When I betake me to a zoological garden, equipped with a pennyworth of
popcorn, a food strangely popular even among the carnivora, I am touched
by a prescience of all the pleasure and dumb gratitude to be evoked by
those humble grains. And in truth how many eager caged creatures are
destined to have a joyous thrill of sniffing suspense, followed by the
due titillation of the palate! My proffering fingers shall meet the
gentle nose of the deer, the sensitive arching trunk of the elephant,
the kindly peck of parrots, the mischievous hands of monkeys, the soft
snouts of strange beasts. Not otherwise is it when, faring forth to
Italy, I provision myself with a bag of coin. Into what innumerable
itching tentacles these gilded or cuprous grains are to drop:
white-cuffed hands of waiters, horny digits of _vetturini_ and
_facchini_, gnarled fins of gondoliers and hookers, grimy paws of
beggars, shrivelled stumps of cripples, dexterous toes of armless
ancients, spluttering mouths of divers, rosy fingers of flower-throwing
children, persuasive plates of serenading musicians, deceptive
ticket-holes of dishonest railway clerks, plethoric pockets of
hotel-keepers, greedy tills of bargaining shopkeepers, pious palms of
monks and sacristans, charity-boxes of cathedrals, long-handled
fishing-nets of little churches, musty laps of squatting, mumbling
crones, greasy caps of guides, official pyxes of curators and janitors,
clutching claws of unbidden cicerones. All these—and how many
more!—photographers and painters and copyists and forgers, modellers
and restorers and lecturers on ruins, landlords and cooks and
critics—live by Italy’s ancient art. Great Cæsar dead—and turned to
Show.
The beauty of Italy is elemental fodder for the autochthones; yet how
strange the existence of the Neapolitan swimmer whose _métier_ is to
dive for coppers when the steamer sails for the witching cliffs of
Sorrento, and to cry in enticing gurgles, “Money in the water!” the
spluttering syllables flowing into one another as in the soft _patois_
of Venice! Precisely when the Bay of Naples is a violet dancing flame,
and Vesuvius, majestically couchant, sends her white incense to the
blue, and you are tranced with beauty and sunshine, comes this monetary
merman to drag you down to the depths.
“Nutritive chains” the biologists name the inter-related organisms whose
existence depends on one another, and another link of this chain you
shall count the boatmen waiting to show you the blue grotto of Capri.
Their skiffs dart upon you like creatures whose prey comes only at a
fixed hour; like creatures, moreover, shaped in the struggle for
existence to the only function by which they can survive, for they are
fittest to pass under the low arch of the cerulean grotto (the occupant
consenting to crouch like an antenna drawn in). That ardent water in the
Capri cave—that lovely flame of light blue in a bluer burning
spirit—sustains likewise the naked diver who stands poised on a rock,
ready to show its chromatic effects upon flesh; the culminating moment
of whose day—the feeding-time, as it were—comes when the tourists
glide in.
Apt symbol indeed of the tourist, that shallow skiff skimming over
beauty with which the native is in deep elemental contact, from which,
indeed, he wrests his living.
Since Goethe with his gospel of culture spent those famous _Wanderjahre_
in Italy, a swollen stream of pious art-pilgrims has been pouring over
the land. And coming into Florence from Lucca and a sheaf of quiet
cities on an afternoon of this spring, I had a horrid impression of
modern bustling streets and motors and trams and a great press of
people, and ten thousand parasites battening on the art and beauty of
the city, and it was not till I had won my way to my beloved Ponte
Vecchio, with its mediæval stalls, that the city of the lily seemed to
possess her soul again. Then as I saw her compose herself under her deep
blue sky into a noble harmony, with her heights and her palaces and her
river and her arches and arcades, and group herself round a tower, and
brood in Venetian glamour over her water with her ancient rusty houses,
and rise behind into a fantasy of quaint roofs and brick domes and
steeples and belfries, all floating in a golden glory; and as I
reflected on all she was and held within her narrow compass, how the
names of great men and great days were written on every stone, and how
every sort of art had been poured over her as prodigally as every sort
of earth-beauty; and as I thought of the enchanting villages around and
above her, where the cypress and the olive, the ilex and the pine
slumbered in the sunshine, amid great rocks that shadowed cool glooming
pools, and white roads went winding odorous with may and sweet with the
song of thrush and blackbird, framing and arabesquing the faery city
below in magic tangles of leafy boughs; and as I remembered that here
to-day in this same city was not only spring, but Botticelli’s
_Spring_—then it seemed to me that her flowers and her palaces, her
frescoes and the curves of her hills were pushed up from the same deep
elemental core of beauty, and that she lay like some great princess of
Brobdingnag on whose body a colony of all the culture-snobs of the world
had dumped its masses of raw building, run up its hundreds of hotels and
_pensions_, piled its pyramids of handbooks, biographies, _Dantes_,
histories, essays, landed its hordes of guides and interpreters,
encamped its army of lecturers and art critics, installed its cohort of
copyists, dragged up its heavy battery of professional photographers,
supplemented by an amateur corps of Kodak snapshooters; but that,
breathing lightly beneath all this mountainous cumber, unasphyxiated
even by the works on the Renaissance, she could still rise radiant in
her immortal strength and beauty, shaking off the Lilliputian creatures
and their spawn of print, ungalled by that ceaseless fire of snapshots,
imperturbable amid the lecturing, unimpaired even by all that immemorial
admiration.
