Chapter I: The Industrial Scene, 1842 (3)

Hence we are led back to consider the progress of Physiology as a whole--a subject with which the present writer hesitates to deal except in a very superficial manner. Physiology as an organized science has inevitably been deeply influenced by its close relation with medicine, with the result that through a large portion of the period under review it has concerned itself chiefly with the functions of the human body in particular, or at least chiefly with Vertebrates from which, by analogy, the human functions may be inferred. In this field it has made enormous progress, and a vast amount of knowledge has been gained with regard to the function and mechanism of all the parts and organs of the body. It may perhaps be suggested, however, that in the pursuit of this detailed (and in practice absolutely necessary) knowledge, physiologists have to some extent lost sight of the wood in their preoccupation with the trees. That is to say, while they have advanced an immense distance in their knowledge of organs, they have not yet got as far as might be hoped in the understanding of the organism--which is to say no more than that the great and fundamental problem of Biology, the nature and meaning of Life, is apparently almost as far from solution as ever. To this further reference will be made below.

The progress of Physiology has been so great in all its branches that it is difficult to decide which most deserve mention; perhaps the most important advances are those connected with the nervous system and with internal secretions. Little or nothing was known fifty years ago of the minute structure of the nervous system, nor of the special functions of its different parts. Now the main functions of the various parts of the brain, and the relation of these parts to the activities of the other organs of the body, are well known, although much remains to be discovered with regard to the more detailed localization of function. The study of the microscopic structure of brain and nerve, and experiment on the conduction of nervous impulse, have given us some insight into the mechanism of the nervous system, but the fundamental nature of nervous action still remains unsolved.

The nervous system is the chief co-ordinating link between the various organs of the body, but in recent years it has been discovered that the relations of the different parts to one another are greatly influenced by substances known as internal secretions or 'hormones'. These substances are produced by ductless glands (the thyroid, suprarenals, &c.), from which they diffuse into the blood-stream and exercise a remarkable influence either on particular organs or systems, or on the body as a whole. Some of these secretions act specifically on the involuntary muscles of the body, others control growth, others the development of the secondary sexual characters, such as the distinctive plumage of male birds, and also greatly influence the sexual instinct. Much still remains to be discovered with regard to them, but it seems clear that they are of immense importance in the economy of the body. It has been suggested, without much experimental support, however, that if a part of the body becomes modified by use or environment, it may produce a modified hormone, and that so, by the action of this on the germ-cells, the modification may be transmitted to subsequent generations.

Before leaving the subject of physiology in the more special or technical application of the term, reference must be made to another science the growth of which has been largely under the influence of medicine. This is bacteriology, one of the newest branches of biology, and yet one which both from its practical importance and from the theoretical interest of its discoveries is rapidly taking a foremost place. Of its practical achievements in connexion with disease, and with the part played by bacteria and other minute organisms in the life and affairs of man, it is not necessary to speak. Every one knows the great advances that have been made in recent years in identifying (and to a less extent in controlling) disease-producing organisms, whether bacteria, protozoa (such as the organisms causing malaria, dysentery, etc.), or more highly organized parasites. The attempt, however, to combat these pathogenic bacteria has led to discoveries of the highest importance with regard to the production of immunity, not only against specific germs, but against many organic poisons such as snake venom and various vegetable toxins. That an attack of certain diseases leaves the patient immune to that disease for a longer or shorter time has of course been known for centuries, but it is a modern discovery that a specific poison induces the body to produce a specific antidote which neutralizes it, and the detailed working out of this principle and the study of the means by which the immunity is brought about promise to lead us a long way towards the central problem of the nature and activities of life itself.

