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.
Some of those generous prophets who sit at home dreaming of pure communistic societies have been good enough to find a place in them for the artist. Demos is to keep for his diversion a kennel of mountebanks. Artists will be chosen by the State and supported by the State. The people will pay the piper and call the tune. In the choice of politicians the method works well enough, but to art it would be fatal. The creation of soft artistic jobs is the most unlikely method of encouraging art. Already hundreds take to it, not because they have in them that which must be expressed, but because art seems to offer a pleasant and genteel career. When the income is assured the number of those who fancy art as a profession will not diminish. On the contrary, in the great State of the future the competition will be appalling. I can imagine the squeezing and intriguing between the friends of applicants and their parliamentary deputies, between the deputies and the Minister of Fine Arts; and I can imagine the art produced to fulfil a popular mandate in the days when private jobbery will be the only check on public taste. Can we not all imagine the sort of man that would be chosen? Have we no experience of what the people love? Comrades, dear democratic ladies and gentlemen, pursue, by all means, your schemes for righting the world, dream your dreams, conceive Utopias, but leave the artists out. For, tell me honestly, does any one of you believe that during the last three hundred years a single good artist would have been supported by your system? And remember, unless it had supported him it would not have allowed him to exist. Remember, too, that you will have to select or reject your artists while yet they are students—you will not be able to wait until a name has been imposed on you by years of reputation with a few good judges. If Degas is now reverenced as a master that is because his pictures fetch long prices, and his pictures fetch long prices because a handful of people who would soon have been put under the great civic pump have been for years proclaiming his mastery. And during those long years how has Degas lived? On the bounty of the people who love all things beautiful, or on the intelligence and discrimination of a few rich or richish patrons? In the great State you will not be able to take your masters ready-made with years of reputation behind them; you will have to pick them yourselves, and pick them young.
Here you are, then, at the door of your annual exhibition of students' work; you are come to choose two State pensioners, and pack the rest off to clean the drains of Melbourne. They will be chosen by popular vote—the only fair way of inducting a public entertainer to a snug billet. But, unknown to you, I have placed amongst the exhibits two drawings by Claude and one by Ingres; and at this exhibition there are no names on the catalogue. Do you think my men will get a single vote? Possibly; but dare one of you suggest that in competition with any rubbishy sensation-monger either of them will stand a chance? "Oh, but," you say, "in the great new State everyone will be well educated." "Let them," I reply, "be as well educated as the M.A.s of Oxford and Cambridge who have been educated from six to six-and-twenty: and I suggest that to do even that will come pretty dear. Well, then, submit your anonymous collection of pictures to people qualified to elect members of parliament for our two ancient universities, and you know perfectly well that you will get no better result. So, don't be silly: even private patronage is less fatal to art than public. Whatever else you may get, you will never get an artist by popular election."
You say that the State will select through two or three highly sensitive officials. In the first place you have got to catch your officials. And remember, these, too, in the eyes of their fellow-workers, will be men who have got hold of a soft thing. The considerations that govern the selection of State-paid artists will control the election of State-paid experts. By what sign shall the public recognise the man of sensibility, always supposing that it is a man of sensibility the public wants? John Jones, the broker's man, thinks himself quite as good a judge of art as Mr. Fry, and apparently Mr. Asquith thinks the trustees of the National Gallery better than either. Suppose you have by some miracle laid hands on a man of aesthetic sensibility and made him your officer, he will still have to answer for his purchases to a popularly elected parliament. Things are bad enough at present: the people will not tolerate a public monument that is a work of art, neither do their obedient servants wish to impose such a thing on them; but when no one can live as an artist without becoming a public servant, when all works of art are public monuments, do you seriously expect to have any art at all? When the appointment of artists becomes a piece of party patronage does anyone doubt that a score of qualifications will stand an applicant in better stead than that of being an artist? Imagine Mr. Lloyd George nominating Mr. Roger Fry Government selector of State-paid artists. Imagine—and here I am making no heavy demand on your powers—imagine Mr. Fry appointing some obscure and shocking student of unconventional talent. Imagine Mr. Lloyd George going down to Limehouse to defend the appointment before thousands of voters, most of whom have a son, a brother, a cousin, a friend, or a little dog who, they feel sure, is much better equipped for the job.