The pioneers of this culture-colony blundered sometimes, as pioneers
will, and even Goethe, one notes with malicious glee, spent himself upon
the wrong pictures, gloating over Guercino, wrestling with Caracci,
Guido and Domenichino, and passing Botticelli by, nay taking all
Florence as an afternoon excursion. And Pater himself, the pontifical
Pater, though he has the merit of a Botticelli pioneer, yet thought it
necessary to apologise for criticising “a second-rate painter”: which is
as though one should apologise for discussing Keats.
Nor were Byron and Shelley more felicitous in their admirations. The
_Kunstforscher_, that Being usually made in Germany, has been busy since
their day. Amid the great movement of life, while men have been sowing
and reaping, writing and painting, voyaging and making love, this
spectacled creature has been peering at pictures and statues,
scientifically analysing away their authenticity and often their charm.
There is the Venus de’ Medici, which generations have raved over, which
innumerable processions of tourists have journeyed to admire and found
admirable. The connoisseurs have now pronounced her “spurious and
meretricious,” and to-day nobody who respects himself would allow
himself a thrill at the sight of her. Yet Childe Harold cried:
“We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness.”
I must admit that after the Venus of Milo the beauty of the Medici Venus
does appear a trivial prettiness. But even the Venus of Milo—though we
are still permitted to admire her—is “late and eclectic.”
The unhappy Byron also wrote to somebody: “The Venus is more for
admiration than for love. What struck me most was the mistress of the
Raphael portrait.” Alas! nobody believes now that the picture has
anything to do with La Fornarina.
As for Shelley, when in 1819 he saw at Florence the _Medusa_ attributed
to Leonardo da Vinci, he broke into lyric raptures,
“Its horror and its beauty are divine,
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, &c. &c.
* * *
“’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare,
Kindled by that inextricable error! . . .”
Kindled indeed by that inextricable error! For the _Medusa_ is now given
up by every connoisseur. It is a mere inartistic futility and to-day
every lover of the arts must grow stony at the sight of it. That
immortal line “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” is the only thing
to its credit, though some might count, too, the passage in which Pater
gloats over its beauty of conception.
Then there is that little matter of Leonardo’s _St. John_ in the Louvre.
Michelet saw the whole Renaissance in it, and Pater alludes to it as
“one of the few naked figures Leonardo painted,” and builds upon it a
complex theory of Leonardo’s symbolic suggestive method, and is not
surprised at the saint’s “strange likeness to the Bacchus which hangs
near it, which set Théophile Gautier thinking of Heine’s notion of
decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of Paganism,
took employment in the new religion.” And now the _St. John_ turns out
to have been a pupil’s or an imitator’s, and probably not even a St.
John.
The culture-pilgrims of to-day, armed with sacred text-books, verbally
infallible, and canonical lists of authentic attributions, enjoy a
suspicious superiority in æsthetic judgment over the greatest creative
artists. For Goethe and Byron and Shelley did at least create, and
Pater’s interpretation of Mona Lisa is finer than the picture itself;
whereas the pursuit of culture in the average pilgrim is a confession of
sterility either in himself or in his own nation, which is not
sufficiently vitalised to absorb his interests. “If the Romans had had
to learn Latin,” said Heine, “they would never have conquered the
world.” And were England free in thought and nobly artistic, there would
be no need of this fervour for the preservation of Greek. Even Goethe,
it is amazing to discover from his “Italiänische Reise,” never saw the
sea till he went to Italy. And his first glimpse of it was, of all
places in the world, at the Lido in Venice! He with the German Ocean to
draw from him, as it drew from Heine, the cry of “Thalassa!”; he who
might have seen how
“Die weissen Meerkinder
Hoch aufspringen und jauchzen
Uebermut-berauscht,”
must fare forth to another land and behold a lazy, almost tideless
lagoon lapping in shallow muddiness on the tamest and dullest shore in
the world. Surely we have here an ironic image of the culture-pilgrim
who sets out to see Art abroad before he has seen Nature at home.
