[Footnote U: Happily, I have never laid great claims to that prevalent modern virtue, originality; otherwise, I might have been somewhat dashed by coming across the following pa.s.sage, only the other day, in the miscellaneous writings of Gibbon (_de mes lectures Oct_. 3, 1762): "Till now (says he) I was acquainted only with two ways of criticising a beautiful pa.s.sage: the one, to shew, by an exact anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of it, and whence they sprung; the other, an idle exclamation, or a general encomium which leaves nothing behind it.

Longinus has shown me that there is a third. He tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and tells them with such energy that he communicates them."]

Impressionistic criticism of literature is not much approved nowadays, though Mr. Arthur Symonds and one or two of his contemporaries still preserve it from the last outrages of a new and possibly less subtle generation, while M. Proust, by using it to fine effect in his extraordinary masterpiece, may even bring it again into fashion. But it has got a bad name by keeping low company; for it has come to be a.s.sociated with those journalistic reviewers who describe, not the feelings and ideas provoked in them by reading a book, but what they thought and felt and did at or about the time they were supposed to be reading it. These are the chatterboxes who will tell you how they got up, cut themselves shaving, ate sausages, spilt the tea, and nearly missed the train in which they began to read the latest work of Benedetto Croce, which, unluckily, having got into conversation with a pretty typist or a humorous bagman, they quite forgot, left in the carriage, and so can tell you no more about. But this is not Impressionism, it is mere vulgarity.

If in literary criticism the impressionist method is falling into disfavour, in the criticism of music and painting it holds the field.

Nor is this surprising: to write objectively about a symphony or a picture, to seize its peculiar intrinsic qualities and describe them exactly in words, is a feat beyond the power of most. Wherefore, as a rule, the unfortunate critic must either discourse on history, archaeology, and psychology, or chatter about his own feelings. With the exception of Mr. Roger Fry there is not in England one critic capable of saying so much, to the purpose, about the intrinsic qualities of a work of visual art as half a dozen or more--Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr. Murry, Mr. Squire, Mr. Clutton Brock, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Mr.

McCarthy to begin with--can be trusted to say easily, and, if necessary, weekly, about the intrinsic qualities of a book. To be sure, Mr. Fry is a great exception: with my own ears have I heard him take two or three normally intelligent people through a gallery and by severely objective means provoke in them a perfect frenzy of enthusiasm for masterpieces of utterly different schools and ages. Doubtless that is what art-criticism should be; but perhaps it is wrong to despise utterly those who achieve something less.

Just at present it is the thing to laugh at biographical and historical critics, a cla.s.s of which Sainte-Beuve is the obvious representative, and to which belong such writers as Taine and Francesco de Sanctis and all who try to explain works of art by describing their social and political circ.u.mstances. "At any rate," it is said, "these are not _critics_." I shall not quarrel over words; but I am persuaded that, when they care genuinely for books and have a gift of exposition, these perform the same function as their more aesthetically-minded brethren. I am sure that a _causerie_ by Sainte-Beuve often sends a reader, with a zest he had never found unaided, to a book he had never opened unadvised. There are plenty of men and women, equipped to relish the finest and subtlest things in literature, who can hardly come at a book save through its author, or at an author save through the story of his life and a picture of his surroundings; wherefore, few things do more to promote and disseminate a taste for art and letters and, I will add, for all things of the spirit, than biographical and historical criticism and the discussion of tendencies and ideas.

And this brings me to my conclusion. Though the immediate object of criticism is to put readers in the way of appreciating fully a work or works in the merit of which the critic believes, its ultimate value lies further afield in more general effects. Good criticism not only puts people in the way of appreciating particular works; it makes them feel, it makes them remember, what intense and surprising pleasures are peculiar to the life of the spirit. For these it creates an appet.i.te, and keeps that appet.i.te sharp: and I would seriously advise anyone who complains that his taste for reading has deserted him to take a dip into the great critics and biographers and see whether they will not send him back to his books. For, though books, pictures, and music stand charged with a mysterious power of delighting and exciting and enhancing the value of life; though they are the keys that unlock the door to the world of the spirit--the world that is best worth living in--busy men and women soon forget. It is for critics to be ever jogging their memories. Theirs it is to point the road and hold open the unlocked doors. In that way they become officers in the kingdom of the mind, or, to use a humbler and preferable term, essential instruments of culture.

