Clive Bell's Aesthetic: Tradition and Significant Form Author(s): Thomas M.

McLaughlin Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Summer, 1977), pp. 433443 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430609 . Accessed: 23/12/2013 06:13
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THOMAS M. McLAUGHLIN

Clive Tradition

Bell's and

Aesthetic.

Significant Form

I. Introduction
CLIVEBELLhas often been dismissed by aes-

theticians and art critics who demand rigorous logic in their disciplines. They point persuasively to his circular reasoning, inconsistencies, and even overt contradictions. No one, though, has denied his sensibility, especially since he championed the artists of his time who have survived to be recognized universally as masters. But Bell claimed for himself more than sensibility. At the outset of his career, in Art (1913), he designated the qualities that aesthetic thinking demands: "artistic sensibility and a turn for clear thinking." 1 Obviously he considered himself so qualified, but many of his critics have since questioned his "clear thinking." His reputation has suffered not only because of his own weaknesses, but because he is so often invidiously compared to Roger Fry, whose superiority need not be secured at Bell's expense. In addition, Bell has unfortunately, if inevitably, been identified almost completely with the phrase "significant form," and has suffered the fate common to any critic whose impact relies on one memorable phrase: the rest of his career has been neglected, and the setting in which the phrase first appeared has been forgotten. Bell's thinking, then, can be distorted either by arbitrarily translating his
THOMASM. MCLAUGIILIN is visiting assistant professor in the department of English at Temple University.

explanations into more limited formulas or by ignoring all of his works but his most famous, Art. For example, if his conception of form is reduced to "outline," as it was by one reviewer of Art, then an antagonistic critic can easily dismiss Bell's theory as rigid and narrow.2Similarly, Bell is often attacked for failing to provide an adequate definition of "significant form" by critics who have apparently considered only his first attempt to do so.3 When Bell's entire career is considered, a more fully developed aesthetic system than his detractors have been willing to recognize is apparent. The system depends on Bell's formulation of a theory of tradition which provides a coherent explanation of the process by which form is imposed on the world, and which anticipates at least in part many of the objections raised against him. This is not to overlook the weaknesses in Bell's theory; his system can legitimately be questioned on several important issues. However, simply to dismiss Bell (as some critics have done) because of the apparent circularity of one of his arguments - the definition of significant form - is to overlook his considerable achievement both as a critic and as a theoretician. In fact, that a critic whose method depended so much on the articulation of his direct emotional responses to various works of art should also construct a consistent aesthetic theory is itself an achievement that deserves our attention. Bell's system attains its theoretical con-

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mits that some art excites the emotions of life, he still maintains that the function of the highest art is to produce this aesthetic emotion. The validity of these claims will be considered later, but their importance here is in the task that they set for Bell. He will attempt to discover what it is in the work of art that is the ground for this particular emotion. Bell's answer, significant form, must be seen over against its opposite to be fully understood. Bell usually speaks of art in terms of its purely visual qualities, that is, as line, color, mass, and volume. Significant form is these elements seen as visual pattern, rather than seen as representations of the external world. In reaction to the nineteenthcentury academic tradition, which Bell and all of Bloomsbury accused of reducing art to illustration, he insists on seeing each element of a work primarily as part of an interrelating structure. What Bell calls "descriptive painting" is that in which the artist has directed his spectators' attention to forms as illustrations, and has thus denied that which is peculiar to art; in such works, Bell says, "forms are used not as objects of emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information" (Art, p. 22). R. Meager has noted that, to Bell, the potential for aesthetic emotion is deeply human, but has been blurred in his time by the constant enshrinement in officially sanctioned art of the common emofamiliarity with its emotions . . . for a mo- tions of everyday life.5 Bell demands that ment we are shut off from human inter- this historical movement be reversed, that ests . . ." (Art, p. 27). This emotion is peculartists force their audience to see forms as iar to the experience of art; the vast majority, forms, and that critics foster attention to at least, cannot respond aesthetically to the form, so that spectators may experience the world outside of art. They cannot do so be- aesthetic emotion. Since this emotion is cause the events that they witness in that absolutely distinct from those which reworld demand from them a moral response; spond to life, it follows that forms seen as in art they are free to be merely spectators, illustrations of life cannot cause it. Only to respond as uninvolved, detached sensi- forms seen as ends in themselves can achieve bilities. There is, therefore, an amoral allure what Bell defines as the purpose of art, to to this emotion; the spectator observes a transport the viewer into a purely artistic scene or a pattern which does not in any world, cut off from life. When Bell defines direct sense concern him, and so his normal significant form, then, as that which proinstincts and ideals can be set aside during vokes aesthetic emotion, the emphasis must this isolated experience. What differentiates fall on the word "aesthetic" as opposed to this aesthetic emotion, then, is its detached, "life" emotions, and the distinction bealmost impersonal quality. While Bell ad- tween form as an end in itself and form as sistency in spite of local faults; indeed, even the faults deserve close critical attention because of the revelations they provide about the very habits of thought that produced the system. For example, the definition of significant form has often been sharply criticized as circular, but this flaw results more from the imprecise language of Bell's first attempt at a definition than from inherent conceptual weaknesses in his fully developed exposition of the problem.4 Bell's critics usually formulate his circular thinking in this way: he begins his analysis by asserting the existence of a purely aesthetic emotion, and then argues that all art must possess some quality to which this emotion responds, that is, significant form, which he then defines as form capable of stirring aesthetic emotion. Such an argument is obviously circular, but it is only a reduced version of Bell's actual argument. A closer look at "The Aesthetic Hypothesis" shows that the circularity is more apparent than real, and an examination of Bell's later explanations clarifies some of the confusions actually present in the early definition. Bell does begin by arguing for the existence of "a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art" (Art, p. 17), and strongly distinguishes this aesthetic emotion from those which respond to life. "To appreciate a work of art," Bell argues, "we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no

