not necessarily "pictorial," the painter might see in the objects some
story they have to tell. The plaster of the garret wall where they are
hanging he may show to be cracked; that tear in the coat speaks of
faithful service, but the coat hangs limp and dusty now; the
inscription on the canteen is almost obliterated, and the strap is
broken; the sabre, which shows the marks of stern usage along its
blade, is spotted with rust: the whole composition means Trusty
Servants in Neglect. By the emphasis of certain aspects he picture is
made to signify more than he mere objects themselves, wherein
there was nothing salient. The meaning is imposed upon them or
drawn out of them by he artist. Or again, the painter may see in
these things the expression for him of a harmony which he can
manifest by the arrangement of line and color, and he so disposes his
material as to make that harmony visible. It is, then, not the crude
fact which the artist transcribes, but rather some feeling he has
toward the fact. By selection, by adjustment, he gives this special
aspect of the fact emphasis and relief. In virtue of his interpretation
the picture acquires a significance that is new; it gives the beholder a
pleasure which the fact itself did not give, and thus it passes over
into the domain of art.
The purpose of art is not the reproduction of a beautiful object, but
the expression in objective form of a beautiful idea. A plaster cast of
a hand, however comely the hand may be, is not a work of art. As
with the photograph, the work involves only incidentally the
exercise of human skill. But that is not all. In order to render the
work in the spirit of art, the sculptor must model, not the hand, but
his sense of the hand; he must draw out and express its character, its
significance. To him it is not a certain form in bone and flesh; to him
it means grace, delicacy, sensitiveness, or perhaps resolution,
strength, force. As the material symbol of his idea of the hand, he
will select and make salient such lines and contours as are
expressive to him of that character.
Indeed, so little depends upon the exact subject represented and so
much upon the artist's feeling toward it, so much depends upon the
spirit of the rendering, that the representation of a subject
uninteresting or even "ugly" in itself may be beautiful. In the art of
literature, the _subject_ is drawn from the life of man. The material
of the poem, the novel, the drama, is furnished by man's total
experience, the sum of his sensations, impressions, emotions, and
the events in which he is concerned. But experience crowds in upon
him at every point, without order and without relation; the daily
round of living is for most men a humdrum thing. Yet it is just this
rudimentary and undistinguished mass of experience which is
transmuted into literature; by the alchemy of art the representation
of that which is without interest becomes interesting. And it happens
on this wise. Life is humdrum only in so far as it is meaningless;
men can endure any amount drudgery and monotony provided that it
lead somewhere, that they perceive its relation to a larger unity
which is the total of life. As part of a whole which can be
apprehended, immediately it acquires purpose and becomes
significant. It is the sense of meaning in life which gives color and
warmth to the march of uniform days. So the literary artist shapes
his inchoate material to a definite end; out of the limitless complex
details at his command, he selects such passages of background,
such incidents, and such traits of character as make for the setting
forth of the idea he has conceived. Clearly the artist cannot use
everything, clearly he does not aim to reproduce the fact: there are
abridgments and suppressions, as there are accent and emphasis. The
finished work is a composite, embodying what is essential of many,
many preliminary studies and sketches, wrought and compiled with
generous industry. The master is recognized in what he omits; what
is suppressed is felt but not perceived: the great artist, in the result,
steps from peak to peak.
"The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the Dark."
Thus with three strokes the master Coleridge depicts the onrush of
the night over boundless spaces of sky and sea. Within the compass
of a few lines, Tennyson registers the interminable, empty monotony
of weary years:
"No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail."
Thus through selection does the artist work to interpretation. By
detaching the eternal meaning from the momentary fact, by
embodying his sense of its significance in such concrete forms as
symbolize his idea, by investing the single instance with universally
typical import, then in very truth he represents. Nature is not the
subject of art; she is the universal treasury from whose infinitely
various store the artist selects his symbols.
A special method in art may here suggest itself as having for its
purpose to reproduce the fact in perfect fidelity; the method is called
_realism._ But a moment's considerate analysis shows that realism is
only a label for one manner of handling, and in the end comes no
nearer the object as it "really" is. In its essence realism is the artist's
personal vision of the fact, exactly as idealism or romanticism or
impressionism is personal. For after all, what is the reality? A
chance newsboy is offering his papers on a crowded street corner.