When the Goths besieged Rome, Belisarius hurled down upon them the
statues of the Mausoleum of St. Angelo, and the tomb was turned to a
citadel. But against the siege of Rome by the Goethes there is no known
defence. A rain of statues would merely aggravate their zeal, and the
more hopelessly the statues smashed, the more would their admiration
solidify. So to-day the Goethes and the Huns alike are invited up to see
the statues—for a fee—and every citadel of reality is turned to a
mausoleum-museum. St. Angelo, that has stood the storms of eighteen
centuries, is the perquisite of a facetious warder who gabbles
automatically of Beatrice Cenci, “_la più bella ragazza d’ Italia_,” as
he points out her pitiful, if dubious, dungeon. In the stone cell of the
Florentine monastery, on whose cold flags Savonarola wore his knees in
fasting and prayer, a guide holds up a reflector to concentrate the
light on the frescoes with which Fra Angelico glorified the rude walls.
Where St. Catherine walked—in the footsteps of the Bridegroom—leaving
the marks of her miraculous feet, a buxom native of Siena expects her
obolus. Outside the pyramid-shadowed cemetery where Keats lies under his
heart-broken epitaph, a Roman urchin turns supplicatory somersaults.
_Italia Bella_, a paper published at Milan, adjured Arona to wake up and
celebrate the tercentenary of the canonisation of its Saint Carlo, “if
only because it pays.” History, with its blood and tears, becomes
æsthetics for the tourist and economics for the native. Of a truth
quaint links concatenate Cæsar and the showman, the saint with the
apple-woman who finds a profitable pitch for her stall at his
church-corner. While we are fuming and strutting we are but providing
popcorn for posterity. Buskined heroes of history, who walk the earth in
tragic splendour, perchance your truest service to humanity has been
done in affording occupation for the poor devil who expatiates upon the
traces of your passing. This, at least, ye may be sure is good service;
the rest of your work, who shall sever the good and evil strands of it?
So much pother of prophets and politicians—and, lo! how poor a planet
we still wander in.
The culture-pilgrim, too, apart from this scattering of popcorn, is a
futile being. Culture as a mere excursion from a solid home-reality may
be vitalising, but whoso thinks to batten on alien arts and letters is
filling his belly with the sirocco. There is no reality in the
travel-world, be it the world of Art or the world of Nature, for we have
no true volitional relations with it. ’Twas Schopenhauer who discovered
this for Art—though his World has only the two dimensions of Will and
Idea. But he did not, if I remember, point out that everything seen with
aloofness from action partakes of this art-quality. The landscape from
the observation-car is a mere picture to us, however real to the
peasants working in the fields.
The only “real” traveller is the commercial. We others, wandering
through streets that our ancestors did not build, or sitting in alien
apartments and gazing upon unhomely hills, are still spectators, not
actors. We are not rooted in this soil, nor feel the deep intimacies
that are the truest truth about it. I may partake in the annual _festa_
of an Italian mountain village, hear the Mass, bear banner and taper in
the procession, salute the saintly image, dance upon the plateau-piazza
with a snooded peasant-girl, but how shall I feel the holiness and joy
of this day of days?—I whose infant breath was not drawn amid these
precipitous fastnesses, who have not lived in these human caves cut in
the rock, who have not played in these steep stone streets, who know
nothing of the dear narrowness, the vivid intensity that is born of
_cramped_ consciousness! There is in the very attitude of spectator
something that stands between one and the object in its truth. This it
is that makes the appreciations of cities by the school of Pater such
hollow phantasy, such bastards of an accident by a temperament. This it
was that begot Pierre Loti’s monumental misreading of Japan as a
Lilliput of the pretty-pretty. To lose the artistic Ego in the inner
life of the phenomenon—how rare the critic who is capable of that!
