Skip to main content <#maincontent>
We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!
Internet Archive logo A line drawing of the Internet Archive
headquarters building façade.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Upload icon An illustration of a horizontal line over an up pointing
arrow. Upload
User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up
| Log in
Web icon An illustration of a computer application window
Wayback Machine
Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
Books
Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip.
Video
Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker.
Audio
Software icon An illustration of a 3.5" floppy disk.
Software
Images icon An illustration of two photographs.
Images
Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
Donate
Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.
More
Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by
interacting with this icon.
Internet Archive Audio
Live Music Archive Librivox Free
Audio
Featured
* All Audio
* This Just In
* Grateful Dead
* Netlabels
* Old Time Radio
* 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Top
* Audio Books & Poetry
* Computers, Technology and Science
* Music, Arts & Culture
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Podcasts
* Radio News Archive
Images
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Featured
* All Images
* This Just In
* Flickr Commons
* Occupy Wall Street Flickr
* Cover Art
* USGS Maps
Top
* NASA Images
* Solar System Collection
* Ames Research Center
Software
Internet Arcade Console
Living Room
Featured
* All Software
* This Just In
* Old School Emulation
* MS-DOS Games
* Historical Software
* Classic PC Games
* Software Library
Top
* Kodi Archive and Support File
* Vintage Software
* APK
* MS-DOS
* CD-ROM Software
* CD-ROM Software Library
* Software Sites
* Tucows Software Library
* Shareware CD-ROMs
* Software Capsules Compilation
* CD-ROM Images
* ZX Spectrum
* DOOM Level CD
Books
Books to Borrow Open Library
Featured
* All Books
* All Texts
* This Just In
* Smithsonian Libraries
* FEDLINK (US)
* Genealogy
* Lincoln Collection
Top
* American Libraries
* Canadian Libraries
* Universal Library
* Project Gutenberg
* Children's Library
* Biodiversity Heritage Library
* Books by Language
* Additional Collections
Video
TV News Understanding 9/11
Featured
* All Video
* This Just In
* Prelinger Archives
* Democracy Now!
* Occupy Wall Street
* TV NSA Clip Library
Top
* Animation & Cartoons
* Arts & Music
* Computers & Technology
* Cultural & Academic Films
* Ephemeral Films
* Movies
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Sports Videos
* Television
* Videogame Videos
* Vlogs
* Youth Media
Search the history of over 835 billion web pages
on the Internet.
Search the Wayback Machine
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Mobile Apps
* Wayback Machine (iOS)
* Wayback Machine (Android)
Browser Extensions
* Chrome
* Firefox
* Safari
* Edge
Archive-It Subscription
* Explore the Collections
* Learn More
* Build Collections
Save Page Now
Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in
the future.
Please enter a valid web address
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
* Sign up for free
* Log in
Search metadata
Search text contents
Search TV news captions
Search radio transcripts
Search archived web sites
Advanced Search
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
Full text of "Art and Beauty
"
See other formats
EEN IEEE TESTE GTEC TELS
Art and Beauty
By
MAX SCHOEN
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1932
SPE E TE G TE EGTA ATO GAO.
Copyricut, 1932
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED—NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE
REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING
FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO WISHES
TO QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN CONNECTION WITH A REVIEW
WRITTEN FOR INCLUSION IN MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER
.
.
. ry
-, PubMshed March, 1932.
. ry
ry
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE BERWICK & SMITH CO.
For
Lillian
AENEAN EEA CONT GTESIES
PREFATORY NOTE
In these pages I have tried to present in an unpretentious,
and in as brief, concise, and clear a manner as is within my
power, what I have learned after years of sincere searching,
about art, artists, and artistic activity, from those who have
a right to speak, the creators themselves. I have done so, in
so far as I have deemed it advisable, in the words of the
original writers themselves, hence the unusual amount of
quoted material, for which, I suspect, critics will take me to
task. But I have not written for critics. I have written for
myself and for those who seek to understand rather than to
judge.
M. S.
THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY,
February, 1932.
ATCA Cal E TEs Sa Iya GAELS
fis
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY: THE NATURE AND OBJEC-
TIVE OF AESTHETICS : ; : ‘ ; 1 _—-
PART I
ART AND THE ARTIST
II. THe ART WoRKE . A ‘5 ‘ : ; . 2355
III. THE ART WORK IN THE MAKING . A s 5
IV. THE CREATIVE MIND : : . : . 74
V. ART AND THE ARTIST : ‘ . ; - 112
PART II
ART AND THE LAYMAN
VI. THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY : P » 133/=
VII. BEAutyY IN Music . : : ; ‘ - 158 —
VIII. PAINTING. : : ; ; : ‘ = 5
IX. Poetry . ; ; : . é : - - 194
BIBLIOGRAPHY . ; : 5 . ‘ . 219
INDEX OF SUBJECTS . : é ; ‘ . 225
INDEX OF AUTHORS QUOTED . oe. ve we 229
Art and Beauty
eaten STEELE EET Ces EET EE Ee [es le
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
THE NATURE AND OBJECTIVE OF
ASTHETICS
“Esthetics is that region in the land of science whose borders
of investigation are known as experiences of beauty, and whose
soil is particularly favorable for the production of a crop called
art works. This land of beauty and art has been visited nu-
merous times by intrepid explorers, the estheticians, who have
given accounts more or less detailed, but always enthusiastic,
of their discoveries. In most instances, however, the explorers
met a cold reception on their return home, while the reports
of their findings were either scorned or severely criticized.
Now since we are about to venture into this apparently
hazardous region, it will be most advisable that we acquaint
ourselves with what has been and is being said about the
estheticians and their findings, examine the charges, and see
who is at fault, the explorers or their critics. There must be a
misunderstanding somewhere, for among the explorers are
some of the greatest minds of the ages, while their critics
are men whose serious interest in art is beyond question. We
must take this step at the very outset of our own adventure
in order to fortify ourselves against several risks and hazards
that a mental journey of this sort entails. Our purpose,
then, in examining the charges of the critics against the estheti-
cians is simply to find out the better what the estheticians are
truly trying to do for us.
What do the critics say? Here are several samples of their
complaints: One of them writes that: ‘It is improbable
that more nonsense has been written about esthetics than
about anything else; the literature of the subject is not large
enough for that.”’! Another is quite certain that, “any man
1Clive Bell, Art, New York, p. 3.
1
Art and Beauty
who declares that he has distilled the essence of the beauti-
ful and formulated a method whereby the work of art may be
infallibly analyzed, its appeal explained and catalogued, and
its esthetic value appraised and tested, is a self-deceived brag-
gart or a fraud.” ? A third claims that, “if we look shrewdly
at the enormous accumulation of so-called criticism during
our two thousand five hundred years of culture: this mountain
of manuscripts, commentaries, biographies, histories, analyses
of ‘styles’, classifications of art into kinds, attacks on art and
defenses of art: we are stupified by the display of so multitu-
dinous and ant-like an energy, but we cannot help also being
stupified—may the human race forgive us—by its stupidity.” ?
A fourth writes, ‘‘Many attempts have been made by writers
of art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express
it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for
it. . . . Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what
has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between
what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words
like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise mean-
ing than they would otherwise have.” *
The charges against the estheticians, as deduced from the
above complaints, are twofold: (1) that they attempt the im-
possible, in that beauty and art are indefinable, as is indicated
by the contradictory theories of the xstheticians themselves;
(2) that they attempt the futile, in that, even were a defini-
tion possible, it would be of no aid to the appreciation of an
art work.
An examination of these two charges will reveal to us the
nature and objectives of zsthetics as a field of study and
investigation.
1
. THE POSSIBILITY OF A DEFINITION OF BEAUTY AND ART
The most obvious rejoinder to the claim that beauty is
indefinable is that we define it every time we say ‘This is
1 Thomas Craven, “Have Painters Minds?” American Mercury, March, 1927, p. 257.
2 Conrad Aiken, “A Basis for Criticism,” The New Republic, April 11, 1923, p. 3.
3 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, New York, 1903, p. ix.
2
Introductory
beautiful,”’ for the term “beautiful” is descriptive of a certain,
unique attitude towards an object. If we went just one step
farther and elaborated on the nature of this attitude, gave an
account of it, we would have a definition of beauty. Now it is
the failure to take this essential step by those who neverthe-
less claim to speak authoritatively on art that is responsible
for the confusion that prevails in art criticism. For beauty is
the realm in which art dwells, and without an understanding
of the nature of that realm, art itself is condemned to mis-
understanding. And it is not at all strange, but rather to
be expected in the nature of things, that it is precisely those
who cry loudest that beauty is indefinable who are most
dogmatic in their pronouncements on art works. Thus, the
very critic who proclaims in no uncertain terms that estheti- i
Clans are braggarts and frauds proceeds to rule out of the
sphere of painting all works whose subject-matter is the nude, ;
landscapes, still-life, the mural, and calls the modern painter!
an inferior being, dumb, dull, conceited. Now if beauty can:
not be defined, which implies that we can not know what art,
is, how can this critic pass judgment on that about which he:
himself claims nothing can be known? What he utters, in’
substance, is this absurdity: “I don’t know what beauty is, '
and I don’t know what art is, but I’ll tell you what is and’
what isn’t an art work.” And it is invariably the very person |
who proclaims that of tastes there is no disputing, since what
is beauty to one is not beauty to another, and that therefore
a definition of beauty is absurd, who disputes loud and long
with those whose tastes differ from his, and calls heaven and
earth to witness that it is principally of his own tastes that
there can be no room for dispute.
Now the net result of such lop-sided logic, a logic that pro-
claims that in art, the less you know the better and surer is your
judgment, is that the critics get caught in their own nets and en-
tangle the layman with them. A case in point is the hoax perpe-
trated by a resident of California, as reported in the daily press:
“Pavel Jerdanowitch” and the “‘disumbrationist school of painting”
of which he was the “founder and supreme master,” were exposed
3
Art and Beauty
today as the whimsical revenge of a Californian upon critics who failed
to appreciate the paintings of his wife.
Until Boston critics challenged the collection of Paul Jordan Smith,
alias “‘ Pavel Jerdanowitch,” on display at the Vose galleries, the paint-
ings had been admired by art patrons here, as well as in New York and
Chicago. Jerdanowitch was hailed as a “modern genius” and even was
offered $1500 for one painting, the Vose galleries officials said.
Smith, an author, revealed August 14, 1927, that he was the “ Pavel
Jerdanowitch” who painted ‘“Exaltation,” “Aspiration,” and “Tlu-
mination,” three ultra-impressionistic pictures which won international
fame.
He painted them, he said, without the slightest knowledge of paint-
ing, ‘‘just to prove most art critics didn’t know what they were talking
about.”
“Exaltation,” the most famous of his works, at one time, Smith
revealed, was called ‘“‘ Yes, We Have No Bananas,” and served as a fire
screen in his home. ‘“TJllumination”’ shows a drunken man staggering
home, and “Aspiration,” a Negro washerwoman bent over a tub of
suds with eyes on a bird in a tree.
The case of Mark Twain and music is a capital illustration
of how the critics confuse the layman and lead him to pretend
to tastes in art that he does not possess. It is Mark Twain
who is reported to have said that he always applauded music
he did not understand because then he knew it was classical.
The critics told him what good music was, but they also told
him that the beautiful in music could not be ascertained.
Now good music is beautiful music, music that gives one an
experience of beauty. Hence, if one does not know the nature
of the experience of beauty how can one judge whether one’s
response to a musical selection is or is not one of beauty, and
therefore whether the music one hears is or is not good music
for himself? In a letter from Germany Mark Twain wrote:
Huge crowd to hear the band play the “‘Fremersburg!’”’ I suppose
it is very low-grade music—I know it must be low-grade—because it
so delighted me, it so warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me,
enraptured me, that at times I could have cried, and at other times
split my throat with shouting. The great crowd was another evidence
that it was low-grade music, for only the few are educated up to a point
where high-class music gives pleasure. I have never heard enough
classic music to be able to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it.
Not mildly, but with all my heart. What a poor lot we human beings
4
Introductory
are anyway! If base music gives me wings, why should I want any
other? But I do. I want to like the higher music because the higher
and better like it.
But it is not we who are the poor lot, but the critics who
mislead us, who tell us in one breath that we do not know
what beauty is, and in the next breath tell us what art work we
should or should not appreciate. They do not know, but are
nevertheless most ready to tell us what is what and why.
Surely, if base music gave Mark Twain wings, aroused in him
an experience of beauty, why should he want any other?
What other test is there as to what is good music for one,
excepting that it does create the experience of beauty? And
if it does, how can it be base music? And how can one get to
like the higher, and how can it be higher, unless through that
experience? How can one judge or evaluate it excepting by
the standard of beauty? And how can any music be higher
than by arousing that experience?
Apparently then, there must be something basically wrong
with the contention that beauty is indefinable, for without
such a definition art and art criticism must remain a wilder-
ness of counter-charges, whims, fancies, and unwarranted
judgments. (Let us see, therefore, if we can get to the heart
of the difficulty.
€ widespread notion that beauty is indefinable arises
om the failure to distinguish between the terms art and
beauty. These terms are related, but not identical. Beauty is
an experience, while art is an activity. If the art activity is
aroused by the experience of beauty, it may result in a product
which constitutes an adequate record of that experience,
in which case the product is an art work. For the creator,
then, an art work is a successful expression of an experience
of beauty. For the layman an art work is any product which
is an outgrowth of artistic activity and which arouses in him
an experience of beauty. Hence, art, in general, is an activity
for the expression of an experience of beauty, or a product
that arouses an experience of beauty. The art work, however,
which is an expression of an co a of beauty for its
| §
\
\ ,
ee a
Art and Beauty
creator, may or may not be a stimulus for beauty to the on-
looker, or it may be such for one person, and not for another.
But this fact does not invalidate its significance as an expres-
sion for its creator. Nor does its failure to arouse beauty in
one person detract from its value as an object of beauty for
_ another person. Furthermore, there is beauty without art
for both creator and appreciator. Not every experience of
beauty gives rise to an art work, in that the artist may make
no effort to give his experience bodily form, or in that his
attempt to do so is unsuccessful, while the experience of beauty
may be derived from a wider field of objects and occurrences
than the limited realm of art works. The sphere of beauty
is co-extensive with the whole realm of experience, only a
small fraction of which ultimately finds its expression in works
of art.
Now the objective of the esthetician is twofold, namely,
(1) to define the experience of beauty irrespective of its source,
(2) to analyze the artistic activity in order to ascertain what
an art work is in terms of its creator. Since an art work is a
record of an experience and an activity, it is possible to de-
termine what it is that impels it, what the steps are in its
making, and what its objective is. In other words, in analyz-
ing the artistic activity, the esthetician also defines, by impli-
cation, the art work in which the activity culminates. But
he does not define the art work objectively, that is, in terms
of its material features. He does not say or imply that if a
product possesses certain physical qualities it is an art work
and will or should arouse an experience of beauty. He does
not attempt to teach the painter how or what to paint, or
the novelist how or what to write, or the poet how to write
poetry, or the musician how to compose, or the playwright
how and what to dramatize. This bold and impertinent task
he leaves to the critic. Nor does the esthetician make the
foolish attempt to define an art work objectively for the
appreciator. It is quite evident to him that the same stimulus
may give rise to a variety of reactions in different persons,
or even to the same person on different occasions. He is also
6
Introductory
quite fully aware of the fact that a variety of stimuli may
arouse the same or a similar response in several individuals.
Thus the same article of food may give one person a stomach
ache, another a headache, and agree with a third, while a
variety of foods may cause a like experience—stomach ache
—in several persons. Hence, to define or describe the stimulus
for a stomach ache in general terms is manifestly absurd,
but to define or describe a stomach ache is perfectly possible.
That is, an h_experience can_ be defined generally, but the
stimulus for a certain experience can be defined only in specific
cases, and even then it is impossible to state just why that
particular stimulus should produce that particular effect.
In other words, there is no saying why or when a certain object
_ will give rise to this or that experience.. But whenever the.
certain experience occurs, it is definable in terms of its salient
characteristics. I can not say that this or that object, pro-
vided it possesses certain features, will give me an experience
of beauty, for the object that is beautiful to me today may
fail to be so tomorrow. But whenever I have the experience
of beauty, and whatever its stimulus, my experience is the
_ same in kind, differing only in intensity. Hence an experi-
ence is definable in general terms, as a certain state of being,
“although the cause for the experience is not so definable.
It would be absurd to attempt a definition of a Romeo or a
Juliet. But the experience of love has been very aptly defined
by numerous writers, from the time of the author of The Song
of Songs to the present day.
_Now the esthetician does not define an object of beauty,
_but he does attempt to define the experience of beauty.
Again he leaves the impossible task of describing an object of
beauty in terms of its physical characteristic to the critic
who belabors him. The esthetician simply tries to do for
the appreciator what he attempts to do for the creator. The
creator does something when he creates and the appreciator
does something when he appreciates. Hence arises the ques-
tion for both creator and appreciator: What is the nature of
the activity whether creative or receptive? The esthetician
;
Art and Beauty
describes neither the product of the creator nor the stimulus
object of the appreciator. His interest is entirely in analyzing _
the experience and the activity that lead to the birth of an
‘art work—still born as it may at times be—and_ the experience
~ aroused by an art.work when that experience is called beauty.
Consequently, the charge against the esthetician that in
seeking a definition of the nature of the experience of beauty
he is setting up an objective standard for art works, that he
is giving criteria in terms of which one may determine whether
a certain art product is or is not beautiful, is absurd; it exists
only in the mind of the critic whose stupefaction at the daring
of the zxsthetician comes primarily through his failure to
understand what the esthetician tries to do.
We see, therefore, that it is not the xsthetician who is
inconsistent, and who attempts the impossible, but rather
those who prefer these charges against him. The critic main-
tains that beauty is indefinable in the abstract, and then
proceeds to set up standards for what is art or what is not
art. It is he who dares tell the artist what to do and what
not to do, the why, what, and how of art. The esthetician,
on the other hand, sets up no standards, dictates no pro-
cedures or objectives, but takes the creative mind in its
labors for beauty, and the responsive mind in its search for
beauty, and analyzes both phenomena in an objective and
disinterested search for knowledge.
2
Tse VALUE OF A DEFINITION OF BEAUTY
Pater’s statement regarding the value of an abstract defini-
tion of beauty is both true and false. It is true that such a
definition is no aid to the enjoyment of “‘what has been well
done in art or poetry,” but it is not true that it does not help
us “‘to discriminate between what is more and what is less ex-
cellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art,
poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would other-
wise have.”’ Pater himself gives just such a ‘‘universal for-
8
Introductory
mula” for beauty, which he deplores in zestheticians, when he
calls music the measure of all the arts, because music alone
completely realizes a perfect identification of form and matter,
and then proceeds to discriminate between what is more and
what is less excellent in the arts by means of this universal
formula for beauty. How else can one discriminate if not in
terms of some standard other than one’s own likes and dis-
likes. Does not one often like food which is anything but
nutritious, while disliking other food which is nutritious?
How is one then to discriminate between what is good food
or bad food unless through a definition of food, in terms of
which one may evaluate one’s own tastes? In what other
manner than a definition of beauty can one ascertain whether
one’s response to some art work is or is not zsthetic? Certainly
all responses to art works are not of the nature of beauty.
‘They may be ethical, utilitarian, moralistic, anything but
esthetic. .
Unless then we make the apparently absurd claim that a
response is one of beauty just because it is derived from an
art work, we must have a universal formula for beauty if we are
_to to evaluate our reactions to art, and use the word beauty with
_some precision... Now to discriminate does not necessarily
mean to like and appreciate. Admiration is not necessarily
appreciation. I may discriminate between my friends, X and
Y, and conclude that X is more intelligent than Y, but at
the same time I may prefer Y to X. I may discriminate
between food articles X and Y and discover that X is more
nourishing than Y, and yet prefer Y to X. I may discriminate
between poets, X and Y, and conclude that X is a greater
poet than Y, and yet prefer to read Y. There are many of
us who prefer to read Edgar Guest to Robert Frost, although
we are convinced that Frost is a poet while Guest is a senti-
mental rhymester. Intellectual discrimination and person
inclination are not inseparable. Now there is no need for
standard to determine one’s likes and dislikes. But how can,
‘one discriminate, evaluate, unless by a standard other than}!
one’s tastes, namely, by a universal formula rather than per- {
9 ;
Art and Beauty
sonal inclination. The claim that beauty is relative is not true.
It is absolute, that is, its nature as an experience, its charac-
teristics as an attitude, are the same whenever and wherever
and to whomsoever it occurs. What is relative is the object
that arouses it. Hence a definition of beauty is not only
possible, but useful for discrimination and judgment, al-
though it is no help to appreciation. It is of much value to
be able to judge intelligently, even where appreciation is
lacking, that is, to be able to draw a distinction between one’s
reaction to an art work and the significance of an art work as
| art. A novel may not appeal to one, and yet be a great work
of art as a novel, just as an article of food may not taste good
and yet be excellent as nourishment. The value of an art
work to me is determined by my reaction to it, but its value
as an art work, as a successful creative expression for its
creator, is entirely independent of any one’s reaction to it.
While it is true, then, that of tastes there is no disputing, it
is also true that of tastes there is evaluating, even of one’s
own tastes. This standard for discrimination, for evaluation,
is supplied by a definition of beauty, a universal formula for
it, the kind of experience it is whenever and wherever it oc-
curs, how it differs from other experiences, such as the good,
the true, or the useful.
In evidence that a definition of beauty is not only valuable
as a standard of judgment, but that consciously or uncon-
sclously we actually use such a standard, let us consider some
' problems in art that have been and are being widely dis-
cussed.
Is art for all or for the few? On both sides of this question
there are ardent defenders and detractors. But ardor never
answers a question with any degree of adequacy. It only in-
tensifies the issue, besides confusing it. The “‘art for the few ”
champions can cite the history of art as evidence that works |
that were widely hailed in their day as art have disappeared,
and some of those most severely denounced have survived,
while the advocates of ‘‘art for all” can appeal to human
nature with its universal craving for beauty. But such evi-
10
re eee RE EEE EE A SE RL
a
Introductory
dence proves nothing excepting that anything can be proven
to suit the particular inclination or prejudice of the contender.
Popular appeal can not be relied upon, says one side, since
historically great art never had a popular reception. But
history proves just the opposite, retorts the other side, for
ultimately it is popular appeal that establishes the significance
of an art work. Wagner and Keats may have been viciously
denounced in their day but in the long run it was popular
taste that vindicated them. But either side fails to take ac-
count of the crucial issue, namely, whe’her an art work is
great because it survives, or whether its initial greatness is
responsible for its persistence. And this crucial question can
not be answered otherwise than by a definition of art, its
place and function in human life, what craving it satisfies,
and whether all human beings possess the appetite for art
in like degree, and is the appetite satisfied by the same or
similar food or does it call for a variety of foods. And if ap-
petites differ in degree of hunger, what is the nature of this
difference and what sort of art food do the differences call
for? Invariably, in any contention both sides to the argu-
ment are at the same time right and wrong. Each side is
right from its standpoint and wrong from the standpoint of
the other. The “‘art for the few”’ side must base its standpoint
on some feeling as to what art is. And likewise the “ art for
all” side. But neither states definitely what its standpoint is.
Hence, the endless and fruitless discussion. Would it not be
advisable therefore that the feeling be made articulate so that
each side would understand what the other is talking about,
and thus substitute disinterested examination for heated
quarreling and bickering? We can not consequently deal
with this question intelligently excepting by means of a clear-
cut definition of art and beauty.
Then we have the question of standard in art. One camp
proclaims that the sole standard is the individual response.
The other camp counters that the value of an art work is in-
herent in the art work, and does not depend on the effect it
produces, that an art work judges us, not we the art work.
11
Art and Beauty
Now again both sides seem to be right and also wrong. If a
product does not evoke beauty in one it is not an art work.
On the other hand, it may arouse beauty in another, and
hence it is an art work. But how can one and the same object
be both an art work and not an art work? Where lies its basic
value as an art work, within itself as an expression of the
artist, or in its effect on the observer? Is an object necessarily
an art work just because it appeals or gives pleasure? Ex-
perience answers no. I may read a novel, enjoy it greatly,
yet also feel that its value as an art work is small or nil, as I
may eat an article of food whose taste pleases me but whose
value as food I know to be negative. There is therefore no
necessary relationship between an effect, and the significance
of the stimulus producing the effect in terms of itself. A
judgment of value does not invariably depend on the effect
produced. The standard for the value may be different from
the standard for the effect. One standard is intellectual, in
terms of the inherent nature of the object as belonging to a
certain class, and fulfilling a certain impersonal function,
the other is affective in terms of its personal appeal. Here,
then, we have another instance of an art problem where a
standard is not only valuable, but is actually used in our
judgments. Now this standard must be our feeling of what
art and beauty truly are, for how could I otherwise conclude
that what pleases me is not necessarily real art? To examine
this feeling and make it articulate would give us a definition
of beauty and art.
Another perennial and troublesome problem in art is the
relationship existing between art and morality. There is the
cult of “‘art for art’s sake,” implying that art is its own justi-
fication, and the dogma of ‘‘art for man’s sake,” that the
value of art is its moral influence. And again both cult and
dogma appear to be right and also wrong. For it can not be
said that the sole or even secondary objective of the creator
of an art work is to teach or preach. Nor is a product an art
work simply because a moral can be derived from it, or because
its intention is to point a moral. Yet a preachment may be
12
Introductory
an art work, but it is not an art work just because it is a good
__preachment. Its value as a preachment appears to be apart
_ from its value as beauty. On the other hand, any art product
~ that does evoke_the. experience of beauty, is moral, in that
‘its effect is positive, wholesome, good. Such an effect can
not possibly be evil. Once again we have a case of two stand-
ards, since what we judge to be moral we do not also judge
to be beautiful, and we prize beauty not for its morality, but
for what it is as beauty. What is that standard for beauty?
And would not the quibbling about art and morality die a
natural and quiet death if this standard that we unconsciously
use were brought to the surface and applied to this problem?
3
WHat AESTHETICS Is
Let us now summarize our findings and see what esthetics
is.
We have found that a definition of beauty and art is not
only possible, but also valuable. It is possible. Ahecause the
esthetician draws a clear distinction between_the experience \
of beauty and the object of beauty. sthetics does not |
pretend to give a definition of an object of beauty, which |
would imply that any object that would comply with the |
specifications of the definition would be beautiful to any person
coming in contact with it. But it does seek a definition of the y
art work as a product of a creative mind. Every product of
man has a cause, something that instigated it, and involves
@ process in its making. We can therefore ask of any art work
what it is that started it, what processes were involved in its
production, and how it came about being what it is. Professor
John L. Lowes has given us an excellent example of the value
of such an investigation in his study of the origin and growth
of two poems of Coleridge. And we can do the same for art as__
a whole. We can ask what is the art impulse, the creative /
urge, what are the steps in the creative process, and from the .
data we can formulate a statement regarding the nature of -
13
ONO ee
ra
es ee ee ee OO
Art and Beauty
art in general. Such a statement regarding art will give us a
clue for a definition of the experience of beauty. And such a
definition is valuable and desirable because it makes us more
intelligent about the world of art and the artist, although it
may not bring us any closer to an appreciation of a specific
art work. To be intelligent about science, philosophy, or
religion does not mean that we will be scientists, philosophers,
or become religious. An intelligent conception of the nature
of science and scientific method will not necessarily lead to
an understanding or appreciation of the theory of relativity
or the electron theory. But it will lead to a respect for science,
the scientist, and scientific ideas. And a definition of beauty
and art will do the same for art, the artist, and art problems.
For without understanding we gibber, confuse counsel with
words without knowledge, since our words are but sound and
fury signifying nothing.
4
THE MATERIAL FOR A DEFINITION
A definition is a summary statement of conclusions based
upon an examination of all available reliable data in some
field of investigation. The examination of the data must
be scientific, that is, disinterested, and the data must be ample
and pertinent, if the definition is to have any validity. Our
next step, therefore, must be to make a survey of the material,
the data, that we might use as a basis for our examination
of the nature of art and beauty, and the relative values of
the material for this purpose.
The literature on art is varied and manifold. But all of it
may be grouped under the following heads: Technological,
artistic, socto-historical, literary, philosophical, and psychological.
Each of these looks upon the art work from a somewhat
different angle, the technological dealing with the general laws
of artistic structure, the grammar of art, the artistic with the
formal analysis of a specific art work, the socto-historical with
the influence of social conditions and historical epochs upon
14
Introductory
the art produced during a given period; the literary with
the comments of poets, novelists, dramatists on their respec-
tive arts, the philosophical with speculations on the place and
function of art in life, the psychological with analysis of and
experiments on the nature of the esthetic experience.
We wish to examine this literature to see what data it
promises to yield us for our purpose.
Technological. Technology is concerned with the artisanship
of the creative activity. It takes for granted the creative
impulse, and examines the tools and materials of art in order
to deduce the general laws of artistic structure. Books on
harmony and composition in music, on color theory and design
in painting, on versification in poetry, on the technique of the
novel and drama, are examples of the technological approach
to art. A familiarity with these laws and skill in their applica-
tion will produce the craftsman, but not the artist. A musical
composition constructed in strict accordance with the laws of
harmony and composition and nothing else, will yield a prod-
uct that is technically correct, but artistically, musically,
insignificant. The reason is that artistry is more than crafts-
manship. It includes craltsmanship, but it is more than
craftsmanship. That is the meaning of the principle that all
great art is artless, namely, that the craftsmanship is so
perfect that it does not obtrude itself upon the attention, but
is a perfect medium for what it conveys. The objective of the
artist is not so much to produce a perfect product technically,
structurally, as to give perfect expression, adequate embodi-
ment, to some significant personal experience. To accomplish
this objective he must be a master of his tools and materials,
but his mastery is ever a means to an end, but not an end. All
this becomes quite apparent when we consider the fact that
one often encounters a product in art which is flawless in
structure but insignificant, ineffective artistically. The product
arouses admiration, but not appreciation. A number of artists
may paint a landscape in accordance with the laws of painting,
and what they produce will be correct technically, but worth-
less artistically. They produced something that is perfect in
15
Art and Beauty
letter but lacking in spirit. Now it is the spirit of art that we
are seeking rather than its letter, and hence, the technological
approach to art is quite inadequate for our purpose.
Artistic. ‘There is nothing more disheartening to man,”
wrote Stevenson, ‘‘than to be shown the springs and mecha-
nisms of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the
surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty,
fitness and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by
their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the springs
and pulleys.”
The springs and pulleys of an art work are disheartening and
appalling only to the layman, as would be an outlay of the parts
of the human body. To the anatomist and physiologist these
parts are anything but empty and coarse, and far from causing a
shock, are viewed with admiration and enthusiasm. The reason
is that the layman sees nothing but wreckage, while the pro-
fessional man is aware of the contribution of each item to the
whole of which it forms a part. Viewed in the light of the whole,
the part is as significant as is the whole, being a symbol of the
whole. Without an idea of the whole, the parts are just so much
rubbish, empty and meaningless, and therefore appalling.
Now for the artist, being a creative worker, imbued with the
spirit of the whole, the letter of the springs and pulleys is of
vast significance. His dissection of the whole into its parts is
inspired and guided by his love of the whole, and he who loves
seeks also to understand. But without the love of the whole,
the analysis of it into its constituent parts is motiveless,
therefore meaningless, and therefore also without understand-
ing. It is full of toil and trouble, but it signifies nothing.
What the analytical approach to an art work gives us then.
is the ways and means, but not the end, the goal, that is to be
attained, and which instigated the ways and means and gives
them their warmth and vitality. Means arise out of ends to
be achieved, and can be evaluated and appreciated only in
the light of the ends. ‘‘Art,’’ said John Stuart Mill, “‘ proposes
- to itself an end, and looks out for means to effect it.”
Now the task of esthetics is to inquire into the ends of art.
16
Introductory
The definition of art and beauty that it seeks is in terms of
artistic impulse and objective. It is not a description of how
the artist works that gives an insight into the nature of his
activity, but an account of wky he works, what the driving
force of his activity is, and the objective that the activity seeks
to attain. Artistic analyses of how only arouse the queries
why and whai, forcing the investigator to seek data for an
answer wherever these may be found.
Socio-historical. When the investigator turns to the socio-
historical material and evaluates it he again finds little of
value for his purpose. In spite of the apparent fact that art
works may be utilized as historical and sociological records,
he finds himself in agreement with Algernon Clarke Swin-
burne that “‘the question whether past or present afford
the highest matter for high poetry and offer the noblest re-
ward to the noble workman .. . is really less debatable on
any rational ground than the question of the end and aim of
art. ... Art knows nothing of time; for her there is but one
tense, and all ages in her sight are alike present; there is
nothing old in her sight, and nothing new . . . (S)he can-
not be vulgarized by the touch of the present or destroyed by
the contact of the past. . . . No form is obsolete, no subject
out of date, if the right man be there to rehandle it.”
y artistic product of the past that has value for us to-
y as an art work does not owe that esthetic value to its
mere subject-matter as a record of an event or a condition of
the times, no matter how skillfully done. The subject-matter
is certainly not irrelevant, but neither is it paramount. It
is but the raw material that the creative mind utilizes for its
creative purposes. Neither time, nor place, nor subject-
Pater make the artist. Time and place and available material
influence him and his work, but they do not determine his
significance as an artist nor the value of his output as art
works. An Ibsen or Shakespeare living today would produce
dramatic literature of the same quality he produced in his
day, although the material would be different. The placing
of an art work historically or sociologically neither adds nor
17
Art and Beauty
detracts anything from its status as an art work. Art is
neither dependent nor independent of time and place, because
it is neither dependent nor independent of subject-matter.
It needs subject-matter, and so is dependent on time and
place. But since mere subject-matter is not art, only its
raw stuff, it is also independent of time and place, for what-
ever the raw stuff, it will be turned into artistic gold by genius,
while in the hands of mediocrity it will remain but artistic
dross. Hence the sociological and historical materials of art
offer little of direct value for the purpose of the esthetician.
Literary, Philosophical, Psychological. The literary, philo-
sophical, and psychological material on art we may consider
together, for they are mutually inclusive, since the literary
man often philosophizes and psychologizes about art and
beauty, while the most significant philosophical and psycho-
logical writings, as for instance those of Plato, Schopenhauer,
or Santayana, who have written extensively on art, are not
only philosophy or psychology, but literature. Each of these
views art and beauty from a somewhat different angle, but
all are equally significant, since their interest is not in tech-
nique or formal analysis, but in the nature and function of
art as a whole. Thus, the philosopher, whose aim is to ob-
tain a unified, integrated view of the world, comes upon art
and defines it in the course of his attempt to ascertain the
particular living need that gives rise to it. Consequently a
patient search through the wnitings of the philosophers from
Plato to Croce gives us many a valuable clue to the secret of
the esthetic realm. The contradictions of the philosophers
that ‘“‘stupify” their critics are due to a superficial reading
or to second-hand accounts of their writings and not to the
stupidity of the philosophers. For if mental giants like Plato,
Aristotle, Plotinus, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, are stupid,
then their stupidity is the sole wisdom that we possess about
the prime human values of the good, the true, and the beauti-
ful. It were well that we examined the beam in our own eyes
before we point our fingers in derision at the motes in the
eyes of philosophers. The philosopher is an earnest seeker
18
Introductory
for wisdom on the basis of the facts supplied him by the sciences
of his day, and his conclusions are not only worthy of our
respect, but it is our wisdom to study them earnestly and
seriously. And the ezsthetic theories of the philosophers,
whether consistent or inconsistent with each other, possess
the one supreme virtue of being the earnest search of a great
mind for the truth that is in him, a virtue that the detractors
of the philosophers might do well to cultivate and emulate.
: « Peychology is the scientific study of the interests, motives,
; and activities of living organisms. Its objective is that of any
’ other science, namely, to discover hy experiment and observa-
tion the laws of sequence of events and thereby obtain control
over them. To effect this science asks of any phenomenon what
is happening, fow it is happening, and when it is happening.
These questions apply to an organism as they do to a mecha-
nism, since the laws of cause and effect operate for living bodies
as they do for the non-living, only that causes and effects are
more complex and varied for the former than the latter. This
only means, however, a difference in degree, not in kind, in that
_ the scientific investigation of animate matter presents dif-
ficulties not encountered in the study of inanimate substances.
