AS I swing through the wide country in the freshness and fullness of
a blossoming, sun-steeped morning in May, breathing the breath of
the fields and the taller by inches for the sweep of the hills and the
reaches of sky above my head, every nerve in my body is alive with
sensation and delight. My joy is in the fragrance of earth, the
ingratiating warmth of the fresh morning, the spacious, inclosing air.
My pleasure in this direct contact with the landscape is a physical
reaction, to be enjoyed only by the actual experience of it; it cannot
be reproduced by any other means; it can be recalled by memory but
faintly and as the echo of sensation. There is, however, something
else in the landscape which can be reproduced; and this recall may
seem more glorious than the original in nature. There are elements
in the scene which a painter can render for me more intensely and
vividly than I perceived them for myself. These elements embody
the value that the landscape has for my emotions. The scene appeals
to something within me which lies beyond my actual physical
contact with it and the mere sense of touch. The harmony that the
eye perceives in these open fields, the gracious line of trees along
the stream's edge, the tossing hills beyond, and the arch of the blue
sky above impregnating the earth with light, is communicated to my
spirit, and I feel that this reach of radiant country is an extension of
my own personality. A painter, by the manipulation of his color and
line and mass, concentrates and intensifies the harmony of it and so
heightens its emotional value. The meaning of the scene for the
spirit is conveyed in terms of color and mass.
Color and mass are the painter's medium, his language. The final
import of art is the _idea,_ the emotional content of the work. On his
way to the expression of his idea the artist avails himself of material
to give his feeling concrete actuality and visible or audible
realization. He paints a picture, glorious in color and compelling in
the concentration of its massing; he carves a statue, noble in form or
subtly rhythmic; he weaves a pattern of harmonious sounds. He
values objects not for their own sake but for the energies they
possess,--their power to rouse his whole being into heightened
activity. And they have this power by virtue of their material
qualities, as color and form or sound. A landscape is gay in
springtime or sad in autumn. The difference in its effect upon us is
not due to our knowledge that it is spring or autumn and our
consciousness of the associations appropriate to each season. The
emotional quality of the scene is largely a matter of its color. Let the
spring landscape be shrouded in gray mist sifting down out of gray
skies, and we are sad. Let the autumn fields and woodland sparkle
and dance in the crisp golden sunlight, and our blood dances with
them and we want to shout from full lungs. In music the major key
wakens a different emotion from the minor. The note of a violin is
virgin in quality; the voice of the 'cello is the voice of experience.
The distinctive emotional value of each instrument inheres in the
character of its sound. These qualities of objects art uses as its
language.
Though all art is one in essence, yet each art employs a medium of
its own. In order to understand a work in its scope and true
significance we must recognize that an artist thinks and feels in
terms of his special medium. His impulse to create comes with his
vision, actual or imaginative, of color or form, and his thought is
transmitted to his hand, which shapes the work, without the
intervention of words. The nature of his vehicle and the conditions
in which he works determine in large measure the details of the form
which his idea ultimately assumes. Thus a potter designs his vessel
first with reference to its use and then with regard to his material, its
character and possibilities. As he models his plastic clay upon a
wheel, he naturally makes his bowl or jug round rather than sharply
angular. A pattern for a carpet, to be woven by a system of little
squares into the fabric, will have regard for the conditions in which
it is to be rendered, and it will differ in the character of its lines and
masses from a pattern for a wall-paper, which may be printed from
blocks. The designer in stained glass will try less to make a picture
in the spirit of graphic representation than to produce an harmonious
color-pattern whose outlines will be guided and controlled by the
possibilities of the "leading" of the window. The true artist uses the
conditions and very limitations of his material as his opportunity.
The restraint imposed by the sonnet form is welcomed by the poet as
compelling a collectedness of thought and an intensity of expression
which his idea might not achieve if allowed to flow in freer channels.
The worker in iron has his triumphs; the goldsmith has his. The
limitations of each craft open to it effects which are denied to the
other. There is an art of confectionery and an art of sculpture. The
designer of frostings who has a right feeling for his art will not
emulate the sculptor and strive to model in the grand style; the
sculptor who tries to reproduce imitatively the textures of lace or
other fabrics and who exuberates in filigrees and fussinesses so far
departs from his art as to rival the confectioner. In the degree that a
painter tries to wrench his medium from its right use and function
and attempts to make his picture tell a story, which can better be told
in words, to that extent he is unfaithful to his art. Painting, working
as it does with color and form, should confine itself to the
expression of emotion and idea that can be rendered visible. On the
part of the appreciator, likewise, the emotion expressed in one kind
of medium is not to be translated into any other terms without a
difference. Every kind of material has its special value for
expression. The meaning of pictures, accordingly, is limited
precisely to the expressive power of color and form. The impression
which a picture makes upon the beholder maybe phrased by him in
words, which are his own means of expression; but he suggests the
import of the picture only incompletely. If I describe in words
Millet's painting of the "Sower" according to my understanding of it,
I am telling in my own terms what the picture means to me. What it
meant to Millet, the full and true significance of the situation as the
painter felt it, is there expressed upon his canvas in terms of visible
aspect; and correspondingly, Millet's meaning is fully and truly
received in the measure that we feel in ourselves the emotion roused
by the sight of his color and form.