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Clive Bell's Aesthetic an illustration must be remembered. Interpreted in this way, Bell can be seen as making necessary distinctions rather than as constructing a mere tautology. At the same time, however, it must be admitted that Bell does not often press himself to explain away the circularity. He seems to have assumed that no further argument was necessary, that any person of taste and refinement had experienced and could identify an aesthetic emotion, and knows instinctively the quality that causes it. His arguments are, therefore, often more vitriolic than rational, because he aims at revealing his opponents as philistine fools rather than at developing a coherent argument for what seems to him self-evident. Nevertheless, Bell does avoid simple circularity, despite the admitted flaws in his presentation. II. The Aesthetic Emotion More damaging than the charge of circularity is the controversy over the very existence of a purely aesthetic emotion. I. A. Richards first clashed with Bell on this issue, but their interchange provides little intentional illumination. Richards simply denies the existence of an aesthetic emotion, asserting that "psychology has no place for such an entity." 6 Although Richards's solution to the problem, that art produces a "finer organization" of emotions which occur elsewhere, may seem more satisfying, and has been more influential, in this argument he gives no compelling reasons for rejecting Bell's position. Similarly, Bell answers Richards's criticism only by suggesting that Richards was incapable of an aesthetic experience, and so could not encompass it in his psychology. Bell's ad hominem argument can be seen as a justifiably angry and rhetorically effective response to Richards's scientific absolutism, but it in fact reveals much more about Bell's position on this issue. His argument assumes not only that the aesthetic emotion should be immediately accepted by any cultivated man, but that its existence is self-evident, known by what G. E. Moore calls an "intuition," and that therefore no argument is possible.7 But Bell's certainty has not been shared by re-

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cent commentators, and indeed the assertion that the emotional response to art is absolutely distinct from life-emotions seems extreme and rigid rather than obvious. It could be argued, for example, that even in the midst of an aesthetic experience the responses of the spectator are influenced in great part by his normal emotional patterns. Certainly his emotions are altered under the pressure of the artist's vision, but the spectator must bring with him into the experience his own sensibility, one which has been shaped not only by other aesthetic experiences but by his daily interaction with the world. Bell's vision of aesthetic emotion is almost apocalyptic; the man who views art divests himself of all prior emotional tendencies in order to experience this new and higher emotion. What Bell misses is the dialectical pressure between the work of art and the normal emotional patterns of the spectator. An interchange occurs in that moment in which the powerful work of art reveals the limitations of the spectator's vision, and forces him to grow, to accommodate this new perspective. Thus Bell's image of a morally detached, distanced spectator is illusory. Whether the audience wills it or not, its strongest emotions are brought directly into play, under the control of the artist's technique. Bell's theory of aesthetic emotion in fact reveals a spectator so willing to receive the momentary salvation of art that he cannot play his part in the real imaginative exchange. He is looking for a defense against emotion, not growth. Further, much of Bell's occasional criticism suggests the practical impossibility of experiencing a purely aesthetic emotion. For example, Bell's approach to African sculpture reveals the inevitable intermixing of "life" emotions in the response to art. These works were crucial to his development of the concept of significant form, because at the time their historical context was unknown, and so their formal qualities were foregrounded.8 Bell praises the "beauty, taste, quality, and skill" of the works, but denies them full artistic status because they are not the products of individuals, 'at least in his terms, but rather

