J^^^ 
 
EPSTEIN 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/epsteineOOvandrich 
 
EPSTEIN 
 
 BY BERNARD VAN DIEREN ILLUS- 
 TRATED WITH FIFTY REPRODUCTIONS IN 
 COLLOTYPE OF THE SCULPTOR'S WORK a a 
 
 LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, W. 
 NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXX. 
 
Printed in Great Britain at 
 
 Cl)e mapflowcr press, 
 pipmoutt) 
 
 William Brendon & Son, Ltd. 
 
A/5 ^97 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ^HIS book is not intended to be more than introductory in 
 sxa±xvi^e^ It mnct remain an introdnction-JD^niore than, 
 
 ERRATA 
 
 Page vi. The closing paragraph of the Preface (quotation) has been placed here by 
 mistake. It should be read as an Introduction to the First Chapter on page i. 
 
 „ 25, 2nd par., 4th line, "should not have failed" should read "should have failed" 
 
 „ 32 „ ,, 1st „ ",alio" „ "a/so," 
 
 „ 35, 2nd line " in any form " „ " in any other form" 
 
 „ 52, 1st par., 7th „ "Then there" „ "There" 
 
 „ 53 last „ 1st „ "is needed;" „ "is needed:" 
 
 „ 53 » » 3''d .. "make it" „ "to make it" 
 
 „ 66, quotation § I, 3rd line "fades" „ "fades" 
 
 „ 71, last par., 2nd line "three" ,, "two" 
 
 „ 79, 1st „ pth „ "conversions" „ "conventions" 
 
 „ 79,2nd „ 5th „ "convention" „ "conventions" 
 
 „ 91, last „ 4th „ "prevented" „ "presented" 
 
 „ 103, 3rd par., 4th line, "out" should read "cut" 
 
 „ 103, last „ and „ "are" „ "is" 
 
 „ 106, 5th line "formula" „ "formula" 
 
 „ 108, 13th line from bottom, " of the most valuable qualities" should read " ... of 
 the most valuable " (of them, i.e. the traditions) 
 
 „ 128, 1st par., last line but two, "Damidnus" should read " Damianus" 
 
 ijixaix a iiLV/Xcix Y xxivu.xixxxi axv^ v..v/xxv\^x xxv^u. kxiv^ix ciooxoi.axxv.'i^ v.x^aov.'O 
 
 when the spectator thus prepared is in front of the works. These 
 restrictions naturally assert themselves even more positively when 
 one is discussing the work of a living master. 
 Jacob Epstein is not only that, but he is also a man of extraordinary 
 
 ^768567 
 
r^^^rv^sa^W' 
 
 Printed in Great Britain at 
 
 Cbe mapfloujcr press, 
 pipmouti) 
 
 William Brendon & Son, Ltd. 
 
NB ^97 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THIS book is not Intended to be more than introductory in 
 nature. It must remain an introduction in more than 
 one sense. 
 
 In the first place, where products of plastic art are con- 
 cerned, one cannot hope to do more with words than indicate the 
 direction from which they should be approached. If then, when 
 the spectator is left alone with the work, it does not speak to him 
 in its own language, if the thought of which it is the embodiment 
 does not communicate itself to him, how can words help him 
 further ? 
 
 Dialectics might be able to suggest a conviction in the spectator 
 of having grasped a work's meaning and qualities ; but then 
 nothing has been gained towards the attainment of a real under- 
 standing, for it is not the artist's creation but his propagator's 
 power of persuasion that causes the effect. 
 
 In this way proselytes are made, but the faith instilled by a success- 
 ful exercise of authority, and not born from direct conviction, is 
 of no value. The artist is not served by the results of such forcible 
 conversion. 
 
 Those new Christians that embraced the faith as the only alterna- 
 tive to the stake and the fire were no great acquisition to the 
 Church. 
 
 Written incitements may serve to rouse and assist a well-inten- 
 tioned but uninformed interest, but where creations in any other 
 than a literary medium are concerned their assistance ceases 
 when the spectator thus prepared is in front of the works. These 
 restrictions naturally assert themselves even more positively when 
 one is discussing the work of a living master. 
 Jacob Epstein is not only that, but he is also a man of extraordinary 
 
 0768567 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 potentialities, the nature of which could not be foretold by specula- 
 tions based on that of his past achievements. 
 If the steady increase of mastery and the constant development 
 of new aspects in the manifestation of his creative powers continue 
 one may confidently predict that his future works will reveal his 
 significance and genius even more overwhelmingly than those he 
 has already achieved. 
 
 This makes any attempted review of his work at this time un- 
 avoidably the more incomplete, though again one has reason to 
 be grateful that the reason should be such an agreeable one. 
 The foregoing reflections make it almost unnecessary for me to 
 crave my readers' indulgence for the fact that the greater part of 
 my observations will be chiefly devoted to the problems of appre- 
 ciation and understanding of art in general, and will deal with 
 such abstractions more extensively than with the works of Epstein 
 in particular. The defence and justification of my method are 
 self-evident. 
 
 Vae cum benedixerent vobis homines ; secundum haec enim 
 faciebant pseudo prophetis patres eorum. 
 
LIST OF PLATES 
 
 Detail from Tomb of Oscar Wilde 
 
 (In Ph-e La Chaise Cemetery, Paris) 
 
 Sun God 
 The Christ 
 The Christ 
 
 (Slightly side view) 
 
 Cursed be the day wherein I was born 
 
 {John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Maternity 
 Carving in Flenite 
 
 (T. E. Hiilme Collection) 
 
 Venus .... 
 
 (John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Doves .... 
 
 (Owned hy John Aljord, Esq.) 
 
 Mother and Child 
 
 (John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Carving in Flenite 
 
 (John Quinti Collection) 
 
 Original drawing for " Rock Drill " 
 Upper part of figure from " Rock Drill 
 Head of a Boy 
 
 (John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Mrs. Jacob Epstein 
 
 (John Quinn Collection 
 
 Mrs. Jacob Epstein 
 
 Her Grace the Duchess of Hamilton 
 
 Euphemia Lamb . 
 
 (John Quinn Collection 
 
 Head of an Infant 
 
 {Owned by H.M. Queen Alexandra) 
 
 Head of a Child . 
 Bust of Nan 
 Head of a Girl 
 
 Plate I. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 n. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 in. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 IV. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 V. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 VI. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 VII. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 VIII. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 IX. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 X. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XI. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XII. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XIII. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XIV. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XV. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XVI. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XVII. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XVIII 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XIX. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XX. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XXI. 
 
 . Plate 
 
 XXII. 
 
 ▼u 
 
VIU 
 
 LIST OF PLATES— continued. 
 
 M.A. 
 
 The Tin Hat 
 
 {Imperial War Museum) 
 
 Mrs. Ambrose McEvoy 
 An American Soldier 
 Miss Marguerite Nielka 
 Euphemia Lamb 
 
 {Eumorpopoulos Collection) 
 
 Helena 
 Marcelle . 
 
 (Coleman Collection) 
 
 Mile Gabrielle Soene 
 
 The late Lieut. T. E. Hulme, R 
 
 {John Quinn Collection) 
 
 W. H. Davies , 
 
 {Owned by Hon. Evan Morgan) 
 
 The Countess of Drogheda 
 
 { /ohn Quinn Collection) 
 
 Admiral Lord Fisher 
 
 {Imperial War Museum) 
 
 Bust of a Girl 
 
 {John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Iris Tree . 
 
 {John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Lillian Shelley 
 Meum with a Fan 
 Betty May 
 Lady Gregory . 
 
 (Dublin National Gallery) 
 
 Augustus John 
 
 {John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Muirhead Bone . 
 
 {Dundee Art Gallery) 
 
 Josef Holbrooke . 
 
 {Owned by JoseJ Holbrooke) 
 
 Bust of a Lady 
 Bernard Van Dieren 
 
 {John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Elizabeth, Daughter of Lady 
 Walden 
 
 {Owned by Lady Howard de Walden) 
 
 Old Italian Woman 
 
 (John Quinn Collection) 
 
 Masque de Meum 
 
 Nan 
 
 Sergt. David Ferguson Hunter, V.C. 
 
 (Imperial War Museum) 
 
 Howard de 
 
 Plate XXIII. 
 
 Plate XXIV. 
 Plate XXV. 
 Plate XXVI. 
 Plate XXVH. 
 
 Plate XXVIII. 
 Plate XXIX. 
 
 Plate XXX. 
 Plate XXXI. 
 
 Plate XXXII. 
 
 Plate XXXIII. 
 
 Plate XXXIV. 
 
 Plate XXXV. 
 
 Plate XXXVI. 
 
 Plate XXXVII. 
 Plate XXXVIII. 
 Plate XXXIX. 
 Plate XL. 
 
 Plate XLI. 
 
 Plate XLII. 
 
 Plate XLIII. 
 
 Plate XLIV. 
 Plate XLV. 
 
 Plate XLVI. 
 
 Plate XLVI I. 
 
 Plate XLVIII. 
 Plate XLIX. 
 Plate L. 
 
EPSTEIN 
 
EPSTEIN 
 
 THE world does not forgive talent. Consequently those 
 that possess it have to pass through a struggle which 
 permits only the strongest minds to come through the 
 ordeal with sufficient energy left to achieve their mission 
 of enriching humanity, their most implacable antagonists included. 
 This expense of energy is one of the causes of the rarity of 
 good works. And the antagonism the good artist has to contend 
 with affords protection to the legion of mediocrities who find in 
 the exercise of scientific and artistic professions a respectable 
 means of existence. Philistinism feels familiar in their company 
 and points to their example in censure of the men of genuine 
 gifts for their embarrassing difference from its own appearance. 
 On the other hand, the world does not forgive success either. 
 Being itself responsible for its bestowal, it is on that account 
 the more vindictive. It is as cruelly disposed towards its un- 
 fortunate attainers as any pale princess with regard to the happy 
 wretch whom she has singled out for her favours. None of these 
 terrible queens ever found more bewitchingly ingenious pretext 
 for a holocaust of her favourites as the world finds for the execu- 
 tion of its own elected idols. 
 
 One blushingly acknowledges the voluptuous devilry the dilettanti 
 display in the disparagement of their ideal of yesterday, while 
 they, lying at the feet of some contemporary calf (rarely even a 
 golden one) pityingly look down upon their fathers, whom they 
 emulate in spirit, for having in letter differed from themselves. 
 One might feel inclined to take up the case of the despised 
 
3 EPSTEIN 
 
 preceding generation but for the fact that they committed the 
 identical sins before their hairs became grey and their dresses anti- 
 quated. So poetic justice is done to every generation in its turn. 
 Now it is generally assumed that if an observer's mind is trained to 
 interpret the moral of facts, he must stand sufficiently far above 
 the crowds that look to him for guidance to watch their move- 
 ments, seeing whence they come and whither they go, without 
 being caught up in them. But the danger for him lies in the 
 pernicious homage the crowd will pay him, when it sees him 
 moving with them. It becomes sweet to him to hear that " in spite 
 of his position he is not in the least conceited." It makes him 
 forget that they would yield him this gratification on mere appear- 
 ances also. From sheer perverted honesty he is so anxious to give 
 his soul in exchange that he voluntarily becomes one of the crowd. 
 When once he is caught in the crush he loses his views of the 
 distances and sees no further than his neighbours' heads. From 
 then on he must inevitably fail, losing as he does the very qualifica- 
 tions from which his authority was derived. 
 
 He himself becomes a second-hand idol of the market-place, a 
 sheer reflection of the enthroned one he reveres in company with 
 "his public." 
 
 And when succeeding generations have started dealing out retri- 
 bution he shares in the disgrace of the central subject of his 
 contemporaries' collective adoration. 
 
 When the critics and aesthetes of the later generation, in unison 
 with the vox popnli, reverse the judgments of their predecessors 
 they include their confreres of the lapsed period in the condemna- 
 tion of the abandoned idols ; but they do not learn the lesson of 
 history, and are themselves ready to join in the chorus of adulation 
 with which their contemporaries acclaim the successful mediocrities 
 of their own time. 
 
 Jacob Epstein, to-day, is as much the victim of this treatment as 
 was Rembrandt three centuries ago, and just as was the latter 
 then, the former now is being penalized during his lifetime for 
 the superiority of his talents, only to obscure afterwards by 
 his renown the reputations of contemporary objects of idolatry. 
 These, moreover, will then pay the penalty of their ephemeral 
 
EPSTEIN 3 
 
 successes by being cast into oblivion as deep as the pedestal on 
 which their own generation placed them was high. 
 It may be objected that I seem to exaggerate the neglect Epstein's 
 work is meeting with and to ignore the fact that several leading 
 " connoisseurs " and a considerable " public " have not withheld 
 their recognition from it. A personaHty such as Epstein's could 
 not well be overlooked ; but although it has occasionally been the 
 fashion to take note of his activities, the very air of superiority 
 with which even his favourably disposed judges have condescended 
 to give their attention and their conditionally tolerant praise to his 
 greatest works is sufficient to brand their tepid kind of interest as 
 too insultingly diminutive to need acknowledgment. 
 
I 
 
 II 
 
 T is not by accident that I coupled Epstein's name with Rem- 
 brandt's. How much connection there is between these two 
 figures the most superficial examination will reveal. In the 
 work of both we meet with a force of individuality that only 
 a few others, like Diirer or Michel Angelo have manifested. The 
 <*• work of both is characterized by a humanity as simple as it is pro- 
 
 found, and by an intense interest in the plastic and pictural aspect 
 of surrounding life. Both of them harboured an insistent inclination 
 for the fantastic and at the same time an intense naturalism in the 
 execution of their conception. The great number of portraits by 
 both the artists are distinguished by a directness and sincerity 
 that have often puzzled their admirers, who could not reconcile 
 this with the more fantastic execution of their purely imaginative 
 works. And in those portraits both of them over and again re- 
 turned to the same models, and by preference to such as lacked 
 those picturesque features which popular notions expect to find in 
 painters' models. 
 
 Both achieved in these simplest of artistic motives and concepts 
 a profundity of expression that consisted in the revelation of 
 eternal elements and universal significance out of subjects that 
 seemed unremarkable to others. 
 
 In either case there is a force of vitality that seems brutal to 
 sentimental natures, and a certain aloofness from contemporary 
 ideals and fashions that cannot but create and preserve widespread 
 * prejudice and aversion. 
 
 Finally, we find in Epstein again as in Rembrandt a constant pre- 
 occupation with the elemental motives of life that finds expression 
 in the most dramatic presentation of the simplest moments and 
 happenings which for both of them, from identical view-points, 
 assume an Old-Testamentarian universality of meaning. 
 
 4 
 
EPSTEIN 5 
 
 When we compare Rembrandt's portraits of his mother and wife 
 and of himself with the quaintly fantastic subjects of his engravings 
 like that of Dr. Faustus, or such bewildering compositions as the 
 Appearance to the Shepherds, we cannot fail to recognize the same 
 so-called dualism that has perplexed so many well-disposed 
 students of Epstein's various works. In reality there is no more 
 question of this dualism or diversity of purpose in Epstein's case 
 than there is in Rembrandt's. The whole mistaken notion finds 
 its origin in a misconception of the creative artist's intentions 
 and aims. Before I can demonstrate the thesis in reference to 
 the works themselves I must attempt to make my meaning clearer 
 by discussing the problem that is touched upon in connection 
 with the functioning of creative intelligence and power. 
 One of the commonest errors of reasoning is that which confounds 
 the creative artist's use of his instinctive powers with his deliber- 
 ately applied will to construct works from the material he has 
 gathered by the use of them. 
 
 From vaguely apprehending that the quasi-unconscious method 
 of producing is a more impressive manifestation of divine gifts, 
 the hasty observer is led to the conclusion that the most inspired 
 artist must be the one who creates almost automatically. But 
 here we are confronted with an inspiration that is active not 
 during the moment that is most important for the ultimate pro- 
 duction, i.e. that of the conception, but during the execution. 
 What in this respect is described as inspiration is the artist's 
 exultation at seeing the work assuming shape under his hands, 
 and his ecstasy is chiefly caused by his gratification on perceiving 
 how during this process of giving shape to his thought sugges- 
 tions come to him that engender ever new ones, bringing ideas 
 out of the shadow and clearing his own mind as his work proceeds. 
 The initial inspiration, on the other hand, was solely dependent 
 on the power of his creative impulse, his power of instinctive 
 perception. These powers which we call genius enable him to 
 grasp with axiomatical directness the complexities that are the 
 essential nature of things. It is in this respect that the mind of 
 genius distinguishes itself from the less gifted that must reduce 
 everything to the few simple propositions that it can recognize 
 
6 EPSTEIN 
 
 " a priori." It cannot be a cause of surprise to anyone who has 
 studied the foundations of human vanity that the mind which 
 instead of assimilating the truth of facts in the form in which they 
 present themselves must find its whole satisfaction in the facts' 
 tested liability to yield to a system of reason adopted from others, 
 should pride itself on what it takes to be evidence of its own 
 superior mental structure. 
 
 The opposed method is that which indicates the functioning of 
 the mind of genius. It is the capacity for conviction by instinc- 
 tively perceived truth. The most powerful mind has the widest 
 range of this perception, and every new fact apprehended enables 
 it to grasp directly a more complex truth as a single entity. 
 This capacity is one of the chief attributes of creative intelligence 
 which can only attain to an appreciation of its own principles by 
 taking the creations of nature as its example. 
 The other order of minds, to obtain these results, would have to 
 translate the complex truth into its own simple language, and 
 retranslate this again into the complexities of the work of human 
 making, a task which is beyond their powers. 
 Human creative intelligence is only a reflection of that greater 
 power which formed the universe, and its products are even as 
 those of the latter infinitely complex, though in either case they 
 appear to the observer infinitely simple because of the perfection 
 of their organization. 
 
 Genius expresses this infinite complexity with the same ease with 
 which it grasped it, while the mind that must work by reducing 
 to elementals cannot but be staggered at some stage by the be- 
 wildering intricacies it has to contend with. As I already said, 
 it will nearly always become the victim of an eternal human 
 infirmity and make a virtue of necessity. Its natural inertia will 
 resume its sway, and drive it to take refuge in proclaiming the 
 necessity of simplification of notions and forms in artistic expres- 
 sion. 
 
 Thus end the attempts at conscious and so-called cerebral pro- 
 duction by those who are not by the force of genius brought to 
 them. Genius, on the other hand, while perceiving and under- 
 standing by what I called inspiration, thus gathers unlimited 
 
EPSTEIN 7 
 
 knowledge which enables it to construct works by reflection and 
 deliberation from the constituent elements which it handles by 
 the exercise of its creative faculties after the manner of Him that 
 invested it with these powers. The recognition of this principle 
 demonstrates the absurdity of the notion which pictures the artist 
 creating in a fury of hysterical exaltation. Would anybody think 
 of God creating in a frantic fever ? Yet most people are dis- 
 inclined to admit that great work might be the result of sober 
 dehberation and prefer to imagine that the depth and vitality and 
 emotional quality of a work are dependent on, let us say, the 
 temperature of the inspiration that gave the initial conception. 
 I said that creative genius could be only understood as a reflection 
 of the divine creative will, and must point out in this connection 
 that the great works of art are as impressively convincing a revela- 
 tion as those of the holy books or the inspired words of the 
 prophets. 
 
 The smaller talent which, instead of using its faculties of in- 
 stinctive perception for conscious production, produces instinc- 
 tively, can hardly claim the name of creative since in reality it 
 reproduces. It acts as a tool, and is, so to say, itself the medium 
 which nature employs to create indirectly. Its work is on a level 
 with that of the actor or executive musician. However perfect in 
 execution, however capable of inducing emotion, it is never 
 genuinely creative, as its power to stir is ultimately derived from 
 an impulse not its own. The talented mind has been rightly 
 compared to a sensitive plate reacting on emanations from outside, 
 while in as far as the same could be said of the mind of genius 
 this would remain only one of its diverse aspects. The mind of 
 genius embraces the universe and its contents to build from 
 whatever material it may select, while the mind of talent only 
 expresses the emotions it receives or imitates those it has observed 
 in others. Creative genius is not bound by this opportunity for 
 observation because it has only to direct its mind upon a thing to 
 penetrate its entire nature. One would not find it in search of 
 local colour or studying psychology ; a Rembrandt has no need 
 to go to the East to be able to paint it more convincingly than 
 many artists of smaller calibre whose travels yield comparatively 
 
8 EPSTEIN 
 
 negligible results. Shakespeare did not, as the authors who 
 pride themselves on their psychological understanding, seek 
 the company of alienists and visit the asylums, and yet while 
 experts are slow to admit any worth in the observations of the 
 very authors who exalt their own activities, they must acknow- 
 ledge that they find guidance in characterizations (to them 
 " typical cases ") of Shakespeare, who was not afraid to scoff 
 at them occasionally, but who in his study learnt more 
 of the soul's pathology than the expert in ward and padded 
 room. 
 
 The significant fact has not escaped observation that the lives of 
 many of the greatest artists have been most uneventful ones, and 
 that their versatile knowledge and apparent familiarity with the 
 most diverse phases of life and aspects of the world was not as 
 it is for the ordinary mind the fruit of adventure, travel and local 
 investigation. One may safely distrust the gifts of the artist who 
 seeks to know life by chasing after it, preferably in its wilder 
 forms : experience shows that he very seldom finds what he is 
 professedly in search of. 
 
 While the average talent remains an instrument for transmitting 
 impressions from which it received emotions strong enough to 
 become a driving power, genius instead of thus reflecting and 
 regenerating creates a universe, a law of its own, generates. It 
 may be impressionist, emotional, but when the other order of 
 mentality is no more than that, genius is infinitely more, and 
 emotionalism is one of the levers it can deliberately handle when 
 it judges that appropriate. 
 
 It is not my intention to belittle the works of those who do not 
 belong to the very exceptional few who are creative in that sense 
 I have tried to define, but rather to show how very far the work of 
 genius still towers above that of even most admirable masters. 
 Almost everyone senses the fundamental difference of point of 
 view, of method in the works of the rare minds of absolute genius 
 when comparing them to works of less exceptionally gifted minds, 
 which, however great, belong to a different order. 
 There is no question here of a mere matter of degree, as if talent 
 increased would become genius. In fact it is not unthinkable that 
 
EPSTEIN 9 
 
 a mind of genius should be lacking in a certain natural adapt- 
 ability, though, its powers of expression being commensurate to 
 those of perception, it can create its own talents if need be. But 
 though its possessor should happen on a form of expression 
 requiring a predisposition not present to a sufficient degree, though 
 painting he may be colour-blind, carving but weak of muscle, 
 may be a deaf musician, yet his work while conceivably inferior 
 on some points to that of lesser minds will not admit of his genius 
 being mistaken. The pictures of Leonardo da Vinci, who is one 
 of the most striking representatives of the order of creative genius, 
 have been incontestably surpassed in some respects by those of 
 painters whose entire output is not of such value to the world as 
 Leonardo's Madonna. 
 
 Balzac's prose may sometimes be clumsy, yet no Louvet could, 
 for all his elegance and polish, his superb brilliancy and unique 
 wit, hope to shine in comparison. The music of Beethoven 
 is frequently below a standard that very much smaller men 
 have sustained during the entirety of fairly extensive com- 
 positions. 
 
 The originality* of the creations Leonardo, Balzac, Beethoven 
 have given the world is one of the characteristics of the works 
 of genius which dwarf those of artists who as craftsmen might show 
 themselves not only their equals but their superiors. 
 Now to create is the first and last aim of art. When a work 
 actually is an original creation in the sense I have formulated 
 above, it cannot be otherwise than perfect for our human senses. 
 From whence could we derive a criterion of criticism ? How 
 should we contain the universe and see it from a detached stand- 
 point or find an object for comparison ? We are here faced with 
 another aspect of the identical impossibility that confronted the 
 sage who recognized that he could lift the earth provided he could 
 obtain a lever and a fixed point. To derive from nature's mani- 
 festations canons by which to judge them is a foolish undertaking, 
 of which to judge the equivalent works of the elect is in the same 
 way only a repetition. 
 
 * In the real sense of the word, I do not mean the originality of novelty that 
 may be obscured or meaningless. 
 
10 EPSTEIN 
 
 I should add, though, that individuality need not mean originaHty, 
 and that the highest accompHshment does not of itself denote 
 creative power. 
 
 The great original creations of the very great whose personal 
 individuality has become one with the organism of the universe 
 over which they have expanded and which they have contained 
 within themselves must be placed in a category apart from other 
 works of the human mind, however admirable they may be. 
 It is by no means a rare effect of human frailty that one may feel 
 more sympathetically attracted by the work of a lesser mind and 
 love it more while recognizing the genius and unquestionable 
 superiority of another which may as far as concerns one's personal 
 inclination cause the reverse of attraction. 
 
 We may in the same way feel ill at ease in the presence of certain 
 manifestations or aspects of nature, though we are aware that 
 every one of these is equally great in character and meaning, and 
 that to distinguish between them is introducing an element of 
 personal equation which constitutes an absurd conceptional in- 
 congruity. 
 
 But quite apart from the authority exercised by the name of a 
 master whose fame has been established by the recognition of 
 many generations, there are names that have a different sound in 
 the ears of everyone with the instincts and knowledge that enable 
 him to discriminate between the relative significance of the great 
 masters. This refers to those few who are felt to stand apart 
 from everyone else, because they stand as far above the mere 
 " great artist " as any master properly so named stands in his 
 turn above the mere " artist " of popular conception. The latter 
 in the majority of instances is only a neurasthenic subject dis- 
 tinguished from the average human being by his stronger sensuality 
 and self-indulgence whose effects act as a driving power bringing 
 him to the rendering of his impressions in productions which, 
 jor the vocabulary, are of the same kind as the works of Shakespeare, 
 Cervantes, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Pascal, Goethe, Leonardo, to 
 choose some of the most familiar names. 
 
 Those greatest of masters are the men who have made the world, 
 made humanity what it is in its best aspects. Human achieve- 
 
EPSTEIN II 
 
 ment is their work, human thought takes its foundation from what 
 they have recognized and revealed, and the sum total of know- 
 ledge progresses by cumulative effect from one of such masters 
 to the next one. Without them, the prophets, the leaders, men 
 would for ever remain Yahoos. From the first man who made a 
 tool to Pasteur and Anatole France thought has been determined 
 by their work, and the lesser talents would have remained as 
 sterile as the least of humble minds without their guidance that 
 supplied the axioms on whose bases alone further building could 
 prosper. 
 
Ill 
 
 IT is to this order of original creative minds that Jacob Epstein 
 belongs. This is saying that his is one of the rarest of per- 
 sonalities. In our modern society, so well regulated that it 
 has no place for the genuine artists to whom it owes whatever 
 is permanent and valuable in it, such a personality is more curiously 
 separated from its collective movements than it would have been 
 in periods and places where the people realized that their existence 
 derived its sense and justification from the presence of these men 
 in their midst. 
 
 In Epstein, who among the men of creative intelligence is of the 
 great so-called " instinctives," primitive men in the sense that 
 Rembrandt and Beethoven were primitive,* this fact explains why 
 his individuality is frequently bewildering to students of his work, 
 who seek to explain a master's tendencies from his relations to his 
 time and surroundings, misconceiving their nature. For a man 
 of his mentality it is possible to mix intimately with contemporary 
 life in its varied phases and yet remain a spectator whose thoughts 
 are never in any essential influenced by the culture of the period. 
 He preserves one single purpose and has the lucidity, the direct- 
 ness of outlook which one may meet anywhere in a man of genius, 
 but in any other case only when society as a whole is as primitive 
 and unsophisticated as the individual mind. 
 The Old Testamentarian character which some of Epstein's works 
 exhibit is frequently misunderstood by a race that has lost the 
 
 * As distinguished from men of the versatility and erudition of Leonardo or 
 Goethe, who in reality were equally instinctive as regards their power of con- 
 ception, but whose scholarly knowledge of concrete facts was assumed to be 
 responsible for the profundity of their works by those who had not recognized 
 that these things exist alongside of, but not on account of, each other ; hence the 
 designation which I employ to express my idea of Epstein's social existence 
 without accepting its reputed meaning. 
 
 13 
 
 . ^- 
 
EPSTEIN 13 
 
 qualities necessary for its appreciation. Searching for those same 
 qualities in other works they can, naturally, perceive them only 
 in works that, though artistically indifferent, bespeak at least the 
 primitive character of their makers. That this primitivity may 
 be only the outcome of the state of life, and that therefore the 
 similarity discoverable is one of externals, escapes them again. 
 It is as idle to presume that a man without teeth was born 
 yesterday as that anyone with curly hair is a Papuan, or than 
 that all ice must necessarily come from the North Pole. 
 But by the aid of these superficial observations and unwarrantable 
 conclusions Epstein's work has been, to the satisfaction of a great 
 many who are ready to have their thinking done for them like 
 their laundry, proved to be aboriginal, Polynesian, or at least, as 
 an unsound favourite of technical parlance has it, " archaic." 
 There may be similarity of origin in all these manifestations, but 
 to speak of imitation in this respect is absurd. It is equally absurd 
 to believe that Epstein, after a study of some of these forms of art, 
 has accepted their canons and mannerisms for his own. 
 For what analogy there exists here there is a much deeper cause, 
 though for the present purpose equally negligible. Its character 
 is identical with the cause of the observable phenomenon that 
 where light is excluded the most diverse objects become equally 
 invisible, this being a property they have in common, while it 
 does not in the least justify the acceptance of other relations 
 between them. Both in this instance and in the case to which I 
 am alluding the origins of the effect lie in the observer and in 
 the intervention of an independent third agent. 
 Epstein, with his fine nervous sensitiveness, has assimilated the 
 modes of expression, living, and thinking of his time, but for a mind 
 which is of all times they remain but an acquisition. This, in so 
 far as it adds to his range of perception, may increase the material 
 subject of his conception, but his mind otherwise remains untouched 
 and free of the faults and weaknesses of contemporary life. 
 However familiar he may be with the neurasthenia of modern 
 impressionistic art, his psychological disposition is such that he 
 is not contaminated by it. There is one of his works that exhibits 
 the characteristics of style I described above, and which his critics 
 
 »" 
 
14 EPSTEIN 
 
 have descried as " South Sea Islands," which at the same time 
 is expressive of a state of mind notorious as one of the products 
 of our time and society. I refer to his much discussed and violently 
 attacked red statuette, exhibiting analogies of style with exotic 
 wood carvings, named " Cursed be the day that I was born." 
 Though the sentiment of despair it translates is an eternal and 
 universal one, as is sufficiently suggested by the reference to two 
 significant Scriptural texts, viz. " Pereat dies in qua natus sum " 
 (Tobit 3. 3), and " Maledicta dies, in qua natus sum " (Jeremiah 
 20. 14), it has at the same time an aspect particularly applicable 
 to the mental scourge of our days. Now the singleness of thought 
 and purpose in this work, the simplicity of form and delineation 
 may effect the appearance of points of comparison with Poly- 
 nesian or African wood carvings, but it should not be forgotten 
 that the requirements of the material create the style and that 
 certain forms must appear if wood is logically handled whether by 
 an African or by Epstein. But some who call themselves " idealists " 
 have stood aghast at an element of degeneration and despairing 
 impotence they found in the work. They considered it an ominous 
 symptom to see an artist thus reveal what they took to be a phase 
 of his own mental state. 
 
 The absurdity of this notion is on a par with that of calling Shake- 
 speare to account for Lady Macbeth 's wickedness or the abject 
 vileness of lago. A work born from a man's imagination, though 
 it proceeds from his mind, need not be expressive of it. I pointed 
 out already that the spectacle of the neurasthenic becoming 
 productive for sheer force of misery is responsible for the im- 
 pression that this is the way of artistic creation. The genuinely 
 creative mind, however, can make itself the vehicle for the expres- 
 sion of sentiments revealed to it by observation of other subjects, 
 and the artist may remain personally detached while deliberately 
 constructing the work that materializes them. 
 One may see in this work a terrible indictment of the wild raving 
 about semi-consciously realized impotence that is the black spleen 
 of modern thought. Its effort at production and resultant mis- 
 carriage, the vicious circle of a crushing " tedium vitae " that 
 embitters the nerve-racked sufferer of " artistic temperament " 
 
EPSTEIN 15 
 
 cannot be presented with more uncanny veracity than it is in this 
 fierily screeching, dripping-red, tetanically convulsed, smarting 
 raw flesh of woe. The work should be approached as the mediasval 
 allegory or the old German woodcuts where death leers over the 
 courtesan's tender shoulder and grasps the brawling lansquenet by 
 his hauberk, to be appreciated as the " morality " it is. 
 Those forms of art are understood and approved of, but in art 
 people ever fail to recognize old acquaintances in new clothes. 
 The epigon will take form, thought and style as he finds it, but 
 every original mind gives the unchanging idea the new form his 
 individuality suggests. This being always the unexpected, it 
 baffles and provokes the aesthetic snob. 
 
