Form and colour

Front matter

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BY

LISLE MARCH PHILLIPPS

Introduction

Knowledge comes to us in two ways : it comes to us by way of an inward, immediate vision, or instinct, as we call it, which perceives the end without perceiving the steps by which it is attained ; or it comes by way of the more matter-of-fact action of reason and of thought. In all ages the difference, even the rivalry and opposition between these two methods of perception, has been recognised. Mystics and rationalists distinguish between the emotional and intellectual standpoints, between the interior and the exterior vision, or, as is so often said, between " the things that are without and the things that are within." " Put away vain reason and the outward shows of things," cries the mystic, " and surrender yourself to the act of spiritual contemplation which has for its subject-matter the truths that endure." " Brush aside," cries the rationalist, " visions and dreams of an unknown state of being, and confine yourself to the aspects of this material universe, which is the only one of which you have, or are ever likely to have, experience." Thus the teachers of mankind, the mystic, the seer, the prophet, the ascetic on the one hand, and on the other the philosopher, the scholar, the man of science speak to the world. They have ever been so much opposed that the success of one side has been measured in the loss of the other, and for mystical progress it was as essential to surrender material interests and the faculties of the mind which take charge of those interests, as for proficiency in science and mundane knowledge it was necessary to abjure abstract spiritual contemplation.

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This dualism has always, I say, existed in life, and since art is an expression of life, and is governed and controlled by life's emotions and ideas, we can but expect that so marked a distinction in life will reflect itself in a corresponding distinction in art. That expectation is verified. The true main elements in art are form and colour. Of these form, in its essence, is a process of definition which lends itself spontaneously to the operations of intellect, while colour, in its essence and divorced from form, is the natural medium in which sensuous and emotional, as distinct from rational, impulses express themselves. Thus the essential division of the human mind into intellectual and emotional is mirrored in art's similar division into form and colour.

In this way have these two vehicles been used in the past. Form has dominated art whenever and wherever the intellectual faculty was dominant in life ; colour has dominated art whenever and wherever the emotional faculty has dominated life. Thus, by the traces they have left in art, the two great currents of ideas which have illumined the mind and spirit of man may be traced in their ebb and flow and in their interaction upon each other.

Moreover, it appears that not only is the mind of man divided into intellectual and spiritual faculties, and not only is art divided into the corresponding elements of form and colour, but the actual universe itself has come to share in this arrangement and be subject to a similar division. Every spiritual impulse which has quickened the soul of man has come out of the East just as every practical invention or intellectual conception has come out of the West. Mysticism is as commonplace an affair in Eastern life as science is in Western. Form, therefore, is the art idiom of the West, colour the art idiom of the East.

It has been attempted ir the following pages, not only to show how all the great colour schools, such as the Byzantine style of architecture, the splendour of Gothic interiors, the suffused richness of Venetian painting, have been

INTRODUCTION xi

derived directly from Eastern sources of influence, and in the same way how all the triumphs of form are strictly of Western origin, but also that each element in art is an outward manifestation of its own order of ideas, and when it appears in art only does so because its own order of ideas has previously appeared in life.

I would, in short, map out the past to the reader's eye as dominated by the play of the spiritual and rational faculties. I would show him the mystical faculty of inward vision — impatient of outward claims, silencing intellectual interference, intent and absorbed in contemplation— out of its home in the East darting Westward its rays of emotion and colour ; and I would show him the intellectual faculty, reliant on the aspects of things and devoted to material definitions, invading the East, now and again, with its well-equipped forces of definite facts and forms. Only I would show him these things, not as philosophical vague arguments, but as made visible and strikingly apparent in terms of* art. As on a war map red or blue flags, advancing and retreating, register the conquests or defeats of their respective armies, so the movements of art in the past, crystallising into form or dissolving into colour, register the rise and decline of the two great orders of ideas to which humanity owes its enlightenment.

The value of such a testimony lies in the sense of intelligibility it carries with it. The past history of mankind is vague and in some measure incomprehensible. The whence and whither of the human lot is doubtful. By what forces are we moved, and by what invisible currents of racial instinct are we hurried along ? Is there anywhere an order in this chaos ?

Wordsworth speaks of moments of serenity and insight occurring in the midst of all this perplexity ; he speaks of 'a " serene and blessed mood,"

In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened.

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Nature and the contemplation of Nature are the sources for Wordsworth of this enlightenment. But art is such a source also. Art in its record preserves the sense of proportion and significance. Whims, fantasies, the experiments of a day leave no permanent artistic impression behind them. Only the master-impulses, the thoughts shared by whole races survive. These survive, stript of all obscuring irrelevancies, in their naked power. So that looking back, under art's guidance, we see humanity, not blindly fluctuating to and fro, but moving under the banners of great ideas in motions related to each other and governed by a purpose.

