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Other documents randomly have
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Vision and Design
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Title: Vision and Design

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VISION AND

DESIGN ***
 Contents.
Index.
List of Illustrations
(In certain versions of this etext [in
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Maya Sculpture (portion) from Piedras Negras

Frontispiece
 VISION AND DESIGN
BY

ROGER FRY

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS

1920

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED

LONDON AND BECCLES
 PREFACE
This book contains a selection from my writings on Art extending over a
period of twenty years. Some essays have never before been published in
England; and I have also added a good deal of new matter and made slight
corrections throughout. In the laborious work of hunting up lost and
forgotten publications, and in the work of selection, revision, and
arrangement I owe everything to Mr. R. R. Tatlock’s devoted and patient
labour.

DEDICATED
TO
MY SISTER MARGERY
WITHOUT WHOSE GENTLE BUT PERSISTENT PRESSURE
THIS BOOK WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN MADE
 CONTENTS
PAGE
ART AND LIFE 1
AN ESSAY IN ÆSTHETICS 11
THE OTTOMAN AND THE WHATNOT 26
THE ARTIST’S VISION 31
ART AND SOCIALISM 36
ART AND SCIENCE 52
THE ART OF THE BUSHMEN 56
NEGRO SCULPTURE 65
ANCIENT AMERICAN ART 69
THE MUNICH EXHIBITION OF MOHAMMEDAN ART 76
GIOTTO 87
THE ART OF FLORENCE 117
THE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ COLLECTION 123
DÜRER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 127
EL GRECO 134
THREE PICTURES IN TEMPERA BY WILLIAM BLAKE 140
CLAUDE 145
AUBREY BEARDSLEY’S DRAWINGS 153
THE FRENCH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS 156
DRAWINGS AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB 160
PAUL CÉZANNE 168
RENOIR 175
A POSSIBLE DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE 179
JEAN MARCHAND 184
RETROSPECT 188
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TO FACE
PAGE
MAYA SCULPTURE (PORTION) FROM PIEDRAS
NEGRAS Frontispiece
THIRTEENTH-CENTURY SCULPTURE IN THE
CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN LATERAN 9
GROUP FROM THE BURGHERS OF CALAIS. BY
AUGUSTE RODIN 9
SCULPTURE IN PLASTER. BY HENRI-MATISSE 9
LA DONNA GRAVIDA. BY RAPHAEL 10
PORTRAIT OF MISS GERTRUDE STEIN. BY PABLO
PICASSO 10
NEGRO SCULPTURE 66
FATIMITE BRONZES 80
PERSIAN PAINTING, END OF THIRTEENTH CENTURY 86
PIETÀ. BY GIOTTO 108
CRUCIFIXION. BY CASTAGNO 117
ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. BY UCELLO 123
VIRGIN AND CHILD. BY BALDOVINETTI 125
HOLY FAMILY. BY SIGNORELLI 126
THE CALUMNY OF APELLES. BY REMBRANDT,
MANTEGNA, DÜRER 131
CELESTIAL SPHERE. TAROCCHI PRINT 132
CELESTIAL SPHERE. BY DÜRER 132
ALLEGORY. BY EL GRECO 136
BATHSHEBA. BY WILLIAM BLAKE 142
LANDSCAPE. BY CLAUDE 148
LANDSCAPE IN WATER-COLOUR. BY CLAUDE 150
TEA PARTY. BY HENRI-MATISSE 156
STILL LIFE. BY PABLO PICASSO 156
PROFILE. BY GEORGES ROUAULT 159
APOTHEOSIS OF NAPOLEON. BY INGRES 163
PENCIL DRAWING. BY COROT 165
PEN DRAWING. BY HENRI-MATISSE 166
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST. BY CÉZANNE 168
GARDANNE. BY CÉZANNE 170
SCÈNE DE PLEIN AIR. BY CÉZANNE 172
THE ARTIST’S WIFE. BY CÉZANNE 172
LE RUISSEAU. BY CÉZANNE 174
JUDGEMENT OF PARIS. BY RENOIR 176
STILL LIFE. BY MARCHAND 184
LA BAIGNADE. BY SEURAT 190
STILL LIFE. BY DERAIN 192
THE TRANSFIGURATION. BY RAPHAEL 196

VISION AND DESIGN

 ART AND LIFE[1]

