Part 13

Design is the organisation of forms: drawing is the shaping of the forms themselves. Clearly there is a point at which the two commingle, but that is a matter of no present importance. When I say that drawing is bad, I mean that I am not moved by the contours of the forms that make up the work of art. The causes of bad drawing and bad design I believe to be similar. A form is badly drawn when it does not correspond with a part of an emotional conception. The shape of every form in a work of art should be imposed on the artist by his inspiration. The hand of the artist, I believe, must be guided by the necessity of expressing something he has felt not only intensely but definitely. The artist must know what he is about, and what he is about must be, if I am right, the translation into material form of something that he felt in a spasm of ecstasy. Therefore, shapes that merely fill gaps will be ill-drawn. Forms that are not dictated by any emotional necessity, forms that state facts, forms that are the consequences of a theory of draughtsmanship, imitations of natural objects or of the forms of other works of art, forms that exist merely to fill spaces--padding in fact,--all these are worthless. Good drawing must be inspired, it must be the natural manifestation of that thrill which accompanies the passionate apprehension of form.

One word more to close this discussion. No critic is so stupid as to mean by "bad drawing," drawing that does not represent the model correctly. The gods of the art schools, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Raffael, &c. played the oddest tricks with anatomy. Everyone knows that Giotto's figures are less accurately drawn than those of Sir Edward Poynter; no one supposes that they are not drawn better. We do possess a criterion by which we can judge drawing, and that criterion can have nothing to do with truth to nature. We judge drawing by concentrating our aesthetic sensibility on a particular part of design. What we mean when we speak of "good drawing" and "bad drawing" is not doubtful; we mean "aesthetically moving" and "aesthetically insignificant." Why some drawing moves and some does not is a very different question. I have put forward an hypothesis of which I could write a pretty sharp criticism: that task, however, I leave to more willing hands. Only this I will say: just as a competent musician knows with certainty when an instrument is out of tune though the criterion resides nowhere but in his own sensibility; so a fine critic of visual art can detect lines and colours that are not alive. Whether he be looking at an embroidered pattern or at a careful anatomical study, the task is always the same, because the criterion is always the same. What he has to decide is whether the drawing is, or is not, aesthetically significant.

Insistence on design is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the movement. To all are familiar those circumambient black lines that are intended to give definition to forms and to reveal the construction of the picture. For almost all the younger artists,--Bonnard is an obvious exception--affect that architectural method of design which indeed has generally been preferred by European artists. The difference between "architectural design" and what I call "imposed design" will be obvious to anyone who compares a picture by Cézanne with a picture by Whistler. Better still, compare any first-rate Florentine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century with any Sung picture. Here are two methods of achieving the same end, equally good, so far as I can judge, and as different as possible. We feel towards a picture by Cézanne or Masaccio or Giotto as we feel towards a Romanesque church; the design seems to spring upwards, mass piles itself on mass, forms balance each other masonrywise: there is a sense of strain, and of strength to meet it. Turn to a Chinese picture; the forms seem to be pinned to the silk or to be hung from above. There is no sense of thrust or strain; rather there is the feeling of some creeper, with roots we know not where, that hangs itself in exquisite festoons along the wall. Though architectural design is a permanent characteristic of Western art, of four periods I think it would be fairly accurate to say that it is a characteristic so dominant as to be distinctive; and they are Byzantine VIth Century, Byzantine IX-XIIIth Century, Florentine XIVth and XVth Century, and the Contemporary Movement.

To say that the artists of the movement insist on design is not to deny that some of them are exceptionally fine colourists. Cézanne is one of the greatest colourists that ever lived; Henri-Matisse is a great colourist. Yet all, or nearly all, use colour as a mode of form. They design in colour, that is in coloured shapes. Very few fall into the error of regarding colour as an end in itself, and of trying to think of it as something different from form. Colour in itself has little or no significance. The mere juxtaposition of tones moves us hardly at all. As colourists themselves are fond of saying, "It is the quantities that count." It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colours, and the combinations of those shapes, that we recognise the colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. It is a virtue in contemporary artists that they have set their faces against the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour without much considering their formal relations, and that they attempt so to organise tones as to raise form to its highest significance. But it is not surprising that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those black lines that seem to do violence to their darling. They are irritated by pictures in which there is to be no accidental charm of soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro. They do not admire the austere determination of these young men to make their work independent and self-supporting and unbeholden to adventitious dainties. They cannot understand this passion for works that are admirable as wholes, this fierce insistence on design, this willingness to leave bare the construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to a conception of the plan. Critics of the Impressionist age are vexed by the naked bones and muscles of Post-Impressionist pictures. But, for my own part, even though these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far from blaming a band of ascetics who in an age of unorganised prettiness insisted on the paramount importance of design.

