Progress and History Part 13

They cannot discover what circ.u.mstances favour art, and therefore they cannot attempt to produce those circ.u.mstances. 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.ses 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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.

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 circ.u.mstances; and those who deny progress altogether deny that man has any will or any command over circ.u.mstances.

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 a.s.sume 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sion of his own, not some pa.s.sion 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-cla.s.ses. Everywhere there spread a kind of aesthetic sn.o.bbery 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 sn.o.bbery 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 a.s.sociation with gentility. But so strong was the contagion of this a.s.sociation 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 n.o.ble things it will be n.o.ble, 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 sn.o.bbism 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.sical art has lost its old superst.i.tious 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.

But still this freedom of all the ages has not enabled us to produce a great art of our own. There are some, indeed, who think that it has hindered us from doing so, that we are becoming merely universal connoisseurs who can criticize anything and produce nothing. We have the most wonderful museums that ever were, and the most wonderful power of enjoying all that is in them, but, with all our riches from the past, our present is barren; and it is barren because our rich men would rather pay great prices for past treasures than encourage artists to produce masterpieces now. If that is so, if that is all that is coming to us from our freedom of all the ages, there is certainly not progress in it. Better that we should produce and enjoy the humblest genuine art of our own than that we should continue in this learned impotence.

But this power of enjoying the art of all ages, though it certainly has had some unfortunate results, must be good in itself. It is sympathy, and that is always better than indifference or antipathy. It is knowledge, and that is always better than ignorance. And we have to remember that it has existed only for a short time and is, therefore, not yet to be judged by its fruits. We are still gasping at all the artistic treasures of the past that have been revealed to us like a new world; and still they are being revealed to our new perceptions. Only in the last ten years, for instance, have we discovered that Chinese painting is the rival of Italian, or that the golden age of Chinese pottery was centuries before the time of that Chinese porcelain which we have hitherto admired so much. The knowledge, the delight, is still being gathered in with both hands. It is too soon to look for its effects upon the mind of Europe.

But it is not the result of mere barren connoisseurs.h.i.+p or scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new effort of the human spirit, and an effort after what? An effort to exert the human will in the matter of art far more consciously than it has exerted ever before.

It is to be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us that we must exert our wills in art, was also himself eager in the discovery and enjoyment of all kinds of art in the past. He had his prejudices, the prejudices of a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I see in Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?' But he enjoyed the art of most ages and countries more than he enjoyed his prejudices. He had the historical sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the artist long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his own language, and from the art of the past which he loved he saw what was wrong with the art of our time. So did Ruskin and so do many now.

Further we are not in the least content to admire the art of the past without producing any of our own. There is incessant restless experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant effort to apply them to the actual production of art, in fact to exert the conscious human will upon art as it has never been exerted before.

So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity of the last century in the history of art, one would say that it is the first age in which men have rebelled against the process of decadence in art, in which they have been completely conscious of that process and have tried to arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say that that effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either that it has failed. We may be discontented with the art of our own time, but at least we must allow that it is, with all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and blind experiments, utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past have lacked.

The artistic decadence of the past which is most familiar to us is that of the later Graeco-Roman art. It was a long process which began at least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, the decadent cla.s.sical art was utterly supplanted by the art which we call Romanesque and Byzantine, and which seems to us now at its best to be as great as any art that has ever been.

But a hundred years ago this Romanesque and Byzantine art was thought to be only a barbarous corruption of the cla.s.sical art. For then the cla.s.sical art even in its last feebleness still kept its immense and unique prestige. Sh.e.l.ley said that the effect of Christianity seemed to have been to destroy the last remains of pure taste, and he said this when he had been looking at the great masterpieces of Byzantine mosaic at Ravenna. Now we know with an utter certainty that he was wrong. He was himself a great artist, but to him there was only one rational and beautiful and civilized art, and that was the decadent Graeco-Roman art.

To him works like the Apollo Belvedere were the masterpieces of the world, and all other art was good as it resembled them. He and in fact most people of his time were still overawed by the immense complacency of that art. They had not the historical sense at all. They had no notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage than in the Laoc.o.o.n.

This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed to inevitable decay because of its immense complacency. The artists had discovered, as they thought, the right way to produce works of art, and they went on producing them in that way without asking themselves whether they meant anything by them or whether they enjoyed them. They knew, in fact, what was the proper thing to do just as conventional people now know what is the proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art was as uninteresting as the conversation of such people. In both the talk and the art there is no expression of real values and so no expression of real will. The past lies heavy upon both. So people have talked, so artists have worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists must work for evermore.

Now we have been threatened with just the same kind of artistic decadence, and we are still threatened with it; so that it would be very easy to argue that, when men reach a certain stage in that organization of their lives which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall into artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to a high stage of such organization, and all the life went out of its art. We have reached perhaps a still higher or at least more elaborate stage of it, and the life has gone or is going out of our art. It has become even more mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost the power of expressing ourselves, our real values, our real will, in it; and we had better submit to that impotence and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art really is an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human mind, and we shall do well not to waste our time and energy upon it. That is the only way in which we can be superior to the Graeco-Roman world in the matter of art. We can give it up altogether or rather put it all into museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for historical and scientific purposes.

