"What pains me most," writes the late Sir Joseph Crowe in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for October, 1896, "is to think that the art of Fra
Filippo, the loose fish, and seducer of holy women, looks almost as
pure, and is often quite as lovely as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of
Fiesole." And indeed, if the fact be admitted, it cannot but be a shock
to all those high-minded thinkers who have committed themselves
unreservedly to the view that personal sanctity and elevation of
character in the artist is an essential condition for the production of
any great work of art, and especially of religious art. As regards the
fact, we need not concern ourselves very long. If Rio and others,
presumably biassed by the same theory, are inclined to see Lippi's moral
depravity betrayed in every stroke of his brush, yet the more general
and truer verdict accords him a place among the great masters of his
age, albeit beneath Angelico and some others. Beyond all doubt it must
be allowed that even in point of spirituality and heavenliness of
expression, he stands high above numbers of artists of pure life and
blameless reputation; and this fact leaves us face to face with the
problem already suggested as to the precise connection between high
morality and high art--if any.
Plainly a good man need not be a good artist. Must a good artist be a
good man? I suppose from a vague feeling in certain minds that it ought
to be so, there rises a belief that it must be so, and that it is so;
and from this belief a disposition to see that it is so, and to read
facts accordingly. Prominent among the advocates of this view is Mr.
Ruskin in his treatment of the relation of morality to art. He holds
"that the basis of art is moral; that art cannot be merely pleasant or
unpleasant, but must be lawful or unlawful, that every legitimate
artistic enjoyment is due to the perception of moral propriety, that
every artistic excellence is a moral virtue, every artistic fault is a
moral vice; that noble art can spring only from noble feeling, that the
whole system of the beautiful is a system of moral emotions, moral
selections, and moral appreciation; and that the aim and end of art is
the expression of man's obedience to God's will, and of his recognition
of God's goodness." [1]
But a man who can characterize a vulgar pattern as immoral, plainly uses
the term "morality" in some transcendental, non-natural sense, and
therefore cannot be regarded as an exponent of the precise theory
referred to. Still, as this larger idea of morality includes the lesser
and more restricted, we may consider Mr. Ruskin and his disciples among
those to whom the case of Lippo Lippi and many another presents a
distinct difficulty. "Many another," for the principle ought to extend
to every branch of fine art; and we should be prepared to maintain that
there never has been, or could have been, a truly great musician, or
sculptor, or poet, who was not also a truly good man. In a way the
position is defensible enough; for one can, in every contrary instance,
patch up the artist's character or else pick holes in his work. Who is
to settle what is a truly great work or a truly good man. But a position
may be quite defensible, yet obviously untrue. Again, if by great art we
mean that which is subordinated to some great and good purpose, we are
characterizing it by a goodness which is extrinsic to it, and is not the
goodness of art itself, as such. If the end of fine art is to teach,
then its goodness must be estimated by the matter and manner of its
teaching, and a "moral pocket-handkerchief" must take precedence of many
a Turner. Yet it would even then remain questionable whether a good and
great moral teacher is necessarily a good man. In truth, a good man is
one who obeys his conscience, and whose conscience guides him right. If,
in defect of the latter condition, we allow that a man is good or
well-meaning, it is because we suppose that his conscience is erroneous
inculpably, and that he is faithful to right order as far as he
understands it. But one who sees right and wills wrong is in no sense
good, but altogether bad. Allowing that for the solution of some
delicate moral problems a certain height of tone and keenness of insight
inseparable from habitual conscientiousness is necessary, yet mere
intellectual acumen, in the absence of any notably biassing influence,
suffices to give us as great a teacher as Aristotle, who, if exonerated
from graver charges, offers no example of astonishing elevation of heart
at all proportioned to the profundity of his genius. We do not deny that
in the case of free assent to beliefs fraught with grave practical
consequences, the moral condition of the subject has much to do with the
judgments of the intellect. But first principles and their logical
issues belong to the domain of necessary truth; while in other matters a
teacher may accept current maxims and sentiments with which he has no
personal sympathy, and weave from all these a whole system of excellent
and orthodox moral teaching. And if one may be a good moralist and a bad
man, why _à fortiori_ may one not be a good artist and a bad man? If
vice does not necessarily dim the eye to ethical beauty, why should it
blind it to aesthetic beauty? In order to get at a solution we must fix
somewhat more definitely the notion of fine art and its scope.
I think it is in a child's book called _The Back of the North Wind_,
that a poet is somewhat happily and simply defined as a person who is
glad about something and wants to make other people glad about it too.
