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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on Art, by A. Clutton-Brock
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays on Art
+
+Author: A. Clutton-Brock
+
+Release Date: July 2, 2005 [EBook #16178]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON ART ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Peter Barozzi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+                             ESSAYS ON ART
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           A. CLUTTON-BROCK
+
+
+
+
+                           METHUEN & CO. LTD.
+                          36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
+
+                                 LONDON
+
+
+
+
+                        _First Published in 1919_
+
+
+
+
+                                 PREFACE
+
+
+These essays, reprinted from the _Times Literary Supplement_ with a few
+additions and corrections, are not all entirely or directly concerned
+with art; but even the last one--Waste or Creation?--does bear on the
+question, How are we to improve the art of our own time? After years of
+criticism I am more interested in this question than in any other that
+concerns the arts. Whistler said that we could not improve it; the best
+we could do for it was not to think about it. I have discussed that
+opinion, as also the contrary opinion of Tolstoy, and the truth that
+seems to me to lie between them. If these essays have any unity, it is
+given to them by my belief that art, like other human activities, is
+subject to the will of man. We cannot cause men of artistic genius to be
+born; but we can provide a public, namely, ourselves, for the artist,
+who will encourage him to be an artist, to do his best, not his worst.
+I believe that the quality of art in any age depends, not upon the
+presence or absence of individuals of genius, but upon the attitude of
+the public towards art.
+
+Because of the decline of all the arts, especially the arts of use,
+which began at the end of the eighteenth century and has continued up to
+our own time, we are more interested in art than any people of the past,
+with the interest of a sick man in health. To say that this interest
+must be futile or mischievous is to deny the will of man in one of the
+chief of human activities; but it often is denied by those who do not
+understand how it can be applied to art. We cannot make artists
+directly; no government office can determine their training; still less
+can any critic tell them how they ought to practise their art. But we
+can all aim at a state of society in which they will be encouraged to do
+their best, and at a state of mind in which we ourselves shall learn to
+know good from bad and to prefer the good. At present we have neither
+the state of society nor the state of mind; and we can attain to both
+not by connoisseurship, not by an anxiety to like the right thing or at
+least to buy it, but by learning the difference between good and bad
+workmanship and design in objects of use. Anyone can do that, and can
+resolve to pay a fair price for good workmanship and design; and only so
+will the arts of use, and all the arts, revive again. For where the
+public has no sense of design in the arts of use, it will have none in
+the "fine arts." To aim at connoisseurship when you do not know a good
+table or chair from a bad one is to attempt flying before you can walk.
+So, I think, professors of art at Oxford or Cambridge should be chosen,
+not so much for their knowledge of Greek sculpture, as for their success
+in furnishing their own houses. What can they know about Greek sculpture
+if their own drawing-rooms are hideous? I believe that the notorious
+fallibility of many experts is caused by the fact that they concern
+themselves with the fine arts before they have had any training in the
+arts of use. So, if we are to have a school of art at Oxford or
+Cambridge, it should put this question to every pupil: If you had to
+build and furnish a house of your own, how would you set about it? And
+it should train its pupils to give a rational answer to that question.
+So we might get a public knowing the difference between good and bad in
+objects of use, valuing the good, and ready to pay a fair price for it.
+
+At present we have no such public. A liberal education should teach the
+difference between good and bad in things of use, including buildings.
+Oxford and Cambridge profess to give a liberal education; but you have
+only to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachers
+themselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like all
+the rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they
+trust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and
+superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely
+mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere
+pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. These have
+their sense or nonsense, their righteousness or unrighteousness, which
+anyone can learn to see for himself, and, until he has learned, he will
+be at the mercy of charlatans.
+
+I have written all these essays as a member of the public, as one who
+has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish
+again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to
+himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling
+artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a
+natural and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a defence
+of criticism, and I will not repeat it here.
+
+                                                  A. CLUTTON-BROCK
+   _July_ 30, 1919
+  FARNCOMBE, SURREY
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                 "THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI"            1
+
+                 LEONARDO DA VINCI                     13
+
+                 THE POMPADOUR IN ART                  27
+
+                 AN UNPOPULAR MASTER                   37
+
+                 A DEFENCE OF CRITICISM                48
+
+                 THE ARTIST AND HIS AUDIENCE           58
+
+                 WILFULNESS AND WISDOM                 74
+
+                 "THE MAGIC FLUTE"                     86
+
+                 PROCESS OR PERSON?                    97
+
+                 THE ARTIST AND THE TRADESMAN         110
+
+                 PROFESSIONALISM IN ART               120
+
+                 WASTE OR CREATION?                   132
+
+
+
+
+                              ESSAYS ON ART
+
+
+                       "The Adoration of the Magi"
+
+
+There is one beauty of nature and another of art, and many attempts have
+been made to explain the difference between them. Signor Croce's theory,
+now much in favour, is that nature provides only the raw material for
+art. The beginning of the artistic process is the perception of beauty
+in nature; but an artist does not see beauty as he sees a cow. It is his
+own mind that imposes on the chaos of nature an order, a relation, which
+is beauty. All men have the faculty, in some degree, of imposing this
+order; the artist only does it more completely than other men, and he
+owes his power of execution to that. He can make the beauty which he has
+perceived because he has perceived it clearly; and this perceiving is
+part of the making.
+
+The defect of this theory is that it ends by denying that very
+difference between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art which it
+sets out to explain. If the artist makes the beauty of nature in
+perceiving it, if it is produced by the action of his own mind upon the
+chaos of reality, then it is the very same beauty that appears in his
+art; and if, to us, the beauty of his art seems different from the
+beauty of nature, as we perceive it, it is only because we have not
+ourselves seen the beauty of nature as completely as he has, we have not
+reduced chaos so thoroughly to order. It is a difference not of kind,
+but of degree; for the artist himself there is no difference even of
+degree. What he makes he sees, and what he sees he makes. All beauty is
+artistic, and to speak of natural beauty is to make a false distinction.
+
+Yet it is a distinction that we remain constantly aware of. In spite of
+Signor Croce and all the subtlety and partial truth of his theory, we do
+not believe that we make beauty when we see it, or that the artist makes
+it when he sees it. Nor do we believe that that beauty which he makes is
+of the same nature as that which he has perceived in reality. Rather he,
+like us, values the beauty which he perceives in reality because he
+knows that he has not made it. It is something, independent of himself,
+to which his own mind makes answer: that answer is his art; it is the
+passionate value expressed in it which gives beauty to his art. If he
+knew that the beauty he perceives was a product of his own mind, he
+could not value it so; if he held Signor Croce's theory, he would cease
+to be an artist.
+
+And, in fact, those who act on his theory do cease to be artists.
+Nothing kills art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the
+same kind as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature,
+as we perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is
+perfection because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made,
+but born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference
+between them and between their beauties. If a work of art tries to have
+the finish of a thing born, not made, if a piece of enamel apes the
+gloss of a butterfly's wing, it misses the peculiar beauty of art and is
+but an inadequate imitation of the beauty of nature. That beauty of the
+butterfly's wing, which the artist like all of us perceives, is of a
+different kind from any beauty he can make; and if he is an artist he
+knows it and does not try to make it. But all the arts, even those which
+are not themselves imitative, are always being perverted by the attempt
+to imitate the finish of nature. There is a vanity of craftsmanship in
+Louis Quinze furniture, in the later Chinese porcelain, in modern
+jewelry, no less than in Dutch painting, which is the death of art. All
+great works of art show an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of
+craftsmanship, which is the essence of their beauty and distinguishes it
+from the beauty of nature. As soon as men cease to understand this and
+despise this effort and roughness and inadequacy, they demand from art
+the beauty of nature and get something which is mostly dead nature, not
+living art.
+
+We can best understand the difference between the two kinds of beauty if
+we consider how beauty steals into language, that art which we all
+practise more or less and in which it is difficult, if not impossible,
+to imitate the finish of natural beauty. There is no beauty whatever in
+sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Pass the mustard,"
+because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say. There
+is beauty in sentences like "The bright day is done, And we are for the
+dark," or "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," because in them,
+although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say a thousand
+times more than he can say. It is the effort to do something beyond the
+power of words that brings beauty into them. That is the very nature of
+the beauty of art, which distinguishes it from the beauty of nature; it
+is always produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible, and what
+the artist knows to be impossible. Whenever that effort ceases, whenever
+the artist sets himself a task that he can accomplish, a task of mere
+skill, then he ceases to be an artist, because he no longer experiences
+reality in the manner necessary to an artist. The great poet is aware of
+some excellence in reality so intensely that it is to him beauty; for
+all excellence when we are intensely aware of it is beauty to us. There
+is that truth in Croce's theory. Our perception of beauty does depend
+upon the intensity of our perception of excellence. But that intensity
+of perception remains perception, and does not make what it perceives.
+That the poet and every artist knows; and his art is not merely an
+extension of the process of perception, but an attempt to express his
+own value for that excellence which he has perceived as beauty. It is an
+answer to that beauty, a worship of it, and is itself beautiful because
+it makes no effort to compete with it.
+
+Thus in the beauty of art there is always value and wonder, always a
+reference to another beauty different in kind from itself; and we too,
+if we are to see the beauty of art, must share the same value and
+wonder. To enter that Kingdom of Heaven we must become little children
+as the artist himself does. Art is the expression of a certain attitude
+towards reality, an attitude of wonder and value, a recognition of
+something greater than man; and where that recognition is not, art dies.
+In a society valuing only itself, believing that it can make a heaven of
+itself out of its own skill and knowledge and wisdom, the difference
+between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art is no longer seen,
+and art loses all its own beauty. The surest sign of corruption and
+death in a society is where men and women see the best life as a life
+without wonder or effort or failure, where labour is hidden underground
+so that a few may seem to live in Paradise; where there is perfect
+finish of all things, human beings no less than their clothes and
+furniture and buildings and pictures; where the ideal is the lady so
+perfectly turned out that any activity whatever would mar her
+perfection. In such societies the artist becomes a slave. He too must
+produce work that does not seem to be work. He must express no wonder
+or value for patrons who would be ashamed to feel either. What he makes
+must seem to be born and not made, so that it may fit a world which
+pretends to be a born Paradise populated by cynical angels who own
+allegiance to no god. In such a world art means, beauty means, the
+concealment of effort, the pretence that it does not exist; and that
+pretence is the end of art and beauty in all things made by man. There
+is a close connexion between the idea of life expressed in Aristotle's
+ideal man and the later Greek sculpture. The aim of that sculpture, as
+of his ideal man, was proud and effortless perfection. Both dread the
+confession of failure above all things--and both are dull. In
+Aristotle's age art had started upon a long decline, which ended only
+when the pretence of perfection was killed, both in art and in life, by
+Christianity. Then the real beauty of art, the beauty of value and
+wonder, superseded the wearisome imitation of natural beauty; and it is
+only lately that we have learnt again to prefer the real beauty to the
+false.
+
+Men must free themselves from the contempt of effort and the desire to
+conceal it, they must be content with the perpetual, passionate failure
+of art, before they can see its beauty or demand that beauty from the
+artist. When they themselves become like little children, then they see
+that the greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are like
+little children too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not the
+arrogant, the accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They are
+great men to us; but they achieved beauty because in their effort to
+achieve it they were little children to themselves. They impose awe on
+us, but it is their own awe that they impose. It is not their
+achievement that makes beauty, but their effort, always confessing its
+own failure; and in that confession is the beauty of art. That is why it
+moves and frees us; for it frees us from our pretence that we are what
+we would be, it carries us out of our own egotism into the wonder and
+value of the artist himself.
+
+Consider the beauty of a tune. Music itself is the best means which man
+has found for confessing that he cannot say what he would say; and it is
+more purely and rapturously beauty than any other form of art. A tune is
+the very silencing of speech, and in the greatest tunes there is always
+the hush of wonder: they seem to tell us to be silent and listen, not to
+what the musician has to say, but to what he cannot say. The very
+beauty of a tune is in its reference to something beyond all expression,
+and in its perfection it speaks of a perfection not its own. Pater said
+that all art tries to attain to the condition of music. That is true in
+a sense different from what he meant. Art is always most completely art
+when it makes music's confession of the ineffable; then it comes nearest
+to the beauty of music. But when it is no longer a forlorn hope, when it
+is able to say what it wishes to say with calm assurance, then it has
+ceased to be art and become a game of skill.
+
+Often the great artist is imperious, impatient, full of certainties; but
+his certainty is not of himself; and he is impatient of the failure to
+recognize, not himself, but what he recognizes. Michelangelo, Beethoven,
+Tintoret, would snap a critic's head off if he did not see what they
+were trying to do. They may seem sometimes to be arrogant in the mere
+display of power, yet their beauty lies in the sudden change from
+arrogance to humility. The arrogance itself bows down and worships; the
+very muscle and material force obey a spirit not their own. They are
+lion-tamers, and they themselves are the lions; out of the strong comes
+forth sweetness, and it is all the sweeter for the strength that is
+poured into it and subdued by it. What is the difference, as of
+different worlds, between Rubens at his best and Tintoret at his best?
+This: that Rubens always seems to be uplifted by his own power, whereas
+Tintoret has most power when he forgets it in wonder. When he bows down
+all his turbulence in worship, then he is most strong. Rubens, in the
+"Descent from the Cross," is still the supreme drawing-master; and
+painters flocking to him for lessons pay homage to him. But, in his
+"Crucifixion," it is Tintoret himself who pays homage, and we forget the
+master in the theme. We may say of Rubens's art, in a new sense, "C'est
+magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre." The greatest art is not
+magnificent, but it is war, desperate and without trappings, a war in
+which victory comes through the confession of defeat.
+
+Man, if he tries to be a god in his art, makes a fool of himself. He
+becomes like God, he makes beauty like God, when he is too much aware of
+God to be aware of himself. Then only does he not set himself too easy a
+task, for then he does not make his theme so that he may accomplish it;
+it is forced upon him by his awareness of God, by his wonder and value
+for an excellence not his own. So in all the beauty of art there is a
+humility not only of conception, but also of execution, which is mere
+failure and ugliness to those who expect to find in art the beauty and
+finish of nature, who expect it to be born, not made. They are always
+disappointed by the greatest works of art, by their inadequacy and
+strain and labour. They look for a proof of what man can do and find a
+confession of what he cannot do; but that confession, made sincerely and
+passionately, is beauty. There is also a serenity in the beauty of art,
+but it is the serenity of self-surrender, not of self-satisfaction, of
+the saint, not of the lady of fashion. And all the accomplishment of
+great art, its infinite superiority in mere skill over the work of the
+merely skilful, comes from the incessant effort of the artist to do more
+than he can. By that he is trained; by that his work is distinguished
+from the mere exclamation of wonder. He is not content to applaud; he
+must also worship, and make his offerings in his worship; and they are
+the best he can do. It was not only the shepherds who came to the birth
+of Christ; the wise men came also and brought their treasures with them.
+And the art of mankind is the offering of its wise men, it is the
+adoration of the Magi, who are one with the simplest in their worship--
+
+                 Wise men, all ways of knowledge past,
+                 To the Shepherd's wonder come at last.
+
+But they do not lose their wisdom in their wonder. When it passes into
+wonder, when all the knowledge and skill and passion of mankind are
+poured into the acknowledgment of something greater than themselves,
+then that acknowledgment is art, and it has a beauty which may be envied
+by the natural beauty of God Himself.
+
+
+
+
+                           Leonardo da Vinci
+
+
+Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous men in history--as a man
+more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart--because
+posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great
+artists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but what
+Leonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from what
+he is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; we cannot
+think of him as a mere individual, eating and drinking, living and
+competing, on equal terms with other men. We see him magnified by his
+own legend from the first, with people standing aside to watch and
+whisper as he passed through the streets of Florence or Milan. "There he
+goes to paint the Last Supper," they said to each other; and we think of
+it as already the most famous picture in the world before it was begun.
+Every one knew that he had the most famous picture in his brain, that he
+was born to paint it, to initiate the High Renaissance; from Giotto
+onwards all the painters had been preparing for that, Florence herself
+had been preparing for it. It makes no difference that for centuries it
+has been a shadow on the wall; it is still the most famous painting in
+the world because it is the masterpiece of Leonardo. There was a fate
+against the survival of his masterpieces, but he has survived them and
+they are remembered because of him. We accept him for himself, like the
+people of his own time, who, when he said he could perform
+impossibilities, believed him. To them he meant the new age which could
+do anything, and still to us he means the infinite capacities of man. He
+is the Adam awakened whom Michelangelo only painted; and, if he
+accomplished but little, we believe in him, as in mankind, for his
+promise. If he did not fulfil it, neither has mankind; but he believed
+that all things could be done and lived a great life in that faith.
+
+Another Florentine almost equals him in renown. Men watched and
+whispered when Dante passed through the streets of Florence; but Dante
+lives in his achievement, Leonardo in himself. Dante means to us an
+individual soul quivering through a system, a creed, inherited from the
+past. Leonardo is a spirit unstraitened; not consenting to any past nor
+rebelling against it, but newborn with a newborn universe around it,
+seeing it without memories or superstitions, without inherited fears or
+pieties, yet without impiety or irreverence. He is not an iconoclast,
+since for him there are no images to be broken; whatever he sees is not
+an image but itself, to be accepted or rejected by himself; what he
+would do he does without the help or hindrance of tradition. In art and
+in science he means the same thing, not a rebirth of any past, as the
+word Renaissance seems to imply, but freedom from all the past, life
+utterly in the present. He is concerned not with what has been thought,
+or said, or done, but with his own immediate relation to all things,
+with what he sees and feels and discovers. Authority is nothing to him,
+whether of Galen or of St. Thomas, of Greek or medi�val art. In science
+he looks at the fact, in art at the object; nor will he allow either to
+be hidden from him by the achievements of the dead. Giotto had struck
+the first blow for freedom when he allowed the theme to dictate the
+picture; Leonardo allowed the object to dictate the drawing. To him the
+fact itself is sacred, and man fulfils himself in his own immediate
+relation to fact.
+
+All those who react and rebel against the Renaissance have an easy case
+against its great representative. What did he do in thought compared
+with St. Thomas, or in art compared with the builders of Chartres or
+Bourges? He filled notebooks with sketches and conjectures; he modelled
+a statue that was never cast; he painted a fresco on a wall, and with a
+medium so unsuited to fresco that it was a ruin in a few years. Even in
+his own day there was a doubt about him; it is expressed in the young
+Michelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not cast the statue he had
+modelled. Michelangelo was one of those who see in life always the great
+task to be performed and who judge a man by his performance; to him
+Leonardo was a dilettante, a talker; he made monuments, but Leonardo
+remains his own monument, a prophecy of what man shall be when he comes
+into his kingdom. With him, we must confess, it is more promise than
+performance; he could paint "The Last Supper" because it means the
+future; he could never, in good faith, have painted "The Last Judgment,"
+for that means a judgment on the past, and to him the past is nothing;
+to him man, in the future, is the judge, master, enjoyer of his own
+fate. Compared with his, Michelangelo's mind was still medi�val, his
+reproach the reproach of one who cares for doing more than for being,
+and certainly Michelangelo did a thousand times more; but from his own
+day to ours the world has not judged Leonardo by his achievement. As
+Johnson had his Boswell so he has had his legend; he means to us not
+books or pictures, but himself. In his own day kings bid for him as if
+he were a work of art; and he died magnificently in France, making
+nothing but foretelling a race of men not yet fulfilled.
+
+Before Francis Bacon, before Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied not
+merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who is
+to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in
+all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary
+hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For
+his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he
+initiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from his
+inheritance. It seems strange to us that Leonardo sang hymns to
+causation as if to God. In its will was his peace and his freedom.
+
+     O marvellous necessity, thou with supreme reason constrainest
+     all efforts to be the direct result of their causes, and by a
+     supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by
+     the shortest possible process.
+
+     Who would believe that so small a space could contain the
+     images of all the universe? O mighty process, what talent can
+     avail to penetrate a nature such as thine? What tongue will it
+     be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily none. This it is
+     that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine
+     things.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The sayings of Leonardo quoted in this article are taken
+from _Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks_, by E. M'Curdy. (Duckworth, 1906.)]
+
+To Leonardo causation meant the escape from caprice; it meant a secure
+relation between man and all things, in which man would gain power by
+knowledge, in which every increase of knowledge would reveal to him more
+and more of the supreme reason. There was no chain for him in cause and
+effect, no unthinking of the will of man. Rather by knowledge man would
+discover his own will and know that it was the universal will. So man
+must never be afraid of knowledge. "The eye is the window of the soul."
+Like Whitman he tells us always to look with the eye, and so to confound
+the wisdom of ages. There is in every man's vision the power of relating
+himself now and directly to reality by knowledge; and in knowing other
+things he knows himself. By knowledge man changes what seemed to be a
+compulsion into a harmony; he gives up his own caprice for the universal
+will.
+
+That is the religion of Leonardo, in art as in science. For him the
+artist also must relate himself directly to the visible world, in which
+is the only inspiration; to accept any formula is to see with dead men's
+eyes. That has been said again and again by artists, but not with
+Leonardo's mystical and philosophical conviction. He knew that it is
+vain to study Nature unless she is to you a goddess or a god; you can
+learn nothing from reality unless you adore it, and in adoring it he
+found his freedom. How different is this doctrine from that with which,
+after centuries of scientific advance, we intimidate ourselves. We are
+threatened by a creed far more enslaving than that of the Middle Ages.
+If the Middle Ages turned to the past to learn what they were to think
+or to do, we turn to the past to learn what we are. They may have feared
+the new; but we say that there is no new, nothing but some combination
+or variation of the old. Causation is to us a chain that binds us to the
+past, but to Leonardo it was freedom; and so he prophesies a freedom
+that we may attain to not by denying facts or making myths, but by
+discovering what he hinted--that causation itself is not compulsion but
+will, and our will if, by knowledge, we make it ours.
+
+No one before him had been so much in love with reality, whatever it may
+be. He was called a sceptic, but it was only that he preferred reality
+itself to any tales about it; and his religion, his worship, was the
+search for the very fact. This, because he was both artist and man of
+science, he carried further than anyone else, pursuing it with all his
+faculties. In his drawings there is the beauty not of his character, but
+of the character of what he draws; he does not make a design, but finds
+it. That beauty proves him a Florentine--D�rer himself falls short of
+it--but it is the beauty of the thing itself, discovered and insisted
+upon with the passion of a lover. He draws animals, trees, flowers, as
+Correggio draws Antiope or Io; and it is only in his drawings now that
+he speaks clearly to us. The "Mona Lisa" is well enough, but another
+hand might have executed the painting of it. It owes its popular fame to
+the smile about which it is so easy to write finely; but in the drawings
+we see the experiencing passion of Leonardo himself, we see him
+feeling, as in the notebooks we see him thinking. There is the eagerness
+of discovery at which so often he stopped short, turning away from a
+task to further discovery, living always in the moment, taking no
+thought either for the morrow or for yesterday, unable to attend to any
+business, even the business of the artist, seeing life not as a struggle
+or a duty, but as an adventure of all the senses and all the faculties.
+He is, even with his pencil, the greatest talker in the world, but
+without egotism, talking always of what he sees, satisfying himself not
+with the common appetites and passions of men, but with his one supreme
+passion for reality. If Michelangelo thought him a dilettante, there
+must have been in his taunt some envy of Leonardo's freedom.
+
+Yet once at least Leonardo did achieve, and something we should never
+have expected from his drawings. "The Last Supper" is but a shadow on
+the wall, yet still we can see its greatness, which is the greatness of
+pure design, of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesa. Goethe and
+others have found all kinds of psychological subtleties in it, meanings
+in every gesture; but what we see now is only space, grandeur, a supreme
+moment expressed in the relation of all the forms. The pure music of
+the painting remains when the drama is almost obliterated; and it
+proves that Leonardo, when he chose, could withdraw himself from the
+delight of hand-to-mouth experience into a vision of his own, that he
+had the reserve and the creative power of the earlier masters and of
+that austere, laborious youth who taunted him. If it were not for "The
+Last Supper" we might doubt whether he could go further in art than the
+vivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The Last Supper" tells us how great his
+passion for reality must have been, since it could distract him from the
+making of such masterpieces.
+
+That passion for reality itself made him cold to other passions. We know
+Michelangelo and Beethoven as men in some respects very like other men.
+They were anxious, fretful, full of affections and grievances, and much
+concerned with their relations. Leonardo is like Melchizedek, not only
+by the accident of birth, for he was a natural son, but by choice. He
+never married, he never had a home; there is no evidence that he was
+ever tied to any man or woman by his affections; yet it would be stupid
+to call him cold, for his one grand passion absorbed him. Monks
+suspected him, but in his heart he was celibate like the great monkish
+saints, celibate not by vows but by preoccupation. It is clear that
+from youth to age life had no cumulative power over him; as we should
+say in our prosaic language, he never settled down, for he let things
+happen to him and valued the very happening. He was always like a
+strange, wonderful creature from another planet, taking notes with
+unstaled delight but never losing his heart to any particular. Sex
+itself seems hardly to exist for him, or at least for his mind. Often
+the people in his drawings are of no sex. Rembrandt draws every one,
+Leonardo no one, as if he were his own relation. Women and youths were
+as much a subject of his impassioned curiosity as flowers, and no more.
+He is always the spectator, but a spectator who can exercise every
+faculty of the human mind and every passion in contemplation; he is the
+nearest that any man has ever come to Aristotle's Supreme Being.
+
+But we must not suppose that he went solemnly through life living up to
+his own story, that he was mysterious in manner or in any respect like a
+charlatan. Rather, he lived always in the moment and overcame mankind by
+his spontaneity. He had the charm of the real man of genius, not the
+reserve of the false one. The famous statement of what he could do,
+which he made to Ludovico Sforza, is not a mere boast but an expression
+of his eagerness to do it. These engines of war were splendid toys to
+him, and all his life he enjoyed making toys and seeing men wonder at
+them. His delight was to do things for the first time like a child, and
+then not to do them again. Again and again he cries out against
+authority and in favour of discovery. "Whoever in discussion adduces
+authority," he says, "uses not intellect but rather memory"; and,
+anticipating Milton, he observes that all our knowledge originates in
+opinions. Perhaps some one had rebuked him for having too many opinions.
+We can be sure that he chafed against dull, cautious, safe men who
+wished for results. He himself cared nothing for them; it was enough for
+him to know what might be done, without doing it. He was so sure of his
+insight that he did not care to put it to the test of action; that was
+for slower men, whether artists or men of science. His notebooks were
+enough for him.
+
+In spite of the notebooks and the sketches, we know less about the man
+Leonardo than about the man Shakespeare. Here and there he makes a
+remark with some personal conviction or experience in it. "Intellectual
+passion," he says, "drives out sensuality." In him it had driven out or
+sublimated all the sensual part of character. We cannot touch or see or
+hear him in anything he says or draws. The passion is there, but it is
+too much concerned with universals to be of like nature with our own
+passions. He seems to be speaking to himself as if he had forgotten the
+whole audience of mankind, but in what he says he ignores the personal
+part of himself; he is most passionate when most impersonal. "To the
+ambitious, whom neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world
+suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is
+squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of
+the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we know
+that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty of
+the world, were enough for him without ambition, without even further
+affections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even achievement,
+to follow them; and he left all those not out of coldness, or fear, or
+idleness, but because his own passion drew him away. No cold man could
+have said, "Where there is most power of feeling, there of martyrs is
+the greatest martyr." It is difficult for us northerners to understand
+the intellectual passion of the South, to see even that it is passion;
+most difficult of all for us to see that in men like Leonardo the
+passion for beauty itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism, our
+sense of exile, can never find that identity which he found between
+beauty and reality. "This benign nature so provides that all over the
+world you find something to imitate." To us imitation means prose, to
+him it meant poetry; science itself meant poetry, and illusion was the
+only ugliness. "Nature never breaks her own law." It is we who try to
+find freedom in lawlessness, which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion.
+"Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it should praise the great
+works of God, it offends against His divinity." There is Leonardo's
+religion; and if still it is too cold for us, it is because we have not
+his pure spiritual fire in ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+                          The Pompadour in Art
+
+
+It is an important fact in the history of the arts for the last century
+or more that in England and America, if not elsewhere, the chief
+interest in all the arts, including literature, has been taken by women
+rather than by men. In the great ages of art it was not so. Women, so
+far as we can tell, had little to do with the art of Greece in the fifth
+century or with the art of the Middle Ages. There were female patrons of
+art at the Renaissance, but they were exceptions subject to the
+prevailing masculine taste. Art was and remained a proper interest of
+men up to the eighteenth century. Women first began to control it and to
+affect its character at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV. But in
+the nineteenth century men began to think they were too busy to concern
+themselves with the arts. Men of power, when they were not working,
+needed to take exercise and left it to their wives to patronize the
+arts. And so the notion grew that art was a feminine concern, and even
+artists were pets for women. The great man, especially in America, liked
+his wife to have every luxury. The exquisite life she led was itself a
+proof of his success; and she was for him a living work of art, able to
+live so because of the abundance of his strength. In her, that strength
+passed into ornament and became beautiful; she was a friendly, faithful
+Delilah to his Samson, a Delilah who did not shear his locks. And so he
+came to think of art itself as being in its nature feminine if not
+effeminate, as a luxury and ornament of life, as everything, in fact,
+except a means of expression for himself and other men.
+
+This female control of art began, as I have said, at the mistress-ridden
+Court of Louis XV, and it has unfortunately kept the stamp of its
+origin. At that Court art, to suit the tastes of the Pompadour and the
+Du Barri, became consciously frivolous, became almost a part of the
+toilet. The artist was the slave of the mistress, and seems to have
+enjoyed his chains. In this slavery he did produce something charming;
+he did invest that narrow and artificial Heaven of the Court with some
+of the infinite beauty and music of a real Heaven. But out of this
+refined harem art there has sprung a harem art of the whole world which
+has infested the homes even of perfectly respectable ladies ever since.
+All over Europe the ideals of applied art have remained the ideals of
+the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have either
+women or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spread
+a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in
+their efforts at �sthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are
+not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes
+even in their clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. Of course, if
+this pretence were put into words and so presented to their
+consciousness, they would be indignant. It has for them no connexion
+with conduct; it is purely �sthetic, but art means to them make-believe,
+the make-believe that they live an entirely frivolous life of pleasure
+provided for them by masculine power and devotion.
+
+Yet these ladies know that they have not the revenues of the Pompadour;
+they must have their art, their make-believe, as cheap as possible; and
+it has been one of the triumphs of modern industry to provide them with
+cheap imitations of the luxury of the Pompadour. Hence the machine-made
+frivolities of the most respectable homes, the hair-brushes with backs
+of stamped silver, the scent-bottles of imitation cut-glass, the
+draperies with printed rose-buds on them, the general
+artificial-floweriness and flimsiness and superfluity of naughtiness of
+our domestic art. It expresses a feminine romance to which the male
+indulgently consents, as if he were really the voluptuous monarch whose
+mistress the female, �sthetically, pretends to be. In this world of
+�sthetic make-believe our homes are not respectable; they would scorn to
+be so, for to the romantic female mind, when it occupies itself with
+art, the improper is the artistic.
+
+But this needs a more precise demonstration. We wonder at our modern
+passion for superfluous ornament. We shall understand it only if we
+discover its origin. The King's mistress liked everything about her to
+be ornamented, because it was a point of honour with her to advertise
+the King's devotion to her in the costliness of all her surroundings. He
+loved her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation. She, like
+Cleopatra, was always proving the potency of her charms by melting
+pearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was hung with the trophies of
+her physical pre-eminence. In all the art which we call Louis Quinze
+there is this advertisement of the labour spent upon it. It proclaims
+that a vast deal of trouble has been taken in the making of it, and we
+can see the artist utterly subdued to this trouble, utterly the slave of
+the mistress's exorbitant whims. This advertisement of labour spent,
+without the reality, has been the mark of all popular domestic art ever
+since.
