Conduct of life; English essays -- 20th century; Ethics; Philosophy
There is, however, one distinguishing mark of Art which at this stage,
as we conclude our survey, must be clearly indicated. It has been
subsumed, as the acute reader will not have failed to note, throughout.
But it has, for the most part, been deliberately left implicit. It has
constantly been assumed, that is to say, that Art is the sum of all the
active energies of Mankind. We must in this matter of necessity follow
Aristotle, who in his “Politics” spoke, as a matter of course, of all
those who practice “medicine, gymnastics, and the arts in general” as
“artists.” Art is the moulding force of every culture that Man during
his long course has at any time or place produced. It is the reality of
what we imperfectly term “morality.” It is all human creation.
Yet creation, in the active visible constructive sense, is not the whole
of Man. It is not even the whole of what Man has been accustomed to call
God. When, by what is now termed a process of Narcissism, Man created
God in his own image, as we may instructively observe in the first
chapter of the Hebrew Book of Genesis, he assigned to him six parts of
active creational work, one part of passive contemplation of that work.
That one seventh part—and an immensely important part—has not come under
our consideration. In other words, we have been looking at Man the
artist, not at Man the æsthetician.
There was more than one reason why these two aspects of human faculty
were held clearly apart throughout our discussion. Not only is it even
less possible to agree about æsthetics, where the variety of individual
judgment is rightly larger, than about art (ancient and familiar is the
saying, _De gustibus_—), but to confuse art and æsthetics leads us into
lamentable confusion. We may note this in the pioneers of the modern
revival of what Sidgwick called “æsthetic Intuitionism” in the
eighteenth century, and especially in Hutcheson, though Hutcheson’s work
is independent of consistency, which he can scarcely even be said to
have sought. They never sufficiently emphasised the distinction between
art and æsthetics, between, that is to say, what we may possibly, if we
like, call the dynamic and the static aspects of human action. Herein is
the whole difference between work, for art is essentially work, and the
spectacular contemplation of work, which æsthetics essentially is. The
two things are ultimately one, but alike in the special arts and in that
art of life commonly spoken of as morals, where we are not usually
concerned with ultimates, the two must be clearly held apart. From the
point of view of art we are concerned with the internal impulse to guide
the activities in the lines of good work. It is only when we look at the
work of art from the outside, whether in the more specialised arts or in
the art of life, that we are concerned with æsthetic contemplation, that
activity of vision which creates beauty, however we may please to define
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