Yet mature reflection shows two flaws in this definition. First of all,
the theme of poetry, or any other fine art, need not always be gladsome,
but can appeal to some other strong emotion, provided it be high and
noble. The tragedian is one who is thrilled with awe and sorrow, and
strives to excite a like thrill in others. Again, though the craving for
sympathy hardly ever fails to follow close on the experience of deep
feeling; and though, as we shall presently see, fine art is but an
extension of language whose chief end is intercommunion of ideas, yet
this altruist end of fine art is not of its essence, but of its
superabundance and overflow. Expression for expression's sake is a
necessity of man's spiritual nature, in solitude no less than in
society. To speak, to give utterance to the truth that he sees, and to
the strong emotions that stir within his heart, is that highest
energizing in which man finds his natural perfection and his rest. His
soul is burdened and in labour until it has brought forth and expressed
to its complete satisfaction the word conceived within it. Nor is it
only within the mind that he so utters himself in secret self-communing;
for he is not a disembodied intelligence, but one clothed with body and
senses and imagination. His medium of expression is not merely the
spiritual substance of the mind, but his whole complex being. Nor has he
uttered his "word" to his full satisfaction till it has passed from his
intellect into his imagination, and thence to his lips, his voice, his
features, his gesture. And when the mind is more vigorous and the
passion for utterance more intense, he will not be at rest while there
is any other medium in which he can embody his conception, be it stone,
or metal, or line, or colour, or sound, or measure, or imagery, which
under his skilled hand can be made to shadow out his hidden thought and
emotion. We cannot hold with Max Müller and others, who make thought
dependent and consequent on language.
For it is evident, on a moment's introspection, that thought makes
language for itself to live in, just as a snail makes its own shell or a
soul makes its own body. Who has not felt the anguish of not being able
to find a word to hit off his thought exactly?--which surely means that
the thought was already there unclothed, awaiting its embodiment. As the
soul disembodied is not man, so thought not clothed in language is not
perfect human thought. Its essence is saved, but not its substantial, or
at least its desirable, completeness. A man thinks more fully, more
humanly, who thinks not with his mind alone, but with his imagination,
his voice, his tongue, his pen, his pencil. If, therefore, solitary
contemplative thought is a legitimate end in itself; if it is that
_ludus_, or play of the soul, which is the highest occupation of man, a
share in the same honour must be allowed to its accompanying embodiment;
to the music which delights no ear but the performer's; to poetry, to
painting, to sculpture done for the joy of doing, and without reference
to the good of others communicating in that joy. And if the Divine
Artist, whose lavish hand fills everything with goodness; who pours out
the treasures of His love and wisdom in every corner of our universe; of
whose greatness man knows not an appreciable fraction; who "does all
things well" for the very love of doing and of doing well; who utters
Himself for the sake of uttering, not only in His eternal, co-equal,
all-expressive Word, but also in the broken, stammering accents of a
myriad finite words or manifestations--if this Divine Artist teaches us
anything, it is that man, singly or collectively, is divinest when he
finds rest and joy in utterance for its own sake, in "telling the glory
of God and showing forth His handiwork," or, as Catholic doctrine puts
it, in praise; for praise is the utterance of love, and love is joy in
the truth.
As most of the useful arts perfect man's executive faculties, and thus
are said to improve upon, while in a certain sense they imitate nature;
so the fine arts extend and exalt man's faculty of expression, or
self-utterance, regarded not precisely as useful and _propter aliud_;
but as pleasurable and _propter se_. Even the most uncultivated savage
finds pleasure in some discordant utterance of his subjective frame of
mind; and it is really hard to find any tribe so degraded as to show no
rudiment of fine art, no sign of reflex pleasure in expression, and of
inventiveness in extending the resources nature has provided us with for
that end.
The artist as such aims at self-expression for its own sake. It is a
necessity of his nature, an outpouring of pent-up feeling, as much as is
the song of the lark. Of course we are speaking of the true creative
artist, and not of the laborious copyist. If he subordinates his work as
a means to some further end; if his aim is morality or immorality, truth
or error, pleasure or pain; if it is anything else than the embodiment
or utterance of his own soul, so far he is acting riot as an artist, but
as a minister of morality, or truth, or pleasure, or their contraries.
If we keep this idea steadily in view, we can see how much truth, or how
little, is contained in the various theories of fine art which have been
advanced from the earliest times. We can see how truly art is a [Greek:
mimaesis] an imitating of realities; not that art-objects are, as Plato
supposes, faint and defective representations, vicegerent species of the
external world, whose beauty is but the transfer and dim reflection of
the beauty of nature. Were it so, then the mirror, or the camera, were
the best of all artists. As expression, fine art is the imitation of the
soul within; of outward realities as received into the mind and heart of
the artist, in their ideal and emotional setting. The artist gives word
or expression to what he sees; but what he sees is within him. His work
is self-expression. We can from this infer where to look for a solution
of the controversy between idealism and realism. We can also see how,
owing to the essential disproportion between the material and sensible
media of expression which art uses, and the immaterial and spiritual
realities it would body forth, its utterances must always be symbolic,
never literal. We can see how needlessly they embarrass themselves who
deny the name of fine art to any work whose theme is not beautiful, or
which is not morally didactic. Finally, we can see that if fine art be
but an extension of language, there can be no immediate connection
between art as art, and general moral character; no more reason for
supposing that skilful and beautiful self-utterance is incompatible with
immorality, than that its absence is incompatible with sanctity.
