ART starts from life and in the end comes back to it. Art is born out
of the stirring of the artist's spirit in response to his need of
expression, and it reaches its fulfillment in the spirit of the
appreciator as it answers his need of wider and deeper experience.
Midway on its course from spirit to spirit it traverses devious paths.
The emotion out of which art springs and of which it is the
expression is controlled and directed by the shaping force of mind,
and it embodies itself in material form. This material form, by virtue
of its qualities, has the power to delight our senses; the skill which
went into the fashioning of it, so far as we can recognize the
processes of execution, gives us pleasure; the harmony which the
work of art must manifest satisfies the mind and makes it possible
for us to link the emotion with our own experience.
These paths which a work of art traverses in its course from its
origin to its fulfillment I have tried to follow in their ramifications,
and I have tried to trace them to their issue in appreciation. Some
lovers of art may linger on the way and rest content with the
distance they have come, without pressing forward to the end. A
work of art is complex in its appeal; and it is possible to stop with
one or another of its elements. Thus we may receive the work
intellectually, recognizing its subject, and turning the artist's
emotion into our thought and translating it from his medium of color
and form or sound into our own medium of words. Here is a portrait
of Carlyle; and Carlyle we _know_ as an author and as a man. This
landscape is from the Palisades, where we have roamed in leisure
hours. Before us is a statue of Zeus, whom our classical reading has
made a reality to us. This symphony gathers about a day in the
country, suggesting an incident in our own experience of which we
have pleasant remembrances. Intellectually, also, we enjoy the
evidence of the artist's skill which the work exhibits. Or we may
pass beyond the simple exercise of the intellect, and with a
refinement of perception we may take a sensuous delight in the
qualities of the material in which the work is embodied. This portrait
is a subtle harmony of color and exquisite adjustment of line and
mass. The luminous night which enwraps the Palisades is a solemn
mighty chord. The white rhythm of this statue caresses the eye that
follows it. This symphony is an intricate and wonderful
wave-pattern upon a sea of billowing sound in which the listener immerses
himself voluptuously. The essential significance of a work of art is
not to be received apart from its form, but the form is more than
merely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, therefore, the color and the
composition of the portrait are but the point of meeting where we
touch in energizing contact a powerful personality. Our spirit goes
out into the night of these Palisades and dilates into immensity. This
statue is Olympian majesty made visible, and in its presence we feel
that we too are august. The symphony is a resolution of the struggle
of our own tangled lives, a purification, and the experience of joy.
Art is the expression of experience, whether the experience enacts
itself within the spirit of the artist or derives from his contact with
the external world. So by the same token, art is finally to be received
as experience. The ultimate meaning of a work of art to the
appreciator is what it wakens in him of emotion. It is the artist's
business, by the manipulation of his materials and his elements, by
the choice of motive and the rendering, by the note and pitch of his
color, the ordering of his line, the disposition of his masses, to
compel the direction of the emotion; he must not allow the
solemnity and awe with which his night invests the Palisades to be
mistaken by the beholder for terror or for mere obscurity. But the
quality and the intensity of the emotion depend upon the temper of
the appreciator's sensibilities and the depth and range of his
experience of life. Art is not fixed and invariable in its effect.
"Vanity Fair" is a great novel. One man may read it for the sake of
the story, and in his amusement and interest in following the
succession of incident, he may for a while forget himself. A possible
use to put one's reading to; yet for that man the book is not art.
Another may be entertained by the spectacle of the persons as they
exhibit themselves in Thackeray's pages, much as he might stop a
moment on the curbstone and watch a group of children at play in
the street. Here he is a looker-on, holding himself aloof; and for him,
again, the book is not art. Still a third may find in "Vanity Fair" a
record of the customs and manners of English people at the
beginning of the nineteenth century; and he adds this much to his
stock of information. Still for him the book is not art. Not one of the
three has touched in vital contact the essential meaning of "Vanity
Fair." But the man who sees in the incidents of the book a situation
possible in his own life, who identifies himself with the personages
and acts out with them their adventures, who feels that he actually
knows Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp, Jo Sedley, Dobbin, and
Amelia, and understands their character and personality better here
than in the actual world about him by force of Thackeray's greater
insight and power of portraiture, who sees in English manners here
represented the interpretation of his own surroundings, so that as a
result of it all, his own experience becomes richer for his having
lived out the life of the fictitious persons, his own acquaintances
have revealed themselves more fully, his own life becomes more
intelligible,--for him at last the book is a work of art. So any work
may be a mirror which simply reflects the world as we know it; it
may be a point of departure, from which tangentially we construct
an experience of our own: it is truly art only in the degree that it is
revelation.
