[Illustration:
Maya Sculpture (portion) from Piedras Negras
Frontispiece]
VISION AND DESIGN
BY
ROGER FRY
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1920
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED
LONDON AND BECCLES
PREFACE
This book contains a selection from my writings on Art extending over a
period of twenty years. Some essays have never before been published in
England; and I have also added a good deal of new matter and made slight
corrections throughout. In the laborious work of hunting up lost and
forgotten publications, and in the work of selection, revision, and
arrangement I owe everything to Mr. R. R. Tatlock’s devoted and patient
labour.
DEDICATED
TO
MY SISTER MARGERY
WITHOUT WHOSE GENTLE BUT PERSISTENT PRESSURE
THIS BOOK WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN MADE
CONTENTS
PAGE
ART AND LIFE 1
AN ESSAY IN ÆSTHETICS 11
THE OTTOMAN AND THE WHATNOT 26
THE ARTIST’S VISION 31
ART AND SOCIALISM 36
ART AND SCIENCE 52
THE ART OF THE BUSHMEN 56
NEGRO SCULPTURE 65
ANCIENT AMERICAN ART 69
THE MUNICH EXHIBITION OF MOHAMMEDAN ART 76
GIOTTO 87
THE ART OF FLORENCE 117
THE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ COLLECTION 123
DÜRER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 127
EL GRECO 134
THREE PICTURES IN TEMPERA BY WILLIAM BLAKE 140
CLAUDE 145
AUBREY BEARDSLEY’S DRAWINGS 153
THE FRENCH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS 156
DRAWINGS AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB 160
PAUL CÉZANNE 168
RENOIR 175
A POSSIBLE DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE 179
JEAN MARCHAND 184
RETROSPECT 188
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TO FACE PAGE
MAYA SCULPTURE (PORTION) FROM PIEDRAS NEGRAS _Frontispiece_
THIRTEENTH-CENTURY SCULPTURE IN THE CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN LATERAN 9
GROUP FROM _THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS_. BY AUGUSTE RODIN 9
SCULPTURE IN PLASTER. BY HENRI-MATISSE 9
_LA DONNA GRAVIDA._ BY RAPHAEL 10
PORTRAIT OF MISS GERTRUDE STEIN. BY PABLO PICASSO 10
NEGRO SCULPTURE 66
FATIMITE BRONZES 80
PERSIAN PAINTING, END OF THIRTEENTH CENTURY 86
_PIETÀ._ BY GIOTTO 108
_CRUCIFIXION._ BY CASTAGNO 117
_ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON._ BY UCELLO 123
_VIRGIN AND CHILD._ BY BALDOVINETTI 125
_HOLY FAMILY._ BY SIGNORELLI 126
_THE CALUMNY OF APELLES._ BY REMBRANDT, MANTEGNA, DÜRER 131
CELESTIAL SPHERE. TAROCCHI PRINT 132
CELESTIAL SPHERE. BY DÜRER 132
ALLEGORY. BY EL GRECO 136
_BATHSHEBA._ BY WILLIAM BLAKE 142
LANDSCAPE. BY CLAUDE 148
LANDSCAPE IN WATER-COLOUR. BY CLAUDE 150
_TEA PARTY._ BY HENRI-MATISSE 156
STILL LIFE. BY PABLO PICASSO 156
_PROFILE._ BY GEORGES ROUAULT 159
_APOTHEOSIS OF NAPOLEON._ BY INGRES 163
PENCIL DRAWING. BY COROT 165
PEN DRAWING. BY HENRI-MATISSE 166
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST. BY CÉZANNE 168
_GARDANNE._ BY CÉZANNE 170
_SCÈNE DE PLEIN AIR._ BY CÉZANNE 172
THE ARTIST’S WIFE. BY CÉZANNE 172
_LE RUISSEAU._ BY CÉZANNE 174
_JUDGEMENT OF PARIS._ BY RENOIR 176
STILL LIFE. BY MARCHAND 184
_LA BAIGNADE._ BY SEURAT 190
STILL LIFE. BY DERAIN 192
_THE TRANSFIGURATION._ BY RAPHAEL 196
VISION AND DESIGN
ART AND LIFE[1]
When we look at ancient works of art we habitually treat them not merely
as objects of æsthetic enjoyment but also as successive deposits of the
human imagination. It is indeed this view of works of art as
crystallised history that accounts for much of the interest felt in
ancient art by those who have but little æsthetic feeling and who find
nothing to interest them in the work of their contemporaries where the
historical motive is lacking and they are left face to face with bare
æsthetic values.
