It is a part of the common claptrap that “art is immoral.” Behold, everywhere, artists running to put on jazz underwear, to demoralize themselves; or, at least, to debourgeoiser themselves.
For the bourgeois is supposed to be the fount of morality. Myself, I have found artists far more morally finicky.
Anyhow, what has a water-pitcher and six insecure apples on a crumpled tablecloth got to do with bourgeois morality? Yet I notice that most people, who have not learnt the trick of being arty, feel a real moral repugnance for a Cezanne still-life. They think it is not right.
For them, it isn’t.
Yet how can they feel, as they do, that it is subtly immoral?
The very same design, if it was humanized, and the tablecloth was a draped nude and the water-pitcher a nude semi-draped, weeping over the draped one, would instantly become highly moral. Why?
Perhaps from painting better than from any other art we can realize the subtlety of the distinction between what is dumbly felt to be moral, and what is felt to be immoral. The moral instinct in the man in the street.
But instinct is largely habit. The moral instinct of the man in the street is largely an emotional defence of an old habit.
Yet what can there be in a Cezanne still-life to rouse the aggressive moral instinct of the man in the street? What ancient habit in man do these six apples and a water-pitcher succeed in hindering?
A water-pitcher that isn’t so very much like a water-pitcher, apples that aren’t very appley, and a tablecloth that’s not particularly- much of a tablecloth. I could do better myself!
Probably! But then, why not dismiss the picture as a poor attempt? Whence this anger, this hostility? The derisive resentment?
Six apples, a pitcher, and a tablecloth can’t suggest improper behaviour. They don’t — not even to a Freudian. If they did, the man in the street would feel much more at home with them.
Where, then, does the immorality come in? Because come in it does.
Because of a very curious habit that civilized man has been forming down the whole course of civilization, and in which he is now hard-boiled. The slowly formed habit of seeing just as the photographic camera sees.
You may say, the object reflected on the retina is always photographic. It may be. I doubt it. But whatever the image on the retina may be, it is rarely, even now, the photographic image of the object which is actually taken in by the man who sees the object. He does not, even now, see for himself. He sees what the Kodak has taught him to see. And man, try as he may, is not a Kodak.
When a child sees a man, what does the child take in, as an impression? Two eyes, a nose, a mouth of teeth, two straight legs, two straight arms: a sort of hieroglyph which the human child has used through all the ages to represent man. At least, the old hieroglyph was still in use when I was a child.
Is this what the child actually sees If you mean by seeing, consciously registering, then this is what the child actually sees. The photographic image may be there all right, upon the retina. But there the child leaves it: outside the door, as it were.
Through many ages, mankind has been striving to register the image on the retina as it is: no more glyphs and hieroglyphs. We’ll have the real objective reality.
And we have succeeded. As soon as we succeed, the Kodak is invented, to prove our success. Could lies come out of a black box, into which nothing but light had entered? Impossible! It takes life to tell a lie.
Colour also, which primitive man cannot really see, is now seen by us, and fitted to the spectrum.
Eureka! We have seen it, with our own eyes.
When we see a red cow, we see a red cow. We are quite sure of it, because the unimpeachable Kodak sees exactly the same.
But supposing we had all of us been born blind, and had to get our image of a red cow by touching her, and smelling her, hearing her moo, and “feeling” her? Whatever should we think of her? Whatever sort of image should we have of her, in our dark minds? Something very different, surely!
As vision developed towards the Kodak, man’s idea of himself developed towards the snapshot. Primitive man simply didn’t know what he was: he was always half in the dark. But we have learned to see, and each of us has a complete Kodak idea of himself.
You take a snap of your sweetheart, in the field among the buttercups, smiling tenderly at the red cow with a calf, and dauntlessly offering a cabbage-leaf.
Awfully nice, and absolutely “real.” There is your sweetheart, complete in herself, enjoying a sort of absolute objective reality: complete, perfect, all her surroundings contributing to her, incontestable. She is really a “picture.”
This is the habit we have formed: of visualizing everything. Each man to himself is a picture. That is, he is a complete little objective reality, complete in himself, existing by himself, absolutely, in the middle of the picture. All the rest is just setting, background. To every man, to every woman, the universe is just a setting to the absolute little picture of himself, herself.
This has been the development of the conscious ego in man, through several thousand years: since Greece first broke the spell of “darkness.” Man has learnt to see himself. So now, he is what he sees. He makes himself in his own image.
Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learnt to see straight. They fumbled in the dark, and didn’t quite know where they were, or what they were. Like men in a dark room, they only felt their own existence surging in the darkness of other creatures.
We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness. We see as the All-Seeing Eye sees, with the universal vision. And we are what is seen: each man to himself an identity, an isolated absolute, corresponding with a universe of isolated absolutes. A picture! A Kodak snap, in a universal film of snaps.
We have achieved universal vision. Even god could not see differently from what we see: only more extensively, like a telescope, or more intensively, like a microscope. But the same vision. A vision of images which are real, and each one limited to itself.
We behave as if we had got to the bottom of the sack, and seen the Platonic Idea with our own eyes, in all its photographically developed perfection, lying in the bottom of the sack of the universe. Our own ego!
The identifying of ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me.
