which has produced war against the conscience of mankind, and even of
many Germans. Conscience was powerless to prevent it because conscience
had ceased to believe in its own power, had come to think of itself as a
vain and inexplicable rebellion against the nature of things. This
rebellion we call sentimentality, meaning thereby that it is really not
even moral; for true morality would recognize the process to which the
nature of man is subject, of which that nature is itself a part; and
would cure man of his futile rebellions so that he should not suffer
needlessly from them. It would cure man of pity, because it is through
pity that he suffers. He is a machine, and, if he is a conscious
machine, he should be conscious of the fact that he is one. Such is the
belief that has been growing upon us for fifty years or more with many
strange effects. It has not destroyed our sense of pity, but has
confused and exasperated it. We pity and love still, but with
desperation, not like Christians assured that these things are according
to the order of the universe, but fearing that they are wilful
exceptions to that order, costly luxuries that we indulge in at our own
peril. We seem to ourselves lonely in our pity and love; the supreme
process knows nothing of them; the God, who is love, does not exist.
In the past wars have happened with the consent of mankind; but this war
did not happen so. Even in Germany there was something hysterical in the
praise of war, as if it were the worship of an idol both hated and
feared. We must praise war, the German worshippers of force seem to say,
so that we may survive. We must forgo the past hopes of man so that we
may find something real to hope for. We must habituate ourselves to the
universe as it is, and break ourselves and all mankind in to the bitter
truth. They praised war as we used in England to praise industry.
Labour, we believed, when all the labour of the poor had been made
joyless by the industrial revolution, was the result of the curse laid
upon man by God. Therefore, man must labour without joy and never dream
of happy work. And so now the very worshippers of war believe that it is
a curse laid upon man by the nature of things. They may not believe in
the fall of man, but they do believe that he can never rise, since he is
himself part of a process which is always war; and, if he tries to
escape from it, he will become extinct. So they exhort us to consent to
that process even with our conscience; the more completely we consent
to it, the more we shall succeed in it. But all the while they are doing
violence to our natures and to their own. They try to think like
machines, like the slaves of a process; but thought itself is
inconsistent with their effort; their very praises of the heroism of
their victims are inconsistent with it. There is a gaping incongruity
between the obsolete German romanticism and the new German atheism which
exploited it, between their talk about Siegfried and their talk about
the struggle for life. And there is the same incongruity between the
cubist effort to see the visible world as a mechanical process and art
itself. The cubist seems to force himself with a savage irony into this
caricature of nature; we have emptied reality of its content in our
thought and he will empty it of its content to our eyes; that is not how
we really see things, but it is how we ought to see them if what we
believe about the nature of things is true. This irony we find in Mr.
Nevinson's pictures of the war, whether it be a despairing irony or the
rebellion of an unshaken faith. He has emptied man of his content, just
as the Prussian drill sergeant would empty him of his content for the
purposes of war; and only a Prussian drill sergeant could consent to
this version of man with any joy.
That, perhaps, is how we shall all come to see everything if we continue
for some centuries to believe that process and not person is the
ultimate reality. Emptying ourselves of all our content in thought, we
shall at last empty ourselves of all content in reality; we shall become
what now we fear we are, and our very senses will be obedient to our
unfaith. For unfaith is the belief in process; and faith is the belief
in person. It is the belief in process that makes men sacrifice other
men in thousands to some idol; it is the belief in person that makes
them refuse to sacrifice anyone but themselves; and they are afraid when
they sacrifice others, but confident when they sacrifice themselves.
Ultimately process has no value and can have no value for us. It is
merely what exists or what we believe to exist, and our effort to value
it is only the obsequiousness of the slave to the power that he fears.
All our values come from the sense of person as more real than process.
We will not do wrong to a man because he is a man; if he is to us only
part of a process, we cannot value him and we can do what we will to him
without any sense of wrong. All the old cruelties and iniquities of the
world arose out of a belief in process and a fear of it. It is not a
modern scientific discovery, but the oldest and darkest superstition
that has oppressed the mind of man. To all religious persecutors
salvation was a process, like that struggle for life which is the modern
form of the struggle for salvation to the superstitious. And because
salvation was a process human beings were sacrificed to it. It did not
matter how they were tortured, provided this abstract process was
maintained. So it does not matter now how they are slaughtered, provided
the abstract process of the struggle for life is maintained. To the
German this war was part of a process, the historical process of the
triumph of Germany, and it did not matter how many Germans were killed
in furthering it. If they were all killed Germany would still have
asserted her faithless faith in process and would have reduced it to a
glorious absurdity.
