Read Ebook: The Enjoyment of Art by Noyes Carleton Eldredge

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 26 lines and 6393 words, and 1 pages

ly 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet