With Nietzsche's concept of Art before me I feel as if I had left the arts of the present day many thousand leagues behind, and it is almost a hardship to be obliged to return to them. For unless most of that which is peculiar to this age be left many thousand leagues to the rear, all hope of making any headway must be abandoned.
We live in a democratic age. It is only natural, therefore, that all that belongs to the ruler should have been whittled down, diluted, and despoiled of its dignity; and we must feel no surprise at finding that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the spirit of the times. All that savours of authority has become the work of committees, assemblies, herds, crowds, and mobs. How could the word of one man be considered authoritative, now that the ruling principle, to use a phrase of Mr. Chesterton's, is that "twelve men are better than one"?[1]
The conception of Art as a manifestation of the artist's will to power and his determination to prevail, is a much too dangerous one for the present day. It involves all kinds of things which are antagonistic to democratic theory, such as: Command, Reverence, Despotism, Obedience, Greatness and Inequality. Therefore, if artists are to be tolerated at all, they must have a much more modest, humble, and pusillanimous comprehension of what their existence means, and of the purpose and aim of their work; and their claims, if they make any, must be meek, unprivileged, harmless and unassuming.
While, therefore, the artist, as Nietzsche understood him, scarcely exists at all to-day, another breed of man has come to the fore in the graphic arts, whose very weakness is his passport, who makes no claims at establishing new values of beauty, and who contents himself modestly with exhibiting certain baffling dexterities, virtuosities and tricks, which at once amaze and delight ordinary spectators or Art-students, simply because they themselves have not yet overcome even the difficulties of a technique.
Monet's pointillisme, Sargent's visible and nervous brush strokes, Rodin's wealth of anatomical detail, the Impressionist's scientific rendering of atmosphere, Peter Graham's gauzy mists, Lavery's post-Whistlerian portraits of pale people, and the touching devotion of all modern artists to Truth, in the Christian and scientific sense, are all indications of the general "funk"—the universal paralysis of will that has overtaken the Art-world.
But I am travelling too fast. I said that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the democratic spirit of the times. Now in what form have these pains been taken?
Their form has invariably been to turn the tables upon Art, and to make its beauty dependent upon Nature, instead of Nature's beauty dependent upon it.[2]
Tradition, of course, very largely laid the foundation of this mode of thinking, and, from the Greeks to Ruskin, few seem to have realized how much beauty Art had already laid in Nature, before even the imitative artist could consider Nature as beautiful.
As Croce rightly observes: "Antiquity seems generally to have been entrammelled in the meshes of the belief in mimetic, or the duplication of natural objects by the artist;"[3] but when we remember that, as Schelling points out, in Greece speculation about Art began with Art's decline,[4] we ought to feel no surprise at this remote underestimation of the artistic fact.[5]
In reviewing the work of æstheticians from Plato to Croce, however, what strikes me as so significant is the fact that, from the time of Plotinus—who practically marks the end of the declension which started in Plato's time—to the end of the seventeenth century, scarcely a voice of any magnitude was raised in Europe on the subject of Art.[6]