4. To obtain information on the what, how, and when of phe-
nomena calls for analysis, the breaking up of the whole into
its constituent parts. Consequently, when psychology turns to
the study of the phenomena of human nature, analyzes it
into its ingredients, it encounters among the other elements
of human interest and activity the experience of beauty and
its expression in art works. Hence the question: What is the
nature of this experience and this expression, and in what way
do they differ from other interests and activities such as the
good, the true, and the useful. So psychology proceeds to
draw distinctions by analyzing out the features that are
unique to beauty. In doing so, psychology begins where
philosophy leaves off. Philosophy inquires into the place of
beauty and art in life, while psychology examines the nature _
of the experience of beauty and the creative activity. But the —
two are supplementary. For in dealing with the function of
19
Art and Beauty >
the experience philosophy must also consider its nature, while
the psychological analysis of the experience also suggests
its function. In fact, a good many philosophical theories of
beauty deal as much with its nature as with its function, while
/ psychological writings on xsthetics more often than not dis-
cuss its function in connection with its analysis. Neverthe-
i less there is a difference, in that psychology, in so far as pos-
‘sible, relies upon data experimentally obtained, while the
= views beauty in a somewhat interested manner as
' a part of his philosophical system.
Since psychology and philosophy concern themselves so
intimately with art and beauty, examining both at their
very well-head, they supply an important source from which
we can draw reliable data for a science of esthetics. But they
are not the principal source. For that we must go to those
who know, because they do, the artists themselves. When
the artist, whether as poet, novelist, dramatist, or true critic,
expresses himself on art, his word must be taken as coming
from the court of last resortm He speaks by the authority
of the living spirit of personal experience, not as the scribe
of theory, dogma, or creed, by the dead letter of the law.
Even when the artist insists that he does not know, he gives
away many a secret in his very denial. But more often than
not, the great artists of the ages have expressed themselves
directly or indirectly on their work. The poetry of Keats is,
in large measure, an examination of the nature of poetry in
particular and art and beauty in general. Many of Brown-
ing’s greatest poems, like Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto,
Pippa Passes, Sordello, Toccata of Galuppi, Abt Vogler, are
expositions of the passions and aims of painter, poet, and
musician. Here then we have first-hand material which, to-
gether with the speculations of the philosophers and the
analyses of the psychologists, we can utilize as data from which
to draw fairly reliable conclusions of the nature of art and
beauty. In our study we shall rely primarily on the original
source material of the creative minds, using the findings of
philosophy and psychology as corroborative evidence.
20
|
|
PART I
ART AND THE ARTIST
. . . human nature cannot know the mys-
tery of an art without experience.—Plato
Genius is to aesthetics what the ego ts to
philosophy, the only supreme and absolute
rule.—Schelling
BASS aasaeaesesaeaae
CHAPTER II
THE ART WORK
How shall we begin our search? How can we best utilize
our data? The answer is that, if we expect our conclusions
to have any validity, our procedure must be as closely scien-
tific as we can possibly make it. Now the word scientific sounds
harsh and grating when used outside the sphere of the so-
called material sciences. In the realm of art or religion or ‘~~
even ethics and morality it seems almost blasphemous. This
attitude is due primarily to the unfortunate fact that tra-
ditionally we have steeped these human values in a pool of
soft sentimentalism and emotionalisms from which they
have not been completely rescued even in this scientific age.
But the progress of the physical sciences for the last century
and a half should teach us an object lesson. So soon as the
inquiry into material phenomena became truly scientific,
instead of being viewed supernaturally, we began to gain a
control over our physical environment to an extent that has
proved a permanent blessing to mankind. Today our physical
household is in fairly good order, with a good promise of
even better things to come in the near future. But we are still
entertaining the delusion that the sole approach to human
values is emotion and sentiment, with their inevitable bick-
erings, quarrels, and confusion. Yet art, morality, and religion
are phenomena, experiences, facts, not essentially unlike
those that reign in the objective world. There are esthetic, —
moral, and religious facts as there are physical and chemical
facts. And they can be investigated by scientific procedure.
There is no pathway to system, order, and control excepting”
that of knowledge. And knowledge is impossible without
scientific method. We can not arrive at truth by talk, no
matter how heated, but by a calm, dispassionate, disinterested
search for basic facts. This is all that is meant by scientific
method, and no more. The scientist questions some observable
23
Art and Beauty
phenomenon until it has told him what it is in its substance,
as different from other phenomena, how it comes to be what it
is, that is, what processes operate in it, and when it gets to be
what it is, or the conditions that bring it about. This method
can be readily applied to art. An art work is the tangible,
observable manifestation of an experience. The experience is
the cause of which the art work is the effect, and between
the two there is a process, an activity. The art work is our
laboratory subject, and we can inquire of it to tell us what
sort of phenomenon it is, what processes are involved in its
creation, and what impulse brought it into existence. And
such will be our procedure. We shall first consider the what of
the art work, namely, its general nature, next, its how, the proc-
esses involved in its creation, and when we have the answers to
the what and how, we shall turn to an examination of the when,
or the nature of the impulse or drive that brings it about.
1
THE GENERAL NATURE OF THE ART WORK
We begin our search with several definitions of an art
work given by some creative workers, from which we may
deduce a plausible hypothesis as to its general nature, and
which we shall then examine in the light of the data from
literary, psychological, and philosophical sources.
“Art is that beauty which the imagination has created, and
which wakes in the observer an emotion of pleasure similar to
that of the artist.” (Mrs. John Sloan)
“Art may be almost any form of beauty, created or expressed
in such form that it may be enjoyed and which thereby makes
living a more delightful experience.” (Don Dickerman)
“This is all I know of art—unhappy men of other days
distilled the poison of the heart and sealed it in a perfect
phrase.” (Floyd Dell)
“It certainly is not mere craftsmanship. More important is
the mystical power of feeling and of communicating that
feeling to others.” (Art Young)
24
The Art Work
“Art is the perfection of expression.” (Phelps Phelps)
“ Art is yearning done in matter.” (L. C. M. Reed)
“Art is the material expression of unconscious ideas and
emotions, passed through consciousness and handed on as
a torch to others.”” (Silas Bent)
“Art is the outpouring of the creative flood of life in terms
of a personality.”’ (Beth Benton Sutherland)
“‘Art is essence as distinguished from the husk.” (Don
Corley)
‘Art is man’s attempt to conquer nature, either by improv-
ing upon her or by condemning her.’”’ (Rex Stout)
‘“‘The most beautiful presentation of whatever is.”’ (Robert
C. Beadle)
All these definitions are vague, and to the layman quite
meaningless. The first definition states one unknown in
terms of another, in saying that art is beauty—for what is
beauty? The second speaks of the creative urge—but what is
that? The third refers to interpretation—but what is the
nature of the interpretation and why? The last mentions
beautiful presentation—but what is beautiful presentation?
Apparently these definitions do no more than raise questions.
They are principally definitions that need defining. But they
are nevertheless valuable, in that we can glean from each and
every one of them several suggestive ideas. All of them either“
state directly or imply that art 1s expression. They also state
or imply that the expression is not any expression, but some-
thing that partakes of the nature of perfection. And then, what
is most important, they state or imply that the something that
is expressed perfectly is not merely commonplace ordinary
experience, but something unique, and of unusual significance
and vitality, which was evolved from common experience.
The definitions yield us therefore the following hypothesis
about the art work:
A product ts not an art work just because it is a skillful, perfect
reproduction of something that already exists, mor 1s 1t an art
work merely because it has no connection with, or relationship to
| anything which already exists. The art work is something evolved
| :
Art and Beauty
from ordinary experience and given perfect form, and not the
mere perfect literal transcription of ordinary experience, no
matter how interesting or exciting.
Let us put this hypothesis to the test of experience.
The first thought that comes to mind when we question
an art work is that we are never much concerned with its mere
factual material. We never ask whether the incidents, charac-
ters, and events in a novel or drama did or did not occur, nor
whether the person in a portrait ever did or did not exist. It is
a matter of indifference to us, zsthetically, as to whether
Hamlet was an actual person who was born at this or that
time, who lived in this or that place, or whether the incidents of
Romeo and Juliet or Othello are historically true. If we were
to read two biographies of Julius Cesar that were different
in some details, we would feel that there was something
wrong. But two dramas on Julius Cesar that differed com-
pletely from each other would not trouble us in the least, pro-
vided both were good dramas. One drama might picture
him as a martyr, the other as a tyrant who deserved his fate,
yet, as drama, one could be as significant as the other, despite
the differences in historical, chronological, or biographical
details. Historical novels, like Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities or
Tolstoi’s War and Peace, or historical dramas like those of
Shakespeare, do not owe their artistic quality to their being
historical, while the artistic quality of histories like Carlyle’s
French Revolution, or Green’s Short History of the English
People, or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is
not due to their being history. We might even go farther and
say that if a novel like Dickens’ Oliver Twist or a social play
like Ibsen’s Doll’s House remains an art work today, it is not
because of its subject-matter, but in spite of it, for the condi-
tions pictured in each of them are no longer true. If art con-
sisted in no more than skillful reproduction of fact we would
have to admit into the realm everything that we now exclude,
“like books on science, history, psychology, and exclude every-
thing that we now accept as real art.
To the above we may add the further apparent fact that to
26
The Art Work
reduce a play, novel, or poem to its mere subject-matter,
namely, the plot of the play, the story of the novel, the idea
of the poem, destroys its very substance as art, irrespective of
how skillful and interesting the narrative of this subject-matter
may be. Any one familiar with Shakespeare revolts at Lamb’s
stories of the plays, well told as they are. On the other hand,
all subject-matter, all factual material, has within it the germ,
the possibility of art, for there is hardly a human interest or
activity, or an aspect of nature, that has not been used by
some creator as a basis for drama, novel, story, poem, essay,
painting, or sculpture.
Thus we find that fact, as such, is not art. Nevertheless, if
the factual material of an artistic product seems to us to
be distotted, fantastic, freakish, untrue, we do not accept
it as art. YUnless there is natural, factual truth, there is no
artistic, eéthetic truth. For instance, there is a significance,
a truth, a vitality, a livingness, in the characters of Dreiser’s
novels in comparison with which those of Sinclair Lewis are
lifeless puppets. Lewis’ characters give the impression of
having been manufactured to suit some arbitrary purpose
of their maker. They are means to fit an end, as expressions
of the prejudices of Mr. Lewis. He does not paint life; he
approves and disapproves of particular individuals, social
classes, or professions. He is a master technician, but he ex-
aggerates, distorts. His characters are either all virtue or
all vice, all wisdom or all ignorance, and in either case, false,
untrue to life. There is no Elmer Gantry in life, nor a Dods-
worth, nor an Arrowsmith. We do not know of human beings
who are either all strength or all weakness. We know them
only as both strong and weak, some of them more one than the
other. The only all-perfect or all-imperfect individuals are
those deluded, and we usually put such in asylums. Mr. Lewis’
novels are the social tracts of a strongly prejudiced master
craftsman. They are interesting, exciting, entertaining, but
when we have read them once we are through with them. They
are excellent showmanship, but not art. We exhaust them at
one reading. They have no depth which invites repeated
27
Art and Beauty
probing. They have no universality, because they do not
touch those aspects of life that are independent of the ac-
cidents of time and place. In Dreiser we touch the under-
currents of life, life in its universal truth. His characters are
symbols of human existence in its totality, its hopes, desires,
urges, aspirations, groping in the dark, but striving for light.
They are real, we know them, we touch elbows with them
daily, they are ourselves. We differ from them on the surface,
but we are they and they are we at the core of being. Lewis’
characters we judge. We approve or disapprove of them. We
moralize about them. They arouse indignation or praise.
Our response to them is not esthetic, but moralistic, ethical.
Those of Dreiser we accept as revelations of ourselves; we
accept them as we accept life, as we accept our own existence.
We know we are not Elmer Gantrys or Dodsworths. We may
have a touch of them, but we are not they. But all of us are
at one and the same time all the characters of the The Genius,
An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie, The Plutocrat, and Jennie
Gerhardt. We are not only one of them, but all of them. At
best, Elmer Gantry arouses a temporary and local issue, or
he amuses or miles us, after which we dismiss him. But Eugene
Witla is ever with us, and we are ever with him.
2
ART AND FAcT
But if art is neither mere fact nor sheer fantasy, what is it?
What else is left? Every art work gives us a peculiar experience,
an experience that we can get from no other source. Our’
ordinary responses to stimuli we readily classify into real and
unreal, true or false, tangible or intangible, our criterion
being the objectivity of the stimulus. An image of a table is
unreal in comparison with the table itself. The unreal is the
subjective, the real is the objective. But in an art work this
condition seems to be reversed. The unreal not only appears
to be the real, but even more real than the objective fact,
A character in a novel or play, if he interests us at all, is more
28
The Art Work
real, true, living, to us, at the time than any actual person
we have ever encountered, although we know that he is only
an idea, a fiction, a mental construction of the author, and
has never really existed as flesh and blood. During the time
that we are immersed in that fictitious character, it is the
people we know exist as actualities that appear to us as il-
lusory, as unreal, while the fictitious one is the truly, the really
real. A person of whom we read in a newspaper we know to be
real, that he exists somewhere, yet he is not as real as the
person in the novel or play. By the objective test he is un-
real; by the subjective test, he is intrinsically real. The test of
the art reality, then, seems to be the reverse of that of daily,
ordinary experience. Yet the art reality is not divorced from the
ordinary reality, but seems to grow out of it, for we feel that
the truth of the fictitious character holds for every actual
person we know. It is in all of us. But it is not apparent,
manifest, while here in the novel or drama it is the very thing,
clear, precise, tangible, apparent, and manifest. 4 Thus the
truth of history or science, capable of objective verification, is
the untruth of art, while the truth of art, incapable of ob-
jective verification, is the untruth of science or history, and
yet the truth of art is inherent in the truth of science or his-
tory. The fiction dwells in fact, lies hidden, potential in it,
and is brought forth, made actual in the art work.
Here then we have the proof of our hypothesis that art is
not mere literal transcription of fact, nor mere reversal of fact.
“We may therefore define an art work in a preliminary manner
_as fact transformed by fiction. If we give the name of realism
to fact, to that which is real externally, and reality to fiction,
to that which is true internally, our definition reads as
follows: An art work ts reality evolved out of and expressed
through realism, thus transforming realism into reality.
This definition does no more than establish a relationship
between art and life, telling us that art begins where life
ends, that art lifts life into a new level of being, of existence,
a sort of revaluation of values, that it is a creation, not an
imitation. But in telling us this much it tells us a great deal,
29
Art and Beauty
in that it enables us to deduce some general characteristics of
the art work and of the creator, from which we may begin an
inquiry into its specific nature.
To get at these general characteristics let us supplement and
fortify our definition by a quotation for a creative mind:
All art consists of the stuff of experience. The question is: Into
what, without being contorted, has that stuff been transformed or
transmuted? Not changed! Character, incident, shape, color, land-
scape—all may be strictly those of reality, and indeed the artist need
have had little consciousness but that of precisely rendering reality.
But if he is an artist his inner feeling of what constitutes precision will
raise his mimesis, his imitation of life into a region above life. His
product will be, in a definite sense, more like life than life itself—this
is neither jest nor paradox—in that it will shape completely where life’s
hand slipped and bring out hidden meanings missed by the hot hour of
experience and add to incident and character the fruit of meditation
and later insight. The artistic process does more: it conceives this
clarified and completed substance in terms of form—form which is,
in this sense next to impossible to define, for it is an unanalyzable
building of structure toward an identity of significance and rhythm, of
meaning and music. . . . The artist works at this form; this and this
alone is the substance of his labor. He regards the stuff of experience
which he is using, though it was once the beating of his very heart,
the rending of his very nerves, with cold objectivity and uses it calmly
to build the structure of form that is some day, he hopes, to stand
against the sky. . . . The passion that he feels during the creative
process is not the echo or the shadow of the passions that he uses in
his work: as passions they are dead to him. What shakes him now is
the passion of his form, the tremor of eternity. Upon him blows a cold,
yet ardent wind from other spheres. Hence, though not hence only, the
mean absurdity of the strutting manikins out in the world of the
perishable who say to the artist: You have used me as material: that is
I and I will not have it. Is it indeed “you?” Then it is a “you” to
which you have no mght, which you could never have seen or created,
a transcendent “you,” a “you” wrought into an eternal substance
unimaginable to the “you” that, in humble fact, you are. . . .2
If we examine the quotation in the light of our definition a
number of points emerge, an examination of which will bring
us more closely to the substance of the art work.
What do we find in this pronouncement?
1 Ludwig Lewisohn, Mid-Channel, Harpers, pp. 161-162.
30
The Art Work
It tells us, in the first place, that all art consists of the stuff
of experience, but is more than that stuff. But what is the
stuff of experience? Of what does it consist? What is a true
experience, under ordinary, everyday, normal circumstances?
There are at least four criteria for the truth of ordinary
experience. Ordinarily an experience is true, real, if it is
common, if all normally constituted persons give similar re-
ports of it. It is apparent, obvious, requiring no more for its
apprehension and comprehension than the mere utterance of
it to be accepted. For all normal persons grass is green, the
sky is blue, two and two make four. Ordinarily an experience:
is true, real, if the mental occurrence can be referred to some
physical, objective phenomenon as its cause. The sight of a
tree is real when the cause of the vision can be verified by other
sense organs as being due to an objective stimulus. Ordinarily
that is true, real, which works, which can be tried and found
not wanting; or which is useful, in that it furthers and satisfies
some commonly recognized need like hunger, shelter, sex,
play, power, control. Ordinarily an experience is real if it
involves mental or physical effort, as some problem to be
solved or some obstruction to be overcome.
Such is ordinary experience, which constitutes the stuff of
art, but which the above pronouncement, as well as our pre-
liminary definition, tell us is not art, no matter how well
imitated by artistic means. It becomes art only when it is
transformed, transmuted into something else, a something
above life, and yet more like life than life itself. This some-
thing does not consist of a change of the stuff, but of its
transformation into something that is different from it in
appearance and significance. In a transformation the presence
of that which has been transformed 1s felt in the new product.
There is a consciousness that something new has been evolved
from something old, that the old has been transcended, raised
to a new level, that something that existed in the old poten-
tially, innerly, has been made manifest, brought forth, built
out into an actual. There is a unique power of mind, pos-
sessed by a few rare individuals, of penetrating beyond the
31
Art and Beauty
surface of experience to the presence of something that is
neither apparent to sense nor can be deduced by reason alone,
and which is not consciously, deliberately sought after, but
appears to come rather as a sudden revelation. The painter
does not arbitrarily set out to find something in a human face
or in a bit of nature to paint. What he is painting is not the
result of cold calculated premeditation. Were he to do this he
would produce something mechanical, arbitrary. He is not
even aware that what he is painting is in any manner different
from what he sees. But by the very virtue of his being an
artist, possessing a certain unique mentality, he sees beyond
the powers of the eye, so that what he puts on canvas Is at
once like and also unlike that which is present objectively.
Hence the uniqueness of what he produces. His product is
real, yet also unreal. It is like, yet also unlike that which is
given in visual experience. He therefore does not imitate, he
creates. A creation is not a delusion, a deception, but a
revelation, an unfolding. That which is revealed, unfolded,
has its existence in dormant form in that from which it is re-
vealed, and through which it is revealed. An art work does not
delude or deceive. It unveils. The poet, wrote Shelley, ‘‘strips
the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked
and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its form.”
Our poesy is as a gem, which oozes
From whence ’ tis nourished; the fire
Shows not till it is struck; lo the flint over gentle flame
Provokes itself and like the current flies
Each bound it chafes.
This is the mind of the creative artist. The world is its flint,
which it strikes for the fire within it. It is the mind that feels,
in the words of Whitman, that
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed of perfection.
“The poet,” writes Edwin Markham, ‘‘comes to behold and
to express the hidden loveliness of the world, to point out the
32
The Art Work
ideal that is ever seeking to push through the husk of things
and to reveal the inner spiritual reality. So all of life is ma-
terial for his seeing eye and his thinking heart, and he makes
the wonderful familiar and makes the familiar wonderful.”’
What else does the pronouncement tell us?
It tells us further that this unique experience of the creative
mind, this something that is life, yet more than life itself,
leads to a fully conscious, rational activity, to labor, in the
course of which the experience is given bodily form, is materi-
ally incarnated, that there is a stage at which the artist re-
gards the stuff of experience ‘‘with cold objectivity and uses
it calmly to build the structure of form that is some day,
he hopes, to stand against the sky.” But what is it that
stands against the sky, what is the significance of the ‘‘struc-
ture of form’’? It is that the structure is a carefully, labori-
ously worked out record, adequate to the point of perfection,
of the unique creative experience. The creative experience
is the stimulus for the form giving. The passion of the expen-
ence gives rise to the passion of work, but a passion that is
rationally guided, that selects, discriminates between possible
means for the accomplishment of an urgent end. Thus cold
reason is warmed by the passion of creative experience. Herein
lies the expressive element of art. Art, it is true, is expression.
But expression of what and how? All life is expression. We
express ourselves in all we do. But all expression is not art, ”
beauty. Most of it is anything but that. Expression becomes
art only when it is the expression of a unique experience in a
unique manner, a creative experience creatively uttered. Art’
is not mere passion. It is not mere labor. It is not mere in-
spiration. It is passionate labor, inspired by, and therefore
guided by a passionate experience, so that the product of the
labor becomes a permanent monument of the experience.
What, now, is an art work, in general? An art work ts the’
expression of a unique experience by a unique mind, the expres-
sion resulting in a product which is a perfect record of the ex-
But what is the nature of the unique experience and the
33
Art and Beauty
unique mind? How does the experience come into being,
wherein lies its uniqueness and its significance, what is the
nature of the expressive activity, and in what manner does
the creative mind differ from other minds? It is the answers
to these crucial questions that will reveal to us the substance
of art and beauty.
es EEE eSNG CONGO E ETE
CHAPTER III
THE ART WORK IN THE MAKING
The art work, we have seen, begins with the old, the familiar,
the commonplace, and culminates in the presentation of the
new, the unique, the rare. In order to see the creative product,
therefore, in its full, complete significance, we should begin the
examination of how it comes into existence with a study of
the nature of the old, how this arises, what purpose it serves,
and in what way it differs from the new that is evolved out
of it.
1
THe NATURE OF THE OLD
An organism lives by and through the environment in
which it dwells. Biologically, life means an adjustment between
organism and environment. Any living body that is incapable
for whatever reason to make such an adjustment can not
survive. Now some organisms come into the world natively
supplied with the means of adjustment. The higher organisms,
man in particular, possess no such native equipment. They
come into the world helpless, and must gradually acquire the
ability to meet a situation in an adequate, effective manner.
This process of acquiring ability to meet the physical world
we call learning, and its results constitute what is commonly
termed knowledge. We know a situation when, as a result of
learning, we can meet it directly and effectively, that is,
without delay and without fumbling, whenever it presents
itself before us. In this learning process that equips us for
the contingencies of existence there are three steps, namely,
sensation, perception, and recall.
Sensation supplies us with the material out of which knowl-
edge is built up. A sensation is a direct, immediate contact of
mind with matter. Sensations constitute the elementary mental
processes initiated in the brain by any sense organ being stimu-
35
Art and Beauty
lated by some force either inside or outside the body. Ini-
tially then, we know the world as well as our own bodies only
as sensations. So soon as the infant’s sense organs begin to
function it has sensations.
Now whereas sensations are the raw stuff of knowledge,
they do not constitute knowledge. With sensations alone no
adequate adjustment would be possible. If, by some mis-
chance, any one of us were to lose everything we ever learned,
but with the sense organs still functioning, we would be reduced
to helplessness. The world about us would become what
William James called a ‘‘buzzing confusion.” We would hear,
see, taste, touch, smell, etc., but we would not know what we
heard, tasted, saw, touched, smelled. And without such
knowledge we_could do nothing definite or specific. Here
perception comes in. In the process of perception the vague
sensations become definite ideas or percepts. They assume
form and content or meaning. By form is meant that a number
of sensations become integrated into some one object differing
from another integration of sensations into another object.
Thus out of the chaos of sensation there gradually develops,
as a result of experience, of learning, a systematic, orderly
world of objects and happenings. As the world is assuming
order it is also becoming clothed with meaning, that is, with
definite behavior responses. The meaning of a situation is
always the behavior it evokes. he behavior constitutes the
knowledge of the situation. So long as the behavior is hap-
hazard, hit or miss, the situation is unknown. Behavior
is the sole indication of the presence or absence of knowledge,
as well as the degree of its presence or absence. We know
because we can do, and only when we can do, and the degree
to which we can do. Language is no more than substitute
behavior. The verbal statement “I can swim” is but a report
of the act of swimming, and has no meaning apart from that
act. Words are but records of behavior experiences. With-
out such behavior experiences they are meaningless.
Meaning is made possible by the bodily property of reten-
tion, which results in the mental power of recognition. All
36
The Art Work in the Making
living bodies, but particularly those possessing a highly
developed nervous system, retain the results of past occur-
rences. Any occurrence in the nervous system, any neural
process, leaves a trace of itself behind, a sort of readiness for
another process of the same or similar nature. The exact
nature of this trace we do not know. It is most probable
that the whole complex of neural organization or pattern is
in some way modified, similar, perhaps, to the modification
that occurs in a chemical substance on the introduction into it
of an additional ingredient. But, whatever the nature of the
effect, retention means greater readiness for re-excitation
along a similar line.
The mental consequent of retention is recognition, its con-
scious counterpart. Recognition is made possible by retention,
and varies with it in degree. Faint retention means vague
recognition, a mere cloudy feeling that what is happening
now has happened before. Such hazy feeling is not knowl-
edge in the true sense, for behavior is vacillating, uncertain.
Recognition is knowledge only when it attains the vividness
and clarity of specific, definite, certain behavior.
But knowledge is not complete even with fully conscious
perception. Perception is dependent upon the physical pres-
ence of the situation. With perception alone mind remains a
slave of matter, in that it can operate only when the situa-
tion enables it to do so by being physically present. Mind is
freed from this bondage only when it can deal with the situa-
tion in its physical absence, and be fully prepared to meet it
when it makes its physical appearance. This complete eman-
cipation of mind from matter is made possible by the mental
power of recall, which occurs either as an image or a memory.
To recall is to bring back past events, past experiences in the
physical absence of the stimuli that originally caused them.
This recalling may occur either as a mere revival of the past
event or as a recollection of it. In revival the event is relived,
re-experienced mentally, as an image, a picture, a mental
copy of the situation as it occurred in the past. The past
occurs as if it were the present. In recollection the present
37
Art and Beauty
image is definitely referred to the past, in the full conscious-
ness of details as to when and how it occurred. The past
event does not only occur as a present event, but everything
connected with it as a past event is recollected, gathered
together, in the present. This is memory. Memory is thus
heightened imagery, in that it is not only the bare past event
that is present, but all events that have been associated
with it in the past, where, when, how, and why it occurred.
When knowledge has attained this stage it is full and com-
plete, for not only can a situation be handled and dealt
with at will, whether bodily present or absent, but since the
image is also more plastic than the percept, the situation
can be shaped and moulded at pleasure into a form that
is quite different from what it is in actuality. Mind is now
master of the situation, whereas in perception it was the
slave.
Such is practical experience, realism, knowledge that arises
out of the exigencies of life as a process of adjustment between
organism and environment. This is the stuff of art, the mate-
rial that art utilizes for its creative purposes. Artistic activity
therefore begins where practical activity culminates. Our
problem now is to examine the nature of this transforming
process, how it occurs and why.
2
THe CREATIVE PROCESS
To the creative mind the creative activity does not appear
so much as a process, a sequence of happenings, a growth
culminating in a fruition, as a mere occurrence, a sudden
appearance in the form of an illumination, or inspiration. The
idea or theme to be given material form seems to spring fully
mature, like Minerva from the head of Jove, while the creator
is in a state of divine afflatus or fine frenzy. Yet, though this
substance of the art work may come as a flash of inspiration,
it must come from somewhere and in some manner. Even
divine gifts are not so much donations as acquisitions, and
38
The Art Work in the Making
the muses must be courted before they yield their favors. The
human mind certainly does not work by leaps and bounds, nor
does it evolve anything out of nothing. It works slowly and
gradually in a sequence of steps, growing on the nourishment
supplied by experience. And if the art work is built out of
the stuff of experience, the building process starts somewhere
in some way and proceeds systematically, though spontane-
ously, in a certain manner, until it reaches completion. ‘‘There
is a painful pregnancy in genius,” writes George Santayana,
“a long incubation and waiting for the spirit, a thousand
rejections and futile birthpangs, before the wonderful child
appears, a gift of the gods, utterly undeserved and inexplicably
perfect.” In order to be able to appreciate this wondrous
perfect child, to realize its true wonder and perfection, we
must follow its development from its inception, through its
painful pregnancy, to its birth and maturity.
But is this process subject to analysis or must it be taken for
ted as a mysterious gift bestowed on the creative mind?
“‘I have often thought,’ wrote Poe, “how interesting a maga-
zine paper might be written by any author who would—that
is to say, who could—detail, step by step, the processes by
which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate
point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given
to the world, I am mucff at a loss to say; but, perhaps, the
authorial vanity has had more to do with the omissions than
. any one other cause. Most writers—poets in especial—prefer
having it understood that they compose by a species of fine
frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder
at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the
elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—at the true
purposes seized only at the last moment—at the innumerable
glimpses of idea that arrived not at the matunty of full view—
at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanage-
able—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the pain-
ful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and
pinions—the tackle for scene-shifting—the step-ladders and
demon-traps—the cocks feathers, the red paint and black
39
Art and Beauty
patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, con-
stitute the properties of the literary histrionics.”’ !
Poe is not stating the case altogether accurately in this
passage. It is not true, in the first place, that the poet “would
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the
scenes’’ of his creative activity. The truth is that the creator
does not know specifically what is happening in the process of
creation, since he does not deliberately set out on the journey,
with a consciously worked out plan of operation, although he
does deliberately set out to state what he has found at the
end of the journey of discovery. Nor is he able to retrace his
steps, for they are too winding and complicated. Besides, such
retracing would be wasteful, tedious for him—why should he
look backward when there are such glorious prospects ahead
of him? He is therefore not reluctant to tell; he either does not
know or he has no time to waste in merely going over traveled
ground. Even if he did make the attempt deliberately he could
only tell us a pack of lies, as Poe himself does in his account
of how The Raven was written. But we can retrace his steps
for him by playing spy upon him and by taking a clue from
a hint he throws out here and there in his work. He does,
therefore, tell us what he is about, only indirectly so, and
therefore also more truthfully, since he does so spontaneously.
Keats’ poems, for instance, are a treasure trove on how poems
arise slowly and gradually from the pain and anguish of their
makers. In the second place, if we search far enough and wide
enough in the realm of literature we are invariably rewarded
with more or less direct statements from creative minds about
the manner in which their ideas came to them and the labor
involved in giving them formal expression. From these original
sources, fortified with what we know from psychological re-
search on creative thought, we can make a fairly systematic
analysis of the steps in the creative process. Here are several
such original sources:
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche gives the following account of
the evolution of his main work, Thus Spake Zarathustra:
1 The Philosophy of Composttion.
40
The Art Work in the Making
I would like to tell you the history of my Zarathustra. Its fundamental
conception, the idea of Eternal Recurrence, the highest formula of
affirmation that can ever be attained, belongs to August, 1881. I made
a hasty note of it on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: “Six thou-
sand feet beyond man and time.” That day I was walking through
the woods beside Lake Silvaplana; I halted not far from Surlei, beside
a huge, towering pyramidal rock. It was there that the idea came to
me. If I count back two months previous to this day, I can discover
a warning sign in the form of an abrupt and profoundly decisive
change in my tastes—more especially in music. Perhaps the whole
of Zarathustra may be classified as music—I am sure that one of the
conditions of its production was a renaissance in me of the art of hear-
ing. In Recoaro, a little mountain watering-place near Vicenza, where
I spent the spring of 1881, I, together with my friend and maestro
Peter Gast (another who had been reborn), discovered that the phcenix
bird of music hovered over us, decked in more beautiful and brilliant
plumage than it had ever before exhibited. If, therefore, I reckon
from that day to the sudden birth of the book, amid the most unlikely
circumstances, in February, 1883,—its last part, . . . —it would ap-
pear that the period of gestation was eighteen months. The period of
eighteen months might suggest, at least to Buddhists, that I am in real-
ity a female elephant. The interval was devoted to the Gaya Scienza,
which has a hundred indications of the approach of something unpar-
alleled; its conclusion shows the beginning of Zarathustra, since it
presents Zarathusira’s fundamental thought in the last aphorism but
one of the fourth book. To this interval also belongs that Hymn to
Life (for a mixed choir and orchestra), the score of which was published
in Leipzig two, years ago by E. W. Fritsch.!
The German dramatist Grillparzer reports this incident
of his creative life:
At this time I planned to take advantage of a vacation to finish
my play, The Golden Fleece, work on which was interrupted by my
Italian journey. But a tragic event intervened. My mother’s death,
the overwhelming impressions of the Italian journey, my sickness in
Italy, the distractions of the return home, had effaced all preparation
for the work I planned. I had forgotten everything. Above all, the
point of view, but also the details, were cast into darkness, so that I
could never decide to put anything on paper. While I was attempting
vainly to delve into my memory, something wonderful occurred. I
used to play with my mother the compositions of great masters ar-
ranged for the piano for four hands. While playing the symphonies
of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, I thought continually about my Golden
3 Modern Library edition, pp. 94-96.
. 41
Art and Beauty
Fleece, and the embryonic ideas fused with the tones into a unified
whole. This fact I had also forgotten or never thought of seeking
help thereby. I had made the acquaintance of Karoline Pickler, an
authoress. Her daughter was a pianist and at times we would play
the piano after dinner. Then it happened that when we came to the
symphonies that I had played with mother all my former ideas came
back to me. I knew once more what I needed,—and although the same
standpoint could not be regained, my purpose and the tendency of
the entire play became clarified. I set to work, finished the Argonauts
and began Medea.
From poets we have numerous accounts of how poems are
born. Thus John Gould Fletcher tells us that his own method
of writing poetry is as follows:
Something which I have seen, heard, or experienced in life affects
me very strongly. I brood upon it, largely unconsciously, until sud-
denly, for no apparent reason, a line or a group of lines form them-
selves in my brain, in some way connected with the subject on which
I have been thinking. These lines are not necessarily the opening lines
of the poem; they may be its refrain, or leading idea, but when they
have established themselves in memory for the time being, other lines
are added to them. In this way I have often composed as many as a
dozen lines of poetry before putting pen to paper. When I finally sit
‘down to the actual task of composition, I generally (except in the case
of a very long poem, of which the process of incubation has gone on
for a considerable time) write out the whole poem in a single draft and
at a single sitting, my aim being to preserve my original subconscious
impulse as long as possible.
This original draft may later be amplified or corrected, but never
entirely rewritten. During the first heat of composition, I find that
I am usually so entirely absorbed in the subject as to be oblivious
of the flight of time, and sometimes I am so completely unaware of
what it is that I am putting on paper, that it is only at a later reading
that I recognize its value. This seems to be a fairly common experi-
ence with most poets; and I should say that the great point about
the first draft of any poem is to be able to stop before exhaustion has
set in, and also to be able to look upon it later with a detached and
refreshed mind. Sometimes the subconscious discovery I have made in
writing a poem urges me to compose a number of others on similar
or related lines. In this way I wrote my color-symphonies, and a great
many poems contained in The Tree of Life.
Frequently I have noticed that it is not a single impulse that has
produced in me a poem, but the fusion of several. Thus, for example,
my poem on Lincoln came into being, first, because I had been strongly
42
The Art Work in the Making
moved by reading Herndon’s Life; second, because I had but recently
spent a summer in the pine woods of Michigan, and had been power-
fully affected by the backwoods atmosphere in which Lincoln had
grown to manhood; third, because of the troubled political situation
in America, in the spring of 1916, when the poem was actually com-
posed. Incidentally, I may also remark that this poem was written
in a single afternoon, but that my mind had in some way been pre-
paring for it for nearly a year before. And in much the same way I
might analyze many of my longer and better-known poems.
In A Midsummer-Night’s Dream Shakespeare gives us a
most striking comment on the workings of the imagination:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
One of the most striking of all indirect lights on the
creative process is given in verse form by Amy Lowell.
Dr. W. V. Bingham gives the following account of the occa-
sion of this poem:
One day in July, 1924, we had been dining with Amy Lowell at
her home in Brookline. After an evening of brilliant talk about the
mental processes of poetic invention and particularly about the way
in which some of her own poems had come to birth, we tried to per-
1“Thoughts on the Making of Poetry.” From The Way of the Makers, by Marguerite
Wilkinson, pp. 257-258. Copyright, 1925, by ‘The Macmillan Co., reprinted by permis-
sion.
43
Art and Beauty
suade her to save the first drafts of her manuscripts with all the changes
and interlinings. This, we argued, would be a good way to study
records of the creative process at work. She protested that they would
be useless, because the really creative act occurs before putting pen to
paper.
At the time she was working at high tension on her monumental
life of Keats, and had written no poetry for almost two years. But
that memorable night she began again. Several new poems came
rapidly, first among them the one which follows. When she read it
to us a week or so later, it was entitled, To the Impudent Psychologist.
But hardly a scrap of her first drafts has ever been found.
