TO become sensitive to the meaning of color and form and sound as
the artist employs them for expression, to feel a work of art in its
relation to its background, to find in criticism enlightenment and
guidance but not a substitute for one's own experience,--these are
methods of approach to art. But the appreciator has yet to penetrate
art's inmost secret. At the centre, as the motive of all his efforts to
understand the language of art and the processes of technique, as the
goal of historical study and the purpose of his recourse to criticism,
stands the work itself with its power to attract and charm. Here is
Millet's painting of the "Sower." In the actual presence of the picture
the appreciator's experience is complex. Analysis resolves it into
considerations of the material form of the work, involving its
sensuous qualities and the processes of execution, considerations
also of the subject of the picture, which gathers about itself many
associations out of the beholder's own previous knowledge of life.
But the clue to the final meaning of the work, its meaning both to
the artist and to the appreciator, is contained in the answer to the
question, Why did Millet paint this picture? And just what is it
designed to express?
Art is born out of emotion. Though the symbols it may employ to
expression, the forms in which it may manifest itself, are infinitely
various in range and character, essentially all art is one. A work of
art is the material bodying forth of the artist's sense of a meaning in
life which unfolds itself to him as harmony and to which his spirit
responds accordantly. It may be a pattern he has conceived; or he
adapts material to a new use in response to a new need: the artist is
here a craftsman. He is stirred by the tone and incident of a
landscape or by the force or charm of some personality: and he puts
brush to canvas. He apprehends the complex rhythms of form: and
the mobile clay takes shape under his fingers. He feels the
significance of persons acting and reacting in their contact with one
another: and he pens a novel or a drama. He is thrilled by the
emotion attending the influx of a great idea; philosophy is touched
with feeling: and the thinker becomes a poet. The discords of
experience resolve themselves within him into harmonies: and he
gives them out in triumphant harmonies of sound. The particular
medium the artist chooses in which to express himself is incidental
to the feeling to be conveyed. The stimulus to emotion which impels
the artist to create and the essential content of his work is _beauty._
As beauty, then, is the very stuff and fibre of art, inextricably bound
up with it, so in our effort to relate art to our experience we may
seek to know something of the nature of beauty and its place in
common life.
During a visit in Philadelphia I was conducted by a member of the
firm through the great Locomotive Works in that city. From the vast
office, with its atmosphere of busy, concentrated quiet, punctuated
by the clicking of many typewriters, I was led through doors and
passages, and at length came upon the shrieking inferno of the shops.
The uproar and din were maddening. Overhead, huge cranes were
swinging great bulks of steel from one end of the cavernous shed to
the other; vague figures were moving obscurely in the murk; the
floor was piled and littered with heaps of iron-work of unimaginable
shapes. After a time we made our way into another area where there
was more quiet but no less confusion. I yelled to my guide, "Such a
rumpus and row I never saw; it is chaos come again!" And he
replied, "Why, to me it is all a perfect order. Everything is in its
place. Every man has his special job and does it. I know the meaning
and purpose of all those parts that seem to you to be thrown around
in such a mess. If you could follow the course of making from the
draughting-rooms to the finishing-shop, if you could see the process
at once as a whole, you would understand that it is all a complete
harmony, every part working with every other part to a definite
end." It was not I but my friend who had the truth of the matter.
Where for me there was only chaos, for him was order. And the
difference was that he had the clue which I had not. His sense of the
meaning of the parts brought the scattering details into a final unity;
and therein he found harmony and satisfaction.
I went away much impressed by what I had seen. When I had
collected my wits a little in the comparative calm of the streets, it
occurred to me that the immense workshops were a symbol of man's
life in the world. In the instant of experience all seems chaos. At
close range, in direct contact with the facts and demands of every
day, we feel how confusing and distracting it all is. Life is beating in
upon us at every point; all our senses are assailed at once. Each new
day brings its conflicting interests and obligations. Now, whether we
are aware of it or not, our constant effort is, out of the great variety
of experience pressing in upon us, to select such details as make to a
definite purpose and end. Instinctively we grope toward and attract
to us that which is special and proper to our individual development.
Our progress is toward harmony. By the adjustment of new material
to the shaping principle of our experience, the circle of our
individual lives widens its circumference. We are able to bring more
and more details into order, and correspondingly fuller and richer
our life becomes.
