Title: The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life
Author: Noyes, Carleton Eldredge, 1872-1950
Language: English
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THE GATE OF APPRECIATION
Studies in the Relation of Art to Life

BY

CARLETON NOYES

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1907


COPYRIGHT 1907 BY CARLETON NOYES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


_Published April 1907_


TO
MY FATHER
AND THE MEMORY OF
MY MOTHER


"Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves,
As souls only understand souls."


CONTENTS

Preface                               i
I.      The Impulse to Expression     i
II.     The Attitude of Response     23
III.    Technique and the Layman     44
IV.     The Value of the Medium      87
V.      The Background of Art       105
VI.     The Service of Criticism    137
VII.    Beauty and Common Life      165
VIII.   The Arts of Form            201
IX.     Representation              221
X.      The Personal Estimate       254



PREFACE

IN the daily life of the ordinary man, a life crowded with diverse
interests and increasingly complex demands, some few moments of
a busy week or month or year are accorded to an interest in art.
Whatever may be his vocation, the man feels instinctively that in his
total scheme of life books, pictures, music have somewhere a place.
In his own business or profession he is an expert, a man of special
training; and intelligently he does not aspire to a complete
understanding of a subject which lies beyond his province. In the
same spirit in which he is a master of his own craft, he is content to
leave expert knowledge of art to the expert, to the artist and to the
connoisseur. For his part as a layman he remains frankly and happily
on the outside. But he feels none the less that art has an interest and
a meaning even for him. Though he does not practice any art himself,
he knows that he enjoys fine things, a beautiful room, noble
buildings, books and plays, statues, pictures, music; and he believes
that in his own fashion he is able to appreciate art, I venture to think
that he is right.

There is a case for the outsider in reference to art. And I have tried
here to state it. This book is an attempt to suggest the possible
meaning of art to the ordinary man, to indicate methods of approach
to art, and to trace the way of appreciation. It is essentially a
personal record, an account of my own adventures with the problem.
The book does not pretend to finality; the results are true for me as
far as I have gone. They may or may not be true for another. If they
become true for another man, he is the one for whom the book was
written. I do not apologize because the shelter here put together, in
which I have found a certain comfort, is not a palace. Rude as the
structure may be, any man is welcomed to it who may find solace
there in an hour of need.

     C. N.
CAMBRIDGE, _November second, 1906._



I

THE IMPULSE TO EXPRESSION

TOWARD evening a traveler through a wild country finds himself
still in the open, with no hope of reaching a village that night. The
wind is growing chill; clouds are gathering in the west, threatening
rain. There rises in him a feeling of the need of shelter; and he looks
about him to see what material is ready to his hand. Scattered stones
will serve for supports and low walls; there are fallen branches for
the roof; twigs and leaves can be woven into a thatch. Already the
general design has shaped itself in his mind. He sets to work,
modifying the details of his plan to suit the resources of his material.
At last, after hours of hard thought and eager toil, spurred on by his
sense of his great need, the hut is ready; and fee takes refuge in it as
the storm breaks.

The entire significance of the man's work is _shelter._ The
beginning of it lay in his need of shelter. The impulse to action rose
out of his consciousness of his need. His imagination conceived the
plan whereby the need might be met, and the plan gave shape to his
material. The actual result of his labor was a hut, but the hut itself
was not the end for which he strove. The hut was but the means. The
all-inclusive import of his work--the stimulus which impelled him to
act, the purpose for which he toiled, and the end which he
accomplished--is shelter.

A man of special sensitiveness to the appeal of color and form finds
himself also in the open. He is weary with the way, which shows but
broken glimpses of the road. His spirit, heavy with the "burden of
the mystery," is torn by conflict and confusion. As he looks across
the stony places to the gnarled and weather-tortured trees beyond,
and up to the clouds piling black above him, there is revealed to him
a sudden harmony among the discords; an inner principle,
apprehended by his imagination, compels the fragments of the
seeming chaos into a regnant order. These natural forms become for
him the expression external to himself of the struggle of his own
spirit and its final resolution. The desire rises in him to express by
his own act the order he has newly perceived, the harmony of his
spirit with the spirit of nature. As life comes to him dominantly in
terms of color and form, it is with color and form that he works to
expression so as to satisfy his need. The design is already projected
in his imagination, and to realize concretely his ideal he draws upon
the material of nature about him. The picture which he paints is not
the purpose of his effort. The picture is but the means. His end is to
express the great new harmony in which his spirit finds shelter.

Both men, the traveler and the painter, are wayfarers. Both are
seeking shelter from stress and storm, and both construct their
means. In one case the product is more obviously and immediately
practical, and the informing purpose tends to become obscured in
the actual serviceableness of the result. The hut answers a need that
is primarily physical; the need in the other case is spiritual. But it is
a matter of degree. In essence and import the achievement of the two
men is the same. The originating impulse, a sense of need; the
processes involved, the combination of material elements to a
definite end; the result attained, shelter which answers the need,--they
are identical. Both men are artists. Both hut and picture are
works of art.

So art is not remote from common life after all. In its highest
manifestations art is life at its best; painting, sculpture, poetry, music
are the distillment and refinement of experience. Architecture and
the subsidiary arts of decoration adorn necessity and add delight to
use. But whatever the flower and final fruit, art strikes its roots deep
down into human need, and draws its impulse and its sustenance
from the very sources of life itself. In the wide range from the hut in
the wilderness to a Gothic cathedral, from the rude scratches
recorded on the cave walls of prehistoric man to the sublimities of
the Sistine Chapel, there is no break in the continuity of effort and
aspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist,
so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot be
passed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization to-day that
art has become specialized and the practice of it is limited to a few;
in consequence artists have become a kind of class. But essentially
the possibilities of art lie within the scope of any man, given the
right conditions. So too the separation of the "useful arts" from the
"fine arts" is unjust to art and perversive of right appreciation.
Whatever the form in which it may manifest itself, from the lowest
to the highest, the art spirit is one, and it may quicken in any man
who sets mind and heart to the work of his hand. That man is an
artist who fashions a new thing that he may express himself in
response to his need.

Art is creation. It is the combination of already existing material
elements into new forms which become thus the realization of a
preconceived idea. Both hut and picture rose in the imagination of
their makers before they took shape as things. The material of each
was given already in nature; but the form, as the maker fashioned it,
was new. Commonly we think of art as the expression and
communication of emotion. A picture, a statue, a symphony we
recognize as the symbol of what the artist has felt in some passage
of his experience and the means by which he conveys his feeling to
us. Art _is_ the expression of emotion, but all art springs out of need.
The sense of need which impels expression through the medium of
creation is itself an emotion. The hut which the traveler built for
himself in the wilderness--shaping it according to the design which
his imagination suggested, having reference to his need and to the
character of his materials--was a work of creation; the need which
prompted it presented itself to him as emotion. The picture which
the other wayfarer painted of the storm-swept landscape, a harmony
which his imagination compelled out of discords, was a work of
creation; the emotion which inspired the work was attended by need,
the need of expression. The material and practical utility of the hut
obscures the emotional character of its origin; the emotional import
of the picture outweighs consideration of its utility to the painter as
the means by which his need of expression is satisfied. The
satisfaction of physical needs which results in the creation of
utilities and the satisfaction of spiritual needs which results in the
forms of expression we commonly call works of art differ one from
the other in their effect on the total man only in degree. All works of
use whose conception and making have required an act of creation
are art; all art--even in its supreme manifestations--embraces
elements of use. The measure in which a work is art is established
by the intensity and scope of its maker's emotion and by his power
to body forth his feeling in harmonious forms which in turn recreate
the emotion in the spirit of those whom his work reaches.

In its essence and widest compass art is the making of a new thing in
response to a sense of need. The very need itself creates, working
through man as its agent. This truth is illustrated vividly by the
miracles of modern invention. The hand of man unaided was not
able to cope with his expanding opportunities; the giant steam and
the magician electricity came at his call to work their wonders. The
plow and scythe of the New England colonist on his little farm were
metamorphosed into the colossal steam-driven shapes, in which
machinery seems transmuted into intelligence, as he moved to the
conquest of the acres of the West which summoned him to dominion.
First the need was felt; the contrivance was created in response. A
man of business sees before him in imagination the end to be
reached, and applying his ideal to practical conditions, he makes
every detail converge to the result desired. All rebellious
circumstances, all forces that pull the other way, he bends to his
compelling will, and by the shaping power of his genius he
accomplishes his aim. His business is his medium of self-expression;
his success is the realization of his ideal. A painter does no more
than this, though he works with a different material. The landscape
which is realized ultimately upon his canvas is the landscape seen in
his imagination. He draws his colors and forms from nature around;
but he selects his details, adapting them to his end. All accidents and
incidents are purged away. Out of the apparent confusion of life
rises the evident order of art. And in the completed work the artist's
_idea_ stands forth salient and victorious.

That consciousness of need which compels creation is the origin of
art. The owner of a dwelling who first felt the need of securing his
door so that he alone might possess the secret and trick of access
devised a lock and key, rude enough, as we can fancy. As the maker
of the first lock and key he was an artist. All those who followed
where he had led, repeating his device without modification, were
but artisans. In the measure that any man changed the design,
however, adapting it more closely to his peculiar needs and so
making it anew, to that extent he was an artist also. The man who
does a thing for the first time it is done is an artist; a man who does a
thing better is an artist. The painter who copies his object imitatively,
finding nothing, creating nothing, is an artisan, however skillful he
may be. He is an artist in the degree in which he brings to his subject
something of his own, and fashioning it, however crudely, to express
the idea he has conceived of the object, so creates.

The difference between work which is art and work which is not art
is just this element of the originating impulse and creative act. The
difference, though often seemingly slight and not always
immediately perceived, is all-important. It distinguishes the artist
from the artisan; a free spirit from a slave; a thinking, feeling man
from a soulless machine. It makes the difference between life rich
and significant, and mere existence; between the mastery of fate and
the passive acceptance of things as they are.

If a mind and heart are behind it to control and guide it to expression,
even the machine may be an instrument in the making of a work of
art. It is not the work itself, but the motive which prompted the
making of it, that determines its character as art. Art is not the way a
thing is done, but the reason why it is done. A chair, though turned
on a lathe, may be a work of art, if the maker has truly expressed
himself in his work. A picture, though "hand-painted," may be
wholly mechanical in spirit. To set about "making a picture" is to
begin at the wrong end. The impulse to art flows from within
outwards. Art is bound up with life itself; like nature, it is organic
and must grow. The form cannot be laid on from the outside; it is
born and must develop in response to vital need. In so far as our acts
are consciously the expression of ourselves they are prompted by the
art spirit.

All our acts are reducible to one of two kinds: either they are acts of
creation, effecting a new result, or they are acts of repetition. Acts of
repetition tend rapidly to become habits; and they may be performed
without attention or positive volition. Thus, as I am dressing in the
morning I may be planning the work for the day; while my mind is
given over to thought, I lose the sense of my material surroundings,
my muscles work automatically, the motor-currents flowing through
the well-worn grooves, and by force of habit the acts execute
themselves. Obviously, acts of repetition, or habits, make up the
larger part of our daily lives.

Acts of creation, on the other hand, are performed by an effort of the
will in response to the consciousness of a need. To meet the new
need we are obliged to make new combinations. I assume that the
traveler constructed his hut for the first time, shaping it to the special
new conditions; that the harmony which the painter discerned in the
tumult around him he experienced for the first time, and the picture
which he paints, shaped with reference to his need and fulfilling it,
is a new thing. In the work produced by this act of creation, the
feeling which has prompted it finds expression. In the making of the
hut, in the painting of the picture, the impelling need is satisfied.

Although acts of repetition constitute the bulk of life, creation is of
its very essence and determines its quality. The significance and joy
of life are less in being than in _becoming._ Growth is expression,
and in turn expression is made possible by growth. In our
conscious experience the sense of becoming is one of our supreme
satisfactions. Growth is the purpose and the recompense of our
being here, the end for which we strive and the reward of all the
effort and the struggle. In the exercise of brain or hand, to feel the
work take form, develop, and become something,--that is happiness.
And the joy is in the creating rather than in the thing created; the
completed work is behind us, and we move forward to new creation.
A painter's best picture is the blank canvas before him; an author's
greatest book is the one he is just setting himself to write. The desire
for change for the sake of change which we all feel at times, a vague
restlessness of mind and body, is only the impulse to growth which
has not found its direction. Outside of us we love to see the
manifestation of growth. We tend and cherish the little plant in the
window; we watch with delight the unfolding of each new leaf and
the upward reach into blossom. The spring, bursting triumphant
from the silent, winter-stricken earth, is nature's parable of
expression, her symbol perennially renewed of the joy of growth.

The impulse to expression is cosmic and eternal. But even in the
homeliness and familiarity of our life from day to day the need of
expression is there, whether we are entirely aware of it or not; and
we are seeking the realization and fulfillment of ourselves through
the utterance of what we are. A few find their expression in forms
which with distinct limitation of the term we call works of art. Most
men find it in their daily occupations, their profession or their
business. The president of one of the great Western railroads
remarked once in conversation that he would rather build a thousand
miles of railroad than live in the most sumptuous palace on Fifth
Avenue. Railroad building was his medium of expression; it was his
art. Some express themselves in shaping their material environment,
in the decoration and ordering of their houses. A young woman said,
"My ambition is to keep my house well." Again, for her,
housekeeping is her art. Some find the realization of themselves in
the friends they draw around them. Love is but the utterance of what
we essentially are; and the response to it in the loved one makes the
utterance articulate and complete. Expression rises out of our
deepest need, and the need impels expression.

The assertion that art is thus involved with need seems for the
moment to run counter to the usual conception, which regards art as
a product of leisure, a luxury, and the result not of labor but of play.
Art in its higher forms becomes more and more purely the
expression of emotion, the un-trammeled record of the artist's
spiritual experience. It is only when physical necessities have been
met or ignored that the spirit of man has free range. But the maker
who adds decoration to his bowl after he has moulded it is just as
truly fulfilling a need--the need of self-expression--as he fulfilled a
need when he fashioned the bowl in the first instance in order that he
might slake his thirst. Art is not superadded to life,--something
different in kind. All through its ascent from its rudimentary forms
to its highest, from hut to cathedral, art is coordinate with the
development of life, continuous and without breach or sudden end; it
is the expression step by step of ever fuller and ever deeper
experience.

Creation, therefore, follows upon the consciousness of need,
whether the need be physical, as with the traveler, or spiritual, as
with the painter; from physical to spiritual we pass by a series of
gradations. At their extremes they are easy to distinguish, one from
the other; but along the way there is no break in the continuity. The
current formula for art, that art is the utterance of man's joy in his
work, is not quite accurate. In the act of creation the maker finds the
expression of himself. The man who decorates a bowl in response to
his own creative impulse is expressing himself. The painter who
thrills to the wonder and significance of nature is impelled to
expression; and his delight is not fully realized and complete until he
has uttered it. Such art is love expressed, and the artist's work is his
"hymn of the praise of things." But the joy for both the potter and
the painter, the joy which is so bound up with art as to partake of its
very essence, is the joy which attends self-expression and the
satisfaction of the need.

A work of art is a work of creation brought into being as the
expression of emotion. The traveler creates not the wood and stone
but shelter, by means of the hut; the painter creates not the landscape
but the beauty of it; the musician creates not the musical tones, but
by means of a harmony of tones he creates an emotional experience.
The impulse to art rises out of the earliest springs of consciousness
and vibrates through all life. Art does not disdain to manifest itself
in the little acts of expression of simple daily living; with all its
splendid past and vital present it is ever seeking new and greater
forms whose end is not yet. I spoke of the work of the traveler
through the wilderness as art; the term was applied also to
railroad-building and to housekeeping. The truth to be illustrated by these
examples is that the primary impulse to artistic expression does not
differ in essence from the impulse to creation of any kind. The
nature of the thing created, as art, depends upon the emotional value
of the result, the degree in which it expresses immediately the
emotion of its creator, and the power it possesses to rouse the
emotion in others. To show that all art is creation and that all
creation tends toward art is not to obscure useful distinctions, but
rather to restore art to its rightful place in the life of man.

In the big sense, then, art is bounded only by life itself. It is not a
cult; it is not an activity practiced by the few and a mystery to be
understood only by those who are initiated into its secrets. One
difficulty in the way of the popular understanding of art is due to the
fact that the term art is currently limited to its highest manifestations;
we withhold the title of artist from a good carpenter or
cabinet-maker who takes a pride in his work and expresses his creative
desire by shaping his work to his own idea, and we bestow the name
upon any juggler in paint: with the result that many people who are
not painters or musicians feel themselves on that account excluded
from all appreciation. If we go behind the various manifestations of
art to discover just what art is in itself and to determine wherein it is
able to link itself with common experience, we find that art is the
response to a need. And that need may waken in any man. Every
man may be an artist in his degree; and every man in his degree can
appreciate art. A work of art is the expression of its maker's
experience, the expression in such terms that the experience can be
communicated to another. The processes of execution involved in
fashioning a work, its technique, may be as incomprehensible and
perplexed and difficult as its executants choose to make them.
Technique is not the same as art. The only mystery of art is the
mystery of all life itself. Accept life with its fundamental mysteries,
with its wonders and glories, and we have the clue to art. But we
miss the central fact of the whole matter if we do not perceive that
art is only a means. It is by expression that we grow and so fulfill
ourselves. The work itself which art calls into being is not the end. It
fails of its purpose, remaining void and vain, if it does not perform
its function. The hut which does not furnish shelter is labor lost. The
significance of the painter's effort does not stop with the canvas and
pigment which he manipulates into form and meaning. The artist
sees beyond the actual material thing which he is fashioning; his
purpose in creation is expression. By means of his picture he
expresses himself and so finds the satisfaction of his deepest need.
The beginning and the end of art is life.

But the artist's work of expression is not ultimately complete until
the message is received, and expression becomes communication as
his utterance calls out a response in the spirit of a fellow-man. Art
exists not only for the artist's sake but for the appreciator too. As art
has its origin in emotion and is the expression of it, so for the
appreciator the individual work has a meaning and is art in so far as
it becomes for him the expression of what he has himself felt but
could not phrase; and it is art too in the measure in which it is the
revelation of larger possibilities of feeling and creates in him a new
emotional experience. The impulse to expression is common to all;
the difference is one of degree. And the message of art is for all,
according as they are attuned to the response. Art is creation. For the
artist it is creation by expression; for the appreciator it is creation by
evocation. These two principles complete the cycle; abstractly and
very briefly they are the whole story of art.

To be responsive to the needs of life and its emotional appeal is the
first condition of artistic creation. By new combinations of material
elements to bring emotion to expression in concrete harmonious
forms, themselves charged with emotion and communicating it, is to
fashion a work of art. To feel in material, whether in the forms of
nature or in works of art, a meaning for the spirit is the condition of
appreciation.



II

THE ATTITUDE OF RESPONSE

IT is a gray afternoon in late November. The day is gone; evening is
not yet come. Though too dark to read or write longer, it is not dark
enough for drawn shades and the lamp. As I sit in the gathering dusk,
my will hovering between work done and work to do, I surrender to
the mood of the moment. The day is accomplished, but it is not yet a
remembrance, for it is still too near for me to define the details that
made up its hours. Consciousness, not sharp enough for thought,
floats away into diffused and obscure emotion. The sense is upon
me and around me that I am vaguely, unreasoningly, yet pleasantly,
unhappy. Out of the dimness a trick of memory recalls to me the
lines,--

     "Tears! tears! tears!
     In the night, in solitude, tears,
     On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand,
     Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,
     Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;
     O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?
     What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand?
     Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
     O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the
          beach!
     O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and
          desperate!
     O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance
          and regulated pace,
     But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the
          unloosened ocean
     Of tears! tears! tears!"

Now I know. My mood was the mood of tears. The poet, too, has
felt what I was feeling. And as a poet he has been able to bring his
emotion to expression. By the magic of phrase and the mystery of
image he has, out of the moving of his spirit, fashioned a concrete
reality. By means of his expression, because of it, his emotion
becomes realized, and so reaches its fulfillment. And for me, what
before was vague has been made definite. The poet's lines have
wakened in me a response; I have felt what he has phrased; and now
they become my expression too. As my mood takes form, I become
conscious of its meaning. I can distill its significance for the spirit,
and in the emotion made definite and realizable as consciousness I
feel and know that I am living. Doubly, completely, the poem is a
work of art. And my response to it, the absorption of it into my own
experience, is appreciation.

I appreciate the poem as I make the experience which the poet has
here phrased my own, and at the instant of reading I live out in
myself what he has lived and here expressed. I read the words, and
intellectually I take in their signification, but the poem is not
realized in me until it wakens in me the feeling which the words are
framed to convey. The images which an artist employs have the
power to rouse emotion in us, so that they come to stand for the
emotion itself. We care for nature and it is beautiful to us as its
forms become objectively the intimate expression for us of what we
feel.

     "O to realize space!
     The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
     To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying
          clouds, as one with them."

In his contact with the external world the artist identifies himself
with his object. If he is painting a tree he in a measure becomes the
tree; he values it at all because it expresses for him concretely what
he feels in its presence. The object and his spirit fuse; and through
the fusion they together grow into a new and larger unity. What his
work expresses is not the object for its own sake but this larger unity
of his identity with it. To appreciate the artist's work, therefore, we
must in our turn merge ourselves in his emotion, and becoming one
with it, so extend our personality into larger life.

To make the artist's emotion our own, to identify ourselves with the
object which he presents to us, we must pass beyond the material
form in which the work is embodied, letting the spirit and meaning
of it speak to our spirit. In itself an individual picture or statue or
symphony is an objective, material thing, received into
consciousness along the channel of the senses; but its origin and its
end alike are in emotion. The material form, whether in nature or in
works of art, is only the means by which the emotion is
communicated. A landscape in nature is composed of meadow and
hills, blue sky and tumbling clouds; these are the facts of the
landscape. But they are not fixed and inert. The imagination of the
beholder combines these elements into a harmony of color and mass;
his spirit flows into consonance with the harmony his imagination
has compelled out of nature, becoming one with it. To regard the
world not as facts and things, but as everywhere the stimulus of
feeling, feeling which becomes our own experience, is the condition
of appreciation.

To the awakening mind of a child, life is full of wonder, and each
unfolding day reveals new marvels of excitement and surprise. As
yet untrammeled by any sense of the limitations of material, his
quick imagination peoples his world with creatures of his fancy,
which to him are more real than the things he is able actually to see
and touch. For him the external world is fluid and plastic, to be
moulded into forms at will in obedience to his creative desire. In the
tiny bundle of rags which mother-love clasps tight to her heart, a
little girl sees only the loveliest of babies; and a small boy with his
stick of lath and newspaper cap and plume is a mightier than
Napoleon. The cruder the toy, the greater is the pleasure in the game;
for the imagination delights in the exercise of itself. A wax doll, sent
from Paris, with flaxen hair and eyes that open and shut, is laid away,
when the mere novelty of it is exhausted, in theatric chest, and the
little girl is fondling again her first baby of rag and string. A real
steel sword and tin helmet are soon cast aside, and the boy is back
again among the toys of his own making. That impulse to creation
which all men feel, the impulse which makes the artist, is especially
active in a child; his games are his art. With a child material is not
an end but a means. Things are for him but the skeleton of life, to be
clothed upon by the flesh and blood reality of his own fashioning.
His feeling is in excess of his knowledge. He has a faculty of
perception other than the intellectual. It is imagination.

The child is the first artist. Out of the material around him he creates
a world of his own. The prototypes of the forms which he devises
exist in life, but it is the thing which he himself makes that interests
him, not its original in nature. His play is his expression. He creates;
and he is able to merge himself in the thing created. In his play he
loses all consciousness of self. He and the toy become one, caught
up in the larger unity of the game. According as he identifies himself
with the thing outside of him, the child is the first appreciator.

Then comes a change.

     "Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
     Shades of the prison-house begin to close
          Upon the growing Boy,
     But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
          He sees it in his joy;
     The Youth, who daily farther from the east
     Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
          And by the vision splendid
          Is on his way attended;
     At length the Man perceives it die away,
     And fade into the light of common day."

Imagination surrenders to the intellect; emotion gives place to
knowledge.

Gradually the material world shuts in about us until it becomes for
us a hard, inert thing, and no longer a living, changing presence,
instinct with infinite possibilities of experience and feeling. Now
custom lies upon us

          "with a weight,
     Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"

It happens, unfortunately for our enjoyment of life, that we get used
to things. Little by little we come to accept them, to take them for
granted, and they cease to mean anything to us. Habit, which is our
most helpful ally in lending our daily life its practical efficiency, is
the foe of emotion and appreciation. Habit allows us to perform
without conscious effort the innumerable little acts of each day's
necessity which we could not possibly accomplish if every single act
required a fresh exercise of will. But just because its action is
unconscious and unregarded, habit blunts the edge of our
sensibilities. "Thus let but a Rising of the Sun," says Carlyle, "let but
a creation of the World happen _twice,_ and it ceases to be
marvelous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable."

"Except ye become as little children!" Unless the world is
new-created every day, unless we can thrill to the beauty of nature with
its fair surfaces and harmonies of vibrant sounds, or quicken to the
throb of human life with its occupations and its play of energies, its
burdens and its joys, unless we find an answer to our needs, and
gladness, in sunlight or storms, in the sunset and evening and
solitude under the stars, in fields and hills or in thronging city streets,
in conflict and struggle or in the face of a friend, unless each new
day is a gift and new opportunity, then we cannot interpret the
meaning of life nor read the riddle of art. For we cannot truly
appreciate art except as we learn to appreciate life. Until then art has
no message for us; it is a sealed book, and we shall not open the
book nor loose the seals thereof. The meaning of life is for the spirit,
and art is its minister. To share in the communion we must become
as children. As a child uses the common things of life to his own
ends, transfiguring them by force of his creative desire, and
fashioning thus a wonderful world of his own by the exercise of his
shaping imagination, a world of limitless incident and high
adventure, so we must penetrate the visible and tangible actuality
around us, the envelope of seemingly inert matter cast in forms of
rigid definition, and we must open ourselves to the influence of
nature. That influence--nature's power to inspire, quicken, and
dilate--flowing through the channel of the senses, plays upon our
spirit. The indwelling significance of things is apprehended by the
imagination, and is won for us in the measure that we feel.

As we respond to the emotional appeal of the great universe external
to ourselves we come to realize that the material world which we see
and touch is not final. In the experience of us all there are moments
of exaltation and quickened response, moments of illumination
when--

          "with an eye made quiet by the power
     Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
     We see into the life of things."

The "life of things" is their significance for the spirit. By spirit I
mean the sum of our conscious being, that complete entity within us
which we recognize as the self. The material world, external, visible,
tangible, may be regarded as the actual world. The real world is the
world of spiritual forces and relations, apprehended by the
imagination and received with feeling. Life, in the sense of our
conscious experience of the world, is the moving of the spirit in
emotion.

