Artifice

“ They say to you, oh Poet, ‘Perfect those gifts of your higher nature—yet be not of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.’ Look upon every beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression. ”

“ As, therefore, the sublime is not distinct from what is beautiful, nor from other sources of pleasure in art, but is only a particular mode and manifestation of them, my subject will divide itself into the investigation of ideas of truth, beauty, and relation; and to each of these classes of ideas I destine a separate part of the work. The investigation of ideas of truth will enable us to determine [Page 43] the relative rank of artists as followers and historians of nature. ”

“ For, among that vast group of human activities to which the name of "arts" is applied, there are certain forms, the very essence of which consists in the seemingly unattainable character of their ends. And these activities, constantly striving for the absolute—for ideals of the many forms of beauty and of strength—are those known as the "Fine Arts." ”

“ Always and universally it is a thought, the idea of some subject or form as the inner sense and significance thereof, that constitutes the essence of a work of art, and with which art in general is concerned. In other words, art is symbolical. And this may be predicated with equal truth of every higher art, as well as of sculpture, whatever may be the medium of its manifestations, whether a statue, or tone as in music, or words as in poetry. ”

“ Even thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the artist's function. ”

“ But if you look closely at them with all the acuteness of sight that you can command, and examine the inmost secrets of this wondrous art, you will discover such delicate, such wonderful and finely wrought lines, twisted and interwoven with such intricate knots and adorned with such fresh and brilliant colours, that you will readily acknowledge the whole to have been the work of angelic rather than human skill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With these, in whatever department of letters or art, in poetry, oratory, music, painting, sculpture, architecture—whatever is grand, and lofty, and full of inspiration, whatever is beautiful and pleasing, whatever is of choicest worth and excellence in its own proper sphere; with these let him become familiar who seeks to cultivate in himself the faculty of the ideal. ”

“ Throughout this discussion of the elements of the experience of art, I have used the terms emotion and feeling with an inclusive meaning, to cover impulses as well as feelings in the narrower sense. For in the aesthetic experience, there are impulses—impulses to move when action is represented in picture and statue, impulses to act, as when, in watching a play, we put ourselves in the place of the persons. ”

“ I have spoken of poetry, but all the other modes of art produce similar effects in their degree. The races and nations whose senses are naturally finer, and their sensuous perceptions more exercised, than ours, receive the same kind of impressions from painting and sculpture: and many of the more delicately organized among ourselves do the same. All the arts of expression tend to keep alive and in activity the feelings they express. ”

“ How eagerly the poet, the painter, the sculptor, would seek to recover some traits of their terrible lineaments, or of their softer outlines when they related to scenes of the gentler passions or of domestic life!—that either a stern grandeur or the romantic glow of a primitive state of existence might be imparted to some work of art. ”

“ And this is the place for a remark which, in the present uncertainty of all æsthetic psychology, I put forward as a mere suggestion, but a suggestion less wide of the truth than certain theories now almost unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the immediate and exact expression of contemporary spiritual aspirations and troubles. ”

“ All Art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediæval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy ”

“ Therefore, if one should be under the mistake of thinking that these qualifications are attainable by art, what will such a one say of those which are certainly born with them; such as the volubility of tongue, the music of the voice, the strength of lungs, the symmetry and beauty of the look and figure? ”

“ As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm—the form in all its characteristics.
If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal." ”

“ We talk here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms, but of those whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the æsthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art. ”

“ And what could this new knowledge be, supplied by art and by the aesthetic activity, appearing when the human spirit has come full circle, after it has imagined, perceived, thought, abstracted, calculated, and constructed the whole world of thought and history? ”

“ Sculpture, painting and poetry, then, are among the greater fine arts those which express and arouse emotion by imitating or evoking real and known things, either for their own sakes literally, or for the sake of shadowing forth things not known but imagined. ”

“ Emphatically as they speak to the naturalist with his various instrumentalities, they speak, at the same moment, with marvellous eloquence to the poet and the painter. There are forces, motions, and forms, voices, beauties, and a sentiment, which escape the touch of science, and are scarcely caught by the subtle, poetic mind. ”

“ To image the divine, you see, you must accomplish somewhat, scrupulously weigh, select and refuse; in short adapt exquisitely your means until they are adequate to your ends. And, keeping the eye steadily on that, you might grow to discard solemn ends, or momentous, altogether, until poetry and painting ceased to be arts at all, and must be classed, at best, with needlework. ”

“ The sculptor and the architect deal in less perishable ware, but the stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, and will not take the impress of all states of the soul. Morals, philosophy, and æsthetic, mood and conviction, creed and whim, habit, passion, and demonstration—p. 3what art but the art of literature admits the entrance of all these, and guards them from the suddenness of mortality? What other art gives scope to natures and dispositions so diverse, and to tastes so contrarious? ”

