(From the _Atlantic Monthly_ and _Fortnightly Review_, 1915.)
Monsieur Rodin—perhaps the greatest living artist—has lately defined
art as the pursuit of beauty, and beauty as “the expression of what
there is best in man.” “Man,” he says, “needs to express in a perfect
form of art all his intuitive longings towards the Unknowable.” His
words may serve as warning to those who imagine that the war will loosen
one root of the tree of art—a tree which has been growing slowly since
first soul came into men’s eyes.
This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of
an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God; that
which not every one will admit is that this Creative Purpose works in
its fashioning not only of matter but of what we call spirit, through
friction, through the rubbing together of the noses, the thoughts, and
the hearts of men. While the material condition of our planet—the heat
or friction within it—remains favourable to human life, there will,
there must needs be, a continual crescendo in the stature of Humanity,
through the ever-increasing friction of human spirits one with the
other; friction supplied by life itself, and, next after life, by those
transcripts of life, those expressions of human longing, which we know
as art. Art for art’s sake—if it meant what it said, which is
doubtful—was always a vain and silly cry. As well contend that an
artist is not a man. Art was ever the servant as well as the mistress of
men, and ever will be. Civilization, which after all is but the gradual
conversion of animal man into human man, has come about through art even
more than through religion, law, and science. For the achieved
“expression of man’s intuitive longing towards the Unknowable, in more
or less perfect forms of art” has ever—after life itself—been the
chief influence in broadening men’s hearts.
The aim of human life no doubt is happiness. But, after all, what is
happiness? Efficiency, wealth, material comfort? Many by their lives do
so affirm; few are cynical enough to say so; and on their death-beds
none will feel that they are. Not even freedom in itself brings
happiness. Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is
that inward freedom, which has the power to understand, feel with, and,
if need be, help others. In breadth of heart are founded justice, love,
sacrifice; without it there would seem no special meaning to any of our
efforts, and the tale of all human life would still be no more than that
of very gifted animals, many of whom, indeed, are highly efficient, and
have unity partly instinctive, partly founded on experiences of the
utility thereof; but none of whom have that conscious altruism which is
without perception of benefit to self, and works from sheer recognition
of its own beauty. In sum, human civilization is the growth of conscious
altruism; and the directive moral purpose in the world nothing but our
dim perception, ever growing through spiritual friction, that we are all
bound more and more towards the understanding of ourselves and each
other, and all that this carries with it. To imagine, then, that a
conflagration like this war, however vast and hellish, will do aught but
momentarily retard the crescendo of that understanding, is to miss
perception of the whole slow process by which man has become less and
less an animal throughout the ages; and to fear that the war will scorch
and wither art, that chief agent of understanding, is either to identify
oneself with the petty and eclectic views which merely produce æsthetic
excrescences, or to be frankly ignorant of what art means.
Recognition of the relativity of art is constantly neglected by those
who talk and write about it. For one school the audience does not exist;
for another nothing but the audience. Obviously neither view is right.
Art may be very naïve and still be art—still be the expression of a
childish vision appealing to childish visions, making childish hearts
beat. Thus:
“Mary had a little lamb,
Its wool was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go,”
is art to the child of five, whose heart and fancy it affects. And:
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
Through the forests of the night—
What immortal hand and eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?”
is art to the writer and the reader of these words.
On the other hand, Tolstoi, in limiting art to such of it as might be
understanded of simple folk, served his purpose of attacking the
extravagant dandyisms of æstheticism, but fell lugubriously short of the
wide truth. The essence of art is the power of communication between
heart and heart. Yes! But since no one shall say to human nature: “Be of
this or that pattern,” or to the waves of human understanding: “Thus far
and no further,” so no man shall say these things to art.
