such a counsel of despair. The Romans went on producing art, even if it
was bad art, and we shall certainly go on producing art whether it is
good or bad. We have produced an immense mass of bad art, worse perhaps
than any that the Roman world produced. But there is this difference
between us and the Romans, that we are not content with it. We have the
conviction of artistic sin and they had not. Therefore we do not think
that their example need make us despair. They were not exercising their
will on their art. It was to them what a purely conventional morality is
to a morally decadent people. It went from bad to worse, just as
conventional morals do, when no man arises and says: 'This is wrong,
although you think it right. I know what is right from my own sense of
values, and I will do it in spite of you.' So far as we know, there were
no rebels of that kind in the art of the Graeco-Roman world. But our
world of art is full of such rebels and has been ever since the artistic
debacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact the chief
and the unique characteristic of the art of the last hundred years has
been the constant succession of artistic rebels. All our greatest
artists have been men who were determined to exercise their own wills in
their art, whatever the mass of men might think of it. And what has
always happened is that they have been first bitterly abused and then
passionately praised. This, so far as I know, has never happened before.
There have been rebel artists like Rembrandt, but only a few of them.
Most great artists before the nineteenth century have been admired in
their own time. But in the nineteenth century, and more and more towards
the end of it, the great artists have had to conquer the world with
their rebellion, they have had to exercise their own individual wills
against the common convention. And it seems to us now the mark of the
great artist so to exercise his individual will, so to rebel and conquer
the world with his rebellion, even if he kills himself in the process.
Think of Constable and even Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above
all of nearly all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of
Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but
only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of
all the rebel musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists,
Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach,
Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer
the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world
knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman
world were not rebels. There they were like Michelangelo and Raphael, if
they were like them in nothing else. If they had been rebels we might
not yawn at their works now.
Now, clearly, this rebellion is not so good a thing as the harmony
between the artist and his public which has prevailed in all great ages
of art. But it is better than the harmony of dull and complacent
convention which prevailed in the Graeco-Roman decadence. For it means
that our artists are not content with such complacence, that they will
not accept decadence as an inevitable process. And the fact that we do
passionately admire them for their rebellion as soon as we understand
what it means, that this rebellion seems to us a glorious and heroic
thing, is a proof that we, the public, also are not content to sink into
the Graeco-Roman complacency. We may stone our prophets at first, but
like the Hebrews, we produce prophets as well as priests, that is to say
academicians. And we treasure their works as the Hebrews treasured the
books of the prophets.
Art, in fact, is a human activity in which we try to exercise our wills.
We are aware that it is threatened with decadence by the mere process of
our civilization, that it is much more difficult for us to produce
living art than it was for our forefathers of the Middle Ages. But still
we are not content to produce dead art. Half unconsciously we are making
the effort to exercise our wills upon our art, as upon our science, our
morals, our politics, to avoid decadence in art as we try to avoid it in
other human activities; and this effort is the great experiment, the
peculiar feature, of the art of the last century.
It is an effort not merely aesthetic but also intellectual. There is a
great interest in aesthetics and a constant and growing effort to
charge them with actual experience and to put them to some practical
end. In the past they have been the most backward, the most futile and
barren, kind of philosophy because men wrote about them who had never
really experienced works of art and who saw no connexion between their
philosophy and the production of works of art. They talked about the
nature of the beautiful, as schoolmen talked about the nature of God.
And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful from their own
experience of it than schoolmen knew about the nature of God. But now
men are interested in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the
present works of men and because they so passionately desire it; and
their speculation has the aim of recovering it. So aesthetics, whatever
some artists in their peculiar and pontifical narrowness may say, is of
great importance now; they are part of the effort which the modern world
is making to exercise its will in the production of works of art, and
they are bound, if that effort is successful, to have more and more
effect upon that production.
But is that effort going to be successful? That is a question which no
one can answer yet. But my object is to insist that in our age, because
of its effort, an effort which has never been made so consciously and
resolutely before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the
same nature as progress in other human activities. If we can escape from
what has seemed to some men this inexorable process of decadence in art,
we shall have accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the human
will. We shall have redeemed art from the tyranny of mere fate.
