Nobody calls Mantegna a pedant nowadays; yet one might say against him
most of the things that have been said against Poussin. But Mantegna
lived in a century that we like, and Poussin in one that we dislike. The
seventeenth century is for us a time of pictorial platitude; there was
nothing then to discover about gesture or expression, and painters, even
the best of them, used stock gestures and stock expressions without any
of the eagerness of discovery. Now Poussin is, or appears to be, in many
of his works a dramatic painter, and for us his drama is platitudinous.
Take the "Plague of Ashdod," in the National Gallery. There are the
gestures that we are already a little weary of in Raphael's cartoons.
The figures express horror and fear with uplifted hands or contorted
features; but their real business seems to be to make the picture. The
drama is thrust upon us, and we cannot ignore it; yet we feel that it
is no discovery for the artist, but something that he has learnt like a
second-rate actor--that he has, in fact, a "bag of tricks" in common
with all the Italian painters of his time, and that he is only
pretending to be surprised by his subject. Now every age has its
artistic platitudes; but these platitudes of dramatic expression are
peculiarly wearisome to us because they have persisted in European
painting up to the present day, and because most great painters in
modern times have struggled in one way or another to escape from them.
We associate them with mediocrity and insincerity; and we do not
understand that for many of the better painters of the seventeenth
century they were only a basis for discoveries of a different kind. Il
Greco, for instance, is often as dramatically platitudinous as Guido
Reni, but he also was making discoveries in design which happen to
interest us now, so that we overlook his platitudes. He was trying to
express his emotions not so much by gesture and the play of features as
by a rhythm really independent of those, a rhythm carried through
everything in the picture, to which all his platitudes are subject. And
because this rhythm is new to us now we hardly notice the platitudes.
Poussin was playing the same game, but his rhythm has been imitated by
so many dull painters that we are tempted to think it as platitudinous
as his drama, and that is where we are unjust to him.
Poussin had a mind that was at once passionate and determined to be
master of its passions. He would not suppress them, but he would express
them with complete composure; and as Donne in poetry tried to attain to
an intellectual mastery over his passions by means of conceits, so
Poussin in painting tried to attain to the same mastery through the
representation of an ideal world. Each was enthralled with his
experience of real life; but each was dissatisfied with the haphazard,
tyrannous nature of that experience, and especially with the divorce
between passion and intellect, which in actual experience is so painful
to the man who is both passionate and intelligent. So each, in his art,
tried to make a new kind of experience, in which passion should be
intelligent and intellect passionate. This, no doubt, is what every
artist tries to do; but the effort was peculiarly fierce in Donne and
Poussin because in them there was a more than common discord between
passion and intelligence, because they were instantly critical both of
what they desired and of their own process of desire. Donne, at the very
height of passion, asked himself why he was passionate; and he could not
express his passion without trying to justify it to his intelligence. So
in his poetry he endeavoured to experience it again with simultaneous
intellectual justification which in that poetry was a part of the
experience itself. Poussin aims not so much at an intellectual
justification of passion as at an expression of it in which there shall
be also complete intellectual composure. He aims in his art at an
experience in which the intellect shall be free from the bewilderment of
the passions and the passions also free from the check of the intellect;
and to this he attains by the representation of an ideal state in which
the intellect can make all the forms through which the passion expresses
itself. He is, in fact, nearer than most painters to the musician; but
still he is a painter and appeals to us through the representation of
objects that we can recognize by their likeness to what we have seen
ourselves. His intellect desires to make its forms, not to have them
imposed upon it by mere ocular experience, since ocular experience for
him is full of the tyrannous bewilderment of actual passion. But at the
same time those forms which his intellect makes must be recognized by
their likeness to what men see in the world about them. So he found a
link between his ideal forms and what men see in what is vaguely called
the antique.