But I have only to say that to prove that we will not be contented with such a counsel of despair. The Romans went on producing art, even if it was bad art, and we shall certainly go on producing art whether it is good or bad. We have produced an immense ma.s.s of bad art, worse perhaps than any that the Roman world produced. But there is this difference between us and the Romans, that we are not content with it. We have the conviction of artistic sin and they had not. Therefore we do not think that their example need make us despair. They were not exercising their will on their art. It was to them what a purely conventional morality is to a morally decadent people. It went from bad to worse, just as conventional morals do, when no man arises and says: 'This is wrong, although you think it right. I know what is right from my own sense of values, and I will do it in spite of you.' So far as we know, there were no rebels of that kind in the art of the Graeco-Roman world. But our world of art is full of such rebels and has been ever since the artistic debacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact the chief and the unique characteristic of the art of the last hundred years has been the constant succession of artistic rebels. All our greatest artists have been men who were determined to exercise their own wills in their art, whatever the ma.s.s of men might think of it. And what has always happened is that they have been first bitterly abused and then pa.s.sionately praised. This, so far as I know, has never happened before.

There have been rebel artists like Rembrandt, but only a few of them.

Most great artists before the nineteenth century have been admired in their own time. But in the nineteenth century, and more and more towards the end of it, the great artists have had to conquer the world with their rebellion, they have had to exercise their own individual wills against the common convention. And it seems to us now the mark of the great artist so to exercise his individual will, so to rebel and conquer the world with his rebellion, even if he kills himself in the process.

Think of Constable and even Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above all of nearly all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of all the rebel musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists, Michelangelo, t.i.tian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach, Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman world were not rebels. There they were like Michelangelo and Raphael, if they were like them in nothing else. If they had been rebels we might not yawn at their works now.

Now, clearly, this rebellion is not so good a thing as the harmony between the artist and his public which has prevailed in all great ages of art. But it is better than the harmony of dull and complacent convention which prevailed in the Graeco-Roman decadence. For it means that our artists are not content with such complacence, that they will not accept decadence as an inevitable process. And the fact that we do pa.s.sionately admire them for their rebellion as soon as we understand what it means, that this rebellion seems to us a glorious and heroic thing, is a proof that we, the public, also are not content to sink into the Graeco-Roman complacency. We may stone our prophets at first, but like the Hebrews, we produce prophets as well as priests, that is to say academicians. And we treasure their works as the Hebrews treasured the books of the prophets.

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 G.o.d.

And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful from their own experience of it than schoolmen knew about the nature of G.o.d. But now men are interested in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the present works of men and because they so pa.s.sionately 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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 plat.i.tudes 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 pa.s.sionately 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 t.i.tle 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.

X

PROGRESS IN SCIENCE

F.S. MARVIN

'L'Esprit travaillant sur les donnees de l'experience.'

The French phrase, neater as usual than our own, may be taken as the starting-point in our discussion. We shall put aside such questions as what an experience is, or how much the mind itself supplies in each experience, or what, if anything, is the not-mind upon which the mind works. We must leave something for the chapter on philosophy; and the present chapter is primarily historical. Having defined what we mean by science, we are to consider at what stage in history the working of the mind on experience can be called scientific, in what great strides science has leapt forward since its definite formation, and in what ways this growth of science has affected general progress, both by its action on the individual and on the welfare and unity of mankind.

Our French motto must be qualified in order to give us precision in our definition and a starting-point in history for science in the strict sense. In a general sense the action of the mind upon the given in experience has been going on from the beginning of animal life. But science, strictly so-called, does not appear till men have been civilized and settled in large communities for a considerable time. We cannot ascribe 'science' to the isolated savage gnawing bones in his cave, though the germs are there, in every observation that he makes of the world around him and every word that he utters to his mates. But we may begin to speak of science when we reach those large and ordered societies which are found in the great river-basins and sedentary civilizations of East and West, especially in Egypt and Chaldea.

When we turn to the quality of the thing itself, we note in the first place that while science may be said to begin with mere description, it implies from the first a certain degree of order and accuracy, and this order and accuracy increase steadily as science advances. It is thus a type of progress, for it is a constant growth in the fullness, accuracy and simplification of our experience. From the dawn of science, therefore, man must have acquired standards and instruments of measurement and means of handing on his observations to others. Thus writing must have been invented. But in the second place, there is always involved in this orderly description, so far as it is scientific, the element of prediction. The particular description is not scientific.

'I saw a bird fly' is not a scientific description, however accurate; but 'The bird flies by stretching out its wings' is. It contains that causal connexion or element of generality which enables us to predict.