I once knew an old gentleman who had retired from his city office to a
country house--a fussy, feeble little being who had cut no great figure
in life. He had built himself a house which was preternaturally hideous;
his taste was deplorable and his manners indifferent; but he had a
dream, the dream of himself as an exquisite and refined intellectual
dandy living in a society of elegant frivolity. To realise this dream he
had spent large sums in buying up every scrap of eighteenth-century
French furniture which he could lay hands on. These he stored in an
immense upper floor in his house which was always locked except when he
went up to indulge in his dream and to become for a time a courtier at
Versailles doing homage to the du Barry, whose toilet-tables and
what-nots were strewn pell-mell about the room without order or effect
of any kind. Such is an extreme instance of the historical way of
looking at works of art. For this old gentleman, as for how many an
American millionaire, art was merely a help to an imagined dream life.
To many people then it seems an easy thing to pass thus directly from
the work of art to the life of the time which produced it. We all in
fact weave an imagined Middle Ages around the parish church and an
imagined Renaissance haunts us in the college courts of Oxford and
Cambridge. We don’t, I fancy, stop to consider very closely how true the
imagined life is: we are satisfied with the prospect of another sort of
life which we might have lived, which we often think we might have
preferred to our actual life. We don’t stop to consider much how far the
pictured past corresponds to any reality, certainly not to consider what
proportion of the whole reality of the past life gets itself embalmed in
this way in works of art. Thus we picture our Middle Ages as almost
entirely occupied with religion and war, our Renaissance as occupied in
learning, and our eighteenth century as occupied in gallantry and wit.
Whereas, as a matter of fact, all of these things were going on all the
time while the art of each period has for some reason been mainly taken
up with the expression of one or another activity. There is indeed a
certain danger in accepting too naïvely the general atmosphere--the
ethos, which the works of art of a period exhale. Thus when we look at
the thirteenth-century sculpture of Chartres or Beauvais we feel at once
the expression of a peculiar gracious piety, a smiling and gay
devoutness which we are tempted to take for the prevailing mood of the
time--and which we perhaps associate with the revelation of just such a
type of character in S. Francis of Assisi. A study of Salimbeni’s
chronicle with its interminable record of squalid avarice and meanness,
or of the fierce brutalities of Dante’s Inferno are necessary
correctives of such a pleasant dream.
It would seem then that the correspondence between art and life which we
so habitually assume is not at all constant and requires much correction
before it can be trusted. Let us approach the same question from another
point and see what result we obtain. Let us consider the great
revolutions in art and the revolutions in life and see if they coincide.
And here let me try to say what I mean by life as contrasted with art. I
mean the general intellectual and instinctive reaction to their
surroundings of those men of any period whose lives rise to complete
self-consciousness. Their view of the universe as a whole and their
conception of their relations to their kind. Of course their conception
of the nature and function of art will itself be one of the most varying
aspects of life and may in any particular period profoundly modify the
correspondence of art to life.
Perhaps the greatest revolution in life that we know of at all
intimately was that which effected the change from Paganism to
Christianity. That this was no mere accident is evident from the fact
that Christianity was only one of many competing religions, all of which
represented a closely similar direction of thought and feeling. Any one
of these would have produced practically the same effect, that of
focussing men’s minds on the spiritual life as opposed to the material
life which had pre-occupied them for so long. One cannot doubt then that
here was a change which denoted a long prepared and inevitable
readjustment of men’s attitude to their universe. Now the art of the
Roman Empire showed no trace whatever of this influence; it went on with
precisely the same motives and principles which had satisfied Paganism.
The subjects changed and became mainly Christian, but the treatment was
so exactly similar that it requires more than a cursory glance to say if
the figure on a sarcophagus is Christ or Orpheus, Moses or Æsculapius.
The next great turning-point in history is that which marks the triumph
of the forces of reaction towards the close of the twelfth century--a
reaction which destroyed the promising hopes of freedom of thought and
manners which make the twelfth century appear as a foretaste of modern
enlightenment. Here undoubtedly the change in life corresponds very
closely with a great change in art--the change from the Romanesque to
the Gothic, and at first sight we might suppose a causal connection
between the two. But when we consider the nature of the changes in the
two sequences, this becomes very doubtful. For whereas in the life of
the Middle Ages the change was one of reaction--the sharp repression by
the reactionary forces of a gradual growth of freedom--the change in art
is merely the efflorescence of certain long prepared and anticipated
effects. The forms of Gothic architecture were merely the answer to
certain engineering problems which had long occupied the inventive
ingenuity of twelfth-century architects, while in the figurative arts
the change merely showed a new self-confidence in the rendering of the
human figure, a newly developed mastery in the handling of material. In
short, the change in art was in the opposite direction to that in life.
Whereas in life the direction of movement was sharply bent backwards, in
art the direction followed on in a continuous straight line.
It is true that in one small particular the reaction did have a direct
effect on art. The preaching of S. Bernard of Clairvaux did impose on
the architects who worked for the Cistercian order a peculiar
architectural hypocrisy. They were bound by his traditional influence to
make their churches have an appearance of extreme simplicity and
austerity, but they wanted nevertheless to make them as magnificent and
imposing as possible. The result was a peculiar style of ostentatious
simplicity. Paray le Monial is the only church left standing in which
this curious and, in point of fact, depressing evidence of the direct
influence of the religious reaction on art is to be seen, and, as a
curiosity in psychological expression, it is well worth a visit. For the
rest the movement of art went on entirely unaffected by the new
orientation of thought.