But he did not go to the antique out of any artistic snobbery or because
he distrusted his own natural taste. The antique was not for him an
aristocratic world of art that he tried to enter in the hope of becoming
himself an aristocrat. He showed that he was perfectly at ease in that
world by the manner in which he painted its subjects. When, for
instance, he paints Bacchanals, he is really much less overawed by the
subject than Rubens would be. Rubens, who was a man of culture and an
intellectual _parvenu_, tried desperately to combine his natural tastes
with classical subjects. When he painted a Flemish cook as Venus he
really tried to make her look like Venus; and the result is a Flemish
cook pretending to be Venus, an incongruity that betrays a like
incongruity in the artist's mind. Poussin's Venus, far less flesh and
blood, does belong entirely to the world in which he imagines
her--indeed, so intensely that, if we have lost interest in that world,
she fails to interest us. The Venetians have done this much better, we
think; and why, if Poussin was going to paint like Titian, did he not
use Titian's colour? The answer is, Because his mood was very far from
Titian's, because he makes a comment that Titian never makes upon his
Venuses and Bacchanals. Rubens makes no comment at all: his attitude
towards the classical is that of the wondering _parvenu_. Titian through
the classical expresses the Renaissance liberation from scruple and
fear. But Poussin gives us a mortal comment upon this immortal
carelessness and delight. Whether his figures are tranquil or rapturous,
there is in his colour an expression of something far from their
felicity. Indeed, however voluptuous the forms may be, the colour is
always ascetic. It is not that he seems to disapprove of those glorified
pleasures of the senses, but that he cannot satisfy himself with his own
conception of them, as Titian could. Titian represents a world in which
all the mind consents to delight. His figures are not foolish, but they
are like dancers or dreamers to the music of their own pleasure. He
makes us hear that music to which his figures dance or dream; but, with
Poussin, we do not hear it, we only see the figures subject to it as to
some influence from which we are cut off; and that which cuts us off is
the colour.
Most painters, if they wished to paint a scene of voluptuous pleasure,
would conceive it first in colour; for colour is the natural expression
of all delights of the senses. But Poussin never allows the delight that
he paints to affect his colour at all. That is always an expression of
his own permanent mind, of a mind that could not dance or dream to the
music of any pleasure possible in this world. For him the ideal world
was not merely one of perpetual, intensified pleasure, but one in which
all the activities of the mind should work like gratified senses and yet
keep their own character, in which passion should be freed from its
bewilderment and intellect from its questioning. That was what he tried
to represent; and his colour was a comment, half-unconscious perhaps,
upon its impossibility. For the everlasting conflict between colour and
form does itself express that impossibility. Whatever he might
represent, Poussin could not, for one moment, lose his interest in form
or subordinate it to colour. His figures, whatever their raptures, must
express his own intellectual mastery of them; and it was impossible to
combine this with a colour that should express their raptures. But
Poussin, knowing this impossibility, was not content with a compromise.
He might have used a faintly agreeable colour that would not be
incongruous with their raptures; but he chose rather to express his own
exasperation in a colour that was violently incongruous with them, but
which at the same time heightens his emphasis upon form. So, though
there is an incongruity between the subject itself and the mood in which
it is treated, there is none in the treatment. Poussin himself seems to
look, and to make us look, at a mythological Paradise, with the
searching, mournful gaze of a human spectator. This glory is forbidden
to us not merely by our circumstances but by the nature of our own
minds. It is, indeed, one of our own conceptions of Heaven, but
inadequate like all the rest; and Poussin, by making the conception
clear to us, reveals its inadequacy.
