It is in relation with art, not with æsthetics, it may be noted in passing, that we are concerned with morals. That was once a question of seemingly such immense import that men were willing to spiritually slay each other over it. But it is not a question at all from the standpoint which has here from the outset been taken. Morals, for us to-day, is a species of which art is the genus. It is an art, and like all arts it necessarily has its own laws. We are concerned with the art of morals: we cannot speak of art and morals. To take “art” and “morals” and “religion,” and stir them up, however vigorously, into an indigestible plum-pudding, as Ruskin used to do, is no longer possible.[[127]] This is a question which—like so many other furiously debated questions—only came into existence because the disputants on both sides were ignorant of the matter they were disputing about. It is no longer to be taken seriously, though it has its interest because the dispute has so often recurred, not only in recent days, but equally among the Greeks of Plato’s days. The Greeks had a kind of æsthetic morality. It was instinctive with them, and that is why it is so significant for us. But they seldom seem to have succeeded in thinking æsthetic problems clearly out. The attitude of their philosophers towards many of the special arts, even the arts in which they were themselves supreme, to us seem unreasonable. While they magnified the art, they often belittled the artist, and felt an aristocratic horror for anything that assimilated a man to a craftsman; for craftsman meant for them vulgarian. Plato himself was all for goody-goody literature and in our days would be an enthusiastic patron of Sunday-school stories. He would forbid any novelist to represent a good man as ever miserable or a wicked man as ever happy. The whole tendency of the discussion in the third book of the “Republic” is towards the conclusion that literature must be occupied exclusively with the representation of the virtuous man, provided, of course, that he was not a slave or a craftsman, for to such no virtue worthy of imitation should ever be attributed. Towards the end of his long life, Plato remained of the same opinion; in the second book of “The Laws” it is with the maxims of virtue that he will have the poet solely concerned. The reason for this ultra-puritanical attitude, which was by no means in practice that of the Greeks themselves, seems not hard to divine. The very fact that their morality was temperamentally æsthetic instinctively impelled them, when they were thinking philosophically, to moralise art generally; they had not yet reached the standpoint which would enable them to see that art might be consonant with morality without being artificially pressed into a narrow moral mould. Aristotle was conspicuously among those, if not the first, who took a broader and saner view. In opposition to the common Greek view that the object of art is to teach morals, Aristotle clearly expressed the totally different view that poetry in the wide sense—the special art which he and the Greeks generally were alone much concerned to discuss—is an emotional delight, having pleasure as its direct end, and only indirectly a moral end by virtue of its cathartic effects. Therein he reached an æsthetic standpoint, yet it was so novel that he could not securely retain it and was constantly falling back towards the old moral conception of art.[[128]]
We may call it a step in advance. Yet it was not a complete statement of the matter. Indeed, it established the unreal conflict between two opposing conceptions, each unsound because incomplete, which loose thinkers have carried on ever since. To assert that poetry exists for morals is merely to assert that one art exists for the sake of another art, which at the best is rather a futile statement, while, so far as it is really accepted, it cannot fail to crush the art thus subordinated. If we have the insight to see that an art has its own part of life, we shall also see that it has its own intrinsic morality, which cannot be the morality of morals or of any other art than itself. We may here profitably bear in mind that antinomy between morals and morality on which Jules de Gaultier has often insisted. The Puritan’s strait-jacket shows the vigour of his external morals; it also bears witness to the lack of internal morality which necessitates that control. Again, on the other hand, it is argued that art gives pleasure. Very true. Even the art of morals gives pleasure. But to assert that therein lies its sole end and aim is an altogether feeble and inadequate conclusion, unless we go further and proceed to inquire what “pleasure” means. If we fail to take that further step, it remains a conclusion which may be said to merge into the conclusion that art is aimless; that, rather, its aim is to be aimless, and so to lift us out of the struggle and turmoil of life. That was the elaborately developed argument of Schopenhauer: art—whether in music, in philosophy, in painting, in poetry—is useless; “to be useless is the mark of genius, its patent of nobility. All other works of men are there for the preservation or alleviation of our existence; but this alone not; it alone is there for its own sake; and is in this sense to be regarded as the flower, or the pure essence, of existence. That is why in its enjoyment our heart rises, for we are thereby lifted above the heavy earthen atmosphere of necessity.”[[129]] Life is a struggle of the will; but in art the will has become objective, fit for pure contemplation, and genius consists in an eminent aptitude for contemplation. The ordinary man, said Schopenhauer, plods through the dark world with his lantern turned on the things he wants; the man of genius sees the world by the light of the sun. In modern times Bergson adopted that view of Schopenhauer’s, with a terminology of his own, and all he said under this head may be regarded as a charming fantasia on the Schopenhauerian theme: “Genius is the most complete objectivity.” Most of us, it seems to Bergson, never see reality at all; we only see the labels we have fixed on things to mark for us their usefulness.[[130]] A veil is interposed between us and the reality of things. The artist, the man of genius, raises this veil and reveals Nature to us. He is naturally endowed with a detachment from life, and so possesses as it were a virginal freshness in seeing, hearing, or thinking. That is “intuition,” an instinct that has become disinterested. “Art has no other object but to remove the practically useful symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, so as to bring us face to face with reality itself.”