I
It is a nice question to ask whether belief in the absolute
irresponsibility of the artistic temperament has engendered the modern
ideal of absolute art, or the contrary. Which is first, the complacency
of conceit or of theory? For myself I am willing to leave the solution
of such a problem to the Demon himself, who alone knoweth his own
mind; but from the _Æsthetic_[19] of Signor Croce, the most epoptic
hierophant of the demonic mysteries in these days, I can see how
nearly the two absolutes are related, and can get some glimpse of the
procedure of the metaphysical mind at its highest point of activity.
Now Signor Croce, though really himself a child of Hegel, makes
good sport of the theoretical æstheticians in the train of Kant and
Hegel who define art as pure hedonism, or pure moralism, or pure
conceptualism; and so far he does well. You might suppose he was taking
the ordinary and sensible point of view, viz., that art must of course
give pleasure, and must be psychologically moral (not pedantically so),
and must contain ideas, but that it is a false sort of simplification
to define art itself therefore _as_ pleasure, or _as_ morals, or
_as_ ideas. If such were the motive behind Croce’s antipathy to the
Teutonic æsthetics of the last century, he would seem, as I say, to
be pleading for the liberty of common sense against the absolutism of
the Demon; but he too quickly dispels any such illusion. “Art,” he
declares, “which _depends_ on morals or pleasure or philosophy _is_
morals or pleasure or philosophy, and not art at all.” Now what kind of
logic is this that argues: Because art is not pure pleasure, therefore
pure art is absolved from the need of giving pleasure; because art is
not pure morals, therefore pure art is absolved from any concern with
morals? One might as well say, e.g., that cookery which is relished
for the pleasure it gives _is_ pleasure, and not cookery at all;
therefore cookery has nothing to do with pleasure. It is the old story
of Luther’s drunken man on horseback: prop him up on one side and over
he flops on the other. Because one absolute is not true, therefore the
contrary absolute must be true; because art which gives pleasure is not
definable simply as pleasure, therefore art is a hieratic abstraction
entirely independent of pleasure.
But if such a theory of art would seem to be buzzing in a metaphysical
vacuum, it is not without its very practical aspect, whether as
cause or effect. “The artist,” says Signor Croce, coming down
abruptly to earth, “is always above blame morally and above censure
philosophically.” There you have it, the claim to irresponsibility, so
dear to our militant gentlemen of the press, vested in the authority of
an awesome name. I do not suppose many of our emancipated writers are
deeply versed in the thin dialectic of æsthetics, but they understand
pretty well what is meant when they are told that in their work as
creative artists they need not concern themselves with the ethical laws
supposed to govern life or with the dull maxims of truth.
It may be a question, as I have said, whether the great Neapolitan
has risen from the popular lust of irresponsibility to his theory
of independent art or has condescended to the lower level from the
heights of abstract reasoning. In either case the next step, from a
definition by negation to a definition by affirmation, carries him
into an altitude beyond the reach of any earthly telescope. Art, he
has shown, is absolutely not pleasure or morals or philosophy; it just
absolutely _is_--but is what? In the answer to this question I seem
to hear no human voice but the very diction of the Demon. Otherwise
I cannot understand whence the avowed foe of Kantian and Hegelian
abstractions has derived his positive definition of art, which of
all abstractions is the most abstract and of all absolutes the most
absolute. “Art is intuition,” he says, that and nothing else; not the
vision of something, mind you, but pure vision. Or, if you desire
more words in your definition, you may have it thus: “An aspiration
inclosed in the circle of a representation, that is art; and in it the
aspiration exists solely by the representation, and the representation
solely by the aspiration.” Which words, if they mean anything, signify,
I suppose, that art is of the spirit of pure creativeness, a reaching
out towards a goal which is non-existent until visualised by the very
act of reaching out. Such a definition may engage the attention of
metaphysicians; in my common-place mind, frankly, it draws blank. I
do not comprehend what is meant by aspiring towards that which is
non-existent until we visualise it by aspiring.
Croce is the pope of the new school, and as such ought to be immune
from the questioning of the lay intelligence. For a more accessible
exposition of the ideas stirring the young modernists, I turn to the
distinguished critic and philosopher of Spain, José Ortega y Gasset,
and in particular to his essay published under the significant title of
_The Dehumanization of Art_.[20] Unless I mistake his language, Señor
Ortega finds little satisfaction æsthetically in the extreme products
of the movement he describes. But he believes that it is not the
function of a critic to value works of art in accordance with his own
taste or distaste. And especially to-day, when more than ever before
it is a characteristic of art to divide mankind sharply into those who
comprehend and those who do not, the business of criticism should be to
enter into the intention of the artist, and not to judge his work from
some alien point of view, least of all to condemn. Well, Señor Ortega
in a sense comprehends; he states the various theories adopted by the
_jóvenes_ to justify their adventurous ways with admirable perspicuity
and precision--and with that final confusion at the back of his mind
which enables him to speak as one who belongs intellectually to the
movement, however practically his taste may lag a little behind its
utmost advance.
