The Tenth Muse (Routledge Revivals)

Essays in Criticism

Herbert Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138913974
• eBook ISBN: 9781317429074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book, first published in 1957, is a collection of Herbert Read's essays on various topics. The essays explore many different subjects and themes, including art, literature, religion and philosophy. This title will be of interest to a variety of readers.

1

On Something in Particular

“AT PRESENT the essay, as a serious, yet personal, intimate, and friendly way of public utterance, is at a low ebb. Those who write ‘easy’ essays write idly about trifles, often with some elegance, in the tone of polite society; but these things are essentially empty. The tendency is to write articles, not about things in general, about life as it is lived and thought about, or lived and not thought about by the essayist, but about something in particular—literature let us say—from a rather expert or professional point of view.”

Thus writes one of the most graceful of living essayists on the modern English essay,¹ and I, as another and less graceful essayist, must confess that the criticism is just. I tend to write “about something in particular”, and from a rather expert or professional point of view; and generally my essays are called articles, perhaps because they are not personal enough, certainly not intimate enough, to deserve the grander name. An “essay”—that undoubtedly is a form not merely of literature, but of belles lettres; an article—that is something paid for at so many guineas a thousand; an article, indeed, of commerce.

I doubt if I could write an easy essay, just to express my thoughts about life in general. The only essays in this volume that were not written about something in particular, on a particular occasion and for a particular purpose, were written as pegs to hang my coat on; and even then I was creating my own particular purpose. The rest were written to command—the command of editors and talks producers—as reviews and broadcasts. Each had a particular subject and in each I tried to express a critical opinion. And that is the way of writing forced on one by the circumstances of our time. It may be a bad way of writing, but at least it belongs to the pattern of our way of life.

The circumstances which dictate the form of the modern essay to the writer are economic. The writer cannot dictate to the public: most certainly he cannot dictate to the editors who interpret the demands of the public. Even if the writer is a man of financial independence and ample leisure, and can sit quietly in some country retreat rounding off his five or ten thousand words in the manner of Hazlitt or Macaulay, what is he then to do with the product? No journals like the old Quarterly or Edinburgh now exist to accommodate such essays; and if some idealist were to cause one to come into existence, such is the pace of modern life that no one would have time to read it. The Criterion made an attempt to restore the serious essay, and I took part in that forlorn effort. We failed because we were travelling in a coach-and-four along a first-class motor road, where speed and the number of passengers were the prime essentials. We were often complimented on our elegant turn-out, but there were few who wanted to adopt our pace.

I believe that in the coming years the essay will change even more decisively through the influence of broadcasting. The good talk is a spoken essay, and it usually reads well when printed. That depends, of course, on one’s definition of a good talk; personally I am glad to see the last of the mannered talks—the groans and hesitations, the pompous deliberation and fatuous intonations, which passed for a good broadcasting style in the early days. Directness and sincerity have been recognized as the essential qualities of good broadcasting, and these are the essential qualities of good essay writing. But broadcasting imposes standard lengths and usually short lengths, and it imposes a particular subject. The radio does not exist to put across trifles (though it might well be a little less serious): it does not exist to propagate a personal view of life. It encourages intimacy of approach (which is all to the good), and it magnifies and makes intolerable any form of affectation. When one can afford to be serious, or even idle with elegance, as on the Third Programme, then broadcasting is an ideal medium for the essayist.

Must the modern essayist be an expert, as Professor Dobrée suggests? It depends on what is meant by an expert. An expert is usually a man who knows everything about one thing, and nothing much about anything else—he has a fanatical single-track mind: he burrows in a tunnel where no side-passages admit light and air. His counterpart is a man who knows a little about everything and nothing much about anything in particular. I myself am sometimes accused of eclecticism. I do not object to the charge. The essayists I most admire—Bacon, Hazlitt, Bagehot—they too were eclectic. If one has a beam of intelligence, let it play where it lists, so long as it has power and penetration, and a fixed centre.

The intensity and restlessness of modern life forces the essayist to dubious shifts: he is commanded by pressures and exigencies which distort the true picture of his interests. I have been persuaded to write on some subjects beyond my competence, and by chance I have never been asked to write on subjects near my heart. But the longer one lives and the more one writes, the more complete the pattern becomes.

I do not pretend that there is any pattern discernible in the miscellany that follows this opening essay—indeed, if the title had not already been used by Paul Valéry, I might have called it Variety. I do not even claim the virtue of consistency, and I am sure a logician could have fine intellectual sport in exposing my contradictions—my paralogisms, as he might call them. I am not in desperate search of what Mr. Crawshay-Williams has called “the comforts of unreason”: rather, I am a pluralist, content to let loose a number of truths with no desire to bring them within a house of correction, no itch to reduce them to some “unifying formula”. The quotation from C. F. Ramuz’s Journal which I put in front of a previous collection of this kind, A Coat of Many Colours, was meant as a warning, an excuse, a confession of this possible deficiency. That quotation, which I left in French because I found it too difficult to translate into adequate English, is a fairly exact and very compact summary of my general outlook—of an attitude I would never venture to call a philosophy. I might paraphrase it thus: Never yield to habit, especially to habits of thought which polish away the rough edges of truth; remain open, innocent, original. Put away childish things, but retain, all the same, a core of childhood, a slender vein of vital sap which the rings of growth may hide, but must never destroy. Keep a reserve of simplicity, even of primitiveness, so that you do not meet elementary situations with sophistication. Your aim should be, not simply to be, but rather to be ever capable of becoming—not at rest, but moving with the moving world—always in touch with what is changing, changing oneself—open, like the child, to the whole world without, but with an inward reserve which the child does not yet possess, where one gathers a little strength, a certain order.

¹  Bonamy Dobrée, in English Essayists. London, 1946.

2

The Art of Art Criticism

I

BY ART CRITICISM in the accepted sense, we mean the current criticism of painting, sculpture, architecture and other visual arts. But what is “criticism”? There is ambiguity in this very word, for it is obvious that the nature of criticism must be determined by the nature of the audience to which it is addressed. A teacher, moving from easel to easel in the life class, will be critical in one manner—pointing to faulty composition in one case, to an insensitive line in another, to inadequacies of all kinds; at the same time praising the successes where they exist, and always urging on his pupils by communicating to them his sympathy and enthusiasm. That I would call professional criticism, and with its technicalities and jargon it should be confined to its proper sphere, the studio or the school of art.

There is another kind of criticism which should also be confined to a school. Though it can be applied to contemporary art, it is, properly speaking, historical criticism, by which I mean the delineation of movements and groups, the description of styles, the analysis of techniques and materials—in general, the post-mortem attitude to art.

Finally, there is what I would call the aesthetical or philosophical criticism of art. In so far as aesthetics is a science, and philosophy a discipline, this also is a form of criticism that calls for a specialized terminology and a concentrated manner of thought. The best art critics have, of course, a philosophical background: their criticism is an applied philosophy, but is not in itself a philosophical activity.

What, then, are we left with that might be called simply art criticism? It must be an activity addressed, not to a professional minority of any kind, but to the general body of educated opinion, and it must give its public something it wants—something it is not capable of finding for itself—in one word, enlightenment.

Such a criticism will be either informative or interpretative. It will not assume that everyone has seen the work of art the critic is talking about; on the contrary, it will try to give everyone a vivid image of the object in question. Having done this, the critic will proceed to interpret the artist’s intention, and in the end he may express his own view of the artist’s achievement, and this view need not necessarily be favourable. But most critics, I am afraid, never stop to ask what the artist was trying to do; they assume that there is only one way of doing a particular job (painting a landscape, building a cathedral) and they proceed to criticize the artist for not doing the job as they would have done it.

But some critics make a practice of imputing to the artist motives which he never had in mind; and they criticize him for not doing what he never intended to do. There can be no true interpretation without complete sympathy and understanding. The lack of sympathy, and therefore of understanding, may be due to the confusing variety of modern styles. Ruskin was faced by an extreme deviation from one style, which we call realism; a modern critic has to cope with a wide variation of execution in at least four distinct styles—realism, super-realism, expressionism and abstract art. He may have sufficient sympathy for realism to make a good critic of realistic painting, but be so completely out of sympathy with abstract art as to be quite incapable of writing anything sensible about it. Few critics would refrain on that account from criticizing abstract art.

I think the modern art critic fails most conspicuously on the descriptive or visualizing side of his activity. Perhaps the verbal description of a painting, a piece of sculpture or a building, is regarded as somewhat old-fashioned. “It seems all right,” as Georges Duthuit says, “to speak because of a picture, but speaking of it must be avoided as much as possible.” Photographs and various methods of reproduction have made it easy—in periodicals and in television, but not in broadcasting—to dispense with a lot of verbal description; it is assumed that the reader can grasp from the illustration what the picture or piece of sculpture is about; as well as various details of its composition. Here, maybe, we are near the heart of the present malady, for I believe that the critic ought to be capable of giving an exact verbal description of the object which has caused him aesthetic pleasure or displeasure—only in that way can he be sure that his experience is a complete one, and that the necessary transformation has taken place in his mind which will enable him to criticize the processes of one art (say painting) in the terms of another art (the art of writing).

That, at any rate, was the method of the old art critics—of Hazlitt and Ruskin, of Diderot and Baudelaire. They were all masters of the art of writing, and to them a work of art—a painting or a building—was first and foremost something to be described, something to be realized in words, just as a painting in its turn had been something to be realized in paint. One might take, as a perfect example of this type of art criticism, Hazlitt’s essay “On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin”—an essay of some three to four thousand words, first published in The New Monthly Magazine for August, 1821. I emphasize that fact to show that it was written as journalism. It deals with Poussin’s “Orion”, painted in 1658, which Hazlitt had seenin an exhibition at the British Institution. The whole process of criticism is, for Hazlitt, infinitely leisurely. There was no paper shortage in 1821, no restriction of space, and the public had leisured vacancies to fill. So he begins with some account of the legend of “Orion”, so that we can appreciate the justness of the painter’s selection of a particular incident and scene, and the pertinency with which it has been treated. Then there is a disquisition on the relation of art to nature—to make the point that Poussin’s art is “a second nature, not a different one”. By this he means that a painter like Poussin—he calls him an “historic” painter, meaning what we should now call a “literary” painter—that such a painter “does not neglect nature, but follows her more closely into her fantastic heights, or hidden recesses. He demonstrates what she would be in conceivable circumstances, and under implied conditions”. Hazlitt then interpolates an attack on the lifeless imitators, the dull traducers of nature, and by this time he is half-way through his essay, and must come to his main point, which is: that Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. To prove this point will demand a lot of significant detail, not only from the picture under observation, but from Poussin’s work in general. Subsidiary points will be made—for example, that Poussin succeeded better in classic than in sacred subjects. A comparison with Rubens is called for, and then we come to a definition which shows the bias of Hazlitt’s own mind. “Pictures,” he says, “are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. … A life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same time; for it has all ‘the sober certainty of waking bliss’ with the romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. Pictures are the bright consummate essences of things.…” And then Hazlitt checks his eloquence to return to “Orion”, and to the gallery in which he had seen the picture, and with a final tribute to the private patrons of art and to the enterprise of those who had organized the exhibition of loans from their collection, he ends his essay.

A leisurely performance, indeed; not apt for the fraction of a newspaper column which is now all that is at the disposal of the modern art critic, nor even for the twenty minutes or so that is put at the disposal of a broadcaster.

The critic in the daily newspaper or the weekly review does not describe the works he criticizes, simply because it is not possible to do so in the space at his disposal; so he resorts, either to the supposition that his readers have seen what he is criticizing, or to shorthand symbols which only the initiated understand.

In broadcasting the position should be easier: the time given to an art talk is equivalent to quite a lengthy critical review, but the critic often seems to carry over into the medium of broadcasting the clipped and emaciated language of the Press.

