follow upon those primary

creative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At every

stage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered for

æsthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythm

are at first sensuously defined; they are characters arrested by

æsthetic instinct; but they are the materials of mathematics. And long

after these initial forms have disowned their sensuous values, and

suffered a wholly dialectical expansion or analysis, mathematical

objects again fall under the æsthetic eye, and surprise the senses by

their emotional power. A mechanical system, such as astronomy in one

region has already unveiled, is an inexhaustible field for æsthetic

wonder. Similarly, in another sphere, sensuous affinity leads to

friendship and love, and makes us huddle up to our fellows and feel

their heart-beats; but when human society has thereupon established a

legal and moral edifice, this new spectacle yields new imaginative

transports, tragic, lyric, and religious. Æsthetic values everywhere

precede and accompany rational activity, and life is, in one aspect,

always a fine art; not by introducing inaptly æsthetic vetoes or

æsthetic flourishes, but by giving to everything a form which, implying

a structure, implies also an ideal and a possible perfection. This

perfection, being felt, is also a beauty, since any process, though it

may have become intellectual or practical, remains for all that a vital

and sentient operation, with its inherent sensuous values. Whatever is

to be representative in import must first be immediate in existence;

whatever is transitive in operation must be at the same time actual in

being. So that an æsthetic sanction sweetens all successful living;

animal efficiency cannot be without grace, nor moral achievement without

a sensible glory.

[Sidenote: Even inhibited functions, when they fall into a new rhythm,

yield new beauties.]

These vital harmonies are natural; they are neither perfect nor

preordained. We often come upon beauties that need to be sacrificed, as

we come upon events and practical necessities without number that are

truly regrettable. There are a myriad conflicts in practice and in

thought, conflicts between rival possibilities, knocking inopportunely

and in vain at the door of existence. Owing to the initial

disorganisation of things, some demands continually prove to be

incompatible with others arising no less naturally. Reason in such cases

imposes real and irreparable sacrifices, but it brings a stable

consolation if its discipline is accepted. Decay, for instance, is a

moral and æsthetic evil; but being a natural necessity it can become the

basis for pathetic and magnificent harmonies, when once imagination is

adjusted to it. The hatred of change and death is ineradicable while

life lasts, since it expresses that self-sustaining organisation in a

creature which we call its soul; yet this hatred of change and death is

not so deeply seated in the nature of things as are death and change

themselves, for the flux is deeper than the ideal. Discipline may attune

our higher and more adaptable part to the harsh conditions of being, and

the resulting sentiment, being the only one which can be maintained

successfully, will express the greatest satisfactions which can be

reached, though not the greatest that might be conceived or desired. To

be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a

happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. Wisdom

discovers these possible accommodations, as circumstances impose them;

and education ought to prepare men to accept them.

[Sidenote: He who loves beauty must chasten it.]

It is for want of education and discipline that a man so often insists

petulantly on his random tastes, instead of cultivating those which

might find some satisfaction in the world and might produce in him some

pertinent culture. Untutored self-assertion may even lead him to deny

some fact that should have been patent, and plunge him into needless

calamity. His Utopias cheat him in the end, if indeed the barbarous

taste he has indulged in clinging to them does not itself lapse before

the dream is half formed. So men have feverishly conceived a heaven only

to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. Theodicies that

were to demonstrate an absolute cosmic harmony have turned the universe

into a tyrannous nightmare, from which we are glad to awake again in

this unintentional and somewhat tractable world. Thus the fancies of

effeminate poets in violating science are false to the highest art, and

the products of sheer confusion, instigated by the love of beauty, turn

out to be hideous. A rational severity in respect to art simply weeds

the garden; it expresses a mature æsthetic choice and opens the way to

supreme artistic achievements. To keep beauty in its place is to make

all things beautiful.

CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE

[Sidenote: Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.]

Dogmatism in matters of taste has the same status as dogmatism in other

spheres. It is initially justified by sincerity, being a systematic

expression of a man’s preferences; but it becomes absurd when its basis

in a particular disposition is ignored and it pretends to have an

absolute or metaphysical scope. Reason, with the order which in every

region it imposes on life, is grounded on an animal nature and has no

other function than to serve the same; and it fails to exercise its

office quite as much when it oversteps its bounds and forgets whom it is

serving as when it neglects some part of its legitimate province and

serves its master imperfectly, without considering all his interests.

Dialectic, logic, and morals lose their authority and become inept if

they trespass upon the realm of physics and try to disclose existences;

while physics is a mere idea in the realm of poetic meditation. So the

notorious diversities which human taste exhibits do not become

conflicts, and raise no moral problem, until their basis or their

function has been forgotten, and each has claimed a right to assert

itself exclusively. This claim is altogether absurd, and we might fail

to understand how so preposterous an attitude could be assumed by

anybody did we not remember that every young animal thinks himself

absolute, and that dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative side

of greed and courage in the brute. The brute cannot surrender his

appetites nor abdicate his primary right to dominate his environment.

What experience and reason may teach him is merely how to make his

self-assertion well balanced and successful. In the same way taste is

bound to maintain its preferences but free to rationalise them. After a

man has compared his feelings with the no less legitimate feelings of

other creatures, he can reassert his own with more complete authority,

since now he is aware of their necessary ground in his nature, and of

their affinities with whatever other interests his nature enables him to

recognise in others and to co-ordinate with his own.

[Sidenote: Taste gains in authority as it is more and more widely

based.]

A criterion of taste is, therefore, nothing but taste itself in its more

deliberate and circumspect form. Reflection refines particular

sentiments by bringing them into sympathy with all rational life. There

is consequently the greatest possible difference in authority between

taste and taste, and while delight in drums and eagle’s feathers is

perfectly genuine and has no cause to blush for itself, it cannot be

compared in scope or representative value with delight in a symphony or

an epic. The very instinct that is satisfied by beauty prefers one

beauty to another; and we have only to question and purge our æsthetic

feelings in order to obtain our criterion of taste. This criterion will

be natural, personal, autonomous; a circumstance that will give it

authority over our own judgment—which is all moral science is concerned

about—and will extend its authority over other minds also, in so far as

their constitution is similar to ours. In that measure what is a genuine

instance of reason in us, others will recognise for a genuine expression

of reason in themselves also.