We have seen how zoology has been led back into physiological channels of research, and how the study of bacteria is opening up some of the deepest problems of the reaction of living things to environmental stimuli, and just as the various branches of these sciences interlace and influence one another, so all of them, in recent years, have been coming into contact with the inorganic sciences of chemistry and physics. One of the noteworthy features of science in all its branches in recent years has been the tendency of subjects which were at one time regarded as distinct to come together again and to find that the problems of each can only be successfully attacked by the co-operation of the others. In their earlier days the biological sciences were in most respects far removed from chemistry and physics; it was recognized, of course, that organisms were in one sense at least physico-chemical mechanisms, consisting of chemical elements and subject to the fundamental laws of matter and energy. With the advent of the theory of evolution this conception of the organism as a mechanism took more definite shape, and among many biologists the belief was held that in no very long time all the phenomena of life would be explicable by known physico-chemical laws. Hence arose the scientific materialism which was so widespread in the years following the general acceptance of Darwin's theory. It was recognized, of course, that our knowledge of organic chemistry was at the time entirely inadequate to place this belief upon a proved scientific basis, but the expectation of proving it gave a great impetus to the study of the physical and chemical phenomena of life. This attempt was still further stimulated by the investigation of the factors controlling development referred to in a preceding paragraph, for it is evident that to a great extent at least these factors are chemical and physical in nature. And concurrently, the great advances in organic chemistry, resulting in the analysis and in many cases in the artificial synthesis of substances previously regarded as capable of production only in the tissues of living organisms, made possible a much more thorough investigation of the chemical and physical basis of vital phenomena. The result of this has been that to a quite considerable extent the factors, hitherto mysterious, which control the fertilization, division, and differentiation of the egg, the digestion and absorption of food, the conduction of nervous impulses, and many of the changes undergone in the normal or pathological functioning of the organs and tissues, can be ascribed to chemical and physical causes which are well known in the inorganic world.

As in other instances, however, some of which have been mentioned above, the elucidation of the organism from this point of view has turned out to be a much less simple process than the more sanguine of the early investigators supposed. The more knowledge has progressed, the more complex and intricate has even the simplest organism shown itself to be, and although the mechanism of the parts is gradually becoming understood, the fundamental mystery of life remains as elusive as ever.

The chief reason for this failure to penetrate appreciably nearer to the central mystery of life appears to be the fact that an organism is something more than the sum of its various parts and functions. In tracing the behaviour of any one part or function, whether it be the conduction of a nervous impulse, the supply of oxygen to the tissues by the blood, or the transmission of inherited characters by the germ-cells, we may be able to give a more or less complete physico-chemical or mechanical account of the process. But we seem to get little or no nearer to an explanation of the fact that although every one of these processes may be explicable by laws familiar in the non-living, in the living organism they are co-ordinated in such a way that none of them is complete in itself; they are parts of a whole, but the whole is not simply a sum of its parts, but is in itself a unity, in which all the parts are subject to the controlling influence of the whole. An organism, alone among the material bodies which we know, is constantly and necessarily in a state of unstable equilibrium, and yet has a condition of _normality_ which is maintained by the harmonious interaction of all its parts. Every function of the body, if not thus co-ordinated with the rest, would very quickly destroy this condition of normality, but in consequence of the co-ordination each is subject to the needs of the whole, and normality is maintained. When the normality is artificially disturbed, all the functions of the body adapt themselves to the change, and, if the disturbance be not too great, co-operate in the restoration of the normal condition. It is in these phenomena of adaptation and organic unity and co-ordination that up to the present time the efforts to reduce the phenomena of living things to the operation of physico-chemical laws have most conspicuously failed.

From what has been said it will be evident that, fundamentally, all biological research, whether its authors are conscious of it or not, is directed towards the solution of one central problem--the problem of the real and ultimate nature of life. And the main outcome of the work of sixty years has been that this problem has begun clearly to emerge as the central aim of the science. The theory of evolution made the problem a reality, for without evolution the mystery of life must for ever be insoluble, but whatever direction biological investigation has taken, it has led, often by devious paths, to the borderland between the living and the inorganic, and in that borderland the central problem inevitably faces us.

Many suggestions for its solution have been made. On the one hand there is still, as there always has been, a considerable body of opinion that the solution will be a mechanical one--using the word mechanical in the widest sense--and that the living differs from the non-living not in kind, but only in degree of complexity. The upholders of the mechanistic or materialist theory, however, are perhaps less confident than their predecessors of the last century, for the solution in this direction has to face not only the problem of organic co-ordination already referred to, but also that of consciousness and mind. For although the study of psychology on physiological lines has made similar progress to that of other branches of physiology, it seems to approach little nearer to a discovery of the nature of the relation between consciousness in its various aspects and the material body with which it is associated. So long as this gulf remains unbridged, the possibility of a satisfactory mechanistic explanation of life seems far away.

On the other hand, there has been a revival of the ancient tendency towards what is called a vitalistic solution. A certain number of biologists, impressed by the apparent similarity between the control and co-ordination exercised by the organism over its functions and the conscious control of voluntary activity with which we are familiar in ourselves, have supposed that these things are not merely superficially similar but have a real and fundamental affinity. This does not mean that organic control is always conscious, but that there is a controlling entity, non-material in nature, which is similar in kind to the 'ego' of a self-conscious human being. They suppose that the organism is not simply material, but is a material mechanism controlled by a non-material entity the nature of which is more akin to what we mean by the word spirit than anything else of which we are accustomed to think. They are in fact dualists, and divide reality into the material and spatial on the one hand, and non-material principle or entity which may fairly be called spiritual on the other.

