Art | Page 7

customs of an age: they are
not used to provoke aesthetic emotion. Forms and the relations of forms
were for Frith not objects of emotion, but means of suggesting emotion
and conveying ideas.
The ideas and information conveyed by "Paddington Station" are so
amusing and so well presented that the picture has considerable value
and is well worth preserving. But, with the perfection of photographic
processes and of the cinematograph, pictures of this sort are becoming
otiose. Who doubts that one of those Daily Mirror photographers in
collaboration with a Daily Mail reporter can tell us far more about
"London day by day" than any Royal Academician? For an account of
manners and fashions we shall go, in future, to photographs, supported
by a little bright journalism, rather than to descriptive painting. Had the
imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufacturing incredibly
loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the
manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish,
would now be an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths
instead of being Alma Tademas! But photography has made impossible
any such transmutation of modern rubbish. Therefore it must be
confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous;
they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably
employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they are not

unpleasant, which is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive
painting of which "The Doctor" is the most flagrant example. Of course
"The Doctor" is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of
emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to
make it nugatory; it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it
suggests is false. What it suggests is not pity and admiration but a sense
of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity. It is sentimental.
Art is above morals, or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to
show presently, works of art are immediate means to good. Once we
have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically of the
first importance and put it beyond the reach of the moralist. But
descriptive pictures which are not works of art, and, therefore, are not
necessarily means to good states of mind, are proper objects of the
ethical philosopher's attention. Not being a work of art, "The Doctor"
has none of the immense ethical value possessed by all objects that
provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state of mind to which it is a means,
as illustration, appears to me undesirable.
The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian Futurists, are
notable examples of descriptive painting. Like the Royal Academicians,
they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey
information and ideas. Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists
prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art.
Their social and political theories are respectable, but I would suggest
to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in
thought and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be
born one. To associate art with politics is always a mistake. Futurist
pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and
colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment; their forms are not
intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information.
These forms, by the way, whatever may be the nature of the ideas they
suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary. In such Futurist
pictures as I have seen--perhaps I should except some by Severini--the
drawing, whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is
found to be in that soft and common convention brought into fashion
by Besnard some thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux-Art
students ever since. As works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible;

but they are not to be judged as works of art. A good Futurist picture
would succeed as a good piece of psychology succeeds; it would reveal,
through line and colour, the complexities of an interesting state of mind.
If Futurist pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in a
lack of artistic qualities that they never were intended to possess, but
rather in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal.
Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves
them most the greater part is what scholars call "Primitive." Of course
there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of
enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers
(Notre-Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned,
over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as any better class