If the great communistic society is bent on producing art—and the society that does not produce live art is damned—there is one thing, and one only, that it can do. Guarantee to every citizen, whether he works or whether he loafs, a bare minimum of existence—say sixpence a day and a bed in the common dosshouse. Let the artist be a beggar living on public charity. Give to the industrious practical workers the sort of things they like, big salaries, short hours, social consideration, expensive pleasures. Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of his trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute. For all let there be a choice between a life of dignified, highly-paid, and not over-exacting employment and the despicable life of a vagrant. There can be little doubt about the choice of most, and none about that of a real artist. Art and Religion are very much alike, and in the East, where they understand these things, there has always been a notion that religion should be an amateur affair. The pungis of India are beggars. Let artists all over the world be beggars too. Art and Religion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not produce to live—they live to produce. There is no place for them in a social system based on the theory that what men desire is prolonged and pleasant existence. You cannot fit them into the machine, you must make them extraneous to it. You must make pariahs of them, since they are not a part of society but the salt of the earth.
In saying that the mass of mankind will never be capable of making delicate aesthetic judgments, I have said no more than the obvious truth. A sure sensibility in visual art is at least as rare as a good ear for music. No one imagines that all are equally capable of judging music, or that a perfect ear can be acquired by study: only fools imagine that the power of nice discrimination in other arts is not a peculiar gift. Nevertheless there is no reason why the vast majority should not become very much more sensitive to art than it is; the ear can be trained to a point. But for the better appreciation, as for the freer creation, of art more liberty is needed. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people who visit picture galleries need to be delivered from that "museum atmosphere" which envelops works of art and asphyxiates beholders. They, the ninety-nine, should be encouraged to approach works of art courageously and to judge them on their merits. Often they are more sensitive to form and colour than they suppose. I have seen people show a nice taste in cottons and calicoes, and things not recognised as "Art" by the custodians of museums, who would not hesitate to assert of any picture by Andrea del Sarto that it must be more beautiful than any picture by a child or a savage. In dealing with objects that are not expected to imitate natural forms or to resemble standard masterpieces they give free rein to their native sensibility. It is only in the presence of a catalogue that complete inhibition sets in. Traditional reverence is what lies heaviest on spectators and creators, and museums are too apt to become conventicles of tradition.
Society can do something for itself and for art by blowing out of the museums and galleries the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worship. Let us try to remember that art is not something to be come at by dint of study; let us try to think of it as something to be enjoyed as one enjoys being in love. The first thing to be done is to free the aesthetic emotions from the tyranny of erudition. I was sitting once behind the driver of an old horse-omnibus when a string of sandwich-men crossed us carrying "The Empire" poster. The name of Genée was on the bill. "Some call that art," said the driver, turning to me, "but we know better" (my longish hair, I surmise, discovered a fellow connoisseur): "if you want art you must go for it to the museums." How this pernicious nonsense is to be knocked out of people's heads I cannot guess. It has been knocked in so solemnly and for so long by the schoolmasters and the newspapers, by cheap text-books and profound historians, by district visitors and cabinet ministers, by clergymen and secularists, by labour leaders, teetotallers, anti-gamblers, and public benefactors of every sort, that I am sure it will need a brighter and braver word than mine to knock it out again. But out it has to be knocked before we can have any general sensibility to art; for, while it remains, to ninety-nine out of every hundred a work of art will be dead the moment it enters a public gallery.
The museums and galleries terrify us. We are crushed by the tacit admonition frowned from every corner that these treasures are displayed for study and improvement, by no means to provoke emotion. Think of Italy—every town with its public collection; think of the religious sightseers! How are we to persuade these middle-class masses, so patient and so pathetic in their quest, that really they could get some pleasure from the pictures if only they did not know, and did not care to know, who painted them. They cannot all be insensitive to form and colour; and if only they were not in a flutter to know, or not to forget, who painted the pictures, when they were painted, and what they represent, they might find in them the key that unlocks a world in the existence of which they are, at present, unable to believe. And the millions who stay at home, how are they to be persuaded that the thrill provoked by a locomotive or a gasometer is the real thing?—when will they understand that the iron buildings put up by Mr. Humphrey are far more likely to be works of art than anything they will see at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy?[27] Can we persuade the travelling classes that an ordinarily sensitive human being has a better chance of appreciating an Italian primitive than an expert hagiographer? Will they understand that, as a rule, the last to feel aesthetic emotion is the historian of art? Can we induce the multitude to seek in art, not edification, but exaltation? Can we make them unashamed of the emotion they feel for the fine lines of a warehouse or a railway bridge? If we can do this we shall have freed works of art from the museum atmosphere; and this is just what we have got to do. We must make people understand that forms can be significant without resembling Gothic cathedrals or Greek temples, and that art is the creation, not the imitation, of form. Then, but not till then, can they go with impunity to seek aesthetic emotion in museums and galleries.
