ART. V.-TRADITION IN ART.

1. Correggio. By T. STURGE MOORE. London: Duckworth, 1906.

2. Aims and Ideals in Art. By G. CLAUSEN. Eight Lectures delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy. London: Methuen, 1906.

3. The Art of the Italian Renaissance. From the German of HEINRICH WÖLFFLIN, Professor of Art History at Berlin University. London: W. Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1903.

MR

R. STURGE MOORE devotes the opening portion of his recent study of Correggio, as well as frequent passages and pages sprinkled through the remainder of it, to an uncompromising attack on the technical or scientific school of art criticism. He argues that it is impossible, in the nature of things, for science to deal with such subjects as art or genius, because its methods of investigation and study are not of a kind that can take cognisance of such matters. Science generalises. Its glance is a wide one. It has an eye only for collective affinities. Its delight is to classify. The singularities of the individual, those apparently accidental traits which start into being and disappear, it would seem, at hazard, are of no account to it. Individuals among animals are assumed (by science) 'to be units, not merely of number but of character, precisely equivalent the one to the other; peculiarities of individuality are treated as accidentals and of no calculable importance. On the other hand, it is of the essence of genius that it is personal, exceptional and singular, and in so far as it is this it necessarily eludes classification and comparison: that is to say, it eludes the handling of science altogether. So that science, in dealing with those parts of an artist's work which are susceptible of its analysis, is dealing with the parts only which do not matter and have no real significance. Personal genius is all that counts in art, and this the scientific method can in no way appraise. Hence the only real criticism in art is that which deals with the individual direct, and, itself of a kindred nature, fathoms by an act of imaginative sympathy the processes and impulses of creative genius.

Such seems to be Mr. Sturge Moore's argument, and he enforces it by attempting to interpret the art of Correggio in the manner he prescribes: namely, by sympathetically divining the emotions and conceptions which occurred to the artist's own mind. The attempt thus made, though many passages

might be quoted as suggestive, seems to us on the whole a failure, and that chiefly because of the difficulty, or impossibility rather, of securing the necessary exact agreement between the creative and interpretative mind. To find a critic of such imaginative sensibility that he can re-echo every thought and emotion of the artist, and yet of such imaginative disinterestedness that he will never be inclined to see what he wishes to see and interpret according to his own prepossessions, would be an altogether hopeless task. Mr. Sturge Moore himself is, so far as one man can be, a proof of it. He has a great deal of imaginative sensibility, but, as is usually the case with people so endowed, he has also very marked prepossessions of his own. The consequence is, before we have read a dozen pages we find that instead of Mr. Sturge Moore interpreting Correggio we have Correggio interpreting Mr. Sturge Moore. The truth is that criticism conducted after these methods has not a sufficiently secure basis to rest on. The material it deals with is little more than so much conjecture, which can be twisted about at will and made to assume any shape that is desired.

It is not, however, our intention to analyse at any length Mr. Sturge Moore's critical method, but rather to deal a little further with the possibilities of the scientific, or, as we would rather call it, the rational method, which he appears to condemn. There is something of discrepancy, no doubt, between the terms science and art, and the idea of absolute knowledge as applied to works of genius may perhaps seem inadmissible. If living and personal genius were separable from tradition, no doubt imaginative sympathy would be the means we should have to rely on for estimating it. But we must remember that in the great epochs of art they are not separable. The individual passes, but his example remains to those who come after. These in turn carry on the precepts by which he worked and bequeath them, augmented, to their successors. There thus accumulates a common store of knowledge and of efficiency infinitely greater and more powerful than can fall to the lot of any individual genius.

Moreover, there is this to be said of knowledge thus accumulated, that, far more than individual talent, it is susceptible of an examination which may almost be called scientific, for it engenders principles and laws of which the significance can be appreciated by careful study and which can be formulated and wielded with a certain precision.

It is this reliable and fixed character of the knowledge of the principles of great painting gradually piled up by the Italian Renaissance which makes the study of that epoch fruitful

of real and valid results. Something definite can be got out of it. Were it a question of a time like the present, a time in which all existing art is comprised in the individual experiment, and in which there exists no accumulated and impersonal stock of knowledge, then, no doubt, a consideration of individual methods and ideas might be our only means for gauging results. This is, indeed, the standard we usually apply to contemporary art. No one thinks of judging the Royal Academy by fixed principles. Although some scraps of technical phraseology may be introduced from time to time into the criticisms of the daily press, yet we are all pretty well aware that the real attraction of the art of the day consists, not in its obedience to any recognised law, and in its exposition of the possibilities inherent in such a law, but, on the contrary, in its suggestions of altogether new and fresh ideas, ideas which may be to almost any extent eccentric and extravagant provided they have novelty and freshness provided, that is to say, they are the outcome of purely individual initiative This quality of individual initiative is, in times like these, the quality that counts. The first thing we ask of a work of art to-day is that it shall startle and surprise us, that it shall attempt a solution of some problem hitherto unsolved, or attain its effects by new and curious processes. We value it in proportion as it turns to the unknown rather than as it cleaves to the known, and the gifts of the pioneer, activity, alertness, a sharp and eager curiosity, are the gifts which insure success. And very probably we are right. He works best who works in the spirit of his age, and in an age confessedly experimental the artist who possesses the instinct of the experimentalist-who possesses that alertness and curiosity we spoke of-may rightly be held to excel. is to such an age that the standard of criticism proposed by Mr. Sturge Moore, a standard of criticism taking note of individual genius, particularly applies. But there are ages to which it does not apply, and qualities which it is by no means competent to appraise. It is entirely incapable of gauging the significance of the great creative epochs of art, and we lose a great deal of the significance of such epochs if we so attempt to apply it. Clearly to perceive this, clearly to distinguish the gulf that separates traditional from experimental art is, as it seems to us, the first essential in all useful art criticism.

