Clive Bell - Art

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If it were said that art and religion were twin manifestations of
something that, for convenience sake, may be called "the religious
spirit," I should make no serious complaint. But I should insist on the
distinction between "religion," in the ordinary acceptation of the word,
and "the religious spirit" being stated beyond all possibility of cavil.
I should insist that if we are to say that art is a manifestation of the
religious spirit, we must say the same of every respectable religion
that ever has existed or ever can exist. Above all, I should insist that
whoever said it should bear in mind, whenever he said it, that
"manifestation" is at least as different from "expression" as Monmouth
is from Macedon.

The religious spirit is born of a conviction that some things matter
more than others. To those possessed by it there is a sharp distinction
between that which is unconditioned and universal and that which is
limited and local. It is a consciousness of the unconditioned and
universal that makes people religious; and it is this consciousness or,
at least, a conviction that some things are unconditioned and universal,
that makes their attitude towards the conditioned and local sometimes a
little unsympathetic. It is this consciousness that makes them set
justice above law, passion above principle, sensibility above culture,
intelligence above knowledge, intuition above experience, the ideal
above the tolerable. It is this consciousness that makes them the
enemies of convention, compromise, and common-sense. In fact, the
essence of religion is a conviction that because some things are of
infinite value most are profoundly unimportant, that since the
gingerbread is there one need not feel too strongly about the gilt.

It is useless for liberal divines to pretend that there is no antagonism
between the religious nature and the scientific. There is no antagonism
between religion and science, but that is a very different matter. In
fact, the hypotheses of science begin only where religion ends: but both
religion and science are born trespassers. The religious and the
scientific both have their prejudices; but their prejudices are not the
same. The scientific mind cannot free itself from a prejudice against
the notion that effects may exist the causes of which it ignores. Not
only do religious minds manage to believe that there may be effects of
which they do not know, and may never know, the causes--they cannot even
see the absolute necessity for supposing that everything is caused.
Scientific people tend to trust their senses and disbelieve their
emotions when they contradict them; religious people tend to trust
emotion even though sensual experience be against it. On the whole, the
religious are the more open-minded. Their assumption that the senses may
mislead is less arrogant than the assumption that through them alone can
we come at reality, for, as Dr. McTaggart has wittily said, "If a man is
shut up in a house, the transparency of the windows is an essential
condition of his seeing the sky. But it would not be prudent to infer
that, if he walked out of the house, he could not see the sky, because
there was no longer any glass through which he might see it."[6]

Examples of scientific bigotry are as common as blackberries. The
attitude of the profession towards unorthodox medicine is the classical
instance. In the autumn of 1912 I was walking through the Grafton
Galleries with a man who is certainly one of the ablest, and is reputed
one of the most enlightened, of contemporary men of science. Looking at
the picture of a young girl with a cat by Henri-Matisse, he
exclaimed--"I see how it is, the fellow's astigmatic." I should have let
this bit of persiflage go unanswered, assuming it to be one of those
witty sallies for which the princes of science are so justly famed and
to which they often treat us even when they are not in the presence of
works of art, had not the professor followed up his clue with the utmost
gravity, assuring me at last that no picture in the gallery was beyond
the reach of optical diagnostic. Still suspicious of his good faith, I
suggested, tentatively, that perhaps the discrepancies between the
normal man's vision and the pictures on the wall were the result of
intentional distortion on the part of the artists. At this the professor
became passionately serious--"Do you mean to tell me," he bawled, "that
there has ever been a painter who did not try to make his objects as
lifelike as possible? Dismiss such silly nonsense from your head." It is
the old story: "Clear your mind of cant," that is to say, of anything
which appears improbable or unpalatable to Dr. Johnson.

The religious, on the other hand, are apt to be a little prejudiced
against common-sense; and, for my own part, I confess that I am often
tempted to think that a common-sense view is necessarily a wrong one. It
was common-sense to see that the world must be flat and that the sun
must go round it; only when those fantastical people made themselves
heard who thought that the solar system could not be quite so simple an
affair as common-sense knew it must be were these opinions knocked on
the head. Dr. Johnson, the great exemplar of British common-sense,
observing in autumn the gathered swallows skimming over pools and
rivers, pronounced it certain that these birds sleep all the winter--"A
number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and
then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lie in the bed of a
river": how sensibly, too, did he dispose of Berkeley's
Idealism--"striking his foot with mighty force against a large
stone"--"I refute it thus." Seriously, is the common-sense view ever the
right one?

