Essays on Art | Page 2

in things of use, including buildings.
Oxford and Cambridge profess to give a liberal education; but you have
only to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachers
themselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like all
the rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they trust in
the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and
superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely
mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere
pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. These have
their sense or nonsense, their righteousness or unrighteousness, which
anyone can learn to see for himself, and, until he has learned, he will be
at the mercy of charlatans.
I have written all these essays as a member of the public, as one who
has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish
again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to
himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling
artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a natural
and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a defence of
criticism, and I will not repeat it here.
A. CLUTTON-BROCK July 30, 1919 FARNCOMBE, SURREY

CONTENTS
"THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI" 1

LEONARDO DA VINCI 13
THE POMPADOUR IN ART 27
AN UNPOPULAR MASTER 37
A DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 48
THE ARTIST AND HIS AUDIENCE 58
WILFULNESS AND WISDOM 74
"THE MAGIC FLUTE" 86
PROCESS OR PERSON? 97
THE ARTIST AND THE TRADESMAN 110
PROFESSIONALISM IN ART 120
WASTE OR CREATION? 132

ESSAYS ON ART
"The Adoration of the Magi"
There is one beauty of nature and another of art, and many attempts
have been made to explain the difference between them. Signor Croce's
theory, now much in favour, is that nature provides only the raw
material for art. The beginning of the artistic process is the perception
of beauty in nature; but an artist does not see beauty as he sees a cow. It
is his own mind that imposes on the chaos of nature an order, a relation,
which is beauty. All men have the faculty, in some degree, of imposing
this order; the artist only does it more completely than other men, and
he owes his power of execution to that. He can make the beauty which
he has perceived because he has perceived it clearly; and this
perceiving is part of the making.
The defect of this theory is that it ends by denying that very difference
between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art which it sets out to
explain. If the artist makes the beauty of nature in perceiving it, if it is
produced by the action of his own mind upon the chaos of reality, then
it is the very same beauty that appears in his art; and if, to us, the
beauty of his art seems different from the beauty of nature, as we
perceive it, it is only because we have not ourselves seen the beauty of
nature as completely as he has, we have not reduced chaos so
thoroughly to order. It is a difference not of kind, but of degree; for the
artist himself there is no difference even of degree. What he makes he
sees, and what he sees he makes. All beauty is artistic, and to speak of
natural beauty is to make a false distinction.

Yet it is a distinction that we remain constantly aware of. In spite of
Signor Croce and all the subtlety and partial truth of his theory, we do
not believe that we make beauty when we see it, or that the artist makes
it when he sees it. Nor do we believe that that beauty which he makes is
of the same nature as that which he has perceived in reality. Rather he,
like us, values the beauty which he perceives in reality because he
knows that he has not made it. It is something, independent of himself,
to which his own mind makes answer: that answer is his art; it is the
passionate value expressed in it which gives beauty to his art. If he
knew that the beauty he perceives was a product of his own mind, he
could not value it so; if he held Signor Croce's theory, he would cease
to be an artist.
And, in fact, those who act on his theory do cease to be artists. Nothing
kills art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the same kind
as that which is perceived in nature. In the