TO A GENTLEMAN
Who wanted to see the first drafts of my poems in
the interests of psychological research into the
workings of the creative mind
So you want to see my papers, look what I have written down
’Twixt an ecstasy and heartbreak, con them over with a frown.
You would watch my thought’s green sprouting ere a single blossom’s blown.
Would you, friend? And what should I be doing, have you thought of that?
Is it pleasant, think you, being gazed upon from feet to hat,
Microscopically viewed by eyes commissioned just for that?
Don’t assure me that your interest does not lie with me at all.
I’m a poet to be dissected for the good of science. Call
It by any name, I feel like some old root where fungi sprawl.
Think you, I could make you see it, all the little diverse strands
Locked in one short poem? By no means do I find your prying hands
Pleasure bearing and delightful straying round my lotus lands.
Not a word but joins itself with some adventure I alone
Could attach consideration to. You’d wrench me flesh from bone,
Find the heart and count its tappings. At your touch, ’twould turn to stone.
What is I, and what that other? That’s your quest. I'll have you know
Telling it would break it from me, it would melt like travelled snow.
I will be no weary pathway for another’s feet to go.
Seize the butterfly and wing it, thus you learn of butterflies.
But you do not ask permission of the creature, which is wise.
If I did consent, to please you, I should tell you packs of lies.
To one only will I tell it, do I tell it all day long.
Only one can see the patches I work into quilts of song.
Crazy quilts, I’m sure you’d deem them, quite unworthy of your prong.
44
The Art Work in the Making
One must go half-way with poets, feel the thing you’re out to find,
Wonder even while you name it, keep it somehow still enshrined,
Still encased within its leafage like an arbor honey-vined.
Lacking just this touch and tremor, how can I but shrink and clutch
What I have to closer keeping. Little limping phantoms, such
Are my poems before I’ve taught them how to walk without a crutch.
You mean well, I do not doubt it, but you’re blind as any mule.
Would you question a mad lover, set his love-making to rule?
With your pulse upon his finger, watch him play the sighing fool?
Would he win the lady, tell me, with you by? Your calculations
Might frustrate a future teeming with immeasurable equations.
Which will prove the most important, your research or his relations?
Take my answer then, for, flatly, I will not be vivisected.
Life is more to me than learning. If you clumsily deflected
My contact with what I know not, could it surely be connected?
Scarcely could you, knowing nothing, swear to me it would be so.
Therefore unequivocally, brazenly, I tell you ‘‘No!”
To the fame of an avowal, I prefer my domino.
Still I have a word, one moment, stop, before you leave this room.
Though I shudder thinking of you wandering through my beds of bloom,
You may come with spade and shovel when I’m safely in the tomb.
What can we deduce from these pronouncements regarding
the art work in the making?
They tell us rather clearly that the art work is not the
product of an inspiration, but of a slow growth. They tell
us, furthermore, that in this growth two related processes
are clearly discernible, namely, one process in the course of
which
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
during which the prospective art work consists of no more than
thought’s green sprouting and little limping phantoms, but
this process leads up to a stage when the sprouts are blown
into blossoms, when the imagination bodies forth the forms
of things up to then unknown. In the second process the
1From Ballads for Sale, 1927. Used by permission of, and special arrangement with,
Houghton Miffiin Company.
45
Art and Beauty
little phantoms are taught to walk without a crutch, when
the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
But these utterances tell us nothing definite as to what
actually happens in the course of these processes. Here we
must resort to spade and shovel, and we shall borrow those
of J. Middleton Murry ! who reverentially dug up the ground
that Keats covered on the way to one of his most famous
poems, the sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen,
Round many a Western island have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold;
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
Which deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne
Yet never could I judge what men could mean
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with wond’ring eyes
He stared at the Pacific,—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
The poem was written by Keats within a few hours after
he and his friend Cowden Clarke had delved for the first time
into Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Keats left
Clarke at daybreak, and at ten o'clock in the morning the
finished poem was on Clarke’s breakfast table. On the surface,
then, the poem was written between daybreak and breakfast
time one day in October, 1816, when Keats became twenty-
one years of age. As Mr. Murry states, ‘‘It is one of the great
sonnets in the English language, and it was the first great
poem Keats wrote. If the word ‘inspiration’ is ever to be
used in literary criticism it might be used with some pro-
priety here.” ?
1 Studies irs Keats, London, 1930, Oxford University Press.
2 Op. ctt., p. 16.
46
The Art Work in the Making
But the “inspiration” was the flower of a long period of
search and preparation, and Mr. Murry traces it through
the labyrinth of Keats’ rich mind and long labors. He shows
the complexity of the structure of the poem, and yet, ‘‘the
more the intricacy of the structure is realized the more im-
possible it becomes to conceive that the poem was constructed
deliberately as a watchmaker constructs a chronometer.” !
Its genesis is rather like that of the new-born animal, “‘before
whose birth there is indeed a long period of elaboration, but
the elaboration is unconscious, and occurs in the darkness of
the womb.”’? Mr. Murry then proceeds to trace this period
of unconscious elaboration. Chapman’s Homer was not the
direct cause of the poem, but “‘has served the office of a spark
to ignite a highly combustible gas in the poet’s mind into a
flash of perfect incandescence.”* And the gas had been
gathering gradually in the mind of the poet.
Mr. Murry finds a clue to the making of the poem ‘“‘in its
native setting among Keats’ poetry of this period,” namely,
Keats’ first volume of poetry. In that volume the sonnet,
“besides being the one perfect poem in that uneven and
exciting book, is a perfect crystallization of a mood of thought
and feeling which exists in solution throughout the volume.
In the sonnet Keats succeeded in expressing, with a strange
completeness and concision, a complex condition of thought
and feeling which finds imperfect and partial utterance in
nearly all his serious poems of the same period.”’ 4
What is this condition that is crystallized in the poem?
Mr. Murry calls it, ‘‘the ardor of exploration and the excite-
ment of discovery.”.> At first the ardor of exploration is in
the realm of poetry and nature. The poet finds the two realms
to be one;’“‘and he is a chained prisoner from both.’”*® He
is studying medicine, and the Borough where the medical
students had their lodgings is a dirty place. He cries:
Far different cares
Beckon me sternly from soft ‘Lydian airs”
1 Op. cit., p. 20. 3 Op. cit., p. 21. 5 Op. ctt., p. 21.
2 Op. cit., p. 20. 4 Op. cis., p. 21. 6 Op. cil., p. 22.
47
Art and Beauty
And hold my faculties so long in thrall,
That I am oft in doubt whether at all
I shall again see Phoebus in the morning . . .
But might I now each passing moment give
To the coy muse, with me she would not live
In this dark city.
This is November, 1815. In the early summer of 1816 Keats
climbed out of the dingy Borough to visit Cowden Clarke,
a poet, at Hampstead Heath, thus finding his way to nature
and poetry. Clarke ‘‘had shown some of Keats’ verses to
Leigh Hunt. Hunt had been, as he himself tells us, ‘fairly
surprised with the truth of their ambition and the ardent
grappling with nature’ and had invited Keats to his cottage
in the Vale of Health on the Heath.” ? As a result of these
visits and contacts with nature Keats cries:
Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heap’d up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a table whiter than a star...
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres;
For what a height my spirit is contending!
*Tis not content so soon to be alone.
But his visits to the Heath were not enough. ‘‘He must
go away. And away he went, to Margate—to something he
had not seen before, the sea.”’? His epistles to his brother
George, to Mathew, to Clarke, during this period, ‘‘are con-
cerned with a single theme, his consuming ambition to write
poetry and his conviction that poetry is somehow directly
created in the poet’s soul by Nature.” * Keats is discovering
nature and therefore also poetry:
Open afresh your round of starry folds,
Ye ardent marigolds!
Dry up the moisture from your golden lids,
For great Apollo bids
That in these days your praises should be sung
On many harps, which he has lately strung.
1 0p. cil., p. 22. 20p. cit., p. 24. 2 Op. cit., p. 24.
48
The Art Work in the Making
He identifies his power of response to nature with his power of
poetry. The poet is
ever startled by the leap
Of buds into ripe flowers; or by the flitting
Of diverse moths, that aye their rest are quitting;
Or by the moon lifting her silver rim
Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim
Coming into the blue with all her light.
He has thus discovered the beauty of nature, the beauty of
poetry, and his power to express the beauty of nature in poetry.
He is gaining confidence in himself, becoming ready for the
supreme moment. Mr. Murry continues
Now let us take stock of our materials—what we have gathered towards
the making of the Chapman sonnet. The moment is apt, for that
spirit ‘‘standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come” is curi-
ously reminiscent of Cortez on his peak in Darien. We have the ardor
of exploration, the excitement of discovery: of Nature, of Poetry, and
of Keats’ own powers of poetry. We have an ocean, that speaks to
him unutterable things, upon which he looks down from a lofty cliff.
We have, if not a planet, a moon, to whom he cries:
O maker of sweet poets, dear delight
Of this fair world, and all its gentle lovers;
whom he had described first in Calidore,
Lovely the moon in ether, all alone,
and later as “with a gradual swim, coming into the blue with all her
light.”
The discovery of poetry—the thing in itself and his own powers of
it—the discovery of the moon, the discovery of the ocean. Since
Nature and Poetry are one to him, why should not all these be the
same? But how to express these as discoveries? The ocean had been
discovered—why not the ocean when it was unknown? !
Keats is ready for the great leap, for the sonnet. The raw
material is prepared. What is to bring it to the point of fusion?
Mr. Murry finds this catalytic agent in a poem of Keats’,
entitled Sleep and Poetry, composed in 1816, after a ‘‘ white
night spent on the sofa at Hunt’s cottage where he lay think-
ing of poetry, with a picture of Petrarch and Laura before
1 Op. cit., pp. 25-26.
49
Art and Beauty
his eyes.” ! “From the first,” says Mr. Murry of this poem,
“‘we are conscious that the poet is straining to utter a con-
ception of poetry too great for his words. He has had an in-
tuition into a mystery, which he seeks again and again to
declare. Poetry, he seems to be saying, is the instinctive
response of the purified soul to the wonder and majesty of
the Universe: through the poet the All finds voice.” ?
Mr. Murry summarizes his study as follows:
But what can we claim to have accomplished by this inquiry? To
have explained a great poem? Assuredly not. The act of composing
the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer remains unique and beyond analysis.
But we can, I think, fairly claim to have substantiated the theory
that the composition of a great poem is but a final conscious act super-
vening upon a long process of unconscious elaboration.
Can we, with the help of our evidence, more clearly define the
nature of this process? What elements can we distinguish in it?
First and foremost, a predominant, constantly recurring complex
of thought and emotion. Throughout the period of unconscious
elaboration Keats had been continually discovering more and more of
what was to him the highest reality: Nature, Poetry, the Nature of
Poetry; and the continual discovery was accompanied by an incessant
emotional excitement. Whether his successive acts of discovery can
properly be called ‘‘thoughts” will depend upon the philosophy of the
man describing them; but ‘“‘thoughts” they shall be for us, as they were
for Keats:
There came
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
Within my breast...
These successive thoughts (which some would call intuitions), ac-
companied by an incessant emotional excitement, form what Coleridge
calls ‘‘a predominant passion,” more exactly a persistent process of
thought-emotion.
Second, in the service of this persistent thought-emotion the specific
poetic-creative faculty has been continually at work to find means of
expression for it. These means of expression are chiefly images derived
from a series of particular sense-perceptions. Thus, the poet’s first per-
ception of the Moon:
Lovely the moon in ether, all alone
is refined to a subtler perception of her
10p. cit., p. 25. 2 Op. cit., pp. 26-27.
50
The Art Work in the Making
Lifting her silver rim
Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim
Coming into the blue with all her light.
And this sense-perception is used to enable the poet to grasp his own
thought of the nature of poetry. The smooth and lovely motion of the
moon is a quality of the poetry he conceives:
More strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal
Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle.
So the image of the moon becomes an image of his thought of poetry.
Again, he sees the sea for the first time, and that perception of the
sea, with its attendant emotion, enables him once again to grasp his
main thought with its emotion. The image of the vast ocean also
becomes an image of his vast “idea” of poetry. Nay more, the very
sound of the sea,
which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been,
enables him to make audible, as the sight of the sea to make visible
his thought. Again, another aspect of his thought is grasped through
the vision of himself standing alone on a cliff (at Margate) or on a
hill (at Hampstead), staring with wondering eyes at the prospect
before him. He is ‘‘a spirit standing apart upon the forehead of the
age to come.”
So the poet’s mind has been accumulating through successive acts
of sense-perception a series of images which can be assimilated into
the main process of his thought and act as surrogates for it. And the
condition of this assimilation is an emotional and qualitative cor-
respondence. His perccption of the moon is a delighted discovery,
so is his perception of the ocean—in both the hidden loveliness of an
unknown reality is revealed to him; therefore, both in the qualities
discovered and in the emotion awakened in discovering them, these
sense-discoveries are analogous to the main thought—discovery of
the nature of poetry. With his senses he discovers Nature, with his
thoughts he discovers the nature of poetry.
His two crowning sense-discoveries were those of the moon and sea,
and those are instantly pressed into the service of his thought: the
images of the moon and the ocean can serve at will to embody the
objects of his thought. And he is able to think more exactly con-
cerning the nature of poetry because the sensuous images of moon
and ocean are become true symbols of the reality about which he is
thinking. So that in the process of unconscious elaboration the con-
tinually progressing thought is given ever fresh definition and sub-
stance by the images it is able to assimilate; and, on the other hand,
51
Art and Beauty
the images acquire a thought-content. The thought steadily gains
focus and intensity; the images significance.
Suddenly this complex of thought and images, which is working
itself towards an organic unity, is ejected into poetic form. What
occasions this sudden birth? The dominant thought, with its attend-
ant emotion, is given a final focus by a particular event. The dis-
covery of the nature of poetry, which had been going on for months,
is consummated by the discovery of Chapman’s Homer. Utterance
becomes urgent, necessary, inevitable. The means are at hand—
images long since assimilated to that dominant thought-emotion, of
which the discovery of Chapman is the final instance and occasion.
But there is a final creative act. If this unconscious preparation were
all, we should imagine Keats in his sestet saying: “‘Then felt I—as I
did when I discovered the moon, as I did when I discovered the ocean.”
But the moon was discovered long ago, and so was the ocean. It will
not do. It must be: ‘Then felt I—as a man who discovers a new planet,
as a man who discovers a new ocean.” ‘Then to his need came the
memory of Robertson’s America, which he had read as a schoolboy.
An inexact memory—for as Tennyson pointed out, it was Balboa, not
Cortez, who stared at the Pacific—but one definite enough to give the
final perfection to his imagery.
Of the last act of poetic creation there is nothing to say. We cannot
explain it; but it is no longer utterly miraculous. We have seen at
least how the main materials lay ready prepared for the final harmo-
nious ordering; part, and not the least part, of the final harmony had
already been achieved; we may fairly say that the actual composition
of this great poem was but the conscious last of a whole series of un-
conscious acts of poetic creation. And we may hazard the guess that
it is this long period of unconscious preparation which distinguishes
the great poem from the merely good one; but this is the reason why,
in a great poem, the subject seems to be dissolved away in the incan-
descence of the emotion it kindles; and, finally, that this is the reason
why the depths of significance in a great poem are inexhaustible.*
From this study of an art work in the making we see that
Shakespeare’s poet, whose eye rolls in a frenzy, glancing from
earth to heaven and heaven to earth, or Lowell’s thought’s
green sprouting and limping phantoms, is a process of ad-
venture, a search instigated and initiated by a living, vital
urge, neither conscious, nor subconscious, nor super-conscious,
but all three, like life itself; that the adventure, long, anguish-
ing, heartbreaking, but urgent, results in a discovery, a
109. cit., pp. 30-33.
52
fos — — ¢
The Art Work in the Making
fruition, when imagination bodies forth into full conscious-
ness the forms of things previously unknown, the discovery
in turn serving as a stimulus for another long, but now fully
conscious, deliberate, rational activity, a process of execu-
tion, in the course of which that which the imagination has
bodied forth is given a local habitation and a name, when
the little limping phantoms are taught to walk without a
crutch.
3
Tae Process oF ADVENTURE
If we are asked what it is that starts the adventure, all
we can say is that it is a characteristic of the creative mind
that in the actual, the commonplace, the old, it senses vaguely
the presence of a potential, unique new, and that it cannot
rest until the vague feeling has become a clear idea. This
characteristic of sensing the new in the old and of bringing
ft forth is what ts meant by creativeness. It is such a mind,
and that is all that’can be said. Why it is so, and whence it
came, we do not know, unless we accept Plato’s mystical ex-
planation that it is the soul seeking to restore itself to its
original state of perfection and purity, after being polluted
by its association with the body. All we can do is accept the
fact that there are such minds, and seek to understand their
operations in order to understand their works. We know there
is an adventure in the realm of the old, a discovery of the
new and a recording of the new, with the result that the new
permeates the old and is transformed by it. It is such minds
that prevent life from becoming a stagnant pool of routine
habit, and to whom we owe everything that we include in the
terms culture and civilization.
The adventure is a self-searching, a growth in personality,
a development in self-realization, hence it is not arbitrary,
consciously planned out, but natural and spontaneous. It
proceeds along two stages, a stage of preparation, and a stage
of elaboration or maturation.
53
Art and Beauty
a. THE STAGE OF PREPARATION
In preparation the seed is sown in the fertile soil of a crea-
tive mind, to gestate, send forth sprouts, and grow into npe
fruit. Keats’ preparation for the Chapman sonnet consisted
of his experiences with the city streets, his journeys to the
country, his discovery of nature, of the ocean, the moon,
and the discovery of his own poetic powers. Coleridge gathered
the raw material that incubated and matured into the fruits
of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan in his wide and
desultory readings of exotic literature, which took him, ac-
cording to Professor John Livingston Lowes, ‘through all the
lands and all the seven seas of the globe,” where he encoun-
tered ‘‘as strange a concourse as ever haunted the slopes of
Parnassus—with alligators and albatrosses and auroras and
Antichthories; with biscuit-worms, bubbles of ice, bassoons,
and breezes; with candles and Cain, and the Corpo Santo;
Weoclesian, king of Syria, and the demons of the elements;
earthquakes, and the Euphrates; frost-needles, and fog-smoke,
and phosphorescent light; gooseberries, and the Gardonia
Casianthus; halves and hurricanes; lightnings and Laplanders;
meteors, and the Old Man of the Mountain, and stars behind
the moon; nightmares, and the sources of the Nile; footless
birds of Paradise, and the observatory at Pekin; swoons, and
spectres, and slimy seas; wefts, and water-snakes, and the
Wandering Jew.” ?
The note books of Milton and Shelley are the recorded
witnesses of the endless sources from which genius gathers
the preparatory material for its creative purposes. The
artist is an zsthetic Midas. Everything he touches may
at some future time turn into artistic gold, so that his
whole life is a preparation for his work, all his experiences
are raw material for creation, all his contacts with the
world assume creative possibilities. Professor Lowes writes
of Coleridge:
1 The Road to Xanadu. Reprinted by permission of, and special arrangement with,
Houghton Mifflin Company.
34
The Art Work in the Making
Coleridge’s Note Book is a catch-all for suggestions jotted down
chaotically from Coleridge’s absorbing adventures among books. It
is a repository of waifs and strays of verse, some destined to find a
lodgment later in the poems, others yet lying abandoned where they
fell, like drifted leaves. It is a mirror of the fitful and kaleidoscopic
moods, and a record of the germinal ideas of one of the most gifted
and utterly incalculable spirits ever let loose upon the planet. And it
is like nothing else in the world so much as a jungle, illuminated eerily
with patches of phosphorescent light, and peopled with uncanny life
and strange exotic flowers. But it is teeming and fecund soil, and out
of it later rose, like exhalations, gleaming and aérial shapes.'
In the stage of preparation the creative mind thus lays up
treasures on earth to utilize in the heavens of creative imagi-
nation. Professor Lowes writes:
Every great imaginative conception is a vortex into which every-
thing under the sun may be swept. “All other men’s worlds,” wrote
Coleridge once, “are the poet’s chaos.” In that regard “The Ancient
Mariner” is one with the noble army of imaginative masterpieces of
all time. Oral traditions—homely, fantastic, barbaric, disconnected—
which had ebbed and flowed across the planet in its unlettered days,
were gathered up into that marvel of constructive genius, the plot of the
Odyssey, and out of ‘‘a tissue of old marchen”’ was fashioned a unity
palpable as flesh and blood and universal as the sea itself. Well nigh
all the encylopedic erudition of the Middle Ages was forged and welded,
in the white heat of an indomitable will, into the steel-knit structure
of the Divine Comedy. There are not in the world, I suppose, more
appalling masses of raw fact than would stare us in the face could we
once, through some super-subtle chemistry, resolve that superb, organic
unity into its primal elements.?
b. THE STAGE OF ELABORATION
The seeds planted in the soil of the creative mind during
the stage of preparation must have time in which to develop
whatever potentiality lies dormant in them. The development
is subject to no laws but its own inherent nature. It will not
be commanded or forced from the outside, although it may
be influenced by external conditions. It will have its own time
in which to grow, mature, flower, and bear fruit. When Schiller
wrote to Goethe that what he had been brooding over in vain
1 Idid., p. 6. P 2 Ibid., p. 426.
55
Art and Beauty
for five weeks came to him as in a flash within three days,
Goethe replied that: ‘‘We can do nothing but pile up the wood
and let it dry; it will catch fire in due time, and we wonder
over the occurrence.” Preparation piles up the wood which
dries and catches fire during the stage of gestation and matu-
ration, from which it emerges as a new product, perfect and
wondrous to behold.
This stage of the creative process is altogether unconscious,
in the sense that the creator does not know what is happening,
and consequently those accounts of it that we have are couched
in hazy mysterious terms, regarding some higher power at work.
Sir Philip Sydney writes in his Defense of Poesie,
Poesy . . . must be gently led, or rather it must lead. Which was
partly the cause that made the ancient-learned affirm it was a divine
gift, and no human skill: sith all other knowledge lie ready for any
that hath strength of wit: a poet no industry can make, if his own gentus
be not carried unto it: and therefore is it an old proverb, orator fu,
poeta nascitur. Yet confess I always that as the fertilest ground must
be manured, so must the highest flying wit have a Dedalus to guide
him. The Dedalus, they say, both in this and in other, hath three
wings to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is,
art, imitation, and exercise. But these, neither artificial rules nor
imitative patterns, we much cumber ourselves withal.
But that something is happening, that there is a process in
operation, that the seed is not lying fallow in the ground, is
attested to by other accounts. In a letter to his brother and
sister Keats complained that he was “‘wnting at random,
straining after particles of light in the midst of a great dark-
ness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of
any one opinion—” In a letter to Hunt, he gives another
indication of this process of incubation and maturation:
I went to the Isle of Wight, thought so much about poetry, so long
together, that I could not get to sleep at night; and, moreover, I know
not how it is, I could not get wholesome food. By this means, in a week
or so, I became not over-capable in my upper stories, and set off pell-
mell for Margate, at least a hundred and fifty miles, because, forsooth,
I fancied I should like my old lodgings here, and could continue to do
without trees. Another thing, I was too much in solitude, and conse-
56
The Art Work in the Making
quently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought as an only
resource. However, Tom is with me at present, and we are very com-
fortable. We intend, though, to get among some trees. How have you
got on among them? How are the nymphs? I suppose they have led
you a fine dance. Where are you now?
I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other
men, seeing how great a thing it is, how great things are to be gained
by it, what a thing to be in the mouth of Fame, that at last the idea
has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment,
that the other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a
Phaéton. Yet ’tis a disgrace to fail even in a huge attempt, and at this
moment I drive the thought from me. I begun my poem about a fort-
night since, and have done some every day, except traveling ones.
Perhaps I may have done a good deal for the time, but it appears such
a pin’s point to me, that I will not copy any out. When I consider that
so many of these pin-points go to form a bodkin-point (God send I end
not my life with a bare bodkin, in its modern sense) and that it re-
quires a thousand bodkins to make a star bright enough to throw any
light to posterity, I see nothing but continual uphill journeying. Nor
is there anything more unpleasant (it may come among the thousand
and one) than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last. But I
intend to whistle all these cogitations into the sea, where I hope they
will breed storms violent enough to block up all exit from Russia. . . .!
In The Prelude Wordsworth writes:
And now it would content me to yield up
Those lofty hopes awhile, for present gifts
Of humbler industry. But, oh, dear Friend:
The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts: his mind, best pleased
While she as duteous as the mother dove
Sits brooding, loves not always to that end,
But like the innocent bird, hath goadings on
That drive her as in trouble through the groves;
With me is now such passion, to be blamed
No otherwise than as it lasts too long.
In the light of such utterances the mystery of this uncon-
scious elaboration and formation of the old into the new is
TR. M, Milnes, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, 1848, Putnam.
57
Art and Beauty
somewhat dispelled. And it completely disappears when we
compare the finished new product with the old material and
note what has happened to it in the course of the transforma-
tion. The transformation occurs either as a reconstruction,
an integration, an intuition, an abstraction, a generalization,
or a transmutation.
In reconstruction some already existing product is disrupted
and from the parts or elements a new entity constructed. A
new invention is an instance in point. In the mental realm
old ideas are rearranged, broken up, disintegrated, mak-
ing possible the emergence of a new arrangement. Polit-
ical, social, economic, moral, and religious changes are cases
of creation by reconstruction. Nature creates by destroying
the old as the new arises from it. “‘ Except a corn of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit.” Reconstruction is thus a renewal,
a rebirth of the old, its regeneration into a more vital form,
preventing its stagnation. In the realm of art reconstruction
is responsible for the constantly progressive technical accom-
plishments, the triumph of spirit over letter. The roman-
tic, adventurous spirit of genius is cramped by the narrow
letter of classicism and breaks through it to emerge into
the new light of freedom. Genius can not tolerate the
stifling, stagnant atmosphere of cold formalism, the set laws
of artistic procedure. It must create its own atmosphere,
blaze its own trails through the untraveled regions of mind,
and in the course of its exploration treads roughshod and
crushes under foot whatever obstructs its progress to its goal.
Adherence to the established is the province of the imitative
artist following in the footsteps of his leader, the creator. In
his youth Richard Wagner was controlled by the operatic
tradition of the predominance of voice over instrument. Be-
cause of the inner necessity of his genius, he gradually broke
through this tradition, destroyed it, and the instrumental
supersedes the vocal, since he felt that the orchestra is
capable of more varied expression than the voice. Conse-
quently in his works arias and melodies of the opera are more
38
The Art Work in the Making
and more displaced by the recitative, which approximates
spoken language and is therefore more plastic in expression
than melody. In his hands, as a result, the limitation of the
opera is displaced by the wider expressive possibilities of the
music-drama.
In integration the new arises out of the old by a process
of gathering together hitherto disparate, unrelated material
culled from numerous sources and fusing it into a whole that
differs, by virtue of its being a whole, from the sum total of
the properties of its constituent parts. A unity has arisen
out of a variety, the variety now having meaning only in
terms of the unity. A novel or a drama is such a product,
while Professor Lowes shows us in much detail how two great
poems were evolved in this manner by the creative mind of
Coleridge. Coleridge himself describes this process as a syn-
thetic and magical power which “reveals itself in the balance
or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities . . . the
sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects;
. . - the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect
and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant
thought or feeling.” The predominant thought or feeling,
which itself has arisen from a preoccupation with the diverse
raw material, becomes the central core around which the
diversity gathers into unity. It is the “‘arrowy fire ” of Brown-
ing, which runs up and down,
while earthly forms combine
To throb the secret forth—a touch divine.
The touch divine is creative thought, which, ignited by the
secret inherent in the fragments of earthly forms, acts upon
them with an increasing heat until they yield up the full
secret in the whole into which they have been gradually
fused. /
In iniuttion the new emerges out of the old by a process of
insight. As intuition creative thought is the power of pene-
trating the surface or outer-side of experience supplied by
39
Art and Beauty
sensory perception into its core or inner-side. On its outer-
side experience is transient, sequential, partial, and fragmen-
tary, and therefore incomplete. I observe a man, and on the
surface, externally, I see no more than a series of acts, which
he performs more or less in common with other men. He is
just one among many, and his whole meaning as a man is no
more than that of his being just one more of a kind. On the
surface he has no uniqueness, no special distinctiveness, no
meaning as a personality. And even if his acts are different
from those of other persons, they are just that and no more,
since there is no significance, no cause for them apparent
externally. But these acts emanate from somewhere, they
are the effects of a cause, and if they are different from the
acts of others they are so because they arise from some source
that is as unique as the acts are different. This source is then
the reality of which the acts are the outward appearances or
manifestations. They are the parts of the basic whole, the
varied effects of a single cause. When this cause or whole is de-
tected, the parts which were formerly common and insignificant
in themselves become unique, significant, while the personality
which formerly was just one among many, becomes one out
of many, outstanding, distinctive, and significant in itself.
The acts, or parts, become transformed, transfigured by the
light cast upon them by the whole of which they are the
partial expression or manifestation. But this whole is not
apparent in the parts, is not subject to direct sensory experi-
ence. It can not be seen in them, it can only be experienced
through them, evolved or created out of them, the light gained
by this penetration reflecting upon the parts and illuminating
them with a new significance. This is the power of creation by
intuition, by insight, in terms of which the transient becomes a
witness of the permanent, and the imperfect and incomplete
the outer testimony of the perfect and complete. Genius
possesses this power to a marked degree. ‘On hearing the
people of the street,” wrote Balzac, ‘‘I was able to wed myself
to their life; I felt their rags on my back; I walked with my
feet in their torn shoes; their desires, their needs, everything
60
= 2a — 38 «ee
The Art Work in the Making
passed into my soul, and my soul passed into their’s—it was
the dream of a man awake.”
Balzac not only saw these people with his eyes, and ob-
served their actions; he lived their life in his mind, their
thoughts were his thoughts, their feelings were his feelings,
their actions were his actions. From this power of intuition,
of projecting his being into that of others, of merging himself
with others and others with himself, is derived the great
living truth and vitality of the characters in his novels. In
this power lies also the secret of great acting. A great actress
wrote in her reminiscences that in reading a play in which
she was to appear her procedure was to immerse herself in it
completely. If it affected her she found herself in a unique
state in which she saw the characters, particularly those she
might enact, vividly and vitally, in all their details, not out-
side of herself, but within her. When that happened she knew
that she could enact the rdle. If this state did not occur
spontaneously all mental effort to make it live was in vain,
and if she had to play the part the performance was mechan-
ical and wearisome. This is what Emerson meant in substance
when he wrote that ‘‘Thoughts let us into realities, neither
miracle nor magic nor any religious tradition, not the im-
mortality of the private soul is incredible, after we have
experienced an insight, a thought.”
Creation by abstraction is a process in the course of which
those constituents of experience imposed by practical needs
are eliminated until all that remains is experience in its essence
and substance, namely, pure form. Ordinarily, due to the
exigencies of the practical demands of life, the world of forms
is clothed with meanings that are extraneous to the form
itself, that are imposed upon it by the experient. We must
do something about a situation, we must react to it in order
to live, so we clothe it in the raiment of our needs to suit our
purposes. We do not accept it as it is in itself in its naked
purity, as it comes to us directly from the lap of nature, but
we Stand over it aggressively demanding of it to tell us what it
is good for, what we can get out of it. When we get through
61
Art and Beauty
questioning it, it is no longer itself but what we have made of
it. A form is not a form, but a chair to sit in, or a house to
live in, or an article of food to satisfy hunger, or a hat to wear.
A man is not a personality, but a good or poor worker, a
plumber or preacher, rich or poor, influential, and therefore
to be courted in view of favors he might bestow on us or harm
he may do us if displeased, or he is minus influence and con-
sequently may be disregarded with impunity, or even slighted
or insulted. Ordinarily, an idea is not valuable as an idea, but
only in what it can yield us. We want to know what it is good
for, what can be derived from it that might aid us to satisfy
the better some practical need, whether actual or fancied.
We thus impose upon experience, clutter it up with the débris
of our needs and wants. In abstraction this débris is removed
to permit the experience to stand for itself and by itself, in
all its pristine, original nature. In our day creation by abstrac-
tion is most evident in the so-called modern movement in
painting, poetry, and the novel, in the attempt to free these
arts from their long historical bondage in the service of con-
ventional morality.
In generalization the creative mind brings about order out
of chaos by seeking and establishing some wide, embracing,
inclusive idea or law that operates in particular, observable
phenomena, thereby turning the particular into a symbol of
the general. A word of common usage like mankind is an
instance of a general idea derived from particular individual
men, and embracing all particular individual men. Such a
term becomes creative, that is uniquely significant and op-
erative, when any one single man, black, white, yellow, or
brown, and irrespective of clime, time, place, or position,
becomes a living symbol of everything that man is in body,
mind, and spirit, actual or potential. Jesus had such a creative
concept of men, which was the source of his unique attitude
towards every human being. For him the woman taken in
adultery was not so much one person falling a victim to the
lusts of the flesh, as a symbol of mankind in its sufferings and
weaknesses, yet a reflection, an image of supreme perfection
62
The Art Work in the Making
and beauty as incorporated in the all-inclusive and all-
embracing idea of God. Hence, to abuse her was to abuse
mankind, to sin against God. The Platonic realm of ideas is
another case of such creative generalization. In that realm,
love, justice, truth, beauty exist as pure and perfect because
complete, while in man they are present only in an incomplete
and consequently imperfect and impure form. Every par-
ticular man has love, justice, truth, and beauty in him and is
therefore a symbol of them. When he becomes conscious of
his symbolic nature he becomes creative, for he will strive to
transform the part into the nature of the whole, to make that
which is imperfect and incomplete into a true image, a reflec-
tion of the perfect and complete. Unless one becomes aware
of his symbolism he will mistake the part for the whole, the
many for the one, the imperfect for the perfect, the appear-
ance for the reality. Every scientific law is such a created and
creative concept. The general law was created out of specific
events, the events thereby becoming particular, partial mani-
festations and reflections of the general idea. The true scien-
tist does not value that law because of any practical applica-
tion, but solely for its being the unity, the reality, underlying
diverse appearances. To the genuine scientist science is an art,
the law a creation of beauty, a building-out of the new out of
the old, in the course of which the old is transformed into the
aspect of the new. For Newton the laws of the movements of
the celestial bodies were witnesses to the glory and beauty
of God, while Einstein identifies science with religion.
In transmutation the creative mind builds an ideal world
out of the actual by deliberately denying the reality of the
actual and affirming the reality of the ideal. For Browning
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven—
All’s right with the world.
63
Art and Beauty
while Henley affirms that
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
In The Concert, Edna St. Vincent Millay denies the reality of
the gruesome in war and offers the reality
Of armies without a country
Storming a nameless gate
Hurling terrible javelins down
From the shouting wall of a singing town
Where no women wait.
and in the following quaint fancy J. M. Barrie denies the
reality of fleeting time and offers the reality of eternity.
How comely a thing is affliction borne cheerfully, which is not beyond
the reach of the humblest of us. What is beauty? It is these hard-
bitten men singing courage to you from their tent; it is the waves of
their island home crooning of their deeds to you who are to follow
them. Sometimes beauty boils over and then spirits are abroad. Ages
may pass as we look or listen, for time is annihilated. There is a very
old legend told to me by Nansen the explorer—I like well to be in the
company of explorers—the legend of a monk who had wandered into
the fields and a lark began to sing. He had never heard a lark before,
and he stood there entranced until the bird and its song had become
part of the heavens. Then he went back to the monastery and found
there a doorkeeper whom he did not know and who did not know him.
Other monks came, and they were all strangers to him. He told them
he was Father Anselm, but that was no help. Finally they looked
through the books of the monastery, and these revealed that there had
been a Father Anselm there a hundred or more years before. Time had
been blotted out while he listened to the lark.!
The substance of every significant art work is the fruit
of one or the other, or of one or more, of these ways of creative
thought in the process of preparation-elaboration. The process
is intimately personal. No answer to a problem is being de-
liberately sought, no scheme of action is being rationally
planned, no result is consciously anticipated. The creator
is simply living. He is obeying the law of creative mindedness
1 Courage, Scribner’s, pp. 33-34.
64
rn
a
The Art Work in the Making
for growth. He is engaged upon an exploration of life, an
adventure in vivid, enhanced living. He is occupied with the
discovery, and hence also the realization of his self in and
through the maelstrom of the non-self, of the world about him.
The urge for living drives him relentlessly from experience
to experience, from attainment to attainment, from peak to
valley and valley to peak, in the endless journey of self-
realization through self-discovery. Each of Keats’ poems
pnor to the Chapman sonnet represents one step in the jour-
ney towards self-realization attained in that poem. He was
not seeking so much to write poems, but to find poetry, which
was for him the substance of existence, the truth and beauty
of life, which was not only all that he needed to know or
could know, but had to know in order to really live. His
poems are the records of this search for the truth of beauty
and the beauty of truth, of this yearning to find himself,
to make articulate the still small voice of his true being.
