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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Enjoyment of Art
+
+Author: Carleton Noyes
+
+Release Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #27194]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENJOYMENT OF ART ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ruth Hart
+
+
+
+
+[Note:  for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents to
+the beginning of the text.]
+
+
+
+THE ENJOYMENT OF ART
+
+BY
+
+CARLETON NOYES
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+1903
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CARLETON NOYES
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+_Published, March, 1903_
+
+
+To
+ROBERT HENRI
+AND
+VAN D. PERRINE
+
+
+This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at
+     the crowded heaven,
+And I said to my spirit _When we become the enfolders of
+     those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every
+     thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?_
+And my spirit said _No, we but level that lift to pass and
+     continue beyond._
+
+WALT WHITMAN
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Preface
+I.     The Picture and the Man         i
+II.    The Work of Art as Symbol      19
+III.   The Work of Art as Beautiful   41
+IV.    Art and Appreciation           67
+V.     The Artist                     86
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+The following pages are the answer to questions which a young man
+asked himself when, fresh from the university, he found himself
+adrift in the great galleries of Europe. As he stood helpless and
+confused in the presence of the visible expressions of the spirit of
+man in so many ages and so many lands, one question recurred
+insistently: _Why_ are these pictures? What is the meaning of all
+this striving after expression? What was the aim of these men who
+have left their record here? What was their moving impulse? Why,
+why does the human spirit seek to manifest itself in forms which we
+call beautiful?
+
+He turned to histories of art and to biographies of artists, but he
+found no answer! to the "Why?" The philosophers with their
+theories of aesthetics helped him little to understand the dignity and
+force of this portrait or the beauty of that landscape. In the
+conversation of his artist friends there was no enlightenment, for
+they talked about "values" and "planes of modeling" and the
+mysteries of "tone." At last he turned in upon himself: What does
+this canvas mean to me? And here he found his answer. This work
+of art is the revelation to me of a fuller beauty, a deeper harmony,
+than I have ever seen or felt. The artist is he who has experienced
+this new wonder in nature and who wants to communicate his joy, in
+concrete forms, to his fellow men.
+
+The purpose of this book is to set forth in simple, untechnical
+fashion the nature and the meaning of a work of art. Although the
+illustrations of the underlying principles are drawn mainly from
+pictures, yet the conclusions apply equally to books and to music. It
+is true that the manifestations of the art-impulse are innumerable,
+embracing not only painting, sculpture, literature, music, and
+architecture, but also the handiwork of the craftsman in the
+designing of a rug or in the fashioning of a cup or a candlestick; it is
+true that each art has its special province and function, and that each
+is peculiarly adapted to the expression of a certain order of emotion
+or idea, and that the distinctions between one art and another are not
+to be inconsiderately swept aside or obscured. Yet art is one. It is
+possible, without confusing the individual characteristics essential to
+each, to discuss these principles under the comprehensive rubric of
+Art.
+
+The attempt is made here to reduce the supposed mysteries of art
+discussion to the basis of practical, every-day intelligence and
+common sense. What the ordinary man who feels himself in any
+way attracted; towards art needs is not more and constantly more
+pictures to look at, not added lore about them, not further knowledge
+of the men and the times that have produced them; but rather what
+he needs is some understanding of what the artist has aimed to
+express, and, as reinforcing that understanding, the capacity rightly
+to appreciate and enjoy.
+
+It is hoped that in this book the artist may find expressed with
+simplicity and justice his own highest aims; and that the appreciator
+and the layman may gain some insight into the meaning of art
+expression, and that they may be helped a little on their way to the
+enjoyment of art.
+
+HARVARD COLLEGE, _December tenth, 1902._
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE PICTURE AND THE MAN
+
+At any exhibition of paintings, more particularly at some public
+gallery or museum, one can hardly fail to reflect that an interest in
+pictures is unmistakably widespread. People are there in
+considerable numbers, and what is more striking, they seem to
+represent every station and walk in life. It is evident that pictures, as
+exhibited to the public, are not the cult of an initiated few; their
+appeal is manifestly to no one class; and this popular interest is as
+genuine as it is extended.
+
+Thus reflectively scanning the crowd, the observer asks himself:
+What has attracted these numbers to that which might be supposed
+not to be understood of the many? And what are the pictures that in
+general draw the popular attention?
+
+A few persons have of course drifted into the exhibition out of
+curiosity or from lack of something better to do. So much is evident
+at once, for these file past the walls listlessly, seldom stopping, and
+then but to glance at those pictures which are most obviously like
+the familiar object they pretend to represent,--such as the bowl of
+flowers which the beholder can almost smell, the theatre-checks and
+five-dollar note pasted on a wall which tempt him to finger them, or
+the panel of game birds which puzzles him to determine whether the
+birds are real or not. These visitors, however, are not the most
+numerous. With the great majority it is not enough that the picture
+be a clever piece of imitation or illusion: transferring their interest
+from the mere execution, they demand further that the subjects
+represented shall be pleasing. The crowd pause before a sunny
+landscape, with cows standing by the shaded pool; they gather about
+the brilliant portrait of a woman splendidly arrayed,--a favorite
+actress or a social celebrity; they linger before a group of children
+wading in a brook, or a dog crouching mournfully by an empty
+cradle. At length, with an approving and sympathetic word of
+comment, they pass on to the next pleasing picture. Some canvases,
+not the most popular ones, are yet not without their interest for a few;
+these visitors are taking things a little more seriously; they do not try
+to see every picture, they do not hurry; they seem to be considering
+the canvas immediately before them with concentrated attention.
+
+No one of all these people is insensible to the appeal of the
+picturesque: their presence at the exhibition is evidence of that. In
+life they like to see a bowl of flowers, a sunny landscape, a beautiful
+woman in beautiful surroundings; and naturally they are interested
+in that which represents and recalls the reality. At once it is plain,
+however, that to different individuals the various pictures appeal in
+different measure and for differing reasons. To one the very fact of
+representation is a mystery and fascination. To another the important
+thing is the subject; the picture must represent what he likes in
+nature or in life. To a third the subject itself is of less concern than
+what the painter wanted to say about it: the artist saw a beauty
+manifested by an ugly beggar, perhaps, and he wanted to show that
+beauty to his fellows, who could not perceive it for themselves.
+
+The special interest in pictures of each of these three men is not
+without its warrant in experience. What man is wholly indifferent to
+the display of human skill? Who is there without his store of
+pleasurable associations, who is not stirred by any call which rouses
+them into play? What lover of beauty is not ever awake to the
+revelation of new beauty? Indeed, upon these three principles
+together, though in varying proportion, depends the full significance
+of a great work of art.
+
+As the lover of pictures looks back over the period of his conscious
+interest in exhibitions and galleries, it is not improbable that his
+earliest memories attach themselves to those paintings which most
+closely resembled the object represented. He remembers the great
+wonder which he felt that a man with mere paint and canvas could
+so reproduce the reality of nature. So it is that those paintings which
+are perhaps the first to attract the man who feels an interest in
+pictures awakening are such as display most obviously the painter's
+skill. Whatever the subject imitated, the fascination remains; that
+such illusion is possible at all is the mystery and the delight.
+
+But as his interest in pictures grows with indulgence, as his
+experience widens, the beholder becomes gradually aware that he is
+making a larger demand. After the first shock of pleasurable surprise
+is worn away, he finds that the repeated exhibition of the painter's
+dexterity ceases to satisfy him; these clever pieces of deception
+manifest a wearying sameness, after all; and the beholder begins
+now to look for something more than mere expertness. Thinking on
+his experience, he concludes that the subjects which can be imitated
+deceptively are limited in range and interest; he has a vague,
+disquieting sense that somehow these pictures do not mean anything.
+Yet he is puzzled. Art aims to represent, he tells himself, and it
+should follow that the best art is that which represents most closely
+and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek
+painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down
+to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his
+very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most
+plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to
+bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill;
+and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ
+essentially from the adroitness of the juggler who keeps a billiard
+ball, a chair, and a silk handkerchief rotating from hand to hand.
+
+Conscious, then, of a new demand, of an added interest to be
+satisfied, the amateur of pictures turns from the imitative canvas to
+those paintings which appeal more widely to his familiar experience.
+Justly, he does not here forgo altogether his delight in the painter's
+cunning of hand, only he requires further that the subjects
+represented shall be pleasing. It must be a subject whose meaning he
+can recognize at once: a handsome or a strong portrait, a familiar
+landscape, some little incident which tells its own story. The
+spectator is now attracted by those pictures which rouse a train of
+agreeable associations. He stops before a canvas representing a bit
+of rocky coast, with the ocean tumbling in exhilaratingly. He
+recognizes the subject and finds it pleasing; then he wonders where
+the picture was painted. Turning to his catalogue, he reads: "37. On
+the Coast of Maine." "Oh, yes," he says to himself, "I was on the
+coast of Maine last summer, and I remember what a glorious time I
+had sitting on the rocks of an afternoon, with some book or other
+which the ocean was too fine to let me read. I like that picture." If
+the title had read "Massachusetts Coast," it is to be feared he would
+not have liked the canvas quite so well. The next picture which he
+notices shows, perhaps, a stately woman sumptuously attired. It is
+with a slight shock of disappointment that the visitor finds recorded
+in his catalogue: "41. Portrait of a Lady." He could see that much for
+himself. He hoped it was going to be the painter's mother or
+somebody's wife,--a person he ought to know about. But the pictures
+which appeal to him most surely are those which tell some little
+story,--"The Lovers," "The Boy leaving Home," "The Wreck." Here
+the subject, touching some one of the big human emotions, to which
+no man is wholly insensible, calls out the response of immediate
+interest and sympathy. It is something which he can understand.
+
+At length there comes a day when the visitor stops before a
+landscape which seems to him more beautiful than anything he has
+ever seen in nature; or some portrait discloses a strength of character
+or radiates a charm of personality which he has seldom met with in
+life. Whence comes this beauty, this strength, this graciousness? Can
+it be that the painter has seen a new wonder in nature, a new
+significance in human life? The spectator's previous experience of
+pictures has familiarized him in some measure with the means of
+expression which the painter employs. More sensitive now to the
+appeal of color and form, he sees that what the artist cares to present
+on his canvas is just his peculiar  sense of the beauty in the world, a
+beauty that is best symbolized and made manifest through the
+medium of color and form. Before he understood this eloquent
+language which the painter speaks, he misinterpreted those pictures
+whose significance he mistook to be literary and not pictorial. He
+early liked the narrative picture because here was a subject he could
+understand; he could rephrase it in his own terms, he could retell the
+story to himself in words. Now words are the means of expression of
+every-day life. Because of this fact, the art which employs words as
+its medium is the art which comes nearest to being universally
+understood, namely, literature. The other arts use each a medium
+which it requires a special training to understand. Without some
+sense of the expressiveness of color, line, form, and sounds,--a sense
+which can be cultivated,--one is necessarily unable to grasp the full
+and true meaning of picture, statue, or musical composition. One
+must realize further that the artist thinks and feels in his peculiar
+medium; his special meaning is conceived and expressed in color or
+form or sound. The task of the appreciator, correspondingly, is to
+receive the artist's message in the same terms in which it was
+conceived. The tendency is inevitable, however, to translate the
+meaning of the work into words, the terms in which men commonly
+phrase their experience. A parallel tendency is manifest in one's
+efforts to learn a foreign language. The English student of French at
+first thinks in English and laboriously translates phrase for phrase
+into French; and in hearing or reading the foreign language, he
+translates the original, word for word, into his native tongue before
+he can understand its sense: he has mastered the language only when
+he has reached that point where English is no longer present to his
+consciousness: he thinks in French and understands in French.
+Similarly, to translate the message of any art into terms that are
+foreign to it, to phrase the meaning of music or painting, for
+example, in words, is to fail of its essential, true significance. The
+import of music is musical; the meaning of pictures is not literary
+but pictorial. In the understanding of this truth, then, the spectator
+penetrates to the artist's real intention; and he becomes aware that
+when he used the picture as the peg whereon to hang his own
+reflections and ideas, he missed the meaning of the artist's work. "As
+I look at this canvas," he tells himself, "it is not what I know of the
+coast of Maine that is of concern, but what the painter has seen and
+felt of its beauty and wants to reveal to me." Able at last to interpret
+the painter's medium, the appreciator comes to seek in pictures not
+primarily an exhibition of the craftsman's skill, not even a recall of
+his own pleasurable experiences, but rather, beyond all this, a fuller
+visible revelation of beauty.
+
+The essential significance of art, that art is revelation, is illustrated
+not only by painting but by the other arts as well. In music, to take
+but a single example, are present the same elements that constitute
+the appeal of pictures,--skill in the rendering, a certain
+correspondence with experience, and the power of imaginative
+interpretation of the facts of life. The music-hall performer who
+wins the loudest and heartiest applause is he who does the greatest
+number of pyrotechnic, wonderful things on the piano, or holds a
+high note on the cornet for the longest time. His success, as with the
+painter whose aim is to create illusion, rests upon men's instinctive
+admiration for the exhibition of skill. Again, as the imitative picture
+involves not only the display of dexterity, but also likeness to the
+thing represented and the consequent possibility of recognizing it
+immediately, so in the domain of music there is an order of
+composition which seems to aim at imitation,--the so-called
+"descriptive" music. A popular audience is delighted with the "Cats'
+Serenade," executed on the violins with overwhelming likeness to
+the reality, or with, the "Day in the Country," in which the sun rises
+in the high notes, cocks crow, horses rattle down the road,
+merrymakers frolic on the green, clouds come up in the horns,
+lightning plays in the violins, thunder crashes in the drums and
+cymbals, the merrymakers scatter in the whole orchestra, the storm
+passes diminuendo, and in the muted violins the full moon rises
+serenely into a twilight sky. Here the intention is easily understood;
+the layman cannot fail to recognize what the composer wanted to
+say. And as in the case of pictures which interest the beholder
+because he can translate their subject into the terms which are his
+own medium of expression, that is, words, so with descriptive music,
+broadly speaking, the interest and significance is literary and not
+musical. Still another parallel is presented. Just as those pictures are
+popular whose subjects lie within the range of familiar experience,
+such as cows by the shaded pool, or children playing, or whose
+subjects touch the feelings; so, that music is popular which is
+phrased in obvious and familiar rhythms such as the march and the
+waltz, or which appeals readily and unmistakably to sentiment and
+emotion. It is after the lover of music has traversed these passages of
+musical expression and has proved their imitations that he comes to
+seek in music new ranges of experience, unguessed-at possibilities
+of feeling, which the composer has himself sounded and which he
+would communicate to others. He is truly the artist only as he leads
+his auditors into regions of beautiful living which they alone and of
+themselves had not penetrated. For it is then that his work reveals.
+
+Only such pictures, too, will have a vital meaning as reveal. The
+imitative and the iterative alike, that which adds nothing to the
+object and that which adds nothing to the experience of the beholder,
+though once pleasing, now fail to satisfy. The appreciator calls for
+something fuller. He wants to pass beyond the object, beyond his
+experience of it, into the realm of illumination whither the true artist
+would lead him. The development of appreciation, as the amateur
+has come to realize in his own person, is only the enlargement of
+demand. The appreciator requires ever fresh revelations of beauty.
+He discovers, too, that in practice the tendency of his development is
+in the direction of exclusion. As he goes on, he cares for fewer and
+fewer things, because those works which can minister to his
+ever-expanding desire of beauty must needs be less numerous. But these
+make up in largeness of utterance, in the intensity of their message,
+what they lack in numbers. Nor does this outcome make against a
+fancied catholicity of taste. The true appreciator still sees in his
+earlier loves something that is good, and he values the good the
+more justly that he sees it now in its right relation and apprehends its
+real significance. As each in its turn led him to seek further, each
+became an instrument in his development. For himself he has need
+of them no longer. But far from contemning them, he is rightly
+grateful for the solace they have afforded, as by them he has made
+his way up into the fuller meaning of art.
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE WORK OF ART AS SYMBOL
+
+In the experience of the man who feels himself attracted to pictures
+and who studies them intelligently and with sympathy, there comes
+a day when suddenly a canvas reveals to him a new beauty in nature
+or in life. Much seeing and much thinking, much bewilderment and
+some disappointment, have taught him that in the appreciation of
+pictures the question at issue is not, how cleverly has the painter
+imitated his object, is not, how suggestive is the subject of pleasing
+associations; he need simply ask himself, "What has the artist
+conceived or felt in the presence of this landscape, this arrangement
+of line and color, this human face, that I have not seen and felt, and
+that he wants to communicate to me?"
+
+The incident of the single canvas, which by its illuminating
+revealment first discloses to the observer the true significance of
+pictures, is typical of the whole scope of art. The mission of art is to
+reveal. It is the prophet's message to his fellow men, the apocalypse
+of the seer. The artist is he to whom is vouchsafed a special
+apprehension of beauty. He has the eye to see, the temperament to
+feel, the imagination to interpret; it is by virtue of these capacities,
+this high, transfiguring vision, that he is an artist; and his skill of
+hand, his equipment with the means of expression, is incidental to
+the great fact that he has somewhat to express that the common man
+has not. To his work, the manifestation of his spirit in material form,
+his perception made sensible, is accorded the name of art.
+
+Art is expression. It is not a display of skill; it is not the reproduction
+of external forms or appearances; it does not even, as some say,
+exist for itself: it is a message, a means. To cry "Art for Art's sake!"
+is to converse with the echo. Such a definition but moves in a circle,
+and doubles upon itself. No; art is for the artist's sake. The artist is
+the agent or human instrument whereby the supreme harmony,
+which is beauty, is manifested to men. Art is the medium by which
+the artist communicates himself to his fellows; and the individual
+work is the expression of what the artist felt or thought, as at the
+moment some new aspect of the universal harmony was revealed to
+his apprehension. Art is emotion objectified, but the object is
+subordinated to the emotion as means is to an end. The material
+result is not the final significance, but what of spiritual meaning or
+beauty the artist desired to convey. Not what is painted, as the
+layman thinks, not how it is painted, as the technician considers, but
+why did the artist paint it, is the question which sums up the truth
+about art. The appreciator need simply ask, What is the beauty, what
+the idea, which the artist is striving to reveal by these symbols of
+color and form? He understands that the import of the work is the
+_idea,_ and that the work itself is beautiful because it symbolizes a
+beautiful idea; its significance is spiritual. The function of art, then,
+is through the medium of concrete, material symbols to reveal to
+men whatever of beauty has been disclosed to the artist's more
+penetrating vision.
+
+In order to seize the real meaning of art it is necessary to strip the
+word beauty of all the wrappings of customary associations and the
+accretions of tradition and habit. As the word is current in ordinary
+parlance, the attribute of beauty is ascribed to that which is pleasing,
+pretty, graceful, comely; in fine, to that which is purely agreeable.
+But surely such is not the beauty which Rembrandt saw in the filthy,
+loathsome beggar. To Rembrandt the beggar was expressive of some
+force or manifestation of the supreme universal life, wherein all
+things work together to a perfect harmony.  Beauty is the essential
+quality belonging to energy, character, significance. A merely
+agreeable object is not beautiful unless it is expressive of a meaning;
+whatever, on the other hand, is expressive of a meaning, however
+shocking it may be in itself, however much it may fail to conform to
+conventional standards, is beautiful. Beauty does not reside in the
+object. No; it is the artist's sense of the great meaning of things; and
+in proportion as he finds that meaning--the qualities of energy, force,
+aspiration, life--manifest and expressed in objects do those objects
+become beautiful. Such was the conception of beauty Keats had
+when he wrote in a letter: "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty
+must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same
+idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,
+creative of essential Beauty." And similarly; "I can never feel certain
+of any truth, but from a clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse
+he sings:--
+
+     "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all
+     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
+
+When it is said here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the
+phrase may be understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as
+when one says the sun rises or the sun sets. Beauty is in the
+landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for the
+artist an idea he has conceived of some aspect of the universal life.
+
+The artist is impelled to embody concretely his perception of beauty,
+and so to communicate his emotion, because the emotion wakened
+by the perception of new harmony in things is most fully possessed
+and enjoyed as it comes to expression. Thus to make real his ideal
+and find the expression of himself is the artist's supreme Happiness.
+A familiar illustration of the twin need and delight of expression
+may be found in the handiwork produced in the old days when every
+artisan was an artist. It may be, perhaps, a key which some
+craftsman of Nuremberg fashioned. In the making of it he was not
+content to stop with the key which would unlock the door or the
+chest It was his key, the work of his hands; and he wrought upon it
+lovingly, devotedly, and made it beautiful, finding in his work the
+expression of his thought or feeling; it was the realization for that
+moment of his ideal. His sense of pleasure in the making of it
+prompted the care he bestowed upon it; his delight was in creation,
+in rendering actual a new beau which it was given him to conceive.
+
+In its origin as a work of art the key does not differ from a landscape
+by Inness, an "arrangement" by Whistler, a portrait by Sargent. The
+artist, whether craftsman or painter, is deeply stirred by some
+passage in his experience, a fair object or a true thought: it is the
+imperious demand of his nature, as it is his supreme pleasure, to
+give his feeling expression. The form which his expression takes--it
+may be key or carpet, it may be statue, picture, poem, symphony, or
+cathedral--is that which most closely responds to his idea, the form
+which most truly manifests and represents it.
+
+All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite
+sense representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality,
+as it is said that painting or literature represents and music does not;
+but every work of art, in painting, poetry, music, or in the handiwork
+of the craftsman, _represents_ in that it is the symbol of the creator's
+ideal. To be sure, the painter or sculptor or dramatist draws his
+symbols from already existing material forms, and these symbols are
+like objects in a sense in which music is not But line and color and
+the life of man, apart from this resemblance to external reality, are
+representative or symbolic of the artist's idea precisely as the
+craftsman's key, the designer's pattern, or the musician's symphony.
+The beautifully wrought key, the geometric pattern of oriental rug or
+hanging, the embroidered foliation on priestly vestment, are works
+of art equally with the landscape, the statue, the drama, or the
+symphony, in that they are one and all the sensuous manifestation of
+some new beauty spiritually conceived.
+
+The symbolic character of a work of art must not be lost from sight,
+for it is the clue to the interpretation of pictures, as it is of all art.
+The painter feels his way through the gamut of his palette to a
+harmony of color just as truly as the musician summons the notes of
+his scale and marshals them into accord. The painter is moved by
+some sweep of landscape; it wakens in him an emotion. When he
+sets himself to express his emotion in the special medium with
+which he works, he represents by pigment the external aspect of the
+landscape, yes; but not in order to imitate it or reproduce it: he
+represents the landscape because the colors and the forms which he
+registers upon the canvas express for him the emotions roused by
+those colors and those forms in nature. He does not try to match his
+grays with nature's grays, but this nuance which he gropes for on his
+palette, and having found it, touches upon his canvas, expresses for
+him what that particular gray in nature made him feel. His one
+compelling purpose is in all fidelity and singleness of aim to
+"translate the impression received." The painter's medium is just as
+symbolic as the notes of the musician's nocturne or the words of the
+poet's sonnet, equally inspired by the hour and place. Color and line
+and form, although they happen to be the properties of _things,_
+have a value for the emotions as truly as musical sounds: they are
+the outward symbol of the inward thought or feeling, the visible
+bodying forth of the immaterial idea.
+
+The symbolic character of the material world is not early
+apprehended. In superficial reaction upon life, men do not readily
+pass beyond the immediate actuality. That the spiritual meaning of
+all things is not perceived, that all things are not seen to be beautiful,
+or expressive of the supreme harmony, is due to men's limited
+powers of sight and feeling. Therefore is it that the artist is given in
+order that he may reveal as yet unrealized spiritual relations, or new
+beauty. The workaday world with its burden of exigent "realities"
+has need of a Carlyle to declare that things are but a wonderful
+metaphor and the physical universe is the garment of the living God.
+In the realm of thought an Emerson, seer of transcendent vision,
+must come to restore his fellows to their birthright, which is the life
+of the spirit. As in life, so in art men do not easily pass the obvious
+and immediate. The child reads "Gulliver's Travels" or "The
+Pilgrim's Progress" for the story. As his experience of life both
+widens and deepens, he is able to see through externals, and he
+penetrates to the real significance, of which the narrative is but the
+symbol. So it is with an insight born of experience that the lover of
+art sees no longer the "subject," but the beauty which the subject is
+meant to symbolize.
+
+In the universal, all-embracing constitution of things, nothing is
+without its significance. To be aware that everything has a meaning
+is necessary to the understanding of art, as indeed of life itself. That
+meaning, which things symbolize and express, it cannot be said too
+often, is not necessarily to be phrased in words. It is a meaning for
+the spirit. A straight line affects one differently from a curve; that is,
+each kind of line means something. Every line in the face utters the
+character behind it; every movement of the body is eloquent of the
+man's whole being. "The expression of the face balks account," says
+Walt Whitman,
+
+     "But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his
+          face,
+     It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints
+          of his hips and wrists,
+     It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
+          and knees, dress does not hide him,
+     The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and
+          broadcloth,
+     To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
+     You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and
+          shoulder-side."
+
+Crimson rouses a feeling different from that roused by yellow, and
+gray wakens a mood different from either. In considering this
+symbolic character of colors it is necessary to distinguish between
+their value for the emotions and merely literary associations. That
+white stands for purity or blue for fidelity is a conventionalized and
+attached conception. But the pleasure which a man has in some
+colors or his dislike for others depends upon the effect each color
+has upon his emotions, and this effect determines for him the
+symbolic value of the color. In the same way sounds are symbolic in
+that they affect the emotions apart from associated "thoughts." Even
+with a person who has no technical knowledge of music, the effect
+of the minor key is unmistakably different from the major. The tones
+and modulations of the voice, quite apart from the words uttered,
+have an emotional value and significance. Everything, line, form,
+gesture, movement, color, sound, all the material world, is
+expressive. All objective forms have their meaning, and rightly
+perceived are, in the sense in which the word is used here, beautiful,
+in that they represent or symbolize a spiritual idea.
+
+Thus it is that beauty is not in the object but in man's sense of the
+object's symbolic expressiveness. The amateur may be rapt by some
+artist's "quality of color." But it is probable that in the act of laying
+on his pigment, the artist was not thinking of his "quality" at all, but,
+rapt himself by the perception of the supreme harmony at that
+moment newly revealed to his sense, he was striving sincerely and
+directly to give his feeling its faithfullest expression. His color is
+beautiful because his idea was beautiful. The expression is of the
+very essence of the thought; it _is_ the thought, but the thought
+embodied. "Coleridge," says Carlyle, "remarks very pertinently
+somewhere that whenever you find a sentence musically worded, of
+true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and
+good in the meaning, too. For body and soul, word and idea, go
+strangely together here as everywhere." Not to look beyond the
+material is to miss the meaning of the work.
