Art

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the fourth of the great ideas — Art.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

We are walking the great ideas in the order Mortimer Adler set them down, and his map has brought us to Art. A word about the word. When the old books say art they very rarely mean what a museum means. They mean skill. They mean the knowing hand. The art of the physician, the art of the shipwright, the art of the poet, the art of the man who can shoe a horse — all of them arts, all of them a knowledge that lives in the fingers as much as in the head. The narrowing of the word down to painting and sculpture is late, and it is a loss. So tonight we use the old width. Art is making.

And the first thing to say is that Scripture puts the arts very early — earlier than we expect, and in a line we do not expect.

From Genesis:

And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

That is the line of Cain. The tent, the harp, the forge. Shelter, music, metal. The three come into the world together and they come through the family that had already gone out from the presence of the Lord. Scripture does not pause to explain that. It simply records it, and it does not take the gifts back. The harp is a real harp. The brass is real brass.

Then, much later, the arts are called by name — and this time not out of Cain's line but out of God's own mouth.

From Exodus:

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, To devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, And in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship. And I, behold, I have given with him Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan: and in the hearts of all that are wise hearted I have put wisdom, that they may make all that I have commanded thee.

Notice what has happened. This is the first man in Scripture of whom it is said that God filled him with His Spirit — and the filling is for craftsmanship. Not for prophecy. Not for battle. For gold and silver and brass, for cutting stones and carving timber. The Spirit of God comes upon a man so that he can make beautiful things well.

And the text goes on to say what those things were for:

The tabernacle of the congregation, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is thereupon, and all the furniture of the tabernacle, And the table and his furniture, and the pure candlestick with all his furniture, and the altar of incense, And the altar of burnt offering with all his furniture, and the laver and his foot, And the cloths of service, and the holy garments for Aaron the priest, and the garments of his sons, to minister in the priest's office, And the anointing oil, and sweet incense for the holy place: according to all that I have commanded thee shall they do.

The call is repeated later, and Moses says it out loud to the whole congregation. From Exodus again:

And Moses said unto the children of Israel, See, the LORD hath called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; And he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship; And to devise curious works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, And in the cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of wood, to make any manner of cunning work. And he hath put in his heart that he may teach, both he, and Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that devise cunning work.

Two words there deserve to be held onto for the rest of the night. Cunning work. In the old English of that translation, cunning has none of our sneaking in it. It means skilled; it means knowing. And the other word: devise. Those that devise cunning work. Not merely copy — devise. Invent. Find out.

And then the making itself:

Then wrought Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise hearted man, in whom the LORD put wisdom and understanding to know how to work all manner of work for the service of the sanctuary, according to all that the LORD had commanded. And Moses called Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise hearted man, in whose heart the LORD had put wisdom, even every one whose heart stirred him up to come unto the work to do it.

Whose heart stirred him up to come unto the work. That is a description of an artist, and it is a very old one.

The same pattern appears again when the temple is built. The workman is not an Israelite at all.

From the book of Kings:

And king Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre. He was a widow's son of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass: and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass. And he came to king Solomon, and wrought all his work.

And the chronicler describes him in the letter from Tyre:

And now I have sent a cunning man, endued with understanding, skilful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in stone, and in timber, in purple, in blue, and in fine linen, and in crimson; also to grave any manner of graving, and to find out every device which shall be put to him.

To find out every device which shall be put to him. That is the highest compliment the Old Testament pays to a craftsman: give him a problem and he will solve it.

But the same book that gives us Bezaleel gives us this, and gives it in the ten words spoken from the mountain.

From Exodus:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

So the Spirit fills a man to carve, and the law forbids a certain kind of carving. Both are true and both stand. The tension is not an embarrassment; it is the whole subject. Art is a power, and a power can be turned. The prophet turns it over and shows us the underside.

From Isaiah:

The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals, and fashioneth it with hammers, and worketh it with the strength of his arms: yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth: he drinketh no water, and is faint. The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a line; he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man; that it may remain in the house.

He goes on:

He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the oak, which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest: he planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it. Then shall it be for a man to burn: for he will take thereof, and warm himself; yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread; yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it; he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto. He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied: yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire: And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god.

Read that beside Bezaleel and the two poles of this idea are fixed. Notice that the prophet does not sneer at the skill. He is precise about it. He knows the tools by name. What he mocks is the destination: half the log warms the supper and the other half is asked to save a soul. The failure is not that the carpenter made something. It is what he did with what he made.

Now to the Greeks, who worried at this idea as hard as anyone ever has, and who came to two different minds about it.

Plato is the great suspicious one. In the last book of the Republic he sets out to show that the artist is further from the truth than anybody, and he does it with a bed.

