Clive Bell - Art
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Clive Bell >> Art
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III
ART AND ETHICS
Between me and the pleasant places of history remains, however, one ugly
barrier. I cannot dabble and paddle in the pools and shallows of the
past until I have answered a question so absurd that the nicest people
never tire of asking it: "What is the moral justification of art?" Of
course they are right who insist that the creation of art must be
justified on ethical grounds: all human activities must be so justified.
It is the philosopher's privilege to call upon the artist to show that
what he is about is either good in itself or a means to good. It is the
artist's duty to reply: "Art is good because it exalts to a state of
ecstasy better far than anything a benumbed moralist can even guess at;
so shut up." Philosophically he is quite right; only, philosophy is not
so simple as that. Let us try to answer philosophically.
The moralist inquires whether art is either good in itself or a means
to good. Before answering, we will ask what he means by the word "good,"
not because it is in the least doubtful, but to make him think. In fact,
Mr. G.E. Moore has shown pretty conclusively in his _Principia Ethica_
that by "good" everyone means just good. We all know quite well what we
mean though we cannot define it. "Good" can no more be defined than
"Red": no quality can be defined. Nevertheless we know perfectly well
what we mean when we say that a thing is "good" or "red." This is so
obviously true that its statement has greatly disconcerted, not to say
enraged, the orthodox philosophers.
Orthodox philosophers are by no means agreed as to what we do mean by
"good," only they are sure that we cannot mean what we say. They used to
be fond of assuming that "good" meant pleasure; or, at any rate, that
pleasure was the sole good as an end: two very different propositions.
That "good" means "pleasure" and that pleasure is the sole good was the
opinion of the Hedonists, and is still the opinion of any Utilitarians
who may have lingered on into the twentieth century. They enjoy the
honour of being the only ethical fallacies worth the powder and shot of
a writer on art. I can imagine no more delicate or convincing piece of
logic than that by which Mr. G.E. Moore disposes of both. But it is none
of my business to do clumsily what Mr. Moore has done exquisitely. I
have no mind by attempting to reproduce his dialectic to incur the
merited ridicule of those familiar with the _Principia Ethica_ or to
spoil the pleasure of those who will be wise enough to run out this very
minute and order a masterpiece with which they happen to be
unacquainted. For my immediate purpose it is necessary only to borrow
one shaft from that well-stocked armoury.
To him who believes that pleasure is the sole good, I will put this
question: Does he, like John Stuart Mill, and everyone else I ever heard
of, speak of "higher and lower" or "better and worse" or "superior and
inferior" pleasures? And, if so, does he not perceive that he has given
away his case? For, when he says that one pleasure is "higher" or
"better" than another, he does not mean that it is greater in _quantity_
but superior in _quality_.
On page 7 of _Utilitarianism_, J.S. Mill says:--
"If one of the two (pleasures) is, by those who are competently
acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they
prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater
amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of
the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are
justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in
quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in
comparison, of small account."
But if pleasure be the sole good, the only possible criterion of
pleasures is quantity of pleasure. "Higher" or "better" can only mean
containing more pleasure. To speak of "better pleasures" in any other
sense is to make the goodness of the sole good as an end depend upon
something which, _ex hypothesi_, is not good as an end. Mill is as one
who, having set up sweetness as the sole good quality in jam, prefers
Tiptree to Crosse and Blackwell, not because it is sweeter, but because
it possesses a better kind of sweetness. To do so is to discard
sweetness as an ultimate criterion and to set up something else in its
place. So, when Mill, like everyone else, speaks of "better" or
"higher" or "superior" pleasures, he discards pleasure as an ultimate
criterion, and thereby admits that pleasure is not the sole good. He
feels that some pleasures are better than others, and determines their
respective values by the degree in which they possess that quality which
all recognise but none can define--goodness. By higher and lower,
superior and inferior pleasures we mean simply more good and less good
pleasures. There are, therefore, two different qualities, Pleasantness
and Goodness. Pleasure, amongst other things, may be good; but pleasure
cannot mean good. By "good" we cannot mean "pleasureable;" for, as we
see, there is a quality, "goodness," so distinct from pleasure that we
speak of pleasures that are more or less good without meaning pleasures
that are more or less pleasant. By "good," then, we do not mean
"pleasure," neither is pleasure the sole good.