Anybody can draw a tree, but few can draw a tree that others can see is
like a tree, and not one in a million can convey the essential spirit of
Tree. The power of getting over the footlights to some audience or other
is clearly necessary before a man can be called an artist by any but
himself. But so soon as he has established genuine connection between
his creation and the gratified perception of others, he is making art,
though it may be, and usually is, very childish art. The point to grasp
is this, and again this: Art is rooted in life for its inspiration, and
dependent for its existence as art on affecting other human beings,
sooner or later. The statue, the picture, or the book which, having been
given a proper chance, has failed to move any but its creator, is
certainly not art. It does not follow that the artist should consider
his public, or try to please others than his own best self; but if, in
pleasing his best self, he does not succeed in pleasing others, in the
past, the present, or the future, he will certainly not have produced
art. Not, of course, that the size of his public is proof of an artist’s
merit. The public of all time is generally but a small public at any
given moment. Tolstoi seems to have forgotten that, and to have
neglected the significance attaching to the quality of a public. For, if
the essence of art be its power of bridging between heart and heart (as
he admitted), its value may well be greater if at first it only reaches
and fertilizes the hearts of other artists rather than those of the
public, for through these other artists it sweeps out again in further
circles and ripples of expression. Art is the universal traveller,
essentially international in influence. Revealing the spirit of things
lying behind parochial surfaces and circumstance, delving down into the
common stuff of nature and human nature, and recreating therefrom, it
passes ten thousand miles of space, ten thousand years of time, and yet
appeals to the men it finds on those far shores. It is the one
possession of a country which that country’s enemies usually still
respect and take delight in. War—destructive outcome of the side of
man’s nature which is hostile to all breadth of heart—can for the
moment paralyse the outward activities of art, but can it ever chain its
spirit, or arrest the inner ferment of the creative instinct? For
thousands of generations war has been the normal state of man’s
existence, yet alongside war has flourished art, reflecting man’s myriad
aspirations and longings, and, by innumerable expressions of individual
vision and sentiment, ever unifying human life, through the common
factor of impersonal emotion passing from heart to heart by ways more
invisible than the winds travel, carrying the seeds and pollen of herb
life. If one could only see those countless tenuous bridges spun by art,
a dewy web over the whole lawn of life! If for a moment we could see
them, discouragement would cease its uneasy buzzing. What can this war
do that a million wars have not? It is bigger, and more bloody—the
reaction from it will but be the greater. If every work of art existing
in the Western world were obliterated, and every artist killed, would
human nature return to the animalism from which art has in a measure
raised it? Not so. Art makes good in the human soul all the positions
that it conquers.
When the war is over, the world will find that the thing which has
changed least is art. There will be less money to spend on it; some
artists will have been killed; certain withered leaves, warts, and dead
branches will have sloughed off from the tree; and that is all. The wind
of war reeking with death will neither have warped nor poisoned it. The
utility of art, which in these days of blood and agony is mocked at,
will be rising again into the view even of the mockers, almost before
the thunder of the last shell has died away. “Beauty is useful,” says
Monsieur Rodin. Aye! it is useful!
Who knows whether, even in the full whirlwind of this most gigantic
struggle, art work may not be produced which, in sum of its ultimate
effect on mankind, will outlive and outweigh the total net result of
that struggle, just as the work of Euripides, Shakespeare, Leonardo,
Beethoven, and Tolstoi outweighed the net result of the Peloponnesian,
sixteenth century, Napoleonic, and Crimean wars? War is so unutterably
tragic, because—without it—Nature, given time, would have attained the
same ends in other ways. A war is the spasmodic uprising of old savage
instincts against the slow and gradual humanizing of the animal called
man. It emanates from restless and so-called virile natures
fundamentally intolerant of men’s progress towards the understanding of
each other—natures that often profess a blasphemous belief in art, a
blasphemous alliance with God. It still apparently suffices for a knot
of such natures to get together, and play on mass fears and loyalties,
to set a continent on fire. And at the end? Those of us who are able to
look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death will conclude
with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come the state of the world
would be very much the same.
It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance
of this conflict _now that it has been joined_. Humanism and Democracy
have been forced into a sudden and spasmodic death-grapple with their
arch-enemies; and the end of that struggle must be brought into
conformity with the slow, sure, general progress of mankind. But if, by
better fortune, this fearful conflict had not been forced upon
civilization, the same victory would have made good, in course of time,
by other processes. That is the irony. For, of a surety, wars or no
wars—the future is to Humanism.
But art has no cause to droop its head, nor artists to be discouraged.