Listening to these parasites upon alien autocosms,
“Moving about in worlds not realised,”
one would imagine that a civilisation or a city existed, that its remote
founders had fevered and its burghers toiled and its architects built,
to the mere end that centuries after they were dust some exquisite
vibrations should be registered on a sensitive soul.
Only less arrogant is it to place one’s soul in patronising
“appreciation” before some great historic structure—a cathedral, a
mosque, a palace, a library. These works of man so immensely transcend
any man’s works that he fits into them almost as ludicrously as a mouse.
A cathedral that represents the genius and labours and sacrifices of
generations towers so immensely out of proportion to any individual that
he can only recover a reasonable relation to it by fusing himself into
the life and stature of the race. To be solely concerned with its
impingement upon his own soul is an impertinence, to pass his life in
contriving such impingements is to live by robbery, and to enjoy these
secular products of human solidarity on the Paterian pretext that the
only reality is the fleeting and isolated Ego, is peculiarly
paradoxical.
Pater himself would even go so far as to study men, _e.g._ Pico di
Mirandola, for their æsthetic flavours. This is, indeed, to live
resolutely _Im Schönen_ if not _Im Ganzen_, and it is, therefore, the
more curious, that in citing Goethe’s maxim in his “Winckelmann” Pater
should, like Carlyle, have unconsciously substituted _Im Wahren_ for _Im
Schönen_. The æsthetic appreciation of Pico—as of most things—is a
mere by-product. I do not deny that by-products are sometimes
delightful. But let us not mistake them for central verities. And these
churches, these pictures, these statues, these palaces, these
monasteries which we see to-day in two dimensions, had once their third
dimension of reality, nay often have it still to those who know them in
their truth. How quaint that juxtaposition of Bibles and Baedekers in
Italian churches! The image which, seen through tears, is soothing a
worshipper’s pain, is at the same moment finding exact appreciation at
the eyes of a connoisseur. Who can read without emotion of how in
thirteenth-century Florence Cimabue’s _Madonna_, “the first Madonna the
people could love,” was borne in triumph from the painter’s studio to
its church by the whole population of the quarter, which henceforwards
took the name of the Allegro Borgo! To-day the art-critic analyses its
types and its composition, and it takes its place coldly in the history
of painting as the link between the Byzantine and the Tuscan. But the
citizens of the Joyous Quarter had the true flavour of the thing.
Despite the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake it remains questionable if
any maker of Art has ever escaped a desire to act—massively or
diffusively—upon the life of his age. In vain he hides himself in the
past, or flies to No-man’s-land, he vibrates throughout to the present,
touches living interests with their myriad indirect relations to action,
to the third dimension. Every art-product holds, however subtly,
something of that topical quality which makes the portrait of a
contemporary celebrity, wet from the painter’s brush, very different
from the peaceful remoteness of an Old Master.
No half-deciphered face of dim sweetness, charming us from the magic
casement of some fading fresco by some forgotten artist, as with the
very image of Art aloof and absolute, but was once wrought for a
specific market and born into a specific atmosphere. The forlorn stumps
and torsos that litter the moss-grown courts of museums were hailed, as
they fell from the craftsman’s hand, by a definite clientèle, rejoicing
in their beauty, stimulated by their freshness. Nothing, alas! is so
old, so corroded with time, but it was once brand new, the pleasant
novelty of the day to beings looking back upon an immemorial antiquity,
and now long since mouldered to dust. Every blurred inscription, every
crumbling pillar and shattered fragment had once its life, its meaning,
its public.
The hand of time in eliminating the topical element and reducing a
picture to pure Art—the inactive beauty that is its own end—removes
from our perception the full reality of the art phenomenon as it fell
from the artist’s hand into time and space.
Some parts of this original plenitude were indeed better forgotten, for
the Old Masters who were young once, young and impecunious, turned
Renaissance art into a fancy dress ball of their patrons, the
Magnificent Ones figuring as saints and patriarchs, Bethlehem shepherds
and Magian kings, whom oblivious time has done well to mellow into a
quasi-anonymity. But if the loss of such intellectual elements is a
gain, I am less certain as to the evaporation of the emotional auras of
works of art.
