Beauty, Form & Redemption

WHAT IS the source of art that has real and lasting appeal, and how do we judge that a work of art possesses it? Three words summarize my answer: “beauty,” “form,” and “redemption.”

For many artists and critics beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Germany. The modernist message, that art must show life as it is, suggests to many people that, if you aim for beauty, you will end up with kitsch. This is a mistake, however. Kitsch tells you how nice you are: it offers easy feelings on the cheap. Beauty tells you to stop thinking about yourself, and to wake up to the world of others. It says, look at this, listen to this, study this—for here is a means to cheap emotion; beauty is an end in itself. We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life—our own life and all that life means to us—and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession.

Our human need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. it is a need arising from our moral nature. 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. And 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. That is what we see in Corot’s landscapes, Cézanne’s apples, or Van Gogh’s unlaced boots.

The true work of art is not beautiful in the way an animal, a flower or a stretch of countryside is beautiful. It is a consciously created thing, in which the human need for form triumphs over the randomness of objects. Our lives are fragmented and distracted: things start up in our feelings without finding their completion. Very little is revealed to us in such a way that its significance can be fully understood. In art, however, we create a realm of the imagination, in which each beginning finds its end, and each fragment is part of a meaningful whole. The subject of a Bach fugue seems to develop its own accord, filling musical space and moving logically towards closure. But it is not an exercise in mathematics. Every theme in Bach is pregnant with emotion, moving with the rhythm of the listener’s inner life. Bach is taking you into an imagined space, and presenting you, in that space, with the image of your own fulfillment. Likewise Rembrandt will take the flesh tints on an ageing face and show how each one captures something of the life within, so that the formal harmony of the colors conveys the completeness and unity of the person. In Rembrandt we see integrated character in a disintegrating body. And we are moved to reverence.

Formal perfection cannot be achieved without knowledge, discipline and attention to detail. People are slowly beginning to understand this. The illusion that art flows out of us, and that the only purpose of an art school is to teach us how to open the taps, is no longer believable. Gone are the days when you can make a stir by wrapping a building in polystyrene like Christo or sitting in silence at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds like John Cage. To be really modern, you must create works of art that take modern life, in all its disconnectedness, and bring it to fullness and resolution, as Philip Larkin did in his great poem “The Whitsun Weddings.” It is fine for a composer to lard his pieces with dissonant sounds and cluster chords like Harrison Birtwistle; but if he knows nothing of harmony and counterpoint the result will be random noise, not music. It is fine for a painter to splash paint around like Jackson Pollock, but the real knowledge of color comes through studying the natural world, and finding our own emotions mirrored in the secret tints, as Cézanne found peace and comfort in a dish of apples.

If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time—I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and James MacMillan, of poets like Ruth Padel and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Georges Perec—we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail which have characterized their craft. In art beauty has to be won , and the work is harder, as the surrounding idiocy grows. In the face of sorrow, imperfection and the fleetingness of our affections and joys, we ask ourselves “why?” We need reassurance. We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful and that suffering is not the pointless thing that it so often appears to be, but the necessary part of a larger and redeeming whole. Tragedies show us the triumph of dignity over destruction and compassion over despair. In a way that will always be mysterious, they endow suffering with a formal completion and thereby restore the moral equilibrium. The tragic hero is completed through his fate; his death is a sacrifice, and this sacrifice renews the world.

Tragedy reminds us that beauty is a redemptive presence in our lives: it is the face of love, shining in the midst of desolation. We should not be surprised that many of the most beautiful works of modern art have emerged in reaction to hatred and cruelty. The poems of Akhmatova, the writings of Pasternak, the music of Shostakovitch—such works shone a light in the totalitarian darkness, and showed love in the midst of destruction. Something similar could be said of Eliot’s Four Quartets , of Britten’s War Requiem , of Matisse’s chapel at Venice.

Modernism arose because artists, writers, and musicians held on to the vision of beauty, as a redemptive presence in our lives. And that is the difference between the real work of art and the fake. Real art is a work of love; fake art is a work of deception.

Feast of St. Chariton the Confessor
Anno Domini 2019, September 28

*Conclusion to Roger Scruton's opening essay “Faking It” in Confessions of a Heretic (Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2016).

Sir Roger Scruton is an English philosopher and writer who specializes in aesthetics, political philosophy, and traditional conservatism.