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ESSAYS ON ART
BY
A. CLUTTON-BROCK
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1919_
PREFACE
These essays, reprinted from the _Times Literary Supplement_ with a few
additions and corrections, are not all entirely or directly concerned
with art; but even the last one--Waste or Creation?--does bear on the
question, How are we to improve the art of our own time? After years of
criticism I am more interested in this question than in any other that
concerns the arts. Whistler said that we could not improve it; the best
we could do for it was not to think about it. I have discussed that
opinion, as also the contrary opinion of Tolstoy, and the truth that
seems to me to lie between them. If these essays have any unity, it is
given to them by my belief that art, like other human activities, is
subject to the will of man. We cannot cause men of artistic genius to be
born; but we can provide a public, namely, ourselves, for the artist,
who will encourage him to be an artist, to do his best, not his worst.
I believe that the quality of art in any age depends, not upon the
presence or absence of individuals of genius, but upon the attitude of
the public towards art.
Because of the decline of all the arts, especially the arts of use,
which began at the end of the eighteenth century and has continued up to
our own time, we are more interested in art than any people of the past,
with the interest of a sick man in health. To say that this interest
must be futile or mischievous is to deny the will of man in one of the
chief of human activities; but it often is denied by those who do not
understand how it can be applied to art. We cannot make artists
directly; no government office can determine their training; still less
can any critic tell them how they ought to practise their art. But we
can all aim at a state of society in which they will be encouraged to do
their best, and at a state of mind in which we ourselves shall learn to
know good from bad and to prefer the good. At present we have neither
the state of society nor the state of mind; and we can attain to both
not by connoisseurship, not by an anxiety to like the right thing or at
least to buy it, but by learning the difference between good and bad
workmanship and design in objects of use. Anyone can do that, and can
resolve to pay a fair price for good workmanship and design; and only so
will the arts of use, and all the arts, revive again. For where the
public has no sense of design in the arts of use, it will have none in
the "fine arts." To aim at connoisseurship when you do not know a good
table or chair from a bad one is to attempt flying before you can walk.
So, I think, professors of art at Oxford or Cambridge should be chosen,
not so much for their knowledge of Greek sculpture, as for their success
in furnishing their own houses. What can they know about Greek sculpture
if their own drawing-rooms are hideous? I believe that the notorious
fallibility of many experts is caused by the fact that they concern
themselves with the fine arts before they have had any training in the
arts of use. So, if we are to have a school of art at Oxford or
Cambridge, it should put this question to every pupil: If you had to
build and furnish a house of your own, how would you set about it? And
it should train its pupils to give a rational answer to that question.
So we might get a public knowing the difference between good and bad in
objects of use, valuing the good, and ready to pay a fair price for it.
At present we have no such public. A liberal education should teach the
difference between good and bad in things of use, including buildings.
Oxford and Cambridge profess to give a liberal education; but you have
only to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachers
themselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like all
the rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they
trust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and
superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely
mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere
pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. These have
their sense or nonsense, their righteousness or unrighteousness, which
anyone can learn to see for himself, and, until he has learned, he will
be at the mercy of charlatans.
I have written all these essays as a member of the public, as one who
has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish
again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to
himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling
artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a
natural and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a defence
of criticism, and I will not repeat it here.
A. CLUTTON-BROCK
_July_ 30, 1919
FARNCOMBE, SURREY
CONTENTS
"THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI" 1
LEONARDO DA VINCI 13
THE POMPADOUR IN ART 27
AN UNPOPULAR MASTER 37
A DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 48
THE ARTIST AND HIS AUDIENCE 58
WILFULNESS AND WISDOM 74
"THE MAGIC FLUTE" 86
PROCESS OR PERSON? 97
THE ARTIST AND THE TRADESMAN 110
PROFESSIONALISM IN ART 120
WASTE OR CREATION? 132
ESSAYS ON ART
"The Adoration of the Magi"
There is one beauty of nature and another of art, and many attempts have
been made to explain the difference between them. Signor Croce's theory,
now much in favour, is that nature provides only the raw material for
art. The beginning of the artistic process is the perception of beauty
in nature; but an artist does not see beauty as he sees a cow. It is his
own mind that imposes on the chaos of nature an order, a relation, which
is beauty. All men have the faculty, in some degree, of imposing this
order; the artist only does it more completely than other men, and he
owes his power of execution to that. He can make the beauty which he has
perceived because he has perceived it clearly; and this perceiving is
part of the making.