The measure of life for the individual, therefore, is the degree of
intensity with which he feels. Experience is not meted out by weeks
and months; it is to be sounded by the depth and poignancy of
instant emotion. Variety and multitude of incident may crowd
through insentient years and leave no record of their progress along
the waste places of their march. Or a day may be a lifetime. In such
moments of intensest experience time and space fall away and are
not. The outermost bounds of things recede; they vanish altogether:
and we are made free of the universe. At such moments we are truly
living; then we really _are._

As the meaning of art is not the material thing which it calls into
form, but what the work expresses of life, so in order to appreciate
art it is necessary to appreciate life, which is the inspiration of art
and its fulfillment. To appreciate life is to send out our being into
experience and to _feel_,--to realize in terms of emotion our
identity with the great universe outside of us, this world of color and
form and sound and movement, this web of illimitable activities and
energies, shot through with currents of endlessly varied and
modulated feeling. "My son," says the father in Hindu lore, pointing
to an animal, a tree, a rock, "my son, thou art that!" The universe is
one. Of it we are each an essential part, distinct as individuals, yet
fusing with it in our sense of our vital kinship with all other parts
and with the whole. I am sauntering through the Public Garden on a
fragrant hushed evening in June; touched by the lingering afterglow,
the twilight has not yet deepened into night. Grouped about a bench,
children are moving softly in the last flicker of play, while the
mother nods above them. On the next bench a wanderer is stretched
at full length, his face hidden in his crooked-up arm. I note a couple
seated, silent, with shoulder touching shoulder. I meet a young man
and woman walking hand in hand; they do not see me as I pass.
Beyond, other figures are soundless shadows, gathering out of the
enveloping dusk. It is all so intimate and friendly. The air, the
flowers, the bit of water through the trees reflecting the lights of the
little bridge, are a caress. And it is all for me! I am a child at his
tired play, I am the sleeping tramp, I am the young fellow with his
girl. It is not the sentiment of the thing, received intellectually, that
makes it mine. My being goes out into these other lives and becomes
one with them. I feel them in myself. It is not thought that
constitutes appreciation; it is emotion.

Another glimpse, caught this time through a car window. Now it is a
winter twilight. The flurry of snow has passed. The earth is
penetrated with blue light, suffused by it, merged in it, ever blue.
Vague forms, still and shadowy, of hills and trees, soppy with light,
are blue within the blue. The brief expanse of bay is deeply
luminous and within the pervasive tempering light resolves itself
into the cool and solemn reaches of the sky which bends down and
touches it. Once more my spirit meets and mingles with the spirit of
the landscape. By the harmony of nature's forms and twilight tones I
am brought into a larger harmony within myself and with the world
around.

All experience offers to us at any moment just such possibilities of
living. The infinite and ever-changing expressiveness of nature at
every instant of day and night is ours to read if we will but look
upon it with the inner vision. The works of men in cities and
cultivated fields, if we will see beyond the actual material, may
quicken our emotions until we enact in ourselves their story of
struggle, of hopes and ambitions partly realized, of defeat or final
triumph. The faces seen in a passing crowd bear each the record of
life lived, of lives like ours of joys or disappointments, lives of great
aims or no aims at all, of unwritten heroisms, of hidden tragedies
bravely borne, lives sordid and mean or generous and bright. The
panorama of the world unrolls itself _for us._ It is ours to experience
and live out in our own being according as we are able to feel. Just
as the impulse to expression is common to all men, and all are artists
potentially, differing in the depth of their insight into life and in the
degree of emotion they have to express, so appreciation lies within
the scope of all, and the measure of it to us as individuals is
determined by our individual capability of response.

Life means to each one of us what we are able to receive of it in
"wise passiveness," and then are able by the constructive force of
our individuality to shape into coherence and completeness. As the
landscape which an artist paints is the landscape visioned in
imagination, though composed of forms given in nature, so life
furnishes us the elements of experience, and out of these elements
we construct a meaning, each for himself. To one man an object or
incident is commonplace and blank; to another it may be charged
with significance and big with possibilities of fuller living. "In every
object." says Carlyle, "there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees
in it what it brings means of seeing." To _see_ is not merely to
receive an image upon the retina. The stimulation of the visual organ
becomes sight properly only as the record is conveyed to the
consciousness. When I am reading a description of a sunset, there is
an image upon my retina of a white page and black marks of
different forms grouped in various combinations. But what I see is
the sunset. Momentarily to rest the eye upon a landscape is not
really to see it, for our mind may be quite otherwhere. We see the
landscape only as it becomes part of our conscious experience. The
beauty of it is in us. A novelist conceives certain characters and
assembles them in action and reaction, but it is we who in effect
create the story as we read. We take up a novel, perhaps, which we
read five years ago; we find in it now new significances and appeals.
The book is the same; it is we who have changed. We bring to it the
added power of feeling of those five years of living. Art works not
by information but by evocation. Appreciation is not reception but
response. The artist must compel us to feel what he has felt,--not
something else. But the scope of his message, with its overtones and
subtler implications, is limited by the rate of vibration to which we
are attuned.

     "All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,
     (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
          the arches and cornices?)
     All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by
          the instruments."

And again Whitman says, "A great poem is no finish to a man or
woman, but rather a beginning." The final significance of both life
and art is not won by the exercise of the intellect, but unfolds itself
to us in the measure that we feel.

To illustrate the nature of appreciation and the power from which
appreciation derives, the power to project ourselves into the world
external to us, I spoke of the joy of living peculiar to the child and to
the childlike in heart. But that is not quite the whole of the story. A
child by force of his imagination and capacity of feeling is able to
pass beyond the limits of material, and he lives in a world of
exhaustless play and happiness; for him objects are but means and
not an end. To transcend thus the bounds of matter imposed by the
senses and to live by the power of emotion is the first condition of
appreciation. The second condition of appreciation is to feel and
know it, to become conscious of ourselves in our relation to the
object. To _live_ is the purpose of life; to be aware that we are
living is its fulfillment and the reward of appreciation.

Experience has a double value. There is the instant of experience
itself, and then the reaction on it. A child is unconscious in his play;
he is able to forget himself in it completely. At that moment he is
most happy. The instant of supreme joy is the instant of ecstasy,
when we lose all consciousness of ourselves as separate and distinct
individualities. We are one with the whole. But experience does not
yield us its fullest and permanent significance until, having
abandoned ourselves to the moment, we then react upon it and
become aware of what the moment means. A group of children are
at play. Without thought of themselves they are projected into their
sport; with their whole being merged in it, they are intensely living.
A passer on the street stands and watches them. For the moment, in
spirit he becomes a child with them. In himself he feels the
absorption and vivid reality to them of what they are doing. But he
feels also what they do not feel, and that is, what it means to be a
child. Where they are unconscious he is conscious; and therefore he
is able, as they are not, to distill the significance of their play. This
recognition makes possible the extension of his own life; for the
man adds to himself the child. The reproach is sometimes brought
against Walt Whitman that the very people he writes about do not
read him. The explanation is simple and illustrates the difference
between the unconscious and the conscious reception of life. The
"average man" who is the hero of Whitman's chants is not aware of
himself as such. He goes about his business, content to do his work;
and that makes up his experience. It is not the average man himself,
but the poet standing outside and looking on with imaginative
sympathy, who feels what it means to be an average man. It is the
poet who must "teach the average man the glory of his daily walk
and trade." It is not enough to be happy as children are
happy,--unconsciously. We must be happy and know it too.

The attitude of appreciation is the attitude of response,--the
projection of ourselves into new and fuller ranges of feeling, with
the resultant extension of our personality and a larger grasp on life.
We do not need to go far afield for experience; it is here and now.
To-day is the only day, and every day is the best day. "The readiness
is all." But mere contact with the surface of life is not enough.
Living does not consist in barely meeting the necessities of our
material existence; to live is to feel vibrantly throughout our being
the inner significance of things, their appeal and welcome to the
spirit. This fair world of color and form and texture is but a show
world, after all,--this world which looms so near that we can see it,
touch it, which comes to us out of the abysms of time and recedes
into infinitudes of space whither the imagination cannot follow it.
The true and vital meaning of it resides within and discovers itself to
us finally as emotion. Some of this meaning art reveals to us, and in
that measure it helps us to find ourselves. But art is only the means.
The starting-point of the appreciation of art, and its goal, is the
appreciation of life. The reward of living is the added ability to live.
And life yields its fullest opportunities, its deepest tragedies, its
highest joys, all its infinite scope of feeling, to those who enter by
the gate of appreciation.



III

TECHNIQUE AND THE LAYMAN

A PEASANT is striding across a field in the twilight shadow of a
hill. Beyond, where the fold of the hill dips down into the field,
another peasant is driving a team of oxen at a plow. The distant
figures are aglow with golden mellow light, the last light of day,
which deepens the gloom of the shadowing hillside. The sower's cap
is pulled tight about his head, hiding under its shade the unseeing
eyes. The mouth is brutal and grim. The heavy jaw flows down into
the thick, resistive neck. The right arm swings powerfully out,
scattering the grain. The left is pressed to his body; the big, stubborn
hand clutches close the pouch of seed. Action heroic, elemental; the
dumb bearing of the universal burden. In the flex of the shoulder,
the crook of the outstretched arm, the conquering onward stride, is
expressed all the force of that word of the Lord to the first toiler, "In
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."

Three men are standing before Millet's canvas.

One recognizes the subject of the picture. With the pleasure of
recognition he notes what the artist has here represented, and he is
interested in the situation. This is a peasant, and he is sowing his
grain. So the onlooker stands and watches the peasant in his
movement, and he _thinks_ about the sower, recalling any sower he
may have read of or seen or known, his own sower rather than the
one that Millet has seen and would show to him. This man's pleasure
in the picture has its place.

The second of the three men is attracted by the qualities of execution
which the work displays, and he is delighted by what he calls the
"actual beauty" of the painting. With eyes close to the canvas he
notes the way Millet has handled his materials, his drawing, his
color, his surfaces and edges, all the knack of the brush-work,
recognizing in his examination of the workmanship of the picture
that though Millet was a very great artist, he was not a great painter,
that the reach of his ideas was not equaled by his technical skill.
Then as the beholder stands back from the canvas to take in the
ensemble, his eye is pleased by the color-harmony, it rests lovingly
upon the balance of the composition, and follows with satisfaction
the rhythmic flow of line. His enjoyment is both intellectual and
sensuous. And that too has its place.

The third spectator, with no thought of the facts around which the
picture is built, not observing the technical execution as such,
unconscious at the moment also of its merely sensuous charm, feels
within himself, "_I_ am that peasant!" In his own spirit is enacted
the agelong world-drama of toil. He sees beyond the bare subject of
the picture; the medium with all its power of sensuous appeal and
satisfaction becomes transparent. The beholder enters into the very
being of the laborer; and as he identifies himself with this other life
outside of him, becoming one with it in spirit and feeling, he adds
just so much to his own experience. In his reception of the meaning
of Millet's painting of the "Sower" he lives more deeply and
abundantly.

It is the last of these three men who stands in the attitude of full and
true appreciation. The first of the three uses the picture simply as a
point of departure; his thought travels away from the canvas, and he
builds up the entire experience out of his own knowledge and store
of associations. The second man comes a little nearer to appreciation,
but even he falls short of full realization, for he stops at the actual
material work itself. His interest in the technical execution and his
pleasure in the sensuous qualities of the medium do not carry him
through the canvas and into the emotion which it was the artist's
purpose to convey. Only he truly appreciates the painting of the
"Sower" who feels something of what Millet felt, partaking of the
artist's experience as expressed by means of the picture, and making
it vitally his own.

But before the appreciator can have brought himself to the point of
perception where he is able to respond directly to the significance of
art and to make the artist's emotion a part of his own emotional
experience, he must needs have traveled a long and rather devious
way. Appreciation is not limited to the exercise of the intellect, as in
the recognition of the subject of a work of art and in the interest
which the technically minded spectator takes in the artist's skill. It
does not end with the gratification of the senses, as with the delight
in harmonious color and rhythmic line and ordered mass. Yet the
intellect and the senses, though they are finally but the channel
through which the artist's meaning flows to reach and rouse the
feelings, nevertheless play their part in appreciation. Between the
spirit of the artist and the spirit of the appreciator stands
the individual work of art as the means of expression and
communication. In the work itself emotion is embodied in material
form. The material which art employs for expression constitutes its
language. Certain principles govern the composition of the work,
certain processes are involved in the making of it, and the result
possesses certain qualities and powers. The processes which enter
into the actual fashioning of the work are both intellectual and
physical, requiring the exercise of the artist's mind in the planning of
the work and in the directing of his hand; so far as the appreciator
concerns himself with them, they address themselves to his intellect.
The finished work in its material aspect possesses qualities which
are perceived by the senses and which have a power of sensuous
delight. Upon these processes and these qualities depends in part the
total character of a work of art, and they must be reckoned with in
appreciation.

In his approach to any work of art, therefore, the layman is
confronted first of all with the problem of the language which the
work employs. Architecture uses as its language the structural
capabilities of its material, as wood or stone, bringing all together
into coherent and serviceable form. Poetry is phrased in words.
Painting employs as its medium color and line and mass. At the
outset, in the case of any art, we have some knowledge of the
signification of its terms. Here is a painting of a sower. Out of
previous experience of the world we easily recognize the subject of
the picture. But whence comes the majesty of this rude peasant, the
dignity august of this rough and toil-burdened laborer, his power to
move us? In addition to the common signification of its terms, then,
language seems to have a further expressiveness, a new meaning
imparted to it by the way in which the artist uses it. In a poem we
know the meaning of the words, but the _poetry_ of it, which we
feel rather than know, is the creation of the poet, wrought out of the
familiar words by his cunning manipulation of them.

     "The grey sea and the long black land;
     And the yellow half-moon large and low;
     And the startled little waves that leap
     In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
     As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
     And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

     "Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
     Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
     A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
     And blue spurt of a lighted match,
     And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
     Than the two hearts beating each to each!"

A drama in twelve lines. These are words of common daily usage,
every one,--for the most part aggressively so. But the romance
which they effuse, the glamour which envelops the commonplace
incident as with an aura, is due to the poet's strategic selection of his
terms, the one right word out of many words that offered, and his
subtle combination of his terms into melody and rhythm. The
wonder of the poet's craft is like the musician's,--

     "That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a
          star."

A building rises before us; we recognize it as a building, and again
easily we infer the purpose which it serves, that it is a temple or a
dwelling. And then the beauty of it, a power to affect us beyond the
mere feet that it is a building, lays hold upon us, an influence
emanating from it which we do not altogether explain to ourselves.
Simply in its presence we feel that we are pleased. The fact, the
material which the artist uses, exists out there in nature. But the
beauty of the building, the majesty and power of the picture, the
charm of the poem,--this is the _art_ of the artist; and he wins his
effects by the way in which he handles his materials, by his
_technique._ Some knowledge of technique, therefore,--not the
artist's knowledge of it, but the ability to read the language of art as
the artist intends it to be read,--is necessary to appreciation.

The hut which the traveler through a wild country put together to
provide himself shelter against storm and the night was in essence a
work of art. The purpose of his effort was not the hut itself but
shelter, to accomplish which he used the hut as his means. The
emotion of which the work was the expression, in this case the
traveler's consciousness of his need, embodied itself in a concrete
form and made use of material. The hut which he conceived in
response to his need became for him the subject or motive of his
work. For the actual expression of his design he took advantage of
the qualities of his material, its capabilities to combine thus and so;
these inherent qualities were his medium. The material wood and
stone which he employed were the vehicle of his design. The way in
which he handled his vehicle toward the construction of the hut,
availing himself of the qualities and capabilities of his material,
might be called his technique.

The sight of some landscape wakens in the beholder a vivid and
definite emotion; he is moved by it to some form of expression. If he
is a painter he will express his emotion by means of a picture, which
involves in the making of it certain elements and certain processes.
The picture will present selected facts in the landscape; the
landscape, then, as constructed according to the design the painter
has conceived of it, becomes the motive or subject of his picture.
The particular aspects of the landscape which the picture records are
its color and its form. These qualities of color and form are the
painter's medium. An etching of the scene would use not color but
line to express the artist's emotion in its presence; so line is the
medium of etching. But "qualities" of objects are an abstraction
unless they are embodied in material. In order, therefore, to give his
medium actual embodiment the painter uses pigment, as oil-color or
water-color or tempera, laid upon a surface, as canvas, wood, paper,
plaster; this material pigment is his vehicle. The etcher employs
inked scratches upon his plate of zinc or copper, bitten by acid or
scratched directly by the needle; these marks of ink are the vehicle
of etching. To the way in which the artist uses his medium for
practical expression and to his methods in the actual handling of his
vehicle is applied the term technique. The general conception of his
picture, its total design, the choice of motive, the selection of details,
the main scheme of composition,--these belong to the great strategy
of his art. The application of these principles in practice and their
material working out upon his canvas are an affair of tactics and fall
within the province of technique.

The ultimate significance of a work of art is its content of emotion,
the essential controlling idea, which inspires the work and gives it
concrete form. In its actual embodiment, the expressive power of the
work resides in the medium. The medium of any art, then, as color
and mass in painting, line in drawing and etching, form in sculpture,
sound in music, is its means of expression and constitutes its
language. Now the signification of language derives from
convention. Line, for example, which may be so sensitive and so
expressive, is only an abstraction and does not exist in nature. What
the draughtsman renders as line is objectively in fact the boundary
of forms. A head, with all its subtleties of color and light and shade,
may be represented by a pencil or charcoal drawing, black upon a
white surface. It is not the head which is black and white, but
the drawing. Our acceptance of the drawing as an adequate
representation of the head rests upon convention. Writing is an
elementary kind of drawing; the letters of the alphabet were
originally pictures or symbols. So to-day written or printed letters
are arbitrary symbols of sounds, and grouped together in arbitrary
combinations they form words, which are symbols of ideas. The
word _sum_ stood to the old Romans for the idea "I am;" to
English-speaking people the word signifies a "total" and also a problem in
arithmetic. A painting of a landscape does not attempt to imitate the
scene; it uses colors and forms as symbols which serve for
expression. The meaning attaching to these symbols derives from
common acceptance and usage, Japanese painting, rendering the
abstract spirit of movement of a wave, for example, rather than the
concrete details of its surface appearance, differs fundamentally
from the painting of the western world; it is none the less pregnant
with meaning for those who know the convention. To understand
language, therefore, we must understand the convention and accept
its terms. The value of language as a means of expression and
communication depends upon the knowledge, common to the user
and to the person addressed, of the signification of its terms. Its
effectiveness is determined by the way in which it is employed,
involving the choice of terms, as the true line for the false or
meaningless one, the right value or note of color out of many that
would almost do, the exact and specific word rather than the vague
and feeble; involving also the combination of terms into articulate
forms. These ways and methods in the use of language are the
concern of technique. Technique, therefore, plays an important part
in the creation and the ultimate fortunes of the artist's work.

Just here arises a problem for the layman in his approach to art. The
man who says, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I
like," is a familiar figure in our midst; of such, for the most part, the
"public" of art is constituted. What he really means is, "I don't know
anything about technique, but art interests me. I read books, I go to
concerts and the theatre, I look at pictures; and in a way they have
something for me." If we make this distinction between art and
technique, the matter becomes simplified. The layman does not
himself paint pictures or write books or compose music; his contact
with art is with the purpose of appreciation. Life holds some
meaning for him, as he is engaged in living, and there his chief
interest lies. So art too has a message addressed to him, for art starts
with life and in the end comes back to it. If art is not the expression
of vital feeling, in its turn communicating the feeling to the
appreciator so that he makes it a real part of his experience of life,
then the thing called art is only an exercise in dexterity for the maker
and a pastime for the receiver; it is not art. But art is not quite the
same as life at first hand; it is rather the distillment of it. In order to
render the significance of life as he has perceived and felt it, the
artist selects and modifies his facts; and his work depends for its
expressiveness upon the material form in which the emotion is
embodied. The handling of material to the end of making it
expressive is an affair of technique. The layman may ask himself,
then, To what extent is a knowledge of technique necessary for
appreciation? And how may he win that knowledge?

On his road to appreciation the layman is beset with difficulties.
Most of the talk about art which he hears is either the translation of
picture or sonata into terms of literary sentiment or it is a discussion
of the way the thing is done. He knows at least that painting is not
the same as literature and that music has its own province; he
recognizes that the meaning of pictures is not literary but pictorial,
the meaning of music is musical. But the emphasis laid upon the
manner of execution confuses and disturbs him. At the outset he
frankly admits that he has no knowledge of technical processes as
such. Yet each art must be read in its own language, and each has its
special technical problems. He realizes that to master the technique
of any single art is a career. And yet there are many arts, all of
which may have some message for him in their own kind. If he must
be able to paint in order to enjoy pictures rightly, if he cannot listen
intelligently at a concert without being able himself to compose or at
least to perform, his case for the appreciation of art seems hopeless.

If the layman turns to his artist friends for enlightenment and a little
sympathy, it is possible he may encounter a rebuff. Artists
sometimes speak contemptuously of the public. "A painter," they
say, "paints for painters, not for the people; outsiders know nothing
about painting." True, outsiders know nothing about painting, but
perhaps they know a little about life. If art is more than intellectual
subtlety and manual skill, if art is the expression of something the
artist has felt and lived, then the outsider has after all some standard
for his estimate of art and a basis for his enjoyment. He is able to
determine the value of the work to himself according as it expresses
what he already knows about life or reveals to him fuller
possibilities of experience which he can make his own. He does not
pretend to judge painting; but he feels that he has some right to
appreciate art. In reducing all art to a matter of technique artists
themselves are not quite consistent. My friends Jones, a painter, and
Smith, a composer, do not withhold their opinion of this or that
novel and poem and play, and they discourse easily on the
performances of Mr. James and Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Shaw; but I
have no right to talk about the meaning to me of Jones's picture or
Smith's sonata, for my business is with words, and therefore I cannot
have any concern with painting or with music. To be sure, literature
uses as its vehicle the means of communication of daily life, namely,
words. But the _art_ in literature, the interpretation of life which it
gives us, as distinct from mere entertainment, is no more generally
appreciated than the art in painting. A man's technical
accomplishment may be best understood and valued by his
fellow-workmen in the same craft; and often the estimate set by artists on
their own work is referred to the qualities of its technical execution.
As a classic instance, Raphael sent some of his drawings to Albert
Dürer to "show him his hand." So a painter paints for the painters.
But the artist gives back a new fullness and meaning to life and
addresses all who live. That man is fortunate who does not allow his
progress toward appreciation to be impeded by this confusion of
technique with art.

The emphasis which workers in any art place upon their powers of
execution is for themselves a false valuation of technique, and it
tends to obscure the layman's vision of essentials. Technique is not,
as it would seem, the whole of art, but only a necessary part. A work
of art in its creation involves two elements,--the idea and the
execution. The idea is the emotional content of the work; the
execution is the practical expressing of the idea by means of the
medium and the vehicle. The idea of Millet's "Sower" is the emotion
attending his conception of the laborer rendered in visual terms; the
execution of the picture is exhibited in the composition, the color,
the drawing, and the actual brush-work. So, too, the artist himself is
constituted by two qualifications, which must exist together: first,
the power of the subject over the artist; and second, the artist's
power over his subject. The first of these without the second results
simply in emotion which does not come to expression as art. The
second without the first produces sham art; the semblance of art may
be fashioned by technical skill, but the life which inspires art is
wanting. The artist, then, may be regarded in a dual aspect. He is
first a temperament and a mind, capable of feeling intensely and
able to integrate his emotions into unified coherent form; in this
aspect he is essentially the _artist_. Secondly, for the expression of
his idea he brings to bear on the execution of his work his command
of the medium, his intellectual adroitness and his manual skill; in
this aspect he is the _technician_. Every artist has a special kind of
means with which he works, requiring knowledge and dexterity; but
it may be assumed that in addition to his ability to express himself
he has something to say. We may test a man's merit as a painter by
his ability to paint. As an artist his greatness is to be judged with
reference to the greatness of his ideas; and in his capacity as artist
his technical skill derives its value from the measure in which it is
adequate to their expression. In the case of an accomplished pianist
or violinist we take his proficiency of technique for granted, and we
ask, What, with all this power of expression at his command, has he
to say? In his rendering of the composer's work what has he of his
own to contribute by way of interpretation? Conceding at once to Mr.
Sargent his supreme competence as a painter, his consummate
mastery of all his means, we ask, What has he seen in this man or
this woman before him worthy of the exercise of such skill? In terms
of the personality he is interpreting, what has he to tell us of the
beauty and scope of life and to communicate to us of larger
emotional experience? The worth of technique is determined, not by
its excellence as such, but by its efficiency for expression.

It is difficult for an outsider to understand why painters, writers,
sculptors, and the rest, who are called artists in distinction from the
ordinary workman, should make so much of their skill. Any man
who works freely and with joy takes pride in his performance. And
instinctively we have a great respect for a good workman. Skill is
not confined to those who are engaged in what is conventionally
regarded as art. Indeed, the distinction implied in favor of "art" is
unjust to the wide range of activities of familiar daily life into which
the true art spirit may enter. A bootblack who polishes his shoes as
well as he can, not merely because he is to be paid for it, though too
he has a right to his pay, but because that is his work, his means of
expression, even he works in the spirit of an artist. Extraordinary
skill is often developed by those who are quite outside the pale of art.
In a circus or music-hall entertainment we may see a man throw
himself from a trapeze swinging high in air, and after executing a
double somersault varied by complex lateral gyrations, catch the
extended arms of his partner, who is hanging by his knees on
another flying bar. Or a man leaning backwards over a chair shoots
at a distance of fifty paces a lump of sugar from between the
foreheads of two devoted assistants. Such skill presupposes
intelligence. Of the years of training and practice, of the sacrifice
and the power of will, that have gone to the accomplishment of this
result, the looker-on can form but little conception. These men are
not considered artists. Yet a painter who uses his picture to exhibit a
skill no more wonderful than theirs would be grieved to be
accounted an acrobat or a juggler. Only such skill as is employed in
the service of expression is to be reckoned with as an element in art;
and in art it is of value not for its own sake but as it serves its
purpose. The true artist subordinates his technique to expression,
justly making it a means and not the end. He cares for the
significance of his idea more than for his sleight of hand; he effaces
his skill for his art.

A recognition of the skill exhibited in the fashioning of a work of art,
however, if seen in its right relation to the total scope of the work, is
a legitimate source of pleasure. Knowledge of any subject brings its
satisfactions. To understand with discerning insight the workings of
any process, whether it be the operation of natural laws, as in
astronomy or chemistry, whether it be the construction of a
locomotive, the playing of a game of foot-ball, or the painting of a
picture, to see the "wheels go round" and know the how and the
wherefore,--undeniably this is a source of pleasure. In the
understanding of technical processes, too, there is a further occasion
of enjoyment, differing somewhat from the satisfaction which
follows in the train of knowledge.

     "There is a pleasure in poetic pains
     Which only poets know,"

says the poet Cowper. There is a pleasure in the sense of difficulties
overcome known only to those who have tried to overcome them.
But such enjoyment--the pleasure which comes with enlightened
recognition and the pleasure of mastery and triumph--derives from
an intellectual exercise and is not to be confounded with the full
appreciation of art. Art, finally, is not the "how" but the "what" in
terms of its emotional significance. Our pleasure in the result, in the
design itself, is not the same as our pleasure in the skill that
produced the work. The design, with the message that it carries, not
the making of it, is the end of art.

Too great preoccupation with technique conflicts with full
appreciation. To fix the attention upon the manner of expression is
to lose the meaning. A style which attracts notice to itself is in so far
forth bad style, because it defeats its own end, which is expression;
but beyond this, our interest in technical execution is purely
intellectual, whereas art reaches the emotions. At the theatre a critic
sits unmoved; dispassionately he looks upon the personages of the
drama, as they advance, retreat, and countermarch, little by little
yielding up their secret, disclosing all the subtle interplay of human
motives. From the heights of his knowledge the critic surveys the
spectacle; with an insight born of his learning, he penetrates the
mysteries of the playwright's craft. He knows what thought and skill
have gone into this result; he knows the weary hours of toil, the
difficulties of invention and selection, the heroic rejections, the
intricacies of construction, the final triumph. He sees it all from the
point of view of the master-workman, and sympathetically he
applauds his success; his recognition of what has been accomplished
is his pleasure. But all the while he has remained on the outside. Not
for a moment has he become a party to the play. He brings to it
nothing of his own feeling and power of response. There has been
no union of his spirit with the artist's spirit,--that union in which a
work of art achieves its consummation. The man at his side, with no
knowledge or thought of how the effect has been won, surrenders
himself to the illusion. These people on the stage are more intensely
and vividly real to him than in life itself; the artist has distilled the
significance of the situation and communicates it to him as emotion.
The man's reaction is not limited to the exercise of his intellect,--he
gives himself. In the experience which the dramatist conveys to him
beautifully, shaping discords into harmony and disclosing their
meaning for the spirit, he lives.

