[77] This sentence is practically an unconscious paraphrase of a passage from Aristotle's defence of slavery.
[78] The Welsh Outlook, August 1916, p. 272.
[79] Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. viii.
IX
PROGRESS IN ART
A. Clutton Brock
It is often said that there can be no such thing as progress in art. At one time the arts flourish, at another they decay: but, as Whistler put it, art happens as men of genius happen; and men cannot make it happen. They cannot discover what circumstances favour art, and therefore they cannot attempt to produce those circumstances. There are periods of course in which the arts, or some one particular art, progress. One generation may excel the last; through several generations an art may seem to be rushing to its consummation. This happened with Greek sculpture and the Greek drama in the sixth and fifth centuries; with architecture and all kindred arts in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and at the same time with many arts in China. It happened with painting and sculpture in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with literature in England in the sixteenth century, with music in Germany in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. But in all these cases there followed a decline, often quite unconscious at the time and one of which we cannot discover the causes. Attempts are made by historians of the arts to state the causes; but they satisfy only those who make them, for they are, in fact, only statements of the symptoms of decline. They tell us what happened, not why it happened. And they all seem to point to two conclusions about the course of the arts, both of which would make us despair of any settled progress in them. The first is that the practice of any art by any particular people always follows a certain natural course of growth, culmination, and decay. At least it always follows this course where an art is practised naturally and therefore with success. Art in fact, in its actual manifestations, is like the life of an individual human being and subject to inexorable natural laws. It is born, as men are born, without the exercise of will; and in the same way it passes through youth, maturity, and old age. The second conclusion follows from this, and it is that one nation or age cannot take up an art where another has left it. That is where art seems to differ from science. The mass of knowledge acquired in one country can, if that country loses energy to apply or increase it, be utilized by another. But we cannot so make use of the art of the Greeks or of the Italian Renaissance or of our own Middle Ages. In the Gothic revival we tried to make use of the art of the Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We imitated without understanding, and we could not understand because we were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages. Art, in fact, is always a growth of its own time which cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell why it grows in one time and among one people and not in another.
That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a dream. But that it is not; for men produce it in their waking hours and with the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints a picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He exercises will and choice in all his actions, and the man who buys a picture does the same. We talk of inspiration in the arts as something that cannot be commanded, but there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will. It jumps into one mind and not into another just like an artistic inspiration. And further we are taught and trained in the arts as in the sciences; and success in both depends a great deal upon the nature of the training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from Florence, they were quickened from Florence, however much their art kept its own natural character. But this school which had the best teaching also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was higher and its heights were higher; and for this reason, that the whole Florentine intellect went both into the teaching and into the practice of painting and sculpture. The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the scientific faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was eager for knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint things as he saw them; he tried to discover how they were made, what were the laws of their growth and construction; and his knowledge of these things changed the character of his vision, made him see the human body, for instance, as no mediaeval artist had ever seen it; made him see it as an engineer sees a machine. Just as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man who does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw more in the human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw it with a scientific as well as an aesthetic passion, and all this science of his enriched his art so that there has never since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at once so logical and so expressive.