What we have to do now is to understand what it is that causes decadence
in art, we have to apply a conscious science to the production of it. We
have to see what are the social causes that produce excellence and
decay in it. And we have made a great beginning in this. For we are all
aware that art is not an isolated thing, that it does not merely happen,
as Whistler said. We know that it is a symptom of something right or
wrong with the whole mind of man and with the circumstances that affect
that mind. We know at last that there is a connexion between the art of
man and his intellect and his conscience. It was because William Morris
saw that connexion that he, from being a pure artist, became a socialist
and spoke at street corners. Such a change, such a waste and perversion
as it seemed to many, would have been impossible in any former age. It
was possible and inevitable, it was a natural process for Morris in the
nineteenth century, because he was determined to exercise his will upon
art, just as men in the past had exercised their will upon religion or
politics; because he no longer believed that art happened as the weather
happens and that the artist is a charming but irresponsible child swayed
merely by the caprices of his own private subconsciousness. Was he right
or wrong? I myself firmly believe that he was right. That if man has a
will at all, if he is not a mere piece of matter moulded by
circumstances, he has a will in art as in all other things. And,
further, if he has a common will which can express itself in his other
activities, in religion or politics, that common will must also be able
to express itself in art. It has not hitherto done so consciously,
because man in all periods of artistic success has been content to
succeed without asking why he succeeded, and in all periods of artistic
failure he has been content to fail without asking why he has failed. We
have been for long living in a period of artistic failure, but we have
asked, we are asking always more insistently, why we fail. And that is
where our time differs from any former period of artistic decadence,
why, I believe, it is not a period of decadence but one of experiment,
and of experiment which will not be wasted, however much it may seem at
the moment to fail. But if out of all this conscious effort and
experiment we do arrest the process of decadence, if we do pass from
failure to success, then we shall have accomplished a progress in art
such as has never been accomplished before even in the greatest ages.
For whereas men have never been able to learn from the experience of
those ages, whereas the Greeks and the men of the thirteenth century
have not taught men how to avoid decadence in art, we and our children
will teach them how to avoid it. We shall then have given a security to
art such as it has never enjoyed before; and we shall do that by
applying science to it, by using the conscious intelligence upon it.
We may fail, of course, but even so our effort will not have been in
vain. And some future age in happier circumstances may profit by it, and
achieve that progress, that application of science to art, which we are
now attempting.
Many people, especially artists, tell us that the attempt is a mere
absurdity. But ignorance even about art need not be eternal. Ignorance
is eternal only when it is despairing or contented. Twenty years ago
many people said that men never would be able to fly, yet they are
flying now because they were resolved to fly. So we are more and more
resolved to have great art. Every year we feel the lack of it more and
more. Every year more people exercise their wills more and more
consciously in the effort to achieve it. This, I repeat, has never
happened before in the history of the world. And the consequence is that
our art, what real art we have, is unlike any that there has been in the
world before. It is so strange and so rebellious that we ourselves are
shocked and amazed by it. Much of it, no doubt, is merely strange and
rebellious, as much of early Christianity was merely strange and
rebellious and so provoked the resentment and persecution of
self-respecting pagans. Every great effort of the human mind attracts
those who merely desire their own salvation, and so it is with the
artistic effort now. There are cubists and futurists and
post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because
they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They
are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable
than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the
early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort
which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the
past, and men could not endure to live without life and truth in their
religion. So now they cannot endure to live without life and truth in
their art. They are determined to have an art which shall express all
that they have themselves experienced of the beauty of the universe,
which shall not merely utter platitudes of the past about that beauty.
So far perhaps there is little but the effort at expression, an effort
strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can say your worst about it and
laugh at all its failures. Yet they are failures different in kind from
the artistic failures of the past, for they are failures of the
conscious will, not of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all
human activities that prepare the way for successes.
Let us remember then, always, that art is a human activity, not a fairy
chance that happens to the mind of man now and again. And let us
remember, too, that it does not consist merely of pictures or statues or
of music performed in concert-rooms. It is, indeed, rather a quality of
all things made by man, a quality that may be good or bad but which is
always in them. That is one of the facts about art that was discovered
in the nineteenth century, when men began to miss the excellence of art
in all their works and to wish passionately that its excellence might
return to them. And this discovery which was then made about art was of
the greatest practical importance. For then men became aware that they
could not have good pictures or architecture or sculpture unless the
quality of art became good again in all their works. So much they learnt
about the science of art. They began, or some of them did, to think
about their furniture and cottages and pots and pans and spoons and
forks, and even about their tombstones, as well as about what had been
called their works of art. And in all these humbler things an advance, a
conscious resolute wilful advance, has been made. We begin to see when
and also why spoons and forks and pots and pans are good or bad. We are
less at the mercy of chance or blind fashion in such things than our
fathers were. We know our vulgarity and the naughtiness of our own
hearts. The advance, the self-knowledge, is not general yet, but it
grows more general every year and the conviction of sin spreads. No
doubt, like all conviction of sin, it often produces unpleasant results.
