goblets, "taking no note the while of the craftsman's pride, and
understanding not his glory in his work; drinking at the cup not from
choice, not from a consciousness that it was beautiful, but because,
forsooth, there was none other!" Luxury grew, and the great ages of art
came. "Greece was in its splendour, and art reigned supreme--by force of
fact, not by election. And the people questioned not, and had nothing to
say in the matter." In fact art flourished because mankind did not
notice it. But "there arose a new class, who discovered the cheap, and
foresaw fortune in the manufacture of the sham." Then, according to
Whistler, a strange thing happened. "The heroes filled from the jugs and
drank from the bowls--with understanding.... And the people--this
time--had much to say in the matter, and all were satisfied. And
Birmingham and Manchester arose in their might, and art was relegated
to the curiosity shop."
Whistler does not explain why, if no one was aware of the existence of
art except the artist, those who were not artists began to imitate it.
If no one prized art, why should sham art have come into existence?
According to him it was the sham that made men aware of the true; yet
the sham could not exist until men were aware of the true. But the
account he gives of the decadence of art is historically untrue as well
as unintelligible. We know little of the primitive artist; but we have
no proof that he was utterly different from other men, or that they did
not enjoy his activities. If they had not enjoyed them they would
probably have killed him. The primitive artist survived, no doubt,
because he was an artist in his leisure; and all we know of more
primitive art goes to prove that it was, and is, practised not by a
special class but by the ordinary primitive man in his leisure. Peasant
art is produced by peasants, not by lonely artists. Some, of course,
have more gift for it than others, but all enjoy it, though they do not
call it art. Whistler saw himself in every primitive artist; and seeing
himself as a dreamer apart misunderstood by the common herd, he saw the
primitive artist as one living in a primitive White House, and
producing primitive nocturnes for his own amusement, unnoticed, happily,
by primitive critics.
But his view, though refuted both by history and by common sense, is
still held by many artists and amateurs. They themselves make much of
art, but do not see that their theory makes little of it, makes it a
mere caprice of the human mind, like the collecting of postage stamps.
If art has any value or importance for mankind, it is because it is a
social activity. If no one but an artist can enjoy art, it seems to
follow that no art can be completely enjoyed except by him who has
produced it; for in relation to that art he alone is an artist. All
other artists, even, are the public; and, according to Whistler, the
public has nothing to do with art; it flourishes best when they are not
aware of its existence. He is very contemptuous of taste. All judgment
of art must be based on expert knowledge, for art, he says, "is based
upon laws as rigid and defined as those of the known sciences." Yet
whereas "no polished member of society is at all affected by admitting
himself neither engineer, mathematician, nor astronomer, and therefore
remains willingly discreet and taciturn upon these subjects, still he
would be highly offended were he supposed to have no voice in what
clearly to him is a matter of taste." So to Whistler art has no more to
do with the life of the ordinary man than astronomy or mathematics. His
mention of engineering is an unfortunate slip, for, although we are not
engineers we all knew, when the Tay Bridge broke down and threw hundreds
of passengers into the water, that it was not a good bridge. We are all
concerned with engineering in spite of our ignorance of it, because we
make use of its works. Whistler assumes that we make no use of works of
art except as objects of use; and since pictures, poems, music are not
objects of use, we can have no concern with them whatever--which is
absurd.
But here comes Tolstoy, who tells us that all works of art are merely
objects of use and are to be judged therefore by the extent of their
use. A work of art that few can enjoy fails as much as a railway that
few can travel by. "Art," Tolstoy says, "is a human activity, consisting
in this--that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs,
hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people
are infected by these feelings and also experience them." So it is the
essence of a work of art that it shall infect others with the feelings
of the artist. Now certainly a work of art is a work of art to us only
if it does so infect us, but Tolstoy is not content with that. The
individual is not to judge the work of art by its infection of himself.
He is to consider also the extent of its infection. "For a work to be
esteemed good and to be approved of and diffused it will have to satisfy
the demands, not of a few people living in identical and often unnatural
conditions, but it will have to satisfy the demands of all those great
masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious
life."
The two views are utterly irreconcilable. According to Whistler the
public are not to judge art at all because they have no concern with it,
and it flourishes most when they do not pretend to have any concern with
it. According to Tolstoy the individual is to judge it, not by the
effect it produces on him, but by the effect it produces on others, "on
all those great masses of people who are situated in the natural
conditions of laborious life."
