Magical Art
A magical art is an art which is representative and there-
fore evocative of emotion, and evokes of set purpose some
emotions rather than others in order to discharge them into
the affairs of practical life. Such an art may be good or bad
when judged by aesthetic standards, but that kind of good-
ness or badness has little, if any, connexion with its efficacy
in its own proper work. The brilliant naturalism of the
admittedly magical palaeolithic animal paintings cannot be
explained by their magical function. Any kind of scrawl or
smudge would have served the purpose, if the neophyte on
approaching it had been solemnly told that it ‘was’ a bison.
When magical art reaches a high aesthetic level, this is
because the society to which it belongs (not the artists alone,
but artists and audience alike) demands of it an aesthetic
excellence quite other than the very modest degree of
competence which would enable it to fulfil its magical
function. Such an art has a double motive. It remains at a
high level only so long as the two motives are felt as absolutely
coincident. As soon as a sculptor thinks to himself ‘surely
it is a waste of labour to finish this portrait with such care,
when it is going to be shut up in a tomb as soon as it leaves
my hand’, the two motives have come apart in his mind.
He has conceived the idea that something short of his best
work, in the aesthetic sense of that phrase, would satisfy the
needs of magic; and decadence at once begins. Indeed, it
has begun already; for ideas of that kind only come up into
consciousness long after they have begun to influence
conduct.
The change of spirit which divides Renaissance and
modern art from that of the Middle Ages consists in the
fact that medieval art was frankly and definitely magical,
while Renaissance and modern art was not. I say ‘was’ not,
because the climax of this non-magical or anti-magical
period in the history of art was reached in the late nineteenth
century, and the tide is now visibly turning. But there were
always eddies in the tide-stream. There were cross-currents
even in the nineties, when English literary circles were domi-
nated by a school of so-called aesthetes professing the doctrine
that art must not subserve any utilitarian end but must be
practised for its own sake alone. This cry of art for art’s sake
was in some ways ambiguous; it did not, for example,
distinguish art proper from amusement, and the art which
its partisans admired and practised was in fact a shameless
amusement art, amusing a select and self-appointed clique;
but in one way it was perfectly definite: it ruled out magical
art altogether. Into the perfumed and stuffy atmosphere
of this china-shop burst Rudyard Kipling, young, nervous,
short-sighted, and all on fire with the notion of using his
very able pen to evoke and canalize the emotions which in
his Indian life he had found to be associated with the govern-
ing of the British Empire. The aesthetes were horrified, not
because they disapproved of imperialism, but because they
disapproved of magical art; Kipling had blundered right up
against their most cherished taboo. What was worse, he
made a huge success of it. Thousands of people who knew
those emotions as the steam in the engine of their daily work
took him to their hearts. But Kipling was a morbidly sensi-
tive little man, and the rebuff he had met with from the
aesthetes blasted the early summer of his life. Henceforth he
was torn between two ideals, and could pursue neither with
undivided allegiance.
To-day the boot is on the other leg. It is Kipling, and
not Wilde, whose principles are in favour. Most of our
leading young writers have reverted to magical art; and this
reversion is by far the most conspicuous fact in English art
to-day. To the aesthetician it is unimportant that this new
magical literature is the propaganda no longer of imperialism
but of communism. It is unimportant to him (though very
important to the politician) that, of the two warring creeds
which are dividing the inheritance of nineteenth-century
liberalism, communism appears to have tongue, eyes, and
fingers, and fascism only teeth and claws. What is important
to the aesthetician is the re-emergence of a very old kind of
aesthetic consciousness: one which reverses the painfully
taught lesson of nineteenth-century criticism, and instead of
saying ‘never mind about the subject; the subject is only a
corpus vile on which the artist has exercised his powers, and
what concerns you is the artist’s powers and the way in
which he has here displayed them’, says ‘the artist’s powers
can be displayed only when he uses them upon a subject
that is worthy of them’. {I.e., what Peterson would call ideological
propaganda.} This new aesthetic consciousness
involves a two-eyed stance. It regards the subject as an
integral element in the work of art; it holds that, in order to
appreciate any given work of art, one must be interested in its
subject for its own sake, as well as in the artist’s handling of it.
To the aesthetician trained in a nineteenth-century school,
these are words of horror. To take them seriously would
mean looking forward to an age of artistic decadence and
barbarism: an age when the infinitely difficult quest of
artistic perfection will be shelved in favour of an easy pro-
paganda; when artists will be judged not on their artistic
merits but on their conformity with the political and moral
and economic dogmas accepted by the society to which they
belong; when the hard-won freedom of modern art will be
thrown away, and obscurantism will reign supreme.
