But mere simplification, the elimination of detail, is not enough. The
informatory forms that remain have got to be made significant. The
representative element, if it is not to injure the design, must become a
part of it; besides giving information it has got to provoke aesthetic
emotion. That is where symbolism fails. The symbolist eliminates, but
does not assimilate. His symbols, as a rule, are not significant forms,
but formal intelligencers. They are not integral parts of a plastic
conception, but intellectual abbreviations. They are not informed by the
artist's emotion, they are invented by his intellect. They are dead
matter in a living organism. They are rigid and tight because they are
not traversed by the rhythm of the design. The explanatory legends that
illustrators used to produce from the mouths of their characters are not
more foreign to visual art than the symbolic forms with which many able
draughtsmen have ruined their designs. In the famous "Melancholia," and,
to some extent, in a few other engravings--"St. Eustace," for instance,
and "The Virgin and Child" (B. 34. British Museum),--Dürer has managed
to convert a mass of detail into tolerably significant form; but in the
greater part of his work (_e.g._ "The Knight," "St. Jerome") fine
conception is hopelessly ruined by a mass of undigested symbolism.
Every form in a work of art has, then, to be made aesthetically
significant; also every form has to be made a part of a significant
whole. For, as generally happens, the value of the parts combined
into a whole is far greater than the value of the sum of the parts.
This organisation of forms into a significant whole is called Design;
and an insistence--an exaggerated insistence some will say--on design
is the fourth characteristic of the Contemporary Movement. This
insistence, this conviction that a work should not be good on the whole,
but as a whole, is, no doubt, in part a reaction from the rather too
easy virtue of some of the Impressionists, who were content to cover
their canvases with charming forms and colours, not caring overmuch
whether or how they were co-ordinated. Certainly this was a weakness in
Impressionism--though by no means in all the Impressionist masters--for
it is certain that the profoundest emotions are provoked by significant
combinations of significant forms. Also, it seems certain that only in
these organised combinations can the artist express himself completely.
It seems that an artist creates a good design when, having been
possessed by a real emotional conception, he is able to hold and
translate it. We all agree, I think, that till the artist has had his
moment of emotional vision there can be no very considerable work of
art; but, the vision seen and felt, it still remains uncertain whether
he has the force to hold and the skill to translate it. Of course the
vast majority of pictures fail in design because they correspond to no
emotional vision; but the interesting failures are those in which the
vision came but was incompletely grasped. The painters who have failed
for want of technical skill to set down what they have felt and mastered
could be counted on the fingers of one hand--if, indeed, there are any
to be counted. But on all sides we see interesting pictures in which the
holes in the artist's conception are obvious. The vision was once
perfect, but it cannot be recaptured. The rapture will not return. The
supreme creative power is wanting. There are holes, and they have to be
filled with putty. Putty we all know when we see it--when we feel it. It
is dead matter--literal transcriptions from nature, intellectual
machinery, forms that correspond with nothing that was apprehended
emotionally, forms unfired with the rhythm that thrilled through the
first vision of a significant whole.
There is an absolute necessity about a good design arising, I imagine,
from the fact that the nature of each form and its relation to all the
other forms is determined by the artist's need of expressing exactly
what he felt. Of course, a perfect correspondence between expression and
conception may not be established at the first or the second attempt.
But if the work is to be a success there will come a moment in which the
artist will be able to hold and express completely his hour or minute of
inspiration. If that moment does not come the design will lack
necessity. For though an artist's aesthetic sense enables him, as we
shall see, to say whether a design is right or wrong, only this
masterful power of seizing and holding his vision enables him to make it
right. A bad design lacks cohesion; a good design possesses it; if I
conjecture that the secret of cohesion is the complete realisation of
that thrill which comes to an artist when he conceives his work as a
whole, I shall not forget that it is a conjecture. But it is not
conjecture to say that when we call a design good we mean that, as a
whole, it provokes aesthetic emotion, and that a bad design is a
congeries of lines and colours, individually satisfactory perhaps, but
as a whole unmoving.
