If the chief end of all art is delight, there is small blame to be
attached to most of us in that we are glad to take our pleasure
carelessly and to give little thought to the means whereby we have been
moved. Properly enough, the enjoyment of most of us is unthinking; and
in the appreciation of the masterpieces of the several arts few of us
are wont to consider curiously the craftsmanship of the men who wrought
these marvels, their skill of hand, their familiarity with the mechanics
of their art, their consummate knowledge of technic. Our regard is
centered rather on the larger aspects of the masterwork, on its meaning
and on its veracity, on its intellectual elevation, and on its moral
appeal. No doubt this is best, for it is only by its possession of these
nobler qualities that a work of art endures. On the other hand, these
nobler qualities by themselves will not suffice to confer immortality,
unless they are sustained by the devices of the adroit craftsman. As
Massinger asserted long ago:
No fair colors
Can fortify a building faintly joined.
Technic is most successful when its existence is least suspected, and
this is one reason why it is often overlooked and neglected in the very
achievements which owe to its aid their vitality. Perhaps this happens
the more frequently because it is the affectation of many an artist to
hurry his tools out of sight as swiftly as he can, and to sweep up the
chips of his workshop as soon as may be, so that the result of his
effort shall seem almost as if it were the sudden effect of the
inspiration that is believed to visit a genius now and again. He may
have toiled at it unceasingly for months, joying in the labor and
finding keen pleasure in every workmanlike artifice he had used to
attain his end; and yet he refrains from confessing his many struggles
with his rebellious material, wisely preferring to let what he has done
speak for itself, simply and without commentary. But the artists know
that the pathway to achievement is never along the line of least
resistance; and they smile when they hear Mascarille, in Molière's
little comedy, tell the affected young ladies whom he is seeking to
impress that all he did "was done without effort." By this the artists
at once perceive the fellow to be a pretender, who had never
accomplished anything and who never would. They know, as no others can
know, that there is no cable-road to the tops of the twin-peaks of
Parnassus, and that he who would climb to these remote heights must
trudge afoot,--even if he is lucky enough now and again to get a lift on
Pegasus.
What the artists do not care to parade, it is the duty of the
commentators to point out; and an understanding of the technic of any
art, of its possibilities and of its limitations, is as necessary for
the critics as for the creators. Perhaps it is not pedantic to suggest
that the critic who seeks to be of service ought to be able to see in
every masterpiece the result of the combined action of three forces,
without any one of which that work of art could not have come into
being. First, there is the temperament of the artist himself, his native
endowment for the practise of that special art, his gift of
story-telling or of play-making, as the case may be. Second, there is
the training of the artist, his preparation for his work, his slowly
acquired mastery of the processes of his craft, his technical
accomplishments. And, thirdly, there is the man's own character, his
intelligence, and energy, and determination, his moral sense, his
attitude toward life and its insistent problems. Now, of these three
necessary factors--first, his native gift; second, his technic; and,
third, his character--only the second is improvable by taking thought.
The native gift must remain ever what it is, neither more nor less; and
it cannot be enlarged by any effort of will. So also the character,
which is conditioned by much that is beyond a man's control,--which can
be bettered, perhaps, but only as the man himself climbs upward.
Technic, however, can be had for the asking. Any man can acquire it if
he will but pay the price,--the needful study and experiment. Any man
can make himself a master of his craft, if he will but serve his
apprenticeship loyally. The beginner in painting, for example, can go
into the studio of an older practitioner to get grounded in the grammar
of his art, and to learn slowly how to speak its language, not
eloquently at first, but so as to make his meaning clear. In that
workshop he soon awakens to the fact that permanent success is never won
by any audacity of ignorance, and that the most famous artists are those
who acquainted themselves with every artifice of their craft and with
every trick of their trade. They went to school to certain of their
elders to acquire that tradition of technic, past along from hand to
hand, enriched by the devices of one after another of the strong men who
had practised the art, following each in the other's footsteps and
broadening the trail blazed by those who went first.
Every generation is privileged to stand on the shoulders of its
predecessors, and it is taller by what they accomplished. The art of
fiction, for example, is a finer art to-day than it was yesterday; and
so is every other art, even tho the artists themselves are no greater
now than then, and even tho genius is no more frequent than it was
formerly. Ghirlandajo and Marlowe and Cervantes were men of genius; but
their technic is seen to-day to be as primitive as their native talent
is indisputable. We can perceive them doubtfully feeling for a formula,
fumbling in the dark, for want of the model which they themselves were
to aid in establishing and which every novice nowadays has ready to his
hand, even tho he may lack the temperament to profit by what is set
before him.
