I have had the sense that now, before these foregoing pages be
definitely printed--before what have been living thoughts and feelings
be irrevocably composed and stiffened, embalmed, distinctly and
unmistakably prepared to last, as things are permitted to last, only in
death--I have had the sense that while yet I can, I must say one or two
more things. But now, I can scarcely tell why, it seems to me as if
there could by no means be anything to say. It is a mood, due to the
moment and place. All about me there is broad, scarce-flickering shadow
on the grass, and stirring of sunlit tree-tops and vague buzzing of
bees in the limes; and across the low ivied wall comes from the black,
crumbly-stoned chapel faint music of organ and white-sounding voices,
which swells and pierces through the silence (as a green reed bud swells
and pierces its soft scaly core) and dies away, making you suddenly very
conscious of twitter of sparrows and chucking of jackdaws; bringing
suddenly close home to you, with the silence, a sense of solid reality.
So, instead of saying what I wished, it seems to me most evident that
there is nothing to say, that there scarcely could have been anything
worth saying. It is enervate, I suppose; but so it is. I wonder how any
one can ever have felt inclined to write about art--how art can ever
have been worth writing about. Everything around seems so incomparably
more interesting does it not, than art; so entirely beyond the power
of writing to convey or imitate. Above, high up, there are two great
branches of lime, apparently printed distinctly on to the pale blue sky,
black wood dividing and subdividing and projecting, green leaves and
light yellow blossom, the sun shining straight through; it seems so
simple. But try and paint it: those two branches, which seem at first so
well-defined, so close together, so closely clapped against the sky, do
you now see how far apart they really are, how separated by a gulf of
luminous air, how freely suspended, poised, at infinite distance, in the
far receding pale blue; those green leaves and yellow blossoms, which
are not green nor yellow, but something shadowy and at the same time
luminous, are clearly defined and yet undefinable; the sunshine which we
thought at first one plain beam of light is now a white, vague sheen, a
shimmer; now one light spark, one tremulous star between the leaves, or
a waving network of rays, long, then short, white, coloured, iridescent,
shaking, shifting, dancing. Paint it, describe it if you have a mind to,
my friend the poet, my friend the painter; I have not.
This is one of those moments when reality, and the enjoyment thereof,
fill one with a sense, self-contemptuous, sceptical, almost cynical, and
yet pleasureable and stoically self-flattering in the recognition of
our own importance, a pervading illogical sense of the futility, the
unreality, the museum-glass-case uselessness of art. It seems as if art
were enjoyed because it has been produced, not produced because it is to
be enjoyed; as if mankind had acquired an elaborate pleasure in its
own works because they are its own works; as if all of us, instead of
passively receiving the impression of beauty in the same way that we
passively perceive the rustle of the branches, the twitter of the birds,
the light upon the grass, our soul staying quietly, as it were, at home,
and receiving these things as visits from nature; went forth, when art
appeals to us, on a sort of journey or grand tour, well provided with
guide-book knowledge, schooled beforehand which road to take, what
turnings of feeling to expect, what baggage of poetic and historic
association to lug with us, what little mole-hill eminences of thought
and feeling to stand upon, morally on tiptoe, looking down upon an
artistic scene upon which we have never before set eyes, and which is
yet as well-known, as drearily familiar to us as is the inside of our
pocket.
Such is my present mood; fickle, contradictory, unworthy, slightly
apostatising and blasphemous to my own deeper convictions, to my own
written ideas, you say; you, my friend, the poet, who insist upon people
being steadfast, unchangeable in all their feelings, because you poets
keep your own moods quite steady, as photographers keep their victims,
until you have taken the concentrated likeness, and can shift your souls
into another equally steadfast, unchangeable pose. Such is my present
mood, and you may call me what names you please for having it. All that
concerns me is that most certainly this present mood of mine happens to
be the one, of all others, in which I am least likely to be able to
muster up those two or three remarks upon art with which I ought to
conclude, and finally despatch into the limbo of things printed this
collection of studies. The things must be said. If I carry my papers
home, sit down at my table, fix my eyes upon the patterned wall-paper,
I shall, in all probability, get back within five minutes all that the
usual ideas, the usual feelings about art, in the contemplation of that
patterned blankness; all that phantasmagoria of art appreciation for
which we carry all the necessary mechanism, self-manufactured (yet very
neat) out of fragments of culture and philosophy, in a sort of little
travelling case appended to our soul. A fact this, which is suggestive;
for does not our modern, imaginative appreciation of art, do not all
those wondrous beautiful and horrible dreams and nightmares, suggested
to us by a quite plain and unsuggestive picture, statue, or piece of
music, depend a little upon our contemplation of the methodical, zig-zag
and twirligig patterned vacuity of modern life? For I suspect that, in
former days (I confess I do not know exactly when), art may have been
perceived pretty much in the same manner in which we perceive nature:
that the enjoyed perception of a beautiful statue, of a picture, of a
grand song, may have come interrupting, with pleasant interludes of
quiet self-unconscious pleasure, the matter-of-fact, but not monotonous
business of life; even as my work now, my conscientious, deliberate,
attempted work, is for ever being interrupted by the flicker of the
lime-leaf shadows, light and clear, on my paper, by the breeze which
sweeps the branches and carries away the drying manuscript on the grass.
