LOST PROVINCES
1. _Business_
In any scheme of things where the churches, as agents of God, assert
the right to speak with authority about the conduct of life they should
be able to lay down rules about the way business shall be carried on.
The churches once did just that. In some degree they still attempt to
do it. But the attempts have grown feebler and feebler. In the last
six hundred years the churches have fought a losing battle against the
emancipation of business from religious control.
The early Christian writers looked upon business as a peril to the
soul. Although the church was in itself, among other things, a large
business corporation, they did not countenance business enterprise.
Money-making they called avarice and money-lending usury, just as they
spoke of lust when they meant sexual desire. They had sound reasons of
their own for this attitude. They knew from observation, perhaps even
from introspection, that the desire for riches is so strong a passion
that men possessed by it will devote only their odd moments to God. The
objection to a business career was like the objection to fornication;
it diverted the energies of the soul.
There were, no doubt, worldly reasons as well which account for the
long resistance of the mediæval Church [p085] to what we now regard
as the highest form of capitalistic endeavor. The Church belonged to
the feudal system. The Pope and his bishops were in fact great feudal
lords. They thrived best in a social order where men lived upon the
land. They had a premonition that the rise of capitalism, with its
large cities, its financiers, merchants, and proletarian workers, was
bound to weaken the secular authority of the church and to dissolve the
influence of religion in men’s lives. They failed in their resistance,
but surely one can hardly say that their vision was not prophetic.
The drastic legislation of the church against business was enacted
in the early days of capitalism; it was inspired, like the English
corn laws and many another agrarian measure, by a determination to
preserve a landed order of society. Thus in discussing whether money
might properly be loaned out at interest Pope Innocent IV argued that
if this were permitted “men would not give thought to the cultivation
of their land, except when they could do naught else ... even if they
could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts
and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not
have them, and the rich, both for the sake of profit and security,
would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more
risky investments.” The argument is the same as that which the American
farmer makes when he complains that the bankers in Wall Street prefer
to lend money to business men and to speculators rather than to farmers.
But the solid reasons which once inspired the church’s opposition to
business do not concern us here. The opposition was unsuccessful, the
reasons were forgotten, and [p086] the old pronouncements against
usury were looked upon as quaint and unworldly. For the new economic
order which displaced feudalism, the Catholic Church, at least, had no
program. It did not adapt itself readily to the spirit of commercial
enterprise which captured the active minds of Northern Europe. The
Protestant churches did adapt themselves and contrived to preach a
gospel which encouraged, where Roman Catholicism had discouraged, the
enterprising business man. They preached the divine duty of labor. “At
the day of doom,” said John Bunyan, “men shall be judged according to
their fruits. It will not be said then, Did you Believe? But, were you
Doers, or Talkers only?” As this preaching became more concrete, to
be a doer meant to do work and make money. Baxter in his _Christian
Directory_ wrote that “if God show you a way in which you may lawfully
get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any
other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross
one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.”
Richard Steele in _The Tradesman’s Calling_ pointed out that the
virtues enjoined on Christians—diligence, moderation, sobriety, and
thrift—are the very qualities which are most needed for commercial
success. For “godly wisdom ... comes in and puts due bounds” to his
expenses, “and teaches the tradesman to live rather somewhat below than
at all above his income.”
However edifying such doctrine may have been, it was clearly an
abandonment of the right, once so eloquently asserted by the church,
that it had the authority to regulate business in the interest of man’s
spiritual welfare. That right is still sometimes asserted. Sermons are
still [p087] preached about business ethics; there are programs of
Christian socialism and Christian capitalism. Churchmen still interest
themselves, often very effectively, to reform some flagrant industrial
abuse like the sweating of women and children. But the modern efforts
to moralize business and to subordinate profit-seeking to humane ends
are radically different from those of the mediæval church. They are
admittedly experimental—that is to say, debatable—since they do not
derive their authority from revelation. And they are presented as an
appeal to reason, to conscience, to generosity, not as the commandments
of God. The Council of Vienna in 1312 declared that any ruler or
magistrate who sanctioned usury and compelled debtors to observe
usurious contracts would be excommunicated; all laws which sanctioned
money-lending at interest were to be repealed within three months. The
churches do not speak in that tone of voice to-day.
Thus if an organization like the Federal Council of Churches of Christ
is distressed by, let us say, the labor policy of a great corporation,
it inquires courteously of the president’s secretary whether it would
not be possible for him to confer with a delegation about the matter.
