Chapter II: Sidenote: The "Trachiniae" at "The Court."

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum July 1911_]

The players of Bedford College are winning for themselves a place of honour amongst those who help the modern world to understand Greek drama. The traditional opinion that the Athenians were a race of fools with a sense of form, who wrote tedious verse to perfection, has been ousted by a new doctrine, less false, but even more dangerous. A race of scholars arose who assumed, reasonably enough, that plays written by intelligent men for an intelligent public could not be quite so dull as tradition proclaimed; and though to rob the classics of their terrors needed much audacity and some irreverence, the new ideas won ground by sheer force of plausibility. Unfortunately, to the modern scholar an intelligent public meant a public of modern scholars. He peopled the Attic theatre with an audience of cultivated liberals, and by "a good play" meant the sort of play such a public would relish. Whence it followed that the Athenian dramatists must have concerned themselves with those problems which have been so acutely discussed in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Shaw.

As a fact, Athenian tragedy is never, or hardly ever, concerned with intellectual matters of any sort; its business is to express emotion, and this it has done in the most perfect literary form ever devised by man. The great merit of Miss E. B. Abraham's performance is that she plays the part of Deianeira neither as if that lady were a relic of the most insipid period of classical sculpture, nor yet as though she were cousin-german to Hedda Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side of modernity; and that is as it should be. Certainly she puts too much "psychology" into the character of the fond, gentle lady, whose simple humanity at pathetic odds with Fate wins sympathy from the audience without effort or emphasis; while a hankering after the latest subtleties has led her to misunderstand completely the passage (580-95 in the acting edition) in which she supposes the queen to be justifying herself to a reluctant chorus, whereas, in fact, she is justifying herself to the Universe, and giving the audience a hint. The meek chorus is only too willing to agree.

Poor is the triumph of Fate over a timid woman. Heracles is a more splendid but not less helpless victim. Mr. G. Edwards understands the part well. Very fine was the passionate indignation, surging up through physical agony, in the first great speech; and this mood is made to prevail until in the name "[Greek: Nessos]" the hero recognizes the finger of God. From that point, though violent and dictatorial still to his son and the respectful mortals about him, the tyrant submits sullenly to those he can neither vanquish nor appease.

Mr. Garrod, who played the part of Hyllus, spoke his lines exceedingly well. Perhaps the chorus was a little too classical--that is to say, too stiff and lackadaisical; but the phrasing was always pretty and sometimes unexpected, and the lovely strophe beginning,

[Greek: hon aiola nux enarizomena;]

seemed to gain a new enchantment from the delicately concerted voices.

Scholars will have to bring strong arguments to justify what is an obvious literary blemish in the distribution of the concluding lines. Somehow or other, between Hyllus and the chorus, the sombre intensity of the complaint was allowed to evaporate. The words,

[Greek: ta de nun hestot' oiktra men hemin, aischra]

and

[Greek: kouden touton o ti me Zeus]

should come from the same lips, surely.

O Providence, I will not praise,
Neither for fear, nor joy of gain,
Your blundering and cruel ways.

* * * * *

And all men's miserable days,
And all the ugliness and pain,
O Providence, I will not praise.

THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON[14]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Oct. 1911_]

No one will be surprised to learn that fourteen hundred years ago the Chinese laid down six canons of art. Nothing is more natural than that some great artist, reviewing in old age his life and work, should deduce from the mass of experience and achievement certain propositions, and that these, in time, should become rules, to be preached by pedants, practised by dilettanti, and ignored by every artist worthy of the name. What does surprise us is that the first of these Chinese canons should be nothing less than a definition of that which is essential in all great art. "Rhythmic vitality," Prof. Giles calls it; Mr. Okakura, "the Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of things"; Mr. Binyon suggests "the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of living things."

"At any rate," he says, "what is certainly meant is that the artist
must pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to seize and
himself to be possessed by that great cosmic rhythm of the spirit
which sets the currents of life in motion. We should say in Europe
that he must seize the universal in the particular."

"The universal in the particular," that is perhaps what the greatest art expresses. Perhaps it is a widespread consciousness of this that produces all great movements; and perhaps the history of their decline and fall is nothing more than a history of its gradual decay and disappearance. Great movements seem to arise when men become aware suddenly that the universe has a soul: the first artists of a movement are the men who perceive most clearly this soul in every part of the universe; they are called Primitives. They are men driven to art by the intolerable necessity of expressing what they feel; they break silence only because they have something to say; and their one object is to say it as completely and intelligibly as possible. Primitives stand in a class by themselves because they have perceived more clearly than others the reality that lies beneath the superficial, and because, having no other end in view, they have expressed it more completely.