The central thesis of Señor Ortega’s book, which at once justifies his
title and summarises the most advanced attitude towards art, is exactly
this: “To rejoice or suffer with the human lot which a work of art
may incidentally suggest or present to us, is a very different thing
from the true artistic pleasure. More than that: this occupation with
the human element of the work is essentially incompatible with pure
æsthetic fruition.”[21]
That clearly is the voice of the Demon once more, appealing to the
same lust for an irresponsible absolute as inspires the Crocean
æsthetics. And now art is to be not only independent of morals but in
its essence divided altogether from human nature; and if it still aims
to please, its pleasure is of a kind peculiar to itself and unrelated
to the coarse fodder of life. Suppose, to take the illustration given
by Señor Ortega, a notable man is lying at the point of death. His
wife will be standing by his bed, a physician will be counting his
pulse, while elsewhere in the house a reporter awaits the news and
a painter is engaged to depict the scene. All four persons--wife,
physician, reporter, painter--are intent upon the same fact, but with
varying degrees of intimacy and with different kinds of interest. To
the wife the event is an occasion of grief and anxiety; she is, as it
were, a part of it; whereas to the artist, at the other extreme, the
situation is entirely divested of human sympathy or sentiment: “his
mind is set solely on the exterior, on certain lights and shadows,
certain chromatic values.” And so it happens that if the natural
emotions felt on such an occasion by the wife, the physician, and
even to a lesser degree by the news-reporter, are what the ordinary
man (the “philistine” or “bourgeois” of the older romantic jargon)
regards as the real stuff of life, then art to the ordinary man is
removed to a sphere of incomprehensible unreality. “An artistic
object,” says Señor Ortega, “is artistic only in the measure in which
it ceases to be real.” Hence, in the scene just described, the actual
death-bed and the artist’s picture of it are two things “absolutely
different (_completamente distintos_).” We may interest ourselves in
one or the other; in one case we live with, or in, the event, in the
other case we “contemplate” an object of art as such, with æsthetic
pleasure perhaps, but with no human emotions. Just in so far as the
picture shows any feeling for, or awakens in the beholder any response
to, the significance of death, it falls below the high function of
art. The tragedy of loss, the frustration of ambition, the humility
of surrender, the consolations of hope, the victory of love, the
sanctities of religion,--any shadow of these resting upon the canvas
will detract from the purity of æsthetic pleasure. The artist and the
connoisseur in the presence of death find only an occasion for certain
lines and colours. And further, as our power of contemplation becomes
more refined, we cease to discern (or, if we are artists, to paint)
even the unreal representation of a real event; a picture will cease to
depend on, or suggest, any subject whatsoever. For art is like a window
through which we look out upon a garden. The ordinary man sees only the
flowers and leaves beyond, and is so absorbed in these as to be quite
unaware of the pane of glass, the more so as the glass is purer and
clearer. But with effort we can make ourselves conscious of the medium
through which we are looking; and as our vision is thus concentrated on
the glass, the garden fades into a confused blotch of colours or even
passes out of conscious perception altogether.
That is Señor Ortega’s vivid metaphor for the Crocean theory of
art as pure intuition--which he professes to reach, however, by no
theorising of his own but from study of the actual practice of certain
of the _jóvenes_. For those who believe in the divine mission of art
the elevation of society might seem to lie in obeying the command
of Mr. Skionar in Peacock’s _Crotchet Castle_: “Build sacella for
transcendental oracles to teach the world how to see through a glass
darkly.” It all sounds rather funny to me. But I hope I am not laughing
at an unfair caricature. What else in fact is the meaning of those
sapient critics, who might join me in repudiating the language of
metaphysics, yet insist that in judging a picture we shall pay no heed
to the subject represented but consider it as pure representation,
or who say that the value of a work of art depends not at all on
the character of the human experience put into it but only on the
sincerity of self-expression?--as if there were some mystical virtue
in self-expression even when the self has no experience worthy to be
expressed. It is, in fact, pedantic talk of this sort in the mouths of
respected critics that indicates how far the depredations of the Demon
have extended into the realm of common sense.