And, in the third place, there are those who seek a solution which denies the truth of both the preceding, and which is metaphysically idealist or monist in character. To them, if the present writer understands their attitude, matter and spirit are different aspects of one reality. In the inorganic and non-living, phenomena appear which are generalized under the laws of physics and chemistry, but the phenomena of life fall into a different category which includes the conception of co-ordination or individuality, while a still higher category is required to include the phenomena of consciousness and mind.

It is evident from this brief review that Biology in the period considered has passed through three main stages. The first of these was the acceptance of a new illuminating and unifying idea, which led to enthusiastic research in many directions for the purpose of proving and amplifying it. Very rapidly new facts, or new interpretations of facts already known, were shown to fall into line, and the evolution theory became converted from a hypothesis into something approaching a dogma. Not only the idea of organic evolution itself, but all the current beliefs about the method of evolution, and the larger speculations to which it gave rise, were widely regarded as almost indisputable, and where difficulties and inconsistencies appeared, these were supposed to be due solely to the insufficiency of our knowledge, which would soon be remedied. Then, however, as detailed knowledge increased, the voice of criticism and doubt was more frequently heard. The various branches of Biology began once more to overlap, and to join hands with chemistry and physics, and it became clear that the interpretation of life was very far from being a simple problem. And so, as with the Atomic Theory in chemistry, the present position is one of dissolution of the older ideas and of hesitation to express a fixed belief, for while Biology has a clearer vision of the problem before it than ever it had, its wider knowledge reveals the fact that the problem is far from being solved. Perhaps one of the chief results of the great increase of knowledge during the past sixty years has been to show us the immensity of the field still remaining to be explored.

FOR REFERENCE

Centenary volume on Darwin (Cambridge University Press).

X

ART

A. CLUTTON-BROCK

My subject is art and thought about art. I deal with aesthetics only so far as they concern art, that is to say I shall not attempt any purely philosophic speculations about the nature of art and I shall speak of the speculations of others, such as Croce and Tolstoy, only so far as they seem to me likely to have a practical effect upon art. My subject is the art of to-day and our ideas about it. We are beginning at last to connect aesthetics with our own experience of art and to see that our beliefs about the nature and value of art will affect the art we produce. Hence a new aesthetic is very slowly appearing; but I have to confess it has not yet appeared.

Indeed there are at present two conflicting theories of art, one or other of which is held consciously or unconsciously by most people who are interested in art at all, and both of which I think are not only imperfect but to some extent false. They are theories about the relation of the artist to the public, and because of the conflict between them and the falsity of each, we are confused in our ideas about art, and the artists are often confused in their practice of it.

The first theory has been expressed, not philosophically but with great liveliness, by Whistler in his _Ten O'clock_, and has had great influence both upon the thought of many people who care about art and upon the practice of artists. It is, put shortly, that the artist has no concern with the public whatever, nor the public with the artist. There is no kind of necessary relation between them, but only an accidental one; and the less of that the better for the artist and his art.

Whistler states it in the form of a New Testament of his own.

'Listen,' he says. 'There never was an artistic period.

'There never was an art-loving nation.

'In the beginning man went forth each day--some to do battle,
some to the chase; others again to dig and to delve in the
field--all that they might gain and live or lose and die. Until
there was found among them one differing from the rest, whose
pursuits attracted him not, and so he stayed by the tents with
the women, and traced strange devices with a burnt stick upon a
gourd.

'This man, who took no joy in the ways of his brethren--who cared
not for conquest and fretted in the field--this designer of
quaint patterns--this deviser of the beautiful--who perceived in
nature about him curious curvings--as faces are seen in the
fire--this dreamer apart, was the first artist.'

'And when from the field and from afar, there came back the
people, they took the gourd--and drank from it.'

Whistler means that they did not notice the patterns the artist had traced on it.

'They drank at the cup,' he says, 'not from choice, not from a
consciousness that it was beautiful, but because forsooth there
was none other.'

So gradually there came the great ages of art.

'Then', he says, 'the people lived in marvels of art--and ate and
drank out of masterpieces for there was nothing else to eat and
drink out of, and no bad building to live in.'

And, he says, the people questioned not, and had nothing to do or say in the matter.

But then a strange thing happened. There arose a new class

'who discovered the cheap, and foresaw fortune in the facture of
the sham. Then sprang into existence the tawdry, the common, the
gewgaw, and what was born of the million went back to them and
charmed them, for it was after their own heart.... And Birmingham
and Manchester arose in their might--and Art was relegated to the
curiosity shop.'

