Portraits and Speculations

by Arthur Ransome

The question is, what is their rightful place? And to answer it we must first satisfy ourselves as to the nature of the artistic phenomenon.

A work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom, for purposes of reference, I shall call the speaker and the listener. But, before it is a collaboration, a re-creation, in which form we commonly know it, it is an independent act performed by the speaker alone. He, as first creator, isolates some from the flux of impressions in which he lives. It is as if he were to arrest that flux, and momentarily to stop its flow. He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses, and, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in the dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his existence. This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world, the universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory, clearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to have a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which itself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. The resulting clarity is as if he had suddenly stopped the cross-currents of a stream, and the stream, losing the opaqueness of its tangled motion, had become crystal. He isolates that moment by surrounding it with his own consciousness, while other moments fly past taking with them shreds of that tattered veil, no more.... There is a choice of moments, and because the choice is not reasonable, but determined by the moment itself, the speaker feels himself inspired. That which attracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and hold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad others with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is a moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture, words, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such. Two bars are heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a jumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost of an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... These things are pledges. He seizes them and, warily, lest he lose them, listens for the rest of the melody, watchfully draws out of the flood the figure whose gesture had seemed to be the moment itself, pieces the brittle words together, and shapes the picture in his brain. He allows the moment to redeem the pledge it has given, his care being not to impede it by forestalling its further appearance with something contradictory to the original fragment, something that the character of that fragment has not determined. He seeks only to be true to the original promise, and the good artist is known by the fact that it is impossible to tell with what he began, the bad artist by the fragment he has surrounded with baser metal that does not ring with its note, or the phantom whose vitality he has blurred by clothing it with flesh uninformed by its peculiar vitality.

The process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is a process of finding out. He is engaged in knowing the uttermost implications of the fragment of impression caught by him from the flux of unconscious or semi-conscious life. He is making the whole of that impression his own by his profound, his complete consciousness of it. That is why the artist can never understand those people, not artists, who ask him how he can prefer art to life; imitation to the real thing. He cannot believe that such people mean what they say. In his humility he assumes that they too have the modesty to admit to themselves that their life is unconscious, or semi-conscious, and he believes that this process of knowing, of becoming conscious, is the intensest form of living that there is.

Then, when the work of art is as we know it, we, the listener, collaborate with that other artist, the speaker, and from what he has said, in stone, music, paint or words, try to reconstruct the fragment of life that he has made his own and to share his consciousness of it. Accurately speaking, this is impossible. We become conscious of a moment of life different from his. We cannot give his words the precise atmosphere they had for him, we cannot see with exactly his eyes, or hear with his ears, we are without his private and individual memory. We can but be inaccurate translators. We can, however, perceive, uncertainly, that he has been successful himself in allowing a moment of life to redeem the pledge it had given him, that his work does not contradict itself, and so is true to the original inspiration bedded in it or clothed by it. And this perception suggests to us that, if it were possible, we should find, certainly, what we already believe, that his share in the collaboration is perfect. We then say that a work of art is beautiful; the wistfulness with which we sometimes say it, the tears that sometimes dim our eyes as we close a book or turn from a picture that we believe to be beautiful, and the sadness that has often been associated with the name of beauty, are due to the half-conscious knowledge that our share in the collaboration is imperfect, since we can never stand exactly where he stood.

Our judgment of the beautiful then depends on our belief that, were certain unalterable facts altered in the constitution of the universe and of ourselves, we should be sharing a perfect expression, an expression, that is to say, in perfect unity with itself. Art then for art’s sake, perfection of expression first. But what is this expression in perfect unity with itself, but a moment of conscious living, isolated from all else, lifted from the unconscious flux and given us—to live?

Let us rewrite the half-obliterated formula. Let us write it now: Art for Life’s sake, and raise a party cry from its momentary usefulness into a proud suggestion of the noble function of art. This function is not merely to teach us how to act, as was supposed by the old critics, who recommended Homer for the heroism of his heroes, though, as we shall see, they were not wholly wrong, nor yet merely to teach us how to order our lives, though it may do that by suggestion. Art is itself life. Its function is to increase our consciousness of life, to make us more than wise or sensitive, to transform us from beings overwhelmed by the powerful stream of unconscious living to beings dominating that stream, to change us from objects acted upon by life to joyful collaborators in that reaction. By its means we become conscious gainers by life’s procreative activity. No longer hiding our faces from that muddied storm that sweeps irresistibly from the future to the past, a medley of confused figures, a babel of cries of joy, of laughter, of sorrow, of pain, by its means we lift our heads, and, learning from the isolation of moments in eternity, to imagine the isolation of all such moments, we conquer that storm, and accept pain, joy, laughter or sorrow, with equal gratitude, in our continually realised desire to feel ourselves alive.

Let us examine from this point of view the fundamental quarrel between the theorists of “Art for Art’s sake” and the moralists. What are their respective beliefs?

The Moralist.—The noblest end of being is to be good. All human activities must serve this end or be pernicious. Art, the most eloquent, the most powerful of pleaders, cannot, without violating the trust that humanity puts in her, turn devil’s advocate. Let the artist be as skilful an artist as he can, but let him make a right use of his excellence. In peace we ask no more of a good shot than that he hit the bull’s eye of a target. But we live in times of war between the hosts of good and of evil. The fight is to the death, and we admire the good shot if he fire from among the ranks of angels, and fear him if we see that his skill is at the service of our opponents, who in age-long battle have shown themselves merciless and strong.

The Artist for Art’s sake.—Morality in art is an accident of no importance. We hear the battle of which you speak, but do not take part in it, though we listen sometimes to the music of its trumpets far away, and see the red glow it throws up to the sky. But morality concerns our circumstances or possible circumstances, and so has nothing to do with the beautiful, which is art’s sole concern. A work of art that declares its sympathy with one or other party to your battle is one whose creator has looked aside to ends other than beauty. It is therefore a failure as a work of art. Art must not be limited to edifying subjects. There is nothing that may not become beautiful in the hands of an artist. Church and lupanar, angel and courtesan, are of equal value in his eyes. They are material, no more, and he will not tolerate that morality should hamper him by dictating the choice or use of his material. A work of art is independent of morality.

To these two we reply, believing that art is for life’s sake.—When a man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality, ask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled to admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he attributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in each individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and his environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the code of values that is his will be one of the determining influences on an artist’s vision of life. If, perchance, he is so uncritical as to believe that he has nothing to do with morality, that belief will itself share in giving his work a moral value. There is no escape from morality in art. If, therefore, we choose to consider ourselves as one of a band of people whose moralities are more or less similar, and to regard their average morality, their average code of values as important, we shall be perfectly justified in judging art by what we suppose to be its effect on that average morality. But we must not forget that we are then regarding artists as a regiment from which we are engaged in picking out the traitors and the loyalists—and that it is a regiment whose immediate business is not war, a regiment which does not know that it is enlisted.