Now, if we find ourselves intimidated by one or other of these views, if
we seem forced to accept one of them against our will, it is a relief
and liberation from the tyranny of Whistler's or Tolstoy's logic to ask
ourselves simply what does actually happen to us in our own experience
and enjoyment of a work of art. The fact that we are able to enjoy and
experience a work of art does liberate us at once from the tyranny of
Whistler; for clearly, if we can experience and enjoy a work of art, we
are concerned with it. It is vain for Whistler to tell us that we ought
not to be, or that we do injury to art by our concern. The fact of our
enjoyment and experience makes art for us a social activity; we know
that our enjoyment of it is good; we know also that the artist likes us
to enjoy it; and we do not believe that either the primitive artist or
the primitive man was different from us in this respect. There is now,
and always has been, some kind of social relation between the artist and
the public; the only question is how far that relation is the essence of
art.
Tolstoy tells us that it is the essence of art, because the proper aim
of art is to do good. This is implied in his doctrine that art can be
good only if it is intelligible to most men. "The assertion that art may
be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of
people, is extremely unjust; and its consequences are ruinous to art
itself." The word unjust implies the moral factor. I am not to enjoy a
work of art if I know that others cannot enjoy it, because it is not
fair that I should have a pleasure not shared by them. If I know that
others cannot share it, I am to take no account of my own experience,
but to condemn the work, however good it may seem to me. From this logic
also I can liberate myself by concerning myself simply with my own
experience. Again, if I experience and enjoy a work of art, I know that
my experience of it is good; and, in my judgment of the work of art, I
do not need to ask myself how many others enjoy it. I may wish them to
enjoy it and try to make them do so, but that effort of mine is not
æsthetic but moral. It does not affect my judgment of the work of art,
but is a result of that judgment. And, as a matter of fact, if I am to
experience a work of art at all, I cannot be asking myself how many
others enjoy it. Judgments of art are not formed in that way and cannot
be; they are, and must be, always formed out of our own experience of
art. If art is to be art to us, we cannot think of it in terms of
something else. There would be no public for art at all if we all agreed
to judge it in terms of each other's enjoyment or understanding. Each
individual of "the great masses of people who are situated in the
natural conditions of laborious life" would also have to ask himself
whether the rest of the masses were enjoying and understanding, before
he could judge; indeed, he would not feel a right to enjoy until he knew
that the rest were enjoying. That is to say, no individual would ever
enjoy art at all. The fact is that art is produced by the individual
artist and experienced by the individual man. Tolstoy says that it is
experienced by mankind in the mass, and not as individuals; Whistler
that it is not experienced at all, either by the mass or by the
individual. Each is a heretic with some truth in his heresy; what is the
true doctrine?
It is clear that every artist desires an audience, not merely so that he
may win pudding and praise from them, nor so that he may do them good;
none of these aims will make him an artist; he can accomplish all of
them without attempting to produce a work of art. It is also clear that
his artistic success is not his success in winning an audience. Those
"great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of
laborious life" are a figment of Tolstoy's mind. No conditions are
natural in the sense in which he uses the word; nor do any existing
conditions make one man a better judge of art than another. There is no
multitude of simple, normal, unspoilt men able and willing to enjoy any
real art that is presented to them. The right experience of art comes
with effort, like right thought and right action; and no Russian peasant
has it because he works in the fields. Nor, on the other hand, are there
any artists who are mere "sports" occupied with a queer game of their
own self-expression which no one else can enjoy. There is a necessary
relation between the work of art and its audience, even if no actual
audience for it exists; and the fact that this relation must be, even
when there is no audience in existence, is the paradox and problem of
art. A work of art claims an audience, entreats it, is indeed made for
it; but must have it on its own terms. Men are artists because they are
men, because they have a faculty, at its height, which is shared by all
men. In that Croce is right; and his doctrine that all men are artists
in some degree, and that the very experience of art is itself an
æsthetic activity, contains a truth of great value. But his æsthetic
ignores, or seems to ignore, the fact that art is not merely, as he
calls it, expression, but is also a means of address; in fact, that we
do not express ourselves except when we address ourselves to others,
even though we speak to no particular, or even existing, audience. Yet
this fact is obvious; for all art gets its very form from the fact that
it is a method of address. A story is a story because it is told, and
told to some one not the teller. A picture is a picture because it is
painted to be seen. It has all its artistic qualities because it is
addressed to the eye. And music is music, and has the form which makes
it music, because it is addressed to the ear. Without this intention of
address there could be no form in art and no distinction between art and
day-dreaming. Day-dreaming is not expression, is not art, because it is
addressed to no one but is a purposeless activity of the mind. It
becomes art only when there is the purpose of address in it. That
purpose will give it form and turn it from day-dreaming into art. Even
in an object of use which is also a work of art, the art is the effort
of the maker to emphasize, that is, to point out, the beauty of that
which he has made. It is this emphasis that turns building into
architecture; and it implies that the building is made not merely for
the builder's or for anyone else's use, but that its aim also is to
address an audience, to speak to the eye as a picture speaks to it. Art
is made for men as surely as boots are made for them.
