Carleton Eldredge Noyes

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”