any other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to
us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern
world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and
irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still
remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not
arrest that decline. Indeed the Florentines themselves seem not to have
been conscious of it. They thought that the dull imitators of
Michelangelo were greater than his great predecessors. As we say, their
taste became bad, their values were perverted; and with that perversion
all their natural genius for the arts was wasted. To this day Carlo
Dolci is the favourite painter of the ordinary Florentine. He was a man
of some ability, and he painted pictures at once feeble and revolting
because he himself and his public liked such pictures.
There is no accounting for tastes, we say, and in saying that we despair
of progress in the arts. For it is ultimately this unaccountable thing
called taste, and not the absence or presence of genius, which
determines whether the arts shall thrive or decay in any particular age
or country. People often say that they know nothing about art, but that
they do know what they like; and what they imply is that there is
nothing to be known about art except your own likes and dislikes, and
further that no man can control those. The Florentines of the
seventeenth century happened to like Carlo Dolci, where the Florentines
of the fifteenth had liked Botticelli. That is the only explanation we
can give of the decline of Florentine painting.
It is of course no explanation; and because no explanation beyond it has
been given, we are told that there can be no such thing as progress in
the arts. That is the lesson of history. We are far beyond the Egyptians
in science, but certainly not beyond them in art. Indeed one might say
that there has been a continual slow decline in all the arts of Europe,
except music, since the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly
declining since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable
decline of the arts there has been a great advance in nearly everything
else, in knowledge, in power, even in morality. Upon everything man has
been able to exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has really
wished for progress there he has got it, except in this one case.
Therefore it seems that upon the arts he cannot exercise his will, and
that they alone of all his activities are not capable of progress. What
do we mean by progress except the successful exercise of the human will
in a right direction? That is what distinguishes progress from natural
growth; that alone can preserve it from natural processes of decay.
There are people who say that it does not exist, that everything which
happens to man is a natural process of growth or decay. Whether that is
so or not, we do mean by progress something different from these natural
processes. When we speak of it we do imply the exercise of the human
will, man's command over circumstances; and those who deny progress
altogether deny that man has any will or any command over circumstances.
For them things happen to man and that is all, it is not man's will that
makes things happen. But if we use the word progress at all, we imply
that it is man's will that makes things happen. And since man is
evidently liable to decline as well as progress, it follows that if we
believe man to be capable of exercising his will in a right direction we
must also believe that he can and does exercise it in a wrong direction.
I assume that man has this power both for good and for evil. If I did
not, I should not be addressing you upon the question whether man is
capable of progress in the arts, but upon the question whether he is
capable of progress at all. And I should be trying to prove that he is
not.
As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he has the power of
exercising for good or evil his will upon the arts as upon other things;
and hitherto I have been giving you certain facts in the history of the
arts which seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to this--that
man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising his will upon the arts;
that he has not produced good art because he wished to produce it. We,
for instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more power than the
ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we have not been able to apply that
power to the arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence. We
cannot build like our forefathers of the Middle Ages, we cannot make
furniture like our great-grandfathers of the eighteenth century. Go into
an old churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and present.
You will see that the lettering is always fine up to the first
generation of the nineteenth century. In that generation there is a
rapid decline; and since about 1830 there has been no decent lettering
upon tombstones except what has been produced in the last ten years or
so by the conscious effort of a few individual artists of great natural
talent and high training. If I want good lettering on a tombstone I have
to employ one of these artists and to pay him a high price for his
talent and his training. But that is only one example of a universal
decline in all the arts of use, a decline which happened roughly between
the years 1800 and 1830. And the significant fact about it is that when
it happened no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic
catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known to us in the
whole course of history, was never even mentioned in contemporary
literature. The poets, the lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They
talked about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in the
letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of it in some sayings
of Blake; but that is all. One would suppose that such a catastrophe
would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied
with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was
passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle
to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not
aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all
things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased
them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again that there is
no accounting for tastes, and no test that we can apply to them. When
science declines, men at least know that they have less power. They are
more subject to pestilence when they forget medicine and sanitation;
their machines become useless to them when they no longer know how to
work them; there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill. But
when their taste decays they do not know that it has decayed. And with
it decays their artistic capacity, so that, quite complacently, they
lose the power of doing decently a thousand things that their fathers
did excellently.
But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new fact in human history.
The arts have declined, but our complacency over their decline has
ceased. The first man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw
the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was aware of it; suddenly
he escaped from the universal tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He
was the first to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first
to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he liked. And he
was followed with more knowledge and practical power, in fact with more
science, by William Morris. What both of these great men really said was
that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men do not know what
they like, that they do not apply their intellect and will to what they
suppose to be their likes and dislikes, and that they could apply their
intellect and will to these things if they chose.
