THE DEGRADATION OF BEAUTY

Some time ago I found myself at an exhibition of Post-Impressionist pictures, under the aegis of an artist who was himself of that persuasion. Indeed, he was one of the exhibitors, and I was constrained to express my opinions in the form of questions. We passed before a picture which to my untutored eyes was formless, meaningless and ugly. It was by a well-known artist, and my instructor admired it. He said it was the head of a woman, and he indicated certain hook-like marks in the painting which to him distinctly suggested the nose, the mouth and the neck of a woman, reduced to their simplest terms. After he had fully explained the picture, I asked him if the result was in any sense beautiful to him.

“Beautiful!” he exclaimed, with something of disdain in his voice. “Why should it be beautiful? I do not require that a picture should be beautiful.”

He had not finished, but I was relieved by the first part of his reply. As I cannot hope to appreciate more than a certain number of things in the world, I am willing, so far as pictures are concerned, to be limited to beautiful pictures, and to be proved ignorant and obtuse in regard to all others. For the same reason I have long since reconciled myself to the fact that there are some branches of science and natural history which I shall never master. I shall always endeavour to follow clever writers like Shaw and Brieux whose plays have, as the former puts it, “a really scientific natural history” for their basis. But I cannot hope to acquire the whole of knowledge or reform the whole of the world, and there are books which contain a great deal of sound knowledge and urgent opinion for which I have no use. Moreover, I deny Mr. Shaw’s right to interfere with my enjoyment if I turn to literature which teaches nothing and serves no utilitarian or reforming purpose. It is only when I am in the scientific frame of mind that I desire accurate natural history, or when I am in the reforming frame of mind that I desire earnest exhortations to improve society. In the same way I am only drawn to the Post-Impressionists when I want, not beautiful pictures, but an agreeable sense of the impudence and imbecility of professional craftsmen. But when I am in the mood for literature and art, I demand something that shall appeal to my sense of beauty; and I refuse to be shamed into believing that I ought to prefer scientific knowledge, or ethical suasion, or those particular kinds of ugliness admired by some Realists and some Post-Impressionists.

But I was a little disconcerted when my Post-Impressionist artist concluded with the remark: “I have never yet found anyone who could tell me what he meant by beauty.”

Certainly I had not asked him for an exact definition, or any definition of Beauty in the abstract. I should have been satisfied if, for the moment, he had taken it on trust, as most of us take the law of gravity, the postulates of Euclid, and the evidence of our senses. I was not dismayed because a single Post-Impressionist thought that “beautiful” is a word that has no meaning; but because the reply came so pat upon his lips; he was repeating, parrot-like, a current view; he was adopting the fashionable attitude of scorn towards what is regarded as an ancient tyranny, long since indicted and exploded. This bland acceptance of the meaninglessness and the inefficacy of beauty is habitual to most young professionals who wield pen or pencil. They have learnt it from Mr. Shaw, forgetting that when Mr. Shaw demands complete freedom for the writer he also demands objective truth; or they have learnt it from Mr. Roger Fry, forgetting that even Mr. Fry demands some kind of subjective truth. Every young artist like my acquaintance at the Grafton Gallery, every young novelist like Mr. Gilbert Cannan, is encouraged by the intellectuals to accept formlessness and anarchy as evidence of a magnanimous and enlightened spirit.

But it is not necessary to expose this falsity in its crude and most violent forms. For we may find it expressed in an almost academic way, with philosophical aloofness, a show of nice reasoning, and a kind of Epicurean sweetness in a Romanes lecture delivered by Mr. Arthur James Balfour and published under the title Criticism and Beauty. It is worth while to study so responsible a writer, for we may be sure that he will weigh his words, that he will not over-state his case, or be led away by passion or fanaticism. And it is assuredly interesting to examine the argument for anarchy as stated and defended by a Conservative statesman.