A work of art, therefore, is to be received by the individual
appreciator as an added emotional experience. It appeals to him at
all because in some way it relates itself to his own life; and its value
to him is determined by the measure in which it carries him out into
wider ranges of feeling. There are works whose absolute greatness
he recognizes but yet which do not happen at the moment to find
him. Constable comes to him as immensely satisfying; Turner,
though an object of great intellectual interest, leaves him cold. He
knows Velasquez to be supreme among painters, but he turns away
to stand before Frans Hals, whose quick, sure strokes call such very
human beings into actuality and rouse his spirit to the fullest
response. Why is it that of two works of equal depth of insight into
life, of equal scope of feeling, of the same excellence of technical
accomplishment, one has an appeal and a message for him and not
the other? What is the bridge of transition between the work and the
spirit of the appreciator by which the subtle connection is
established?
It comes back to a matter of harmony. Experience presents itself to
us in fragments; and in so far as the parts are scattering and
unrelated, it is not easy for us to guess the purpose of our being here.
But so soon as details, which by virtue of some selecting principle
are related to one another, gather themselves into a whole, chaos is
resolved into order, and this whole becomes significant, intelligible,
and beautiful. Instinctively we are seeking, each in his own way, to
bring the fragments of experience into order; and that order stands to
each of us for what we are, for our individual personality, the self.
We define thus our selecting principle, by which we receive some
incidents of experience as related to our development and we reject
others as not related to it. Thus the individual life achieves its
integrity, its unity and significance. This, too, is the process of art. A
landscape in nature is capable of a various, interpretation. By
bringing its details into order and unity, the artist creates its beauty.
His perception of the harmony which his imagination compels out of
the landscape is attended with emotion, and the emotion flows
outward to expression in a form which is itself harmonious. This
form is a work of art. Art, therefore, is the harmonizing of
experience. Appreciation is an act of fusion and identification. In
spirit we _become_ the thing presented by the work of art and we
merge with it in a larger unity. The individual harmony which a
work of art manifests becomes significant to us as we can make it an
harmonious part of our own experience and as it carries us in the
direction of our development.
But how to determine, each man for himself, what is the direction of
our development? A life becomes significant to itself so soon as it is
conscious of its purpose, and it becomes harmonious as it makes all
the details of experience subserve that purpose. The purpose of the
individual life, so far as we can guess it, seems to be that the life
shall be as complete as possible, that it shall fulfill itself and provide
through its offspring for its continuance. It is true that no life is
isolated; as every atom throughout the universe is bound to every
other atom by subtlest filaments of influence, so each human life
stands related to all other lives. But the man best pays his debt of
service to others who makes the most of that which is given him to
work with; and that is his own personality. We must begin at the
centre and work outwards. My concern is with my own justice. If I
worry because my friend or another is not just, I not only do not
make him more just, but I also fail of the highest justice I can
achieve, which is my own. We must be true to ourselves. We help
one another not by precept but by _being;_ and what we are
communicates itself. As physical life propagates and thus continues
itself, so personality is transmitted in unconscious innumerable ways.
The step and carriage of the body, the glance of the eye, the work of
our hands, our silences no less than our speech, all express what we
are. As everything follows upon what we are, so our responsibility is
to _be,_ to be ourselves completely, perfectly.
A tender shoot pushes its way out of the soil into light and air, and
with the years it grows into a tree. The tree bears fruit, which
contains the seed of new manifestations of itself. The fruit falls to
the ground and rots, providing thus the aliment for the seed out of
which other trees are to spring. From seed to seed the life of the tree
is a cycle, without beginning and without end. At no one point in the
cycle can we say, Here is the purpose of the tree. Incidentally the
tree may minister to the needs and comfort and pleasure of man. The
tree delights him to look upon it; its branches shade him from the
noonday sun; its trunk and limbs can be hewn down and turned to
heat and shelter; its fruit is good to eat. The primary purpose of the
fruit, however, is not to furnish food to man, but to provide the
envelope for the transmission of its seed and the continuance of its
own life. Seen in its cosmic bearing and scope, the purpose of the
tree is to be a tree, as fit, as strong, as beautiful, as complete, as
tree-like, as it can be. The leaf precedes the flower and may be thought
on that account to be inferior to it in the scale of development. If a
leaf pines and withers in regret that it is not a flower, it not only
does not become a flower, but it fails of being a good leaf.
