these two qualities of order and variety in a high degree, and these
objects do undoubtedly stimulate and satisfy that clear disinterested
contemplation which is characteristic of the æsthetic attitude. But in
our reaction to a work of art there is something more--there is the
consciousness of purpose, the consciousness of a peculiar relation of
sympathy with the man who made this thing in order to arouse precisely
the sensations we experience. And when we come to the higher works of
art, where sensations are so arranged that they arouse in us deep
emotions, this feeling of a special tie with the man who expressed them
becomes very strong. We feel that he has expressed something which was
latent in us all the time, but which we never realised, that he has
revealed us to ourselves in revealing himself. And this recognition of
purpose is, I believe, an essential part of the æsthetic judgment
proper.
The perception of purposeful order and variety in an object gives us the
feeling which we express by saying that it is beautiful, but when by
means of sensations our emotions are aroused we demand purposeful order
and variety in them also, and if this can only be brought about by the
sacrifice of sensual beauty we willingly overlook its absence.
Thus, there is no excuse for a china pot being ugly, there is every
reason why Rembrandt’s and Degas’ pictures should be, from the purely
sensual point of view, supremely and magnificently ugly.
This, I think, will explain the apparent contradiction between two
distinct uses of the word beauty, one for that which has sensuous charm,
and one for the æsthetic approval of works of imaginative art where the
objects presented to us are often of extreme ugliness. Beauty in the
former sense belongs to works of art where only the perceptual aspect of
the imaginative life is exercised, beauty in the second sense becomes as
it were supersensual, and is concerned with the appropriateness and
intensity of the emotions aroused. When these emotions are aroused in a
way that satisfies fully the needs of the imaginative life we approve
and delight in the sensations through which we enjoy that heightened
experience, because they possess purposeful order and variety in
relation to those emotions.
One chief aspect of order in a work of art is unity; unity of some kind
is necessary for our restful contemplation of the work of art as a
whole, since if it lacks unity we cannot contemplate it in its entirety,
but we shall pass outside it to other things necessary to complete its
unity.
In a picture this unity is due to a balancing of the attractions to the
eye about the central line of the picture. The result of this balance of
attractions is that the eye rests willingly within the bounds of the
picture. Dr. Denman Ross of Harvard University has made a most valuable
study of the elementary considerations upon which this balance is based
in his “Theory of Pure Design.” He sums up his results in the formula
that a composition is of value in proportion to the number of orderly
connections which it displays.
Dr. Ross wisely restricts himself to the study of abstract and
meaningless forms. The moment representation is introduced forms have an
entirely new set of values. Thus a line which indicated the sudden bend
of a head in a certain direction would have far more than its mere value
as line in the composition because of the attraction which a marked
gesture has for the eye. In almost all paintings this disturbance of the
purely decorative values by reason of the representative effect takes
place, and the problem becomes too complex for geometrical proof.
This merely decorative unity is, moreover, of very different degrees of
intensity in different artists and in different periods. The necessity
for a closely woven geometrical texture in the composition is much
greater in heroic and monumental design than in genre pieces on a small
scale.
It seems also probable that our appreciation of unity in pictorial
design is of two kinds. We are so accustomed to consider only the unity
which results from the balance of a number of attractions presented to
the eye simultaneously in a framed picture that we forget the
possibility of other pictorial forms.
In certain Chinese paintings the length is so great that we cannot take
in the whole picture at once, nor are we intended to do so. Sometimes a
landscape is painted upon a roll of silk so long that we can only look
at it in successive segments. As we unroll it at one end and roll it up
at the other we traverse wide stretches of country, tracing, perhaps,
all the vicissitudes of a river from its source to the sea, and yet,
when this is well done, we have received a very keen impression of
pictorial unity.
Such a successive unity is of course familiar to us in literature and
music, and it plays its part in the graphic arts. It depends upon the
forms being presented to us in such a sequence that each successive
element is felt to have a fundamental and harmonious relation with that
which preceded it. I suggest that in looking at drawings our sense of
pictorial unity is largely of this nature; we feel, if the drawing be a
good one, that each modulation of the line as our eye passes along it
gives order and variety to our sensations. Such a drawing may be almost
entirely lacking in the geometrical balance which we are accustomed to
demand in paintings, and yet have, in a remarkable degree, unity.
Let us now see how the artist passes from the stage of merely gratifying
our demand for sensuous order and variety to that where he arouses our
emotions. I will call the various methods by which this is effected, the
emotional elements of design.
The first element is that of the rhythm of the line with which the forms
are delineated.
The drawn line is the record of a gesture, and that gesture is modified
by the artist’s feeling which is thus communicated to us directly.
The second element is mass. When an object is so represented that we
recognise it as having inertia we feel its power of resisting movement,
or communicating its own movement to other bodies, and our imaginative
reaction to such an image is governed by our experience of mass in
actual life.
