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Art. 9.-LAY CRITICISM OF ART.

We have been told that M. Matisse may now be praised because he heads the reaction against Cubism, and we may at any moment find that Mr Wyndham Lewis is trying to return to Nature. The consternation of the student of art movements on hearing this is comparable with that which an observer of politics would have felt if in 1906 he had been told to praise Joseph Chamberlain for heading a reaction against Protection. Our student, moreover, has probably not failed to note another equally unsettling thing. Ten years ago a wave of young men's work broke over his accepted convictions. When the foam and uproar had subsided, authoritative prophets were discovered explaining that all was well; that what was drowned deserved its fate, and that the triumphant art had come to stay. Believing that these prophets really knew, by inspiration, the ins and outs of their perplexing business, the aforesaid student doubtless set to work to bury his unregenerate ideas of art and devoutly prepare his mind to be a decent receptacle for the swiftly successive revelations of Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Spheroidism and the rest. Let us suppose, then, that earnest seekers after the true art had brought themselves, by December 1919, to accept the principle that representation of things seen was about as bad as art could be. Then let us suppose that this public, visiting the War Paintings Exhibition at Burlington House, discovered there and in the eulogistic Press that the young men of to-day are seriously returning to Nature, and to an intensified kind of the representation which a few years ago was said to have been swept away for good. Lastly, let us wonder what are the ripe conclusions of this docile, puzzled public about the whole business of Art. In its most charitable mood, it may decide that the ways of Art are too difficult and high for ordinary folk; when most disgusted, that the entire affair is nothing but a senseless game for rival charlatans.

Indeed, it is time that we attempted to arrive at some fairly working standard for ourselves, so that when fresh upheavals occur, we can keep our heads and form our own judgments. For Art should not be a thing of mystery and jargon and secret significance, nor the Vol. 234.-No. 465.

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preserve of an inner ring of priests. We are, at least, intelligent enough to apply sound tests, that guide our lay opinion, for the theories of Einstein or Bergson, for the qualities of literature and, to a considerable extent, of music. Without being deep and technical, our judgment is adequate to save us from blind acceptance of charlatanry and contradictions. Towards the more obscurantist rigmaroles of philosophy we are healthily indifferent, believing that, if their shades are so very fine and their application and meaning so infinitesimal and dark, they cannot be looked to when practical needs are in question, then they are no real concern of ours. In part we owe this capacity for avoiding superstition and credulity to our general common sense and education; in part to qualified expositors of the higher technicalities, who interpret for our lower comprehension the special learning of the great. But in Art the interpreters on whom we rely for intermediary guidance are apt to darken counsel; and we are too diffident, or too much taken aback, to use our common sense. But is it not possible that by deduction, by the development of our own perception and the application of our common sense, we should be able to distinguish between revelation and . misconception, between what succeeds in Art and what

fails?

Sharing the excitement caused by factions who have successively assailed Pre-Impressionism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism, we possibly do not bear in mind that fifty years hence the movements of 19121920 will be telescoped by art-historians into a short paragraph or two. Nor do we always keep in view the fact that the relatively permanent importance of any master depends entirely on his power of interesting a remote posterity. Human æsthetic interest, so far as one can tell, has altered very little in the last twenty thousand years or so. No doubt the capacity of this interest has expanded, so that we are moved by a greater number of artistic qualities than were the Magdalenian Reindeer men. But it appears that, so far as drawings, paintings and sculpture are concerned, man to-day is chiefly interested by the same qualities that held the attention of his ancestors in the earliest ages. That the nature of æsthetic interest has altered

so little, in so long a period, seems to warrant the assumption that it will not radically change within the next thousand years. If this be conceded, exception will not be taken to an attempt to deduce from the past history of Art some reliable information as to its future.

The course of Art, from the Aurignacian era (circa 35,000 B.C.) till to-day, has been curiously consistent; so that the record of one period can be fitted almost exactly to any other, given the necessary change of names and material. For example, the history of Palæolithic art is one of very slow perception of life, and an equally slow understanding of how to express it. After centuries of experiment and discovery the artists of the Magdalenian age had arrived at remarkable vision and skill. Probably they had reached the limit to which artistic perception could go in their environment. At any rate, their skill in drawing animals in good proportion, with good action and masterly line, was followed by a period of ingenious schematisation. Apparently the latest Palæolithic artists, and such as survived in Neolithic times, were absorbed in the pastime of reducing Nature to design. They used natural forms as the basis of conventional pattern, distorting and debasing them out of all recognition. This schematic art, succeeding a period of masterly representation, faded into nothingness. What it was called by the controversialists of the Chelseas and Quartiers Latins of those days, we do not know, but we may suppose it was some '-ism' or other.