[Sidenote: Different æsthetic endowments may be compared in quantity or

force.]

Æsthetic feeling, in different people, may make up a different fraction

of life and vary greatly in volume. The more nearly insensible a man is

the more incompetent he becomes to proclaim the values which sensibility

might have. To beauty men are habitually insensible, even while they are

awake and rationally active. Tomes of æsthetic criticism hang on a few

moments of real delight and intuition. It is in rare and scattered

instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for

habitual comfort to remembering her past favours. An æsthetic glow may

pervade experience, but that circumstance is seldom remarked; it figures

only as an influence working subterraneously on thoughts and judgments

which in themselves take a cognitive or practical direction. Only when

the æsthetic ingredient becomes predominant do we exclaim, How

beautiful! Ordinarily the pleasures which formal perception gives remain

an undistinguished part of our comfort or curiosity.

[Sidenote: Authority of vital over verbal judgments]

Taste is formed in those moments when æsthetic emotion is massive and

distinct; preferences then grown conscious, judgments then put into

words, will reverberate through calmer hours; they will constitute

prejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other

beauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent

may amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth

in these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early

impressions more systematically and find confirmations of them in

various quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use new

categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our first

masters, and the other half from our first loves. Never being so deeply

stirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we then

discovered can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of æsthetic

life may easily be reached under tutelage. It may be some eloquent

appreciations read in a book, or some preference expressed by a gifted

friend, that may have revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature;

and then, since our own perception was vicarious and obviously inferior

in volume to that which our mentor possessed, we shall take his

judgments for our criterion, since they were the source and exemplar of

all our own. Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations,

especially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them

authoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those warm moments hang

all our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days and

shape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive.

A race which loves beauty holds the same place in history that a season

of love or enthusiasm holds in an individual life. Such a race has a

pre-eminent right to pronounce upon beauty and to bequeath its judgments

to duller peoples. We may accordingly listen with reverence to a Greek

judgment on that subject, expecting that what might seem to us wrong

about it is the expression of knowledge and passion beyond our range; it

will suffice that we learn to live in the world of beauty, instead of

merely studying its relics, for us to understand, for instance, that

imitation is a fundamental principle in art, and that any rational

judgment on the beautiful must be a moral and political judgment,

enveloping chance æsthetic feelings and determining their value. What

most German philosophers, on the contrary, have written about art and

beauty has a minimal importance: it treats artificial problems in a

grammatical spirit, seldom giving any proof of experience or

imagination. What painters say about painting and poets about poetry is

better than lay opinion; it may reveal, of course, some petty jealousy

or some partial incapacity, because a special gift often carries with it

complementary defects in apprehension; yet what is positive in such

judgments is founded on knowledge and avoids the romancing into which

litterateurs and sentimentalists will gladly wander. The specific values

of art are technical values, more permanent and definite than the

adventitious analogies on which a stray observer usually bases his

views. Only a technical education can raise judgments on musical

compositions above impertinent auto-biography. The Japanese know the

beauty of flowers, and tailors and dressmakers have the best sense for

the fashions. We ask them for suggestions, and if we do not always take

their advice, it is not because the fine effects they love are not

genuine, but because they may not be effects which we care to produce.

[Sidenote: Tastes differ also in purity or consistency.]

This touches a second consideration, besides the volume and vivacity of

feeling, which enters into good taste. What is voluminous may be

inwardly confused or outwardly confusing. Excitement, though on the

whole and for the moment agreeable, may verge on pain and may be, when

it subsides a little, a cause of bitterness. A thing’s attractions may

be partly at war with its ideal function. In such a case what, in our

haste, we call a beauty becomes hateful on a second view, and according

to the key of our dissatisfaction we pronounce that effect meretricious,

harsh, or affected. These discords appear when elaborate things are

attempted without enough art and refinement; they are essentially in bad

taste. Rudimentary effects, on the contrary, are pure, and though we may

think them trivial when we are expecting something richer, their defect

is never intrinsic; they do not plunge us, as impure excitements do,

into a corrupt artificial conflict. So wild-flowers, plain chant, or a

scarlet uniform are beautiful enough; their simplicity is a positive

merit, while their crudity is only relative. There is a touch of

sophistication and disease in not being able to fall back on such things

and enjoy them thoroughly, as if a man could no longer relish a glass of

water. Your true epicure will study not to lose so genuine a pleasure.

Better forego some artificial stimulus, though that, too, has its charm,

than become insensible to natural joys. Indeed, ability to revert to

elementary beauties is a test that judgment remains sound.

Vulgarity is quite another matter. An old woman in a blonde wig, a dirty

hand covered with jewels, ostentation without dignity, rhetoric without

cogency, all offend by an inner contradiction. To like such things we

should have to surrender our better intuitions and suffer a kind of

dishonour. Yet the elements offensively combined may be excellent in

isolation, so that an untrained or torpid mind will be at a loss to

understand the critic’s displeasure. Oftentimes barbaric art almost

succeeds, by dint of splendour, in banishing the sense of confusion and

absurdity; for everything, even reason, must bow to force. Yet the

impression remains chaotic, and we must be either partly inattentive or

partly distressed. Nothing could show better than this alternative how

mechanical barbaric art is. Driven by blind impulse or tradition, the

artist has worked in the dark. He has dismissed his work without having

quite understood it or really justified it to his own mind. It is rather

his excretion than his product. Astonished, very likely, at his own

fertility, he has thought himself divinely inspired, little knowing that

clear reason is the highest and truest of inspirations. Other men,

observing his obscure work, have then honoured him for profundity; and

so mere bulk or stress or complexity have produced a mystical wonder by

which generation after generation may be enthralled. Barbaric art is

half necromantic; its ascendancy rests in a certain measure on

bewilderment and fraud.

