WHAT IS ART?
Philosophy of Power ^ 1897, by Ragnar Redbeard, Chicago.” The substance of this book, as it is expressed in the editor’s preface, is that to measure goodness by the false philosophy of the Hebrew prophets and “ Aveepful ” Messiahs is mad- ness. Right is not the offspring of doctrine but of power. All laws, commandments, or doctrines as to not doing to another what you do not wish done to you, have no inherent authority whatever, but receive it only from the club, the gallows, and the sword. A man truly free is under no obligation to obey any injunction, human or divine. Obedience is the sign of the degenerate. Dis- obedience is the stamp of a hero. Men should not be bound by the moral rules invented by their foes. The whole world is a slippery battlefield. Ideal justice demands that the defeated should be exploited, emasculated, and scorned. The free and brave may seize the world. And, therefore, there should be eternal war for life, for land, for love, for women, for power, and for gold. The earth and its treasures is “booty for the bold.” (Something similar was said a few years ago by the celebrated and refined academician, Yogiie.)
The author has evidently by himself, independently of Nietzsche, come to the same conclusions which are professed by the new artists.
Expressed in the form of a doctrine these positions startle us. In reality they are implied in the ideal of art serving beauty. The art of our upper classes has educated people in this ideal of the over-man,^ — which is, in reality, the old ideal of Nero, Stenka Razin,^ Genghis Khan, Robert ^ The over-man (Uebermenscli), in the Nictzschean philosophy, is that superior type of man wliom the straggle for existence is to evolve, and who will seek only his own power and pleasure, will know nothing of pity, and will have the right, because he will possess the power, to make ordinary people serve him. — Trans.
2 Stenka Razin was by origin a common Cossack. His brother was WHAT IS ART?
i8j Macaire/ or JSTapoleon, and all their accomplices, assist- ants, and adulators — and it supports this ideal with all its might.
It is this supplanting of the ideal of what is right by the ideal of what is beautiful, i.e. of what is pleasant, that is the fourth consequence, and a terrible one, of the perversion of art in our society. It is fearful to think of what would befall humanity were such art to spread among the masses of the people. And it already begins to spread.
Finally, the fifth and chief result is, that the art which flourishes in the upper classes of European society has a directly vitiating influence, infecting people with the worst feelings and with those most harmful to humanity — supersti- tion, patriotism, and, above all, sensuality.
Look parefully into the causes of the ignorance of the masses, and you may see that the chief cause does not at all lie in the lack of schools and libraries, as we are accustomed to suppose, but in those superstitions, both ecclesiastical and patriotic, with which the people are saturated, and which are unceasingly generated by all the methods of art. Church superstitions are supported and produced by the hung for a breach of military discipline, and to this event Stenka Kazin’s hatred of the governing classes has been attributed. He formed a robber band, and 'subsequently headed a formidable re- bellion, declaring himself in favour of freedom for the serfs, religious toleration, and the abolition of taxes. Like the Government he opposed, he relied on force, and, though he used it largely in defence of the poor against the rich, he still held to “ The good old rule, the simple plan.
That they should take who have the power.
And they should keep who can.”
Like Robin Hood he is favourably treated in popular legends. — Trans.
^ Robert Macaire is a modern type of adroit and audacious rascality. He was the hero of a popular play produced in Paris in 1834. — Trans.
ТѴШТ IS ART?
poetry of prayers, hymns, painting, by the sculpture of images and of statues, by singing, by organs, by music, by architecture, and even by dramatic art in religious ceremonies. Patriotic superstitions are supported and produced by verses and stories, which are supplied even in schools, by music, by songs, by triumphal processions, by royal meetings, by martial pictures, and by monuments.
Were it not for this continual activity in all departments of art, perpetuating the ecclesiastical and patriotic intoxica- tion and embitterment of the people, the masses would long ere this have attained to true enlightenment.
But it is not only in Church matters and patriotic matters that art depraves; it is art in our time that serves as the chief cause of the perversion of people in the most important question of social life — in their sexual relations. We nearly all know by our own experience, and those who are fathers and mothers know in the case of their grown-up children also, what fearful mental and physical suffering, what useless waste of strength, people suffer merely as a consequence of dissoluteness in sexual desire.
