Progress and History

by Unknown

The Florentines in fact did exercise their will upon their art more than any other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not arrest that decline. Indeed the Florentines themselves seem not to have been conscious of it. They thought that the dull imitators of Michelangelo were greater than his great predecessors. As we say, their taste became bad, their values were perverted; and with that perversion all their natural genius for the arts was wasted. To this day Carlo Dolci is the favourite painter of the ordinary Florentine. He was a man of some ability, and he painted pictures at once feeble and revolting because he himself and his public liked such pictures.

There is no accounting for tastes, we say, and in saying that we despair of progress in the arts. For it is ultimately this unaccountable thing called taste, and not the absence or presence of genius, which determines whether the arts shall thrive or decay in any particular age or country. People often say that they know nothing about art, but that they do know what they like; and what they imply is that there is nothing to be known about art except your own likes and dislikes, and further that no man can control those. The Florentines of the seventeenth century happened to like Carlo Dolci, where the Florentines of the fifteenth had liked Botticelli. That is the only explanation we can give of the decline of Florentine painting.

It is of course no explanation; and because no explanation beyond it has been given, we are told that there can be no such thing as progress in the arts. That is the lesson of history. We are far beyond the Egyptians in science, but certainly not beyond them in art. Indeed one might say that there has been a continual slow decline in all the arts of Europe, except music, since the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly declining since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable decline of the arts there has been a great advance in nearly everything else, in knowledge, in power, even in morality. Upon everything man has been able to exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has really wished for progress there he has got it, except in this one case. Therefore it seems that upon the arts he cannot exercise his will, and that they alone of all his activities are not capable of progress. What do we mean by progress except the successful exercise of the human will in a right direction? That is what distinguishes progress from natural growth; that alone can preserve it from natural processes of decay. There are people who say that it does not exist, that everything which happens to man is a natural process of growth or decay. Whether that is so or not, we do mean by progress something different from these natural processes. When we speak of it we do imply the exercise of the human will, man's command over circumstances; and those who deny progress altogether deny that man has any will or any command over circumstances. For them things happen to man and that is all, it is not man's will that makes things happen. But if we use the word progress at all, we imply that it is man's will that makes things happen. And since man is evidently liable to decline as well as progress, it follows that if we believe man to be capable of exercising his will in a right direction we must also believe that he can and does exercise it in a wrong direction. I assume that man has this power both for good and for evil. If I did not, I should not be addressing you upon the question whether man is capable of progress in the arts, but upon the question whether he is capable of progress at all. And I should be trying to prove that he is not.

As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he has the power of exercising for good or evil his will upon the arts as upon other things; and hitherto I have been giving you certain facts in the history of the arts which seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to this—that man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising his will upon the arts; that he has not produced good art because he wished to produce it. We, for instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more power than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we have not been able to apply that power to the arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence. We cannot build like our forefathers of the Middle Ages, we cannot make furniture like our great-grandfathers of the eighteenth century. Go into an old churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and present. You will see that the lettering is always fine up to the first generation of the nineteenth century. In that generation there is a rapid decline; and since about 1830 there has been no decent lettering upon tombstones except what has been produced in the last ten years or so by the conscious effort of a few individual artists of great natural talent and high training. If I want good lettering on a tombstone I have to employ one of these artists and to pay him a high price for his talent and his training. But that is only one example of a universal decline in all the arts of use, a decline which happened roughly between the years 1800 and 1830. And the significant fact about it is that when it happened no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known to us in the whole course of history, was never even mentioned in contemporary literature. The poets, the lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They talked about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in the letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of it in some sayings of Blake; but that is all. One would suppose that such a catastrophe would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again that there is no accounting for tastes, and no test that we can apply to them. When science declines, men at least know that they have less power. They are more subject to pestilence when they forget medicine and sanitation; their machines become useless to them when they no longer know how to work them; there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill. But when their taste decays they do not know that it has decayed. And with it decays their artistic capacity, so that, quite complacently, they lose the power of doing decently a thousand things that their fathers did excellently.

But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new fact in human history. The arts have declined, but our complacency over their decline has ceased. The first man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was aware of it; suddenly he escaped from the universal tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He was the first to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he liked. And he was followed with more knowledge and practical power, in fact with more science, by William Morris. What both of these great men really said was that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men do not know what they like, that they do not apply their intellect and will to what they suppose to be their likes and dislikes, and that they could apply their intellect and will to these things if they chose.