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have been produced unself-consciously, much as birds produce their nests. Here, where a detached analysis of pure form is rhetorically necessary, Bell's cultural preconceptions dictate his response. He cannot remain morally neutral to works which question his beliefs. Further, the real limitation of his approach is revealed by the fact that, in the end, his beliefs cannot be altered by these new works of art. The critic who most firmly denies the role of normal emotional patterns in his response is most liable to their subtle influence. Such a failure on Bell's part must bring his entire argument on the nature of aesthetic emotion into question.9 F. A. Whiting, in an early review of Enjoying Pictures, suggested that the underlying cause of Bell's belief in a purely aesthetic emotion was his fear of life, which required that he separate the art that he so valued from the world that he feared.10 Although it is difficult to reconstruct Bell's mental state, there are numerous references in his criticism to the unsatisfying, disordered state of the external world. There Bell sees only "clatter and tumult," and "incoherent facts." It is the very function of art to raise man above this "grey and trivial affair," to release him from normal perceptions and daily emotions.11 The aesthetic emotion, then, would need to be held distinct, since the origin of the emotions of life is of such dubious value. Bell's continuous reference to the high spiritual value of art indicates the importance that he attaches to the aesthetic emotion, and to the distance that it provides from life. Although the existence of a purely aesthetic emotion is at least questionable, it provides the starting point for Bell's more successful theoretical work and for his practical criticism. His system is frankly subjective; one commentator has accurately described Bell's work as an "elucidation of the aesthetic thrill." 12 Bell himself announces his subjective base in Art: "the starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion" (pp. 16-17). The ways in which this subjectivity shapes Bell's critical practice are not always beneficial, but at its

best, his criticism communicates his emotion forcefully enough to lead his reader to a sympathetic experience of the work, even if he does not share Bell's assumptions. As Bell said, "I have no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally" (Art, p. 18). Many of his critics have asserted that no true critical judgments are possible if they spring from subjective experience.'3 But criticizing Bell on these grounds raises two distinct difficulties. First, he is neither the first nor the most influential thinker to claim that art can only be recognized through the existence of a particular mental state. Kant, for example, contends that we recognize beauty only through our experience of the equilibrium of certain internal powers. Bell, then, participates in a much larger historical phenomenon, and cannot be criticized in isolation, especially since the more general notion that all criticism and aesthetics should retain the integrity of the original experience of the work is shared by a wide range of critics. Secondly, those who criticize Bell's subjectivity often ignore the objective phase of his theory. Once an aesthetic emotion has been experienced, the spectator can then point to the work to show the grounds for his emotion. The forms to which the spectator responds do exist objectively. In fact, Bell's entire career can be seen as an attempt to educate the visual sensibilities of the public so that they could see those forms more clearly. Certainly a subjective experience is the clue that a given set of forms should be seen in this way, but Bell maintains that the experience leads us to objectively existing forms.14One indication of Bell's objective phase is his admonition, expressed in Since Cezanne, that the existence of a good response is not an infallible sign of great art, since other, purely subjective causes may account for the response (p. 164). Strong emotion is necessary for an assertion that significant form exists, but it is not a sufficient reason for such an assertion. Since Bell's system is so subjective, some critics have charged that he simply extended his personal tastes into a theory of art. Lawrence Buermayer, for example,