I do not think this can be a true account of the matter; for, if the people were not aware of the existence of art and did not value it at all, how came they to imitate it? One imitates only that which one values. Imitation, as we know, is the sincerest form of flattery; and you cannot flatter that which you do not know to exist.

But Whistler's account of the primitive artist is also wrong, so far as we can check it. We may be sure that, if the other primitive men had seen no value in his pursuits, they would have killed him or let him starve. And the artist, as he exists at present among primitive peoples, is not a dreamer apart. The separation between the artist and other men is modern and a result of modern specialization. In many primitive societies most men practise some art in their leisure, and for that reason are interested in each other's art. In fact they notice the cups they drink out of much more than we do. If we did notice the cups we drink out of, we should not be able to endure them. In primitive societies there are not star pianists or singers or dancers; they all dance and make music. Homer himself was a popular entertainer; he would have been very much surprised to hear that he was a dreamer apart. In fact Whistler made up this pretty story about the primitive artist because he assumed that all artists must be like himself. He read himself back into the past and saw himself painting primitive nocturnes in a primitive Chelsea, happily undisturbed by primitive critics. He is wrong in his facts, and I believe he is wrong in his theory. There is a relation, and a necessary relation, between the artist and his public; but what is the nature of it? That is a difficult question for us to answer because the relation now between the artist and the public is, in fact, usually wrong; and Tolstoy in his _What is Art?_ tried to put it right.

_What is Art?_ is a most interesting book, full of incidental truth; but I believe that the main contention in it is false. I will give this contention as shortly as I can in his own words.

'Art', he says, 'is a human activity, consisting in this--that
one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on
to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people
are infected by these feelings and also experience them.'

Now this is well enough as far as it goes, but it is not enough, and just because it is not enough it leads Tolstoy into error. Clearly, if art is nothing but the infection of the public with the feelings of the artist, it follows that a work of art is to be judged by the number of people who are infected. And Tolstoy with his usual sincerity accepts these conclusions; indeed, he wrote his book to insist upon them. He judges art entirely as a thing of use, moral use, and he says it can be of no use unless a large audience is infected by it. A work of art that few can enjoy fails as art, just as a railway from nowhere to nowhere fails as a railway. A railway exists to be travelled by and a work of art exists to be experienced by as many people as possible. Here are the actual words of Tolstoy:

'For a work to be esteemed good and to be approved of and
diffused, it will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few
people living in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it
will have to satisfy the demands of all those great masses of
people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious
life.'

Now this sounds plausible; but consider the effect of it upon yourself. You listen to a symphony by Beethoven; and before you esteem it good, you must ask yourself, not whether it is good to you, but whether it will satisfy the demands of those great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life. Tolstoy does proceed to ask himself this question about Beethoven's Choral symphony and about King Lear, and condemns them both because, he says, a Russian peasant would not understand them. But if we all obeyed him and asked this question about all works of art, we should none of us ever experience any work of art at all; for, while we listened to a piece of music, we should be wondering whether other people understood it; that is to say we should not listen to it at all. And what is this Jury of people situated in the natural conditions of laborious life who are to decide not individually but as a Jury? Who can say whether he himself belongs to them? Who is to choose them? Tolstoy chose them as consisting of Russian peasants; he, like Whistler, believed in the primitive, but for him it was the primitive man, not the primitive artist, who was blessed. In his view there would be no Jury in all western Europe worthy of deciding upon a work of art, because we none of us are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life. So we must change all our way of life or despair of art altogether. Not one of the great ages of art would satisfy his conditions. Certainly not the Greeks of the age of Pericles, or the Chinese of the Sung dynasty, or the thirteenth century in France, or the Renaissance in Italy; and as a matter of fact he condemns most of the great art of the world, including his own.

We can escape from the tyranny of Tolstoy's doctrine, as from the tyranny of Whistler's, only by considering the facts of our own experience of art. The fact that we _can_ enjoy and experience a work of art frees us from Whistler's doctrine, because, if we can enjoy and experience it, we are concerned with it. Because of our enjoyment, art is for us a social activity and not a game played by the artist for his own amusement. We know also that the artist likes us to enjoy his art, in fact complains loudly if we do not; and we do not believe that the primitive artist or man was different in this respect. There is now, and always has been, some kind of relation between the artist and the public, but not the relation which Tolstoy affirms.

According to him the proper aim of art is to do good.