We are all one family. We are something, not out of our own thought and experience, but out of the thought and experience of past generations. What, then, was that thought and experience ? What did it amount to ? What is the message which the past sends on to the present ? It is recorded in art. The best of Greek thought is recorded in the columns and architraves of a Doric temple. We must find room for that. The best of Hindu thought is recorded in the apses and domes of a Byzantine interior. We must find room for that. Matthew Arnold used to say that the great thing was to possess the best ideas going ; but it is perhaps even more important to possess the best ideas not going. Ideas that are in the air can be trusted to take care of themselves. It is the ideas we have got out of touch with, the ideas we can no longer handle because of the atrophy in ourselves of the faculty which deals with them — it is these we need to exert ourselves to recapture.

The usual biblical phrase for the curing of the sick is that they were " made whole." The sick man, that is to say, was thought of as incomplete, as only part of a man, whereas the healthy man was whole or complete. What is true of the body is usually more or less true of the mind. Mental sickness is apt to be a kind of lopsidedness due to the development of certain faculties at the expense of others. The sources from which joy

INTRODUCTION xiii

and insight are derived by one age may be perhaps sealed up entirely for another. The East, developing its spiritual mysticism with concentrated fervour, ignored with equal completeness the claims and gifts of the intellect. The West, cultivating under Greek auspices the fruits of intellect, had scarcely a thought to spare for spiritual insight.

But the main characteristic of modern life is the world-wide scope and breadth of its knowledge, its research, its appreciation. We cannot ever again concentrate exclusively on a life or an art entirely spiritual or entirely intellectual. The necessity is forced upon us, by our outlook, our point of view, our whole culture, of being " whole " in a new sense, whole, that is to say, not in the sense of being wholly devoted to the things of the soul or of the mind, but as including both these in our estimate of a whole man.

In this necessity of ours art is our best aid. Whatever is dropped out of account in to-day's estimate, art survives to correct our reckoning. This is the great advocate which testifies to all the sources from which the mind of man has derived light and pleads for the disinterested use of all the human faculties. Weighing its testimony we enter into the meaning of thoughts which have been the stay of ages ; sides of our nature long disused are quickened ; we shake ourselves free from the paralysing conventions and limitations of contemporary thought, and in the recognition of what is permanent we obtain release from that worst of all tyrannies, the tyranny of the ephemeral.

I have divided my subject into three parts ; the first dealing with the East, the second with the classical epoch, and the third with Christian Europe, these being, as it seems to me, the most significant eras into which life and art can be divided. In each case a preliminary chapter deals with the point of view and outlook of the epoch afterwards to be described in terms of art. Thus the first part (after a chapter on Nature, which may seem xiv FORM AND COLOUR

an irrelevance, but which is really not so) opens with a sketch of India's spiritual philosophy, and briefly indicates the extent to which that central thought has monopolised the attention of the Indian mind, to the entire exclusion of intellectual culture. This bias of the Indian mind imposes certain limitations on Indian life and civilisation, and indeed on the life and civilisation of the East as a whole, for the whole East has largely taken the ply from India, and in the following chapters this effect on the life and civilisation of the East is examined in its consequences upon art. That is to say, Eastern art is used as the interpreter of Eastern life.

In the same way with the classic section ; the first chapter describes the exclusively intellectual bias of that period, the kind of life that was led, its successful developments and no less marked limitations, and the chapters which follow endeavour to point out how and in what manner both the noble qualities and the deficiencies of the Greek temperament are visibly incarnated in the characteristics of Greek art.

These two first parts, being naturally contrasted, are easy to deal with. The third is more difficult. I have endeavoured in the first chapter of this section to show that, from the Christianised age on, the attempt of the West constantly was to unite and combine the spiritual and intellectual motives which had hitherto been cultivated separately, and under conditions which seemed to show that they were deemed irreconcilable. It is during the mediaeval period that the reconciliation and equai development of these two ideals is first apparent. Mediaeval life is remarkable, on the one hand, for its strong, practical realisation of mundane interests and keen and virile interest in mundane affairs, and, on the other hand, for the speculative fervour with which it surrendered itself to spiritual contemplation, and its evident sensitiveness to that kind of inward felicity. From that date on, whatever fluctuations to one side or the other may have occurred, it has always been apparent that no ultimate

INTRODUCTION xv

contentment was to be achieved which left out of account either of the two great preceding developments of the human intelligence. Christian art, during and since the mediaeval epoch, has been and is, I think, chiefly significant by reason of its unremitting experiments in the reconciliation of these hitherto opposed ideals.