W
HEN we look at ancient works of art we habitually treat them not
merely as objects of æsthetic enjoyment but also as successive
deposits of the human imagination. It is indeed this view of works
of art as crystallised history that accounts for much of the interest
felt in ancient art by those who have but little æsthetic feeling and who find
nothing to interest them in the work of their contemporaries where the
historical motive is lacking and they are left face to face with bare æsthetic
values.
I once knew an old gentleman who had retired from his city office to a
country house—a fussy, feeble little being who had cut no great figure in
life. He had built himself a house which was preternaturally hideous; his
taste was deplorable and his manners indifferent; but he had a dream, the
dream of himself as an exquisite and refined intellectual dandy living in a
society of elegant frivolity. To realise this dream he had spent large sums in
buying up every scrap of eighteenth-century French furniture which he
could lay hands on. These he stored in an immense upper floor in his house
which was always locked except when he went up to indulge in his dream
and to become for a time a courtier at Versailles doing homage to the du
Barry, whose toilet-tables and what-nots were strewn pell-mell about the
room without order or effect of any kind. Such is an extreme instance of the
historical way of looking at works of art. For this old gentleman, as for how
many an American millionaire, art was merely a help to an imagined dream
life.
To many people then it seems an easy thing to pass thus directly from the
work of art to the life of the time which produced it. We all in fact weave an
imagined Middle Ages around the parish church and an imagined
Renaissance haunts us in the college courts of Oxford and Cambridge. We
don’t, I fancy, stop to consider very closely how true the imagined life is:
we are satisfied with the prospect of another sort of life which we might
have lived, which we often think we might have preferred to our actual life.
We don’t stop to consider much how far the pictured past corresponds to
any reality, certainly not to consider what proportion of the whole reality of
the past life gets itself embalmed in this way in works of art. Thus we
picture our Middle Ages as almost entirely occupied with religion and war,
our Renaissance as occupied in learning, and our eighteenth century as
occupied in gallantry and wit. Whereas, as a matter of fact, all of these
things were going on all the time while the art of each period has for some
reason been mainly taken up with the expression of one or another activity.
There is indeed a certain danger in accepting too naïvely the general
atmosphere—the ethos, which the works of art of a period exhale. Thus
when we look at the thirteenth-century sculpture of Chartres or Beauvais we
feel at once the expression of a peculiar gracious piety, a smiling and gay
devoutness which we are tempted to take for the prevailing mood of the
time—and which we perhaps associate with the revelation of just such a
type of character in S. Francis of Assisi. A study of Salimbeni’s chronicle
with its interminable record of squalid avarice and meanness, or of the
fierce brutalities of Dante’s Inferno are necessary correctives of such a
pleasant dream.
It would seem then that the correspondence between art and life which
we so habitually assume is not at all constant and requires much correction
before it can be trusted. Let us approach the same question from another
point and see what result we obtain. Let us consider the great revolutions in
art and the revolutions in life and see if they coincide. And here let me try to
say what I mean by life as contrasted with art. I mean the general
intellectual and instinctive reaction to their surroundings of those men of
any period whose lives rise to complete self-consciousness. Their view of
the universe as a whole and their conception of their relations to their kind.
Of course their conception of the nature and function of art will itself be
one of the most varying aspects of life and may in any particular period
profoundly modify the correspondence of art to life.
Perhaps the greatest revolution in life that we know of at all intimately
was that which effected the change from Paganism to Christianity. That this
was no mere accident is evident from the fact that Christianity was only one
of many competing religions, all of which represented a closely similar
direction of thought and feeling. Any one of these would have produced
practically the same effect, that of focussing men’s minds on the spiritual
life as opposed to the material life which had pre-occupied them for so
long. One cannot doubt then that here was a change which denoted a long
prepared and inevitable readjustment of men’s attitude to their universe.
Now the art of the Roman Empire showed no trace whatever of this
influence; it went on with precisely the same motives and principles which
had satisfied Paganism. The subjects changed and became mainly Christian,
but the treatment was so exactly similar that it requires more than a cursory
glance to say if the figure on a sarcophagus is Christ or Orpheus, Moses or
Æsculapius.
The next great turning-point in history is that which marks the triumph
of the forces of reaction towards the close of the twelfth century—a
reaction which destroyed the promising hopes of freedom of thought and
manners which make the twelfth century appear as a foretaste of modern
enlightenment. Here undoubtedly the change in life corresponds very
closely with a great change in art—the change from the Romanesque to the
Gothic, and at first sight we might suppose a causal connection between the
two. But when we consider the nature of the changes in the two sequences,
this becomes very doubtful. For whereas in the life of the Middle Ages the
change was one of reaction—the sharp repression by the reactionary forces
of a gradual growth of freedom—the change in art is merely the
efflorescence of certain long prepared and anticipated effects. The forms of
Gothic architecture were merely the answer to certain engineering problems
which had long occupied the inventive ingenuity of twelfth-century
architects, while in the figurative arts the change merely showed a new self-