Indeed, it is hard to believe that the author of this essay is the same Mr. Balfour whom we know as the leader of the Conservative party. A statesman ostensibly so consistent in upholding order and authority in the Church, in adhering to time-honoured standards of government, and in trusting the judgment of men “trained in the tradition of politics,” might have been expected to hold views somewhat similar in matters of art. We should have expected him to believe in the existence, not perhaps of artistic canons, but of artistic standards; to be convinced that in aesthetics there is an aesthetic right and wrong; to attach weight to the judgment of men of “trained sensibility.” But it is not so. He holds in the most extreme form the ancient doctrine that seeming is being. Art, as such, has for him nothing to do with truth. He recognises no valid standard of excellence. The only excellence in a work of art is to afford aesthetic pleasure, and the pleasure which a boy derives from a blood-curdling adventure-book or the public from a popular melodrama is, in Mr. Balfour’s view, no less “aesthetic” than the pleasure which another may derive from contemplating a statue by Michelangelo. There is no universal standard; no criterion; no excellence in art except such as each man accepts for himself.

Mr. Balfour does, indeed, make a proper distinction between art as “technical dexterity” and art as related to the “sublime,” the “beautiful,” the “pathetic,” the “humorous,” the “melodious,” and admits that it is possible to apply an “objective test” to technical skill to decide that this line scans, that this rhyme is flawless, that these bars in music are in such-and-such a key. But he will allow no objective grounds of excellence to art in the more important sense. If you say that this poem is beautiful or sublime, you are asserting what is only true for you, a mere personal preference which others need not be expected to share. Not only do men of “trained sensibility” differ from the uncultured, but they differ equally from one another. He cites the evidence of Greek music to show how widely the cultured of one nation and epoch may differ from the cultured of other nations and epochs. Having laid it down as an axiom that our aesthetic judgments are “for the most part immediate, and, so to speak, intuitive,” and observing that the fastidious differ among themselves, and that their delight in fine objects is no more intense than the delight of the vulgar in coarser themes, he proceeds to the conclusion that there can be no valid right or wrong in taste, no absolute standard of beauty. He even maintains that art is not based upon any special faculty for perceiving the true. “I can find no justification in experience for associating great art with penetrating insight.”

Before going further it is necessary to hint at a curious confusion in which he here involves himself a surely rather crude confusion between aesthetic, and moral, right and wrong. Being concerned to disprove the existence of the former, he for a moment identifies it with the latter. It is either, as I have taken it, a crude confusion of thought, or an equivocating device more often used in political controversy than in the domain of art criticism that of identifying the opinion attacked with another of an ignominious character. The view which he is rejecting is thus set forth. “An artist is deemed to be more than the maker of beautiful things. He is a seer, a moralist, a prophet.” Surely he must realise that there are many who would most fervently hold that an artist must be a seer or even a prophet, who would ridicule the idea that he must be that very different sort of thing, a moralist. And in the same way, when he has declared categorically: “I can find no justification in experience for associating great art with penetrating insight,” he almost ludicrously adds, “or good art with good morals.”

It is this confusion of the aim of the artist with the aims of other expounders the moralist, the philosopher, the theologian that vitiates his argument against the insight of the great artists. Why does he deny them this “penetrating insight?” Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. “Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty.” The non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that he only shows that artists have differed in respect of what is not essential to art. If he had shown that some artists have created the beautiful, and others have created the ugly, he would have produced evidence fatal to his opponents. As it is he has denied perception of the beautiful to artists because they differ in respect of that which has no necessary connection with beauty.

But to leave this technical, though not wholly unreal, disputation. There is this merit in Mr. Balfour’s essay: that it states in its most extreme form a view for which there is something to be said and which has been gaining in favour in modern times. It is a reaction against the view which became established in the course of the last century. It was the habit of the eighteenth century to judge poetry by its form alone; the nineteenth judged it by the spirit which inspired it, by that which, as De Quincey puts it, was “incarnated” in a work of art. William Blake literally believed that there was a real world of the imagination which was opened up to the artist in his visions, and that was why he said: “Learn to see through, not with, the eye.” Coleridge, too, asserted the primacy of Reason and imagination; and for Wordsworth poetry was “Reason in her most exalted form,” just as for Keats “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty.” Even so logical and prosaic a thinker as John Stuart Mill recognised that supremacy of the artist to which he himself could not attain; the artist, as he said in a letter to Carlyle, perceives truth immediately, by intuition, and it was his own humble function to translate the truths discerned by the artist into logic. “Is not the distinction between mysticism, the mysticism which is of truth, and mere dreamery, or the institution of imaginations for realities, exactly this, that mysticism may be translated into logic?” Logic, for Mill, was only the hand-servant of that art which is concerned, not with “imaginations” only, but with realities. And it was in the same spirit that Matthew Arnold laid down his decisive verdict that literature is a criticism of life, that it may be subjected to a “universal” estimate, and that the standard is “the best that has been said and thought in the world.”

