"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly"

"IT IS one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of "levitation." They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, VII. The Eternal Revolution.

Archangel Gabriel Annunciate, by Fra Angelico.

Tempera and gold on panel, 1431-33; Institute of Arts, Detroit.

"General ideals used to dominate politics"

"NOW, IN OUR TIME, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is, about ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously, from two fields which it used to occupy. General ideals used to dominate literature. They have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's sake." General ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven out by the cry of "efficiency," which may roughly be translated as "politics for politics' sake." Persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has purposely become less political; politics have purposely become less literary. General theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded from both; and we are in a position to ask, "What have we gained or lost by this extrusion? Is literature better, is politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?""

~G.K. Chesterton: Heretics.

"Vision of worthlessness"

“TOUCHING this matter of time, there does seem to be a rather peculiar quality about modern painters. I have never understood why painters are so much more terrified than poets or prose writers of the notion of being behind the times. It seems probable, at present, that they will really find themselves behind the times. They will find themselves the last people left alive, to believe in this silly nineteenth century notion of being in advance of the times. All the thinkers who really think, and all the theorists whose theories seriously count, are growing more and more skeptical about the very existence of progress, and certainly about the desirability of this sort of self-swallowing and suicidal kind of progress. The notion that every generation proves worthless the last generation, and is in its turn proved worthless by the next generation, is an everlasting vista and vision of worthlessness which is fortunately itself worthless.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Are the Artists Going Mad?

 

 

On Art

"ART is a language, and not a secret language."
—Illustrated London News, Oct. 3, 1908.

"EVERY form of art has a soul of its own. It has a certain psychological effect which differs from the impression produced by another kind."
—Daily News, April 9, 1901.

"A WORK of art is like a prayer."
—Daily News, June 7, 1901.

"IN our time we find a great deal of religion in art. In former ages we found a great deal of art in religion. Religion was the orthodoxy of those days: art has become almost the only orthodoxy of these. They permitted art and literature because they glorified God."
—Daily News, Jan. 2, 1902.

"THE province of art may be said to be to discover what are the main lines of our pleasure, and to fix them firmly in the mind. It recreates for us the vanished sensation, and hunts the flying happiness."
—Daily News, Feb. 7, 1902.

"IF Art is crowned queen, the first who will suffer will be the artists. This new tyranny will be of necessity a tyranny of the critics, who are many, not merely of the creators, who are few."
—Daily News, Nov. 19, 1904.

"MEN do not produce art in order to become joyful. They are joyful, and therefore they produce art. Men do not dance in order to be happy. They dance because they are happy…Art is not the mother, but the child of beauty."
—Daily News, April 8, 1905.

"ALL art is a thing of glimpses."
—Daily News, May 26, 1906.

"MUCH is said nowadays against the cult of pleasure, not without reason; and it is possible to make far too much of the cult of art. It is only fair to count this truth on the other side; that there is a certain candour about the worlds of impressions and sensations that there is not always in
the world of theories and of laws; and that in this sense it is not only possible to dispute about tastes, but they are things about which men dispute with least hypocrisy and sophistry."
—Introduction to The New World of the Theatre.

"THERE are two senses in which an artist may work to awaken wonder. One is the basest and vulgarist kind of art; the other is the highest and noblest kind of art. The former is meant to make us wonder at the artist; the latter is meant to make us wonder at the world."
—New Witness, Mar. 12, 1920.

"EVERY great artist in his heart scorns art, as compared with the greatness of God and man."
—Shakespeare and the Germans.

~G.K. Chesterton

(Quotes from Gilbert Magazine, Vol. 13, Num. 8; July/Aug. 2010; Art: Battleground for the Soul of Man. http://tinyurl.com/caux8s9 )

The Art of Painting, by Johannes Vermeer; Oil on canvas, 1665-67.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

"Art is the signature of man"

BUT SUPPOSE the boy bad not been taught by a priest but by a professor, by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to a mere evolutionary variation. Suppose the boy saw himself, with the same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running with the pack of nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest save by a relative and recent variation. What would be for him the simplest lesson of that strange stone picture-book? After all, it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. That sounds like a truism but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth. He might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in the inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon; he might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone, traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of biological life, rather like the ruins of successive creations and separate universes than the stages in the story of one. He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger. But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one significant line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that bad even begun to scratch the faint suggestion of a form.

To all appearance, the thing would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations of forgotten eons as it would be in the beasts and birds before our eyes. The child would no more expect to see it than to see the cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common sense would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything like that; yet in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors of humanity he would have seen exactly that. It must surely strike him as strange that men so remote from him should be so near, and that beasts so near to him should be so remote. To his simplicity it must seem at least odd that he could not find any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the colored pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt.

It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings ought really to begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too simple to be understood. He tries to deduce all sorts of other indirect and doubtful things from the details of the pictures, because he cannot see the primary significance of the whole; thin and theoretical deductions about the absence of religion or the presence of superstition; about tribal government and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what.

~G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man.
 

 

Lascaux cave art from Upper Paleolithic period; c. 15,000 B.C