Mr. Roger Fry, by means of an instructive tale (_Athenæum_, August
13, 1920), has shown us that in their dealings with art Bolshevik
politicians remain true to type. Like the rest of their breed, they have
no use for it unless they can exploit it to their own ends. For my part,
I was never so simple as to suppose that, if the _de facto_ government
of Russia professed admiration for Matisse and Picasso, that admiration
had anything to do with the artistic gifts of either of these painters,
any more than that the respect with which the British Government treats
the names of Raphael and Michel Angelo should be taken to imply that any
single one of His Majesty's ministers has ever experienced an æsthetic
emotion. Consequently, I was not at all surprised to learn that the
sure, though unconscious, taste of the statesman had led the rulers of
Russia to reject their first loves; that instinctively they had divined
that both Matisse and Picasso were too much like genuine artists to be
trustworthy; and that they had, therefore, transferred their affections
to the thin, and fundamentally academic, work of Larionoff, which
should, I fancy, be just the thing for advanced politicians.
Some time ago, however, before Picasso was found out, a young Russian
æsthete--so Mr. Fry tells us--was licensed by the competent authority to
pronounce that artist's eulogy, on the understanding, of course, that
the lecture should somehow serve as a stick wherewith to beat the
opposition. Nothing easier: Picasso was pitted against Renoir. Picasso
was a great artist, because, abstract and austere, he was the man for
the proletariat; whereas Renoir, who painted pretty pictures for the
_bourgeoisie_, was no earthly good. The lecturer, as might have been
expected, was out even in his facts: for Renoir--who came from the
people, by the way--might, were he less of an artist, by means of the
taking and almost anecdotic quality of his earlier work, give some
pleasure to a working man; whereas Picasso--the son of middle-class
parents, too--could not possibly win from an honest labourer, left to
himself, anything but sarcastic laughter or ferocious abuse. But even if
true, the lecturer's facts would have been beside the point. To say
that a work is aristocratic or democratic, moral or immoral, is to say
something silly and irrelevant, or rather, silly if meant to be relevant
to its value as art. In the work of Renoir and of Picasso, in all works
of art for that matter, the essential quality, as every sensitive person
knows, is the same. Whatever it may be that makes art matter is to be
found in every work that does matter. And though, no doubt, "subject"
and to some extent "attack" may be conditioned by an artist's opinions
and attitude to life, such things are irrelevant to his work's final
significance. Strange as it may seem, the essential quality in a work of
art is purely artistic. It has nothing to do with the moral, religious,
or political views of its creator. It has to do solely with his æsthetic
experience and his power of expressing that. But, as no politician is
capable of appreciating, or even becoming aware of, this essential
quality, it is perhaps only natural that politicians should look
elsewhere for the significance of art.
This painful but certain fact once grasped, it becomes possible to
understand several things that have considerably puzzled critics and
historians. For instance, it is often remarked, and generally with
surprise, that progressive politicians are commonly averse to new
movements in art. The attitude of the present Russian Government to the
contemporary movement makes neither for nor against this view, for that
novelty it took over as a going concern. Let us see how it looks on the
next, which will be very likely a return to the tradition of Ingres.
The example usually cited by exponents of this theory--that progressive
politicians are reactionary in art--is the notorious hostility of
Liberals to the romantic movement; but I believe that were they to study
closely the histories of the Impressionist, the Pre-Raphaelite, and the
Wagnerian movements they would find in them, too, evidence on the whole
favourable to their case. Be that as it may, this theory, which once
seemed paradoxical, quite loses its fantastic air when considered in the
light of our discovery. Had art anything to do with opinion it would be
strange, indeed, if new art were ill-received by those who like their
opinions new. But as art has nothing whatever to do with such things
there is no more reason why a Radical should like new forms of art than
why he should like new brands of tea.
