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.