The whole life of the creative mind is thus one constant
stage of preparation and maturation, each art work being
a landmark, a record, of its progressive discoveries. For
while the creative mind is seeking it is also finding, each
finding being, however, but an invitation, a stimulus for a
further seeking. Goethe’s seventy years of life represent the
journey of preparatory seekings and findings which culmi-
nated in his supreme creative effort, Faust. Faust is Goethe,
ripe, mature, fully grown, fully realized, with the span of
those seventy years of life and work forming the roots that
nourished the trunk and branches of the tree that made pos-
sible the perfect fruit of Faust. During those years the wood
was being piled up and drying, awaiting the spark that would
ignite it in due time.
Since this stage is a spontaneous, natural growth it will not
be forced from the outside, although it may be aided or abetted
by external circumstances. And since it is also autistic, un-
conscious, non-deliberate, in that its final fruit is as yet but a
potentiality, the mental activity seems to the creator himself
to be idle, haphazard, and futile. Alexander Pope wrote:
65
Art and Beauty
. . - [ believe no mortal ever lived in such indolence and inactivity
of body, though my mind be perpetually rambling—it no more knows
whither than poor Adrian’s did when he lay a-dying. Like a witch,
whose carcass lies motionless on the floor, while she keeps her airy
sabbaths, and enjoys a thousand imaginary entertainments abroad, in
this world and in others, I seem to sleep in the midst of the hurry,
even as you would swear a top stands still, when it is in the whirl of
its giddy motion. It is no figure, but a serious truth I tell thee, when I
say that my days and nights are so much alike, so equally insensible of
any moving power but fancy, that I have sometimes spoke of things
in our family as truths and real accidents, which I only dreamt of; and
again, when some things that actually happened came into my head,
have thought, till I enquired, that I had only dreamed of them.
Nevertheless, there are indications in the course of this proc-
ess that these apparently futile mental wanderings are as the
scattered clouds in the sky heralding the approach of the storm.
There are occasional faint distant rumblings and brief streaks of
lightning in the form of flashes of illuminations or inspirations,
announcing the coming glory of the birth of an idea in due
time. These are premature birthpangs, but prophetic omens
of a coming maturity. These omens often deceive the creator
with an appearance of full growth, but he is soon undeceived if
he makes any effort to deliver the mental child. ‘‘A poet,”
writes Robert Graves, “‘reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement,
“**T say, listen, I am going to write a great poem on such-and-such!
I have the whole thing clear in my mind, waiting to be put down.’ ”’
But if he goes on to give a detailed account of the scheme, then the
act of expression (especially prose expression) kills the creative impulse
by presenting it prematurely with too much definiteness. The poem is
never written. It remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple of
phrases and an elaborate scheme of work, and is then banished to the
lumber room of the mind; later it probably becomes subsidiary to
another apparently irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two
in quite a different shape, the elaboration very much condensed, the
phrase altered and the title lost.!
4
THE Process OF DISCOVERY
This process differs from the process of adventure from
which it emanates, by being fully conscious, in that the creator
102 English Poetry, Knopf.
66
The Art Work in the Making
now labors in the full light of an objective to be attained. The
fruit is ready, and the plans for its harvesting are in progress
and soon to be put in operation. The imagination has now
bodied forth the forms of things unknown, and they call loud
and strong to be given a local habitation and a name. The ad-
venture is over, the discovery has been made, and now calls
for a record to be made of it. There is great rejoicing over the
discovery, particularly so because it came in so unexpected
a manner, but the enthusiasm must give way to the calm, but
nevertheless arduous, labor of reporting the great news in the
most vivid, clear, and concise manner possible. The ardor of the
adventure and the enthusiasm of the discovery now give way to
the arduousness of painful, fatiguing, and nerve racking labor
of execution.
a. THE INSPIRATION
The discovery is the ‘‘dear mystery” of the creative process
spoken of as inspiration or illumination. Because it comes
upon the heels of the subconscious process of incubation it
gives the appearance of hailing from some source other than
the person of the creator himself. “Every product of higher
art,’ wrote Goethe, ‘‘every significant apercu, every thought
which yields fruit, lies in no man’s control, but is raised
above all earthly power. The man is controlled by a demon
while he believes he is directing his own activities. In such in-
stances a man is a tool of a higher ruling power, a favored re-
ceptacle of divine influences.” He is in the hands of the muses,
of a personality other than his own, as pictured so invitingly
by J. M. Barrie in Courage where he contrasts his everyday
self with his writing self.
My special difficulty is that though you have had literary rectors
here before, they were the big guns, the historians, the philosophers;
you have had none, I think, who followed my more humble branch,
which may be described as playing hide and seek with angels. My
puppets seem more real to me than myself, and I could get on much
more swingingly if I made one of them deliver this address. It is
M’Connachie who has brought me to this pass). M’Connachie, I
should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is
the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half. We are
67
Art and Beauty
complement and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical
and canny, he is the fanciful half; my desire is to be the family solicitor,
standing firm on my hearth rug among the harsh realities of the office
furniture; while he prefers to fly around on one wing. I should not
mind him doing that, but he drags me with him. I have sworn that
M’Connachie shall not interfere with this address to-day; but there is
no telling. I might have done things worth while if it had not been for
M’Connachie, and my first piece of advice to you at any rate shall be
sound: don’t copy me. A good subject for a rectorial address would be
the mess the rector himself has made of life. I merely cast this forth
as a suggestion, and leave the working of it out to my successor. I
do not think it has been used yet.!
This other self has its psychological cause in the unusual
emotional state aroused by the discovery, so that the self is
no longer that of the adventurer, perplexed, uncertain, but a
new, sure, and certain being, who has conquered the world.
Thus William Butler Yeats sings:
I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sand by the water’s edge,
And look most alike me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self.
Wordsworth gives an excellent account of the effect of this
moment of illumination upon his normal self:
Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapor that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveler. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say—
“T recognize thy glory:” in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbors; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
1 Courage, Scribner’s, pp. 3-4.
68
The Art Work in the Making
And something evermore about to be.
Under such banners militant, the soul
Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils
That may attest her prowess, blest in thoughts
That are their own perfection and reward,
Strong in herself and beatitude
That hides her, like the mighty flood of Nile
Poured from his fount of Abyssinian clouds
To fertilize the whole Egyptian plain.
It is of inspiration that Plato speaks so eloquently in the
Phedrus as ‘‘divine madness,” and to which the poet “‘A. E.”’
(George Russell) refers when he writes:
I believed then, and still believe, that the immortal in us has memory
of all its wisdom, or, as Keats puts it in one of his letters, there is an an-
cestral wisdom in man and we can if we wish drink that old wine of
heaven. This memory of the spirit is the real basis of imagination,
and when it speaks to us we feel truly inspired and a mightier crea-
ture than ourselves speaks through us. I remember how pure, holy
and beautiful these imaginations seemed, how they came like crystal
water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life, and the astonish-
ment I felt, I who was almost inarticulate, to find sentences which
seemed noble and full of melody sounding in my brain as if another
and greater than I had spoken them; and how strange it was also a
little later to write without effort verse, which some people still think
has beauty, while I could hardly, because my reason had then no
mastery over the materials of thought, pen a prose sentence intelli-
gently. I am convinced that all poetry is, as Emerson said, first writ-
ten in the heavens, that is, it is conceived by a self deeper than appears
in normal life, and when it speaks to us or tells us its ancient story we
taste of eternity and drink the Soma juice, the elixir of immortality.!
The most vivid account of the state of inspiration is given
by Nietzsche. He writes:
Can any one at the end of this nineteenth century possibly have any
distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period meant by in-
spiration? If not, I should like to describe it. Provided one has the
slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely
the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium
of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the con-
dition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly con-
vulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with in-
1 The Candle of Vision. Copyright 1918, by The Macmillan Company, pp. 75-76.
Reprinted by permission.
69
Art and Beauty
describable definiteness and exactness. One hears—one does not seek;
one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like
lightning, inevitably without hesitation—I have never had any choice
about it. There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension is sometimes re-
leased by a flood of tears, during which one’s progress varies from in-
voluntary impetuosity to involuntary slowness. There is a feeling
that one is utterly out of hand, with the most distinct consciousness
of an infinitude of shuddering thrills that pass through one from head
to foot;—there is a profound happiness in which the most painful
and gloomy feelings are not discordant in effect, but are required as
necessary colors in this overflow of light. There is an instinct for
rhythmic relations which embraces an entire world of forms (length,
the need for a widely extended rhythm, is almost a measure of the
force of inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension).
Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of
freedom, independence, power and divinity. The spontaneity of the
images and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of
what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the most im-
mediate, exact, and simple means of expression.!
b. THE EXECUTION
Genius has often been defined as consisting of ninety-nine
per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration. Like all
other glib statements, this one contains one per cent of truth
and ninety-nine per cent of falsehood, for the inspiration is
inseparable from the perspiration, in that the former is not
only the stimulus, the driving force for the latter, but also
its sole justification. The value of the labor of execution is
derived from and is in direct proportion to the end that is to be
attained through it. Without the inspiration no amount of
perspiration can produce anything of real significance as an
art work. Only the fire of inspiration can generate a truly
effective heat of execution that moulds and shapes a proper
local habitation for the forms bodied forth by the imagination.
Execution may, and most often does, involve long sustained
physical and mental labor and heart-break. But all these are
instigated and directed by the end to be achieved through
them: the adequate expression in material form of the signifi-
cant, unique experience evolved during preparation-matura-
1 Ecce Homo, Modern Library, pp. 99-100.
70
!
The Art Work in the Making
tion and reaching fruition in inspiration. It is the birth of the
wondrous, perfect child that gives rise to the serious concern
of its proper training which must be cautiously pursued lest
the perfect lose its perfection and the wondrous turn out to be
the commonplace as it reaches full growth as a finished product.
If the child were not initially perfect and wondrous its training
would call for little caution and concern, nor would the finest
of training be of much avail. It is only when in the course of
training the perfection and wonder become increasingly ob-
- vious that great zeal is exercised in the choice of proper
nourishment. Quite often just the reverse is the case. As the
child grows, its original wonder and perfection turn out to
have been a deception, a false alarm, and it is disclaimed or
even discarded by its parent. When the great enthusiasm and
joy generated by the new on its arrival is somewhat abated,
there sets in a period of calm deliberation and evaluation of its
true worth, an evaluation which either sets up a new enthusi-
asm, an eagerness to do justice to it if found true to expectation,
to spare no pains in developing its true nature and worth, or,
if disappointing, its growth becomes a matter of indifference
or is completely disregarded.
Now it is this zeal, this eagerness to do justice to a true
child of the creative mind that is the source of the relentless
effort that characterizes the creator in dealing with the tools
and materials, the mechanisms, of his art. The letter must not
only reflect the spirit, but become the spirit. The form must
so fit the content, the matter must so clothe the idea, that
the two are merged, wedded, and united to a point when matter
loses its identity by becoming idea. Only when the artist
succeeds in his labors to this point of identification has he
created a mould for his shapes fit to sustain their beauty and
their strength. The construction of such perfect forms is the
welcome task imposed upon the artist by the moment of
inspiration, and it is in the degree of his success in this task
that his standing as an artist is made manifest. Many are
called to inspiration, but few are chosen for execution. The
true mark of the artist is this ceaseless labor towards mastery
71
Art and Beauty
of his formal material in order to attain that spontaneity in
execution when his art will become truly artless, when all signs
of effort, of labor, are effaced from his work.
The chief conscious concern of the artist is therefore with
the labor in the interest of perfection. His labors are his life,
of which the final product is to him primarily an evidence of
his degree of success or failure. When the artist then speaks
of his works it is principally in terms of the conscious labor
expended upon them, of the difficulties he encountered and
handled on the road to facility. Those very happy touches
of genius discernible in his work which it seems no study or
labor could attain are the very ones due to long sustained
endeavor. Every artist blazes his own trail to the promised
land of each of his achievements, from which the uniqueness,
the originality, of his work is derived. It is work alone, as
Whistler said, that effaces the footsteps of work. Chopin would
rewrite a single passage a hundred times, raging and pacing
his room, biting his pen and tearing up sheets, which at times
reduced him to tears, while the agony of Whistler’s labors
were so great that often after a day’s work on a painting he
would collapse as from an illness when things did not go so
well, Tolstoi, reports Stefan Zweig, ‘‘was one of the most
diligent and painstaking of penmen; his literary frescoes were
mosaics, laboriously pieced together out of millions upon
millions of details, out of countless minute and particular
observations. What looks as if it had been sketched freehand
in broad and bold and clear outline, has really been the result
of strenuous craftsmanship on the part of a man who did not
see things in sweeping vision, but set to work slowly and pa-
tiently and concretely.”’” Shakespeare, in the words of Mase-
field, ‘“‘grew by continual, very difficult mental labor, by the
deliberate and prolonged exertion of every mental weapon,
and by the resolve to do not the nearest thing ‘precious’ to
human sheep, but the difficult, new and noble thing, glimmering
behind his mind, and brought to glow there by toil.”
It is thus by the fruits of his toil that the artist reveals the
nature of the kingdom of heaven that is within him. And it is
72
The Art Work in the Making
a toil, a laborious plodding, and not a rambling about, because
it is prompted, commanded, and directed by a clarity of vision,
definiteness of end to be attained, to say exactly what one
must say in just the manner that one must say it, because it is
so very important. There is, therefore, the chiseling, the
forging, the shaping, the choosing, the rejecting, the giving
up in despair and the resuming in hope, the disappointment
amidst triumph, and triumph amidst disappointment, as the
craftsman in the artist is aspiring to give perfect shape to the
artist in the craftsman. And the artist in the craftsman is
ever disappointed in the craftsman, for the craftsman’s grasp
can never attain to the artist’s reach. The finished product
is but a shadow, an imperfect representation, of the substance
and perfection of the idea. The calm of reason cools and dulls
somewhat the keen edge of the heat of imagination, so that
what execution presents as the product of imagination appears
as but an imitation of what imagination evolved. The ideal
loses its ideality when it becomes the actual, the letter pol-
lutes the spirit, even though without the letter it would be
nothing but an attenuated ghost. So the creator is ever dis-
appointed in triumph, but also triumphant in his disappoint-
ment, for no matter how imperfectly the perfect is mani-
fested, no matter how shadow hides substance, the fire has
nevertheless transformed and transfigured the impure, the
potential has nevertheless become the actual, the grasp has
come closer to the reach. There is joy in grief, and the grief
becomes a stimulus for joy to come. If attainment were with-
out sorrow, striving would die in infancy. Moses died happy
because he died before reaching the promised land, for he
died with the pure vision and was spared the impure realiza-
tion. The creator’s mind lives in the struggle and joy of an-
ticipation, and dies in the triumph and sorrow of realization,
only to be reborn anew with a renewed vision and to begin a
new struggle and joy of anticipation. Its peak of attainment
is a death and a rebirth, for one must die to be reborn, or
live a liying death.
73
BESSA SeSeseaaeas
CHAPTER IV
THE CREATIVE MIND
About the creative personality there has always been much
curiosity due to the attention aroused by its unusual behavior.
The so-called artistic temperament has been termed divine
and devilish, sublime and ridiculous, delineated in caricature
and described in language of awe. What sort of mentality
is behind the art work, what sort of personality is the creative
artist?
The behavior of artistic genius can be properly evaluated
only in the light of its mentality, and its mentality we can
readily study by comparing it with the mental status of its
fellow-beings. The genius is a human being like other human
beings. He is of the world with other men, he looks like other
men, acts like them, evinces desires like theirs, and yet there
is something in him and about him that is not like others. He
is like others, but he is different in his likeness. He is then
apparently not different in kind, but only so in degree.
But degree of what? Obviously the degree of mental power
possessed by other human beings, power of sensation, per-
ception, memory, and imagination. Genius seems to be su-
preme in all those activities, interests, and powers, that all
of us possess in a lesser degree. All of us see and hear, feel,
understand, remember, imagine, and express ourselves, but
genius, as is obvious from its products, can do all these things
in a superlative manner. The world therefore means more to
genius than to non-genius. Genius is more alive, more sus-
ceptible to the world about it than other human beings.
We may therefore say, in general, that genius is an en-
hanced, superior capacity for living. The question, then, as
to the nature of genius, reduces itself to an examination of
what it is in the mental equipment of genius that makes such
living possible.
We can attempt an answer to this question by the data
74
The Creative Mind
furnished by scientific experimentation in the field of musical
artistry, on the basis of which we may draw some general
conclusions on the mentality of artistic genius in whatever
field of art it happens to operate.
1
THE NATURE OF MUSICAL TALENT
Investigations on the nature of musical talent are based
upon two facts amply supported by the experiences of those
who train the prospective musical artist, namely, that artistic
musical performance rests, in the end, upon an innate equip-
ment which is bestowed by nature upon human beings un-
equally, and that this equipment, or talent, is not a single
power, but consists of a cluster of specific powers, all of which
one must possess to a high and somewhat equal degree in order
to attain any position above mediocrity as a performer. Thus,
one of the greatest violin masters and teachers of this genera-
tion expressed himself to the effect that: ‘‘One great mistake
lies in the failure of so large a majority of those who decide to
devote themselves to music—to learning some string instru-
ment, the violin, for example—to ascertain at the very outset
whether nature has adequately supplied them with the neces-
sary tools for what they have in mind.”
What these tools or innate powers are has been derived from
three sources.
The first source that shed some light on the factors of musical
artistry was the examination of children of outstanding musi-
cal endowment. These children were subjected to various
tests in order to determine what were their outstanding
qualities as potential musicians. A concrete case will serve
to illustrate this procedure.
Pepito Arriola was a noted Spanish prodigy. When three
and a half years of age he played twenty piano pieces from
memory, having learned these by ear. He could play a selec-
tion after two or three hearings and would also reproduce on
the piano that which had been sung to him, and supply the
75
Art and Beauty
melody with an accompaniment. What he once played he
never forgot. He readily improvised on the piano, and his
productions of this type showed a marked feeling for form and
structure, while his interpretations of musical works showed
unusual musical insight. Intellectually Pepito was developed
far beyond his age. When six years old he learned to speak
German in a few months, and read German and Latin script
with ease. He solved problems in addition of two and three
figures orally, never having had any instruction. He learned
his letters and numbers by spelling out the names of streets
on street corners and by reading the numbers on house doors.
During the tests that were given him he was constantly on the
alert and on no occasion could the purpose of the test be hidden
from him. He delighted in the apparatus and wanted to
manipulate it. He was very. temperamental and restless.
On entering a room he seemed to be everywhere at once. At
one moment he would be elated, jubilant, and the next mo-
ment would come anger and tears, to be followed soon by
smiles and joy. On the psychological tests, Pepito showed
himself to be the possessor of the following musical powers:
1. He could easily judge pitch intervals.
2. He possessed absolute pitch.
3. He had a wonderful musical memory.
4. He could transpose a musical composition with great
ease and apparent joy.
5. When a few measures of an improvisation were played
for him he would readily continue the musical suggestion and
carry it to a logical conclusion. Music seemed to be to him
a natural medium for emotional expression.
6. He would reproduce difficult dissonant chords with
much ease and with but few mistakes, and he would also
easily reproduce a succession of four unmelodic unrelated tones.
7. His ranking in pitch discrimination was very high.
8. He exhibited a keen sensitivity for the purity of inter-
vals.
Another source from which the inventory was derived, was
the pronouncements of master music teachers on artistic
76
The Creative Mind
musical production. For instance, Professor Leopold Auer
enumerates the following essentials:
A keen sense of hearing is, above all, one of the qualities which a
musician needs. One who does not possess it in the highest degree, is
wasting his time when he centers his ambitions on a musical career.
Of course, one may perfect one’s musical hearing if the faculty exists
in even a rudimentary form—though the student will have to be quick
to improve it by exact attention to the advice given him, and by un-
remitting watchfulness while he is at work—but there must be a cer-
tain amount of auditory sensibility to begin with.
(Furthermore) . . . one of the qualifications most important to the
musician is a sense of rhythm. Together with the sense of hearing,
it is a sine qua non for every one who wishes successfully to devote
himself to music. The more conspicuously nature has gifted the
young musical aspirant with a discriminating sense of hearing and a
strong feeling for rhythm, the greater are his chances of reaching his
goal. There is still, however, one more quality which the promising
student must possess. It is what the French call Pesprit de son metier,
the feeling of the professional man for the detail of his profession.
He should have, by intuition—by instinct—the faculty of grasping
all the technical fine points of his art, and an easy comprehension of
all shades of musical meaning.!
The third source from which the inventory was obtained
was from the comments of great artists concerning their own
performances. ‘Thus, according to Elman, the fundamental
of a perfected violin technique is perfect pitch:
Many a violinist plays a difficult passage, sounding every note and
yet it sounds out of tune. Many a player has the facility; but without
perfect intonation he can never attain the highest perfection. On the
other hand, anyone who can play a single phrase in absolute pitch
has the great and first essential. Few artists, not excepting some of
the greatest, play with perfect intonation. Its control depends first
of all on the ear. And a sensitive ear finds differences in shading;
it bids the violinist play a trifle sharper, a trifle flatter, according to
the general harmonic color and the accompaniment; it leads him to
observe a difference when the harmonic atmosphere demands it, be-
tween a C sharp in the key of E major anda D flat in the same key.?
Another factor stressed is tonal quality. On this point Professor
Auer expresses himself as follows:
1 Violin Playing as I Teach It, 1921, Stokes, pp. 4-5.
3F. H. Martens, Violin Mastery, Stokes.
7
Art and Beauty
The problem involved in the production of an entirely agreeable
tone—that is to say a tone which is singing to a degree that leads the
hearer to forget the physical process of its development—is one whose
solution must always be the most important task of those who devote
themselves to mastering the violin.!
Another item emphasized is that of tone inflection. To
quote Professor Auer again:
I regard suance in music as a specific application of Nature’s vari-
ability of mood and tone to musical ends and aims. Nature is never
monotonous—the violinist who realizes the fact, and gives his playing
those qualities of nuance, which diversify Nature’s every mood and
aspect will never play in a stilted, tiresome fashion. His interpreta-
tion will never be conceived on a dead level of uniformity.?
A further factor mentioned by artists is that of virtuosity
or technique. In the words of Mr. Ysaye:
At the present day, the tools of violin mastery, of expression tech-
nique, mechanism, are far more necessary than in days gone by. In
fact, they are indispensable if the spirit is to express itself without
restraint, and the greater mechanical command one has the less notice-
able it becomes. All that suggests effort, awkwardness, difficulty,
repels the listener.
With this inventory of the tools of musical mastery as
determined by master-performers and teachers, let us now see
upon what equipments in the make-up of the individual each
is conditioned.
First comes tone production which includes intonation and
tone quality. It is evident that intonation depends first of all
upon a keen ear—an ear that is sensitive to the fine differences
in pitch, an ear that discriminates readily and accurately
slight pitch deviations. A person whose pitch discrimination
is poor, might play off pitch without being aware of the fault,
since he does not hear it. A second equipment functioning in
correct intonation is motor or muscular, which is conditioned
upon the proper conformation of hand and fingers. Poor
motor control, codrdination, and adjustment mean that a
performer might be aware of producing faulty pitch, and yet
not be able to make the necessary muscular adjustments to
10. cit., p. 51. 3 Ibid., p. 152.
78
The Creative Mind
correct the fault. The fingers refuse to obey the dictates of
the ear. It is only when ear and muscles are both keenly sen-
sitive and working hand in hand that correct intonation is
possible.
Tonal quality, like intonation, depends upon sensory as well
as motor capacity. The ear must be sharply sensitive to
differences of timbre before the hand can produce them. In
other words, when the performer does not feel a need for a
singing tone or his conception of a singing tone is crude, the
hand naturally will not produce any better effect than the
ear calls for. On the other hand, the ear might call for a
beautiful tone, but the hand be unable to produce the de-
sired effect because of muscular defects. ‘The items, then,
that function specifically in the production of tonal quality are
first of all, an ear sensitive to timbre, and the muscular con-
trol that enables the performer to produce the desired effect.
A second main factor is tone inflection. ‘This implies the
ability to produce such musical effects as piano, forte, cres-
cendo, diminuendo, and all other intensity variations with-
out which a performance is dull and monotonous. The factors
upon which the production of these effects is conditioned are,
as in the previous cases, a sensitive ear, an ear that can de-
tect very fine dynamic inflections, and secondly, fine muscular
sensitivity plus codrdination of ear and hand.
The third factor is phrasing. The phrase is the structural
esthetic unit of music; the interpretation of a musical com-
position resting upon the performer’s conception and rendi-
tion of its constituent phrases. As the phrase, so the entire
composition. Now, a phrase is a rhythmic unit, made up of
a sequence of tones of varied pitches and durations, all com-
bining to produce a symmetrical, balanced, esthetic whole, and
yet also arousing an expectation for a sequential phrase. Each
phrase has an individuality all its own, and yet is not suffi-
cient unto itself. It is an individual in a society of individuals,
having its own earmarks, its distinguishing characteristics, and
yet depending for its full realization upon the other unities
or individuals that constitute the composition as a whole.
79
Art and Beauty
Furthermore, some phrases are more important than others,
have a more important place in the composition than others.
From the point of view of phrasing, then, an artistic rendi-
tion is conditioned upon (1) the performer’s musical under-
standing of, and his esthetic response to, the musical com-
position as a whole; (2) his evaluation of the constituent
phrases of the composition as regards their relative impor-
tance and significance; (3) his esthetic response to the in-
dividual phrase; (4) his response to every tone in the phrase
as regards its intonation, duration, intensity, timbre, conso-
nance; (5) his ability to produce the above effects.
The fourth factor is virtuosity. Deduced from the expressions
of artists, the following specific equipments are the sine qua
non for an adequate technique: muscular control and co-
ordination, speed, accuracy, flexibility, precision (having the
right finger in the right place at the right time), unrestrained
movements of arm and wrist.
In the above analysis we have a picture, incomplete of
course, but nevertheless suggestive of the inherent make-up of
the musical mind. The picture tells us definitely that what dif-
ferentiates the musical genius from mediocrity is not the kind
of powers possessed but the degree of the same powers. And
what is true of musical genius applies to genius in all the arts.
2
THe Mrinp oF GENIUS
Basically genius is an unusually high power of sensory
responsiveness to the world of direct immediate impressions.
The senses of genius, as has been well said “‘are not narrow
paths, but broad highways whereon march armies of im-
pressions, thronging to the citadel of his mind.’”’ With keenness
and acuity of sensation genius combines a delicacy of dis-
crimination, of nicety of perception, both together giving the
world of direct experience a limitless range, an exhaustless
abundance, and above all, a subtle refinement, that is alto-
gether beyond the ken of the more commonplace mind.
80
The Creative Mind
But sensation, no matter how wide in range, is but the cold
material of perception. If this material is to become operative,
effective, warm, and living, it must become intimately personal.
Now it is in the manner of this personification of sensation
that the essential trait of genius is recognized. For the ordinary
mind the personification is highly prejudiced, interested. The
ordinary mind values phenomena only in terms of their mean-
ing to itself. The insistent cry of life is to live, to maintain exist-
ence, and experience becomes significant only when, and in the
degree to which, it obeys the loud commands of the will to live.
The commands can be satisfied only through the environment,
and thus the objective world becomes subservient to the sub-
jective world. Life is a standing battle between outer and
inner, between the forces of the self and those of the non-self,
with the self as the aggressor imposing its will upon its more
or less complacent opponent. On the level of existence life
ever asks of its surroundings what it can offer for the satisfac-
tion of its need to live, and demands that it yield completely
to this need. From this asking and demanding all the values,
all the meaning and significance of the outer world are derived.
The world has no values apart from its relationship to the
exigencies of survival. Life imposes a label of its own making
upon all experience, and accepts experience only on the cre-
dentials of the label as good or bad, desirable or undesirable,
pleasant or unpleasant, to accept or reject what the world has
to offer it.
Now the will to live of genius dwells on a plane above that
of existence. Genius does not demand of the world, but gives
itself to the world. Its self is neither aggressive nor militant.
It is participating. It is not hungry for life, but for living. It
does not exist by and through experience, but lives in ex-
perience. It does not seek, it gives. And because it does not
seek but gives, it also finds. It does not seek its self within
itself but in the non-self, and therefore finds that which it
seeks in great abundance. Genius, in brief, is a state of inter-
ested disinterestedness. Because it is disinterested subjectively
it is also the more interested objectively. In its detachment
81
Art and Beauty
from its self it becomes attached to the non-self, living in it
and not through it. It thus sees clearly face to face and not as
through a glass, darkly. The value of the world to genius is
inherent, intrinsic, when experience becomes meaningful, signif-
icant, in itself, as experience. Its world is therefore not only
of wide range due to its sensory endowment, but the perception
of that extensive world is profound and penetrating because
of its attitude. Experience becomes living, vital, in that it
becomes identified with life itself.
It is this trait of genius that gives the quality of livingness
to its experiences. Nature becomes alive for it. This trait
makes it possible for D. H. Lawrence to write:
It is marvelous weather—brilliant sunshine on the snow, clear
as summer, slightly golden sun, distance lit up. But it is immensely
cold—everything frozen solid—milk, mustard, everything. Yesterday
I went out for a real walk. I’ve had a cold and been in bed. I climbed
with my niece to the bare top of the hills. Wonderful is to see the foot-
marks on the snow—beautiful ropes of rabbit prints, trailing away
over the brows; heavy hare marks; a fox so sharp and dainty, going
over the wall; birds with two feet that hop; very splendid straight
advance of a pheasant; wood-pigeons that are clumsy and move in
flocks; splendid little leaping marks of weasels, coming along like
a necklace chain of berries; odd little filigree of the field-mice; the
trail of a mole—it is astounding what a world of wild creatures one
feels round one, on the hills in the snow. From the height it is very
beautiful. The upland is naked, white like silver, and moving far into
the distance, strange and muscular, with gleams like skin. Only the
wind surprises one, invisibly cold; the sun lies bright on a field, like
the movement of a sleeper. It is strange how insignificant, in all
this, life seems. Two men, tiny as dots, move from a farm on a snow-
slope, carrying hay to the beasts. Every moment, they seem to melt
like insignificant spots of dust. The sheer, living muscular white of the
uplands absorbs everything. Only there is a tiny clump of trees
bare on the hill-top—small beeches—writhing like iron in the blue
sky. I wish one could cease to be a human being, and be a demon.
Alizu menschlich.'
It is also this characteristic of the mind of genius which gives
its works their great, superabundant vitality. Carlyle writes
of Burns:
1 The New Adelphi, June-August, 1930, pp. 282-283.
82
The Creative Mind
How his heart flows out in sympathy over universal nature; and in her
bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning! The “ Daisy”’ falls
not unheeded under his ploughshare; nor the ruined nest of that “ wee,
cowering, timorous beastie,” cast forth, after all its provident pains,
to ‘‘thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch cauld.’”’ The “‘hoar visage’”’
of Winter delights him: he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fond-
ness in these scenes of solemn desolation; but the voice of the tempest
becomes an anthem to his ears; he loves to walk in the sounding woods,
for “‘ it raises his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind”
It is in reference to this trait that Carlyle further comments:
The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to seek for a
subject: the elements of his art are in him, and around him on every
hand; for him the Ideal world is not remote from the Actual, but
under it and within it: nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can dis-
cern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around
him, the poet is in his place; for here too is man’s existence, with its
infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed
endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander
through Eternity: and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that
it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to
live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in every deathbed, though
it were a peasant’s and a bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings
obsolete, that there can be Comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly
grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be
cheated of his Farce? Man’s life and nature is, as it was, and as it
will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and
a heart to understand them; or they come and pass away before him
in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has
life no meanings for him, which another cannot equally decipher?
then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one.”
Burns wrote of himself:
We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the structure of our souls,
sO we cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one
should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that,
which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression.
I have some favorite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-
daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding
birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with par-
ticular delight. I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in
a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover
in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the
1 Critical ond Miscelloncous Essoys, 1852, A. Hart, p. 97. 2 Ibid., p. 99.
83
Art and Beauty
enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what
can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Aolian
harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident; or do these
workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own
myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities:
a God that made all things, man’s immaterial and immortal nature, and
a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.!
And of Tolstoi Zweig writes:
The fully grown Tolstoy, merging himself with his environment,
often does so with an ecstasy which merges on drunkenness. Read how
he goes into the forest that he may contemplate the world which has
singled him out from among millions to perceive it, to feel it, more
intensely and more wittingly than them all; he fills his chest and flings
his arms wide, as if he hoped to embrace the infinite. Read how, moved
no less strongly by the infinitely small than by the infinitely large, he
stoops to smooth out tenderly the leaves of some trampled plant, or
with passionate joy he looks at the quivering wings of a dragon-fly;
then, since his friends are watching him, he turns his face away lest they
should see that his eyes have filled with tears. ... We understand
his extravagant and boastful-seeming assertion: “I myself am nature”.?
In the stories and writings of Maupassant and Sherwood
Anderson we find ample evidences regarding this profound
penetrating perception due to the attitude of a disinterested
interest. For Maupassant a piece of string lying in the street
is pregnant with the significances of human tragedy. In the
fine sensorium of Emily Dickinson
. every experience was enlarged and the events that might occupy
an ordinary person’s consciousness for a few moments abided with her
for days; a breath became a tornado, and the first buds of March were
as tumultuous and overwhelming as the birth of a baby. “To live is
so startling,’ she exclaimed; ‘‘it leaves but little room for other occu-
pations.” Or, again: ‘‘The noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.”
With this heightened consciousness, the decorous round of household
tasks did not impoverish her quick sense of life; they were mingled with
the grander visitations of sun and stars, of blue birds and bumblebees
and daisies. What seems to us the smooth, polished surface of things
is for Emily Dickinson a tempest of mad atoms. Nature was magni-
fied in her consciousness, as it is magnified in the gigantic leaves and
buds of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings—and behold! it is another world.
1 Stefan Zweig, Adepts in Self-Portratture, 1928, The Viking Press, p. 232.
2 Op. cit., p. 101.
84
The Creative Mind
All of Sherwood Anderson’s stories and novels are the expres-
sions of a mind that ever reaches out beyond itself to people,
streets, houses, sun, and clouds with which he becomes identi-
fied, while in his autobiographic writings there are recurrent
passages referring to this characteristic of artistic perception.
In his A New Testament he speaks of the time in which he
becomes for a moment a Cesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander. ‘If
you men who are my friends and those of you who are acquain-
tances could surrender yourselves to me for just a little while,
I tell you what—I would take you within myself and carry
you around within me as though I were a pregnant woman.”
I have recently thrown out of my
arms the maiden placed there
by my father—a liar.
I sit in a stone chair in a cold
place.
I am beset by many pains.
Pain comes running to me out of
the bodies of men and
women.
I am bred out of the lusts of the
world.
I am become the abiding place of
little lustful thoughts that
weave in and out of the
minds of my people.
It is only to comfort my solitude I
whisper to myself it is thus
the new man emerges. It is
a thought to play with, a ball
to bounce off the wall. I
have whispered to myself
that the new man emerges
out of the womb of an
engine, that his birth cry
arises out of a clangor of
sounds.
My thoughts are tossed back and
forth on a wall.
As you sit with me you shall be
compelled to share my fate.
85
Art and Beauty
All you who live in the valley have
had sticks thrust into your eyes.
You are shepherds of blind sheep.
You shall sit in the chair of stone.
You shall sit in the narrow place.
You shall be pregnant.
You shall sit in the stone chair at
night and the throbbing of
iron cities shall be in the in-
tricate veins of your being.
There are walls of stone.
There are walls faced with iron.
Between them you shall sit.
Tales are people who sit on the
doorstep of the house of my
mind.
It is cold outside and they sit wait-
ing.
I look out at a window.
The tales have cold hands.
Their hands are freezing.
A short thickly-built tale arises and
threshes his arms about.
His nose is red and he has two
gold teeth.
There is an old female tale sits
hunched up in a cloak.
Many tales come to sit for a mo-
ment on the doorstep and then
go away.
It is too cold for them outside.
The street before the door of the
house of my mind is filled
with tales.
They murmur and cry out, they
are dying of cold and hunger.
I am a helpless man—my hands
tremble.
I should be sitting on a bench like
a tailor.
I should be weaving warm cloth
out of the threads of thought.
The tales should be clothed.
86
The Creative Mind
They are freezing on the doorstep
of the house of my mind.
I am a helpless man—my hands
tremble.
I feel in the darkness but cannot
find the doorknob.
I look out at a window.
Many tales are dying in the street
before the house of my mind.!