We come now to the Renaissance, and here for the first time in our
survey we may, I think, safely admit a true correspondence between the
change in life and the change in art. The change in life, if one may
generalise on such a vast subject, was towards the recognition of the
rights of the individual to complete self-realisation and the
recognition of the objective reality of the material universe which
implied the whole scientific attitude--and in both these things the
exemplar which men put before themselves was the civilisation of Greece
and Rome. In art the change went _pari passu_ with the change in life,
each assisting and directing the other--the first men of science were
artists like Brunelleschi, Ucello, Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da
Vinci. The study of classical literature was followed in strict
connection with the study of classical canons of art, and the greater
sense of individual importance found its expression in the new
naturalism which made portraiture in the modern sense possible.
For once then art and the other functions of the human spirit found
themselves in perfect harmony and direct alliance, and to that harmony
we may attribute much of the intensity and self-assurance of the work of
the great Renaissance artists. It is one of the rarest of good fortunes
for an artist to find himself actually understood and appreciated by the
mass of his educated contemporaries, and not only that, but moving
alongside of and in step with them towards a similar goal.
The Catholic reaction retarded and impeded the main movement of
Renaissance thought, but it did not really succeed either in
suppressing it or changing the main direction of its current. In art it
undoubtedly had some direct effect, it created a new kind of insincerity
of expression, a florid and sentimental religiosity--a new variety of
bad taste, the rhetorical and over-emphatic. And I suspect that art was
already prepared for this step by a certain exhaustion of the impulsive
energy of the Renaissance--so that here too we may admit a
correspondence.
The seventeenth century shows us no violent change in life, but rather
the gradual working out of the principles implicit in the Renaissance
and the Catholic reaction. But here we come to another curious want of
correspondence between art and life, for in art we have a violent
revolution, followed by a bitter internecine struggle among artists.
This revolution was inaugurated by Caravaggio, who first discovered the
surprising emotional possibilities of chiaroscuro and who combined with
this a new idea of realism--realism in the modern sense, viz., the
literal acceptance of what is coarse, common, squalid or undistinguished
in life--realism in the sense of the novelists of Zola’s time. To
Caravaggio’s influence we might trace not only a great deal of
Rembrandt’s art but the whole of that movement in favour of the
extravagantly impressive and picturesque, which culminated in the
romantic movement of the nineteenth century. Here, then, is another
surprising want of correspondence between art and life.
In the eighteenth century we get a curious phenomenon. Art goes to
court, identifies itself closely with a small aristocratic clique,
becomes the exponent of their manners and their tastes. It becomes a
luxury. It is no longer in the main stream of spiritual and intellectual
effort, and this seclusion of art may account for the fact that the next
great change in life--the French Revolution and all its accompanying
intellectual ferment--finds no serious correspondence in art. We get a
change, it is true; the French Republicans believed they were the
counterpart of the Romans, and so David had to invent for them that
peculiarly distressing type of the ancient Roman--always in heroic
attitudes, always immaculate, spotless and with a highly polished ‘Mme.
Tussaud’ surface. By-the-by, I was almost forgetting that we do owe Mme.
Tussaud to the French Revolution. But the real movement of art lay in
quite other directions to David--lay in the gradual unfolding of the
Romanticist conception of the world--a world of violent emotional
effects, of picturesque accidents, of wild nature, and this was a long
prepared reaction from the complacent sophistication of
eighteenth-century life. It is possible that one may associate this with
the general state of mind that produced the Revolution, since both were
a revolt against the established order of the eighteenth century; but
curiously enough it found its chief ally in the reaction which followed
the Revolution, in the neo-Christianism of Chateaubriand and the new
sentimental respect for the age of faith--which, incidentally, appeared
so much more picturesque than the age of reason.
It would be interesting at this point to consider how far during the
nineteenth century reactionary political and religious thought was
inspired primarily by æsthetic considerations--a curious instance of the
counter-influence of art on life might perhaps be discovered in the
devotees of the Oxford movement. But this would take us too far afield.
The foregoing violently foreshortened view of history and art will show,
I hope, that the usual assumption of a direct and decisive connection
between life and art is by no means correct. It may, I hope, give pause
to those numerous people who have already promised themselves a great
new art as a result of the present war, though perhaps it is as well to
let them enjoy it in anticipation, since it is, I fancy, the only way in
which they are likely to enjoy a great art of any kind. What this survey
suggests to me is that if we consider this special spiritual activity of
art we find it no doubt open at times to influences from life, but in
the main self-contained--we find the rhythmic sequences of change
determined much more by its own internal forces--and by the readjustment
within it, of its own elements--than by external forces. I admit, of
course, that it is always conditioned more or less by economic changes,
but these are rather conditions of its existence at all than directive
influences. I also admit that under certain conditions the rhythms of
life and of art may coincide with great effect on both; but in the main
the two rhythms are distinct, and as often as not play against each
other.
