Produced by Ruth Hart
[Note: for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents to
the beginning of the text.]
THE ENJOYMENT OF ART
BY
CARLETON NOYES
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CARLETON NOYES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published, March, 1903_
To
ROBERT HENRI
AND
VAN D. PERRINE
This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at
the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit _When we become the enfolders of
those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every
thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?_
And my spirit said _No, we but level that lift to pass and
continue beyond._
WALT WHITMAN
CONTENTS
Preface
I. The Picture and the Man i
II. The Work of Art as Symbol 19
III. The Work of Art as Beautiful 41
IV. Art and Appreciation 67
V. The Artist 86
PREFACE
The following pages are the answer to questions which a young man
asked himself when, fresh from the university, he found himself
adrift in the great galleries of Europe. As he stood helpless and
confused in the presence of the visible expressions of the spirit of
man in so many ages and so many lands, one question recurred
insistently: _Why_ are these pictures? What is the meaning of all
this striving after expression? What was the aim of these men who
have left their record here? What was their moving impulse? Why,
why does the human spirit seek to manifest itself in forms which we
call beautiful?
He turned to histories of art and to biographies of artists, but he
found no answer! to the "Why?" The philosophers with their
theories of aesthetics helped him little to understand the dignity and
force of this portrait or the beauty of that landscape. In the
conversation of his artist friends there was no enlightenment, for
they talked about "values" and "planes of modeling" and the
mysteries of "tone." At last he turned in upon himself: What does
this canvas mean to me? And here he found his answer. This work
of art is the revelation to me of a fuller beauty, a deeper harmony,
than I have ever seen or felt. The artist is he who has experienced
this new wonder in nature and who wants to communicate his joy, in
concrete forms, to his fellow men.
The purpose of this book is to set forth in simple, untechnical
fashion the nature and the meaning of a work of art. Although the
illustrations of the underlying principles are drawn mainly from
pictures, yet the conclusions apply equally to books and to music. It
is true that the manifestations of the art-impulse are innumerable,
embracing not only painting, sculpture, literature, music, and
architecture, but also the handiwork of the craftsman in the
designing of a rug or in the fashioning of a cup or a candlestick; it is
true that each art has its special province and function, and that each
is peculiarly adapted to the expression of a certain order of emotion
or idea, and that the distinctions between one art and another are not
to be inconsiderately swept aside or obscured. Yet art is one. It is
possible, without confusing the individual characteristics essential to
each, to discuss these principles under the comprehensive rubric of
Art.
The attempt is made here to reduce the supposed mysteries of art
discussion to the basis of practical, every-day intelligence and
common sense. What the ordinary man who feels himself in any
way attracted; towards art needs is not more and constantly more
pictures to look at, not added lore about them, not further knowledge
of the men and the times that have produced them; but rather what
he needs is some understanding of what the artist has aimed to
express, and, as reinforcing that understanding, the capacity rightly
to appreciate and enjoy.
It is hoped that in this book the artist may find expressed with
simplicity and justice his own highest aims; and that the appreciator
and the layman may gain some insight into the meaning of art
expression, and that they may be helped a little on their way to the
enjoyment of art.
HARVARD COLLEGE, _December tenth, 1902._
I
THE PICTURE AND THE MAN
At any exhibition of paintings, more particularly at some public
gallery or museum, one can hardly fail to reflect that an interest in
pictures is unmistakably widespread. People are there in
considerable numbers, and what is more striking, they seem to
represent every station and walk in life. It is evident that pictures, as
exhibited to the public, are not the cult of an initiated few; their
appeal is manifestly to no one class; and this popular interest is as
genuine as it is extended.
Thus reflectively scanning the crowd, the observer asks himself:
What has attracted these numbers to that which might be supposed
not to be understood of the many? And what are the pictures that in
general draw the popular attention?
A few persons have of course drifted into the exhibition out of
curiosity or from lack of something better to do. So much is evident
at once, for these file past the walls listlessly, seldom stopping, and
then but to glance at those pictures which are most obviously like
the familiar object they pretend to represent,--such as the bowl of
flowers which the beholder can almost smell, the theatre-checks and
five-dollar note pasted on a wall which tempt him to finger them, or
the panel of game birds which puzzles him to determine whether the
birds are real or not. These visitors, however, are not the most
numerous. With the great majority it is not enough that the picture
be a clever piece of imitation or illusion: transferring their interest
from the mere execution, they demand further that the subjects
represented shall be pleasing. The crowd pause before a sunny
landscape, with cows standing by the shaded pool; they gather about
the brilliant portrait of a woman splendidly arrayed,--a favorite
actress or a social celebrity; they linger before a group of children
wading in a brook, or a dog crouching mournfully by an empty
cradle. At length, with an approving and sympathetic word of
comment, they pass on to the next pleasing picture. Some canvases,
not the most popular ones, are yet not without their interest for a few;
these visitors are taking things a little more seriously; they do not try
to see every picture, they do not hurry; they seem to be considering
the canvas immediately before them with concentrated attention.
