uncertain. But, unless we assume that all artists are liars, I think we
must suppose that they do feel an emotion which they can express in
form--and form alone. And note well this further point; artists try to
express emotion, not to make statements about its ultimate or immediate
object. Naturally, if an artist's emotion comes to him from, or through,
the perception of forms and formal relations, he will be apt to express
it in forms derived from those through which it came; but he will not be
bound by his vision. He will be bound by his emotion. Not what he saw,
but only what he felt will necessarily condition his design. Whether the
connection between the forms of a created work and the forms of the
visible universe be patent or obscure, whether it exist or whether it
does not, is a matter of no consequence whatever. No one ever doubted
that a Sung pot or a Romanesque church was as much an expression of
emotion as any picture that ever was painted. What was the object of the
potter's emotion? What of the builder's? Was it some imagined form, the
synthesis of a hundred different visions of natural things; or was it
some conception of reality, unrelated to sensual experience, remote
altogether from the physical universe? These are questions beyond all
conjecture. In any case, the form in which he expresses his emotion
bears no memorial of any external form that may have provoked it.
Expression is no wise bound by the forms or emotions or ideas of life.
We cannot know exactly what the artist feels. We only know what he
creates. If reality be the goal of his emotion, the roads to reality
are several. Some artists come at it through the appearance of things,
some by a recollection of appearance, and some by sheer force of
imagination.
To the question--"Why are we so profoundly moved by certain combinations
of forms?" I am unwilling to return a positive answer. I am not obliged
to, for it is not an aesthetic question. I do suggest, however, that it
is because they express an emotion that the artist has felt, though I
hesitate to make any pronouncement about the nature or object of that
emotion. If my suggestion be accepted, criticism will be armed with a
new weapon; and the nature of this weapon is worth a moment's
consideration. Going behind his emotion and its object, the critic will
be able to surprise that which gives form its significance. He will be
able to explain why some forms are significant and some are not; and
thus he will be able to push all his judgments a step further back. Let
me give one example. Of copies of pictures there are two classes; one
class contains some works of art, the other none. A literal copy is
seldom reckoned even by its owner a work of art. It leaves us cold; its
forms are not significant. Yet if it were an absolutely exact copy,
clearly it would be as moving as the original, and a photographic
reproduction of a drawing often is--almost. Evidently, it is impossible
to imitate a work of art exactly; and the differences between the copy
and the original, minute though they may be, exist and are felt
immediately. So far the critic is on sure and by this time familiar
ground. The copy does not move him, because its forms are not identical
with those of the original; and just what made the original moving is
what does not appear in the copy. But why is it impossible to make an
absolutely exact copy? The explanation seems to be that the actual lines
and colours and spaces in a work of art are caused by something in the
mind of the artist which is not present in the mind of the imitator. The
hand not only obeys the mind, it is impotent to make lines and colours
in a particular way without the direction of a particular state of mind.
The two visible objects, the original and the copy, differ because that
which ordered the work of art does not preside at the manufacture of the
copy. That which orders the work of art is, I suggest, the emotion which
empowers artists to create significant form. The good copy, the copy
that moves us, is always the work of one who is possessed by this
mysterious emotion. Good copies are never attempts at exact imitation;
on examination we find always enormous differences between them and
their originals: they are the work of men or women who do not copy but
can translate the art of others into their own language. The power of
creating significant form depends, not on hawklike vision, but on some
curious mental and emotional power. Even to copy a picture one needs,
not to see as a trained observer, but to feel as an artist. To make the
spectator feel, it seems that the creator must feel too. What is this
that imitated forms lack and created forms possess? What is this
mysterious thing that dominates the artist in the creation of forms?
What is it that lurks behind forms and seems to be conveyed by them to
us? What is it that distinguishes the creator from the copyist? What can
it be but emotion? Is it not because the artist's forms express a
particular kind of emotion that they are significant?--because they fit
and envelop it, that they are coherent?--because they communicate it,
that they exalt us to ecstasy?
One word of warning is necessary. Let no one imagine that the expression
of emotion is the outward and visible sign of a work of art. The
characteristic of a work of art is its power of provoking aesthetic
emotion; the expression of emotion is possibly what gives it that power.
It is useless to go to a picture gallery in search of expression; you
must go in search of significant form. When you have been moved by form,
you may begin to consider what makes it moving. If my theory be correct,
rightness of form is invariably a consequence of rightness of emotion.
Right form, I suggest, is ordered and conditioned by a particular kind
of emotion; but whether my theory be true or false, the form remains
right. If the forms are satisfactory, the state of mind that ordained
them must have been aesthetically right. If the forms are wrong, it does
not follow that the state of mind was wrong; between the moment of
inspiration and the finished work of art there is room for many a slip.