The defect of this theory is that it ends by denying that very
difference between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art which it
sets out to explain. If the artist makes the beauty of nature in
perceiving it, if it is produced by the action of his own mind upon the
chaos of reality, then it is the very same beauty that appears in his
art; and if, to us, the beauty of his art seems different from the
beauty of nature, as we perceive it, it is only because we have not
ourselves seen the beauty of nature as completely as he has, we have not
reduced chaos so thoroughly to order. It is a difference not of kind,
but of degree; for the artist himself there is no difference even of
degree. What he makes he sees, and what he sees he makes. All beauty is
artistic, and to speak of natural beauty is to make a false distinction.
Yet it is a distinction that we remain constantly aware of. In spite of
Signor Croce and all the subtlety and partial truth of his theory, we do
not believe that we make beauty when we see it, or that the artist makes
it when he sees it. Nor do we believe that that beauty which he makes is
of the same nature as that which he has perceived in reality. Rather he,
like us, values the beauty which he perceives in reality because he
knows that he has not made it. It is something, independent of himself,
to which his own mind makes answer: that answer is his art; it is the
passionate value expressed in it which gives beauty to his art. If he
knew that the beauty he perceives was a product of his own mind, he
could not value it so; if he held Signor Croce's theory, he would cease
to be an artist.
And, in fact, those who act on his theory do cease to be artists.
Nothing kills art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the
same kind as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature,
as we perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is
perfection because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made,
but born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference
between them and between their beauties. If a work of art tries to have
the finish of a thing born, not made, if a piece of enamel apes the
gloss of a butterfly's wing, it misses the peculiar beauty of art and is
but an inadequate imitation of the beauty of nature. That beauty of the
butterfly's wing, which the artist like all of us perceives, is of a
different kind from any beauty he can make; and if he is an artist he
knows it and does not try to make it. But all the arts, even those which
are not themselves imitative, are always being perverted by the attempt
to imitate the finish of nature. There is a vanity of craftsmanship in
Louis Quinze furniture, in the later Chinese porcelain, in modern
jewelry, no less than in Dutch painting, which is the death of art. All
great works of art show an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of
craftsmanship, which is the essence of their beauty and distinguishes it
from the beauty of nature. As soon as men cease to understand this and
despise this effort and roughness and inadequacy, they demand from art
the beauty of nature and get something which is mostly dead nature, not
living art.
We can best understand the difference between the two kinds of beauty if
we consider how beauty steals into language, that art which we all
practise more or less and in which it is difficult, if not impossible,
to imitate the finish of natural beauty. There is no beauty whatever in
sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Pass the mustard,"
because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say. There
is beauty in sentences like "The bright day is done, And we are for the
dark," or "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," because in them,
although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say a thousand
times more than he can say. It is the effort to do something beyond the
power of words that brings beauty into them. That is the very nature of
the beauty of art, which distinguishes it from the beauty of nature; it
is always produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible, and what
the artist knows to be impossible. Whenever that effort ceases, whenever
the artist sets himself a task that he can accomplish, a task of mere
skill, then he ceases to be an artist, because he no longer experiences
reality in the manner necessary to an artist. The great poet is aware of
some excellence in reality so intensely that it is to him beauty; for
all excellence when we are intensely aware of it is beauty to us. There
is that truth in Croce's theory. Our perception of beauty does depend
upon the intensity of our perception of excellence. But that intensity
of perception remains perception, and does not make what it perceives.
That the poet and every artist knows; and his art is not merely an
extension of the process of perception, but an attempt to express his
own value for that excellence which he has perceived as beauty. It is an
answer to that beauty, a worship of it, and is itself beautiful because
it makes no effort to compete with it.
Thus in the beauty of art there is always value and wonder, always a
reference to another beauty different in kind from itself; and we too,
if we are to see the beauty of art, must share the same value and
wonder. To enter that Kingdom of Heaven we must become little children
as the artist himself does. Art is the expression of a certain attitude
towards reality, an attitude of wonder and value, a recognition of
something greater than man; and where that recognition is not, art dies.