'The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time
unintelligible to a great number of people is extremely unjust,
and its consequences are ruinous to art itself.'

The word _unjust_ implies that the aim of art is to do good. The artist sins if he does not try to do good to as many people as possible, and I sin if I am ready to enjoy and encourage a work of art which most people do not enjoy.

But as a matter of fact a work of art is good to me, not morally good but good as a work of art, if I enjoy it. In my estimate of the work of art I can ask only if it is a work of art to me, not if it is one to other people. I may wish and try to make them enjoy it, but if I do that is as a result of my own enjoyment of it. I can't begin by asking whether other people enjoy it; I must begin with my own experience of it, for I have nothing else to go by.

And so it is with the artist; he cannot begin by asking himself whether the mass of men will understand what he proposes to produce; he must produce it, and then trust in man, and God, for its effect. Art is produced by the individual artist and experienced by the individual man. Tolstoy holds that it is to be experienced by mankind in the mass, not by individuals; his audience is an abstraction. Whistler holds that it is produced by the individual, but for himself, and not experienced by mankind either in the mass or as individuals. Both are heretics. What is the truth?

I will now turn for a moment to the high aesthetic doctrine of Benedetto Croce. He in his _Aesthetic_ tells us that all art is expression. True enough, as far as it goes; but what do we mean by expression? Croce's doctrine of expression is incomplete, he does not explain clearly what he means by expression, because he also avoids the question of the necessary relation between the artist and his audience; and this is the question which our thought about art has to deal with, just as we have to solve it in our practice of art and in our actual relation with the artist. Croce does not see that the question--What is expression? depends upon the question--What is the relation between the artist and his audience? He does see that the audience exists, which Whistler denies; he insists that the audience have the same faculties as the artist, though to a less degree--that the artist is not a dreamer apart. He says indeed that to experience a work of art we also must exercise our aesthetic faculty; our very experience of it is itself expression; and this is a most important point. But for Croce, as for Whistler, the artist, when he expresses himself, is concerned only with what he expresses, not with the people to whom he expresses himself. Croce does not see this obvious fact, that a work of art is a work of art _because it is addressed to some one_ and is not a private activity of the artist. That is why he fails to give a satisfying account of the nature of expression. Croce cannot distinguish between expression, or art, and day-dreaming; but the distinction is this, that as soon as I pass from day-dreaming to expression, I am speaking no longer to myself but to others. So the form of every work of art is conditioned by the fact that it is addressed to others. A story, for instance, is a story, it has a plot, because it is told. A play is a play, and also has a plot, because it is made to be acted before an audience. A piece of music has musical form, with its repetitions and developments, because it is made to be heard. A picture has composition, emphasis, because it is painted to be seen. The very process of pictorial art is a process of pointing out. When a man draws he makes a gesture of emphasis; he says--This is what I have seen and what I want you to see. And in each case the work of art is a work of art, expression is expression, because it implies an audience or spectators. Without that implication, without the effort of address, there could be no art, no expression, at all.

In fact, art in its nature is a social activity, because man in his nature is a social being. Art does not exist in isolation because man does not exist in isolation. His very faculties are in their nature social always and whether for good or for evil. The individual in isolation is a figment of man's mind, and so is art in isolation.

But although art is a social activity, it is not, as Tolstoy thinks, a moral activity. The artist does not address mankind with the object of doing them good. It is useless to say that he ought to have that object; if he had he would not be an artist. The aim of doing good is itself incompatible with the artistic aim. But that is not to say that art does not do good. It may do good all the more because the artist is not trying to do good.

But what is it that really happens when the artist addresses us, and why does he wish to address us? To answer this, we must consider our own experience, not merely as an audience but also as artists, for we are, as Croce insists, all of us to some extent artists. You have all no doubt been aware of some failure and dissatisfaction in those of your experiences which seem to you the highest. Suppose, for instance, you see some extreme beauty, as of a sunset. It leaves you sad with a feeling of your own inadequacy. You have not been equal to it, and why? You will say in speaking of it to others--I wish I could tell you what I felt or what I saw, but I can't. That wish is itself natural and instantly stirred in you by the experience of extreme beauty. The experience seems incomplete, because you cannot tell anyone else what you felt and saw; and you are hurt by your effort and failure to do so.

It is a fact of human nature that the experience of any beauty does arouse in us the desire to communicate our experience; and this desire is instinctive. It is not that we wish to do good to others by communicating it. It is simply that we wish to communicate it. The experience itself is incomplete for us until we communicate it. The happiness which it gives us is frustrated by our failure to communicate it. We should be utterly happy if we could make others see what we see and feel what we feel, but we fail of happiness because we cannot.