No one of all these people is insensible to the appeal of the
picturesque: their presence at the exhibition is evidence of that. In
life they like to see a bowl of flowers, a sunny landscape, a beautiful
woman in beautiful surroundings; and naturally they are interested
in that which represents and recalls the reality. At once it is plain,
however, that to different individuals the various pictures appeal in
different measure and for differing reasons. To one the very fact of
representation is a mystery and fascination. To another the important
thing is the subject; the picture must represent what he likes in
nature or in life. To a third the subject itself is of less concern than
what the painter wanted to say about it: the artist saw a beauty
manifested by an ugly beggar, perhaps, and he wanted to show that
beauty to his fellows, who could not perceive it for themselves.
The special interest in pictures of each of these three men is not
without its warrant in experience. What man is wholly indifferent to
the display of human skill? Who is there without his store of
pleasurable associations, who is not stirred by any call which rouses
them into play? What lover of beauty is not ever awake to the
revelation of new beauty? Indeed, upon these three principles
together, though in varying proportion, depends the full significance
of a great work of art.
As the lover of pictures looks back over the period of his conscious
interest in exhibitions and galleries, it is not improbable that his
earliest memories attach themselves to those paintings which most
closely resembled the object represented. He remembers the great
wonder which he felt that a man with mere paint and canvas could
so reproduce the reality of nature. So it is that those paintings which
are perhaps the first to attract the man who feels an interest in
pictures awakening are such as display most obviously the painter's
skill. Whatever the subject imitated, the fascination remains; that
such illusion is possible at all is the mystery and the delight.
But as his interest in pictures grows with indulgence, as his
experience widens, the beholder becomes gradually aware that he is
making a larger demand. After the first shock of pleasurable surprise
is worn away, he finds that the repeated exhibition of the painter's
dexterity ceases to satisfy him; these clever pieces of deception
manifest a wearying sameness, after all; and the beholder begins
now to look for something more than mere expertness. Thinking on
his experience, he concludes that the subjects which can be imitated
deceptively are limited in range and interest; he has a vague,
disquieting sense that somehow these pictures do not mean anything.
Yet he is puzzled. Art aims to represent, he tells himself, and it
should follow that the best art is that which represents most closely
and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek
painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down
to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his
very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most
plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to
bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill;
and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ
essentially from the adroitness of the juggler who keeps a billiard
ball, a chair, and a silk handkerchief rotating from hand to hand.
Conscious, then, of a new demand, of an added interest to be
satisfied, the amateur of pictures turns from the imitative canvas to
those paintings which appeal more widely to his familiar experience.
Justly, he does not here forgo altogether his delight in the painter's
cunning of hand, only he requires further that the subjects
represented shall be pleasing. It must be a subject whose meaning he
can recognize at once: a handsome or a strong portrait, a familiar
landscape, some little incident which tells its own story. The
spectator is now attracted by those pictures which rouse a train of
agreeable associations. He stops before a canvas representing a bit
of rocky coast, with the ocean tumbling in exhilaratingly. He
recognizes the subject and finds it pleasing; then he wonders where
the picture was painted. Turning to his catalogue, he reads: "37. On
the Coast of Maine." "Oh, yes," he says to himself, "I was on the
coast of Maine last summer, and I remember what a glorious time I
had sitting on the rocks of an afternoon, with some book or other
which the ocean was too fine to let me read. I like that picture." If
the title had read "Massachusetts Coast," it is to be feared he would
not have liked the canvas quite so well. The next picture which he
notices shows, perhaps, a stately woman sumptuously attired. It is
with a slight shock of disappointment that the visitor finds recorded
in his catalogue: "41. Portrait of a Lady." He could see that much for
himself. He hoped it was going to be the painter's mother or
somebody's wife,--a person he ought to know about. But the pictures
which appeal to him most surely are those which tell some little
story,--"The Lovers," "The Boy leaving Home," "The Wreck." Here
the subject, touching some one of the big human emotions, to which
no man is wholly insensible, calls out the response of immediate
interest and sympathy. It is something which he can understand.
