Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/384

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. ix. MAY 9,

apprehension of the thing as an end in itself, which may rise to ecstasy, and, at its purest and intensest, may be taken to be possibly an intuition, analogous to the mystic's intuition, into the real.

Mr. Bell does not claim too much when he claims that his theory, whether or no it is other- wise sound, at least explains how it is that objects so widely different as cathedrals, paintings, pots, and textiles are felt to have some quality in common by virtue of which they may all be classed together as works of art. He draws in respect to their emotional effect their " significance," that is, as form a clear distinction between natural objects commonly recognized as beautiful .and works of art. The former, it seems to him, are but rarely found capable of moving the ordinary spectator to pure aesthetic emotion, though it is possible that the artist's vision through nature is characteristically the same as the sensitive spectator's vision through art. Mr. Bell takes a butterfly as a beautiful thing which awakes in most of us a feeling of delight other than the feel- ing aroused by a work of art, an example which, however, brings to mind Wallace in the Malay Archipelago, taking out of his net his first speci- men of the male of the Croesus butterfly, and so overcome with an ecstasy of emotion at its beauty that he came nearer to fainting than he had done when in apprehension of immediate death. In what he says of landscape seen as pure form, Mr. Bell has provided the writer of these lines with the reason, for some time vaguely groped after, for a conviction that illustrated papers with views of places in them tend to soul- destruction. The best thing we compass sea and land to get from nature is, no doubt, a sight of building, landscape, street, or moun- tain as " a thing in itself. The vision of it as that and no more lasts but the space of the first thrill, longer or shorter lived as our tem- perament or circumstance permits ; and how easily we may be cheated of that if we have seen the forms too often before, and linked, it may be, with irrelevant associations ! Mr. Bell's theory of the nearness between Aesthetic and mystic intuition may, perhaps, receive some support from the fact that both at any intensity abolish memory ; and it certainly provides for any one who may choose to wield it a key to the essential charm and the essential significance for vitality of the new.

The weak point of the book is that the relativity of the conception " significant form " is inade- quately dealt with. We may grant that art is what Mr. Clive Bell says the present writer, indeed, joyfully consents to it in the main but for art to be effective as a means of escape one must consider not merely into what, but from what, the spectator is escaping. Several years ago there was a rather unusually terrible case of the murder of a father by his two sons. A young and imaginative person read about it, and was haunted by it to distraction. What relieved the excess of pain at last was reading the ' Electra ' of Sophocles ; and the relief, just as Mr. Bell describes it, was by an escape into another world, a sort of ecstasy from which the horror could be looked back upon and seen differently. But it was the fact that the ' Electra ' turns on the murder of a parent that made this possible. There must be correspondence of some definite sort between the work of art and the inner life from which artist or spectator is to rise into ecstasy. When the

way of escape is by visual form the problem is peculiarly subtle doubtless resolves itself differently for every individual, and also differently at different stages of life. A person interiorly much entangled in the banalities of Western civili- zation might be excused if he could not feel the liberative power of Picasso. This is to open up the question which Mr. Bell admits he has left on one side " how far the unessential is a neces- sary means to the essential." Jt is possible that pure science has more to do with the matter than at first sight appears. At any rate, it may, perhaps, be said that a critic who did not experi- ence aesthetic emotion in a very high degree when looking at the sound-forms made by the voice of Mrs. Watts-Hughes, or at some of Haeckel's drawings of the Radiolaria from the Challenger Expedition, should expect to have his dicta considered subject to revision. But these forms are the visible aspect of the nature of things which lies behind and beyond sense-perception, perhaps the closest visible aspect of it we have- as form. The vast scale from these to an Academy picture is one that includes an infinity of grada- tions. The point is, at what depth in the scale has form become for nobody " significant " ? And here the writer is by no means forgetting; that, in Mr. Clive Bell's sense, " significance " is a widely different thing from interest in represen- tation.

The historical part of the book is tantalizing from its slightness and the boldness of its theory, which obviously requires more than vivacious assertion to substantiate it. We should be sur- prised to learn that its author held it twenty years hence. The book is vigorously written ; though not all of the bolder expressions in it are happy. Thus the use of the word " slope," not happy, may yet be justified as picturesque and a an aid to visualization ; but surely to go on further and talk of the birth of a slope has some- thing quaint about it.

The Archaeological Rambles of the Upper Norwood Athenceum, 1013 (Printed for Private Cir- culation.)

WE again have a record of a most satisfactory year of work of the Ramblers. There are a> number of new names, for the old Ramblers are wise, and get the younger members to help them in the conduct and choice of rambles.

The winter lectures included ' Some Old-Time Punishments,' by Mr. G. M. Matthews, and ' The Historical Development of English Brickwork/ by Mr. Harold F. Murrell. Mr. George Thatcher led the Ramblers to Lambeth Palace, and Mr. J. Charles Bourne took them to St. Dunstan's, Stepney.

The summer rambles opened with a visit to- Fetcham and Leatherhead, Mr. T. C. Thatcher being the leader. Kew until last year had been overlooked, and Mr. W. H. Truslove took a large party to Kew Palace and the church. A visit to Rainham was undertaken by Mr. H. E. H. Biden, where the church of St. Helen and St. Giles- afforded much interest. " The font is termed Saxon, but its peculiar formation seems to in- dicate that it is not earlier than 1236. Parker and Bloxam contended that no Saxon fonts siirvived : and Lee emphatically wrote, ' No Saxon font remains in England.' Later students, however, including Dr. Cox, ha.ve the courage to express different views ; and now some thirty