IT is a gray afternoon in late November. The day is gone; evening is
not yet come. Though too dark to read or write longer, it is not dark
enough for drawn shades and the lamp. As I sit in the gathering dusk,
my will hovering between work done and work to do, I surrender to
the mood of the moment. The day is accomplished, but it is not yet a
remembrance, for it is still too near for me to define the details that
made up its hours. Consciousness, not sharp enough for thought,
floats away into diffused and obscure emotion. The sense is upon
me and around me that I am vaguely, unreasoningly, yet pleasantly,
unhappy. Out of the dimness a trick of memory recalls to me the
lines,--
"Tears! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears,
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand,
Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;
O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand?
Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the
beach!
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and
desperate!
O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance
and regulated pace,
But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the
unloosened ocean
Of tears! tears! tears!"
Now I know. My mood was the mood of tears. The poet, too, has
felt what I was feeling. And as a poet he has been able to bring his
emotion to expression. By the magic of phrase and the mystery of
image he has, out of the moving of his spirit, fashioned a concrete
reality. By means of his expression, because of it, his emotion
becomes realized, and so reaches its fulfillment. And for me, what
before was vague has been made definite. The poet's lines have
wakened in me a response; I have felt what he has phrased; and now
they become my expression too. As my mood takes form, I become
conscious of its meaning. I can distill its significance for the spirit,
and in the emotion made definite and realizable as consciousness I
feel and know that I am living. Doubly, completely, the poem is a
work of art. And my response to it, the absorption of it into my own
experience, is appreciation.
I appreciate the poem as I make the experience which the poet has
here phrased my own, and at the instant of reading I live out in
myself what he has lived and here expressed. I read the words, and
intellectually I take in their signification, but the poem is not
realized in me until it wakens in me the feeling which the words are
framed to convey. The images which an artist employs have the
power to rouse emotion in us, so that they come to stand for the
emotion itself. We care for nature and it is beautiful to us as its
forms become objectively the intimate expression for us of what we
feel.
"O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying
clouds, as one with them."
In his contact with the external world the artist identifies himself
with his object. If he is painting a tree he in a measure becomes the
tree; he values it at all because it expresses for him concretely what
he feels in its presence. The object and his spirit fuse; and through
the fusion they together grow into a new and larger unity. What his
work expresses is not the object for its own sake but this larger unity
of his identity with it. To appreciate the artist's work, therefore, we
must in our turn merge ourselves in his emotion, and becoming one
with it, so extend our personality into larger life.
To make the artist's emotion our own, to identify ourselves with the
object which he presents to us, we must pass beyond the material
form in which the work is embodied, letting the spirit and meaning
of it speak to our spirit. In itself an individual picture or statue or
symphony is an objective, material thing, received into
consciousness along the channel of the senses; but its origin and its
end alike are in emotion. The material form, whether in nature or in
works of art, is only the means by which the emotion is
communicated. A landscape in nature is composed of meadow and
hills, blue sky and tumbling clouds; these are the facts of the
landscape. But they are not fixed and inert. The imagination of the
beholder combines these elements into a harmony of color and mass;
his spirit flows into consonance with the harmony his imagination
has compelled out of nature, becoming one with it. To regard the
world not as facts and things, but as everywhere the stimulus of
feeling, feeling which becomes our own experience, is the condition
of appreciation.
To the awakening mind of a child, life is full of wonder, and each
unfolding day reveals new marvels of excitement and surprise. As
yet untrammeled by any sense of the limitations of material, his
quick imagination peoples his world with creatures of his fancy,
which to him are more real than the things he is able actually to see
and touch. For him the external world is fluid and plastic, to be
moulded into forms at will in obedience to his creative desire. In the
tiny bundle of rags which mother-love clasps tight to her heart, a
little girl sees only the loveliest of babies; and a small boy with his
stick of lath and newspaper cap and plume is a mightier than
Napoleon. The cruder the toy, the greater is the pleasure in the game;
for the imagination delights in the exercise of itself. A wax doll, sent
from Paris, with flaxen hair and eyes that open and shut, is laid away,
when the mere novelty of it is exhausted, in theatric chest, and the
little girl is fondling again her first baby of rag and string. A real
steel sword and tin helmet are soon cast aside, and the boy is back
again among the toys of his own making. That impulse to creation
which all men feel, the impulse which makes the artist, is especially
active in a child; his games are his art. With a child material is not
an end but a means. Things are for him but the skeleton of life, to be
clothed upon by the flesh and blood reality of his own fashioning.
