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 fewadditions and corrections, are not all entirely or directly concernedwith art; but even the last one--Waste or Creation?--does bear on thequestion, How are we to improve the art of our own time? After years ofcriticism I am more interested in this question than in any other thatconcerns the arts. Whistler said that we could not improve it; the bestwe could do for it was not to think about it. I have discussed thatopinion, as also the contrary opinion of Tolstoy, and the truth thatseems to me to lie between them. If these essays have any unity, it isgiven to them by my belief that art, like other human activities, issubject to the will of man. We cannot cause men of artistic genius to beborn; 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 thepresence or absence of individuals of genius, but upon the attitude ofthe 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 toour 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 interestmust be futile or mischievous is to deny the will of man in one of thechief of human activities; but it often is denied by those who do notunderstand how it can be applied to art. We cannot make artistsdirectly; no government office can determine their training; still lesscan any critic tell them how they ought to practise their art. But wecan all aim at a state of society in which they will be encouraged to dotheir best, and at a state of mind in which we ourselves shall learn toknow good from bad and to prefer the good. At present we have neitherthe state of society nor the state of mind; and we can attain to bothnot by connoisseurship, not by an anxiety to like the right thing or atleast to buy it, but by learning the difference between good and badworkmanship and design in objects of use. Anyone can do that, and canresolve to pay a fair price for good workmanship and design; and only sowill the arts of use, and all the arts, revive again. For where thepublic has no sense of design in the arts of use, it will have none inthe "fine arts. " To aim at connoisseurship when you do not know a goodtable 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 successin furnishing their own houses. What can they know about Greek sculptureif their own drawing-rooms are hideous? I believe that the notoriousfallibility of many experts is caused by the fact that they concernthemselves with the fine arts before they have had any training in thearts of use. So, if we are to have a school of art at Oxford orCambridge, it should put this question to every pupil: If you had tobuild and furnish a house of your own, how would you set about it? Andit 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 inobjects 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 thedifference between good and bad in things of use, including buildings. Oxford and Cambridge profess to give a liberal education; but you haveonly to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachersthemselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like allthe rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; theytrust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant andsuperstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merelymischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is merepedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. These havetheir sense or nonsense, their righteousness or unrighteousness, whichanyone can learn to see for himself, and, until he has learned, he willbe at the mercy of charlatans. 

I have written all these essays as a member of the public, as one whohas to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourishagain. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is tohimself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and tellingartists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with anatural and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a defenceof 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 havebeen made to explain the difference between them. Signor Croce's theory, now much in favour, is that nature provides only the raw material forart. The beginning of the artistic process is the perception of beautyin nature; but an artist does not see beauty as he sees a cow. It is hisown mind that imposes on the chaos of nature an order, a relation, whichis beauty. All men have the faculty, in some degree, of imposing thisorder; the artist only does it more completely than other men, and heowes his power of execution to that. He can make the beauty which he hasperceived because he has perceived it clearly; and this perceiving ispart of the making. 

The defect of this theory is that it ends by denying that verydifference between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art which itsets out to explain. If the artist makes the beauty of nature inperceiving it, if it is produced by the action of his own mind upon thechaos of reality, then it is the very same beauty that appears in hisart; and if, to us, the beauty of his art seems different from thebeauty of nature, as we perceive it, it is only because we have notourselves seen the beauty of nature as completely as he has, we have notreduced chaos so thoroughly to order. It is a difference not of kind, but of degree; for the artist himself there is no difference even ofdegree. What he makes he sees, and what he sees he makes. All beauty isartistic, 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 ofSignor Croce and all the subtlety and partial truth of his theory, we donot believe that we make beauty when we see it, or that the artist makesit when he sees it. Nor do we believe that that beauty which he makes isof the same nature as that which he has perceived in reality. Rather he, like us, values the beauty which he perceives in reality because heknows 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 thepassionate value expressed in it which gives beauty to his art. If heknew that the beauty he perceives was a product of his own mind, hecould not value it so; if he held Signor Croce's theory, he would ceaseto 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 thesame kind as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature, as we perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which isperfection because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made, but born; works of art are made. There is the essential differencebetween them and between their beauties. If a work of art tries to havethe finish of a thing born, not made, if a piece of enamel apes thegloss of a butterfly's wing, it misses the peculiar beauty of art and isbut an inadequate imitation of the beauty of nature. That beauty of thebutterfly's wing, which the artist like all of us perceives, is of adifferent kind from any beauty he can make; and if he is an artist heknows it and does not try to make it. But all the arts, even those whichare not themselves imitative, are always being perverted by the attemptto imitate the finish of nature. There is a vanity of craftsmanship inLouis Quinze furniture, in the later Chinese porcelain, in modernjewelry, no less than in Dutch painting, which is the death of art. Allgreat works of art show an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy ofcraftsmanship, which is the essence of their beauty and distinguishes itfrom the beauty of nature. As soon as men cease to understand this anddespise this effort and roughness and inadequacy, they demand from artthe beauty of nature and get something which is mostly dead nature, notliving art. 

We can best understand the difference between the two kinds of beauty ifwe consider how beauty steals into language, that art which we allpractise more or less and in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to imitate the finish of natural beauty. There is no beauty whatever insentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Pass the mustard, "because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say. Thereis beauty in sentences like "The bright day is done, And we are for thedark, " or "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well, " because in them, although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say a thousandtimes more than he can say. It is the effort to do something beyond thepower of words that brings beauty into them. That is the very nature ofthe beauty of art, which distinguishes it from the beauty of nature; itis always produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible, and whatthe artist knows to be impossible. Whenever that effort ceases, wheneverthe artist sets himself a task that he can accomplish, a task of mereskill, then he ceases to be an artist, because he no longer experiencesreality in the manner necessary to an artist. The great poet is aware ofsome excellence in reality so intensely that it is to him beauty; forall excellence when we are intensely aware of it is beauty to us. Thereis that truth in Croce's theory. Our perception of beauty does dependupon the intensity of our perception of excellence. But that intensityof perception remains perception, and does not make what it perceives. That the poet and every artist knows; and his art is not merely anextension of the process of perception, but an attempt to express hisown value for that excellence which he has perceived as beauty. It is ananswer to that beauty, a worship of it, and is itself beautiful becauseit makes no effort to compete with it. 

Thus in the beauty of art there is always value and wonder, always areference 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 andwonder. To enter that Kingdom of Heaven we must become little childrenas the artist himself does. Art is the expression of a certain attitudetowards reality, an attitude of wonder and value, a recognition ofsomething greater than man; and where that recognition is not, art dies. In a society valuing only itself, believing that it can make a heaven ofitself out of its own skill and knowledge and wisdom, the differencebetween 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 anddeath in a society is where men and women see the best life as a lifewithout wonder or effort or failure, where labour is hidden undergroundso that a few may seem to live in Paradise; where there is perfectfinish of all things, human beings no less than their clothes andfurniture and buildings and pictures; where the ideal is the lady soperfectly turned out that any activity whatever would mar herperfection. In such societies the artist becomes a slave. He too mustproduce work that does not seem to be work. He must express no wonderor value for patrons who would be ashamed to feel either. What he makesmust seem to be born and not made, so that it may fit a world whichpretends to be a born Paradise populated by cynical angels who ownallegiance to no god. In such a world art means, beauty means, theconcealment of effort, the pretence that it does not exist; and thatpretence is the end of art and beauty in all things made by man. Thereis a close connexion between the idea of life expressed in Aristotle'sideal man and the later Greek sculpture. The aim of that sculpture, asof his ideal man, was proud and effortless perfection. Both dread theconfession of failure above all things--and both are dull. InAristotle's age art had started upon a long decline, which ended onlywhen the pretence of perfection was killed, both in art and in life, byChristianity. Then the real beauty of art, the beauty of value andwonder, superseded the wearisome imitation of natural beauty; and it isonly lately that we have learnt again to prefer the real beauty to thefalse. 

Men must free themselves from the contempt of effort and the desire toconceal it, they must be content with the perpetual, passionate failureof art, before they can see its beauty or demand that beauty from theartist. When they themselves become like little children, then they seethat the greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are likelittle children too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not thearrogant, the accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They aregreat men to us; but they achieved beauty because in their effort toachieve it they were little children to themselves. They impose awe onus, but it is their own awe that they impose. It is not theirachievement that makes beauty, but their effort, always confessing itsown failure; and in that confession is the beauty of art. That is why itmoves and frees us; for it frees us from our pretence that we are whatwe would be, it carries us out of our own egotism into the wonder andvalue of the artist himself. 

Consider the beauty of a tune. Music itself is the best means which manhas found for confessing that he cannot say what he would say; and it ismore purely and rapturously beauty than any other form of art. A tune isthe very silencing of speech, and in the greatest tunes there is alwaysthe hush of wonder: they seem to tell us to be silent and listen, not towhat the musician has to say, but to what he cannot say. The verybeauty 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 saidthat all art tries to attain to the condition of music. That is true ina sense different from what he meant. Art is always most completely artwhen it makes music's confession of the ineffable; then it comes nearestto the beauty of music. But when it is no longer a forlorn hope, when itis able to say what it wishes to say with calm assurance, then it hasceased to be art and become a game of skill. 

Often the great artist is imperious, impatient, full of certainties; buthis certainty is not of himself; and he is impatient of the failure torecognize, not himself, but what he recognizes. Michelangelo, Beethoven, Tintoret, would snap a critic's head off if he did not see what theywere trying to do. They may seem sometimes to be arrogant in the meredisplay of power, yet their beauty lies in the sudden change fromarrogance to humility. The arrogance itself bows down and worships; thevery muscle and material force obey a spirit not their own. They arelion-tamers, and they themselves are the lions; out of the strong comesforth sweetness, and it is all the sweeter for the strength that ispoured into it and subdued by it. What is the difference, as ofdifferent worlds, between Rubens at his best and Tintoret at his best?This: that Rubens always seems to be uplifted by his own power, whereasTintoret has most power when he forgets it in wonder. When he bows downall his turbulence in worship, then he is most strong. Rubens, in the"Descent from the Cross, " is still the supreme drawing-master; andpainters flocking to him for lessons pay homage to him. But, in his"Crucifixion, " it is Tintoret himself who pays homage, and we forget themaster in the theme. We may say of Rubens's art, in a new sense, "C'estmagnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. " The greatest art is notmagnificent, but it is war, desperate and without trappings, a war inwhich victory comes through the confession of defeat. 

Man, if he tries to be a god in his art, makes a fool of himself. Hebecomes like God, he makes beauty like God, when he is too much aware ofGod to be aware of himself. Then only does he not set himself too easy atask, 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 valuefor an excellence not his own. So in all the beauty of art there is ahumility not only of conception, but also of execution, which is merefailure and ugliness to those who expect to find in art the beauty andfinish of nature, who expect it to be born, not made. They are alwaysdisappointed by the greatest works of art, by their inadequacy andstrain and labour. They look for a proof of what man can do and find aconfession of what he cannot do; but that confession, made sincerely andpassionately, is beauty. There is also a serenity in the beauty of art, but it is the serenity of self-surrender, not of self-satisfaction, ofthe saint, not of the lady of fashion. And all the accomplishment ofgreat art, its infinite superiority in mere skill over the work of themerely skilful, comes from the incessant effort of the artist to do morethan he can. By that he is trained; by that his work is distinguishedfrom the mere exclamation of wonder. He is not content to applaud; hemust also worship, and make his offerings in his worship; and they arethe best he can do. It was not only the shepherds who came to the birthof 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 theadoration 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 intowonder, when all the knowledge and skill and passion of mankind arepoured into the acknowledgment of something greater than themselves, then that acknowledgment is art, and it has a beauty which may be enviedby the natural beauty of God Himself. 

 Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous men in history--as a manmore famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart--becauseposterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most greatartists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but whatLeonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from whathe is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; we cannotthink of him as a mere individual, eating and drinking, living andcompeting, on equal terms with other men. We see him magnified by hisown legend from the first, with people standing aside to watch andwhisper as he passed through the streets of Florence or Milan. "There hegoes to paint the Last Supper, " they said to each other; and we think ofit 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 hewas born to paint it, to initiate the High Renaissance; from Giottoonwards all the painters had been preparing for that, Florence herselfhad been preparing for it. It makes no difference that for centuries ithas been a shadow on the wall; it is still the most famous painting inthe world because it is the masterpiece of Leonardo. There was a fateagainst the survival of his masterpieces, but he has survived them andthey are remembered because of him. We accept him for himself, like thepeople of his own time, who, when he said he could performimpossibilities, believed him. To them he meant the new age which coulddo anything, and still to us he means the infinite capacities of man. Heis the Adam awakened whom Michelangelo only painted; and, if heaccomplished but little, we believe in him, as in mankind, for hispromise. If he did not fulfil it, neither has mankind; but he believedthat all things could be done and lived a great life in that faith. 

Another Florentine almost equals him in renown. Men watched andwhispered when Dante passed through the streets of Florence; but Dantelives in his achievement, Leonardo in himself. Dante means to us anindividual soul quivering through a system, a creed, inherited from thepast. Leonardo is a spirit unstraitened; not consenting to any past norrebelling against it, but newborn with a newborn universe around it, seeing it without memories or superstitions, without inherited fears orpieties, yet without impiety or irreverence. He is not an iconoclast, since for him there are no images to be broken; whatever he sees is notan image but itself, to be accepted or rejected by himself; what hewould do he does without the help or hindrance of tradition. In art andin science he means the same thing, not a rebirth of any past, as theword Renaissance seems to imply, but freedom from all the past, lifeutterly 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 mediæval art. In sciencehe looks at the fact, in art at the object; nor will he allow either tobe hidden from him by the achievements of the dead. Giotto had struckthe first blow for freedom when he allowed the theme to dictate thepicture; Leonardo allowed the object to dictate the drawing. To him thefact itself is sacred, and man fulfils himself in his own immediaterelation to fact. 