Yet, as a matter of fact, and rightly, we judge of art not merely as
art, or as expression; but we look to that which is expressed, to the
inner soul which is revealed to us, to the "matter" as well as to the
"form." And it maybe questioned whether our estimate of a work is not
rather determined in most cases by this non-artistic consideration.
Obviously it is possible in our estimate of a landscape, to be drawn
away from the artistic to the real beauty; from its merits as a "word,"
or expression, to the merits of the thing signified. And still more
naturally is our admiration drawn from the artist's self-utterance, to
the self which he endeavours to utter, and we are brought into sympathy
with his thought and feeling. Much of the fascination exercised over us
by art, which precisely as art is rude and imperfect in many ways, is to
be ascribed to this source. Though here we must remember that the soul
is often more truly and artistically betrayed by the simple lispings of
childhood than by the ornate and finished eloquence of a rhetorician.
It is in regard to the matter expressed, rather than to the mode of
expression, that we have a right to look for a difference between such
men as Lippo Lippi and Fra Angelico. According to a man's inner tone and
temperament and character, will be the impression produced upon him by
the objects of his contemplation. These will determine him largely in
the choice of his themes, and in the aspect under which he will treat
them. Obviously in many cases there are noble themes of art for whose
appreciation no particular delicacy of moral or religious taste is
required. There is no reason why such a subject as the Laocoon should
make a different impression on a saint and on a profligate. It appeals
to the tragic sense, which may be as highly developed in one as in the
other. But if the Annunciation be the theme, we can well understand how
differently it will impress a man of lively and cultured faith, a
contemplative and mystic, with an appreciative and effective love of
reverence and purity; and another whose faith is a formula, whose life
is impure, frivolous, worldly. Why then is there not a more distinctly
marked inferiority in the religious art of Lippi to that of Angelico?
Why does it look "almost as pure," and "often quite as lovely"? Two very
clear reasons offer themselves in reply. First of all, the art of such a
man as Angelico falls far more hopelessly short of his ideal. Most of
the beauties which such a soul would find in the contemplation of Mary,
or of Gabriel, are spiritual, moral, non-æsthetic, and can embody
themselves in form and feature only most imperfectly. Given equal skill
in expression, equal command of words, one man can say all that he
feels, and more, while another is tortured with a sense of much more to
be uttered, were it not unutterable. Perhaps it is in some hint of this
hidden wealth of unuttered meaning that skilled eyes find in Angelico
what they can never find in Lippi. A second reason might be found in the
external influence exerted on the artist by society, its requirements,
fashions, and conventions. It is plain that Lippi, left to himself,
would never have chosen religious themes as such: it is equally plain,
that having chosen them, he would naturally try to emulate and eclipse
what was most admired in the great works of his predecessors and
contemporaries. It would need little more than a familiar acquaintance
with the great models, together with the artist's discriminating
observance, for a man of Lippi's talent to catch those lines and shades
of form and feature which hint at, rather than express, the inward
purity, the reverence, the gentleness, with which he himself was so
little in sympathy.
No doubt, were two such men equally skilled in all the arts of
expression, in language, in verse, in song and music, in sculpture and
painting, and acting, their general treatment of religious themes would
be more glaringly different; but within the comparatively narrow limits
of painting, we cannot reasonably expect more than we actually find.
The saint, as such, and the artist, as such, are occupied with different
facets of the world; the former with its moral, the latter with its
æsthetic beauty. Even were the artist formally to recognize that all the
beauty in nature is but the created utterance of the Divine thought and
love, and that the real, though unknown, term of his abstraction is not
the impersonal symbol, but the person symbolized; yet it is not enough
for sanctity or morality to be attracted to God viewed simply as the
archetype of æsthetic beauty. On the other hand, one may be drawn,
through the love of moral beauty in creatures, of justice, and mercy,
and liberality, and truthfulness, to the love of God as their archetype,
and yet be perfectly obtuse to æsthetic beauty; and thus again we see
that high æstheticism is compatible with low morality, and conversely.
Doubtless when produced to infinity, all perfections are seen to
converge and unite in God, but short of this, they retain their
distinctness and opposition. At the same time, it cannot for a moment be
denied that keenness of moral, and of æsthetic perception, act and react
upon one another. He gains much morally whose eyes are opened to the
innumerable traces of the Divine beauty with which he is surrounded, and
there are æsthetic joys which are necessarily unknown to a soul which is
selfish and gross--still more to a soul from which the glories of
revealed religion are hidden, either through unbelief or sluggish
indifference. Yet, on the whole, it may be said that sanctity is
benefited by art more than art is by sanctity, especially where we deal
with so limited a medium of expression as painting. And so it seems to
us that, after all, there is nothing to surprise or pain us in the fact
that "the art of a Fra Filippo, the loose fish, looks almost as pure,
and is often quite as lovely as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of
Fiesoli."
_Dec._ 1896.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: Vernon Lee, _Belcaro_.]