Art

Let us imagine if we can a world entirely without art: without story, image, edifice, or significant sound. If we can, for perhaps it is impossible. Such a world might well be invisible, inaudible, ineffable, and intangible. Even if we could see it, hear it, feel it, we would not know we did, at least as men know things. Without the earliest of all arts, language, we would scarcely know of what we were deprived: the privilege, namely, of expressing our satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what had taken place before our eyes. Without the arts of speaking, listening, thinking, counting, and measuring—without the intellectual arts—we could not assess or repossess the experience we had undergone. Without the useful arts we could make nothing, build nothing worthy to contain and shelter our bodies, to be a home wherein our thought might rest. And then without the fine arts—the arts that serve only themselves, that are ends, not means, that justify themselves when they give us nothing but pleasure—we would be shallow and poor of mind, with little or no sense of the world’s depth and colour, or of ourselves as creatures for whom the present moment is also past and future. We call these arts fine not because they are better than the others but because they are different, as beauty is different from use—beauty that is its own excuse for being.

None of them is more intimately ours than story. The art of literature is the art of story; there are songs and there are essays long and short, there are histories, there are biographies, there are treatises, sermons, and discussions of everything under the sun, but story is our first and last entertainment—when we are children and when we are too old to care any more what truth is unless it comes in the past tense, with persons reflecting in their lives the peculiar radiance that attends the accidents of time and character. Stories may vary in length from the anecdote to the epic, from the fairy tale to the novel, the imaginary biography, the romance. And they may reach us in many forms: in the theatre, for instance, where they may employ flesh-and-blood actors to convey their meaning or where they may be only flickers of light and shade upon a screen that has no depth save what we give it in our imaginations; where, in other words, they call themselves plays or motion pictures or where, if music also sounds and dancers whirl and pose, they call themselves ballets.

Nature does not tell stories; only artists do, and in the process they work transformations that measure the distance between matter and mind. In nature, so far as we can know it, there are no beginnings and no ends in the sense familiar to both writers and readers of fiction and drama, or for that matter history, which likewise imposes form upon a welter of events. No matter how simple a tale is, or how complex, how few the words in it or how many, it is a human construction that no animal or plant, and of course no stone, would find in the least degree interesting; whereas human beings hold their breaths until an end is reached. Ends are intelligible as the raw materials of life seem not to be; if life itself does not become intelligible through story, it becomes in some mysterious way both beautiful and clear, and for the time being that suffices.

Each of the fine arts flourishes both in large and in little forms. Just as story has a choice between the brevity of folk tales and the elaboration of epics and romances, so statements about life may be as compendious as a proverb—the wisdom of many and the wit of one—or as bulky as the longest book in numberless volumes. So music—the sound of other worlds—reaches our ears either as simple song or as opera and symphony and other complex forms. There are those who say that the song, like the anonymous fable or tale, is more lasting and important than compositions of great complexity can ever be; and they also say that the lyric poem, at least when it is perfect, as in truth it seldom is, has more to tell us, or at least deeper ways of touching us, than the most tremendous tragedy in five acts or the subtlest comic novel in a thousand pages. When a memorable melody attaches itself to a lyric or a ballad, something indeed does come into existence and hang there as if for perpetuity. Music is the most ineffable of all the arts. It has its own language and it listens to itself; we do not so much hear it as overhear it, nor can we speak very sensibly about what we have overheard. Successful music, powerful music, has an effect upon us that many have tried in vain to describe; it takes us out of ourselves, they say, and perhaps they need to say no more than that. Even then they may be speaking only of the music that is native to them; Eastern music sounds like mere noise to untrained Western ears, and Western music has a monotony, say the Chinese, that Europeans of course deny is there. The same thing is true, though in lesser measure, of all the arts. East and West have different eyes as well as ears, and different thoughts.

The arts of drawing and painting, of etching and lithography, of engraving and decorative design, have covered many surfaces—canvas, plaster, parchment, paper—which no longer show where the artist’s hand once worked; for the materials of these arts are perishable, as the marble of sculptors has been, as the bronze, as the wood. Much remains, but more does not. Even the cave paintings of prehistoric France and Africa, hailed by modern man when he discovered them as miracles of survival, may not survive the visits that living people rushed to pay them. Ancient Greek music has failed to survive for a further reason: we do not know how it was written or how it sounded; we are told that it had almost magical powers over those who heard it in its time, but that time is gone, along with the time when paintings adorned the walls and columns of Greek temples and houses. Painting has been for centuries the queen of the arts in Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and England—each of them in its turn, and sometimes in more than one turn, has enriched the world with shapes and colours that only genius could have foretold, only passion could have brought into being. And that is but half the story; in China long before, in India, in Persia, in Japan, in Russia, the brushes of painters, sometimes tipped with gold, beautified and glorified the palaces of emperors, the tombs of princes, and the dwelling places of great gods. In Egypt for millennia the order of the world was registered in stone and gold, and the written word itself was pictures.