OTHON FRIESZ

Friesz is a painter who has "come on" visibly since the war. He has drawn right away from "the field" to join those leaders--Matisse, Pica.s.so, Derain, Bonnard, shall we say, with one or two more in close attendance--a cursory glance at whom, as they flash by, provokes this not unprofitable exclamation: "How different they are!" Apparently, amongst the chiefs, that famous movement no longer counts for much. Look at them; to an eye at all practised these artists are as unlike each other as are hounds to the eye of a huntsman. Certainly, they all owe something to Cezanne: but what other important characteristic have they in common which they do not share with the best of the last hundred years? It was ever thus: the best, who are all alike in some ways, in others are, from the first, the most sharply differentiated simply because they are the most personal. Also, as they mature they become more and more peculiar because they tend to rely less and less on anything but themselves and the grand tradition. Each creates and inhabits a world of his own, which, by the way, he is apt to mistake for the world of everyone who is not maliciously prejudiced against him. And Friesz, whose character and intelligence are utterly unlike those of his compeers, is now, naturally enough, producing work which has little in common with that even of Matisse--

[Ill.u.s.tration: OTHON FRIESZ]

Matisse, to whom, not fifteen years ago, I saw a picture of his attributed by a competent amateur who was the friend of both.

Friesz has an air of being more professional than any other artist of this first rank--for Marchand, I think, is not quite of it. Indeed, for a moment, Friesz may appear alarmingly professional. Certainly, he leaves nothing to chance: all is planned, and planned not in haste and agitation, fingers itching to be at it, but with the deliberation, the critical thoroughness, of an engineer or an architect. There is so much of the painstaking craftsman in his method that for a moment you may overlook the sensitive artist who conceives and executes. But, in fact, the effective alliance of practical intelligence with fine sensibility is the secret of his strength, as I realized one day, when I had the privilege of studying a large decoration (a sketch for a fragment of which is to be seen in this exhibition) [V] which Friesz had just carried out. Since then I have not doubted that he was the man who might give this age that of which the age talks much and gets little--monumental decoration.

[Footnote V: At the Independent Gallery, 1921.]

Large decorative schemes--when they are not, what most are, mere wastes of tumid pomposity--are apt to fail for one of two reasons: either they are too much like pictures or too little like works of art. Because very few artists are capable by taking thought of adapting their means to an unfamiliar end, it will happen that a sensitive and gifted painter sets about a decoration as though he were beginning an easel picture. He has his sense of the importance of richness, of filling a picture to the brim; he has a technique adequate to his conception; but he has neither the practical readiness nor the intellectual robustness which would enable him to adjust these to a new problem. He endeavours, therefore, to key every part of his scheme up to the highest pitch of intensity that line and colour can bear. He is attempting the impossible; his conception is inappropriate; and, in any case, his technique is unequal to so vast an undertaking. He produces something which may be delicious in detail but is pretty sure to be unsatisfactory as a whole. He fails to fill his s.p.a.ce. His work has the vice of Sidney's _Arcadia_ and the _Religio Medici_: it is good to dip into. You cannot write an epic as though it were a sonnet.

On the other hand, you must not write an epic as though you were telling a tale in the bar-parlour, lest you should create another _Earthly Paradise_, leaving quite untouched the subtler and more energetic chords in your listener's appreciative faculty. The craftsman decorator, though he may know how to fill vast s.p.a.ces, will never fill them with lively images. His plan may be cleverly devised to surmount difficulties of structure and material; it will not be inspired. Incapable of keying his instrument too high, he will be satisfied with a slack string and abominable flatness. His forms will be conventional; his handling impersonal; ten to one he will give us a row of insipid Gothic figures or something in the pseudo-Veronese taste.