 If only people would be content to approach a work of art without 
 preconceived notions, if they would only look at a work patiently 
 and long enough to assimilate its thought, it would enter into 
 them when the impression is complete, and the artist's idea would 
 penetrate their minds and be born from them anew. They should 
 — though their impression need not stimulate similar action — 
 submit to the work's influence as must the executant artist, actor 
 or musician, taking it in so as to be able to reproduce it where 
 their talents permit this proof of understanding. If one is in- 
 capable of this or unwilling to exhibit so much modesty (this 
 contingency is not by any means as rare as it is ludicrous) one 
 should remain satisfied, unless one prefers to be classed with the 
 critics of bad faith who are ready to condemn — or praise, which is 
 worse — ^with their eyes closed. One should not in that case pretend 
 to oneself or to others to have performed or experienced anything 
 that could justify mention of the work as if one knew it. This, 
 however, is the very thing the majority of people do. They 
 believe their task in front of a work is to look at it until some 
 remark occurs to them. This they gratuitously proffer and feel sure 
 they cannot expect anything further from the work, nor the work 
 from them, and that they have given the maker his due. 
 The evil goes further when spectators, starting from the mis- 
 taken notion that the sculptor wishes to represent actualities with 
 stylistic modifications, would assume they have to detect in this 
 work the representation of a human being, and expect from the 
 
i6 EPSTEIN 
 
 artist an explanation of his motives in making the same appear 
 so different from what they would imagine the possible subject 
 or model of the work to be in reality. How should there be a 
 better explanation of the work than the work itself ? How shall 
 the artist make his intentions clear in words for the minds who 
 fail to grasp them when they are expressed in the medium that 
 is the artist's own language ? 
 
 But here enters the aesthete with the dictionary, here is the happy 
 field for the connoisseur and critic to display their vocabulary, 
 and for the revolution-humbug to bring forth his manifesto. 
 Things too simple for words are explained by introducing tenets 
 of cubism, impressionism (post or simple), luminism, futurism, 
 vorticism and vagaries about abstraction and simpHfication. 
 But in the work under discussion (as in the flenite carvings) the 
 execution is direct and unsophisticated, and the thought is a 
 simple thought, the common property of conceptive imagination 
 of all times. There is no room for any " ism " anywhere. If 
 Diirer would have expressed it differently the cause would not be 
 his living in the sixteenth century, but his being Diirer who would 
 still be Diirer were he born to-day, even as Epstein would remain 
 himself were he living in the sixteenth century and could not at 
 that time have carved this work otherwise than he has done now. 
 In it are summed up humanity's attempts at understanding beyond 
 its powers ; its futile efforts to penetrate the mystery of creation 
 and the complexities of life and nature. It materializes the rack- 
 ing, torturing cramp of insanity that triumphs over one man in 
 his abortive effort to create, over another in his attempt to grasp 
 the meaning of creative deeds. The resultant state of mind may 
 well find relief in the wail of Job. If, however, a man of genius 
 could himself feel like this — to assume an absurdity for the sake 
 of argument — instead of understanding that feeling in others he 
 would not feel inclined to exhibit his agony in the shape of a work 
 to be derided, to be gaped and spat on by envenomed opponents 
 and ignorant imbeciles. He would not risk the misgivings and 
 head-shakings of well-meaning " admirers " who regret such 
 works from a man who has pleased their senses by portraits of 
 attractive sitters they covet in the flesh, and who are ever shouting 
 
EPSTEIN 
 
 17 
 
 at Epstein : " Why not give us more of your other work we like 
 far better ? " No, instead of exposing himself after an inferno of 
 irreparable grief to the indignity and humiliation of such idiotic 
 impudence, he would act in the only way possible for a man with 
 the sincerity of impulse an artist must possess, and go and hang 
 himself. But by drawing this conclusion we have arrived at the 
 proposed " reductio ad absurdum." To curse one's existence 
 and prolong it is the inconsequential act of a coward and can 
 never be that of a genuine artist with whom saying is meaning a 
 thing. Without logical action he would reveal feebleness of 
 impulse and lack of self-respect, without which his existence as 
 a creative artist would be an impossibility. 
 
IV 
 
 THERE exists a reluctance to admit that a contemporary 
 form of art may reach back to one of its so-called primitive 
 forms. Frequently art students appear hypnotized to 
 such an extent by the absurd current doctrine of progress 
 in artistic effort that they believe in good faith that they can explain 
 the characteristics of style in works of masters from the thirteenth 
 to the sixteenth centuries by assuming them to have been in- 
 sufficiently trained observers and clumsy draughtsmen. They treat 
 " art " as an entity in the sense that the scientists of one period did 
 nature, ascribing to it personal predilections and aversions (the 
 notorious horror vacui for instance), or contemporary medical 
 science does diseases, speaking of cholera or tuberculosis for all 
 the world as if those were evil spirits with a tangible individuality. 
 Art, according to this conception, has made from one period to the 
 next strides in the right direction, or has occasionally stood still, 
 or had its course retarded by the actions of the obscurantists. 
 Undoubtedly, if these critics could be at least logical they would 
 find the canons of some modern " isms " applicable to the stylistic 
 modifications observable in Egyptian friezes or Florentine paint- 
 ings (the adoption of existing *' archaism " is certainly a proceed- 
 ing of a similar nature). 
 
 However, in periods when the dearth of original talent has re- 
 sulted in the flourishing of an insipid form of artistic expression 
 commonly described as " realism," its exponents are ever men who 
 see eye to eye with their average contemporaries and precisely 
 render the ideals of the time to which their work relates. Thus, 
 as far as such second-rate artists are concerned, they indeed supply 
 an existing need or demand, and it is by no means sheer accident 
 that they are invariably much admired during their lifetime. 
 The longer such a period of artistic sterility lasts, the more be- 
 
 i8 
 
EPSTEIN 19 
 
 wildering will appear the advent of the next great mind whose 
 work must, to his contemporaries, appear the more startlingly 
 original. Metaphorically speaking, no great artist is born without 
 a father any more than anyone else. He cannot, therefore, but 
 reach^^back (as regards the basis of tradition which must be at 
 once the foundation and the justifying norm for any individual 
 originality to assert itself otherwise than for its own sake) to ideals 
 associated with a time which the public, under the influence of 
 the last popular artist's achieved reputation, had begun to consider 
 as having lost direct human interest and as being significant only 
 from the historical angle of the " aesthetic " student's viewpoint. 
 In the case of sculpture there has been an exceptionally long 
 period unproductive of original talent, and consequently the 
 general quality of sculpture became, more than it did in any other 
 art at any recent period, expressive of " bourgeois " ideals of an 
 appallingly low standard. The absence of creative originality 
 must inevitably become most painfully apparent in the domain 
 of an art that relies for its productions in the first and 
 the last place on form, while in a time when art tends to fall 
 under the influence of a scientific philosophy that is mainly 
 analytical and characterized by a lack of intuition and faith, 
 it can only produce results as barren as they are seductive to 
 the least comprehending minds. Any sculptor of original talent 
 appearing after the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could only 
 revert to traditions that to his contemporaries had become the 
 almost forgotten ideals of a time with which they had lost every 
 contact and whose manifestations had an artificial existence in 
 museums of interest only to professed students of historic relics. 
 During a period like that of the Renaissance the amazing origin- 
 ality of the master of one generation became already canonized 
 by those of the next where, during a few centuries, every genera- 
 tion was productive of men of genius. But after the long inter- 
 vening period, lovers of art had lost the sense of reality in these 
 matters and become unmindful of the fact that for a great original 
 artist indulging his individuality is only one of the aspects of his 
 understanding of the traditions of his art as formed by the example 
 of the preceding masters. 
 
20 EPSTEIN 
 
 As in the case of Rodin, who was one of the first modern sculptors 
 to resume the great traditions of sculpture, so, and to a larger extent, 
 the public was baffled at Epstein's works, both by their originality 
 and by their reference to antique and Renaissance ideals. The 
 two things seemed to be incompatible and mutually]^exclusive, 
 and they naturally could not view his relation to older artTfrom a 
 sufficiently detached and elevated standpoint to see that it was 
 not in the least self-conscious, " archaizing " or the product of 
 historical preciosity, but, on the contrary, perfectly natural and 
 spontaneously sincere. 
 
 Now between opposing temperaments that may love art and its 
 products with equal honesty there exists an interminable feud. 
 On the one side are arranged those that uphold a claim of con- 
 temporary art to superiority over that of the past, and opposing 
 them those who believe no work of the present or future can ever 
 again reach the standard set by the master- works of past ages. 
 As usually happens in such cases the fact that the cause of this 
 feud is a misunderstanding only denotes that it is the more im- 
 movably and profoundly rooted, leaving the smallest promise of 
 eventual reconciliation. 
 
 The contest resulting from it may be considered as only one 
 aspect of the greater one between two irreconcilable conceptions 
 of the world and human life. 
 
 On one side capable thinkers and followers who outdo their 
 leaders in dogmatism as much as they fall short of them in personal 
 capabilities, hold that every next generation profits by the previous 
 one's experience, as the human mind individually does from the 
 knowledge acquired by that of a revered teacher or admired 
 master. 
 
 On the opposing side we find an equal number of competent 
 and incompetent men maintaining that, on the contrary, experience 
 is lost with those that acquired it ; that the recognition of the 
 bare facts remains, but their proper appreciation, which is 
 all that matters to those who would make use of them, can be 
 attained to only by the power of a penetration so profound that 
 the understanding and energy required is equal to that needed 
 for the initial discovery of the truths concerned. 
 
EPSTEIN 21 
 
 From this they claim it follows that humanity so far from profiting 
 by the acquisitions of succeeding generations and thus progressing 
 from an original state of ignorant savagery to one of comparative 
 perfection (enter the supermen !) stumbles on uniformly, repeat- 
 ing the same performances good and bad everlastingly and, 
 without reaching new summits, turns in a circle like the planet it 
 inhabits, ever ignoring the signiificance of new facts that inces- 
 santly present themselves but remain outside their sphere of 
 comprehension. 
 
 It is not within the compass of the present study to contemplate 
 the widest aspects of the question ; I must confine myself to 
 considering the problem only in as far as it is reflected in the 
 struggle resulting from the classic controversies concerning art 
 and artists. 
 
 As in the greater question undue importance is ascribed to the 
 human race as a collective unit, so in the one at present under 
 view it is not generally appreciated that here as there, whatever 
 progress may be discernible through any great and significant 
 action — invention or discovery — always stands to the credit of 
 individuals, the great and the most talented. In art one cannot 
 pause to reckon with the multitude of mortals who for practical 
 reasons or from enthusiasm spend their time and energies on 
 the occupation with works of art, their discussion or reproduction 
 or valuation. One need only consider and weigh the actions and 
 personality of those that really matter, the original creative minds. 
 For any progress to be possible at all what is required is a con- 
 genial mind which alone is capable of understanding the preceding 
 ones that count. Now, as I said, he who actually understands 
 the thoughts and works of our earlier worker, who appreciates 
 facts discovered by the latter at their intrinsic value, must be of 
 a disposition and power of mind that would enable him to repeat 
 his predecessor's performance in discovering the facts for himself. 
 In this sense, one man of genius is only " understood " by another, 
 and only in this case is there question of the latter profiting from 
 the former's experience. 
 
 Again, as regards the familiar query whether the great masters of 
 the past were the superiors of contemporary ones, the question 
 
22 EPSTEIN 
 
 is absurdly put, as a past is in a philosophical sense a non-existent 
 thing, and it is in that sense only that the whole matter could be 
 approached. We may be sometimes led to assume that this " past " 
 has produced the greatest of masters, but we must realize that 
 they are only claimed and recognized as such once they belong 
 to it. 
 
 The question becomes reduced to an optical problem ; it is the 
 shorter distance from which we see contemporaries and their 
 achievements that prevents us from appreciating their true great- 
 ness. An object reveals its dimensions by the mere fact that we 
 must put a distance between it and ourselves to see it as a whole. 
 The optical illusion declares itself when we believe the man only 
 to be great once we see him in the past. 
 
 One effect of the illusion is that some are convinced " art " is 
 declining because when looking backward they find invariably 
 the greatest number of men of genius at the furthest distance .1 ^^ 
 In their own surroundings, on the other hand, they appear so thinly 
 sown that not one may be discernible at anyigiven moment within 
 a given circumference. 
 
 The sum total of human intelligence, however, must be a constant 
 factor, and its distribution is at all times of much the same in- 
 equality. At a time when the average intelligence of the human 
 species would be extraordinarily high, one might be sure a total 
 absence of any man of genius would be remarkable. Happily 
 there never was such a time, though one certainly can, by com- 
 paring cultures and civilizations, discover a few slight instances 
 where the phenomenon began to declare itself ; and its comple- 
 ment has not been wholly unknown. 
 
 As all cumulative effect is, as I argued, dependent on the efforts 
 of the great minds, it goes without saying it must tend to lead 
 in an ascending direction rather than the reverse, as where it is 
 caused by genius there can be no question of degeneration. 
 One sometimes meets the contention that formerly the great men 
 were readily hailed and recognized, but when it does not issue 
 from people who do not hesitate deliberately to pervert truth in 
 order to prove a thesis, it points only to a complete ignorance of 
 the facts. 
 
EPSTEIN 23 
 
 If any great man was even thus recognized it has been by sheer 
 accident or mistake rather. The pubHc's criterion of judgment — 
 a norm necessarily based on what they can appreciate of already 
 existing works (and that is always insufficient) — cannot comprise 
 the manifestations of a new mind, which are always unforeseen. 
 Every next individual of genius gives a new expression to old 
 truths and presents original facts. In so far as he adds to the 
 cumulative effect he augments its growth at a speed unattainable 
 by the united actions of any number of intellects devoid of the 
 spark of genius. Also, he does this in a manner invariably different 
 from what any observer could expect or foretell. Therefore his 
 work is neglected for that of the man who brings what students 
 of already familiar works might expect. 
 
 The so-called patrons and supporters of " revolutionary " art are 
 usually the first to declare themselves the opponents of a real 
 innovator and to shout their " non credo " at really original talent 
 and genuinely revolutionary deeds. In the first place, they are 
 mostly people who from temperament feel an aversion to the 
 study of old works, which they underrate because they do not 
 know them, and, further, their carefully cultivated and nurtured 
 enthusiasm for the innovator of yesterday makes them incapable 
 of imagining any other " originality " than that with which they 
 have become familiar. So the new man must either imitate, over- 
 state or " develop " the style and manner of their idol ; anything 
 else is for them nonsense or conservatism, return, contra-revolu- 
 tion. They sustain, support and become part of the notorious 
 cliques of artistic revolutionaries who give us the poor spectacle 
 of rebelling against the very forms of art that they themselves con- 
 temptuously declare to be dead, exposed, insipid — and, one would 
 think, on that account harmless — but they are at the same time 
 the most vehement opponents of any real revolutionary who rebels 
 against the tyranny of contemporary shibboleths. The uninformed 
 public, naturally unwilling to pay serious attention to the work of 
 an original artist, see the work of one who to them is a modern 
 and a revolutionary, chiefly disclaimed and attacked by these 
 critics, aesthetics and connoisseurs, whom they imagine to be his 
 kindred and his partisans who ought to be eager to recognize and 
 
3i4 EPSTEIN 
 
 propagate his work. As these people are supposed to possess a 
 criterion for judging that mysterious product " modern " art — 
 and by writing and speaking in a specialized technical jargon 
 they usually support the pretence — their expert judgment on a 
 contemporary is generally accepted as final in as far as it is irre- 
 placeable. 
 
 If the man who has " discovered " and introduced Rodin to a 
 doubting public condemns Epstein, his public will readily mur- 
 mur : " li he says so . . ." " if he does not know . . ." And the 
 Rodin apostle will most likely believe he owes it to his august 
 idol's reputation as well as his own to do so, as any later master is 
 expected to emulate the last in every respect save in initiative 
 and the courage of his individuaUty. 
 
 Again, the identical mental limitations will bring the Epstein 
 apostle to dismissing Rodin's work as a superseded clumsiness, 
 and very likely to expect Epstein himself to share their opinion. 
 Needless to say, Epstein would be the last to do that, as naturally 
 the French master could hardly hope to find anyone better capable 
 of understanding his intentions and appreciating his achievements. 
 And no eminent master could allow his most fervent admirers 
 (however tolerant their homage might make him to their regard) 
 to belittle another great man within his hearing, as the detestable 
 flattery of it is unacceptable, and the implied assumption that he 
 would consider their avowed admiration of his own work in itself 
 a qualifying factor that could justify them is nothing else than an 
 impertinent insult. 
 
 (I do not even refer here to the unspeakable habit of attempting 
 to please a living artist by treating all his contemporaries in one 
 collective sweep as boobies and humbugs, and in so far as his 
 reputation is the reverse of academic decry the old masters as 
 bungling imbeciles and childish primitives when they^are not 
 mere mummies and historic relics.) 
 
 I pointed out already^that widespread appreciation of a master's 
 works is only to be expected from later-born generations, and 
 how when it is asked by what reversion of feeling this is at all 
 possible one must answer that the opinion of a few penetrating 
 minds comes to be accepted as time proceeds. Original talent is 
 
EPSTEIN 25 
 
 only appreciated as it deserves by appreciative intelligence which 
 is relatively as great as the creative intelligence concerned. The 
 opinions of the world in general being slowly shaped by that of 
 the men who have proved themselves superior in all respects, it 
 will finally accept as a classic master that one whom those acknow- 
 ledged leaders of some generations following have over and again 
 acclaimed. 
 
 Thus a reputation becomes established, and it must be admitted 
 that when some pseudo-leader through impudence or naive con- 
 viction of his own excellence discovers as overwhelming signs 
 of genius in the performances of some mediocrity, a pseudo- 
 master's reputation can become established and last long enough 
 to pervert the taste of many a generation. Fortunately though, 
 as I argued above, for the reputation to be lasting the authority 
 of a single man does not suffice. No Ruskin could make a Prout, 
 no Riemann could assure a Reger an enduring reputation ; the 
 effort is but a ludicrous caricature of Brunelleschi's fame being 
 spread by Donatello's recognition or of the latter's own name 
 becoming glorified through the homage paid to him in work or 
 word by Michel Angelo or Raphael, or of Diderot or Benvenuto 
 being revealed to Germany by Goethe. 
 
 I also argued that the number of minds capable of exercising 
 such authority hardly varies through the generations. Therefore 
 any master of genius who might feel unhappy on account of the 
 absence of widespread appreciation should not have failed to 
 recognize the fact that only the elect can form his audience. But 
 this would from the very nature of the matter be a very rare occur- 
 rence. Any general direct appreciation he cannot hope for after 
 his lifetime any more than during it. The fact remains incon- 
 trovertible that thousands are always prepared to call Shakespeare 
 the greatest poet, Rembrandt or Beethoven the greatest of painters 
 and musicians, to say " Michel Angelo " as soon as there is ques- 
 tion of the sublime in sculpture, but this does not in any way 
 denote" a 'genuine love and understanding of those masters' minds 
 and works. 
 
 Of the latter they have more often than not never heard or seen 
 anything, or very little and imperfectly in the most favourable 
 
26 EPSTEIN 
 
 instances. They call them great by hearsay as they would believe 
 in the qualities of any much-advertised article. It is the means 
 by which the suggestion is exercised on their minds that impresses 
 on them the conviction of these masters' excellence. 
 This supplies the explanation for the familiar contention that 
 while the " classics " are popular and their works universally 
 appreciated it is almost impossible for anyone, even the relatively 
 initiated, to grasp the aims of the " moderns." Those aims, how- 
 ever (whether in art or science), are ever the same, even as the 
 aims of the exponents of human creative action are always identical, 
 however much the modes of expression may vary. 
 An eternal and foremost aim is to understand and reveal truth, 
 and in the terms of truth give expression to the individual thoughts 
 in forms which original creative power must construct in accord- 
 ance with the requirements of the laws form and content present 
 for the growth of a perfect organism. 
 
 In the sculptor's work the fact becomes manifest that these 
 " laws " are not, as theorists would make us believe, immutable 
 in themselves, but that they vary with the material medium. In 
 sculpture more easily than in other arts it is apparent that 
 it is never the artist's aim to become proficient in the handling 
 of a conventional form — and thus acquire a readily discernible 
 style or manner — but facing the notorious reproach that he is 
 groping and experimenting, he must renounce the fame of facile 
 acquisition that rests on the confusing of mannerism and person- 
 ality, and must master as many divergent kinds of style as he 
 works materials. A survey of some of Epstein's different works 
 is from this point of view highly instructive and elucidating. It 
 also casts light on the reasons that have brought so many of his 
 critics to point out, and every one of them with some semblance 
 of justification, the similarity between some of his works and the 
 cultural styles of different races and periods. 
 While some of his bronze heads or busts have been likened to 
 early Greek sculpture or to the finely chiselled bronze mouldings 
 of the Quattrocento masters whose treatment of this material 
 presented the same perfection of logic that Epstein's work in this 
 
EPSTEIN 27 
 
 kind does, his carvings in hard stone (the granite Mother and 
 Child, for instance) have with equal right been compared to the 
 work of the Egyptians, who were of the few that tackled this in- 
 tractable material. Again his carving in soft stone presents 
 similarity with the soft-stone sculptures of the Assyrians and 
 Persians or the older Greek (the Maternity , the Sun God, and the 
 marble Oscar Wilde Tomb). The Venus whose " Michel Angesque " 
 qualities only further prove the point as the Renaissance master's 
 relation to the antique examples of marble carving were similar 
 in nature to those of Epstein. How and why the suggestion of 
 carved wood in the Cursed be the Day should recall the wood- 
 carvings of the African or Polynesians I have already referred to. 
 Those exotic works in wood are true to the demands of the 
 material's natural form and structure, a thing that could not be 
 said of the early French and German Renaissance statues in wood, to 
 which consequently Epstein's work does not bear any resemblance. 
 Moreover, in the flenite gargoyle-like figures, as in the VenuSy 
 we meet with significant demonstrations of how the sculptor's 
 vision of the work and the manner of its execution may be to a 
 great extent suggested by the shape of the block of material to be 
 employed and the nature of its structure. Frequently the sculptor's 
 genius declares itself through his power to derive his conception 
 from, to give life and form to, a fantastically shaped piece of stone 
 that has baffled and exasperated his less-gifted brethren. The 
 few classic examples of this in Donatello's and Michel Angelo's 
 work are too familiar to need quotation. 
 
 I do not wish to deny that the ideals and aims of the so- 
 called " moderns " are rarely understood (a fact which is used as 
 evidence against their honesty or lucidity of intention), but, as I 
 emphasized above, those of the older masters are understood 
 just as little, and the causes are in both instances the same. None 
 of the " classic " masters has a very much greater public than he 
 had during his lifetime, and again every living master, now as 
 formerly, meets but a few minds capable of appreciating his. 
 The difference lies in this, that a master's potential " public " 
 is spread over the entire earth and through the ages, and that 
 
28 EPSTEIN 
 
 during the years of his life his work can only reach a very few 
 of that small number, while slowly the propagation of his work 
 by these few attracts the attention of others equally capable of 
 valuing his work as it deserves. 
 
 Jesus Christ never could have found more fervent disciples than 
 the apostles were. Though in their time the number of genuine 
 Christians was but small, yet everyone knows that no twelve 
 would be found at any time as firmly convinced, as deeply pene- 
 trated by their Master's divine mission as they were, and Chris- 
 tianity has spread over the six continents. 
 
1 ALLUDED to the fact that " progress " in art is only the 
 accumulation of master works and that the most " primitive " 
 or " troglodyte " works may be the equally sincere expression 
 of an artist's vision 5000 B.C. or at the present day, while the 
 most minute realism, the most sophisticated draughtsmanship, as 
 well as the unmistakably "abstract decorative" work is no more 
 a property of the Victorians or a development of the twentieth 
 century than of the Middle Ages, though examples of those 
 styles abound in these periods. 
 
 I further pointed out how in the various works of such a versatile 
 artist and exceptionally capable craftsman as Epstein one can 
 discern, so to say, an historic survey, a summing up of what is 
 good and great in sculpture of every race and country at any 
 time. 
 
 I propose to give a few examples to enable the reader who is 
 acquainted with them to perceive how his different works declare 
 their relationship to the art of the people and the period from 
 which the best examples in the same material have been preserved 
 for our observation, and at the same time he will see how some of 
 the most generally attacked of Epstein's works are justified by 
 great traditions whose truth no one questions or denies and how 
 his originality of treatment is akin to that we have learnt, through 
 familiarity, to appreciate. 
 
 To limit the examples to more generally known and readily 
 accessible works : there is the extremely realistic, perfectly 
 proportioned, double-portrait statue of the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty 
 at the Berlin Museum, representing the priest Teuti and his wife, 
 or the statue portraying a scribe in the Louvre. Compare this 
 to the highly decorative, " abstracted " fresco from a tomb in 
 Thebe, picturing a lake with birds and fishes, surrounded by trees, 
 
 89 
 
30 EPSTEIN 
 
 which is in the British Museum. And to suggest at least one 
 concrete comparison with a particular work of Epstein, which 
 bears out my thesis very strongly, let a reader who may have seen 
 his granite Mother and Child (a work which has baffled many of 
 the professed friends of his work and provoked accusations of 
 barbarism and wild " vorticist " eccentricity from several critics) 
 think of that stone fantasy of incomparable grandeur, bewitching 
 beauty and lovable tenderness : the Egyptian statue of the master- 
 builder Senmut and the Princess Ranofin which is to be seen 
 at the Berlin Museum. 
 
 Also, in Assyrian sculpture whose fantastic imaginings and quaint 
 forms of dream-beings (that provide a parallel for Epstein's flenite 
 figures) are sufficiently well known, we meet with such highly 
 accomplished naturalistic representations as those of which the 
 famous dying lioness is characteristic. 
 
 How the different extremes of conception and manner of execu- 
 tion are to be found in Greek sculpture is a too familiar fact to 
 need illustration, only here again it may be noticed that, contrary 
 to popular assumption, they do not by any means always belong 
 to different periods ; the contrast between the highly developed 
 stylization (or outspoken primitiveness as some would have it, 
 though that makes no difference from our present purpose) of the 
 mutilated female statue from Samos (the Cheramyes fragment) 
 in the Louvre and the statues from the Western temple front at 
 ^gina that are preserved at the Munich *' Glyptothek " is a sig- 
 nificant instance, as these most realistically executed figures belong 
 equally to the so-called " archaic " period. 
 
 The wonderful close-fitting garments revealing the form of 
 the body under them, of which Epstein's Christ is such a 
 striking example, do no more exclusively belong to the Greek 
 period mentioned than the flowing draperies that obtrude so 
 objectionably on the figures they hide belong to the Middle 
 Ages. This notorious sign of degeneration of the sculptural 
 vision appears in the productions of the less-gifted ancients side 
 by side with the perfect works of the masters of genius in which, 
 especially in the " Gothic " period, it is as conspicuously absent 
 as it is in evidence in that of the convention-serving academics 
 
 « 
 
EPSTEIN 31 
 
 who have parasitized in the region of artistic creation from the 
 days of Adam. 
 
 One can further notice such contrasted products of one period 
 and culture as, for instance, the very realistic portrait statue of the 
 mounted Emperor Charles in the Carnavalet at Paris and the 
 apocalyptically-fantastic, strongly "abstracted" — as modern 
 manifesto-theory would call it — miniature of Christ in Glory 
 appearing to the beatified community in the Carolingian Bible 
 at San Paolo fuori le mura near Rome. 
 
 How the artists of the Middle Ages understood that style springs 
 from the requirements of the medium they select for execution 
 the stained-glass windows prove abundantly, as do the caryatides 
 on their cathedrals, where the shape which architectural purpose 
 prescribes to the material has been so wonderfully merged into 
 the form of the carving that lent the life of their sculptural vision 
 to it. 
 
 That Epstein knows how to reconcile the requirements of his 
 block of material and his sculptural conception into a perfect 
 harmony is proved by his Venus, a work which, in that respect, is 
 representative of one of the most vital of traditions of sculpture 
 of which such convincing examples are naturally as rare as the 
 master minds who alone can give us them. 
 
 A remarkable diversity of sculptural intention is presented by 
 two works of the fifteenth century, both Italian, one of which 
 shows a negation of the structural demands of marble (the Eva 
 of Antonio Rizzo at the Porta della Carta of the Doge's palace 
 in Venice), whereas the other, the bust of a Neapolitan Princess 
 by Francesco Laurana (at the Berlin Museum) is in the best tradi- 
 tion of carving in marble, and presents the tender velvety smooth- 
 ness of surface, the crystalline clarity of softly curving contours, 
 the subtle modulation between the reclining planes, the trans- 
 parent fulness of rhythmically flowing masses of Epstein's marble 
 Birds, Mother and Child or Venus. A remarkable and suggestive 
 instance of a subtle difference in style of execution, while yet the 
 master's individuality speaks as strongly out of both, is presented 
 by two paintings of PoUajuoli : the poetically-inclined com- 
 position, Tobiah and the Angel (Pinakothek — Turino), with its 
 
32 EPSTEIN 
 
 flowing rhythms and its atmosphere of mildness and dewy tripping 
 lightness, and the somewhat hard, severe, unbending, stabbingly 
 sharp of line and lighting, David with the Head of Goliath which 
 is in the erstwhile " Royal " Museum of Berlin. 
 Finally, a most informing series of three works of the same period 
 by German artists who were under the influence of the guilds of 
 the thirteenth century, each in a different medium, yet exhibiting 
 a remarkable uniformity of manner and intention, supplies a 
 striking commentary on the vast differences of style, each develop- 
 ing logically from the conditions carried by the medium chosen. 
 Schreiber's Manuel de la gravure sur bois et sur metal au XVme 
 siecle (Part VI) contains the reproduction of a woodcut printed 
 on parchment dating from about 1450 entitled Pieta. The work 
 exhibits all the characteristics aesthetic analysis is used to describe 
 as primitive ; the strictly parallel lines of fingers and toes, the 
 mathematically schematized anatomy in general, the elongated, 
 unsupported, rigorously suspended limbs, and the decoratively 
 treated garments that obey the demands of the composition 
 sooner than those of the body's support in conjunction with the 
 effect of gravity as realistic rendering would demand. The head 
 of the Christ lying on the Mother's knees, though in a horizontal 
 position, is drawn as if it were vertically held ; the long hairs fall 
 straight down on to the shoulders and breast. 
 Such characteristics occur on Egyptian friezes, also where the 
 aspect of certain parts of the human body is invariably rendered 
 in the same way independent of the angle at which they are seen 
 and the position of the other parts of the body. The effect for the 
 composition is, in both instances, far more satisfying than the 
 conscientious copying of nature's example could be. Curiously 
 contrasted with this is the careful drawing and the fine precise 
 line betraying the goldsmith's hand, of Martin Schongauer's well- 
 known copper-plate engraving Baptism oj Christ. The different 
 depths of plane of which the copper-plate allows have enabled 
 the master to give a great variety of tone and mellowness of light 
 and shade, a richness of folding garments yet coupled with a 
 sharply defined contour and, generally, a compromise between 
 naturalistic treatment and decorative composition that is ever 
 
EPSTEIN 33 
 
 characteristic of engraving in metal. If one compares with these 
 two works the painting of Konrad Witz in the Bale Museum, 
 Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate, which looks deceivingly 
 like a direct colour-photograph, one cannot help recognizing the 
 finally determining influences of subject and medium that far 
 outweigh the vaunted cultural and chronological influences in 
 importance. 
 
 Could one besides find a more striking demonstration in support 
 of my thesis than the work of Albert Diirer, whose portraits in oil 
 and other paintings, whose copper and steel-plate engravings and 
 woodcuts show the same variety of style as Epstein's work does. 
 The analogy between Epstein and Rembrandt, who is for the 
 same reasons equally related to Diirer, I have already noticed in 
 the first chapter. 
 
 The most superficial survey of Epstein's work will reveal the fact 
 that it does not include any anecdotal representations (or so- 
 called " genre " compositions). 
 
 From this single fact one could conclude — (if for the close observer 
 other indications did not abound) — that literary " poetical " con- 
 ceptions are foreign to his works which are materializations of 
 exclusively sculptural ideas. This is by no means such a frequent 
 occurrence as one might, from the nature of the matter, expect 
 it to be. Most of the European sculpture of the last few centuries 
 has been as much an illustration of events in themselves uncon- 
 nected with sculpture as most of the post-Beethovenian symphonic 
 music is chiefly illustrative of thought and events that had in their 
 origin no connection with phenomena of sound. In both cases 
 this was not, as is pretty commonly assumed, the conse- 
 quence of romantic culture or modern psycho-analytical pro- 
 pensities, but simply of the absence of great original creative 
 talent. 
 
