By a superstition we mean something that “stands over” from a former time, and which we no longer understand and no longer have any use for. By a way of life, we mean a habit conducive to man’s good, and in particular to the attainment of man’s last and present end of happiness.
It seems to be a matter of general agreement at the present day that “Art” is a part of the higher things of life, to be enjoyed in hours of leisure earned by other hours of inartistic “Work.” We find accordingly as one of the most obvious characteristics of our culture a class division of artists from workmen, of those for example who paint on canvas from those who paint the walls of houses, and of those who handle the pen from those who handle the hammer. We are certainly not denying here that there is a distinction of the contemplative from the active life, nor of free from servile operation: but mean to say that in our civilization we have in the first place made an absolute divorce of the contemplative from the active life, and in the second place substituted for the contemplative life an aesthetic life,—or as the term implies, a life of pleasure. We shall return to this point. In any case we have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent, categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.
Individualists and humanists as we are, we attach an inordinate value to personal opinion and personal experience, and feel an insatiable interest in the personal experiences of others; the work of art has come to be for us a sort of autobiography of the artist. Art having been abstracted from the general activity of making things for human use, material or spiritual, has come to mean for us the projection in a visible form of the feelings or reactions of the peculiarly-endowed personality of the artist, and especially of those most peculiarly-endowed personalities which we think of as “inspired” or describe in terms of genius. Because the artistic genius is mysterious we, who accept the humbler status of the workman, have been only too willing to call the artist a “prophet,” and in return for his “vision” to allow him many privileges that a common man might hesitate to exercise. Above all we congratulate ourselves that the artist has been “emancipated” from what was once his position as the servant of church or state, believing that his mysterious imagination can operate best at random; if an artist like Blake still respects a traditional iconography we say that he is an artist in spite of it, and if as in Russia or Germany the state presumes to conscript the artist, it is even more the principle involved than the nature of the state itself that disturbs us. If we ourselves exercise a censorship necessitated by the moral inconvenience of certain types of art, we feel it needful at least to make apologies. Whereas it was once the highest purpose of life to achieve a freedom from oneself, it is now our will to secure the greatest possible measure of freedom for oneself, no matter from what.
Despite the evidence of our environment, with its exaggerated standards of living, and equally depreciated standards of life, our conception of history is optimistically based on the idea of “progress”; we designate cultures of the past or those of other peoples as relatively “barbaric” and our own as relatively “civilized,” never reflecting that such prejudgments, which are really wish-fulfillments, may be very far from fact. The student of the history of art discovers, indeed, in every art cycle a decline from a primitive power to a refinement of sentimentality or cynicism. But being a sentimentalist, materialist, cynic, or more briefly a humanist himself, he is able to think what he likes, and to argue that the primitive or savage artist “drew like that” because he knew no better; because he (whose knowledge of nature was so much greater and more intimate than that of the “civilized” or “city” man) had not learnt to see things as they are, was not acquainted with anatomy or perspective, and therefore drew like a child! We are indeed careful to explain when we speak of an imitation of nature or study of nature we do not mean a “photographic” imitation, but rather an imitation of nature as experienced by the individual artist, or finally a representation of the nature of the artist as experienced by himself. Art is then “self-expression,” but still an imitation of nature as effect, and essentially figurative rather than formal.
On the other hand we have said to ourselves that in the greatest works of art there is always a quality of abstraction, and have invoked the Platonic endorsement of a geometrical beauty; we have said, Go to, let us also make use of abstract formulae. It was overlooked here that the abstract formulae of ancient art were its natural vehicle, and not a personal or even local invention but the common language of the world. The result of the modern interest in abstraction as such, and apart from questions of content and communicability, has been indeed to eliminate recognizability in art, but scarcely to modify its still essentially representative purpose. Personal symbolisms have been evolved which are not based on any natural correspondences of things to principles, but rather on private associations of ideas. The consequence is that every abstract artist must be individually “explained”: the art is not communicative of ideas, but like the remainder of contemporary art, only serves to provoke reactions.
