_The Artist Older than the Fish_
_Section_ 1. _The Artist Older than the Fish._
” 2. _The Physiognomy of Our Time._
” 3. _Fashion._
_The Artist Older than the Fish_
The artist goes back to the fish. The few centuries that separate him
from the savage are a mere flea-bite to the distance his memory must
stretch if it is to strike the fundamental slime of creation. And it is
the condition, the very first gusto of creation in this scale of life
in which we are set, that he must reach, before he, in his turn, can
create!
The creation of a work of art is an act of the same description as
the evolution of wings on the sides of a fish, the feathering of its
fins; or the invention of a weapon within the body of a hymenopter
to enable it to meet the terrible needs of its life. The ghostly and
burning growths, the walking twigs and flying stones, the two anguished
notes that are the voice of a being, the vapid twitter, the bellows of
age-long insurrection and discontent, the complacent screech, all may
be considered as types of art, all equally perfect, but not all equally
desirable.
The attitude of instructed people as regards “the artist” has changed.
It is mixed up with, and depends a good deal on, the exactitude of
their application of this term. With the grotesque prostitution of the
word Artist, and its loose, indeed very loose and paltry meaning in
this country, I will deal in a separate section. A German philosopher,
living in the heyday of last century German music, accepted the
theory of an æsthetic justification of the universe. Many people play
with this notion, just as they play with Art. But we should have to
disembarrass “art” of a good deal of cheap adhesive matter, and cheap
and pretty adhesive people, before it could appear a justification for
anything at all; much less for such a gigantic and, from every point of
view, dubious concern as the Universe!
The artist’s function is to create--to make something; and _not_ to
_make something pretty_, as dowagers, dreamers, and dealers here
suppose. In any synthesis of the universe, the harsh, the hirsute,
the enemies of the rose, must be built in for the purposes as much of
a fine æsthetic, as of a fine logical, structure. And having removed
the sentimental gulf that often has, in the course of their chequered
career, kept Sense and Beauty apart, we may at this stage of the
proceedings even refer to their purposes as one.
Fabre describes the creative capabilities of certain beetles,
realisable on their own bodies; beasts with a record capacity for
turning their form and colour impulses into living flesh. These beetles
can convert their faces into hideously carved and detestable masks, can
grow out of their bodies menacing spikes, and throw up on top of their
heads sinister headdresses, overnight. Such changes in their personal
appearance, conceived to work on the psychology of their adversaries,
is possibly not a very profound or useful invention, but it is surely
a considerable feat. Any art worth the name is, at the least, a feat
of this description. The New Guinea barred and whitewashed masks are an
obvious parallel. But any invention or phantasy in painting or carving
is such. As to the wing mechanism that first lifted a creature off the
ground, and set it spinning or floating through the air, you must call
Shakespeare in to compete with it. Ma Yuan we can consider, roughly
speaking, as the creator of the first tree; or substitute for him the
best artist, who has painted the best tree, that you can remember.
The more sensible we grow about the world, the more sensible we grow
about the artist. We are really more in sympathy with a bird or a fish
to-day than we have been for a considerable time. And while people at
large are being forced, by snobbery, into a less anthropomorphic mood,
they find, with some awakening of respect, traces and odd indications
of the artist’s presence everywhere they go beyond their simian pale.
The artist, we all agree, was the first scientist! His “inhumanity”
is so old that he looks with considerable contempt on the upstart and
fashionable growth that the last twenty years has produced!
We have got out of our anthropomorphism, then, to this extent; that
it is to-day in reality as respectable to be a fish, as it was in
the latter part of the last century to be a savage. The Robert Louis
Stevenson, George Borrow, “back to Nature” Englishman (not an artist
type at all) is as dead as a doornail. It is the artist type, even,
that has prevailed in the philosopher’s mind, its dogmatism correcting
itself by a careful liaison with the spirit of the artist.
