Essays on Art | Page 4

any activity whatever would mar her perfection. In such
societies the artist becomes a slave. He too must produce work that
does not seem to be work. He must express no wonder or value for
patrons who would be ashamed to feel either. What he makes must
seem to be born and not made, so that it may fit a world which pretends
to be a born Paradise populated by cynical angels who own allegiance
to no god. In such a world art means, beauty means, the concealment of
effort, the pretence that it does not exist; and that pretence is the end of
art and beauty in all things made by man. There is a close connexion
between the idea of life expressed in Aristotle's ideal man and the later
Greek sculpture. The aim of that sculpture, as of his ideal man, was
proud and effortless perfection. Both dread the confession of failure
above all things--and both are dull. In Aristotle's age art had started
upon a long decline, which ended only when the pretence of perfection
was killed, both in art and in life, by Christianity. Then the real beauty
of art, the beauty of value and wonder, superseded the wearisome
imitation of natural beauty; and it is only lately that we have learnt
again to prefer the real beauty to the false.
Men must free themselves from the contempt of effort and the desire to
conceal it, they must be content with the perpetual, passionate failure of
art, before they can see its beauty or demand that beauty from the artist.
When they themselves become like little children, then they see that the
greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are like little children too.
For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not the arrogant, the
accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They are great men to us;
but they achieved beauty because in their effort to achieve it they were
little children to themselves. They impose awe on us, but it is their own
awe that they impose. It is not their achievement that makes beauty, but
their effort, always confessing its own failure; and in that confession is
the beauty of art. That is why it moves and frees us; for it frees us from
our pretence that we are what we would be, it carries us out of our own
egotism into the wonder and value of the artist himself.
Consider the beauty of a tune. Music itself is the best means which man
has found for confessing that he cannot say what he would say; and it is

more purely and rapturously beauty than any other form of art. A tune
is the very silencing of speech, and in the greatest tunes there is always
the hush of wonder: they seem to tell us to be silent and listen, not to
what the musician has to say, but to what he cannot say. The very
beauty of a tune is in its reference to something beyond all expression,
and in its perfection it speaks of a perfection not its own. Pater said that
all art tries to attain to the condition of music. That is true in a sense
different from what he meant. Art is always most completely art when
it makes music's confession of the ineffable; then it comes nearest to
the beauty of music. But when it is no longer a forlorn hope, when it is
able to say what it wishes to say with calm assurance, then it has ceased
to be art and become a game of skill.
Often the great artist is imperious, impatient, full of certainties; but his
certainty is not of himself; and he is impatient of the failure to
recognize, not himself, but what he recognizes. Michelangelo,
Beethoven, Tintoret, would snap a critic's head off if he did not see
what they were trying to do. They may seem sometimes to be arrogant
in the mere display of power, yet their beauty lies in the sudden change
from arrogance to humility. The arrogance itself bows down and
worships; the very muscle and material force obey a spirit not their own.
They are lion-tamers, and they themselves are the lions; out of the
strong comes forth sweetness, and it is all the sweeter for the strength
that is poured into it and subdued by it. What is the difference, as of
different worlds, between Rubens at his best and Tintoret at his best?
This: that Rubens always seems to be uplifted by his own power,
whereas Tintoret has most power when he forgets it in wonder. When
he bows down all his turbulence in worship, then he is most strong.
Rubens, in the "Descent from the Cross," is still the supreme
drawing-master; and painters flocking to