Briefly, then, the aim of what I have written is to treat art as a language of which the two main dialects are form and colour, and in this way, by the examination of its really perfectly intelligible records, to add the testimony of art to such evidences of the characters and motives of man as we already possess. The reader who happens to be acquainted with a former book of mine, The Works of Man, may observe a resemblance between that and the present one. At the time the earlier book was written I had not fully grasped the range of the ideas with which I was dealing, and I was content to treat styles of art as merely characteristic of their own epochs and races. However, the earlier standpoint leads naturally to the later, so much so that the chapters of The Works of Man fall into their place, and may be read as amplifications of the present volume.

Some of the material, amounting to about four or five chapters, of the following pages has appeared in the Contemporary and Edinburgh Reviews. I am much obliged to the editors of those periodicals for allowing me to make the present use of it.

LISLE MARCH PHILLIPPS.

Chapter I

Those scenes in Nature in which the quality of form most predominates tend to stimulate an intellectual mood ; those scenes in which colour predominates stimulate an emotional mood.

My object in this chapter is a simple one. I wish to point out that the arguments we shall by and by apply to art apply also to Nature, and are borne out and verified, so to speak, by the views and landscapes we see around us. Such testimony is important, because laws which are laws of art only, which have been evolved in the studio or formulated by critics but have no general application, are of very doubtful authenticity and value compared to those which can be shown to form part of the universal scheme of Nature. In the present book we are dealing with form and colour, elements common to Nature and to art, and we shall presently perhaps be able to show that, as regards art, form is the expressive vehicle for intellectual impressions and colour the expressive vehicle for emotional impressions. But there is nothing exclusively artistic or aesthetic in these propositions. They hold just as good of all natural sights and objects as they do of pictures and sculpture, and the reader can verify them as well in a country walk as in visits to museums. We shall find, if we consult Nature, that, in her operations, too, colour is emotional and form intellectual ; and more than that we shall find that, in ringing the changes on these motives, Nature relies on

i B just the same agencies as Art does. For instance, we shall find that scenes in Nature which most deeply strike the emotional chord in us are scenes.in which colour is controlled by chiaroscuro rather than by shape and outline, whereas those scenes which are most evidently intellectual are scenes in which colour is controlled by shape and outline rather than by chiaroscuro. Step by step, as colour passes under the dominion of light and shade or under the dominion of individual objects, an emotional or intellectual value will be found to attach to it. That, we shall find, is the rule in Nature ; and by and by, when we discover that precisely the same rule holds good in art, we shall regard it with the more respect for having remarked that it was a law of Nature before it was a law of art.

Let us, then, with this testimony in view, essay a brief analysis of one or two samples of scenery. Along the south Devon coast the cliffs often descend abruptly into the sea, and as we round the promontories each bay reveals its cluster of cottages, its boats on the shingle, and old grey quay, the whole being secluded by the capes east and west which hold the hamlet in their embrace, and endow it with the distinction of isolation. If the reader will imagine himself to be looking at such a scene he will perceive that the definite character of its objects awaken a like mood of definite observation in himself. The cottages, the grove of masts in the harbour, the white gulls wheeling above them, the outspread nets on the beach, these and a hundred other items are distinct features with a meaning and associations belonging to them. They have much to communicate with regard to the life and character of the community. They are things to notice and think about, and their appearance naturally tends to awaken in the mind a correspondingly observant mood. In a word, the forms of cottage, boat, gull, and the rest of them stimulate that kind of reasoning comprehension which we call intellectual. But if, as the boat drifts under the shadow of the cliff, he leans over the side and gazes down into the depths of water till they absorb his vision, the reader will be aware immediately of a change of mind within himself, a change of mind corresponding to the change of view presented to his vision. The transition from exterior to interior, from looking at to looking into, will constitute a change not in outward point of view only, but in his own mood. In the transition one set of faculties, the faculties which recognise, distinguish, and reason upon the doings and appearances of Nature, are laid to rest, and another set of faculties, the faculties which apprehend the mystery of the universe and readily respond to spiritual promptings, are awakened and stimulated.

Further, he will perceive that, though the mood of pure feeling — of sensation as distinct from thought — in which he is now wrapt, resents the intrusion of definite forms, that is, definite ideas, yet it answers instantly to suggestions of colour. If clouds pass over the sun and the depths turn cold and grey, his own emotions contract to the same bleakness. If the rays shine out and those depths are illuminated with colour, his mood dilates in proportion, and he is aware of an intensified spiritual consciousness.