+
+The beautiful is the ornamented--namely, that which looks as if it had
+taken a great deal of trouble to make. The trouble now is taken by
+machinery, and so, with the cost, is minimized; and what it produces is
+ugliness, an ugliness which could not be mistaken for beauty but for the
+notion that it does express a desirable state of being in those who
+possess it. And this desirable state is the state of the King's
+mistress, of a siren who can have whatever she desires because of the
+potency of her charms. How otherwise can we explain the passion for
+superfluous machine-made ornament which makes our respectable homes so
+hideous? The machine simulates a trouble that has not been taken, and so
+gives proof of a voluptuous infatuation that does not exist. The
+hardworking mother of a family buys out of her scanty allowance a
+scent-bottle that looks as if it had been laboriously cut for a King's
+mistress, whereas really it has been moulded by machinery to keep up
+the delusion, unconsciously cherished by her, that she lives in a world
+of irresistible and unscrupulous feminine charm. And her husband endures
+indulgently all this superfluous ugliness because he, too, believes that
+it is the function of art to make the drawing-room of the mother of a
+family look like the boudoir of a siren.
+
+Most of this make-believe remains unconscious. We are all so used to it
+that we do not see in it the expression of the dying harem instinct in
+women. Yet it persists, even where the harem instinct would be
+passionately repudiated. It persists often in the dress of the most
+defiant suffragette, in outbreaks of incongruous frivolity, forlorn
+tawdry roses that still whisper memories of the Pompadour and her
+triumphant guilty splendour.
+
+But besides all this unconscious feminine influence upon art, there is
+the influence of women who care consciously for art; and it also has an
+enervating effect on the artist. For the female patron of art, just
+because there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to take a motherly
+interest in the artist. To her he is a delightful wayward child rather
+than a real man occupied with real things, like her husband or her
+father or her brother: not one who can earn money for her and fight for
+her and protect her, but rather one who needs to be protected and
+humoured in a world which cares so little for art. To her, with all her
+passion for art, it is something in its nature irrational, and, like a
+child, delightful because irrational. It is an escape from reality
+rather than a part of it. And so she will believe whatever the artist
+tells her because he is an artist, not because he is a man of sense; and
+she encourages him to be more of an artist than a man of sense. She
+encourages him to be extravagantly �sthetic, and enjoys all his
+extravagance as a diversion from the sound masculinity of her own
+mankind. There is room in her prosperous, easy world for these
+diversions from business, just as there is room for charity or, perhaps,
+religion. The world can afford artists as it can afford pets; as it can
+afford beautiful, cultivated women. And that also is the view of her
+husband, if he is good-natured. But to him, just because art and artists
+are the proper concern of his wife, they are even less serious than they
+are to her. She may persuade herself that she takes them quite
+seriously, but he pretends to do so only out of politeness, and as he
+would pretend to take her clothes seriously. For him the type of the
+artist is still the pianist who gives locks of his over-abundant hair to
+ladies. Even if the artist is a painter and cuts his hair and dresses
+like a man, he still belongs to the feminine world and excites himself
+about matters that do not concern men. Men can afford him, and so they
+tolerate him; but he is one of the expenses they would cut down if it
+were necessary to cut down expenses.
+
+Well, it is necessary to cut down expenses now; and yet in ages much
+sterner and poorer than our own art was the concern of men, and they
+afforded it because it was not to them a mere feminine luxury. They
+afforded the towering churches of the Middle Ages because they expressed
+the religious passion of all mankind; and have we nothing to express
+except a dying harem instinct and the motherliness of kind women to a
+neglected class? We ought to be grateful to this motherliness, which has
+kept art alive in an age of ignorance; but we should see that it is only
+a _pis-aller_, and women should see this as well as men. The female
+attitude towards art has been itself the result of a wrong relation
+between women and men, a relation half-animal, half-romantic, and
+therefore not quite real. This relation, even while it has ceased to
+exist more and more in fact, has still continued to express itself
+�sthetically; and in art it has become a mere obsolete nuisance. One may
+care nothing for art and yet long to be rid of the meaningless
+frivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as so
+much litter and trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we may
+purge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost rid of the
+manners of the King's mistress, and most women no longer try to appeal
+to men by their charming unreason. It is not merely that the appeal
+fails now; they themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect. But
+they still remain irrational in their tastes; or at least they have not
+learned that all this �sthetic irrationality misrepresents them, that it
+is forced upon them by tradesmen, that it is as inexpressive as a
+sentimental music-hall song sung by a gramophone. But now that men have
+given women the vote, and so proved that they take them seriously at
+last, they have the right to speak plainly on this matter. The feminine
+influence upon art has been bad. Let us admit that it has been the
+result of a bad masculine influence upon women, that it has been supreme
+because men have become philistine; but the fact remains that it has
+been bad. Art must be taken seriously if it is to be worth anything. It
+must be the expression of what is serious and real in the human mind.
+But all this feminine art has expressed, and has tried to glorify,
+something false and worthless. Therefore it has been ugly, and we are
+all sick of its ugliness. We look to women, now that they are equalled
+with men by an act of legal justice, to deliver us from it. They disown
+the Pompadour in fact; let them disown her in art.
+
+
+
+
+                           An Unpopular Master
+
+
+Nicholas Poussin is one of the great painters of the world; yet it is
+easier to give reasons for disliking him than for liking him. After his
+death there was a war of pamphlets about him; the one side, led by
+Lebrun, holding him up as a model for all painters to come, the other
+side, under de Piles, calling him a mere pedant compared with Rubens.
+Here is a passage from a poem against Poussin:--
+
+            Il s�avoit manier la r�gle et le compas,
+            Parloit de la lumi�re et ne l'entendoit pas;
+            Il estoit de l'antique un assez bon copiste,
+            Mais sans invention, et mauvais coloriste.
+            Il ne pouvait marcher que sur le pas d'autruy:
+            Le g�nie a manqu�, c'est un malheur pour luy.
+
+Now this is just what the criticism of yesterday said about him, the
+criticism of the eighties and nineties, when it was supposed that
+Velasquez had discovered the art of seeing, and with it the art of
+painting. It sounds plausible, but not a word of it is true. And yet it
+remains difficult to show why it is not true, to distinguish between the
+genius of Poussin and the pedantry of his imitators, to convince people
+that he was not a bad colourist, and that he did not imitate the
+antique.
+
+This difficulty is connected with the age in which he happened to live.
+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."
+
+Then, he says, the hunters and the workers drank from the artists'
+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
+�sthetic 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
+�sthetic activity, contains a truth of great value. But his �sthetic
+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 _Chim�ra 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 �sthetic 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.
+
+_Quem Deus vult perdere dementat prius._ That old tag puts a truth
+wrongly. God does not interfere to afflict the wilful man with madness,
+but he has never thrown himself open to the wisdom of God. His mind is
+like a machine that acts with increasing speed and fury because there is
+less and less material for it to act upon. One act leads to another in a
+blind chain of cause and effect; he does this merely because he has done
+that, and seems to be driven by fate on and on to his own ruin. So it
+was with Napoleon in his later years. He had lost the sense of any
+reality whatever except his own action; he saw the world as a passive
+object to be acted upon by himself. And that is how the Germans saw it
+two years ago. They could not understand that it was possible for the
+world to react against them. It was merely something that they were
+going to remake, to work their will upon. The war, at its beginning, was
+not to them a conflict between human beings; it was a process by which
+they would make of things what they willed. There was no reality except
+in themselves and their own will; for, in their worship of action, they
+had lost the sense of external reality, they had come to believe that
+there was nothing to learn from it except what a craftsman learns from
+his material by working in it. It is by making that he learns; and they
+thought that there was no learning except by making.
+
+But that is the mistake of the whole Western world, though we have none
+of us carried it so far as Germany. Other men are to us still men, they
+still have some reality to us; but we see external reality as a material
+for us to work in; we are to ourselves entirely active and not at all
+passive beings. Even among all the evil and sorrow of the war we still
+took a pride in the enormous power of our instruments of destruction, as
+if we were children playing with big, dangerous toys. But these toys are
+themselves the product of a society that must always be making and never
+thinking or feeling. They express the will for action that has ousted
+the will to experience; and all the changes which we work on the face of
+the earth express that will too. We could not live in the cities we have
+made for ourselves if we thought that we had anything to learn from the
+beauty of the earth. They are for us merely places in which we learn to
+act, in which no one could learn to think or feel. Passive experience is
+impossible in them and they do not consider the possibility of it. So
+they express in every building, in every object, in the very clothes of
+their inhabitants, an utter poverty of passive experience. In what we
+make we give out no stored riches of the mind; we make only so that we
+may act, never so that we may express ourselves; and we have little art
+because our making is entirely wilful. Our attempts at art are
+themselves entirely wilful. We will have art, we say; and so we plaster
+our utilities with the ornaments of the past, as if we could get the
+richness of experience secondhand from our ancestors. And in the same
+way we are always finding for our blind activities moral motives, those
+motives which are real only when they spring out of right experience. We
+rationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornament
+to blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our
+actions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us an
+incessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it is
+entirely wilful. The thinker makes theories to justify what is done; he,
+too, sees all life in terms of action, he is the parasite of action. For
+a German professor the whole process of history was but a prelude to the
+wilfulness of Germany; he could not experience the past except in terms
+of what Germany willed to do; and the aim of his theorizing was to
+remove all scrupulous impediments to the action of Germany which she may
+have inherited from the past. Think so that you may be stronger to do
+what you wish to do; that is the modern notion of thought, and that is
+the reason why we throw up theories so easily; for thinking of this kind
+needs no experience, it needs merely an activity of the mind, the
+activity which collects facts and does with them what it will. And these
+theories are eagerly accepted so long as the impulse lasts which they
+justify. When that is spent they are forgotten, and new theories take
+their place to justify fresh impulses. And so it is with the incessant
+new movements in art. Art now is conceived entirely as action. The
+artist is as wilful as the Germanic hero; the will to make excludes in
+him the will to experience. The painter cannot look at the visible world
+without considering at once what kind of picture he will make of it. It
+is to him mere passive material for his artistic will, not an
+independent reality to enrich his mind so that it will give out its
+riches in the form of art. And as he is always willing to make pictures
+so he must will the kind of pictures he will make, as the Germans willed
+the kind of world they would make. But this willing of his is a kind of
+theorizing to justify his own action; and it changes incessantly because
+he never can be satisfied with his own poverty of experience. But still
+he will do anything rather than try to enrich that poverty.
+
+And that is the secret of all our restlessness, the restlessness that
+forced the Germans into the folly and crime of war. We are always
+dissatisfied with our poverty of experience; and we try to get rid of
+our dissatisfaction in more blind activity, throwing up new theories all
+the while as reasons why we should act. We fidget about the earth as if
+we were children, that could not read, left in a library; and, like
+them, we do mischief. And that is just what we are: children that have
+not learnt to read let loose upon the library of the universe; and all
+that we can do is to pull the books about and play games with them and
+scribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth is defaced with our
+meaningless scribbling, and we tell ourselves that it means something
+because we want to scribble. Or sometimes we tell ourselves that there
+is no meaning in anything, no more in the books than in our scribble.
+
+The only remedy is that we should learn to read; and for this we need
+above all things humility; not merely the personal humility of a man who
+knows that other men excel him, but a generic humility which
+acknowledges in the universe a greater wisdom, power, righteousness than
+his own. That is formally acknowledged by our religion, but it is not
+practically acknowledged in our way of life, in our conduct or our
+thought. We think and feel and behave as if we were the best and wisest
+creatures in the universe, as if it existed only for us to make use of
+it; and in so far as we learn from it at all, we learn only to make use
+of it. That is our idea of knowledge and wisdom; more and more it is our
+idea of science; and as for philosophy, we pay no heed to it because, in
+its nature, it is not concerned with making use of things. In every way
+we betray the fact that we cannot listen humbly, because we do not
+believe there is anything to listen to. For a few of the devout God
+spoke long ago, but He is not speaking now. "The kings of modern thought
+are dumb," said Matthew Arnold; but that is because everything outside
+the mind of man is dumb; all must be dumb to those who will not listen.
+If we assume that there, is no intelligence anywhere but in ourselves,
+we shall find none anywhere else. There will be no meaning for us in
+anything but our own actions; and they will become more and more
+meaningless to us as they become more and more wilful, until at last we
+shall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage, or prisoners on a
+universal treadmill. Years ago the war must have seemed a meaningless
+treadmill to the Germans, but they cannot escape from its consequences;
+they have done and they must suffer. But will they learn from their
+sufferings, shall we all learn, that doing is not everything? Are we
+humbled enough to listen to the wisdom of the ages, which tells us that
+we can be wise only if we listen for a wisdom that is not ours?
+
+
+
+
+                           "The Magic Flute"
+
+
+When _The Magic Flute_ was produced by the already dying Mozart it had
+little success. At the first performance, it is said, when the applause
+was faint, the leader of the orchestra stole up to Mozart, who was
+conducting, and kissed his hand; and Mozart stroked him on the head. We
+may guess that the leader knew what the music meant and that Mozart knew
+that he knew. Neither could put it into words and it is not put into
+words in the libretto. But the libretto need not be an obstruction to
+the meaning of the music if only the audience will not ask themselves
+what the libretto means. After Mozart's death the opera was successful,
+no doubt because the audience had given up asking what the libretto
+meant and had learnt something of the meaning of the music.
+
+There are worse librettos--librettos which have some clear unmusical
+meaning of their own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate to the
+meaning of the music, if it has any. This libretto, apart from the
+music, is so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence, that one
+can easily pass through it to the music. The author, Schickaneder, was
+Mozart's friend, and he had wit enough to understand the mood of Mozart.
+That mood does express itself in the plot and the incidents of the
+libretto, although in them it is empty of value or passion.
+Schickaneder, in fact, constructed a mere diagram to which Mozart gave
+life. The life is all in the music, but the diagram has its use, in that
+it supplies a shape, which we recognize, to the life of the music. The
+characters live in the music, but in the words they tell us something
+about themselves which enables us to understand their musical speech
+better. Papageno tells us that he is a bird-catcher and a child of
+nature. The words are labels, but through them we pass more quickly to
+an understanding of his song. Only we shall miss that understanding if
+we try to reach it through the words, if we look for the story of the
+opera in them. In the words the events of the opera have no connexion
+with each other. There is no reason why one should follow another. The
+logic of it is all in the music, for the music creates a world in which
+events happen naturally, in which one tune springs out of another, or
+conflicts with it, like the forces of nature or the thoughts and actions
+of man. This world is the universe as Mozart sees it; and the whole
+opera is an expression of his peculiar faith. It is therefore a
+religious work, though free from that meaningless and timid solemnity
+which we associate with religion. Mozart, in this world, was like an
+angel who could not but laugh, though without any malice, at all the
+bitter earnestness of mankind. Even the wicked were only absurd to him;
+they were naughty children whom, if one had the spell, one could enchant
+into goodness. And in _The Magic Flute_ the spell works. It works in the
+flute itself and in Papageno's lyre when the wicked negro Monostatos
+threatens him and Tamino with his ugly attendants. Papageno has only to
+play a beautiful childish tune on his lyre and the attendants all march
+backwards to an absurd goose-step in time with it. They are played off
+the stage; and the music convinces one that they must yield to it. So,
+we feel if we had had the music, we could have made the Prussians march
+their goose-step back to Potsdam; so we could play all solemn perversity
+off the stage of life. If we had the music--but there is solemn
+perversity in us too; by reason of which we can hardly listen to the
+music, much less play it, hardly listen to it or understand it even
+when Mozart makes it for us. For he had the secret of it; he was a
+philosopher who spoke in music and so simply that the world missed his
+wisdom and thought that he was just a beggar playing tunes in the
+street. A generation ago he was commonly said to be too tuney, as you
+might say that a flower was too flowery. People would no more consider
+him than they would consider the lilies of the field. They preferred
+Wagner in all his glory.
+
+Even now you can enjoy _The Magic Flute_ as a more than usually absurd
+musical comedy with easy, old-fashioned tunes. You can enjoy it anyway,
+if you are not solemn about it, as you can enjoy _Hamlet_ for a bloody
+melodrama. But, like _Hamlet_, it has depths and depths of meaning
+beyond our full comprehension. Papageno is a pantomime figure, but he is
+also one of the greatest figures in the drama of the world. He is
+everyman, like Hamlet, if only we had the wit to recognize ourselves in
+him. Or rather he is that element in us which we all like and despise in
+others, but which we will never for one moment confess to in
+ourselves--the coward, the boaster, the liar, but the child of nature.
+He, because he knows himself for all of these, can find his home in
+Sarostro's paradise. He does not want Sarostro's high wisdom; what he
+does want is a Papagena, an Eve, a child of nature like himself; and she
+is given to him. He has the wit to recognize his mate, almost a bird
+like himself, and to them Mozart gives their bird-duet, so that, when
+they sing it, we feel that we might all sing it together. It is not
+above our capacity of understanding or delight. The angel has learnt our
+earthly tongue, but transformed it so that he makes a heaven of the
+earth, a heaven that is not too high or difficult for us, a wild-wood
+heaven, half-absurd, in which we can laugh as well as sing, and in which
+the angels will laugh at us and with us, laugh our silly sorrows into
+joy.
+
+There is Mozart himself in Papageno, the faun domesticated and sweetened
+by centuries of Christian experience, yet still a faun and always ready
+to play a trick on human solemnity; and in this paradise which Mozart
+makes for us the faun has his place and a beauty not incongruous with
+it, like the imps and gargoyles of a Gothic church. At any moment the
+music will turn from sublimity into fun, and in a moment it can turn
+back to sublimity; and always the change seems natural. It is like a
+great cathedral with High Mass and children playing hide-and-seek behind
+the pillars; and the Mass would not be itself without the children. That
+is the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just because
+in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of
+Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything
+in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but
+it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with
+the twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seems
+to be not religion, but merely beauty, as real saints seem to be not
+good, but merely charming. And there are people to whom his beauty does
+not seem to be art, because it is just beauty; they think that he had
+the trick of it and could turn it on as he chose; they prefer the
+creaking of effort and egotism. His gifts are so purely gifts and so
+lavish that they seem to be cheap; and _The Magic Flute_ is an absurdity
+which he wrote in a hurry to please the crowd.
+
+We can hardly expect to see a satisfying performance of it on the stage
+of to-day, but we must be grateful for any performance, for the life of
+the music is in it. One can see from it what _The Magic Flute_ might be.
+The music is so sung, so played that it does transfigure the peculiar
+theatrical hideousness of our time. Tamino and Panina may look like
+figures out of an Academy picture, as heroes and heroines of opera
+always do. They may wear clothes that belong to no world of reality or
+art, clothes that suggest the posed and dressed-up model. But the music
+mitigates even these, and it helps every one to act, or rather to forget
+what they have learnt about acting. It evidently brings happiness and
+concord to those who sing it, so that they seem to be taking part in a
+religious act rather than in an act of the theatre. One feels this most
+in the concerted music, when the same wind from paradise seems to be
+blowing through all the singers and they move to it like flowers, in
+spite of their absurd clothes.
+
+But what is needed for a satisfying performance is a world congruous to
+the eye as well as to the ear; and for this we need a break with all our
+theatrical conventions. Sarostro, for instance, lives among Egyptian
+scenery--very likely the architecture of his temple was Egyptian at the
+first performance--but, for all that, this Egyptian world does not suit
+the music, and to us it suggests the miracles of the Egyptian Hall. But
+there is one world which would perfectly suit the music, a world in
+which it could pass naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in which all
+the figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is the
+Chinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there is
+something fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a
+mixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye what
+Mozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be a
+saint; only in that world, which ranges from the willow-pattern plate to
+the Rishi in his mystical ecstasy in the wilderness, could the soul of
+Mozart, with its laughter and its wisdom, be at home. That too is the
+world in which flowers and all animals are of equal import with mankind;
+it is the world of dragons in which the serpent of the first act would
+not seem to be made of pasteboard, and in which all the magic would not
+seem to be mere conjuring. In that world one might have beautiful
+landscapes and beautiful figures to suit them. There Sarostro would not
+be a stage magician, but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to him
+would be only the change from Ming to Sung, which would seem no change
+at all. Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic flute, the world
+where silver bells hang on every flowering tree and the thickets are
+full of enchanted nightingales. It is the world of imps and monsters,
+and yet of impassioned contemplation, where the sage sits in a moonlit
+pavilion and smiles like a lover, and where the lovers smile like sages;
+where everything is to the eye what the music of Mozart is to the ear.
+
+In the Chinese world we could be rid of all the drawling erotics of the
+modern theatre, we could give up the orchid for the lotus and the heavy
+egotism of Europe for the self-forgetful gaiety of the East. It may be
+only an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality, but it is one
+which the art of China makes real to us and with which we are familiar
+in that art; and there is a smiling wisdom in it, there is a gaiety
+which comes from conquest rather than refusal of reality, just like the
+gaiety and wisdom of Mozart's music. He knew sorrow well, but would not
+luxuriate in it; he took the beauty of the universe more seriously than
+himself. To him wickedness was a matter of imps and monsters rather than
+of villains, and of imps and monsters that could be exorcized by music.
+He was the Orpheus of the world who might tame the beast in all of us if
+we would listen to him, the wandering minstrel whom the world left to
+play out in the street. And yet his ultimate seriousness and the last
+secret of his beauty is pity, not for himself and his own little
+troubles, but for the whole bitter earnestness of mortal children. And
+in this pity he seems not to weep for us, still less for himself, but to
+tell us to dry our tears and be good, and listen to his magic flute.
+That is what he would have told the Prussians, after he had set them
+marching the goose-step backwards. Even they would not be the villains
+of a tragedy for him, but only beasts to be tamed with his music until
+they should be fit to sing their own bass part in the last chorus of
+reconciliation. And this pity of his sounds all through _The Magic
+Flute_ and gives to its beauty a thrill and a wonder far beyond what any
+fleshly passion can give. Sarostro is a priest, not a magician, because
+there is in him the lovely wisdom of pity, because he has a place in his
+paradise for Papageno, the child of nature, where he shall be made happy
+with his mate Papagena. There is a moment when Papageno is about to hang
+himself because there is no one to love him; he will hang himself in
+Sarostro's lonely paradise. But there is a sly laughter in the music
+which tells us that he will be interrupted with the rope round his neck.
+And so he is, and Papagena is given to him, and the paradise is no
+longer lonely; and the two sing their part in the chorus of
+reconciliation at the end. And we are sure that the Queen of Night, and
+the ugly negro and all his goose-stepping attendants, are not punished.
+They have been naughty for no reason that anyone can discover, just like
+Prussians and other human beings; and now the magic flute triumphs over
+their naughtiness, and the silver bells ring from every tree and the
+enchanted nightingales sing in all the thickets, and the sages and the
+lovers smile like children; and the laughter passes naturally into the
+divine beauty of Mozart's religion, which is solemn because laughter and
+pity are reconciled in it, not rejected as profane.
+
+
+
+
+                          Process or Person?
+
+
+Nearly all war pictures in the past have been merely pictures that
+happened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but
+pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as
+well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his
+treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt
+dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes
+about the manner in which fighting men and horses ought to be
+represented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things.
+Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the
+nude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment."
+Titian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment
+of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle
+scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes
+or his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none of
+these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of
+war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who
+take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently
+because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity
+because of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battle
+scene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a _genre_
+picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patriotic
+appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battle
+pictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is a
+public that likes them.
+
+In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of war
+as an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the very
+method of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; but
+in these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for his
+cubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that in
+war man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is a
+process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a
+great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and
+is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp
+distinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process better
+than any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being to
+express the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of all
+things, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; and
+machines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed by
+our own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future in
+which machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it is
+not so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves have
+lost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seem
+more and more like us, but that we seem more and more like the machines.
+Everywhere we see processes to which we are subject and of which our
+humanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured the
+delusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes. Now
+that delusion is fading away from us; and it fades away most of all in
+war, where all humanity is evidently dominated by the struggle for life,
+and is but a part of it, as raindrops are part of a storm.
+
+It is this sense of tyrannous process that Mr. Nevinson expresses in
+his battle pictures, with, we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentment
+against it. His pictures look like a visible _reductio ad absurdum_ of
+it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in
+modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least,
+is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on
+all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He has
+allowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which has
+no purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universe
+seems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as well
+be called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle
+between two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of the
+machines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no souls
+in them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that they
+collide and destroy each other like masses of matter in space. Nothing
+can be said of them except that they obey certain laws; we call their
+obedience discipline, but it is only the discipline of things subject to
+a process.
+
+Now it is the sense of process, as the ultimate reality in the universe,
+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 _Chim�ra 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 �sthetic
+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.
+
+Now professionalism is the result of a false analogy between mechanical
+invention and the higher activities. It happens whenever the medium is
+regarded merely as material to be manipulated, when the artist thinks
+that he can learn to fly by mastering some other artist's machine, when
+his art is to him a matter of invention gradually perfected and
+necessarily progressing through the advance of knowledge and skill. One
+often finds this false analogy in books about the history of the arts,
+especially of painting and music. It is assumed, for instance, that
+Italian painting progressed mechanically from Giotto to Titian, that
+Titian had a greater power of expression than Giotto because he had
+command of a number of inventions in anatomy and perspective and the
+like that were unknown to Giotto. So we have histories of the
+development of the symphony, in which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven are
+treated as if they were mechanical inventors each profiting by the
+discoveries of his predecessors. Beethoven was the greatest of the three
+because he had the luck to be born last, and Beethoven's earliest
+symphonies are necessarily better than Mozart's latest because they were
+composed later. But in such histories there always comes a point at
+which artists cease to profit by the inventions of their predecessors.
+After Michelangelo, perhaps after Beethoven, is the decadence. Then
+suddenly there is talk of inspiration, or the lack of it. Mere
+imitators appear, and the historian who reviles them does not see that
+they have only practised, and refuted, his theory of art. They also have
+had the luck to be born later; but it has been bad luck, not good, for
+them, because to them their art has been all a matter of mechanical
+invention, of professionalism.
+
+The worst of it is that the greatest artists are apt themselves to fall
+in love with their own inventions, not to see that they are mechanical
+inventions because they themselves have discovered them. Michelangelo in
+his "Last Judgment" is very professional; Titian was professional
+through all his middle age; Tintoret was professional whenever he was
+bored with his work, which happened often; Shakespeare, whenever he was
+lazy, which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin to see, could be
+very earnestly professional; and as for Milton--consider this end of the
+last speech of Manoah, in _Samson Agonistes_, where we expect a simple
+cadence:--
+
+               The virgins also shall on feastful days
+               Visit his tomb with flowers, only bewailing
+               His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,
+               From whence captivity and loss of eyes
+
+Milton was tempted into the jargon of these last two lines, which are
+like a bad translation of a Greek play, by professionalism. He was
+trying to make his poetry as much unlike ordinary speech as he could; he
+was for the moment a slave to a tradition, and none the less a slave
+because it was the tradition of his own past.
+
+Professionalism is a device for making expression easy; and it is one
+used by the greatest artists sometimes because their business is to be
+always expressing themselves, and even they have not always something to
+express. But expression is so difficult, even for those who have
+something to express, that they must be always practising it if they are
+ever to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance, was a professed enemy
+of professionalism in poetry; yet he, too, was for ever writing verses.
+It was a hobby with him as well as an art; and his professionalism was
+merely less accomplished than that of Milton or Spenser:--
+
+                  Fair Ellen Irwin, when she sate
+                  Upon the Braes of Kirtle,
+                  Was lovely as a Grecian maid
+                  Adorned with wreaths of myrtle.
+
+Why adorned with wreaths of myrtle? Wordsworth himself tells us. His
+subject had already been treated in Scotch poems "in simple ballad
+strain," so, he says, "at the outset I threw out a classical image to
+prepare the reader for the style in which I meant to treat the story,
+and so to preclude all comparison." No one, whose object was just to
+tell the story, would compare Ellen with a Grecian maid and her wreaths
+of myrtle; but Wordsworth must do so to show us how he means to tell it,
+and, as he forgets to mention, so that he may rhyme with Kirtle. That is
+all professionalism, all a device for making expression easy, practised
+by a great poet because at the moment he had nothing to express. But art
+is always difficult and cannot be made easy by this means. We need not
+take a malicious pleasure in such lapses of the great poet; but it is
+well to know when Homer nods, even though he uses all his craft to
+pretend that he is wide awake. Criticism may have a negative as well as
+a positive value. It may set us on our guard against professionalism
+even in the greatest artists, and most of all in them. For it is they
+who begin professionalism and, with the mere momentum of their vitality,
+make it attractive. Because they are great men and really accomplished,
+they can say nothing with a grand air; and these grand nothings of
+theirs allure us just because they are nothings and make no demands
+upon our intelligence. That is art indeed, we cry: and we intoxicate
+ourselves with it because it is merely art. "The quality of mercy is not
+strained" is far more popular than Lear's speech, "No, no, no! Come,
+let's away to prison," because it is professional rhetoric; it is what
+Shakespeare could write at any moment, whereas the speech of Lear is
+what Lear said at one particular moment. The contrast between the two is
+the contrast well put in the epigram about Barry and Garrick in their
+renderings of King Lear:--
+
+      A king, aye, every inch a king, such Barry doth appear.
+      But Garrick's quite another thing; he's every inch King Lear.
+
+We admire the great artist when he is every inch a king more than when
+he has lost his kingship in his passion.
+
+He no doubt knows the difference well enough. But he wishes to do
+everything well, he has a natural human delight in his own
+accomplishment; and a job to finish. Shakespeare, Michelangelo,
+Beethoven were not slaves to their own professionalism; no doubt they
+could laugh at it themselves. But there is always a danger that we shall
+be enslaved by it; and it is the business of criticism to free us from
+that slavery, to make us aware of this last infirmity of great artists.
+We are on our guard easily enough against a professionalism that is out
+of fashion. The Wagnerian of a generation ago could sneer at the
+professionalism of Mozart; but the professionalism of Wagner seemed to
+him to be inspiration made constant and certain by a new musical
+invention. We know now only too well, from Wagner's imitators, that he
+did not invent a new method of tapping inspiration; we ought to know
+that no one can do that. The more complete the method the more tiresome
+it becomes, even as practised by the inventor.
+
+Decadence in art is always caused by professionalism, which makes the
+technique of art too difficult, and so destroys the artist's energy and
+joy in his practice of it. Teachers of the arts are always inclined to
+insist on their difficulty and to set hard tasks to their pupils for the
+sake of their hardness; and often the pupil stays too long learning
+until he thinks that anything which is difficult to do must therefore be
+worth doing. This notion also overawes the general public so that they
+value what looks to them difficult; but in art that which seems
+difficult to us fails with us, we are aware of the difficulty, not of
+the art. The greater the work of art the easier it seems to us. We feel
+that we could have done it ourselves if only we had had the luck to hit
+upon that way of doing it; indeed, where our �sthetic experience of it
+is complete, we feel as if we were doing it ourselves; our minds jump
+with the artist's mind; we are for the moment the artist himself in his
+very act of creation. But we are always apt to undervalue this true and
+complete �sthetic experience, because it seems so easy and simple, and
+we mistake for it a painful sense of the artist's skill, of his
+professional accomplishment. So we demand of artists, that they shall
+impress us with their accomplishment; we have not had our money's worth
+unless we feel that we could not possibly do ourselves what they have
+done. No doubt, when the _Songs of Innocence_ were first published,
+anyone who did happen to read them thought them doggerel. Blake in a
+moment had freed himself from all the professionalism of the followers
+of Pope, and even now they make poetry seem an easy art to us, until we
+try to write songs of innocence ourselves:--
+
+          When the voices of children are heard on the green,
+              And laughing is heard on the hill,
+          My heart is at rest within my breast,
+              And everything else is still.
+
+          "Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
+              And the dews of night arise;
+          Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,
+              Till the morning appears in the skies."
