Art of living

“ Into this moment, eternal in its significance, into this mood, universal in its appeal, we enter, to realize it in ourselves. The subject of picture or statue is but the means; the end is life. Objective fact is transmuted into living truth. Art is the manifestation of a higher reality than we alone have been able to know. It begins with the particular and then transcends it, admitting us to share in the beauty of the world, the cosmic harmony of universal experience. ”

“ We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil. ”

“ It is a living presentment of all traits, shapes, modifications of such, motions, limbs, in which there is nothing without significance and expression, but everything is instinct with life and action, and testifies to the breath, or very pulse of free life itself on the merest glance at the work of art in question; a vitality, however, which essentially makes visible one totality, and only one, is the expression of one content, of one individuality of action. ”

“ Simplicity of life will make you sensitive to the refinement and modesty of scenery, just as inordinate excitement and pomp of daily life will make you enjoy coarse colours and affected forms. Habits of patient comparison and accurate judgment will make your art precious, as they will make your actions wise; and every increase of noble enthusiasm in your living spirit will be measured by the reflection of its light upon the works of your hands. ”

“ That the expression and the interpretation of such expression of the inner life shown through these art-forms constituted much of the real living of these people, who can doubt ? Then what has all of this been to the rest of the world ? The mind cannot form a picture of the earth without the beauty, aside from the utility, of these creations of man. The charm of foreign travel, and the general satisfaction and enjoyment of life can we think how different these would be without such beauty and our varied inheritances from it ? ”

“ There you have life! Life is, undoubtedly, essential to art because life is the stuff of emotion, but some thinkers and artists have an oddly limited notion of what life is. It must, it seems, in the first place, be essentially physical. To sit and dream in your study is not to live. The reason of this odd limitation is easy to see. We all think life is especially the sort of life we are not living ourselves. ”

“ If we become intimate with any great work of art, and intimate in so far with the thoughts and emotions it awakens in ourselves, we shall find that it possesses, besides this congruity within itself which assimilates it to all really living things, a further congruity, not necessarily found in real objects, but which forms the peculiarity of the work of art, a congruity with ourselves; for the great work of art is vitally connected with the habits and wants, the whole causality and rhythm of mankind ”

“ We have just seen that all great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul. ”

“ This objective presence, which proceeds from the personality itself, no less than this personal experience, [9] which is reproduced in its active realization and all that declares its worth in the world, is Spirit in its own living totality; it is this which, as action, supplies both form and content to dramatic poetry. ”

“ He loved life in all its [Pg 303] manifestations of beauty too much not to understand and admire such perfect art, whose holy inspiration tore from the heart, as one tears up weeds from a garden, all evil desires, all hatreds and light thoughts. ”

“ Others have found the same relief in the perception and consciousness of life and of living things, whether that life be natural or intellectual.—The work of Art, as well as the living individual, is, it must be owned, of limited content. ”

“ His function is thus the liberation within us of faculties, of powers of living, which otherwise might never have risen into consciousness. We commonly call this ‘idealizing the facts of life.’ It would be nearer the mark to say that it makes them real. Art turns our formal, sensible, external perceptions of things into real and vital perceptions, and thus enormously increases the range and volume of life of which those who apprehend it are capable. ”

“ This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially its genesis out of life. ”

“ Mind and matter, hope and experience, longing and limitation, for an instant combine in a reconciliation that interprets and ennobles his environment. This is art's maturity, its fine and perfect flower. ”

“ Whole schools of art, entire ages of old workmanship, the very soul of the Middle Age, have been revealed with a new inspiration and transfigured in a more mysterious light. Poetry, Greek sculpture, mediaeval worship, commercial morality, the training of the young, the nobility of industry, the purity of the home,--a thousand things that make up the joy and soundness of human life have been irradiated by the flashing searchlight of one ardent soul: irradiated, let us say, as this dazzling ray shot round the horizon, glancing from heaven to earth, and touching the gloom with fire. ”

“ And yet there is great enjoyment, to some people, in the contemplation of a beautiful building or statue or painting,--as of a beautiful landscape or of a glorious sky. The ideas of beauty, of grace, of grandeur, which are eternal, are suggested to the mind and soul; and these cultivate and refine in proportion as the mind and soul are enlarged, especially among the rich, the learned, and the favored classes. So, in high civilizations, especially material, Art is not only a fashion but a great enjoyment, a lofty study, and a theme of general criticism and constant conversation. ”

“ The whole world of matter and of spirit and the long record of human art are open to him as the never-failing fountains of his delight. In these pure realms he seeks his daily food and has his daily life. ”

“ Now the expression of vision, of reality, of beauty, at an artist's hands--the creation of new life in all forms--has two factors: the living moulding creative spirit, and the material in which it works. ”

“ Thou art the main-spring, the vital secret, the fountain-source, of our existence. What is life but a genial current of joy and grace that wells up incessantly from Thy centred self? Thou art the life, the inner vitality, of our senses. ”

“ So long as I fancied life had some meaning in it, although I knew not how to express it, the reflection of life in art gave me pleasure, and it was pleasant to me to look upon life in this mirror called art. ”

