things, not to look at them. Life takes care that we all learn the
lesson thoroughly, so that at a very early age we have acquired a very
considerable ignorance of visual appearances. We have learned the
meaning for life of appearances so well that we understand them, as it
were, in shorthand. The subtlest differences of appearance that have a
utility value still continue to be appreciated, while large and
important visual characters, provided they are useless for life, will
pass unnoticed. With all the ingenuity and resource which manufacturers
put into their business, they can scarcely prevent the ordinary eye from
seizing on the minute visual characteristics that distinguish margarine
from butter. Some of us can tell Canadian cheddar at a glance, and no
one was ever taken in by sham suède gloves.
The sense of sight supplies prophetic knowledge of what may affect the
inner fortifications, the more intimate senses of taste and touch, where
it may already be too late to avert disaster. So we learn to read the
prophetic message, and, for the sake of economy, to neglect all else.
Children have not learned it fully, and so they look at things with some
passion. Even the grown man keeps something of his unbiological,
disinterested vision with regard to a few things. He still looks at
flowers, and does not merely see them. He also keeps objects which have
some marked peculiarity of appearance that catches his eye. These may be
natural, like precious stones, fossils, incrustations and such like; or
they may be manufactured entirely with a view to pleasing by
peculiarities of colour or shape, and these are called ornaments. Such
articles, whether natural or artificial, are called by those who sell
them ‘curios,’ and the name is not an unhappy one to denote the kind of
interest which they arouse. As I showed in a previous article, such
objects get attached to them a secondary interest, arising from the kind
of social milieu that they were made for, so that they become not merely
curious for the eye, but stimulating to our social-historical
imagination.
The vision with which we regard such objects is quite distinct from the
practical vision of our instinctive life. In the practical vision we
have no more concern after we have read the label on the object; vision
ceases the moment it has served its biological function. But the
curiosity vision does contemplate the object disinterestedly; the object
_ex hypothesi_ has no significance for actual life; it is a play or
fancy object, and our vision dwells much more consciously and
deliberately upon it. We notice to some extent its forms and colours,
especially when it is new to us.
But human perversity goes further even than this in its misapplication
of the gift of sight. We may look at objects not even for their
curiosity or oddity, but for their harmony of form and colour. To arouse
such a vision the object must be more than a ‘curio’: it has to be a
work of art. I suspect that such an object must be made by some one in
whom the impulse was not to please others, but to express a feeling of
his own. It is probably this fundamental difference of origin between
the ‘curio’ or ornament and the work of art that makes it impossible for
any commercial system, with its eye necessarily on the customer, ever to
produce works of art, whatever the ingenuity with which it is attempted.
But we are concerned here not with the origin, but with the vision. This
is at once more intense and more detached from the passions of the
instinctive life than either of the kinds of vision hitherto discussed.
Those who indulge in this vision are entirely absorbed in apprehending
the relation of forms and colour to one another, as they cohere within
the object. Suppose, for example, that we are looking at a Sung bowl; we
apprehend gradually the shape of the outside contour, the perfect
sequence of the curves, and the subtle modifications of a certain type
of curve which it shows; we also feel the relation of the concave curves
to the outside contour; we realise that the precise thickness of the
walls is consistent with the particular kind of matter of which it is
made, its appearance of density and resistance; and finally we
recognise, perhaps, how satisfactory for the display of all these
plastic qualities are the colour and the dull lustre of the glaze. Now
while we are thus occupied there comes to us, I think, a feeling of
purpose; we feel that all these sensually logical conformities are the
outcome of a particular feeling, or of what, for want of a better word,
we call an idea; and we may even say that the pot is the expression of
an idea in the artist’s mind. Whether we are right or not in making this
deduction, I believe it nearly always occurs in such æsthetic
apprehension of an object of art. But in all this no element of
curiosity, no reference to actual life, comes in; our apprehension is
unconditioned by considerations of space or time; it is irrelevant to us
to know whether the bowl was made seven hundred years ago in China, or
in New York yesterday. We may, of course, at any moment switch off from
the æsthetic vision, and become interested in all sorts of
quasi-biological feelings; we may inquire whether it is genuine or not,
whether it is worth the sum given for it, and so forth; but in
proportion as we do this we change the focus of our vision; we are more
likely to examine the bottom of the bowl for traces of marks than to
look at the bowl itself.