The mental perception of order in the parts gives the whole its
significance. This quick grasp of the whole is like the click of the
kaleidoscope which throws the tumbling, distorted bits into a design.
The conduct of practical life on the mental plane is the process also
of art on the plane of the emotions. Not only does experience offer
itself to us as the subject of thought; our contact with the world is
also the stimulus of feeling. In my account of the visit to the
Locomotive Works I have set down but a part and not the sum of my
reaction. After I had come away, I fell to thinking about what I had
seen, and intellectually I deduced certain abstract principles with
regard to unity and significance. But at the moment of experience
itself I simply felt. I was overwhelmed by the sense of unloosened
power. The very confusion of it all constituted the unity of
impression. The emotion roused in me by the roar and riotous
movement and the vast gloom torn by fitful yellow gleams from
opened furnaces and shapes of glowing metal was the emotion
appropriate to the experience of chaos. That I can find a single word
by which to characterize it, is evidence that the moment had its
harmony for me and consequent meaning. All the infinite universe
external to us is everywhere and at every instant potentially the
stimulus to emotion. But unless feeling is discriminated, it passes
unregarded. When the emotion gathers itself into design, when the
moment reveals within itself order and significance, then and not till
then the emotion becomes substance for expression in forms of art.
If I were able to phrase what I saw and what I felt in the Locomotive
Works, so that by means of presenting what I saw I might
communicate to another what I felt and so rouse in him the same
emotion, I should be an artist. Whistler or Monet might picture for
us the murk and mystery of this pregnant gloom. Wagner might
sound for us the tumultuous, weird emotions of this Niebelungen
workshop of the twentieth century. Dante or Milton might phrase
this inferno and pandemonium of modern industry and leave us
stirred by the sense of power in the play of gigantic forces. Whether
the medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet's
words, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as the
work expresses the emotion which the artist has felt in the presence
of this spectacle. He, the artist, more than I or another, has thrilled to
its mystery, its tumult, its power. It is this effect, received as a unity
of impression, that he wants to communicate. This power of the
object over him, and consequently the content of his work, is beauty.
In the experience of us all there are objects and situations which can
stir us,--the twilight hour, a group of children at play, the spectacle
of the great human crowd, it may be, or solitude under the stars, the
works of man as vast cities or cunningly contrived machines, or
perhaps it is the mighty, shifting panorama which nature unrolls for
us at every instant of day and night, her endless pageant of color and
light and shade and form. Out of them at the moment of our contact
is unfolded a new significance; because of them life becomes for us
larger, deeper. This power possessed by objects to rouse in us an
emotion which comes with the realization of inner significance
expressed in harmony is beauty. A brief analysis of the nature and
action of beauty may help us in the understanding and appreciation
of art, though the value to us of any explanation is to quicken us to a
more vivid sensitiveness to the effect of beauty in the domain of
actual experience of it.
Because the world external to us, which manifests beauty, is
received into consciousness by the senses, it is natural to seek our
explanation in the processes involved in the functioning of our
organism. Our existence as individual human beings is conditioned
by our embodiment in matter. Without senses, without nerves and a
brain, we should not _be._ Our feelings, which determine for us
finally the value of experience, are the product of the excitement of
our physical organism responding to stimulation. The rudimentary
and most general feelings are pleasure and pain. All the complex
and infinitely varied emotions that go to make up our conscious life
are modifications of these two elementary reactions. The feeling of
pleasure results when our organism "functions harmoniously with
itself;" pain is the consequence of discord. In the words of a recent
admirable statement of the psychologists' position: "When rhythm
and melody and forms and colors give me pleasure, it is because the
imitating impulses and movements that have arisen in me are such
as suit, help, heighten my physical organization in general and in
particular. . . . The basis, in short, of any aesthetic
experience--poetry, music, painting and the rest--is beautiful
through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses,
primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of the
suggestions and impulses it arouses with the whole organism." Beauty,
then, according to the psychologists, is the quality inherent in
things, the possession of which enables them to stimulate our
organism to harmonious functioning. And the perception of beauty
is a purely physiological reaction.