+
+In an art such as music, in which form and content are one and
+inextricable, it is not difficult to understand that the medium of
+expression which the art employs is necessarily symbolic, for here
+the form cannot exist apart from the meaning to be conveyed. In the
+art of literature, however, the case is not so clear, for the material
+with which the poet, the novelist, the dramatist works, material
+made up of the facts of the world about us, we are accustomed to
+regard as objective realities. An incident is an incident, the
+inevitable issue of precedent circumstances, and that's all there is to
+it Character is the result of heredity, environment, training, plus the
+inexplicable _Ego._ To regard these facts of life which are so actual
+and immediate as a kind of animate algebraic formulae seems
+absurd, but absurd only as one is unable to penetrate to the inner
+meaning of things. "Madame Bovary," to take an example quite at
+random, is called a triumph of realism. Now realism, of all literary
+methods, should register the fact as it is, and least of all should
+concern itself with symbols. But this great novel is more than the
+record of one woman's life. Any one who has come to understand
+the character and temperament of Flaubert as revealed in his Letters
+must feel that "Madame Bovary" is no arbitrary recital of tragic
+incident, but those people who move through his pages, what they
+do and what goes on about them, expressed for Flaubert his own
+dreary, baffled rebellion against life. That the artist may consciously
+employ the facts of life, not for the sake of the fact, but to
+communicate his feeling by thus bodying it forth in concrete
+symbols, there is explicit testimony. In an essay dealing with his
+own method of composition, Poe writes: "I prefer commencing with
+the consideration of an _effect._ Keeping originality _always_ in
+view . . .  I say to myself, in the first place, 'of the innumerable
+effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
+generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
+occasion, select?' Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid
+effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or
+tone . . . afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such
+combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the
+construction of the effect." Yes, physical circumstances, the
+succession of incident, shifting momentary grouping of persons,
+traits of character in varied combination and contrast,--all these are
+significant for the literary artist of spiritual relations.
+
+As the symbol of what the artist feels and strives to express, the
+individual work of art is necessarily more than any mere transcript
+of fact. It is the meeting and mingling of nature and the spirit of man;
+the result of their union is fraught with the inheritance of the past
+and holds within it the limitless promise of the future. The work of
+art is a focus, gathering into itself all the stored experience of the
+artist, and radiating in turn so much to the beholder as he is able at
+the moment to receive. A painter is starting out to sketch. Through
+underbrush and across the open he pushes his way, beset by beauty
+on every side, and storing impressions, sensations, thoughts. At last
+his eye lights upon some clump of brush, some meadow or hill,
+which seems at the instant to sum up and express his accumulated
+experience. In rendering this bit of nature, he pours out upon his
+canvas his store of feeling. It is the single case which typifies his
+entire course. "The man's whole life preludes the single deed." His
+way through the world has been just such a gathering up of
+experience, and each new work which he produces is charged with
+the collected wealth of years.
+
+The special work is the momentary epitome of the artist's total
+meaning. He finds this brief passage in nature beautiful then and
+there because it expresses what he feels and means. He does not try
+to reproduce the thing, but uses the thing for what it signifies. The
+thing is but for that moment: it signifies all that has gone before. As
+he watches, a cloud passes over the sun and the face of nature is
+darkened. Suddenly the scene bursts into light again. In itself the
+landscape is no brighter than before the sun was darkened. The
+painter feels it brighter for the contrast, and inevitably his rendering
+of its aspect is heightened and intensified.
+
+Art is nature heightened and intensified as nature is interpreted
+through the transfiguring medium of the human spirit To the object
+is added
+
+          "The gleam,
+     The light that never was on sea or land,
+     The consecration and the poet's dream."
+
+After an early morning in the fields, Corot withdraws to his house to
+rest. "I dream of the morning landscape," he writes; "I dream my
+picture, and presently I will paint my dream." But not only does the
+artist render the beauty which this landscape happens to express for
+him: he charges these colors and forms with the beauty of all
+landscape. Corot painted _at_ Ville d'Avray; _what_ he painted
+was God's twilight or dawn enwrapping tree and pool. In gratitude
+and worship he revealed to men the tender, ineffable poetry of gray
+dawns in all places and for all time. Millet's peasants were called
+John and Peter and Charles, and they tilled the soil of France; but on
+their bowed shoulders rests the universal burden; these dumb figures
+are eloquent of the uncomplaining, hopeless "peasanthood" of the
+world. In the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to
+penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal
+the spiritual,--this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his
+achievement is art.
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE WORK OF ART AS BEAUTIFUL
+
+Just as nature and life are significant as the material manifestation of
+spiritual forces and relations, so a work of art is in its turn the
+symbol by which the artist communicates himself; it is his revelation
+to men of the beauty he has perceived and felt.
+
+Beauty is not easy to define. That conception which regards beauty
+as the power to awaken merely agreeable emotions is limited and in
+so far false. Another source of misunderstanding is the confusion of
+beauty with moralistic values. It is said that beauty is the Ideal; and
+by many the "Ideal" is taken to mean ideal goodness. With
+righteousness and sin as such beauty has no concern. Much that is
+evil in life, much that offends against the moral law, must be
+regarded as beautiful in so far as it plays its necessary part in the
+universal whole. Clearing away these misconceptions, then, an
+approximate definition would be that the essence of beauty is
+harmony. So soon as a detail is shown in its relation to a whole, then
+it becomes beautiful because it is expressive of the supreme unity. A
+discord in music is felt to be a discord only as it is isolated; when it
+takes its fitting and inevitable place in the large unity of the
+symphony, it becomes full of meaning. The hippopotamus, dozing
+in his tank at the Zoo, is wildly grotesque and ugly. But who shall
+say that, seen in the fastnesses of his native rivers, he is not the
+beautiful perfect fulfilling of nature's harmony? To a race of blacks,
+the fair-skinned Apollo appearing among them could not but be
+monstrous. The smoking factory, sordid and hideous, is beautiful to
+him who sees that it accomplishes a necessary function in the great
+scheme of life. Beauty is adaptation. Whatever is truly useful is in so
+far truly beautiful. The steam engine and the battleship are beautiful
+just as truly as Titian's Madonna, glorified and sweeping upward
+into the presence of God the Father. Only what is vital and
+serviceable, and whatever is that, is beautiful.
+
+When the spirit of man perceives a unity in things, a working
+together of parts, there beauty exists. It resides in the synthesis of
+details to the end of shaping a complete whole. This perception, this
+synthesis, is a function of the human mind. Beauty is not in the
+landscape, but in the intelligence which apprehends it. Evidence of
+this fundamental truth is the fact that the same landscape is more
+"beautiful" to one man than to another, or to a third, perhaps, is not
+beautiful at all. It is only as the individual perceives a relation
+among the parts resulting in a total unity that the object becomes
+beautiful for him.
+
+This abstract exposition may be made clearer by a graphic
+illustration. Here are four figures composed of the same elements:--
+
+           * ***   **      *  ***
+      *   ***** *  ******
+                *   **  * * * *
+                         *
+            *************  *
+          *  *  *  *
+                           **
+                  Fig. I.
+
+*  *  *  *  *      *  *  *
+*  *  *  *  *        *  *                                *
+*  *  *  *  *          *                *                *
+*  *  *  *  *        *  *                                *
+*  *  *  *  *      *  *  *
+Fig. II.          Fig. III.                 Fig. IV.
+
+Figure I., far from being pleasing, is positively disquieting. With the
+other three figures, the perception of their form is attended with a
+kind of pleasure. Whereas the first figure is without form and is
+meaningless, each of the second group exhibits harmony, balance,
+proportion, interrelation of parts: each is perceived to be a whole.
+Although experience itself comes to men in fragments and
+seemingly without order, yet the human mind is so constituted as to
+require that an idea or a truth be shown to be a whole before the
+mind can comprehend it In considering the element of balance, it
+should be noted, as illustrated by Figure IV., that balance is not
+necessarily perfect symmetry. A Gothic cathedral is beautiful no less
+than a Greek temple. In a painting of a landscape, for example, it is
+necessary simply that the masses and the tones stand in balancing
+relation; the perfect symmetry of geometric exactness, characteristic
+of Hellenic and Renaissance art, is not required. In the work which
+embodies the artist's perception of the universal harmony, there must
+be rhythm, order, unity in variety; so framed it becomes expressive
+and significant
+
+As the symbol of beauty, the work of art is itself beautiful in that it
+manifests in itself that wholeness and integrity which is beauty.
+Every work of art is informed by a controlling design; it
+subordinates manifold details to a definite whole; it reduces and
+adjusts its parts to an all-inclusive, perceptible unity. The
+Nuremberg key must have some sort of rhythm; the rug or vestment
+must exhibit a pattern which can be seen to be a whole; the canvas
+must show balance in the composition, and the color must be "in
+tone." In any work of art there must be design and purpose.
+
+In nature there is much which to the limited perception of men does
+not appear to be beautiful, for there is much that does not manifest
+superficially the necessary harmony. The landscape at noonday
+under the blaze of the relentless sun discloses many things which are
+seemingly incongruous with one another. The dull vision of men
+cannot penetrate to the unity underlying it all. At twilight, as the
+shadows of evening wrap it round, the same landscape is invested
+with mysterious beauty. Conflicting details are lost, harsh outlines
+are softened and merged, discordant colors are mellowed and
+attuned. Nature has brought her field and hill and clustered
+dwellings into "tone." So the artist, who has perceived a harmony
+where the common eye saw it not, selects; he suppresses here,
+strengthens there, fuses, and brings all into unity.
+
+Harmony wherever perceived is beauty. Beauty made manifest by
+the agency of the human spirit is art. Art, in order to reveal this
+harmony to men, must work through selection, through rejection and
+emphasis, through interpretation. It is not difficult to understand,
+then, that the exact reproduction of the facts of the external world is
+not in a true sense art.
+
+The photograph, which is the most exact method of reproducing
+outward aspect, is denied the title of a work of art; that is, the
+photograph direct, which has not been retouched. To be sure, the
+photograph is the product of a mechanical process, and is not, except
+incidentally, the result of human skill. Another kind of reproduction
+of outward aspect, however, virtually exact, which does show the
+evidence of human skill, is yet not entitled to rank as art,--the
+imitative or deceptive picture. Photograph and picture are ruled out
+equally on the one count. Neither selects.
+
+In an exhibition of paintings were once displayed two panels
+precisely similar in appearance, presenting an army coat and cap, a
+sabre and a canteen. At a distance there was no point of difference in
+the two. A nearer view disclosed the fact that on one panel the
+objects were real and that the other panel was painted. The beholder
+was pleased by the exhibition of the painter's skill; but in so far as
+the work did not reveal a significance or beauty in these objects
+which the artist had seen and the beholder had not, it fell short of
+being a work of art Just as the key of the Nuremberg craftsman was
+a work of art in that it was for him the expression, the rendering
+actual, of a new beauty it was given him to conceive, so only that is
+art which makes manifest a beauty that is new, a beauty that is truly
+born of the artist's own spirit. The repetition of existing forms with
+no modification by the individual workman is not creation, but
+imitation; and imitation is manufacture, not art. Inasmuch as the two
+panels could not be distinguished, the presentment signified no more
+than the reality. Tried as a work of art, the imitative picture, in
+common with the photograph, lacks the necessary element of
+interpretation, of revelation. That the representation may become art,
+there must be added to it some new attribute or quality born of the
+artist's spirit. The work must take on new meaning.
+
+As lending his work significance of an obvious sort, a significance
+not necessarily "pictorial," the painter might see in the objects some
+story they have to tell. The plaster of the garret wall where they are
+hanging he may show to be cracked; that tear in the coat speaks of
+faithful service, but the coat hangs limp and dusty now; the
+inscription on the canteen is almost obliterated, and the strap is
+broken; the sabre, which shows the marks of stern usage along its
+blade, is spotted with rust: the whole composition means Trusty
+Servants in Neglect. By the emphasis of certain aspects he picture is
+made to signify more than he mere objects themselves, wherein
+there was nothing salient. The meaning is imposed upon them or
+drawn out of them by he artist. Or again, the painter may see in
+these things the expression for him of a harmony which he can
+manifest by the arrangement of line and color, and he so disposes his
+material as to make that harmony visible. It is, then, not the crude
+fact which the artist transcribes, but rather some feeling he has
+toward the fact. By selection, by adjustment, he gives this special
+aspect of the fact emphasis and relief. In virtue of his interpretation
+the picture acquires a significance that is new; it gives the beholder a
+pleasure which the fact itself did not give, and thus it passes over
+into the domain of art.
+
+The purpose of art is not the reproduction of a beautiful object, but
+the expression in objective form of a beautiful idea. A plaster cast of
+a hand, however comely the hand may be, is not a work of art. As
+with the photograph, the work involves only incidentally the
+exercise of human skill. But that is not all. In order to render the
+work in the spirit of art, the sculptor must model, not the hand, but
+his sense of the hand; he must draw out and express its character, its
+significance. To him it is not a certain form in bone and flesh; to him
+it means grace, delicacy, sensitiveness, or perhaps resolution,
+strength, force. As the material symbol of his idea of the hand, he
+will select and make salient such lines and contours as are
+expressive to him of that character.
+
+Indeed, so little depends upon the exact subject represented and so
+much upon the artist's feeling toward it, so much depends upon the
+spirit of the rendering, that the representation of a subject
+uninteresting or even "ugly" in itself may be beautiful. In the art of
+literature, the _subject_ is drawn from the life of man. The material
+of the poem, the novel, the drama, is furnished by man's total
+experience, the sum of his sensations, impressions, emotions, and
+the events in which he is concerned. But experience crowds in upon
+him at every point, without order and without relation; the daily
+round of living is for most men a humdrum thing. Yet it is just this
+rudimentary and undistinguished mass of experience which is
+transmuted into literature; by the alchemy of art the representation
+of that which is without interest becomes interesting. And it happens
+on this wise. Life is humdrum only in so far as it is meaningless;
+men can endure any amount drudgery and monotony provided that it
+lead somewhere, that they perceive its relation to a larger unity
+which is the total of life. As part of a whole which can be
+apprehended, immediately it acquires purpose and becomes
+significant. It is the sense of meaning in life which gives color and
+warmth to the march of uniform days. So the literary artist shapes
+his inchoate material to a definite end; out of the limitless complex
+details at his command, he selects such passages of background,
+such incidents, and such traits of character as make for the setting
+forth of the idea he has conceived. Clearly the artist cannot use
+everything, clearly he does not aim to reproduce the fact: there are
+abridgments and suppressions, as there are accent and emphasis. The
+finished work is a composite, embodying what is essential of many,
+many preliminary studies and sketches, wrought and compiled with
+generous industry. The master is recognized in what he omits; what
+is suppressed is felt but not perceived: the great artist, in the result,
+steps from peak to peak.
+
+     "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
+     At one stride comes the Dark."
+
+Thus with three strokes the master Coleridge depicts the onrush of
+the night over boundless spaces of sky and sea. Within the compass
+of a few lines, Tennyson registers the interminable, empty monotony
+of weary years:
+
+     "No sail from day to day, but every day
+     The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
+     Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
+     The blaze upon the waters to the east;
+     The blaze upon his island overhead;
+     The blaze upon the waters to the west;
+     Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
+     The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
+     The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail."
+
+Thus through selection does the artist work to interpretation. By
+detaching the eternal meaning from the momentary fact, by
+embodying his sense of its significance in such concrete forms as
+symbolize his idea, by investing the single instance with universally
+typical import, then in very truth he represents. Nature is not the
+subject of art; she is the universal treasury from whose infinitely
+various store the artist selects his symbols.
+
+A special method in art may here suggest itself as having for its
+purpose to reproduce the fact in perfect fidelity; the method is called
+_realism._ But a moment's considerate analysis shows that realism is
+only a label for one manner of handling, and in the end comes no
+nearer the object as it "really" is. In its essence realism is the artist's
+personal vision of the fact, exactly as idealism or romanticism or
+impressionism is personal. For after all, what is the reality? A
+chance newsboy is offering his papers on a crowded street corner.
+The fine lady recoils from his filth and from all contact with him;
+the philanthropist sees in him a human being to help and to redeem;
+the philosopher regards him dispassionately as a "social factor," the
+result of heredity and environment; the artist cries out in joy as his
+eye lights upon good stuff to paint. But all the while, which of these
+conceptions figures the "real" newsboy? Not one. For he is all these
+together; and the single observer, whatever his bias, cannot
+apprehend him at every point. Any attempt to represent him involves
+selection and interpretation, the suppression of some traits in order
+to emphasize others, which are the special aspects that have
+impressed the given observer. So there is no essential realism. The
+term applies to the method of those who choose to render what is
+less comforting in life, who insist on those characteristics of things
+which men call ugly. In realism, just as truly as in any other kind of
+treatment, is expressed the personality of the artist, his own peculiar
+way of envisaging the world.
+
+A work of art is born of the artist's desire to express his joy in some
+new aspect of the universal harmony which has been disclosed to
+him. The mission of art is through interpretation to reveal. It
+happens sometimes that a visitor at an exhibition of paintings is
+shocked by a picture which seems to him for the moment impossible,
+because so far beyond the range of his experience; yet withal he
+finds himself attracted by it and he returns to study it. It is not many
+days before his glance is arrested by that very effect in nature, and
+he says, "Why, that is like that picture!" It was the artist who first
+saw it and who taught him to see it for himself. When one observes
+an effect in nature or in life that one calls "a Corot" or "a Whistler,"
+one means that to Corot or to Whistler is due the glory of
+discovering that fuller beauty and revealing it. Browning makes Fra
+Lippo Lippi say:
+
+          "We're made so that we love
+     First when we see them painted, things we have passed
+     Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
+     And so they are better, painted--better to us,
+     Which is the same thing. Art was given for that."
+
+This revealing power of art is not restricted to the individual
+appreciator. It is said that the French are an artistic people and that
+Americans are not. The explanation is that for generations the artists
+of France have been discovering to their countrymen the beauty that
+is around them at their very door, and have taught them to appreciate
+it. The Americans will be an artistic people when our artists shall
+have done the like for us. When there shall have been for
+generations a truly native American art, there will be a public to
+understand and to appreciate. So it is that everywhere the high
+function of art is to reveal. As a friend, more sensitive and more
+enthusiastic, with whom we are strolling, points out to us many
+beauties by the wayside or in trees and sky, so the artist takes us by
+the hand and leads us out into life, indicating for us a harmony to
+which we were blind before. Burdened with affairs and the daily
+round, we had not thought to look off and out to the spreading
+meadows tossing into hills which roll upward into the blue heaven
+beyond.
+
+The beauty thus revealed is a beauty which the artist has
+apprehended in spirit and which he would make actual. A work of
+art is the expression of an aspiration. The crude and tawdry images
+of the Madonna Set in the roadside cross are just as truly a work of
+art as the rapt saints of Giotto or the perfect Madonnas of Raphael in
+so far as they are expressive of what those poor, devout souls who
+fashioned them felt of worship and of love. After all, the difference
+is that Giotto felt more than they, Raphael was endowed with more
+accomplished powers of expression. The work receives its import as
+it is the faithful utterance of him who shaped it, as it is genuinely the
+realization of his ideal. "The gift without the giver is bare." But it is
+no less true that the gift without the receiver is sterile and void, for
+art involves not only its creator's intention but also its message to
+him whom the work reaches. In a book, it is not only what the writer
+says that makes its significance but also what the reader thinks as he
+reads. In so far as any man finds in picture or poem or song a new
+beauty, a fuller sense of harmony than was his before, for him that is
+a work of art.
+
+Thus the standard by which art is to be tried is relative. For its
+creator, the work is art in that it embodies a perception of new
+harmony that is peculiarly his. In the material result, this special
+character is imparted to the work by the artist's instinctive selection.
+No two painters, though equipped with equal technical skill and
+perhaps of like tastes and preferences, would or indeed could render
+the same sweep of landscape in precisely similar fashion. Obviously,
+to set down everything were at once an impossibility and an untruth,
+for the detail of nature is infinite and the beholder does not see
+everything. Each is bound to select such details as impress him, and
+his selection will be determined by the way in which he as a unique
+personality, an individual different from every other man in the
+whole wide universe, feels about the bit of nature before him. In
+expressing by his special medium what he feels about the landscape,
+he aims, in the selection of material form and color, to detach and
+render visible what of essential truth the landscape means to him, to
+purge it of accidents, and register its eternal beauty. The painter will
+not attempt, then, to reproduce the physical facts of nature,--the
+topography, geology, botany, of the landscape,--but rather through
+those facts in terms of color and form he tries to render its
+_expression:_ its quality, as brilliance, tenderness; its mood, as joy,
+mystery, setting down those salient aspects of it which combine to
+give it character and meaning. For landscape--to recall the
+exposition of a preceding page--has its expression as truly as the
+human face. A man knows his friends not by the shape of the nose
+or the color of the eyes, but by the character which these features
+express, the personality which shines in the face and radiates from it
+This effluence of the soul within is the essential man; people call it
+the "expression." As with human life, so with the many aspects of
+nature. External traits are merged in the spiritual meaning. The
+material forms have the power of affecting the spirit thus or so; and
+in man's reaction on his universe they come to take on a symbolic
+emotional significance. Each manifestation of nature arouses in the
+artist, more or less consciously on his part, some feeling toward it:
+he cares, then, to represent these external material forms, whether a
+flower, a landscape, a human face, only because there is in them
+something in which he delights; he fashions the work of art in praise
+of the thing he loves. To the clever technician who imitatively paints
+the flower as he knows it to be,
+
+     "A primrose on the river's brim
+     A yellow primrose is to him
+          And it is nothing more."
+
+But to the artist
+
+          "The meanest flower that blows can give
+     Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
+
+And it is these thoughts that he cares to express and not the visible
+truth about the flower. A writer was walking along the streets of
+Paris on a day in early March.
+
+"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I
+had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon
+a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of
+desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness
+destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of
+the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great
+or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what
+secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless
+beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this
+immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will
+contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it
+would seem that nature has not made."
+
+And if Sénancour had set himself to paint his jonquil as he has
+written about it, how that tender flower would have been
+transfigured and glorified!
+
+What the artist aims to render is not the rose but the beauty of the
+rose, his sense of one chord in the universal harmony which the rose
+sounds for him, not that only, but the beauty of all roses that ever
+were or ever shall be; and inevitably he will select such colors and
+such lines as bring that special and interpreted beauty into relief, and
+so make manifest to the beholder what was revealed to his own
+higher vision, by virtue of which, and not because of any
+exceptional technical skill, he is an artist.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ART AND APPRECIATION
+
+It may be that some reader of the foregoing pages will attempt to
+apply the principles therein set forth to the pictures shown in the
+next exhibition he happens to attend. It is more than probable that in
+his first efforts he will be disappointed. For the principles discussed
+have dealt with art in its authentic manifestations; and not every
+painter is an artist, not every picture is a work of art.
+
+At the very outset it should be said that an exhibition of paintings as
+ordinarily made up is confusing and wholly illogical. We may
+suppose that a volume to be read through in one sitting of two hours
+is placed in the hands of an intelligent reader. The book consists of
+essays, poems, short stories, and dramatic dialogue, each within the
+compass of a few pages, each contributed by a different writer as an
+example of his work for the year. We may suppose now that the
+reader is asked to gather from this volume, read hastily and either
+superficially or in random bits, some idea of the significance of each
+author and of the import and scope of contemporary American
+literature. Is it a fair test? This volume, we may further suppose, is
+practically the only means by which the writer can get his work
+before the public. A public means a purchaser, and of course the
+writer must live. Is it reasonable to think that every number
+contributed to such a volume will be a work of art, wrought with
+singleness of heart and in loving devotion to an ideal? There are still
+with us those who "work for money" and those who "work for
+fame." There are those who believe in "giving the public what it
+wants," and the numbers they contribute to the yearly volumes are
+samples of the sort of thing they do, from which the public may
+order. In the table of contents stand celebrated names; and to the
+work of such men, perhaps, will turn the seeker after what he thinks
+ought to be the best, not realizing that these are the men who have
+known how to "give the people what they want," that the people do
+not always want the good and right thing, and that it is somewhat the
+habit of genius to dispense with contemporary recognition. If there
+is here or there in the book an essay or a poem the product of
+thought and effort and offered in all seriousness, how little chance it
+has of being appreciated, except by a few, even if it is remarked at
+all in the jumble of miscellaneous contributions.
+
+This hypothetical volume is a fair parallel of an annual exhibition of
+paintings. In such an exhibition the number of works of art, the true,
+inevitable expression of a new message, is relatively small. The
+most celebrated and most popular painters are not necessarily by
+that fact great artists, or indeed artists at all. Contemporary judgment
+is notoriously liable to go astray. The gods of one generation are
+often the laughing stock of the next; the idols of the fathers are torn
+down and trampled under foot by the children. Some spirits there
+have been of liberal promise who have not been able to withstand
+the demands made upon them by early popular approval. Such is the
+struggle and soul's tragedy which is studied convincingly in Mr.
+Zangwill's novel, "The Master." No assault on the artist's integrity is
+so insidious as immediate favor, which in its turn begets the fatal
+desire to please.
+
+To the "successful" painters, however, are for the most part accorded
+the places of honor on academy walls. The canvases of these men
+are seen first by the visitor; but they are not all. There are other
+pictures which promise neither better nor worse. Here are paintings
+of merit, good in color and good in drawing, but empty of any
+meaning. Scattered through the exhibition are the works of a group
+of able men, imitating themselves, each trying to outdo the others by
+a display of cleverness in solving some "painter's problem" or by
+some startling effect of subject or handling. But it is a sad day for
+any artist when he ceases to find his impulse and inspiration either
+in his own spirit or in nature, and when he looks to his fellow
+craftsmen for the motive of his work. Again, there are pictures by
+men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have caught the
+manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it
+was simply intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism
+and turn out a product which people do not distinguish from the
+authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and prophet,
+the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor,
+writer, is a very human being.
+
+As he looks over these walls, clamorous of the commonplace and
+the commercial, the seeker after what is good and true in art realizes
+how very few of these pictures have been rendered in the spirit of
+love and joy. The painter has one eye on his object and one eye on
+the public; and too often, as a distinguished actor once said of the
+stage manager whose vision is divided between art and the box
+office, the painter is a one-eyed man.
+
+A painter once refused to find anything to interest him, still less to
+move him, in a silent street with a noble spire detaching itself
+vaguely from the luminous blue depths of a midnight sky, because,
+he said, "People won't buy dark things, so what's the use? You might
+as well do bright, pretty things that they will buy, and that are just as
+easy to make." A portrait-painter gives up landscape subjects
+because, as he does not hesitate to declare, it hurts his business. And
+the painters themselves are not altogether to blame for this attitude
+towards their work. The fault lies half with the people who buy
+pictures, having the money, and who have not a gleam of
+understanding of the meaning of art. A woman who had ordered her
+house to be furnished and decorated expensively, remarked
+to a caller who commented on a water-color hanging in the
+drawing-room: "Yes, I think it matches the wall-paper very nicely." When
+such is the purpose of those who paint pictures and such is the
+understanding of those who buy them, it is not surprising that not
+every picture is inevitably a work of art.