He paints the subjects of the Renaissance like a man remembering his own
youth, and sad, not because he has lost the pleasures of youth, but
because he wasted himself upon them. Here are these deities, he seems to
tell us, but there must be a secret in their felicity that we do not
understand. The joy they seem to offer is below us, and he will not
pretend to have caught it from them in his art. For that art is always
sad, not with a particular grief nor with mere low spirits, but with the
incongruity of the passions and the intellect; and this noble sadness is
expressed by Poussin as no other painter has expressed it. He was
himself a melancholy man to whom art was the one happiness of life; but
he did not use his art to talk of his sorrows. He used it to create a
world of clear and orderly design, and satisfied his intellect in the
creation of it. In his art he could exercise the composure which actual
experience disturbed; he could remake that reality so troubled by the
conflict of sense, emotion, and understanding; but, even in remaking it,
he added the comment that it was only his in art. And that is the reason
why his art seems so impersonal to us, why there is the same cold
passion in all his pictures, whether religious or mythological. In all
of them he expresses a sharp dissatisfaction with the very nature of his
actual experience. A painter like Rubens is entranced with his own
actual vision of things; but Poussin tells us that he has never even
seen anything as he wanted to see it. He is not a vague idealist
dissatisfied with reality because of the weakness of his own senses or
understanding. Rather he seems to cry, like Poe, of everything that he
draws--
O God, can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
It is the very substance and matter of things that he tries to master;
and that so intensely that he never sees them flushed or dimmed by any
mood of his own. Nor does he allow the passions of his figures to affect
his representation of them or of their surroundings. He is cold,
himself, towards these passions, for to him they are only a part of the
bewilderment of actual experience. But in making forms he escapes from
that bewilderment and shows us matter utterly subject to mind. Yet in
this triumph there is always implied the sadness that such a triumph is
impossible in life, that the artist cannot be what he paints. The
Renaissance had failed, and Poussin's art was a bitterly sincere
announcement of its failure.
A Defence of Criticism
The only kind of critic taken seriously in England is the art critic;
and he is taken seriously as an expert, that is to say, as one who will
tell us not what he has found in a work of art, but who produced it. His
very judgment is valued not on a matter of art at all, but on a matter
of business. No one wants to know whether a certain picture is good or
bad. The question is, Was it painted by Romney? It might well have been
and yet be a very bad picture; but that is not the point. Experts are
called to say that it is by Romney; and they are proved to be wrong.
Thereupon Sir Thomas Jackson writes to the _Times_ and says that if
people learned to think for themselves the profession of art critic
would be at an end. The art critic, for him, is one who tells people
what to think. And then he proceeds--
It is only for the public he writes; he is of no use to
artists. I doubt whether any man in any branch of art could be
found who would honestly say he had ever learned anything from
the art critic, who, after all, is only an amateur. The
criticism we value, and that which really helps, is that of our
brother artists, often sharp and unsparing, but always salutary
and useful. And if useless to the artist, art criticism is
harmful to the public, who take their opinion from it at second
hand. Were all art criticism made penal for ten years lovers of
art would learn to think for themselves, and a truer
appreciation of art than the commercial one would result, with
the greatest benefit both to art and to artists. It is the
artist and not the professional critic who should be the real
instructor of the public taste.
Here there seems to be an inconsistency; for if we are to think for
ourselves we do not need to be instructed by artists any more than by
critics. But Sir Thomas Jackson may mean that the artist is to instruct
the public only through his works. Still, the question remains, How is
the artist to be recognized? There is a riddle--When is an artist not an
artist? and the answer is--Nine times out of ten. Certainly the opinions
of artists about each other will not bring security to the public mind;
and does Sir T. Jackson really believe that artists always value the
criticism of brother artists? Does an Academician value the criticism
of a Vorticist, or _vice versa_? The Academician, of course, would say
that the Vorticist was not an artist--and _vice versa_. The artist
values the opinion of the artist who agrees with him; and at present
there is less agreement among artists than among critics. They condemn
each other more than the critics condemn them.
But these are minor points. What I am concerned with is Sir T. Jackson's
notion of the function of criticism. For him, as for most Englishmen,
the critic is one who tells people what to think; and the value of his
criticism depends upon his reputation; we should pay no heed to art
critics, because they are not artists. But the critic, whether of art or
of anything else; is a writer; and he is to be judged not by his
reputation either as artist or as critic, but by what he writes. Sir T.