We have, I hope, gained some experience with which to handle the real
subject of my inquiry, the relation of the modern movement in art to
life. To understand it we must go back to the impressionist movement,
which dates from about 1870. The artists who called themselves
impressionists combined two distinct ideas. On the one hand they upheld,
more categorically than ever before, the complete detachment of the
artistic vision from the values imposed on vision by everyday life--they
claimed, as Whistler did in his “10 o’clock,” to be pure artists. On the
other hand a group of them used this freedom for the quasi-scientific
description of new effects of atmospheric colour and atmospheric
perspective, thereby endowing painting with a quite new series of colour
harmonies, or at least of harmonies which had not been cultivated by
European painters for many hundreds of years. They did more than
this--the effects thus explored were completely unfamiliar to the
ordinary man, whose vision is limited to the mere recognition of objects
with a view to the uses of everyday life. He was forced, in looking at
their pictures, to accept as artistic representation something very
remote from all his previous expectations, and thereby he also acquired
in time a new tolerance in his judgments on works of art, a tolerance
which was destined to bear a still further strain in succeeding
developments.
As against these great advantages which art owes to impressionism we
must set the fact that the pseudo-scientific and analytic method of
these painters forced artists to accept pictures which lacked design and
formal co-ordination to a degree which had never before been permitted.
They, or rather some of them, reduced the artistic vision to a
continuous patchwork or mosaic of coloured patches without architectural
framework or structural coherence. In this, impressionism marked the
climax of a movement which had been going on more or less steadily from
the thirteenth century--the tendency to approximate the forms of art
more and more exactly to the representation of the totality of
appearance. When once representation had been pushed to this point where
further development was impossible, it was inevitable that artists
should turn round and question the validity of the fundamental
assumption that art aimed at representation; and the moment the question
was fairly posed it became clear that the pseudo-scientific assumption
that fidelity to appearance was the measure of art had no logical
foundation. From that moment on it became evident that art had arrived
at a critical moment, and that the greatest revolution in art that had
taken place since Græco-Roman impressionism became converted into
Byzantine formalism was inevitable. It was this revolution that Cézanne
inaugurated and that Gauguin and van Goch continued. There is no need
here to give in detail the characteristics of this new movement: they
are sufficiently familiar. But we may summarise them as the
re-establishment of purely æsthetic criteria in place of the criterion
of conformity to appearance--the rediscovery of the principles of
structural design and harmony.
The new movement has, also, led to a new canon of criticism, and this
has changed our attitude to the arts of other times and countries. So
long as representation was regarded as the end of art, the skill of the
artist and his proficiency in this particular feat of representation
were regarded with an admiration which was in fact mainly non-æsthetic.
With the new indifference to representation we have become much less
interested in skill and not at all interested in knowledge. We are thus
no longer cut off from a great deal of barbaric and primitive art the
very meaning of which escaped the understanding of those who demanded a
certain standard of skill in representation before they could give
serious consideration to a work of art. In general the effect of the
movement has been to render the artist intensely conscious of the
æsthetic unity of the work of art, but singularly naïve and simple as
regards other considerations.
It remains to be considered whether the life of the past fifty years has
shown any such violent reorientation as we have found in the history of
modern art. If we look back to the days of Herbert Spencer and Huxley,
what changes are there in the general tendencies of life? The main ideas
of rationalism seem to me to have steadily made way--there have been
minor counter revolutions, it is true, but the main current of active
thought has surely moved steadily along the lines already laid down. I
mean that the scientific attitude is more and more widely accepted. The
protests of organised religion and of various mysticisms seem to grow
gradually weaker and to carry less weight. Hardly any writers or
thinkers of first-rate calibre now appear in the reactionary camp. I
see, in short, no big change in direction, no evident revulsion of
feeling.
None the less I suppose that a Spencer would be impossible now and that
the materialism of to-day is recognisably different from the materialism
of Spencer. It would be very much less naïvely
[Illustration: 13th Cent. Sculpture in the Cloister of S. John Lateran]
[Illustration: Auguste Rodin. Group from “The Burghers of Calais”]
[Illustration: Henri Matisse. Sculpture in Plaster
Property of the Artist
Plate I.]
self-confident. It would admit far greater difficulties in presenting
its picture of the universe than would have occurred to Spencer. The
fact is that scepticism has turned on itself and has gone behind a great
many of the axioms that seemed self-evident to the earlier rationalists.