At length there comes a day when the visitor stops before a
landscape which seems to him more beautiful than anything he has
ever seen in nature; or some portrait discloses a strength of character
or radiates a charm of personality which he has seldom met with in
life. Whence comes this beauty, this strength, this graciousness? Can
it be that the painter has seen a new wonder in nature, a new
significance in human life? The spectator's previous experience of
pictures has familiarized him in some measure with the means of
expression which the painter employs. More sensitive now to the
appeal of color and form, he sees that what the artist cares to present
on his canvas is just his peculiar sense of the beauty in the world, a
beauty that is best symbolized and made manifest through the
medium of color and form. Before he understood this eloquent
language which the painter speaks, he misinterpreted those pictures
whose significance he mistook to be literary and not pictorial. He
early liked the narrative picture because here was a subject he could
understand; he could rephrase it in his own terms, he could retell the
story to himself in words. Now words are the means of expression of
every-day life. Because of this fact, the art which employs words as
its medium is the art which comes nearest to being universally
understood, namely, literature. The other arts use each a medium
which it requires a special training to understand. Without some
sense of the expressiveness of color, line, form, and sounds,--a sense
which can be cultivated,--one is necessarily unable to grasp the full
and true meaning of picture, statue, or musical composition. One
must realize further that the artist thinks and feels in his peculiar
medium; his special meaning is conceived and expressed in color or
form or sound. The task of the appreciator, correspondingly, is to
receive the artist's message in the same terms in which it was
conceived. The tendency is inevitable, however, to translate the
meaning of the work into words, the terms in which men commonly
phrase their experience. A parallel tendency is manifest in one's
efforts to learn a foreign language. The English student of French at
first thinks in English and laboriously translates phrase for phrase
into French; and in hearing or reading the foreign language, he
translates the original, word for word, into his native tongue before
he can understand its sense: he has mastered the language only when
he has reached that point where English is no longer present to his
consciousness: he thinks in French and understands in French.
Similarly, to translate the message of any art into terms that are
foreign to it, to phrase the meaning of music or painting, for
example, in words, is to fail of its essential, true significance. The
import of music is musical; the meaning of pictures is not literary
but pictorial. In the understanding of this truth, then, the spectator
penetrates to the artist's real intention; and he becomes aware that
when he used the picture as the peg whereon to hang his own
reflections and ideas, he missed the meaning of the artist's work. "As
I look at this canvas," he tells himself, "it is not what I know of the
coast of Maine that is of concern, but what the painter has seen and
felt of its beauty and wants to reveal to me." Able at last to interpret
the painter's medium, the appreciator comes to seek in pictures not
primarily an exhibition of the craftsman's skill, not even a recall of
his own pleasurable experiences, but rather, beyond all this, a fuller
visible revelation of beauty.
The essential significance of art, that art is revelation, is illustrated
not only by painting but by the other arts as well. In music, to take
but a single example, are present the same elements that constitute
the appeal of pictures,--skill in the rendering, a certain
correspondence with experience, and the power of imaginative
interpretation of the facts of life. The music-hall performer who
wins the loudest and heartiest applause is he who does the greatest
number of pyrotechnic, wonderful things on the piano, or holds a
high note on the cornet for the longest time. His success, as with the
painter whose aim is to create illusion, rests upon men's instinctive
admiration for the exhibition of skill. Again, as the imitative picture
involves not only the display of dexterity, but also likeness to the
thing represented and the consequent possibility of recognizing it
immediately, so in the domain of music there is an order of
composition which seems to aim at imitation,--the so-called
"descriptive" music. A popular audience is delighted with the "Cats'
Serenade," executed on the violins with overwhelming likeness to
the reality, or with, the "Day in the Country," in which the sun rises
in the high notes, cocks crow, horses rattle down the road,
merrymakers frolic on the green, clouds come up in the horns,
lightning plays in the violins, thunder crashes in the drums and
cymbals, the merrymakers scatter in the whole orchestra, the storm
passes diminuendo, and in the muted violins the full moon rises
serenely into a twilight sky. Here the intention is easily understood;
the layman cannot fail to recognize what the composer wanted to
say. And as in the case of pictures which interest the beholder
because he can translate their subject into the terms which are his
own medium of expression, that is, words, so with descriptive music,
broadly speaking, the interest and significance is literary and not
musical. Still another parallel is presented. Just as those pictures are
popular whose subjects lie within the range of familiar experience,
such as cows by the shaded pool, or children playing, or whose
subjects touch the feelings; so, that music is popular which is
phrased in obvious and familiar rhythms such as the march and the
waltz, or which appeals readily and unmistakably to sentiment and
emotion. It is after the lover of music has traversed these passages of
musical expression and has proved their imitations that he comes to
seek in music new ranges of experience, unguessed-at possibilities
of feeling, which the composer has himself sounded and which he
would communicate to others. He is truly the artist only as he leads
his auditors into regions of beautiful living which they alone and of
themselves had not penetrated. For it is then that his work reveals.
