When Protagoras said that “Man is the measure of all things,” he uttered a dictum which has been variously interpreted, but from the standpoint we have now reached, from which Man is seen to be preëminently an artist, it is a monition to us that we cannot to the measurement of life apply our instruments of precision, and cut life down to their graduated marks. They have, indeed, their immensely valuable uses, but it is strictly as instruments and not as ends of living or criteria of the worth of life. It is in the failure to grasp this that the human tragedy has often consisted, and for over two thousand years the dictum of Protagoras has been held up for the pacification of that tragedy, for the most part, in vain. Protagoras was one of those “Sophists” who have been presented to our contempt in absurd traditional shapes ever since Plato caricatured them—though it may well be that some, as, it has been suggested, Gorgias, may have given colour to the caricature—and it is only to-day that it is possible to declare that we must place the names of Protagoras, of Prodicus, of Hippias, even of Gorgias, beside those of Herodotus, Pindar, and Pericles.[[121]]
It is in the sphere of morals that the conflict has often been most poignant. I have already tried to indicate how revolutionary is the change which the thoughts of many have had to undergo. This struggle of a living and flexible and growing morality against a morality that is rigid and inflexible and dead has at some periods of human history been almost dramatically presented. It was so in the seventeenth century around the new moral discoveries of the Jesuits; and the Jesuits were rewarded by becoming almost until to-day a by-word for all that is morally poisonous and crooked and false—for all that is “Jesuitical.” There was once a great quarrel between the Jesuits and the Jansenists—a quarrel which is scarcely dead yet, for all Christendom took sides in it—and the Jansenists had the supreme good fortune to entrap on their side a great man of genius whose onslaught on the Jesuits, “Les Provinciales,” is even still supposed by many people to have settled the question. They are allowed so to suppose because no one now reads “Les Provinciales.” But Remy de Gourmont, who was not only a student of unread books but a powerfully live thinker, read “Les Provinciales,” and found, as he set forth in “Le Chemin de Velours,” that it was the Jesuits who were more nearly in the right, more truly on the road of advance, than Pascal. As Gourmont showed by citation, there were Jesuit doctrines put forth by Pascal with rhetorical irony as though the mere statement sufficed to condemn them, which need only to be liberated from their irony, and we might nowadays add to them. Thus spake Zarathustra. Pascal was a geometrician who (though he, indeed, once wrote in his “Pensées”: “There is no general rule”) desired to deal with the variable, obscure, and unstable complexities of human action as though they were problems in mathematics. But the Jesuits, while it is true that they still accepted the existence of absolute rules, realised that rules must be made adjustable to the varying needs of life. They thus became the pioneers of many conceptions which are accepted in modern practice.[[122]] Their doctrine of invincible ignorance was a discovery of that kind, forecasting some of the opinions now held regarding responsibility. But in that age, as Gourmont pointed out, “to proclaim that there might be a sin or an offence without guilty parties was an act of intellectual audacity, as well as scientific probity.” Nowadays the Jesuits (together, it is interesting to note, with their baroque architecture) are coming into credit, and casuistry again seems reputable. To establish that there can be no single inflexible moral code for all individuals has been, and indeed remains, a difficult and delicate task, yet the more profoundly one considers it, the more clearly it becomes visible that what once seemed a dead and rigid code of morality must more and more become a living act of casuistry. The Jesuits, because they had a glimmer of this truth, represented, as Gourmont concluded, the honest and most acceptable part of Christianity, responding to the necessities of life, and were rendering a service to civilisation which we should never forget.
There are some who may not very cordially go to the Jesuits as an example of the effort to liberate men from the burden of a subservience to rigid little rules, towards the unification of life as an active process, however influential they may be admitted to be among the pioneers of that movement. Yet we may turn in what direction we will, we shall perpetually find the same movement under other disguises. There is, for instance, Mr. Bertrand Russell, who is, for many, the most interesting and stimulating thinker to be found in England to-day. He might scarcely desire to be associated with the Jesuits. Yet he also seeks to unify life and even in an essentially religious spirit. His way of putting this, in his “Principles of Social Reconstruction,” is to state that man’s impulses may be divided into those that are creative and those that are possessive, that is to say, concerned with acquisition. The impulses of the second class are a source of inner and outer disharmony and they involve conflict; “it is preoccupation with possessions more than anything else that prevents men from living freely and nobly”; it is the creative impulse in which real life consists, and “the typical creative impulse is that of the artist.” Now this conception (which was that Plato assigned to the “guardians” in his communistic State) may be a little too narrowly religious for those whose position in life renders a certain “preoccupation with possessions” inevitable; it is useless to expect us all to become, at present, fakirs and Franciscans, “counting nothing one’s own, save only one’s harp.” But in regarding the creative impulses as the essential part of life, and as typically manifested in the form of art, Bertrand Russell is clearly in the great line of movement with which we have been throughout concerned. We must only at the same time—as we shall see later—remember that the distinction between the “creative” and the “possessive” impulses, although convenient, is superficial. In creation we have not really put aside the possessive instinct, we may even have intensified it. For it has been reasonably argued that it is precisely the deep urgency of the impulse to possess which stirs the creative artist. He creates because that is the best way, or the only way, of gratifying his passionate desire to possess. Two men desire to possess a woman, and one seizes her, the other writes a “Vita Nuova” about her; they have both gratified the instinct of possession, and the second, it may be, most satisfyingly and most lastingly. So that—apart from the impossibility, and even the undesirability, of dispensing with the possessive instinct—it may be well to recognise that the real question is one of values in possession. We must needs lay up treasure; but the fine artist in living, so far as may be, lays up his treasure in Heaven.