Lately, the men of sense and science have secured allies who have
brought to their cause what most it lacked, a little fundamental
thought. Those able and honest people, the Cambridge rationalists,
headed by Mr. G.E. Moore, to whose _Principia Ethica_ I owe so much,
are, of course, profoundly religious and live by a passionate faith in
the absolute value of certain states of mind; also they have fallen in
love with the conclusions and methods of science. Being extremely
intelligent, they perceive, however, that empirical arguments can avail
nothing for or against a metaphysical theory, and that ultimately all
the conclusions of science are based on a logic that precedes
experience. Also they perceive that emotions are just as real as
sensations. They find themselves confronted, therefore, by this
difficulty; if someone steps forward to say that he has a direct,
disinterested, _a priori_, conviction of the goodness of his emotions
towards the Mass, he puts himself in the same position as Mr. Moore, who
feels a similar conviction about the goodness of his towards the Truth.
If Mr. Moore is to infer the goodness of one state of mind from his
feelings, why should not someone else infer the goodness of another from
his? The Cambridge rationalists have a short way with such dissenters.
They simply assure them that they do not feel what they say they feel.
Some of them have begun to apply their cogent methods to aesthetics; and
when we tell them what we feel for pure form they assure us that, in
fact, we feel nothing of the sort. This argument, however, has always
struck me as lacking in subtlety.

Much as he dislikes mentioning the fact or hearing it mentioned, the
common man of science recognises no other end in life than protracted
and agreeable existence. That is where he joins issue with the
religious; it is also his excuse for being a eugenist. He declines to
believe in any reality other than that of the physical universe. On that
reality he insists dogmatically.[7] Man, he says, is an animal who, like
other animals, desires to live; he is provided with senses, and these,
like other animals, he seeks to gratify: in these facts he bids us find
an explanation of all human aspiration. Man wants to live and he wants
to have a good time; to compass these ends he has devised an elaborate
machinery. All emotion, says the common man of science, must ultimately
be traced to the senses. All moral, religious and aesthetic emotions are
derived from physical needs, just as political ideas are based on that
gregarious instinct which is simply the result of a desire to live long
and to live in comfort. We obey the by-law that forbids us to ride a
bicycle on the footpath, because we see that, in the long run, such a
law is conducive to continued and agreeable existence, and for very
similar reasons, says the man of science, we approve of magnanimous
characters and sublime works of art.

"Not so," reply saints, artists, Cambridge rationalists, and all the
better sort; for they feel that their religious, aesthetic, or moral
emotions are not conditioned, directly or indirectly, by physical needs,
nor, indeed, by anything in the physical universe. Some things, they
feel, are good, not because they are means to physical well-being, but
because they are good in themselves. In nowise does the value of
aesthetic or religious rapture depend upon the physical satisfaction it
affords. There are things in life the worth of which cannot be related
to the physical universe,--things of which the worth is not relative but
absolute. Of these matters I speak cautiously and without authority: for
my immediate purpose--to present my conception of the religious
character--I need say only that to some the materialistic conception of
the universe does not seem to explain those emotions which they feel
with supreme certainty and absolute disinterestedness. The fact is, men
of science, having got us into the habit of attempting to justify all
our feelings and states of mind by reference to the physical universe,
have almost bullied some of us into believing that what cannot be so
justified does not exist.

