Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1480
Sandro Botticelli, 1445-1510
Staatliche Museum, Berlin
[Painting on the front cover of Scruton's Beauty, albeit the book cover
has cropped the painting, and the hue is more golden than reddish]
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Below, I have reprinted most of Flight from Beauty, Roger Scruton's eighth chapter on Beauty. This book was an important (perhaps I can be more dramatic and say it was a seminal) influence on the development of this site.
Beauty
Roger Scruton
pp 167-176
In the first chapter I distinguished two ideas of beauty - one denoting aesthetic success, the other a specific form of it, the form in which we delight, and are at one with, the presented aspect of the world. Throughout this book I have pointed to aesthetic objects that succeed without necessarily being beautiful in this idealizing sense - either because they are too ordinary, like clothes, or because they attract our attention by disturbing us, like the novels of Zola or the operas of Berg.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even in Zola and Berg, however, beauty shows its face - as in the lovely invocation of the young Francoise and her cow at the opening of La Terre or the equally lovely music with which Berg's orchestra sorrows over Lulu. Zola and Berg, in their different ways, remind us that real beauty can be found, even in what is seedy, painful and decayed. Our ability to tell the truth about our own condition, in measured words and touching melodies, offers a kind of redemption from it. The most influential work of twentieth-century English literature, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, describes the modern city as a soul-less desert: but it does so with images and allusions that affirm what the city denies. Our very ability to make this judgement is the final disproof of it. If we can grasp the emptiness of modern life, this is because art points to another way of being, and Eliot's poem makes this other way available.
The Waste Land belongs to the tradition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and James's The Golden Bowl. It describes what is seedy and sordid in words so resonant of the opposite, so replete with the capacity to feel, to sympathize and to understand, that life in its lowest forms is vindicated by our response to it. This 'redemption through art' occurs only because the artists aims at beauty in the narrow sense. And this is the paradox of fin-de-siecle culture: that it continued to believe in beauty, while focusing on all the reasons for doubting that beauty is obtainable outside the realm of art.
Since that time art has taken another turn, refusing to bless human life with anything like a vision of redemption. Art in the tradition of Baudelaire floats like an angel above the world beneath its gaze. It does not avoid the spectacle of human folly, malice and decay; but it invites us to another place, telling us that 'là tout n'est qu’ordre et beauté: | Luxe, calme et volupté'. More recent art cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own. Beauty is downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention. Qualities that previously denoted aesthetic failure are now cited as marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty is often regarded as a retreat from the real task of artistic creation, which is to challenge comforting illusions and to show life as it is. Arthur Danto has even argued that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art.
This movement of ideas can be seen as in part a recognition of the ambiguous nature of the term 'beauty'. But it also involves a rejection of beauty in its narrow sense, an affirmation that the old invocations of home, peace, love and contentment are lies, and that art must henceforth devote itself to the real and unpleasant truth of our condition.
The modernist apology
The repudiation of beauty gains strength from a particular vision of modern art and its history. According to many critics writing today a work of art justifies itself by announcing itself as a visitor from the future. The value of art is a shock value: art exists to awaken us to our historical predicament and to remind us of the ceaseless change which is the only permanent thing in human nature.
Historians of painting therefore constantly remind us of the Salon Art of the mid-nineteenth century - art that was not art at all, precisely because it was derived from a repertoire of exhausted gestures - and of the resistance at first encountered by Manet, whom Baudelaire extolled as 'le peintre de la vie moderne'. They remind us of the great force that was released into the world by Manet's iconoclasm, and of the successive shocks to the system as one by one the experiments proceeded, until figurative painting came to be seen by many as a thing of the past.
Historians of music remind us of the last symphony and late quartets of Beethoven, in which the constraints of form seem to be burst asunder by a titanic power; they dwell on the case of Tristan mid Isolde, whose shifting chromatic harmonies seem to stretch tonality to the very limit, and on the music of Stravinsky, Bartok and Schoenberg - music which at first shocked the world, and which was justified in terms used to justify the abolition of figurative painting. The old language, the historians say, was exhausted: only clichés could result from the attempt to prolong its use. The new language was designed to place music in its historical context, to recognize the present as something detached from the past, a new experience which we seize only by understanding it as 'other' than what has gone before. But in the very moment of seizing the present we become aware of it as past and superseded.
Tradition and Orthodoxy
In architecture and literature we find the same story, of art at war with its past, forced to challenge the rule of clichés, and to set off on a path of transgression. However, the story is fed on a one-sided diet of examples. At the moment when Rothko, de Kooning and Pollock were engaged in their (to my mind highly repetitive) experiments, Edward Hopper was producing figurative paintings that showed him to be as much the painter of modern American life as Manet had been the painter of life in nineteenth-century Paris. At the moment when Schoenberg was jettisoning tonality for the twelve-tone serial method, Janacek was composing Katya Kabanova and Sibelius beginning his great series of tonal symphonies.
Moreover, there is another, truer, history of the modern artist which is the story told by many of the great modernists themselves. It is the history told by T.S. Eliot, in his essays and in Four Quartets, by Ezra Pound in the Cantos, by Schoenberg in his critical writings and in Moses und Aron, and by Pfitzner in Palestrina. And it sees the goal of the modern artist not as a break with tradition, but as a recapturing of tradition, in circumstances for which the artistic legacy has made little or no provision. This history does not see the pastness of the present moment, but its present reality, as the place we have got to, and whose nature must be understood in terms of a continuum. If, in modern circumstances, the forms and styles of art must be remade, this is not in order to repudiate the old tradition, but in order to restore it. The effort of the modern artist is to express realities which have not been encountered before, and which are especially hard to encompass. But this cannot be done, except by bringing the spiritual capital of our culture to bear on the present moment and to show it as it truly is. For Eliot and his colleagues, therefore, there could be no truly modern art which was not at the same time a search for orthodoxy: an attempt to capture the nature of the modern experience, by setting it in relation to the certainties of a live tradition.
