Part 11

Any expression of a humanistic society through the arts depends upon the acceptance by the artist of some sort of central authority. The authority is not that of official organisations or written codes; it is rather that of approved traditional ideals in which both the artist and the laity believe. In their application to the work of art, such ideals appear concretely as accredited conventions. In a humanistic society, these conventions assume no burdensome or arbitrarily authoritative form. They represent merely a body of successful experience--ways that have been tried and found good. The accepted convention tells the artist how he must begin; it does not tell him how he must end. It does, however, warn him off from any too abrupt breaking with tradition, and from any too urgent assertion of his individual taste save in so far as that taste finds sanction in precedent and in opinion other than his own. Right here is the stone of stumbling. The humanist artist willingly admits that his own genius is not his final authority. He checks its impulses by the practice and teaching of other geniuses, and by the degree of acceptance which its expression commands from competent criticism and patronage. It is not enough that he shall have expressed just himself; it matters quite as much that he shall have communicated himself to a fit public with whom he shares a confidence in the guiding conventions of his art and in ideals mutually honoured.

On the side of the artist, this relation will indicate a procedure of delicate adjustment. The accepted conventions of his art and the ideals of the society for which he works, will of course not fit him precisely any more than a ready-made suit fits perfectly either the artist or layman. The practical problem of the humanist artist, then, will be how far he shall reshape himself to the expectations of his public; and how far he may change these expectations in a sense favourable to his individual bent. And this implies chiefly a very superior sort of judgment and common sense. The humanist artist will feel that it is a vain thing to have expressed himself, however gorgeously, if nobody knows that he has expressed himself, and he will also admit that the mere feelingful and urgent self gains richness and value only when it is measured by other selves in society.

On the side of society and patronage, a humanised art would imply in practice a central authority lightly and genially imposed, a just offishness towards the artists who too overtly repudiated the tradition, withal a somewhat sceptical hopefulness towards experiment and innovation, a hospitable desire to understand the artist even when his communication is obscure, a wish to have its own ideals expressed through the arts. In short a humanised society co-operates with the artist to a degree difficult even to imagine to-day. It provides him with incentive, furnishes most of his æsthetic notions, helps him to realise himself through opportune criticism and companionship, thus taking an active part in what is the essential thing--the formation of his spirit.

So far I have dealt in convenient abstractions which are in part misleading. I have made the reciprocal relation between the artist and public too conscious, much more conscious than it has been in history. I shall presently try to correct the error by appealing to precedents concretely in given time and place. However, the over-emphasis on consciousness as producing mutuality between artist and public may well be pragmatically justified. It seems unlikely that our society will simply gravitate towards humanism. On the contrary, if we are to achieve a humanistic social balance, it will apparently be done only through much taking of thought, on the part of both the enlightened laity and the intelligent artist. So the analysis I have tried to make of the mutually helpful relation of artist and layman in a humanised world, though it overstresses the conscious element in this reciprocity in seeming disregard of past history, may for that very reason suggest a programme for history yet to be realised.

Programmes, however, are entirely valueless except as they rest soundly on dynamic states of mind. Our problem as humanists is to create a state of mind in which neither artist nor layman will exaggerate the worth of his idiosyncrasy, nor yet follow the general drift unthinkingly. We are trying to make a man who is a friendly critic both of himself and of the society in which he moves, a man who accepts the growing complexity of living as offering him fascinating and profitable problems of adjustment. To maintain this hope in the face of the chicken-and-lobster-eating motorist, the radio fan, the devotee of the “talkies,” the sycophant artist who bows to base authority, and the behaviourist artist who admits none but that of his own glands--to keep the hope of making humanists in the face of the daily American spectacle requires an audacity which even the Expressionist might envy. But we contributors to this symposium have actually seen a few humanists made, have helped a little to make them perhaps; and we are dealing with spiritual values which transcend ordinary statistics. A few thousand genuine humanists in America would make our society humanistic; a hundred humanist painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, and men of letters would make our art solidly humanistic. In this hope we keep our tiny banner up beside the hoardings that promise to beautify our teeth, remove our corns, clothe our bodies appealingly, or incase the relentlessly exposed legs of our women in silk as durable as filmy.