They are the servants of the future every bit as much as, and more than,
they have been the servants of the past; they are even the faithful
servants of the present, for they must keep their powers in training,
and their vision keen against the time when they are once more accounted
of. A true picture is a joy that will move hearts some day, though it
may not sell now, nor even for some years after the war; beauty none the
less “the expression of what there is best in man” because the earth is
being soaked with blood.
Monsieur Sologub, the Russian poet, speaking recently on the future of
art, seems to have indicated his view that after the war art will move
away from the paths of naturalism; and he defines the naturalists as
“people who describe life from the standpoint of material satisfaction.”
With that definition I do not at all agree, but it is never good to
argue about words. Confusion in regard to the meaning of terms
describing art activity is so profound that it is well to sweep them out
of our minds, and, in considering what forms art ought to take, go deep
down to the criterion of communication between heart and heart. The only
essential is, that vision, fancy, feeling should be given the concrete
clothing that shall best make them perceptible by the hearts of others;
the simpler, the more direct and clear and elemental the form, the
better; and that is all you can say about it. To seek remote, intricate,
and “precious” clothings for the imagination is but to handicap vision
and imperil communication and appeal; the artists who seek them are not
usually of much account. The greatness of Blake is the greatness of his
simpler work. Though, in this connection, it is as much affectation to
pretend that men are more childish than they are, as to pretend that
they all have the subtlety of a Robert Browning. If the range of an
artist’s vision, the essential truth of his fancy, and the heat of his
feeling be great, then, obviously, the simpler, the more accessible the
form he takes, the wider will be his reach, the deeper the emotion he
stirs, the greater the value of his art.
“What is wanted,” says Monsieur Sologub, “is true art.” Quite so! What
is wanted in a work of art is an unforced natural and adequate
correspondence between fancy and form, matter and spirit, so that one
shall not be distracted by its naturalism, mysticism, cubism,
whatnotism, but shall simply be moved in a deep impersonal way by
perception of another’s vision. Two instances come into the mind: A
picture of Spring, by Jean François Millet, in the Louvre. Therein, by
simple selection, without any departure whatever from the normal
representation of life, the very essence of Spring, the brooding and the
white flash of it, the suspense and stir, the sense of gathered
torrents, all the special emotion, which, every Spring of the year, is
sooner or later felt by every heart, has been stored by the painter’s
vision and feeling, and projected from his eyes and heart to other eyes
and hearts.
And: Those chapters in a novel of Monsieur Sologub’s compatriot,
Turgenev—“Fathers and Children”—which describe with the simplest
naturalism the death of Bazarov. There, too, is the heart-beat of
emotion as universal as it well can be, rendered so vividly that one is
not conscious at all of how it is rendered.
These are two cases of that complete welding of form and spirit which is
all one need or should demand of art; the rest is a mere question of the
artist’s emotional quality and stature. Art, in fact, will take all
paths after the war just as before; and now and then the artist will
fashion that true blend of form and fancy which is the achievement of
beauty.
For Monsieur Rodin, beauty is the adoration of all that man perceives
with his spiritual senses. Yes. And the task of artists is to kneel
before life till they rive the heart from it and with that heart twine
their own; out of such marriages come precious offspring, winged
messengers.
There is a picture of Francesca’s in the Louvre, too much restored—some
say it is not a Francesca, but if not, then neither are they Francescas
in the English National Gallery, and those, so far as I know, are not
disputed—a picture of the Virgin, with hands pressed together, before
her naked Babe, in a landscape of hills and waters. Her kneeling figure
has in it I cannot tell what of devotion and beauty, which makes the
heart turn over within one. With his spiritual senses the painter has
perceived, and in adoration set down what he has seen, mingling with it
the longings of his own heart. And they who look on that picture know
for evermore what devotion and beauty are. And if they be artists, they
go away fortified again to the taking up of a long quest.
This is the utility of art. It plays between men like light, showing the
heights and depths of nature, beckoning on, or warning of destruction,
and ever through emotion revealing heart to heart. It is the priestess
of Humanism, confirming to us our future, reassuring our faltering faith
in our own approach to the Unknowable, till the tides of the Creative
Purpose turn, and our world gets cold; and Man, having lived his day to
the uttermost, finds gradual sleep.