Great movements are alike in their beginnings; whether they are Buddhist or Byzantine, Greek or Egyptian, Assyrian or Mexican, their primitives have two qualities in common, profundity and directness. And in their histories, so far as we may judge from the scanty records of ancient civilizations, all have a general resemblance. Always, as the sense of reality decays, the artist labours to conceal under technical proficiency the poverty of his emotional experience. For the inspired artist technique was nothing but a means; for his hungry successors it becomes an end. For the man who has little to say the manner of saying it gains consequence, and in a manner which has been elaborated into an intricate craft the greatest emotions cannot be expressed. The circle is vicious. With the exaltation and elaboration of craftsmanship expression first falls into neglect and then becomes impossible. Those who are not content to marvel at cleverness, but still ask emotion of art, must be satisfied with such as craftsmen can supply. If pictures no longer express feeling they may at least provoke it. If painting is to be a mere question of pattern-making, at least let the patterns be pretty. Sensuous beauty and cunning delineation become rivals for the throne whence expression has been ousted. So, with occasional irregularities, the path winds down the hill. Skill itself declines, and the sense of beauty runs thin. At the bottom, for what once was art--the expression of man's most holy emotions--smart tradesmen offer, at fancy prices, mechanical prettiness, cheap sentiment, and accurate representation.

Comparisons between the history of Asiatic and of European art are admittedly possible; but as yet we believe the precise nature of the similarity has not been stated. It lies in the fact that both conform to the general laws of decay. The Asiatic movement with which we are familiar is essentially Buddhist; it expresses that sense of the universe that is expressed in another form by Buddhist doctrine and its later developments along the lines of Taoist idealism. How far the spread of Buddhism in China represents a spiritual reaction from the dry materialism of Confucianism is no matter for brief and dogmatic discussion. We need only say that the fourth-century painting in the British Museum by Ku K'ai-chih, though the artist himself is said to have been a Buddhist, belongs clearly to an earlier movement than that of which the T'ang and just pre-T'ang masterpieces are the primitives. By comparison with early Buddhist art this exquisite picture is sufficiently lacking in emotional significance to tempt one to suppose that it represents the ripe and highly cultivated decadence of a movement that the growing religious spirit was soon to displace. Slight as his acquaintance with this early art must be, an Englishman who visited regularly the exhibition at Shepherd's Bush was able to gather from eight or ten pictures, a couple of large wooden Bodhisattvas, and a few small figures in bronze, some idea of the way in which Japanese primitives could enter and express the world of reality. That same power he will find in the Byzantine mosaics of the sixth century, which express the earliest triumphs of another spiritual revolution over the cultured materialism of a moribund civilization.

That new movement spread slowly across Europe, and till the middle of the twelfth century there was no general decline. But the best was over in France before the twelfth century was out. Gothic architecture is juggling in stone and glass. In Italy Giotto followed Cimabue; and Giotto could not always resist the temptation to state the particular and leave the universal out. He sometimes tells us facts instead of expressing emotions. In the full Renaissance the coarsest feeling sufficed to flavour a handsome, well-made picture.

Meanwhile, under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) Asiatic art had reached much the same stage. The Ming picture in the British Museum known as _The Earthly Paradise_ is inferior to the best work of Botticelli, with which it is commonly compared, but reminds us, in its finished grace and gaiety, of a painting by Watteau. Korin, towards the end of the Ming period, is about as empty as Velasquez and more brilliant than Frans Hals. The eighteenth century, one inclines to believe, was the same everywhere. Stylistic obsession and the taste for material beauty ended in mechanical prettiness, altogether inexpressive or sentimental. In both hemispheres painting was reduced to a formula--a formula for producing elegant furniture.

But even in the age of decay Oriental art retained traces of primitive splendour. It never sank into mere representation. The men who turned out the popular Japanese colour-prints, though they chose the same subjects as the Dutch genre painters, were artists enough to treat them differently and to look for something significant beneath the mass of irrelevant accidents. Also they preserved a nicer sensibility to material beauty. A cheap Japanese print has sometimes the quality of a painting by Whistler. Indeed, the superiority of the Orientals is discreetly insinuated from beginning to end of Mr. Binyon's essay. Equal, if not superior, to the Greek or Christian in the primitive stage, the Asiatic movement clung to the heights longer, sank more gradually, and never sank so low. These facts are painful, but patent; they require explanation.

Why is Oriental art generally superior to European? Bearing in mind what has been said about the nature of the greatest art, we shall expect it to be because in the East they have kept in closer touch with reality. That is precisely what has happened. The emotional life has never been in the East what it has become in the West, the rare possession of a fortunate few. There the practical life has been kept subordinate, a means to supporting the emotional. In China men still go about their business that they may purchase leisure in which to contemplate reality. In Europe we are practical; and reality is banished from the life of the practical man who regards all things as means instead of contemplating them as ends. He sees just what is of use to him, and no more. He sees enough for identification and recognition; in fact, he reads the labels on things. The labels are all he requires. In the emotional life things are valued for their significance--for what they are, not for what they can be made to do; they are seen whole because they are seen as ends. The practical man sees only a part--the part that serves his purpose. The camera sees more than that, it sees all the details; but it cannot see the spirit--that has to be felt.