Almost everyone would admit that, considered as pictures, those great decorations in the Doges' Palace were a little empty; no one can deny that as parts of a vast scheme they are superbly adequate. Very much the same might be said of the decorations I have in mind. It is clear that Friesz plotted and reasoned with himself until he had contrived a method of matching means with ends. By constructing it out of forms less charged, more fluent, and more in the nature of arabesques than those he habitually employs he gave to his scheme continuity and easy comprehensibility: but never did he allow those forms to subside into mere coloured s.p.a.ces, or the lines to become mere flourishes: always every detail was doing something, and so the whole was significant and alive. The scheme which was planned with caution was carried through with pa.s.sion.

Now, obviously, a painter capable of performing this feat must possess a rare, at this moment possibly unique, gift. Friesz is one who can bring the whole weight of his intellect to bear on his sensibility. That sensibility let no one underrate. Before his vision of the external world, especially before what we are pleased to call Nature, Friesz has a reaction as delicate and enthusiastic as that of an English poet.

Only, unlike most English painters, he would never dream of jotting it down and leaving it at that. Such hit-or-miss frivolity is not in his way. He is no amateur. He takes his impressions home and elaborates them; he brings his intellect to bear on them; and, as this exhibition shows, without robbing them of their bloom, makes of them something solid and satisfying. To realize what a power this is we may, I hope without indiscretion, glance for an instant at another handsomely endowed French painter. That M. Lhote does not want for sensibility is shown by his sketches and water-colours, that his intellect is sharp enough is proved by his writings; but the devitalized rect.i.tude of his more ambitious pieces shows how appallingly difficult it is to bring intellect to bear on sensibility without crushing it. The failure of M.

Lhote is the measure of M. Friesz's achievement.

If I am right, it is only natural that pictures by Friesz should improve on acquaintance. The studied logic of the composition may for a time absorb the spectator's attention and blind him to more endearing qualities; but, sooner or later, he will begin to perceive not only that a scrupulously honest vision has been converted into a well-knit design, but that the st.i.tches are lovely. In every part he will be discovering subtle and seductive harmonies and balances of which the delicacy dawns on him as he gazes. The more he looks the more will he get of that curiously gratifying thrill which comes of the recognition of unostentatious rightness.

But, though he offers the sensitive amateur an unusually generous allowance of the amateur's most delicate pleasure, Friesz is, above all, a painters' painter. He has been called a theorist. And, because he is a painter of exceptionally good understanding, who thinks logically about his art and can find words for what he thinks, I suppose the appellation is admissible. But, remember, he never dreams of trying to convert his theories of art into theories of life. His are not of the kind that can be so converted; I said he was a painters', not a journalists', painter.

Also, unlike the theories of the mere craftsman, his are based always on the a.s.sumption that there is such a thing as art--something that is created by and appeals to peculiar faculties, something rare and personal, something not to be had simply by taking thought and pains, something as utterly unlike honest craftsmanship as it is unlike the cryptic mutterings of boozy mountebanks: subject, however, to this a.s.sumption, his theories are severely practical. They have to do solely with the art of painting; they are born of his own experience; and he makes visible use of them. That is why I call Friesz a painters'

painter. I wonder whether the Italian Primitives, with that disquietingly unself-conscious inspiration of theirs, directed with such amazing confidence along well devised, practical channels, were not a little like him.

The exhibition is fairly representative of Friesz's later work; and if it cannot be said quite to summarize a stage of his career, at least it is a milestone. Friesz has arrived: that is to say, what he has already achieved suffices to affirm the existence of a distinct, personal talent ent.i.tled to its place in the republic of painting. At that point we leave him. But we may be sure that, with his remarkable gift and even more remarkable power of turning it to account, his energy, his patience, and his manifest ambition, he will soon have gone beyond it.

