Art as Life

Art as Experience. By John Dewey. (Allen and Unwin.

Dn. JOHN DEWEY, like the late Professor Babbitt, is a man that no one can fail to respect and admire, however much the doctrines to which he adheres may be considered unsound. He is as typical of America as is Negro Jazz, yes : but his heart is in the right place, even if his head is all astray. And this book elicits in a remarkable degree the personal qualities which stand up so • bravely against his theoretic defauts—faults that are the faults of the crude American materialism.

By tom' quotations, selected at hazard, I will demonstrate the asset side of Dr: Dewey :

(1) " Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary trait of all artists that have something new to say Communicability has nothing to do with popularity . . . what Tolstoi says about immediate contagion as a test of artistic quality is false, and what he says about the kind of material which can alone be communicated is narrow." (2) " I think the idea that there is a moral obligation on an artist to deal with ' proletarian ' material . . . is an effort to return to a position that art has historically, outgrown."

(3) " Ono of the functions of art is precisely to sap moralistic timidity." (4) " As long as art is the beauty parlour of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure." •

Those are direct observations outside of, and independent of. theory, of the order of Goethean obiter dicta, and they strike me as being as true as they are simple. But his book is entitled Art as Experience: and he seeks in it to identify life and art. "The close connexion of the fine arts with daily life " is his theme. He is " fascinated by the colourful drama of change " : and Change is the conceptual hero of his philosophy.

" Time as organization in change is growth "—" eompleticins that become the initial points of new processes of develop- ment." 'Till's language means, if it means anything, that Time is the magician, , who (since " change enters .upon intervals of pause and rest;" in order to reculer pour mfeux

Sauter) after every " pause," proceeds to " cleyelop " ever " up and up and up--and on and on and on" ! • The ascent: of Man to ever higher, better and brighter, manifestations of pantheistic improvement—that is the burden of his arguments.

But experience—since in this book " experience " is the Capital counter—experience teaches us that this " up and up and up, and on and on " is a delusion. When Dr. Fai Yuan-pei described Dr. Dewey as " the second -Confucius," 'he was surely committing himself to a recognition of that fact. For as no match for Confucius has appeared for two or three . thousand years—until in fact Dr. Dewey saw the light at Burlington, Vermont—then certainly—in spite of all the " progress," generation after generation, that has been going on ever since the death of the Chinese sage—mankind did not register quite so much " growth " as the believer in Time, as a creative agency of highly improving change, would have us suppose. Only two Confuciuses in such a substantial ellluxion of Time ! It is not much to boast about, on behalf of the stand- point of the chronological philosophy !

It is quite possible to experience- a -full-blooded interest in change, while accepting as a sound aphorism that plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose. Here are the two philo- sophical positions involved, or so they may be popularly stated. You may believe that (1) Brighter and Better Worlds, of absolute Newness, present themselves every few years : or that (2) men fool about, century after century, their heads full of dreams of one sort and another, but that " progress " is ideologically absurd. Life is essentially a game, you will believe, in the latter case. If on the other hand your beliefs are of the " Bright New World " variety, then

life is real, life is earnest," is the statement most suited to define your type of intellect. You are on the " dynamic " side of the argument—human life, always " progressing," is the end in itself. But you are eternally conunitted to the extreme dilemma of accounting for the oddly unsatisfactory and indeed retrograde state of the world in which you find yourself : though, of course, you may find some consolation in the reflection that if it only gets bad enough, althost anything or anybody will be able to improve it—and so effect " progress," upon the lowest plane of all. Ours is an interval of pause and rest " just now, as Dr. Dewey would say ! Progress is possible for us.

. People get just as patriotic aboutperiodas they do about place : there is a sort of time-nationalism, just as there is a political, geographical nationalism. People get just as uplifted about " progress " (which is synonymous with time-nationalism)- as they do about fatherland : but most people find it more difficult to detect the former than the latter, and further find the nationalism of place far more difficult to make allowance for, than they do for time-nationalism.

Art as Experienc'e might be read with advantage in con- junction with Art, recently published, from the pen of Mr. Eric Gill. Both Dr. Dewey and Mr. Gill are dogmatic naturalists, for although the latter's sculpture may seem quite a formalized affair, compared to say that of Mr. Jagger, it is of course of the

• naturalist tradition—that of imitation of nature, rather . than of interpretation of nature, or a symbolic approach. Usually," says Dr. Dewey, " there is a hostile reaction to a conception of art that connects it with the activities of a live creature in its environment." - And on this road you more or less rapidly reach the painted statue of a woman, with perhaps eyes. that open and shut, and whose bosom all but heaves : or you get back to the picture of the flowers that looked so " lifelike " that the live bee mistook them for the real thing.

1 As to the complement to this ideal of " lifelikeness " in the objects of art, you have in the pages of Dr. Dewey, ideas, as well, that ahnost speak to you—that have a pleasant, or an unpleasant, odour. "Those who are especially addicted to thinking as an occupation, are aware when they observe the processes of thought, instead of determining by dialectic

what they must be, that immediate feeling is not limited in its scope. Different ideas have their different ' feels ' . . .

just as much as anything else." Even the addict to thought, when unsure of his way, sniffs the ideas by which he is sur- rounded to find out which road he should take. " Their qualities stop him when he enters the wrong -path- and send; him ahead when he hits the right one." Hoy. -very dub- jectil4 this " right and " wrong ' of Dr. Dewey's; inist

be ,needs no pointing out. Though the sort of .philosopiter who pretends to orientate.- himself on the same principle as the artist (and who, indeed, would seek to assimilate the habits of art and the habits of science) is not a philosopher in whom we can much believe ; though in the case. of Dr. Dewey there are, as I started by saying, many obserVatioas by the way which are worthy of attention.

WYNDHAM LEWIS.