confidence in the rendering of the human figure, a newly developed
mastery in the handling of material. In short, the change in art was in the
opposite direction to that in life. Whereas in life the direction of movement
was sharply bent backwards, in art the direction followed on in a continuous
straight line.
It is true that in one small particular the reaction did have a direct effect
on art. The preaching of S. Bernard of Clairvaux did impose on the
architects who worked for the Cistercian order a peculiar architectural
hypocrisy. They were bound by his traditional influence to make their
churches have an appearance of extreme simplicity and austerity, but they
wanted nevertheless to make them as magnificent and imposing as possible.
The result was a peculiar style of ostentatious simplicity. Paray le Monial is
the only church left standing in which this curious and, in point of fact,
depressing evidence of the direct influence of the religious reaction on art is
to be seen, and, as a curiosity in psychological expression, it is well worth a
visit. For the rest the movement of art went on entirely unaffected by the
new orientation of thought.
 We come now to the Renaissance, and here for the first time in our
survey we may, I think, safely admit a true correspondence between the
change in life and the change in art. The change in life, if one may
generalise on such a vast subject, was towards the recognition of the rights
of the individual to complete self-realisation and the recognition of the
objective reality of the material universe which implied the whole scientific
attitude—and in both these things the exemplar which men put before
themselves was the civilisation of Greece and Rome. In art the change went
pari passu with the change in life, each assisting and directing the other—
the first men of science were artists like Brunelleschi, Ucello, Piero della
Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci. The study of classical literature was
followed in strict connection with the study of classical canons of art, and
the greater sense of individual importance found its expression in the new
naturalism which made portraiture in the modern sense possible.
For once then art and the other functions of the human spirit found
themselves in perfect harmony and direct alliance, and to that harmony we
may attribute much of the intensity and self-assurance of the work of the
great Renaissance artists. It is one of the rarest of good fortunes for an artist
to find himself actually understood and appreciated by the mass of his
educated contemporaries, and not only that, but moving alongside of and in
step with them towards a similar goal.
The Catholic reaction retarded and impeded the main movement of
Renaissance thought, but it did not really succeed either in suppressing it or
changing the main direction of its current. In art it undoubtedly had some
direct effect, it created a new kind of insincerity of expression, a florid and
sentimental religiosity—a new variety of bad taste, the rhetorical and over-
emphatic. And I suspect that art was already prepared for this step by a
certain exhaustion of the impulsive energy of the Renaissance—so that here
too we may admit a correspondence.
The seventeenth century shows us no violent change in life, but rather
the gradual working out of the principles implicit in the Renaissance and
the Catholic reaction. But here we come to another curious want of
correspondence between art and life, for in art we have a violent revolution,
followed by a bitter internecine struggle among artists. This revolution was
inaugurated by Caravaggio, who first discovered the surprising emotional
possibilities of chiaroscuro and who combined with this a new idea of
realism—realism in the modern sense, viz., the literal acceptance of what is
coarse, common, squalid or undistinguished in life—realism in the sense of
the novelists of Zola’s time. To Caravaggio’s influence we might trace not
only a great deal of Rembrandt’s art but the whole of that movement in
favour of the extravagantly impressive and picturesque, which culminated
in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century. Here, then, is another
surprising want of correspondence between art and life.
In the eighteenth century we get a curious phenomenon. Art goes to
court, identifies itself closely with a small aristocratic clique, becomes the
exponent of their manners and their tastes. It becomes a luxury. It is no
longer in the main stream of spiritual and intellectual effort, and this
seclusion of art may account for the fact that the next great change in life—
the French Revolution and all its accompanying intellectual ferment—finds
no serious correspondence in art. We get a change, it is true; the French
Republicans believed they were the counterpart of the Romans, and so
David had to invent for them that peculiarly distressing type of the ancient
Roman—always in heroic attitudes, always immaculate, spotless and with a
highly polished ‘Mme. Tussaud’ surface. By-the-by, I was almost forgetting
that we do owe Mme. Tussaud to the French Revolution. But the real
movement of art lay in quite other directions to David—lay in the gradual
unfolding of the Romanticist conception of the world—a world of violent
emotional effects, of picturesque accidents, of wild nature, and this was a
long prepared reaction from the complacent sophistication of eighteenth-
century life. It is possible that one may associate this with the general state
of mind that produced the Revolution, since both were a revolt against the
established order of the eighteenth century; but curiously enough it found
its chief ally in the reaction which followed the Revolution, in the neo-
Christianism of Chateaubriand and the new sentimental respect for the age
of faith—which, incidentally, appeared so much more picturesque than the
age of reason.
It would be interesting at this point to consider how far during the
nineteenth century reactionary political and religious thought was inspired
primarily by æsthetic considerations—a curious instance of the counter-
influence of art on life might perhaps be discovered in the devotees of the
Oxford movement. But this would take us too far afield.