All those who react and rebel against the Renaissance have an easy caseagainst its great representative. What did he do in thought comparedwith St. Thomas, or in art compared with the builders of Chartres orBourges? He filled notebooks with sketches and conjectures; he modelleda statue that was never cast; he painted a fresco on a wall, and with amedium so unsuited to fresco that it was a ruin in a few years. Even inhis own day there was a doubt about him; it is expressed in the youngMichelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not cast the statue he hadmodelled. Michelangelo was one of those who see in life always the greattask to be performed and who judge a man by his performance; to himLeonardo was a dilettante, a talker; he made monuments, but Leonardoremains his own monument, a prophecy of what man shall be when he comesinto his kingdom. With him, we must confess, it is more promise thanperformance; he could paint "The Last Supper" because it means thefuture; 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 ownfate. Compared with his, Michelangelo's mind was still mediæval, hisreproach the reproach of one who cares for doing more than for being, and certainly Michelangelo did a thousand times more; but from his ownday to ours the world has not judged Leonardo by his achievement. AsJohnson had his Boswell so he has had his legend; he means to us notbooks or pictures, but himself. In his own day kings bid for him as ifhe were a work of art; and he died magnificently in France, makingnothing but foretelling a race of men not yet fulfilled. 

Before Francis Bacon, before Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied notmerely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who isto free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act inall things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendaryhero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. Forhis prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that heinitiated tells us how hard it is for man to free himself from hisinheritance. It seems strange to us that Leonardo sang hymns tocausation 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 takenfrom _Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks_, by E. M'Curdy. (Duckworth, 1906. )]

To Leonardo causation meant the escape from caprice; it meant a securerelation between man and all things, in which man would gain power byknowledge, in which every increase of knowledge would reveal to him moreand more of the supreme reason. There was no chain for him in cause andeffect, no unthinking of the will of man. Rather by knowledge man woulddiscover his own will and know that it was the universal will. So manmust 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 confoundthe wisdom of ages. There is in every man's vision the power of relatinghimself now and directly to reality by knowledge; and in knowing otherthings he knows himself. By knowledge man changes what seemed to be acompulsion into a harmony; he gives up his own caprice for the universalwill. 

That is the religion of Leonardo, in art as in science. For him theartist also must relate himself directly to the visible world, in whichis the only inspiration; to accept any formula is to see with dead men'seyes. That has been said again and again by artists, but not withLeonardo's mystical and philosophical conviction. He knew that it isvain to study Nature unless she is to you a goddess or a god; you canlearn nothing from reality unless you adore it, and in adoring it hefound his freedom. How different is this doctrine from that with which, after centuries of scientific advance, we intimidate ourselves. We arethreatened 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 thinkor to do, we turn to the past to learn what we are. They may have fearedthe new; but we say that there is no new, nothing but some combinationor variation of the old. Causation is to us a chain that binds us to thepast, but to Leonardo it was freedom; and so he prophesies a freedomthat we may attain to not by denying facts or making myths, but bydiscovering what he hinted--that causation itself is not compulsion butwill, and our will if, by knowledge, we make it ours. 

No one before him had been so much in love with reality, whatever it maybe. He was called a sceptic, but it was only that he preferred realityitself to any tales about it; and his religion, his worship, was thesearch for the very fact. This, because he was both artist and man ofscience, he carried further than anyone else, pursuing it with all hisfaculties. In his drawings there is the beauty not of his character, butof the character of what he draws; he does not make a design, but findsit. That beauty proves him a Florentine--Dürer himself falls short ofit--but it is the beauty of the thing itself, discovered and insistedupon with the passion of a lover. He draws animals, trees, flowers, asCorreggio draws Antiope or Io; and it is only in his drawings now thathe speaks clearly to us. The "Mona Lisa" is well enough, but anotherhand might have executed the painting of it. It owes its popular fame tothe smile about which it is so easy to write finely; but in the drawingswe see the experiencing passion of Leonardo himself, we see himfeeling, as in the notebooks we see him thinking. There is the eagernessof discovery at which so often he stopped short, turning away from atask to further discovery, living always in the moment, taking nothought either for the morrow or for yesterday, unable to attend to anybusiness, even the business of the artist, seeing life not as a struggleor 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, butwithout egotism, talking always of what he sees, satisfying himself notwith the common appetites and passions of men, but with his one supremepassion for reality. If Michelangelo thought him a dilettante, theremust have been in his taunt some envy of Leonardo's freedom. 

Yet once at least Leonardo did achieve, and something we should neverhave expected from his drawings. "The Last Supper" is but a shadow onthe wall, yet still we can see its greatness, which is the greatness ofpure design, of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesa. Goethe andothers have found all kinds of psychological subtleties in it, meaningsin every gesture; but what we see now is only space, grandeur, a suprememoment expressed in the relation of all the forms. The pure music ofthe painting remains when the drama is almost obliterated; and itproves that Leonardo, when he chose, could withdraw himself from thedelight of hand-to-mouth experience into a vision of his own, that hehad the reserve and the creative power of the earlier masters and ofthat austere, laborious youth who taunted him. If it were not for "TheLast Supper" we might doubt whether he could go further in art than thevivid sketch of "The Magi"; but "The Last Supper" tells us how great hispassion for reality must have been, since it could distract him from themaking of such masterpieces. 

That passion for reality itself made him cold to other passions. We knowMichelangelo and Beethoven as men in some respects very like other men. They were anxious, fretful, full of affections and grievances, and muchconcerned with their relations. Leonardo is like Melchizedek, not onlyby the accident of birth, for he was a natural son, but by choice. Henever married, he never had a home; there is no evidence that he wasever tied to any man or woman by his affections; yet it would be stupidto call him cold, for his one grand passion absorbed him. Monkssuspected him, but in his heart he was celibate like the great monkishsaints, celibate not by vows but by preoccupation. It is clear thatfrom youth to age life had no cumulative power over him; as we shouldsay in our prosaic language, he never settled down, for he let thingshappen to him and valued the very happening. He was always like astrange, wonderful creature from another planet, taking notes withunstaled delight but never losing his heart to any particular. Sexitself seems hardly to exist for him, or at least for his mind. Oftenthe 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 wereas much a subject of his impassioned curiosity as flowers, and no more. He is always the spectator, but a spectator who can exercise everyfaculty of the human mind and every passion in contemplation; he is thenearest that any man has ever come to Aristotle's Supreme Being. 

But we must not suppose that he went solemnly through life living up tohis own story, that he was mysterious in manner or in any respect like acharlatan. Rather, he lived always in the moment and overcame mankind byhis spontaneity. He had the charm of the real man of genius, not thereserve 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 expressionof his eagerness to do it. These engines of war were splendid toys tohim, and all his life he enjoyed making toys and seeing men wonder atthem. His delight was to do things for the first time like a child, andthen not to do them again. Again and again he cries out againstauthority and in favour of discovery. "Whoever in discussion adducesauthority, " he says, "uses not intellect but rather memory"; and, anticipating Milton, he observes that all our knowledge originates inopinions. Perhaps some one had rebuked him for having too many opinions. We can be sure that he chafed against dull, cautious, safe men whowished for results. He himself cared nothing for them; it was enough forhim to know what might be done, without doing it. He was so sure of hisinsight that he did not care to put it to the test of action; that wasfor slower men, whether artists or men of science. His notebooks wereenough for him. 

In spite of the notebooks and the sketches, we know less about the manLeonardo than about the man Shakespeare. Here and there he makes aremark with some personal conviction or experience in it. "Intellectualpassion, " he says, "drives out sensuality. " In him it had driven out orsublimated all the sensual part of character. We cannot touch or see orhear him in anything he says or draws. The passion is there, but it istoo much concerned with universals to be of like nature with our ownpassions. He seems to be speaking to himself as if he had forgotten thewhole audience of mankind, but in what he says he ignores the personalpart of himself; he is most passionate when most impersonal. "To theambitious, whom neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the worldsuffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them issquandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty ofthe world. " That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we knowthat in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty ofthe world, were enough for him without ambition, without even furtheraffections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even achievement, to follow them; and he left all those not out of coldness, or fear, oridleness, but because his own passion drew him away. No cold man couldhave said, "Where there is most power of feeling, there of martyrs isthe greatest martyr. " It is difficult for us northerners to understandthe 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 thepassion for beauty itself is intellectual. We, with our romanticism, oursense of exile, can never find that identity which he found betweenbeauty and reality. "This benign nature so provides that all over theworld you find something to imitate. " To us imitation means prose, tohim it meant poetry; science itself meant poetry, and illusion was theonly ugliness. "Nature never breaks her own law. " It is we who try tofind freedom in lawlessness, which is ignorance, ugliness, illusion. "Falsehood is so utterly vile that, though it should praise the greatworks of God, it offends against His divinity. " There is Leonardo'sreligion; and if still it is too cold for us, it is because we have nothis pure spiritual fire in ourselves. 

 The Pompadour in Art

It is an important fact in the history of the arts for the last centuryor more that in England and America, if not elsewhere, the chiefinterest in all the arts, including literature, has been taken by womenrather than by men. In the great ages of art it was not so. Women, sofar as we can tell, had little to do with the art of Greece in the fifthcentury or with the art of the Middle Ages. There were female patrons ofart at the Renaissance, but they were exceptions subject to theprevailing masculine taste. Art was and remained a proper interest ofmen up to the eighteenth century. Women first began to control it and toaffect its character at the mistress-ridden Court of Louis XV. But inthe nineteenth century men began to think they were too busy to concernthemselves with the arts. Men of power, when they were not working, needed to take exercise and left it to their wives to patronize thearts. And so the notion grew that art was a feminine concern, and evenartists were pets for women. The great man, especially in America, likedhis wife to have every luxury. The exquisite life she led was itself aproof of his success; and she was for him a living work of art, able tolive so because of the abundance of his strength. In her, that strengthpassed into ornament and became beautiful; she was a friendly, faithfulDelilah to his Samson, a Delilah who did not shear his locks. And so hecame to think of art itself as being in its nature feminine if noteffeminate, 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-riddenCourt of Louis XV, and it has unfortunately kept the stamp of itsorigin. At that Court art, to suit the tastes of the Pompadour and theDu Barri, became consciously frivolous, became almost a part of thetoilet. The artist was the slave of the mistress, and seems to haveenjoyed his chains. In this slavery he did produce something charming;he did invest that narrow and artificial Heaven of the Court with someof the infinite beauty and music of a real Heaven. But out of thisrefined harem art there has sprung a harem art of the whole world whichhas infested the homes even of perfectly respectable ladies ever since. All over Europe the ideals of applied art have remained the ideals ofthe Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have eitherwomen or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spreada strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, intheir efforts at æsthetic expression, always pretend to be what they arenot. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimeseven in their clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. Of course, ifthis pretence were put into words and so presented to theirconsciousness, they would be indignant. It has for them no connexionwith conduct; it is purely æsthetic, but art means to them make-believe, the make-believe that they live an entirely frivolous life of pleasureprovided 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; andit has been one of the triumphs of modern industry to provide them withcheap imitations of the luxury of the Pompadour. Hence the machine-madefrivolities of the most respectable homes, the hair-brushes with backsof stamped silver, the scent-bottles of imitation cut-glass, thedraperies with printed rose-buds on them, the generalartificial-floweriness and flimsiness and superfluity of naughtiness ofour domestic art. It expresses a feminine romance to which the maleindulgently consents, as if he were really the voluptuous monarch whosemistress the female, æsthetically, pretends to be. In this world ofæsthetic make-believe our homes are not respectable; they would scorn tobe so, for to the romantic female mind, when it occupies itself withart, the improper is the artistic. 

But this needs a more precise demonstration. We wonder at our modernpassion for superfluous ornament. We shall understand it only if wediscover its origin. The King's mistress liked everything about her tobe ornamented, because it was a point of honour with her to advertisethe King's devotion to her in the costliness of all her surroundings. Heloved her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation. She, likeCleopatra, was always proving the potency of her charms by meltingpearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was hung with the trophies ofher physical pre-eminence. In all the art which we call Louis Quinzethere is this advertisement of the labour spent upon it. It proclaimsthat a vast deal of trouble has been taken in the making of it, and wecan see the artist utterly subdued to this trouble, utterly the slave ofthe mistress's exorbitant whims. This advertisement of labour spent, without the reality, has been the mark of all popular domestic art eversince. 

The beautiful is the ornamented--namely, that which looks as if it hadtaken a great deal of trouble to make. The trouble now is taken bymachinery, and so, with the cost, is minimized; and what it produces isugliness, an ugliness which could not be mistaken for beauty but for thenotion that it does express a desirable state of being in those whopossess it. And this desirable state is the state of the King'smistress, of a siren who can have whatever she desires because of thepotency of her charms. How otherwise can we explain the passion forsuperfluous machine-made ornament which makes our respectable homes sohideous? The machine simulates a trouble that has not been taken, and sogives proof of a voluptuous infatuation that does not exist. Thehardworking mother of a family buys out of her scanty allowance ascent-bottle that looks as if it had been laboriously cut for a King'smistress, whereas really it has been moulded by machinery to keep upthe delusion, unconsciously cherished by her, that she lives in a worldof irresistible and unscrupulous feminine charm. And her husband enduresindulgently all this superfluous ugliness because he, too, believes thatit is the function of art to make the drawing-room of the mother of afamily look like the boudoir of a siren. 

Most of this make-believe remains unconscious. We are all so used to itthat we do not see in it the expression of the dying harem instinct inwomen. Yet it persists, even where the harem instinct would bepassionately repudiated. It persists often in the dress of the mostdefiant suffragette, in outbreaks of incongruous frivolity, forlorntawdry roses that still whisper memories of the Pompadour and hertriumphant guilty splendour. 

But besides all this unconscious feminine influence upon art, there isthe influence of women who care consciously for art; and it also has anenervating effect on the artist. For the female patron of art, justbecause there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to take a motherlyinterest in the artist. To her he is a delightful wayward child ratherthan a real man occupied with real things, like her husband or herfather or her brother: not one who can earn money for her and fight forher and protect her, but rather one who needs to be protected andhumoured in a world which cares so little for art. To her, with all herpassion for art, it is something in its nature irrational, and, like achild, delightful because irrational. It is an escape from realityrather than a part of it. And so she will believe whatever the artisttells her because he is an artist, not because he is a man of sense; andshe encourages him to be more of an artist than a man of sense. Sheencourages him to be extravagantly æsthetic, and enjoys all hisextravagance as a diversion from the sound masculinity of her ownmankind. There is room in her prosperous, easy world for thesediversions from business, just as there is room for charity or, perhaps, religion. The world can afford artists as it can afford pets; as it canafford beautiful, cultivated women. And that also is the view of herhusband, if he is good-natured. But to him, just because art and artistsare the proper concern of his wife, they are even less serious than theyare to her. She may persuade herself that she takes them quiteseriously, but he pretends to do so only out of politeness, and as hewould pretend to take her clothes seriously. For him the type of theartist is still the pianist who gives locks of his over-abundant hair toladies. Even if the artist is a painter and cuts his hair and dresseslike a man, he still belongs to the feminine world and excites himselfabout matters that do not concern men. Men can afford him, and so theytolerate him; but he is one of the expenses they would cut down if itwere necessary to cut down expenses. 