To purge away these impurities nothing is needed but quickened

intelligence, a keener spiritual flame. Where perception is adequate,

expression is so too, and if a man will only grow sensitive to the

various solicitations which anything monstrous combines, he will

thereby perceive its monstrosity. Let him but enact his sensations, let

him pause to make explicit the confused hints that threaten to stupefy

him; he will find that he can follow out each of them only by rejecting

and forgetting the others. To free his imagination in any direction he

must disengage it from the contrary intent, and so he must either purify

his object or leave it a mass of confused promptings. Promptings

essentially demand to be carried out, and when once an idea has become

articulate it is not enriched but destroyed if it is still identified

with its contrary. Any complete expression of a barbarous theme will,

therefore, disengage its incompatible elements and turn it into a number

of rational beauties.

[Sidenote: They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of appeal.]

When good taste has in this way purified and digested some turgid

medley, it still has a progress to make. Ideas, like men, live in

society. Not only has each a will of its own and an inherent ideal, but

each finds itself conditioned for its expression by a host of other

beings, on whose co-operation it depends. Good taste, besides being

inwardly clear, has to be outwardly fit. A monstrous ideal devours and

dissolves itself, but even a rational one does not find an immortal

embodiment simply for being inwardly possible and free from

contradiction. It needs a material basis, a soil and situation

propitious to its growth. This basis, as it varies, makes the ideal vary

which is simply its expression; and therefore no ideal can be

ultimately fixed in ignorance of the conditions that may modify it. It

subsists, to be sure, as an eternal possibility, independently of all

further earthly revolutions. Once expressed, it has revealed the

inalienable values that attach to a certain form of being, whenever that

form is actualised. But its expression may have been only momentary, and

that eternal ideal may have no further relevance to the living world. A

criterion of taste, however, looks to a social career; it hopes to

educate and to judge. In order to be an applicable and a just law, it

must represent the interests over which it would preside.

There are many undiscovered ideals. There are many beauties which

nothing in this world can embody or suggest. There are also many once

suggested or even embodied, which find later their basis gone and

evaporate into their native heaven. The saddest tragedy in the world is

the destruction of what has within it no inward ground of dissolution,

death in youth, and the crushing out of perfection. Imagination has its

bereavements of this kind. A complete mastery of existence achieved at

one moment gives no warrant that it will be sustained or achieved again

at the next. The achievement may have been perfect; nature will not on

that account stop to admire it. She will move on, and the meaning which

was read so triumphantly in her momentary attitude will not fit her new

posture. Like Polonius’s cloud, she will always suggest some new ideal,

because she has none of her own.

In lieu of an ideal, however, nature has a constitution, and this, which

is a necessary ground for ideals, is what it concerns the ideal to

reckon with. A poet, spokesman of his full soul at a given juncture,

cannot consider eventualities or think of anything but the message he is

sent to deliver, whether the world can then hear it or not. God, he may

feel sure, understands him, and in the eternal the beauty he sees and

loves immortally justifies his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, critics must

view his momentary ebullition from another side. They do not come to

justify the poet in his own eyes; he amply relieves them, of such a

function. They come only to inquire how significant the poet’s

expressions are for humanity at large or for whatever public he

addresses. They come to register the social or representative value of

the poet’s soul. His inspiration may have been an odd cerebral rumbling,

a perfectly irrecoverable and wasted intuition; the exquisite quality it

doubtless had to his own sense is now not to the purpose. A work of art

is a public possession; it is addressed to the world. By taking on a

material embodiment, a spirit solicits attention and claims some kinship

with the prevalent gods. Has it, critics should ask, the affinities

needed for such intercourse? Is it humane, is it rational, is it

representative? To its inherent incommunicable charms it must add a

kind of courtesy. If it wants other approval than its own, it cannot

afford to regard no other aspiration.

This scope, this representative faculty or wide appeal, is necessary to

good taste. All authority is representative; force and inner consistency

are gifts on which I may well congratulate another, but they give him no

right to speak for me. Either æsthetic experience would have remained a

chaos—which it is not altogether—or it must have tended to conciliate

certain general human demands and ultimately all those interests which

its operation in any way affects. The more conspicuous and permanent a

work of art is, the more is such an adjustment needed. A poet or

philosopher may be erratic and assure us that he is inspired; if we

cannot well gainsay it, we are at least not obliged to read his works.

An architect or a sculptor, however, or a public performer of any sort,

that thrusts before us a spectacle justified only in his inner

consciousness, makes himself a nuisance. A social standard of taste must

assert itself here, or else no efficacious and cumulative art can exist

at all. Good taste in such matters cannot abstract from tradition,

utility, and the temper of the world. It must make itself an interpreter

of humanity and think esoteric dreams less beautiful than what the

public eye might conceivably admire.

[Sidenote: Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar.]

There are various affinities by which art may acquire a representative

or classic quality. It may do so by giving form to objects which

everybody knows, by rendering experiences that are universal and

primary. The human figure, elementary passions, common types and crises

of fate—these are facts which pass too constantly through apperception

not to have a normal æthetic value. The artist who can catch that effect

in its fulness and simplicity accordingly does immortal work. This sort

of art immediately becomes popular; it passes into language and

convention so that its æsthetic charm is apparently worn down. The old

images after a while hardly stimulate unless they be presented in some

paradoxical way; but in that case attention will be diverted to the

accidental extravagance, and the chief classic effect will be missed. It

is the honourable fate or euthanasia of artistic successes that they

pass from the field of professional art altogether and become a portion

of human faculty. Every man learns to be to that extent an artist;

approved figures and maxims pass current like the words and idioms of a

mother-tongue, themselves once brilliant inventions. The lustre of such

successes is not really dimmed, however, when it becomes a part of man’s

daily light; a retrogression from that habitual style or habitual

insight would at once prove, by the shock it caused, how precious those

ingrained apperceptions continued to be.