 In minor talent one cannot expect to meet the particularly directed 
 profundity of thought that is capable of being universal in terms 
 of the plastic medium ; it must therefore endeavour to substitute 
 breadth and diversity for depth and singleness. One single 
 primitive thought can only be grasped in its infinite complexity 
 of aspects and associations, unaccompanied by points of support 
 
34 EPSTEIN 
 
 lying outside its own sphere to serve as foils and guide-posts, by 
 an absolute and undivided talent. 
 
 Thus in Epstein's work we observe that its basic motives are 
 always^ the^ great primitive human affections and forces, but ex- 
 pressed- in^ their entirety and fullest compass. In the chief of his 
 great imaginative works one such primary idea becomes materialized 
 with such completeness and embracing profundity that it assumes 
 a form which is the universe understood from one point of view. 
 A similar materialization of one idea can be likened to the revela- 
 tion of that pervading element of a whole structure which could 
 become visible to the eye or be projected on an active medium 
 through the action of one particular quality of luminous rays or 
 some radio-active emanation which exercises no effect on the other 
 elements present in the same structure. Or to give a less precise 
 analogy which has, however, the merit of being easily visualized, 
 it could be compared to a structure of unoxidizable metal filled to 
 one solid whole with a substance that yields to the action of a 
 solvent which leaves the former intact while eliminating the latter : 
 or an organic structure as a coral or sponge from which the 
 contained substance is washed out. 
 
 Such elemental motives as grief, exultation, love, maternity, toil, 
 fecundity, are the subjects for his greatest works. The Sun God, 
 the Maternity, the Mother and Child, the Rock Drill, all are most 
 convincing examples of it. 
 
 There are certainly sections of artists and public who labour 
 under the apprehension that art has outgrown such elemental 
 notions, not seeing that these eternal motives must remain for 
 ever the great inspiring forces of art. The same who make this 
 mistake are committed, logically enough, to another erroneous 
 view, namely, that the " form " is eternal while the contents vary. 
 In reaUty, of course, the contents are eternal and invariable, love 
 or maternity, hate or ambition are to-day what they were two 
 thousand years ago, but the form is ever varying and changing 
 with the individuality of great creative artists and the lead they 
 give to the minor talents. The material of any substance found 
 in nature is admittedly in itself of no significance ; it is the forms 
 under which it appears that give it its value. An exact and striking 
 
EPSTEIN 35 
 
 parallel can be found in the case of precious stones ; the con- 
 stituent materials are in any form considered worthless ; they are 
 chemically considered, silicates or fluorites, or other salts of no 
 more precious things than magnesia or potash, but it is their 
 physical form of crystals that endow them with qualities that make 
 them sought after. A diamond consists of nothing but carbon, 
 for which in its amorphous state no one would stretch out his 
 hand, while its ideal value in the crystalline structure is unequalled. 
 But even then it is the further form given to it by skilful cutting 
 and grinding which gives it its fabulous ultimate value. 
 And as the thoughts, affections and emotions that in all times 
 are the seed of human expression are immovable principles, so is 
 the creative intelligence, while the forms which, from the artistic 
 viewpoint, give them the value of individual creation are con- 
 stantly changing. Only where creative power has imagined forms 
 that present the idea with unsurpassable perfection can they 
 themselves become as lasting as all visible creation of divine 
 making. 
 
 The form-giving thought itself is eternal and infinite. The truth 
 of these matters could not be more finally stated than in the 
 psalmist's words : " In initio tui Domine terram fundasti ; et opera 
 manuum tuorum sunt caeli. Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanes ; et 
 omnes sicut veterascent. Et sicut opertorium mutahis eos, et muta- 
 buntur ; tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient.'* 
 What I understood by profundity, which, I said, made any 
 elemental thought universal in its expression, I attempted to 
 make clear by analogies. But I should not fail to protest ener- 
 getically that under no condition would I wish to use the word in 
 the sense in which it is so frequently applied with regard to modern 
 art. This profundity is nothing but its curse of attempted philo- 
 sophical meaning. A familiar manifestation of it is Wagner's 
 painful insistence in speech and writing that his music was " much 
 more than music " [sic]. This marvellous idea has, of course, been 
 eagerly caught up by authors, painters, sculptors and musicians. 
 They all are most anxious to impress on their public that they 
 are giving " much more " than they apparently do. What men 
 like Bocklin, Watts, Richard Strauss achieve is to create a mist 
 
36 EPSTEIN 
 
 and confusion that makes confused minds sit up, feeling they 
 have been understood, catching the " vibrations " of a sympatheti- 
 cally tuned mind. 
 
 In such surroundings the appearance of such v^^ork as that of 
 Epstein is all the more welcome. What he does is simple and direct, 
 his sculpture is sculpture and not " much more." But its truth 
 and completeness make it profound in the real sense. Much 
 harm., however, has been caused by the fact that the works of 
 those artists who claim a much wider sphere for their work than 
 it apparently needs are the most gratifying subjects for the writer 
 on art who finds in their own declarations sufficient material for 
 literary fantasies which have nothing to do with the art through 
 which the work under notice has materialized, but philander 
 round the work with such agreeable and earnest mien that they 
 cannot help appealing to those who, in their enjoyment of the 
 writer's production, are content to forget the rights of the subject. 
 And unfortunately discussion of artistic subjects and descriptions 
 of artists' creations come, in the overwhelming majority of cases, 
 from men who themselves are no artists. A creative artist who 
 has translated his thoughts into the medium, the use of which his 
 talent and adaptabiUty have indicated, would never be capable of 
 making them equally clear in any other medium. If he were, 
 this latter would become the work most unmistakably expressive 
 of his intention, and it would again require commentary of a 
 different order to satisfy those who are in need of one. 
 If, however, it should happen, in rare cases, that a sculptor or 
 painter were, at the same time, a master of literary expression, 
 it would be undesirable that he should interrupt his vastly more 
 important work of producing painting or sculpture to discuss 
 either his own or other people's works, and attempt to express in 
 words his philosophical and theorizing reflections concerning 
 them. On the other hand, when, as mostly happens, this 
 is being done by minds that are themselves lacking creative 
 instincts the outcome will, with rare exceptions, remain a [com- 
 mentary approaching the work from a standpoint entirely different 
 from the artist's. This becomes fatal from the moment when 
 aspects of the work are considered which cannot be seen from 
 
EPSTEIN 37 
 
 any other point of view but their makers'. The critic's point of 
 view, whether ethical or philosophical, is usually a literary one. 
 When he starts reasoning from a point fixed by similar reflections, 
 he is bound to fail the moment he arrives at the essentials of any 
 work owing its conception to relations that can only exist between 
 the material employed by the artist as a medium and his terms 
 of thinking in it. 
 
 The meaning of the words the critic employs then becomes one 
 that does not apply to the requirements of the subject he treats. 
 The abuse of the high-sounding terms " profound " and " pro- 
 fundity," in the sense in which most art critics employ them, 
 is one of the notorious examples of " aesthetic " irrelevancy. 
 Nothing is more natural than that they should praise work that 
 to them appears profound of meaning, the expression of a pro- 
 found thought. Quite as natural to assign a less important place 
 to those that seem to them lacking in the respect of profundity. 
 But — in the current dialect of philosophizing critical literature 
 on art, " profound " has come to mean first of all as much as 
 " serious," " grave." This ignores the fact that profundity 
 denotes the grade of penetration into the intrinsic being of the 
 thing under consideration, consequently one may be profound in 
 dealing with a most frivolous subject. Further, those employing 
 the word think of profundity only in its literary sense, when it 
 conveys the presence of comprehensiveness in the inclusion of 
 relevant detail, and, in the description of a thought concerned 
 with any particular subject, the implied knowledge of all its 
 aspects and associations with other subjects and of its relations to 
 human life, thought and observation : all these in so far as they can 
 be elucidated in words indicating the right proportions and 
 grouping in the complex of ideas. Now when they arrive at the 
 application of a similar test to an embodiment of human thought 
 in a different medium, they first transpose this into the medium 
 which determines the development of their own reasoning. The 
 differing requirements of those two become responsible for a 
 grade of irrelevancy^conforming to the extent of the former. 
 The absurdity of judging Sanskrit poetry from an English trans- 
 lation by applying to the latter the rules of English grammar is 
 
38 EPSTEIN 
 
 obvious. How far more obvious then ought to be the surpassing 
 absurdity of applying canons extracted from Hterary ideas and 
 their transcription into words to a thought translated into 
 them from conceptions conveyed by means of painting, music or 
 sculpture. And yet that is what self-styled scientific art criticism 
 is constantly doing. The literary analyst will discover greater 
 profundity and meaning in painting or sculpture in relation to the 
 amount of " translatable " matter in it. This naturally increases 
 in inverse ratio as the intrinsic pictural or sculptural meaning of 
 the work decreases. It becomes less and nought as the absolute 
 " profundity " of meaning is reached, which is of a quality 
 only possible in the conception of a painter's or sculptor's mind. 
 Contrasting with these, the favourite subjects for discussion of 
 the art-critic, are the works in which an abundance of literary 
 detail of meaning has been suggested by an artist who himself 
 proceeds from a conception that is in its essentials a literary and 
 not a sculptural or pictural (though all the more frequently a 
 " picturesque ") one. 
 
 It is for the average essayist on art a task at once congenial and 
 easy to write volumes about the products of a Puvis de Chavannes 
 or Felicien Rops, paintings that are painfully superficial as regards 
 the amount of thought they contain in terms of painting proper and 
 pure. If, on the other hand, he chooses for discussion works of 
 Rembrandt or Leonardo (think of the David and Saul of the 
 former, or the latter 's Madonna of the Rocks), he notoriously pro- 
 duces journalistic causeries of an appalling emptiness and ver- 
 bosity. Yet such are the very works that in terms of painting, 
 that is of line, colour, light, proportions, composition, rhythm, 
 attain to a profundity which, if it has been equalled, surely has 
 never been surpassed in any work of human brain and hands in 
 any department of art or science. 
 
 The penetration, the completeness, the grasp of essentials, the 
 comprehension of associations and relations that constitute pro- 
 fundity, are in the work of a painter or sculptor the depth and 
 fulness of things he can see. These may have their correlative in 
 thought subject to utterance in words, but they themselves cannot 
 be conveyed by their means. Now even as a mind capable of con- 
 
EPSTEIN 39 
 
 ceiving the whole meaning of words can become penetrated with 
 the significance, the reveaUng precision and intensity of a word, 
 so the mind capable of containing thought that can only be trans- 
 mitted through the medium of any other art can be struck by 
 precisely identical qualities contained in a curve, a rhythm, a 
 shade, a tone-value, a relation of planes or masses. In those 
 conceptions, contrary to popular notions, there is no question of 
 vagueness : the impressions, though outside the province of 
 word's power, are unmistakable, precise and definite. This very 
 fact, however, the average commentator or scribe can so little 
 understand that he must simply deny a possibility he cannot 
 conceive. By their attempts to describe the qualities and meaning 
 of works in terms of a medium into which they must first mentally 
 transpose it, they cause the loss of quite as much, or more than any 
 work of literature can lose by translation from its original language 
 into one that is founded on the most differing requirements and 
 derives from totally diff"erent conditions. In this particular domain 
 of transcription the loss is admittedly incalculable. In the 
 most favourable instances the translated work is comparable 
 — to borrow the image Cervantes puts into the mouth of Don 
 Quixote — to a carpet reversed. On its back it exhibits some kind 
 of reproduction of its design and pattern, while surface, colours, 
 texture, contours of drawing and all intention of subtlety is lost. 
 I may hope, having made my meaning sufficiently clear, to evade 
 the chances of being misunderstood when I say that Epstein is a 
 profound thinker. I mean by that (as distinct from the popular 
 conception of the term, which would imply his thinking after the 
 manner of the philosopher, making the conclusions he thus arrives 
 at the basis for conceptions of works of art that embody them) 
 that his penetration of nature and the human mind and life, and 
 the interplay of their connections is relatively as great. Also that 
 it reveals to him the essentials of its mysteries with equal clarity, 
 making the significance of his works equally far-reaching. There- 
 fore his works belong to those manifestations which reveal the 
 human mind to itself, enriching the^world after the desire of its 
 highest ambition. 
 It is the form given to the thought which, as I said, lends the value 
 
40 EPSTEIN 
 
 to it, and naturally in sculpture, where it is essential in a double 
 sense, it is the last achievement of a master. Gifted sculptors are 
 the rarest of artists for that reason, and consequently no art has so 
 degenerated and sunk to such an exceedingly low level in times 
 when form has become nothing else but the prescription of 
 tradition, a convention to be obeyed regardless of the meaning 
 to be or not to be discovered in it ; while, as I argued, it must 
 constitute the personal factor in the expression of perfectly objec- 
 tive sentiments. It is the artist's handling of them that makes them 
 " artistic material." One of the fundamental errors of aestheticism, 
 is its attempt to fix form before anything else, proceeding from 
 comparison between master works and abstract theoretical con- 
 siderations founded on them. But for this reason aesthetic theory 
 always is an afterthought, and in the position of the person who 
 regularly remembers and knows all facts when someone else acts 
 as a prompter but becomes helpless the moment he is left to 
 himself. The artist's sense of form being his artistic personality 
 it is impossible for anyone to foretell either. How could anyone 
 be expected, not even in advance, to know his mind when to that 
 purpose the artist himself has to direct his entire energy, concen- 
 trate the power of his genius and talents ? Could anyone be 
 expected to do this task for him, that for himself is the great task 
 of his life ? 
 
 The more rare is the sculptor in particular because his handiwork 
 is so exceptionally difficult and because, apart from manual 
 skill and versatility it demands a bodily predisposition, a 
 physical adaptabiUty, qualities of body and mind that are them- 
 selves rare and therefore the more seldom met in combination 
 with genius that finds sculpture the indicated medium for the 
 conveyance of its ideas. 
 
 Now Epstein is a sculptor in the complete sense of the word, as 
 the great sculptors of antiquity and the Renaissance were. He 
 knows how to tackle metal ; he can carve marble, hew granite ; 
 he is a skilful workman handling divers materials with knowledge 
 and nimbleness. And he possesses the inexhaustible energy and 
 the almost titanic vigour the work demands. 
 The shape his thought is to take is ultimately determined by the 
 
EPSTEIN 41 
 
 material the particular work requires, and it is his logical treat- 
 ment of it that co-operates to give to the sculpture its close unity 
 and the appearance of an organic structure of the substance 
 employed. If this be metal the shapes are " metallic," if the word 
 may pass, and reproduce the edges of the tools the working in it 
 needs. The same shapes could not justifiably exist in marble or 
 wood. When he carves marble it is the " spirit " of the marble 
 which decides the conception and the ultimate appearance, and 
 again the work is unthinkable in bronze or granite. It is not 
 generally realized that most of the work which is supposed to 
 come from the artist's studio is in the case of the average sculptor 
 not even the product of his own hands, but of skilled artisans 
 who work in obscurity and anonymity. The latter are often 
 solely responsible for the beauty of a piece of sculpture of 
 which the nominal maker has only executed a model in clay or 
 wax, which is not mechanically reproduced as a bronze moulding 
 is, but entirely chiselled by a humble stonemason who becomes 
 the artist's talent and conscience. The Italian workmen employed 
 to carve marble for sculptors are usually wonderful craftsmen who 
 will correct and purify many a model from an incompetent sculptor 
 who receives the credit for the impression created by the excel- 
 lence of the carving. 
 
 But one cannot expect the sculptor of our time to produce his 
 own bronze mouldings. Some of the Renaissance artists were in 
 a position to do this because, unlike their present confreres, they 
 received the requisite financial assistance from patrons and the 
 technical assistance of students, themselves capable artists and 
 potential masters who were grateful and eager to work in their 
 studios. In that period a sculptor of considerable merit did not 
 feel humiliated to be employed in the capacity of a stonemason 
 by the architect of a cathedral, while in our time anyone who can 
 model sufferably is so penetrated by the importance of his in- 
 dividuality that he expects the world to pause when he raises his 
 hand and naturally would not dream of entering a master's studio 
 as a pupil and assistant, as he would feel he were robbing the 
 world of the fruit of the time and energy he could employ in 
 independent creation. 
 
42 EPSTEIN 
 
 And for a sculptor to become his own bronze moulder when, 
 even if he could do so without financial aid, he would have to 
 engage workmen and run the whole establishment for his own 
 works only, would, in view of the apparatus and outfit needed, 
 become an absurdly disproportionate proposition. Moreover, the 
 successful reproduction in bronze asks of the artist that he shall 
 see the ultimate cast in his imagination ere he sets out to model, 
 and that though his hands work in wax or clay, he shall con- 
 tinuously think in metal, as otherwise not only shapes that could be 
 reproduced would become nonsensical, but some might actually have 
 a totally different appearance and others finally might not be fit for 
 reproduction at all. Many a sculptor's mechanically reproduced 
 metal casts were not only modelled but conceived and thought in 
 clay or wax, and look monstrosities because the metal demands its 
 due and refuses to be denied. 
 
 Or the sculptor presses the stonemason to execute in stone a 
 model which taxes the latter 's executive virtuosity to the utmost 
 and to a wholly perverted purpose. But the carving in stone is 
 like a violin melody played on a trombone, even as similarly 
 produced work in bronze often makes the effect of a trumpet 
 playing flute music. Because, apart from not himself working 
 the material in which the work has to appear, the sculptor does not 
 even understand its nature and indicated treatment. He asks his 
 moulder to copy wax fantasies in metal which may often be quite 
 easily done, but certainly never with impunity. Exactly as he 
 expects analogous prodigies of his stonemason, who, obeying, 
 may thus wastefully apply noteworthy skill while the stone cries 
 out against the mishandling. 
 
VI 
 
 DURING the last few centuries, as I previously pointed 
 out, sculpture has sunk into a cesspool from which it 
 has been drawn out by the work of a few men with an 
 incontestable genius for it of which Epstein is the most 
 important. I must reckon with results and not potentialities, and 
 the actual output of a few men, of whom Brancusi is one, is put 
 into the shade by that of Epstein. The originality and craftsman- 
 ship of Gaudier were unquestionable, but he unfortunately was 
 killed at such an early age that next to the fairest of promises he 
 left few works in which he had sufficiently overcome technical 
 problems and successfully emerged from his experimental struggles 
 to make them complete revelations of his artistic personality. 
 There is hardly a work of Epstein that is not for its masterful 
 utterance of an original conception a valuable addition to, and 
 in which do not at the same time reappear, the great and glorious 
 traditions of the work of the best of antique or Renaissance masters 
 from Polykleitos to Donatello or Michel Angelo. 
 We must go to a work like Donatello 's David to meet the square- 
 ness of cut and force of precise delineation wedded to a softness 
 of contour, shining mellowness of surface and tender play of 
 light and shade in the subtly moving planes that bronze works of 
 Epstein like the Romilly or the Old Woman's Head exhibit. Never 
 did a Phidias, a Michel Angelo, make the marble seem at once 
 more immaterial and monumental, more softly undulating between 
 clear-cut lines and angles, or in a similar microcosmos of detail 
 better preserve a perfect balance in the rhythm of great masses. 
 The sensitiveness, the transparence, the wonderfully moving 
 melody of profile and the original purity of surface in the marble 
 Mother and Child, are equal to what the craft's greatest tradition 
 has suggested. 
 
 43 
 
44 EPSTEIN 
 
 The best and greatest examples of Assyrian and Egyptian carvings 
 in granite or soft stone possess no more lapidary force and massive 
 weight or compactness, next to elegance without frivolity, sim- 
 plicity and completeness, no more elementary directness than 
 Epstein's granite Mother and Child or the (Hopton Wood stone) 
 Maternity or the Sun God. 
 
 The mystic rhythm and subdued play of shadows on the dully 
 effaced polish, the shining softness and exquisitely intersecting 
 lines on the plane's edges of his flenite figures or the dark metal of 
 his Rock Drill are equal to the finest of African carved wooden 
 masks or Indian bronze work. 
 
 The entire gamut of sentiment and emotion is for the sculptor 
 born the soul of a language he can speak in stone with his chisel. 
 In it he can dream in vague thought of fantastic fable-life and 
 chant loud psalms of definite conviction and thunder ; as a 
 woman can he smile and weep ; he can roar as battle arms roar 
 in the shock of warriors, cast forth full-lunged hymns of joy and 
 sing in whispers of soft modulations. Tenderly he can murmur 
 or shrilly screech in angular shrieks and sublimate the tapering 
 recesses of his thought into fine icicles of unbodily lacework or 
 pile earthquake boulders, and again tremblingly quiver as dragon- 
 flies' wings or flowers' petals opening out of the bud under the 
 first morning rays. But no dithyrambic utterance can be other 
 than wholly inadequate to translate the exalted enthusiasm and 
 ecstatic devotion that makes inspired tools of the hands that under 
 genius' guidance solve for him the problems as they present them- 
 selves. The perfect workman, quietly certain of his sovereign 
 mastery over the material, can watch his skilful hands which, not 
 betraying his confidence as independent and reliable helpers, 
 mould for him while his mind can concentrate entirely on the 
 direction of what he sees being executed before his eyes. 
 He can see his vision take shape as those dexterous hands 
 proceed, trusting in their power to realize to the last precise detail 
 the model in front of his spiritual eye. He knows", his hands will 
 not disappoint him in giving the reproduction of his vision. To 
 watch this unstumbling materialization of his mind's content is 
 as the joy of participating at a ritual of which every phase leads 
 
EPSTEIN 45 
 
 to the next with a naturalness and exactness expressive of the 
 unwavering sureness of significance of that which created it. 
 No human frailty, however harnessed by will and ambition, 
 discipline and conscientiousness can, of itself, attain to this 
 creative sureness, and to witness it is for the artist to recog- 
 nize the grace of divine reflection that constitutes his own power. 
 I should not omit while I point out the traditional element in 
 Epstein's work to insert a few explanatory words in order that 
 my meaning may not be mistaken. Tradition, as Elijah's cloak, 
 falls from the older masters' shoulders on those of their successors, 
 who, however, may be their contemporaries or may be living 
 centuries after them. The unbroken chain of tradition is formed 
 by the identity of essential aims after which the creative mind is 
 striving and of the means he employs to realize them. One should 
 be careful not to confound traditional and conventional. The 
 mistake is as frequently committed as that virtuosity — which is 
 the shining case of the intentions' realization — is mistaken for 
 the frivolous flippancy that pleases itself in showing off dexterity 
 without the meaning that should direct it being preserved. Artistic 
 tradition is not as convention is, concerned with outward 
 mannerisms, but with inward ideals and just recognition of the 
 highest summits reached by human effort. It cannot be ignored 
 by the most powerful and original talent any more than the truth 
 of which it is the revelation. Convention, on the other hand, 
 enslaves the less independently active imagination. The free 
 play of instincts that in the case of the lesser talents should be 
 assiduously nurtured is stunted in its development by the man- 
 made law of convention which is by the petrified pontifical souls 
 of its upholders dispensed in pharisaical block-headedness of 
 formal stiffness and ceremonial sluggishness as sinister and insane 
 as its effect is fatal. 
 
 In several instances, however, critics of Epstein's work, while 
 admitting that it means a glorious resurrection of sculpture's 
 great traditions, have thought it necessary to take exception to 
 much of it on moral grounds, and in this connection have pointed 
 to a significant difference they believed they could observe between 
 his imaginative works and his portraits, and even to a reflection of 
 
46 EPSTEIN 
 
 the same antithesis in the contrast between the portraits them- 
 selves conforming to the character and obvious moral and social 
 status of the sitters. In how far this art criticism on moral grounds 
 is justifiable and what is much more important even in how far it 
 holds good, or is at all applicable in Epstein's case, I will refer to 
 in the next chapter. First, I must deal with the alleged " dualism " 
 that seems to puzzle a great many benevolently intentioned com- 
 mentators on his art. It has been thought necessary by them to 
 make a distinction between a " realistic " and an " abstract " mode 
 of rendering to which his sculptures alternatingly should conform. 
 The bona fides of some of those who have forwarded these con- 
 tentions justifies at least their discussion, however erroneous they 
 seem. 
 
 I do not propose to assert that Epstein's portraits and his 
 works of an obviously imaginative character have come into 
 existence in an exactly identical manner. No work of any in- 
 dependent value is ever conceived or executed precisely as any 
 other was. Every subject, moreover, defines its own treatment 
 as much as the ultimate form of a grown organism is predeter- 
 mined in its seed. A work of art, as a living organism or a structure 
 of crystals or any natural formation, varies in the ways of its growth 
 and final appearance with the conditions attendant on its origin- 
 ating, gestation and development exactly as do two subjects of the 
 same species. 
 
 Nature's aims, whether she produces apparently complex or 
 simple forms, are constant and identical, indifferent of whether 
 they take the shape of the simplest crystals or the most highly 
 organized animal organism. 
 
 Now the only way to understand artistic creation is, as I have 
 repeatedly emphasized, to recognize it as only another manifesta- 
 tion of the principal creative power which, instead of acting 
 directly, immediately, establishes an independent agency to act 
 as intermediary, viz. the artist's intelhgence. 
 That there is in Epstein's case no need to search for an enlighten- 
 ing designation that will serve as a bridge between his contrasting 
 works, I endeavoured to make clear when I compared the diverse 
 modes of expression of which he makes use, to those of cultural 
 
EPSTEIN 47 
 
 periods of closely co-operating castes of artists, and chiefly when 
 in this connection I pointed to the totally different viewpoint and 
 technique between the various works (portraits in oil, imaginative 
 composition in dry point, etc.) of Diirer, Rembrandt and others. 
 To a considerable extent the responsibility for the desired distinc- 
 tion is borne by the commercially inclined artists who, uncon- 
 cernedly arresting their own development, once they happen to 
 find they have turned out a successful article, go on repeating it 
 and continue in this way as long as the demand persists. They 
 can then at the same time flatter themselves with the public homage 
 to their position as masters of their art, won for them by the 
 reputation of their personal style or manner. 
 The public's exigencies in this respect are the cause of many a 
 talent wasting its powers in the chase after this chimera of " the 
 master's inimitable manner." 
 
 Whatever contrast we observe in the different works of a master 
 whose intentions are not influenced by similar considerations 
 originates in the diversity of the subjects and the form their logical 
 treatment requires, and not in the inconstancy of aims and vari- 
 ability of artistic sensitiveness in the creative spirit. The fact 
 that every new conception demands a new manner of execution, 
 as every formation grows after its particular nature and require- 
 ments, does not lead to the conclusion that the artist's general out- 
 look on the universe as it relates to his own production varies 
 incessantly. Therefore the contemplator labours under a mis- 
 apprehension when he thinks he must readjust his focus and be 
 continually shifting his point of observation as he is confronted 
 by the various manifestations of one master's conceptive capacity. 
 If I did not know that the difficulty assumes a concrete shape for 
 many a student of Epstein's work, I would not dwell on the point, 
 because without the evidence my own experience of such instances 
 has supplied it would appear inconceivable to me that it could be 
 expected that his Venus or Rock Drill and the Portrait of Lord Fisher 
 should be executed in the same manner, or that one should need 
 to classify him on the strength of the latter work a realist and of 
 the former an ideological fantastic visionary. 
 The Fisher bust as a sculpture is as much pure invention as the 
 
48 EPSTEIN 
 
 Venus ; while the latter work again is as " realistic " in execution 
 as the portrait mentioned, because though in that case there exists 
 an indubitable stimulus in the personality and physiognomy of 
 the sitter, it determines the sculptural conception but does not 
 replace it, and therefore both works are equally conscientiously 
 modelled after the sculptor's vision of the mentally completed 
 work that precedes the starting of the execution. 
 An artist possessed of such burning intensity of imagination and 
 so supremely sure of the nature of the message he has to deliver 
 does not work at hazard, trusting to good fortune, but even when 
 commencing in an improvising way or on a commissioned or an 
 occasional work will arrive at a fixed conception in the very act 
 of briefly preludizing, and thus the least reflected of his works 
 after living models may differ in degree but do not differ in kind 
 from his more important gradually-generating great constructions 
 that realize his individual imaginings. 
 
 But naturally, as I said, the sculptural conception of a portrait 
 is (with the exception of the rare cases where the sculptor meets 
 the ideal model for a finally planned work) not arrived at inde- 
 pendently of the sitter. According to the amount of interest his 
 person and figure may rouse in the mind of the sculptor, this latter 
 will be relatively restricted and bound in the range of his con- 
 ceptive potentialities. Therefore though even his few com- 
 paratively indifferent products in portraiture are as sculptures 
 generally unique in some respect through his sublime workman- 
 ship, the great significance of his entire output derives chiefly 
 from the qualities of those works in which his imagination has 
 been unhampered by the necessity to find a compromise between 
 his artistic intentions and the limits prescribed by what possi- 
 bilities a model can suggest. 
 
 Unfortunately, the task of a sculptor, who must, as any other 
 artist, carry on an uninterrupted fight against prejudice and 
 ignorance, snobbism and hypocrisy, is more exceptionally difficult 
 in that he must, in addition, expend an amount of physical energy 
 which, besides requiring an extraordinary constitution, needs the 
 greatest possible mental concentration for its proper application. 
 It is, however, too much to expect that he should, in addition. 
 
EPSTEIN 49 
 
 make the immense material sacrifices his work necessitates, when 
 he does not receive the protection of weahh's patronage to assist 
 and encourage him. In order not only to live but to be able to 
 defray the vast expenses the acquisition of his costly materials 
 necessitates, he is forced to devote the greater part of his hours 
 of work to the execution of commissioned work which is, where 
 disinterestedness of his patrons is conspicuously non-existent, 
 usually their own portraits. The art patron of our present day 
 appears little aware of his moral obligations towards contemporary 
 creative artists. He generally imagines that he renders the greatest 
 service to one and through him to art, when he orders a portrait 
 from him or buys any other work which he personally happens 
 to like or approve of. But, in this way, he does not do much more 
 than co-operate to prevent the artist from starving. It is appar- 
 ently inconceivable to the potential patron that to be valuable 
 his assistance should take the form of unconditional financing, 
 which would make the creative artist the master of his own time 
 and free from care, and enable him to execute any conception 
 without having to reckon with the expenses he incurs, guided 
 exclusively by artistic considerations. He should know he can 
 be ever sure of the trust and confidence of his patron and that 
 the latter does not expect him to remain informed of possible 
 desires and cognizant of his taste, but is satisfied to be of help to 
 a master while understanding that he may be quite unable to 
 follow the flight of his mind and therefore modest enough to 
 renounce a right to be disappointed if some of his works do not 
 appeal to him. 
 
 So far from acknowledging the rationality of this standpoint, the 
 average wealthy man who pretends to any culture assumes he is 
 creating a general indebtedness of artists towards himself if he 
 invests his money in marketable works of art and that he de- 
 serves the particular gratitude of any living master if he buys 
 some of his productions. If, on the other hand, he acquired, 
 in either case admittedly for his own gratification and not from 
 philanthropic motives, articles of equal monetary value from a 
 commercial concern, whether individual undertaking or the im- 
 personal emporium, the absurd notion that in so doing he would 
 
so 
 
 EPSTEIN 
 
 create a debt of gratitude or obligation would not even enter his 
 head. 
 
 A sculptor then is, in our time, in a particularly unfortunate 
 position. With the exception of one American art lover, John 
 Quinn, not even a multi-millionaire, vv^ho has acquired almost the 
 entire output of Epstein in the course of the last years, no dis- 
 interested patron has presented himself in order to enable the 
 master to give to humanity in the fuller measure the benefit of his 
 creative powers. The consequence of this is that Epstein has 
 had to renounce many a planned execution of works that were to 
 be important materializations of his most individual conceptions, 
 and that even some of his greatest and most original works, after 
 having been exhibited in an initial stage of realization, have had 
 to remain uncompleted. One of the most painfully notable 
 instances of this is his Rock Drill, which I hold to be one 
 of his most significant works and one of the supremely character- 
 istic expressions of his creative genius. The entire figure executed 
 in plaster in 1913 was originally exhibited in London in 1916. 
 It considerably puzzled the public and art critics, who, instead of 
 approaching the work whose elemental power was obvious, with- 
 out preconceived notions, were led, probably also under the 
 influence of its surroundings on that occasion, to consider it as a 
 stylistic experiment to be understood as representing one of the 
 tendentious " isms " rebellious " manifestos " were then familiar- 
 izing. The fact is, however, only relevant in so far as it may 
 partly account for the regrettable lack of interest the work was, 
 at that time, able to excite. Anyhow, no one has come forward 
 with an offer of assistance that would have enabled its maker to 
 carry out his plan of having the figure reproduced in metal on a 
 larger scale and place it on a base, the shape and proportions of 
 which were to complete the realization of the sculptural idea. 
 Consequently, up to the present, only the gun-metal reproduction 
 (on the original scale) of the torso exists, which is here reproduced. 
 Unfortunately this instance of how the sculptor has been ham- 
 pered by material factors is not an isolated one, and the reflection 
 that much may be missed for which, at some future date, when 
 the true value of his work has become indisputable and raised 
 
EPSTEIN 51 
 
 above question, no sacrifice would be judged too great, is an utterly 
 depressing one. 
 
