THE greatest art is universal. It transcends the merely local
conditions in which it is produced. It sweeps beyond the individual
personality of its creator, and links itself with the common
experience of all men. The Parthenon, so far as it can be
reconstructed in imagination, appeals to a man of any race or any
period, whatever his habit of mind or degree of culture, as a perfect
utterance. The narrow vault of the Sistine Chapel opens into
immensity, and every one who looks upon it is lifted out of himself
into new worlds. Shakespeare's plays were enjoyed by the
apprentices in the pit and royalty in the boxes, and so all the way
between. The man Shakespeare, of such and such birth and training,
and of this or that experience in life, is entirely merged in his
creations; he becomes the impersonal channel of expression of the
profoundest, widest interpretation of life the world has known. Such
art as this comes closest to the earth and extends farthest into
infinity, "beyond the reaches of our souls."
But there is another order of art, more immediately the product of
local conditions, the personal expression of a distinctive
individuality, phrased in a language of less scope and currency, and
limited as to its content in the range of its appeal. These lesser works
have their place; they can minister to us in some moment of need
and at some point in our development. Because of their limitations,
however, their effectiveness can be furthered by interpretation. A
man more sensitive than we to the special kind of beauty which they
embody and better versed in their language, can discover to us a
significance and a charm in them to which we have not penetrated.
To help us to the fullest enjoyment of the great things and to a more
enlightened and juster appreciation of the lesser works is the service
of criticism.
We do not wholly possess an experience until, having merged
ourselves in it, we then react upon it and become conscious of its
significance. A novel, a play, a picture interests us, and we surrender
to the enjoyment of the moment. Afterwards we think about our
pleasure, defining the nature of the experience and analyzing the
means by which it was produced, the subject of the work and the
artist's method of treating it. It may be that we tell our pleasure to a
friend, glad also perhaps to hear his opinion of the matter. The
impulse is natural; the practice is helpful. And herein lies the origin
of criticism. In so far as an appreciator does not rest in his
immediate enjoyment of a work of art, but seeks to account for his
pleasure, to trace the sources of it, to establish the reasons for it, and
to define its quality, so far he becomes a critic. As every man who
perceives beauty in nature and takes it up into his own life is
potentially an artist, so every man is a critic in the measure that he
reasons about his enjoyment. The critical processes, therefore, are an
essential part of our total experience of art, and criticism may be an
aid to appreciation.
The function of criticism has been variously understood through the
centuries of its practice. Early modern criticism, harking back to the
method of Aristotle, concerned itself with the form of a work of art.
From the usage of classic writers it deduced certain "rules" of
composition; these formulas were applied to the work under
examination, and that was adjudged good or bad in the degree that it
conformed or failed to conform to the established rules. It was a
criticism of law-giving and of judgment. In the eighteenth century
criticism extended its scope by the admission of a new consideration,
passing beyond the mere form of the work and reckoning with its
power to give pleasure. Addison, in his critique of "Paradise Lost,"
still applies the formal tests of the Aristotelian canons, but he
discovers further that a work of art exists not only for the sake of its
form, but also for the expression of beautiful ideas. This power of
"affecting the imagination" he declares is the "very life and highest
perfection" of poetry. This is a long step in the right direction. With
the nineteenth century, criticism conceives its aims and procedure in
new and larger ways. A work of art is now seen to be an evolution;
and criticism adapts to its own uses the principles of historical study
and the methods of scientific investigation. Recognizing that art is
organic, that an art-form, as religious painting or Gothic architecture
or the novel, is born, develops, comes to maturity, lapses, and dies,
that an individual work is the product of "race, environment, and the
moment," that it is the expression also of the personality of the artist
himself, criticism no longer regards the single work as an isolated
phenomenon, but tries to see it in its relation to its total background.
Present-day criticism avails itself of this larger outlook upon art. But
the ends to be reached are understood differently by different critics.