The foregoing violently foreshortened view of history and art will show,
I hope, that the usual assumption of a direct and decisive connection
between life and art is by no means correct. It may, I hope, give pause to
those numerous people who have already promised themselves a great new
art as a result of the present war, though perhaps it is as well to let them
enjoy it in anticipation, since it is, I fancy, the only way in which they are
likely to enjoy a great art of any kind. What this survey suggests to me is
that if we consider this special spiritual activity of art we find it no doubt
open at times to influences from life, but in the main self-contained—we
find the rhythmic sequences of change determined much more by its own
internal forces—and by the readjustment within it, of its own elements—
than by external forces. I admit, of course, that it is always conditioned
more or less by economic changes, but these are rather conditions of its
existence at all than directive influences. I also admit that under certain
conditions the rhythms of life and of art may coincide with great effect on
both; but in the main the two rhythms are distinct, and as often as not play
against each other.
We have, I hope, gained some experience with which to handle the real
subject of my inquiry, the relation of the modern movement in art to life. To
understand it we must go back to the impressionist movement, which dates
from about 1870. The artists who called themselves impressionists
combined two distinct ideas. On the one hand they upheld, more
categorically than ever before, the complete detachment of the artistic
vision from the values imposed on vision by everyday life—they claimed,
as Whistler did in his “10 o’clock,” to be pure artists. On the other hand a
group of them used this freedom for the quasi-scientific description of new
effects of atmospheric colour and atmospheric perspective, thereby
endowing painting with a quite new series of colour harmonies, or at least
of harmonies which had not been cultivated by European painters for many
hundreds of years. They did more than this—the effects thus explored were
completely unfamiliar to the ordinary man, whose vision is limited to the
mere recognition of objects with a view to the uses of everyday life. He was
forced, in looking at their pictures, to accept as artistic representation
something very remote from all his previous expectations, and thereby he
also acquired in time a new tolerance in his judgments on works of art, a
tolerance which was destined to bear a still further strain in succeeding
developments.
As against these great advantages which art owes to impressionism we
must set the fact that the pseudo-scientific and analytic method of these
painters forced artists to accept pictures which lacked design and formal co-
ordination to a degree which had never before been permitted. They, or
rather some of them, reduced the artistic vision to a continuous patchwork
or mosaic of coloured patches without architectural framework or structural
coherence. In this, impressionism marked the climax of a movement which
had been going on more or less steadily from the thirteenth century—the
tendency to approximate the forms of art more and more exactly to the
representation of the totality of appearance. When once representation had
been pushed to this point where further development was impossible, it was
inevitable that artists should turn round and question the validity of the
fundamental assumption that art aimed at representation; and the moment
the question was fairly posed it became clear that the pseudo-scientific
assumption that fidelity to appearance was the measure of art had no logical
foundation. From that moment on it became evident that art had arrived at a
critical moment, and that the greatest revolution in art that had taken place
since Græco-Roman impressionism became converted into Byzantine
formalism was inevitable. It was this revolution that Cézanne inaugurated
and that Gauguin and van Goch continued. There is no need here to give in
detail the characteristics of this new movement: they are sufficiently
familiar. But we may summarise them as the re-establishment of purely
æsthetic criteria in place of the criterion of conformity to appearance—the
rediscovery of the principles of structural design and harmony.
The new movement has, also, led to a new canon of criticism, and this
has changed our attitude to the arts of other times and countries. So long as
representation was regarded as the end of art, the skill of the artist and his
proficiency in this particular feat of representation were regarded with an
admiration which was in fact mainly non-æsthetic. With the new
indifference to representation we have become much less interested in skill
and not at all interested in knowledge. We are thus no longer cut off from a
great deal of barbaric and primitive art the very meaning of which escaped
the understanding of those who demanded a certain standard of skill in
representation before they could give serious consideration to a work of art.
In general the effect of the movement has been to render the artist intensely
conscious of the æsthetic unity of the work of art, but singularly naïve and
simple as regards other considerations.
It remains to be considered whether the life of the past fifty years has
shown any such violent reorientation as we have found in the history of
modern art. If we look back to the days of Herbert Spencer and Huxley,
what changes are there in the general tendencies of life? The main ideas of
rationalism seem to me to have steadily made way—there have been minor
counter revolutions, it is true, but the main current of active thought has
surely moved steadily along the lines already laid down. I mean that the
scientific attitude is more and more widely accepted. The protests of
organised religion and of various mysticisms seem to grow gradually
weaker and to carry less weight. Hardly any writers or thinkers of first-rate
calibre now appear in the reactionary camp. I see, in short, no big change in
direction, no evident revulsion of feeling.
None the less I suppose that a Spencer would be impossible now and that
the materialism of to-day is recognisably different from the materialism of
Spencer. It would be very much less naïvely