+
+We call it artless, with still a hint of depreciation in the word, or at
+least of wonder that we should be so moved by such simple means. It is a
+kind of cottage-poetry, and has that beauty which in a cottage moves us
+more than all the art of palaces. But we never learn the lesson of that
+beauty because it seems to us so easily won; and so our arts are always
+threatened by the decadence of professionalism. But poetry in England
+has been a living art so long because it has had the power of freeing
+itself from professionalism and choosing the better path with Mary and
+with Ruth. The value of the Romantic movement lay, not in its escape to
+the wonders of the past, but in its escape from professionalism and all
+its self-imposed and easy difficulties. For it is much easier to write
+professional verses in any style than to write songs of innocence; and
+that is why professionalism in all the arts tempts all kinds of artists.
+Anyone can achieve it who has the mind. It is a substitute for
+expression, as mere duty is a substitute for virtue. But, as a
+forbidding sense of duty makes virtue itself seem unattractive, so
+professionalism destroys men's natural delight in the arts. Like the
+artist himself, his public becomes anxious, perverse, exacting; afraid
+lest it shall admire the wrong thing, because it has lost the immediate
+sense of the right thing. Just as it expects art to be difficult, so it
+expects its own pleasure in art to be difficult; and thus we have
+attained to our present notion about art which is like the Puritan
+notion about virtue, that it is what no human being could possibly enjoy
+by nature. And if we do enjoy it, "like a meadow gale in spring," it
+cannot be good art.
+
+But in painting as in poetry, all the new movements of value are escapes
+from professionalism; and they begin by shocking the public because they
+seem to make the art too easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work of
+Millais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne of Whistler. He said it was
+cockney impudence because it lacked the professionalism he expected.
+Artists and critics alike are always binding burdens on the arts; and
+they are always angry with the artist who cuts the burden off his back.
+They think he is merely shirking difficulties. But the difficulty of
+expression is so much greater than the self-imposed difficulties of
+mere professionalism that any man who is afraid of difficulties will try
+to be a professional rather than an artist.
+
+In art there is always humility, in professionalism pride. And it is
+this pride that makes art more ugly and tiresome than any other work of
+man. Nothing is stranger in human nature than the tyranny of boredom it
+will endure in the pursuit of art; and the more bored men are, the more
+they are convinced of artistic salvation. Our museums are cumbered with
+monstrous monuments of past professionalism; our bookshelves groan with
+them. Always we are trying to like things because they seem to us very
+well done; never do we dare to say to ourselves: It may be well done,
+but it were better if it were not done at all; and the artist is still
+to us a dog walking on his hind legs, a performer whose merit lies in
+the unnatural difficulty of his performance.
+
+
+
+
+                           Waste or Creation?
+
+
+The William Morris Celebration was not so irrelevant to these times as
+it may seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe to our society,
+and it has come. That commercial system of ours, which seems to so many
+part of the order of Nature, was to him as evil and unnatural as
+slavery. His quarrel with it was not political, but human; it was the
+quarrel not of the oppressed, for he was not the man to be oppressed in
+any society, but of the workman. He was sure that a society which
+encouraged bad work and discouraged good must in some way or other come
+to a bad end; and he would have seen in this war the end that he
+predicted. Whatever its result, there must be a change in the order of
+our society, whether it sinks through incessant wars, national and
+commercial, into barbarism or is shocked into an effort to attain to
+civilization. There were particular sayings of Morris's to which no one
+at the time paid much heed. They seemed mere grumblings against what
+must be. He was, for instance, always crying out against our waste of
+labour. If only all men did work that was worth doing--
+
+     Think what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I
+     feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of the work which is
+     undergone for the making of useless things. It would be an
+     instructive day's work, for any one of us who is strong enough,
+     to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London
+     on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop
+     windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life
+     of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious
+     or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the
+     lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them; and to many
+     people, even of those who buy them, they are obvious
+     encumbrances to real work, thought, and pleasure.
+
+At the time most people said that this waste of labour was all a matter
+of demand and supply, and thought no more about it; some said that it
+was good for trade. Very few saw, with Morris, that demand for such
+things is something willed and something that ought not to be willed.
+
+But then it was generally believed that we could afford this waste of
+labour; and so it went on until, after a year or two of war, we found
+that we could not afford it. Then even the most ignorant and thoughtless
+learned, from facts, not from books, certain lessons of political
+economy. They learned that, in war-time at least, a nation that wastes
+its labour will be overcome by one that does not. At once the common
+will was set against the waste of labour; and, what would have seemed
+strangest of all forty years ago, the Government, with the consent of
+the people, set to work to stop the waste of labour, and did to a great
+extent succeed in stopping it. When people thought in terms of
+munitions, instead of in terms of general well-being, they saw that the
+waste of labour must be, and could be, stopped. They talked no longer
+about the laws of supply and demand, but about munitions. Those who had
+made trash must be set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some way to
+second the Army. Those who still were ready to waste labour on trash for
+themselves were no longer obeying the laws of supply and demand; they
+were diverting labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic, they
+were helping the Germans. Money, in fact, had no longer the right to an
+absolute command over labour. A man, before he spent a sovereign, must
+ask himself whether he was spending it for the good of the nation; and
+if he did not ask himself that, the Government would ask it for him.
+
+So much the war taught us, for purposes of war. But Morris many years
+ago tried to teach it for purposes of peace. When he wrote those words
+which we have quoted, he was not talking politics but ordinary common
+sense. He was not even talking art, but rather economics; and he was
+talking it not to any vague abstraction called the community, but to
+each individual human being. At that time every one thought of economics
+as something which concerned society or the universe. It was, so to
+speak, a natural science; it observed phenomena as if they were in the
+heavens; and stated laws about them, laws not human but natural. Perhaps
+it was the greatest achievement of Morris in the way of thought that he
+saw economics, even more clearly than Ruskin, as a matter not of natural
+laws, but of conscience and duty. He did not talk about economics at
+all, but about the waste of labour, just as we talk about it now. The
+only difference is that he saw it to be one of the chief causes of
+poverty in time of peace, whereas we see it as a hindrance to victory in
+time of war. We have, for war purposes, acquired the conscience that he
+wished us to acquire for all purposes. The question is whether we shall
+keep it in peace.
+
+Upon that depends the question how soon we shall recover from the war.
+For there is no doubt that we shall not be able to afford our former
+waste of labour; and, if we persist in it, we shall be bankrupt as a
+society. It may be said that we shall not have the money, the power, to
+waste labour. But we shall certainly have some superfluous energy, more
+and more, it is to be hoped, as time goes on; and our future recovery
+will depend upon the use we make of this superfluous energy. We can
+waste it, as we wasted it before the war; or we can keep the conscience
+we have acquired in war and ask ourselves in peace, with every penny we
+spend, whether we are wasting labour. It is true that what may be waste
+to one will not be waste to another; but in that matter every one must
+obey his own conscience. The important thing is that every one should
+have a conscience and obey it. There will be plenty of people to tell us
+that no one can define waste of labour. No one can define sin; but each
+man has his own conscience on that point and lives well or ill as he
+obeys it or disobeys it. Besides, there are many things, all the trash
+that Morris speaks about in the shop windows, that every one knows to be
+waste. We need not trouble ourselves about the fact that art will seem
+waste to the philistine and not to the artist. We must allow for
+differences on that point as on most others. Some things that might
+have been waste to Samuel Smiles would have been to Morris a symptom of
+well-being. But he knew, and often said, that we cannot have the beauty
+which was to him a symptom of well-being unless we end the waste of
+labour on trash. Of luxury he said:--
+
+     By those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for
+     art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each
+     day's hard practice of the difficult art of living. But I say,
+     art cannot live beside it nor self-respect in any class of
+     life. Effeminacy and brutality are its companions on the right
+     hand and the left.
+
+There is, we have all discovered now, only a certain amount of labour in
+the country, in the world. Even the most ignorant are aware at last that
+money does not create labour but only commands it, and may command it to
+do what will or will not benefit us all. We were, for the purposes of
+the war, much more of a fellowship than we had ever been before. We
+acknowledged a duty to each other, the duty of commanding labour to the
+common good. We asked with every sovereign we spent whether it would
+help or hinder us in the war. Morris would have us ask also whether it
+will help or hinder us in the advance towards a general happiness.
+
+And he put a further question, which in time of war unfortunately we
+could not put, a question not only about the work but about the workman.
+Are we, with our money, forcing him to work that is for him worth doing;
+are we, to use an old phrase, considering the good of his soul? Morris
+insisted on our duty to the workman more even than on our duty to
+society. He saw that where great masses of men do work that they know to
+be futile there must be a low standard of work and incessant discontent.
+The workman may not even know the cause of his discontent. He may think
+he is angry with the rich because they are rich; but the real source of
+his anger is the work that they set him to do with their riches. And no
+class war, no redistribution of wealth, will end that discontent if the
+same waste of labour continues. Double the wages of every workman in the
+country, and if he spends the increase on trash no one will be any
+better off in mind or body. There will still be poverty and still
+discontent, with the work if not with the wages.
+
+The problem for us, for every modern society now, is not so much to
+redistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but to
+use our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste it
+piecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We have
+to solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is not
+to lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us a
+great opportunity. It has opened our eyes, if only we do not shut them
+again. It has taught every one in the country the most important of all
+lessons in political economy which the books often seem to conceal. And,
+better still, it has taught us that in economics we can exercise our own
+wills, that they concern each individual man and woman as much as
+morals; that they are morals, and not abstract mathematics; that we have
+the same duty towards the country, towards mankind, that we have to our
+own families. The proverb, Waste not, want not, does not apply merely to
+each private income. We have accounts to settle not only with our
+bankers, but with the community. It will thrive or not according as we
+are thrifty or thriftless; and our thrift depends upon how we spend our
+income, not merely on how much we spend of it. For all that part of it
+which we do not spend on necessaries is the superfluous energy of
+mankind, and we determine how it shall be exercised; each individual
+determines that, not an abstraction called society.
+
+One may present the thrift of labour as a matter of duty to society.
+But Morris saw that it was more than that; and he lit it with the
+sunlight of the warmer virtues. It is not merely society that we have to
+consider, or the direction of its superfluous energy. It is also the
+happiness, the life, of actual men and women. We shall not cease to
+waste work until we think always of the worker behind it, until we see
+that it is our duty, if with our money we have command over him, to set
+him to work worth doing. Capital now is to most of those who own it a
+means of earning interest. We should think of it as creative, as the
+power which may make the wilderness blossom like the rose and change the
+slum into a home for men and women; and, better still, as the power that
+may train and set men to do work that will satisfy their souls, so that
+they shall work for the work's sake and not only for the wages. Until
+capital becomes so creative in the hands of those who own it there will
+always be a struggle for the possession of it; and to those who do
+possess it it will bring merely superfluities and not happiness. If it
+becomes creative, no one will mind much who possesses it. The class war
+will be ended by a league of classes, their aim not merely peace, but
+those things which make men resolve not to spoil peace with war.
+
+We shall be told that this is a dream, as we are always told that the
+ending of war is a dream. "So long as human nature is what it is there
+will always be war." Those who talk thus think of human nature as
+something not ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is not their own
+nature. They know that they themselves do not wish for war; but, looking
+at mankind in the mass and leaving themselves out of that mass, they see
+it governed by some force that is not really human nature, but merely
+nature "red in tooth and claw," a process become a malignant goddess,
+who forces mankind to act contrary to their own desires, contrary even
+to their own interests. She has taken the place for us of the old
+original sin; and the belief in her is far more primitive than the
+belief in original sin. She is in fact but a modern name for all the
+malignant idols that savages have worshipped with sacrifices of blood
+and tears that they did not wish to make. It is strange that, priding
+ourselves as we do on our modern scepticism which has taught us to
+disbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine, we yet have not dared
+to affirm the plain fact that this nature, this human nature, does not
+exist. There is no force, no process, whether within us or outside us,
+that compels us to act contrary to our desires and our interests. There
+is nothing but fear; and fear can be conquered, as by individuals, so by
+the collective will of man. It is fear that produces war, the fear that
+other men are not like ourselves, that they are hostile animals governed
+utterly by the instinct of self-preservation.
+
+So it is fear that produces the class war and the belief that it must
+always continue. It is our own fears that cut us off from happiness by
+making us despair of it. The man who has capital sees it as a means of
+protecting himself and his children from poverty; it is to him a
+negative, defensive thing, at best the safeguard of a negative,
+defensive happiness. So others see it as something which he has and they
+have not, something they would like to snatch from him if they could.
+But if he saw capital as a creative thing, like the powers of the mind,
+like the genius of the artist, then it would be to him a means of
+positive happiness both for himself and for others. He would say to
+himself, not How can I protect myself with this against the tyranny of
+the struggle for life? not How can I invest this? but What can I do with
+this? He would see it as Michelangelo saw the marble when he looked for
+the shape within it. And then he would rise above the conception of mere
+duty as something we do against our own wills, or of virtue as a luxury
+of the spirit to which we escape in our little leisure from the
+struggle for life. Virtue, duty, would be for him life itself; in
+creation he would attain to that harmony of duty and pleasure which is
+happiness.
+
+If only we could see that the superfluous energy of mankind is something
+out of which to make the happiness of mankind we should find our own
+happiness in the making of it. There is still for us a gulf between
+doing good to others and the delight of the artist, the craftsman, in
+his work. The artist is one kind of man and the philanthropist another;
+the artist is a selfish person whom we like, and the philanthropist an
+unselfish person whom we do not like. What we need is to fuse them in
+our use of capital, in our exercise of the superfluous energy of
+mankind. There are single powerful capitalists who know this joy of
+creation, who are benevolent despots, and yet are suspect to the poor
+because of their great power. But it never enters the head of the
+smaller investor that he, too, might create instead of merely investing;
+that, instead of being a shareholder in a limited liability company, he
+might be one of a creative fellowship, not merely earning dividends but
+transforming cities, exalting things of use into things of beauty,
+giving to himself and to mankind work worth doing for its own sake,
+work in which all the obsolete conflicts of rich and poor could be
+forgotten in a commonwealth. That is the vision of peace which our
+sacrifices in the war may earn for us. We have learned sacrifice and the
+joy of it; but, so far, only so that we may overcome an enemy of our own
+kind. There remains to be overcome, by a sacrifice more joyful and with
+far greater rewards, this other old enemy not of our own kind, the enemy
+we call nature or human nature, the enemy that is so powerful merely
+because we dare not believe that she does not exist.
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on Art, by A. Clutton-Brock
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
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+Title: Essays on Art
+
+Author: A. Clutton-Brock
+
+Release Date: July 2, 2005 [EBook #16178]
+
+Language: English
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON ART ***
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+
+<h1>ESSAYS ON ART<br /><br /><br /></h1>
+
+
+<h3>BY<br /><br /></h3>
+
+<h2>A. CLUTTON-BROCK<br /><br /><br /></h2>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="centerbold">METHUEN &amp; CO. LTD.<br />
+36 ESSEX STREET W.C.<br />
+LONDON</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>First Published in 1919</i><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_v" id="Pg_v" title="Pg_v">[v]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">PREFACE</p>
+
+
+<p>These essays, reprinted from the <i>Times
+Literary Supplement</i> with a few additions
+and corrections, are not all entirely or
+directly concerned with art; but even the last
+one&mdash;Waste or Creation?&mdash;does bear on the
+question, How are we to improve the art of
+our own time? After years of criticism I am
+more interested in this question than in any
+other that concerns the arts. Whistler said
+that we could not improve it; the best we
+could do for it was not to think about it. I
+have discussed that opinion, as also the contrary
+opinion of Tolstoy, and the truth that
+seems to me to lie between them. If these
+essays have any unity, it is given to them by
+my belief that art, like other human activities,
+is subject to the will of man. We cannot
+cause men of artistic genius to be born; but
+we can provide a public, namely, ourselves, for
+the artist, who will encourage him to be an
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_vi" id="Pg_vi" title="Pg_vi">[vi]</a></span>artist, to do his best, not his worst. I believe
+that the quality of art in any age depends, not
+upon the presence or absence of individuals of
+genius, but upon the attitude of the public
+towards art.</p>
+
+<p>Because of the decline of all the arts, especially
+the arts of use, which began at the end of
+the eighteenth century and has continued up
+to our own time, we are more interested in art
+than any people of the past, with the interest
+of a sick man in health. To say that this
+interest must be futile or mischievous is to
+deny the will of man in one of the chief of
+human activities; but it often is denied by
+those who do not understand how it can be
+applied to art. We cannot make artists
+directly; no government office can determine
+their training; still less can any critic tell
+them how they ought to practise their art.
+But we can all aim at a state of society in
+which they will be encouraged to do their best,
+and at a state of mind in which we ourselves
+shall learn to know good from bad and to
+prefer the good. At present we have neither
+the state of society nor the state of mind; and
+we can attain to both not by connoisseurship,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_vii" id="Pg_vii" title="Pg_vii">[vii]</a></span>not by an anxiety to like the right thing or at
+least to buy it, but by learning the difference
+between good and bad workmanship and design
+in objects of use. Anyone can do that,
+and can resolve to pay a fair price for good
+workmanship and design; and only so will the
+arts of use, and all the arts, revive again. For
+where the public has no sense of design in the
+arts of use, it will have none in the "fine arts."
+To aim at connoisseurship when you do not
+know a good table or chair from a bad one is
+to attempt flying before you can walk. So, I
+think, professors of art at Oxford or Cambridge
+should be chosen, not so much for their knowledge
+of Greek sculpture, as for their success in
+furnishing their own houses. What can they
+know about Greek sculpture if their own
+drawing-rooms are hideous? I believe that
+the notorious fallibility of many experts is
+caused by the fact that they concern themselves
+with the fine arts before they have had
+any training in the arts of use. So, if we are
+to have a school of art at Oxford or Cambridge,
+it should put this question to every pupil: If
+you had to build and furnish a house of your
+own, how would you set about it? And it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_viii" id="Pg_viii" title="Pg_viii">[viii]</a></span>should train its pupils to give a rational answer
+to that question. So we might get a public
+knowing the difference between good and bad
+in objects of use, valuing the good, and ready
+to pay a fair price for it.</p>
+
+<p>At present we have no such public. A
+liberal education should teach the difference
+between good and bad in things of use, including
+buildings. Oxford and Cambridge profess
+to give a liberal education; but you have only
+to look at their modern buildings to see that
+their teachers themselves do not know a good
+building from a bad one. They, like all the
+rest of us, think that taste in art is an
+irrational mystery; they trust in the expert
+and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant
+and superstitious trust in the wrong priest.
+For as religion is merely mischievous unless it
+is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere
+pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on
+things of use. These have their sense or nonsense,
+their righteousness or unrighteousness,
+which anyone can learn to see for himself, and,
+until he has learned, he will be at the mercy of
+charlatans.</p>
+
+<p>I have written all these essays as a member
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_ix" id="Pg_ix" title="Pg_ix">[ix]</a></span>of the public, as one who has to find a right
+attitude towards art so that the arts may
+flourish again. The critic is sure to be a
+charlatan or a prig, unless he is to himself not
+a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art
+and telling artists how to practise them, but
+simply one of the public with a natural and
+human interest in art. But one of these
+essays is a defence of criticism, and I will not
+repeat it here.</p>
+
+<p class="sig">A. CLUTTON-BROCK</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>July</i> 30, 1919<br />
+<span class="smcap">Farncombe, Surrey</span></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_xi" id="Pg_xi" title="Pg_xi">[xi]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div><a name="contents" id="contents"></a></div>
+
+<p class="chapterhead">CONTENTS</p>
+
+
+<div class='centerbold'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="5" summary="toc">
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">"The Adoration of the Magi"</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Leonardo da Vinci</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Pompadour in Art</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">An Unpopular Master</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_37">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">A Defence of Criticism</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_48">48</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Artist and his Audience</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Wilfulness and Wisdom</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_74">74</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">"The Magic Flute"</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Process or Person?</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_97">97</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Artist and the Tradesman</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_110">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Professionalism in Art</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Waste or Creation?</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Pg_132">132</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_1" id="Pg_1" title="Pg_1">[1]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ESSAYS ON ART</h2>
+
+
+<p class="chapterhead">"The Adoration of the Magi"</p>
+
+<p>There is one beauty of nature and
+another of art, and many attempts have
+been made to explain the difference between
+them. Signor Croce's theory, now much in
+favour, is that nature provides only the raw
+material for art. The beginning of the artistic
+process is the perception of beauty in nature;
+but an artist does not see beauty as he sees a
+cow. It is his own mind that imposes on the
+chaos of nature an order, a relation, which is
+beauty. All men have the faculty, in some
+degree, of imposing this order; the artist only
+does it more completely than other men, and
+he owes his power of execution to that. He
+can make the beauty which he has perceived
+because he has perceived it clearly; and this
+perceiving is part of the making.</p>
+
+<p>The defect of this theory is that it ends
+by denying that very difference between the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_2" id="Pg_2" title="Pg_2">[2]</a></span>beauty of nature and the beauty of art which
+it sets out to explain. If the artist makes the
+beauty of nature in perceiving it, if it is produced
+by the action of his own mind upon the
+chaos of reality, then it is the very same beauty
+that appears in his art; and if, to us, the
+beauty of his art seems different from the
+beauty of nature, as we perceive it, it is only
+because we have not ourselves seen the beauty
+of nature as completely as he has, we have not
+reduced chaos so thoroughly to order. It is a
+difference not of kind, but of degree; for the
+artist himself there is no difference even of
+degree. What he makes he sees, and what he
+sees he makes. All beauty is artistic, and to
+speak of natural beauty is to make a false
+distinction.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is a distinction that we remain constantly
+aware of. In spite of Signor Croce
+and all the subtlety and partial truth of his
+theory, we do not believe that we make beauty
+when we see it, or that the artist makes it
+when he sees it. Nor do we believe that that
+beauty which he makes is of the same nature
+as that which he has perceived in reality.
+Rather he, like us, values the beauty which he
+perceives in reality because he knows that he
+has not made it. It is something, independent
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_3" id="Pg_3" title="Pg_3">[3]</a></span>of himself, to which his own mind makes
+answer: that answer is his art; it is the
+passionate value expressed in it which gives
+beauty to his art. If he knew that the beauty
+he perceives was a product of his own mind, he
+could not value it so; if he held Signor Croce's
+theory, he would cease to be an artist.</p>
+
+<p>And, in fact, those who act on his theory
+do cease to be artists. Nothing kills art so
+certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of
+the same kind as that which is perceived in
+nature. In the beauty of nature, as we perceive
+it, there is a perfection of workmanship
+which is perfection because there is no workmanship.
+Natural things are not made, but
+born; works of art are made. There is the
+essential difference between them and between
+their beauties. If a work of art tries to have
+the finish of a thing born, not made, if a piece
+of enamel apes the gloss of a butterfly's wing,
+it misses the peculiar beauty of art and is but
+an inadequate imitation of the beauty of nature.
+That beauty of the butterfly's wing, which the
+artist like all of us perceives, is of a different
+kind from any beauty he can make; and if he
+is an artist he knows it and does not try to
+make it. But all the arts, even those which
+are not themselves imitative, are always being
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_4" id="Pg_4" title="Pg_4">[4]</a></span>perverted by the attempt to imitate the finish
+of nature. There is a vanity of craftsmanship
+in Louis Quinze furniture, in the later Chinese
+porcelain, in modern jewelry, no less than in
+Dutch painting, which is the death of art. All
+great works of art show an effort, a roughness,
+an inadequacy of craftsmanship, which is the
+essence of their beauty and distinguishes it
+from the beauty of nature. As soon as men
+cease to understand this and despise this effort
+and roughness and inadequacy, they demand
+from art the beauty of nature and get something
+which is mostly dead nature, not living
+art.</p>
+
+<p>We can best understand the difference
+between the two kinds of beauty if we consider
+how beauty steals into language, that art which
+we all practise more or less and in which it is
+difficult, if not impossible, to imitate the finish
+of natural beauty. There is no beauty whatever
+in sentences like "Trespassers will be
+prosecuted" or "Pass the mustard," because
+they say exactly and completely all that they
+have to say. There is beauty in sentences like
+"The bright day is done, And we are for the
+dark," or "After life's fitful fever he sleeps
+well," because in them, although they seem
+quite simple, the poet is trying to say a thousand
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_5" id="Pg_5" title="Pg_5">[5]</a></span>times more than he can say. It is the
+effort to do something beyond the power of
+words that brings beauty into them. That is
+the very nature of the beauty of art, which
+distinguishes it from the beauty of nature; it
+is always produced by the effort to accomplish
+the impossible, and what the artist knows to
+be impossible. Whenever that effort ceases,
+whenever the artist sets himself a task that he
+can accomplish, a task of mere skill, then he
+ceases to be an artist, because he no longer
+experiences reality in the manner necessary to
+an artist. The great poet is aware of some
+excellence in reality so intensely that it is to
+him beauty; for all excellence when we are
+intensely aware of it is beauty to us. There
+is that truth in Croce's theory. Our perception
+of beauty does depend upon the intensity
+of our perception of excellence. But that
+intensity of perception remains perception,
+and does not make what it perceives. That
+the poet and every artist knows; and his art
+is not merely an extension of the process of
+perception, but an attempt to express his own
+value for that excellence which he has perceived
+as beauty. It is an answer to that beauty, a
+worship of it, and is itself beautiful because it
+makes no effort to compete with it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_6" id="Pg_6" title="Pg_6">[6]</a></span>Thus in the beauty of art there is always
+value and wonder, always a reference to another
+beauty different in kind from itself; and we
+too, if we are to see the beauty of art, must
+share the same value and wonder. To enter
+that Kingdom of Heaven we must become
+little children as the artist himself does. Art
+is the expression of a certain attitude towards
+reality, an attitude of wonder and value, a
+recognition of something greater than man;
+and where that recognition is not, art dies.
+In a society valuing only itself, believing that
+it can make a heaven of itself out of its own
+skill and knowledge and wisdom, the difference
+between the beauty of nature and the beauty
+of art is no longer seen, and art loses all its
+own beauty. The surest sign of corruption
+and death in a society is where men and women
+see the best life as a life without wonder or
+effort or failure, where labour is hidden underground
+so that a few may seem to live in
+Paradise; where there is perfect finish of all
+things, human beings no less than their clothes
+and furniture and buildings and pictures;
+where the ideal is the lady so perfectly turned
+out that any activity whatever would mar her
+perfection. In such societies the artist becomes
+a slave. He too must produce work that does
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_7" id="Pg_7" title="Pg_7">[7]</a></span>not seem to be work. He must express no
+wonder or value for patrons who would be
+ashamed to feel either. What he makes must
+seem to be born and not made, so that it may
+fit a world which pretends to be a born Paradise
+populated by cynical angels who own
+allegiance to no god. In such a world art
+means, beauty means, the concealment of effort,
+the pretence that it does not exist; and that
+pretence is the end of art and beauty in all
+things made by man. There is a close connexion
+between the idea of life expressed in
+Aristotle's ideal man and the later Greek
+sculpture. The aim of that sculpture, as of
+his ideal man, was proud and effortless perfection.
+Both dread the confession of failure
+above all things&mdash;and both are dull. In
+Aristotle's age art had started upon a long
+decline, which ended only when the pretence
+of perfection was killed, both in art and in life,
+by Christianity. Then the real beauty of art,
+the beauty of value and wonder, superseded
+the wearisome imitation of natural beauty;
+and it is only lately that we have learnt again
+to prefer the real beauty to the false.</p>
+
+<p>Men must free themselves from the contempt
+of effort and the desire to conceal it, they must
+be content with the perpetual, passionate
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_8" id="Pg_8" title="Pg_8">[8]</a></span>failure of art, before they can see its beauty
+or demand that beauty from the artist. When
+they themselves become like little children,
+then they see that the greatest artists, in all
+their seeming triumphs, are like little children
+too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it
+is not the arrogant, the accomplished, the
+magnificent, that moves us. They are great
+men to us; but they achieved beauty because
+in their effort to achieve it they were little
+children to themselves. They impose awe on
+us, but it is their own awe that they impose.
+It is not their achievement that makes beauty,
+but their effort, always confessing its own
+failure; and in that confession is the beauty of
+art. That is why it moves and frees us; for it
+frees us from our pretence that we are what
+we would be, it carries us out of our own
+egotism into the wonder and value of the artist
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>Consider the beauty of a tune. Music itself
+is the best means which man has found for
+confessing that he cannot say what he would
+say; and it is more purely and rapturously
+beauty than any other form of art. A tune is
+the very silencing of speech, and in the greatest
+tunes there is always the hush of wonder: they
+seem to tell us to be silent and listen, not to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_9" id="Pg_9" title="Pg_9">[9]</a></span>what the musician has to say, but to what he
+cannot say. The very beauty of a tune is in
+its reference to something beyond all expression,
+and in its perfection it speaks of a perfection
+not its own. Pater said that all art tries
+to attain to the condition of music. That is
+true in a sense different from what he meant.
+Art is always most completely art when it
+makes music's confession of the ineffable; then
+it comes nearest to the beauty of music. But
+when it is no longer a forlorn hope, when it is
+able to say what it wishes to say with calm
+assurance, then it has ceased to be art and
+become a game of skill.</p>
+
+<p>Often the great artist is imperious, impatient,
+full of certainties; but his certainty is not of
+himself; and he is impatient of the failure to
+recognize, not himself, but what he recognizes.
+Michelangelo, Beethoven, Tintoret, would snap
+a critic's head off if he did not see what they
+were trying to do. They may seem sometimes
+to be arrogant in the mere display of power,
+yet their beauty lies in the sudden change from
+arrogance to humility. The arrogance itself
+bows down and worships; the very muscle and
+material force obey a spirit not their own.
+They are lion-tamers, and they themselves are
+the lions; out of the strong comes forth sweetness,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_10" id="Pg_10" title="Pg_10">[10]</a></span>and it is all the sweeter for the strength
+that is poured into it and subdued by it.
+What is the difference, as of different worlds,
+between Rubens at his best and Tintoret at his
+best? This: that Rubens always seems to be
+uplifted by his own power, whereas Tintoret
+has most power when he forgets it in wonder.
+When he bows down all his turbulence in
+worship, then he is most strong. Rubens, in
+the "Descent from the Cross," is still the
+supreme drawing-master; and painters flocking
+to him for lessons pay homage to him. But,
+in his "Crucifixion," it is Tintoret himself who
+pays homage, and we forget the master in the
+theme. We may say of Rubens's art, in a new
+sense, "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la
+guerre." The greatest art is not magnificent,
+but it is war, desperate and without trappings,
+a war in which victory comes through the
+confession of defeat.</p>
+
+<p>Man, if he tries to be a god in his art, makes
+a fool of himself. He becomes like God, he
+makes beauty like God, when he is too much
+aware of God to be aware of himself. Then
+only does he not set himself too easy a task,
+for then he does not make his theme so that he
+may accomplish it; it is forced upon him by
+his awareness of God, by his wonder and value
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_11" id="Pg_11" title="Pg_11">[11]</a></span>for an excellence not his own. So in all the
+beauty of art there is a humility not only of
+conception, but also of execution, which is mere
+failure and ugliness to those who expect to find
+in art the beauty and finish of nature, who
+expect it to be born, not made. They are
+always disappointed by the greatest works of
+art, by their inadequacy and strain and labour.