We no longer dream about earlier communities, knowing more about them,
or long for some pristine animal fierceness or abundant and unblemished
health. We realise how every good thing dates, and grasp better the
complexities of life’s compensations. That does not mean that we
are satisfied with to-day’s conditions any more than we covet the
Hereros or Hawaiian natives to a morbid degree. Generally speaking, an
intelligent and well-adjusted modern man does not place his paradise
in the Prairie or in the heart of some bronzed Highland clan, although
envying the great and simple assets that such plain conditions imply.
He has caught a glimpse of something more subtle and more satisfying.
He really at last has a vision of his own; it plunges him back to more
refreshing energies and oblivions than the noisy and snarling claptrap
of the tribe and clan. “The artist” was formally identified with the
savage or the school-boy to a disobliging extent, largely by thinkers
impatient with the retrograde gushings and heroics of a type of rhyming
or picture-painting crétin, as conservative as a woman, that the
thinker was perpetually meeting, full of noisy Kiplingesque protest, at
the opening of every street marked out by his sage mind for draining
and sanification (to be “saved” because of its “picturesque bits”); and
through constantly detecting this absurd bechevelured figure daubing
pretty colours, like a malicious and stupid urchin, on every idea that
had been pronounced moribund, and that was destined for the dustbin.
But clearly this individual, this masquerader, this bag of schoolboy
conceits, this old-clo merchant, loaded with rusty broadswords, Spanish
knives, sombreros, oaths, the arch-priest of the romantic Bottle, was
not an artist-type. Gauguin was not an artist-type. He was a savage
type addicted to painting. He was in reality very like his sunny
friends in the Marquesas Islands. He was in as limited a way a savage
as an American negro is typic, or a Jew over-raced and over-sexed.
These are savages that go in for art for motives of vanity or disguised
sex, in fact the individuals on whom the “sensational” theorists build
their generalisations about the artist. Gauguin appears like a vulgar
tripper by the side of Cézanne.
The music of Carmen, the Prince Igor ballet, all the “savage stuff”
that always gets the audience, is where the artist must be supposed,
logically, to have his home. The truth is that in the trek of the
imagination, of however feeble powers, from any man’s Present outwards
towards anything, the first region struck is the Savage time, clash
of cymbals, howl of clansmen, voluptuous belly-dance, Caucasian
cartridge-pockets, castagnettes, vendettas and corybantics. That is
about as far as a respectable Public-school fancy takes you. It is like
a scene from the more boring of the Russian ballets or a Victory Ball.
And there _all_ the “Chelsea artists” are to be found, every form of
artist, far too many artists, in fact, and far too few “sauvages purs.”
But the sometimes festive philosopher is a bit of an “artist” of that
sort himself. And it has been from such regions and hobnobbings that he
has borne away his very firm convictions on the nature of “artists,”
and their abode in time. It is only since a variety of more adventurous
men have pushed out beyond this sententious belt of savage life into
lonelier regions, that a new type of “artist” has been met with, far
rarer and far more venturesome, who has disposed already of much of
the prestige of the dense herds of a manifestly different and falsely
labelled species.
_The Physiognomy of our Time_
Life, simply, however vivid and tangible, is too material to be
anything but a mechanism, and the seagull is not far removed from the
hydroplane. Whether a stone flies and copulates, or remains respectably
in its place, half hiding the violet from the eye, is little matter.
It is just as remarkable to be so hard and big as to be so busy and
passionate; though owing to our busyness and passion we have a shoppy
interest in the hurrying insect that we do not display for the stone.
Life has begun, as language, for instance, begins, with a crowding
and redundance that must be ordered and curtailed if the powerfullest
instincts of life, even, are to triumph. Where everything is mutually
destructive, and where immense multitudes of activities and modes of
life have to be scrapped and excised, it is important not to linger in
ecstasy over _everything_, simply because it _is_; or to sentimentalise
about Life where creation is still possible and urgent; where much
life, although pretty, powerful or bewitching, interferes with and
opposes the life of something still more bewitching and strong.
