INTRODUCTION

I. The Ultimate Significance of all Art

HE who would understand the Art of Painting must first understand the significance of all Art, of which Painting is but a part.

The most vastly interesting thing to man is Life.

Whence it comes, whither it goes-these are a part of the Eternal Mystery. But we can, and ought to know all of life 'twixt its coming and its going.

Now, we can only know life in two ways-either by Personal Experience of it ; or, at second hand, through its transference to us by Communion with our fellow-men. But our Personal adventures in life, even though we should be granted the destiny to bestride the world like a Napoleon, can at best be but a small and parochial affair, after all's said, when set against the multitudinous experience of our generation. Shut off from communion with our fellows, we should walk but in a blind man's parish. But it is given to us to know of life through our fellows by their communion to us of their Thoughts and their Sensations. And so, just as by Speech we communicate our thoughts and ideas to others ; so by Art we may communicate our sensations, the emotions we feel, through the gift of being able to arouse in their senses what our senses have felt-whether into their hearing by sounds, as in Music ; or by the emotional employment of words, as in the poetry of prose, [2] or of verse, or of oratory ; or through the sight by the rhythmic use of colour and forms, as in Painting ; or by form, as in Sculpture ; or by the union of these, as in the drama, or architecture, or the like.

Art, then, is the Emotional Utterance of Life. Art is our emotional means of communion with our fellows.

And just as Speech must be an intelligent utterance of Thought ; so must Art be an intelligent utterance of Emotion-of Things Felt quite apart from Reason or Intellect.

Now, it is not enough to have uttered a Thought to account it Speech ; it is essential that the Thought shall be so uttered as to arouse the like thought in the hearer- otherwise are we in a Babel of Strange Sounds.

So, it is not enough to have uttered Emotion to account it Art ; it is essential that the Emotion shall have been so uttered as to arouse the like Emotion in the onlooker- otherwise are we but in a tangled whirl of confusion.

Therefore, just as Thought is the more perfectly and swiftly understood as it is deftly expressed ; so is Emotion the more powerfully felt as it is most perfectly uttered. In other words, the Craftsmanship of Art will generally be beautiful ; but it must be compelling-it must arouse the subtle thing called Sensation in our emotions before it can create Art. Craftsmanship, then, is the grammar or tool of Art.

Now we have arrived at the fact that Speech is the means of communion of the Intellect; Art is the means of communion of the Senses. There is the marked difference.

A confusion, created by the Greeks, and repeated by the pedants of the centuries, has arisen in confusing Art with Beauty. That Art is Beauty, or has any concern [3] with Beauty, is wholly untenable. If not, then the greatest masterpieces of the ages must be wholly rejected ; and small things that have no concern whatever with Art must be raised to masterpieces of Art.

This confusion has largely arisen owing to the confusion of Art with its tool, Craftsmanship.

A poker may be a beautiful thing-it is not art. A photograph may be beautiful-it is not art. A woman may be beautiful-she is not necessarily a work of art.

Art must create-it must transfer Sensation from the creator of it to us.

The Greek genius set up Beauty as the ultimate goal of Life-it therefore set up Beauty as the ultimate goal of Art. The Greeks really did mean that beauty of craftsmanship alone was not enough-that Art must always create Beauty. This absolute aim to achieve Beauty was the cause of the triumph of Greece in Art-a greatly overrated triumph when set against the whole meaning of life, and one of which the professors tell us much ; it was also the cause of her limitations and of her eventual failure to achieve the supreme mastery of the world, of which we hear little. For, splendid as was the mighty achievement of Greece, she never reached to the majesty and the grandeur of that masterpiece of sculpture that stands upon the edge of Africa, head and shoulders above her achievement, in the wondrous thing that is called the Sphinx. The genius of Egypt spent itself upon the majesty and the mystery of life-and it moved thereby to a higher aim.

Craftsmanship-that skill of cunning whereby the artist so employs the clay of the sculptor, the colours of the painter, the words of the poet in prose, or verse, or oratory, and bends and compels these things into such rhythmic [4] forms and combinations that they create a thrill in our senses and arouse the desired emotion-this craftsmanship is so fascinating to the mind of man that it, not unnaturally, looms out of place in the eyes of such as do not create Art, yet become inquisitive as to why they are moved by Art.

When a school arose, but a little while ago, that had for its battle-cry the still smaller aim of Art for Art's sake, it really meant that Art was for Craft's sake-that the aim of Art lay solely in the beauty of its craftsmanship. They would have the play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. In the deeps of their confusion, what they said was this : that if a master-hand painted a wall white very beautifully, by his mastery of thumb he created Art ! Otherwise there were no need to say that Art was for Art's sake. Of course, Art is for Art's sake. But it were well to know what is Art. This narrow-eyed school of theorists whittled away the whole function of Art until they reduced it to craft-exactly what it is not. And in proportion as their folly grew, their arrogance mounted. So that they made of a Truth an utter Falsity-simply in that they did not know what Art was !