In a society valuing only itself, believing that it can make a heaven of
itself out of its own skill and knowledge and wisdom, the difference
between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art is no longer seen,
and art loses all its own beauty. The surest sign of corruption and
death in a society is where men and women see the best life as a life
without wonder or effort or failure, where labour is hidden underground
so that a few may seem to live in Paradise; where there is perfect
finish of all things, human beings no less than their clothes and
furniture and buildings and pictures; where the ideal is the lady so
perfectly turned out that any activity whatever would mar her
perfection. In such societies the artist becomes a slave. He too must
produce work that does not seem to be work. He must express no wonder
or value for patrons who would be ashamed to feel either. What he makes
must seem to be born and not made, so that it may fit a world which
pretends to be a born Paradise populated by cynical angels who own
allegiance to no god. In such a world art means, beauty means, the
concealment of effort, the pretence that it does not exist; and that
pretence is the end of art and beauty in all things made by man. There
is a close connexion between the idea of life expressed in Aristotle's
ideal man and the later Greek sculpture. The aim of that sculpture, as
of his ideal man, was proud and effortless perfection. Both dread the
confession of failure above all things--and both are dull. In
Aristotle's age art had started upon a long decline, which ended only
when the pretence of perfection was killed, both in art and in life, by
Christianity. Then the real beauty of art, the beauty of value and
wonder, superseded the wearisome imitation of natural beauty; and it is
only lately that we have learnt again to prefer the real beauty to the
false.
Men must free themselves from the contempt of effort and the desire to
conceal it, they must be content with the perpetual, passionate failure
of art, before they can see its beauty or demand that beauty from the
artist. When they themselves become like little children, then they see
that the greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are like
little children too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not the
arrogant, the accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They are
great men to us; but they achieved beauty because in their effort to
achieve it they were little children to themselves. They impose awe on
us, but it is their own awe that they impose. It is not their
achievement that makes beauty, but their effort, always confessing its
own failure; and in that confession is the beauty of art. That is why it
moves and frees us; for it frees us from our pretence that we are what
we would be, it carries us out of our own egotism into the wonder and
value of the artist himself.
Consider the beauty of a tune. Music itself is the best means which man
has found for confessing that he cannot say what he would say; and it is
more purely and rapturously beauty than any other form of art. A tune is
the very silencing of speech, and in the greatest tunes there is always
the hush of wonder: they seem to tell us to be silent and listen, not to
what the musician has to say, but to what he cannot say. The very
beauty of a tune is in its reference to something beyond all expression,
and in its perfection it speaks of a perfection not its own. Pater said
that all art tries to attain to the condition of music. That is true in
a sense different from what he meant. Art is always most completely art
when it makes music's confession of the ineffable; then it comes nearest
to the beauty of music. But when it is no longer a forlorn hope, when it
is able to say what it wishes to say with calm assurance, then it has
ceased to be art and become a game of skill.
Often the great artist is imperious, impatient, full of certainties; but
his certainty is not of himself; and he is impatient of the failure to
recognize, not himself, but what he recognizes. Michelangelo, Beethoven,
Tintoret, would snap a critic's head off if he did not see what they
were trying to do. They may seem sometimes to be arrogant in the mere
display of power, yet their beauty lies in the sudden change from
arrogance to humility. The arrogance itself bows down and worships; the
very muscle and material force obey a spirit not their own. They are
lion-tamers, and they themselves are the lions; out of the strong comes
forth sweetness, and it is all the sweeter for the strength that is
poured into it and subdued by it. What is the difference, as of
different worlds, between Rubens at his best and Tintoret at his best?
This: that Rubens always seems to be uplifted by his own power, whereas
Tintoret has most power when he forgets it in wonder. When he bows down
all his turbulence in worship, then he is most strong. Rubens, in the
"Descent from the Cross," is still the supreme drawing-master; and
painters flocking to him for lessons pay homage to him. But, in his
"Crucifixion," it is Tintoret himself who pays homage, and we forget the
master in the theme. We may say of Rubens's art, in a new sense, "C'est
magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre." The greatest art is not
magnificent, but it is war, desperate and without trappings, a war in
which victory comes through the confession of defeat.
Man, if he tries to be a god in his art, makes a fool of himself. He
becomes like God, he makes beauty like God, when he is too much aware of
God to be aware of himself. Then only does he not set himself too easy a
task, for then he does not make his theme so that he may accomplish it;
it is forced upon him by his awareness of God, by his wonder and value
for an excellence not his own. So in all the beauty of art there is a
humility not only of conception, but also of execution, which is mere
failure and ugliness to those who expect to find in art the beauty and
finish of nature, who expect it to be born, not made. They are always
disappointed by the greatest works of art, by their inadequacy and
strain and labour. They look for a proof of what man can do and find a
confession of what he cannot do; but that confession, made sincerely and
passionately, is beauty. There is also a serenity in the beauty of art,
but it is the serenity of self-surrender, not of self-satisfaction, of
the saint, not of the lady of fashion. And all the accomplishment of
great art, its infinite superiority in mere skill over the work of the
merely skilful, comes from the incessant effort of the artist to do more
than he can. By that he is trained; by that his work is distinguished
from the mere exclamation of wonder. He is not content to applaud; he
must also worship, and make his offerings in his worship; and they are
the best he can do. It was not only the shepherds who came to the birth
of Christ; the wise men came also and brought their treasures with them.