Everything in its place and after its own kind. In so far as it is
perfectly itself, a leaf, a blossom, a tree, a man, does it contribute to
the well-being of others. Man has subdued all things under his feet
and turned them to his own uses. By force of mind he is the
strongest creature, but it is not to be inferred that he is therefore the
aim and end of all creation. Like everything else, he has his place;
like everything else he has the right to live his own life, triumphing
over the weaker and in his turn going down before a mightier when
the mightier shall come; like everything else he is but a part in the
universal whole. Only a part; but as we recognize our relation to
other parts and through them our connection with the whole, our
sense of the value of the individual life becomes infinitely extended.
We must get into the rhythm, keeping step with the beat of the
universal life and finding there our place, our destiny, the meaning
of our being here, and joy. The goods which men set before
themselves as an end are but by-products after all. If we pursue
happiness we overtake it not. If we do what our hands find to do,
devotedly and with our might, then, some day, if we happen to stop
and make question of it, we discover that happiness is already there,
in us, with us, and around us. The aim of a man's life in the world, as
it would seem, is to be perfectly a man, and his end is to fulfill
himself; as part of this fulfillment of himself, he provides for the
continuance of his life in other lives, and transmitting his character
and influence, he enriches other lives because of what he is. The
purpose of seeing is that we may see more, and the eye is ever
striving to increase its power; the health of the eye is growth. The
purpose of life is more life, individual in the measure that it lies
within a man's power to develop it, but cosmic in its sources and its
influence.
As the harmony which a work of art presents finds a place in that
harmony of experience and outward-reaching desire which
constitutes our personality, art becomes for us an entrance into more
life. In the large, art is a means of development. But as any work
embraces diverse elements and is capable of a various appeal, it may
be asked in what sense the appreciation of art is related to education
and culture. Before we can answer the question intelligently, we
must know what we mean by our terms. By many people education
is regarded as they regard any material possession, to be classed
with fashionable clothes, a fine house, a carriage and pair, or
touring-car, or steam yacht, as the credential and card of entrée to
what is called good society. Culture is a kind of ornamental furniture,
maintained to impress visitors. Of course we ourselves do not think
so, but we know people who do. Nor do we believe--as some
believe--that education is simply a means of gaining a more
considerable livelihood. It is pathetic to see young men in college
struggling in desperate, uncomplaining sacrifice to obtain an
education, and all the while mistaking the end of their effort. Not all
the deeds of daring in a university course are enacted on the athletic
field; the men I am thinking of do not have their pictures published
in the newspapers,--the unrecorded heroisms of college life are very
moving to those who know. But the tragedy I have in mind is this--for
tragedy consists not in sacrifice itself but in needless and futile
sacrifice--that some of these young men suppose _there_ is a magic
virtue in education for its own sake, that it is the open-sesame to all
the wealth and beauty of life. With insufficient ability to start with,
they are preparing to be unfit professional men, when they might be
excellent artisans. The knowledge of books is in no sense the whole
story nor the only means of education. In devotion to some craft or
in the intelligent conduct of some business they might find the true
education, which is the conscious discipline of one's powers. The
man who can do things, whether with his hands or with his brain,
provided intelligence govern the exercise of hand and brain, and
who finds happiness in his work because it is the expression of
himself, is an educated man. The end of education is the building of
personality, the making of human power, and its fruit is wisdom.