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Clive Bell's Aesthetic argues that Bell's theory is inevitably narrow and exclusive, since it dismisses works valued by more flexible tastes which would result in a more inclusive theory.15 Buermayer apparently objects not so much to the practice of basing an aesthetic on one's personal tastes, but rather to the restrictions of Bell's own taste. If Art is taken as an example, Bell certainly does display limited taste. In that work only "primitive" art, especially of the Byzantine period, and postImpressionism are sanctioned, while the entire Renaissance is depicted as decadent. However, it should be noted that Bell's tastes become more catholic as he realized that significant form could coexist with even a strong representational element. In Art, for example, Raphael plays the role of the darling of the corrupt Academy (p. 120), while in Enjoying Pictures (1934), Bell lavishes on Raphael perhaps the highest praise expressed in his criticism. Similarly, in Since Cezanne, Bell discards his earlier view of the history of painting, which had elevated Byzantine art and Cezanne into lonely achievements on opposite ends of a period of great decline. He now constructs a continuing tradition of great artists, including many he had denigrated in Art, of which Cezanne, for all his experimentation, is a reaffirmation.16 Bell's tastes, it is clear, became increasingly inclusive, but more significantly, it is doubtful that his theoretical system was ever limited absolutely to the range of his sensibility. Even in Art Bell says, "we may all agree about aesthetics, and yet differ about particular works of art" (p. 19). That is, Bell admits that he might not see significant form in a work, and yet have no quarrel in theory with a critic who did, so long as both agreed on the quality being discussed. It is more accurate to depict Bell, as some critics have done, as accepting a new and challenging artistic style, and then creating a theory to account for the qualities he had perceived there. Bell believed that the emotion he experienced in the presence of modern art differed in quality from that which purely representational art elicited. As Morris Weitz has pointed out, Bell is simply attempting to construct a theory to

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account for paintings which the accepted theory of his time would not allow him to understand.17 When Cezanne, for example, was judged by the dominant canon of verisimilitude, he was declared a "botcher." 18 Bell's system was intended to reduce the obvious gap between practice and theory, to widen the definition of art to include the vigorous creative artists of his time. His books, particularly Art, are polemical; they are aimed at an audience which had been educated under the old theories, and which Bell rightly assumed would be hostile to these new artists. In this context, it is not surprising that the rhetoric of the attempt to widen the definition of art at times demanded a rejection of the preeminent models that Bell's opponents upheld. His growth as a critic, though, is indicated by his later recognition that the fault lay with traditional critics, not with traditional artists, who were capable of creating significant form even in the midst of a representational intention. He realized, for example, that the academy had misunderstood Raphael, and that his own appreciation of Raphael had been perverted by his overreaction to the false use to which his works had been put. Undeniably, then, Bell's system is thoroughly subjective at its outset, but it does not necessarily limit him to expressing his own responses, or to canons of taste derived from a narrow sensibility. The definition of the aesthetic emotion, questionable as it is, retains the virtue of consistency; the rest of Bell's system derives from it directly. It is the definition of significant form that causes extensive questions regarding the internal coherence of Bell's aesthetics.

III. Tradition and Significant Form The development apparent in Bell's range of taste perhaps accounts for the increasingly confident tone of his theoretical speculations. The definition of significant form, especially, develops from a tentative speculation in Art to a fully developed governing principle in later works. This movement is typical of Bell's thought; hypotheses which are never adequately tested or defended

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seem later to be taken for granted. They are so thoroughly assumed that they are no longer the subject of speculations but rather the basis for new investigations. As R. K. Elliott and Solomon Fishman have shown, underlying the definition of significance is the assumption that the artist's and the spectator's experiences are identical.19 Just as the work's form appeals to the spectator, so the artist is susceptible to form in the external world. Therefore, when Bell announces that "created form moves us so profoundly because it expresses the emotion of its creator" (Art, p. 43), he is not simply equating significance and self-expression. He suggests that true art recreates and gives artistic form to the artist's own aesthetic response to the world. The artist, Bell says, is uniquely capable of seeing the external world as form, and thus of responding to it in a way which will eventually induce the aesthetic emotion in his spectators. The chaotic, fragmented world in which Bell habitually lives and from which he hopes art can deliver him seems to be suspended for the artist, who sees about him a more hospitable, more orderly world. Explanations for this inconsistency have varied: it has plausibly been dismissed as one of Bell's careless contradictions, or it can be seen as one more instance of his uncritical veneration of artists. In fact, throughout his career, but especially in Since Cezanne, he offers an implicit answer to these objections, slowly extricating himself from the paradox. To see objects as ordered and significant, the artist must somehow see them "not as means shrouded in associations, but as pure forms" (Art, p. 45). Thus for the artist, "life" emotions are as irrelevant as they are to the spectator. They lead him away from an object's shape and texture into the learned emotional associations that objects used throughout man's life accrue. It is in this sense that the artist reveals the "ultimate reality" (Art, p. 45) of the external world; he sees objects as "things in themselves," in Bell's terms, as forms to be admired rather than as matter to be manipulated. By Since Cezanne (1922), the expressive nature of art has become an underlying