I will not pursue this question further. In another place
we shall have to consider it seriously. For the present, we
will simply register the facts that a recrudescence of magical
art is going on before our eyes, and that aesthetic theorists
and critics are in two minds how to take it.
I spoke of a recrudescence. But it appears as a recrudes-
cence only if we take a very snobbish or high-brow view of
what constitutes art. The self-elected circle of artists and
litterateurs have no monopoly of artistic production. Out-
side that circle we have had two vigorous streams at least
of artistic tradition since the Renaissance; and in each case
the magical quality of the art is unmistakable.
First, there is the native art of the poor: in particular, that
rustic or peasant art which goes by the patronizing name of
folk-art. This folk-art, consisting of songs and dances and
stories and dramas which in this country (with its tradition
of a patronizing contempt for the poor) were allowed to perish
almost completely before ‘educated’ persons had become
aware of their existence, was largely magical in its origin
and motive. It was the magical art of an agricultural people.
Secondly, there are the traditional low-brow arts of the
upper classes. Of these (since their nature is very often
misunderstood) it will be necessary to speak in greater
detail. I refer to such things as the prose of the pulpit, the
verse of hymns, the instrumental music of the military band
and the dance band, the decoration of drawing-rooms, and
so forth. I can see the high-brow reader pulling a face and
hear him cry ‘This, God help us, is not art at all’. I know;
but it is magic; and now that the relation between art and
magic is becoming an important problem once more, no
longer to be dismissed with a facile negation, it concerns the
aesthetician to find that magic has been flourishing, unre-
cognized but omnipresent, among the leaders (as they think
themselves) of a society whose claim to enlightenment is
based on its belief that it has given magic up altogether.
The case of religious art eo nomine, with its hymns and
ceremonies and ritual acts, hardly needs analysis. Obviously
its function is to evoke, and constantly re-evoke, certain
emotions whose discharge is to be effected in the activities
of everyday life. In calling it magical I am not denying its
claim to the title religious. Now that we have given up using
the word ‘magic’ as a term of abuse, and have decided what
it means, no one need fasten it upon things because he dis-
likes them, or hesitate to use it for things which he respects.
Magic and religion are not the same thing, for magic is the
evocation of emotions that are needed for the work of practical
life, and a religion is a creed, or system of beliefs about the
world, which is also a scale of values or system of conduct. {I.e., a "map of meaning"}
But every religion has its magic, and what is commonly
called ‘practising’ a religion is practising its magic.
Equally obvious, or jhardly less so, is the case of patriotic
art, whether the patriotism be national or civic or attached
to a party or class or any other corporate body: the patriotic
poem, the school song, the portraits of worthies or statues of
statesmen, the war-memorial, the pictures or plays recalling
historic events, military music, and all the innumerable
forms of pageantry, procession, and ceremonial whose pur-
pose is to stimulate loyalty towards country or city or party
or class or family or any other social or political unit. All
these are magical in so far as they are meant to arouse
emotions not discharged there and then, in the experience
that evokes them, but canalized into the activities of every-
day life and modifying those activities in the interest of the
social or political unit concerned.
Another group of examples may be found in the rituals
which we commonly call sport. Fox-hunting and amateur
football are primarily not amusements, practised for the sake
of harmless entertainment; not means of physical training,
intended to develop bodily strength and skill; they are ritual
activities, undertaken as social duties and surrounded by all
the well-known marks and trappings of magic: the ritual
costume, the ritual vocabulary, the ritual instruments, and
above all the sense of electedness, or superiority over the
common herd, which always distinguishes the initiate and the
hierophant. And in saying this I am not saying anything
new. The ordinary man has already reflected sufficiently
on these things to have formed a just appreciation of their
purpose. He regards them as methods of what he calls
‘training character’, whose function is to fit their devotees for
the work of living, and in particular for the work of living in
that station to which it has pleased God to call them. These
sports, we are told, inculcate a team-spirit, a sense of fair
play, a habit of riding straight and taking one’s fences like a
man. In other words, they generate certain emotions destined
to be discharged in certain kinds of everyday situations, with-
out which these situations would not be faced in a becoming
manner. They are the magical part of the religion of being
a gentleman. And even their harshest critics do not deny
this. They do not say that these sports are not magical, or
that their magic is not efficacious. What they say is that the
emotions generated by this traditional English upper-class
magic are not the emotions that best equip a man to live
effectively in the world as it exists to-day.
As a last group of examples, we will consider the cere-
monies of social life: such things as weddings, funerals,
dinner-parties, dances; forms of pageantry (and therefore,
potentially at least, forms of art) which decorate in their
fashion the private lives of modern civilized men and women.