Jackson thinks that he is condemning the critic when he says that he
writes only for the public. He might as well think that he condemned the
artist if he said that he worked only for the public. Of course the
critic writes for the public, as the painter paints for the public; and
he writes as one of the public, not as an artist. Further, if he is a
critic, he does not write to tell the public what to think any more
than he writes to tell the painter how to paint. Just as the painter in
his pictures expresses a general interest in the visible world, so the
critic in his criticism expresses a general interest in art; and his
justification, like that of the painter, consists in his power of
expressing this interest. If he cannot express it well, it is useless to
talk about his reputation either as artist or critic; one might as well
excuse a bad picture of a garden by saying that the painter of it was a
good gardener and therefore a good judge of gardens.
It is a misfortune that the word critic should be derived from a Greek
word meaning judge. A critic certainly does arrive at judgments; but the
value of his criticism, if it has any, consists not in the judgment, but
in the process by which it is arrived at. This fact is seldom understood
in England, either by the public or by artists. The artist cares only
about the judgment and complains that a mere amateur has no right to
judge him. He would rather be judged by himself; and, being himself an
artist, he must be a better judge. But the question to be asked about
the critic is not whether he is an amateur as an artist, but whether he
is an amateur as a critic; and that can be decided only by his
criticism. The greatest artist might prove that he was an amateur in
criticism; and he could not disprove it by appealing to his art. Sir
Joshua Reynolds, for instance, thinks like an amateur in some of his
discourses; and it is amateur thinking to defend him by saying that he
does not paint like one.
Certainly much of our criticism consists of mere judgments, and is
therefore worthless as criticism. But much of our art consists also of
mere judgments; it tells us nothing except that the artist admires this
or that, or believes that the public admires it; and it also is
worthless as art. But no critic therefore writes to the papers to say
that, if only the public would learn to feel for themselves, the
profession of artist would be at an end. We know that the business of an
artist is not to tell the public what to feel about the visible world,
or anything else, but to express his own interest in the visible world
or whatever may be the subject-matter of his art. We do not condemn art
because of its failures. Those who know anything at all about the nature
of art know that it has value because it expresses the common interests
of mankind better than most men can express them; and for this reason
it has value for mankind and not merely for artists. For this reason,
also, criticism has value for mankind and not merely for artists or for
critics. But the value of it does not lie in the judgment of the critic
any more than the value of art lies in the judgment, taste, preference
of the artist. The value in both cases lies in power of expression; and
by that art and criticism are to be judged.
Needless to say, then, criticism is not to be judged by the help it
gives to artists. One might as well suppose that philosophy was to be
judged by the help it gives to the Deity. The philosopher does not tell
the Deity how He ought to have made the universe; nor do we read
philosophy for the sake of the judgments at which philosophers arrive.
We do not want to know Kant's opinion because he is Kant; what interests
us is the process by which he arrives at that opinion, and it is the
process which convinces us that his opinion is right, if we are
convinced. So it is, or should be, with criticism. It ought to provoke
thought rather than to suppress it; and if it does not provoke thought
it is worthless.
But in the best criticism judgment is rather implied than expressed. For
the proper subject-matter of criticism is the experience of works of
art. The best critic is he who has experienced a work of art so
intensely that his criticism is the spontaneous expression of his
experience. He tells us what has happened to him, as the artist tells us
what has happened to him; and we, as we read, do not judge either the
criticism or the art criticized, but share the experience. The value of
art lies in the fact that it communicates the experience and the
experiencing power of one man to many. When we hear a symphony of
Beethoven, we are for the moment Beethoven; and we ourselves are
enriched for ever by the fact that we have for the moment been
Beethoven. So the value of the best criticism lies in the fact that it
communicates the experience and the experiencing power of the critic to
his readers and so enriches their experiencing power. If he is futile,
so is the artist. If we cannot read him without danger to our own
independence of thought, neither can we look at a picture without danger
to our own independence of vision. But believe in the fellowship of
mankind, believe that one mind can pour into another and enrich it with
its own treasures, and you will know that neither art nor criticism is
futile. They stand or fall together, and the artist who condemns the
critic condemns himself also.