Andrea Orcagna worked ten years at the marble Gothic Tabernacle that
stands in the fuscous Or San Michele of Florence, and men of other races
and faiths gaze perfunctorily upon its decorative jewelled marvels, its
pictorial reliefs, wrought after the plague of 1348 from the pious
legacies of the dead or the thank-offerings of the survivors. The marble
gleams in the immortal inactive beauty that is its own end—but where
are the hope and the faith, the mourning and the anguish that made the
atmosphere in which its beauty had birth? Ebbed to the eternal silence,
like that great wave of popular rejoicing on which Cimabue’s _Madonna_
was carried to S. Maria Novella, or a picture of Duccio’s to its due
church in Siena. Can it be that Art, launched thus upon a sea of
emotion, is only its true self when stranded high and dry upon the
beach?
Is perhaps its most precious aspect precisely that by which it is
related to life? And its least precious part that which remains over for
the connoisseur of beauty? Oh but this is heresy, almost the
philistinism of a Tolstoy or a Savonarola.
But believe me, my dear Virtuosi, that flavour which the citizens of the
Joyous Quarter tasted, that wild-strawberry flavour of living, that
dog-rose aroma of reality which you miss by your wilful avoidance of
volitional relations, by your gospel of Art for Art’s sake, is as
exquisite as any of your hot-house flowers and fruitage. Are you rushing
in pursuit of the new pleasure? Nay, it can only be captured by those
who do not pursue it, who are even unaware that it exists. Mill’s
eudæmonistic paradox again, you see.
Has any professional hunter of the æsthetic ever, I wonder, had so
exquisite a sense of the starry heaven as Garibaldi when he embarked
from Quarto to redeem his country? “O night of the fifth of May, lit up
with the fire of a thousand lamps with which the Omnipotent has adorned
the Infinite! Beautiful, tranquil, solemn with that solemnity which
swells the hearts of generous men when they go forth to free the slave!”
“He never tampered with his sense of reality.” These words came to me as
the epitaph of an old Jewish pedlar when I heard of his passing away in
far-off Jerusalem. He too knew this joy of the Allegro Borgo (though in
his autocosm the Madonna was an idol) and gleams of it sustained him
through long years of poverty and pain, and through the shadows of his
closing hour. Pictures, songs, histories—all had no existence for him
outside his religion. All were but ministers of faith, to feed its
sacred flame. There was not in his whole life a moment of divorce
between reality and consciousness. In such simplicity, what a unity,
what a giant strength! Pitiful ye seem in comparison, ye unshelled
æsthetes, wandering in search of an autocosm or yearning to inhabit
every one in turn. Imagine it, to live the years of the Patriarch in our
complex tortured era, and never to have had an art-emotion, never—save
perhaps in childhood—to have known make-believe, never to have sundered
vision and idea from actuality! Think of it, ye who have played such
tricks with your souls as would make the angels weep, whose pious
emotion has as much relation to religion as the enjoyment of a painted
ocean to a struggle in the blind waters. You, Monsieur Loti of the
Académie Française, with your vain literary vigil at the Holy Sepulchre,
will you not envy this high seriousness which found an exaltation in
forty fasts a year, without bite or sup, and drew a salty vitalisation
from the tear of penitence? And you, sophisters of religion, who cling
to your creed because it is good for the poor, or a beautiful tradition,
or a branch of respectability; and above all, you, amateurs of “_la
volupté dans la dévotion_,” after the recipe of Barrès; you,
neo-Catholics who mistake masturbation for adoration, bow your heads
before one who worshipped God as naïvely as a dog adores his master, who
did not even know that he believed, who _was_ belief; who went to
Jerusalem not because he was a Zionist but because it was Zion, whose
tears at the Wailing Wall were tinctured with never a thought of the
wonder and picturesqueness of weeping over a Zion lost eighteen hundred
years before he was born! Poor Parsifal! Poor pure fool! Gone is thy
restful simplicity. Persiflage is now our wisdom.
But because I have been privileged to see this _sancta simplicitas_ of
the old Jewish pedlar, I feel I know my Middle Ages better than the
Protestant connoisseur whose learning flattens me out, or the
pseudo-Catholic in search of sensations. I understand the Allegro Borgo,
I say, and I am not appalled by the terrible list of Christian forgeries
and legends, the apocryphal Gospels, the pseudo-Epistles, the
hagiologies, for I know that ’tis the dry light of literary history that
is false—like every other science—and that in life all these figments
may have been the harmless nutriment of saintly souls. In this old Jew’s
autocosm, too, there were no physical impossibilities, no incredible
miracles, no monsters or leviathans so strange but their names in Hebrew
letters were a certificate of pedigree; the centuries were fused for him
as by a cosmic cinematograph, the patriarchs and saints hovering over
him in immortal synchrony. So am I not taken aback to see the _Bambino_
still in his mother’s lap by the time the Visconti present the Certosa
to the Madonna, nor does it disconcert me to behold all the abbots and
bishops of Christendom in attendance at the Crucifixion with consoling
models of their churches. And as for the Madonna being an Italian
_grande dame_ dressed in Venetian silks or Florentine brocades, how
else, pray, are we to preserve religion? True local colour and true
Jerusalem costuming would have brought relativity into the absoluteness
of belief, would have been a reminder that the Madonna was a foreigner.