+
+But what is the poor seeker after art to do? The case is by no means
+hopeless. In current exhibitions a few canvases strike a new note;
+and by senses delicately attuned this note can be distinguished
+within the jangle of far louder and popular tunes ground out, as it
+were, by the street-piano. Seriously to study contemporary painting,
+however, the logical opportunity is furnished by the exhibitions of
+the works of single men or of small groups. As the reader who
+wishes to understand an author or perhaps a school does not content
+himself with random extracts, but instead isolates the man for the
+moment and reads his work consecutively and one book in its
+relation to his others; so the student of pictures can appreciate the
+work and understand the significance of a given painter only as he
+sees a number of his canvases together and in relation. So, he is able
+to gather something of the man's total meaning.
+
+Widely different from annual exhibitions, too, are galleries and
+museums; for here the proportion of really good things is
+immeasurably larger. In the study of masterpieces, it need hardly be
+said, the amateur may exercise judgment and moderation. He should
+not try to do too much at one time, for he can truly appreciate only
+as he enters fully into the spirit of the work and allows it to possess
+him. To achieve this sympathy and understanding within the same
+hour for more than a very few great works is manifestly impossible.
+Such appreciation involves fundamentally a quick sensitiveness to
+the appeal and the variously expressive power of color and line and
+form. To win from the picture its fullest meaning, the observer may
+bring to bear some knowledge of the artist who produced it and of
+the age and conditions in which he lived. But in the end he must
+surrender himself to the work of art, bringing to it his intellectual
+equipment, his store of sensuous and emotional experience, his
+entire power of being moved.
+
+For when all is said, there is no single invariable standard by which
+to try a work of art: its significance to the appreciator rests upon his
+capacity at the moment to receive it. "A jest's prosperity lies in the
+ear of him that hears it." The appreciator need simply ask himself,
+"What has this work to reveal to me of beauty that I have not
+perceived for myself? I shall not look for the pretty and the
+agreeable. But what of new significance, energy, life, has this work
+to express to me? I will accept no man entirely and unquestioningly,
+I will condemn no one unheard. No man has the whole truth; every
+man has some measure of the truth, however small. Let it be my task
+to find it and to separate it from what is unessential and false. In my
+search for what is true, I will conserve my integrity and maintain my
+independence. And I shall recognize my own wherever I may find
+it."
+
+"Man is the measure of all things," declared an ancient philosopher.
+And his teaching has not been superseded to-day. The individual is
+the creator of his own universe; he is the focus of the currents and
+forces of his world. The meaning of all things is subjective. So the
+measure of beauty in life for a man is determined by his capacity to
+receive and understand. Thus it is that a man's joy in experience and
+his appreciation of art in any of its manifestations are conditioned by
+the opportunity that nature or art furnishes for his spirit to exercise
+itself. In the reading of poetry, for example, we seek the expression
+of ourselves. Our first emotion is, perhaps, a simple, unreflecting
+delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or
+that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a
+delight wholly physical,--pure sensation. A quick taking of the
+breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only
+expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an
+abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which
+we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of
+the Apollo Belvedere. We know simply that we are pleased. But
+after nerves have ceased to tingle so acutely, we begin to think; and
+we seek to give account to ourselves of the beauty which for the
+moment we could but feel. Once arrived at the attitude of reflection,
+we find that the poetry which affects us most and to which we
+oftenest return is the poetry that contains the record of our own
+experience, but heightened, the poetry which expresses our desires
+and aspirations, that in which we recognize ourselves elevated and
+idealized. In so far as we see in it the ennobled image of our own
+nature, so far it has power to hold us and to stir us.
+
+An elementary manifestation of the tendency to seek in art the
+record of our own experience is seen in the popularity of those
+pictures whose subjects are familiar and can be immediately
+recognized. On a studio wall was once hanging a "Study of Brush,"
+showing the play of sunlight through quivering leaves. A visitor
+asked the painter why he did not put some chickens in the
+foreground. To her the canvas was meaningless, for she had never
+seen, had never really seen, the sunlight dancing on burnished leaves.
+The chickens, which she had seen and could recognize, were the
+element of the familiar she required in order to find any significance
+in the picture.
+
+This tendency, of which the demand for chickens is a rudimentary
+manifestation, is the basis of all appreciation. The artist's revelation
+of the import of life we can receive and understand only as we have
+felt a little of that import for ourselves. Color is meaningless to a
+blind man, music does not exist for the deaf. To him who has never
+opened his eyes to behold the beauty of field and hill and trees and
+sky, to him whose spirit has not dimly apprehended something of
+that eternal significance of which these things are the material
+visible bodying forth, to such a the work of the master is only so
+much paint and canvas. The task of the appreciator, then, is to
+develop his capacity to receive and enjoy.
+
+That capacity is to be trained by the exercise of itself. Each new
+harmony which he is enabled to perceive intensifies his power to
+feel and widens the range of his vision. The more beauty he
+apprehends in the world, so much the more of universal forces he
+brings into unity with his own personality. By this extension of his
+spirit he reaches out and becomes merged in the all-embracing life.
+
+If the conception be true that a supreme unity, linking all seemingly
+chaotic details, ultimately brings them into order, and that this unity,
+which is spiritual, penetrates every atom of matter, fusing everything
+and making all things one; then the appreciator will realize that the
+significance of art is for the spirit The beauty which the artist reveals
+is but the harmony which underlies the universal order; and he in his
+turn must apprehend that beauty spiritually.
+
+From this truth it follows that the condition of aesthetic enjoyment,
+or in other words the appreciation of beauty, is detachment of spirit
+and remoteness from practical consequences. The classic illustration
+of the truth is the saying of Lucretius, that it is sublime to stand on
+the shore and behold a shipwreck. It is sublime only as one's
+personal interests and feelings are not engaged. It would not be
+sublime if it were possible for the spectator to aid in averting the
+catastrophe; it would not be sublime if one's friends were aboard the
+ship. One is able to appreciate beauty only as one is able to detach
+one's self from what is immediate and practical, and by virtue of this
+detachment, to apprehend the spiritual significance. The sublimity of
+the shipwreck lies in what it expresses of the impersonal might of
+elemental forces and man's impotence in the struggle against nature.
+That sublimity, which is one manifestation of beauty, is of the spirit,
+and by the spirit it must be apprehended.
+
+To illustrate this truth by a few homely examples. A farmer looking
+out on his fields of tossing wheat, drenched in golden sunlight,
+exclaims, "Look, isn't that beautiful!" What he really means is: "See
+there the promise of a rich harvest, and it is mine." If the fields
+belonged to his neighbor, his feelings towards them would be quite
+different. No, their _beauty_ is to be seen and felt only by him
+whose mind is free of thoughts of personal enrichment and who thus
+can perceive the harmony with life of golden sunshine and nature's
+abundant gifts. The farmer could not see beyond the material and its
+value to him as material. But beauty lies deeper than that, for it is
+the expression of spiritual relations.
+
+Two men are riding together in a railway carriage. As the train
+draws into a city, they pass a little group of tumble-down houses,
+brown and gray, a heap of corners thrown together. One man thinks:
+"What dreary lives these people must lead who dwell there." The
+other, with no such stirring of the sympathy, sees a wonderful
+"scheme" in grays and browns, or an expressive composition or
+ordering of line. Neither could think the thoughts of the other at the
+same time with his own. One feels a practical and physical reaction,
+and he cannot therefore at that moment penetrate to the meaning of
+these things for the spirit; and that meaning is the harmony which
+they express.
+
+From the tangle of daily living with its conflict of interests and its
+burden of practical needs, the appreciator turns to art with its power
+to chasten and to tranquillize. In art, he finds the revelation in fuller
+measure of a beauty which he has felt but vaguely. He realizes that
+underlying the external chaos of immediate practical experience
+rests a supreme and satisfying order. Of that order he can here and
+now perceive but little, hemmed in as he is by the material world,
+whose meaning he discerns as through a glass, darkly. Yet he keeps
+resolutely on his way, secure in his kinship with the eternal spirit,
+and rewarded by momentary glimpses of the "broken arcs" which he
+knows will in the end take their appointed places in the "perfect
+round."
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ARTIST
+
+Out of chaos, order. Man's life on the earth is finite and fragmentary,
+but it is the constant effort of his spirit to bring the scattering details
+of momentary experience into an enduring harmony with his
+personality and with that supreme unity of which he is a part.
+
+The man who out of the complex disarray of his little world effects a
+new harmony is an artist. He who fashioned the first cup, shaping it
+according to his ideal,--for no prototype existed,--and in response to
+his needs; he who, taking this elementary form, wrought upon it
+with his fingers and embellished it according to his ideal and in
+response to his need of expressing himself; he, again, who out of the
+same need for expression adds to the cup anything new: each of
+these workmen is an artist. The reproduction of already existing
+forms, with no modification by the individual workman, is not art.
+So, for example, only that painter is an artist who adds to his
+representation of the visible world some new attribute or quality
+born of his own spirit Primitive artisan, craftsman, painter, each
+creates in that he reveals and makes actual some part, which before
+was but potential, of the all-embracing life.
+
+As the artist, then, wins new reaches of experience and brings them
+into unity, he reveals new beauty, new to men yet world-old. For the
+harmony which he effects is new only in the sense that it was not
+before perceived. As, in the physical universe, not an atom of matter
+through the ages is created or destroyed, so the supreme spiritual life
+is constant in its sum and complete. Of this life individuals partake
+in varying measure; their growth is determined by how much of it
+they make their own. The growth of the soul in this sense is not
+different from man's experience of the physical world. The child is
+born: he grows up into his family; the circle widens to include
+neighbors and the community; the circle widens again as the boy
+goes away to school and then to college. With ever-widening sweep
+the outermost bound recedes, though still embracing him, as he
+reaches out to Europe and at length compasses the earth, conquering
+experience and bringing its treasures into tribute to his own spirit.
+The things were there; but for the boy each was in turn created as he
+made it his own. So the artist, revealing new aspects of the supreme
+unity, creates in the sense that he makes possible for his fellows a
+fuller taking-up of this life into themselves.
+
+It may be said that he is the greatest artist who has felt the most of
+harmony in life,--the greatest artist but potentially. The beauty he
+has perceived must in accordance with our human needs find
+expression concretely, because it is only as he manifests himself in
+forms which we can understand that we are able to recognize him.
+Though a mute, inglorious Milton were Milton still, yet our human
+limitations demand his utterance that we may know him. So the
+artist accomplishes his mission when he communicates himself. The
+human spirit is able to bring the supreme life into unity with itself
+according to the measure of its own growth made possible through
+expression.
+
+The supreme life, of which every created thing partakes,--the stone,
+the flower, the animal, and man,--is beauty, because it is the
+supreme harmony wherein everything has its place in relation to
+every other thing. This central unity has its existence in expression.
+The round earth, broken off from the stellar system and whirling
+along its little orbit through space, is yet ever in communication
+with the great system; the tree, with its roots in the earth, puts forth
+branches, the branches expand into twigs, the twigs burst into leaves
+whose veins reach out into the air; out of the twigs spring buds
+swelling into blossoms, the blossoms ripen into fruit, the fruit drops
+seed into the earth which gave it and springs up into new trees. The
+tree by its growth, which is the putting forth of itself or expression,
+develops needs, these needs are satisfied, and the satisfying of the
+needs is the condition of its continued expansion.
+
+Man, too, has his existence in expression. By growth through
+expression, which is the creation of a new need, he is enabled to take
+up more into himself; he brings more into the unity of his
+personality, and thus he expands into the universal harmony.
+
+The unity which underlies the cosmos--to define once more the
+conception which is the basis of the preceding chapters--is of the
+spirit. The material world which we see and touch is but the symbol
+and bodying forth of spiritual relations. The tranquillizing, satisfying
+power of art is due to the revelation which art accomplishes of a
+spiritual harmony which transcends the seeming chaos of instant
+experience. So it comes about that harmony, or beauty, which is of
+the spirit, is apprehended by the spirit. That faculty in the artist by
+which he is able to perceive beauty is called _temperament._ By
+temperament is to be understood the receptive faculty, the power to
+feel, the capacity for sensations, emotions, and "such intellectual
+apprehensions as, in strength and directness and their immediately
+realized values at the bar of an actual experience, are most like
+sensations." The function of temperament is to receive and to
+transmit, to interpret, to create in the sense that it reveals. In the
+result it is felt to be present only as the medium through which the
+forces behind it come to expression.
+
+Art, the human spirit, temperament,--these terms are general and
+abstract. Now the abstract to be realized must be made concrete. Just
+as art, in order to be manifest, must be embodied in the particular
+work, as the statue, the picture, the building, the drama, the
+symphony, so the human spirit becomes operative in the person of
+the individual, and temperament may be best studied in the character
+of the individual artist.
+
+As temperament is the receptive faculty, the artist's attitude toward
+life is what Wordsworth called "wise passiveness,"--Wordsworth,
+the poet of "impassioned contemplation." Keats, too,--and among
+the poets, whose vision of beauty was more beautiful, whose grasp
+on the truth more true?--characterizes himself as "addicted to
+passiveness." It is of temperament that Keats is writing when he says
+in a letter: "That quality which goes to form a man of achievement,
+especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so
+enormously, is _Negative Capability_ ." In another letter he writes:--
+
+"It has been an old comparison for our urging on--the Beehive;
+however, it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the
+Bee--for it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving than
+giving--no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. The
+flower, I doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the Bee--its leaves
+blush deeper in the next spring--and who shall say between Man and
+Woman which is the most delighted? Now it is more noble to sit like
+Jove than to fly like Mercury--let us not therefore go hurrying about
+and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently
+from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our
+leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive--budding patiently
+under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect
+that favours us with a visit--sap will be given us for meat and dew
+for drink. . . .
+
+         "O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
+         And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
+         O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
+         And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
+         At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
+         And he's awake who thinks himself asleep."
+
+Still again he says: "The Genius of Poetry must work out its own
+salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
+sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must
+create itself."
+
+A nature so constituted, a nature receptive and passive, is
+necessarily withdrawn from practical affairs. To revert to Keats as
+an example, for Keats is so wholly the artist, it is his remoteness
+from the daily life about him that makes him the man of no one
+country or time. His poetry has a kind of universality, but
+universality within a definite sphere, and that sphere is the world of
+things lovely and fair. In a playful mood Keats writes to his sister:
+"Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little
+music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know . . . and I can
+pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat
+Regent or the Duke of Wellington." These are trivial words; but they
+serve to define in some measure the artistic temperament.
+
+For this characteristic remoteness from affairs the artist is sometimes
+reproached by those who pin their faith to material things. Such are
+not aware that for the artist the only reality is the life of the spirit.
+The artist, as Carlyle says of the Man of Letters, "lives in the inward
+sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists
+always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in
+that." Temperament constitutes the whole moral nature of the artist.
+"With a great poet," says Keats, "the sense of beauty overcomes
+every consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." It is the
+standard which measures the worth of any act. It is conscience, too;
+for the functions performed by conscience in the normal moral life
+of the man of action are fulfilled by the artist's devotion to his ideal;
+his service to his art is his sole and sufficient obligation.
+
+And where the man of action looks to find his rewards in the
+approval of his fellow men, the artist cares to please himself. The
+very act of expressing is itself the joy and the reward. To this truth
+Keats again stands as witness: "I feel assured," he says, "I should
+write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful,
+even if my night's labours should be burnt every Morning and no
+eye ever shine upon them." And still again: "I value more the
+privilege of seeing great things in loneliness than the fame of a
+prophet." Not that the artist does not crave appreciation. His
+message fails of completeness if there is no ear to hear it, if it does
+not meet a sympathy which understands. But the true artist removes
+all shadow of petty vanity and becomes, in Whitman's phrase, "the
+free channel of himself." He is but the medium through whom the
+spirit of beauty reveals itself; in thankfulness and praise he but
+receives and transmits. That it is given him to see beauty and to
+interpret it is enough.
+
+It is by virtue of his power to feel that the artist is able to apprehend
+beauty; his temperament is ever responsive to new harmonies. By
+force of his imagination, which is one function of his temperament,
+he sends his spirit into other lives, absorbs their experience and
+makes it his own, and ultimately identifies himself with world forces
+and becomes creator. In a lyric passage in a letter Keats exclaims:--
+
+"The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the
+more divided and minute domestic happiness. . . . I feel more and
+more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in
+this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone
+than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my
+Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard--then
+'Tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' According to my
+state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with
+Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into
+Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul upon the
+Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a
+voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be  alone."
+
+This power to penetrate and to identify was exercised with peculiar
+directness and plenitude by Walt Whitman, prophet of the
+omnipotence of man. To find the burden of his message formulated
+in the single phrase one may turn to his Poems quite at random.
+
+     "My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the
+          whole earth."
+     "I inhale great draughts of space,--
+     The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are
+          mine.
+     . . . . .
+     All seems beautiful to me."
+
+Of the artist may be affirmed what Whitman affirms of the
+Answerer:--
+
+     "Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and
+          tongue,
+     He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men,
+          and any man translates, and any man translates himself also,
+     One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he
+          sees how they join."
+
+As the artist sends out his spirit through the world, as he becomes
+the channel of universal and divine influences, so he is admitted to
+new and ever new revelations of beauty. And stirred by the glorious
+vision, he brings that beauty to earth, communicating it to his
+fellows and making them partakers of it, as he gives his feeling
+expression. Thus finding utterance as the prophet of God, he
+consummates his mission and takes his place in the world order.
+Herein he has his being, for life is expression; and each new
+harmony which he makes manifest is the medium of his fuller
+identification with the universal life.
+
+So it is that the artist is the supreme interpreter, the mediator
+between man and beauty. His work is a work of joy, of gratitude, of
+worship. He is the happy servant of God, His prophet, through
+whom He declares Himself to the children of men.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes
+
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+	body 	{margin-top:100px;
+			 margin-left:10%;
+			 margin-right:10%;
+			 text-align:justify}
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+	link {color:blue;
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+	a:hover {color:red}
+	pre		{font-size: 75%;}
+	blockquote {margin: 1em 5em 1em 5em;}
+</style>
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+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Enjoyment of Art
+
+Author: Carleton Noyes
+
+Release Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #27194]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENJOYMENT OF ART ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ruth Hart
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<center>
+
+<p>[Note:&nbsp; for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents to the
+beginning of the text.]</p>
+
+
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<p>THE ENJOYMENT OF ART</p>
+
+<p>BY</p>
+
+<p>CARLETON NOYES</p><br>
+
+<p>BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br>
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY<br>
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge<br>
+1903</p><br>
+
+<p>COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CARLETON NOYES<br>
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br>
+<i>Published, March, 1903</i></p><br>
+<br>
+
+<p>To<br>
+ROBERT HENRI<br>
+AND<br>
+VAN D. PERRINE</p><br>
+<br>
+
+<blockquote>This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the crowded heaven,<br>
+And I said to my spirit <i>When we become the enfolders of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; those orbs, and the
+pleasure and knowledge of every<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied
+then?<br></i>And my spirit said <i>No, we but level that lift to pass and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; continue
+beyond.</i>
+<br>
+
+<p>WALT WHITMAN</blockquote><br>
+
+
+<p>CONTENTS</p><br>
+
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td align="right"></td>
+
+<td><a href="#0">Preface</a></td>
+
+<td align="right"></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">I.</td>
+
+<td><a href="#1">The Picture and the Man</a></td>
+
+<td align="right">i</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">II.</td>
+
+<td><a href="#2">The Work of Art as Symbol</a></td>
+
+<td align="right">19</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">III.</td>
+
+<td><a href="#3">The Work of Art as Beautiful</a></td>
+
+<td align="right">41</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">IV.</td>
+
+<td><a href="#4">Art and Appreciation</a></td>
+
+<td align="right">67</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">V.</td>
+
+<td><a href="#5">The Artist</a></td>
+
+<td align="right">86</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</center><br>
+<a name="0"></a><br>
+<br>
+
+<p>PREFACE</p>
+
+<p>The following pages are the answer to questions which a young man asked himself when,
+fresh from the university, he found himself adrift in the great galleries of Europe. As
+he stood helpless and confused in the presence of the visible expressions of the spirit
+of man in so many ages and so many lands, one question recurred insistently: <i>Why</i>
+are these pictures? What is the meaning of all this striving after expression? What was
+the aim of these men who have left their record here? What was their moving impulse? Why,
+why does the human spirit seek to manifest itself in forms which we call beautiful?</p>
+
+<p>He turned to histories of art and to biographies of artists, but he found no answer!
+to the "Why?" The philosophers with their theories of aesthetics helped him little to
+understand the dignity and force of this portrait or the beauty of that landscape. In the
+conversation of his artist friends there was no enlightenment, for they talked about
+"values" and "planes of modeling" and the mysteries of "tone." At last he turned in upon
+himself: What does this canvas mean to me? And here he found his answer. This work of art
+is the revelation to me of a fuller beauty, a deeper harmony, than I have ever seen or
+felt. The artist is he who has experienced this new wonder in nature and who wants to
+communicate his joy, in concrete forms, to his fellow men.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of this book is to set forth in simple, untechnical fashion the nature and
+the meaning of a work of art. Although the illustrations of the underlying principles are
+drawn mainly from pictures, yet the conclusions apply equally to books and to music. It
+is true that the manifestations of the art-impulse are innumerable, embracing not only
+painting, sculpture, literature, music, and architecture, but also the handiwork of the
+craftsman in the designing of a rug or in the fashioning of a cup or a candlestick; it is
+true that each art has its special province and function, and that each is peculiarly
+adapted to the expression of a certain order of emotion or idea, and that the
+distinctions between one art and another are not to be inconsiderately swept aside or
+obscured. Yet art is one. It is possible, without confusing the individual
+characteristics essential to each, to discuss these principles under the comprehensive
+rubric of Art.</p>
+
+<p>The attempt is made here to reduce the supposed mysteries of art discussion to the
+basis of practical, every-day intelligence and common sense. What the ordinary man who
+feels himself in any way attracted; towards art needs is not more and constantly more
+pictures to look at, not added lore about them, not further knowledge of the men and the
+times that have produced them; but rather what he needs is some understanding of what the
+artist has aimed to express, and, as reinforcing that understanding, the capacity rightly
+to appreciate and enjoy.</p>
+
+<p>It is hoped that in this book the artist may find expressed with simplicity and
+justice his own highest aims; and that the appreciator and the layman may gain some
+insight into the meaning of art expression, and that they may be helped a little on their
+way to the enjoyment of art.</p>
+
+<p>HARVARD COLLEGE, <i>December tenth, 1902.</i></p><a name="1"></a><br>
+<br>
+
+<p>I</p>
+
+<p>THE PICTURE AND THE MAN</p>
+
+<p>At any exhibition of paintings, more particularly at some public gallery or museum,
+one can hardly fail to reflect that an interest in pictures is unmistakably widespread.
+People are there in considerable numbers, and what is more striking, they seem to
+represent every station and walk in life. It is evident that pictures, as exhibited to
+the public, are not the cult of an initiated few; their appeal is manifestly to no one
+class; and this popular interest is as genuine as it is extended.</p>
+
+<p>Thus reflectively scanning the crowd, the observer asks himself: What has attracted
+these numbers to that which might be supposed not to be understood of the many? And what
+are the pictures that in general draw the popular attention?</p>
+
+<p>A few persons have of course drifted into the exhibition out of curiosity or from lack
+of something better to do. So much is evident at once, for these file past the walls
+listlessly, seldom stopping, and then but to glance at those pictures which are most
+obviously like the familiar object they pretend to represent,&mdash;such as the bowl of
+flowers which the beholder can almost smell, the theatre-checks and five-dollar note
+pasted on a wall which tempt him to finger them, or the panel of game birds which puzzles
+him to determine whether the birds are real or not. These visitors, however, are not the
+most numerous. With the great majority it is not enough that the picture be a clever
+piece of imitation or illusion: transferring their interest from the mere execution, they
+demand further that the subjects represented shall be pleasing. The crowd pause before a
+sunny landscape, with cows standing by the shaded pool; they gather about the brilliant
+portrait of a woman splendidly arrayed,&mdash;a favorite actress or a social celebrity;
+they linger before a group of children wading in a brook, or a dog crouching mournfully
+by an empty cradle. At length, with an approving and sympathetic word of comment, they
+pass on to the next pleasing picture. Some canvases, not the most popular ones, are yet
+not without their interest for a few; these visitors are taking things a little more
+seriously; they do not try to see every picture, they do not hurry; they seem to be
+considering the canvas immediately before them with concentrated attention.</p>
+
+<p>No one of all these people is insensible to the appeal of the picturesque: their
+presence at the exhibition is evidence of that. In life they like to see a bowl of
+flowers, a sunny landscape, a beautiful woman in beautiful surroundings; and naturally
+they are interested in that which represents and recalls the reality. At once it is
+plain, however, that to different individuals the various pictures appeal in different
+measure and for differing reasons. To one the very fact of representation is a mystery
+and fascination. To another the important thing is the subject; the picture must
+represent what he likes in nature or in life. To a third the subject itself is of less
+concern than what the painter wanted to say about it: the artist saw a beauty manifested
+by an ugly beggar, perhaps, and he wanted to show that beauty to his fellows, who could
+not perceive it for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The special interest in pictures of each of these three men is not without its warrant
+in experience. What man is wholly indifferent to the display of human skill? Who is there
+without his store of pleasurable associations, who is not stirred by any call which
+rouses them into play? What lover of beauty is not ever awake to the revelation of new
+beauty? Indeed, upon these three principles together, though in varying proportion,
+depends the full significance of a great work of art.</p>
+
+<p>As the lover of pictures looks back over the period of his conscious interest in
+exhibitions and galleries, it is not improbable that his earliest memories attach
+themselves to those paintings which most closely resembled the object represented. He
+remembers the great wonder which he felt that a man with mere paint and canvas could so
+reproduce the reality of nature. So it is that those paintings which are perhaps the
+first to attract the man who feels an interest in pictures awakening are such as display
+most obviously the painter's skill. Whatever the subject imitated, the fascination
+remains; that such illusion is possible at all is the mystery and the delight.</p>
+
+<p>But as his interest in pictures grows with indulgence, as his experience widens, the
+beholder becomes gradually aware that he is making a larger demand. After the first shock
+of pleasurable surprise is worn away, he finds that the repeated exhibition of the
+painter's dexterity ceases to satisfy him; these clever pieces of deception manifest a
+wearying sameness, after all; and the beholder begins now to look for something more than
+mere expertness. Thinking on his experience, he concludes that the subjects which can be
+imitated deceptively are limited in range and interest; he has a vague, disquieting sense
+that somehow these pictures do not mean anything. Yet he is puzzled. Art aims to
+represent, he tells himself, and it should follow that the best art is that which
+represents most closely and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek
+painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down to peck at, the
+other with his painting of a veil which deceived his very rival. The imitative or
+"illusionist" picture pleads its case most plausibly. A further experience of such
+pictures, however, fails to bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the
+painter's skill; and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ
+essentially from the adroitness of the juggler who keeps a billiard ball, a chair, and a
+silk handkerchief rotating from hand to hand.</p>
+
+<p>Conscious, then, of a new demand, of an added interest to be satisfied, the amateur of
+pictures turns from the imitative canvas to those paintings which appeal more widely to
+his familiar experience. Justly, he does not here forgo altogether his delight in the
+painter's cunning of hand, only he requires further that the subjects represented shall
+be pleasing. It must be a subject whose meaning he can recognize at once: a handsome or a
+strong portrait, a familiar landscape, some little incident which tells its own story.