+They look for a proof of what man can do and
+find a confession of what he cannot do; but
+that confession, made sincerely and passionately,
+is beauty. There is also a serenity in
+the beauty of art, but it is the serenity of self-surrender,
+not of self-satisfaction, of the saint,
+not of the lady of fashion. And all the accomplishment
+of great art, its infinite superiority
+in mere skill over the work of the merely
+skilful, comes from the incessant effort of the
+artist to do more than he can. By that he is
+trained; by that his work is distinguished from
+the mere exclamation of wonder. He is not
+content to applaud; he must also worship, and
+make his offerings in his worship; and they
+are the best he can do. It was not only the
+shepherds who came to the birth of Christ;
+the wise men came also and brought their
+treasures with them. And the art of mankind
+is the offering of its wise men, it is the adoration
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_12" id="Pg_12" title="Pg_12">[12]</a></span>of the Magi, who are one with the simplest
+in their worship&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>Wise men, all ways of knowledge past,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>To the Shepherd's wonder come at last.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>But they do not lose their wisdom in their
+wonder. When it passes into wonder, when
+all the knowledge and skill and passion of
+mankind are poured into the acknowledgment
+of something greater than themselves, then
+that acknowledgment is art, and it has a
+beauty which may be envied by the natural
+beauty of God Himself.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_13" id="Pg_13" title="Pg_13">[13]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">Leonardo da Vinci</p>
+
+
+<p>Leonardo da Vinci is one of the
+most famous men in history&mdash;as a man
+more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare
+or Mozart&mdash;because posterity has elected him
+the member for the Renaissance. Most great
+artists live in what they did, and by that we
+know them; but what Leonardo did gets much
+of its life from what he was, or rather from
+what he is to us. Of all great men he is the
+most representative; we cannot think of him
+as a mere individual, eating and drinking,
+living and competing, on equal terms with
+other men. We see him magnified by his own
+legend from the first, with people standing
+aside to watch and whisper as he passed through
+the streets of Florence or Milan. "There he
+goes to paint the Last Supper," they said to
+each other; and we think of it as already the
+most famous picture in the world before it was
+begun. Every one knew that he had the most
+famous picture in his brain, that he was born
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_14" id="Pg_14" title="Pg_14">[14]</a></span>to paint it, to initiate the High Renaissance;
+from Giotto onwards all the painters had been
+preparing for that, Florence herself had been
+preparing for it. It makes no difference that
+for centuries it has been a shadow on the
+wall; it is still the most famous painting in
+the world because it is the masterpiece of
+Leonardo. There was a fate against the
+survival of his masterpieces, but he has survived
+them and they are remembered because
+of him. We accept him for himself, like the
+people of his own time, who, when he said
+he could perform impossibilities, believed him.
+To them he meant the new age which could do
+anything, and still to us he means the infinite
+capacities of man. He is the Adam awakened
+whom Michelangelo only painted; and, if he
+accomplished but little, we believe in him, as
+in mankind, for his promise. If he did not
+fulfil it, neither has mankind; but he believed
+that all things could be done and lived a great
+life in that faith.</p>
+
+<p>Another Florentine almost equals him in
+renown. Men watched and whispered when
+Dante passed through the streets of Florence;
+but Dante lives in his achievement, Leonardo
+in himself. Dante means to us an individual
+soul quivering through a system, a creed, inherited
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_15" id="Pg_15" title="Pg_15">[15]</a></span>from the past. Leonardo is a spirit
+unstraitened; not consenting to any past nor
+rebelling against it, but newborn with a newborn
+universe around it, seeing it without
+memories or superstitions, without inherited
+fears or pieties, yet without impiety or irreverence.
+He is not an iconoclast, since for him
+there are no images to be broken; whatever he
+sees is not an image but itself, to be accepted
+or rejected by himself; what he would do he
+does without the help or hindrance of tradition.
+In art and in science he means the same thing,
+not a rebirth of any past, as the word Renaissance
+seems to imply, but freedom from all the
+past, life utterly in the present. He is concerned
+not with what has been thought, or
+said, or done, but with his own immediate relation
+to all things, with what he sees and feels
+and discovers. Authority is nothing to him,
+whether of Galen or of St. Thomas, of Greek
+or medi&aelig;val art. In science he looks at the
+fact, in art at the object; nor will he allow
+either to be hidden from him by the achievements
+of the dead. Giotto had struck the
+first blow for freedom when he allowed the
+theme to dictate the picture; Leonardo
+allowed the object to dictate the drawing. To
+him the fact itself is sacred, and man fulfils
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_16" id="Pg_16" title="Pg_16">[16]</a></span>himself in his own immediate relation to
+fact.</p>
+
+<p>All those who react and rebel against the
+Renaissance have an easy case against its great
+representative. What did he do in thought
+compared with St. Thomas, or in art compared
+with the builders of Chartres or Bourges? He
+filled notebooks with sketches and conjectures;
+he modelled a statue that was never cast; he
+painted a fresco on a wall, and with a medium
+so unsuited to fresco that it was a ruin in a few
+years. Even in his own day there was a doubt
+about him; it is expressed in the young
+Michelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not
+cast the statue he had modelled. Michelangelo
+was one of those who see in life always the
+great task to be performed and who judge a
+man by his performance; to him Leonardo
+was a dilettante, a talker; he made monuments,
+but Leonardo remains his own monument,
+a prophecy of what man shall be when
+he comes into his kingdom. With him, we
+must confess, it is more promise than performance;
+he could paint "The Last Supper"
+because it means the future; he could never, in
+good faith, have painted "The Last Judgment,"
+for that means a judgment on the past, and to
+him the past is nothing; to him man, in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_17" id="Pg_17" title="Pg_17">[17]</a></span>future, is the judge, master, enjoyer of his own
+fate. Compared with his, Michelangelo's mind
+was still medi&aelig;val, his reproach the reproach
+of one who cares for doing more than for
+being, and certainly Michelangelo did a thousand
+times more; but from his own day to ours
+the world has not judged Leonardo by his
+achievement. As Johnson had his Boswell so
+he has had his legend; he means to us not
+books or pictures, but himself. In his own
+day kings bid for him as if he were a work
+of art; and he died magnificently in France,
+making nothing but foretelling a race of men
+not yet fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>Before Francis Bacon, before Velasquez or
+Manet, he prophesied not merely the new artist
+or the new man of science, but the new man
+who is to free himself from his inheritance and
+to see, feel, think, and act in all things with
+the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a
+legendary hero to us, with a legend that is not
+in the past but in the future. For his prophecy
+is still far from fulfilment; and the very science
+that he initiated tells us how hard it is for
+man to free himself from his inheritance. It
+seems strange to us that Leonardo sang hymns
+to causation as if to God. In its will was his
+peace and his freedom.</p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_18" id="Pg_18" title="Pg_18">[18]</a></span></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>O marvellous necessity, thou with supreme reason
+constrainest all efforts to be the direct result of their
+causes, and by a supreme and irrevocable law every
+natural action obeys thee by the shortest possible
+process.</p>
+
+<p>Who would believe that so small a space could
+contain the images of all the universe? O mighty
+process, what talent can avail to penetrate a nature
+such as thine? What tongue will it be that can unfold
+so great a wonder? Verily none. This it is that
+guides the human discourse to the considering of
+divine things.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The sayings of Leonardo quoted in this article are taken
+from <i>Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks</i>, by E. M'Curdy.
+(Duckworth, 1906.)</p></div>
+
+<p>To Leonardo causation meant the escape
+from caprice; it meant a secure relation
+between man and all things, in which man
+would gain power by knowledge, in which
+every increase of knowledge would reveal to
+him more and more of the supreme reason.
+There was no chain for him in cause and effect,
+no unthinking of the will of man. Rather by
+knowledge man would discover his own will
+and know that it was the universal will. So
+man must never be afraid of knowledge. "The
+eye is the window of the soul." Like Whitman
+he tells us always to look with the eye, and so
+to confound the wisdom of ages. There is in
+every man's vision the power of relating himself
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_19" id="Pg_19" title="Pg_19">[19]</a></span>now and directly to reality by knowledge; and
+in knowing other things he knows himself. By
+knowledge man changes what seemed to be a
+compulsion into a harmony; he gives up his
+own caprice for the universal will.</p>
+
+<p>That is the religion of Leonardo, in art as
+in science. For him the artist also must relate
+himself directly to the visible world, in which
+is the only inspiration; to accept any formula
+is to see with dead men's eyes. That has been
+said again and again by artists, but not with
+Leonardo's mystical and philosophical conviction.
+He knew that it is vain to study
+Nature unless she is to you a goddess or a god;
+you can learn nothing from reality unless you
+adore it, and in adoring it he found his freedom.
+How different is this doctrine from that with
+which, after centuries of scientific advance, we
+intimidate ourselves. We are threatened by
+a creed far more enslaving than that of the
+Middle Ages. If the Middle Ages turned to
+the past to learn what they were to think or
+to do, we turn to the past to learn what we
+are. They may have feared the new; but we
+say that there is no new, nothing but some
+combination or variation of the old. Causation
+is to us a chain that binds us to the past,
+but to Leonardo it was freedom; and so he
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_20" id="Pg_20" title="Pg_20">[20]</a></span>prophesies a freedom that we may attain to
+not by denying facts or making myths, but by
+discovering what he hinted&mdash;that causation
+itself is not compulsion but will, and our will
+if, by knowledge, we make it ours.</p>
+
+<p>No one before him had been so much in love
+with reality, whatever it may be. He was
+called a sceptic, but it was only that he preferred
+reality itself to any tales about it; and
+his religion, his worship, was the search for the
+very fact. This, because he was both artist
+and man of science, he carried further than anyone
+else, pursuing it with all his faculties. In
+his drawings there is the beauty not of his
+character, but of the character of what he
+draws; he does not make a design, but finds
+it. That beauty proves him a Florentine&mdash;D&uuml;rer
+himself falls short of it&mdash;but it is the
+beauty of the thing itself, discovered and insisted
+upon with the passion of a lover. He
+draws animals, trees, flowers, as Correggio
+draws Antiope or Io; and it is only in his
+drawings now that he speaks clearly to us.
+The "Mona Lisa" is well enough, but another
+hand might have executed the painting of it.
+It owes its popular fame to the smile about
+which it is so easy to write finely; but in the
+drawings we see the experiencing passion of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_21" id="Pg_21" title="Pg_21">[21]</a></span>Leonardo himself, we see him feeling, as in
+the notebooks we see him thinking. There is
+the eagerness of discovery at which so often he
+stopped short, turning away from a task to
+further discovery, living always in the moment,
+taking no thought either for the morrow or for
+yesterday, unable to attend to any business,
+even the business of the artist, seeing life not
+as a struggle or a duty, but as an adventure of
+all the senses and all the faculties. He is, even
+with his pencil, the greatest talker in the world,
+but without egotism, talking always of what he
+sees, satisfying himself not with the common
+appetites and passions of men, but with his one
+supreme passion for reality. If Michelangelo
+thought him a dilettante, there must have been
+in his taunt some envy of Leonardo's freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Yet once at least Leonardo did achieve, and
+something we should never have expected from
+his drawings. "The Last Supper" is but a
+shadow on the wall, yet still we can see its
+greatness, which is the greatness of pure design,
+of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesa.
+Goethe and others have found all kinds of
+psychological subtleties in it, meanings in every
+gesture; but what we see now is only space,
+grandeur, a supreme moment expressed in the
+relation of all the forms. The pure music of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_22" id="Pg_22" title="Pg_22">[22]</a></span>the painting remains when the drama is almost
+obliterated; and it proves that Leonardo, when
+he chose, could withdraw himself from the
+delight of hand-to-mouth experience into a
+vision of his own, that he had the reserve and
+the creative power of the earlier masters and of
+that austere, laborious youth who taunted him.
+If it were not for "The Last Supper" we might
+doubt whether he could go further in art than
+the vivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The
+Last Supper" tells us how great his passion for
+reality must have been, since it could distract
+him from the making of such masterpieces.</p>
+
+<p>That passion for reality itself made him cold
+to other passions. We know Michelangelo
+and Beethoven as men in some respects very
+like other men. They were anxious, fretful,
+full of affections and grievances, and much
+concerned with their relations. Leonardo is
+like Melchizedek, not only by the accident of
+birth, for he was a natural son, but by choice.
+He never married, he never had a home; there
+is no evidence that he was ever tied to any
+man or woman by his affections; yet it would
+be stupid to call him cold, for his one grand
+passion absorbed him. Monks suspected him,
+but in his heart he was celibate like the great
+monkish saints, celibate not by vows but by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_23" id="Pg_23" title="Pg_23">[23]</a></span>preoccupation. It is clear that from youth to
+age life had no cumulative power over him;
+as we should say in our prosaic language, he
+never settled down, for he let things happen to
+him and valued the very happening. He was
+always like a strange, wonderful creature from
+another planet, taking notes with unstaled
+delight but never losing his heart to any
+particular. Sex itself seems hardly to exist for
+him, or at least for his mind. Often the people
+in his drawings are of no sex. Rembrandt
+draws every one, Leonardo no one, as if he were
+his own relation. Women and youths were as
+much a subject of his impassioned curiosity
+as flowers, and no more. He is always the
+spectator, but a spectator who can exercise
+every faculty of the human mind and every
+passion in contemplation; he is the nearest
+that any man has ever come to Aristotle's
+Supreme Being.</p>
+
+<p>But we must not suppose that he went
+solemnly through life living up to his own
+story, that he was mysterious in manner or in
+any respect like a charlatan. Rather, he lived
+always in the moment and overcame mankind
+by his spontaneity. He had the charm of the
+real man of genius, not the reserve of the false
+one. The famous statement of what he could
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_24" id="Pg_24" title="Pg_24">[24]</a></span>do, which he made to Ludovico Sforza, is not a
+mere boast but an expression of his eagerness
+to do it. These engines of war were splendid
+toys to him, and all his life he enjoyed making
+toys and seeing men wonder at them. His
+delight was to do things for the first time like
+a child, and then not to do them again.
+Again and again he cries out against authority
+and in favour of discovery. "Whoever in discussion
+adduces authority," he says, "uses not
+intellect but rather memory"; and, anticipating
+Milton, he observes that all our knowledge
+originates in opinions. Perhaps some one had
+rebuked him for having too many opinions.
+We can be sure that he chafed against dull,
+cautious, safe men who wished for results. He
+himself cared nothing for them; it was enough
+for him to know what might be done, without
+doing it. He was so sure of his insight that
+he did not care to put it to the test of action;
+that was for slower men, whether artists or
+men of science. His notebooks were enough
+for him.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the notebooks and the sketches,
+we know less about the man Leonardo than
+about the man Shakespeare. Here and there
+he makes a remark with some personal conviction
+or experience in it. "Intellectual
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_25" id="Pg_25" title="Pg_25">[25]</a></span>passion," he says, "drives out sensuality." In
+him it had driven out or sublimated all the
+sensual part of character. We cannot touch
+or see or hear him in anything he says or
+draws. The passion is there, but it is too
+much concerned with universals to be of like
+nature with our own passions. He seems to
+be speaking to himself as if he had forgotten
+the whole audience of mankind, but in what
+he says he ignores the personal part of himself;
+he is most passionate when most impersonal.
+"To the ambitious, whom neither the boon of
+life nor the beauty of the world suffices to
+content, it comes as a penance that life with
+them is squandered and that they possess
+neither the benefits nor the beauty of the
+world." That might be a platitude said by
+some one else; but we know that in it Leonardo
+expresses his faith. The boon of life, the
+beauty of the world, were enough for him
+without ambition, without even further affections.
+He left father and mother and wealth,
+and even achievement, to follow them; and he
+left all those not out of coldness, or fear, or
+idleness, but because his own passion drew him
+away. No cold man could have said, "Where
+there is most power of feeling, there of martyrs
+is the greatest martyr." It is difficult for
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_26" id="Pg_26" title="Pg_26">[26]</a></span>us northerners to understand the intellectual
+passion of the South, to see even that it is
+passion; most difficult of all for us to see that
+in men like Leonardo the passion for beauty
+itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism,
+our sense of exile, can never find that
+identity which he found between beauty and
+reality. "This benign nature so provides that
+all over the world you find something to
+imitate." To us imitation means prose, to
+him it meant poetry; science itself meant
+poetry, and illusion was the only ugliness.
+"Nature never breaks her own law." It
+is we who try to find freedom in lawlessness,
+which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion. "Falsehood
+is so utterly vile that, though it should
+praise the great works of God, it offends
+against His divinity." There is Leonardo's
+religion; and if still it is too cold for us, it is
+because we have not his pure spiritual fire in
+ourselves.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_27" id="Pg_27" title="Pg_27">[27]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">The Pompadour in Art</p>
+
+
+<p>It is an important fact in the history of the
+arts for the last century or more that in
+England and America, if not elsewhere, the
+chief interest in all the arts, including literature,
+has been taken by women rather than
+by men. In the great ages of art it was not
+so. Women, so far as we can tell, had little
+to do with the art of Greece in the fifth century
+or with the art of the Middle Ages. There
+were female patrons of art at the Renaissance,
+but they were exceptions subject to the prevailing
+masculine taste. Art was and remained
+a proper interest of men up to the eighteenth
+century. Women first began to control it and
+to affect its character at the mistress-ridden
+Court of Louis XV. But in the nineteenth
+century men began to think they were too busy
+to concern themselves with the arts. Men of
+power, when they were not working, needed
+to take exercise and left it to their wives to
+patronize the arts. And so the notion grew
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_28" id="Pg_28" title="Pg_28">[28]</a></span>that art was a feminine concern, and even
+artists were pets for women. The great man,
+especially in America, liked his wife to have
+every luxury. The exquisite life she led was
+itself a proof of his success; and she was for
+him a living work of art, able to live so because
+of the abundance of his strength. In her, that
+strength passed into ornament and became
+beautiful; she was a friendly, faithful Delilah
+to his Samson, a Delilah who did not shear his
+locks. And so he came to think of art itself
+as being in its nature feminine if not effeminate,
+as a luxury and ornament of life, as everything,
+in fact, except a means of expression for himself
+and other men.</p>
+
+<p>This female control of art began, as I have
+said, at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV,
+and it has unfortunately kept the stamp of its
+origin. At that Court art, to suit the tastes
+of the Pompadour and the Du Barri, became
+consciously frivolous, became almost a part of
+the toilet. The artist was the slave of the
+mistress, and seems to have enjoyed his chains.
+In this slavery he did produce something
+charming; he did invest that narrow and
+artificial Heaven of the Court with some of the
+infinite beauty and music of a real Heaven.
+But out of this refined harem art there has
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_29" id="Pg_29" title="Pg_29">[29]</a></span>sprung a harem art of the whole world which
+has infested the homes even of perfectly respectable
+ladies ever since. All over Europe the
+ideals of applied art have remained the ideals
+of the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious
+effort have either women or men been able
+to escape from them. Everywhere there has
+spread a strange disease of romantic snobbery,
+the sufferers from which, in their efforts at
+&aelig;sthetic expression, always pretend to be what
+they are not. Excellent mothers of families,
+in their furniture and sometimes even in their
+clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. Of
+course, if this pretence were put into words and
+so presented to their consciousness, they would
+be indignant. It has for them no connexion with
+conduct; it is purely &aelig;sthetic, but art means to
+them make-believe, the make-believe that they
+live an entirely frivolous life of pleasure provided
+for them by masculine power and devotion.</p>
+
+<p>Yet these ladies know that they have not the
+revenues of the Pompadour; they must have
+their art, their make-believe, as cheap as
+possible; and it has been one of the triumphs
+of modern industry to provide them with cheap
+imitations of the luxury of the Pompadour.
+Hence the machine-made frivolities of the most
+respectable homes, the hair-brushes with backs
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_30" id="Pg_30" title="Pg_30">[30]</a></span>of stamped silver, the scent-bottles of imitation
+cut-glass, the draperies with printed rose-buds
+on them, the general artificial-floweriness and
+flimsiness and superfluity of naughtiness of our
+domestic art. It expresses a feminine romance
+to which the male indulgently consents, as if
+he were really the voluptuous monarch whose
+mistress the female, &aelig;sthetically, pretends to
+be. In this world of &aelig;sthetic make-believe
+our homes are not respectable; they would
+scorn to be so, for to the romantic female mind,
+when it occupies itself with art, the improper
+is the artistic.</p>
+
+<p>But this needs a more precise demonstration.
+We wonder at our modern passion for superfluous
+ornament. We shall understand it only
+if we discover its origin. The King's mistress
+liked everything about her to be ornamented,
+because it was a point of honour with her to
+advertise the King's devotion to her in the
+costliness of all her surroundings. He loved
+her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation.
+She, like Cleopatra, was always
+proving the potency of her charms by melting
+pearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was
+hung with the trophies of her physical pre-eminence.
+In all the art which we call Louis
+Quinze there is this advertisement of the labour
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_31" id="Pg_31" title="Pg_31">[31]</a></span>spent upon it. It proclaims that a vast deal
+of trouble has been taken in the making of it,
+and we can see the artist utterly subdued to
+this trouble, utterly the slave of the mistress's
+exorbitant whims. This advertisement of labour
+spent, without the reality, has been the mark
+of all popular domestic art ever since.</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful is the ornamented&mdash;namely, that
+which looks as if it had taken a great deal of
+trouble to make. The trouble now is taken by
+machinery, and so, with the cost, is minimized;
+and what it produces is ugliness, an ugliness
+which could not be mistaken for beauty but for
+the notion that it does express a desirable state
+of being in those who possess it. And this
+desirable state is the state of the King's mistress,
+of a siren who can have whatever she desires
+because of the potency of her charms. How
+otherwise can we explain the passion for superfluous
+machine-made ornament which makes our
+respectable homes so hideous? The machine
+simulates a trouble that has not been taken,
+and so gives proof of a voluptuous infatuation
+that does not exist. The hardworking mother
+of a family buys out of her scanty allowance
+a scent-bottle that looks as if it had been
+laboriously cut for a King's mistress, whereas
+really it has been moulded by machinery to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_32" id="Pg_32" title="Pg_32">[32]</a></span>keep up the delusion, unconsciously cherished
+by her, that she lives in a world of irresistible
+and unscrupulous feminine charm. And her
+husband endures indulgently all this superfluous
+ugliness because he, too, believes that
+it is the function of art to make the drawing-room
+of the mother of a family look like the
+boudoir of a siren.</p>
+
+<p>Most of this make-believe remains unconscious.
+We are all so used to it that we do
+not see in it the expression of the dying harem
+instinct in women. Yet it persists, even where
+the harem instinct would be passionately
+repudiated. It persists often in the dress of
+the most defiant suffragette, in outbreaks of
+incongruous frivolity, forlorn tawdry roses that
+still whisper memories of the Pompadour and
+her triumphant guilty splendour.</p>
+
+<p>But besides all this unconscious feminine
+influence upon art, there is the influence of
+women who care consciously for art; and it
+also has an enervating effect on the artist.
+For the female patron of art, just because
+there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to
+take a motherly interest in the artist. To
+her he is a delightful wayward child rather
+than a real man occupied with real things, like
+her husband or her father or her brother: not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_33" id="Pg_33" title="Pg_33">[33]</a></span>one who can earn money for her and fight for
+her and protect her, but rather one who needs
+to be protected and humoured in a world which
+cares so little for art. To her, with all her
+passion for art, it is something in its nature
+irrational, and, like a child, delightful because
+irrational. It is an escape from reality rather
+than a part of it. And so she will believe
+whatever the artist tells her because he is an
+artist, not because he is a man of sense; and
+she encourages him to be more of an artist
+than a man of sense. She encourages him to
+be extravagantly &aelig;sthetic, and enjoys all his
+extravagance as a diversion from the sound
+masculinity of her own mankind. There is
+room in her prosperous, easy world for these
+diversions from business, just as there is room
+for charity or, perhaps, religion. The world
+can afford artists as it can afford pets; as it
+can afford beautiful, cultivated women. And
+that also is the view of her husband, if he is
+good-natured. But to him, just because art
+and artists are the proper concern of his wife,
+they are even less serious than they are to her.
+She may persuade herself that she takes them
+quite seriously, but he pretends to do so only
+out of politeness, and as he would pretend to
+take her clothes seriously. For him the type
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_34" id="Pg_34" title="Pg_34">[34]</a></span>of the artist is still the pianist who gives locks
+of his over-abundant hair to ladies. Even if
+the artist is a painter and cuts his hair and
+dresses like a man, he still belongs to the
+feminine world and excites himself about
+matters that do not concern men. Men can
+afford him, and so they tolerate him; but he
+is one of the expenses they would cut down if
+it were necessary to cut down expenses.</p>
+
+<p>Well, it is necessary to cut down expenses
+now; and yet in ages much sterner and poorer
+than our own art was the concern of men, and
+they afforded it because it was not to them
+a mere feminine luxury. They afforded the
+towering churches of the Middle Ages because
+they expressed the religious passion of all mankind;
+and have we nothing to express except
+a dying harem instinct and the motherliness of
+kind women to a neglected class? We ought
+to be grateful to this motherliness, which has
+kept art alive in an age of ignorance; but
+we should see that it is only a <i>pis-aller</i>, and
+women should see this as well as men. The
+female attitude towards art has been itself
+the result of a wrong relation between women
+and men, a relation half-animal, half-romantic,
+and therefore not quite real. This relation,
+even while it has ceased to exist more and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_35" id="Pg_35" title="Pg_35">[35]</a></span>more in fact, has still continued to express
+itself &aelig;sthetically; and in art it has become a
+mere obsolete nuisance. One may care nothing
+for art and yet long to be rid of the meaningless
+frivolities of our domestic art. One may
+wish to clear them away as so much litter and
+trash; and this clearance is necessary so that
+we may purge our vision and see what is beautiful.
+We are almost rid of the manners of the
+King's mistress, and most women no longer try
+to appeal to men by their charming unreason.
+It is not merely that the appeal fails now; they
+themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect.
+But they still remain irrational in their tastes;
+or at least they have not learned that all this
+&aelig;sthetic irrationality misrepresents them, that
+it is forced upon them by tradesmen, that
+it is as inexpressive as a sentimental music-hall
+song sung by a gramophone. But now
+that men have given women the vote, and so
+proved that they take them seriously at last,
+they have the right to speak plainly on this
+matter. The feminine influence upon art has
+been bad. Let us admit that it has been the
+result of a bad masculine influence upon women,
+that it has been supreme because men have
+become philistine; but the fact remains that
+it has been bad. Art must be taken seriously
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_36" id="Pg_36" title="Pg_36">[36]</a></span>if it is to be worth anything. It must be the
+expression of what is serious and real in the
+human mind. But all this feminine art has
+expressed, and has tried to glorify, something
+false and worthless. Therefore it has been ugly,
+and we are all sick of its ugliness. We look to
+women, now that they are equalled with men
+by an act of legal justice, to deliver us from
+it. They disown the Pompadour in fact; let
+them disown her in art.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_37" id="Pg_37" title="Pg_37">[37]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">An Unpopular Master</p>
+
+
+<p>Nicholas Poussin is one of the great
+painters of the world; yet it is easier
+to give reasons for disliking him than for liking
+him. After his death there was a war of
+pamphlets about him; the one side, led by
+Lebrun, holding him up as a model for all
+painters to come, the other side, under de
+Piles, calling him a mere pedant compared with
+Rubens. Here is a passage from a poem
+against Poussin:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>Il s&ccedil;avoit manier la r&eacute;gle et le compas,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Parloit de la lumi&egrave;re et ne l'entendoit pas;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Il estoit de l'antique un assez bon copiste,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Mais sans invention, et mauvais coloriste.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Il ne pouvait marcher que sur le pas d'autruy:</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Le g&eacute;nie a manqu&eacute;, c'est un malheur pour luy.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>Now this is just what the criticism of yesterday
+said about him, the criticism of the eighties
+and nineties, when it was supposed that Velasquez
+had discovered the art of seeing, and with
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_38" id="Pg_38" title="Pg_38">[38]</a></span>it the art of painting. It sounds plausible,
+but not a word of it is true. And yet it
+remains difficult to show why it is not true, to
+distinguish between the genius of Poussin and
+the pedantry of his imitators, to convince
+people that he was not a bad colourist, and
+that he did not imitate the antique.</p>
+
+<p>This difficulty is connected with the age in
+which he happened to live. 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_39" id="Pg_39" title="Pg_39">[39]</a></span>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&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_40" id="Pg_40" title="Pg_40">[40]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_41" id="Pg_41" title="Pg_41">[41]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_42" id="Pg_42" title="Pg_42">[42]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>parvenu</i>, 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&mdash;indeed,
+so intensely that, if we have lost interest in
+that world, she fails to interest us. The Venetians
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_43" id="Pg_43" title="Pg_43">[43]</a></span>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 <i>parvenu</i>. 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_44" id="Pg_44" title="Pg_44">[44]</a></span>are cut off; and that which cuts us off is the
+colour.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_45" id="Pg_45" title="Pg_45">[45]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_46" id="Pg_46" title="Pg_46">[46]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_47" id="Pg_47" title="Pg_47">[47]</a></span>understanding. Rather he seems to cry, like
+Poe, of everything that he draws&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>O God, can I not grasp</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Them with a tighter clasp?</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_48" id="Pg_48" title="Pg_48">[48]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">A Defence of Criticism</p>
+
+
+<p>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
+<i>Times</i> 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_49" id="Pg_49" title="Pg_49">[49]</a></span>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;When is an artist not an artist? and
+the answer is&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_50" id="Pg_50" title="Pg_50">[50]</a></span>criticism of a Vorticist, or <i>vice versa</i>? The
+Academician, of course, would say that the
+Vorticist was not an artist&mdash;and <i>vice versa</i>.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_51" id="Pg_51" title="Pg_51">[51]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_52" id="Pg_52" title="Pg_52">[52]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_53" id="Pg_53" title="Pg_53">[53]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But in the best criticism judgment is rather
+implied than expressed. For the proper
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_54" id="Pg_54" title="Pg_54">[54]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_55" id="Pg_55" title="Pg_55">[55]</a></span>or fall together, and the artist who condemns
+the critic condemns himself also.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_56" id="Pg_56" title="Pg_56">[56]</a></span>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 <i>is</i> 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_57" id="Pg_57" title="Pg_57">[57]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_58" id="Pg_58" title="Pg_58">[58]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">The Artist and his Audience</p>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;some to battle, some to the
+chase; others again to dig and to delve in the
+field&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_59" id="Pg_59" title="Pg_59">[59]</a></span>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&mdash;this dreamer
+apart was the first artist."</p>
+
+<p>Then, he says, the hunters and the workers
+drank from the artists' 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&mdash;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&mdash;with understanding.... And
+the people&mdash;this time&mdash;had much to say
+in the matter, and all were satisfied. And
+Birmingham and Manchester arose in their
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_60" id="Pg_60" title="Pg_60">[60]</a></span>might, and art was relegated to the curiosity
+shop."</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_61" id="Pg_61" title="Pg_61">[61]</a></span>artist as one living in a primitive White
+House, and producing primitive nocturnes for
+his own amusement, unnoticed, happily, by
+primitive critics.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_62" id="Pg_62" title="Pg_62">[62]</a></span>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&mdash;which
+is absurd.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_63" id="Pg_63" title="Pg_63">[63]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_64" id="Pg_64" title="Pg_64">[64]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_65" id="Pg_65" title="Pg_65">[65]</a></span>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 &aelig;sthetic 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_66" id="Pg_66" title="Pg_66">[66]</a></span>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?</p>
+
+<p>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;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_67" id="Pg_67" title="Pg_67">[67]</a></span>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 &aelig;sthetic activity, contains a
+truth of great value. But his &aelig;sthetic 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_68" id="Pg_68" title="Pg_68">[68]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_69" id="Pg_69" title="Pg_69">[69]</a></span>speak to the eye as a picture speaks to it. Art
+is made for men as surely as boots are made for
+them.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_70" id="Pg_70" title="Pg_70">[70]</a></span>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
+<i>Chim&aelig;ra bombinans in vacuo</i>; 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_71" id="Pg_71" title="Pg_71">[71]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Artists are not "sports," but men; and men
+engaged in one of the most difficult of human
+activities. They are subject to &aelig;sthetic
+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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_72" id="Pg_72" title="Pg_72">[72]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_73" id="Pg_73" title="Pg_73">[73]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_74" id="Pg_74" title="Pg_74">[74]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">Wilfulness and Wisdom</p>
+
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_75" id="Pg_75" title="Pg_75">[75]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_76" id="Pg_76" title="Pg_76">[76]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>The Christian doctrine, preached so long in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_77" id="Pg_77" title="Pg_77">[77]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_78" id="Pg_78" title="Pg_78">[78]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Quem Deus vult perdere dementat prius.</i>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_79" id="Pg_79" title="Pg_79">[79]</a></span>That old tag puts a truth wrongly. God does
+not interfere to afflict the wilful man with
+madness, but he has never thrown himself open
+to the wisdom of God. His mind is like a
+machine that acts with increasing speed and
+fury because there is less and less material for
+it to act upon. One act leads to another in a
+blind chain of cause and effect; he does this
+merely because he has done that, and seems to
+be driven by fate on and on to his own ruin.