And the art of mankind is the offering of its wise men, it is the
adoration of the Magi, who are one with the simplest in their worship--
Wise men, all ways of knowledge past,
To the Shepherd's wonder come at last.
But they do not lose their wisdom in their wonder. When it passes into
wonder, when all the knowledge and skill and passion of mankind are
poured into the acknowledgment of something greater than themselves,
then that acknowledgment is art, and it has a beauty which may be envied
by the natural beauty of God Himself.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous men in history--as a man
more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart--because
posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great
artists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but what
Leonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from what
he is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; we cannot
think of him as a mere individual, eating and drinking, living and
competing, on equal terms with other men. We see him magnified by his
own legend from the first, with people standing aside to watch and
whisper as he passed through the streets of Florence or Milan. "There he
goes to paint the Last Supper," they said to each other; and we think of
it as already the most famous picture in the world before it was begun.
Every one knew that he had the most famous picture in his brain, that he
was born to paint it, to initiate the High Renaissance; from Giotto
onwards all the painters had been preparing for that, Florence herself
had been preparing for it. It makes no difference that for centuries it
has been a shadow on the wall; it is still the most famous painting in
the world because it is the masterpiece of Leonardo. There was a fate
against the survival of his masterpieces, but he has survived them and
they are remembered because of him. We accept him for himself, like the
people of his own time, who, when he said he could perform
impossibilities, believed him. To them he meant the new age which could
do anything, and still to us he means the infinite capacities of man. He
is the Adam awakened whom Michelangelo only painted; and, if he
accomplished but little, we believe in him, as in mankind, for his
promise. If he did not fulfil it, neither has mankind; but he believed
that all things could be done and lived a great life in that faith.
Another Florentine almost equals him in renown. Men watched and
whispered when Dante passed through the streets of Florence; but Dante
lives in his achievement, Leonardo in himself. Dante means to us an
individual soul quivering through a system, a creed, inherited from the
past. Leonardo is a spirit unstraitened; not consenting to any past nor
rebelling against it, but newborn with a newborn universe around it,
seeing it without memories or superstitions, without inherited fears or
pieties, yet without impiety or irreverence. He is not an iconoclast,
since for him there are no images to be broken; whatever he sees is not
an image but itself, to be accepted or rejected by himself; what he
would do he does without the help or hindrance of tradition. In art and
in science he means the same thing, not a rebirth of any past, as the
word Renaissance seems to imply, but freedom from all the past, life
utterly in the present. He is concerned not with what has been thought,
or said, or done, but with his own immediate relation to all things,
with what he sees and feels and discovers. Authority is nothing to him,
whether of Galen or of St. Thomas, of Greek or mediæval art. In science
he looks at the fact, in art at the object; nor will he allow either to
be hidden from him by the achievements of the dead. Giotto had struck
the first blow for freedom when he allowed the theme to dictate the
picture; Leonardo allowed the object to dictate the drawing. To him the
fact itself is sacred, and man fulfils himself in his own immediate
relation to fact.
All those who react and rebel against the Renaissance have an easy case
against its great representative. What did he do in thought compared
with St. Thomas, or in art compared with the builders of Chartres or
Bourges? He filled notebooks with sketches and conjectures; he modelled
a statue that was never cast; he painted a fresco on a wall, and with a
medium so unsuited to fresco that it was a ruin in a few years. Even in
his own day there was a doubt about him; it is expressed in the young
Michelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not cast the statue he had
modelled. Michelangelo was one of those who see in life always the great
task to be performed and who judge a man by his performance; to him
Leonardo was a dilettante, a talker; he made monuments, but Leonardo
remains his own monument, a prophecy of what man shall be when he comes
into his kingdom. With him, we must confess, it is more promise than
performance; he could paint "The Last Supper" because it means the
future; he could never, in good faith, have painted "The Last Judgment,"
for that means a judgment on the past, and to him the past is nothing;
to him man, in the future, is the judge, master, enjoyer of his own
fate. Compared with his, Michelangelo's mind was still mediæval, his
reproach the reproach of one who cares for doing more than for being,
and certainly Michelangelo did a thousand times more; but from his own
day to ours the world has not judged Leonardo by his achievement. As
Johnson had his Boswell so he has had his legend; he means to us not
books or pictures, but himself. In his own day kings bid for him as if
he were a work of art; and he died magnificently in France, making
nothing but foretelling a race of men not yet fulfilled.