+The spectator is now attracted by those pictures which rouse a train of agreeable
+associations. He stops before a canvas representing a bit of rocky coast, with the ocean
+tumbling in exhilaratingly. He recognizes the subject and finds it pleasing; then he
+wonders where the picture was painted. Turning to his catalogue, he reads: "37. On the
+Coast of Maine." "Oh, yes," he says to himself, "I was on the coast of Maine last summer,
+and I remember what a glorious time I had sitting on the rocks of an afternoon, with some
+book or other which the ocean was too fine to let me read. I like that picture." If the
+title had read "Massachusetts Coast," it is to be feared he would not have liked the
+canvas quite so well. The next picture which he notices shows, perhaps, a stately woman
+sumptuously attired. It is with a slight shock of disappointment that the visitor finds
+recorded in his catalogue: "41. Portrait of a Lady." He could see that much for himself.
+He hoped it was going to be the painter's mother or somebody's wife,&mdash;a person he
+ought to know about. But the pictures which appeal to him most surely are those which
+tell some little story,&mdash;"The Lovers," "The Boy leaving Home," "The Wreck." Here the
+subject, touching some one of the big human emotions, to which no man is wholly
+insensible, calls out the response of immediate interest and sympathy. It is something
+which he can understand.</p>
+
+<p>At length there comes a day when the visitor stops before a landscape which seems to
+him more beautiful than anything he has ever seen in nature; or some portrait discloses a
+strength of character or radiates a charm of personality which he has seldom met with in
+life. Whence comes this beauty, this strength, this graciousness? Can it be that the
+painter has seen a new wonder in nature, a new significance in human life? The
+spectator's previous experience of pictures has familiarized him in some measure with the
+means of expression which the painter employs. More sensitive now to the appeal of color
+and form, he sees that what the artist cares to present on his canvas is just his
+peculiar&nbsp; sense of the beauty in the world, a beauty that is best symbolized and
+made manifest through the medium of color and form. Before he understood this eloquent
+language which the painter speaks, he misinterpreted those pictures whose significance he
+mistook to be literary and not pictorial. He early liked the narrative picture because
+here was a subject he could understand; he could rephrase it in his own terms, he could
+retell the story to himself in words. Now words are the means of expression of every-day
+life. Because of this fact, the art which employs words as its medium is the art which
+comes nearest to being universally understood, namely, literature. The other arts use
+each a medium which it requires a special training to understand. Without some sense of
+the expressiveness of color, line, form, and sounds,&mdash;a sense which can be
+cultivated,&mdash;one is necessarily unable to grasp the full and true meaning of
+picture, statue, or musical composition. One must realize further that the artist thinks
+and feels in his peculiar medium; his special meaning is conceived and expressed in color
+or form or sound. The task of the appreciator, correspondingly, is to receive the
+artist's message in the same terms in which it was conceived. The tendency is inevitable,
+however, to translate the meaning of the work into words, the terms in which men commonly
+phrase their experience. A parallel tendency is manifest in one's efforts to learn a
+foreign language. The English student of French at first thinks in English and
+laboriously translates phrase for phrase into French; and in hearing or reading the
+foreign language, he translates the original, word for word, into his native tongue
+before he can understand its sense: he has mastered the language only when he has reached
+that point where English is no longer present to his consciousness: he thinks in French
+and understands in French. Similarly, to translate the message of any art into terms that
+are foreign to it, to phrase the meaning of music or painting, for example, in words, is
+to fail of its essential, true significance. The import of music is musical; the meaning
+of pictures is not literary but pictorial. In the understanding of this truth, then, the
+spectator penetrates to the artist's real intention; and he becomes aware that when he
+used the picture as the peg whereon to hang his own reflections and ideas, he missed the
+meaning of the artist's work. "As I look at this canvas," he tells himself, "it is not
+what I know of the coast of Maine that is of concern, but what the painter has seen and
+felt of its beauty and wants to reveal to me." Able at last to interpret the painter's
+medium, the appreciator comes to seek in pictures not primarily an exhibition of the
+craftsman's skill, not even a recall of his own pleasurable experiences, but rather,
+beyond all this, a fuller visible revelation of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>The essential significance of art, that art is revelation, is illustrated not only by
+painting but by the other arts as well. In music, to take but a single example, are
+present the same elements that constitute the appeal of pictures,&mdash;skill in the
+rendering, a certain correspondence with experience, and the power of imaginative
+interpretation of the facts of life. The music-hall performer who wins the loudest and
+heartiest applause is he who does the greatest number of pyrotechnic, wonderful things on
+the piano, or holds a high note on the cornet for the longest time. His success, as with
+the painter whose aim is to create illusion, rests upon men's instinctive admiration for
+the exhibition of skill. Again, as the imitative picture involves not only the display of
+dexterity, but also likeness to the thing represented and the consequent possibility of
+recognizing it immediately, so in the domain of music there is an order of composition
+which seems to aim at imitation,&mdash;the so-called "descriptive" music. A popular
+audience is delighted with the "Cats' Serenade," executed on the violins with
+overwhelming likeness to the reality, or with, the "Day in the Country," in which the sun
+rises in the high notes, cocks crow, horses rattle down the road, merrymakers frolic on
+the green, clouds come up in the horns, lightning plays in the violins, thunder crashes
+in the drums and cymbals, the merrymakers scatter in the whole orchestra, the storm
+passes diminuendo, and in the muted violins the full moon rises serenely into a twilight
+sky. Here the intention is easily understood; the layman cannot fail to recognize what
+the composer wanted to say. And as in the case of pictures which interest the beholder
+because he can translate their subject into the terms which are his own medium of
+expression, that is, words, so with descriptive music, broadly speaking, the interest and
+significance is literary and not musical. Still another parallel is presented. Just as
+those pictures are popular whose subjects lie within the range of familiar experience,
+such as cows by the shaded pool, or children playing, or whose subjects touch the
+feelings; so, that music is popular which is phrased in obvious and familiar rhythms such
+as the march and the waltz, or which appeals readily and unmistakably to sentiment and
+emotion. It is after the lover of music has traversed these passages of musical
+expression and has proved their imitations that he comes to seek in music new ranges of
+experience, unguessed-at possibilities of feeling, which the composer has himself sounded
+and which he would communicate to others. He is truly the artist only as he leads his
+auditors into regions of beautiful living which they alone and of themselves had not
+penetrated. For it is then that his work reveals.</p>
+
+<p>Only such pictures, too, will have a vital meaning as reveal. The imitative and the
+iterative alike, that which adds nothing to the object and that which adds nothing to the
+experience of the beholder, though once pleasing, now fail to satisfy. The appreciator
+calls for something fuller. He wants to pass beyond the object, beyond his experience of
+it, into the realm of illumination whither the true artist would lead him. The
+development of appreciation, as the amateur has come to realize in his own person, is
+only the enlargement of demand. The appreciator requires ever fresh revelations of
+beauty. He discovers, too, that in practice the tendency of his development is in the
+direction of exclusion. As he goes on, he cares for fewer and fewer things, because those
+works which can minister to his ever-expanding desire of beauty must needs be less
+numerous. But these make up in largeness of utterance, in the intensity of their message,
+what they lack in numbers. Nor does this outcome make against a fancied catholicity of
+taste. The true appreciator still sees in his earlier loves something that is good, and
+he values the good the more justly that he sees it now in its right relation and
+apprehends its real significance. As each in its turn led him to seek further, each
+became an instrument in his development. For himself he has need of them no longer. But
+far from contemning them, he is rightly grateful for the solace they have afforded, as by
+them he has made his way up into the fuller meaning of art.</p><a name="2"></a><br>
+<br>
+
+<p>II</p>
+
+<p>THE WORK OF ART AS SYMBOL</p>
+
+<p>In the experience of the man who feels himself attracted to pictures and who studies
+them intelligently and with sympathy, there comes a day when suddenly a canvas reveals to
+him a new beauty in nature or in life. Much seeing and much thinking, much bewilderment
+and some disappointment, have taught him that in the appreciation of pictures the
+question at issue is not, how cleverly has the painter imitated his object, is not, how
+suggestive is the subject of pleasing associations; he need simply ask himself, "What has
+the artist conceived or felt in the presence of this landscape, this arrangement of line
+and color, this human face, that I have not seen and felt, and that he wants to
+communicate to me?"</p>
+
+<p>The incident of the single canvas, which by its illuminating revealment first
+discloses to the observer the true significance of pictures, is typical of the whole
+scope of art. The mission of art is to reveal. It is the prophet's message to his fellow
+men, the apocalypse of the seer. The artist is he to whom is vouchsafed a special
+apprehension of beauty. He has the eye to see, the temperament to feel, the imagination
+to interpret; it is by virtue of these capacities, this high, transfiguring vision, that
+he is an artist; and his skill of hand, his equipment with the means of expression, is
+incidental to the great fact that he has somewhat to express that the common man has not.
+To his work, the manifestation of his spirit in material form, his perception made
+sensible, is accorded the name of art.</p>
+
+<p>Art is expression. It is not a display of skill; it is not the reproduction of
+external forms or appearances; it does not even, as some say, exist for itself: it is a
+message, a means. To cry "Art for Art's sake!" is to converse with the echo. Such a
+definition but moves in a circle, and doubles upon itself. No; art is for the artist's
+sake. The artist is the agent or human instrument whereby the supreme harmony, which is
+beauty, is manifested to men. Art is the medium by which the artist communicates himself
+to his fellows; and the individual work is the expression of what the artist felt or
+thought, as at the moment some new aspect of the universal harmony was revealed to his
+apprehension. Art is emotion objectified, but the object is subordinated to the emotion
+as means is to an end. The material result is not the final significance, but what of
+spiritual meaning or beauty the artist desired to convey. Not what is painted, as the
+layman thinks, not how it is painted, as the technician considers, but why did the artist
+paint it, is the question which sums up the truth about art. The appreciator need simply
+ask, What is the beauty, what the idea, which the artist is striving to reveal by these
+symbols of color and form? He understands that the import of the work is the <i>idea,</i>
+and that the work itself is beautiful because it symbolizes a beautiful idea; its
+significance is spiritual. The function of art, then, is through the medium of concrete,
+material symbols to reveal to men whatever of beauty has been disclosed to the artist's
+more penetrating vision.</p>
+
+<p>In order to seize the real meaning of art it is necessary to strip the word beauty of
+all the wrappings of customary associations and the accretions of tradition and habit. As
+the word is current in ordinary parlance, the attribute of beauty is ascribed to that
+which is pleasing, pretty, graceful, comely; in fine, to that which is purely agreeable.
+But surely such is not the beauty which Rembrandt saw in the filthy, loathsome beggar. To
+Rembrandt the beggar was expressive of some force or manifestation of the supreme
+universal life, wherein all things work together to a perfect harmony.&nbsp; Beauty is
+the essential quality belonging to energy, character, significance. A merely agreeable
+object is not beautiful unless it is expressive of a meaning; whatever, on the other
+hand, is expressive of a meaning, however shocking it may be in itself, however much it
+may fail to conform to conventional standards, is beautiful. Beauty does not reside in
+the object. No; it is the artist's sense of the great meaning of things; and in
+proportion as he finds that meaning&mdash;the qualities of energy, force, aspiration,
+life&mdash;manifest and expressed in objects do those objects become beautiful. Such was
+the conception of beauty Keats had when he wrote in a letter: "What the Imagination
+seizes as Beauty must be Truth&mdash;whether it existed before or not,&mdash;for I have
+the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of
+essential Beauty." And similarly; "I can never feel certain of any truth, but from a
+clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse he sings:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'&mdash;that is all<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."</p>
+
+<p>When it is said here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the phrase may be
+understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as when one says the sun rises or the sun
+sets. Beauty is in the landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for
+the artist an idea he has conceived of some aspect of the universal life.</p>
+
+<p>The artist is impelled to embody concretely his perception of beauty, and so to
+communicate his emotion, because the emotion wakened by the perception of new harmony in
+things is most fully possessed and enjoyed as it comes to expression. Thus to make real
+his ideal and find the expression of himself is the artist's supreme Happiness. A
+familiar illustration of the twin need and delight of expression may be found in the
+handiwork produced in the old days when every artisan was an artist. It may be, perhaps,
+a key which some craftsman of Nuremberg fashioned. In the making of it he was not content
+to stop with the key which would unlock the door or the chest It was his key, the work of
+his hands; and he wrought upon it lovingly, devotedly, and made it beautiful, finding in
+his work the expression of his thought or feeling; it was the realization for that moment
+of his ideal. His sense of pleasure in the making of it prompted the care he bestowed
+upon it; his delight was in creation, in rendering actual a new beau which it was given
+him to conceive.</p>
+
+<p>In its origin as a work of art the key does not differ from a landscape by Inness, an
+"arrangement" by Whistler, a portrait by Sargent. The artist, whether craftsman or
+painter, is deeply stirred by some passage in his experience, a fair object or a true
+thought: it is the imperious demand of his nature, as it is his supreme pleasure, to give
+his feeling expression. The form which his expression takes&mdash;it may be key or
+carpet, it may be statue, picture, poem, symphony, or cathedral&mdash;is that which most
+closely responds to his idea, the form which most truly manifests and represents it.</p>
+
+<p>All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite sense
+representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality, as it is said that
+painting or literature represents and music does not; but every work of art, in painting,
+poetry, music, or in the handiwork of the craftsman, <i>represents</i> in that it is the
+symbol of the creator's ideal. To be sure, the painter or sculptor or dramatist draws his
+symbols from already existing material forms, and these symbols are like objects in a
+sense in which music is not But line and color and the life of man, apart from this
+resemblance to external reality, are representative or symbolic of the artist's idea
+precisely as the craftsman's key, the designer's pattern, or the musician's symphony. The
+beautifully wrought key, the geometric pattern of oriental rug or hanging, the
+embroidered foliation on priestly vestment, are works of art equally with the landscape,
+the statue, the drama, or the symphony, in that they are one and all the sensuous
+manifestation of some new beauty spiritually conceived.</p>
+
+<p>The symbolic character of a work of art must not be lost from sight, for it is the
+clue to the interpretation of pictures, as it is of all art. The painter feels his way
+through the gamut of his palette to a harmony of color just as truly as the musician
+summons the notes of his scale and marshals them into accord. The painter is moved by
+some sweep of landscape; it wakens in him an emotion. When he sets himself to express his
+emotion in the special medium with which he works, he represents by pigment the external
+aspect of the landscape, yes; but not in order to imitate it or reproduce it: he
+represents the landscape because the colors and the forms which he registers upon the
+canvas express for him the emotions roused by those colors and those forms in nature. He
+does not try to match his grays with nature's grays, but this nuance which he gropes for
+on his palette, and having found it, touches upon his canvas, expresses for him what that
+particular gray in nature made him feel. His one compelling purpose is in all fidelity
+and singleness of aim to "translate the impression received." The painter's medium is
+just as symbolic as the notes of the musician's nocturne or the words of the poet's
+sonnet, equally inspired by the hour and place. Color and line and form, although they
+happen to be the properties of <i>things,</i> have a value for the emotions as truly as
+musical sounds: they are the outward symbol of the inward thought or feeling, the visible
+bodying forth of the immaterial idea.</p>
+
+<p>The symbolic character of the material world is not early apprehended. In superficial
+reaction upon life, men do not readily pass beyond the immediate actuality. That the
+spiritual meaning of all things is not perceived, that all things are not seen to be
+beautiful, or expressive of the supreme harmony, is due to men's limited powers of sight
+and feeling. Therefore is it that the artist is given in order that he may reveal as yet
+unrealized spiritual relations, or new beauty. The workaday world with its burden of
+exigent "realities" has need of a Carlyle to declare that things are but a wonderful
+metaphor and the physical universe is the garment of the living God. In the realm of
+thought an Emerson, seer of transcendent vision, must come to restore his fellows to
+their birthright, which is the life of the spirit. As in life, so in art men do not
+easily pass the obvious and immediate. The child reads "Gulliver's Travels" or "The
+Pilgrim's Progress" for the story. As his experience of life both widens and deepens, he
+is able to see through externals, and he penetrates to the real significance, of which
+the narrative is but the symbol. So it is with an insight born of experience that the
+lover of art sees no longer the "subject," but the beauty which the subject is meant to
+symbolize.</p>
+
+<p>In the universal, all-embracing constitution of things, nothing is without its
+significance. To be aware that everything has a meaning is necessary to the understanding
+of art, as indeed of life itself. That meaning, which things symbolize and express, it
+cannot be said too often, is not necessarily to be phrased in words. It is a meaning for
+the spirit. A straight line affects one differently from a curve; that is, each kind of
+line means something. Every line in the face utters the character behind it; every
+movement of the body is eloquent of the man's whole being. "The expression of the face
+balks account," says Walt Whitman,</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in
+his face,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the
+joints of his hips and wrists,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his
+waist and knees, dress does not hide him,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and
+broadcloth,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps
+more,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and
+shoulder-side."</p>
+
+<p>Crimson rouses a feeling different from that roused by yellow, and gray wakens a mood
+different from either. In considering this symbolic character of colors it is necessary
+to distinguish between their value for the emotions and merely literary associations.
+That white stands for purity or blue for fidelity is a conventionalized and attached
+conception. But the pleasure which a man has in some colors or his dislike for others
+depends upon the effect each color has upon his emotions, and this effect determines for
+him the symbolic value of the color. In the same way sounds are symbolic in that they
+affect the emotions apart from associated "thoughts." Even with a person who has no
+technical knowledge of music, the effect of the minor key is unmistakably different from
+the major. The tones and modulations of the voice, quite apart from the words uttered,
+have an emotional value and significance. Everything, line, form, gesture, movement,
+color, sound, all the material world, is expressive. All objective forms have their
+meaning, and rightly perceived are, in the sense in which the word is used here,
+beautiful, in that they represent or symbolize a spiritual idea.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is that beauty is not in the object but in man's sense of the object's
+symbolic expressiveness. The amateur may be rapt by some artist's "quality of color." But
+it is probable that in the act of laying on his pigment, the artist was not thinking of
+his "quality" at all, but, rapt himself by the perception of the supreme harmony at that
+moment newly revealed to his sense, he was striving sincerely and directly to give his
+feeling its faithfullest expression. His color is beautiful because his idea was
+beautiful. The expression is of the very essence of the thought; it <i>is</i> the
+thought, but the thought embodied. "Coleridge," says Carlyle, "remarks very pertinently
+somewhere that whenever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody
+in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning, too. For body and soul,
+word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere." Not to look beyond the material
+is to miss the meaning of the work.</p>
+
+<p>In an art such as music, in which form and content are one and inextricable, it is not
+difficult to understand that the medium of expression which the art employs is
+necessarily symbolic, for here the form cannot exist apart from the meaning to be
+conveyed. In the art of literature, however, the case is not so clear, for the material
+with which the poet, the novelist, the dramatist works, material made up of the facts of
+the world about us, we are accustomed to regard as objective realities. An incident is an
+incident, the inevitable issue of precedent circumstances, and that's all there is to it
+Character is the result of heredity, environment, training, plus the inexplicable
+<i>Ego.</i> To regard these facts of life which are so actual and immediate as a kind of
+animate algebraic formulae seems absurd, but absurd only as one is unable to penetrate to
+the inner meaning of things. "Madame Bovary," to take an example quite at random, is
+called a triumph of realism. Now realism, of all literary methods, should register the
+fact as it is, and least of all should concern itself with symbols. But this great novel
+is more than the record of one woman's life. Any one who has come to understand the
+character and temperament of Flaubert as revealed in his Letters must feel that "Madame
+Bovary" is no arbitrary recital of tragic incident, but those people who move through his
+pages, what they do and what goes on about them, expressed for Flaubert his own dreary,
+baffled rebellion against life. That the artist may consciously employ the facts of life,
+not for the sake of the fact, but to communicate his feeling by thus bodying it forth in
+concrete symbols, there is explicit testimony. In an essay dealing with his own method of
+composition, Poe writes: "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an <i>effect.</i>
+Keeping originality <i>always</i> in view . . .&nbsp; I say to myself, in the first
+place, 'of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or
+(more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion,
+select?' Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it
+can be best wrought by incident or tone . . . afterwards looking about me (or rather
+within) for such combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the construction
+of the effect." Yes, physical circumstances, the succession of incident, shifting
+momentary grouping of persons, traits of character in varied combination and
+contrast,&mdash;all these are significant for the literary artist of spiritual
+relations.</p>
+
+<p>As the symbol of what the artist feels and strives to express, the individual work of
+art is necessarily more than any mere transcript of fact. It is the meeting and mingling
+of nature and the spirit of man; the result of their union is fraught with the
+inheritance of the past and holds within it the limitless promise of the future. The work
+of art is a focus, gathering into itself all the stored experience of the artist, and
+radiating in turn so much to the beholder as he is able at the moment to receive. A
+painter is starting out to sketch. Through underbrush and across the open he pushes his
+way, beset by beauty on every side, and storing impressions, sensations, thoughts. At
+last his eye lights upon some clump of brush, some meadow or hill, which seems at the
+instant to sum up and express his accumulated experience. In rendering this bit of
+nature, he pours out upon his canvas his store of feeling. It is the single case which
+typifies his entire course. "The man's whole life preludes the single deed." His way
+through the world has been just such a gathering up of experience, and each new work
+which he produces is charged with the collected wealth of years.</p>
+
+<p>The special work is the momentary epitome of the artist's total meaning. He finds this
+brief passage in nature beautiful then and there because it expresses what he feels and
+means. He does not try to reproduce the thing, but uses the thing for what it signifies.
+The thing is but for that moment: it signifies all that has gone before. As he watches, a
+cloud passes over the sun and the face of nature is darkened. Suddenly the scene bursts
+into light again. In itself the landscape is no brighter than before the sun was
+darkened. The painter feels it brighter for the contrast, and inevitably his rendering of
+its aspect is heightened and intensified.</p>
+
+<p>Art is nature heightened and intensified as nature is interpreted through the
+transfiguring medium of the human spirit To the object is added</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "The gleam,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The light that never was on sea or land,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The consecration and the poet's dream."</p>
+
+<p>After an early morning in the fields, Corot withdraws to his house to rest. "I dream
+of the morning landscape," he writes; "I dream my picture, and presently I will paint my
+dream." But not only does the artist render the beauty which this landscape happens to
+express for him: he charges these colors and forms with the beauty of all landscape. Corot painted <i>at</i>
+Ville d'Avray; <i>what</i> he painted was God's twilight or dawn
+enwrapping tree and pool. In gratitude and worship he revealed to men the tender,
+ineffable poetry of gray dawns in all places and for all time. Millet's peasants were
+called John and Peter and Charles, and they tilled the soil of France; but on their bowed
+shoulders rests the universal burden; these dumb figures are eloquent of the
+uncomplaining, hopeless "peasanthood" of the world. In the actual to discern the ideal,
+in the appearance to penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to
+reveal the spiritual,&mdash;this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his
+achievement is art.</p>
+
+
+<a name="3"></a><br>
+<br>
+III
+
+<p>THE WORK OF ART AS BEAUTIFUL</p>
+
+<p>Just as nature and life are significant as the material manifestation of spiritual
+forces and relations, so a work of art is in its turn the symbol by which the artist
+communicates himself; it is his revelation to men of the beauty he has perceived and
+felt.</p>
+
+<p>Beauty is not easy to define. That conception which regards beauty as the power to
+awaken merely agreeable emotions is limited and in so far false. Another source of
+misunderstanding is the confusion of beauty with moralistic values. It is said that
+beauty is the Ideal; and by many the "Ideal" is taken to mean ideal goodness. With
+righteousness and sin as such beauty has no concern. Much that is evil in life, much that
+offends against the moral law, must be regarded as beautiful in so far as it plays its
+necessary part in the universal whole. Clearing away these misconceptions, then, an
+approximate definition would be that the essence of beauty is harmony. So soon as a
+detail is shown in its relation to a whole, then it becomes beautiful because it is
+expressive of the supreme unity. A discord in music is felt to be a discord only as it is
+isolated; when it takes its fitting and inevitable place in the large unity of the
+symphony, it becomes full of meaning. The hippopotamus, dozing in his tank at the Zoo, is
+wildly grotesque and ugly. But who shall say that, seen in the fastnesses of his native
+rivers, he is not the beautiful perfect fulfilling of nature's harmony? To a race of
+blacks, the fair-skinned Apollo appearing among them could not but be monstrous. The
+smoking factory, sordid and hideous, is beautiful to him who sees that it accomplishes a
+necessary function in the great scheme of life. Beauty is adaptation. Whatever is truly
+useful is in so far truly beautiful. The steam engine and the battleship are beautiful
+just as truly as Titian's Madonna, glorified and sweeping upward into the presence of God
+the Father. Only what is vital and serviceable, and whatever is that, is beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>When the spirit of man perceives a unity in things, a working together of parts, there
+beauty exists. It resides in the synthesis of details to the end of shaping a complete
+whole. This perception, this synthesis, is a function of the human mind. Beauty is not in
+the landscape, but in the intelligence which apprehends it. Evidence of this fundamental
+truth is the fact that the same landscape is more "beautiful" to one man than to another,
+or to a third, perhaps, is not beautiful at all. It is only as the individual perceives a
+relation among the parts resulting in a total unity that the object becomes beautiful for
+him.</p>
+
+<p>This abstract exposition may be made clearer by a graphic illustration. Here are four
+figures composed of the same elements:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; * ***&nbsp;&nbsp;
+**&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp; ***<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp; ***** *&nbsp; ******<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp; **&nbsp; * * * *<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *************&nbsp;
+*<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+**<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Fig. I.</p>
+
+<p>*&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;<br>
+*&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*<br>
+*&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*<br>
+*&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*<br>
+*&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp; *&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>
+
+Fig. II.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Fig.
+III.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Fig.
+IV.</p>
+
+<p>Figure I., far from being pleasing, is positively disquieting. With the other three
+figures, the perception of their form is attended with a kind of pleasure. Whereas the
+first figure is without form and is meaningless, each of the second group exhibits
+harmony, balance, proportion, interrelation of parts: each is perceived to be a whole.
+Although experience itself comes to men in fragments and seemingly without order, yet the
+human mind is so constituted as to require that an idea or a truth be shown to be a whole
+before the mind can comprehend it In considering the element of balance, it should be
+noted, as illustrated by Figure IV., that balance is not necessarily perfect symmetry. A
+Gothic cathedral is beautiful no less than a Greek temple. In a painting of a landscape,
+for example, it is necessary simply that the masses and the tones stand in balancing
+relation; the perfect symmetry of geometric exactness, characteristic of Hellenic and
+Renaissance art, is not required. In the work which embodies the artist's perception of
+the universal harmony, there must be rhythm, order, unity in variety; so framed it
+becomes expressive and significant</p>
+
+<p>As the symbol of beauty, the work of art is itself beautiful in that it manifests in
+itself that wholeness and integrity which is beauty. Every work of art is informed by a
+controlling design; it subordinates manifold details to a definite whole; it reduces and
+adjusts its parts to an all-inclusive, perceptible unity. The Nuremberg key must have
+some sort of rhythm; the rug or vestment must exhibit a pattern which can be seen to be a
+whole; the canvas must show balance in the composition, and the color must be "in tone."
