Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art

by T. W. Rolleston

No art is more sensuous than Music, and none more abstract, more removed from what are called realities, in the substance of what it conveys. Its entire independence of objects of sense as given in experience, combined with its mastery of the inner law, the spiritual significance, of life has led to its being ranked by some as the highest of the arts. I doubt if such comparisons are profitable, but it is easy to recognize a sense in which Schopenhauer speaks truth when he says that the other arts deal with the shadows of life, Music, however, with its essence.[184]

Let us now consider the Representative Arts in the light of the principle which we are trying to establish. Since they depend on the portrayal of objects actually found in nature and not created by the artist, their relation to life is obvious. There are, however, some minor problems of great interest and intricacy connected with them, and these we must briefly touch on.

A great school of artists and art critics has in recent times maintained that Painting is concerned with nothing except harmonies of light and colour, and that subject is therefore completely indifferent to it save in so far as it affords opportunity for the rendering of surfaces variously illuminated and composed. The sun falling on a heap of refuse is on this theory as much to the artist as when it lights up the features of Cordelia under her tragic fate. A champion of this, as it is called, Impressionist school has explained its particular point of view by suggesting the manner in which two painters, one of the older type and one an Impressionist, would treat such a subject as the death of Agamemnon. The former would think of the magnitude of the event and the greatness of the characters of those concerned in it—the Impressionist would probably try to fix the attention of the spectator on some note of colour such as the red robe which a character in the scene might be wearing.[185] Can we judge between these rival conceptions of the function of the representative arts?

Let us revert to our formula—Art is the expression of Life. In the Representative Arts it is the expression of visible life. If one wishes to paint the death of Agamemnon it will not do to rely for one’s effect upon the spectator’s knowledge of that bit of Greek history and to make one’s art impressive simply because its allusions are freely recognizable. So far undoubtedly the Impressionists are right. But on the other hand, the assassination of a great man is a bit of life and a very notable and memorable one. The visible world is, after all, not entirely summed up in the texture of surfaces under light. Character and spirit have also their visible manifestations, and the painter who can render them, as well as the aspects of physical life by which they are accompanied, is surely cutting a wider swathe of life than he who thinks only of the red robe of the actor in a tragic scene. Goethe satirized a whole false theory of art when he remarked in a well-known epigram that “pictures which work miracles are mostly very poor paintings.” Yet one is reminded of his own feeling before the painting of St. Agatha, by Raphael, which he saw on his first Italian journey at Bologna. “I have marked this figure well,” he writes. “I shall one day read my Iphigenia before her in spirit, and shall put no words in the mouth of my heroine which might not have been spoken by this saint.” Was there not something here for Goethe, for all of us, beyond painting for the sake of light and colour?

In considering the plastic arts in relation to subject, the large question of their function as illustration comes into view. An immense range of art, from that which deals with religion and history down to the drawings in our comic journals, evidently presupposes in the spectator’s mind a background of information with which the work of art itself does not and cannot furnish him. A work of this kind must certainly be said to rely for part of its interest upon something which is not in the picture. It is therefore not a pure art product; it is a complex of artistic with historical or religious or critical interest; but so long as we do not confuse the different elements it would be absurd to say that they may not be legitimately united. Still, the subject of a picture, as a picture, remains always something which is in the picture. It would therefore be a contradiction in terms to speak of a poor picture on a great subject. If the painting be poor, the subject is poor—the painter’s intention may have been great, but he has not expressed it. A reference to portraiture may help to make the matter clear. An indifferent portrait of a person held in special love or veneration by me would, if it were not so bad as to belie him, have an interest and value for me which it would entirely lack in the case of one who knew or cared nothing for the person represented. This superadded interest, the interest which travels through the painting to some concrete person or thing behind it, must be thought away before a work of art can be judged as a work of art. The application to religious or historical art is obvious. Here is a painting in which an uninformed observer sees a woman and an angel. What is he to make of it? The painter is evidently representing a moment of great exaltation and significance. The woman is receiving a message; and the painter can tell us, within the limits of his art, not what the message is, but of what kind it is—sad, or solemn, or joyful, or tragic. He can make all the accessories of the theme, the lighting, colour, etc., reinforce his conception, and the observer can discern, if he has intelligence in such things, that the painter is putting before us his conception of the way in which a soul conceives a mighty destiny. That is the subject; the universal idea, although the label on the frame be ‘The Annunciation.’

I hope it will not be thought that I am in any degree seeking to disparage the beautiful art of the Impressionists in maintaining that the highest art is that in which there is most of life. Life is so abundant and rich that one can find it almost anywhere in sufficient measure to delight and to enchant. Moreover, the great laws by which life acts and endures, the laws of rhythm, contrast, harmony, can be amply suggested in the plastic arts even when dealing with the most familiar things of earth, and these exalt and glorify any theme.

I remember to have heard once of a visitor to an exhibition of paintings by—I need not name him—a certain well-known purveyor of sensuous religiosities, a kind of nineteenth-century Carlo Dolci. On entering he met two ladies passing out through the ante-room, which happened to be hung with landscapes by an artist whom I need not hesitate to name, Mr. Mark Fisher. One of them wished to pause over these. The other, who walked with wet eyes and flushed cheek, cried, “Trees, trees! Do you want me to look at trees after having had my soul uplifted?” This little anecdote will bear some thinking over. Can we call an art bad which has power to uplift the soul? But we have to ask, Was it really the art which did so, or the allusions in the art? And again, as in the case of Tolstoy and his canon of infectiousness, we must ask, What soul? It is difficult to imagine that the soul capable of being uplifted by the art of the painter in question would be very quick to recognize the signs of nobility and heroic passion in real life. To recognize that the trees of Mr. Mark Fisher might be worth many Martyrdoms would be at least a sound beginning of an artistic education.

Dancing, so far as it is an art, must be classed under the Representative Arts. Unlike most of these it can render movement; and its art is to display movements in a progressive and a rhythmic sequence. It is sculpture in motion. Unless when combined with Music, however, its range of artistic expression is not great, beautiful effects are not under strict control, and in their rapid change the eye cannot properly take them in. The impression left by a succession of attitudes seems more confused and more transitory than that of a musical phrase.

The question of the place of Literature in the scheme is one of some difficulty. Unlike all the other arts, its subject matter is not brought directly before the senses, but evoked by conventional symbols which have in themselves no æsthetic value whatever. Thus in one sense it may be called the only strictly national art in existence. The most beautiful poem in the world, though it were graven in Egyptian basalt, would be a collection of meaningless scratches if the language in which it was written were lost. If, however, the language be known, Literature has not only the power of evoking the conceptions desired by the maker, but also that of working directly on the senses by means of the rhythmic qualities of speech. Still the range of rhythmic expression in language is so limited that in itself (i.e. as we might feel it if spoken in an unknown tongue) it may be regarded as quite subordinate to the matter conveyed. Strictly, therefore, we ought perhaps to call Literature neither a Presentative nor a Representative, but an Evocative art. Within its own circle, however, it falls naturally into classes corresponding to those of the other arts, for narrative literature and drama, which deal with actions and images taken from external life, are clearly Representative in character, while lyrical and meditative poetry, which place the maker’s mind, mood, or passion directly before us, are Presentative.