In recent time some alert thinkers have been moved to attempt to measure the art of civilisation by less impossibly exact methods than of old, by the standard of art, and even of fine art. In a remarkable book on “The Revelations of Civilisation”—published about three years before the outbreak of that Great War which some have supposed to date a revolutionary point in civilisation—Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, who has expert knowledge of the Egyptian civilisation which was second to none in its importance for mankind, has set forth a statement of the cycles to which all civilisations are subject. Civilisation, he points out, is essentially an intermittent phenomenon. We have to compare the various periods of civilisation and observe what they have in common in order to find the general type. “It should be examined like any other action of Nature; its recurrences should be studied, and all the principles which underlie its variations should be defined.” Sculpture, he believes, may be taken as a criterion, not because it is the most important, but because it is the most convenient and easily available, test. We may say with the old Etruscans that every race has its Great Year—it sprouts, flourishes, decays, and dies. The simile, Petrie adds, is the more precise because there are always irregular fluctuations of the seasonal weather. There have been eight periods of civilisation, he reckons, in calculable human history. We are now near the end of the eighth, which reached its climax about the year 1800; since then there have been merely archaistic revivals, the value of which may be variously interpreted. He scarcely thinks we can expect another period of civilisation to arise for several centuries at least. The average length of a period of civilisation is 1330 years. Ours Petrie dates from about A.D. 450. It has always needed a fresh race to produce a new period of civilisation. In Europe, between A.D. 300 and 600, some fifteen new races broke in from north and east for slow mixture. “If,” he concluded, “the source of every civilisation has lain in race mixture, it may be that eugenics will, in some future civilisation, carefully segregate fine races, and prohibit continual mixture, until they have a distinct type, which will start a new civilisation when transplanted. The future progress of Man may depend as much on isolation to establish a type as on fusion of types when established.”
At the time when Flinders Petrie was publishing his suggestive book, Dr. Oswald Spengler, apparently in complete ignorance of it, was engaged in a far more elaborate work, not actually published till after the War, in which an analogous conception of the growth and decay of civilisations was put forward in a more philosophic way, perhaps more debatable on account of the complex detail in which the conception was worked out.[[123]] Petrie had considered the matter in a summary empiric manner with close reference to the actual forces viewed broadly. Spengler’s manner is narrower, more subjective, and more metaphysical. He distinguishes—though he also recognises eight periods—between “culture” and “civilisation.” It is the first that is really vital and profitable; a “civilisation” is the decaying later stage of a “culture,” its inevitable fate. Herein it reaches its climax. “Civilisations are the most externalised and artistic conditions of which the higher embodiment of Man is capable. They are a spiritual senility, an end which with inner necessity is reached again and again.”[[124]] The transition from “culture” to “civilisation” in ancient times took place, Spengler holds, in the fourth century, and in the modern West in the nineteenth. But, like Petrie, though more implicitly, he recognises the prominent place of the art activities in the whole process, and he explicitly emphasises the interesting way in which those activities which are generally regarded as of the nature of art are interwoven with others not so generally regarded.
III
However we look at it, we see that Man, whether he works individually or collectively, may conveniently be regarded, in the comprehensive sense, as an artist, a bad artist, maybe, for the most part, but still an artist. His civilisation—if that is the term we choose to apply to the total sum of his group activities—is always an art, or a complex of arts. It is an art that is to be measured, or left immeasurable. That question, we have seen, we may best leave open. Another question that might be put is easy to deal with more summarily: What is Art?
We may deal with it summarily because it is an ultimate question and there can be no final answer to ultimate questions. As soon as we begin to ask such questions, as soon as we begin to look at any phenomenon as an end in itself, we are on the perilous slope of metaphysics, where no agreement can, or should be, possible. The question of measurement was plausible, and needed careful consideration. What is Art? is a question which, if we are wise, we shall deal with as Pilate dealt with that like question: What is Truth?
How futile the question is, we may realise when we examine the book which Tolstoy in old age wrote to answer it. Here is a man who was himself, in his own field, one of the world’s supreme artists. He could not fail to say one or two true things, as when he points out that “all human existence is full of art, from cradle songs and dances to the offices of religion and public ceremonial—it is all equally art. Art, in the large sense, impregnates our whole life.” But on the main point all that Tolstoy can do is to bring together a large miscellaneous collection of definitions—without seeing that as individual opinions they all have their rightness—and then to add one of his own, not much worse, nor much better, than any of the others. Thereto he appends some of his own opinions on artists, whence it appears that Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoievsky, Maupassant, Millet, Bastien-Lepage, and Jules Breton—and not always they—are the artists whom he considers great; it is not a list to treat with contempt, but he goes on to pour contempt on those who venerate Sophocles and Aristophanes and Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and Michelangelo and Bach and Beethoven and Manet. “My own artistic works,” he adds, “I rank among bad art, excepting a few short stories.” It seems a reduction of the whole question, What is Art? to absurdity, if one may be permitted to say so at a time when Tolstoy would appear to be the pioneer of some of our most approved modern critics.
Thus we see the reason why all the people who come forward to define art—each with his own little measuring-rod quite different from everybody else’s—inevitably make themselves ridiculous. It is true they are all of them right. That is just why they are ridiculous: each has mistaken the one drop of water he has measured for the whole ocean. Art cannot be defined because it is infinite. It is no accident that poetry, which has so often seemed the typical art, means a making. The artist is a maker. Art is merely a name we are pleased to give to what can only be the whole stream of action which—in order to impart to it selection and an unconscious or even conscious aim—is poured through the nervous circuit of a human animal or some other animal having a more or less similar nervous organisation. For a cat is an artist as well as a man, and some would say more than a man, while a bee is not only an obvious artist, but perhaps even the typical natural and unconscious artist. There is no defining art; there is only the attempt to distinguish between good art and bad art.