Wisdom, however, does not consist in the most extensive knowledge
of facts. Oftentimes information overweights a man and snuffs out
what personal force there might otherwise have been. On the futility
of mere learning there is abundant testimony. Walt Whitman, as we
might expect from his passion for the vital and the human, has said:
"You must not know too much and be too precise and scientific
about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft. A certain free
margin, perhaps ignorance, credulity, helps your enjoyment of these
things and of the sentiment of feather'd, wooded, river or marine
nature generally. I repeat it--don't want to know too exactly or the
reasons why." Even Ruskin, whose learning was extensive and
various, bears witness to the same effect. He notes "the diminution
which my knowledge of the Alps had made in my impression of
them, and the way in which investigation of strata and structure
reduces all mountain sublimity to mere debris and wall-building." In
the same spirit he planned an essay on the Uses of Ignorance. From
the midst of his labors in Venice he wrote: "I am sure that people
who work out subjects thoroughly are disagreeable wretches. One
only feels as one should when one doesn't know much about the
matter." In other words, we are not to let our knowledge come
between us and our power to feel. In thus seeming to assail
education I am not seeking to subvert or destroy; I want simply to
adjust the emphasis. The really wise man is he who knows how to
make life yield him its utmost of true satisfaction and furnish him
the largest scope for the use of his powers and the expression of
himself. In this sense a newsboy in the streets may be wiser than a
university professor, in that one may be the master of his life and the
other may be the servant of his information. Education should have
for its end the training of capacities and powers, the discipline and
control of the intelligence, the quickening of the sympathies, the
development of the ability to live. No man is superior to his fellows
because of the fact of his education. His education profits him only
in so far as it makes him more of a man, more responsive because
his own emotions have been more deeply stirred, more tolerant
because his wider range has revealed more that is good, more
generous to give of his own life and service because he has more
generously received. It is not what we know nor what we have that
marks our worth, but what we are. No man, however fortunate and
well-circumstanced he may be, can afford to thank God that he is
not as other men are. In so far as his education tends to withdraw
him from life and from contact with his fellows of whatever station,
in so far as it fosters in him the consciousness of class, so far it is an
evil. Education should lead us not to judge lives different from our
own, but to try to understand and, to appreciate. The educated man,
above all others, should thank God that there are diversity of gifts
and so many kinds of good.
Art is a means of culture, but art rightly understood and received.
Art does not aim to teach. It may teach incidentally, tangentially to
its circle, but instruction, either intellectual or ethical, is not its
purpose. It fulfills itself in the spirit of the appreciator as it enables
him in its presence to become something that otherwise he had not
been. It is not enough to be told things; we must make trial of them
and live them out in our own experience before they become true for
us. As appreciation is not knowledge but feeling, so we must live
our art. It is well to have near us some work that we want to be
_like._ We get its fullest message only as we identify ourselves with
it. If we are willing to be thought ignorant and to live our lives as
seems good to us, I believe it is better to go the whole way with a
few things that can minister to us abundantly and so come to the end
of them, than to touch in superficial contact a great many lesser
works. The lesser works have their place; and so far as they can
carry us beyond the point where we are, they can serve us. In a
hurried touch-and-go, however, there is danger of scattering;
whereas true appreciation takes time, for it is less an act than a
whole attitude of mind. This is an age of handbooks and short cuts.
But there is no substitute for life. If for one reason or another the
opportunity to realize art in terms of life is not accorded us, it is
better to accept the situation quite frankly and happily, and not try to
cheat ourselves with the semblance. But if it is indeed the reality,
then we maybe content with the minutes of experience, though we
are denied the hours or the years. "The messages of great poems,"
says Whitman, "to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal
terms; only then can you understand us." The power of response
must be in us, and that power is the fruit of experience. The only
mystery of art is the mystery of all life itself. In nature the artist
finds the manifestation of a larger self toward which he aspires, and
this is what his work expresses. Alone with his spirit, he cries to us
for that intimate mystic companionship which is appreciation, and
our response gives back the echo of his cry. He reaches out across
the distance to touch other and kindred spirits and draw them to
himself. Says the poet,--
"Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants."
We appreciate the artist's work as in it we live again and doubly.
Thus art links itself with life. The message of art to the individual
defines itself according to his individual needs. Life rises with each
man, to him a new opportunity and a new destiny. We create our
own world; and life means to us what we are in ourselves. In art we
are seeking to find ourselves expressed more fully. The works that
we care for, if we consider it a moment, are the works we
understand; and we understand them because they phrase for us our
own experience. Life and the truth of life are relative. Truth is not in
the object but in our relation to it. What is true for me may or may
not be true for another. This much is true for me, namely, whatever
tallies with my experience and reveals to me more of the underlying
purpose of the universe. We are all, each in his own way, seeking
the meaning of life; and that meaning is special and personal to the
individual, each man deciding for himself. By selection here, by
rejection there, we are trying to work toward harmony. The details
of life become increasingly complex with the years, but living grows
simpler because we gradually fix a selecting and unifying principle.
When we have truly found ourselves, we come to feel that the
external incidents do not signify; which chance happens, whether
this or that, is indifferent. It is the spirit in which the life is lived
that determines its quality and value. The perception of purpose in the
parts brings them into order and gives them meaning. A man's life is
an expanding circle, the circumference of which is drawn around an
order or interplay and adjustment of part with part. Whatever lies
without the circle does not pertain to the individual--as yet. So soon
as any experience reveals its meaning to us and we feel that it takes
its place in our life, then it belongs to us. Whatever serves to bring
details, before scattering and unrelated, into order, is for that
moment true. Art has a message for us as it tallies with what we
already know about life; and, quickening our perceptions, disclosing
depths of feeling, it carries us into new ranges of experience.