Before Francis Bacon, before Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied not
merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who is
to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in
all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary
hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For
his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he
initiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from his
inheritance. It seems strange to us that Leonardo sang hymns to
causation as if to God. In its will was his peace and his freedom.
O marvellous necessity, thou with supreme reason constrainest
all efforts to be the direct result of their causes, and by a
supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by
the shortest possible process.
Who would believe that so small a space could contain the
images of all the universe? O mighty process, what talent can
avail to penetrate a nature such as thine? What tongue will it
be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily none. This it is
that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine
things.[1]
[Footnote 1: The sayings of Leonardo quoted in this article are taken
from _Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks_, by E. M'Curdy. (Duckworth, 1906.)]
To Leonardo causation meant the escape from caprice; it meant a secure
relation between man and all things, in which man would gain power by
knowledge, in which every increase of knowledge would reveal to him more
and more of the supreme reason. There was no chain for him in cause and
effect, no unthinking of the will of man. Rather by knowledge man would
discover his own will and know that it was the universal will. So man
must never be afraid of knowledge. "The eye is the window of the soul."
Like Whitman he tells us always to look with the eye, and so to confound
the wisdom of ages. There is in every man's vision the power of relating
himself now and directly to reality by knowledge; and in knowing other
things he knows himself. By knowledge man changes what seemed to be a
compulsion into a harmony; he gives up his own caprice for the universal
will.
That is the religion of Leonardo, in art as in science. For him the
artist also must relate himself directly to the visible world, in which
is the only inspiration; to accept any formula is to see with dead men's
eyes. That has been said again and again by artists, but not with
Leonardo's mystical and philosophical conviction. He knew that it is
vain to study Nature unless she is to you a goddess or a god; you can
learn nothing from reality unless you adore it, and in adoring it he
found his freedom. How different is this doctrine from that with which,
after centuries of scientific advance, we intimidate ourselves. We are
threatened by a creed far more enslaving than that of the Middle Ages.
If the Middle Ages turned to the past to learn what they were to think
or to do, we turn to the past to learn what we are. They may have feared
the new; but we say that there is no new, nothing but some combination
or variation of the old. Causation is to us a chain that binds us to the
past, but to Leonardo it was freedom; and so he prophesies a freedom
that we may attain to not by denying facts or making myths, but by
discovering what he hinted--that causation itself is not compulsion but
will, and our will if, by knowledge, we make it ours.
No one before him had been so much in love with reality, whatever it may
be. He was called a sceptic, but it was only that he preferred reality
itself to any tales about it; and his religion, his worship, was the
search for the very fact. This, because he was both artist and man of
science, he carried further than anyone else, pursuing it with all his
faculties. In his drawings there is the beauty not of his character, but
of the character of what he draws; he does not make a design, but finds
it. That beauty proves him a Florentine--Dürer himself falls short of
it--but it is the beauty of the thing itself, discovered and insisted
upon with the passion of a lover. He draws animals, trees, flowers, as
Correggio draws Antiope or Io; and it is only in his drawings now that
he speaks clearly to us. The "Mona Lisa" is well enough, but another
hand might have executed the painting of it. It owes its popular fame to
the smile about which it is so easy to write finely; but in the drawings
we see the experiencing passion of Leonardo himself, we see him
feeling, as in the notebooks we see him thinking. There is the eagerness
of discovery at which so often he stopped short, turning away from a
task to further discovery, living always in the moment, taking no
thought either for the morrow or for yesterday, unable to attend to any
business, even the business of the artist, seeing life not as a struggle
or a duty, but as an adventure of all the senses and all the faculties.
He is, even with his pencil, the greatest talker in the world, but
without egotism, talking always of what he sees, satisfying himself not
with the common appetites and passions of men, but with his one supreme
passion for reality. If Michelangelo thought him a dilettante, there
must have been in his taunt some envy of Leonardo's freedom.
Yet once at least Leonardo did achieve, and something we should never
have expected from his drawings. "The Last Supper" is but a shadow on
the wall, yet still we can see its greatness, which is the greatness of
pure design, of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesa. Goethe and
others have found all kinds of psychological subtleties in it, meanings
in every gesture; but what we see now is only space, grandeur, a supreme
moment expressed in the relation of all the forms. The pure music of
the painting remains when the drama is almost obliterated; and it
proves that Leonardo, when he chose, could withdraw himself from the
delight of hand-to-mouth experience into a vision of his own, that he
had the reserve and the creative power of the earlier masters and of
that austere, laborious youth who taunted him. If it were not for "The
Last Supper" we might doubt whether he could go further in art than the
vivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The Last Supper" tells us how great his
passion for reality must have been, since it could distract him from the
making of such masterpieces.
