But we ought to note a borderland in which the concern is
professedly not with beauty, but with ideas of life. Aristotle's
lover of knowledge, who rejoiced to say of a picture "This is
that man," is the inspirer of drawing as opposed to the art of
visual form.
It is not beauty we seek from the Rembrandt and Durer of the
etchings and woodcuts, from Hogarth, Goya, Klinger, down to
Leech and Keene and Du Maurier; it is not beauty, but ideas,--
information, irony, satire, life-philosophy. Where there is
a conflict, beauty, as we have defined it, goes to the wall.
We may trace, perhaps, the ground of this in the highly increased
amount of symbolic, associative power given, and required, in
the black and white. Even to understand such a picture demands
such an enormous amount of unconscious mental supplementation
that it is natural to find the aesthetic centre of gravity in
that element.
The first conditions of the work, that is, determine its trend
and aim. The part played by imagination in our vision of an
etching is and must be so important, that it is, after all, the
imaginative part which outweighs the given. Nor do we desire the
given to infringe upon the ideal field. Thus do we understand
that for most drawings a background vague and formless is the
desideratum. "Such a tone is the foil for psychological
moments, as they are handled by Goya, for instance, with
barbarically magnificent nakedness. On a background which is
scarcely indicated, with few strokes, which barely suggest
space, he impales like a butterfly the human type, mostly in a
moment of folly or wickedness.... The least definition of
surrounding would blunt his (the artist's) keenness, and make
his vehemence absurd."<1>
<1> Max Klinger, _Malerei u. Zeichnung_, 1903, p. 42.
This theory of the aim of black and white is confirmed by the
fact that while a painting is composed for the size in which it
is painted, and becomes another picture if reproduced in another
measure, the size of drawings is relatively indifferent; reduced
or enlarged, the effect is approximately the same, because what
is given to the eye is such a small proportion of the whole
experience. The picture is only the cue for a complete structure
of ideas.
Here is a true case of Anders-Streben, that "partial alienation
from its own limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed
to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each
other new forces."<1> It is by its success as representation
that the art of the burin and needle--Griffelkunst, as Klinger
names it--ought first to be judged. This is not saying that it
may not also possess beauty of form to a high degree,--only that
this beauty of form is not its characteristic excellence.
<1> W. Pater, _The Renaissance: Essay on Giorgione_.
In what consists the beauty of visual form? If this question
could be answered in a sentence our whole discussion of the
abstract formula for beauty would have been unnecessary. But
since we know what the elements of visual form must do to bring
about the aesthetic experience, it has been the aim of the
preceding pages to show how those elements must be determined
and related. The eye, the psychophysical organism, must be
favorably stimulated; these, and such colors, combinations,
lines as we have described, are fitted to do it. It must be
brought to repose; these, and such relations between lines and
colors as we have set forth, are fitted to do it, for reasons
we have given. It is to the eye and all that waits upon it
that the first and the last appeal of fine art must be made;
and in so far as the emotion or the idea belonging to a
picture or a statue waits upon the eye, in so far does it
enter into the characteristic excellence, that is, the beauty
of visual form.