Well, it is necessary to cut down expenses now; and yet in ages muchsterner and poorer than our own art was the concern of men, and theyafforded it because it was not to them a mere feminine luxury. Theyafforded the towering churches of the Middle Ages because they expressedthe religious passion of all mankind; and have we nothing to expressexcept a dying harem instinct and the motherliness of kind women to aneglected class? We ought to be grateful to this motherliness, which haskept art alive in an age of ignorance; but we should see that it is onlya _pis-aller_, and women should see this as well as men. The femaleattitude towards art has been itself the result of a wrong relationbetween women and men, a relation half-animal, half-romantic, andtherefore not quite real. This relation, even while it has ceased toexist more and more in fact, has still continued to express itselfæsthetically; and in art it has become a mere obsolete nuisance. One maycare nothing for art and yet long to be rid of the meaninglessfrivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as somuch litter and trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we maypurge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost rid of themanners of the King's mistress, and most women no longer try to appealto men by their charming unreason. It is not merely that the appealfails now; they themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect. Butthey still remain irrational in their tastes; or at least they have notlearned that all this æsthetic irrationality misrepresents them, that itis forced upon them by tradesmen, that it is as inexpressive as asentimental music-hall song sung by a gramophone. But now that men havegiven women the vote, and so proved that they take them seriously atlast, they have the right to speak plainly on this matter. The feminineinfluence upon art has been bad. Let us admit that it has been theresult of a bad masculine influence upon women, that it has been supremebecause men have become philistine; but the fact remains that it hasbeen bad. Art must be taken seriously if it is to be worth anything. Itmust 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 areall sick of its ugliness. We look to women, now that they are equalledwith men by an act of legal justice, to deliver us from it. They disownthe 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 iseasier to give reasons for disliking him than for liking him. After hisdeath there was a war of pamphlets about him; the one side, led byLebrun, holding him up as a model for all painters to come, the otherside, under de Piles, calling him a mere pedant compared with Rubens. Here is a passage from a poem against Poussin:--

 Il sçavoit manier la régle et le compas, Parloit de la lumière 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 génie a manqué, c'est un malheur pour luy. 

Now this is just what the criticism of yesterday said about him, thecriticism of the eighties and nineties, when it was supposed thatVelasquez had discovered the art of seeing, and with it the art ofpainting. It sounds plausible, but not a word of it is true. And yet itremains difficult to show why it is not true, to distinguish between thegenius of Poussin and the pedantry of his imitators, to convince peoplethat he was not a bad colourist, and that he did not imitate theantique. 

This difficulty is connected with the age in which he happened to live. Nobody calls Mantegna a pedant nowadays; yet one might say against himmost of the things that have been said against Poussin. But Mantegnalived in a century that we like, and Poussin in one that we dislike. Theseventeenth century is for us a time of pictorial platitude; there wasnothing then to discover about gesture or expression, and painters, eventhe best of them, used stock gestures and stock expressions without anyof the eagerness of discovery. Now Poussin is, or appears to be, in manyof his works a dramatic painter, and for us his drama is platitudinous. Take the "Plague of Ashdod, " in the National Gallery. There are thegestures that we are already a little weary of in Raphael's cartoons. The figures express horror and fear with uplifted hands or contortedfeatures; but their real business seems to be to make the picture. Thedrama is thrust upon us, and we cannot ignore it; yet we feel that itis no discovery for the artist, but something that he has learnt like asecond-rate actor--that he has, in fact, a "bag of tricks" in commonwith all the Italian painters of his time, and that he is onlypretending to be surprised by his subject. Now every age has itsartistic platitudes; but these platitudes of dramatic expression arepeculiarly wearisome to us because they have persisted in Europeanpainting up to the present day, and because most great painters inmodern times have struggled in one way or another to escape from them. We associate them with mediocrity and insincerity; and we do notunderstand that for many of the better painters of the seventeenthcentury they were only a basis for discoveries of a different kind. IlGreco, for instance, is often as dramatically platitudinous as GuidoReni, but he also was making discoveries in design which happen tointerest us now, so that we overlook his platitudes. He was trying toexpress his emotions not so much by gesture and the play of features asby a rhythm really independent of those, a rhythm carried througheverything in the picture, to which all his platitudes are subject. Andbecause this rhythm is new to us now we hardly notice the platitudes. Poussin was playing the same game, but his rhythm has been imitated byso many dull painters that we are tempted to think it as platitudinousas his drama, and that is where we are unjust to him. 

Poussin had a mind that was at once passionate and determined to bemaster of its passions. He would not suppress them, but he would expressthem with complete composure; and as Donne in poetry tried to attain toan intellectual mastery over his passions by means of conceits, soPoussin in painting tried to attain to the same mastery through therepresentation of an ideal world. Each was enthralled with hisexperience of real life; but each was dissatisfied with the haphazard, tyrannous nature of that experience, and especially with the divorcebetween passion and intellect, which in actual experience is so painfulto 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 beintelligent and intellect passionate. This, no doubt, is what everyartist tries to do; but the effort was peculiarly fierce in Donne andPoussin because in them there was a more than common discord betweenpassion and intelligence, because they were instantly critical both ofwhat they desired and of their own process of desire. Donne, at the veryheight of passion, asked himself why he was passionate; and he could notexpress his passion without trying to justify it to his intelligence. Soin his poetry he endeavoured to experience it again with simultaneousintellectual justification which in that poetry was a part of theexperience itself. Poussin aims not so much at an intellectualjustification of passion as at an expression of it in which there shallbe also complete intellectual composure. He aims in his art at anexperience in which the intellect shall be free from the bewilderment ofthe 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 whichthe intellect can make all the forms through which the passion expressesitself. He is, in fact, nearer than most painters to the musician; butstill he is a painter and appeals to us through the representation ofobjects that we can recognize by their likeness to what we have seenourselves. His intellect desires to make its forms, not to have themimposed upon it by mere ocular experience, since ocular experience forhim is full of the tyrannous bewilderment of actual passion. But at thesame time those forms which his intellect makes must be recognized bytheir likeness to what men see in the world about them. So he found alink between his ideal forms and what men see in what is vaguely calledthe antique. 

But he did not go to the antique out of any artistic snobbery or becausehe distrusted his own natural taste. The antique was not for him anaristocratic world of art that he tried to enter in the hope of becominghimself an aristocrat. He showed that he was perfectly at ease in thatworld by the manner in which he painted its subjects. When, forinstance, he paints Bacchanals, he is really much less overawed by thesubject than Rubens would be. Rubens, who was a man of culture and anintellectual _parvenu_, tried desperately to combine his natural tasteswith classical subjects. When he painted a Flemish cook as Venus hereally tried to make her look like Venus; and the result is a Flemishcook pretending to be Venus, an incongruity that betrays a likeincongruity in the artist's mind. Poussin's Venus, far less flesh andblood, does belong entirely to the world in which he imaginesher--indeed, so intensely that, if we have lost interest in that world, she fails to interest us. The Venetians have done this much better, wethink; and why, if Poussin was going to paint like Titian, did he notuse Titian's colour? The answer is, Because his mood was very far fromTitian's, because he makes a comment that Titian never makes upon hisVenuses and Bacchanals. Rubens makes no comment at all: his attitudetowards the classical is that of the wondering _parvenu_. Titian throughthe classical expresses the Renaissance liberation from scruple andfear. But Poussin gives us a mortal comment upon this immortalcarelessness and delight. Whether his figures are tranquil or rapturous, there is in his colour an expression of something far from theirfelicity. Indeed, however voluptuous the forms may be, the colour isalways ascetic. It is not that he seems to disapprove of those glorifiedpleasures of the senses, but that he cannot satisfy himself with his ownconception of them, as Titian could. Titian represents a world in whichall the mind consents to delight. His figures are not foolish, but theyare like dancers or dreamers to the music of their own pleasure. Hemakes us hear that music to which his figures dance or dream; but, withPoussin, we do not hear it, we only see the figures subject to it as tosome influence from which we are cut off; and that which cuts us off isthe colour. 

Most painters, if they wished to paint a scene of voluptuous pleasure, would conceive it first in colour; for colour is the natural expressionof all delights of the senses. But Poussin never allows the delight thathe paints to affect his colour at all. That is always an expression ofhis own permanent mind, of a mind that could not dance or dream to themusic of any pleasure possible in this world. For him the ideal worldwas not merely one of perpetual, intensified pleasure, but one in whichall the activities of the mind should work like gratified senses and yetkeep their own character, in which passion should be freed from itsbewilderment and intellect from its questioning. That was what he triedto represent; and his colour was a comment, half-unconscious perhaps, upon its impossibility. For the everlasting conflict between colour andform does itself express that impossibility. Whatever he mightrepresent, Poussin could not, for one moment, lose his interest in formor subordinate it to colour. His figures, whatever their raptures, mustexpress his own intellectual mastery of them; and it was impossible tocombine this with a colour that should express their raptures. ButPoussin, knowing this impossibility, was not content with a compromise. He might have used a faintly agreeable colour that would not beincongruous with their raptures; but he chose rather to express his ownexasperation in a colour that was violently incongruous with them, butwhich at the same time heightens his emphasis upon form. So, thoughthere is an incongruity between the subject itself and the mood in whichit is treated, there is none in the treatment. Poussin himself seems tolook, and to make us look, at a mythological Paradise, with thesearching, mournful gaze of a human spectator. This glory is forbiddento us not merely by our circumstances but by the nature of our ownminds. It is, indeed, one of our own conceptions of Heaven, butinadequate like all the rest; and Poussin, by making the conceptionclear to us, reveals its inadequacy. 

He paints the subjects of the Renaissance like a man remembering his ownyouth, and sad, not because he has lost the pleasures of youth, butbecause he wasted himself upon them. Here are these deities, he seems totell us, but there must be a secret in their felicity that we do notunderstand. The joy they seem to offer is below us, and he will notpretend to have caught it from them in his art. For that art is alwayssad, not with a particular grief nor with mere low spirits, but with theincongruity of the passions and the intellect; and this noble sadness isexpressed by Poussin as no other painter has expressed it. He washimself a melancholy man to whom art was the one happiness of life; buthe did not use his art to talk of his sorrows. He used it to create aworld of clear and orderly design, and satisfied his intellect in thecreation of it. In his art he could exercise the composure which actualexperience disturbed; he could remake that reality so troubled by theconflict 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 reasonwhy his art seems so impersonal to us, why there is the same coldpassion in all his pictures, whether religious or mythological. In allof them he expresses a sharp dissatisfaction with the very nature of hisactual experience. A painter like Rubens is entranced with his ownactual vision of things; but Poussin tells us that he has never evenseen anything as he wanted to see it. He is not a vague idealistdissatisfied with reality because of the weakness of his own senses orunderstanding. Rather he seems to cry, like Poe, of everything that hedraws--

 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 anymood of his own. Nor does he allow the passions of his figures to affecthis representation of them or of their surroundings. He is cold, himself, towards these passions, for to him they are only a part of thebewilderment of actual experience. But in making forms he escapes fromthat bewilderment and shows us matter utterly subject to mind. Yet inthis triumph there is always implied the sadness that such a triumph isimpossible in life, that the artist cannot be what he paints. TheRenaissance had failed, and Poussin's art was a bitterly sincereannouncement 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 willtell us not what he has found in a work of art, but who produced it. Hisvery judgment is valued not on a matter of art at all, but on a matterof business. No one wants to know whether a certain picture is good orbad. The question is, Was it painted by Romney? It might well have beenand yet be a very bad picture; but that is not the point. Experts arecalled 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 ifpeople learned to think for themselves the profession of art criticwould be at an end. The art critic, for him, is one who tells peoplewhat 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 forourselves we do not need to be instructed by artists any more than bycritics. But Sir Thomas Jackson may mean that the artist is to instructthe public only through his works. Still, the question remains, How isthe artist to be recognized? There is a riddle--When is an artist not anartist? and the answer is--Nine times out of ten. Certainly the opinionsof artists about each other will not bring security to the public mind;and does Sir T. Jackson really believe that artists always value thecriticism of brother artists? Does an Academician value the criticismof a Vorticist, or _vice versa_? The Academician, of course, would saythat the Vorticist was not an artist--and _vice versa_. The artistvalues the opinion of the artist who agrees with him; and at presentthere is less agreement among artists than among critics. They condemneach other more than the critics condemn them. 

But these are minor points. What I am concerned with is Sir T. Jackson'snotion 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 hiscriticism depends upon his reputation; we should pay no heed to artcritics, because they are not artists. But the critic, whether of art orof anything else; is a writer; and he is to be judged not by hisreputation 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 hewrites only for the public. He might as well think that he condemned theartist if he said that he worked only for the public. Of course thecritic writes for the public, as the painter paints for the public; andhe writes as one of the public, not as an artist. Further, if he is acritic, he does not write to tell the public what to think any morethan he writes to tell the painter how to paint. Just as the painter inhis pictures expresses a general interest in the visible world, so thecritic in his criticism expresses a general interest in art; and hisjustification, like that of the painter, consists in his power ofexpressing this interest. If he cannot express it well, it is useless totalk about his reputation either as artist or critic; one might as wellexcuse a bad picture of a garden by saying that the painter of it was agood gardener and therefore a good judge of gardens. 

It is a misfortune that the word critic should be derived from a Greekword meaning judge. A critic certainly does arrive at judgments; but thevalue of his criticism, if it has any, consists not in the judgment, butin the process by which it is arrived at. This fact is seldom understoodin England, either by the public or by artists. The artist cares onlyabout the judgment and complains that a mere amateur has no right tojudge him. He would rather be judged by himself; and, being himself anartist, he must be a better judge. But the question to be asked aboutthe critic is not whether he is an amateur as an artist, but whether heis an amateur as a critic; and that can be decided only by hiscriticism. The greatest artist might prove that he was an amateur incriticism; and he could not disprove it by appealing to his art. SirJoshua Reynolds, for instance, thinks like an amateur in some of hisdiscourses; and it is amateur thinking to defend him by saying that hedoes not paint like one. 