This explanation, valid within its limits, seems to me to fall short of
the whole truth. For it fails to reckon with that faculty and that entity
within us whose existence we know but cannot explain,--the faculty
we call mind, which operates as imagination, and the entity we
recognize as spirit or soul. I mean the faculty which gives us the
idea of God and the consciousness of self, the faculty which
apprehends relations and significance in material transcending their
material embodiment. I mean the entity within us which expresses
itself in love and aspiration and worship, the entity which is able to
fuse with the harmony external to it in a larger unity. When I glance
out upon a winter twilight drenching earth and sky with luminous
blue, a sudden delight floods in upon me, gathering up all my senses
in a surging billow of emotion, and my being pulses and vibrates in
a beat of joy. Something within me goes out to meet the landscape;
so far as I am at all conscious of the moment, I feel, There, that is
what I am! This deep harmony of tone and mass is the expression of
a fuller self toward which I yearn. My being thrills and dilates with
the sensation of larger life. Then, after the joy has throbbed itself out
and my reaction takes shape as consciousness, I set myself to
consider the sources and the processes of my experience. I note that
my eye has perceived color and form. My intellect, as I summon it
into action, tells me that I am looking upon a scene in nature
composed of material elements, as land and trees and water and
atmosphere. My senses, operating through channels of matter,
receive, and my brain registers, impressions of material objects. But
this analysis, though defining the processes, does not quite explain
_my joy._ I know that beyond all this, transcending my material
sense-perception and transcending the actual material of the
landscape, there is something in me and there is something in nature
which meet and mingle and become one. Above all embodiment in
matter, there is a plane on which I feel my community with the
world external to me, recognizing that world to be an extension of
my own personality, a plane on which I can identify myself with the
thing outside of me in so far as it is the expression of what I am or
may become. Between me and the external world there is a common
term. The effect which nature has upon us is determined, not by the
object itself alone and not by our individual mind and temperament
alone, but by the meeting of the two, the community between the
object and the spirit of man. When we find nature significant and
expressive, it is because we make nature in some way a part of our
own experience.
The material of an object is perceived by the senses. We see that it is
blue or green or brown; we may touch it and note that it is rough or
smooth, hard or soft, warm or cold. But the expressiveness of the
object, its value for the emotions, does not stop with its merely
material qualities, but comes with our grasp of the "relations" which
it embodies; and these relations, transmitted through material by the
senses, are apprehended by the mind. There are, of course,
elementary data of sense-perception, such as color and sound. It may
be that I prefer red to yellow because my eye is so constituted as to
function harmoniously with a rate of vibration represented by 450
billions per second, and discordantly with a rate of vibration
represented by 526 billions per second. So also with tones of a given
pitch. But though simple color and simple sound have each the
power to please the senses, yet in actual experience neither color nor
sound is perceived abstractly, apart from its embodiment in form.
Color is felt as the property of some concrete object, as the crimson
of a rose, the dye of some fabric or garment, the blue of the sky,
which, though we know it to be the infinite extension of atmosphere
and ether, we nevertheless conceive as a dome, with curvature and
the definite boundary of the horizon. Sound in and of itself has pitch
and _timbre_, qualities of pure sensation; but even with the
perception of sound the element of form enters in, for we hear it
with a consciousness of its duration--long or short--or of its relation
to other sounds, heard or imagined.
Our perceptions, therefore, give us forms. Now form implies
_relation,_ the reference of one part to the other parts in the
composition of the whole. And relation carries with it the
possibilities of harmony or discord, of unity or disorder. Before an
object can be regarded as beautiful it must give out a unity of
impression. This unity does not reside in the object itself, but is
effected by the mind which perceives it. In looking at a
checkerboard I may see it as an aggregation of white squares set off
by black, or as black squares relieved by white. I may read it as a
series of horizontals, or of verticals, or of diagonals, according as I
_attend_ to it. The design of the checker-board is not an absolute
and fixed quantity inherent in the object itself, but is capable of a
various interpretation according to the relative emphasis given to the
parts by the perceiving mind. So with all objects in nature. The
twilight landscape which stirred me may have been quite without
interest or meaning to the man at my side; or, if he responded to it at
all, his feelings may have been of a different order and quality than
mine. Where I felt a deep and intimate solemnity in the landscape,
he might have received the twilight as chill and forbidding. Beauty,
then, which consists in harmonious relation, does not lie in nature
objectively, but is constituted by the perception in man's
constructive imagination of a harmony and consequent significance
drawn out of natural forms. It is, in Emerson's phrase, "the integrity
of impression made by manifold natural objects." And Emerson says
further, "The charming landscape which I saw this morning is
indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns
this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none
of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon
which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that
is, the poet." The mere pleasurable excitement of the senses is hardly
to be called beauty. An object to be beautiful must express a
harmony of relations and hence a meaning,--a meaning which goes
beyond sense-perception and does not stop with the intellect, but
reaches the spirit. Psychologists tell us that "a curved line is pleasing
because the eye is so hung as best to move in it." Pleasing, yes; but
not beautiful. And precisely herein is illustrated the distinction. A
life wearied with an undulating uniformity of days will find beauty
less in the curve than in the zigzag, because the sight of the broken
line brings to the spirit suggestions of change and adventure. A
supine temper finds shock, excitement, and a meaning in the vertical.
