Art and Environment

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Introduction

THE aim of the present book is easily explained. I have made no attempt to treat art from the aesthetic standpoint, as a realisation of the beautiful, and as controlled by principles which have that realisation for their object. My desire has been to confine myself to the consideration of art as an expression of human life and character. Selecting some of the great periods, or creative epochs, in the art of the world, I have endeavoured to deduce from them the distinguishing qualities, limitations, and point of view of the races which produced them.

The note of style which characterises such epochs, and which declares itself in the coherence and uniformity of all the aspects and details of their art, is, as we all know, the natural effect of a certain definiteness of inward thought and emotion. Just as coherent speech can only result from coherent and articulate thought, so too coherent art, which is in itself a kind of speech, can only result from a similar mental coherence. The more strongly this coherence, or note of style as we call it, is felt in art, the more will the life of that period be dominated by

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INTRODUCTION

an equivalent order of ideas. Art is always an expression of life, but it is in proportion as it gathers into the unity of a style that it becomes expressive of collective and social attributes in contradistinction to the petty interests of an art subject to individual caprices.

These moments then, the moment when art is harmonised into definite styles, are the moments when it is most charged and saturated with human significance. It is at these moments that it incar* nates the spirit of its age, and it is, therefore, at such times that we ourselves may hope to extract most meaning from it. Not often are the minds of men so agreed as to admit of such a unity of expression, but when the agreement takes place and the great styles arise, then there can be found, as it seems to me, no other sort of evidence, or literary or other record, which can for a moment compare in vividness with the testimony of art. Not only are the positive qualities and what is definite and determined in racial character saliently depicted, but, by contrast with what is given, what is not given also— that is to say, the limitations and deficiencies of such character — are just as clearly suggested.

The interest I seek being of this human kind, I have been led to deal in the following chapters chiefly with architecture, for architecture, being the most broadly human of all the arts, is the richest in

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INTRODUCTION

human character. In its coming and going across the world-stage each race — Egyptian or Greek, Roman or Goth or Arab — is represented by its own style of building, and these styles are so patently the personification of racial characteristics that they themselves, in their antagonisms or alliances, seem to possess a living individuality, and to act over again, in a sort of stony Dumb Crambo, the history of their time. Even of the issues of such struggles, and of the degrees in which each human element survived and influenced the rest, the record is faithfully kept by succeeding architecture in the blending of the structural traits proper to each race.

If to the study of such subjects we would bring nothing of our own ; if, standing within the temple or the mosque or the minster, we would so give ourselves to the forms around us that these should seem to utter us as completely as they once uttered their builders, then we should have attained to the point of view of those vanished generations and should see and know them as they are.

I do not say this can be done. I am sure that I have not succeeded in doing it. The following attempted interpretations are sure to be full of defects, and, as is the way of criticism, probably most clearly reveal their author's limitations when they insist on the limitations of others. Nevertheless

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INTRODUCTION

I cannot help feeling sure that art really possesses this power of instilling into us the spirit of a past time and people. The treasure sought is there, and if these scratchings fail to reveal the extent of it, they may perhaps show others where to dig deeper and with more success.

Most of the material of this book has appeared in articles in the Edinburgh and Contemporary Reviews, and I desire to express my sincere thanks to the editors of those periodicals for their kindness in allowing me to make the present use of it.

It is difficult, I may add, when applying the same theory to various circumstances, entirely to avoid repetition. I have done my best in this direction, but where clearness of treatment seemed to demand it, I have thought it better to repeat myself than risk obscurity.