Sculpture, that once was solid and now is full of spaces—or may be—left open by the ingenuity of workers in metal, has changed as architecture has changed. Both arts now cultivate openness: buildings are closed, but the exterior is glass, so that space plays games with itself inside, and the effect is of a lightness that winds might blow away, except of course that the buildings look lean and strong enough to remain just where they are. It has always been true that architects desired the effect of lightness, as all art does, heaviness being a quality that no mind admires; any building weighs tons, but we are not supposed to think of that; rather indeed we are expected to imagine that brick and stone for once have learned to lie lightly on the earth, which they do not seem to press at all. So with Classical sculpture, from Greek days on; the charm of it was its poise, its grace, its management of idea in marble. So too with Classical architecture; the Parthenon is both massive and weightless, like a ship that might sail yet does not. And always in China and Japan there have been those curled and tapered roofs that still look as if at this very instant in time they are taking wing. The open revolution, then, was only a restatement of what had long been understood though some of its secrets were forgotten.

Abstraction in all the arts, for there is no art from which it is absent, is again a restatement of what has always been true, however feebly it was recognized by schools of artists who had lost contact with reality. Great painting, great music, great poetry, great architecture—great landscape architecture too—have never been strangers to abstraction, just as they have never been slaves to an incomplete understanding of what is meant when we say that art is imitation. It is imitation, but of what? Of essences, not accidents; of the truth that is hard to see; of beauty that is basic; of shapes that will not change; of colours that will not fade. And if, say, the great painters of the past, comprehending this, still “copied nature,” they did not do so inanely. They did so, on the contrary, with huge effort aimed at the verities that underlie verisimilitude, so that in one sense they were not copying at all; they were extracting essences, they were reducing appearances to the ideas that informed them; they were, in a word, abstracting truth from vessels that contained it. But they did not say they were doing this. They said they were copying nature. And when later on they were taken at their word by painters with inadequate aspiration, the result was woeful insipidity, was mediocrity and flatness. The heroic remedy was warfare against representation as such, was a shortcut to abstraction that could have its weakness too, was a loss, in all but the great revolutionaries, of the contact with Earth which no art ever can be without. Abstract painting at its best—and the worst does not matter—imitates nature at nature’s best; is “like” nature after all, for nature is brilliant and strong, and abstract painting convinces us of this even though it dispenses with the particulars with which we used to be fascinated and of which we were quite properly fond.

A world entirely without art would be worse than invisible, inaudible, ineffable, and intangible. It would be a world without temporal dimension, it would be a world that human minds could not remember. Human memory is unique in its capacity not only to recall but also to utilize the past, and to apply it; and better still, to re-create it so that it becomes a part of the present moment, which is more like eternity than anything else we shall ever experience. Human memory is nothing less than the origin of human art.

“The Greeks fabled not unwisely,” said Sir Thomas Browne, “in making Memory the mother of the Muses.” The memory of man is indeed a wonderful thing, and his richest possession. Not only is it the source of all our arts, it is their record too, stored in the mind of the beholder, the listener. Plato even asked us to conceive “in the mind of man a block of wax, the gift of Memory, and when we wish to remember anything which we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and thoughts, and in that material receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring; and we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts.” An artist whose poems or pictures or musical ideas have great power is certainly, we feel, the possessor of a memory that is always at his command, bringing to him at any moment whatever detail he needs, and reminding him too of the knowledge he has, and never forgets, of the way the world is put together, so that he does not misrepresent things as they are. The human race itself can be said to be such an artist, for it has its myths which it keeps alive, its stories that are “so true,” someone has said, “that they couldn’t have happened.” There is such a thing as folk memory, the mother perhaps of all our thoughts and feelings, and the guardian of such wisdom as we have.

A story that cannot be remembered, a song that fades out of the mind, a hero whose name escapes us, a sentence we thought we would never forget but somehow do—such works of art must be defective at the core. But there are others that we could not forget if we tried, and it is those we live with in the company of friends who remember them too. Perhaps the final justification of art is the two-fold pleasure it gives: the pleasure of remembering great and beautiful things that we cannot lose, and the pleasure of sharing them with others who possess them in the same fashion.

There is a limited number of such things, of these greatest of human works of art; by definition there can be no superfluous masterpieces. The ones we have are numerous after all, and no single person can claim to have done justice to every one of them, or can claim to know what further ones are still unborn, Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and Mother of the Muses, will have the deciding vote as to which ones, now or in the future, will survive the ravages of time.