The consciously artistic person often has a more irritating house than
his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple
pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out
for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and
there was none in paganism.
The title of this book is _Progress and History_, and it may justly be
complained that the progress of which I have been talking is not
historic, but a progress that has not yet happened and may never happen
at all. But that I think is a defect of my particular branch of the
subject. Progress in art, if progress is anything more than a natural
process of growth to be followed inevitably by a natural process of
decay, has never yet happened in art; but there is now an effort to make
it happen, an effort to exercise the human will in art more completely
and consciously than it has ever been exercised before. Therefore I
could do nothing but attempt to describe that effort and to speculate
upon its success.
X
PROGRESS IN SCIENCE
F.S. MARVIN
'L'Esprit travaillant sur les donnees de l'experience.'
The French phrase, neater as usual than our own, may be taken as the
starting-point in our discussion. We shall put aside such questions as
what an experience is, or how much the mind itself supplies in each
experience, or what, if anything, is the not-mind upon which the mind
works. We must leave something for the chapter on philosophy; and the
present chapter is primarily historical. Having defined what we mean by
science, we are to consider at what stage in history the working of the
mind on experience can be called scientific, in what great strides
science has leapt forward since its definite formation, and in what ways
this growth of science has affected general progress, both by its action
on the individual and on the welfare and unity of mankind.
Our French motto must be qualified in order to give us precision in our
definition and a starting-point in history for science in the strict
sense. In a general sense the action of the mind upon the given in
experience has been going on from the beginning of animal life. But
science, strictly so-called, does not appear till men have been
civilized and settled in large communities for a considerable time. We
cannot ascribe 'science' to the isolated savage gnawing bones in his
cave, though the germs are there, in every observation that he makes of
the world around him and every word that he utters to his mates. But we
may begin to speak of science when we reach those large and ordered
societies which are found in the great river-basins and sedentary
civilizations of East and West, especially in Egypt and Chaldea.
When we turn to the quality of the thing itself, we note in the first
place that while science may be said to begin with mere description, it
implies from the first a certain degree of order and accuracy, and this
order and accuracy increase steadily as science advances. It is thus a
type of progress, for it is a constant growth in the fullness, accuracy
and simplification of our experience. From the dawn of science,
therefore, man must have acquired standards and instruments of
measurement and means of handing on his observations to others. Thus
writing must have been invented. But in the second place, there is
always involved in this orderly description, so far as it is scientific,
the element of prediction. The particular description is not scientific.
'I saw a bird fly' is not a scientific description, however accurate;
but 'The bird flies by stretching out its wings' is. It contains that
causal connexion or element of generality which enables us to predict.
Before entering on a historical sketch of the most perfect example of
human progress, it is of the first importance to realize its social
foundation. This is the key-note, and it connects science throughout with
the other aspects of our subject. Knowledge depends upon the free
intercourse of mind with mind, and man advances with the increase and
better direction of his knowledge. But when we consider the implications
of any generalization which we can call 'a law of nature' the social
co-operation involved becomes still more apparent. Geometry and
astronomy--the measurement of the earth and the measurement of the
heavens--dispute the honour of the first place in the historical order.