I do not see that it has at any point threatened the superstructure of
the rationalist position, but it has led us to recognise the necessity
of a continual revision and reconstruction of these data. Rationalism
has become less arrogant and less narrow in its vision. And this is
partly due also to the adventure of the scientific spirit into new
regions. I refer to all that immense body of study and speculation which
starts from Robertson Smith’s “Religion of the Israelites.” The
discovery of natural law in what seemed to earlier rationalists the
chaotic fancies and caprices of the human imagination. The assumption
that man is a mainly rational animal has given place to the discovery
that he is, like other animals, mainly instinctive. This modifies
immensely the attitude of the rationalist--it gives him a new charity
and a new tolerance. What seemed like the wilful follies of mad or
wicked men to the earlier rationalists are now seen to be inevitable
responses to fundamental instinctive needs. By observing mankind the man
of science has lost his contempt for him. Now this I think has had an
important bearing on the new movement in art. In the first place I find
something analogous in the new orientation of scientific and artistic
endeavour. Science has turned its instruments in on human nature and
begun to investigate its fundamental needs, and art has also turned its
vision inwards, has begun to work upon the fundamental necessities of
man’s æsthetic functions.
But besides this analogy, which may be merely accidental and not causal,
I think there can be little doubt that the new scientific development
(for it is in no sense a revolution) has modified men’s attitude to art.
To Herbert Spencer religion was primitive fear of the unknown and art
was sexual attraction--he must have contemplated with perfect
equanimity, almost with satisfaction, a world in which both these
functions would disappear. I suppose that the scientific man of to-day
would be much more ready to admit not only the necessity but the great
importance of æsthetic feeling for the spiritual existence of man. The
general conception of life in the mid-nineteenth century ruled out art
as noxious, or at best, a useless frivolity, and above all as a mere
survival of more primitive stages of evolution.
On the other hand, the artist of the new movement is moving into a
sphere more and more remote from that of the ordinary man. In proportion
as art becomes purer the number of people to whom it appeals gets less.
It cuts out all the romantic overtones of life which are the usual bait
by which men are induced to accept a work of art. It appeals only to the
æsthetic sensibility, and that in most men is comparatively weak.
In the modern movement in art, then, as in so many cases in past
history, the revolution in art seems to be out of all proportion to any
corresponding change in life as a whole. It seems to find its sources,
if at all, in what at present seem like minor movements. Whether the
difference between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will in
retrospect seem as great in life as they already do in art I cannot
guess--at least it is curious to note how much more conscious we are of
the change in art then we are in the general change in thought and
feeling.
NOTE.--The original lecture was not illustrated, but the opportunity of
publishing this summary of it has suggested the possibility of
introducing a few examples to illustrate one point, viz., the extent to
which the works of the new movement correspond in aim with the works of
early art while being sharply contrasted with those of the penultimate
period. This will be, perhaps, most evident in Plate I, where I have
placed a figure from the cloisters of S. John Lateran, carved by a
thirteenth-century sculptor--then one of Rodin’s _Burghers of Calais_,
and then Matisse’s unfinished alto-rilievo figure. Here there is no need
to underline the startling difference shown by Rodin’s descriptive
method from the more purely plastic feeling of the two other artists.
Matisse and the thirteenth-century artist are much closer together than
Matisse and Rodin.
In Plate II I have placed Picasso beside Raphael. Here the obvious fact
is the common preoccupation of both artists with certain problems of
plastic design and the similarity of their solutions. Had I had space to
put a Sargent beside these the same violent contrast would have been
produced.
[Illustration:
Raphael. “La Donna Gravida” Pitti Palace, Florence]
[Illustration:
Pablo Picasso. Portrait of Miss Gertrude Stein Miss Gertrude Stein
Plate II.]
AN ESSAY IN ÆSTHETICS[2]
A certain painter, not without some reputation at the present day, once
wrote a little book on the art he practises, in which he gave a
definition of that art so succinct that I take it as a point of
departure for this essay.
“The art of painting,” says that eminent authority, “is the art of
imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments.” It is
delightfully simple, but prompts the question--Is that all? And, if so,
what a deal of unnecessary fuss has been made about it. Now, it is
useless to deny that our modern writer has some very respectable
authorities behind him. Plato, indeed, gave a very similar account of
the affair, and himself put the question--is it then worth while? And,
being scrupulously and relentlessly logical, he decided that it was not
worth while, and proceeded to turn the artists out of his ideal
republic. For all that, the world has continued obstinately to consider
that painting was worth while, and though, indeed, it has never quite
made up its mind as to what, exactly, the graphic arts did for it, it
has persisted in honouring and admiring its painters.
Can we arrive at any conclusions as to the nature of the graphic arts,
which will at all explain our feelings about them, which will at least
put them into some kind of relation with the other arts, and not leave
us in the extreme perplexity, engendered by any theory of mere
imitation? For, I suppose, it must be admitted that if imitation is the
sole purpose of the graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of
such arts are ever looked upon as more than curiosities, or ingenious
toys, are ever taken seriously by grown-up people. Moreover, it will be
surprising that they have no recognisable affinity with other arts, such
as music or architecture, in which the imitation of actual objects is a
negligible quantity.