Certainly much of our criticism consists of mere judgments, and istherefore worthless as criticism. But much of our art consists also ofmere judgments; it tells us nothing except that the artist admires thisor that, or believes that the public admires it; and it also isworthless as art. But no critic therefore writes to the papers to saythat, if only the public would learn to feel for themselves, theprofession of artist would be at an end. We know that the business of anartist 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 worldor whatever may be the subject-matter of his art. We do not condemn artbecause of its failures. Those who know anything at all about the natureof art know that it has value because it expresses the common interestsof mankind better than most men can express them; and for this reasonit has value for mankind and not merely for artists. For this reason, also, criticism has value for mankind and not merely for artists or forcritics. But the value of it does not lie in the judgment of the criticany more than the value of art lies in the judgment, taste, preferenceof the artist. The value in both cases lies in power of expression; andby that art and criticism are to be judged. 

Needless to say, then, criticism is not to be judged by the help itgives to artists. One might as well suppose that philosophy was to bejudged by the help it gives to the Deity. The philosopher does not tellthe Deity how He ought to have made the universe; nor do we readphilosophy for the sake of the judgments at which philosophers arrive. We do not want to know Kant's opinion because he is Kant; what interestsus is the process by which he arrives at that opinion, and it is theprocess which convinces us that his opinion is right, if we areconvinced. So it is, or should be, with criticism. It ought to provokethought rather than to suppress it; and if it does not provoke thoughtit is worthless. 

But in the best criticism judgment is rather implied than expressed. Forthe proper subject-matter of criticism is the experience of works ofart. The best critic is he who has experienced a work of art sointensely that his criticism is the spontaneous expression of hisexperience. He tells us what has happened to him, as the artist tells uswhat has happened to him; and we, as we read, do not judge either thecriticism or the art criticized, but share the experience. The value ofart lies in the fact that it communicates the experience and theexperiencing power of one man to many. When we hear a symphony ofBeethoven, we are for the moment Beethoven; and we ourselves areenriched for ever by the fact that we have for the moment beenBeethoven. So the value of the best criticism lies in the fact that itcommunicates the experience and the experiencing power of the critic tohis readers and so enriches their experiencing power. If he is futile, so is the artist. If we cannot read him without danger to our ownindependence of thought, neither can we look at a picture without dangerto our own independence of vision. But believe in the fellowship ofmankind, believe that one mind can pour into another and enrich it withits own treasures, and you will know that neither art nor criticism isfutile. They stand or fall together, and the artist who condemns thecritic condemns himself also. 

There remains the contention, half implied by Sir T. Jackson, that thecritic'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, thenart is of no value to anyone except the artist, and the artist whopractises the same kind of art; music is of value only to musicians, andpainting to painters. It cannot be that mere technical training gives aman the mysterious power of experiencing works of art; for, as we allknow, it does not make an artist. No artist will admit that anyonethrough technical training can become a member of the sacred brotherhoodof those who understand the mystery of art. Therefore they had allbetter admit that there is no mystery about it, or, rather, a mysteryfor us all. Either art is of value to us all, and our own experience ofit is of value to us; or art has no value whatever to anyone, but is themeaningless activity of a few oddities who would be better employed inagriculture. 

But if our own experience of art is of value to us, then it is possiblefor us to communicate that experience to others so that it may be ofvalue to them; as it is possible for the painter to communicate toothers his experience of the visible world. If he denies this, onceagain he denies himself. He shuts himself within the prison of his ownarrogance, 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 ispossible for us to communicate that experience to others, it is alsopossible for us to arrive at conclusions about that experience which maybe of value both to ourselves and to others. Hence scientific orphilosophic criticism, which is based not, as some artists seem tothink, upon a fraudulent pretence of the critic that he himself is anartist, but upon that experience of art which is, or may be, common toall men. The philosophic critic writes not as one who knows how toproduce that which he criticizes better than he who has produced it, butas one who has experienced art; and his own experience is really thesubject-matter of his criticism. If he _is_ a philosophic critic, hewill know that his experience is itself necessarily imperfect. As someone has said: "We do not judge works of art; they judge us"; and thecritic is to be judged by the manner in which he has experienced art, asthe painter is to be judged by the manner in which he has experiencedthe visible world. All the imperfections of his experience will bebetrayed in his criticism; where he is insensitive, there he will fail, both as artist and as philosopher; and of this fact he must beconstantly aware. So if he gives himself the airs of a judge, if herelies on his own reputation to make or mar the reputation of a work ofart, he ceases to be a critic and deserves all that artists in theirhaste have said about him. Still, it is a pity that artists, in theirhaste, should say these things; for when they do so they, too, becomecritics of the wrong sort, critics insensitive to criticism. They maythink that they are upholding the cause of art; but they are upholdingthe 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 toTolstoy it is nothing else. But art is clearly a social activity andsomething more; yet no one has yet reconciled the truth in Whistler'sdoctrine with the truth in Tolstoy's. Each leaves out an essential partof the truth, and they remain opposed in their mixture of error andtruth. The main point of Whistler's "Ten o'clock" is that art is not asocial activity. "Listen, " he cries, "there never was an artisticperiod. There never was an art-loving nation. In the beginning man wentforth each day--some to battle, some to the chase; others again to digand to delve in the field--all that they might gain and live or lose anddie. Until there was found among them one, differing from the rest, whose pursuits attracted him not, and so he stayed by the tents with thewomen, and traced strange devices with a burnt stick upon a gourd. Thisman, who took no joy in the ways of his brethren, who cared not forconquest and fretted in the field, this designer of quaint patterns, this deviser of the beautiful, who perceived in Nature about him curiouscurvings, as faces are seen in the fire--this dreamer apart was thefirst artist. "

Then, he says, the hunters and the workers drank from the artists'goblets, "taking no note the while of the craftsman's pride, andunderstanding not his glory in his work; drinking at the cup not fromchoice, not from a consciousness that it was beautiful, but because, forsooth, there was none other!" Luxury grew, and the great ages of artcame. "Greece was in its splendour, and art reigned supreme--by force offact, not by election. And the people questioned not, and had nothing tosay in the matter. " In fact art flourished because mankind did notnotice it. But "there arose a new class, who discovered the cheap, andforesaw fortune in the manufacture of the sham. " Then, according toWhistler, a strange thing happened. "The heroes filled from the jugs anddrank from the bowls--with understanding. .. . And the people--thistime--had much to say in the matter, and all were satisfied. AndBirmingham and Manchester arose in their might, and art was relegatedto the curiosity shop. "

Whistler does not explain why, if no one was aware of the existence ofart 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; yetthe sham could not exist until men were aware of the true. But theaccount he gives of the decadence of art is historically untrue as wellas unintelligible. We know little of the primitive artist; but we haveno proof that he was utterly different from other men, or that they didnot enjoy his activities. If they had not enjoyed them they wouldprobably have killed him. The primitive artist survived, no doubt, because he was an artist in his leisure; and all we know of moreprimitive art goes to prove that it was, and is, practised not by aspecial class but by the ordinary primitive man in his leisure. Peasantart 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 notcall it art. Whistler saw himself in every primitive artist; and seeinghimself as a dreamer apart misunderstood by the common herd, he saw theprimitive artist as one living in a primitive White House, andproducing primitive nocturnes for his own amusement, unnoticed, happily, by primitive critics. 

But his view, though refuted both by history and by common sense, isstill held by many artists and amateurs. They themselves make much ofart, but do not see that their theory makes little of it, makes it amere 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 asocial activity. If no one but an artist can enjoy art, it seems tofollow that no art can be completely enjoyed except by him who hasproduced it; for in relation to that art he alone is an artist. Allother artists, even, are the public; and, according to Whistler, thepublic has nothing to do with art; it flourishes best when they are notaware of its existence. He is very contemptuous of taste. All judgmentof art must be based on expert knowledge, for art, he says, "is basedupon laws as rigid and defined as those of the known sciences. " Yetwhereas "no polished member of society is at all affected by admittinghimself neither engineer, mathematician, nor astronomer, and thereforeremains willingly discreet and taciturn upon these subjects, still hewould be highly offended were he supposed to have no voice in whatclearly to him is a matter of taste. " So to Whistler art has no more todo with the life of the ordinary man than astronomy or mathematics. Hismention of engineering is an unfortunate slip, for, although we are notengineers we all knew, when the Tay Bridge broke down and threw hundredsof passengers into the water, that it was not a good bridge. We are allconcerned with engineering in spite of our ignorance of it, because wemake use of its works. Whistler assumes that we make no use of works ofart except as objects of use; and since pictures, poems, music are notobjects of use, we can have no concern with them whatever--which isabsurd. 

But here comes Tolstoy, who tells us that all works of art are merelyobjects of use and are to be judged therefore by the extent of theiruse. A work of art that few can enjoy fails as much as a railway thatfew can travel by. "Art, " Tolstoy says, "is a human activity, consistingin this--that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other peopleare infected by these feelings and also experience them. " So it is theessence of a work of art that it shall infect others with the feelingsof the artist. Now certainly a work of art is a work of art to us onlyif it does so infect us, but Tolstoy is not content with that. Theindividual 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 beesteemed good and to be approved of and diffused it will have to satisfythe demands, not of a few people living in identical and often unnaturalconditions, but it will have to satisfy the demands of all those greatmasses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laboriouslife. "

The two views are utterly irreconcilable. According to Whistler thepublic 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 withit. According to Tolstoy the individual is to judge it, not by theeffect it produces on him, but by the effect it produces on others, "onall those great masses of people who are situated in the naturalconditions of laborious life. "

Now, if we find ourselves intimidated by one or other of these views, ifwe seem forced to accept one of them against our will, it is a reliefand liberation from the tyranny of Whistler's or Tolstoy's logic to askourselves simply what does actually happen to us in our own experienceand enjoyment of a work of art. The fact that we are able to enjoy andexperience a work of art does liberate us at once from the tyranny ofWhistler; for clearly, if we can experience and enjoy a work of art, weare concerned with it. It is vain for Whistler to tell us that we oughtnot to be, or that we do injury to art by our concern. The fact of ourenjoyment and experience makes art for us a social activity; we knowthat our enjoyment of it is good; we know also that the artist likes usto enjoy it; and we do not believe that either the primitive artist orthe primitive man was different from us in this respect. There is now, and always has been, some kind of social relation between the artist andthe public; the only question is how far that relation is the essence ofart. 

Tolstoy tells us that it is the essence of art, because the proper aimof art is to do good. This is implied in his doctrine that art can begood only if it is intelligible to most men. "The assertion that art maybe good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number ofpeople, is extremely unjust; and its consequences are ruinous to artitself. " The word unjust implies the moral factor. I am not to enjoy awork of art if I know that others cannot enjoy it, because it is notfair that I should have a pleasure not shared by them. If I know thatothers 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 logicalso I can liberate myself by concerning myself simply with my ownexperience. Again, if I experience and enjoy a work of art, I know thatmy experience of it is good; and, in my judgment of the work of art, Ido not need to ask myself how many others enjoy it. I may wish them toenjoy it and try to make them do so, but that effort of mine is notæsthetic 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 toexperience a work of art at all, I cannot be asking myself how manyothers enjoy it. Judgments of art are not formed in that way and cannotbe; they are, and must be, always formed out of our own experience ofart. If art is to be art to us, we cannot think of it in terms ofsomething else. There would be no public for art at all if we all agreedto judge it in terms of each other's enjoyment or understanding. Eachindividual of "the great masses of people who are situated in thenatural conditions of laborious life" would also have to ask himselfwhether the rest of the masses were enjoying and understanding, beforehe could judge; indeed, he would not feel a right to enjoy until he knewthat the rest were enjoying. That is to say, no individual would everenjoy art at all. The fact is that art is produced by the individualartist and experienced by the individual man. Tolstoy says that it isexperienced by mankind in the mass, and not as individuals; Whistlerthat it is not experienced at all, either by the mass or by theindividual. Each is a heretic with some truth in his heresy; what is thetrue doctrine?

It is clear that every artist desires an audience, not merely so that hemay 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 ofthem without attempting to produce a work of art. It is also clear thathis artistic success is not his success in winning an audience. Those"great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions oflaborious life" are a figment of Tolstoy's mind. No conditions arenatural in the sense in which he uses the word; nor do any existingconditions make one man a better judge of art than another. There is nomultitude of simple, normal, unspoilt men able and willing to enjoy anyreal art that is presented to them. The right experience of art comeswith effort, like right thought and right action; and no Russian peasanthas it because he works in the fields. Nor, on the other hand, are thereany artists who are mere "sports" occupied with a queer game of theirown self-expression which no one else can enjoy. There is a necessaryrelation between the work of art and its audience, even if no actualaudience for it exists; and the fact that this relation must be, evenwhen there is no audience in existence, is the paradox and problem ofart. A work of art claims an audience, entreats it, is indeed made forit; but must have it on its own terms. Men are artists because they aremen, because they have a faculty, at its height, which is shared by allmen. In that Croce is right; and his doctrine that all men are artistsin some degree, and that the very experience of art is itself anæsthetic activity, contains a truth of great value. But his æstheticignores, or seems to ignore, the fact that art is not merely, as hecalls it, expression, but is also a means of address; in fact, that wedo not express ourselves except when we address ourselves to others, even though we speak to no particular, or even existing, audience. Yetthis fact is obvious; for all art gets its very form from the fact thatit is a method of address. A story is a story because it is told, andtold to some one not the teller. A picture is a picture because it ispainted to be seen. It has all its artistic qualities because it isaddressed to the eye. And music is music, and has the form which makesit music, because it is addressed to the ear. Without this intention ofaddress there could be no form in art and no distinction between art andday-dreaming. Day-dreaming is not expression, is not art, because it isaddressed to no one but is a purposeless activity of the mind. Itbecomes art only when there is the purpose of address in it. Thatpurpose will give it form and turn it from day-dreaming into art. Evenin an object of use which is also a work of art, the art is the effortof the maker to emphasize, that is, to point out, the beauty of thatwhich he has made. It is this emphasis that turns building intoarchitecture; and it implies that the building is made not merely forthe builder's or for anyone else's use, but that its aim also is toaddress an audience, to speak to the eye as a picture speaks to it. Artis made for men as surely as boots are made for them. 