 Some compensation may be found in the circumstance that, 
 confining himself during the most recent phase of his artistic 
 development almost exclusively to portraiture, Epstein has been 
 so deeply absorbed in the study of physiognomy and the pene- 
 tration of human character that he has here (thus stronger than 
 ever suggesting the analogy with Rembrandt's artistic career) 
 eclipsed the masterly portraiture of his earlier work, producing 
 ever more profoundly studied heads, and busts of incomparable 
 execution. Some of them, indeed, are the highest possible creative 
 manifestations, short of blowing life into the nostrils. Their very 
 build suggests the process of vitalization the material has under- 
 gone at his hands, and his way of building up his heads in the 
 round from within is in itself strikingly expressive of the nature 
 of his sculptural conceptions. 
 
 A great many portraits modelled in wax or clay give an unmistak- 
 able impression of having been produced by either lumping big 
 masses together which the thumbs and fingers rolled into shape 
 as they fixed them in their position, or of the final surface having 
 been arrived at by cutting away from the block of material (which 
 the structural stone demands, but logical handling does not 
 permit in the case of the mouldable amorphous substances) — a 
 process which leaves the inside untouched by life. It is arrested 
 on the outside ; does not glow through it and permeate the whole. 
 In Epstein's portraits the infinite sensitiveness of surface is even 
 as in the living model dependent on the underlying portions. 
 The loving care with which his portraits are treated in this respect 
 recalls for its artistic conscientiousness and devotion, the moving 
 sincerity and respectful abandonment, the religious labour of those 
 old painters and gravers who adorned with the most beautiful 
 ornamentation they could produce the inside of sarcophagi where 
 no glance of human eyes would, as far as they could foresee, ever 
 reach. 
 
 His earlier portraits exhibit also this marvellous vitality, not as 
 so much sculpture irritatingly does, presenting an arrested move- 
 ment, thus attempting to achieve the suggestion of life. His, on 
 
52 EPSTEIN 
 
 the contrary, combine the psychological summing up of character- 
 istic momentum, and the rhythm of movement that determines 
 the essence of features and facial expression with the conscientious 
 execution of a plastic conception founded on purely sculptural 
 factors and fixing the eternal type in the envelope that yet pre- 
 serves its direct human appeal in consequence of the unflagging 
 love with which the living model has been studied. Yet his later 
 portraits become in this last respect ever profounder utterances of 
 psychological observation and divination of the deepest recesses 
 of character without losing as regards their plastic significance. 
 On the contrary, they present an overwhelming wealth of detail 
 welded together into perfect unity and, however widely diverging, 
 all reasserting one single thought and from the remotest points 
 of contact reconducting to the central idea. 
 
 Nothing could be more revealing, and command greater admira- 
 tion than a comparative study of different heads obviously pre- 
 senting the same type, being various plastic conceptions of closely 
 related complexes of thought to be found amongst Epstein's 
 portraits, and perhaps even more convincing in this connection 
 would be the comparison of portraits produced at different periods 
 from the same sitters. Then there are the several portraits of the 
 sculptor's wife that so finally demonstrate the development I 
 noted to need no comment — the mask, the wonderfully sensitive 
 head of the bust, with the monumental stateliness of the drapery 
 which magnificently frames the head. 
 
 Then there are the head and two busts of Mrs. Lindsell Stewart, 
 the last of which is a portrait in which he has, without employ- 
 ing any but legitimate means, achieved an amazing fulness of 
 suggestion of movement, colour, and various consistencies of 
 substance that constitute a verily stupendous technical per- 
 formance. Those tired, burning eyelids of the last-named 
 head have been suggested by a miraculously acute observa- 
 tion of the infinitely subtle anatomical changes that permit such 
 a condition to be indicated by means of shape alone. 
 How his eye and hand are capable of recalling such almost micro- 
 scopic gradations of form is, besides, already apparent in the much 
 earlier head of a newly born baby, which no mother's eye could 
 
EPSTEIN S3 
 
 have observed with more love and penetration. In this work 
 the quivering eyeHds hardly protect the unseeing but 
 trusting little eyes, whose diminutive ball shapes are apparent 
 through those pathetic tiny shields, palpitating with the pulsation 
 of the blood which is unmistakably noticeable at the fontanelles 
 on the frail little shell of a skull begging support for its unwitting 
 helplessness. This tender work is the more impressive, coming, 
 as it does, from the maker of the Sun God. 
 
 This wonderful contrast of uncompromising force and touchingly 
 tender weakness finds a moving expression in one of his works 
 where the two exist next to each other. The soft embryonal shape 
 of an infant protectingly held between that proud harness of 
 human ribs on the figure of the Rock Drill is one of the inspiring 
 features of that sublime creation. 
 
 Two works which also suggest the comparison I made are the 
 Marcelle, which (as other earlier portraits — the Mrs. McEvoy, the 
 Lady Gregory) has already established a perfect balance between 
 the two performances of fixing a type by apportioning in the finest 
 differentiation the grade of physiognomical characteristics cumula- 
 tive of the sitter's spiritual complex, and obeying the dictates of a 
 purely plastic concept in the harmony of curvature, intersecting 
 planes and the masses of material, and the bust of Lillian Shelley. 
 This latter work, while lacking none of the qualities that dis- 
 tinguish the Marcelle and the others from the same period, 
 exhibits, in addition to them, the features of Epstein's more 
 recent style that became apparent at the time of execution of the 
 masterly series of presentations of human types of which the 
 heads of the poet W. H. Davies, Augustus John the painter and the 
 Josef Holbrooke the musical composer afford examples. 
 Like the Marcelle it possesses all that is needed ; the simple com- 
 pactness, the repose and the sculptural qualities I enumerated 
 above make it thoroughly and ultimately satisfactory as a 
 plastic creation. The Marcelle with the feline agility in the play 
 of muscle, the strong neck firmly planted on the shoulders and 
 proudly supporting the head, admirably conveys the expansion of 
 an elementally feminine force which in the Lillian Shelley also 
 comes to expression, but here with a gripping intensity and an 
 
54 EPSTEIN 
 
 added universality of meaning that lend it an incomparable 
 grandeur and nobility. In both works a strikingly contrasted 
 softness of outline from neck to shoulder onward brings to the 
 ruthless directness of primitive temperament an element of 
 bewitching loveliness, of appealing tenderness, recalling the 
 persisting delicately-limbed child in the flesh of the woman that 
 with a dramatic precision visualizes irresistible fascination, the 
 pernicious charms of that Fata Morgana — the eternal Hetaira. 
 In the Marcelle appears the uncanny contradiction between the 
 classic beauty and dignity of the profile, the soft contours of the 
 cheek and the hardly concealed scorn of the sceptical mouth, the 
 badly contained hate of the perfunctorily smiling eye. She is the 
 horribly lovable creature of man's sinful desire, the seductive 
 scourge, yielding to lust in a terrifying travesty of passionate love, 
 dispensing poetic justice by the monstrous harvest of remorse 
 and detestation for which she sows the seeds. Through the 
 ornamental curtain of her gaily beckoning mask pierces the glow 
 of her intuitive, atavistic hatred of social superiors on whom she 
 can prey while they condescend to her, but from whom she is 
 tragically certain she can expect but contempt and renunciation 
 the moment she would give way to any wish to pretend to human 
 rights, to reveal the sister-being that is in her. She is infinitely 
 pathetic, pitiable to the extent even of offering no reward to vanity 
 and sentiment by the suggestion of her redemption. But these 
 facts are too familiar and too generally, if most instinctively, 
 realized to make the appearance of their expression in a work like 
 the portrait by Epstein particularly notable, as there exists no 
 portrait by him that does not offer an equal or greater fulness of 
 human understanding and penetration. It is in this very aspect 
 that the bust of Lillian Shelley, even as practically every single one 
 of his own recent portraits, almost dwarfs his earlier achieve- 
 ments. In it the subtlety of psychological observation is far less 
 tangible and indicative of a highly exceptional power of percep- 
 tion. Though the general character of the observation is similar 
 (as it obviously has to be in the other cases as well as in the present 
 one, the artist's task being more to recognize the representative 
 and not the accidentally abnormal, though he is bound to be as 
 
EPSTEIN 55 
 
 deeply interested if he happens to come upon it) it is even more 
 sensitively differentiated, and in this respect related to the other 
 work ; and it is as sculpture a further development by reason of its 
 even more superb workmanship that handles with unfailing grasp 
 and sureness a genuine microcosmos of detail and yet maintains 
 a harmonious unity of composition that constitutes an absolutely 
 flawless organism. 
 
 This, now, is one of those instances of the working of creative 
 genius which as infallible as nature itself builds structures of a 
 complexity never-ending, but telescopically unfolding, into ever 
 further perspectives. This task can only be made possible by 
 unlimited intuition and to obtain the same result by applying the 
 sum of experience to be gained (if the attainment were possible) 
 by complete analysis is indisputably beyond reach of the human 
 intellect. 
 
 I will return to a discussion of some of the individual portraits 
 at a later stage. The difficulties, however, of going into particulars 
 concerning these works are obvious. Considered solely as plastic 
 productions they could not, of course, be in any degree adequately 
 described by words. And the illustrations this book contains, 
 while giving but the projection on to one plane with only the 
 added suggestion of depth in the gradation between black and 
 white that conforms to, but does not reproduce, the effect of the 
 light on the curving planes of the surface, are still far more eloquent 
 than words could ever be in approaching the impression which 
 the sculptor's actual work alone can convey. With regard to this 
 I can only attempt to give to anyone who feels the need of it the 
 direction which his thought should take when confronting sculp- 
 ture with the wish to grasp the artist's intentions and to keep his 
 mind free of the misleading influence of preconceived notions 
 that may have formed without taking account of the personality 
 of the sculptor whose work is being contemplated. The possible 
 revelations that primarily relate to the character of the sitter, and 
 the sculptor's synthetic expression of his preconceptional intuitively 
 exhausting analysis of his model's psyche, are accompanied by the 
 peculiar restrictions proceeding from their own nature. The 
 majority of the sitters are mentioned by name and do not belong 
 
56 EPSTEIN 
 
 to the historical past, which guarantees an absence of personal 
 motive when dealing with the portraits of a Sforza or Borgia, 
 whose memory is preserved by anecdotal interest. It does so 
 equally in the cases of portraits of a Sappho or Homer, where it is 
 not curiosity that asks for anecdotal information but where light 
 may be thrown on the association of the artist's central idea by 
 taking note of the representative human qualities and emotions 
 connected with such names that tend to become the symbols of 
 them. While, on the other hand, in the case of portraits of living 
 persons by a living artist, it may frequently be as much as one can 
 permit oneself to do if one allots them to either of the two cate- 
 gories mentioned. To try and do justice to the artist's performance 
 one should be free of the restrictions of which I spoke. But to 
 have to make the attempt in those instances where one is certain 
 to be wounding susceptibilities on all sides, if not actually incurring 
 actions for libel, means executing an egg-dance, for which feat I 
 lack the necessary disposition. 
 
VII 
 
 I HAVE discovered a tendency, in many a criticism of Epstein's 
 work, that has assumed the character of a war-cry in its use by 
 some maliciously disposed writers, to mobilize against the dis- 
 concerting activities of this embarrassing artistic personality 
 the forces of pietism that will react to the watchword without any 
 laborious examination of particular cases, and of hypocrisy that 
 will, for its own gratification, rally without much bother about the 
 respective merits of good and bad faith in art criticism. The 
 attitude of such critics towards all art is usually one of latent 
 suspicion: they eagerly fasten upon any gossip that seems to 
 justify it, and are only too pleased to hear the exciting stories 
 denouncing the uncovered immorality of modern art and its 
 exponents. And they seem not by any means to constitute the 
 whole of the public ready to ponder over imbecilities such as 
 the earnest assertions that Epstein's art is not only " immoral " 
 but " hostile to Hfe," tending to " destroy " beauty and health, 
 and in their place exalt disease and purulence, glorify the abscesses 
 of existence, the pus of society. 
 
 This particular relation of art to values borrowed from the region 
 of morals is a most elusive and hardly definable one. Artistic 
 perfection and beauty are in the work and not in the subject, and 
 the qualification of the subject from a moral point of view does 
 not any longer apply to the work of whose contents it forms a 
 part. The subject in itself may be objectionable, but that does 
 not make the work so. The work can only become objectionable 
 when the artist's intentions are of an immoral kind, a contingency 
 whose occurrence it is infinitely harder to prove. But, again, when 
 this should happen to be the case the resulting immorality would 
 be, this time, in the work, and the subject, considered separately, 
 might be perfectly harmless and free from any obnoxious elements. 
 
 57 
 
58 EPSTEIN 
 
 Many a moralizing spectator, however, is quick to ascribe to the 
 artist intentions that are analogous to thoughts the work is sug- 
 gesting to him by its perception through the instrument of his 
 own perverted imagination or psycho-pathological aberrations — 
 " The fault, dear Brutus. . . ." 
 
 But other bona-fide moralists of unsoiled fancy attack works under 
 the stimulus of a falsely conceived and wrongly applied piety 
 because they act from a total misconception of an artist's vocation. 
 They lamentably fail from an ethical standpoint that seems to 
 suggest they have badly read the examples of Christ and the 
 Saints, which can teach us that the purest intelUgence, the highest 
 form of human understanding, that divine perspicacity and deepest 
 penetration do never in disgust turn away from whatever aspect 
 life and humanity may present. Genuinely sincere art, which is 
 not concerned with calculating the effect of its utterances on any 
 particular section of the human race, but addresses itself to an ideal 
 whole of its brothers, may strive to emulate these examples because 
 it is the earthly reflection of the divine power. It does not engage 
 in chasing the chimera of certain aesthetes who dream of a definable 
 canonical ideal of " the " beautiful which per se is believed by 
 them to have an abstract independent existence. Though, whence 
 that should derive and how it could be divorced from human 
 equation none of them ever was able to explain, because whether 
 conscious of it or not they are inevitably faced at some stage of 
 their investigations by the uncomfortable fact that things have 
 no existence we can conceive, in other words, as far as we are 
 concerned, are not apart from our perceptions. 
 The realization of this and its consequent effects is essential to 
 the artist's attitude towards his intellectual and sensual appre- 
 hensions, and explains the absence of a driving principle that 
 would lead him to strip existence of its disturbing sides rather 
 than of its comforting or pleasing ones. He uses his gifts to 
 convey whatever offers itself to his perception with sufficient 
 clarity to suggest the possibility of an employment that suits his 
 artistic purposes for any particular work. 
 
 His admirers are free to extract from his productions a criterion 
 of what beauty must mean to them, if they feel the need for it, 
 
EPSTEIN 59 
 
 while others are equally free to derive from them a standard of 
 ugliness that may suit their personal tastes, but they have no more 
 right than the admirers to expect anyone else to accept a standard 
 they have thus formed as applicable or holding good in respect 
 of works of art in general. 
 
 But the spectator who would wish to offer a standard that is not 
 even derived from the work he proposes to judge by it, or from 
 others that owe their existence to analogous intentions, one, on 
 the contrary, that is based on considerations whose connections 
 with the work in question only the artist himself is competent to 
 appreciate, cannot expect support for his preposterous claim to 
 make such judgments generally acceptable as sound and relevant, 
 nor any confidence in his opinions on the works' artistic merits, 
 since he has by the very way in which he approached the 
 work disclosed the ludicrous inadequacy of his method and 
 attitude. In this respect he appears to belong to the category 
 of those legendary fools who incurred picturesque forms of failure 
 when proposing such performances as to judge guilt or 
 innocence by smell, or test a building by tasting of the bricks, 
 the wine by putting their ear to the barrel. 
 
 There was more detectable sense in judging heresy by means of 
 the thumb-screw and the rack, or discovering the witch by going 
 for the cat or seeing whether she would float on the water or 
 survive the fall from a tower. 
 
 If many a respectably competent art critic has defended works 
 against attacks on irrelevant moral points by attempting to justify 
 them by these, he has probably shown if not any more conscientious 
 adherence to his own convictions at least as much world-wise 
 recognition of the power of popular prejudice as did the exalted 
 philosopher who, when defending his mother accused of witch- 
 craft, did not scruple to renounce his own writings, and without 
 denying the possibility of the existence of witches, the sabbaths 
 and the helpful broomstick, only questioned the validity of the 
 charge on " technical " grounds. 
 
 The renunciation of his principle by Galileo shows conclusively 
 how far a cynic may go in this direction, only one would wish 
 that everyone would, as he did, make it clear how little reliance 
 
6o EPSTEIN 
 
 should be placed on the actions of the most discerning mind under 
 certain circumstances. There are, however, cases in which the 
 attack on the artist's work by the outraged moraUst is not a direct 
 one, but subtly disguised in the shape of a legitimate criticism 
 leaning on the pillars of historical tradition by more accomplished 
 scribes, who, recognizing the strength of the opposing position, 
 reverse the procedure of the defenders, to whom I referred above, 
 who borrow their adversaries' weapons. As those moralize amongst 
 the moralists the former, too, becomes as Saul amongst the prophets 
 and howls " Art " with what to him are the art wolves. 
 They have made us familiar with the, at first sight, plausible 
 enough accusation, categorically launched as " modern " art, that 
 it goes for its inspiration to the asylum, the brothel and the pest- 
 house. Many a student of contemporary art has been so far 
 fascinated by its apparent vraisemblance to have his thought led 
 into the channel that flows to reason's perdition. They have 
 forwarded the compromising excuse that, the classic masters 
 having finally treated every other subject, nothing else remained 
 for the moderns but to take refuge in the study of morbid psy- 
 chology. They overlook the undeniable interest apparent in 
 every great master's work in every phase of life and death. It is 
 not generally recognized that all those diflFerences between art 
 and culture as a whole of one period and another have no actual 
 existence, but lead, as do the " archaic," the " baroque," the 
 " rococo " a chimerically artificial existence in the professor's 
 mouldy study. 
 
 This parody of an existence originates in the pretentious Teutonic 
 so-called scientific comparative analysis of artistic productions. 
 Its chief function, apart from raising pedants, snobs and art- 
 idiots generally, is to supply backbone to the " professional " art- 
 critic's preconceived notions. And a joyously hailed rampart 
 they form for the critic-antiquarian, the dealer's-devil, the average 
 wealthy collector's faithfully devoted galloper. He has an axe 
 to grind, and if not spurred by conviction, must at least preserve an 
 appearance of artistic decency. Either to hide his incapacity or 
 the commercial motives of his disinclination to appreciate or 
 admit the qualities of any work not yet assimilated through the 
 
EPSTEIN 6i 
 
 sustained efforts of the mental superiors of several consecutive 
 generations, he is anxious to unmask the degeneracy of con- 
 temporaneous art. If one goes into the question with a mind 
 cleared of cant and prejudice based on hearsay, one finds that no 
 " morbid " interest in pathological phenomena, no demonomania, 
 no eroticism healthy or diseased is foreign to the great artists of 
 any period. 
 
 The famous words that introduce the name of " man " in the 
 fullest significance, considered next to each other, suggest the 
 reason in a remarkably cogent manner : " Ecce homo " — " homo 
 sum. . . ." 
 
 Antique art has been pointed to frequently in a misleading manner 
 to supply a contradiction, but it is too transparent. Its greatest 
 periods produced their Marsyas being skinned and similar popular 
 subjects in equal numbers to the " idealistic " works. 
 Besides, the art professors themselves have treated antique 
 civilization as a rounded off whole, presenting the same famous 
 phases of a " golden " period and subsequent degeneration which 
 they set out to find back in modern civilization ; by adopting their 
 own method one can show that in this way one only leads the 
 mind to a different orientation. 
 
 Thus the identical question returns placed in another milieu. 
 But let us take a period whose direct connection with our own 
 time is incontestable, one between which and ours there is no 
 historical break, no closing phase of one culture and the rise of a 
 new one, knowing new aims and conforming to other ideals. 
 When looking to France of the eighteenth century we see what 
 to eyes in search of it must appear a perfect orgy of perverted 
 eroticism in the works of a Boucher, or earlier yet, a Watteau, 
 later a Fragonard. Of course there are authors who cut short 
 any discussion by simply asserting that the subjects of those 
 masters' works stamp them as degenerate, but in face of such 
 dogmatic statements, apodictically given, the possibility of con- 
 troversy ceases. One can only step over them and proceed. I 
 can hardly imagine an artist who would not, whatever his opinion 
 of these painters may be otherwise, admit their works to show 
 insatiable interest in things that, of themselves considered, were 
 
62 EPSTEIN 
 
 undoubtedly symptomatic of moral decomposition. And practi- 
 cally every museum in Europe harbours, often hidden from public 
 view, works by nearly every great master from the fourteenth to 
 the twentieth century, which the thoughtful philistinism of the 
 European male wishes to spare the sight of to his wife and sister 
 of whose moral deHcacy he is the natural guardian. 
 Need I speak of some of Callot's engravings, of the horrible 
 fantasies of Breughel or Bosch and most of their contemporaries. 
 Or of the repulsive prostitutes, the horrifying old courtesans of 
 Goya, the dwarfs and monstrosities of Velasquez ; the mis- 
 carriages of animals and generally unspeakable things by no less 
 a cultured humanist and chaste personality than Diirer, whose 
 unflagging interest in every abnormality (though I should perhaps 
 make clear once more at this point in every normal thing equally) 
 is well known. Of this same master who painted the Salvator 
 Mundi that is in the Bremen Museum and the Virgin with the Iris 
 in the possession of Sir Frederick Cook, are the perfectly ghastly 
 The Avarice in Vienna, the nightmarish Martyrdom of the Ten 
 Thousand Christians and the too many so disconcertingly natural- 
 istic studies from the nude (the so-called Paris drawings of bathing 
 women) that recall in every respect those of the most " notoriously 
 decadent " of French masters between 1850 and to-day. 
 From the shockingly decrepit old women, the criminal lunatics 
 and satanists of Leonardo to the sickening wretched miserable 
 idiots, thieves and whores of a Garschin or Dostojevski where is 
 the novelty of interested motive ? Is not Cervantes' Don Quixote^ 
 seen from the point of view of psychological art criticism, a de- 
 tailed study of pathological aberration, as are Goethe's Faust, 
 Werther or the Wahlverwandtschajten ? There was nothing new 
 and before unexplored in the mysticism of crime and disease that 
 held E. T. A. Hoffmann in his feverish descriptions of abominably 
 decayed souls and hellish apparitions, or the similar ones of E. A. 
 Poe. 
 
 And where could one find more exhaustive studies presented in 
 a series of dramatic portrayals of every thinkable aberration, of 
 the entire " Psychopatia Sexualis," of all diabolism, Satanism, 
 demonomania, mental disease and degeneracy, criminal decay, 
 
EPSTEIN 63 
 
 blasphemous rages, hysterical trances and epileptic ravings or 
 the agonies of neurasthenic obsessions, than in the books of the 
 Old Testament ? There are the familiar works of Rembrandt 
 showing corpses dissected, surgeons trepanning patients, bloody 
 carcases displayed in butchers' booths, and both paintings and 
 engravings of lewd beings in the course of vicious occupation. 
 Yet who would be sufficiently insensate to suspect lewdness or 
 cruel sensuality as motive power in the man before whose self- 
 portrait in the National Gallery no seeing eye can remain dry ? 
 Works by the greatest masters picturing torturings of the martyrs, 
 the terrifying convulsions, the dislocated limbs, the gouged out 
 eyes, the streaming, writhing, lacerated bodies of the massacred 
 innocents abound, as do their terribly unsparing crucifixions, 
 passing no minute detail of horror. 
 
 The pietist standpoint in this matter is a strange one to find in 
 a Christian who significantly adores a God who in His own person 
 waded through all the excrements of life, underwent every humilia- 
 tion, every abomination and died a death of terror at the hang- 
 man's hands ! 
 
 One cannot help thinking of this in front of Epstein's Christy the 
 Christ who has passed through the entire ordeal and can show the 
 stigmata, not only in the five holy places, but in those eyes that, 
 after seeing every thinkable outrage have forgivingly looked down 
 on Longinus and in those lips through which the agonizing wail 
 has passed : " Eli, Eli, lama Sabachtani." 
 
 But the majority of Christians shrink from looking at this un- 
 comfortable side in their Redeemer's human existence and prefer 
 to see His suffering only as symbolically represented in ritual 
 ceremonies whose meaning they can forget for their magnificence. 
 They are disagreeably impressed by any representation reminding 
 them of : " Ce Christ au tetanos ..." 
 
 " . . . le Christ vulgaire, laid, parce qu'il assuma toute la 
 somme des peches et qu'il revetit, par humilite, les formes 
 les plus abjectes." " Le Christ des Pauvres, celui qui s'etait 
 assimile aux plus miserables de ceux qu'il venait racheter, 
 
64 EPSTEIN 
 
 aux disgracies et aux mendiants . . ." " . . . il avait accepte 
 f* que sa Divinite fut comme interrompue depuis les soufflets 
 
 et les coups de verges, les insultes et les crachats, depuis 
 f^. toutes ces maraudes de la soufFrance, jusqu'aux effroyables 
 
 douleurs d'une agonie sans fin. II avait ainsi pu mieux 
 
 souffrir, raler, crever ainsi qu'un bandit, ainsi qu'un chien, 
 
 salement, bassement, en allant dans cette decheance jusqu'au 
 
 ^ bout, jusqu'a Tignominie de la pourriture, jusqu'a la derniere 
 
 '■ avanie du pus . . . ce Redempteur de vadrouille, ce Dieu de 
 
 morgue. . . ." 
 
 Only the great, convinced minds have dared thus to represent 
 the idea of Christ on the earth, who in the moment of supreme 
 consummation of unequalled suffering, lovingly consoled the 
 J' murderer ! " Hodie mecum eris in paradiso." 
 
 Our time, feeble in faith, would wish to see a veil drawn over 
 certain phases of the Saviour's being, but the artistic integrity 
 and perspicacity of Epstein's attitude command admiration. He 
 has dared to return to the conception of a time of burning faith 
 that produced the artist whose pictorial representation of the 
 Crucifixion moved the author quoted. 
 
 I will quote also the superbly terrible description forcibly recall- 
 ing Epstein's masterful work : 
 
 " . . . de cette tete exulceree filtraient des lueurs ; une 
 expression surhumaine illuminait 1 'effervescence des chairs, 
 I'eclampsie des traits. Cette charogne eployee etait celle 
 d'un Dieu, et sans aureole, sans nimbe." 
 
 The author's impression of the artist's attitude is one that strik- 
 ingly applies to Epstein's as revealed in his Christ statue : 
 
 "II avait " (the artist is Matthias Grunewald, whose Cruci- 
 fixion in Colmar is being discussed), '* le plus forcene des 
 idealistes ... si magnifiquement exalte 1 'altitude et si resolu- 
 -4f, ment bondi de la cime I'ame dans I'orbe eperdu d'un cile 
 
 . . . etait a.\\6 aux deux extremes et il avait, d'une triomphale 
 
EPSTEIN 6s f f^' 
 
 ordure, extrait les menthes les plus fines des dilections, les 
 
 essences les plus acerees des pleurs . . . revelait le chef d'cEuvre ^ 
 
 de I'art accule, somme de rendre I'invisible et le tangible, de 
 
 manif ester rimmondice eploree du corps, de sublimer la 
 
 detresse infinie de I'ame." X<^ j 
 
 Though the nature of the vision is legitimately inspired by that 
 of our religion, the professor, staring at the ideals of a neo-classicism 
 distilled from a totally misinterpreted Hellenism, imagines that 
 art as such could become " purer " if it developed without any 
 direct relations to the miseries and excrescences of life. 
 Quite appropriately it is in the products of drawing-room art in 
 which reigns supreme an ideal of suave beauty aiming at the 
 absence of any shocks, at sweetly pleasing, well-proportioned, 
 regulated, agreeably sensuous utterances, that one discovers the 
 artist " selecting " from so-called " artistic " matter and emotions. 
 I have seen it quite seriously stated by a writer on economic sub- 
 jects, who, occasionally ventures on the slippery path of moralizing 
 art criticism, that what was the matter with Epstein was his in- 
 capacity " to select." That in the same breath he accused him 
 of intentionally selecting always " unsavoury " subjects, may in 
 passing be mentioned as characteristic enough but need cause 
 no amazement, as logic is the one thing never to be expected from 
 those gentlemen who invariably write under the highest emotional 
 pressure of either furious indignation or open-mouthed abandon- 
 ment of unconditional admiration. 
 
 It is this " selective " art which tremblingly rejects anything that 
 could rouse the facile and sleepy mind and might appear dis- 
 quieting or repulsive. 
 
 It goes without saying that for this art the image of the suffering 
 Redeemer does not exist, but is replaced by a picture of 
 suffering that suggests as much reality of sorrow as does the 
 discreetly sobbing gentlewoman in evening dress who, placed in 
 the fitting milieu of an exquisitely furnished apartment, puts in a 
 famiUar appearance on the walls of the Academy's exhibition 
 rooms every year. 
 The substitute is the Christ of " ces debonnaires Golgotha " pre* 
 
 H- 
 
-V* 
 
 66 EPSTEIN 
 
 senting in always the same author's words whom I have been 
 quoting : — 
 
 " Le Christ des Riches, I'Adonis de GaHlee, le belle etre 
 bien portant, le joli gar9on aux meches rousses, a la barbe 
 divisee, aux traits chevalins et fades." 
 
 A figure such as this Christ of Epstein, so far from presenting a 
 degeneration after the period in which the sculptures of the 
 Canovas and Thorwaldsens personified the beau-ideal of plastic 
 art, takes us back to the strong healthy utterances of those masters 
 whose work is at present sometimes described as primitive-natural- 
 istic. It realizes the idealism of the creative artist, a thing very 
 much distinct from the " idealism " of the crowd, which means 
 nothing but smug sentimentality where art is concerned. 
 Again, we have been told, for the benefit of those with whom the 
 protest just dealt with mught not serve, that Epstein is to that extent 
 obsessed by the sexual element of life (procreation, maternity in 
 their various aspects are according to confused pietists such 
 intimately holy things that by some mysterious process of psychic 
 alchemy they become obscenities when an artist handles them !) 
 that he has made it the basis for the majority of his conceptions. 
 Once more this is a matter that independently from the subject 
 can only be discussed in view of the artist's attitude. But in any 
 case, to put it as his critics have repeatedly been doing is to put 
 the most malicious construction on a thing perfectly natural. 
 No artist has ever been more profoundly inspired by any other 
 subject than by that of love. 
 
 " Love is a very different matter " is usually the critics' rejoinder 
 as soon as one turns the matter this way, but it is not, and the 
 intuition of the creative mind grasps everything the psychologists 
 are groping for when in the course of their analytical investigations 
 they call the countless forms and aspects of love by an appalling 
 variety of ugly names. It is the inexhaustible subject of human 
 creation not only because it presents the overwhelming mani- 
 festation of the creative principle entering our lives at every 
 moment and at every place, but because it constitutes the one great 
 
EPSTEIN 67 
 
 undoubted redeeming factor of humanity and represents the, 
 in most instances, only remaining ideal element in and amongst 
 human transactions. 
 
 Practically every immaterial aspiration of the human race, religion 
 and art alike, is rooted in it, and so it unavoidably becomes the 
 eternal theme, admitting endless variation, for all creative instinct. 
 In Epstein's work, quite in harmony with the original force and 
 directness of his character and vision, the presentations of the 
 theme tend to go to the soil and to the sun, and its inspiration 
 seeks to embrace, as they did once in " the cradle of humanity," 
 a rock, and in a furore of impulse hew it into shapes, as the roam- 
 ing lover in the wood carves names and symbols in stones and 
 trees, thus obeying the pressure of the same impulse in weaker 
 manifestation. 
 
 So, in his works, his conceptions will frequently remind one of 
 so-called " pagan " ones. Love becomes identified with the 
 origin of all life, of organic growth, of fecundity and with the 
 bacchantic exaltations which the announcement of fecundity's 
 labours has always evoked : and, on the other hand, associating 
 the tenets of Christianity, introducing its familiar traditional 
 aspect as the origin of sin, even as in the material sense, the Pagan 
 preoccupation brings the hosts of perversions in its train. 
 Though religion may not officially recognize that particular aspect 
 of it, a sentiment not in any way incompatible with the require- 
 ments of Christian love is the artist's tender interest for the pariahs 
 created by man's bhnd, instinctive search for the sweet oblivion 
 of love's ecstasies, which produces the humiliating paradox of 
 beastly cruelty and unmentionable ferocities committed in un- 
 conscious submission to the whisperings of the only one soft 
 voice sounding within him. 
 