The third element is space. The same sized square on two pieces of paper
can be made by very simple means to appear to represent either a cube
two or three inches high, or a cube of hundreds of feet, and our
reaction to it is proportionately changed.
The fourth element is that of light and shade. Our feelings towards the
same object become totally different according as we see it strongly
illuminated against a black background or dark against light.
A fifth element is that of colour. That this has a direct emotional
effect is evident from such words as gay, dull, melancholy in relation
to colour.
I would suggest the possibility of another element, though perhaps it is
only a compound of mass and space: it is that of the inclination to the
eye of a plane, whether it is impending over or leaning away from us.
Now it will be noticed that nearly all these emotional elements of
design are connected with essential conditions of our physical
existence: rhythm appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular
activity; mass to all the infinite adaptations to the force of gravity
which we are forced to make; the spatial judgment is equally profound
and universal in its application to life; our feeling about inclined
planes is connected with our necessary judgments about the conformation
of the earth itself; light, again, is so necessary a condition of our
existence that we become intensely sensitive to changes in its
intensity. Colour is the only one of our elements which is not of
critical or universal importance to life, and its emotional effect is
neither so deep nor so clearly determined as the others. It will be
seen, then, that the graphic arts arouse emotions in us by playing upon
what one may call the overtones of some of our primary physical needs.
They have, indeed, this great advantage over poetry, that they can
appeal more directly and immediately to the emotional accompaniments of
our bare physical existence.
If we represent these various elements in simple diagrammatic terms,
this effect upon the emotions is, it must be confessed, very weak.
Rhythm of line, for instance, is incomparably weaker in its stimulus of
the muscular sense than is rhythm addressed to the ear in music, and
such diagrams can at best arouse only faint ghost-like echoes of
emotions of differing qualities; but when these emotional elements are
combined with the presentation of natural appearances, above all with
the appearance of the human body, we find that this effect is
indefinitely heightened.
When, for instance, we look at Michelangelo’s “Jeremiah,” and realise
the irresistible momentum his movements would have, we experience
powerful sentiments of reverence and awe. Or when we look at
Michelangelo’s “Tondo” in the Uffizi, and find a group of figures so
arranged that the planes have a sequence comparable in breadth and
dignity to the mouldings of the earth mounting by clearly-felt
gradations to an overtopping summit, innumerable instinctive reactions
are brought into play.[3]
At this point the adversary (as Leonardi da Vinci calls him) is likely
enough to retort, “You have abstracted from natural forms a number of
so-called emotional elements which you yourself admit are very weak when
stated with diagrammatic purity; you then put them back, with the help
of Michelangelo, into the natural forms whence they were derived, and at
once they have value, so that after all it appears that the natural
forms contain these emotional elements ready made up for us, and all
that art need do is to imitate Nature.”
But, alas! Nature is heartlessly indifferent to the needs of the
imaginative life; God causes His rain to fall upon the just and upon the
unjust. The sun neglects to provide the appropriate limelight effect
even upon a triumphant Napoleon or a dying Cæsar.[4] Assuredly we have
no guarantee that in nature the emotional elements will be combined
appropriately with the demands of the imaginative life, and it is, I
think, the great occupation of the graphic arts to give us first of all
order and variety in the sensuous plane, and then so to arrange the
sensuous presentment of objects that the emotional elements are elicited
with an order and appropriateness altogether beyond what Nature herself
provides.
Let me sum up for a moment what I have said about the relation of art to
Nature, which is, perhaps, the greatest stumbling-block to the
understanding of the graphic arts.
I have admitted that there is beauty in Nature, that is to say, that
certain objects constantly do, and perhaps any object may, compel us to
regard it with that intense disinterested contemplation that belongs to
the imaginative life, and which is impossible to the actual life of
necessity and action; but that in objects created to arouse the æsthetic
feeling we have an added consciousness of purpose on the part of the
creator, that he made it on purpose not to be used but to be regarded
and enjoyed; and that this feeling is characteristic of the æsthetic
judgment proper.
When the artist passes from pure sensations to emotions aroused by means
of sensations, he uses natural forms which, in themselves, are
calculated to move our emotions, and he presents these in such a manner
that the forms themselves generate in us emotional states, based upon
the fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological nature.
The artist’s attitude to natural form is, therefore, infinitely various
according to the emotions he wishes to arouse. He may require for his
purpose the most complete representation of a figure, he may be
intensely realistic, provided that his presentment, in spite of its
closeness to natural appearance, disengages clearly for us the
appropriate emotional elements. Or he may give us the merest suggestion
of natural forms, and rely almost entirely upon the force and intensity
of the emotional elements involved in his presentment.