If the churchmen are granted an interview, which is never altogether
certain, they have to argue with the business man on secular grounds.
Were they to say that the eight-hour day was the will of God, he
would conclude they were cranks, he would surreptitiously press the
buzzer under his desk, and in a few moments his secretary would appear
summoning him to an important board meeting. They have to argue with
him, if they are to obtain a hearing, about the effect on health,
efficiency, turnover, [p088] and other such matters which are worked
up for them by economists. As churchmen they have kindly impulses, but
there is no longer a body of doctrine in the churches which enables
them to speak with authority.
The emancipation of business from religious control is perhaps even
more threatening to the authority of the churches than the rivalry of
sects or the rise of the civil power. Business is a daily occupation;
government meets the eye of the ordinary men only now and then. That
the main interest in the waking life of most people should be carried
on wholly separated from the faith they profess means that the churches
have lost one of the great provinces of the human soul. The sponsors
of the Broadway Temple in New York City put the matter in a thoroughly
modern, even if it was a rather coarse, way when they proclaimed a
campaign to sell bonds as “a five percent investment in your Fellow
Man’s Salvation—Broadway Temple is to be a combination of Church and
Skyscraper, Religion and Revenue, Salvation and 5 Percent—and the 5
percent is based on ethical Christian grounds.” The five percent, they
hastened to add, was also based on a gilt-edged real-estate mortgage;
the salvation, however, was, we may suppose, a speculative profit.
2. _The Family_
The family is the inner citadel of religious authority and there the
churches have taken their most determined stand. Long after they had
abandoned politics to Caesar and business to Mammon, they continued
to insist upon their authority to fix the ideal of sexual relations.
But here, too, the dissolution of their authority has proceeded
[p089] inexorably. They have lost their exclusive right to preside
over marriages. They have not been able to maintain the dogma that
marriage is indissoluble. They are not able to prevent the remarriage
of divorced persons. Although in many jurisdictions fornication and
adultery are still crimes, there is no longer any serious attempt to
enforce the statutes. The churches have failed in their insistence that
sexual intercourse by married persons is a sin unless it is validated
by the willingness to beget a child. Except to the poorest and most
ignorant the means of preventing conception are available to all. There
is no longer any compulsion to regard the sexual life as within the
jurisdiction of the commissioners of the Lord.
Religious teachers knew long ago what modern psychologists have
somewhat excitedly rediscovered: that there is a very intimate
connection between the sexual life and the religious life. Only men
living in a time when religion has lost so much of its inward vitality
could be shocked at this simple truth, for the churches, when their
inspiration was fresh, have always known it. That is why they have
laid such tremendous emphasis upon the religious control of sexual
experience, have extolled chastity, have preached continence after
marriage except where parenthood was in view, have inveighed against
fornication, adultery, divorce, and all unprocreative indulgence, have
insisted that marriages be celebrated within the communion, have upheld
the parental authority over children. They were not prudish. That is
a state of mind which marks the decay of vigorous determination to
control the sexual life. The early teachers did not avert their eyes.
They did not mince their words. For they knew what they were doing.
[p090]
Men like St. Paul and St. Augustine knew in the most direct way what
sexual desire can do to distract the religious life; how if it is not
sternly regulated, and if it is allowed to run wild, it intoxicates
the whole personality to the exclusion of spiritual interests. They
knew, too, although perhaps not quite so explicitly, that these same
passions, if they are repressed and redirected, may come forth as
an ecstasy of religious devotion. They were not reformers. They did
not think of progress. They did not suppose that the animal in man
could somehow be refined until it was no longer animal. When Paul
spoke of the law of his members warring against the law of his mind,
and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin, he had made a
realistic observation which any candid person can verify out of his own
experience. There was no vague finical nonsense about this war of the
members against the inward man seeking delight in the law of God.
If the sexual impulse were not deeply related to the religious life,
the preoccupation of churchmen with it throughout the ages would be
absurd. They have not been preoccupied in any comparable degree with
the other physiological functions of the body. They have concerned
themselves somewhat with eating and drinking, for gluttony and
drunkenness can also distract men from religion. But hunger and thirst
are minor passions, far more easily satisfied than lust, and in no way
so pervasive and imperious. The world, the flesh, and the devil may
usually be taken to mean sexual desire. Around it, then, the churches
have built up a ritual, to dominate it lest they be dominated by it.