The essential qualities of a work of art are purely artistic; and since
politicians, if not too coarse by nature, soon make themselves so by
practice, to apprehend these they must, unless they can leave art alone,
seek its significance in what is unessential. Progressive politicians,
who have a way of taking ethics under their wing and even conceive
themselves the active promoters of good, are apt to seek it in morals.
One might have supposed that a message was to be found as easily in
new forms of art as in old; but, unluckily, new forms are to most
incomprehensible. And though to a hardened sinner here and there what
is incomprehensible may be nothing worse than disconcerting, to him
who seeks good in all things, and is constantly on the look-out for
uplifting influences, whatever disappoints this longing is positively
and terribly evil. Now, a new and genuine work of art is something
unmistakably alive and, at the same time, unprovided, as yet, with moral
credentials. It is unintelligible without being negligible. It comes
from an unfamiliar world and shakes a good man's belief in the obvious.
It must be very wicked. And the proper reaction to what is wicked is a
blind fury of moral indignation. Well, blind fury is blind. So no one
could be much worse placed than the political moralist for seeing
whatever there may be to be seen in what is, at once, strange and
subtle.
We are in a position now to clear up another difficulty, which has
distressed so deeply the best and wisest of men that to get rid of
it some have felt justified in tampering with the truth. If art had
anything to do with politics, evidently art should have flourished most
gloriously in those ages of political freedom which do us all so much
credit. The necessity of this inference has been felt strongly enough by
Liberal historians to make them accept without demur the doctrine that
the age of Pericles was the great age of visual art, and repeat it
without mentioning the fact that in that age an aristocracy of some
twenty-five thousand citizens was supported by the compulsory labours of
some four hundred thousand slaves. The truth is, of course, that art may
flourish under any form of government. It flourished in the Athenian
aristocracy and under the despotic bureaucracies of China, Persia, and
Byzantium. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries it flourished under
the feudal system, and in the fifteenth amongst the oligarchies and
tyrannies of Italy. On the other hand, neither the Roman Republic nor
the Roman Empire gave us anything much worth remembering: and no period
in French history has been less fruitful in art and letters than the
first republic and empire. There was Ingres, of course; but the period
on the whole was singularly barren, and it may be just worth remarking
that at no time, perhaps, has French art been so academic, professorial,
timid, and uninspired as in the first glorious years of the great
Revolution.
Here there is nothing to surprise us. But what does, at first sight,
seem odd is that art should apparently be indifferent, not only to
political systems, but to social conditions as well. Barbarism or
Civilization: it is all one to art. Old-fashioned historians, who had a
pleasant, tidy way of dealing with the past, used to plot out from that
wilderness four great periods of civilization: the Athenian (from 480
B.C. to the death of Aristotle, 322), the first and second centuries of
the Roman Empire, Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,
and from the end of the Fronde, 1653, to the Revolution. For my part, I
should be inclined to subtract from these the Roman period, and add, if
only I knew more about it, the age of Sung. But accepting, by way of
compromise, all five, we find that three--the Greek, Chinese, and
Italian--were rich in visual art, whereas Rome was utterly barren and
the eighteenth century not extraordinarily prolific. To make matters
worse, we see in the dark and early middle ages a steady flow of
first-rate art from societies more or less barbarous, while lately we
have learnt that black and naked savages can create exquisitely.
Are we, then, to assume that there is no connection between art and
civilization? I think not. A connection there is, but, as was to
be expected, an unessential one. The essential quality in art is
invariable, and what gives the Parthenon its significance is what gives
significance to a nigger's basket-work box. There is such a thing as
civilized art, but its civility lies in adventitious and subsidiary
qualities--in the means, not in the end. It seems to me we do mean
something when we say that Phidias, Sophocles, and Aristophanes,
Raphael, Racine, Molière, Poussin, Milton, Wren, Jane Austen and Mozart
are highly civilized artists, and that the creators of the Gothic
cathedrals and the author of the _Chanson de Roland_, Villon, Webster,
Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, Whitman, Turner, Wagner
and the Congolese fetish-makers are not. But, whatever we may mean,
assuredly we do not mean that one set is superior to the other. They
differ widely; but they differ in the means by which they compass the
same end. It is absurd to argue that civilization is either favourable
or unfavourable to art; but it is reasonable to suppose that it may be
the one or the other to a particular artist. Different temperaments
thrive in different atmospheres. How many mute, inglorious Miltons,
Raphaels, and Mozarts may not have lost heart and gone under in the
savage insecurity of the dark ages? And may not the eighteenth
century, which clipped the wings of Blake, have crushed the fluttering
aspirations of a dozen Gothically-minded geniuses and laughed some
budding Wagner out of all idea of expressing his ebullient personality?