Only such pictures, too, will have a vital meaning as reveal. The
imitative and the iterative alike, that which adds nothing to the
object and that which adds nothing to the experience of the beholder,
though once pleasing, now fail to satisfy. The appreciator calls for
something fuller. He wants to pass beyond the object, beyond his
experience of it, into the realm of illumination whither the true artist
would lead him. The development of appreciation, as the amateur
has come to realize in his own person, is only the enlargement of
demand. The appreciator requires ever fresh revelations of beauty.
He discovers, too, that in practice the tendency of his development is
in the direction of exclusion. As he goes on, he cares for fewer and
fewer things, because those works which can minister to his
ever-expanding desire of beauty must needs be less numerous. But these
make up in largeness of utterance, in the intensity of their message,
what they lack in numbers. Nor does this outcome make against a
fancied catholicity of taste. The true appreciator still sees in his
earlier loves something that is good, and he values the good the
more justly that he sees it now in its right relation and apprehends its
real significance. As each in its turn led him to seek further, each
became an instrument in his development. For himself he has need
of them no longer. But far from contemning them, he is rightly
grateful for the solace they have afforded, as by them he has made
his way up into the fuller meaning of art.
II
THE WORK OF ART AS SYMBOL
In the experience of the man who feels himself attracted to pictures
and who studies them intelligently and with sympathy, there comes
a day when suddenly a canvas reveals to him a new beauty in nature
or in life. Much seeing and much thinking, much bewilderment and
some disappointment, have taught him that in the appreciation of
pictures the question at issue is not, how cleverly has the painter
imitated his object, is not, how suggestive is the subject of pleasing
associations; he need simply ask himself, "What has the artist
conceived or felt in the presence of this landscape, this arrangement
of line and color, this human face, that I have not seen and felt, and
that he wants to communicate to me?"
The incident of the single canvas, which by its illuminating
revealment first discloses to the observer the true significance of
pictures, is typical of the whole scope of art. The mission of art is to
reveal. It is the prophet's message to his fellow men, the apocalypse
of the seer. The artist is he to whom is vouchsafed a special
apprehension of beauty. He has the eye to see, the temperament to
feel, the imagination to interpret; it is by virtue of these capacities,
this high, transfiguring vision, that he is an artist; and his skill of
hand, his equipment with the means of expression, is incidental to
the great fact that he has somewhat to express that the common man
has not. To his work, the manifestation of his spirit in material form,
his perception made sensible, is accorded the name of art.
Art is expression. It is not a display of skill; it is not the reproduction
of external forms or appearances; it does not even, as some say,
exist for itself: it is a message, a means. To cry "Art for Art's sake!"
is to converse with the echo. Such a definition but moves in a circle,
and doubles upon itself. No; art is for the artist's sake. The artist is
the agent or human instrument whereby the supreme harmony,
which is beauty, is manifested to men. Art is the medium by which
the artist communicates himself to his fellows; and the individual
work is the expression of what the artist felt or thought, as at the
moment some new aspect of the universal harmony was revealed to
his apprehension. Art is emotion objectified, but the object is
subordinated to the emotion as means is to an end. The material
result is not the final significance, but what of spiritual meaning or
beauty the artist desired to convey. Not what is painted, as the
layman thinks, not how it is painted, as the technician considers, but
why did the artist paint it, is the question which sums up the truth
about art. The appreciator need simply ask, What is the beauty, what
the idea, which the artist is striving to reveal by these symbols of
color and form? He understands that the import of the work is the
_idea,_ and that the work itself is beautiful because it symbolizes a
beautiful idea; its significance is spiritual. The function of art, then,
is through the medium of concrete, material symbols to reveal to
men whatever of beauty has been disclosed to the artist's more
penetrating vision.
In order to seize the real meaning of art it is necessary to strip the
word beauty of all the wrappings of customary associations and the
accretions of tradition and habit. As the word is current in ordinary
parlance, the attribute of beauty is ascribed to that which is pleasing,
pretty, graceful, comely; in fine, to that which is purely agreeable.