It is argued with plausibility that a sensitive people would have no use for museums. It is said that to go in search of aesthetic emotion is wrong, that art should be a part of life—something like the evening papers or the shop windows that people enjoy as they go about their business. But, if the state of mind of one who enters a gallery in search of aesthetic emotion is necessarily unsatisfactory, so is the state of one who sits down to read poetry. The lover of poetry shuts the door of his chamber and takes down a volume of Milton with the deliberate intention of getting himself out of one world and into another. The poetry of Milton is not a part of daily life, though for some it makes daily life supportable. The value of the greatest art consists not in its power of becoming a part of common existence but in its power of taking us out of it. I think it was William Morris who said that poetry should be something that a man could invent and sing to his fellows as he worked at the loom. Too much of what Morris wrote may well have been so invented. But to create and to appreciate the greatest art the most absolute abstraction from the affairs of life is essential. And as, throughout the ages, men and women have gone to temples and churches in search of an ecstasy incompatible with and remote from the preoccupations and activities of laborious humanity, so they may go to the temples of art to experience, a little out of this world, emotions that are of another. It is not as sanctuaries from life—sanctuaries devoted to the cult of aesthetic emotion—but as class-rooms, laboratories, homes of research and warehouses of tradition, that museums and galleries become noxious.
Human sensibility must be freed from the dust of erudition and the weight of tradition; it must also be freed from the oppression of culture. For, of all the enemies of art, culture is perhaps the most dangerous, because the least obvious. By "culture" it is, of course, possible to mean something altogether blameless. It may mean an education that aims at nothing but sharpening sensibility and strengthening the power of self-expression. But culture of that sort is not for sale: to some it comes from solitary contemplation, to others from contact with life; in either case it comes only to those who are capable of using it. Common culture, on the other hand, is bought and sold in open market. Cultivated society, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a congeries of persons who have been educated to appreciate le beau et le bien. A cultivated person is one on whom art has not impressed itself, but on whom it has been impressed—one who has not been overwhelmed by the significance of art, but who knows that the nicest people have a peculiar regard for it. The characteristic of this Society is that, though it takes an interest in art, it does not take art seriously. Art for it is not a necessity, but an amenity. Art is not something that one might meet and be overwhelmed by between the pages of Bradshaw, but something to be sought and saluted at appropriate times in appointed places. Culture feels no imperative craving for art such as one feels for tobacco; rather it thinks of art as something to be taken in polite and pleasant doses, as one likes to take the society of one's less interesting acquaintances. Patronage of the Arts is to the cultivated classes what religious practice is to the lower-middle, the homage that matter pays to spirit, or, amongst the better sort, that intellect pays to emotion. Neither the cultivated nor the pious are genuinely sensitive to the tremendous emotions of art and religion; but both know what they are expected to feel, and when they ought to feel it.
Now if culture did nothing worse than create a class of well-educated ladies and gentlemen who read books, attend concerts, travel in Italy, and talk a good deal about art without ever guessing what manner of thing it is, culture would be nothing to make a fuss about. Unfortunately, culture is an active disease which causes positive ill and baulks potential good. In the first place, cultivated people always wish to cultivate others. Cultivated parents cultivate their children; thousands of wretched little creatures are daily being taught to love the beautiful. If they happen to have been born insensitive this is of no great consequence, but it is misery to think of those who have had real sensibilities ruined by conscientious parents: it is so hard to feel a genuine personal emotion for what one has been brought up to admire. Yet if children are to grow up into acceptable members of the cultivated class they must be taught to hold the right opinions—they must recognise the standards. Standards of taste are the essence of culture. That is why the cultured have ever been defenders of the antique. There grows up in the art of the past a traditional classification under standard masterpieces by means of which even those who have no native sensibility can discriminate between works of art. That is just what culture wants; so it insists on the veneration of standards and frowns on anything that cannot be justified by reference to them. That is the serious charge against culture. A person familiar with the masterpieces of Europe, but insensitive to that which makes them masterpieces, will be utterly non-plussed by a novel manifestation of the mysterious "that." It is well that old masters should be respected; it were better that vital art should be welcome. Vital art is a necessity, and vital art is stifled by culture, which insists that artists shall respect the standards, or, to put it bluntly, shall imitate old masters.
