Part 8 (1/2)

Theyand disendowing art; by withdrawing doles fro the moneys ent Art schools do nothing but har

Art is not to be learned; at any rate it is not to be taught All that the drawing-master can teach is the craft of imitation In schools there must be a criterion of excellence and that criterion cannot be an artistic one; the drawing---fidelity to the model No master can make a student into an artist; but all can, and most do, turn into impostors, maniacs, criirls who had been made artists by nature It is not the ht not to be bla all his pupils to a certain standard of efficiency appreciable by inspectors and by the general public, and the only quality of which such can judge is verisimilitude The only respects in which one work can be seen to differ fro_ a Board of Education inspector) are choice of subject and fidelity to conise artistic talent, he would not be per-masters are wicked, but that the systeo

The eiven to the rich It would be te to save it for the purchase of works of art, but perhaps that can lead to nothing but mischief It is unthinkable that any Governe; it is a question how far purchase by the State even of fine old pictures is a benefit to art It is not a question that need be discussed; for though a State nise a fine work of art, provided it be sufficiently old, a erously good taste State-acquisition of fine ancient art ood--I daresay it would be; but the purchase of third-rate old masters and _objets d'art_ can benefit no one except the dealers As I shall hope to show, soalleries and museums, if only the public attitude towards, and the official conception of, these places could be changed As for contee is the surestin it all that is most stupid and pernicious Our public race our streets, our postage-stamps, coins, and official portraits are mere bait to the worst instincts of the worst art-students and to the better a forenerous prophets who sit at hoh to find a place in them for the artist Demos is to keep for his diversion a kennel of mountebanks

Artists will be chosen by the State and supported by the State The people will pay the piper and call the tune In the choice of politicians the h, but to art it would be fatal

The creation of soft artistic jobs is theart Already hundreds take to it, not because they have in them that which must be expressed, but because art seeenteel career When the income is assured the number of those who fancy art as a profession will not direat State of the future the co and intriguing between the friends of applicants and their parliamentary deputies, between the deputies and the Minister of Fine Arts; and I can iine the art produced to fulfil a popular mandate in the days when private jobbery will be the only check on public taste Can we not all iine the sort of man that would be chosen? Have we no experience of what the people love? Coentle the world, dream your dreams, conceive Utopias, but leave the artists out For, tellthe last three hundred years a single good artist would have been supported by your system? And remember, unless it had supported him it would not have allowed him to exist Remember, too, that you will have to select or reject your artists while yet they are students--you will not be able to wait until a naood judges If Degas is now reverenced as aprices, and his pictures fetch long prices because a handful of people ould soon have been put under the great civic pu those long years how has Degas lived? On the bounty of the people who love all things beautiful, or on the intelligence and discrireat State you will not be able to take your masters ready-made with years of reputation behind the

Here you are, then, at the door of your annual exhibition of students'

work; you are come to choose two State pensioners, and pack the rest off to clean the drains of Melbourne They will be chosen by popular vote--the only fair way of inducting a public entertainer to a snug billet But, unknown to you, I have placed ares; and at this exhibition there are no nale vote?

Possibly; but dare one of you suggest that in coer either of thereat new State everyone will be well educated” ”Let them,” I reply, ”be as well educated as the MAs of Oxford and Cae who have been educated froest that to do even that will come pretty dear Well, then, submit your anonymous collection of pictures to people qualified to elect members of parliament for our two ancient universities, and you know perfectly well that you will get no better result So, don't be silly: even private patronage is less fatal to art than public Whatever else you et an artist by popular election”

You say that the State will select through two or three highly sensitive officials In the first place you have got to catch your officials And remember, these, too, in the eyes of their felloorkers, will beThe considerations that govern the selection of State-paid artists will control the election of State-paid experts By what sign shall the public recognise thethat it is a man of sensibility the public wants? John Jones, the broker's e of art as Mr Fry, and apparently Mr Asquith thinks the trustees of the National Gallery better than either Suppose you have by some miracle laid hands on a man of aesthetic sensibility and made him your officer, he will still have to answer for his purchases to a popularly elected parliah at present: the people will not tolerate a public monument that is a work of art, neither do their obedient servants wish to i on the a public servant, when all works of art are public monuments, do you seriously expect to have any art at all? When the appointe does anyone doubt that a score of qualifications will stand an applicant in better stead than that of being an artist? Ier Fry Governine--and here I aine Mr Fry appointing soine Mr Lloyd George going down to Limehouse to defend the appointment before thousands of voters, most of who who, they feel sure, is reat co art--and the society that does not produce live art is da, and one only, that it can do Guarantee to every citizen, whether he works or whether he loafs, a bare minimum of existence--say sixpence a day and a bed in the co on public charity Give to the industrious practical workers the sort of things they like, big salaries, short hours, social consideration, expensive pleasures Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of his trade: ask nothing of him Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute For all let there be a choice between a life of dignified, highly-paid, and not over-exacting erant There can be little doubt about the choice of ion are very s, there has always been a notion that religion should be an aars