But surely such is not the beauty which Rembrandt saw in the filthy,
loathsome beggar. To Rembrandt the beggar was expressive of some
force or manifestation of the supreme universal life, wherein all
things work together to a perfect harmony. Beauty is the essential
quality belonging to energy, character, significance. A merely
agreeable object is not beautiful unless it is expressive of a meaning;
whatever, on the other hand, is expressive of a meaning, however
shocking it may be in itself, however much it may fail to conform to
conventional standards, is beautiful. Beauty does not reside in the
object. No; it is the artist's sense of the great meaning of things; and
in proportion as he finds that meaning--the qualities of energy, force,
aspiration, life--manifest and expressed in objects do those objects
become beautiful. Such was the conception of beauty Keats had
when he wrote in a letter: "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty
must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same
idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,
creative of essential Beauty." And similarly; "I can never feel certain
of any truth, but from a clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse
he sings:--
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
When it is said here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the
phrase may be understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as
when one says the sun rises or the sun sets. Beauty is in the
landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for the
artist an idea he has conceived of some aspect of the universal life.
The artist is impelled to embody concretely his perception of beauty,
and so to communicate his emotion, because the emotion wakened
by the perception of new harmony in things is most fully possessed
and enjoyed as it comes to expression. Thus to make real his ideal
and find the expression of himself is the artist's supreme Happiness.
A familiar illustration of the twin need and delight of expression
may be found in the handiwork produced in the old days when every
artisan was an artist. It may be, perhaps, a key which some
craftsman of Nuremberg fashioned. In the making of it he was not
content to stop with the key which would unlock the door or the
chest It was his key, the work of his hands; and he wrought upon it
lovingly, devotedly, and made it beautiful, finding in his work the
expression of his thought or feeling; it was the realization for that
moment of his ideal. His sense of pleasure in the making of it
prompted the care he bestowed upon it; his delight was in creation,
in rendering actual a new beau which it was given him to conceive.
In its origin as a work of art the key does not differ from a landscape
by Inness, an "arrangement" by Whistler, a portrait by Sargent. The
artist, whether craftsman or painter, is deeply stirred by some
passage in his experience, a fair object or a true thought: it is the
imperious demand of his nature, as it is his supreme pleasure, to
give his feeling expression. The form which his expression takes--it
may be key or carpet, it may be statue, picture, poem, symphony, or
cathedral--is that which most closely responds to his idea, the form
which most truly manifests and represents it.
All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite
sense representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality,
as it is said that painting or literature represents and music does not;
but every work of art, in painting, poetry, music, or in the handiwork
of the craftsman, _represents_ in that it is the symbol of the creator's
ideal. To be sure, the painter or sculptor or dramatist draws his
symbols from already existing material forms, and these symbols are
like objects in a sense in which music is not But line and color and
the life of man, apart from this resemblance to external reality, are
representative or symbolic of the artist's idea precisely as the
craftsman's key, the designer's pattern, or the musician's symphony.
The beautifully wrought key, the geometric pattern of oriental rug or
hanging, the embroidered foliation on priestly vestment, are works
of art equally with the landscape, the statue, the drama, or the
symphony, in that they are one and all the sensuous manifestation of
some new beauty spiritually conceived.
The symbolic character of a work of art must not be lost from sight,
for it is the clue to the interpretation of pictures, as it is of all art.
The painter feels his way through the gamut of his palette to a
harmony of color just as truly as the musician summons the notes of
his scale and marshals them into accord. The painter is moved by
some sweep of landscape; it wakens in him an emotion. When he
sets himself to express his emotion in the special medium with
which he works, he represents by pigment the external aspect of the
landscape, yes; but not in order to imitate it or reproduce it: he
represents the landscape because the colors and the forms which he
registers upon the canvas express for him the emotions roused by
those colors and those forms in nature. He does not try to match his
grays with nature's grays, but this nuance which he gropes for on his
palette, and having found it, touches upon his canvas, expresses for
him what that particular gray in nature made him feel. His one
compelling purpose is in all fidelity and singleness of aim to
"translate the impression received." The painter's medium is just as
symbolic as the notes of the musician's nocturne or the words of the
poet's sonnet, equally inspired by the hour and place. Color and line
and form, although they happen to be the properties of _things,_
have a value for the emotions as truly as musical sounds: they are
the outward symbol of the inward thought or feeling, the visible
bodying forth of the immaterial idea.
The symbolic character of the material world is not early
apprehended. In superficial reaction upon life, men do not readily
pass beyond the immediate actuality. That the spiritual meaning of
all things is not perceived, that all things are not seen to be beautiful,
or expressive of the supreme harmony, is due to men's limited
powers of sight and feeling. Therefore is it that the artist is given in
order that he may reveal as yet unrealized spiritual relations, or new
beauty. The workaday world with its burden of exigent "realities"
has need of a Carlyle to declare that things are but a wonderful
metaphor and the physical universe is the garment of the living God.