That adjustment between artist and layman which seems so difficult to-day, until the seventeenth century and the beginning of modern times came of itself and in some such fashion as this--it hardly matters whether the scene be Italy, Spain, France, England, China, Japan, India, or Persia: in every case the basis was fine craftsmanship. Pretty much all objects of common use were delicately conceived and carefully made. The amateur of to-day gladly pays great prices for the ordinary grave figurines and temple vessels of China, for the horse trappings of the Scythians, for the common household gear and even the workman’s tools of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, for the comfit boxes and carved fobs of feudal Japan, for the peasant furniture of Brittany and Scandinavia. This general high level of craftsmanship depended chiefly on the fact that even the humblest craftsman was also a designer. To the joy of fit execution was joined that of successful invention.

A very few craftsmen became what we now call artists,--that is made finer inventions on a more impressive scale, designed a cathedral or a palace instead of a simple house, decorated an entire chapel instead of a bride chest or tournament shield, made a bronze statue instead of a chiselled ink stand. But the line between the craftsman and the artist was not a sharp one. At Florence a Donatello belonged to the Stonecutters Guild and officially was merely a very highly esteemed stonecutter. And every future artist entered upon his career as a simple apprentice in a craft. The tragedy and frustration so common in the artists’ career to-day were absent. The apprentice with only a fine craftsman’s endowment lived out his life contentedly as a craftsman. But he was free, had he the ability, to become an artist and to achieve the companionship of princes.

The step from craftsman to artist lay really in the artist’s intelligent assimilation of greater subject matter or in his fuller expression of subject matter common to artist and craftsman alike. Such subject matter was furnished him by his ecclesiastical and temporal betters; he did not invent it. There was no hardship in this imposition, for the values of his betters were also his own. There was a like-mindedness and real co-operation between artist and patron. A romantic and sentimentally individualistic criticism has challenged this case. No person who knows either history or human nature, however, will hold that Giotto was hampered because he had to paint the legends of Saint Francis and those of the Virgin; that Raphael was great in spite of the fact that he had to find symbols for syncretic theology; that Hogarth is belittled by the fact that he so genially followed the literary, satirical current of his age. A humanistic criticism will hold, on the contrary, that an essential factor in the greatness of these artists was that, their themes coming almost ready made, they were spared the waste and perturbation of so-called original invention and were free to face in tranquillity their real problem of transformation and execution.

To recapitulate: the craftsman, until at most a couple of centuries ago, depended on a universal taste for the well-made thing, while the artist depended on the taste of a minority, the taste of an aristocracy with which he himself felt in harmony. The few remaining fine craftsmen of to-day find no general taste for the well-made thing upon which they may depend, while the myriad artists of to-day face no aristocracy whatever, no accepted body of taste whatever, but rather a congeries of pseudo-aristocracies each with its shifting preferences, which hardly deserve the name of tastes at all.

How the isolation of the artist with the virtual extinction of the craftsman has come about is a commonplace of history which need be recalled here only in its broad lines. The factory within a century has done away with the craftsman designer. Still earlier the crumbling of the old aristocracy of birth and religion at once put an end to community of taste at the top, and gave exaggerated scope to the already strongly rising ideal of originality and individuality as highest æsthetic values. A stable and spiritually profitable patronage ceased and was succeeded by a capricious and heavy handed patronage from a new wealth undisciplined either by tradition or by fine and broad personal experience. The artist’s immemorial task of realising himself in society became almost impossibly difficult. If he were weak and clever, his resort was to sycophancy; if he were strong and wise, there was little for him but patience, resignation, and a tragic hopefulness; if he were strong and unwise, he became a rebel. And the rebel, in a manner perfectly familiar to the neurologist, built up his compensations, by which he extolled that isolation which was really his sore misfortune as his superiority and his advantage, until after three generations it has become a common conviction among artists that their proper task is self-expression in a void, that there should be no desire to communicate and, obviously, no need to be understood.

And just at the moment when the position of the artist was becoming barely tenable, the number of artists increased inordinately. The craftsman who didn’t want to go into a factory but wanted to use his head and hands delicately, had to become an artist, while wholesale methods of education in the practice of art made the way to becoming an artist easy to any young person with a modicum of money and diligence. As if that were not enough, the false glamour thrown about the artist life by romantic poets and novelists brought new hordes of the unfit to join the bewildered survivors from the old régime.