As for the creators, so called, there may be a young votary of art
here and there who is trying honestly to put these abstractions into
practice; and for him, I should suppose, the goal of dehumanisation and
derealisation will have been attained when his pictures are simplified
to a cunning design of line and colour with no suggestion of a definite
subject, or still further to a spread of pure colour with no design at
all; his music to a pure tone without melody or even variation; his
poems to a succession of beautiful words unsullied by sense. That would
seem to be the nearest practical equivalent to seeing a pure pane of
glass. One wonders why the pilgrim of vacuity should be so slow and
hesitant in his progress towards so easy a mark. Perhaps he foresees
that absolute art, so reached, will cease to be art at all. Perhaps
he has a foreboding that the prize if obtained would not be very
valuable. It is hard to imagine the pleasure or profit to be derived
from concentrating one’s attention upon a pane of transparent glass
until one sees nothing through it; most of us would prefer to retain
our impure perception of the flowers in the garden beyond. Despite the
majestic logic of youth we persist in thinking that such a picture
as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is a truer work of art than the
deftest whirl of colours ever painted; that the _Æneid_ is richer in
poetical joy than _Kubla Khan_ (not to mention the latest lyric from
the American colony in Paris); that Bach’s Mass in B Minor is still a
miracle and a rapture of sound. Yet all these--the painting and the
epic and the mass--are brimming with human emotion and with a brooding
sense of the eternal values of life. They are great for various
reasons, no doubt; but certainly among those reasons is the fact that
they are not art at all as the modernists would have us believe.
The simple truth is that the effort to create pure art is nothing
more than idolatry to a fetish of abstract reason--unless you prefer
to ticket it as empty conceit--and could never engage the practical
interest of any but a few witless cranks. There is a profound confusion
in Señor Ortega’s interpretation of what is happening among the mass of
the younger artists, as indeed there is often in their own statement of
what they are endeavouring to do. They may be seeking an absolute, but
it is not an absolute of purity in any sense of the word.
Now I grant at once that there is a difference between art and life,
that the attitude of the painter, to return to the old illustration,
is not identical with that of the wife in the house of mourning.
There is in art a change, a transmutation, a something taken away
and a something added. “Art,” said Goethe, “is art only because it
is not nature.” And Aristotle, perhaps, had the same truth in mind
in his famous theory of the purgation of the human passions. In that
sense we can accept a maxim that comes from Japan: “Art lies in the
shadowy frontiers between reality and unreality.”[22] The point I
would make is the falseness and futility of the logical deduction that
art can therefore dispense with the stuff of humanity or nature, or
can weigh anchor and sail off into a shoreless sea of unreality. What
has actually happened is this. Always the great creators have taken
the substance of life, and, not by denying it or attempting to evade
its laws, but by looking more intently below its surface, have found
meanings and values that transmute it into something at once the same
and different. The passions that distract the individual man with the
despair of isolated impotence they have invested with a universal
significance fraught with the destinies of humanity; the scenery of the
material world they have infused with suggestions of an indwelling
otherworld. And so by a species of symbolism, or whatever you choose
to call it, they have lifted mortal life and its theatre to a higher
reality which only to the contented or dust-choked dwellers in things
as they are may appear as unreal. That, for instance, is precisely what
Perugino has achieved in his picture of a death-scene entitled the
Mystic Crucifixion, where pain and grief and the fear that clutches the
individual heart in its hand of ice have been transmuted into a drama
of divine redemption through suffering, while the tender burgeoning of
spring thrown up against the far-off juncture of earth and sky gives
hints of a mode of existence in joyous and infinite freedom. Even the
lesser creators, those who in innocence of spirit have undertaken
merely to reproduce what they see, may have done so with a clarity and
largeness of vision capable of working a magic alchemy of which they
themselves perhaps never dreamed.
That was the tradition of agelong practice; it is what we mean,
or ought to mean, by classical. And then, after the devastating
materialism of late eighteenth-century philosophy there came a change
of ideals. The veritable feeling for the otherworld and for spiritual
values was lost, while at the same time the new school, stirred
with vague aspirations, was not satisfied with a simple and, in its
way, wholesome naturalism. Above all these prophets of the romantic
movement, as we designate it, revolted from the restrictive rules
of an art which was neither classical nor innocently naturalistic,
but pseudo-classical, and which had developed from one side of the
Renaissance. They too perceived that no great art was possible without
escape from the levelling tyranny of natural law, and, being unable
to transcend nature, seeing indeed no higher reality into which
nature could be raised, they sought freedom by sinking below nature.
In painting, as Mr. Mather has shown with fulness of knowledge
and admirable acumen, this process of escape meant “a successive
elimination of academic authority, imagination, memory, fidelity to
nature, and nature itself. It would seem as if the last sacrifice had
been made; but no. In all these rejections and in the most grotesque
experiments the painter had retained his seriousness and self-respect.