From the standpoint of the processes of sensation and per-
ception genius is a high power of responsiveness to the sources
of experience in range and penetration. This sensorial and
perceptual property of creative mindedness has its effect on
the nature and quality of the next higher mental processes of
imagery and memory. Because sensations are rich in variety,
and percepts intense in significance, the sensations are readily
available for recall in great abundance, either as naked images
or garbed with the memory of all past events associated with
them. And since imagery and memory supply the raw material
of imagination their wealth in number and depth of significance
determine the quality of the finished product of artistic effort.
Fundamentally, then, genius may be defined as a state of
mental superabundance, of an over-supply of readily avail-
able raw material, making possible a sifting and a resifting,
a combining and a recombining, a choosing and rejecting by
the various operations of the creative process.
In sum, we find that genius is distinguished constitutionally
by a quality of neural organization, a quality of high vigilance
of the nervous system, making possible a wide range of sensa-
tion, deep perception, and vivid recall. This is the meaning of
the statement that genius differs from others not in kind but
in degree, that genius can do extremely well what others can
do only more or less imperfectly. The genius is not a magician,
art works do not drop out of his lap, but are the consequence
of senses that are keen, of perceptions that are penetrating,
of recall that is quick, sure, and trustworthy, of thought
processes that are swift and accurate. The gifts of genius, in
1 Sherwood Anderson, The New Testament, 1927, Horace Liveright.
87
Art and Beauty
the words of Carlyle, ‘‘are those that exist with more or less
development in every human soul.” All of us are alive, but
genius is supremely so.
3
THE PERSONALITY OF GENIUS
The life of the artist has had an interest for the public
far above that aroused by other creative workers. In large
measure this public prominence of the artist is due to dilet-
tantes and amateurs who compensate for lack of genuine
creative powers by a display of eccentricity in the name of
artistic temperament. There is, however, a closer relationship
between the general public and the artist than either the
scientist or philosopher. The artist is largely dependent upon
public favor and approval for his living, while his works play
a not unimportant réle in the life of the masses. The scientist
and philosopher touch us but indirectly, while the artist is
an integral part of our habitual existence. He is an intimate
member of our family. He visits us in our home and exerts an
influence upon us in his books, paintings, music, while we
visit him in his domicile in the art gallery, theater, and con-
cert hall, and we encounter him regularly in our industrial
and religious activities. Since he is so much part and parcel
of our individual and social life we have a personal interest
in him. But he is so different from the rest of us in his interests
and activities as to appear freakish and abnormal. Our ways
do not seem to be his ways, and he bothers and disturbs us.
He is one of us, yet remains a stranger among us, attracting
undue attention. So we try to explain him by making of him
either a divinity or a monster. In days gone by he was an
outcast from decent society, today he is being turned into a
super-man. He has been variously called a god and madman,
above all human standards and beneath everything that is
humanly decent, a spoiled child to be tolerated with a mixture
of pity and scorn, and an irresponsible adult to be dealt with
severely in his transgressions. What is lacking both on the
part of his adorers and censors is an understanding of his real
88
The Creative Mind
nature as a human being, of which his peculiar behavior is the
outer expression. The peculiarities that have been attributed
to him and which need examination are: that he is deficient in
intelligence, in reasoning, but unduly emotional or tempera-
mental; that he is weak in character in that he falls a ready
victim to drink, drugs, and disease; that he is more mad than
sane; that he is more of a child or woman than a man.
Let us inquire into each of these alleged traits of artistic
genius in turn.
4
GENIUS, INTELLIGENCE, AND TEMPERAMENT
We know intelligence only as behavior. There is no mean-
ing to intelligence apart from action, from the manner in
which a person adjusts himself to his environment. Man is
the most intelligent of organisms because he can adjust him-
self most adequately to a most complex environment, that is,
because he is capable of the most varied behavior. And the
most intelligent person is he who can adjust himself most
readily and most effectively to the widest variety of complex
situations. It is on the basis of the nature of the adjustment
that we classify the human family into normal, sub-normal,
and super-normal.
The normal person is one who can get along without at-
tracting undue attention, whether favorable or unfavorable.
He gets along fairly peacefully and harmoniously with others,
can support himself and his dependents without calling for
charity, belongs to the night party and the right church,
observes conventional morality, at least in public, keeps out
of jail, pays his bills, contributes to charity and right social
causes, agrees with what is generally accepted and con-
demns what runs against accepted standards, can keep up with
the trend of times fairly well, can meet new conditions if they
are not too novel or sudden, is not too aggressive or too cower-
ing, does not agree or disagree too quickly or too violently, but
is ‘‘reasonable,”’ believes in the greatest good of the greatest
89
Art and Beauty
number, is tactful, willing to compromise for the good of the
cause, talks of self-sacrifice and self-denial, is patriotic, loyal,
trustworthy, open-minded, tolerant, does not question that
the home is the foundation of civilization, capital the backbone
of business and prosperity, the church the divinely ordained
guardian of morality, the law just and safe, and that virtue
is the price he pays for a reward in heaven. He is the good
citizen, the backbone of the nation, on whom established in-
stitutions can rely for financial and moral support. In brief,
the normal person is the average. He falls in readily with
the established, customary, old, and slowly and gradually is
reconciled to the new.
The sub-normals range from the moron, through the imbe-
cile, to the idiot. These terms designate an increasing lack of
mental power to meet those conditions in the environment on
which bare physical existence depends. The idiot is so de-
fective mentally as to be unable by himself to take care of his
physical needs or to guard himself against ordinary physical
dangers. It is unsafe to leave him unprotected, unguarded.
The imbecile can look after his physical needs but is incapable
of managing himself and his affairs. He can not earn his liv-
ing by himself. The moron has sufficient mentality to earn a
bare living provided conditions are favorable, but can not
compete with any sort of success on equal terms with his
fellows or manage his affairs with ordinary prudence. He re-
quires care, supervision, constant directions for his own good
and for the protection of others, while he is totally helpless in
any sort of emergency situation.
The super-normals range from the superior through the
talented, to the genius. The mark of the superior person is
that he readily adapts himself to new conditions in an adequate
manner, and is able and eager to keep up with advanced knowl-
edge in all lines of human interests and activities. He is liberal
minded, but not gullible. He is free of prejudices, earnest in
his desire for facts, modifies his opinions and actions in ac-
cordance with them, and recognizes the authority of those en-
gaged upon a disinterested search for knowledge. He is
90
The Creative Mind
moderate in his judgments and criticisms, accepts no final
panaceas for human ills, recognizing that progress is a slow and
gradual journey along the endless highway of dispassionate in-
vestigation. For him there is no virtue other than knowledge,
and no sin but refusal to learn. He finds no particular virtue
in the old and established just because it is old, nor in the new
merely on the grounds of its novelty, but realizes that with-
out the new the old would stagnate, whereas without the old
for its foundation the new is but a wild, empty dream. The
superior person is thus the intelligent layman. He may him-
self not be active in any field of creative endeavor, but he
recognizes in the creative worker the greatest benefactor of
mankind.
The talented person is a grade above the level of intelli-
gence of the superior man in that he not only appreciates the
work of the creator but can understand the fruits of his labor.
In the vast army of workers in scientific laboratories, art stu-
dios, and academic halls there are extremely few geniuses, but
the rest are their co-workers, disciples, treading the path-
way blazed by the leaders and charting it. Genius is the spark
that sets off the powers of talent into a blaze. The genius of
the Newtons, Keplers, and Einsteins of the ages has kindled
the lesser lights of scientific talents that populate the labora-
tories of the world, testing the theoretical products of those
supreme minds and applying the results for the conquest of
organic and inorganic nature. The genius of the Bachs, the
Beethovens, and Wagners is the inspiration of the talented
performers who recreate their works for the populace of the
civilized world. The genius of the Leonardos, the Raphaels,
the Rembrandts, is the light that illumines the steps of the
talented painter, sculptor, and architect whose works fill our
art galleries and homes. In literature talent takes its model
and follows in the footsteps of the Homers, the Dantes, the
Shakespeares, and the Keatses supplying us with an endless
stream of drama, novel, and poetry. Talent is the legitimate
offspring of genius, owing to it not only its life but also what-
ever merits are found in its work.
91
Art and Beauty
Genius thus stands at the peak of intelligence. It is the
advance guard and beacon light of civilization. To the mind
of genius we are indebted for all the permanently significant
cultural accomplishments of mankind, whether in the arts,
sciences, philosophies, or religions. And genius is alike in in-
tellectual power in whatever realm it operates. Artistic genius
is no less than scientific genius. There is as much crea-
tive energy in a Beethoven symphony, or a Shakespearean
drama, as there is in Newton’s Laws or Einstein’s Theories.
Whether artistic or scientific, philosophical or religious, the
creative process is alike in nature, and its products equal in
value.
5
ARTISTIC GENIUS AND TEMPERAMENT
Artistic genius is as highly temperamental as it is supremely
intelligent. But it does not display any characteristics that
are usually implied under “artistic temperament.” Genius
is not cranky, fussy, sentimental, gushing, soft, careless, ec-
centric in manners and dress, irresponsible, supercilious,
mocking, aggressive, or blasé. These are invariably the signs
of the amateurs, dilettantes, pretenders, and poseurs. As Mr.
Roger Fry writes, ‘“‘Most people lead dull, monotonous and
conventional lives with inadequate satisfaction of their libido,
and one of their favorite phantoms is that of the Bohemian—
the gay, reckless, devil-may-care fellow who is always kicking
over the traces and yet gets toleration and even consideration
from the world by reason of a purely magic gift called genius.
Now this creature is not altogether a myth—he or something
like him does undoubtedly exist—he frequently practices art,
but he is generally a second-rate artist. He may even be a
very brilliant and successful one, but he is none the less a very
minor artist. On the other hand, almost all the artists who
have done anything approaching first-rate work have been
thoroughly bourgeois people—leading quiet, unostentatious
lives, indifferent to the world’s praise or blame, and far too
92
The Creative Mind
much interested in their jobs to spend their time in kicking
over the traces.’ !
There is nothing arbitrary or artificial in temperament any
more than in intelligence. Temperament is the affective,
emotional background of experience. It not only gives ex-
perience its color as pleasant or unpleasant, to be accepted
or repulsed, but is the very motive power of action, the energy
that drives the organism to react to the environment. An
emotionless organism would be a completely inactive one,
dead. Emotion is, in fact, what differentiates the living from
the non-living. The mark of a non-living body is that all its
movements are initiated and controlled by external forces act-
ing upon it. A body is alive, on the other hand, when the force
that activates it is generated by and is inherent in the body
itself. A non-living body is set in motion by an external force
and its reaction is passive, in that the only resistance it offers
to the acting force is its own inertia. Its movements are there-
fore determined not from within itself, but from the outside.
In a living body the external agent does no more than set off
the inner stored-up energy, which means that its reactions
are active, resisting, and hence its movements are to a con-
siderable extent self-determined. Furthermore, this inner
energy drives the body to do something, to be astir, to satisfy
the drive within it through the environment, so that its re-
actions are not only active, but also aggressive and selective.
Livingness consists thus of active, aggressive, selective move-
ments, to which we apply the term behavior, in contrast to
the movements of non-living bodies, which, because they are
non-active, non-aggressive, and non-selective, we call motion.
And emotion is this inner energy that marks a body as being
an organism and not a mechanism.
Now temperament is a general term referring to the con-
stitutional susceptibility of a living body to emotional reaction
to its surroundings. Some individuals are more vital, more
alive, alert, vigilant, than others. Human beings distribute
themselves temperamentally as they do intellectually, below
1 The Artist and Psycho-Analysis, The Hogarth Press, 1924, p. 11.
93
Art and Beauty
and above normal, ranging from the pathologically apathetic,
phlegmatic, through the normally interested, to the supremely
keen, zestful, and arduous. And it is at this topmost level of
temperament, of living energy, that we find artistic genius,
just as we found it at the peak of intelligence. From this
emotional property of genius there arise several behavior
traits that have a profound effect upon its work and its
products.
Because genius is so high pitched temperamentally, its
reactions to its surroundings are intense, it knows no modera-
tion or neutrality or compromise, but ever alternates between
the positive and negative poles of passion, giving the impression
of living in two opposing worlds and of being a dual personal-
ity. It is greatly repelled or attracted. It loves intensely and
hates wholeheartedly. Its judgments know no boundary line.
It throws itself into a cause or experience unreservedly, with
its whole being, or denounces it with equal fervor. Thus Emil
Ludwig can write of Goethe with full justice:
His existence was one long self-contradiction. He was sensual and
transcendental, amoral and Spinozaistic, all egotism and all self-
surrender, now delighting in companionship, now imperious in his
demand for solitude; today religiously, tomorrow cynically, inclined;
misanthropic, philanthropic, arrogant and kindly, patient and im-
patient, sentimental and pornographic, absorbed in form or intent on
act, untamed and pedantic, a far-reaching thinker, but an instinctive
doer, coldly objective, yet essentially and passionately erratic, entirely
masculine yet very feminine—a dual being, if ever there was one: . . .!
But this storming, torrential life of genius does not mean a
dual personality, a personality split into two alternating, op-
posing selfs, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde existence, but rather a
richly complex personality of which the ingredients are gath-
ered together from the exhaustless variety of human experi-
ence. The personality of genius is an epitome of mankind.
As it swings between the crest and trough of the wave of life
it passes through the center of being of every sort and condi-
1 Goethe, The History of a Man, Putnam, 1928, p. 88.
94
The Creative Mind
tion of human existence. Genius is not two-sided nor many-
sided, but an all-sided, all-inclusive being, a complex of man-
kind, a ray of light having within its being all the hues and
tints of human experience, a rich tone composed of all the
overtones of human emotion.
It is because artistic genius is so fully and completely alive,
encompassing in one single life the life of mankind, that we
are so greatly impressed with the livingness, truthfulness, and
vitality of its works. Each of Shakespeare’s characters is a
witness not so much to the scope of his interests as to the
breadth of his experience. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello,
Iago, Caliban, Touchstone, and Malvolio, are not the psycho-
logical speculations of Shakespeare but Shakespeare himself.
‘Poetry’ wrote Kahlil Gibran, ‘“‘is not an opinion expressed.
It is a song that rises from a bleeding wound or a smiling
mouth,” a pronouncement similar to that of Milton that the
man who would wnite a great poem must first live one, or that
of Heine that it was out of his suffering that his songs arose.
The bleeding wound and the suffering are the direct results
of the passion to live. He who does not venture does not suffer,
because he does not know. But out of suffering arises true
joy. Opposites feed each other. The anguish of the seeking is
compensated for by the joy of discovery, which joy, however,
is but the starting point for another higher seeking and suffer-
ing. So Heine wrote to a friend, ‘“‘I hear that you are not
happy! That you must sleep off the rapture of your despair!
So Schwind writes me. Although it grieves me greatly, it does
not astonish me, for that is the lot of almost every sensitive
person in this miserable world. And what should we do with
happiness, since unhappiness is the only stimulus left us.”
Despair and rapture, inseparable companions, one the punish-
ment, the other the reward, that genius pays for its endow-
ments, or perhaps, its afflictions. The despair generated by
temperament is the spur for the rapture of creation, of im-
agination.
John Davidson well summarizes the many-sidedness of
genius in verse form:
95
Art and Beauty
Our ruthless creeds that bathe the earth in blood
Are moods by alchemy made dogmas of —
The petrification of a metaphor.
No creed for me! I am a man apart:
A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world;
A soulless life that angels may possess
Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things
May loll at ease beside the loveliest;
A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;
The slave of every passion; and the slave
Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light;
A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.
I am a man set by to overhear
The inner harmony, the very tune
Of Nature’s heart; to be a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time; to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour
And make them known; and of the lowliest
To be the minister, and therefore reign
Prince of the powers of the air, lord of the world
And master of the sea. Within my heart
I'll gather all the universe, and sing
As sweetly as the spheres; and I shall be
The first of men to understand himself... .
And lo! to give me courage comes the dawn,
Crimsoning the smoky east; and still the sun
With fire-shod feet shall step from hill to hill
Downward before the night; winter shall ply
His ancient craft, soldering the years with ice;
And spring appear, caught in a leafless brake,
Breathless with wonder and the tears half-dried
Upon her rosy cheek; summer shall come
And waste his passion like a prodigal
Right royally; and autumn spend her gold
Free-handed as a harlot; men to know,
Women to love are waiting everywhere.!
6
GENIUS AND MADNESS
It is because of its intellectual and temperamental nature
that genius has been so frequently and widely identified with
14 Ballad in Blank Verse. Used by permission of Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc.
96
The Creative Mind
madness. But genius is not insane, but rather super-sane.
The sane person is the safe, practical, hard-headed individual,
who keeps his feet as well as his head on solid ground. He is
a realist. Life for him is no idle or ideal dream, but a hard fact
of duties and obligations to be met, competitors to be fought,
social and economic position and honor to be gained, enemies
to be hated, and friends to be enjoyed. With Longfellow he
murmurs:
Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us further than to-day.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
The insane person has departed completely from the world
of fact to make his abode in a fictitious realm of his own con-
struction. In his insane condition, whether temporary or
permanent, he is altogether a different person from that of his
sane state. There is a complete split between what he actually
is and what he believes himself to be. He is a completely de-
luded individual, his delusion constituting for him his true,
real self. For the insane, the real is the false and the false the
real. He has lost all distinction between the actual and the
ideal, the real and the imaginary. He has therefore become
unbalanced, irrational, disintegrated, in that his ideal self
has become completely severed, split off, from his actual self.
97
Art and Beauty
He does not dream of power, of accomplishment, but in his
own mind has attained them. And since there are no factual,
realistic bases for what he conceives himself to be, he invents
them, thus rationalizing his position. The characteristic of the
insane is therefore that he lives a completely rationalized life.
The sane person also rationalizes, but only on occasion, and is
faintly conscious that he is rationalizing, or can at least be
made aware of it. The insane has become the rationalization,
and is neither conscious of his delusion nor can he be made
conscious of it. He may of his own accord come out of it, but
he can not be convinced of it by any external agency.
The super-sanity of genius lies in the fact that the actual
world is the raw stuff out of which the ideal world is built,
so that while its head is in the skies its feet are planted on solid
ground. Genius is practical in its idealism, and ideal in its
contact with the practical. Genius does not depart from the
actual, but begins with the actual in which it senses the ideal
and into which it seeks rationally to transform it. Genius
is therefore neither sane nor insane, but sane in its insanity.
But whence the association between genius and insanity?
The answer is that, to the sane man, whose attention is totally
engrossed by sense perception, the imaginative flights of
genius appear as wild dreams, phantoms, delusions, and its
labors futile and wasteful. Hence, to such a mind, genius is
insane. To genius, the ideal which is evolved from the actual
is more real than the actual itself, since in the light of the ideal,
the actual is but a drab, shadowy appearance. And the reality
of the ideal is the greater as the imagination is more powerful,
with the correspondingly increasing unreality and ephemer-
alness of the actual. This is the state that Plato describes as
divine madness in figurative, metaphorical language, as the
striving of genius for the attaining of the ideal in and through
the actual. The sane man, he states “‘disappears and is no-
where to be found when he enters into rivalry with the mad-
man.” Furthermore, as genius ‘‘forgets earthly interests and
is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke
him; they do not see that he is inspired.”
98
The Creative Mind
Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of mad-
ness, which is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is
transported with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like
to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking
upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought
to be mad. And I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest
and highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he who loves the
beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. For, as has been
already said, every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true
being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man.
But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they
may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been un-
fortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to
unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have
lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only re-
tain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold
here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they
are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly
perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the
higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them;
they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to
the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty.!
7
GENIUS, DISEASE, DRINK, AND DruGS
It has been said that the work of the world is carried on by
its invalids. But that is an inverted truth. It has been even
claimed that disease, drugs, and alcohol are the sources of
creative work, in that they release the demon of genius. One
writer, for instance, claims that:
If we are challenged to cite from the clinic of life any outstanding
proof of the existence of an agency paralyzing inhibitions at propitious
times and releasing the spirits that give wings to the soul, or, in other
words, setting free creative powers resident in a secondary personality,
the following names will be enumerated as witnesses to the power of
alcohol: Anacreon, A/schylus, Alcibiades, Cicero, Catullus, Horace,
Ovid, Omar, Barbatelli, Tasso, Cervantes, Caracci, Marlowe, Bacon,
Jonson, Frans Hals, Thomas Carew, Hobbes, Herrick, Brouwer, Samuel
Butler, Cowley, Helius, Jan Steen, Addison, Steele, Parnell, Gay,
Handel, Pope, Savage, Swift, Schumann, Gluck, Blackstone, Goldsmith,
1 Phaedrus, The Works of Plato, edited by Irwin Edman, Simon and Schuster,
1928, p. 279.
99
Art and Beauty
Churchill, Goethe, Sheridan, Burns, Dussek, Schiller, Schubert, Cole-
ridge, Lamb, Kleist, Hazlitt, Balzac, Tom Moore, De Quincey, Byron,
Turner, Mangan, Gerard de Nerval, Poe, Tennyson, Alfred de Musset,
Dickens, Kingsley, Whitman, Baudelaire, Murger, Stephen Collins
Foster, Rossetti, Swinburne, Verlaine, Guy de Maupassant, Wilde,
the Thomsons, Phil May, Richard Le Gallienne, Ermest Dowson,
Lionel Johnson, Andreyev, and James Joyce.
The toxins of tuberculosis have facilitated the release of creative
personalities in many notable instances. Again from the great clinic
of life we call as witnesses: Saint Francis of Assisi, Calvin, Francis
Beaumont, George Herbert, Richelieu, Descartes, Milton, Richard
Baxter, Lovelace, Moliére, Spinoza, Locke, Watteau, Voltaire, Rous-
seau, Sterne, Kant, Michael Bruce, Hannah More, Mozart, Henry
Headley, Madame de Staél, Bichat, Scott, Jane Austen, Channing,
Béranger, Laénnec, Washington Irving, Paganini, von Weber, ‘“‘Thomas
Ingoldsby”, Shelley, Joseph Rodman Drake, Keats, Robert Pol-
lok, Tom Hood, George Ripley, Nevin, Hurrell Froude, Kirke White,
Hawthorne, John Sterling, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, N. P. Willis,
Georges de Guerin, Chopin, Beardsley, Grace Darling, Adelaide Anne
Procter, Grace Aguilar, Charlotte Bronté, Thoreau, Kingsley, Rus-
kin, Rachel, E. P. Roe, Henry Timrod, John R. Green, David Gray,
James Ryder Randall, John Addington Symonds, Lanier, George
Gissing, Beatrice Harraden, Emerson, Westcott, Bastien-Lepage,
Stevenson, H. C. Bunner, Marie Bashkirtseff, Stephen Crane, Paul
Laurence Dunbar, Adelaide Crapsey, Katherine Mansfield, Klabund,
and Eugene O’Neill.!
But the above claim is a confusion of cause and effect,
even if it were true that all geniuses suffered ill-health, which,
of course, is not the case. There are as many cases of robust
health as of ill-health, and it would be just as easy to make
out a case for genius as being marked by soundness of body
as suffering physical debility. Ill-health, where it exists, is
far more the consequence of the possession of genius than a
factor in its composition. If genius is physically not up to
par it is because in its absorption in creative effort it neglects
food, sleep, exercise, and other conditions that promote
bodily well-being. It has been well said that everything great
is accompanied by pathological manifestations and is there-
fore taken to be pathological. The pregnant woman, if she
were unaware of her condition, would consider every one of
? Arthur C. Jacobson, Gesius, Greenberg, 1926, pp. 4-6.
100
The Creative Mind
her symptoms as a serious ailment. But these symptoms
mean the birth of a child. Likewise the development of mental
children involves a disturbance of the normal state, emotional
disturbances, disturbances of the nervous system, which do
not disappear until the idea is born. He who would renounce
artistic or scientific creativeness for the sake of health is like
the child who would rather have no teeth than undergo the
pain of teething, and he who would designate higher mental
activity as abnormal must likewise designate teeth as a dis-
ease, since teething is accompanied by pain and fever. And,
since the productive person will not cease to think and create,
he will not cease to suffer. The autobiographies of our great
men speak a very distinct language. It is no exaggeration
to speak of health as being an evil. It is certainly not an
unconditioned good, and it is demonstrable that suffering
and pain are essential companions of spiritual growth. The
conclusion is therefore apparent. The average man, or
James’ ‘‘tough-minded,” desires health above all, while to the
creative-minded bodily health is the least essential. The body
is not to stand in the way of fruitful mental work. Mind does
not soar when hemmed in by anxiety over every disturbance
of bodily well-being. The psycho-pathologies of mental
workers could be avoided if these workers would accept medi-
cal advice and cease their labors. The customary prescription
of the moralist, ‘“‘banish disease, need, and misery from the
world, and you do well,” is unpleasantly naive. In the suffer-
ing of the mother man is born, and he is reborn in his own
suffering.
The usual pecuniary state of genius and its dependents is
similarly a consequence of its pre-occupation with its work.
If genius would be as occupied with the accumulation of
worldly goods as it is with non-mundane concerns, its eco-
nomic status would be with that of the world’s Midases and its
life would be that of a Mzcenas. But the world would pay the
price in art treasures, and scientific and social progress. Per-
haps it is because of this predominance of self-expression to
the disregard of all extrinsic personal consideration that
101
Art and Beauty
genius has been called egotistical. Now it is true that the
creator is a monstrous egotist, but not in the sense of selfish-
ness. He is rather unselfish, in that instead of seeking those
goods whose acquisition means the despoilation and depreda-
tion of others, he is engaged in an enterprise, an adventure of
self-development, self-searching, rather than self-seeking,
from which there accrue everlasting benefits to mankind.
For this one supreme purpose he sacrifices everything that
the more common man prizes above all: friendship, family,
comfort, position, praise, social approval, and prominence.
If in this pursuit of selfishness he is cruel to others, causing
suffering even to his family, it must be borne in mind that he
is even more cruel to himself as compared with the worldling’s
peace of mind. If he crushes those intimately associated with
him, it is for the larger family of mankind and of posterity.
In this sense of egotism Jesus was the greatest of egotists the
world has ever seen, for he would acknowledge neither his
mother nor brothers, while of his disciples he demanded that
they leave home and family, and even let the dead bury the
dead. By being essentially true to itself, genius is true not to
one or two or many, but to all mankind. In this vein Elie
Fauré speculates:
This pitiless need that rises from the depths of the unconscious
in order to people the mind with images and give to the will the com-
mand to realize them is the true salt of the earth and the food of heroes.
I am thinking of the destinies of the majority of the masters, so diverse,
but in whom one almost always discovers this fury to experience life
through and through, whether one leaves one’s flesh behind or takes
the flesh of others, in order to follow a phantom which becomes in-
substantial the moment one touches it and which, as soon as it has
escaped, resumes a fixed form, always the same, always new, never
leaving one any rest until one has seized it to experience a brief in-
toxication and one more disappointment.
I think of Ghirlandajo, weighed down with children and orders,
always behind in his work, talking of covering all the walls of Florence
with paintings. I think of Signorelli disrobing the corpse of his son
in order to paint it, suppressing his tears, his heart contracted in
anguish composed of creative fever and sorrow. I think of Tintoretto
living in a torment of continuous fecundation, shut up for days and
102
The Creative Mind
nights, painting by lamplight, in order to people convents and churches
with the tormented forms that unceasingly germinated in him. I
think of Michael Angelo locked up for fifty-four months in the Sistine
with his bread and his jug of water, coming out staggering, emaciated,
drained dry, blinded by the daylight. I think of Rubens, whose co-
lossal creation cleaves life like the keel of a ship, his pomp, his embas-
sies, his love affairs being nothing but the spray of the wake behind
him. I think of Rembrandt leaving everything, success, friendships,
fortunes, a method of painting legible to all, to allow ruin, poverty,
intoxication perhaps to establish themselves in his household, because
one day he had surprised in himself an image of the world that was
like nothing but his own self. I think of Poussin refusing the presents
of the King of France because he saw every day, on the threshold of
his little house on the Pincio, the motives of his emotion renewing
themselves for him. I think of Goya, green with fear, suspected by
the Inquisition, suspected by the Bourbons, suspected by the French,
but rather than not paint with vitriol, peppering the Inquisition with
arrows, boxing the ears of the Bourbons, butchering the French. I
think of Gros, old and illustrious, pursuing his fugitive form to the
very reeds of the Seine and plunging his mouth in the mud in order
to drink it there along with death. I think of Constable to whom the
verdant humidity of the fields, the growing shoots, the sprouting herbs
repeat without ever wearying him: “I am the resurrection and the
life.” I think of Cézanne, bent over his ungrateful work, deaf to all
the sounds of the world, shut up for thirty years among fools, painting
like a madman for the relief of the monster whom he feels in himself
alone, forgetting his canvas in the fields because he has caught sight
of some flame rising before his soul. I think of Renoir, a human ruin,
ossified, warped with rheumatism, unable either to get up or lie down
and creating incessantly the breasts, the bellies of women, roses and
anemones, from the brush fastened to his fist. I think of Hokusai,
the “old man mad over drawing,” affirming that at the age of one
hundred and ten he would at last know how to give life to this point,
to this line.
I think of those artisans without genius, the sick Cellini, dragging
himself from his bed to cast his pewter vessel into the mold where the
bronze of his Perseus was liquefying too slowly, of the poverty-stricken
Palissy burning the wood of his floors and furniture in order to heat
his plates. I think of all those Italians wandering from city to city,
Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Uccello, Gozzoli, Lippi, Piero della Francesca,
Pinturicchio, Sodoma, without a roof to cover them, paid by the
piece, mad with science and painting, for whom it was a passionate
adventure to decorate some little chapel in a forgotten village, as
jealous of one another as lovers, exhausting their genius in the effort
103
Art and Beauty
to conquer that clenched their passion about an idea like a hand about
a dagger.
I think of those good companions of Flanders or France, setting
out on foot for Italy where glittered the golden fleece, painting sign-
boards on the way for a living, Fouquet, Breughel, Van der Weyden,
Van Orley, Courtois, Mignard, Bourdon, Coypel, Duquesnoy, Puget,
Girardou, of the child Callot following a band of gypsies, of Claude
Lorrain becoming a cook, then a household servant in order to live
there, of Parrocel taken prisoner by pirates while seeking to land there.
I think of the engravers of Egyptian hypogeums, making the shadows
blossom with feminine forms, palms, shimmering water, of the Chinese
or Hindu sculptors scooping out their mountains, peopling their
immense caves with their swarming gods. I know very well that
in these cases it was the mystic passion that drove them to bury
themselves alive or roast themselves in the sunlight on the vertical
wall. But is not the search for the incorruptible element that con-
stitutes his inevitable form precisely, even in the atheist, a mystical
passion before which all the others are forced to abdicate? Mystical,
that is to say, eager to confront a mystery that is common only to
himself and God. I think of the confession of Pascal who, after having
denounced literary vanity, wonders, if he does not hope that his notes
will be found at the bottom of some drawer. The poet must teach
men sooner or later that something essential to the development of
their quality as men comes from his quality as a man, the only one
which belongs to himself alone.!
The same holds true of genius and alcohol. Drink and drugs
form no inherent part of creativeness, although the creator,
because of the nature of his activity, often becomes its ready
prey. Burns, Gluck, Poe, Hoffmann, Schubert, de Musset,
were strong drinkers. Baudelaire smoked hashish, De Quincey
opium, others used arsenic, cocaine, chloral. Maupassant re-
lates that every line of Pierre et Jean was written under the
influence of ether. From these and other similar cases the
superficial deduction is readily made that Bacchus and Gam-
brinus are the gods who bestow the rewards of inspiration
upon those who serve them well. But it is far more plausible
that genius turns to drink and drugs for artificial stimulation
because of the strenuous demands of constant creative labor
and nervously exhausting intensity of continuous mental
1 The Spirit of the Forms, Harpers, 1930, pp. 209-213.
104
The Creative Mind
effort, as well as for the solace of forgetfulness from the suf-
fering imposed by life upon those who would taste of it to its
bitter dregs. And it is not at all improbable that those among
the creators who have resorted to such artificial stimulants,
instead of finding a reward therein, have paid the penalty for
their weakness in inferior quality of work. Alcohol and other
drugs paralyze the brain and weaken its controlling and direct-
ing powers, with the result that experience normally kept i in
check rushes in riotous manner to the surface like prisoners
escaping jail confinement. But it is not imagination that is
operating under such conditions but unrestrained fancy, wild,
incoherent, and inconsequential imagery. One must therefore
stretch many a point to substantiate a claim that “whole
works of consummate power and masterful consistency have
been produced under the inspiration of alcohol.” Poe and
De Quincey may have, and no doubt did, utilize the imagery
provoked by alcohol and opium, but they were able to turn that
material into works of power because they were artists when
sober. Their works suffered rather than profited from their
addiction, in that the subject-matter of many of their products
is gruesome, morbid, and grotesque. Goethe remarked to
Eckermann that “Schiller never drank much, he was very
moderate; but in moments of bodily weakness he sought stimu-
lants in liquor. The practice however interfered with his health
and harmed his productivity. For what the wise critics find
exception to in his work I trace to this cause. All such parts,
of which they say are not just, I call pathological parts, in
that he wrote them on those days when he lacked strength, in
order to find the true motives.’”’ Emerson, in commenting on
the “bards’ love of wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium,
the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other spe-
cies of animal exhilaration,” writes that:
These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his
passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody
of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual
relations in which he is inclosed. Hence a great number of such as
were professionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians
105
Art and Beauty
and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure
and indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as
it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipa-
tion not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they
were punished for that advantage they won by a dissipation and
deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a
trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator,
comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime
vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.
That is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counter-
feit excitement and fury.
In a very similar vein to that of Emerson, John Milton wrote
to Charles Diodati:
. . . Festivity and poetry are surely not incompatible. . . . One
sees the triple influence of Bacchus, Apollo and Ceres, in the verses
you have sent me. And, then, have you not music—the harp lightly
touched by nimble hands, and the lute giving time to the fair ones as
they dance in the old tapestried room? Believe me, where the ivory
keys leap, and the accompanying dance goes round the perfumed hall,
there will the Song-god be. But let me not go too far. Light Elegy is the
care of many gods, and calls any one of them by turns to her assistance
—Bacchus, Erato, Ceres, Venus, and little Cupid besides. To poets of
this order, therefore, conviviality is allowable; and they may often
indulge in draughts of good old wine. But the man who speaks of high
matters—the heaven of the full-grown Jove, and pious heroes, and demi-
god leaders of men, the man who now sings the holy counsels of the gods
above, and now the subterranean realms guarded by the fierce dog—tet
him live sparely, after the manner of the Samian master, let herbs afford
him his innocent diet, let clear water in a beechen cup stand near him,
and let him drink sober draughts from a pure fountain! To this be there
added a youth chaste and free from gutlt, and rigid morals, and hands
without a stain. Being such, thou shalt rise up, glittering in sacred
raiment and purified by lustral waters, an augur about to go into
the presence of the un-offended gods. So is wise Tiresias said to have
lived, after he had been deprived of his sight; and Theban Linus; and
Calchas the exile; and old Orpheus. So did the scantily-eating, water-
drinking Homer carry his hero Ulysses through the monster-teeming
hall of Circe, and the straits insidious with the voices of the Syrens,
and through thy courts, too, O infernal King, where he is said to
have held the troops of shades enthralled by libations of black blood.
For the poet is sacred and the priest of the gods; and his breast and
his mouth breathe the indwelling Jove.
106
The Creative Mind
8
GENIUS, THE CHILD, AND THE WOMAN
Genius has also been compared to the child and the woman.
Regarding genius and the child, we must draw a distinc-
tion between childish and childlike. Genius is not childish,
but childlike in its attitude towards experience. The child’s
attitude is that of a disinterested interest, in contrast with
that of the interested interest of the adult. The child is avid
for experience, throwing itself into it with complete abandon
and spontaneity. The adult is calculating, scheming, selfish,
experience having no value as such, but only in what it can
yield in satisfaction of some consciously felt need or desire.
The child-likeness of genius lies precisely in this impractical
outlook on its surroundings, an attitude so vividly described
by Schopenhauer.
Thus genius is the faculty of continuing in the state of pure per-
ception, of losing oneself in perception, and of enlisting in this service
the knowledge which originally existed only for the service of the will;
that is to say, genius is the power of leaving one’s own interests, wishes,
and aims entirely out of sight, . . . and with sufficient conscious-
ness, to enable one to reproduce by deliberate art what has thus been
apprehended, and “to fix in lasting thoughts the wavering images that
float before the mind.”’ It is as if, when genius appears in an individual,
a far larger measure of the power of knowledge falls to his lot than is
necessary for the service of an individual will; and this superfluity of
knowledge, being free, now becomes subject purified from will, a clear
mirror of the inner nature of the world. This explains the activity,
amounting even to disquietude, of men of genius, for the present can
seldom satisfy them, because it does not fill their consciousness. This
gives them that restless aspiration, that unceasing desire for new things,
and for the contemplation of lofty things, and also that longing that
is hardly ever satisfied, for men of similar nature and of like stature,
to whom they might communicate themselves; whilst the common
mortal, entirely filled and satisfied by the common present, ends
in it, and finding everywhere his like, enjoys that peculiar satisfaction
in daily life that is denied to genius.'