Feeble or defective emotion is at best only one explanation of
unsatisfactory form. Therefore, when the critic comes across
satisfactory form he need not bother about the feelings of the artist;
for him to feel the aesthetic significance of the artist's forms
suffices. If the artist's state of mind be important, he may be sure
that it was right because the forms are right. But when the critic
attempts to account for the unsatisfactoriness of forms he may consider
the state of mind of the artist. He cannot be sure that because the
forms are wrong the state of mind was wrong; because right forms imply
right feeling, wrong forms do not necessarily imply wrong feeling; but
if he has got to explain the wrongness of form, here is a possibility he
cannot overlook. He will have left the firm land of aesthetics to travel
in an unstable element; in criticism one catches at any straw. There is
no harm in that, provided the critic never forgets that, whatever
ingenious theories he may put forward, they can be nothing more than
attempts to explain the one central fact--that some forms move us
aesthetically and others do not.
This discussion has brought me close to a question that is neither
aesthetic nor metaphysical but impinges on both. It is the question of
the artistic problem, and it is really a technical question. I have
suggested that the task of the artist is either to create significant
form or to express a sense of reality--whichever way you prefer to put
it. But it is certain that few artists, if any, can sit down or stand up
just to create nothing more definite than significant form, just to
express nothing more definite than a sense of reality. Artists must
canalise their emotion, they must concentrate their energies on some
definite problem. The man who sets out with the whole world before him
is unlikely to get anywhere. In that fact lies the explanation of the
absolute necessity for artistic conventions. That is why it is easier to
write good verse than good prose, why it is more difficult to write good
blank verse than good rhyming couplets. That is the explanation of the
sonnet, the ballade, and the rondeau; severe limitations concentrate and
intensify the artist's energies.
It would be almost impossible for an artist who set himself a task no
more definite than that of creating, without conditions or limitations
material or intellectual, significant form ever so to concentrate his
energies as to achieve his object. His objective would lack precision
and therefore his efforts would lack intention. He would almost
certainly be vague and listless at his work. It would seem always
possible to pull the thing round by a happy fluke, it would rarely be
absolutely clear that things were going wrong. The effort would be
feeble and the result would be feeble. That is the danger of
aestheticism for the artist. The man who feels that he has got nothing
to do but to make something beautiful hardly knows where to begin or
where to end, or why he should set about one thing more than another.
The artist has got to feel the necessity of making his work of art
"right." It will be "right" when it expresses his emotion for reality or
is capable of provoking aesthetic emotion in others, whichever way you
care to look at it. But most artists have got to canalise their emotion
and concentrate their energies on some more definite and more maniable
problem than that of making something that shall be aesthetically
"right." They need a problem that will become the focus of their vast
emotions and vague energies, and when that problem is solved their work
will be "right."
"Right" for the spectator means aesthetically satisfying; for the artist
at work it means the complete realisation of a conception, the perfect
solution of a problem. The mistake that the vulgar make is to suppose
that "right" means the solution of one particular problem. The vulgar
are apt to suppose that the problem which all visual and literary
artists set themselves is to make something lifelike. Now, all artistic
problems--and their possible variety is infinite--must be the _foci_ of
one particular kind of emotion, that specific artistic emotion which I
believe to be an emotion felt for reality, generally perceived through
form: but the nature of the focus is immaterial. It is almost, though
not quite, true to say that one problem is as good as another. Indeed
all problems are, in themselves, equally good, though, owing to human
infirmity, there are two which tend to turn out badly. One, as we have
seen, is the pure aesthetic problem; the other is the problem of
accurate representation.
The vulgar imagine that there is but one focus, that "right" means
always the realisation of an accurate conception of life. They cannot
understand that the immediate problem of the artist may be to express
himself within a square or a circle or a cube, to balance certain
harmonies, to reconcile certain dissonances, to achieve certain rhythms,
or to conquer certain difficulties of medium, just as well as to catch a
likeness. This error is at the root of the silly criticism that Mr. Shaw
has made it fashionable to print. In the plays of Shakespeare there are
details of psychology and portraiture so realistic as to astonish and
enchant the multitude, but the conception, the thing that Shakespeare
set himself to realise, was not a faithful presentation of life. The
creation of Illusion was not the artistic problem that Shakespeare used
as a channel for his artistic emotion and a focus for his energies. The
world of Shakespeare's plays is by no means so lifelike as the world of
Mr. Galsworthy's, and therefore those who imagine that the artistic
problem must always be the achieving of a correspondence between printed
words or painted forms and the world as they know it are right in
judging the plays of Shakespeare inferior to those of Mr. Galsworthy. As
a matter of fact, the achievement of verisimilitude, far from being the
only possible problem, disputes with the achievement of beauty the
honour of being the worst possible. It is so easy to be lifelike, that
an attempt to be nothing more will never bring into play the highest
emotional and intellectual powers of the artist. Just as the aesthetic
problem is too vague, so the representative problem is too simple.