 How could the artist fail to be held by the moving spectacle 
 of the artificial paradises of those miserable existences who seek in 
 love's cultivation, or pathetically in its most pitiable perversions, 
 the poetic intoxication, the desire of which means their only 
 striving after the immaterial, and which, however sickeningly they 
 err, must provide the one promising light in their dark pere- 
 grinations ! 
 
 * '- 
 
68 EPSTEIN 
 
 One of Epstein's works that has, like his Rock Drill , given rise to 
 heated controversies, the misplaced exhibition of wit of the ignorant, 
 and indignant cries of outraged guardians of public morals is his 
 Venus. I am^dealing elsewhere with the ridiculous descriptions 
 given of this work as a " cubist " extravagance. Here I am first 
 concerned with the indictment that it is an objectionable work 
 because it is " suggestive," and exalts the sterile love that leads 
 human beings to perdition as it did Sire Daniel of the mediaeval 
 legend, the Tannhauser of the later German singers. I can again 
 ask here whether it can appear to sound sense a reasonable method 
 of criticism to decry a work because it conveys what it sets out to 
 do. The failure to achieve this is, on the contrary, one of the 
 few things criticism can rely upon to provide it with a justifiable 
 basis for measuring the lack or presence of artistic success. 
 But a work like this, it has been argued, is an ominous mani- 
 festation of its maker's hatred of life [sic] (not of the sins of Venus 
 or of the men of whose desires she is the resulting projection, but 
 of those of Epstein). I remember an extremely laboured and 
 ponderous essay apropos of the work in which the writer pur- 
 ported to show that Epstein here indulged in the idealization of 
 sterility and the female type representative of it and for which his 
 tastes betrayed a sinister preference. Of course this predilection 
 was itself again of a Sadistic nature, because he manifested in his 
 subject a love that would seem to any innocent observer his best 
 hatred. But, a new Nero, possessed of a furious lust to cut the 
 throat of humanity if it would only provide such a collective 
 appurtenance, he was mimicking the satisfying of his maniacal 
 purposes and trying to infect the unsuspecting lamb of a spectator 
 whom the writer was protecting against Epstein's wicked plans, 
 with his necrophilous leaning to decay and monstrous anger 
 against healthy life. 
 
 I cannot help quoting the priceless remark : " But Epstein will 
 not permit you to forgive his Venus, she has no face." Here we 
 see again a most amazing confusion of plastic motives and inten- 
 tions with psychological and moral ones. If the writer had been 
 acquainted with Epstein's works, as he obviously was not, he 
 would have found the sculptural motive of the facial mask, at 
 
EPSTEIN 69 
 
 various phases of development, in the direction of assuming a 
 suggestion of features or the opposite, back in several of his 
 sculptures, deriving from the most diverse external inducements, 
 all leading to this returning result of artistic compromise. I need 
 only mention the Rock Drill, the Mother and Child, the fienite 
 figures as conclusive instances. 
 
 But assuming his intention to be partly psychological in origin, 
 for the sake of argument, it is clear that the sculptor, wishing to 
 present an eternal symbolic type was accentuating the schematic 
 and avoided the final stamp of individuality which the facial 
 features give, as he did in limiting any appearance of individual 
 character by his treatment of the limbs. Therefore such criticism 
 is not to the point and is short-sighted even as regards any moral 
 intention one might, by some detour of reasoning, discover in the 
 artist's attitude. One could argue that indulgence towards Venus 
 and the spectator, leads him to hide her face, as the face of Truth 
 remains hidden from the latter for reasons he has cause to be 
 grateful for. How while exhibiting the body one may as an act 
 of charity hide the face, Camille Lemonnier describes strikingly 
 in his book on F. Rops : 
 
 " Toute chose par indice irrecusable, se revele toujours de 
 son temps, et si le corps a des gestes eternels, le visage a des 
 grimaces variables. . . . Le masque, avec ses stigmates, avec 
 la griffe et I'estampille de la vie, avec Tempreinte speciale 
 de I'animalite du siecle, voila la part de la modernite dans le 
 . trefond classique . . . cachez le, ce masque ... en mettant 
 le corps a nu : c'est Tharmonie plastique paienne des Phryn^ 
 et des Aspasia." ..." Mais que le visage seul demeure visible 
 et c'est alors, comme la-haut aux tours des cathedrales, la 
 stryge, des gargouilles, toute la bete d'une fois remontee du 
 pli agressif d'une grimace maquillee de fille. Et cette fois, 
 nous sommes bien chez nous, aux sources memes de notre 
 morbide erotisme." 
 
 In the overwhelming majority of instances this observation is 
 physiognomically applicable ; where the body has still preserved 
 
 e 
 
^ 
 
 70 EPSTEIN 
 
 its eternal type the face Is already able to draw it out of the 
 sphere of the infinite and place it in a definite milieu either 
 bridging over the ages and taking us back to a definite historic 
 period, thus providing the artist w^ith the popularly understood 
 means of supplying pictorial anecdote, or immediately reporting 
 from our own surroundings, offering the subject for a notation of 
 contemporary life. 
 
 In a time and land where the form of the body is not only hidden 
 but contradicted by costume, it loses its expressive power and 
 appears hopelessly embarrassed by the consciousness of its nudity, 
 while the artists themselves show an enfeebled sense of its 
 physiognomical potentialities, therefore, as recent sculpture demon- 
 strates only too overwhelmingly, concentrating attention on the 
 head and conventionalizing the body. Unless after the manner 
 of academic art they substitute for life and nature the canons 
 construed from reproductions of older works of art, they hire the 
 professional models who, for their exceptional physique, can serve 
 as imitations of ancient sculptures, and have been trained to adopt 
 the poses which illustrations of it have vulgarized. Those methods 
 are at least partly responsible for the mummified plastic products 
 of most eighteenth and nineteenth-century European sculpture 
 and its deadly lack of pulse and sincerity. That to the minds that 
 have been reared on it Epstein's studies from the nude (as for 
 example the Nan) seem disconcertingly crude, " unkindly " un- 
 compromising is perfectly understandable as it is equally when we 
 find such minds absolutely at a loss in face of those of his sculp- 
 tures whose conception has been concerned with the human 
 frame or anatomy as an accessory motive only, when they must 
 be totally devoid of the faculties necessary for obtaining a notion 
 of the connecting link between the work and the suggestions 
 nature offers. However much sympathy such incapacity may 
 command, it can provoke nothing but disgust and anger when it 
 imagines itself to be unspoilt sound sense justifying a critical 
 attitude. All the more so when from instinctive apprehension of 
 its own inadequacy or from sheer stupid conceit and impudence 
 it proposes to complete and support its criticisms by the adoption 
 of the moral standard as a further basis for them. 
 
EPSTEIN 71 
 
 A remarkable analogy for the relations of face and body we can 
 discover in the portraits by Epstein, where, the effort concentrating 
 on the comparative importance and meaning of the various groups 
 of features, their relations on a different scale become eloquent of 
 the contrast between the eternal and the individually representa- 
 tive. I am the more led to draw attention to it at this juncture 
 because on the strength of the intermixture of diversity-revealing 
 traits, the sculptor has been again made to receive a shower of 
 reproaches for his obscure " dualism," for his ruthless cruelty 
 towards his sitters, and other sinister dispositions enumerated ijgf 
 
 above. 
 
 Going over the reproductions one must inevitably be struck by 
 several admirable instances of the sculptor's transcendent power 
 lovingly to reveal and unpityingly unmask, and, without sacrificing 
 the integrity of his sculptural utterance, to make it contain the 
 complete expression of the type of ages modified by the personal 
 characteristics of its particular vessel. The moralizing critic 
 exposes his insufficiency and dishonesty even in his role of a 
 moralist when, according to what the artist's standpoint may 
 appear to be in any particular work, he closes one or the other eye 
 and refuses to see how, inspired by the same feeling, he may, as jr 
 
 the Great Dispenser, be forgiving the adulterous, raising the '^ 
 
 despised woman, and comforting her with gentle word, pardoning 
 the publican, consoling the murderer and relentlessly chastizing 
 the money-changer, rebuking the Pharisee with unfaltering rigour, 
 and damning the traitor. 
 
 It should also be remarked how one sentiment or disposition 
 appears under a totally different guise and with an altered meaning 
 in two or more different portraits of various sitters. I alluded to 
 one of these instances when comparing the Marcelle and the bust , 
 
 of Lillian Shelley. I need not again enter into detailed particulars, 
 and it will be sufficiently clear what I am aiming at when I suggest 
 the comparison between the heads of Billie Gordon and Lillian 
 Shelley. 
 
 The vindictiveness of the Marcelle is quite absent from the first 
 of these three, who is far from appearing the pity-deserving girl 
 whom the world and life have thrown now this, now that way, 
 
72 EPSTEIN 
 
 but, on the contrary, the face, with its apocalyptic sensuality, 
 reveals the working of a free and purposeful will and is in its 
 unswerving singleness of motive and ambition, of desire and 
 expectation, remarkably contrasted to the not unrelated Lillian 
 Shelley, whose wavering of intention, whose almost generously 
 indiscriminating, frank surrender to the obscurest and the most 
 obvious impulses, constitute an attractiveness that matches her 
 beauty and makes her infinitely more human, more pathetically 
 human, without tarnishing her bewildering brilliance. 
 An element of motherliness is clearly apparent in two such 
 contrasted works as the Nan Condron and Mrs. McEvoy. In 
 the first one sees theTquiet, homely tender feeling of the wild 
 primitive spirit, caught in servility and outwardly seeming tamed, 
 and in the wonderfully moving portrait of Mrs. McEvoy, it is 
 the crowning subdued radiance to which high intelligence, fine 
 womanly instinct, refined sentiment and a thoughtful self- 
 sacrifice lend peaceful loveliness. 
 
 How vastly different is the naivete of the Quixotic poet in the 
 Davies head from the knowing childishness of some two or three 
 of a young woman's portraits. 
 
 The direct force, the manly vigour and incisive deliberation of 
 the American Soldier's Head is equally notable in the head of 
 Lord Fisher, but what a far subtler meaning it acquires here where 
 it is combined with a lapidary intelligence, an assiduously applied 
 perspicacity and the angrily haughty defiance of a contemptuous 
 conviction of superiority and, in addition to the concentration of 
 physical power and application, an heroic centralization of mental 
 powers naturally versatile enough to demand it. 
 I do not believe 1 could forward any important argument in 
 support of my assertions concerning the alleged degeneracy and 
 morbid preoccupations of " modern " art and its exponents 
 that would be likely to convince anyone who does not admit 
 my point of view on the strength of the observations I have 
 made already. 
 
 I have, I hope, made it sufficiently clear that the objections pre- 
 ferred on ethical or moral points, when they are not directed 
 against art in general but against the art of our time, are betraying 
 
EPSTEIN 73 
 
 bad faith, ignorance and a hypocritical injustice ; in fact, whatever 
 their ultimate purpose, a strategic feint, or an incident in the 
 embittered contest, a certain class of minds are ever waging war 
 against the artists of their own time. 
 
 I made a fairly minute analysis of the motives, aims and tactics 
 of the leaders of this ever-present movement in the first chapter 
 of this study. Now, however, after I have made mention in this 
 chapter of the several matters connected with it, which for obvious 
 reasons it would have been premature to introduce at that stage ^ 
 
 of generalizing treatment, I can complete my observations on the ^p 
 
 subject. 
 
 The force and value of the arguments advanced against con- jjjJT 
 
 temporary art by its professed antagonists are pretty equal, but ^ 
 
 the form they adopt varies with the particular period of the 
 incriminated works' appearance. 
 
 One should not forget that whatever is stable in the public taste 
 has its constituents modelled on the so-called " aesthetic " criterion 
 the art-critics have distilled from what they accept as the canons 
 perceptible in the familiar works, of which they have obtained a 
 knowledge, usually at second-hand, during their initial period of 
 " aesthetic " education. Unfortunately even when the critic is 
 sincere and genuinely striving after the honest satisfaction of his 
 enquiring impulses, he may not intend to see his dictum applied 
 to any other work than the one he is judging by its tests, while 
 his pubUc, wanting dogma, will see it in spite of his own possible 
 repudiation of it. On the other hand, the critic with a popular 
 reputation to lose will, if necessary, become soon reconciled to 
 the recurring contingency of acting the charlatan. He will wish 
 to be understood as professing dogma and will appear to be dis- 
 posing of a criterion for " aesthetic valuation " based on it. As * ' 
 the alchemist who, intending to retain his prince's favour and the 
 position he held by the grace of it, knew he would be well-advised 
 not to shake the latter's belief in his wizard's possession of the 
 philosopher's stone, so the established critic will be careful to 
 preserve his patron's belief in his infallible touchstone. He will 
 wish to be regarded as having the free and full enjoyment of, as ^ 
 his inalienable property, the imperishable norm by which he can 
 
 •.^ *. 
 
74 EPSTEIN 
 
 measure anything between the two opposing poles of " beauty " 
 and " ugliness." 
 
 His public will then be only too eager to rejoice in the advantage 
 of taking the ready-made opinions with which his ex-cathedra dis- 
 courses provide them. 
 
 But a truth remaining unaltered through the flight of time, the 
 creative artist is, as I remarked before, in whatever period he 
 lives, aiming at the same thing, and the value and power of his 
 work derives from the personal expression it assumes on being 
 reflected by his individuality. And this, while it is responsible 
 for the intrinsic significance of amy work of art, happens to be 
 just the one thing it is humanly impossible to foresee, even though 
 one were equipped with an absolutely complete knowledge of 
 all the works of art ever produced. Therefore when, for the 
 aesthetes and dogmatists, the last word in artistic utterance has 
 been spoken (which happened invariably the day before yester- 
 day), and the advent of another original master threatens to break 
 the magic circle of their system, giving the lie direct to their claims 
 and pretensions, the wild man remaining impervious to any 
 adjuration for their own justification, in self-defence they attack 
 him without being over particular in the choice of their weapons. 
 And, let us hope, unconsciously, certain that " I'art c'est moi," 
 and very conscious indeed of the danger to their own privileged 
 position which the new man's appearance creates, they raise the 
 alarm and cry that " art " is being endangered, that another vandal 
 is determined to " destroy "it. 
 
 If the new master is expected to be walking in the footsteps of the 
 former one, the expectation is reasonable. I have pointed out 
 already why he mostly will and frequently must do so. But the 
 trouble is that of those who want to watch the performance in 
 order to be quite reassured, the one does not know who that 
 preceding master really was, while the other may see the foot- 
 prints without recognizing them or be quite incapable of discover- 
 ing them where the discerning eye of genius is an unfailing guide 
 on the trail. Thus the new master's mission is not understood 
 because the one is expecting another variation of the last popu- 
 larized mode of expression and the other who has never grasped 
 
EPSTEIN 75 
 
 the true meaning of the blindly idolized classic's manner, cannot 
 even recognize it, much less a kindred one, or one derived from it, 
 if it is not accompanied by the authority of the name which is 
 everything for him, so that the work is taken for granted. 
 Once more, it is only the new master himself who is capable of 
 knowing where lies the connecting duct between his own work 
 and that of the men whose works or perhaps whose only partly 
 realized intentions have provided the central point whence his 
 perceptions radiate. A sadly diverting spectacle is the familiar 
 one occurring when the artist who in this way realizes the origin 
 of his own style-characteristics imprudently points to it only to 
 be scolded for a fool or a blasphemer by an ignorant public as 
 little able to observe from the latter's altitude as it has been to 
 sense the innermost being of the older master's work whose name 
 they have been carrying in their mouths ever since it became 
 worth their while to be heard shouting it abroad. 
 Now the form of the objections one can expect to be raised against 
 the inclinations of creative artists by the critics of their own time, 
 depends on what, according to popular conception, the style 
 character of the period immediately preceding it has been. 
 According to their particular temperament the two opposing 
 lesthetic theorisers will expect, nay demand, either a restatement, 
 a confirmation or a " revolutionary " negation, an emphatic 
 contradiction. After a victory of creative artists whose work 
 has been classed as " romantic " the next generation will be 
 found preparing for the reception of men who are to cause a 
 reaction in the direction of either " realism," " naturaUsm " 
 preferably accompanied by the pretence to have discovered it for 
 the first time in its purest, yet insufficiently realized shape, or a 
 reversion to also rediscovered classic ideals, or, in as far as it prides 
 itself on its conservative propensities, an ever further-reaching 
 development of those " romantic " tendencies which would have 
 found in them, had the historical sequence been in the inverse 
 line, or had those conservators lived fifty years earlier, their most 
 implacably irreconcilable adversaries. 
 
 The creative artist whose ideas of style are based on totally different 
 notions and perceptions from those the public hold, who reckons 
 
76 EPSTEIN 
 
 with his individual artistic needs in the first place and may derive 
 from either or both of the styles which he knows to be striving in 
 essentials after the consummation of aims that are by no means 
 the opposing poles and clear contrasts the non-creative mind 
 believes them to be, is certain to disappoint everybody and upset 
 his potential friends quite as much as he inevitably must upset 
 those who mean to be his enemies. 
 
 One should not forget that the " revolutionists " are, in artistic 
 matters, always revolting against the principles their fathers 
 attacked and are the unbending critics of the man, who is revolting 
 against themselves, and their sacred tenets. One may still to-day 
 see the amusing spectacle of petrified Wagnerians fighting the 
 ghosts of memories, going with all their might for the dear old 
 dead Brahms and his admirers with the same gusto as they do 
 for any living mortal who would undertake to emulate Wagner's 
 pretentions and propose to defy the schools where the realization 
 of his individuality seemed to him to necessitate it. 
 An as yet unrecognized master may uphold the old master's 
 tradition in its purest form, but the " classicists," unable to see his 
 relation to their idols, will never admit it and will reject uncon- 
 ditionally what they daily accept in the works of their blindly 
 revered great, which in the new man's work appears to them the 
 flat contradiction of it. The " modernists," who must be sup- 
 posed to know why they call themselves so, will be quite as con- 
 vinced in their refusal to accept the work of any independent 
 personality though he may be achieving the completest con- 
 summation of their recognized master's ideals. If he is not the 
 latter's slavish imitator he must be leaning toward the anathema- 
 tized traditions of which neither their own idol nor their new 
 enemy is likely to have been the violent opponent they have made 
 him after their own images. 
 
 It needs an almost congenial mind to understand that this way 
 of judging works of art is a perfectly insane one, and that in the 
 first place, for the creatively endowed intellect those concrete 
 distinctions, so dear to the philistine, are as superfluous as they 
 ^ are absurd. And one would seem to be justified in the assumption 
 
 that it requires a most exceptionally lucid and penetrating intelli- 
 
 V 
 
EPSTEIN 77 
 
 gence to recognize the exceedingly simple and, one should think, 
 obtrusively obvious truth that what the artist has a right to expect 
 is not " classification," nor a judgment on his work, but a generous 
 interest, and a patient and earnest study of it. If only the pre- 
 tended art-lovers would spend the time and energy they employ 
 discussing his work in looking at it ! 
 
 Why should he expect their judgment ? What, forsooth, should 
 he want it for ? Any doubts on his part leading him to desiring 
 the encouragement of flattering appreciations would reveal only 
 the immaturity and the insufficiency of his artistic instincts. But 
 to presume their occurrence in a man of genius would be an 
 appalling absurdity. That, on the other hand, the sheerest childish 
 vanity may occasionally make praise pleasing to him is a totally 
 irrelevant matter that proves nothing with regard to his artistic 
 needs. 
 
 What is due to him first and last is an unfaltering interest not 
 moved by preconceived notions ; and where, from the world's 
 point of view, the artist's desire to express himself is one that 
 enriches it, thus as he sacrifices his entire existence to humanity, 
 the mightiest of philanthropic deeds, it is unquestionably the very 
 least he may expect. 
 
 I am perfectly aware that this contention supplies an evergreen 
 subject for mirth, and has, whenever it has been presented, let 
 loose torrents of wit and sarcasm, the artist being popularly 
 supposed to be the supremest egoist, an unequalled libertine of 
 sensual self-indulgence, and, though pleasing himself occasionally 
 in the role of a moral humbug, long ago known as of necessity 
 immoral. I have already pointed out elsewhere that however well 
 the vulgar conception may be applied to the neurasthenic im- 
 pressionalist who is really no more than a gramophone, or an 
 emotional sponge, it does not apply in the very least to the creative 
 genius. 
 
 One sees only the strongly tendentious element in the relations 
 of anecdotes people are so fond of reading as the biographies of 
 men of genius. But who shall make a biography of the man who 
 is as profound and impenetrable as nature itself on the only aspects 
 that matter in him ? 
 
 V 
 
78 EPSTEIN 
 
 The easily satisfied reader who imagines he understands anything 
 more about lightning when he has been told it comes from a cloud, 
 will, no doubt, fancy he is brought nearer to Beethoven when he 
 has seen the ridiculous accounts of his wild splashing at the wash- 
 stand and heard the nauseating story of his crazy walks, how he 
 roared and furiously beat time with arms and legs, the yokels 
 running after him, tickled to convulsions by his antics for all the 
 world as if he were the village idiot. 
 
 But if one could see their lives, if not with the clarity and pre- 
 cision of the revelations that even their own most intimately personal 
 work can hardly afford to any but the greatest receptive capacities, 
 at least shorn of the ludicrous superficialities and the howlingly 
 insipid anecdotes the average biographer delights in, and with the 
 firm wish to see them as one wishes to understand the saints' lives, 
 one could not but arrive at the conclusion that the really great, the 
 men of incontestable creative genius, are indeed the great examples, 
 the best men, the anointed leaders of humanity as David, and the 
 prophets, as the patriarchs, as Moses or the Judges, as Samuel. 
 
 w.. ">■ 
 
VIII 
 
 IN the last chapter I alluded to the pretentious attitude of the 
 so-called lay public toward art works, to their mistaken belief 
 that the nearer they come to their guiding sestheticism's ways 
 the more they reveal their knowledge and the value of their 
 opinion. Their sophistication is a perfect curse. No self-respecting 
 artist wants their aesthetic pretentions and no one but would be 
 grateful for a great deal more naivete on their part. But they 
 are, as much as the second-hand artistic mind, caught in the fossil 
 conventions of academic mannerism. The senseless conversions of 
 perspective and colour have for their appreciation replaced the 
 natural appearance of things. Objects drawn to resemble their 
 familiar presentation which rests on a feeble theoretical reasoning 
 appear therefore to them more acceptable renderings of their real 
 aspect than the same things when drawn by artists who with a mind 
 free from pre-established considerations render the appearance of 
 objects as they actually see them instead of as they have been 
 taught and suggest to themselves they ought to see them. To 
 what absurdities this leads must be clear to any unprejudiced 
 observer who has noticed that people accept any schoolmaster's 
 drawings and question the competence of a Cezanne's draughts- 
 manship. 
 
 A child who, left to himself, would try to copy exactly the pro- 
 jection of objects on its retina, is trained to substitute examples of 
 the same things on paper until its eye has been trained to see the 
 lie instead of the truth, till it believes it sees them under the forms 
 the convention of perspective have created. The fact that it is 
 apparently a paying proposition to insert newspaper advertise- 
 ments offering to teach drawing by correspondence (!) is highly 
 significant. 
 Just as people for their personal artistic efforts sooner believe the 
 
 79 
 
8o EPSTEIN 
 
 schoolmaster than their own eyes, so for the formation of their 
 opinions on the artist's work they will rather follow the " aesthe- 
 tician " than their own sense, and be concerned to " understand," 
 to analyse and reduce to principles, to pigeonhole, to recognize 
 " isms " instead of trying to enjoy things because they exist as 
 they might enjoy nature if they were not spoilt into looking for 
 " views " and " landscapes," and instinctively felt that they should 
 love things for what they are. Unfortunately it is a common error 
 that it bespeaks good education when one pretends to a judgment 
 of instead of " only " pleasure in and taste for the work of human 
 hands. 
 
 When in front of a work of art the brain that should be preferably 
 as a clean wax tablet is usually more like an ant-heap teeming with 
 confused recollections of analytical descriptions, annotations, mono- 
 graphs, commentaries, manifestos picked up indiscriminately here, 
 there and everywhere, only bending always to the authority of the 
 author and the power of the printed word. 
 
 It certainly is not only the professional writers on art who are 
 responsible for this lamentable state of mind ; it is a special 
 symptom of the hesitating artist to stifle his own faltering con- 
 victions — as a frightened child will loudly shout out its intrepidity 
 — by issuing bawlingly clamorous decrees in which he gratuitously 
 communicates his own primitive notions concerning the elementals 
 of his art. Thus one finds painters and sculptors pontifically 
 announcing such enormous simplicities — with the air of making 
 new stupendous revelations to a staggered world — as that, the 
 constituting factors of a work of art being the combinations, con- 
 stellations, juxtapositions, modulations, of lines, colours, planes, 
 angles, masses, it should occupy itself with those. 
 The public and artists who are inclined to intoxicate themselves 
 with words will enthusiastically hail these wonderful discoveries. 
 And they will expect to see those theories demonstrated in their 
 most obvious primitive forms, apparently ignoring the fact that 
 the analysis applies to anything under the sun, that every work, 
 good, bad or indifferent, must of necessity consist of the identical 
 elements. They remind one of M. Jourdain realizing with a 
 stupefaction he is anxious to see shared by his wife and his maid- 
 
EPSTEIN 8i 
 
 servant that he has been unconsciously speaking prose for forty 
 years. 
 
 And in a great many more instances they do not even draw these 
 intelligent conclusions, but just love to babble, prattle and gibber 
 about a thing they take to be highly original and fashionably 
 " up-to-date." 
 
 But with an amazing number of quite serious lovers of art the 
 trouble, as I said, is that they, vaguely apprehending the un- 
 assailable truth of such proclamations, begin to believe it should 
 be directly apparent in the finished work ; they start looking for 
 the skeleton and the viscera, for the blood corpuscles and the 
 phagocytes of the man who presents himself in the living flesh 
 to them. Having been told that sunlight is composed of several 
 diff"erent colours they henceforth expect to see them separately. 
 One might be inclined to think the comparisons absurdly out of 
 proportion, but I have actually heard noted musicians, humbugging 
 in their innocence, claim the faculty of hearing, separately and 
 individually, the overtones they knew the single tone to be com- 
 posed of (not the independently sounding overtones which the 
 simultaneous sounding of several tones, or the body of a musical 
 instrument set in vibration do produce) — a claim to aural faculties 
 that is quite in line with that of the man who would want us to 
 believe his naked eye capable of performing spectrum analysis. 
 A man of genius (no one is that without being aware of it) never 
 would hesitate to confess his natural limitations, but he that 
 pretends to it, in his fear to understate the gifts he believes 
 should be its attributes, frequently claims dispositions and endow- 
 ments that are physical and physiological impossibilities. 
 Now the mind which transcribes the impressions the senses 
 convey into those the current conventions demand must, where 
 it is not even able to perceive the natural appearance of objects, 
 be the more incapable of detecting the subtler connections between 
 nature's suggestions and the artist's conceptions. Provided its 
 appreciation of a work is not simply that of a school whose tenets 
 and aspirations it accepts without questioning, approaching the 
 work equipped with those prejudices, but that it reacts honestly 
 within its own limits, it is to be expected it should be more at a 
 
82 EPSTEIN 
 
 loss than ever in face of so-called ** imaginative " art, i.e. art not 
 obviously derived from nature's examples, presenting no parallel 
 in nature for its entire structure, though necessarily dependent 
 on nature for its constituent elements. 
 
 One is used to hear such elements, as they appear in Epstein's 
 Rock Drill, his Venus , flenite carvings, Mother and Child described 
 as " decorative " (be it noted that because a motive may be decora- 
 tive or ornamental in its effect this need not mean always that it 
 is so in the popular sense, viz. pleasingly meaningless and, strictly 
 speaking, superfluous, certainly not essential, in a work that 
 pretends to be more than an ornament), but one should be exceed- 
 ingly careful in accepting the description. The relations of similar 
 motives may be correlative to those of an organism the artist 
 has understood from nature, and they may be of supreme intrinsic 
 significance. 
 
 The work's conception may derive from these, and so far from 
 being an addition everything else may depend from them. The 
 comparison with imaginative works such as Oriental carpets, where 
 the design or pattern may represent the whole work and where 
 elements introduced as an after-thought may be entirely absent, is 
 dangerously attractive ; its suggestions mislead many who over- 
 look the fact that here, as in architecture, the forms, which have 
 become traditional under the hands of generations of workers and 
 adapted to the use made of the object, have for the most part been 
 originally direct and minute representations of familiar things. 
 They are generally such " realistic " pictorial or sculptural render- 
 ings that, according to their employment, have become modified 
 either in order to be practically more useful or to fill a geometrically 
 logical place in the surrounding design, as their mechanical im- 
 portance either increased or decreased. 
 
 The distinctions possible on those grounds are, in works of an 
 art whose origins reach back to distant periods of human culture 
 and obscure sources that are only intuitively revealed to the 
 creative mind, extremely subtle ones, and here more than any- 
 where it must be the undeniable appearance of the artist's con- 
 viction that guides the auditor or spectator. The kind of sterile 
 virtuosity that excels and delights in handling similar motives 
 
EPSTEIN 83 
 
 indiscriminately without an imperative internal need may be 
 damned, but the attempts to " purify " Bach's melodies of orna- 
 mentation or present Beethoven's intricately figurated melody as 
 a skeleton line with embroideries is perfectly ludicrous. One 
 might with equal right propose to eradicate the costumes from 
 such paintings as the Death's Triumph (in the Campo Santo of Pisa), 
 Crivelli's Annunciation (at the National Gallery) or Pinturicchio's 
 compositions, carve away — or think away — the draperies on the 
 three sisters of the Parthenon's eastern front, or wish to see 
 Rembrandt's portraits deprived of the frills and ruffles, the 
 gauffered collars, the fantastic headgear, Durer's engravings of 
 the countless objects of the most varied nature that enter into the 
 picture. 
 
 While the expectation that there shall be a relation between a work 
 of art and some point in nature, to which instinctively or reason- 
 ingly every discerning intellect comes, is of the most legitimate, 
 not everyone arrives at the further apperception that the action 
 of the human mind itself must be counted amongst the phenomena 
 of nature. The process of reasoning that leads to the conclusion 
 is perhaps too simple and the fact commands indulgence for the 
 painful superficiality of the assumption that the artist whose work 
 does not directly reveal its connection with nature has renounced 
 the supreme teacher. 
 
 One should not be surprised to find second-hand artists fulminating 
 against the obsolete convention that " Natura " is " artis magistra," 
 as long as one is careful not to lose sight of the fact that the apostle 
 of originality at any price, the radical art rebel who asserts that 
 it must be art's aim and vocation to deliver itself from the tyranny 
 of nature, is as considerably distinguished an idiot as the pitifully 
 idealistic simpleton whose " back to nature " means an exhorta- 
 tion to dodder sleepily on all fours in pastoral insipidity. 
 If the flower is a very tangible product of nature it is not any 
 more so than its invisible, intangible scent. In the same way, 
 practically every object has an aspect not presenting itself to our 
 perceptions in the shape of a structure subject to mechanical 
 analysis. As I argued elsewhere, it is genius' power of intuitive 
 perception that enables it to receive suggestion from forces and 
 
§4 EPSTEIN 
 
 their effects in the universe that remain hidden from any but the 
 minds of its spiritual profundity and penetrative capability. To 
 it are equally revealed the external forms of the things and the 
 internal forces acting in and through them — macrocosmos and 
 microcosmos, matter and motion, past and future, as they exist for 
 us by the limitations of our senses, are for the understanding that 
 is above them approachable to the same extent. The mind is 
 part of and one with cosmic intelligence and vibrates in unison 
 with cosmic energy, of which it is one of the intangible emanations. 
 Therefore the effects of its workings are for us justified by their 
 very existence, as apart from personal likes or dislikes we have to 
 accept both as inevitable and inscrutable. 
 
 Beyond its materialization, behind the manifestation we can 
 perceive will lie the common point of origin that connects the 
 work with its correlative embryonal or developed and sensuously 
 apprehendable nature. But the latter may be non-existent and 
 the manifestation through the instrumentality of the creative 
 mind may be the only one our perceptivity permits to reach us. 
 To assume the creative intelligence could dissociate itself from 
 nature is to ignore the fact that it is part of it ; and, consequently, 
 the non-creative mind's investigation of the character of the 
 reference to nature in the work of productive genius remains 
 so absurdly incomplete and inadequate that it can never provide 
 a reliable basis for methodical critical test. 
 
 Even as in the direct manifestations of nature, it is the use made 
 by the mind of those gifts that contain its potential " originality " 
 and the significance its perception discovers in them that makes 
 the artist strive to reveal them to humanity. Whether he takes a 
 model from nature as it presents itself in visible form or as it 
 manifests itself in his own being constitutes no disparity. But 
 while in the first case another intelligence may critically compare 
 — though with what right is a question that depends on its own 
 qualifications — the model and its presentment, it must, when in 
 the second case this becomes an impossibility, admitting its own 
 incompetence, assume the artist's good faith on the strength of 
 his affirmation : because one cannot receive any other guidance 
 if one's instincts fail to supply it. 
 