A true artist employs his medium as an instrument of expression;
and he values his own technical skill in the handling of it according
to the measure that he is enabled thereby to express himself more
effectively. On the layman's part so much knowledge of technique is
necessary as makes it possible for him to understand the artist's
language and the added expressiveness wrought out of language by
the artist's cunning use of it. And such knowledge is not beyond his
reach.

In order to understand the meaning of any language we must first
understand the signification of its terms, and then we must know
something of the ways in which they may be combined into
articulate forms of expression. The terms of speech are words; in
order to speak coherently and articulately we must group words into
sentences according to the laws of the tongue to which they belong.
Similarly, every art has its terms, or "parts of speech," and its
grammar, or the ways in which the terms are combined. The terms
of painting are color and form, the terms of music are tones. Colors
and forms are brought together into harmony and balance that by
their juxtaposition they may be made expressive and beautiful.
Tones are woven into a pattern according to principles of harmony,
melody, and rhythm, and they become music. When technique is
turned to such uses, not for the vainglory of a virtuoso, but for the
service of the artist in his earnest work of expression, then it
identifies itself with art.

A knowledge of the signification of the terms of art the layman may
win for himself by a recognition of the expressive power of all
material and by sensitiveness to it. The beholder will not respond to
the appeal of a painting of a landscape unless he has himself felt
something of the charm or glory of landscape in nature; he will not
quicken and expand to the dignity or force caught in rigid marble
triumphantly made fluent in statue or relief until he has realized for
himself the significance of form and movement which exhales from
every natural object. Gesture is a universal language. The mighty
burden of meaning in Millet's picture of the "Sower" is carried by
the gesture of the laborer as he swings across the background of
field and hill, whose forms also are expressive; here, too, the
elemental dignity of form and movement is reinforced by the
solemnity of the color. Gesture is but one of nature's characters
wherewith she inscribes upon the vivid, shifting surface of the world
her message to the spirit of man. A clue to the understanding of the
terms of art, therefore, is found in the layman's own appreciation of
the emotional value of all objects of sense and their multitudinous
power of utterance,--the sensitive decision of line, the might or
delicacy of form, the splendor and subtlety of color, the magic of
sound, the satisfying virtue of harmony in whatever embodiment, all
the beauty of nature, all the significance of human life. And this
appreciation is to be won largely by the very experience of it. The
more we feel, the greater becomes our power for deeper feeling.
Every emotion to which we thrill is the entrance into larger capacity
of emotion. We may allow for growth and trust to the inevitable
working of its laws. In the appreciation of both life and art the
individual may be his own teacher by experience.

The qualities of objects with their inherent emotional values
constitute the raw material of art, to be woven by the artist into a
fabric of expressive form and texture. Equipped with a knowledge of
the terms of any art, the layman has yet to understand something of
the ways in which the terms may be combined. Every artist has his
idiom or characteristic style. Rembrandt on the flat surface of his
canvas secures the illusion of form in the round by a system of light
and shade; modeling is indicated by painting the parts in greater
relief in light and the parts in less relief in shadow. Manet renders
the relief of form by a system of "values," or planes of more and less
light. The local color of objects is affected by the amount of light
they receive and the distance an object or part of an object is from
the eye of the spectator. Manet paints with degrees of light, and he
wins his effects, not by contrasts of color, but by subtle modulations
within a given hue. Landscape painters before the middle of the
nineteenth century, working with color in masses, secured a total
harmony by bringing all their colors, mixed upon the palette, into
the same key. The "Luminarists," like Claude Monet, work with
little spots or points of color laid separately upon the canvas; the
fusion of these separate points into the dominant tone is made by the
eye of the beholder. The characteristic effect of a work of art is
determined by the way in which the means are employed. Some
knowledge, therefore, of the artist's aims as indicated in his method
of working is necessary to a full understanding of what he wants to
say.

In his effort to understand for his own purposes of appreciation what
the artist has accomplished by his technique, the layman may first of
all distinguish between processes and results. A landscape in nature
is beautiful to the beholder because he perceives in it some harmony
of color and form which through the eye appeals to the emotions.
His vision does not transmit every fact in the landscape;
instinctively his eye in its sweep over meadow and trees and hill
selects those details that compose. By this act of _integration_ he is
for himself in so far forth an artist. If he were a painter he would
know what elements in the landscape to put upon his canvas. But he
has no skill in the actual practice of drawing and of handling the
brush, no knowledge of mixing colors and matching tones; he
understands nothing of perspective and "values" and the relations of
light and shade. He knows only what he sees, that the landscape as
he sees it is beautiful; and equally he recognizes as beautiful the
presentment of it upon canvas. He is ignorant of the technical
problems with which the painter in practice has had to contend in
order to reach this result; it is the result only that is of concern to
him in so far as it is or is not what he desires. The painter's color is
significant to him, not because he knows how to mix the color for
himself, but because that color in nature has spoken to him
unutterable things and he has responded to it. The layman cannot
make a sunset and he cannot paint a picture; but he can enjoy both.
So he cares, then, rather for what the painter has done than for how
he has done it, because the processes do not enter into his own
experience. The picture has a meaning for him in the measure that it
expresses what he perceives and feels, and that is the beauty of the
landscape.

Any knowledge of technical processes which the layman may
happen to possess may be a source of intellectual pleasure. But for
appreciation, only so much understanding of technique is necessary
as enables him to receive the message of a given work in the degree
of expressiveness which the artist by his use of his medium has
attained. A clue to this understanding may come to him by intuition,
by virtue of his own native insight and intelligence. He may gain it
by reading or by instruction. He may go out and win it by intrepid
questioning of those who know; and it is to be hoped that such will
be very patient with him, for after all even a layman has the right to
live. Once started on the path, then, in the mysteries of art as in the
whole complex infinite business of living, he becomes his own tutor
by observation and experience; and he may develop into a fuller
knowledge in obedience to the law of growth. Each partial clue to
understanding brings him a step farther on his road; each new
glimmer of insight beckons him to ultimate illumination. Though
baffled at the outset, yet patient under disappointment, undauntedly
he pushes on in spite of obstacles, until he wins his way at last to
true appreciation.

If the layman seeks a standard by which to test the value of any
technical method, he finds it in the success of the work itself. Every
method is to be judged in and for itself on its own merits, and not as
better or worse than some other method. Individually we may prefer
Velasquez to Frans Hals; Whistler may minister to our personal
satisfaction in larger measure than Mr. Sargent; we may enjoy Mr.
James better than Stevenson; Richard Strauss may stir us more
deeply than Brahms. We do not affirm thereby that impressionism is
inherently better than realism, or that subtlety is more to be desired
than strength; the psychological novel is not necessarily greater than
romance; because of our preference "programme music" is not
therefore more significant than "absolute music." The greatness of
an artist is established by the greatness of his ideas, adequately
expressed. And the value of any technical method is determined by
its own effectiveness for expression.

There is, then, no invariable standard external to the work itself by
which to judge technique. For no art is final. A single work is the
manifestation of beauty as the individual artist has conceived or felt
it. The perception of what is beautiful varies from age to age and
with each person. So, too, standards of beauty in art change with
each generation; commonly they are deduced from the practice of
preceding artists. Classicism formulates rules from works that have
come to be recognized as beautiful, and it requires of the artist
conformity to these rules. By this standard, which it regards as
absolute, it tries a new work, and it pretends to adjudge the work
good or bad according as it meets the requirements. Then a Titan
emerges who defies the canons, wrecks the old order, and in his own
way, to the despair or scorn of his contemporaries, creates a work
which the generation that follows comes to see is beautiful. "Every
author," says Wordsworth, "as far as he is great and at the same time
_original,_ has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be
enjoyed." Wordsworth in his own generation was ridiculed; Millet,
when he ceased painting nudes for art-dealers' windows and
ventured to express himself, faced starvation. Every artist is in some
measure an innovator; for his own age he is a romanticist. But the
romanticist of one age becomes a classic for the next; and his
performance in its turn gives laws to his successors. Richard Strauss,
deriving in some sense from Wagner, makes the older man seem a
classic and conservative. Then a new mind again is raised up, a new
temperament, with new needs; and these shape their own adequate
new expression. "The cleanest expression," says Whitman, "is that
which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one." As all life is
growth, as there are no bounds to the possibilities of human
experience, so the workings of the art-impulse cannot be
compressed within the terms of a hard and narrow definition, and
any abstract formula for beauty is in the very nature of things
foredoomed to failure. No limit can be set to the forms in which
beauty may be made manifest.

"The true poets are not followers of beauty, but the august masters
of beauty." And Whitman's own verse is a notable example of a new
technique forged in response to a new need of expression. Dealing
as he did with the big basic impulses of common experience
accessible to all men, Whitman needed a largeness and freedom of
expression which he did not find in the accepted and current poetic
forms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people,
occupations, and aspirations of "these States," as yet undeveloped
but vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tally
the fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and a
new world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope and
flexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation and
variety. Finding none ready to his hand, he created it. Not that
Whitman did not draw for his resources on the great treasury of
world-literature; and he profited by the efforts and achievement of
predecessors. But the form in his hands and as he uses it is new.
Whatever we may think of the success of his total accomplishment,
there are very many passages to which we cannot deny the name of
poetry. Nor did Whitman work without conscious skill and
deliberate regard for technical processes. His note-books and papers
reveal the extreme calculation and pains with which he wrote,
beginning with the collection of synonyms applying to his idea and
mood, and so building them up gradually, with many erasures,
corrections, and substitutions, into the finished poem. Much of the
vigor of his style is due to his escape from conventional literary
phrase-making and his return to the racy idiom of common life. His
verse, apparently inchoate and so different from classical poetic
forms, is shaped with a cunning incredible skill. And more than that,
it is art, in that it is not a bare statement of fact, but communicates to
us the poet's emotion, so that we realize the emotion in ourselves.
When his purpose is considered, it is seen that no other technique
was possible. His achievement proves that a new need creates its
own means of expression.

What is true of Whitman in respect to his technique is true in greater
or less degree of every artist, working in any form. It is true of
Pheidias, of Giotto and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, of Dante and
Shakespeare, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Monet, of Rodin, in fine,
from the beginnings of art to the day that now is. All have created
out of existing forms of expression their own idiom and way of
working. Every artist owes something to his predecessors, but
language is re-created in the hands of each master and becomes a
new instrument. There can be then no single formula for technical
method nor any fixed and final standard of judgment.

An artist himself is justified from his own point of view in his
concern with technique, for upon his technique depends his
effectiveness of expression. His practice serves to keep alive the
language and to develop its resources. Art in its concrete
manifestations is an evolution. From Velasquez through Goya to
Manet and Whistler is a line of inheritance. But a true artist
recognizes that technique is only a means. As an artist he is seeking
to body forth in external form the vision within, and he tries to make
his medium "faithful to the coloring of his own spirit." Every artist
works out his characteristic manner; but the progress must be from
within outwards. Toward the shaping of his own style he is helped
by the practice of others, but he is helped and not hindered only in
so far as the manner of others can be made genuinely the expression
of his own feeling. Direct borrowing of a trick of execution and
servile imitation of a style have no place in true art. A painter who
would learn of Velasquez should study the master's technique, not
that in the end he may paint like Velasquez, but that he may
discover just what it was that the master, by means of his individual
style, was endeavoring to express, and so bring to bear on his own
environment here in America to-day the same ability to see and the
same power of sympathetic and imaginative penetration that
Velasquez brought to his environment at the court of seventeenth-century
Spain. The way to paint like Velasquez is to be Velasquez. No man
is a genius by imitation. Every man may seek to be a master
in his own right. Technique does not lead; it follows. Style is the
man.

From within outwards. Art is the expression of sincere and vital
feeling; the material thing, picture, statue, poem, which the artist
conjures into being is only a means. The moment art is worshiped
for its own sake, that moment decadence begins. "No one," says
Leonardo, "will ever be a great painter who takes as his guide the
paintings of other men." In general the history of art exhibits this
course. In the beginning arises a man of deep and genuine feeling,
the language at whose command, however, has not been developed
to the point where it is able to carry the full burden of his meaning.
Such a man is Giotto; and we have the "burning messages of
prophecy delivered by the stammering lips of infants." In the
generations which supervene, artists with less fervor of spirit but
with growing skill of hand, increased with each inheritance, turn
their efforts to the development of their means. The names of this
period of experiment and research are Masaccio, Uccello, Pollaiuolo,
Verrocchio. At length, when the fullness of time is come, emerges
the master-mind, of original insight and creative power. Heir to the
technical achievements of his predecessors, he is able to give his
transcendent idea its supremely adequate expression. Content is
perfectly matched by form. On this summit stand Michelangelo,
Raphael, Leonardo. Then follow the Carracci, Domenichino,
Guercino, Guido Reni, Carlo Dolci, men who mistake the master's
manner for his meaning. The idea, the vital principle, has spent itself.
The form only is left, and that is elaborated into the exuberance of
decay. Painters find their impulse no longer in nature and life but in
paint. Technique is made an end in itself. And art is dead, to be
reborn in another shape and guise.

The relation of technique to appreciation in the experience of the
layman begins now to define itself. Technique serves the artist for
efficient expression; an understanding of it is of value to the layman
in so far as the knowledge helps him to read the artist's language and
thus to receive his message. Both for artist and for layman technique
is only a means. Out of his own intelligent and patient experience
the layman can win his way to an understanding of methods; and his
standard of judgment, good enough for his own purposes, is the
degree of expressiveness which the work of art, by virtue of its
qualities of execution, is able to achieve. Skill may be enjoyed
intellectually for its own sake as skill; in itself it is not art.
Technique is most successful when it is least perceived. _Ars celare
artem:_ art reveals life and conceals technique. We must understand
something of technique and then forget it in appreciation. When we
thrill to the splendor and glory of a sunset we are not thinking of the
laws of refraction. Appreciation is not knowledge, but emotion.



IV

THE VALUE OF THE MEDIUM

AS I swing through the wide country in the freshness and fullness of
a blossoming, sun-steeped morning in May, breathing the breath of
the fields and the taller by inches for the sweep of the hills and the
reaches of sky above my head, every nerve in my body is alive with
sensation and delight. My joy is in the fragrance of earth, the
ingratiating warmth of the fresh morning, the spacious, inclosing air.
My pleasure in this direct contact with the landscape is a physical
reaction, to be enjoyed only by the actual experience of it; it cannot
be reproduced by any other means; it can be recalled by memory but
faintly and as the echo of sensation. There is, however, something
else in the landscape which can be reproduced; and this recall may
seem more glorious than the original in nature. There are elements
in the scene which a painter can render for me more intensely and
vividly than I perceived them for myself. These elements embody
the value that the landscape has for my emotions. The scene appeals
to something within me which lies beyond my actual physical
contact with it and the mere sense of touch. The harmony that the
eye perceives in these open fields, the gracious line of trees along
the stream's edge, the tossing hills beyond, and the arch of the blue
sky above impregnating the earth with light, is communicated to my
spirit, and I feel that this reach of radiant country is an extension of
my own personality. A painter, by the manipulation of his color and
line and mass, concentrates and intensifies the harmony of it and so
heightens its emotional value. The meaning of the scene for the
spirit is conveyed in terms of color and mass.

Color and mass are the painter's medium, his language. The final
import of art is the _idea,_ the emotional content of the work. On his
way to the expression of his idea the artist avails himself of material
to give his feeling concrete actuality and visible or audible
realization. He paints a picture, glorious in color and compelling in
the concentration of its massing; he carves a statue, noble in form or
subtly rhythmic; he weaves a pattern of harmonious sounds. He
values objects not for their own sake but for the energies they
possess,--their power to rouse his whole being into heightened
activity. And they have this power by virtue of their material
qualities, as color and form or sound. A landscape is gay in
springtime or sad in autumn. The difference in its effect upon us is
not due to our knowledge that it is spring or autumn and our
consciousness of the associations appropriate to each season. The
emotional quality of the scene is largely a matter of its color. Let the
spring landscape be shrouded in gray mist sifting down out of gray
skies, and we are sad. Let the autumn fields and woodland sparkle
and dance in the crisp golden sunlight, and our blood dances with
them and we want to shout from full lungs. In music the major key
wakens a different emotion from the minor. The note of a violin is
virgin in quality; the voice of the 'cello is the voice of experience.
The distinctive emotional value of each instrument inheres in the
character of its sound. These qualities of objects art uses as its
language.

Though all art is one in essence, yet each art employs a medium of
its own. In order to understand a work in its scope and true
significance we must recognize that an artist thinks and feels in
terms of his special medium. His impulse to create comes with his
vision, actual or imaginative, of color or form, and his thought is
transmitted to his hand, which shapes the work, without the
intervention of words. The nature of his vehicle and the conditions
in which he works determine in large measure the details of the form
which his idea ultimately assumes. Thus a potter designs his vessel
first with reference to its use and then with regard to his material, its
character and possibilities. As he models his plastic clay upon a
wheel, he naturally makes his bowl or jug round rather than sharply
angular. A pattern for a carpet, to be woven by a system of little
squares into the fabric, will have regard for the conditions in which
it is to be rendered, and it will differ in the character of its lines and
masses from a pattern for a wall-paper, which may be printed from
blocks. The designer in stained glass will try less to make a picture
in the spirit of graphic representation than to produce an harmonious
color-pattern whose outlines will be guided and controlled by the
possibilities of the "leading" of the window. The true artist uses the
conditions and very limitations of his material as his opportunity.
The restraint imposed by the sonnet form is welcomed by the poet as
compelling a collectedness of thought and an intensity of expression
which his idea might not achieve if allowed to flow in freer channels.
The worker in iron has his triumphs; the goldsmith has his. The
limitations of each craft open to it effects which are denied to the
other. There is an art of confectionery and an art of sculpture. The
designer of frostings who has a right feeling for his art will not
emulate the sculptor and strive to model in the grand style; the
sculptor who tries to reproduce imitatively the textures of lace or
other fabrics and who exuberates in filigrees and fussinesses so far
departs from his art as to rival the confectioner. In the degree that a
painter tries to wrench his medium from its right use and function
and attempts to make his picture tell a story, which can better be told
in words, to that extent he is unfaithful to his art. Painting, working
as it does with color and form, should confine itself to the
expression of emotion and idea that can be rendered visible. On the
part of the appreciator, likewise, the emotion expressed in one kind
of medium is not to be translated into any other terms without a
difference. Every kind of material has its special value for
expression. The meaning of pictures, accordingly, is limited
precisely to the expressive power of color and form. The impression
which a picture makes upon the beholder maybe phrased by him in
words, which are his own means of expression; but he suggests the
import of the picture only incompletely. If I describe in words
Millet's painting of the "Sower" according to my understanding of it,
I am telling in my own terms what the picture means to me. What it
meant to Millet, the full and true significance of the situation as the
painter felt it, is there expressed upon his canvas in terms of visible
aspect; and correspondingly, Millet's meaning is fully and truly
received in the measure that we feel in ourselves the emotion roused
by the sight of his color and form.

The essential content of a work of art, therefore, is modified in its
effect upon us by the kind of medium in which it is presented. If an
idea phrased originally in one medium is translated into the terms of
another, we have _illustration._ Turning the pages of an "illustrated"
novel, we come upon a plate showing a man and a woman against
the background of a divan, a chair, and a tea-table. The man, in a
frock coat, holding a top hat in his left hand, extends his right hand
to the woman, who has just risen from the table. The legend under
the picture reads, "Taking his hat, he said good-by." Here the
illustrator has simply supplied a visible image of what was
suggested in the text; the drawing has no interest beyond helping the
reader to that image. It is a statement of the bare fact in other terms.
In the hands of an artist, however, the translation may take on a
value of its own, changing the original idea, adding to it, and
becoming in itself an independent work of art. This value derives
from the form into which the idea is translated. The frescoes of the
Sistine Chapel are only sublime illustration; but how little of their
power attaches to the subject they illustrate, and how much of their
sublimity lies in the painter's rendering! Conversely, an example of
the literary interpretation of a picture is Walter Pater's description of
Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are
come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful
women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty,
into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts
and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that
which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward
form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the
middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the
return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a
diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda,
was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the
changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The
fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand
experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the
idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all
modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the
embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

It is Leonardo's conception, yet with a difference. Here the critic has
woven about the subject an exquisite tissue of associations, a whole
wide background of knowledge and thought and feeling which it lay
beyond the painter's range to evoke; but the critic is denied the
vividness, the immediateness and intimate warmth of vital contact,
which the painter was able to achieve. The Lisa whom Leonardo
shows us and the Lisa whom Pater interprets for us are the same in
essence yet different in their power to affect us. The difference
resulting from the kind of medium employed is well exemplified by
Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel." The fundamental concept of both
poem and picture is identical, but picture and poem have each its
distinctive range and limitations and its own peculiar appeal. If we
cancel the common element in the two, the difference remaining
makes it possible for us to realize how much of the effect of a work
of art inheres in the medium itself. Painting may be an aid to
literature in that it helps us to more vivid images; the literary
interpretation of pictures or music gives to the works with which it
deals an intellectual definiteness. But the functions peculiar to each
art are not to be confounded nor the distinctions obscured.

Pictures are not a substitute for literature, and their true meaning is
finally not to be translated into words. Their beauty is a visible
beauty; the emotions they rouse are such as can be conveyed
through the sense of sight. In the end they carry their message
sufficingly as color and mass. Midway, however, our enjoyment
may be complicated by other elements which have their place in our
total appreciation. Thus a painting of a landscape may appeal to us
over and above its inherent beauty because we are already, out of
actual experience, familiar with the scene it represents, and the sight
of it wakens in our memory a train of pleasant allied associations. A
ruined tower, in itself an exquisite composition in color and line and
mass, may gather about it suggestions of romance, elemental
passions and wild life, and may epitomize for the beholder the
whole Middle Age. Associated interest, therefore, may be
sentimental or intellectual. It may be sensuous also, appealing to
other senses than those of sight. The sense of touch plays a large
part in our enjoyment of the world. We like the "feel" of objects, the
catch of raw silk, the chill smoothness of burnished brass, the thick
softness of mists, the "amorous wet" of green depths of sea. The
senses of taste and smell may be excited imaginatively and
contribute to our pleasure. Winslow Homer's breakers bring back to
us the salt fragrance of the ocean, and in the presence of these white
mad surges we feel the stinging spray in our faces and we taste the
cosmic exhilaration of the sea-wind. But the final meaning of a
picture resides in the total harmony of color and form, a harmony
into which we can project our whole personality and which itself
constitutes the emotional experience.

All language in its material aspect has a sensuous value, as the
wealth of color of Venetian painting, the sumptuousness of
Renaissance architecture, the melody of Mr. Swinburne's verse, the
gem-like brilliance of Stevenson's prose, the all-inclusive
sensuousness, touched with sensuality, of Wagner's music-dramas.
Because of the charm of beautiful language there are many
art-lovers who regard the sensuous qualities of the work itself as
making up the entire experience. Apart from any consideration of
intention or expressiveness, the material _thing_ which the artist's
touch summons into form is held to be "its own excuse for being."

This order of enjoyment, valid as far as it goes, falls short of
complete appreciation. It does not pass the delight one has in the
radiance of gems or the glowing tincture of some fabric. The
element of meaning does not enter in. There is a beauty for the eye
and a beauty for the mind. The qualities of material may give
pleasure to the senses; the object embodying these qualities becomes
beautiful only as it is endowed with a significance wakened in the
human spirit. A landscape, says Walter Crane, "owes a great part of
its beauty to the harmonious relation of its leading lines, or to certain
pleasant contrasts, or a certain impressiveness of form and mass, and
at the same time we shall perceive that this linear expression is
inseparable from the sentiment or emotion suggested by that
particular scene." In the appreciation of art, to stop with the
sensuous appeal of the medium is to mistake means for an end.
"Rhyme," says the author of "Intentions," "in the hands of a real
artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but
a spiritual element of thought and passion also." An artist's color,
glorious or tender, is only a symbol and manifestation to sense of his
emotion. At first glance Titian's portrait of the "Man with the Glove"
is an ineffable color-harmony. But truly seen it is infinitely more. By
means of color and formal design Titian has embodied here his
vision of superb young manhood; by the expressive power of his
material symbols he has rendered visible his sense of dignity, of
fineness, of strength in reserve. The color is beautiful because his
idea was beautiful. Through the character of this young man as
revealed and interpreted by the artist, the beholder is brought into
contact with a vital personality, whose influence is communicated to
him; in the appreciation of Titian's message he sees and feels and
lives.

The value of the medium resided not in the material itself but in its
power for expression. When language is elaborated at the expense of
the meaning, we have in so far forth sham art. It should be easy to
distinguish in art between what is vital and what is mechanical. The
mechanical is the product of mere execution and calls attention to
the manner. The vital is born out of inspiration, and the living idea
transmutes its material into emotion. Too great an effort at
realization defeats the intended illusion, for we think only of the
skill exercised to effect the result, and the operation of the intellect
inhibits feeling. In the greatest art the medium is least perceived, and
the beholder stands immediately in the presence of the artist's idea.
The material is necessarily fixed and finite; the idea struggles to free
itself from its medium and untrammeled to reach the spirit. It is
mind speaking to mind. However complete the material expression
may seem, it is only a part of what the artist would say; imagination
transcends the actual.  In the art which goes deepest into life, the
medium is necessarily inadequate. The artist fashions his work in a
sublime despair as he feels how little of the mighty meaning within
him he is able to convey. In the greatest works rightly seen the
medium becomes transparent. Within the Sistine Chapel the visitor,
when once he has yielded to the illusion, is not conscious of plaster
surface and pigment; indeed, he hardly sees color and design as such
at all; through them he looks into the immensity of heaven, peopled
with gods and godlike men. Consummate acting is that which makes
the spectator forget that it is acting. The part and the player become
one. The actor, in himself and in the words he utters, is the
unregarded vehicle of the dramatist's idea. In a play like Ibsen's
"Ghosts," the stage, the actors, the dialogue merge and fall away,
and the overwhelming meaning stands revealed in its complete
intensity. As the play opens, it cuts out a segment from the chaos of
human life; step by step it excludes all that is unessential, stroke by
stroke with an inevitableness that is crushing, it converges to the
great one-thing that the dramatist wanted to say, until at the end the
spectator, conscious no longer of the medium but only of the idea
and all-resolving emotion, bows down before its overmastering
force with the cry, "What a _mind_ is there!"

In the art which most completely achieves expression the medium is
not perceived as distinct from the emotion of which the medium is
the embodiment. In order to render expressive the material
employed in its service, art seeks constantly to identify means and
end, to make the form one with the content. The wayfarer out of his
need of shelter built a hut, using the material which chance gave into
his hand and shaping his design according to his resources; the
purpose of his work was not the hut itself but shelter. So the artist in
any form is impelled to creation by his need of expression; the thing
which he creates is not the purpose and end of his effort, but only
the means. Each art has its special medium, and each medium has its
peculiar sensuous charm and its own kind of expressiveness. This
power of sensuous delight is incidental to the real beauty of the
work; and that beauty is the message the work is framed to convey
to the spirit. In the individual work, the inspiring and shaping idea
seeks so to fuse its material that we feel the idea could not have been
phrased in any other way as we surrender to its ultimate appeal,--the
sum of the emotional content which gave it birth and in which it
reaches its fulfillment.



V

THE BACKGROUND OF ART

SCENE: The main hall of the Accademia in Venice.

Time: Noon of a July day.

