THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT From the Library of Henry Goldman, Ph.D. 1886-1972 ART WEI FIGURE, FIFTH CENTURY In .!/. Itgmifrs Collection ART BY GLIVE BELL NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS Printed iii England With 6 Illustrations Fifth Edition Att rights reserved StacK Annex A/ PREFACE IN this little book I have tried to develop a complete theory of visual art. I have put forward an hypothesis by reference to which the respectability, though not the validity, of all aesthetic judgments can be tested, in the light of which the history of art from palaeolithic days to the present becomes intelligible, by adopting which we give intel- lectual backing to an almost universal and immemorial conviction. Everyone in his heart believes that there is a real distinction between works of art and all other objects ; this belief my hypothesis justifies. We all feel that art is immensely important ; my hypothesis affords reason for thinking it so. In fact, the great merit of this hypothesis of mine is that it seems to explain what we know to be true. Anyone who is curious to discover why we call a Persian carpet or a fresco by Piero della Francesca a work of art, and a portrait-bust of Hadrian ART or a popular problem-picture rubbish, will here find satisfaction. He will find, too, that to the familiar counters of criticism e.g. '''good drawing/' " magnificent design," " mechanical," " unfelt," " ill-organised," " sensitive," is given, what such terms sometimes lack, a definite meaning. In a word, my hypothesis works ; that is un- usual : to some it has seemed not only workable but true ; that is miraculous almost. In fifty or sixty thousand words, though one may develop a theory adequately, one cannot pretend to develop it exhaustively. My book is a simplification. I have tried to make a generalisation about the nature of art that shall be at once true, coherent, and comprehensible. I have sought a theory which should explain the whole of my aesthetic experience and suggest a solution of every problem, but I have not attempted to answer in detail all the questions that proposed themselves, or to follow any one of them along its slenderest ramifications. The science of aesthetics is a complex business and so is the history of art ; my hope has been to write about them some- thing simple and true. For instance, though I have indicated very clearly, and even re- petitiously, what I take to be essential in vi PREFACE a work of art, I have not discussed as fully as I might have done the relation of the essential to the unessential. There is a great deal more to be said about the mind of the artist and the nature of the artistic problem. It remains for someone who is an artist, a psychologist, and an expert in human limitations to tell us how far the unessential is a necessary means to the essential to tell us whether it is easy or difficult or impossible for the artist to destroy every rung in the ladder by which he has climbed to the stars. My first chapter epitomises discussions and conversations and long strands of cloudy speculation which, condensed to solid argu- ment, would still fill two or three stout volumes : some day, perhaps, I shall write one of them if my critics are rash enough to provoke me. As for my third chapter a sketch of the history of fourteen hundred years that it is a simplification goes with- out saying. Here I have used a series of historical generalisations to illustrate my theory ; and here, again, I believe in my theory, and am persuaded that anyone who will consider the history of art in its light will find that history more intelligible than of old. At the same time I willingly admit vii ART that in fact the contrasts are less violent, the hills less precipitous, than they must be made to appear in a chart of this sort. Doubtless it would be well if this chapter also were expanded into half a dozen read- able volumes, but that it cannot be until the learned authorities have learnt to write or some writer has learnt to be patient. Those conversations and discussions that have tempered and burnished the theories advanced in my first chapter have been carried on for the most part with Mr. Roger Fry, to whom, therefore, I owe a debt that defies exact computation. In the first place, I can thank him, as joint-editor of The Bur- lington Magazine^ for permission to reprint some part of an essay contributed by me to that periodical. That obligation discharged, I come to a more complicated reckoning. The first time I met Mr. Fry, in a rail- way carriage plying between Cambridge and London, we fell into talk about contemporary art and its relation to all other art ; it seems to me sometimes that we have been talking about the same thing ever since, but my friends assure me that it is not quite so bad as that. Mr. Fry, I remember, had recently become familiar with the modern French masters Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse : I en- viii PREFACE joyed the advantage of a longer acquaint- ance. Already, however, Mr. Fry had pub- lished his Essay in ^Aesthetics, which, to my thinking, was the most helpful contribution to the science that had been made since the days of Kant. We talked a good deal about that essay, and then we discussed the possibility of a " Post-Impressionist " Exhibi- tion at the Grafton Galleries. We did not call it " Post-Impressionist "; the word was invented later by Mr. Fry, which makes me think it a little hard that the more advanced critics should so often upbraid him for not knowing what " Post-Impressionism " means. For some years Mr. Fry and I have been arguing, more or less amicably, about the principles of aesthetics. We still disagree profoundly. I like to think that I have not moved an inch from my original position, but I must confess that the cautious doubts and reservations that have insinuated them- selves into this Preface are all indirect conse- quences of my friend's criticism. And it is not only of general ideas and fundamental things that we have talked ; Mr. Fry and I have wrangled for hours about particular works of art. In such cases the extent to which one may have affected the judgment of the other cannot possibly be appraised, ix ART nor need it be : neither of us, I think, covets the doubtful honours of proselytism. Surely whoever appreciates a fine work of art may be allowed the exquisite pleasure of suppos- ing that he has made a discovery? Never- theless, since all artistic theories are based on aesthetic judgments, it is clear that should one affect the judgments of another, he may affect, indirectly, some of his theories ; and it is certain that some of my historical generalisations have been modified, and even demolished, by Mr. Fry. His task was not arduous : he had merely to confront me with some work over which he was sure that I should go into ecstasies, and then to prove by the most odious and irrefragable evidence that it belonged to a period which I had concluded, on the highest a priori grounds, to