A little while ago I told you that I wished this collection of studies
to be more especially yours: so now I send it you, a bundle of proofs
and of MS., to know whether you will have it. I wish I could give you
what I have written in the same complete way that a painter would give
you one of his sketches; that a singer, singing for you alone, might
give you his voice and his art; for a dedication is but a drop of ink on
a large white sheet, and conveys but a sorry notion of property. Now,
this book is intended to be really yours; yours in the sense that, were
it impossible for more than one copy of it to exist, that one copy I
should certainly give to you. Because these studies represent the ideas
I have so far been able to work out for myself about art, considered not
historically, but in its double relation to the artist and the world for
whom he works; ideas which it is my highest ambition should influence
those young enough and powerful enough to act upon them; and, this being
the case, my first thought is to place them before you: it is, you see,
a matter of conversion, and the nearest, most difficult, most desired
convert, is yourself.
To you, therefore, before any one else, must I explain what manner
of book this is, what are its origin and its aims. And first, the
meaning of its title. Logically, this title means nothing; it is a mere
negation, a mere arbitrary combination of letters chosen from sheer
despair to find any name which should tell, what this title certainly
does not, what is the contents of the volume. Yet, a meaning the name
has: a meaning of association. For, even as a snatch of melody will
sometimes, for no apparent reason, haunt us while we are about any
particular work, follow us while we are travelling through a definite
tract of country (as, two years since, Wagner's Spinning Chorus
travelled with me from Mantua to Verona, and from Verona to Venice) in
such a way that the piece of work, the tract of country, bring with
their recollection the haunting tune to our mind; so, also, during the
time of making up this volume, I have been haunted by the remembrance of
that winter afternoon, when last we were together, on the battlements of
Belcaro. Perhaps (if we must seek a reason), because, while driving to
the strange, isolated villa castle, up and down, and round and round the
hills of ploughed-up russet earth, and pale pink leafless brushwood, and
bright green pine-woods, where every sharp road-turning surprises one
with a sudden glimpse of Siena, astride, with towers and walls and
cupolas, on her high, solitary ridge; while dashing up the narrow hedged
lanes whose sere oak and ilex branches brushed across our faces; or,
while looking down from the half-fortified old place on to the endless,
vague, undulating Sienese fields and oak-woods; perhaps, because at
that moment I may, unconscious to myself, have had a vague first desire
to put together more of the helter-skelter contents of the notes over
which we had been looking, and give it you in some intelligible shape.
Perhaps this may have served to set up the association; or perhaps it
was something wholly different, unguessed, trumpery, inscrutable. Be
this as it may, the fact remains that during the dull months of planning
and putting together this book, I have been haunted, as by a melody, by
the remembrance, the vision, the consciousness of that afternoon, warm
and hazy, of early December, on the battlements of Belcaro castle, when
we looked down over the top of the dense mural crown of sprouting pale
green acorned ilex on to the hills and ravines, with the sere oak-woods
reddened with the faint flush of sun-light, and the vague, white thinned
olives and isolated golden-leaved oaks, and distant solitary belfries
and castles; away towards Siena, grey on the horizon, beneath the grey,
pinked, wet cloud masses, lurid and mysterious like Beccafumi's frescos,
as if the clouds, if one looked at them long, might gather into
clustered angels with palm-shaped wings and flushed faces and reddened
pale locks. Thus have I been haunted by this remembrance, this inner
sight, this single moment continuing, in a way, to exist alongside of so
many and various other moments; so that, when it has come to giving a
name to this book, I find that there is already indissolubly associated
with it, the name of Belcaro.