principle. Here Bell asserts that the artist "creates forms that shall correspond with his intimate sense of the significance of things" (p. 101), and defines "the proper end of art" as "externalizing in form an aesthetic experience" (p. 30). The tone in these passages is confident and dogmatic, far from hesitant. In Art Bell's theory amounts to a statement of his faith in the superior ordering powers of artists; in Since Cezanne his faith has been confirmed. His continued devotion to Cezanne seems to have been the catalyst for his developing confidence. Cezanne was the breakthrough; he "removed all unnecessary barriers between what [artists] felt and its realization in form" (Since Cezanne, p. 15). Not only had Bell proved to be right and Cezanne's critical detractors come reluctantly to accept him, but the new masters of the modern French movement also followed in his direction. The metaphysical hypothesis became more acceptable to Bell as his successful models reinforced for him its plausibility, and as he realized that it applied to artists whom he had previously rejected. Although Bell became increasingly convinced of the truth of his hypothesis, two serious difficulties still arise with regard to his explanation of significance. As R. K. Elliott has pointed out in his brilliant essay on Bell, if the artist can discover significant form in the external world, then the distinction between art and that world cannot be so complete as Bell claims, since significance can only be encountered in an ordered object, certainly not in the collection of "incoherent facts" that Bell more typically sees in the world.20 In some way the artist must be able to see as form what others - including Bell - see as chaos. Otherwise, the claim that art begins in the artist's own aesthetic experience of the world is impossible. Bell was aware of the confusion provoked by his definition, and in 1919 suggested this explanation of the difference between the significance of art and the mere beauty of nature: "in a work of art an artist expresses an emotion, whereas the flower and the gem express nothing and are, in that sense, insignificant." 21 This attempt at simplifying the issue unfortunately adds to the con-

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Clive Bell's Aesthetic fusion, since, as we have seen, the metaphysical hypothesis states that the emotion expressed by art is precisely the artist's sense of the significance of things. Bell even suggests in another context that, to the artist, objects are somehow themselves expressive. This provokes the second major objection to the theory; if significance and expression are related, and if the artist sees significance in the world, whose emotion does it express? Jerome Stolnitz has noticed this problem, and C. J. Ducasse takes it an incongruous further step.22He imports into the discussion a divine figure, which he admits is foreign to Bell but nevertheless seems to him to be implied by an "expressive" external world, and then wonders what was the object of the artistic creator god's emotion, which his creation, the natural world, expresses. The tone of Ducasse's essay mocks Bell rather than controverting him, and his intention here is simply to trivialize Bell's argument. However, Bell's problems with these issues have not been manufactured by hostile critics; they arise from his own flawed formulation of the metaphysical hypothesis. He uses terms like "expressive" with too little rigor, and his use of "discover" to describe the creation of form cannot be taken literally as signifying his belief in a world in which order can be found. Although Bell's works do not provide a direct, conscious answer to these objections, an implicit answer does arise, although Bell never connected it to the metaphysical hypothesis. It is through Bell's theory of tradition, indebted strongly to T. S. Eliot, and developed and applied in Since Cezanne, Landmarks in Nineteenth Century Painting, and An Account of French Painting, that the difficulties are diminished. Bell's limitations as a theorist, however, are suggested by the fact that so much interpretation and synthesis is required from a reader of his works to construct a coherent theory from his less systematic approach. Bell never makes the connections that I will suggest here, but the connections can still legitimately be made without falsifying the material that he could have provided in his own defense. Further, if these connections are ignored, his career

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becomes truncated and distorted. If Since Cezanne does not take up the problems that arose in Art, then we must posit in Bell a lack of intellectual continuity and integrity more massive than any of his most virulent critics suggest. Bell's theory of tradition provides the solution to the apparent contradiction that Elliott points out. In Since Cezanne Bell sees the artist as living within a world of art. Through his training and his natural interest in the works of other artists, his perception of the world becomes conditioned by the artistic orders which he has encountered. The works of the past provide him with structures which at once order and ennoble the visible world. Unconsciously these works exclude from his vision the trivial, mundane facts that entrap Bell. Because these past works are themselves ordered and significant, the artist lives in a world which, for him, has already been transformed when he turns his conscious mind to the task of creation.23 Those who are not artists can only recognize significant form in art, where it has been "ordered for [their] apprehension." 24 The artist himself, of course, benefits more subtly from the same ordering power of art; its results remain with him whenever his creative vision is in play. The gap between Bell's experience and that which he imputes to artists may explain at once the tentativeness of the original metaphysical hypothesis, since he was then ascribing to artists an emotion foreign to his experience, and also his respect for artists, as beings capable of experiences higher than his own. Bell's theory of composition explains how these higher experiences can occur. He divides the creative process into two parts, "sensibility" and "the artistic problem" (Since Cezanne, pp. 41-43). Sensibility is that openness to ecstasy which occurs when the significance of external objects becomes apparent. The artistic problem is that which focuses the artist's powers so that a new aesthetic order can be imposed. Bell most directly connects the tradition to the artistic problem, seeing it as the source of each artist's solution to his problem (p. 76), or as "an indispensible means to self-

