The Philosophy of Art

Extract

The amateur, however much he may parade his amateurishness, has secretly always an envy of the professor. I am an amateur in art-criticism, and I have always wanted to be an Aristotle in judgment. Such awkward situations arise! The schoolboy bubbling over with enthusiasm consults me on Pre-Raphaelitism; the undergraduate asks me to admire Picasso or Wyndham Lewis; the pundit expects me to follow his monologue on the latest tendencies in painting and music, and always I struggle in the dark and conscience shakes its head at me for hypocrisy. How I long to be able to tick off on my fingers, after the manner of Aquinas in the picture, the good and bad points of this picture or that, and round off a classic treatment of the subject with some Olympian dictum!

In the days of credulous youth, I thought Ruskin was a Bible of Art. I learnt his definitions and went to art galleries a happy child certain of what I ought to like and dislike. But with the years disillusion came. Whistler found Ruskin wanting, and my friends, when I sang the song of Ruskin, laughed in my face and looked on me as a Victorian who had never grown old and wise. So I sought anew in great discontentment for a theory that would defy time and change. Books with alluring titles, What is Art? A New Theory of the Beautiful, The Relation of Art to Life, were tried, but instead of light I met fog, fog and ever thicker fog.