The fine lady recoils from his filth and from all contact with him;
the philanthropist sees in him a human being to help and to redeem;
the philosopher regards him dispassionately as a "social factor," the
result of heredity and environment; the artist cries out in joy as his
eye lights upon good stuff to paint. But all the while, which of these
conceptions figures the "real" newsboy? Not one. For he is all these
together; and the single observer, whatever his bias, cannot
apprehend him at every point. Any attempt to represent him involves
selection and interpretation, the suppression of some traits in order
to emphasize others, which are the special aspects that have
impressed the given observer. So there is no essential realism. The
term applies to the method of those who choose to render what is
less comforting in life, who insist on those characteristics of things
which men call ugly. In realism, just as truly as in any other kind of
treatment, is expressed the personality of the artist, his own peculiar
way of envisaging the world.
A work of art is born of the artist's desire to express his joy in some
new aspect of the universal harmony which has been disclosed to
him. The mission of art is through interpretation to reveal. It
happens sometimes that a visitor at an exhibition of paintings is
shocked by a picture which seems to him for the moment impossible,
because so far beyond the range of his experience; yet withal he
finds himself attracted by it and he returns to study it. It is not many
days before his glance is arrested by that very effect in nature, and
he says, "Why, that is like that picture!" It was the artist who first
saw it and who taught him to see it for himself. When one observes
an effect in nature or in life that one calls "a Corot" or "a Whistler,"
one means that to Corot or to Whistler is due the glory of
discovering that fuller beauty and revealing it. Browning makes Fra
Lippo Lippi say:
"We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted--better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that."
This revealing power of art is not restricted to the individual
appreciator. It is said that the French are an artistic people and that
Americans are not. The explanation is that for generations the artists
of France have been discovering to their countrymen the beauty that
is around them at their very door, and have taught them to appreciate
it. The Americans will be an artistic people when our artists shall
have done the like for us. When there shall have been for
generations a truly native American art, there will be a public to
understand and to appreciate. So it is that everywhere the high
function of art is to reveal. As a friend, more sensitive and more
enthusiastic, with whom we are strolling, points out to us many
beauties by the wayside or in trees and sky, so the artist takes us by
the hand and leads us out into life, indicating for us a harmony to
which we were blind before. Burdened with affairs and the daily
round, we had not thought to look off and out to the spreading
meadows tossing into hills which roll upward into the blue heaven
beyond.
The beauty thus revealed is a beauty which the artist has
apprehended in spirit and which he would make actual. A work of
art is the expression of an aspiration. The crude and tawdry images
of the Madonna Set in the roadside cross are just as truly a work of
art as the rapt saints of Giotto or the perfect Madonnas of Raphael in
so far as they are expressive of what those poor, devout souls who
fashioned them felt of worship and of love. After all, the difference
is that Giotto felt more than they, Raphael was endowed with more
accomplished powers of expression. The work receives its import as
it is the faithful utterance of him who shaped it, as it is genuinely the
realization of his ideal. "The gift without the giver is bare." But it is
no less true that the gift without the receiver is sterile and void, for
art involves not only its creator's intention but also its message to
him whom the work reaches. In a book, it is not only what the writer
says that makes its significance but also what the reader thinks as he
reads. In so far as any man finds in picture or poem or song a new
beauty, a fuller sense of harmony than was his before, for him that is
a work of art.
Thus the standard by which art is to be tried is relative. For its
creator, the work is art in that it embodies a perception of new
harmony that is peculiarly his. In the material result, this special
character is imparted to the work by the artist's instinctive selection.
No two painters, though equipped with equal technical skill and
perhaps of like tastes and preferences, would or indeed could render
the same sweep of landscape in precisely similar fashion. Obviously,
to set down everything were at once an impossibility and an untruth,
for the detail of nature is infinite and the beholder does not see
everything. Each is bound to select such details as impress him, and
his selection will be determined by the way in which he as a unique
personality, an individual different from every other man in the
whole wide universe, feels about the bit of nature before him. In
expressing by his special medium what he feels about the landscape,
he aims, in the selection of material form and color, to detach and
render visible what of essential truth the landscape means to him, to
purge it of accidents, and register its eternal beauty. The painter will
not attempt, then, to reproduce the physical facts of nature,--the
topography, geology, botany, of the landscape,--but rather through
those facts in terms of color and form he tries to render its
_expression:_ its quality, as brilliance, tenderness; its mood, as joy,
mystery, setting down those salient aspects of it which combine to
give it character and meaning. For landscape--to recall the
exposition of a preceding page--has its expression as truly as the
human face. A man knows his friends not by the shape of the nose
or the color of the eyes, but by the character which these features
express, the personality which shines in the face and radiates from it
This effluence of the soul within is the essential man; people call it
the "expression." As with human life, so with the many aspects of
nature. External traits are merged in the spiritual meaning. The
material forms have the power of affecting the spirit thus or so; and
in man's reaction on his universe they come to take on a symbolic
emotional significance. Each manifestation of nature arouses in the
artist, more or less consciously on his part, some feeling toward it:
he cares, then, to represent these external material forms, whether a
flower, a landscape, a human face, only because there is in them
something in which he delights; he fashions the work of art in praise
of the thing he loves. To the clever technician who imitatively paints
the flower as he knows it to be,
"A primrose on the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him
And it is nothing more."