For, ultimately, the spectator can determine whether a design is good
or bad only by discovering whether or no it moves him. Having made that
discovery he can go on to criticise in detail; but the beginning of all
aesthetic judgment and all criticism is emotion. It is after I have been
left cold that I begin to notice that defective organisation of forms
which I call bad design. And here, in my judgments about particular
designs, I am still on pretty sure ground: it is only when I attempt to
account for the moving power of certain combinations that I get into the
world of conjecture. Nevertheless, I believe that mine are no bad
guesses at truth, and that on the same hypothesis we can account for the
difference between good and bad drawing.
Design is the organisation of forms: drawing is the shaping of the forms
themselves. Clearly there is a point at which the two commingle, but
that is a matter of no present importance. When I say that drawing is
bad, I mean that I am not moved by the contours of the forms that make
up the work of art. The causes of bad drawing and bad design I believe
to be similar. A form is badly drawn when it does not correspond with a
part of an emotional conception. The shape of every form in a work of
art should be imposed on the artist by his inspiration. The hand of the
artist, I believe, must be guided by the necessity of expressing
something he has felt not only intensely but definitely. The artist must
know what he is about, and what he is about must be, if I am right, the
translation into material form of something that he felt in a spasm of
ecstasy. Therefore, shapes that merely fill gaps will be ill-drawn.
Forms that are not dictated by any emotional necessity, forms that state
facts, forms that are the consequences of a theory of draughtsmanship,
imitations of natural objects or of the forms of other works of art,
forms that exist merely to fill spaces--padding in fact,--all these are
worthless. Good drawing must be inspired, it must be the natural
manifestation of that thrill which accompanies the passionate
apprehension of form.
One word more to close this discussion. No critic is so stupid as to
mean by "bad drawing," drawing that does not represent the model
correctly. The gods of the art schools, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Raffael,
&c. played the oddest tricks with anatomy. Everyone knows that Giotto's
figures are less accurately drawn than those of Sir Edward Poynter; no
one supposes that they are not drawn better. We do possess a criterion
by which we can judge drawing, and that criterion can have nothing to do
with truth to nature. We judge drawing by concentrating our aesthetic
sensibility on a particular part of design. What we mean when we speak
of "good drawing" and "bad drawing" is not doubtful; we mean
"aesthetically moving" and "aesthetically insignificant." Why some
drawing moves and some does not is a very different question. I have put
forward an hypothesis of which I could write a pretty sharp criticism:
that task, however, I leave to more willing hands. Only this I will say:
just as a competent musician knows with certainty when an instrument is
out of tune though the criterion resides nowhere but in his own
sensibility; so a fine critic of visual art can detect lines and colours
that are not alive. Whether he be looking at an embroidered pattern or
at a careful anatomical study, the task is always the same, because the
criterion is always the same. What he has to decide is whether the
drawing is, or is not, aesthetically significant.
Insistence on design is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the
movement. To all are familiar those circumambient black lines that are
intended to give definition to forms and to reveal the construction of
the picture. For almost all the younger artists,--Bonnard is an obvious
exception--affect that architectural method of design which indeed has
generally been preferred by European artists. The difference between
"architectural design" and what I call "imposed design" will be obvious
to anyone who compares a picture by Cézanne with a picture by Whistler.
Better still, compare any first-rate Florentine of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century with any Sung picture. Here are two methods of
achieving the same end, equally good, so far as I can judge, and as
different as possible. We feel towards a picture by Cézanne or Masaccio
or Giotto as we feel towards a Romanesque church; the design seems to
spring upwards, mass piles itself on mass, forms balance each other
masonrywise: there is a sense of strain, and of strength to meet it.