Yet the significance of forms is not determined necessarily by
contrasts. A quiet spirit sees its own expression, a harmony of self
with external form, in the even lines and flat spaces of some Dutch
etching. Or a vigorous, hardy mind takes fresh stimulus and courage
from the swirling clouds of Turner or the wind-torn landscapes of
Constable. An object is beautiful, not because of the physical ease
with which the eye follows its outlines, but in so far as it has the
power to communicate to us the feeling of larger life, to express and
complete for us a harmony within our emotional experience.
Our senses report to us the material world; we see, we hear, we
touch and taste and smell. But we recognize also that nature has a
value for the emotions; it can delight and thrill and uplift, taking us
out of ourselves and carrying us beyond the confines of the little
circle of our daily use and wont. As I look from my window I see
against the sky a pear tree, radiant with blossom, an explosion of
light and sensation. Its green and white, steeped in sunshine and
quivering out of rain-washed depths of blue, are good to behold. But
for me, as my spirit goes out to meet it, the tree is spring! In this I do
not mean to characterize a process of intellectual deduction,--that as
blossoms come in the spring, so the flowering of the tree is evidence
that spring is here. I mean that by its color and form, all its outward
loveliness, the tree communicates to me the spirit of the new birth of
the year. In myself I feel and live the spring. My joy in the tree,
therefore, does not end with the sight of its gray trunk and
interwoven branches and its gleaming play of leaves: there my joy
only begins, and it comes to its fulfillment as I feel the life of the
tree to be an expression and extension of the life that is in me. My
physical organism responds harmoniously in rhythm with the form
of the tree, and so far the tree is pleasing. But, finally, a form is
beautiful because it is expressive. "Beauty," said Millet, "does not
consist merely in the shape or coloring of a face. It lies in the
general effect of the form, in suitable and appropriate action. . . .
When I paint a mother, I shall try and make her beautiful simply by
the look she bends upon her child. Beauty is expression." Beauty
works its effect through significance, a significance which is not
always to be phrased in words, but is felt; conveyed by the senses, it
at last reaches the emotions. Where the spirit of man comes into
harmony with a harmony external to it, there is beauty.
The elements of beauty are design, wholeness, and significance.