L. MARCH PHILLIPPS Satwell,

Chapter I The Temples Of Egypt

Two views of art : Mr. Blomfield's estimate of Egyptian architectare : In what respects this estimate appears to be exaggerated : Character of Egyptian structural features : Their non-intellectual form : The Egyptian and Greek column contrasted : The value of Egyptian architecture as a comment on Egyptian life and character : The formalism of old Egypt, limitations of its civilisation : Religion : Literature : Science : Medicine : Its inability to develop beyond the primitive phase : These limitations reflected in art : The power in Egyptian art of usage and routine : How in its patient reiteration of old conventions it mirrors the life of the Nile valley Pp. 1-41

Chapter II

The river's part in Egypt : The art and civilisation of Egypt cast in the same mould as the country : Dependence of Egypt on the Nile : Character of that dependence : Nile fertilisation and Nile rule : All occupations, all hopes and fears dominated by the Nile : The labours of the Egyptians regulated by its movements from month to month : It turns life into the repetition of a perpetual formula : Compare the rival river-civilisation of Assyria : The similarity in circumstances and routine of life :

ix

Similarity also in art : Limitations of Assyrian and Egyptian art identical : Each stops at the point where intellect should exert its informing power : It is so, too, in life and character : The influences which dominate Egypt focussed in her temples Pp. 42-73

Chapter III

The new factor at work : The movement in Greek archaic art an intellectual movement : The Greek point of view : Intellectual bias of the Greek mind : In what respects sculpture is calculated to express that bias : The Greek instinct for definition : Its restrictions and limitations : Greek religion : The Greek idea of death : Gods and tombs : Greek poetry : Analogy between Myron and i€)schylus, Phidias and Sophocles : What Greek art cannot give Pp. 74-98

Chapter IV

Greek and Gothic art compared : Gothic architecture a picture of contemporary life : Aloofness of the Doric temple from such life : What hold had it on Greek life ? : The ssthetic sense as a source of ideas : Proportion, harmony, unity at once aesthetic and ethical principles : Similarity between the eye and the mind : Hence possibility of appealing to the mind through the eye — t^, an image of harmony, unity, &c., presented to the eye will stimulate a mental recognition of those principles : Use the Greeks made of this thought : Doric architecture an embodiment of the ethical conceptions which governed Greek life

Chapter V The Last Word In Classic Architecture

Santa Sophia : In what the bailding i8 anique : Its vindication of the idea of arch constrnction : Romans had misused that principle : The Roman jumble of arcuated and trabeated oonstmction : The Greeks deliver the arch from this confasion and proceed to develop its intrinsic possibilities : Santa Sophia is the result : It is rather to be looked upon as the last word on classic building than as the inauguration of a new style : Though commonly regarded as the type of Byzantine it does not pursue the Byzantine ideal : It is not an architecture of colour nor in agreement with other Byzantine buildings in its mode of exhibiting colour : It is animated rather by the old imperial spirit of amplitude and order, but it expresses its idea with a new logic and power : All that Roman architecture tried to be and could not is attained in Santa Sophia : As a summing up of the classical era it is a signal illustration of the part which the Greek genius had played in that era Pp. 124-146

Chapter VI

Arab architecture as a presentment of Arab character : Living qualities of the race : Its terrific eneigy combined with fickleness and instability : All Arab enterprise to this day marked by same combination : Arab war : Arab science and scholarship and civilisation generally : Their rapid but evanescent achievements : Testimony of their buildings : Their hatred of all steadfast and stable forms : Fate of the round arch in their hands : Their destructive impulse : Thefr inability to construct : Their tendency to the fantastic and whimsical ! The structural forms of Arab buildings are the racial traits in their living image xi

Chapter VII The Gothic Contribution

The energy of Gothic architectore and in what that energy consists : The side-thrust of the arch : Its unsleeping activity : The Gothic delight in this characteristic : The eagerness with which the Gothic races exhibited and enhanced by all possible means the activity of the arch principle : Loftiness of their vaults : Dangerous character of side-thrusts which they provoked and met : Buttresses and flying buttresses : The visible conflict betwixt stone and human energy : Participation of Gothic detail in the structural motive : Ribs, mouldings, &c., used to indicate the arch pressures and explain to the eye how they converge and how they are withstood : This structural activity the image of a racial activity : Part played by the Gothic race : Roman apathy : The quickening and vitalising influence of the barbarian invasions : The Gothic ideal in life : The revitalising of the old Roman system was the cardinal event in post-classic life : How it worked out and formed the basis of the national system : How having worked itself out in life it was ripe to embody itself in art : The twelfth century in England and France : The moment of triumph of the Gothic ideal : That triumph in all its completeness depicted in Gothic architecture Pp. x68<-ao6

