A Sheaf

by John Galsworthy

is art to the writer and the reader of these words.

On the other hand, Tolstoi, in limiting art to such of it as might be understanded of simple folk, served his purpose of attacking the extravagant dandyisms of æstheticism, but fell lugubriously short of the wide truth. The essence of art is the power of communication between heart and heart. Yes! But since no one shall say to human nature: “Be of this or that pattern,” or to the waves of human understanding: “Thus far and no further,” so no man shall say these things to art.

Anybody can draw a tree, but few can draw a tree that others can see is like a tree, and not one in a million can convey the essential spirit of Tree. The power of getting over the footlights to some audience or other is clearly necessary before a man can be called an artist by any but himself. But so soon as he has established genuine connection between his creation and the gratified perception of others, he is making art, though it may be, and usually is, very childish art. The point to grasp is this, and again this: Art is rooted in life for its inspiration, and dependent for its existence as art on affecting other human beings, sooner or later. The statue, the picture, or the book which, having been given a proper chance, has failed to move any but its creator, is certainly not art. It does not follow that the artist should consider his public, or try to please others than his own best self; but if, in pleasing his best self, he does not succeed in pleasing others, in the past, the present, or the future, he will certainly not have produced art. Not, of course, that the size of his public is proof of an artist’s merit. The public of all time is generally but a small public at any given moment. Tolstoi seems to have forgotten that, and to have neglected the significance attaching to the quality of a public. For, if the essence of art be its power of bridging between heart and heart (as he admitted), its value may well be greater if at first it only reaches and fertilizes the hearts of other artists rather than those of the public, for through these other artists it sweeps out again in further circles and ripples of expression. Art is the universal traveller, essentially international in influence. Revealing the spirit of things lying behind parochial surfaces and circumstance, delving down into the common stuff of nature and human nature, and recreating therefrom, it passes ten thousand miles of space, ten thousand years of time, and yet appeals to the men it finds on those far shores. It is the one possession of a country which that country’s enemies usually still respect and take delight in. War—destructive outcome of the side of man’s nature which is hostile to all breadth of heart—can for the moment paralyse the outward activities of art, but can it ever chain its spirit, or arrest the inner ferment of the creative instinct? For thousands of generations war has been the normal state of man’s existence, yet alongside war has flourished art, reflecting man’s myriad aspirations and longings, and, by innumerable expressions of individual vision and sentiment, ever unifying human life, through the common factor of impersonal emotion passing from heart to heart by ways more invisible than the winds travel, carrying the seeds and pollen of herb life. If one could only see those countless tenuous bridges spun by art, a dewy web over the whole lawn of life! If for a moment we could see them, discouragement would cease its uneasy buzzing. What can this war do that a million wars have not? It is bigger, and more bloody—the reaction from it will but be the greater. If every work of art existing in the Western world were obliterated, and every artist killed, would human nature return to the animalism from which art has in a measure raised it? Not so. Art makes good in the human soul all the positions that it conquers.

When the war is over, the world will find that the thing which has changed least is art. There will be less money to spend on it; some artists will have been killed; certain withered leaves, warts, and dead branches will have sloughed off from the tree; and that is all. The wind of war reeking with death will neither have warped nor poisoned it. The utility of art, which in these days of blood and agony is mocked at, will be rising again into the view even of the mockers, almost before the thunder of the last shell has died away. “Beauty is useful,” says Monsieur Rodin. Aye! it is useful!

Who knows whether, even in the full whirlwind of this most gigantic struggle, art work may not be produced which, in sum of its ultimate effect on mankind, will outlive and outweigh the total net result of that struggle, just as the work of Euripides, Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, and Tolstoi outweighed the net result of the Peloponnesian, sixteenth century, Napoleonic, and Crimean wars? War is so unutterably tragic, because—without it—Nature, given time, would have attained the same ends in other ways. A war is the spasmodic uprising of old savage instincts against the slow and gradual humanizing of the animal called man. It emanates from restless and so-called virile natures fundamentally intolerant of men’s progress towards the understanding of each other—natures that often profess a blasphemous belief in art, a blasphemous alliance with God. It still apparently suffices for a knot of such natures to get together, and play on mass fears and loyalties, to set a continent on fire. And at the end? Those of us who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come the state of the world would be very much the same.

It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance of this conflict now that it has been joined. Humanism and Democracy have been forced into a sudden and spasmodic death-grapple with their arch-enemies; and the end of that struggle must be brought into conformity with the slow, sure, general progress of mankind. But if, by better fortune, this fearful conflict had not been forced upon civilization, the same victory would have made good, in course of time, by other processes. That is the irony. For, of a surety, wars or no wars—the future is to Humanism.

But art has no cause to droop its head, nor artists to be discouraged. They are the servants of the future every bit as much as, and more than, they have been the servants of the past; they are even the faithful servants of the present, for they must keep their powers in training, and their vision keen against the time when they are once more accounted of. A true picture is a joy that will move hearts some day, though it may not sell now, nor even for some years after the war; beauty none the less “the expression of what there is best in man” because the earth is being soaked with blood.

Monsieur Sologub, the Russian poet, speaking recently on the future of art, seems to have indicated his view that after the war art will move away from the paths of naturalism; and he defines the naturalists as “people who describe life from the standpoint of material satisfaction.” With that definition I do not at all agree, but it is never good to argue about words. Confusion in regard to the meaning of terms describing art activity is so profound that it is well to sweep them out of our minds, and, in considering what forms art ought to take, go deep down to the criterion of communication between heart and heart. The only essential is, that vision, fancy, feeling should be given the concrete clothing that shall best make them perceptible by the hearts of others; the simpler, the more direct and clear and elemental the form, the better; and that is all you can say about it. To seek remote, intricate, and “precious” clothings for the imagination is but to handicap vision and imperil communication and appeal; the artists who seek them are not usually of much account. The greatness of Blake is the greatness of his simpler work. Though, in this connection, it is as much affectation to pretend that men are more childish than they are, as to pretend that they all have the subtlety of a Robert Browning. If the range of an artist’s vision, the essential truth of his fancy, and the heat of his feeling be great, then, obviously, the simpler, the more accessible the form he takes, the wider will be his reach, the deeper the emotion he stirs, the greater the value of his art.

“What is wanted,” says Monsieur Sologub, “is true art.” Quite so! What is wanted in a work of art is an unforced natural and adequate correspondence between fancy and form, matter and spirit, so that one shall not be distracted by its naturalism, mysticism, cubism, whatnotism, but shall simply be moved in a deep impersonal way by perception of another’s vision. Two instances come into the mind: A picture of Spring, by Jean François Millet, in the Louvre. Therein, by simple selection, without any departure whatever from the normal representation of life, the very essence of Spring, the brooding and the white flash of it, the suspense and stir, the sense of gathered torrents, all the special emotion, which, every Spring of the year, is sooner or later felt by every heart, has been stored by the painter’s vision and feeling, and projected from his eyes and heart to other eyes and hearts.

And: Those chapters in a novel of Monsieur Sologub’s compatriot, Turgenev—“Fathers and Children”—which describe with the simplest naturalism the death of Bazarov. There, too, is the heart-beat of emotion as universal as it well can be, rendered so vividly that one is not conscious at all of how it is rendered.