Dramatis personae: A guide; two drab-colored and tired men; a
group of women, of various ages, equipped with red-covered little
volumes, and severally expressive of great earnestness, wide-eyed
rapture, and giggles.

_The guide, in strident, accentless tones:_ Last work of Titian.
Ninety-nine years old. He died of smallpox.

_A woman:_ Is that it?

_A high voice on the outskirts:_ I'm going to get one for forty
dollars.

_Another voice:_ Well, I'm not going to pay more than fifty for
mine.

_A straggler:_ Eliza, look at those people. Oh, you missed it!
_(Stopping suddenly?)_ My, isn't that lovely!

_Chorus:_ Yes, that's Paris Bordone. Which one is that? He has
magnificent color.

_The guide:_ The thing you want to look at is the five figures in
front.

_A voice:_ Oh, that's beautiful. I love that.

_A man:_ Foreshortened; well, I should say so! But I say, you can't
remember all these pictures.

_The other man:_ Let's get out of this!

_The guide, indicating a picture of the Grand Canal:_ This one has
been restored.

_A girl's voice:_ Why, that's the house where we are staying!

_The guide:_ The next picture . . .

The squad shuffles out of range.

This little comedy, enacted in fact and here faithfully reported, is not
without its pathos. These people are "studying art." They really want
to understand, and if possible, to enjoy. They have visited galleries
and seen many pictures, and they will visit other galleries and see
many more pictures before their return home. They have read
guide-books, noting the stars and double stars; they have dipped into
histories of art and volumes of criticism. They have been told to
observe the dramatic force of Giotto, the line of Botticelli, the
perfect composition of Raphael, the color of Titian; all this they
have done punctiliously. They know in a vague way that Giotto was
much earlier than Raphael, that Botticelli was rather pagan than
Christian, that Titian belonged to the Venetian school. They have
come to the fountain head of art, the very works themselves as
gathered in the galleries; they have tried to remember what they
have read and to do what they have been told; and now they are left
still perplexed and unsatisfied.

The difficulty is that these earnest seekers after knowledge of art
have laid hold on partial truths, but they have failed to see these
partial truths in their right relation to the whole. The period in which
an artist lived means something. His way of thinking and feeling
means something. The quality of his color means something. But
what does his _picture_ mean? These people have not quite found
the key by which to piece the fragments of the puzzle into the
complete design. They miss the central fact with regard to art; and as
a consequence, the ways of approach to the full enjoyment of art,
instead of bringing them nearer the centre, become for them a
network of by-paths in which they enmesh themselves, and they are
left to wander helplessly up and down and about in the blind-alleys
of the labyrinth. The central fact with regard to art is this, that a
work of art is the expression of some part of the artist's experience
of life, his vision of some aspect of the world. For the appreciator,
the work takes on a meaning as it becomes for him in his turn the
expression of his own actual or possible experience and thus relates
itself by the subtle links of feeling to his own life. This is the central
fact; but there are side issues. Any single work of art is in itself
necessarily finite. Because of limitations in both the artist and the
appreciator the work cannot express immediately and completely of
itself all that the author wished to convey; it can present but a single
facet of his many-sided radiating personality. What is actually said
may be reinforced by some understanding on the beholder's part of
what was intended. In order to win its fullest message, therefore, the
appreciator must set the work against the large background out of
which it has proceeded.

A visitor in the _Salon Carré_ of the Louvre notes that there are
arrayed before him pictures by Jan van Eyck and Memling, Raphael
and Leonardo, Giorgione and Titian, Rembrandt and Metsu, Rubens
and Van Dyck, Fouquet and Poussin, Velasquez and Murillo. Each
one bears the distinctive impress of its creator. How different some
of them, one from another,--the Virgin of Van Eyck from the
Virgin of Raphael, Rembrandt's "Pilgrimsat Emmaus" from the
"Entombment" by Titian. Yet between others there are common
elements of likeness. Raphael and Titian are distinguished by an
opulence of form and a luxuriance of color which reveal supreme
technical accomplishment in a fertile land under light-impregnated
skies. The rigidity and restraint of Van Eyck and Memling suggest
the tentative early efforts of the art of a sober northern race. To a
thoughtful student of these pictures sooner or later the question
comes, Whence are these likenesses and these differences?

Hitherto I have referred to the creative mind and executive hand as
generically _the artist._ I have thought of him as a type,
representative of all the great class of those who feel and express,
and who by means of their expression communicate their feeling.
Similarly I have spoken of _the work of art,_ as though it were
complete in itself and isolated, sprung full-formed and panoplied
from the brain of its creator, able to win its way and consummate its
destiny alone. The type is conceived intellectually; in actual life the
type resolves itself into individuals. So there are individual artists,
each with his own distinctive gifts and ideals, each with his own
separate experience of life, with his personal and special vision of
the world, and his characteristic manner of expression. Similarly, a
single work of art is not an isolated phenomenon; it is only a part of
the artist's total performance, and to these other works it must be
referred. The kind of work an artist sets himself to do is determined
to some extent by the period into which he was born and the country
in which he lived. The artist himself, heir to the achievements of his
predecessors, is a development, and his work is the product of an
evolution. A work of art, therefore, to be judged aright and truly
appreciated, must be seen in its relation to its background, from
which it detaches itself at the moment of consideration,--the
background of the artist's personality and accomplishment and of the
national life and ideals of his time.

If the layman's interest in art is more than the casual touch-and-go of
a picture here, a concert there, and an entertaining book of an
evening, he is confronted with the important matter of the study of
art as it manifests itself through the ages and in diverse lands. It is
not a question of practicing an art himself, for technical skill lies
outside his province. The study of art in the sense proposed has to
do with the consideration of an individual work in its relation to all
the factors that have entered into its production. The work of an
artist is profoundly influenced by the national ideals and way of life
of his race and of his age. The art of Catholic Italy is ecclesiastical;
the art of the Protestant North is domestic and individual. The actual
form an artist's work assumes is modified by the resources at his
disposal,--resources both of material and of technical methods.
Raphael may have no more to say than Giotto had, but he is able to
express himself in a fuller and more finished way, because in his
time the language of painting had become richer and more varied
and the rhetoric of it had been carried to a farther point of
development. Finally, as all art is in essence the expression of
personality, a single work is to be understood in its widest intention
and scope by reference to the total personality of the individual artist
as manifested in his work collectively, and to be interpreted by the
appreciator through his knowledge of the artist's experience of life.

In order to wrest its fullest expressiveness from a work of art it is
necessary as far as possible to regard the work from the artist's own
point of view. We must try to see with his eyes and to feel with him
what he was working for. To this end we must reconstruct
imaginatively on a basis of the facts the conditions in which he lived
and wrought. The difference between Giotto and Raphael is a
difference not of individuality only. Each gives expression to the
ideals and ways of thought of his age. Each is a creative mind, but
each bases his performance upon what has gone before, and the
form of their work is conditioned by the resources each had at his
disposal. To discover the artist's purpose more completely than he
was able to realize it for himself in the single work,--that is the aim
and function of the historical study of art. A brief review of the
achievement of Giotto and of Raphael may serve to illustrate
concretely the application of the principle and to fix its value to
appreciation.

In the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire art passed
from Rome to Byzantium. The arts of sculpture and painting were
employed in the service of the Church, imposing by its magnificence
and all-powerful in its domination over the lives and minds of men.
The function of art was to teach; its character was symbolic and
decorative. Art had no separate and independent existence. It had no
direct reference to nature; the pictorial representation of individual
traits was quite outside its scope; a few signs fixed by convention
sufficed. A fish--derived from the acrostic _ichtbus--_symbolized
the Saviour; a cross was the visible token of redeeming grace. And
so through several hundred years. The twelfth century saw the
beginnings of a change in the direction of spiritual and intellectual
emancipation. The teachings and example of Francis of Assisi
brought men to the consciousness of themselves and to a realization
of the worth and significance of the individual life. The work of
Giotto is the expression in art of the new spirit.

Of necessity Giotto founded his work upon the accepted forms of
the Byzantine tradition. But Giotto was a man of genius and a
creative mind. In the expression of his fresh impulse and vital
feeling, the assertion of new-found individuality, he tried to
_realize_ as convincingly and vividly as possible the situation with
which he was dealing; and with this purpose he looked not back
upon art but out upon nature. Where the Byzantine convention had
presented but a sign and remote indication of form by means of flat
color, Giotto endows his figures with life and movement and
actuality by giving them a body in three dimensions; his forms exist
in the round. Until his day, light and shade had not been employed;
and such perspective as he was able to achieve he had to discover
for himself. For the first time in Christian painting a figure has
bodily existence. Giotto gives the first evidence, too, of a sense of
the beauty of color, and of the value of movement as a means of
added expressiveness. His power of composition shows an immense
advance on his predecessors. In dealing with traditional subjects, as
the Madonna and child, he follows in general the traditional
arrangement. But in those subjects where his own inventiveness is
given free play, as in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St.
Francis, he reveals an extraordinary faculty of design and a dramatic
sense which is matched by a directness and clarity of expression.

Not only in the technique of his craft was Giotto an innovator, but
also in the direction of naturalness and reality of feeling. He was the
first to introduce portraits into his work. His Madonnas and saints
are no longer mere types; they are human and individual, vividly felt
and characterized by immediate and present actuality. Giotto was
the first realist, but he was a poet too. His insight into life is
tempered by a deep sincerity and piety; his work is genuinely and
powerfully felt. As a man Giotto was reverent and earnest, joyous
and beautifully sane. As a painter, by force of the freshness of his
impulse and the clarity of his vision, he created a new manner of
expression. As an artist he reveals a true power of imaginative
interpretation. The casual spectator of to-day finds him naive and
quaint. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was anything but that;
they regarded him as a marvel of reality, surpassing nature itself.
When judged with reference to the conditions of life in which he
worked and to the technical resources at his command, Giotto is
seen to be of a very high order of creative mind.

The year 1300 divides the life of Giotto into two nearly equal parts;
the year 1500 similarly divides the life of Raphael. In the two
centuries that intervene, the great age of Italian painting, initiated by
Giotto, reaches its flower and perfection in Michelangelo, Leonardo,
and Raphael. The years which followed the passing of these
greatnesses were the years of decadence and eclipse. If we are to
understand and justly appreciate the work of each man in its own
kind, the painting of Giotto must be tried by other standards than
those we apply to the judgment of Raphael. Giotto was a pioneer;
Raphael is a consummation. The two centuries between were a
period of development and change, a development in all that regards
technique, a change in national ideals and in the artist's attitude
toward life and toward his art. A quick survey of the period, if so
hasty a generalization permits correctness of statement, will help us
in the understanding of the craft and art of Raphael.

Giotto was succeeded by a host of lesser men, regarded as his
followers, men who sought to apply the principles and methods of
painting worked out by the master, but who lacked his inspiration
and his power. Thus it was for nearly a hundred years. The turn of
the fourteenth century into the fifteenth saw the emergence of new
forces in the science and the mechanics of painting. The laws of
perspective and foreshortening were made the object of special
research and practice by men like Uccello (1397-1475), Piero dei
Franceschi (1416-1492), and Mantegna (1431-1506). "Oh, what a
beautiful thing this perspective is!" Uccello exclaimed, as he stood
at his desk between midnight and dawn while his wife begged him
to take some rest. In the first thirty years of the fifteenth century,
Masaccio contributed to the knowledge of anatomy by his painting
of the nude form; and the study of the nude was continued by
Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli, in the second half of the century.
Masaccio, also, was the first to place his figures in _air,_ enveloping
them in atmosphere. Verrocchio, a generation later than Masaccio,
was one of the first of the Florentines to understand landscape and
the part played in it by air and light. The realistic spirit, which
suffices itself with subjects drawn from every-day actual experience,
finds expression in the first half of the fifteenth century in the work
of Andrea del Castagno. And so down through that century of spring
and summer. Each painter in his own way carries some detail of his
craft to a further point of development and prepares the path for the
supreme triumphs of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael.

The growing mastery of the principles and technique of painting
accompanied a change in the painter's attitude toward his art.
Originally, painting, applied in subjection to architecture and
employed in the service of the Church, was decorative in scope; its
purpose was illustration, its function was to teach. As painters, from
generation to generation, went deeper into the secrets of their craft,
they became less interested in the didactic import of their work, and
they concerned themselves more and more with its purely artistic
significance. Religious subjects were no longer used merely as
symbols for the expression of piety and as incitements to devotion;
they became inherently artistic motives, valued as they furnished the
artist an opportunity for the exercise of his knowledge and skill and
for the exhibition of lovely color and significant form. A change in
the mechanical methods of painting, also, had its influence on a
change in the conception of the function of art. With a very few
exceptions, the works of Giotto were executed in fresco as wall
decorations. The principles of mural painting require that the
composition shall be subordinated to the architectural conditions of
the space it is to fill and that the color shall be kept flat. The fresco
method meets these requirements admirably, but because of its
flatness it has its limitations. The introduction of an oil vehicle for
the pigment material, in the fifteenth century, made possible a much
greater range in gradated color, and reinforcing the increased
knowledge of light and shade, aided in the evolution of decoration
into the "easel picture," complete in itself. Released from its
subjection to architecture, increasing its technical resources, and
widening its interests in the matter of subject so as to include all life,
painting becomes an independent and self-sufficing art.

Coincident with the development of painting as a craft, a mighty
change was working itself out in the national ideals and in men's
ways of thought and feeling. Already in Giotto's time the spirit of
individualism had begun to assert itself in reaction from the
dominance of an all-powerful restrictive ecclesiasticism, but the age
was still essentially pietistic and according to its lights, religious.
The fifteenth century witnessed the emancipation from tradition.
The new humanism, which took its rise with the rediscovery of
Greek culture, extended the intellectual horizon and intensified the
enthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowly
religious, but human; their art became the expression of the new
spirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of life
and the mortification of the flesh. The men of the Renaissance, with
something of the feeling of the elder Greeks, glorified the body and
delighted in the pride of life. Pagan myths and Greek legends take
their place alongside of Bible episodes and stories of saints and
martyrs, as subjects of representation; all served equally as motives
for the expression of the artist's sense of the beauty of this world.

To this new culture and to these two centuries of growth and
accomplishment in the practice of painting Raphael was heir. With a
knowledge of the background out of which he emerges, we are
prepared now to understand and appreciate his individual
achievement. In approaching the study of his work we may ask,
What is in general his ideal, his dominant motive, and in what
manner and by what means has he realized his ideal?

How much was already prepared for him, what does he owe to the
age and the conditions in which he worked, and what to the common
store has he added that is peculiarly his own?

Whereas Giotto, the shepherd boy, was a pioneer, almost solitary, by
sheer force of mind and by his sincerity and intensity of feeling
breaking new paths to expression, for Raphael, on the contrary, the
son of a painter and poet, the fellow-worker and well-beloved friend
of many of the most powerful artistic personalities of his own or any
age, the way was already prepared along which he moved in
triumphant progress. The life of Raphael as an artist extends through
three well-defined periods, the Umbrian, the Florentine, and the
Roman, each one of which contributed a distinctive influence upon
his development and witnessed a special and characteristic
achievement.

To his father, who died when the boy was eleven years old, Raphael
owed his poetic nature, scholarly tastes, and love of beauty, though
he probably received from him no training as a painter. His first
master was Timoteo Viti of Urbino, a pupil of Francia; from him he
learned drawing and acquired a "certain predilection for round and
opulent forms which is in itself the negation of the ascetic ideal." At
the age of seventeen he went from Urbino to Perugia; there he
entered the workshop of Perugino as an assistant. The ideal of the
Umbrian school was tenderness and sweetness, the outward and
visible rapture of pietistic feeling; something of these qualities
Raphael expressed in his Madonnas throughout his career. Under the
teaching of Perugino he laid hold on the principles of "space
composition" which he was afterwards to carry to supreme
perfection.

From Perugia the young Raphael made his way to Florence, and
here he underwent many influences. At that moment Florence was
the capital city of Italian culture. It was here that the new humanism
had come to finest flower. Scholarship was the fashion; art was the
chief interest of this beauty-loving people. It was the Florentines
who had carried the scientific principles of painting to their highest
point of development, particularly in their application to the
rendering of the human figure. In Florence were collected the art
treasures of the splendid century; here Michelangelo and Leonardo
were at work; here were gathered companies of lesser men. By the
study of Masaccio Raphael was led out to a fresh contact with nature.
Fra Bartolomeo revealed to him further possibilities of composition
and taught him some of the secrets of color. In Florence, too, he
acknowledged the spell of Michelangelo and Leonardo. But though
he learned from many teachers, Raphael was never merely an
imitator. His scholarship and his skill he turned to his own uses; and
when we have traced the sources of his motives and the influences
in the moulding of his manner, there emerges out of the fusion a
creative new force, which is his genius. What remains after our
analysis is the essential Raphael.

Raphael's residence in Florence is the period of his Madonnas. From
Florence Raphael, twenty-five years old and now a master in his
own right, was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II; and here he
placed his talents and his mastership at the disposal of the Church.
He found time to paint Madonnas and a series of powerful and
lovely portraits; but these years in Rome, which brought his brief
life to a close, are preeminently the period of the great frescoes,
which are his supreme achievement. But even in these mature years,
and though he was himself the founder of a school, he did not cease
to learn. Michelangelo was already in Rome, and now Raphael came
more immediately under his influence, although not to submit to it
but to use it for his own ends. In Rome were revealed to him the
culture of an older and riper civilization and the glories and
perfectness of an elder art. Raphael laid antiquity under contribution
to the consummation of his art and the fulfillment and complete
realization of his genius.

This analysis of the elements and influences of Raphael's career as
an artist--inadequate as it necessarily is--may help us to define his
distinctive accomplishment. A comparison of his work with that of
his predecessors and contemporaries serves to disengage his
essential significance. By nature he was generous and tender; the
bent of his mind was scholarly; and he was impelled by a passion for
restrained and formal beauty. Chiefly characteristic of his mental
make-up was his power of assimilation, which allowed him to
respond to many and diverse influences and in the end to dominate
and use them. He gathered up in himself the achievements of two
centuries of experiment and progress, and fusing the various
elements, he created by force of his genius a new result and stamped
it with the seal perfection. Giotto, to whom religion was a reality,
was deeply in earnest about his message, and he phrased it as best he
could with the means at his command; his end was expression.
Raphael, under the patronage of wealthy dilettanti and in the service
of a worldly and splendor-loving Church, delighted in his
knowledge and his skill; he worshiped art, and his end was beauty.
The genius of Giotto is a first shoot, vigorous and alive, breaking
ground hardily, and tentatively pushing into freer air. The genius of
Raphael is the full-blown flower and final fruit, complete, mature.
The step beyond is decay.

By reference to Giotto and to Raphael I have tried to illustrate the
practical application of certain principles of art study. A work of art
is not absolute; both its content and its form are determined by the
conditions out of which it proceeds. All judgment, therefore, must
be comparative, and a work of art must be considered in its relation
to its background and its conventions. Art is an interpretation of
some aspect of life as the artist has felt it; and the artist is a child of
his time. It is not an accident that Raphael portrayed Madonnas,
serene and glorified, and Millet pictured rude peasants bent with toil.
Raphael's painting is the culmination of two centuries of eager
striving after the adequate expression of religious sentiment; in
Millet's work the realism of his age is transfigured. As showing
further how national ideals and interests may influence individual
production, we may note that the characteristic art of the Italian
Renaissance is painting; and Italian sculpture of the period is
pictorial rather than plastic in motive and handling. Ghiberti's doors
of the Florence Baptistery, in the grouping of figures and the three
and four planes in perspective of the backgrounds, are essentially
pictures in bronze. Conversely, in the North the characteristic art of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is carving and sculpture; and
"the early painters represented in their pictures what they were
familiar with in wood and stone; so that not only are the figures dry
and hard, but in the groups they are packed one behind another,
heads above heads, without really occupying space, in imitation of
the method adopted in the carved relief." Some knowledge of the
origin and development of a given form of technique, a knowledge
to be reached through historical study, enables us to measure the
degree of expressiveness of a given work. The ideas of a child may
be very well worth listening to, though his range of words is limited
and his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, having
acquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. In
our endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or by
Tennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or a
symphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wanted
to say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? With
a sense of the artist's larger motive, whether religious sentiment, or a
love of sheer beauty of color and form, or insight into human
character, we are aided by a study of the history of technique to
determine how far the artist with the language at his command was
able to realize his intention.

But not only is art inspired and directed by the time-spirit of its age.
A single work is the expression for the artist who creates it of his
ideal. An artist's ideal, what he sets himself to accomplish, is the
projection of his personality, and that is determined by many
influences. He is first of all a child of his race and time; inheritance
and training shape him to these larger conditions. Then his ideal is
modified by his special individuality. A study of the artist's character
as revealed in his biography leads to a fuller understanding of the
intention and scope of his work. The events of his life become
significant as they are seen to be the causes or the results of his total
personality, that which he was in mind and temperament. What were
the circumstances that moulded his character and decided his course?
What events did he shape to his own purpose by the active force of
his genius? What was the special angle of vision from which he
looked upon the world? The answers to these questions are the clue
to the full drift of his work. As style is the expression of the man, so
conversely a knowledge of the man is an entrance into the wider and
subtler implications of his style. We explore the personality of the
man in order more amply to interpret his art, and we turn to his art
as the revelation of his personality. In studying an artist we must
look for his _tendency_ and seek the unifying principle which binds
his separate works into a whole. An artist has his successive periods
or "manners." There is the period of apprenticeship, when the young
man is influenced by his predecessors and his masters. Then he
comes into his own, and he registers nature and life as he sees it
freshly for himself. Finally, as he has mastered his art and won some
of the secrets of nature, and as his own character develops, he tends
more and more to impose his subjective vision upon the world, and
he subordinates nature to the expression of his distinctive
individuality. A single work, therefore, is to be considered in
relation to its place in the artist's development; it is but a part, and it
is to be interpreted by reference to the whole.

In the study of biography, however, the man must not be mistaken
for the artist; his acts are not to be confounded with his message. "A
man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he
became." We must summon forth the spirit of the man from within
the wrappages of material and accident. In our preoccupation with
the external details of a man's familiar and daily life it is easy to lose
sight of his spiritual experience, which only is of significance.
Whistler, vain, aggressive, quarrelsome, and yet so exquisite and so
subtle in extreme refinement, is a notable example of a great spirit
and a little man. Wagner wrote to Liszt: "As I have never felt the
real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of
my dreams, in which from beginning to end that love shall be
thoroughly satiated." Not the Wagner of fact, but the Wagner of
dreams. Life lived in the spirit and imagination may be different
from the life of daily act. So we should transcend the material,
trying through that to penetrate to the spiritual. It is not a visit to the
artist's birthplace that signifies, it is not to do reverence before his
likeness or cherish a bit of his handwriting. All this may have a
value to the disciple as a matter of loyalty and fine piety. But in the
end we must go beyond these externals that we may enter
intelligently and sympathetically into the temper of his mind and
mood and there find disclosed what he thought and felt and was able
only in part to express. It is not the man his neighbors knew that is
important. His work is the essential thing, what that work has to tell
us about life in terms of emotional experience.

Studies in the history of art and in biography are avenues of
approach to the understanding of a work of art; they do not in
themselves constitute appreciation. Historical importance must not
be mistaken for artistic significance. In reading about pictures we
may forget to look at them. The historical study of art in its various
divisions reduces itself to an exercise in analysis, resolving a given
work into its elements. But art is a synthesis. In order to appreciate a
work the elements must be gathered together and fused into a whole.
A statue or a picture is meant not to be read about, but to be looked
at; and its final message must be received through vision. Our
knowledge will serve us little if we are not sensitive to the appeal of
color and form. There is danger that preoccupation with the history
of art may betray us if we are not careful to keep it in its place. The
study of art should follow and not lead appreciation. We are apt to
see what we are looking for. So we ought to come to each work
freshly without prejudice or bias; it is only afterwards that we should
bring to bear on it our knowledge about the facts of its production.
Connoisseurship is a science and may hold within itself no element
of aesthetic enjoyment. Appreciation is an art, and the quality of it
depends upon the appreciator himself. The end of historical study is
not a knowledge of facts for their own sake, but through those facts
a deeper penetration and fuller true enjoyment. By the aid of such
knowledge we are enabled to recognize in any work more certainly
and abundantly the expression of an emotional experience which
relates itself to our own life.

The final meaning of art to the appreciator lies in just this sense of
its relation to his own experience. The greatest works are those
which express reality and life, not limited and temporary conditions,
but life universal and for all time. Without commentary these carry
their message, appealing to the wisest and the humblest. Gather into
a single room a fragment of the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo's
"Day and Night," Botticelli's "Spring," the sprites and children of
Donatello and Delia Robbia, Velasquez's "Pope Innocent,"
Rembrandt's "Cloth-weavers," Frans Hals' "Musician," Millet's
"Sower," Whistler's "Carlyle." There is here no thought of period or
of school. These living, present, eternal verities are all one company.



VI

THE SERVICE OF CRITICISM

THE greatest art is universal. It transcends the merely local
conditions in which it is produced. It sweeps beyond the individual
personality of its creator, and links itself with the common
experience of all men. The Parthenon, so far as it can be
reconstructed in imagination, appeals to a man of any race or any
period, whatever his habit of mind or degree of culture, as a perfect
utterance. The narrow vault of the Sistine Chapel opens into
immensity, and every one who looks upon it is lifted out of himself
into new worlds. Shakespeare's plays were enjoyed by the
apprentices in the pit and royalty in the boxes, and so all the way
between. The man Shakespeare, of such and such birth and training,
and of this or that experience in life, is entirely merged in his
creations; he becomes the impersonal channel of expression of the
profoundest, widest interpretation of life the world has known. Such
art as this comes closest to the earth and extends farthest into
infinity, "beyond the reaches of our souls."

But there is another order of art, more immediately the product of
local conditions, the personal expression of a distinctive
individuality, phrased in a language of less scope and currency, and
limited as to its content in the range of its appeal. These lesser works
have their place; they can minister to us in some moment of need
and at some point in our development. Because of their limitations,
however, their effectiveness can be furthered by interpretation. A
man more sensitive than we to the special kind of beauty which they
embody and better versed in their language, can discover to us a
significance and a charm in them to which we have not penetrated.
To help us to the fullest enjoyment of the great things and to a more
enlightened and juster appreciation of the lesser works is the service
of criticism.

We do not wholly possess an experience until, having merged
ourselves in it, we then react upon it and become conscious of its
significance. A novel, a play, a picture interests us, and we surrender
to the enjoyment of the moment. Afterwards we think about our
pleasure, defining the nature of the experience and analyzing the
means by which it was produced, the subject of the work and the
artist's method of treating it. It may be that we tell our pleasure to a
friend, glad also perhaps to hear his opinion of the matter. The
impulse is natural; the practice is helpful. And herein lies the origin
of criticism. In so far as an appreciator does not rest in his
immediate enjoyment of a work of art, but seeks to account for his
pleasure, to trace the sources of it, to establish the reasons for it, and
to define its quality, so far he becomes a critic. As every man who
perceives beauty in nature and takes it up into his own life is
potentially an artist, so every man is a critic in the measure that he
reasons about his enjoyment. The critical processes, therefore, are an
essential part of our total experience of art, and criticism may be an
aid to appreciation.