Here, then, are two scenes in immediate juxtaposition. In the one the quality of form predominates. A number of distinct, recognisable objects are set out in view, suggesting ideas, as definite as themselves. The whole scene exudes ideas, and naturally the mood of the onlooker responds to the stimulus, and his intellectual faculties of recognition and observation are kept active and alert. In the second scene, on the contrary, forms cease to exist, and with them dies mental activity. But the very absence of recognisable objects opens the way for a mood of enhanced spiritual sensibility, which, too, has its own machinery, and, as it passes from the intellectual to the emotional phase, is played upon not by notes of form but by notes of colour.

The distinction we have noted is a universal one. Form is always, in all circumstances of art or Nature, intellectual in its essence. It speaks directly to the understanding. Moreover, in consequence of its intellectual nature, it appeals most strongly to intellectual races and periods. It is strong whenever and wherever intellect is developed, and weak whenever and wherever intellect is undeveloped. If the sense for form has always prevailed in the West, it is because the West has particularly relied upon and cultivated the intellectual faculty. Further, in the West it has prevailed most and achieved its finest successes when the intellectual stimulus behind it was freshest and most vital, as in classic Greece and Renaissance Italy. On the other hand, colour, being emotional in its essence, has always appealed most strongly to emotional races. Thus the colour sense is indigenous to the East because the East has always relied upon the emotional faculty, the faculty of passive intuition as opposed to active thought. If the reader will recall the scenes just described, he will follow the transition as a matter of personal experience. While gazing at the boats, cottages, and trees of the coast he belonged to the West. His material was the material out of which Western science and creative art have wrought their triumphs, and which has given to our Western ideas their practical bias. But when he detached himself from that view to immerse his attention in the depths of ocean, he abandoned the Western standpoint for the Eastern. He became a seer, a fakir, a yogi. The spiritual consciousness which . suffused his being is the only mode of apprehension which the East recognises ; and it was attained in the same way, by the renunciation of the things of sense. In turning his eyes from outward appearances to inward depths he is obeying the Eastern counsel which lies at the root of asceticism in all ages, and the enhanced spirituaj consciousness which he feels stealing over hirn is a taste of the identical emotional ecstasy for the sake of which so many austerities have been patiently sustained.

Let me biing these arguments to yet one further test. A beech- wood in autumn, at a time when the leaves have turned yellow but are sft'M thick on the trees, may be cited as the most profoundly emotional and sensuous effect in English scenery. Near a certain house in Dorsetshire such a grove exists, formed of towering trees, the branches of which, meeting and mixing above, enclose the interior of the wood with vaults of leaves, while the space beneath is darkened and at the same time indescribably enriched by the tints of the foliage through which the light filters.

Of the emotional character of such a scene there can be no question, but the author was recently the witness of an incident which, though trifling, may, as a proof of the influence of such scenery, be worth describing. It happened that a child was disporting itself on the lawn adjoining the beech-grove already mentioned, plucking flowers, helping the gardener, chasing butterflies, and accompanying its manoeuvres with a lively chatter as now one thing now another attracted its attention. Presently it entered the grove to join the present writer, but no sooner had it done so than a striking change was visible in its whole manner and bearing. Advancing into the interior of the wood, among the mottled shadows and beams of light, it paused and looked up and became as it were absorbed in, or rather by, its surroundings. In silence, with wide eyes and parted lips, it seemed to surrender itself to the current of feeling which possessed these glades, and when at last it turned to the writer it was with eyes dilated and with an expression as wrapt and abstracted as though it had seen a vision. Such an experience to be sure is no more than common, but, happening to be thinking of the nature of the feeling here present, to see its effect thus suddenly exerted on the unconsciously receptive temperament of a child startled the author almost as though he had for an instant surprised the geniu^Joci in visible aspect. A spirit seemed to inhabit these precincts, so immanent, so almost palpable to human sense, as to call to mind the famous sentence of Bright, " You can almost hear the beating of its wings." (

In the depths of the wood as in the depths of the sea the spirit of emotion may equally reside. Nay, it may reside in much smaller compass. The effect of infinity it conveys is independent of actual extent. An object as tiny as a jewel will possess it, while a view embracing an area of miles will not possess it. It may be that the reason for the mystical and magical properties ascribed to gems and crystals, and the part they have always played in divination and the occult sciences, is due to the fact that they achieve, within their tiny circuit, perfect space obliteration. They possess the power of absorbing vision, and the world and its claims are forgotten by whoever gazes into them. In short, they are themselves facsimiles and small replicas of the emotional mood which is concerned, not with exact ideas, but with the consciousness of being. Their depths are depths of the soul, and whoever looks long into them feels the beginnings of hypnotic suggestion stirred by the presentment of an image of the infinite. Yet they may be carried in the fingers. These phenomena are, however, familiar to all. That the reader is aware of the mood we are concerned with may be taken for granted. Let us go on, then, to ask the further question — What is there in the disposition and arrangement of our autumn mood that can account for the kind of influence it exercises ? What are the emotional factors that are at work in it ?