But in recent years there has been a revolt against the idea of standards or authority in art. Art has always been conceived as something which affords pleasure; but now it is conceived as that which affords pleasure to anyone. The democracy, now that it has become literate, claims the right of private judgment, equality for its members even in matters of art. And in a sense it is right. Nothing should be or can be acclaimed as beautiful unless it appears beautiful to the spectator. There is no criterion of beauty outside the perception of beauty. For each man, that only is beautiful which affords him the experience of beauty; and whatever does afford him that experience has given him the aesthetic pleasure which is the true pleasure of art. But there are many pleasurable thrills which have nothing to do with beauty or with art. That is why Mr. Balfour surely is wrong when he suggests that the youthful delight in blood-curdling adventures is an “enjoyment of what is Art, and nothing but Art.” But I agree that we are confronted with an antinomy which seems hard enough to overcome on the one hand art is only good because some people have judged or felt it to be good; on the other hand all sincere critics are convinced that some works are absolutely good, that their excellence is beyond reasonable challenge, and that those who do not perceive this excellence are lacking in fineness of perception.

The anarchistic side of the paradox is put in its crudest form by Mr. Balfour. It has been put in perhaps its finest and truest form by Mr. Henry James:

Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it is enough simply that we please or are pleased. There the tree is judged only by its fruits. If these are sweet the tree is justified and not less so the consumer.... Differences here are not iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament, kinds of curiosity. We are not under theological government.

It is true; in art, at least, we are “not under theological government,” and that was a maxim worth asserting at a time when the dicta of Matthew Arnold and Ruskin were being converted into shibboleths. It is necessary for happiness no less than for honesty that we should realise that poetry, music, and pictures are personal things; that what they are worth to us is their sole measure of value. And here it must be mentioned that Mr. Balfour puts forth two hints which are inconclusive enough, but which do dimly suggest a truer way of escape than that to which his argument leads. He notes, first of all, that art is disinterested; that it is not a means, but an end in itself. And, secondly, we feel towards beautiful things as we feel towards persons; if they are congenial we may like or love them, though we can assign no ground for our preference.

If the analogy were pursued it might lead to something like a solution of the difficulty. For all fine art is beautiful expression; it is self-expression; it is the expression of something which the artist perceives. If it strikes an answering chord in us we are satisfied; and that fact of response means a community of perception, of aesthetic knowledge, between the artist and the recipient, something perhaps which is dragged from the depths of our duller natures but which burst forth in expression from the artist with his quicker and more apt perception. But let it be noted that there could be no such response or sympathy conveyed from one to another by a symbol unless there were some real bond, some existent principle possessed in common. Art is communicative, but not surely a communication of nothing. It communicates something which is not the less real because it is intangible and mysterious. If it inexplicably affords us as it does an experience which some persons describe as transcendent, then that quality in it, which we call the “sublime” or the “beautiful,” has at least to this extent a definite reality, that it affords us unique experiences. It is this question which I shall examine in the following chapter.

Some men have not been so made that they can respond to the beauty which is summoned by art, just as some men, born blind, are not touched by the light of the sun. But it is of no moment to say that tastes differ. Men may differ about their friends, but they do not differ about friendship. They may have different codes of honour, but a sense of honour is the same thing for a savage as it is for a bishop. And so not all things are called beautiful by the same men, but beauty is the same for all.