All these are in essence magical. They all involve dressing
up, and a dressing-up which is done not for amusement,
and not for the gratification of individual taste, but according
to a prescribed pattern, often very uncomfortable, and always
so designed as to emphasize the solemnity of the occasion.
This is what anthropologists call the ritual dress of the
initiate. They all involve prescribed forms of speech and at
any rate the rudiments of a ritual vocabulary. They all
involve ritual instruments: a ring, a hearse, a peculiar and
complicated outfit of knives and forks and glasses, each with
its prescribed function. Almost always they involve the use
of flowers of prescribed kinds, arranged in a prescribed
manner, offerings to the genius of the ritual. They always
involve a prescribed demeanour, a ritual gaiety or a ritual
gloom.
As for their purpose, each one is consciously and explicitly
aimed at arousing certain emotions which are meant to
fructify in the later business of practical life.
The pageantry of marriage has nothing to do with the
fact, when it is a fact, that the principals are in love with each
other. On that subject it is dumb; and this is why many
persons deeply in love detest it as an insult to their passion,
and undergo it only because they are forced into it by
the opinion of their families. Its purpose is to create an
emotional motive for maintaining a partnership of a certain
kind, not the partnership of lovers but the partnership of
married people, recognized as such by the world, whether
love is present or no. {I.e., enforced monogamy!}
The funeral is an emotional reorientation of a different
kind. The mourners are not, essentially, making a public
exhibition of their grief; they are publicly laying aside their
old emotional relation to a living person and taking up a new
emotional relation to that same person as dead. The funeral
is their public undertaking that they are going to live in
future without him. How difficult an undertaking to fulfil
completely, which of us knows his own heart well enough to
say?
The ceremonial of a dinner-party is intended to create
or renew a bond, not of understanding or interest or policy,
but simply of emotion, among the diners, and more par-
ticularly between the host and each several guest. It
consolidates and crystallizes a sentiment of friendship, at
best making each feel what a charming person the other is,
and at worst, that he is not such a bad fellow after all. It
would be a poor dinner-party in which these feelings were
not to some extent evoked, and did not to some extent
survive the party itself.
The dance has always been magical; and so it still is
among ourselves. In its modern and ‘civilized’ form it is
essentially a courtship-ritual. Its intention is to arouse in the
young of each sex an interest in some member of the other
sex, to be selected in the ritual act itself from among the
persons qualified by birth and upbringing (that is to say,
by proper initiations undergone at the various critical stages
of life) to unite together in matrimony. This interest, so far
from being satisfied and therefore exhausted in the dance
itself, is intended to fructify in a future partnership. At
bottom, as our more outspoken grandmothers quite correctly
put it, a ball is the occasion on which girls find husbands.
True to type, all these magical ceremonies are represen-
tative. They literally, though selectively, represent the
practical activities they are intended to promote. Like the
war-dance and the plough-ritual, they are ‘symbolic’ in
the sense of that word defined under protest at the end of
Chapter III, § 4. Thus, in marriage, the principals join
hands and walk arm-in-arm through the company, to sym-
bolize their partnership in the eyes of the world. At a
funeral, the mourners leave the dead behind them to sym-
bolize their renunciation of the emotional attitude which
they maintained towards him in life. At a dinner party,
host and guest eat the same food to symbolize the sense of
intimacy and friendliness that is to pervade their more
sympathetic future relations. At a dance the embrace of
partners is a symbol for the embrace of love.
Regarded from the strictly aesthetic point of view, all
these rituals are in general as mediocre as an average
Academy portrait, and for the same reason. The artistic
motive is present in them all; but it is enslaved and denatured
by its subordination to the magical. Hymn-tunes and
patriotic songs do not as a rule inspire respect in a musician.
A ballet-master is not likely to feel much enthusiasm for a
meet of foxhounds or a cricket-match. The stage manage-
ment of a wedding or dinner-party is seldom of high quality;
and a professional dancer would have little praise for what
goes on at a fashionable ball. But this is of a piece with the
strictly magical character of these rituals: or rather, with the
representative character of which their magical character is
one specific form. They are not art proper, any more than
a portrait or a landscape. Like these things, they have a
primary function which is wholly non-aesthetic: the function
of generating specific emotions. Like them, they may in
the hands of a true artist (who is never to be thought of as
separable from a public that demands true art) become art
as well; and if the artistic and magical motives are felt as
one motive, this is bound to happen, as it happened among
the Aurignacian and Magdalenian cave-men, the ancient
Egyptians, the Greeks, and the medieval Europeans. It can
never happen so long as the motives are felt as distinct, as
among ourselves they invariably are.
And there are probably a bunch of other things to consider about him, not to mention that he is a polititian after all. But I did find his words about the new generation and what values should be emphasised as useful and interesting.