Tenaciously and with good reason they have fought against surrendering
their authority. [p091]
With equally great insight they have kept the closest possible
association with family life especially during the childhood of
the offspring. Here again they anticipated by many long ages the
discoveries of modern psychologists. They have always known that it is
in the earliest years, before puberty, that tradition is transmitted.
Much is learned after puberty, but in childhood education is more than
mere learning. There education is the growth of the disposition, the
fixing of the prejudices to which all later experience is cumulative.
In childhood men acquire the forms of their seeing, the prototypes of
their feeling, the style of their character. There presumably the very
pattern of authority itself is implanted by habit, fitted to the model
presented by the child’s parents. There the assumption is fixed that
there are wiser and stronger beings whom, in the nature of things, one
must obey. There the need to obey is fixed. There the whole drift of
experience is such as to make credible the idea that above the child
there is the father, above the father a king and the wise men, above
them all a heavenly Father and King.
It is plain that any change which disturbs the constitution of the home
will tend profoundly to alter the child’s sense of what he may expect
the constitution of the universe to be. There are many disturbing
changes of which none is more important surely than the emancipation
of women. The God of popular religion has usually been an elderly
male. There have been some female divinities worshipped in different
parts of the world as there have been matriarchal societies. But by
and large the imagination of men has conceived God as a father. They
have magnified to a cosmic scale what they [p092] had seen at home.
It was the male who created the child. It was his seed that the mother
cherished in her womb. It was the male who provided for the needs of
the family, even if the woman did the hard work. It was the male who
fended off enemies. It was the male who laid down the law. It was
the name of the male parent which was preserved and passed on from
generation to generation. Everything conspired to fix the belief that
the true order of life was a hierarchy with a man at the apex.
This general notion becomes less and less credible as women assert
themselves. The child of the modern household is soon made to see that
there are at least two persons who can give him orders, and that they
do not always give him the same ones. This does not educate him to
believe that there is one certain guide to conduct in the universe.
There are likely to be two guides to conduct in his universe, as women
insist that they are independent personalities with minds of their
own. This insistence, moreover, tends rather to disarrange the notion
that the father is the creator of the child. An observant youngster,
especially in these days of frank talk about sex, soon becomes aware of
the fact that the role of the male in procreation is a relatively minor
one. But most disturbing of all is the very modern household in which
the woman earns her own living. For here the child is deprived of the
opportunity, which is so conducive to belief in authority, of seeing
daily that even his mother is dependent upon a greater person for the
good things in life.
Although women, by and large, are by no means able to earn as much
money as men, the fact which counts is that they can earn enough to
support themselves. They [p093] may not actually support themselves.
But the knowledge that they could, as it becomes an accepted idea in
society, has revolutionary consequences. In former times the woman was
dependent upon her husband for bed, board, shelter, and clothing. Her
whole existence was determined by her mating; her sexual experience was
an integral part of her livelihood and her social position. But once it
had become established that a woman could live without a husband, the
intimate connection between her sex and her career began to dissolve.
The invention of dependable methods of preventing conception has
carried this dissolution much further. Birth control has separated the
sexual act from the whole series of social consequences which were
once probable if not inevitable. For with the discovery that children
need be born only when they are wanted, the sexual experience has
become increasingly a personal and private affair. It was once an
institutional affair—for the woman. For the man, from time immemorial,
there have been two sorts of sexual experience—one which had no public
consequences, and one which entailed the responsibilities of a family.
The effect of the modern changes, particularly of woman’s economic
independence and of birth control, is to equalize the freedom and the
obligations of men and women.
That the sexual life has become separated from parenthood and that
therefore it is no longer subject to external regulation, is evident.
While the desires of men and women for each other were links in a chain
which included the family and the household and children, authority,
and by that token religious authority, could hope to fix the sexual
[p094] ideal. When the chain broke, and love had no consequences
which were not too subtle for the outsider to measure, the ideal of
love was fixed not by the church in the name of God, but by prudence,
convention, the prevailing rules of hygiene, by taste, circumstances,
and personal sensibility.
3. _Art_
_(a) The Disappearance of Religious Painting_
To walk through a museum of Western European art is to behold a
peculiarly vivid record of how the great themes of popular religion
have ceased to inspire the imagination of modern men. One can visualize
there the whole story of the dissolution of the ancestral order and
of our present bewilderment. One can see how toward the close of
the Fifteenth Century the great themes illustrating the reign of a
heavenly king and of the drama of man’s salvation had ceased to be
naively believed; how at the close of the next century which witnessed
the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the beginnings of modern
science, the growth of cities, and the rise of capitalism, religious
painting ceased to be the concern of the best painters; and finally
how in the last hundred years painters have illustrated by feverish
experimentation the modern man’s effort to find an adequate substitute
for the organizing principle of the religion which he has lost.
It has been said by way of explanation that painters must sell their
work, and they must, therefore, paint what the rich and powerful
will buy. Thus it is pointed out that in the Middle Ages they worked
under the patronage of the Church; in the Renaissance their patrons
were paganized [p095] princes and popes, and artists made pictures
which, even when the theme was religious, were no longer Christian in
spirit. Later in the north of Europe the bourgeoisie acquired money and
station, and the Dutch painters did their portraits, and made faithful
representations of their kitchens and their parlors. A little later
French painters at the Court of Versailles made pictures for courtiers,
and in our time John Sargent painted the wives of millionaires. To say
all this is to say that the ruling classes in the modern world are no
longer interested in pictures which illustrate or are inspired by the
religion they profess.
This attempt at an explanation in terms of supply and demand may or
may not be sound for the ordinary run of painters. It leaves out of
account, however, those very painters who are the most significant
and interesting. It leaves out of account the painters who, by heroic
refusal to supply the existing market, deserve universal respect, and
in many cases have won an ultimate public vindication. These men do not
fit into the theory of supply and demand, for they endured poverty and
derision in order to paint what they most wanted to paint. They are not
of the tribe, which Mr. Walter Pach calls Ananias, who betray the truth
that is in them. But for that truth they did not draw upon the themes
nor the sense of life which almost all of them must have been taught
when they were children. They did not paint religious pictures. They
painted landscapes, streets, interiors, still life, heads, persons,
nudes. Whatever else they perceived and tried to express, they did
not see their objects in the perspective of human destiny and divine
government. There is no reason, then, to say that religious painting,
even in the [p096] broadest sense of the term, has disappeared because
there is no effective demand for it. Obviously it has disappeared
because the will to produce it has disappeared.
_(b) The Loss of a Heritage_
In setting the religious tradition aside as something with which they
are not concerned when they are at work, artists are merely behaving
like modern men. It is plain that the religious tradition has become
progressively less relevant to anyone who as painter or sculptor is
engaged in making images. This is a direct result of that increasing
sophistication of religious thought which was signalized in Europe
by the iconoclasm of the Protestant reformers and the puritanism of
the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Before the acids of modernity had
begun to dissolve the organic reality of the ancient faith, there was
no difficulty about picturing God the Father as a patriarch and the
Virgin Mary as a young blonde Tuscan mother. There was no disposition
to disbelieve, and so the imagination was at once nourished by a great
heritage of ideas and yet free to elaborate it. But when the authority
of the old beliefs was challenged, a great literature of controversy
and definition was let loose upon the world. And from the point of
view of the artist the chief effect of this effort to argue and to
state exactly, to defend and to rebut, was to substitute concepts for
pictorial ideas. When the nature of God became a matter of definition,
it was obviously crude and illiterate to represent him as a benign
old man. Thus the more the theologians refined the dogmas of their
religion the more impossible they made it for painters to express its
significance. No painter who ever lived could [p097] make a picture
which expressed the religion of the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick. There
is nothing there which the visual imagination can use.
Painters have, therefore, a rather better reason than most men for
having turned their backs upon the religious tradition. They can say
with a clear conscience that the contemporary churches have removed
from that tradition those very qualities which once made it an
inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration. They need only point to
modern religious writing in their own support: at its best it has the
qualities of an impassioned argument and more often it is intolerably
flat and vague because in our intellectual climate skepticism dissolves
the concreteness of the imagery and leaves behind sonorous adjectives
and opaque nouns.
The full effects of this separation of the artist from the ancient
traditions of Christendom have been felt only in the last two or three
generations. It is no doubt true that the modern disbelief had its
beginnings many generations ago, perhaps in the Fifteenth Century, but
the momentum of the ancient faith was so great that it took a long
time, even after corrosive doubt had started, before its influence came
to an end. The artists of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries may
not have been devout, but they lived in a society in which the forms of
the old order, the hierarchy of classes, the sense of authority, and
the general fund of ideas about human destiny, still had vast prestige.
But in the Nineteenth Century that old order was almost completely
dissolved and the prestige of its ideas destroyed. The artist of the
last two or three generations has confronted the world without any
accepted understanding [p098] of human life. He has had to improvise
his own understanding of life. That is a new thing in the experience of
artists.
