IN the preceding chapters we have seen ritual emerge from the practical doings of life. We have noted that in ritual we have the beginning of a detachment from practical ends; we have watched the merely emotional dance develop from an undifferentiated chorus into a spectacle performed by actors and watched by spectators, a spectacle cut off, not only from real life, but also from ritual issues; a spectacle, in a word, that has become an end in itself. We have further seen that the choral dance is an undifferentiated whole which later divides out into three clearly articulate parts, the artist, the work of art, the spectator or art lover. We are now in a position to ask what is the good of all this antiquarian enquiry? Why is it, apart from the mere delight of scientific enquiry, important to have seen that art arose from ritual? Moreover, and this is very important, we all feel about art a certain obligation, such as some of us feel about religion. There is an "ought" about it. Perhaps we do not really care much about pictures and poetry and music, but we feel we "ought to." In the case of music it has happily been at last recognized that if you have not an "ear" you cannot care for it, but two generations ago, owing to the unfortunate cheapness and popularity of keyed instruments, it was widely held that one half of humanity, the It is worth noting because it indicates a vague feeling that art has a real value, that art is not a mere luxury, nor even a rarefied form of pleasure. No one feels they ought to take pleasure in beautiful scents or in the touch of velvet; they either do or they don't. The first point, then, that must be made clear is that art is of real value to life in a perfectly clear biological sense; it invigorates, enhances, promotes actual, spiritual, and through it physical life. This from our historical account we should at the outset expect, because we have seen art, by way of ritual, arose out of life. And yet the statement is a sort of paradox, for we have seen also that art differs from ritual just in this, that in art, whether of the spectator or the creator, the "motor reactions," i. e. practical life, the life of doing, is for the time checked. This is of the essence of the artist's vision, that he sees things detached and therefore more vividly, more completely, and in a different light. This is That this is so we see most clearly in the simple fact that, when the artist begins to aim direct at Beauty, he usually misses it. We all know, perhaps by sad experience, that the man who seeks out pleasure for herself fails to find her. Let him do his work
So it is with the artist. Let him feel strongly, and see raptly--that is, in complete detachment. Let him cast this, his rapt vision and his intense emotion, into outside form, a statue or a painting; that form will have about it a nameless thing, an unearthly aroma, which we call beauty; this nameless presence will cause in the spectator a sensation too rare to be called pleasure, and we shall call it a "sense of beauty." But let the artist aim direct at Beauty, and she is gone, gone before we hear the flutter of her wings. The sign manual, the banner, as it were, of artistic creation is for the creative artist not
So far we might perhaps say that art was non-moral. But the statement would be misleading, since, as we have seen, art is in its very origin social, and social means human and collective. Moral and social are, in their final analysis, the same. That human, But there is another, and perhaps simpler, way in which art is moral. As already suggested, it purifies by cutting off the motor-reactions of personal desire. An artist deeply in love with his friend's wife once said: "If only I could paint her and get what I want from her, I could bear it." His wish strikes a chill at first; it sounds egotistic; it has the peculiar, instinctive, inevitable cruelty of the artist, seeing in human nature material for his art. But it shows us the moral side of art. The artist was a good and sensitive man; he saw the misery he had brought and would bring to people he loved, and he saw, or rather felt, a way of escape; he saw that through art, through vision, through detachment, desire might be slain, and the man within him find peace. To some natures this instinct after art is almost their sole morality. If they find themselves intimately entangled Now we say advisedly "primitive gods," and this with no intention of obscurantism. The god of later days, the unknown source of life, the unresolved mystery of the world, is not begotten of a rite, is not, essentially not, the occasion or object of art. With his relation to art--which is indeed practically nonexistent--we have nothing to do. Of the other
Why does the conception of a god impose obligation? Just because and in so far as he claims to have objective existence. By giving to his god from the outset objective existence the worshipper prevents his god from taking his place in that high kingdom of spiritual realities which is the imagination, and sets him down in that lower objective world which always compels practical reaction. What might have been an ideal becomes an idol. Straightway this objectified idol compels all sorts of ritual reactions of prayer and praise and sacrifice. It is as though another and a more exacting and (2) The "expression" theory, which holds that the aim of art is to express the emotions and thoughts of the artist. The reaction against the Imitation theory has naturally and inevitably gone much too far. We have "thrown out the child with the bath-water." All through the present book we have tried to show that art arises from ritual, and ritual is in its essence a faded
If our contention throughout this book be correct the Expressionists are in one matter abundantly right. Art, we have seen, again
The Expressionist is, then, triumphantly right in the stress he lays on emotion; but he is not right if he limits life to certain of All art is, according to Tolstoi, good quâ
Now this social, collective element in art is too apt to be forgotten. When an artist claims that expression is the aim of art he is too apt to mean self-expression only-- The young are often temporary artists; art. being based on life, calls for a strong vitality. The young are also self-centred and seek self-enhancement. This need of self-expression is a sort of artistic impulse. The young are. partly from sheer immaturity, still more through a foolish convention, shut out from real life; they are secluded, forced to become in a sense artists, or, if they have not the power for that, at least self-aggrandizers. They write lyric poems, they love masquerading, There is always apt to be some discord between the artist and the large practical world in which he lives, but those ages are happiest in which the discord is least. The nineteenth century, amid its splendid achievements in science and industry, in government and learning, and above all in humanity, illustrates this conflict in an interesting way. Science has given us back something strangely like a World-Soul, and art is beginning to feel she must utter our emotion towards it. Such art is exposed to an inherent and imminent peril. Its very bigness and newness tends to set up fresh and powerful reactions. Unless, in the process of creation, these can be inhibited, the artist will be lost in the reformer, and the play or the novel turn tract. This does not mean that the artist, if he is strong enough, may not be reformer too, only not at the moment of creation. The art of Mr. Arnold Bennett gets its It is a beautiful and life-giving faith, felt and with a perfect sincerity expressed towards all nature by the Indian poet Tagore, and towards humanity especially by M. Vildrac in his Book of Love ("Livre d’Amour"). He tells us in his "Commentary" how to-day the poet, sitting at home with pen and paper before him, feels that he is pent in, stifled by himself. He had been about to re-tell the old, old story of himself, to set himself once more on the stage of his poem--the same old dusty self tricked out, costumed anew. Suddenly he knows the figure to be tawdry and shameful. He is hot all over when he looks at it; he must out into the air, into the street, out of the stuffy museum "I am ashamed of lying to my work, Again, in "The Conquerors," the poet dreams of the Victorious One who has no army, the Knight who rides afoot, the Crusader without breviary or scrip, the Pilgrim of Love who, by the shining in his eyes, draws all men to him, and they in turn draw other men until, at last: And so our tale ends where it began, with the Choral Dance. 211:1 Ethics, X, 4. 213:1 H. Bergson, Life and Consciousness, Huxley Lecture, May 29, 1911. 225:1 Religion is here used as meaning the worship of some form of god, as the practical counterpart of theology. 233:1 Mr. D. S. MacColl. 234:1 D. S. MacColl, Nineteenth Century Art, p. 21. (1902.) 238:1 It is interesting to find, since the above was written, that the Confession of Faith published in the catalogue of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912, p. 21) reproduces, consciously or unconsciously, Tolstoy's view: We have ceased to ask, "What does this picture represent?" and ask instead, "What does it make us feel?"RITUAL, ART AND LIFE
Of my work lying to my life,
And of being able to content myself,
By burning sweet spices,
With the mouldering smell that is master here."
The time of the Great Conquest,
There was nothing but songs in unison,
One round danced about the houses,
One battle and one victory."
Footnotes