Chapter VIII The Rise Of The Renaissance

The vertical and horizontal styles of architecture : What they stand for : Energy idealised in the twelfth century : Chivalry, ballad poetry, crusades, Gothic architecture : Break-up of the system before advance of intellect : The classic note in architecture : Its breadth : Corre* spondence of the quality with classic intellectualism : Spaciousness of classic thought and classic buildings :

Survival of this trait among Latin races : Italy's reception

• •

xu of the Gothic style : Consistency of her criticism : She insists on horLEontal expansion : Rejects IGothio as inadequate to intellectual ideas : Revives classic proportions as more appropriate : The case of France : Intellectual awakening there, too, followed by adoption of spacious forms : The Renaissance in England : Its insular character : The expansion or contraction of architecture expresses the play of the mind of Europe Pp. 907-341

Chapter IX Sculpture And The Modern Mind

Breakdown of classic intellectualism : West and East in contact : The West imbibes the Eastern thought of spiritual vision : Effect seen in Hellenistic sculpture : Character of that sculpture : Its now indefinite hopes and fears : Loss of the old serenity and calm : Parallel between Hellenistic and Renaissance art : The Florentine intellectualism : The presence of a spiritual religion in the midst of it : Consequent inability to realise the classic ideal : Savonarola : His teaching and influence : Lorenzo the Magnificent : Blending of spiritual and pagan motives : Michelangelo : The conflict in his art between the act of definition and thought which refuses definition : He expresses the conflicting ideals of his age

Chapter X Painting And The Intellectual

MOVEMENT

Manual dexterity of modem art : Consequent superabundance and confusion of subject-matter : Contrast with earlier creative epochs : These were protected from redundancy by their own ignorance : They had not our fatal executive facility : Course of Italian painting from

Giotto to Raphael : Development of painting keeps pace

Xlll with intellectaal development : The new precision and accoracy of inteliectnal vision : Seeing with the mind : Need of this in order to realise and represent naturally : By what degrees the eyes of men during the Renaissance were opened : Man himself the centre of the movement : Renaissance art realises first man, then man's handiwork, and finally nature : It keeps pace in its progress with the intellectual advance of the age Pp. 966-284

Chapter XI

The question of style : Style in French furniture : What constitutes it : The luxury of this furniture its sole reason for existence : French society in the age of Louis XV. : Luxury and frivolity the governing motives of its every action : Aspect of France and of French policy in that age : French colonisation in the East and West : French campaigns : Decline of the military spirit : The reign of corruption : Diderot and the Encyclopaedists : The seriousness of the Court etiquette : Total severance of French aristocratic life from all real practical considerations : Its approaching doom and the terror that hangs over it : The visible manifestation of these ideas embodied in its characteristic art Pp. 985-316

SUMMARY Pp. 3x7-327

BIBLIOGRAPHY Pp. 3a&-343

?C1V

• •.

Chapter I The Temples Of Egypt

Two views of art : Mr. Blomfield's estimate of Egjrptian architecture : In what respects this estimate appears to be exaggerated : Character of Egjrptian stmcturai features : Their non-intellectual form : The Egyptian and Greek column contrasted : The value of Egyptian arcnitecture as a comment on Egyptian life and character : The formalism of old Egypt, limitations of its civilisation : Religion : Literature : Science : Medicine : Its inability to develop beyond the primitive phase : These limitations reflected in art : The power in Egyptian art of usage and routine : How in its patient reiteration of old conventions it mirrors the life of the