But not as Tolstoy thinks, for any particular class of men or even for
the whole mass of existing mankind. The artist will not and cannot judge
his work by its effects on any actual men, any more than we can or will
judge it by its effects on anyone except ourselves. As we, in our
experience of it, must be completely individual; so must he in his
production of it. He is not a public servant, but a man speaking for
himself, and with no thought of effects, to anyone who will hear. His
audience consists only of those who will hear, of those individuals who
can understand his individual expression which is also communication. In
his art he seeks the individual who will hear. He has something to say;
but he can say it only to others, not to himself; it is what it is
because he says it to others. Yet he says it also for its own sake and
not for theirs. The particular likes and dislikes, stupidities,
limitations, demands, of individual men or classes are nothing to him.
The condition of his art is this alone, that he does address it to an
audience. So the relation between the artist and his audience is the
most important fact of his art, even if he has no actual audience. It
is his attitude towards the audience that makes him do his best or his
worst, makes him a good artist or a bad one, that sets him free to
express all he has to say or hampers him with inhibitions. His business
is not to find an audience, but to find the right attitude towards one,
the attitude which is that of the artist and not of the tradesman, or
peacock, or philanthropist. And it is plain that in his effort to find
this right attitude he may be helped or hindered much by his actual
fellow-men. The artist is also a man and subject to all the temptations
of men. Whistler, when he said that art happens, ignored this fact,
ignored the whole social relation of mankind and the whole history of
the arts; while Tolstoy ignored no less the mind of the artist, and the
minds of all those who do actually experience art. To Whistler the
artist is a _Chimæra bombinans in vacuo_; to Tolstoy he is a
philanthropist. For Whistler the public has no function whatever in
relation to art; for Tolstoy the artist himself has no function whatever
except a moral one. In fact he denies the existence of the artist, as
Whistler denies the existence of the public. Whistler's truth is that
the public must not tell the artist what he is to do; Tolstoy's, that a
public with a right relation to the artist will help the artist to have
a right relation to the public.
Artists are not "sports," but men; and men engaged in one of the most
difficult of human activities. They are subject to æsthetic temptation
and sin, as all men are subject to temptation and sin of all kinds.
Their public may tempt them to think more of themselves than of what
they have to express, either by perverse admiration or by ignorant
contempt. An actual audience may be an obstruction between them and the
ideal audience to which every artist should address himself. Every
artist must desire that his ideal audience should exist, and may mistake
an actual audience for it. In the ideal relation between an artist and
his audience, it is the universal in him that speaks to the universal in
them, and yet this universal finds an intensely personal expression.
Art, which is personal expression, tells, not of what the artist wants,
but of what he values. But if his ego is provoked by the ego in a
particular audience, then he begins to tell of what he wants or of what
they want. The audience may demand of him that he shall please them by
indulging their particular vanities, appetites, sentimental desires,
that he shall present life to them as they wish it to be; and if he
yields to that demand it is because of the demands of his own particular
ego. There is a transaction between him and that audience, in its
essence commercial. His art is the particular supplying some kind of
goods to the particular, not the universal pouring itself out to the
universal.
The function of the audience is not to demand but to receive. It should
not allow its own expectations to hinder its receptiveness; to that
extent Whistler is right. Art happens as the beauty of the universe
happens; and it is the business of the audience to experience it, not to
dictate how it shall happen. It has been said: It is not we who judge
works of art; they judge us. The artist speaks and we listen; but still
he speaks to us and by listening wisely we help him to speak his best,
for man is a social being; and all life, in so far as it is what it
wishes to be, is a fellowship. Never is it so completely a fellowship as
in the relation between an artist and his audience. There Tolstoy is
right, but the fellowship has to be achieved by both the artist and the
audience. There is no body of simple peasants, any more than there are
rich or cultured people, to whom he must address himself or whose
demands he must satisfy. Art that tries to satisfy any particular demand
is of use neither to the flesh nor to the spirit. It is neither meat nor
music. But where all is well with it, the spirit in the artist speaks to
the spirit in his audience. There is a common quality in both, with
which he speaks and they listen; and where this common quality is found
art thrives.
