Part 6 (2/2)

This is very satisfactory but it does not suffice to prove that the newof a new slope; it does not prove that we stand nohere the early Byzantines stood, with the ruins of a civilisation clattering about our ears and our eyes set on a new horizon In favour of that view there are no solid argu and pondering, though not to be pushed too violently He ould cast the horoscope of hulect history nor trust her overlect of history is the last mistake into which a land with Imperial Rome has been the pastiere imperio populos, Ro in a public schoolman to remember

The historically minded should travel a little further with their couainst Socialism), on their way, they will not have failed to reh standard of coence, the unholy alliance of cynicision to nifying the itation To similise the state superstitions and observances of Rome with our official devotions and ministration, the precise busts in the British Museu likenesses” in the National Portrait Gallery, the acadelish Liberalis-field, would be pretty sport for any little Gere the brat to lay an historical finger on callousness, bravado, tre alo in the majority as attributes coland

Rather I will inquire whether the rest of Europe does not labour under the proverbial disability of those who live in glass-houses It is not so lish politics as Western civilisation that reminds me of the last days of the Empire

The facility of the co up of similarities; I need not compare Mr Shaith Lucian or the persecution of Christians with the savage out-bursts of our shopkeepers against anarchists One h, that it is as iious spirit that was to n a birth-place to the spiritual ferh we ree that the art of one genius may produce a movement, even Cezanne will hardly suffice to account for what looks like the beginning of an artistic slope and a renaissance of the human spirit One would hesitate to explain the dark and es by the mosaics at Ravenna The spirit that was to revive the moribund Roman world ca before the world grew conscious of its existence Its reins are probably undiscoverable To-day we can name pioneers, beside Cezanne, in the neorld of emotion; there was Tolstoi, and there was Ibsen; but who can say that these did not set out in search of Eldorados of which already they had heard travellers' tales Ruskin shook his fist at the old order to sos counted, succeeded at least incontemptible some that did not Nietzsche's preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense ins is none of my business; when the Church shall be established be sure that industrious hagiographers will do justice to its reat emotional renaissance must be preceded by an intellectual, destructive -point? It could be argued, I suppose, that it began with Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists Having gone so far back, the historian would find cause for going further still How could he justify any frontier? Every living organiserm of its own decay, and perhaps a civilisation is no sooner alive than it begins to contrive its end Gradually the symptoms of disease become apparent to acute physicians who state the effect without perceiving the cause Be it so; circular fatalisood h to show that if Europe be again at the head of a pass, if we are about to take the first step along a new slope, the historians of the new age will have plenty to quarrel about

ItEurope for a new epoch, that it understood better its destructive critics than its constructive artists At any rate before that century ended it had produced one of the great constructive artists of the world, and overlooked hi of a slope, Cezanne certainlyof a movement the main characteristics of which it will be h there is so one artistic e they belong, are essentially the same; yet these superficial differences which are the characteristics of a move historians The particularform, and the particular kinds of foreneration, have an i on the art of the next For whereas the methods and forms of one may admit of almost infinite develop but imitation For instance, the fifteenth century no opened up a rich vein of rather inferior ore; whereas the school of Raffael was a blind alley Cezanne discovered methods and forms which have revealed a vista of possibilities to the end of which no man can see; on the instrument that he invented thousands of artists yet unborn may play their own tunes

What the future will owe to Cezanne we cannot guess: what contemporary art owes to hienius and talent who to-day delight us with the significance and originality of their worktheir objective, wanting chart, rudder, and compass

Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form In 1839 he was born at Aix-en-Provence, and for forty years he painted patiently in the manner of his master pissarro To the eyes of the world he appeared, so far as he appeared at all, a respectable, minor Ie, of Zola, a loyal, negligible disciple He was on the right side, of course--the Impressionist side, the side of the honest, disinterested artists, against the acade

