ART AND PERSONALITY
We have promised to prove our thesis psychologically, by watching the
art process at work, and historically, by studying the art works of the
ages. We begin with the former task.
Let us investigate the art process in its elemental forms, as we have
seen them in the story of Ogi. Art begins as the effort of man to
represent reality; first, for the purpose of bringing it back to his own
mind, and second, for the purpose of making it apprehensible to others.
Just as Ogi would seek for ways to keep the meat of the aurochs for as
long as possible so that he might eat it, so he would keep the memory of
the aurochs so that he might contemplate it. And just as he would share
the meat of the aurochs in a feast with his fellows, and derive honor
and advantage therefrom, so he would use a picture of the aurochs, or a
story of the hunt, or a song about it, or a dance reproducing it.
Thus we note two motives, the second of them predominantly social. It is
this impulse to communicate ideas and emotions to others, that becomes
the dominant motive in art, and is the determining factor in the
greatness of art. We share Ogi’s memory of the hunt, his thrills of
fear, his furious struggle, his triumph over a chunk of brutal and
non-rational force. Try it on your own little Ogis, and you will find
they never tire of hearing about the aurochs hunt; and--here is the
essential point--while hearing, they are living in the minds of others,
they are becoming social beings. So through the ages the race has
developed its great civilizing force, the sympathetic imagination, which
has brought the tribes together into nations, and ultimately may bring
the nations into the human race.
The pleasures which we derive from a picture or representation of
reality are many and complicated. There is, first of all, the pleasure
of recognition. In its cruder form it is like guessing a puzzle; in more
mature reproductions we have the pleasure of following the details.
“That is old Smith,” we say--“even to the wart on his nose!” We say:
“You can see the shine of the fish’s scales, you can wipe the fuzz off
the peach, you can bury your hands in the birds’ feathers!” But is that
all there is to art? Manifestly not, for if it were, the sons and
grandsons of Ogi would have been put out of business by the photographic
camera. You can take a microscope to the product of a camera, and
discover endless more details--a bigger magic than any son or grandson
of Ogi has achieved.
But even supposing that a micro-photograph were the highest art, still
you could not get away from the influence of personality. There would
always remain the problem: Upon what shall the camera-lens be focussed?
The first artist I met in my life was a painter, the late J. G. Brown.
He used to paint pictures of newsboys and country urchins, and the
quaint-looking old fellows who loaf in cross-roads stores. As a boy I
watched him at work, and roamed about the country with him when he
selected his subjects. At this distance I remember only two things about
him, his benevolent gray beard, and the intense repugnance he expressed
when I pointed out an old war veteran who had lost an arm. Deformity and
mutilation--oh, horrible! Never could an artist tolerate such a subject
as that!
But growing older, I observed that some of the world’s greatest artists
had made a habit of painting mutilations and deformities. I saw “Old
Masters” portraying crucifixions and martyrdoms; I saw the nightmares of
Doré, and the war paintings of Verestchagin. So I understand the
difference between a man who wishes to probe the deeps of the human
spirit, and one who wishes merely to be popular with children and
childish-minded adults. The late J. G. Brown was a “realist,” according
to the popular use of the term; that is, having selected a subject, he
painted him exactly as he was; but by deliberately excluding from his
artistic vision everything suggesting pain and failure, he left you as
the sum total of his work an utterly false and sentimental view of life.
Most artists go even further in imposing their personality upon their
work. Having selected a subject, they do not reproduce it exactly, but
modify it, emphasizing this trait or that. This process is known as
“idealizing.” The word is generally understood to mean making the thing
more pretty, more to the beholder’s taste; but this is a misuse of the
word. To idealize a subject means to modify it according to an idea, to
make it expressive of that idea, whether pleasing or otherwise. Henry
James tells a story about a portrait painter, who takes as his subject a
prominent man; divining the fundamental cheapness and falsity of the
man’s character, he paints a portrait which brings out these qualities,
and so for the first time reveals the man to the world, and causes the
man’s wife to leave him. That is one kind of “idealizing”; but
manifestly the portrait painter who practiced that method would have a
hard time to find sitters.
What generally happens in such cases we saw when Ogi was invited to
portray the Witch Doctor and the Old Man of his tribe. The last great
hero of the Hohenzollerns, who paid for those white marble monsters at
which I tittered in the Sieges Allée, is cursed with a withered left
arm, a cause of agonies of humiliation to his strutting soul. In his
photographs you will see him carefully posed, so that his left arm is
partly turned away. But how about the countless paintings he had made of
himself? Do you imagine that the painter ever failed to supply a sound
and sturdy left arm? In the same way, in the pictorial labors of all the
Ogis of Egypt, you will find the ruler always represented as of abnormal
stature. Manifestly, in a settled empire the ruler will be of smaller
stature than his fighting men, because he will be coddled in childhood;
but the smaller he becomes in reality, the more rigid the art convention
that he is big.
It was for offenses such as this that Plato drove the artists out of his
Republic. They were liars and pretenders, the whole tribe, and destroyed
men’s respect for truth. But as a matter of fact, this kind of
idealizing of rulers and fighting men may be entirely sincere. The
artist is more sensitive than his fellowmen--that is what makes him an
artist; he shrinks from pain and violence, and feels a real awe for
authority. He thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in
making him bigger in body, the artist is acting as a seer and
philosopher, bringing out an inner truth. Such is the clue to the
greater part of our present-day art standards; snobbery and
subservience, timidity and worship of tradition, also bragging and
strutting and beating of tom-toms. Every little tea-party poet and
semi-invalid cherishes a strong and cruel dream--Nietzsche with his
Blond Beast, and Carlyle with his Hero-worship, and Henley with his
Song of the Sword, and Kipling with his God of our Fathers, known of
old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line.