[15] Catalogue, Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Grafton Galleries, 1910-11, pp. 11-12.
It should be noted that the early Post-Impressionists were artists first and theorists afterwards, and they did not themselves produce the theories which attempt to explain their art. The later men, on the other hand, appear to have consummated a remarkable marriage of philosophical reflection and artistic expression. Their art is the conscious execution of their argument. There is no a priori objection to this luminous rationality. The only essential is that the argument should be correct. Therefore, while one cannot condemn the art of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne on the ground that the explanatory theories subsequently put forward are fallacious, a great many of the cubist experiments live or fall with their theory.
While Cubism and Futurism had a similar origin they very soon parted ways, and each followed the light of its own peculiar interpretation. The difference of opinion concerned not the departure from verisimilitude to persons and natural objects, about which both were in agreement, but the content and character of the expression. The futurists wanted, so to speak, programme music, the cubists pure music without any taint of worldly and literary associations. It is curious that these two movements which started so near together should diverge to either extreme, Cubism to enshrine itself in a pure inhuman emotion which possesses an absolutely divine "in itselfness," but is totally unrelated to the rest of life, and can, therefore, only be ejaculated about, and Futurism "to introduce brutally life into art, to combat the old ideal æsthetic, static, decorative, effeminate, precious, cynical that loathed action."[16] Cubism is fugitive, mystical, averse to science and the world of raw human passion. Futurism is explosive with mundane energy; it is not merely a theory of art, literature, music, it is a new orientation embracing the whole of life; "on every question, in Parliament, in communal councils, and in the market-places, men are divided into lovers of the past (passatisti) and futurists." Yet it is not so much the whole of life that the futurists wish to express as that part of it which is peculiarly modern, its movement, its flux, its dynamism. Any theory of a disruptive, hurly-burly aspect is grist to the mill of Futurism. With what acclamation will Professor Einstein's relativism be greeted: except that space should be angular rather than gracefully curved! And it is again curious how the extremes tend to meet. The Futurist's state, nous aspirons à la création d'un type inhumain en qui seront aboli la douleur morale, la bonté, la tendresse et l'amour.[17] Man must become metallic, mechanical, and dynamical. Mr. Clive Bell aspires (if only in art) after an inhuman emotion crystallised in abstract plastic form, in intricate relations of masses: a sort of divine mathematical matter.
[16] Noi Futuristi! Milan, 1917.
[17] Le Futurisme, by Maxinetti and others. 1911.
Recently an interesting controversy has taken place in the Burlington Magazine between Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. D. S. Maccoll on the question of representative and abstract or purely decorative form. Mr. Maccoll stands for the older school of J. A. Symonds; Mr. Roger Fry would assimilate pictorial art to music and deprive it altogether of a world outside itself. Both are in agreement as to art being non-photographic, and as to the existence parallel with or prior to visual emotional art of a photographic visual consciousness. Art, they both admit, is not reproductive; to reproduce is the function of photography and of the photographic side of our minds.
Art is temperamental, the expression in line and colour of emotion. But while Mr. Maccoll thinks that the emotion lies mainly in the rhythm of the objects represented, Mr. Fry considers that we are wrong in concerning ourselves either with the ideas and sentiments of the artist or with his interpretation of objects. We must appreciate and judge a drawing solely according to the degree of beauty the lines set up among themselves. Mr. Maccoll shrewdly points out that Mr. Fry and his school always lay great emphasis on "mass," "volume," "plasticity," etc., which are definitely characters of objects and, therefore, representative. It is possible, however, to go further: even a line and a colour are natural objects, and if we are able to find enjoyment in simple arrangements of lines and colours, why should we not find equal enjoyment in trees and clouds and hills and people? Stated thus these are generalities, but so are lines and colours: in a picture, however, or a decoration they are endowed with individual life, with a unique tone and significance.
In order to be absolutely logical, neither Mr. Roger Fry nor Mr. Clive Bell should attempt to describe or explain a picture at all. It is a world in a watertight compartment entirely severed and shut off from the ordinary world. It either throws us into an ecstasy or it does not, but these ecstasies are so many discrete units, and if they differ we cannot articulate the difference. We ought not, for instance, to describe early Italian art as ascetically religious, Botticelli as pagan and lyrical, Hogarth as satirical. For this would be ascribing to art a content extracted from life, it would be turning art into literature. Even literature, however, at its best is devoid of meaning. "In great poetry," writes Mr. Clive Bell, "it is the formal music that makes the miracle. The poet expresses in verbal form an emotion but distantly related to the words set down." And he quotes Shakespeare's poetry as an instance of this great meaningless word music. This surely is the reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory.
Mr. Clive Bell defines art as significant form. At first sight it would appear as though the delimitations set up by the reduction of art to abstract form were swept away by the admission of "significance" which might include in its range the whole world. But the significance is indescribable except in terms of form itself. Hence there is a certain justification in Mr. Maccoll's contention that Mr. Clive Bell really means "insignificant form." In his reply Mr. Bell falls back on the conception of emotion. The significance is emotional, it is not only incommunicable except by means of the actual work of art, but is also totally unrelated to life in general: it is an intelligible and self-contained department of its own, and does not require the liaison work of the critical guide and commentator.
The fact is that in their most legitimate preoccupation of ensuring that the work of art shall be a world in itself, a unity whose essential significance and content does not lie outside itself in a world of which it is merely a superfluous copy, but is firmly grasped and held in its imaginative synthesis so that the content is identical with the form. Messrs. Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Co. have gone absolutely to the other extreme and deprived the work of art of all content and significance; they have rendered it a discrete unit instead of an individual unit. Now, there is only one mental activity which deals with discrete units, and that is mathematics. Hence we can detect a gradual assimilation in their critical terminology to the language of mathematics and physics. The mysticism of art is becoming the mysticism of planes, angles, cubes, surfaces and relations of lines and masses.