III

Now, any going back to the conditions of the Middle Ages or to those of the Renaissance is of course impossible; but if craftsmanship and art are again to become normal functions in a helpful social order, the old formulas, at least in principle, must hold. There will be no generally fine craftsmanship until most people want well-made things and get them from craftsmen who design; and the so-called fine arts will have no general importance until there are many patrons with a common bond of taste which is sympathetic to most artists. Is there anything which promises so desirable a reconstruction?

On the side of craftsmanship, I fear nothing is to be expected. The gallant counter-attacks of a John Ruskin and a William Morris against modern industrialism show just how much and how little can be gained from a militant reaction. A hundred passionate spinsters are printing batiks or glazing pottery in as many æsthetic last ditches, but they are mostly doing so at the expense of rich and generous eccentrics, in short are merely subsidised artists disguised as craftsmen. We are getting better designed things from the factory--the museums are working usefully to this end--but this reform only enlists a handful of professional designers, and does nothing to produce the old type of creative craftsman. In short we probably must say good-bye to the craftsman save as a picturesque survival, like the man who is skilful with the rapier or the long bow. All we can hope for is that some improvement in the general taste, which I think is reasonable to look for,--since for a century it could hardly have been lower,--may cause a discriminating demand for better designed factory goods. This of course leaves the problem of the artist and the craftsman just where it was, with the sole difference that the passing of the craftsman shuts off the possibility of any return of the artist to his traditionally best school, the shop of a good craftsman.

So if there is to be any useful rebuilding, I feel it must proceed after the very modern precedent of the skyscraper, from the top down. Much might conceivably be done to produce a more coherent and intelligent patronage for the fine arts, much is already being done by museums, art dealers, colleges and universities, and all manner of art societies. Indeed the increased activity of museums, collectors, and colleges in behalf of the acquisition and appreciation of fine works of art has persuaded Mr. R. C. Duffus that we are well launched on an American Renaissance, and to that effect he has published a very interesting book. Far be it from me to minimise the importance of activities in which I have been and am deeply engaged myself. One may gladly admit that to multiply our art treasures--and for a generation the multiplication has been astoundingly accelerated--is in itself an unqualified benefit. But the mere accumulation of great works of art and much talk about them does not imply understanding of them, and the question the humanist must raise is always--Are these masterpieces understood? And how are they understood? Mediæval Rome lay in full artistic decadence when much of the glory of her old art was visible on every hand. To understand any nobly conceived work of art, one must have lived nobly in deed, in imagination, or in both. To own a great work of art may be a mere counsel of personal vanity; to expound a work of art, a mere assertion of self-importance. A whole school of interpretation, which has its faculty, museum, and journal, tears the work of art from its human context and studies its forms as if these were ends in themselves. And this sort of teaching is popular. Along such lines one may make a generation of resolute pedants. For the humanist such teaching is not merely defective but positively harmful. On the other side, there is much sound and modest teaching, and the next generation of art patrons will be far better trained than that which is passing.

Yet all such useful activities are simply marginal. Without a predisposition in its visitors, the museum might just as well be unvisited, since it then has no more dignity or value than the peep show. It is a proper uneasiness before flattering statistics of attendance that has rightly induced our museums to inaugurate direct instruction in appreciation. It is a weakness and limitation of such teaching that it too often merely foments a diffused interest in art taken as an entity and not as related to human values generally. For appreciation really requires a right and balanced attitude towards life. It was really more important for Florence that her great citizens, while bowing to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, wanted a full and honourable life in Florence--it was really more important, I say, that they cared discriminatingly for the dignity of their ordinary activities and for the authority of their faith, than that they cared specifically for painting, sculpture, and architecture.