To form such conclusions is the aim I have put before myself in this
essay. Even if the results are not decisive, the inquiry may lead us to
a view of the graphic arts that will not be altogether unfruitful.
I must begin with some elementary psychology, with a consideration of
the nature of instincts. A great many objects in the world, when
presented to our senses, put in motion a complex nervous machinery,
which ends in some instinctive appropriate action. We see a wild bull in
a field; quite without our conscious interference a nervous process goes
on, which, unless we interfere forcibly, ends in the appropriate
reaction of flight. The nervous mechanism which results in flight causes
a certain state of consciousness, which we call the emotion of fear. The
whole of animal life, and a great part of human life, is made up of
these instinctive reactions to sensible objects, and their accompanying
emotions. But man has the peculiar faculty of calling up again in his
mind the echo of past experiences of this kind, of going over it again,
“in imagination” as we say. He has, therefore, the possibility of a
double life; one the actual life, the other the imaginative life.
Between these two lives there is this great distinction, that in the
actual life the processes of natural selection have brought it about
that the instinctive reaction, such, for instance, as flight from
danger, shall be the important part of the whole process, and it is
towards this that the man bends his whole conscious endeavour. But in
the imaginative life no such action is necessary, and, therefore, the
whole consciousness may be focussed upon the perceptive and the
emotional aspects of the experience. In this way we get, in the
imaginative life, a different set of values, and a different kind of
perception.
We can get a curious side glimpse of the nature of this imaginative life
from the cinematograph. This resembles actual life in almost every
respect, except that what the psychologists call the conative part of
our reaction to sensations, that is to say, the appropriate resultant
action is cut off. If, in a cinematograph, we see a runaway horse and
cart, we do not have to think either of getting out of the way or
heroically interposing ourselves. The result is that in the first place
we _see_ the event much more clearly; see a number of quite interesting
but irrelevant things, which in real life could not struggle into our
consciousness, bent, as it would be, entirely upon the problem of our
appropriate reaction. I remember seeing in a cinematograph the arrival
of a train at a foreign station and the people descending from the
carriages; there was no platform, and to my intense surprise I saw
several people turn right round after reaching the ground, as though to
orientate themselves; an almost ridiculous performance, which I had
never noticed in all the many hundred occasions on which such a scene
had passed before my eyes in real life. The fact being that at a station
one is never really a spectator of events, but an actor engaged in the
drama of luggage or prospective seats, and one actually sees only so
much as may help to the appropriate action.
In the second place, with regard to the visions of the cinematograph,
one notices that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are
likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more
clearly to the consciousness. If the scene presented be one of an
accident, our pity and horror, though weak, since we know that no one is
really hurt, are felt quite purely, since they cannot, as they would in
life, pass at once into actions of assistance.
A somewhat similar effect to that of the cinematograph can be obtained
by watching a mirror in which a street scene is reflected. If we look at
the street itself we are almost sure to adjust ourselves in some way to
its actual existence. We recognise an acquaintance, and wonder why he
looks so dejected this morning, or become interested in a new fashion in
hats--the moment we do that the spell is broken, we are reacting to life
itself in however slight a degree, but, in the mirror, it is easier to
abstract ourselves completely, and look upon the changing scene as a
whole. It then, at once, takes on the visionary quality, and we become
true spectators, not selecting what we will see, but seeing everything
equally, and thereby we come to notice a number of appearances and
relations of appearances, which would have escaped our vision before,
owing to that perpetual economising by selection of what impressions we
will assimilate, which in life we perform by unconscious processes. The
frame of the mirror then, does, to some extent, turn the reflected scene
from one that belongs to our actual life into one that belongs rather to
the imaginative life. The frame of the mirror makes its surface into a
very rudimentary work of art, since it helps us to attain to the
artistic vision. For that is what, as you will already have guessed, I
have been coming to all this time, namely that the work of art is
intimately connected with the secondary imaginative life, which all men
live to a greater or lesser extent.
That the graphic arts are the expression of the imaginative life rather
than a copy of actual life might be guessed from observing children.
Children, if left to themselves, never, I believe, copy what they see,
never, as we say, “draw from nature,” but express, with a delightful
freedom and sincerity, the mental images which make up their own
imaginative lives.
Art, then, is an expression and a stimulus of this imaginative life,
which is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action.
Now this responsive action implies in actual life moral responsibility.
In art we have no such moral responsibility--it presents a life freed
from the binding necessities of our actual existence.
What then is the justification for this life of the imagination which
all human beings live more or less fully? To the pure moralist, who
accepts nothing but ethical values, in order to be justified, it must be
shown not only _not_ to hinder but actually to forward right action,
otherwise it is not only useless but, since it absorbs our energies,
positively harmful. To such a one two views are possible, one the
Puritanical view at its narrowest, which regards the life of the
imagination as no better or worse than a life of sensual pleasure, and
therefore entirely reprehensible. The other view is to argue that the
imaginative life does subserve morality. And this is inevitably the view
taken by moralists like Ruskin, to whom the imaginative life is yet an
absolute necessity. It is a view which leads to some very hard special
pleading, even to a self-deception which is in itself morally
undesirable.
But here comes in the question of religion, for religion is also an
affair of the imaginative life, and, though it claims to have a direct
effect upon conduct, I do not suppose that the religious person if he
were wise would justify religion entirely by its effect on morality,
since that, historically speaking, has not been by any means uniformly
advantageous. He would probably say that the religious experience was
one which corresponded to certain spiritual capacities of human nature,
the exercise of which is in itself good and desirable apart from their
effect upon actual life. And so, too, I think the artist might if he
chose take a mystical attitude, and declare that the fullness and
completeness of the imaginative life he leads may correspond to an
existence more real and more important than any that we know of in
mortal life.
And in saying that, his appeal would find a sympathetic echo in most
minds, for most people would, I think, say that the pleasures derived
from art were of an altogether different character and more fundamental
than merely sensual pleasures, that they did exercise some faculties
which are felt to belong to whatever part of us there may be which is
not entirely ephemeral and material.
It might even be that from this point of view we should rather justify
actual life by its relation to the imaginative, justify nature by its
likeness to art. I mean this, that since the imaginative life comes in
the course of time to represent more or less what mankind feels to be
the completest expression of its own nature, the freest use of its
innate capacities, the actual life may be explained and justified in its
approximation here and there, however partially and inadequately, to
that freer and fuller life.
Before leaving this question of the justification of art, let me put it
in another way. The imaginative life of a people has very different
levels at different times, and these levels do not always correspond
with the general level of the morality of actual life. Thus in the
thirteenth century we read of barbarity and cruelty which would shock
even us; we may I think admit that our moral level, our general humanity
is decidedly higher to-day, but the level of our imaginative life is
incomparably lower; we are satisfied there with a grossness, a sheer
barbarity and squalor which would have shocked the thirteenth century
profoundly. Let us admit the moral gain gladly, but do we not also feel
a loss; do we not feel that the average business man would be in every
way a more admirable, more respectable being if his imaginative life
were not so squalid and incoherent? And, if we admit any loss then,
there is some function in human nature other than a purely ethical one,
which is worthy of exercise.
Now the imaginative life has its own history both in the race and in the
individual. In the individual life one of the first effects of freeing
experience from the necessities of appropriate responsive action is to
indulge recklessly the emotion of self-aggrandisement. The day-dreams of
a child are filled with extravagant romances in which he is always the
invincible hero. Music--which of all the arts supplies the strongest
stimulus to the imaginative life, and at the same time has the least
power of controlling its direction--music, at certain stages of people’s
lives, has the effect merely of arousing in an almost absurd degree this
egoistic elation, and Tolstoy appears to believe that this is its only
possible effect. But with the teaching of experience and the growth of
character the imaginative life comes to respond to other instincts and
to satisfy other desires, until, indeed, it reflects the highest
aspirations and the deepest aversions of which human nature is capable.
In dreams and when under the influence of drugs the imaginative life
passes out of our own control, and in such cases its experiences may be
highly undesirable, but whenever it remains under our own control it
must always be on the whole a desirable life. That is not to say that it
is always pleasant, for it is pretty clear that mankind is so
constituted as to desire much besides pleasure, and we shall meet among
the great artists, the great exponents, that is, of the imaginative
life, many to whom the merely pleasant is very rarely a part of what is
desirable. But this desirability of the imaginative life does
distinguish it very sharply from actual life, and is the direct result
of that first fundamental difference, its freedom from necessary
external conditions. Art, then, is, if I am right, the chief organ of
the imaginative life, it is by art that it is stimulated and controlled
within us, and, as we have seen, the imaginative life is distinguished
by the greater clearness of its perception, and the greater purity and
freedom of its emotion.
First with regard to the greater clearness of perception. The needs of
our actual life are so imperative, that the sense of vision becomes
highly specialised in their service. With an admirable economy we learn
to see only so much as is needful for our purposes; but this is in fact
very little, just enough to recognise and identify each object or
person; that done, they go into an entry in our mental catalogue and are
no more really seen. In actual life the normal person really only reads
the labels as it were on the objects around him and troubles no further.
Almost all the things which are useful in any way put on more or less
this cap of invisibility. It is only when an object exists in our lives
for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it, as for
instance at a China ornament or a precious stone, and towards such even
the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of
pure vision abstracted from necessity.