[Sidenote: or by reporting the ultimate.]

Universality may also be achieved, in a more heroic fashion, by art that

expresses ultimate truths, cosmic laws, great human ideals. Virgil and

Dante are classic poets in this sense, and a similar quality belongs to

Greek sculpture and architecture. They may not cause enthusiasm in

everybody; but in the end experience and reflection renew their charm;

and their greatness, like that of high mountains, grows more obvious

with distance. Such eminence is the reward of having accepted discipline

and made the mind a clear anagram of much experience. There is a great

difference between the depth of expression so gained and richness or

realism in details. A supreme work presupposes minute study, sympathy

with varied passions, many experiments in expression; but these

preliminary things are submerged in it and are not displayed side by

side with it, like the foot-notes to a learned work, so that the

ignorant may know they have existed.

Some persons, themselves inattentive, imagine, for instance, that Greek

sculpture is abstract, that it has left out all the detail and character

which they cannot find on the surface, as they might in a modern work.

In truth it contains those features, as it were, in solution and in the

resultant which, when reduced to harmony, they would produce. It

embodies a finished humanity which only varied exercises could have

attained, for as the body is the existent ground for all possible

actions, in which as actions they exist only potentially, so a perfect

body, such as a sculptor might conceive, which ought to be ready for all

excellent activities, cannot present them all in act but only the

readiness for them. The features that might express them severally must

be absorbed and mastered, hidden like a sword in its scabbard, and

reduced to a general dignity or grace. Though such immersed eloquence be

at first overlooked and seldom explicitly acknowledged, homage is

nevertheless rendered to it in the most unmistakable ways. When lazy

artists, backed by no great technical or moral discipline, think they,

too, can produce masterpieces by summary treatment, their failure shows

how pregnant and supreme a thing simplicity is. Every man, in proportion

to his experience and moral distinction, returns to the simple but

inexhaustible work of finished minds, and finds more and more of his own

soul responsive to it.

Human nature, for all its margin of variability, has a substantial core

which is invariable, as the human body has a structure which it cannot

lose without perishing altogether; for as creatures grow more complex a

greater number of their organs become vital and indispensable. Advanced

forms will rather die than surrender a tittle of their character; a fact

which is the physical basis for loyalty and martyrdom. Any deep

interpretation of oneself, or indeed of anything, has for that reason a

largely representative truth. Other men, if they look closely, will make

the same discovery for themselves. Hence distinction and profundity, in

spite of their rarity, are wont to be largely recognised. The best men

in all ages keep classic traditions alive. These men have on their side

the weight of superior intelligence, and, though they are few, they

might even claim the weight of numbers, since the few of all ages, added

together, may be more than the many who in any one age follow a

temporary fashion. Classic work is nevertheless always national, or at

least characteristic of its period, as the classic poetry of each people

is that in which its language appears most pure and free. To translate

it is impossible; but it is easy to find that the human nature so

inimitably expressed in each masterpiece is the same that, under

different circumstance, dictates a different performance. The deviations

between races and men are not yet so great as is the ignorance of self,

the blindness to the native ideal, which prevails in most of them. Hence

a great man of a remote epoch is more intelligible than a common man of

our own time.

[Sidenote: Good taste demands that art should be rational, _i.e._,

harmonious with all other interests.]

Both elementary and ultimate judgments, then, contribute to a standard

of taste; yet human life lies between these limits, and an art which is

to be truly adjusted to life should speak also for the intermediate

experience. Good taste is indeed nothing but a name for those

appreciations which the swelling incidents of life recall and

reinforce. Good taste is that taste which is a good possession, a friend

to the whole man. It must not alienate him from anything except to ally

him to something greater and more fertile in satisfactions. It will not

suffer him to dote on things, however seductive, which rob him of some

nobler companionship. To have a foretaste of such a loss, and to reject

instinctively whatever will cause it, is the very essence of refinement.

Good taste comes, therefore, from experience, in the best sense of that

word; it comes from having united in one’s memory and character the

fruit of many diverse undertakings. Mere taste is apt to be bad taste,

since it regards nothing but a chance feeling. Every man who pursues an

art may be presumed to have some sensibility; the question is whether he

has breeding, too, and whether what he stops at is not, in the end,

vulgar and offensive. Chance feeling needs to fortify itself with

reasons and to find its level in the great world. When it has added

fitness to its sincerity, beneficence to its passion, it will have

acquired a right to live. Violence and self-justification will not pass

muster in a moral society, for vipers possess both, and must

nevertheless be stamped out. Citizenship is conferred only on creatures

with human and co-operative instincts. A civilised imagination has to

understand and to serve the world.

The great obstacle which art finds in attempting to be rational is its

functional isolation. Sense and each of the passions suffers from a

similar independence. The disarray of human instincts lets every

spontaneous motion run too far; life oscillates between constraint and

unreason. Morality too often puts up with being a constraint and even

imagines such a disgrace to be its essence. Art, on the contrary, as

often hugs unreason for fear of losing its inspiration, and forgets that

it is itself a rational principle of creation and order. Morality is

thus reduced to a necessary evil and art to a vain good, all for want of

harmony among human impulses. If the passions arose in season, if

perception fed only on those things which action should be adjusted to,

turning them, while action proceeded, into the substance of ideas—then

all conduct would be voluntary and enlightened, all speculation would be

practical, all perceptions beautiful, and all operations arts. The Life

of Reason would then be universal.

To approach this ideal, so far as art is concerned, would involve

diffusing its processes and no longer confining them to a set of dead

and unproductive objects called works of art.

[Sidenote: A mere “work of art” a baseless artifice.]

Why art, the most vital and generative of activities, should produce a

set of abstract images, monuments to lost intuitions, is a curious

mystery. Nature gives her products life, and they are at least equal to

their sources in dignity. Why should mind, the actualisation of nature’s

powers, produce something so inferior to itself, reverting in its

expression to material being, so that its witnesses seem so many fossils

with which it strews its path? What we call museums—mausoleums, rather,

in which a dead art heaps up its remains—are those the places where the

Muses intended to dwell? We do not keep in show-cases the coins current

in the world. A living art does not produce curiosities to be collected

but spiritual necessaries to be diffused.