Mr. Moore goes on to inquire what things are good in themselves, as ends
that is to say. He comes to a conclusion with which we all agree, but
for which few could have found convincing and logical arguments: "states
of mind," he shows, alone are good as ends.[9] People who have very
little taste for logic will find a simple and satisfactory proof of this
conclusion afforded by what is called "the method of isolation."
That which is good as an end will retain some, at any rate, of its value
in complete isolation: it will retain all its value as an end. That
which is good as a means only will lose all its value in isolation. That
which is good as an end will remain valuable even when deprived of all
its consequences and left with nothing but bare existence. Therefore, we
can discover whether honestly we feel some thing to be good as an end,
if only we can conceive it in complete isolation, and be sure that so
isolated it remains valuable. Bread is good. Is bread good as an end or
as a means? Conceive a loaf existing in an uninhabited and uninhabitable
planet. Does it seem to lose its value? That is a little too easy. The
physical universe appears to most people immensely good, for towards
nature they feel violently that emotional reaction which brings to the
lips the epithet "good"; but if the physical universe were not related
to mind, if it were never to provoke an emotional reaction, if no mind
were ever to be affected by it, and if it had no mind of its own, would
it still appear good? There are two stars: one is, and ever will be,
void of life, on the other exists a fragment of just living protoplasm
which will never develop, will never become conscious. Can we say
honestly that we feel one to be better than the other? Is life itself
good as an end? A clear judgment is made difficult by the fact that one
cannot conceive anything without feeling something for it; one's very
conceptions provoke states of mind and thus acquire value as means. Let
us ask ourselves, bluntly, can that which has no mind and affects no
mind have value? Surely not. But anything which has a mind can have
intrinsic value, and anything that affects a mind may become valuable as
a means, since the state of mind produced may be valuable in itself.
Isolate that mind. Isolate the state of mind of a man in love or rapt in
contemplation; it does not seem to lose all its value. I do not say that
its value is not decreased; obviously, it loses its value as a means to
producing good states of mind in others. But a certain value does
subsist--an intrinsic value. Populate the lone star with one human mind
and every part of that star becomes potentially valuable as a means,
because it may be a means to that which is good as an end--a good state
of mind. The state of mind of a person in love or rapt in contemplation
suffices in itself. We do not stay to inquire "What useful purpose does
this serve, whom does it benefit, and how?" We say directly and with
conviction--"This is good."
When we are challenged to justify our opinion that anything, other than
a state of mind, is good, we, feeling it to be a means only, do very
properly seek its good effects, and our last justification is always
that it produces good states of mind. Thus, when asked why we call a
patent fertiliser good, we may, if we can find a listener, show that the
fertiliser is a means to good crops, good crops a means to food, food a
means to life, and life a necessary condition of good states of mind.
Further we cannot go. When asked why we hold a particular state of mind
to be good, the state of aesthetic contemplation for instance, we can
but reply that to us its goodness is self-evident. Some states of mind
appear to be good independently of their consequences. No other things
appear to be good in this way. We conclude, therefore, that good states
of mind are alone good as ends.
To justify ethically any human activity, we must inquire--"Is this a
means to good states of mind?" In the case of art our answer will be
prompt and emphatic. Art is not only a means to good states of mind,
but, perhaps, the most direct and potent that we possess. Nothing is
more direct, because nothing affects the mind more immediately; nothing
is more potent, because there is no state of mind more excellent or more
intense than the state of aesthetic contemplation. This being so, to
seek any other moral justification for art, to seek in art a means to
anything less than good states of mind, is an act of wrong-headedness to
be committed only by a fool or a man of genius.
Many fools have committed it and one man of genius has made it
notorious. Never was cart put more obstructively before horse than when
Tolstoi announced that the justification of art was its power of
promoting good actions. As if actions were ends in themselves! There is
neither virtue nor vice in running: but to run with good tidings is
commendable, to run away with an old lady's purse is not. There is no
merit in shouting: but to speak up for truth and justice is well, to
deafen the world with charlatanry is damnable. Always it is the end in
view that gives value to action; and, ultimately, the end of all good
actions must be to create or encourage or make possible good states of
mind. Therefore, inciting people to good actions by means of edifying
images is a respectable trade and a roundabout means to good. Creating
works of art is as direct a means to good as a human being can practise.
