Essays on Art Part 2

goblets, "taking no note the while of the craftsman's pride, and understanding not his glory in his work; drinking at the cup not from choice, not from a consciousness that it was beautiful, but because, forsooth, there was none other!" Luxury grew, and the great ages of art came. "Greece was in its splendour, and art reigned supreme--by force of fact, not by election. And the people questioned not, and had nothing to say in the matter." In fact art flourished because mankind did not notice it. But "there arose a new cla.s.s, who discovered the cheap, and foresaw fortune in the manufacture of the sham." Then, according to Whistler, a strange thing happened. "The heroes filled from the jugs and drank from the bowls--with understanding.... And the people--this time--had much to say in the matter, and all were satisfied. And Birmingham and Manchester arose in their might, and art was relegated to the curiosity shop."

Whistler does not explain why, if no one was aware of the existence of art except the artist, those who were not artists began to imitate it.

If no one prized art, why should sham art have come into existence?

According to him it was the sham that made men aware of the true; yet the sham could not exist until men were aware of the true. But the account he gives of the decadence of art is historically untrue as well as unintelligible. We know little of the primitive artist; but we have no proof that he was utterly different from other men, or that they did not enjoy his activities. If they had not enjoyed them they would probably have killed him. The primitive artist survived, no doubt, because he was an artist in his leisure; and all we know of more primitive art goes to prove that it was, and is, practised not by a special cla.s.s but by the ordinary primitive man in his leisure. Peasant art is produced by peasants, not by lonely artists. Some, of course, have more gift for it than others, but all enjoy it, though they do not call it art. Whistler saw himself in every primitive artist; and seeing himself as a dreamer apart misunderstood by the common herd, he saw the primitive artist as one living in a primitive White House, and producing primitive nocturnes for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, unnoticed, happily, by primitive critics.

But his view, though refuted both by history and by common sense, is still held by many artists and amateurs. They themselves make much of art, but do not see that their theory makes little of it, makes it a mere caprice of the human mind, like the collecting of postage stamps.

If art has any value or importance for mankind, it is because it is a social activity. If no one but an artist can enjoy art, it seems to follow that no art can be completely enjoyed except by him who has produced it; for in relation to that art he alone is an artist. All other artists, even, are the public; and, according to Whistler, the public has nothing to do with art; it flourishes best when they are not aware of its existence. He is very contemptuous of taste. All judgment of art must be based on expert knowledge, for art, he says, "is based upon laws as rigid and defined as those of the known sciences." Yet whereas "no polished member of society is at all affected by admitting himself neither engineer, mathematician, nor astronomer, and therefore remains willingly discreet and taciturn upon these subjects, still he would be highly offended were he supposed to have no voice in what clearly to him is a matter of taste." So to Whistler art has no more to do with the life of the ordinary man than astronomy or mathematics. His mention of engineering is an unfortunate slip, for, although we are not engineers we all knew, when the Tay Bridge broke down and threw hundreds of pa.s.sengers into the water, that it was not a good bridge. We are all concerned with engineering in spite of our ignorance of it, because we make use of its works. Whistler a.s.sumes that we make no use of works of art except as objects of use; and since pictures, poems, music are not objects of use, we can have no concern with them whatever--which is absurd.

But here comes Tolstoy, who tells us that all works of art are merely objects of use and are to be judged therefore by the extent of their use. A work of art that few can enjoy fails as much as a railway that few can travel by. "Art," Tolstoy says, "is a human activity, consisting in this--that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them." So it is the essence of a work of art that it shall infect others with the feelings of the artist. Now certainly a work of art is a work of art to us only if it does so infect us, but Tolstoy is not content with that. The individual is not to judge the work of art by its infection of himself.

He is to consider also the extent of its infection. "For a work to be esteemed good and to be approved of and diffused it will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people living in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it will have to satisfy the demands of all those great ma.s.ses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life."

The two views are utterly irreconcilable. According to Whistler the public are not to judge art at all because they have no concern with it, and it flourishes most when they do not pretend to have any concern with it. According to Tolstoy the individual is to judge it, not by the effect it produces on him, but by the effect it produces on others, "on all those great ma.s.ses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life."