We may, then, dispense once for all with the idea of likeness to Nature,
of correctness or incorrectness as a test, and consider only whether the
emotional elements inherent in natural form are adequately discovered,
unless, indeed, the emotional idea depends at any point upon likeness,
or completeness of representation.
THE OTTOMAN AND THE WHATNOT[5]
Such were the outlandish names of the two great clans that marched under
the flag of the Antimacassar to the resounding periods of Mr. Podsnap’s
rhetoric. For all the appearance of leisure, for all the absence of
hustle, those were strenuous days. Respectability and “the young person”
were perpetually menaced by inveterate human nature, and were always or
nearly always just being saved as by a miracle. But in the end it was
the boast of the Victorians that they had established a system of taboos
almost as complicated and as all-pervading as that of the Ojibbeways or
the Waramunga. The Ottoman, which seated two so conveniently, was liable
to prove a traitor, but what the Ottoman risked could be saved by the
Whatnot, with Tennyson and John Greenleaf Whittier to counsel and
assuage. One of the things they used to say in those days, quite loudly
and distinctly, was: “Distance lends enchantment to the view.” It seemed
so appropriate at the frequent and admirably organised picnics that at
last it was repeated too often, and the time came when, under pain of
social degradation, it was forbidden to utter the hated words. But now
that we are busy bringing back the Ottoman and the Whatnot from the
garret and the servants’ hall to the drawing-room, we may once more
repeat the phrase with impunity, and indeed this article has no other
purpose than to repeat once more (and with how new a relish!): “Distance
lends enchantment to the view.”
Also, with our passion for science and exact measurement, we shall wish
to discover the exact distance at which enchantment begins. And this is
easier than might be supposed; for any one who has lived long enough
will have noticed that a certain distance lends a violent disgust to the
view--that as we recede there comes a period of oblivion and total
unconsciousness, to be succeeded when consciousness returns by the
ecstasy, the nature of which we are considering.
I, alas! can remember the time when the Ottoman and Whatnot still
lingered in the drawing-rooms of the less fashionable and more
conservative bourgeoisie; lingered despised, rejected, and merely
awaiting their substitutes. I can remember the sham Chippendale and the
sham old oak which replaced them. I can remember a still worse horror--a
genuine modern style which as yet has no name, a period of black
polished wood with spidery lines of conventional flowers incised in the
wood and then gilt. These things must have belonged to the eighties--I
think they went with the bustle; but as they are precisely at the
distance where unconsciousness has set in, it is more difficult to me to
write the history of this period than it would be to tell of the
sequence of styles in the Tang dynasty. And now, having watched the
Whatnot disappear, I have the privilege of watching its resurrection. I
have passed from disgust, through total forgetfulness, into the joys of
retrospection.
Now my belief is that none of these feelings have anything to do with
our æsthetic reactions to the objects as works of art. The odd thing
about either real or would-be works of art, that is to say, about any
works made with something beyond a purely utilitarian aim--the odd thing
is that they can either affect our æsthetic sensibilities or they can
become symbols of a particular way of life. In this aspect they affect
our historical imagination through our social emotions. That the
historical images they conjure up in us are probably false has very
little to do with it; the point is that they exist for us, and exist for
most people, far more vividly and poignantly than any possible æsthetic
feelings. And somehow the works of each period come to stand for us as
symbols of some particular and special aspect of life. A Limoges casket
evokes the idea of a life of chivalrous adventure and romantic devotion;
an Italian cassone gives one a life of intellectual ferment and
Boccaccian freedom; before a Caffieri bronze or a Riesener bureau one
imagines oneself an exquisite aristocrat proof against the deeper
passions, and gifted with a sensuality so refined and a wit so ready
that gallantry would be a sufficient occupation for a lifetime. Whoever
handling a Louis XV. tabatière reflected how few of the friends of its
original owner ever washed, and how many of them were marked with
smallpox? The fun of these historical evocations is precisely in what
they leave out.
And in order that this process of selection and elimination may take
place, precise and detailed knowledge must have faded from the
collective memory, and the blurred but exquisite outlines of a
generalisation must have been established.
We have just got to this point with the Victorian epoch. It has just got
its vague and generalised _Stimmung_. We think as we look at Leech’s
drawings, or sit in a bead-work chair, of a life which was the perfect
flower of bourgeoisie. The aristocracy with their odd irregular ways,
the Meredith heroines and heroes, are away in the background; _the_
Victorian life is of the upper bourgeoisie. It is immensely leisured,
untroubled by social problems, unblushingly sentimental, impenitently
unintellectual, and devoted to sport. The women are exquisitely trained
to their social functions; they respond unfailingly to every sentimental
appeal; they are beautifully ill-informed, and yet yearning for
instruction; they have adorable tempers and are ever so mildly
mischievous. The men can afford, without fear of impish criticism, to
flaunt their whiskers in the sea breeze, and to expatiate on their
contempt for everything that is not correct.