“ In exploring the ancestry of the symbolic vision we draw nigh to that clouded majesty we divine in the depths of our being, and which is heard normally in intuition and conscience, but which now reveals character in its manifestation as the artist in his work. ”

“ The artist or the art-critic, discriminating still, even among these raw materials of human creation, derives an elaborate and subtle delight from the suggestiveness of their colours, their odours, and their fabrics—conscious all the while of wondrous and visionary evocations, wherein they take their place. ”

“ There is no more dangerous assumption in modern aesthetics than that of popular poetry and individual poetry, or, as it is usually called, artistic poetry. This is the reaction, or, if you will, the superstition, which followed upon the most momentous discovery of historico-philological science, the discovery and appreciation of the soul of the people. ”

“ What I have said of sculpture, painting or architecture, applies equally to poetry, music or philosophy. I would even go further, and apply it in other directions where no material matrix for it exists. Every department of mental activity has its ornament—the culminating expression of that particular direction of the human will. ”

“ Sometimes the same distinction, taken from the bosom of poetry or of some other special art, has been thrown into the midst of the series of the so-called arts, severing those arts which have cosmic Harmony, absolute Beauty, ideal Beauty, the rhythm of the Universe for their object, from others which have for their object individual feelings and [Pg 43] life. ”

“ The grand and beautiful in art continued to be followed and admired, while, amid the contention of arms, eloquence began to attain that nervous elegance which yet renders attic oratory the finest model of deliberative procedure. ”

“ Little by little the conditions conquered her, and she learned to regard the substance of life as a mere canvas for the embroideries of poet and painter, and its little swept and fenced and tended surface as its actual substance. ”

“ Those beautiful pictures in which a different object seems to have been followed—in which the expression is that of permanent emotion, not transient passion, while they captivate our admiration, seem to be exceptions from the general design, and to have been suggested by the peculiar nature of the subject represented, or a particular firmness of mind in the artist. ”

“ Its forms, and its symbols, and its imagery, have mingled with every branch of art, and become a universal language. It is the deification of the material world; and therefore, that art, which in its perfection may be called the apotheosis of form, finds there its proper region and element. ”

“ Of late years, with a growing passion for the works of Art of the Middle Ages, there has arisen among us a [Pg 2] desire to comprehend the state of feeling which produced them, and the legends and traditions on which they are founded;—a desire to understand, and to bring to some surer critical test, representations which have become familiar without being intelligible. ”

“ Personally, I am so conscious of these insistent questions that, at the risk of some misunderstanding, I habitually describe works of art as "significant" rather than "beautiful" forms. For works of art, unlike roses, are the creations and expressions of conscious minds. ”

“ This may perhaps become clearer if we consider more in detail one of the separate arts, selecting the most widely symbolic of all, the art that is most clearly made of the stuff of life, and so able to translate most truly and clearly into beautiful form the various modalities of life. ”

“ In addition to the poetic fancy and the idealism of art and literature generally, we must distinguish the work of imagination in the æsthetic, in the moral, in the religious, in the scientific, and in the political life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The personification of abstract ideas by modern painters or sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of health, for instance, shocks, in most cases, the aesthetic sense, as something conventional or rhetorical, as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech, which could please almost no one. ”

“ My life-long observation satisfies me that in accordance with the elevation of his aims will be the richness and the infinite mystery of the artist's power of expression. All past great Art was born of religious thought, and thus acquired its strength ”

“ This productive activity of the imagination by means of which the artist gives, by a process of elaboration to that which is essentially rational in its nature, a real embodiment, a creation more his own than anything else—this is what is usually summarized as genius and talent. ”

“ The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. ”

“ The result is, therefore, that the decorative art of any period is an indication of that which gives pleasure at the moment, and an absolute reflex of the artistic wishes, desires, and tastes of the cultivated classes to whom executive art must appeal. ”

“ On the contrary, the structures of greatness and antiquity should be marked by a character of awful sublimity, suited to the dignity of the subject; indenting on the mind a reverential and permanent impression, and giving, at once, a corresponding and unequivocal grandeur to the picture. ”

“ Then the arts of the first order will be those in which the Imaginative part of the intellect and the Sensitive part of the soul are joined: as poetry, architecture, and painting; these forming a kind of cross, in their part of the scheme of the human being, with those of the second order, which wed the Intelligent part of the intellect and Resolute part of the soul. ”

“ The opinion upheld was that the idea or mental conception constituted the chief value of any art work, that outline or form was the direct language or vehicle of such idea, and that colour, light, shade, surface‐texture, or realism, were subordinate, if not derogatory, elements. ”