Let artists all over the world be beggars too Art and Religion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to , but in obedience to some mysterious necessity They do not produce to live--they live to produce There is no place for them in a social systeed and pleasant existence You cannot fit them into the machine, you must make them extraneous to it You must make pariahs of them, since they are not a part of society but the salt of the earth

In saying that thedelicate aesthetic judgments, I have said no more than the obvious truth A sure sensibility in visual art is at least as rare as a good ear formusic, or that a perfect ear can be acquired by study: only fools iine that the power of nice discriift Nevertheless there is no reason why the vast majority should not become very much more sensitive to art than it is; the ear can be trained to a point But for the better appreciation, as for the freer creation, of art more liberty is needed Ninety-nine out of every hundred people who visit picture galleries need to be delivered from that ”museum atmosphere” which envelops works of art and asphyxiates beholders They, the ninety-nine, should be encouraged to approach works of art courageously and to judge them on their merits Often they are more sensitive to form and colour than they suppose I have seen people show a nice taste in cottons and calicoes, and things not recognised as ”Art” by the custodians of museums, ould not hesitate to assert of any picture by Andrea del Sarto that it e In dealing with objects that are not expected to imitate natural forive free rein to their native sensibility It is only in the presence of a catalogue that complete inhibition sets in Traditional reverence is what lies heaviest on spectators and creators, and museums are too apt to beco for itself and for art by blowing out of the alleries the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worshi+p Let us try to re to be co to be enjoyed as one enjoys being in love The first thing to be done is to free the aesthetic e once behind the driver of an old horse-o ”The Empire” poster The name of Genee was on the bill ”So to ish hair, I surmise, discovered a fellow connoisseur): ”if you want art you o for it to the museums” How this pernicious nonsense is to be knocked out of people's heads I cannot guess It has been knocked in so sole by the schoolmasters and the newspapers, by cheap text-books and profound historians, by district visitors and cabinet yamblers, and public benefactors of every sort, that I ahter and braver word than ain But out it has to be knocked before we can have any general sensibility to art; for, while it remains, to ninety-nine out of every hundred a work of art will be dead the alleries terrify us We are crushed by the tacit admonition frowned from every corner that these treasures are displayed for study and improvement, by no means to provoke emotion Think of Italy--every toith its public collection; think of the religious sightseers! How are we to persuade these middle-class masses, so patient and so pathetic in their quest, that really they could get some pleasure from the pictures if only they did not know, and did not care to knoho painted them They cannot all be insensitive to form and colour; and if only they were not in a flutter to know, or not to forget, who painted the pictures, when they were painted, and what they represent, they ht find in them the key that unlocks a world in the existence of which they are, at present, unable to believe And the millions who stay at home, how are they to be persuaded that the thrill provoked by a loco?--ill they understand that the iron buildings put up by Mr Hu they will see at the summer exhibition of the Royal Acade classes that an ordinarily sensitive hu an Italian prirapher? Will they understand that, as a rule, the last to feel aesthetic emotion is the historian of art? Can we induce the multitude to seek in art, not edification, but exaltation? Can we make them unashamed of the emotion they feel for the fine lines of a warehouse or a railway bridge? If we can do this we shall have freed works of art froot to do We nificant without rese Gothic cathedrals or Greek temples, and that art is the creation, not the io with ialleries

It is argued with plausibility that a sensitive people would have no use for o in search of aesthetic e like the evening papers or the shop s that people enjoy as they go about their business But, if the state of allery in search of aesthetic emotion is necessarily unsatisfactory, so is the state of one who sits down to read poetry The lover of poetry shuts the door of his chamber and takes down a volu himself out of one world and into another The poetry of Milton is not a part of daily life, though for soreatest art consists not in its power of beco us out of it I think it was Willia that ato his fellows as he worked at the loom Too much of what Morris wrote may well have been so invented But to create and to appreciate the greatest art the most absolute abstraction froes, one to temples and churches in search of an ecstasy incompatible with and remote from the preoccupations and activities of laborious huo to the temples of art to experience, a little out of this world, emotions that are of another It is not as sanctuaries from life--sanctuaries devoted to the cult of aesthetic emotion--but as class-rooms, laboratories, homes of research and warehouses of tradition, that alleries become noxious