So far of the title: now of the book itself, of what it is, and why it
is such. When, two summers since, I wrote the last pages of my first
book, it was, in a way, as if I had been working out the plans of
another dead individual. The myself who had, almost as a child, been
insanely bewitched by the composers and singers, the mask actors and
pedants, and fine ladies and fops, the whole ghostly turn-out of the
Italian 18th century; who had, for years, in the bustle of self-culture,
I might almost say, of childish education, never let slip an opportunity
of adding a new microscopic dab of colour to the beloved, quaint, and
ridiculous and pathetic century-portrait which I carried in my mind;
this myself, thus smitten with the Italian 18th century, had already
ceased to exist. Another myself had come instead, to whom this long
accumulated 18th century lore had been bequeathed, but who would never
have taken the pains, or had the patience, to collect it; who carried
out with a sort of filial piety the long cherished plan of making into a
book all that inherited material, seeing the while in this 18th century
lore what the original collector had never guessed: illustrations,
partial explanations, of questions of artistic genesis and evolution,
of artistic right and wrong, which were for ever being discussed within
me. This new myself, this heir to the task of putting into shape the
historical materials collected by an extinct individuality, is the
myself by whom has been written this present book: this present book
represents the thoughts, the problems, the doubts, the solutions, which
were haunting me while writing that first book from which this new one
so completely differs. To plan, to work for such a book as that first
one, seems to me now about the most incomprehensible of all things; to
care for one particular historical moment, to study the details of one
particular civilisation, to worry about finding out the exact when and
how of any definite event; above all, to feel (as I felt) any desire to
teach any specified thing to anybody; all this has become unintelligible
to my sympathies of to-day. And it is natural: natural in mental
growth that we are, to some extent, professorial and professorially
self-important and engrossed, before becoming restlessly and sceptically
studious: we may teach some things before we even know the desire of
learning others. Thus I, from my small magisterial chair or stool of
18th century-expounder, have descended and humbly gone to school as a
student of aesthetics.
To school, where, and with whom? A little to books, and this (excepting
a few psychological works not bearing directly upon my subject) with but
small profit; mainly to art itself, to pictures and statues and music
and poetry, to my own feelings and my own thoughts; studying, in
seemingly desultory fashion, in discussions with my friends and with
myself. This volume BELCARO is the first fruit of these attempts at
knowing: it is not the Sir-Oracle manual of a professor, with all in its
right place, understood or misunderstood, truth and error all neatly
systematised for the teaching of others; but rather the scholar's copy
book, the fragmentary and somewhat helter-skelter notes of what, in his
listenings and questionings, he has been able to understand, and which
he hands over to his fellow-pupils, who may have understood as much of
the lessons as himself, but have in all probability understood different
portions or in different ways. Such a collection of notes this volume
most unmetaphorically is: it is literally a selection of such pages out
of my commonplace books as seemed (though written at various moments)
to converge upon given points of aesthetical discussion; to coalesce,
conglomerate naturally, and to admit of some sort of setting, or
resetting. I say setting or resetting, because these thoughts, these
questionings, these discussions, though in their written shape merely
copied out from a confusion of quite heterogeneous notes, have nearly
all had, while they were living, while thought or asked or discussed,
a real setting of some sort. For the ideas have come mainly in the
presence of works of art, or in discussions with friends: they have
come, sometimes unperceived at the moment, together with the sight
of a picture, the hearing of a bar or two of music, the reading of
an accidentally met, familiar quotation; a reason, a long sought
explanation has been suddenly struck out by a sentence, a word from a
friend. Oh yes, a setting they have had, these ideas, such as they are:
a real, living, shimmering setting of tones and looks, and jests and
passion, and anecdote and illustration, and irrelevant streakings and
veinings of description and story; a setting too of place and time and
personality. For they have come out of real desultory talks: re-echoed
by the bare walls of glaring galleries and sounding statue cells; or
whispered on the steps before the withdrawn curtain of some altar-piece,
while the faint mass bell tinkled from distant chapels, or great waves
of litany responses rushed roaring down the nave, and broke in short