Every artist must choose his own problem. He may take it from wherever
he likes, provided he can make it the focus of those artistic emotions
he has got to express and the stimulant of those energies he will need
to express them. What we have got to remember is that the problem--in a
picture it is generally the subject--is of no consequence in itself. It
is merely one of the artist's means of expression or creation. In any
particular case one problem may be better than another, as a means, just
as one canvas or one brand of colours may be; that will depend upon the
temperament of the artist, and we may leave it to him. For us the
problem has no value; for the artist it is the working test of absolute
"rightness." It is the gauge that measures the pressure of steam; the
artist stokes his fires to set the little handle spinning; he knows that
his machine will not move until he has got his pointer to the mark; he
works up to it and through it; but it does not drive the engine.
What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? No more than this, I
think. The contemplation of pure form leads to a state of extraordinary
exaltation and complete detachment from the concerns of life: of so
much, speaking for myself, I am sure. It is tempting to suppose that the
emotion which exalts has been transmitted through the forms we
contemplate by the artist who created them. If this be so, the
transmitted emotion, whatever it may be, must be of such a kind that it
can be expressed in any sort of form--in pictures, sculptures,
buildings, pots, textiles, &c., &c. Now the emotion that artists express
comes to some of them, so they tell us, from the apprehension of the
formal significance of material things; and the formal significance of
any material thing is the significance of that thing considered as an
end in itself. But if an object considered as an end in itself moves us
more profoundly (_i.e._ has greater significance) than the same object
considered as a means to practical ends or as a thing related to human
interests--and this undoubtedly is the case--we can only suppose that
when we consider anything as an end in itself we become aware of that in
it which is of greater moment than any qualities it may have acquired
from keeping company with human beings. Instead of recognising its
accidental and conditioned importance, we become aware of its essential
reality, of the God in everything, of the universal in the particular,
of the all-pervading rhythm. Call it by what name you will, the thing
that I am talking about is that which lies behind the appearance of all
things--that which gives to all things their individual significance,
the thing in itself, the ultimate reality. And if a more or less
unconscious apprehension of this latent reality of material things be,
indeed, the cause of that strange emotion, a passion to express which is
the inspiration of many artists, it seems reasonable to suppose that
those who, unaided by material objects, experience the same emotion have
come by another road to the same country.
That is the metaphysical hypothesis. Are we to swallow it whole, accept
a part of it, or reject it altogether? Each must decide for himself. I
insist only on the rightness of my aesthetic hypothesis. And of one
other thing am I sure. Be they artists or lovers of art, mystics or
mathematicians, those who achieve ecstasy are those who have freed
themselves from the arrogance of humanity. He who would feel the
significance of art must make himself humble before it. Those who find
the chief importance of art or of philosophy in its relation to conduct
or its practical utility--those who cannot value things as ends in
themselves or, at any rate, as direct means to emotion--will never get
from anything the best that it can give. Whatever the world of aesthetic
contemplation may be, it is not the world of human business and
passion; in it the chatter and tumult of material existence is unheard,
or heard only as the echo of some more ultimate harmony.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: The existence of the Ku K'ai-chih makes it clear that the
art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive
movement. To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang
dynasties a development out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art
of the Han decadence--from which Ku K'ai-chih is a delicate
straggler--is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of
Praxiteles. Between the two some thing has happened to refill the stream
of art. What had happened in China was the spiritual and emotional
revolution that followed the onset of Buddhism.]
[Footnote 2: This is not to say that exact representation is bad in
itself. It is indifferent. A perfectly represented form may be
significant, only it is fatal to sacrifice significance to
representation. The quarrel between significance and illusion seems to
be as old as art itself, and I have little doubt that what makes most
palaeolithic art so bad is a preoccupation with exact representation.
Evidently palaeolithic draughtsmen had no sense of the significance of
form. Their art resembles that of the more capable and sincere Royal
Academicians: it is a little higher than that of Sir Edward Poynter and
a little lower than that of the late Lord Leighton. That this is no
paradox let the cave-drawings of Altamira, or such works as the sketches
of horses found at Bruniquel and now in the British Museum, bear
witness. If the ivory head of a girl from the Grotte du Pape,
Brassempouy (_Musée St. Germain_) and the ivory torso found at the same
place (_Collection St. Cric_), be, indeed, palaeolithic, then there were
good palaeolithic artists who created and did not imitate form.
