Part 1

PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING: STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE. 1909

EDGAR ALLAN POE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1910

THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN. 1911

OSCAR WILDE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1912

PORTRAITS

AND

SPECULATIONS

BY

ARTHUR RANSOME

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1913

_Copyright_

TO

JOHN MASEFIELD

NOTE

Of the Essays in this book, “Art for Life’s Sake” appeared in _The English Review_; “The Poetry of Yone Noguchi,”[1] “Remy de Gourmont,” and “Aloysius Bertrand” in _The Fortnightly Review_; “Kinetic and Potential Speech,” in _The Oxford and Cambridge Review_. The papers on Daudet and Coppée were prefixed to collections of stories by these writers: I thank the publishers, Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack, for permission to reproduce them here.

CONTENTS

PAGE ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE 1

ALOYSIUS BERTRAND 35

ALPHONSE DAUDET 57

THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE 71

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 87

WALTER PATER 129

REMY DE GOURMONT 161

THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI 187

KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH 207

ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE

ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE

It is not yet fifty years since one or two men of genius, followed presently by a score of men of talent, noisier, shriller in voice than themselves, preached a theory of art new in this country, shocking to our prejudices at that time, and imported from some French artists and from a German philosopher. This was the doctrine of art for art’s sake. Baudelaire had written: “Poetry ... has no other end than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely for the pleasure of writing a poem.” Whistler, that butterfly of letters, who had borrowed his sting from the wasp, directed it with gay despair against the granite face of the British public. Rossetti and, with certain qualifications, Pater, illustrated the theory in their practice, as Whistler did also; and Wilde, a little later than they, remarked: “All art is quite useless,” and “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”

With this doctrine of art for art’s sake we are now dissatisfied. We object to it, not for the sake of “morality,” against which it was partly directed, nor yet for the sake of “nature,” but for the sake of art, whose function it limits rather than glorifies. We have seen the school of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the banner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the nineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner, with words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined the procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is over, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him. Yet the demonstration was successful; its promoters, who stitched the banner with gaiety, hope, and defiance, themselves painted and wrote fine things, and men are working to-day whose work would have been impossible if, in the course of its march, that small, daring procession had not walked seven times round a city of Jericho and blown silver trumpets under its walls.

Some battle-cries are no more than an irrelevant but inspiriting noise. Most of them, however, are related to something fought for, (St. George and Merry England!), something that, it is hoped, will superintend the fight (God with us!), or something that is fought against (A bas Marat!). The knight who shouted, “Two red roses across the moon” on a sultry day when--

“... the battle was scattered from hill to hill From the windmill to the watermill.”

may have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not incomprehensible to himself, and “Art for Art’s sake!” forty and fifty years ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the early Victorians who then survived, was something very different for the men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude towards art in general. We must first understand what they fought against before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their battle-cry.

They fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought, secondly, against “nature” ... against, that is to say, a crude conception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put that crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he who looked at a picture could find something in the external world, by its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would be a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of external things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and, on the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is an essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted into discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a solution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who read this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art’s relation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion, though, in justice to the artists for art’s sake, I must point out that their revolt was not against “morality” alone. When we hear Wilde’s gay proclamation that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more serious, that “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,” and that the artist “in all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at his service, and to him is nought refused.” We must not imagine that the revolt was merely playful.

Against “nature” and against “morality.” In an age when the painter of “Derby Day” assisted Ruskin by saying that he could not “see anything of the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of “Battersea Bridge,” they upheld the superiority of art to “nature.” In an age when Dickens was praised for his reforms of the workhouse and blamed for his love of low life, when novelists were judged by the deeds, no, by the manners of the persons of their fiction, when poets were judged by their private lives, they protested the irrelevance of all such things to the question at issue, which was the goodness or badness of the work of art to be judged. We must not blame their formula, but the ideas against which it was directed, for the bad manners, the morality that they hoped would be regarded as immorality, for the unpublishable private lives, that were the excesses after victory. We may, perhaps, smile as we observe how accurately they balance those other excesses against which they were a reaction.

The question, no longer how to conquer, became how to use the victory, and we had the common spectacle of veterans and retired camp-followers trying to live up to the battle-cry of their youth, and, unable to free themselves from the habit of their excesses, committing these excesses with less and less gusto and more and more skill. But skill, even so acquired, is not valueless. The battle-cry, after opening a primrose path to charlatans, after turning “morality” into “immorality” as a spectre ruling over art, remained the stimulus to an improved technique, a scrupulousness, an economy of effect, a delicacy in the handling of material, a care for melody and counterpoint, an intolerance of careless workmanship, for which for a long time it will be our privilege to be grateful.