Such, then, is the nature of the æsthetic vision, the vision with which
we contemplate works of art. It is to such a vision, if to anything
outside himself, that the artist appeals, and the artist in his spare
hours may himself indulge in the æsthetic vision; and if one can get him
to do so, his verdict is likely to be as good as any one’s.
The artist’s main business in life, however, is carried on by means of
yet a fourth kind of vision, which I will call the creative vision.
This, I think, is the furthest perversion of the gifts of nature of
which man is guilty. It demands the most complete detachment from any of
the meanings and implications of appearances. Almost any turn of the
kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist this detached and
impassioned vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of
vision, the (æsthetically) chaotic and accidental conjunction of forms
and colours begins to crystallise into a harmony; and as this harmony
becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the
emphasis of the rhythm which has been set up within him. Certain
relations of directions of line become for him full of meaning; he
apprehends them no longer casually or merely curiously, but
passionately, and these lines begin to be so stressed and stand out so
clearly from the rest that he sees them far more distinctly than he did
at first. Similarly colours, which in nature have almost always a
certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him,
owing to their now necessary relation to other colours, that if he
chooses to paint his vision he can state them positively and definitely.
In such a creative vision the objects as such tend to disappear, to lose
their separate unities, and to take their places as so many bits in the
whole mosaic of vision. The texture of the whole field of vision becomes
so close that the coherence of the separate patches of tone and colour
within each object is no stronger than the coherence with every other
tone and colour throughout the field.
In such circumstances the greatest object of art becomes of no more
significance than any casual piece of matter; a man’s head is no more
and no less important than a pumpkin, or, rather, these things may be so
or not according to the rhythm that obsesses the artist and crystallises
his vision. Since it is the habitual practice of the artist to be on the
look out for these peculiar arrangements of objects that arouse the
creative vision, and become material for creative contemplation, he is
liable to look at all objects from this point of view. In so far as the
artist looks at objects only as part of a whole field of vision which is
his own potential picture, he can give no account of their æsthetic
value. Every solid object is subject to the play of light and shade, and
becomes a mosaic of visual patches, each of which for the artist is
related to other visual patches in the surroundings. It is irrelevant to
ask him, while he is looking with this generalised and all-embracing
vision, about the nature of the objects which compose it. He is likely
even to turn away from works of art in which he may be tempted to
relapse into an æsthetic vision, and so see them as unities apart from
their surroundings. By preference he turns to objects which make no
strong æsthetic appeal in themselves. But he may like objects which
attract by some oddity or peculiarity of form or colour, and thereby
suggest to him new and intriguing rhythms. In his continual and restless
preoccupation with appearance he is capable of looking at objects from
which both æsthetic and even curious vision may turn instinctively, or
which they may never notice, so little prospect of satisfaction do they
hold out. But the artist may always find his satisfaction, the material
for his picture, in the most unexpected quarters. Objects of the most
despised periods, or objects saturated for the ordinary man with the
most vulgar and repulsive associations, may be grist to his mill. And so
it happened that while the man of culture and the connoisseur firmly
believed that art ended with the brothers Adam, Mr. Walter Sickert was
already busy getting hold of stuffed birds and wax flowers just for his
own queer game of tones and colours. And now the collector and the
art-dealer will be knocking at Mr. Sickert’s door to buy the treasures
at twenty times the price the artist paid for them. Perhaps there are
already younger artists who are getting excited about the tiles in the
refreshment room at South Kensington, and, when the social legend has
gathered round the names of Sir Arthur Sullivan and Connie Gilchrist,
will inspire in the cultured a deep admiration for the “æsthetic”
period.