The truer truth is that she is _Our_ Lady.
Art, you see, had in its palmy days to be a full-orbed reality, carrying
conviction as well as beauty to the guileless beholder. To us too ’tis
only the masterpiece attuned to our own macrocosm that can give us this
plenary satisfaction. Even “Paradise Lost” is for us merely a
magnificent banquet of words, the virgin bloom of Paradise truly lost
with our faith in the groundwork of the epic. Tolstoy’s attack on Art
fails to differentiate between the Art of alien autocosms, the Culture
Art which divides our soul against itself, and the real vitalising Art
of our own epoch. For though we say, “Blessed are the simple, who live
in the Absolute,” ’tis no necessary converse to cry damnation on the
complex. Art, we know, is in a sense a playing with life, an outcome, as
Schiller said, of the play-impulse, the exuberance of energies not
exhausted in the struggle for existence. This is what Carlyle felt when
he denounced mere rhymesters and canvas-colourers; it was the secret of
his “imperfect sympathies” (in Elia’s phrase) with Shakespeare himself.
’Tis Hebraism _versus_ Hellenism—the earnestness of the writers of the
Bible, whose Art is an unconscious enhancement, a by-product struck off
at white heat, _versus_ the self-conscious manipulation of themes by
Æschylus or Sophocles. A sense of futility and superfluity, if not of
positive pravity, lies behind the eternal distrust of the Puritan for
the make-believe of Art, his suspicion of the theatre and the nudities
of Pagan sculpture. A prick of atavistic Calvinism caused the writer
with the profoundest instinct for make-believe our generation has
seen—Robert Louis Stevenson—suddenly to declare that the artist was no
better than a _fille de joie_. But this was because the bulk of
Stevenson’s fiction—unlike his essays and his poetry—is Art in its
anecdotage, without serious relation to the spirit. And there are moods
in which a jejune elegance or an empty exhilaration is as unsatisfying
as a lady’s boudoir; and the artist, as a maker of beautiful toys, must
sink into the same place as the contriver of perfumes and cushions. In
Japan, where every workman is an artist, Art is in its proper place, and
there is neither cant nor confusion. But besides the little Art of
decorative line and melodious tinkle and romantic falsification of life
there is the greater Art which has in it the unrest of the ocean and the
silence of the starry night. Art, if in some instances it has sprung
direct from the play-impulse, has largely come to us by way of religion,
and where it is merely play for play’s sake—as in rococo Art—it is
doomed to sterility.
Although Art represents, yet, as photography came to prove,
representation is not the aim of Art. The aim of Art is
creation—creation that stimulates the soul. The artist has not to
reproduce his model, but to create something new, living, and
stimulating by help of it. He adds new creations to Nature. He marries
her facts to his passion and pain, and the offspring is Art—Nature
crossed by Man. The great odes of Keats and Wordsworth, the symphonies
of Beethoven, the pictures of Bellini, the statues of Michelangelo,
transmit to us the artists’ spiritual exaltations, their ideals of
beauty and energy. It boots not to point out that the artist is often
selfish and licentious, irritable and vain. It is the greatnesses of his
soul, not its pettinesses, which he puts into his art; his emotions and
ideals into its content, his sincerity into its craftsmanship. And by
greatnesses I do not mean only moral greatnesses, for life is larger
than morality. It is his own temperament with which the artist crosses
Nature. And that is why schools of Art can never yield more than craft:
new creations can only be got by new crossings.