be utterly barren. I can only hope that Mr. Fry's scholarship has been as profit- able to me as it has been painful : I have travelled with him through France, Italy, and the near East, suffering acutely, not always, I am glad to remember, in silence ; for the man who stabs a generalisation with a fact forfeits all claim on good-fellowship and the usages of polite society. I have to thank my friend Mr. Vernon Kendall for permission to make what use I x PREFACE chose of the articles I have contributed from time to time to The Athenaeum : if I have made any use of what belongs by Jaw to the proprietors of other papers I herewith offer the customary dues. My readers will be as grateful as I to M. Vignier, M. Druet, and Mr. Kevorkian, of the Persian Art Gallery, since it is they who have made it certain that the purchaser will get something he likes for his money. To Mr. Eric Maclagan of South Kensington, and Mr. Joyce of the British Museum, I owe a more private and particular debt. My wife has been good enough to read both the MS. and proof of this book ; she has corrected some errors, and called attention to the more glar- ing offences against Christian charity. You must not attempt, therefore, to excuse the author on the ground of inadvertence or haste. CLIVE BELL. November 19134 XI CONTENTS I. WHAT IS ART? I. THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS page 3 II. AESTHETICS AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM 38 III. THE METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESIS 49 II. ART AND LIFE I. ART AND RELIGION 75 II. ART AND HISTORY 95 III. ART AND ETHICS 106 III. THE CHRISTIAN SLOPE I. THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ART 121 II. GREATNESS AND DECLINE 138 III. THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES 156 IV. ALID EX ALIO 181 xiii ART IV. THE MOVEMENT I. THE DEBT TO CEZANNE page 199 II. SIMPLIFICATION AND DESIGN 215 III. THE PATHETIC FALLACY 239 V. THE FUTURE I. SOCIETY AND ART 151 II. ART AND SOCIETY 276 xiv ILLUSTRATIONS I. WEI FIGURE Frontispiece II. PERSIAN DISH Facing page 3 III. PERUVIAN POT 75 IV. BYZANTINE MOSAIC 121 V. CEZANNE 199 VI. PICASSO 251 PERSIAN' DISH, ELEVENTH CENTURY (?) By permission of Mr. Kevorkian of the Persian Art Gallery THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS IT is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else : the literature of the subject is not large enough for that. It is certain, however, that about no subject with which I am acquainted has so little been said that is at all to the purpose. The explanation is dis- coverable. He who would elaborate a plau- sible theory of aesthetics must possess two qualities artistic sensibility and a turn for clear thinking. Without sensibility a man can have no aesthetic experience, and, obvi- ously, theories not based on broad and deep aesthetic experience are worthless. Only those for whom art is a constant source of passionate emotion can possess the data from which profitable theories may be deduced ; but to deduce profitable theories even from accurate data involves a certain amount of brain-work, and, unfortunately, robust in- 3 ART tellects and delicate sensibilities are not inseparable. As often as not, the hardest thinkers have had no aesthetic experience whatever. I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value ; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously false. Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though unlucky in that it makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his argument, mercifully blinds him to the absurdity of his con- clusions while leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic. People who set out from the hypothesis that Sir Edwin Landseer was the finest painter that ever lived will feel no uneasiness about an aesthetic which proves that Giotto was the worst. So, my friend, when he arrives very 4 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS logically at the conclusion that a work of art should be small or round or smooth, or that to appreciate fully a picture you should pace smartly before it or set it spinning like a top, cannot guess why I ask him whether he has lately been to, Cambridge, a place he sometimes visits. On the other hand, people who respond immediately and surely to works of art, though, in my judgment, more enviable than men of massive intellect but slight sensi- bility, are often quite as incapable of talking sense about aesthetics. Their heads are not always very clear. They possess the data on which any system must be based ; but, generally, they want the power that draws correct inferences from true data. Having received aesthetic emotions from works of art, they are in a position to seek out the quality common to all that have moved them, but, in fact, they do nothing of the sort. I do not blame them. Why should they bother to examine their feelings when for them to feel is enough ? Why should they stop to think when they are not very good at thinking ? Why should they hunt for a common quality in all objects that move them in a particular way when they can linger over the many delicious and 5 ART peculiar charms of each as it comes ? So, if they write criticism and call it aesthetics, if they imagine that they are talking about Art when they are talking about particular works of art or even about the technique of painting, if, loving particular works they find tedious the consideration of art in general, perhaps they have chosen the better part. If they are not curious about the nature of their emotion, nor about the quality common to all objects that provoke it, they have my sympathy, and, as what they say is often charming and suggestive, my admiration too. Only let no one sup- pose that what they write and talk is aesthetics ; it is criticism, or just " shop." The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion. On the con- trary, every work produces a different emotion. But all these emotions are recog- nisably the same in kind ; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side. That there is a particular kind of emotion pro- 6 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS voked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, &c., &c., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the aesthetic emo- tion ; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distin- guishes works of art from all other classes r i of objects. For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of " works of art " we gibber. Everyone speaks of " art," making a mental classifica- tion by which he distinguishes the class "works of art" from all other classes. What is the justification of this classifica- tion? What is the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class? Whatever it be, no doubt it is often found in company with other qualities; but they are adventitious it is essential. There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist ; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether 7 ART worthless. What is this quality ? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions ? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne ? Only one answer seems possible significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call " Signifi- cant Form " ; and " Significant Form " is the one quality common to all works of visual art. At this point it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective business, since my only data are personal experiences of a particular emotion. It will be said that the objects that provoke this emotion vary with each individual, and that therefore a system of aesthetics can have no objective validity. It must be replied that any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth dis- cussing. We have no other means of recog- 8 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS nising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emo- tion vary with each individual. Aesthetic judgments are, as the saying goes, matters of taste ; and about tastes, as everyone is proud to admit, there is no disputing. A good critic may be able to make me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till at last, receiving the aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art. To be continually pointing out those parts, the sum, or rather the combina- tion, of which unite to produce significant form, is the function of criticism. But it is useless for a critic to tell me that some- thing is a work of art ; he must make me feel it for myself. This he can do only by making me see ; he must get at my emotions through my eyes. Unless he can make me see something that moves me, he cannot force my emotions. I have no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannnot react emotionally ; and I have no right to look for the essential quality in anything that I have not felt to be a work of art. The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal ex- 9 ART perience that is to say, they must be subjective. Yet, though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judgments, and ulti- mately all aesthetic judgments must be matters of personal taste, it would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity. For, though A, B, C, D are the works that move me, and A, D, E, F the works that move you, it may well be that x is the only quality believed by either of us to be common to all the works in his list. We may all agree about aesthetics, and yet differ about particular works of art. We may differ as to the presence or absence of the quality x. My immediate object will be to show that significant form is the only quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art that move me ; and I will ask those whose aesthetic ex- perience does not tally with mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment, common to all works that move them, and whether they can discover any other quality of which the same can be said. Also at this point a query arises, irre- levant indeed, but hardly to be suppressed : 10 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS "Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a particular way?" The question is extremely interesting, but irre- levant to aesthetics. In pure aesthetics we have only to consider our emotion and its object : for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any neces- sity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it. Later, I shall attempt to answer the question ; for by so doing I may be able to develop my theory of the relation of art to life. I shall not, however, be under the delusion that I am rounding off my theory of aesthetics. For a discussion of aesthetics, it need be agreed only that forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a par- ticular way, and that it is the business of an artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall move us. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called, for the sake of convenience and for a reason that will appear later, " Significant Form." third interruption has to be met. Are you forgetting about colour ? " some- one inquires. Certainly not ; my term " significant form " included combinations II ART of lines and of colours. The distinction between form and colour is an unreal one ; you cannot conceive a colourless line or a colourless space ; neither can you con- ceive a formless relation of colours. In a black and white drawing the spaces are all white and all are bounded by black lines ; in most oil paintings the spaces are multi-coloured and so are the boundaries ; you cannot imagine a boundary line with- out any content, or a content without a boundary line. Therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of lines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves me aestheti- cally. Some people may be surprised at my not having called this " beauty." Of course, to those who define beauty as " combinations of lines and colours that provoke aesthetic emotion," I willingly concede the right of substituting their word for mine. But most of us, however strict we may be, are apt to apply the epithet " beautiful " to objects that do not provoke that peculiar emotion produced by works of art. Everyone, I suspect, has called a butterfly or a flower beautiful. Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that 12 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS he feels for a cathedral or a picture? Surely, it is not what I call an aesthetic emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty. I shall suggest, later, that some people may, occasionally, see in nature what we see in art, and feel for her an aesthetic emotion ; but I am satis- fied that, as a rule, most people feel a very different kind of emotion for birds and flowers and the wings of butterflies from that which they feel for pictures, pots, temples and statues. Why these beautiful things do not move us as works of art move is another, and not an aesthetic, ques- tion. For our immediate purpose we have to discover only what quality is common to objects that do move us as works of art. In the last part of this chapter, when I try to answer the question " Why are we so profoundly moved by some combinations of lines and colours ? " I shall hope to offer an acceptable explanation of why we are less profoundly moved by others. Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic emotion " Beauty," it would be misleading to call by the same name the quality that does. To make " beauty " the object of the aesthetic emotion, we must give to the '3 ART word an over-strict and unfamiliar defini- tion. Everyone sometimes uses "beauty" in an unaesthetic sense ; most people habitu- ally do so. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic. Of its grosser abuse, patent in our chatter about "beautiful huntin'" and "beautiful shootinY' I need not take account ; it would be open to the precious to reply that they never do so abuse it Besides, here there is no danger of confusion between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic use; but when we speak of a beautiful woman there is. When an ordinary man speaks of a beautiful woman he certainly does not mean only that she moves him aestheti- cally; but when an artist calls a withered old hag beautiful he may sometimes mean what he means when he calls a battered torso beautiful. The ordinary man, if he be also a man of taste, will call the battered torso beautiful, but he will not call a withered hag beautiful because, in the matter of women, it is not to the aesthetic quality that the hag may possess, but to some other quality that he assigns the epithet. Indeed, most of us never dream of going for aesthetic emotions to human THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS beings, from whom we ask something very different. This "something," when we find it in a young woman, we are apt to call " beauty." We live in a nice age. With the man-in-the-street " beautiful " is more often than not synonymous with " desir- able " ; the word does not necessarily con- note any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I am tempted to believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word is stronger than the aesthetic. I have noticed a consistency in those to whom the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful woman, and the next most beautiful thing a picture of one. The confusion between aesthetic and sensual beauty is not in their case so great as might be supposed. Per- haps there is none ; for perhaps they have never had an aesthetic emotion to confuse with their other emotions. The art that they call " beautiful " is generally closely related to the women. A beautiful picture is a photograph of a pretty girl ; beautiful music, the music that provokes emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls the same emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector's daughter. Clearly the word " beauty " is used to con- ART note the objects of quite distinguishable emotions, and that is a reason for not em- ploying a term which would land me in- evitably in confusions and misunderstandings with my readers. On the other hand, with those who judge it more exact to call these com- binations and arrangements of form that provoke our aesthetic emotions, not " signi- ficant form," but "significant relations of form," and then try to make the best of two worlds, the aesthetic and the meta- physical, by calling these relations " rhythm," I have no quarrel whatever. Having made it clear that by " significant form " I mean arrangements and combinations that move us in a particular way, I willingly join hands with those who prefer to give a different name to the same thing. The hypothesis that significant form is the essential quality in a work of art has at least one merit denied to many more famous and more striking it does help to explain things. We are all familiar with pictures that interest us and excite our admiration, but do not move us as works of art. To this class belongs what I call " Descriptive Painting " that is, painting in which forms are used not as objects of 16 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information. Portraits of psychological and historical value, topo- graphical works, pictures that tell stories and suggest situations, illustrations of all sorts, belong to this class. That we all recognise the distinction is clear, for who has not said that such and such a drawing was excellent as illustration, but as a work of art worthless? Of course many de- scriptive pictures possess, amongst other qualities, formal significance, and are there- fore works of art : but many more do not. They interest us ; they may move us too in a hundred different ways, but they do not move us aesthetically. Accord- ing to my hypothesis they are not works of art. They leave untouched our aesthetic emotions because it is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or con- veyed by their forms that affect us. Few pictures are better known or liked than Frith's " Paddington Station " ; cer- tainly I should be the last to grudge it its popularity. Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its fasci- nating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain though it is that Frith's master- 17 B ART piece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one half- second of aesthetic rapture and this although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is by no means badly painted. " Paddington Station " is not a work of art ; it is an interesting and amus- D ing document. In it line and colour are used to recount anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age : they are not used to provoke aesthetic emo- tion. Forms and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotion, but means of suggesting emotion and conveying ideas. The ideas and information conveyed by " Paddington Station " are so amusing and so well presented that the picture has considerable value and is well worth pre- serving. But, with the perfection of photo- graphic processes and of the cinematograph, pictures of this sort are becoming otiose. Who doubts that one of those Daily Mirror photographers in collaboration with a Daily Mail reporter can tell us far more about "London day by day" than any Royal Academician ? For an account of manners and fashions we shall go, in 18 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS future, to photographs, supported by a little bright journalism, rather than to descriptive painting. Had the imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufac- turing incredibly loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths instead of being Alma Tademas ! But photography has made im- possible any such transmutation of modern rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous ; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they are not unpleasant, which is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which "The Doctor" is the most flagrant example. Of course " The Doctor " is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to make it nugatory ; it is worse than nugatory be- cause the emotion it suggests is false. What it suggests is not pity and admira- tion but a sense of complacency in our 19 ART own pitifulness and generosity. It is senti- mental. Art is above morals, or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate means to good. Once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically of the first importance and put it beyond the reach of the moralist. But descriptive pictures which are not works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means to good states of mind, are proper objects of the ethical philosopher's attention. Not being a work of art, " The Doctor " has none of the immense ethical value possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy ; and the state of mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to me undesirable. The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian Futurists, are notable examples of descriptive painting. Like the Royal Academicians, they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey information and ideas. Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art. Their social and political theories are respectable, but I would suggest to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in thought and action and 20 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be born one. To associate art with politics is always a mistake. Futurist pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment ; their forms are not in- tended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These forms, by the way, whatever may be the nature of the ideas they suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary. In such Futurist pictures as I have seen perhaps I should except some by Severini the drawing, whenever it be- comes representative as it frequently does, is found to be in that soft and common conven- tion brought into fashion by Besnard some thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux- Art students ever since. As works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible ; but they are not to be judged as works of art. A good Futurist picture would succeed as a good piece!of psychology succeeds ; it would reveal, through line and colour, the com- plexities of an interesting state of mind. If Futurist pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in a lack of artistic qualities that they never were intended to possess, but rather in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal. 21 ART Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves them most the greater part is what scholars call " Primi- tive." Of course there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers (Notre- Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-pro- portioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as any better class building by one of those highly civilised architects who flourished a thousand years earlier or eight hundred later. But such exceptions are rare. As a rule primitive art is good and here again my hypothesis is helpful for, as a rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities. In primitive art you will find no accurate re- presentation ; you will find only significant form. Yet no other art moves us so pro- foundly. Whether we consider Sumerian sculpture or pre-dynastic Egyptian art, or archaic Greek, or the Wei and T'ang master- pieces, l or those early Japanese works of 1 The existence of the Ku K'ai-chih makes it clear that the art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive movement. To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang dynasties a develop- ment out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art of the Han decadence from which Ku K'ai-chih is a delicate straggler is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of Praxiteles. Between the two sotne- 22 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS which I had the luck to see a few superb examples (especially two wooden Bodhi- sattvas) at the Shepherd's Bush Exhibition in 1910, or whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the Western barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished in Central and South America before the coming of the white men, in every case we observe three common characteristics absence of repre- sentation, absence of technical swagger, sub- limely impressive form. Nor is it hard to discover the connection between these three. Formal significance loses itself in preoccupa- tion with exact representation and ostentatious cunning. 1 thing has happened to refill the stream of art. What had happened in China was the spiritual and emotional revolution that followed the onset of Buddhism. 1 This is not to say that exact representation is bad in itself. It is indifferent. A perfectly represented form may be significant, only it is fatal to sacrifice significance to representation. The quarrel between significance and illusion seems to be as old as art itself, and I have little doubt that what makes most palaeolithic art so bad is a preoccupation with exact representation. Evidently palaeolithic draughtsmen had no sense of the significance of form. Their art resembles that of the more capable and sincere Royal Academicians : it is a little higher than that of 4>ir Edward Poynter and a little lower than that of the late Lord Leighton. That this is no paradox 23 ART Naturally, it is said that if there is little representation and less saltimbancery in primitive art, that is because the primitives were unable to catch a likeness or cut intel- lectual capers. The contention is beside the point. There is truth in it, no doubt, though, were I a critic whose reputation depended on a power of impressing the public with a semblance of knowledge, I should be more cautious about urging it than such people generally are. For to suppose that the Byzantine masters wanted skill, or could not have created an illusion had they wished to do so, seems to imply ignorance of the amazingly dexterous realism of the notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the misrepresentation of the primitives must be attributed to what the critics call, " wilful distortion." Be that as it may, the point is that, either from want of skill or want of will, primitives neither create illusions, nor make display of ex- let the cave-drawings of AJtamiia, or such works as the sketches of horses found at Bruniquel and now in the British Museum, bear witness. If the ivory head of a girl from the Grotte du Pape, Brassempouy (Musfr St. Germain) and the ivory torso found at the same place (Collection St. Cric), be, indeed, palaeolithic, then there were good palaeolithic artists who created and did not imitate form. Neolithic art is, of course, a very different matter. 2 4 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS travagant accomplishment, but concentrate their energies on the one thing needful the creation of form. Thus have they created the finest works of art that we possess. Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic form may be as significant, in its place as part of the design, as an abstract. But if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful ; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art trans- ports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human in- terests ; our anticipations and memories are arrested ; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, in- human or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of 25 ART mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the Tightness and necessity of the combination ? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognised intellectually the Tightness of its forms without staying to fix our atten- tion, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance. If this were so, it would be permissible to inquire whether it was the forms themselves or our perception of their Tightness and necessity that caused aesthetic emotion. But I do not think I need linger to discuss the matter here. I have been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us ; I should not have travelled by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain combinations are perceived to be right and necessary, and why our perception of their Tightness and necessity is moving. What I have to say is this : the rapt philo- sopher, and he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that signi- ficance is unrelated to the significance of 26 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS life. In this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with emotions of its own. To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space. That bit of knowledge, I admit, is essential to the appreciation of many great works, since many of the most moving forms ever created are in three dimensions. To see a cube or a rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its significance, and a sense of three-dimensional space is essential to the full appreciation of most architectural forms. Pictures which would be insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly moving because, in fact, we see them as related planes. If the representation of three-dimensional space is to be called " re- presentation," then I agree that there is one kind of representation which is not irrelevant. Also, I agree that along with our feeling for line and colour we must bring with us our knowledge of space if we are to make the most of every kind of form. Nevertheless, there are magnificent designs to an appreciation of which this knowledge is not necessary : so, though it is not irre- levant to the appreciation of some works of 27 ART art it is not essential to the appreciation of all. What we must say is that the representation of three - dimensional space is neither irrelevant nor essential to all art, and that every other sort of representation is irrelevant. That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in many great works of art is not in the least surprising. Why it is not surprising I shall try to show else- where. Representation is not of necessity baneful, and highly realistic forms may be extremely significant. Very often, however, representation is a sign of weakness in an artist. A painter too feeble to create forms that provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out by suggesting the emotions of life. To evoke the emotions of life he must use representa- tion. Thus a man will paint an execution, and, fearing to miss with his first barrel of significant form, will try to hit with his second by raising an emotion of fear or pity. But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always. It means that his aesthetic 28 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS emotions are weak or, at any rate, imperfect. Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They know that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power of apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the work those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel for them the emotions that they can feel the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture, in- stinctively they refer back its forms to the world from which they came. They treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture as though it were a photo- graph. Instead of going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experi- ence, they turn a sharp corner and come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance of a work of art depends on what they bring to it ; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred. A good work of visual art carries a person who is 29 ART capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy : to use art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope for reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emo- tions remember pictures by their subjects ; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the repre- sentative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or no a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities ; but from these they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas. This last sentence has a very confident ring over-confident, some may think. Per- haps I shall be able to justify it, and make my meaning clearer too, if I give an account of my own feelings about music. I am not really musical. I do not understand music well. I find musical form exceedingly difficult to apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder subtleties of harmony and 3 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS rhythm more often than not escape me. The form of a musical composition must be simple indeed if I am to grasp it honestly. My opinion about music is not worth having. Yet, sometimes, at a concert, though my appreciation of the music is limited and humble, it is pure. Sometimes, though I have a poor understanding, I have a clean palate. Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent, at the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp is being played, I get from music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent ; I understand music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious neces- sity, as pure art with a tremendous signific- ance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life ; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concert. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin ART weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of life. Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased ; they would afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very well what has happened. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with a razor. I have tumbled from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a jolly country. No one need be ashamed or enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in the cosy valleys And let no one imagine, because he has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess 32 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art. About music most people are as willing to be humble as I am. If they cannot grasp musical form and win from it a pure aesthetic emotion, they confess that they understand music imperfectly or not at all. They recognise quite clearly that there is a dif- ference between the feeling of the musician for pure music and that of the cheerful concert-goer for what music suggests. The latter enjoys his own emotions, as he has every right to do, and recognises their in- feriority. Unfortunately, people are apt to be less modest about their powers of appre- ciating visual art. Everyone is inclined to believe that out of pictures, at any rate, he can get all that there is to be got ; every- one is ready to cry " humbug " and <{ im- postor " at