William of Germany

by Stanley Shaw

The Emperor says art "takes its models, supplies itself from the great sources of Mother Nature." With all courtesy to the Emperor one may suggest that art, and sane art, takes its models not only from Mother Nature, but also from an almost as prolific a maternal source, namely imagination; and that imagination is limited by no eternal laws we know of, or can even suspect. Accordingly it is useless to check, or try to check, the imagination by telling it to work in a certain direction—so long, naturally, as the imagination is not obviously indecent or insane.

Again, the Emperor says that in classical art there reigns an eternal law, the "law of beauty and harmony, of the aesthetic" which is expressed in a "thoroughly complete form" by the ancients. It is admittedly a delightful and admirable form, but is it thoroughly complete? Is it the last and only form; and may not the very same law be found by experiment to be at work in future art that cannot be called classical, as it was found to be at work in the various noble schools since classical times? One must agree with the Emperor that the Greeks and Romans illustrated the "law of beauty and harmony, of the esthetic, in a wonderful manner." But it was wonderfully done for their age and intellect. They did not exhaust the beautiful and harmonious: far from it.

Neither the world nor mankind has been standing still ever since; certainly the mind of man has not, even though his senses have undergone no elemental change. Paganism was succeeded by Christianity, and with Christianity came a new art canon, new forms of beauty and harmony—the Early Italian. The age of reason followed, bringing with it the Baroque and Rococo canons: and as time went on, and the world's mind kept working, came other canons still. The most recent canon appears to be that of naturalism (the Emperor's "gutter ") with which artists are now experimentalizing. None of the canons, be it noticed, destroyed the canon that preceded, because beauty and harmony are indestructible and imperishable. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

But not only the mind of man kept changing: the world itself and its civilization—by war, by treaty, by science, by invention, by art itself—kept changing, and is changing now. Development, physical as well as social, has been constant, and the changes accompanying it have inspired, and are inspiring, artists with new ideas to which they are always trying to give expression. The subjects of art have enormously multiplied. Those introduced by sport of all kinds, by the development of the theatre, by the newly-found effects of light and colour, need only be mentioned as examples capable of suggesting beauties and harmonies unknown to and unsuspected by the ancients. Hence, in addition to the classical art of the day, there is room for the "new art," the secessionist, the futurist, the impressionist, even the cubist, or whatever the experimental movement may call itself. And any day any of these movements may lead to the establishment of a new and admirable school of genuine art as beautiful as the classical, if in a different manner. The world has no idea of the surprises in all directions yet in store for it.

The Emperor, too, is at one with all the world in assuming that art, to deserve the name, must possess the quality of beauty. He speaks of "beauty and harmony," but let it be taken that he understands beauty to include harmony. Now, as has been suggested, to answer the question, what is beauty, satisfactorily, is no easy matter. In immediate proximity to it lies the question, what is ugliness? It might be argued that nothing in nature is ugly, and that the word was introduced to express what is merely an inability on the part of mankind to perceive the beauty which constitutes nature; and it certainly is possible that, were man endowed with the mind of God, instead of with only some infinitesimal and mysterious emanation of it, he would find all things in creation, all art included, beautiful. The author of the Book of Genesis asserts that when God had finished making the world He looked upon His handiwork and saw that it was good. There is one advantage in adopting this view, and no small one, that a belief in its truth must impel us to look for beauty and goodness in all things, whether in art or nature—and even in the Secession. Perhaps, however, we shall not be far from the truth in saying, as regards art, that all things in creation are beautiful, that there are degrees in beauty of which ugliness is the lowest, and that the truly inspired artist can make all things, ugliness included, beautiful.

The Emperor thinks the appreciation of beauty is one of our innate ideas, like the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, which we call conscience. There is no agreement among thinkers on the point, and it may be that both beauty and conscience are relative, and simply the result of environment and education. Certainly there is no standard of beauty, and more certainly still, not of feminine beauty. The Mahommedan admires a woman who has the nose of the parrot, the teeth of the pomegranate seed, and the tread of the elephant.

But though there is no complete standard of beauty about which all people, at all times, in all countries, are agreed, there are two elements of beauty which may be said to have been standardized, at least for the civilized world, by the early Greeks and Romans. These elements are simplicity and harmony, simplicity being the forms of things most directly and pleasingly appealing to the eye and most easily reaching the common understanding, while harmony is the combination of parts most nearly identical with the lines, contours, and proportions of nature. These are two essentials of good sculpture, and the Emperor was talking to sculptors and perhaps thinking only of sculpture.

Yet simplicity and harmony alone do not constitute beauty, while on the other hand beauty may take very complicated forms. A third element one may suggest is essential, and its indescribable nature causes all the difficulty there is in defining beauty. This third element is—charm. A work of art, to be beautiful, must charm, and to different people different things are charming. Plato's theory is that the sense of beauty is a dim recollection of a standard we have seen in a heavenly pre-existence. Accepting it as as good an explanation of charm as we can get, we may conclude by defining beauty as, in its highest form, a combination of simplicity and harmony, resulting in charm.

The Emperor says: "To us Germans great ideals have become permanent possessions, whereas to other peoples they have been more or less lost." The remark is not one of those best calculated to promote friendly feelings on the part of other peoples towards Germany or its Emperor. It is like his declaration that Germans are the "salt of the earth," and of a piece with the aggressive attitude of intellectual superiority adopted by many Germans towards other nations—one reason, by the way, for German unpopularity in the world. But is it true? Germany has great ideals in permanent possession, but are they more or less lost to other peoples? It is at least doubtful. Great ideals are the permanent possession of every great people; it is these ideals that have made them great; and they are no less great if they differ according to the nature and conditions of each great people. One might go further, indeed, and say that great ideals are the common property and permanent possession of all great peoples. It is a hard saying that any one people has a monopoly of them. The contribution of every great nation to the common stock of great ideals is incalculable, and it would be interesting to investigate which nation is most successfully working out its great ideals in practice.

The truth is the German ideal of beauty in art is not, generally speaking, the same as that of the Anglo-Saxon or Latin foreigner. The art ideals of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races in this respect are for the most part Greek, while those of the German race are for the most part Roman; and in each case the ideals are the outcome of the spirit which has had most influence on the mind and manners of the different races. The Greek philosophic and aesthetic spirit has chiefly influenced Anglo-Saxon and Latin art ideals: the Roman spirit, particularly the military spirit and the spirit of law, have chiefly influenced German ideals: and, as a result, arrived at through ages during which events of epoch-making importance caused many successive modifications, while the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races are most impressed by such qualities as lightness and delicacy of outline, round and softly-flowing curves and elegance of ornamentation, the German appears, to the Anglo-Saxon and Latin, to be more impressed by the elaborate, the gigantic, the Gothic, the grotesque, the hard, the made, the massive, and the square. In both styles are to be found "beauty and harmony, the aesthetic," to quote the Emperor, but they appeal differently to people of different national temperaments. To the Anglo-Saxon and Latin in general, therefore, German art, and particularly German sculpture and architecture, while impressive and admirable, lack for most foreigners the entirely indescribable quality we have called "charm."