With M. Brunetière, to cite now a few representative names,
criticism is authoritative and dogmatic: he looks at the work
objectively, refusing to be the dupe of his pleasure, if he has any;
and approaching the work in the spirit of dispassionate impersonal
inquiry as an object of historical importance and scientific interest,
he decrees that it is good or bad. Matthew Arnold considers
literature a "criticism of life," and he values a work with reference to
the moral significance of its ideas. Ruskin's criticism is didactic; he
wishes to educate his public, and by force of his torrential eloquence
he succeeds in persuading his disciples into acceptance of his
teaching, though he may not always convince. Impressionistic
criticism, as with M. Anatole France or M. Jules Lemaître, does not
even try to see the work "as in itself it really is," but is an account of
the critic's own subjective reaction on it, a narrative of what he
thought and felt in this chance corner of experience. With Walter
Pater criticism becomes _appreciation._ A given work of art
produces a distinctive impression and communicates a special and
unique pleasure; this active power constitutes its beauty. So the
function of the critic as Pater conceives it is "to distinguish, analyze,
and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a
landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this
special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source
of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced."
The interpretative critic--represented in the practice of Pater--stands
between a work of art and the appreciator as mediator and revealer.
Each kind of criticism performs a certain office, and is of use within
its own chosen sphere. To the layman, for his purposes of
appreciation, that order of criticism will be most helpful which
responds most closely and amply to his peculiar needs. A work of
art may be regarded under several aspects, its quality of technical
execution, its power of sensuous appeal, its historical importance;
and to each one of these aspects some kind of criticism applies. The
layman's reception of art includes all these considerations, but
subordinates them to the total experience. His concern, therefore, is
to define the service of criticism to appreciation.
The analysis of a work of art resolves it into these elements. There is
first of all the emotion which gives birth to the work and which the
work is designed to express. The emotion, to become definite,
gathers about an idea, conceived in the terms of its own medium, as
form, or color and mass, or musical relations; and this artistic idea
presents itself as the subject or motive of the work. The emotion and
artistic idea, in order that they may be expressed and become
communicable, embody themselves in material, as the marble of a
statue, the pigment of a picture, the audible tones of a musical
composition. This material form has the power to satisfy the mind
and delight the senses. Through the channel of the senses and the
mind the work reaches the feelings; and the aesthetic experience is
complete.
As art springs out of emotion, so it is to be received as emotion; and
a work to be appreciated in its true spirit must be enjoyed. But to be
completely enjoyed it must be understood. We must know what the
artist was trying to express, and we must be able to read his
language; then we are prepared to take delight in the form and to
respond to the emotion.
To help us to understand a work of art in all the components that
entered into the making of it is the function of historical study. Such
study enables us to see the work from the artist's own point of view.
A knowledge of its background, the conditions in which the artist
wrought and his own attitude toward life, is the clue to his ideal; and
by an understanding of the language it was possible for him to
employ, we can measure the degree of expressiveness he was able to
achieve. This study of the artist's purpose and of his methods is an
exercise in explanation.
The interpretation of art, for which we look to criticism, deals with
the picture, the statue, the book, specifically in its relation to the
appreciator. What is the special nature of the experience which the
work communicates to us in terms of feeling? In so far as the
medium itself is a source of pleasure, by what qualities of form has
the work realized the conditions of beauty proper to it, delighting
thus the senses and satisfying the mind? These are the questions
which the critic, interpreting the work through the medium of his
own temperament, seeks to answer.
Theoretically, the best critic of art would be the artist himself. He
above all other men should understand the subtle play of emotion
and thought in which a work of art is conceived; and the artist rather
than another should trace the intricacies and know the cunning of the
magician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself into
visible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out by
the fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings of
his spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and not
analytic. From his contact with nature and from his experience of
life, out of which rises his generative emotion, he moves directly to
the fashioning of expressive forms, without pausing on the way to
scan too closely the "meaning" of his work. Mr. Bernard Shaw
remarks that Ibsen, giving the rein to the creative impulse of his
poetic nature, produced in "Brand" and "Peer Gynt" a "great puzzle
for his intellect." Wagner, he says, "has expressly described how the
intellectual activity which he brought to the analysis of his music
dramas was in abeyance during their creation. Just so do we find
Ibsen, after composing his two great dramatic poems, entering on a
struggle to become intellectually conscious of what he had done."
Moreover, the artist is in the very nature of things committed to one
way of seeing. His view of life is limited by the trend of his own
dominant and creative personality; what he gains in intensity and
penetration of insight he loses in breadth. He is less quick to see
beauty in another guise than that which his own imagination weaves
for him; he is less receptive of other ways of envisaging the world.
