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Doodle and Dither
Last Lectures. By Roger Fry. With an introduction by Kenneth Clark. (Cambridge University Press 15s.)
I AM moved by the publication of Roger Fry's Last Lectures to conclude a critical discussion I maintained with him during his propagandist years. I found him a first-rate whetstone for the wits of one lethargic about writing except under such provocation as his plausible discourse provided.
I am not attempting a review of the whole book, which Sir Kenneth Clark has piously seen through the Press. Illustra- tions and commentary offer too vast a field, in which many points are well put and aptly exemplified, always, even in this unrevised shape, expressed in that lively and persuasive prose of which Fry was a master. But obstinately, where he was not on the safe common ground of undisputed beauties in this, or that country and period (the range is refreshingly wide), II find him the victim of fundamental muddle.
Fry% mind was semi-scientific. It was possessed by a very lively curiosity, with an itch for labelling the objects under review and assigning them to species. When he praises or blames, it is the kind rather than the individual to which he refers : he sees through a veil of theory. In those theoretical preferences he was a will-o'-the-wisp, boxing the compass from sheer abstract " purity " to what, in that mood, he had condemned as " literary " irrelevance about the subject in works of art. His vision was in two ways limited : he had no searching eye for form, nor conscience of tone, and was entirely wanting in the sense of colour as tone affects it.
He privately confessed an inability to grasp the conception of " values." His paintings are a proof of those disabilities; his attempts to transpose a colour aerially or umbrageously resulted merely in discord on a higher or lower key. What with those two defects of cramping classification and blurred perception, he played a somewhat disastrous part as a mis-leader, a " minor false prophet " of the arts he cham- pioned so ardently.
An alternative title for this article would be " Sensibility and Sense," for I will take as my text Fry's treatment, in an introductory chapter, of " Sensibility," one of two tests of art he proposes to apply throughout. The second is " Vitality," which, he ought to have argued, is a main element in appeal to the first ; but he is suspicious, even to confessed nescience, about the respectability of that essential force.
Under the head of " Sensibility " he confuses two very different things. " What," he begins, " do we mean by sensibility, and what significance has it for us? The simplest case we can take is the comparison between a straight line made with a ruler and one drawn by hand."
" Sensibility"" is displayed in " aberrations " from geometrical exactitude in the latter. He takes as an example a line draw- ing by Paul Klee compared with a ruled copy made by him- self. There is no indication under the illustration which is
which, but I conjecture that the reproduction to the right is from the original, and that to the left the inaccurate copy ruled by Fry. Before examining these there is a word to say, in the Fry vein, about the type of drawing to which we are here introduced with considerable solemnity. It belongs to a class we may conveniently term " Doodles." " Doodle " is the name given to scribbles produced, on the paper provided for notes, by the half-attentive to relieve the tedium of a committee. Klee's drawing is a fully conscious cousin of that kind, and a pretty one ; a cat's cradle intended, we are told, ,to represent in shorthand a man carrying two parcels. So be it ; but let us remark, before going farther, the preponderant part the Doodle has played in what Mr. Herbert Read calls "Art Now." Modigliani, for example, is a sentimental, Rouault a portentously bogey Doodler, and among the shockingly bad artists for whom. Mr. Read has so nearly infallible an instinct and so unfailing an admiration, doodling is rife. The Doodler in excelsis is, of course, Picasso, taking refuge in those exercises from the " straight " painting in which he has been unable to satisfy himself or any but his devotees. We may call him, indeed, the Cock-a-Doodler on a chief eminence in the farmyard, and admire how huge a cackle from sequacious poultry has responded to those evasions, to this elaborate doodle-do. Finally, be it whispered, in the Negro sculpture we are invited by Fry to regard as supremely plastic and " spiritual "—" Negro art," he says, " is the most purely spiritual art we know of "—there is more of a doodling impulse, of vague whittling at a knob-form, than of the " disquieting " profundities Fry ascribes to it. There is room left in them, as the vague of mind put it, for the imagination ; the onlooker's imagination, be it noted, not the artist's, who has frequently, however, a true designer's instinct.
I must return, however, to Herr Klee. I see no evidence that in the drawing Fry holds up as an example of sensibility the artist did not himself rule the lines. The " aberrations " in them are no more than would result from a slight clogging of the nib or a trifling deflection of the hand, from what, in fact, we may conveniently call " dither." " Dither " is the name given to the play, this way and that, allowed to a machine when excess of tightness is unnecessary or undesirable. But its- use may be extended to the aberrations that occur when an artist sets out to join two points with a straight line, drawn free-hand, or to follow from his model more complex forms involving curvature. The supreme example of a Ditherer in painting is Cezanne, who is anything but a Doodler, having little instinct for design. His progressive incapacity for scoring even an outer on the target of exact form reduced him to an extremity of Dither.
The Oriental or the Negro weaver, as we know, varies the regularity of his 'shapes and colours by subtle modifications. This is not Dither, but Design, whether it be a fully conscious process or an instinctive adjustment. This entirely different process, carrying out the craftsman's intentions, is lumped by Fry with the accidents of eye and hand we have been discussing. But the illustration he gives, " Negro Textiles " (Fig. i r), it would be kind to excuse as wild dither. This loathsome object, composed of nasty little right-angled triangles of various size, varies also in its widths, as if a blind man had taken up the weaving, and the chequer border is equally chaotic. Beneath it is a carpet design by Mr. Duncan Grant, which is a piece of conscious, deliberate dither, the horizontal lines being broken by steppings up and down. This emphasising of accident, not regularised into pattern, Fry ought to have recognised as the extravagant under- or over-lining of a wilful trait which he very properly diagnoses and condemns elsewhere as " Expressionism." Much that he says of the play of " sensibility " in this second, contradictory meaning is 'better directed, as between, for example, the rigid forms of printer's type and the elastic variation of script ; his own hand was notably good, making his letters a pleasure to receive. But he misses, in using the analogy of verse, the distinction between strict Metre (a missing word) and vital Rhythm. .Like all unmusical literary people, including the professors, he could not comprehend metrical structure, in itself fixed, but subject to subtle rhythmical modulations for expression, the ex- pressiveness depending on our knowledge of the strict basis.
He was also semi-artistic. if is failure, from visual bluntness, to apprehend optical refinements of form comes out painfully in his treatment of Greek art, which he treats as one charac- terised by mathematical rigidity. The Greeks, as every scholar since Penrose's pioneer work on the Parthenon should know, were precisely the people who tempered, for the comfort and pleasure of the eye, by incredibly delicate adjustments, mechanical metre with elastic rhythm. The outlines of Greek Vases, on which Fry chiefly depends, loading the balance characteristically with a very poor example, were dealt with in a well-known volume, Hambidge's Dynamic Symmetry (592o). The author, extremely questionable in his theories of propor- tion, employed expert draughtsmen and mathematicians to reproduce and analyse those curves, and a single line sums up their research and demolishes Fry's fanciful boutade. " No mathematical curves have, so far, been found in Greek art."
I cannot share Sir Kenneth Clark's amused complaisance over the spectacle of such light-hearted ignorance in a Univer- sity professor. Fry was semi-scientific, semi-artistic, and affected, as he was, by the tug of personal ties and 'prejudice, imperfectly honest of mind. Recommended by high com- petence and charm in the lecturer and writer, the mixture rendered him popular with a public which adores sophistical
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