Most Europeans think of boats as means of locomotion, of apples as eatables. They recognize such things by their serviceable qualities; their individuality, the universal in these particulars, escapes them. In a picture of a boat or an apple they look for those unessential qualities which minister to their pleasure, and of which alone they are aware. The cleverness of a man who can paint fruit that tempts urchins impresses them; but the artist who feels, and tries to express, the soul of fruit and flowers they take for an incompetent dunce or a charlatan.

"One might say that man has been a monarch, looking to his
subject-world only for service and for flattery, and just because
of this lordly attitude he has failed to understand that
subject-world, and, even more, has failed to understand himself."

In the East men have ever set the spiritual life above the practical, and artists have excelled in expressing the very essence of material things because they expressed what they felt, instead of representing what the ordinary man sees. They have felt that if the spirit informs all, then all must have individual significance. To see things as means is to see what is most useful and least important about them. To see things as ends is to be shockingly unpractical; it is to see God in everything; it is to exalt the spirit above the flesh; it is not the way to "get on"; but it is the only way to produce significant art, and, indeed, it is only on such terms that life itself signifies.

So far we have admitted the superiority of the East: the last word has yet to be said. Few observant people will deny that there are signs of an awakening in Europe. The times are great with the birth of some new thing. A spiritual renaissance may be at hand. Meanwhile, we are not suffered to ignore the huge strides in material progress that are the chief glory of modern Japan; nor have we failed to remark that the latest art to reach us from that country proved, when displayed with some ostentation at Shepherd's Bush, equal in vulgarity of sentiment, flashiness of execution, and apelike imitation to the worst that can be seen at Burlington House. Philistinism, it seems, finds ready converts on the other side of the globe. Let the spokesmen of the young and bustling empire be heard. Shiba Kokan, the pupil of Harunobu, says in his "Confessions":

"In Occidental art objects are copied directly from nature; hence
before a landscape one feels as if one were placed in the midst of
nature. There is a wonderful apparatus called the photograph, which
gives a facsimile copy of the object, whatever it is, to which it
is directed. Nothing which has not actually been seen is sketched,
nor is a nameless landscape reproduced, as we often see done in
Chinese productions.... A painting which is not a faithful copy of
nature has neither beauty nor is worthy of the name."

And this is the considered judgment of that popular modern painter Okio:

"The use of art is to produce copies of things, and if an artist
has a thorough knowledge of the properties of the thing he paints,
he can assuredly make a name.... Without the true depiction of
objects there can be no pictorial art. Nobility of sentiment and
suchlike only come after a successful delineation of the external
form of an object."

Such men would be very much at home at an Academy banquet or in the parlour of a suburban stockbroker and less so in the world of art than a saint would be in Wall Street. For whereas the saint would perceive the spark of the universal in the particular stockjobber, the stockjobber and his friends, Mr. Okio, the delineator, and the philophotographic Mr. Kokan, are blind to anything that is not on the surface. Japan, we are told, is to shape the future of the Eastern hemisphere. Japan is "forging ahead." Already she has set her hand to the task of civilizing, that is to say Europeanizing, China--just at the moment when Europe is coming to loathe her own grossness. Time is the master of paradox. Who shall say what surprises are too fantastic for his contriving? Can the classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia--rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] "The Flight of the Dragon: an Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan." By Laurence Binyon. (John Murray.)

WILLIAM MORRIS[15]

[Sidenote: _New Statesman Oct. 1914_]

Here is a book that starts a dozen hares, any one of which would be worth catching or hunting, at any rate, through a couple of large-type columns. For a really good book about William Morris is bound to raise those questions that Morris made interesting and his disciples fashionable, and that our children, we may hope, will one day make vital. "How far can society affect art, or art society?" "What might we have made of machinery and what has machinery made of us?" "Was the nineteenth century a disaster or only a failure?" These are the questions that it seems right and natural for a writer who has made William Morris his peg to discuss; and if I discuss something quite different it may look as though, forsaking profitable hares, I were after a herring of my own trailing. Yet, reading this book, I find that the question that interests me most is: "Why does Clutton Brock tend to overrate William Morris?" To answer it I have had to discover what sort of person I suppose Clutton Brock to be, and William Morris to have been.

Clutton Brock is one of our best critics. When I say this, of course I take into consideration his unsigned writings, the anonymity of which is not so strict as to make my judgment indiscreet. Without the subtlety of a philosopher or a trained dialectician, he has been blest with a powerful intellect which enables him, unlike most of our critics, not only to distinguish between sense and nonsense, but himself to refrain from saying what is utterly absurd. Mr. Brock does not like nonsense, and he never talks it. Both the form and the content of his criticism are intellectual. He is in the great English tradition--the tradition of Dryden and Johnson and Macaulay and Leslie Stephen; he has an argumentative prose-style and a distaste for highfalutin, and, where the unenlightened intellectualism of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, and the incorrigible common sense of Johnson, might have pitched these eminent men into the slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens that Mr. Brock, whose less powerful mind is sweetened by a sense of art, contrives to escape.