But to the artist
"The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
And it is these thoughts that he cares to express and not the visible
truth about the flower. A writer was walking along the streets of
Paris on a day in early March.
"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I
had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon
a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of
desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness
destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of
the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great
or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what
secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless
beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this
immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will
contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it
would seem that nature has not made."
And if Sénancour had set himself to paint his jonquil as he has
written about it, how that tender flower would have been
transfigured and glorified!
What the artist aims to render is not the rose but the beauty of the
rose, his sense of one chord in the universal harmony which the rose
sounds for him, not that only, but the beauty of all roses that ever
were or ever shall be; and inevitably he will select such colors and
such lines as bring that special and interpreted beauty into relief, and
so make manifest to the beholder what was revealed to his own
higher vision, by virtue of which, and not because of any
exceptional technical skill, he is an artist.
IV
ART AND APPRECIATION
It may be that some reader of the foregoing pages will attempt to
apply the principles therein set forth to the pictures shown in the
next exhibition he happens to attend. It is more than probable that in
his first efforts he will be disappointed. For the principles discussed
have dealt with art in its authentic manifestations; and not every
painter is an artist, not every picture is a work of art.
At the very outset it should be said that an exhibition of paintings as
ordinarily made up is confusing and wholly illogical. We may
suppose that a volume to be read through in one sitting of two hours
is placed in the hands of an intelligent reader. The book consists of
essays, poems, short stories, and dramatic dialogue, each within the
compass of a few pages, each contributed by a different writer as an
example of his work for the year. We may suppose now that the
reader is asked to gather from this volume, read hastily and either
superficially or in random bits, some idea of the significance of each
author and of the import and scope of contemporary American
literature. Is it a fair test? This volume, we may further suppose, is
practically the only means by which the writer can get his work
before the public. A public means a purchaser, and of course the
writer must live. Is it reasonable to think that every number
contributed to such a volume will be a work of art, wrought with
singleness of heart and in loving devotion to an ideal? There are still
with us those who "work for money" and those who "work for
fame." There are those who believe in "giving the public what it
wants," and the numbers they contribute to the yearly volumes are
samples of the sort of thing they do, from which the public may
order. In the table of contents stand celebrated names; and to the
work of such men, perhaps, will turn the seeker after what he thinks
ought to be the best, not realizing that these are the men who have
known how to "give the people what they want," that the people do
not always want the good and right thing, and that it is somewhat the
habit of genius to dispense with contemporary recognition. If there
is here or there in the book an essay or a poem the product of
thought and effort and offered in all seriousness, how little chance it
has of being appreciated, except by a few, even if it is remarked at
all in the jumble of miscellaneous contributions.
This hypothetical volume is a fair parallel of an annual exhibition of
paintings. In such an exhibition the number of works of art, the true,
inevitable expression of a new message, is relatively small. The
most celebrated and most popular painters are not necessarily by
that fact great artists, or indeed artists at all. Contemporary judgment
is notoriously liable to go astray. The gods of one generation are
often the laughing stock of the next; the idols of the fathers are torn
down and trampled under foot by the children. Some spirits there
have been of liberal promise who have not been able to withstand
the demands made upon them by early popular approval. Such is the
struggle and soul's tragedy which is studied convincingly in Mr.
Zangwill's novel, "The Master." No assault on the artist's integrity is
so insidious as immediate favor, which in its turn begets the fatal
desire to please.
To the "successful" painters, however, are for the most part accorded
the places of honor on academy walls. The canvases of these men
are seen first by the visitor; but they are not all. There are other
pictures which promise neither better nor worse. Here are paintings
of merit, good in color and good in drawing, but empty of any
meaning. Scattered through the exhibition are the works of a group
of able men, imitating themselves, each trying to outdo the others by
a display of cleverness in solving some "painter's problem" or by
some startling effect of subject or handling. But it is a sad day for
any artist when he ceases to find his impulse and inspiration either
in his own spirit or in nature, and when he looks to his fellow
craftsmen for the motive of his work. Again, there are pictures by
men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have caught the
manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it
was simply intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism
and turn out a product which people do not distinguish from the
authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and prophet,
the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor,
writer, is a very human being.