Significance proceeds out of wholeness or unity of impression; and
unity is made possible by design. Whatever the flower into which it
may ultimately expand, beauty has its roots in fitness and utility;
design in this case is constituted by the adaptation of the means to
the end. The owner of a saw-mill wanted a support made for a
shafting. Indicating a general idea of what he desired, he applied to
one of his workmen, a man of intelligence and skill in his craft, but
without a conventional education. The man constructed the support,
a triangular framework contrived to receive the shafting at the apex;
where there was no stress within the triangle, he cut away the timber,
thus eliminating all surplusage of material. When the owner saw the
finished product he said to his workman, "Well, John, that is a really
beautiful thing you have made there." And the man replied, "I don't
know anything about the beauty of it, but I know it's strong!" The
end to be reached was a support which should be strong. The strong
support was felt to be beautiful, for its lines and masses were
apprehended as _right._ Had the man, with the "little learning" that
is dangerous, attempted embellishment or applied ornament, he
would have spoiled the effect; for ornateness would have been out of
place. The perfect fitness of means to end, without defect and
without excess, constituted its beauty; and its beauty was perceived
aesthetically, as a quality inherent in the form, a quality which apart
from the practical serviceableness of the contrivance was capable of
communicating pleasure. So in general, when the inherent needs of
the work give shape to the structure or contrivance, the resulting
form is in so far forth beautiful. The early "horseless carriages," in
which a form intended for one use was grafted upon a different
purpose, were very ugly. Today the motor-car, evolved out of
structural needs, a thing complete in and for itself, has in its lines
and coherence of composition certain elements of beauty. In his
"Song of Speed," Henley has demonstrated that the motorcar,
mechanical, modern, useful, may even be material for poetry. That
the useful is not always perceived as beautiful is due to the fact that
the design which has shaped the work must be regarded apart from
the material serviceableness of the object itself. Beauty consists not
in the actual material, but in the unity of relations which the object
embodies. We appreciate the art involved in the making of the first
lock and key only as we look beyond the merely practical usefulness
of the device and so apprehend the harmony of relations effected
through its construction. As the lock and key serve to fasten the door,
they are useful; they are beautiful as they manifest design and we
feel their harmony. Beauty is removed from practical life, not
because it is unrelated to life,--just the reverse of that is true,--but
because the enjoyment of beauty is disinterested. The detachment
involved in appreciation is a detachment from material. The
appreciator may seem to be a looker-on at life, in that he does not
act but simply feels. But his spirit is correspondingly alert. In the
measure that he is released from servitude to material he gives free
play to his emotion.
Although beauty is founded upon design, design is not the whole of
beauty. Not all objects which exhibit equal integrity of design are
equally beautiful. The beauty of a work of art is determined by the
degree of emotion which impelled its creation and by the degree in
which the work itself is able to communicate the emotion
immediately. The feeling which entered into the making of the first
lock and key was simply the inventor's desire for such a device, his
desire being the feeling which accompanied his consciousness of his
need. At the other extreme is the emotion such as attended
Michelangelo's vision of his "David" and urged his hand as he set
his chisel to the unshaped waiting block. And so all the way between.
Many pictures are executed in a wholly mechanical spirit, as so
much manufacture; and they exhibit correspondingly little beauty.
Many useful things, as a candle-stick, a pair of andirons, a chair, are
wrought in the spirit of art; into them goes something of the maker's
joy in his work; they become the expression of his emotion: and
they are so far beautiful. It is asserted that Millet's "Angelus" is a
greater picture than the painting entitled "War" by Franz Stuck,
because "the idea of peasants telling their beads is more beautiful
than the idea of a ruthless destroyer only in so far as it is morally
higher." The moral value as such has very little to do with it. It is a
question of emotion. If Stuck were to put on canvas his idea of
peasants at prayer and if Millet had phrased in pictorial terms his
feeling about war, there is little doubt that Millet's painting would be
the more telling and beautiful. The degree of beauty is fixed by the
depth of the man's insight into life and the corresponding intensity of
his emotion.
Beauty is not limited to one class of object or experience and
excluded from another. A chair may be beautiful, although turned to
common use; a picture is not beautiful necessarily because it is a
picture. "Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is
bad," says Whitman, Whistler speaks of art as "seeking and finding
the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest,
Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in
the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its
inhabitants were not Greeks." The beautiful must exhibit an integrity
of relations within itself, and it must be in integral relation with its
surroundings. The standard of beauty varies with every age, with
every nation, indeed with every individual. As beauty is not in the
object itself, but is in the mind which integrates the relations which
the object manifests, so our appreciation of beauty is determined by
our individuality. And individuality is the resultant of many forces.
The self, inexplicable in essence, is the product of inheritance, and is
modified by environment and training. More than we realize, our
judgment is qualified by tradition and habit and even fashion.
