Thus it is that I find no escape from the Aristotelian position of Shakespeare that
“Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean....
This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is Nature.”
And that this conception is Aristotelian, even the essential Greek conception, is no testimony to Shakespeare’s scholarship. It is merely the proof that here we are in the presence of one of these great ultimate facts of the world which cannot but be sensitively perceived by the finest spirits, however far apart in time and space. Aristotle, altogether in the same spirit as Shakespeare, insisted that the works of man’s making, a State, for example, are natural, though Art partly completes what Nature is herself sometimes unable to bring to perfection, and even then that man is only exercising methods which, after all, are those of Nature. Nature needs Man’s art in order to achieve many natural things, and Man, in fulfilling that need, is only following the guidance of Nature in seeming to make things which are all the time growing by themselves.[[125]] Art is thus scarcely more than the natural midwife of Nature.
There is, however, one distinguishing mark of Art which at this stage, as we conclude our survey, must be clearly indicated. It has been subsumed, as the acute reader will not have failed to note, throughout. But it has, for the most part, been deliberately left implicit. It has constantly been assumed, that is to say, that Art is the sum of all the active energies of Mankind. We must in this matter of necessity follow Aristotle, who in his “Politics” spoke, as a matter of course, of all those who practice “medicine, gymnastics, and the arts in general” as “artists.” Art is the moulding force of every culture that Man during his long course has at any time or place produced. It is the reality of what we imperfectly term “morality.” It is all human creation.
Yet creation, in the active visible constructive sense, is not the whole of Man. It is not even the whole of what Man has been accustomed to call God. When, by what is now termed a process of Narcissism, Man created God in his own image, as we may instructively observe in the first chapter of the Hebrew Book of Genesis, he assigned to him six parts of active creational work, one part of passive contemplation of that work. That one seventh part—and an immensely important part—has not come under our consideration. In other words, we have been looking at Man the artist, not at Man the æsthetician.
There was more than one reason why these two aspects of human faculty were held clearly apart throughout our discussion. Not only is it even less possible to agree about æsthetics, where the variety of individual judgment is rightly larger, than about art (ancient and familiar is the saying, De gustibus—), but to confuse art and æsthetics leads us into lamentable confusion. We may note this in the pioneers of the modern revival of what Sidgwick called “æsthetic Intuitionism” in the eighteenth century, and especially in Hutcheson, though Hutcheson’s work is independent of consistency, which he can scarcely even be said to have sought. They never sufficiently emphasised the distinction between art and æsthetics, between, that is to say, what we may possibly, if we like, call the dynamic and the static aspects of human action. Herein is the whole difference between work, for art is essentially work, and the spectacular contemplation of work, which æsthetics essentially is. The two things are ultimately one, but alike in the special arts and in that art of life commonly spoken of as morals, where we are not usually concerned with ultimates, the two must be clearly held apart. From the point of view of art we are concerned with the internal impulse to guide the activities in the lines of good work. It is only when we look at the work of art from the outside, whether in the more specialised arts or in the art of life, that we are concerned with æsthetic contemplation, that activity of vision which creates beauty, however we may please to define beauty, and even though we see it so widely as to be able to say with Remy de Gourmont: “Wherever life is, there is beauty,”[[126]] provided, one may add, that there is the æsthetic contemplation in which it must be mirrored.