It is possible to speak of civilized or uncivilized art and mean
something by our words; but what we mean has nothing to do with the
ultimate value of the work. And, in the same way, there may be an
unessential connection between art and politics, though more remote and
unimportant still. As I have explained too often already, an artist,
before he can create effectively, has got to work himself into a
passion; by some means he has got to raise his feelings to the creative
temperature and his energies to a corresponding pitch of intensity. He
must make himself drunk somehow, and political passion is as good
a tipple as another. Religion, Science, Morals, Love, Hate, Fear,
Lust--all serve the artist's turn, and Politics and Patriotism have done
their bit. It is clear that Wordsworth was thrown into the state of mind
in which he wrote his famous sonnets by love of England and detestation
of France, by fear of revolution and longing for order; but how much
patriotism or constitutionalism has to do with the suave beauty of those
harmonious masterpieces may be inferred from the fact that "hoarse
Fitzgerald" and Mr. Kipling are quite as patriotic and even more
reactionary. Amongst painters David is the conspicuous example of an
artist--a small one, to be sure--intoxicated by politics. David set
out as a humble, eighteenth-century follower of Fragonard. But the
Revolution filled his poor head with notions about the Greeks and the
Romans, Harmodius and Aristogiton, Cornelia and the Gracchi, _sic semper
tyrannis_, and Phrygian caps. And his revolutionary enthusiasm changed
the whole manner of his attack on that central, artistic problem which
never, in any style, did he succeed in solving. But the influence of
this new style was immense, and paramount in French painting for the
next forty or fifty years. It is to be noted, however, that David's
great and immediate follower, the mighty Ingres, who frankly adopted
this style, redolent of all republican virtues, was himself one of the
most virulent reactionaries that ever lived.
And that, perhaps, would be all that needed saying about Art and
Politics were it not that at this moment the subject has an unusual
importance. Movements in art have, more often than not, been the result
of an extraordinarily violent preoccupation, on the part of artists,
with the unessential and insignificant. David rescued painting from
the charming and slightly sentimental disorder of the later eighteenth
century by concentrating on Roman virtues and generals' uniforms. The
Romantics freed themselves from Davidism by getting frantically excited
about a little hazy nonsense rather unfairly attributed to Lord Byron
and Sir Walter Scott. From this the Impressionists escaped by persuading
themselves that they were men of science. And against this my
contemporaries set up a conscious æstheticism, slightly tinged with
certain metaphysico-moral doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and
the thing in itself. With Cubism conscious æstheticism holds the field,
for the Cubist theory is, in the main, æsthetic. That is one reason why
I cannot think that there is any great future for Cubism. An artistic
movement is unlikely to live long on anything so relevant to art; for
artists, it seems, must believe that they are concerned with something
altogether different. Wherefore, I think it not improbable--indeed,
there are indications already [X]--that, political progress having in the
last few years somewhat outrun civilization, and the new democracy being
apparently hostile to art and culture, artists will take to believing
passionately in what they will call "order." If so, in the name of
Napoleon and Louis XIV, but, let us hope, with the science and restraint
of Poussin and Ingres, they will turn, most likely, to the classical
tradition and, while endeavouring to create significant form, will
assert vehemently that they are expressing their political convictions.
[Footnote X: September 1920.]
[Illustration: DERAIN (_Photo: Bernheim jeune_)]