Now, if we find ourselves intimidated by one or other of these views, if we seem forced to accept one of them against our will, it is a relief and liberation from the tyranny of Whistler's or Tolstoy's logic to ask ourselves simply what does actually happen to us in our own experience and enjoyment of a work of art. The fact that we are able to enjoy and experience a work of art does liberate us at once from the tyranny of Whistler; for clearly, if we can experience and enjoy a work of art, we are concerned with it. It is vain for Whistler to tell us that we ought not to be, or that we do injury to art by our concern. The fact of our enjoyment and experience makes art for us a social activity; we know that our enjoyment of it is good; we know also that the artist likes us to enjoy it; and we do not believe that either the primitive artist or the primitive man was different from us in this respect. There is now, and always has been, some kind of social relation between the artist and the public; the only question is how far that relation is the essence of art.

Tolstoy tells us that it is the essence of art, because the proper aim of art is to do good. This is implied in his doctrine that art can be good only if it is intelligible to most men. "The a.s.sertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people, is extremely unjust; and its consequences are ruinous to art itself." The word unjust implies the moral factor. I am not to enjoy a work of art if I know that others cannot enjoy it, because it is not fair that I should have a pleasure not shared by them. If I know that others cannot share it, I am to take no account of my own experience, but to condemn the work, however good it may seem to me. From this logic also I can liberate myself by concerning myself simply with my own experience. Again, if I experience and enjoy a work of art, I know that my experience of it is good; and, in my judgment of the work of art, I do not need to ask myself how many others enjoy it. I may wish them to enjoy it and try to make them do so, but that effort of mine is not aesthetic but moral. It does not affect my judgment of the work of art, but is a result of that judgment. And, as a matter of fact, if I am to experience a work of art at all, I cannot be asking myself how many others enjoy it. Judgments of art are not formed in that way and cannot be; they are, and must be, always formed out of our own experience of art. If art is to be art to us, we cannot think of it in terms of something else. There would be no public for art at all if we all agreed to judge it in terms of each other's enjoyment or understanding. Each individual of "the great ma.s.ses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life" would also have to ask himself whether the rest of the ma.s.ses were enjoying and understanding, before he could judge; indeed, he would not feel a right to enjoy until he knew that the rest were enjoying. That is to say, no individual would ever enjoy art at all. The fact is that art is produced by the individual artist and experienced by the individual man. Tolstoy says that it is experienced by mankind in the ma.s.s, and not as individuals; Whistler that it is not experienced at all, either by the ma.s.s or by the individual. Each is a heretic with some truth in his heresy; what is the true doctrine?

It is clear that every artist desires an audience, not merely so that he may win pudding and praise from them, nor so that he may do them good; none of these aims will make him an artist; he can accomplish all of them without attempting to produce a work of art. It is also clear that his artistic success is not his success in winning an audience. Those "great ma.s.ses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life" are a figment of Tolstoy's mind. No conditions are natural in the sense in which he uses the word; nor do any existing conditions make one man a better judge of art than another. There is no mult.i.tude of simple, normal, unspoilt men able and willing to enjoy any real art that is presented to them. The right experience of art comes with effort, like right thought and right action; and no Russian peasant has it because he works in the fields. Nor, on the other hand, are there any artists who are mere "sports" occupied with a queer game of their own self-expression which no one else can enjoy. There is a necessary relation between the work of art and its audience, even if no actual audience for it exists; and the fact that this relation must be, even when there is no audience in existence, is the paradox and problem of art. A work of art claims an audience, entreats it, is indeed made for it; but must have it on its own terms. Men are artists because they are men, because they have a faculty, at its height, which is shared by all men. In that Croce is right; and his doctrine that all men are artists in some degree, and that the very experience of art is itself an aesthetic activity, contains a truth of great value. But his aesthetic ignores, or seems to ignore, the fact that art is not merely, as he calls it, expression, but is also a means of address; in fact, that we do not express ourselves except when we address ourselves to others, even though we speak to no particular, or even existing, audience. Yet this fact is obvious; for all art gets its very form from the fact that it is a method of address. A story is a story because it is told, and told to some one not the teller. A picture is a picture because it is painted to be seen. It has all its artistic qualities because it is addressed to the eye. And music is music, and has the form which makes it music, because it is addressed to the ear. Without this intention of address there could be no form in art and no distinction between art and day-dreaming. Day-dreaming is not expression, is not art, because it is addressed to no one but is a purposeless activity of the mind. It becomes art only when there is the purpose of address in it. That purpose will give it form and turn it from day-dreaming into art. Even in an object of use which is also a work of art, the art is the effort of the maker to emphasize, that is, to point out, the beauty of that which he has made. It is this emphasis that turns building into architecture; and it implies that the building is made not merely for the builder's or for anyone else's use, but that its aim also is to address an audience, to speak to the eye as a picture speaks to it. Art is made for men as surely as boots are made for them.