EPSTEIN 85 
 
 Also, one should realize that the creative faculties do not need 
 support from the theories of the aesthetes, or the various ** isms " 
 of anxiously groping artists for whom they are the promising last 
 straw. Their assistance is as laughably superfluous as it is to 
 nature. Therefore it is an infelicitous purism that with for- 
 bidding indignation watches creative genius in its diverse works, 
 according to the requirements of the subject, appear painfully 
 elusive in its seeming conformation now to the tenets and prin- 
 ciples of one school, now of another whose aims seem incompatible 
 with those of the former. Every time it has just succeeded in 
 fitting him on the Procrustean bed of " realism " or " cubism " 
 it will find him obstinate at the next attempt to repeat the process, 
 but apparently preparing to be received as a brother by the 
 " classicists " or the " impressionists " who in their turn are 
 disappointed till the man whose essential aims remain unchanged 
 throughout is given up and censured by all on account of his 
 indecent lack of aesthetical good manners. In the same way we 
 hear nature described according to the temperament of the observer 
 as disconcertingly " realistic," sentimental or fantastic, economical 
 or wasteful, generous and anodyne or cruelly indiff"erent. 
 Whether in either of these cases (of personal and impersonal 
 creative intelligence) the manifestation of cosmic energy is the 
 exercise of an absolute consciousness or an equally absolute 
 unconsciousness (whether in the naturalist's world there is a 
 universally pervading completeness of law or an entire absence 
 of it) is a question for religion to answer and irrelevant to our 
 present purpose. The artist, the intermediary of the creative 
 principle, strives after truth only (for the sceptics who always, 
 after the manner of Pilatus, questioningly pause in front of this 
 word I must interpolate that one can perfectly well operate with a 
 word and lose nothing of the precision of one's reasoning without 
 being able to offer a satisfactory definition of it) and that he can 
 express it in an unlimited variety of aspects as regards style and 
 method, as any subject, any material and every relation between 
 them has its particular requirements. 
 
 These and the conditions obtaining during the work's conception, 
 status nascens, and ultimate formation determine, as they do in 
 
86 EPSTEIN ^ 
 
 the forms of flora and fauna, its final form and appearance, and 
 the artist's incapacity to conform to them denotes the relative 
 mediocrity of his gifts. 
 
 On the other hand, the more he adopts, in contradiction to them, 
 a style and self-conscious manner, the more chance he has, while 
 becoming even more displeasing to one " school " of thought, 
 at least of pleasing the opposing one, and in consequence the 
 corresponding part of the general " public," which, a few un- 
 spoilt, unsophisticated instinctives excepted, is without this com- 
 plaisance and as little capable of appreciating a work of art as 
 they are of a work of nature, and for the same reasons. Those 
 minds that are honestly capable of seeing the beauties of nature 
 should be equally capable of seeing the beauties of art. The 
 genuinely unprejudiced mind which is not in the first instance 
 open to the impression of a natural phenomenon may have its 
 essential being revealed to it through the individual emphasis of 
 the artist's presentment of it. Or by a similar process it may 
 have the work of the artist again revealed by the stimulus of a 
 congenial mind's assistance. The latter 's indication may act on 
 the nebula of the spectator's thought as the hypothetical initial 
 disturbance of the mutually stabilizing forces that start the forma- 
 tion of the ordinate system : or to draw the comparison within 
 the narrower space of humanly conceivable time limits, as the 
 grain dropped in the saturated solution which causes the immediate 
 crystallization of the substance contained in the solvent. 
 
 Minds capable of exercising this stimulus are, however, exceed- 
 ingly rare. They may lack the predisposition and special adapt- 
 ability of the creative intelligence, but the congenial faculty of 
 penetrative appreciation is in itself of a high order. Unfortunately, 
 it is very seldom that it enjoys its vocation, as its qualities are too 
 frequently mistaken for creative, while vanity's seduction helps 
 to make the notorious solicitations proceeding from its environ- 
 ment effectual. A rich receptive existence is renounced in favour 
 of the endless misery and depression of an incompetent effort 
 towards creative activity. The adolescent enthusiasm for truth 
 and beauty is unsuspectingly perverted when yielding to the 
 
EPSTEIN 87 
 
 pressure of well-meaning admiration posing the fatal question 
 why its impressions should not be communicated in a material 
 shape. 
 
 In this connection, and especially because it confirms my asser- 
 tion of the genuinely creative artist's human superiority as con- 
 trasted with the notorious feeble character of the majority of 
 artistic mediocrities, it is not superfluous to dwell yet longer on 
 the consequences of this misunderstood sensitivity. The condi- 
 tions of the artist's life demand an energy and perseverance that 
 taxes highly the mental strength of a man of genius, and almost 
 always prove pernicious to the appreciatively gifted mind that 
 has to contend with them. The symptoms are familiar. They 
 soon well-nigh inevitably become tainted with the minor artist's 
 vices. They become embittered, hypochondriacal — a " sad un- 
 Grecian hypochondriac " is the term Goethe coined — ^vain and 
 jealous. Their self-indulgence and gross sensuality, or the hypo- 
 critical travesty of chastity that is the usual result of the conse- 
 quential loss of virility are responsible for the contempt — or worse, 
 the sneaking envy — provoked by their so-called " artistic tempera- 
 ment " (which is not the artist's temperament).* The spitefulness 
 which is the natural outcome of their torturing pessimism makes 
 them, in lamentable contradiction to their original predispositions, 
 incline to judge the artistic products of their contemporaries with 
 the crassest prejudice. So, instead of being the most valued 
 and desirable receptors of the works of important artists, they 
 heartily detest them. And their detestation is usually the more 
 vehement because, their faculties remaining subconsciously active, 
 they cannot help instinctively recognizing the excellence of a 
 genuinely great work, and with silent mortification having to admit 
 its superiority over their own. 
 It is a painful and frequently recurring spectacle to see those 
 
 • ". . . No man ever becomes distinguished in any art who does not early 
 begin to acquire the power of supporting heat, cold, hunger, thirst and other 
 discomforts ; wherefore those persons deceive themselves altogether who suppose 
 that while taking their ease and surrounded by all the enjoyments of the world, 
 they may still attain to honourable distinction — for it is not by sleeping, but by 
 waking, watching and labouring continually, that proficiency is attained. ..." 
 (Vasari.) 
 
88 EPSTEIN 
 
 who could be the most powerful and authoritative of supporters, 
 the most helpful of propagating patrons of creative art and its ex- 
 ponents, become instead their direst, most redoubtably ruthless and 
 implacable enemies. The authority with which their position — 
 " I also am an artist ! " — invests them for an ingenuous public 
 makes the harm of their words and acts incalculable, in one 
 respect because those that accept their judgment without doubting 
 their good faith will feel confident of its reliability as it is pro- 
 nounced by the very men who should be capable of understanding : 
 and, in another and far more regrettable one, because an over- 
 whelming public accepts the opinion of writers on art who 
 penetrate far enough into the truth to see the whole extent of 
 effects without yet arriving at their causes and point out with delight 
 how artists themselves prove the worst and most partial of critics. 
 From their joyous observations generalizing conclusions are drawn 
 which are far from flattering to the morality and mental powers of 
 all artists. This most unjustly reflects on the reliability of judg- 
 ment and on the intentions of the very great men who have ex- 
 pressed their thought through the medium of art. The applica- 
 tion of such criticisms to the elect, to Shakespeare, Leonardo, 
 Palestrina, Rembrandt, the great revealers of the divinity reflected 
 in them, is very much more than ridiculous ; its blasphemous levity 
 is nauseating ; it is a sacrilege, a crimej^against the Holy Spirit. 
 
IX 
 
 IN the last chapter I have emphasized the fact that as the 
 human mind cannot, being itself a part of nature, detach itself 
 from nature, the spiritual and material forms that constitute 
 the man-created organism must originate in observation and 
 perception of those that nature presents. The so-called elemental 
 forms whose more obvious use has been identified with the ten- 
 dencies of recent artistic expression have been described as geo- 
 metrical, implying that they were the product of intellectual 
 artificiality rather than of full throbbing life absorbed by powerful 
 sensuous apperception. 
 
 Now in the first place to regard their appearance as symptomatic 
 of " modern " art is the same error committed by the pathologists 
 who are misled into assuming the clinical entity presented by some 
 specific disease to be only of recent rise and spreading since from 
 that recent period date the contributed observations of men whose 
 attention it had formerly escaped. 
 
 In the second place, it is necessary to count with a frequently 
 recognizable inability on the part of otherwise shrewd observers 
 to discover in nature the suggestions of formal elements man has 
 adopted for the structure of his works. I have seen it stated by 
 an author noted for his imagination and insight that the straight 
 line and the circle were inventions of the human brain into which 
 nature's co-operation did not enter ; that nature did not " make 
 use of them " to quote his rather inept expression. As for the 
 straight line, it is very materially represented in many formations, 
 the " geometrically " shaped crystal being an obvious instance 
 where it results as intersecting (secant) where two planes cut each 
 other, and it is produced in movement as described by a falling 
 object. As for the circle — if its suggestion by the projection 
 
 89 
 
90 EPSTEIN 
 
 on the retina of a sphere (as the soap-bubble for example) or the 
 celestial bodies is not acceptable, here also in its pure geometrical 
 form it appears through movement under certain restricting 
 conditions, as when an object following mechanical impetus 
 returns to the point of its start if attached to the end of a material 
 radius whose opposing end is fixed so as to permit of motion in 
 one plane only. When stated the facts seem so perfectly self-evident 
 that it requires the experience of having them seen ignored by an 
 otherwise lucid intellect to summon the courage of expounding 
 them. 
 
 I am insisting on these things because their recognition explodes 
 the fallacy of reasoning which ascribes, whether for good or bad, 
 certain manifestations of art to the effect of arbitrary performances 
 of the artist's consciousness. Thus one finds people arming 
 themselves with these notions of lauding or censuring an artist's 
 independence, his escape from the leading strings of nature, as 
 apparent in the generally misnamed " simplification," " abstrac- 
 tion " (cubing) of form his work seems to them to reveal. 
 This so-called simplifying, sometimes consciously perpetrated and 
 as often demonstrably absurd, is, in the majority of cases where 
 it seems diagnosed with some justification, yet entirely illusory 
 in so far as it is supposed to be the outcome of a " supra-naturally " 
 acting faculty. It exists then only in the imagination of observers 
 whose field does not extend to the comprehension of the facts in 
 nature that were grasped by the artist. 
 
 However modified a form may appear when compared to its 
 supposed correlative in nature, the employment of the term 
 " simplification " in this connection betrays a faulty appreciation 
 of the constituting elements of form, because the complexity of 
 existing things is infinite and seems only to increase and decrease 
 as dimensions, seen from the immovable point of the limited 
 human power of apprehension, become too large or too small 
 (so to say infra-microscopic or " ultra-telescopic "). In the same 
 way as the human brain does not permit realization of events 
 moving in units of time (which is but another aspect of space) of 
 much longer or shorter duration than those which the pace of our 
 functional existence fiixes as the " normal " for our conception, 
 
EPSTEIN 91 
 
 so, where its relativity is nothing else but the reflection of our 
 mental insufficiency it stands to reason that no one thing is simpler 
 than another. 
 
 There is no more a tenable logic of formal simplification in plastic 
 art than there is anywhere else. The craving for the sanction of 
 this particular lie is nothing else but the effect of the inertia in 
 which the mind, tired of handling things that constantly demand 
 the most concentrated application, attempts in self-defence to 
 obtain the oblivion of rest. Therefore, also, it will the soonest 
 and most imperatively manifest itself in the mentally incompetent, 
 in the piteous wretches who are living " above their spiritual 
 income," with all the unbearable strain and nervous tension, the 
 never-abating gnawing anxieties and exhaustion attendant on it. 
 If, however, this is the sweetly deceptive call of a Fata Morgana, 
 if this chimerical " simplicity " is unattainable, as the mentally 
 virile artist of genius can afford to realize with equanimity, it is 
 not so with the highly desirable simplicity which exists in the 
 relation between the work's subject and its execution. This sim- 
 plicity is the badly described " economy " of the artist's method. 
 What is called " economy " here is a negative ; it is the absence 
 of wasteful effort, and superfluous expense of energy, so only 
 the perfection and precision of method. And this is common to 
 the great masters of creative art of all times. 
 It was the natural method of the first good sculptor as it must be 
 of the last, and it is through yielding to the seduction of a com- 
 fortable system of aesthetic morals that theorizing sluggards have 
 prevented sculpture passing through the evolutions corresponding 
 to the varying aims and intentions of sculptors (this is a process 
 of inverted reason, because the aims of good sculptors are naturally 
 identical and only contrasted at any place or period to those of a 
 bad one) from simple beginnings to bewildering complexity and 
 in a desire for relief escaping back again to the lost paradise of 
 simplicity. Such processes, when abruptly performed, the 
 theorizing sluggards must, for the sake of consistency, describe 
 as " revolution " which, as it does not synchronize in speed with 
 the " evolutions " they accept, they are bound to condemn 
 for its indecent rush ; for these " evolutions," they admit, are 
 
92 EPSTEIN 
 
 the communal work of the herd whose sacrosanct movements they 
 assiduously follow. 
 
 An instance of it is provided by the anxious protests provoked by 
 such an alleged " revolutionary " work as Epstein's Rock Drills 
 a work which for all its originality does not exhibit anything that 
 is incompatible with the unassailable traditions exposed in the 
 works of the great masters of sculpture (of which traditions origin- 
 ality is one). The governing principles of this work are the same 
 that moved the great masters. In this, as in theirs, the presenta- 
 tion of a new aspect of human activity implies a corresponding 
 new effect of the means that are in harmony with it. Naturally, 
 Praxiteles could not have presented a rock drill. " It would be 
 self-contradictory and unsound fancy to expect that things which 
 have never been expressed could be expressed unless by means 
 that have never yet been tried." The man who has almost become 
 part of the machinery he controls is exactly as new an apparition 
 as the machinery happens to be. On the other hand, the outward 
 manifestation of the controlling spirit, of the purely human forces 
 coming into play is not a new thing, but it is as much contained in 
 Epstein's presentment as in any other of " les noces primitives 
 de I'homme et de la terre : I'homme par ce grand contrat, aban- 
 donnant a la terre I'heritage de ses sueurs, et la terre s'engageant 
 en retour a porter fidelement les moissons et les cendres de 
 I'homme." 
 
 Nothing could be further from the truth than the view that 
 regards a work like this as a challenging negation of " classic " 
 ideals, a work which for its admiration demands one's consent to 
 the attempted overthrow of the supreme masters of the craft. 
 In Epstein's Rock Drill the characteristic anatomy of the figure 
 is of a kind frequently described as " abstracted " because it is 
 considered to present the kind of simplification of forms to their 
 nearest geometrical equivalent, a method that is supposed to put 
 into practice the notions to which I have alluded and which has 
 recently been so enthusiastically advocated by artists who are 
 anxious to find a prescription for "originality." In the present 
 case it is erroneous to assume that tendency ; the particular 
 requirements of the work would have made the reproduction of 
 
EPSTEIN 93 
 
 the anatomy of the human body an absurdity, and in this respect 
 there is nothing in the work that shows intentions that contradict 
 those of the great " classics " who in a similar case would have 
 acted in an analogous manner. The attempt to explain the style 
 of this work by looking on it as exhibiting simplifications of the 
 anatomical shapes referred to is a demonstrable failure. If it 
 conformed to these, it must be obvious its structure should have 
 been entirely different from what it is. How by any process of 
 " simplification " that reduces forms to their barest essentials, 
 the shape of a knee-cap could be made to appear in the shape 
 of a cube escapes understanding. It seems clear that the relations, 
 though the moving intention of the sculptor may be a constant 
 factor, are not of the same nature as, for instance, they are between 
 such anatomical parts as the breasts on the Venus or the Maternity 
 or the hands on the Venus or the marble Mother and Child. 
 It is in this case desirable to dismiss the inelastic reasoning that 
 insists on the direct similarity of the work's forms and the familiar 
 forms in nature that are correlate to them. Rather one should 
 attempt to follow the sculptor thinking in terms of the material he 
 employs. Unavoidably his metal structure, having its own organic 
 requirements, demands a " metallic " anatomy of its own which, 
 however related, must count with principles alien to the anatomy 
 of the flesh. The logic the material engenders will by the guidance 
 of the sculptor's procedure reveal itself to the unprejudiced 
 observer. 
 
 The soul of the stone or of the metal communicates to the artist's 
 perception its laws and determines the medium's physiology and 
 anatomy, and the spectator, if he does not obstinately resist as the 
 fossil aesthete does, if he does not set up the barrier of ignorance 
 and prejudice against its transmission, will find his trust in the 
 artist's sensitivity justified and will receive the full warmth of the 
 work's absorbed life instead of the chilly deceptive satisfaction of 
 seeing his own obtrusive notions more or less justified according 
 to the degree of precision he can attain in endeavouring to unravel 
 the tissue of cross references to a diff"erent order of organisms 
 which the work may recall to his mind. 
 But in the overwhelming majority of cases the spectator would 
 
94 EPSTEIN 
 
 indignantly refuse to admit that he must necessarily abandon his 
 own habits of thinking when, as a foreign visitor, he is introduced 
 to the universe of the artist's thought. He disHkes to feel that, 
 instead of being a solicited patron, a distinguished guest who 
 honours his host's house by his august presence and who can 
 rightly expect to see his comfort and wishes submissively studied, 
 he should as a humble, but for that the more welcome, visitor to a 
 temple, leave the pride of his personal importance behind him and 
 seek to efface the disturbing effect of his pretences as an in- 
 formed connoisseur. He should understand that he will then 
 find the access to the innermost sanctuary of the artist's thought 
 made possible, while by posing as one initiated in the mysteries 
 as one of the honoured adepts he will derive no other profit from 
 his pretensions than possibly the degrading adulation of the un- 
 discerning crowd of the vulgar who will on his claims readily 
 ascribe to him the artist's power of penetration supported more- 
 over by the *' sound common sense " it denies to the latter. But 
 if he is in quest of this, he has no relation to the artist's work at 
 all ; he only uses the name of it to make his imbecile vanity appear 
 impressive in the eyes of the basely ignorant. 
 But in the case of the spectator who renounces those foolish 
 aspirations it depends, apart from his intelligence and intuition, 
 almost entirely on his good will to come under the power of the 
 artist's thought, which alone can reveal to him that greater universe 
 of which it is the reflection. 
 
 He must be prepared to understand from this that it is the right 
 of genius to appear the maker of its own laws ; the derivation of 
 these laws, the reference or the copying from example that remain 
 unapproachable for the spectator he may take for granted on the 
 strength of the artistic integrity which is inalienable from the 
 spiritual dispositions of the really creative mind. 
 But where the latter sees clearly and the former must trust, this 
 requires, in view of the little capacity for faith that is in most men, 
 an exceptionally difficult exercise of confidence — instinctive per- 
 ception of the artist's imaginative reliability — or a feat of personal 
 effort of imagination of which most minds, lacking both predisposi- 
 tion and training, are quite incapable. 
 
 
EPSTEIN 95 
 
 It appears to be one of the last things one can expect of the average 
 human intellectual capacity, to recognize the possibility of laws 
 and organizations conditional on premises that are intrinsically 
 different from those of which it has cognizance. I alluded already 
 to the questions of matter, time and space that are apt to discover 
 the conceptual insufficiency of even comparatively capable and 
 disciplined intelligences. An easily ascertainable example of this 
 incapacity in minds of superior intelligence and more than ordinary 
 lucidity is supplied by their almost general incapability to recog- 
 nize the probabilities of organic existence, of life, on other planets 
 for example, under any conditions but those they are used to asso- 
 ciate with the forms of life familiar to themselves. 
 One hears in all seriousness men of extensive scientific training 
 dispose of any hypothetical organic existence on some celestial 
 body on the ridiculously flimsy ground of the absence round it 
 of a gaseous atmosphere similar to the layer of air round the earth. 
 Granting the accuracy of physical observation one is stupefied by 
 the lack of imaginative faculty as well as by the stultifying pedantry 
 that presumes conscious life and organic growth and existence to 
 be universally dependent on respiration in some form, or on the 
 presence of oxygen or a certain grade of temperature. But for our 
 present purpose we have only to establish the fact that these are 
 pretty common limitations, and calculate their effect on the 
 potential appreciation of the artist's work to which is not even 
 brought, as a rule, the measure of assiduous application and desire 
 for research that, in the case of investigations by scientifically 
 trained minds, shows such restricted results. The man who 
 would forward the thesis of possible existence of living, thinking 
 bodies of liquid or gaseous composition, in a medium of solid 
 matter at a temperature of 3000 degrees Celsius would be treated 
 as a harmless lunatic by the very scientists who, ridiculing the 
 philosopher's stone or the magic formula or incantation, feel 
 themselves comfortably at home in the fantastic menagery of 
 molecules, atoms, ions, electrons, the " ether " and the various 
 mnemotechnic cribs they themselves insist on having taken 
 seriously. 
 In view of this it is not surprising to find people hampered by 
 
 t^ 
 
96 EPSTEIN 
 
 similar difficulties when confronted by the creation of an artist of 
 which the beauties and significance are the outcome of an organic 
 order whose foundations are not known factors within the sphere 
 of their comprehension. The assimilation of any methodical 
 aestheticism which attempts to give an explanatory representation 
 of the arts as a " universal language," requiring of the spectator 
 or auditor a knowledge of its grammar and syntax and leading him 
 to expect the artist reciprocally to adopt its vocabulary and alleged 
 rules in order to be intelligible, is of no use. As a rule it is per- 
 nicious, making ridiculous pedants and unbearable snobs of any 
 but the strongest and clearest minds who, while able to escape its 
 fatal influences, happen to be practically the only ones who do 
 not feel the need of its deceptive support. 
 
 If only it were possible to convince others of the truth, self- 
 evident to the degree of being the more easily overlooked, that 
 it is more rational to have confidence in the creative artist than in 
 the professors and critics who trudge behind him, face backward 
 to keep up the pretence of looking in front ! If one could only 
 make others understand that it is obviously more reasonable to 
 trust the work itself than someone else's comments, to convey to 
 them its maker's intentions, and that it is the boiling-point of 
 absurdity to expect the latter to succeed where the former fails 1 
 But unfortunately such is the tyrannous power exercised over the 
 average mind by the plausibly insinuated notions with which the 
 journalist-aesthete and art dissector flatters its " amour-propre," 
 that the victim becomes as incapable as he is unwilling to undergo 
 the " subordination " of his thought to the artist's ideas. They 
 pervert the originally inoffensive mediocrity into a stupendous 
 arrogance, an immeasurably grotesque self-esteem. The passive 
 role of a " mere spectator " is felt to be unworthy of the spiritual 
 and cultural aristocrat-by-the-grace-of-his-sixpenny- weekly. He 
 regards himself rather as the courted idol for whose suffrage and 
 consideration the artists compete, to whose taste their works must 
 pay homage, the inspiring patron (the Roi Soleil of Clapham 
 Common, the Golders-Green-Lorenzo !) from whose pronounce- 
 ments the shades of the departed great must depend for the 
 severance or continuation of their works' lease of life, and from 
 
EPSTEIN 97 
 
 whose anxiously evoked approval the living artist derives his 
 raison d'etre. 
 
 While it goes without saying that these suburban Incroyables, the 
 " Precieuses Ridicules " of the bead shop at some point of their 
 career start dabbling for their private account in aesthetic specula- 
 tion (alone or in " coterie," according to whether they are fanatics 
 of individuality or the most up-to-date enlightened thinkers who 
 have found out individualism and its cult as an obsolete pose and 
 a particular piece of Victorian sham), they are in this respect like 
 to the " old faithful reader of your esteemed journal " who, by 
 force of habitually spelling out its contents, ends by writing to 
 it " about it," in that they have long been victims themselves 
 before they start victimizing others in their turn. 
 
 " Beralde. ' Faites vous medecin vous-meme. La com- 
 
 modite sera encore plus grande d 'avoir en vous tout ce qu'il 
 
 vous faut.' 
 
 Toinette. ' Cela est vrai . . . et il n'y a point de maladie 
 
 si osee que de se jouer a la personne d'un medecin.' 
 
 Argan. ' Est-ce que je suis en age d'etudier ? ' 
 
 Beralde. ' Bon, etudier ! Vous etes assez savant ; et il y 
 
 en a beaucoup parmis eux qui ne sont pas plus habiles que 
 
 vous.' 
 
 Argan. * Mais il faut savoir bien parler Latin, connaitre les 
 
 maladies, et les remedes qu'il y faut faire.' 
 
 Beralde. ' En recevant la robe et le bonnet de medecin vous 
 
 apprendrez tout cela ; et vous serez apres plus habile que 
 
 vous ne voudrez.' 
 
 Argan. ' Quoi ! Ton sait discourir sur les maladies quand 
 
 on a cet habit-la } ' 
 
 Beralde. ' Oui. L'on n'a qu'a parler avec une robe et un 
 
 bonnet, tout galimatias devient savant, et toute sottise devient 
 
 raison.' " 
 
 Besides, the aesthetic education those dilettanti receive encloses 
 to the full those potentialities for rivalling their teachers ; as the 
 medical encyclopaedia offered for sale by certain unofficial " Uni- 
 
 H 
 
98 EPSTEIN 
 
 versities " contains the certificate made out to the purchaser 
 bestowing upon him the institute's doctoral degree which, 
 with a deep and splendid faith in humanity, it adjures and 
 trusts him not to consider as obtained before he feels worthy 
 of it, i.e. has acquainted himself with the magic vade-mecum's 
 contents. 
 
 The instruction the aspiring art-lover, ambitious of judicial 
 privileges, receives from his august leaders, the propagators of 
 the critical idea and applied aesthetics, is responsible for the 
 spreading of the type, this curious monster of the artistic fauna, 
 the " asinus ruminans.'' The seduction is too great ; the individual 
 with a vague sensibility is given to understand that by climb- 
 ing the short ladder of aestheticism at the hand of the professor 
 who guarantees the reliability of the instrument made in his work- 
 shop after approved and tested models he will find himself on the 
 summit of Parnassus in the company of the great masters, men of 
 genius but unconscious dreamers, who unlike the resourceful 
 professor are obstinate enough to make the ascent by the un- 
 scientific, unmethodical means their childlike, instinctive hap- 
 hazard ways prefer (to the never ceasing wonderment of the 
 professor, who marvels that they ever arrived there — occasionally 
 — be it whispered pianissimo, quasi niente, without, ay, before 
 him). And there on that giddy height they feel themselves 
 more steady than the great, with the presence of the good 
 guide whose offices these irresponsible children of genius 
 frivolously, opinionatedly rejected. The obvious advantages 
 of accepting these services instead of following the erratic 
 wayward genius on the whimsical meanderings into which his 
 unaccountable fancies steer him would convince stronger minds. 
 Why should one be sceptical and not admit with the proofs before 
 one that aesthetics can perform miracles at will ? Did not that 
 cynical materialist Sancho Panza admit the same powers in knight- 
 errantry and practical magic when he held the governor's sceptre 
 in his hand and, reality surpassing his boldest imagining, sat 
 in the chair disposing of the weal and woe of his isle's inhabitants ? 
 One might as well expect the guileless reader to resist when the 
 quack advertisements, in the style of the immortal Cesar Birotteau, 
 
EPSTEIN 99 
 
 inform him that he can praise his lucky stars for being alive 
 on the day that offers to him unique and unprecedented oppor- 
 tunities ; that he may obtain " while-you-wait " the inestimable 
 and priceless benefit of the-most-famous-scientific-minds-of-our- 
 age's lifelong and patient researches, enabling him to dispose 
 without any sort of personal effort (immediately-the-first-instal- 
 ment-is-paid) of the precious fruits of his magnificent benefactors' 
 disinterested sacrifices, to be put to whatever uses the subject of 
 this grandiose philanthropy may desire. The wonderful helpers 
 of the charitable demigods who thus succour deserving humanity, 
 having ' ' reduced-every thing-to-the-strictest-scientific-principles- 
 of-the-most-up-to-date-discoveries," one may feel perfectly safe 
 in accepting and making unrestricted use of the present of so much 
 brilliancy. Quite in the approved tone the aspiring dilettanti are 
 interrogated, answered and encouraged finally by the blinding 
 promise of having themselves turned into infallible connoisseurs 
 and of having put into their hands a never-failing eesthetic criterion 
 — simplicity itself, a child learns to handle it in four minutes — the 
 product of highly expert specialists, the splendid result of incessant 
 investigation and years of untiring study of the most famous, etc. 
 — the big drum ad infinitum, ad nauseam ... of high academic 
 distinction, splendid heritage of culture . . . the great educational 
 opportunity dreamed of by reformers for so long at last an accom- 
 plished fact . . . brought to your own home, brought to your own 
 home* ... to be had for the asking, brings the world within your 
 grasp without moving from your chair (irresistible ideal). 
 But it should be well understood that the esthetic cattle formed 
 in this way, while acutely feeling it incompatible with the dignity 
 of their knowledge and conscious taste to trust in the power of an 
 
 * It should not be said that I quote pill advertisements to attack aesthetic hum- 
 bug which is not likely to be of so coarse a character. But the nauseating cult 
 of ' ' aesthetic " discernment and artistic judgment acquired : ' ' why not " — " give 
 us a trial " — " let us send it you now " — " what would your friend say, if . . ." 
 — "no drudgery." . . . "let us beautify your life" — is a painful fact, and the 
 majority of the above are textual quotations from a prospectus bearing the name 
 of one of the world's most venerable institutes. The theme has no special 
 actuality though. Idiots, too, are of all ages and, unlike the true poets, are not 
 only born, but also made, on the whole, with conspicuous success. 
 
100 EPSTEIN 
 
 artist whose works defy their thumb-rule tests, appear quite 
 expansively impressionable and ready for any acquired display of 
 enthusiasm before works whose meaning may completely 
 escape them and yet possess for them all the suggestive power of 
 their makers' solidly established reputation. It is almost touching 
 to see how the proud and unapproachable can, under such circum- 
 stances, assume the most lamb -like submissiveness and docility. 
 But it would be a mistake to ascribe much significance to their 
 now and then loudly proclaimed humility in face of the classic 
 master's works. They feel in reality on a footing of equality with 
 them and intimately at home in their company. Their obtrusive 
 humility and their pompous modesty is not the intimidated guest 
 but the superior graciousness of the host. 
 
 In the cases where they do not feel watched and so can abandon 
 pose, their attitude towards the work of art is the meaningless 
 state of confident expectation of the visitor to the magician who 
 comes to have magic for his money, who means to be enchanted 
 when he goes to the enchantress. He goes to a concert to be 
 excited or soothed, according to his state of mind, and feels as 
 much cheated if the pastor does not console or elevate him as he 
 would if Circe did not turn him into a swine. 
 Such people go to a museum or an exhibition as the traveller who 
 has things arranged for him by a tourist agency goes on a traditional 
 journey to see the vaunted landscapes, and is duly prepared to 
 undergo the proverbial sensations, " the overpowering beauty of 
 the Swiss mountain scenes " or " the might and superb grandeur 
 of the tropical skies." 
 
 And the " guides " who are, sometimes innocently, but more 
 often very guiltily, responsible to a great extent for the stupid 
 arrogance and ridiculous pretensions of the " dilettanti " jealously 
 guard their position of power. In our society they have estab- 
 lished themselves after the manner of the caste of priests serving 
 as intermediary between deity and man. But the effect of the 
 activity of this caste-of-aestheticians, lacking the justification of 
 ardent faith, is without exception detrimental. It abuses its usurped 
 pontifical powers from the very first moment of its existence. 
 Even if the case might be thinkable in which a mind, helpless with- 
 
EPSTEIN loi 
 
 out support, profits by directions and arrives at the capacity of 
 interesting itself in and to some extent enjoying art, the result- 
 ing profit goes to its possessor only, while the fatal influence 
 exercised in the other cases has widespread and much more 
 positive results. 
 
 Whatever might be the personal loss to the artificially nurtured 
 adept, the loss of his attention and pretentious homage to the arts 
 is nil. The mind that by its own effort is incapable of any mani- 
 festation of faith and love is not of consequence to anything but 
 itself. Any favourable influence in this respect that could be 
 ascribed to the aesthetes' ascendency over the more feeble-minded 
 well-intentioned is more than outweighed by the notoriously 
 detestable state of mind they engender in many a possessor of 
 perhaps mediocre intelligence but also of honest curiosity and pure 
 instincts untainted by the conceit of the vulgar, who trusting to 
 his own disposition might derive a sincere unaffected enjoyment 
 from art without spoiling the possible pleasure of others by 
 adopting the self-conscious, critical attitude of his prophets to 
 satisfy his own vanity. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the 
 fact that the professional critic and aesthete may be a man of far 
 more than ordinary intelligence and quite convinced of the utility 
 and necessity of his calling — but the rules of the caste are not 
 ignored with impunity ; he has to prove its assumptions and to 
 uphold its theories, and the consciousness of his position is a 
 formidable ally of incapacity and laziness, altogether keeping him 
 in the slavery of the criterions, canons and fixed principles of 
 which he must pretend to be the master. 
 
