VALUE OF ART

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20587, 28 November 1936, Page 14 (Supplement)

VALUE OF ART

SURVEY FROM ENGLISH STANDPOINT Very few writers on the development of the arts attempt to take them all together and show the intimate relation between music, poetry, sculpture, and painting, say, at successive epochs. Literary histories ought to take more account of movements in the other arts, and histories of these arts ought to take more account of literature. Mr T. Ashcroft in his book “English Art and English Society” courageously ventures on a synthetic survey for England, and furthermore, bases it on social, political, and economic developments. To him the arts, as they were to Mr Taine, are conditioned by social progress. He makes a great point of the rise of the bourgeoise from Elizabethan times onwards to their acme under Victoria and just before the war.

“The outstanding characteristics of life, intellect, and art under modern capitalism are nationalism and individualism during its more youthful and vigorous phases; complacency, readily degenerating into sentimentality during its prosperous middle age; querulous moralising, blatant braggartism, unrest, scepticism, and anarchism in its old age”—from which we understand that capitalism is an evil thing, and matters have been all wrong for three centuries. Mr Ashcroft is hard put to it to explain the literary glories of this period during which England went entirely astray. Strangely enough he has a keen appreciation of our literature, apart, it seems, from any social significance, and he is not hostile to uncommunistic modernism. Such a reading of artistic history has its element of truth, no doubt, and can be plausibly Illustrated (many writers and painters are unaware of the wider meaning of their work), but it subordinates free creative activity and makes the creator a mere instrument. The greatest artist does not give what is wanted by his public, but what he thinks he ought to give it; he has conscience.