In the realm of thought an Emerson, seer of transcendent vision,
must come to restore his fellows to their birthright, which is the life
of the spirit. As in life, so in art men do not easily pass the obvious
and immediate. The child reads "Gulliver's Travels" or "The
Pilgrim's Progress" for the story. As his experience of life both
widens and deepens, he is able to see through externals, and he
penetrates to the real significance, of which the narrative is but the
symbol. So it is with an insight born of experience that the lover of
art sees no longer the "subject," but the beauty which the subject is
meant to symbolize.
In the universal, all-embracing constitution of things, nothing is
without its significance. To be aware that everything has a meaning
is necessary to the understanding of art, as indeed of life itself. That
meaning, which things symbolize and express, it cannot be said too
often, is not necessarily to be phrased in words. It is a meaning for
the spirit. A straight line affects one differently from a curve; that is,
each kind of line means something. Every line in the face utters the
character behind it; every movement of the body is eloquent of the
man's whole being. "The expression of the face balks account," says
Walt Whitman,
"But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his
face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints
of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and
broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and
shoulder-side."
Crimson rouses a feeling different from that roused by yellow, and
gray wakens a mood different from either. In considering this
symbolic character of colors it is necessary to distinguish between
their value for the emotions and merely literary associations. That
white stands for purity or blue for fidelity is a conventionalized and
attached conception. But the pleasure which a man has in some
colors or his dislike for others depends upon the effect each color
has upon his emotions, and this effect determines for him the
symbolic value of the color. In the same way sounds are symbolic in
that they affect the emotions apart from associated "thoughts." Even
with a person who has no technical knowledge of music, the effect
of the minor key is unmistakably different from the major. The tones
and modulations of the voice, quite apart from the words uttered,
have an emotional value and significance. Everything, line, form,
gesture, movement, color, sound, all the material world, is
expressive. All objective forms have their meaning, and rightly
perceived are, in the sense in which the word is used here, beautiful,
in that they represent or symbolize a spiritual idea.
Thus it is that beauty is not in the object but in man's sense of the
object's symbolic expressiveness. The amateur may be rapt by some
artist's "quality of color." But it is probable that in the act of laying
on his pigment, the artist was not thinking of his "quality" at all, but,
rapt himself by the perception of the supreme harmony at that
moment newly revealed to his sense, he was striving sincerely and
directly to give his feeling its faithfullest expression. His color is
beautiful because his idea was beautiful. The expression is of the
very essence of the thought; it _is_ the thought, but the thought
embodied. "Coleridge," says Carlyle, "remarks very pertinently
somewhere that whenever you find a sentence musically worded, of
true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and
good in the meaning, too. For body and soul, word and idea, go
strangely together here as everywhere." Not to look beyond the
material is to miss the meaning of the work.
In an art such as music, in which form and content are one and
inextricable, it is not difficult to understand that the medium of
expression which the art employs is necessarily symbolic, for here
the form cannot exist apart from the meaning to be conveyed. In the
art of literature, however, the case is not so clear, for the material
with which the poet, the novelist, the dramatist works, material
made up of the facts of the world about us, we are accustomed to
regard as objective realities. An incident is an incident, the
inevitable issue of precedent circumstances, and that's all there is to
it Character is the result of heredity, environment, training, plus the
inexplicable _Ego._ To regard these facts of life which are so actual
and immediate as a kind of animate algebraic formulae seems
absurd, but absurd only as one is unable to penetrate to the inner
meaning of things. "Madame Bovary," to take an example quite at
random, is called a triumph of realism. Now realism, of all literary
methods, should register the fact as it is, and least of all should
concern itself with symbols. But this great novel is more than the
record of one woman's life. Any one who has come to understand
the character and temperament of Flaubert as revealed in his Letters
must feel that "Madame Bovary" is no arbitrary recital of tragic
incident, but those people who move through his pages, what they
do and what goes on about them, expressed for Flaubert his own
dreary, baffled rebellion against life. That the artist may consciously
employ the facts of life, not for the sake of the fact, but to
communicate his feeling by thus bodying it forth in concrete
symbols, there is explicit testimony. In an essay dealing with his
own method of composition, Poe writes: "I prefer commencing with
the consideration of an _effect._ Keeping originality _always_ in
view . . . I say to myself, in the first place, 'of the innumerable
effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
occasion, select?' Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid
effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or
tone . . . afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such
combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the
construction of the effect." Yes, physical circumstances, the
succession of incident, shifting momentary grouping of persons,
traits of character in varied combination and contrast,--all these are
significant for the literary artist of spiritual relations.