The common mortal, that manufacture of Nature which she pro-
duces by the thousand every day, is, as we have said, not capable,
1 The World as Ws and Idea, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1891, Vol. I,
pp. 240-241.
107
Art and Beauty
at least not continuously so, of observation that in every sense is
wholly disinterested, as sensuous contemplation, strictly so-called is.
He can turn his attention to things only so far as they have some rela-
tion to his will, however indirect it may be. Since in this respect,
which never demands anything but the knowledge of relations, the
abstract conception of the thing is sufficient, and for the most part
even better adapted for use; the ordinary man does not linger long
over the mere perception, does not fix his attention long on one object,
but in all that is presented to him hastily seeks merely the concept
under which it is to be brought, as the lazy man seeks a chair, and then
it interests him no further. This is why he is so soon done with every
thing, with works of art, objects of natural beauty, and indeed every-
where with the truly significant contemplation of all the scenes of life.
He does not linger; only seeks to know his own way. Thus he makes
topographical notes in the widest sense; over the consideration of life
itself as such he wastes no time. The man of genius, on the other hand,
whose excessive power of knowledge frees it at times from the service
of will, dwells on the consideration of life itself, strives to comprehend
the Idea of each thing, not its relations to other things; and in doing
this he often forgets to consider his own path in life, and therefore
for the most part pursues it awkwardly enough. While to the ordinary
man his faculty of knowledge is a lamp to light his path, to the man
of genius it is the sun which reveals the world. This great diversity in
their way of looking at life soon becomes visible in the outward appear-
ance both of the man of genius and of the ordinary mortal. The man
in whom genius lives and works is easily distinguished by his glance,
which is both keen and steady, and bears the stamp of perception,
of contemplation. This is easily seen from the likenesses of the few
men of genius whom Nature has produced here and there among
countless millions. On the other hand, in the case of an ordinary man,
the true object of his contemplation, what he is prying into, can be
easily seen from his glance, if indeed it is not quite stupid and vacant,
as is generally the case. Therefore the expression of genius in a face
consists in this, that in it a decided predominance of knowledge over
will is visible, and consequently there also shows itself in it a knowl-
edge that is entirely devoid of relation to will, i. e., pure knowing. On
the contrary, in ordinary countenances there is a predominant ex-
pression of will; and we see that knowledge comes into activity
only under the impulse of will, and thus is directed merely by
motives.!
Really every child is to a certain extent a genius, and the genius
is to a certain extent a child. The relationship of the two shows itself
primarily in the naiveté and sublime simplicity which is characteristic
109. cit., pp. 243-244.
108
The Creative Mind
of true genius; and beside this it appears in several traits, so that a
certain childishness certainly belongs to the character of the genius.
In Riemer’s ‘“‘ Mittheilungen uber Goethe’”’ (vol. 1., p. 184) it is related
that Herder and others found fault with Goethe, saying he was always
a big child. Certainly they were right in what they said, but they
were not right in finding fault with it. It has also been said of Mozart
that all his life he remained a child (Nissen’s Biography of Mozart,
pp. 2 and 529). Schlichtegroll’s “Nekrology” (for 1719, vol. ii,
p. 109) says of him: “ In his art he early became a man, but in all other
relations he always remained a child.” Every genius is even for this
reason a big child; he looks out into the world as into something
strange, a play, and therefore with purely objective interest. Accord-
ingly he has just as little as the child that dull gravity of ordinary men,
who, since they are capable only of subjective interests, always see
in things mere motives for their actions. Whoever does not to a certain
extent remain all his life a big child, but becomes a grave, sober,
thoroughly composed, and reasonable man, may be a very useful and
capable citizen of this world; but never a genius. In fact, the genius
is so because that predominance of the sensible system and of intel-
lectual activity which is natural to childhood maintains itself in him
in an abnormal manner through his whole life, thus here becomes
perennial. A trace of this certainly shows itself in many ordinary
men up to the period of their youth; therefore, for example, in many
students a purely intellectual tendency and an eccentricity sug-
gestive of genius is unmistakable. But nature returns to her track;
they assume the chrysalis form and reappear at the age of manhood,
as incarnate Philistines, at whom we are startled when we meet them
again in later years. Upon all this that has been expounded here
depends Goethe’s beautiful remark: ‘Children do not perform what
they promise; young people very seldom; and if they do keep their
word, the world does not keep its word with them.” (Wahlverwandt-
schaften, Pt. i., ch. 10)—the world which afterwards bestows the crowns
which it holds aloft for merit on those who are the tools of its low aims
or know how to deceive it. In accordance with what has been said, as
there is a mere beauty of youth, which almost every one at some time
possesses (beauté du diable), so there is a mere intellectuality of youth,
a certain mental nature disposed and adapted for apprehending,
understanding, and learning, which every one has in childhood, and
some have still in youth, but which is afterwards lost, just like that
beauty. Only in the case of a very few, the chosen, the one, like the
other, lasts through the whole life; so that even in old age a trace of
it still remains visible; these are the truly beautiful and the men of
true genius.!
1 Op. cté., Vol. IIT, pp. 163-169.
109
Art and Beauty
The notion that the mind of artistic creative genius re-
sembles that of the woman arises from a misconception as to
the real nature of the female mentality. Popular opinion
notwithstanding, it is not the female who is idealistically, im-
aginatively inclined, but the male. It is the man who has
idealized the woman, not the woman the man. There are few
great love poems written by women in glorification of the
man, while the literature of the world is replete with idealiza-
tions of woman by man. What the male has done—and this
is an indication of his imaginative nature—is to turn the es-
sentially factual, realistic-minded woman into his ideal, has
made her into his art work, a réle which she gladly accepts
and enacts with all the skill and astuteness characteristic of
the practical nature. No woman idealizes a man. She loves
him, when she does not merely use him, for what he actually is.
He loves her for what he makes out of her. And she encourages
him in his idealization of her because it serves her realistic
purpose to have control over his roving, romantic, unquiet,
restless disposition. The male grows weary of one female in
propinquity unless she shows unusual skill in deliberately de-
veloping a many-sided personality or is naturally endowed with
it, while the female chooses, when she can, and when she is
wise, the not too brilliant male as a guarantee of steadiness
and constancy. It is the male who strains at the leash of
marriage, hungry for further adventures with the new and
untried, which in turn loses their glamour and fascination soon
after they have been attained.
Historically the female is a neglible factor in the imaginative
realm. She has almost no place in the sciences, arts, philoso-
phies, and religions, in a word, in creative endeavor. And this
fact can not be altogether ascribed to limitation of opportu-
nity, for genius is not a matter of occasion but of endowment.
Genius is not an accident. It does not wait for opportunities,
advantages, and favors. It fights its way against all odds or
obstructions. But even if creative attainment were prin-
cipally dependent on opportunity, the predominance of the
male in the arts is an indication of his imaginative status as
110
The Creative Mind
compared with the female. A woman of outstanding accom-
plishment in any one of the arts is a most rare phenomenon,
in spite of the fact that by far more women than men take up
the study of music, painting, or acting in youth, although the
support of these arts, as is evidenced from the composition
of audiences at theaters, concerts, and art galleries, is main-
tained principally by the supposed-to-be weaker sex. The
woman often shows marked talent in these arts, but rarely,
if ever, genius.
That it is the male rather than the female who is the un-
practical is shown even among animals, savages, and the
state of those occupations of civilized peoples on which depends
the sustenance of life. Among savages the woman supports
the family while the male plays at hunting or war, or sits in
solemn council regarding affairs of state. With civilized
peoples, industry, politics, and war are games or adventures,
and the male objects to the female’s entrance into these
mainly on the ground that she would spoil his games by turn-
ing them into the drab business of national housekeeping.
Had the management of the practical affairs of the world
been left to geniuses history would relate a tale of great dreams
and utter disasters. It is the female mentality of the so-called
common man, with his nose to the grindstone of physical
existence, that is keeping the world safe and sane, with an
occasional spur from genius to keep him from resting too
long on the oars of existence. The average man is the real
male counterpart of the true, normal female, and it is in the
degree to which he deviates from this norm in the direction
of creativity that he approximates the true male.
$31
SASS Seeseeeaaae
CHAPTER V
ART AND THE ARTIST
We should now be in a position to make a deduction regard-
ing the specific nature of the art work from the standpoint of
its creator. It is very probable, however, that we lost the
thread of our investigation in the mass of details, so we had
better first make a brief review of our findings.
We started out by asking the art work to tell us what it
was as a finished product. From several definitions of art
by artists we deduced an hypothesis that a product is not an
art work just because it is a literal reproduction of some object
or occurrence, no matter how perfectly executed, nor is a
product an art work simply in that it presents us with some-
thing completely opposed to what we know to be actually
true in the form of a fantastic, rhapsodic dream. This hy-
pothesis we proceeded to test out by the evidences of personal
experience and historical perspective. The question then
arose: If the art work is neither skillful representation of
ordinary experience, nor its reversal, what is it? The examina-
tion of this question revealed to us that there are certain
minds whose unique trait is a mental power of sensing in the
ordinary, familiar, and impersonal aspect of the world, the
presence of something highly distinctive and personal, an
ideal, perfect something, of which the actual is an imperfect
and incomplete manifestation, and the art work is the result
of the striving of such a mind to evoke the ideal dormant in
the actual by using the actual as its medium. The actual is
thus but the raw material for the ideal, into which it becomes
transformed in the finished art work. From these considera-
tions we formulated a definition of an art work as a unique
presentation, or expression, of a unique experience by a
unique mind.
This very general, and therefore vague, definition stimu-
lated the further and crucial question as to the nature of the
112
Art and the Artist
unique experience, the unique expression and the unique mind.
This question led us to an analysis of the creative process and
the creative mind.
It is in the nature of the creative process and what it tells
us about the creative mind that the specific nature and sig-
nificance of the art work is revealed. The creative process
tells us that the mental impulse for the art work is not a set
plan or scheme to produce something. The creator is not
primarily engaged in producing or acquiring something. He
is principally engrossed in living, and what he produces or
acquires is the by-product of this pre-occupation. Such living
is on a level other than that of ordinary existence. The ordi-
nary man lives by producing and acquiring. Production and
acquisition are his objectives, and the more that he produces
and acquires the more satisfactorily does he live. His life is a
scheme of begetting and getting. For him life is a business,
a transaction. He buys himself by selling himself. He gives
in order to get. Whatever life means for him depends on what
he can acquire through that which he produces. His product
is not the result of living, but the condition for living. Such is
the man on the practical level of life, the man of the world,
calculating, scheming, planning to gain life by the deliberate
conquest of his environment.
The life of the creative mind is the reverse of the practical
mind, and the values of the creative product are also the
reverse of the values of practical goods.
The imaginative life finds its satisfactions within itself.
t does not depend for its life upon external things, but it
uses the external as the raw stuff, the food for the nourishment
f its internal being. It seeks not the possession of goods,
but the discovery of itself, the finding of the self in the non-
self. It therefore does not calculate or scheme how to over-
come its environment, but lends itself fully, completely, and
‘spontaneously, to experience in an attitude of disinterested
interest. Being disinterested in its interest, it is not aggres-
sive towards that which promotes or hinders its practical
welfare, nor indifferent to that which offers neither aid nor
“ 113
Art and Beauty
obstruction. It neither selects nor rejects. It lives. Every-
thing about and around it is food for the enrichment of its
_inner life. It digests what is suitable, and rejects what is
unsuitable. But both digestion and rejection are spontaneous,
so that genius, by losing itself in experience, finds itself therein.
By standing over the world, questioning it, prying into it,
one may discover principles and laws. By yielding oneself
to the world, permitting it to enter into one, one discovers
one’s being. We find our identity by finding the identity of
others. By standing off from things we shut the very doors
that would give us entrance to the essential nature of the
thing we would know. When we gain entrance into the essen-
tial being of one thing we obtain a glimpse of the unity of all
things, and it is only by partaking of the life of the whole
that we can know our own life. But such a vision can not
be caught by standing off from the world and calculating its
meaning in terms of some immediate or prospective need, but
by standing in with the world and partaking of its intimate
life.
The mystery of the imaginative life is the mystery of self-
hood—the mystery of all true growth. It is a development
from inside out, an unfolding, a revealing. The seed sprouts,
sends its roots into the soil for nourishment, and in due time
its bloom, flowers, and fruit reveal in the actual that which
it contained potentially in its dormant original state. All
true being is an unfolding of the inner in and through the
outer. { The imaginative life explores its soil, its external
world, feeds and grows upon it, and reveals the stages of its
growth in its fruits, the art work. That is the meaning of the
whole creative process from preparation to execution. It is a
continuous process of self-searching, self-discovery, and self-
revelation—the seed of selfhood unfolding, finding itself
through the non-self. Genius grows as does the oak from the
acorn. All true growth is spontaneous, unconscious; all forced
growth distorts, stunts, and stultifies potentialities by arbi-
trary, external impositions, a process of clogging up instead of
letting out. The truth, the genuineness, the reality, the author-
114
Art and the Artist
ity, we feel in some art works is the truth of selfhood develop-
ing in a normal, natural manner. The lack of these qualities
in other art products, their artificiality, often their freakish-
ness, their immaturity, their one-sidedness, the feeling they
give us of something lacking, is a lack of genuine selfhood in
their creator. The true artist, the full, natural self, dwells
in the art work as does the seed in its flowering. ‘‘The author,”
wrote Flaubert, ‘“‘should be in his work as God is in the Uni-
verse, present everywhere, and visible nowhere.” It is not
so much that the author should be in his work, as that if he is
true and genuine, he is in his work, for his work is himself.
And since his work is himself, because he is present every-
where in it, he is visible nowhere. The visible is always the
partial, the incomplete, the whole is always experiential.
With the eye we see only the parts of a painting, with the!
ear we hear no more than the single successive tones of a'
melody. The whole, the unit, is neither visible nor audible.
Thus the tones of a melody are present everywhere, but
audible nowhere, for let one fix his attention on the single
tones and the melody disappears. Since the art work is the
consummation of the vital growth of its creator, presenting
him in what he was as a whole, as a personality, when he
executed it, he is visible in it nowhere, just because he is
present in it everywhere.
‘‘The less one feels a thing,’”’ wrote Flaubert, “the more
fitted one is to express it as it is—as it is always in itself, in
its general aspect, and freed from all contingencies of the
moment.”’ What Flaubert should have said is that the less
one feels, not the things, but one’s own personal, conscious
interests of the moment, the more one is free to feel, to experi-
ence, the thing, and therefore one is the more fitted to express
the thing as it is in itself. Commonly, as practical beings, we
do not express a thing, but ourselves through the thing. Our
needs interpose themselves between us and things as they are
in their essential nature. As Bergson puts it: ‘We do not see
the actual things themselves, in most cases we confine our-
selves to reading the labels affixed to them. This tendency,
115
Art and Beauty
the result of need, has become even more pronounced under
the influence of speech; for words—with the exception of
proper nouns—all denote genera. The word, which only takes
note of the most ordinary function and commonplace aspect
of the thing, intervenes between it and ourselves, and would
conceal its form from our eyes, were that form not already
marked beneath the necessities that brought the word into
existence. Not only external objects, but even our own mental
states, are screened from us in their inmost, their personal
aspect, in the original life they possess.” We do not feel
things, as much as ourselves through the things, the degree
to which things aid or hamper the fulfillment of the needs
we seek to satisfy. And the more we feel our needs the less we
can feel the things as they are in themselves, their inherent
truth and vitality. Things can not enter into us and we into
things in this attitude, for it is a war, a battle, in which the
issue is to conquer or be conquered. In this battle of necessity
we never are, we only do. The life of biological survival is an
ever becoming and a never being. In attaining and reaching we
never attain or reach. Hence we are never complete, fulfilled,
for we are constantly engaged in completing and fulfilling.
In striving to overcome for the sake of ourselves we lose the
self we are striving for. But there is a striving which is at
the same time an attaining. As the seed is growing, striving,
it is also attaining. In becoming it is also being. In reaching
it is also grasping. And what it is grasping is not external to
itself, but internal to itself. In striving for the self we are also
attaining the self. We are as we become. Being is realizing
itself in becoming, so that there is being in becoming. All
inner growth is a being in becoming. Such growth is spon-
taneous, natural. Instead of holding itself in, it lets itself go.
And because it lets itself go it finds nourishment in all it
touches. It becomes what it touches, and what touches it is
absorbed into itself. Because it yields it also conquers. Be-
cause it gives it also is given. Yielding itself freely and wholly
to experience, experience yields itself freely and wholly. Life
thus feeds life in mutual codperation.
116
Art and the Artist
Such is the imaginative life in contrast with the practical
life. Because the imaginative life does not strain to conquer
the outer, it is free to attain the inner. In its emancipation
from the non-self it reaches the self. Slavery to the outer
kills the inner. In trying to save our soul we lose it. In gaining
the world one loses the very values the world has to bestow.
By forcing one drives away the very thing one would possess.
By pursuing one misses what is being pursued, mistaking the
means for the end. Life’s treasures can not be whipped into
line, but fall into line by mutual attraction. To him that gives
is also given, while from him who would only be given even
that which he has is taken away. The way of the imagination
is that of spontaneous giving and spontaneous finding. The
creative process is not a conscious search. The creator is not
out to find anything or prove anything. What develops in the
process of preparation—incubation—and comes to fruition
in inspiration is no different from the bud bursting into blos-
som, presaging the fruit to be harvested. The fruit of the
creative process, the art work, is then no arbitrary product,
planned in accordance with some preconceived purpose. It
is rather a milestone in the ‘growth of a significant personality,
a record of an attainment in living.
Much of what has been said and written about genius and
inspiration, both in praise and disparagement, is part truth
and part falsehood just because it is praise or disparagement.
What is needed is understanding. The art work is supposed,
on the one hand, to come like a lightning bolt from a clear
sky, as a sudden inspiration, a divine ordination, on the other,
to be the result of labor and perspiration. Genius, at one
extreme, is a charmer for the demon, at another, a capacity
for taking pains, ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one
per cent inspiration. But neither perspiration nor inspiration
account for the art work. There are any number of individuals
who feel inspired and perspire, but what they produce—when
they do produce—resembles nothing more than the mountain
that labored and brought forth a mouse. The réle of inspira-
tion and perspiration in the creative activity is worthy of
117
—
Art and Beauty
careful scrutiny for the sake of an understanding of the art
work.
An art work comes into being neither by inspiration alone
nor perspiration alone, but by sustained, hard effort, initiated
and directed by a compelling idea. The crucial test of an
idea is its driving power, while its driving power depends on
the background of experiences that have given rise to it. The
life span of an idea or inspiration is in proportion to its period
of gestation. Fancies, whims, caprices, and fads die as quickly
as they are born. There is no life to them because there is
no life in them. Their immature birth presages a premature
death. The sudden bloom dies a-borning. Of such stuff are
the fancies of the mind, and they are easily and eagerly mis-
taken for imagination. But there is nothing fanciful or spas-
modic about the imagination. ‘The mill of the creative mind
grinds slowly, and because it grinds slowly it also grinds fine.
The imagination does not blow hot and cold. It gathers heat
slowly, and when the heat bursts into flame, it burns with a
steady and lasting light, fed by the rich sources that have
given it life.
Such is the mind of genius. What its imagination bodies
forth in the stage of inspiration is not a phantom, or fancy,
but an idea of substance and significance, a fruit emerging
by a long process of growth and maturation out of a rich
variety of warm personal experiences. There is nothing sudden
or flash-like in inspiration. It is rather a discovery following
a long period of arduous adventuring and exploring in the
wilderness of selfhood. Each inspiration is a landmark in the
journey of self-discovery as well as a beacon light for the next
stage of the journey towards self-fulfillment. It contains
both joy and sorrow, the joy of reaching and the sorrow of not
grasping, of fulfilling, yet falling short of fulfillment.
“The raptures of creative activity,’ exclaims one writer,
‘‘empty words invented by men who never had an opportunity
of judging from their own experience. At the best, the maker
finds himself confronted with a formless, meaningless, usually
obstinate and stiff matter, which yields reluctantly to form.
118
s
Art and the Artist
. . . Creative activity is a continual progressing from failure
to failure, and the condition of the creator is usually one of
uncertainty, mistrust, and shattered nerves. For that reason
even men of genius can not keep up the creative activity to
the last. As soon as they have acquired their technique, they
begin to repeat themselves, well aware that the public willingly
endures the monotony of a favorite, even finds virtue in
it. . . . He who has once been through the creative rapture
is not easily tempted to try again.”
But is this a true account of creative activity? The maker
does find himself confronted with obstinate material, but
what about the joy of the victory in conquering it? Can there
be any real joy unless derived from the conquest of obstruc-
tions? And is not every failure of creative effort an accom-
plishment, a triumph in progress towards greater perfection
and a spur, an invitation, for the next step in higher attain-
ment? Can there be recognition of accomplishment without
the realization of failure? Each art work is a failure, but is it
not also therefore a triumph, for he who does not realize
failure has ceased growing. Each art work is therefore a record
of a triumphant failure, triumphant as an actual achievement,
a failure as a potential achievement. The true artist is ever
disappointed with what he has done, for his reach always
exceeds his grasp, the ideal is ever beyond the actual. But
the actual is ever striving towards the ideal, and it is precisely
the mark of men of genius that they do keep up creative
activity to the last, each of their works being a unique prod-
uct instead of a duplication. Genius never acquires a set
technique. It is not interested in manual dexterity, nor has
it any direct concern with the public. It is not producing
marketable goods. There is no repetition of technique in
Shakespeare, Goethe, or Beethoven. Each work stands on
its own feet, and is a law unto itself. Its technique is its own,
evolved by the necessity of its own being. No preconceived
formula is recognizable in it. Each bears the stamp of creative
rapture, of the conquest of a new world of experience, of an
adventure and discovery in self-realization.
119
Art and Beauty
The herculean labors of genius—that stage of the creative
process that has given rise to the consoling idea that genius
is a minimum of inspiration and a maximum of perspiration
—arises at the demand of the raptures of creative activity.
The new-born mental child demands an appropriate habita-
tion and a name. Its demands are exacting. The specifica-
tions for its abode are finely drawn and minute in detail.
It is the severest of taskmasters and strictest of disciplina-
rians. The parent may protest, revolt, threaten, revile, and
even disclaim or abandon his offspring. But if he would rear
it he must do so at its own terms, even at the cost of anguished
days, sleepless nights, and shattered nerves. It will be neither
forced nor driven, but must lead and direct. It issues com-
mands for its own rearing, and unless obeyed, prefers destruc-
tion to distortion.
Genius therefore labors. But its labors are for the sake of
giving material form to the substance of imagination. Imagi-
nation stirs genius to labor by setting a goal that can be
attained only by intensive and prolonged physical and mental
effort. The imagination is the driving power of the labor,
while the intensity and persistency of the effort is the test of
the authenticity of the imagination. The imagination is
authentic only when that which is bodied forth in inspiration
is demonstrated to be a truth and not a phantom by the re-
sults of the labor of execution. On the other hand, the labor is
creative only when the hand and head of the worker are urged
along by a creative idea. Without such an urge labor is a
deadly routine. The creative element in labor is directly
derived from the creative idea. In the process of execution
the creative worker becomes familiar with his brain-children.
In their original form, as ideas, they are strangers to him.
He gets to know them only as he watches them develop under
his hand. Some of them he discovers to be imposters or weak-
lings, to be discarded, others genuine visitations to be care-
fully nourished into maturity, still others to be more promis-
ing than they originally appeared to be. It is through labor
that the creative worker learns to know himself as a creator
120
Art and the Artist
by becoming intimately acquainted with the real nature of
his mental offspring.
Furthermore, since each brain-child requires its own mode
of handling, an environment suited for its own particular
needs, the creative worker also becomes familiar in the course
of his labors with his growing powers as a craftsman, how
well he can cope with the continuous demands of creative
effort. This is the ultimate test of the artist as a creator. If
he stops growing as a craftsman and settles down to a routine
execution, he is through as an artist, and becomes an artisan.
The art work is then a product of neither inspiration nor
perspiration, but of inspired labor. Inspiration without labor
is self-deception, a delusion. Nothing of more than transitory
significance for mankind has ever been produced by labor
alone, while armies of individuals have been clogging up the
machinery of progress with loud claims of divinely inspired
utterances, but whose very loudness is an indication of the
sources of emptiness from which it emanates. All true inspira-
tion is of the nature of self-discovery following upon the un-
conscious but severe labor of imaginative adventure in living,
and resulting in the conscious toil of testing the truth of the
discovery in the act of execution. Every art work is a measure
of a man as artist and craftsman. It is a revelation of himself
to himself. Through it he finds out what he is and who he is.
It is the objective evidence of his past being and a forecast
of his future becoming.
It is told of Robert Browning that on receiving an inquiry
from a club regarding the meaning of one of his poems he
replied that when he wrote it he and God knew what it meant,
but that now only God knew {The artist can no more give a
reason for his works than he Could for his life. His work is
his life and his reason for living. He presents his reason for
living, the meaning of his life, in what he produces. All that
can be said about an art work is that here a man has lived.
And that is saying everything, for life is its own reason for
being. When we say that a value is non-rational we are label-
ing it as fundamental, basic, vital. In their essential nature
121
Art and Beauty
things are what they are for no other reason than that they
are what they are. By reason we can establish what they are,
but not why they are what they are. When reason attempts
more than an answer to the what of things, it is no longer
reason but rationalization. Reason does not establish the
truth of anything, for the truth is already there. What it can
do is reveal whether or not we possess the truth of things. By
rationalization we hide the truth. By reason we draw it forth,
reveal it unto ourselves. And that is what the artist does.
In his art work he reveals the truth that is in him. And his
revelation is rational, in that it is orderly, systematic, a har-
monious whole. By reason he assures himself of the truth of
his imagination. But the truth that is in him, the truth
bodied forth by his imagination, is non-rational. The rational
is ever but the means for presenting, expressing, giving utter-
ance to, the non-rational. There is no such thing as giving
reasons. We never give reasons for anything. We only seek
for justifications. And whatever is in need of justification
is already condemned by that very need. The so-called proofs
for the existence of God are no proofs at all, but substitutes
for the absence of a personal experience of God. That is left
to the theologian. But the religious genius does present in
a rational manner the God that dwells in him. He is rational
because he is non-rational. His rationality grows out of his ©
non-rationality. The truth that is in him drives him to seek
adequate expression of it, and the adequate expression is his
assurance of the truth that is in him. The art work is the
rational presentation of the non-rational, which means that
it is a truthful expression of an experience that is of the very
stuff of life itself.
The creative impulse has been traced by many writers
to have a social origin, as arising from the desire to communi-
cate to others what the artist experiences. Without a public
for his works, we are told, the artist would have no urge to
create. In accordance with this view, the artist is a showman,
and art a means for exhibitionism and self-display. There is
no doubt but that much of what passes for art at any given
122
Art and the Artist
time is motivated by nothing more than a craving for public
favor. But to attribute the herculean labors and sufferings of
the creative minds of the ages to such a trite purpose indicates
a most naive conception of the nature of human experience
and a disregard, to say the least, of the records of artistic
history.
The activities of living organisms are anything but arbitrary,
and that of human beings the least so. The motives of human
experience are ever internal in origin, with the external as the
medium through which they operate and seek satisfaction. An
organism uses its environment for its own inherent purposes.
It is never used by it. Its activities have no purpose other than
the expression of itself and for the sake of itself. Every act of
a living body, from amceba to man, begins internally, with
an urge for living, and is completed internally with the urge
pacified. Its reach for the outer is initiated, directed, and con-
trolled, by the inner. Life is not the adjustment of inner
to outer, but rather the utilization of the outer by the inner
in the interest of the inner. An organism never reacts twice
to the same situation in precisely the same way, indicating
that the situation, though exerting an influence on experience,
is not its determining factor. The organism seeks stimuli,
makes different selections from among them at different
times, and reacts to them in a manner suited to the needs of a
particular occasion.
The creative genius, above all living forms, is imbued with
the urge to live. Mentally and temperamentally his is an
enhanced existence. He is relentlessly driven by the life
within him to seek profounder experiences by penetrating
more and more deeply into the substance of the world about
him, for the greater enrichment of his own life. What he gives
to the public, and what the public most often rejects, at least
temporarily, is the consequence, the evidence, the record, of
his development in self-discovery. He does not produce in
order to live. He produces because he lives. He is not a trades-
man. He does not have his eye on the market, nor does he
seek the favor or goodwill of the populace. Whatever public
Art and Beauty
favor his works attract is accidental and welcome. But public
disfavor, even condemnation, never swerves him from his
purpose. The records of artistic endeavor throughout the
ages tell a continuous story of genius bearing with magnificent
fortitude not only public indifference and neglect, but braving
savage criticism. If art were actuated by a desire to please,
if the creative impulse depended on social approval, if art
were no more than communication, then artistic mediocrity
would be triumphant and genius eradicated. But history
bears certain witness that what is most popular at any epoch
is also most subject to the ravages of time, and what is most
savagely denounced is often also most permanent. Genius
is denounced precisely because it will not pander to popular
tastes. And it will not do so simply because it can not do so.
Its very life is to create, not to reproduce. Reproduction is
the province of talent, not of genius. What the public wants
is what it has become accustomed to. Hence, what genius
produces at any time the public gets to accept in due time as
it becomes adapted to it. The rejected of today becomes the
accepted of tomorrow. Genius does not flaunt the public
nor truckle to the public. It does what its nature compels
it to do, irrespective of consequences. Public favor is welcome,
if it comes, but it will not be bought at the price of self-
prostitution.
“Public neglect,” writes Mr. Galsworthy, “lack of apprecia-
tion or even the suffering of condemnation, eccentricity,
poverty, are certainly no signs or indications of greatness.
But the great are usually neglected, poor, and often eccentric
to their contemporaries and familiars, just because they are
great, namely, above and beyond their time and place, and
it takes centuries for the rest of us to begin to understand
or even catch a glimpse of their heights. That which is
superficial and flamboyant is readily and quite immediately
grasped, because it is on level ground, and he who runs
y see,”
Just as artistic genius labors for no extrinsic reason, so its
product, the art work, is inherent in value, needing no justi-
124
Art and the Artist
fication other than that it is a record of vital experience. Its
effect on the public is altogether irrelevant to its genuine
worth as an art work. No art work is great just because it
pleases, nor is it lacking in greatness because it displeases.
Its significance or lack of significance is derived from no
sources other than itself. 'To genuinely appreciate an art work
is an achievement to the appreciator, for he has risen to the
heights of its creator. But to judge it is an impertinence.
As a product of genius, the art work judges us; we judge it
only at the risk of displaying our limitations to rise to its level.
The art work loses nothing of its inherent value by being
Judged. But by judging it we lose the opportunity of dwelling
with it long enough to permit its significance to dawn upon us.
What a Keats, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven lived, labored
over, and poured his life’s blood into is no matter for judg-
ment, but for reverence, hope, and gratitude if its power
penetrates into us and revives us. The sole judge of the art
work, the only one who can judge and has a nght to judge,
is the artist himself of his own work. But what the artist
judges is not his experience, but his success in giving that
experience adequate expression. His divine discontent is
not so much with what he has lived, but with his powers as
a craftsman to execute what his imagination commands. Here
his reach invariably exceeds his grasp, and what stands before
him in bodily form as a finished product is always but an
imperfect shadow of his mental substance. But the onlooker
is in no position even to evaluate the artist as an artisan,
for he can have no conception of the purpose, the idea, behind
the form, excepting as it is revealed to him by that form.
If the form appears imperfect to him it is probably because
he reads an idea into it that is foreign to the purpose of the.
artist. All that he can do, therefore, legitimately, is lend
himself completely to the art work that it might work upon
him. If it works favorably he should be grateful. If unfavor-
ably he might bemoan his powers of. perception. And if in-
differently, let him hope, with Plato, that, “after long inter-
course with the thing itself, and after it has been lived with,
125
Art and Beauty
suddenly, as when the fire leaps up and light kindles, it is
found in the soul and feeds itself there.”’
If the value of an art work depended upon its effect on the
spectator the artist would be in a hopeless dilemma. For
whom is he to please, and who are his judges, and whose
judgment is to guide him? The critics? History shows the
Critics to be mostly on the wrong side of the fence. Most
often, what they condemned has survived, and what they
praised has disappeared. Nor do the critics agree, excepting
to disagree. Which critic is he then to accept? The only
way the artist could please the critics is by turning himself
into a chameleon. His case with the public is even more
hopeless. The public may claim that it knows what it wants,
but the trouble is that each of its members wants something
else, and that which they want vanes with their physiological
state. Hence, in accordance with this criterion, any art work
may be great one day and quite inferior another day. Any
criterion of the value of art, therefore, other than its own,
intrinsic significance, reduces the whole realm of artistic
creative work to an absurdity and a hopeless confusion.
‘There is no more reason why the work of the artist should be
( dependent for its value on the reactions of the public than
‘that of the scientist. But even the proposal of such a criterion
for the scientist would be greeted with loud laughter, whereas
it is taken for granted for the artist. But why so? The real
scientist is always an artist. The motive of the scientist, to
quote the words of one of the greatest of all time, Albert
Einstein, is ‘to seek a simplified synoptic view of the world
conformable to their own nature, overcoming the world by
replacing it with this picture.” ‘This fits the artist, the phi-
losopher, the saint and mystic of religion, as well as the scien-
tific worker. The spirit of all creative endeavor is of one kind.
It transforms the world of sensory perception into a universe
suited to the needs of an imaginatively creative mind. All
creativeness is a self-realization through the material of the
environment. The commonness of the common man is his
satisfaction with the common, that is, with communal experi-
126
Art and the Artist
ence. The superiority of the superior man is likewise precisely
that the common and obvious are no more than the raw
material for the building of a home suitable for his being.
Both the common man and the superior one are occupied
with the business of living. Everything else is an outgrowth
and an accessory to the essential business of subsistence.
For the common run of man subsistence means the pursuit
of material health, wealth, and power, and the happiness
accruing from their possession. For him the acquisition of
the outer physical leads to the satisfaction of the inner self,
and his activities are limited to the realm of common percep-
tion. His self-realization is dependent predominantly upon
what he can acquire of the world’s common goods. The
self-realization of the genius is inner. He seeks the world
in order to find himself, and his works, in whatever realm, are
the stepping-stones towards that end. That is their intrinsic
value, their inherent justification. That such works profit
mankind is accidental and extrinsic to their initial or essential
value. The genuine artist communicates with none but
himself, and his works are the records of such al uestoning
and self-answering. If others derive any benefit or good fro
his labor nothing is added to its inherent value, nor is any-
thing taken away from it if others fail to be impressed with it.
The absurdity resulting from the extrinsic justification of art
is well illustrated by Tolstoi, who, in his insistence that the
sole function of art is communication of emotion, condemns
as bad or false art the whole of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian,
and Beethoven.
~ Since the art work is inherent in value it also transcends
ime and place. The inherent, the intrinsic has neither chronol-
ogy nor geography, but belongs to all epochs and all localities.
That whose value is derived from time, is also discarded in
time. What time creates it also destroys. Modes, manners,
fashions, and customs serve the purpose of the period that
called them forth, and pass away. Since they come into exist-
ence as means for living, they go out of existence as they
become worn out by living. Life has its necessity and its
127
Art and Beauty
conveniences. Its necessity is to live, and it invents conven-
iences for living. The necessity is inherent, therefore perma-
nent, the convenience is external and transitory. The art work
is not a convenience, but a necessity. It is not a means for
living, but a record of a way of life. It stands as a monument
to himself erected by a great man of his moments of supreme
greatness. It is life incarnated, uttered, expressed, by those
who drank it in spirit and substance, that those who can no
more than taste, yet may look, wonder, and be refreshed.
What, now, as a result of the above summary of the creative
process and the nature of genius, can we conclude about
the artist and art in general, and the art work in particular?
We engaged in an analysis of the creative process and the
creative mind for the sole purpose of getting at the spirit
and substance of art. For our data we have utilized the most
reliable evidences available, namely, the utterances and pro-
nouncements of those who know, the creators themselves.
eir voices are unanimous in proclaiming that they are
iven to their labors by a force, a power, that is beyond their
control, that will not be denied, that knows no obstacles, and
that neither seeks nor asks for any rewards other than its
own satisfaction. This force, this power, is the imaginative
consciousness which opposes itself to the practical conscious-
ness and asserts, in the face of the biological demands of exist-
ence, that the law of life is the revelation of self to self and
not the capitulation of self to the non-self. Every art work
is a declaration and proclamation of this law of the imagina-
tive consciousness, a law enunciated in ringing terms by the
greatest artist of all time: what shall it profit a man if he gain
the whole world and lose his own soul? The artist is the
champion, the torch-bearer through the ages, of the claims
of life as a self-subsistent, self-revealing process, with art
works for his witnesses. The artist creates out of no motive
other than this inner necessity, and his creation has no end
besides the expression of that necessity. The artist seeks
nothing but the clarification of the life that is in him, while
the sole purpose and function of art is to him that of a verifi-
128
Art and the Artist
cation of his life to himself. The artist is a self-searcher, and
art a self-revealer. “I feel assured,” wrote Keats, “‘I should
write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the
beautiful, even if my night’s labors should be burnt every
morning and no eye ever shine upon them.” Thoreau wrote
in his diary upon the return of the greater portion of the first
edition of his book as unsaleable: ‘‘ Nevertheless, in spite of
the result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take
up my pen tonight, to record what thought or experience I
may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever.”’