Both, of course, involved the still more fundamental conception of number
and the acceptance of some unit for measurement. Now in each case and at
every step a long previous elaboration is implied of intellectual
conventions and agreements--conscious and unconscious--between many minds
stretching back to the beginnings of conscious life: the simplest element
of thought involves the co-operation of individual minds in a common
product. Language is such a common product of social life and it prepares
the ground for science. But science, as the exact formulation of general
truths, attains a higher degree of social value, because it rises above
the idioms of person or race and is universally acceptable in form and
essence. Such is the intrinsic nature of the process, and the historical
circumstances of its beginnings make it clear. It was the quick mind of
the Greek which acted as the spark to fire the trains of thought and
observation which had been accumulating for ages through the agency of the
priests in Egypt and Babylonia. The Greeks lived and travelled between the
two centres, and their earliest sages and philosophers were men of the
most varied intercourse and occupation. Their genius was fed by a wide
sympathy and an all-embracing curiosity. No other people could have
demonstrated so well the social nature of science from its inception, and
they were planting in a soil well prepared. In Egypt conspicuously and in
Chaldea also to a less extent there had been a social order which before
the convulsions of the last millennium B.C. had lasted substantially
unchanged for scores of centuries. This order was based upon a religious
discipline which connected the sovereigns on earth with the divine power
ruling men from the sky. Hence the supreme importance of the priesthood
and their study of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The calendar,
which they were the first to frame, was thus not only or even primarily a
work of practical utility but of religious meaning and obligation. The
priests had to fix in advance the feast days of gods and kings by
astronomical prediction. Their standards and their means of measurement
were rough approximations. Thus the 360 degrees into which the Babylonians
taught us to divide the circle are thought to have been the nearest round
number to the days of the year. The same men were also capable of the more
accurate discovery that the side of a hexagon inscribed in a circle was
equal to the radius and gave us our division of sixty minutes and sixty
seconds with all its advantages for calculation. In Egypt, if the
surveyors were unaware of the true relation between a triangle and the
rectangle on the same base, they had yet established the carpenter's rule
of 3, 4 and 5 for the sides of a right-angled triangle.
How much the Greeks drew from the ancient priesthoods we shall never
know, nor how far the priests had advanced in those theories of general
relations which we call scientific. But one or two general conclusions
as to this initial stage of scientific preparation may well be drawn.
One is that a certain degree of settlement and civilization was
necessary for the birth of science. This we find in these great
theocracies, where sufficient wealth enabled a class of leisured and
honoured men to devote themselves to joint labour in observing nature
and recording their observations. Another point is clear, namely, that
the results of these early observations, crude as they were, contributed
powerfully to give stability to the societies in which they arose. The
younger Pliny points out later the calming effect of Greek astronomy on
the minds of the Eastern peoples, and we are bound to carry back the
same idea into the ancient settled communities where astronomy began and
where so remarkable an order prevailed for so long during its
preparation.
But however great the value we allow to the observations of the priests,
it is to the Ionian Greeks that we owe the definite foundation of
science in the proper sense; it was they who gave the raw material the
needed accuracy and generality of application, A comparison of the
societies in the nearer East to which we have referred, with the history
of China affords the strongest presumption of this. In the later
millenniums B.C. the Chinese were in many points ahead of the
Babylonians and Egyptians. They had made earlier predictions of eclipses
and more accurate observations of the distance of the sun from the
zenith at various places. They had, too, seen the advantages of a
decimal system both in weights and measures and in the calculations of
time. But no Greek genius came to build the house with the bricks that
they had fashioned, and in spite of the achievements of the Chinese they
remained until our own day the type in the world of a settled and
contented, although unprogressive, conservatism.
Science then among its other qualities contains a force of social
movement, and our age of rapid transformation has begun to do fuller
justice to the work of the Greeks, the greatest source of intellectual
life and change in the world. We are now fully conscious of the defects
in their methods, the guesses which pass for observations, the
metaphysical notions which often take the place of experimental
results.[80] But having witnessed the latest strides in the unification
of science on mathematical lines, we are more and more inclined to prize
the geometry and astronomy of the Greeks, who gave us the first
constructions on which the modern mechanical theories of the universe
are based. We shall quote from them here only sufficient illustrations
to explain and justify this statement.
The first shall be what is called Euclidean geometry, but which is in
the main the work of the Pythagorean school of thinkers and social
reformers who flourished from the seventh to the fifth centuries B.C.
This formed the greater part of the geometrical truth known to mankind
until Descartes and the mathematicians recommenced the work in the
seventeenth century. The second greatest contribution of the Greeks was
the statics and the conics of which Archimedes was the chief creator in
the third century B.C. In his work he gave the first sketch of an
infinitesimal calculus and in his own way performed an integration. The
third invaluable construction was the trigonometry by which Hipparchus
for the first time made a scientific astronomy possible. The fourth, the
optics of Ptolemy based on much true observation and containing an
approximation to the general law.
These are a few outstanding landmarks, peaks in the highlands of Greek
science, and nothing has been said of their zoology or medicine. In all
these cases it will be seen that the advance consisted in bringing
varying instances under the same rule, in seeing unity in difference, in
discovering the true link which held together the various elements in
the complex of phenomena. That the Greek mind was apt in doing this is
cognate to their idealizing turn in art. In their statues they show us
the universal elements in human beauty; in their science, the true
relations that are common to all triangles and all cones.