Artistic instinct

“ What becomes of the real, inherent effect of the work of art itself in the midst of such concatenations of fancies and associations? How can we listen to its own magic speech, its language of lines and colours and sounds, when our mind is full of confused voices telling us of different and irrelevant things? Where, at such times, is our artistic appreciation, and what is it worth? ”

“ It is not merely the special endowment of eye, ear, hand, not merely what we call artistic talent, which is exceptional and vested in individuals only. It takes a surplus of sensitiveness and energy to be determined in one's moods by natural surroundings instead of solely by one's own wants or circumstances or business. Now art is born of just this surplus sensitiveness and energy; it is the response not to the impressions made by our private ways and means, but to the impressions made by the ways and means of the visible, sensible universe. ”

“ Is our artist a genre painter: then does his mind see small things to delight in them, or to delight us—if this, he is our servitor or little better,—does he go at the whole thing with the sincerity of an artistic purpose and somewhere place a veritable touch of genius, or only represent one item after another until the whole catalogue of items is complete, careful that he leave behind no just cause for reproach? Has the man dignified his subject and raised it to something above imitative art, or does he clearly state in his treatment of it that imitation is the end of art? ”

“ And so, to return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not merely the critical temperament, but also the æsthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty. Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be revealed to you, and remember that in criticism, as in creation, temperament is everything, and that it is, not by the time of their production, but by the temperaments to which they appeal, that the schools of art should be historically grouped. ”

“ Without emotion a picture was null and void; technique by itself could give works of craft, never works of Art. On the other hand, to have the artistic emotion without the technique necessary to pass it on to the spectator was to be artistic, but not an artist. ”

“ In whatever light the art-impulse may appear to the reflecting consciousness of the producing artist, this is the only consistent interpretation at which we can arrive by an examination of the artistic activity on psychological grounds. ”

“ In those barbarous days before the culmination of the era of enlightenment, art was not a cult, isolated from life, nor were artists a sort of creature apart, made so by the possession of a then undiscovered and quite pathological affliction called the “artistic temperament.” ”

“ And as, when our eye beholds the products of an artist’s labour, the mind, immediately on perceiving anything of unusual artistic excellence, burns to know of what nature it is, or how it was formed, or to what purposes it was fashioned ”

“ That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. ”

“ The instinctive tendency to express overmastering feeling, to enhance pleasure, and to seek relief from pain, forms the most deep-seated motive of all human activity. We can therefore derive the distinctive qualities of artistic production from this impulse only when it has been proved that art is better able than any other kind of mental function to serve and satisfy the requirements which arise from this impulse when it occurs in its purest form. ”

“ We have now to discuss the efforts of the savage to represent. Here, again, we have to consider the purpose which animates him, and the materials which are at his service. His pictures have a practical purpose, and do not spring from what we are apt, perhaps too hastily, to consider the innate love of imitation for its own sake. In modern art, in modern times, no doubt the desire to imitate nature, by painting or sculpture, has become almost an innate impulse, an in-born instinct. ”

“ I see no reason, therefore, to place art higher than the essence of human life and grant it immunity from attack and exegesis by the intellect. Indeed, the intellect in its metaphysical moods is alone capable of solving the riddle of artistic sensation. Once defined by intellect and applied by intellect, the esperanto of the arts may well serve to reconcile them and demonstrate to their various forms, against their will, their fundamental unity. ”

“ This, and not any train of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not necessarily existing resemblance to an already known natural object, or to an already known sort of emotional voice inflexion, is what is given by the artist, and this is artistic form, the absolutely, objectively existing work of art. And now we may examine what mental faculties, in the various arts, are required for the production of this work: what portions of the whole individual man are included or excluded in that smaller, more limited individual whom we call the artist. ”

“ In order to understand the art-impulse as a tendency to æsthetic production, we must bring it into connection with some function, from the nature of which the specifically artistic qualities may be derived. Such a function is to be found, we believe, in the activities of emotional expression. ”

“ While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated and discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal qualities of its own, qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic sense and not needing for their æsthetic effect any lofty intellectual vision, any deep criticism of life or even any passionate human emotion at all, the spirit and the method of the poet’s working—what people call his inspiration—have not escaped the controlling influence of the artistic spirit. ”

“ Third, the perfect use of the medium in the effort to fulfill the artistic purpose of sympathetic representation—the power to delight the senses and create sympathy for the object expressed, on the one hand, and the range of the vision of the object, on the other; the depth and the breadth of the aesthetic experience. With reference to the former we ask: how vividly does the work of art force us to see; how completely does it make us enter into the world it has created ”

“ There are not wanting signs that art, both in painting and sculpture, and in poetry and novel-writing, is beginning again to realize its social function, beginning to be impatient of mere individual emotion, beginning to aim at something bigger, more bound up with a feeling towards and for the common weal. ”

“ This desire for expression is the driving-force of the artist; it informs, controls, and animates his method of working; it governs the hand and eye. That figures should give the impression of life and spontaneity, that the sun should shine, trees move in the wind, and nature be felt and represented as a living thing—this is the firm ground in art; and in those who have this feeling every effort will, consciously or unconsciously, lead towards its realisation. ”

