the twelfth century there was no general decline. But the best was over
in France before the twelfth century was out. Gothic architecture is
juggling in stone and glass. In Italy Giotto followed Cimabue; and
Giotto could not always resist the temptation to state the particular
and leave the universal out. He sometimes tells us facts instead of
expressing emotions. In the full Renaissance the coarsest feeling
sufficed to flavour a handsome, well-made picture.
Meanwhile, under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) Asiatic art had reached
much the same stage. The Ming picture in the British Museum known as
_The Earthly Paradise_ is inferior to the best work of Botticelli, with
which it is commonly compared, but reminds us, in its finished grace and
gaiety, of a painting by Watteau. Korin, towards the end of the Ming
period, is about as empty as Velasquez and more brilliant than Frans
Hals. The eighteenth century, one inclines to believe, was the same
everywhere. Stylistic obsession and the taste for material beauty ended
in mechanical prettiness, altogether inexpressive or sentimental. In
both hemispheres painting was reduced to a formula--a formula for
producing elegant furniture.
But even in the age of decay Oriental art retained traces of primitive
splendour. It never sank into mere representation. The men who turned
out the popular Japanese colour-prints, though they chose the same
subjects as the Dutch genre painters, were artists enough to treat them
differently and to look for something significant beneath the mass of
irrelevant accidents. Also they preserved a nicer sensibility to
material beauty. A cheap Japanese print has sometimes the quality of a
painting by Whistler. Indeed, the superiority of the Orientals is
discreetly insinuated from beginning to end of Mr. Binyon's essay.
Equal, if not superior, to the Greek or Christian in the primitive
stage, the Asiatic movement clung to the heights longer, sank more
gradually, and never sank so low. These facts are painful, but patent;
they require explanation.
Why is Oriental art generally superior to European? Bearing in mind what
has been said about the nature of the greatest art, we shall expect it
to be because in the East they have kept in closer touch with reality.
That is precisely what has happened. The emotional life has never been
in the East what it has become in the West, the rare possession of a
fortunate few. There the practical life has been kept subordinate, a
means to supporting the emotional. In China men still go about their
business that they may purchase leisure in which to contemplate reality.
In Europe we are practical; and reality is banished from the life of the
practical man who regards all things as means instead of contemplating
them as ends. He sees just what is of use to him, and no more. He sees
enough for identification and recognition; in fact, he reads the labels
on things. The labels are all he requires. In the emotional life things
are valued for their significance--for what they are, not for what they
can be made to do; they are seen whole because they are seen as ends.
The practical man sees only a part--the part that serves his purpose.
The camera sees more than that, it sees all the details; but it cannot
see the spirit--that has to be felt.
Most Europeans think of boats as means of locomotion, of apples as
eatables. They recognize such things by their serviceable qualities;
their individuality, the universal in these particulars, escapes them.
In a picture of a boat or an apple they look for those unessential
qualities which minister to their pleasure, and of which alone they are
aware. The cleverness of a man who can paint fruit that tempts urchins
impresses them; but the artist who feels, and tries to express, the soul
of fruit and flowers they take for an incompetent dunce or a charlatan.
"One might say that man has been a monarch, looking to his
subject-world only for service and for flattery, and just because
of this lordly attitude he has failed to understand that
subject-world, and, even more, has failed to understand himself."
In the East men have ever set the spiritual life above the practical,
and artists have excelled in expressing the very essence of material
things because they expressed what they felt, instead of representing
what the ordinary man sees. They have felt that if the spirit informs
all, then all must have individual significance. To see things as means
is to see what is most useful and least important about them. To see
things as ends is to be shockingly unpractical; it is to see God in
everything; it is to exalt the spirit above the flesh; it is not the way
to "get on"; but it is the only way to produce significant art, and,
indeed, it is only on such terms that life itself signifies.
So far we have admitted the superiority of the East: the last word has
yet to be said. Few observant people will deny that there are signs of
an awakening in Europe. The times are great with the birth of some new
thing. A spiritual renaissance may be at hand. Meanwhile, we are not
suffered to ignore the huge strides in material progress that are the
chief glory of modern Japan; nor have we failed to remark that the
latest art to reach us from that country proved, when displayed with
some ostentation at Shepherd's Bush, equal in vulgarity of sentiment,
flashiness of execution, and apelike imitation to the worst that can be
seen at Burlington House. Philistinism, it seems, finds ready converts
on the other side of the globe. Let the spokesmen of the young and
bustling empire be heard. Shiba Kokan, the pupil of Harunobu, says in
his "Confessions":
"In Occidental art objects are copied directly from nature; hence
before a landscape one feels as if one were placed in the midst of
nature. There is a wonderful apparatus called the photograph, which
gives a facsimile copy of the object, whatever it is, to which it
is directed. Nothing which has not actually been seen is sketched,
nor is a nameless landscape reproduced, as we often see done in
Chinese productions.... A painting which is not a faithful copy of
nature has neither beauty nor is worthy of the name."