_(c) The Artist Formerly_
In 787 the Second Council of Nicæa laid down the rule which for nearly
five hundred years was binding upon the artists of Christendom:
The substance of religious scenes is not left to the initiative
of the artists: it derives from the principles laid down by the
Catholic Church and religious tradition.... His art alone belongs
to the painter, its organization and arrangement belong to the
clergy.
This was a reasonable rule, since the Church and not the individual was
held to be the guardian of those sacred truths upon which depended the
salvation of souls and the safety of society. The notion had occurred
to nobody that the artist was divinely inspired and knew more than
the doctors of the church. Therefore, the artist was given careful
specifications as to what he was to represent.
Thus when the Church of St. Urban of Troyes decided to order a set of
tapestries illustrating the story of St. Valerian and of his wife, St.
Cecilia, a learned priest was deputed to draw up the contract for the
artist. In it he wrote among other specifications that: “there shall be
portrayed a place and a tabernacle in the manner of a beautiful room,
in which there shall be St. Cecilia, humbly on her knees with her hands
joined, praying to God. And beside her shall be Valerian expressing
great admiration and watching an angel which, being above their heads,
should be holding two crowns made of lilies and of roses, [p099] which
he will be placing the one on the head of St. Cecilia and the other on
the head of Valerian, her husband....”
The rest, one might suppose, was left to the artist’s imagination.
But it was not. Having been given his subject matter and his theme,
he was bound further by strict conventions as to how sacred subjects
were to be depicted. Jesus on the Cross had to be shown with his mother
on the right and St. John on the left. The centurion pierced his left
side. His nimbus contained a cross, as the mark of divinity, whereas
the saints had the nimbus without a cross. Only God, the angels,
Jesus Christ, and the Apostles could be represented with bare feet;
it was heretical to depict the Virgin or the Saints with bare feet.
The purpose of these conventions was to help the spectator identify
the figures in the picture. Thus St. Peter was given a short beard
and a tonsure; St. Paul was bald and had a long beard. It is possible
that these conventions, which were immensely intricate, were actually
codified in manuals which were passed on from master to apprentice in
the workshops.
As a general rule the ecclesiastics who drew up specifications did not
invent the themes. Thus the learned priest who drafted the contract for
the tapestry of St. Cecilia drew his material from the encyclopedia
of Vincent de Beauvais. This was a compendium of universal knowledge
covering the whole of history from Creation to the Last Judgment. It
was a source book to which any man could turn in order to find the
truth he happened to need. It contained all of human knowledge and the
answer to all human problems. By the Thirteenth Century there were a
number of these encyclopedias, of which the greatest was [p100] the
_Summa_ of St. Thomas Aquinas. From these books churchmen took the
themes which they employed their artists to embellish. The artist
himself had no concern as to what he would paint, nor even as to how
he would paint it. That was given, and his energies could be employed
without the travail of intellectual invention, upon the task of
expressing a clear conception in well-established forms.
It must not be supposed, of course, that either doctrines, lore, or
symbolism were uniformly standardized and exactly enforced. In an age
of faith, contradictions and discrepancies are not evident; they are
merely variations on the same theme. Thus, while it may be true that
enthusiastic mediævalists like M. Mâle have exaggerated the order
and symmetry of the mediæval tradition, they are right, surely, on
the main point, which is that the organic character of the popular
religion provided a consensus of feeling about human destiny which,
in conjunction with the resources of the popular lore, sustained and
organized the imagination of mediæval artists. Because religious faith
was simple and genuine, it could absorb and master almost anything.
Thus the clergy ruled the artists with a relatively light hand, and
they were not disturbed if, in illuminating the pages of a Book of
Hours, the artist adorned the margins with a picture of Bacchus or the
love of Pyramus and Thisbe.
It was only when the clergy had been made self-conscious by the
controversies which raged around the Reformation that they began in any
strict and literally-minded modern sense to enforce the rule laid down
at Nicæa in 787. At the Council of Trent in 1563 the great liberty of
the artist within the Christian tradition came to an end: [p101]
The Holy Council forbids the placing in a church of any image
which calls to mind an erroneous dogma which might mislead the
simple-minded. It desires that all impurity be avoided, that
provocative qualities be not given to images. In order to insure
respect for its decisions, the Holy Council forbids anyone to place
or to have placed anywhere, and even in churches which are not open
to the public, any unusual image unless the bishop has approved it.
