understand the history of its art? It seems so. And yet the idea is
intolerable to scientific historians. What becomes of the great
scientific principle of water-tight compartments? Again, it is unjust:
for assuredly, to understand art we need know nothing whatever about
history. It may be that from works of art we can draw inferences as to
the sort of people who made them: but the longest and most intimate
conversations with an artist will not tell us whether his pictures are
good or bad. We must see them: then we shall know. I may be partial or
dishonest about the work of my friend, but its aesthetic significance is
not more obvious to me than that of a work that was finished five
thousand years ago. To appreciate fully a work of art we require nothing
but sensibility. To those that can hear Art speaks for itself: facts and
dates do not; to make bricks of such stuff one must glean the uplands
and hollows for tags of auxiliary information and suggestion; and the
history of art is no exception to the rule. To appreciate a man's art I
need know nothing whatever about the artist; I can say whether this
picture is better than that without the help of history; but if I am
trying to account for the deterioration of his art, I shall be helped by
knowing that he has been seriously ill or that he has married a wife who
insists on his boiling her pot. To mark the deterioration was to make a
pure, aesthetic judgment: to account for it was to become an historian.
To understand the history of art we must know something of other kinds
of history. Perhaps, to understand thoroughly any kind of history we
must understand every kind of history. Perhaps the history of an age or
of a life is an indivisible whole. Another intolerable idea! What
becomes of the specialist? What of those formidable compendiums in which
the multitudinous activities of man are kept so jealously apart? The
mind boggles at the monstrous vision of its own conclusions.
But, after all, does it matter to me? I am not an historian of art or of
anything else. I care very little when things were made, or why they
were made; I care about their emotional significance to us. To the
historian everything is a means to some other means; to me everything
that matters is a direct means to emotion. I am writing about art, not
about history. With history I am concerned only in so far as history
serves to illustrate my hypothesis: and whether history be true or false
matters very little, since my hypothesis is not based on history but on
personal experience, not on facts but on feelings. Historical fact and
falsehood are of no consequence to people who try to deal with
realities. They need not ask, "Did this happen?"; they need ask only,
"Do I feel this?" Lucky for us that it is so: for if our judgments about
real things had to wait upon historical certitude they might have to
wait for ever. Nevertheless it is amusing to see how far that of which
we are sure agrees with that which we should expect. My aesthetic
hypothesis--that the essential quality in a work of art is significant
form--was based on my aesthetic experience. Of my aesthetic experiences
I am sure. About my second hypothesis, that significant form is the
expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality--I am far from
confident. However, I assume it to be true, and go on to suggest that
this sense of reality leads men to attach greater importance to the
spiritual than to the material significance of the universe, that it
disposes men to feel things as ends instead of merely recognising them
as means, that a sense of reality is, in fact, the essence of spiritual
health. If this be so, we shall expect to find that ages in which the
creation of significant form is checked are ages in which the sense of
reality is dim, and that these ages are ages of spiritual poverty. We
shall expect to find the curves of art and spiritual fervour ascending
and descending together. In my next chapter I shall glance at the
history of a cycle of art with the intention of following the movement
of art and discovering how far that movement keeps pace with changes in
the spiritual state of society. My view of the rise, decline and fall of
art in Christendom is based entirely on a series of independent
aesthetic judgments in the rightness of which I have the arrogance to
feel considerable confidence. I pretend to a power of distinguishing
between significant and insignificant form, and it will interest me to
see whether a decline in the significance of forms--a deterioration of
art, that is to say--synchronises generally with a lowering of the
religious sense. I shall expect to find that whenever artists have
allowed themselves to be seduced from their proper business, the
creation of form, by other and irrelevant interests, society has been
spiritually decadent. Ages in which the sense of formal significance has
been swamped utterly by preoccupation with the obvious, will turn out, I
suspect, to have been ages of spiritual famine. Therefore, while
following the fortunes of art across a period of fourteen hundred years,
I shall try to keep an eye on that of which art may be a
manifestation--man's sense of ultimate reality.