And this is the considered judgment of that popular modern painter Okio:
"The use of art is to produce copies of things, and if an artist
has a thorough knowledge of the properties of the thing he paints,
he can assuredly make a name.... Without the true depiction of
objects there can be no pictorial art. Nobility of sentiment and
suchlike only come after a successful delineation of the external
form of an object."
Such men would be very much at home at an Academy banquet or in the
parlour of a suburban stockbroker and less so in the world of art than a
saint would be in Wall Street. For whereas the saint would perceive the
spark of the universal in the particular stockjobber, the stockjobber
and his friends, Mr. Okio, the delineator, and the philophotographic Mr.
Kokan, are blind to anything that is not on the surface. Japan, we are
told, is to shape the future of the Eastern hemisphere. Japan is
"forging ahead." Already she has set her hand to the task of civilizing,
that is to say Europeanizing, China--just at the moment when Europe is
coming to loathe her own grossness. Time is the master of paradox. Who
shall say what surprises are too fantastic for his contriving? Can the
classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of
trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the
unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than
the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a
tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world,
while Asia--rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of
lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police
regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and
obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.
FOOTNOTE:
[14] "The Flight of the Dragon: an Essay on the Theory and Practice of
Art in China and Japan." By Laurence Binyon. (John Murray.)
WILLIAM MORRIS[15]
[Sidenote: _New Statesman Oct. 1914_]
Here is a book that starts a dozen hares, any one of which would be
worth catching or hunting, at any rate, through a couple of large-type
columns. For a really good book about William Morris is bound to raise
those questions that Morris made interesting and his disciples
fashionable, and that our children, we may hope, will one day make
vital. "How far can society affect art, or art society?" "What might we
have made of machinery and what has machinery made of us?" "Was the
nineteenth century a disaster or only a failure?" These are the
questions that it seems right and natural for a writer who has made
William Morris his peg to discuss; and if I discuss something quite
different it may look as though, forsaking profitable hares, I were
after a herring of my own trailing. Yet, reading this book, I find that
the question that interests me most is: "Why does Clutton Brock tend to
overrate William Morris?" To answer it I have had to discover what sort
of person I suppose Clutton Brock to be, and William Morris to have
been.
Clutton Brock is one of our best critics. When I say this, of course I
take into consideration his unsigned writings, the anonymity of which is
not so strict as to make my judgment indiscreet. Without the subtlety of
a philosopher or a trained dialectician, he has been blest with a
powerful intellect which enables him, unlike most of our critics, not
only to distinguish between sense and nonsense, but himself to refrain
from saying what is utterly absurd. Mr. Brock does not like nonsense,
and he never talks it. Both the form and the content of his criticism
are intellectual. He is in the great English tradition--the tradition of
Dryden and Johnson and Macaulay and Leslie Stephen; he has an
argumentative prose-style and a distaste for highfalutin, and, where the
unenlightened intellectualism of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, and the
incorrigible common sense of Johnson, might have pitched these eminent
men into the slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens that Mr.
Brock, whose less powerful mind is sweetened by a sense of art,
contrives to escape.
No man who has ever done anything worth doing has done less highfalutin
than Morris. He was always the craftsman who kept close to his
material, and thought more about the block and the chisel than about
aesthetic ecstasy. The thrills and ecstasies of life, he seems to have
felt, must come as by-products out of doing one's job as well as one
could: they were not things, he thought, to aim at, or even talk about
overmuch. I do not agree with Morris, but that is beside the point. The
point is that Clutton Brock is unwilling to disagree with him violently.
He has a peculiar kindness for Morris that does not surprise me. He is a
man who works for his living, and does his work so well that we may be
sure he wins from it delight. The greater part of what he writes he does
not sign; and there are thousands of people in England who, though they
hardly know his name, have yet been affected by his mind. As he sits
quietly producing a surprising quantity of good literature, he must
sometimes feel very near those anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages
who, lost in the scaffolding, struck out forms that would to-day make
only too familiar the names of their creators. At such moments, can he
be less than partial to the man who understood so well the greatness and
the dignity of those nameless artists?