Why? One can only conjecture and express conjectures in dull language. This beauty is itself a universal quality or virtue which makes particular things more real when they have it. It speaks to the universal in us, to the everyman in us, and, speaking so, it makes us aware of the universal in all men. We too wish to speak to that universal, we wish to find it and the more intense reality which is to be seen only where it is seen, we wish ourselves to be a part of it; and we can do that only when all other men also are a part of it. Beauty seems to speak not merely to us but to the whole listening earth, and we would be assured that all the earth is listening to it, not to us.

But we ourselves have to play our part in the realizing of this universal; the sense of it comes and goes; for the most part we ourselves are not aware of it. We are merely particulars, like other men, and separated from them by the fact that we are all particulars. Only, when for a moment we are aware of it, then we are filled with a passion to make it real and permanent; and it is this passion which causes art and the blind instinctive effort at art, at communication, at expression, which we have all experienced.

But it follows from this that the audience to which the artist addresses himself is not any particular men and women: it is mankind. The moment he addresses himself to any particular men and women and considers their particular wants and desires, he is giving up that very sense of the universal that impelled him to expression; he is ceasing to be an artist and becoming something else, a tradesman, a philanthropist, a politician. The artist as artist speaks to mankind, not to any particular set of men; and he speaks not of himself but of that universal which he has experienced. His effort is to establish that universal relation which he has seen, a universal relation of feeling. And to him, in his effort, there is neither time nor space. Mankind are not here or there or of this moment or of that; they are everywhere and for ever. The voice in Mozart's music is itself a universal voice speaking to the universe of universal things. And all art is an acting of the beauty that has been experienced, a perpetuation of it so that all men may share it for ever. The artist's effort is to be the sunset he has seen, to eternalize it in his art, but always so that he and all men may be part of this universal by their common experience of it.

So, as I say, the artist must not speak to any particular audience with the aim of pleasing them--there is that amount of truth in Whistler's doctrine; and he does fail if he does not communicate, since his aim is communication--there is that amount of truth in Tolstoy's doctrine.

But the next question that arises is the attitude of ourselves to the artist.

We have to remember that he is speaking not to us in particular, but to all mankind, and that he speaks, not to please us or to satisfy any particular demand of ours, but to communicate to us that universal he has experienced so that we with him may become part of it.

It follows then that we must not make any particular demands upon him. We must not come with our own ideas of what he ought to give us. If we do, we shall be an obstruction between him and that ideal universal audience to which he would address himself. We shall be tempting him, with our egotistical demands, to comply with them. But these demands we are always making; and that is why the relation between the artist and any actual public is usually nowadays wrong. I was once looking at Tintoret's 'Crucifixion' in the Scuola di San Rocco with a lady, and she said to me--'That isn't my idea of a horse.' 'No'--I answered--'it's Tintoret's. If it were your idea of a horse, why should you look at it? You look at a picture to get the artist's idea.' But that isn't the truth about art either. The artist doesn't try to substitute his own particular for yours. He tries to communicate to you that universal which he has experienced, because it is to him a universal, not his own, but all men's, and he wishes to realize it by sharing it with all men. His faith, though he may never have consciously expressed it to himself, is in this universal which, because it is a universal, can be communicated to all men. His effort is based on that faith. He speaks because he believes all men can hear, if they will.

So the effort of the audience must be to hear and not to distract him with their particular demands. They must not, for instance, demand that he shall remind them of what they have found pleasant in actual life. They must not complain of him that he does not paint pretty women for them, or compose bright cheerful tunes. They are not to him particular persons to be tickled according to their particular tastes, but mankind to whom he wishes to communicate the universal he has experienced.

So, if there is an actual audience listening for that universal and clearing their minds of their own egotistical demands, then art will flourish and the artist will be encouraged to communicate that universal which he has experienced. But if particular audiences demand this or that and are not happy until they get it, if they say to him--Tickle my senses--Persuade me that all is for the best in the world as I like it; that prosperous people like myself have a right to be prosperous; that I am a fine fellow because I once fell in love; that all who disagree with me are wicked and absurd--then you will have the kind of art you have now, in the theatre, in the picture gallery, in the cinema, in the novel; yes, and in your buildings, your cups and saucers, your pots and pans even. For in the very arts of use you demand that the craftsman shall provide you with what you demand, and as cheap as possible; because you do not understand that he should express himself, you do not understand also that his expression is worth having and that he ought to be paid for it. In the very pattern on a tea-cup, if it is worth having at all, there is the communication of that universal which the artist has experienced. It is there to remind you of itself whenever you drink tea, to bring the sacrament of the universal into everything as if it were music accompanying and heightening all our common actions; but if you want a fashionable tea-cup cheap, you will get that, and you will not get anything expressed or communicated with it. You will be shut up in yourself and your own particularity and ugliness. If we want art we must know how we should think and feel and act so as to encourage the artist to produce it.

