Carleton Eldredge Noyes

“ Thus the painter who sees beyond the merely intellectual and sensuous appeal of his subject and enters into its spirit, tries to render on his canvas, not the actual color of nature, but the sensation of color and its value for the emotions. With the material splendor of nature,—her inexhaustible lavish wealth of color, the glory of life which throbs through creation, the mystery of actual movement,—art cannot compete. For the hues and tones of nature, infinite in number and subtlety, the painter has only the few notes within the poor gamut of his palette. ”

“ Experience is a swing of the pendulum between the momentary ecstasy of immediate contact and the subsequent reaction upon the moment, which is consciousness of it. In order to make his vision actual, the artist rises out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. The landscape has compelled him; it is now he who must compel the landscape. To the shaping of his work he must bring to bear all his conscious power of selection and organization and all his knowledge of the capabilities and resources of his means. Art springs out of emotion; painting is a science. ”

“ The statue is not only presentation but representation. It figures forth a youth, David, the Hebrew shepherd-boy, and he stands awaiting the Philistine. I have read his story, I have my own mental image of him, and about his personality cluster many thoughts. To what Michelangelo shows me I add what I already know. Recognition, memory, knowledge, facts and ideas, a whole store of associations allied with my previous experience, mingle with my instant emotion in its presence. The sculptor, unlike the potter, has not created his own form; the subject of his work exists outside of him in nature. ”

“ As the meaning of art is not the material thing which it calls into form, but what the work expresses of life, so in order to appreciate art it is necessary to appreciate life, which is the inspiration of art and its fulfillment. To appreciate life is to send out our being into experience and to feel,—to realize in terms of emotion our identity with the great universe outside of us, this world of color and form and sound and movement, this web of illimitable activities and energies, shot through with currents of endlessly varied and modulated feeling. ”

“ A man of special sensitiveness to the appeal of color and form finds himself also in the open. He is weary with the way, which shows but broken glimpses of the road. His spirit, heavy with the "burden of the mystery," is torn by conflict and confusion. As he looks across the stony places to the gnarled and weather-tortured trees beyond, and up to the clouds piling black above him, there is revealed to him a sudden harmony among the discords; an inner principle, apprehended by his imagination, compels the fragments of the seeming chaos into a regnant order. ”

“ The significance of a work of representative art depends not upon the subject in and of itself, but upon what the artist has to say about it. A rose may be made to reveal the cosmos; a mountain range or cloud-swept spaces of the upper air may be niggled into meanness. The ugly in practical life may be transfigured by the artist's touch into supreme beauty. "Il faut pouvoir faire servir le trivial à l'expression du sublime, c'est la vraie force," said one who was able to invest a humble figure with august dignity. ”

“ In myself I feel and live the spring. My joy in the tree, therefore, does not end with the sight of its gray trunk and interwoven branches and its gleaming play of leaves: there my joy only begins, and it comes to its fulfillment as I feel the life of the tree to be an expression and extension of the life that is in me. My physical organism responds harmoniously in rhythm with the form of the tree, and so far the tree is pleasing. But, finally, a form is beautiful because it is expressive. "Beauty," said Millet, "does not consist merely in the shape or coloring of a face. ”

“ Admiration is wonder and worship, a sense of the mystery and the beauty of life as we know it now, and thankfulness for it, and joy. Hope is the vision of things to be. And love is the supreme enfolding unity that makes all one. Art is life at its best, but life is the greatest of the arts,—life harmonious, deep in feeling, big in sympathy, the life that is appreciation, responsiveness, and love. ”

“ Because of the essential make-up of man's mind and spirit, powers that are innate and determined by forces still beyond the scope of analysis, the perception of a harmony of relations, which is beauty, is attended with pleasure, a pleasure that is felt and cannot be explained. This inborn, inexplicable delight is at once the origin of the arts of form and the basis of our appreciation. Each art, as the fashioning of objects of use, as decoration, architecture, and music, is governed by its own intrinsic, inherent laws and rests its appeal upon man's pleasure in form. ”