repeated echoes against the pillars of the aisle; or, never clearly
begun or ended, between one piece of music and another, with the hands
still on the keys, and the eyes still on the score; talks desultory,
digressive, broken off by the withdrawing of the curtain from a fresh
picture, by the prelude of another piece, by a cart blocking up the
street or a cat in behind a window grating; by something often utterly
trumpery, senseless and for the moment all important. And they have come
also, these scattered ideas, in long discussions, rambling but eager
(their seriousness shivered ever and anon by a sudden grotesque image or
cutting answer, or inane pun, or diverted off, no one knew how, into
anecdotes or folk tales), in the fire-lit winter afternoons, with the
crackle of wood and the crackling of sparks; or, in the August-heated,
shuttered room, with the midday drowsy silence brought home more
completely by the never flagging saw of the cicalas on the vine-bearing
poplars, by the uniform clatter of the wooden frame crushing the brittle
silvery hemp straw in the dark courtyard outside. This manner of setting
they have had; and a far finer than any that could artificially be given
to them. In order to endure, they had, these ideas, to be removed out of
all this living frame-work; to be written down, that is to say, to be
made quite lifeless and inorganic, and dry and stiff, like some stuffed
animal or bird. And when it came to sorting them, to preparing them to
show to other folk; the vague melancholy sense of how different they
now looked, my poor art thoughts all dreary in their abstractness, from
what they had been when they had first come into my head; this sense
of difference made me wish and try to replace them in a setting, an
artificial one, which should in a manner be equivalent to that original
real setting of place and moment, and individuality and digression:
equivalent as an acre of garden, with artificial rocks, streams, groves,
grottoes, places for losing your way, flower-beds etc., is equivalent
for all the country you can travel over in five or six years. I have
done as best I could, merely to satisfy my own strong feeling that art
questions should always be discussed in the presence of some definite
work of art, if art and its productions are not to become mere
abstractions, logical counters wherewith to reckon; also, that
discussions should be, what real discussions are, a gradual unravelling
of tangled questions, either alone or with others' assistance, not a
mere exposition of a cut and dry system. I have always, in putting
together these notes, had a vision of pictures or statues or places, had
a sound of music in my mind, or a page of a book in my memory; I have
always thought, in arranging these discussions, of the real individuals
with whom I should most willingly have them: I have always felt that
some one else was by my side to whom I was showing, explaining,
answering; hence, the use of the second person plural, of which I have
vainly tried to be rid: it is not the oracular _we_ of the printed book,
it is the _we_ of myself and those with whom, for whom, I am speaking;
it is the constantly felt dualism of myself and my companion.
Thus much of the form into which, as the only one which, however
imperfectly, suited my liking, I have worked these notes, taken from
out of the confusion of my commonplace books. Now, as to the notes, or
rather as to the ideas which they embody. These ideas, I repeat, are not
a system; they are mere fragmentary thinkings out of aesthetic questions.
Yet, they have, taken altogether, a certain uniformity of tendency, a
certain logical shape: they look like a system. But if a logical shape
they have, it is not because they have been deliberately fitted into
each other, but because they have been homogeneously evolved; if a
system they appear, it is because the same individual mind, in its
attempt to solve a series of closely allied problems, must solve them
in a self-consistent way. Hence, while dreading beyond all things to
cramp my still growing, and therefore altering, ideas in the limits
of a system, I find that I have, nevertheless, evolved for myself a
series of answers to separate questions, which constitute a sort of
art-philosophy. An art-philosophy entirely unabstract, unsystematic,
essentially personal, because evolved unconsciously, under the pressure
of personal circumstances, and to serve the requirements of personal
tendencies. I have, of course, read a good deal about art, perhaps more
than other people; and I have consciously and unconsciously assimilated
a good deal of the books that I read; but I have never deliberately
accepted (except in the domain of art-history and evolution, of which I
have not treated in this book which deals only of art in its connection
with the individual artist and his public) a whole theory, and set
myself either to developing or correcting it: the ideas of others enter
largely into the answers to my self-questionings, but they do so because
they had become part and parcel of my own thought; and the questions and
their answers have always been asked by myself and answered by myself.