That passion for reality itself made him cold to other passions. We know
Michelangelo and Beethoven as men in some respects very like other men.
They were anxious, fretful, full of affections and grievances, and much
concerned with their relations. Leonardo is like Melchizedek, not only
by the accident of birth, for he was a natural son, but by choice. He
never married, he never had a home; there is no evidence that he was
ever tied to any man or woman by his affections; yet it would be stupid
to call him cold, for his one grand passion absorbed him. Monks
suspected him, but in his heart he was celibate like the great monkish
saints, celibate not by vows but by preoccupation. It is clear that
from youth to age life had no cumulative power over him; as we should
say in our prosaic language, he never settled down, for he let things
happen to him and valued the very happening. He was always like a
strange, wonderful creature from another planet, taking notes with
unstaled delight but never losing his heart to any particular. Sex
itself seems hardly to exist for him, or at least for his mind. Often
the people in his drawings are of no sex. Rembrandt draws every one,
Leonardo no one, as if he were his own relation. Women and youths were
as much a subject of his impassioned curiosity as flowers, and no more.
He is always the spectator, but a spectator who can exercise every
faculty of the human mind and every passion in contemplation; he is the
nearest that any man has ever come to Aristotle's Supreme Being.
But we must not suppose that he went solemnly through life living up to
his own story, that he was mysterious in manner or in any respect like a
charlatan. Rather, he lived always in the moment and overcame mankind by
his spontaneity. He had the charm of the real man of genius, not the
reserve of the false one. The famous statement of what he could do,
which he made to Ludovico Sforza, is not a mere boast but an expression
of his eagerness to do it. These engines of war were splendid toys to
him, and all his life he enjoyed making toys and seeing men wonder at
them. His delight was to do things for the first time like a child, and
then not to do them again. Again and again he cries out against
authority and in favour of discovery. "Whoever in discussion adduces
authority," he says, "uses not intellect but rather memory"; and,
anticipating Milton, he observes that all our knowledge originates in
opinions. Perhaps some one had rebuked him for having too many opinions.
We can be sure that he chafed against dull, cautious, safe men who
wished for results. He himself cared nothing for them; it was enough for
him to know what might be done, without doing it. He was so sure of his
insight that he did not care to put it to the test of action; that was
for slower men, whether artists or men of science. His notebooks were
enough for him.
In spite of the notebooks and the sketches, we know less about the man
Leonardo than about the man Shakespeare. Here and there he makes a
remark with some personal conviction or experience in it. "Intellectual
passion," he says, "drives out sensuality." In him it had driven out or
sublimated all the sensual part of character. We cannot touch or see or
hear him in anything he says or draws. The passion is there, but it is
too much concerned with universals to be of like nature with our own
passions. He seems to be speaking to himself as if he had forgotten the
whole audience of mankind, but in what he says he ignores the personal
part of himself; he is most passionate when most impersonal. "To the
ambitious, whom neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world
suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is
squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of
the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we know
that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty of
the world, were enough for him without ambition, without even further
affections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even achievement,
to follow them; and he left all those not out of coldness, or fear, or
idleness, but because his own passion drew him away. No cold man could
have said, "Where there is most power of feeling, there of martyrs is
the greatest martyr." It is difficult for us northerners to understand
the intellectual passion of the South, to see even that it is passion;
most difficult of all for us to see that in men like Leonardo the
passion for beauty itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism, our
sense of exile, can never find that identity which he found between
beauty and reality. "This benign nature so provides that all over the
world you find something to imitate." To us imitation means prose, to
him it meant poetry; science itself meant poetry, and illusion was the
only ugliness. "Nature never breaks her own law." It is we who try to
find freedom in lawlessness, which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion.
"Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it should praise the great
works of God, it offends against His divinity." There is Leonardo's
religion; and if still it is too cold for us, it is because we have not
his pure spiritual fire in ourselves.
The Pompadour in Art
It is an important fact in the history of the arts for the last century
or more that in England and America, if not elsewhere, the chief
interest in all the arts, including literature, has been taken by women
rather than by men. In the great ages of art it was not so. Women, so
far as we can tell, had little to do with the art of Greece in the fifth
century or with the art of the Middle Ages. There were female patrons of
art at the Renaissance, but they were exceptions subject to the
prevailing masculine taste. Art was and remained a proper interest of
men up to the eighteenth century. Women first began to control it and to
affect its character at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV. But in
the nineteenth century men began to think they were too busy to concern
themselves with the arts. Men of power, when they were not working,
needed to take exercise and left it to their wives to patronize the
arts. And so the notion grew that art was a feminine concern, and even
artists were pets for women. The great man, especially in America, liked
his wife to have every luxury. The exquisite life she led was itself a
proof of his success; and she was for him a living work of art, able to
live so because of the abundance of his strength. In her, that strength
passed into ornament and became beautiful; she was a friendly, faithful
Delilah to his Samson, a Delilah who did not shear his locks. And so he
came to think of art itself as being in its nature feminine if not
effeminate, as a luxury and ornament of life, as everything, in fact,
except a means of expression for himself and other men.