Here, I suppose, is something like the outline of that generalised
historical fancy that by now emanates so fragrantly from the marble
inlaid tables and the beadwork screens of the period. How charming and
how false it is, one sees at once when one reflects that we imagine the
Victorians for ever playing croquet without ever losing their tempers.
It is evident, then, that we have just arrived at the point where our
ignorance of life in the Victorian period is such as to allow the
incurable optimism of memory to build a quite peculiar little earthly
paradise out of the boredoms, the snobberies, the cruel repressions, the
mean calculations and rapacious speculations of the mid-nineteenth
century. Go a little later, and the imagination is hopelessly hampered
by familiarity with the facts of life which the roseate mist has not yet
begun to transmute. But let those of us who are hard at work collecting
Victorian paper-weights, stuffed hummingbirds and wax flowers reflect
that our successors will be able to create quite as amusing and
wonderful interiors out of the black wood cabinets and “æsthetic”
crewel-work of the eighties. They will not be able to do this until
they have constructed the appropriate social picture, the outlines of
which we cannot dimly conceive. We have at this moment no inkling of the
kind of lies they will invent about the eighties to amuse themselves; we
only know that when the time comes the legend will have taken shape, and
that, from that moment on, the objects of the time will have the
property of emanation.
So far it has been unnecessary even to consider whether the objects of
the Victorian period are works of art or not; all that is necessary is
that they should have some margin of freedom from utility, some scope
for the fancy of their creators. And the Victorian epoch is, I think,
unusually rich in its capacity for emanation, for it was the great
period of _fancy work_. As the age-long traditions of craftsmanship and
structural design, which had lingered on from the Middle Ages, finally
faded out under the impact of the new industrialism, the amateur stepped
in, his brain teeming with fancies. Craftsmanship was dead, the
craftsman replaced either by the machine or by a purely servile and
mechanical human being, a man without tradition, without ideas of his
own, who was ready to accomplish whatever caprices the amateur or the
artist might set him to. It was an age of invention and experiment, an
age of wildly irresponsible frivolity, curiosity and sentimentality. To
gratify sentiment, nature was opposed to the hampering conventions of
art; to gratify fatuous curiosity, the most improbable and ill-suited
materials conceivable were used. What they call in France _le style
coco_ is exactly expressive of this. A drawing of a pheasant is coloured
by cutting up little pieces of real pheasant’s feathers and sticking
them on in the appropriate places. Realistic flowers are made out of
shells glued together, or, with less of the pleasant shock of the
unexpected, out of wax or spun glass. They experiment in colour, using
the new results of chemistry boldly, greens from arsenic, magenta and
maroons from coal-tar, with results sometimes happy, sometimes
disastrous; but always we feel behind everything the capricious fancy of
the amateur with his desire to contribute by some joke or conjuring
trick to the social amenities. The general groundwork of design, so far
as any tradition remains at all, is a kind of bastard baroque passing at
times into a flimsy caricature of rococo, but almost always so overlaid
and transfigured by the fancies of the amateur as to be hardly
recognisable, and yet all, by now, so richly redolent of its social
legend as to have become a genuine style.
There is reason enough, then, why we should amuse ourselves by
collecting Victorian objects of art, or at least those of us who have
the special social-historical sensibility highly developed. But so
curiously intertwisted are our emotions that we are always apt to put a
wrong label on them, and the label “beauty” comes curiously handy for
almost any of the more spiritual and disinterested feelings. So our
collector is likely enough to ask us to admire his objects, not for
their social emanations, but for their intrinsic æsthetic merit, which,
to tell the truth, is far more problematical. Certain it is that the use
of material at this period seems to be less discriminating, and the
sense of quality feebler, than at any previous period of the world’s
history, at all events since Roman times--Pompeii, by-the-by, was a
thoroughly Victorian city. The sense of design was also chaotically free
from all the limitations of purpose and material, and I doubt if it
attained to that perfect abstract sense of harmony which might justify
any disregard of those conditions. No, on the whole it will be better to
recognise fully how endearing, how fancy-free, how richly evocative are
the objects of the Victorian period than to trouble our heads about
their æsthetic value.
The discovery of Victorian art is due to a few enterprising and original
artists. In a future article I hope to show why it is to the artist
rather than to the collector that we always owe such discoveries, and
also why artists are of all people the most indifferent to the æsthetic
value of the objects they recommend to our admiration.
THE ARTIST’S VISION[6]
In the preceding article I stated that artists always lead the way in
awakening a new admiration for forgotten and despised styles, and that
in doing so they anticipate both the archæologist and the collector. I
also suggested that they were of all people the least fitted to report
upon the æsthetic value of the objects they pressed upon us.