In short some aristocratic vision of the good life has always been the foundation on which great national art has been reared in the past. It behooves us then to ask what is in America our accepted vision of the good life? For upon it must rest our art. What do we all agree to (saving always negligible minorities of “knockers”)? I fear it would come to these few articles of faith:--to make a lot of money by fair means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die with one’s boots on. This is a credo which has within its limitations positive merits, and it is by no means lightly to be decried, but it palpably offers little spiritual nourishment to the “art-artist,” to quote a recent mayor of New York. A certain kind of art it feeds admirably. And it naturally gets the art it feeds--the immaculate bank clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like apparition in the porcelain tub, the beach party in the classy car--the art of the advertisement generally. And this ideal also finds its authentic expression in the cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the moving picture, and the potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over the radio. These are our representative arts, as sculpture was the representative art of Greece, or painting of Florence.

The prospect is more pleasing when we turn to architecture, really the only art that is perennial. Here there is at least a great progress, a far higher level of taste than that of a generation ago, a competent and audacious coping with unprecedented problems. Yet here as elsewhere the cult of haste works harm. No architect of a skyscraper is given time to think his building out. Perfection in the arts rests largely on trifles lovingly meditated, and what successful architect has time for meditation? We have in abundance such arts as we deserve, and we shall have better arts only as we deserve them through better ideals of life generally.

Painting and sculpture are kept alive by a sort of artificial respiration. It is to be hoped that the increasing public use of both in decoration may restore to these traditionally leading arts a fuller measure of vitality. As it is, these arts have joined fine craftsmanship as an elegant survival, like fencing or court tennis. Since painting and sculpture are the arts I most love, it would be pleasant indeed to come forward with a programme for their rehabilitation. But I have no such programme. I feel rather that we should at once accept the situation and emphasise it. The only remedy, and a partial one at that, is, I think, this: since painting and sculpture have become exotic, relatively unwanted, and subsidised arts, let us rebuild on their rarity value. If instead of making it ridiculously easy to learn painting and sculpture, we made it difficult, we should probably have better painting and sculpture. This could be done by withdrawing charitable support from the art schools, keeping open such as reasonably pay their way, and by suspending the artificially encouraged salesmanship of painting and sculpture. There would remain the human problem of what to do with the thousands of young men and women who legitimately wish to work delicately with their hands; but in a civilisation that is supplied from the factory, that problem seems insoluble. And withal there may be a satisfactory outlet in amateurism--this has happened notably in the art of the theatre at the very moment when the moving picture seemed to announce the end of the spoken play. In general I am not discouraging the support of survivals. Indeed I see in such support a singularly sympathetic act of patronage. But one should know what he is about. I have, for example, a predilection for the quill pen, but I should be very unwise to endow an institution for writing with the quill. And we are very unwise in America when, not really wanting their works, we artificially multiply painters and sculptors.

Whatever reform comes from within the arts, will probably not come from carefully fostered survivals nor yet from conscious revivals, but rather from the response of the wanted arts to a finer demand. The comic strip and the moving picture seem barometric to me, as does illustration for advertising. Whenever I see a marked improvement in these popular arts, I shall expect to find greater improvement in the traditional fine arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture. And while I am only a casual observer of these barometric arts, what I have observed of design for advertising and of the moving picture does not cause me either to hope unduly nor yet to despair utterly. Certainly both have improved much within my experience. There remains the dilemma: can the democratic arts really acquire distinction, that solicitude for perfecting trifles which we have already remarked, or must they stop at a certain level simply because they are democratic arts? It would be hazardous to answer this question, but historically no democratic art, with the possible exception of engraving, has as yet transcended fine craftsmanship and successfully invaded the realm of great ideas. That realm has without exception been occupied by the arts that were frankly aristocratic.

Our desired rehabilitation of the traditional and also of the new arts may in the last analysis depend upon the creation within our democracy of the right sort of an aristocracy. Here we are back to the central problem of humanism--how to produce a superiority that is generally accepted and socially available. If we can make such an aristocracy, it will foster the artist and the arts justly and generously; it will provide a world in which the creative artist is no longer a tolerated alien but solidly at home. Whenever such an aristocracy has a clear and noble vision of the good life, it will want symbols for its ideals, and will call upon the only man who can provide such symbols--the artist.