In theory this decree at Trent is not far removed from the decree at
Nicæa nearly one thousand years earlier. But in fact it is a whole
world removed from it. For the dogmas at Nicæa rested upon naive faith
and the dogmas at Trent rested upon definition. The outcome showed the
difference, for within a generation Catholic scholars made a critical
survey of the lore which mediæval art had employed, and on grounds of
taste, doctrine, and the like, condemned the greater part of it. After
that, as M. Mâle says, there might still be artists who were Christians
but there was no longer a Christian art.
_(d) The Artist as Prophet_
Whether the necessity of creating his own tradition is a good or a bad
thing for the artist, there can be no doubt that it is a novel thing
and a burdensome one. Artists have responded to it by proclaiming one
of two theories: they have said that the artist, being a genius, was a
prophet; when they did not say that, they said that religion, morality,
and philosophy were irrelevant, and that art should be practiced for
art’s sake. Both theories are obviously attempts to find some personal
substitute for those traditions upon which artists in all other ages
have been dependent. [p102]
The theory of the artist as prophet has this serious defect: there
is practically no evidence to support it. Why should there be? What
connection is there between the capacity to make beautiful objects and
the capacity to discover truth? Surely experience shows that it is
something of a marvel when a great artist appears who, like Leonardo
or Goethe, is also an original and important thinker. Indeed, it is
reasonable to ask whether the analysis and abstraction which thinking
involves are not radically different psychological processes from
the painter’s passionate appreciation of the appearance of things.
Certainly to think as physicists think is to strip objects of all
their secondary characters, not alone of their emotional significance,
but of their color, their texture, their fragrance, and even of their
superficial forms. The world as we know it through our senses has
completely disappeared before the physicist begins to think about
it. And in its place there is a collection of concepts which have no
pictorial value whatsoever. These concepts are by definition incapable
of being visualized, and when as a concession to human weakness, his
own or his pupil’s, the scientist constructs a mechanical model to
illustrate an idea, this model is at best a crude analogy, and in no
real sense the portrait of that idea.
Thus when Shelley made Earth say:
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens ...
he borrowed an image from astronomy. But this image, which is, I think,
superb poetry, radically alters the original scientific idea, for
it introduces into a realm of purely [p103] physical relations the
notion of a gigantic spectator with a vastly magnified human eye. There
are, no doubt, many other concepts in science which, if poets knew
more science, would lend themselves to translation into equally noble
images. But these images would not state the scientific truth.
The current belief that artists are prophets is an inheritance from
the time when science had no critical method of its own, and poets,
being reflective persons, had at least as good a chance as anyone
else of stumbling upon truths which were subsequently verified. It is
due in some measure also to the human tendency to remember the happy
guesses of poets and to forget their unhappy ones, a tendency which
has gone far to sustain the reputations of fortune-tellers, oracles,
and stockbrokers. But above all, the reputation of the artist as one
who must have wisdom is sustained by a rather genial fallacy: he finds
expression for the feelings of the spectator, and the spectator rather
quickly assumes that the artist has found an explanation for the world.
Yet unless I am greatly mistaken the modern painter has ceased not
only to depict any theory of destiny but has ceased to express any
important human mood in the presence of destiny. One goes to a museum
and comes out feeling that one has beheld an odd assortment of nude
bodies, copper kettles, oranges, tomatoes, and zinnias, babies, street
corners, apple trees, bathing beaches, bankers, and fashionable ladies.
I do not say that this person or that may not find a picture immensely
significant to him. But the general impression for anyone, I think, is
of a chaos of anecdotes, perceptions, fantasies, and little [p104]
commentaries, which may be all very well in their way, but are not
sustaining and could readily be dispensed with.
The conclusive answer to the romantic theory of the artist as prophet
is a visit to a collection of modern paintings.
_(e) Art for Art’s Sake_
This brings us to the other theory, which is that art has nothing to do
with prophecy, wisdom, and the meaning of life, but has to do only with
art. This theory must command an altogether different kind of respect
than the sentimental theory of the artist as prophet. This indeed is
the theory which most artists now hold. “I am convinced,” says Mr. R.
H. Wilenski in his book _The Modern Movement in Art_, “that all the
most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have
been tormented by this search for a justification of their work and a
criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted
to solve the problem by some consciously-held idea of art; or in other
words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have
sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.”
The instinct of artists in this matter is, I think, much sounder than
the rationalizations which they have constructed. As working artists
they do not think of themselves as seers, philosophers, or moralists.
