Part 10

, Aph. "Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is accident. Studying 'according to nature' seems to me a bad sign; it betrays subjection, weakness, fatalism; this lying-in-the-dust before petit fails is unworthy of a complete artist. Seeing what is--that belongs to another species of intellects, to the anti-artistic, to the practical."

[41] See Woltmann and Woermann, _History of Painting_, Vol. I, p. 62.

[42] _B. T._, p. 59. See also Schopenhauer, _Parerga und Paralipomena_, Vol. II, p. 447.

[43] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 255.

[44] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 241.

[45] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 95: "A people that are proud of themselves, and who are on the ascending path of Life, always picture another existence as lower and less valuable than theirs."

5. The Confusion of the Two Points of View.

It is obvious that if both pleasures are to remain pure and undefiled-- if the artist is to attain to his zenith in happiness, and the layman to his also--their particular points of view must not be merged, dulled, or blunted by excessive spiritual intercourse.[46] For a very large amount of the disorder in the arts of the present can easily be traced to a confusion of the two points of view.

In an ideal society, the artist's standpoint would be esoteric, and the layman's exoteric.

Nowadays, of course, owing to the process of universal levelling which has been carried so far that it is invading even the department of sex, it is hard to find such distinctions as the artist's and the layman's standpoint in art sharply and definitely juxtaposed. And this fact accounts for a good deal of the decrease in æsthetic pleasure, which is so characteristic of the age. In fact, it accounts for the decrease of pleasure in general, for only where there are sharp differences can there be any great pleasure. Pessimism and melancholia can arise only in inartistic ages, when a process of levelling has merged all the joys of particular standpoints into one.

Let me give you a simple example, drawn from modern life and the pictorial arts, in order to show you to what extent the standpoint of the people or of the layman has become corrupted by the standpoint of the artist, and vice-versâ.

Strictly speaking, artists in search of scope for their powers should prefer Hampstead Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau[47] to the carefully laid-out gardens of our parks and of Versailles. Conversely, if their taste were still uncorrupted, the public ought to prefer the carefully arranged gardens of our parks and of Versailles to Hampstead Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau.

Some of the public, of course, still do hold the proper views on these points, but their number is rapidly diminishing, and most of them assume the airs of artists now, and speak with sentimental enthusiasm about the beautiful ruggedness of craggy rocks, the glorious beauty of uncultivated Nature, and the splendour of wild scenery.[48]

[Illustration: The Marriage of Mary. By Raphael. (Brera, Milan.)]

Artists, on the other hand, having become infected by the public's original standpoint--the desire for order--either paint pictures like Raphael's "Marriage of Mary,"[49] his "Virgin and Child attended by St. John the Baptist and St. Nicholas of Bari,"[50] and Perugino's "Vision of St. Bernard,"[51] in which the perfectly symmetrical aspect and position of the architecture is both annoying and inartistic, owing to the fact that it was looked at by the artist from a point at which it was orderly and arranged before he actually painted it, and could not therefore testify to his power of simplifying or ordering--but simply to his ability to avail himself of another artist's power, namely, the architect's; or else, having become infected by the public's corrupt standpoint--the desire for disorder and chaos as an end in itself-- they paint as Ruysdael, Hobbema and Constable painted--that is to say, without imparting anything of themselves, or of their power to order and simplify, to the content of the picture, lest the desire for disorder or chaos should be thwarted.[52]

This is an exceedingly important point, and its value for art criticism cannot be overrated. If one can trust one's taste, and it is still a purely public taste, it is possible to tell at a glance why one cannot get oneself to like certain pictures in which either initial regularity has been too great, thus leaving no scope for the artist's power, or in which final irregularity is too great, thus betraying no evidence of the artist's power.

Looking at Rubens' "Ceres,"[53] in which the architecture is viewed also in a frontal position, you may be tempted to ask why such a picture is not displeasing, despite the original symmetry of the architecture in the position in which the painter chose to paint it. The reply is simple. Here Rubens certainly placed the architecture full-face; but besides dissimulating the greater part of it in shadow-- which in itself produces unsymmetrical shapes that have subsequently to be arranged by tone composition--lie carefully disordered it by means of garlands and festoons, and only then did he exercise his artistic mind in making a harmonious and orderly pictorial arrangement of it, which also included some cupids skilfully placed.

All realism, or Police Art, therefore, in addition to being the outcome of the will to truth which Christianity and its offshoot Modern Science have infused into the arts, may also be the result of the artist's becoming infected either with the public's pure taste, or with the public's corrupted or artist-infected taste, and we are thus in possession of one more clue as to what constitutes a superior work of graphic art.

[46] _W. P._, Vol. II, pp. 255, 256.

[47] In regard to this point it is interesting to note that Kant, in his _Kritik der Urteilskraft_, actually called landscape-painting a process of gardening.