One would like to think that the oncoming generation, with unparalleled advantages in museums and in collegiate instruction in art, endowed with a great open-mindedness, audacity, and hopefulness--one would like to think, I say, that this young generation will provide the needed humanistic support for art. But association with youth, delightful as it is, gives me no very clear hope in any humanistic direction. The most typical and engaging youths and maidens of to-day illustrate merely the lovelier and more attractive traits of the barbarian. They have an unlimited confidence, very beautiful in its way, with the smallest background of lived or imagined experience. They think life is so simple that they may ignore all the traditional solutions for its manifold problems, trusting to their own instinct of the moment to meet emergencies that have engaged the best wits of generations of sages and saints. We have, characteristically tinged with humanitarianism, the mentality of the noble bandit sheik or the generous sea rover, who knows what he wants and asks nothing from tradition or authority. To make humanists of this generation of self-elected spiritual adventurers implies preliminary contrition and moral rebuilding. There was a better chance really of making humanists out of my own somewhat over-sophisticated and fainéant generation. At least we started from the sound postulate that life was complex, and the problem of living a problem of delicate adjustment in which one needed whatever help he might draw from any time or source. So I am really glad that I shall probably not see the young generation when it passes the forties. Bruised in its self-confidence, perplexed and baffled by a life envisaged too simply, it is all too likely to manifest a general revulsion to indiscriminately chosen formalisms--social, political, and religious--with the result that the middle-aged dull dog of to-day will be as nothing in view of his successor of twenty years hence. On the better side, a general return to formalism may be the opportunity for an intelligently aggressive humanism. It will be an advantage to find, what we to-day sadly lack, a basis of agreement on any traditional plane, however narrow. Thus the new generation may after all serve the ends of a future humanism, if only by living into entire discredit their barbarous programme of individualism.

In fine, the problem of a humanistic art is no discrete problem, but rather that of humanism generally. It has been my task merely to define the issue in a single aspect, and not at all to find a solution that could be adopted to-morrow. The deep gap that isolates the serious artist from a public content with the puerilities of the radio and the “talkie,” will scarcely be bridged to-morrow or the day after. Many critics, indeed, hail the latter-day individualist as the finally liberated artist, and bid us joyously expect even more individualism than that which has already been so generously vouchsafed us. This may be a true prognosis. No one can safely deny the possibility that art may be permanently “on its own.” If so, art will of course become merely an eccentric activity, an indulgence and luxury of coteries, hence of no more concern really to the humanist than the trade, say, of the perfume maker. On the other hand, no one can safely deny the possibility that art may once again be profoundly integrated with society. Every contributor to this volume is perforce thinking toward that reintegration, even if the theme be not in his mind nor the words on his pen. To my younger colleagues, then, in whom the hope of a new humanism lies, I leave the problem and the solution, with that chastened confidence which befits a humanist grown old in the most unpopular of faiths.

The Dilemma of Modern Tragedy

ALAN REYNOLDS THOMPSON

Most modern tragedy is depressing; classic tragedy is elevating. That the best tragic art of the past, in spite of the calamities it presents, elevates the spirit is obvious; but the cause of the “lift” it produces is obscure. If the cause were technical and formal beauty, Ghosts ought to be more inspiriting than Macbeth. If it were wholly the melody of verse--which most modern drama has foregone--no great classic tragedy could endure translation. But Greek tragedies can still powerfully exalt an audience, though presented in the English renderings of Campbell and Potter!

The problem seems particularly to have appealed to the German metaphysical mind. Hegel thought tragedy a transcendental reconciliation of opposites. Schopenhauer found in it resignation to loss of individuality and return to the universal Will. Nietzsche turned the latter’s pessimism into the semblance of optimism by defining the spirit of Dionysus as an intoxicated joy in annihilation and union with nature.

But one hardly need resort to metaphysics, since the experience seems sufficiently explained by psychology. It is in my opinion chiefly the result of admiration. Every tragedy grows from a struggle of the individual against circumstance; but this emotional elevation we are discussing, as distinguished from more melodramatic thrills, seems to arise not from the mere struggle but from an impressive exhibition of will. The spectator is inspirited because in tragedy he sees an exhibition of convincing heroism. The tragic hero achieves a spiritual victory in spite of a physical defeat. “To affect the soul, and excite the passions, and above all to move admiration,” says Dryden, “is the delight of serious plays.”