I call him a religious man who, feeling with conviction that some things
are good in themselves, and that physical existence is not amongst them,
pursues, at the expense of physical existence, that which appears to him
good. All those who hold with uncompromising sincerity that spiritual is
more important than material life, are, in my sense, religious. For
instance, in Paris I have seen young painters, penniless, half-fed,
unwarmed, ill-clothed, their women and children in no better case,
working all day in feverish ecstasy at unsaleable pictures, and quite
possibly they would have killed or wounded anyone who suggested a
compromise with the market. When materials and credit failed altogether,
they stole newspapers and boot-blacking that they might continue to
serve their masterful passion. They were superbly religious. All artists
are religious. All uncompromising belief is religious. A man who so
cares for truth that he will go to prison, or death, rather than
acknowledge a God in whose existence he does not believe, is as
religious, and as much a martyr in the cause of religion, as Socrates
or Jesus. He has set his criterion of values outside the physical
universe.

In material things, half a loaf is said to be better than no bread. Not
so in spiritual. If he thinks that it may do some good, a politician
will support a bill which he considers inadequate. He states his
objections and votes with the majority. He does well, perhaps. In
spiritual matters such compromises are impossible. To please the public
the artist cannot give of his second best. To do so would be to
sacrifice that which makes life valuable. Were he to become a liar and
express something different from what he feels, truth would no longer be
in him. What would it profit him to gain the whole world and lose his
own soul? He knows that there is that within him which is more important
than physical existence--that to which physical existence is but a
means. That he may feel and express it, it is good that he should be
alive. But unless he may feel and express the best, he were better dead.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from
circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there
is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of
mind. And if we are licensed to lay aside the science of aesthetics and,
going behind our emotion and its object, consider what is in the mind of
the artist, we may say, loosely enough, that art is a manifestation of
the religious sense. If it be an expression of emotion--as I am
persuaded that it is--it is an expression of that emotion which is the
vital force in every religion, or, at any rate, it expresses an emotion
felt for that which is the essence of all. We may say that both art and
religion are manifestations of man's religious sense, if by "man's
religious sense" we mean his sense of ultimate reality. What we may not
say is, that art is the expression of any particular religion; for to do
so is to confuse the religious spirit with the channels in which it has
been made to flow. It is to confuse the wine with the bottle. Art may
have much to do with that universal emotion that has found a corrupt and
stuttering expression in a thousand different creeds: it has nothing to
do with historical facts or metaphysical fancies. To be sure, many
descriptive paintings are manifestos and expositions of religious
dogmas: a very proper use for descriptive painting too. Certainly the
blot on many good pictures is the descriptive element introduced for
the sake of edification and instruction. But in so far as a picture is a
work of art, it has no more to do with dogmas or doctrines, facts or
theories, than with the interests and emotions of daily life.

II

ART AND HISTORY

And yet there is a connection between art and religion, even in the
common and limited sense of that word. There is an historical
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between the history of art and the history of religion. Religions are
vital and sincere only so long as they are animated by that which
animates all great art--spiritual ferment. It is a mistake, by the way,
to suppose that dogmatic religion cannot be vital and sincere. Religious
emotions tend always to anchor themselves to earth by a chain of dogma.
That tendency is the enemy within the gate of every movement. Dogmatic
religion can be vital and sincere, and what is more, theology and ritual
have before now been the trumpet and drum of spiritual revolutions. But
dogmatic or intellectually free, religious ages, ages of spiritual
turmoil, ages in which men set the spirit above the flesh and the
emotions above the intellect, are the ages in which is felt the
emotional significance of the universe. Then it is men live on the
frontiers of reality and listen eagerly to travellers' tales. Thus it
comes about that the great ages of religion are commonly the great ages
of art. As the sense of reality grows dim, as men become more handy at
manipulating labels and symbols, more mechanical, more disciplined, more
specialised, less capable of feeling things directly, the power of
escaping to the world of ecstasy decays, and art and religion begin to
sink. When the majority lack, not only the emotion out of which art and
religion are made, but even the sensibility to respond to what the few
can still offer, art and religion founder. After that, nothing is left
of art and religion but their names; illusion and prettiness are called
art, politics and sentimentality religion.