[48] I do not mean to imply here that all the sentimental gushing that is given vent to nowadays over rugged and wild scenery is the outcome only of a confusion of the artist's and layman's standpoints. The influence of the Christian and Protestant worship of pointless freedom, together with that of their contempt of the work of man, is largely active here; and the sight of unhandseled and wild shrubs, and of tangled and matted grasses, cheers the heart of the fanatical believer in the purposeless freedom and anarchy which Christianity and Protestantism have done so much to honour and extol. That the same man who honours government and an aristocratic ideal may often be found to-day dilating upon the charms of chaotic scenery, only shows how muddle-headed and confused mankind has become.

[49] The Brera at Milan.

[50] The National Gallery, London. Raphael was very much infected with the people's point of view, hence the annoying stiltedness of many of his pictures.

[51] Pinakothek, Munich.

[52] See particularly, Ruysdael's "Rocky Landscape," "Landscape with a Farm" (Wallace collection); Hobbema's "Outskirts of a Wood" and many others in the Wallace collection; and Constable's "Flatford Mill" and "The Haywain" (National Gallery).

[53] Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg.

6. The Meaning of Beauty of Form and of Beauty of Content in Art.

So far, then, I have arrived at this notion of beauty in Ruler-Art, namely: that it may be regarded almost universally as that order, simplicity and transfiguration which the artist mind imparts to the content of his production. This notion seems to allow of almost universal application, because, as I showed in the first part of this lecture, it involves one of the primary instincts of man--the overcoming of chaos and anarchy by adjustment, simplification and transfiguration. It is only in democratic ages, or ages of decline, when instincts become disintegrated, that beauty in Art is synonymous with a lack of simplicity, of order and of transfiguration. I have shown, however, that the second kind of beauty, or democratic beauty, is of an inferior kind to that of the first beauty, or Ruler beauty, because, while the former takes its root in the will to live, the latter arises surely and truly out of the will to power.[54] Either beauty, however, constitutes ugliness in its opponent's opinion.

But there is another aspect of Beauty in Art which has to be considered, and that is the intrinsic beauty of the content of an artistic production. You may say that, _ex hypothesi_, I have denied that there could be any such beauty. Not at all!

Since the ruler-artist transfigures by enhancement, by embellishment and by ennoblement, his mind can be stimulated perfectly well by an object or a human being which to the layman is vertiginously beautiful, and which to himself is exceedingly pleasing. In fact, if his mind is a mind which, like that of most master-artists, adores that which is difficult, it will go in search of the greatest natural beauty it can find, in order, by a stupendous effort in transfiguration, to outstrip even that; for the embellishment of the downright ugly and the downright revolting presents a task too easy to the powerful artist--a fact which explains a good deal of the ugly contents of many a modern picture.

What, then, constitutes the beauty of the content in an artistic production, as distinct from the beauty of the treatment? In other words, what is beauty in a subject?

For the notion that the subject does not matter in a picture is one which should be utterly and severely condemned. It arose at a time when art was diseased, when artists themselves had ceased from having anything of importance to say, when the subjects chosen had no meaning, and when technique was bad. And it must be regarded more in the light of a war-cry coming from a counter-movement, aiming at an improved technique and rebelling against an abuse of literature in the graphic arts, than in the light of sound doctrine, taking its foundation in normal and healthy conditions.

The intrinsic beauty of the content or substance of a picture or sculpture may therefore be the subject of legitimate inquiry, and in determining what it consists of, we raise the whole question of content beauty.

Volumes, stacks of volumes, have been written on this question. The most complicated and incomprehensible answers have been given to it, and not one can be called satisfactory; for all of them would be absolute.

When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as "that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium,"[55] we feel, or at least _I_ feel, that something must be wrong. It is definitions such as these which compel one to seek for something more definite and more lucid in the matter of explanation, and if, in finding the latter, one may seem a little too prosaic and _terre-à-terre_, it is only because the transcendental and metaphysical nature of the kind of definition we have just quoted makes anything which is in the slightest degree clearer, appear earthly and material beside it.

It is obvious that, if we could only arrive at a subject-beauty which was absolute, practically all the difficulties of our task would vanish. For having established the fact that the purpose of the graphic arts is to determine the values beautiful and ugly, it would only remain for us to urge all artists to advocate that absolute subject-beauty with all the eloquence of line and colour that our concept of Art-form would allow, and all the problems of Art would be solved.

But we can postulate no such absolute in subject-beauty. "Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth."[56] The term "beautiful," like the term "good," is only a means to an end. It is simply the arbitrary self-affirmation of a certain type of man in his struggle to prevail.[57] He says "Yea" to his type, and calls it beautiful. He cannot extend his power and overcome other types unless with complete confidence and assurance he says "Yea" to his own type.

You and I, therefore, can speak of the beautiful with an understanding of what that term means, only on condition that our values, our traditions, our desires, and our outlook are exactly the same. If you agree with me on the question of what is good, our agreement simply means this, that in that corner of the world from which you and I hail, the same creator of values prevails over both of us. Likewise, if you and I agree on the question of what is beautiful, this fact merely denotes that as individuals coming from the same people, we have our values, our tradition and our outlook in common.