But not as Tolstoy thinks, for any particular cla.s.s of men or even for the whole ma.s.s of existing mankind. The artist will not and cannot judge his work by its effects on any actual men, any more than we can or will judge it by its effects on anyone except ourselves. As we, in our experience of it, must be completely individual; so must he in his production of it. He is not a public servant, but a man speaking for himself, and with no thought of effects, to anyone who will hear. His audience consists only of those who will hear, of those individuals who can understand his individual expression which is also communication. In his art he seeks the individual who will hear. He has something to say; but he can say it only to others, not to himself; it is what it is because he says it to others. Yet he says it also for its own sake and not for theirs. The particular likes and dislikes, stupidities, limitations, demands, of individual men or cla.s.ses are nothing to him.

The condition of his art is this alone, that he does address it to an audience. So the relation between the artist and his audience is the most important fact of his art, even if he has no actual audience. It is his att.i.tude towards the audience that makes him do his best or his worst, makes him a good artist or a bad one, that sets him free to express all he has to say or hampers him with inhibitions. His business is not to find an audience, but to find the right att.i.tude towards one, the att.i.tude which is that of the artist and not of the tradesman, or peac.o.c.k, or philanthropist. And it is plain that in his effort to find this right att.i.tude he may be helped or hindered much by his actual fellow-men. The artist is also a man and subject to all the temptations of men. Whistler, when he said that art happens, ignored this fact, ignored the whole social relation of mankind and the whole history of the arts; while Tolstoy ignored no less the mind of the artist, and the minds of all those who do actually experience art. To Whistler the artist is a _Chimaera bombinans in vacuo_; to Tolstoy he is a philanthropist. For Whistler the public has no function whatever in relation to art; for Tolstoy the artist himself has no function whatever except a moral one. In fact he denies the existence of the artist, as Whistler denies the existence of the public. Whistler's truth is that the public must not tell the artist what he is to do; Tolstoy's, that a public with a right relation to the artist will help the artist to have a right relation to the public.

Artists are not "sports," but men; and men engaged in one of the most difficult of human activities. They are subject to aesthetic temptation and sin, as all men are subject to temptation and sin of all kinds.

Their public may tempt them to think more of themselves than of what they have to express, either by perverse admiration or by ignorant contempt. An actual audience may be an obstruction between them and the ideal audience to which every artist should address himself. Every artist must desire that his ideal audience should exist, and may mistake an actual audience for it. In the ideal relation between an artist and his audience, it is the universal in him that speaks to the universal in them, and yet this universal finds an intensely personal expression.

Art, which is personal expression, tells, not of what the artist wants, but of what he values. But if his ego is provoked by the ego in a particular audience, then he begins to tell of what he wants or of what they want. The audience may demand of him that he shall please them by indulging their particular vanities, appet.i.tes, sentimental desires, that he shall present life to them as they wish it to be; and if he yields to that demand it is because of the demands of his own particular ego. There is a transaction between him and that audience, in its essence commercial. His art is the particular supplying some kind of goods to the particular, not the universal pouring itself out to the universal.

The function of the audience is not to demand but to receive. It should not allow its own expectations to hinder its receptiveness; to that extent Whistler is right. Art happens as the beauty of the universe happens; and it is the business of the audience to experience it, not to dictate how it shall happen. It has been said: It is not we who judge works of art; they judge us. The artist speaks and we listen; but still he speaks to us and by listening wisely we help him to speak his best, for man is a social being; and all life, in so far as it is what it wishes to be, is a fellowship. Never is it so completely a fellowship as in the relation between an artist and his audience. There Tolstoy is right, but the fellowship has to be achieved by both the artist and the audience. There is no body of simple peasants, any more than there are rich or cultured people, to whom he must address himself or whose demands he must satisfy. Art that tries to satisfy any particular demand is of use neither to the flesh nor to the spirit. It is neither meat nor music. But where all is well with it, the spirit in the artist speaks to the spirit in his audience. There is a common quality in both, with which he speaks and they listen; and where this common quality is found art thrives.

Wilfulness and Wisdom

There are people to whom the war was merely the running amuck of a criminal lunatic; and they get what pleasure they can from calling that lunatic all the names they can think of. To them the Germans are different in kind from all other peoples, utterly separated from the rest of us by their crimes. We could learn nothing from them except how to crush them; and, having done so, we shall need to learn nothing except how to keep them down. But such minds never learn anything from experience, because they believe that there is nothing to be learnt.