I would grant the Puritan, to whom all Art is of Satan, as I would grant
his strange ally, Plato, that æsthetics may be abused, especially when
divorced from life. There are young ladies who consume a novel a day,
Sundays not omitted, by which process half their waking life is passed
in a species of opium-eating. There are amateurs of music whose life is
a surfeit of sweet sounds, and picture-lovers whose day is an orgy of
line and colour. But when Tolstoy, perceiving what a sensual sty of Fine
Art we may wallow in, ranged himself with the old Puritan iconoclasts,
and launched his famous Platonic encyclical against music divorced from
public psalmody, song sundered from harvest-festivity, or poetry that
was not a marching song to the Millennium, he overlooked that even a
healthy soul may have a surplusage of play-energy—nay, that this is the
very child-soul—and that even from a Puritan point of view Fine Art may
purify for fine Action, though it lack the direct nexus with Action.
Tolstoy’s tracts on religion may even be less vitalising for our age
than “Anna Karenina” operating by way of the Aristotelian _katharsis_.
And the relation of so-called fiction to truth may be even closer than
its nexus with Action. For it follows from our analysis of Science that
novels and plays have the great initial veracity of reproducing the
fulness of life as compared with the segregative sciences with their
one-sided abstractions, which are to actuality as the conjugations in a
Greek grammar are to a conversation with Helen of Troy. While the
artificial selection of Science breaks a whole into parts, the
artificial selection of Art can make a part truly represent the whole.
And the greater the artist-soul the less will it play with its moods by
the artificial and conscious refraction of Art for Art’s sake. None
should know better than Tolstoy that the highest Art is only Truth seen
as Beauty. The great artist’s registration and reflection of the
universe in tone or colour, line or word, is, indeed, the highest form
of Science at our command, fact and flower in one. “Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty.” Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven,
Milton, Browning, were not playing with life. The world of Art may not
be the world of Science, but it is the world we live in, the human world
furnished with faith and emotion, no less “real” than the naked universe
of physical law.
To accept Art for Art’s sake, to divorce it from life, would be to
pigeon-hole our souls, as most people put their religion into Sundays.
The deepest analysis seems to conduct us back to a recognition that Art
and Reality, though they have no necessary relation, do actually tend to
approach each other in the greatest Art. The greatest writers—a
Shakespeare or a Tourgénieff—in that selection from life which
constitutes Art, select so as to give a sense of the whole, avoiding the
one-sided selection which gives us on the one hand the disproportionate
sexualities of the Palais-Royal farce or of the elegant bawdy-book, on
the other the disproportionate sentimentalisms of goody-goody fiction.
In painting, too, the Art which seizes the essence of places and people
is the greatest, and I believe the greatest music seizes the essence of
moods. Moreover, it is only by their relations to human realities that
imaginative creations like Goethe’s Mephistopheles or Swift’s
Lilliputians, the Prometheus of Æschylus, the Caliban of Shakespeare or
the Jungle-Beasts of Kipling, have power to hold us. It may give us a
useful distinction between Imagination and Fancy to connect the one with
invention along the lines of life and born of insight into its
essence—as in the creation of Hamlet; the other with artificial
invention—as in the creation of Alice’s Wonderland. Whether Hamlet
existed or not, or that Prince Hal did exist, is irrelevant to Art. The
transient reality has been replaced by the permanent creation. _Per
contra_, what was meant as Truth may survive only as Art, like the
mythological parts of the “Iliad,” “Macbeth,” “Paradise Lost,” or the
“Divina Commedia.” Yet, as I have just pointed out, even these great
artistic creations lose their hold in proportion as they cease to seem
in correspondence with external realities. And if the supreme test of
plastic and literary Art is its communication of a sense of life, is it
not Truth we are really worshipping, Truth under another name? For
lifelikeness, if it does not necessarily mean likeness to particular
individuals, does necessarily mean likeness to universals. And
Selection, though it omits portions of the truth, does not omit the
whole truth—nay, sometimes reveals the whole truth by cutting away the
obscuring details. Reality is the inexhaustible _fons et origo_ of all
great Art; apart from which there is no life in Art, but a rootless,
sapless, soulless simulacrum. So that with the supreme artist, the
Puritan antithesis of Truth and Art, Reality and Make-believe, Hebraism
and Hellenism, disappears. A Sophocles is as earnest as a Socrates, a
Michelangelo as a Savonarola, a Shakespeare as a Luther, a Beethoven as
a Darwin.
As earnest, but not as limited. The biggest souls have never been able
to express their sense of the multiform flowingness of things in neat
packets of propositions; they have expressed it through the infinitude
of Art. And Art, having once in human history been the medium of the
spirit, must never sink back into a soulless toy. The Art of the future
must vivify Science and take it up into Life; it must touch Truth with
emotion and exalt it into Religion.