It is significant that not a few of the masters, in the days when they
were but novices, found so much satisfaction in this mere acquiring of
the secrets of the craft, that they chose to linger in the
apprentice-stage longer than might seem necessary. In their earlier work
they were content modestly to put in practise the technical principles
they had just been acquiring; and for a little while they sought
scarcely more than mere technical adroitness. Consider the firstlings of
Shakspere's art and of Molière's; and observe how they reveal these
prentice playwrights at work, each seeking to display his cleverness
and each satisfied when he had done this. In 'Love's Labor's Lost,'
Shakspere is trying to amuse by inventive wit and youthful gaiety and
ingenuity of device, just as Molière in the 'Étourdi' is enjoying his
own complicating of comic imbroglios, not yet having anything of
importance to say on the stage, but practising against the time when he
should want to say something. Neither in the English comedy nor in the
French is there any purpose other than the desire to please by the
devices of the theater.
There is so little hint of a deeper meaning in either 'Love's Labor's
Lost' or the 'Étourdi,' of a moral, so to speak, of a message of
ulterior significance, that, if Shakspere and Molière had died after
these plays were produced, nobody would ever have suspected that either
youthful playwright had it in him to develop into a philosophic observer
of the deeper realities of life. Of course, neither of them was long
satisfied with this dexterous display of technical adroitness alone;
and, as they grew in years, we find their plays getting richer in
meaning and dealing more seriously with the larger problems of
existence. But technic was never despised; and, if it was not always the
chief end of the playwright, it remained the means whereby he was
enabled to erect the solid framework of masterpieces like 'Othello' and
'Tartuffe,' in which the craftsmanship is overshadowed by the nobler
qualities, no doubt, but in which the stark technical skill is really
more abundant than in the earlier and emptier plays.
As Shakspere and Molière matured mentally and morally, so also did they
grow in facility of accomplishment, in the ease with which they could
handle the ever-present problems of exposition and construction. The
student of dramaturgy notes with increasing delight the ingenuity with
which the first appearance of Tartuffe is prepared; and he finds an
almost equal joy in the bolder beginnings of 'Romeo and Juliet' and of
'Hamlet,' where the difficulty was less, it may be, but where the
interest of the craftsman in the excellence of his device is quite as
obvious. Shakspere was the greatest of dramatic poets and Molière was
the greatest of comic dramatists; and both of them were good workmen,
taking an honest pride in the neatness with which they finished a job.
In his later years, Shakspere seems to have relaxed a little his
interest in technic, and the value of his work is at once seen to
suffer. Altho his mind is as powerful as ever up to the last years of
his stay in London, 'Cymbeline' and 'A Winter's Tale' are far inferior
to 'Hamlet' and to 'Macbeth'; and the cause is apparently little more
than a carelessness of technic, an unwillingness to take the trouble
needful to master his material and to present it in due proportion.
If Shakspere and Molière ever meet in that other world which was so much
in the mind of the one and so little in the thought of the other, and if
they chance to fall into chat--Shakspere spoke French, pretty certainly,
even if Molière knew no English--we may rest assured that they will not
surprize each other by idle questions about the meaning of this play or
that, its moral purpose or its symbolic significance. We may be
confident that their talk would turn promptly to technic; and, perhaps,
Shakspere would congratulate Molière on his advantage in coming later,
when the half-open, semi-medieval playhouse, with which the English
dramatist had perforce to be contented, had been superseded by a more
modern theater, roofed and lighted and set with scenery. And, in his
turn, Molière might be curious to inquire how the English playwright was
able to produce upon the spectators the effect of a change of scene
when, in fact, there was no actual scenery to change.
To suggest that these two masters of the dramatic art would probably
confine their conversation to matters of mere technic is not so vain or
adventurous as it may seem, since technic is the one theme the
dramatists from Lope de Vega to Legouvé have always chosen to discuss,
whenever they have been emboldened to talk about their art in public.
Lope's 'New Art of Writing Plays' is in verse, and it has taken for its
remote model Horace's 'Art of Poetry,' but none the less does it contain
the practical counsels of a practical playwright, advising his
fellow-craftsmen how best to succeed on the stage; and it is just as
technical in its precepts as Mr. Pinero's acute lecture on the probable
success of Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, if only the Scots
romancer had taken the trouble to learn the rules of the game, as it is
played in the theater of to-day.