When we say that there is no accounting for tastes we imply that tastes
are always real, that, whether good or bad, they happen to men without
any exercise of their will. But Ruskin and Morris implied that we must
exercise our will and our intelligence to discover what our tastes
really are; that this discovery is not at all easy, but that, if we do
not make it, we are at the mercy, not of our own real tastes, but of an
unreal thing which is called the public taste, or of equally unreal
reactions against it. We think that we like what we suppose other people
to like, and these other people too think that they like what no one
really likes. Or in mere blind reaction we think that we dislike what
the mob likes. But in either case our likes and dislikes are not ours at
all and, what is more, they are no one's. Taste in fact is bad because
it is not any one's taste, because no one's will is exercised in it or
upon it. When it is good, it is always real taste, that is to say some
real person's taste. In the work of art the artist does what he really
likes to do and expresses some real passion of his own, not some passion
which he believes that he, as an artist, ought to express. Art, said
Morris, is the expression of the workman's pleasure in his work. It
cannot be real art unless it is a real pleasure. And so the public will
not demand real art unless they too take a real pleasure in it. If they
do not know what they really like, they will not demand of the artist
what they really like or what he really likes. They will demand
something tiresome and insincere, and by the tyranny of their demand
will set him to produce it.
That was what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century in
nearly all the arts and especially in the arts of use. It had happened
before in different ages and countries, especially in painting,
sculpture, architecture, and the arts of use as they were patronized by
the vulgar rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it happened
suddenly and universally to all arts. There were no longer vulgar rich
only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there
spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this
I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the
cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do,
because they were the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias,
geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because
any one thought them more beautiful, but because, since they were grown
in green-houses, they implied the possession of green-houses and so of
wealth. They did not, of course, even do that, since they could be
bought very cheaply from nurserymen. They implied only the bad taste of
snobbery which is the absence of all real taste. For it is physically
impossible for any one to like such a combination of plants better than
larkspurs and lilies and roses. What they did enjoy was not the flowers
themselves but their association with gentility. But so strong was the
contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw
away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so
detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage
gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now
is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias,
calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as
it was once one of social superiority. But what it never was and never
could be was an expression of a genuine liking.
Now I owe the very fact that I am able to give this account of a simple
perversion of taste to Ruskin and Morris. It was they who first made the
world aware that its taste was perverted and that most of its art was
therefore bad. It was they who filled us with the conviction of artistic
sin, and who also in a manner entirely scientific tried to discover what
was the nature of this sin and how it had come about. First Ruskin
tentatively, and afterwards Morris systematically and out of his own
vast artistic experience, connected this decay of the arts with certain
social conditions. It was not merely that taste had decayed or that the
arts had developed to a point beyond which there was nothing for them
but decline. Morris insisted that there were causes for the decay of
taste and the decline of the arts, causes as much subject to the will of
man as the causes of any kind of social decay or iniquity. He insisted
that a work of art is not an irrational mystery, not something that
happens and may happen well or ill; but that all art is intimately
connected with the whole of our social well-being. It is in fact an
expression of what we value, and if we value noble things it will be
noble, if we pretend to value base things it will be base.
Whistler said that this was not so. He insisted that genius is born, not
made, and that some peoples have artistic capacity, some have not. Now
it is true that nations vary very much in their artistic capacity and in
the strength of their desire to produce art. But even the nations which
have little artistic capacity and little desire to produce art have in
their more primitive state produced charming works of real art. Whistler
gave the case of the Swiss as an excellent people with little capacity
for art. But the old Swiss chalets are full of character and beauty, and
there are churches in Switzerland which have all the beauty of the
Middle Ages. The cuckoo clocks and other Swiss articles of commerce
which Whistler despised are contemptible, not because they are Swiss,
but because they are tourist trash produced by workmen who express no
pleasure of their own in them for visitors who buy them only because
they think they are characteristic of Switzerland. They are, in fact,
not the expression of any genuine taste or liking whatever, like the
tourist trash that is sold in the Rue de Rivoli. Probably the Swiss
would never be capable of producing works of art like Chartres Cathedral
or Don Giovanni, but they have in the past possessed a genuine and
delightful art of their own like nearly every European nation in the
Middle Ages.
So, though genius is born, it is also made, and though nations differ in
artistic capacity, they all have some artistic capacity so long as they
know what they like and express only their own liking in their art, so
long as they are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism.
This we know now, and we have developed a new and remarkable power of
seeing and enjoying all the genuine art of the past. This power is part
of the historical sense which is itself modern. In the past, until the
nineteenth century, very few people could see any beauty or meaning in
any art of the past that did not resemble the art of their own time and
country. The whole art of the Middle Ages, for instance, was thought to
be merely barbarous until the Gothic revival, and so was the art of all
the past so far as it was known, except the later art of Greece and
Rome. For our ancestors' taste did indeed happen as art happened, and
they could not escape from the taste which circumstances imposed on
them; any art that was not according to that taste was for them as it
were in an unknown tongue. But we have made this great progress in
taste, at least, if not in the production of art, that we can understand
nearly all artistic languages, and that what used to be called classical
art has lost its old superstitious prestige for us. Not only can we
enjoy the art of our own Middle Ages; but many of us can enjoy and
understand just as well the great art of Egypt and China, and can see as
clearly when that art is good or bad as if it were of our own time. We
have, in fact, in the matter of artistic appreciation gained the freedom
of all the ages, and this is a thing that has never, so far as we know,
happened before in the history of the human mind.