[[131]] Art would thus be fulfilling its function the more completely the further it removed us from ordinary life, or, more strictly, from any personal interest in life. That was also Remy de Gourmont’s opinion, though I do not know how far he directly derived it from Schopenhauer. “If we give to art a moral aim,” he wrote, “it ceases to exist, for it ceases to be useless. Art is incompatible with a moral or religious aim. It is unintelligible to the crowd because the crowd is not disinterested and knows only the principle of utility.” But the difficulty of making definite affirmation in this field, the perpetual need to allow for nuances which often on the surface involve contradictions, is seen when we find that so great an artist as Einstein—for so we may here fairly call him—and one so little of a formal æsthetician, agrees with Schopenhauer. “I agree with Schopenhauer,” he said to Moszkowski, “that one of the most powerful motives that attract people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life, with its painful coarseness and unconsoling barrenness, and to break the fetters of their own ever-changing desires. Man seeks to form a simplified synoptical view of the world conformable to his own nature, to overcome the world by replacing it with his picture. The painter, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, each does this in his own way. He transfers the centre of his emotional life to this picture, to find a surer haven of peace than the sphere of his turbulent personal experience offers.” That is a sound statement of the facts, yet it is absurd to call such an achievement “useless.”
Perhaps, however, what philosophers have really meant when they have said that art (it is the so-called fine arts only that they have in mind) is useless, is that an art must not be consciously pursued for any primary useful end outside itself. That is true. It is even true of morals, that is to say the art of living. To live in the conscious primary pursuit of a “useful” end—such as one of the fine arts—outside living itself is to live badly; to declare, like André Gide, that “outside the doctrine of ‘Art for Art’ I know not where to find any reason for living,” may well be the legitimate expression of a personal feeling, but, unless understood in the sense here taken, it is not a philosophical statement which can be brought under the species of eternity, being, indeed, one of those confusions of substances which are, metaphysically, damnable. So, again, in the art of science: the most useful applications of science have sprung from discoveries that were completely useless for purposes outside pure science, so far as the aim of the discoverer went, or even so far as he ever knew. If he had been bent on “useful” ends, he would probably have made no discovery at all. But the bare statement that “art is useless” is so vague as to be really meaningless, if not inaccurate and misleading.
Therefore, Nietzsche was perhaps making a profound statement when he declared that art is the great stimulus to life; it produces joy as an aid to life; it possesses a usefulness, that is to say, which transcends its direct aim. The artist is one who sees life as beauty, and art is thus fulfilling its function the more completely, the more deeply it enables us to penetrate into life. It seems, however, that Nietzsche insufficiently guarded his statement. Art for art’s sake, said Nietzsche, is “a dangerous principle,” like truth for truth’s sake and goodness for goodness’ sake. Art, knowledge, and morality are simply means, he declared, and valuable for their “life-promoting tendency.” (There is here a pioneering suggestion of the American doctrine of Pragmatism, according to which how a thing “works” is the test of its validity, but Nietzsche can by no means be counted a Pragmatist.) To look thus at the matter was certainly, with Schopenhauer and with Gourmont, to put aside the superficial moral function of art, and to recognise in it a larger sociological function. It was on the sociological function of art that Guyau, who was so penetrating and sympathetic a thinker, insisted in his book, posthumously published in 1889, “L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique.” He argued that art, while remaining independent, is at the foundation one with morals and with religion. He believed in a profound unity of all these terms: life, morality, society, religion, art. “Art, in a word, is life.” So that, as he pointed out, there is no conflict between the theory of art for art, properly interpreted, and the theory that assigns to art a moral and social function. It is clear that Guyau was on the right road, although his statement was confusingly awkward in form. He deformed his statement, moreover, through his perpetual tendency to insist on the spontaneously socialising organisation of human groups—a tendency which has endeared him to all who adopt an anarchist conception of society—and, forgetting that he had placed morals only at the depth of art and not on the surface, he commits himself to the supremely false dictum: “Art is, above everything, a phenomenon of sociability,” and the like statements, far too closely resembling the doctrinary pronouncements of Tolstoy. For sociability is an indirect end of art: it cannot be its direct aim. We are here not far from the ambiguous doctrine that art is “expression,” for “expression” may be too easily confused with “communication.”[[132]]
All these eminent philosophers—though they meant something which so far as it went was true—have failed to produce a satisfying statement because they have none of them understood how to ask the question which they were trying to answer. They failed to understand that morals is just as much an art as any other vital psychic function of man; they failed to see that, though art must be free from the dominance of morals, it by no means followed that it has no morality of its own, if morality involves the organised integrity which all vital phenomena must possess; they failed to realise that, since the arts are simply the sum of the active functions which spring out of the single human organism, we are not called upon to worry over any imaginary conflicts between functions which are necessarily harmonious because they are all one at the root. We cannot too often repeat the pregnant maxim of Bacon that the right question is the half of knowledge. Here we might almost say that it is the whole of knowledge. It seems, therefore, unnecessary to pursue the subject further. He who cannot himself pursue it further had best leave it alone.
