Made and Printed in Great Britain byM. F. Robinson & Co., Ltd., at The Library Press, Lowestoft
Made and Printed in Great Britain byM. F. Robinson & Co., Ltd., at The Library Press, Lowestoft
EUTERPEI
EUTERPE
At the outset it will be desirable to state that when I speak of the future of art I do not mean the “art of the future”. Art can be considered from either an inside or an outside point of view; that is to say, we can deal either with its nature, problems, and performances—art itself, or with the amount and quality of the interest taken in art by men and women—the “art-life” of the community. The latter subject is that dealt with here.
The “art-life” of the civilized world is at present in a transition period, which is fraught with distinct, though maybe unrealized, dangers. Its problems are only indirectly related to the present and the future state of art-production: whether we foresee development or retrogression in modern tendencies in literature,painting, music, and so on, these dangers will need to be faced, or they will, at least, minimize the value of the creative work of to-morrow. For we are concerned not with the production of art but with the enjoyment and appreciation of art. As the latter is the more important, since without it production would be sterile, it is an essential preliminary that the conditions necessary for the healthy growth of a more widespread, deeper-rooted love of the beautiful should exist. We are now viewing the situation as sociologists, as men, rather than as artists. The artist can be satisfied when he attains a certain level of performance: at least he can work with content and happiness while he is seeking to reach a may-be unattainable perfection. He is, naturally and rightly, concerned with absolute values; and the critic and the individual lover can maintain the same attitude. If a painting or a poem reaches perfection, he asks no more. But the sociologist must take a different attitude. To the artist and the critic the work is the end; to the sociologist it is the beginning. It is not enough for him to know that the painting is great, since to him it is onlythe means by which men attain artistic enjoyment; it has no significance until it has acted upon the minds of men. That being so he must ask other questions about it—firstly,How manymen can see it? How many are able to appreciate its value intelligently, gaining the full aesthetic, spiritual, or intellectual stimulus from it?—in short, What is the aggregate of its human significance?
It does not follow, of course, that we can relate the quality of a work of art to the “quantity” of its appeal; it would, in fact, be absurd to suppose that it is necessarily better that 100,000 should know and appreciate the second-rate than that 100 should love the finest—neither, with certain reservations, need this necessarily be untrue. The point I would urge at present is simply that the value of art to humanity does depend very largely upon the desire and opportunity of men to take advantage of it. The poet whose works are ignored saving by the very few may be as impotent as a mute inglorious Milton.
Therefore there are two factors—production and reproduction, or, shall we say, creation and distribution. A musiciancomposes a symphony, a dramatist writes a play, a novelist a story—that is the first factor. If no one ever performed the symphony, produced the play, or published the novel, of what importance would this creation prove to the world?—Practically none. The art-product must be distributed before it can accomplish any part of its essential purpose. It necessarily follows, moreover, that thewiderthe distribution, the more adequately will it function. This is all very obvious, though often forgotten, and will disclose the next step in the argument, which is that, were it not for certain tendencies, increased means of reproduction and distribution would lead to a better developed, more valuable, and more active artistic life. That being so, the present, which is a period when mankind is enjoying the benefit of recent and important reproductive inventions, should be imbued with hopeful tendencies—Is it?
Yes and no. Let us take stock of our position. Reproduction is almost entirely a mechanical matter, depending upon non-artistic, purely material factors. Production is the business of the creative artists; reproduction that of the scientists.The latter have given us within recent years inventions which have revolutionized artistic conditions—the mechanical processes and innumerable secondary inventions such as stereotyping, and mechanical composition and binding, which have facilitated the reproduction of printed matter, the three-colour and other photo-mechanical methods of reproducing pictorial matter, the gramophone, the piano-player, and wireless to aid the distribution of music, and so on, throughout the range of pure and applied art.
Until recent years the percentage of the population who were in direct contact with the fine arts had remained much the same in civilized countries from probably the earliest times. Art had almost invariably depended upon direct patronage of some kind or other, religious or secular, if not entirely at least to an important degree. I would not denounce this; one cannot, when one remembers that the system fostered art which has not been equalled under the new régime. But direct patronage by the few is rapidly declining and is to-day almost negligible. It has been replaced, simply as a result of the mechanical factor, by a more democraticeconomic basis. Some arts are still to some extent produced for the few, but others entirely for the many. The important fact is that wherever reproduction is easiest that art is the most democratic—books and music, for example; wherever least possible its range is narrower and its support less democratic, e.g., sculpture, household decoration, etc.
The character of our artistic experience has therefore to a very large extent been decided by purely non-artistic factors. That whichcanbe reproduced has been reproduced, and opportunity has developed taste. This is a generalization, though not a fallacious one. We may assume that the artistic needs of men have been led into their different channels partly as a result of personal inclination, but very largely through the influence of opportunity. If a number of men were cast upon a desert island with only books to minister to their aesthetic needs, the majority would take what was to hand and be quite content. I am not saying that this is a good tendency but that it is a true hypothesis, applicable to modern life, and a contention which istenable on historical grounds. The favourite pursuits of early civilizations were not those of to-day, and it is very unlikely that any one factor has done so much to change taste as the development of means of reproduction. The pursuit of once-popular arts need not die out; it need not even decline, since the numbers of those interested in all the arts is increasing; but the proportionate or relative interest alters. This being so, can we ignore the influence of the mechanical factor? It is operating in a striking manner to-day whenrelativelymusic is being appreciated by more and literature by fewer people, when the theatre is attracting, relatively again, fewer every day than the cinema, when the graphic arts are becoming more significant than the plastic arts.
To ignore the mechanical factor is to put effect before cause. Certainly the character of taste has influenced the direction of invention to some extent, since the scientist would naturally turn first to fields where his work would be most effective. This aspect should not, however, be magnified. Sooner or later science has given all it was capable of giving toeveryform of art, regardless of its importance or popularity.
And so we realize that thecharacterof public taste—that is to say, the proportionate amount of interest in the various arts—has been dictated by the mechanical factor. We can go still further and assert that itsqualityhas been largely determined by this same influence.