The essential content of a work of art, therefore, is modified in its
effect upon us by the kind of medium in which it is presented. If an
idea phrased originally in one medium is translated into the terms of
another, we have _illustration._ Turning the pages of an "illustrated"
novel, we come upon a plate showing a man and a woman against
the background of a divan, a chair, and a tea-table. The man, in a
frock coat, holding a top hat in his left hand, extends his right hand
to the woman, who has just risen from the table. The legend under
the picture reads, "Taking his hat, he said good-by." Here the
illustrator has simply supplied a visible image of what was
suggested in the text; the drawing has no interest beyond helping the
reader to that image. It is a statement of the bare fact in other terms.
In the hands of an artist, however, the translation may take on a
value of its own, changing the original idea, adding to it, and
becoming in itself an independent work of art. This value derives
from the form into which the idea is translated. The frescoes of the
Sistine Chapel are only sublime illustration; but how little of their
power attaches to the subject they illustrate, and how much of their
sublimity lies in the painter's rendering! Conversely, an example of
the literary interpretation of a picture is Walter Pater's description of
Leonardo's Mona Lisa.
The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are
come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful
women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty,
into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts
and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that
which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward
form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the
middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the
return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a
diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda,
was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the
changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The
fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand
experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the
idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all
modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the
embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
It is Leonardo's conception, yet with a difference. Here the critic has
woven about the subject an exquisite tissue of associations, a whole
wide background of knowledge and thought and feeling which it lay
beyond the painter's range to evoke; but the critic is denied the
vividness, the immediateness and intimate warmth of vital contact,
which the painter was able to achieve. The Lisa whom Leonardo
shows us and the Lisa whom Pater interprets for us are the same in
essence yet different in their power to affect us. The difference
resulting from the kind of medium employed is well exemplified by
Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel." The fundamental concept of both
poem and picture is identical, but picture and poem have each its
distinctive range and limitations and its own peculiar appeal. If we
cancel the common element in the two, the difference remaining
makes it possible for us to realize how much of the effect of a work
of art inheres in the medium itself. Painting may be an aid to
literature in that it helps us to more vivid images; the literary
interpretation of pictures or music gives to the works with which it
deals an intellectual definiteness. But the functions peculiar to each
art are not to be confounded nor the distinctions obscured.
Pictures are not a substitute for literature, and their true meaning is
finally not to be translated into words. Their beauty is a visible
beauty; the emotions they rouse are such as can be conveyed
through the sense of sight. In the end they carry their message
sufficingly as color and mass. Midway, however, our enjoyment
may be complicated by other elements which have their place in our
total appreciation. Thus a painting of a landscape may appeal to us
over and above its inherent beauty because we are already, out of
actual experience, familiar with the scene it represents, and the sight
of it wakens in our memory a train of pleasant allied associations. A
ruined tower, in itself an exquisite composition in color and line and
mass, may gather about it suggestions of romance, elemental
passions and wild life, and may epitomize for the beholder the
whole Middle Age. Associated interest, therefore, may be
sentimental or intellectual. It may be sensuous also, appealing to
other senses than those of sight. The sense of touch plays a large
part in our enjoyment of the world. We like the "feel" of objects, the
catch of raw silk, the chill smoothness of burnished brass, the thick
softness of mists, the "amorous wet" of green depths of sea. The
senses of taste and smell may be excited imaginatively and
contribute to our pleasure. Winslow Homer's breakers bring back to
us the salt fragrance of the ocean, and in the presence of these white
mad surges we feel the stinging spray in our faces and we taste the
cosmic exhilaration of the sea-wind. But the final meaning of a
picture resides in the total harmony of color and form, a harmony
into which we can project our whole personality and which itself
constitutes the emotional experience.
All language in its material aspect has a sensuous value, as the
wealth of color of Venetian painting, the sumptuousness of
Renaissance architecture, the melody of Mr. Swinburne's verse, the
gem-like brilliance of Stevenson's prose, the all-inclusive
sensuousness, touched with sensuality, of Wagner's music-dramas.