So, if we fought for anything beyond ourselves, we fought for the belief
in person as against the belief in process. Indeed, it is the chief
glory of England, among her many follies and crimes, that she has always
believed in person rather than in process; and that is what we mean when
we say that we refuse to sacrifice facts to theories. Men themselves
are to us facts, and we distrust theories that empty them of content. If
we act like brutes, we would rather do so because the brute has mastered
us for the moment than because we believe that humanity is inconsistent
with the process that dominates the world. We ourselves had rather be
inconsistent than empty ourselves of all reality for the sake of a
theory. And there is an intellectual as well as a moral basis to this
inconsistency of ours. For if you believe that person, not process, is
the ultimate reality, you must offer some defiance to the material facts
of life. There is evidently a conflict between person and process; and
in that conflict the process, which you perceive with your intelligence,
will be less real to you than the person of whom you are aware with all
your faculties. So you will trust in this union of all the faculties
rather than in the exercise of the pure intelligence; for to you the
pure intelligence will be part of the person and will share in the
person's universal imperfection. In fact it will not be pure
intelligence at all, but rather a faculty that may be obsequious to all
the lower passions. Nothing will free you from them, except the respect
for persons, except, in fact, loving your neighbour as yourself. There
is no way to consistency but through that, and no way to the exercise of
the pure intelligence. Never sacrifice a person to a process and you
will never sacrifice a person to your own lower passions. But, if you
believe in process rather than in person, you will see your passions as
part of the process and glorify them when you think you are glorifying
the nature of the universe.
Cubism and all those new methods of art which subject facts to the
tyranny of a process may be good satire, but they will never, I think,
produce an independent beauty of their own. Like all satire, they are
parasitic upon past art, negative and rebellious. They tell us what the
universe may look like to us if we lose all faith in ourselves and each
other; and, when they are the result of a desperate effort to see the
universe so, they are unconscious satire. The complete, convinced cubist
reduces his own method, his own beliefs, his own state of mind, to an
absurdity. The more sincere he is, the more complete is the reduction.
For he, rejecting all that has been the subject-matter of painting in
the past, all the human values and the complexes of association which
have invested the visible world with beauty for men, proves to us in his
tortured diagrams that he has found nothing to take their place, He
gives us a _Chimæra bombinans in vacuo_, that vacuum which the universe
is to the human spirit when it denies itself. He tries to make art,
having cut himself off from all the experience and belief that produce
art. For art springs always out of a supreme value for the personal and
is an expression of that value. It is an effort, no matter in what
medium, to find the personal in all things, to see trees as men walking;
and the new abstract methods in painting reverse this process, they
empty all things, even men, of personality and subject them to a process
invented by the artist, which expresses, if it expresses anything, his
own loss of personal values and nothing else. The result may be
ingenious, it may still have a kind of beauty remembered from the great
design of past art; but it will lead nowhere, since it is cut off from
the very experience, the passionate personal interest in people and
things, which gave design to the great art of the past. It is at best
satirical, at worst parasitic, using up all devices of design and
turning from one to another in a restless ennui which of itself can give
no enrichment. It may have its uses, since it insists upon the supreme
importance of design and provides a new method for the expression of
three dimensions; but this method will be barren unless those who
practise it enrich it with their own observation and delight. Already
some of them seem to be weary of the barrenness of pure abstraction;
they see that any fool can hide his own commonplace in cubism as an
ostrich hides its head in the sand; but we would rather have honest
chocolate-box ladies than the kaleidoscopic but betraying chocolate-box
fragments of the futurist.
The Artist and the Tradesman
The Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts at Burlington House was an
acknowledgment of the fact that there are other arts besides those of
painting, sculpture, and architecture, or rather perhaps that the arts
subsidiary to architecture are arts and not merely commercial
activities. Burlington House would protest, of course, that it is not a
shop; but now at last objects are to be shown in it which the great mass
of the public expects to see only in shops and expects to be produced
merely to sell. We remember how Lord Grimthorpe called Morris a poetic
upholsterer. He meant there was something incongruous in the combination
of an upholsterer and a poet; he would have seen nothing incongruous in
the combination of a poet and a painter, because he would have called a
painter an artist; but an upholsterer was to him merely a tradesman, and
tradesmen are not expected to write poetry. Their business is to sell
things and to make objects for sale.
In that respect he thought like the mass of the public now. For them
the painter has some prestige, because he is supposed not to be a
tradesman, not to paint his pictures merely so that he may sell them. He
has to live by his art, of course, but he practises it also because he
enjoys it; and, if he is an artist, he will not paint bad pictures
merely because they are what the public wants. But it is the business of
those who make furniture and such things to produce what the public
wants. No one would blame them for producing what they do not like
themselves, any more than one would blame a pill-maker for producing
pills that he would not swallow himself. The pill-maker and the
furniture-maker are both tradesmen producing objects in answer to a
demand. They have no prestige and no conscience is expected of them.
Now in Italy in the fifteenth century this distinction between the
artist and the tradesman did not exist. The painter was a tradesman; he
kept a shop and he had none of that peculiar prestige which he possesses
now. But of the tradesman more was expected than is expected now; for
instance, good workmanship and material were expected of him and also
good design. He did not produce articles merely to sell, whether they
were pictures or wedding-chests or jewelry or pots and pans. He made all
these other things just as he made pictures, with some pleasure and
conscience in his own work; and it was the best craftsman who became a
painter or sculptor, merely because those were the most difficult
crafts. Now it is the gentleman with artistic faculty who becomes a
painter; the poor man, however much of that faculty he possesses,
remains a workman without any artistic prestige and without any
temptation to consider the quality of his work or to take any pleasure
in it. This is a commonplace, no doubt; but it remains a fact, however
often it may have been repeated, and a social fact with a constant evil
effect upon all the arts. Because the painter is supposed to be an
artist and nothing else and the craftsman a tradesman and nothing else,
we do not expect the virtues of the craftsman from the painter nor the
virtues of the artist from the craftsman. For us there is nothing but
mystery in the work of the artist and no mystery at all in the work of
the craftsman. The painter can be as silly as he likes, and we do not
laugh at him, if we are persons of culture, because his art is a sacred
mystery. But, as for the craftsman, there is nothing sacred about his
work. It is sold in a shop and made to be sold; and all we expect of it
is that it shall be in the fashion, which means that it shall be what
the commercial traveller thinks he can sell. There are, of course, a few
craftsman who are thought of as artists, and their work at once becomes
a sacred mystery, like pictures. They too have a right to be as silly as
they like; and some people will buy their work, however silly it may be,
as they would buy pictures--that is to say, for the good of their souls
and not because they like it.
How are we to get rid of this distinction we have made between the
artist and the tradesman? How are we to recover for the artist the
virtues of the craftsman and for the craftsman the virtues of the
artist? At present we get from neither what we really like. Art remains
to us a painful mystery; most of us would define it, if we were honest,
as that which human beings buy because they do not like it. While, as
for objects of use, they are bought mainly because they are sold; they
are forced upon us as a conjurer forces a card. We think we like them
while they remain the fashion; but soon they are like women's clothes of
two years ago, if they last long enough to be outmoded. It is vain for
us to reproach either the artist or the tradesman. The fault is in
ourselves; we have as a whole society yielded to the most subtle
temptation of Satan. We have lost the power of knowing what we
like--that is to say, the power of loving. We value nothing for itself,
but everything for its associations. The man of culture buys a picture,
not because he likes it, but because he thinks it is art; at most what
he enjoys is not the picture itself but the thought that he is cultured
enough to enjoy it. That thought comes between him and the picture, and
makes it impossible for him to experience the picture at all. And so he
is ready to accept anything that the painter chooses to give him, if
only he believes the painter to be a real artist. This is bad for the
painter, who has every temptation to become a charlatan, and to think of
his art as a sacred mystery which no one can understand but himself and
a few other painters of his own sect. But in this matter the man of
culture is just like the vulgar herd, as he would call them. Their
attitude to the arts of use is the same as his attitude to pictures.
They do not buy furniture or china because they like them, but because
the shopman persuades them that what they buy is the fashion. Or
perhaps they recognize it themselves as the fashion and therefore
instantly believe that they like it. In both cases the buyer is
hypnotized; he has lost the faculty of finding out for himself what he
really likes, and his mind, being empty of real affection, is open to
the seven devils of suggestion. He cannot enjoy directly any beautiful
thing, all he can enjoy is the belief that he is enjoying it; and he can
harbour this belief about any nonsense or trash.
It is a very curious disease that has become endemic in the whole of
Europe. People impute it to machinery, but unjustly. There are objects
made by machinery, such as motor-cars, which have real beauty of design;
and people do genuinely and unconsciously enjoy this beauty, just
because they never think of it as beauty. They like the look of a car
because they can see that it is well made for its purpose. If only they
would like the look of any object of use for the same reason, the arts
of use would once again begin to flourish among us. But when once we ask
ourselves whether any thing is beautiful, we become incapable of knowing
our real feelings about it. Any tradesman or artist can persuade us that
we think it beautiful when we do nothing of the kind. We are all like
the crowd who admired the Emperor's clothes; and there is no child to
tell us that the Emperor has no clothes on at all. We are not so with
human beings; we cannot be persuaded that we like a man when really we
dislike him; if we could, our whole society would soon dissolve in a
moral anarchy. But with regard to the works of man, or that part of them
which is supposed to aim at beauty, we are in a state of æsthetic
anarchy, because there is a whole vast conspiracy, itself unconscious
for the most part, to persuade us that we like what no human being out
of a madhouse could like.