As the symbol of what the artist feels and strives to express, the
individual work of art is necessarily more than any mere transcript
of fact. It is the meeting and mingling of nature and the spirit of man;
the result of their union is fraught with the inheritance of the past
and holds within it the limitless promise of the future. The work of
art is a focus, gathering into itself all the stored experience of the
artist, and radiating in turn so much to the beholder as he is able at
the moment to receive. A painter is starting out to sketch. Through
underbrush and across the open he pushes his way, beset by beauty
on every side, and storing impressions, sensations, thoughts. At last
his eye lights upon some clump of brush, some meadow or hill,
which seems at the instant to sum up and express his accumulated
experience. In rendering this bit of nature, he pours out upon his
canvas his store of feeling. It is the single case which typifies his
entire course. "The man's whole life preludes the single deed." His
way through the world has been just such a gathering up of
experience, and each new work which he produces is charged with
the collected wealth of years.
The special work is the momentary epitome of the artist's total
meaning. He finds this brief passage in nature beautiful then and
there because it expresses what he feels and means. He does not try
to reproduce the thing, but uses the thing for what it signifies. The
thing is but for that moment: it signifies all that has gone before. As
he watches, a cloud passes over the sun and the face of nature is
darkened. Suddenly the scene bursts into light again. In itself the
landscape is no brighter than before the sun was darkened. The
painter feels it brighter for the contrast, and inevitably his rendering
of its aspect is heightened and intensified.
Art is nature heightened and intensified as nature is interpreted
through the transfiguring medium of the human spirit To the object
is added
"The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."
After an early morning in the fields, Corot withdraws to his house to
rest. "I dream of the morning landscape," he writes; "I dream my
picture, and presently I will paint my dream." But not only does the
artist render the beauty which this landscape happens to express for
him: he charges these colors and forms with the beauty of all
landscape. Corot painted _at_ Ville d'Avray; _what_ he painted
was God's twilight or dawn enwrapping tree and pool. In gratitude
and worship he revealed to men the tender, ineffable poetry of gray
dawns in all places and for all time. Millet's peasants were called
John and Peter and Charles, and they tilled the soil of France; but on
their bowed shoulders rests the universal burden; these dumb figures
are eloquent of the uncomplaining, hopeless "peasanthood" of the
world. In the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to
penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal
the spiritual,--this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his
achievement is art.
III
THE WORK OF ART AS BEAUTIFUL
Just as nature and life are significant as the material manifestation of
spiritual forces and relations, so a work of art is in its turn the
symbol by which the artist communicates himself; it is his revelation
to men of the beauty he has perceived and felt.
Beauty is not easy to define. That conception which regards beauty
as the power to awaken merely agreeable emotions is limited and in
so far false. Another source of misunderstanding is the confusion of
beauty with moralistic values. It is said that beauty is the Ideal; and
by many the "Ideal" is taken to mean ideal goodness. With
righteousness and sin as such beauty has no concern. Much that is
evil in life, much that offends against the moral law, must be
regarded as beautiful in so far as it plays its necessary part in the
universal whole. Clearing away these misconceptions, then, an
approximate definition would be that the essence of beauty is
harmony. So soon as a detail is shown in its relation to a whole, then
it becomes beautiful because it is expressive of the supreme unity. A
discord in music is felt to be a discord only as it is isolated; when it
takes its fitting and inevitable place in the large unity of the
symphony, it becomes full of meaning. The hippopotamus, dozing
in his tank at the Zoo, is wildly grotesque and ugly. But who shall
say that, seen in the fastnesses of his native rivers, he is not the
beautiful perfect fulfilling of nature's harmony? To a race of blacks,
the fair-skinned Apollo appearing among them could not but be
monstrous. The smoking factory, sordid and hideous, is beautiful to
him who sees that it accomplishes a necessary function in the great
scheme of life. Beauty is adaptation. Whatever is truly useful is in so
far truly beautiful. The steam engine and the battleship are beautiful
just as truly as Titian's Madonna, glorified and sweeping upward
into the presence of God the Father. Only what is vital and
serviceable, and whatever is that, is beautiful.