They consume all their mental energy in anger and the expression of it; and in doing so they grow more and more like those with whom they are angry. Wisdom always goes contrary to what our pa.s.sions tell us, especially when they take the form of righteous indignation. The creative power of the mind begins with refusal of all those tempting fierce delights which the pa.s.sions offer to it. Wisdom must be cold before it can become warm; it must suppress the comforting heat of the flesh before it can kindle with the pure fire of the spirit. Above all, when we say that we are not as other men, as the Germans, for instance, it must insist that we are, and that we shall avoid the German crime only by recognizing our likeness to those who have committed it.

The Germans have committed the great crime; but they have been born and nurtured in an atmosphere which made that crime possible; and we live in the same atmosphere. Their error, though they carried it to an extreme in theory and in practice with the native extravagance of their race, is the error of the whole Western world; and we shall not understand what it is unless we are aware of it in ourselves as well as in them. For it is a world-error and one against which men have been warned for ages; but in their pride they will not listen to the warning. Many of the old warnings, in the Gospels and elsewhere, sound like plat.i.tudes to us; we expect the clergyman to repeat them in church; but we should never think of applying them to this great, successful, progressive Western world of ours. If we are not happy; if we do not even see the way to happiness; if all our power merely helps us to destroy each other, or to make the rich more vulgarly rich and the poor more squalidly poor; if the great energy of Germany has hurried her to her own ruin; still we do not ask whether we may not have made some fundamental mistake about our own nature and the nature of the universe, and whether Germany has not merely made it more systematically and more philosophically than the rest of us.

But the German, because he is systematic and philosophical, may reveal to us what that error is in us as well as in himself. We do not state it as if it were a splendid truth; we merely act upon it. He stated it for us with such histrionic and towering absurdity that we can laugh at his statement of it; but we must not laugh at him without learning to laugh at ourselves. All this talk about the iron will, about set teeth and ruthlessness, what does it mean except that the German chose to glorify openly and to carry to a logical extreme the peculiar error of the whole Western world--the belief that the highest function of man is to work his will upon people and things outside him, that he can change the world without changing himself?

The Christian doctrine, preached so long in vain and now almost forgotten, is the opposite of this. It insists that man is by nature a pa.s.sive, an experiencing creature, and that he can do nothing well in action unless he has first learned a right pa.s.sivity. Only by that pa.s.sivity can he enrich himself; and when he has enriched himself he will act rightly. Man has a will; but he must apply it at the right point, or it will seem to him merely a blind impulse. He must apply it to the manner in which he experiences things; he must free himself from his "will to live" or his "will to power," and see all men and things not as they are of material use to him, but with the object of loving whatever there is of beauty or virtue in them. His will, in fact, must be the will to love, which is the will to experience in a certain way; and out of that will to love right action will naturally ensue. Is this a plat.i.tude? If it is, it is flatly contradicted by the German doctrine of wilfulness. For the Germanic hero exercises his will always upon other men and things, not upon himself; and we all admire this Germanic hero, when he is not an obvious danger to us all, and when he is not made ridiculous by the German presentment of him. We all believe that the will is to be exercised first of all in action, that it is the function of the great man to change the world, not to change himself.

To us the great man is one who does work a change upon the world, no matter what that change may be. He may change it only as an explosion changes things, and at the end he may be left among the ruins he has made; but still we admire him. We compare him to the forces of nature, we say that there is "something elemental" in him, even though he has been merely an elemental nuisance. We value force in itself, and do not ask what it can find to value in itself when it has exhausted itself upon the world. But out of this worship of wilfulness there comes, sooner or later, a profound scepticism and discouragement. For while these wilful heroes do produce some violent effect, it is not the effect they aimed at. Something happens; something has happened to Germany as the result of Bismarck's wilfulness; but it is not what he willed. The wilful hero is a cause in that he acts; but the effect is not what he designed, and so he seems to himself, and to the world, only a link in an unending chain of cause and effect; and as for his sense of will, it is nothing but the illusion that he is all cause and not at all effect.