You may find the result impenetrable, unintelligible or even ugly – as many do in the case of Schoenberg. But that is certainly not the intention. Schoenberg, like Eliot, sought to renew the tradition, not to destroy it, but to renew it as a vehicle in which beauty, rather than banality, would once more be the norm. There is nothing absurd in the view that the gossamer lines of Schoenberg’s Erwartung have more of real melody than the thick textures of a Vaughan Williams symphony. True, this little melodrama has a nightmarish quality that is far from the consoling beauties of a song by Schubert. But Schoenberg’s idiom can be understood as an attempt both to understand the nightmare, and to rein it in – to confine it in a musical form which gives meaning and beauty to catastrophe in the way that Aeschylus gave meaning and beauty to the avenging furies, or Shakespeare to the dreadful death of Desdemona.
The modernists feared that the aesthetic endeavour would detach itself from the full artistic intention, and become empty, repetitious, mechanical and cliché-ridden. It was self-evident to Eliot, Matisse and Schoenberg that this was happening all around them, and they set out to protect an endangered aesthetic ideal from the corruptions of popular culture. This ideal had connected the idea of beauty with the impulse to consecrate human life and endow it with a more than worldly significance. In short, the modernists set out to reunite the artistic enterprise with its underlying spiritual aim. Modernism was not conceived as a transgression but as a recuperation: an arduous path back to a hard-won inheritance of meaning, in which beauty would again be honoured, as the present symbol of transcendent values. This is not what we see in the consciously 'transgressive' and 'challenging' art of today, which exemplifies a flight from beauty, rather than a desire to recover it.
The Flight from Beauty
One of Mozart’s most endearing works is the comic opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which tells the story of Konstanze, shipwrecked and separated from her fiancé Belmonte, and taken to serve in the harem of the Pasha Selim. After various intrigues, Belmonte rescues her, helped by the clemency of the Pasha, who respects Konstanze’s chastity, declining to take her by force. This implausible plot permits Mozart to express his Enlightenment conviction that charity is a universal virtue, as real in the Muslim empire of the Turks as in the Christian Empire of the enlightened Joseph II (himself hardly Christian). The faithful love of Belmonte and Konstanze inspires the Pasha’s clemency. And, even if Mozart’s innocent vision is without much historical basis, his belief in the reality of disinterested love is everywhere expressed and endorsed by the music. Die Entführung advances a moral idea, and its melodies share the beauty of that idea and persuasively present it to the listener.
In the 2004 production of Die Entführung at the Comic Opera in Berlin, the producer Calixto Bieito decided to set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp, and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, the stage was littered with couples copulating, and every excuse for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. At one point a prostitute is gratuitously tortured, and her nipples bloodily and realistically severed before she is killed. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the loudly orchestrated scenes of murder and narcissistic sex that litter the stage.
That is an example of a phenomenon with which we are familiar from every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. There is a desire to eliminate beauty, to rub it out. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, the desire to pre-empt its appeal can intervene, ensuring that its still small voice will not be heard behind the scenes of desecration. For beauty makes a claim on us: it is a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world. (Cf. Iago of Cassio: ‘He hath a daily beauty in his life/ Which makes me ugly’, and the soliloquy of Claggart in Britten's Billy Budd, raging against the beauty that shines its light on his own moral worthlessness.)
I have used the word 'desecration', thereby recalling the discussion of the sacred in Chapter 2. To desecrate is to spoil what might otherwise be set apart, in the sphere of consecrated things. We can desecrate a church, a mosque, a graveyard, a tomb; and also a holy image, a holy book or a holy ceremony. We can also desecrate a corpse, a cherished image, even a living human being – in so far as these things contain (as they do) a portent of some original ‘apartness’. The fear of desecration is a vital element in all religions. Indeed, that is what the word religio originally meant: a cult or ceremony designed to protect some sacred place from sacrilege.
Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and objective world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us. But - and this is again one of the messages of the early modernists - beings like us become at home in the world only by paying tribute to our 'fallen' condition, as Eliot acknowledged it in The Wast Land. Hence the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world, to a 'kingdom of ends' in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered. As Plato and Kant both saw, therefore, the feeling for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of mind, arising from a humble sense of living with imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest unity with the transcendental.
Look at any picture by one of the great landscape painters – Poussin, Guardì, Turner, Corot, Cézanne – and you will see that idea of beauty celebrated and fixed in images. Those painters do not turn a blind eye to suffering, or to the vastness and threateningness of the universe, of which we occupy so small a corner. Far from it. Landscape painters show us death and decay in the very heart of things: the light on their hills is a fading light; the walls of their houses are patched and crumbling like the stucco on the villages of Guardì. But their images point to the joy that lies incipient in decay, and to the eternal that is implied in the transient.
Even in the brutal presentations of thwarted and malicious life that fill the novels of Zola we find, if not the reality of beauty, at least a distant glimpse of it — recorded in the rhythm of the prose, and in the invocations of stillness amid the futile longings which drive the characters to their goals. Realism, in Zola as in Baudelaire and Flaubert, is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal. The subject matter is profane; but profane by nature, and not because the writer has chosen to desecrate the few scant beauties that he finds. The art of desecration represents a new departure, and one that we should try to understand, since it lies at the centre of the post-modern experience.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat