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.

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.