Just in this fact lies the tremendous importance of art: there is no
more direct means to good.
To pronounce anything a work of art is, therefore, to make a momentous
moral judgment. It is to credit an object with being so direct and
powerful a means to good that we need not trouble ourselves about any
other of its possible consequences. But even were this not the case, the
habit of introducing moral considerations into judgments between
particular works of art would be inexcusable. Let the moralist make a
judgment about art as a whole, let him assign it what he considers its
proper place amongst means to good, but in aesthetic judgments, in
judgments between members of the same class, in judgments between works
of art considered as art, let him hold his tongue. If he esteem art
anything less than equal to the greatest means to good he mistakes. But
granting, for the sake of peace, its inferiority to some, I will yet
remind him that his moral judgments about the value of particular works
of art have nothing to do with their artistic value. The judge at Epsom
is not permitted to disqualify the winner of the Derby in favour of the
horse that finished last but one on the ground that the latter is just
the animal for the Archbishop of Canterbury's brougham.
Define art as you please, preferably in accordance with my ideas; assign
it what place you will in the moral system; and then discriminate
between works of art according to their excellence in that quality, or
those qualities, that you have laid down in your definition as essential
and peculiar to works of art. You may, of course, make ethical judgments
about particular works, not as works of art, but as members of some
other class, or as independent and unclassified parts of the universe.
You may hold that a particular picture by the President of the Royal
Academy is a greater means to good than one by the glory of the New
English Art Club, and that a penny bun is better than either. In such a
case you will be making a moral and not an aesthetic judgment. Therefore
it will be right to take into account the area of the canvases, the
thickness of the frames, and the potential value of each as fuel or
shelter against the rigours of our climate. In casting up accounts you
should not neglect their possible effects on the middle-aged people who
visit Burlington House and the Suffolk Street Gallery; nor must you
forget the consciences of those who handle the Chantry funds, or of
those whom high prices provoke to emulation. You will be making a moral
and not an aesthetic judgment; and if you have concluded that neither
picture is a work of art, though you may be wasting your time, you will
not be making yourself ridiculous. But when you treat a picture as a
work of art, you have, unconsciously perhaps, made a far more important
moral judgment. You have assigned it to a class of objects so powerful
and direct as means to spiritual exaltation that all minor merits are
inconsiderable. Paradoxical as it may seem, the only relevant qualities
in a work of art, judged as art, are artistic qualities: judged as a
means to good, no other qualities are worth considering; for there are
no qualities of greater moral value than artistic qualities, since there
is no greater means to good than art.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: "An Essay in Aesthetics," by Roger Fry: _The New
Quarterly_, No. 6, vol. ii.]
[Footnote 6: McTaggart: _Some Dogmas of Religion_.]
[Footnote 7: I am aware that there are men of science who preserve an
open mind as to the reality of the physical universe, and recognise that
what is known as "the scientific hypothesis" leaves out of account just
those things that seem to us most real. Doubtless these are the true men
of science; they are not the common ones.]
[Footnote 8: I should not have expected the wars of so-called religion
or the Puritan revolution to have awakened in men a sense of the
emotional significance of the universe, and I should be a good deal
surprised if Sir Edward Carson's agitation were to produce in the
North-East of Ireland a crop of first-rate formal expression.]
[Footnote 9: Formerly he held that inanimate beauty also was good in
itself. But this tenet, I am glad to learn, he has discarded.]