Now, if I am right in thinking that art is a manifestation--a
manifestation, mark, and not an expression--of man's spiritual state,
then in the history of art we shall read the spiritual history of the
race. I am not surprised that those who have devoted their lives to the
study of history should take it ill when one who professes only to
understand the nature of art hints that by understanding his own
business he may become a judge of theirs. Let me be as conciliatory as
possible. No one can have less right than I, or, indeed, less
inclination to assume the proud title of "scientific historian": no one
can care less about historical small-talk or be more at a loss to
understand what precisely is meant by "historical science." Yet if
history be anything more than a chronological catalogue of facts, if it
be concerned with the movements of mind and spirit, then I submit that
to read history aright we must know, not only the works of art that each
age produced, but also their value as works of art. If the aesthetic
significance or insignificance of works of art does, indeed, bear
witness to a spiritual state, then he who can appreciate that
significance should be in a position to form some opinion concerning the
spiritual state of the men who produced those works and of those who
appreciated them. If art be at all the sort of thing it is commonly
supposed to be, the history of art must be an index to the spiritual
history of the race. Only, the historian who wishes to use art as an
index must possess not merely the nice observation of the scholar and
the archaeologist, but also a fine sensibility. For it is the aesthetic
significance of a work that gives a clue to the state of mind that
produced it; so the ability to assign a particular work to a particular
period avails nothing unaccompanied by the power of appreciating its
aesthetic significance.

To understand completely the history of an age must we know and
understand the history of its art? It seems so. And yet the idea is
intolerable to scientific historians. What becomes of the great
scientific principle of water-tight compartments? Again, it is unjust:
for assuredly, to understand art we need know nothing whatever about
history. It may be that from works of art we can draw inferences as to
the sort of people who made them: but the longest and most intimate
conversations with an artist will not tell us whether his pictures are
good or bad. We must see them: then we shall know. I may be partial or
dishonest about the work of my friend, but its aesthetic significance is
not more obvious to me than that of a work that was finished five
thousand years ago. To appreciate fully a work of art we require nothing
but sensibility. To those that can hear Art speaks for itself: facts and
dates do not; to make bricks of such stuff one must glean the uplands
and hollows for tags of auxiliary information and suggestion; and the
history of art is no exception to the rule. To appreciate a man's art I
need know nothing whatever about the artist; I can say whether this
picture is better than that without the help of history; but if I am
trying to account for the deterioration of his art, I shall be helped by
knowing that he has been seriously ill or that he has married a wife who
insists on his boiling her pot. To mark the deterioration was to make a
pure, aesthetic judgment: to account for it was to become an historian.
To understand the history of art we must know something of other kinds
of history. Perhaps, to understand thoroughly any kind of history we
must understand every kind of history. Perhaps the history of an age or
of a life is an indivisible whole. Another intolerable idea! What
becomes of the specialist? What of those formidable compendiums in which
the multitudinous activities of man are kept so jealously apart? The
mind boggles at the monstrous vision of its own conclusions.

But, after all, does it matter to me? I am not an historian of art or of
anything else. I care very little when things were made, or why they
were made; I care about their emotional significance to us. To the
historian everything is a means to some other means; to me everything
that matters is a direct means to emotion. I am writing about art, not
about history. With history I am concerned only in so far as history
serves to illustrate my hypothesis: and whether history be true or false
matters very little, since my hypothesis is not based on history but on
personal experience, not on facts but on feelings. Historical fact and
falsehood are of no consequence to people who try to deal with
realities. They need not ask, "Did this happen?"; they need ask only,
"Do I feel this?" Lucky for us that it is so: for if our judgments about
real things had to wait upon historical certitude they might have to
wait for ever. Nevertheless it is amusing to see how far that of which
we are sure agrees with that which we should expect. My aesthetic
hypothesis--that the essential quality in a work of art is significant
form--was based on my aesthetic experience. Of my aesthetic experiences
I am sure. About my second hypothesis, that significant form is the
expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality--I am far from
confident. However, I assume it to be true, and go on to suggest that
this sense of reality leads men to attach greater importance to the
spiritual than to the material significance of the universe, that it
disposes men to feel things as ends instead of merely recognising them
as means, that a sense of reality is, in fact, the essence of spiritual
health. If this be so, we shall expect to find that ages in which the
creation of significant form is checked are ages in which the sense of
reality is dim, and that these ages are ages of spiritual poverty. We
shall expect to find the curves of art and spiritual fervour ascending
and descending together. In my next chapter I shall glance at the
history of a cycle of art with the intention of following the movement
of art and discovering how far that movement keeps pace with changes in
the spiritual state of society. My view of the rise, decline and fall of
art in Christendom is based entirely on a series of independent
aesthetic judgments in the rightness of which I have the arrogance to
feel considerable confidence. I pretend to a power of distinguishing
between significant and insignificant form, and it will interest me to
see whether a decline in the significance of forms--a deterioration of
art, that is to say--synchronises generally with a lowering of the
religious sense. I shall expect to find that whenever artists have
allowed themselves to be seduced from their proper business, the
creation of form, by other and irrelevant interests, society has been
spiritually decadent. Ages in which the sense of formal significance has
been swamped utterly by preoccupation with the obvious, will turn out, I
suspect, to have been ages of spiritual famine. Therefore, while
following the fortunes of art across a period of fourteen hundred years,
I shall try to keep an eye on that of which art may be a
manifestation--man's sense of ultimate reality.