Artificial art, made to be exhibited, is something gratuitous and

sophisticated, and the greater part of men’s concern about it is

affectation. There is a genuine pleasure in planning a work, in

modelling and painting it; there is a pleasure in showing it to a

sympathetic friend, who associates himself in this way with the artist’s

technical experiment and with his interpretation of some human episode;

and there might be a satisfaction in seeing the work set up in some

appropriate space for which it was designed, where its decorative

quality might enrich the scene, and the curious passer-by might stop to

decipher it. The pleasures proper to an ingenuous artist are spontaneous

and human; but his works, once delivered to his patrons, are household

furniture for the state. Set up to-day, they are outworn and replaced

to-morrow, like trees in the parks or officers in the government. A

community where art was native and flourishing would have an

uninterrupted supply of such ornaments, furnished by its citizens in

the same modest and cheerful spirit in which they furnish other

commodities. Every craft has its dignity, and the decorative and

monumental crafts certainly have their own; but such art is neither

singular nor pre-eminent, and a statesman or reformer who should raise

somewhat the level of thought or practice in the state would do an

infinitely greater service.

[Sidenote: Human uses give to works of art their highest expression and

charm.]

The joys of creating are not confined, moreover, to those who create

things without practical uses. The merely æsthetic, like rhyme and

fireworks, is not the only subject that can engage a playful fancy or be

planned with a premonition of beautiful effects. Architecture may be

useful, sculpture commemorative, poetry reflective, even, music, by its

expression, religious or martial. In a word, practical exigencies, in

calling forth the arts, give them moral functions which it is a pleasure

to see them fulfil. Works may not be æsthetic in their purpose, and yet

that fact may be a ground for their being doubly delightful in execution

and doubly beautiful in effect. A richer plexus of emotions is concerned

in producing or contemplating something humanly necessary than something

idly conceived. What is very rightly called a _sense_ for fitness is a

vital experience, involving æsthetic satisfactions and æsthetic shocks.

The more numerous the rational harmonies are which are present to the

mind, the more sensible movements will be going on there to give

immediate delight; for the perception or expectation of an ulterior good

is a present good also. Accordingly nothing can so well call forth or

sustain attention as what has a complex structure relating it to many

complex interests. A work woven out of precious threads has a deep

pertinence and glory; the artist who creates it does not need to

surrender his practical and moral sense in order to indulge his

imagination.

The truth is that mere sensation or mere emotion is an indignity to a

mature human being. When we eat, we demand a pleasant vista, flowers, or

conversation, and failing these we take refuge in a newspaper. The

monks, knowing that men should not feed silently like stalled oxen,

appointed some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers,

obeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theology

intelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mind

finds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality

without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What is

true of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The Arabian

Nights—futile enough in any case—would be absolutely intolerable if

they contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, and no convinced

epicureanism behind their miracles and their tattle. Any absolute work

of art which serves no further purpose than to stimulate an emotion has

about it a certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with a

blank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasures.

Art, so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove a

disappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can never

sweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mind

only by leaving the other half in abeyance. In the mere artist, too,

there is always something that falls short of the gentleman and that

defeats the man.

[Sidenote: The sad values of appearance.]

Surely it is not the artistic impulse in itself that involves such lack

of equilibrium. To impress a meaning and a rational form on matter is

one of the most masterful of actions. The trouble lies in the barren and

superficial character of this imposed form: fine art is a play of

appearance. Appearance, for a critical philosophy, is distinguished from

reality by its separation from the context of things, by its immediacy

and insignificance. A play of appearance is accordingly some little

closed circle in experience, some dream in which we lose ourselves by

ignoring most of our interests, and from which we awake into a world in

which that lost episode plays no further part and leaves no heirs. Art

as mankind has hitherto practised it falls largely under this head and

too much resembles an opiate or a stimulant. Life and history are not

thereby rendered better in their principle, but a mere ideal is

extracted out of them and presented for our delectation in some cheap

material, like words or marble. The only precious materials are flesh

and blood, for these alone can defend and propagate the ideal which has

once informed them.

Artistic creation shows at this point a great inferiority to natural

reproduction, since its product is dead. Fine art shapes inert matter

and peoples the mind with impotent ghosts. What influence it has—for

every event has consequences—is not pertinent to its inspiration. The

art of the past is powerless even to create similar art in the present,

unless similar conditions recur independently. The moments snatched for

art have been generally interludes in life and its products parasites in

nature, the body of them being materially functionless and the soul

merely represented. To exalt fine art into a truly ideal activity we

should have to knit it more closely with other rational functions, so

that to beautify things might render them more useful and to represent

them most imaginatively might be to see them in their truth. Something

of the sort has been actually attained by the noblest arts in their

noblest phases. A Sophocles or a Leonardo dominates his dreamful vehicle

and works upon the real world by its means. These small centres, where

interfunctional harmony is attained, ought to expand and cover the whole

field. Art, like religion, needs to be absorbed in the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: They need to be made prophetic of practical goods.]

What might help to bring about this consummation would be, on the one

side, more knowledge; on the other, better taste. When a mind is filled

with important and true ideas and sees the actual relations of things,

it cannot relish pictures of the world which wantonly misrepresent it.

Myth and metaphor remain beautiful so long as they are the most adequate

or graphic means available for expressing the facts, but so soon as they

cease to be needful and sincere they become false finery. The same thing

happens in the plastic arts. Unless they spring from love of their

subject, and employ imagination only to penetrate into that subject and

interpret it with a more inward sympathy and truth, they become

conventional and overgrown with mere ornament. They then seem ridiculous

to any man who can truly conceive what they represent. So in putting

antique heroes on the stage we nowadays no longer tolerate a modern

costume, because the externals of ancient life are too well known to us;

but in the seventeenth century people demanded in such personages

intelligence and nobleness, since these were virtues which the ancients

were clothed with in their thought. A knowledge that should be at once

full and appreciative would evidently demand fidelity in both matters.