“ Whether it be spring or divine maternity or the beauty of a pagan idea, which Botticelli renders, the same power is there, the same sense of gracious life. Whether it be Credi's naïve womanhood, or Titian's abounding, glorious women and calm and forceful men, or Delia Robbia's joyous children and Donatello's sprites, the same great meaning is expressed, the same appreciation of the goodness and beauty of all life. This beauty is for me, here, to-day. In the experience of a man who thinks and feels, there is a time when his imagination turns toward the past. ”

“ In the experience of us all there are objects and situations which can stir us,—the twilight hour, a group of children at play, the spectacle of the great human crowd, it may be, or solitude under the stars, the works of man as vast cities or cunningly contrived machines, or perhaps it is the mighty, shifting panorama which nature unrolls for us at every instant of day and night, her endless pageant of color and light and shade and form. Out of them at the moment of our contact is unfolded a new significance; because of them life becomes for us larger, deeper. ”

“ He brings to it nothing of his own feeling and power of response. There has been no union of his spirit with the artist's spirit,—that union in which a work of art achieves its consummation. The man at his side, with no knowledge or thought of how the effect has been won, surrenders himself to the illusion. These people on the stage are more intensely and vividly real to him than in life itself; the artist has distilled the significance of the situation and communicates it to him as emotion. The man's reaction is not limited to the exercise of his intellect,—he gives himself. ”

“ The desire for change for the sake of change which we all feel at times, a vague restlessness of mind and body, is only the impulse to growth which has not found its direction. Outside of us we love to see the manifestation of growth. We tend and cherish the little plant in the window; we watch with delight the unfolding of each new leaf and the upward reach into blossom. The spring, bursting triumphant from the silent, winter-stricken earth, is nature's parable of expression, her symbol perennially renewed of the joy of growth. ”

“ His business is his medium of self-expression; his success is the realization of his ideal. A painter does no more than this, though he works with a different material. The landscape which is realized ultimately upon his canvas is the landscape seen in his imagination. He draws his colors and forms from nature around; but he selects his details, adapting them to his end. All accidents and incidents are purged away. Out of the apparent confusion of life rises the evident order of art. And in the completed work the artist's idea stands forth salient and victorious. ”

“ Every man may be an artist in his degree; and every man in his degree can appreciate art. A work of art is the expression of its maker's experience, the expression in such terms that the experience can be communicated to another. The processes of execution involved in fashioning a work, its technique, may be as incomprehensible and perplexed and difficult as its executants choose to make them. Technique is not the same as art. The only mystery of art is the mystery of all life itself. Accept life with its fundamental mysteries, with its wonders and glories, and we have the clue to art. ”

“ But our delight goes beyond any enjoyment of the skill here exhibited, goes beyond even the satisfaction of the senses in its color and composition. What the picture expresses is not merely the visible aspect of this woman, but the painter's own sympathy and appreciation. He saw a beauty in ugliness, a beauty to which we were blind, for he felt the significance of her life, the eternal rightness to herself of what she was. His joy in this inner harmony has transfigured the object and made it beautiful. Beauty penetrates deeper than grace and comeliness ”

“ In the same spirit in which he is a master of his own craft, he is content to leave expert knowledge of art to the expert, to the artist and to the connoisseur. For his part as a layman he remains frankly and happily on the outside. But he feels none the less that art has an interest and a meaning even for him. Though he does not practice any art himself, he knows that he enjoys fine things, a beautiful room, noble buildings, books and plays, statues, pictures, music; and he believes that in his own fashion he is able to appreciate art, I venture to think that he is right. ”

“ Only in so far as art can communicate this sensation, this same impression of the beauty and present reality of life, has it a meaning for us. The painter must have registered his appreciation of immediate reality and must impart that to us until it becomes, heightened and intensified, our own. The secret of successful living lies in compelling the details of our surroundings to our own ends. Michelangelo lived his life; Leonardo lived his; neither could be the other. A man must paint the life that he knows, the experience into which he enters. So we must live our lives immediately and newly. ”