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And yet there is, perhaps, no harder task. Has the reader ever attempted to realise what it must have been like to live during the ascendency of, let us say, the great Gothic tradition, when one passionate impulse ruled supreme, and all buildings throughout, not nations only, but all Western Europe, were

governed by so strict a uniformity that it was impossible to so much as imagine any other way of building, and every structure planned or thought of was, as it were, as good as finished before one stone had been laid on another? We are accustomed greatly to admire these constructive epochs and, amid the present apathy and indifference, to envy an age when architecture was a vital interest and the life of the whole nation flowed into those structural moulds and shapes which are still the choicest and most valued of our national possessions. And we judge reasonably, for that age is above all to be envied when art is a living power and most closely united to the national existence. But at the same time let us acknowledge that, at the time when tradition counts for so much, the individual counts for very little. By the attenuation of the mouldings, the pitch of the arches, the pattern of the tracery, we date the building with confidence and assign it its place in the whole scheme of its particular evolution. Our eye is on no human builder as we make these calculations, but on that greater architect whose instruments men are, whose schemes they obediently carry out, and whose slow developments and modifications of style are independent of and unruffled by the whims and caprices of individuals.

And although it is true that the tradition of the Renaissance was not so powerful and inflexible as that of the Gothic era; although Italian painting does not obliterate and swallow up the individual as Gothic architecture does; although we speak of the genius of this artist or that, yet there exists in our minds the consciousness that all these works are in a sense the fruit of the Renaissance tradition-of that accumulated stock of knowledge, that is to say, which was handed on from painter to painter and from one generation to another, and which increases and swells in its power and influence by the very absorption of individuals and their free dedication of their talents. It is this tradition which supplies us with a standard behind, as it were, the individual artist, guiding and directing our judgment, so that, when we are confronted with a work of which we ignore the authorship, we can yet as a rule, with tolerable confidence, assign it its position and function in the whole scheme of Italian painting, not judging it by the share that any particular painter has in it, but by that more solid and reliable share-that share which Mr. Sturge Moore has such contempt for, but which probably comprises about nineteen-twentieths of the greatness of any great work of art-which tradition has in it. It would be no idle stretch of the imagination to allow ourselves to picture the genius of painting during such a period as a distinct personality, with its own accumulated knowledge, its own slowly

gathered experience, its own expanding power. Such a tendency to allegory, indeed, has always been characteristic of creative epochs. And although it is a habit with us to ridicule such impersonations as conceits, altogether affected and unreal, we should perhaps feel otherwise if we had had experience ourselves of the authority of a great tradition. To us, set free in this experimental age of ours to follow our own whims, to display our own inventions, to collect from time to time, it may be, in little groups round conspicuous figures, groups that speedily dissolve as the master's presence is withdrawn; to us who have no tradition behind us, upholding and sustaining us, directing our energies and controlling our vagaries, the idea of Painting, figured as a personality, must naturally seem unreal. But it was not unreal to the great Italians, who were conscious of the constant supervision of such a presence, who were trained from boyhood in obedience to its rule, and whose ambition it was to be ranked among its loyal instruments and servants. And not among its loyal only, but among its willing and actively co-operating instruments and servants; for while it is important to separate the tradition of a great creative epoch from experimental art on the one hand, so is it equally important to separate it from stereotyped convention on the other. There are and always have been traditions in art which, whatever value they may once have possessed, have become arbitrary and meaningless, and which, in their petrified consistency, represent the force of custom and nothing more. Egyptian and Assyrian art are the two standing examples of this kind of cast-iron conventionality. They have a cold strength about them and a certain inanimate durability, due to the unquestioned authority of the convention that dominates them. They are witnesses to authority, if ever there were such; yet certainly none of us would ever make the mistake of confusing Egyptian or Assyrian art with the art of a great creative epoch. Something more than mere authority, evidently, something more than the transmission of certain precepts from generation to generation, goes to the making of vital and permanent art. And if we consider those periods to which by common consent the world looks back as creatively great in art, we may easily perceive in what this other necessary quality consists. We can detect at such times as these a balance and interaction of traditional and individual influences, tradition being constantly vivified by personal initiative, and personal initiative constantly controlled and disciplined by tradition, so that the appearance of art during such intervals is equally removed from the iron immobility of pure convention as from the spasmodic and irregular action