“ This artistic creativeness consequently encloses within itself, as art does throughout, the aspect of immediacy envisaged with the directness of Nature's own creations, and it is this appearance, which the individual is unable to evolve from himself, but has to find it, if he finds it at all, as immediately presented to him. Herein lies the significance of the statement, and herein alone, that genius and talent are innate. ”

“ If, on the other hand, his instincts lead him to an art gallery, and he studies rather than enjoys the pictures that he sees, is curious as to the methods of the artist, and goes away with his mind charged with the intention of getting further knowledge of what he has seen from books or other authorities, it is natural to assume that the art instinct is within him, and he should give it the fullest chance of development. ”

“ From the external conditions of art we pass to the mental and moral conditions; they are the most important ones. The question before us is, if the scientific spirit, which is gradually penetrating humanity and fashioning its brain from generation to generation, will not, in the long run, destroy the three essential faculties of the artist—imagination, the creative instinct, and sentiment. ”

“ The spirit of an art-work, the measure of emotion, of humanity, that is in it—these remain unchanged in value through changing years; the form which these three assumed, the manner of their expression, and the flavor of the epoch which gave them birth, are transient, and age rapidly.
Spirit and emotion retain their essence, in the art-work as in man himself; we admire technical achievements, yet they are outstripped, or cloy the taste and are discarded. ”

“ This manner is in reality, in painting, what language is in poetry; we are all sensible how differently the imagination is affected by the same sentiment expressed in different words, and how mean or how grand the same object appears when presented to us by different painters. Whether it is the human figure, an animal, or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however unpromising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a painter of genius. ”

“ An artist must maintain the creative impulse alert throughout. He must himself, in the strength of his own imagination, already impregnated with the knowledge of appropriate form and made vital with profound experience and emotion, give such an embodiment to the significance, which is the inspiring motive of the work, as will make it appear throughout as metal cast at one time and is one state of fusion. ”

“ Gifted with a vibrant, sensitive temperament, endowed with discriminating and organizing power of mind, equipped with a knowledge of the science and the mechanics of his craft, and trained to skill in manual execution, the artist responds to the impulse of his inspiration. His subject is before him. But what is his subject? A scene in nature furnishes him the objective base of his picture, but properly his work is the expression of what he feels. A storm may convey to different men entirely different impressions. In its presence one man may feel himself overwhelmed with terror. ”

“ We dwell with pleasure, no doubt, on the drawing, and exceptionally so on the study or sketch, as on that which pre-eminently betrays the quality of genius; but however rich with invention and imagination, with whatever directness the soul of an artist may assert itself in such studies by reason of the more transparent and mobile shell of their form, yet the fact remains to be painting we must have colour, if the work is not to continue abstract from the point of view of its sensuous material in the vital individuality and articulation of its objects. ”

“ Considered simply as a natural basis a talent of this kind asserts itself for the most part in early youth, and is manifested in the restless persistency, ever intent with vivacity and alertness, to create artistic shapes in some particular sensuous medium, and to make this mode of expression and utterance the unique one or the one of main importance and most suitable. ”

“ It may be, of course, that in moments of passionate excitement the mind grasps some new [178] idea, or the nervous tension suggests to the mechanical parts of the body some new form of expression; but such are accidents which belong to the great scheme of life, and not to this art, or any art, alone. You all know the story of the painter who, in despair at not being able to carry out the intention of his imagination, dashed his brush at the imperfect canvas, and with the scattering paint produced by chance the very effect which his brush guided by his skill alone, had failed to achieve. ”

“ Self-expression that does not attain to objectivity is incomplete as art. Even music and lyric poetry are something more than mere feeling. In all genuine art, experience takes on permanence and form—a synthesis, a total meaning, supervenes within the flux of impressions and ideas and moods, not excluding, but embracing and controlling them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a well-known fact, almost a rule, that the poet, the novelist, the dramatist, and the musician—often, indeed, even the sculptor and the painter—experience the thoughts and feeling of their characters, become identified with them. There are, then, in this second instance, two currents of feeling—the one, constituting emotion as material for art, the other, drawing out creative activity and developing along with it. ”

“ Or is it not rather the very prerequisite which enables the artist to [Pg 80] accomplish something?... Is his most fundamental instinct concerned with art? Is it not rather concerned with the purpose of art, with life? with a certain desirable kind of life? Art is the great stimulus to life ”

“ Even the passion for creation must wait upon slowly and painfully acquired technique, and, in the case of painting, sculpture, instrumental music, and some other forms of art, upon inherent capacity and manual skill. Many an artist's soul is imprisoned in a clumsy body which will not do its bidding. ”

“ Whether the medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet's words, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as the work expresses the emotion which the artist has felt in the presence of this spectacle. He, the artist, more than I or another, has thrilled to its mystery, its tumult, its power. It is this effect, received as a unity of impression, that he wants to communicate. This power of the object over him, and consequently the content of his work, is beauty. ”