In thus centering the interest of their public utterance upon the
necessities of craftsmanship, the dramatists are in accord with the
customs of the practitioners of all the other arts. Consider the
criticism of poetry by the poets themselves, for example,--how narrowly
it is limited to questions of vocabulary or of versification, whether
the poet-critic is Dryden or Wordsworth or Poe. Consider the criticism
of painting by the painters themselves,--how frankly it is concerned
with the processes of the art, whether the painter-critic is Fromentin
or La Farge. It is La Farge who records that Rembrandt was a "workman
following his trade of painting to live by it," and who reminds us that
"these very great artists"--Rembrandt and his fellows--"are primarily
workmen, without any pose or assumption of doing more than a daily
task." What they did was all in the day's work. One of the most
distinguished of American sculptors was once standing before a
photograph of the Panathenaic frieze, and a critical friend by his side
exprest a wonder as to "what those old Greeks were thinking of when they
did work like that?" The professional artist smiled and responded: "I
guess that, like the rest of us, they were thinking how they could pull
it off!"
The method, the tricks of the trade, the ingenious devices of one kind
or another, these are what artists of all sorts like to discuss with
fellow-practitioners of the art; and it is by this interchange of
experiences that the means of expression are multiplied. The inner
meaning of what they have wrought, its message, its morality, its
subtler spirit, the artists do not care ever to talk over, even with
each other. This is intangible and incommunicable; and it is too
personal, too intimate, to be vulgarized in words; it is to be felt
rather than phrased. Above all, it must speak for itself, for it is
there because it had to be there, and not because the artist put it
there deliberately. If he has not builded better than he knew, then is
the result of his labor limited and narrow. A story is told of
Thorwaldsen in his old age, when a friend found him disconsolate before
a finished statue and inquired if he was despondent because he had not
been able to realize his ideal. And the sculptor responded that, on the
contrary, he had realized his ideal, and therefore he was downcast; for
the first time his hand had been able to accomplish all that his mind
had planned.
"Neither in life, nor even in literature and in art, can we always do
what we intend to do," M. Brunetière once asserted, adding that, "in
compensation, we have not always intended to do all that we have
actually accomplished." Often no one is more astonished than the artist
himself--be he poet or painter--at what the critics sometimes find in
his work; and he is frankly unaware of any intention on his part to do
all the fine things which he is told that he has done. But the critics
may be justified, despite the disclaimer of the artist; and the fine
things are, of a truth, to be discovered even tho they get into the work
by accident, as it were, and even tho they may be the result of an
intention which was either unconscious on the artist's part, or
subconscious.
We cannot help feeling the sublimity so obvious in the frescos of the
Sistine Chapel; and yet it is equally obvious--if we care to look for
the evidence--that while he was at this work the mind of Michelangelo
was absorbed by the conquest of a host of technical difficulties. Of
course, it would be going too far to assert that the great artist did
not actually intend the sublimity that we admire and wonder at; but we
may be sure that this sublimity is not something deliberately planned
and achieved by him. It is there because the theme evoked it, and
because Michelangelo was himself a man of the noblest character and of
the loftiest imagination. It was inherent and latent in him, and it had
to come out, inevitably and mightily, when he was engaged on a piece of
work that tasked all his powers.
An ideal, a significance, a moral, that has to be inserted into a work
of art and that might have been omitted, is not likely to be firmly
joined; and it is liable to fall apart sooner or later. Morality, for
example, is not something to be put in or left out, at the caprice of
the creator; it is, as Mr. Henry James once called it, "a part of the
essential richness of inspiration." Therefore the artist need not give
thought to it. If his own soul is as clean as may be, and if his vision
is clear, the moral of his work may be left to take care of itself.
Nearly always when an artist has been over-anxious to charge his work
with a moral message, written so plain that all who run may read, he has
failed to attain either of his ends, the ethical or the esthetic. There
is a purpose plainly exprest in Miss Edgeworth's 'Moral Tales' and in
her 'Parent's Assistant'; and the result is that healthy girls and
wholesome boys are revolted. There was no moral intent in her
ever-delightful 'Castle Rackrent'; and yet it has an ethical
significance which few of its readers can have failed to feel.
Perhaps 'Castle Rackrent' is the finest of Miss Edgeworth's stories,
because it is the only one in which she had set herself a technical
problem of exceeding difficulty. She chose to use the faithful old
retainer to tell the tale of the family's downfall in consequence of its
weakness, its violence, and its vice. Thady has never a word of blame
for any son of the house he has served generation after generation.
Indeed, he is forever praising his succession of masters; but so
artfully does the author utilize the device of transparency that the
reader is put in possession of the damning facts, one by one, and is
soon able to see the truth of the matter which Thady himself has no
thought of revealing,--which, indeed, he would probably deny indignantly
if it was suggested by any one else.
The chief reason why the novel is still held to be inferior to the drama
is to be found in its looseness of form. The novel is not strictly
limited, as the play must be by the practical necessities of the
theater; and the practitioners of the art of fiction permit themselves a
license of structure which cannot but be enfeebling to the artists
themselves. Few of the novelists have ever gone about a whole winter
with a knot in their foreheads, such as Hawthorne carried there while he
was thinking out the 'Scarlet Letter.' And only by strenuous grappling
with his obstacles was he able to attain the masterly simplicity of that
Puritan tragedy. A resolute wrestling with difficulty is good not only
for the muscles but also for the soul; and it may be because they know
this, that artists are inclined to go afield in search of difficulties
to be overthrown, that they set themselves problems, that they accept
limitations. Herein we may see a cause for the long popularity of the
sonnet, with its restricted scheme of rimes. Herein, again, we may see a
reason for the desire of the novelist to try his fate as a dramatist.
"To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws," so Mr. James
once declared, "is always a strong man's highest ideal of success." The
novelist often fails as a dramatist, because he has the gift of the
story-teller only, and not that of the play-maker, but more often still
because the writing of fiction has provided him with no experience in
working beneath any law other than his own caprice.
The modern sculptor, by the mere fact that he may now order marble of
any shape and of any size, finds his work far easier and, therefore,
far less invigorating than it was long ago, when the artist needed to
have an alerter imagination to perceive in a given piece of marble the
beautiful figure he had to cut out of that particular block and no
other. Professor Mahaffy has suggested that the decay of genius may be
traced to the enfeebling facilities of our complex civilization. "In
art," he maintained, "it is often the conventional shackles,--the
necessities of rime and meter, the triangle of a gable, the circular top
of a barrel--which has led the poet, the sculptor, or the painter, to
strike out the most original and perfect products of their art.
Obstacles, if they are extrinsic and not intrinsic, only help to feed
the flame." Professor Butcher has declared that genius "wins its most
signal triumphs from the very limitations within which it works." And
this is what Gautier meant when he declared that the greater the
difficulty the more beautiful the work; or, as Mr. Austin Dobson has
paraphrased it:
Yes; when the ways oppose--
When the hard means rebel,
Fairer the work outgrows,--
More potent far the spell.
Not only has a useful addition to the accepted devices of the craft been
the guerdon of a victorious grapple with a difficulty, but the
successful effort to solve a purely technical problem has often led to
an ennobling enlargement of the original suggestion, with which the
artist might have rested content if he had not been forced to the
struggle. From the history of sculpture and of architecture here in the
United States during the last years of the nineteenth century, it is
easy to select two instances of this enrichment of the fundamental idea,
as the direct consequence of an unexpected obstacle which the artist
refused to consider a stumbling-block, preferring to make it a
stepping-stone to a loftier achievement.
When the city of New York was making ready to welcome the men of the
navy on their return from Manila and Santiago, the Architectural League
offered to design a triumphal arch. The site assigned, in front of
Madison Square, just where Broadway slants across Fifth Avenue, forced
the architect to face a difficulty seemingly unsurmountable. The line of
march was to be along Fifth Avenue, and, therefore, the stately monument
was set astride that street. But the line of approach, for most of the
multitude certain to come to gaze on the temporary addition to civic
beauty, was along Broadway; and the arch built squarely across the
avenue would seem askew to all who first caught sight of it from the
other street. To avoid this unfortunate effect the designer devised a
colonnade, extending north and south, up and down the avenue. Thus he
corrected the apparent slant by emphasizing the fact that it was the
avenue in which the arch was placed and not the more popular highway
that chanced to cut across it. But this colonnade, invented solely to
solve a difficulty, lent itself readily to rich adornment. It became at
once an integral element of the architectural scheme, to which it gave
breadth as well as variety. It was accepted instantly as a welcome
modification of the tradition,--as an amplification not to be wantonly
disregarded by any architect hereafter called upon to design a triumphal
arch.