No man who has ever done anything worth doing has done less highfalutin than Morris. He was always the craftsman who kept close to his material, and thought more about the block and the chisel than about aesthetic ecstasy. The thrills and ecstasies of life, he seems to have felt, must come as by-products out of doing one's job as well as one could: they were not things, he thought, to aim at, or even talk about overmuch. I do not agree with Morris, but that is beside the point. The point is that Clutton Brock is unwilling to disagree with him violently. He has a peculiar kindness for Morris that does not surprise me. He is a man who works for his living, and does his work so well that we may be sure he wins from it delight. The greater part of what he writes he does not sign; and there are thousands of people in England who, though they hardly know his name, have yet been affected by his mind. As he sits quietly producing a surprising quantity of good literature, he must sometimes feel very near those anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages who, lost in the scaffolding, struck out forms that would to-day make only too familiar the names of their creators. At such moments, can he be less than partial to the man who understood so well the greatness and the dignity of those nameless artists?

Morris was amongst the first to perceive that much of the greatest art has been produced anonymously and collectively; and we may be sure that Clutton Brock shares his dislike for that worship of names, that interest in catalogues and biographies, which amongst the collecting classes still does duty for aesthetic sensibility. Morris was indignant, as well he might be, when he heard the pictures of some famous artist--famous because he signed his name and left some record of his life--exalted above the sculpture and windows of Chartres--the work of obscure stone-cutters and verriers. He loved the mediaeval craftsmen for the fineness of their work and for their personal modesty. He liked to think of men who could take their orders from a _contre-maitre_ and execute them superbly, partly, I think, because he saw that these were men who could be fitted into his ideal State. And Mr. Clutton Brock, good Socialist that he is, must, I suppose, himself have been perplexed by that problem which confronts every modern State-projector: What is to be done about the artists? How are these strange, turbulent, individualistic creatures to be fitted into any rational collectivism? What place can be found in Utopia for people who do not work to live, but live to do what they consider their own peculiar piece of work? Now, if only they were craftsmen, they would make what was wanted; they would do what they were told.

Some feeling of this sort may, I think, be at the back of Mr. Clutton Brock's peculiar sympathy with Morris; it would explain, too, why he did less than justice to Shelley in that remarkable study he published some years ago. He could not quite forgive the poet for being so hopelessly anti-Social. Perhaps, in his heart, Mr. Brock would hardly admit the absolute value of aesthetic rapture; he wants art to do something for life, and he loses patience with people who simply add to its confusion. Shelley, he thought, made a mess of his own life and of Harriet's, and, for all one knows, of Miss Hitchener's, and of a score of others; and his poetry you must read for its own sake or not at all. The poetry of Morris has value for people who have never known what it is to feel an aesthetic emotion, and his life was superbly useful to his fellow-men. The great State of the future will be glad of as many William Morrises as it can get.

But it is I who am being less than just now. From what I have said any one might infer that I had not read, or had not appreciated, that volume called "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," in which are to be found things of pure beauty, "Summer Dawn," "In Prison," "The Wind," "The Haystack in the Floods"; any one might suppose that I did not know "Love is Enough." These are the poems which, with "Sigurd," give William Morris his place amongst the poets. Mr. Clutton Brock feels this surely enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility--part aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems--that he can be trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is why I suppose Mr. Brock to be one of our best critics.

If there were anything fundamentally nasty about Morris Mr. Brock would not be inclined to overrate him. Mr. Brock pardons no unpardonable horrors: there are none here to pardon. But he overrates, or rather overmarks, William Morris as a scrupulous but soft-hearted examiner might overmark a sympathetic pupil. He never gives marks when the answer is wrong, but he gives a great many when it is right: and he is a little blind to deficiencies. He does not make it clear that Morris, as an artist, was cursed with two of the three modern English vices, that he was provincial and amateurish. But he gives him full credit for not being goaded to futility by a sense of his own genius.

Morris was provincial as the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson and Carlyle were provincial, as Swinburne and Whistler were not; his mind could rarely escape from the place and age in which it was formed. He looked at art and life, and at the future even, from the point of view of an Englishman and a Victorian; and when he tries to change his position we feel the Victorian labouring, more or less unsuccessfully, to get out of himself. When I accuse him of being "amateurish" I do not use that vile word in contradistinction to "professional." In a sense all true artists must be amateurs; the professional view, the view that art is a hopeful and genteel way of earning one's living, is possible only to official portrait-painters and contractors for public monuments. When I say that Morris, like almost all our visual artists and too many of our modern writers, was amateurish, I mean that he was not serious enough about his art. He tended to regard art as a part of life instead of regarding life as a means to art. A long morning's work, an afternoon of fresh air, a quiet evening, and so to bed and fit next morning for another good spell of production; something of that sort, one fancies, was not unlike the ideal of William Morris. It is a craftsman's ideal; it is a good life for any one but an artist; and it would be a good attitude towards art if art were not something altogether different from work. Alas! it is the English attitude. I never look at those Saxon manuscripts in the British Museum but I say to myself: "And didn't they go out and have a game of cricket after hours and work all the harder next day for their wholesome exercise!"