This female control of art began, as I have said, at the mistress-ridden
Court of Louis XV, and it has unfortunately kept the stamp of its
origin. At that Court art, to suit the tastes of the Pompadour and the
Du Barri, became consciously frivolous, became almost a part of the
toilet. The artist was the slave of the mistress, and seems to have
enjoyed his chains. In this slavery he did produce something charming;
he did invest that narrow and artificial Heaven of the Court with some
of the infinite beauty and music of a real Heaven. But out of this
refined harem art there has sprung a harem art of the whole world which
has infested the homes even of perfectly respectable ladies ever since.
All over Europe the ideals of applied art have remained the ideals of
the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have either
women or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spread
a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in
their efforts at æsthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are
not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes
even in their clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. Of course, if
this pretence were put into words and so presented to their
consciousness, they would be indignant. It has for them no connexion
with conduct; it is purely æsthetic, but art means to them make-believe,
the make-believe that they live an entirely frivolous life of pleasure
provided for them by masculine power and devotion.
Yet these ladies know that they have not the revenues of the Pompadour;
they must have their art, their make-believe, as cheap as possible; and
it has been one of the triumphs of modern industry to provide them with
cheap imitations of the luxury of the Pompadour. Hence the machine-made
frivolities of the most respectable homes, the hair-brushes with backs
of stamped silver, the scent-bottles of imitation cut-glass, the
draperies with printed rose-buds on them, the general
artificial-floweriness and flimsiness and superfluity of naughtiness of
our domestic art. It expresses a feminine romance to which the male
indulgently consents, as if he were really the voluptuous monarch whose
mistress the female, æsthetically, pretends to be. In this world of
æsthetic make-believe our homes are not respectable; they would scorn to
be so, for to the romantic female mind, when it occupies itself with
art, the improper is the artistic.
But this needs a more precise demonstration. We wonder at our modern
passion for superfluous ornament. We shall understand it only if we
discover its origin. The King's mistress liked everything about her to
be ornamented, because it was a point of honour with her to advertise
the King's devotion to her in the costliness of all her surroundings. He
loved her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation. She, like
Cleopatra, was always proving the potency of her charms by melting
pearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was hung with the trophies of
her physical pre-eminence. In all the art which we call Louis Quinze
there is this advertisement of the labour spent upon it. It proclaims
that a vast deal of trouble has been taken in the making of it, and we
can see the artist utterly subdued to this trouble, utterly the slave of
the mistress's exorbitant whims. This advertisement of labour spent,
without the reality, has been the mark of all popular domestic art ever
since.
The beautiful is the ornamented--namely, that which looks as if it had
taken a great deal of trouble to make. The trouble now is taken by
machinery, and so, with the cost, is minimized; and what it produces is
ugliness, an ugliness which could not be mistaken for beauty but for the
notion that it does express a desirable state of being in those who
possess it. And this desirable state is the state of the King's
mistress, of a siren who can have whatever she desires because of the
potency of her charms. How otherwise can we explain the passion for
superfluous machine-made ornament which makes our respectable homes so
hideous? The machine simulates a trouble that has not been taken, and so
gives proof of a voluptuous infatuation that does not exist. The
hardworking mother of a family buys out of her scanty allowance a
scent-bottle that looks as if it had been laboriously cut for a King's
mistress, whereas really it has been moulded by machinery to keep up
the delusion, unconsciously cherished by her, that she lives in a world
of irresistible and unscrupulous feminine charm. And her husband endures
indulgently all this superfluous ugliness because he, too, believes that
it is the function of art to make the drawing-room of the mother of a
family look like the boudoir of a siren.
Most of this make-believe remains unconscious. We are all so used to it
that we do not see in it the expression of the dying harem instinct in
women. Yet it persists, even where the harem instinct would be
passionately repudiated. It persists often in the dress of the most
defiant suffragette, in outbreaks of incongruous frivolity, forlorn
tawdry roses that still whisper memories of the Pompadour and her
triumphant guilty splendour.