+In any work of art there must be design and purpose.</p>
+
+<p>In nature there is much which to the limited perception of men does not appear to be
+beautiful, for there is much that does not manifest superficially the necessary harmony.
+The landscape at noonday under the blaze of the relentless sun discloses many things
+which are seemingly incongruous with one another. The dull vision of men cannot penetrate
+to the unity underlying it all. At twilight, as the shadows of evening wrap it round, the
+same landscape is invested with mysterious beauty. Conflicting details are lost, harsh
+outlines are softened and merged, discordant colors are mellowed and attuned. Nature has
+brought her field and hill and clustered dwellings into "tone." So the artist, who has
+perceived a harmony where the common eye saw it not, selects; he suppresses here,
+strengthens there, fuses, and brings all into unity.</p>
+
+<p>Harmony wherever perceived is beauty. Beauty made manifest by the agency of the human
+spirit is art. Art, in order to reveal this harmony to men, must work through selection,
+through rejection and emphasis, through interpretation. It is not difficult to
+understand, then, that the exact reproduction of the facts of the external world is not
+in a true sense art.</p>
+
+<p>The photograph, which is the most exact method of reproducing outward aspect, is
+denied the title of a work of art; that is, the photograph direct, which has not been
+retouched. To be sure, the photograph is the product of a mechanical process, and is not,
+except incidentally, the result of human skill. Another kind of reproduction of outward
+aspect, however, virtually exact, which does show the evidence of human skill, is yet not
+entitled to rank as art,&mdash;the imitative or deceptive picture. Photograph and picture
+are ruled out equally on the one count. Neither selects.</p>
+
+<p>In an exhibition of paintings were once displayed two panels precisely similar in
+appearance, presenting an army coat and cap, a sabre and a canteen. At a distance there
+was no point of difference in the two. A nearer view disclosed the fact that on one panel
+the objects were real and that the other panel was painted. The beholder was pleased by
+the exhibition of the painter's skill; but in so far as the work did not reveal a
+significance or beauty in these objects which the artist had seen and the beholder had
+not, it fell short of being a work of art Just as the key of the Nuremberg craftsman was
+a work of art in that it was for him the expression, the rendering actual, of a new
+beauty it was given him to conceive, so only that is art which makes manifest a beauty
+that is new, a beauty that is truly born of the artist's own spirit. The repetition of
+existing forms with no modification by the individual workman is not creation, but
+imitation; and imitation is manufacture, not art. Inasmuch as the two panels could not be
+distinguished, the presentment signified no more than the reality. Tried as a work of
+art, the imitative picture, in common with the photograph, lacks the necessary element of
+interpretation, of revelation. That the representation may become art, there must be
+added to it some new attribute or quality born of the artist's spirit. The work must take
+on new meaning.</p>
+
+<p>As lending his work significance of an obvious sort, a significance not necessarily
+"pictorial," the painter might see in the objects some story they have to tell. The
+plaster of the garret wall where they are hanging he may show to be cracked; that tear in
+the coat speaks of faithful service, but the coat hangs limp and dusty now; the
+inscription on the canteen is almost obliterated, and the strap is broken; the sabre,
+which shows the marks of stern usage along its blade, is spotted with rust: the whole
+composition means Trusty Servants in Neglect. By the emphasis of certain aspects he
+picture is made to signify more than he mere objects themselves, wherein there was
+nothing salient. The meaning is imposed upon them or drawn out of them by he artist. Or
+again, the painter may see in these things the expression for him of a harmony which he
+can manifest by the arrangement of line and color, and he so disposes his material as to
+make that harmony visible. It is, then, not the crude fact which the artist transcribes,
+but rather some feeling he has toward the fact. By selection, by adjustment, he gives
+this special aspect of the fact emphasis and relief. In virtue of his interpretation the
+picture acquires a significance that is new; it gives the beholder a pleasure which the
+fact itself did not give, and thus it passes over into the domain of art.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of art is not the reproduction of a beautiful object, but the expression
+in objective form of a beautiful idea. A plaster cast of a hand, however comely the hand
+may be, is not a work of art. As with the photograph, the work involves only incidentally
+the exercise of human skill. But that is not all. In order to render the work in the
+spirit of art, the sculptor must model, not the hand, but his sense of the hand; he must
+draw out and express its character, its significance. To him it is not a certain form in
+bone and flesh; to him it means grace, delicacy, sensitiveness, or perhaps resolution,
+strength, force. As the material symbol of his idea of the hand, he will select and make
+salient such lines and contours as are expressive to him of that character.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, so little depends upon the exact subject represented and so much upon the
+artist's feeling toward it, so much depends upon the spirit of the rendering, that the
+representation of a subject uninteresting or even "ugly" in itself may be beautiful. In
+the art of literature, the <i>subject</i> is drawn from the life of man. The material of
+the poem, the novel, the drama, is furnished by man's total experience, the sum of his
+sensations, impressions, emotions, and the events in which he is concerned. But
+experience crowds in upon him at every point, without order and without relation; the
+daily round of living is for most men a humdrum thing. Yet it is just this rudimentary
+and undistinguished mass of experience which is transmuted into literature; by the
+alchemy of art the representation of that which is without interest becomes interesting.
+And it happens on this wise. Life is humdrum only in so far as it is meaningless; men can
+endure any amount drudgery and monotony provided that it lead somewhere, that they
+perceive its relation to a larger unity which is the total of life. As part of a whole
+which can be apprehended, immediately it acquires purpose and becomes significant. It is
+the sense of meaning in life which gives color and warmth to the march of uniform days.
+So the literary artist shapes his inchoate material to a definite end; out of the
+limitless complex details at his command, he selects such passages of background, such
+incidents, and such traits of character as make for the setting forth of the idea he has
+conceived. Clearly the artist cannot use everything, clearly he does not aim to reproduce
+the fact: there are abridgments and suppressions, as there are accent and emphasis. The
+finished work is a composite, embodying what is essential of many, many preliminary
+studies and sketches, wrought and compiled with generous industry. The master is
+recognized in what he omits; what is suppressed is felt but not perceived: the great
+artist, in the result, steps from peak to peak.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; At one stride comes the Dark."</p>
+
+<p>Thus with three strokes the master Coleridge depicts the onrush of the night over
+boundless spaces of sky and sea. Within the compass of a few lines, Tennyson registers
+the interminable, empty monotony of weary years:</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "No sail from day to day, but every day<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Among the palms and ferns and precipices;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The blaze upon the waters to the east;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The blaze upon his island overhead;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The blaze upon the waters to the west;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The scarlet shafts of sunrise&mdash;but no sail."</p>
+
+<p>Thus through selection does the artist work to interpretation. By detaching the
+eternal meaning from the momentary fact, by embodying his sense of its significance in
+such concrete forms as symbolize his idea, by investing the single instance with
+universally typical import, then in very truth he represents. Nature is not the subject
+of art; she is the universal treasury from whose infinitely various store the artist
+selects his symbols.</p>
+
+<p>A special method in art may here suggest itself as having for its purpose to reproduce
+the fact in perfect fidelity; the method is called <i>realism.</i> But a moment's
+considerate analysis shows that realism is only a label for one manner of handling, and
+in the end comes no nearer the object as it "really" is. In its essence realism is the
+artist's personal vision of the fact, exactly as idealism or romanticism or impressionism
+is personal. For after all, what is the reality? A chance newsboy is offering his papers
+on a crowded street corner. The fine lady recoils from his filth and from all contact
+with him; the philanthropist sees in him a human being to help and to redeem; the
+philosopher regards him dispassionately as a "social factor," the result of heredity and
+environment; the artist cries out in joy as his eye lights upon good stuff to paint. But
+all the while, which of these conceptions figures the "real" newsboy? Not one. For he is
+all these together; and the single observer, whatever his bias, cannot apprehend him at
+every point. Any attempt to represent him involves selection and interpretation, the
+suppression of some traits in order to emphasize others, which are the special aspects
+that have impressed the given observer. So there is no essential realism. The term
+applies to the method of those who choose to render what is less comforting in life, who
+insist on those characteristics of things which men call ugly. In realism, just as truly
+as in any other kind of treatment, is expressed the personality of the artist, his own
+peculiar way of envisaging the world.</p>
+
+<p>A work of art is born of the artist's desire to express his joy in some new aspect of
+the universal harmony which has been disclosed to him. The mission of art is through
+interpretation to reveal. It happens sometimes that a visitor at an exhibition of
+paintings is shocked by a picture which seems to him for the moment impossible, because
+so far beyond the range of his experience; yet withal he finds himself attracted by it
+and he returns to study it. It is not many days before his glance is arrested by that
+very effect in nature, and he says, "Why, that is like that picture!" It was the artist
+who first saw it and who taught him to see it for himself. When one observes an effect in
+nature or in life that one calls "a Corot" or "a Whistler," one means that to Corot or to
+Whistler is due the glory of discovering that fuller beauty and revealing it. Browning
+makes Fra Lippo Lippi say:</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "We're made so that we
+love<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; First when we see them painted, things we have passed<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And so they are better, painted&mdash;better to us,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Which is the same thing. Art was given for that."</p>
+
+<p>This revealing power of art is not restricted to the individual appreciator. It is
+said that the French are an artistic people and that Americans are not. The explanation
+is that for generations the artists of France have been discovering to their countrymen
+the beauty that is around them at their very door, and have taught them to appreciate it.
+The Americans will be an artistic people when our artists shall have done the like for
+us. When there shall have been for generations a truly native American art, there will be
+a public to understand and to appreciate. So it is that everywhere the high function of
+art is to reveal. As a friend, more sensitive and more enthusiastic, with whom we are
+strolling, points out to us many beauties by the wayside or in trees and sky, so the
+artist takes us by the hand and leads us out into life, indicating for us a harmony to
+which we were blind before. Burdened with affairs and the daily round, we had not thought
+to look off and out to the spreading meadows tossing into hills which roll upward into
+the blue heaven beyond.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty thus revealed is a beauty which the artist has apprehended in spirit and
+which he would make actual. A work of art is the expression of an aspiration. The crude
+and tawdry images of the Madonna Set in the roadside cross are just as truly a work of
+art as the rapt saints of Giotto or the perfect Madonnas of Raphael in so far as they are
+expressive of what those poor, devout souls who fashioned them felt of worship and of
+love. After all, the difference is that Giotto felt more than they, Raphael was endowed
+with more accomplished powers of expression. The work receives its import as it is the
+faithful utterance of him who shaped it, as it is genuinely the realization of his ideal.
+"The gift without the giver is bare." But it is no less true that the gift without the
+receiver is sterile and void, for art involves not only its creator's intention but also
+its message to him whom the work reaches. In a book, it is not only what the writer says
+that makes its significance but also what the reader thinks as he reads. In so far as any
+man finds in picture or poem or song a new beauty, a fuller sense of harmony than was his
+before, for him that is a work of art.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the standard by which art is to be tried is relative. For its creator, the work
+is art in that it embodies a perception of new harmony that is peculiarly his. In the
+material result, this special character is imparted to the work by the artist's
+instinctive selection. No two painters, though equipped with equal technical skill and
+perhaps of like tastes and preferences, would or indeed could render the same sweep of
+landscape in precisely similar fashion. Obviously, to set down everything were at once an
+impossibility and an untruth, for the detail of nature is infinite and the beholder does
+not see everything. Each is bound to select such details as impress him, and his
+selection will be determined by the way in which he as a unique personality, an
+individual different from every other man in the whole wide universe, feels about the bit
+of nature before him. In expressing by his special medium what he feels about the
+landscape, he aims, in the selection of material form and color, to detach and render
+visible what of essential truth the landscape means to him, to purge it of accidents, and
+register its eternal beauty. The painter will not attempt, then, to reproduce the
+physical facts of nature,&mdash;the topography, geology, botany, of the
+landscape,&mdash;but rather through those facts in terms of color and form he tries to
+render its <i>expression:</i> its quality, as brilliance, tenderness; its mood, as joy,
+mystery, setting down those salient aspects of it which combine to give it character and
+meaning. For landscape&mdash;to recall the exposition of a preceding page&mdash;has its
+expression as truly as the human face. A man knows his friends not by the shape of the
+nose or the color of the eyes, but by the character which these features express, the
+personality which shines in the face and radiates from it This effluence of the soul
+within is the essential man; people call it the "expression." As with human life, so with
+the many aspects of nature. External traits are merged in the spiritual meaning. The
+material forms have the power of affecting the spirit thus or so; and in man's reaction
+on his universe they come to take on a symbolic emotional significance. Each
+manifestation of nature arouses in the artist, more or less consciously on his part, some
+feeling toward it: he cares, then, to represent these external material forms, whether a
+flower, a landscape, a human face, only because there is in them something in which he
+delights; he fashions the work of art in praise of the thing he loves. To the clever
+technician who imitatively paints the flower as he knows it to be,</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "A primrose on the river's brim<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A yellow primrose is to him<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And it is nothing more."</p>
+
+<p>But to the artist</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "The meanest flower that blows
+can give<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."</p>
+
+<p>And it is these thoughts that he cares to express and not the visible truth about the
+flower. A writer was walking along the streets of Paris on a day in early March.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I
+passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It
+is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all
+the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the
+ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I
+know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in
+this flower a limitless beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power,
+this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal
+of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And if S<font face="Times New Roman">&eacute;</font>nancour had set himself to paint
+his jonquil as he has written about it, how that tender flower would have been
+transfigured and glorified!</p>
+
+<p>What the artist aims to render is not the rose but the beauty of the rose, his sense
+of one chord in the universal harmony which the rose sounds for him, not that only, but
+the beauty of all roses that ever were or ever shall be; and inevitably he will select
+such colors and such lines as bring that special and interpreted beauty into relief, and
+so make manifest to the beholder what was revealed to his own higher vision, by virtue of
+which, and not because of any exceptional technical skill, he is an artist.</p><a name=
+"4"></a><br>
+<br>
+
+<p>IV</p>
+
+<p>ART AND APPRECIATION</p>
+
+<p>It may be that some reader of the foregoing pages will attempt to apply the principles
+therein set forth to the pictures shown in the next exhibition he happens to attend. It
+is more than probable that in his first efforts he will be disappointed. For the
+principles discussed have dealt with art in its authentic manifestations; and not every
+painter is an artist, not every picture is a work of art.</p>
+
+<p>At the very outset it should be said that an exhibition of paintings as ordinarily
+made up is confusing and wholly illogical. We may suppose that a volume to be read
+through in one sitting of two hours is placed in the hands of an intelligent reader. The
+book consists of essays, poems, short stories, and dramatic dialogue, each within the
+compass of a few pages, each contributed by a different writer as an example of his work
+for the year. We may suppose now that the reader is asked to gather from this volume,
+read hastily and either superficially or in random bits, some idea of the significance of
+each author and of the import and scope of contemporary American literature. Is it a fair
+test? This volume, we may further suppose, is practically the only means by which the
+writer can get his work before the public. A public means a purchaser, and of course the
+writer must live. Is it reasonable to think that every number contributed to such a
+volume will be a work of art, wrought with singleness of heart and in loving devotion to
+an ideal? There are still with us those who "work for money" and those who "work for
+fame." There are those who believe in "giving the public what it wants," and the numbers
+they contribute to the yearly volumes are samples of the sort of thing they do, from
+which the public may order. In the table of contents stand celebrated names; and to the
+work of such men, perhaps, will turn the seeker after what he thinks ought to be the
+best, not realizing that these are the men who have known how to "give the people what
+they want," that the people do not always want the good and right thing, and that it is
+somewhat the habit of genius to dispense with contemporary recognition. If there is here
+or there in the book an essay or a poem the product of thought and effort and offered in
+all seriousness, how little chance it has of being appreciated, except by a few, even if
+it is remarked at all in the jumble of miscellaneous contributions.</p>
+
+<p>This hypothetical volume is a fair parallel of an annual exhibition of paintings. In
+such an exhibition the number of works of art, the true, inevitable expression of a new
+message, is relatively small. The most celebrated and most popular painters are not
+necessarily by that fact great artists, or indeed artists at all. Contemporary judgment
+is notoriously liable to go astray. The gods of one generation are often the laughing
+stock of the next; the idols of the fathers are torn down and trampled under foot by the
+children. Some spirits there have been of liberal promise who have not been able to
+withstand the demands made upon them by early popular approval. Such is the struggle and
+soul's tragedy which is studied convincingly in Mr. Zangwill's novel, "The Master." No
+assault on the artist's integrity is so insidious as immediate favor, which in its turn
+begets the fatal desire to please.</p>
+
+<p>To the "successful" painters, however, are for the most part accorded the places of
+honor on academy walls. The canvases of these men are seen first by the visitor; but they
+are not all. There are other pictures which promise neither better nor worse. Here are
+paintings of merit, good in color and good in drawing, but empty of any meaning.
+Scattered through the exhibition are the works of a group of able men, imitating
+themselves, each trying to outdo the others by a display of cleverness in solving some
+"painter's problem" or by some startling effect of subject or handling. But it is a sad
+day for any artist when he ceases to find his impulse and inspiration either in his own
+spirit or in nature, and when he looks to his fellow craftsmen for the motive of his
+work. Again, there are pictures by men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have
+caught the manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it was simply
+intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism and turn out a product which people
+do not distinguish from the authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and
+prophet, the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor, writer, is a
+very human being.</p>
+
+<p>As he looks over these walls, clamorous of the commonplace and the commercial, the
+seeker after what is good and true in art realizes how very few of these pictures have
+been rendered in the spirit of love and joy. The painter has one eye on his object and
+one eye on the public; and too often, as a distinguished actor once said of the stage
+manager whose vision is divided between art and the box office, the painter is a one-eyed
+man.</p>
+
+<p>A painter once refused to find anything to interest him, still less to move him, in a
+silent street with a noble spire detaching itself vaguely from the luminous blue depths
+of a midnight sky, because, he said, "People won't buy dark things, so what's the use?
+You might as well do bright, pretty things that they will buy, and that are just as easy
+to make." A portrait-painter gives up landscape subjects because, as he does not hesitate
+to declare, it hurts his business. And the painters themselves are not altogether to
+blame for this attitude towards their work. The fault lies half with the people who buy
+pictures, having the money, and who have not a gleam of understanding of the meaning of
+art. A woman who had ordered her house to be furnished and decorated expensively,
+remarked to a caller who commented on a water-color hanging in the drawing-room: "Yes, I
+think it matches the wall-paper very nicely." When such is the purpose of those who paint
+pictures and such is the understanding of those who buy them, it is not surprising that
+not every picture is inevitably a work of art.</p>
+
+<p>But what is the poor seeker after art to do? The case is by no means hopeless. In
+current exhibitions a few canvases strike a new note; and by senses delicately attuned
+this note can be distinguished within the jangle of far louder and popular tunes ground
+out, as it were, by the street-piano. Seriously to study contemporary painting, however,
+the logical opportunity is furnished by the exhibitions of the works of single men or of
+small groups. As the reader who wishes to understand an author or perhaps a school does
+not content himself with random extracts, but instead isolates the man for the moment and
+reads his work consecutively and one book in its relation to his others; so the student
+of pictures can appreciate the work and understand the significance of a given painter
+only as he sees a number of his canvases together and in relation. So, he is able to
+gather something of the man's total meaning.</p>
+
+<p>Widely different from annual exhibitions, too, are galleries and museums; for here the
+proportion of really good things is immeasurably larger. In the study of masterpieces, it
+need hardly be said, the amateur may exercise judgment and moderation. He should not try
+to do too much at one time, for he can truly appreciate only as he enters fully into the
+spirit of the work and allows it to possess him. To achieve this sympathy and
+understanding within the same hour for more than a very few great works is manifestly
+impossible. Such appreciation involves fundamentally a quick sensitiveness to the appeal
+and the variously expressive power of color and line and form. To win from the picture
+its fullest meaning, the observer may bring to bear some knowledge of the artist who
+produced it and of the age and conditions in which he lived. But in the end he must
+surrender himself to the work of art, bringing to it his intellectual equipment, his
+store of sensuous and emotional experience, his entire power of being moved.</p>
+
+<p>For when all is said, there is no single invariable standard by which to try a work of
+art: its significance to the appreciator rests upon his capacity at the moment to receive
+it. "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it." The appreciator need
+simply ask himself, "What has this work to reveal to me of beauty that I have not
+perceived for myself? I shall not look for the pretty and the agreeable. But what of new
+significance, energy, life, has this work to express to me? I will accept no man entirely
+and unquestioningly, I will condemn no one unheard. No man has the whole truth; every man
+has some measure of the truth, however small. Let it be my task to find it and to
+separate it from what is unessential and false. In my search for what is true, I will
+conserve my integrity and maintain my independence. And I shall recognize my own wherever
+I may find it."</p>
+
+<p>"Man is the measure of all things," declared an ancient philosopher. And his teaching
+has not been superseded to-day. The individual is the creator of his own universe; he is
+the focus of the currents and forces of his world. The meaning of all things is
+subjective. So the measure of beauty in life for a man is determined by his capacity to
+receive and understand. Thus it is that a man's joy in experience and his appreciation of
+art in any of its manifestations are conditioned by the opportunity that nature or art
+furnishes for his spirit to exercise itself. In the reading of poetry, for example, we
+seek the expression of ourselves. Our first emotion is, perhaps, a simple, unreflecting
+delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or that of a child
+playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a delight wholly physical,&mdash;pure
+sensation. A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and
+uncritical, are the only expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when
+an abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which we had not dreamed,
+or we enter for the first time the presence of the Apollo Belvedere. We know simply that
+we are pleased. But after nerves have ceased to tingle so acutely, we begin to think; and
+we seek to give account to ourselves of the beauty which for the moment we could but
+feel. Once arrived at the attitude of reflection, we find that the poetry which affects
+us most and to which we oftenest return is the poetry that contains the record of our own
+experience, but heightened, the poetry which expresses our desires and aspirations, that
+in which we recognize ourselves elevated and idealized. In so far as we see in it the
+ennobled image of our own nature, so far it has power to hold us and to stir us.</p>
+
+<p>An elementary manifestation of the tendency to seek in art the record of our own
+experience is seen in the popularity of those pictures whose subjects are familiar and
+can be immediately recognized. On a studio wall was once hanging a "Study of Brush,"
+showing the play of sunlight through quivering leaves. A visitor asked the painter why he
+did not put some chickens in the foreground. To her the canvas was meaningless, for she
+had never seen, had never really seen, the sunlight dancing on burnished leaves. The
+chickens, which she had seen and could recognize, were the element of the familiar she
+required in order to find any significance in the picture.</p>
+
+<p>This tendency, of which the demand for chickens is a rudimentary manifestation, is the
+basis of all appreciation. The artist's revelation of the import of life we can receive
+and understand only as we have felt a little of that import for ourselves. Color is
+meaningless to a blind man, music does not exist for the deaf. To him who has never
+opened his eyes to behold the beauty of field and hill and trees and sky, to him whose
+spirit has not dimly apprehended something of that eternal significance of which these
+things are the material visible bodying forth, to such a the work of the master is only
+so much paint and canvas. The task of the appreciator, then, is to develop his capacity
+to receive and enjoy.</p>
+
+<p>That capacity is to be trained by the exercise of itself. Each new harmony which he is
+enabled to perceive intensifies his power to feel and widens the range of his vision. The
+more beauty he apprehends in the world, so much the more of universal forces he brings
+into unity with his own personality. By this extension of his spirit he reaches out and
+becomes merged in the all-embracing life.</p>
+
+<p>If the conception be true that a supreme unity, linking all seemingly chaotic details,
+ultimately brings them into order, and that this unity, which is spiritual, penetrates
+every atom of matter, fusing everything and making all things one; then the appreciator
+will realize that the significance of art is for the spirit The beauty which the artist
+reveals is but the harmony which underlies the universal order; and he in his turn must
+apprehend that beauty spiritually.</p>
+
+<p>From this truth it follows that the condition of aesthetic enjoyment, or in other
+words the appreciation of beauty, is detachment of spirit and remoteness from practical
+consequences. The classic illustration of the truth is the saying of Lucretius, that it
+is sublime to stand on the shore and behold a shipwreck. It is sublime only as one's
+personal interests and feelings are not engaged. It would not be sublime if it were
+possible for the spectator to aid in averting the catastrophe; it would not be sublime if
+one's friends were aboard the ship. One is able to appreciate beauty only as one is able
+to detach one's self from what is immediate and practical, and by virtue of this
+detachment, to apprehend the spiritual significance. The sublimity of the shipwreck lies
+in what it expresses of the impersonal might of elemental forces and man's impotence in
+the struggle against nature. That sublimity, which is one manifestation of beauty, is of
+the spirit, and by the spirit it must be apprehended.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate this truth by a few homely examples. A farmer looking out on his fields
+of tossing wheat, drenched in golden sunlight, exclaims, "Look, isn't that beautiful!"
+What he really means is: "See there the promise of a rich harvest, and it is mine." If
+the fields belonged to his neighbor, his feelings towards them would be quite different.
+No, their <i>beauty</i> is to be seen and felt only by him whose mind is free of thoughts
+of personal enrichment and who thus can perceive the harmony with life of golden sunshine
+and nature's abundant gifts. The farmer could not see beyond the material and its value
+to him as material. But beauty lies deeper than that, for it is the expression of
+spiritual relations.</p>
+
+<p>Two men are riding together in a railway carriage. As the train draws into a city,
+they pass a little group of tumble-down houses, brown and gray, a heap of corners thrown
+together. One man thinks: "What dreary lives these people must lead who dwell there." The
+other, with no such stirring of the sympathy, sees a wonderful "scheme" in grays and
+browns, or an expressive composition or ordering of line. Neither could think the
+thoughts of the other at the same time with his own. One feels a practical and physical
+reaction, and he cannot therefore at that moment penetrate to the meaning of these things
+for the spirit; and that meaning is the harmony which they express.</p>
+
+<p>From the tangle of daily living with its conflict of interests and its burden of
+practical needs, the appreciator turns to art with its power to chasten and to
+tranquillize. In art, he finds the revelation in fuller measure of a beauty which he has
+felt but vaguely. He realizes that underlying the external chaos of immediate practical
+experience rests a supreme and satisfying order. Of that order he can here and now
+perceive but little, hemmed in as he is by the material world, whose meaning he discerns
+as through a glass, darkly. Yet he keeps resolutely on his way, secure in his kinship
+with the eternal spirit, and rewarded by momentary glimpses of the "broken arcs" which he
+knows will in the end take their appointed places in the "perfect round."</p><a name=
+"5"></a><br>
+<br>
+
+<p>V</p>
+
+<p>THE ARTIST</p>
+
+<p>Out of chaos, order. Man's life on the earth is finite and fragmentary, but it is the
+constant effort of his spirit to bring the scattering details of momentary experience
+into an enduring harmony with his personality and with that supreme unity of which he is
+a part.</p>
+
+<p>The man who out of the complex disarray of his little world effects a new harmony is
+an artist. He who fashioned the first cup, shaping it according to his ideal,&mdash;for
+no prototype existed,&mdash;and in response to his needs; he who, taking this elementary
+form, wrought upon it with his fingers and embellished it according to his ideal and in
+response to his need of expressing himself; he, again, who out of the same need for
+expression adds to the cup anything new: each of these workmen is an artist. The
+reproduction of already existing forms, with no modification by the individual workman,
+is not art. So, for example, only that painter is an artist who adds to his
+representation of the visible world some new attribute or quality born of his own spirit
+Primitive artisan, craftsman, painter, each creates in that he reveals and makes actual
+some part, which before was but potential, of the all-embracing life.</p>
+
+<p>As the artist, then, wins new reaches of experience and brings them into unity, he
+reveals new beauty, new to men yet world-old. For the harmony which he effects is new
+only in the sense that it was not before perceived. As, in the physical universe, not an
+atom of matter through the ages is created or destroyed, so the supreme spiritual life is
+constant in its sum and complete. Of this life individuals partake in varying measure;
+their growth is determined by how much of it they make their own. The growth of the soul
+in this sense is not different from man's experience of the physical world. The child is
+born: he grows up into his family; the circle widens to include neighbors and the
+community; the circle widens again as the boy goes away to school and then to college.