WILc.o.xISM

To return from Paris, full of enthusiasm for contemporary art, and find oneself forced immediately into an att.i.tude of querulous hostility is surely a melancholy thing. It is my fate; but it is not my fault. Had I found our native quidnuncs in a slightly less exalted humour, had they gushed a little less over their imperial painters at Burlington House, had they made the least effort to preserve a sense of proportion, I, for my part, had held my peace. But, deafened by the chorus of hearty self-applause with which British art has just been regaling itself, [W] a critic who hopes that his country is not once again going to make itself the laughing-stock of Europe is bound at all risks to say something disagreeable.

[Footnote W: February 1920.]

In that delightful book _The Worlds and I_, for bringing me acquainted with which I shall ever be grateful to _The Athenaeum_, nothing is more delightful than the chapter in which Mrs. Wilc.o.x takes us through the list of the great writers she has known. We are almost as much pleased by the auth.o.r.ess's confident expectation that we shall be thrilled to learn any new fact about Miss Aldrich, who wrote "one of the most exquisite lyrics in the language"; about Rhoda Hero Dunn, "a genius"

with "an almost Shakespearean quality in her verse," or about Elsa Barker, whose poem _The Frozen Grail_, "dedicated to Peary and his band, is an epic of august beauty," and whose sonnet _When I am Dead_ "ranks with the great sonnets of the world," as she would be surprised to discover that we had never heard of one of them. Mrs. Wilc.o.x believed, in perfect good faith, that the crowd of magazine-makers with whom she a.s.sociated were, in fact, the great figures of the age. She had no reason for supposing that we should not be as much interested in first-hand personal gossip about Zona Gale and Ridgeley Torrence, Arthur Grissom (first editor of the _Smart Set_), Judge Malone, Theodosia Garrison, and Julie Opp Faversham ("even to talk with whom over the telephone gives me a sense of larger horizons") as we should have been in similar gossip about Swinburne and Hardy, Henry James and Mallarme, Laforgue, Anatole France, Tolstoy, Tchekov, or Dostoevsky.

And, as Mrs. Wilc.o.x had no reason for supposing that her friends were not the greatest writers alive, what reason had she for supposing that they were not the greatest that ever lived? Without the taste, the intelligence, or the knowledge which alone can give some notion of what's what in art, she was obliged to rely on more accessible criteria.

The circulation of her own works, for instance, must have compared favourably with that of most poets. To be sure there was Shakespeare and the celebrated Hugo--or was it Gambetta? But what grounds could there be for thinking that she was not superior to the obscure John Donne or the obscurer Andrew Marvel, or to Arthur Rimbaud, of whom no one she had ever heard of had ever heard? Mrs. Wilc.o.x was not dishonest in a.s.suming that the most successful writer in her set was the best in the world; she was not conceited even; she was merely ridiculous.

It is disquieting to find the same sort of thing going on in England, where our painters are fiercely disputing with each other the crown of European painting, and our critics appraising the respective claims of Mr. Augustus John and Mr. John Nash as solemnly as if they were comparing Cezanne with Renoir. It is more than disquieting, it is alarming, to detect symptoms of the disease--this distressing disease of Wilc.o.xism--in _The Athenaeum_ itself. Yet I am positive that not long since I read in this very paper that Mr. Wyndham Lewis was more than a match for Matisse and Derain; and, having said so much, the critic not unnaturally went on to suggest that he was a match for Lionardo da Vinci. Since then I have trembled weekly lest the infection should have spread to our literary parts. Will it be a.s.serted, one of these Fridays, that the appetizing novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan are distinctly better than Hardy's Wess.e.x tales, and comparable rather with the works of Jane Austen?