But from the fatal curse Morris was free; no man of great ability was ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on sun and moon to stand and watch him sign his name, neither was he the shy genius of the English hedgerows sheltering his little talent from contemporary infection and the chill winds of criticism.

Morris was neither a great artist nor a great thinker, but he was a great man, and that, I suspect, is the chief reason why Mr. Brock loves him, and why none of the better sort can help liking him. He had that magnanimity which makes people take instinctively the right side. His reasons might be wrong, but he was in the right. There are people in history, and Morris is one of them, about whom we feel that if they were alive they would sympathize with whatever were the best and most pressing aspirations of the age. Morris would, of course, be as firm to-day as ever against plutocracy, but one feels sure that he would take his stand with those who are trying to win for themselves some kind of moral and intellectual as well as economic freedom. One feels sure he would be of that forlorn hope of civilization that carries on a sporadic and ineffective war against officialism and militarism on the one hand, and puritanism and superstition on the other. One feels sure that, however little he might like new developments in art or thought, he would be against the people who tried to suppress them. One feels quite sure that he would never cease to believe that so long as society is imperfect it is the right and duty of individuals to experiment. The fact is, Morris was at once a practical craftsman and an idealist. In practical affairs and private prejudices he could be as truculent and wrong-headed as the rest of us; but he was always conscious of something much more important than practical affairs and private prejudices. He cared nothing for his own reputation and little for immediate success because he cared for something greater. For that he cared so much that he was able to forgive the quarrels and absurdities of the Hammersmith Socialists and to laugh even at his own vehemence.

FOOTNOTE:

[15] "William Morris." By A. Clutton Brock. (Williams and Norgate: Home University Library, 1s. net.)

PERSIAN MINIATURES[16]

[Sidenote: _Burlington Magazine May 1914_]

Very slowly it is becoming possible to construct a history of Persian painting. Until quite lately all attempts were frustrated by what is sure to frustrate the attempts of the first historians of any "school" or "slope," or, for that matter, of any subject whatever--a false point of departure. So long as it was supposed that Behzad was the first mature master of Persian painting, Persian art-historians were as inevitably out in their conjectures as were the people who used to believe that Raphael was what they would have called "the _fons et origo_" of European painting.

We are now acquainted, if not familiar, with Persian paintings of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with the Mongol and with a pre-Mongol school--for it seems imprudent to give the name Mongol to works that can be assigned to a date earlier than 1258 (the year of the eponymous establishment), especially as they differ profoundly from the recognized Mongol type. We know that the pre-Mongol school was the heir of a great decorative tradition; and we have good reasons for believing that this tradition was based on Sassanian, Sung, and Byzantine art. We are therefore more or less in the position of people who should be acquainted with the work of Cimabue, Giotto, and Duccio, though knowing very little of Byzantine art and its primitive developments in the West.

Of this early period--Mongol and pre-Mongol--we do not yet possess many examples; but the student who turns to the _Burlington Magazine_ for July and August 1913 will see reproductions from a superb manuscript of the late thirteenth century, Mr. Pierpont Morgan's "Manafi-i-Heiwan," and any one who has the good fortune to know M. Claude Anet or M. Vignier can probably be put in the way of seeing some originals. He will discover in the work of this early period two distinct schools: one--of which the running ibexes in the "Manafi-i-Heiwan" is an example--obviously related to Sung; the other--of which the "Kalila and Dimna" miniatures[17] (dated 1236), and the elephants from the "Manafi-i-Heiwan" (1295 _circa_) may be taken as illustrations--reminding us rather of Sassanian art. Exquisite perfection of line is the dominant characteristic of the first school; in the second, we find a broader treatment, a more splendid disposition of masses, and a more monumental design than in any other known school of Persian painting. It is amongst the works of these thirteenth-century painters that we must look for the discovered masterpieces of Persian art.

In our present state of ignorance we may call this the great age. It is the familiar age of fine Rhages pottery; and to compare the beautiful drawing on the twelfth-and thirteenth-century pots with the miniatures of this period is to let a flood of light on to the study of both. Mr. Kevorkian has, or had, a wonderful painting from "The History of the Kalifs" by Tabari (about 1200), the figures of which might have walked straight out of a Rhages bowl into which they had walked some fifty years earlier direct from Western China. Yet, admirable as this thirteenth century is, I do not believe that it is in fact the supreme age of Persian painting. Certainly it is not the primitive age. This is an art that comes out of a long tradition. And just as we have already discovered pottery earlier than and surpassing that of the thirteenth century, so I hope and believe we shall yet see primitive Persian paintings superior to anything that the late pre-Mongol and Mongol period can show. For the present we can only say that the works of this period are not much inferior to the greatest that the genius of any race or age has created.