Art, however, cannot live by perfection of technique alone, nor yet by the repetition of remembered excesses. A new generation of artists, working in a new environment, inspired by new aims, and threatened by new dangers, requires a new formula, or a restatement of the old. These artists of our own generation look at the faded banner with the remains of reverence, or, in their dislike of the mistakes it made possible, with a suspicion of contempt. In the turbulence of valuations in this century, in the different, sharply defined attitudes of men on such questions as property, labour, capital, the position of women in the State, marriage, education, or the Church, they see a herd of conflicting moralities. Involved in one or other of these conflicts, perhaps in many of them, they cannot but believe, suspect, or hope that art also must speak for or against, as tribune or as patrician, as Churchman or as secularist, and, if the conflict be important to them, the excellence of an artist must seem to be determined, at least in part, by the views that he expresses. How then can art “have nothing to do with morality”? They are, however, sufficiently critical to see that it is possible that a work of art may be good for a democrat, bad for an aristocrat, and yet, somehow, good in itself. Was there something in “Art for Art’s sake” after all?

Of the men whose names I mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay one had founded his views on those of a philosopher, and so, whatever may be his rank among those dogmatists, we are able to examine the background of reasoning on which he saw his own dogmatic statements. It is in that reasoning, and not in the cheerful taunts of the battlefield that we are likely to learn how it was that the formula of “Art for Art’s sake” seemed to be justified, and how it is that the formula is fundamentally inadequate. Baudelaire’s proclamation, Pater’s practice, Whistler’s blue-feathered, silver-tipped darts point us to no analysis. The analysis that made Wilde’s paradoxes possible is open to our view in the pages of Kant.

Now Kant said that what was called beautiful was the object of a delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate reference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our judgment. Upon our judgment of what? The beautiful. How many crimes has that word committed, how many discussions it has obscured, how many it has closed at the very moment of their fertility. Not the least of its knaveries has been this substitution of a condition of art for the function of art, which, as I hope to show, is life itself. A work of art suggests the achievement of the beautiful. That may be its immediate object. It is not its ultimate object. It may be an essential condition. It is not a function. Art for art’s sake means the substitution of condition for function, and, as the beautiful can never be a function of anything, the implicit denial that art has a function at all. “All art is quite useless.”

But that is not what we believe. And the reason why the theorists of art for art’s sake were both right and wrong was that they did not want art for the sake of anything irrelevant to the artistic phenomenon, but were a little ungenerous in their interpretation of that phenomenon. They saw that moralities, private lives, reforms, interests, had nothing to do with the attempted achievement of the condition of the beautiful, but, having seen that, forgot, in their hurry for battle, that the work of art persists beyond this achievement or attempted achievement; forgot that, will he nill he, the artist’s work cannot but bear the impress of his personality, and forgot that through that fact all the things they wished to rule out of the discussion had their rightful place in it.

The question is, what is their rightful place? And to answer it we must first satisfy ourselves as to the nature of the artistic phenomenon.

A work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom, for purposes of reference, I shall call the speaker and the listener. But, before it is a collaboration, a re-creation, in which form we commonly know it, it is an independent act performed by the speaker alone. He, as first creator, isolates some from the flux of impressions in which he lives. It is as if he were to arrest that flux, and momentarily to stop its flow. He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses, and, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in the dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his existence. This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world, the universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory, clearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to have a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which itself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. The resulting clarity is as if he had suddenly stopped the cross-currents of a stream, and the stream, losing the opaqueness of its tangled motion, had become crystal. He isolates that moment by surrounding it with his own consciousness, while other moments fly past taking with them shreds of that tattered veil, no more.... There is a choice of moments, and because the choice is not reasonable, but determined by the moment itself, the speaker feels himself inspired. That which attracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and hold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad others with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is a moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture, words, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such. Two bars are heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a jumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost of an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... These things are pledges. He seizes them and, warily, lest he lose them, listens for the rest of the melody, watchfully draws out of the flood the figure whose gesture had seemed to be the moment itself, pieces the brittle words together, and shapes the picture in his brain. He allows the moment to redeem the pledge it has given, his care being not to impede it by forestalling its further appearance with something contradictory to the original fragment, something that the character of that fragment has not determined. He seeks only to be true to the original promise, and the good artist is known by the fact that it is impossible to tell with what he began, the bad artist by the fragment he has surrounded with baser metal that does not ring with its note, or the phantom whose vitality he has blurred by clothing it with flesh uninformed by its peculiar vitality.

The process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is a process of finding out. He is engaged in _knowing_ the uttermost implications of the fragment of impression caught by him from the flux of unconscious or semi-conscious life. He is making the whole of that impression his own by his profound, his complete consciousness of it. That is why the artist can never understand those people, not artists, who ask him how he can prefer art to life; imitation to the real thing. He cannot believe that such people mean what they say. In his humility he assumes that they too have the modesty to admit to themselves that their life is unconscious, or semi-conscious, and he believes that this process of _knowing_, of becoming conscious, is the intensest form of living that there is.

Then, when the work of art is as we know it, we, the listener, collaborate with that other artist, the speaker, and from what he has said, in stone, music, paint or words, try to reconstruct the fragment of life that he has made his own and to share his consciousness of it. Accurately speaking, this is impossible. We become conscious of a moment of life different from his. We cannot give his words the precise atmosphere they had for him, we cannot see with exactly his eyes, or hear with his ears, we are without his private and individual memory. We can but be inaccurate translators. We can, however, perceive, uncertainly, that he has been successful himself in allowing a moment of life to redeem the pledge it had given him, that his work does not contradict itself, and so is true to the original inspiration bedded in it or clothed by it. And this perception suggests to us that, if it were possible, we should find, certainly, what we already believe, that his share in the collaboration is perfect. We then say that a work of art is beautiful; the wistfulness with which we sometimes say it, the tears that sometimes dim our eyes as we close a book or turn from a picture that we believe to be beautiful, and the sadness that has often been associated with the name of beauty, are due to the half-conscious knowledge that our share in the collaboration is imperfect, since we can never stand exactly where he stood.