To save ourselves from absurdity, and still more to save our painters from insp.i.s.sating that trickle of fatuity which wells from heads swollen with hot air, critics should set themselves to check this nasty malady.

Let them make it clear that to talk of modern English painting as though it were the rival of modern French is silly. In old racing days--how matters stand now I know not--it used to be held that French form was about seven pounds below English: the winner of the Derby, that is to say, could generally give the best French colt about that weight and a beating. In painting, English form is normally a stone below French. At any given moment the best painter in England is unlikely to be better than a first-rate man in the French second cla.s.s. Whistler was never a match for Renoir, Degas, Seurat, and Manet; but Whistler, Steer, and Sickert may profitably be compared with Boudin, Jongkind, and Berthe Morisot. And though Duncan Grant holds his own handsomely with Marchand, Vlaminck, Lhote, de Segonzac, Bracque and Modigliani, I am not yet prepared to cla.s.s him with Matisse, Pica.s.so, Derain, and Bonnard.

Having bravely recognized this disagreeable truth, let us take as much interest in contemporary British painting as we can. I will try to believe that it merits more enthusiasm than I have been able to show, provided it is not made a point of patriotism to excite oneself about the Imperial War Museum's pictures exhibited at Burlington House. As a matter of fact, the most depressing thing about that show was the absence of the very quality for which British art has been most justly admired--I mean sensibility. Mr. Wilson Steer's picture seemed to me the best in the place, just because Mr. Steer has eyes with which, not only to see, but to feel. To see is something; Mr. Steer also feels for what he sees; and this emotion is the point of departure for his pictures.

That he seems almost completely to have lost such power as he ever had of giving to his vision a coherent and self-supporting form is unfortunate; still, he does convey to us some modic.u.m of the thrill provoked in him by his vision of Dover Harbour.

Those thoughtful young men, on the other hand, whose works have been causing such a commotion might almost as well have been blind. They seem to have seen nothing; at any rate, they have not reacted to what they saw in that particular way in which visual artists react. They are not expressing what they feel for something that has moved them as artists, but, rather, what they think about something that has horrified them as men. Their pictures depart, not from a visual sensation, but from a moral conviction. So, naturally enough, what they produce is mere "arty"

anecdote. This, perhaps, is the secret of their success--their success, I mean, with the cultivated public. Those terrible young fellows who were feared to be artists turn out after all to be innocent Pre-Raphaelites. They leave Burlington House without a stain upon their characters.

This is plain speaking; how else should a critic, who believes that he has diagnosed the disease, convince a modern patient of his parlous state? To just hint a fault and hesitate dislike (not Pope, but I split that infinitive) is regarded nowadays merely as a sign of a base, compromising spirit; or not regarded at all. Artists, especially in England, cannot away with qualified praise or blame: and if they insist on all or nothing I can but offer them the latter. Nevertheless, I must a.s.sert, for my own satisfaction, that in many even of our most imperial artists, in the brothers Spenser and the brothers Nash, in Mr. Lewis, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Bomberg, and Mr. Lamb, I discover plenty of ability; only I cannot help fancying that they may have mistaken the nature of their gifts. Were they really born to be painters? I wonder. But of this I am sure: their friends merely make them look silly by comparing them with contemporary French masters, or even with Lionardo da Vinci.

Wilc.o.xism is a terrible disease because it slowly but surely eats away our sense of imperfection, our desire for improvement, and our power of self-criticism. Modesty and knowledge are the best antidotes; and a treatment much recommended by the faculty is to take more interest in art and less in one's own prestige. Above all, let us cultivate a sense of proportion. Let us admire, for instance, the admirable, though somewhat negative, qualities in the work of Mr. Lewis--the absence of vulgarity and false sentiment, the sobriety of colour, the painstaking search for design--without forgetting that in the Salon d'Automne or the Salon des Independants a picture by him would neither merit nor obtain from the most generous critic more than a pa.s.sing word of perfunctory encouragement; for in Paris there are perhaps five hundred men and women--drawn from the four quarters of the earth--all trying to do what Mr. Lewis tries to do, and doing it better.