To criticise a work of art historically is to play the science-besotted
fool. No more disastrous theory ever issued from the brain of a
charlatan than that of evolution in art. Giotto did not creep, a grub,
that Titian might flaunt, a butterfly. To think of a man's art as
leading on to the art of someone else is to misunderstand it. To praise
or abuse or be interested in a work of art because it leads or does not
lead to another work of art is to treat it as though it were not a work
of art. The connection of one work of art with another may have
everything to do with history: it has nothing to do with appreciation.
So soon as we begin to consider a work as anything else than an end in
itself we leave the world of art. Though the development of painting
from Giotto to Titian may be interesting historically, it cannot affect
the value of any particular picture: aesthetically, it is of no
consequence whatever. Every work of art must be judged on its own
merits.

Therefore, be sure that, in my next chapter, I am not going to make
aesthetic judgments in the light of history; I am going to read history
in the light of aesthetic judgments. Having made my judgments,
independently of any theory, aesthetic or non-aesthetic, I shall be
amused to see how far the view of history that may be based on them
agrees with accepted historical hypotheses. If my judgments and the
dates furnished by historians be correct, it will follow that some ages
have produced more good art than others: but, indeed, it is not disputed
that the variety in the artistic significance of different ages is
immense. I shall be curious to see what relation can be established
between the art and the age that produced it. If my second
hypothesis--that art is the expression of an emotion for ultimate
reality--be correct, the relation between art and its age will be
inevitable and intimate. In that case, an aesthetic judgment will imply
some sort of judgment about the general state of mind of the artist and
his admirers. In fact, anyone who accepts absolutely my second
hypothesis with all its possible implications--which is more than I am
willing to do--will not only see in the history of art the spiritual
history of the race, but will be quite unable to think of one without
thinking of the other.

If I do not go quite so far as that, I stop short only by a little.
Certainly it is less absurd to see in art the key to history than to
imagine that history can help us to an appreciation of art. In ages of
spiritual fervour I look for great art. By ages of spiritual fervour I
do not mean pleasant or romantic or humane or enlightened ages; I mean
ages in which, for one reason or another, men have been unusually
excited about their souls and unusually indifferent about their bodies.
Such ages, as often as not, have been superstitious and cruel.
Preoccupation with the soul may lead to superstition, indifference about
the body to cruelty. I never said that ages of great art were
sympathetic to the middle-classes. Art and a quiet life are incompatible
I think; some stress and turmoil there must be. Need I add that in the
snuggest age of materialism great artists may arise and flourish? Of
course: but when the production of good art is at all widespread and
continuous, near at hand I shall expect to find a restless generation.
Also, having marked a period of spiritual stir, I shall look, not far
off, for its manifestation in significant form. But the stir must be
spiritual and genuine; a swirl of emotionalism or political frenzy will
provoke nothing fine.[8] How far in any particular age the production of
art is stimulated by general exaltation, or general exaltation by works
of art, is a question hardly to be decided. Wisest, perhaps, is he who
says that the two seem to have been interdependent. Just how dependent I
believe them to have been, will appear when, in my next chapter, I
attempt to sketch the rise, decline, and fall of the Christian slope.

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