Our judgment of the beautiful then depends on our belief that, were certain unalterable facts altered in the constitution of the universe and of ourselves, we should be sharing a perfect expression, an expression, that is to say, in perfect unity with itself. Art then for art’s sake, perfection of expression first. But what is this expression in perfect unity with itself, but a moment of conscious living, isolated from all else, lifted from the unconscious flux and given us--to live?

Let us rewrite the half-obliterated formula. Let us write it now: Art for Life’s sake, and raise a party cry from its momentary usefulness into a proud suggestion of the noble function of art. This function is not merely to teach us how to act, as was supposed by the old critics, who recommended Homer for the heroism of his heroes, though, as we shall see, they were not wholly wrong, nor yet merely to teach us how to order our lives, though it may do that by suggestion. Art is itself life. Its function is to increase our consciousness of life, to make us more than wise or sensitive, to transform us from beings overwhelmed by the powerful stream of unconscious living to beings dominating that stream, to change us from objects acted upon by life to joyful collaborators in that reaction. By its means we become conscious gainers by life’s procreative activity. No longer hiding our faces from that muddied storm that sweeps irresistibly from the future to the past, a medley of confused figures, a babel of cries of joy, of laughter, of sorrow, of pain, by its means we lift our heads, and, learning from the isolation of moments in eternity, to imagine the isolation of all such moments, we conquer that storm, and accept pain, joy, laughter or sorrow, with equal gratitude, in our continually realised desire to feel ourselves alive.

Let us examine from this point of view the fundamental quarrel between the theorists of “Art for Art’s sake” and the moralists. What are their respective beliefs?

_The Moralist._--The noblest end of being is to be good. All human activities must serve this end or be pernicious. Art, the most eloquent, the most powerful of pleaders, cannot, without violating the trust that humanity puts in her, turn devil’s advocate. Let the artist be as skilful an artist as he can, but let him make a right use of his excellence. In peace we ask no more of a good shot than that he hit the bull’s eye of a target. But we live in times of war between the hosts of good and of evil. The fight is to the death, and we admire the good shot if he fire from among the ranks of angels, and fear him if we see that his skill is at the service of our opponents, who in age-long battle have shown themselves merciless and strong.

_The Artist for Art’s sake._--Morality in art is an accident of no importance. We hear the battle of which you speak, but do not take part in it, though we listen sometimes to the music of its trumpets far away, and see the red glow it throws up to the sky. But morality concerns our circumstances or possible circumstances, and so has nothing to do with the beautiful, which is art’s sole concern. A work of art that declares its sympathy with one or other party to your battle is one whose creator has looked aside to ends other than beauty. It is therefore a failure as a work of art. Art must not be limited to edifying subjects. There is nothing that may not become beautiful in the hands of an artist. Church and lupanar, angel and courtesan, are of equal value in his eyes. They are material, no more, and he will not tolerate that morality should hamper him by dictating the choice or use of his material. A work of art is independent of morality.

_To these two we reply, believing that art is for life’s sake._--When a man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality, ask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled to admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he attributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in each individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and his environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the code of values that is his will be one of the determining influences on an artist’s vision of life. If, perchance, he is so uncritical as to believe that he has nothing to do with morality, that belief will itself share in giving his work a moral value. There is no escape from morality in art. If, therefore, we choose to consider ourselves as one of a band of people whose moralities are more or less similar, and to regard their average morality, their average code of values as important, we shall be perfectly justified in judging art by what we suppose to be its effect on that average morality. But we must not forget that we are then regarding artists as a regiment from which we are engaged in picking out the traitors and the loyalists--and that it is a regiment whose immediate business is not war, a regiment which does not know that it is enlisted.

Let us now consider the nature of the moral influence which the speaker exerts upon the listener. It will not be surprising if we find that it has a direct bearing upon the point under discussion.

The artist whose act of conscious living is the work of art cannot alter his personality without disloyalty to the moment of life that under his hands is simultaneously becoming conscious and becoming expression. His personality, and with it his morality, is already involved; any dishonesty blurs his vision, and the crystal whose increasing clarity was his delight becomes for ever opaque. Here and nowhere else must we find the origin of the artist’s distrust of morality. He means by it not “morality,” but any morality other than his own at the time of artistic creation or _knowing_. A work of art is always the expression of _a_ morality, the morality of its creator at the moment when he began its creation, a morality that has ceased to exist, since its creator has been changed to a greater or less degree by the very fact of its creation. Returning to our metaphor of speaker and listener, we may say that the listener, who tries as nearly as possible to share the moment of conscious life that was the speaker’s, to stand where he stood, and think what he thought, does, in contemplation of the work of art, share to some extent in the morality, that momentary morality we have described, of another man.