The history of Egyptian, Greek and Byzantine art is in fundamentals almost identical. Each began with painful stammering; each attained its golden age of highly sensitive perception and expression of what we call life-form, character and movement; each sank to mannerism and derivation, which Vasari in his life of Cimabue, so well described. He says that Cimabue

'swept away that ancient manner, making . . . everything a little more lively and more natural and softer than the manner of these Greeks [Cimabue's Byzantine-Roman predecessors and contemporaries], all full of lines and profiles both in mosaic and painting; which manner. . . the painters of those times, not by means of study, but by a certain convention, had taught one another for many and many a year,

without ever thinking of bettering their draughtsmanship, of beauty of colouring, or of any invention that might be good.'

Cimabue made the stammering effort at perceiving and expressing life. Giotto, still stammering a little, developed artistic perception and expression as far as it could go in that early Florentine environment. His art fell a victim to the schematisers, the '-ists' of that time, known to us as the Giotteschi. After a hundred years a new generation swept away their ancient manner. Masaccio is the greatest name of that return to Nature; and of him one of the first intellects of all time-Leonardo-said that he showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but Naturethe mistress of all masters-weary themselves in vain.'

We should but weary the reader if we deployed further schools and movements to illustrate this wellknown feature of Art history-the cycle of growth, high prime and decay. But we may emphasise that without exception posterity has always taken Nature, or Life, as its standard of excellence wherewith to test a school or master. In no single instance has human æsthetic interest been retained by any painter or sculptor who lagged in the expression of life, or who in contemplating life evinced no deep emotion and no rare sense of its human significance or application.

Perhaps we should set out here what in this context we mean by life. By life we mean character and truth. In portraiture life is revealed by insight into character rather than by a study of complexion. Life is given to historical painting by those artists who through the virtue of imagination and invention have personally and vitally realised the actual humanity and spirit of their characters. They can paint St Sebastian as he was and as he bore his agony, where those lacking this personal comprehension paint him as a languid elegant, with several unnoticed arrows protruding from his wellgroomed body. Millet knew that peasants were harsh and angular, and that the iron was deep in their souls; he knew by physical and mental experience what they really were. His etchings and pictures are true, whereas the paintings that counterfeit peasants with artists' models, who have never spoiled their hands, never faced

storms, nor ached with fatigue, are false to life. And as regards landscape, genre and still life, the quality that distinguishes real perception of life from the false or superficial is the expression of true light and air, growth, the movement of out-of-doors, and subtle truth of relation-in short, the fluid qualities of Nature as opposed to the metallic, airless petrifaction of late Dutch still-life painters and most popular academicians.

In no case, we repeat, have painters who consistently fall short of the highest level of their time in the expression of life or Nature, spiritual and material, retained the interest of posterity. Never yet has any substitute for this expression proved interesting enough to withstand the return to Nature which has always succeeded periods of mannerism, abstract schematisation or intellectual formulæ. It would not be far-fetched to suppose that the late Byzantines, the Giotteschi and the Eclectics, like the French Classicists of 1790, bristled with impeccable arguments for their conception of ideal art. But they went down like a pack of cards, each in turn, at the breath of a return to Nature.

It may bring the matter to a more immediate issue if we consider in this light various recent art movements, and try to analyse the cause of their success or failure. For they bear upon the question which we are attempting to answer, and are sufficiently far back to be seen in perspective. First we will take the Pre-Raphaelites of 1848. Like most new movements, theirs was bitterly attacked before it found wide favour. In time it became the object of a cult; by those who neglected Constable's new standard it was accepted as a great return to Nature, and a great salvation. It would be extravagant to say that already the Pre-Raphaelite movement is discredited; but those who watch the signs know that its reputation is seriously impaired. A few works only are now pointed to as explaining the enthusiasm which we used to feel about the P.R.B. Why have we lost interest? For one thing, we recognise that, when a balance is cast, the actual results of that movement were not beneficial; for another, we find that only exceptionally did the genuine brethren express life fully enough to interest us. The inherent weakness of the school was that their

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