There remains the contention, half implied by Sir T. Jackson, that the
critic's experience of art is of no value because he is not an artist.
Now if it is of no value to himself because he is not an artist, then
art is of no value to anyone except the artist, and the artist who
practises the same kind of art; music is of value only to musicians, and
painting to painters. It cannot be that mere technical training gives a
man the mysterious power of experiencing works of art; for, as we all
know, it does not make an artist. No artist will admit that anyone
through technical training can become a member of the sacred brotherhood
of those who understand the mystery of art. Therefore they had all
better admit that there is no mystery about it, or, rather, a mystery
for us all. Either art is of value to us all, and our own experience of
it is of value to us; or art has no value whatever to anyone, but is the
meaningless activity of a few oddities who would be better employed in
agriculture.
But if our own experience of art is of value to us, then it is possible
for us to communicate that experience to others so that it may be of
value to them; as it is possible for the painter to communicate to
others his experience of the visible world. If he denies this, once
again he denies himself. He shuts himself within the prison of his own
arrogance, from which he can escape only by a want of logic. But,
further, if our experience of art is of value to ourselves, and if it is
possible for us to communicate that experience to others, it is also
possible for us to arrive at conclusions about that experience which may
be of value both to ourselves and to others. Hence scientific or
philosophic criticism, which is based not, as some artists seem to
think, upon a fraudulent pretence of the critic that he himself is an
artist, but upon that experience of art which is, or may be, common to
all men. The philosophic critic writes not as one who knows how to
produce that which he criticizes better than he who has produced it, but
as one who has experienced art; and his own experience is really the
subject-matter of his criticism. If he _is_ a philosophic critic, he
will know that his experience is itself necessarily imperfect. As some
one has said: "We do not judge works of art; they judge us"; and the
critic is to be judged by the manner in which he has experienced art, as
the painter is to be judged by the manner in which he has experienced
the visible world. All the imperfections of his experience will be
betrayed in his criticism; where he is insensitive, there he will fail,
both as artist and as philosopher; and of this fact he must be
constantly aware. So if he gives himself the airs of a judge, if he
relies on his own reputation to make or mar the reputation of a work of
art, he ceases to be a critic and deserves all that artists in their
haste have said about him. Still, it is a pity that artists, in their
haste, should say these things; for when they do so they, too, become
critics of the wrong sort, critics insensitive to criticism. They may
think that they are upholding the cause of art; but they are upholding
the cause of stupidity, that common enemy of art and of criticism.
The Artist and his Audience
According to Whistler art is not a social activity at all; according to
Tolstoy it is nothing else. But art is clearly a social activity and
something more; yet no one has yet reconciled the truth in Whistler's
doctrine with the truth in Tolstoy's. Each leaves out an essential part
of the truth, and they remain opposed in their mixture of error and
truth. The main point of Whistler's "Ten o'clock" is that art is not a
social activity. "Listen," he cries, "there never was an artistic
period. There never was an art-loving nation. In the beginning man went
forth each day--some to battle, some to the chase; others again to dig
and to delve in the field--all that they might gain and live or lose and
die. Until there was found among them one, differing from the rest,
whose pursuits attracted him not, and so he stayed by the tents with the
women, and traced strange devices with a burnt stick upon a gourd. This
man, who took no joy in the ways of his brethren, who cared not for
conquest and fretted in the field, this designer of quaint patterns,
this deviser of the beautiful, who perceived in Nature about him curious
curvings, as faces are seen in the fire--this dreamer apart was the
first artist."