He believed that it could be soraphy or an accoainst sentimentality

But science will neither reat Ih they were still painting exquisite pictures their theories had led art into a _cul de sac_ So while he orking away in his corner of Provence, shut off completely from the aestheticism of Paris, fro for so to replace the bad science of Claude Monet And somewhere about 1880 he found it At Aix-en-Provence caulf between the nineteenth century and the twentieth: for, gazing at the familiar landscape, Cezanne caht, nor yet as a player in the game of human life, but as an end in itself and an object of intense ereat artist has seen landscape as an end in itself--as pure foreneration of artists feel that conificance as an end in itself all else about a landscape is negligible From that time forward Cezanne set himself to create forms that would express the emotion that he felt for what he had learnt to see Science beca can be seen as pure fornificance that thrills to ecstasy The rest of Cezanne's life is a continuous effort to capture and express the significance of form

I have tried to say in another place that there are more roads than one by which a man may come at reality Soination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no material ladder to help them out of matter They have spoken with reality as e in for but bare existence to the physical universe Of this race are the best musicians and architects; of this race is not Cezanne He travelled towards reality along the traditional road of European painting It was in what he saw that he discovered a sublime architecture haunted by that Universal which informs every Particular

He pushed further and further towards a conificance of for concrete as a point of departure It was because Cezanne could coh what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forreat artists have depended more on the model Every picture carried hioal--co of pictures but the expression of his sense of the significance of form that he cared about, he lost interest in his work so soon as he had rasped His own pictures were for Cezanne nothing but rungs in a ladder at the top of which would be co towards an ideal For him every picture was ahe was ready to discard as soon as it had served his purpose He had no use for his own pictures

To him they were experiments He tossed the-blocks for a future race of luckless critics

Cezanne is a type of the perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis of the professional picture-maker, or poem-maker, orcould he accomplish the end of his existence--the expression of his sense of the significance of for about aesthetics, very properly we brush all this aside, and consider only the object and its e to explain the emotional effectiveness of pictures we turn naturally to the minds of the men who made the of suggestion His life was a constant effort to create forms that would express what he felt in the moment of inspiration The notion of uninspired art, of a for pictures, would have appeared to him preposterous The real business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own salvation Fortunately for us he could only do this by painting Any two pictures by Cezanne are bound to differ profoundly He never drea hieneration of otherwise dissimilar artists have drawn inspiration froe artist when I say that the prime characteristic of the new movement is its derivation from Cezanne

The world into which Cezanne tuitated by the quarrels of Romantics and Realists The quarrel between Roree as to whether the history of Spain or the nue The Ro to blows about the squeak of a bat The instinct of a Ro was to recall its associations A rose, for instance,ladies and Edracious things that, at one time or another, had befallen him or someone else A rose touched life at a hundred pretty points A rose was interesting because it had a past ”Bosh,” said the Realist, ”I will tell you what a rose is; that is to say, I will give you a detailed account of the properties of _Rosa setigera_, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five obovate petals” To a Cezanne one account would appear as irrelevant as the other, since both o thatin itself,” what now, I iine, they call ”the essential reality” For, after all, what is a rose? What is a tree, a dog, a wall, a boat? What is the particular significance of anything? Certainly the essence of a boat is not that it conjures up visions of argosies with purple sails, nor yet that it carries coals to Newcastle Iine a boat in coent activities and fabulous history, what is it that remains, what is that to which we still react e behind pure fornificance It was for this Cezanne felt the e And the second characteristic of the new movement is a passionate interest, inherited fro this I a no more than that the painters of the movement are consciously determined to be artists Peculiarity lies in the consciousness--the consciousness hich they set themselves to eliminate all that lies between thes To be an artist, they think, suffices

Howeffective artists because they tried to be so else?

II

SIMPLIFICATION AND DESIGN

At the risk of beco ludicrous about hunting for characteristics in the art of to-day or of yesterday, or of any particular period In art the only iood art and bad That this pot was made in Mesopotamia about 4000 BC, and that picture in Paris about 1913 AD, is of very little consequence Nevertheless, it is possible, though not very profitable, to distinguish between equally good works h the practice of associating art with the age in which it was produced can be of no service to art or artists, I am not sure that it can be of no service whatever For if it be true that art is an index to the spiritual condition of an age, the historical consideration of art cannot fail to throw soht on the history of civilisation It is conceivable therefore that a coht lead us to modify our conception of human development, and to revise a few of our social and political theories Be that as it may, this much is sure: should anyone wish to infer froe, he e froes He must be familiar with the characteristics of the movement It is my intention to indicate a few of the more obvious characteristics of the contemporary e differs froht it seems odd that art, which is the expression of nificance of fore Yet, deeply considered, it is as certain that superficially art will always be changing as that essentially it cannot change It see that unless he were continually changing he would cease to create and merely imitate It is the old question of the artistic proble himself new problems can the artist raise his powers to the white heat of creation

The forms in which artists can express themselves are infinite, and their desire to express thee and reaction in artistic for of the ancestral ape inof the ancestral sheep; there are fashi+ons in forms and colours and the relations of forms and colours; or, to put the matter more pleasantly, and more justly, there is sufficient accord in the sensibilities of an age to induce a certain sie powers in the air froether escape; we call them by pet names--”Movements,” ”Forces,” ”Tendencies,” ”Influences,” ”The Spirit of the Age”--but we never understand thehtened nor cajoled by our airs of familiarity, which impress the public only They exist, however, and if they did not we should have to invent them; for how else are we to explain the fact that not only do the artists of a particular period affect particular kinds of foreneration seem to be born with sensibilities specially apt to be flattered by theic word ”Cezanne”; we can say that Cezanne has iner ioers This explanation seems to me inadequate; and in any case it will not account for the predoes undoe is, I suspect, a coreat enerally one part of it, the e are often another Technical discoveries have soes For instance, toon wood, the invention of canvas would suggest all sorts of fascinating novelties Lastly, there is a continual change in the appearance of those familiar objects which are the raw h the essential quality--significance--is constant, in the choice of fores seehts or shorter juers on two points bethich there is a certain a certain common characteristics That which lies between two such points historians call a period or movement

The period in which we find ourselves in the year 1913 begins with the maturity of Cezanne (about 1885) It therefore overlaps the Impressionist movement, which certainly had life in it till the end of the nineteenth century Whether Post-Impressionism will peter out as I of a new artistic vitality with centuries of development before it, is, I have admitted, a matter of conjecture What seems to me certain is that those who shall be able to conte complete, as a period in the history of art, will not so st us who create illusions and chaffer and quarrel in the tradition of the Victorians When they think of the early twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who tried to create forotten They will think of the men who looked to the present, not of those who looked to the past; and, therefore, it is of them alone that I shall think when I attempt to describe the conteested two characteristics of the movement; I have said that in their choice of forms and colours most vital contemporary artists are, more or less, influenced by Cezanne, and that Cezanne has inspired them with the resolution to free their art from literary and scientific irrelevancies Most people, asked to mention a third, would promptly answer, I suspect--Simplification To instance sie seems queer, since simplification is essential to all art Without it art cannot exist; for art is the creation of significant fornificant from what is not Yet to such depths had art sunk in the nineteenth century, that in the eyes of the rabble the greatest crime of Whistler and the Impressionists was their by no means drastic sih The spent dip stinks on into the dawn You have only to look at al to see masses of elaboration and detail that forn and serve no useful purpose Nothing stands in greater need of simplification than architecture, and nowhere is sist architects

Walk the streets of London; everywhere you will see huge blocks of ready-made decoration, pilasters and porticoes, friezes and facades, hoisted on cranes to hang fros have beco-heaps, and far less beautiful Only where economy has banished the architect do we see ineers, who have at least a scientific problees, our most creditable monuments They at least are not ashamed of their construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to ss a foot We shall have no more architecture in Europe till architects understand that all these tawdry excrescences have got to be simplified away, till they make up their e--steel, concrete, and glass--and to create in these adnificant forms