ART AND POLITICS

Mr. Roger Fry, by means of an instructive tale (_Athenaeum_, August 13, 1920), has shown us that in their dealings with art Bolshevik politicians remain true to type. Like the rest of their breed, they have no use for it unless they can exploit it to their own ends. For my part, I was never so simple as to suppose that, if the _de facto_ government of Russia professed admiration for Matisse and Pica.s.so, that admiration had anything to do with the artistic gifts of either of these painters, any more than that the respect with which the British Government treats the names of Raphael and Michel Angelo should be taken to imply that any single one of His Majesty's ministers has ever experienced an aesthetic emotion. Consequently, I was not at all surprised to learn that the sure, though unconscious, taste of the statesman had led the rulers of Russia to reject their first loves; that instinctively they had divined that both Matisse and Pica.s.so were too much like genuine artists to be trustworthy; and that they had, therefore, transferred their affections to the thin, and fundamentally academic, work of Larionoff, which should, I fancy, be just the thing for advanced politicians.

Some time ago, however, before Pica.s.so was found out, a young Russian aesthete--so Mr. Fry tells us--was licensed by the competent authority to p.r.o.nounce that artist's eulogy, on the understanding, of course, that the lecture should somehow serve as a stick wherewith to beat the opposition. Nothing easier: Pica.s.so was pitted against Renoir. Pica.s.so was a great artist, because, abstract and austere, he was the man for the proletariat; whereas Renoir, who painted pretty pictures for the _bourgeoisie_, was no earthly good. The lecturer, as might have been expected, was out even in his facts: for Renoir--who came from the people, by the way--might, were he less of an artist, by means of the taking and almost anecdotic quality of his earlier work, give some pleasure to a working man; whereas Pica.s.so--the son of middle-cla.s.s parents, too--could not possibly win from an honest labourer, left to himself, anything but sarcastic laughter or ferocious abuse. But even if true, the lecturer's facts would have been beside the point. To say that a work is aristocratic or democratic, moral or immoral, is to say something silly and irrelevant, or rather, silly if meant to be relevant to its value as art. In the work of Renoir and of Pica.s.so, in all works of art for that matter, the essential quality, as every sensitive person knows, is the same. Whatever it may be that makes art matter is to be found in every work that does matter. And though, no doubt, "subject"

and to some extent "attack" may be conditioned by an artist's opinions and att.i.tude to life, such things are irrelevant to his work's final significance. Strange as it may seem, the essential quality in a work of art is purely artistic. It has nothing to do with the moral, religious, or political views of its creator. It has to do solely with his aesthetic experience and his power of expressing that. But, as no politician is capable of appreciating, or even becoming aware of, this essential quality, it is perhaps only natural that politicians should look elsewhere for the significance of art.

This painful but certain fact once grasped, it becomes possible to understand several things that have considerably puzzled critics and historians. For instance, it is often remarked, and generally with surprise, that progressive politicians are commonly averse to new movements in art. The att.i.tude of the present Russian Government to the contemporary movement makes neither for nor against this view, for that novelty it took over as a going concern. Let us see how it looks on the next, which will be very likely a return to the tradition of Ingres.

The example usually cited by exponents of this theory--that progressive politicians are reactionary in art--is the notorious hostility of Liberals to the romantic movement; but I believe that were they to study closely the histories of the Impressionist, the Pre-Raphaelite, and the Wagnerian movements they would find in them, too, evidence on the whole favourable to their case. Be that as it may, this theory, which once seemed paradoxical, quite loses its fantastic air when considered in the light of our discovery. Had art anything to do with opinion it would be strange, indeed, if new art were ill-received by those who like their opinions new. But as art has nothing whatever to do with such things there is no more reason why a Radical should like new forms of art than why he should like new brands of tea.