Nile valley

RESULTS of two very difiFerent kinds may be obtained from the study of art. Either we may obtain an insight into the laws and principles of art itself, or we may obtain an insight into the lives and characters of those by whom the art was evolved. Unity, symmetry, proportion, the subordination of the parts to the whole are among the ideas associated with the former, the aesthetic point of view, while the relations of man to his Maker, his mental development, and the occupations and pursuits of his daily life are among the ideas belonging to the latter, or human point of view. The two sets of ideas are quite distinct. It is not every school of art which possesses any definite aesthetic significance at all. Not many races have seriously considered the problems of unity, symmetry and'

A I

•• * • • • proportion, ancf in tne works of not many races are the answers to such problems embodied. On the other hand, be the aesthetic value of any kind of art what it may, its human interest is an assured factor. This is always present: nor, perhaps, will it be found that there ever survives to later generations a more graphic and convincing record of the life of past races and ages than is contained in the characteristic art through which that life was uttered.

We may go even a step farther. Not only are these rival interests in art often disjoined and opposed to each other, but it happens frequently that what we must admit, from the aesthetic standpoint, to be the defects and blemishes of a style will be actually &e chief source of its human interest and significance. No one, for example, would, I suppose, deny that the restless and fantastic impulses of Arab architecture, rendered as they are in bad brickwork or crumbling masonry, are, aesthetically speaking, a defect and a blemish ; but, at the same time, no one can consider the style as an embodiment of the Arab character and temperament without being led to perceive that all that is most lifelike and convincing in its interpretation consists in those very qualities which are an aesthetic disfigurement. This being so, it is evidently the first condition of sane criticism to distinguish clearly between methods of analysis which ^ yield such totally different results. We must know in what sense we are to understand the critic's language, and whether the return yielded by the art in question is in the nature of aesthetic pleasure or human interest. Yet this necessary condition of

THE TEMPLEwS OF EGYPT

sane criticism is, as a matter of fact, very rarely attended to. I could point out to the reader at least fifty books on Gothic architecture the greater number of which, so far from attempting to discriminate between the interest of the style as a record of mediaeval life and its value as an embodiment of aesthetic laws and principles, mix, involve, and transpose the two kinds of criticism in such a way that the merits of one kind often come out, by a sort of jugglery, as the merits of the other. The result of this confusion usually is, that not only is aesthetic langus^e more than ever obscured but that the especial merit and use of the art dealt with, as a vigorous representation of life, is also hidden from us. To praise a thing for what it has not got is the surest way of hiding from us what it has got. Led off on a false scent we lose sight of what the subject really has to ofiFer, and by the time we have discovered that its aesthetic pretensions are more or less of a myth, we have forgotten that it ever had any other claim to our notice.

In a collection of lectures recently published by Mr. Blomfield, under the title of ^^The Mistress Art," there occurs an analysis of Egyptian architecture which, as it seems to me, is prone to fall into this error of praising on the wrong grounds. Mr. Blomfield is well known as one who writes^ not only with technical knowledge but thoughtfully and suggestively, on architectural matters. There is the less need, therefore, to say that the essays forming the present volume are, in general, full of ideas which will repay a careful study. This being premised, I may pass at once to the point I desire to examine. Mr. Blomfield treats Egyptian architecture as a style of first-rate aesthetic excellence and power. Nothing is said of any other interest it may possess ; but it is, we are given clearly to understand, in what it attains to as an expression of aesthetic laws and principles that its main value for us consists. It seems to me that this process of reasoning should be reversed. It appears very doubtful whether Egyptian architecture, or Egyptian art in general, was based on any clear knowledge of aesthetic principles, and whether, consequently, it has any aesthetic teaching to communicate to us. On the other hand, if the Egyptian temples have little aesthetic value, they have another merit of almost equal consequence. They shed an extraordinarily vivid light not only on the daily lives and habits of the Egyptians but on their characters and on their mental attributes and limitations. They enable us in some degree to realise what we may call the Egyptian point of view, and perhaps even to allocate to the Nile civilisation its approximate place among the civilisations of the world. This interpretative interest Egyptian art, and more particularly Egyptian architecture, possesses, and this interest Mr. Blomfield's aesthetic treatment of the subject tends inevitably to obscure.