"Beautiful," then, is a purely relative term which may be applied to a host of dissimilar types and which every people must apply to its own type alone, if it wishes to preserve its power. Biologically, absolute beauty exists only within the confines of a particular race. That race which would begin to consider another type than their own as beautiful, would thereby cease from being a race. We may be kind, amiable, and even hospitable to the Chinaman or the Negro; but the moment we begin to share the Chinaman's or the Negro's view of beauty, we run the risk of cutting ourselves adrift from our own people.

But assuming, as we must, that all people, the Chinese, the Negroes, the Hindus, the Red Indians, and the Arabs between themselves apply the word beautiful only to particular individuals among their own people, in order to distinguish them from less beautiful or mediocre individuals--what meaning has the term in that case?

Obviously, since the spirit of the people, its habits, prejudices and prepossessions are determined by their values, and values may fix a type, that creature will be most beautiful among them who is the highest embodiment and outcome of all their values, and who therefore corresponds most to the ideal their æsthetic legislator had in mind when he created their values.[58] Thus even morality can be justified æsthetically.[59] And in legislating for primeval peoples, higher men and artist-legislators certainly worked like sculptors on a yielding medium which was their own kind.

The most beautiful negro or Chinaman thus becomes that individual negro or Chinaman who is rich in those features which the life-spirit of the Ethiopian or Chinese people is calculated to produce, and who, owing to a long and regular observance of the laws and traditions of his people, by his ancestors for generations, has inherited that regularity of form in his type, which all long observance of law and order is bound to cultivate and to produce.[60] And in reviewing the peoples of Europe alone, we can ascribe the many and different views which they have held and still hold of beauty, only to a difference in the values they have observed for generations in their outlook, their desires and their beliefs.

It is quite certain, therefore, that, in the graphic arts, which either determine or accentuate the values "ugly" and "beautiful," every artist who sets up his notion of what is subject-beauty, like every lover about to marry, either assails or confirms and consolidates the values of his people.[61]

Examples of this, if they were needed, are to be found everywhere. See how the Gothic school of painting, together with men like Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, El Greco, and subsequently Burne-Jones, set up the soulful person, the person of tenuous, nervous and heaven-aspiring slenderness, as the type of beauty, thus advocating and establishing Christian values in a very seductive and often artistic manner; while the Pagans, with Michelangelo, Titian, and even Rubens, represented another code of values--perhaps even several other codes-- and sought to fix their type also.

Note, too, how hopeless are the attempts of artists who stand for the Pagan ideal, when they paint Christian saints and martyrs, and how singularly un-Pagan those figures are which appear in the pictures of the advocates of the Christian ideal when they attempt Pagan types. Christ by Rubens is not the emaciated, tenuous Person suffering from a wasting disease that Segna represents him to be; while the Mars and Venus of Botticelli in the National Gallery would have been repudiated with indignation by any Greek of antiquity.

When values are beginning to get mixed, then, owing to an influx of foreigners from all parts of the world, we shall find the strong biological idea of absolute beauty tending to disappear, and in its place we shall find the weak and wholly philosophical belief arising that beauty is relative. Thus, in Attica of the fifth century B.C., when 300,000 slaves, chiefly foreigners, were to be counted among the inhabitants, the idea that beauty was a relative term first occurred to the "talker" Socrates.

Still, in all concepts of beauty, however widely separated and however diametrically opposed, there is this common factor: that the beautiful person is the outcome of a long observance through generations of the values peculiar to a people. A certain regularity of form and feature, whether this form and feature be Arab, Ethiopian or Jewish, is indicative of a certain regular mode of life which has lasted for generations; and in calling this indication beautiful, a people once more affirms itself and its values. If the creature manifesting this regularity be a Chinaman, he will be the most essential Chinaman that the Chinese values can produce; his face will reveal no fighting and discordant values; there will be no violent contrasts of type in his features, and, relative to Chinese values, his face will be the most regular and harmonious that can be seen, and therefore the most beautiful.[62] The Chinese ruler-artist, in representing a mediocre Chinaman, would therefore exercise his transfiguring powers to overcome any discordant features in the face before him, and would thus produce a beautiful type.[63] Or, if his model happened to be the highest product of Chinese values, his object would be to transcend even that, and to point to something higher.

Once again, therefore, though it is impossible to posit a universal concept of subject-beauty, various concepts may be given an order of rank, subject to the values with which they happen to be associated.

[54] If this book be read in conjunction with my monograph on _Nietzsche: his Life and Works_ (Constable), or my _Who is to be Master of the World?_ (Foulis), there ought to be no difficulty in understanding this point.

[55] B. Bosanquet, _A History of Æsthetic_, p. 4.

[56] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 246. See also _T. I._, Part 10 , Aph. 19: "The 'beautiful in itself' is merely an expression, not even a concept."

[57] _T. I._,