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expression" (p. 125). On this level, the artists of the past merely provide technical possibilities which the artist can utilize when necessary. However, if as Bell says, seeing artists as traditional places them in a world of pure art (p. 75), then the influence of tradition must extend to sensibility. There is evidence that Bell employed such an assumption in his practical criticism. He says of Turner, for example, that "the subject is seen purely in terms of art" (Landmarks, p. 137-emphasis added), and it is clear that the tradition operates directly on Turner's actual visual experience, since Bell also asserts that Turner simply reports what he sees without producing mere illustrations. Turner's immersion in the world of art alters his perception so that the world appears as already formed with a significance of its own. Similarly, Bell notes the influence of Japanese art on the visual experience of Degas (Landmarks, p. 191). When Bell uses a term like "discover," then, suggesting that order exists in the world to be found by the artist, the verbal context that his entire critical canon establishes demands that we read the word as shorthand for apparent discovery by means of an unconscious imposition of forms derived from the tradition of art. The contradiction that Elliott sees in Bell's work results, again, from a difficulty in articulation rather than in conception. Interpreted in the way that I have suggested, Bell implies that significance exists in the external world only to artists. The work of art retains its unique quality. Anyone can perceive the significance of art works, without needing to transform them in any way. The work of art is visibly significant because it expresses the emotions of the artist. The world is significant to the artist because of his superior powers of "self-assertion"; he sees in the world only the structures that he has unconsciously imposed on it. In this case, Bell's entire aesthetic system explains the dilemma posed by Art. He seems to have lacked the sustained intellectual rigor to forge some of these connections within material written over a twenty year period, but his mind re-

turns fruitfully to the same problem, offering compelling new solutions. Similarly, the extended theory of tradition answers Ducasse's and Stolnitz's objection to Bell's argument that significance exists in the world. That is, if the objects in the world are significant, whose emotions do they express? Within Bell's system, of course, there is no need to invent a creator god expressing himself in natural form. In fact, if significance is imposed by the artist through the tradition, then it is the artists of the past themselves, as imaginations interrelated in the new artist's mind, who are the composite god that creates expressive emotion in the world. When a given artist looks at the world, then, in effect he comes into direct contact with the emotions of other artists. His struggle, then, is to express his own unique sensibility and join the tradition. The individual psychological structures of each artist interact with the tradition so that new visions are always enriching it.25 No work of the tradition will

embody the new artist's personality and mode of perception perfectly. All works are, therefore, imperfect frames for the artist; he must fashion with their aid and direction an object which embodies his vision more precisely, which corresponds to his own psychological makeup more profoundly. The determining interaction in the creative act, then, occurs between the individual artist and the artists of the past; at no time is there an unmediated vision of the external world. Bell's sense of tradition is closely allied with his use of the term "primitive" to describe authentic art.26 Although the term is available to Bell because of the renewed popularity in his time of early African art, he does not intend the word to carry a simple historical meaning. Bell associates the primitive not only with the earliest origins of art, but with any artist who returns to its fundamental task, the creation of significant form. In Art he contrasts the primitive with art which displays representational skill, and provides a general historical explanation for the difference. In Bell's vision, the earliest primitive artists, out of

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Clive Bell's Aesthetic ritualistic requirements and religious fervor, created a spiritual art which aimed at simplicity and purity. This art excluded all reference to irrelevant detail and called its spectators into contact with the world of the spirit. But, as civilization develops, rich patrons begin to finance art, and their tastes must be flattered (p. 113). Such patrons are, in Bell's view, necessarily vulgar, and demand representations of the objects that they gain pleasure in possessing. Concurrently, the role of the artist becomes specialized, and artists must compete for patrons by developing meticulous skill at imitation. The result, says Bell, is that "formal significance loses itself in preoccupation with exact representation and ostentatious cunning" (p. 26). Ages which lose touch with the primitive create "obsequious
art . . . descriptive, official, eclectic, histori-