 Thus his habits are contradictory and hostile to the free 
 attitude the work of art, quite apart from the valuation of its 
 merits, demands from any spectator, if it is to be loved and appre- 
 ciated. The best among them, since naturally they conceal the 
 loss of their liberty, become necessarily of bad faith in their 
 pronunciations. They become doubly so because, in order to 
 preserve whatever prestige they have acquired in the eyes of their 
 " pubHc," they must avoid disappointing it and therefore they 
 continue to supply the products that have made their reputation. 
 They cannot afford to lose it by becoming inconsequent and self- 
 
I02 - EPSTEIN 
 
 contradictory in their public's eye, because their claims to leader- 
 ship are precisely founded on the unfailing applicability of their 
 stable methods of criticism. They would then be on a par with 
 their docile readers who do not expect them to discourse on art 
 as the man does who says : "I am very fond of it, but I do not 
 know anything about it." The critic must know all about it ; he 
 must in their eyes remain the expert who " understands," for 
 whom every work is an utterance in a familiar language to which 
 he has only to listen to know what is said. The " plain man " who 
 " loves music " but does not " understand it," when he hears 
 " the musical critic " speaking with perfect assurance of the 
 " contents " of a composition as if he were referring to a con- 
 versation or a lecture, would undoubtedly be shocked if he knew 
 that on this particular point the " initiated " critic's notions are not 
 likely to be any more precise than his own. And when, moreover, 
 the critic has for his readers been pretending to classify these 
 " contents " of the work in the same way as his colleagues who cater 
 for the political section of the readers do those of public speeches, 
 the pretended leader becomes as sheepish as can be. He bleats 
 the familiar tune he is paid for — whether in money or admiration 
 — bleats conservatism, liberalism, revolution as inevitably as any. 
 He is a black or a white or a red sheep or a multi-coloured 
 monstrum — ^without prejudices — that means with all the other 
 prejudices combined — and wants the world black, white, red or 
 motley ; but in any case he knows exactly what he wants, and 
 that is why he may be damned. 
 
 He has accustomed his followers to dogma, and he must give 
 them dogma. To distinguish himself from a shopkeeper and a 
 penny-in-the-slot machine he has for the description of his 
 activity invented some wonderful journalistic euphemisms ; he 
 listens to the step of the ages ; he keeps his finger on the pulse 
 of the world's opinions. 
 
 Verily, if one might accept his word as truth, one could be sure 
 that from this to listening to the music of the spheres is but one 
 step, and thence to the padded room only one more. The fate of 
 the aesthetic charlatan Jullien, who at least was sincere in his 
 folly, points a pretty moral ; the universality of his aesthetic 
 
EPSTEIN 103 
 
 functions went to his head as he believed in his calling, and when 
 Berlioz saw him in London playing the flute from the top of a 
 carriage for the public enlightenment he enthusiastically accosted 
 the latter to demonstrate his great discovery that : when he put 
 his fingers in both ears he heard " a colossal A " — " the diapason 
 of the universe " ! 
 
 Fortunately for themselves most aesthetes and art critics are made 
 of sterner stuff and successfully ward off the danger that hyper- 
 sensitiveness of conscience may put an untimely end to their 
 professional careers. They are occasionally faced by the painful 
 necessity of arming themselves with deceit and swindle when their 
 own dogma forbids them to praise the work of some infamous 
 genius whom on former opportunities they could sincerely dis- 
 parage. 
 
 Against this unwelcome conviction of the moment the critic has 
 to set off his earlier propagated one that has already gained his 
 public, whose faith in his judgment as well as his own authority 
 that depends on it have to be considered. 
 
 But when an irresistible vanity drives him to a naively impudent 
 attempt to make his judgment respected in a private circle of men 
 in whose eyes he is aware his apparent incapacity to recognize the 
 value of some particular work makes him out a poor figure, one may 
 hear the feared judge apologize for the public avowal of opinions 
 that in this environment would leave a false impression of his 
 discerning power. 
 
 It may therefore be noted in his favour that rather than see his 
 intelligence undervalued he rouses contempt when he is not 
 ashamed to have it remarked that he knows a certain work is 
 deserving of recognition while yet the public's sanction of his 
 principles obliges him to condemn it ex cathedra. 
 As regards honesty and moral decency one must prefer the equally 
 harmful ignorant who, I am anxious to admit, are a far more 
 familiar subject. The vast majority cannot in extenuation of their 
 blunders plead their professional loyalty to principle and public in 
 justification of their dishonesty. They are quite honest and quite 
 stupid. A third category and quite an influential one, who, however 
 stupid they may be, are more dishonest than any, unblushingly 
 
104 EPSTEIN 
 
 praise and condemn, their mouth full of the most exalted profes- 
 sions, swayed entirely by personal motives, flattery or revenge, or 
 material gain. They make themselves the willing tools of dealers 
 and the henchmen of the commercial opposition of artists em- 
 barrassing to the " trade " — but the effect in the different cases 
 is very much identical. From the point of view of art and artist's 
 interest it is immaterial whether the chief representative of a caste 
 whose activities are detrimental to it happens to be an intelligent 
 cad or an ignorant parasite or just a fool, whether of the honest 
 or dishonest variety. 
 
 It should also be taken into account that the more unsuspecting 
 section of the reading public is inclined to trust the writer on 
 art, apart from the notion that whatever comes from the printing 
 press is infallible, because they take it for granted that he is con- 
 stantly occupied with questions concerning art. The professional 
 art critic is supposed to be at home in an atmosphere of " artistic 
 thought " and intimately familiar with every product of at least 
 those artists whose work embody his own professed ideals. 
 The fundamental aims, the striving after whose achievement 
 characterizes the work of the masters of all times and countries, 
 are presumed to [be before the writer's eye as an ever reliable 
 inspiration. 
 
 The so-called lay public, who as a rule are only acquainted with a 
 very limited number of even the most popularly idolized works 
 and whose only knowledge concerning the entire produce of 
 artistic creation has been gained at second hand from their 
 " cicerone's " descriptions, would be very surprised to know that 
 the latter more often than not is in a precisely similar position, 
 that his attitude and point of view is not worth more than their 
 own, only an infinitesimal fraction of his information having been 
 obtained at first hand and his curiosity being generally quite 
 satisfied with it. 
 
 The man who is thought to be consumed with the intensity of 
 his eager love and unflagging interest for the great master's works 
 will in reality prove to be anxious to have his occupation looked 
 upon as a business-like activity not substantially different from a 
 
EPSTEIN 105 
 
 commercial or any other one. In consequence of this view he does 
 not feel obliged to take a greater interest and acquire a more 
 extensive knowledge than suffices for the ambitions he entertains 
 with regard to the advancement of his career. If he is in the first 
 place concerned with making a living he will not trouble to expend 
 more energy than will be sufficient for the particular grade of 
 comfort of which he is in need. He can generally plead in justifi- 
 cation of his lukewarm state of ambition the similarity of attitude 
 of the multitudes of indifferent artists whose interest in their own 
 and others' work and art decreases as their forced occupation 
 increases in the constant attention and intensity of application it 
 requires of them. 
 
 Apart from externalities which may cause them to pose as either 
 the " bohemian " or the " gentleman," they think it incumbent 
 on the consideration they owe to their personal well-being to be 
 as little different from the average mortal as is feasible — on the 
 whole with conspicuously satisfactory results — and take as little 
 cognisance of various tiresome realities as they can possibly help. 
 One of the consequences of this antiseptic discipline is that even 
 men of naturally distinguished intellectual potentialities become 
 entirely incapable of apprehending the moving forces of a newly 
 appearing artist's existence. 
 
 And they will carefully avoid displaying any enthusiasm that 
 might rouse thought and intensify the conception of the artist's 
 aspects of life in others, as this would inevitably react on the 
 intensity of effort demanded from themselves. As a^prophy lactic 
 against this danger, whose employment, however, is suggested 
 by a rather questionable logic, they are ever trying to level 
 down the aspirations they can discern in the incriminated 
 artist's manifestations in accordance with the leisurely facile 
 standards representative of what they describe as " normal life." 
 These attempts are naturally disguised in the moral of common 
 sense and prayers for the " sanity " of art. But^the motives^of the 
 sound and sensible critic's appeals for " sobriety " and " healthy " 
 relation with " life " of contemporary or future art are too pain- 
 fully transparent. It may be exceedingly difficult to point out 
 what exactly these relations in the case of any artist are, from his 
 
io6 EPSTEIN 
 
 work, but this is primarily a concern for himself, while the critic 
 should know that whatever their nature they are always defensible 
 from the artist's point of view and that the severance of them is a 
 physical impossibility ; but in any case the critic's notorious 
 formula as that " art is life " or that " life and art should be one " 
 may mean anything and nothing. They are the kind of cliches that 
 remind one of nothing so much as of some photographs of ghosts, 
 in which the producer can make himself or others see practically 
 anything he or they may wish. They belong to those singularly 
 adaptable and handy propositions that lose nothing by being put 
 on their head or turned inside out, that reveal their greatest loveli- 
 ness to the blind and sound most agreeably in the ears of the deaf. 
 If for the artist's perception there can exist " common " aspects 
 of life that should enter into his work they become by his treat- 
 ment raised to the level of his supposedly superior " artistic 
 thoughts," and the lazy, vulgar mind which, when formulating 
 the necessity of " daily Ufe " art, or " art for the people " (which 
 curious property they, vaguely and insultingly, imagine as some 
 sort of semi-digested, savoury palatable commodity), expects 
 somewhat the reverse to take place does little more than obey 
 the craving for repose its instincts know is to be found for it 
 in a snugly-unrolling display of pompously " arty " hearth-rug 
 platitudes. 
 
 If the pitiable " plain man " has not much good to expect from 
 the guidance of a class of alleged experts whose ignorance, though 
 not much less complete than his own, is successfully concealed 
 from him by their impudence, he cannot hope for any particularly 
 helpful assistance from the self-styled " scientific " art critic, even 
 when the latter is free from the worst vices of irresponsible 
 journalism. The Teutonic gift to the world of " historic com- 
 parative critical analysis of art " is not one to be specially grateful 
 for. The tendentious historian's point of view is not under any 
 circumstances a convincing one. It might be if he would trust 
 to his intuition if he can dispose of any. But where its absence 
 must be compensated for by an extra show of ponderous insistence 
 and laborious plodding conscientiousness, the chances that he will 
 
EPSTEIN I07 
 
 gain much insight into the meaning of events become ever more 
 negligible. Yet he deals with facts concerning which he can at 
 least collect suggestive documents and apply the test of ordinary 
 human experience, and while he may be a prodigious bore he can 
 yet for a courageous reader be sufficiently informative to deserve 
 every indulgence. 
 
 But with the tendentious art-historian (and his artistic pretences 
 imply the constant presence of tendentiousness) the case is different ; 
 he cannot hope to supply the reader with documents more reveal- 
 ing than the works themselves, which after all are the foundation 
 of his whole activity and which are physically existent and at any 
 time approachable by everyone. Therefore he cannot expect the 
 patience the reader can give to his confrere, and his distressing 
 vagaries in the field of comparative valuation cannot be excused 
 on account of any analogous usefulness of the references and 
 documentary material he can hope to discover. And his familiar 
 insistence on the course of events in artistic evolution presenting 
 the same characteristics as that of human civilization or the 
 development of racial culture is as absurd as it is irritating. Where 
 he does not lose himself in poetic irrelevances and literary fan- 
 tasies apropos of some work that appeals to him, he generally 
 appears obsessed by the tendency to detect progress, development, 
 births and deaths of " schools," imitation, and devolution, deca- 
 dence, disintegration and revival. With this queer outfit he 
 perverts any unapprised susceptible reader till he can no longer 
 look with innocent eyes on any work of art. 
 That those influences are responsible for the widespread erroneous 
 notion that " modern " art has been based on " theories " which 
 are supposed to be hostile to " classic traditions " I have pointed 
 out elsewhere already. Spectators whose attitude has been deter- 
 mined by them imagine that when admitting works like Epstein's 
 Rock Drill or Venus, they admit by silent implication those 
 " theories " they presume to have provided a stimulus for the 
 works' conception. These preposterous notions moved many 
 students pro and contra to the heated controversies that raged 
 about these works. Many a critic who violently attacked them 
 might have condescended to being won by the works' qualities 
 
io8 EPSTEIN 
 
 and to withhold his objections if he did not feel obliged to refuse his 
 praise to a work he takes to be a living expression of ideas to 
 which he takes exception in their entirety. 
 
 Now I have already given as my opinion that it can be easily 
 shown, point for point, that what is new and original in the Rock 
 Drills for instance, which no human eye has seen before, is yet 
 the outcome of analogous apperceptions to those that preceded 
 the presentment of anything new and original in any master's 
 work in whatever period, distant or near. Epstein, like every 
 convinced and courageous artist, has only followed the example 
 of the great masters who never hesitated to adopt new means of 
 expression where their use was indicated by new elements in a 
 subject. The notorious fault in the reasoning of the academic 
 theorists is that they expect salvation for art in the imitating of the 
 unquestionably great, overlooking the fact that while they are 
 predisposed to accept their works with all they contain, their 
 predisposition towards living masters is generally the reverse, 
 and that by denying to the latter the very rights whose use estab- 
 lished the fame of the exceptional original creative minds, they 
 negate their great example and expect the later artists to become 
 what the former never were — imitators. I have frequently em- 
 phasized my opinion that every artist works after " the " tradi- 
 tions ; but it should be understood that the courage to add to 
 them, to innovate (occasionally to display a ruthless independence 
 of them !) is one of the most valuable qualities. The most fanatical 
 defenders of the traditions are usually, like Don Quixote, keeping 
 watch over his rusty armour in the yard of the wayside inn, ready 
 to fight any donkey-driver in their honour. But Orlando in the 
 proud consciousness of his own glory would be the first to value 
 the temerity of the hero who might come and put his trophy next 
 to the arms by the road, ready to incur the ire he need not fear 
 (and every great artist is himself a Roland again who in his fury 
 might overthrow the monument though he will be the first to see 
 the greatness of his predecessor and restore it again, being the 
 only one who could do so, while the mere dunce who could not 
 has to be looked after so that he does not display any lack of 
 respect). The threat was not meant for such, and it is significant 
 
EPSTEIN 109 
 
 that it was Zerbino, not Orlando himself, who placed the defiant 
 warning at the foot of the trophy : 
 
 " Nessun la muova 
 Que star non possa con Orlando a prova." 
 
 How can anybody hope to offer a final judgment or even a reasoned 
 criticism in the face of a work of whose constituent elements he 
 knows not the origin ? His intuitive perception of the artist's 
 power alone can give him the conviction that the means the latter 
 employs are incontestably commanded by the works' requirements. 
 The timid mind naturally distrusts its own discerning powers and, 
 where the artist dares choose and establish, must wait till the 
 sanction of the dictionary invests the new expression with the 
 dignity of official recognition. It is sufficiently remarkable that 
 the makers of the dictionary who might be capable of recognizing 
 where a new word's mode of originating assured it equal rights 
 with the existing ones of which they — as the aesthetes of the vocabu- 
 lary and syntax of artistic expression — know and understand so 
 much more than the lay public, wait for the latter's acceptance of 
 it to make them feel justified in extending the approbation of their 
 authority to it. 
 
 The " boldness " of the artist who is sure of himself (which the 
 public are ever somewhat doubtful of because they are no more 
 sure of him than of themselves and therefore inclined to question 
 the possibility altogether where it suits them), so far from causing 
 the destructive revolution his critics fear, and most of his indis- 
 criminate admirers hope it to be, really denotes a constructive 
 acceptance of the real meaning of the tradition. The spectators' 
 incapacity to read this meaning is natural as only the creative artist 
 can makes them incredulous ; when the essentials of the tradi- 
 tions to which they pay lip service are presented to them in any 
 unfamiliar light they are ready to blaspheme. 
 They are as delighted to see the critics making short work of an 
 artist who pays more valuable tribute to their idols than either 
 they or their henchmen ever did or could, as the father and mother 
 who did not recognize their son and walked twenty miles to see 
 him hanged. 
 
X 
 
 THE appearance of familiar objects represented in a work 
 of art is naturally different from the appearance they 
 present to the eye of the non-creative observer, in the 
 majority of cases. 
 Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that the artist's render- 
 ing cannot be but more trustworthy than their own, the most 
 vulgarly indifferent people who may give occasional thought to 
 the problems the artist struggles with every second of his life, on 
 the rare occasions when they look at a work of art with some 
 interest and a slight concentration of attention, are quite prepared 
 to lay down their apperception as normal, ignoring the way it was 
 formed and the fact that it is much more dependent on prejudices 
 than on physical fact, as I explained in an earlier chapter. 
 They ignore also the fact that a great many of what are so rashly 
 pronounced to be abnormal representations on the slender evidence 
 of the " I-can-use-my-own-eyes " type of philistine impertinence 
 recur in the works of nearly every one of the greatest draughts- 
 men. Instead of learning the lesson, the observer will give accord- 
 ing to the moment of its appearance two explanations of one pheno- 
 menon which are self-contradictory to the extent of being mutually 
 annihilating, i.e. that the " old " artist has an arbitrary style of 
 presenting certain objects because he reveres conventions, and 
 that the " new " artist adopts the same stylization because he 
 execrates these conventions. 
 
 The " normally " seeing artist who calls himself the vassal of 
 nature and not of the craft is supposed to be free from the eccen- 
 tricities of either school and to represent things "as they are," that 
 means as they seem to Smith and Brown, on the walls of whose 
 rooms the reproductions of his works are welcome ornaments. 
 A horse or a dog, in fact any animal from a cricket to a lion as 
 
 no 
 
EPSTEIN III 
 
 presented in painting or sculpture by the best of the " moderns," 
 is as notably different from what it looks on " realistic " pictures 
 or sculptures of the Landseer type as are the representations by 
 the old masters. The human anatomy which the public see with 
 the eyes of the Victorian academicians and as it appears on the 
 popular " natural " pictorial and plastic renderings is a proposition 
 notoriously discrepant from what it is in Egyptian or Assyrian, as 
 well as contemporary French art or mediaeval Italian and German. 
 It is a curiously childish way of reasoning to assume then that 
 things " are " what they seem to the mediocre power of observa- 
 tion, because the average spectator will have his vision chiefly 
 defined by suggestions derived from those works whose maker's 
 psyche he feels to be most like his own. Therefore his notions do 
 not proceed from his " innocence," which might indeed supply 
 useful material for a test, but the reverse. He is not free from 
 prejudice but consists of nothing else. 
 
 Nothing daunted by the divergencies of the various arguments, 
 their propagator, the historical art critic, is generally prepared to 
 make one set of conventions the norm from which he judges the 
 degree of success in representation reached by the artists of all 
 times. Either the " canon " of the antique or some " ism " 
 abstraction of the moderns or the " actuality " of " objective " 
 appearance of material forms must serve ; though while by each 
 method he may succeed in discovering as much order as will 
 satisfy him it must, when applied to any of the two others, yield 
 complete absurdity, and when he becomes sufficiently aware of 
 this to introduce slight modifications the absurdity will become 
 somewhat less in one case and increase as much in the other till a 
 perfectly balanced stability of the absurd has been established. 
 The very same things which in the works of one period are 
 ascribed to naivete, ignorance, unworldly helplessness, ingenuous 
 clumsiness, lack of resource, undeveloped vision, infantile imagina- 
 tion and nervous insensibility are, when they appear in another 
 period, explained as the unmistakable results of sophistication, 
 tiredness, pathological sensitiveness, lust of sensation, degenerate 
 refinement, perversity, an over developed vision and diseased, 
 decayed imagination. 
 
112 EPSTEIN 
 
 If only the law givers, who are perhaps themselves well-intentioned 
 and intelligently sincere, saw the nonsensical use made of their 
 proposed tests, they would flare up and break their aesthetic stone 
 tablets ; but they never do, probably realizing they would not 
 like the great irate prophet, so soon obtain new ones. 
 It should be mentioned that many highly intelligent readers derive 
 a real enjoyment and receive mentally invigorating suggestions 
 from reading essays on the history of art and descriptions of its 
 products. But while this may rouse their interest sufficiently 
 to make them devote more energy to the study of these, 
 it depends on their own intuition whether they come any 
 nearer to the kernel of the matter. They are usually no wiser 
 after those lectures, though they may be stimulated to a desire 
 for opportunities of undergoing emotions works of art may 
 convey to them, because with the rarest exceptions the things to 
 which their attention has been drawn are elements of the works 
 irrelevant to their artistic significance. Therefore the pleasure 
 derived from the study of such writings does not prove their worth 
 as an analysis of those parts that constitute the work a plastic or 
 pictorial creative utterance. 
 
 What these writings generally discuss, in the readable sections that 
 abandon for the moment abstractly aesthetical pretensions, are the 
 anecdotal aspects they with more or less justification detach and 
 which they consider as literary or philosophic vehicles of expres- 
 sion. With regard to works in a pure style this method is super- 
 fluous and misleading and it only becomes more applicable as the 
 works themselves become more pronouncedly the transcriptions 
 of literary or philosophical thought into plastic or pictorial medium. 
 Anecdotal and philosophically intentioned paintings or sculptures 
 are often quite genuinely appreciated by people who are full of a 
 very fine human sentiment. Only they are inclined to give the 
 artist credit for a quite different achievement from what he should 
 legitimately strive after. Their mistake proceeds from insufficient 
 realization of the nature of the artist's taste. They fail to realize 
 that they, as spectators, bring to a work, incomplete as an utter- 
 ance in the medium through which it comes to them, the support 
 of a willing emotionalism and so take upon themselves a trans- 
 
EPSTEIN 113 
 
 formation of the artist's idea which should have preceded his 
 conception — should be his work, not theirs. The artist has only 
 suggested to them things which by the act of their eager imagina- 
 tion excite in them emotions the work as such would be incapable 
 of causing. 
 
 If a man is shown an actual " landscape " through a frame and he 
 is capable of seeing it as a self-contained organic composition, that 
 means his eye and imagination are those of an artist. If a sequence 
 of occurrences from actual life were divided into a number of acts, 
 no playwright would be justified in calling it his creation, and 
 if the spectator followed the connections between the happenings, 
 discerned the motives, and brought form and order into what he 
 observed, the creative principle at work would be a product of 
 his own brain. 
 
 Think, for example, of the popular painting representing a man 
 being let out of a dungeon by a grim gaoler who, keys in hand, 
 peruses the document commanding his discharge while the loving 
 spouse who brought it, pressing the infant to her breast, casts a 
 defiant glance at the reading official over the head of her man 
 who weeps, his head resting on her shoulder. Everyone must 
 recall the pages upon pages of enthusiastic and poetic descriptions 
 of every thinkable kind of painting that form nine-tenths of all 
 that is written on art — sometimes with reasonable justification, 
 often without any. But when the writers of such effusions have 
 to say anything of a pyramid or a drawing of Picasso they are 
 baffled, as their method appears useless. Sometimes in similar 
 instances they will, without further ado, declare that these works 
 are perfectly " meaningless " ! But if they have not the ingenuous 
 courage of their opinion in its logical consequences, they will, far 
 from abandoning the good fight, pluckily go on to the bitter 
 end, vapouring merrily on the most distressing irrelevancies. 
 In extreme instances they may then become conscious of 
 emitting nothing but flatulent nonsense ; but in the majority 
 of cases where the works do not in the least justify their 
 methods, though the fact may not be so overwhelmingly apparent, 
 they remain unconscious of the gaseous consistency of their 
 comments. 
 
114 EPSTEIN 
 
 With regard to the well-known painting by Millais to which 1 
 alluded, the dramatic display of conjugal love and faithful devotion 
 is always a most touching thing, but picturing a moving sentiment 
 does not make a picture moving. It is the painter who does so, 
 and how he does so is a less tangible question that generally eludes 
 description in words. A pair of old boots are not things that 
 wring the heart as does the maid of Orleans, yet van Gogh's 
 painting of them conveys a deeper feeling* than a great many 
 heartrending representations of the fair saint at the stake. 
 The spectator before the anecdotal work is moved, quite inde- 
 pendently from the effect of whatever qualities the work may 
 possess, by the nature of his own thoughts, his imagination having 
 been set going in a certain direction by the subject and the anec- 
 dotal details the artist is presenting. It might, however, receive 
 this directing stimulus from any happening in actual life that he 
 might chance to witness. The state of feeling that remains from 
 this action of the imagination should have been established in the 
 artist's mind in the first instance, and if through the filter of his 
 disposition and human comprehension he extracts from it elements 
 which allow a purely pictorial or plastic embodiment, he could 
 find in his medium the corresponding expression for the senti- 
 ment he otherwise by literary suggestion must leave it to the spec- 
 tator to conceive. 
 
 The spectator's mind having been adjusted to the perception of 
 literary intentions in painting or sculpture, he will naturally, when 
 confronted with modes of expression that are unfamiliar to him, 
 attempt to find an explanation for their appearance which pre- 
 sumes in the artist a point of view that is akin to his own. The 
 occurrence of similar characteristics of style in works where they 
 are an integral part of a subtly organized complex — say a sculpture 
 by Michel Angelo or Donatello — is most likely to escape his 
 attention, his power of analytical observation being rudimentary. 
 
 * Only not of a literary complexion ; it should be well understood there is 
 no queslion here of the sentimental sort of rhetorical caterpillar-dredger that 
 calls for "soft music behind the scene"; a pair of old boots— the dear old 
 toiler that walked in them— how many a night through storm and rain — the 
 curly head of his little granddaughter— etc. etc., till the last clod thuds on 
 the coffin and the audience sobs. 
 
EPSTEIN 115 
 
 Lacking such guidance he will be the more confused by the same 
 elements in a work that exhibits them more plainly so as to appear 
 to his understanding the outcome of an arbitrary treatment that 
 conforms to some theory. Egyptian, Assyrian or Gothic sculpture, 
 for instance, may give him this impression or works as Epstein's 
 Maternity or the Oscar Wilde monument. He will assume this 
 theory to rest on a literary philosophical reasoning and conse- 
 quently ascribe to the artist, perhaps admiringly, intentions he 
 never dreamed of and be bitterly disappointed when the latter 
 appears more shocked or irritated than gratefully pleased by his 
 tributes. A few concrete examples may be helpful in elucidating 
 my meaning. It is perfectly justifiable to draw attention to the 
 fact that in much Greek sculpture animals are presented on a scale 
 relatively smaller than that on which the human figures in the 
 same work are executed, and to note that the sculptor obviously 
 intended the latter to occupy the spectator's interest to a greater 
 degree and that he found the modified relations of size a useful 
 means of establishing in his composition that harmonious balance 
 he desired to exist between its more and less important constituents. 
 If, on the other hand, I assert this to be a manifestation of philo- 
 sophic idealism and that the sculptor intended by this preponder- 
 ance to convey his belief in the ascendancy of man, of the superiority 
 of the human intellect over the beast, I arrive on the slippery path 
 of literary speculation where the justification for my assertions 
 would be far to seek. The reduction to absurdity of the hypo- 
 thesis is easily arrived at when I consider that in this case Diirer 
 when he drew an enormous horse next to a small man must be an 
 inverted idealist. I may note that the ancients presented Hercules 
 with a head that is diminutive in relation to the body and that the 
 latter's size is successfully suggested by these proportions, but it 
 would be ridiculous to say they intended us to understand that the 
 hero was a mere jack-screw with " no more brains than ear wax." 
 Yet one meets on every hand with such foolish comments, not 
 only on pictorial anecdotes that provoke them, but also on works ex- 
 hibiting a stylistic manner that by puzzling the observer who cannot 
 rely on his intuition creates in him a desire to have it " explained " 
 to him ; and the professional cicerone rushes in to oblige. 
 
ii6 EPSTEIN 
 
 Of Epstein's Rock Drill I may say it embodies the epic of 
 man's Promethean efforts to force the earth into his service — the 
 strained neck suggests how his eyes seek to pierce into the distant 
 night of the hidden future — that its tragic intensity betrays his 
 consciousness of his power's limitation, while his redeeming hope 
 clings to the tender embryo he carries lovingly in his toil-racked 
 body because it promises him immortality, the saving reward of 
 his heroic labours which alone can sustain the glorious battle to 
 the last stage of the race's progress on the woeful path. This does 
 not mean that the sculptor necessarily conceived the thought in 
 this form and is not an " explanation " of the work. The mistake 
 would enter were I to attempt to find detail of meaning in the 
 anatomy, the lines and proportions which give the work its real 
 beauty and are untranslatable into the medium of words. 
 Their origin lies in the artist's thinking in terms of sculpture pure 
 and simple. Again, in the Maternity I may draw attention to the 
 smile of fecundity, to the half-sleep of happiness that dreams of 
 the divine mystery of the new life developing. To see, however, 
 tendencies to emphasize this meaning in the style in which the 
 work is executed would be unjustifiable. One might go so far as 
 asserting that the fact that the figure is hewn out of the block 
 from which it does not entirely detach itself but in which it remains 
 slumbering, as the unborn form is itself not wholly separated from 
 the mother earth, is a powerful means of preserving profound 
 unity between the material form and the form giving thought. 
 But the style of execution, having once been fixed by the nature 
 of the idea, has its own demands that further determine the shapes. 
 I may be excused for the introduction of pedantic-sounding 
 technicalities when I point out that a sculpture which only in part 
 detaches itself from the block out of which it comes forward cannot 
 be logically " worked in the round." Its " dimension " must 
 necessarily remain rudimentarily indicated in the direction towards 
 the block of stone seen from the point from which the sculptor 
 faced it when starting to detach the form of his vision from the 
 chaotic infinity of the containing material. The shape of the mass 
 of the hairs on the Maternity^ for instance, demonstrates this 
 clearly. Seen from the front its outline is completely modelled, 
 
EPSTEIN 117 
 
 while from the side where it comes out of the block it shows 
 hardly any accentuation of the surface towards left or right, but 
 the curv'ed plane is an almost exact reproduction (infinitely re- 
 peated) of the line at its ultimate front (as the cylinder is the result 
 of the movement in the direction of the perpendicular on its 
 centre that reproduces the (n) dimensional form in its (n+i) 
 dimensional equivalent. 
 
 If the reader has grasped the meaning of my remarks and their 
 application to this particular instance, he will without difficulty be 
 able to recognize the effect of the formal requirements of the shape 
 of the eyebrows, the lips and the fingers, the chin, cheeks and 
 temples of the Maternity figure. Also he may find much become 
 intelligible to him that I have noticed baffles many quite un- 
 prejudiced spectators in sculptural works. In this connection I 
 should mention here the carvings on the surface of the little 
 flenite block, or the torso of the Sun God, or the shoulders, chest, 
 the face and the ornaments and figures above the head on the Oscar 
 Wilde fragment here reproduced. 
 
 Now I should not omit to emphasize the fact that the treatment of 
 shapes in relation to the spectator's — or sculptor's — position 
 should not be mistaken for the deliberate distortion of shapes 
 practised by sculptors who by means of such artifices intend to 
 reproduce in their plastic products not the relative measures of 
 an object but its projection on the retina from one certain point of 
 view, nor for the even more artificial distortion that is intended 
 — by practising the same substitution of reasoning for the organical 
 logic of the formal conception — to suggest to the eye a more 
 complete image of the object than would be visible from his stand- 
 point. 
 
 In the first instance the sculptor attempts to abrogate the effects 
 of " optical illusion," while in the second he endeavours to let his 
 work have the benefit of its potentialities by deliberately creating 
 them himself. Whatever they may be in respect to painting 
 that seeks acceptable conventions for the suggestion of depth on 
 the canvas (i.e. of an added dimension to those in the plane on 
 which the shapes are presented) the artist's justifications to apply 
 analogous methods to sculpture are of the most doubtful. 
 
ii8 EPSTEIN 
 
 » 
 
 The sculptor certainly cannot, like the painter, offer the weighty 
 plea of practically inevitable necessity. The eternal problem of 
 the painter to find a convincing relationship between the concessions 
 to the contradictor}^ demands of the space he represents and the 
 plane on which he does so is one that for a satisfactory solution 
 needs the infallible intuition of the creative genius. It is to the 
 few such " standard " solutions reached by the most profound 
 and lucid minds that the minor artists wisely conform, realizing 
 that apart from slight modifications, a new and equally con- 
 vincing solution is beyond their powers. A few immature minds 
 with a craving for originality at any price and a contempt for 
 traditions that is not counterbalanced by reliable discernment 
 and creative capacity, now and again surprise the world with 
 freak solutions of their own that naturally fail to establish them- 
 selves though, while the results convince no one, a plausible adver- 
 tisement of the innovator's intentions may succeed in maintaining 
 both friendly and hostile interest for some while. 
 If an extension of the same problem might be said to exist for the 
 sculptor at all, it is only of theoretical importance and conse- 
 quently none of the great sculptors have ever seriously occupied 
 their minds with it. Its importance has at times been artificially 
 inflated by ingenious cranks, but for a sculptor of genius, who 
 always finds his time and energy insufficient to materialize his 
 conceptions, life is far too short to afford him the leisure to bring 
 to the test of actual embodiment answers to a question which by 
 no stretch of the imagination could be considered vital to his 
 artistic occupation. 
 
