Artistic style

“ The complete mastery of technique, the dignity and dramatic force of the characters, the beauty of the language and clear directness of the style together with the vivid imagination needed to portray so strikingly the renaissance spirit and atmosphere, make the work one that should last. ”

“ In the range of figure painting, for instance, what variety of subject as well as of temper meets us! We see, not historic or domestic scenes alone; not alone scenes in which the rhythmic dream of beauty and of style is aimed at ”

“ By the originality and vigour of the spiritual life and of the emotion of which the work is an expression, together with its power of impressing these characteristics on the reader. All art is the expression of some emotion, and has for its object the production of emotions. The deeper a signet gem is cut, the sharper, the clearer are the outlines in wax. The deeper the impression in the soul of the artist, the clearer, the more forcible is its artistic expression. ”

“ In the effort to explain the principles of an art so bewildering in its variety, writers on style have gladly availed themselves of analogy from the other arts, and have spoken, for the most part, not without a parable. ”

“ All attempts to define absolute beauty in itself—whether as an imitation of nature, or as suitability to its object, or as a correspondence of parts, or as symmetry, or as harmony, or as unity in variety, etc.—either define nothing at all, or define only some traits of some artistic productions, and are far from including all that everybody has always held, and still holds, to be art. ”

“ This, then, is the fourfold work of literature, and if you want to be perfect you must be perfect in each part. Art must inspire and shape each and all, but only the first, the Idea, is pure art; with Plot, and Construction, and Style there is an alloy of artifice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. ”

“ It is style which insures duration to the work, and fame to the poet. Beauty of expression embellishes beauty of thought, and preserves it; it is at the same time an ornament and armor~ Style, to the idea, is like enamel to the tooth. ”

“ The creative fancy is that which gives beauty, picturesqueness, and charm to all the work of poet or novelist. This element of fancy diffuses itself as a living glow through every classic product that was made to endure. In the masters of style the rhythmic flow and energy of language are enlivened by poetic imagery. Figures of speech in architectural simplicity and chasteness stand out to symbolize thought. That keenness and originality which astonishes us in master thinkers is due to the magic vigor and picturesqueness of their images. ”

“ In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. ”

“ What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction,—like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations. ”

“ The aesthetic merit of this kind of novel is in the vivacity of a general effect produced by large, swift strokes of character; and in such strokes, if they be by a great artist, force and freedom of style must still be apparent, even when they are left rough and unfinished. ”

“ Thus, if when one paints an image or carves it of wood there are, in the name of artistic licence, some stylized parts in a work otherwise resembling the real form; this is, after all, what people love in art. ”

“ Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the reader,—I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mind sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is ever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at those doubtful points that the function of style, as tact or taste, intervenes. ”

“ We are not going to quarrel with the technique of the painters, any more than with their handwriting; if it is clear and legibly conveys the message and satisfies eye and heart, we want to help to an understanding and appreciation of their thought and their art. If it rings true, beauty of style, texture, color, and sentiment will come to the surface and art is manifested. ”

“ To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:—style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason—insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action—true, most of all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence. ”

“ Methods of expression, conventions alter as each artist, each age seeks some new interpretation of nature and the imagination—the well-springs of artistic life, and from these reviving streams continually flow new harmonies, new inventions and recombinations, taking form and colour according to the temperaments which give them birth. ”

“ Thus, while the three arts are each limited to their own special functions, they, at the same time, would appear to assimilate from each other what is lacking in themselves, and so contribute to the complete artistic harmony. ”

“ In the progressive unfolding which characterizes a living style, all its stages must be interesting and possess their own significance, since all fall into their places in the great and golden record of the history of art itself. ”

“ Nevertheless, I repeat, you should cultivate your own style, not by changing it into some other person’s style, but by striving to preserve its individuality, while decorating it with all the graces of art. Nature gives the style, for your style is yourself; but the decorations are slowly and laboriously acquired by diligent study, and, above all, by long and patient practice. There are but two methods of attaining to this accomplishment—contemplation of the best productions of art, and continuous toil in the exercise of it.
Make Your Composition Attractive. ”

“ So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist himself. ”

“ If the work is artistic, the spectator's interest will center in feeling the life in the color and line or sculptured form; that it happens to be an imitation of something else will become of secondary importance. ”

“ The finest elements of the style, however, are its subtleties of statement and representation, subtleties which follow the most intricate windings and enfoldings of complex thought, speeding on the fire track of an ideal allusion to the very limits of its course, and thoroughly mastering all the obstacles of expression in giving form to the most evanescent workings of the creative power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great secret, on the other hand, of the beauty of the most exquisite specimens of modern art, lies in the simplicity of expression which they bear, in their production of one uniform emotion, from all the parts of one harmonious composition. ”

“ Style, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of speech. By a figure, obvious enough, which yet might serve for an epitome of literary method, the most rigid and simplest of instruments has lent its name to the subtlest and most flexible of arts. Thence the application of the word has been extended to arts other than literature, to the whole range of the activities of man. ”

“ These groups were as refined in composition as they were exuberant,{207} exhibiting the genuine creativeness of an artist who has an instinct for decoration and a lively delight in the pure expression of line and form, regulated by an instinct also of artistic propriety. ”

“ If the definition of realistic art be “a piece of nature seen through a temperament,” that of the new movement may be “an artistic temperament attuned to pieces of nature,” a sensitive and supple talent which has an almost unlimited capacity to tell every story just in the vein its particular subject demands. ”

“ for I wish rather, in this lecture at least, to dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human life—on its social not its purely artistic effect. ”

“ Though much of that exists in our modern decorations, it is highly desirable that it should not partake of that character; a little taste, a little poetry, gracefulness, order, and some display of general knowledge, of artistic combinations and principles, cannot fail to make our productions more valued and valuable. Give a tinge of some originality,—display an attempt of your own inventive powers, based upon acknowledged principles of beauty and effect, and your productions will soon reach an eminence of which art is ever capable! ”

“ Somewhat later in the history of fiction, as in the history of figure painting, we find instances in which the element of setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into an artistic relation with the elements of action and character. ”

“ 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 ”

“ One can imagine what an infinity, what variety and richness, of details it should contain.
Our subject presents, at the same time, another kind of interest more elevated and not less alluring. Here each Art appears in its different phases and in its diversified progress. It is a history, not alone of the Arts, but of the epoch itself in which they were developed; for the Arts, regarded in their generality, are the truest expression of society. They speak to us of tastes, of ideas, of character: they exhibit us in their works. ”

“ When we regard the theory of style from the standpoint of recent psychology, a whole series of problems are seen to be involved—the nature of literary genius, association by similarity and its relation to the feelings, and connected with all these—and offering, perhaps, the best point of attack for our present purpose—the functioning of the creative imagination. ”

“ Before we can come to a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. ”

“ In each art, the perfect style consists exactly in knowing how to remove specific limits, while sacrificing at the same time the particular advantages of the art, and to give it by a wise use of what belongs to it specially a more general character. ”

“ Each art has its own medium of expression and to this medium it absolutely adheres in its periods of greatness, adapting itself to its limitations, working within them, and even making them tributary to its excellence. ”

“ The transformation of style which was visible at the very outset is one of the miracles of literary art. Simplicity, swiftness, precision, all the qualities which were conspicuously absent, we will not say wanting, in the Portraits,—these are the characteristics, and that in a surpassing degree, of the Causeries. ”

“ Well, I know what art is in the same way.”
“Yes, but I ask you as a favour to define it for me. A picture is art, a living person is life. We sitting here are life; if we were talking on a stage we should be art. How would you define art?” ”