Now it seems to me quite evident that art cannot be any such thing, as
long as its enjoyment or supposed enjoyment is a sort of deliberate
mental gymnastics, which our desire for well-balanced activity, or our
wish to display a certain unnecessary gracefulness of intellectual
motions, impose upon us; setting aside a certain portion of our time for
counteracting, in the artistic gymnasiums (rows of soaped poles, and
hurdles, and ladders, and expanses of padded floor, quite as unlike as
may be from the climbable trees and jumpable brooks which we ought
to meet in our walks), called galleries, concerts, etc., the direful
slackening of our muscles and stiffening of our joints, almost
inevitable in our cramped intellectual shop life of to-day. We writhe,
clinging with arms and legs, up the soaped poles of aesthetic feeling,
slipping and rising again, straining and twisting, to plop down at last
on to the padding and the sawdust; we dangle, with constrained grace,
high in aesthetic contemplation, flying, with a clutching swing, from
idea to idea: distant, oscillating in mid air, like so many trapeze
acrobats; and then we think that an hour or so, every now and then, of
such exercise is all (except brutal slumber) that can be required as
repose in our intellectual life. For we are all of us getting more
and more into the habit of enjoying, not so much art, as the feelings
and thoughts, the theories and passions, for which we make it the
excuse. "Nay," you will say "you yourself have written, are printing,
correcting, and publishing a whole volume of whims and ideas about
art, you yourself are for ever theorising and becoming angry on the
subject--what right have you to object thereto in others?"
None, perhaps; I have never pretended that I am not as bad as my
neighbours; but the whole gist of these my theorisings is that people
should try and take art more simply than they do; that, if not called
upon to try and persuade others to simpler courses, they should not
theorise themselves. By theorising, I mean, incorrectly perhaps, all
manner of irrelevant fantasticating, whether it take the shape of
seeking in art for hidden psychological meanings or moral values, or of
using art merely as a suggestion of images and emotions, the perception
of which infallibly interferes with, and sometimes entirely replaces,
the perception of the art itself. To you, I know, all that I have
written seems extremely narrow, seems to limit excessively the powers of
art, the enjoyments we can derive therefrom. But I think otherwise; I
understand fully that, in the first place, there is included, under the
general name of art, the result of ever so many intellectual activities:
activities of mere psychological perception, of mere mechanical
imitation and handling, which, though belonging quite equally to other
concerns, such as science or handicraft, are yet pleasurable both to him
who exerts and to him who perceives them; I understand that there are
so many different sorts of pictures, statues, and poems, and so many
different kinds of minds to see and read them; I see that so many
questions of mental and physical why and how are connected with every
sort of visible or audible thing, that there is nothing, however utterly
bad and idiotic and abortive, among the productions of mankind (and,
consequently, among the things called works of art), out of which some
sort of intellect may not derive very keen enjoyment. The enjoyment,
however, may be merely similar to that with which a physiologist studies
a disease, or a psychologist a form of vice; and, to my mind, this sort
of enjoyment, which does not depend upon any perception of beauty, is no
more artistic than would be that of such men of science. And my wish is
merely that such pleasure be not substituted where there is an object
to afford, or a mind to receive, the mere simple, honest pleasure in
beauty. Moreover, with regard to your imputation of narrowness, I
think, on the contrary, that, could we break ourselves of our habit of
replacing or alloying real artistic interests with irrelevant matters,
we should (and this is to my mind a great reason for so doing) be
ridding ourselves of a great number of imaginary restrictions to our
enjoyment. For in many, nay, most artistic things there is, in greater
or less degree, beauty and enjoyableness; nor should we always despise
the less, since we cannot always obtain the greater. I do not mean
that all art is equally valuable; such intellectual democracy, Walt.