In this attitude toward life lies the justice of the personal estimate.
The individual is finally his own authority. To find truth we return
upon our own consciousness, and we seek thus to define our
"original relation" to the universal order. So as one stands before the
works of the Italian painters and sculptors, for example, in the
endeavor rightly to appreciate what they have achieved, one may ask:
How much of life has this artist to express to me, of life as I know it
or can know it? Has the painter through these forms, however crude
or however accomplished, uttered what he genuinely and for himself
thought and felt? The measure of these pictures for me is the degree
of reality, of vital feeling, which they transmit. Whether it be spring
or divine maternity or the beauty of a pagan idea, which Botticelli
renders, the same power is there, the same sense of gracious life.
Whether it be Credi's naïve womanhood, or Titian's abounding,
glorious women and calm and forceful men, or Delia Robbia's
joyous children and Donatello's sprites, the same great meaning is
expressed, the same appreciation of the goodness and beauty of all
life. This beauty is for me, here, to-day. In the experience of a man
who thinks and feels, there is a time when his imagination turns
toward the past. At the moment, as the world closes in about him,
his spirit, dulled by the attrition of daily use and wont, is unable to
discern the beauty and significance of the present life around him.
For a time his imagination finds abundant nourishment in the mighty
past. Many spirits are content there to remain. But life is of the
present. To live greatly is to live now, inspired by the past, corrected
and encouraged by it, impelled by "forward-looking thoughts'" and
providing for the future, but living in to-day. Life is neither
remembrance nor anticipation, neither regret nor deferment, but
present realization. Often one feels in a gallery that the people are
more significant than the pictures. Two lovers furtively holding
hands and stopping before a canvas to press closer together,
shoulder to shoulder; a young girl erect and firm, conscious of her
young womanhood and rejoicing in it, radiating youth and life; an
old man, whose years are behind him yet whose interest reveals his
eager welcome of new experience, unconsciously rebuking the jaded
and indifferent: here is reality. Before it the pictures seem to recede
and become dimmed. Our appreciation of these things makes the
significance of it all. Only in so far as art can communicate this
sensation, this same impression of the beauty and present reality of
life, has it a meaning for us. The painter must have registered his
appreciation of immediate reality and must impart that to us until it
becomes, heightened and intensified, our own. The secret of
successful living lies in compelling the details of our surroundings
to our own ends. Michelangelo lived his life; Leonardo lived his;
neither could be the other. A man must paint the life that he knows,
the experience into which he enters. So we must live our lives
immediately and newly. We have penetrated the ultimate mystery of
art when we realize the inseparable oneness of art with life.
Art is a call to fuller living. Its real service is to increase our
capacity for experience. The pictures, the music, the books, which
profit us are those which, when we have done with them, make us
feel that we have lived by just so much. Often we purchase
experience with enthusiasm; we become wise at the expense of our
power to enjoy. What we need in relation to art is not more
knowledge but greater capability of feeling, not the acquisition of
more facts but the increased power to interpret facts and to apply
them to life. In appreciation it is not what we know about a work of
art, it is not even what we actually see before us, that constitutes its
significance, but what in its presence we are able to feel. The
paradox that nature imitates art has in it this much of truth, that art is
the revelation of the possibilities of life, and we try to make these
possibilities actual in our own experience. Art is not an escape from
life and a refuge; it is a challenge and reënforcement. Its action is
not to make us less conscious but more; in it we are not to lose
ourselves but to find ourselves more truly and more fully. Its effect
is to help us to a larger and juster appreciation of the beauty and
worth of nature and of life.
Art is within the range of every man who holds himself open to its
appeal. But art is not the final thing. It is a means to an end; its end
is personality. There are exalted moments in the experience of us all
which we feel to be finer than any art. Then we do not need to turn
to painting, music, literature, for our satisfaction. We are living. Art
is aid and inspiration, but its fulfillment and end is life.
"We live," says Wordsworth, "by admiration, hope, and love."
Admiration is wonder and worship, a sense of the mystery and the
beauty of life as we know it now, and thankfulness for it, and joy.
Hope is the vision of things to be. And love is the supreme enfolding
unity that makes all one. Art is life at its best, but life is the greatest
of the arts,--life harmonious, deep in feeling, big in sympathy, the
life that is appreciation, responsiveness, and love.