Art, in fact, is a human activity in which we try to exercise our wills. We are aware that it is threatened with decadence by the mere process of our civilization, that it is much more difficult for us to produce living art than it was for our forefathers of the Middle Ages. But still we are not content to produce dead art. Half unconsciously we are making the effort to exercise our wills upon our art, as upon our science, our morals, our politics, to avoid decadence in art as we try to avoid it in other human activities; and this effort is the great experiment, the peculiar feature, of the art of the last century.
It is an effort not merely aesthetic but also intellectual. There is a great interest in aesthetics and a constant and growing effort to charge them with actual experience and to put them to some practical end. In the past they have been the most backward, the most futile and barren, kind of philosophy because men wrote about them who had never really experienced works of art and who saw no connexion between their philosophy and the production of works of art. They talked about the nature of the beautiful, as schoolmen talked about the nature of God. And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful from their own experience of it than schoolmen knew about the nature of God. But now men are interested in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the present works of men and because they so passionately desire it; and their speculation has the aim of recovering it. So aesthetics, whatever some artists in their peculiar and pontifical narrowness may say, is of great importance now; they are part of the effort which the modern world is making to exercise its will in the production of works of art, and they are bound, if that effort is successful, to have more and more effect upon that production.
But is that effort going to be successful? That is a question which no one can answer yet. But my object is to insist that in our age, because of its effort, an effort which has never been made so consciously and resolutely before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the same nature as progress in other human activities. If we can escape from what has seemed to some men this inexorable process of decadence in art, we shall have accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the human will. We shall have redeemed art from the tyranny of mere fate.
What we have to do now is to understand what it is that causes decadence in art, we have to apply a conscious science to the production of it. We have to see what are the social causes that produce excellence and decay in it. And we have made a great beginning in this. For we are all aware that art is not an isolated thing, that it does not merely happen, as Whistler said. We know that it is a symptom of something right or wrong with the whole mind of man and with the circumstances that affect that mind. We know at last that there is a connexion between the art of man and his intellect and his conscience. It was because William Morris saw that connexion that he, from being a pure artist, became a socialist and spoke at street corners. Such a change, such a waste and perversion as it seemed to many, would have been impossible in any former age. It was possible and inevitable, it was a natural process for Morris in the nineteenth century, because he was determined to exercise his will upon art, just as men in the past had exercised their will upon religion or politics; because he no longer believed that art happened as the weather happens and that the artist is a charming but irresponsible child swayed merely by the caprices of his own private subconsciousness. Was he right or wrong? I myself firmly believe that he was right. That if man has a will at all, if he is not a mere piece of matter moulded by circumstances, he has a will in art as in all other things. And, further, if he has a common will which can express itself in his other activities, in religion or politics, that common will must also be able to express itself in art. It has not hitherto done so consciously, because man in all periods of artistic success has been content to succeed without asking why he succeeded, and in all periods of artistic failure he has been content to fail without asking why he has failed. We have been for long living in a period of artistic failure, but we have asked, we are asking always more insistently, why we fail. And that is where our time differs from any former period of artistic decadence, why, I believe, it is not a period of decadence but one of experiment, and of experiment which will not be wasted, however much it may seem at the moment to fail. But if out of all this conscious effort and experiment we do arrest the process of decadence, if we do pass from failure to success, then we shall have accomplished a progress in art such as has never been accomplished before even in the greatest ages. For whereas men have never been able to learn from the experience of those ages, whereas the Greeks and the men of the thirteenth century have not taught men how to avoid decadence in art, we and our children will teach them how to avoid it. We shall then have given a security to art such as it has never enjoyed before; and we shall do that by applying science to it, by using the conscious intelligence upon it.
We may fail, of course, but even so our effort will not have been in vain. And some future age in happier circumstances may profit by it, and achieve that progress, that application of science to art, which we are now attempting.
Many people, especially artists, tell us that the attempt is a mere absurdity. But ignorance even about art need not be eternal. Ignorance is eternal only when it is despairing or contented. Twenty years ago many people said that men never would be able to fly, yet they are flying now because they were resolved to fly. So we are more and more resolved to have great art. Every year we feel the lack of it more and more. Every year more people exercise their wills more and more consciously in the effort to achieve it. This, I repeat, has never happened before in the history of the world. And the consequence is that our art, what real art we have, is unlike any that there has been in the world before. It is so strange and so rebellious that we ourselves are shocked and amazed by it. Much of it, no doubt, is merely strange and rebellious, as much of early Christianity was merely strange and rebellious and so provoked the resentment and persecution of self-respecting pagans. Every great effort of the human mind attracts those who merely desire their own salvation, and so it is with the artistic effort now. There are cubists and futurists and post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the past, and men could not endure to live without life and truth in their religion. So now they cannot endure to live without life and truth in their art. They are determined to have an art which shall express all that they have themselves experienced of the beauty of the universe, which shall not merely utter platitudes of the past about that beauty.
So far perhaps there is little but the effort at expression, an effort strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can say your worst about it and laugh at all its failures. Yet they are failures different in kind from the artistic failures of the past, for they are failures of the conscious will, not of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all human activities that prepare the way for successes.
Let us remember then, always, that art is a human activity, not a fairy chance that happens to the mind of man now and again. And let us remember, too, that it does not consist merely of pictures or statues or of music performed in concert-rooms. It is, indeed, rather a quality of all things made by man, a quality that may be good or bad but which is always in them. That is one of the facts about art that was discovered in the nineteenth century, when men began to miss the excellence of art in all their works and to wish passionately that its excellence might return to them. And this discovery which was then made about art was of the greatest practical importance. For then men became aware that they could not have good pictures or architecture or sculpture unless the quality of art became good again in all their works. So much they learnt about the science of art. They began, or some of them did, to think about their furniture and cottages and pots and pans and spoons and forks, and even about their tombstones, as well as about what had been called their works of art. And in all these humbler things an advance, a conscious resolute wilful advance, has been made. We begin to see when and also why spoons and forks and pots and pans are good or bad. We are less at the mercy of chance or blind fashion in such things than our fathers were. We know our vulgarity and the naughtiness of our own hearts. The advance, the self-knowledge, is not general yet, but it grows more general every year and the conviction of sin spreads. No doubt, like all conviction of sin, it often produces unpleasant results. The consciously artistic person often has a more irritating house than his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and there was none in paganism.
The title of this book is Progress and History, and it may justly be complained that the progress of which I have been talking is not historic, but a progress that has not yet happened and may never happen at all. But that I think is a defect of my particular branch of the subject. Progress in art, if progress is anything more than a natural process of growth to be followed inevitably by a natural process of decay, has never yet happened in art; but there is now an effort to make it happen, an effort to exercise the human will in art more completely and consciously than it has ever been exercised before. Therefore I could do nothing but attempt to describe that effort and to speculate upon its success.