Since the world began, since the Trojan war, which sprang from that same sexual dissoluteness, down to and including the suicides and murders of lovers described in almost every newspaper, a great proportion of the sufferings of the human race have come from this source.
And what is art doing? All art, real and counterfeit, with very few exceptions, is devoted to describing, depicting, and inflaming sexual love in every shape and form. When one remembers all those novels and their lust-kindling descrip- tions of love, from the most refined to the grossest, with which the literature of our society overflows; if one only remembers all those pictures and statues representing women’s naked bodies, and all sorts of abominations which are reproduced in illustrations and advertisements; if one only remembers all the filthy operas and operettas, songs WHAT IS ART?
and romances with, which our world teems, involuntarily it seems as if existing art had hut one definite aim — to disseminate vice as widely as possible.
Such, though not all, are the most direct consequences of that perversion of art which has occurred in our society. So that, what in our society is called art not only does not conduce to the progress of mankind, but, more than almost anything else, hinders the attainment of goodness in our lives.
And therefore the question which involuntarily presents itself to every man free from artistic activity and therefore not bound to existing art by self-interest, the question asked by me at the beginning of this work: Is it just that to what we call art, to a something belonging to but a small section of society, should be offered up such sacrifices of human labour, of human lives, and of goodness as are now being offered up 1 receives the natural reply: No; it is un- just, and these things should not be! So also replies sound sense and unperverted moral feeling. Not only should these things not be, not only should no sacrifices be offered up to what among us is called art, but, on the contrary, the efforts of those who wish to live rightly should be directed towards the destruction of this art, for it is one of the most cruel of the evils that harass our section of humanity. So that, were the question put: Would it be preferable for our Christian world to be deprived of all that is now esteemed to be art, and, together with the false, to lose all that is good in if? I think that every reasonable and moral man would again decide the question as Plato decided it for his Republic^ and as all the Church Christian and Mahommedan teachers of mankind decided it, i.e. would say, “Rather let there be no art at all than continue the depraving art, or simulation of art, which now exists.” Happily, no one has to face this question, and no one need adopt either solution. All that man can do, and WHAT IS ART?
that we — the so-called educated people, who are so placed that we have the possibility of understanding the meaning of the phenomena of our life — can and should do, is to understand the error we are involved in, and not harden our hearts in it hut seek for a way of escape.
CHAPTER ХУШ The cause of the lie into which the art of our society has fallen was that people of the upper classes, having ceased to believe in the Church teaching (called Christian), did not resolve to accept true Christian teaching in its real and fundamental principles of sonship to God and brotherhood to man, hut continued to live on without any belief, en- deavouring to make up for the absence of belief — some by hypocrisy, pretending still to believe in the nonsense of the Church creeds; others by boldly asserting their disbelief; others by refined agnosticism; and others, again, by return- ing to the Greek worship of beauty, proclaiming egotism to be right, and elevating it to the rank of a religious doctrine.
The cause of the malady was the non-acceptance of Christ’s teaching in its real, г.е, its full, meaning. And the only cure for the illness lies in acknowledging that teaching in its full meaning. And such acknowledgment in our time is not only possible but inevitable. Already to-day a man, standing on the height of the knowledge of our age, whether he be nominally a Catholic or a Protestant, cannot say that he really believes in the dogmas of the Church: in God being a Trinity, in Christ being God, in the scheme of redemption, and so forth; nor can he satisfy himself by pro- claiming his unbelief or scepticism, nor by relapsing into the worship of beauty and egotism. Above all, he can no longer say that we do xiot know the real meaning of Christ’s teaching. That meaning has not only become accessible to all men of our times, but the whole life of man to-day is WHAT IS ART?
permeated by the spirit of that teaching, and, consciously or unconsciously, is guided by it.
However differently in form people belonging to our Christian world may define the destiny of man; whether they see it in human progress in whatever sense of the words, in the union of all men in a socialistic realm, or in the establishment of a commune; whether they look forward to the union of mankind under the guidance of one universal Church, or to the federation of the world, — however various in form their definitions of the destination of human life may be, all men in our times already admit that the highest well-being attainable by men is to be reached by their union with one another.