Turn to a Chinese picture; the forms seem to be pinned to the silk or to
be hung from above. There is no sense of thrust or strain; rather there
is the feeling of some creeper, with roots we know not where, that
hangs itself in exquisite festoons along the wall. Though architectural
design is a permanent characteristic of Western art, of four periods I
think it would be fairly accurate to say that it is a characteristic so
dominant as to be distinctive; and they are Byzantine VIth Century,
Byzantine IX-XIIIth Century, Florentine XIVth and XVth Century, and the
Contemporary Movement.
To say that the artists of the movement insist on design is not to deny
that some of them are exceptionally fine colourists. Cézanne is one of
the greatest colourists that ever lived; Henri-Matisse is a great
colourist. Yet all, or nearly all, use colour as a mode of form. They
design in colour, that is in coloured shapes. Very few fall into the
error of regarding colour as an end in itself, and of trying to think of
it as something different from form. Colour in itself has little or no
significance. The mere juxtaposition of tones moves us hardly at all. As
colourists themselves are fond of saying, "It is the quantities that
count." It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his
colours, and the combinations of those shapes, that we recognise the
colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. It is
a virtue in contemporary artists that they have set their faces against
the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour without much
considering their formal relations, and that they attempt so to organise
tones as to raise form to its highest significance. But it is not
surprising that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but
rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those
black lines that seem to do violence to their darling. They are
irritated by pictures in which there is to be no accidental charm of
soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro. They do not admire the austere
determination of these young men to make their work independent and
self-supporting and unbeholden to adventitious dainties. They cannot
understand this passion for works that are admirable as wholes, this
fierce insistence on design, this willingness to leave bare the
construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to a conception
of the plan. Critics of the Impressionist age are vexed by the naked
bones and muscles of Post-Impressionist pictures. But, for my own part,
even though these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness
exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far from blaming a
band of ascetics who in an age of unorganised prettiness insisted on the
paramount importance of design.
III
THE PATHETIC FALLACY
Many of those who are enthusiastic about the movement, were they asked
what they considered its most important characteristic, would reply, I
imagine, "The expression of a new and peculiar point of view."
"Post-Impressionism," I have heard people say, "is an expression of the
ideas and feelings of that spiritual renaissance which is now growing
into a lusty revolution." With this I cannot, of course, agree. If art
expresses anything, it expresses some profound and general emotion
common, or at least possible, to all ages, and peculiar to none. But if
these sympathetic people mean, as I believe they do, that the art of the
new movement is a manifestation of something different from--they will
say larger than--itself, of a spiritual revolution in fact, I will not
oppose them. Art is as good an index to the spiritual state of this age
as of another; and in the effort of artists to free painting from the
clinging conventions of the near past, and to use it as a means only to
the most sublime emotions, we may read signs of an age possessed of a
new sense of values and eager to turn that possession to account. It is
impossible to visit a good modern exhibition without feeling that we are
back in a world not altogether unworthy to be compared with that which
produced primitive art. Here are men who take art seriously. Perhaps
they take life seriously too, but if so, that is only because there are
things in life (aesthetic ecstasy, for instance) worth taking seriously.
In life, they can distinguish between the wood and the few fine trees.
As for art, they know that it is something more important than a
criticism of life; they will not pretend that it is a traffic in
amenities; they know that it is a spiritual necessity. They are not
making handsome furniture, nor pretty knick-knacks, nor tasteful
souvenirs; they are creating forms that stir our most wonderful
emotions.