As he looks over these walls, clamorous of the commonplace and
the commercial, the seeker after what is good and true in art realizes
how very few of these pictures have been rendered in the spirit of
love and joy. The painter has one eye on his object and one eye on
the public; and too often, as a distinguished actor once said of the
stage manager whose vision is divided between art and the box
office, the painter is a one-eyed man.
A painter once refused to find anything to interest him, still less to
move him, in a silent street with a noble spire detaching itself
vaguely from the luminous blue depths of a midnight sky, because,
he said, "People won't buy dark things, so what's the use? You might
as well do bright, pretty things that they will buy, and that are just as
easy to make." A portrait-painter gives up landscape subjects
because, as he does not hesitate to declare, it hurts his business. And
the painters themselves are not altogether to blame for this attitude
towards their work. The fault lies half with the people who buy
pictures, having the money, and who have not a gleam of
understanding of the meaning of art. A woman who had ordered her
house to be furnished and decorated expensively, remarked
to a caller who commented on a water-color hanging in the
drawing-room: "Yes, I think it matches the wall-paper very nicely." When
such is the purpose of those who paint pictures and such is the
understanding of those who buy them, it is not surprising that not
every picture is inevitably a work of art.
But what is the poor seeker after art to do? The case is by no means
hopeless. In current exhibitions a few canvases strike a new note;
and by senses delicately attuned this note can be distinguished
within the jangle of far louder and popular tunes ground out, as it
were, by the street-piano. Seriously to study contemporary painting,
however, the logical opportunity is furnished by the exhibitions of
the works of single men or of small groups. As the reader who
wishes to understand an author or perhaps a school does not content
himself with random extracts, but instead isolates the man for the
moment and reads his work consecutively and one book in its
relation to his others; so the student of pictures can appreciate the
work and understand the significance of a given painter only as he
sees a number of his canvases together and in relation. So, he is able
to gather something of the man's total meaning.
Widely different from annual exhibitions, too, are galleries and
museums; for here the proportion of really good things is
immeasurably larger. In the study of masterpieces, it need hardly be
said, the amateur may exercise judgment and moderation. He should
not try to do too much at one time, for he can truly appreciate only
as he enters fully into the spirit of the work and allows it to possess
him. To achieve this sympathy and understanding within the same
hour for more than a very few great works is manifestly impossible.
Such appreciation involves fundamentally a quick sensitiveness to
the appeal and the variously expressive power of color and line and
form. To win from the picture its fullest meaning, the observer may
bring to bear some knowledge of the artist who produced it and of
the age and conditions in which he lived. But in the end he must
surrender himself to the work of art, bringing to it his intellectual
equipment, his store of sensuous and emotional experience, his
entire power of being moved.
For when all is said, there is no single invariable standard by which
to try a work of art: its significance to the appreciator rests upon his
capacity at the moment to receive it. "A jest's prosperity lies in the
ear of him that hears it." The appreciator need simply ask himself,
"What has this work to reveal to me of beauty that I have not
perceived for myself? I shall not look for the pretty and the
agreeable. But what of new significance, energy, life, has this work
to express to me? I will accept no man entirely and unquestioningly,
I will condemn no one unheard. No man has the whole truth; every
man has some measure of the truth, however small. Let it be my task
to find it and to separate it from what is unessential and false. In my
search for what is true, I will conserve my integrity and maintain my
independence. And I shall recognize my own wherever I may find
it."
"Man is the measure of all things," declared an ancient philosopher.
And his teaching has not been superseded to-day. The individual is
the creator of his own universe; he is the focus of the currents and
forces of his world. The meaning of all things is subjective. So the
measure of beauty in life for a man is determined by his capacity to
receive and understand. Thus it is that a man's joy in experience and
his appreciation of art in any of its manifestations are conditioned by
the opportunity that nature or art furnishes for his spirit to exercise
itself. In the reading of poetry, for example, we seek the expression
of ourselves. Our first emotion is, perhaps, a simple, unreflecting
delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or
that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a
delight wholly physical,--pure sensation. A quick taking of the
breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only
expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an
abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which
we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of
the Apollo Belvedere. We know simply that we are pleased. But
after nerves have ceased to tingle so acutely, we begin to think; and
we seek to give account to ourselves of the beauty which for the
moment we could but feel. Once arrived at the attitude of reflection,
we find that the poetry which affects us most and to which we
oftenest return is the poetry that contains the record of our own
experience, but heightened, the poetry which expresses our desires
and aspirations, that in which we recognize ourselves elevated and
idealized. In so far as we see in it the ennobled image of our own
nature, so far it has power to hold us and to stir us.