+So it was with Napoleon in his later years.
+He had lost the sense of any reality whatever
+except his own action; he saw the world as a
+passive object to be acted upon by himself.
+And that is how the Germans saw it two years
+ago. They could not understand that it was
+possible for the world to react against them.
+It was merely something that they were going
+to remake, to work their will upon. The war,
+at its beginning, was not to them a conflict
+between human beings; it was a process by
+which they would make of things what they
+willed. There was no reality except in themselves
+and their own will; for, in their worship
+of action, they had lost the sense of external
+reality, they had come to believe that there
+was nothing to learn from it except what a
+craftsman learns from his material by working
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_80" id="Pg_80" title="Pg_80">[80]</a></span>in it. It is by making that he learns; and
+they thought that there was no learning except
+by making.</p>
+
+<p>But that is the mistake of the whole Western
+world, though we have none of us carried it so
+far as Germany. Other men are to us still
+men, they still have some reality to us; but
+we see external reality as a material for us to
+work in; we are to ourselves entirely active
+and not at all passive beings. Even among all
+the evil and sorrow of the war we still took a
+pride in the enormous power of our instruments
+of destruction, as if we were children playing
+with big, dangerous toys. But these toys
+are themselves the product of a society that
+must always be making and never thinking or
+feeling. They express the will for action that
+has ousted the will to experience; and all the
+changes which we work on the face of the
+earth express that will too. We could not
+live in the cities we have made for ourselves if
+we thought that we had anything to learn
+from the beauty of the earth. They are for us
+merely places in which we learn to act, in
+which no one could learn to think or feel.
+Passive experience is impossible in them and
+they do not consider the possibility of it.
+So they express in every building, in every
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_81" id="Pg_81" title="Pg_81">[81]</a></span>object, in the very clothes of their inhabitants,
+an utter poverty of passive experience.
+In what we make we give out no stored
+riches of the mind; we make only so that we
+may act, never so that we may express ourselves;
+and we have little art because our
+making is entirely wilful. Our attempts at
+art are themselves entirely wilful. We will
+have art, we say; and so we plaster our utilities
+with the ornaments of the past, as if we could
+get the richness of experience secondhand from
+our ancestors. And in the same way we are
+always finding for our blind activities moral
+motives, those motives which are real only
+when they spring out of right experience. We
+rationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing
+is secondhand ornament to blind impulse; it
+is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our
+actions spring out of the experience which we
+lack. There is among us an incessant activity
+both of thought and of art; but much of it is
+entirely wilful. The thinker makes theories to
+justify what is done; he, too, sees all life in
+terms of action, he is the parasite of action.
+For a German professor the whole process of
+history was but a prelude to the wilfulness of
+Germany; he could not experience the past
+except in terms of what Germany willed to do;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_82" id="Pg_82" title="Pg_82">[82]</a></span>and the aim of his theorizing was to remove
+all scrupulous impediments to the action of
+Germany which she may have inherited from
+the past. Think so that you may be stronger
+to do what you wish to do; that is the modern
+notion of thought, and that is the reason why
+we throw up theories so easily; for thinking of
+this kind needs no experience, it needs merely
+an activity of the mind, the activity which
+collects facts and does with them what it will.
+And these theories are eagerly accepted so
+long as the impulse lasts which they justify.
+When that is spent they are forgotten, and
+new theories take their place to justify fresh
+impulses. And so it is with the incessant new
+movements in art. Art now is conceived
+entirely as action. The artist is as wilful as
+the Germanic hero; the will to make excludes
+in him the will to experience. The painter
+cannot look at the visible world without considering
+at once what kind of picture he will
+make of it. It is to him mere passive material
+for his artistic will, not an independent reality
+to enrich his mind so that it will give out its
+riches in the form of art. And as he is always
+willing to make pictures so he must will the
+kind of pictures he will make, as the Germans
+willed the kind of world they would make.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_83" id="Pg_83" title="Pg_83">[83]</a></span>But this willing of his is a kind of theorizing
+to justify his own action; and it changes incessantly
+because he never can be satisfied with
+his own poverty of experience. But still he
+will do anything rather than try to enrich that
+poverty.</p>
+
+<p>And that is the secret of all our restlessness,
+the restlessness that forced the Germans
+into the folly and crime of war. We are
+always dissatisfied with our poverty of experience;
+and we try to get rid of our dissatisfaction
+in more blind activity, throwing up new
+theories all the while as reasons why we should
+act. We fidget about the earth as if we were
+children, that could not read, left in a library;
+and, like them, we do mischief. And that is
+just what we are: children that have not learnt
+to read let loose upon the library of the universe;
+and all that we can do is to pull the
+books about and play games with them and
+scribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth
+is defaced with our meaningless scribbling, and
+we tell ourselves that it means something
+because we want to scribble. Or sometimes we
+tell ourselves that there is no meaning in anything,
+no more in the books than in our
+scribble.</p>
+
+<p>The only remedy is that we should learn to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_84" id="Pg_84" title="Pg_84">[84]</a></span>read; and for this we need above all things
+humility; not merely the personal humility of
+a man who knows that other men excel him,
+but a generic humility which acknowledges
+in the universe a greater wisdom, power,
+righteousness than his own. That is formally
+acknowledged by our religion, but it is not
+practically acknowledged in our way of life, in
+our conduct or our thought. We think and
+feel and behave as if we were the best and
+wisest creatures in the universe, as if it existed
+only for us to make use of it; and in so far as
+we learn from it at all, we learn only to make
+use of it. That is our idea of knowledge and
+wisdom; more and more it is our idea of
+science; and as for philosophy, we pay no heed
+to it because, in its nature, it is not concerned
+with making use of things. In every way we
+betray the fact that we cannot listen humbly,
+because we do not believe there is anything to
+listen to. For a few of the devout God spoke
+long ago, but He is not speaking now. "The
+kings of modern thought are dumb," said
+Matthew Arnold; but that is because everything
+outside the mind of man is dumb; all
+must be dumb to those who will not listen.
+If we assume that there, is no intelligence anywhere
+but in ourselves, we shall find none anywhere
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_85" id="Pg_85" title="Pg_85">[85]</a></span>else. There will be no meaning for us
+in anything but our own actions; and they
+will become more and more meaningless to us as
+they become more and more wilful, until at last
+we shall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage,
+or prisoners on a universal treadmill. Years
+ago the war must have seemed a meaningless
+treadmill to the Germans, but they cannot
+escape from its consequences; they have done
+and they must suffer. But will they learn from
+their sufferings, shall we all learn, that doing
+is not everything? Are we humbled enough
+to listen to the wisdom of the ages, which tells
+us that we can be wise only if we listen for a
+wisdom that is not ours?</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_86" id="Pg_86" title="Pg_86">[86]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">"The Magic Flute"</p>
+
+
+<p>When <i>The Magic Flute</i> was produced
+by the already dying Mozart it had
+little success. At the first performance, it is
+said, when the applause was faint, the leader
+of the orchestra stole up to Mozart, who was
+conducting, and kissed his hand; and Mozart
+stroked him on the head. We may guess that
+the leader knew what the music meant and
+that Mozart knew that he knew. Neither
+could put it into words and it is not put into
+words in the libretto. But the libretto need
+not be an obstruction to the meaning of the
+music if only the audience will not ask themselves
+what the libretto means. After Mozart's
+death the opera was successful, no doubt because
+the audience had given up asking what the
+libretto meant and had learnt something of the
+meaning of the music.</p>
+
+<p>There are worse librettos&mdash;librettos which
+have some clear unmusical meaning of their
+own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate
+to the meaning of the music, if it has
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_87" id="Pg_87" title="Pg_87">[87]</a></span>any. This libretto, apart from the music, is
+so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence,
+that one can easily pass through it to the
+music. The author, Schickaneder, was Mozart's
+friend, and he had wit enough to understand
+the mood of Mozart. That mood does express
+itself in the plot and the incidents of the
+libretto, although in them it is empty of value
+or passion. Schickaneder, in fact, constructed
+a mere diagram to which Mozart gave life.
+The life is all in the music, but the diagram
+has its use, in that it supplies a shape, which
+we recognize, to the life of the music. The
+characters live in the music, but in the words
+they tell us something about themselves which
+enables us to understand their musical speech
+better. Papageno tells us that he is a bird-catcher
+and a child of nature. The words are
+labels, but through them we pass more quickly
+to an understanding of his song. Only we
+shall miss that understanding if we try to reach
+it through the words, if we look for the story
+of the opera in them. In the words the events
+of the opera have no connexion with each other.
+There is no reason why one should follow
+another. The logic of it is all in the music,
+for the music creates a world in which events
+happen naturally, in which one tune springs
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_88" id="Pg_88" title="Pg_88">[88]</a></span>out of another, or conflicts with it, like the
+forces of nature or the thoughts and actions of
+man. This world is the universe as Mozart
+sees it; and the whole opera is an expression
+of his peculiar faith. It is therefore a religious
+work, though free from that meaningless and
+timid solemnity which we associate with religion.
+Mozart, in this world, was like an
+angel who could not but laugh, though without
+any malice, at all the bitter earnestness of mankind.
+Even the wicked were only absurd to
+him; they were naughty children whom, if one
+had the spell, one could enchant into goodness.
+And in <i>The Magic Flute</i> the spell works. It
+works in the flute itself and in Papageno's lyre
+when the wicked negro Monostatos threatens
+him and Tamino with his ugly attendants.
+Papageno has only to play a beautiful childish
+tune on his lyre and the attendants all march
+backwards to an absurd goose-step in time with
+it. They are played off the stage; and the
+music convinces one that they must yield to it.
+So, we feel if we had had the music, we could
+have made the Prussians march their goose-step
+back to Potsdam; so we could play all solemn
+perversity off the stage of life. If we had the
+music&mdash;but there is solemn perversity in us too;
+by reason of which we can hardly listen to the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_89" id="Pg_89" title="Pg_89">[89]</a></span>music, much less play it, hardly listen to it or
+understand it even when Mozart makes it for
+us. For he had the secret of it; he was a
+philosopher who spoke in music and so simply
+that the world missed his wisdom and thought
+that he was just a beggar playing tunes in the
+street. A generation ago he was commonly
+said to be too tuney, as you might say that a
+flower was too flowery. People would no more
+consider him than they would consider the
+lilies of the field. They preferred Wagner in
+all his glory.</p>
+
+<p>Even now you can enjoy <i>The Magic Flute</i> as
+a more than usually absurd musical comedy
+with easy, old-fashioned tunes. You can enjoy
+it anyway, if you are not solemn about it, as
+you can enjoy <i>Hamlet</i> for a bloody melodrama.
+But, like <i>Hamlet</i>, it has depths and depths of
+meaning beyond our full comprehension. Papageno
+is a pantomime figure, but he is also one
+of the greatest figures in the drama of the
+world. He is everyman, like Hamlet, if only
+we had the wit to recognize ourselves in him.
+Or rather he is that element in us which we all
+like and despise in others, but which we will
+never for one moment confess to in ourselves&mdash;the
+coward, the boaster, the liar, but the child
+of nature. He, because he knows himself for
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_90" id="Pg_90" title="Pg_90">[90]</a></span>all of these, can find his home in Sarostro's
+paradise. He does not want Sarostro's high
+wisdom; what he does want is a Papagena, an
+Eve, a child of nature like himself; and she is
+given to him. He has the wit to recognize
+his mate, almost a bird like himself, and to
+them Mozart gives their bird-duet, so that,
+when they sing it, we feel that we might all
+sing it together. It is not above our capacity
+of understanding or delight. The angel has
+learnt our earthly tongue, but transformed it
+so that he makes a heaven of the earth, a
+heaven that is not too high or difficult for us,
+a wild-wood heaven, half-absurd, in which we
+can laugh as well as sing, and in which the
+angels will laugh at us and with us, laugh our
+silly sorrows into joy.</p>
+
+<p>There is Mozart himself in Papageno, the
+faun domesticated and sweetened by centuries
+of Christian experience, yet still a faun and
+always ready to play a trick on human
+solemnity; and in this paradise which Mozart
+makes for us the faun has his place and a
+beauty not incongruous with it, like the imps
+and gargoyles of a Gothic church. At any
+moment the music will turn from sublimity
+into fun, and in a moment it can turn back to
+sublimity; and always the change seems natural.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_91" id="Pg_91" title="Pg_91">[91]</a></span>It is like a great cathedral with High Mass
+and children playing hide-and-seek behind the
+pillars; and the Mass would not be itself
+without the children. That is the mind of
+Mozart which people have called frivolous, just
+because in his heaven there is room for everything
+except the vulgar glory of Solomon and
+cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There
+never was anything in art more profound or
+beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but
+it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious,
+incongruous with the twitterings of Papageno.
+Mozart's religion is so real that it seems to be
+not religion, but merely beauty, as real saints
+seem to be not good, but merely charming.
+And there are people to whom his beauty does
+not seem to be art, because it is just beauty;
+they think that he had the trick of it and
+could turn it on as he chose; they prefer the
+creaking of effort and egotism. His gifts are
+so purely gifts and so lavish that they seem to
+be cheap; and <i>The Magic Flute</i> is an absurdity
+which he wrote in a hurry to please the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>We can hardly expect to see a satisfying performance
+of it on the stage of to-day, but we
+must be grateful for any performance, for the
+life of the music is in it. One can see from it
+what <i>The Magic Flute</i> might be. The music
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_92" id="Pg_92" title="Pg_92">[92]</a></span>is so sung, so played that it does transfigure
+the peculiar theatrical hideousness of our time.
+Tamino and Panina may look like figures out
+of an Academy picture, as heroes and heroines
+of opera always do. They may wear clothes
+that belong to no world of reality or art,
+clothes that suggest the posed and dressed-up
+model. But the music mitigates even these,
+and it helps every one to act, or rather to
+forget what they have learnt about acting. It
+evidently brings happiness and concord to those
+who sing it, so that they seem to be taking
+part in a religious act rather than in an act of
+the theatre. One feels this most in the concerted
+music, when the same wind from paradise
+seems to be blowing through all the singers
+and they move to it like flowers, in spite of
+their absurd clothes.</p>
+
+<p>But what is needed for a satisfying performance
+is a world congruous to the eye as
+well as to the ear; and for this we need a
+break with all our theatrical conventions.
+Sarostro, for instance, lives among Egyptian
+scenery&mdash;very likely the architecture of his
+temple was Egyptian at the first performance&mdash;but,
+for all that, this Egyptian world does
+not suit the music, and to us it suggests the
+miracles of the Egyptian Hall. But there is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_93" id="Pg_93" title="Pg_93">[93]</a></span>one world which would perfectly suit the music,
+a world in which it could pass naturally from
+absurdity to beauty, and in which all the figures
+could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that
+is the Chinese world as we know it in Chinese
+art. For in that there is something fantastic
+yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a
+mixture of the childish and the sacred, which
+might say to the eye what Mozart's music says
+to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno
+be a saint; only in that world, which ranges
+from the willow-pattern plate to the Rishi in
+his mystical ecstasy in the wilderness, could the
+soul of Mozart, with its laughter and its wisdom,
+be at home. That too is the world in which
+flowers and all animals are of equal import with
+mankind; it is the world of dragons in which
+the serpent of the first act would not seem to
+be made of pasteboard, and in which all the
+magic would not seem to be mere conjuring.
+In that world one might have beautiful landscapes
+and beautiful figures to suit them.
+There Sarostro would not be a stage magician,
+but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to
+him would be only the change from Ming to
+Sung, which would seem no change at all.
+Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic
+flute, the world where silver bells hang on
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_94" id="Pg_94" title="Pg_94">[94]</a></span>every flowering tree and the thickets are full
+of enchanted nightingales. It is the world of
+imps and monsters, and yet of impassioned
+contemplation, where the sage sits in a moonlit
+pavilion and smiles like a lover, and where the
+lovers smile like sages; where everything is to
+the eye what the music of Mozart is to the ear.</p>
+
+<p>In the Chinese world we could be rid of all
+the drawling erotics of the modern theatre,
+we could give up the orchid for the lotus and
+the heavy egotism of Europe for the self-forgetful
+gaiety of the East. It may be only
+an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality,
+but it is one which the art of China makes
+real to us and with which we are familiar in
+that art; and there is a smiling wisdom in it,
+there is a gaiety which comes from conquest
+rather than refusal of reality, just like the
+gaiety and wisdom of Mozart's music. He
+knew sorrow well, but would not luxuriate in
+it; he took the beauty of the universe more
+seriously than himself. To him wickedness
+was a matter of imps and monsters rather than
+of villains, and of imps and monsters that
+could be exorcized by music. He was the
+Orpheus of the world who might tame the
+beast in all of us if we would listen to him, the
+wandering minstrel whom the world left to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_95" id="Pg_95" title="Pg_95">[95]</a></span>play out in the street. And yet his ultimate
+seriousness and the last secret of his beauty is
+pity, not for himself and his own little troubles,
+but for the whole bitter earnestness of mortal
+children. And in this pity he seems not to
+weep for us, still less for himself, but to tell us
+to dry our tears and be good, and listen to his
+magic flute. That is what he would have told
+the Prussians, after he had set them marching
+the goose-step backwards. Even they would
+not be the villains of a tragedy for him, but
+only beasts to be tamed with his music until
+they should be fit to sing their own bass part
+in the last chorus of reconciliation. And this
+pity of his sounds all through <i>The Magic Flute</i>
+and gives to its beauty a thrill and a wonder
+far beyond what any fleshly passion can give.
+Sarostro is a priest, not a magician, because there
+is in him the lovely wisdom of pity, because he
+has a place in his paradise for Papageno, the
+child of nature, where he shall be made happy
+with his mate Papagena. There is a moment
+when Papageno is about to hang himself
+because there is no one to love him; he will
+hang himself in Sarostro's lonely paradise.
+But there is a sly laughter in the music which
+tells us that he will be interrupted with the
+rope round his neck. And so he is, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_96" id="Pg_96" title="Pg_96">[96]</a></span>Papagena is given to him, and the paradise is
+no longer lonely; and the two sing their part
+in the chorus of reconciliation at the end.
+And we are sure that the Queen of Night,
+and the ugly negro and all his goose-stepping
+attendants, are not punished. They have been
+naughty for no reason that anyone can discover,
+just like Prussians and other human beings;
+and now the magic flute triumphs over their
+naughtiness, and the silver bells ring from
+every tree and the enchanted nightingales sing
+in all the thickets, and the sages and the
+lovers smile like children; and the laughter
+passes naturally into the divine beauty of
+Mozart's religion, which is solemn because
+laughter and pity are reconciled in it, not
+rejected as profane.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_97" id="Pg_97" title="Pg_97">[97]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">Process or Person?</p>
+
+
+<p>Nearly all war pictures in the past
+have been merely pictures that happened
+to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle
+scenes are but pretexts for his peculiar version
+of the visible world. They might as
+well be still life for all the effect the subject
+has had upon his treatment of it. Leonardo,
+in his lost battle picture, was no doubt
+dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite
+curiosity; he has left notes about the manner
+in which fighting men and horses ought to be
+represented, but he had this detached curiosity
+about all things. Michelangelo's battle
+picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the
+nude in violent action, like his picture of the
+"Last Judgment." Titian's "Battle of Cadore,"
+which we know from the copy of a fragment
+of it, was a landscape with figures in
+violent action. Tintoret's battle scenes are
+parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his
+hunting scenes or his Bacchanals, expressions
+of his own overweening energy. In none of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_98" id="Pg_98" title="Pg_98">[98]</a></span>these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there
+implied any criticism of war, or any sense that
+it is an abnormal activity of man. The men
+who take part in it are just men fighting;
+they are not men seen differently because they
+are fighting, or in any way robbed of their
+humanity because of their inhuman business.
+As for Meissonier, he paints a battle scene just
+as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting
+a <i>genre</i> picture; and most other modern
+military painters make merely a patriotic
+appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation;
+and they paint battle pictures as they
+might paint sporting pictures, because there is
+a public that likes them.</p>
+
+<p>In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is
+expressed a modern sense of war as an
+abnormal occupation; and this sense shows
+itself in the very method of the artist. He
+was something of a Cubist before the war; but
+in these pictures he has found a new reason for
+being one; for his cubist method does express,
+in the most direct way, his sense that in war
+man behaves like a machine or part of a
+machine, that war is a process in which man
+is not treated as a human being but as an
+item in a great instrument of destruction, in
+which he ceases to be a person and is lost in a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_99" id="Pg_99" title="Pg_99">[99]</a></span>process. The cubist method, with its repetition
+and sharp distinction of planes, expresses
+this sense of mechanical process better than
+any other way of representation. Perhaps it
+came into being to express the modern sense of
+process as the ultimate reality of all things,
+even of life and growth. This is the age of
+mechanism; and machines have affected even our
+view of the universe; we are overawed by our
+own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler
+imagined a future in which machines would
+come to life and make us their slaves; but it
+is not so much that machines have come to life
+as that we ourselves have lost the pride and
+sweetness of our humanity; not that the
+machines seem more and more like us, but that
+we seem more and more like the machines.
+Everywhere we see processes to which we are
+subject and of which our humanity is the
+result, though in the past we have harboured
+the delusion that our humanity was in some
+way independent of processes. Now that delusion
+is fading away from us; and it fades
+away most of all in war, where all humanity
+is evidently dominated by the struggle for life,
+and is but a part of it, as raindrops are part of
+a storm.</p>
+
+<p>It is this sense of tyrannous process that Mr.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_100" id="Pg_100" title="Pg_100">[100]</a></span>Nevinson expresses in his battle pictures, with,
+we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentment
+against it. His pictures look like a visible
+<i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of it all. That is how
+men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting
+in modern war; and, being men, they
+ought not to look so. That, at least, is the
+effect the pictures produce on us. They are a
+bitter satire on all the modern power of man
+and the uses to which he has put it. He has
+allowed it to make him its slave and to set him
+to a business which has no purpose whatever,
+which is as blind as the process of the universe
+seems to one who has no faith. This struggle
+for life might just as well be called a struggle
+for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle
+between two machines intent on wrecking each
+other; and part of the machines are the bodies
+of men, which behave as if there were no souls
+in them, as if there were not even life, but
+merely energy; so that they collide and destroy
+each other like masses of matter in space.
+Nothing can be said of them except that they
+obey certain laws; we call their obedience
+discipline, but it is only the discipline of things
+subject to a process.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is the sense of process, as the ultimate
+reality in the universe, which has produced
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_101" id="Pg_101" title="Pg_101">[101]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_102" id="Pg_102" title="Pg_102">[102]</a></span>of them; the God, who is love, does not
+exist.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_103" id="Pg_103" title="Pg_103">[103]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_104" id="Pg_104" title="Pg_104">[104]</a></span>Prussian drill sergeant could consent to this
+version of man with any joy.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_105" id="Pg_105" title="Pg_105">[105]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_106" id="Pg_106" title="Pg_106">[106]</a></span>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_107" id="Pg_107" title="Pg_107">[107]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_108" id="Pg_108" title="Pg_108">[108]</a></span>that he has found nothing to take their place,
+He gives us a <i>Chim&aelig;ra bombinans in vacuo</i>, 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_109" id="Pg_109" title="Pg_109">[109]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_110" id="Pg_110" title="Pg_110">[110]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">The Artist and the Tradesman</p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_111" id="Pg_111" title="Pg_111">[111]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_112" id="Pg_112" title="Pg_112">[112]</a></span>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,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_113" id="Pg_113" title="Pg_113">[113]</a></span>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&mdash;that is
+to say, for the good of their souls and not
+because they like it.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_114" id="Pg_114" title="Pg_114">[114]</a></span>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&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_115" id="Pg_115" title="Pg_115">[115]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_116" id="Pg_116" title="Pg_116">[116]</a></span>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 &aelig;sthetic
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_117" id="Pg_117" title="Pg_117">[117]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>So, in the matter of ornament, we need to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_118" id="Pg_118" title="Pg_118">[118]</a></span>make a self-denying ordinance; not because
+ornament is necessarily bad&mdash;it is the natural
+expression of the artist's superfluous energy
+and delight&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_119" id="Pg_119" title="Pg_119">[119]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_120" id="Pg_120" title="Pg_120">[120]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">Professionalism in Art</p>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>As if his whole vocation</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Were endless imitation.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_121" id="Pg_121" title="Pg_121">[121]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now professionalism is the result of a false
+analogy between mechanical invention and the
+higher activities. It happens whenever the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_122" id="Pg_122" title="Pg_122">[122]</a></span>medium is regarded merely as material to be
+manipulated, when the artist thinks that he
+can learn to fly by mastering some other artist's
+machine, when his art is to him a matter of
+invention gradually perfected and necessarily
+progressing through the advance of knowledge
+and skill. One often finds this false analogy
+in books about the history of the arts, especially
+of painting and music. It is assumed,
+for instance, that Italian painting progressed
+mechanically from Giotto to Titian, that
+Titian had a greater power of expression than
+Giotto because he had command of a number
+of inventions in anatomy and perspective and
+the like that were unknown to Giotto. So we
+have histories of the development of the symphony,
+in which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
+are treated as if they were mechanical inventors
+each profiting by the discoveries of his predecessors.
+Beethoven was the greatest of the
+three because he had the luck to be born last,
+and Beethoven's earliest symphonies are necessarily
+better than Mozart's latest because they
+were composed later. But in such histories
+there always comes a point at which artists
+cease to profit by the inventions of their
+predecessors. After Michelangelo, perhaps
+after Beethoven, is the decadence. Then suddenly
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_123" id="Pg_123" title="Pg_123">[123]</a></span>there is talk of inspiration, or the lack
+of it. Mere imitators appear, and the historian
+who reviles them does not see that they have
+only practised, and refuted, his theory of art.
+They also have had the luck to be born later;
+but it has been bad luck, not good, for
+them, because to them their art has been all
+a matter of mechanical invention, of professionalism.</p>
+
+<p>The worst of it is that the greatest artists
+are apt themselves to fall in love with their
+own inventions, not to see that they are
+mechanical inventions because they themselves
+have discovered them. Michelangelo
+in his "Last Judgment" is very professional;
+Titian was professional through all his middle
+age; Tintoret was professional whenever he
+was bored with his work, which happened
+often; Shakespeare, whenever he was lazy,
+which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin
+to see, could be very earnestly professional;
+and as for Milton&mdash;consider this end of the
+last speech of Manoah, in <i>Samson Agonistes</i>,
+where we expect a simple cadence:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>The virgins also shall on feastful days</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Visit his tomb with flowers, only bewailing</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>From whence captivity and loss of eyes</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_124" id="Pg_124" title="Pg_124">[124]</a></span>Milton was tempted into the jargon of these last
+two lines, which are like a bad translation of a
+Greek play, by professionalism. He was trying
+to make his poetry as much unlike ordinary
+speech as he could; he was for the moment a
+slave to a tradition, and none the less a slave
+because it was the tradition of his own past.</p>
+
+<p>Professionalism is a device for making expression
+easy; and it is one used by the
+greatest artists sometimes because their business
+is to be always expressing themselves, and even
+they have not always something to express.
+But expression is so difficult, even for those
+who have something to express, that they
+must be always practising it if they are ever
+to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance,
+was a professed enemy of professionalism in
+poetry; yet he, too, was for ever writing verses.
+It was a hobby with him as well as an art; and
+his professionalism was merely less accomplished
+than that of Milton or Spenser:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>Fair Ellen Irwin, when she sate</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Upon the Braes of Kirtle,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Was lovely as a Grecian maid</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Adorned with wreaths of myrtle.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>Why adorned with wreaths of myrtle? Wordsworth
+himself tells us. His subject had already
+been treated in Scotch poems "in simple ballad
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_125" id="Pg_125" title="Pg_125">[125]</a></span>strain," so, he says, "at the outset I threw out
+a classical image to prepare the reader for the
+style in which I meant to treat the story, and
+so to preclude all comparison." No one, whose
+object was just to tell the story, would compare
+Ellen with a Grecian maid and her wreaths of
+myrtle; but Wordsworth must do so to show
+us how he means to tell it, and, as he forgets
+to mention, so that he may rhyme with Kirtle.
+That is all professionalism, all a device for
+making expression easy, practised by a great
+poet because at the moment he had nothing to
+express. But art is always difficult and cannot
+be made easy by this means. We need not
+take a malicious pleasure in such lapses of the
+great poet; but it is well to know when Homer
+nods, even though he uses all his craft to pretend
+that he is wide awake. Criticism may
+have a negative as well as a positive value. It
+may set us on our guard against professionalism
+even in the greatest artists, and most of
+all in them. For it is they who begin professionalism
+and, with the mere momentum of
+their vitality, make it attractive. Because
+they are great men and really accomplished,
+they can say nothing with a grand air; and
+these grand nothings of theirs allure us just
+because they are nothings and make no
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_126" id="Pg_126" title="Pg_126">[126]</a></span>demands upon our intelligence. That is art
+indeed, we cry: and we intoxicate ourselves with
+it because it is merely art. "The quality of
+mercy is not strained" is far more popular
+than Lear's speech, "No, no, no! Come, let's
+away to prison," because it is professional
+rhetoric; it is what Shakespeare could write
+at any moment, whereas the speech of Lear is
+what Lear said at one particular moment. The
+contrast between the two is the contrast well
+put in the epigram about Barry and Garrick
+in their renderings of King Lear:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>A king, aye, every inch a king, such Barry doth appear.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>But Garrick's quite another thing; he's every inch King Lear.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>We admire the great artist when he is every
+inch a king more than when he has lost his
+kingship in his passion.</p>
+
+<p>He no doubt knows the difference well
+enough. But he wishes to do everything well,
+he has a natural human delight in his own
+accomplishment; and a job to finish. Shakespeare,
+Michelangelo, Beethoven were not
+slaves to their own professionalism; no doubt
+they could laugh at it themselves. But there
+is always a danger that we shall be enslaved by
+it; and it is the business of criticism to free us
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_127" id="Pg_127" title="Pg_127">[127]</a></span>from that slavery, to make us aware of this last
+infirmity of great artists. We are on our guard
+easily enough against a professionalism that is
+out of fashion. The Wagnerian of a generation
+ago could sneer at the professionalism of
+Mozart; but the professionalism of Wagner
+seemed to him to be inspiration made constant
+and certain by a new musical invention. We
+know now only too well, from Wagner's imitators,
+that he did not invent a new method of
+tapping inspiration; we ought to know that no
+one can do that. The more complete the
+method the more tiresome it becomes, even as
+practised by the inventor.</p>
+
+<p>Decadence in art is always caused by professionalism,
+which makes the technique of art
+too difficult, and so destroys the artist's energy
+and joy in his practice of it. Teachers of the
+arts are always inclined to insist on their difficulty
+and to set hard tasks to their pupils for
+the sake of their hardness; and often the pupil
+stays too long learning until he thinks that
+anything which is difficult to do must therefore
+be worth doing. This notion also overawes
+the general public so that they value what
+looks to them difficult; but in art that which
+seems difficult to us fails with us, we are aware
+of the difficulty, not of the art. The greater
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_128" id="Pg_128" title="Pg_128">[128]</a></span>the work of art the easier it seems to us. We
+feel that we could have done it ourselves if only
+we had had the luck to hit upon that way of
+doing it; indeed, where our &aelig;sthetic experience
+of it is complete, we feel as if we were doing it
+ourselves; our minds jump with the artist's
+mind; we are for the moment the artist himself
+in his very act of creation. But we are
+always apt to undervalue this true and complete
+&aelig;sthetic experience, because it seems so easy
+and simple, and we mistake for it a painful
+sense of the artist's skill, of his professional
+accomplishment. So we demand of artists,
+that they shall impress us with their accomplishment;
+we have not had our money's worth
+unless we feel that we could not possibly do
+ourselves what they have done. No doubt,
+when the <i>Songs of Innocence</i> were first published,
+anyone who did happen to read them
+thought them doggerel. Blake in a moment
+had freed himself from all the professionalism
+of the followers of Pope, and even now they
+make poetry seem an easy art to us, until we
+try to write songs of innocence ourselves:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poem">
+<tr><td align='left'>When the voices of children are heard on the green,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;">And laughing is heard on the hill,</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>My heart is at rest within my breast,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;">And everything else is still.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;">And the dews of night arise;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Till the morning appears in the skies."</span></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_129" id="Pg_129" title="Pg_129">[129]</a></span></div>
+
+<p>We call it artless, with still a hint of depreciation
+in the word, or at least of wonder that we
+should be so moved by such simple means.