It is tempting to suppose that art such as this implies an attitude
towards society. It seems to imply a belief that the future will not be
a mere repetition of the past, but that by dint of willing and acting
men will conquer for themselves a life in which the claims of spirit and
emotion will make some headway against the necessities of physical
existence. It seems, I say: but it would be exceedingly rash to assume
anything of the sort, and, for myself, I doubt whether the good artist
bothers much more about the future than about the past. Why should
artists bother about the fate of humanity? If art does not justify
itself, aesthetic rapture does. Whether that rapture is to be felt by
future generations of virtuous and contented artisans is a matter of
purely speculative interest. Rapture suffices. The artist has no more
call to look forward than the lover in the arms of his mistress. There
are moments in life that are ends to which the whole history of humanity
would not be an extravagant means; of such are the moments of aesthetic
ecstasy. It is as vain to imagine that the artist works with one eye on
The Great State of the future, as to go to his art for an expression of
political or social opinions. It is not their attitude towards the State
or towards life, but the pure and serious attitude of these artists
towards their art, that makes the movement significant of the age. Here
are men who refuse all compromise, who will hire no half-way house
between what they believe and what the public likes; men who decline
flatly, and over-stridently sometimes, to concern themselves at all with
what seems to them unimportant. To call the art of the movement
democratic--some people have done so--is silly. All artists are
aristocrats in a sense, since no artist believes honestly in human
equality; in any other sense to call an artist an aristocrat or a
democrat is to call him something irrelevant or insulting. The man who
creates art especially to move the poor or especially to please the rich
prostitutes whatever of worth may be in him. A good many artists have
maimed or ruined themselves by pretending that, besides the distinction
between good art and bad, there is a distinction between aristocratic
art and plebeian. In a sense all art is anarchical; to take art
seriously is to be unable to take seriously the conventions and
principles by which societies exist. It may be said with some justice
that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it insists so
emphatically on fundamentals and challenges so violently the
conventional tradition of art and, by implication, I suppose, the
conventional view of life. By setting art so high, it sets industrial
civilisation very low. Here, then, it may shake hands with the broader
and vaguer spirit of the age; the effort to produce serious art may bear
witness to a stir in the underworld, to a weariness of smug materialism
and a more passionate and spiritual conception of life. The art of the
movement, in so far as it is art, expresses nothing temporal or local;
but it may be a manifestation of something that is happening here and
now, something of which the majority of mankind seems hardly yet to be
aware.
Men and women who have been thrilled by the pure aesthetic significance
of a work of art go away into the outer world in a state of excitement
and exaltation which makes them more sensitive to all that is going
forward about them. Thus, they realise with a heightened intensity the
significance and possibility of life. It is not surprising that they
should read this new sense of life into that which gave it. Not in the
least; and I shall not quarrel with them for doing so. It is far more
important to be moved by art than to know precisely what it is that
moves. I should just like to remind them, though, that if art were no
more than they sometimes fancy it to be, art would not move them as it
does. If art were a mere matter of suggesting the emotions of life a
work of art would give to each no more than what each brought with him.
It is because art adds something new to our emotional experience,
something that comes not from human life but from pure form, that it
stirs us so deeply and so mysteriously. But that, for many, art not only
adds something new, but seems to transmute and enrich the old, is
certain and by no means deplorable.
The fact is, this passionate and austere art of the Contemporary
Movement is not only an index to the general ferment, it is also the
inspiration, and even the standard, of a young, violent, and fierce
generation. It is the most visible and the most successful manifestation
of their will, or they think it is. Political reform, social reform,
literature even, move slowly, ankle-deep in the mud of materialism and
deliquescent tradition. Though not without reason Socialists claim that
Liberals ride their horses, the jockeys still wear blue and buff. Mr.
Lloyd George stands unsteadily on the shoulders of Mr. Gladstone; the
bulk of his colleagues cling on behind. If literature is to be made the
test, we shall soon be wishing ourselves back in the nineteenth
century. Unless it be Thomas Hardy, there is no first-rate novelist in
Europe; there is no first-rate poet; without disrespect to D'Annunzio,
Shaw, or Claudel, it may be said that Ibsen was their better. Since
Mozart, music has just kept her nose above the slough of realism,
romance, and melodrama. Music seems to be where painting was in the time
of Courbet; she is drifting through complex intellectualism and a
brilliant, exasperating realism, to arrive, I hope, at greater
purity.[26] Contemporary painting is the one manifest triumph of the
young age. Not even the oldest and wisest dare try to smile it away.