_Quem Deus vult perdere dementat prius._ That old tag puts a truth wrongly. G.o.d does not interfere to afflict the wilful man with madness, but he has never thrown himself open to the wisdom of G.o.d. His mind is like a machine that acts with increasing speed and fury because there is less and less material for it to act upon. One act leads to another in a blind chain of cause and effect; he does this merely because he has done that, and seems to be driven by fate on and on to his own ruin. So it was with Napoleon in his later years. He had lost the sense of any reality whatever except his own action; he saw the world as a pa.s.sive object to be acted upon by himself. And that is how the Germans saw it two years ago. They could not understand that it was possible for the world to react against them. It was merely something that they were going to remake, to work their will upon. The war, at its beginning, was not to them a conflict between human beings; it was a process by which they would make of things what they willed. There was no reality except in themselves and their own will; for, in their worship of action, they had lost the sense of external reality, they had come to believe that there was nothing to learn from it except what a craftsman learns from his material by working in it. It is by making that he learns; and they thought that there was no learning except by making.

But that is the mistake of the whole Western world, though we have none of us carried it so far as Germany. Other men are to us still men, they still have some reality to us; but we see external reality as a material for us to work in; we are to ourselves entirely active and not at all pa.s.sive beings. Even among all the evil and sorrow of the war we still took a pride in the enormous power of our instruments of destruction, as if we were children playing with big, dangerous toys. But these toys are themselves the product of a society that must always be making and never thinking or feeling. They express the will for action that has ousted the will to experience; and all the changes which we work on the face of the earth express that will too. We could not live in the cities we have made for ourselves if we thought that we had anything to learn from the beauty of the earth. They are for us merely places in which we learn to act, in which no one could learn to think or feel. Pa.s.sive experience is impossible in them and they do not consider the possibility of it. So they express in every building, in every object, in the very clothes of their inhabitants, an utter poverty of pa.s.sive experience. In what we make we give out no stored riches of the mind; we make only so that we may act, never so that we may express ourselves; and we have little art because our making is entirely wilful. Our attempts at art are themselves entirely wilful. We will have art, we say; and so we plaster our utilities with the ornaments of the past, as if we could get the richness of experience secondhand from our ancestors. And in the same way we are always finding for our blind activities moral motives, those motives which are real only when they spring out of right experience. We rationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornament to blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our actions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us an incessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it is entirely wilful. The thinker makes theories to justify what is done; he, too, sees all life in terms of action, he is the parasite of action. For a German professor the whole process of history was but a prelude to the wilfulness of Germany; he could not experience the past except in terms of what Germany willed to do; and the aim of his theorizing was to remove all scrupulous impediments to the action of Germany which she may have inherited from the past. Think so that you may be stronger to do what you wish to do; that is the modern notion of thought, and that is the reason why we throw up theories so easily; for thinking of this kind needs no experience, it needs merely an activity of the mind, the activity which collects facts and does with them what it will. And these theories are eagerly accepted so long as the impulse lasts which they justify. When that is spent they are forgotten, and new theories take their place to justify fresh impulses. And so it is with the incessant new movements in art. Art now is conceived entirely as action. The artist is as wilful as the Germanic hero; the will to make excludes in him the will to experience. The painter cannot look at the visible world without considering at once what kind of picture he will make of it. It is to him mere pa.s.sive material for his artistic will, not an independent reality to enrich his mind so that it will give out its riches in the form of art. And as he is always willing to make pictures so he must will the kind of pictures he will make, as the Germans willed the kind of world they would make. But this willing of his is a kind of theorizing to justify his own action; and it changes incessantly because he never can be satisfied with his own poverty of experience. But still he will do anything rather than try to enrich that poverty.

And that is the secret of all our restlessness, the restlessness that forced the Germans into the folly and crime of war. We are always dissatisfied with our poverty of experience; and we try to get rid of our dissatisfaction in more blind activity, throwing up new theories all the while as reasons why we should act. We fidget about the earth as if we were children, that could not read, left in a library; and, like them, we do mischief. And that is just what we are: children that have not learnt to read let loose upon the library of the universe; and all that we can do is to pull the books about and play games with them and scribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth is defaced with our meaningless scribbling, and we tell ourselves that it means something because we want to scribble. Or sometimes we tell ourselves that there is no meaning in anything, no more in the books than in our scribble.

The only remedy is that we should learn to read; and for this we need above all things humility; not merely the personal humility of a man who knows that other men excel him, but a generic humility which acknowledges in the universe a greater wisdom, power, righteousness than his own. That is formally acknowledged by our religion, but it is not practically acknowledged in our way of life, in our conduct or our thought. We think and feel and behave as if we were the best and wisest creatures in the universe, as if it existed only for us to make use of it; and in so far as we learn from it at all, we learn only to make use of it. That is our idea of knowledge and wisdom; more and more it is our idea of science; and as for philosophy, we pay no heed to it because, in its nature, it is not concerned with making use of things. In every way we betray the fact that we cannot listen humbly, because we do not believe there is anything to listen to. For a few of the devout G.o.d spoke long ago, but He is not speaking now. "The kings of modern thought are dumb," said Matthew Arnold; but that is because everything outside the mind of man is dumb; all must be dumb to those who will not listen.