In 1335 begins what is known as the Timourid age--the age beloved above all others by discerning connoisseurs--and it is tempting to assign to this famous period the illustrations in a manuscript belonging to Mr. Herramaneck, now in the possession of Mr. Arthur Ruck, from which are drawn the paintings reproduced on Plate I. This temptation is strengthened by the fact that the manuscript is said to be dated 1398; yet it is a temptation to which I am unwilling to yield. Rather, I incline to think that these are the work of an early contemporary of Behzad, by whom they are not influenced, and that they belong, therefore, to that interesting period of transition which lies between the Timourids of the fifteenth and the Sefevaeans of the sixteenth century. If we turn to the _Burlington Magazine_ for October 1912, we can compare our Plate I, a, with two paintings, one in M. Claude Anet's collection dating from the fourteenth century, the other from M. Meyer-Riefstahl's belonging to the fifteenth. All have Mongol affinities: but in M. Anet's picture, though the rather finicking and academic drawing of the tree shows that already under the early Timourids the full Persian style was developed, there are yet to be found traces of a monumental design that had almost disappeared by the end of the fifteenth century.

The work here illustrated is too "descriptive" and not sufficiently "monumental" to be assigned to the Timourid age, and so I give it to the late fifteenth century, to those delicious years when the old tradition, though weakened, had not been smothered under the scenic delicacies brought into fashion by Behzad. If the Timourid age is to be dubbed the Persian _quattrocento_, Mr. Ruck's man will pass muster as the counterpart of some artist older than Raphael, who worked independently of the young prodigy unaffected by his ultimately disastrous inventions.

From an album, also in the possession of Mr. Arthur Ruck, comes a drawing signed by Behzad and reproduced on Plate II, c. On the genuineness of the signature I cannot pretend to an opinion, but there seem to be no solid grounds for disputing it. The work itself is characteristic enough. It is accomplished and tasteful; it is also thin in quality and the forms are indifferently co-ordinated. It is, in fact, a very pretty piece of illustration; it is not a profoundly moving design. Compared with figure A on Plate I it is tight and unlovely: compared with the masterpieces of the thirteenth century it is not even what a picture by Raphael is to a picture by Giotto; if, historically, Behzad is the Raphael of Persia, aesthetically, he is a very inferior one.

It is in the post-Behzad art, their Sefevaean art of the sixteenth century, that the Persians have the advantage of us. The miniatures of this age were, until lately, reckoned by European collectors the masterpieces of Persian painting, and the decline of their reputation may be compared with that of those later _cinquecentiste_ who stood so high in the taste of the eighteenth century. The descent, however, has been less sharp as the error was less glaring. After Behzad there is no such tumble as befell Italian art in the last days of the Renaissance. On the contrary, as my final illustrations (also drawn from Mr. Ruck's scrap-book) show, the Persian art of the sixteenth century maintained a very high level. The ladder picture (Plate III, D) is, I presume, by Sultan Mohamed. For my part I prefer it to the Behzad. It is less mechanical; and I find in it none of that weary pomposity, that gesture of the great man who knows his business too well, which so often displeases me in the master. Sultan Mohamed was, so the story goes, a pupil of Aga Mirek, who was a pupil of Behzad.

This charming Sultan Mohamed belongs to the middle of the sixteenth century, and its companion illustration (Plate III, E) may be placed some twenty years later. About this last, however, it would be easy and excusable to go wrong; for from the local colour and the head of the man who leads the horse it would seem to have been painted in India. We know that the album from which it comes was for many years in that country; yet I cannot believe that this picture is the product of any Indo-Persian school. It is too good: there persists too much of the great Timourid and Mongol tradition which, as the work of Sultan Mohamed shows, was still cherished by the Persian artists of the sixteenth century. That it is earlier than the seventeenth century and the reign of Shah Abbas is beyond dispute; it is untainted, or almost untainted, with that soft, slick, convictionless woolliness that was brought to perfection by Riza Abbassi, the court painter, and seems to have flattered so happily the taste of the Persian _grand monarque_. The figure of the kneeling princess comes nearer to the style of Mirek than to that of any other artist with whom I am acquainted; and, if I must hazard a guess, I will suggest that this is the work of some Persian pupil of Mirek who went to try his luck at the court of the Great Mogul.