The function of criticism has been variously understood through the
centuries of its practice. Early modern criticism, harking back to the
method of Aristotle, concerned itself with the form of a work of art.
From the usage of classic writers it deduced certain "rules" of
composition; these formulas were applied to the work under
examination, and that was adjudged good or bad in the degree that it
conformed or failed to conform to the established rules. It was a
criticism of law-giving and of judgment. In the eighteenth century
criticism extended its scope by the admission of a new consideration,
passing beyond the mere form of the work and reckoning with its
power to give pleasure. Addison, in his critique of "Paradise Lost,"
still applies the formal tests of the Aristotelian canons, but he
discovers further that a work of art exists not only for the sake of its
form, but also for the expression of beautiful ideas. This power of
"affecting the imagination" he declares is the "very life and highest
perfection" of poetry. This is a long step in the right direction. With
the nineteenth century, criticism conceives its aims and procedure in
new and larger ways. A work of art is now seen to be an evolution;
and criticism adapts to its own uses the principles of historical study
and the methods of scientific investigation. Recognizing that art is
organic, that an art-form, as religious painting or Gothic architecture
or the novel, is born, develops, comes to maturity, lapses, and dies,
that an individual work is the product of "race, environment, and the
moment," that it is the expression also of the personality of the artist
himself, criticism no longer regards the single work as an isolated
phenomenon, but tries to see it in its relation to its total background.

Present-day criticism avails itself of this larger outlook upon art. But
the ends to be reached are understood differently by different critics.
With M. Brunetière, to cite now a few representative names,
criticism is authoritative and dogmatic: he looks at the work
objectively, refusing to be the dupe of his pleasure, if he has any;
and approaching the work in the spirit of dispassionate impersonal
inquiry as an object of historical importance and scientific interest,
he decrees that it is good or bad. Matthew Arnold considers
literature a "criticism of life," and he values a work with reference to
the moral significance of its ideas. Ruskin's criticism is didactic; he
wishes to educate his public, and by force of his torrential eloquence
he succeeds in persuading his disciples into acceptance of his
teaching, though he may not always convince. Impressionistic
criticism, as with M. Anatole France or M. Jules Lemaître, does not
even try to see the work "as in itself it really is," but is an account of
the critic's own subjective reaction on it, a narrative of what he
thought and felt in this chance corner of experience. With Walter
Pater criticism becomes _appreciation._ A given work of art
produces a distinctive impression and communicates a special and
unique pleasure; this active power constitutes its beauty. So the
function of the critic as Pater conceives it is "to distinguish, analyze,
and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a
landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this
special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source
of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced."
The interpretative critic--represented in the practice of Pater--stands
between a work of art and the appreciator as mediator and revealer.

Each kind of criticism performs a certain office, and is of use within
its own chosen sphere. To the layman, for his purposes of
appreciation, that order of criticism will be most helpful which
responds most closely and amply to his peculiar needs. A work of
art may be regarded under several aspects, its quality of technical
execution, its power of sensuous appeal, its historical importance;
and to each one of these aspects some kind of criticism applies. The
layman's reception of art includes all these considerations, but
subordinates them to the total experience. His concern, therefore, is
to define the service of criticism to appreciation.

The analysis of a work of art resolves it into these elements. There is
first of all the emotion which gives birth to the work and which the
work is designed to express. The emotion, to become definite,
gathers about an idea, conceived in the terms of its own medium, as
form, or color and mass, or musical relations; and this artistic idea
presents itself as the subject or motive of the work. The emotion and
artistic idea, in order that they may be expressed and become
communicable, embody themselves in material, as the marble of a
statue, the pigment of a picture, the audible tones of a musical
composition. This material form has the power to satisfy the mind
and delight the senses. Through the channel of the senses and the
mind the work reaches the feelings; and the aesthetic experience is
complete.

As art springs out of emotion, so it is to be received as emotion; and
a work to be appreciated in its true spirit must be enjoyed. But to be
completely enjoyed it must be understood. We must know what the
artist was trying to express, and we must be able to read his
language; then we are prepared to take delight in the form and to
respond to the emotion.

To help us to understand a work of art in all the components that
entered into the making of it is the function of historical study. Such
study enables us to see the work from the artist's own point of view.
A knowledge of its background, the conditions in which the artist
wrought and his own attitude toward life, is the clue to his ideal; and
by an understanding of the language it was possible for him to
employ, we can measure the degree of expressiveness he was able to
achieve. This study of the artist's purpose and of his methods is an
exercise in explanation.

The interpretation of art, for which we look to criticism, deals with
the picture, the statue, the book, specifically in its relation to the
appreciator. What is the special nature of the experience which the
work communicates to us in terms of feeling? In so far as the
medium itself is a source of pleasure, by what qualities of form has
the work realized the conditions of beauty proper to it, delighting
thus the senses and satisfying the mind? These are the questions
which the critic, interpreting the work through the medium of his
own temperament, seeks to answer.

Theoretically, the best critic of art would be the artist himself. He
above all other men should understand the subtle play of emotion
and thought in which a work of art is conceived; and the artist rather
than another should trace the intricacies and know the cunning of the
magician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself into
visible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out by
the fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings of
his spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and not
analytic. From his contact with nature and from his experience of
life, out of which rises his generative emotion, he moves directly to
the fashioning of expressive forms, without pausing on the way to
scan too closely the "meaning" of his work. Mr. Bernard Shaw
remarks that Ibsen, giving the rein to the creative impulse of his
poetic nature, produced in "Brand" and "Peer Gynt" a "great puzzle
for his intellect." Wagner, he says, "has expressly described how the
intellectual activity which he brought to the analysis of his music
dramas was in abeyance during their creation. Just so do we find
Ibsen, after composing his two great dramatic poems, entering on a
struggle to become intellectually conscious of what he had done."
Moreover, the artist is in the very nature of things committed to one
way of seeing. His view of life is limited by the trend of his own
dominant and creative personality; what he gains in intensity and
penetration of insight he loses in breadth. He is less quick to see
beauty in another guise than that which his own imagination weaves
for him; he is less receptive of other ways of envisaging the world.

The ideal critic, on the contrary, is above everything else catholic
and tolerant. It is his task to discover beauty in whatever form and to
affirm it. By nature he is more sensitive than the ordinary man, by
training he has directed the exercise of his powers toward their
fullest scope, and by experience of art in its diverse manifestations
he has certified his judgment and deepened his capacity to enjoy.
The qualifications of an authentic critic are both temperament and
scholarship. Mere temperament uncorrected by knowledge may
vibrate exquisitely when swept by the touch of a thing of beauty, but
its music may be in a quite different key from the original motive.
Criticism must relate itself to the objective fact; it should interpret
and not transpose. Mere scholarship without temperament misses art
at its centre, that art is the expression and communication of
emotional experience; and the scholar in criticism may wander his
leaden way down the by-paths of a sterile learning. To mediate
between the artist and the appreciator, the critic must understand the
artist and he must feel with the appreciator. He is at once the artist
translated into simpler terms and the appreciator raised to a higher
power of perception and response.

The service of criticism to the layman is to furnish him a clue to the
meaning of the work in hand, and by the critic's own response to its
beauty to reveal its potency and charm. With technique as such the
critic is not concerned. Technique is the business of the artist; only
those who themselves practice an art are qualified to judge in
matters of practice. The form is significant to the appreciator only so
far as regards its expressiveness and beauty. It is not the function of
the critic to tell the artist what his work _should be;_ it is the critic's
mission to reveal to the appreciator what the work _is_. That
revelation will be accomplished in terms of the critic's own
experience of the beauty of the work, an experience imaged forth in
such phrases that the pleasure the work communicates is conveyed
to his readers in its true quality and foil intensity. It is not enough to
dogmatize as Ruskin dogmatizes, to bully the reader into a terrified
acceptance. It is not enough to determine absolute values as
Matthew Arnold seeks to do, to fix certain canons of intellectual
judgment, and by the application of a formula as a touchstone, to
decide that this work is excellent and that another is less good.
Really serviceable criticism is that which notes the special and
distinguishing quality of beauty in any work and helps the reader to
live out that beauty in his own experience.

These generalizations may be made more immediate and practical
by examples. In illustration of the didactic manner in criticism I may
cite a typical paragraph of Ruskin, chosen from his "Mornings in
Florence."

First, look at the two sepulchral slabs by which you are standing.
That farther of the two from the west end is one of the most
beautiful pieces of fourteenth-century sculpture in this world. . . .
And now, here is a simple but most useful test of your capacity for
understanding Florentine sculpture or painting. If you can see that
the lines of that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of the
folds is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that the
softness and ease of them is complete,--though only sketched with a
few dark touches,--then you can understand Giotto's drawing, and
Botticelli's;--Donatello's carving, and Luca's. But if you see nothing
in _this_ sculpture, you will see nothing in theirs, _of_ theirs. Where
they choose to imitate flesh, or silk, or to play any vulgar modern
trick with marble--(and they often do)--whatever, in a word, is
French, or American, or Cockney, in their work, you can see; but
what is Florentine, and for ever great--unless you can see also the
beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap,--you will see never.

The earnest and docile though bewildered layman is intimidated into
thinking that he sees it, whether he really does or not. But it is a
question if the contemplation of the "beauty of this old man in his
citizen's cap," however eager and serious the contemplation may be,
adds much to his experience; it may be doubted whether as a result
of his effort toward the understanding of the rightness and loveliness
of the lines of the cap and the exquisiteness of the choice of folds,
which the critic has pointed out to him with threatening finger, he
feels that life is a fuller and finer thing to live.

An example of the intellectual estimate, the valuation by formulas,
and the assignment of abstract rank, is this paragraph from Matthew
Arnold's essay on Wordsworth.

Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of
profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he is
unique. His best poems are those which most perfectly exhibit this
balance. I have a warm admiration for "Laodameia" and for the great
"Ode;" but if I am to tell the very truth, I find "Laodameia" not
wholly free from something artificial, and the great "Ode" not
wholly free from something declamatory. If I had to pick out poems
of a kind most perfectly to show Wordsworth's unique power, I
should rather choose poems such as "Michael," "The Fountain,"
"The Highland Reaper." And poems with the peculiar and unique
beauty which distinguishes these, Wordsworth produced in
considerable number; besides very many other poems of which the
worth, although not so rare as the worth of these, is still exceedingly
high.

Thus does the judicial critic mete out his estimate by scale and
measuring-rod. We are told dogmatically what is good and what is
less good; but of distinctive quality and energizing life-giving
virtues, not a word. The critic does not succeed in communicating to
us anything of Wordsworth's special charm and power. We are
informed, but we are left cold and unresponding.

The didactic critic imposes his standard upon the layman. The
judicial critic measures and awards. The appreciative critic does not
attempt to teach or to judge; he makes possible to his reader an
appreciation of the work of art simply by recreating in his own terms
the complex of his emotions in its presence. Instead of declaring the
work to be beautiful or excellent, he makes it beautiful in the very
telling of what it means to him. As the artist interprets life,
disclosing its depths and harmonies, so the appreciative critic in his
turn interprets art, reconstituting the beauty of it in his own terms.
Through his interpretation, the layman is enabled to enter more fully
into the true spirit of the work and to share its beauty in his own
experience.

In contrast to the passage from Arnold is this paragraph from an
essay on Wordsworth by Walter Pater.

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle of
it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their
daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great
elementary feelings, lifting and solemnizing their language and
giving it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to
Michael by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these
humble children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate
souls. In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of
George Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. With
a penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the
masters of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold and
Victor Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement which
were to be found in that pastoral world--the girl who rung her
father's knell; the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; the
instinctive touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures,
even--their home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales of
passionate regret that hang by a ruined farm-building, a heap of
stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer
world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower
these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrow
of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personal
beauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their pathetic
wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the
stormy seas;" the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her
betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of
the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all the
pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their
wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of
children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their
yearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their
early toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this
strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised the
image, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction
has caught from him.

Here is the clue to Wordsworth's meaning; and the special quality
and power of his work, gathering amplitude and intensity as it plays
across the critic's temperament, is reconstituted in other and
illuminating images which communicate the emotion to us. The
critic has felt more intimately than we the appeal of this poetry, and
he kindles in us something of his own enthusiasm. So we return to
Wordsworth for ourselves, more alert to divine his message, more
susceptible to his spell, that he may work in us the magic of
evocation.

Criticism is of value to us as appreciators in so far as it serves to
recreate in us the experience which the work was designed to
convey. But criticism is not a short cut to enjoyment. We cannot
take our pleasure at second hand. We must first come to the work
freshly and realize our own impression of it; then afterwards we may
turn to the critic for a further revelation. Criticism should not shape
our opinion, but should stimulate appreciation, carrying us farther
than we could go ourselves, but always in the same direction with
our original impression. There is a kind of literary exercise, calling
itself criticism, which takes a picture or a book as its point of
departure and proceeds to create a work of art in its own right,
attaching itself only in name to the work which it purports to
criticise. "Who cares," exclaims a clever maker of epigrams,
"whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What does
it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's Gallery." A very good appreciation of Ruskin, this. But
the answer is that such writing as is here attributed to Ruskin is
magnificent: it may be art; but it is not true criticism. A work of art
is not "impressive" merely, but "expressive" too. Criticism in its
relation to the work itself has an objective base, and it must be
steadied and authenticated by constant reference to the original feet.
Criticism is not the source of our enjoyment but a medium of
interpretation.

Before we turn to criticism, therefore, we must first, as Pater
suggests, know our own impression as it really is, discriminate it,
and realize it distinctly. Only so shall we escape becoming the dupe
of some more aggressive personality. In our mental life suggestion
plays an important and perhaps unrecognized part. In a certain frame
of mind we can be persuaded into believing anything and into liking
anything. When, under the influence of authority or fashion, we
think we care for that which has no vital and consciously realized
relation to our own experience, we are the victims of a kind of
hypnotism, and there is little hope of our ultimate adjustment over
against art. It is far better honestly to like an inferior work and know
why we like it than to pretend to like a good one. In the latter case
no real progress or development is possible, for we have no
standards that can be regarded as final; we are swayed by the
authority or influence which happens at that moment to be most
powerful. In the former case we are at least started in the right
direction. Year by year, according to the law of natural growth, we
come to the end of the inferior work which up to that time has been
able to minister to us, and we pass on to new and greater works that
satisfy the demands of our deepening experience. It is sometimes
asked if we ought not to try to like the best things in art. I should
answer, the very greatest things we do not have to _try_ to like; the
accent of greatness is unmistakable, and greatness has a message for
every one. As regards the lesser works, we ought to be willing to
grow up. There was a time when I enjoyed "Robinson Crusoe" in
words of one syllable. If I had _tried_ then to like Mr. George
Meredith, I should not really have enjoyed him, and I should have
missed the fun of "Robinson Crusoe." Everything in its time and
place. The lesser works have their use: they may be a starting-point
for our entrance into life; and they furnish a basis of comparison by
which we are enabled to realize the greatness of the truly great. We
must value everything in its own kind, affirming what it is, and not
regretting what it is not. But the prerequisite of all appreciation,
without which our contact with art is a pastime or a pretense, is that
we be honest with ourselves. In playing solitaire at least we ought
not to cheat.

So the layman must face the situation squarely and accept the
responsibility of deciding finally for himself. On the way we may
look to criticism to guide us to those works which are meant for us.
In art as in the complex details of living, there is need of selection;
and criticism helps toward that. In literature alone, to name but a
single art, there is so much to be left unread which the length of our
life would not otherwise permit us to escape, that we are grateful to
the critic who aids us to omit gracefully and with success. But the
most serviceable criticism is positive and not destructive. The lesser
works may have a message for us, and it is that message in its
distinctive quality which the critic should affirm. In the end,
however, the use we make of criticism should not reduce itself to an
unquestioning acceptance of authority. In the ceremonial of the
Roman service, at the moment preceding the elevation of the Host,
two acolytes enter the chancel, bearing candles, and kneel between
the congregation and the ministrants at the altar; the tapers,
suffusing the altar in their golden radiance, throw the dim figures of
the priests into a greater gloom and mystery. So it happens that art
often is enshrouded by the off-giving of those who would seem to
illuminate it; and "dark with excess of light," the obscurity is
intensified. The layman is told of the virginal poetry of early Italian
painting; he is bidden to sit at the homely, substantial feast of the
frank actuality of Dutch art; he listens in puzzled wonder to the
glorification of Velasquez and Goya; he reads in eloquent, glowing
language of the splendor of Turner. He is more than half persuaded;
but he does not quite understand. From this tangle of contending
interests there seems for the moment to be no way out. It is assumed
that the layman has no standard of his own; and he yields himself to
the appeal which comes to him immediately at the instant. The next
day, perhaps, brings a new interest or another judgment which runs
counter to the old. Back and forth and back again, without purpose
and without reason; it is only an endless recurrence of the conflict
instead of development and progress. Taking all his estimates at
second hand, so for his opinion even of a concert or a play he is at
the mercy of a critic who may have dined badly. Some boy, caught
young at the university and broken to miscellaneous tasks on a big
newspaper, is sent to "do" a picture-exhibition, a concert, and the
theatre in the same day. He is expected to "criticise" in an hour the
work of a lifetime of struggle and effort and knowledge and thought
and feeling. This is the guide of opinion and the foundation of
artistic creed. I have stated the reduction to absurdity of the case for
authority in criticism. If the layman who leans too heavily upon
criticism comes to realize the hopelessness of his position and thinks
the situation through to its necessary conclusion, he sees that the
authority of criticism is not absolute, but varies with the powers and
range of the individual critic, and that at the last he must find his
standard within himself.

There are, of course, certain standards of excellence recognized
universally and certain principles of taste of universal validity; and
to these standards and these principles must be referred our
individual estimates for comparison and correction. Given a native
sensibility to the worth of life and to the appeal of beauty, the justice
of our estimate will be in proportion to the extent of our knowledge
of life and of our contact with art. Our individual judgment,
therefore, must be controlled by experience,--our momentary
judgments by the sum of our own experience, and our total
judgment by universal experience. In all sound criticism and right
appreciation there must be a basis of disciplined taste. We must
guard ourselves against whims and caprice, even our own. So the
individual may not cut loose altogether from external standards. But
these must be brought into relation to his personal needs and applied
with reference to his own standard. Finally, for his own uses, the
individual has the right to determine the meaning and value to him
of any work of art in the measure that it links itself with his own
actual or possible experience and becomes for him a revelation of
fuller life. For beauty is the power possessed by objects to quicken
us with a sense of larger personality; and art, whether the arts of
form or of representation, is the material bodying forth of beauty as
the artist has perceived it and the means by which his emotion in its
presence is communicated. Upon this conception of beauty and this
interpretation of the scope and function of art rests the justice of the
personal estimate.



VII

BEAUTY AND COMMON LIFE

TO become sensitive to the meaning of color and form and sound as
the artist employs them for expression, to feel a work of art in its
relation to its background, to find in criticism enlightenment and
guidance but not a substitute for one's own experience,--these are
methods of approach to art. But the appreciator has yet to penetrate
art's inmost secret. At the centre, as the motive of all his efforts to
understand the language of art and the processes of technique, as the
goal of historical study and the purpose of his recourse to criticism,
stands the work itself with its power to attract and charm. Here is
Millet's painting of the "Sower." In the actual presence of the picture
the appreciator's experience is complex. Analysis resolves it into
considerations of the material form of the work, involving its
sensuous qualities and the processes of execution, considerations
also of the subject of the picture, which gathers about itself many
associations out of the beholder's own previous knowledge of life.
But the clue to the final meaning of the work, its meaning both to
the artist and to the appreciator, is contained in the answer to the
question, Why did Millet paint this picture? And just what is it
designed to express?

Art is born out of emotion. Though the symbols it may employ to
expression, the forms in which it may manifest itself, are infinitely
various in range and character, essentially all art is one. A work of
art is the material bodying forth of the artist's sense of a meaning in
life which unfolds itself to him as harmony and to which his spirit
responds accordantly. It may be a pattern he has conceived; or he
adapts material to a new use in response to a new need: the artist is
here a craftsman. He is stirred by the tone and incident of a
landscape or by the force or charm of some personality: and he puts
brush to canvas. He apprehends the complex rhythms of form: and
the mobile clay takes shape under his fingers. He feels the
significance of persons acting and reacting in their contact with one
another: and he pens a novel or a drama. He is thrilled by the
emotion attending the influx of a great idea; philosophy is touched
with feeling: and the thinker becomes a poet. The discords of
experience resolve themselves within him into harmonies: and he
gives them out in triumphant harmonies of sound. The particular
medium the artist chooses in which to express himself is incidental
to the feeling to be conveyed. The stimulus to emotion which impels
the artist to create and the essential content of his work is _beauty._
As beauty, then, is the very stuff and fibre of art, inextricably bound
up with it, so in our effort to relate art to our experience we may
seek to know something of the nature of beauty and its place in
common life.

During a visit in Philadelphia I was conducted by a member of the
firm through the great Locomotive Works in that city. From the vast
office, with its atmosphere of busy, concentrated quiet, punctuated
by the clicking of many typewriters, I was led through doors and
passages, and at length came upon the shrieking inferno of the shops.
The uproar and din were maddening. Overhead, huge cranes were
swinging great bulks of steel from one end of the cavernous shed to
the other; vague figures were moving obscurely in the murk; the
floor was piled and littered with heaps of iron-work of unimaginable
shapes. After a time we made our way into another area where there
was more quiet but no less confusion. I yelled to my guide, "Such a
rumpus and row I never saw; it is chaos come again!" And he
replied, "Why, to me it is all a perfect order. Everything is in its
place. Every man has his special job and does it. I know the meaning
and purpose of all those parts that seem to you to be thrown around
in such a mess. If you could follow the course of making from the
draughting-rooms to the finishing-shop, if you could see the process
at once as a whole, you would understand that it is all a complete
harmony, every part working with every other part to a definite
end." It was not I but my friend who had the truth of the matter.
Where for me there was only chaos, for him was order. And the
difference was that he had the clue which I had not. His sense of the
meaning of the parts brought the scattering details into a final unity;
and therein he found harmony and satisfaction.

I went away much impressed by what I had seen. When I had
collected my wits a little in the comparative calm of the streets, it
occurred to me that the immense workshops were a symbol of man's
life in the world. In the instant of experience all seems chaos. At
close range, in direct contact with the facts and demands of every
day, we feel how confusing and distracting it all is. Life is beating in
upon us at every point; all our senses are assailed at once. Each new
day brings its conflicting interests and obligations. Now, whether we
are aware of it or not, our constant effort is, out of the great variety
of experience pressing in upon us, to select such details as make to a
definite purpose and end. Instinctively we grope toward and attract
to us that which is special and proper to our individual development.
Our progress is toward harmony. By the adjustment of new material
to the shaping principle of our experience, the circle of our
individual lives widens its circumference. We are able to bring more
and more details into order, and correspondingly fuller and richer
our life becomes.

The mental perception of order in the parts gives the whole its
significance. This quick grasp of the whole is like the click of the
kaleidoscope which throws the tumbling, distorted bits into a design.
The conduct of practical life on the mental plane is the process also
of art on the plane of the emotions. Not only does experience offer
itself to us as the subject of thought; our contact with the world is
also the stimulus of feeling. In my account of the visit to the
Locomotive Works I have set down but a part and not the sum of my
reaction. After I had come away, I fell to thinking about what I had
seen, and intellectually I deduced certain abstract principles with
regard to unity and significance. But at the moment of experience
itself I simply felt. I was overwhelmed by the sense of unloosened
power. The very confusion of it all constituted the unity of
impression. The emotion roused in me by the roar and riotous
movement and the vast gloom torn by fitful yellow gleams from
opened furnaces and shapes of glowing metal was the emotion
appropriate to the experience of chaos. That I can find a single word
by which to characterize it, is evidence that the moment had its
harmony for me and consequent meaning. All the infinite universe
external to us is everywhere and at every instant potentially the
stimulus to emotion. But unless feeling is discriminated, it passes
unregarded. When the emotion gathers itself into design, when the
moment reveals within itself order and significance, then and not till
then the emotion becomes substance for expression in forms of art.

If I were able to phrase what I saw and what I felt in the Locomotive
Works, so that by means of presenting what I saw I might
communicate to another what I felt and so rouse in him the same
emotion, I should be an artist. Whistler or Monet might picture for
us the murk and mystery of this pregnant gloom. Wagner might
sound for us the tumultuous, weird emotions of this Niebelungen
workshop of the twentieth century. Dante or Milton might phrase
this inferno and pandemonium of modern industry and leave us
stirred by the sense of power in the play of gigantic forces. Whether
the medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet's
words, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as the
work expresses the emotion which the artist has felt in the presence
of this spectacle. He, the artist, more than I or another, has thrilled to
its mystery, its tumult, its power. It is this effect, received as a unity
of impression, that he wants to communicate. This power of the
object over him, and consequently the content of his work, is beauty.

In the experience of us all there are objects and situations which can
stir us,--the twilight hour, a group of children at play, the spectacle
of the great human crowd, it may be, or solitude under the stars, the
works of man as vast cities or cunningly contrived machines, or
perhaps it is the mighty, shifting panorama which nature unrolls for
us at every instant of day and night, her endless pageant of color and
light and shade and form. Out of them at the moment of our contact
is unfolded a new significance; because of them life becomes for us
larger, deeper. This power possessed by objects to rouse in us an
emotion which comes with the realization of inner significance
expressed in harmony is beauty. A brief analysis of the nature and
action of beauty may help us in the understanding and appreciation
of art, though the value to us of any explanation is to quicken us to a
more vivid sensitiveness to the effect of beauty in the domain of
actual experience of it.

Because the world external to us, which manifests beauty, is
received into consciousness by the senses, it is natural to seek our
explanation in the processes involved in the functioning of our
organism. Our existence as individual human beings is conditioned
by our embodiment in matter. Without senses, without nerves and a
brain, we should not _be._ Our feelings, which determine for us
finally the value of experience, are the product of the excitement of
our physical organism responding to stimulation. The rudimentary
and most general feelings are pleasure and pain. All the complex
and infinitely varied emotions that go to make up our conscious life
are modifications of these two elementary reactions. The feeling of
pleasure results when our organism "functions harmoniously with
itself;" pain is the consequence of discord. In the words of a recent
admirable statement of the psychologists' position: "When rhythm
and melody and forms and colors give me pleasure, it is because the
imitating impulses and movements that have arisen in me are such
as suit, help, heighten my physical organization in general and in
particular. . . . The basis, in short, of any aesthetic
experience--poetry, music, painting and the rest--is beautiful
through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses,
primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of the
suggestions and impulses it arouses with the whole organism." Beauty,
then, according to the psychologists, is the quality inherent in
things, the possession of which enables them to stimulate our
organism to harmonious functioning. And the perception of beauty
is a purely physiological reaction.

This explanation, valid within its limits, seems to me to fall short of
the whole truth. For it fails to reckon with that faculty and that entity
within us whose existence we know but cannot explain,--the faculty
we call mind, which operates as imagination, and the entity we
recognize as spirit or soul. I mean the faculty which gives us the
idea of God and the consciousness of self, the faculty which
apprehends relations and significance in material transcending their
material embodiment. I mean the entity within us which expresses
itself in love and aspiration and worship, the entity which is able to
fuse with the harmony external to it in a larger unity. When I glance
out upon a winter twilight drenching earth and sky with luminous
blue, a sudden delight floods in upon me, gathering up all my senses
in a surging billow of emotion, and my being pulses and vibrates in
a beat of joy. Something within me goes out to meet the landscape;
so far as I am at all conscious of the moment, I feel, There, that is
what I am! This deep harmony of tone and mass is the expression of
a fuller self toward which I yearn. My being thrills and dilates with
the sensation of larger life. Then, after the joy has throbbed itself out
and my reaction takes shape as consciousness, I set myself to
consider the sources and the processes of my experience. I note that
my eye has perceived color and form. My intellect, as I summon it
into action, tells me that I am looking upon a scene in nature
composed of material elements, as land and trees and water and
atmosphere. My senses, operating through channels of matter,
receive, and my brain registers, impressions of material objects. But
this analysis, though defining the processes, does not quite explain
_my joy._ I know that beyond all this, transcending my material
sense-perception and transcending the actual material of the
landscape, there is something in me and there is something in nature
which meet and mingle and become one. Above all embodiment in
matter, there is a plane on which I feel my community with the
world external to me, recognizing that world to be an extension of
my own personality, a plane on which I can identify myself with the
thing outside of me in so far as it is the expression of what I am or
may become. Between me and the external world there is a common
term. The effect which nature has upon us is determined, not by the
object itself alone and not by our individual mind and temperament
alone, but by the meeting of the two, the community between the
object and the spirit of man. When we find nature significant and
expressive, it is because we make nature in some way a part of our
own experience.