This too went by the board in a brief moment after the War, when the
Dadaists bade the artist create in a mood of joyous bluff, meanwhile
mocking himself and his world. The oft-repeated demonstration is
complete once more--the latter end of expansive Romantic individualism
is Romantic disillusionment and Romantic irony.”[23] And the same
history might be given of modern music and literature, though in
the case of the latter the disinvolution, by reason of the medium
employed, is more complicated. For instance the liberation of art
from the moral obligations of life, so vaunted by Mr. Cabell and
others of the left wing in America as a new achievement, is really
contemporaneous with the romantic movement. At least as far back as
1837 we find George Sand declaring that by almost universal consent
the arts have become accomplices in this strange tendency towards
“amoralism.” Now conscientious theorists may hold that amoralism is a
step in the direction of freedom; in practice it became commonly a mere
euphemism for immorality, not to say vulgar indecency. The climax of
the movement in that direction was reached in the realism of Zola and
others who, quite frankly and systematically and “scientifically,” made
human nature coterminous with the bestial in man. Art may have been
emancipated from one set of bonds, but it was wrapt and enfolded and
constricted in a bondage tenfold straiter. It may have been dehumanised
in the sense that it had repudiated the government of reason which to
the older humanists was the distinguishing trait of man as man; it
certainly was not purged of its attempt to evoke passions which on a
lower plane are _menschlich allzu menschlich_.
As a matter of fact the radical writers of to-day who are accomplishing
anything of magnitude are still predominantly of that school of
realism. But a few restless souls, those in particular whom Señor
Ortega has in mind, driven on by the despotic Demon of the Absolute,
have not been content to abide in this halfway house. They see clearly
enough that art has not been purified by such realism, but mixed and
muddied by deliberate opposition to the ethical interpretation of life;
they will detach art from even that poor remnant of deliberation which
made a selection among the elements of composite human nature with
a certain regard, though an inverted regard, for moral values. They
hold deliberation to be the foe of liberation. Hence the later theory,
exemplified in English by James Joyce, that art shall not reproduce
a picture of life as the humanist sees it, or even from the inverted
point of view of the realist, but for its subject matter shall descend
to what they call the pure “stream of consciousness.” The hero of
fiction shall have no will, no purpose, no inhibition, no power of
choice whether for good or evil, but shall be merely a medium through
which passes an endless, unchecked, meaningless flux of sensations and
memories and emotions and impulses.
And so the limit of elimination has been reached--at least the
practical limit, since below the stream of consciousness there would
seem to remain nothing to represent save bottomless inanity. But
this fact is to be noted: though the process of evolution may seem
to have been carried on in the name of absolute art, the actual goal
attained is an absolute of quite another order; there has been no true
liberation, but a progressive descent in slavery. As, successively, one
after another of the higher elements of our composite nature has been
suppressed, a lower instinct has taken its place. The submergence of
the humanistic conception of man as a responsible creature of free will
has been accompanied by an emergence of the romantic glorification of
uncontrollable temperament; this has been supplanted by a realistic
theory of subjection to the bestial passions, and this, at the last, by
an attempt to represent life as an unmitigated flux, which in practice,
however it be in literature, means confinement in a mad-house. The
practitioners of the newest art call themselves _surréalistes_,
super-realists; they flatter themselves, they are sub-realists.
Art may be dehumanised, but only in the sense that, having passed
beyond the representation of men as undifferentiated from animals,
it undertakes to portray them as complete imbeciles. To speak of the
works produced by the boastful modern school as pure art is, from any
point of view, mere bluff. By their fruits you shall know them. Turn
the pages of the little magazine published in Paris under the title
of _transition_, wherein Mr. Joyce and a group of denationalised
Americans and Americanised Frenchmen collaborate to their own mutual
satisfaction: you will there find what the Simon-pure article is in
theory and practice. For instance a certain M. Louis Aragon,--described
by his admiring introducer as “an intellectual on a lifelong holiday,
a twentieth-century pilgrim with a pack of words on his back,”
etc.,--expounds the theory thus:
Reason, reason, o abstract day-phantom, I have already driven you
from my dreams. And now I am at the point where they are ready
to blend with the realities of appearance. There is no longer
room only for me. In vain reason denounces the dictatorship of
sensuality. In vain it puts me on guard against error. Error is
here the queen. Come in, Madame, this is my body, this is your
throne. I pat my delirium as I would a beautiful horse.... Nothing
can assure me of reality. Nothing, neither the exactness of logic
nor the strength of a sensation, can assure me that I do not base
it on the delirium of interpretation.
And so M. Aragon, concluding “that only the syllables of reality are
artistically usable,” exemplifies the new style:
_Ité ité la réa
Ité ité la réalité
La réa la réa
Té té La réa
Li
Té La réalité
Il y avait une fois LA RÉALITÉ._
Such is the manifesto of Super-realism, “the Freudian period,” as the
addicts of the stream of consciousness call it, “to the realistic
misconception.” Their title, I have said, is a pretty mistake for
sub-realism; but they are not mistaken in their claim to have reached
a kind of absolute. At least I cannot imagine what lower level of
imbecility may still be honoured with the name of art.
(If any votary of “pure art” chances to read this essay, he will say:
So Keats and Milton were treated by critics of their age.)