But still this freedom of all the ages has not enabled us to produce a
great art of our own. There are some, indeed, who think that it has
hindered us from doing so, that we are becoming merely universal
connoisseurs who can criticize anything and produce nothing. We have the
most wonderful museums that ever were, and the most wonderful power of
enjoying all that is in them, but, with all our riches from the past,
our present is barren; and it is barren because our rich men would
rather pay great prices for past treasures than encourage artists to
produce masterpieces now. If that is so, if that is all that is coming
to us from our freedom of all the ages, there is certainly not progress
in it. Better that we should produce and enjoy the humblest genuine art
of our own than that we should continue in this learned impotence.
But this power of enjoying the art of all ages, though it certainly has
had some unfortunate results, must be good in itself. It is sympathy,
and that is always better than indifference or antipathy. It is
knowledge, and that is always better than ignorance. And we have to
remember that it has existed only for a short time and is, therefore,
not yet to be judged by its fruits. We are still gasping at all the
artistic treasures of the past that have been revealed to us like a new
world; and still they are being revealed to our new perceptions. Only in
the last ten years, for instance, have we discovered that Chinese
painting is the rival of Italian, or that the golden age of Chinese
pottery was centuries before the time of that Chinese porcelain which we
have hitherto admired so much. The knowledge, the delight, is still
being gathered in with both hands. It is too soon to look for its
effects upon the mind of Europe.
But it is not the result of mere barren connoisseurship or
scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new effort of the human
spirit, and an effort after what? An effort to exert the human will in
the matter of art far more consciously than it has exerted ever before.
It is to be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us that we
must exert our wills in art, was also himself eager in the discovery and
enjoyment of all kinds of art in the past. He had his prejudices, the
prejudices of a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I see in
Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?' But he enjoyed the
art of most ages and countries more than he enjoyed his prejudices. He
had the historical sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the
artist long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his own
language, and from the art of the past which he loved he saw what was
wrong with the art of our time. So did Ruskin and so do many now.
Further we are not in the least content to admire the art of the past
without producing any of our own. There is incessant restless
experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant effort to
apply them to the actual production of art, in fact to exert the
conscious human will upon art as it has never been exerted before.
So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity of the last
century in the history of art, one would say that it is the first age in
which men have rebelled against the process of decadence in art, in
which they have been completely conscious of that process and have tried
to arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say that that
effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either that it has failed. We
may be discontented with the art of our own time, but at least we must
allow that it is, with all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and
blind experiments, utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence
known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere
pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always
following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin
in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past have
lacked.
The artistic decadence of the past which is most familiar to us is that
of the later Graeco-Roman art. It was a long process which began at
least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of
the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, the decadent
classical art was utterly supplanted by the art which we call Romanesque
and Byzantine, and which seems to us now at its best to be as great as
any art that has ever been.
But a hundred years ago this Romanesque and Byzantine art was thought to
be only a barbarous corruption of the classical art. For then the
classical art even in its last feebleness still kept its immense and
unique prestige. Shelley said that the effect of Christianity seemed to
have been to destroy the last remains of pure taste, and he said this
when he had been looking at the great masterpieces of Byzantine mosaic
at Ravenna. Now we know with an utter certainty that he was wrong. He
was himself a great artist, but to him there was only one rational and
beautiful and civilized art, and that was the decadent Graeco-Roman art.
To him works like the Apollo Belvedere were the masterpieces of the
world, and all other art was good as it resembled them. He and in fact
most people of his time were still overawed by the immense complacency
of that art. They had not the historical sense at all. They had no
notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar
to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless
it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that
characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there
may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage
than in the Laocoon.
This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed to inevitable decay
because of its immense complacency. The artists had discovered, as they
thought, the right way to produce works of art, and they went on
producing them in that way without asking themselves whether they meant
anything by them or whether they enjoyed them. They knew, in fact, what
was the proper thing to do just as conventional people now know what is
the proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art was as
uninteresting as the conversation of such people. In both the talk and
the art there is no expression of real values and so no expression of
real will. The past lies heavy upon both. So people have talked, so
artists have worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists must
work for evermore.
Now we have been threatened with just the same kind of artistic
decadence, and we are still threatened with it; so that it would be very
easy to argue that, when men reach a certain stage in that organization
of their lives which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall
into artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to a high stage of
such organization, and all the life went out of its art. We have reached
perhaps a still higher or at least more elaborate stage of it, and the
life has gone or is going out of our art. It has become even more
mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost the power of
expressing ourselves, our real values, our real will, in it; and we had
better submit to that impotence and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art
really is an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human mind,
and we shall do well not to waste our time and energy upon it. That is
the only way in which we can be superior to the Graeco-Roman world in
the matter of art. We can give it up altogether or rather put it all
into museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for historical and
scientific purposes.