ART AND THE WAR.

MONSIEUR RODIN-probably the greatest living artist-has lately defined art as the pursuit of beauty, and beauty as "the expression of what there is best in man." "Man," he says, "needs to express in a perfect form of art all his intuitive longings towards the Unknowable." His words may serve as warning to those who imagine that the war will loosen one root of the tree of arta tree which has been growing slowly since first soul came into men's eyes.

This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God; that which not everyone will admit is that this Creative purpose works in its fashioning, not only of matter, but of what we call spirit, through friction, through the rubbing together of the noses, the thoughts, and the hearts of men. While the material condition of our planet-the heat or friction within it— remains favourable to human life, there will, there must needs be, a continual crescendo in the stature of Humanity, through the ever-increasing friction of human spirits one with the other; friction supplied by life itself, and next after life, by those transcripts of life, those expressions of human longing, which we know as art. Art for art's sake-if it meant what it said, which is doubtful-was always a vain and silly cry. As well contend that an artist is not a man. Art was ever the servant as well as the mistress of men, and ever will be. Civilisation, which is but the gradual conversion of animal man into human man, has come about through art even more than through religion, law, and science. For the achieved "expression of man's intuitive longing towards the Unknowable, in more or less perfect . . . forms of art" has ever-after Life itself-been the chief influence in broadening men's hearts.

The aim of human life no doubt is happiness. But, after all, what is happiness? Efficiency, wealth, material comfort? Many by their lives do so affirm; few are cynical enough to say so; and on their death-beds none will feel that these are. Not even freedom in itself brings happiness. Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freedom which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, help, others. In breadth of heart are founded justice, love, sacrifice; without it there would be no special meaning to any of our efforts, and the tale of all human life still no more than that of supremely gifted

animals, many of whose communities are highly efficient, and have unity partly instinctive, partly founded on experience of the utility thereof, but none of that conscious altruism which is without perception of benefit to self, and works from sheer recognition of its own beauty. In sum, human civilisation is the growth of conscious altruism; and the directive Moral Purpose in the world nothing but our dim perception, ever growing through spiritual friction, that we are all bound more and more towards the understanding of ourselves and each other, and all that this carries with it. To imagine, then, that a conflagration like this war, however vast, however hellish, will do aught but momentarily retard the crescendo of that understanding, is to miss perception of the whole slow process by which man has become less and less an animal throughout the ages; and to fear that the war will scorch and wither art, that chief agent of understanding, is either to identify oneself with the petty and eclectic views which merely produce aesthetic excrescences or to be frankly ignorant of what art means.

Recognition of the relativity of art is constantly neglected by those who talk and write about it. For one school the audience does not exist; for another nothing but the audience. Obviously neither view is right. Art may be very naïve and still be artstill be the expression of a childish vision appealing to childish visions, making childish hearts beat. Thus :

"Mary had a little lamb,

Its wool was white as snow,

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go."

is art to the child of five, whose heart and fancy it affects. And :

is art to the writer and the reader of these words.

On the other hand, Tolstoi, in limiting art to such of it as might be understanded of simple folk, served his purpose of attacking the extravagant dandyisms of aestheticism, but fell lugubriously short of the wide truth. The essence of art is the power of communication between heart and heart-Yes! But since no one shall say to human nature: "Be of this or that pattern," or to the waves of human understanding, "Thus far and no further," so no man shall say these things to art.

Anybody can draw a tree, but few can draw a tree that others can see is like a tree, and not one in a million can convey the

essential spirit of Tree. The power of getting over the footlights to some audience or other is clearly necessary before a man can be called an artist by any but himself. But so soon as he has established genuine connection between his creation and the gratified perception of others, he is making art, though it may be, and usually is, very childish art. The point to grasp is this, and again this Art is rooted in life for its inspiration, and dependent for its existence as art on affecting other human beings, sooner or later. The statue, the picture, or the book which, having been given a proper chance, has failed to move any but oneself, is certainly not art. It does not follow that the artist should consider his public, or try to please others than his own best self; but if, in pleasing his best self, he does not succeed in pleasing others, in the past, the present, or the future, he will certainly not have produced art. Not that the size of his public is proof of an artist's merit. The public of all time is generally but a small public at any given moment. Tolstoi seems to have forgotten that did he not refuse greatness to the Ninth Symphony? --and to have neglected the significance attaching to the quality of a public. For, if the essence of art be its power of bridging between heart and heart (as he admitted) its value may well be greater if it reaches and fertilises the hearts of other artists rather than those of the generality, for through these other artists it sweeps out again in further circles and ripples of expression. Art is the universal traveller, essentially international in influence. Revealing the spirit of things lying behind parochial surfaces and circumstance, delving down into the common stuff of nature and human nature, and recreating therefrom, it passes ten thousand miles of space, ten thousand years of time, and yet appeals to the men it finds on those far shores. It is the one possession of a country which that country's enemies usually still respect and take delight in. War, outcome of the side of man's nature which is hostile to all breadth of heart, can for the moment paralyse the outward activities of art, but can it ever chain its spirit, or arrest the inner ferment of the creative instinct? For thousands of generations war has been the normal state of man's existence, yet alongside war has flourished art, reflecting man's myriad aspirations and longings, and by innumerable expressions of individual vision and sentiment, ever unifying human life, through the common factor of impersonal emotion passing from heart to heart by ways more invisible than the winds travel, carrying the seeds and pollen of herb life. If one could only see those countless tenuous bridges spun by art, a dewy web over the whole lawn of life! If for a moment we could see them, discouragement would cease its uneasy buzzing. What can this war do that a million