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representation has become to the establishment the sole criterion of quality, the genuine artist must outrage the tastes of his spectators and contemporary judges, in order to gain a permanent importance and to provide the highest possible spiritual benefit to his true audience. Thus the artist must return to the tradition to fulfill his purpose, but he must bring to the task his own perceptual experience and imagination. For this reason, he cannot merely imitate his predecessors, since he would then not express his own responses and could not create the truly expressive form that makes artists a part of the continuing
tradition.27

cal, plutocratic, palatial, and vulgar" (p. 97). Bell's original paradigm for this conflict was the gradual change from Byzantine to Renaissance art, but he later realized that the conflict was perpetual. In each age, Byzantine significance and Renaissance representation conflict. The post-Impressionists, for example, are primitives in their concern for formal significance, and oppose the academic artists of their time (personified by the Royal Academy) who value only exact imitation of nature. Artist's like Cezanne also share the primitive emphasis on spirituality. They include nothing in their work that does not contribute to its design, and thus to the spectator's spiritual exaltation. They avoid all reference to the brute, untransformed world that man wishes to escape through art. In Since Cezanne Bell identifies the tradition as including all artists who choose to create significant form (p. 75), thus suggesting that it is a tradition of primitives. That is, the true artist instinctively recognizes the genuine purpose of art and then immerses himself in the works of other artists who have achieved this purpose. But this effort, especially since the Renaissance, has always been resisted by those who have gained power through representational skill. Thus, in effect all true art has become revolutionary; especially in Bell's time, when

There is a darker side to the artist's relationship with the tradition, and Bell is fully aware of its possible consequences. He sees that the artist can at times face a danger more powerful than the corrupt and successful figures of his time; the tradition itself, whose function is to enable the artist's creation, may instead overpower him with a sense of what Harold Bloom would call his "belatedness," his need to create the new in the face of the monuments of the past. This is especially critical for artists who live in highly civilized ages, which worship the art of the past. French painting, in Bell's view, has not produced as many original personalities as the English, precisely because it has not needed to rebel against a corrupt authority. French painters are the direct descendants of a tradition too noble to be rejected, and so unique sensibilities give way to a rich, but predictable store of works (Civilization, p. 91). Bell's Civilization, which seems to be a hymn to man's civilized achievement, in fact attempts to define the limits of civilization's values. Such a society may venerate its artistic past and thus intimidate its own artists into repeating past successes. As Bell says, "savages create furiously," and each artist must retain that primitive energy if the past is to act as his partner rather than his adversary. Tradition must remain for him that "indispensible means of selfexpression," or it can become a sacred and unalterable edifice. Either he uses the tradi-

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442

MC LAUGHLIN

in the midst of a higher world, one which asserts its difference from the real, and thus attests to the power of its human creator. Bell combined this commitment to aesthetic experience with a desire to clarify the processes by which art is produced. His IV. Conclusion theory of tradition has the advantage of that explanation in a recoggrounding of artist's his the interIn explanation action with the tradition, Bell's definition nizable feature of any artist's life, his own of significant form becomes less mysterious. aesthetic experience. Bell's entire system What the spectator sees in a genuine work shows the ways in which an artist's training, of art is a creative mind's struggle to express his inevitable familiarity with the works its own vision of the world, by means of its which proceed and surround him, determemory of earlier works of art, which at mine his very vision of the world. That he once make the expression possible and left to his readers the substantial task of problematic. Without the contribution that connecting his earlier and later works does other creators have unconsciously given, not diminish Bell's theoretical system, althe artist would be trapped in a world in though it does call into question his rhewhich order is impossible. But other works torical abilities. Bell's theories argue for of art assert the priority of their own vision, the importance of art, the spiritual rewards and so tempt the later artist into submissive to be gained from aesthetic experience. In imitation. The genuine artist, however, this endeavor, the rigors of logic are unnegotiates these difficulties through two important to him if this central message is complementary desires: the need for order communicated. That a coherent system and for self-expression. The order he reveals should still emerge from such an unsysis imposed on the visible world by the inter- tematic thinker is remarkable, certainly action of his personality and the tradition more so than his coining of one memorable that lives in him. It is, therefore, an order phrase. which externalizes in a satisfying way the artist's creative self, yet filtered through a process so subtle as to allow the artist him'Clive Bell, Art (1913; rpt. New York, 1958), self to believe absolutely and his spectators p. 15. All subsequent references will be to this to believe momentarily that such an order edition. 2 Charles Aitken, "On Art and Aesthetics,"? Burpre-existed him in the natural world. 1lgton Mlagazine, 26 (1914-15), 194-95. Thus the twofold function of art for Bell. 3One example is Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Primarily, art provides man an escape from Philosophy of Art Criticism: An Introduction (Bosa "grey and trivial" world. For the moment ton, 1960), pp. 145-46. 4Cf., for example, C. J. Ducasse, The Philosophy of his aesthetic exaltation he sees that world Art (New York, 1929), p. 308; and Stolnitz, p. of as "the echo of some ultimate harmony" 145. (Art, p. 55); the painting presents a vision 5 R. Meager, "Clive Bell and Aesthetic Emotion," of a more perfect world, ordered and serene. British Journal of Aesthetics, 5 (1965), 124. However, the moment is elusive, and can RI. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism York, 1925), pp. 15-16. only be followed by a more sober discovery, (New 7See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903; rpt. that any order which man can encounter is 1968), p. x. the result of human creative energy. The Cambridge, 8Clive Bell, Since Cezanne (New York, 1922), pp. spectator comes to recognize the act of "self- 116-18. All subsequent references will be to this expression" responsible for this ideal world. edition. 9A case in which the emotions of life are mixed Significant form, then, leads the spectator into an aesthetic response does not, of course, prove artist who produced it, inevitably to the aesthetic response is impossible. Howand to the imaginative power in the artist that a purely ever, Bell, we must assume, would be extremely and potentially in himself. For Bell, a life careful to recount only the purest of emotions to committed to the experience of art is spent support his positions. This example is only the tion in his own struggle against complacent taste, or it stifles his belief in his creative powers.

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Clive Bell's Aesthetic

most blatant of many in which other emotions, not responding to form, are present. Bell's entire output does not support his position, but rather reveals that a spectator brings his values and beliefs to the experience, even in responding to the formal elements of art. 10 F. A. Whiting, rev. of Enjoying Pictures, by Clive Bell, American Magazine of .4rt, 27 (1934), 616-17. " See Art, p. 55 and 59 and Enjoying Pictures (New York, 1934), p. 28n. 12Rev. of Enjoying Pictures, by Clive Bell, The Connoisseur, 93 (1934), 400. 13 Cf., for example, Stolnitz, p. 148; and Bernard C. Heyl, New Bearings in Aesthetics and Art Criticism (New Haven, 1943), p. 121. 14Cf. Art, p. 18. 15 Lawrence Buermayer, "Pattern and Plastic Form," (1926) in John Dewey, et al., Art and Education (Merion, Pa., 1947), p. 124. See also Beryl Lake, "A Study of the Irrefutability of Two Aesthetic Theories," in W. Elton, ed., Aesthetics and Language (Oxford, 1959), pp. 112-13. 16See Since Cezanne, p. 18 and 174. 17 Morris Weitz, Philosophy of the Arts (New York, 1950), p. 1. 18 Art, p. 11. Bell attributes this phrase to Sargent. 19 R. K. Elliott, "Clive Bell's Aesthetic Theory and Critical Practice," British Journal of Aesthetics, 5 (1965), 112; and Solomon Fishman, The Interpretation of Art (Berkeley. 1963), p. 84.

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20Elliott, p. 113. See also D. W. Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order (Chicago, 1947), p. 148. 21Bell, "Significant Form," The Burlington Magazine, 34 (1919), 257. 22 Cf. Stolnitz, p. 146 and Ducasse, p. 313. 23 Bell, Since Cezanne, pp. 75-79. 24Landmarks in Nineteenth Century Painting (New York, 1927), pp. 175-83. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 25See Bell's comments, for example, on the importance of individuality in artists in Sinlce Cezanne, p. 124 and in Civilization: ,4n Essay (New York, 1928), p. 105. 2 The only reference to Bell's primitivism that I have found is in Fishman, p. 80. Bell's preference for primitive art is central to his critical theory, and it is surprising that it has gone unnoticed. 27 The parallels between Bell's theory of tradition and that outlined by T. S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" are striking. In both cases, the artist is pictured before the works of the past, which assert their presence in every artist. In both Bell and Eliot the artist must create an original work by means of his relationship with the tradition, so that the tradition can grow. Both see the tradition as dynamic, changing as new authentic works enter it. A plausible case could be made for Eliot's theory influencing Bell directly. Eliot's essay falls between Art and Since Cezanne, the works which exemplify the major shift in Bell's position on tradition.

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