Book: Essays on Art

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7