13th Cent. Sculpture in the Cloister of S. Auguste Rodin. Group Henri Matisse. Sculpture
John from in
Lateran “The Burghers of Calais” Plaster
Property of the Artist
Plate I.

self-confident. It would admit far greater difficulties in presenting its

picture of the universe than would have occurred to Spencer. The fact is that
scepticism has turned on itself and has gone behind a great many of the
axioms that seemed self-evident to the earlier rationalists. I do not see that it
has at any point threatened the superstructure of the rationalist position, but
it has led us to recognise the necessity of a continual revision and
reconstruction of these data. Rationalism has become less arrogant and less
narrow in its vision. And this is partly due also to the adventure of the
scientific spirit into new regions. I refer to all that immense body of study
and speculation which starts from Robertson Smith’s “Religion of the
Israelites.” The discovery of natural law in what seemed to earlier
rationalists the chaotic fancies and caprices of the human imagination. The
assumption that man is a mainly rational animal has given place to the
discovery that he is, like other animals, mainly instinctive. This modifies
immensely the attitude of the rationalist—it gives him a new charity and a
new tolerance. What seemed like the wilful follies of mad or wicked men to
the earlier rationalists are now seen to be inevitable responses to
fundamental instinctive needs. By observing mankind the man of science
has lost his contempt for him. Now this I think has had an important bearing
on the new movement in art. In the first place I find something analogous in
the new orientation of scientific and artistic endeavour. Science has turned
its instruments in on human nature and begun to investigate its fundamental
needs, and art has also turned its vision inwards, has begun to work upon
the fundamental necessities of man’s æsthetic functions.
But besides this analogy, which may be merely accidental and not
causal, I think there can be little doubt that the new scientific development
(for it is in no sense a revolution) has modified men’s attitude to art. To
Herbert Spencer religion was primitive fear of the unknown and art was
sexual attraction—he must have contemplated with perfect equanimity,
almost with satisfaction, a world in which both these functions would
disappear. I suppose that the scientific man of to-day would be much more
ready to admit not only the necessity but the great importance of æsthetic
feeling for the spiritual existence of man. The general conception of life in
the mid-nineteenth century ruled out art as noxious, or at best, a useless
frivolity, and above all as a mere survival of more primitive stages of
evolution.
On the other hand, the artist of the new movement is moving into a
sphere more and more remote from that of the ordinary man. In proportion
as art becomes purer the number of people to whom it appeals gets less. It
cuts out all the romantic overtones of life which are the usual bait by which
men are induced to accept a work of art. It appeals only to the æsthetic
sensibility, and that in most men is comparatively weak.
In the modern movement in art, then, as in so many cases in past history,
the revolution in art seems to be out of all proportion to any corresponding
change in life as a whole. It seems to find its sources, if at all, in what at
present seem like minor movements. Whether the difference between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries will in retrospect seem as great in life as
they already do in art I cannot guess—at least it is curious to note how
much more conscious we are of the change in art then we are in the general
change in thought and feeling.
Note.—The original lecture was not illustrated, but the opportunity of
publishing this summary of it has suggested the possibility of introducing a
few examples to illustrate one point, viz., the extent to which the works of
the new movement correspond in aim with the works of early art while
being sharply contrasted with those of the penultimate period. This will be,
perhaps, most evident in Plate I, where I have placed a figure from the
cloisters of S. John Lateran, carved by a thirteenth-century sculptor—then
one of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, and then Matisse’s unfinished alto-
rilievo figure. Here there is no need to underline the startling difference
shown by Rodin’s descriptive method from the more purely plastic feeling
of the two other artists. Matisse and the thirteenth-century artist are much
closer together than Matisse and Rodin.
In Plate II I have placed Picasso beside Raphael. Here the obvious fact is
the common preoccupation of both artists with certain problems of plastic
design and the similarity of their solutions. Had I had space to put a Sargent
beside these the same violent contrast would have been produced.
Raphael. “La Donna Pitti Palace, Pablo Picasso. Portrait of Miss Miss Gertrude
Gravida” Florence Gertrude Stein Stein
Plate II.
 AN ESSAY IN ÆSTHETICS[2]

A
CERTAIN painter, not without some reputation at the present day,
once wrote a little book on the art he practises, in which he gave a
definition of that art so succinct that I take it as a point of departure
for this essay.
“The art of painting,” says that eminent authority, “is the art of imitating
solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments.” It is delightfully
simple, but prompts the question—Is that all? And, if so, what a deal of
unnecessary fuss has been made about it. Now, it is useless to deny that our
modern writer has some very respectable authorities behind him. Plato,
indeed, gave a very similar account of the affair, and himself put the
question—is it then worth while? And, being scrupulously and relentlessly
logical, he decided that it was not worth while, and proceeded to turn the
artists out of his ideal republic. For all that, the world has continued
obstinately to consider that painting was worth while, and though, indeed, it
has never quite made up its mind as to what, exactly, the graphic arts did for
it, it has persisted in honouring and admiring its painters.
Can we arrive at any conclusions as to the nature of the graphic arts,
which will at all explain our feelings about them, which will at least put
them into some kind of relation with the other arts, and not leave us in the
extreme perplexity, engendered by any theory of mere imitation? For, I
suppose, it must be admitted that if imitation is the sole purpose of the
graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon
as more than curiosities, or ingenious toys, are ever taken seriously by
grown-up people. Moreover, it will be surprising that they have no
recognisable affinity with other arts, such as music or architecture, in which
the imitation of actual objects is a negligible quantity.
To form such conclusions is the aim I have put before myself in this
essay. Even if the results are not decisive, the inquiry may lead us to a view
of the graphic arts that will not be altogether unfruitful.
I must begin with some elementary psychology, with a consideration of
the nature of instincts. A great many objects in the world, when presented to
our senses, put in motion a complex nervous machinery, which ends in
some instinctive appropriate action. We see a wild bull in a field; quite
without our conscious interference a nervous process goes on, which, unless
we interfere forcibly, ends in the appropriate reaction of flight. The nervous
mechanism which results in flight causes a certain state of consciousness,
which we call the emotion of fear. The whole of animal life, and a great part
of human life, is made up of these instinctive reactions to sensible objects,
and their accompanying emotions. But man has the peculiar faculty of
calling up again in his mind the echo of past experiences of this kind, of
going over it again, “in imagination” as we say. He has, therefore, the
possibility of a double life; one the actual life, the other the imaginative life.
Between these two lives there is this great distinction, that in the actual life
the processes of natural selection have brought it about that the instinctive
reaction, such, for instance, as flight from danger, shall be the important
part of the whole process, and it is towards this that the man bends his
whole conscious endeavour. But in the imaginative life no such action is
necessary, and, therefore, the whole consciousness may be focussed upon
the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience. In this way we
get, in the imaginative life, a different set of values, and a different kind of
perception.
We can get a curious side glimpse of the nature of this imaginative life
from the cinematograph. This resembles actual life in almost every respect,
except that what the psychologists call the conative part of our reaction to
sensations, that is to say, the appropriate resultant action is cut off. If, in a
cinematograph, we see a runaway horse and cart, we do not have to think
either of getting out of the way or heroically interposing ourselves. The
result is that in the first place we see the event much more clearly; see a
number of quite interesting but irrelevant things, which in real life could not
struggle into our consciousness, bent, as it would be, entirely upon the
problem of our appropriate reaction. I remember seeing in a cinematograph
the arrival of a train at a foreign station and the people descending from the
carriages; there was no platform, and to my intense surprise I saw several
people turn right round after reaching the ground, as though to orientate
themselves; an almost ridiculous performance, which I had never noticed in
all the many hundred occasions on which such a scene had passed before
my eyes in real life. The fact being that at a station one is never really a
spectator of events, but an actor engaged in the drama of luggage or
prospective seats, and one actually sees only so much as may help to the
appropriate action.
In the second place, with regard to the visions of the cinematograph, one
notices that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are likely
to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the
consciousness. If the scene presented be one of an accident, our pity and
horror, though weak, since we know that no one is really hurt, are felt quite
purely, since they cannot, as they would in life, pass at once into actions of
assistance.
A somewhat similar effect to that of the cinematograph can be obtained
by watching a mirror in which a street scene is reflected. If we look at the
street itself we are almost sure to adjust ourselves in some way to its actual
existence. We recognise an acquaintance, and wonder why he looks so
dejected this morning, or become interested in a new fashion in hats—the
moment we do that the spell is broken, we are reacting to life itself in
however slight a degree, but, in the mirror, it is easier to abstract ourselves
completely, and look upon the changing scene as a whole. It then, at once,
takes on the visionary quality, and we become true spectators, not selecting
what we will see, but seeing everything equally, and thereby we come to
notice a number of appearances and relations of appearances, which would
have escaped our vision before, owing to that perpetual economising by
selection of what impressions we will assimilate, which in life we perform
by unconscious processes. The frame of the mirror then, does, to some
extent, turn the reflected scene from one that belongs to our actual life into
one that belongs rather to the imaginative life. The frame of the mirror
makes its surface into a very rudimentary work of art, since it helps us to
attain to the artistic vision. For that is what, as you will already have
guessed, I have been coming to all this time, namely that the work of art is
intimately connected with the secondary imaginative life, which all men
live to a greater or lesser extent.
That the graphic arts are the expression of the imaginative life rather
than a copy of actual life might be guessed from observing children.
Children, if left to themselves, never, I believe, copy what they see, never,
as we say, “draw from nature,” but express, with a delightful freedom and
sincerity, the mental images which make up their own imaginative lives.
 Art, then, is an expression and a stimulus of this imaginative life, which
is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action. Now this
responsive action implies in actual life moral responsibility. In art we have