The genius of the executant in art, the curiosity of the amateur, imply
in their indiscriminate tasting and the promiscuity of their talent,
an equal perfection in everything that succeeds in living, happens to
move as swiftly, or far more swiftly, for its size, than the swiftest
motor-car; or to fly as infallibly as the most perfected plane we can
imagine. And Marinetti (with his Caruso tenor-instincts of inflation,
and mellifluous self-aggrandisement and tiptoe tirade), was, in his
rant about _speed_, in the same position. He might, ten thousand
years before our wonderful time, have ranted about the lizard or the
dragon-fly, with a deeper wonder at the necessities and triumphs their
powers of displacement implied.
An act of creation in art may be as far removed from the life of the
fashionable chattering animal as the amoeba from the monkey. Truth is
as strange a bird as ever flew in a Chinese forest. What shall we do
with it? Does it require a drab and fickle world to shine in? Can it
thrive in anything but a rich and abundant setting? Shall it be allowed
to become extinct, made war on by some ill-favoured reptile? Should
it be caught and sent to the Zoo and fed by horrible Cockney brats
on bastard buns? It is in any case difficult to admit the claims of
the stuffed birds we have occasion to mention to peck at and refill
themselves on the carcase of this more splendid creature.
We know that all our efforts indicate a desire to perfect and continue
to create; to order, regulate, disinfect and stabilise our life. What
I am proposing is activity, more deliberate and more intense, on the
material we know and on our present very fallible stock. But that
stock must be developed, not in the sense of the prize bullock, not
simply fattened, elated, and made sleek with ideas proper to a ruminant
species: but made the soul of things in this universe; until as a bird
a man would be a first-rate growth, and even as a bullock, be stalled
in a Palace. Let us substitute ourselves everywhere for the animal
world; replace the tiger and the cormorant with some invention of our
mind, so that we can intimately control this new Creation. The danger,
as it would appear at present, and in our first flight of substitution
and remounting, is evidently that we should become overpowered by our
creation, and become as mechanical as a tremendous insect world, all
our awakened reason entirely disappeared. Immediately we can put a
great deal behind us.
When I put forward my opinion that the aspect of life, and the forms
that surrounds us, _might_, perchance--without too great sacrifice on
the part of the painter, without too great a disturbance for our dear
conservatisms and delicate obstructionisms--be modified, I start from
Buddha rather than from Lipton, Maximilian Harden or Madame Tussaud.
But I start from Buddha with so much of the Fashion and spirit of our
time as he would have developed living in our midst to-day; familiar
with and delighting in the pleasant inventions and local colour of
our age; drinking Buchanan’s Scotch whisky with relish, smoking Three
Nuns; familiar with the smell of Harris tweeds, Euthymol, and the hot
pestiferous Tube wind. I do not recommend any abstraction of our mental
structure, or more definite unclothing than to strip till we come to
the energetic lines required. So we have visualised a respectable
and legendary figure, appreciating Dunhill or Dubec tobacco, with no
aversion to seeing Mae Marsh, or paying homage to that uncanny piece of
meat flinging itself indignantly about nightly under the hungry nose of
the Monster of Mirth, the sturdy and priceless ape, George Robey.
Supposing that we destroyed every vestige of animal and insect life on
this planet, and substituted machines of our invention, under immediate
human control, for this mass of mechanisms that we had wiped out,
what would be the guiding principle of these new masses? The same as
at present, the wild animal and insect forms? Would we domesticate
the universe, and make it an immense hive working for our will,
scavenging, honey-making, fetching and carrying for man; or what? It
is not a bird-like act for a man to set himself coldly to solve the
riddle of the bird and understand it; as it is human to humanise it.
So we do not wish to become a vulture or a swallow. We want to enjoy
our consciousness, but to enjoy it in all forms of life, and use all
modes and processes for our satisfaction. Having said _all_ forms, we
get back once more to the indiscriminate, mechanical and unprogressive
world that we first considered. Only now we have substituted, in fancy,
an approximate human invention for every form of animate life. It
is evidently not this hungry, frigid and devouring existence of the
scorpion, the wild cat or the eagle that we are disposed to perpetuate.