For, with respect to aesthetic training, I have been circumstanced
differently from most writers on the subject, nay, from most readers of
our generation. I was taught as little about art, I heard as little talk
about pictures, statues, or music, as any legendary calvinist child of
the 17th century; I jostled art of one kind or another as much as any
child well can: I was familiar with art, cared about it (to the extent
of requiring it) before well knowing that art existed: reversing the
training of these days of culture and eclecticism and philosophy,
according to which one usually knows all about art, all about its
history, ethics, philosophy, schools, epochs, moral value, poetic
meaning, and so forth, before one knows art itself, long before one
cares a jot for it. To me, art was neither a technical study, nor a
philosophic puzzle, nor a rhetorical theme, nor a fashionable craze: it
was something natural, familiar; indifferent at first, then enjoyed;
only later read and thought about. It was only when I began to read
what other people had thought and felt on the subject, that I began
to discover (with surprise and awe) that there was something rare,
wonderful, exotic, sublime, mysterious, ineffable about art. I read a
great many books about all the arts, and about each art in particular,
from Plato to Lessing, from Reynolds to Taine, from Hegel to Ruskin; I
read, re-read, annotated, extracted, compared, refuted; I filled copy
books with transcendental, romantic, and positivistic aesthetics; I began
to feel, to understand art and all its wonderful mysteries; I began to
be able to express in words all the vague sublimities which I felt. Any
one reading my notes, hearing my conversation, would have sworn that I
was destined to become an art philosopher. But it was not to be. Much as
I read, copied, annotated, analysed, imitated, I could not really take
in any of the things which I read; or if I took them in, they would
remain pure literary flourishes. As soon as I got back into the presence
of art itself, all my carefully acquired artistic philosophy, mystic,
romantic, or transcendental, was forgotten: I looked at pictures and
statues, and saw in them mere lines and colours, pleasant or unpleasant;
I listened to music, and when, afterwards, I asked myself what strange
moods it had awakened in my soul, what wondrous visions it had conjured
up in my mind, I discovered that, during that period of listening, my
mind had been a complete blank, and that all I could possibly recollect
were notes. My old original prosaic, matter-of-fact feeling about art,
as something simple, straightforward, enjoyable, always persisted
beneath all the metaphysics and all the lyrism with which I tried to
crush it. I continued, indeed, to study art, to think about what it
really was; but gradually I perceived that this thinking of mine,
instead of developing my faculties for seeing in art all the wonderful
things seen in it by others, tended more and more to confirm my original
childish impression that art was a simple thing to be simply enjoyed.
My thinking was mainly negative: instead of discovering new things
in art, I discovered every day the absence in it of some of the strange
properties with which I had learned to invest it; I perceived more and
more distinctly that half of the ideas of aestheticians had merely served
to hide the real nature of the art about which they wrote; I understood
that while analysing psychological meanings in pictures, they were
shutting their eyes to the form and the colour; that while they were
dreaming about woods and lakes, and love and death, they were not
listening to the music. I gradually took in the fact that most writers
on art were simply substituting psychological or mystic or poetic
enjoyment, due to their own literary activities, for the simple artistic
enjoyment which was alone and solely afforded by art itself. I saw that
the more value any work of art possessed in itself, and the greater
the amount of pleasure which it could afford, the more extraneous and
impertinent was the sort of interest with which aestheticians tried to
invest it. I became aware that writers, being unable to awaken with
their machinery of thoughts and feelings and words the activities
awakened by the intrinsic qualities, visible or audible, of statues or
pictures or music, had unconsciously substituted an appeal to other
mental activities with which the works of art had at best but little
connection. This gradual discovery amused me, but it also made me
indignant. Had mankind appeared to me to be merely placidly enjoying as
artistic effects those which were not artistic effects at all, it would
have been a mere matter for amusement; but it seemed to me that as a
consequence of this mankind was entirely missing much of the enjoyment
which art could give, and, moreover, which could be given only by art.
Besides, art was for ever attempting really to produce those imaginary,
imagined effects: sculpture was trying to give psychological amusement,
music was trying to play tragedies and paint landscapes, and write
religious meditations; and in so doing art was incapacitating itself
for its real work, even as mankind was incapacitating itself for
appreciating the real powers of art. Hence, in so far as I thought
at all about art in its absolute relations to artist and public (as
distinguished from art as a psychological, historical, merely scientific
study) my thoughts all tended towards getting rid of those foreign,
extra-artistic, irrelevant interests which aestheticians have since the
beginning of time interposed between art and those who are intended to
enjoy it; my work has, unconsciously enough, been to logically justify
that perfectly simple, direct connection between art and ourselves,
which was the one I had felt, as a child, before learning all the
wonderful fantastications of art philosophers. My own art philosophy is
therefore simply to try and enjoy in art what art really contains, to
obtain from art all that it can give, by refraining from asking it to
give what it cannot. To this end have tended all those most harum-scarum
notes, written during the last six years, which I have here collected
and tried to group according to the particular art, or the particular
portion of an art, to which they referred. Some are about painting,
some about music, some about poetry, some about art in general, some
inextricably combined and mixed up with other subjects. They have been
written at different times, hence with varying amount of experience and
information; occasionally they may even be contradictory in a trifle.