Let us, to begin with, see what it is exactly that Mr. Blomfield finds in Egyptian aichitecture. He treats the subject in a chapter entitled " The Grand Manner," and in this chapter the Nile temples are coupled and equalled with the Doric temple of the Greeks in the degree and kind of aesthetic insight they exhibit. We know what the qualities are which the champions of the grand manner have always claimed for it ; they are the great classic qualities of unity, proportion and the subordination of the parts to the whole design. These are the merits Mr. Blomfield finds in the Egyptian style. He praises it for " the lessons it teaches of finely considered mass, and of the effect to be got by the simplest form of construction properly handled." He alludes to a "central idea" which "is never sacrificed to detail, but serenely maintains its sway, undisputed and irresistible." It is here that he finds the analogy between the Egyptian and Greek styles, ** this architectonic quality, this perfect instinct for organic design," being the attribute common to both. The same profound intellectual insight, according to Mr. Blomfield, directs the Egyptian artists in their elaboration of detail and application of ornament. " The carving is of admirable low relief, firm in outline and consummate in drawing, but reduced to the most abstract expression in modelling." He adds, what would seem a natural conclusion, that "such skill was only possible to artists steeped in an immemorial tradition of art, and intent on the expression of a great monumental theme." Finally, he concludes with the tribute, the highest attainable by the most intellectualised of the arts, that " not the least remarkable characteristic of Egyptian art is the stringent logic that governed it in every detail."

This is high praise, higher praise, so far as I know, than has ever yet been vouchsafed to the buildings of Egypt. At the same time it is definite praise. Mr. Blomfield does not admire Egyptian airchitecture for those vague picturesque effects which are common in the massive and archaic structures of primitive races» and which, as we feel, however striking in their way, are accidental rather than consciously thought out The grandeur of Karnak to Mr. Blomfield is not a bit the grandeur of Stonehenge. The Egyptian genius is made out to be as essentially intellectual as the Greek. Such phrases as "finely considered/' a "central idea/' forms "properly handled/' a faculty for "organic design/' a sense of "stringent logic/' and so on, conclusively prove — indeed it is the drift of the whole lecture — ^that in the author's estimation Egyptian artists grasped their purpose and foresaw results with clear, intellectual vision. Karnak is instanced as the Egyptian Parthenon. To the present writer, reflecting on Mr. Blomfield's praises of the building for clear-thoughted larticulation and knowledge of the effect to be produced, there cannot but recur the recollection of repeated visits once paid to this colossal shrine, visits which served to confirm a slow-grown suspicion that Egyptian art contained in truth nothing intellectual, that its massiveness was a triumph of matter over mind, and its power the power of blind routine. In place, however, of my own opinion let me quote on this point a remark or two from the criticism of a recognised and high authority.

Mr. Blomfield extols Karnak's grandiose simplicity, its carefully considered scheme and the cumulative effect of its halls and colonnades. He represents to our imagination — it belongs to his intellectual estimate of the style — a master intellect brooding over the whole design 6 and directing it all to the embodiment of a single idea. Herr Erman, on the contrary, observes that " the fact that the plans of the temples seem to us most complicated arises from the circumstance that they were not built from one design. Temples such as Luxor, or more particularly Karnak, owe the development of their plan to the many hands which have worked at them. Each king, fired with ambition to build, designed some new addition to the temple of the Theban Amon ; he wished his plan if possible to surpass any previous project, but it was granted to few to complete the work they had designed. Thothmes L erected his pylon at Karnak and thought thus to have completed the fa9ade for ever ; he also began, but never finished, those splendid buildings intended to meet this fa9ade, and to unite the great temple with the temple of Mut. Amenhotep III. spoilt this plan by adding another pylon in front, and the kings of the nineteenth dynasty went so far as to place their gigantic hypostyle hall before this latter pylon, so that the fa9ade of the eighteenth dynasty was left in the very centre of the temple ; a new pylon (the fourth), greater than any other, formed the entrance. Incredible as it may appear, the temple was not yet complete ; when Rameses III. built his little temple to the Theban gods, he placed it, in part, close in front of the facade of the great temple. Afterwards the Libyan princes felt it their duty to build an immense hall of pillars in front again, which, curiously enough, happened exactly to cross the temple of Rameses III. If we consider that at the same time similar additions were made to the back of the temple and to the interior, we gain a slight idea of the extreme confusion of the whole."