Knowledge, where it exists, undermines satisfaction in what does

violence to truth, and it renders such representations grotesque. If

knowledge were general and adequate the fine arts would accordingly be

brought round to expressing reality.

[Sidenote: which in turn would be suffused with beauty.]

At the same time, if the rendering of reality is to remain artistic, it

must still study to satisfy the senses; but as this study would now

accompany every activity, taste would grow vastly more subtle and

exacting. Whatever any man said or did or made, he would be alive to its

æsthetic quality, and beauty would be a pervasive ingredient in

happiness. No work would be called, in a special sense, a work of art,

for all works would be such intrinsically; and even instinctive mimicry

and reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idleness

prompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made the

exercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to be

no division of mankind into mechanical blind workers and half-demented

poets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people make

who have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate reward of human

action. All arts would be practised together and merged in the art of

life, the only one wholly useful or fine among them.

CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

[Sidenote: Æsthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones.]

The greatest enemy harmony can have is a premature settlement in which

some essential force is wholly disregarded. This excluded element will

rankle in the flesh; it will bring about no end of disorders until it is

finally recognised and admitted into a truly comprehensive regimen. The

more numerous the interests which a premature settlement combines the

greater inertia will it oppose to reform, and the more self-righteously

will it condemn the innocent pariah that it leaves outside.

Art has had to suffer much Pharisaical opposition of this sort.

Sometimes political systems, sometimes religious zeal, have excluded it

from their programme, thereby making their programme unjust and

inadequate. Yet of all premature settlements the most premature is that

which the fine arts are wont to establish. A harmony in appearance only,

one that touches the springs of nothing and has no power to propagate

itself, is so partial and momentary a good that we may justly call it an

illusion. To gloat on rhythms and declamations, to live lost in

imaginary passions and histrionic woes, is an unmanly life, cut off from

practical dominion and from rational happiness. A lovely dream is an

excellent thing in itself, but it leaves the world no less a chaos and

makes it by contrast seem even darker than it did. By dwelling in its

mock heaven art may inflict on men the same kind of injury that any

irresponsible passion or luxurious vice might inflict. For this reason

it sometimes passes for a misfortune in a family if a son insists on

being a poet or an actor. Such gifts suggest too much incompetence and

such honours too much disrepute. A man does not avoid real evils by

having visionary pleasures, but besides exposing himself to the real

evils quite unprotected, he probably adds fancied evils to them in

generous measure. He becomes supersensitive, envious, hysterical; the

world, which was perhaps carried away at first by his ecstasies, at the

next moment merely applauds his performance, then criticises it

superciliously, and very likely ends by forgetting it altogether.

Thus the fine arts are seldom an original factor in human progress. If

they express moral and political greatness, and serve to enhance it,

they acquire a certain dignity; but so soon as this expressive function

is abandoned they grow meretricious. The artist becomes an abstracted

trifler, and the public is divided into two camps: the dilettanti, who

dote on the artist’s affectations, and the rabble, who pay him to grow

coarse. Both influences degrade him and he helps to foster both. An

atmosphere of dependence and charlatanry gathers about the artistic

attitude and spreads with its influence. Religion, philosophy, and

manners may in turn be infected with this spirit, being reduced to a

voluntary hallucination or petty flattery. Romanticism, ritualism,

æstheticism, symbolism are names this disease has borne at different

times as it appeared in different circles or touched a different object.

Needless to say that the arts themselves are the first to suffer. That

beauty which should have been an inevitable smile on the face of

society, an overflow of genuine happiness and power, has to be imported,

stimulated artificially, and applied from without; so that art becomes a

sickly ornament for an ugly existence.

[Sidenote: yet prototypes of true perfections.]

Nevertheless, æsthetic harmony, so incomplete in its basis as to be

fleeting and deceptive, is most complete in its form. This so partial

synthesis is a synthesis indeed, and just because settlements made in

fancy are altogether premature, and ignore almost everything in the

world, in type they can be the most perfect settlements. The artist,

being a born lover of the good, a natural breeder of perfections, clings

to his insight. If the world calls his accomplishments vain, he can,

with better reason, call vain the world’s cumbrous instrumentalities, by

which nothing clearly good is attained. Appearances, he may justly urge,

are alone actual. All forces, substances, realities, and principles are

inferred and potential only and in the moral scale mere instruments to

bring perfect appearances about. To have grasped such an appearance, to

have embodied a form in matter, is to have justified for the first time

whatever may underlie appearance and to have put reality to some use. It

is to have begun to live. As the standard of perfection is internal and

is measured by the satisfaction felt in realising it, every artist has

tasted, in his activity, what activity essentially is. He has moulded

existence into the likeness of thought and lost himself in that ideal

achievement which, so to speak, beckons all things into being. Even if a

thousand misfortunes await him and a final disappointment, he has been

happy once. He may be inclined to rest his case there and challenge

practical people to justify in the same way the faith that is in them.

[Sidenote: Pros and cons of detached indulgences.]

That a moment of the most perfect happiness should prove a source of

unhappiness is no paradox to any one who has observed the world. A hope,

a passion, a crime, is a flash of vitality. It is inwardly congruous

with the will that breeds it, yet the happiness it pictures is so

partial that even while it is felt it may be overshadowed by sinister

forebodings. A certain unrest and insecurity may consciously harass it.