+It is a kind of cottage-poetry, and has that
+beauty which in a cottage moves us more than
+all the art of palaces. But we never learn
+the lesson of that beauty because it seems to
+us so easily won; and so our arts are always
+threatened by the decadence of professionalism.
+But poetry in England has been a living art
+so long because it has had the power of freeing
+itself from professionalism and choosing the
+better path with Mary and with Ruth. The
+value of the Romantic movement lay, not in
+its escape to the wonders of the past, but in its
+escape from professionalism and all its self-imposed
+and easy difficulties. For it is much
+easier to write professional verses in any style
+than to write songs of innocence; and that is
+why professionalism in all the arts tempts all
+kinds of artists. Anyone can achieve it who
+has the mind. It is a substitute for expression,
+as mere duty is a substitute for virtue. But, as
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_130" id="Pg_130" title="Pg_130">[130]</a></span>a forbidding sense of duty makes virtue itself
+seem unattractive, so professionalism destroys
+men's natural delight in the arts. Like
+the artist himself, his public becomes anxious,
+perverse, exacting; afraid lest it shall admire
+the wrong thing, because it has lost the immediate
+sense of the right thing. Just as it
+expects art to be difficult, so it expects its own
+pleasure in art to be difficult; and thus we
+have attained to our present notion about art
+which is like the Puritan notion about virtue,
+that it is what no human being could possibly
+enjoy by nature. And if we do enjoy it, "like a
+meadow gale in spring," it cannot be good art.</p>
+
+<p>But in painting as in poetry, all the new
+movements of value are escapes from professionalism;
+and they begin by shocking the
+public because they seem to make the art too
+easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work
+of Millais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne
+of Whistler. He said it was cockney impudence
+because it lacked the professionalism he expected.
+Artists and critics alike are always binding
+burdens on the arts; and they are always
+angry with the artist who cuts the burden off
+his back. They think he is merely shirking
+difficulties. But the difficulty of expression is
+so much greater than the self-imposed difficulties
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_131" id="Pg_131" title="Pg_131">[131]</a></span>of mere professionalism that any man
+who is afraid of difficulties will try to be a professional
+rather than an artist.</p>
+
+<p>In art there is always humility, in professionalism
+pride. And it is this pride that
+makes art more ugly and tiresome than any
+other work of man. Nothing is stranger in
+human nature than the tyranny of boredom
+it will endure in the pursuit of art; and the
+more bored men are, the more they are convinced
+of artistic salvation. Our museums are cumbered
+with monstrous monuments of past professionalism;
+our bookshelves groan with them.
+Always we are trying to like things because
+they seem to us very well done; never do we
+dare to say to ourselves: It may be well done,
+but it were better if it were not done at all;
+and the artist is still to us a dog walking on his
+hind legs, a performer whose merit lies in the
+unnatural difficulty of his performance.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_132" id="Pg_132" title="Pg_132">[132]</a></span></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="chapterhead">Waste or Creation?</p>
+
+
+<p>The William Morris Celebration was not
+so irrelevant to these times as it may
+seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe
+to our society, and it has come. That
+commercial system of ours, which seems to so
+many part of the order of Nature, was to him
+as evil and unnatural as slavery. His quarrel
+with it was not political, but human; it was
+the quarrel not of the oppressed, for he was
+not the man to be oppressed in any society, but
+of the workman. He was sure that a society
+which encouraged bad work and discouraged
+good must in some way or other come to a bad
+end; and he would have seen in this war the
+end that he predicted. Whatever its result,
+there must be a change in the order of our
+society, whether it sinks through incessant
+wars, national and commercial, into barbarism
+or is shocked into an effort to attain to civilization.
+There were particular sayings of Morris's
+to which no one at the time paid much heed.
+They seemed mere grumblings against what
+must be. He was, for instance, always crying
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_133" id="Pg_133" title="Pg_133">[133]</a></span>out against our waste of labour. If only all
+men did work that was worth doing&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Think what a change that would make in
+the world! I tell you I feel dazed at the
+thought of the immensity of the work which
+is undergone for the making of useless things.
+It would be an instructive day's work, for any
+one of us who is strong enough, to walk
+through two or three of the principal streets
+of London on a weekday, and take accurate
+note of everything in the shop windows which
+is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life
+of a serious man. Nay, the most of these
+things no one, serious or unserious, wants at
+all; only a foolish habit makes even the
+lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants
+them; and to many people, even of those who
+buy them, they are obvious encumbrances to
+real work, thought, and pleasure.</p></div>
+
+<p>At the time most people said that this waste
+of labour was all a matter of demand and
+supply, and thought no more about it; some
+said that it was good for trade. Very few saw,
+with Morris, that demand for such things is
+something willed and something that ought
+not to be willed.</p>
+
+<p>But then it was generally believed that we
+could afford this waste of labour; and so it
+went on until, after a year or two of war, we
+found that we could not afford it. Then even
+the most ignorant and thoughtless learned,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_134" id="Pg_134" title="Pg_134">[134]</a></span>from facts, not from books, certain lessons of
+political economy. They learned that, in war-time
+at least, a nation that wastes its labour
+will be overcome by one that does not. At
+once the common will was set against the waste
+of labour; and, what would have seemed
+strangest of all forty years ago, the Government,
+with the consent of the people, set to
+work to stop the waste of labour, and did to
+a great extent succeed in stopping it. When
+people thought in terms of munitions, instead
+of in terms of general well-being, they saw that
+the waste of labour must be, and could be,
+stopped. They talked no longer about the
+laws of supply and demand, but about munitions.
+Those who had made trash must be
+set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some
+way to second the Army. Those who still
+were ready to waste labour on trash for themselves
+were no longer obeying the laws of
+supply and demand; they were diverting
+labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic,
+they were helping the Germans.
+Money, in fact, had no longer the right to
+an absolute command over labour. A man,
+before he spent a sovereign, must ask himself
+whether he was spending it for the good of the
+nation; and if he did not ask himself that, the
+Government would ask it for him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_135" id="Pg_135" title="Pg_135">[135]</a></span>So much the war taught us, for purposes of
+war. But Morris many years ago tried to
+teach it for purposes of peace. When he
+wrote those words which we have quoted, he
+was not talking politics but ordinary common
+sense. He was not even talking art, but rather
+economics; and he was talking it not to any
+vague abstraction called the community, but
+to each individual human being. At that time
+every one thought of economics as something
+which concerned society or the universe. It
+was, so to speak, a natural science; it observed
+phenomena as if they were in the heavens; and
+stated laws about them, laws not human but
+natural. Perhaps it was the greatest achievement
+of Morris in the way of thought that he
+saw economics, even more clearly than Ruskin,
+as a matter not of natural laws, but of conscience
+and duty. He did not talk about
+economics at all, but about the waste of labour,
+just as we talk about it now. The only difference
+is that he saw it to be one of the chief
+causes of poverty in time of peace, whereas we
+see it as a hindrance to victory in time of war.
+We have, for war purposes, acquired the conscience
+that he wished us to acquire for all
+purposes. The question is whether we shall
+keep it in peace.</p>
+
+<p>Upon that depends the question how soon
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_136" id="Pg_136" title="Pg_136">[136]</a></span>we shall recover from the war. For there is
+no doubt that we shall not be able to afford
+our former waste of labour; and, if we persist
+in it, we shall be bankrupt as a society. It
+may be said that we shall not have the money,
+the power, to waste labour. But we shall certainly
+have some superfluous energy, more and
+more, it is to be hoped, as time goes on; and
+our future recovery will depend upon the use
+we make of this superfluous energy. We can
+waste it, as we wasted it before the war; or we
+can keep the conscience we have acquired in
+war and ask ourselves in peace, with every
+penny we spend, whether we are wasting
+labour. It is true that what may be waste to
+one will not be waste to another; but in that
+matter every one must obey his own conscience.
+The important thing is that every one should
+have a conscience and obey it. There will be
+plenty of people to tell us that no one can
+define waste of labour. No one can define sin;
+but each man has his own conscience on that
+point and lives well or ill as he obeys it or disobeys
+it. Besides, there are many things, all
+the trash that Morris speaks about in the shop
+windows, that every one knows to be waste.
+We need not trouble ourselves about the fact
+that art will seem waste to the philistine and
+not to the artist. We must allow for differences
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_137" id="Pg_137" title="Pg_137">[137]</a></span>on that point as on most others. Some
+things that might have been waste to Samuel
+Smiles would have been to Morris a symptom
+of well-being. But he knew, and often said,
+that we cannot have the beauty which was to
+him a symptom of well-being unless we end the
+waste of labour on trash. Of luxury he said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By those who know of nothing better it has
+even been taken for art, the divine solace of
+human labour, the romance of each day's hard
+practice of the difficult art of living. But I
+say, art cannot live beside it nor self-respect in
+any class of life. Effeminacy and brutality are
+its companions on the right hand and the left.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is, we have all discovered now, only a
+certain amount of labour in the country, in the
+world. Even the most ignorant are aware at
+last that money does not create labour but
+only commands it, and may command it to do
+what will or will not benefit us all. We were,
+for the purposes of the war, much more of a
+fellowship than we had ever been before. We
+acknowledged a duty to each other, the duty
+of commanding labour to the common good.
+We asked with every sovereign we spent
+whether it would help or hinder us in the war.
+Morris would have us ask also whether it will
+help or hinder us in the advance towards a
+general happiness.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_138" id="Pg_138" title="Pg_138">[138]</a></span>And he put a further question, which in
+time of war unfortunately we could not put, a
+question not only about the work but about
+the workman. Are we, with our money, forcing
+him to work that is for him worth doing;
+are we, to use an old phrase, considering the
+good of his soul? Morris insisted on our duty
+to the workman more even than on our duty
+to society. He saw that where great masses
+of men do work that they know to be futile
+there must be a low standard of work and
+incessant discontent. The workman may not
+even know the cause of his discontent. He
+may think he is angry with the rich because
+they are rich; but the real source of his anger
+is the work that they set him to do with their
+riches. And no class war, no redistribution of
+wealth, will end that discontent if the same
+waste of labour continues. Double the wages
+of every workman in the country, and if he
+spends the increase on trash no one will be any
+better off in mind or body. There will still be
+poverty and still discontent, with the work if
+not with the wages.</p>
+
+<p>The problem for us, for every modern society
+now, is not so much to redistribute wealth;
+that at best can be only a means to an end;
+but to use our superfluous energy to the best
+purpose, no longer to waste it piecemeal. That
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_139" id="Pg_139" title="Pg_139">[139]</a></span>problem we solved, to a great extent, in war.
+We have to solve it also in peace if the peace
+is to be worth having and is not to lead to
+further wars at home or abroad. The war
+itself has given us a great opportunity. It has
+opened our eyes, if only we do not shut them
+again. It has taught every one in the country
+the most important of all lessons in political
+economy which the books often seem to conceal.
+And, better still, it has taught us that
+in economics we can exercise our own wills,
+that they concern each individual man and
+woman as much as morals; that they are
+morals, and not abstract mathematics; that
+we have the same duty towards the country,
+towards mankind, that we have to our own
+families. The proverb, Waste not, want
+not, does not apply merely to each private
+income. We have accounts to settle not only
+with our bankers, but with the community.
+It will thrive or not according as we are thrifty
+or thriftless; and our thrift depends upon how
+we spend our income, not merely on how much
+we spend of it. For all that part of it which we
+do not spend on necessaries is the superfluous
+energy of mankind, and we determine how it
+shall be exercised; each individual determines
+that, not an abstraction called society.</p>
+
+<p>One may present the thrift of labour as a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_140" id="Pg_140" title="Pg_140">[140]</a></span>matter of duty to society. But Morris saw
+that it was more than that; and he lit it with
+the sunlight of the warmer virtues. It is not
+merely society that we have to consider, or the
+direction of its superfluous energy. It is also
+the happiness, the life, of actual men and
+women. We shall not cease to waste work
+until we think always of the worker behind it,
+until we see that it is our duty, if with our
+money we have command over him, to set him
+to work worth doing. Capital now is to most
+of those who own it a means of earning interest.
+We should think of it as creative, as the power
+which may make the wilderness blossom like
+the rose and change the slum into a home for
+men and women; and, better still, as the power
+that may train and set men to do work that
+will satisfy their souls, so that they shall work
+for the work's sake and not only for the wages.
+Until capital becomes so creative in the hands
+of those who own it there will always be a
+struggle for the possession of it; and to those
+who do possess it it will bring merely superfluities
+and not happiness. If it becomes
+creative, no one will mind much who possesses
+it. The class war will be ended by a league of
+classes, their aim not merely peace, but those
+things which make men resolve not to spoil
+peace with war.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_141" id="Pg_141" title="Pg_141">[141]</a></span>We shall be told that this is a dream, as we
+are always told that the ending of war is a
+dream. "So long as human nature is what it
+is there will always be war." Those who talk
+thus think of human nature as something not
+ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is
+not their own nature. They know that they
+themselves do not wish for war; but, looking
+at mankind in the mass and leaving themselves
+out of that mass, they see it governed by some
+force that is not really human nature, but
+merely nature "red in tooth and claw," a
+process become a malignant goddess, who forces
+mankind to act contrary to their own desires,
+contrary even to their own interests. She has
+taken the place for us of the old original sin;
+and the belief in her is far more primitive than
+the belief in original sin. She is in fact but a
+modern name for all the malignant idols that
+savages have worshipped with sacrifices of blood
+and tears that they did not wish to make. It
+is strange that, priding ourselves as we do on
+our modern scepticism which has taught us to
+disbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine,
+we yet have not dared to affirm the plain fact
+that this nature, this human nature, does not
+exist. There is no force, no process, whether
+within us or outside us, that compels us to
+act contrary to our desires and our interests.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_142" id="Pg_142" title="Pg_142">[142]</a></span>There is nothing but fear; and fear can be
+conquered, as by individuals, so by the collective
+will of man. It is fear that produces war,
+the fear that other men are not like ourselves,
+that they are hostile animals governed utterly
+by the instinct of self-preservation.</p>
+
+<p>So it is fear that produces the class war and
+the belief that it must always continue. It is
+our own fears that cut us off from happiness
+by making us despair of it. The man who has
+capital sees it as a means of protecting himself
+and his children from poverty; it is to him a
+negative, defensive thing, at best the safeguard
+of a negative, defensive happiness. So others
+see it as something which he has and they have
+not, something they would like to snatch from
+him if they could. But if he saw capital as a
+creative thing, like the powers of the mind,
+like the genius of the artist, then it would be
+to him a means of positive happiness both for
+himself and for others. He would say to himself,
+not How can I protect myself with this
+against the tyranny of the struggle for life?
+not How can I invest this? but What can I do
+with this? He would see it as Michelangelo
+saw the marble when he looked for the shape
+within it. And then he would rise above the
+conception of mere duty as something we do
+against our own wills, or of virtue as a luxury
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_143" id="Pg_143" title="Pg_143">[143]</a></span>of the spirit to which we escape in our little
+leisure from the struggle for life. Virtue, duty,
+would be for him life itself; in creation he
+would attain to that harmony of duty and
+pleasure which is happiness.</p>
+
+<p>If only we could see that the superfluous
+energy of mankind is something out of which
+to make the happiness of mankind we should
+find our own happiness in the making of it.
+There is still for us a gulf between doing good
+to others and the delight of the artist, the
+craftsman, in his work. The artist is one kind
+of man and the philanthropist another; the
+artist is a selfish person whom we like, and the
+philanthropist an unselfish person whom we do
+not like. What we need is to fuse them in our
+use of capital, in our exercise of the superfluous
+energy of mankind. There are single powerful
+capitalists who know this joy of creation, who
+are benevolent despots, and yet are suspect to
+the poor because of their great power. But it
+never enters the head of the smaller investor
+that he, too, might create instead of merely
+investing; that, instead of being a shareholder
+in a limited liability company, he might be one
+of a creative fellowship, not merely earning
+dividends but transforming cities, exalting
+things of use into things of beauty, giving to
+himself and to mankind work worth doing for
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Pg_144" id="Pg_144" title="Pg_144">[144]</a></span>its own sake, work in which all the obsolete
+conflicts of rich and poor could be forgotten in
+a commonwealth. That is the vision of peace
+which our sacrifices in the war may earn for us.
+We have learned sacrifice and the joy of it;
+but, so far, only so that we may overcome an
+enemy of our own kind. There remains to be
+overcome, by a sacrifice more joyful and with
+far greater rewards, this other old enemy not
+of our own kind, the enemy we call nature or
+human nature, the enemy that is so powerful
+merely because we dare not believe that she
+does not exist.</p>
+
+<p class="return"><a href="#contents">[TABLE OF CONTENTS]</a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="centerbold"><small>PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH</small></p>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on Art, by A. Clutton-Brock
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays on Art
+
+Author: A. Clutton-Brock
+
+Release Date: July 2, 2005 [EBook #16178]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON ART ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Peter Barozzi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+                             ESSAYS ON ART
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           A. CLUTTON-BROCK
+
+
+
+
+                           METHUEN & CO. LTD.
+                          36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
+
+                                 LONDON
+
+
+
+
+                        _First Published in 1919_
+
+
+
+
+                                 PREFACE
+
+
+These essays, reprinted from the _Times Literary Supplement_ with a few
+additions and corrections, are not all entirely or directly concerned
+with art; but even the last one--Waste or Creation?--does bear on the
+question, How are we to improve the art of our own time? After years of
+criticism I am more interested in this question than in any other that
+concerns the arts. Whistler said that we could not improve it; the best
+we could do for it was not to think about it. I have discussed that
+opinion, as also the contrary opinion of Tolstoy, and the truth that
+seems to me to lie between them. If these essays have any unity, it is
+given to them by my belief that art, like other human activities, is
+subject to the will of man. We cannot cause men of artistic genius to be
+born; but we can provide a public, namely, ourselves, for the artist,
+who will encourage him to be an artist, to do his best, not his worst.
+I believe that the quality of art in any age depends, not upon the
+presence or absence of individuals of genius, but upon the attitude of
+the public towards art.
+
+Because of the decline of all the arts, especially the arts of use,
+which began at the end of the eighteenth century and has continued up to
+our own time, we are more interested in art than any people of the past,
+with the interest of a sick man in health. To say that this interest
+must be futile or mischievous is to deny the will of man in one of the
+chief of human activities; but it often is denied by those who do not
+understand how it can be applied to art. We cannot make artists
+directly; no government office can determine their training; still less
+can any critic tell them how they ought to practise their art. But we
+can all aim at a state of society in which they will be encouraged to do
+their best, and at a state of mind in which we ourselves shall learn to
+know good from bad and to prefer the good. At present we have neither
+the state of society nor the state of mind; and we can attain to both
+not by connoisseurship, not by an anxiety to like the right thing or at
+least to buy it, but by learning the difference between good and bad
+workmanship and design in objects of use. Anyone can do that, and can
+resolve to pay a fair price for good workmanship and design; and only so
+will the arts of use, and all the arts, revive again. For where the
+public has no sense of design in the arts of use, it will have none in
+the "fine arts." To aim at connoisseurship when you do not know a good
+table or chair from a bad one is to attempt flying before you can walk.
+So, I think, professors of art at Oxford or Cambridge should be chosen,
+not so much for their knowledge of Greek sculpture, as for their success
+in furnishing their own houses. What can they know about Greek sculpture
+if their own drawing-rooms are hideous? I believe that the notorious
+fallibility of many experts is caused by the fact that they concern
+themselves with the fine arts before they have had any training in the
+arts of use. So, if we are to have a school of art at Oxford or
+Cambridge, it should put this question to every pupil: If you had to
+build and furnish a house of your own, how would you set about it? And
+it should train its pupils to give a rational answer to that question.
+So we might get a public knowing the difference between good and bad in
+objects of use, valuing the good, and ready to pay a fair price for it.
+
+At present we have no such public. A liberal education should teach the
+difference between good and bad in things of use, including buildings.
+Oxford and Cambridge profess to give a liberal education; but you have
+only to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachers
+themselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like all
+the rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they
+trust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and
+superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely
+mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere
+pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. These have
+their sense or nonsense, their righteousness or unrighteousness, which
+anyone can learn to see for himself, and, until he has learned, he will
+be at the mercy of charlatans.
+
+I have written all these essays as a member of the public, as one who
+has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish
+again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to
+himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling
+artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a
+natural and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a defence
+of criticism, and I will not repeat it here.
+
+                                                  A. CLUTTON-BROCK
+   _July_ 30, 1919
+  FARNCOMBE, SURREY
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                 "THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI"            1
+
+                 LEONARDO DA VINCI                     13
+
+                 THE POMPADOUR IN ART                  27
+
+                 AN UNPOPULAR MASTER                   37
+
+                 A DEFENCE OF CRITICISM                48
+
+                 THE ARTIST AND HIS AUDIENCE           58
+
+                 WILFULNESS AND WISDOM                 74
+
+                 "THE MAGIC FLUTE"                     86
+
+                 PROCESS OR PERSON?                    97
+
+                 THE ARTIST AND THE TRADESMAN         110
+
+                 PROFESSIONALISM IN ART               120
+
+                 WASTE OR CREATION?                   132
+
+
+
+
+                              ESSAYS ON ART
+
+
+                       "The Adoration of the Magi"
+
+
+There is one beauty of nature and another of art, and many attempts have
+been made to explain the difference between them. Signor Croce's theory,
+now much in favour, is that nature provides only the raw material for
+art. The beginning of the artistic process is the perception of beauty
+in nature; but an artist does not see beauty as he sees a cow. It is his
+own mind that imposes on the chaos of nature an order, a relation, which
+is beauty. All men have the faculty, in some degree, of imposing this
+order; the artist only does it more completely than other men, and he
+owes his power of execution to that. He can make the beauty which he has
+perceived because he has perceived it clearly; and this perceiving is
+part of the making.
+
+The defect of this theory is that it ends by denying that very
+difference between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art which it
+sets out to explain. If the artist makes the beauty of nature in
+perceiving it, if it is produced by the action of his own mind upon the
+chaos of reality, then it is the very same beauty that appears in his
+art; and if, to us, the beauty of his art seems different from the
+beauty of nature, as we perceive it, it is only because we have not
+ourselves seen the beauty of nature as completely as he has, we have not
+reduced chaos so thoroughly to order. It is a difference not of kind,
+but of degree; for the artist himself there is no difference even of
+degree. What he makes he sees, and what he sees he makes. All beauty is
+artistic, and to speak of natural beauty is to make a false distinction.
+
+Yet it is a distinction that we remain constantly aware of. In spite of
+Signor Croce and all the subtlety and partial truth of his theory, we do
+not believe that we make beauty when we see it, or that the artist makes
+it when he sees it. Nor do we believe that that beauty which he makes is
+of the same nature as that which he has perceived in reality. Rather he,
+like us, values the beauty which he perceives in reality because he
+knows that he has not made it. It is something, independent of himself,
+to which his own mind makes answer: that answer is his art; it is the
+passionate value expressed in it which gives beauty to his art. If he
+knew that the beauty he perceives was a product of his own mind, he
+could not value it so; if he held Signor Croce's theory, he would cease
+to be an artist.
+
+And, in fact, those who act on his theory do cease to be artists.
+Nothing kills art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the
+same kind as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature,
+as we perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is
+perfection because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made,
+but born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference
+between them and between their beauties. If a work of art tries to have
+the finish of a thing born, not made, if a piece of enamel apes the
+gloss of a butterfly's wing, it misses the peculiar beauty of art and is
+but an inadequate imitation of the beauty of nature. That beauty of the
+butterfly's wing, which the artist like all of us perceives, is of a
+different kind from any beauty he can make; and if he is an artist he
+knows it and does not try to make it. But all the arts, even those which
+are not themselves imitative, are always being perverted by the attempt
+to imitate the finish of nature. There is a vanity of craftsmanship in
+Louis Quinze furniture, in the later Chinese porcelain, in modern
+jewelry, no less than in Dutch painting, which is the death of art. All
+great works of art show an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of
+craftsmanship, which is the essence of their beauty and distinguishes it
+from the beauty of nature. As soon as men cease to understand this and
+despise this effort and roughness and inadequacy, they demand from art
+the beauty of nature and get something which is mostly dead nature, not
+living art.
+
+We can best understand the difference between the two kinds of beauty if
+we consider how beauty steals into language, that art which we all
+practise more or less and in which it is difficult, if not impossible,
+to imitate the finish of natural beauty. There is no beauty whatever in
+sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Pass the mustard,"
+because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say. There
+is beauty in sentences like "The bright day is done, And we are for the
+dark," or "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," because in them,
+although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say a thousand
+times more than he can say. It is the effort to do something beyond the
+power of words that brings beauty into them. That is the very nature of
+the beauty of art, which distinguishes it from the beauty of nature; it
+is always produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible, and what
+the artist knows to be impossible. Whenever that effort ceases, whenever
+the artist sets himself a task that he can accomplish, a task of mere
+skill, then he ceases to be an artist, because he no longer experiences
+reality in the manner necessary to an artist. The great poet is aware of
+some excellence in reality so intensely that it is to him beauty; for
+all excellence when we are intensely aware of it is beauty to us. There
+is that truth in Croce's theory. Our perception of beauty does depend
+upon the intensity of our perception of excellence. But that intensity
+of perception remains perception, and does not make what it perceives.
+That the poet and every artist knows; and his art is not merely an
+extension of the process of perception, but an attempt to express his
+own value for that excellence which he has perceived as beauty. It is an
+answer to that beauty, a worship of it, and is itself beautiful because
+it makes no effort to compete with it.
+
+Thus in the beauty of art there is always value and wonder, always a
+reference to another beauty different in kind from itself; and we too,
+if we are to see the beauty of art, must share the same value and
+wonder. To enter that Kingdom of Heaven we must become little children
+as the artist himself does. Art is the expression of a certain attitude
+towards reality, an attitude of wonder and value, a recognition of
+something greater than man; and where that recognition is not, art dies.
+In a society valuing only itself, believing that it can make a heaven of
+itself out of its own skill and knowledge and wisdom, the difference
+between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art is no longer seen,
+and art loses all its own beauty. The surest sign of corruption and
+death in a society is where men and women see the best life as a life
+without wonder or effort or failure, where labour is hidden underground
+so that a few may seem to live in Paradise; where there is perfect
+finish of all things, human beings no less than their clothes and
+furniture and buildings and pictures; where the ideal is the lady so
+perfectly turned out that any activity whatever would mar her
+perfection. In such societies the artist becomes a slave. He too must
+produce work that does not seem to be work. He must express no wonder
+or value for patrons who would be ashamed to feel either. What he makes
+must seem to be born and not made, so that it may fit a world which
+pretends to be a born Paradise populated by cynical angels who own
+allegiance to no god. In such a world art means, beauty means, the
+concealment of effort, the pretence that it does not exist; and that
+pretence is the end of art and beauty in all things made by man. There
+is a close connexion between the idea of life expressed in Aristotle's
+ideal man and the later Greek sculpture. The aim of that sculpture, as
+of his ideal man, was proud and effortless perfection. Both dread the
+confession of failure above all things--and both are dull. In
+Aristotle's age art had started upon a long decline, which ended only
+when the pretence of perfection was killed, both in art and in life, by
+Christianity. Then the real beauty of art, the beauty of value and
+wonder, superseded the wearisome imitation of natural beauty; and it is
+only lately that we have learnt again to prefer the real beauty to the
+false.
+
+Men must free themselves from the contempt of effort and the desire to
+conceal it, they must be content with the perpetual, passionate failure
+of art, before they can see its beauty or demand that beauty from the
+artist. When they themselves become like little children, then they see
+that the greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are like
+little children too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not the
+arrogant, the accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They are
+great men to us; but they achieved beauty because in their effort to
+achieve it they were little children to themselves. They impose awe on
+us, but it is their own awe that they impose. It is not their
+achievement that makes beauty, but their effort, always confessing its
+own failure; and in that confession is the beauty of art. That is why it
+moves and frees us; for it frees us from our pretence that we are what
+we would be, it carries us out of our own egotism into the wonder and
+value of the artist himself.
+
+Consider the beauty of a tune. Music itself is the best means which man
+has found for confessing that he cannot say what he would say; and it is
+more purely and rapturously beauty than any other form of art. A tune is
+the very silencing of speech, and in the greatest tunes there is always
+the hush of wonder: they seem to tell us to be silent and listen, not to
+what the musician has to say, but to what he cannot say. The very
+beauty of a tune is in its reference to something beyond all expression,
+and in its perfection it speaks of a perfection not its own. Pater said
+that all art tries to attain to the condition of music. That is true in
+a sense different from what he meant. Art is always most completely art
+when it makes music's confession of the ineffable; then it comes nearest
+to the beauty of music. But when it is no longer a forlorn hope, when it
+is able to say what it wishes to say with calm assurance, then it has
+ceased to be art and become a game of skill.
+
+Often the great artist is imperious, impatient, full of certainties; but
+his certainty is not of himself; and he is impatient of the failure to
+recognize, not himself, but what he recognizes. Michelangelo, Beethoven,
+Tintoret, would snap a critic's head off if he did not see what they
+were trying to do. They may seem sometimes to be arrogant in the mere
+display of power, yet their beauty lies in the sudden change from
+arrogance to humility. The arrogance itself bows down and worships; the
+very muscle and material force obey a spirit not their own. They are
+lion-tamers, and they themselves are the lions; out of the strong comes
+forth sweetness, and it is all the sweeter for the strength that is
+poured into it and subdued by it. What is the difference, as of
+different worlds, between Rubens at his best and Tintoret at his best?
+This: that Rubens always seems to be uplifted by his own power, whereas
+Tintoret has most power when he forgets it in wonder. When he bows down
+all his turbulence in worship, then he is most strong. Rubens, in the
+"Descent from the Cross," is still the supreme drawing-master; and
+painters flocking to him for lessons pay homage to him. But, in his
+"Crucifixion," it is Tintoret himself who pays homage, and we forget the
+master in the theme. We may say of Rubens's art, in a new sense, "C'est
+magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre." The greatest art is not
+magnificent, but it is war, desperate and without trappings, a war in
+which victory comes through the confession of defeat.
+
+Man, if he tries to be a god in his art, makes a fool of himself. He
+becomes like God, he makes beauty like God, when he is too much aware of
+God to be aware of himself. Then only does he not set himself too easy a
+task, for then he does not make his theme so that he may accomplish it;
+it is forced upon him by his awareness of God, by his wonder and value
+for an excellence not his own. So in all the beauty of art there is a
+humility not only of conception, but also of execution, which is mere
+failure and ugliness to those who expect to find in art the beauty and
+finish of nature, who expect it to be born, not made. They are always
+disappointed by the greatest works of art, by their inadequacy and
+strain and labour. They look for a proof of what man can do and find a
+confession of what he cannot do; but that confession, made sincerely and
+passionately, is beauty. There is also a serenity in the beauty of art,
+but it is the serenity of self-surrender, not of self-satisfaction, of
+the saint, not of the lady of fashion. And all the accomplishment of
+great art, its infinite superiority in mere skill over the work of the
+merely skilful, comes from the incessant effort of the artist to do more
+than he can. By that he is trained; by that his work is distinguished
+from the mere exclamation of wonder. He is not content to applaud; he
+must also worship, and make his offerings in his worship; and they are
+the best he can do. It was not only the shepherds who came to the birth
+of Christ; the wise men came also and brought their treasures with them.