What, now, can we tell about the art work from our analy-
sis? It tells us that the art work is an adequate, perfect record
of an achievement in significant living. The record is adequate,
perfect, in that it is the result or product of a highly conscious
process of choice, selection and rejection, examination and
re-examination, so that the local habitation is a perfect reflec-
tion of the inhabitant, the inhabitant prompting, even dictat-
ing, the planning and erection of the structure. The building
is not merely constructed around the inhabitant, but out of
him. It is of him, by him, and for him. It reflects him and
he reflects it. It is empty without him, while without it he is
but a shadow. The two are so fused and blended that a change
in one is a change in the other, the destruction of one means
the destruction of the other. They are eternally wedded to
each other, and not even death can tear them asunder without
material destruction. And the record is significant in that it
is not merely a record of a commonplace, routine, habitual
event, but of an achievement in living, of a growth, a develop-
ment in personality, a transformation of life from a lower
to a higher level. The life of habit is the life of stagnation, of
blind routine, life in the valleys and plains of existence. The
creative life is the growing life, the life that climbs from peak
to peak towards the sun. In the life of habit reach and grasp
are one, for there is nothing to reach for that has not already
been grasped. For the creative life the reach exceeds the
grasp, but the grasp ever strains for the reach. The art work
is the perfect record of one attainment in this yearning of the
129
Art and Beauty
reach for the grasp,_ The art work is thus an expression of a
unique experience, a living, vital experience, on the part of a_
unique, vital, living mind, in a unique, vital, living manner. ;
In the process of the growth of the art work impersonal, cold;
objective experience is translated, transformed, and trans-
muted into a personal, subjective innerly created world. )
That is, the impersonal world comes to us, bidden or unbidden,
reports itself to us unannounced. The personal world happens
to us, reveals itself to us gradually from within ourselves,
using the impersonal for its raw stuff. The impersonal becomes
personal in that so soon as the fiction, the living idea, is sensed
in the fact, the fact becomes fiction, the objective is trans-
muted into the subjective, matter becomes idea, but incar-
nated in matter. The art work thus is a re-creation of the
world, a cold, distant world becomes an intimate world aglow
with the fire of personal experience, the re-creation of the world
involving a rebirth of the creator, a new insight into the uni- |
verse, giving a new vision of self.; It therefore has a warmth,
a glow, an intensity of feeling that welcomes and greets a
great discovery. Objective experience is the accumulation of
knowledge. Personal experience is an achievement in living,
an adventure and discovery in self-realization. Each art work
represents therefore an epoch in the development of the per-
sonality of its creator. It is a landmark in the progress of
self-discovery, a monument to a coming into being, into a
higher consciousness of life, of a mind that is ever being reborn,
reincarnated. For, as has been well said: “The mark of our
passion is to wander without rest in the search for ourselves.
The mark of our power is not to discover ourselves. Whoever
has penetrated the mystery of himself no longer has to resolve
the drama by projecting it into his work, with that heroic force
which intoxicates the spectator.” The art work, in short, is
adequate, hence successful expression of creative, hence, vital,
experience. ‘‘All the works . . . that have been published by
me,” wrote Goethe, “are only fragments of one great confes-
sion.” An art work is a permanent and an adequate record
of an adventure and discovery in significant, creative living.
130
PART II
ART AND THE LAYMAN
Men do not realize that the power to ap-
preciate a great or good thing and the will
bo accepi tt are made warp and woof exactly
of the same psychic stuff as is the power to
create them and differs from originality
only in degree—G. Stanley Hall
EEE EMEC EEE EOE IGE OEIC E TOTES
CHAPTER VI
THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY
For the esthetically creative mind art is the transformation
of the common world of perceptual experience into the unique
realm of imaginative thought plus its adequate recording in
some material form. Art is the reconstruction of the factual
universe into an ideational universe in conformity with the
needs of a creative mind. That is its service to the artist. It
is his way of life. But what service does it render the lay mind?
What is the source of its universal appeal to the non-artist?
What widespread common need does it satisfy? What impulse,
what urge, sends the proverbial man of the street to art?
To say that he goes to art for recreation is but to raise the
question: recreation from what? If he seeks recreation through
art there must be some destructive element in his life for
which art is an antidote. What is that disintegrating element,
and in what way does art reintegrate it? What do we lose in
our daily, ordinary contacts that art restores to us and so
restores us? In a word, what is there in human nature that
calls for art?
We shall attempt an answer to these questions by a study
of the nature of the experience of beauty. To the layman,
that which the artist produces is art only when he can report
that it is beautiful, and therefore it is his need for beauty
that art serves. If, then, we can obtain a clear idea of what he
means by beauty we have a key to that part of his nature to
which art appeals.
The experience of beauty, like all complete experience,
~ is complex in structure. It is composed of a number of ele-
ments, each of which is easily mistaken for the whole. Hence
we have numerous so-called theories of beauty, each theory
calling attention to one of its component ingredients, and
disregarding, more or less, the other constituents. It is this
condition that has given rise in the minds of the uncritical
133
a oy
Art and Beauty
to the notion that estheticians contradict each other, and
hence, that beauty is indefinable. But estheticians no more
contradict each other than do chemists when they study
some perplexing compound and report its several elements.
The esthetic theories are supplementary, and it is only when
we put all of them together that we obtain an idea of the
nature of the experience of beauty in its totality.
1
THe THEORIES OF BEAUTY
We shall consider the following theories: intrinsicality,
disinterestedness, significant form, objectification, empathy,
psychical distance, intuition, @sthetic repose, and catharsts.
These theories are divisible into two groups, namely, theories
of (1) Mental Attitude, and theories of (2) Organic State.
Under (1) belong intrinsicality, objectification, psychical
distance, significant form, intuition, disinterestedness, and
empathy, and under (2) catharsis and esthetic repose. Our
problem is fourfold: (1) to see whether each of the Attitude”
Theories contains the substance of every other theory, whether
each theory can be deduced from every other theory, whether
each theory is thus but an elaboration or a restatement of
every other theory; (2) to do likewise for the State Theories;
(3) to see whether the State Theories are deducible from the
Attitude Theories, and vice versa; (4) to seek the codrdinating
center for all the theories.
: @. THEORIES OF MENTAL ATTITUDE
Intrinsicality. We begin with the theory of intrinsicality
for no other reason than that we must begin somewhere. Any
other theory would be just as effective for the crucial purpose
here intended.
' This theory holds that in beauty experience is valued for
itself, is its own justification, in contrast with practical experi-
ences, like the good, the true, or the useful, where experience
is esteemed for its fruits, and hence is not sufficient in itself, but
134
The Experience of Beauty
is justified by its results. In other words, whenever experi-
ence becomes significance as experience, whenever its value
is immediate rather than derived, whenever value is placed
upon experience as experience, it is termed an experience of !
’
‘
4
1
:
I
beauty, and its object is labeled an object of beauty. Beauty —
is thus a matter of emphasis. When an activity or an interest
is considered as a means towards some end, and directed by a
consciousness of the end to be accomplished, the experience
is utilitarian, practical. When the emphasis is on the activity
itself, when the activity or interest is its own end, the experi-
ence is beautiful. A common illustration is ‘‘a beautiful walk,”
namely, when the activity of walking is engaged in for its
own sake, in contrast with walking to reach a certain destina-
tion, when the activity becomes laborious. In beauty, value
is intrinsic, the activity is the value and the value is the activ-
ity. In practical experience the value is outside of the activity,
extrinsic to it, namely, in some conscious end that the activity
is to promote.
Disinterestedness. The theory of disinterestedness holds
that in the experience of beauty interest is attached to the
immediate event rather than to some felt need that is promoted
by the event. The experience is in this sense impersonal,
that is, detached from conscious personal motives. For in-
stance, walking for one’s health is an interested, motive-full,
intentional activity, since the activity may be unpleasant in
itself, but is persisted in because of the desirability of the end
td be accomplished. The difference is brought out in such
remarks as that the laborer works for his hire, and the artist
for the sake of the work. Both laborer and artist work, of
course, toward an end, but while the laborer is interested only
in the end, works only because of the fruits of the labor, the
artist finds satisfaction in the work itself, at the end of which
he may even feel grief instead of satisfaction. Again, this
rbot
theory also deals with emphasis. In disinterestedness the '
emphasis, the concentration, is on the immediate activity;
in interestedness it is on the culmination of the activity.
Thus disinterestedness is object-centered, while interestedness
135
a
XN
Art and Beauty
is self-centered. Platonic friendship is an instance of disinter-
estedness, and hence labeled beautiful, while friendship based
upon some ulterior motive, upon some conscious gain to be
obtained from the association, is given an opprobrius name.
Now it is obvious that this theory is in substance but a
restatement of the theory of intrinsicality. In the interested
attitude attention is centered on considerations outside the
event itself, that is, on extrinsicalities. I work because I want
the money or the fame, or because I must, in order to satisfy
some external pressure. The work is not its own justification,
intrinsic, but finds its justification in something outside of
itself, something extrinsic to itself. In disinterestedness, on
the other hand, emphasis is on the thing itself, hence attention
is intrinsic, the activity is its own justification, interest in it
being for itself. [Hence intrinsicality and disinterestedness
describe the same attitude.’
ce Significant Form. This theory is advanced by Clive Bell in
his book, Art. His statement of it is as follows:
All sensitive people agree that there is a emotion provoked
by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the
same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emo-
tion. But all these emotions are recognizably the same in kind; so
far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side. That there is a par-
ticular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this
emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculp-
tures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc., is not disputed, I think,
by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the esthetic
emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar
to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to
be the central problem of zxsthetics. We shall have discovered the
essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works
of art from all other classes of objects.
For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or
when we speak of “works of art” we gibber. Everyone speaks of
“art”, making a mental classification by which he distinguishes the class
“‘works of art” from all other classes. What is the justification of this
classification? What is the quality common and peculiar to all mem-
bers of this class? Whatever it be, no doubt it is often found in com-
pany with other qualities; but they are adventitious—it is essential.
There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot
136
The Experience of Beaut
exist; possessing which, in the least degree, ng work is altogether worth-
less. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects
that provoke our zsthetic emotions? What/quality is common to Sta.
Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian
bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces
of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cémanne? Only one answer
seems possible—significant form. In each, lines and colours combined
in a particular way, certain forms and rdlations of forms, stir our
sesthetic emotions.{ Their relations and cgmbinations of lines and
colours, these zsthetically moving forms, J call “Significant Form”;
and ‘Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of
visual art.?
A simple illustration will bring outj the substance of this
theory. Two men are observing a column of smoke emanating
from a smoke-stack of a steel mill. @ne of them comments
‘‘What a shame that this be tolerate to pollute the atmos-
phere, befog the landscape, soil linen,]’ etc., etc. The second.
exclaims “‘How beautiful.” Now what is it that is beautiful
in the smoke? Apparently not that which pollutes the atmos-
phere, etc., but the phenomenon ag such, namely, the form
that is directly present before us. he form is the essence of
the phenomenon, for if that disappeared the phenomenon
would disappear, while its effects, the befogging of the atmos-
phere, etc., are its consequences qr attributes. The theo
states, then, that whenever form becomes significant, mean
ingful, as form, the experience is t¢rmed beautiful. )
This illustration serves also to pgint out the identity of this
of it that are extrinsic to the phen
is calculating, subjective, namel
menon, per se. His attitude
, interested. The second
-
Art and Beauty
disinterested attitude attention is centered on the essential,
intrinsic aspect of an event, and this sspect is, necessarily,
its form. Or, when attention is fo on the intrinsic
aspect of an event, that is, on its form} as form, the attitude
is disinterested, in that any considerations of the effects of
the event are out of mind. Or, when attention is centered on
the form of a phenomenon rather 1 on its consequences,
the experience is necessarily intrinsic ad disinterested.
Psychical Distance. Dr. E. Bullough gives the following
excellent account of his theory:
A short illustration will explain what is meant by “ Psychical Dis-
tance.”’ Imagine a fog at sea: for most people it is an experience of acute
unpleasantness. Apart from the physical annoyance and remoter
forms of discomfort such as delays, it is apt to produce feelings of
peculiar anxiety, fears of invisible dangers, strains of watching and
listening for distant and unlocalized signals. The listless movements
of the ship and her warning calls soon tell upon the nerves of the pas-
sengers; and that special, expectant, tacit anxiety and nervousness,
always associated with this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror
of the sea (all the more terrifying because of its very silence and gen-
tleness) for the expert seafarer no less than for the ignorant landsman.
Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish and en-
joyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea fog, for the moment,
its danger and practical unpleasantness, just as every one in the en-
joyment of a mountain-climb disregards its physical labor and its
danger (though, it is not denied, that these may incidentally enter
into the enjoyment and enhance it); direct the attention to the features
“‘objectively” constituting the phenomenon—the veil surrounding
you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline
of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe
the carrying-power of the air, producing the impression as if you
could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and
letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy
smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any sug-
gestion of danger; and, above all, the strange solitude and remote-
ness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain
tops; and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of re-
pose and terror, flavor of such concentrated poignancy and delight
as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its
other aspects. This contrast, often emerging with startling sudden-
ness, is like a momentary switching on of some new current, or the
passing ray of a brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps
138
The Experience of Beauty
the most ordinary and familiar object—an impression which we
experience sometimes in instants of direst extremity, when our practical
interest snaps like a wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the
consummation of some impending catastrophe with the marveling
unconcern of a mere spectator.!
Psychical distance then means distance from one’s self,
one’s personal, practical interests in the event. In any experi-
ence, the closer that one is to one’s own self, the more that
one is concerned with one’s interests, the farther one is re-
moved, psychically, from the object, in that he relates it to
himself, stands over it, appraising and evaluating it, con-
sciously seeking through it the satisfaction of some need, and
aware of a separation between himself and the object, namely,
that the object is a means towards some conscious personal
end that is to be attained. Conversely, the farther that one
is removed from one’s self, from personal considerations, the
closer he gets to the object, in that the self-interests do not
intervene and separate subject and object, hence there is a
mergence, the subject being in the object, instead of the object
being consciously used to further some need of the subject.
In the former attitude there is psychical distance, in the latter
psychical closeness.
In psychical distance, therefore, experience becomes signifi-
cant as such, valued as experience, while the fruit of experi-
ence, namely, the extrinsicalities that arise in the interested
attitude, are absent. This theory is, then, but another restate-
ment of those of disinterestedness, intrinsicality, and signifi-
cant form.
Objectification. George Santayana defines beauty as pleasure
objectified. His formulation of it is as follows:
Finally, the pleasures of sense are distinguished from the percep-
tion of beauty, as sensation in general is distinguished from percep-
tion; by the objectification of the elements and their appearance as
qualities rather of things than of consciousness. The passage from
sensation to perception is gradual, and the path may be sometimes
retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of sensation. There is
3“ ¢Psychical Distance’, as a Factor in Art and an Asthetic Principle,’’ The British
Journal of Psychology, Vol. 5, pp. 87-118.
139
Art and Beauty
no sharp line between them, but it depends upon the degree of objec-
tivity my feeling has attained at the moment whether I say “It pleases
me,” or “It is beautiful.” If I am self-conscious and critical, I shall
probably use one phrase; if I am impulsive and susceptible, the other.
The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the
more objective it will appear; and the union of two pleasures often
makes one beauty.
In Shakespeare’s Livth sonnet are these words:
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odor which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses.
But, for their beauty only is their show,
They live unwooed and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so:
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made.
One added ornament, we see turns the deep dye, which was but
show and mere sensation before, into an element of beauty and reality;
and as truth is here the co-operation of perceptions, so beauty is the
co-operation of pleasures. If colour, form, and motion are hardly
beautiful without the sweetness of the odour, how much more necessary
would they be for the sweetness itself to become a beauty! If we had
the perfume in a flask, no one would think of calling it beautiful: it
would give us too detached and controllable a sensation. There would
be no object in which it could be easily incorporated. But let it float
from the garden, and it will add another sensuous charm to objects
simultaneously recognized, and help to make them beautiful. Thus
beauty is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure
objectified.?
In ordinary feeling we find two traits. I see you are sad,
and I know that the sadness is in you and not in me. Or Iam
sad and I refer the sadness to myself and not to the thing or
situation that made me sad. Or if your sadness makes me
sad, I make a distinction between the two and say that your
sadness made me sad. But in beauty we have the unique
fact that the feeling which is in me is referred to the object
which created the feeling in me. The feeling is objectified,
1 The Sense of Beauty, New York, Scribner, 1896, pp. 50-52.
140
The Experience of Beauty
expressed, which means that it receives a form, it becomes the
thing that has aroused it, and is contemplated or observed as
the thing. Thus in an esthetic attitude I contemplate my
own feelings, objectify them, consider the self in relation to
the feelings instead of the feelings in relation to the self. The
feelings, therefore, are not mine, but I am the feelings. I
become identified with them. I am therefore disinterested,
detached from the self, in other words, objectified.
What is the nature of “‘the thing,” the object, that is ob-
served in this attitude? It cannot be the thing of ordinary
experience any more than the feeling is that of ordinary experi-
ence. Just as in ordinary experience we do not observe the
feeling for itself but in its meaning, so an object in ordinary
experience is seen not as it is in itself but in its relationship
to other things or to the observer. The reality of an object
to me, ordinarily, resides in its significance to me, what it does
to me, how it affects me, what is its meaning to me. Con-
sequently, when feeling becomes detached from me it becomes
attached not to the meaning of the object as chair or table,
that is, to its extrinsic aspect, but to the object itself, namely,
its intrinsicality, that which it is in itself, as a form. Thus
meaning and form become identical: the form being the mean-
ing, and the meaning the form. And for the same reason,
percipient and perceived become identified, for, when the
meaning, which is J, is referred to the object, I also reside in
the object. Object and subject thus fuse into pure being.
Now what does this theory offer us that is new, that is not
contained in the theories already discussed? All that it does
is add the affective element to the theories of intrinsicality,
disinterestedness, etc. These theories describe the mental
attitude in the experience of beauty. The theory of objecti-
fication describes the feeling attitude. What it tells us is
this: that since what is present to mind in the intrinsic, dis-
interested, psychically distanced attitude is not subjective
meaning, but objective meaning, the feeling-counterpart of
the experience is also objective. Beauty is really not so much
pleasure objectified, but rather the pleasure is objectified
141
Art and Beauty
because beauty is an objective experience, and hence the
pleasure-aspect of the experience is also objective.
Lo Intuition. This is a theory advocated by the Italian philoso-
pher, Benedetto Croce.
Croce identifies the esthetic experience with intuition, and
intuition with expression. Intuition is, for Croce, a midway
station between sensation and perception, in the psychological
connotation of these terms. To Croce sensation and matter
are identical. Sensation is formless matter, chaotic, unformu-
lated confusion. In the words of Croce, “‘it is what the spirit
of man suffers, but does not produce. Without it no human
knowledge or activity is possible; but mere matter produces
animality, whatever is brutal and impulsive in man, not the
spiritual dominion, which is humanity.” Perception, as
used in psychology, is the process of interpretation of sensation
in terms of behavior, that is, meaning. But before chaotic
sensation can become perception, it must become individ-
ualized, systematized, ordered, in a word, formulated. This
process of form-giving, individualizing, Croce calls intuition.
Intuition is contrasted with intellect. Through intuition we
obtain knowledge of individual things, and through intellect
knowledge of relations between them. Examples of intuitive
knowledge are, an impression of a moonlight scene by a painter,
a musical theme, the words of a singing lyric. These are com-
plete, self-contained, formed impressions, “intuitive facts
without a shadow of intellectual relation,’’ that is, not de-
pendent on anything outside of themselves for their meaning.
The meaning is intrinsic. Intuition is also expression, for this
form-giving process is an activity of the mind, spiritual activ-
ity, as Croce calls it, a mental creation, an imaginative act.
“Every true intuition or representation is also expression.
t which does not objectify itself in expression is not intui-
tion or representation, but sensation and mere natural fact.
The spirit only intuits in making, forming, expressing.” ?
Ordinarily the intuitive process is superseded by interpreta-
1 £sthettc. Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Company, reprinted by permission.
3 Ibid., p. 8.
142
The Experience of Beauty
tion, that is, by perception. Then it loses its purity, form is
submerged in meaning, resulting in a practical attitude.
Interest is no longer in form, but in relations, meanings, and
consequences. The attitude becomes interested, selfish,
utilitarian. Thus the esthetic attitude liberates us from the
practical, from perception, and leads us back to pure experi-
ence, to intuition. ‘In our intuitions,” says Croce, “‘we do
not oppose ourselves as empirical beings to external reality,
but we simply objectify our impressions, whatever they may
be.”’
In this theory, then, we have a restatement of the doctrine
of intrinsicality, and therefore by implication, also of the other
theories, with the addition of the idea of expression. What this
theory states, in substance, is, that our ordinary experience
becomes intuitive experience, esthetic experience, when
stripped of everything but what is directly, immediately
experienced, namely, form. In this state the attitude is neces-
sarily disinterested, depersonalized or objectified, distanced,
intrinsic.
Empathy. The theory of empathy or Einfuhlung (feeling-
into), advanced by the German, Theodor Lipps, holds that
the zsthetic experience is one in which we project our own
state of being into things, attribute to them our own feelings
whether of activity or passivity. The forces, tendencies, and
strivings that we feel in inanimate objects like columns are
our own muscular activities projected into them. Thus when
I feel a column “striving” upwards, it is my “striving”
that I “feel into” the column. I project my own inner state
into the perceived object, so that I and the object become one.
In the wording of Lipps ‘‘The meaning of the object to me as
object, is in reality what I am within myself, but through the
object, and hence also in the object.” In other words, my own
state was induced in me by the object, and therefore the object
is within me and I am in the object.
Empathy is not specifically an esthetic theory, but the
psychological principle of the source of all meaning, applied
to esthetic experience. All significant experience is an instance
143
Art and Beauty
of empathy. Without inner participation of some sort and to
some degree, experience is meaningless. Inner strains and
stresses, incipient movements, are phases of all perception,
and in no manner limited to esthetic perception. There is
probably more objectification of these strains and stresses of
perception in esthetic experience, but this in itself does not
make of empathy an esthetic theory per se. Since in beauty
all subjective occurrences become objectified, the incipient
movements are necessarily also referred to the object and not
to the subject. It is also probable that these movements are
more balanced in zsthetic experience because of the unity of
the art product, and it is also probable that they are more
intense because of the state of complete absorption and mer-
gence with the object of experience. Yet this is also true of
listening to an effective speaker, of intense interest in reading
a book on science, in which experiences there may be nothing
esthetic. Hence, all that may be said of empathy is that its
réle in beauty is that of its réle in experience in general and it
therefore tells us nothing that is uniquely esthetic.
b. THEORIES OF ORGANIC STATE
Zi sthetic Repose. This theory concerns itself with the bodily
state in the zsthetic experience. Its advocate, Ethel Puffer,
defines beauty as a ‘‘moment of perfection, of self-complete
unity of experience, of favorable stimulation with repose.” !
The esthetic state is repose in tension, ‘‘a combination of
favorable stimulation and repose.”’ Ordinarily, repose is a
state of muscular relaxation, of mild stimulation. Ordinarily,
intense stimulation, muscular tension, means excitement,
restlessness, desire to engage in gross behavior. But in the
esthetic state there is muscular tension, intense stimula-
tion, but instead of excitement, restlessness, there is repose.
Hence the exhilarating effect of beauty: increased tonicity,
and also peace. In this state we have the cake and also
eat it.
1 The Psychology of Beauty, p. 56. Reprinted by permission of, and special arrange-
ment with, Houghton Mifflin Company.
144
The Experience of Beauty
How does this unique state come about? What is its cause?
Puffer attributes it to the condition of the art work. The art
work is necessarily, by its very nature, a unified object. ‘The
symmetrical picture calls out a set of motor impulses which
‘balance,’—a system of energies reacting on one center; the
sonnet takes us out on one wave of rhythm and of thought, to
bring us back on another to the same point; the sonata does
the same in melody. In the ‘whirling circle’ of the drama,
not a word or an act that is not indissolubly linked with before
and after. Thus the unity of a work of art makes the system
of suggested energies which form the foreground of attention
an impregnable, and invulnerable circle . . . all incidents to
motor impulse—except those which belong to the indissoluble
ring of the object itself—have been shut out by the perfec-
tion of unity to which the esthetic object has been brought.” !
We may suggest another cause than the unity of the art
work for the state of repose, a cause that is not only plausible
but which also brings Puffer’s theory in harmony with the
Theories of Attitude.
Tension, that is, incipient movement, as we have seen, is a
concomitant of all significant experience. The greater the
tension the more significant the experience. In intense emotion,
for instance, tension is near its maximum, hence the intense
significance of the exciting stimulus. But in all such cases,
the tension overflows into overt behavior, and the greater the
tension the more violent and gross is the outer activity. In
eesthetic experience, however, there is great tension, but no
gross manifestation. Why? Simply because tension makes
experience significant as experience, while its overflow in
gross movements is not concerned with the experience as such
but with the doing of something about the experience. In
other words, gross movement is interested because aroused
by extrinsic considerations, while incipient movement is
disinterested, being intrinsic. Thus, if the inner tensions
in fear and anger were not to overflow into gross movements
both anger and fear would become experiences of beauty,
2 Jbid., pp. 77-78.
145
Art and Beauty
as is the case in the drama. Since in the drama we follow the
flow of events as events, without considering the fruits and
consequences of the events, the outer manifestations that
would be present were we to have these experiences under
ordinary conditions, are absent. Now when such outer mani-
festations are absent there is repose in tension. And that is
what happens in beauty, in esthetic repose; namely, since
beauty is an attitude of disinterestedness, intrinsicality, etc.,|
the overt acts of interested, extrinsic experience do not occur. '
Hence, in the theory of zsthetic repose we have the organic ,
aspect of the Theories of Attitude.
Catharsis. The doctrine of catharsis dates to Aristotle and
has been subjected to numerous interpretations. More ink
has been spilled over the single sentence in the Poetics in
which Aristotle states his theory regarding the function of the
drama than has been the fate of any other one pronouncement
in the history of zsthetics. “ Tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is an
imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a
certain magnitude, in language embellished with each kind of
artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate
parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative;
through pity and fear effecting the proper kathersts, or pur-
Vv gation, of these emotions.” !
Aristotle nowhere tells us what this purifying process is,
how tragedy effects this catharsis. Nor does he limit it to
tragedy, for in the Politics he speaks at some length of the
purgation effect of music.
Now of what is the emotion cleansed, in what way is it
- altered, and why? To cleanse is to eliminate all those proper-
ties of a thing that are not of its essence and substance, and
leave only that which constitutes the thing in itself. The
essence of emotion is the inner tension, the organic occur-
rences. The gross activities are an accretion, a consequence,
arising from the practical necessity to get rid of the exciting
stimulus. In the Rhetoric Aristotle defines fear as ‘‘a species
of pain or disturbance issuing from an impression of impending
1S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry ond Fine Art, London, 1923, p. 240
146
The Experience of Beauty
evil which is destructive or painful in its nature.” ! That is,
the emotion is destructive and disturbing because the individ-
ual refers the incident to himself, hence the overt activity to
get rid of it, to ward it off. But, as Butcher puts it, ‘The
emotion of fear is profoundly altered when it is transferred
from the real to the imaginative world. It is no longer the di-
rect apprehension of misfortune impending over our own life.
It is not caused by the actual approach of danger. It is the
sympathetic shudder we feel for a hero whose character in its
essentials resembles our own.” ? Thus, ‘‘The true tragic fear
becomes an almost impersonal emotion, attaching itself not
so much to this or that particular incident, as to the general
course of action which is for us an image of human destiny,’ ®
so that the emotion becomes disinterested, objectified, dis-
tanced, intrinsic, and hence that which would happen in the
practical, interested subjective attitude, namely, to run, weep,
or any other gross expression of emotion, is not called forth
since it has no reason for being. Catharsis, therefore, like
esthetic repose, is the physiological counterpart of the mental
attitude in the experience of beauty. And the two theories
are aspects one of the other, since the catharsis consists of the
repose in tension, and the repose in tension is the catharsis.
3
THe SUBSTANCE OF THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY
Our examination of the esthetic theories shows quite plainly
that, far from contradicting each other, all of them are driving
at one common substance in somewhat different language.
What is this substance, this central thread that runs through
them? It is that the esthetic experience is one in which, to
use the words of Walter Pater, ‘‘Not the fruit of experience,
but experience itself, is the end.” Preanty is an impression —*
giving a feeling of completeness in its kind, of self-sufficiency,
of significance in, by, and for itself. It is a state of attention, of
1 Tbid., p. 256.
3 Ibid., pp. 258-259.
3 Ibid., pp. 262-263.
147
Art and Beauty
complete absorption, from which all mental strain is absent,
in which the mind is free of desire and will, of straining and
iving, calculating and scheming, a mental state of intense
interest, yet without intellectual effort bent on understanding
or consequent action.) Beauty is a state of being in which
we are raised above time and place, lifted out of the stream
of life, in which there is neither past nor future, neither before
nor after, but only the now exists., It is the unique glory of
moments of beauty, as has been well said, that “they have
nothing to do with business, with the adaptation of means
to ends, with the bustle and dust of life. They are impractical
and purposeless. They serve no interest and further no cause.
They are self-sufficing, and neither point to any good beyond
themselves, nor overflow except by accident into any practical
activities.”! No better account of this state of being is to be
found than that given by Schopenhauer. He writes:
If, raised by the power of the mind, a man relinquished the common
way of looking at things, gives up tracing, under the guidance of the
forms of the principle of sufficient reason, their relations to each other,
the final goal of which is always a relation to his own will; if he thus
ceases to consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither of
things, and looks simply and solely at the what; if, further, he does not
allow abstract thought, the concepts of the reason, to take possession
of his consciousness, but, instead of all this, gives the whole power of
his mind to perception, sinks himself entirely in this, and lets his whole
consciousness be filled with the quiet contemplation of the natural
object actually present, whether a landscape, a tree, a mountain, a
building, or whatever it may be; inasmuch as he /oses himself in this
object, i. e. forgets even his individuality, his will, and only continues
to exist as the pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is
as if the object alone were there, without any one to perceive it, and
he can no longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but both
have become one, because the whole consciousness is filled and oc-
cupied with one single sensuous picture; if thus the object has to such
an extent passed out of all relation to something outside it, and the
subject out of all relation to the will, then that which is so known is no
longer the particular thing as such; but it is the Zdea, the et2rnal form,
the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade; and therefore,
he who is sunk in this perception is no longer individual, for in such
1A. J. Balfour, Essays Speculative and Political, George W. Doran Co., p. 88.
148
The Experience of Beauty
perception the individual has lost himself; but he is pure, will-less,
painless, timeless, subject of knowledge. . . . In such contemplation
the particular thing becomes at once the Idea of its species, and the
perceiving individual becomes pure subject of knowledge.'
In sum: beauty is experience become significant as experi-~
ence. Beauty is an unique relationship existing between a
perceiving subject and a perceived object, the uniqueness
consisting in the fact that the subject is completely immersed
in the active contemplation of the object as object, a pure
form, the subject thus existing in a state of complete intel-
lectual and affective detachment from the world of facts or
ideas that are outside the object present to mind. Such experi-
ence or activity is intrinsic, disinterested, objective, significant
as form, psychically distanced, therefore reposeful, and there-
fore also cathartic. On the other hand, when experience or
activity becomes significant because of its consequences it is
practical. Such experience or activity is extrinsic, interested,
subjective, significant as meaning, psychically close, therefore
restless and troublesome. And when practical experience be-
comes obnoxious, repugnant, it is ugly. Beauty is, in a word,
pure experience. And whenever such experience is aroused by
some object or phenomenon in nature, that object or phenome-
non is termed beautiful. Whenever such experience is aroused
by any product of man that product is called an art work.
4
Tse SERVICE OF ART
! The esthetic experience, we find, is a release, an eman-
. Cipation from the practical demands of living. It is a restora-
tion of the wholeness of the self which is constantly being
shattered by the conflicting upheavals of biological necessity.
Its appeal lies in the respite that it offers from oneself, from
one’s daily struggling, wounded, self, which Romain Rolland
describes in such glowing words:
Life passes. Body and soul flow onward like a stream. The years
are written in the flesh of the aging tree. The whole visible world of
1 The World_as Will ond Idea, Kegan Paul, Vol. I, pp. 251-252.
149
Art and Beauty
form is forever wearing out and springing to new life. Thou only dost
- not pass, immortal music. Thou art the inward sea. Thou art the pro-
found depths of the soul. In thy clear eyes the scowling face of life is
not mirrored. Far, far from thee, like the herded cloud, flies the pro-
cession of days burning, icy, feverish, driven by uneasiness, huddling,
moving on, on, never for one moment to endure. Thou art a whole
world to thyself. Thou hast thy sun, thy laws, thy ebb and flow. Thou
hast the peace of the stars in the great spaces of the field of night,
marking their luminous track-plows of silver guided by the sure hand
of the invisible ox-herd.
Music, serene music, how sweet is thy moony light to eyes wearied
of the harsh brilliance of this world’s sun! The soul that has lived and
turned away from the common horse-pond, where, as they drink, men
stir up the mud with their feet, nestles to thy bosom, and from thy
breasts suckled with the clear running waters of dreams. Music, thou
virgin mother, who in thy immaculate womb bearest the fruit of all
passions, who in the lake of thy eyes, whereof the color is as the color
of the rushes, or as the pale green glacier water, enfoldest good and
evil, thou art beyond evil, thou art beyond good; he that taketh refuge
with thee is raised above the passing time; the succession of days will
be but one day, and death that devours everything on such an one will
never close its jaws.?
To escape from necessity is one of the least recognized,
and yet one of the most intense of human cravings, and the
re sensitive the individual soul, the more intensely does it
cry out against the tyranny and oppression of life’s everyday
affairs and trials. Wordsworth cries:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
3 Jean Christophe, Henry Holt and Co., pp. 349-350.
150
The Experience of Beauty
In like vein Keats sings in To a Nightingale:
O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green.
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim;
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
And in more prosaic terms Bertrand Russell suggests an
avenue of escape from the tyranny of life:
v
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit
of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the
assertion of freedom, to defy with promethean constancy a hostile
universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to
refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the
duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is
still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil
world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there
is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome.
Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the
stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of
our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires
springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts
springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty
by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But thé vision
of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not
weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to
151
Art and Beauty
those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of the per-
sonal goods that are subject to the mutation of Time.?
What indications are there in life’s routine of the need and
desire for escape, or, in other words, how does this urge for
relief manifest itself under usual conditions?
One source of evidence is the great popularity of certain types
of literature whose subject-matter is of a highly fantastic and
improbable nature, namely: stories of adventure of the Robin-
son Crusoe type; romances, in which life appears as perfect and
harmonious; fairy tales, with their unfailing appeal to young
and old; mythology, where the prince is always perfect and the
princess always beautiful; utopias of perfect government and
harmonious social relationships; all these afford a compensation
for the shortcomings and frustrations of actual experience.
In a more definite manner this ever active urge manifests
itself in the organization and appeal of secret societies with
their very mysterious sounding names and esoteric rituals and
ceremonies; in masquerades where the individual hides tem-
porarily in the guise of a character of fictitious origin or dis-
tant land; and in the ever-recurring outbreak of the wander-
lust. Nor is there a person who has not at one time or other
experienced a strong impulse to be someone else, to possess the
traits and characteristics of another individual, to exchange
occupations or social standing.
Another avenue of escape is a type of experience that is
surrounded with a great deal of mystery, and is particularly
associated with religion, namely, mysticism. The mystical
experience consists essentially “‘in a gradual but swiftly pro-
gressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multi-
tudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we
are pleased to call our Self.” “It is an experience in which the
universe becomes without form and void of content,” and dur-
ing which one becomes identified with the unity of all life and
thus attains a condition in which the eternal strife between
subject and object is obliterated.
1 “Mysticism and Logic,” A Free Mas’s Worship, Longmans, Green and Co., 1919,
p. 51
152
The Experience of Beauty
5
ArT AS RELEASE
In what way does art carry out this high function of afford-
ing an escape from the cold and clammy facts that hedge us in?