To criticise a work of art historically is to play the science-besotted
fool. No more disastrous theory ever issued from the brain of a
charlatan than that of evolution in art. Giotto did not creep, a grub,
that Titian might flaunt, a butterfly. To think of a man's art as
leading on to the art of someone else is to misunderstand it. To praise
or abuse or be interested in a work of art because it leads or does not
lead to another work of art is to treat it as though it were not a work
of art. The connection of one work of art with another may have
everything to do with history: it has nothing to do with appreciation.
So soon as we begin to consider a work as anything else than an end in
itself we leave the world of art. Though the development of painting
from Giotto to Titian may be interesting historically, it cannot affect
the value of any particular picture: aesthetically, it is of no
consequence whatever. Every work of art must be judged on its own
merits.
Therefore, be sure that, in my next chapter, I am not going to make
aesthetic judgments in the light of history; I am going to read history
in the light of aesthetic judgments. Having made my judgments,
independently of any theory, aesthetic or non-aesthetic, I shall be
amused to see how far the view of history that may be based on them
agrees with accepted historical hypotheses. If my judgments and the
dates furnished by historians be correct, it will follow that some ages
have produced more good art than others: but, indeed, it is not disputed
that the variety in the artistic significance of different ages is
immense. I shall be curious to see what relation can be established
between the art and the age that produced it. If my second
hypothesis--that art is the expression of an emotion for ultimate
reality--be correct, the relation between art and its age will be
inevitable and intimate. In that case, an aesthetic judgment will imply
some sort of judgment about the general state of mind of the artist and
his admirers. In fact, anyone who accepts absolutely my second
hypothesis with all its possible implications--which is more than I am
willing to do--will not only see in the history of art the spiritual
history of the race, but will be quite unable to think of one without
thinking of the other.
If I do not go quite so far as that, I stop short only by a little.
Certainly it is less absurd to see in art the key to history than to
imagine that history can help us to an appreciation of art. In ages of
spiritual fervour I look for great art. By ages of spiritual fervour I
do not mean pleasant or romantic or humane or enlightened ages; I mean
ages in which, for one reason or another, men have been unusually
excited about their souls and unusually indifferent about their bodies.
Such ages, as often as not, have been superstitious and cruel.
Preoccupation with the soul may lead to superstition, indifference about
the body to cruelty. I never said that ages of great art were
sympathetic to the middle-classes. Art and a quiet life are incompatible
I think; some stress and turmoil there must be. Need I add that in the
snuggest age of materialism great artists may arise and flourish? Of
course: but when the production of good art is at all widespread and
continuous, near at hand I shall expect to find a restless generation.
Also, having marked a period of spiritual stir, I shall look, not far
off, for its manifestation in significant form. But the stir must be
spiritual and genuine; a swirl of emotionalism or political frenzy will
provoke nothing fine.[8] How far in any particular age the production of
art is stimulated by general exaltation, or general exaltation by works
of art, is a question hardly to be decided. Wisest, perhaps, is he who
says that the two seem to have been interdependent. Just how dependent I
believe them to have been, will appear when, in my next chapter, I
attempt to sketch the rise, decline, and fall of the Christian slope.
III
ART AND ETHICS
Between me and the pleasant places of history remains, however, one ugly
barrier. I cannot dabble and paddle in the pools and shallows of the
past until I have answered a question so absurd that the nicest people
never tire of asking it: "What is the moral justification of art?" Of
course they are right who insist that the creation of art must be
justified on ethical grounds: all human activities must be so justified.
It is the philosopher's privilege to call upon the artist to show that
what he is about is either good in itself or a means to good. It is the
artist's duty to reply: "Art is good because it exalts to a state of
ecstasy better far than anything a benumbed moralist can even guess at;
so shut up." Philosophically he is quite right; only, philosophy is not
so simple as that. Let us try to answer philosophically.
The moralist inquires whether art is either good in itself or a means
to good. Before answering, we will ask what he means by the word "good,"
not because it is in the least doubtful, but to make him think. In fact,
Mr. G.E. Moore has shown pretty conclusively in his _Principia Ethica_
that by "good" everyone means just good. We all know quite well what we
mean though we cannot define it. "Good" can no more be defined than
"Red": no quality can be defined. Nevertheless we know perfectly well
what we mean when we say that a thing is "good" or "red." This is so
obviously true that its statement has greatly disconcerted, not to say
enraged, the orthodox philosophers.