Morris was amongst the first to perceive that much of the greatest art
has been produced anonymously and collectively; and we may be sure that
Clutton Brock shares his dislike for that worship of names, that
interest in catalogues and biographies, which amongst the collecting
classes still does duty for aesthetic sensibility. Morris was indignant,
as well he might be, when he heard the pictures of some famous
artist--famous because he signed his name and left some record of his
life--exalted above the sculpture and windows of Chartres--the work of
obscure stone-cutters and verriers. He loved the mediaeval craftsmen for
the fineness of their work and for their personal modesty. He liked to
think of men who could take their orders from a _contre-maitre_ and
execute them superbly, partly, I think, because he saw that these were
men who could be fitted into his ideal State. And Mr. Clutton Brock,
good Socialist that he is, must, I suppose, himself have been perplexed
by that problem which confronts every modern State-projector: What is to
be done about the artists? How are these strange, turbulent,
individualistic creatures to be fitted into any rational collectivism?
What place can be found in Utopia for people who do not work to live,
but live to do what they consider their own peculiar piece of work? Now,
if only they were craftsmen, they would make what was wanted; they
would do what they were told.
Some feeling of this sort may, I think, be at the back of Mr. Clutton
Brock's peculiar sympathy with Morris; it would explain, too, why he did
less than justice to Shelley in that remarkable study he published some
years ago. He could not quite forgive the poet for being so hopelessly
anti-Social. Perhaps, in his heart, Mr. Brock would hardly admit the
absolute value of aesthetic rapture; he wants art to do something for
life, and he loses patience with people who simply add to its confusion.
Shelley, he thought, made a mess of his own life and of Harriet's, and,
for all one knows, of Miss Hitchener's, and of a score of others; and
his poetry you must read for its own sake or not at all. The poetry of
Morris has value for people who have never known what it is to feel an
aesthetic emotion, and his life was superbly useful to his fellow-men.
The great State of the future will be glad of as many William Morrises
as it can get.
But it is I who am being less than just now. From what I have said any
one might infer that I had not read, or had not appreciated, that volume
called "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," in which are to be
found things of pure beauty, "Summer Dawn," "In Prison," "The Wind,"
"The Haystack in the Floods"; any one might suppose that I did not know
"Love is Enough." These are the poems which, with "Sigurd," give William
Morris his place amongst the poets. Mr. Clutton Brock feels this surely
enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer
critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic
distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and
rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility--part
aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems--that he can be
trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that
quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt
Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is
why I suppose Mr. Brock to be one of our best critics.
If there were anything fundamentally nasty about Morris Mr. Brock would
not be inclined to overrate him. Mr. Brock pardons no unpardonable
horrors: there are none here to pardon. But he overrates, or rather
overmarks, William Morris as a scrupulous but soft-hearted examiner
might overmark a sympathetic pupil. He never gives marks when the answer
is wrong, but he gives a great many when it is right: and he is a little
blind to deficiencies. He does not make it clear that Morris, as an
artist, was cursed with two of the three modern English vices, that he
was provincial and amateurish. But he gives him full credit for not
being goaded to futility by a sense of his own genius.
Morris was provincial as the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson and Carlyle
were provincial, as Swinburne and Whistler were not; his mind could
rarely escape from the place and age in which it was formed. He looked
at art and life, and at the future even, from the point of view of an
Englishman and a Victorian; and when he tries to change his position we
feel the Victorian labouring, more or less unsuccessfully, to get out of
himself. When I accuse him of being "amateurish" I do not use that vile
word in contradistinction to "professional." In a sense all true artists
must be amateurs; the professional view, the view that art is a hopeful
and genteel way of earning one's living, is possible only to official
portrait-painters and contractors for public monuments. When I say that
Morris, like almost all our visual artists and too many of our modern
writers, was amateurish, I mean that he was not serious enough about his
art. He tended to regard art as a part of life instead of regarding life
as a means to art. A long morning's work, an afternoon of fresh air, a
quiet evening, and so to bed and fit next morning for another good
spell of production; something of that sort, one fancies, was not unlike
the ideal of William Morris. It is a craftsman's ideal; it is a good
life for any one but an artist; and it would be a good attitude towards
art if art were not something altogether different from work. Alas! it
is the English attitude. I never look at those Saxon manuscripts in the
British Museum but I say to myself: "And didn't they go out and have a
game of cricket after hours and work all the harder next day for their
wholesome exercise!"
But from the fatal curse Morris was free; no man of great ability was
ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired
pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that
empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely
British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on
sun and moon to stand and watch him sign his name, neither was he the
shy genius of the English hedgerows sheltering his little talent from
contemporary infection and the chill winds of criticism.