But why should we want art at all? I hope I have answered that question incidentally. It is so that we may have life more abundantly; for we can have life more abundantly only when we are in communication with each other, mind flowing into mind, the universal expressing itself in and through all of us. We all more or less blindly desire this communication, but we seldom know why we desire it or even what exactly it is we desire. We make the strangest, clumsiest efforts to communicate with each other--I am making one now--and we are constantly inhibited by false shame from real communication. We are afraid to be serious with each other, afraid of beauty, of the universal, when we see it. On this point I will tell a little story from Mr. Kirk's _Study of Silent Minds_. At a concert behind the front, an audience of soldiers had listened to the ordinary items, a performance, as Mr. Kirk says, 'clean, bright, and amusing', which means of course silly and ugly. Then the orchestra played the introduction to the _Keys of Heaven_, and a gunner remarked--'Sounds like a bloody hymn.' That was his fear of beauty, his false shame. But when the _Keys of Heaven_ was ended, the whole audience, including the gunner, gave a sigh of content; and after that they went to hear it time after time. Well, the beauty of that song, and of all art, is the 'Key of Heaven' itself. For Heaven is a state of being of which we all dream, however dully, in which all have the power of communication with each other; in which all are aware of the universal, possessed by it and a part of it, all members of one body, all notes in one tune, and therefore all the more intensely themselves, for a note is itself, finds itself, only in a tune; otherwise it is mere nonsense.

Of course if you are to believe this, you must believe in the existence of a universal, independent of yourself, yet also in you and in all men. You must believe that beauty exists as a virtue, a quality, a relation of things, and that it is possible for you also to produce that virtue, to live in that relation. But no one can prove that to you. The only way to believe it is to see beauty with intensity and to make the effort of communication in some form or other.

Tolstoy believes that the very word beauty is a useless one because, he says, all efforts to define beauty are vain. But that is true of the word life, yet we have to use the word because life exists. And all explanations of art which refuse to believe in beauty as a reality independent of us, yet one of which we may become a part, do fall into incredible nonsense. We are told that art is play; the only answer to which is that it isn't. Others say that it is an expression of the sexual instinct, which has forgotten itself. They discover that in some savage tribe the male beats a tom-tom to attract the female; and they conclude that Beethoven's Choral Symphony is only a more elaborate tom-tom beaten to attract a more sophisticated female. But again the only answer is that it isn't; and that if all our ancestors were, not Whistler's dreamers apart, but beaters of tom-toms to attract females, then there was something in the sound of the tom-tom that made them forget the female. The reality of art is to be found not in its origins but in what it is trying to be; and what it is trying to be is always a communication between mind and mind; what we aim at in art is a fellowship not for purposes of use but for its own sake, the fellowship we feel when we are all together singing a great tune.

But now, since we have a hundred foolish ideas about art, its nature and value, it is of the greatest importance that we should attain to a right idea of it, not only as a matter of theory to be discussed, but as a religion to be practised. And, if we can grasp this right idea of it, we shall not think of art as consisting merely of the fine arts, painting, poetry, music, sculpture. We shall see that it is possible for men to be artists, to exercise this great activity of communication, in the work by which they earn their living, and that a happy society is one in which all men do so exercise it. We are very far from that happiness now, and that is why Ruskin and Morris became almost desperate rebels against our present society. What they said about art and its nature is still the best that has been said about it, far nearer to philosophic truth than all that the professed philosophers have said, and of the utmost moment to us now. For if we could believe them we should change most of our values; we should see that the ordinary man, now being deprived of all the joy of art in his work, is living a mutilated life; we should place art among the rights of man. Whereas Rousseau said--All men are born free and everywhere they are in chains--we should say--All men are born artists and everywhere they are drudges. With our curious English originality, which hits on so many momentous truths and then makes no use of them, it is we who have found the greatest truth about art, but neither we nor any other people is at present making much use of it. Because we lack art, lack the power of communication, we lack fellowship; and as Morris said--Fellowship is life and the lack of it is death.