Orthodox philosophers are by no means agreed as to what we do mean by
"good," only they are sure that we cannot mean what we say. They used to
be fond of assuming that "good" meant pleasure; or, at any rate, that
pleasure was the sole good as an end: two very different propositions.
That "good" means "pleasure" and that pleasure is the sole good was the
opinion of the Hedonists, and is still the opinion of any Utilitarians
who may have lingered on into the twentieth century. They enjoy the
honour of being the only ethical fallacies worth the powder and shot of
a writer on art. I can imagine no more delicate or convincing piece of
logic than that by which Mr. G.E. Moore disposes of both. But it is none
of my business to do clumsily what Mr. Moore has done exquisitely. I
have no mind by attempting to reproduce his dialectic to incur the
merited ridicule of those familiar with the _Principia Ethica_ or to
spoil the pleasure of those who will be wise enough to run out this very
minute and order a masterpiece with which they happen to be
unacquainted. For my immediate purpose it is necessary only to borrow
one shaft from that well-stocked armoury.
To him who believes that pleasure is the sole good, I will put this
question: Does he, like John Stuart Mill, and everyone else I ever heard
of, speak of "higher and lower" or "better and worse" or "superior and
inferior" pleasures? And, if so, does he not perceive that he has given
away his case? For, when he says that one pleasure is "higher" or
"better" than another, he does not mean that it is greater in _quantity_
but superior in _quality_.
On page 7 of _Utilitarianism_, J.S. Mill says:--
"If one of the two (pleasures) is, by those who are competently
acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they
prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater
amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of
the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are
justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in
quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in
comparison, of small account."
But if pleasure be the sole good, the only possible criterion of
pleasures is quantity of pleasure. "Higher" or "better" can only mean
containing more pleasure. To speak of "better pleasures" in any other
sense is to make the goodness of the sole good as an end depend upon
something which, _ex hypothesi_, is not good as an end. Mill is as one
who, having set up sweetness as the sole good quality in jam, prefers
Tiptree to Crosse and Blackwell, not because it is sweeter, but because
it possesses a better kind of sweetness. To do so is to discard
sweetness as an ultimate criterion and to set up something else in its
place. So, when Mill, like everyone else, speaks of "better" or
"higher" or "superior" pleasures, he discards pleasure as an ultimate
criterion, and thereby admits that pleasure is not the sole good. He
feels that some pleasures are better than others, and determines their
respective values by the degree in which they possess that quality which
all recognise but none can define--goodness. By higher and lower,
superior and inferior pleasures we mean simply more good and less good
pleasures. There are, therefore, two different qualities, Pleasantness
and Goodness. Pleasure, amongst other things, may be good; but pleasure
cannot mean good. By "good" we cannot mean "pleasureable;" for, as we
see, there is a quality, "goodness," so distinct from pleasure that we
speak of pleasures that are more or less good without meaning pleasures
that are more or less pleasant. By "good," then, we do not mean
"pleasure," neither is pleasure the sole good.
Mr. Moore goes on to inquire what things are good in themselves, as ends
that is to say. He comes to a conclusion with which we all agree, but
for which few could have found convincing and logical arguments: "states
of mind," he shows, alone are good as ends.[9] People who have very
little taste for logic will find a simple and satisfactory proof of this
conclusion afforded by what is called "the method of isolation."