But when we enter the æsthetic sphere we are no longer artists. That, indeed, is inevitable if we regard the arts as the sum of all the active functions of the organism. Rickert, with his methodical vision of the world,—for he insists that we must have some sort of system,—has presented what he regards as a reasonable scheme in a tabular form at the end of the first volume of his “System.”[[133]] He divides Reality into two great divisions: the monistic and asocial Contemplative and the pluralistic and social Active. To the first belong the spheres of Logic, Æsthetics, and Mysticism, with their values, truth, beauty, impersonal holiness; to the second, Ethics, Erotics, the Philosophy of Religion, with their values, morality, happiness, personal holiness. This view of the matter is the more significant as Rickert stands aside from the tradition represented by Nietzsche and returns to the Kantian current, enriched, indeed, and perhaps not quite consistently, by Goethe. It seems probable that all Rickert’s active attitudes towards reality may fairly be called Art, and all the contemplative attitudes, Æsthetics.
There is in fact nothing novel in the distinction which underlies this classification, and it has been recognised ever since the days of Baumgarten, the commonly accepted founder of modern æsthetics, not to go further back.[[134]] Art is the active practical exercise of a single discipline: æsthetics is the philosophic appreciation of any or all the arts. Art is concerned with the more or less unconscious creation of beauty: æsthetics is concerned with its discovery and contemplation. Æsthetics is the metaphysical side of all productive living.
IV
This complete unlikeness on the surface between art and æsthetics—for ultimately and fundamentally they are at one—has to be emphasised, for the failure to distinguish them has led to confusion and verbosity. The practice of morals, we must ever remember, is not a matter of æsthetics; it is a matter of art. It has not, nor has any other art, an immediate and obvious relationship to the creation of beauty.[[135]] What the artist in life, as in any other art, is directly concerned to express is not primarily beauty; it is much more likely to seem to him to be truth (it is interesting to note that Einstein, so much an artist in thought, insists that he is simply concerned with truth), and what he produces may seem at first to all the world, and even possibly to himself, to be ugly. It is so in the sphere of morals. For morals is still concerned with the possessive instinct, not with the creation of beauty, with the needs and the satisfaction of the needs, with the industrial and economic activities, with the military activities to which they fatally tend. But the æsthetic attitude, as Gaultier expresses it, is the radiant smile on the human face which in its primitive phases was anatomically built up to subserve crude vital needs; as he elsewhere more abstractly expresses it, “Beauty is an attitude of sensibility.” It is the task of æsthetics, often a slow and painful task, to see art—including the art of Nature, some would insist—as beauty. That, it has to be added, is no mean task. It is, on the contrary, essential. It is essential to sweep away in art all that is ultimately found to be fundamentally ugly, whether by being, at the one end, distastefully pretty, or, at the other, hopelessly crude. For ugliness produces nausea of the stomach and sets the teeth on edge. It does so literally, not metaphorically. Ugliness, since it interferes with digestion, since it disturbs the nervous system, impairs the forces of life. For when we are talking æsthetics (as the word itself indicates) we are ultimately talking physiologically. Even our metaphysics—if it is to have any meaning for us—must have a physical side. Unless we hold that fact in mind, we shall talk astray and are likely to say little that is to the point.
Art has to be seen as beauty and it is the function of æsthetics so to see it. How slowly and painfully the function works every one must know by observing the æsthetic judgments of other people, if not by recalling his own experiences. I know in my own experience how hardly and subconsciously this process works. In the matter of pictures, for instance, I have found throughout life, from Rubens in adolescence to Cézanne in recent years, that a revelation of the beauty of a painter’s work which, on the surface, is alien or repulsive to one’s sensibility, came only after years of contemplation, and then most often by a sudden revelation, in a flash, by a direct intuition of the beauty of some particular picture which henceforth became the clue to all the painter’s work. It is a process comparable to that which is in religion termed “conversion,” and, indeed, of like nature.[[136]] So also it is in literature. And in life? We are accustomed to suppose that a moral action is much easier to judge than a picture of Cézanne. We do not dream of bringing the same patient and attentive, as it were æsthetic, spirit to life as we bring to painting. Perhaps we are right, considering what poor bungling artists most of us are in living. For “art is easy, life is difficult,” as Liszt used to say. The reason, of course, is that the art of living differs from the external arts in that we cannot exclude the introduction of alien elements into its texture. Our art of living, when we achieve it, is of so high and fine a quality precisely because it so largely lies in harmoniously weaving into the texture elements that we have not ourselves chosen, or that, having chosen, we cannot throw aside. Yet it is the attitude of the spectators that helps to perpetuate that bungling.