Whitmanish assertion of the equality of body and soul, good and
evil, high and low, being just the most brutal rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul
dishonesty that I know; but I think that in most art there is something
valuable, and that we ought to make the most of it, and doubtless
should, did not our eternal theorising interfere, with its arbitrary
standard and requirements. Were we guided solely by our feelings, we
should not be ashamed of taking a certain pleasure in the half-dapper,
half-grotesque stone nymphs and tritons, with golden-lichened tresses
and beards of green pond ooze, who smirk among the ill-clipped hedges,
and puff at their horns among the flags and lilies of every abandoned
Prince-Bishop or Margrave's garden, where the apricots ripen against the
palace wall, and the old portraits fade behind the blistered palace
shutters; we should not be ashamed of being just a little the better
pleased for some common dance tune, heard vaguely, and between our work,
from the neighbouring houses; we should not be ashamed of liking our
village church all the more for the atrocious stained glass which we
have decried as vandalism, when the sunlight falls rosy, and golden,
and green, through its monstrosities on to the extremely chaste, but
excessively dreary, grey arches and pillars. We should not be so
hypocritical to ourselves, so exclusive in our adoration of only the
best pictures, and statues, and music, to appreciate rightly whose
great merit we ought (but do not), to appreciate also the small, more
appreciable merit of the less perfect things of art. When, instead of
enjoying, we fantasticate in theory, we not only remove a proportion of
our attention from the work in hand, but also exclude ourselves from
getting the good we might from other things; one man will positively
whip his soul out of enjoying the sweet solemnity of Claude's sea
sunsets, the tragedy pomp of Poussin's black rustling ilex-groves,
and ominous green evening skies, because he seeks in painting a moral
sincerity which is incompatible with a false shadow or a lumpishly
rendered cloud. Another man thinks music ought to be the expression
of dramatic passion, and closes his ears to the splendours of poor
Rossini's vocal arabesques, theory-blinded to the sense that the powers
of creating beauty of the composer of _Tristram_, is after all akin to
the beauty making genius of the composer of _Semiramis_. Meanwhile, he
who merely enjoys is able to enjoy; is able (oh wonder of wonders) to be
what the man of theories never can be: just, because he can be grateful
for every amount of bestowed good.
There is another objection which you may make, which (though perhaps
unformulated) you certainly will feel, against me and my book. You have
an uncomfortable sense that in some way, although our artistic life may
gain, a certain amount of life which goes on in or about art--we do not
clearly know which--is being cramped: a life of the fancy and feelings,
which weave between ourselves and the things which surround us and the
things which are absent, between the present moment and the long-gone
past, strange crossed and recrossed threads, webs of association,
infinitely fine, iridescently connected by almost invisible filaments,
floating and oscillating in the vacuum of our lives, for ever changing,
breaking; reknotting their sensitive filaments. For in most of the
things which we see and hear with free, unpractical mind in the moments
when we belong to ourselves and to the present, there exists a capacity
for importance, nay for fascination, quite independent of beauty and of
the pleasures which beauty can give. There is in such things more than
what they can give alike to every one; there is also what they can give
to each separate; they have, besides the clear language of form, which
is equally intelligible to all men, a half articulate language for every
individual man, a language of associations, vague, poor, if you will,
broken by something which might be a laugh or a sob; an imperfect
irrational language, which is yet, even when spoken by some trifling
thing, by a bar or two of trivial melody, by a door such as we have many
times passed through, or a chair such as we have looked at when not,
as now, empty; by a mere scent or touch; is yet, this mumble-jumble
language, more dear to us than all the eloquence and poetry which our
soul hears from a great work of art. I grant you all this. But I do not
think that such things need be interfered with by looking at art simply
and with straightforwardness; interfered with they cannot be. Nor could
I wish it to be otherwise. For in some ways I do think that almost
better than the mere perception of the work of another, than the mere
perception of statue or picture or poem, is this evolving from out of
ourselves of vague beauty and goodness: our fancy and our feelings do
not create anything enduring, but they are active, they create. You
artists, you poets must be broad awake, for you can and are bound to
give to us the sober realities of beauty; but we who cannot, we can yet
sometimes dream, if but for a moment, of an intangible, vague fairyland;
and of this we must not be cheated. Out of the broken, fragmentary
realities of life there must arise, ever and again for all of us,
strange involuntary visions, which have greater power over us, more
charm for us, than all the art in the world. And of such things art has
no right to be jealous; they are beyond it. And thus, I will confess to
you, as I fasten together these last pages of my book, and rise from the
grass, sere in the sunshine, and sprinkled with daisies in the shadow
of each tree, I will confess to you that more nearly appealing to me,
dearer also, than antique bas-relief or song of Mozart, has been the
vague remembrance, evoked by trivial word or sight, of that early winter
afternoon on the ilex girded battlements of Belcaro, looking down upon
the sere oak-woods, flushed by the low sun, upon the hazy olive slopes
and walls and towers of Siena. And, moreover, I will even confess (as
severest self-chastisement to a writer on art, as complete expiation of
aesthetic dogmatism and fantastications), while we walk across the warm
grass and out through the low archway of black and flakewise crumbling
stone, that I foresee that many a time in the future there will arise
between me and the fresco or picture at which I am looking, a vision
of this old world garden, of the ivied chapel buttress, the flowering
lime, the daisied grass, the copper beech leaves, ruddy and diaphanous,
against the pale, moist English sky; that, sometimes, there will
come into my head something--something ill-defined, pleasurable,
painful--which will make me read only with my eyes; which will make me
(worst humiliation) lose the thread of my theories, of my thoughts, of
my sentence. And, after this confession, I think I can say no more.