Clive Bell - Art

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I believe it is possible, though extremely difficult, to give people
both--if they really want them. Only, I am sure that, for most, creation
must precede contemplation. In Monsieur Poiret's _Ecole Martine_[28]
scores of young French girls, picked up from the gutter or thereabouts,
are at this moment creating forms of surprising charm and originality.
That they find delight in their work is not disputed. They copy no
master, they follow no tradition; what they owe to the past--and it is
much--they have borrowed quite unconsciously with the quality of their
bodies and their minds from the history and traditional culture of their
race. Their art differs from savage art as a French _midinette_ differs
from a squaw, but it is as original and vital as the work of savages. It
is not great art, it is not profoundly significant, it is often frankly
third-rate, but it is genuine; and therefore I rate the artisans of the
_Ecole Martine_ with the best contemporary painters, not as artists, but
as manifestations of the movement.

I am no devout lover of rag-time and turkey-trotting, but they too are
manifestations. In those queer exasperated rhythms I find greater
promise of a popular art than in revivals of folk-song and
morris-dancing. At least they bear some relationship to the emotions of
those who sing and dance them. In so far as they are significant they
are good, but they are of no great significance. It is not in the souls
of bunny-huggers that the new ferment is potent; they will not dance and
sing the world out of its lethargy; not to them will the future owe that
debt which I trust it will be quick to forget. There is nothing very
wonderful or very novel about rag-time or tango, but to overlook any
live form of expression is a mistake, and to attack it is sheer
silliness. Tango and rag-time are kites sped by the breeze that fills
the great sails of visual art. Not every man can keep a cutter, but
every boy can buy a kite. In an age that is seeking new forms in which
to express that emotion which can be expressed satisfactorily in form
alone, the wise will look hopefully at any kind of dancing or singing
that is at once unconventional and popular.

So, let the people try to create form for themselves. Probably they will
make a mess of it; that will not matter. The important thing is to have
live art and live sensibility; the copious production of bad art is a
waste of time, but, so long as it is not encouraged to the detriment of
good, nothing worse. Let everyone make himself an amateur, and lose the
notion that art is something that lives in the museums understood by the
learned alone. By practising an art it is possible that people will
acquire sensibility; if they acquire the sensibility to appreciate, even
to some extent, the greatest art they will have found the new religion
for which they have been looking. I do not dream of anything that would
burden or lighten the catalogues of ecclesiastical historians. But if it
be true that modern men can find little comfort in dogmatic religion,
and if it be true that this age, in reaction from the materialism of the
nineteenth century, is becoming conscious of its spiritual need and
longs for satisfaction, then it seems reasonable to advise them to seek
in art what they want and art can give. Art will not fail them; but it
may be that the majority must always lack the sensibility that can take
from art what art offers.

That will be very sad for the majority; it will not matter much to art.
For those who can feel the significance of form, art can never be less
than a religion. In art these find what other religious natures found
and still find, I doubt not, in impassioned prayer and worship. They
find that emotional confidence, that assurance of absolute good, which
makes of life a momentous and harmonious whole. Because the aesthetic
emotions are outside and above life, it is possible to take refuge in
them from life. He who has once lost himself in an "O Altitudo" will not
be tempted to over-estimate the fussy excitements of action. He who can
withdraw into the world of ecstasy will know what to think of
circumstance. He who goes daily into the world of aesthetic emotion
returns to the world of human affairs equipped to face it courageously
and even a little contemptuously. And if by comparison with aesthetic
rapture he finds most human passion trivial, he need not on that account
become unsympathetic or inhuman. For practical purposes, even, it is
possible that the religion of art will serve a man better than the
religion of humanity. He may learn in another world to doubt the extreme
importance of this, but if that doubt dims his enthusiasm for some
things that are truly excellent it will dispel his illusions about many
that are not. What he loses in philanthropy he may gain in magnanimity;
and because his religion does not begin with an injunction to love all
men, it will not end, perhaps, in persuading him to hate most of them.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: An example of this was the temporary police-court set up
recently in Francis Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road. I do not
know whether it yet stands; if so, it is one of the few tolerable pieces
of modern architecture in London.]

[Footnote 28: We may hope much from the Omega Workshops in London; but
at present they employ only trained artists. We have yet to see what
effect they will have on the untrained.]

THE END

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