wars have not? It is bigger, and more bloody the reaction from it will but be the greater. If every work of art existing in the Western world were obliterated, and every artist killed, would human nature return to the animalism from which art has in a measure raised it? Not so. Art makes good in the human soul all the positions that it conquers.

When the war is over the world will find that the thing which has changed least is art. Certain withered leaves, warts, dead branches will have sloughed off from the tree; the sap will run at first a little faster for the temporary check, and that is all. The wind of war reeking with death will neither have warped nor poisoned it. The utility of art, which in these days of blood and agony is mocked at, will be rising again into the view even of the mockers, almost before the thunder of the last shell has died away. "Beauty is useful," says Monsieur Rodin. Aye! it is useful!

Even now-in the full whirlwind of this most gigantic struggle, art work is very likely being produced which, in sum of its ultimate effect on mankind, will outlive and outweigh the total net result of that struggle, just as surely as the work of Euripides, Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, and Tolstoi outweighed the net result of the Peloponnesian, sixteenth century, Napoleonic, and Crimean wars. War is so unutterably tragic, becausewithout it-Nature, given time, would have attained the same ends in other ways. A war is the spasmodic uprising of old savage instincts against the slow and gradual humanising of the animal called man. It emanates from restless and so-called virile natures fundamentally intolerant of men's progress towards the understanding of each other-natures that often profess a blasphemous belief in art, a blasphemous alliance with God. It still apparently suffices for a knot of such natures to get together, and play on mass fears and loyalties, to set a continent on fire. And at the end? Those of us-at the rate we are going we may not be many-who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death-will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come the state of the world would be very much the

same.

It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance of this conflict now that it has been joined-Humanism and Democracy have been forced into a sudden and spasmodic death-grapple with its arch enemies; and the end of that struggle must be brought into conformity with the slow, sure, general progress of mankind. But, if by better fortune, this fearful conflict had not been forced upon civilisation, the same victory would have made good in course of time, by other pro

cesses.

That is the irony. For, of a surety, wars or no warsthe future is to Humanism.

But art has no cause to droop its head, nor artists to be discouraged. They are the servants of the future every bit as much as, and more than, they have been the servants of the past; they are even the faithful servants of the present, for they must keep their powers in training, and their vision keen against the time when they are once more accounted of. A true picture is a joy that will move hearts some day, for all that it may not sell now; beauty none the less "the expression of what there is best in man," because the earth is being soaked with blood.

Monsieur Sologub, the Russian poet, speaking recently on the future of art, has indicated his view that after the war art will move away from the paths of naturalism; and he defines the naturalists as "people who describe life from the standpoint of material satisfaction." It is never good to argue about words; but confusion in regard to the meaning of terms describing art activity is so profound that it is well to sweep them out of our minds, and, in considering what forms art ought to take, to go deep down to the criterion of communication between heart and heart. The only essential thing is-that vision, fancy, feeling should be given the concrete clothing that shall best make them perceptible by the hearts of others; the simpler, the more direct and clear and elemental the form, the better; and that is all you can say about it. To seek remote, intricate, and "precious" clothings for the imagination is but to handicap vision, and imperil communication and appeal; the artists who seek them are not usually of much account. The greatness of Blake is the greatness of his simpler work. And in this connection it is as much affectation to pretend that men are more childish than they are, as to pretend that they all have the subtlety of a Robert Browning. If the range of an artist's vision, the essential truth of his fancy, and the heat of his feeling be great, then, obviously, the simpler, the more accessible the form he takes, the wider will be his reach, the deeper the emotion he stirs, the greater the value of his art. What is wanted," says Monsieur Sologub, "is true art." Quite so! What is wanted in a work of art is an unforced, natural, and adequate correspondence between fancy and form, matter and spirit, so that one shall not be distracted by its naturalism, mysticism, cubism, whatnotism, but shall simply be moved in a deep impersonal way by perception of another's vision. Two instances come into the mind: A picture of "Spring," by Jean François Millet, in the Louvre, wherein, by simple selection, without any departure whatever from the normal