no such moral responsibility—it presents a life freed from the binding
necessities of our actual existence.
What then is the justification for this life of the imagination which all
human beings live more or less fully? To the pure moralist, who accepts
nothing but ethical values, in order to be justified, it must be shown not
only not to hinder but actually to forward right action, otherwise it is not
only useless but, since it absorbs our energies, positively harmful. To such a
one two views are possible, one the Puritanical view at its narrowest, which
regards the life of the imagination as no better or worse than a life of
sensual pleasure, and therefore entirely reprehensible. The other view is to
argue that the imaginative life does subserve morality. And this is inevitably
the view taken by moralists like Ruskin, to whom the imaginative life is yet
an absolute necessity. It is a view which leads to some very hard special
pleading, even to a self-deception which is in itself morally undesirable.
But here comes in the question of religion, for religion is also an affair of
the imaginative life, and, though it claims to have a direct effect upon
conduct, I do not suppose that the religious person if he were wise would
justify religion entirely by its effect on morality, since that, historically
speaking, has not been by any means uniformly advantageous. He would
probably say that the religious experience was one which corresponded to
certain spiritual capacities of human nature, the exercise of which is in itself
good and desirable apart from their effect upon actual life. And so, too, I
think the artist might if he chose take a mystical attitude, and declare that
the fullness and completeness of the imaginative life he leads may
correspond to an existence more real and more important than any that we
know of in mortal life.
And in saying that, his appeal would find a sympathetic echo in most
minds, for most people would, I think, say that the pleasures derived from
art were of an altogether different character and more fundamental than
merely sensual pleasures, that they did exercise some faculties which are
felt to belong to whatever part of us there may be which is not entirely
ephemeral and material.
 It might even be that from this point of view we should rather justify
actual life by its relation to the imaginative, justify nature by its likeness to
art. I mean this, that since the imaginative life comes in the course of time
to represent more or less what mankind feels to be the completest
expression of its own nature, the freest use of its innate capacities, the
actual life may be explained and justified in its approximation here and
there, however partially and inadequately, to that freer and fuller life.
Before leaving this question of the justification of art, let me put it in
another way. The imaginative life of a people has very different levels at
different times, and these levels do not always correspond with the general
level of the morality of actual life. Thus in the thirteenth century we read of
barbarity and cruelty which would shock even us; we may I think admit that
our moral level, our general humanity is decidedly higher to-day, but the
level of our imaginative life is incomparably lower; we are satisfied there
with a grossness, a sheer barbarity and squalor which would have shocked
the thirteenth century profoundly. Let us admit the moral gain gladly, but do
we not also feel a loss; do we not feel that the average business man would
be in every way a more admirable, more respectable being if his
imaginative life were not so squalid and incoherent? And, if we admit any
loss then, there is some function in human nature other than a purely ethical
one, which is worthy of exercise.
Now the imaginative life has its own history both in the race and in the
individual. In the individual life one of the first effects of freeing experience
from the necessities of appropriate responsive action is to indulge recklessly
the emotion of self-aggrandisement. The day-dreams of a child are filled
with extravagant romances in which he is always the invincible hero. Music
—which of all the arts supplies the strongest stimulus to the imaginative
life, and at the same time has the least power of controlling its direction—
music, at certain stages of people’s lives, has the effect merely of arousing
in an almost absurd degree this egoistic elation, and Tolstoy appears to
believe that this is its only possible effect. But with the teaching of
experience and the growth of character the imaginative life comes to
respond to other instincts and to satisfy other desires, until, indeed, it
reflects the highest aspirations and the deepest aversions of which human
nature is capable.
In dreams and when under the influence of drugs the imaginative life
passes out of our own control, and in such cases its experiences may be
highly undesirable, but whenever it remains under our own control it must
always be on the whole a desirable life. That is not to say that it is always
pleasant, for it is pretty clear that mankind is so constituted as to desire
much besides pleasure, and we shall meet among the great artists, the great
exponents, that is, of the imaginative life, many to whom the merely
pleasant is very rarely a part of what is desirable. But this desirability of the
imaginative life does distinguish it very sharply from actual life, and is the
direct result of that first fundamental difference, its freedom from necessary
external conditions. Art, then, is, if I am right, the chief organ of the
imaginative life, it is by art that it is stimulated and controlled within us,
and, as we have seen, the imaginative life is distinguished by the greater
clearness of its perception, and the greater purity and freedom of its
emotion.
First with regard to the greater clearness of perception. The needs of our
actual life are so imperative, that the sense of vision becomes highly
specialised in their service. With an admirable economy we learn to see
only so much as is needful for our purposes; but this is in fact very little,
just enough to recognise and identify each object or person; that done, they
go into an entry in our mental catalogue and are no more really seen. In
actual life the normal person really only reads the labels as it were on the
objects around him and troubles no further. Almost all the things which are
useful in any way put on more or less this cap of invisibility. It is only when
an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we
really look at it, as for instance at a China ornament or a precious stone, and
towards such even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic
attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity.
Now this specialisation of vision goes so far that ordinary people have
almost no idea of what things really look like, so that oddly enough the one
standard that popular criticism applies to painting, namely, whether it is like
nature or not, is one which most people are, by the whole tenour of their
lives, prevented from applying properly. The only things they have ever
really looked at being other pictures; the moment an artist who has looked
at nature brings to them a clear report of something definitely seen by him,
they are wildly indignant at its untruth to nature. This has happened so
constantly in our own time that there is no need to prove it. One instance
will suffice. Monet is an artist whose chief claim to recognition lies in the
fact of his astonishing power of faithfully reproducing certain aspects of