What is then the peculiar endowment of the artist, so much valued? It is evidently, and by general consent, a special sensibility, and it is just for this reason that the modern terms “aesthetic” and “empathy” have been found so appropriate. By sensibility we mean of course an emotional sensibility; aisthesis in Hellenistic usage implying physical affectability as distinguished from mental operations. We speak of a work of art as “felt” and never of its “truth,” or only of its truth to nature or natural feeling; “appreciation” is a “feeling into” the work. Now an emotional reaction is evoked by whatever we like (or dislike, but as we do not think of works of art as intended to provoke disgust, we need only consider them here as sources of pleasure): what we like, we call beautiful, admitting at the same time that matters of taste are not subject to law. The purpose of art is then to reveal a beauty that we like or can be taught to like; the purpose of art is to give pleasure; the work of art as the source of pleasure is its own end; art is for art’s sake. We value the work for the pleasure to be derived from the sight, sound, or touch of its aesthetic surfaces; our conception of beauty is literally skin-deep; questions of utility and intelligibility rarely arise, and if they arise are dismissed as irrelevant. If we propose to dissect the pleasure derived from a work of art, it becomes a matter of psychoanalysis, and ultimately a sort of science of affections and behaviors. If we nevertheless sometimes make use of such high-sounding expressions as “significant form,” we do so ignoring that nothing can properly be called a “sign” that is not significant of something other than itself, and for the sake of which it exists. We think of “composition” as an arrangement of masses designed for visual comfort, rather than as determined by the logic of a given content. Our theoretical knowledge of the material and technical bases of art, and of its actual forms, is encyclopedic; but we are either indifferent to its raison d’être and final cause, or find this ultimate reason and justification for the very existence of the work in the pleasure to be derived from its beauty by the patron. We say the patron; but under present conditions, it is oftener for his own than for the patron’s pleasure that the artist works; the perfect patron being nowadays, not the man who knows what he wants, but the man who is willing to commission the artist to do whatever he likes, and thus as we express it, “respects the freedom of the artist.” The consumer, the man, is at the mercy of the manufacturer for pleasure (the “artist”) and manufacturer for profit (the “exploiter”) and these two are more nearly the same than we suspect.
To say that art is essentially a matter of feeling is to say that its sufficient purpose is to please; the work of art is then a luxury, accessory to the life of pleasure. It may be enquired, Are not pleasures legitimate? Do not the office worker and factory hand deserve and need more pleasures than are normally afforded by the colorless routine of wage-earning tasks? Assuredly. But there is a profound distinction between the deliberate pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of pleasures proper to the active or contemplative life. It is one of the greatest counts against our civilization that the pleasures afforded by art, whether in the making or of subsequent appreciation, are not enjoyed or even supposed to be enjoyed by the workman at work. It is taken for granted that while at work we are doing what we like least, and while at play what we should wish to be doing all the time. And this is a part of what we meant by speaking of our depreciated standards of life: it is not so shocking that the workman should be underpaid, as that he should not be able to delight as much in what he does for hire as in what he does by free choice. As Meister Eckhart says, “the craftsman likes talking of his handicraft”: but, the factory worker likes talking of the ball game! It is an inevitable consequence of production under such conditions that quality is sacrificed to quantity: an industry without art provides a necessary apparatus of existence, houses, clothing, frying pans, and so forth, but an apparatus lacking the essential characteristics of things made by art, the characteristics, viz., of beauty and significance. Hence we say that the life that we call civilized is more nearly an animal and mechanical life than a human life; and that in all these respects it contrasts unfavorably with the life of savages, of American Indians for example, to whom it had never occurred that manufacture, the activity of making things for use, could ever be made an artless activity.
Most of us take for granted the conception of art and artists outlined above and so completely that we not only accept its consequences for ourselves, but misinterpret the art and artists of former ages and other cultures in terms that are only appropriate to our own historically provincial point of view. Undisturbed by our own environment, we assume that the artist has always been a peculiar person, that artist and patron have always been at cross purposes, and that work has always been thought of as a necessary evil. But let us now consider what we have often called the “normal view of art,” meaning by “normal” a theory not merely hitherto and elsewhere universally accepted as basic to the structure of society, but also a correct or upright doctrine of art. We shall find that this normal, traditional, and orthodox view of art contradicts in almost every particular the aesthetic doctrines of our time, and shall imply that the common wisdom of the world may have been superior to our own, adding that a thorough understanding of the traditional meaning of “art” and theory of “beauty” are indispensable for the serious student of the history of art, whose business it is to explain the genesis of works of art produced for patrons with whose purposes and interests we are no longer familiar.
To begin with, then, the active life of a man consists on the one hand in doing, and on the other in making or arranging things with a view to efficient doing: broadly speaking, man as doer is the patron, and man as maker the artist. The patron knows what purpose is to be served, for example, he needs shelter. The artist knows how to construct what is required, namely a house. Everyone is naturally a doer, patron, and consumer; and at the same time an artist, that is to say a maker by art, in some specialized sense, for example, either a painter, carpenter, or farmer. There is a division of labor, and for whatever a man does not make for himself he commissions another professional, the shoemaker, for example, when he needs shoes, or the author when he needs a book. In any case, in such relatively unanimous societies as we are considering, societies whose form is predetermined by traditional conceptions of order and meaning, there can hardly arise an opposition of interest as between patron and artist; both require the same kind of shoes, or worship at the same shrines, fashions changing only slowly and imperceptibly, so that under these conditions it has been truly said that “Art has fixed ends, and ascertained means of operation.”
