Process Or Person?

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Title:     Process Or Person?
Author: A. Clutton-Brock [More Titles by Clutton-Brock]

Nearly all war pictures in the past have been merely pictures that happened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes about the manner in which fighting men and horses ought to be represented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things. Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the nude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment." Titian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes or his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none of these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity because of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battle scene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a genre picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patriotic appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battle pictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is a public that likes them.

In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of war as an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the very method of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; but in these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for his cubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that in war man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is a process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp distinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process better than any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being to express the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of all things, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; and machines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed by our own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future in which machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it is not so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves have lost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seem more and more like us, but that we seem more and more like the machines. Everywhere we see processes to which we are subject and of which our humanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured the delusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes. Now that delusion is fading away from us; and it fades away most of all in war, where all humanity is evidently dominated by the struggle for life, and is but a part of it, as raindrops are part of a storm.

It is this sense of tyrannous process that Mr. Nevinson expresses in his battle pictures, with, we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentment against it. His pictures look like a visible reductio ad absurdum of it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least, is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He has allowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which has no purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universe seems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as well be called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle between two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of the machines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no souls in them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that they collide and destroy each other like masses of matter in space. Nothing can be said of them except that they obey certain laws; we call their obedience discipline, but it is only the discipline of things subject to a process.

Now it is the sense of process, as the ultimate reality in the universe, which has produced war against the conscience of mankind, and even of many Germans. Conscience was powerless to prevent it because conscience had ceased to believe in its own power, had come to think of itself as a vain and inexplicable rebellion against the nature of things. This rebellion we call sentimentality, meaning thereby that it is really not even moral; for true morality would recognize the process to which the nature of man is subject, of which that nature is itself a part; and would cure man of his futile rebellions so that he should not suffer needlessly from them. It would cure man of pity, because it is through pity that he suffers. He is a machine, and, if he is a conscious machine, he should be conscious of the fact that he is one. Such is the belief that has been growing upon us for fifty years or more with many strange effects. It has not destroyed our sense of pity, but has confused and exasperated it. We pity and love still, but with desperation, not like Christians assured that these things are according to the order of the universe, but fearing that they are wilful exceptions to that order, costly luxuries that we indulge in at our own peril. We seem to ourselves lonely in our pity and love; the supreme process knows nothing of them; the God, who is love, does not exist.

In the past wars have happened with the consent of mankind; but this war did not happen so. Even in Germany there was something hysterical in the praise of war, as if it were the worship of an idol both hated and feared. We must praise war, the German worshippers of force seem to say, so that we may survive. We must forgo the past hopes of man so that we may find something real to hope for. We must habituate ourselves to the universe as it is, and break ourselves and all mankind in to the bitter truth. They praised war as we used in England to praise industry. Labour, we believed, when all the labour of the poor had been made joyless by the industrial revolution, was the result of the curse laid upon man by God. Therefore, man must labour without joy and never dream of happy work. And so now the very worshippers of war believe that it is a curse laid upon man by the nature of things. They may not believe in the fall of man, but they do believe that he can never rise, since he is himself part of a process which is always war; and, if he tries to escape from it, he will become extinct. So they exhort us to consent to that process even with our conscience; the more completely we consent to it, the more we shall succeed in it. But all the while they are doing violence to our natures and to their own. They try to think like machines, like the slaves of a process; but thought itself is inconsistent with their effort; their very praises of the heroism of their victims are inconsistent with it. There is a gaping incongruity between the obsolete German romanticism and the new German atheism which exploited it, between their talk about Siegfried and their talk about the struggle for life. And there is the same incongruity between the cubist effort to see the visible world as a mechanical process and art itself. The cubist seems to force himself with a savage irony into this caricature of nature; we have emptied reality of its content in our thought and he will empty it of its content to our eyes; that is not how we really see things, but it is how we ought to see them if what we believe about the nature of things is true. This irony we find in Mr. Nevinson's pictures of the war, whether it be a despairing irony or the rebellion of an unshaken faith. He has emptied man of his content, just as the Prussian drill sergeant would empty him of his content for the purposes of war; and only a Prussian drill sergeant could consent to this version of man with any joy.