+With ever-widening sweep the outermost bound recedes, though still embracing him, as he
+reaches out to Europe and at length compasses the earth, conquering experience and
+bringing its treasures into tribute to his own spirit. The things were there; but for the
+boy each was in turn created as he made it his own. So the artist, revealing new aspects
+of the supreme unity, creates in the sense that he makes possible for his fellows a
+fuller taking-up of this life into themselves.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that he is the greatest artist who has felt the most of harmony in
+life,&mdash;the greatest artist but potentially. The beauty he has perceived must in
+accordance with our human needs find expression concretely, because it is only as he
+manifests himself in forms which we can understand that we are able to recognize him.
+Though a mute, inglorious Milton were Milton still, yet our human limitations demand his
+utterance that we may know him. So the artist accomplishes his mission when he
+communicates himself. The human spirit is able to bring the supreme life into unity with
+itself according to the measure of its own growth made possible through expression.</p>
+
+<p>The supreme life, of which every created thing partakes,&mdash;the stone, the flower,
+the animal, and man,&mdash;is beauty, because it is the supreme harmony wherein
+everything has its place in relation to every other thing. This central unity has its
+existence in expression. The round earth, broken off from the stellar system and whirling
+along its little orbit through space, is yet ever in communication with the great system;
+the tree, with its roots in the earth, puts forth branches, the branches expand into
+twigs, the twigs burst into leaves whose veins reach out into the air; out of the twigs
+spring buds swelling into blossoms, the blossoms ripen into fruit, the fruit drops seed
+into the earth which gave it and springs up into new trees. The tree by its growth, which
+is the putting forth of itself or expression, develops needs, these needs are satisfied,
+and the satisfying of the needs is the condition of its continued expansion.</p>
+
+<p>Man, too, has his existence in expression. By growth through expression, which is the
+creation of a new need, he is enabled to take up more into himself; he brings more into
+the unity of his personality, and thus he expands into the universal harmony.</p>
+
+<p>The unity which underlies the cosmos&mdash;to define once more the conception which is
+the basis of the preceding chapters&mdash;is of the spirit. The material world which we
+see and touch is but the symbol and bodying forth of spiritual relations. The
+tranquillizing, satisfying power of art is due to the revelation which art accomplishes
+of a spiritual harmony which transcends the seeming chaos of instant experience. So it
+comes about that harmony, or beauty, which is of the spirit, is apprehended by the
+spirit. That faculty in the artist by which he is able to perceive beauty is called
+<i>temperament.</i> By temperament is to be understood the receptive faculty, the power
+to feel, the capacity for sensations, emotions, and "such intellectual apprehensions as,
+in strength and directness and their immediately realized values at the bar of an actual
+experience, are most like sensations." The function of temperament is to receive and to
+transmit, to interpret, to create in the sense that it reveals. In the result it is felt
+to be present only as the medium through which the forces behind it come to
+expression.</p>
+
+<p>Art, the human spirit, temperament,&mdash;these terms are general and abstract. Now
+the abstract to be realized must be made concrete. Just as art, in order to be manifest,
+must be embodied in the particular work, as the statue, the picture, the building, the
+drama, the symphony, so the human spirit becomes operative in the person of the
+individual, and temperament may be best studied in the character of the individual
+artist.</p>
+
+<p>As temperament is the receptive faculty, the artist's attitude toward life is what
+Wordsworth called "wise passiveness,"&mdash;Wordsworth, the poet of "impassioned
+contemplation." Keats, too,&mdash;and among the poets, whose vision of beauty was more
+beautiful, whose grasp on the truth more true?&mdash;characterizes himself as "addicted
+to passiveness." It is of temperament that Keats is writing when he says in a letter:
+"That quality which goes to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and
+which Shakespeare possessed so enormously, is <i>Negative Capability</i>." In another
+letter he writes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+"It has been an old comparison for our urging on&mdash;the Beehive; however, it seems to
+me that we should rather be the flower than the Bee&mdash;for it is a false notion that
+more is gained by receiving than giving&mdash;no, the receiver and the giver are equal in
+their benefits. The flower, I doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the Bee&mdash;its
+leaves blush deeper in the next spring&mdash;and who shall say between Man and Woman
+which is the most delighted? Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like
+Mercury&mdash;let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like
+buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us
+open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive&mdash;budding patiently under
+the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a
+visit&mdash;sap will be given us for meat and dew for drink. . . .
+</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "O fret not after knowledge&mdash;I have none,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And yet my song comes native with the warmth.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; O fret not after knowledge&mdash;I have none,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; At thought of idleness cannot be idle,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And he's awake who thinks himself asleep."
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Still again he says: "The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man:
+It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself.
+That which is creative must create itself."</p>
+
+<p>A nature so constituted, a nature receptive and passive, is necessarily withdrawn from
+practical affairs. To revert to Keats as an example, for Keats is so wholly the artist,
+it is his remoteness from the daily life about him that makes him the man of no one
+country or time. His poetry has a kind of universality, but universality within a
+definite sphere, and that sphere is the world of things lovely and fair. In a playful
+mood Keats writes to his sister: "Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and
+a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know . . . and I can pass a
+summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat Regent or the Duke of
+Wellington." These are trivial words; but they serve to define in some measure the
+artistic temperament.</p>
+
+<p>For this characteristic remoteness from affairs the artist is sometimes reproached by
+those who pin their faith to material things. Such are not aware that for the artist the
+only reality is the life of the spirit. The artist, as Carlyle says of the Man of
+Letters, "lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which
+exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that."
+Temperament constitutes the whole moral nature of the artist. "With a great poet," says
+Keats, "the sense of beauty overcomes every consideration, or rather obliterates all
+consideration." It is the standard which measures the worth of any act. It is conscience,
+too; for the functions performed by conscience in the normal moral life of the man of
+action are fulfilled by the artist's devotion to his ideal; his service to his art is his
+sole and sufficient obligation.</p>
+
+<p>And where the man of action looks to find his rewards in the approval of his fellow
+men, the artist cares to please himself. The very act of expressing is itself the joy and
+the reward. To this truth Keats again stands as witness: "I feel assured," he says, "I
+should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my
+night's labours should be burnt every Morning and no eye ever shine upon them." And still
+again: "I value more the privilege of seeing great things in loneliness than the fame of
+a prophet." Not that the artist does not crave appreciation. His message fails of
+completeness if there is no ear to hear it, if it does not meet a sympathy which
+understands. But the true artist removes all shadow of petty vanity and becomes, in
+Whitman's phrase, "the free channel of himself." He is but the medium through whom the
+spirit of beauty reveals itself; in thankfulness and praise he but receives and
+transmits. That it is given him to see beauty and to interpret it is enough.</p>
+
+<p>It is by virtue of his power to feel that the artist is able to apprehend beauty; his
+temperament is ever responsive to new harmonies. By force of his imagination, which is
+one function of his temperament, he sends his spirit into other lives, absorbs their
+experience and makes it his own, and ultimately identifies himself with world forces and
+becomes creator. In a lyric passage in a letter Keats exclaims:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+"The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and
+minute domestic happiness. . . . I feel more and more every day, as my imagination
+strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner
+am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the
+office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard&mdash;then 'Tragedy with sceptered pall
+comes sweeping by.' According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the
+Trenches, or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into
+Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian Banks
+staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am
+content to be&nbsp; alone."
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This power to penetrate and to identify was exercised with peculiar directness and
+plenitude by Walt Whitman, prophet of the omnipotence of man. To find the burden of his
+message formulated in the single phrase one may turn to his Poems quite at random.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around
+the whole earth."<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "I inhale great draughts of space,&mdash;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are
+mine.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; . . . . .<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; All seems beautiful to me."</p>
+
+<p>Of the artist may be affirmed what Whitman affirms of the Answerer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and
+tongue,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men,
+and any man translates, and any man translates himself also,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner,
+he sees how they join."</p>
+
+<p>As the artist sends out his spirit through the world, as he becomes the channel of
+universal and divine influences, so he is admitted to new and ever new revelations of
+beauty. And stirred by the glorious vision, he brings that beauty to earth, communicating
+it to his fellows and making them partakers of it, as he gives his feeling expression.
+Thus finding utterance as the prophet of God, he consummates his mission and takes his
+place in the world order. Herein he has his being, for life is expression; and each new
+harmony which he makes manifest is the medium of his fuller identification with the
+universal life.</p>
+
+<p>So it is that the artist is the supreme interpreter, the mediator between man and
+beauty. His work is a work of joy, of gratitude, of worship. He is the happy servant of
+God, His prophet, through whom He declares Himself to the children of men.</p><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes
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+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/27194.txt b/27194.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b059536
--- /dev/null
+++ b/27194.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2012 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Enjoyment of Art
+
+Author: Carleton Noyes
+
+Release Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #27194]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENJOYMENT OF ART ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ruth Hart
+
+
+
+
+[Note:  for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents to
+the beginning of the text.]
+
+
+
+THE ENJOYMENT OF ART
+
+BY
+
+CARLETON NOYES
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+1903
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CARLETON NOYES
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+_Published, March, 1903_
+
+
+To
+ROBERT HENRI
+AND
+VAN D. PERRINE
+
+
+This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at
+     the crowded heaven,
+And I said to my spirit _When we become the enfolders of
+     those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every
+     thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?_
+And my spirit said _No, we but level that lift to pass and
+     continue beyond._
+
+WALT WHITMAN
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Preface
+I.     The Picture and the Man         i
+II.    The Work of Art as Symbol      19
+III.   The Work of Art as Beautiful   41
+IV.    Art and Appreciation           67
+V.     The Artist                     86
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+The following pages are the answer to questions which a young man
+asked himself when, fresh from the university, he found himself
+adrift in the great galleries of Europe. As he stood helpless and
+confused in the presence of the visible expressions of the spirit of
+man in so many ages and so many lands, one question recurred
+insistently: _Why_ are these pictures? What is the meaning of all
+this striving after expression? What was the aim of these men who
+have left their record here? What was their moving impulse? Why,
+why does the human spirit seek to manifest itself in forms which we
+call beautiful?
+
+He turned to histories of art and to biographies of artists, but he
+found no answer! to the "Why?" The philosophers with their
+theories of aesthetics helped him little to understand the dignity and
+force of this portrait or the beauty of that landscape. In the
+conversation of his artist friends there was no enlightenment, for
+they talked about "values" and "planes of modeling" and the
+mysteries of "tone." At last he turned in upon himself: What does
+this canvas mean to me? And here he found his answer. This work
+of art is the revelation to me of a fuller beauty, a deeper harmony,
+than I have ever seen or felt. The artist is he who has experienced
+this new wonder in nature and who wants to communicate his joy, in
+concrete forms, to his fellow men.
+
+The purpose of this book is to set forth in simple, untechnical
+fashion the nature and the meaning of a work of art. Although the
+illustrations of the underlying principles are drawn mainly from
+pictures, yet the conclusions apply equally to books and to music. It
+is true that the manifestations of the art-impulse are innumerable,
+embracing not only painting, sculpture, literature, music, and
+architecture, but also the handiwork of the craftsman in the
+designing of a rug or in the fashioning of a cup or a candlestick; it is
+true that each art has its special province and function, and that each
+is peculiarly adapted to the expression of a certain order of emotion
+or idea, and that the distinctions between one art and another are not
+to be inconsiderately swept aside or obscured. Yet art is one. It is
+possible, without confusing the individual characteristics essential to
+each, to discuss these principles under the comprehensive rubric of
+Art.
+
+The attempt is made here to reduce the supposed mysteries of art
+discussion to the basis of practical, every-day intelligence and
+common sense. What the ordinary man who feels himself in any
+way attracted; towards art needs is not more and constantly more
+pictures to look at, not added lore about them, not further knowledge
+of the men and the times that have produced them; but rather what
+he needs is some understanding of what the artist has aimed to
+express, and, as reinforcing that understanding, the capacity rightly
+to appreciate and enjoy.
+
+It is hoped that in this book the artist may find expressed with
+simplicity and justice his own highest aims; and that the appreciator
+and the layman may gain some insight into the meaning of art
+expression, and that they may be helped a little on their way to the
+enjoyment of art.
+
+HARVARD COLLEGE, _December tenth, 1902._
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE PICTURE AND THE MAN
+
+At any exhibition of paintings, more particularly at some public
+gallery or museum, one can hardly fail to reflect that an interest in
+pictures is unmistakably widespread. People are there in
+considerable numbers, and what is more striking, they seem to
+represent every station and walk in life. It is evident that pictures, as
+exhibited to the public, are not the cult of an initiated few; their
+appeal is manifestly to no one class; and this popular interest is as
+genuine as it is extended.
+
+Thus reflectively scanning the crowd, the observer asks himself:
+What has attracted these numbers to that which might be supposed
+not to be understood of the many? And what are the pictures that in
+general draw the popular attention?
+
+A few persons have of course drifted into the exhibition out of
+curiosity or from lack of something better to do. So much is evident
+at once, for these file past the walls listlessly, seldom stopping, and
+then but to glance at those pictures which are most obviously like
+the familiar object they pretend to represent,--such as the bowl of
+flowers which the beholder can almost smell, the theatre-checks and
+five-dollar note pasted on a wall which tempt him to finger them, or
+the panel of game birds which puzzles him to determine whether the
+birds are real or not. These visitors, however, are not the most
+numerous. With the great majority it is not enough that the picture
+be a clever piece of imitation or illusion: transferring their interest
+from the mere execution, they demand further that the subjects
+represented shall be pleasing. The crowd pause before a sunny
+landscape, with cows standing by the shaded pool; they gather about
+the brilliant portrait of a woman splendidly arrayed,--a favorite
+actress or a social celebrity; they linger before a group of children
+wading in a brook, or a dog crouching mournfully by an empty
+cradle. At length, with an approving and sympathetic word of
+comment, they pass on to the next pleasing picture. Some canvases,
+not the most popular ones, are yet not without their interest for a few;
+these visitors are taking things a little more seriously; they do not try
+to see every picture, they do not hurry; they seem to be considering
+the canvas immediately before them with concentrated attention.
+
+No one of all these people is insensible to the appeal of the
+picturesque: their presence at the exhibition is evidence of that. In
+life they like to see a bowl of flowers, a sunny landscape, a beautiful
+woman in beautiful surroundings; and naturally they are interested
+in that which represents and recalls the reality. At once it is plain,
+however, that to different individuals the various pictures appeal in
+different measure and for differing reasons. To one the very fact of
+representation is a mystery and fascination. To another the important
+thing is the subject; the picture must represent what he likes in
+nature or in life. To a third the subject itself is of less concern than
+what the painter wanted to say about it: the artist saw a beauty
+manifested by an ugly beggar, perhaps, and he wanted to show that
+beauty to his fellows, who could not perceive it for themselves.
+
+The special interest in pictures of each of these three men is not
+without its warrant in experience. What man is wholly indifferent to
+the display of human skill? Who is there without his store of
+pleasurable associations, who is not stirred by any call which rouses
+them into play? What lover of beauty is not ever awake to the
+revelation of new beauty? Indeed, upon these three principles
+together, though in varying proportion, depends the full significance
+of a great work of art.
+
+As the lover of pictures looks back over the period of his conscious
+interest in exhibitions and galleries, it is not improbable that his
+earliest memories attach themselves to those paintings which most
+closely resembled the object represented. He remembers the great
+wonder which he felt that a man with mere paint and canvas could
+so reproduce the reality of nature. So it is that those paintings which
+are perhaps the first to attract the man who feels an interest in
+pictures awakening are such as display most obviously the painter's
+skill. Whatever the subject imitated, the fascination remains; that
+such illusion is possible at all is the mystery and the delight.
+
+But as his interest in pictures grows with indulgence, as his
+experience widens, the beholder becomes gradually aware that he is
+making a larger demand. After the first shock of pleasurable surprise
+is worn away, he finds that the repeated exhibition of the painter's
+dexterity ceases to satisfy him; these clever pieces of deception
+manifest a wearying sameness, after all; and the beholder begins
+now to look for something more than mere expertness. Thinking on
+his experience, he concludes that the subjects which can be imitated
+deceptively are limited in range and interest; he has a vague,
+disquieting sense that somehow these pictures do not mean anything.
+Yet he is puzzled. Art aims to represent, he tells himself, and it
+should follow that the best art is that which represents most closely
+and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek
+painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down
+to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his
+very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most
+plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to
+bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill;
+and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ
+essentially from the adroitness of the juggler who keeps a billiard
+ball, a chair, and a silk handkerchief rotating from hand to hand.
+
+Conscious, then, of a new demand, of an added interest to be
+satisfied, the amateur of pictures turns from the imitative canvas to
+those paintings which appeal more widely to his familiar experience.
+Justly, he does not here forgo altogether his delight in the painter's
+cunning of hand, only he requires further that the subjects
+represented shall be pleasing. It must be a subject whose meaning he
+can recognize at once: a handsome or a strong portrait, a familiar
+landscape, some little incident which tells its own story. The
+spectator is now attracted by those pictures which rouse a train of
+agreeable associations. He stops before a canvas representing a bit
+of rocky coast, with the ocean tumbling in exhilaratingly. He
+recognizes the subject and finds it pleasing; then he wonders where
+the picture was painted. Turning to his catalogue, he reads: "37. On
+the Coast of Maine." "Oh, yes," he says to himself, "I was on the
+coast of Maine last summer, and I remember what a glorious time I
+had sitting on the rocks of an afternoon, with some book or other
+which the ocean was too fine to let me read. I like that picture." If
+the title had read "Massachusetts Coast," it is to be feared he would
+not have liked the canvas quite so well. The next picture which he
+notices shows, perhaps, a stately woman sumptuously attired. It is
+with a slight shock of disappointment that the visitor finds recorded
+in his catalogue: "41. Portrait of a Lady." He could see that much for
+himself. He hoped it was going to be the painter's mother or
+somebody's wife,--a person he ought to know about. But the pictures
+which appeal to him most surely are those which tell some little
+story,--"The Lovers," "The Boy leaving Home," "The Wreck." Here
+the subject, touching some one of the big human emotions, to which
+no man is wholly insensible, calls out the response of immediate
+interest and sympathy. It is something which he can understand.
+
+At length there comes a day when the visitor stops before a
+landscape which seems to him more beautiful than anything he has
+ever seen in nature; or some portrait discloses a strength of character
+or radiates a charm of personality which he has seldom met with in
+life. Whence comes this beauty, this strength, this graciousness? Can
+it be that the painter has seen a new wonder in nature, a new
+significance in human life? The spectator's previous experience of
+pictures has familiarized him in some measure with the means of
+expression which the painter employs. More sensitive now to the
+appeal of color and form, he sees that what the artist cares to present
+on his canvas is just his peculiar  sense of the beauty in the world, a
+beauty that is best symbolized and made manifest through the
+medium of color and form. Before he understood this eloquent
+language which the painter speaks, he misinterpreted those pictures
+whose significance he mistook to be literary and not pictorial. He
+early liked the narrative picture because here was a subject he could
+understand; he could rephrase it in his own terms, he could retell the
+story to himself in words. Now words are the means of expression of
+every-day life. Because of this fact, the art which employs words as
+its medium is the art which comes nearest to being universally
+understood, namely, literature. The other arts use each a medium
+which it requires a special training to understand. Without some
+sense of the expressiveness of color, line, form, and sounds,--a sense
+which can be cultivated,--one is necessarily unable to grasp the full
+and true meaning of picture, statue, or musical composition. One
+must realize further that the artist thinks and feels in his peculiar
+medium; his special meaning is conceived and expressed in color or
+form or sound. The task of the appreciator, correspondingly, is to
+receive the artist's message in the same terms in which it was
+conceived. The tendency is inevitable, however, to translate the
+meaning of the work into words, the terms in which men commonly
+phrase their experience. A parallel tendency is manifest in one's
+efforts to learn a foreign language. The English student of French at
+first thinks in English and laboriously translates phrase for phrase
+into French; and in hearing or reading the foreign language, he
+translates the original, word for word, into his native tongue before
+he can understand its sense: he has mastered the language only when
+he has reached that point where English is no longer present to his
+consciousness: he thinks in French and understands in French.
+Similarly, to translate the message of any art into terms that are
+foreign to it, to phrase the meaning of music or painting, for
+example, in words, is to fail of its essential, true significance. The
+import of music is musical; the meaning of pictures is not literary
+but pictorial. In the understanding of this truth, then, the spectator
+penetrates to the artist's real intention; and he becomes aware that
+when he used the picture as the peg whereon to hang his own
+reflections and ideas, he missed the meaning of the artist's work. "As
+I look at this canvas," he tells himself, "it is not what I know of the
+coast of Maine that is of concern, but what the painter has seen and
+felt of its beauty and wants to reveal to me." Able at last to interpret
+the painter's medium, the appreciator comes to seek in pictures not
+primarily an exhibition of the craftsman's skill, not even a recall of
+his own pleasurable experiences, but rather, beyond all this, a fuller
+visible revelation of beauty.
+
+The essential significance of art, that art is revelation, is illustrated
+not only by painting but by the other arts as well. In music, to take
+but a single example, are present the same elements that constitute
+the appeal of pictures,--skill in the rendering, a certain
+correspondence with experience, and the power of imaginative
+interpretation of the facts of life. The music-hall performer who
+wins the loudest and heartiest applause is he who does the greatest
+number of pyrotechnic, wonderful things on the piano, or holds a
+high note on the cornet for the longest time. His success, as with the
+painter whose aim is to create illusion, rests upon men's instinctive
+admiration for the exhibition of skill. Again, as the imitative picture
+involves not only the display of dexterity, but also likeness to the
+thing represented and the consequent possibility of recognizing it
+immediately, so in the domain of music there is an order of
+composition which seems to aim at imitation,--the so-called
+"descriptive" music. A popular audience is delighted with the "Cats'
+Serenade," executed on the violins with overwhelming likeness to
+the reality, or with, the "Day in the Country," in which the sun rises
+in the high notes, cocks crow, horses rattle down the road,
+merrymakers frolic on the green, clouds come up in the horns,
+lightning plays in the violins, thunder crashes in the drums and
+cymbals, the merrymakers scatter in the whole orchestra, the storm
+passes diminuendo, and in the muted violins the full moon rises
+serenely into a twilight sky. Here the intention is easily understood;
+the layman cannot fail to recognize what the composer wanted to
+say. And as in the case of pictures which interest the beholder
+because he can translate their subject into the terms which are his
+own medium of expression, that is, words, so with descriptive music,
+broadly speaking, the interest and significance is literary and not
+musical. Still another parallel is presented. Just as those pictures are
+popular whose subjects lie within the range of familiar experience,
+such as cows by the shaded pool, or children playing, or whose
+subjects touch the feelings; so, that music is popular which is
+phrased in obvious and familiar rhythms such as the march and the
+waltz, or which appeals readily and unmistakably to sentiment and
+emotion. It is after the lover of music has traversed these passages of
+musical expression and has proved their imitations that he comes to
+seek in music new ranges of experience, unguessed-at possibilities
+of feeling, which the composer has himself sounded and which he
+would communicate to others. He is truly the artist only as he leads
+his auditors into regions of beautiful living which they alone and of
+themselves had not penetrated. For it is then that his work reveals.
+
+Only such pictures, too, will have a vital meaning as reveal. The
+imitative and the iterative alike, that which adds nothing to the
+object and that which adds nothing to the experience of the beholder,
+though once pleasing, now fail to satisfy. The appreciator calls for
+something fuller. He wants to pass beyond the object, beyond his
+experience of it, into the realm of illumination whither the true artist
+would lead him. The development of appreciation, as the amateur
+has come to realize in his own person, is only the enlargement of
+demand. The appreciator requires ever fresh revelations of beauty.
+He discovers, too, that in practice the tendency of his development is
+in the direction of exclusion. As he goes on, he cares for fewer and
+fewer things, because those works which can minister to his
+ever-expanding desire of beauty must needs be less numerous. But these
+make up in largeness of utterance, in the intensity of their message,
+what they lack in numbers. Nor does this outcome make against a
+fancied catholicity of taste. The true appreciator still sees in his
+earlier loves something that is good, and he values the good the
+more justly that he sees it now in its right relation and apprehends its
+real significance. As each in its turn led him to seek further, each
+became an instrument in his development. For himself he has need
+of them no longer. But far from contemning them, he is rightly
+grateful for the solace they have afforded, as by them he has made
+his way up into the fuller meaning of art.
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE WORK OF ART AS SYMBOL
+
+In the experience of the man who feels himself attracted to pictures
+and who studies them intelligently and with sympathy, there comes
+a day when suddenly a canvas reveals to him a new beauty in nature
+or in life. Much seeing and much thinking, much bewilderment and
+some disappointment, have taught him that in the appreciation of
+pictures the question at issue is not, how cleverly has the painter
+imitated his object, is not, how suggestive is the subject of pleasing
+associations; he need simply ask himself, "What has the artist
+conceived or felt in the presence of this landscape, this arrangement
+of line and color, this human face, that I have not seen and felt, and
+that he wants to communicate to me?"
+
+The incident of the single canvas, which by its illuminating
+revealment first discloses to the observer the true significance of
+pictures, is typical of the whole scope of art. The mission of art is to
+reveal. It is the prophet's message to his fellow men, the apocalypse
+of the seer. The artist is he to whom is vouchsafed a special
+apprehension of beauty. He has the eye to see, the temperament to
+feel, the imagination to interpret; it is by virtue of these capacities,
+this high, transfiguring vision, that he is an artist; and his skill of
+hand, his equipment with the means of expression, is incidental to
+the great fact that he has somewhat to express that the common man
+has not. To his work, the manifestation of his spirit in material form,
+his perception made sensible, is accorded the name of art.
+
+Art is expression. It is not a display of skill; it is not the reproduction
+of external forms or appearances; it does not even, as some say,
+exist for itself: it is a message, a means. To cry "Art for Art's sake!"