With Shah Abbas and the seventeenth century Persian art becomes definitely and hopelessly second-rate. From the ruins emerge a variety of decadent schools of which two deserve mention. The academic school continued the Behzad tradition, and its hard but capable style did well enough for copying Persian old masters, European paintings by such artists as Bellini, and engravings by such artisans as Marcantonio--an amusing product of this last kind of activity (also from a book in Mr. Ruck's possession) will be reproduced later in the _Burlington Magazine_. At the same time there appeared a freer and softer style, examples of which, at first sight, sometimes remind one of a particularly good Conder. In India developed a number of schools, romantic, picturesque, and literal; of these, a queer sensual charm notwithstanding, it must be confessed that the two main characteristics are weakness of design and a sweetly sugary colour. But I am straying beyond any boundary that my illustrations could justify. I have been able to give excellent examples of the late middle period of Persian painting. In the two first we caught an echo of the great Timourid age and felt a premonition of the good Sefevaean: in the last we see how splendid Persian painting could be in its decline. I wish I could have reproduced examples to show how glorious was its youth and early manhood.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] To make the most of an article of this sort the reader ought, obviously, to have illustrations by him. For these, in the original even, I was obliged to refer to back numbers of the _Burlington Magazine_, and now I must refer also to the plates that accompanied this article when first it appeared.

[17] In the collections of M. Henraux and M. Claude Anet. Reproduced in the _Burlington Magazine_, October 1912.

COUNTERCHECK QUARRELSOME

[Sidenote: _New Statesman Mar. 1914_]

I hasten to accept Mr. Randall Davies's offer of friendship,[18] though I doubt whether much good can come of it if we are to go on arguing about aesthetics. We are too far apart. What Mr. Davies feels for a picture is something altogether different from what he feels for a carpet, whereas the emotion I feel for a carpet is of exactly the same kind as the emotion I feel for a picture, a statue, a cathedral, or a pot. Also, my whole system of aesthetics is based on this psychological fact, so that it would, perhaps, have been wiser in Mr. Davies to have stated the difference between us and let it go at that.

If some one were to find fault with the _New Statesman_ on account of the flimsiness and inadequacy of the arguments it adduces in favour of private ownership of railways, the editor, being a polite man, would reply, I suppose, that his critic had misunderstood the policy of the paper: he would not feel that his arguments had received any very damaging blow. In my first chapter I made it clear--my publishers accused me of becoming repetitious about it--that what I wanted to discover was a quality common and peculiar to all those objects I called works of art; I explained that by "works of art" I meant objects that provoked in me a peculiar emotion, called aesthetic; and I repeated over and over again that amongst these objects were pictures, pots, textiles, statues, buildings, etc. Mr. Davies's sharp eyes have enabled him to perceive either that my hypothesis--that "significant form" is the essential quality in a work of art--leads to the inclusion of Persian carpets amongst works of art, or that the hypothesis that representation is the essence of art excludes them: I am not sure which. Anyway, this much is certain, either both pictures and carpets can be works of art or they cannot. I set out from the hypothesis that pictures and carpets, or rather some pictures and some carpets, are works of art; and therefore I am less inclined to feel crushed by Mr. Davies's discovery that my premises follow from my conclusions than to inquire why Mr. Davies does not consider carpets and pots and buildings works of art, or, if, after all, he does consider them works of art, to what class he relegates pictures and statues. My object is to discover some quality common and peculiar to all works of art. Such a quality there must be unless when we use the term "works of art" we gibber. Does Mr. Davies assert that only pictures and statues can be works of art? Or are we to assume that he gibbers?

Even if I cannot argue profitably with my new friend I may be able to give him a useful hint. For though, as he wittily observes, he is still much older than I am, it is conceivable that I enjoy a wider aesthetic experience.

"To look for the same qualities in a carpet and a picture would be
equally absurd, seeing that one is intended to hang on the wall and
the other to be laid on the floor. If any one doubts this, let him
frame his carpets and put his canvases over the parquet."

To hang on the wall was, of course, precisely the purpose for which many of the finest Oriental carpets were intended; but disdaining all considerations, no matter how relevant, that seem to set a premium on scholarship, I will gladly put my friend and his readers in the way of carrying out this interesting experiment. They need not jeopardize the drawing-room furniture. Not far from the house in which Mr. Davies lives stands a building so large and so silly that it can scarcely have escaped his admiration. It is the Victoria and Albert Museum; and any one who cares to step inside can see a fair collection of Oriental carpets hanging picture-wise against the wall--hanging in frames too. I shall be very much surprised if the more sensitive of those who trouble to pay them a visit do not feel that these carpets are as aesthetically satisfactory on the wall as they would be on the floor, and I shall be amazed if they do not feel also that they are as definitely works of art as the objects that adorn the walls of the Tate Gallery.