So the real problem for us is to discover, not merely in pictures, but
in all things that are supposed to have beauty, what we really do like.
And we can best do that, perhaps, if we dismiss the notions of art and
beauty for a time from our minds; not because art and beauty do not
exist, but because our notions of them are wrong and misleading. The
very words intimidate us, as people used to be intimidated by the jargon
of pietistic religion, so that they would believe that a very unpleasant
person was a saint. When once we look for beauty in anything, we look no
longer for good design, good workmanship, or good material. It is
because we do not look for beauty in motor-cars that we enjoy the
excellence of their design, workmanship, and material, which is beauty,
if only we knew it. Beauty, in fact, is a symptom of success in things
made by man, not of success in selling, but of success in making. If an
object made by man gives us pleasure in itself, then it has beauty; if
we got pleasure only from the belief that in it we are enjoying what we
ought to enjoy, then very likely it is as naked of beauty as the Emperor
was of clothes. The great mass of people now have a belief that ornament
is necessarily beauty, that, without it, nothing can be beautiful. But
ornament is often only added ugliness, like a wen on a man's face. It is
always added ugliness when it is machine-made, and when it is put on to
hide cheapness of material and faults of design and workmanship.
Unfortunately, it does hide these things from us; we accept ornament as
a substitute for that beauty which can only come of good design,
material, and workmanship; and we do not recognize these things when we
see them, except in objects like motor-cars, which we prefer plain
because we do unconsciously enjoy their real beauty.
So, in the matter of ornament, we need to make a self-denying
ordinance; not because ornament is necessarily bad--it is the natural
expression of the artist's superfluous energy and delight--but because
we ourselves cannot be trusted with ornament, as a drunkard cannot be
trusted with strong drink. We must learn to see things plain before we
can see them at all, or enjoy them for their own real qualities and not
for what we think we see in them. A man whose taste is for bad poetry
can only improve it by reading good, plain prose. He must become
rational before he can enjoy the real beauties of literature. And so we
need to become rational before we can enjoy art, whether in pictures or
in objects of use. The unreason of our painting has the same cause as
the unreason of our objects of use; and the cause is in us, not in the
artist. We think of taste as something in its nature irrational. It is
no more so than conscience is. Indeed, there is conscience in all good
taste as in all the good workmanship that pleases it. But where the
public has not this conscience, the artist will not possess it either.
At best he will have only what he calls his artistic conscience--that is
to say, a determination to follow his own whims rather than the taste of
the public. But where the public knows what it likes, and the artist
makes what he likes, there is more than a chance that both will like the
same thing, as they have in the great ages of art. For a real liking
must be a liking for something good. It is Satan who persuades us that
we like what is bad by filling our mind with sham likings, which are
always really the expression of our egotism disguised.
Professionalism in Art
Professionalism is a dull, ugly word; but it means dull, ugly things, a
perversion of the higher activities of man, of art, literature,
religion, philosophy; and a perversion to which we are all apt to be
blind. We know that in these activities specialization is a condition of
excellence. As Keats said to Shelley, in art it is necessary to serve
both God and Mammon; and as Samuel Butler said, "That is not easy, but
then nothing that is really worth doing ever is easy." The poet may be
born, not made; but no man can start writing poetry as if it had never
been written before. In every art there is a medium, and the poet, like
all other artists, learns from the poets of the past how to use his
medium. Often he does this unconsciously by reading them for delight. He
first becomes a poet because he loves the poetry of others. And the
painter becomes a painter because he loves the pictures of others. Each
of them is apt to begin--
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
So the artist insists to himself upon the value of hard work. He is
impatient of all the talk about inspiration; for he knows that, though
nothing can be done without it, it comes only with command of the
medium. And this command, like all craftsmanship, is traditional, handed
down from one generation to another. Any kind of expression in this
imperfect world is as difficult as virtue itself. For expression, like
virtue, is a kind of transcendence. In it the natural man rises above
his animal functions, above living so that he may continue to live; he
triumphs over those animal functions which hold him down to the earth as
incessantly as the attraction of gravity itself. But, like the airman,
he can triumph only by material means, and by means gradually perfected
in the practice of others. Yet there is always this difference, that in
mechanics anyone can learn to make use of an invention; but in the
higher activities, invention, if it becomes mechanical, destroys the
activity itself, even in the original inventor. The medium is always a
medium, not merely a material; and if it becomes merely a material to be
manipulated, it ceases to be a medium.