His feeling is in excess of his knowledge. He has a faculty of
perception other than the intellectual. It is imagination.
The child is the first artist. Out of the material around him he creates
a world of his own. The prototypes of the forms which he devises
exist in life, but it is the thing which he himself makes that interests
him, not its original in nature. His play is his expression. He creates;
and he is able to merge himself in the thing created. In his play he
loses all consciousness of self. He and the toy become one, caught
up in the larger unity of the game. According as he identifies himself
with the thing outside of him, the child is the first appreciator.
Then comes a change.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
Imagination surrenders to the intellect; emotion gives place to
knowledge.
Gradually the material world shuts in about us until it becomes for
us a hard, inert thing, and no longer a living, changing presence,
instinct with infinite possibilities of experience and feeling. Now
custom lies upon us
"with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"
It happens, unfortunately for our enjoyment of life, that we get used
to things. Little by little we come to accept them, to take them for
granted, and they cease to mean anything to us. Habit, which is our
most helpful ally in lending our daily life its practical efficiency, is
the foe of emotion and appreciation. Habit allows us to perform
without conscious effort the innumerable little acts of each day's
necessity which we could not possibly accomplish if every single act
required a fresh exercise of will. But just because its action is
unconscious and unregarded, habit blunts the edge of our
sensibilities. "Thus let but a Rising of the Sun," says Carlyle, "let but
a creation of the World happen _twice,_ and it ceases to be
marvelous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable."
"Except ye become as little children!" Unless the world is
new-created every day, unless we can thrill to the beauty of nature with
its fair surfaces and harmonies of vibrant sounds, or quicken to the
throb of human life with its occupations and its play of energies, its
burdens and its joys, unless we find an answer to our needs, and
gladness, in sunlight or storms, in the sunset and evening and
solitude under the stars, in fields and hills or in thronging city streets,
in conflict and struggle or in the face of a friend, unless each new
day is a gift and new opportunity, then we cannot interpret the
meaning of life nor read the riddle of art. For we cannot truly
appreciate art except as we learn to appreciate life. Until then art has
no message for us; it is a sealed book, and we shall not open the
book nor loose the seals thereof. The meaning of life is for the spirit,
and art is its minister. To share in the communion we must become
as children. As a child uses the common things of life to his own
ends, transfiguring them by force of his creative desire, and
fashioning thus a wonderful world of his own by the exercise of his
shaping imagination, a world of limitless incident and high
adventure, so we must penetrate the visible and tangible actuality
around us, the envelope of seemingly inert matter cast in forms of
rigid definition, and we must open ourselves to the influence of
nature. That influence--nature's power to inspire, quicken, and
dilate--flowing through the channel of the senses, plays upon our
spirit. The indwelling significance of things is apprehended by the
imagination, and is won for us in the measure that we feel.
As we respond to the emotional appeal of the great universe external
to ourselves we come to realize that the material world which we see
and touch is not final. In the experience of us all there are moments
of exaltation and quickened response, moments of illumination
when--
"with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."
The "life of things" is their significance for the spirit. By spirit I
mean the sum of our conscious being, that complete entity within us
which we recognize as the self. The material world, external, visible,
tangible, may be regarded as the actual world. The real world is the
world of spiritual forces and relations, apprehended by the
imagination and received with feeling. Life, in the sense of our
conscious experience of the world, is the moving of the spirit in
emotion.
The measure of life for the individual, therefore, is the degree of
intensity with which he feels. Experience is not meted out by weeks
and months; it is to be sounded by the depth and poignancy of
instant emotion. Variety and multitude of incident may crowd
through insentient years and leave no record of their progress along
the waste places of their march. Or a day may be a lifetime. In such
moments of intensest experience time and space fall away and are
not. The outermost bounds of things recede; they vanish altogether:
and we are made free of the universe. At such moments we are truly
living; then we really _are._
As the meaning of art is not the material thing which it calls into
form, but what the work expresses of life, so in order to appreciate
art it is necessary to appreciate life, which is the inspiration of art
and its fulfillment. To appreciate life is to send out our being into
experience and to _feel_,--to realize in terms of emotion our
identity with the great universe outside of us, this world of color and
form and sound and movement, this web of illimitable activities and
energies, shot through with currents of endlessly varied and
modulated feeling. "My son," says the father in Hindu lore, pointing
to an animal, a tree, a rock, "my son, thou art that!" The universe is
one. Of it we are each an essential part, distinct as individuals, yet
fusing with it in our sense of our vital kinship with all other parts
and with the whole. I am sauntering through the Public Garden on a
fragrant hushed evening in June; touched by the lingering afterglow,
the twilight has not yet deepened into night. Grouped about a bench,
children are moving softly in the last flicker of play, while the
mother nods above them. On the next bench a wanderer is stretched
at full length, his face hidden in his crooked-up arm. I note a couple
seated, silent, with shoulder touching shoulder. I meet a young man
and woman walking hand in hand; they do not see me as I pass.
Beyond, other figures are soundless shadows, gathering out of the
enveloping dusk. It is all so intimate and friendly. The air, the
flowers, the bit of water through the trees reflecting the lights of the
little bridge, are a caress. And it is all for me! I am a child at his
tired play, I am the sleeping tramp, I am the young fellow with his
girl. It is not the sentiment of the thing, received intellectually, that
makes it mine. My being goes out into these other lives and becomes
one with them. I feel them in myself. It is not thought that
constitutes appreciation; it is emotion.
Another glimpse, caught this time through a car window. Now it is a
winter twilight. The flurry of snow has passed. The earth is
penetrated with blue light, suffused by it, merged in it, ever blue.
Vague forms, still and shadowy, of hills and trees, soppy with light,
are blue within the blue. The brief expanse of bay is deeply
luminous and within the pervasive tempering light resolves itself
into the cool and solemn reaches of the sky which bends down and
touches it. Once more my spirit meets and mingles with the spirit of
the landscape. By the harmony of nature's forms and twilight tones I
am brought into a larger harmony within myself and with the world
around.
All experience offers to us at any moment just such possibilities of
living. The infinite and ever-changing expressiveness of nature at
every instant of day and night is ours to read if we will but look
upon it with the inner vision. The works of men in cities and
cultivated fields, if we will see beyond the actual material, may
quicken our emotions until we enact in ourselves their story of
struggle, of hopes and ambitions partly realized, of defeat or final
triumph. The faces seen in a passing crowd bear each the record of
life lived, of lives like ours of joys or disappointments, lives of great
aims or no aims at all, of unwritten heroisms, of hidden tragedies
bravely borne, lives sordid and mean or generous and bright. The
panorama of the world unrolls itself _for us._ It is ours to experience
and live out in our own being according as we are able to feel. Just
as the impulse to expression is common to all men, and all are artists
potentially, differing in the depth of their insight into life and in the
degree of emotion they have to express, so appreciation lies within
the scope of all, and the measure of it to us as individuals is
determined by our individual capability of response.
Life means to each one of us what we are able to receive of it in
"wise passiveness," and then are able by the constructive force of
our individuality to shape into coherence and completeness. As the
landscape which an artist paints is the landscape visioned in
imagination, though composed of forms given in nature, so life
furnishes us the elements of experience, and out of these elements
we construct a meaning, each for himself. To one man an object or
incident is commonplace and blank; to another it may be charged
with significance and big with possibilities of fuller living. "In every
object." says Carlyle, "there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees
in it what it brings means of seeing." To _see_ is not merely to
receive an image upon the retina. The stimulation of the visual organ
becomes sight properly only as the record is conveyed to the
consciousness. When I am reading a description of a sunset, there is
an image upon my retina of a white page and black marks of
different forms grouped in various combinations. But what I see is
the sunset. Momentarily to rest the eye upon a landscape is not
really to see it, for our mind may be quite otherwhere. We see the
landscape only as it becomes part of our conscious experience. The
beauty of it is in us. A novelist conceives certain characters and
assembles them in action and reaction, but it is we who in effect
create the story as we read. We take up a novel, perhaps, which we
read five years ago; we find in it now new significances and appeals.