The ideal critic, on the contrary, is above everything else catholic
and tolerant. It is his task to discover beauty in whatever form and to
affirm it. By nature he is more sensitive than the ordinary man, by
training he has directed the exercise of his powers toward their
fullest scope, and by experience of art in its diverse manifestations
he has certified his judgment and deepened his capacity to enjoy.
The qualifications of an authentic critic are both temperament and
scholarship. Mere temperament uncorrected by knowledge may
vibrate exquisitely when swept by the touch of a thing of beauty, but
its music may be in a quite different key from the original motive.
Criticism must relate itself to the objective fact; it should interpret
and not transpose. Mere scholarship without temperament misses art
at its centre, that art is the expression and communication of
emotional experience; and the scholar in criticism may wander his
leaden way down the by-paths of a sterile learning. To mediate
between the artist and the appreciator, the critic must understand the
artist and he must feel with the appreciator. He is at once the artist
translated into simpler terms and the appreciator raised to a higher
power of perception and response.
The service of criticism to the layman is to furnish him a clue to the
meaning of the work in hand, and by the critic's own response to its
beauty to reveal its potency and charm. With technique as such the
critic is not concerned. Technique is the business of the artist; only
those who themselves practice an art are qualified to judge in
matters of practice. The form is significant to the appreciator only so
far as regards its expressiveness and beauty. It is not the function of
the critic to tell the artist what his work _should be;_ it is the critic's
mission to reveal to the appreciator what the work _is_. That
revelation will be accomplished in terms of the critic's own
experience of the beauty of the work, an experience imaged forth in
such phrases that the pleasure the work communicates is conveyed
to his readers in its true quality and foil intensity. It is not enough to
dogmatize as Ruskin dogmatizes, to bully the reader into a terrified
acceptance. It is not enough to determine absolute values as
Matthew Arnold seeks to do, to fix certain canons of intellectual
judgment, and by the application of a formula as a touchstone, to
decide that this work is excellent and that another is less good.
Really serviceable criticism is that which notes the special and
distinguishing quality of beauty in any work and helps the reader to
live out that beauty in his own experience.
These generalizations may be made more immediate and practical
by examples. In illustration of the didactic manner in criticism I may
cite a typical paragraph of Ruskin, chosen from his "Mornings in
Florence."
First, look at the two sepulchral slabs by which you are standing.
That farther of the two from the west end is one of the most
beautiful pieces of fourteenth-century sculpture in this world. . . .
And now, here is a simple but most useful test of your capacity for
understanding Florentine sculpture or painting. If you can see that
the lines of that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of the
folds is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that the
softness and ease of them is complete,--though only sketched with a
few dark touches,--then you can understand Giotto's drawing, and
Botticelli's;--Donatello's carving, and Luca's. But if you see nothing
in _this_ sculpture, you will see nothing in theirs, _of_ theirs. Where
they choose to imitate flesh, or silk, or to play any vulgar modern
trick with marble--(and they often do)--whatever, in a word, is
French, or American, or Cockney, in their work, you can see; but
what is Florentine, and for ever great--unless you can see also the
beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap,--you will see never.
The earnest and docile though bewildered layman is intimidated into
thinking that he sees it, whether he really does or not. But it is a
question if the contemplation of the "beauty of this old man in his
citizen's cap," however eager and serious the contemplation may be,
adds much to his experience; it may be doubted whether as a result
of his effort toward the understanding of the rightness and loveliness
of the lines of the cap and the exquisiteness of the choice of folds,
which the critic has pointed out to him with threatening finger, he
feels that life is a fuller and finer thing to live.
An example of the intellectual estimate, the valuation by formulas,
and the assignment of abstract rank, is this paragraph from Matthew
Arnold's essay on Wordsworth.
Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of
profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he is
unique. His best poems are those which most perfectly exhibit this
balance. I have a warm admiration for "Laodameia" and for the great
"Ode;" but if I am to tell the very truth, I find "Laodameia" not
wholly free from something artificial, and the great "Ode" not
wholly free from something declamatory. If I had to pick out poems
of a kind most perfectly to show Wordsworth's unique power, I
should rather choose poems such as "Michael," "The Fountain,"
"The Highland Reaper." And poems with the peculiar and unique
beauty which distinguishes these, Wordsworth produced in
considerable number; besides very many other poems of which the
worth, although not so rare as the worth of these, is still exceedingly
high.