But not as Tolstoy thinks, for any particular class of men or even forthe whole mass of existing mankind. The artist will not and cannot judgehis work by its effects on any actual men, any more than we can or willjudge it by its effects on anyone except ourselves. As we, in ourexperience of it, must be completely individual; so must he in hisproduction of it. He is not a public servant, but a man speaking forhimself, and with no thought of effects, to anyone who will hear. Hisaudience consists only of those who will hear, of those individuals whocan understand his individual expression which is also communication. Inhis 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 isbecause he says it to others. Yet he says it also for its own sake andnot 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 anaudience. So the relation between the artist and his audience is themost important fact of his art, even if he has no actual audience. Itis his attitude towards the audience that makes him do his best or hisworst, makes him a good artist or a bad one, that sets him free toexpress all he has to say or hampers him with inhibitions. His businessis 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, orpeacock, or philanthropist. And it is plain that in his effort to findthis right attitude he may be helped or hindered much by his actualfellow-men. The artist is also a man and subject to all the temptationsof men. Whistler, when he said that art happens, ignored this fact, ignored the whole social relation of mankind and the whole history ofthe arts; while Tolstoy ignored no less the mind of the artist, and theminds of all those who do actually experience art. To Whistler theartist is a _Chimæra bombinans in vacuo_; to Tolstoy he is aphilanthropist. For Whistler the public has no function whatever inrelation to art; for Tolstoy the artist himself has no function whateverexcept a moral one. In fact he denies the existence of the artist, asWhistler denies the existence of the public. Whistler's truth is thatthe public must not tell the artist what he is to do; Tolstoy's, that apublic with a right relation to the artist will help the artist to havea right relation to the public. 

Artists are not "sports, " but men; and men engaged in one of the mostdifficult of human activities. They are subject to æsthetic temptationand 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 whatthey have to express, either by perverse admiration or by ignorantcontempt. An actual audience may be an obstruction between them and theideal audience to which every artist should address himself. Everyartist must desire that his ideal audience should exist, and may mistakean actual audience for it. In the ideal relation between an artist andhis audience, it is the universal in him that speaks to the universal inthem, 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 aparticular audience, then he begins to tell of what he wants or of whatthey want. The audience may demand of him that he shall please them byindulging their particular vanities, appetites, sentimental desires, that he shall present life to them as they wish it to be; and if heyields to that demand it is because of the demands of his own particularego. There is a transaction between him and that audience, in itsessence commercial. His art is the particular supplying some kind ofgoods to the particular, not the universal pouring itself out to theuniversal. 

The function of the audience is not to demand but to receive. It shouldnot allow its own expectations to hinder its receptiveness; to thatextent Whistler is right. Art happens as the beauty of the universehappens; and it is the business of the audience to experience it, not todictate how it shall happen. It has been said: It is not we who judgeworks of art; they judge us. The artist speaks and we listen; but stillhe 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 itwishes to be, is a fellowship. Never is it so completely a fellowship asin the relation between an artist and his audience. There Tolstoy isright, but the fellowship has to be achieved by both the artist and theaudience. There is no body of simple peasants, any more than there arerich or cultured people, to whom he must address himself or whosedemands he must satisfy. Art that tries to satisfy any particular demandis of use neither to the flesh nor to the spirit. It is neither meat normusic. But where all is well with it, the spirit in the artist speaks tothe spirit in his audience. There is a common quality in both, withwhich he speaks and they listen; and where this common quality is foundart thrives. 

 Wilfulness and Wisdom

There are people to whom the war was merely the running amuck of acriminal lunatic; and they get what pleasure they can from calling thatlunatic all the names they can think of. To them the Germans aredifferent in kind from all other peoples, utterly separated from therest of us by their crimes. We could learn nothing from them except howto crush them; and, having done so, we shall need to learn nothingexcept how to keep them down. But such minds never learn anything fromexperience, 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 areangry. Wisdom always goes contrary to what our passions tell us, especially when they take the form of righteous indignation. Thecreative power of the mind begins with refusal of all those temptingfierce delights which the passions offer to it. Wisdom must be coldbefore it can become warm; it must suppress the comforting heat of theflesh 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 crimeonly by recognizing our likeness to those who have committed it. 

The Germans have committed the great crime; but they have been born andnurtured in an atmosphere which made that crime possible; and we live inthe same atmosphere. Their error, though they carried it to an extremein theory and in practice with the native extravagance of their race, isthe error of the whole Western world; and we shall not understand whatit is unless we are aware of it in ourselves as well as in them. For itis 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 oldwarnings, in the Gospels and elsewhere, sound like platitudes to us; weexpect the clergyman to repeat them in church; but we should never thinkof applying them to this great, successful, progressive Western world ofours. 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 therich more vulgarly rich and the poor more squalidly poor; if the greatenergy of Germany has hurried her to her own ruin; still we do not askwhether we may not have made some fundamental mistake about our ownnature and the nature of the universe, and whether Germany has notmerely made it more systematically and more philosophically than therest of us. 

But the German, because he is systematic and philosophical, may revealto us what that error is in us as well as in himself. We do not state itas if it were a splendid truth; we merely act upon it. He stated it forus with such histrionic and towering absurdity that we can laugh at hisstatement of it; but we must not laugh at him without learning to laughat ourselves. All this talk about the iron will, about set teeth andruthlessness, what does it mean except that the German chose to glorifyopenly and to carry to a logical extreme the peculiar error of the wholeWestern world--the belief that the highest function of man is to workhis will upon people and things outside him, that he can change theworld without changing himself?

The Christian doctrine, preached so long in vain and now almostforgotten, is the opposite of this. It insists that man is by nature apassive, an experiencing creature, and that he can do nothing well inaction unless he has first learned a right passivity. Only by thatpassivity can he enrich himself; and when he has enriched himself hewill act rightly. Man has a will; but he must apply it at the rightpoint, or it will seem to him merely a blind impulse. He must apply itto the manner in which he experiences things; he must free himself fromhis "will to live" or his "will to power, " and see all men and thingsnot as they are of material use to him, but with the object of lovingwhatever there is of beauty or virtue in them. His will, in fact, mustbe 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 thisa platitude? If it is, it is flatly contradicted by the German doctrineof wilfulness. For the Germanic hero exercises his will always uponother men and things, not upon himself; and we all admire this Germanichero, when he is not an obvious danger to us all, and when he is notmade ridiculous by the German presentment of him. We all believe thatthe will is to be exercised first of all in action, that it is thefunction 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, nomatter what that change may be. He may change it only as an explosionchanges things, and at the end he may be left among the ruins he hasmade; 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 hasbeen merely an elemental nuisance. We value force in itself, and do notask what it can find to value in itself when it has exhausted itselfupon the world. But out of this worship of wilfulness there comes, sooner or later, a profound scepticism and discouragement. For whilethese wilful heroes do produce some violent effect, it is not the effectthey aimed at. Something happens; something has happened to Germany asthe result of Bismarck's wilfulness; but it is not what he willed. Thewilful hero is a cause in that he acts; but the effect is not what hedesigned, and so he seems to himself, and to the world, only a link inan unending chain of cause and effect; and as for his sense of will, itis 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 truthwrongly. 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 islike a machine that acts with increasing speed and fury because there isless and less material for it to act upon. One act leads to another in ablind chain of cause and effect; he does this merely because he has donethat, and seems to be driven by fate on and on to his own ruin. So itwas with Napoleon in his later years. He had lost the sense of anyreality whatever except his own action; he saw the world as a passiveobject to be acted upon by himself. And that is how the Germans saw ittwo years ago. They could not understand that it was possible for theworld to react against them. It was merely something that they weregoing to remake, to work their will upon. The war, at its beginning, wasnot to them a conflict between human beings; it was a process by whichthey would make of things what they willed. There was no reality exceptin themselves and their own will; for, in their worship of action, theyhad lost the sense of external reality, they had come to believe thatthere was nothing to learn from it except what a craftsman learns fromhis material by working in it. It is by making that he learns; and theythought that there was no learning except by making. 

But that is the mistake of the whole Western world, though we have noneof us carried it so far as Germany. Other men are to us still men, theystill have some reality to us; but we see external reality as a materialfor us to work in; we are to ourselves entirely active and not at allpassive beings. Even among all the evil and sorrow of the war we stilltook a pride in the enormous power of our instruments of destruction, asif we were children playing with big, dangerous toys. But these toys arethemselves the product of a society that must always be making and neverthinking or feeling. They express the will for action that has oustedthe will to experience; and all the changes which we work on the face ofthe earth express that will too. We could not live in the cities we havemade for ourselves if we thought that we had anything to learn from thebeauty of the earth. They are for us merely places in which we learn toact, in which no one could learn to think or feel. Passive experience isimpossible in them and they do not consider the possibility of it. Sothey express in every building, in every object, in the very clothes oftheir inhabitants, an utter poverty of passive experience. In what wemake we give out no stored riches of the mind; we make only so that wemay act, never so that we may express ourselves; and we have little artbecause our making is entirely wilful. Our attempts at art arethemselves entirely wilful. We will have art, we say; and so we plasterour utilities with the ornaments of the past, as if we could get therichness of experience secondhand from our ancestors. And in the sameway we are always finding for our blind activities moral motives, thosemotives which are real only when they spring out of right experience. Werationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornamentto blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that ouractions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us anincessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it isentirely 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. Fora German professor the whole process of history was but a prelude to thewilfulness of Germany; he could not experience the past except in termsof what Germany willed to do; and the aim of his theorizing was toremove all scrupulous impediments to the action of Germany which she mayhave inherited from the past. Think so that you may be stronger to dowhat you wish to do; that is the modern notion of thought, and that isthe reason why we throw up theories so easily; for thinking of this kindneeds no experience, it needs merely an activity of the mind, theactivity which collects facts and does with them what it will. And thesetheories are eagerly accepted so long as the impulse lasts which theyjustify. When that is spent they are forgotten, and new theories taketheir place to justify fresh impulses. And so it is with the incessantnew movements in art. Art now is conceived entirely as action. Theartist is as wilful as the Germanic hero; the will to make excludes inhim the will to experience. The painter cannot look at the visible worldwithout considering at once what kind of picture he will make of it. Itis to him mere passive material for his artistic will, not anindependent reality to enrich his mind so that it will give out itsriches in the form of art. And as he is always willing to make picturesso he must will the kind of pictures he will make, as the Germans willedthe kind of world they would make. But this willing of his is a kind oftheorizing to justify his own action; and it changes incessantly becausehe never can be satisfied with his own poverty of experience. But stillhe will do anything rather than try to enrich that poverty. 

And that is the secret of all our restlessness, the restlessness thatforced the Germans into the folly and crime of war. We are alwaysdissatisfied with our poverty of experience; and we try to get rid ofour dissatisfaction in more blind activity, throwing up new theories allthe while as reasons why we should act. We fidget about the earth as ifwe were children, that could not read, left in a library; and, likethem, we do mischief. And that is just what we are: children that havenot learnt to read let loose upon the library of the universe; and allthat we can do is to pull the books about and play games with them andscribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth is defaced with ourmeaningless scribbling, and we tell ourselves that it means somethingbecause we want to scribble. Or sometimes we tell ourselves that thereis 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 needabove all things humility; not merely the personal humility of a man whoknows that other men excel him, but a generic humility whichacknowledges in the universe a greater wisdom, power, righteousness thanhis own. That is formally acknowledged by our religion, but it is notpractically acknowledged in our way of life, in our conduct or ourthought. We think and feel and behave as if we were the best and wisestcreatures in the universe, as if it existed only for us to make use ofit; and in so far as we learn from it at all, we learn only to make useof it. That is our idea of knowledge and wisdom; more and more it is ouridea of science; and as for philosophy, we pay no heed to it because, inits nature, it is not concerned with making use of things. In every waywe betray the fact that we cannot listen humbly, because we do notbelieve there is anything to listen to. For a few of the devout Godspoke long ago, but He is not speaking now. "The kings of modern thoughtare dumb, " said Matthew Arnold; but that is because everything outsidethe 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 inanything but our own actions; and they will become more and moremeaningless to us as they become more and more wilful, until at last weshall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage, or prisoners on auniversal treadmill. Years ago the war must have seemed a meaninglesstreadmill to the Germans, but they cannot escape from its consequences;they have done and they must suffer. But will they learn from theirsufferings, shall we all learn, that doing is not everything? Are wehumbled enough to listen to the wisdom of the ages, which tells us thatwe 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 hadlittle success. At the first performance, it is said, when the applausewas faint, the leader of the orchestra stole up to Mozart, who wasconducting, and kissed his hand; and Mozart stroked him on the head. Wemay guess that the leader knew what the music meant and that Mozart knewthat he knew. Neither could put it into words and it is not put intowords in the libretto. But the libretto need not be an obstruction tothe meaning of the music if only the audience will not ask themselveswhat the libretto means. After Mozart's death the opera was successful, no doubt because the audience had given up asking what the librettomeant and had learnt something of the meaning of the music. 

There are worse librettos--librettos which have some clear unmusicalmeaning of their own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate to themeaning of the music, if it has any. This libretto, apart from themusic, is so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence, that onecan easily pass through it to the music. The author, Schickaneder, wasMozart'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 thelibretto, although in them it is empty of value or passion. Schickaneder, in fact, constructed a mere diagram to which Mozart gavelife. The life is all in the music, but the diagram has its use, in thatit supplies a shape, which we recognize, to the life of the music. Thecharacters live in the music, but in the words they tell us somethingabout themselves which enables us to understand their musical speechbetter. Papageno tells us that he is a bird-catcher and a child ofnature. The words are labels, but through them we pass more quickly toan understanding of his song. Only we shall miss that understanding ifwe try to reach it through the words, if we look for the story of theopera in them. In the words the events of the opera have no connexionwith each other. There is no reason why one should follow another. Thelogic of it is all in the music, for the music creates a world in whichevents happen naturally, in which one tune springs out of another, orconflicts with it, like the forces of nature or the thoughts and actionsof man. This world is the universe as Mozart sees it; and the wholeopera is an expression of his peculiar faith. It is therefore areligious work, though free from that meaningless and timid solemnitywhich we associate with religion. Mozart, in this world, was like anangel who could not but laugh, though without any malice, at all thebitter earnestness of mankind. Even the wicked were only absurd to him;they were naughty children whom, if one had the spell, one could enchantinto goodness. And in _The Magic Flute_ the spell works. It works in theflute itself and in Papageno's lyre when the wicked negro Monostatosthreatens him and Tamino with his ugly attendants. Papageno has only toplay a beautiful childish tune on his lyre and the attendants all marchbackwards to an absurd goose-step in time with it. They are played offthe 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 marchtheir goose-step back to Potsdam; so we could play all solemn perversityoff the stage of life. If we had the music--but there is solemnperversity in us too; by reason of which we can hardly listen to themusic, much less play it, hardly listen to it or understand it evenwhen Mozart makes it for us. For he had the secret of it; he was aphilosopher who spoke in music and so simply that the world missed hiswisdom and thought that he was just a beggar playing tunes in thestreet. A generation ago he was commonly said to be too tuney, as youmight say that a flower was too flowery. People would no more considerhim than they would consider the lilies of the field. They preferredWagner in all his glory. 

Even now you can enjoy _The Magic Flute_ as a more than usually absurdmusical 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 bloodymelodrama. But, like _Hamlet_, it has depths and depths of meaningbeyond our full comprehension. Papageno is a pantomime figure, but he isalso one of the greatest figures in the drama of the world. He iseveryman, like Hamlet, if only we had the wit to recognize ourselves inhim. Or rather he is that element in us which we all like and despise inothers, but which we will never for one moment confess to inourselves--the coward, the boaster, the liar, but the child of nature. He, because he knows himself for all of these, can find his home inSarostro's paradise. He does not want Sarostro's high wisdom; what hedoes want is a Papagena, an Eve, a child of nature like himself; and sheis given to him. He has the wit to recognize his mate, almost a birdlike himself, and to them Mozart gives their bird-duet, so that, whenthey sing it, we feel that we might all sing it together. It is notabove our capacity of understanding or delight. The angel has learnt ourearthly tongue, but transformed it so that he makes a heaven of theearth, a heaven that is not too high or difficult for us, a wild-woodheaven, half-absurd, in which we can laugh as well as sing, and in whichthe angels will laugh at us and with us, laugh our silly sorrows intojoy. 

There is Mozart himself in Papageno, the faun domesticated and sweetenedby centuries of Christian experience, yet still a faun and always readyto play a trick on human solemnity; and in this paradise which Mozartmakes for us the faun has his place and a beauty not incongruous withit, like the imps and gargoyles of a Gothic church. At any moment themusic will turn from sublimity into fun, and in a moment it can turnback to sublimity; and always the change seems natural. It is like agreat cathedral with High Mass and children playing hide-and-seek behindthe pillars; and the Mass would not be itself without the children. Thatis the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just becausein his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory ofSolomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anythingin art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, butit is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous withthe twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seemsto be not religion, but merely beauty, as real saints seem to be notgood, but merely charming. And there are people to whom his beauty doesnot seem to be art, because it is just beauty; they think that he hadthe trick of it and could turn it on as he chose; they prefer thecreaking of effort and egotism. His gifts are so purely gifts and solavish that they seem to be cheap; and _The Magic Flute_ is an absurditywhich he wrote in a hurry to please the crowd. 

We can hardly expect to see a satisfying performance of it on the stageof to-day, but we must be grateful for any performance, for the life ofthe 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 peculiartheatrical hideousness of our time. Tamino and Panina may look likefigures out of an Academy picture, as heroes and heroines of operaalways do. They may wear clothes that belong to no world of reality orart, clothes that suggest the posed and dressed-up model. But the musicmitigates even these, and it helps every one to act, or rather to forgetwhat they have learnt about acting. It evidently brings happiness andconcord to those who sing it, so that they seem to be taking part in areligious act rather than in an act of the theatre. One feels this mostin the concerted music, when the same wind from paradise seems to beblowing through all the singers and they move to it like flowers, inspite of their absurd clothes. 

But what is needed for a satisfying performance is a world congruous tothe eye as well as to the ear; and for this we need a break with all ourtheatrical conventions. Sarostro, for instance, lives among Egyptianscenery--very likely the architecture of his temple was Egyptian at thefirst performance--but, for all that, this Egyptian world does not suitthe music, and to us it suggests the miracles of the Egyptian Hall. Butthere is one world which would perfectly suit the music, a world inwhich it could pass naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in which allthe figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is theChinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there issomething fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, amixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye whatMozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be asaint; only in that world, which ranges from the willow-pattern plate tothe Rishi in his mystical ecstasy in the wilderness, could the soul ofMozart, with its laughter and its wisdom, be at home. That too is theworld 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 wouldnot seem to be made of pasteboard, and in which all the magic would notseem to be mere conjuring. In that world one might have beautifullandscapes and beautiful figures to suit them. There Sarostro would notbe a stage magician, but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to himwould be only the change from Ming to Sung, which would seem no changeat all. Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic flute, the worldwhere silver bells hang on every flowering tree and the thickets arefull of enchanted nightingales. It is the world of imps and monsters, and yet of impassioned contemplation, where the sage sits in a moonlitpavilion 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 themodern theatre, we could give up the orchid for the lotus and the heavyegotism of Europe for the self-forgetful gaiety of the East. It may beonly an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality, but it is onewhich the art of China makes real to us and with which we are familiarin that art; and there is a smiling wisdom in it, there is a gaietywhich comes from conquest rather than refusal of reality, just like thegaiety and wisdom of Mozart's music. He knew sorrow well, but would notluxuriate in it; he took the beauty of the universe more seriously thanhimself. To him wickedness was a matter of imps and monsters rather thanof 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 ifwe would listen to him, the wandering minstrel whom the world left toplay out in the street. And yet his ultimate seriousness and the lastsecret of his beauty is pity, not for himself and his own littletroubles, but for the whole bitter earnestness of mortal children. Andin this pity he seems not to weep for us, still less for himself, but totell 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 themmarching the goose-step backwards. Even they would not be the villainsof a tragedy for him, but only beasts to be tamed with his music untilthey should be fit to sing their own bass part in the last chorus ofreconciliation. And this pity of his sounds all through _The MagicFlute_ and gives to its beauty a thrill and a wonder far beyond what anyfleshly passion can give. Sarostro is a priest, not a magician, becausethere is in him the lovely wisdom of pity, because he has a place in hisparadise for Papageno, the child of nature, where he shall be made happywith his mate Papagena. There is a moment when Papageno is about to hanghimself because there is no one to love him; he will hang himself inSarostro's lonely paradise. But there is a sly laughter in the musicwhich 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 nolonger lonely; and the two sing their part in the chorus ofreconciliation at the end. And we are sure that the Queen of Night, andthe ugly negro and all his goose-stepping attendants, are not punished. They have been naughty for no reason that anyone can discover, just likePrussians and other human beings; and now the magic flute triumphs overtheir naughtiness, and the silver bells ring from every tree and theenchanted nightingales sing in all the thickets, and the sages and thelovers smile like children; and the laughter passes naturally into thedivine beauty of Mozart's religion, which is solemn because laughter andpity are reconciled in it, not rejected as profane. 

 Process or Person?

Nearly all war pictures in the past have been merely pictures thathappened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are butpretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might aswell be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon histreatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubtdramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notesabout the manner in which fighting men and horses ought to berepresented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things. Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in thenude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment. "Titian's "Battle of Cadore, " which we know from the copy of a fragmentof it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battlescenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenesor his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none ofthese, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism ofwar, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men whotake part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differentlybecause they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanitybecause of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battlescene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a _genre_picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patrioticappeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battlepictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is apublic that likes them. 

In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of waras an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the verymethod of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; butin these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for hiscubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that inwar man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is aprocess in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in agreat instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person andis lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharpdistinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process betterthan any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being toexpress the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of allthings, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; andmachines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed byour own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future inwhich machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it isnot so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves havelost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seemmore 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 ourhumanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured thedelusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes. Nowthat delusion is fading away from us; and it fades away most of all inwar, 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 inhis battle pictures, with, we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentmentagainst it. His pictures look like a visible _reductio ad absurdum_ ofit all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting inmodern 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 onall the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He hasallowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which hasno purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universeseems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as wellbe called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a strugglebetween two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of themachines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no soulsin them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that theycollide and destroy each other like masses of matter in space. Nothingcan be said of them except that they obey certain laws; we call theirobedience discipline, but it is only the discipline of things subject toa 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 ofmany Germans. Conscience was powerless to prevent it because consciencehad ceased to believe in its own power, had come to think of itself as avain and inexplicable rebellion against the nature of things. Thisrebellion we call sentimentality, meaning thereby that it is really noteven moral; for true morality would recognize the process to which thenature of man is subject, of which that nature is itself a part; andwould cure man of his futile rebellions so that he should not sufferneedlessly from them. It would cure man of pity, because it is throughpity that he suffers. He is a machine, and, if he is a consciousmachine, he should be conscious of the fact that he is one. Such is thebelief that has been growing upon us for fifty years or more with manystrange effects. It has not destroyed our sense of pity, but hasconfused and exasperated it. We pity and love still, but withdesperation, not like Christians assured that these things are accordingto the order of the universe, but fearing that they are wilfulexceptions to that order, costly luxuries that we indulge in at our ownperil. We seem to ourselves lonely in our pity and love; the supremeprocess 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 wardid not happen so. Even in Germany there was something hysterical in thepraise of war, as if it were the worship of an idol both hated andfeared. 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 wemay find something real to hope for. We must habituate ourselves to theuniverse as it is, and break ourselves and all mankind in to the bittertruth. They praised war as we used in England to praise industry. Labour, we believed, when all the labour of the poor had been madejoyless by the industrial revolution, was the result of the curse laidupon man by God. Therefore, man must labour without joy and never dreamof happy work. And so now the very worshippers of war believe that it isa curse laid upon man by the nature of things. They may not believe inthe fall of man, but they do believe that he can never rise, since he ishimself part of a process which is always war; and, if he tries toescape from it, he will become extinct. So they exhort us to consent tothat process even with our conscience; the more completely we consentto it, the more we shall succeed in it. But all the while they are doingviolence to our natures and to their own. They try to think likemachines, like the slaves of a process; but thought itself isinconsistent with their effort; their very praises of the heroism oftheir victims are inconsistent with it. There is a gaping incongruitybetween the obsolete German romanticism and the new German atheism whichexploited it, between their talk about Siegfried and their talk aboutthe struggle for life. And there is the same incongruity between thecubist effort to see the visible world as a mechanical process and artitself. The cubist seems to force himself with a savage irony into thiscaricature of nature; we have emptied reality of its content in ourthought and he will empty it of its content to our eyes; that is not howwe really see things, but it is how we ought to see them if what webelieve 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 therebellion of an unshaken faith. He has emptied man of his content, justas the Prussian drill sergeant would empty him of his content for thepurposes of war; and only a Prussian drill sergeant could consent tothis version of man with any joy. 

That, perhaps, is how we shall all come to see everything if we continuefor some centuries to believe that process and not person is theultimate reality. Emptying ourselves of all our content in thought, weshall at last empty ourselves of all content in reality; we shall becomewhat now we fear we are, and our very senses will be obedient to ourunfaith. For unfaith is the belief in process; and faith is the beliefin person. It is the belief in process that makes men sacrifice othermen in thousands to some idol; it is the belief in person that makesthem refuse to sacrifice anyone but themselves; and they are afraid whenthey sacrifice others, but confident when they sacrifice themselves. Ultimately process has no value and can have no value for us. It ismerely what exists or what we believe to exist, and our effort to valueit 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 onlypart of a process, we cannot value him and we can do what we will to himwithout any sense of wrong. All the old cruelties and iniquities of theworld arose out of a belief in process and a fear of it. It is not amodern scientific discovery, but the oldest and darkest superstitionthat has oppressed the mind of man. To all religious persecutorssalvation was a process, like that struggle for life which is the modernform of the struggle for salvation to the superstitious. And becausesalvation was a process human beings were sacrificed to it. It did notmatter how they were tortured, provided this abstract process wasmaintained. So it does not matter now how they are slaughtered, providedthe abstract process of the struggle for life is maintained. To theGerman this war was part of a process, the historical process of thetriumph of Germany, and it did not matter how many Germans were killedin furthering it. If they were all killed Germany would still haveasserted her faithless faith in process and would have reduced it to aglorious absurdity. 

So, if we fought for anything beyond ourselves, we fought for the beliefin person as against the belief in process. Indeed, it is the chiefglory of England, among her many follies and crimes, that she has alwaysbelieved in person rather than in process; and that is what we mean whenwe say that we refuse to sacrifice facts to theories. Men themselvesare to us facts, and we distrust theories that empty them of content. Ifwe act like brutes, we would rather do so because the brute has masteredus for the moment than because we believe that humanity is inconsistentwith the process that dominates the world. We ourselves had rather beinconsistent than empty ourselves of all reality for the sake of atheory. And there is an intellectual as well as a moral basis to thisinconsistency of ours. For if you believe that person, not process, isthe ultimate reality, you must offer some defiance to the material factsof life. There is evidently a conflict between person and process; andin 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 allyour faculties. So you will trust in this union of all the facultiesrather than in the exercise of the pure intelligence; for to you thepure intelligence will be part of the person and will share in theperson's universal imperfection. In fact it will not be pureintelligence at all, but rather a faculty that may be obsequious to allthe lower passions. Nothing will free you from them, except the respectfor persons, except, in fact, loving your neighbour as yourself. Thereis no way to consistency but through that, and no way to the exercise ofthe pure intelligence. Never sacrifice a person to a process and youwill never sacrifice a person to your own lower passions. But, if youbelieve in process rather than in person, you will see your passions aspart of the process and glorify them when you think you are glorifyingthe nature of the universe. 