The book is the same; it is we who have changed. We bring to it the
added power of feeling of those five years of living. Art works not
by information but by evocation. Appreciation is not reception but
response. The artist must compel us to feel what he has felt,--not
something else. But the scope of his message, with its overtones and
subtler implications, is limited by the rate of vibration to which we
are attuned.
"All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
the arches and cornices?)
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by
the instruments."
And again Whitman says, "A great poem is no finish to a man or
woman, but rather a beginning." The final significance of both life
and art is not won by the exercise of the intellect, but unfolds itself
to us in the measure that we feel.
To illustrate the nature of appreciation and the power from which
appreciation derives, the power to project ourselves into the world
external to us, I spoke of the joy of living peculiar to the child and to
the childlike in heart. But that is not quite the whole of the story. A
child by force of his imagination and capacity of feeling is able to
pass beyond the limits of material, and he lives in a world of
exhaustless play and happiness; for him objects are but means and
not an end. To transcend thus the bounds of matter imposed by the
senses and to live by the power of emotion is the first condition of
appreciation. The second condition of appreciation is to feel and
know it, to become conscious of ourselves in our relation to the
object. To _live_ is the purpose of life; to be aware that we are
living is its fulfillment and the reward of appreciation.
Experience has a double value. There is the instant of experience
itself, and then the reaction on it. A child is unconscious in his play;
he is able to forget himself in it completely. At that moment he is
most happy. The instant of supreme joy is the instant of ecstasy,
when we lose all consciousness of ourselves as separate and distinct
individualities. We are one with the whole. But experience does not
yield us its fullest and permanent significance until, having
abandoned ourselves to the moment, we then react upon it and
become aware of what the moment means. A group of children are
at play. Without thought of themselves they are projected into their
sport; with their whole being merged in it, they are intensely living.
A passer on the street stands and watches them. For the moment, in
spirit he becomes a child with them. In himself he feels the
absorption and vivid reality to them of what they are doing. But he
feels also what they do not feel, and that is, what it means to be a
child. Where they are unconscious he is conscious; and therefore he
is able, as they are not, to distill the significance of their play. This
recognition makes possible the extension of his own life; for the
man adds to himself the child. The reproach is sometimes brought
against Walt Whitman that the very people he writes about do not
read him. The explanation is simple and illustrates the difference
between the unconscious and the conscious reception of life. The
"average man" who is the hero of Whitman's chants is not aware of
himself as such. He goes about his business, content to do his work;
and that makes up his experience. It is not the average man himself,
but the poet standing outside and looking on with imaginative
sympathy, who feels what it means to be an average man. It is the
poet who must "teach the average man the glory of his daily walk
and trade." It is not enough to be happy as children are
happy,--unconsciously. We must be happy and know it too.
The attitude of appreciation is the attitude of response,--the
projection of ourselves into new and fuller ranges of feeling, with
the resultant extension of our personality and a larger grasp on life.
We do not need to go far afield for experience; it is here and now.
To-day is the only day, and every day is the best day. "The readiness
is all." But mere contact with the surface of life is not enough.
Living does not consist in barely meeting the necessities of our
material existence; to live is to feel vibrantly throughout our being
the inner significance of things, their appeal and welcome to the
spirit. This fair world of color and form and texture is but a show
world, after all,--this world which looms so near that we can see it,
touch it, which comes to us out of the abysms of time and recedes
into infinitudes of space whither the imagination cannot follow it.
The true and vital meaning of it resides within and discovers itself to
us finally as emotion. Some of this meaning art reveals to us, and in
that measure it helps us to find ourselves. But art is only the means.
The starting-point of the appreciation of art, and its goal, is the
appreciation of life. The reward of living is the added ability to live.
And life yields its fullest opportunities, its deepest tragedies, its
highest joys, all its infinite scope of feeling, to those who enter by
the gate of appreciation.