+And the art of mankind is the offering of its wise men, it is the
+adoration of the Magi, who are one with the simplest in their worship--
+
+                 Wise men, all ways of knowledge past,
+                 To the Shepherd's wonder come at last.
+
+But they do not lose their wisdom in their wonder. When it passes into
+wonder, when all the knowledge and skill and passion of mankind are
+poured into the acknowledgment of something greater than themselves,
+then that acknowledgment is art, and it has a beauty which may be envied
+by the natural beauty of God Himself.
+
+
+
+
+                           Leonardo da Vinci
+
+
+Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous men in history--as a man
+more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart--because
+posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great
+artists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but what
+Leonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from what
+he is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; we cannot
+think of him as a mere individual, eating and drinking, living and
+competing, on equal terms with other men. We see him magnified by his
+own legend from the first, with people standing aside to watch and
+whisper as he passed through the streets of Florence or Milan. "There he
+goes to paint the Last Supper," they said to each other; and we think of
+it as already the most famous picture in the world before it was begun.
+Every one knew that he had the most famous picture in his brain, that he
+was born to paint it, to initiate the High Renaissance; from Giotto
+onwards all the painters had been preparing for that, Florence herself
+had been preparing for it. It makes no difference that for centuries it
+has been a shadow on the wall; it is still the most famous painting in
+the world because it is the masterpiece of Leonardo. There was a fate
+against the survival of his masterpieces, but he has survived them and
+they are remembered because of him. We accept him for himself, like the
+people of his own time, who, when he said he could perform
+impossibilities, believed him. To them he meant the new age which could
+do anything, and still to us he means the infinite capacities of man. He
+is the Adam awakened whom Michelangelo only painted; and, if he
+accomplished but little, we believe in him, as in mankind, for his
+promise. If he did not fulfil it, neither has mankind; but he believed
+that all things could be done and lived a great life in that faith.
+
+Another Florentine almost equals him in renown. Men watched and
+whispered when Dante passed through the streets of Florence; but Dante
+lives in his achievement, Leonardo in himself. Dante means to us an
+individual soul quivering through a system, a creed, inherited from the
+past. Leonardo is a spirit unstraitened; not consenting to any past nor
+rebelling against it, but newborn with a newborn universe around it,
+seeing it without memories or superstitions, without inherited fears or
+pieties, yet without impiety or irreverence. He is not an iconoclast,
+since for him there are no images to be broken; whatever he sees is not
+an image but itself, to be accepted or rejected by himself; what he
+would do he does without the help or hindrance of tradition. In art and
+in science he means the same thing, not a rebirth of any past, as the
+word Renaissance seems to imply, but freedom from all the past, life
+utterly in the present. He is concerned not with what has been thought,
+or said, or done, but with his own immediate relation to all things,
+with what he sees and feels and discovers. Authority is nothing to him,
+whether of Galen or of St. Thomas, of Greek or mediaeval art. In science
+he looks at the fact, in art at the object; nor will he allow either to
+be hidden from him by the achievements of the dead. Giotto had struck
+the first blow for freedom when he allowed the theme to dictate the
+picture; Leonardo allowed the object to dictate the drawing. To him the
+fact itself is sacred, and man fulfils himself in his own immediate
+relation to fact.
+
+All those who react and rebel against the Renaissance have an easy case
+against its great representative. What did he do in thought compared
+with St. Thomas, or in art compared with the builders of Chartres or
+Bourges? He filled notebooks with sketches and conjectures; he modelled
+a statue that was never cast; he painted a fresco on a wall, and with a
+medium so unsuited to fresco that it was a ruin in a few years. Even in
+his own day there was a doubt about him; it is expressed in the young
+Michelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not cast the statue he had
+modelled. Michelangelo was one of those who see in life always the great
+task to be performed and who judge a man by his performance; to him
+Leonardo was a dilettante, a talker; he made monuments, but Leonardo
+remains his own monument, a prophecy of what man shall be when he comes
+into his kingdom. With him, we must confess, it is more promise than
+performance; he could paint "The Last Supper" because it means the
+future; he could never, in good faith, have painted "The Last Judgment,"
+for that means a judgment on the past, and to him the past is nothing;
+to him man, in the future, is the judge, master, enjoyer of his own
+fate. Compared with his, Michelangelo's mind was still mediaeval, his
+reproach the reproach of one who cares for doing more than for being,
+and certainly Michelangelo did a thousand times more; but from his own
+day to ours the world has not judged Leonardo by his achievement. As
+Johnson had his Boswell so he has had his legend; he means to us not
+books or pictures, but himself. In his own day kings bid for him as if
+he were a work of art; and he died magnificently in France, making
+nothing but foretelling a race of men not yet fulfilled.
+
+Before Francis Bacon, before Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied not
+merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who is
+to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in
+all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary
+hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For
+his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he
+initiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from his
+inheritance. It seems strange to us that Leonardo sang hymns to
+causation as if to God. In its will was his peace and his freedom.
+
+     O marvellous necessity, thou with supreme reason constrainest
+     all efforts to be the direct result of their causes, and by a
+     supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by
+     the shortest possible process.
+
+     Who would believe that so small a space could contain the
+     images of all the universe? O mighty process, what talent can
+     avail to penetrate a nature such as thine? What tongue will it
+     be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily none. This it is
+     that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine
+     things.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The sayings of Leonardo quoted in this article are taken
+from _Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks_, by E. M'Curdy. (Duckworth, 1906.)]
+
+To Leonardo causation meant the escape from caprice; it meant a secure
+relation between man and all things, in which man would gain power by
+knowledge, in which every increase of knowledge would reveal to him more
+and more of the supreme reason. There was no chain for him in cause and
+effect, no unthinking of the will of man. Rather by knowledge man would
+discover his own will and know that it was the universal will. So man
+must never be afraid of knowledge. "The eye is the window of the soul."
+Like Whitman he tells us always to look with the eye, and so to confound
+the wisdom of ages. There is in every man's vision the power of relating
+himself now and directly to reality by knowledge; and in knowing other
+things he knows himself. By knowledge man changes what seemed to be a
+compulsion into a harmony; he gives up his own caprice for the universal
+will.
+
+That is the religion of Leonardo, in art as in science. For him the
+artist also must relate himself directly to the visible world, in which
+is the only inspiration; to accept any formula is to see with dead men's
+eyes. That has been said again and again by artists, but not with
+Leonardo's mystical and philosophical conviction. He knew that it is
+vain to study Nature unless she is to you a goddess or a god; you can
+learn nothing from reality unless you adore it, and in adoring it he
+found his freedom. How different is this doctrine from that with which,
+after centuries of scientific advance, we intimidate ourselves. We are
+threatened by a creed far more enslaving than that of the Middle Ages.
+If the Middle Ages turned to the past to learn what they were to think
+or to do, we turn to the past to learn what we are. They may have feared
+the new; but we say that there is no new, nothing but some combination
+or variation of the old. Causation is to us a chain that binds us to the
+past, but to Leonardo it was freedom; and so he prophesies a freedom
+that we may attain to not by denying facts or making myths, but by
+discovering what he hinted--that causation itself is not compulsion but
+will, and our will if, by knowledge, we make it ours.
+
+No one before him had been so much in love with reality, whatever it may
+be. He was called a sceptic, but it was only that he preferred reality
+itself to any tales about it; and his religion, his worship, was the
+search for the very fact. This, because he was both artist and man of
+science, he carried further than anyone else, pursuing it with all his
+faculties. In his drawings there is the beauty not of his character, but
+of the character of what he draws; he does not make a design, but finds
+it. That beauty proves him a Florentine--Duerer himself falls short of
+it--but it is the beauty of the thing itself, discovered and insisted
+upon with the passion of a lover. He draws animals, trees, flowers, as
+Correggio draws Antiope or Io; and it is only in his drawings now that
+he speaks clearly to us. The "Mona Lisa" is well enough, but another
+hand might have executed the painting of it. It owes its popular fame to
+the smile about which it is so easy to write finely; but in the drawings
+we see the experiencing passion of Leonardo himself, we see him
+feeling, as in the notebooks we see him thinking. There is the eagerness
+of discovery at which so often he stopped short, turning away from a
+task to further discovery, living always in the moment, taking no
+thought either for the morrow or for yesterday, unable to attend to any
+business, even the business of the artist, seeing life not as a struggle
+or a duty, but as an adventure of all the senses and all the faculties.
+He is, even with his pencil, the greatest talker in the world, but
+without egotism, talking always of what he sees, satisfying himself not
+with the common appetites and passions of men, but with his one supreme
+passion for reality. If Michelangelo thought him a dilettante, there
+must have been in his taunt some envy of Leonardo's freedom.
+
+Yet once at least Leonardo did achieve, and something we should never
+have expected from his drawings. "The Last Supper" is but a shadow on
+the wall, yet still we can see its greatness, which is the greatness of
+pure design, of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesa. Goethe and
+others have found all kinds of psychological subtleties in it, meanings
+in every gesture; but what we see now is only space, grandeur, a supreme
+moment expressed in the relation of all the forms. The pure music of
+the painting remains when the drama is almost obliterated; and it
+proves that Leonardo, when he chose, could withdraw himself from the
+delight of hand-to-mouth experience into a vision of his own, that he
+had the reserve and the creative power of the earlier masters and of
+that austere, laborious youth who taunted him. If it were not for "The
+Last Supper" we might doubt whether he could go further in art than the
+vivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The Last Supper" tells us how great his
+passion for reality must have been, since it could distract him from the
+making of such masterpieces.
+
+That passion for reality itself made him cold to other passions. We know
+Michelangelo and Beethoven as men in some respects very like other men.
+They were anxious, fretful, full of affections and grievances, and much
+concerned with their relations. Leonardo is like Melchizedek, not only
+by the accident of birth, for he was a natural son, but by choice. He
+never married, he never had a home; there is no evidence that he was
+ever tied to any man or woman by his affections; yet it would be stupid
+to call him cold, for his one grand passion absorbed him. Monks
+suspected him, but in his heart he was celibate like the great monkish
+saints, celibate not by vows but by preoccupation. It is clear that
+from youth to age life had no cumulative power over him; as we should
+say in our prosaic language, he never settled down, for he let things
+happen to him and valued the very happening. He was always like a
+strange, wonderful creature from another planet, taking notes with
+unstaled delight but never losing his heart to any particular. Sex
+itself seems hardly to exist for him, or at least for his mind. Often
+the people in his drawings are of no sex. Rembrandt draws every one,
+Leonardo no one, as if he were his own relation. Women and youths were
+as much a subject of his impassioned curiosity as flowers, and no more.
+He is always the spectator, but a spectator who can exercise every
+faculty of the human mind and every passion in contemplation; he is the
+nearest that any man has ever come to Aristotle's Supreme Being.
+
+But we must not suppose that he went solemnly through life living up to
+his own story, that he was mysterious in manner or in any respect like a
+charlatan. Rather, he lived always in the moment and overcame mankind by
+his spontaneity. He had the charm of the real man of genius, not the
+reserve of the false one. The famous statement of what he could do,
+which he made to Ludovico Sforza, is not a mere boast but an expression
+of his eagerness to do it. These engines of war were splendid toys to
+him, and all his life he enjoyed making toys and seeing men wonder at
+them. His delight was to do things for the first time like a child, and
+then not to do them again. Again and again he cries out against
+authority and in favour of discovery. "Whoever in discussion adduces
+authority," he says, "uses not intellect but rather memory"; and,
+anticipating Milton, he observes that all our knowledge originates in
+opinions. Perhaps some one had rebuked him for having too many opinions.
+We can be sure that he chafed against dull, cautious, safe men who
+wished for results. He himself cared nothing for them; it was enough for
+him to know what might be done, without doing it. He was so sure of his
+insight that he did not care to put it to the test of action; that was
+for slower men, whether artists or men of science. His notebooks were
+enough for him.
+
+In spite of the notebooks and the sketches, we know less about the man
+Leonardo than about the man Shakespeare. Here and there he makes a
+remark with some personal conviction or experience in it. "Intellectual
+passion," he says, "drives out sensuality." In him it had driven out or
+sublimated all the sensual part of character. We cannot touch or see or
+hear him in anything he says or draws. The passion is there, but it is
+too much concerned with universals to be of like nature with our own
+passions. He seems to be speaking to himself as if he had forgotten the
+whole audience of mankind, but in what he says he ignores the personal
+part of himself; he is most passionate when most impersonal. "To the
+ambitious, whom neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world
+suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is
+squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of
+the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we know
+that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty of
+the world, were enough for him without ambition, without even further
+affections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even achievement,
+to follow them; and he left all those not out of coldness, or fear, or
+idleness, but because his own passion drew him away. No cold man could
+have said, "Where there is most power of feeling, there of martyrs is
+the greatest martyr." It is difficult for us northerners to understand
+the intellectual passion of the South, to see even that it is passion;
+most difficult of all for us to see that in men like Leonardo the
+passion for beauty itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism, our
+sense of exile, can never find that identity which he found between
+beauty and reality. "This benign nature so provides that all over the
+world you find something to imitate." To us imitation means prose, to
+him it meant poetry; science itself meant poetry, and illusion was the
+only ugliness. "Nature never breaks her own law." It is we who try to
+find freedom in lawlessness, which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion.
+"Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it should praise the great
+works of God, it offends against His divinity." There is Leonardo's
+religion; and if still it is too cold for us, it is because we have not
+his pure spiritual fire in ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+                          The Pompadour in Art
+
+
+It is an important fact in the history of the arts for the last century
+or more that in England and America, if not elsewhere, the chief
+interest in all the arts, including literature, has been taken by women
+rather than by men. In the great ages of art it was not so. Women, so
+far as we can tell, had little to do with the art of Greece in the fifth
+century or with the art of the Middle Ages. There were female patrons of
+art at the Renaissance, but they were exceptions subject to the
+prevailing masculine taste. Art was and remained a proper interest of
+men up to the eighteenth century. Women first began to control it and to
+affect its character at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV. But in
+the nineteenth century men began to think they were too busy to concern
+themselves with the arts. Men of power, when they were not working,
+needed to take exercise and left it to their wives to patronize the
+arts. And so the notion grew that art was a feminine concern, and even
+artists were pets for women. The great man, especially in America, liked
+his wife to have every luxury. The exquisite life she led was itself a
+proof of his success; and she was for him a living work of art, able to
+live so because of the abundance of his strength. In her, that strength
+passed into ornament and became beautiful; she was a friendly, faithful
+Delilah to his Samson, a Delilah who did not shear his locks. And so he
+came to think of art itself as being in its nature feminine if not
+effeminate, as a luxury and ornament of life, as everything, in fact,
+except a means of expression for himself and other men.
+
+This female control of art began, as I have said, at the mistress-ridden
+Court of Louis XV, and it has unfortunately kept the stamp of its
+origin. At that Court art, to suit the tastes of the Pompadour and the
+Du Barri, became consciously frivolous, became almost a part of the
+toilet. The artist was the slave of the mistress, and seems to have
+enjoyed his chains. In this slavery he did produce something charming;
+he did invest that narrow and artificial Heaven of the Court with some
+of the infinite beauty and music of a real Heaven. But out of this
+refined harem art there has sprung a harem art of the whole world which
+has infested the homes even of perfectly respectable ladies ever since.
+All over Europe the ideals of applied art have remained the ideals of
+the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have either
+women or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spread
+a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in
+their efforts at aesthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are
+not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes
+even in their clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. Of course, if
+this pretence were put into words and so presented to their
+consciousness, they would be indignant. It has for them no connexion
+with conduct; it is purely aesthetic, but art means to them make-believe,
+the make-believe that they live an entirely frivolous life of pleasure
+provided for them by masculine power and devotion.
+
+Yet these ladies know that they have not the revenues of the Pompadour;
+they must have their art, their make-believe, as cheap as possible; and
+it has been one of the triumphs of modern industry to provide them with
+cheap imitations of the luxury of the Pompadour. Hence the machine-made
+frivolities of the most respectable homes, the hair-brushes with backs
+of stamped silver, the scent-bottles of imitation cut-glass, the
+draperies with printed rose-buds on them, the general
+artificial-floweriness and flimsiness and superfluity of naughtiness of
+our domestic art. It expresses a feminine romance to which the male
+indulgently consents, as if he were really the voluptuous monarch whose
+mistress the female, aesthetically, pretends to be. In this world of
+aesthetic make-believe our homes are not respectable; they would scorn to
+be so, for to the romantic female mind, when it occupies itself with
+art, the improper is the artistic.
+
+But this needs a more precise demonstration. We wonder at our modern
+passion for superfluous ornament. We shall understand it only if we
+discover its origin. The King's mistress liked everything about her to
+be ornamented, because it was a point of honour with her to advertise
+the King's devotion to her in the costliness of all her surroundings. He
+loved her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation. She, like
+Cleopatra, was always proving the potency of her charms by melting
+pearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was hung with the trophies of
+her physical pre-eminence. In all the art which we call Louis Quinze
+there is this advertisement of the labour spent upon it. It proclaims
+that a vast deal of trouble has been taken in the making of it, and we
+can see the artist utterly subdued to this trouble, utterly the slave of
+the mistress's exorbitant whims. This advertisement of labour spent,
+without the reality, has been the mark of all popular domestic art ever
+since.
+
+The beautiful is the ornamented--namely, that which looks as if it had
+taken a great deal of trouble to make. The trouble now is taken by
+machinery, and so, with the cost, is minimized; and what it produces is
+ugliness, an ugliness which could not be mistaken for beauty but for the
+notion that it does express a desirable state of being in those who
+possess it. And this desirable state is the state of the King's
+mistress, of a siren who can have whatever she desires because of the
+potency of her charms. How otherwise can we explain the passion for
+superfluous machine-made ornament which makes our respectable homes so
+hideous? The machine simulates a trouble that has not been taken, and so
+gives proof of a voluptuous infatuation that does not exist. The
+hardworking mother of a family buys out of her scanty allowance a
+scent-bottle that looks as if it had been laboriously cut for a King's
+mistress, whereas really it has been moulded by machinery to keep up
+the delusion, unconsciously cherished by her, that she lives in a world
+of irresistible and unscrupulous feminine charm. And her husband endures
+indulgently all this superfluous ugliness because he, too, believes that
+it is the function of art to make the drawing-room of the mother of a
+family look like the boudoir of a siren.
+
+Most of this make-believe remains unconscious. We are all so used to it
+that we do not see in it the expression of the dying harem instinct in
+women. Yet it persists, even where the harem instinct would be
+passionately repudiated. It persists often in the dress of the most
+defiant suffragette, in outbreaks of incongruous frivolity, forlorn
+tawdry roses that still whisper memories of the Pompadour and her
+triumphant guilty splendour.
+
+But besides all this unconscious feminine influence upon art, there is
+the influence of women who care consciously for art; and it also has an
+enervating effect on the artist. For the female patron of art, just
+because there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to take a motherly
+interest in the artist. To her he is a delightful wayward child rather
+than a real man occupied with real things, like her husband or her
+father or her brother: not one who can earn money for her and fight for
+her and protect her, but rather one who needs to be protected and
+humoured in a world which cares so little for art. To her, with all her
+passion for art, it is something in its nature irrational, and, like a
+child, delightful because irrational. It is an escape from reality
+rather than a part of it. And so she will believe whatever the artist
+tells her because he is an artist, not because he is a man of sense; and
+she encourages him to be more of an artist than a man of sense. She
+encourages him to be extravagantly aesthetic, and enjoys all his
+extravagance as a diversion from the sound masculinity of her own
+mankind. There is room in her prosperous, easy world for these
+diversions from business, just as there is room for charity or, perhaps,
+religion. The world can afford artists as it can afford pets; as it can
+afford beautiful, cultivated women. And that also is the view of her
+husband, if he is good-natured. But to him, just because art and artists
+are the proper concern of his wife, they are even less serious than they
+are to her. She may persuade herself that she takes them quite
+seriously, but he pretends to do so only out of politeness, and as he
+would pretend to take her clothes seriously. For him the type of the
+artist is still the pianist who gives locks of his over-abundant hair to
+ladies. Even if the artist is a painter and cuts his hair and dresses
+like a man, he still belongs to the feminine world and excites himself
+about matters that do not concern men. Men can afford him, and so they
+tolerate him; but he is one of the expenses they would cut down if it
+were necessary to cut down expenses.
+
+Well, it is necessary to cut down expenses now; and yet in ages much
+sterner and poorer than our own art was the concern of men, and they
+afforded it because it was not to them a mere feminine luxury. They
+afforded the towering churches of the Middle Ages because they expressed
+the religious passion of all mankind; and have we nothing to express
+except a dying harem instinct and the motherliness of kind women to a
+neglected class? We ought to be grateful to this motherliness, which has
+kept art alive in an age of ignorance; but we should see that it is only
+a _pis-aller_, and women should see this as well as men. The female
+attitude towards art has been itself the result of a wrong relation
+between women and men, a relation half-animal, half-romantic, and
+therefore not quite real. This relation, even while it has ceased to
+exist more and more in fact, has still continued to express itself
+aesthetically; and in art it has become a mere obsolete nuisance. One may
+care nothing for art and yet long to be rid of the meaningless
+frivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as so
+much litter and trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we may
+purge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost rid of the
+manners of the King's mistress, and most women no longer try to appeal
+to men by their charming unreason. It is not merely that the appeal
+fails now; they themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect. But
+they still remain irrational in their tastes; or at least they have not
+learned that all this aesthetic irrationality misrepresents them, that it
+is forced upon them by tradesmen, that it is as inexpressive as a
+sentimental music-hall song sung by a gramophone. But now that men have
+given women the vote, and so proved that they take them seriously at
+last, they have the right to speak plainly on this matter. The feminine
+influence upon art has been bad. Let us admit that it has been the
+result of a bad masculine influence upon women, that it has been supreme
+because men have become philistine; but the fact remains that it has
+been bad. Art must be taken seriously if it is to be worth anything. It
+must be the expression of what is serious and real in the human mind.
+But all this feminine art has expressed, and has tried to glorify,
+something false and worthless. Therefore it has been ugly, and we are
+all sick of its ugliness. We look to women, now that they are equalled
+with men by an act of legal justice, to deliver us from it. They disown
+the Pompadour in fact; let them disown her in art.
+
+
+
+
+                           An Unpopular Master
+
+
+Nicholas Poussin is one of the great painters of the world; yet it is
+easier to give reasons for disliking him than for liking him. After his
+death there was a war of pamphlets about him; the one side, led by
+Lebrun, holding him up as a model for all painters to come, the other
+side, under de Piles, calling him a mere pedant compared with Rubens.
+Here is a passage from a poem against Poussin:--
+
+            Il scavoit manier la regle et le compas,
+            Parloit de la lumiere et ne l'entendoit pas;
+            Il estoit de l'antique un assez bon copiste,
+            Mais sans invention, et mauvais coloriste.
+            Il ne pouvait marcher que sur le pas d'autruy:
+            Le genie a manque, c'est un malheur pour luy.
+
+Now this is just what the criticism of yesterday said about him, the
+criticism of the eighties and nineties, when it was supposed that
+Velasquez had discovered the art of seeing, and with it the art of
+painting. It sounds plausible, but not a word of it is true. And yet it
+remains difficult to show why it is not true, to distinguish between the
+genius of Poussin and the pedantry of his imitators, to convince people
+that he was not a bad colourist, and that he did not imitate the
+antique.
+
+This difficulty is connected with the age in which he happened to live.
+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."
+
+Then, he says, the hunters and the workers drank from the artists'
+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
+aesthetic 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
+aesthetic activity, contains a truth of great value. But his aesthetic
+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 _Chimaera 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 aesthetic 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.
+
+_Quem Deus vult perdere dementat prius._ That old tag puts a truth
+wrongly. God does not interfere to afflict the wilful man with madness,
+but he has never thrown himself open to the wisdom of God. His mind is
+like a machine that acts with increasing speed and fury because there is
+less and less material for it to act upon. One act leads to another in a
+blind chain of cause and effect; he does this merely because he has done
+that, and seems to be driven by fate on and on to his own ruin. So it
+was with Napoleon in his later years. He had lost the sense of any
+reality whatever except his own action; he saw the world as a passive
+object to be acted upon by himself. And that is how the Germans saw it
+two years ago. They could not understand that it was possible for the
+world to react against them. It was merely something that they were
+going to remake, to work their will upon. The war, at its beginning, was
+not to them a conflict between human beings; it was a process by which
+they would make of things what they willed. There was no reality except
+in themselves and their own will; for, in their worship of action, they
+had lost the sense of external reality, they had come to believe that
+there was nothing to learn from it except what a craftsman learns from
+his material by working in it. It is by making that he learns; and they
+thought that there was no learning except by making.
+
+But that is the mistake of the whole Western world, though we have none
+of us carried it so far as Germany. Other men are to us still men, they
+still have some reality to us; but we see external reality as a material
+for us to work in; we are to ourselves entirely active and not at all
+passive beings. Even among all the evil and sorrow of the war we still
+took a pride in the enormous power of our instruments of destruction, as
+if we were children playing with big, dangerous toys. But these toys are
+themselves the product of a society that must always be making and never
+thinking or feeling. They express the will for action that has ousted
+the will to experience; and all the changes which we work on the face of
+the earth express that will too. We could not live in the cities we have
+made for ourselves if we thought that we had anything to learn from the
+beauty of the earth. They are for us merely places in which we learn to
+act, in which no one could learn to think or feel. Passive experience is
+impossible in them and they do not consider the possibility of it. So
+they express in every building, in every object, in the very clothes of
+their inhabitants, an utter poverty of passive experience. In what we
+make we give out no stored riches of the mind; we make only so that we
+may act, never so that we may express ourselves; and we have little art
+because our making is entirely wilful. Our attempts at art are
+themselves entirely wilful. We will have art, we say; and so we plaster
+our utilities with the ornaments of the past, as if we could get the
+richness of experience secondhand from our ancestors. And in the same
+way we are always finding for our blind activities moral motives, those
+motives which are real only when they spring out of right experience. We
+rationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornament
+to blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our
+actions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us an
+incessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it is
+entirely wilful. The thinker makes theories to justify what is done; he,
+too, sees all life in terms of action, he is the parasite of action. For
+a German professor the whole process of history was but a prelude to the
+wilfulness of Germany; he could not experience the past except in terms
+of what Germany willed to do; and the aim of his theorizing was to
+remove all scrupulous impediments to the action of Germany which she may
+have inherited from the past. Think so that you may be stronger to do
+what you wish to do; that is the modern notion of thought, and that is
+the reason why we throw up theories so easily; for thinking of this kind
+needs no experience, it needs merely an activity of the mind, the
+activity which collects facts and does with them what it will. And these
+theories are eagerly accepted so long as the impulse lasts which they
+justify. When that is spent they are forgotten, and new theories take
+their place to justify fresh impulses. And so it is with the incessant
+new movements in art. Art now is conceived entirely as action. The
+artist is as wilful as the Germanic hero; the will to make excludes in
+him the will to experience. The painter cannot look at the visible world
+without considering at once what kind of picture he will make of it. It
+is to him mere passive material for his artistic will, not an
+independent reality to enrich his mind so that it will give out its
+riches in the form of art. And as he is always willing to make pictures
+so he must will the kind of pictures he will make, as the Germans willed
+the kind of world they would make. But this willing of his is a kind of
+theorizing to justify his own action; and it changes incessantly because
+he never can be satisfied with his own poverty of experience. But still
+he will do anything rather than try to enrich that poverty.
+
+And that is the secret of all our restlessness, the restlessness that
+forced the Germans into the folly and crime of war. We are always
+dissatisfied with our poverty of experience; and we try to get rid of
+our dissatisfaction in more blind activity, throwing up new theories all
+the while as reasons why we should act. We fidget about the earth as if
+we were children, that could not read, left in a library; and, like
+them, we do mischief. And that is just what we are: children that have
+not learnt to read let loose upon the library of the universe; and all
+that we can do is to pull the books about and play games with them and
+scribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth is defaced with our
+meaningless scribbling, and we tell ourselves that it means something
+because we want to scribble. Or sometimes we tell ourselves that there
+is no meaning in anything, no more in the books than in our scribble.
+
+The only remedy is that we should learn to read; and for this we need
+above all things humility; not merely the personal humility of a man who
+knows that other men excel him, but a generic humility which
+acknowledges in the universe a greater wisdom, power, righteousness than
+his own. That is formally acknowledged by our religion, but it is not
+practically acknowledged in our way of life, in our conduct or our
+thought. We think and feel and behave as if we were the best and wisest
+creatures in the universe, as if it existed only for us to make use of
+it; and in so far as we learn from it at all, we learn only to make use
+of it. That is our idea of knowledge and wisdom; more and more it is our
+idea of science; and as for philosophy, we pay no heed to it because, in
+its nature, it is not concerned with making use of things. In every way
+we betray the fact that we cannot listen humbly, because we do not
+believe there is anything to listen to. For a few of the devout God
+spoke long ago, but He is not speaking now. "The kings of modern thought
+are dumb," said Matthew Arnold; but that is because everything outside
+the mind of man is dumb; all must be dumb to those who will not listen.
+If we assume that there, is no intelligence anywhere but in ourselves,
+we shall find none anywhere else. There will be no meaning for us in
+anything but our own actions; and they will become more and more
+meaningless to us as they become more and more wilful, until at last we
+shall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage, or prisoners on a
+universal treadmill. Years ago the war must have seemed a meaningless
+treadmill to the Germans, but they cannot escape from its consequences;
+they have done and they must suffer. But will they learn from their
+sufferings, shall we all learn, that doing is not everything? Are we
+humbled enough to listen to the wisdom of the ages, which tells us that
+we can be wise only if we listen for a wisdom that is not ours?
+
+
+
+
+                           "The Magic Flute"
+
+
+When _The Magic Flute_ was produced by the already dying Mozart it had
+little success. At the first performance, it is said, when the applause
+was faint, the leader of the orchestra stole up to Mozart, who was
+conducting, and kissed his hand; and Mozart stroked him on the head. We
+may guess that the leader knew what the music meant and that Mozart knew
+that he knew. Neither could put it into words and it is not put into
+words in the libretto. But the libretto need not be an obstruction to
+the meaning of the music if only the audience will not ask themselves
+what the libretto means. After Mozart's death the opera was successful,
+no doubt because the audience had given up asking what the libretto
+meant and had learnt something of the meaning of the music.
+
+There are worse librettos--librettos which have some clear unmusical
+meaning of their own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate to the
+meaning of the music, if it has any. This libretto, apart from the
+music, is so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence, that one
+can easily pass through it to the music. The author, Schickaneder, was
+Mozart's friend, and he had wit enough to understand the mood of Mozart.
+That mood does express itself in the plot and the incidents of the
+libretto, although in them it is empty of value or passion.