With time, or by a slight widening in the field of interest, this

submerged unhappiness may rise to the surface. If, as is probable, it is

caused or increased by the indulgence which preceded, then the only

moment in which a good was tasted, the only vista that had opened

congenially before the mind, will prove a new and permanent curse. In

this way love often misleads individuals, ambition cities, and religion

whole races of men. That art, also, should often be an indulgence, a

blind that hides reality from ill-balanced minds and ultimately

increases their confusion, is by no means incompatible with art’s ideal

essence. On the contrary, such a result is inevitable when ideality is

carried at all far upon a narrow basis. The more genuine and excellent

the vision the greater havoc it makes if, being inadequate, it

establishes itself authoritatively in the soul. Art, in the better

sense, is a condition of happiness for a practical and labouring

creature, since without art he remains a slave; but it is one more

source of unhappiness for him so long as it is not squared with his

necessary labours and merely interrupts them. It then alienates him from

his world without being able to carry him effectually into a better one.

[Sidenote: The happy imagination is one initially in line with things.]

The artist is in many ways like a child. He seems happy, because his

life is spontaneous, yet he is not competent to secure his own good. To

be truly happy he must be well bred, reared from the cradle, as it were,

under propitious influences, so that he may have learned to love what

conduces to his development. In that rare case his art will expand as

his understanding ripens; he will not need to repent and begin again on

a lower key. The ideal artist, like the ideal philosopher, has all time

and all existence for his virtual theme. Fed by the world he can help to

mould it, and his insight is a kind of wisdom, preparing him as science

might for using the world well and making it more fruitful. He can then

be happy, not merely in the sense of having now and then an ecstatic

moment, but happy in having light and resource enough within him to cope

steadily with real things and to leave upon them the vestige of his

mind.

[Sidenote: and brought always closer to them by experience.]

One effect of growing experience is to render what is unreal

uninteresting. Momentous alternatives in life are so numerous and the

possibilities they open up so varied that imagination finds enough

employment of a historic and practical sort in trying to seize them. A

child plans Towers of Babel; a mature architect, in planning, would lose

all interest if he were bidden to disregard gravity and economy. The

conditions of existence, after they are known and accepted, become

conditions for the only pertinent beauty. In each place, for each

situation, the plastic mind finds an appropriate ideal. It need not go

afield to import something exotic. It need make no sacrifices to whim

and to personal memories. It rather breeds out of the given problem a

new and singular solution, thereby exercising greater invention than

would be requisite for framing an arbitrary ideal and imposing it at all

costs on every occasion.

[Sidenote: Reason is the principle of both art and happiness.]

In other words, a happy result can be secured in art, as in life, only

by intelligence. Intelligence consists in having read the heart and

deciphered the promptings latent there, and then in reading the world

and deciphering its law and constitution, to see how and where the

heart’s ideal may be embodied. Our troubles come from the colossal

blunders made by our ancestors (who had worse ancestors of their own) in

both these interpretations, blunders which have come down to us in our

blood and in our institutions. The vices thus transmitted cloud our

intelligence. We fail in practical affairs when we ignore the conditions

of action and we fail in works of imagination when we concoct what is

fantastic and without roots in the world.

The value of art lies in making people happy, first in practising the

art and then in possessing its product. This observation might seem

needless, and ought to be so; but if we compare it with what is commonly

said on these subjects, we must confess that it may often be denied and

more often, perhaps, may not be understood. Happiness is something men

ought to pursue, although they seldom do so; they are drawn away from it

at first by foolish impulses and afterwards by perverse laws. To secure

happiness conduct would have to remain spontaneous while it learned not

to be criminal; but the fanatical attachment of men, now to a fierce

liberty, now to a false regimen, keeps them barbarous and wretched. A

rational pursuit of happiness—which is one thing with progress or with

the Life of Reason—would embody that natural piety which leaves to the

episodes of life their inherent values, mourning death, celebrating

love, sanctifying civic traditions, enjoying and correcting nature’s

ways. To discriminate happiness is therefore the very soul of art, which

expresses experience without distorting it, as those political or

metaphysical tyrannies distort it which sanctify unhappiness. A free

mind, like a creative imagination, rejoices at the harmonies it can find

or make between man and nature; and, where it finds none, it solves the

conflict so far as it may and then notes and endures it with a shudder.

A morality organised about the human heart in an ingenuous and sincere

fashion would involve every fine art and would render the world

pervasively beautiful—beautiful in its artificial products and

beautiful in its underlying natural terrors. The closer we keep to

elementary human needs and to the natural agencies that may satisfy

them, the closer we are to beauty. Industry, sport, and science, with

the perennial intercourse and passions of men, swarm with incentives to

expression, because they are everywhere creating new moulds of being and

compelling the eye to observe those forms and to recast them ideally.

Art is simply an adequate industry; it arises when industry is carried

out to the satisfaction of all human demands, even of those incidental

sensuous demands which we call æsthetic and which a brutal industry, in

its haste, may despise or ignore.

Arts responsive in this way to all human nature would be beautiful

according to reason and might remain beautiful long. Poetic beauty

touches the world whenever it attains some unfeigned harmony either with

sense or with reason; and the more unfeignedly human happiness was made

the test of all institutions and pursuits, the more beautiful they would

be, having more numerous points of fusion with the mind, and fusing with

it more profoundly. To distinguish and to create beauty would then be no

art relegated to a few abstracted spirits, playing with casual fancies;

it would be a habit inseparable from practical efficiency. All

operations, all affairs, would then be viewed in the light of ultimate

interests, and in their deep relation to human good. The arts would thus

recover their Homeric glory; touching human fate as they clearly would,

they would borrow something of its grandeur and pathos, and yet the

interest that worked in them would be warm, because it would remain

unmistakably animal and sincere.

[Sidenote: Only a rational society can have sure and perfect arts.]

The principle that all institutions should subserve happiness runs

deeper than any cult for art and lays the foundation on which the latter

might rest safely. If social structure were rational its free expression

would be so too. Many observers, with no particular philosophy to

adduce, feel that the arts among us are somehow impotent, and they look

for a better inspiration, now to ancient models, now to the raw

phenomena of life. A dilettante may, indeed, summon inspiration whence

he will; and a virtuoso will never lack some material to keep him busy;

but if what is hoped for is a genuine, native, inevitable art, a great

revolution would first have to be worked in society. We should have to

abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms

and schools of art, and to discover instead our genuine needs, the forms

of our possible happiness. To call for such self-examination seems

revolutionary only because we start from a sophisticated system, a

system resting on traditional fashions and superstitions, by which the

will of the living generation is misinterpreted and betrayed. To shake

off that system would not subvert order but rather institute order for

the first time; it would be an _Instauratio Magna_, a setting things

again on their feet.

