Clive Bell

“ What Trelawny cared for in literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for its part, what they hate—the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct. ”

“ No one will be surprised to learn that fourteen hundred years ago the Chinese laid down six canons of art. Nothing is more natural than that some great artist, reviewing in old age his life and work, should deduce from the mass of experience and achievement certain propositions, and that these, in time, should become rules, to be preached by pedants, practised by dilettanti, and ignored by every artist worthy of the name. What does surprise us is that the first of these Chinese canons should be nothing less than a definition of that which is essential in all great art. ”

“ That people who in times of peace treat art as an amenity should feel that this is no time for art is, I suppose, natural. That they should expect those who feel that art is the most important thing in the world to do the same seems to me unreasonable. To those who care seriously for art, to those for whom it is a constant source of passionate emotion, the notion that this is no time for art seems as ludicrous as to a Christian mystic of the ninth century would have seemed the notion that that tortured age was no time for religious ecstasy. ”

“ It is hard to conjecture; for our portrait-painters live in a world which, though not insensitive to prettiness, and impressed by obvious manifestations of ability, cares nothing for art or good painting. In such a world an artist—who is, after all, little better than a human being—can hardly be expected to develop his critical faculty. If some of our gifted men were to take their talents to Paris, where is a press and public that knows how to be serious about art, they would, one fancies, begin to feel dissatisfied with their facile triumphs and appetizing confections. ”

“ For an indolent and lawless imagination force of character is the only whip, force of intellect the only guide. Miss Coleridge was deficient in both respects, and so her fancy sat playing with chips and pebbles, making mud-pies when it should have been making palaces.
Miss Coleridge never created a real work of art because she could not grasp emotions, or, if she grasped, failed to hold them. Perhaps she was too much of a Victorian lady to do more than express the culture of an imperfect age imperfectly. ”

“ There Ibsen was never so completely at home as Cézanne; he lacked the imagination by which alone one arrives and remains in the world of reality. His vision was more uncertain and so his faith was weaker. He was a less ferociously sincere artist. When vision began to fail he took refuge in a catalogue of facts or in unconvincing symbolism: Cézanne tossed his picture into a bush. Perhaps that is why a new generation, hungry for great contemporary art, turns more hopefully to painting than to literature. ”

“ In art, such a process means incredible labour and agony; Gertler sweats blood and shows it. He labours terribly, and his pictures are terribly laboured. He is not artist enough to paint as a bird sings; he paints as a desperate soldier might dig himself in.
What he has to express is not, it must be confessed, of the highest quality, because his reactions are limited and rather undistinguished. He has only two or three notes, and they are neither rich nor rare. For an artist he is unimaginative, and often in their blank simplicity his conceptions are all but commonplace. ”

“ But these memories and ideas are not a part of the music; they are only the contribution of an unæsthetic auditor. The man who says that he can no longer appreciate the music of Bach merely admits that he has never appreciated the music of any one.
Two things above all others give value to a civilization, art and thought. It were well that those even who cannot appreciate Beauty and Truth should bear this in mind. Instead of blustering about this being no time for art they should rejoice that there are some who, rising above tumultuous circumstance, continue to create and speculate. ”

“ And any one who cannot respond to the conviction and conscience with which he not only excludes whatever is irrelevant or fortuitous or false, but does positively realize his conceptions is, in my judgment, incapable of appreciating visual art.
No art could be more different from the art of Gertler than that of Duncan Grant. For him it seems impossible to scrabble a line or wipe his brush on a bit of paper without giving delight. As the saying goes, he is all over an artist. Men endowed with this prodigious sensibility, facility, and sense of beauty are not uncommon in England. ”

“ Believing, as I do, in the influence of one artist on another, I regard this exhibition as a piece of rare good fortune for British art. Marchand is eminent in just those qualities that we most lack. Above all things he is a painter. I am curious to hear what Mr. Sickert has got to say about his pictures; and I shall be disappointed if they do not wring from him what used to be the highest encomium on the lips of his old friend Degas—C'est de la peinture!
No living painter is more purely concerned with the creation of form, with the emotional significance of shapes and colours, than Marchand. ”