FOR REFERENCE

W. Morris, _Hopes and Fears for Art_.

XI

A GENERATION OF MUSIC

DR. ERNEST WALKER

The general subject of this course is European Thought; and, to some, music may perhaps seem in this connexion rather like an intruder. Indeed, if the musician is, in William Morris's phrase, 'the idle singer of an empty day', if his business is to administer alternate stimulants and soporifics to the nerves or, at best, the surface emotions, or to serve in Cinderella-like fashion any passing, shallow needs of either the individual or the crowd, then, obviously, he has no place worth self-respecting mention in the world as it exists for philosophy. But widespread as some such conception of the function of music is, I hope you will agree with me in throwing it aside as, at any rate for our present purpose, no more worth the trouble of even approximately patient argument than that other less general but more objurgated conception of musical composition as something like a mechanically calculated spinning of bloodless formulae. By the conditions of its being, music has to express itself through non-intellectual channels, but may we not say that its essence is intellectual, that it is, in Combarieu's phrase, the art of thinking in sound--thinking in as precise a sense as the word can bear? It does not express itself verbally: it is self-dependent, with a language available only for the expression of its own ideas and not even indirectly translatable by nature into a verbal medium. Yet it is thought none the less; perhaps all the more. Words, we have often been told, serve for the concealment of thought; but the language of music is more subtle, more comprehensive. It has been said that where words end, music begins; and anyhow, for musicians, there stands on record the serenely proud claim of one of themselves. 'Only art and knowledge', said Beethoven, 'raise man to the divine; and music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and all philosophy.'

But I must not allow this little preliminary apology to stray into the field of abstract aesthetics. The subject proposed to me, the correlation of the progress of specifically musical thought during the last generation with the progress of European thought in general, is so extensive that I cannot within the necessary limits attempt to deal with more than some of the most salient features, and even those I shall have to treat in very broad outlines, with a certain disregard of detail and nicely balancing qualifications. I shall only attempt to put before you what seem to me the most prominent considerations, and to throw out suggestions which I hope you may perhaps, if sufficiently interested, develop at leisure for yourselves.

In several ways the correlation of the musician with the non-musical world is now more intimate and conscious than ever before. Forty or fifty years ago--in spite of brilliant individual exceptions--musicians were, in the main, self-centred craftsmen; they were inclined to drift into a backwater, away from the chief currents of the intellectual, or often indeed of the general artistic life of their day, and they seem on the whole to have been content to have it so. In England we were somewhat behindhand, no doubt, in our participation in the gradual but steady change. But men like Parry and Stanford brought their profession into close touch with the general culture of their contemporaries, and made the universities and music understand each other; Grove, the first director of the Royal College, himself a man whose professional career (not to mention his amateur interests) had ended in music after ranging through civil engineering, business organization, biblical archaeology, and the editorship of a great literary magazine, preached with infectious enthusiasm the new doctrine of the larger outlook; and for the last thirty years, even if our practice may have occasionally seemed somewhat to lag behind, at any rate our theory has not looked back. Musicians have been granted their claim to be judged by the same intellectual and moral standards as other reasonable people; it is a modest claim, but, especially in England, it has had to be fought for.

And the entry on this wider heritage, which English musicians, apart from an exception or two such as Pierson and Bennett, won for the first time a generation ago, has had in every country a definite influence on composition, especially (as is only natural) on the composer's attitude towards the musical setting of literature. I should be far from saying that any modern is a greater song-writer than Schubert; but it is obvious that the followers of Wolf and Duparc and Moussorgsky are aiming at something different. They may not express the general mood of the poem more faithfully, but they certainly attach more importance to its lyrical structure and to flexibly expressive diction: they accept the poet as an equal colleague. The serious song-writer can hardly any longer, like Schumann in his setting of Heine's 'Das ist ein Floeten und Geigen', afford to stultify great poetry by quoting from memory and getting the adjectives deplorably wrong. Nor can he, like Beethoven in 'Adelaide' and the 'Entfernte Geliebte' cycle, let himself weave musical structures many sizes too large for the proper structure of the words, which have consequently to be repeated over and over again with very little regard for poetical or even common sense. Schumann and Beethoven, especially the former, were culturally very far from narrow-minded men; but there was not in their days any general cultural pressure sufficiently strong to influence them as composers. Now, the pressure is so strong that few can resist. Most composers have now fully learned their lesson of a fitting politeness towards their poet-colleagues--learned it in the main, so far as not intuitively, from the high examples set by Wolf and the modern French school--and have, moreover, come to recognize the duty of setting such words as may be fit not only to be sung but to be read, a duty shockingly neglected by many of the greatest geniuses in musical history.