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.