Art...does not rise and decay—Art is eternal. What does decay and rise and decay is craftsmanship, the skill to produce Art, the power of beautifully uttering Art. It is this craftsmanship that is so often confused with Art—a misunderstanding that leads to all the sad confusion and casuistry to which Mr. Bennett, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is the victim. I will try to put it clearly. The most vastly interesting thing to man is Life. Whence it comes, whither it goes—these are a part of the eternal mystery. But we can and ought to know all of life 'twixt its coming and its going. We can only know of life by personal experience, or at second hand by the communicated experience of our fellows. Now our personal adventures in life, even though we bestride the world like a Napoleon, can at best be a small and parochial affair, when all is said, set beside the multitudinous experience of all our generation. But we may know of life through the experience of our fellows, by the communication of their sensations to us, that is to say by Art: for, just as our thoughts are communicated to our fellows through Speech, so may we communicate our Emotions to our fellows by transferring those Emotions through the senses, whether by sound, as in music, or the poetry of verse or prose, or oratory, or by the sight, as by colour in painting, or by form, as in sculpture or architecture, or by the drama, and the like. Art is the Emotional statement of Life. Speech is the intelligent utterance of Thought; Art is the intelligent utterance of the Emotions. Craftsmanship is the grammar of Art.
Now, it is not enough to have uttered a Thought to account it Speech; it is vital that the Thought shall be so uttered as to arouse the like thought in the hearer, otherwise are we but in a jibbering Babel of Strange Sounds. It is not enough to have uttered Emotion to account it Art: it is vital that the Emotion shall be so uttered as to arouse the like emotion in the onlooker; otherwise are we but in the tangled Whirl of Confusion. And just as Thought is the more perfectly understood as it is deftly expressed, so is Emotion the more powerfully transmitted as it is most perfectly uttered. In other words Art depends for its strength on the perfection of its craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is the perfection or beauty of statement by and through which Art is uttered. A poker may be a beautiful thing; it is not art. A photograph may be beautiful—it is not art. A woman may be very beautiful—she is not art. Art must create—it must transfer Sensation from the creator to us, whether by colour or sound or form, or the rhythmic effects produced by the emotion-arousing use of words such as oratory or the poetry of verse or prose. Now, the Greek genius set up Beauty as the ultimate goal of Art. The Greeks did really mean that Beauty of Craftsmanship alone was not enough, that Art must create Beauty. This absolute aim to achieve Beauty was the cause of the triumph of Greece in Art—a greatly over-rated triumph and one of which the schoolmasters tell us much ; it was also the cause of her limitations and of her eventual failure to achieve the supreme mastery in Art, of which we hear little. For, splendid as was the mighty achievement of Greece in Art, she never reached to the majesty and grandeur of that masterpiece that stands upon the edge of Africa, head and shoulders above her genius, in the wondrous thing that is called the Sphinx. The genius of Egypt spent itself upon the majesty and the mystery of life; and it moved thereby to a higher achievement than that of all Greece. When a school arose that had for its battle-cry Art for Art's sake, it really meant Art was for Craft's sake—that the aim of Art lay solely in the Beauty of its Craftsmanship. To show the deeps of their confusion, what they said, therefore, was this, that if a Whistler painted a wall white, he by his trick of thumb created a work of Art When Whistler said that Art was the science of Beauty, he reminded one of the wiseacre's definition of a crab, that it was “a scarlet insect that walked backwards"; the which was not an unworthy definition except that the crab is not an insect, is not scarlet, and does not walk backwards. Art concerns itself with tears and pathos and tragedy and ugliness and greyness and the agonies of life as much as with laughter and comedy and beauty. How much did Shakespeare concern himself with Beauty: Is jealousy beautiful? Yet “Othello” is great art. Is man's ineffectual struggle against destiny beautiful? Yet “Hamlet” is accounted the masterpiece of the ages. What did Isaiah concern himself with Beauty: Are killing and suffering and judgment beautiful? Mr. Bennett says that the killing of a hog is beautiful. I utterly deny it. It is wholly unbeautiful. Had Millet made it beautiful he had uttered the stupidest of lies. Nevertheless the statement of it may be Art. Indeed, Millet's aim in Art, a large part of his significance in Art, is a protest against the pettiness of mere beauty. He took the earth, this great soul’d man, and he wrought with a master's statement the pathos and the tragedy and the might and the majesty of the earth and of them that toil upon the earth. The “Man with the Hoe" is far more than beautiful, it holds the vast emotions of man's destiny to labour and of man's acceptance of that destiny; it utters the ugliness as loudly as it states the beauty of the earth and of toil; and it most rightly utters these things, so that they take equal rank, and thereby add to our experience of life through the masterly power and the beauty of craftsmanship whereby he so solemnly uttered the truth.
HALDANE MACFALL.
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