The artist is of all men the most constantly observant of his
surroundings, and the least affected by their intrinsic æsthetic value.
He is more likely on the whole to paint a slum in Soho than St. Paul’s,
and more likely to do a lodging-house interior than a room at Hampton
Court. He may, of course, do either, but his necessary detachment comes
more easily in one case than the other. The artist is, I believe, a very
good critic if you can make him drop his own job for a minute, and
really attend to some one else’s work of art; but do not go to him when
he is on duty as an artist if you want a sound judgment about objects of
art. The different visions I have discussed are like the different gears
of a motor-car, only that we sometimes step from one gear into another
without knowing it, and the artist may be on the wrong gear for
answering us truly. Mr. Walter Sickert is likely to have a Sickert in
his eye when he gives us a panegyric on a bedroom candlestick.
ART AND SOCIALISM[7]
I am not a Socialist, as I understand that word, nor can I pretend to
have worked out those complex estimates of economic possibility which
are needed before one can endorse the hopeful forecasts of Lady Warwick,
Mr. Money, and Mr. Wells. What I propose to do here is first to discuss
what effect plutocracy, such as it is to-day, has had of late, and is
likely to have in the near future, upon one of the things which I should
like to imagine continuing upon our planet--namely, art. And then
briefly to prognosticate its chances under such a regime as my
colleagues have sketched.
As I understand it, art is one of the chief organs of what, for want of
a better word, I must call the spiritual life. It both stimulates and
controls those indefinable overtones of the material life of man which
all of us at moments feel to have a quality of permanence and reality
that does not belong to the rest of our experience. Nature demands with
no uncertain voice that the physical needs of the body shall be
satisfied first; but we feel that our real human life only begins at the
point where that is accomplished, that the man who works at some
uncreative and uncongenial toil merely to earn enough food to enable him
to continue to work has not, properly speaking, a human life at all.
It is the argument of commercialism, as it once was of aristocracy, that
the accumulation of surplus wealth in a few hands enables this spiritual
life to maintain its existence, that no really valuable or useless work
(for from this point of view only useless work has value) could exist in
the community without such accumulations of wealth. The argument has
been employed for the disinterested work of scientific research. A
doctor of naturally liberal and generous impulses told me that he was
becoming a reactionary simply because he feared that public bodies would
never give the money necessary for research with anything like the same
generosity as is now shown by the great plutocrats. But Sir Ray
Lankester does not find that generosity sufficient, and is prepared at
least to consider a State more ample-spirited.
The situation as regards art and as regards the disinterested love of
truth is so similar that we might expect this argument in favour of a
plutocratic social order to hold equally well for both art and science,
and that the artist would be a fervent upholder of the present system.
As a matter of fact, the more representative artists have rarely been
such, and not a few, though working their life long for the plutocracy,
have been vehement Socialists.
Despairing of the conditions due to modern commercialism, it is not
unnatural that lovers of beauty should look back with nostalgia to the
age when society was controlled by a landed aristocracy. I believe,
however, that from the point of view of the encouragement of great
creative art there is not much difference between an aristocracy and a
plutocracy. The aristocrat usually had taste, the plutocrat frequently
has not. Now taste is of two kinds, the first consisting in the negative
avoidance of all that is ill-considered and discordant, the other
positive and a by-product; it is that harmony which always results from
the expression of intense and disinterested emotion. The aristocrat, by
means of his good taste of the negative kind, was able to come to terms
with the artist; the plutocrat has not. But both alike desire to buy
something which is incommensurate with money. Both want art to be a
background to their radiant self-consciousness. They want to buy beauty
as they want to buy love; and the painter, picture-dealer, and the
pander try perennially to persuade them that it is possible. But living
beauty cannot be bought; it must be won. I have said that the
aristocrat, by his taste, by his feeling for the accidentals of beauty,
did manage to get on to some kind of terms with the artist. Hence the
art of the eighteenth century, an art that is prone before the
distinguished patron, subtly and deliciously flattering and yet always
fine. In contrast to that the art of the nineteenth century is coarse,
turbulent, clumsy. It marks the beginning of a revolt. The artist just
managed to let himself be coaxed and cajoled by the aristocrat, but when
the aristocratic was succeeded by the plutocratic patron with less
conciliatory manners and no taste, the artist rebelled; and the history
of art in the nineteenth century is the history of a band of heroic
Ishmaelites, with no secure place in the social system, with nothing to
support them in the unequal struggle but a dim sense of a new idea, the
idea of the freedom of art from all trammels and tyrannies.