They do not wish to be judged as thinkers, but as painters, and they
are justifiably impatient with the Philistines who are interested
primarily in the subject matter and its human significance. The painter
knows quite well that in the [p105] broadly human sense he has no
special qualifications as story-teller or wise man. What he is driving
at, therefore, in his expression of contempt for the subject matter of
art is the wish that he might again be in the position of the mediæval
artist who did not have to concern himself _as artist_ with the
significance of his themes. The intuition behind the theory of art for
art’s sake is the artist’s wish to be free of a responsibility which
he has never before had put upon him. The peculiar circumstances of
modernity have thrust upon him, much against his will and regardless of
his aptitudes, the intolerably heavy burden of doing for himself what
in other ages was done for him by tradition and authority.
The philosophy which he has invented is an attempt to prove that
no philosophy is necessary. Carried to its conclusion, this theory
eventuates in the belief that painting must become an arrangement of
forms and colors which have no human connotation whatsoever for the
artist or the spectator. These arrangements represent nothing in the
real world. They signify nothing. They are an esthetic artifice in the
same sense that the more esoteric geometries are logical artifices.
This much can at least be said of them: they are a consistent effort
to practice the arts in a world where there is no human tradition upon
which the representative arts can draw.
This absolute estheticism is not, however, art without philosophy. Some
sort of philosophy is implied in all human activity. The artist who
says that it is delightful above all other things to realize the pure
form of objects, regardless of whether this object is a saint, a lovely
woman, or a dish of fruit, has made a very important [p106] statement
about life. He has said that the ordinary meanings which men attach
to objects are of no consequence, that their order of moral values is
ultimately a delusion, that all facts are equally good and equally bad,
and that to contemplate anything, it does not matter what, under the
aspect of its esthetic form, is to realize all that the artist can give.
This, too, is a philosophy and a very radical philosophy at that. It
is in fact just the philosophy which men were bound to construct for
themselves in an age when the traditional theory of the purpose of life
had lost its meaning for them. For they are saying that experience
has no meaning beyond that which each man can find in the intense
realization of each passing moment. He must fail, they would feel, if
he attempts to connect these passing moments into a coherent story
of his whole experience, let alone the whole experience of the human
race. For experience has no underlying significance, man himself has
no station in the universe, and the universe has no plan which is more
than a drift of circumstances, illuminated here and there by flashes of
self-consciousness.
_(f) The Burden of Originality_
As a matter of fact this doctrine is merely the esthetic version of the
rather crude mechanistic materialism which our grandfathers thought
was the final conclusion of science. The connection is made evident in
the famous “_Conclusions_” to “_The Renaissance_” which Walter Pater
wrote in 1868, and then omitted from the second edition because “it
might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it
might fall.” In this [p107] essay there was the startling, though
it is now hackneyed, assertion that “to burn always with this hard,
gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,” and
that “of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the
love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they
pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” What is never quoted, and
is apparently forgotten, is the reasoning by which Pater arrived at
the conclusion that momentary ecstasy is the end and aim of life. It
is, if we turn back a few pages, that scientific analysis has reduced
everything to a mere swarm of whirling atoms, upon which consciousness
discerns impressions that are “unstable, flickering, inconsistent.” It
was out of this misunderstanding of the nature of scientific concepts
that Pater developed his theory of art for the moment’s sake.
I dwell upon this only in order to show that what appeared to be an
estheticism divorced from all human concern was really a somewhat
casual by-product of a fashionable misunderstanding at the time
Pater was writing. We should find that to-day equally far-reaching
conclusions are arrived at by half-understood popularizations of
Bergson or Freud. I venture to believe that any theory of art is
inevitably implicated in some philosophy of life, and that the only
question is whether the artist is conscious or unconscious of the
theory he is acting upon. For unless the artist deals with purely
logical essences, provided he observes and perceives anything in
the outer world, no matter how he represents it or symbolizes it or
comments upon it, there must be implicit in it some attitude [p108]
toward the meaning of existence. If his conclusion is that human
existence has no meaning, that, too, is an attitude toward the meaning
of existence. The mediæval artist worked on much less tangled premises.
He painted pictures which illustrated the great hopes and fears of
Christendom. But he did not himself attempt to formulate those hopes
and fears. He accepted them more or less ready made, understanding
them and believing in them because, as a child of his age, they were
his hopes and fears. But because they existed and were there for
him to work upon, he could put his whole energy into realizing them
passionately. The modern artist would like to have the same freedom
from preoccupation, but he cannot have it. He has first to decide what
it is that he shall passionately realize.