Because men have been familiar for so many centuries with the idea
that sculpture should find its vehicle in white marble, the knowledge
that Greek marbles originally were painted comes with something of
a shock; and for the moment they have difficulty in persuading
themselves that a Parthenon frieze _colored_ could possibly be
beautiful. Until within comparatively recent years the French have
regarded Shakespeare as a barbarian. The heroic couplet, which was
the last word in poetical expression in the age of Queen Anne, we
consider to-day as little more than a mechanical jingle. Last year's
fashions in dress, which seemed at the time to have their merits, are
this year amusingly grotesque. In our judgment of beauty, therefore,
allowance must be made for standards which merely are imposed
upon us from without. It is necessary to distinguish between a
formula and the reality. As far as possible we should seek to come
into "original relation" with the universe, freshly for ourselves. So
we must return upon our individual consciousness, and thus
determine what is vitally significant to us. For the man who would
appreciate beauty, it is not a question between this or that "school"
in art, whether the truth lies with the classicists or the romanticists; it
is not a question of this or that subject or method to the exclusion of
all others. Beauty may be anywhere or everywhere. It is our task and
joy to find it, wherever it may be. And we shall find it, if we are able
to recognize it and we hold ourselves responsive to its multitudinous
appeal.
The conception of beauty which limits its manifestation to one kind
of experience is so far false and leads to mischievous acceptances
and narrowing rejections. We mistake the pretty for the beautiful
and so fail of the true value of beauty; we are blind to the
significance which all nature and all life, in the lowest and
commonest as in the highest and rarest, hold within them. "If
beauty," says Hamerton, "were the only province of art, neither
painters nor etchers would find anything to occupy them in the foul
stream that washes the London wharfs." By beauty here is meant the
merely agreeable. Pleasing the river may not be, to the ordinary man;
but for the poet and the painter, those to whom it is given to see with
the inner eye, the "foul stream" and its wharfs may be lighted with
mysterious and tender beauty.
"Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning.
. . . . .
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!"
And Whistler, by the witchery of his brush and his needle, has
transmuted the confusion and sordidness and filth of this
Thames-side into exquisite emotion. The essence of beauty is harmony, but
that harmony is not to be reduced to rule and measure. In the very
chaos of the Locomotive Works we may feel beauty; in the thrill
which they communicate we receive access of power and we _are,_
more largely, more universally. The harmony which is beauty is that
unity or integrity of impression by force of which we are able to feel
significance and the relation of the object to our own experience. It
is an error to suppose that beauty must be racked on a procrustean
bed of formula. Such false conceptions result in sham art. To create
a work which shall be beautiful it is not necessary to "smooth, inlay,
and clip, and fit." Beauty is not imposed upon material from without,
according to a recipe; it is drawn out from within by the integrating
power of imagination. Art is not artificiality. Art is the expression of
vital emotion and essential significance. The beauty of architecture,
for example, consists not in applied ornament but in structural
fitness and adaptability, and grows out of the inherent needs of the
work. The cathedral-builders of old time did not set themselves to
create a "work of art." They wanted a church; and it was a church
they built. It is we who, perceiving the rightness of their
achievement, pronounce it to be beautiful. Beauty is not
manufactured, but grows; it cannot be laid on as ornament. Beauty is
born out of the contact of the spirit of man with natural forms, that
contact which gives to objects their significance.
The recognition of the true nature of beauty may change for us the
face of the world. Some things are universally regarded as beautiful
because their appeal is universal. There are passions, joys,
aspirations, common to all the race; and the forms which objectify
these emotions are beautiful universally. We can all enter into the
feelings that gather about a group of children dancing round a
Maypole in the Park; but in the murk and din and demoniacal
activity of the Locomotive Works the appeal is not so obvious. The
stupendous workshops become beautiful to me as my being merges
into harmony with them and dilates with the emotion of intenser and
fuller life. The Sistine Madonna is generally regarded as beautiful.