III
THE CHRISTIAN SLOPE
I. THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ART
II. GREATNESS AND DECLINE
III. THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES
IV. ALID EX ALIO
[Illustration: _Photo, Alinari_
BYZANTINE MOSAIC, SIXTH CENTURY
_S. Vitale, Ravenna_]
I
THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ART
What do I mean by a slope? That I hope to make clear in the course of
this chapter and the next. But, as readers may expect something to go on
with, I will explain immediately that, though I recognise the continuity
of the stream of art, I believe that it is possible and proper to divide
that stream into slopes and movements. About the exact line of division
there can be no certainty. It is easy to say that in the passage of a
great river from the hills to the sea, the depth, the width, the colour,
the temperature, and the velocity of the waters are bound to change; to
fix precisely the point of change is another matter. If I try to picture
for myself the whole history of art from earliest times in all parts of
the world I am unable, of course, to see it as a single thread. The
stuff of which it is made is unchangeable, it is always water that flows
down the river, but there is more than one channel: for instance, there
is European art and Oriental. To me the universal history of art has the
look of a map in which several streams descend from the same range of
mountains to the same sea. They start from different altitudes but all
descend at last to one level. Thus, I should say that the slope at the
head of which stand the Buddhist masterpieces of the Wei, Liang, and
T'ang dynasties begins a great deal higher than the slope at the head of
which are the Greek primitives of the seventh century, and higher than
that of which early Sumerian sculpture is the head; but when we have to
consider contemporary Japanese art, Graeco-Roman and Roman sculpture,
and late Assyrian, we see that all have found the same sea-level of
nasty naturalism.
By a slope, then, I mean that which lies between a great primitive
morning, when men create art because they must, and that darkest hour
when men confound imitation with art. These slopes can be subdivided
into movements. The downward course of a slope is not smooth and even,
but broken and full of accidents. Indeed the procession of art does not
so much resemble a river as a road from the mountains to the plain. That
road is a sequence of ups and downs. An up and a down together form a
movement. Sometimes the apex of one movement seems to reach as high as
the apex of the movement that preceded it, but always its base carries
us farther down the slope. Also, in the history of art the summit of one
movement seems always to spring erect from the trough of its
predecessor. The upward stroke is vertical, the downward an inclined
plane. For instance, from Duccio to Giotto is a step up, sharp and
shallow. From Giotto to Lionardo is a long and, at times, almost
imperceptible fall. Duccio is a fine decadent of that Basilian movement
which half survived the Latin conquest and came to an exquisite end
under the earlier Palaeologi. The peak of that movement rises high above
Giotto, though Duccio near its base is below him. Giotto's art is
definitely inferior to the very finest Byzantine of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, and Giotto is the crest of a new movement destined
and doomed inevitably to sink to depths undreamed of by Duccio.
All that was spiritual in Greek civilisation was sick before the sack of
Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years
earlier. That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at
Constantinople be my witness. Before they set the last stone of the
Parthenon it was ailing: the big marbles in the British Museum are the
last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves
nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as
well call "The Theseus" and "The Ilissus," the man whom one may as well
call Phidias, crowns the last vital movement in the Hellenic slope. He
is a genius, but he is no oddity: he falls quite naturally into his
place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs
rich and fast but a little coarsened the stream of inspiration that gave
life to archaic Greek sculpture. He is the Giotto--but an inferior
Giotto--of the slope that starts from the eighth century B.C.--so
inferior to the sixth century A.D.--to peter out in the bogs of
Hellenistic and Roman rubbish. Whence sprang that Hellenic impulse? As
yet we cannot tell. Probably, from the ruins of some venerable
Mediterranean civility, against the complex materialism of which it was,
in its beginnings, I dare say, a reaction. The story of its prime can be
read in fragments of archaic sculpture scattered throughout Europe, and
studied in the National Museum at Athens, where certain statues of
athletes, dating from about 600, reveal the excellences and defects of
Greek art at its best. Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias
is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and
immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles,
in the fourth century, the age of accomplished prettiness, is the
Correggio, or whatever delightful trifler your feeling for art and
chronology may suggest. Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us
to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their
intellectual and political history. The descent from sensitive, though
always rather finikin, drawing through the tasteful and accomplished to
the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth,
fifth, fourth, and third centuries. In the long sands and flats of Roman
realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever.
Before the death of Marcus Aurelius, Europe was as weary of materialism
as England before the death of Victoria. But what power was to destroy a
machine that had enslaved men so completely that they dared not conceive
an alternative? The machine was grown so huge that man could no longer
peer over its side; man could see nothing but its cranks and levers,
could hear nothing but its humming, could mark the spinning fly-wheel
and fancy himself in contemplation of the revolving spheres.