In the normal society as envisaged by Plato, or realized in a feudal social order or caste system, occupation is vocational, and usually hereditary; it is intended at least that every man shall be engaged in the useful occupation for which he is best fitted by nature, and in which therefore he can best serve the society to which he belongs and at the same time realize his own perfection. As everyone makes use of things that are made artfully, as the designation “artifact” implies, and everyone possesses an art of some sort, whether of painting, sculpture, blacksmithing, weaving, cookery or agriculture, no necessity is felt to explain the nature of art in general, but only to communicate a knowledge of particular arts to those who are to practice them; which knowledge is regularly passed on from master to apprentice, without there being any necessity for “schools of art.” An integrated society of this sort can function harmoniously for millennia, in the absence of external interference. On the other hand, the contentment of innumerable peoples can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilization; the local market is flooded by a production in quantity with which the responsible maker by art cannot compete; the vocational structure of society, with all its guild organization and standards of workmanship, is undermined; the artist is robbed of his art and forced to find himself a “job”; until finally the ancient society is industrialized and reduced to the level of such societies as ours, in which business takes precedence of life. Can one wonder that western nations are feared and hated by other peoples, not alone for obvious political or economic reasons, but even more profoundly and instinctively for spiritual reasons?
What is art, or rather what was art? In the first place the property of the artist, a kind of knowledge and skill by which he knows, not what ought to be made, but how to imagine the form of the thing that is to be made, and how to embody this form in suitable material, so that the resulting artifact may be used. The shipbuilder builds, not for aesthetic reasons, but in order that men may be able to sail on the water; it is a matter of fact that the well-built ship will be beautiful, but it is not for the sake of making something beautiful that the shipbuilder goes to work; it is a matter of fact that a well made icon will be beautiful, in other words that it will please when seen by those for whose use it was made, but the imager is casting his bronze primarily for use and not as a mantelpiece ornament or for the museum showcase.
Art can then be defined as the embodiment in material of a preconceived form. The artist’s operation is dual, in the first place intellectual or “free” and in the second place manual and “servile.” “To be properly expressed,” as Eckhart says, “a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form.” It is just as necessary that the idea of the work to be done should first of all be imagined in an imitable form as that the workman should command the technique by which this mental image can be imitated in the available material. “It is,” as Augustine says, “by their ideas that we judge of what things ought to be like.” A private property in ideas in inconceivable, since ideas have no existence apart from the intellect that entertains them and of which they are the forms; there cannot be an authorship of ideas, but only an entertainment, whether by one or many intellects is immaterial. It is not then in the ideas to be expressed in art, or to speak more simply not in the themes of his work, that an artist’s intellectual operation is spoken of as “free”; the nature of the ideas to be expressed in art is predetermined by a traditional doctrine, ultimately of superhuman origin, and through the authority of which the necessity of a clear and repeated expression of such and such ideas has come to be accepted without question. As Aristotle expresses it, the general end of art is the good of man. This is a matter of religious art only in this sense, that in a traditional society there is little or nothing that can properly be called secular; whatever the material uses of artifacts, we find that what we (who scarcely distinguish in principle art from millinery), describe as their ornamentation or decoration, has always a precise significance; no distinction can be drawn between the ideas expressed in the humblest peasant art of a given period and those expressed in the actually hieratic arts of the same period. We cannot too often repeat that the art of a traditional society expresses throughout its range the governing ideology of the group; art has fixed ends and ascertained means of operation; art is a conscience about form, precisely as prudence is a conscience about conduct,—a conscience in both senses of the word, i.e., both as rule and as awareness. Hence it is that we can speak of a conformity or non-conformity in art, just as we can of regular and irregular, orderly and disorderly in conduct. Good art is no more a matter of moods than good conduct a matter of inclination; both are habits; it is the recollected man, and not the excited man, who can either make or do well.
On the other hand, nothing can be known or stated except in some way; the way of the individual knower. Whatever may be known to you and me in common can only be stated by either of us each in our own way. At any given moment these ways of different individuals will be and are so much alike as to be pleasing and intelligible to all concerned; but in proportion as the psychology and somatology of the group changes with time, so will the ways of knowing and idiom of expression; an iconography may not vary for millennia, and yet the style of every century will be distinct and recognizable at a glance. It is in this respect that the intellectual operation is called free; the style is the man, and that in which the style of one individual or period differs from that of another is the infallible trace of the artist’s personal nature; not a deliberate, but an unconscious self-expression of the free man.