Human sensibility ht of tradition; it must also be freed from the oppression of culture For, of all the eneerous, because the least obvious By ”culture” it is, of course, possible to ether bla but sharpening sensibility and strengthening the power of self-expression But culture of that sort is not for sale: to some it comes from solitary contemplation, to others from contact with life; in either case it co it Coht and sold in open market Cultivated society, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a congeries of persons who have been educated to appreciate _le beau et le bien_ A cultivated person is one on whom art has not impressed itself, but on whom it has been inificance of art, but who knows that the nicest people have a peculiar regard for it The characteristic of this Society is that, though it takes an interest in art, it does not take art seriously Art for it is not a necessity, but an aht es of _Bradshaw_, but soht and saluted at appropriate ti for art such as one feels for tobacco; rather it thinks of art as so to be taken in polite and pleasant doses, as one likes to take the society of one's less interesting acquaintances Patronage of the Arts is to the cultivated classes what religious practice is to the lower-st the better sort, that intellect pays to eenuinely sensitive to the treion; but both knohat they are expected to feel, and when they ought to feel it

Now if culture did nothing worse than create a class of well-educated ladies and gentlemen who read books, attend concerts, travel in Italy, and talk a good deal about art without ever guessing whatto make a fuss about

Unfortunately, culture is an active disease which causes positive ill and baulks potential good In the first place, cultivated people alish to cultivate others Cultivated parents cultivate their children; thousands of wretched little creatures are daily being taught to love the beautiful If they happen to have been born insensitive this is of no great consequence, but it is misery to think of those who have had real sensibilities ruined by conscientious parents: it is so hard to feel a genuine personal eht up to adrow up into acceptable ht to hold the right opinions--they nise the standards Standards of taste are the essence of culture That is why the cultured have ever been defenders of the antique There grows up in the art of the past a traditional classification under standard masterpieces by means of which even those who have no native sensibility can discriminate betorks of art

That is just what culture wants; so it insists on the veneration of standards and frowns on anything that cannot be justified by reference to theainst culture A person familiar with the masterpieces of Europe, but insensitive to that which makes them masterpieces, will be utterly non-plussed by a novel manifestation of the mysterious ”that” It is well that old masters should be respected; it were better that vital art should be welcome Vital art is a necessity, and vital art is stifled by culture, which insists that artists shall respect the standards, or, to put it bluntly, shall imitate old masters

The cultured, therefore, who expect in every picture at least some reference to a fahly unwholeso and liberal They are the very innocent but natural eneinal work is the touchstone that exposes educated tasteas sensibility Besides, it is reasonable that those who have been at such pains to sympathise with artists should expect artists to think and feel as they do Originality, however, thinks and feels for itself; coinal artist does not live the refined, intellectual life that would befit the fancy-man of the cultured classes He is not picturesque; perhaps he is positively inartistic; he is neither a gentlery and incredulous Here is one who spends his working hours creating soly, and devotes his leisure to simple animalities; surely one so utterly unlike ourselves cannot be an artist? So culture attacks and sometimes ruins him If he survives, culture has to adopt him He becomes part of the tradition, a standard, a stick hich to beat the next original genius who dares to shove an unsponsored nose above water

In the nineteenth century cultured people were areat poets They had to be accepted, and their caddishness had to be explained away The shocking interaph, and passed over--as though Burns were not as essentially a drunkard as a poet! The vulgarity of Keats's letters to fanny Brawne did not escape the nice censure of Matthew Arnold who could not be expected to see that asuch letters would not have written ”The Eve of St

Agnes” In our day culture having failed to suppress Mr Augustus John welco enthusiasm some ten years behind the times Here and there, a inality until it has lost the appearance of originality

The original genius is ill to live with until he is dead Culture will not live with him; it takes as lover the artificer of the _faux-bon_ It adores the h to imitate, not any particular work of art, but art itself It adores the ht to expect It wants, not art, but so so much like art that it can feel the sort of emotions it would be nice to feel for art To be frank, cultivated people are no fonder of art than the Philistines; but they like to get thrills, and they like to see old faces under new bonnets They admire Mr Lavery's seductive banalities and the literary and erudite novelettes of M Rostand They go silly over Reinhardt and Bakst These confectioners seehts and feelings of cultivated people Culture is far ent andon the side of the artist It has the charm of its acquired taste, and it can corrupt because it can speak with an authority unknown in Philistia

Because it pretends to care about art, artists are not indifferent to its judgers at vulgarity With culture itself, even in the low sense in which I have been using the word, we need not pick a quarrel, but we must try to free the artist and the public too from the influence of cultivated opinion

The liberation will not be complete until those who have already learned to despise the opinion of the lower lect the standards and the disapproval of people who are forced by their eant amenity

If you would have fine art and fine appreciation of art, you must have a fine free life for your artists and for yourselves That is another thing that Society can do for art: it can kill the middle-class ideal