In effect the mediæval artist was reproducing a story that had often
been told before. But the modern artist has to undergo a whole
preliminary labor of inventing, creating, formulating, for which there
was almost no counterpart in the life of a mediæval artist. The modern
artist has to be original. That is to say, he has to seize experience,
pick it over, and drag from it his theme. It is a very exhausting task,
as anyone can testify who has tried it.
That surely is why we hear so much of the storm and stress in the soul
of a modern artist. The craftsman does not go through agonies over the
choice of words, images, and rhythms. The agony of the modern artist
lies in the effort to give birth to the idea, to bring some intuition
of order out of the chaos of experience, to create the idea with which
his art can deal. We assume, [p109] quite falsely I think, that this
act of ‘creation’ is an inherent part of the artist’s task. But if we
refrain from using words loosely, and reserve the word creation to
mean the finding of the original intuition and idea, then creation is
plainly not a necessary part of the artist’s equipment. Creation is
an obligation which the artist has had thrust upon him as a result of
the dissolution of the great accepted themes. He is compelled to be
creative because his world is chaotic.
This labor of creation has no connection with his gifts as a painter.
There is no more reason why a painter should be able to extemporize
a satisfactory interpretation of life than that he should be able to
govern a city or write a treatise on chemistry. Giotto surely was as
profoundly original a painter as the world is likely to see; it has
been said of him by Mr. Berenson, who has full title to speak, that he
had “a thoroughgoing sense for the significant in the visible world.”
But with all his genius, what would have been Giotto’s plight if,
in addition to exercising his sense of the significant, he had had
to create for himself all his standards of significance? For Giotto
those standards existed in the Catholic Christianity of the Thirteenth
Century, and it was by the measure of these standards, within the
framework of a great accepted tradition, that he followed his own
personal sense of the significant. But the modern artist, though he had
Giotto’s gifts, would not have Giotto’s freedom to use them. A very
large part of his energies, consciously or unconsciously, would have
to be spent in devising some sort of substitute for the traditional
view of life which Giotto took for granted. For there is no longer an
accepted view of [p110] life organized in stories which all men know
and understand.
There is instead a profusion of creeds and philosophies, fads and
intellectual experiments among which the modern painter, like every
other modern man, finds himself trying to choose a philosophy of
life. Everybody is somewhat dithered by these choices: the business
of being a Shavian one year, a Nietzschean the next, a Bergsonian
the third, then of being a patriot for the duration of the war, and
after that a Freudian, is not conducive to the serene exercise of a
painter’s talents. For these various philosophies which the artist
picks up here and there, or by which he is oftener than not picked
up and carried along, are immensely in dispute. They are not clear.
They are rather personal and somewhat accidental visions of the world.
They are essentially unpictorial because they originate in science and
are incompleted, abstracted teachings for the meaning of things. As a
result the art in which they are implicit is often uninteresting, and
usually unintelligible, to those who do not happen to belong to the
same cult.
The painter can hardly expect to invent for himself a view of life
which will bring order out of the chaos of modernity. Yet he is
compelled to try, for he is engaged in setting down a vision of the
world, and every vision of the world implies some sort of philosophy.
The effects of the modern emancipation are more clearly evident in the
history of painting during the last hundred years than in almost any
other activity, because in the galleries hang in frames the successive
attempts of men, who are deeply immersed in the modern scene, to set
down their [p111] statements about life. Mr. Wilenski, who is an
astute and well-informed critic, has estimated that during the last
hundred years in Paris a new movement in painting has been inaugurated
every ten years. That would correspond fairly accurately to the birth
and death of new philosophies in the advanced and most emancipated
circles.
What was happening to painting is precisely what has happened to all
the other separated activities of men. Each activity has its own ideal,
indeed a succession of ideals, for with the dissolution of the supreme
ideal of service to God, there is no ideal which unites them all, and
sets them in order. Each ideal is supreme within a sphere of its own.
There is no point of reference outside which can determine the relative
value of competing ideals. The modern man desires health, he desires
money, he desires power, beauty, love, truth, but which he shall desire
the most since he cannot pursue them all to their logical conclusions,
he no longer has any means of deciding. His impulses are no longer
parts of one attitude toward life; his ideals are no longer in a
hierarchy under one lordly ideal. They have become differentiated. They
are free and they are incommensurable.
The religious synthesis has dissolved. The modern man no longer holds a
belief about the universe which sustains a pervasive emotion about his
destiny; he no longer believes genuinely in any idea which organizes
his interests within the framework of a cosmic order.