However people of our upper classes (feeling that their ascendency can only be maintained as long as they separate themselves — the rich and learned — from the labourers, the poor, and the unlearned) may seek to devise new conceptions of life by which their privileges may be perpetuated, — now the ideal of returning to antiquity, now mysticism, now Hellenism, now the cult of the superior person (over- man-ism),— they have, willingly or unwillingly, to admit the truth which is elucidating itself from all sides, voluntarily and involuntarily, namely, that our welfare lies only in the unification and the brotherhood of man.
Unconsciously this truth is confirmed by the construction of means of communication, — telegraphs, telephones, the press, and the ever-increasing attainability of material well-being for everyone, — and consciously it is affirmed by the destruction of superstitions which divide men, by the diffusion of the truths of knowledge, and by the expression of the ideal of the brotherhood of man in the best works of art of our time.
Art is a spiritual organ of human life which cannot be destroyed, and therefore, notwithstanding all the efforts made by people of the upper classes to conceal the religious ideal by which humanity lives, that ideal is more and more WHAT IS ART?
clearly recognised by man, and even in our perverted society is more and more often partially expressed by science and by art. During the present century works of the higher kind of religious art have appeared more and more fre- quently, both in literature and in painting, permeated by a truly Christian spirit, as also works of the universal art of common life, accessible to all. So that even art knows the true ideal of our times, and tends towards it. On the one hand, the best works of art of our times transmit religious feelings urging towards the union and the brother- hood of man (such are the works of Dickens, Hugo, Dostoievsky; and in painting, of Millet, Bastien Lepage, Jules Breton, L’Hermitte, and others); on the other hand, they strive towards the transmission, not of feelings which are natural to people of the upper classes only, but of such feelings as may unite everyone without exception. There are as yet few such works, but the need of them is already acknowledged. In recent times we also meet more and more frequently with attempts at publications, pictures, concerts, and theatres for the people. All this is still very far from accomplishing what should be done, but already the direction in which good art instinctively presses forward to regain the path natural to it can be discerned.
The religiou^^peififiptipS of our time — which consists in acknowledging that the aim of life (both collective and individual) is the union of mankind — is already so suffi- ciently distinct that people have now only to reject the false theory of beauty, according to which enjoyment is considered to be the purpose of art, and religious perception will naturally takes its place as the guide of the art of our time.
And as soon as the religious perception, which already unconsciously directs the life of man, is consciously acknow- ledged, then immediately and naturally the division of art, into art for the lower and art for the upper classes, will disappear. There will be one common, brotherly.
WffAT IS ART?
universal art; and first, that art will naturally be rejected which transmits feelings incompatible with the religious perception of our time, — feelings which do not unite, hut divide men, — and then that insignificant, exclusive art лѵіИ he rejected to which an importance is now attached to which it has no right.
And as soon as this occurs, art will immediately cease to he, what it has been in recent times: a means of making people coarser and more vicious, and it will become, Avhat it always used to be and should he, a means by which humanity progresses towards unity and blessedness.
Strange as the comparison may sound, what has happened to the art of our circle and time is what happens to a лѵотап who sells her womanly attractiveness, intended for maternity, for the pleasure of those who desire such pleasures.
The art of our time and of our circle has become a pros- titute. And this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her it is not limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned, like her it is always saleable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous.
A real work of art can only arise in the soul of an artist occasionally, as the fruit of the life he has lived, just as a child is conceived by its mother. But counterfeit art is produced by artisans and handicraftsmen continually, if only consumers can be found.
Eeal art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out.
The cause of the production of real art is the artist’s inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain.
The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife’s love is the birth of a new man into life.
WIfAT IS ART?
The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man’s spiritual strength.
And this is what people of our day and of our circle should understand, in order to avoid the filthy torrent of depraved and prostituted art with which we are deluged.
CHAPTEE XIX People talk of the art of the future, meaning by “ art of the future ” some especially refined, new art, which, as they imagine, will be developed out of that exclusive art of one class which is now considered the highest art. But no such new art of the future can or will he found. Our exclusive art, that of the upper classes of Christendom, has found its way into a blind alley. The direction in which it has been going leads nowhere. Having once let go of that which is most essential for art (namely, the guidance given by religious perception), that art has become ever more and more exclusive, and therefore ever more and more perverted, until, finally, it has come to nothing. The art of the future, that which is really coming, will not he a development of present-day art, but will arise on completely other and new foundations, having nothing in common with those by which our present art of the upper classes is guided.
Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as will be chosen from among all the art diffused among man- kind, will consist, not in transmitting feelings accessible only to members of the rich classes, as is the case to-day, hut in transmitting such feelings as embody the highest religious perception of our times. Only those productions will be considered art which transmit feelings drawing men together ill brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can unite all men. Only such art will be chosen, tolerated, approved, and diffused. But art transmitting feelings flowing from anti- quated, worn-out religious teaching, — Church art, patriotic art, WJIAT IS ART?
WJIAT IS ART?
voluptuous art, transmitting feelings of superstitious fear, of pride, of vanity, of ecstatic admiration of national heroes,— art exciting exclusive love of one’s own people, or sensuality, will be considered bad, harmful art, and will be censured and despised by public opinion. All the rest of art, transmitting feelings accessible only to a section of people, will be con- sidered unimportant, and will be neither blamed nor praised. And the appraisement of art in general will devolve, not, as is now the case, on a separate class of rich people, but on the whole people; so that for a work to be esteemed good, and to be approved of and diffused, it will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people living in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it w'ill have to satisfy the demands of all those great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life.
And the artists producing art will also not be, as now, merely a few people selected from a small section of the nation, members of the upper classes or their hangers-on, but will consist of all those gifted members of the whole people who prove capable of, and are inclined towards, artistic activity.
Artistic activity will then be accessible to all men. It will become accessible to the whole people, because, in the first place, in the art of the future, not only will that complex technique, which deforms the productions of the art of to-day and requires so great an effort and expenditure of time, not be demanded, but, on the contrary, the demand will be for clearness, simplicity, and brevity — conditions mastered not by mechanical exercises but by the education of taste. And secondly, artistic activity will become accessible to all men of the people because, instead of the present professional schools which only some can enter, all will learn music and depictive art (singing and drawing) equally with letters in the elementary schools, and in such a way that every man, having received the first principles of draw- 13 WHAT IS ART?
ing and music, and feeling a capacity for, and a call to, one or other of the arts, will be able to perfect himself in it.
People think that if there are no special art-schools the technique of art will deteriorate. Undoubtedly, if by technique we understand those complications of art which are now considered an excellence, it will deteriorate; but if by technique is understood clearness, beauty, simplicity, and compression in works of art, then, even if the elements of drawing and music were not to be taught in the national schools, the technique will not only not deteriorate, but, as is shown by all peasant art, will be a hundred times better. It will be improved, because all the artists of genius now hidden among the masses will become pro- ducers of art and will give models of excellence, which (as has always been the case) will be the best schools of technique for their successors. For every true artist, even now, learns his technique, chiefly, not in the schools but in life, from the examples of the great masters; then — when the producers of art will be the best artists of the whole nation, and there will be more such examples, and they will be more accessible — such part of the school training as the future artist will lose will be a hundredfold compen- sated for by the training he will receive from the numerous examples of good art diffused in society.
Such will be one difference between present and future art. Another difference will be that art will not be pro- duced by professional artists receiving payment for their work and engaged on nothing else besides their art. The art of the future will be produced by all the members of the community who feel the need of such activity, but they will occupy themselves with art only when they feel such need.
In our society people think that an artist will work better, and produce more, if he has a secured maintenance. And this opinion would serve once more to show clearly.
WBAT IS ART?
It will consist, not in the expression of exclusive feel- ings: pride, spleen, satiety, and all possible forms of volup- tuousness, available and interesting only to people who, by force, have freed themselves from the labour natural to human beings; but it will consist in the expression of feel- ings experienced by a man living the life natural to all men and flowing from the religious perception of our times, or of such feelings as are open to all men without exception.
To people of our circle who do not know, and cannot or will not understand the feelings Avhich will form the subject- matter of the art of the future, such subject-matter appears very poor in comparison with those subtleties of exclusive art with which they are now occupied. “What is there fresh to be said in the sphere of the Christian feeling of love of one’s fellow-man? The feelings common to everyone are so insigniflcant and monotonous,” think they. And yet, in our time, the really fresh feelings can only be religious, Christian feelings, and such as are open, accessible, to all. The feelings flowing from the religious perception of our times, Christian feelings, are infinitely new and varied, only not in the sense some people imagine, — not that they can be evoked by the depiction of Christ and of Gospel episodes, or by repeating in new forms the Christian truths of unity, brotherhood, equality, and love, — but in that all the oldest, commonest, and most hackneyed phenomena of life evoke the newest, most unexpected and touching emotions as soon as a man regards them from the Christian point of view.
