Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg

by Isaac Rosenberg

  c.1912

  EMERSON

  The great poets of the earth have been mainly intellects with a kind of coarseness engrained. At the most delicate and rare there is a sense of solidity and bulk, close knit, that is like some unthinkably powerful chemical contained in some dewlike drop. We question a poet like Shelley because we feel this lack of robustness where we do not question Keats or Donne or Blake. We ask in a poet a vigorous intellect, a searching varied power that is itself, and an independent nature.

  We know our poem by its being the only poem. The world is too full of echoes and we seize on the real voice. Does it happen that the real voice is sometimes not heard or is mistaken for an echo? It not infrequently happens that the real voice, sickened by echoes and shy of its own sound, withdraws and only calls to ears it is its delight to call to. The Masters must needs have the whole earth for their bough to sing on or they burst their throats, but there are voices humbler in their demands, but nowise less imperious in their result. That ebullition of the heart that seeks in novel but exact metaphor to express itself, the strong but delicate apocalyptical imagination that startles and suggests, the inward sanity that controls and directs — the mainspring of true poetry — is Emerson’s. Does he possess in any eminent degree, does he possess at all, that manly intellect, that solidity and bulk, which is the certificate of legitimacy for a great poet?

  We have here no tradition — no tricks of the trade. Spontaneity, inspiration, abysmal in its light, is the outer look these poems have to the eye. The words ebulliate and sparkle as fresh as a fountain. But we are always near a brink of some impalpable idea, some indefinable rumour of endlessness, some faint savour of primordial being that creeps through occult crevices and is caught back again. We know nothing better than Shakespeare’s lyrics that have this suggestiveness in perfection:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made:

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell...

  Or from the sonnets:

  Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

  Of the wide world dreaming on things to come...

  * * *

  This man paved the way for Whitman.

  His freedom, his daring, his inspiration, in Whitman’s hands became a roadway right through humanity.

  ART

  PART I

  We all, more or less, feel a work of art, and I should like in this paper to find a sort of philosophic connection between one’s thoughts and work created by mind.

  I also want to say a word on modern aims; and no doubt all here have heard of the fermented state of culture now in Europe. The multiplexity, and elaborately interwoven texture of modern life; the whole monstrous fabric of modernity is rapidly increasing in complexity, and art, which is a sort of summing up, and intensification of the spirit of the age, increases its aims accordingly. A great genius is, at once, the product and the creator of his age. It is in him that a marked stage of evolution is fulfilled. His ideas are absorbed and permeate, even when the natures who feel them are not large enough to contain them. These ideas weaken as they become absorbed into the indrawing and everwidening complexities of life, and no longer have their original force, and a new stimulus is necessary. So we have these new movements and their energetic repudiation of preceding movements. To make my point clear I shall be obliged to run roughly through the evolution of art, before I can speak of its present state.

  We all have impressions from nature. Our consciousness of these impressions is life. To express and give shape to such impressions on our consciousness, by artificial means, is art. Man’s natural necessities, his instinct to communicate his desires, and feelings, found shape in corresponding signs and sounds; symbols which, at first crude, gradually developed and refined. Special emotions found expression in the nearest and most sufficient ways. Singing and dancing for joy — for awe and worship, the reverential mien and solemn incantation. Victories, festivities, marriage, love, all these were occasions for art. Shouting became singing; more and more rhythmical and orderly. From the expression of private joy and sorrow, it told tales of others’ joys and woes. It became art. Hunters whose eyes were keen and hands were skilful, gloating over the image of the power they chased, strove to record it, cutting sharply with their rude hunting knives on the stone of their rough cave dwelling. Architecture developed, then sculpture as a natural result. We begin with high culture at the Egyptians. A land of high profound, austere philosophy — their art expressed their priestly natures. Art went hand in hand with their religion, grave and austere. With a profound knowledge of form and perfect craftsmanship, all their energies were directed to express deity, an abstraction of simple, solemn profundity, the omnipresent spirit. Their art was angular and severe.

  The Greeks followed, more idealistic they cultivated a more effeminate conception of beauty, an idea of grace, of rounded forms, suavity. Body’s strength and body’s beauty, was the ideal of this lovely land, and this pagan philosophy has produced art, beautiful indeed, but of no intensity, no real hold on man’s spirit.