The essential qualities of a work of art are purely artistic; and since politicians, if not too coa.r.s.e by nature, soon make themselves so by practice, to apprehend these they must, unless they can leave art alone, seek its significance in what is unessential. Progressive politicians, who have a way of taking ethics under their wing and even conceive themselves the active promoters of good, are apt to seek it in morals.

One might have supposed that a message was to be found as easily in new forms of art as in old; but, unluckily, new forms are to most incomprehensible. And though to a hardened sinner here and there what is incomprehensible may be nothing worse than disconcerting, to him who seeks good in all things, and is constantly on the look-out for uplifting influences, whatever disappoints this longing is positively and terribly evil. Now, a new and genuine work of art is something unmistakably alive and, at the same time, unprovided, as yet, with moral credentials. It is unintelligible without being negligible. It comes from an unfamiliar world and shakes a good man's belief in the obvious.

It must be very wicked. And the proper reaction to what is wicked is a blind fury of moral indignation. Well, blind fury is blind. So no one could be much worse placed than the political moralist for seeing whatever there may be to be seen in what is, at once, strange and subtle.

We are in a position now to clear up another difficulty, which has distressed so deeply the best and wisest of men that to get rid of it some have felt justified in tampering with the truth. If art had anything to do with politics, evidently art should have flourished most gloriously in those ages of political freedom which do us all so much credit. The necessity of this inference has been felt strongly enough by Liberal historians to make them accept without demur the doctrine that the age of Pericles was the great age of visual art, and repeat it without mentioning the fact that in that age an aristocracy of some twenty-five thousand citizens was supported by the compulsory labours of some four hundred thousand slaves. The truth is, of course, that art may flourish under any form of government. It flourished in the Athenian aristocracy and under the despotic bureaucracies of China, Persia, and Byzantium. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries it flourished under the feudal system, and in the fifteenth amongst the oligarchies and tyrannies of Italy. On the other hand, neither the Roman Republic nor the Roman Empire gave us anything much worth remembering: and no period in French history has been less fruitful in art and letters than the first republic and empire. There was Ingres, of course; but the period on the whole was singularly barren, and it may be just worth remarking that at no time, perhaps, has French art been so academic, professorial, timid, and uninspired as in the first glorious years of the great Revolution.

Here there is nothing to surprise us. But what does, at first sight, seem odd is that art should apparently be indifferent, not only to political systems, but to social conditions as well. Barbarism or Civilization: it is all one to art. Old-fashioned historians, who had a pleasant, tidy way of dealing with the past, used to plot out from that wilderness four great periods of civilization: the Athenian (from 480 B.C. to the death of Aristotle, 322), the first and second centuries of the Roman Empire, Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and from the end of the Fronde, 1653, to the Revolution. For my part, I should be inclined to subtract from these the Roman period, and add, if only I knew more about it, the age of Sung. But accepting, by way of compromise, all five, we find that three--the Greek, Chinese, and Italian--were rich in visual art, whereas Rome was utterly barren and the eighteenth century not extraordinarily prolific. To make matters worse, we see in the dark and early middle ages a steady flow of first-rate art from societies more or less barbarous, while lately we have learnt that black and naked savages can create exquisitely.