those who say that more can be had. The good faith of people who feel pure aesthetic emotions is called in question by those who have never felt anything of the sort. It is the prevalence of the representa- tive element, I suppose, that makes the man in the street so sure that he knows a good picture when he sees one. For I have noticed that in matters of architecture, 33 c ART pottery, textiles, &c., ignorance and inepti- tude are more willing to defer to the opinions of those who have been blest with peculiar sensibility. It is a pity that cultivated and intelligent men and women cannot be induced to believe that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation is at least as rare in visual as in musical art. A comparison of my own ex- perience in both has enabled me co discrimi- nate very clearly between pure and impure appreciation. Is it too much to ask that others should be as honest about their feelings for pictures as I have been about mine for music ? For I am certain that most of those who visit galleries do feel very much what I feel at concerts. They have their moments of pure ecstasy ; but the moments are short and unsure. Soon they fall back into the world of human interests and feel emotions, good no doubt, but inferior. I do not dream of saying that what they get from art is bad or nugatory ; I say that they do not get the best that art can give. I do not say that they cannot understand art ; rather I say that they cannot understand the state of mind of those who understand it best. I do not say that art means nothing or little to them ; I say they miss its full significance. I do not suggest for one moment that their apprecia- 34 THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS tion of art is a thing to be ashamed of ; the majority of the charming and intelligent people with whom I am acquainted appreciate visual art impurely ; and, by the way, the appreciation of almost all great writers has been impure. But provided that there be some fraction of pure aesthetic emotion, even a mixed and minor appreciation of art is, I am sure, one of the most valuable things in the world so valuable, indeed, that in my giddier moments I have been tempted to believe that art might prove the world's salvation. Yet, though the echoes and shadows of art enrich the life of the plains, her spirit dwells on the mountains. To him who woos, but woos impurely, she returns en- riched what is brought. Like the sun, she warms the good seed in good soil and causes it to bring forth good fruit. But only to the perfect lover does she give a new strange gift a gift beyond all price. Imperfect lovers bring to art and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisa- tion. In twelfth-century Europe a man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T'ang picture. To a man of a later age, Greek sculpture meant much and Mexican 35 ART nothing, for only to the former could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions. But the per- fect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of time and place. To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagio- graphy are impertinent. If the forms of a work are significant its provenance is ir- relevant. Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures in the Louvre he is carried on the same flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more than four thousand years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried. It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal. 1 Significant form 1 Mr. Roger Fry permits me to make use of an inter- esting story that will illustrate my view. When Mr. Okakura, the Government editor of The Temple Treasures of Japan, first came to Europe, he found no difficulty in appreciating the pictures of those who from want of will or want of skill did not create illusions but concentrated their energies on the creation of form. He understood immediately the Byzantine masters and the French and Italian Primitives. In the Renaissance painters, on the other hand, with their descriptive pre-occupations, their literary and anecdotic interests, he could see nothing but vulgarity and muddle. The universal and essential quality of art, significant form, was missing, or rather had dwindled to a shallow stream, overlaid and hidden beneath weeds, so the universal response, aesthetic emo- tion, was not evoked. It was not till he came on to Henri- Matisse that he again found himself in the familiar world of pure art Similarly, sensitive Europeans who THE AESTHETIC HYPOTHESIS stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feel- ing it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats ; men change their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another ; only great art remains stable and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago ? The forms of art are inexhaustible ; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy. respond immediately to the significant forms of great Oriental art, are left cold by the trivial pieces of anecdote and social criticism so lovingly cherished by Chinese dilettanti. It would be easy to multiply instances did not decency forbid the labouring of so obvious a truth. 37 II AESTHETICS AND POST- IMPRESSIONISM BY the light of my aesthetic hypothesis I can read more clearly than before the history of art ; also I can see in that history the place of the contemporary movement. As I shall have a great deal to say about the contemporary movement, perhaps I shall do well to seize this moment, when the aesthetic hypothesis is fresh in my mind and, I hope, in the minds of my readers, for an examina- tion of the movement in relation to the hypothesis. For anyone of my generation to write a book about art that said no- thing of the movement dubbed in this country Post - Impressionist would be a piece of pure affectation. I shall have a great deal to say about it, and therefore I wish to see at the earliest possible oppor- tunity how Post-Impressionism stands with regard to my theory of aesthetics. The 38 POST-IMPRESSIONISM survey will give me occasion for stating some of the things that Post-Impressionism is and some that it is not. I shall have to raise points that will be dealt with at greater length elsewhere. Here I shall have a chance of raising them, and at least suggest- ing a solution. Primitives produce art because they must ; they have no other motive than a passionate desire to express their sense of form. Un- tempted, or incompetent, to create illusions, to the creation of form they devote them- selves entirely. Presently, however, the artist is joined by a patron and a public, and soon there grows up a demand for u speaking likenesses." While the gross herd still clamours for likeness, the choicer spirits begin to affect an admiration for cleverness and skill. The end is in sight. In Europe we watch art sinking, by slow degrees, from the thrilling design of Ravenna to the tedious portraiture of Holland, while the grand proportion of Romanesque and Norman architecture becomes Gothic juggling in stone and glass. Before the late noon of the Renaissance art was almost extinct. Only nice illusionists and masters of craft abounded. That was the moment for a Post-Impressionist revival. 