The place that the artists left vacant at the plutocrat’s table had to
be filled, and it was filled by a race new in the history of the world,
a race for whom no name has yet been found, a race of pseudo-artists. As
the prostitute professes to sell love, so these gentlemen professed to
sell beauty, and they and their patrons rollicked good-humouredly
through the Victorian era. They adopted the name and something of the
manner of artists; they intercepted not only the money, but the titles
and fame and glory which were intended for those whom they had
supplanted. But, while they were yet feasting, there came an event which
seemed at the time of no importance, but which was destined to change
ultimately the face of things, the exhibition of ancient art at
Manchester in 1857. And with this came Ruskin’s address on the Political
Economy of Art, a work which surprises by its prophetic foresight when
we read it half a century later. These two things were the Mene Tekel of
the orgy of Victorian Philistinism. The plutocrat saw through the
deception; it was not beauty the pseudo-artist sold him, any more than
it was love which the prostitute gave. He turned from it in disgust and
decided that the only beauty he could buy was the dead beauty of the
past. Thereupon set in the worship of _patine_ and the age of forgery
and the detection of forgery. I once remarked to a rich man that a
statue by Rodin might be worthy even of his collection. He replied,
“Show me a Rodin with the _patine_ of the fifteenth century, and I will
buy it.”
_Patine_, then, the adventitious material beauty which age alone can
give, has come to be the object of a reverence greater than that devoted
to the idea which is enshrined within the work of art. People are right
to admire _patine_. Nothing is more beautiful than gilded bronze of
which time has taken toll until it is nothing but a faded shimmering
splendour over depths of inscrutable gloom; nothing finer than the dull
glow which Pentelic marble has gathered from past centuries of sunlight
and warm Mediterranean breezes. _Patine_ is good, but it is a surface
charm added to the essential beauty of expression; its beauty is
literally skin-deep. It can never come into being or exist in or for
itself; no _patine_ can make a bad work good, or the forgers would be
justified. It is an adjectival and ancillary beauty scarcely worthy of
our prolonged contemplation.
There is to the philosopher something pathetic in the Plutocrat’s
worship of _patine_. It is, as it were, a compensation for his own want
of it. On himself all the rough thumb and chisel marks of his maker--and
he is self-made--stand as yet unpolished and raw; but his furniture, at
least, shall have the distinction of age-long acquaintance with good
manners.
But the net result of all this is that the artist has nothing to hope
from the plutocrat. To him we must be grateful indeed for that brusque
disillusionment of the real artist, the real artist who might have
rubbed along uneasily for yet another century with his predecessor, the
aristocrat. Let us be grateful to him for this; but we need not look to
him for further benefits, and if we decide to keep him the artist must
be content to be paid after he is dead and vicariously in the person of
an art-dealer. The artist must be content to look on while sums are
given for dead beauty, the tenth part of which, properly directed, would
irrigate whole nations and stimulate once more the production of vital
artistic expression.