My purpose is to discover the quality common and peculiar to works of art. I have suggested that this quality is what I call Significant Form--i.e. combinations of lines and colours that are in themselves moving. A good many people besides Mr. Davies have blamed me for giving the name Significant Form to just that form which seems to signify nothing. I adopted the term with hesitation, and I shall sacrifice it without pain if something better can be found to take its place. All the same, I did try to explain what I meant by it. I speak of Significant Form in contradistinction to Insignificant Beauty--the beauty of gems or of a butterfly's wing, the beauty that pleases, but does not seem to provoke that peculiar thrill that we call an aesthetic emotion. I suggested very cautiously that the explanation of this difference might lie in the fact that the forms created by an artist express, or in some way transmit, an emotion felt by their creator, whereas the forms of nature, so far as most of us are concerned, do not seem to hand on anything so definite. But about this part of my theory I was, and still am, extremely diffident, and I mention it here only in the hope of justifying what has seemed to many sensible people a silly name.

At the beginning of my book I was at some pains to explain why I held that all systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience. I said that my purpose was to discover some quality common and peculiar to all works that moved me aesthetically, and I invited those whose experience did not tally with mine--and whose experience does tally exactly with that of any one else?--to discover some other quality common and peculiar to all the objects that so moved them. I said that in elaborating a theory of aesthetics an author must depend entirely on his own experience, and in my book I depended entirely on mine. There are people to whom a simple statement of this sort comes as a pressing invitation to score cheaply:--So now we know what art is, it is whatever you are pleased to honour with your approval. "But why should Mr. Bell suppose that the forms that move him are the only ones proper to move others?" says Mr. Davies.

"Again, it is as foolish for Mr. Bell, or any other individual, to
say, as he does say, that Frith's _Paddington Station_ is not a
work of art as it would be for me to say that rhubarb tart--which I
detest--is not food. If I were the only person in the world who ate
anything, then, I admit, I should be right in saying that it was
not food--for it would not be, because I should never eat it. And
if Mr. Bell were the only spectator of works of art on earth, he
would have a perfect right to say that _Paddington Station_ was not
a work of art. But as he is not the only person on earth--if he
will forgive me for mentioning the fact--he has no right to say
that it is not a work of art."

If this were anything more respectable than one of those pieces of grave but delicate sarcasm for which I am told Mr. Davies is famous, it would be perilous doctrine in the mouth of a professional art critic. We have no right to say that something is not a work of art so long as other people say that it is. The poor fellow who has gone through with a picture to the very end and has got it hung will always, I suspect, consider it a work of art; and I hope that some of his friends will have the humanity to back him up. Therefore ... well, we must be catholic. But Mr. Randall Davies, who deals out, week after week, column after column of aesthetic judgments, may surely be invited by his readers to disclose the criteria by which he distinguishes between works of art and rubbish. If a work of art be that which any one judges to be a work of art, we may as well consult the first policeman we meet instead of going for an opinion to a paid expert.

If Mr. Davies had understood the very simple language in which I stated my position, he would have realized that when I say that _Paddington Station_ is not a work of art I mean that _Paddington Station_ does not provoke in me an aesthetic emotion, and that I believe we can have no reason for thinking a thing to be a work of art except that we feel it to be one. _Paddington Station_ did not move me; therefore I had no reason for judging it a work of art, but, of course, I may have looked at the picture stupidly and remained insensitive to the real significance of its forms. If Mr. Davies had understood the very simple language in which I stated my position, he would have realized that, far from making a claim to infallibility in aesthetic judgments, I insisted on the fact that we might all disagree about particular works of art and yet agree about aesthetics. But if Mr. Davies had been able to catch the general drift of my book, he would have understood that whether _Paddington Station_ moves me or whether it leaves me cold is a matter of secondary importance. The point of first importance is whether a person who is moved in the same sort of way by _Paddington Station_ and a Sung bowl and Sta. Sophia and a Persian carpet can find any quality common and peculiar to all save that which I have called Significant Form.

That is the problem. It is not quite so simple as I have had to make it appear. Some day I hope to answer the pertinent questions raised by Mr. Roger Fry and other critics. In my book I have examined my own experience in the hope of inducing my readers to examine theirs. What do they say? Are they really talking nonsense when they speak of "works of art," including under that head pictures, pots, buildings, textiles, etc.? If they are not, what characteristic distinguishes the species? Do they not feel as much emotion for a picture of a round of beef as for a picture of the Crucifixion, and do they feel less for a Sassanian textile? If what they had taken for a jug turns out to be a paper-weight; if, as sometimes happens in a battered fresco, what was said to be the Heavenly host is proved to be a pack of licentious Florentines, do they really have to readjust their aesthetic attitude? If people who are capable of feeling and of analysing their feelings will give me honest answers to these questions, I shall be even more grateful to them than I am to Mr. Davies for his facetious advertisement of my book.

FOOTNOTE:

[18] I wonder what Mr. Davies really said. Any one who cares to know has only to consult the _New Statesman_ for March 7 or 14, 1914. I have not a copy by me. It looks as though there had been a pretty firm offer of some sort: it came to nothing, alas!

PICTURE SHOWS