39 ART For various reasons there was no revolu- tion. The tradition of art remained coma- tose. Here and there a genius appeared and wrestled with the coils of convention and created significant form. For instance, the art of Nicolas Poussin, Claude, El Greco, Chardin, Ingres, and Renoir, to name a few, moves us as that of Giotto and Cezanne moves. The bulk, however, of those who flourished between the high Renaissance and the contemporary movement may be divided into two classes, virtuosi and dunces. The clever fellows, the minor masters, who might have been artists if painting had not absorbed all their energies, were throughout that period for ever setting themselves technical acrostics and solving them. The dunces continued to elaborate chromophotographs, and con- tinue. The fact that significant form was the only common quality in the works that moved me, and that in the works that moved me most and seemed most to move the most sensitive people in primitive art, that is to say it was almost the only quality, had led me to my hypothesis before ever I became familiar with the works of Cezanne and his followers. Cezanne carried me off my feet before ever I noticed that his strongest char- 40 POST-IMPRESSIONISM acteristic was an insistence on the supremacy of significant form. When I noticed this, my admiration for Cezanne and some of his followers confirmed me in my aesthetic theories. Naturally I had found no diffi- culty in liking them since I found in them exactly what I liked in everything else that moved me. There is no mystery about Post-Impres- sionism ; a good Post-Impressionist picture is good for precisely the same reasons that any other picture is good. The essential quality in art is permanent. Post-Impressionism, therefore, implies no violent break with the past. It is merely a deliberate rejection of certain hampering traditions or modern growth. It does deny that art need ever take orders from the past ; but that is not a badge of Post-Impressionism, it is the com- monest mark of vitality. Even to speak of Post-Impressionism as a movement may lead to misconceptions ; the habit of speak- ing of movements at all is rather misleading. The stream of art has never run utterly dry : it flows through the ages, now broad now narrow, now deep now shallow, now rapid now sluggish : its colour is changing always. But who can set a mark against the exact point of change ? In the earlier nineteenth 41 ART century the stream ran very low. In the days of the Impressionists, against whom the contemporary movement is in some ways a reaction, it had already become copious. Any attempt to dam and imprison this river, to choose out a particular school or move- ment and say : " Here art begins and there it ends," is a pernicious absurdity. That way Academization lies. At this moment there are not above half a dozen good painters alive who do not derive, to some extent, from Cezanne, and belong, in some sense, to the Post-Impressionist movement ; but to- morrow a great painter may arise who will create significant form by means superfici- ally opposed to those of Cezanne. Super- ficially, I say, because, essentially, all good art is of the same movement : there are only two kinds of art, good and bad. Neverthe- less, the division of the stream into reaches, distinguished by differences of manner, is in- telligible and, to historians at any rate, useful. The reaches also differ from each other in volume ; one period cf art is distinguished from another by its fertility. For a few fortunate years or decades the output of con- siderable art is great. Suddenly it ceases ; or slowly it dwindles : a movement has ex- hausted itself. How far a movement is 42 POST-IMPRESSIONISM made by the fortuitous synchronisation of a number of good artists, and how far the artists are helped to the creation of signifi- cant form by the pervasion of some under- lying spirit of the age, is a question that can never be decided beyond cavil. But however the credit is to be apportioned and I suspect it should be divided about equally we are justified, I think, looking at the history of art as a whole, in regarding such periods of fertility as distinct parts of that whole. Primarily, it is as a period of fertility in good art and artists that I admire the Post-Impres- sionist movement. Also, I believe that the principles which underlie and inspire that movement are more likely to encourage artists to give of their best, and to foster a good tradition, than any of which modern history bears record. But my interest in this movement, and my admiration for much of the art it has produced, does not blind me to the greatness of the products of other movements ; neither, I hope, will it blind me to the greatness of any new creation of form even though that novelty may seem to imply a reaction against the tradition of Cezanne. Like all sound revolutions, Post-Impres- sionism is nothing more than a return to 43 ART first principles. Into a world where the painter was expected to be either a photo- grapher or an acrobat burst the Post-Impres- sionist, claiming that, above all things, he should be an artist. Never mind, said he, about representation or accomplishment mind about creating significant form, mind about art. Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching a likeness or displaying address. Every sacrifice made to representation is something stolen from art. Far from being the insolent kind of revolution it is vulgarly supposed to be, Post-Impressionism is, in fact, a return, not indeed to any particular tradition of painting, but to the great tradi- tion of visual art. It sets before every artist the ideal set before themselves by the primi- tives, an ideal which, since the twelfth cen- tury, has been cherished only by exceptional men of genius. Post-Impressionism is nothing but the reassertion of the first com- mandment of art Thou shalt create form. By this assertion it shakes hands across the ages with the Byzantine primitives and with every vital movement that has struggled into existence since the arts began. Post-Impressionism is not a matter of technique. Certainly Cezanne invented a 44 POST-IMPRESSIONISM technique, admirably suited to his purpose, which has been adopted and elaborated, more or less, by the majority of his followers. The important thing about a picture, how- ever, is not how it is painted, but whether it provokes aesthetic emotion. As I have said, essentially, a good Post-Impressionist picture resembles all other good works of art, and only differs from some, superficially, by a conscious and deliberate rejection of those technical and sentimental irrelevancies that have been imposed on painting by a bad tradition. This becomes obvious when one visits an exhibition such as the Salon