 It is only in those times where as in the era preceding the period 
 of Donatello or more recently that of Rodin, there is an absence 
 of any creative genius and unprecedented personality that the 
 minor talents, amidst the general mediocrity of contemporary 
 sculpture, are apt to squander their gifts on fruitless preoccupations 
 with the feasible means of constructing devices from reasoned 
 contingencies whose application must automatically yield new 
 forms and original truth. Their desperate conduct reminds one of 
 the mediasval itinerant journeyman who, when he had exhausted 
 his resources, was easily tempted to trust to the persuasive edge 
 
EPSTEIN 119 
 
 of his dagger to procure for him some of the wealth that in such 
 an unaccountable way would persist in going to fate's favourites. 
 Precisely as the despairing artist, he usually gained the dishearten- 
 ing experience that his murderous violence turned out to be most 
 disappointing as a short cut to comfort and that for all the pre- 
 carious result secured by the experiment he might as well have 
 remained honest. Like Dr. Faustus they discover too late that 
 the devil drives a sharp bargain and is an old practised hand at 
 false pretences, giving precious little for a soul. 
 Many of those sculptors when abandoning the modelling of figures 
 " in the round " were not equal to the embarrassing problems 
 which the presumption of the spectator's incomplete vision is apt 
 to introduce to the various methods that can take its place. The 
 most generally distracting is that which culminates in the hybrid 
 form of the " bas-relief" where it becomes necessary to decide 
 on a method between the two extremes represented by the con- 
 ventions of the Chinese and Mantegna. The sculptor, though 
 starting from a conception that is occupied with form in the terms 
 of space, must adapt it to the modifying restrictions that derive 
 from the painter's pretences of " perspective " from the point of 
 view of the spectator whose introduction, not being as in painting 
 silently impHed by a formidable edifice of tradition, becomes 
 painfully obtrusive. The calculation of the results in sculpture 
 being of a disconcerting intricacy it appears practically impossible 
 to foresee them with any measure of success, and to the spectator 
 for whose gratification they are admittedly envisaged they prove 
 ultimately more bewildering than anything else. If the latter were 
 to attain to the proper appreciation of the forms presented to his 
 vision it would be necessary in order that he might profit by the 
 presentment of a projection with the resultant infractions, fore- 
 shortenings, altered angles and juxtaposition to have him fixed on 
 to one base with the sculpture. It would be the more logical pro- 
 cedure because the work remains incomplete without his presence. 
 The intrusion of the painter's mental equipment in these products 
 of sculpture has had one curious effect that might be specifically 
 mentioned, that is the displacement of the chief momentum of 
 expression of the human psyche (which in the antique — as I 
 
120 EPSTEIN 
 
 mentioned in the preceding chapter — spread over the entire body 
 and limbs of the figures) to the features chiefly. 
 The reason is that while it becomes ever more impossible to give 
 free expression and life to the human body which, in sculpture 
 that presents a " front " and no " back," is but partially shown, 
 it always remains possible to present with slight conventionalizing 
 the whole of the face on which naturally the entire physiognomical 
 power of expression becomes concentrated. On the effects of 
 ornamentally treated clothing and drapery, which (as in the bas- 
 relief, where it proves charitably useful to fill, hide, or relieve 
 the " surface ") naturally play an important role in " pictorial " 
 sculpture, and on its style I have dwelt at length elsewhere. On 
 those of Epstein's sculptures that victoriously revive the best 
 traditions of " sculpture in the round," and which show garments 
 on human figures, their treatment is a significant element. The 
 physiognomical vitality of the limbs and body of the impressive 
 Christ figure is wonderfully preserved by the treatment, technically 
 as ingenious as it is original^ of the tight-fitting garment. Yet for 
 all its originality it is as admirable a vindication of one long 
 neglected tradition as the massive repose of the rhythmically 
 arranged folds of the draped portrait head of Mrs. Jacob Epstein 
 is of another and different one. The perfection and completeness 
 of Epstein's modelling of a whole figure is convincingly demon- 
 strated by the infinite variety of formally fully balanced and 
 harmonious aspects they reveal from any point of view under 
 different lighting. The number of sculptures that can stand this 
 test will, after careful examination, prove to be a surprisingly 
 small one. 
 
 Anyone who never thought of attempting it would probably be 
 amazed to discover how numerous are the sculptures in which the 
 makers, emulating the ways of the painter, have sculptured the 
 " lighting " by a series of accentuations that, as much as the " per- 
 spective " attempts alluded to above, presuppose and necessitate 
 a fixed relation between the work's and the spectator's positions, 
 thereby diminishing the expressional versatility of the work. 
 This question of lighting, as revealing the perfections or deficiencies 
 of the form, should not be confounded with that of the work's 
 
EPSTEIN 121 
 
 position or surroundings. A work may be perfect in every respect 
 but hidden from view. Here it entirely depends on whether the 
 sculptor had the opportunity to place his own work in accordance 
 with its ideal destination and in a way that satisfied his own con- 
 ception of required surrounding and position. The consciousness 
 of the spectator's presence need not necessarily, but should, at 
 this stage at least, enter when conditions enable the sculptor to 
 reckon with it without having to degrade his conscientiously 
 considered vision. How different the results may be even when a 
 perfectly competent sculptor is given every opportunity to make 
 his wishes respected with regard to the neighbouring architecture, 
 pedestal, block serving as base and ornaments on or round it, one 
 may see from Rodin's failure to find a satisfactory position for his 
 Burghers of Calais (the placing of which in the garden by the 
 Houses of Parliament on the Embankment in London he personally 
 directed and supervised), and on the other hand from Donatello's 
 unqualified success in the choice of base and position of the 
 Gattamelata on the square of St. Antonio in Padua. 
 However, apart from the characteristic difficulties this part of a 
 sculptor's task presents, he is in our time and social conditions 
 in an uncommonly unfavourable position to have fair opportunity 
 for the development of his gifts in this respect, because art cannot 
 be said to constitute an integral part of contemporary European 
 life, in fact enters so little into it as to make torture of that artist's 
 life who would desire to see his works take their proper place in 
 our social organism; Even in the Catholic Church where 
 Occidental art found a last refuge it is at the present day admitted 
 only under mortifying conditions and stultifying restrictions. 
 This is the more regrettable as it is one of the few possibilities 
 remaining for the artist to see his works attaining to the dignity 
 of a destination commensurate to art's aims if it becomes part 
 of the surroundings of the place for worship where its presence 
 can acquire a ritual significance. It is now continually brought 
 home to any other but the commercial artist (who purveys ohjets 
 d'art as a marketable commodity) that he is a supernumerary 
 in modern society to whom it charitably extends a qualified 
 tolerance. 
 
122 EPSTEIN 
 
 No painter or sculptor — as distinct from the ambitious academician 
 who aspires to honours the community appreciates and can dispose 
 of and whose " career " it admits as a legitimate and laudable 
 " professional " proposition — creates with the object of seeing his 
 works solemnly entombed in a museum that does not even always 
 present the attractions of the mausoleum, any more than the 
 musician (I mean : the musician ; not the species of musical 
 clown that goes by the name) does so for the prospect of having 
 his composition brought to sound in a concert hall sandwiched 
 between any two others at the choice of the concert giver, to have 
 them contaminated by the presence of any hearer who may hold 
 them in the most venomous detestation but can for a few pence 
 buy the right to attend the mystery of its material realization 
 and to profane it by hissing and sniggering if he feels so disposed. 
 The man who desecrated one of the holy things in the temple by 
 laying his hands on it forfeited his life, but the wretch who stabs, 
 rips out or steals a canvas painted by Velasquez or Leonardo may 
 by our laws applied with the utmost severity be made to spend a 
 few weeks in prison and boast of his prowess. 
 A very few of the greatest create works that whatever their des- 
 tination make sacred the surroundings in which they communicate 
 themselves to those present ; the works devoted to the Gloria in 
 Excelsis Deo of a Michel Angelo, of a Palestrina or Rembrandt 
 carry the invisible temple round them at every time in every 
 place, even as the Ark of the Covenant that, when it had no home, 
 made holy the ground on which it stood and made the house or 
 the town and those dwelling in them prosper. But : " Iratus 
 est (itaque) Dominus contra Ozam, et percussit eum, eo quod 
 tetigisset arcam : etTmortuus est ibi coram Domino." 
 But those works are not therefore less that are not by themselves 
 capable of eliminating the thorny question of surroundings. 
 Then, according to conditions of time and place and the character 
 of racial culture, we find products of art taking their place in the 
 ceremonial of state, in popular festivity or entering as an integral 
 element into the arrangement of the houses of a wealthy and 
 spiritually refined aristocracy. None of those destinations is 
 preserved at the present ; with the exception of shattered and 
 
EPSTEIN 123 
 
 abortive attempts to make the architecture of towns a natural 
 frame for the product of sculpture which with the general absence 
 of practised discernment, good taste and reliable instinct, has 
 resulted in the barbarous monstrosity of modern German cities 
 and the insane " artistic interior," the search for a home for art 
 has been abandoned by the clearer minds who have recognized 
 its present hopelessness. They wait hoping for the advent of more 
 favourable conditions in a more worthy future as David renounced 
 the building of the Temple. 
 
 Meanwhile the exasperating tourist may continue " doing " the 
 musea, catalogue in hand, giving a superficial glance and an 
 appropriately superficial remark to any number of works, every 
 one of which, to be seen with some of the mental concentration 
 its maker devoted to it, would require as many days as the visitor 
 spares seconds in front of it. And the " music lover " sits through 
 his " program " whose length would exhaust the receptive powers 
 of any musician (I mean again " musician " . . .). 
 This ghostly mirage of a Gargantuan appetite is so insatiable that 
 no " art dealer " or gallery owner, no concert giver would under- 
 take to arrange for the showing or production of one single work 
 unless that itself were also of such antediluvian dimensions 
 as to deserve the attention of the art-loving ogre. 
 
 When referring to Epstein's Venus I alluded to the difficulties 
 most spectators have to contend with when seeing unfamiliar 
 forms in painting or sculpture. But it should be borne in mind 
 that these difficulties have a curious habit of only presenting 
 themselves where contemporary sculpture is concerned and 
 when the sculptor is still alive ; also when they cannot be 
 evaded by the simple process of classing the work as " exotic." 
 Nothing is more striking than to see someone staring with a 
 puzzled air at a piece of sculpture and to see his face clear with an 
 assured look of final understanding as soon as anyone obliges 
 with the convincing information that " it is Gothic, you know " 
 or that it is " antique " or " mediaeval " or " Indian " or " Chinese." 
 That seems to settle the matter in advance and preclude the neces- 
 sity for any further demonstrative curiosity. Now although this 
 
124 EPSTEIN 
 
 contentment may be absurdly exaggerated, it is certainly founded 
 on a proper recognition that it is rather fruitless to find fault with 
 conceptions of form that created a certain style ; one would only 
 wish people were prepared for its logical consequences and would 
 not insist on laborious " explanations " as soon as their amazed 
 incredulity is roused by the unexpected appearance of contem- 
 porary sculpture. The somewhat exasperating certainty that the 
 sceptical critic in front of Epstein's flenite figures would be imme- 
 diately satisfied if one were to tell him they are copies of gargoyles 
 from Notre Dame de Paris does not create a disposition for a 
 detailed justification ; all the less so because one knows that this 
 uncritical acceptance is not simply that of the anatomy student 
 who is not inclined to question the miscarried calf's right to two 
 heads and six legs, but that it is part of the outfit of the " con- 
 noisseur " who is ready to admire unconditionally when he knows 
 he does not risk a contradiction that has not already been met 
 by someone else. 
 
 He knows he cannot make a fool of himself without the justifica- 
 tion of precedent and if he does so it will be in, for him, select 
 company. Like his illustrious leaders, the professional critics, he 
 displays a courage based on a prearranged mutual understanding 
 that eliminates dangers. When his connoisseurship fails him it is 
 because he is put in the regrettable case of the poor fellow who 
 for thirty years performed nightly prodigies of marksmanship in 
 the music-halls till he lost his life because by misadventure some 
 uninformed assistant had actually loaded his rifle in ignorance of 
 the fact that one of the revived William Tell's wise precautions 
 was never to use any cartridges. 
 
 I have already discussed the infinite number of forms nature 
 suggests to the artist that remain hidden from coarser perceptions 
 and less native imaginations, and the implied justification which 
 evades the control of any but an equally fine sensitiveness. At 
 that place I briefly alluded to one of the more obvious instances 
 of this, viz. that of the forms revealed by motion for which a 
 material equivalent is not readily presentable. 
 In so far as it defines it and makes it apprehendable for our senses, 
 motion creates space. Spatial infinity being for us inconceivable, 
 
EPSTEIN 125 
 
 no space can be said to have for us an appreciable existence 
 before motion has taken place. Therefore every variation of 
 defined space is suggestive of motion which has taken place, and 
 so of arrested motion at least which has established the ultimate 
 form. 
 
 The fact that this impresses on the mind not only space circum- 
 scribed but also the as yet undefined form in space which would 
 have been involved if the arrested motion had been completed in 
 the direction logically indicated by the nature of the partly achieved 
 process, provides a rich field of suggestion for the representation 
 of which every artist has made use. It goes without saying that 
 a great many have made use of the recognition without being 
 personally conscious of it and that it is not necessary for doing 
 this to reason out the justifying causes of one's procedure because 
 the conviction of the artist gives him the courage and right to 
 trust to his instincts. These are, however, the very things which 
 constitute the origin of what I called the sculptor's " language " 
 and which, with the demands of the materials in which he pro- 
 duces form and of the tools the process requires, make the " laws " 
 to which his medium of expression conforms. 
 It is hardly necessary to point out that this medium is as capable 
 of conveying thought as any other and that the sculptor's language 
 is as definite and allows of as much precision as the language of 
 words. Only the most superficial appreciation of the possibilities 
 of communication can permit the erroneous belief that the language 
 of words is a superior vessel for the conveyance of human thought 
 and enables its user to attain to a greater precision and definiteness 
 than any other, because only the most superficial observer can 
 overlook the fact that the significance of any one word is different 
 for every human mind. It is only the common factor of the 
 various groups of associations it denotes in as many brains that 
 presents the generally reliable power of communication it offers 
 to its user whose more or less comprehensive intuition of the 
 remaining factors belonging to an infinity of different mental 
 equipments supplies him with that power of achieving influence 
 over other minds whose effects are usually ascribed to his 
 " power " over the " words." It is in the same way the 
 
126 EPSTEIN 
 
 sculptor's intuitive knowledge of effects and their common factor 
 on human minds that makes applicable his power for conveying 
 his thought. 
 
 This way of considering the different media of expression so to 
 say from the outside shows that however definite may be the 
 relation between two expressions in two different " languages " 
 it remains yet impossible to establish the analogy. While words, 
 lines, tones and colours may exactly " mean " one and the same 
 thing, it is not feasible to give a translation from one medium into 
 the other because no one mind that " speaks " one of these 
 " languages " perfectly can speak any of the others equally well, 
 though he may as perfectly " understand " them. As a matter 
 of fact the very perfection of his " understanding " would show 
 him the hopelessness of the attempt to preserve the appropriate- 
 ness of its expressions in " translation " which he knows are the 
 qualities on which rests the value of the work. 
 The task seems easy enough on the borderland of the different 
 domains, where their spheres of power overlap, but as each of the 
 two extensions derives its meaning not from its contact with the 
 other but from its immediate relation with the centrum of its own 
 sphere, the references would take one back to the remotest points 
 where the old problem represents itself. It is as in those lands on 
 the frontier of two countries where a mixture of two languages is 
 spoken ; the points of similarity facilitate intercourse, and diffi- 
 culties would not be reduced by reference to the centres behind, 
 where the two languages are spoken in their purest forms. 
 One can put the facts to a simple test by observing how a com- 
 mentator, when he detaches the anecdotal element from a paint- 
 ing, is apt to forget he is speaking of a painting at all, being only 
 occupied with the occurrence it presented. But he may talk of 
 King Charles's head for twenty-four hours without bringing us 
 any nearer to Van Dyck. 
 
 I have already referred to a few of the simple instances of forms 
 suggested by motion, as the circle, ellipse, parabolic curve, etc. It 
 should not be overlooked that in a derived sense the idea of arrested 
 motion and the form-modification its effect introduces is one of 
 the elements in some of the more familiar complexes that belong 
 
EPSTEIN 127 
 
 to the well-known conventions of representative art. Significantly 
 this is more apparent in those works in which the artist's intention 
 has been to convey a series of connected happenings and where he 
 has not thought it sufficient to select a characteristic moment from 
 amongst them, taking knowledge of the others in the spectator for 
 granted or leaving it to the commentator to divulge his meaning : 
 not to mention the instances where he has relied on the obscurity 
 of his incompleteness to create an impression of " profundity " 
 or to display on the other hand his erudition by a wealth of 
 pictorially irrelevant detail. In modern times the literary concep- 
 tion of painting or sculpture is so overwhelmingly evident that 
 it is almost forgotten that there was a legitimate method for the 
 painter or sculptor to represent action in the more obvious manner. 
 Its place has been taken by the tiresome and irritating " snapshot " 
 on canvas or in stone which by its painful incompleteness and 
 accidental nature leaves a disconcerting impression of artistic 
 insufficiency. The older artists were more justified who obviated 
 this by selecting those arrangements that lacked these factors of 
 accident by rendering (as the cinematographic film does at shorter 
 intervals in quick succession) a series of characteristic phases of an 
 occurrence they wanted to picture in a set of works forming one 
 whole. 
 
 The more primitive method of showing this was to execute them 
 on the same scale in the same manner and when possible to paint 
 or sculpture them as decorations of buildings where their position 
 would be fixed and they should not become separated. But the 
 better and more artistically legitimate method that has become 
 almost entirely neglected through the " intellectual " opposition 
 of the " realistic " academicians (when they are not posing as 
 " primitive " and " consciously archaizing " !) is that of uniting 
 the consecutive phases which present the completest picture of 
 the action in one composition. It is a composition of this kind 
 Rodin discovered and praised in Watteau's UEmharquement pour 
 Cythere, while in his own Burghers he may — on his own word — 
 have attempted something similar. 
 
 As long as the composition is logically constructed as a picture 
 or sculpture there is nothing from its own point of view which is 
 
128 EPSTEIN 
 
 absurd, as the contradiction of the " unities " of time and place 
 (whatever their justification with regard to the stage may be) 
 cannot destroy its organism. Such curious attempts as modern 
 painters have produced in which those different phases are " con- 
 densed," which only means presented not even as a form com- 
 bination but put on top of each other like Bertillon's " type photo- 
 graphs," rest on an abstract reasoning that leaves the demands of 
 the painting out of account, and the results are not in any way 
 convincing. 
 
 How the composition may be made to preserve its own logic in 
 spite of the " contradictions" that result from the multiplicity of 
 phases or places of action it comprises is sufficiently shown by the 
 numerous paintings of perfectly balanced construction that show 
 Paradise, Purgatory, Hell and Earth within the same frame : or 
 those that, like Lukas van Ley den's Saint George and the Dragon, 
 present the battle and its result next to each other, or like Murillo's 
 cure of the paralysed beggar by a monk, the performance of a 
 miracle next to the onlooker's amazement at the act achieved. I 
 might further mention the old painting in Rome on which, looking 
 from right to left, one sees Jonah being thrown into the sea, the 
 sea monster facing the ship, then the prophet in the beast's 
 jaws being cast on shore and finally resting under a flowery bower 
 inland : or the many beautifully grouped compositions by Fra 
 Angelico from the life of Christ that present several consecutive 
 phases of one occurrence, or the complete story of the miracle 
 performed by Niccolo di Bari in his painting in the Vatican, and 
 his various pictures of the Saints Cosmas, Damidnus and their 
 brothers, presenting the saints before their judges, their attempted 
 execution and their escape. 
 
 When in modern work, as in several of Epstein's sculptures, the 
 spectator is puzzled by unfamiliar forms he would be better 
 advised not to criticize before having reflected on the number of 
 manifestations of things outside visible reality that have during all 
 ages appeared in the works of the very great masters, admiration 
 of whose works he claims in order to justify his critical attitude 
 towards the " destructive " contemporary artist and his " unheard- 
 of " innovations. 
 
EPSTEIN 129 
 
 Also one should realize that the presentment in literature of entities 
 constructed from material gathered by observation of the most 
 remote separate subjects is generally accepted when the form- 
 giving power of the author imparts to them the reality of his 
 visionary convictions, and that in plastic or pictorial art one does 
 at least unquestioningly accept — ^valuing primarily the execution — 
 the presentment of those products of human fantasy that have 
 become famiUar through established convention. The imaginary 
 beings, part man, part beast, of the Egyptians or of the Assyrians 
 provide a remarkable instance, as do those of the Greeks. Mytho- 
 logy and its daughter-in-law heraldry have made the world 
 so familiar with fantastic beings and fabulous monsters whose 
 plastic representations are unhesitatingly accepted on account 
 of their legendary existence that one cannot but feel surprised 
 when the spectator hesitates before such creations of the 
 sculptor's fancy as Epstein's flenites or even his Mother and 
 Child (both the marble and granite), his Cursed be the Day or 
 similar works. One would think that whatever his intentions, 
 nobody keeping in mind the facts alluded to, would care to make 
 himself ridiculous by contesting a sculptor's right to the creation 
 of forms unknown in visible reality, without being dubbed a 
 barbarian. 
 
 Architecture and " architectural " sculpture has everywhere 
 executed form combinations of objects from nature, and frequently 
 refers to flora and geologic formations to which the fertile human 
 fantasy has lent animation and thus long familiarized modified 
 forms of man, animal and plant as suggested by those of pillars, 
 frames and similar objects whose own unalterable shape remains 
 a most important factor in determining the ultimate appearance. 
 When, as is the case with several of Epstein's works, the individual 
 imagination of the artist is capable of achieving what in analogous 
 cases the collective fancy of several generations of others has done, 
 this only means that one mind of genius can create what no com- 
 bined effort of however many less gifted could equal. Besides 
 their work is itself only a development of the use and application 
 of what once one artist of genius imagined and first produced. 
 The curious idea that good things spring up in a primitive form 
 
I30 EPSTEIN 
 
 somewhere and slowly grow into excellence as " folk songs " are 
 supposed to do is too grotesque an assumption for serious examina- 
 tion. Bulls with golden discs between their horns and men with 
 ibises' heads were no more frequently to be met on the banks of 
 the Nile than they are in Kensington Gardens. 
 It should be realized that it is a high manifestation of creative 
 imagination to produce such forms as we find in some of the 
 sculptures of Epstein, which without having had a destination 
 which determined them, have the beauty of logic. It is therefore 
 also an exceedingly rare one and the instances of objects being 
 produced of a shape that possesses the compelling veracity of 
 those that had to obey the logic of their required use occur 
 only at remote intervals. The wonderful shapes of the symbolic 
 head coverings which the Egyptian artists invented for their 
 gods and priests and their perfect proportions whose every 
 curve and relation of mass seems as inevitable as if they were 
 grown from a seed, are practically unique demonstrations of 
 such powers. 
 
 It is significant that the legends of nearly every religion ascribe 
 the origin of the sacerdotal vestments' designs to divine inspira- 
 tion, of which the laboriously detailed instructions relating to 
 them and to every vessel and ornament used at the ritual the 
 Pentateuch affords a remarkable example. 
 
 Among the very few objects used in daily life at the present 
 time that can be said to possess this beauty that the severe 
 logic of construction and the importance of every part give to the 
 ultimate form are the tools we use. The introduction into their 
 design and construction, that must reckon at every point with the 
 performances required of them, of an element of wayward fancy 
 and " artistic " caprice deducts from their precision and may have 
 disastrous consequences and is therefore rigorously avoided. A 
 railway bridge which is modelled on a Gothic monastery not only 
 looks inadequate and ridiculous, but is not very likely to answer 
 the requirements expected of it. If only the " artist who admits 
 no law but his sovereign right " to follow any momentary twist of 
 his fancy were in danger of breaking his neck on his own structures, 
 there would be less ostentatiously eager martyrs for their own 
 
EPSTEIN 131 
 
 causes and the real artist would suffer less from the foolish notions 
 that wanton buffoons have imparted to an ever indulgent and 
 credulous public. 
 
 There is no need even to go so far as to compare with the shape 
 of an anvil, a plane, a hammer or a simple chair the ornamental 
 monstrosities of third-rate artistic invention that are recommended 
 for the improvement of the home ; it will suffice to compare to 
 the shapes of such technically perfected instruments some of 
 the unspeakable objects an artistically intentioned industry of 
 arts and crafts has occasionally attempted to spring on an un- 
 suspecting public. 
 
 It is frequently assumed that such primitively powerful mani- 
 festations of creative instinct belong to periods of racial health 
 and youth, and their appearance is not usually associated with our 
 time, which is often supposed to be one of general decadence and 
 relaxing refinement, at least as far as the European races are con- 
 cerned. It is not, however, the advent of a fresh race, but the birth 
 of a new or the revival of an old ideal that stimulates fresh efforts 
 and interest. 
 
 The apostles belonged to the very race against whose degeneration 
 their exalted ire turned in the first place and it was the children of 
 that time of decay that called for the salvation of their examples. 
 If we admire the element of freshness in early Christian art, its 
 " naive," its " primitive " character, which to the eyes of the 
 uninitiated looks helpless and clumsy, we should not, as they 
 seem to do, forget that it was born from the new idea, that it was 
 the new conception of life seeking expression. To assume those 
 early Christians to have been a primitive people is to crowd the 
 events of a distant past so as to make them cover each other. They 
 existed before the invasion of the Barbarians from the North. 
 That in our time the advent of a " new " art, which means the 
 appearance of great artistic personalities in whose work are the 
 germs of an art that will be perfect, mature and " classic " for our 
 descendants, need not be announced by external happenings of a 
 startlingly momentous nature, should be evident to anyone who 
 understands that the greatest evolutions take place unnoticed by 
 the world at the time, in the silent worker's mind. Those first 
 
 *> 
 
132 EPSTEIN 
 
 Christians from the Mediterranean peninsula belonged themselves 
 to the decadent, over-refined Roman race whose artists had for 
 centuries displayed a mastery of realistic draughtsmanship. That 
 fact alone upsets the theory of art progressing and declining with 
 the rise and fall of the races whose great sons manifested their 
 creative genius through its medium. 
 
 The history of the arts shows to the fullest extent the notorious 
 prejudices of the average general historian who cannot help 
 arranging facts to suit his notions, ignoring the embarrassing 
 features and dismissing all inconvenient evidence. 
 In front of an artist's work, to be just to his achievement, it is 
 much wiser to distrust the orderly generalizations of a false erudi- 
 tion, to look at it rather with the freedom of one who was 
 unaware that any other work of art existed than with the pre- 
 tentious eye of the methodically instructed who, instead of judging 
 the man from his word and act, are only concerned to distinguish 
 his clothes so that according to his wearing the habit of the soldier, 
 the priest, the scribe or the artisan they may confidently classify 
 him and apply to him a ready-made opinion. 
 
PLATE I 
 
 DETAIL FROM TOMB OF OSCAR WILDE 
 {Frontispiece) 
 
 In Pere La Chaise Cemetery, Paris 
 
Q 
 O 
 O 
 
 21 
 D 
 
 < 
 
PLATE HI 
 
 THE CHRIST 
 
PLATE IV 
 
 CHRIST {slightly side 'uiew) 
 
■ij '-A-..!!^. ■•yitS^<f^\' 
 
 PLATE V 
 
 CURSED BE THE DAY WHEREIN I WAS BORN 
 
 John S^uinn Collection 
 
PLATE VI 
 
 MATERNITY 
 
PLATE VII 
 
 CARVING IN FLENITE 
 
 T. E. Hulme Colkction 
 
PLATE VIII 
 
 "Jchn Sluinn Collection 
 
 VENUS 
 
PLATE X 
 
 'John Sluinn Collection 
 
 MOTHER AND CHILD 
 
PLATE XI 
 
 John Siuinn Collection 
 
 CARVING IN KLENITE 
 
PLATE XII 
 
 ORIGINAL DRAWING FOR "ROCK DRILL" 
 
PLATE XIII 
 
 UPPER PART OF FIGURE FROM "ROCK DRILL' 
 
I'LATE XIV 
 
 HEAD OF A BOY 
 
 'John iiluinn Collection 
 
PLATE XV 
 
 'John ^iiin Collcclion 
 
 MRS. JACOB EPSTEIN 
 
PLATE XVI 
 
 MRS. JACOB EPSTEIN 
 
jatb ■ y^it 
 
 PLATE XVII 
 
 HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF HAMILTON 
 
PLATE XVIII 
 
 John Sitiinn Collection 
 
 EUPHEMIA LAMB 
 
PLATE Xrx 
 
 Otvned by H.M. ^ueen Alexandra 
 
 HEAD OF INFANT 
 
fl 
 
 PLATE XX 
 
 HEAD OF A CHILD 
 
PLATE XXI 
 
 BUST OF NAN 
 
PLATE XXII 
 
 HEAD OF A GIRL 
 
PLATE XXIU 
 
 Imperial IVar Museum 
 
 THE TIN HAT 
 
PLATE XXIV 
 
 MRS. AMBROSE MoEVOY 
 
PLATE XX \- 
 
 AN AMERICAN SOLDIER 
 
PLATE XXVI 
 
 MISS MARGUERITE NIELKA 
 
PLATE XXVH 
 
 Eumoipopoulos Collection 
 
 EUPHEMIA LAMB 
 
PLATE XXVIII 
 
 HfeLENE 
 
PLATE XXIX 
 
 MARCELLE 
 
 Coleman CoUeclioti 
 
PLATE XXX 
 
 MLLE. GABRIEI.LE SCENE 
 
PLATE XXXI 
 
 "John Sjiinn CoUection 
 
 THE LATE LIEUT. T. E. HULME, R.M.A. 
 
I'LATE XXXH 
 
 Owned by Hon. Evan Morgan 
 
 W. H. DAVIES 
 
PLATE XXXIII 
 
 John Sluinn Collection 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF DROGHEDA 
 
PLATE XXXIV 
 
 Imperial JVar Museum 
 
 ADMIRAL LORD FISHER 
 
PLATE XXXV 
 
 BUST OK A GIRL 
 
 'John Siuimt Collection 
 
PLATE XXXVI 
 
 IRIS TREE 
 
 John Hiuinn Collection 
 
PLATE XXXVII 
 
 LILLIAN SHELLEY 
 
PLATE XXXVIII 
 
 MEUM WITH A FAN 
 
PLATE XXXIX 
 
 BETTY MAY 
 
PLATE XL 
 
 Dublin National Gallery 
 
 LADY GREGORY 
 
(THW^*:- ■ 
 
 ' JS.. M ' -* a .; : ?■ ' - ' i' ■ .^sg ^ 
 
 PLATE XLI 
 
 John l^inn Collection 
 
 AUGUSTUS JOHN 
 
PLATE XLII 
 
 Dundee Art Gallery 
 
 MUIRHEAD BONE 
 
PLATE XLIII 
 
 Oixined by Josef Holbrooke 
 
 JOSEF HOLBROOKE 
 
PLATE XLIV 
 
 BUST OK A LADY 
 
PLATE XLV 
 
 'John Sitdnn Collection 
 
 BERNARD VAN DIEREN 
 
PLATE XLVI 
 
 Oivaed by Lady Hoivard de It^aUen 
 
 ELIZABETH, 
 DAUGHTER OF LADY HOWARD DE WALDEN 
 
PLATE XLVII 
 
 John iiuinn Collection 
 
 OLD ITALIAN WOMAN 
 
u 
 
 s 
 
 w 
 
 Q 
 
 Ul 
 D 
 O* 
 en 
 < 
 
 u 
 < 
 
PLATE XLIX 
 
 NAN 
 
PLATE L 
 
 Imperial War Museum 
 
 SERGT. DAVID FERGUSON HUNTER, V.C. 
 
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 1 
 
 SEP 2 9 1997 
 
 12,000(11/95) 
 
 LD21A-80m-3,'70 
 (NS3828l0)476-A-32 
 
 General Library 
 
 Univenity of California 
 
 Berlteley