Annihilation was the only escape for the Roman citizen from the Roman
Empire. Yet, while in the West Hadrian was raising the Imperial talent
for brutalisation to a system and a science, somewhere in the East, in
Egypt, or in Asia Minor, or, more probably in Syria, in Mesopotamia, or
even Persia, the new leaven was at work. That power which was to free
the world was in ferment. The religious spirit was again coming to
birth. Here and there, in face of the flat contradiction of
circumstances, one would arise and assert that man does not live by
bread alone. Orphism, Mythraism, Christianity, many forms of one spirit,
were beginning to mean something more than curious ritual and discreet
debauch. Very slowly a change was coming over the face of Europe.
There was change before the signs of it became apparent. The earliest
Christian paintings in the catacombs are purely classical. If the early
Christians felt anything new they could not express it. But before the
second century was out Coptic craftsmen had begun to weave into dead
Roman designs something vital. The academic patterns are queerly
distorted and flattened out into forms of a certain significance, as we
can feel for ourselves if we go to the textile room at South Kensington.
Certainly, these second century Coptic textiles are more like works of
art than anything that had been produced in the Roman Empire for more
than four hundred years. Egyptian paintings of the third century bear
less positive witness to the fumblings of a new spirit. But at the
beginning of the fourth century Diocletian built his palace at Spalato,
where we have all learned to see classicism and the new spirit from the
East fighting it out side by side; and, if we may trust Strzygowski,
from the end of that century dates the beautiful church of Kodja-Kalessi
in Isauria. The century in which the East finally dominated the West
(350-450) is a period of incubation. It is a time of disconcerting
activity that precedes the unmistakable launch of art upon the Christian
slope. I would confidently assert that every artistic birth is preceded
by a period of uneasy gestation in which the unborn child acquires the
organs and energy that are to carry it forward on its long journey, if
only I possessed the data that would give a tottering support to so
comforting a generalisation. Alas! the births of the great slopes of
antiquity are shrouded in a night scarcely ruffled by the minute
researches of patient archaeologists and impervious to the startling
discoveries by experts of more or less palpable forgeries. Of these
critical periods we dare not speak confidently; nevertheless we can
compare the fifth century with the nineteenth and draw our own
conclusions.
In 450 they built the lovely Galla Placidia at Ravenna. It is a building
essentially un-Roman; that is to say, the Romanism that clings to it is
accidental and adds nothing to its significance. The mosaics within,
however, are still coarsely classical. There is a nasty, woolly realism
about the sheep, and about the good shepherd more than a suspicion of
the stodgy, Graeco-Roman, Apollo. Imitation still fights, though it
fights a losing battle, with significant form. When S. Vitale was begun
in 526 the battle was won. Sta. Sophia at Constantinople was building
between 532 and 537; the finest mosaics in S. Vitale, S.
Apollinare-Nuovo and S. Apollinare-in-Classe belong to the sixth
century; so do SS. Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople and the Duomo
at Parenzo. In fact, to the sixth century belong the most majestic
monuments of Byzantine art. It is the primitive and supreme summit of
the Christian slope. The upward spring from the levels of
Graeco-Romanism is immeasurable. The terms in which it could be stated
have yet to be discovered. It is the whole length of the slope from Sta.
Sophia to the Victoria Memorial pushed upright to stand on a base of a
hundred years. We are on heights from which the mud-flats are invisible;
resting here, one can hardly believe that the flats ever were, or, at
any rate, that they will ever be again. Go to Ravenna, and you will see
the masterpieces of Christian art, the primitives of the slope: go to
the Tate Gallery or the Luxembourg, and you will see the end of that
slope--Christian art at its last gasp. These _memento mori_ are salutary
in an age of assurance when, looking at the pictures of Cezanne, we
feel, not inexcusably, that we are high above the mud and malaria.
Between Cezanne and another Tate Gallery, what lies in store for the
human spirit? Are we in the period of a new incubation? Or is the new
age born? Is it a new slope that we are on, or are we merely part of a
surprisingly vigorous premonitory flutter? These are queries to ponder.
Is Cezanne the beginning of a slope, a portent, or merely the crest of a
movement? The oracles are dumb. This alone seems to me sure: since the
Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe
has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cezanne.
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