Because of the charm of beautiful language there are many
art-lovers who regard the sensuous qualities of the work itself as
making up the entire experience. Apart from any consideration of
intention or expressiveness, the material _thing_ which the artist's
touch summons into form is held to be "its own excuse for being."
This order of enjoyment, valid as far as it goes, falls short of
complete appreciation. It does not pass the delight one has in the
radiance of gems or the glowing tincture of some fabric. The
element of meaning does not enter in. There is a beauty for the eye
and a beauty for the mind. The qualities of material may give
pleasure to the senses; the object embodying these qualities becomes
beautiful only as it is endowed with a significance wakened in the
human spirit. A landscape, says Walter Crane, "owes a great part of
its beauty to the harmonious relation of its leading lines, or to certain
pleasant contrasts, or a certain impressiveness of form and mass, and
at the same time we shall perceive that this linear expression is
inseparable from the sentiment or emotion suggested by that
particular scene." In the appreciation of art, to stop with the
sensuous appeal of the medium is to mistake means for an end.
"Rhyme," says the author of "Intentions," "in the hands of a real
artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but
a spiritual element of thought and passion also." An artist's color,
glorious or tender, is only a symbol and manifestation to sense of his
emotion. At first glance Titian's portrait of the "Man with the Glove"
is an ineffable color-harmony. But truly seen it is infinitely more. By
means of color and formal design Titian has embodied here his
vision of superb young manhood; by the expressive power of his
material symbols he has rendered visible his sense of dignity, of
fineness, of strength in reserve. The color is beautiful because his
idea was beautiful. Through the character of this young man as
revealed and interpreted by the artist, the beholder is brought into
contact with a vital personality, whose influence is communicated to
him; in the appreciation of Titian's message he sees and feels and
lives.
The value of the medium resided not in the material itself but in its
power for expression. When language is elaborated at the expense of
the meaning, we have in so far forth sham art. It should be easy to
distinguish in art between what is vital and what is mechanical. The
mechanical is the product of mere execution and calls attention to
the manner. The vital is born out of inspiration, and the living idea
transmutes its material into emotion. Too great an effort at
realization defeats the intended illusion, for we think only of the
skill exercised to effect the result, and the operation of the intellect
inhibits feeling. In the greatest art the medium is least perceived, and
the beholder stands immediately in the presence of the artist's idea.
The material is necessarily fixed and finite; the idea struggles to free
itself from its medium and untrammeled to reach the spirit. It is
mind speaking to mind. However complete the material expression
may seem, it is only a part of what the artist would say; imagination
transcends the actual. In the art which goes deepest into life, the
medium is necessarily inadequate. The artist fashions his work in a
sublime despair as he feels how little of the mighty meaning within
him he is able to convey. In the greatest works rightly seen the
medium becomes transparent. Within the Sistine Chapel the visitor,
when once he has yielded to the illusion, is not conscious of plaster
surface and pigment; indeed, he hardly sees color and design as such
at all; through them he looks into the immensity of heaven, peopled
with gods and godlike men. Consummate acting is that which makes
the spectator forget that it is acting. The part and the player become
one. The actor, in himself and in the words he utters, is the
unregarded vehicle of the dramatist's idea. In a play like Ibsen's
"Ghosts," the stage, the actors, the dialogue merge and fall away,
and the overwhelming meaning stands revealed in its complete
intensity. As the play opens, it cuts out a segment from the chaos of
human life; step by step it excludes all that is unessential, stroke by
stroke with an inevitableness that is crushing, it converges to the
great one-thing that the dramatist wanted to say, until at the end the
spectator, conscious no longer of the medium but only of the idea
and all-resolving emotion, bows down before its overmastering
force with the cry, "What a _mind_ is there!"
In the art which most completely achieves expression the medium is
not perceived as distinct from the emotion of which the medium is
the embodiment. In order to render expressive the material
employed in its service, art seeks constantly to identify means and
end, to make the form one with the content. The wayfarer out of his
need of shelter built a hut, using the material which chance gave into
his hand and shaping his design according to his resources; the
purpose of his work was not the hut itself but shelter. So the artist in
any form is impelled to creation by his need of expression; the thing
which he creates is not the purpose and end of his effort, but only
the means. Each art has its special medium, and each medium has its
peculiar sensuous charm and its own kind of expressiveness. This
power of sensuous delight is incidental to the real beauty of the
work; and that beauty is the message the work is framed to convey
to the spirit. In the individual work, the inspiring and shaping idea
seeks so to fuse its material that we feel the idea could not have been
phrased in any other way as we surrender to its ultimate appeal,--the
sum of the emotional content which gave it birth and in which it
reaches its fulfillment.
V