Thus does the judicial critic mete out his estimate by scale and
measuring-rod. We are told dogmatically what is good and what is
less good; but of distinctive quality and energizing life-giving
virtues, not a word. The critic does not succeed in communicating to
us anything of Wordsworth's special charm and power. We are
informed, but we are left cold and unresponding.
The didactic critic imposes his standard upon the layman. The
judicial critic measures and awards. The appreciative critic does not
attempt to teach or to judge; he makes possible to his reader an
appreciation of the work of art simply by recreating in his own terms
the complex of his emotions in its presence. Instead of declaring the
work to be beautiful or excellent, he makes it beautiful in the very
telling of what it means to him. As the artist interprets life,
disclosing its depths and harmonies, so the appreciative critic in his
turn interprets art, reconstituting the beauty of it in his own terms.
Through his interpretation, the layman is enabled to enter more fully
into the true spirit of the work and to share its beauty in his own
experience.
In contrast to the passage from Arnold is this paragraph from an
essay on Wordsworth by Walter Pater.
And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle of
it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their
daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great
elementary feelings, lifting and solemnizing their language and
giving it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to
Michael by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these
humble children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate
souls. In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of
George Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. With
a penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the
masters of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold and
Victor Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement which
were to be found in that pastoral world--the girl who rung her
father's knell; the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; the
instinctive touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures,
even--their home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales of
passionate regret that hang by a ruined farm-building, a heap of
stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer
world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower
these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrow
of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personal
beauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their pathetic
wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the
stormy seas;" the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her
betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of
the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all the
pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their
wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of
children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their
yearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their
early toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this
strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised the
image, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction
has caught from him.
Here is the clue to Wordsworth's meaning; and the special quality
and power of his work, gathering amplitude and intensity as it plays
across the critic's temperament, is reconstituted in other and
illuminating images which communicate the emotion to us. The
critic has felt more intimately than we the appeal of this poetry, and
he kindles in us something of his own enthusiasm. So we return to
Wordsworth for ourselves, more alert to divine his message, more
susceptible to his spell, that he may work in us the magic of
evocation.
Criticism is of value to us as appreciators in so far as it serves to
recreate in us the experience which the work was designed to
convey. But criticism is not a short cut to enjoyment. We cannot
take our pleasure at second hand. We must first come to the work
freshly and realize our own impression of it; then afterwards we may
turn to the critic for a further revelation. Criticism should not shape
our opinion, but should stimulate appreciation, carrying us farther
than we could go ourselves, but always in the same direction with
our original impression. There is a kind of literary exercise, calling
itself criticism, which takes a picture or a book as its point of
departure and proceeds to create a work of art in its own right,
attaching itself only in name to the work which it purports to
criticise. "Who cares," exclaims a clever maker of epigrams,
"whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What does
it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's Gallery." A very good appreciation of Ruskin, this. But
the answer is that such writing as is here attributed to Ruskin is
magnificent: it may be art; but it is not true criticism. A work of art
is not "impressive" merely, but "expressive" too. Criticism in its
relation to the work itself has an objective base, and it must be
steadied and authenticated by constant reference to the original feet.
Criticism is not the source of our enjoyment but a medium of
interpretation.
Before we turn to criticism, therefore, we must first, as Pater
suggests, know our own impression as it really is, discriminate it,
and realize it distinctly. Only so shall we escape becoming the dupe
of some more aggressive personality. In our mental life suggestion
plays an important and perhaps unrecognized part. In a certain frame
of mind we can be persuaded into believing anything and into liking
anything. When, under the influence of authority or fashion, we
think we care for that which has no vital and consciously realized
relation to our own experience, we are the victims of a kind of
hypnotism, and there is little hope of our ultimate adjustment over
against art. It is far better honestly to like an inferior work and know
why we like it than to pretend to like a good one. In the latter case
no real progress or development is possible, for we have no
standards that can be regarded as final; we are swayed by the
authority or influence which happens at that moment to be most
powerful. In the former case we are at least started in the right
direction. Year by year, according to the law of natural growth, we
come to the end of the inferior work which up to that time has been
able to minister to us, and we pass on to new and greater works that
satisfy the demands of our deepening experience. It is sometimes
asked if we ought not to try to like the best things in art. I should
answer, the very greatest things we do not have to _try_ to like; the
accent of greatness is unmistakable, and greatness has a message for
every one. As regards the lesser works, we ought to be willing to
grow up. There was a time when I enjoyed "Robinson Crusoe" in
words of one syllable. If I had _tried_ then to like Mr. George
Meredith, I should not really have enjoyed him, and I should have
missed the fun of "Robinson Crusoe." Everything in its time and
place. The lesser works have their use: they may be a starting-point
for our entrance into life; and they furnish a basis of comparison by
which we are enabled to realize the greatness of the truly great. We
must value everything in its own kind, affirming what it is, and not
regretting what it is not. But the prerequisite of all appreciation,
without which our contact with art is a pastime or a pretense, is that
we be honest with ourselves. In playing solitaire at least we ought
not to cheat.