Wilfulness and Wisdom
There are people to whom the war was merely the running amuck of a
criminal lunatic; and they get what pleasure they can from calling that
lunatic all the names they can think of. To them the Germans are
different in kind from all other peoples, utterly separated from the
rest of us by their crimes. We could learn nothing from them except how
to crush them; and, having done so, we shall need to learn nothing
except how to keep them down. But such minds never learn anything from
experience, because they believe that there is nothing to be learnt.
They consume all their mental energy in anger and the expression of it;
and in doing so they grow more and more like those with whom they are
angry. Wisdom always goes contrary to what our passions tell us,
especially when they take the form of righteous indignation. The
creative power of the mind begins with refusal of all those tempting
fierce delights which the passions offer to it. Wisdom must be cold
before it can become warm; it must suppress the comforting heat of the
flesh before it can kindle with the pure fire of the spirit. Above all,
when we say that we are not as other men, as the Germans, for instance,
it must insist that we are, and that we shall avoid the German crime
only by recognizing our likeness to those who have committed it.
The Germans have committed the great crime; but they have been born and
nurtured in an atmosphere which made that crime possible; and we live in
the same atmosphere. Their error, though they carried it to an extreme
in theory and in practice with the native extravagance of their race, is
the error of the whole Western world; and we shall not understand what
it is unless we are aware of it in ourselves as well as in them. For it
is a world-error and one against which men have been warned for ages;
but in their pride they will not listen to the warning. Many of the old
warnings, in the Gospels and elsewhere, sound like platitudes to us; we
expect the clergyman to repeat them in church; but we should never think
of applying them to this great, successful, progressive Western world of
ours. If we are not happy; if we do not even see the way to happiness;
if all our power merely helps us to destroy each other, or to make the
rich more vulgarly rich and the poor more squalidly poor; if the great
energy of Germany has hurried her to her own ruin; still we do not ask
whether we may not have made some fundamental mistake about our own
nature and the nature of the universe, and whether Germany has not
merely made it more systematically and more philosophically than the
rest of us.
But the German, because he is systematic and philosophical, may reveal
to us what that error is in us as well as in himself. We do not state it
as if it were a splendid truth; we merely act upon it. He stated it for
us with such histrionic and towering absurdity that we can laugh at his
statement of it; but we must not laugh at him without learning to laugh
at ourselves. All this talk about the iron will, about set teeth and
ruthlessness, what does it mean except that the German chose to glorify
openly and to carry to a logical extreme the peculiar error of the whole
Western world--the belief that the highest function of man is to work
his will upon people and things outside him, that he can change the
world without changing himself?
The Christian doctrine, preached so long in vain and now almost
forgotten, is the opposite of this. It insists that man is by nature a
passive, an experiencing creature, and that he can do nothing well in
action unless he has first learned a right passivity. Only by that
passivity can he enrich himself; and when he has enriched himself he
will act rightly. Man has a will; but he must apply it at the right
point, or it will seem to him merely a blind impulse. He must apply it
to the manner in which he experiences things; he must free himself from
his "will to live" or his "will to power," and see all men and things
not as they are of material use to him, but with the object of loving
whatever there is of beauty or virtue in them. His will, in fact, must
be the will to love, which is the will to experience in a certain way;
and out of that will to love right action will naturally ensue. Is this
a platitude? If it is, it is flatly contradicted by the German doctrine
of wilfulness. For the Germanic hero exercises his will always upon
other men and things, not upon himself; and we all admire this Germanic
hero, when he is not an obvious danger to us all, and when he is not
made ridiculous by the German presentment of him. We all believe that
the will is to be exercised first of all in action, that it is the
function of the great man to change the world, not to change himself.
To us the great man is one who does work a change upon the world, no
matter what that change may be. He may change it only as an explosion
changes things, and at the end he may be left among the ruins he has
made; but still we admire him. We compare him to the forces of nature,
we say that there is "something elemental" in him, even though he has
been merely an elemental nuisance. We value force in itself, and do not
ask what it can find to value in itself when it has exhausted itself
upon the world. But out of this worship of wilfulness there comes,
sooner or later, a profound scepticism and discouragement. For while
these wilful heroes do produce some violent effect, it is not the effect
they aimed at. Something happens; something has happened to Germany as
the result of Bismarck's wilfulness; but it is not what he willed. The
wilful hero is a cause in that he acts; but the effect is not what he
designed, and so he seems to himself, and to the world, only a link in
an unending chain of cause and effect; and as for his sense of will, it
is nothing but the illusion that he is all cause and not at all effect.