Now this specialisation of vision goes so far that ordinary people have
almost no idea of what things really look like, so that oddly enough the
one standard that popular criticism applies to painting, namely, whether
it is like nature or not, is one which most people are, by the whole
tenour of their lives, prevented from applying properly. The only things
they have ever really _looked_ at being other pictures; the moment an
artist who has looked at nature brings to them a clear report of
something definitely seen by him, they are wildly indignant at its
untruth to nature. This has happened so constantly in our own time that
there is no need to prove it. One instance will suffice. Monet is an
artist whose chief claim to recognition lies in the fact of his
astonishing power of faithfully reproducing certain aspects of nature,
but his really naïve innocence and sincerity was taken by the public to
be the most audacious humbug, and it required the teaching of men like
Bastien-Lepage, who cleverly compromised between the truth and an
accepted convention of what things looked like, to bring the world
gradually round to admitting truths which a single walk in the country
with purely unbiassed vision would have established beyond doubt.
But though this clarified sense perception which we discover in the
imaginative life is of great interest, and although it plays a larger
part in the graphic arts than in any other, it might perhaps be doubted
whether, interesting, curious, fascinating as it is, this aspect of the
imaginative life would ever by itself make art of profound importance to
mankind. But it is different, I think, with the emotional aspect. We
have admitted that the emotions of the imaginative are generally weaker
than those of actual life. The picture of a saint being slowly flayed
alive, revolting as it is, will not produce the actual physical
sensations of sickening disgust that a modern man would feel if he could
assist at the actual event; but they have a compensating clearness of
presentment to the consciousness. The more poignant emotions of actual
life have, I think, a kind of numbing effect analogous to the paralysing
influence of fear in some animals; but even if this experience be not
generally admitted, all will admit that the need for responsive action
hurries us along and prevents us from ever realising fully what the
emotion is that we feel, from co-ordinating it perfectly with other
states. In short, the motives we actually experience are too close to us
to enable us to feel them clearly. They are in a sense unintelligible.
In the imaginative life, on the contrary, we can both feel the emotion
and watch it. When we are really moved at the theatre we are always both
on the stage and in the auditorium.
Yet another point about the emotions of the imaginative life--since they
require no responsive action we can give them a new valuation. In real
life we must to some extent cultivate those emotions which lead to
useful action, and we are bound to appraise emotions according to the
resultant action. So that, for instance, the feelings of rivalry and
emulation do get an encouragement which perhaps they scarcely deserve,
whereas certain feelings which appear to have a high intrinsic value get
almost no stimulus in actual life. For instance, those feelings to which
the name of the cosmic emotion has been somewhat unhappily given find
almost no place in life, but, since they seem to belong to certain very
deep springs of our nature, do become of great importance in the arts.
Morality, then, appreciates emotion by the standard of resultant action.
Art appreciates emotion in and for itself.
This view of the essential importance in art of the expression of the
emotions is the basis of Tolstoy’s marvellously original and yet
perverse and even exasperating book, “What is Art,” and I willingly
confess, while disagreeing with almost all his results, how much I owe
to him.
He gives an example of what he means by calling art the means of
communicating emotions. He says, let us suppose a boy to have been
pursued in the forest by a bear. If he returns to the village and merely
states that he was pursued by a bear and escaped, that is ordinary
language, the means of communicating facts or ideas; but if he describes
his state first of heedlessness, then of sudden alarm and terror as the
bear appears, and finally of relief when he gets away, and describes
this so that his hearers share his emotions, then his description is a
work of art.
Now in so far as the boy does this in order to urge the villagers to go
out and kill the bear, though he may be using artistic methods, his
speech is not a pure work of art; but if of a winter evening the boy
relates his experience for the sake of the enjoyment of his adventure in
retrospect, or better still, if he makes up the whole story for the sake
of the imagined emotions, then his speech becomes a pure work of art.
But Tolstoy takes the other view, and values the emotions aroused by art
entirely for their reaction upon actual life, a view which he
courageously maintains even when it leads him to condemn the whole of
Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, and most of Beethoven, not to mention
nearly everything he himself has written, as bad or false art.
Such a view would, I think, give pause to any less heroic spirit. He
would wonder whether mankind could have always been so radically wrong
about a function that, whatever its value be, is almost universal. And
in point of fact he will have to find some other word to denote what we
now call art. Nor does Tolstoy’s theory even carry him safely through
his own book, since, in his examples of morally desirable and therefore
good art, he has to admit that these are to be found, for the most part,
among works of inferior quality. Here, then, is at once the tacit
admission that another standard than morality is applicable. We must
therefore give up the attempt to judge the work of art by its reaction
on life, and consider it as an expression of emotions regarded as ends
in themselves. And this brings us back to the idea we had already
arrived at, of art as the expression of the imaginative life.
If, then, an object of any kind is created by man not for use, for its
fitness to actual life, but as an object of art, an object subserving
the imaginative life, what will its qualities be? It must in the first
place be adapted to that disinterested intensity of contemplation, which
we have found to be the result of cutting off the responsive action. It
must be suited to that heightened power of perception which we found to
result therefrom.
And the first quality that we demand in our sensations will be order,
without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed, and the
other quality will be variety, without which they will not be fully
stimulated.