The orator whose sermon is not the expression of a private opinion or philosophy, but the exposition of a traditional doctrine, is speaking with perfect freedom, and originality; the doctrine is his, not as having invented it, but by conformation (adaequatio rei et intellectus). Even in direct citation he is not a parrot, but giving out of himself a recreated theme. The artist is the servant of the work to be done; and it is as true here as in the realm of conduct that “My service is perfect freedom.” It is only a lip-service that can be called slavish; only when an inherited formula has become an “art form,” or “ornament,” to be imitated as such without any understanding of its significance, that the artist, no longer a traditional craftsman but an academician, can properly be called a forger or plagiarist. Our repetition of classic forms in modern architecture is generally a forgery in this sense; the manufacturer of “brummagem idols” is both a forger and a prostitute; but the hereditary craftsman, who may be repeating formulae inherited from the stone age, remains an original artist until he is forced by economic pressure to accept the status of a parasite supplying the demand of the ignorant tourist in search of drawing-room ornaments and what he calls “the mysterious East.”
Where an idea to be expressed remains the same throughout long sequences of stylistic variation, it is evident that this idea remains the motif or motivating power behind the work; the artist has worked throughout for the sake of the idea to be expressed, although expressing this idea always in his own way. The primary necessity is that he should really have entertained the idea and always visualized it in an imitable form; and this, implying an intellectual activity that must be ever renewed, is what we mean by originality as distinguished from novelty, and by power as distinguished from violence. It will readily be seen, then, that in concentrating our attention on the stylistic peculiarities of works of art, we are confining it to a consideration of accidents, and really only amusing ourselves with a psychological analysis of personalities; not by any means penetrating to what is constant and essential in the art itself.
The manual operation of the artist is called servile, because similitude is with respect to the form; in writing down, for example, the form of a musical composition that has already been heard mentally, or even in performance as such, the artist is no longer free, but an imitator of what he has himself imagined. In such a servility there is certainly nothing dishonorable, but rather a continued loyalty to the good of the work to be done; the artist turns from intellectual to manual operation or vice versa at will, and when the work has been done, he judges its “truth” by measuring the actual form of the artifact against the mental image of it that was his before the work began and remains in his consciousness regardless of what may happen to the work itself. We can now perhaps begin to realize just what we have done in separating artist from craftsman and “fine” from “applied” art. We have assumed that there is one kind of man that can imagine, and another that cannot; or to speak more honestly, another kind whom we cannot afford, without doing hurt to business, to allow to imagine, and to whom we therefore permit a servile and imitative operation only. Just as the operation of the artist who merely imitates nature as closely as possible, or as an archaist merely imitates the forms and formulae of ancient art without attempting any recreation of ideas in terms of his own constitution, is a servile operation, so is that of the mason required to carve, whether by hand or machinery, innumerable copies or “ornaments” for which he is provided with ready-made designs, for which another man is responsible, or which may be simple “superstitions,” that is to say “art forms,” of which the ideal content is no longer understood, and which are nothing but the vestiges of originally living traditions. It is precisely in our modern world that everyone is nominally, and no one really “free.” Art has also been defined as “the imitation of nature in her manner of operation”: that is to say, an imitation of nature, not as effect, but as cause. Nature is here, of course, “Natura naturans, Creatrix, Deus,” and by no means our own already natured environment. All traditions lay a great stress on the analogy of the human and divine artificers, both alike being “makers by art,” or “by a word conceived in intellect.” As the Indian books express it, “We must build as did the Gods in the beginning.” All this is only to say again in other words that “similitude is with respect to the form.” “Imitation” is the embodiment in matter of a preconceived form; and that is precisely what we mean by “creation.” The artist is the providence of the work to be done.
All of our modern teaching centers round the posed model and the dissecting room; our conceptions of portraiture are as a matter of historical fact associated in their origins with the charnel house and death mask. On the other hand, we begin to see now why primitive and traditional and what we have described as normal art is “abstract”; it is an imitation, not of a visible and transient appearance or “effect of light,” but of an intelligible form which need no more resemble any natural object than a mathematical equation need look like its locus in order to be “true.” It is one thing to draw in linear rhythms and abstract light because one must; another thing for anyone who is not by nature and in the philosophical sense a realist, deliberately to cultivate an abstracted style.
The principles of traditional criticism follow immediately from what has been said above. The work of art is “true” to the extent that its actual or accidental form reflects the essential form conceived in the mind of the artist (it is in this sense that the workman still speaks of “trueing” the work in hand); and adequate, or apt, if this form has been correctly conceived with respect to the final cause of the work, which is to be used by the patron. This distinction of judgments, which normally coincide in unanimous cultures, is of particular value to the modern student of ancient or exotic arts, for which we have no longer a practical use. The modern aesthetician thinks that he has done enough if he “feels into” the work, since he holds that the secret of art resides in a peculiar sensibility outwardly manifested as an aesthetic urge to express and communicate a feeling; he does not realize that ancient works of art were produced devoutly, indeed, but primarily to serve a purpose and to communicate a gnosis. What was demanded of the traditional artist was first and foremost to be in possession of his art, that is to be in possession of a knowledge, rather than a sentiment. We forget that sensation is an animal property, and knowledge distinctly human; and that art, if thought of as distinctly human and particularly if we think of art as a department of the “higher things of life,” must likewise have to do much more with knowledge than with feeling. We ought not, then, as Herbert Spinden so cleverly puts it, to “accept a pleasurable effect upon our unintelligent nerve ends as an index of understanding.”
The critic of ancient or exotic art, having only the work of art before him, and nothing but the aesthetic surfaces to consider, can only register reactions, and proceed to a dimensional and chemical analysis of matter, and psychological analysis of style. His knowledge is of the sort defined as accidental, and very different from the essential and practical knowledge of the original artist and patron. One can in fact only be said to have understood the work, or to have any more than a dilettante knowledge of it, to the extent that he can identify himself with the mentality of the original artist and patron. The man can only be said to have understood Romanesque or Indian art who comes very near to forgetting that he has not made it himself for his own use; a man is only qualified to translate an ancient text when he has really participated in, and not merely observed, the outer and inner life of its time, and identified this time with his own. All this evidently requires a far longer, more round about, and self-denying discipline than is commonly associated with the study of the history of art, which generally penetrates no farther than an analysis of styles, and certainly not to an analysis of the necessary reasons of iconographies or logic of composition.
There is also a traditional doctrine of beauty. This theory of beauty is not developed with respect to artifacts alone, but universally. It is independent of taste, for it is recognized that as Augustine says, there are those who take pleasure in deformities. The word deformity is significant here, because it is precisely a formal beauty that is in question; and we must not forget that “formal” includes the connotation “formative.” The recognition of beauty depends on judgment, not on sensation; the beauty of the aesthetic surfaces depending on their information, and not upon themselves. Everything, whether natural or artificial, is beautiful to the extent that it really is what it purports to be, and independently of all comparisons; or ugly to the extent that its own form is not expressed and realized in its tangible actuality. The work of art is beautiful, accordingly, in terms of perfection, or truth and aptitude as defined above; whatever is inept or vague cannot be considered beautiful, however it may be valued by those who “know what they like.” So far from that, the veritable connoisseur “likes what he knows”; having fixed upon that course of art which is right, use has made it pleasant.
Whatever is well and truly made, will be beautiful in kind because of its perfection. There are no degrees of perfection; just as we cannot say that a frog is any more or less beautiful than a man, whatever our preferences may be, so we cannot possibly say that a telephone booth as such is any more or less beautiful than a cathedral as such; we only think that one is more beautiful than the other in kind, because our actual experience is of unlovely booths and really beautiful cathedrals.
It is taken for granted that the artist is always working “for the good of the work to be done”; from the coincidence of beauty with perfection it follows inevitably that his operation always tends to the production of a beautiful work. But this is a very different matter from saying that the artist has always in view to discover and communicate beauty. Beauty in the master craftsman’s atelier is not a final cause of the work to be done, but an inevitable accident. And for this reason, that the work of art is always occasional; it is the nature of a rational being to work for particular ends, whereas beauty is an indeterminate end; whether the artist is planning a picture, a song, or a city, he has in view to make that thing and nothing else. What the artist has in mind is to do the job “right,” secundum rectam rationem artis: it is the philosopher who brings in the word “beautiful” and expounds its conditions in terms of perfection, harmony, and clarity. A recognition of the fact that things can only be beautiful in kind, and not in one another’s kinds, and the conception of the formality of beauty, bring us back again to the futility of a naturalistic art; the beauties of a living man and of a statue or stone man are different in kind and not interchangeable; the more we try to make the statue look like a man, the more we denature the stone and caricature the man. It is the form of a man in a nature of flesh that constitutes the beauty of this man; the form of a man in a nature of stone the beauty of the statue; and these two beauties are incompatible.
Beauty is, then, perfection apprehended as an attractive power; that aspect of the truth for example which moves the will to grapple with the theme to be communicated. In medieval phraseology, “beauty adds to the good an ordering to the cognitive faculty by which the good is known as such”; “beauty has to do with cognition.” If we ourselves endeavor to speak well, it is for the sake of clarity alone, and we should much rather be called interesting than mellifluent. To quote a Hasidic example: if any should say, “‘Let us now hear you talk of your doctrine, you speak so beautifully,’ ‘May I be struck dumb ere I speak beautifully.’” But if beauty is not synonymous with truth, neither can it be isolated from the truth: the distinction is logical, but there is coincidence in re. Beauty is at once a symptom and an invitation; as truth is apprehended by the intellect, so beauty moves the will; beauty is always ordered to reproduction, whether a physical generation or spiritual regeneration. To think of beauty as a thing to be enjoyed apart from use is to be a naturalist, a fetishist, and an idolater.
Nothing more enrages the exhibitionist of modern art than to be asked, What is it about? or What is it for? He will exclaim, You might as well ask what it looks like! In fact, however, the question and answer are on altogether different planes of reference; we have agreed that the work of art by no means needs to look like anything on earth, and is perhaps the worse the more it tends to create an illusion. It is another matter if we demand an intelligibility and functional efficacy in the work. For what are we to do with it, intellectually or physically, if it has no meaning and is not adapted to be used? All that we can do in this case is to like it or dislike it, much as bulls are said to love green and hate red.
The intelligibility of traditional art does not depend on recognitions but, like that of script, on legibility. The characters in which this art is written are properly called symbols; when meaning has been forgotten or ignored and art exists only for the comfort of the eye, these become “art forms” and are spoken of as “ornaments”; we speak of “decorative” values. Symbols in combination form an iconography or myth. Symbols are the universal language of art; an international language with merely dialectic variations, current once in all milieus and always intrinsically intelligible, though now no longer understood by educated men, and only to be seen or heard in the art of peasants. The content of symbols is metaphysical. Whatever work of traditional art we consider, whether a crucifix, Ionic column, peasant embroidery, or trappings of a horse, or nursery tale, has still, or had, a meaning over and above what may be called the immediate value of the object to us as a source of pleasure or necessity of life. This implies for us that we cannot pretend to have accounted for the genesis of any such work of art until we have understood what it was for and what it was intended to mean. The symbolic forms, which we call ornaments because they are only superstitions for us, are none the less the substance of the art before us; it is not enough to be able to use the terms of iconography freely and to be able to label our museum specimens correctly; to have understood them, we must understand the ultimate raison d’être of the iconography, just why it is as it is and not otherwise.
Implicit in this symbolism lies what was equally for artist and patron the ultimately spiritual significance of the whole undertaking. The references of the symbolic forms are as precise as those of mathematics. The adequacy of the symbols being intrinsic, and not a matter of convention, the symbols correctly employed transmit from generation to generation a knowledge of cosmic analogies: as above, so below. Some of us still repeat the prayer, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The artist is constantly represented as imitating heavenly forms,—“the crafts such as building and carpentry which give us matter in wrought forms ... take their principles thence and from the thinking there” (Enneads, V.9). The archetypal house, for example, repeats the architecture of the universe; a ground below, a space between, a vault above, in which there is an opening corresponding to the solar gateway by which one “escapes altogether” out of time and space into an unconfined and timeless empyrean. Functional and symbolic values coincide; if there rises a column of smoke to the luffer above, this is not merely a convenience, but also a representation of the axis of the universe that pillars-apart heaven and earth, essence and nature, and is itself although without dimensions or consistency the adamantine principle and exemplary form of temporal and spatial extension and of all things situated in time or space. This was doubtless already apparent to prehistoric man, though we cannot trace it farther back in literature than perhaps a millennium and a half B.C. Vestiges of the primitive luffer survive in the eyes of domes, and of its significance in the fact that even to-day we speak of Santa Claus, a doublet of the resurrected Sun, as entering in with his gifts, not by the human door, but by the chimney.
The world-wide designation of stone weapons as “thunder-bolts” is a memory surviving from the Stone Age, when already primitive man identified his striking weapons with the shaft of lightning with which the solar Deity smote the Dragon, or if you prefer, St. Michael Satan, in the beginning; an iron age inherits older traditions, and literary evidences for an identification of weapons with lightning go back at least as far as the second millennium B.C. All traditions agree in seeing in the warp of tissues made by hand an image of the fontal-raying of the dawn-light of creation, and in their woof the representation of planes of being or levels of reference more or less removed from, but still dependent on their common center and ultimate support. Instances could be multiplied, but it will suffice to say that the arts have been universally referred to a divine source, that the practice of an art was at least as much a rite as a trade, that the craftsman had always to be initiated into the Lesser Mysteries of his particular craft, and that the artifact itself had always a double value, that of tool on the one hand and that of symbol on the other. These conditions survived in medieval Europe, and still survive precariously in the East, to the extent that normal types of humanity have been able to resist the subversive influences of civilized business.
We are thus in a position to understand in part how both the making of things by art, and the use of things made by art subserved not only man’s immediate convenience, but also his spiritual life; served in other words the whole or holy man, and not merely the outer man who feeds on “bread alone.” The transubstantiation of the artifact had its inevitable corollary in a transformation of the man himself; the Templar, for example, whose sword was also a cross, had been initiated as and strove to become more than a man and as nearly as possible an hypostasis of the Sun. “The sword,” as Rûmî says, is the same sword, but the man is not the same man (Mathnawî V.3287). Now that the greater part of life has been secularized, these transformative values of art can be envisaged only in iconolatry, where the icon made by hands and subsequently consecrated serves as a support of contemplation tending towards a transformation of the worshiper into the likeness of the archetypal form to which, and “not to the colors or the art” as St. Basil says, the honor is paid. The collector who owns a crucifix of the finest period and workmanship, and merely enjoys its “beauty,” is in a very different position from that of the equally sensitive worshiper, who also feels its power, and is actually moved to take up his own cross; only the latter can be said to have understood the work in its entirety, only the former can be called a fetishist. In the same way, and as we have said elsewhere, the man who may have been a “barbarian” but could look upward to the roof tree of his house and say “There hangs the Light of Lights,” or down to his hearth and say “There is the Center of the World,” was more completely a Man than one whose house, however well supplied with labor-saving and sanitary apparatus, is merely “a machine to live in.”
It remains for us to consider the problems of artist and patron, producer and consumer, from the standpoint of ethics: to explain the traditional position, which asserts that there can be no “good use” without art; that is to say no efficient goodness, but only good intentions in case the means provided are defective. Suppose for example, that the artist is a printer; to the extent that he designs an illegible type, the book, however supremely valuable its text, will be “no good.” Of a workman who bungles we say in the same way that he is “no good” or “good for nothing,” or in the technical language of traditional ethics, that he is a “sinner”: “sin” being defined as “any departure from the order to the end,” whatever the nature of the end. Before the artist can even imagine a form there must have been a direction of the will towards a specific idea; since one cannot imagine “form” in the abstract, but only this or that form. In Indian terms, an image can only spring from a “seed.” Or as Bonaventura expresses it, “Every agent acting rationally, not at random, nor under compulsion, foreknows the thing before it is, viz., in a likeness, by which likeness, which is the ‘idea’ of the thing (in an imitable form), the thing is both known and brought into being.” The artist’s will has accordingly consented beforehand to the end in view; whether a good end or bad end is no longer his affair as an artist; it is too late now for qualms, and the artist as such has no longer any duty but to devote himself to the good of the work to be done. As St. Thomas expresses it, “Art does not require of the artist that his act be a good act, but that his work be good ... Art does not presuppose rectitude of the appetite,”—but only to serve the appetite, whether for good or evil. It is for the man to decide what, if any, propaganda are desirable; for man as artist only to make the propagation effective. The artist may nevertheless come short, and in this case he is said to “sin as an artist”: if, for example, he undertakes and proposes to manufacture an efficient poison gas, and actually produces something quite innocuous, or intends to fashion a Madonna, and only produces a fashion plate. The artist as such is an amoral type: at the same time there can be no good use, that is effective use, without art.
Let us now remind ourselves that the artist is also a man, and as a man responsible for all that his will consents to; “in order that a man may make right use of his art, he needs to have a virtue which will rectify his appetite.” The man is responsible directly, as a murderer for example by intent if he consents to manufacture adulterated food, or drugs in excess of medical requirement; responsible as a promoter of loose living if he exhibits a pornographic picture (by which we mean of course something essentially salacious, preserving the distinction of “obscene” from “erotic”); responsible spiritually if he is a sentimentalist or pseudo-mystic. It is a mistake to suppose that in former ages the artist’s “freedom” could have been arbitrarily denied by an external agency; it is much rather a plain and unalterable fact that the artist as such is not a free man. As artist he is morally irresponsible, indeed; but who can assert that he is an artist and not also a man? The artist can be separated from the man in logic and for purposes of understanding; but actually, the artist can only be divorced from his humanity by what is called a disintegration of personality. The doctrine of art for art’s sake implies precisely such a sacrifice of humanity to art, of the whole to the part. It is significant that at the same time that individualistic tendencies are recognizable in the sphere of culture, in the other sphere of business and in the interest of profit most men are denied the opportunity of artistic operation altogether, or can function as responsible artists only in hours of leisure when they can pursue a “hobby” or play games. What shall it profit a man to be politically free, if he must be either the slave of “art,” or slave of “business”?
We say then that if the artist as such is morally irresponsible, he is also a morally responsible man. In the normal and long-enduring types of civilization that we have been considering,—Indian, Egyptian, early Greek, medieval Christian, Chinese, Maori, or American Indian for example,—it has been man as patron rather than man as artist with whom the decision has rested as to what shall be made: the freedom of the artist involving an autonomy only within his own sphere of operation, and not including a free choice of themes. That choice remained with the Man, and amounted to an effective censorship, though not a censorship in our sense, but in the last analysis a self-control, since the artist and the man were still of one mind, and all men in some sense artists. Nothing in fact was made that did not answer to a generally recognized necessity.
All this accords with Aristotle’s dictum, that “the general end of art is the good of man.” General ends take precedence of private ends; it is not the private good of this or that man, and still less of this or that artist, but Man’s conception of the good, that has determined what was made by art. In principle, accordingly, a censorship can be approved of as altogether proper to the dignity of Man. This need not be a legally formulated censorship so long as the responsible artist is also a responsible member of society. But as soon as the artist asserts an absolute independence there arises the occasion for a formulated censorship; liberty becoming license, forges its own chains.
We must not however overlook a factor essential to the current problem. Who is qualified to be a censor? Surely it is not enough to recognize a wrong, or what we think a wrong, and to rush into action guided only by a private, or little group, opinion, however firmly entertained. It is certainly not in a democracy, nor in a society trying to find a means of survival by trial and error, that a censorship can be justly exercised. Our censorships reflect at the best a variable canon of expediency; one that varies, for example, from state to state and decade to decade. To justify the exercise of a censorship, we must know what is right or wrong, and why; we must have read Eternal Law before we can impose a human code. This means that it is only within a relatively unanimous community, acknowledging an ascertained truth, that a censorship can properly be exercised, and only by an elite, whose vocation it is precisely to know metaphysical truth, (whence only can there be deduced and ascertained the governing principles of doing and making) that laws of conduct binding on the artist as a man can properly be promulgated. We cannot therefore expect from any legislative censorship an adjustment of the strained relations between the artist and the patron, producer and consumer; the former is too much concerned with himself, the latter too unaware of man’s real needs, whether physical or spiritual,—too much a lover of quantity and by far too little insistent upon the quality of life. The source of all our difficulties, whether economic, or psychic, lies beyond the power of legislation or philanthropy; what we require is a rectification of humanity itself and a consequent awareness of the priority of contemplation to action. We are altogether too busy, and have made a vice of industry.
Under present circumstances, then, art is by and large a luxury: a luxury that few can afford, and one that need not be overmuch lamented by those who cannot afford to buy. This same “art” was once the principle of knowledge by which the means of life were produced, and the physical and spiritual needs of man were provided for. The whole man made by contemplation, and in making did not depart from himself. To resume all that has been said in a single statement,—Art is a superstition: art was a way of life.
Postscript
Note on Review by Richard Florsheim
of
“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?”
In reviewing my “Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” Mr. Florsheim assumes my “advocacy of a return to a more or less feudal order ... an earlier, but dead, order of things.” In much the same way a reviewer of “Patron and Artist” (cf. in Apollo, February, 1938, p. 100) admits that what I say “is all very true,” but assumes that the remedy we “Medievalists” (meaning such as Gill, Gleizes, Carey and me) suggest is to “somehow get back to an earlier social organization.”
These false, facile assumptions enable the critic to evade the challenge of our criticism, which has two main points: (1) that the current “appreciation” of ancient or exotic arts in terms of our own very special and historically provincial view of art amounts to a sort of hocus pocus, and (2) that under the conditions of manufacture taken for granted in current artistic doctrine man is given stones for bread. These propositions are either true or not, and cannot honestly be twisted to mean that we want to put back the hands of the clock.
Neither is it true that we “do not pretend to offer much in the way of practical remedy”; on the contrary, we offer everything, that is to “somehow get back to first principles.” Translated from metaphysical into religious terms this means, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His Righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” What this can have to do with a sociological archaism or eclecticism I fail to see.
A return to first principles would not recreate the outward aspects of the Middle Ages, though it might enable us to better understand these aspects. I have nowhere said that I wished to “return to the Middle Ages.” In the pamphlet reviewed I said that a cathedral was no more beautiful in kind than a telephone booth in kind, and expressly excluded questions of preference, i.e., of “wishful thinking.” What I understand by “wishful thinking” is that kind of faith in “progress” which leads Mr. Florsheim to identify “earlier” with “dead,” a type of thinking that ignores all distinction of essence from accident and seems to suggest a Marxist or at any rate a definitely anti-traditional bias.
Things that were true in the Middle Ages are still true, apart from any questions of styles; suppose it eternally true, for example, that “beauty has to do with cognition.” Does it follow from this that in order to be consistent I must decorate my house with crockets? or am I forbidden to admire an aeroplane? Dr. Wackernagel, reviewed in The Art Bulletin, XX, p. 123, “warns against the lack of purpose in most of our modern art.” Need this imply a nostalgia for the Middle Ages on his part? If I assert that a manufacture by art is humanely speaking superior to an “industry without art,” it does not follow that I envisage knights in armor. If I see that manufacture for use is better for the consumer (and we are all consumers) than a manufacture for profit, this does not mean that we are to manufacture antiques. If I accept that vocation is the natural basis of individual progress (the word has a real meaning in an individual application, the meaning namely of werden was du bist), I am not necessarily wrong merely because this position was “earlier” maintained by Plato and in the Bhagavad Gita. I do not in fact pretend to foresee the style of a future Utopia; however little may be the value I attach to “modern civilization,” however much higher may have been the prevalent values of the medieval or any other early or still existing social order, I do not think of any of these as providing a ready-made blueprint for future imitation. I have no use for pseudo-Gothic in any sense of the word. The sooner my critics realize this, and that I am not out to express any views, opinions or philosophy of my “own,” the sooner will they find out what I am talking about.