Morris was neither a great artist nor a great thinker, but he was a
great man, and that, I suspect, is the chief reason why Mr. Brock loves
him, and why none of the better sort can help liking him. He had that
magnanimity which makes people take instinctively the right side. His
reasons might be wrong, but he was in the right. There are people in
history, and Morris is one of them, about whom we feel that if they were
alive they would sympathize with whatever were the best and most
pressing aspirations of the age. Morris would, of course, be as firm
to-day as ever against plutocracy, but one feels sure that he would take
his stand with those who are trying to win for themselves some kind of
moral and intellectual as well as economic freedom. One feels sure he
would be of that forlorn hope of civilization that carries on a sporadic
and ineffective war against officialism and militarism on the one hand,
and puritanism and superstition on the other. One feels sure that,
however little he might like new developments in art or thought, he
would be against the people who tried to suppress them. One feels quite
sure that he would never cease to believe that so long as society is
imperfect it is the right and duty of individuals to experiment. The
fact is, Morris was at once a practical craftsman and an idealist. In
practical affairs and private prejudices he could be as truculent and
wrong-headed as the rest of us; but he was always conscious of something
much more important than practical affairs and private prejudices. He
cared nothing for his own reputation and little for immediate success
because he cared for something greater. For that he cared so much that
he was able to forgive the quarrels and absurdities of the Hammersmith
Socialists and to laugh even at his own vehemence.
FOOTNOTE:
[15] "William Morris." By A. Clutton Brock. (Williams and Norgate: Home
University Library, 1s. net.)
PERSIAN MINIATURES[16]
[Sidenote: _Burlington Magazine May 1914_]
Very slowly it is becoming possible to construct a history of Persian
painting. Until quite lately all attempts were frustrated by what is
sure to frustrate the attempts of the first historians of any "school"
or "slope," or, for that matter, of any subject whatever--a false point
of departure. So long as it was supposed that Behzad was the first
mature master of Persian painting, Persian art-historians were as
inevitably out in their conjectures as were the people who used to
believe that Raphael was what they would have called "the _fons et
origo_" of European painting.
We are now acquainted, if not familiar, with Persian paintings of the
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with the Mongol and with a
pre-Mongol school--for it seems imprudent to give the name Mongol to
works that can be assigned to a date earlier than 1258 (the year of the
eponymous establishment), especially as they differ profoundly from the
recognized Mongol type. We know that the pre-Mongol school was the heir
of a great decorative tradition; and we have good reasons for believing
that this tradition was based on Sassanian, Sung, and Byzantine art. We
are therefore more or less in the position of people who should be
acquainted with the work of Cimabue, Giotto, and Duccio, though knowing
very little of Byzantine art and its primitive developments in the West.
Of this early period--Mongol and pre-Mongol--we do not yet possess many
examples; but the student who turns to the _Burlington Magazine_ for
July and August 1913 will see reproductions from a superb manuscript of
the late thirteenth century, Mr. Pierpont Morgan's "Manafi-i-Heiwan,"
and any one who has the good fortune to know M. Claude Anet or M.
Vignier can probably be put in the way of seeing some originals.
He will discover in the work of this early period two distinct
schools: one--of which the running ibexes in the "Manafi-i-Heiwan"
is an example--obviously related to Sung; the other--of which
the "Kalila and Dimna" miniatures[17] (dated 1236), and the
elephants from the "Manafi-i-Heiwan" (1295 _circa_) may be taken
as illustrations--reminding us rather of Sassanian art. Exquisite
perfection of line is the dominant characteristic of the first school;
in the second, we find a broader treatment, a more splendid disposition
of masses, and a more monumental design than in any other known school
of Persian painting. It is amongst the works of these thirteenth-century
painters that we must look for the discovered masterpieces of Persian
art.
In our present state of ignorance we may call this the great age. It is
the familiar age of fine Rhages pottery; and to compare the beautiful
drawing on the twelfth-and thirteenth-century pots with the miniatures
of this period is to let a flood of light on to the study of both. Mr.
Kevorkian has, or had, a wonderful painting from "The History of the
Kalifs" by Tabari (about 1200), the figures of which might have walked
straight out of a Rhages bowl into which they had walked some fifty
years earlier direct from Western China. Yet, admirable as this
thirteenth century is, I do not believe that it is in fact the supreme
age of Persian painting. Certainly it is not the primitive age. This is
an art that comes out of a long tradition. And just as we have already
discovered pottery earlier than and surpassing that of the thirteenth
century, so I hope and believe we shall yet see primitive Persian
paintings superior to anything that the late pre-Mongol and Mongol
period can show. For the present we can only say that the works of this
period are not much inferior to the greatest that the genius of any race
or age has created.