Those who cannot love Cézanne and Matisse hate them; and they not only
say it, they shriek it. It is not surprising, then, that visual art,
which seems to many the mirror in which they see realised their own
ideals, should have become for some a new religion. Not content with its
aesthetic significance, these seek in art an inspiration for the whole
of life. For some of us, to be sure, the aesthetic significance is a
sufficient inspiration; for the others I have no hard words. To art
they take their most profound and subtle emotions, their most
magnanimous ideas, their dearest hopes; from art they bring away
enriched and purified emotion and exaltation, and fresh sources of both.
In art they imagine that they find an expression of their most intimate
and mysterious feelings; and, though they miss, not utterly but to some
extent, the best that art has to give, if of art they make a religion I
do not blame them.
In the days of Alexander Severus there lived at Rome a Greek freed man.
As he was a clever craftsman his lot was not hard. His body was secure,
his belly full, his hands and brain pleasantly busy. He lived amongst
intelligent people and handsome objects, permitting himself such
reasonable emotions as were recommended by his master, Epicurus. He
awoke each morning to a quiet day of ordered satisfaction, the
prescribed toll of unexacting labour, a little sensual pleasure, a
little rational conversation, a cool argument, a judicious appreciation
of all that the intellect can apprehend. Into this existence burst
suddenly a cranky fanatic, with a religion. To the Greek it seemed that
the breath of life had blown through the grave, imperial streets. Yet
nothing in Rome was changed, save one immortal, or mortal, soul. The
same waking eyes opened on the same objects; yet all was changed; all
was charged with meaning. New things existed. Everything mattered. In
the vast equality of religious emotion the Greek forgot his status and
his nationality. His life became a miracle and an ecstasy. As a lover
awakes, he awoke to a day full of consequence and delight. He had learnt
to feel; and, because to feel a man must live, it was good to be alive.
I know an erudite and intelligent man, a man whose arid life had been
little better than one long cold in the head, for whom that madman, Van
Gogh, did nothing less.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 23: Need I say that this list is not intended to be
exhaustive? It is merely representative.]
[Footnote 24: Let us hope that it will. There certainly are ominous
signs of academization amongst the minor men of the movement. There is
the beginning of a tendency to regard certain simplifications and
distortions as ends in themselves and party badges. There is some danger
of an attempt to impose a formula on the artist's individuality. At
present the infection has not spread far, and the disease has taken a
mild form.]
[Footnote 25: Of course there are some good artists alive who owe
nothing to Cézanne. Fortunately two of Cézanne's contemporaries, Degas
and Renoir, are still at work. Also there are a few who belong to the
older movement, _e.g._ Mr. Walter Sickert, M. Simon Bussy, M. Vuillard,
Mr. J.W. Morrice. I should be as unwilling to omit these names from a
history of twentieth century art as to include them in a chapter devoted
to the contemporary movement.]
[Footnote 26: June 1913. _Ariadne in Naxos._ Is Strauss, our one
musician of genius, himself the pivot on which the wheel is beginning to
swing? Having drained the cup of Wagnerism and turned it upside down, is
he now going to school with Mozart?]
V
THE FUTURE
I. SOCIETY AND ART
II. ART AND SOCIETY
[Illustration: PICASSO]
I
SOCIETY AND ART
To bother much about anything but the present is, we all agree, beneath
the dignity of a healthy human animal. Yet how many of us can resist the
malsane pleasure of puzzling over the past and speculating about the
future? Once admit that the Contemporary Movement is something a little
out of the common, that it has the air of a beginning, and you will
catch yourself saying "Beginning of what?" instead of settling down
quietly to enjoy the rare spectacle of a renaissance. Art, we hope,
serious, alive, and independent is knocking at the door, and we are
impelled to ask "What will come of it?" This is the general question,
which, you will find, divides itself into two sufficiently precise
queries--"What will Society do with Art?" and "What will Art do with
Society?"