“ Now wit is purely an affair of the intellect, and so is society when it is at all good; no one but a fool dreams of going there for fine feelings and profound emotions. But the intellect to be nimble must be free: 'tis a sprite will play you the prettiest tricks an you give it the run of the house; close but one door though, and it sits sulking in the lobby. Delightful are the games it can play you: wit, irony, criticism, thrilling ideas, visions of fantastic anarchy and breathless generalizations—all these it can give; but the earth and all things above and below must be its toy-box ”

“ You will not find in his work a trace of that tired pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on sun and moon to stand and watch him sign his name, neither was he the shy genius of the English hedgerows sheltering his little talent from contemporary infection and the chill winds of criticism. ”

“ To that common sense which is compounded of mental sluggishness and a taste for being in the majority Peacock's wit was a needle. He was intellectual enough to enjoy pricking bladders, and so finished a performer that we never tire of watching him at his play.
He was, in fact, an artist with intellectual [Pg 61] curiosity; and just as he lacked the depth of a philosopher so he wanted the vision of a poet. That he possessed genius will not be denied; but his art is fanciful rather than imaginative and of creative power he had next to none. His life was neither a mission nor a miracle. ”

“ In fact, it was coming to be a question whether there was anything essentially ridiculous about a musician, a poet, or a Socialist. Punch was rarely seen in the best houses. For a few dizzy years it was wildly surmised that to found a civilization might be as thrilling as to found a family, and that one could be as romantic and snobbish about Art as about bull-dogs or battleships. To be open-minded became modish; people with interesting, subversive things to say were encouraged to talk—always provided they talked with an air of not taking quite seriously what they said. ”

“ Remi is a masterpiece of the eleventh century, and was still, when last I saw it, a work of splendour and significance in spite of having suffered at the hands of French architects worse things than it is likely to have suffered from German gunners.
It is a mistake for the English upper classes to assure the world that they prize a work of art above a victory; the world knows better. Are not these the people who were telling us just now that this was no time for art? Is it seemly in them, is it prudent even, to revile their own class in Germany for caring as little about art as themselves? ”

“ Those pert and unpopular people who floated about propounding unpleasant riddles and tweaking up the law wherever it had been most solemnly laid down were, in fact, making possible the New Age. Not only did they set chattering the rich and gibbering with rage the less presentable revolutionaries, it was they who poured out the ideas that filtered through to the trades-union class; and, if that class was soon to create and direct a brand-new State, it was high time that it should begin to handle the sort of ideas these people had to offer. ”

“ They are not formidable: besides, art is fearless. For art cannot die; neither can the desire for art. If history teaches nothing else worth remembering, it teaches that. Artists will create though they must starve for it, and art we will have though our days be numbered. Artists and those who care for art may be a mere handful in the human mass, but theirs is the passionate faith that conquers somehow in spite of battles and holds the world in fee. ”

“ Those who go to the Salon for their art or invest in Henners and Bougereaus are reckoned hopelessly bourgeois even by the cultivated pressmen. It is a fastidious public, intelligent, learned, and extremely severe: painting it regards as an end in itself, not as a branch of journalism or a superior amenity; and no artist can begin to abuse his talent or play tricks with the currency without getting from this formidable body the sort of frown that makes even a successful portrait-painter wince. ”

“ With a greater artistic gift, Mark Gertler's conviction and conscience would suffice to make him a painter of the first magnitude. Unfortunately, his artistic gift, one inclines to suppose, is precisely that irreducible minimum without which an artist cannot exist. That is his weakness. His strength is that he exploits that minimum uncompromisingly to its utmost possibility. Gertler is one who will never say an idle word in paint, no matter how charming or interesting or amusing it might be. ”

“ Few observant people will deny that there are signs of an awakening in Europe. The times are great with the birth of some new thing. A spiritual renaissance may be at hand. Meanwhile, we are not suffered to ignore the huge strides in material progress that are the chief glory of modern Japan; nor have we failed to remark that the latest art to reach us from that country proved, when displayed with some ostentation at Shepherd's Bush, equal in vulgarity of sentiment, flashiness of execution, and apelike imitation to the worst that can be seen at Burlington House. ”