When we say that there is no accounting for tastes we imply that tastes are always real, that, whether good or bad, they happen to men without any exercise of their will. But Ruskin and Morris implied that we must exercise our will and our intelligence to discover what our tastes really are; that this discovery is not at all easy, but that, if we do not make it, we are at the mercy, not of our own real tastes, but of an unreal thing which is called the public taste, or of equally unreal reactions against it. We think that we like what we suppose other people to like, and these other people too think that they like what no one really likes. Or in mere blind reaction we think that we dislike what the mob likes. But in either case our likes and dislikes are not ours at all and, what is more, they are no one's. Taste in fact is bad because it is not any one's taste, because no one's will is exercised in it or upon it. When it is good, it is always real taste, that is to say some real person's taste. In the work of art the artist does what he really likes to do and expresses some real passion of his own, not some passion which he believes that he, as an artist, ought to express. Art, said Morris, is the expression of the workman's pleasure in his work. It cannot be real art unless it is a real pleasure. And so the public will not demand real art unless they too take a real pleasure in it. If they do not know what they really like, they will not demand of the artist what they really like or what he really likes. They will demand something tiresome and insincere, and by the tyranny of their demand will set him to produce it.

That was what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century in nearly all the arts and especially in the arts of use. It had happened before in different ages and countries, especially in painting, sculpture, architecture, and the arts of use as they were patronized by the vulgar rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it happened suddenly and universally to all arts. There were no longer vulgar rich only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do, because they were the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias, geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because any one thought them more beautiful, but because, since they were grown in green-houses, they implied the possession of green-houses and so of wealth. They did not, of course, even do that, since they could be bought very cheaply from nurserymen. They implied only the bad taste of snobbery which is the absence of all real taste. For it is physically impossible for any one to like such a combination of plants better than larkspurs and lilies and roses. What they did enjoy was not the flowers themselves but their association with gentility. But so strong was the contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias, calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as it was once one of social superiority. But what it never was and never could be was an expression of a genuine liking.

Now I owe the very fact that I am able to give this account of a simple perversion of taste to Ruskin and Morris. It was they who first made the world aware that its taste was perverted and that most of its art was therefore bad. It was they who filled us with the conviction of artistic sin, and who also in a manner entirely scientific tried to discover what was the nature of this sin and how it had come about. First Ruskin tentatively, and afterwards Morris systematically and out of his own vast artistic experience, connected this decay of the arts with certain social conditions. It was not merely that taste had decayed or that the arts had developed to a point beyond which there was nothing for them but decline. Morris insisted that there were causes for the decay of taste and the decline of the arts, causes as much subject to the will of man as the causes of any kind of social decay or iniquity. He insisted that a work of art is not an irrational mystery, not something that happens and may happen well or ill; but that all art is intimately connected with the whole of our social well-being. It is in fact an expression of what we value, and if we value noble things it will be noble, if we pretend to value base things it will be base.

Whistler said that this was not so. He insisted that genius is born, not made, and that some peoples have artistic capacity, some have not. Now it is true that nations vary very much in their artistic capacity and in the strength of their desire to produce art. But even the nations which have little artistic capacity and little desire to produce art have in their more primitive state produced charming works of real art. Whistler gave the case of the Swiss as an excellent people with little capacity for art. But the old Swiss chalets are full of character and beauty, and there are churches in Switzerland which have all the beauty of the Middle Ages. The cuckoo clocks and other Swiss articles of commerce which Whistler despised are contemptible, not because they are Swiss, but because they are tourist trash produced by workmen who express no pleasure of their own in them for visitors who buy them only because they think they are characteristic of Switzerland. They are, in fact, not the expression of any genuine taste or liking whatever, like the tourist trash that is sold in the Rue de Rivoli. Probably the Swiss would never be capable of producing works of art like Chartres Cathedral or Don Giovanni, but they have in the past possessed a genuine and delightful art of their own like nearly every European nation in the Middle Ages.

So, though genius is born, it is also made, and though nations differ in artistic capacity, they all have some artistic capacity so long as they know what they like and express only their own liking in their art, so long as they are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism. This we know now, and we have developed a new and remarkable power of seeing and enjoying all the genuine art of the past. This power is part of the historical sense which is itself modern. In the past, until the nineteenth century, very few people could see any beauty or meaning in any art of the past that did not resemble the art of their own time and country. The whole art of the Middle Ages, for instance, was thought to be merely barbarous until the Gothic revival, and so was the art of all the past so far as it was known, except the later art of Greece and Rome. For our ancestors' taste did indeed happen as art happened, and they could not escape from the taste which circumstances imposed on them; any art that was not according to that taste was for them as it were in an unknown tongue. But we have made this great progress in taste, at least, if not in the production of art, that we can understand nearly all artistic languages, and that what used to be called classical art has lost its old superstitious prestige for us. Not only can we enjoy the art of our own Middle Ages; but many of us can enjoy and understand just as well the great art of Egypt and China, and can see as clearly when that art is good or bad as if it were of our own time. We have, in fact, in the matter of artistic appreciation gained the freedom of all the ages, and this is a thing that has never, so far as we know, happened before in the history of the human mind.