Neolithic art is, of course, a very different matter.]
[Footnote 3: Mr. Roger Fry permits me to make use of an interesting
story that will illustrate my view. When Mr. Okakura, the Government
editor of _The Temple Treasures of Japan_, first came to Europe, he
found no difficulty in appreciating the pictures of those who from want
of will or want of skill did not create illusions but concentrated their
energies on the creation of form. He understood immediately the
Byzantine masters and the French and Italian Primitives. In the
Renaissance painters, on the other hand, with their descriptive
pre-occupations, their literary and anecdotic interests, he could see
nothing but vulgarity and muddle. The universal and essential quality of
art, significant form, was missing, or rather had dwindled to a shallow
stream, overlaid and hidden beneath weeds, so the universal response,
aesthetic emotion, was not evoked. It was not till he came on to Henri
Matisse that he again found himself in the familiar world of pure art.
Similarly, sensitive Europeans who respond immediately to the
significant forms of great Oriental art, are left cold by the trivial
pieces of anecdote and social criticism so lovingly cherished by Chinese
dilettanti. It would be easy to multiply instances did not decency
forbid the labouring of so obvious a truth.]
[Footnote 4: Anyone who has visited the very latest French exhibitions
will have seen scores of what are called "Cubist" pictures. These afford
an excellent illustration of my thesis. Of a hundred cubist pictures
three or four will have artistic value. Thirty years ago the same might
have been said of "Impressionist" pictures; forty years before that of
romantic pictures in the manner of Delacroix. The explanation is
simple,--the vast majority of those who paint pictures have neither
originality nor any considerable talent. Left to themselves they would
probably produce the kind of painful absurdity which in England is known
as an "Academy picture." But a student who has no original gift may yet
be anything but a fool, and many students understand that the ordinary
cultivated picture-goer knows an "Academy picture" at a glance and knows
that it is bad. Is it fair to condemn severely a young painter for
trying to give his picture a factitious interest, or even for trying to
conceal beneath striking wrappers the essential mediocrity of his wares?
If not heroically sincere he is surely not inhumanly base. Besides, he
has to imitate someone, and he likes to be in the fashion. And, after
all, a bad cubist picture is no worse than any other bad picture. If
anyone is to be blamed, it should be the spectator who cannot
distinguish between good cubist pictures and bad. Blame alike the fools
who think that because a picture is cubist it must be worthless, and
their idiotic enemies who think it must be marvellous. People of
sensibility can see that there is as much difference between Picasso and
a Montmartre sensationalist as there is between Ingres and the President
of the Royal Academy.]
II
ART AND LIFE
I. ART AND RELIGION
II. ART AND HISTORY
III. ART AND ETHICS
[Illustration: EARLY PERUVIAN POT FROM THE NASCA VALLEY
_In the British Museum_]
I
ART AND RELIGION
If in my first chapter I had been at pains to show that art owed nothing
to life the title of my second would invite a charge of inconsistency.
The danger would be slight, however; for though art owed nothing to
life, life might well owe something to art. The weather is admirably
independent of human hopes and fears, yet few of us are so sublimely
detached as to be indifferent to the weather. Art does affect the lives
of men; it moves to ecstasy, thus giving colour and moment to what might
be otherwise a rather grey and trivial affair. Art for some makes life
worth living. Also, art is affected by life; for to create art there
must be men with hands and a sense of form and colour and
three-dimensional space and the power to feel and the passion to create.
Therefore art has a great deal to do with life--with emotional life.
That it is a means to a state of exaltation is unanimously agreed, and
that it comes from the spiritual depths of man's nature is hardly
contested. The appreciation of art is certainly a means to ecstasy, and
the creation probably the expression of an ecstatic state of mind. Art
is, in fact, a necessity to and a product of the spiritual life.
Those who do not part company with me till the last stage of my
metaphysical excursion agree that the emotion expressed in a work of art
springs from the depths of man's spiritual nature; and those even who
will hear nothing of expression agree that the spiritual part is
profoundly affected by works of art. Art, therefore, has to do with the
spiritual life, to which it gives and from which, I feel sure, it takes.
Indirectly, art has something to do with practical life, too; for those
emotional experiences must be very faint and contemptible that leave
quite untouched our characters. Through its influence on character and
point of view art may affect practical life. But practical life and
human sentiment can affect art only in so far as they can affect the
conditions in which artists work. Thus they may affect the production of
works of art to some extent; to how great an extent I shall consider in
another place.