That, perhaps, is how we shall all come to see everything if we continue for some centuries to believe that process and not person is the ultimate reality. Emptying ourselves of all our content in thought, we shall at last empty ourselves of all content in reality; we shall become what now we fear we are, and our very senses will be obedient to our unfaith. For unfaith is the belief in process; and faith is the belief in person. It is the belief in process that makes men sacrifice other men in thousands to some idol; it is the belief in person that makes them refuse to sacrifice anyone but themselves; and they are afraid when they sacrifice others, but confident when they sacrifice themselves. Ultimately process has no value and can have no value for us. It is merely what exists or what we believe to exist, and our effort to value it is only the obsequiousness of the slave to the power that he fears. All our values come from the sense of person as more real than process. We will not do wrong to a man because he is a man; if he is to us only part of a process, we cannot value him and we can do what we will to him without any sense of wrong. All the old cruelties and iniquities of the world arose out of a belief in process and a fear of it. It is not a modern scientific discovery, but the oldest and darkest superstition that has oppressed the mind of man. To all religious persecutors salvation was a process, like that struggle for life which is the modern form of the struggle for salvation to the superstitious. And because salvation was a process human beings were sacrificed to it. It did not matter how they were tortured, provided this abstract process was maintained. So it does not matter now how they are slaughtered, provided the abstract process of the struggle for life is maintained. To the German this war was part of a process, the historical process of the triumph of Germany, and it did not matter how many Germans were killed in furthering it. If they were all killed Germany would still have asserted her faithless faith in process and would have reduced it to a glorious absurdity.

So, if we fought for anything beyond ourselves, we fought for the belief in person as against the belief in process. Indeed, it is the chief glory of England, among her many follies and crimes, that she has always believed in person rather than in process; and that is what we mean when we say that we refuse to sacrifice facts to theories. Men themselves are to us facts, and we distrust theories that empty them of content. If we act like brutes, we would rather do so because the brute has mastered us for the moment than because we believe that humanity is inconsistent with the process that dominates the world. We ourselves had rather be inconsistent than empty ourselves of all reality for the sake of a theory. And there is an intellectual as well as a moral basis to this inconsistency of ours. For if you believe that person, not process, is the ultimate reality, you must offer some defiance to the material facts of life. There is evidently a conflict between person and process; and in that conflict the process, which you perceive with your intelligence, will be less real to you than the person of whom you are aware with all your faculties. So you will trust in this union of all the faculties rather than in the exercise of the pure intelligence; for to you the pure intelligence will be part of the person and will share in the person's universal imperfection. In fact it will not be pure intelligence at all, but rather a faculty that may be obsequious to all the lower passions. Nothing will free you from them, except the respect for persons, except, in fact, loving your neighbour as yourself. There is no way to consistency but through that, and no way to the exercise of the pure intelligence. Never sacrifice a person to a process and you will never sacrifice a person to your own lower passions. But, if you believe in process rather than in person, you will see your passions as part of the process and glorify them when you think you are glorifying the nature of the universe.

Cubism and all those new methods of art which subject facts to the tyranny of a process may be good satire, but they will never, I think, produce an independent beauty of their own. Like all satire, they are parasitic upon past art, negative and rebellious. They tell us what the universe may look like to us if we lose all faith in ourselves and each other; and, when they are the result of a desperate effort to see the universe so, they are unconscious satire. The complete, convinced cubist reduces his own method, his own beliefs, his own state of mind, to an absurdity. The more sincere he is, the more complete is the reduction. For he, rejecting all that has been the subject-matter of painting in the past, all the human values and the complexes of association which have invested the visible world with beauty for men, proves to us in his tortured diagrams that he has found nothing to take their place, He gives us a Chimæra bombinans in vacuo, that vacuum which the universe is to the human spirit when it denies itself. He tries to make art, having cut himself off from all the experience and belief that produce art. For art springs always out of a supreme value for the personal and is an expression of that value. It is an effort, no matter in what medium, to find the personal in all things, to see trees as men walking; and the new abstract methods in painting reverse this process, they empty all things, even men, of personality and subject them to a process invented by the artist, which expresses, if it expresses anything, his own loss of personal values and nothing else. The result may be ingenious, it may still have a kind of beauty remembered from the great design of past art; but it will lead nowhere, since it is cut off from the very experience, the passionate personal interest in people and things, which gave design to the great art of the past. It is at best satirical, at worst parasitic, using up all devices of design and turning from one to another in a restless ennui which of itself can give no enrichment. It may have its uses, since it insists upon the supreme importance of design and provides a new method for the expression of three dimensions; but this method will be barren unless those who practise it enrich it with their own observation and delight. Already some of them seem to be weary of the barrenness of pure abstraction; they see that any fool can hide his own commonplace in cubism as an ostrich hides its head in the sand; but we would rather have honest chocolate-box ladies than the kaleidoscopic but betraying chocolate-box fragments of the futurist.

[The end]
A. Clutton-Brock's essay: Process Or Person?

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