III

THE PATHETIC FALLACY

Many of those who are enthusiastic about the movement, were they asked what they considered its most important characteristic, would reply, I imagine, "The expression of a new and peculiar point of view." "Post-Impressionism," I have heard people say, "is an expression of the ideas and feelings of that spiritual renaissance which is now growing into a lusty revolution." With this I cannot, of course, agree. If art expresses anything, it expresses some profound and general emotion common, or at least possible, to all ages, and peculiar to none. But if these sympathetic people mean, as I believe they do, that the art of the new movement is a manifestation of something different from--they will say larger than--itself, of a spiritual revolution in fact, I will not oppose them. Art is as good an index to the spiritual state of this age as of another; and in the effort of artists to free painting from the clinging conventions of the near past, and to use it as a means only to the most sublime emotions, we may read signs of an age possessed of a new sense of values and eager to turn that possession to account. It is impossible to visit a good modern exhibition without feeling that we are back in a world not altogether unworthy to be compared with that which produced primitive art. Here are men who take art seriously. Perhaps they take life seriously too, but if so, that is only because there are things in life (aesthetic ecstasy, for instance) worth taking seriously. In life, they can distinguish between the wood and the few fine trees. As for art, they know that it is something more important than a criticism of life; they will not pretend that it is a traffic in amenities; they know that it is a spiritual necessity. They are not making handsome furniture, nor pretty knick-knacks, nor tasteful souvenirs; they are creating forms that stir our most wonderful emotions.

It is tempting to suppose that art such as this implies an attitude towards society. It seems to imply a belief that the future will not be a mere repetition of the past, but that by dint of willing and acting men will conquer for themselves a life in which the claims of spirit and emotion will make some headway against the necessities of physical existence. It seems, I say: but it would be exceedingly rash to assume anything of the sort, and, for myself, I doubt whether the good artist bothers much more about the future than about the past. Why should artists bother about the fate of humanity? If art does not justify itself, aesthetic rapture does. Whether that rapture is to be felt by future generations of virtuous and contented artisans is a matter of purely speculative interest. Rapture suffices. The artist has no more call to look forward than the lover in the arms of his mistress. There are moments in life that are ends to which the whole history of humanity would not be an extravagant means; of such are the moments of aesthetic ecstasy. It is as vain to imagine that the artist works with one eye on The Great State of the future, as to go to his art for an expression of political or social opinions. It is not their attitude towards the State or towards life, but the pure and serious attitude of these artists towards their art, that makes the movement significant of the age. Here are men who refuse all compromise, who will hire no half-way house between what they believe and what the public likes; men who decline flatly, and over-stridently sometimes, to concern themselves at all with what seems to them unimportant. To call the art of the movement democratic--some people have done so--is silly. All artists are aristocrats in a sense, since no artist believes honestly in human equality; in any other sense to call an artist an aristocrat or a democrat is to call him something irrelevant or insulting. The man who creates art especially to move the poor or especially to please the rich prostitutes whatever of worth may be in him. A good many artists have maimed or ruined themselves by pretending that, besides the distinction between good art and bad, there is a distinction between aristocratic art and plebeian. In a sense all art is anarchical; to take art seriously is to be unable to take seriously the conventions and principles by which societies exist. It may be said with some justice that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it insists so emphatically on fundamentals and challenges so violently the conventional tradition of art and, by implication, I suppose, the conventional view of life. By setting art so high, it sets industrial civilisation very low. Here, then, it may shake hands with the broader and vaguer spirit of the age; the effort to produce serious art may bear witness to a stir in the underworld, to a weariness of smug materialism and a more passionate and spiritual conception of life. The art of the movement, in so far as it is art, expresses nothing temporal or local; but it may be a manifestation of something that is happening here and now, something of which the majority of mankind seems hardly yet to be aware.

Men and women who have been thrilled by the pure aesthetic significance of a work of art go away into the outer world in a state of excitement and exaltation which makes them more sensitive to all that is going forward about them. Thus, they realise with a heightened intensity the significance and possibility of life. It is not surprising that they should read this new sense of life into that which gave it. Not in the least; and I shall not quarrel with them for doing so. It is far more important to be moved by art than to know precisely what it is that moves. I should just like to remind them, though, that if art were no more than they sometimes fancy it to be, art would not move them as it does. If art were a mere matter of suggesting the emotions of life a work of art would give to each no more than what each brought with him. It is because art adds something new to our emotional experience, something that comes not from human life but from pure form, that it stirs us so deeply and so mysteriously. But that, for many, art not only adds something new, but seems to transmute and enrich the old, is certain and by no means deplorable.

The fact is, this passionate and austere art of the Contemporary Movement is not only an index to the general ferment, it is also the inspiration, and even the standard, of a young, violent, and fierce generation. It is the most visible and the most successful manifestation of their will, or they think it is. Political reform, social reform, literature even, move slowly, ankle-deep in the mud of materialism and deliquescent tradition. Though not without reason Socialists claim that Liberals ride their horses, the jockeys still wear blue and buff. Mr. Lloyd George stands unsteadily on the shoulders of Mr. Gladstone; the bulk of his colleagues cling on behind. If literature is to be made the test, we shall soon be wishing ourselves back in the nineteenth century. Unless it be Thomas Hardy, there is no first-rate novelist in Europe; there is no first-rate poet; without disrespect to D'Annunzio, Shaw, or Claudel, it may be said that Ibsen was their better. Since Mozart, music has just kept her nose above the slough of realism, romance, and melodrama. Music seems to be where painting was in the time of Courbet; she is drifting through complex intellectualism and a brilliant, exasperating realism, to arrive, I hope, at greater purity.[26] Contemporary painting is the one manifest triumph of the young age. Not even the oldest and wisest dare try to smile it away. Those who cannot love Cézanne and Matisse hate them; and they not only say it, they shriek it. It is not surprising, then, that visual art, which seems to many the mirror in which they see realised their own ideals, should have become for some a new religion. Not content with its aesthetic significance, these seek in art an inspiration for the whole of life. For some of us, to be sure, the aesthetic significance is a sufficient inspiration; for the others I have no hard words. To art they take their most profound and subtle emotions, their most magnanimous ideas, their dearest hopes; from art they bring away enriched and purified emotion and exaltation, and fresh sources of both. In art they imagine that they find an expression of their most intimate and mysterious feelings; and, though they miss, not utterly but to some extent, the best that art has to give, if of art they make a religion I do not blame them.

In the days of Alexander Severus there lived at Rome a Greek freed man. As he was a clever craftsman his lot was not hard. His body was secure, his belly full, his hands and brain pleasantly busy. He lived amongst intelligent people and handsome objects, permitting himself such reasonable emotions as were recommended by his master, Epicurus. He awoke each morning to a quiet day of ordered satisfaction, the prescribed toll of unexacting labour, a little sensual pleasure, a little rational conversation, a cool argument, a judicious appreciation of all that the intellect can apprehend. Into this existence burst suddenly a cranky fanatic, with a religion. To the Greek it seemed that the breath of life had blown through the grave, imperial streets. Yet nothing in Rome was changed, save one immortal, or mortal, soul. The same waking eyes opened on the same objects; yet all was changed; all was charged with meaning. New things existed. Everything mattered. In the vast equality of religious emotion the Greek forgot his status and his nationality. His life became a miracle and an ecstasy. As a lover awakes, he awoke to a day full of consequence and delight. He had learnt to feel; and, because to feel a man must live, it was good to be alive. I know an erudite and intelligent man, a man whose arid life had been little better than one long cold in the head, for whom that madman, Van Gogh, did nothing less.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: Need I say that this list is not intended to be exhaustive? It is merely representative.]

[Footnote 24: Let us hope that it will. There certainly are ominous signs of academization amongst the minor men of the movement. There is the beginning of a tendency to regard certain simplifications and distortions as ends in themselves and party badges. There is some danger of an attempt to impose a formula on the artist's individuality. At present the infection has not spread far, and the disease has taken a mild form.]

[Footnote 25: Of course there are some good artists alive who owe nothing to Cézanne. Fortunately two of Cézanne's contemporaries, Degas and Renoir, are still at work. Also there are a few who belong to the older movement, _e.g._ Mr. Walter Sickert, M. Simon Bussy, M. Vuillard, Mr. J.W. Morrice. I should be as unwilling to omit these names from a history of twentieth century art as to include them in a chapter devoted to the contemporary movement.]

[Footnote 26: June 1913. _Ariadne in Naxos._ Is Strauss, our one musician of genius, himself the pivot on which the wheel is beginning to swing? Having drained the cup of Wagnerism and turned it upside down, is he now going to school with Mozart?]

V

THE FUTURE

I. SOCIETY AND ART

II. ART AND SOCIETY

[Illustration: PICASSO]

I

SOCIETY AND ART

To bother much about anything but the present is, we all agree, beneath the dignity of a healthy human animal. Yet how many of us can resist the malsane pleasure of puzzling over the past and speculating about the future? Once admit that the Contemporary Movement is something a little out of the common, that it has the air of a beginning, and you will catch yourself saying "Beginning of what?" instead of settling down quietly to enjoy the rare spectacle of a renaissance. Art, we hope, serious, alive, and independent is knocking at the door, and we are impelled to ask "What will come of it?" This is the general question, which, you will find, divides itself into two sufficiently precise queries--"What will Society do with Art?" and "What will Art do with Society?"

It is a mistake to suppose that because Society cannot affect Art directly, it cannot affect it at all. Society can affect Art indirectly because it can affect artists directly. Clearly, if the creation of works of art were made a capital offence, the quantity, if not the quality, of artistic output would be affected. Proposals less barbarous, but far more terrible, are from time to time put forward by cultivated state-projectors who would make of artists, not criminals, but highly-paid officials. Though statesmanship can do no positive good to art, it can avoid doing a great deal of harm: its power for ill is considerable. The one good thing Society can do for the artist is to leave him alone. Give him liberty. The more completely the artist is freed from the pressure of public taste and opinion, from the hope of rewards and the menace of morals, from the fear of absolute starvation or punishment, and from the prospect of wealth or popular consideration, the better for him and the better for art, and therefore the better for everyone. Liberate the artist: here is something that those powerful and important people who are always assuring us that they would do anything for art can do.

They might begin the work of encouragement by disestablishing and disendowing art; by withdrawing doles from art schools, and confiscating the moneys misused by the Royal Academy. The case of the schools is urgent. Art schools do nothing but harm, because they must do something. Art is not to be learned; at any rate it is not to be taught. All that the drawing-master can teach is the craft of imitation. In schools there must be a criterion of excellence and that criterion cannot be an artistic one; the drawing-master sets up the only criterion he is capable of using--fidelity to the model. No master can make a student into an artist; but all can, and most do, turn into impostors, maniacs, criminals, or just cretins, the unfortunate boys and girls who had been made artists by nature. It is not the master's fault and he ought not to be blamed. He is there to bring all his pupils to a certain standard of efficiency appreciable by inspectors and by the general public, and the only quality of which such can judge is verisimilitude. The only respects in which one work can be seen to differ from another by an ordinarily insensitive person (_e.g._ a Board of Education inspector) are choice of subject and fidelity to common vision. So, even if a drawing-master could recognise artistic talent, he would not be permitted to encourage it. It is not that drawing-masters are wicked, but that the system is vicious. Art schools must go.

The money that the State at present devotes to the discouragement of Art had better, I dare say, be given to the rich. It would be tempting to save it for the purchase of works of art, but perhaps that can lead to nothing but mischief. It is unthinkable that any Government should ever buy what is best in the work of its own age; it is a question how far purchase by the State even of fine old pictures is a benefit to art. It is not a question that need be discussed; for though a State may have amongst its employés men who can recognise a fine work of art, provided it be sufficiently old, a modern State will be careful to thwart and stultify their dangerously good taste. State-acquisition of fine ancient art might or might not be a means to good--I daresay it would be; but the purchase of third-rate old masters and _objets d'art_ can benefit no one except the dealers. As I shall hope to show, something might be said for supporting and enriching galleries and museums, if only the public attitude towards, and the official conception of, these places could be changed. As for contemporary art, official patronage is the surest method of encouraging in it all that is most stupid and pernicious. Our public monuments, the statues and buildings that disgrace our streets, our postage-stamps, coins, and official portraits are mere bait to the worst instincts of the worst art-students and to the better a formidable temptation.