As soon as we are supremely satisfied about it, somebody starts to upset us. Comes Cezanne with his pitcher and his apples, which not only are not life-like, but are a living lie. The Kodak will prove it.
The Kodak will take all sorts of snaps, misty, atmospheric, sun- dazed, dancing — all quite different. Yet the image is the image. There is only more or less sun, more or less vapour, more or less light and shade.
The All-Seeing Eye sees with every degree of intensity and in every possible kind of mood: Giotto, Titian, El Greco, Turner, all so different, yet all the true image in the All-Seeing Eye.
This Cezanne still-life, however, is contrary to the All-Seeing Eye. Apples, to the eye of God, could not look like that, nor could a tablecloth, nor could a pitcher. So, it is wrong.
Because man, since he grew out of a personal God, has taken over to himself all the attributes of the Personal Godhead. It is the all- seeing human eye which is now the Eternal Eye.
And if apples don’t look like that, in any light or circumstance, or under any mood, then they shouldn’t be painted like that.
Oh, la-la-la! The apples are just like that, to me! cries Cezanne. They are like that, no matter what they look like.
Apples are always apples! says Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
Sometimes they’re a sin, sometimes they’re a knock on the head, sometimes they’re a bellyache, sometimes they’re part of a pie, sometimes they’re sauce for the goose.
And you can’t see a bellyache, neither can you see a sin, neither can you see a knock on the head. So paint the apple in these aspects, and you get — probably, or approximately — a Cezanne still- life.
What an apple looks like to an urchin, to a thrush, to a browsing cow, to Sir Isaac Newton, to a caterpillar, to a hornet, to a mackerel who finds one bobbing on the sea, I leave you to conjecture. But the All-Seeing must have mackerel’s eyes, as well as man’s.
And this is the immorality in Cezanne: he begins to see more than the All-Seeing Eye of humanity can possibly see, Kodak-wise. If you can see in the apple a bellyache and a knock on the head, and paint these in the image, among the prettiness, then it is the death of the Kodak and the movies, and must be immoral.
It’s all very well talking about decoration and illustration, significant form, or tactile values, or plastique, or movement, or space- composition, or colour-mass relations, afterwards. You might as well force your guest to eat the menu card, at the end of the dinner.
What art has got to do, and will go on doing, is to reveal things in their different relationships. That is to say, you’ve got to see in the apple the bellyache, Sir Isaac’s knock on the cranium, the vast, moist wall through which the insect bores to lay her eggs in the middle, and the untasted, unknown quality which Eve saw hanging on a tree. Add to this the glaucous glimpse that the mackerel gets as he comes to the surface, and Fantin-Latour’s apples are no more to you than enamelled rissoles.
The true artist doesn’t substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively immoral.
The universe is like Father Ocean, a stream of all things slowly moving. We move, and the rock of ages moves. And since we move and move for ever, in no discernible direction, there is no centre to the movement, to us. To us, the centre shifts at every moment. Even the pole-star ceases to sit on the pole. Allons! there is no road before us
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There is nothing to do but to maintain a true relationship to the things we move with and amongst and against. The apple, like the moon, has still an unseen side. The movement of Ocean will turn it round to us, or us to it.
There is nothing man can do but maintain himself in true relationship to his contiguous universe. An ancient Rameses can sit in stone absolute, absolved from visual contact, deep in the silent ocean of sensual contact. Michelangelo’s Adam can open his eyes for the first time, and see the old man in the skies, objectively. Turner can tumble into the open mouth of the objective universe of light, till we see nothing but his disappearing heels. As the stream carries him, each in his own relatedness, each one differently, so a man must go through life.
Each thing, living or unliving, streams in its own odd, intertwining flux, and nothing, not even man nor the God of man, nor anything that man has thought or felt or known, is fixed or abiding. All moves. And nothing is true, or good, or right, except in its own living relatedness to its own circumambient universe; to the things that are in the stream with it.
Design, in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
Egypt had a wonderful relation to a vast living universe, only dimly visual in its reality. The dim eye-vision and the powerful blood-feeling of the Negro African, even today, gives us strange images, which our eyes can hardly see, but which we know are surpassing. The big silent statue of Rameses is like a drop of water, hanging through the centuries in dark suspense, and never static. The African fetish-statues have no movement, visually represented. Yet one little motionless wooden figure stirs more than all the Parthenon frieze. It sits in the place where no Kodak can snap it.
As for us, we have our Kodak-vision, all in bits that group or jig. Like the movies, that jerk but never move. An endless shifting and rattling together of isolated images, “snaps,” miles of them, all of them jigging, but each one utterly incapable of movement or change, in itself. A kaleidoscope of inert images, mechanically shaken.
And this is our vaunted “consciousness,” made up, really, of inert visual images and little else: like the cinematograph.
Let Cezanne’s apples go rolling off the table for ever. They live by their own laws, in their own ambiente, and not by the laws of the Kodak — or of man. They are casually related to man. But to those apples, man is by no means the absolute.
A new relationship between ourselves and the universe means a new morality. Taste the unsteady apples of Cezanne, and the nailed- down apples of Fantin-Latour are apples of Sodom. If the status quo were paradise, it would indeed be a sin to taste the new apples; but since the status quo is much more prison than paradise, we can go ahead.