What can be older than the relations between married couples, of parents to children, of children to parents; the relations of men to their fellow-countrymen and to for- eigners, to an invasion, to defence, to property, to the land, or to animals? But as soon as a man regards these matters from the Christian point of view, endlessly varied, fresh, complex, and strong emotions immediately arise.
And, in the same way, that realm of subject-matter for РѴЛАТ IS ART?
I9S were such demonstration still needed, that what among us is considered art is not art, hut only its counterfeit. It is quite true that for the production of hoots or loaves division of labour is very advantageous, and that the bootmaker or baker who need not prepare his own dinner or fetch his own fuel will make more hoots or loaves than if he had to busy himself about these matters. But art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. And sound feeling can only be engendered in a man when he is living on all its sides the life natural and proper to mankind. And therefore security of maintenance is a condition most harmful to an artist’s true productiveness, since it removes him from the condition natural to all men, — that of struggle with nature for the maintenance of both his own life and that of others, — and thus deprives him of opportunity and possibility to experience the most important and natural feelings of man. There is no position more injurious to an artist’s productive- ness than that position of complete security and luxury in which artists usually live in our society.
The artist of the future will live the common life of man, earning his subsistence by some kind of labour. The fruits of that highest spiritual strength which passes through him he will try to share with the greatest possible number of people, for in such transmission to others of the feelings that have arisen in him he will find his happiness and his reward. The artist of the future will be unable to understand how an artist, whose chief delight is in the wide diffusion of his works, could give them only in exchange for a certain payment.
Until the dealers are driven out, the temple of art will not he a temple. But the art of the future will drive them out.
And therefore the subject-matter of the art of the future, as I imagine it to myself, will be totally unlike that of to-day.
IVBAT IS ART?
the art of the future which relates to the simplest feelings of common life open to all will not he narrowed but widened. In our former art only the expression of feelings natural to people of a certain exceptional position was considered worthy of being transmitted by art, and even then only on condition that these feelings were trans- mitted in a most refined manner, incomprehensible to the majority of men; all the immense realm of folk-art, and children’s art — jests, proverbs, riddles, songs, dances, children’s games, and mimicry — was not esteemed a domain worthy of art.
The artist of the future will understand that to compose a fairy-tale, a little song which лѵіИ touch, a lullaby or a riddle which will entertain, a jest which will amuse, or to draw a sketch лѵііісіі will delight dozens of generations or millions of children and adults, is incomparably more important and more fruitful than to compose a novel or a symphony, or paint a picture which will divert some members of the wealthy classes for a short time, and then be for ever forgotten. The region of this art of the simple feelings accessible to all is enormous, and it is as yet almost untouched.
The art of the future, therefore, will not be poorer, but infinitely richer in subject-matter. And the form of the art of the future will also not be inferior to the present forms of art, but infinitely superior to them. Superior, not in the sense of having a refined and complex technique, but in the sense of the capacity briefly, simply, and clearly to transmit, without any superfluities, the feeling which the artist has experienced and wishes to transmit.
I remember once speaking to a famous astronomer who had given public lectures on the spectrum analysis of the stars of the Milky Way, and saying it would be a good thing if, with his knowledge and masterly delivery, he would give a lecture merely on the formation and movements of the WHAT IS ART?
earth, for certainly there were many people at his lecture on the spectrum analysis of the stars of the Milky Way, especially among the women, who did not well know why night follows day and summer follows winter. The wise astronomer smiled as he answered, “Yes, it would he a good thing, but it would be very difficult. To lecture on the spectrum analysis of the Milky Way is far easier.”
And so it is in art. To write a rhymed poem dealing with the times of Cleopatra, or paint a picture of Nero burning Kome, or compose a symphony in the manner of Brahms or Richard Strauss, or an opera like Wagner’s, is far easier than to tell a simple story without any unneces- sary details, yet so that it should transmit the feelings of the narrator, or to draw a pencil-sketch which should touch or amuse the beholder, or to compose four bars of clear and simple melody, without any accompaniment, лѵЬісЬ should convey an impression and be remembered by those who hear it.