If we a.s.sume that there, is no intelligence anywhere but in ourselves, we shall find none anywhere else. There will be no meaning for us in anything but our own actions; and they will become more and more meaningless to us as they become more and more wilful, until at last we shall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage, or prisoners on a universal treadmill. Years ago the war must have seemed a meaningless treadmill to the Germans, but they cannot escape from its consequences; they have done and they must suffer. But will they learn from their sufferings, shall we all learn, that doing is not everything? Are we humbled enough to listen to the wisdom of the ages, which tells us that we can be wise only if we listen for a wisdom that is not ours?

"The Magic Flute"

When _The Magic Flute_ was produced by the already dying Mozart it had little success. At the first performance, it is said, when the applause was faint, the leader of the orchestra stole up to Mozart, who was conducting, and kissed his hand; and Mozart stroked him on the head. We may guess that the leader knew what the music meant and that Mozart knew that he knew. Neither could put it into words and it is not put into words in the libretto. But the libretto need not be an obstruction to the meaning of the music if only the audience will not ask themselves what the libretto means. After Mozart's death the opera was successful, no doubt because the audience had given up asking what the libretto meant and had learnt something of the meaning of the music.

There are worse librettos--librettos which have some clear unmusical meaning of their own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate to the meaning of the music, if it has any. This libretto, apart from the music, is so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence, that one can easily pa.s.s through it to the music. The author, Schickaneder, was Mozart's friend, and he had wit enough to understand the mood of Mozart.

That mood does express itself in the plot and the incidents of the libretto, although in them it is empty of value or pa.s.sion.

Schickaneder, in fact, constructed a mere diagram to which Mozart gave life. The life is all in the music, but the diagram has its use, in that it supplies a shape, which we recognize, to the life of the music. The characters live in the music, but in the words they tell us something about themselves which enables us to understand their musical speech better. Papageno tells us that he is a bird-catcher and a child of nature. The words are labels, but through them we pa.s.s more quickly to an understanding of his song. Only we shall miss that understanding if we try to reach it through the words, if we look for the story of the opera in them. In the words the events of the opera have no connexion with each other. There is no reason why one should follow another. The logic of it is all in the music, for the music creates a world in which events happen naturally, in which one tune springs out of another, or conflicts with it, like the forces of nature or the thoughts and actions of man. This world is the universe as Mozart sees it; and the whole opera is an expression of his peculiar faith. It is therefore a religious work, though free from that meaningless and timid solemnity which we a.s.sociate with religion. Mozart, in this world, was like an angel who could not but laugh, though without any malice, at all the bitter earnestness of mankind. Even the wicked were only absurd to him; they were naughty children whom, if one had the spell, one could enchant into goodness. And in _The Magic Flute_ the spell works. It works in the flute itself and in Papageno's lyre when the wicked negro Monostatos threatens him and Tamino with his ugly attendants. Papageno has only to play a beautiful childish tune on his lyre and the attendants all march backwards to an absurd goose-step in time with it. They are played off the stage; and the music convinces one that they must yield to it. So, we feel if we had had the music, we could have made the Prussians march their goose-step back to Potsdam; so we could play all solemn perversity off the stage of life. If we had the music--but there is solemn perversity in us too; by reason of which we can hardly listen to the music, much less play it, hardly listen to it or understand it even when Mozart makes it for us. For he had the secret of it; he was a philosopher who spoke in music and so simply that the world missed his wisdom and thought that he was just a beggar playing tunes in the street. A generation ago he was commonly said to be too tuney, as you might say that a flower was too flowery. People would no more consider him than they would consider the lilies of the field. They preferred Wagner in all his glory.

Even now you can enjoy _The Magic Flute_ as a more than usually absurd musical comedy with easy, old-fashioned tunes. You can enjoy it anyway, if you are not solemn about it, as you can enjoy _Hamlet_ for a b.l.o.o.d.y melodrama. But, like _Hamlet_, it has depths and depths of meaning beyond our full comprehension. Papageno is a pantomime figure, but he is also one of the greatest figures in the drama of the world. He is everyman, like Hamlet, if only we had the wit to recognize ourselves in him. Or rather he is that element in us which we all like and despise in others, but which we will never for one moment confess to in ourselves--the coward, the boaster, the liar, but the child of nature.