From Plato, in Jowett's translation:

Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say — for no one else can be the maker? — There is another which is the work of the carpenter? — And the work of the painter is a third? — Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter.

He goes on:

God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only… And what shall we say of the carpenter — is not he also the maker of the bed? — Yes. — But would you call the painter a creator and maker? — Certainly not. — Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed? — I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make.

And the conclusion he has been driving toward all along:

And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.

He presses it further, and the pressure is worth hearing, because it is the oldest serious charge against art and it has never quite gone away:

Now let me ask you another question: Which is the art of painting designed to be — an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear — of appearance or of reality? — Of appearance. — Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

That is Plato's whole case. Art copies the look of things, not the things; and a man who can paint a shoemaker without knowing how to make a shoe is a kind of impostor, however lovely his picture.

Aristotle takes the same fact — that art imitates — and draws the opposite conclusion. Where his master saw a defect, he saw a root.

From Aristotle, in Butcher's translation:

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.

He goes on, and here is the sentence that answers Plato:

We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, "Ah, that is he."

Ah, that is he. That small delighted noise a man makes in front of a picture — Aristotle says it is the sound of a mind learning. The pleasure of art is a cousin of the pleasure of understanding. The copy is not a lie about the thing; it is a way of coming to know the thing. And he adds the second root:

Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for harmony and rhythm, metres being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.

Two instincts, then: the instinct to imitate and the instinct for rhythm. Give a creature both and he will make art whether you want him to or not. He will make it in caves and he will make it in prison. He is the most imitative of living creatures.

Now to Augustine, who felt the pull of both arguments in his own chest, and who wrote the most honest paragraph on this subject that I know.

From the Confessions, in Pusey's translation:

What innumerable toys, made by divers arts and manufactures, in our apparel, shoes, utensils and all sorts of works, in pictures also and divers images, and these far exceeding all necessary and moderate use and all pious meaning, have men added to tempt their own eyes withal; outwardly following what themselves make, inwardly forsaking Him by whom themselves were made, and destroying that which themselves have been made!

That is the prophet's complaint again, in a quieter voice. But listen to what he does next. He does not stop there. He turns, in the middle of the paragraph, and blesses the thing he has just accused:

But I, my God and my Glory, do hence also sing a hymn to Thee, and do consecrate praise to Him who consecrateth me, because those beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls, which my soul day and night sigheth after.

Cunning hands. The same phrase the Exodus translators reached for. The beautiful patterns pass through a man's soul and out into his hands, and they came from somewhere before they came to him. That is Augustine's settlement, and it is generous: the maker is not the origin of the beauty he makes. He is a channel with a memory. And Augustine will not pretend he is safely past the danger — he adds, of himself, that he still entangles his steps in these outward beauties, and that he is plucked out again and again.

The medievals took that settlement and made it exact. Aquinas asks flatly whether art is a virtue, and answers with a definition that has never been improved on.

From Aquinas, in the Dominican Fathers' translation:

Art is nothing else but the right reason about certain works to be made. And yet the good of these things depends, not on man's appetitive faculty being affected in this or that way, but on the goodness of the work done. For a craftsman, as such, is commendable, not for the will with which he does a work, but for the quality of the work.

Right reason about things to be made. Set that beside right reason about things to be done, which is his definition of prudence, and you have the whole architecture. There is a kind of knowing that aims at a good life, and there is a kind of knowing that aims at a good object, and they are not the same knowing.

He goes on, and this is the hard, clarifying part:

Art has the nature of a virtue in the same way as the speculative habits, in so far, to wit, as neither art nor speculative habit makes a good work as regards the use of the habit, which is the property of a virtue that perfects the appetite, but only as regards the aptness to work well.

Which is to say: art will make you a good workman. It will not make you a good man. Aquinas is willing to say this without flinching, and he says it again in answering an objection:

And yet it falls short of being a perfect virtue, because it does not make its possessor to use it well; for which purpose something further is requisite: although there cannot be a good use without the art.

There cannot be a good use without the art. Hold both halves. Skill is not holiness — and holiness will not saw a straight board. The man who wants to build the tabernacle needs a clean heart and he also needs to know brass.

And then the reply that settles the first objection, about whether a man can misuse art:

When anyone endowed with an art produces bad workmanship, this is not the work of that art, in fact it is contrary to the art: even as when a man lies, while knowing the truth, his words are not in accord with his knowledge, but contrary thereto.

Bad work is not art doing something bad. It is art not being obeyed.

Dante puts the same doctrine into a few lines of verse while climbing down a cliff in hell, which is where the best philosophy in that poem tends to happen. Virgil is explaining why usury is a sin, and to explain it he has to explain what human work is.