Every living form is a miraculous mechanism, however, and every
sanguinary, vicious or twisted need produces in Nature’s workshop a
series of mechanical arrangements extremely suggestive and interesting
for the engineer, and almost invariably beautiful or interesting for
the artist. The Marinetti rant around machinery is really, at bottom,
adulation for the universe of beings, and especially the world of
insects.
So the froth of a Futurist at the mere sight of a Vickers’ biplane is
the same as a foaming ode to the dragon-fly or the seagull; not for any
super-mechanical attribute of the fly or the bird, but simply because
one is a flying insect and the other a bird. And this all-inclusiveness
of the direction of our thought is the result, primarily, of the
all-inclusiveness of our knowledge.
The “gothic” stonemason, whose acquaintance with other forms of art
than those he practised was no doubt relatively nil, was better off
than we are. Similarly, the Modern Man, the abstraction that we all
go to make, in absorbing the universe of beings unto himself and his
immediate life as we have seen him, with his mechanical inventions,
commencing to do, is equally in the position of the dilettante. What
is his synthesis going to be? So far it has been endless imitation;
he has done nothing with his machinery but that. Will he arrive where
there is no power, enjoyment or organisation of which other living
beings have been capable of which he will not, in his turn, and by a
huge mechanical effort, possess the means? If he is amused enough with
his mind to give that carte blanche, his individual existence as an
ape-like animal will grow less and less important. As already his body
in no way indicates the scope of his personal existence (as the bear’s
or the barnacle’s indicates theirs) it cannot any more in pictorial art
be used as his effective delimitation or sign. But that is not to say
that a piece of cheese or a coal scuttle can. There is in the inorganic
world an organism that is his: and which, as much as his partially
superseded body, is in a position of mastery and higher significance
over the cheese and saucepan.
_Fashion_
Fashion is of the nature of an aperient. It is a patent stimulus of
use only to the constipated and the sluggish. It is the specific
for the fifth rate, to correct the stagnations that are perpetually
gathering where life is poor and inactive. The Victorian age produced
a morass of sugary comfort and amiableness, indulged men so much that
they became guys of sentiment. Against this “sentimentality” people
of course reacted. So the brutal tap was turned on, and for fifty
years it will be the thing to be brutal, “unemotional.” Against the
absurdities that this “inhuman” fashion does inevitably breed, you will
need some powerful corrective in due course. And so your fashions go, a
matter of the cold or the hot tap, simply. The majority of people, the
Intellectuals, the Art World, are perpetually in some raw extreme. They
are “of their time” as a man is typically of his country, truculently
Prussian or delightfully French. So there are some people who like cold
in its place and hot in its place, cold and hot out of their place,
or the bath mixed to some exact nuance. Actually how it works out is
that Cézanne, André Dérain, Giotto, the best stone carver of the VII.
dynasty in Egypt, the Hottentot of talent, are far more alike and
nearer to each other in their reactions, than any well-defined type
man of the contiguous ages of Queen Victoria and George V., with sixty
years only separating them. It is at no time unnecessary to point out
that what takes the glamour and starch out of the Chinese pigtail and
the white hood of the Carmelite is when the pigtail proceeds from the
scalp of Lao-Tse and the nun’s coif surrounds the adorable features
of Saint Theresa. East is East and West is West, and at a Macaroni
meeting a post-Georgian swell would bristle with horror, and behave
as the cat and the dog. But some men have the luck to possess a
considerable release from these material attachments, and a powerful
ear that enables them, like a woman in a restaurant, to overhear the
conversations at all the neighbouring tables; to gaze at a number
of revolutions at once, and catch the static and unvarying eye of
Aristotle, a few revolutions away, or the later and more heterodox orb
of Christ.