nature, but his really naïve innocence and sincerity was taken by the public
to be the most audacious humbug, and it required the teaching of men like
Bastien-Lepage, who cleverly compromised between the truth and an
accepted convention of what things looked like, to bring the world
gradually round to admitting truths which a single walk in the country with
purely unbiassed vision would have established beyond doubt.
But though this clarified sense perception which we discover in the
imaginative life is of great interest, and although it plays a larger part in the
graphic arts than in any other, it might perhaps be doubted whether,
interesting, curious, fascinating as it is, this aspect of the imaginative life
would ever by itself make art of profound importance to mankind. But it is
different, I think, with the emotional aspect. We have admitted that the
emotions of the imaginative are generally weaker than those of actual life.
The picture of a saint being slowly flayed alive, revolting as it is, will not
produce the actual physical sensations of sickening disgust that a modern
man would feel if he could assist at the actual event; but they have a
compensating clearness of presentment to the consciousness. The more
poignant emotions of actual life have, I think, a kind of numbing effect
analogous to the paralysing influence of fear in some animals; but even if
this experience be not generally admitted, all will admit that the need for
responsive action hurries us along and prevents us from ever realising fully
what the emotion is that we feel, from co-ordinating it perfectly with other
states. In short, the motives we actually experience are too close to us to
enable us to feel them clearly. They are in a sense unintelligible. In the
imaginative life, on the contrary, we can both feel the emotion and watch it.
When we are really moved at the theatre we are always both on the stage
and in the auditorium.
Yet another point about the emotions of the imaginative life—since they
require no responsive action we can give them a new valuation. In real life
we must to some extent cultivate those emotions which lead to useful
action, and we are bound to appraise emotions according to the resultant
action. So that, for instance, the feelings of rivalry and emulation do get an
encouragement which perhaps they scarcely deserve, whereas certain
feelings which appear to have a high intrinsic value get almost no stimulus
in actual life. For instance, those feelings to which the name of the cosmic
emotion has been somewhat unhappily given find almost no place in life,
but, since they seem to belong to certain very deep springs of our nature, do
become of great importance in the arts.
Morality, then, appreciates emotion by the standard of resultant action.
Art appreciates emotion in and for itself.
This view of the essential importance in art of the expression of the
emotions is the basis of Tolstoy’s marvellously original and yet perverse
and even exasperating book, “What is Art,” and I willingly confess, while
disagreeing with almost all his results, how much I owe to him.
He gives an example of what he means by calling art the means of
communicating emotions. He says, let us suppose a boy to have been
pursued in the forest by a bear. If he returns to the village and merely states
that he was pursued by a bear and escaped, that is ordinary language, the
means of communicating facts or ideas; but if he describes his state first of
heedlessness, then of sudden alarm and terror as the bear appears, and
finally of relief when he gets away, and describes this so that his hearers
share his emotions, then his description is a work of art.
Now in so far as the boy does this in order to urge the villagers to go out
and kill the bear, though he may be using artistic methods, his speech is not
a pure work of art; but if of a winter evening the boy relates his experience
for the sake of the enjoyment of his adventure in retrospect, or better still, if
he makes up the whole story for the sake of the imagined emotions, then his
speech becomes a pure work of art. But Tolstoy takes the other view, and
values the emotions aroused by art entirely for their reaction upon actual
life, a view which he courageously maintains even when it leads him to
condemn the whole of Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, and most of
Beethoven, not to mention nearly everything he himself has written, as bad
or false art.
Such a view would, I think, give pause to any less heroic spirit. He
would wonder whether mankind could have always been so radically wrong
about a function that, whatever its value be, is almost universal. And in
point of fact he will have to find some other word to denote what we now
call art. Nor does Tolstoy’s theory even carry him safely through his own
book, since, in his examples of morally desirable and therefore good art, he
has to admit that these are to be found, for the most part, among works of
inferior quality. Here, then, is at once the tacit admission that another
standard than morality is applicable. We must therefore give up the attempt
to judge the work of art by its reaction on life, and consider it as an
expression of emotions regarded as ends in themselves. And this brings us
back to the idea we had already arrived at, of art as the expression of the
imaginative life.
If, then, an object of any kind is created by man not for use, for its
fitness to actual life, but as an object of art, an object subserving the
imaginative life, what will its qualities be? It must in the first place be
adapted to that disinterested intensity of contemplation, which we have
found to be the result of cutting off the responsive action. It must be suited
to that heightened power of perception which we found to result therefrom.
And the first quality that we demand in our sensations will be order,
without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed, and the other
quality will be variety, without which they will not be fully stimulated.
It may be objected that many things in nature, such as flowers, possess
these two qualities of order and variety in a high degree, and these objects
do undoubtedly stimulate and satisfy that clear disinterested contemplation
which is characteristic of the æsthetic attitude. But in our reaction to a work
of art there is something more—there is the consciousness of purpose, the
consciousness of a peculiar relation of sympathy with the man who made
this thing in order to arouse precisely the sensations we experience. And
when we come to the higher works of art, where sensations are so arranged
that they arouse in us deep emotions, this feeling of a special tie with the
man who expressed them becomes very strong. We feel that he has
expressed something which was latent in us all the time, but which we
never realised, that he has revealed us to ourselves in revealing himself.
And this recognition of purpose is, I believe, an essential part of the
æsthetic judgment proper.
The perception of purposeful order and variety in an object gives us the
feeling which we express by saying that it is beautiful, but when by means
of sensations our emotions are aroused we demand purposeful order and
variety in them also, and if this can only be brought about by the sacrifice
of sensual beauty we willingly overlook its absence.
Thus, there is no excuse for a china pot being ugly, there is every reason
why Rembrandt’s and Degas’ pictures should be, from the purely sensual
point of view, supremely and magnificently ugly.
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