+is to converse with the echo. Such a definition but moves in a circle,
+and doubles upon itself. No; art is for the artist's sake. The artist is
+the agent or human instrument whereby the supreme harmony,
+which is beauty, is manifested to men. Art is the medium by which
+the artist communicates himself to his fellows; and the individual
+work is the expression of what the artist felt or thought, as at the
+moment some new aspect of the universal harmony was revealed to
+his apprehension. Art is emotion objectified, but the object is
+subordinated to the emotion as means is to an end. The material
+result is not the final significance, but what of spiritual meaning or
+beauty the artist desired to convey. Not what is painted, as the
+layman thinks, not how it is painted, as the technician considers, but
+why did the artist paint it, is the question which sums up the truth
+about art. The appreciator need simply ask, What is the beauty, what
+the idea, which the artist is striving to reveal by these symbols of
+color and form? He understands that the import of the work is the
+_idea,_ and that the work itself is beautiful because it symbolizes a
+beautiful idea; its significance is spiritual. The function of art, then,
+is through the medium of concrete, material symbols to reveal to
+men whatever of beauty has been disclosed to the artist's more
+penetrating vision.
+
+In order to seize the real meaning of art it is necessary to strip the
+word beauty of all the wrappings of customary associations and the
+accretions of tradition and habit. As the word is current in ordinary
+parlance, the attribute of beauty is ascribed to that which is pleasing,
+pretty, graceful, comely; in fine, to that which is purely agreeable.
+But surely such is not the beauty which Rembrandt saw in the filthy,
+loathsome beggar. To Rembrandt the beggar was expressive of some
+force or manifestation of the supreme universal life, wherein all
+things work together to a perfect harmony.  Beauty is the essential
+quality belonging to energy, character, significance. A merely
+agreeable object is not beautiful unless it is expressive of a meaning;
+whatever, on the other hand, is expressive of a meaning, however
+shocking it may be in itself, however much it may fail to conform to
+conventional standards, is beautiful. Beauty does not reside in the
+object. No; it is the artist's sense of the great meaning of things; and
+in proportion as he finds that meaning--the qualities of energy, force,
+aspiration, life--manifest and expressed in objects do those objects
+become beautiful. Such was the conception of beauty Keats had
+when he wrote in a letter: "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty
+must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same
+idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,
+creative of essential Beauty." And similarly; "I can never feel certain
+of any truth, but from a clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse
+he sings:--
+
+     "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all
+     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
+
+When it is said here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the
+phrase may be understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as
+when one says the sun rises or the sun sets. Beauty is in the
+landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for the
+artist an idea he has conceived of some aspect of the universal life.
+
+The artist is impelled to embody concretely his perception of beauty,
+and so to communicate his emotion, because the emotion wakened
+by the perception of new harmony in things is most fully possessed
+and enjoyed as it comes to expression. Thus to make real his ideal
+and find the expression of himself is the artist's supreme Happiness.
+A familiar illustration of the twin need and delight of expression
+may be found in the handiwork produced in the old days when every
+artisan was an artist. It may be, perhaps, a key which some
+craftsman of Nuremberg fashioned. In the making of it he was not
+content to stop with the key which would unlock the door or the
+chest It was his key, the work of his hands; and he wrought upon it
+lovingly, devotedly, and made it beautiful, finding in his work the
+expression of his thought or feeling; it was the realization for that
+moment of his ideal. His sense of pleasure in the making of it
+prompted the care he bestowed upon it; his delight was in creation,
+in rendering actual a new beau which it was given him to conceive.
+
+In its origin as a work of art the key does not differ from a landscape
+by Inness, an "arrangement" by Whistler, a portrait by Sargent. The
+artist, whether craftsman or painter, is deeply stirred by some
+passage in his experience, a fair object or a true thought: it is the
+imperious demand of his nature, as it is his supreme pleasure, to
+give his feeling expression. The form which his expression takes--it
+may be key or carpet, it may be statue, picture, poem, symphony, or
+cathedral--is that which most closely responds to his idea, the form
+which most truly manifests and represents it.
+
+All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite
+sense representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality,
+as it is said that painting or literature represents and music does not;
+but every work of art, in painting, poetry, music, or in the handiwork
+of the craftsman, _represents_ in that it is the symbol of the creator's
+ideal. To be sure, the painter or sculptor or dramatist draws his
+symbols from already existing material forms, and these symbols are
+like objects in a sense in which music is not But line and color and
+the life of man, apart from this resemblance to external reality, are
+representative or symbolic of the artist's idea precisely as the
+craftsman's key, the designer's pattern, or the musician's symphony.
+The beautifully wrought key, the geometric pattern of oriental rug or
+hanging, the embroidered foliation on priestly vestment, are works
+of art equally with the landscape, the statue, the drama, or the
+symphony, in that they are one and all the sensuous manifestation of
+some new beauty spiritually conceived.
+
+The symbolic character of a work of art must not be lost from sight,
+for it is the clue to the interpretation of pictures, as it is of all art.
+The painter feels his way through the gamut of his palette to a
+harmony of color just as truly as the musician summons the notes of
+his scale and marshals them into accord. The painter is moved by
+some sweep of landscape; it wakens in him an emotion. When he
+sets himself to express his emotion in the special medium with
+which he works, he represents by pigment the external aspect of the
+landscape, yes; but not in order to imitate it or reproduce it: he
+represents the landscape because the colors and the forms which he
+registers upon the canvas express for him the emotions roused by
+those colors and those forms in nature. He does not try to match his
+grays with nature's grays, but this nuance which he gropes for on his
+palette, and having found it, touches upon his canvas, expresses for
+him what that particular gray in nature made him feel. His one
+compelling purpose is in all fidelity and singleness of aim to
+"translate the impression received." The painter's medium is just as
+symbolic as the notes of the musician's nocturne or the words of the
+poet's sonnet, equally inspired by the hour and place. Color and line
+and form, although they happen to be the properties of _things,_
+have a value for the emotions as truly as musical sounds: they are
+the outward symbol of the inward thought or feeling, the visible
+bodying forth of the immaterial idea.
+
+The symbolic character of the material world is not early
+apprehended. In superficial reaction upon life, men do not readily
+pass beyond the immediate actuality. That the spiritual meaning of
+all things is not perceived, that all things are not seen to be beautiful,
+or expressive of the supreme harmony, is due to men's limited
+powers of sight and feeling. Therefore is it that the artist is given in
+order that he may reveal as yet unrealized spiritual relations, or new
+beauty. The workaday world with its burden of exigent "realities"
+has need of a Carlyle to declare that things are but a wonderful
+metaphor and the physical universe is the garment of the living God.
+In the realm of thought an Emerson, seer of transcendent vision,
+must come to restore his fellows to their birthright, which is the life
+of the spirit. As in life, so in art men do not easily pass the obvious
+and immediate. The child reads "Gulliver's Travels" or "The
+Pilgrim's Progress" for the story. As his experience of life both
+widens and deepens, he is able to see through externals, and he
+penetrates to the real significance, of which the narrative is but the
+symbol. So it is with an insight born of experience that the lover of
+art sees no longer the "subject," but the beauty which the subject is
+meant to symbolize.
+
+In the universal, all-embracing constitution of things, nothing is
+without its significance. To be aware that everything has a meaning
+is necessary to the understanding of art, as indeed of life itself. That
+meaning, which things symbolize and express, it cannot be said too
+often, is not necessarily to be phrased in words. It is a meaning for
+the spirit. A straight line affects one differently from a curve; that is,
+each kind of line means something. Every line in the face utters the
+character behind it; every movement of the body is eloquent of the
+man's whole being. "The expression of the face balks account," says
+Walt Whitman,
+
+     "But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his
+          face,
+     It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints
+          of his hips and wrists,
+     It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
+          and knees, dress does not hide him,
+     The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and
+          broadcloth,
+     To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
+     You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and
+          shoulder-side."
+
+Crimson rouses a feeling different from that roused by yellow, and
+gray wakens a mood different from either. In considering this
+symbolic character of colors it is necessary to distinguish between
+their value for the emotions and merely literary associations. That
+white stands for purity or blue for fidelity is a conventionalized and
+attached conception. But the pleasure which a man has in some
+colors or his dislike for others depends upon the effect each color
+has upon his emotions, and this effect determines for him the
+symbolic value of the color. In the same way sounds are symbolic in
+that they affect the emotions apart from associated "thoughts." Even
+with a person who has no technical knowledge of music, the effect
+of the minor key is unmistakably different from the major. The tones
+and modulations of the voice, quite apart from the words uttered,
+have an emotional value and significance. Everything, line, form,
+gesture, movement, color, sound, all the material world, is
+expressive. All objective forms have their meaning, and rightly
+perceived are, in the sense in which the word is used here, beautiful,
+in that they represent or symbolize a spiritual idea.
+
+Thus it is that beauty is not in the object but in man's sense of the
+object's symbolic expressiveness. The amateur may be rapt by some
+artist's "quality of color." But it is probable that in the act of laying
+on his pigment, the artist was not thinking of his "quality" at all, but,
+rapt himself by the perception of the supreme harmony at that
+moment newly revealed to his sense, he was striving sincerely and
+directly to give his feeling its faithfullest expression. His color is
+beautiful because his idea was beautiful. The expression is of the
+very essence of the thought; it _is_ the thought, but the thought
+embodied. "Coleridge," says Carlyle, "remarks very pertinently
+somewhere that whenever you find a sentence musically worded, of
+true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and
+good in the meaning, too. For body and soul, word and idea, go
+strangely together here as everywhere." Not to look beyond the
+material is to miss the meaning of the work.
+
+In an art such as music, in which form and content are one and
+inextricable, it is not difficult to understand that the medium of
+expression which the art employs is necessarily symbolic, for here
+the form cannot exist apart from the meaning to be conveyed. In the
+art of literature, however, the case is not so clear, for the material
+with which the poet, the novelist, the dramatist works, material
+made up of the facts of the world about us, we are accustomed to
+regard as objective realities. An incident is an incident, the
+inevitable issue of precedent circumstances, and that's all there is to
+it Character is the result of heredity, environment, training, plus the
+inexplicable _Ego._ To regard these facts of life which are so actual
+and immediate as a kind of animate algebraic formulae seems
+absurd, but absurd only as one is unable to penetrate to the inner
+meaning of things. "Madame Bovary," to take an example quite at
+random, is called a triumph of realism. Now realism, of all literary
+methods, should register the fact as it is, and least of all should
+concern itself with symbols. But this great novel is more than the
+record of one woman's life. Any one who has come to understand
+the character and temperament of Flaubert as revealed in his Letters
+must feel that "Madame Bovary" is no arbitrary recital of tragic
+incident, but those people who move through his pages, what they
+do and what goes on about them, expressed for Flaubert his own
+dreary, baffled rebellion against life. That the artist may consciously
+employ the facts of life, not for the sake of the fact, but to
+communicate his feeling by thus bodying it forth in concrete
+symbols, there is explicit testimony. In an essay dealing with his
+own method of composition, Poe writes: "I prefer commencing with
+the consideration of an _effect._ Keeping originality _always_ in
+view . . .  I say to myself, in the first place, 'of the innumerable
+effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
+generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
+occasion, select?' Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid
+effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or
+tone . . . afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such
+combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the
+construction of the effect." Yes, physical circumstances, the
+succession of incident, shifting momentary grouping of persons,
+traits of character in varied combination and contrast,--all these are
+significant for the literary artist of spiritual relations.
+
+As the symbol of what the artist feels and strives to express, the
+individual work of art is necessarily more than any mere transcript
+of fact. It is the meeting and mingling of nature and the spirit of man;
+the result of their union is fraught with the inheritance of the past
+and holds within it the limitless promise of the future. The work of
+art is a focus, gathering into itself all the stored experience of the
+artist, and radiating in turn so much to the beholder as he is able at
+the moment to receive. A painter is starting out to sketch. Through
+underbrush and across the open he pushes his way, beset by beauty
+on every side, and storing impressions, sensations, thoughts. At last
+his eye lights upon some clump of brush, some meadow or hill,
+which seems at the instant to sum up and express his accumulated
+experience. In rendering this bit of nature, he pours out upon his
+canvas his store of feeling. It is the single case which typifies his
+entire course. "The man's whole life preludes the single deed." His
+way through the world has been just such a gathering up of
+experience, and each new work which he produces is charged with
+the collected wealth of years.
+
+The special work is the momentary epitome of the artist's total
+meaning. He finds this brief passage in nature beautiful then and
+there because it expresses what he feels and means. He does not try
+to reproduce the thing, but uses the thing for what it signifies. The
+thing is but for that moment: it signifies all that has gone before. As
+he watches, a cloud passes over the sun and the face of nature is
+darkened. Suddenly the scene bursts into light again. In itself the
+landscape is no brighter than before the sun was darkened. The
+painter feels it brighter for the contrast, and inevitably his rendering
+of its aspect is heightened and intensified.
+
+Art is nature heightened and intensified as nature is interpreted
+through the transfiguring medium of the human spirit To the object
+is added
+
+          "The gleam,
+     The light that never was on sea or land,
+     The consecration and the poet's dream."
+
+After an early morning in the fields, Corot withdraws to his house to
+rest. "I dream of the morning landscape," he writes; "I dream my
+picture, and presently I will paint my dream." But not only does the
+artist render the beauty which this landscape happens to express for
+him: he charges these colors and forms with the beauty of all
+landscape. Corot painted _at_ Ville d'Avray; _what_ he painted
+was God's twilight or dawn enwrapping tree and pool. In gratitude
+and worship he revealed to men the tender, ineffable poetry of gray
+dawns in all places and for all time. Millet's peasants were called
+John and Peter and Charles, and they tilled the soil of France; but on
+their bowed shoulders rests the universal burden; these dumb figures
+are eloquent of the uncomplaining, hopeless "peasanthood" of the
+world. In the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to
+penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal
+the spiritual,--this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his
+achievement is art.
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE WORK OF ART AS BEAUTIFUL
+
+Just as nature and life are significant as the material manifestation of
+spiritual forces and relations, so a work of art is in its turn the
+symbol by which the artist communicates himself; it is his revelation
+to men of the beauty he has perceived and felt.
+
+Beauty is not easy to define. That conception which regards beauty
+as the power to awaken merely agreeable emotions is limited and in
+so far false. Another source of misunderstanding is the confusion of
+beauty with moralistic values. It is said that beauty is the Ideal; and
+by many the "Ideal" is taken to mean ideal goodness. With
+righteousness and sin as such beauty has no concern. Much that is
+evil in life, much that offends against the moral law, must be
+regarded as beautiful in so far as it plays its necessary part in the
+universal whole. Clearing away these misconceptions, then, an
+approximate definition would be that the essence of beauty is
+harmony. So soon as a detail is shown in its relation to a whole, then
+it becomes beautiful because it is expressive of the supreme unity. A
+discord in music is felt to be a discord only as it is isolated; when it
+takes its fitting and inevitable place in the large unity of the
+symphony, it becomes full of meaning. The hippopotamus, dozing
+in his tank at the Zoo, is wildly grotesque and ugly. But who shall
+say that, seen in the fastnesses of his native rivers, he is not the
+beautiful perfect fulfilling of nature's harmony? To a race of blacks,
+the fair-skinned Apollo appearing among them could not but be
+monstrous. The smoking factory, sordid and hideous, is beautiful to
+him who sees that it accomplishes a necessary function in the great
+scheme of life. Beauty is adaptation. Whatever is truly useful is in so
+far truly beautiful. The steam engine and the battleship are beautiful
+just as truly as Titian's Madonna, glorified and sweeping upward
+into the presence of God the Father. Only what is vital and
+serviceable, and whatever is that, is beautiful.
+
+When the spirit of man perceives a unity in things, a working
+together of parts, there beauty exists. It resides in the synthesis of
+details to the end of shaping a complete whole. This perception, this
+synthesis, is a function of the human mind. Beauty is not in the
+landscape, but in the intelligence which apprehends it. Evidence of
+this fundamental truth is the fact that the same landscape is more
+"beautiful" to one man than to another, or to a third, perhaps, is not
+beautiful at all. It is only as the individual perceives a relation
+among the parts resulting in a total unity that the object becomes
+beautiful for him.
+
+This abstract exposition may be made clearer by a graphic
+illustration. Here are four figures composed of the same elements:--
+
+           * ***   **      *  ***
+      *   ***** *  ******
+                *   **  * * * *
+                         *
+            *************  *
+          *  *  *  *
+                           **
+                  Fig. I.
+
+*  *  *  *  *      *  *  *
+*  *  *  *  *        *  *                                *
+*  *  *  *  *          *                *                *
+*  *  *  *  *        *  *                                *
+*  *  *  *  *      *  *  *
+Fig. II.          Fig. III.                 Fig. IV.
+
+Figure I., far from being pleasing, is positively disquieting. With the
+other three figures, the perception of their form is attended with a
+kind of pleasure. Whereas the first figure is without form and is
+meaningless, each of the second group exhibits harmony, balance,
+proportion, interrelation of parts: each is perceived to be a whole.
+Although experience itself comes to men in fragments and
+seemingly without order, yet the human mind is so constituted as to
+require that an idea or a truth be shown to be a whole before the
+mind can comprehend it In considering the element of balance, it
+should be noted, as illustrated by Figure IV., that balance is not
+necessarily perfect symmetry. A Gothic cathedral is beautiful no less
+than a Greek temple. In a painting of a landscape, for example, it is
+necessary simply that the masses and the tones stand in balancing
+relation; the perfect symmetry of geometric exactness, characteristic
+of Hellenic and Renaissance art, is not required. In the work which
+embodies the artist's perception of the universal harmony, there must
+be rhythm, order, unity in variety; so framed it becomes expressive
+and significant
+
+As the symbol of beauty, the work of art is itself beautiful in that it
+manifests in itself that wholeness and integrity which is beauty.
+Every work of art is informed by a controlling design; it
+subordinates manifold details to a definite whole; it reduces and
+adjusts its parts to an all-inclusive, perceptible unity. The
+Nuremberg key must have some sort of rhythm; the rug or vestment
+must exhibit a pattern which can be seen to be a whole; the canvas
+must show balance in the composition, and the color must be "in
+tone." In any work of art there must be design and purpose.
+
+In nature there is much which to the limited perception of men does
+not appear to be beautiful, for there is much that does not manifest
+superficially the necessary harmony. The landscape at noonday
+under the blaze of the relentless sun discloses many things which are
+seemingly incongruous with one another. The dull vision of men
+cannot penetrate to the unity underlying it all. At twilight, as the
+shadows of evening wrap it round, the same landscape is invested
+with mysterious beauty. Conflicting details are lost, harsh outlines
+are softened and merged, discordant colors are mellowed and
+attuned. Nature has brought her field and hill and clustered
+dwellings into "tone." So the artist, who has perceived a harmony
+where the common eye saw it not, selects; he suppresses here,
+strengthens there, fuses, and brings all into unity.
+
+Harmony wherever perceived is beauty. Beauty made manifest by
+the agency of the human spirit is art. Art, in order to reveal this
+harmony to men, must work through selection, through rejection and
+emphasis, through interpretation. It is not difficult to understand,
+then, that the exact reproduction of the facts of the external world is
+not in a true sense art.
+
+The photograph, which is the most exact method of reproducing
+outward aspect, is denied the title of a work of art; that is, the
+photograph direct, which has not been retouched. To be sure, the
+photograph is the product of a mechanical process, and is not, except
+incidentally, the result of human skill. Another kind of reproduction
+of outward aspect, however, virtually exact, which does show the
+evidence of human skill, is yet not entitled to rank as art,--the
+imitative or deceptive picture. Photograph and picture are ruled out
+equally on the one count. Neither selects.
+
+In an exhibition of paintings were once displayed two panels
+precisely similar in appearance, presenting an army coat and cap, a
+sabre and a canteen. At a distance there was no point of difference in
+the two. A nearer view disclosed the fact that on one panel the
+objects were real and that the other panel was painted. The beholder
+was pleased by the exhibition of the painter's skill; but in so far as
+the work did not reveal a significance or beauty in these objects
+which the artist had seen and the beholder had not, it fell short of
+being a work of art Just as the key of the Nuremberg craftsman was
+a work of art in that it was for him the expression, the rendering
+actual, of a new beauty it was given him to conceive, so only that is
+art which makes manifest a beauty that is new, a beauty that is truly
+born of the artist's own spirit. The repetition of existing forms with
+no modification by the individual workman is not creation, but
+imitation; and imitation is manufacture, not art. Inasmuch as the two
+panels could not be distinguished, the presentment signified no more
+than the reality. Tried as a work of art, the imitative picture, in
+common with the photograph, lacks the necessary element of
+interpretation, of revelation. That the representation may become art,
+there must be added to it some new attribute or quality born of the
+artist's spirit. The work must take on new meaning.
+
+As lending his work significance of an obvious sort, a significance
+not necessarily "pictorial," the painter might see in the objects some
+story they have to tell. The plaster of the garret wall where they are
+hanging he may show to be cracked; that tear in the coat speaks of
+faithful service, but the coat hangs limp and dusty now; the
+inscription on the canteen is almost obliterated, and the strap is
+broken; the sabre, which shows the marks of stern usage along its
+blade, is spotted with rust: the whole composition means Trusty
+Servants in Neglect. By the emphasis of certain aspects he picture is
+made to signify more than he mere objects themselves, wherein
+there was nothing salient. The meaning is imposed upon them or
+drawn out of them by he artist. Or again, the painter may see in
+these things the expression for him of a harmony which he can
+manifest by the arrangement of line and color, and he so disposes his
+material as to make that harmony visible. It is, then, not the crude
+fact which the artist transcribes, but rather some feeling he has
+toward the fact. By selection, by adjustment, he gives this special
+aspect of the fact emphasis and relief. In virtue of his interpretation
+the picture acquires a significance that is new; it gives the beholder a
+pleasure which the fact itself did not give, and thus it passes over
+into the domain of art.
+
+The purpose of art is not the reproduction of a beautiful object, but
+the expression in objective form of a beautiful idea. A plaster cast of
+a hand, however comely the hand may be, is not a work of art. As
+with the photograph, the work involves only incidentally the
+exercise of human skill. But that is not all. In order to render the
+work in the spirit of art, the sculptor must model, not the hand, but
+his sense of the hand; he must draw out and express its character, its
+significance. To him it is not a certain form in bone and flesh; to him
+it means grace, delicacy, sensitiveness, or perhaps resolution,
+strength, force. As the material symbol of his idea of the hand, he
+will select and make salient such lines and contours as are
+expressive to him of that character.
+
+Indeed, so little depends upon the exact subject represented and so
+much upon the artist's feeling toward it, so much depends upon the
+spirit of the rendering, that the representation of a subject
+uninteresting or even "ugly" in itself may be beautiful. In the art of
+literature, the _subject_ is drawn from the life of man. The material
+of the poem, the novel, the drama, is furnished by man's total
+experience, the sum of his sensations, impressions, emotions, and
+the events in which he is concerned. But experience crowds in upon
+him at every point, without order and without relation; the daily
+round of living is for most men a humdrum thing. Yet it is just this
+rudimentary and undistinguished mass of experience which is
+transmuted into literature; by the alchemy of art the representation
+of that which is without interest becomes interesting. And it happens
+on this wise. Life is humdrum only in so far as it is meaningless;
+men can endure any amount drudgery and monotony provided that it
+lead somewhere, that they perceive its relation to a larger unity
+which is the total of life. As part of a whole which can be
+apprehended, immediately it acquires purpose and becomes
+significant. It is the sense of meaning in life which gives color and
+warmth to the march of uniform days. So the literary artist shapes
+his inchoate material to a definite end; out of the limitless complex
+details at his command, he selects such passages of background,
+such incidents, and such traits of character as make for the setting
+forth of the idea he has conceived. Clearly the artist cannot use
+everything, clearly he does not aim to reproduce the fact: there are
+abridgments and suppressions, as there are accent and emphasis. The
+finished work is a composite, embodying what is essential of many,
+many preliminary studies and sketches, wrought and compiled with
+generous industry. The master is recognized in what he omits; what
+is suppressed is felt but not perceived: the great artist, in the result,
+steps from peak to peak.
+
+     "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
+     At one stride comes the Dark."
+
+Thus with three strokes the master Coleridge depicts the onrush of
+the night over boundless spaces of sky and sea. Within the compass
+of a few lines, Tennyson registers the interminable, empty monotony
+of weary years:
+
+     "No sail from day to day, but every day
+     The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
+     Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
+     The blaze upon the waters to the east;
+     The blaze upon his island overhead;
+     The blaze upon the waters to the west;
+     Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
+     The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
+     The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail."
+
+Thus through selection does the artist work to interpretation. By
+detaching the eternal meaning from the momentary fact, by
+embodying his sense of its significance in such concrete forms as
+symbolize his idea, by investing the single instance with universally
+typical import, then in very truth he represents. Nature is not the
+subject of art; she is the universal treasury from whose infinitely
+various store the artist selects his symbols.
+
+A special method in art may here suggest itself as having for its
+purpose to reproduce the fact in perfect fidelity; the method is called
+_realism._ But a moment's considerate analysis shows that realism is
+only a label for one manner of handling, and in the end comes no
+nearer the object as it "really" is. In its essence realism is the artist's
+personal vision of the fact, exactly as idealism or romanticism or
+impressionism is personal. For after all, what is the reality? A
+chance newsboy is offering his papers on a crowded street corner.
+The fine lady recoils from his filth and from all contact with him;
+the philanthropist sees in him a human being to help and to redeem;
+the philosopher regards him dispassionately as a "social factor," the
+result of heredity and environment; the artist cries out in joy as his
+eye lights upon good stuff to paint. But all the while, which of these
+conceptions figures the "real" newsboy? Not one. For he is all these
+together; and the single observer, whatever his bias, cannot
+apprehend him at every point. Any attempt to represent him involves
+selection and interpretation, the suppression of some traits in order
+to emphasize others, which are the special aspects that have
+impressed the given observer. So there is no essential realism. The
+term applies to the method of those who choose to render what is
+less comforting in life, who insist on those characteristics of things
+which men call ugly. In realism, just as truly as in any other kind of
+treatment, is expressed the personality of the artist, his own peculiar
+way of envisaging the world.
+
+A work of art is born of the artist's desire to express his joy in some
+new aspect of the universal harmony which has been disclosed to
+him. The mission of art is through interpretation to reveal. It
+happens sometimes that a visitor at an exhibition of paintings is
+shocked by a picture which seems to him for the moment impossible,
+because so far beyond the range of his experience; yet withal he
+finds himself attracted by it and he returns to study it. It is not many
+days before his glance is arrested by that very effect in nature, and
+he says, "Why, that is like that picture!" It was the artist who first
+saw it and who taught him to see it for himself. When one observes
+an effect in nature or in life that one calls "a Corot" or "a Whistler,"
+one means that to Corot or to Whistler is due the glory of
+discovering that fuller beauty and revealing it. Browning makes Fra
+Lippo Lippi say:
+
+          "We're made so that we love
+     First when we see them painted, things we have passed
+     Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
+     And so they are better, painted--better to us,
+     Which is the same thing. Art was given for that."