  We are moved by a work of art. Is an artistic emotion similar to an ordinary emotion got from actual life? Is fear, horror, pride, called into play? Yet we are moved, aesthetically. What moves us? Just as figures stand for quantities, so we have subtle but intelligible symbols to correspond to the most delicate and imperceptible shade of emotion; and it is by bringing these varied symbols into a coherent unity that a work of art is constructed. To detach a part from nature, and give it the completeness of the whole, by applying to that part the principle of rhythmic law that is instinctive in our consciousness, and harmonises us to the exterior nature. A law of repetition and contrast, continuity in variety. It is this principle that our consciousness responds to. Art becomes by this, a living thing, another nature, a communicable creation. To convey to all, in living language, some floating instant in time, that mixing with the artist’s thought and being, has become a durable essence, a separate entity, a portion of eternity. Art widens the scope of living by increasing the bounds of thought. New moods and hitherto unfelt particles of feeling are perpetually created by these new revelations, this interfusion of man’s spirit, eager to beget, and crowd existence with every finer possibility. Thus art is an intensification and simplification of life, which is fragmentary, and has no order and no coherent relationship to us, until it has passed through the crucible of Art. Science explains nature physically by atoms; philosophy explains life morally, but art interprets and intensifies life, representing a portion through the laws of unity that govern the whole.

  How do we know a vital composition? We know it by its newness and by its rightness. Do you know Blake’s drawing of ‘The Song of the Morning Star’? Do you know why it was not conceived before Blake? Yet it is as natural and magnificent a conception as the Sun, as familiar and holy when we are with it as the name of God in our hearts, and as mysterious and holy, and as new.

  Perhaps it is irreverent to analyse, but as we are endeavouring to discover a principle in art, we must see how the most inspired art (and no art is perfect without appearing inspired) conforms to this principle.

  It is a vital composition because its content is an infinite idea expressed coherently in a definite texture. The spaces harmonise in unexpected ways, the forms are expressive and consistent, the gestures are rhythmical, but surprise us, as though one’s own private thought, too secret even to reveal to ourselves, were suddenly shown to us from outside. It is a limitless idea, responsive to the emotion but ungraspable by the intellect. A poem contains in itself all it would convey, which is infinity. This is brought about through movement, the rapid succession of images and thoughts, as in nature itself. Painting is stationary, it only begins a process of thought, it suggests. But you think outside the painting, not i
n it. Now this brings us to a point I wish to insist on. In appreciating a picture, it is the general tendency to confuse literary ideas with painting ideas. An idea in painting is only one because it cannot be put into words, just as an idea in music can only receive form through the medium of sound. Each art has its own special ideas and special qualities to express them, though they all have a common basis, the expression of emotional truth.

  Incident, in a picture, can give some sort of human interest, it might even be that which has inspired the artist to his rhythmical arrangement, but the emotional truth underlying is brought about by insistence on the plastic unity, the beauty and harmony purely of shapes and forms.

  If one takes nature as a standpoint, to a cold judgment, how whimsical and odd it is to see limbs suspended in motion, expressions wrought to the utmost limits of intensity, and remaining so. But pictures depend on gestures and expressions. True, but the gesture must be part of some unfathomable, preponderating idea, hovering on the borderland of revelation. We are struck by no particular gesture, but some rhythmical and unexpected quality that helps in some tentative way our approach to this idea. Art has never received purer or higher utterance than the Italian primitives gave it. No formal, cold, lifeless arrangement, but some elaborately organised pattern, instinct with some vital conception, rich with variety of texture; simple in result. Every space brimful of meaning; touched with adumbrations of some subtly felt idea. Clear and definite in form, their whole outlook was expressiveness. Nature had no other significance to them save as a means to symbolise some more intimate nature. Sometimes their passion for something deeper and occult, something never seen by eye or thought of man, led them a little out of the way, to bring back fantastic blossoms and things strange and curious, but which men might like or be angered by as with a child’s or a woman’s whim. But always their vision of beauty was pure and entire, and their failures rose from their eagerness to obtain a more intimate and profounder sense of her. It was this wishfulness to know, this passionate hunger to reach into the inmost heart of things, by men of such depth, and profundity; this deep imaginative understanding of natural things that drove them burningly to give the clearest utterance to their conclusions of destiny. Art gradually took on different aims. The School founded by Giotto, which might be called the naturalistic school, nature being their immediate inspiration, gave place to a more scholarly group of painters, whose idea of life was largely woven up with Greek culture and learning, Botticelli and Mantegna being the chief.

  We come now to Leonardo Da Vinci, a mind of unhuman vastness, of the deepest poetry, and extraordinary logic and invention. Too fertile in his ideas to ever go through with one completely, he has yet left us some single achievements which stand supreme in Art. He might be said to have invented Chiaroscuro, for he was enamoured of the mystery of shadow. He was enamoured of all mysteries, and strove to fathom most, and in art made many revelations of form. His drawings, particularly of women’s heads, for perfect loveliness and pure realisation of form have never been surpassed — few indeed have ever come near them. In the Primitives the paintings are in a light bright key, the shadows are light and pearl, and the lights delicate rose. Their patterns of colour are definite, and subordinated to the linear effect. But Leonardo, eager to express mystery, the elusiveness of natural aspects, particularly the smiling of women, sought in shadow a symbol of this. You might call his pictures colour monochromes.