That which is good as an end will retain some, at any rate, of its value
in complete isolation: it will retain all its value as an end. That
which is good as a means only will lose all its value in isolation. That
which is good as an end will remain valuable even when deprived of all
its consequences and left with nothing but bare existence. Therefore, we
can discover whether honestly we feel some thing to be good as an end,
if only we can conceive it in complete isolation, and be sure that so
isolated it remains valuable. Bread is good. Is bread good as an end or
as a means? Conceive a loaf existing in an uninhabited and uninhabitable
planet. Does it seem to lose its value? That is a little too easy. The
physical universe appears to most people immensely good, for towards
nature they feel violently that emotional reaction which brings to the
lips the epithet "good"; but if the physical universe were not related
to mind, if it were never to provoke an emotional reaction, if no mind
were ever to be affected by it, and if it had no mind of its own, would
it still appear good? There are two stars: one is, and ever will be,
void of life, on the other exists a fragment of just living protoplasm
which will never develop, will never become conscious. Can we say
honestly that we feel one to be better than the other? Is life itself
good as an end? A clear judgment is made difficult by the fact that one
cannot conceive anything without feeling something for it; one's very
conceptions provoke states of mind and thus acquire value as means. Let
us ask ourselves, bluntly, can that which has no mind and affects no
mind have value? Surely not. But anything which has a mind can have
intrinsic value, and anything that affects a mind may become valuable as
a means, since the state of mind produced may be valuable in itself.
Isolate that mind. Isolate the state of mind of a man in love or rapt in
contemplation; it does not seem to lose all its value. I do not say that
its value is not decreased; obviously, it loses its value as a means to
producing good states of mind in others. But a certain value does
subsist--an intrinsic value. Populate the lone star with one human mind
and every part of that star becomes potentially valuable as a means,
because it may be a means to that which is good as an end--a good state
of mind. The state of mind of a person in love or rapt in contemplation
suffices in itself. We do not stay to inquire "What useful purpose does
this serve, whom does it benefit, and how?" We say directly and with
conviction--"This is good."
When we are challenged to justify our opinion that anything, other than
a state of mind, is good, we, feeling it to be a means only, do very
properly seek its good effects, and our last justification is always
that it produces good states of mind. Thus, when asked why we call a
patent fertiliser good, we may, if we can find a listener, show that the
fertiliser is a means to good crops, good crops a means to food, food a
means to life, and life a necessary condition of good states of mind.
Further we cannot go. When asked why we hold a particular state of mind
to be good, the state of aesthetic contemplation for instance, we can
but reply that to us its goodness is self-evident. Some states of mind
appear to be good independently of their consequences. No other things
appear to be good in this way. We conclude, therefore, that good states
of mind are alone good as ends.
To justify ethically any human activity, we must inquire--"Is this a
means to good states of mind?" In the case of art our answer will be
prompt and emphatic. Art is not only a means to good states of mind,
but, perhaps, the most direct and potent that we possess. Nothing is
more direct, because nothing affects the mind more immediately; nothing
is more potent, because there is no state of mind more excellent or more
intense than the state of aesthetic contemplation. This being so, to
seek any other moral justification for art, to seek in art a means to
anything less than good states of mind, is an act of wrong-headedness to
be committed only by a fool or a man of genius.
Many fools have committed it and one man of genius has made it
notorious. Never was cart put more obstructively before horse than when
Tolstoi announced that the justification of art was its power of
promoting good actions. As if actions were ends in themselves! There is
neither virtue nor vice in running: but to run with good tidings is
commendable, to run away with an old lady's purse is not. There is no
merit in shouting: but to speak up for truth and justice is well, to
deafen the world with charlatanry is damnable. Always it is the end in
view that gives value to action; and, ultimately, the end of all good
actions must be to create or encourage or make possible good states of
mind. Therefore, inciting people to good actions by means of edifying
images is a respectable trade and a roundabout means to good. Creating
works of art is as direct a means to good as a human being can practise.
Just in this fact lies the tremendous importance of art: there is no
more direct means to good.
To pronounce anything a work of art is, therefore, to make a momentous
moral judgment. It is to credit an object with being so direct and
powerful a means to good that we need not trouble ourselves about any
other of its possible consequences. But even were this not the case, the
habit of introducing moral considerations into judgments between
particular works of art would be inexcusable. Let the moralist make a
judgment about art as a whole, let him assign it what he considers its
proper place amongst means to good, but in aesthetic judgments, in
judgments between members of the same class, in judgments between works
of art considered as art, let him hold his tongue. If he esteem art
anything less than equal to the greatest means to good he mistakes. But
granting, for the sake of peace, its inferiority to some, I will yet
remind him that his moral judgments about the value of particular works
of art have nothing to do with their artistic value. The judge at Epsom
is not permitted to disqualify the winner of the Derby in favour of the
horse that finished last but one on the ground that the latter is just
the animal for the Archbishop of Canterbury's brougham.