To this illustration from architecture may be added another from
sculpture, as suggestive and as useful in showing how a conquest of
technical difficulty is likely ever to increase the resources of the
art. The sculptor of the statue of Lincoln, which ennobles a park of
Chicago, was instructed that the work of his hands was to stand upon a
knoll, visible from all sides, stark against the sky, unprotected by any
background of entablature or canopy. The gaunt figure of Lincoln is not
a thing of beauty to be gazed at from all the points of the compass; and
the stern veracity of the artist would not permit him to disguise the
ill-fitting coat and trousers by any arbitrary draperies, mendaciously
cloaking the clothes which were intensely characteristic of the man to
be modeled. To shield the awkwardness of the effigy when seen from the
rear, a chair was placed behind it; and so the sculptor was led to
present Lincoln as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, arisen from the
chair of state, to address the people from whom he had received his
authority. And thus, at that late day, at the end of the nineteenth
century, Mr. Saint-Gaudens did a new thing; altho there had been
standing statues and seated statues, no sculptor had ever before
designed a figure just rising from his seat.
It is by victories like these over technical difficulties that the arts
advance; and it is in combats like these that the true artist finds his
pleasure. The delight of battle is his, as he returns to the attack,
again and again, until at last he wins the day and comes home laden with
the spoil. The true artist hungers after technic for its own sake, well
knowing the nourishment it affords. He even needlessly puts on fetters
now and again, that he may find sharper zest in his effort. This
ravenous appetite for technic leads many an artist to go outside his own
art in search of unforeseen but fascinating difficulties. The painter is
tempted to stretch his muscles by a tussle with the unknown obstacles of
the sculptor; and the sculptor in his turn contends with the limitations
of the painter. Michelangelo called himself a sculptor and pretended to
be no more; but in time he took up the craft of the architect, of the
painter and of the poet. And this interchange of field in search of new
worlds to conquer seems to be characteristic of the great periods of
artistic activity and achievement. In all such periods, the more
accomplished craftsmen have never wearied of technical experiment to the
constant enrichment of the processes of their art.
It is the uncreative critics, it is never the creative craftsmen, who
dwell on the danger of taking too much interest in technic. The critics
may think that the more attention the artist pays to his manner, the
less he has for his matter, and that he is in peril of sacrificing
content to form. But the craftsmen themselves know better; they know
that no one may surely separate manner and matter, form and content,
Siamese twins often, coming into being at a single birth. Furthermore,
the artist knows that technic is the one quality he can control, every
man for himself, every man improving himself as best he can. His native
gift, his temperament,--this is what it is; and what it is it must be;
and no man can better it by any effort. His character, also, the
personality of the artist, that which gives a large meaning to his
work,--how little can any man control this result of heredity and
environment?
If an artist has anything to say it will out, sooner or later, however
absorbed he may be in finding the best way of saying it. If he has
nothing to say, if he has no message for the heart of man, he may at
least give some pleasure to his contemporaries by the sheer dexterity of
his craftsmanship. There would have been no more meaning in Poe's verse,
if there had been less melody, if the poet had less devotedly studied
the "book of iambs and pentameters." There would have been no larger
significance in the painted epigrams of Gérôme, if that master of line
had cared less for draftsmanship. There would have been no more solid
value in the often amusing plays of Sardou, if he had not delighted in
the ingenuity of his dramaturgical devices. At bottom, Sardou, Gérôme,
and Poe, had little or nothing to say; that is their misfortune, no
doubt; but it is not their fault, for, apparently, each one of them made
the best of his native gift.
In his time Milton was the most careful and conscientious of artists in
verse-making, and so, in his turn, was Pope, whose ideals were
different, but whose skill was no less in its kind. So, again, was
Tennyson untiring in seeking to attain ultimate perfection of phrase,
consciously employing every artifice of alliteration, assonance and
rime. But, if Milton's verse seems to us now noble and lofty, while
Pope's appears to us as rather petty and merely clever, surely this is
because Milton himself was noble and his native endowment lofty, and
because Pope himself was petty and his gift only cleverness; surely it
is not because they were both of them as much interested in the
mechanics of their art as was Tennyson after them.
One of the wittiest critics of our modern civilization, the late
Clarence King, remarked, some ten years ago, that the trouble with
American fiction just then lay in the fact that it had the most
elaborate machinery,--and no boiler. But the fault of our fiction at
that time was to be sought in the absence of steam,--and not in the
machinery itself which stood ready to do its work, to the best advantage
and with the utmost economy of effort, just so soon as the power might
be applied.
(1904.)