The material of an object is perceived by the senses. We see that it is
blue or green or brown; we may touch it and note that it is rough or
smooth, hard or soft, warm or cold. But the expressiveness of the
object, its value for the emotions, does not stop with its merely
material qualities, but comes with our grasp of the "relations" which
it embodies; and these relations, transmitted through material by the
senses, are apprehended by the mind. There are, of course,
elementary data of sense-perception, such as color and sound. It may
be that I prefer red to yellow because my eye is so constituted as to
function harmoniously with a rate of vibration represented by 450
billions per second, and discordantly with a rate of vibration
represented by 526 billions per second. So also with tones of a given
pitch. But though simple color and simple sound have each the
power to please the senses, yet in actual experience neither color nor
sound is perceived abstractly, apart from its embodiment in form.
Color is felt as the property of some concrete object, as the crimson
of a rose, the dye of some fabric or garment, the blue of the sky,
which, though we know it to be the infinite extension of atmosphere
and ether, we nevertheless conceive as a dome, with curvature and
the definite boundary of the horizon. Sound in and of itself has pitch
and _timbre_, qualities of pure sensation; but even with the
perception of sound the element of form enters in, for we hear it
with a consciousness of its duration--long or short--or of its relation
to other sounds, heard or imagined.

Our perceptions, therefore, give us forms. Now form implies
_relation,_ the reference of one part to the other parts in the
composition of the whole. And relation carries with it the
possibilities of harmony or discord, of unity or disorder. Before an
object can be regarded as beautiful it must give out a unity of
impression. This unity does not reside in the object itself, but is
effected by the mind which perceives it. In looking at a
checkerboard I may see it as an aggregation of white squares set off
by black, or as black squares relieved by white. I may read it as a
series of horizontals, or of verticals, or of diagonals, according as I
_attend_ to it. The design of the checker-board is not an absolute
and fixed quantity inherent in the object itself, but is capable of a
various interpretation according to the relative emphasis given to the
parts by the perceiving mind. So with all objects in nature. The
twilight landscape which stirred me may have been quite without
interest or meaning to the man at my side; or, if he responded to it at
all, his feelings may have been of a different order and quality than
mine. Where I felt a deep and intimate solemnity in the landscape,
he might have received the twilight as chill and forbidding.  Beauty,
then, which consists in harmonious relation, does not lie in nature
objectively, but is constituted by the perception in man's
constructive imagination of a harmony and consequent significance
drawn out of natural forms.  It is, in Emerson's phrase, "the integrity
of impression made by manifold natural objects." And Emerson says
further, "The charming landscape which I saw this morning is
indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns
this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none
of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon
which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that
is, the poet." The mere pleasurable excitement of the senses is hardly
to be called beauty. An object to be beautiful must express a
harmony of relations and hence a meaning,--a meaning which goes
beyond sense-perception and does not stop with the intellect, but
reaches the spirit. Psychologists tell us that "a curved line is pleasing
because the eye is so hung as best to move in it." Pleasing, yes; but
not beautiful. And precisely herein is illustrated the distinction. A
life wearied with an undulating uniformity of days will find beauty
less in the curve than in the zigzag, because the sight of the broken
line brings to the spirit suggestions of change and adventure. A
supine temper finds shock, excitement, and a meaning in the vertical.
Yet the significance of forms is not determined necessarily by
contrasts. A quiet spirit sees its own expression, a harmony of self
with external form, in the even lines and flat spaces of some Dutch
etching. Or a vigorous, hardy mind takes fresh stimulus and courage
from the swirling clouds of Turner or the wind-torn landscapes of
Constable. An object is beautiful, not because of the physical ease
with which the eye follows its outlines, but in so far as it has the
power to communicate to us the feeling of larger life, to express and
complete for us a harmony within our emotional experience.

Our senses report to us the material world; we see, we hear, we
touch and taste and smell. But we recognize also that nature has a
value for the emotions; it can delight and thrill and uplift, taking us
out of ourselves and carrying us beyond the confines of the little
circle of our daily use and wont. As I look from my window I see
against the sky a pear tree, radiant with blossom, an explosion of
light and sensation. Its green and white, steeped in sunshine and
quivering out of rain-washed depths of blue, are good to behold. But
for me, as my spirit goes out to meet it, the tree is spring! In this I do
not mean to characterize a process of intellectual deduction,--that as
blossoms come in the spring, so the flowering of the tree is evidence
that spring is here. I mean that by its color and form, all its outward
loveliness, the tree communicates to me the spirit of the new birth of
the year. In myself I feel and live the spring. My joy in the tree,
therefore, does not end with the sight of its gray trunk and
interwoven branches and its gleaming play of leaves: there my joy
only begins, and it comes to its fulfillment as I feel the life of the
tree to be an expression and extension of the life that is in me. My
physical organism responds harmoniously in rhythm with the form
of the tree, and so far the tree is pleasing. But, finally, a form is
beautiful because it is expressive. "Beauty," said Millet, "does not
consist merely in the shape or coloring of a face. It lies in the
general effect of the form, in suitable and appropriate action. . . .
When I paint a mother, I shall try and make her beautiful simply by
the look she bends upon her child. Beauty is expression." Beauty
works its effect through significance, a significance which is not
always to be phrased in words, but is felt; conveyed by the senses, it
at last reaches the emotions. Where the spirit of man comes into
harmony with a harmony external to it, there is beauty.

The elements of beauty are design, wholeness, and significance.
Significance proceeds out of wholeness or unity of impression; and
unity is made possible by design. Whatever the flower into which it
may ultimately expand, beauty has its roots in fitness and utility;
design in this case is constituted by the adaptation of the means to
the end. The owner of a saw-mill wanted a support made for a
shafting. Indicating a general idea of what he desired, he applied to
one of his workmen, a man of intelligence and skill in his craft, but
without a conventional education. The man constructed the support,
a triangular framework contrived to receive the shafting at the apex;
where there was no stress within the triangle, he cut away the timber,
thus eliminating all surplusage of material. When the owner saw the
finished product he said to his workman, "Well, John, that is a really
beautiful thing you have made there." And the man replied, "I don't
know anything about the beauty of it, but I know it's strong!" The
end to be reached was a support which should be strong. The strong
support was felt to be beautiful, for its lines and masses were
apprehended as _right._ Had the man, with the "little learning" that
is dangerous, attempted embellishment or applied ornament, he
would have spoiled the effect; for ornateness would have been out of
place. The perfect fitness of means to end, without defect and
without excess, constituted its beauty; and its beauty was perceived
aesthetically, as a quality inherent in the form, a quality which apart
from the practical serviceableness of the contrivance was capable of
communicating pleasure. So in general, when the inherent needs of
the work give shape to the structure or contrivance, the resulting
form is in so far forth beautiful. The early "horseless carriages," in
which a form intended for one use was grafted upon a different
purpose, were very ugly. Today the motor-car, evolved out of
structural needs, a thing complete in and for itself, has in its lines
and coherence of composition certain elements of beauty. In his
"Song of Speed," Henley has demonstrated that the motorcar,
mechanical, modern, useful, may even be material for poetry. That
the useful is not always perceived as beautiful is due to the fact that
the design which has shaped the work must be regarded apart from
the material serviceableness of the object itself. Beauty consists not
in the actual material, but in the unity of relations which the object
embodies. We appreciate the art involved in the making of the first
lock and key only as we look beyond the merely practical usefulness
of the device and so apprehend the harmony of relations effected
through its construction. As the lock and key serve to fasten the door,
they are useful; they are beautiful as they manifest design and we
feel their harmony. Beauty is removed from practical life, not
because it is unrelated to life,--just the reverse of that is true,--but
because the enjoyment of beauty is disinterested. The detachment
involved in appreciation is a detachment from material. The
appreciator may seem to be a looker-on at life, in that he does not
act but simply feels. But his spirit is correspondingly alert. In the
measure that he is released from servitude to material he gives free
play to his emotion.

Although beauty is founded upon design, design is not the whole of
beauty. Not all objects which exhibit equal integrity of design are
equally beautiful. The beauty of a work of art is determined by the
degree of emotion which impelled its creation and by the degree in
which the work itself is able to communicate the emotion
immediately. The feeling which entered into the making of the first
lock and key was simply the inventor's desire for such a device, his
desire being the feeling which accompanied his consciousness of his
need. At the other extreme is the emotion such as attended
Michelangelo's vision of his "David" and urged his hand as he set
his chisel to the unshaped waiting block. And so all the way between.
Many pictures are executed in a wholly mechanical spirit, as so
much manufacture; and they exhibit correspondingly little beauty.
Many useful things, as a candle-stick, a pair of andirons, a chair, are
wrought in the spirit of art; into them goes something of the maker's
joy in his work; they become the expression of his emotion: and
they are so far beautiful. It is asserted that Millet's "Angelus" is a
greater picture than the painting entitled "War" by Franz Stuck,
because "the idea of peasants telling their beads is more beautiful
than the idea of a ruthless destroyer only in so far as it is morally
higher." The moral value as such has very little to do with it. It is a
question of emotion. If Stuck were to put on canvas his idea of
peasants at prayer and if Millet had phrased in pictorial terms his
feeling about war, there is little doubt that Millet's painting would be
the more telling and beautiful. The degree of beauty is fixed by the
depth of the man's insight into life and the corresponding intensity of
his emotion.

Beauty is not limited to one class of object or experience and
excluded from another. A chair may be beautiful, although turned to
common use; a picture is not beautiful necessarily because it is a
picture. "Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is
bad," says Whitman, Whistler speaks of art as "seeking and finding
the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest,
Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in
the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its
inhabitants were not Greeks." The beautiful must exhibit an integrity
of relations within itself, and it must be in integral relation with its
surroundings. The standard of beauty varies with every age, with
every nation, indeed with every individual. As beauty is not in the
object itself, but is in the mind which integrates the relations which
the object manifests, so our appreciation of beauty is determined by
our individuality. And individuality is the resultant of many forces.
The self, inexplicable in essence, is the product of inheritance, and is
modified by environment and training. More than we realize, our
judgment is qualified by tradition and habit and even fashion.
Because men have been familiar for so many centuries with the idea
that sculpture should find its vehicle in white marble, the knowledge
that Greek marbles originally were painted comes with something of
a shock; and for the moment they have difficulty in persuading
themselves that a Parthenon frieze _colored_ could possibly be
beautiful. Until within comparatively recent years the French have
regarded Shakespeare as a barbarian. The heroic couplet, which was
the last word in poetical expression in the age of Queen Anne, we
consider to-day as little more than a mechanical jingle. Last year's
fashions in dress, which seemed at the time to have their merits, are
this year amusingly grotesque. In our judgment of beauty, therefore,
allowance must be made for standards which merely are imposed
upon us from without. It is necessary to distinguish between a
formula and the reality. As far as possible we should seek to come
into "original relation" with the universe, freshly for ourselves. So
we must return upon our individual consciousness, and thus
determine what is vitally significant to us. For the man who would
appreciate beauty, it is not a question between this or that "school"
in art, whether the truth lies with the classicists or the romanticists; it
is not a question of this or that subject or method to the exclusion of
all others. Beauty may be anywhere or everywhere. It is our task and
joy to find it, wherever it may be. And we shall find it, if we are able
to recognize it and we hold ourselves responsive to its multitudinous
appeal.

The conception of beauty which limits its manifestation to one kind
of experience is so far false and leads to mischievous acceptances
and narrowing rejections. We mistake the pretty for the beautiful
and so fail of the true value of beauty; we are blind to the
significance which all nature and all life, in the lowest and
commonest as in the highest and rarest, hold within them. "If
beauty," says Hamerton, "were the only province of art, neither
painters nor etchers would find anything to occupy them in the foul
stream that washes the London wharfs." By beauty here is meant the
merely agreeable. Pleasing the river may not be, to the ordinary man;
but for the poet and the painter, those to whom it is given to see with
the inner eye, the "foul stream" and its wharfs may be lighted with
mysterious and tender beauty.

     "Earth has not anything to show more fair:
     Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
     A sight so touching in its majesty:
     This city now doth, like a garment, wear
     The beauty of the morning.

     . . . . .

     Never did sun more beautifully steep
     In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
     Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
     The river glideth at his own sweet will:
     Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
     And all that mighty heart is lying still!"

And Whistler, by the witchery of his brush and his needle, has
transmuted the confusion and sordidness and filth of this
Thames-side into exquisite emotion. The essence of beauty is harmony, but
that harmony is not to be reduced to rule and measure. In the very
chaos of the Locomotive Works we may feel beauty; in the thrill
which they communicate we receive access of power and we _are,_
more largely, more universally. The harmony which is beauty is that
unity or integrity of impression by force of which we are able to feel
significance and the relation of the object to our own experience. It
is an error to suppose that beauty must be racked on a procrustean
bed of formula. Such false conceptions result in sham art. To create
a work which shall be beautiful it is not necessary to "smooth, inlay,
and clip, and fit." Beauty is not imposed upon material from without,
according to a recipe; it is drawn out from within by the integrating
power of imagination. Art is not artificiality. Art is the expression of
vital emotion and essential significance. The beauty of architecture,
for example, consists not in applied ornament but in structural
fitness and adaptability, and grows out of the inherent needs of the
work. The cathedral-builders of old time did not set themselves to
create a "work of art." They wanted a church; and it was a church
they built. It is we who, perceiving the rightness of their
achievement, pronounce it to be beautiful. Beauty is not
manufactured, but grows; it cannot be laid on as ornament. Beauty is
born out of the contact of the spirit of man with natural forms, that
contact which gives to objects their significance.

The recognition of the true nature of beauty may change for us the
face of the world. Some things are universally regarded as beautiful
because their appeal is universal. There are passions, joys,
aspirations, common to all the race; and the forms which objectify
these emotions are beautiful universally. We can all enter into the
feelings that gather about a group of children dancing round a
Maypole in the Park; but in the murk and din and demoniacal
activity of the Locomotive Works the appeal is not so obvious. The
stupendous workshops become beautiful to me as my being merges
into harmony with them and dilates with the emotion of intenser and
fuller life. The Sistine Madonna is generally regarded as beautiful.
But what is the beauty in the unspeakable witch on the canvas of
Frans Hals? Harmony of color and of composition is employed by
Raphael in the rendering of a figure and in the expression of an
emotion both of which relate themselves to the veneration of
mankind. Maternity, Christian or pagan, divine or human, evokes its
universal tribute of feeling. On Raphael's canvas complete harmony
is made visible; and the beauty of the picture for us is measured by
its power to stir us. In the painting by Frans Hals the subject
represented is in itself not pleasing. The technical execution of the
picture is masterly. But our delight goes beyond any enjoyment of
the skill here exhibited, goes beyond even the satisfaction of the
senses in its color and composition. What the picture expresses is
not merely the visible aspect of this woman, but the painter's own
sympathy and appreciation. He saw a beauty in ugliness, a beauty to
which we were blind, for he felt the significance of her life, the
eternal rightness to herself of what she was. His joy in this inner
harmony has transfigured the object and made it beautiful. Beauty
penetrates deeper than grace and comeliness; it is not confined to the
pretty and agreeable. Indeed, beauty is not always immediately
pleasant, but is received often with pain. The emotion of pleasure,
which is regarded as the necessary concomitant of beauty, ensues as
we are able to merge ourselves in the experience and so come to feel
its ultimate harmony. What is commonly accepted as ugly, as
shocking or sordid, becomes beautiful for us so soon as we
apprehend its inner significance. Judged by the canons of formal
beauty, the sky-line of New York city, seen from the North River, is
ugly and distressing. But the responsive spirit, reaching ever
outward into new forms of feeling, can thrill at sight of those Titanic
structures out-topping the Palisades themselves, thrusting their
squareness adventurously into the smoke-grayed air, and telling the
triumph of man's mind over the forces of nature in this fulfillment of
the needs of irrepressible activity, this expression of tremendous
actuality and life. Not that the reaction is so definitely formulated in
the moment of experience; but this is something of what is felt. The
discovery of such a harmony is the entrance into fuller living. So it
is that the boundaries of beauty enlarge with the expansion of the
individual spirit.

To extend the boundaries of beauty by the revelation of new
harmonies is the function of art. With the ordinary man, the plane of
feeling, which is the basis of appreciation, is below the plane of his
attention as he moves through life from day to day. As a clock may
be ticking in the room quite unheeded, and then suddenly we hear it
because our attention is called to it; so only that emotion really
counts to us as experience which comes to our cognizance. When
once the ordinary man is made aware of the underlying plane of
feeling, the whole realm of appreciation is opened to him by his
recognition of the possibilities of beauty which life may hold.
Consciously to recognize that forces are operating which lie behind
the surface aspect of things is to open ourselves to the play of these
forces. With persons in whom intellect is dominant and the
controlling power, the primary need is to understand; and for such,
first to know is to be helped finally to feel. To comprehend that
there is a soul in every fact and that within material objects reside
meanings for the spirit, or beauty, is to be made more sensitive to
their influence. With the artist, however, the case is different. At the
moment of creation he is little conscious of the purport of the work
to which he sets his hand. He is not concerned, as we have been,
with the "why" of beauty; from the concrete directly to the concrete
is his progress. Life comes to him not as thought but as emotion. He
is moved by actual immediate contact with the world about him,--by
the sight of a landscape, by the mood of an hour or place, by the
power of some personality; it may be, too, a welter of recollected
sensations and impressions that plays upon his spirit. The resultant
emotion, not reasoned about but nevertheless directed to a definite
end, takes shape in external concrete forms which are works of art.
Just because he is so quick to feel the emotional value of life he is an
artist; and much of his power as an artist derives from the
concreteness of his emotion. The artist is the creative mind, creative
in this sense, that in the outward shows of things he feels their
inward and true relations, and by new combinations of material
elements he reëmbodies his feeling in forms whose message is
addressed to the spirit. The reason why Millet painted the "Sower"
was that he felt the beauty of this peasant figure interpreted as
significance and life. And it is this significance and life, in which we
are made to share, that his picture is designed to express.

Experience comes to us in fragments; the surface of the world
throws back to us but broken glimpses. In the perspective of a
lifetime the fragments flow together into order, and we dimly see the
purpose of our being here; in moments of illumination and deeper
insight a glimpse may disclose a sudden harmony, and the brief
segment of nature's circle becomes beautiful. For then is revealed
the shaping principle. Within the fact, behind the surface, are
apprehended the relations of which the fact and the surface are the
expression. The rhythm thus discovered wakens an accordant
rhythm in the spirit of man. The moment gives out its meaning as
man and nature merge together in the inclusive harmony. If the
human spirit were infinite in comprehension, we should receive all
things as beautiful, for we should apprehend their rightness and their
harmony. To our finite perception, however, design is not always
evident, for it is overlaid and confounded with other elements which
are not at the moment fused. Just here is the office of art. For art
presents a harmony liberated from all admixture of conflicting
details and purged of all accidents, thus rendering the single
meaning salient. To compel disorder into order and so reveal new
beauty is the achievement of the artist. The world is commonplace
or fraught with divinest meanings, according as we see it so. To art
we turn for revelation, knowing that ideals of beauty may be many
and that beauty may manifest itself in many forms.



VIII

THE ARTS OF FORM

THE maker of the first bowl moulds the plastic clay into the shape
best adapted to its purpose, a vessel to hold water, from which he
can drink easily; the half-globe rather than the cube affords the
greatest holding capacity with the least expenditure of material. He
finds now that the form itself--over and above the practical
serviceableness of the bowl--gives him pleasure. With a pointed
stick or bit of flint he traces in the yielding surface a flowing line or
an ordered series of dots or crosses, allowing free play to his fancy
and invention. The design does not resemble anything else, nor does
it relate itself to any object external to the maker; it has no meaning
apart from the pleasure which it gave him as he conceived and
traced it, and the pleasure it now gives him to look at it. To another
man who sees the bowl, its form and its decoration afford likewise a
double pleasure: there is first the satisfaction of senses and mind in
the contemplation of harmonious form and rhythmic pattern; and
second, there is communicated to him a feeling of the maker's
delight in his handiwork, and sympathetically and imaginatively the
beholder realizes that delight in his own experience.

I am walking with a friend along a road which climbs a wooded
hillside. A few steps bring us to the top and the edge of a clearing.
There, suddenly a sweep of country is rolled out before us. A quick
intake of the breath, and then the cry, "Ah!" Consciousness surges
back over me, and turning to my friend, I exclaim, "See the line of
those hills over there across the tender sky and those clouds
tumbling above them; see how the hills dip down into the meadows;
look at the lovely group of willows along the bank of the river, how
graciously they come in, and then that wash of purple light over
everything!" My simple cry, "Ah!" was the expression of emotion,
the unconscious, involuntary expression; it was not art. It did not
formulate my emotion definitely, and although it was an expression
of emotion, it had no power to communicate the special quality of it.
So soon, however, as I composed the elements in the landscape,
which stimulated my emotion, into a distinct and coherent whole
and by means of that I tried to convey to my friend something of
what I was feeling, my expression tended to become art. My
medium of expression happened to be words. If I had been alone and
wanted to take home with me a record of my impression of the
landscape, a pencil-sketch of the little composition might have
served to indicate the sources of my feeling and to suggest its
quality. Whether in words or in line and mass, my work would be in
a rudimentary form a work of representative art. The objective fact
of the landscape which I point out to my friend engages his interest;
his pleasure derives from those aspects of it which my emotion
emphasizes and which constitute its beauty; and something of the
same emotion that I felt he realizes in his own experience.

The impulse to expression which fulfills itself in a work of art is
directed in general by one of two motives,--the motive of
representation and the motive of pure form. These two motives are
coexistent with human activity itself. The earliest vestiges of
prehistoric races and the remains of the remotest civilizations are
witnesses of man's desire to imitate and record, and also of his
pleasure in harmony of form. Certain caves in France, inhabited by
man some thousands of years before history begins, have yielded up
reindeer horns and bones, carved with reliefs and engraved with
drawings of mammoths, reindeer, and fish. On the walls and roofs of
these caves are paintings in bright colors of animals, rendered with
correctness and animation. Flint axes of a still remoter epoch "are
carved with great dexterity by means of small chips flaked off the
stone, and show a regularity of outline which testifies to the delight
of primitive man in symmetry."[*] Burial mounds, of unknown
antiquity, and the rude stone monuments such as Stonehenge and the
dolmens of Brittany and Wales, emerging out of prehistoric dawns,
are evidence of man's striving after architectural unity in design and
harmony of proportion.

[*] S. Reinach, _The Story of Art throughout the Ages,_ chapter i.

The existence of these two separate motives which impel creation,
man's desire to imitate and his delight in harmony, gives rise to a
division of the arts into two general classes, namely, the
representative arts and the arts of pure form. The representative arts
comprise painting and sculpture, and literature in its manifestations
of the drama, fiction, and dramatic and descriptive poetry. These arts
draw their subjects from nature and human life, from the world
external to the artist. The arts of form comprise architecture and
music, and that limitless range of human activities in design and
pattern-making for embellishment--including also the whole
category of "useful arts"--which may be subsumed under the
comprehensive term _decoration._ In these arts the "subject" is
self-constituted and does not derive its significance from its likeness to
any object external to it; the form itself is the subject. Lyric poetry
stands midway between the two classes. It is the expression of
"inner states" but it externalizes itself in terms of the outer world. It
has a core of thought, and it employs images from nature which can
be visualized, and it recalls sounds whose echo can be wakened in
imaginative memory.

     "Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
          And Phoebus 'gins arise,
     His steeds to water at those springs
          On chaliced flowers that lies;
     And winking Mary-buds begin
          To ope their golden eyes;
     With everything that pretty bin,
          My lady sweet, arise!
               Arise, arise!"

The intellectual and sensuous elements which lyric poetry embodies
are finally submerged under the waves of emotional stimulus which
flow from the form as form. Such poetry does not depend upon the
fact of representation for its meaning; the very form itself, as in
music, is its medium of communicating the emotion. Art, therefore,
to phrase the same matter in slightly different terms, has a subjective
and an objective aspect. In the one case, the artist projects his
feeling into the forms which he himself creates; in the other case, the
forms external to him, as nature and human life, inspire the emotion,
and these external forms the artist reproduces, with of course the
necessary modifications, as the symbol and means of expression of
his emotion.

The distinction between the representative arts and the arts of form
is not ultimate, nor does it exclude one class wholly from the other;
it defines a general tendency and serves to mark certain differences
in original motive and in the way in which the two kinds of work
may be received and appreciated. In actual works of art themselves,
though they differ as to origin and function, the line of division
cannot be sharply drawn. The dance may be an art of form or a
representative art according as it embodies the rhythms of pure
movement or as it numerically figures forth dramatic ideas. Painting,
as in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and the wall paintings of
Tintoretto and Veronese in the Ducal Palace of Venice, may be
employed in the service of decoration. Decoration, as in
architectural sculpture and in patterns for carpets and wall-coverings,
often draws its motives from nature, such as leaves, flowers, fruits,
and animals; but when the function of the work is decorative and not
representative, the naturalistic and graphic character of the subject is
subordinated to the purposes of abstract and formal design. A
picture, on the other hand, which is frankly representative in purpose,
must submit its composition and color-harmony to the requirements
of unity in design; in a sense it must make a pattern. And a statue, as
the "Victory of Samothrace," bases its ultimate appeal, not upon the
fact of representation, but upon complete, rhythmic, beautiful form.

To the appreciator the arts of form carry a twofold significance.
There is first the pleasure which derives from the contemplation and
reception of a harmony of pure form, including harmony of color, of
line, and of flat design as well as form in the round, a pleasure of the
senses and the mind. Second, works of art in this category, as they
are the expression for the artist of his emotion, become therefore the
manifestation to the appreciator and means of communication of that
emotion.

Man's delight in order, in unity, in harmony, rhythm, and balance, is
inborn. The possession of these qualities by an object constitutes its
form. Form, in the sense of unity and totality of relations, is not to
be confounded with mere regularity. It may assume all degrees of
divergence from geometric precision, all degrees of variety, ranging
from the visual perfectness of the Parthenon to the sublime and
triumphant inconsequence of the sky-line of New York city. It may
manifest all degrees of complexity from a cup to a cathedral or from
"Home, Sweet Home" to Tschaikowski's "Pathetic Symphony."
Whatever the elements and the incidents, our sense of order in the
parts and of singleness of impression endows the object with its
form. The form as we apprehend it of an object constitutes its beauty,
its capability to arouse and to delight.