When the spirit of man perceives a unity in things, a working
together of parts, there beauty exists. It resides in the synthesis of
details to the end of shaping a complete whole. This perception, this
synthesis, is a function of the human mind. Beauty is not in the
landscape, but in the intelligence which apprehends it. Evidence of
this fundamental truth is the fact that the same landscape is more
"beautiful" to one man than to another, or to a third, perhaps, is not
beautiful at all. It is only as the individual perceives a relation
among the parts resulting in a total unity that the object becomes
beautiful for him.
This abstract exposition may be made clearer by a graphic
illustration. Here are four figures composed of the same elements:--
* *** ** * ***
* ***** * ******
* ** * * * *
*
************* *
* * * *
**
Fig. I.
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
Fig. II. Fig. III. Fig. IV.
Figure I., far from being pleasing, is positively disquieting. With the
other three figures, the perception of their form is attended with a
kind of pleasure. Whereas the first figure is without form and is
meaningless, each of the second group exhibits harmony, balance,
proportion, interrelation of parts: each is perceived to be a whole.
Although experience itself comes to men in fragments and
seemingly without order, yet the human mind is so constituted as to
require that an idea or a truth be shown to be a whole before the
mind can comprehend it In considering the element of balance, it
should be noted, as illustrated by Figure IV., that balance is not
necessarily perfect symmetry. A Gothic cathedral is beautiful no less
than a Greek temple. In a painting of a landscape, for example, it is
necessary simply that the masses and the tones stand in balancing
relation; the perfect symmetry of geometric exactness, characteristic
of Hellenic and Renaissance art, is not required. In the work which
embodies the artist's perception of the universal harmony, there must
be rhythm, order, unity in variety; so framed it becomes expressive
and significant
As the symbol of beauty, the work of art is itself beautiful in that it
manifests in itself that wholeness and integrity which is beauty.
Every work of art is informed by a controlling design; it
subordinates manifold details to a definite whole; it reduces and
adjusts its parts to an all-inclusive, perceptible unity. The
Nuremberg key must have some sort of rhythm; the rug or vestment
must exhibit a pattern which can be seen to be a whole; the canvas
must show balance in the composition, and the color must be "in
tone." In any work of art there must be design and purpose.
In nature there is much which to the limited perception of men does
not appear to be beautiful, for there is much that does not manifest
superficially the necessary harmony. The landscape at noonday
under the blaze of the relentless sun discloses many things which are
seemingly incongruous with one another. The dull vision of men
cannot penetrate to the unity underlying it all. At twilight, as the
shadows of evening wrap it round, the same landscape is invested
with mysterious beauty. Conflicting details are lost, harsh outlines
are softened and merged, discordant colors are mellowed and
attuned. Nature has brought her field and hill and clustered
dwellings into "tone." So the artist, who has perceived a harmony
where the common eye saw it not, selects; he suppresses here,
strengthens there, fuses, and brings all into unity.
Harmony wherever perceived is beauty. Beauty made manifest by
the agency of the human spirit is art. Art, in order to reveal this
harmony to men, must work through selection, through rejection and
emphasis, through interpretation. It is not difficult to understand,
then, that the exact reproduction of the facts of the external world is
not in a true sense art.
The photograph, which is the most exact method of reproducing
outward aspect, is denied the title of a work of art; that is, the
photograph direct, which has not been retouched. To be sure, the
photograph is the product of a mechanical process, and is not, except
incidentally, the result of human skill. Another kind of reproduction
of outward aspect, however, virtually exact, which does show the
evidence of human skill, is yet not entitled to rank as art,--the
imitative or deceptive picture. Photograph and picture are ruled out
equally on the one count. Neither selects.
In an exhibition of paintings were once displayed two panels
precisely similar in appearance, presenting an army coat and cap, a
sabre and a canteen. At a distance there was no point of difference in
the two. A nearer view disclosed the fact that on one panel the
objects were real and that the other panel was painted. The beholder
was pleased by the exhibition of the painter's skill; but in so far as
the work did not reveal a significance or beauty in these objects
which the artist had seen and the beholder had not, it fell short of
being a work of art Just as the key of the Nuremberg craftsman was
a work of art in that it was for him the expression, the rendering
actual, of a new beauty it was given him to conceive, so only that is
art which makes manifest a beauty that is new, a beauty that is truly
born of the artist's own spirit. The repetition of existing forms with
no modification by the individual workman is not creation, but
imitation; and imitation is manufacture, not art. Inasmuch as the two
panels could not be distinguished, the presentment signified no more
than the reality. Tried as a work of art, the imitative picture, in
common with the photograph, lacks the necessary element of
interpretation, of revelation. That the representation may become art,
there must be added to it some new attribute or quality born of the
artist's spirit. The work must take on new meaning.