In the first place it is very noticeable that the colour here present appears to be used almost independently of form. Forms actually convey it, of course, but it does not express their shape and dimensions. No forms are visible. The leaves under foot, bronze, brown, grey, are not leaves but rather the blended stitches of a carpet, as soft and dim as some old Persian mosque carpet. So, too, the multitude of leaves of the roof have no individual existence, but, like the leaves of the carpet, are inextricably mingled together. Even in the intermediate spaces betwixt roof and floor, where the great columns of trunks stand by which the whole fabric is supported, no sharp delineations of form occur. The trunks in the deep shade suggest themselves but dimly, like shapes seen through deep water. Their colour is of the kind which melts readily into the surrounding shadows, and in the obscurity in which the lower depths of the wood are shrouded they seem content to efface themselves. >

We allow ourselves sometimes to be taken in by mere statements of fact. Colour cannot exist, we say, apart from substance ; it must colour something. Neither can substance exist, at least visibly, apart from colour. The two, therefore, are inseparable, and to talk of either existing without the other is fallacious. But we have to do with things, not as they are, but as they appear to be, as the eye sees them, for it is thus that they affect the mind. And as a matter of appearance form and colour are separable and even adverse influences. They are taking part in a struggle all over the landscape, and are adversaries in every view we look at. Sometimes form predominates, that is to say, it gets colour into its power and forces it to articulate, forces it to say tree, or gate, or cow, or what not, and of course the mind of the observer is immediately impressed by all the ideas that trees and cows and gates stand for. Sometimes, on the contrary, forms are indistinctly rendered, and among the blending of many objects and the shuffled lights and shades the effect often produced is merely of a variety of tints. One may conceive, in short, of the visible universe as a film suspended before the eyes, of which the colours now have a tendency to adopt decisive outlines and definite shapes, and now again tend to run into each other and mingle in rich suffusions of their own. These are the two rival tendencies which stimulate intellectual or emotional consciousness, and it is in fact in this way that colour is always used, not only in Nature but in art, the intellectual school using it to define form and the emotional school using it for its own sake.

If the reader would test this a little further, let him walk on a few steps to the verge of the beech-grove, where, through low gaps between trunks and under branches — gaps which may be called the doors and windows of the wood — he can obtain glimpses of the view without, of distant hillsides with fields chequered on them, and solid hedgerow elms, and the tiled roofs of a farm with clustering out-buildings. | Here is a scene completely governed by form and the ideas which forms convey. But a moment ago we were steeped in an emotion voiceless but absorbing. Yet while emotion was thus stirred our mind was quiescent, for no clear shapes, or objects capable of rousing distinct ideas, were present to excite its attention. Those gorgeous yet grave tints, that coloured twilight in which we were immersed, as they delineated no recognisable forms, so they suggested no definite thoughts. And our own mood, emotional yet inarticulate, was of a like nature. We had no language for our feelings, for language is itself a kind of form, or act of definition stimulated by the presence of form, and here form was not. But now that our glance finds the outlets along the margin of the grove, and looks out upon the slopes of hill and objects depicted upon them, how swiftly does our mood change ! <The colour of the scene before us is now descriptive colour. It talks, it explains. It is the turn now of 'definite ideas to take the place of indefinite emotions. The square church tower, the just reaped stubble field with the team and plough already at work furrowing its gold to black, the line of new-thatched ricks along the hedge, the cattle drowsing in the shade, now swinging a tail, now flicking an ear, the glimpse of the manor-house half hidden in trees : — these and scores of other details the eye seizes with instant recognition. Each object is known for what it is, and arouses the ideas and associations proper to it. The mind awakens, and the spectator becomes a different man. Unconscious an instant ago of the very existence of material things, he is now, with the recognition of those objects, church, cow, tree, and the rest of them, the creature of his own time and place once more. The English life, the gentle, implacable routine of its ideas and habits, its religious teaching, its social distinctions, its agricultural processes, is outspread before him. This it is, this life of practical ideas and definite duties, which now absorbs the onlooker and makes him, as he looks, part of itself. And this it does, not as the rich hues of the wood did, by setting up an interchange of emotional suggestions, but by setting up, through the instrumentality of form, an interchange of intellectual suggestions.