Because of the essential make-up of man's mind and spirit, powers
that are innate and determined by forces still beyond the scope of
analysis, the perception of a harmony of relations, which is beauty,
is attended with pleasure, a pleasure that is felt and cannot be
explained. This inborn, inexplicable delight is at once the origin of
the arts of form and the basis of our appreciation. Each art, as the
fashioning of objects of use, as decoration, architecture, and music,
is governed by its own intrinsic, inherent laws and rests its appeal
upon man's pleasure in form. There is no standard external to the
laws of the art itself by which to judge the rightness and the beauty
of the individual work. In the arts of use and in decoration and
architecture, the beauty of a work, as the beauty of a chair, as in the
ordering and appointments of a room, as the beauty of a temple, a
theatre, a dwelling, derives primarily from the fitness of the object to
its function, and finally from the rhythm of its lines and the harmony
of its masses and proportions,--its total form. A chair which cannot
be sat in may be interesting and agreeable to look at, but it is not
truly beautiful; for then it is not a chair but a curiosity, a bijou, and a
superfluity; to be beautiful it must be first of all frankly and
practically a chair. A living-room which cannot be lived in with
comfort and restfulness and peace of mind is not a living-room, but
a museum or a concentrated department store; at best it is only an
inclosed space. A beautiful building declares its function and use,
satisfies us with the logic and coherence of its parts, and delights us
with its reticence or its boldness, its simplicity or its inventiveness,
in fine, its personality, as expressed in its parts and their confluence
into an ordered, self-contained, and self-sufficing whole. Music,
using sound for its material, is a pattern-weaving in tones. The
power of music to satisfy and delight resides in the sensuous value
of its material and in the character of its pattern as form, the balance
and contrast of tonal relations, the folding and unfolding of themes,
their development and progress to the final compelling unity-in-variety
which constitutes its form and which in its own inherent and
self-sufficing way is made the expression of the composer's emotion
and musical idea. Lyric poetry is the fitting of rhythmic, melodious,
colored words to the emotion within, to the point where the very
form itself becomes the meaning, and the essence and mystery of the
song are in the singing. Beauty is harmony materialized; it is
emotion ordered and made visible, audible, tangible. If in the arts of
form we seek further a standard of truth, their truth is not found in
their relation to any external verity, but is determined by their
correspondence with inner experience.

In the category of the arts of form the single work is to be received
in its entirety and integrity as form. The whole, however, may be
resolved into its parts, and the individual details may be interesting
in themselves. Thus into decorative patterns are introduced elements
of meaning which attach themselves to the world and experience
external to the artist. Many ornamental motives, like the zigzag and
the egg-and-dart, for example, had originally a symbolic value.
Sometimes they are drawn from primitive structures and fabrics, as
the checker-board pattern, with its likeness to the plaitings of rush
mattings, and the volute and spiral ornaments, which recall the
curves and involutions of wattle and wicker work. Again, decoration
may employ in its service details that in themselves are genuinely
representative art. The frieze of the Parthenon shows in relief a
procession of men and women and horses and chariots and animals.
The sculptures of Gothic churches represent men and women, and
the carvings of mouldings, capitals, and traceries are based on
naturalistic motives, taking their designs from leaves and flowers.
The essential function of ornament is to emphasize form and not to
obscure it, though nowadays in machine-made things a kind of
pseudo-embellishment is laid on to distract attention from the
badness and meaninglessness of the form; in true decoration the
representative elements are subordinated to the formal character of
the whole. The representative interest may be enjoyed separately and
in detail; but finally the graphic purpose yields to the decorative, and
the details take their place as parts of the total design. Thus a Gothic
cathedral conveys its complete and true impression first and last as
form. Midway we may set ourselves to a reading of the details. The
figure of this saint on the jamb or the archivolt of the portal is
expressive of such simple piety and enthusiasm! In this group on the
tympanum what animation and spirit! This moulding of leaves and
blossoms is cut with such loving fidelity and exquisite feeling for
natural truth! But at the last the separate members fulfill their
appointed office as they reveal the supreme function of the living
total form.

Music, too, in some of its manifestations, as in song, the opera, and
programme music, has a representative and illustrative character. In
Chopin's "Funeral March" we hear the tolling of church bells, and it
is easy to visualize the slow, straggling file of mourners following
the bier; the composition here has a definite objective base drawn
from external fact, and the "idea" is not exclusively musical, but
admits an infusion of pictorial and literary elements. In listening to
the love duet of the second act of "Tristan," although the lovers are
before us in actual presence on the stage, I find myself involuntarily
closing my eyes, for the music is so personal and so spiritualized, it
is in and of itself so intensely the realization of the emotion, that the
objective presentment of it by the actors becomes unnecessary and is
almost an intrusion. The representative, figurative element in music
may be an added interest, but its appeal is intellectual; if as we hear
the "Funeral March," we say to ourselves, This is so and so, and,
Here they do this or that, we are thinking rather than feeling. Music
is the immediate expression of emotion communicated immediately;
and the composition will not perfectly satisfy unless it is _music,_
compelling all relations of melody, harmony, and rhythm into a
supreme and triumphant order.

Whereas the representative arts are based upon objective fact,
drawing their "subjects" from nature and life external to the artist; in
decoration, in architecture, and in music the artist creates his own
forms as the projection of his emotion and the means of its
expression. Richard Wagner, referring to the composition of his
"Tristan," writes: "Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the
inner depth of soul events, and from out this inmost centre of the
world I fearlessly built up its outer form. . . . Life and death, the
whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing
but the inner movements of the soul. The whole affecting Action
comes about for the reason only that the inmost soul demands it, and
steps to light with the very shape foretokened in the inner shrine."
The form, thus self-constituted, has the power to delight us, and the
work is at the same time the expression of emotion. The arts of form
please us with the pleasure that attends the perception of formal
beauty; but this pleasure docs not exhaust their capability to minister
to us. What differentiates art from manufacture is the element of
personal expression. Born out of need, whether the need be physical
or spiritual, fulfilling the urge to expression, a work of art embodies
its maker's delight in creating. Correspondingly, beyond our
immediate enjoyment of the work as form, we feel something of
what the man felt who was impelled to create it. His handiwork, his
pattern, his composition, becomes the means of communicating to
us his emotional experience.

Obviously the significance of any work is determined primarily by
the intensity and scope of emotion which has prompted it. The
creation of works of art involves all degrees of intention, from the
hut in the wilderness rudely thrown together, whose purpose was
shelter, to a Gothic cathedral, in its multitudinousness eloquent of
man's worship and aspiration. The man who moulded the first bowl,
adapting its form as closely as possible to its use and shaping its
proportions for his own pleasure to satisfy his sense of harmony and
rhythm, differs from the builders of the Parthenon only in the degree
of intensity of his inspiring emotion and in the measure of his
controlling thought. The beauty of accomplished form of cathedral
and of temple is compelling; and we may forget that they rose out of
need. Both hut and bowl are immediately useful, and their beauty is
not so evident,--that little touch of feeling which wakens a response
in us. But in their adaptation to their function they become
significant; the satisfaction which accompanies expression is
communicated to us as we apprehend in the work the creator's
intention and we realize in ourselves what the creation of it meant to
him as the fulfillment of his need and the utterance of his emotion.

So the expressive power of an individual work is conditioned
originally by the amount of feeling that enters into the making of it.
Every phrase of a Beethoven symphony is saturated with emotion,
and the work leads us into depths and up to heights of universal
experience, disclosing to us tortuous ways and infinite vistas of the
possibilities of human feeling. A simple earthen jug may bear the
impress of loving fingers, and the crudely turned form may be
eloquent of the caress of its maker. So we come to value even in the
humblest objects of use this autographic character, which is the gate
of entrance into the experience of the men who fashioned them.
Every maker strives toward perfection, the completest realization of
his ideal within his power of execution. But the very shortcomings
of his work are significant as expressive of what he felt and was
groping after; they are so significant that by a curious perversion,
machinery, which in our civilized day has supplanted the craftsman,
tries by mechanical means to reproduce the roughness and supposed
imperfections of hand work. Music is the consummate art, in which
the form and the content are one and inextricable; its medium is the
purest, least alloyed means of expression of instant emotion.
Architecture, in its harmonies and rhythms, the gathering up of
details into the balanced and perfect whole, partakes of the nature of
music. But the arts of use and decoration also have their message for
the spirit. There is no object fashioned by the hand of man so
humble that it may not embody a true thought and a sincere delight.
There is no pattern or design so simple and so crude that it may not
be the overflow of some human spirit, a mind and heart touched to
expression.



IX

REPRESENTATION

BEFORE me is a little bowl of old Satsuma. As I look at it there
wakens in me a responsive rhythm, and involuntarily my fingers
move as if to caress its suave and lovely lines. The rich gold and
mingled mellow browns of its surface pattern intricately woven are a
gracious harmony and a delight. Gradually, as I continue to look on
it, a feeling is communicated to me of the maker's own joy in his
work; and the bowl, its harmonies and rhythms, and all that it
expresses, become part of me. There it is, complete in itself,
gathering up and containing within itself the entire experience. My
thoughts, sensations, feelings do not go beyond the bowl.

Another time I am standing in the hall of the Academy in Florence.
At the end of the corridor towers a superb form. I see that it is the
figure of a youth. His left hand holds a sling drawn across his
shoulder; his right arm hangs by his side, his hand grasping a pebble
close to his thigh; calm and confident, his head erect, his strength
held in leash waiting to be loosed, he fronts the oncoming of the foe.
The statue is the presentation of noble form, and it wakens in me an
accordant rhythm; I feel in myself something of what youthful
courage, life, and conscious power mean. But my experience does
not stop there. The statue is not only presentation but representation.
It figures forth a youth, David, the Hebrew shepherd-boy, and he
stands awaiting the Philistine. I have read his story, I have my own
mental image of him, and about his personality cluster many
thoughts. To what Michelangelo shows me I add what I already
know. Recognition, memory, knowledge, facts and ideas, a whole
store of associations allied with my previous experience, mingle
with my instant emotion in its presence. The sculptor, unlike the
potter, has not created his own form; the subject of his work exists
outside of him in nature. He uses the subject for his own ends, but in
his treatment of it he is bound by certain responsibilities to external
truth. His work as it stands is not completely self-contained, but is
linked with the outer world; and my appreciation of it is affected by
this reference to extrinsic fact.

An artist is interested in some scene in nature or a personality or
situation in human life; it moves him. As the object external to him
is the stimulus of his emotion and is associated with it, so he uses
the object as the symbol of his experience and means of expression
of his emotion. Here, then, the feeling, to express which the work is
created, gathers about a subject, which can be recognized
intellectually, and the fact of the subject is received as in a measure
separate from the feeling which flows from it. In a painting of a
landscape, we recognize as the basis of the total experience the fact
that it is a landscape, so much water and field and sky; and then we
yield ourselves to the _beauty_ of the landscape, the emotion with
which the artist suffuses the material objects and so transfigures
them. Into representative art, therefore, there enters an element not
shared by the arts of pure form, the element of _the subject,_
carrying with it considerations of objective truth and of likeness to
external fact. Toward the understanding of the total scope of a
picture or a statue, and by inference and application of the principles,
toward the understanding of literature as well, it may help us if we
determine the relation of beauty to truth and the function and value
of the subject in representative art.

The final significance of a work of art is beauty, received as
emotional experience. Nature becomes beautiful to us at the point
where it manifests a harmony to which we feel ourselves attuned. At
the moment of enjoyment we unconsciously project our personality
into this harmony outside of us, identifying ourselves with it and
finding it at that instant the expression of something toward which
we reach and aspire. When we come consciously to reason about our
experience, we see that the harmony external to us which we feel as
the extension of ourselves does not stop with the actual material
itself of nature, but emanates from it as the expression of nature's
spirit. The harmony is a harmony of relations, made visible through
material, and significant to us and beautiful in the measure that we
respond to it.

It is the beauty of the object, its significance for the spirit, that
primarily moves the artist to expression. Why one landscape and not
another impels him to render it upon his canvas is not to be
explained. This impulse to immediate and concrete utterance is
inspiration. And inspiration would seem to be a confluence of forces
outside of the individual consciousness or will, focused at the instant
into desire, which becomes the urge to creation. "The mind in
creation," says Shelley, "is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;
this power rises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our
natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure." The
artist does not say, "Lo, I will paint a landscape; let me find my
subject!" The subject presents itself. There it is, by chance almost,--a
sudden harmony before him, long low meadows stretching away to
the dark hills, the late sun striking on the water, gold and green
melting into a suffusing flush of purple light, a harmony of color and
line and mass which his spirit leaps out to meet and with which it
fuses in a larger unity. In the moment of contact all consciousness of
self as a separate individuality is lost. Out of the union of the two
principles, the spirit of man and the beauty of the object, is born the
_idea,_ which is to come to expression as a work of art.

But the artist is a mind as well as a temperament. Experience
is a swing of the pendulum between the momentary ecstasy of
immediate contact and the subsequent reaction upon the moment,
which is consciousness of it. In order to make his vision actual, the
artist rises out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. The
landscape has compelled him; it is now he who must compel the
landscape. To the shaping of his work he must bring to bear all his
conscious power of selection and organization and all his knowledge
of the capabilities and resources of his means. Art springs out of
emotion; painting is a science. The artist's command of his subject
as the symbol of his idea derives from the stern and vigorous
exercise of mind. The rightness of his composition is determined by
a logic more flexible, perhaps, but no less exacting than the laws of
geometry. By the flow of his line and the disposition of his masses,
the artist must carry the eye of the beholder along the way he wants
it to travel until it rests upon the point where he wants it to rest.
There must be no leaks and no false directions; there must be the
cosmos within the frame and nothing outside of it. The principles of
perspective have been worked out with a precision that entitles them
to rank as a science. Color has its laws, which, again, science is able
to formulate. These processes and formulas and laws are not the
whole of art, but they have their place. The power to feel, the
imaginative vision, and creative insight are not to be explained. But
knowledge too, acquired learning and skill, plays its part, and to
recognize its function and service is to be helped to a fuller
understanding of the achievement of the artist.

Gifted with a vibrant, sensitive temperament, endowed with
discriminating and organizing power of mind, equipped with a
knowledge of the science and the mechanics of his craft, and trained
to skill in manual execution, the artist responds to the impulse of his
inspiration. His subject is before him. But what is his subject? A
scene in nature furnishes him the objective base of his picture, but
properly his work is the expression of what he feels. A storm may
convey to different men entirely different impressions. In its
presence one man may feel himself overwhelmed with terror. These
wild, black skies piling in upon him, the hilltops that seem to race
through the clouds, the swaying, snapping trees, the earth caught up
in the mad grasp of the tempest, may smite his soul with the
pitilessness of nature and her inexorable blind power. Another thrills
with joy in this cosmic struggle, the joy of conflict which he has
known in his own life, the meeting of equal forces in fair fight,
where the issue is still doubtful and victory will fall at last upon the
strong, though it is not the final triumph but the present struggle that
makes the joy. In rendering the "subject" upon his canvas, by the
manipulation of composition and line and mass and color, he makes
the storm ominous and terrible, or glorious, according as he feels.
The import of his picture is not the natural fact of the storm itself,
but its significance for the emotions.

A work of representative art is the rendering of a unity of impression
and harmony of relations which the artist has perceived and to which
he has thrilled in the world external to him. He presents not the facts
themselves but their spirit, that something which endows the facts
with their significance and their power to stir him. As the meaning
of nature to the beholder is determined by the effect it produces on
his mind and temperament, so the artist, in the expression of this
meaning, aims less at a statement of objective accuracy of exterior
appearance than at producing a certain effect, the effect which is the
equivalent of the meaning of nature to him. Thus the painter who
sees beyond the merely intellectual and sensuous appeal of his
subject and enters into its spirit, tries to render on his canvas, not the
actual color of nature, but the sensation of color and its value for the
emotions. With the material splendor of nature,--her inexhaustible
lavish wealth of color, the glory of life which throbs through
creation, the mystery of actual movement,--art cannot compete. For
the hues and tones of nature, infinite in number and subtlety, the
painter has only the few notes within the poor gamut of his palette.
How can he quicken his dull paint with the life-beat of palpitating
flesh, or the sculptor animate the rigid marble with the vibrations of
vivid motion? But where nature is infinite in her range she is also
scattering in her effects. By the concentration of divergent forces, art
gains in intensity and directness of impression what it sacrifices in
the scope of its material. Michelangelo uses as his subject David, the
shepherd-boy; but the person, the mere name, does not signify. What
his work embodies is triumphant youth, made visible and
communicable. When Millet shows us the peasant, it is not what the
peasant is feeling that the artist represents, but what Millet felt about
him. The same landscape will be rendered differently by different
men. Each selects his details according to the interest of his eye and
mind and feeling, and he brings them into a dominant harmony
which stands to him for the meaning of the landscape. None of the
pictures is an accurate statement of the facts as they are, off there in
nature; all are true to the integrating inner vision. The superficial
observer sees only the accidents, and he does not distinguish relative
importance. The artist, with quicker sensibilities and a trained mind,
analyzes, discovers the underlying principle, and then makes a
synthesis which embodies only the essential; he seizes the
distinctive aspect of the object and makes it salient. There may be,
of course, purely descriptive representation, which is a faithful
record of the facts of appearance as the painter sees them, without
any feeling toward them; here he works as a scientist, not as an artist.
Merely imitative painting falls short of artistic significance, for it
embodies no meaning beyond the external fact. It is the
expressiveness of the object that the true artist cares to represent; it
is its expressiveness, its value for the emotions, that constitutes its
beauty.

To achieve beauty the representative artist bases his work upon the
truth of nature. It is nature that supplies him with his motive,--some
glimpse, some fragment, which reveals within itself a harmony. It
may be a form, as a tree, a man, a mountain range, the race of clouds
across the sky; it may be a color-harmony or "arrangement," in
which color rather than form is the dominant interest, as with a
landscape or an interior; it may be the effects of light, as the
sunshine playing over golden haystacks, or the glint of light on
metal, or the sheen of lovely fabrics. Out of the complex of interests
and appeals which an object offers, what is the _truth_ of the object?
The truth of nature resides not in the accidents of surface but in the
essential relations, of which the surface is the manifestation. A birch
tree and an apple tree are growing side by side. Their roots strike
down into the same soil, their branches are warmed by the same sun,
wet by the same rains, and swept by the same winds. The birch tree
is always lithe and gracious and feminine; the apple tree is always
bent and sternly gnarled like the hand of an old man. The life-force
which impels the tree to growth is distinctive to each kind. Within
all natural objects, then, a crystal, a tree, a man, there is a shaping
principle which determines their essential form. But no two
individual apple trees are precisely alike; from the essential form of
the tree there are divergences in the single manifestations. Though
subject to accident and variation, however, every tree exhibits a
characteristic, inviolate _tendency,_ and remains true to the inner
life-principle of its being. The "truth" of the apple tree is this
distinctive, essential form, by virtue of which it is an apple tree and
not some other kind, the form which underlies and allows for all
individual variations. What the painter renders on his canvas is not
the superficial accidents of some single tree, but by means of that,
he seeks to image forth in color and form the tendency of all trees.
The truth of an object presents itself to the imagination as design, for
this organic, shaping principle of things, expressed in colored
myriad forms throughout the endless pageantry of nature, is
apprehended by the spirit of man as a harmony; and in the
experience of the artist truth identifies itself with beauty.

The distinction between the accidental surface of things and the
significance that may be drawn out of them is exemplified by the
difference between accuracy and truth in representation. Accurate
drawing is the faithful record of the facts of appearance as offered to
the eye. Truth of drawing is the rendering in visible terms of the
meaning and spirit of the object, the form which the object takes not
simply for the eye but for the mind. A pencil sketch by Millet shows
a man carrying in each hand a pail of water. The arms are drawn
inaccurately, in that they are made too long. What Millet wanted to
express, however, was not the physical shape of the arms, but the
feeling of the burden under which the man was bending; and by
lengthening the arms he has succeeded in conveying, as mere
accuracy could not express it, the sensation of weight and muscular
strain. In Hals' picture of the "Jester" the left hand is sketched in
with a few swift strokes of the brush. But so, it "keeps its place" in
relation to the whole; and it is more nearly right than if it had been
made the centre of attention and had been drawn with the most
meticulous precision. The hand is not accurate, but it is true.
Similarly, size is an affair not of physical extent but of proportion. A
figure six inches high may convey the same value as a figure six feet
high, if the same proportions are observed. A statue is the
presentation, not of the human body, but of the human form, and
more than that, of what the form expresses. When I am talking with
my friend I am aware of his physical presence detaching itself from
the background of the room in which we are. But I feel in him
something more. And that something more goes behind the details
of his physical aspect. His eyes might be blue instead of brown, his
nose crooked rather than straight; he might be maimed and
disfigured by some mishap. These accidents would not change for
me what is the reality. My friend is not his body, though it is by his
body that he exists; the reality of my friend is what he essentially is,
what he is of the spirit. A photograph of a man registers certain facts
of his appearance at that moment. The eye and the mind of the artist
discern the truth which underlies the surface; the artist feels his sitter
not as a face and a figure, a mere body, but as a personality; and the
portrait expresses a man.

As grasped by our finite minds, there are partial truths and degrees
of truth. There are, for example, the facts of outer appearance,
modified in our reception of them by what we know as distinct from
what we really see. Thus a tree against the background of hill or sky
seems to have a greater projection and relief than is actually
presented to the eye, because we _know_ the tree is round. Manet's
"Girl with a Parrot," which appears to the ordinary man to be too flat,
is more true to reality than any portrait that "seems to come out of its
frame." Habitually in our observation of objects about us, we note
only so much as serves our practical ends; and this is the most
superficial, least essential aspect. Projection is a partial truth, and to
it many painters sacrifice other and higher truths. Manet, recovering
the "innocence of the eye" and faithful to it, has penetrated the
secrets and won the truth of light. Botticelli saw the world as
sonorous undulations of exquisite line; and his subtly implicated,
evanescent patterns of line movement, "incorrect" as they may be
superficially in drawing, caress the eye as music finds and satisfies
the soul. When such is his power over us, it is difficult to say that
Botticelli had not some measure of the truth. The world of the
Venetians sang full-sounding harmonies of glorious color.
Velasquez saw everything laved around with a flood of silver quiet
atmosphere. All in their own way have found and shown to us a
truth.

To render what he has seen and felt in the essence and meaning of it,
the artist seeks to disengage the shaping principle of the particular
aspect of truth, which has impressed him, from all accidents in its
manifestation. To make this dominant character salient beyond
irrelevant circumstance, art works by selection. Art is necessarily a
compromise. It isolates some elements and sacrifices others; but it is
none the less true on that account. The mere material of the object is
more or less fixed, but the relations which the object embodies are
capable of many combinations and adjustments, according to the
mind and temperament of the individual artist who is moved by it.
All art is in a certain sense abstraction; all art in a measure idealizes.
It is abstraction in the sense that it presents the intrinsic and
distinctive qualities of things, purged of accident.

Art does not compete with nature; it is a statement of the spirit and
intention of nature in the artist's own terms. The test of the work is
not apparent and superficial likeness, but truth. Art idealizes in the
measure that it disengages the truth. In this aspect of it the work is
ideal as distinct from merely actual. There is a practice in art which
draws its standard of beauty, its ideal, not from nature but from
other art, and which seeks to "improve nature" by the combination
of arbitrarily chosen elements and by the modification of natural
truth to fit a preconceived formula. The Eclectics of Bologna, in the
seventeenth century, sought to combine Raphael's perfection of
drawing and composition, Michelangelo's sublimity and his mastery
of the figure, and Correggio's sweet sentiment and his supremacy in
the rendering of light and shade, fondly supposing thus that the sum
of excellent parts is equivalent to an excellence of the whole. This is
false idealism. The Greeks carried their research for certain truths of
the human form to the point of perfection and complete realization.
The truth of the Greeks was mistaken by the pseudo-classicists and
misapplied. Thus Delacroix exclaimed ironically, "In order to
present an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as
far as possible the profile of Antinöus, and then say, 'We have done
our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful,
then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of
nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the
eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it
more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is
more heroically an athlete, the negro more vividly a negro. True
idealism seeks to express the tendency by virtue of which an object
is what it is. The abstraction which art effects is not an unreality but
a higher reality. It is not the mere type, that art presents, for the type
as such does not exist in nature. The individual is not lost but
affirmed by this reference to the inner principle of its being. A good
portrait has in it an element of caricature; the difference between
portraiture and caricature is the difference between emphasis and
exaggeration. Art is not the falsification of nature, but the fuller
realization of it. It is the interpretation of nature's truth, the
translation of it, divined by the artist, into simpler terms to be read
and understood by those of less original insight. The deeper the
penetration into the life-force and shaping principle of nature, the
greater is the measure of truth.

In representative art the truth of nature is the work's objective base.
What the artist finally expresses is the relation of the object to his
own experience. A work of art is the statement of the artist's insight
into nature, moulded and suffused by the emotion attending his
perception. Of the object, he uses that aspect and that degree of truth
which serve him for the expression of his feeling toward it. What is
called "realism" is one order of truth, one way of seeing.
"Impressionism" is another order of truth. "Idealism" is still another.
But all three elements blend in varying proportion in any work.
Even the realist, who "paints what he sees," has his ideal, which is
the effect he sets himself to produce by his picture, and he paints
according to his impression. He renders not the object itself but his
mental image of it; and that image is the result of his way of seeing
and feeling, his habit of mind, his interest, and his store of memories.
The idealist must base his work upon some kind of reality, or it is a
monstrosity; he is obliged to refer to the external world for his
symbols. The impressionist, who concerns himself with the play of
light over surfaces in nature, is seeking for truth, and he cares to
paint at all because that play of light, seemingly so momentary and
so merely sensuous, has a value for his spirit of which he may or
may not be wholly conscious; and these shifting effects are the
realization of his ideal. Unwitting at the moment of contact itself of
the significance that afterwards is to flow articulately from his work,
the artist, in the presence of his object, knows only that he is
impelled to render it. As faithfully as possible he tries to record what
he sees, conscious simply that what he sees gives him delight. His
vision wakens his feeling, and then by reaction his feeling
determines his vision, controlling and directing his selection of the
details of aspect. When Velasquez, engaged on a portrait of the king,
saw the maids of honor graciously attending on the little princess, he
did not set about producing a _picture,_ as an end in itself. In the
relation of these figures to one another and to the background of the
deep and high-vaulted chamber in which they were standing, each
object and plane of distance receiving its just amount of light and
fusing in the unity of total impression, were revealed to him the
wonder and the mystery of nature's magic of light. This is what he
tried to render. His revelation of natural truth, wrung from nature's
inmost latencies and shown to us triumphantly, becomes a thing of
beauty.

So the differences among the various "schools" in art are after all
largely differences of emphasis. The choice of subject or motive, the
angle from which it is viewed, and the method of handling, all are
determined by the artist's kind of interest; and that interest results
from what the man is essentially by inheritance and individual
character, and what he is moulded into by environment, training, and
experience. It may happen that the external object imposes itself in
its integrity upon the artist's mind and temperament, and he tries to
express it, colored inevitably by his feeling toward it, in all
faithfulness to the feet as he sees it. Millet said, "I should never paint
anything that was not the result of an impression received from the
aspect of nature, whether in landscape or figures." Millet painted
what he saw, but he painted it as only he saw it. Or again it happens
that an artist imposes his feeling upon nature. Thus Burne-Jones said,
"I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that
never was, never will be--in a light better than any that ever shone--in
a land no one can define or remember, only desire." Whether true
to nature or true to the creative inner vision, the work of both men
embodies truth. Sometimes an artist effaces entirely his own
individuality, as in Greek sculpture and Gothic architecture, and the
mere name of the creator does not signify. George Frederick Watts
is reported to have said, "If I were asked to choose whether I would
like to do something good, as the world judges popular art, and
receive personally great credit for it, or, as an alternative, to produce
something which should rank with the very best, taking a place with
the art of Pheidias or Titian, with the highest poetry and the most
elevating music, and remain unknown as the perpetrator of the work,
I should choose the latter." Sidney Lanier wrote, "It is of little
consequence whether _I_ fail; the _I_ in the matter is small
business. . . . Let my name perish,--the poetry is good poetry and the
music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it
will find it." Or on the contrary, a work may bear dominantly, even
aggressively, the impress of the distinctive individuality of its
creator, as with Carlyle's prose and Browning's poetry. Whistler
seems at times to delight less in the beauty of his subject than in the
_exercise_ of his own power of refinement. Where another man's art
is personal, as with Velasquez or Frans Hals, Whistler's art becomes
egotistical. He does not say, "Lo, how mysterious is this dusk
river-side, how tenderly serene this mother, how wistful and mighty is this
prophet-seer!" He exclaims rather, "Note how subtly I, Whistler,
have seen. Rejoice with me in my powers of vision and of
execution." There is no single method of seeing, no one formula of
expression and handling. The truth both of nature and of art is great
and infinitely various. For art, like nature, is organic, allowing for
endless modifications, while remaining true to the inner principle of
its being.

The judgment of truth is a delicate business. To test the truth of a
work of art by reference to the truth of nature is to presuppose that
our power of perception is equal to the artist's power, and that our
knowledge of the object represented is equal to his knowledge of it.
The ordinary man's habitual contact with the world is practical, and
his knowledge of natural fact, based upon the most superficial aspect
of it and used for practical purposes, tends to falsify his vision. The
artist's contact with the world, in his capacity as artist, is one of
feeling; he values life, not for its material rewards and satisfactions,
but for what it brings to him of emotional experience. The ordinary
man uses nature for his own workaday ends. The artist loves nature,
and through his love he understands her. His knowledge of natural
fact, instead of falsifying his vision, reinforces it. He studies the
workings of nature's laws as manifested in concrete phenomena
around him,--the movement of storms, the growth of trees, the
effects of light,--penetrating their inmost secrets, that he may make
them more efficient instruments of expression. He uses his
understanding of anatomy, of earth-structure, of the laws of color, as
the means to a fuller and juster interpretation. As he receives the
truth of nature with reverence and joy, so he transmutes truth into
beauty.

An artist's interest in the truth of nature is not the scientist's
interest, an intellectual concern with knowledge for the sake of
knowledge. The artist receives nature's revelation of herself with
emotion. The deeper he penetrates into her hidden ways, the greater
becomes her power to stir him. The artist values his "subject,"
therefore, as the stimulus of emotion and as the symbol by means of
which he expresses his emotion and communicates it. The value of the
subject to the appreciator, however, is not immediately clear. It is
not easy for us to receive the subject purely as the artist shows it
to us and independently of our own knowledge of it. About it already
gather innumerable associations, physical, practical, intellectual,
sentimental, and emotional, all of them or any of them, which result
from our previous contact with it in actual life. Here is a portrait of
Carlyle. I cannot help regarding the picture first of all from the point
of view of its likeness to the original. This is a person with whom I
am acquainted, an individual, by name Carlyle. And my reaction on
the picture is determined, not by what the artist has to say about a
great personality interpreted through the medium of color and form,
but by what I already know about Carlyle. Or here a painting shows
me a landscape with which I am familiar. Then instead of trying to
discover in the picture what the artist has seen in the landscape and
felt in its presence, letting it speak to me in its own language, I allow
my thoughts to wander from the canvas, and I enjoy the landscape in
terms of my own knowledge and remembrance of it. The artist's
work becomes simply a point of departure, whereas it should be not
only the beginning but also the end and fulfillment of the complete
experience. What is, then, we may ask, the relation of the fact of the
subject to the beauty and final message of the work?

The pleasure which attends the recognition of the subject is a
legitimate element in our enjoyment of art. But the work should
yield a delight beyond our original delight in the subject as it exists
in nature. The significance of a work of representative art depends
not upon the subject in and of itself, but upon what the artist has to
say about it. A rose may be made to reveal the cosmos; a mountain
range or cloud-swept spaces of the upper air may be niggled into
meanness. The ugly in practical life may be transfigured by the
artist's touch into supreme beauty. _"Il faut pouvoir faire servir le
trivial à l'expression du sublime, c'est la vraie force,"_ said one who
was able to invest a humble figure with august dignity. Millet's
peasants reveal more of godlike majesty than all the array of
personages in the pantheon of post-Raphaelite Italy and the classic
school of France. Upon his subject the artist bases that harmony of
relations which constitutes the beauty and significance of his work.
Brought thus into a harmony, the object represented is made more
vivid, more intensely itself, than it is in nature, with the result that
we receive from the representation a heightened sense of reality and
of extended personality. The importance of the subject, therefore, is
measured by the opportunity it affords the artist, and with him his
appreciators, to share in the beauty of nature and life. A picture
should not "standout" from its frame, but should go back into it,
reaching even into infinity. Our own associations attaching to the
subject lose themselves as they blend with the artist's revelation of
the fuller beauty of his object; and finally all becomes merged in the
emotional experience.

Eliminating the transient and accidental, a work of art presents the
essential and eternal. Art appeals not to the intellect and the reason,
but to the imagination and the emotions. The single work, therefore,
is concrete and immediate. But universal in its scope, it transcends
the particularities of limited place and individual name. We must
distinguish between the abstractly typical and the universal. The
representative artist does not conceive an abstraction and then seek
to find a symbol for it. That is the method of allegory, where spring,
for example, is figured as a young woman scattering flowers.
Allegory is decorative rather than representative in intention. The
artist receives his inspiration and stimulus from some actual
concrete bit of nature, a woodland wrapt in tender mists of green, a
meadow gold and softly white with blossoms, a shimmering gauze
of sun touched air, moist and vibrating, enfolding it. That is what he
paints. But he paints it so that it is spring, and instinct with the spirit
of all springs. Michelangelo does not intellectually conceive youth
and then carve a statue. Some boy has revealed to him the beauty of
his young strength, and the sculptor moves to immediate expression.
He calls his statue David, but the white form radiates the rhythm and
glory of all youth. And as we realize youth in ourselves, more
poignantly, more abundantly, the mere name of the boy does not
matter. The fact that the portrait shows us Carlyle is an incident.
Carlyle is the "subject" of the picture, but its meaning is the twilight
of a mighty, indomitable mind, made visible and communicable. His
work is done; the hour of quiet is given, and he finds rest. Into this
moment, eternal in its significance, into this mood, universal in its
appeal, we enter, to realize it in ourselves. The subject of picture or
statue is but the means; the end is life. Objective fact is transmuted
into living truth. Art is the manifestation of a higher reality than we
alone have been able to know. It begins with the particular and then
transcends it, admitting us to share in the beauty of the world, the
cosmic harmony of universal experience.



X

THE PERSONAL ESTIMATE

ART starts from life and in the end comes back to it. Art is born out
of the stirring of the artist's spirit in response to his need of
expression, and it reaches its fulfillment in the spirit of the
appreciator as it answers his need of wider and deeper experience.
Midway on its course from spirit to spirit it traverses devious paths.
The emotion out of which art springs and of which it is the
expression is controlled and directed by the shaping force of mind,
and it embodies itself in material form. This material form, by virtue
of its qualities, has the power to delight our senses; the skill which
went into the fashioning of it, so far as we can recognize the
processes of execution, gives us pleasure; the harmony which the
work of art must manifest satisfies the mind and makes it possible
for us to link the emotion with our own experience.

These paths which a work of art traverses in its course from its
origin to its fulfillment I have tried to follow in their ramifications,
and I have tried to trace them to their issue in appreciation. Some
lovers of art may linger on the way and rest content with the
distance they have come, without pressing forward to the end. A
work of art is complex in its appeal; and it is possible to stop with
one or another of its elements. Thus we may receive the work
intellectually, recognizing its subject, and turning the artist's
emotion into our thought and translating it from his medium of color
and form or sound into our own medium of words. Here is a portrait
of Carlyle; and Carlyle we _know_ as an author and as a man. This
landscape is from the Palisades, where we have roamed in leisure
hours. Before us is a statue of Zeus, whom our classical reading has
made a reality to us. This symphony gathers about a day in the
country, suggesting an incident in our own experience of which we
have pleasant remembrances. Intellectually, also, we enjoy the
evidence of the artist's skill which the work exhibits. Or we may
pass beyond the simple exercise of the intellect, and with a
refinement of perception we may take a sensuous delight in the
qualities of the material in which the work is embodied. This portrait
is a subtle harmony of color and exquisite adjustment of line and
mass. The luminous night which enwraps the Palisades is a solemn
mighty chord. The white rhythm of this statue caresses the eye that
follows it. This symphony is an intricate and wonderful
wave-pattern upon a sea of billowing sound in which the listener immerses
himself voluptuously. The essential significance of a work of art is
not to be received apart from its form, but the form is more than
merely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, therefore, the color and the
composition of the portrait are but the point of meeting where we
touch in energizing contact a powerful personality. Our spirit goes
out into the night of these Palisades and dilates into immensity. This
statue is Olympian majesty made visible, and in its presence we feel
that we too are august. The symphony is a resolution of the struggle
of our own tangled lives, a purification, and the experience of joy.

Art is the expression of experience, whether the experience enacts
itself within the spirit of the artist or derives from his contact with
the external world. So by the same token, art is finally to be received
as experience. The ultimate meaning of a work of art to the
appreciator is what it wakens in him of emotion. It is the artist's
business, by the manipulation of his materials and his elements, by
the choice of motive and the rendering, by the note and pitch of his
color, the ordering of his line, the disposition of his masses, to
compel the direction of the emotion; he must not allow the
solemnity and awe with which his night invests the Palisades to be
mistaken by the beholder for terror or for mere obscurity. But the
quality and the intensity of the emotion depend upon the temper of
the appreciator's sensibilities and the depth and range of his
experience of life. Art is not fixed and invariable in its effect.
"Vanity Fair" is a great novel. One man may read it for the sake of
the story, and in his amusement and interest in following the
succession of incident, he may for a while forget himself. A possible
use to put one's reading to; yet for that man the book is not art.
Another may be entertained by the spectacle of the persons as they
exhibit themselves in Thackeray's pages, much as he might stop a
moment on the curbstone and watch a group of children at play in
the street. Here he is a looker-on, holding himself aloof; and for him,
again, the book is not art. Still a third may find in "Vanity Fair" a
record of the customs and manners of English people at the
beginning of the nineteenth century; and he adds this much to his
stock of information. Still for him the book is not art. Not one of the
three has touched in vital contact the essential meaning of "Vanity
Fair." But the man who sees in the incidents of the book a situation
possible in his own life, who identifies himself with the personages
and acts out with them their adventures, who feels that he actually
knows Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp, Jo Sedley, Dobbin, and
Amelia, and understands their character and personality better here
than in the actual world about him by force of Thackeray's greater
insight and power of portraiture, who sees in English manners here
represented the interpretation of his own surroundings, so that as a
result of it all, his own experience becomes richer for his having
lived out the life of the fictitious persons, his own acquaintances
have revealed themselves more fully, his own life becomes more
intelligible,--for him at last the book is a work of art. So any work
may be a mirror which simply reflects the world as we know it; it
may be a point of departure, from which tangentially we construct
an experience of our own: it is truly art only in the degree that it is
revelation.

A work of art, therefore, is to be received by the individual
appreciator as an added emotional experience. It appeals to him at
all because in some way it relates itself to his own life; and its value
to him is determined by the measure in which it carries him out into
wider ranges of feeling. There are works whose absolute greatness
he recognizes but yet which do not happen at the moment to find
him. Constable comes to him as immensely satisfying; Turner,
though an object of great intellectual interest, leaves him cold. He
knows Velasquez to be supreme among painters, but he turns away
to stand before Frans Hals, whose quick, sure strokes call such very
human beings into actuality and rouse his spirit to the fullest
response. Why is it that of two works of equal depth of insight into
life, of equal scope of feeling, of the same excellence of technical
accomplishment, one has an appeal and a message for him and not
the other? What is the bridge of transition between the work and the
spirit of the appreciator by which the subtle connection is
established?

It comes back to a matter of harmony. Experience presents itself to
us in fragments; and in so far as the parts are scattering and
unrelated, it is not easy for us to guess the purpose of our being here.
But so soon as details, which by virtue of some selecting principle
are related to one another, gather themselves into a whole, chaos is
resolved into order, and this whole becomes significant, intelligible,
and beautiful. Instinctively we are seeking, each in his own way, to
bring the fragments of experience into order; and that order stands to
each of us for what we are, for our individual personality, the self.
We define thus our selecting principle, by which we receive some
incidents of experience as related to our development and we reject
others as not related to it. Thus the individual life achieves its
integrity, its unity and significance. This, too, is the process of art. A
landscape in nature is capable of a various, interpretation. By
bringing its details into order and unity, the artist creates its beauty.
His perception of the harmony which his imagination compels out of
the landscape is attended with emotion, and the emotion flows
outward to expression in a form which is itself harmonious. This
form is a work of art. Art, therefore, is the harmonizing of
experience. Appreciation is an act of fusion and identification. In
spirit we _become_ the thing presented by the work of art and we
merge with it in a larger unity. The individual harmony which a
work of art manifests becomes significant to us as we can make it an
harmonious part of our own experience and as it carries us in the
direction of our development.

But how to determine, each man for himself, what is the direction of
our development? A life becomes significant to itself so soon as it is
conscious of its purpose, and it becomes harmonious as it makes all
the details of experience subserve that purpose. The purpose of the
individual life, so far as we can guess it, seems to be that the life
shall be as complete as possible, that it shall fulfill itself and provide
through its offspring for its continuance. It is true that no life is
isolated; as every atom throughout the universe is bound to every
other atom by subtlest filaments of influence, so each human life
stands related to all other lives. But the man best pays his debt of
service to others who makes the most of that which is given him to
work with; and that is his own personality. We must begin at the
centre and work outwards. My concern is with my own justice. If I
worry because my friend or another is not just, I not only do not
make him more just, but I also fail of the highest justice I can
achieve, which is my own. We must be true to ourselves. We help
one another not by precept but by _being;_ and what we are
communicates itself. As physical life propagates and thus continues
itself, so personality is transmitted in unconscious innumerable ways.
The step and carriage of the body, the glance of the eye, the work of
our hands, our silences no less than our speech, all express what we
are. As everything follows upon what we are, so our responsibility is
to _be,_ to be ourselves completely, perfectly.

A tender shoot pushes its way out of the soil into light and air, and
with the years it grows into a tree. The tree bears fruit, which
contains the seed of new manifestations of itself. The fruit falls to
the ground and rots, providing thus the aliment for the seed out of
which other trees are to spring. From seed to seed the life of the tree
is a cycle, without beginning and without end. At no one point in the
cycle can we say, Here is the purpose of the tree. Incidentally the
tree may minister to the needs and comfort and pleasure of man. The
tree delights him to look upon it; its branches shade him from the
noonday sun; its trunk and limbs can be hewn down and turned to
heat and shelter; its fruit is good to eat. The primary purpose of the
fruit, however, is not to furnish food to man, but to provide the
envelope for the transmission of its seed and the continuance of its
own life. Seen in its cosmic bearing and scope, the purpose of the
tree is to be a tree, as fit, as strong, as beautiful, as complete, as
tree-like, as it can be. The leaf precedes the flower and may be thought
on that account to be inferior to it in the scale of development. If a
leaf pines and withers in regret that it is not a flower, it not only
does not become a flower, but it fails of being a good leaf.
Everything in its place and after its own kind. In so far as it is
perfectly itself, a leaf, a blossom, a tree, a man, does it contribute to
the well-being of others. Man has subdued all things under his feet
and turned them to his own uses. By force of mind he is the
strongest creature, but it is not to be inferred that he is therefore the
aim and end of all creation. Like everything else, he has his place;
like everything else he has the right to live his own life, triumphing
over the weaker and in his turn going down before a mightier when
the mightier shall come; like everything else he is but a part in the
universal whole. Only a part; but as we recognize our relation to
other parts and through them our connection with the whole, our
sense of the value of the individual life becomes infinitely extended.
We must get into the rhythm, keeping step with the beat of the
universal life and finding there our place, our destiny, the meaning
of our being here, and joy. The goods which men set before
themselves as an end are but by-products after all. If we pursue
happiness we overtake it not. If we do what our hands find to do,
devotedly and with our might, then, some day, if we happen to stop
and make question of it, we discover that happiness is already there,
in us, with us, and around us. The aim of a man's life in the world, as
it would seem, is to be perfectly a man, and his end is to fulfill
himself; as part of this fulfillment of himself, he provides for the
continuance of his life in other lives, and transmitting his character
and influence, he enriches other lives because of what he is. The
purpose of seeing is that we may see more, and the eye is ever
striving to increase its power; the health of the eye is growth. The
purpose of life is more life, individual in the measure that it lies
within a man's power to develop it, but cosmic in its sources and its
influence.

As the harmony which a work of art presents finds a place in that
harmony of experience and outward-reaching desire which
constitutes our personality, art becomes for us an entrance into more
life. In the large, art is a means of development. But as any work
embraces diverse elements and is capable of a various appeal, it may
be asked in what sense the appreciation of art is related to education
and culture. Before we can answer the question intelligently, we
must know what we mean by our terms. By many people education
is regarded as they regard any material possession, to be classed
with fashionable clothes, a fine house, a carriage and pair, or
touring-car, or steam yacht, as the credential and card of entrée to
what is called good society. Culture is a kind of ornamental furniture,
maintained to impress visitors. Of course we ourselves do not think
so, but we know people who do. Nor do we believe--as some
believe--that education is simply a means of gaining a more
considerable livelihood. It is pathetic to see young men in college
struggling in desperate, uncomplaining sacrifice to obtain an
education, and all the while mistaking the end of their effort. Not all
the deeds of daring in a university course are enacted on the athletic
field; the men I am thinking of do not have their pictures published
in the newspapers,--the unrecorded heroisms of college life are very
moving to those who know. But the tragedy I have in mind is this--for
tragedy consists not in sacrifice itself but in needless and futile
sacrifice--that some of these young men suppose _there_ is a magic
virtue in education for its own sake, that it is the open-sesame to all
the wealth and beauty of life. With insufficient ability to start with,
they are preparing to be unfit professional men, when they might be
excellent artisans. The knowledge of books is in no sense the whole
story nor the only means of education. In devotion to some craft or
in the intelligent conduct of some business they might find the true
education, which is the conscious discipline of one's powers. The
man who can do things, whether with his hands or with his brain,
provided intelligence govern the exercise of hand and brain, and
who finds happiness in his work because it is the expression of
himself, is an educated man. The end of education is the building of
personality, the making of human power, and its fruit is wisdom.

Wisdom, however, does not consist in the most extensive knowledge
of facts. Oftentimes information overweights a man and snuffs out
what personal force there might otherwise have been. On the futility
of mere learning there is abundant testimony. Walt Whitman, as we
might expect from his passion for the vital and the human, has said:
"You must not know too much and be too precise and scientific
about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft. A certain free
margin, perhaps ignorance, credulity, helps your enjoyment of these
things and of the sentiment of feather'd, wooded, river or marine
nature generally. I repeat it--don't want to know too exactly or the
reasons why." Even Ruskin, whose learning was extensive and
various, bears witness to the same effect. He notes "the diminution
which my knowledge of the Alps had made in my impression of
them, and the way in which investigation of strata and structure
reduces all mountain sublimity to mere debris and wall-building." In
the same spirit he planned an essay on the Uses of Ignorance. From
the midst of his labors in Venice he wrote: "I am sure that people
who work out subjects thoroughly are disagreeable wretches. One
only feels as one should when one doesn't know much about the
matter." In other words, we are not to let our knowledge come
between us and our power to feel. In thus seeming to assail
education I am not seeking to subvert or destroy; I want simply to
adjust the emphasis. The really wise man is he who knows how to
make life yield him its utmost of true satisfaction and furnish him
the largest scope for the use of his powers and the expression of
himself. In this sense a newsboy in the streets may be wiser than a
university professor, in that one may be the master of his life and the
other may be the servant of his information. Education should have
for its end the training of capacities and powers, the discipline and
control of the intelligence, the quickening of the sympathies, the
development of the ability to live. No man is superior to his fellows
because of the fact of his education. His education profits him only
in so far as it makes him more of a man, more responsive because
his own emotions have been more deeply stirred, more tolerant
because his wider range has revealed more that is good, more
generous to give of his own life and service because he has more
generously received. It is not what we know nor what we have that
marks our worth, but what we are. No man, however fortunate and
well-circumstanced he may be, can afford to thank God that he is
not as other men are. In so far as his education tends to withdraw
him from life and from contact with his fellows of whatever station,
in so far as it fosters in him the consciousness of class, so far it is an
evil. Education should lead us not to judge lives different from our
own, but to try to understand and, to appreciate. The educated man,
above all others, should thank God that there are diversity of gifts
and so many kinds of good.

Art is a means of culture, but art rightly understood and received.
Art does not aim to teach. It may teach incidentally, tangentially to
its circle, but instruction, either intellectual or ethical, is not its
purpose. It fulfills itself in the spirit of the appreciator as it enables
him in its presence to become something that otherwise he had not
been. It is not enough to be told things; we must make trial of them
and live them out in our own experience before they become true for
us. As appreciation is not knowledge but feeling, so we must live
our art. It is well to have near us some work that we want to be
_like._ We get its fullest message only as we identify ourselves with
it. If we are willing to be thought ignorant and to live our lives as
seems good to us, I believe it is better to go the whole way with a
few things that can minister to us abundantly and so come to the end
of them, than to touch in superficial contact a great many lesser
works. The lesser works have their place; and so far as they can
carry us beyond the point where we are, they can serve us. In a
hurried touch-and-go, however, there is danger of scattering;
whereas true appreciation takes time, for it is less an act than a
whole attitude of mind. This is an age of handbooks and short cuts.
But there is no substitute for life. If for one reason or another the
opportunity to realize art in terms of life is not accorded us, it is
better to accept the situation quite frankly and happily, and not try to
cheat ourselves with the semblance. But if it is indeed the reality,
then we maybe content with the minutes of experience, though we
are denied the hours or the years. "The messages of great poems,"
says Whitman, "to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal
terms; only then can you understand us." The power of response
must be in us, and that power is the fruit of experience. The only
mystery of art is the mystery of all life itself. In nature the artist
finds the manifestation of a larger self toward which he aspires, and
this is what his work expresses. Alone with his spirit, he cries to us
for that intimate mystic companionship which is appreciation, and
our response gives back the echo of his cry. He reaches out across
the distance to touch other and kindred spirits and draw them to
himself. Says the poet,--

     "Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
     Therefore for thee the following chants."

We appreciate the artist's work as in it we live again and doubly.

Thus art links itself with life. The message of art to the individual
defines itself according to his individual needs. Life rises with each
man, to him a new opportunity and a new destiny. We create our
own world; and life means to us what we are in ourselves. In art we
are seeking to find ourselves expressed more fully. The works that
we care for, if we consider it a moment, are the works we
understand; and we understand them because they phrase for us our
own experience. Life and the truth of life are relative. Truth is not in
the object but in our relation to it. What is true for me may or may
not be true for another. This much is true for me, namely, whatever
tallies with my experience and reveals to me more of the underlying
purpose of the universe. We are all, each in his own way, seeking
the meaning of life; and that meaning is special and personal to the
individual, each man deciding for himself. By selection here, by
rejection there, we are trying to work toward harmony. The details
of life become increasingly complex with the years, but living grows
simpler because we gradually fix a selecting and unifying principle.
When we have truly found ourselves, we come to feel that the
external incidents do not signify; which chance happens, whether
this or that, is indifferent. It is the spirit in which the life is lived
that determines its quality and value. The perception of purpose in the
parts brings them into order and gives them meaning. A man's life is
an expanding circle, the circumference of which is drawn around an
order or interplay and adjustment of part with part. Whatever lies
without the circle does not pertain to the individual--as yet. So soon
as any experience reveals its meaning to us and we feel that it takes
its place in our life, then it belongs to us. Whatever serves to bring
details, before scattering and unrelated, into order, is for that
moment true. Art has a message for us as it tallies with what we
already know about life; and, quickening our perceptions, disclosing
depths of feeling, it carries us into new ranges of experience.

In this attitude toward life lies the justice of the personal estimate.
The individual is finally his own authority. To find truth we return
upon our own consciousness, and we seek thus to define our
"original relation" to the universal order. So as one stands before the
works of the Italian painters and sculptors, for example, in the
endeavor rightly to appreciate what they have achieved, one may ask:
How much of life has this artist to express to me, of life as I know it
or can know it? Has the painter through these forms, however crude
or however accomplished, uttered what he genuinely and for himself
thought and felt? The measure of these pictures for me is the degree
of reality, of vital feeling, which they transmit. Whether it be spring
or divine maternity or the beauty of a pagan idea, which Botticelli
renders, the same power is there, the same sense of gracious life.
Whether it be Credi's naïve womanhood, or Titian's abounding,
glorious women and calm and forceful men, or Delia Robbia's
joyous children and Donatello's sprites, the same great meaning is
expressed, the same appreciation of the goodness and beauty of all
life. This beauty is for me, here, to-day. In the experience of a man
who thinks and feels, there is a time when his imagination turns
toward the past. At the moment, as the world closes in about him,
his spirit, dulled by the attrition of daily use and wont, is unable to
discern the beauty and significance of the present life around him.
For a time his imagination finds abundant nourishment in the mighty
past. Many spirits are content there to remain. But life is of the
present. To live greatly is to live now, inspired by the past, corrected
and encouraged by it, impelled by "forward-looking thoughts'" and
providing for the future, but living in to-day. Life is neither
remembrance nor anticipation, neither regret nor deferment, but
present realization. Often one feels in a gallery that the people are
more significant than the pictures. Two lovers furtively holding
hands and stopping before a canvas to press closer together,
shoulder to shoulder; a young girl erect and firm, conscious of her
young womanhood and rejoicing in it, radiating youth and life; an
old man, whose years are behind him yet whose interest reveals his
eager welcome of new experience, unconsciously rebuking the jaded
and indifferent: here is reality. Before it the pictures seem to recede
and become dimmed. Our appreciation of these things makes the
significance of it all. Only in so far as art can communicate this
sensation, this same impression of the beauty and present reality of
life, has it a meaning for us. The painter must have registered his
appreciation of immediate reality and must impart that to us until it
becomes, heightened and intensified, our own. The secret of
successful living lies in compelling the details of our surroundings
to our own ends. Michelangelo lived his life; Leonardo lived his;
neither could be the other. A man must paint the life that he knows,
the experience into which he enters. So we must live our lives
immediately and newly. We have penetrated the ultimate mystery of
art when we realize the inseparable oneness of art with life.

Art is a call to fuller living. Its real service is to increase our
capacity for experience. The pictures, the music, the books, which
profit us are those which, when we have done with them, make us
feel that we have lived by just so much. Often we purchase
experience with enthusiasm; we become wise at the expense of our
power to enjoy. What we need in relation to art is not more
knowledge but greater capability of feeling, not the acquisition of
more facts but the increased power to interpret facts and to apply
them to life. In appreciation it is not what we know about a work of
art, it is not even what we actually see before us, that constitutes its
significance, but what in its presence we are able to feel. The
paradox that nature imitates art has in it this much of truth, that art is
the revelation of the possibilities of life, and we try to make these
possibilities actual in our own experience. Art is not an escape from
life and a refuge; it is a challenge and reënforcement. Its action is
not to make us less conscious but more; in it we are not to lose
ourselves but to find ourselves more truly and more fully. Its effect
is to help us to a larger and juster appreciation of the beauty and
worth of nature and of life.

Art is within the range of every man who holds himself open to its
appeal. But art is not the final thing. It is a means to an end; its end
is personality. There are exalted moments in the experience of us all
which we feel to be finer than any art. Then we do not need to turn
to painting, music, literature, for our satisfaction. We are living. Art
is aid and inspiration, but its fulfillment and end is life.

"We live," says Wordsworth, "by admiration, hope, and love."
Admiration is wonder and worship, a sense of the mystery and the
beauty of life as we know it now, and thankfulness for it, and joy.
Hope is the vision of things to be. And love is the supreme enfolding
unity that makes all one. Art is life at its best, but life is the greatest
of the arts,--life harmonious, deep in feeling, big in sympathy, the
life that is appreciation, responsiveness, and love.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life" ***

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