+
+This revealing power of art is not restricted to the individual
+appreciator. It is said that the French are an artistic people and that
+Americans are not. The explanation is that for generations the artists
+of France have been discovering to their countrymen the beauty that
+is around them at their very door, and have taught them to appreciate
+it. The Americans will be an artistic people when our artists shall
+have done the like for us. When there shall have been for
+generations a truly native American art, there will be a public to
+understand and to appreciate. So it is that everywhere the high
+function of art is to reveal. As a friend, more sensitive and more
+enthusiastic, with whom we are strolling, points out to us many
+beauties by the wayside or in trees and sky, so the artist takes us by
+the hand and leads us out into life, indicating for us a harmony to
+which we were blind before. Burdened with affairs and the daily
+round, we had not thought to look off and out to the spreading
+meadows tossing into hills which roll upward into the blue heaven
+beyond.
+
+The beauty thus revealed is a beauty which the artist has
+apprehended in spirit and which he would make actual. A work of
+art is the expression of an aspiration. The crude and tawdry images
+of the Madonna Set in the roadside cross are just as truly a work of
+art as the rapt saints of Giotto or the perfect Madonnas of Raphael in
+so far as they are expressive of what those poor, devout souls who
+fashioned them felt of worship and of love. After all, the difference
+is that Giotto felt more than they, Raphael was endowed with more
+accomplished powers of expression. The work receives its import as
+it is the faithful utterance of him who shaped it, as it is genuinely the
+realization of his ideal. "The gift without the giver is bare." But it is
+no less true that the gift without the receiver is sterile and void, for
+art involves not only its creator's intention but also its message to
+him whom the work reaches. In a book, it is not only what the writer
+says that makes its significance but also what the reader thinks as he
+reads. In so far as any man finds in picture or poem or song a new
+beauty, a fuller sense of harmony than was his before, for him that is
+a work of art.
+
+Thus the standard by which art is to be tried is relative. For its
+creator, the work is art in that it embodies a perception of new
+harmony that is peculiarly his. In the material result, this special
+character is imparted to the work by the artist's instinctive selection.
+No two painters, though equipped with equal technical skill and
+perhaps of like tastes and preferences, would or indeed could render
+the same sweep of landscape in precisely similar fashion. Obviously,
+to set down everything were at once an impossibility and an untruth,
+for the detail of nature is infinite and the beholder does not see
+everything. Each is bound to select such details as impress him, and
+his selection will be determined by the way in which he as a unique
+personality, an individual different from every other man in the
+whole wide universe, feels about the bit of nature before him. In
+expressing by his special medium what he feels about the landscape,
+he aims, in the selection of material form and color, to detach and
+render visible what of essential truth the landscape means to him, to
+purge it of accidents, and register its eternal beauty. The painter will
+not attempt, then, to reproduce the physical facts of nature,--the
+topography, geology, botany, of the landscape,--but rather through
+those facts in terms of color and form he tries to render its
+_expression:_ its quality, as brilliance, tenderness; its mood, as joy,
+mystery, setting down those salient aspects of it which combine to
+give it character and meaning. For landscape--to recall the
+exposition of a preceding page--has its expression as truly as the
+human face. A man knows his friends not by the shape of the nose
+or the color of the eyes, but by the character which these features
+express, the personality which shines in the face and radiates from it
+This effluence of the soul within is the essential man; people call it
+the "expression." As with human life, so with the many aspects of
+nature. External traits are merged in the spiritual meaning. The
+material forms have the power of affecting the spirit thus or so; and
+in man's reaction on his universe they come to take on a symbolic
+emotional significance. Each manifestation of nature arouses in the
+artist, more or less consciously on his part, some feeling toward it:
+he cares, then, to represent these external material forms, whether a
+flower, a landscape, a human face, only because there is in them
+something in which he delights; he fashions the work of art in praise
+of the thing he loves. To the clever technician who imitatively paints
+the flower as he knows it to be,
+
+     "A primrose on the river's brim
+     A yellow primrose is to him
+          And it is nothing more."
+
+But to the artist
+
+          "The meanest flower that blows can give
+     Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
+
+And it is these thoughts that he cares to express and not the visible
+truth about the flower. A writer was walking along the streets of
+Paris on a day in early March.
+
+"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I
+had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon
+a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of
+desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness
+destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of
+the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great
+or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what
+secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless
+beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this
+immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will
+contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it
+would seem that nature has not made."
+
+And if Senancour had set himself to paint his jonquil as he has
+written about it, how that tender flower would have been
+transfigured and glorified!
+
+What the artist aims to render is not the rose but the beauty of the
+rose, his sense of one chord in the universal harmony which the rose
+sounds for him, not that only, but the beauty of all roses that ever
+were or ever shall be; and inevitably he will select such colors and
+such lines as bring that special and interpreted beauty into relief, and
+so make manifest to the beholder what was revealed to his own
+higher vision, by virtue of which, and not because of any
+exceptional technical skill, he is an artist.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ART AND APPRECIATION
+
+It may be that some reader of the foregoing pages will attempt to
+apply the principles therein set forth to the pictures shown in the
+next exhibition he happens to attend. It is more than probable that in
+his first efforts he will be disappointed. For the principles discussed
+have dealt with art in its authentic manifestations; and not every
+painter is an artist, not every picture is a work of art.
+
+At the very outset it should be said that an exhibition of paintings as
+ordinarily made up is confusing and wholly illogical. We may
+suppose that a volume to be read through in one sitting of two hours
+is placed in the hands of an intelligent reader. The book consists of
+essays, poems, short stories, and dramatic dialogue, each within the
+compass of a few pages, each contributed by a different writer as an
+example of his work for the year. We may suppose now that the
+reader is asked to gather from this volume, read hastily and either
+superficially or in random bits, some idea of the significance of each
+author and of the import and scope of contemporary American
+literature. Is it a fair test? This volume, we may further suppose, is
+practically the only means by which the writer can get his work
+before the public. A public means a purchaser, and of course the
+writer must live. Is it reasonable to think that every number
+contributed to such a volume will be a work of art, wrought with
+singleness of heart and in loving devotion to an ideal? There are still
+with us those who "work for money" and those who "work for
+fame." There are those who believe in "giving the public what it
+wants," and the numbers they contribute to the yearly volumes are
+samples of the sort of thing they do, from which the public may
+order. In the table of contents stand celebrated names; and to the
+work of such men, perhaps, will turn the seeker after what he thinks
+ought to be the best, not realizing that these are the men who have
+known how to "give the people what they want," that the people do
+not always want the good and right thing, and that it is somewhat the
+habit of genius to dispense with contemporary recognition. If there
+is here or there in the book an essay or a poem the product of
+thought and effort and offered in all seriousness, how little chance it
+has of being appreciated, except by a few, even if it is remarked at
+all in the jumble of miscellaneous contributions.
+
+This hypothetical volume is a fair parallel of an annual exhibition of
+paintings. In such an exhibition the number of works of art, the true,
+inevitable expression of a new message, is relatively small. The
+most celebrated and most popular painters are not necessarily by
+that fact great artists, or indeed artists at all. Contemporary judgment
+is notoriously liable to go astray. The gods of one generation are
+often the laughing stock of the next; the idols of the fathers are torn
+down and trampled under foot by the children. Some spirits there
+have been of liberal promise who have not been able to withstand
+the demands made upon them by early popular approval. Such is the
+struggle and soul's tragedy which is studied convincingly in Mr.
+Zangwill's novel, "The Master." No assault on the artist's integrity is
+so insidious as immediate favor, which in its turn begets the fatal
+desire to please.
+
+To the "successful" painters, however, are for the most part accorded
+the places of honor on academy walls. The canvases of these men
+are seen first by the visitor; but they are not all. There are other
+pictures which promise neither better nor worse. Here are paintings
+of merit, good in color and good in drawing, but empty of any
+meaning. Scattered through the exhibition are the works of a group
+of able men, imitating themselves, each trying to outdo the others by
+a display of cleverness in solving some "painter's problem" or by
+some startling effect of subject or handling. But it is a sad day for
+any artist when he ceases to find his impulse and inspiration either
+in his own spirit or in nature, and when he looks to his fellow
+craftsmen for the motive of his work. Again, there are pictures by
+men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have caught the
+manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it
+was simply intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism
+and turn out a product which people do not distinguish from the
+authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and prophet,
+the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor,
+writer, is a very human being.
+
+As he looks over these walls, clamorous of the commonplace and
+the commercial, the seeker after what is good and true in art realizes
+how very few of these pictures have been rendered in the spirit of
+love and joy. The painter has one eye on his object and one eye on
+the public; and too often, as a distinguished actor once said of the
+stage manager whose vision is divided between art and the box
+office, the painter is a one-eyed man.
+
+A painter once refused to find anything to interest him, still less to
+move him, in a silent street with a noble spire detaching itself
+vaguely from the luminous blue depths of a midnight sky, because,
+he said, "People won't buy dark things, so what's the use? You might
+as well do bright, pretty things that they will buy, and that are just as
+easy to make." A portrait-painter gives up landscape subjects
+because, as he does not hesitate to declare, it hurts his business. And
+the painters themselves are not altogether to blame for this attitude
+towards their work. The fault lies half with the people who buy
+pictures, having the money, and who have not a gleam of
+understanding of the meaning of art. A woman who had ordered her
+house to be furnished and decorated expensively, remarked
+to a caller who commented on a water-color hanging in the
+drawing-room: "Yes, I think it matches the wall-paper very nicely." When
+such is the purpose of those who paint pictures and such is the
+understanding of those who buy them, it is not surprising that not
+every picture is inevitably a work of art.
+
+But what is the poor seeker after art to do? The case is by no means
+hopeless. In current exhibitions a few canvases strike a new note;
+and by senses delicately attuned this note can be distinguished
+within the jangle of far louder and popular tunes ground out, as it
+were, by the street-piano. Seriously to study contemporary painting,
+however, the logical opportunity is furnished by the exhibitions of
+the works of single men or of small groups. As the reader who
+wishes to understand an author or perhaps a school does not content
+himself with random extracts, but instead isolates the man for the
+moment and reads his work consecutively and one book in its
+relation to his others; so the student of pictures can appreciate the
+work and understand the significance of a given painter only as he
+sees a number of his canvases together and in relation. So, he is able
+to gather something of the man's total meaning.
+
+Widely different from annual exhibitions, too, are galleries and
+museums; for here the proportion of really good things is
+immeasurably larger. In the study of masterpieces, it need hardly be
+said, the amateur may exercise judgment and moderation. He should
+not try to do too much at one time, for he can truly appreciate only
+as he enters fully into the spirit of the work and allows it to possess
+him. To achieve this sympathy and understanding within the same
+hour for more than a very few great works is manifestly impossible.
+Such appreciation involves fundamentally a quick sensitiveness to
+the appeal and the variously expressive power of color and line and
+form. To win from the picture its fullest meaning, the observer may
+bring to bear some knowledge of the artist who produced it and of
+the age and conditions in which he lived. But in the end he must
+surrender himself to the work of art, bringing to it his intellectual
+equipment, his store of sensuous and emotional experience, his
+entire power of being moved.
+
+For when all is said, there is no single invariable standard by which
+to try a work of art: its significance to the appreciator rests upon his
+capacity at the moment to receive it. "A jest's prosperity lies in the
+ear of him that hears it." The appreciator need simply ask himself,
+"What has this work to reveal to me of beauty that I have not
+perceived for myself? I shall not look for the pretty and the
+agreeable. But what of new significance, energy, life, has this work
+to express to me? I will accept no man entirely and unquestioningly,
+I will condemn no one unheard. No man has the whole truth; every
+man has some measure of the truth, however small. Let it be my task
+to find it and to separate it from what is unessential and false. In my
+search for what is true, I will conserve my integrity and maintain my
+independence. And I shall recognize my own wherever I may find
+it."
+
+"Man is the measure of all things," declared an ancient philosopher.
+And his teaching has not been superseded to-day. The individual is
+the creator of his own universe; he is the focus of the currents and
+forces of his world. The meaning of all things is subjective. So the
+measure of beauty in life for a man is determined by his capacity to
+receive and understand. Thus it is that a man's joy in experience and
+his appreciation of art in any of its manifestations are conditioned by
+the opportunity that nature or art furnishes for his spirit to exercise
+itself. In the reading of poetry, for example, we seek the expression
+of ourselves. Our first emotion is, perhaps, a simple, unreflecting
+delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or
+that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a
+delight wholly physical,--pure sensation. A quick taking of the
+breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only
+expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an
+abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which
+we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of
+the Apollo Belvedere. We know simply that we are pleased. But
+after nerves have ceased to tingle so acutely, we begin to think; and
+we seek to give account to ourselves of the beauty which for the
+moment we could but feel. Once arrived at the attitude of reflection,
+we find that the poetry which affects us most and to which we
+oftenest return is the poetry that contains the record of our own
+experience, but heightened, the poetry which expresses our desires
+and aspirations, that in which we recognize ourselves elevated and
+idealized. In so far as we see in it the ennobled image of our own
+nature, so far it has power to hold us and to stir us.
+
+An elementary manifestation of the tendency to seek in art the
+record of our own experience is seen in the popularity of those
+pictures whose subjects are familiar and can be immediately
+recognized. On a studio wall was once hanging a "Study of Brush,"
+showing the play of sunlight through quivering leaves. A visitor
+asked the painter why he did not put some chickens in the
+foreground. To her the canvas was meaningless, for she had never
+seen, had never really seen, the sunlight dancing on burnished leaves.
+The chickens, which she had seen and could recognize, were the
+element of the familiar she required in order to find any significance
+in the picture.
+
+This tendency, of which the demand for chickens is a rudimentary
+manifestation, is the basis of all appreciation. The artist's revelation
+of the import of life we can receive and understand only as we have
+felt a little of that import for ourselves. Color is meaningless to a
+blind man, music does not exist for the deaf. To him who has never
+opened his eyes to behold the beauty of field and hill and trees and
+sky, to him whose spirit has not dimly apprehended something of
+that eternal significance of which these things are the material
+visible bodying forth, to such a the work of the master is only so
+much paint and canvas. The task of the appreciator, then, is to
+develop his capacity to receive and enjoy.
+
+That capacity is to be trained by the exercise of itself. Each new
+harmony which he is enabled to perceive intensifies his power to
+feel and widens the range of his vision. The more beauty he
+apprehends in the world, so much the more of universal forces he
+brings into unity with his own personality. By this extension of his
+spirit he reaches out and becomes merged in the all-embracing life.
+
+If the conception be true that a supreme unity, linking all seemingly
+chaotic details, ultimately brings them into order, and that this unity,
+which is spiritual, penetrates every atom of matter, fusing everything
+and making all things one; then the appreciator will realize that the
+significance of art is for the spirit The beauty which the artist reveals
+is but the harmony which underlies the universal order; and he in his
+turn must apprehend that beauty spiritually.
+
+From this truth it follows that the condition of aesthetic enjoyment,
+or in other words the appreciation of beauty, is detachment of spirit
+and remoteness from practical consequences. The classic illustration
+of the truth is the saying of Lucretius, that it is sublime to stand on
+the shore and behold a shipwreck. It is sublime only as one's
+personal interests and feelings are not engaged. It would not be
+sublime if it were possible for the spectator to aid in averting the
+catastrophe; it would not be sublime if one's friends were aboard the
+ship. One is able to appreciate beauty only as one is able to detach
+one's self from what is immediate and practical, and by virtue of this
+detachment, to apprehend the spiritual significance. The sublimity of
+the shipwreck lies in what it expresses of the impersonal might of
+elemental forces and man's impotence in the struggle against nature.
+That sublimity, which is one manifestation of beauty, is of the spirit,
+and by the spirit it must be apprehended.
+
+To illustrate this truth by a few homely examples. A farmer looking
+out on his fields of tossing wheat, drenched in golden sunlight,
+exclaims, "Look, isn't that beautiful!" What he really means is: "See
+there the promise of a rich harvest, and it is mine." If the fields
+belonged to his neighbor, his feelings towards them would be quite
+different. No, their _beauty_ is to be seen and felt only by him
+whose mind is free of thoughts of personal enrichment and who thus
+can perceive the harmony with life of golden sunshine and nature's
+abundant gifts. The farmer could not see beyond the material and its
+value to him as material. But beauty lies deeper than that, for it is
+the expression of spiritual relations.
+
+Two men are riding together in a railway carriage. As the train
+draws into a city, they pass a little group of tumble-down houses,
+brown and gray, a heap of corners thrown together. One man thinks:
+"What dreary lives these people must lead who dwell there." The
+other, with no such stirring of the sympathy, sees a wonderful
+"scheme" in grays and browns, or an expressive composition or
+ordering of line. Neither could think the thoughts of the other at the
+same time with his own. One feels a practical and physical reaction,
+and he cannot therefore at that moment penetrate to the meaning of
+these things for the spirit; and that meaning is the harmony which
+they express.
+
+From the tangle of daily living with its conflict of interests and its
+burden of practical needs, the appreciator turns to art with its power
+to chasten and to tranquillize. In art, he finds the revelation in fuller
+measure of a beauty which he has felt but vaguely. He realizes that
+underlying the external chaos of immediate practical experience
+rests a supreme and satisfying order. Of that order he can here and
+now perceive but little, hemmed in as he is by the material world,
+whose meaning he discerns as through a glass, darkly. Yet he keeps
+resolutely on his way, secure in his kinship with the eternal spirit,
+and rewarded by momentary glimpses of the "broken arcs" which he
+knows will in the end take their appointed places in the "perfect
+round."
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ARTIST
+
+Out of chaos, order. Man's life on the earth is finite and fragmentary,
+but it is the constant effort of his spirit to bring the scattering details
+of momentary experience into an enduring harmony with his
+personality and with that supreme unity of which he is a part.
+
+The man who out of the complex disarray of his little world effects a
+new harmony is an artist. He who fashioned the first cup, shaping it
+according to his ideal,--for no prototype existed,--and in response to
+his needs; he who, taking this elementary form, wrought upon it
+with his fingers and embellished it according to his ideal and in
+response to his need of expressing himself; he, again, who out of the
+same need for expression adds to the cup anything new: each of
+these workmen is an artist. The reproduction of already existing
+forms, with no modification by the individual workman, is not art.
+So, for example, only that painter is an artist who adds to his
+representation of the visible world some new attribute or quality
+born of his own spirit Primitive artisan, craftsman, painter, each
+creates in that he reveals and makes actual some part, which before
+was but potential, of the all-embracing life.
+
+As the artist, then, wins new reaches of experience and brings them
+into unity, he reveals new beauty, new to men yet world-old. For the
+harmony which he effects is new only in the sense that it was not
+before perceived. As, in the physical universe, not an atom of matter
+through the ages is created or destroyed, so the supreme spiritual life
+is constant in its sum and complete. Of this life individuals partake
+in varying measure; their growth is determined by how much of it
+they make their own. The growth of the soul in this sense is not
+different from man's experience of the physical world. The child is
+born: he grows up into his family; the circle widens to include
+neighbors and the community; the circle widens again as the boy
+goes away to school and then to college. With ever-widening sweep
+the outermost bound recedes, though still embracing him, as he
+reaches out to Europe and at length compasses the earth, conquering
+experience and bringing its treasures into tribute to his own spirit.
+The things were there; but for the boy each was in turn created as he
+made it his own. So the artist, revealing new aspects of the supreme
+unity, creates in the sense that he makes possible for his fellows a
+fuller taking-up of this life into themselves.
+
+It may be said that he is the greatest artist who has felt the most of
+harmony in life,--the greatest artist but potentially. The beauty he
+has perceived must in accordance with our human needs find
+expression concretely, because it is only as he manifests himself in
+forms which we can understand that we are able to recognize him.
+Though a mute, inglorious Milton were Milton still, yet our human
+limitations demand his utterance that we may know him. So the
+artist accomplishes his mission when he communicates himself. The
+human spirit is able to bring the supreme life into unity with itself
+according to the measure of its own growth made possible through
+expression.
+
+The supreme life, of which every created thing partakes,--the stone,
+the flower, the animal, and man,--is beauty, because it is the
+supreme harmony wherein everything has its place in relation to
+every other thing. This central unity has its existence in expression.
+The round earth, broken off from the stellar system and whirling
+along its little orbit through space, is yet ever in communication
+with the great system; the tree, with its roots in the earth, puts forth
+branches, the branches expand into twigs, the twigs burst into leaves
+whose veins reach out into the air; out of the twigs spring buds
+swelling into blossoms, the blossoms ripen into fruit, the fruit drops
+seed into the earth which gave it and springs up into new trees. The
+tree by its growth, which is the putting forth of itself or expression,
+develops needs, these needs are satisfied, and the satisfying of the
+needs is the condition of its continued expansion.
+
+Man, too, has his existence in expression. By growth through
+expression, which is the creation of a new need, he is enabled to take
+up more into himself; he brings more into the unity of his
+personality, and thus he expands into the universal harmony.
+
+The unity which underlies the cosmos--to define once more the
+conception which is the basis of the preceding chapters--is of the
+spirit. The material world which we see and touch is but the symbol
+and bodying forth of spiritual relations. The tranquillizing, satisfying
+power of art is due to the revelation which art accomplishes of a
+spiritual harmony which transcends the seeming chaos of instant
+experience. So it comes about that harmony, or beauty, which is of
+the spirit, is apprehended by the spirit. That faculty in the artist by
+which he is able to perceive beauty is called _temperament._ By
+temperament is to be understood the receptive faculty, the power to
+feel, the capacity for sensations, emotions, and "such intellectual
+apprehensions as, in strength and directness and their immediately
+realized values at the bar of an actual experience, are most like
+sensations." The function of temperament is to receive and to
+transmit, to interpret, to create in the sense that it reveals. In the
+result it is felt to be present only as the medium through which the
+forces behind it come to expression.
+
+Art, the human spirit, temperament,--these terms are general and
+abstract. Now the abstract to be realized must be made concrete. Just
+as art, in order to be manifest, must be embodied in the particular
+work, as the statue, the picture, the building, the drama, the
+symphony, so the human spirit becomes operative in the person of
+the individual, and temperament may be best studied in the character
+of the individual artist.
+
+As temperament is the receptive faculty, the artist's attitude toward
+life is what Wordsworth called "wise passiveness,"--Wordsworth,
+the poet of "impassioned contemplation." Keats, too,--and among
+the poets, whose vision of beauty was more beautiful, whose grasp
+on the truth more true?--characterizes himself as "addicted to
+passiveness." It is of temperament that Keats is writing when he says
+in a letter: "That quality which goes to form a man of achievement,
+especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so
+enormously, is _Negative Capability_ ." In another letter he writes:--
+
+"It has been an old comparison for our urging on--the Beehive;
+however, it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the
+Bee--for it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving than
+giving--no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. The
+flower, I doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the Bee--its leaves
+blush deeper in the next spring--and who shall say between Man and
+Woman which is the most delighted? Now it is more noble to sit like
+Jove than to fly like Mercury--let us not therefore go hurrying about
+and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently
+from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our
+leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive--budding patiently
+under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect
+that favours us with a visit--sap will be given us for meat and dew
+for drink. . . .
+
+         "O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
+         And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
+         O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
+         And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
+         At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
+         And he's awake who thinks himself asleep."
+
+Still again he says: "The Genius of Poetry must work out its own
+salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
+sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must
+create itself."
+
+A nature so constituted, a nature receptive and passive, is
+necessarily withdrawn from practical affairs. To revert to Keats as
+an example, for Keats is so wholly the artist, it is his remoteness
+from the daily life about him that makes him the man of no one
+country or time. His poetry has a kind of universality, but
+universality within a definite sphere, and that sphere is the world of
+things lovely and fair. In a playful mood Keats writes to his sister:
+"Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little
+music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know . . . and I can
+pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat
+Regent or the Duke of Wellington." These are trivial words; but they
+serve to define in some measure the artistic temperament.
+
+For this characteristic remoteness from affairs the artist is sometimes
+reproached by those who pin their faith to material things. Such are
+not aware that for the artist the only reality is the life of the spirit.
+The artist, as Carlyle says of the Man of Letters, "lives in the inward
+sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists
+always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in
+that." Temperament constitutes the whole moral nature of the artist.
+"With a great poet," says Keats, "the sense of beauty overcomes
+every consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." It is the
+standard which measures the worth of any act. It is conscience, too;
+for the functions performed by conscience in the normal moral life
+of the man of action are fulfilled by the artist's devotion to his ideal;
+his service to his art is his sole and sufficient obligation.
+
+And where the man of action looks to find his rewards in the
+approval of his fellow men, the artist cares to please himself. The
+very act of expressing is itself the joy and the reward. To this truth
+Keats again stands as witness: "I feel assured," he says, "I should
+write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful,
+even if my night's labours should be burnt every Morning and no
+eye ever shine upon them." And still again: "I value more the
+privilege of seeing great things in loneliness than the fame of a
+prophet." Not that the artist does not crave appreciation. His
+message fails of completeness if there is no ear to hear it, if it does
+not meet a sympathy which understands. But the true artist removes
+all shadow of petty vanity and becomes, in Whitman's phrase, "the
+free channel of himself." He is but the medium through whom the
+spirit of beauty reveals itself; in thankfulness and praise he but
+receives and transmits. That it is given him to see beauty and to
+interpret it is enough.
+
+It is by virtue of his power to feel that the artist is able to apprehend
+beauty; his temperament is ever responsive to new harmonies. By
+force of his imagination, which is one function of his temperament,
+he sends his spirit into other lives, absorbs their experience and
+makes it his own, and ultimately identifies himself with world forces
+and becomes creator. In a lyric passage in a letter Keats exclaims:--
+
+"The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the
+more divided and minute domestic happiness. . . . I feel more and
+more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in
+this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone
+than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my
+Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard--then
+'Tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' According to my
+state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with
+Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into
+Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul upon the
+Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a
+voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be  alone."
+
+This power to penetrate and to identify was exercised with peculiar
+directness and plenitude by Walt Whitman, prophet of the
+omnipotence of man. To find the burden of his message formulated
+in the single phrase one may turn to his Poems quite at random.
+
+     "My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the
+          whole earth."
+     "I inhale great draughts of space,--
+     The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are
+          mine.
+     . . . . .
+     All seems beautiful to me."
+
+Of the artist may be affirmed what Whitman affirms of the
+Answerer:--
+
+     "Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and
+          tongue,
+     He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men,
+          and any man translates, and any man translates himself also,
+     One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he
+          sees how they join."
+
+As the artist sends out his spirit through the world, as he becomes
+the channel of universal and divine influences, so he is admitted to
+new and ever new revelations of beauty. And stirred by the glorious
+vision, he brings that beauty to earth, communicating it to his
+fellows and making them partakers of it, as he gives his feeling
+expression. Thus finding utterance as the prophet of God, he
+consummates his mission and takes his place in the world order.
+Herein he has his being, for life is expression; and each new
+harmony which he makes manifest is the medium of his fuller
+identification with the universal life.
+
+So it is that the artist is the supreme interpreter, the mediator
+between man and beauty. His work is a work of joy, of gratitude, of
+worship. He is the happy servant of God, His prophet, through
+whom He declares Himself to the children of men.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes
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