Portraits and Speculations

by Arthur Ransome

“... the battle was scattered from hill to hill

From the windmill to the watermill.”

may have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not incomprehensible to himself, and “Art for Art’s sake!” forty and fifty years ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the early Victorians who then survived, was something very different for the men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude towards art in general. We must first understand what they fought against before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their battle-cry.

They fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought, secondly, against “nature” ... against, that is to say, a crude conception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put that crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he who looked at a picture could find something in the external world, by its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would be a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of external things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and, on the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is an essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted into discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a solution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who read this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art’s relation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion, though, in justice to the artists for art’s sake, I must point out that their revolt was not against “morality” alone. When we hear Wilde’s gay proclamation that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more serious, that “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,” and that the artist “in all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at his service, and to him is nought refused.” We must not imagine that the revolt was merely playful.

Against “nature” and against “morality.” In an age when the painter of “Derby Day” assisted Ruskin by saying that he could not “see anything of the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of “Battersea Bridge,” they upheld the superiority of art to “nature.” In an age when Dickens was praised for his reforms of the workhouse and blamed for his love of low life, when novelists were judged by the deeds, no, by the manners of the persons of their fiction, when poets were judged by their private lives, they protested the irrelevance of all such things to the question at issue, which was the goodness or badness of the work of art to be judged. We must not blame their formula, but the ideas against which it was directed, for the bad manners, the morality that they hoped would be regarded as immorality, for the unpublishable private lives, that were the excesses after victory. We may, perhaps, smile as we observe how accurately they balance those other excesses against which they were a reaction.

The question, no longer how to conquer, became how to use the victory, and we had the common spectacle of veterans and retired camp-followers trying to live up to the battle-cry of their youth, and, unable to free themselves from the habit of their excesses, committing these excesses with less and less gusto and more and more skill. But skill, even so acquired, is not valueless. The battle-cry, after opening a primrose path to charlatans, after turning “morality” into “immorality” as a spectre ruling over art, remained the stimulus to an improved technique, a scrupulousness, an economy of effect, a delicacy in the handling of material, a care for melody and counterpoint, an intolerance of careless workmanship, for which for a long time it will be our privilege to be grateful.

Art, however, cannot live by perfection of technique alone, nor yet by the repetition of remembered excesses. A new generation of artists, working in a new environment, inspired by new aims, and threatened by new dangers, requires a new formula, or a restatement of the old. These artists of our own generation look at the faded banner with the remains of reverence, or, in their dislike of the mistakes it made possible, with a suspicion of contempt. In the turbulence of valuations in this century, in the different, sharply defined attitudes of men on such questions as property, labour, capital, the position of women in the State, marriage, education, or the Church, they see a herd of conflicting moralities. Involved in one or other of these conflicts, perhaps in many of them, they cannot but believe, suspect, or hope that art also must speak for or against, as tribune or as patrician, as Churchman or as secularist, and, if the conflict be important to them, the excellence of an artist must seem to be determined, at least in part, by the views that he expresses. How then can art “have nothing to do with morality”? They are, however, sufficiently critical to see that it is possible that a work of art may be good for a democrat, bad for an aristocrat, and yet, somehow, good in itself. Was there something in “Art for Art’s sake” after all?

Of the men whose names I mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay one had founded his views on those of a philosopher, and so, whatever may be his rank among those dogmatists, we are able to examine the background of reasoning on which he saw his own dogmatic statements. It is in that reasoning, and not in the cheerful taunts of the battlefield that we are likely to learn how it was that the formula of “Art for Art’s sake” seemed to be justified, and how it is that the formula is fundamentally inadequate. Baudelaire’s proclamation, Pater’s practice, Whistler’s blue-feathered, silver-tipped darts point us to no analysis. The analysis that made Wilde’s paradoxes possible is open to our view in the pages of Kant.

Now Kant said that what was called beautiful was the object of a delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate reference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our judgment. Upon our judgment of what? The beautiful. How many crimes has that word committed, how many discussions it has obscured, how many it has closed at the very moment of their fertility. Not the least of its knaveries has been this substitution of a condition of art for the function of art, which, as I hope to show, is life itself. A work of art suggests the achievement of the beautiful. That may be its immediate object. It is not its ultimate object. It may be an essential condition. It is not a function. Art for art’s sake means the substitution of condition for function, and, as the beautiful can never be a function of anything, the implicit denial that art has a function at all. “All art is quite useless.”

But that is not what we believe. And the reason why the theorists of art for art’s sake were both right and wrong was that they did not want art for the sake of anything irrelevant to the artistic phenomenon, but were a little ungenerous in their interpretation of that phenomenon. They saw that moralities, private lives, reforms, interests, had nothing to do with the attempted achievement of the condition of the beautiful, but, having seen that, forgot, in their hurry for battle, that the work of art persists beyond this achievement or attempted achievement; forgot that, will he nill he, the artist’s work cannot but bear the impress of his personality, and forgot that through that fact all the things they wished to rule out of the discussion had their rightful place in it.