He, because he knows himself for all of these, can find his home in Sarostro's paradise. He does not want Sarostro's high wisdom; what he does want is a Papagena, an Eve, a child of nature like himself; and she is given to him. He has the wit to recognize his mate, almost a bird like himself, and to them Mozart gives their bird-duet, so that, when they sing it, we feel that we might all sing it together. It is not above our capacity of understanding or delight. The angel has learnt our earthly tongue, but transformed it so that he makes a heaven of the earth, a heaven that is not too high or difficult for us, a wild-wood heaven, half-absurd, in which we can laugh as well as sing, and in which the angels will laugh at us and with us, laugh our silly sorrows into joy.

There is Mozart himself in Papageno, the faun domesticated and sweetened by centuries of Christian experience, yet still a faun and always ready to play a trick on human solemnity; and in this paradise which Mozart makes for us the faun has his place and a beauty not incongruous with it, like the imps and gargoyles of a Gothic church. At any moment the music will turn from sublimity into fun, and in a moment it can turn back to sublimity; and always the change seems natural. It is like a great cathedral with High Ma.s.s and children playing hide-and-seek behind the pillars; and the Ma.s.s would not be itself without the children. That is the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just because in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with the twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seems to be not religion, but merely beauty, as real saints seem to be not good, but merely charming. And there are people to whom his beauty does not seem to be art, because it is just beauty; they think that he had the trick of it and could turn it on as he chose; they prefer the creaking of effort and egotism. His gifts are so purely gifts and so lavish that they seem to be cheap; and _The Magic Flute_ is an absurdity which he wrote in a hurry to please the crowd.

We can hardly expect to see a satisfying performance of it on the stage of to-day, but we must be grateful for any performance, for the life of the music is in it. One can see from it what _The Magic Flute_ might be.

The music is so sung, so played that it does transfigure the peculiar theatrical hideousness of our time. Tamino and Panina may look like figures out of an Academy picture, as heroes and heroines of opera always do. They may wear clothes that belong to no world of reality or art, clothes that suggest the posed and dressed-up model. But the music mitigates even these, and it helps every one to act, or rather to forget what they have learnt about acting. It evidently brings happiness and concord to those who sing it, so that they seem to be taking part in a religious act rather than in an act of the theatre. One feels this most in the concerted music, when the same wind from paradise seems to be blowing through all the singers and they move to it like flowers, in spite of their absurd clothes.

But what is needed for a satisfying performance is a world congruous to the eye as well as to the ear; and for this we need a break with all our theatrical conventions. Sarostro, for instance, lives among Egyptian scenery--very likely the architecture of his temple was Egyptian at the first performance--but, for all that, this Egyptian world does not suit the music, and to us it suggests the miracles of the Egyptian Hall. But there is one world which would perfectly suit the music, a world in which it could pa.s.s naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in which all the figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is the Chinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there is something fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a mixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye what Mozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be a saint; only in that world, which ranges from the willow-pattern plate to the Rishi in his mystical ecstasy in the wilderness, could the soul of Mozart, with its laughter and its wisdom, be at home. That too is the world in which flowers and all animals are of equal import with mankind; it is the world of dragons in which the serpent of the first act would not seem to be made of pasteboard, and in which all the magic would not seem to be mere conjuring. In that world one might have beautiful landscapes and beautiful figures to suit them. There Sarostro would not be a stage magician, but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to him would be only the change from Ming to Sung, which would seem no change at all. Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic flute, the world where silver bells hang on every flowering tree and the thickets are full of enchanted nightingales. It is the world of imps and monsters, and yet of impa.s.sioned contemplation, where the sage sits in a moonlit pavilion and smiles like a lover, and where the lovers smile like sages; where everything is to the eye what the music of Mozart is to the ear.

In the Chinese world we could be rid of all the drawling erotics of the modern theatre, we could give up the orchid for the lotus and the heavy egotism of Europe for the self-forgetful gaiety of the East. It may be only an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality, but it is one which the art of China makes real to us and with which we are familiar in that art; and there is a smiling wisdom in it, there is a gaiety which comes from conquest rather than refusal of reality, just like the gaiety and wisdom of Mozart's music. He knew sorrow well, but would not luxuriate in it; he took the beauty of the universe more seriously than himself. To him wickedness was a matter of imps and monsters rather than of villains, and of imps and monsters that could be exorcized by music.