“ Only when Society becomes clever and inquisitive, and wants to be amused, does it open its doors to reformers, and only in such society can most reformers—reformers, that is to say, who have not been born with an exceptional gift of self-criticism—acquire that sense of humour and dash of cynicism lacking which they perish.
Society to be good must be open-minded; without that there can be neither wit nor gaiety nor conversation worth the name. Prejudices and pruderies, respect of persons, reverence of sentiments, and consideration for the corns of the dull are fatal. ”

“ The taste of Athens in her prime, or of Rome in hers, of Italy in the days of Dante or of Raphael, of the court of Elizabeth, or of eighteenth-century France was not the taste of Victorian England. And the strange thing is that, though not only in the arts, but in all the delicacies of life—in personal relations, in sentiment and wit—the great poets, artists and critics are admitted to have been more subtle and fastidious than most curates or tradesmen, in the matter of morals the curates and tradesmen are allowed to know better. ”

“ There is no reason why the plays of Sophocles should move us less than they moved the Athenians twenty-three hundred years ago, and there is some for supposing that we, who live in the twentieth, are more likely to appreciate them than those who lived in any intervening century. For everywhere to-day is a cry for simplicity and significance, and art more simple and significant than the Attic drama does not exist. ”

“ In calling Peacock a great writer we have raised a claim that needs some support. His exquisite style with its Tacitean flavour, the perfection of his lyrics, his wit, and that intellectual brilliancy which sparkles from all the facets of his satire, parody, and epigram, suffice to endear him to the small, fastidious world whose approval is best worth having, and also, perhaps, to justify our opinion. But, unless we mistake, the appeal of his novels goes farther than the frontiers of good taste. ”

“ An affectation of superior ignorance has been a favourite literary device from the days of the Preacher to those of Anatole France. Montaigne loves to tease and confound us with a "Que sçay-ie," he has the common literary taste for humiliating unsympathetic readers; but he has also a taste for honesty not so common, even in literature. Doubt is a mark of good sense: honest doubt is a mark of genius almost. In his reflective moments the reasonable man inclines to believe that reason can prove nothing—except what he believes. ”

“ Brock would hardly admit the absolute value of æsthetic rapture; he wants art to do something for life, and he loses patience with people who simply add to its confusion. Shelley, he thought, made a mess of his own life and of Harriet's, and, for all one knows, of Miss Hitchener's, and of a score of others; and his poetry you must read for its own sake or not at all. The poetry of Morris has value for people who have never known what it is to feel an æsthetic emotion, and his life was superbly useful to his fellow-men. ”

“ There are at least half a dozen on whom a discerning critic would keep a hopeful eye—Mr. Duncan Grant, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Stanley Spenser, Mr. Gertler, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Bomberg, Mrs. Bell, and Mr. Epstein—for it would be absurd to omit from this list an artist possessed of such skill, scholarship, and surprising powers of improvisation and development as the last-named. Of these some already have been touched by that breath of life which, blowing from Paris, has revolutionized painting without much discomposing the placid shallows of British culture. ”

“ Our enthusiasm for that Athenian spirit, which respected art and gave free rein to criticism even at the most desperate moment of the city's history, has carried us a little, but only a little, away from the matter in hand—the political ideas of the Lysistrata. Political wisdom, like human folly, seems to obey a law known to men of science as "the Conservation of Energy"—quantity and quality are permanent, form alone changes. It is the Aristophanic method that differs so greatly from that of most modern satirists. ”

“ One feels sure he would be of that forlorn hope of civilization that carries on a sporadic and ineffective war against officialism and militarism on the one hand, and puritanism and superstition on the other. One feels sure that, however little he might like new developments in art or thought, he would be against the people who tried to suppress them. One feels quite sure that he would never cease to believe that so long as society is imperfect it is the right and duty of individuals to experiment. The fact is, Morris was at once a practical craftsman and an idealist. ”