We in Christendom are so accustomed to artificial ideals and to

artificial institutions, kept up to express them, that we hardly

conceive how anomalous our situation is, sorely as we may suffer from

it. We found academies and museums, as we found missions, to fan a flame

that constantly threatens to die out for lack of natural fuel. Our overt

ideals are parasites in the body politic, while the ideals native to the

body politic, those involved in our natural structure and situation,

are either stifled by that alien incubus, leaving civic life barbarous,

or else force their way up, unremarked or not justly honoured as ideals.

Industry and science and social amenities, with all the congruous

comforts and appurtenances of contemporary life, march on their way, as

if they had nothing to say to the spirit, which remains entangled in a

cobweb of dead traditions. An idle pottering of the fancy over obsolete

forms—theological, dramatic, or plastic—makes that by-play to the

sober business of life which men call their art or their religion; and

the more functionless and gratuitous this by-play is the more those who

indulge in it think they are idealists. They feel they are champions of

what is most precious in the world, as a sentimental lady might fancy

herself a lover of flowers when she pressed them in a book instead of

planting their seeds in the garden.

[Sidenote: Why art is now empty and unstable.]

It is clear that gratuitous and functionless habits cannot bring

happiness; they do not constitute an activity at once spontaneous and

beneficent, such as noble art is an instance of. Those habits may indeed

give pleasure; they may bring extreme excitement, as madness notably

does, though it is in the highest degree functionless and gratuitous.

Nor is such by-play without consequences, some of which might

conceivably be fortunate. What is functionless is so called for being

worthless from some ideal point of view, and not conducing to the

particular life considered. But nothing real is dissociated from the

universal flux; everything—madness and all unmeaning cross-currents in

being—count in the general process and discharge somewhere, not without

effect, the substance they have drawn for a moment into their little

vortex. So our vain arts and unnecessary religions are not without real

effects and not without a certain internal vitality. When life is

profoundly disorganised it may well happen that only in detached

episodes, only in moments snatched for dreaming in, can men see the blue

or catch a glimpse of something like the ideal. In that case their

esteem for their irrelevant visions may be well grounded, and their thin

art and far-fetched religion may really constitute what is best in their

experience. In a pathetic way these poor enthusiasms may be justified,

but only because the very conception of a rational life lies entirely

beyond the horizon.

[Sidenote: Anomalous character of the irrational artist.]

It is no marvel, when art is a brief truancy from rational practice,

that the artist himself should be a vagrant, and at best, as it were, an

infant prodigy. The wings of genius serve him only for an escapade,

enabling him to skirt the perilous edge of madness and of mystical

abysses. But such an erratic workman does not deserve the name of artist

or master; he has burst convention only to break it, not to create a new

convention more in harmony with nature. His originality, though it may

astonish for a moment, will in the end be despised and will find no

thoroughfare. He will meantime be wretched himself, torn from the roots

of his being by that cruel, unmeaning inspiration; or, if too rapt to

see his own plight, he will be all the more pitied by practical men, who

cannot think it a real blessing to be lost in joys that do not

strengthen the character and yield nothing for posterity.

Art, in its nobler acceptation, is an achievement, not an indulgence. It

prepares the world in some sense to receive the soul, and the soul to

master the world; it disentangles those threads in each that can be

woven into the other. That the artist should be eccentric, homeless,

dreamful may almost seem a natural law, but it is none the less a

scandal. An artist’s business is not really to cut fantastical capers or

be licensed to play the fool. His business is simply that of every keen

soul to build well when it builds, and to speak well when it speaks,

giving practice everywhere the greatest possible affinity to the

situation, the most delicate adjustment to every faculty it affects. The

wonder of an artist’s performance grows with the range of his

penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal

isolation, considerate of other men’s fate and a great diviner of their

secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance

than they could have spoken with to themselves. And the joy of his great

sanity, the power of his adequate vision, is not the less intense

because he can lend it to others and has borrowed it from a faithful

study of the world.

[Sidenote: True art measures and completes happiness.]

If happiness is the ultimate sanction of art, art in turn is the best

instrument of happiness. In art more directly than in other activities

man’s self-expression is cumulative and finds an immediate reward; for

it alters the material conditions of sentience so that sentience becomes

at once more delightful and more significant. In industry man is still

servile, preparing the materials he is to use in action. In action

itself, though he is free, he exerts his influence on a living and

treacherous medium and sees the issue at each moment drift farther and

farther from his intent. In science he is an observer, preparing himself

for action in another way, by studying its results and conditions. But

in art he is at once competent and free; he is creative. He is not

troubled by his materials, because he has assimilated them and may take

them for granted; nor is he concerned with the chance complexion of

affairs in the actual world, because he is making the world over, not

merely considering how it grew or how it will consent to grow in future.

Nothing, accordingly, could be more delightful than genuine art, nor

more free from remorse and the sting of vanity. Art springs so

completely from the heart of man that it makes everything speak to him

in his own language; it reaches, nevertheless, so truly to the heart of

nature that it co-operates with her, becomes a parcel of her creative

material energy, and builds by her instinctive hand. If the various

formative impulses afoot in the world never opposed stress to stress and

made no havoc with one another, nature might be called an unconscious

artist. In fact, just where such a formative impulse finds support from

the environment, a consciousness supervenes. If that consciousness is

adequate enough to be prophetic, an art arises. Thus the emergence of

arts out of instincts is the token and exact measure of nature’s success

and of mortal happiness.

*** End of Volume Four ***

REASON IN SCIENCE

Volume Five of “The Life of Reason”

GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê

CONTENTS

REASON IN SCIENCE

CHAPTER I