From Dante, in Longfellow's translation:

Philosophy, he said, to him who heeds it, noteth, not only in one place alone, after what manner Nature takes her course from Intellect Divine, and from its art; and if thy Physics carefully thou notest, after not many pages shalt thou find, that this your art as far as possible follows, as the disciple doth the master; so that your art is, as it were, God's grandchild.

God's grandchild. Nature is God's art; our art imitates nature; therefore what comes off our bench is God's grandchild. Set that beside Plato's three beds. The arithmetic is nearly the same and the verdict is opposite. Plato counts the distance and calls it a fall — thrice removed from the truth. Dante counts the same distance and calls it a lineage. The remove is not a demotion. It is a descent in the way a family descends.

The little book of prose quotations I keep for these evenings gathers a handful more on the same page, which is where this idea has settled in the common mind.

From Michelangelo: The true work of art is but a shadow of the Divine perfection.

From John Opie: Art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.

From Julius Hare: Art is mighty; for art is the work of man under the guidance and aspiration of a mightier power than man.

From Bishop Tegner: We speak of profane arts, but there are none properly such; every art is holy in itself, it is the son of eternal light.

From Quintilian, drier than the rest: The perfection of art is to conceal art.

From Amphis, out of the old Greek comedy: Art is a sweet consoler in misfortune.

From Lavater: The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertion of human nature.

From Anna Eliza Bray: Never were the arts more nobly employed than by our forefathers, when they raised those beautiful piles, our cathedrals, churches, universities, and abbeys, to the honor of that religion which God hath given to man.

And one from Hume, who will not let the party get too pleased with itself:

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces which come from the hand of the master; some of which may be of his drawing, but he is not allowed to touch the principal figure. Art may make a man a suit of clothes, but nature must produce a man.

Art may make a man a suit of clothes, but nature must produce a man. Keep that. It is the best sentence anyone has ever written against taking ourselves too seriously in a studio.

Which brings us to the Englishman who said the thing this whole tradition had been circling, and said it in six words. Sir Thomas Browne, a physician, writing what amounted to his private confession of faith, working out how a man of science should regard the world he cuts into.

From Browne:

Now nature was not at variance with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature: were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos: nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God.

Nature is the art of God. Everything in this evening runs through that sentence. If the world is itself a made thing — a devised thing, a cunning work — then the man at the bench is not competing with creation. He is doing on his small scale what was done to him. He is a made maker. Browne is not saying nature needs our help; he is saying the world came out of a workshop, and so does the chair.

Two more voices, and then a poem.

The first is a painter who spent much of his life telling young painters the truth about their trade. Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered these as lectures at the academy, and they are the most sensible pages on artistic training ever put in English.

From Reynolds:

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius. But though there neither are, nor can be, any precise invariable rules for the exercise or the acquisition of those great qualities, yet we may as truly say that they always operate in proportion to our attention in observing the works of nature, to our skill in selecting, and to our care in digesting, methodising, and comparing our observations. There are many beauties in our art, that seem, at first, to lie without the reach of precept, and yet may easily be reduced to practical principles. Experience is all in all.

He goes on, and it is a rebuke to every romantic idea of the artist that came after him:

This great ideal perfection and beauty are not to be sought in the heavens, but upon the earth. They are about us, and upon every side of us. But the power of discovering what is deformed in nature, or in other words, what is particular and uncommon, can be acquired only by experience; and the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.

And then his account of how a painter arrives at a beautiful face:

All the objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection. But it is not every eye that perceives these blemishes. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms. By this means, he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect.

He corrects nature by herself. Not by cleverness, not by inspiration — by more nature, better seen. Reynolds has no patience at all for the young man waiting to be visited by a muse. Elsewhere in the same lectures he says it plainly: You must have no dependence on your own genius.

The last voice is Ruskin, who looked at a rough medieval carving and worked out from it a doctrine of labor.

From Ruskin:

You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

He goes on:

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.

And the end of it:

Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also.

Ruskin is defending crooked carving. He is saying that the rough places in the old stonework are where the man is, and that a perfectly finished ornament may be the sign of a soul that was not permitted to think. That is a strange thing to say about beauty, and it is nearly the last word on it: the flaw in the work may be the proof that a maker was there.

Thomas Watson, in his old plain way, said the whole thing in a sentence. The soul at first was a viol in tune to praise God, and the tongue made the music.

And the psalmist, who was himself a maker, begins the wedding song by telling us what he is doing. My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

We close tonight with an ode on a piece of pottery. The poet is John Keats. He is looking at a marble vessel with a procession carved round it, and he is asking it questions it will not answer, and he arrives at the oldest problem in this idea: the made thing outlives the maker, and it does not grow old, and that is both its glory and the cold thing about it.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn," by John Keats.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Good night.