Let me now quote two examples of the kind of criticism that can be read at any time in a weekly periodical. I shall not mention the names of the critics, because they are irrelevant; and I freely admit that I myself might have spoken in a similar vein. The first is from The Listener and was not broadcast:

At the Lefèvre Gallery Hans Tisdall has enlarged his scope by a remarkable act of self-abnegation. For him, a full range of colour was always a temptation to turn a picture into a decoration, and, having a daring sense of colour, he succumbed to the temptation. Perhaps, realizing his weakness, he has gone deliberately into a kind of aesthetic retreat, or perhaps he has tired of the seductions of a rainbow palette. Whatever the reason, his recent paintings—still-lifes mainly—are worked out in a monochrome tempered with accents of pale colour. The result is a new range of expressiveness. The familiar rococo pattern is impregnated with space and light and density. The eye no longer slides off into patterned surface but explores the shapes and is drawn in between them.

That is very different from Hazlitt’s style of criticism, but it is quite typical of present-day art criticism. I personally do not experience any difficulty in understanding what the critic is saying, for I have studied the private language in which it is written. Not knowing that language, you might protest that if a picture is not a decoration, then what is it; and why shouldn’t it be decorative? But I, as one of the initiated, know that a theoretical distinction has been made by modern art critics between painting and decoration, and it is one of the accepted clichés of modern art criticism. We do not stop to discuss the distinction: we assume that the reader is in the secret, and will not stop to question what we mean.

Again, when the critic tells us that “the familiar rococo pattern is impregnated with space and light and density” and that “the eye no longer slides off into patterned surface but explores the shapes and is drawn in between them”, I know what these rather mixed metaphors mean. My knowledge of the history of art has given me a general idea of “rococo pattern”, but I wonder how many readers know the difference, for example, between a rococo and a baroque pattern?

As for the difficult feat of impregnating such a pattern, not only with space and light, but at the same time with density; and the still more mysterious business of an eye that slides off surfaces, explores shapes and ends by getting drawn in between them—all that will require, on the part of the poor blind reader—I call him blind because he has never seen the painting in question—a prodigious power of visualization.

Now let me take another example—from a broadcast talk which I personally found very illuminating, but which at the time baffled some listeners:

In looking at some of Bacon’s paintings we are conscious at first only of the paint, seeing it as some amorphous, ectoplasmic substance floating aimlessly on the canvas. It takes a little time before this stuff that is paint crystallizes into an image. But as soon as it does crystallize, the once vague and shifting shapes become volumes modelled with a wonderful sensitivity and situated with extreme precision in space.

The certainty with which Bacon creates volumes, volumes that are tangible, is largely due to his uncanny sense of the exact degree of tension along each form.

Admittedly there is some jargon here: “volumes” are not “modelled” in any precisely visual sense: they may be suggested by certain pictorial means: and only in some metaphorical sense could such volumes become “tangible”. We don’t “touch” volumes; we fill them, either really or imaginatively. But apart from such impressions, the language is such as might be used by a lecturer in a physics laborat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1 On Something in Particular
• 2 The Art of Art Criticism
• 3 Gauguin: the Return to Symbolism
• 4 The Inspired Tinker
• 5 Goethe and Art
• 6 Naum Gabo
• 7 Walter Pater
• 8 The Writer and His Region
• 9 Max Stirner
• 10 Frank Lloyd Wright
• 11 Religion and Culture
• 12 Michelangelo and Bernini
• 13 The Limits of Logic
• 14 Baudelaire as Art Critic
• 15 The Image in Modern English Poetry
• 16 De Tocqueville on Art in America
• 17 Sotto Voce
• 18 George Lukács
• 19 The Romantic Revolution
• 20 The Sustaining Myth
• 21 On First Reading Nietzsche
• 22 The Drama and the Theatre
• 23 Two Notes on a Trilogy
• 24 C. G. Jung
• 25 ‘The Prelude’
• 26 Barbara Hepworth
• 27 Susanne Langer
• 28 Henry Miller
• 29 ‘De Stijl’
• 30 Ezra Pound
• 31 The Architect as Universal Man
• 32 Gandhi
• 33 The Enjoyment of Art
• 34 D’Arcy Thompson
• 35 A Seismographic Art
• 36 Tribal Art and Modern Man
• 37 Graham Sutherland
• 38 Kokoschka
• 39 The Problem of the Zeitgeist
• 40 The Faith of a Critic
• Notes