Cubism and all those new methods of art which subject facts to thetyranny of a process may be good satire, but they will never, I think, produce an independent beauty of their own. Like all satire, they areparasitic upon past art, negative and rebellious. They tell us what theuniverse may look like to us if we lose all faith in ourselves and eachother; and, when they are the result of a desperate effort to see theuniverse so, they are unconscious satire. The complete, convinced cubistreduces his own method, his own beliefs, his own state of mind, to anabsurdity. The more sincere he is, the more complete is the reduction. For he, rejecting all that has been the subject-matter of painting inthe past, all the human values and the complexes of association whichhave invested the visible world with beauty for men, proves to us in histortured diagrams that he has found nothing to take their place, Hegives us a _Chimæra bombinans in vacuo_, that vacuum which the universeis to the human spirit when it denies itself. He tries to make art, having cut himself off from all the experience and belief that produceart. For art springs always out of a supreme value for the personal andis an expression of that value. It is an effort, no matter in whatmedium, to find the personal in all things, to see trees as men walking;and the new abstract methods in painting reverse this process, theyempty all things, even men, of personality and subject them to a processinvented by the artist, which expresses, if it expresses anything, hisown loss of personal values and nothing else. The result may beingenious, it may still have a kind of beauty remembered from the greatdesign of past art; but it will lead nowhere, since it is cut off fromthe very experience, the passionate personal interest in people andthings, which gave design to the great art of the past. It is at bestsatirical, at worst parasitic, using up all devices of design andturning from one to another in a restless ennui which of itself can giveno enrichment. It may have its uses, since it insists upon the supremeimportance of design and provides a new method for the expression ofthree dimensions; but this method will be barren unless those whopractise it enrich it with their own observation and delight. Alreadysome 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 anostrich hides its head in the sand; but we would rather have honestchocolate-box ladies than the kaleidoscopic but betraying chocolate-boxfragments of the futurist. 

 The Artist and the Tradesman

The Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts at Burlington House was anacknowledgment of the fact that there are other arts besides those ofpainting, sculpture, and architecture, or rather perhaps that the artssubsidiary to architecture are arts and not merely commercialactivities. Burlington House would protest, of course, that it is not ashop; but now at last objects are to be shown in it which the great massof the public expects to see only in shops and expects to be producedmerely to sell. We remember how Lord Grimthorpe called Morris a poeticupholsterer. He meant there was something incongruous in the combinationof an upholsterer and a poet; he would have seen nothing incongruous inthe combination of a poet and a painter, because he would have called apainter an artist; but an upholsterer was to him merely a tradesman, andtradesmen are not expected to write poetry. Their business is to sellthings and to make objects for sale. 

In that respect he thought like the mass of the public now. For themthe painter has some prestige, because he is supposed not to be atradesman, not to paint his pictures merely so that he may sell them. Hehas to live by his art, of course, but he practises it also because heenjoys it; and, if he is an artist, he will not paint bad picturesmerely because they are what the public wants. But it is the business ofthose who make furniture and such things to produce what the publicwants. No one would blame them for producing what they do not likethemselves, any more than one would blame a pill-maker for producingpills that he would not swallow himself. The pill-maker and thefurniture-maker are both tradesmen producing objects in answer to ademand. They have no prestige and no conscience is expected of them. 

Now in Italy in the fifteenth century this distinction between theartist and the tradesman did not exist. The painter was a tradesman; hekept a shop and he had none of that peculiar prestige which he possessesnow. But of the tradesman more was expected than is expected now; forinstance, good workmanship and material were expected of him and alsogood design. He did not produce articles merely to sell, whether theywere pictures or wedding-chests or jewelry or pots and pans. He made allthese other things just as he made pictures, with some pleasure andconscience in his own work; and it was the best craftsman who became apainter or sculptor, merely because those were the most difficultcrafts. Now it is the gentleman with artistic faculty who becomes apainter; the poor man, however much of that faculty he possesses, remains a workman without any artistic prestige and without anytemptation to consider the quality of his work or to take any pleasurein it. This is a commonplace, no doubt; but it remains a fact, howeveroften it may have been repeated, and a social fact with a constant evileffect upon all the arts. Because the painter is supposed to be anartist and nothing else and the craftsman a tradesman and nothing else, we do not expect the virtues of the craftsman from the painter nor thevirtues of the artist from the craftsman. For us there is nothing butmystery in the work of the artist and no mystery at all in the work ofthe craftsman. The painter can be as silly as he likes, and we do notlaugh at him, if we are persons of culture, because his art is a sacredmystery. But, as for the craftsman, there is nothing sacred about hiswork. It is sold in a shop and made to be sold; and all we expect of itis that it shall be in the fashion, which means that it shall be whatthe commercial traveller thinks he can sell. There are, of course, a fewcraftsman who are thought of as artists, and their work at once becomesa sacred mystery, like pictures. They too have a right to be as silly asthey 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 soulsand not because they like it. 

How are we to get rid of this distinction we have made between theartist and the tradesman? How are we to recover for the artist thevirtues of the craftsman and for the craftsman the virtues of theartist? At present we get from neither what we really like. Art remainsto 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, asfor objects of use, they are bought mainly because they are sold; theyare forced upon us as a conjurer forces a card. We think we like themwhile they remain the fashion; but soon they are like women's clothes oftwo years ago, if they last long enough to be outmoded. It is vain forus to reproach either the artist or the tradesman. The fault is inourselves; we have as a whole society yielded to the most subtletemptation of Satan. We have lost the power of knowing what welike--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 whathe enjoys is not the picture itself but the thought that he is culturedenough to enjoy it. That thought comes between him and the picture, andmakes it impossible for him to experience the picture at all. And so heis ready to accept anything that the painter chooses to give him, ifonly he believes the painter to be a real artist. This is bad for thepainter, who has every temptation to become a charlatan, and to think ofhis art as a sacred mystery which no one can understand but himself anda few other painters of his own sect. But in this matter the man ofculture is just like the vulgar herd, as he would call them. Theirattitude 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 becausethe shopman persuades them that what they buy is the fashion. Orperhaps they recognize it themselves as the fashion and thereforeinstantly believe that they like it. In both cases the buyer ishypnotized; he has lost the faculty of finding out for himself what hereally likes, and his mind, being empty of real affection, is open tothe seven devils of suggestion. He cannot enjoy directly any beautifulthing, all he can enjoy is the belief that he is enjoying it; and he canharbour this belief about any nonsense or trash. 

It is a very curious disease that has become endemic in the whole ofEurope. People impute it to machinery, but unjustly. There are objectsmade by machinery, such as motor-cars, which have real beauty of design;and people do genuinely and unconsciously enjoy this beauty, justbecause they never think of it as beauty. They like the look of a carbecause they can see that it is well made for its purpose. If only theywould like the look of any object of use for the same reason, the artsof use would once again begin to flourish among us. But when once we askourselves whether any thing is beautiful, we become incapable of knowingour real feelings about it. Any tradesman or artist can persuade us thatwe think it beautiful when we do nothing of the kind. We are all likethe crowd who admired the Emperor's clothes; and there is no child totell us that the Emperor has no clothes on at all. We are not so withhuman beings; we cannot be persuaded that we like a man when really wedislike him; if we could, our whole society would soon dissolve in amoral anarchy. But with regard to the works of man, or that part of themwhich is supposed to aim at beauty, we are in a state of æstheticanarchy, because there is a whole vast conspiracy, itself unconsciousfor the most part, to persuade us that we like what no human being outof a madhouse could like. 

So the real problem for us is to discover, not merely in pictures, butin 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 andbeauty for a time from our minds; not because art and beauty do notexist, but because our notions of them are wrong and misleading. Thevery words intimidate us, as people used to be intimidated by the jargonof pietistic religion, so that they would believe that a very unpleasantperson was a saint. When once we look for beauty in anything, we look nolonger for good design, good workmanship, or good material. It isbecause we do not look for beauty in motor-cars that we enjoy theexcellence of their design, workmanship, and material, which is beauty, if only we knew it. Beauty, in fact, is a symptom of success in thingsmade by man, not of success in selling, but of success in making. If anobject made by man gives us pleasure in itself, then it has beauty; ifwe got pleasure only from the belief that in it we are enjoying what weought to enjoy, then very likely it is as naked of beauty as the Emperorwas of clothes. The great mass of people now have a belief that ornamentis necessarily beauty, that, without it, nothing can be beautiful. Butornament is often only added ugliness, like a wen on a man's face. It isalways added ugliness when it is machine-made, and when it is put on tohide cheapness of material and faults of design and workmanship. Unfortunately, it does hide these things from us; we accept ornament asa substitute for that beauty which can only come of good design, material, and workmanship; and we do not recognize these things when wesee them, except in objects like motor-cars, which we prefer plainbecause we do unconsciously enjoy their real beauty. 

So, in the matter of ornament, we need to make a self-denyingordinance; not because ornament is necessarily bad--it is the naturalexpression of the artist's superfluous energy and delight--but becausewe ourselves cannot be trusted with ornament, as a drunkard cannot betrusted with strong drink. We must learn to see things plain before wecan see them at all, or enjoy them for their own real qualities and notfor what we think we see in them. A man whose taste is for bad poetrycan only improve it by reading good, plain prose. He must becomerational before he can enjoy the real beauties of literature. And so weneed to become rational before we can enjoy art, whether in pictures orin objects of use. The unreason of our painting has the same cause asthe unreason of our objects of use; and the cause is in us, not in theartist. We think of taste as something in its nature irrational. It isno more so than conscience is. Indeed, there is conscience in all goodtaste as in all the good workmanship that pleases it. But where thepublic has not this conscience, the artist will not possess it either. At best he will have only what he calls his artistic conscience--that isto say, a determination to follow his own whims rather than the taste ofthe public. But where the public knows what it likes, and the artistmakes what he likes, there is more than a chance that both will like thesame thing, as they have in the great ages of art. For a real likingmust be a liking for something good. It is Satan who persuades us thatwe like what is bad by filling our mind with sham likings, which arealways really the expression of our egotism disguised. 

 Professionalism in Art

Professionalism is a dull, ugly word; but it means dull, ugly things, aperversion of the higher activities of man, of art, literature, religion, philosophy; and a perversion to which we are all apt to beblind. We know that in these activities specialization is a condition ofexcellence. As Keats said to Shelley, in art it is necessary to serveboth God and Mammon; and as Samuel Butler said, "That is not easy, butthen nothing that is really worth doing ever is easy. " The poet may beborn, not made; but no man can start writing poetry as if it had neverbeen written before. In every art there is a medium, and the poet, likeall other artists, learns from the poets of the past how to use hismedium. Often he does this unconsciously by reading them for delight. Hefirst becomes a poet because he loves the poetry of others. And thepainter becomes a painter because he loves the pictures of others. Eachof 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 isimpatient of all the talk about inspiration; for he knows that, thoughnothing can be done without it, it comes only with command of themedium. And this command, like all craftsmanship, is traditional, handeddown from one generation to another. Any kind of expression in thisimperfect world is as difficult as virtue itself. For expression, likevirtue, is a kind of transcendence. In it the natural man rises abovehis animal functions, above living so that he may continue to live; hetriumphs over those animal functions which hold him down to the earth asincessantly as the attraction of gravity itself. But, like the airman, he can triumph only by material means, and by means gradually perfectedin the practice of others. Yet there is always this difference, that inmechanics anyone can learn to make use of an invention; but in thehigher activities, invention, if it becomes mechanical, destroys theactivity itself, even in the original inventor. The medium is always amedium, not merely a material; and if it becomes merely a material to bemanipulated, it ceases to be a medium. 

Now professionalism is the result of a false analogy between mechanicalinvention and the higher activities. It happens whenever the medium isregarded merely as material to be manipulated, when the artist thinksthat he can learn to fly by mastering some other artist's machine, whenhis art is to him a matter of invention gradually perfected andnecessarily progressing through the advance of knowledge and skill. Oneoften finds this false analogy in books about the history of the arts, especially of painting and music. It is assumed, for instance, thatItalian painting progressed mechanically from Giotto to Titian, thatTitian had a greater power of expression than Giotto because he hadcommand of a number of inventions in anatomy and perspective and thelike that were unknown to Giotto. So we have histories of thedevelopment of the symphony, in which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven aretreated as if they were mechanical inventors each profiting by thediscoveries of his predecessors. Beethoven was the greatest of the threebecause he had the luck to be born last, and Beethoven's earliestsymphonies are necessarily better than Mozart's latest because they werecomposed later. But in such histories there always comes a point atwhich artists cease to profit by the inventions of their predecessors. After Michelangelo, perhaps after Beethoven, is the decadence. Thensuddenly there is talk of inspiration, or the lack of it. Mereimitators appear, and the historian who reviles them does not see thatthey have only practised, and refuted, his theory of art. They also havehad the luck to be born later; but it has been bad luck, not good, forthem, because to them their art has been all a matter of mechanicalinvention, of professionalism. 

The worst of it is that the greatest artists are apt themselves to fallin love with their own inventions, not to see that they are mechanicalinventions because they themselves have discovered them. Michelangelo inhis "Last Judgment" is very professional; Titian was professionalthrough all his middle age; Tintoret was professional whenever he wasbored with his work, which happened often; Shakespeare, whenever he waslazy, which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin to see, could bevery earnestly professional; and as for Milton--consider this end of thelast speech of Manoah, in _Samson Agonistes_, where we expect a simplecadence:--

 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 arelike a bad translation of a Greek play, by professionalism. He wastrying to make his poetry as much unlike ordinary speech as he could; hewas for the moment a slave to a tradition, and none the less a slavebecause it was the tradition of his own past. 

Professionalism is a device for making expression easy; and it is oneused by the greatest artists sometimes because their business is to bealways expressing themselves, and even they have not always something toexpress. But expression is so difficult, even for those who havesomething to express, that they must be always practising it if they areever to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance, was a professed enemyof 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 wasmerely 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. Hissubject had already been treated in Scotch poems "in simple balladstrain, " so, he says, "at the outset I threw out a classical image toprepare 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 totell the story, would compare Ellen with a Grecian maid and her wreathsof 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 isall professionalism, all a device for making expression easy, practisedby a great poet because at the moment he had nothing to express. But artis always difficult and cannot be made easy by this means. We need nottake a malicious pleasure in such lapses of the great poet; but it iswell to know when Homer nods, even though he uses all his craft topretend that he is wide awake. Criticism may have a negative as well asa positive value. It may set us on our guard against professionalismeven in the greatest artists, and most of all in them. For it is theywho 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 oftheirs allure us just because they are nothings and make no demandsupon our intelligence. That is art indeed, we cry: and we intoxicateourselves with it because it is merely art. "The quality of mercy is notstrained" is far more popular than Lear's speech, "No, no, no! Come, let's away to prison, " because it is professional rhetoric; it is whatShakespeare could write at any moment, whereas the speech of Lear iswhat Lear said at one particular moment. The contrast between the two isthe contrast well put in the epigram about Barry and Garrick in theirrenderings 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 whenhe has lost his kingship in his passion. 