So the layman must face the situation squarely and accept the
responsibility of deciding finally for himself. On the way we may
look to criticism to guide us to those works which are meant for us.
In art as in the complex details of living, there is need of selection;
and criticism helps toward that. In literature alone, to name but a
single art, there is so much to be left unread which the length of our
life would not otherwise permit us to escape, that we are grateful to
the critic who aids us to omit gracefully and with success. But the
most serviceable criticism is positive and not destructive. The lesser
works may have a message for us, and it is that message in its
distinctive quality which the critic should affirm. In the end,
however, the use we make of criticism should not reduce itself to an
unquestioning acceptance of authority. In the ceremonial of the
Roman service, at the moment preceding the elevation of the Host,
two acolytes enter the chancel, bearing candles, and kneel between
the congregation and the ministrants at the altar; the tapers,
suffusing the altar in their golden radiance, throw the dim figures of
the priests into a greater gloom and mystery. So it happens that art
often is enshrouded by the off-giving of those who would seem to
illuminate it; and "dark with excess of light," the obscurity is
intensified. The layman is told of the virginal poetry of early Italian
painting; he is bidden to sit at the homely, substantial feast of the
frank actuality of Dutch art; he listens in puzzled wonder to the
glorification of Velasquez and Goya; he reads in eloquent, glowing
language of the splendor of Turner. He is more than half persuaded;
but he does not quite understand. From this tangle of contending
interests there seems for the moment to be no way out. It is assumed
that the layman has no standard of his own; and he yields himself to
the appeal which comes to him immediately at the instant. The next
day, perhaps, brings a new interest or another judgment which runs
counter to the old. Back and forth and back again, without purpose
and without reason; it is only an endless recurrence of the conflict
instead of development and progress. Taking all his estimates at
second hand, so for his opinion even of a concert or a play he is at
the mercy of a critic who may have dined badly. Some boy, caught
young at the university and broken to miscellaneous tasks on a big
newspaper, is sent to "do" a picture-exhibition, a concert, and the
theatre in the same day. He is expected to "criticise" in an hour the
work of a lifetime of struggle and effort and knowledge and thought
and feeling. This is the guide of opinion and the foundation of
artistic creed. I have stated the reduction to absurdity of the case for
authority in criticism. If the layman who leans too heavily upon
criticism comes to realize the hopelessness of his position and thinks
the situation through to its necessary conclusion, he sees that the
authority of criticism is not absolute, but varies with the powers and
range of the individual critic, and that at the last he must find his
standard within himself.
There are, of course, certain standards of excellence recognized
universally and certain principles of taste of universal validity; and
to these standards and these principles must be referred our
individual estimates for comparison and correction. Given a native
sensibility to the worth of life and to the appeal of beauty, the justice
of our estimate will be in proportion to the extent of our knowledge
of life and of our contact with art. Our individual judgment,
therefore, must be controlled by experience,--our momentary
judgments by the sum of our own experience, and our total
judgment by universal experience. In all sound criticism and right
appreciation there must be a basis of disciplined taste. We must
guard ourselves against whims and caprice, even our own. So the
individual may not cut loose altogether from external standards. But
these must be brought into relation to his personal needs and applied
with reference to his own standard. Finally, for his own uses, the
individual has the right to determine the meaning and value to him
of any work of art in the measure that it links itself with his own
actual or possible experience and becomes for him a revelation of
fuller life. For beauty is the power possessed by objects to quicken
us with a sense of larger personality; and art, whether the arts of
form or of representation, is the material bodying forth of beauty as
the artist has perceived it and the means by which his emotion in its
presence is communicated. Upon this conception of beauty and this
interpretation of the scope and function of art rests the justice of the
personal estimate.