He was the Orpheus of the world who might tame the beast in all of us if we would listen to him, the wandering minstrel whom the world left to play out in the street. And yet his ultimate seriousness and the last secret of his beauty is pity, not for himself and his own little troubles, but for the whole bitter earnestness of mortal children. And in this pity he seems not to weep for us, still less for himself, but to tell us to dry our tears and be good, and listen to his magic flute.

That is what he would have told the Prussians, after he had set them marching the goose-step backwards. Even they would not be the villains of a tragedy for him, but only beasts to be tamed with his music until they should be fit to sing their own ba.s.s part in the last chorus of reconciliation. And this pity of his sounds all through _The Magic Flute_ and gives to its beauty a thrill and a wonder far beyond what any fleshly pa.s.sion can give. Sarostro is a priest, not a magician, because there is in him the lovely wisdom of pity, because he has a place in his paradise for Papageno, the child of nature, where he shall be made happy with his mate Papagena. There is a moment when Papageno is about to hang himself because there is no one to love him; he will hang himself in Sarostro's lonely paradise. But there is a sly laughter in the music which tells us that he will be interrupted with the rope round his neck.

And so he is, and Papagena is given to him, and the paradise is no longer lonely; and the two sing their part in the chorus of reconciliation at the end. And we are sure that the Queen of Night, and the ugly negro and all his goose-stepping attendants, are not punished.

They have been naughty for no reason that anyone can discover, just like Prussians and other human beings; and now the magic flute triumphs over their naughtiness, and the silver bells ring from every tree and the enchanted nightingales sing in all the thickets, and the sages and the lovers smile like children; and the laughter pa.s.ses naturally into the divine beauty of Mozart's religion, which is solemn because laughter and pity are reconciled in it, not rejected as profane.

Process or Person?

Nearly all war pictures in the past have been merely pictures that happened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes about the manner in which fighting men and horses ought to be represented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things.

Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the nude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment."

t.i.tian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes or his Baccha.n.a.ls, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none of these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity because of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battle scene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a _genre_ picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patriotic appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battle pictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is a public that likes them.

In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of war as an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the very method of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; but in these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for his cubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that in war man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is a process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repet.i.tion and sharp distinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process better than any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being to express the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of all things, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; and machines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed by our own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future in which machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it is not so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves have lost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seem more and more like us, but that we seem more and more like the machines.

Everywhere we see processes to which we are subject and of which our humanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured the delusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes. Now that delusion is fading away from us; and it fades away most of all in war, where all humanity is evidently dominated by the struggle for life, and is but a part of it, as raindrops are part of a storm.

It is this sense of tyrannous process that Mr. Nevinson expresses in his battle pictures, with, we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentment against it. His pictures look like a visible _reductio ad absurdum_ of it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least, is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He has allowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which has no purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universe seems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as well be called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle between two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of the machines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no souls in them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that they collide and destroy each other like ma.s.ses of matter in s.p.a.ce. Nothing can be said of them except that they obey certain laws; we call their obedience discipline, but it is only the discipline of things subject to a process.

Now it is the sense of process, as the ultimate reality in the universe, which has produced war against the conscience of mankind, and even of many Germans. Conscience was powerless to prevent it because conscience had ceased to believe in its own power, had come to think of itself as a vain and inexplicable rebellion against the nature of things. This rebellion we call sentimentality, meaning thereby that it is really not even moral; for true morality would recognize the process to which the nature of man is subject, of which that nature is itself a part; and would cure man of his futile rebellions so that he should not suffer needlessly from them. It would cure man of pity, because it is through pity that he suffers. He is a machine, and, if he is a conscious machine, he should be conscious of the fact that he is one. Such is the belief that has been growing upon us for fifty years or more with many strange effects. It has not destroyed our sense of pity, but has confused and exasperated it. We pity and love still, but with desperation, not like Christians a.s.sured that these things are according to the order of the universe, but fearing that they are wilful exceptions to that order, costly luxuries that we indulge in at our own peril. We seem to ourselves lonely in our pity and love; the supreme process knows nothing of them; the G.o.d, who is love, does not exist.

In the past wars have happened with the consent of mankind; but this war did not happen so. Even in Germany there was something hysterical in the praise of war, as if it were the worship of an idol both hated and feared. We must praise war, the German worshippers of force seem to say, so that we may survive. We must forgo the past hopes of man so that we may find something real to hope for. We must habituate ourselves to the universe as it is, and break ourselves and all mankind in to the bitter truth. They praised war as we used in England to praise industry.