  PART II

  Then we have Michael Angelo whose solitary spirit sought in huge titanic limbs and volcanic energy of motion, to express the grandeur of his conceptions of nature. Sculpturesque, architectural, within these arbitrary bonds he unloosed his vast writhing universe, and poured his lonely cries into the void. With the Primitives, true decoration passed. Art became more and more concerned with the aspect of things. Plastic unity was achieved, not as in the Primitives, by linear design, by expressive spaces and clearly defined planes, but by tonal relationship of shapes of dark and light. Sloven in their form, the work of the Venetians is soft and inexpressive. Their colour is artificial, and has neither the refinement, truth, nor variety of the Primitives. Their designs are almost always commonplace, picturesque, and grandiose; always sensuous, clever and pleasant, seldom noble and profound — never intense.

  With Velasquez we reach the beginning in painting of a new epoch, the objective attitude. Truth to him was not a reaction of the concrete on his sensitiveness in such a way as to become new and unlike — and yet the same. His truth was more the practical truth of the mirror; and yet so clear was his understanding that, even as the sun is drawn into the dark roots of the earth, so his soul too was drawn beneath the surface and gave birth to new combinations. I will say nothing of Rembrandt, who of all artists came nearest to realising the highest of all, the union of the abstract and concrete, the purest interpretation of the concrete, and the clearest translation of the abstract. In Ingres we have the first draughtsman since the old men. Not the picturesque — but the profound ideal of form. Degas followed, and this ideal of form learned from Ingres he used to express in his powerful way, certain phases of modernism. He is perhaps the chief power of modern times. Monet, Pissarro, and the other French Impressionists, made an attempt to reconquer the active vital spirit, to connect the inner with the outer by means of a more spontaneous and intelligent understanding of the actual.

  We come now to what is known as the Post Impressionist movement. This was an attempt by men of the deepest culture, and reverence for art, to see nature as a child might see it. However profound their ideas, however mixed with the multiplexity of modern life, their presentation of that idea must be a sort of detachment from all they know — it must be purely that one thing. We know that children see colours bright and unmixed. A drawing by a child of an animal running would express speed by lines that could mean nothing else. It is when we begin to think, and thought begins to modify all our perceptions of an object, that we can no longer see a thing as a thing without associated ideas. The presentation of an object then would be sentiment. It was in Chinese Art these men found similar aims, but joined to a perfect sense of craft, and in Rembrandt. Art to them was inspiration — not mere craft and secondhand enthusiasm, and this they strove to destroy. With a feverish impatience of the bonds of technique, in a vehement spontaneity, they poured on canvas their direct visions. Their attempt always for vital rhythms, more vehement and startling connections, their colour is perhaps too lyrical for the fiercer qualities of their design. In Cezanne, rose and green and pearl, in definite patterns of colour, make beautiful harmonies. To feel continuity in variety, both in colour and in form, to feel freshness and intimacy — life and genuine communion of man’s spirit with the universal spirit, was the aim of these men. But a new being has arisen. Hitherto all Art has been an attempt to reconcile the present with the age of Artists, the standard has always been the highest achieved, the forms have always remained the same, though the content has changed. But the Futurist, the last spark struck from this seething modernism, this mechanical age of speed and convulsive machinery, must create a new form to completely express this entirely new and changed humanity. The old forms to him are useless, they served for the outworn creed that made the beauty of woman, or some quietist searching for ideal beauty its object, always taking some commonly recognised symbol to express this. This quietist detachment from life to watch from outside is not for the Futurist. Violence and perpetual struggle — this is life. Dynamic force, the constantaneous rush of electricity, the swift fierce power of steam, the endless contortions and deadly logic of machinery; and this can only be expressed by lines that are violent and struggle, that are mechanical and purely abstract. Theirs is an ideal of strength and scorn. The tiger must battle with the tiger. The world must be cleansed of the useless old and weak, for the splendour of battle must rage between the strong and the strong. Theirs is the terrible beauty of destruction and the furious energy in destroying. They would burn up the past, they would destroy all stand
ards. They have wearied of this unfair competition of the dead with the living. To express these new ideals, they have invented forms abstract and mechanical, remote from and unassociated with natural objects, and by the rhythmic arrangement of these forms, to convey sensation. This presupposes a sympathetic intuition — an understanding of the symbols in the spectator.

  We can only see ingenuity. The forms are not new, but dead and mechanical. There is no subtlety nor infinity. The only sensation I have ever got from a Futurist picture is that of a house falling, and however unlike the pictures were, that has always been the sensation. We can never strip ourselves completely from associated ideas; and art, being in its form at least, descriptive, the cubes and abrupt angles call to mind falling bricks. It is too purely abstract and devoid of any human basis to ever become intelligible to anybody outside the creator’s self. The symbols they use are symbols of symbols. But they have introduced urgency — energy into Art, and striven to connect it more with life.

  Art is now, as it were, a volcano. Eruptions are continual, and immense cities of culture at its foot are shaken and shivered. The roots of a dead universe are torn up by hands, feverish and consuming with an exuberant vitality — and amid dynamic threatenings we watch the hastening of the corroding doom.