Essays on Art | Page 3

beauty of nature, as we
perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is perfection
because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made, but born;
works of art are made. There is the essential difference between them
and between their beauties. If a work of art tries to have the finish of a
thing born, not made, if a piece of enamel apes the gloss of a butterfly's
wing, it misses the peculiar beauty of art and is but an inadequate
imitation of the beauty of nature. That beauty of the butterfly's wing,
which the artist like all of us perceives, is of a different kind from any
beauty he can make; and if he is an artist he knows it and does not try
to make it. But all the arts, even those which are not themselves
imitative, are always being perverted by the attempt to imitate the
finish of nature. There is a vanity of craftsmanship in Louis Quinze
furniture, in the later Chinese porcelain, in modern jewelry, no less than
in Dutch painting, which is the death of art. All great works of art show
an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of craftsmanship, which is the
essence of their beauty and distinguishes it from the beauty of nature.
As soon as men cease to understand this and despise this effort and
roughness and inadequacy, they demand from art the beauty of nature
and get something which is mostly dead nature, not living art.
We can best understand the difference between the two kinds of beauty
if we consider how beauty steals into language, that art which we all
practise more or less and in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to

imitate the finish of natural beauty. There is no beauty whatever in
sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Pass the mustard,"
because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say. There
is beauty in sentences like "The bright day is done, And we are for the
dark," or "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," because in them,
although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say a thousand
times more than he can say. It is the effort to do something beyond the
power of words that brings beauty into them. That is the very nature of
the beauty of art, which distinguishes it from the beauty of nature; it is
always produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible, and what
the artist knows to be impossible. Whenever that effort ceases,
whenever the artist sets himself a task that he can accomplish, a task of
mere skill, then he ceases to be an artist, because he no longer
experiences reality in the manner necessary to an artist. The great poet
is aware of some excellence in reality so intensely that it is to him
beauty; for all excellence when we are intensely aware of it is beauty to
us. There is that truth in Croce's theory. Our perception of beauty does
depend upon the intensity of our perception of excellence. But that
intensity of perception remains perception, and does not make what it
perceives. That the poet and every artist knows; and his art is not
merely an extension of the process of perception, but an attempt to
express his own value for that excellence which he has perceived as
beauty. It is an answer to that beauty, a worship of it, and is itself
beautiful because it makes no effort to compete with it.
Thus in the beauty of art there is always value and wonder, always a
reference to another beauty different in kind from itself; and we too, if
we are to see the beauty of art, must share the same value and wonder.
To enter that Kingdom of Heaven we must become little children as the
artist himself does. Art is the expression of a certain attitude towards
reality, an attitude of wonder and value, a recognition of something
greater than man; and where that recognition is not, art dies. In a
society valuing only itself, believing that it can make a heaven of itself
out of its own skill and knowledge and wisdom, the difference between
the beauty of nature and the beauty of art is no longer seen, and art
loses all its own beauty. The surest sign of corruption and death in a
society is where men and women see the best life as a life without
wonder or effort or failure, where labour is hidden underground so that

a few may seem to live in Paradise; where there is perfect finish of all
things, human beings no less than their clothes and furniture and
buildings and pictures; where the ideal is the lady so perfectly turned
out that