He no doubt knows the difference well enough. But he wishes to doeverything well, he has a natural human delight in his ownaccomplishment; and a job to finish. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Beethoven were not slaves to their own professionalism; no doubt theycould laugh at it themselves. But there is always a danger that we shallbe enslaved by it; and it is the business of criticism to free us fromthat slavery, to make us aware of this last infirmity of great artists. We are on our guard easily enough against a professionalism that is outof fashion. The Wagnerian of a generation ago could sneer at theprofessionalism of Mozart; but the professionalism of Wagner seemed tohim to be inspiration made constant and certain by a new musicalinvention. We know now only too well, from Wagner's imitators, that hedid not invent a new method of tapping inspiration; we ought to knowthat no one can do that. The more complete the method the more tiresomeit becomes, even as practised by the inventor. 

Decadence in art is always caused by professionalism, which makes thetechnique of art too difficult, and so destroys the artist's energy andjoy in his practice of it. Teachers of the arts are always inclined toinsist on their difficulty and to set hard tasks to their pupils for thesake of their hardness; and often the pupil stays too long learninguntil he thinks that anything which is difficult to do must therefore beworth doing. This notion also overawes the general public so that theyvalue what looks to them difficult; but in art that which seemsdifficult to us fails with us, we are aware of the difficulty, not ofthe art. The greater the work of art the easier it seems to us. We feelthat we could have done it ourselves if only we had had the luck to hitupon that way of doing it; indeed, where our æsthetic experience of itis complete, we feel as if we were doing it ourselves; our minds jumpwith the artist's mind; we are for the moment the artist himself in hisvery act of creation. But we are always apt to undervalue this true andcomplete æsthetic experience, because it seems so easy and simple, andwe mistake for it a painful sense of the artist's skill, of hisprofessional accomplishment. So we demand of artists, that they shallimpress us with their accomplishment; we have not had our money's worthunless we feel that we could not possibly do ourselves what they havedone. No doubt, when the _Songs of Innocence_ were first published, anyone who did happen to read them thought them doggerel. Blake in amoment had freed himself from all the professionalism of the followersof Pope, and even now they make poetry seem an easy art to us, until wetry 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 atleast of wonder that we should be so moved by such simple means. It is akind of cottage-poetry, and has that beauty which in a cottage moves usmore than all the art of palaces. But we never learn the lesson of thatbeauty because it seems to us so easily won; and so our arts are alwaysthreatened by the decadence of professionalism. But poetry in Englandhas been a living art so long because it has had the power of freeingitself from professionalism and choosing the better path with Mary andwith Ruth. The value of the Romantic movement lay, not in its escape tothe wonders of the past, but in its escape from professionalism and allits self-imposed and easy difficulties. For it is much easier to writeprofessional verses in any style than to write songs of innocence; andthat is why professionalism in all the arts tempts all kinds of artists. Anyone can achieve it who has the mind. It is a substitute forexpression, as mere duty is a substitute for virtue. But, as aforbidding sense of duty makes virtue itself seem unattractive, soprofessionalism destroys men's natural delight in the arts. Like theartist himself, his public becomes anxious, perverse, exacting; afraidlest it shall admire the wrong thing, because it has lost the immediatesense of the right thing. Just as it expects art to be difficult, so itexpects its own pleasure in art to be difficult; and thus we haveattained to our present notion about art which is like the Puritannotion about virtue, that it is what no human being could possibly enjoyby nature. And if we do enjoy it, "like a meadow gale in spring, " itcannot be good art. 

But in painting as in poetry, all the new movements of value are escapesfrom professionalism; and they begin by shocking the public because theyseem to make the art too easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work ofMillais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne of Whistler. He said it wascockney impudence because it lacked the professionalism he expected. Artists and critics alike are always binding burdens on the arts; andthey are always angry with the artist who cuts the burden off his back. They think he is merely shirking difficulties. But the difficulty ofexpression is so much greater than the self-imposed difficulties ofmere professionalism that any man who is afraid of difficulties will tryto be a professional rather than an artist. 

In art there is always humility, in professionalism pride. And it isthis pride that makes art more ugly and tiresome than any other work ofman. Nothing is stranger in human nature than the tyranny of boredom itwill endure in the pursuit of art; and the more bored men are, the morethey are convinced of artistic salvation. Our museums are cumbered withmonstrous monuments of past professionalism; our bookshelves groan withthem. Always we are trying to like things because they seem to us verywell 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 stillto us a dog walking on his hind legs, a performer whose merit lies inthe unnatural difficulty of his performance. 

 Waste or Creation?

The William Morris Celebration was not so irrelevant to these times asit may seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe to our society, and it has come. That commercial system of ours, which seems to so manypart of the order of Nature, was to him as evil and unnatural asslavery. His quarrel with it was not political, but human; it was thequarrel not of the oppressed, for he was not the man to be oppressed inany society, but of the workman. He was sure that a society whichencouraged bad work and discouraged good must in some way or other cometo a bad end; and he would have seen in this war the end that hepredicted. Whatever its result, there must be a change in the order ofour society, whether it sinks through incessant wars, national andcommercial, into barbarism or is shocked into an effort to attain tocivilization. There were particular sayings of Morris's to which no oneat the time paid much heed. They seemed mere grumblings against whatmust be. He was, for instance, always crying out against our waste oflabour. 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 matterof demand and supply, and thought no more about it; some said that itwas good for trade. Very few saw, with Morris, that demand for suchthings is something willed and something that ought not to be willed. 

But then it was generally believed that we could afford this waste oflabour; and so it went on until, after a year or two of war, we foundthat we could not afford it. Then even the most ignorant and thoughtlesslearned, from facts, not from books, certain lessons of politicaleconomy. They learned that, in war-time at least, a nation that wastesits labour will be overcome by one that does not. At once the commonwill was set against the waste of labour; and, what would have seemedstrangest of all forty years ago, the Government, with the consent ofthe people, set to work to stop the waste of labour, and did to a greatextent succeed in stopping it. When people thought in terms ofmunitions, instead of in terms of general well-being, they saw that thewaste of labour must be, and could be, stopped. They talked no longerabout the laws of supply and demand, but about munitions. Those who hadmade trash must be set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some way tosecond the Army. Those who still were ready to waste labour on trash forthemselves were no longer obeying the laws of supply and demand; theywere diverting labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic, theywere helping the Germans. Money, in fact, had no longer the right to anabsolute command over labour. A man, before he spent a sovereign, mustask himself whether he was spending it for the good of the nation; andif 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 yearsago tried to teach it for purposes of peace. When he wrote those wordswhich we have quoted, he was not talking politics but ordinary commonsense. He was not even talking art, but rather economics; and he wastalking it not to any vague abstraction called the community, but toeach individual human being. At that time every one thought of economicsas something which concerned society or the universe. It was, so tospeak, a natural science; it observed phenomena as if they were in theheavens; and stated laws about them, laws not human but natural. Perhapsit was the greatest achievement of Morris in the way of thought that hesaw economics, even more clearly than Ruskin, as a matter not of naturallaws, but of conscience and duty. He did not talk about economics atall, but about the waste of labour, just as we talk about it now. Theonly difference is that he saw it to be one of the chief causes ofpoverty in time of peace, whereas we see it as a hindrance to victory intime of war. We have, for war purposes, acquired the conscience that hewished us to acquire for all purposes. The question is whether we shallkeep 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 formerwaste of labour; and, if we persist in it, we shall be bankrupt as asociety. It may be said that we shall not have the money, the power, towaste labour. But we shall certainly have some superfluous energy, moreand more, it is to be hoped, as time goes on; and our future recoverywill depend upon the use we make of this superfluous energy. We canwaste it, as we wasted it before the war; or we can keep the consciencewe have acquired in war and ask ourselves in peace, with every penny wespend, whether we are wasting labour. It is true that what may be wasteto one will not be waste to another; but in that matter every one mustobey his own conscience. The important thing is that every one shouldhave a conscience and obey it. There will be plenty of people to tell usthat no one can define waste of labour. No one can define sin; but eachman has his own conscience on that point and lives well or ill as heobeys it or disobeys it. Besides, there are many things, all the trashthat Morris speaks about in the shop windows, that every one knows to bewaste. We need not trouble ourselves about the fact that art will seemwaste to the philistine and not to the artist. We must allow fordifferences on that point as on most others. Some things that mighthave been waste to Samuel Smiles would have been to Morris a symptom ofwell-being. But he knew, and often said, that we cannot have the beautywhich was to him a symptom of well-being unless we end the waste oflabour 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 inthe country, in the world. Even the most ignorant are aware at last thatmoney does not create labour but only commands it, and may command it todo what will or will not benefit us all. We were, for the purposes ofthe war, much more of a fellowship than we had ever been before. Weacknowledged a duty to each other, the duty of commanding labour to thecommon good. We asked with every sovereign we spent whether it wouldhelp or hinder us in the war. Morris would have us ask also whether itwill help or hinder us in the advance towards a general happiness. 

And he put a further question, which in time of war unfortunately wecould 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? Morrisinsisted on our duty to the workman more even than on our duty tosociety. He saw that where great masses of men do work that they know tobe 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 thinkhe is angry with the rich because they are rich; but the real source ofhis anger is the work that they set him to do with their riches. And noclass war, no redistribution of wealth, will end that discontent if thesame waste of labour continues. Double the wages of every workman in thecountry, and if he spends the increase on trash no one will be anybetter off in mind or body. There will still be poverty and stilldiscontent, with the work if not with the wages. 

The problem for us, for every modern society now, is not so much toredistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but touse our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste itpiecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We haveto solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is notto lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us agreat opportunity. It has opened our eyes, if only we do not shut themagain. It has taught every one in the country the most important of alllessons in political economy which the books often seem to conceal. And, better still, it has taught us that in economics we can exercise our ownwills, that they concern each individual man and woman as much asmorals; that they are morals, and not abstract mathematics; that we havethe same duty towards the country, towards mankind, that we have to ourown families. The proverb, Waste not, want not, does not apply merely toeach private income. We have accounts to settle not only with ourbankers, but with the community. It will thrive or not according as weare thrifty or thriftless; and our thrift depends upon how we spend ourincome, not merely on how much we spend of it. For all that part of itwhich we do not spend on necessaries is the superfluous energy ofmankind, and we determine how it shall be exercised; each individualdetermines 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 thesunlight of the warmer virtues. It is not merely society that we have toconsider, or the direction of its superfluous energy. It is also thehappiness, the life, of actual men and women. We shall not cease towaste work until we think always of the worker behind it, until we seethat it is our duty, if with our money we have command over him, to sethim to work worth doing. Capital now is to most of those who own it ameans of earning interest. We should think of it as creative, as thepower which may make the wilderness blossom like the rose and change theslum into a home for men and women; and, better still, as the power thatmay train and set men to do work that will satisfy their souls, so thatthey shall work for the work's sake and not only for the wages. Untilcapital becomes so creative in the hands of those who own it there willalways be a struggle for the possession of it; and to those who dopossess it it will bring merely superfluities and not happiness. If itbecomes creative, no one will mind much who possesses it. The class warwill be ended by a league of classes, their aim not merely peace, butthose 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 theending of war is a dream. "So long as human nature is what it is therewill always be war. " Those who talk thus think of human nature assomething not ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is not their ownnature. They know that they themselves do not wish for war; but, lookingat mankind in the mass and leaving themselves out of that mass, they seeit governed by some force that is not really human nature, but merelynature "red in tooth and claw, " a process become a malignant goddess, who forces mankind to act contrary to their own desires, contrary evento their own interests. She has taken the place for us of the oldoriginal sin; and the belief in her is far more primitive than thebelief in original sin. She is in fact but a modern name for all themalignant idols that savages have worshipped with sacrifices of bloodand tears that they did not wish to make. It is strange that, pridingourselves as we do on our modern scepticism which has taught us todisbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine, we yet have not daredto affirm the plain fact that this nature, this human nature, does notexist. There is no force, no process, whether within us or outside us, that compels us to act contrary to our desires and our interests. Thereis nothing but fear; and fear can be conquered, as by individuals, so bythe collective will of man. It is fear that produces war, the fear thatother men are not like ourselves, that they are hostile animals governedutterly by the instinct of self-preservation. 

So it is fear that produces the class war and the belief that it mustalways continue. It is our own fears that cut us off from happiness bymaking us despair of it. The man who has capital sees it as a means ofprotecting himself and his children from poverty; it is to him anegative, defensive thing, at best the safeguard of a negative, defensive happiness. So others see it as something which he has and theyhave 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 ofpositive happiness both for himself and for others. He would say tohimself, not How can I protect myself with this against the tyranny ofthe struggle for life? not How can I invest this? but What can I do withthis? He would see it as Michelangelo saw the marble when he looked forthe shape within it. And then he would rise above the conception of mereduty as something we do against our own wills, or of virtue as a luxuryof the spirit to which we escape in our little leisure from thestruggle for life. Virtue, duty, would be for him life itself; increation he would attain to that harmony of duty and pleasure which ishappiness. 

If only we could see that the superfluous energy of mankind is somethingout of which to make the happiness of mankind we should find our ownhappiness in the making of it. There is still for us a gulf betweendoing good to others and the delight of the artist, the craftsman, inhis work. The artist is one kind of man and the philanthropist another;the artist is a selfish person whom we like, and the philanthropist anunselfish person whom we do not like. What we need is to fuse them inour use of capital, in our exercise of the superfluous energy ofmankind. There are single powerful capitalists who know this joy ofcreation, who are benevolent despots, and yet are suspect to the poorbecause of their great power. But it never enters the head of thesmaller investor that he, too, might create instead of merely investing;that, instead of being a shareholder in a limited liability company, hemight be one of a creative fellowship, not merely earning dividends buttransforming 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 beforgotten in a commonwealth. That is the vision of peace which oursacrifices in the war may earn for us. We have learned sacrifice and thejoy of it; but, so far, only so that we may overcome an enemy of our ownkind. There remains to be overcome, by a sacrifice more joyful and withfar greater rewards, this other old enemy not of our own kind, the enemywe call nature or human nature, the enemy that is so powerful merelybecause we dare not believe that she does not exist. 

 PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD. , EDINBURGH