I would not wish to appear to blame the plutocrat. He has often honestly
done his best for art; the trouble is not of his making more than of the
artist’s, and the misunderstanding between art and commerce is bound to
be complete. The artist, however mean and avaricious he may appear,
knows that he cannot really sell himself for money any more than the
philosopher or the scientific investigator can sell himself for money.
He takes money in the hope that he may secure the opportunity for the
free functioning of his creative power. If the patron could give him
that instead of money he would bless him; but he cannot, and so he tries
to get him to work not quite freely for money; and in revenge the artist
indulges in all manner of insolences, even perhaps in sharp practices,
which make the patron feel, with some justification, that he is the
victim of ingratitude and wanton caprice. It is impossible that the
artist should work for the plutocrat; he must work for himself, because
it is only by so doing that he can perform the function for which he
exists; it is only by working for himself that he can work for mankind.
If, then, the particular kind of accumulation of surplus wealth which we
call plutocracy has failed, as surely it has signally failed, to
stimulate the creative power of the imagination, what disposition of
wealth might be conceived that would succeed better? First of all, a
greater distribution of wealth, with a lower standard of ostentation,
would, I think, do a great deal to improve things without any great
change in other conditions. It is not enough known that the patronage
which really counts to-day is exercised by quite small and humble
people. These people with a few hundreds a year exercise a genuine
patronage by buying pictures at ten, twenty, or occasionally thirty
pounds, with real insight and understanding, thereby enabling the young
Ishmaelite to live and function from the age of twenty to thirty or so,
when perhaps he becomes known to richer buyers, those experienced
spenders of money who are always more cautious, more anxious to buy an
investment than a picture. These poor, intelligent first patrons to whom
I allude belong mainly to the professional classes; they have none of
the pretensions of the plutocrat and none of his ambitions. The work of
art is not for them, as for him, a decorative backcloth to his stage,
but an idol and an inspiration. Merely to increase the number and
potency of these people would already accomplish much; and this is to be
noticed, that if wealth were more evenly distributed, if no one had a
great deal of wealth, those who really cared for art would become the
sole patrons, since for all it would be an appreciable sacrifice, and
for none an impossibility. The man who only buys pictures when he has as
many motor-cars as he can conceivably want would drop out as a patron
altogether.
But even this would only foster the minor and private arts; and what the
history of art definitely elucidates is that the greatest art has always
been communal, the expression--in highly individualised ways, no
doubt--of common aspirations and ideals.
Let us suppose, then, that society were so arranged that considerable
surplus wealth lay in the hands of public bodies, both national and
local; can we have any reasonable hope that they would show more skill
in carrying out the delicate task of stimulating and using the creative
power of the artist?
The immediate prospect is certainly not encouraging. Nothing, for
instance, is more deplorable than to watch the patronage of our
provincial museums. The gentlemen who administer these public funds
naturally have not realised so acutely as private buyers the lesson so
admirably taught at Christie’s, that pseudo or Royal-Academic art is a
bad investment. Nor is it better if we turn to national patronage. In
Great Britain, at least, we cannot get a postage stamp or a penny even
respectably designed, much less a public monument. Indeed, the tradition
that all public British art shall be crassly mediocre and inexpressive
is so firmly rooted that it seems to have almost the prestige of
constitutional precedent. Nor will any one who has watched a committee
commissioning a presentation portrait, or even buying an old master, be
in danger of taking too optimistic a view. With rare and shining
exceptions, committees seem to be at the mercy of the lowest common
denominator of their individual natures, which is dominated by fear of
criticism; and fear and its attendant, compromise, are bad masters of
the arts.
Speaking recently at Liverpool, Mr. Bernard Shaw placed the present
situation as regards public art in its true light. He declared that the
corruption of taste and the emotional insincerity of the mass of the
people had gone so far that any picture which pleased more than ten per
cent. of the population should be immediately burned....
This, then, is the fundamental fact we have to face. And it is this that
gives us pause when we try to construct any conceivable system of public
patronage.