Define art as you please, preferably in accordance with my ideas; assign
it what place you will in the moral system; and then discriminate
between works of art according to their excellence in that quality, or
those qualities, that you have laid down in your definition as essential
and peculiar to works of art. You may, of course, make ethical judgments
about particular works, not as works of art, but as members of some
other class, or as independent and unclassified parts of the universe.
You may hold that a particular picture by the President of the Royal
Academy is a greater means to good than one by the glory of the New
English Art Club, and that a penny bun is better than either. In such a
case you will be making a moral and not an aesthetic judgment. Therefore
it will be right to take into account the area of the canvases, the
thickness of the frames, and the potential value of each as fuel or
shelter against the rigours of our climate. In casting up accounts you
should not neglect their possible effects on the middle-aged people who
visit Burlington House and the Suffolk Street Gallery; nor must you
forget the consciences of those who handle the Chantry funds, or of
those whom high prices provoke to emulation. You will be making a moral
and not an aesthetic judgment; and if you have concluded that neither
picture is a work of art, though you may be wasting your time, you will
not be making yourself ridiculous. But when you treat a picture as a
work of art, you have, unconsciously perhaps, made a far more important
moral judgment. You have assigned it to a class of objects so powerful
and direct as means to spiritual exaltation that all minor merits are
inconsiderable. Paradoxical as it may seem, the only relevant qualities
in a work of art, judged as art, are artistic qualities: judged as a
means to good, no other qualities are worth considering; for there are
no qualities of greater moral value than artistic qualities, since there
is no greater means to good than art.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: "An Essay in Aesthetics," by Roger Fry: _The New
Quarterly_, No. 6, vol. ii.]
[Footnote 6: McTaggart: _Some Dogmas of Religion_.]
[Footnote 7: I am aware that there are men of science who preserve an
open mind as to the reality of the physical universe, and recognise that
what is known as "the scientific hypothesis" leaves out of account just
those things that seem to us most real. Doubtless these are the true men
of science; they are not the common ones.]
[Footnote 8: I should not have expected the wars of so-called religion
or the Puritan revolution to have awakened in men a sense of the
emotional significance of the universe, and I should be a good deal
surprised if Sir Edward Carson's agitation were to produce in the
North-East of Ireland a crop of first-rate formal expression.]
[Footnote 9: Formerly he held that inanimate beauty also was good in
itself. But this tenet, I am glad to learn, he has discarded.]
III
THE CHRISTIAN SLOPE
I. THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ART
II. GREATNESS AND DECLINE
III. THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES
IV. ALID EX ALIO
[Illustration: _Photo, Alinari_
BYZANTINE MOSAIC, SIXTH CENTURY
_S. Vitale, Ravenna_]
I
THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ART
What do I mean by a slope? That I hope to make clear in the course of
this chapter and the next. But, as readers may expect something to go on
with, I will explain immediately that, though I recognise the continuity
of the stream of art, I believe that it is possible and proper to divide
that stream into slopes and movements. About the exact line of division
there can be no certainty. It is easy to say that in the passage of a
great river from the hills to the sea, the depth, the width, the colour,
the temperature, and the velocity of the waters are bound to change; to
fix precisely the point of change is another matter. If I try to picture
for myself the whole history of art from earliest times in all parts of
the world I am unable, of course, to see it as a single thread. The
stuff of which it is made is unchangeable, it is always water that flows
down the river, but there is more than one channel: for instance, there
is European art and Oriental. To me the universal history of art has the
look of a map in which several streams descend from the same range of
mountains to the same sea. They start from different altitudes but all
descend at last to one level. Thus, I should say that the slope at the
head of which stand the Buddhist masterpieces of the Wei, Liang, and
T'ang dynasties begins a great deal higher than the slope at the head of
which are the Greek primitives of the seventh century, and higher than
that of which early Sumerian sculpture is the head; but when we have to
consider contemporary Japanese art, Graeco-Roman and Roman sculpture,
and late Assyrian, we see that all have found the same sea-level of
nasty naturalism.