It is difficult to see how any ordered and cumulative e£Fect can result from such a chaos as this. Where there is no unity of intention there can be no unity of result.

Like all intensely materialistic races, the Egyptians were immensely impressed by mere bulk and extent. It was in the knowledge how to animate that bulk with an intellectual expression that they failed, and in this respect the most characteristic of all their productions is, no doubt, the pyramids. It would probably not be possible to find on the earth's surface buildings so vast yet so vacant of expression of any kind. They do not even express their own size, for the pyramidal or triangular outline carries the eye to its apex with such instant rapidity that the passage thereto seems no distance at all ; and so, though we tell ourselves that the Great Pyramid covers thirteen acres and is taller than the dome of St Peter's, though we walk round it and painfully climb up it, and impress by all means its bulk upon our minds, yet as an object of sight the building does not remain in the memory as of any considerable size. The idea of the pyramid suggests not greatness but a point, and is adequately represented by its image on a post card. If it leave a further impression on the mind, it must be one of wonder at the dullness, amounting, it would seem, to the atrophy of the intellectual faculties, which it indicates as characteristic of its builders. A uniform, solid triangle of masonry, mechanically accurate and utterly expressionless in its dead monotony, without any intelligible purpose, as is now admitted, save the stupid and ignoble one of hiding a wretched corpse within its bowels — ^that, I believe, is an architectural phenomenon absolutely without a parallel. It is true that the fine cutting and fitting of the masonry indicate qualities which have always been the basis, as it were, of great structural effects. But they have been a foundation only. Perfect masonry represents a skill of the hand which must be directed by thought to great designs, but which in the present case is not so directed.

It is important to remember, when we are considering Egyptian art, that there is a primitive simplicity as well as an intellectual simplicity. The pyramids are simple, more simple even than the temples ; but theirs is not the Greek simplicity. It does not arise from a keen perception of the significance of a structural principle and a resolve to extract from it its full emphasis and power, but merely denotes a mind barren of ideas and content with its barrenness. The Greeks discarded irrelevancies and conflicting theories, and reduced construction to its simplest law, because they realised that the great aesthetic effects of unity, symmetry and proportion depend, in the last resort, on singleness of structural idea. They selected the column and lintel as their structural idea, and worked out from it results in the way of unity, symmetry and proportion which they expressed with an intellectual subtlety and refinement never before or since equalled. But it is, of course, quite possible that the column-and-lintel principle should be adopted and persisted in for centuries, not from any perception of its aesthetic possibilities, but merely because it happens to be the most obvious of all means of construction. It was thus Egypt used it. The Egyptian builders remained faithful to their principle, but it never was, for them, a source of inspiration and thought ; nor did it ever occur to them apparently to develop the aesthetic possibilities latent within it. The distended and bloated-looking columns, the squat and stunted architraves of the Egyptian temples, are related by no law of proportion. They are forms which have not reached the state of development at which aesthetic expression becomes possible. The old sense of a fixed limitation, of an art held for ever in leading-strings, recurs again. The fine qualities Mr. Blomfield discerns in Egyptian architecture ought, indeed, to be there, for they are the proper fruit of the simple law of construction on which the style is based ; but, unfortunately, the capacity necessary to draw them out was lacking. The Egyptian simplicity is really not of the intellectual but of the primitive order. It is the effect not of clear thought but of absence of thought. If the Egyptians were well content to go on loading their bulky shafts with bulky architraves, it was not because they derived from the practice any kind of intellectual satisfaction, but because they were quite content to go without any such satisfaction. Under the dominion of an inflexible routine, incapable of initiation because incapable of thought, the Egyptian architects perpetuated for thousands of years a style which testifies convincingly to the low stage of intellectual development attained by the race.