Are we, then, to a.s.sume that there is no connection between art and civilization? I think not. A connection there is, but, as was to be expected, an unessential one. The essential quality in art is invariable, and what gives the Parthenon its significance is what gives significance to a n.i.g.g.e.r's basket-work box. There is such a thing as civilized art, but its civility lies in advent.i.tious and subsidiary qualities--in the means, not in the end. It seems to me we do mean something when we say that Phidias, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, Raphael, Racine, Moliere, Poussin, Milton, Wren, Jane Austen and Mozart are highly civilized artists, and that the creators of the Gothic cathedrals and the author of the _Chanson de Roland_, Villon, Webster, Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Whitman, Turner, Wagner and the Congolese fetish-makers are not. But, whatever we may mean, a.s.suredly we do not mean that one set is superior to the other. They differ widely; but they differ in the means by which they compa.s.s the same end. It is absurd to argue that civilization is either favourable or unfavourable to art; but it is reasonable to suppose that it may be the one or the other to a particular artist. Different temperaments thrive in different atmospheres. How many mute, inglorious Miltons, Raphaels, and Mozarts may not have lost heart and gone under in the savage insecurity of the dark ages? And may not the eighteenth century, which clipped the wings of Blake, have crushed the fluttering aspirations of a dozen Gothically-minded geniuses and laughed some budding Wagner out of all idea of expressing his ebullient personality?

It is possible to speak of civilized or uncivilized art and mean something by our words; but what we mean has nothing to do with the ultimate value of the work. And, in the same way, there may be an unessential connection between art and politics, though more remote and unimportant still. As I have explained too often already, an artist, before he can create effectively, has got to work himself into a pa.s.sion; by some means he has got to raise his feelings to the creative temperature and his energies to a corresponding pitch of intensity. He must make himself drunk somehow, and political pa.s.sion is as good a tipple as another. Religion, Science, Morals, Love, Hate, Fear, l.u.s.t--all serve the artist's turn, and Politics and Patriotism have done their bit. It is clear that Wordsworth was thrown into the state of mind in which he wrote his famous sonnets by love of England and detestation of France, by fear of revolution and longing for order; but how much patriotism or const.i.tutionalism has to do with the suave beauty of those harmonious masterpieces may be inferred from the fact that "hoa.r.s.e Fitzgerald" and Mr. Kipling are quite as patriotic and even more reactionary. Amongst painters David is the conspicuous example of an artist--a small one, to be sure--intoxicated by politics. David set out as a humble, eighteenth-century follower of Fragonard. But the Revolution filled his poor head with notions about the Greeks and the Romans, Harmodius and Aristogiton, Cornelia and the Gracchi, _sic semper tyrannis_, and Phrygian caps. And his revolutionary enthusiasm changed the whole manner of his attack on that central, artistic problem which never, in any style, did he succeed in solving. But the influence of this new style was immense, and paramount in French painting for the next forty or fifty years. It is to be noted, however, that David's great and immediate follower, the mighty Ingres, who frankly adopted this style, redolent of all republican virtues, was himself one of the most virulent reactionaries that ever lived.

And that, perhaps, would be all that needed saying about Art and Politics were it not that at this moment the subject has an unusual importance. Movements in art have, more often than not, been the result of an extraordinarily violent preoccupation, on the part of artists, with the unessential and insignificant. David rescued painting from the charming and slightly sentimental disorder of the later eighteenth century by concentrating on Roman virtues and generals' uniforms. The Romantics freed themselves from Davidism by getting frantically excited about a little hazy nonsense rather unfairly attributed to Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. From this the Impressionists escaped by persuading themselves that they were men of science. And against this my contemporaries set up a conscious aestheticism, slightly tinged with certain metaphysico-moral doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and the thing in itself. With Cubism conscious aestheticism holds the field, for the Cubist theory is, in the main, aesthetic. That is one reason why I cannot think that there is any great future for Cubism. An artistic movement is unlikely to live long on anything so relevant to art; for artists, it seems, must believe that they are concerned with something altogether different. Wherefore, I think it not improbable--indeed, there are indications already [X]--that, political progress having in the last few years somewhat outrun civilization, and the new democracy being apparently hostile to art and culture, artists will take to believing pa.s.sionately in what they will call "order." If so, in the name of Napoleon and Louis XIV, but, let us hope, with the science and restraint of Poussin and Ingres, they will turn, most likely, to the cla.s.sical tradition and, while endeavouring to create significant form, will a.s.sert vehemently that they are expressing their political convictions.