+Schickaneder, in fact, constructed a mere diagram to which Mozart gave
+life. The life is all in the music, but the diagram has its use, in that
+it supplies a shape, which we recognize, to the life of the music. The
+characters live in the music, but in the words they tell us something
+about themselves which enables us to understand their musical speech
+better. Papageno tells us that he is a bird-catcher and a child of
+nature. The words are labels, but through them we pass more quickly to
+an understanding of his song. Only we shall miss that understanding if
+we try to reach it through the words, if we look for the story of the
+opera in them. In the words the events of the opera have no connexion
+with each other. There is no reason why one should follow another. The
+logic of it is all in the music, for the music creates a world in which
+events happen naturally, in which one tune springs out of another, or
+conflicts with it, like the forces of nature or the thoughts and actions
+of man. This world is the universe as Mozart sees it; and the whole
+opera is an expression of his peculiar faith. It is therefore a
+religious work, though free from that meaningless and timid solemnity
+which we associate with religion. Mozart, in this world, was like an
+angel who could not but laugh, though without any malice, at all the
+bitter earnestness of mankind. Even the wicked were only absurd to him;
+they were naughty children whom, if one had the spell, one could enchant
+into goodness. And in _The Magic Flute_ the spell works. It works in the
+flute itself and in Papageno's lyre when the wicked negro Monostatos
+threatens him and Tamino with his ugly attendants. Papageno has only to
+play a beautiful childish tune on his lyre and the attendants all march
+backwards to an absurd goose-step in time with it. They are played off
+the stage; and the music convinces one that they must yield to it. So,
+we feel if we had had the music, we could have made the Prussians march
+their goose-step back to Potsdam; so we could play all solemn perversity
+off the stage of life. If we had the music--but there is solemn
+perversity in us too; by reason of which we can hardly listen to the
+music, much less play it, hardly listen to it or understand it even
+when Mozart makes it for us. For he had the secret of it; he was a
+philosopher who spoke in music and so simply that the world missed his
+wisdom and thought that he was just a beggar playing tunes in the
+street. A generation ago he was commonly said to be too tuney, as you
+might say that a flower was too flowery. People would no more consider
+him than they would consider the lilies of the field. They preferred
+Wagner in all his glory.
+
+Even now you can enjoy _The Magic Flute_ as a more than usually absurd
+musical comedy with easy, old-fashioned tunes. You can enjoy it anyway,
+if you are not solemn about it, as you can enjoy _Hamlet_ for a bloody
+melodrama. But, like _Hamlet_, it has depths and depths of meaning
+beyond our full comprehension. Papageno is a pantomime figure, but he is
+also one of the greatest figures in the drama of the world. He is
+everyman, like Hamlet, if only we had the wit to recognize ourselves in
+him. Or rather he is that element in us which we all like and despise in
+others, but which we will never for one moment confess to in
+ourselves--the coward, the boaster, the liar, but the child of nature.
+He, because he knows himself for all of these, can find his home in
+Sarostro's paradise. He does not want Sarostro's high wisdom; what he
+does want is a Papagena, an Eve, a child of nature like himself; and she
+is given to him. He has the wit to recognize his mate, almost a bird
+like himself, and to them Mozart gives their bird-duet, so that, when
+they sing it, we feel that we might all sing it together. It is not
+above our capacity of understanding or delight. The angel has learnt our
+earthly tongue, but transformed it so that he makes a heaven of the
+earth, a heaven that is not too high or difficult for us, a wild-wood
+heaven, half-absurd, in which we can laugh as well as sing, and in which
+the angels will laugh at us and with us, laugh our silly sorrows into
+joy.
+
+There is Mozart himself in Papageno, the faun domesticated and sweetened
+by centuries of Christian experience, yet still a faun and always ready
+to play a trick on human solemnity; and in this paradise which Mozart
+makes for us the faun has his place and a beauty not incongruous with
+it, like the imps and gargoyles of a Gothic church. At any moment the
+music will turn from sublimity into fun, and in a moment it can turn
+back to sublimity; and always the change seems natural. It is like a
+great cathedral with High Mass and children playing hide-and-seek behind
+the pillars; and the Mass would not be itself without the children. That
+is the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just because
+in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of
+Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything
+in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but
+it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with
+the twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seems
+to be not religion, but merely beauty, as real saints seem to be not
+good, but merely charming. And there are people to whom his beauty does
+not seem to be art, because it is just beauty; they think that he had
+the trick of it and could turn it on as he chose; they prefer the
+creaking of effort and egotism. His gifts are so purely gifts and so
+lavish that they seem to be cheap; and _The Magic Flute_ is an absurdity
+which he wrote in a hurry to please the crowd.
+
+We can hardly expect to see a satisfying performance of it on the stage
+of to-day, but we must be grateful for any performance, for the life of
+the music is in it. One can see from it what _The Magic Flute_ might be.
+The music is so sung, so played that it does transfigure the peculiar
+theatrical hideousness of our time. Tamino and Panina may look like
+figures out of an Academy picture, as heroes and heroines of opera
+always do. They may wear clothes that belong to no world of reality or
+art, clothes that suggest the posed and dressed-up model. But the music
+mitigates even these, and it helps every one to act, or rather to forget
+what they have learnt about acting. It evidently brings happiness and
+concord to those who sing it, so that they seem to be taking part in a
+religious act rather than in an act of the theatre. One feels this most
+in the concerted music, when the same wind from paradise seems to be
+blowing through all the singers and they move to it like flowers, in
+spite of their absurd clothes.
+
+But what is needed for a satisfying performance is a world congruous to
+the eye as well as to the ear; and for this we need a break with all our
+theatrical conventions. Sarostro, for instance, lives among Egyptian
+scenery--very likely the architecture of his temple was Egyptian at the
+first performance--but, for all that, this Egyptian world does not suit
+the music, and to us it suggests the miracles of the Egyptian Hall. But
+there is one world which would perfectly suit the music, a world in
+which it could pass naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in which all
+the figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is the
+Chinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there is
+something fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a
+mixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye what
+Mozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be a
+saint; only in that world, which ranges from the willow-pattern plate to
+the Rishi in his mystical ecstasy in the wilderness, could the soul of
+Mozart, with its laughter and its wisdom, be at home. That too is the
+world in which flowers and all animals are of equal import with mankind;
+it is the world of dragons in which the serpent of the first act would
+not seem to be made of pasteboard, and in which all the magic would not
+seem to be mere conjuring. In that world one might have beautiful
+landscapes and beautiful figures to suit them. There Sarostro would not
+be a stage magician, but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to him
+would be only the change from Ming to Sung, which would seem no change
+at all. Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic flute, the world
+where silver bells hang on every flowering tree and the thickets are
+full of enchanted nightingales. It is the world of imps and monsters,
+and yet of impassioned contemplation, where the sage sits in a moonlit
+pavilion and smiles like a lover, and where the lovers smile like sages;
+where everything is to the eye what the music of Mozart is to the ear.
+
+In the Chinese world we could be rid of all the drawling erotics of the
+modern theatre, we could give up the orchid for the lotus and the heavy
+egotism of Europe for the self-forgetful gaiety of the East. It may be
+only an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality, but it is one
+which the art of China makes real to us and with which we are familiar
+in that art; and there is a smiling wisdom in it, there is a gaiety
+which comes from conquest rather than refusal of reality, just like the
+gaiety and wisdom of Mozart's music. He knew sorrow well, but would not
+luxuriate in it; he took the beauty of the universe more seriously than
+himself. To him wickedness was a matter of imps and monsters rather than
+of villains, and of imps and monsters that could be exorcized by music.
+He was the Orpheus of the world who might tame the beast in all of us if
+we would listen to him, the wandering minstrel whom the world left to
+play out in the street. And yet his ultimate seriousness and the last
+secret of his beauty is pity, not for himself and his own little
+troubles, but for the whole bitter earnestness of mortal children. And
+in this pity he seems not to weep for us, still less for himself, but to
+tell us to dry our tears and be good, and listen to his magic flute.
+That is what he would have told the Prussians, after he had set them
+marching the goose-step backwards. Even they would not be the villains
+of a tragedy for him, but only beasts to be tamed with his music until
+they should be fit to sing their own bass part in the last chorus of
+reconciliation. And this pity of his sounds all through _The Magic
+Flute_ and gives to its beauty a thrill and a wonder far beyond what any
+fleshly passion can give. Sarostro is a priest, not a magician, because
+there is in him the lovely wisdom of pity, because he has a place in his
+paradise for Papageno, the child of nature, where he shall be made happy
+with his mate Papagena. There is a moment when Papageno is about to hang
+himself because there is no one to love him; he will hang himself in
+Sarostro's lonely paradise. But there is a sly laughter in the music
+which tells us that he will be interrupted with the rope round his neck.
+And so he is, and Papagena is given to him, and the paradise is no
+longer lonely; and the two sing their part in the chorus of
+reconciliation at the end. And we are sure that the Queen of Night, and
+the ugly negro and all his goose-stepping attendants, are not punished.
+They have been naughty for no reason that anyone can discover, just like
+Prussians and other human beings; and now the magic flute triumphs over
+their naughtiness, and the silver bells ring from every tree and the
+enchanted nightingales sing in all the thickets, and the sages and the
+lovers smile like children; and the laughter passes naturally into the
+divine beauty of Mozart's religion, which is solemn because laughter and
+pity are reconciled in it, not rejected as profane.
+
+
+
+
+                          Process or Person?
+
+
+Nearly all war pictures in the past have been merely pictures that
+happened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but
+pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as
+well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his
+treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt
+dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes
+about the manner in which fighting men and horses ought to be
+represented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things.
+Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the
+nude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment."
+Titian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment
+of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle
+scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes
+or his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none of
+these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of
+war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who
+take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently
+because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity
+because of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battle
+scene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a _genre_
+picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patriotic
+appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battle
+pictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is a
+public that likes them.
+
+In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of war
+as an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the very
+method of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; but
+in these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for his
+cubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that in
+war man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is a
+process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a
+great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and
+is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp
+distinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process better
+than any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being to
+express the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of all
+things, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; and
+machines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed by
+our own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future in
+which machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it is
+not so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves have
+lost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seem
+more and more like us, but that we seem more and more like the machines.
+Everywhere we see processes to which we are subject and of which our
+humanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured the
+delusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes. Now
+that delusion is fading away from us; and it fades away most of all in
+war, where all humanity is evidently dominated by the struggle for life,
+and is but a part of it, as raindrops are part of a storm.
+
+It is this sense of tyrannous process that Mr. Nevinson expresses in
+his battle pictures, with, we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentment
+against it. His pictures look like a visible _reductio ad absurdum_ of
+it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in
+modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least,
+is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on
+all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He has
+allowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which has
+no purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universe
+seems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as well
+be called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle
+between two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of the
+machines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no souls
+in them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that they
+collide and destroy each other like masses of matter in space. Nothing
+can be said of them except that they obey certain laws; we call their
+obedience discipline, but it is only the discipline of things subject to
+a process.
+
+Now it is the sense of process, as the ultimate reality in the universe,
+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 _Chimaera 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 aesthetic
+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.
+
+Now professionalism is the result of a false analogy between mechanical
+invention and the higher activities. It happens whenever the medium is
+regarded merely as material to be manipulated, when the artist thinks
+that he can learn to fly by mastering some other artist's machine, when
+his art is to him a matter of invention gradually perfected and
+necessarily progressing through the advance of knowledge and skill. One
+often finds this false analogy in books about the history of the arts,
+especially of painting and music. It is assumed, for instance, that
+Italian painting progressed mechanically from Giotto to Titian, that
+Titian had a greater power of expression than Giotto because he had
+command of a number of inventions in anatomy and perspective and the
+like that were unknown to Giotto. So we have histories of the
+development of the symphony, in which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven are
+treated as if they were mechanical inventors each profiting by the
+discoveries of his predecessors. Beethoven was the greatest of the three
+because he had the luck to be born last, and Beethoven's earliest
+symphonies are necessarily better than Mozart's latest because they were
+composed later. But in such histories there always comes a point at
+which artists cease to profit by the inventions of their predecessors.
+After Michelangelo, perhaps after Beethoven, is the decadence. Then
+suddenly there is talk of inspiration, or the lack of it. Mere
+imitators appear, and the historian who reviles them does not see that
+they have only practised, and refuted, his theory of art. They also have
+had the luck to be born later; but it has been bad luck, not good, for
+them, because to them their art has been all a matter of mechanical
+invention, of professionalism.
+
+The worst of it is that the greatest artists are apt themselves to fall
+in love with their own inventions, not to see that they are mechanical
+inventions because they themselves have discovered them. Michelangelo in
+his "Last Judgment" is very professional; Titian was professional
+through all his middle age; Tintoret was professional whenever he was
+bored with his work, which happened often; Shakespeare, whenever he was
+lazy, which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin to see, could be
+very earnestly professional; and as for Milton--consider this end of the
+last speech of Manoah, in _Samson Agonistes_, where we expect a simple
+cadence:--
+
+               The virgins also shall on feastful days
+               Visit his tomb with flowers, only bewailing
+               His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,
+               From whence captivity and loss of eyes
+
+Milton was tempted into the jargon of these last two lines, which are
+like a bad translation of a Greek play, by professionalism. He was
+trying to make his poetry as much unlike ordinary speech as he could; he
+was for the moment a slave to a tradition, and none the less a slave
+because it was the tradition of his own past.
+
+Professionalism is a device for making expression easy; and it is one
+used by the greatest artists sometimes because their business is to be
+always expressing themselves, and even they have not always something to
+express. But expression is so difficult, even for those who have
+something to express, that they must be always practising it if they are
+ever to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance, was a professed enemy
+of professionalism in poetry; yet he, too, was for ever writing verses.
+It was a hobby with him as well as an art; and his professionalism was
+merely less accomplished than that of Milton or Spenser:--
+
+                  Fair Ellen Irwin, when she sate
+                  Upon the Braes of Kirtle,
+                  Was lovely as a Grecian maid
+                  Adorned with wreaths of myrtle.
+
+Why adorned with wreaths of myrtle? Wordsworth himself tells us. His
+subject had already been treated in Scotch poems "in simple ballad
+strain," so, he says, "at the outset I threw out a classical image to
+prepare the reader for the style in which I meant to treat the story,
+and so to preclude all comparison." No one, whose object was just to
+tell the story, would compare Ellen with a Grecian maid and her wreaths
+of myrtle; but Wordsworth must do so to show us how he means to tell it,
+and, as he forgets to mention, so that he may rhyme with Kirtle. That is
+all professionalism, all a device for making expression easy, practised
+by a great poet because at the moment he had nothing to express. But art
+is always difficult and cannot be made easy by this means. We need not
+take a malicious pleasure in such lapses of the great poet; but it is
+well to know when Homer nods, even though he uses all his craft to
+pretend that he is wide awake. Criticism may have a negative as well as
+a positive value. It may set us on our guard against professionalism
+even in the greatest artists, and most of all in them. For it is they
+who begin professionalism and, with the mere momentum of their vitality,
+make it attractive. Because they are great men and really accomplished,
+they can say nothing with a grand air; and these grand nothings of
+theirs allure us just because they are nothings and make no demands
+upon our intelligence. That is art indeed, we cry: and we intoxicate
+ourselves with it because it is merely art. "The quality of mercy is not
+strained" is far more popular than Lear's speech, "No, no, no! Come,
+let's away to prison," because it is professional rhetoric; it is what
+Shakespeare could write at any moment, whereas the speech of Lear is
+what Lear said at one particular moment. The contrast between the two is
+the contrast well put in the epigram about Barry and Garrick in their
+renderings of King Lear:--
+
+      A king, aye, every inch a king, such Barry doth appear.
+      But Garrick's quite another thing; he's every inch King Lear.
+
+We admire the great artist when he is every inch a king more than when
+he has lost his kingship in his passion.
+
+He no doubt knows the difference well enough. But he wishes to do
+everything well, he has a natural human delight in his own
+accomplishment; and a job to finish. Shakespeare, Michelangelo,
+Beethoven were not slaves to their own professionalism; no doubt they
+could laugh at it themselves. But there is always a danger that we shall
+be enslaved by it; and it is the business of criticism to free us from
+that slavery, to make us aware of this last infirmity of great artists.
+We are on our guard easily enough against a professionalism that is out
+of fashion. The Wagnerian of a generation ago could sneer at the
+professionalism of Mozart; but the professionalism of Wagner seemed to
+him to be inspiration made constant and certain by a new musical
+invention. We know now only too well, from Wagner's imitators, that he
+did not invent a new method of tapping inspiration; we ought to know
+that no one can do that. The more complete the method the more tiresome
+it becomes, even as practised by the inventor.
+
+Decadence in art is always caused by professionalism, which makes the
+technique of art too difficult, and so destroys the artist's energy and
+joy in his practice of it. Teachers of the arts are always inclined to
+insist on their difficulty and to set hard tasks to their pupils for the
+sake of their hardness; and often the pupil stays too long learning
+until he thinks that anything which is difficult to do must therefore be
+worth doing. This notion also overawes the general public so that they
+value what looks to them difficult; but in art that which seems
+difficult to us fails with us, we are aware of the difficulty, not of
+the art. The greater the work of art the easier it seems to us. We feel
+that we could have done it ourselves if only we had had the luck to hit
+upon that way of doing it; indeed, where our aesthetic experience of it
+is complete, we feel as if we were doing it ourselves; our minds jump
+with the artist's mind; we are for the moment the artist himself in his
+very act of creation. But we are always apt to undervalue this true and
+complete aesthetic experience, because it seems so easy and simple, and
+we mistake for it a painful sense of the artist's skill, of his
+professional accomplishment. So we demand of artists, that they shall
+impress us with their accomplishment; we have not had our money's worth
+unless we feel that we could not possibly do ourselves what they have
+done. No doubt, when the _Songs of Innocence_ were first published,
+anyone who did happen to read them thought them doggerel. Blake in a
+moment had freed himself from all the professionalism of the followers
+of Pope, and even now they make poetry seem an easy art to us, until we
+try to write songs of innocence ourselves:--
+
+          When the voices of children are heard on the green,
+              And laughing is heard on the hill,
+          My heart is at rest within my breast,
+              And everything else is still.
+
+          "Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
+              And the dews of night arise;
+          Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,
+              Till the morning appears in the skies."
+
+We call it artless, with still a hint of depreciation in the word, or at
+least of wonder that we should be so moved by such simple means. It is a
+kind of cottage-poetry, and has that beauty which in a cottage moves us
+more than all the art of palaces. But we never learn the lesson of that
+beauty because it seems to us so easily won; and so our arts are always
+threatened by the decadence of professionalism. But poetry in England
+has been a living art so long because it has had the power of freeing
+itself from professionalism and choosing the better path with Mary and
+with Ruth. The value of the Romantic movement lay, not in its escape to
+the wonders of the past, but in its escape from professionalism and all
+its self-imposed and easy difficulties. For it is much easier to write
+professional verses in any style than to write songs of innocence; and
+that is why professionalism in all the arts tempts all kinds of artists.
+Anyone can achieve it who has the mind. It is a substitute for
+expression, as mere duty is a substitute for virtue. But, as a
+forbidding sense of duty makes virtue itself seem unattractive, so
+professionalism destroys men's natural delight in the arts. Like the
+artist himself, his public becomes anxious, perverse, exacting; afraid
+lest it shall admire the wrong thing, because it has lost the immediate
+sense of the right thing. Just as it expects art to be difficult, so it
+expects its own pleasure in art to be difficult; and thus we have
+attained to our present notion about art which is like the Puritan
+notion about virtue, that it is what no human being could possibly enjoy
+by nature. And if we do enjoy it, "like a meadow gale in spring," it
+cannot be good art.
+
+But in painting as in poetry, all the new movements of value are escapes
+from professionalism; and they begin by shocking the public because they
+seem to make the art too easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work of
+Millais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne of Whistler. He said it was
+cockney impudence because it lacked the professionalism he expected.
+Artists and critics alike are always binding burdens on the arts; and
+they are always angry with the artist who cuts the burden off his back.
+They think he is merely shirking difficulties. But the difficulty of
+expression is so much greater than the self-imposed difficulties of
+mere professionalism that any man who is afraid of difficulties will try
+to be a professional rather than an artist.
+
+In art there is always humility, in professionalism pride. And it is
+this pride that makes art more ugly and tiresome than any other work of
+man. Nothing is stranger in human nature than the tyranny of boredom it
+will endure in the pursuit of art; and the more bored men are, the more
+they are convinced of artistic salvation. Our museums are cumbered with
+monstrous monuments of past professionalism; our bookshelves groan with
+them. Always we are trying to like things because they seem to us very
+well done; never do we dare to say to ourselves: It may be well done,
+but it were better if it were not done at all; and the artist is still
+to us a dog walking on his hind legs, a performer whose merit lies in
+the unnatural difficulty of his performance.
+
+
+
+
+                           Waste or Creation?
+
+
+The William Morris Celebration was not so irrelevant to these times as
+it may seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe to our society,
+and it has come. That commercial system of ours, which seems to so many
+part of the order of Nature, was to him as evil and unnatural as
+slavery. His quarrel with it was not political, but human; it was the
+quarrel not of the oppressed, for he was not the man to be oppressed in
+any society, but of the workman. He was sure that a society which
+encouraged bad work and discouraged good must in some way or other come
+to a bad end; and he would have seen in this war the end that he
+predicted. Whatever its result, there must be a change in the order of
+our society, whether it sinks through incessant wars, national and
+commercial, into barbarism or is shocked into an effort to attain to
+civilization. There were particular sayings of Morris's to which no one
+at the time paid much heed. They seemed mere grumblings against what
+must be. He was, for instance, always crying out against our waste of
+labour. If only all men did work that was worth doing--
+
+     Think what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I
+     feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of the work which is
+     undergone for the making of useless things. It would be an
+     instructive day's work, for any one of us who is strong enough,
+     to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London
+     on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop
+     windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life
+     of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious
+     or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the
+     lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them; and to many
+     people, even of those who buy them, they are obvious
+     encumbrances to real work, thought, and pleasure.
+
+At the time most people said that this waste of labour was all a matter
+of demand and supply, and thought no more about it; some said that it
+was good for trade. Very few saw, with Morris, that demand for such
+things is something willed and something that ought not to be willed.
+
+But then it was generally believed that we could afford this waste of
+labour; and so it went on until, after a year or two of war, we found
+that we could not afford it. Then even the most ignorant and thoughtless
+learned, from facts, not from books, certain lessons of political
+economy. They learned that, in war-time at least, a nation that wastes
+its labour will be overcome by one that does not. At once the common
+will was set against the waste of labour; and, what would have seemed
+strangest of all forty years ago, the Government, with the consent of
+the people, set to work to stop the waste of labour, and did to a great
+extent succeed in stopping it. When people thought in terms of
+munitions, instead of in terms of general well-being, they saw that the
+waste of labour must be, and could be, stopped. They talked no longer
+about the laws of supply and demand, but about munitions. Those who had
+made trash must be set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some way to
+second the Army. Those who still were ready to waste labour on trash for
+themselves were no longer obeying the laws of supply and demand; they
+were diverting labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic, they
+were helping the Germans. Money, in fact, had no longer the right to an
+absolute command over labour. A man, before he spent a sovereign, must
+ask himself whether he was spending it for the good of the nation; and
+if he did not ask himself that, the Government would ask it for him.
+
+So much the war taught us, for purposes of war. But Morris many years
+ago tried to teach it for purposes of peace. When he wrote those words
+which we have quoted, he was not talking politics but ordinary common
+sense. He was not even talking art, but rather economics; and he was
+talking it not to any vague abstraction called the community, but to
+each individual human being. At that time every one thought of economics
+as something which concerned society or the universe. It was, so to
+speak, a natural science; it observed phenomena as if they were in the
+heavens; and stated laws about them, laws not human but natural. Perhaps
+it was the greatest achievement of Morris in the way of thought that he
+saw economics, even more clearly than Ruskin, as a matter not of natural
+laws, but of conscience and duty. He did not talk about economics at
+all, but about the waste of labour, just as we talk about it now. The
+only difference is that he saw it to be one of the chief causes of
+poverty in time of peace, whereas we see it as a hindrance to victory in
+time of war. We have, for war purposes, acquired the conscience that he
+wished us to acquire for all purposes. The question is whether we shall
+keep it in peace.
+
+Upon that depends the question how soon we shall recover from the war.
+For there is no doubt that we shall not be able to afford our former
+waste of labour; and, if we persist in it, we shall be bankrupt as a
+society. It may be said that we shall not have the money, the power, to
+waste labour. But we shall certainly have some superfluous energy, more
+and more, it is to be hoped, as time goes on; and our future recovery
+will depend upon the use we make of this superfluous energy. We can
+waste it, as we wasted it before the war; or we can keep the conscience
+we have acquired in war and ask ourselves in peace, with every penny we
+spend, whether we are wasting labour. It is true that what may be waste
+to one will not be waste to another; but in that matter every one must
+obey his own conscience. The important thing is that every one should
+have a conscience and obey it. There will be plenty of people to tell us
+that no one can define waste of labour. No one can define sin; but each
+man has his own conscience on that point and lives well or ill as he
+obeys it or disobeys it. Besides, there are many things, all the trash
+that Morris speaks about in the shop windows, that every one knows to be
+waste. We need not trouble ourselves about the fact that art will seem
+waste to the philistine and not to the artist. We must allow for
+differences on that point as on most others. Some things that might
+have been waste to Samuel Smiles would have been to Morris a symptom of
+well-being. But he knew, and often said, that we cannot have the beauty
+which was to him a symptom of well-being unless we end the waste of
+labour on trash. Of luxury he said:--
+
+     By those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for
+     art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each
+     day's hard practice of the difficult art of living. But I say,
+     art cannot live beside it nor self-respect in any class of
+     life. Effeminacy and brutality are its companions on the right
+     hand and the left.
+
+There is, we have all discovered now, only a certain amount of labour in
+the country, in the world. Even the most ignorant are aware at last that
+money does not create labour but only commands it, and may command it to
+do what will or will not benefit us all. We were, for the purposes of
+the war, much more of a fellowship than we had ever been before. We
+acknowledged a duty to each other, the duty of commanding labour to the
+common good. We asked with every sovereign we spent whether it would
+help or hinder us in the war. Morris would have us ask also whether it
+will help or hinder us in the advance towards a general happiness.
+
+And he put a further question, which in time of war unfortunately we
+could not put, a question not only about the work but about the workman.
+Are we, with our money, forcing him to work that is for him worth doing;
+are we, to use an old phrase, considering the good of his soul? Morris
+insisted on our duty to the workman more even than on our duty to
+society. He saw that where great masses of men do work that they know to
+be futile there must be a low standard of work and incessant discontent.
+The workman may not even know the cause of his discontent. He may think
+he is angry with the rich because they are rich; but the real source of
+his anger is the work that they set him to do with their riches. And no
+class war, no redistribution of wealth, will end that discontent if the
+same waste of labour continues. Double the wages of every workman in the
+country, and if he spends the increase on trash no one will be any
+better off in mind or body. There will still be poverty and still
+discontent, with the work if not with the wages.
+
+The problem for us, for every modern society now, is not so much to
+redistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but to
+use our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste it
+piecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We have
+to solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is not
+to lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us a
+great opportunity. It has opened our eyes, if only we do not shut them
+again. It has taught every one in the country the most important of all
+lessons in political economy which the books often seem to conceal. And,
+better still, it has taught us that in economics we can exercise our own
+wills, that they concern each individual man and woman as much as
+morals; that they are morals, and not abstract mathematics; that we have
+the same duty towards the country, towards mankind, that we have to our
+own families. The proverb, Waste not, want not, does not apply merely to
+each private income. We have accounts to settle not only with our
+bankers, but with the community. It will thrive or not according as we
+are thrifty or thriftless; and our thrift depends upon how we spend our
+income, not merely on how much we spend of it. For all that part of it
+which we do not spend on necessaries is the superfluous energy of
+mankind, and we determine how it shall be exercised; each individual
+determines that, not an abstraction called society.
+
+One may present the thrift of labour as a matter of duty to society.
+But Morris saw that it was more than that; and he lit it with the
+sunlight of the warmer virtues. It is not merely society that we have to
+consider, or the direction of its superfluous energy. It is also the
+happiness, the life, of actual men and women. We shall not cease to
+waste work until we think always of the worker behind it, until we see
+that it is our duty, if with our money we have command over him, to set
+him to work worth doing. Capital now is to most of those who own it a
+means of earning interest. We should think of it as creative, as the
+power which may make the wilderness blossom like the rose and change the
+slum into a home for men and women; and, better still, as the power that
+may train and set men to do work that will satisfy their souls, so that
+they shall work for the work's sake and not only for the wages. Until
+capital becomes so creative in the hands of those who own it there will
+always be a struggle for the possession of it; and to those who do
+possess it it will bring merely superfluities and not happiness. If it
+becomes creative, no one will mind much who possesses it. The class war
+will be ended by a league of classes, their aim not merely peace, but
+those things which make men resolve not to spoil peace with war.
+
+We shall be told that this is a dream, as we are always told that the
+ending of war is a dream. "So long as human nature is what it is there
+will always be war." Those who talk thus think of human nature as
+something not ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is not their own
+nature. They know that they themselves do not wish for war; but, looking
+at mankind in the mass and leaving themselves out of that mass, they see
+it governed by some force that is not really human nature, but merely
+nature "red in tooth and claw," a process become a malignant goddess,
+who forces mankind to act contrary to their own desires, contrary even
+to their own interests. She has taken the place for us of the old
+original sin; and the belief in her is far more primitive than the
+belief in original sin. She is in fact but a modern name for all the
+malignant idols that savages have worshipped with sacrifices of blood
+and tears that they did not wish to make. It is strange that, priding
+ourselves as we do on our modern scepticism which has taught us to
+disbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine, we yet have not dared
+to affirm the plain fact that this nature, this human nature, does not
+exist. There is no force, no process, whether within us or outside us,
+that compels us to act contrary to our desires and our interests. There
+is nothing but fear; and fear can be conquered, as by individuals, so by
+the collective will of man. It is fear that produces war, the fear that
+other men are not like ourselves, that they are hostile animals governed
+utterly by the instinct of self-preservation.
+
+So it is fear that produces the class war and the belief that it must
+always continue. It is our own fears that cut us off from happiness by
+making us despair of it. The man who has capital sees it as a means of
+protecting himself and his children from poverty; it is to him a
+negative, defensive thing, at best the safeguard of a negative,
+defensive happiness. So others see it as something which he has and they
+have not, something they would like to snatch from him if they could.
+But if he saw capital as a creative thing, like the powers of the mind,
+like the genius of the artist, then it would be to him a means of
+positive happiness both for himself and for others. He would say to
+himself, not How can I protect myself with this against the tyranny of
+the struggle for life? not How can I invest this? but What can I do with
+this? He would see it as Michelangelo saw the marble when he looked for
+the shape within it. And then he would rise above the conception of mere
+duty as something we do against our own wills, or of virtue as a luxury
+of the spirit to which we escape in our little leisure from the
+struggle for life. Virtue, duty, would be for him life itself; in
+creation he would attain to that harmony of duty and pleasure which is
+happiness.
+
+If only we could see that the superfluous energy of mankind is something
+out of which to make the happiness of mankind we should find our own
+happiness in the making of it. There is still for us a gulf between
+doing good to others and the delight of the artist, the craftsman, in
+his work. The artist is one kind of man and the philanthropist another;
+the artist is a selfish person whom we like, and the philanthropist an
+unselfish person whom we do not like. What we need is to fuse them in
+our use of capital, in our exercise of the superfluous energy of
+mankind. There are single powerful capitalists who know this joy of
+creation, who are benevolent despots, and yet are suspect to the poor
+because of their great power. But it never enters the head of the
+smaller investor that he, too, might create instead of merely investing;
+that, instead of being a shareholder in a limited liability company, he
+might be one of a creative fellowship, not merely earning dividends but
+transforming cities, exalting things of use into things of beauty,
+giving to himself and to mankind work worth doing for its own sake,
+work in which all the obsolete conflicts of rich and poor could be
+forgotten in a commonwealth. That is the vision of peace which our
+sacrifices in the war may earn for us. We have learned sacrifice and the
+joy of it; but, so far, only so that we may overcome an enemy of our own
+kind. There remains to be overcome, by a sacrifice more joyful and with
+far greater rewards, this other old enemy not of our own kind, the enemy
+we call nature or human nature, the enemy that is so powerful merely
+because we dare not believe that she does not exist.
+
+
+
+
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