Thus, when I wrote the notes on musical expression incorporated in the
essay called after Hoffmann's Kapell-Meister Kreisler, I was not yet
acquainted with the discoveries of Mr. Herbert Spencer on the subject;
discoveries which have infinitely cleared my ideas, and which serve to
correct, in the adjoining essay called _Cherubino_, much that was vague,
and perhaps equivocal, in my earlier notes. Had I been constructing a
system, I should have recast all the old (or suppressed all the new);
but I am merely collecting notes, so I have let them stand as they were
written. My object is not to teach others, but to show them how far I
have taught myself, and how far they may teach themselves. I must always
return to my comparison of the copy books of the boy attending a course
of lectures: this is not all that I conceive can be said on the subject;
it is merely as much as I have been able to understand thereof; and the
more I have listened and questioned, the more what I have understood has
become connected within itself and seemed to indicate connections with
unstudied problems belonging to different orders of thought. Thus, after
having thought and written only about art; about what each art can and
cannot do, about the relations of the various arts amongst each other
and to their artists, I have gradually found myself thinking and writing
about what art as a whole can do and should do; about the relations
between all art and life taken as a whole: after the purely aesthetical
questions has come the question, no aesthetical question this time--what
value, in this world of good and evil, of doubt and certainty, of action
and inaction, in this world struggling for physical and social and moral
good, what value have aesthetical questions at all? And with these notes,
written latest of all, and threatening to divert me more than they
should from my present field of study to the wider, nobler, far more
intricate and dangerous field of ethics, I have thought it best to
close my book; since these latest notes supply the explanation--felt
all along, but only vaguely formulated till now--of my whole aesthetic,
because of my whole philosophic, tendencies: the greatest amount of good
work to be obtained from everything, and this possible only by all being
seen in its right light, and consequently used in its right place.
This is what my new book is, and this is how such it has come to be. And
just because it is what it is, because it is not a mere piece of work,
not a mere something made by me and thrust away, in its systematic cut
and dryness, from my living personality; but a certain proportion of my
growing, altering, enlarging, disjointed, helter-skelter thoughts, of
the thoughts which come to me whether I will or not; because it is not
a real book but a collection of notes, do I wish it to be read by you.
So now I tie together and make a packet of all the pages of proofs and
sheets of MS., and send it all to you. The summer has come round: the
tall grass, brocaded like some rough, rich mediaeval stuff, with yellow
buttercups and blue sage flowers, is already beginning to be scythed
and raked away; the last clusters of hawthorn, which, a few days since,
still stood out white and crisp against the blue of the sky, fall to
pieces as soon as one tries to gather them; the Tuscan country has
already got its summer sheen of pale green poppied wheat, and pale green
budding vine, and dim blue distance, and pervading faint yellow haze;
the hills of Siena are green with sprouting arbutus and ilex and fern
and hellebore bells; the oakwoods that we saw russet under the reddening
light, are in tender, yellowish new leaf; the olives are in blossom from
which we broke the fruit-laden twigs; it seems so long, so very long,
since that soft grey winter day when last we were together, looking down
from the battlements of the old Sienese villa; and yet the memory of
that winter day seems as real as the present reality of this summer one;
and haunts me still, as I write these words, even as it has haunted me
throughout the putting together of this book, which I have called,
from that haunting remembrance, and, perhaps, a little also that the
association might make it more pleasant in your eyes, by the name of
that strange, isolated, ilex-circled castle villa of Belcaro. And now,
unroll the tight-rolled manuscript and smooth out the rumpled proof
sheets; read, and tell me whether or not what you have read is ever to
be read by any one else.
FLORENCE, _May, 1881_.