But what is the beauty in the unspeakable witch on the canvas of
Frans Hals? Harmony of color and of composition is employed by
Raphael in the rendering of a figure and in the expression of an
emotion both of which relate themselves to the veneration of
mankind. Maternity, Christian or pagan, divine or human, evokes its
universal tribute of feeling. On Raphael's canvas complete harmony
is made visible; and the beauty of the picture for us is measured by
its power to stir us. In the painting by Frans Hals the subject
represented is in itself not pleasing. The technical execution of the
picture is masterly. But our delight goes beyond any enjoyment of
the skill here exhibited, goes beyond even the satisfaction of the
senses in its color and composition. What the picture expresses is
not merely the visible aspect of this woman, but the painter's own
sympathy and appreciation. He saw a beauty in ugliness, a beauty to
which we were blind, for he felt the significance of her life, the
eternal rightness to herself of what she was. His joy in this inner
harmony has transfigured the object and made it beautiful. Beauty
penetrates deeper than grace and comeliness; it is not confined to the
pretty and agreeable. Indeed, beauty is not always immediately
pleasant, but is received often with pain. The emotion of pleasure,
which is regarded as the necessary concomitant of beauty, ensues as
we are able to merge ourselves in the experience and so come to feel
its ultimate harmony. What is commonly accepted as ugly, as
shocking or sordid, becomes beautiful for us so soon as we
apprehend its inner significance. Judged by the canons of formal
beauty, the sky-line of New York city, seen from the North River, is
ugly and distressing. But the responsive spirit, reaching ever
outward into new forms of feeling, can thrill at sight of those Titanic
structures out-topping the Palisades themselves, thrusting their
squareness adventurously into the smoke-grayed air, and telling the
triumph of man's mind over the forces of nature in this fulfillment of
the needs of irrepressible activity, this expression of tremendous
actuality and life. Not that the reaction is so definitely formulated in
the moment of experience; but this is something of what is felt. The
discovery of such a harmony is the entrance into fuller living. So it
is that the boundaries of beauty enlarge with the expansion of the
individual spirit.
To extend the boundaries of beauty by the revelation of new
harmonies is the function of art. With the ordinary man, the plane of
feeling, which is the basis of appreciation, is below the plane of his
attention as he moves through life from day to day. As a clock may
be ticking in the room quite unheeded, and then suddenly we hear it
because our attention is called to it; so only that emotion really
counts to us as experience which comes to our cognizance. When
once the ordinary man is made aware of the underlying plane of
feeling, the whole realm of appreciation is opened to him by his
recognition of the possibilities of beauty which life may hold.
Consciously to recognize that forces are operating which lie behind
the surface aspect of things is to open ourselves to the play of these
forces. With persons in whom intellect is dominant and the
controlling power, the primary need is to understand; and for such,
first to know is to be helped finally to feel. To comprehend that
there is a soul in every fact and that within material objects reside
meanings for the spirit, or beauty, is to be made more sensitive to
their influence. With the artist, however, the case is different. At the
moment of creation he is little conscious of the purport of the work
to which he sets his hand. He is not concerned, as we have been,
with the "why" of beauty; from the concrete directly to the concrete
is his progress. Life comes to him not as thought but as emotion. He
is moved by actual immediate contact with the world about him,--by
the sight of a landscape, by the mood of an hour or place, by the
power of some personality; it may be, too, a welter of recollected
sensations and impressions that plays upon his spirit. The resultant
emotion, not reasoned about but nevertheless directed to a definite
end, takes shape in external concrete forms which are works of art.
Just because he is so quick to feel the emotional value of life he is an
artist; and much of his power as an artist derives from the
concreteness of his emotion. The artist is the creative mind, creative
in this sense, that in the outward shows of things he feels their
inward and true relations, and by new combinations of material
elements he reëmbodies his feeling in forms whose message is
addressed to the spirit. The reason why Millet painted the "Sower"
was that he felt the beauty of this peasant figure interpreted as
significance and life. And it is this significance and life, in which we
are made to share, that his picture is designed to express.
Experience comes to us in fragments; the surface of the world
throws back to us but broken glimpses. In the perspective of a
lifetime the fragments flow together into order, and we dimly see the
purpose of our being here; in moments of illumination and deeper
insight a glimpse may disclose a sudden harmony, and the brief
segment of nature's circle becomes beautiful. For then is revealed
the shaping principle. Within the fact, behind the surface, are
apprehended the relations of which the fact and the surface are the
expression. The rhythm thus discovered wakens an accordant
rhythm in the spirit of man. The moment gives out its meaning as
man and nature merge together in the inclusive harmony. If the
human spirit were infinite in comprehension, we should receive all
things as beautiful, for we should apprehend their rightness and their
harmony. To our finite perception, however, design is not always
evident, for it is overlaid and confounded with other elements which
are not at the moment fused. Just here is the office of art. For art
presents a harmony liberated from all admixture of conflicting
details and purged of all accidents, thus rendering the single
meaning salient. To compel disorder into order and so reveal new
beauty is the achievement of the artist. The world is commonplace
or fraught with divinest meanings, according as we see it so. To art
we turn for revelation, knowing that ideals of beauty may be many
and that beauty may manifest itself in many forms.