“ Each of the five modes of Art may participate in this salutary influence; each in its own way may give a foretaste of the beauty and greatness of the new life that is now offered to the individual, to the family, and to society. ”

“ Whatever his people might be doing, or if they were not people at all, but variations only of his little slender trees or distant domes and steeples, his art would have been equally high and holy. And this because of its effect, direct, unreasoning, on our spirit, making us, while we look, live with a deeper, more devoutly joyful life. ”

“ Prosperous, famous, happy, blessed in home and hearth, this has become my fundamental creed of life, the basis on which all good, whether of art or of morality, is rested: of art especially; for only by a tender, reverent spirit can the true meaning of his vocation be made known to the artist. All the rest is mere imitation of form, not insight into essence. ”

“ And here I would suggest that this necessity of being, in some way, busy about beautiful things in order thoroughly to perceive them, may represent some sterner necessity of life in general; art being, in this as in so many other cases, significantly typical of what is larger than itself. Can we get the full taste of pleasure sought for pleasure's own sake? And is not happiness in life, like beauty in art, rather a means than an aim: the condition of going on, the replenishing of force; in short, the thing by whose help, not for the sake of which, we feel and act and live? ”

“ It is seen everywhere in the healthy activity of the human mind, in its delight in romance and imagination, in the play of children, the stage, literature, art, scientific invention—the sheer joy of creation, going on everywhere and always. Lay the conscious and controlling and selective power of the upper mind at rest, in the trance-condition, and you have in the deeps of the subliminal self this primal creative power exposed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ for that beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life, if we are to live as nature meant us to; ”

“ From twenty-two till now, when I was twenty-eight, life had opened out into fuller colour still. My art remained the life of the soul, of all that was best in me, but the brain and the senses had come forward, demanding their share of recognition, too, and out of the many coloured strands of which we can weave our web of life, I had chosen that which gleams the next brightest to art, the strand of passion, and woven much with that. ”

“ During this demonstration I have, incidentally, though inexplicitly, pointed out the utility of art itself and of beauty. For beauty is that mode of existence of visible or audible or thinkable things which imposes on our contemplating energies rhythms and patterns of unity, harmony and completeness; and thereby gives us the foretaste and the habit of higher and more perfect forms of life. Art is born of the utilities of life; and art is in itself one of life's greatest utilities. ”

“ As in the study of science and even in the pursuit of philosophy, with their more or less limited quest for immediate causes; as in the visions of poetry, with its intuitive attraction for some select, favourite features of a more or less soul-suffusing emotion; as in the endeavours of art to shift the concrete charm on to the canvas, so too, in the daily routine of the work-a-day world, we place ourselves at every point within hedge and fence, partition and division. ”

“ Put beauty, dignity, harmony, serenity into our lives. It sounds very fine. But can we? I doubt it. We may put beautiful objects, dignified manners, harmonious colours and shapes, but can we put dignity, harmony, or beauty? Can we put them into an individual life; can anything be put into an individual life save furniture and garments, intellectual as well as material? For an individual life, taken separately, is a narrow, weak thing at the very best ”

“ Then, again, we may regard art more from its social aspect as an essential accompaniment of human life, not only for its illustrative and depicting powers, but also and no less for its pleasure-giving properties, its power of awakening and stimulating the observation and sympathy with the moods of nature, its power of touching the emotions, and above all of appealing to our sense of beauty. ”

“ Now this possibility of storing for later use, of increasing by combination, the impressions of beautiful things, makes art—and by art I mean all æsthetic activity, whether in the professed artist who creates or the unconscious artist who assimilates—the type of such pleasures as are within our own keeping, and makes the æsthetic life typical also of that life of the spirit in which alone we can realise any kind of human freedom. ”

“ If you can issue from the circle in which art keeps you enclosed and find nature again, if it shows itself to you in its greatness and in its calm, in its simple beauty, in its childlike innocence and simplicity, oh! then pause before its image, cultivate this feeling lovingly. It is worthy of you, and of what is noblest in man. Let it no more come into your mind to change with it; rather embrace it, absorb it into your being, and try to associate the infinite advantage it has over you with that infinite prerogative that is peculiar to you, and let the divine issue from this sublime union. ”

“ It distinguishes the artist from the artisan; a free spirit from a slave; a thinking, feeling man from a soulless machine. It makes the difference between life rich and significant, and mere existence ”

“ Art in its message to us, and as expression, holds much of the joy and solace of the elevation and inspiration of life. This surely for art were excuse enough for being and for becoming a necessity of life and education ”

“ Thus, they realise with a heightened intensity the significance and possibility of life. It is not surprising that they should read this new sense of life into that which gave it. Not in the least; and I shall not quarrel with them for doing so. It is far more important to be moved by art than to know precisely what it is that moves. ”

“ Then, besides the delight, how much of what is of value in our knowledge of a people is found in the manifestations of their real life and their ideal conceptions through sculpture, architecture, painting, music, even leaving out poetry and eloquence ; and what has been MUNICIPAL ART 67$
enduring in these has been an expression of the life of the people. So much a part of our consciousness has this beauty become, this beauty and its revelations, that we cannot in our thought divest the world of it. ”