Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/232



R BUTLER'S writing is a confusion of pedantries. His thesis is so heavily encumbered with solemn nonsense, so highly saturated with academic ink, that the modern painter with a sense of humour might get a laugh out of it, were it not for the fact that it adds another cloud to the critical obscurity lying between the public and the creative artist. Any person of ordinary intelligence, with a fair sense of human values and a flair for art, who is looking for a little knowledge of the methods of painting, would be profanely repelled by the assemblage of irrelevant mechanics herein presented. Reasonably he would exclaim: "If this is representative of creative procedure, if this is the sort of stuff involved in the technique of construction, then art is merely a quasi-scientific plaything, ingenious perhaps, and somewhat amusing, but not worthy of serious consideration!" It is hard to be tolerant with the author of Painter and Space. At certain happy moments, those of us who have advocated the human value of aesthetics are inclined to feel enthusiastic over the advance of modernism—and then Mr Butler comes along and puts us out of humour, and forces us to return to the elementary stages of our efforts. It would seem that the hypothetical person of average intelligence seeking information must be led back to first principles—so let us cry out once more in unison, "Art is not imitation, but reconstruction!" We shall have need of this truth so long as books are written on the assumption that reproductive accuracy, in any of its forms, is a criterion of art.

Both Leonardo da Vinci and Aristotle were accustomed to speak of art as the imitation of nature. It would be a simple matter to annihilate that pernicious word by recasting their definitions in modern terminology; but such an adaptation becomes unnecessary when one compares Leonardo's monumental conceptions with the photographic painting of to-day, and Greek tragedy with the un-