The cultured, therefore, who expect in every picture at least some reference to a familiar masterpiece, create, unconsciously enough, a thoroughly unwholesome atmosphere. For they are rich and patronising and liberal. They are the very innocent but natural enemies of originality, for an original work is the touchstone that exposes educated taste masquerading as sensibility. Besides, it is reasonable that those who have been at such pains to sympathise with artists should expect artists to think and feel as they do. Originality, however, thinks and feels for itself; commonly the original artist does not live the refined, intellectual life that would befit the fancy-man of the cultured classes. He is not picturesque; perhaps he is positively inartistic; he is neither a gentleman nor a blackguard; culture is angry and incredulous. Here is one who spends his working hours creating something that seems strange and disquieting and ugly, and devotes his leisure to simple animalities; surely one so utterly unlike ourselves cannot be an artist? So culture attacks and sometimes ruins him. If he survives, culture has to adopt him. He becomes part of the tradition, a standard, a stick with which to beat the next original genius who dares to shove an unsponsored nose above water.
In the nineteenth century cultured people were amazed to find that such cads as Keats and Burns were also great poets. They had to be accepted, and their caddishness had to be explained away. The shocking intemperance of Burns was deplored in a paragraph, and passed over—as though Burns were not as essentially a drunkard as a poet! The vulgarity of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne did not escape the nice censure of Matthew Arnold who could not be expected to see that a man incapable of writing such letters would not have written "The Eve of St. Agnes." In our day culture having failed to suppress Mr. Augustus John welcomes him with undiscriminating enthusiasm some ten years behind the times. Here and there, a man of power may force the door, but culture never loves originality until it has lost the appearance of originality. The original genius is ill to live with until he is dead. Culture will not live with him; it takes as lover the artificer of the faux-bon. It adores the man who is clever enough to imitate, not any particular work of art, but art itself. It adores the man who gives in an unexpected way just what it has been taught to expect. It wants, not art, but something so much like art that it can feel the sort of emotions it would be nice to feel for art. To be frank, cultivated people are no fonder of art than the Philistines; but they like to get thrills, and they like to see old faces under new bonnets. They admire Mr. Lavery's seductive banalities and the literary and erudite novelettes of M. Rostand. They go silly over Reinhardt and Bakst. These confectioners seem to give the distinction of art to the natural thoughts and feelings of cultivated people. Culture is far more dangerous than Philistinism because it is more intelligent and more pliant. It has a specious air of being on the side of the artist. It has the charm of its acquired taste, and it can corrupt because it can speak with an authority unknown in Philistia. Because it pretends to care about art, artists are not indifferent to its judgments. Culture imposes on people who would snap their fingers at vulgarity. With culture itself, even in the low sense in which I have been using the word, we need not pick a quarrel, but we must try to free the artist and the public too from the influence of cultivated opinion. The liberation will not be complete until those who have already learned to despise the opinion of the lower middle-classes learn also to neglect the standards and the disapproval of people who are forced by their emotional limitations to regard art as an elegant amenity.
If you would have fine art and fine appreciation of art, you must have a fine free life for your artists and for yourselves. That is another thing that Society can do for art: it can kill the middle-class ideal. Was ever ideal so vulnerable? The industrious apprentice who by slow pettifogging hardness works his way to the dignity of material prosperity, Dick Whittington, what a hero for a high-spirited nation! What dreams our old men dream, what visions float into the minds of our seers! Eight hours of intelligent production, eight hours of thoughtful recreation, eight hours of refreshing sleep for all! What a vision to dangle before the eyes of a hungry people! If it is great art and fine life that you want, you must renounce this religion of safe mediocrity. Comfort is the enemy; luxury is merely the bugbear of the bourgeoisie. No soul was ever ruined by extravagance or even by debauch; it is the steady, punctual gnawing of comfort that destroys. That is the triumph of matter over mind; that is the last tyranny. For how are they better than slaves who must stop their work because it is time for luncheon, must break up a conversation to dress for dinner, must leave on the doorstep the friend they have not seen for years so as not to miss the customary train?
Society can do something for art, because it can increase liberty, and in a liberal atmosphere art thrives. Even politicians can do something. They can repeal censorious laws and abolish restrictions on freedom of thought and speech and conduct. They can protect minorities. They can defend originality from the hatred of the mediocre mob. They can make an end of the doctrine that the State has a right to crush unpopular opinions in the interests of public order. A mighty liberty to be allowed to speak acceptable words to the rabble! The least that the State can do is to protect people who have something to say that may cause a riot. What will not cause a riot is probably not worth saying. At present, to agitate for an increase of liberty is the best that any ordinary person can do for the advancement of art.