But besides all this unconscious feminine influence upon art, there is
the influence of women who care consciously for art; and it also has an
enervating effect on the artist. For the female patron of art, just
because there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to take a motherly
interest in the artist. To her he is a delightful wayward child rather
than a real man occupied with real things, like her husband or her
father or her brother: not one who can earn money for her and fight for
her and protect her, but rather one who needs to be protected and
humoured in a world which cares so little for art. To her, with all her
passion for art, it is something in its nature irrational, and, like a
child, delightful because irrational. It is an escape from reality
rather than a part of it. And so she will believe whatever the artist
tells her because he is an artist, not because he is a man of sense; and
she encourages him to be more of an artist than a man of sense. She
encourages him to be extravagantly æsthetic, and enjoys all his
extravagance as a diversion from the sound masculinity of her own
mankind. There is room in her prosperous, easy world for these
diversions from business, just as there is room for charity or, perhaps,
religion. The world can afford artists as it can afford pets; as it can
afford beautiful, cultivated women. And that also is the view of her
husband, if he is good-natured. But to him, just because art and artists
are the proper concern of his wife, they are even less serious than they
are to her. She may persuade herself that she takes them quite
seriously, but he pretends to do so only out of politeness, and as he
would pretend to take her clothes seriously. For him the type of the
artist is still the pianist who gives locks of his over-abundant hair to
ladies. Even if the artist is a painter and cuts his hair and dresses
like a man, he still belongs to the feminine world and excites himself
about matters that do not concern men. Men can afford him, and so they
tolerate him; but he is one of the expenses they would cut down if it
were necessary to cut down expenses.
Well, it is necessary to cut down expenses now; and yet in ages much
sterner and poorer than our own art was the concern of men, and they
afforded it because it was not to them a mere feminine luxury. They
afforded the towering churches of the Middle Ages because they expressed
the religious passion of all mankind; and have we nothing to express
except a dying harem instinct and the motherliness of kind women to a
neglected class? We ought to be grateful to this motherliness, which has
kept art alive in an age of ignorance; but we should see that it is only
a _pis-aller_, and women should see this as well as men. The female
attitude towards art has been itself the result of a wrong relation
between women and men, a relation half-animal, half-romantic, and
therefore not quite real. This relation, even while it has ceased to
exist more and more in fact, has still continued to express itself
æsthetically; and in art it has become a mere obsolete nuisance. One may
care nothing for art and yet long to be rid of the meaningless
frivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as so
much litter and trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we may
purge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost rid of the
manners of the King's mistress, and most women no longer try to appeal
to men by their charming unreason. It is not merely that the appeal
fails now; they themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect. But
they still remain irrational in their tastes; or at least they have not
learned that all this æsthetic irrationality misrepresents them, that it
is forced upon them by tradesmen, that it is as inexpressive as a
sentimental music-hall song sung by a gramophone. But now that men have
given women the vote, and so proved that they take them seriously at
last, they have the right to speak plainly on this matter. The feminine
influence upon art has been bad. Let us admit that it has been the
result of a bad masculine influence upon women, that it has been supreme
because men have become philistine; but the fact remains that it has
been bad. Art must be taken seriously if it is to be worth anything. It
must be the expression of what is serious and real in the human mind.
But all this feminine art has expressed, and has tried to glorify,
something false and worthless. Therefore it has been ugly, and we are
all sick of its ugliness. We look to women, now that they are equalled
with men by an act of legal justice, to deliver us from it. They disown
the Pompadour in fact; let them disown her in art.
An Unpopular Master
Nicholas Poussin is one of the great painters of the world; yet it is
easier to give reasons for disliking him than for liking him. After his
death there was a war of pamphlets about him; the one side, led by
Lebrun, holding him up as a model for all painters to come, the other
side, under de Piles, calling him a mere pedant compared with Rubens.
Here is a passage from a poem against Poussin:--
Il sçavoit manier la régle et le compas,
Parloit de la lumière et ne l'entendoit pas;
Il estoit de l'antique un assez bon copiste,
Mais sans invention, et mauvais coloriste.
Il ne pouvait marcher que sur le pas d'autruy:
Le génie a manqué, c'est un malheur pour luy.
Now this is just what the criticism of yesterday said about him, the
criticism of the eighties and nineties, when it was supposed that
Velasquez had discovered the art of seeing, and with it the art of
painting. It sounds plausible, but not a word of it is true. And yet it
remains difficult to show why it is not true, to distinguish between the
genius of Poussin and the pedantry of his imitators, to convince people
that he was not a bad colourist, and that he did not imitate the
antique.