Whistler would have had us believe that it is the province of Art to say Nothing very Beautifully ; his instincts and his genius made no such mistake. He is the master of a subtle emotional statement that, in its realm, has never been surpassed. He vowed that Art was the Science of the Beautiful-which were no mean definition of Craft, and had been no bad definition of Art, but that Art is not Science, and is not Beauty. It was of the wisdom of that wiseacre who defined a Crab as a scarlet reptile that walks backwards-which were not so bad, were it a reptile, were it scarlet, and did it walk backwards.

Neither Whistler, nor Flaubert, nor another has the [5] right to narrow the acreage of the garden of life. What concern had Shakespeare with Beauty ? In the Book of I Life that Shakespeare wrote, Beauty is not his god-Beauty is not his ultimate aim. Is jealousy beautiful ? Yet Othello is great art. Is man's ineffectual struggle against destiny beautiful ? Yet Hamlet is rightly accounted a masterpiece of the ages. Are hate and despair and fear and remorse beautiful ? It has been written of late that Millet's Killing of a Hog is beautiful ! It is wholly unbeautiful. Had Millet made it beautiful he had uttered the stupidest of lies. Nevertheless, the statement of it is art. Indeed, Millet's aim in art, a large part of his significance in art, is a protest against the pettiness of mere beauty. He took the earth, this great-soul'd man, and he wrought with a master's statement the pathos and the tragedy and the might and the majesty of the earth and of them that toil upon the earth. The Sower and the Man with the Hoe are far more than beautiful-they hold the vast emotions and wondrous sensations of man's destiny to labour, and of man's acceptance of that destiny ; they utter the gloom and the ugliness as loudly as the beauty of the earth and of toil ; and they most rightly utter these things, so that they take equal rank, and thereby add to our knowledge of the emotions of life through the master's power, and the skill and cunning of his craftsmanship, whereby he so solemnly uttered the truth.

Art is not an oil-painting on canvas in a gilt frame. Art is not the exclusive toy of a few prigs-nor the password of a cult. Art is universal, eternal-not parochial. Every man is an artist in his degree-every man is moved by art in his degree. For one act of our day to which we are moved by reason, we are moved to a score by our emotions-by instinct.

[6] If the artist's revelation of life be true, then by and through his art we live the emotions of life ; it becomes a part of our life for ever. If the revelation be ennobling, we are ennobled ; if base, we are debased thereby.

And surely it is a splendid thing to be made to thrill with the higher emotions of man and to know lofty enthusiasms ! The brightest path by which man may reach to great goals and a larger concept of life is through the arts. Whether by the oratory of the Christ, or by the drama of the masters, or whatsoever pathway, the road that reaches to the Splendid Wayfaring must be through the garden of the Arts.

Whether he will it or not, every man must walk in that garden of the Arts.

No man may know the Splendid Wayfaring of Life, nor indeed know of Life outside a madhouse, without Art. Art is absolutely necessary to all civilised life. It is with us from the cradle to the grave. We cannot escape it. The moment a child essays to tell of its joy or its pain, its sorrows or its delights, at once Art is created.

So far from being the little exclusive preciosity that the so-called Elect pride themselves alone on understanding, if you would realise what your life would be without the means to commune with your fellow-men so as to be partakers of their sensations and their emotions, try to think of a man in that awful solitude that is never broken by contact with any other human soul ; and you scarce exaggerate what a man's punishment would be without the arts.

Now it follows that as a people become ignoble, their utterance of life becomes ignoble, therefore their art becomes ignoble.

There has ever been in all religions, in all states, a [7] tendency of narrow-eyed men to a curious form of Puritanism that looks askance at all works of art as being bad, because bad art is bad. Whether it be a Savonarola in the Catholic church who sets the people in hysterical fervour to burning all the precious works of art in the bonfires of the public market-place ; or the Roundheads who disfigure and destroy works of art in childish wantonness and blatant vulgarity ; whether it be the Mohammedan who denies the human figure to art ; or what not ; yet, so vital a necessity is art to the human being in his wayfaring to the heights and majesty of sublime living, that the blackest Puritans employ it even whilst they destroy it.

The Mohammedans are forbidden the carving of figures in or on their mosques ; forbidden the portraiture of men, lest the faithful shall fall to the worship of images-yet the True Believer flings away his life in battle, like some great bronze god, urged to it by the emotional oratory of his faith; and, where he falls, you shall ever find about his neck, worn as a little charm to keep his quaint fantastic soul from harm, sewn into exquisitely wrought leather-work, fragments of the mighty literature of the Koran ! An art within an art !

So the Roundheads, thundering against the arts lest they should turn men's eyes to graven images, made the land hideous with sculptures overthrown, statues mutilated, works of art destroyed ; yet, even as they committed this scandalous and childish wantonness, in the name of the Lord, they listened with bowed heads of reverence to works of fiction, some amongst the supreme works of art the world has known-the parables of the Man of Sorrows-and went into battle shouting the poetry of the psalms, their nerves athrill to the music of words wrought by the master-skill of the great Elizabethan translators of the Bible !