It carries out this great calling in two ways: First, by emanci-
pating the subject from the disturbing effects of thought
and emotion, and second, by purging the object of the encum-
brances piled upon it by practical concerns.
Our most usual reaction to any event in our environment
that attracts our attention is active and aggressive. We are
ever asking the world about us to tell us something, the secret
of its constitution, or the story of its meaning, or the justifi-
cation of its existence, its what, its how, and its why. In
science and in philosophy there is a beginning, but no end;
one fact displaces another, one function suggests another, one
value contradicts another. To mind in action, man and his
world present an endless series of problems: problems of fact
and fiction, of cause and effect, of good and evil, and the
answer to any one problem is but an incentive to still further
problems. Thought keeps the individual in a constant, and ever-
increasing, turmoil and confusion, questioning and answering,
affirming and denying, an “ever becoming, and a never
being.”’
Emotion, even more so than thought, its twin brother, is a
source of vexation and turmoil. An emotion is an intensely
wrought-up state of the organism caused by some disturbing
feature in the environment, and demanding an immediate
adjustment of some kind. Emotion is synonymous with
strong desire, either to possess or to reject. It is an energy-
creating process, instigating to action, and during its presence
there is excitement and agitation, while its passing leaves the
organism in a state of exhaustion.
From the ezsthetic experience both thought and emotion
are ruled out. Beauty is the negation of mental and emotional
activity, to which is due its peace-giving power. Beauty neither
inquires nor reasons, does not analyze or speculate, weigh or
153
Art and Beauty
ider, but accepts in a state of pure contemplation. In
moments of sheer beauty there is thus a release from the
petty rounds and vexations of routine existence created by
thought and emotion, since in such moments we neither look
forward nor backward, consider neither means nor ends, but
are steeped in the present experience, without contrasting it
with the past or relating it to the future. [tis from the free-
dom of our thoughts that the vision of beauty springs, and by
{means of which we subdue and becalm the ruffled sea of life.
Likewise, beauty rids us of the load of eager wishes with
which we are usually burdened through cntion “A
never creates anger, fear, resentment, envy, or jeal It
is a state of complete repose, a moment of perfect peace, during
which all the powers and processes of body and mind are func-
tioning harmoniously, and which leaves us in a state of height-
ened vitality physically, and exaltation, spiritually. By purg-
ing us of emotion and all its consequences, during which we
stand consciously over an object, desiring it or rejecting it,
moving towards it or away from it, beauty establishes a close
intimacy between us and the object, we and the object become
fused and blended in a single pulse of experience.
Beauty not only cleanses consciousness of the waste accumu-
lations of the stream of thought and emotion, but also frees
the object of all the encumbrances imposed upon it in ordinary”
experience. Art does not view an object in its connections with
other things or in its relationships and meanings to a person.
It lifts the object out of its material surroundings, isolates
it from its environment, strips it of all attributes forced upon
it by the mind, and which are not part and parcel of its inher-
ent being, and thus permits it to stand on its own merits,
what in itself it truly is. In moments of beauty, nothing
extraneous or foreign to the essence of the object is present
in consciousness. ‘‘To isolate the object for the mind, means
to make it beautiful, for it fills the mind without an idea of
anything else: we are interested in the impression as it is in
itself, without any reference to anything outside of it in space
and time; and this complete repose, where the objective im-
154
eauty,
ee, eS eS ee
The Experience of Beauty
pression becomes for us an ultimate end in itself, is the only
possible content of the true experience of beauty.”’
It is because art eliminates thought and emotion, and iso-
lates the object from its material and personal relationships,
that beauty is a purgation, a catharsis, creating a state of self-
forgetfulness. Self is the consciousness of being separate -
and different from other persons and objects. It is the product
of a standing battle between the individual and his environ-
ment. It is through the environment that the individual
functions, that is, through which he seeks the realization of
his aims and objectives. But the environment does not readily
yield to the demands of man. It resists his efforts to make
of it a path through which to travel to his goal. And it is
this resistance that sets the machinery of thought and emo-
tion into operation in an effort to overcome the obstacles on
the road to self-realization. The more obstinate the resistance,
the more intense do thought and emotion become, and the
greater the consciousness of self. The self is most in evidence,
most aggressive, when our efforts for attaining a certain end
meet with severest frustrations. But, in the words of Schopen-
hauer:
. when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly
out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery
of the will, attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing,
but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus
observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely
objectively, and gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are
ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace
which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the
former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well
with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest
good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free
from the miserable striving of the will.
This state may be described as pure contemplation, as sinking
oneself into perception, losing oncself in the object, forgetting all in-
dividuality, surrendering that kind of knowledge which comprehends
only relations: the state by means of which at once and inseparably
the perceived particular thing is raised to the idea of its whole species,
and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will-less knowledge
and as such they are both taken out of the stream of time and all
155
Art and Beauty
other relations. It is then all the same whether they see the sunset
from the prison or from the palace.!
Thoreau writes:
I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of mo-
ments that I have lived. What a comment upon our life is the least
strain of music! It lifts me above the mire and dust of the universe.
. . . Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers
and ditchers but from time to time we meet with reminders of our
destiny. We hear kindred vibrations, music! And we put our dormant
fields into the limits of the universe. We attain to wisdom that
passeth understanding. . . . What is there in music that it should so
stir our deeps? Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which
a strain of music exhibits to me. The field of my life becomes a bound-
less plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the
end of it. All meanness or trivialness disappears.
b The beautiful is thus a life-giving, and a life-saving influ-
ence. Psychologically its essence lies in “‘the profound satis-
faction we feel when, through the medium of fantasy, we
escape from imposed limitations into an aggrandized person-
ality and a harmonized universe. This kind of satisfaction
not only can be said to give rise to the feeling ‘beauty ’—
it is beauty. Its very essence is illusion. And illusion is vital
to us because of the restrictions, of every kind, that hem us in:
we come into the world confident of omnipotence, and daily
our power dwindles. ‘Brightness falls from the air,’ pain
teaches us that we are mortal, injury leaves us crippled,
knowledge serves rather to show us our strength. We look
back to that earlier hour as to something infinitely bright and
happy, we desire passionately and constantly to return to it,
and we seek in day-dreams to do so. It has been urged that in
the day-dream, or art, we do not really seek to escape from our-
selves, but, precisely, to find ourselves. But what part of
ourselves is it that we find? Is it not exactly that part of us
which has been wounded and would be made whole: that
part of us which desires wings and has none, longs for im-
mortality and knows that it must die, craves unlimited power
and has instead ‘common sense’ and the small bitter ‘actual’:
1The World as Will ond Idec, Kegan Paul, 1891, Vol. I, pp. 254-255.
156
The Experience of Beauty
that part of us, in short, which is imprisoned and would
escape? ... There can be little question about it, and it is
precisely of the associations connected with these major
psychic frustrations that we have evolved the universal lan-
guage of healing which we call art.”
Art is imagination’s bold effort to escape the moving present,
with its conflicts, its problems, its passions, rivalries, victories,
and defeats. And it is for this reason that art makes its strong-
est appeal to, and is most eagerly sought after, by those persons
who live most intensely and discriminatingly, namely, the |
highly organized in intelligence and temperament. He |
lives most, and discriminates most, suffers most, and to him
a refuge from the everyday world becomes a living necessity.
\
To such an one art has a biological function. But to the cold, °
phlegmatic, constitution, art is primarily a form of recreation
for leisure hours, and as a recreation, the closer it resembles
life, the greater is the amount of ordinary pleasure that it
yields. Consequently, some value art for its realism, others
for its symbolism. But the highest art is the art that comes-~ i
closest to fulfilling its true function and thus, the closer tat So,
art resembles life, the poorer it is as arts‘ Art does not imitate
life, but takes life for its rough material, and refashions and
purifies it. It is not life that holds a mirror up to art, but art
which is the mirror for life as it might be.
* * *
Our next task is to see whether this theoretical conclusion
on the nature of beauty is supported by the best available
thought as to what constitutes the esthetic element in the arts.
We shall examine for this purpose the arts of music, painting,
and poetry.
we
157
‘
\
,
4
Pa
rae
\
RASS aeeeSesaesae
CHAPTER VII
BEAUTY IN MUSIC
It is a fact of common everyday observation that individ-
uals vary to a significant degree in what music means to them,
and in what they get out of it. Pages might be filled with
quotations from the best and most cultivated minds in illus-
tration of two extreme responses, as well as the gradations
between them, from that of Dr. Johnson, to whom music
was the ‘“‘costliest of rackets,” to Carlyle, to whom it repre-
sented ‘‘a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech which
leads us to the edge of the infinite and lets us for a moment
gaze into that.” To Romain Rolland music is a “moony light
to eyes wearied of the harsh brilliance of this world’s sun,”
while Charles Lamb sat through opera and oratorio “till,
for sheer pain and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into
the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself
with sounds which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of
the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention.”
1
THE VARIETIES OF MusIcAL EXPERIENCE
An excellent, concrete summary of the range of these individ-
ual differences in the musical response is offered by the results
of a study made by Vernon Lee on Vartettes of Musical Ex-
perience.’ This investigator asked a number of persons to
answer the following question: “‘When music interests you,
has it got for you a meaning which seems beyond itself, or
does it remain just music?”
She reports that:
about half of the subjects interrogated did precisely answer that un-
doubtedly music Aad a meaning beyond itself, many adding that, if
it had not, it would constitute only sensual enjoyment and be un-
1 North American Review, Vol. 207, 1918, pp. 748-757.
158
Beauty in Music
worthy of their consideration, some of them moreover indignantly
taking in this sense my words about music remaining just music. That
for these persons music did not remain just music, but became the
bearer of messages, was further made certain by pages and pages,
often of unexpectedly explicit or eloquent writing admitted to describe
the nature of that message, to describe the things it dealt with and
the more or less transcendental spheres whence that message of music
seemed fo come.
So far for one-half of the answers. The others either explicitly
denied or disregarded the existence of such a message; insisted that
music had not necessarily any meaning beyond itself, and far from tak-
ing the words “remains just music’’ as derogatory to the art or to
themselves, they answered either in the selfsame words or by some
paraphrase that when they cared for music it remained just music. And
in the same way that the believers in meaning as message often gave
details about the contents of that message, so, on the other hand,
the subjects denying the existence of a message made it frequently
quite clear that for them the meaning of music was in the music
itself, adding that when really interested in music they could think of
nothing but the music.
Concerning the nature of the message or the meaning found
in music by the first group of listeners, Vernon Lee comments
as follows:
The affirmative answers, often covering many pages, showed that
according to individual cases the message was principally of one
of these kinds: visual or emotional, abstract or personal, but with
many alterations and overlappings. But fragmentary, fluctuating
and elusive as it was often described as being, and only in rare cases
defining itself as a coherent series of pictures, a dramatic sequence or
intelligent story, the message was nevertheless always a message, in-
asmuch as it appeared to be an addition made to the hearers’ previous
thoughts by the hearing of that music, and an addition due to that
music and ceasing with its cessation.
The other half of the listeners did not deny the existence of
a meaning or a message in music, but nevertheless claimed that:
whenever they found music completely satisfying, any other mean-
ing, anything like visual images or emotional suggestions, was excluded
or reduced to utter unimportance. Indeed this class answered by a
great majority that, so far as emotion was concerned, music awakened
in them an emotion sui generis, occasionally shot with human joy or
sadness, or on the whole analogous to the exaltation and tenderness
159
Art and Beauty
and sense of sublimity awakened by the beautiful in other arts or in
nature, but not to be compared with the feeling resulting from the
vicissitudes of real life. It was nearly always persons answering in
this sense who explicitly acquiesced in the fact that music could re-
main, in no derogatory sense, but quite the reverse, just meusic.
In his great work, The Power of Sound,' Gurney also recog-
nizes two types of listeners, which, “though they shade into
one another, and may each of them in various degrees be real-
ised by a single individual in listening to a single composition,
are for all that in their typical state radically different.” The—
two types of listeners are the definite and the indefinite, the
difference between the two lying in what it is they hear, and
the kind of pleasure they experience. In definite hearing ~
there is a perception of form, namely, melodic and harmonic
sequences and combinations, while indefinite hearing involves
‘merely the perception of successions of agreeably-toned and |
harmonious sound.” This distinction is basic, since for Gurney .
the outstanding feature of a melody is an “ideal motion,”
a melody consisting of units of motion, in which each tone
“‘yearns” to move to another tone and each unit of motion
or phrase to another unit, both movements tending towards a
definite position. These motions, one vertical as pitch, and the —
other horizontal as rhythm, give each melody a unity of form
and a definiteness which constitute its unique individuality.
The indefinite listener, therefore, who does not grasp the form,
does not hear music at all, but only discreet pleasant sounds.
It is the response to the “‘ideal motion” which is to Gurney
the one essential source of the pleasurable experience of
music, and which constitutes the esthetic element of the art of
tone. Consequently there are various reasons why
the pleasure arising from any series or combination of sounds which
conveys no distinct musical meaning should be lower and less than
that attainable through more definite apprehension . . . First, there is
the evidence of the majority of those who at all enjoy listening to Music,
and who have experienced at different times both sorts of pleasure.
Next, we have the right to identify the higher pleasure with the more
specialized, that which is appreciated by the more developed and differ-
1 Gurney, Edmund, The Power of Sound, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1880, p. 304.
. 160
Beauty in Music
entiated sense; and which of course belongs to the distinct exercise of the
musical faculty, as opposed to the nearly universal nervous suscepti-
bility to the effect of rich and powerful sound. Next, while the impres-
sion of mere beauty of sound-color is exceptionally sensuous and passive,
not admitting of any of the indirect xsthetic effects given (as we have
seen) by the material of architecture, nor of the associations of space
and freedom which a painter’s most formless hues may gain from the
blue sky and the other colored spaces of nature, the apprehension of
musical motives, on the other hand, constitutes a specially active
kind of self-realization. And lastly, there is the point already suffi-
ciently insisted on, the power of, in some measure at least, permanently
possessing forms which have once become familiar, in contrast to the
utter transience of all formless sound-effects. +
A classification similar to that of Gurney is made by Ort-
mann,? who labels Gurney’s indefinite hearer as the sensorial
type and the definite listener as the perceptual type. The
sensorial Ortmann calls the most rudimentary form of re-
sponse, which has for its basis the raw sensory material of
music.
Responses of the sensorial type are limited entirely to what is given
in the auditory stimulus itself; and this stimulus is restricted here to
a single tone, or an unanalyzed chord. The characteristics of such a
stimulus are, in audition: pitch, intensity, duration, quality, and what-
ever sensorial factor we find must be explained as the result of the
effects of these characteristics. *
The percepiual Ortmann describes as the interpretation of
the sensorial reaction:
The perceptual response . . . is concerned with auditory things:
progression, sequence, motive, phrase, form, outline, contrast, ascent,
descent, movement, and many others. .. . The basic difference be-
tween the perceptual and sensorial responses is the presence in the
former, and the absence in the latter, of relationships. The sensorial re.
sponse represents a single impression upon consciousness. In the per-
ceptual response, the effect of each separate stimulus is determined by
its environment. What has preceded the present stimulus leaves its
influence upon it. A tone now becomes a part of a melody, a chord be-
comes a part of a tonality, and a phrase becomes part of a form.‘
1 Tbid., p. 307.
* The efects of Music (a series of studies edited by Max Schoen) 1927, Kegan
hap. III.
8 Tbid., p. 42. o
* Ibid., ae §2-53.
161
Art and Beauty
On the mental side, the perceptual response involves active
or voluntary attention.
Since perception is a conscious process demanding for its proper
operation both analysis and synthesis, it is accompanied by active or
voluntary attention. It means a response to the stimulus different from
the nature of the stimulus itself. This added increment is the result of
sustained concentration or mental work.!
Ortmann recognizes a third type, an imaginal, which, how-
ever, fits perfectly with Gurney’s definite response, since
its basis is the ‘‘ideal motion,” namely, a feeling for tonality,
anticipated chordal resolutions, responses to a melody in
harmony, and the like.
A somewhat different grouping is made by Hanslick,?
whose essay is devoted to combating the popular notion that
the aim and object of music is the expression of emotion. By
inference from his argument Hanslick would recognize two
types of listeners, the impure or the extrinsic, and the pure or
the intrinsic. To the extrinsic listener, ‘‘sound and its ingen-
ious combination are but the material and the medium or
expression, by which the composer represents love, courage,
pity, and delight. The innumerable varieties of emotion con-
stitute the idea which, on being translated into sound, assumes
the form of a musical composition.” To such listeners the
substance of music is in what it implies: “the whispering of
love, or the clamor of ardent combatants.” For the intrinsic
hearer, on the other hand, the essence of music is sound and
motion, and it expresses nothing but musical ideas—that is,
music consists wholly of sounds artistically combined. ‘The
ingenious co-ordination of intrinsically pleasing sounds, their
consonance and contrast, their flight and reapproach, their
increasing and diminishing strength—this it is, which in
free and unimpeded forms presents itself to our mental vision.”
Of experimental studies on types of listeners that of Myers ®
is probably the most exhaustive and inclusive that has as
1 Jbid., p. 58.
2 The Beautiful in Music, Novello, Ewer and Co., 1891.
8 The Effects of Music, Chap. I.
162
Beauty in Music
yet appeared. His classification is based upon introspective
reports of fifteen persons of various degrees of musicalness
who reported their reactions to six musical compositions
played on the phonograph, namely: Beethoven’s Overture to
“Egmont” (Op. 84), Tschaikowsky’s ‘Valse des Fleurs”’
from the ‘‘Casse-Noisette” Suite (Op. 71a), and his “Italian
Capriccio” (Op. 45), Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (‘‘Fin-
gal’s Cave,’’ Op. 26), the first of Grieg’s Symphonic Dances
(Op. 64), and Kreisler’s setting and rendition of Couperin’s
‘‘Aubade Provencale.’\
From his data Myers deduces the following four types of
listeners:
1. The inira-subjective type. To this type of listener music
appeals for the sensory, emotional, or conative experiences
it arouses. That is, the attention of the hearer is held by the
sensory effects, or the flow of feeling, or the experience of
self-activity induced by the music.
2. The associative type. In this response the main appeal
of the music lies in the extra-musical ideas and associations
it suggests. For instance: ‘“‘I was in the Queen’s Hall, a fair
girl in a pink dress was playing and another girl was accom-
panying her. The violinist had a sad look about her. I felt
she had a sorrow in her life.”
3. The objective type. This listener assumes a critical atti-
tude toward the music, it is analyzed and evaluated as an
esthetic structure. ‘I noticed by what simple means in these
modern days he gets his effects... . I noticed also...
how he gathered up his climax by syncopation.”
4. The character type. Here the music is personified as a
subject, given character traits such as morbid, joyful, dainty,
mystic, reckless, playful, etc.
2
PRINCIPLES OF EVALUATION
What, then, is the experience of beauty in music?
The first principle as a basis for evaluating the relative
esthetic significance of the various attitudes outlined above
163
Art and Beauty
is borrowed here from William James. ‘It is a good rule in
physiology,” says James, “‘when we are studying the mean-
ing of an organ, to ask after its most peculiar and character-
istic sort of performance, and to seek its office in that one of
its functions which no other organ can possibly exert.® Surely
the same maxim holds good in our present quest. The essence
of religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must
judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we
can meet nowhere else, and such a quality will be of course
most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experi-
ences which are most one-sided, exaggerated and intense.”
In its bearing upon the present problem this principle suggests
that the essence of the zsthetic experience in music, or for
that matter, the esthetic experience derived from any source
whatever, must possess a quality of a unique nature, a quality
that marks off this experience from other types of experiences
such as the good, or true, or useful. The experience of beauty
4s good, true, and useful, but the quality that stamps it as
“beauty” is not its goodness, truth, or utility, since an experi-
ence may have all of these, and yet not be beautiful.
Second, every experience derived from music can not,
by virtue of that fact alone, be an experience of beauty, for,
if it were, then beauty would be anything and everything, and
therefore nothing. When one exclaims, ‘This is beautiful,”
he must have experienced a quality which led him to designate
the object as beautiful instead of designating it by some other
quality. Likewise, if several persons label an object as being
beautiful they must have experienced a common quality,
which led them to a common response.
Third, in a discussion of the nature of beauty the issue
involved is not that concerning the validity of the different
kinds of experiences that may be derived from a work of
art, but of the relative significance of the experiences as
experiences of beauty. Therefore, while all reactions to a
work of art are equally valid, as experiences, for the person
experiencing them, they are not of equal value as beauty
simply because their stimulus is an art object. While it is
164
Beauty in Music
true, then, that of tastes there is no disputing, it is also true
that of tastes there is evaluating, the basis for the evaluation
being the essential nature of the experience under discussion,
this essential nature lying in that unique quality which dis-
tinguishes that experience from other experiences.
3
THE BEAUTIFUL IN MusIcC
The essential nature of the esthetic experience in music is
to be sought, following the suggestion of James, in those
cases in which it manifests itself in its most exaggerated, one-
sided, and intense form. The procedure for our search is
thus evident: (1) an examination of what musicians and per-
sons of outstanding musical taste such as Gurney and Hans-
lick have to say about their musical experiences; (2) an inquiry
into the question of whether experimental studies on the sub-
ject support the conclusion drawn from (1).
1. Several years ago the writer sent out questionnaires and
also had interviews with a number of prominent musical artists,
with the object of obtaining from them a statement of their
musical experiences. The question put to these persons was:
“When you hind yourself in an attitude of intense musical
appreciation, what is your general condition of being, physical
and mental?”’
The answers to this question from a few of the persons
follow:
I am usually in a state of muscular tension—with my hands clenched.
If I am really in the esthetic ecstasy, I am absolutely oblivious of my
surroundings. I cannot get to that point except by the piano—that is
really the only instrument that can give me the genuine esthetic
feeling—then everything is black except where the piano is, and I am
very tired afterwards. The effect stays with me for a day or two. I
feel as though I do not want to be interrupted by anybody or anything
rough or harsh, in any sense. I want nothing rough or coarse which
could not share that state with me. .. . If I begin to think of any
matters of personal interest or any memories while listening, then it is
a sure sign that the music is mediocre, that it does not hold my atten-
tion as music. There are some associations in situations of this kind.
165
Art and Beauty
If I hear some dance music, I may feel slightly different in mood, and I
can sometimes trace it to a more or less temporary emotional experi-
ence, to some association with the dance. Even matters of momentary
interest can have that influence upon the music that is not the musical
experience at all. I might have the same experience with anything else.
The smell of a perfume may have its associations. It is not an esthetic
one, but you can have a very definite association with some girl who
has used that particular type of perfume. I have had experiences in
which the music had a soothing effect, and I started day-dreaming,
perhaps extravagantly, of power and mastery, perhaps I dream of doing
something which reveals social approval. If I do that, it means that I
do not care a rap about the music.
When I am in a state of the most intense enjoyment of music, I am
never introspective. I never catch myself at it. Looking back on it, I
should say that I have rather become the music than remained some-
thing apart with some attitude towards it. On the less intense absorp-
tion, I should say that music in a very definite way restores me in
body, mind, and spirit. I am afraid I am a poor informant, though, in
this case, for I really cannot state confidently any one reaction except
that of a rapt condition, at the end of which I take a deep breath and
come back. My enjoyment is derived directly from the music. Associ-
ations or imagery, even when suggested by the title, fade from my
mind as I listen to the music, and I do little except get my mouth set
for the particular kind of taste which I am about to receive.
When I find myself in the act of intense enjoyment, it is generally
after the experience is over. For such moments, loss of myself is fairly
complete. This is, however, for special occasions; the ordinary rhyth-
mic enjoyment of music is very much on the plane of any usual sensuous
enjoyment, as eating or drinking. The self is perfectly conscious of the
thing being enjoyed. In the supreme moment there seems to be a fusion
and I am one with the thing heard. Such moments cannot be but a few
seconds in duration, but they raise the whole attitude into a different
level. . . . Music that does not affect me strongly often sets me off into
a revery, if it does not roil me. But in the supreme moment the en-
joyment seems to come directly as the result of the music, without any
suggestion whatever, except that of motion and movement. What I
seem to feel is perfection, the realization of an ideal, and perfect har-
mony between matter and spirit. Why this should move me so, I am
unable to tell unless it may be that as in our ordinary consciousness our
physical, mental, and spiritual limitations are constantly with us and
we are living most of the time, because of our personality, in a state of
166
Beauty in Music
strife, whenever a perfect moment comes and we forget ourselves, and
find the strife giving place to a perfect union, we experience a certain
vacation or respite from ourselves.
Hanslick is nothing short of combative in his insistence as
to what a truly musical experience is. He writes: ‘‘The task
of clearly realising music as a self-subsistent form of the
beautiful, has hitherto presented unsurmountable difficulties
to musical esthetics, and the dictates of ‘emotion’ still
haunt their domain in broad daylight. Beauty in music is
still as much as ever viewed only in connection with its sub-
jective impressions, and books, critiques, and conversations
continually remind us that the emotions are the only esthetic
foundation of music, and that they alone are warranted in
defining its scope.” This proposition Hanslick claims to be
entirely false:
The beautiful, strictly speaking, aims at nothing, since it is nothing
but a form which, though available for many purposes according to its
nature has, as such, no aim beyond itself. If the contemplation of
something beautiful arouses pleasurable feelings, this effect is distinct
from the beautiful as such. I may, indeed, place a beautiful object
before an observer, with the avowed purpose of giving him pleasure,
but this purpose in no way affects the beauty of the object. The beauti-
ful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and
though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the
beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent
of him.
In this sense music, too, has no aim (object) and the mere fact that
this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means
justifies the assumption that its esthetic principles depend on this
union.!
What then constitutes the exsthetic response in music?
In Hanslick’s opinion “‘the art aims, above all, at producing
something beautiful which affects not our feelings, but the
organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.”
In the pure act of listening, we enjoy the music alone, and do not
think of importing into it any extraneous matter. But the tendency to
allow our feelings to be aroused implies something extraneous to the
music. An exclusive activity of the t#tellect, resulting from the con-
1The Beautiful in Music, pp. 18-19.
167
Art and Beauty
templation of the beautiful, involves not an esthetic but a logical
relation, while a predominant action on the feelings brings us on still
more slippery ground, implying, as it does, a pathological relation.
The beautiful in music, Hanslick insists, is specifically
musical:
It is extremely difficult to define this self-subsistent and specifically
musical beauty. As music has no prototype in nature, and expresses
no definite conceptions, we are compelled to speak of it either in dry,
technical terms, or in the language of poetic fiction. Its kingdom is,
indeed, “not of this world.” All the fantastic descriptions, charac-
terizations, and periphrases are either metaphorical or false. What in
any other art is still descriptive, is in music already figurative. Of
music it is impossible to form any but a musical conception, and it
can be comprehended and enjoyed only in and for itself.*
The ideas which a composer expresses are mainly and primarily
of a purely musical nature. His imagination conceives a definite and
graceful melody aiming at nothing beyond itself. Every concrete
phenomenon suggests the class to which it belongs, or some still wider
conception in which the latter is included, and by continuing this
process, the idea of the absolute is reached at last. This is true of
musical phenomena. This melodious Adagio, for instance, softly
dying away, suggests the ideas of gentleness and concord in the abstract.
Our imaginative faculty, ever ready to establish relations between
the conceptions of art and our sentiments, may construe these softly-
ebbing strains of music in a still loftier sense, e. g., as the placid resig-
nation of a mind at peace with itself, and they may arouse even a vague
sense of everlasting rest.®
When we turn to Gurney we find once more that he leaves
no doubt as to what constitutes for him a truly musical experi-
ence. Gurney insists, as does Hanslick, that ‘“‘expressive-
ness of the literal and tangible sort is either absent or only
slightly present in an immense amount of impressive Music;”’
that to “suggest describable images, qualities, or feelings,
known in connection with other experiences, however fre-
quent a characteristic of music, makes up no inseparable or
essential part of its function; and that this is not a matter of
opinion, or of theory as to what should be, but of definite
17did., p. 21.
3 Ibsd., p. 70.
8 Ibid., p. 36.
168
Beauty in Music
everyday fact.” Furthermore, ‘when we come to the expres-
ston aspect of music, to the definite suggestion or portrayal of
certain special and describable things, we should naturally
expect to be able to trace in some degree the connection of any
special suggestion or shade of character with some special point
or points in the musical form and the process by which we
follow it.... None of them... can be held accountable
for any musical beauty which may be present; a tune is no more
constituted beautiful by an expression, e. g., of mournfulness
or of capriciousness, than a face is. The impressiveness which
we call beauty resides in the unique musical experience whose
nature and history have just been summarized.”
Let us now see what the experimental studies tell us about
this problem. If, in keeping with our findings, we divide
listeners into two general types, .(1) the tnirinsic, or those
who are engrossed in ‘‘the thing itself” and (2) the extrinsic,
or those to whom music is a means towards an end, it is ap-
parent that Ortmann’s sensorial type, Myer’s tntra-subjective,
character, and associative types, and Lee’s message type
belong under (2), while the perceptual and imaginal types of
Ortmann, the objective type of Myers, and the no message
type of Lee come closest to (1). What have these investiga-
tors to say about the musical value of the types as established
by them?
The sensorial reaction, according to Ortmann, is typical of
children, untrained adults, untalented pupils, and is the pre-
dominant factor in popular music. Thus Ortmann’s findings
support the conclusion of Gurney as to the musical signif-
icance of the sensorial-indefinite response. Of the percep-
tual and imaginal types in which attention to structural form,
or the substance of music as music, is predominant, Ortmann
says: ‘“‘The perceptual response in all but a very primitive
form, is largely absent from the response form of the untal-
ented person. This type of response is preéminently that of the
talented person. ... We may expect to find the auditory
imaginal response characteristic essentially of trained musi-
cians and superiorly talented laymen who have frequent
169
Art and Beauty
associations with auditory stimuli.’”’ Again it is apparent that
Ortmann’s findings support both Gurney and Hanslick.
For the musical significance of the types established by
him, Myers concludes that the objective attitude towards
music, ‘‘in which the musical material is considered in refer-
ence to the listener’s standard, occurs most frequently among
those technically trained in music, who tend to adopt a critical
attitude and are interested in the material of their art.”’ This
type of listener has a tendency to suppress all personal feelings,
activities, associations, and characterizations that the music
might evoke, in favor of the critical, analytical standpoint.
As to the place of associations or imagery in the musical re-
sponse, Myers claims that:
~ In the grossly unmusical, music evokes no associations, because it
evokes no corresponding emotion. In the professional musician, music
also evokes few or no associations, because he tends to inhibit them
by his assumption of a critical, objective attitude. Among the most
highly musical, associations tend also to be repressed, because the music
~ comes to be listened to for its own meaning and beauty, apart from
the meaning and beauty derived from associations. In four of the
five persons whose temperament was extremely artistic but who had
little or no technical knowledge of music, associations were to a large
extent replaced by symbols, e. g., of pattern, color, or expanse, the
activities of which, however, tended themselves to evoke associations.
When the average person listens to music, then, associations are
enjoyed for their own sake, adding enormously to the total esthetic
appreciation obtainable. The associations may be in themselves
beautiful; they invite the listener to share in the beauty of a story
and in the emotions of the persons created in his imagination. Among
the more highly musical I find that associations are more particularly
apt to intrude when the music is felt to be “stagey,’’ unreal, meretri-
cious, or vulgar. Thus M reports associations as the music “‘ began to
get more barbaric” and as he “lost interest in the music.”” He observes,
however: “‘The middle of the second movement (which he enjoyed)
switched me off my imagery, and I returned to the pure consideration
of the music.”
It is by no means strange that associations should appear among the
highly musical when music lacks interest or inherent beauty, whereas
the less musical tend to appreciate music not so much on the grounds
of its inherent beauty as for the enjoyment of the associations evoked.
The explanation depends on difference of esthetic level, the level of
170
Beauty in Music
the musically gifted person standing higher than that of one averagely
musical. So long as the former, attending merely to the music, qua
music, can maintain his high level of esthetic enjoyment, associations
are debarred from consciousness. But when for any reason he fails
to maintain that level, e. g., because his esthetic appreciation ceases,
then the products of lower-level aspects enter, e. g., associations
more or less incongruous with the enjoyment of beauty.!
The intra-subjective aspect Myers puts down as the lowest
kind of beauty since in this attitude the person surrenders
himself to the sensory, emotional, and impulsive effects of the
music. In this case,
as the listener gives himself up to the enjoyment of such experiences,
all that he gets is delight or joy, not beauty. As Bullough nghtly
points out, a process of psychical “distancing” is required in order that
any of his sensations or emotions may appear beautiful. One must
look on them with a certain detachment, to a certain extent imperson-
ally. He has to project the beauty into his sensory, emotional or con-
ative experience, instead of subjectively appreciating the delight or joy
to which they give rise. He has to look on them as a spectator, and in
some measure at least to regard that experience as constituting in and
for itself a living, unitary, independent entity.?
Myers summarizes his general conclusions from his studies
as follows:
We can now see how the various aspects which we have distinguished
in the listener may each play a part in the awareness of beauty, and
how the different fundamental connections of music, with courtship,
with dancing, and rudimentary language, may each contribute to
esthetic enjoyment. These different connections may be differently
stressed in different persons to-day, so that one tends specially to
sexual, another to dramatic, another to verbal associations with music.
But we come to recognize that, apart from these connections, music
may be appreciated for its own inherent beauty, that is to say, apart
from its sensuous, emotional or conative influences, and from associa-
tions, symbols and products of ‘‘animistic” characterizations. The
one common and essential attitude required for esthetic enjoyment
is one of detachment. The listener must view the music, as Bullough
rightly insists, from a certain psychical ‘‘distance.” If that distance be
excessive, as occurs in listening for the first time to exotic music or to
other unfamiliar styles of music, the person feels too remote to get, as
1The Effects of Music, pp. 22-23.
3 Ibid., p. 31.
171
Art and Beauty
it were, to grips with the art material. It is overdistanced. On the
other hand, it is underdistanced when he surrenders himself wholly
to its influence in such a way that he is a more or less passive instru-
ment, played upon by the music, without paying any regard to his
sensations, images, emotions, or impulses, save in so far as they have
immediately personal and “practical” import.*
Of her two types of listeners, the one to whom music was
just music, and the other to whom the significance of music
lay in the message that is conveyed, Lee finds that
the more musical answerers were also those who repudiated the mes-
sage, who insisted that music had a meaning in itself, in fact, that it
remained for them ‘‘mere music.”” A certain number of highly musical
subjects not only declared this to be the case with themselves, but
foretold that we should find it so with every sufficiently musical hearer.
Their own experience was that the maximum interest and maximum
pleasure connected with music can leave no room for anything else.
And this answer led to the framing of queries bearing upon musical
attention; queries which elicited some very unexpected information.
For the distinctly musical answerers proved to be those who admitted
without hesitation that their musical attention was liable to fluctua-
tions and lapses. They were continually catching themselves thinking
of something else while hearing music. They complained of their own
inattention and divagation. But—and this is the important point in
the evidence—these lapses were regarded by them as irrelevancies
and interruptions; the music was going on, but their attention was
not following it. The less musical answerers, those also who found in
music a meaning beyond itself, seemed comparatively unaware of such
lapses or interruptions. From some of their answers one might have
gathered that rather unmusical people could sit through two hours of a
concert with unflagging enjoyment. But further sets of inquiries
revealed that, although unbroken by boredom, restlessness or the
conscious intrusion of irrelevant matters, that enjoyment was not
confined to the music. When asked whether the music suggested
anything, they abounded in accounts of inner visions, trains of thought
and all manner of emotional dramas, often most detailed and extensive,
which filled their minds while, as they averred, they were listening to
the music; indeed some of which, they did not hesitate to admit, con-
stituted the chief attraction of the music.*
Lee finally concludes that there exist two different modes of
response to music, namely: one,
1 Jbid., pp. 35-36.
® Varieties of Musical Experience.
172
Beauty in Music
listentng to music, the other, hearing music with lapses into merely
overhearing it. Listening implied the most active attention moving
along every detail of composition and performance, taking in all the
relations of sequences and combinations of sounds as regards pitch,
intervals, modulations, rhythms, and intensities, holding them in
the memory and codrdinating them in a series of complex wholes,
similar (this was an occasional illustration) to that constituted by all
the parts, large, or small, of a piece of architecture; and these archi-
tecturally codrdinated groups of sound-relations, i. e., these audible
shapes made up of intervals, rhythms, harmonies and accents, them-
selves constituted the meaning of music to this class of listeners;
the meaning in the sense not of a message different from whatever
conveyed it, but in the sense of an interest, an importance, residing
in the music and inseparable from it.
Hearing music, on the other hand, as it is revealed by our answerers,
is not simply a lesser degree of the same mental activity, but one whose
comparative poverty from the musical side is eked out and compen-
sated by other elements. The answers to our questionnaires show
that even the least attentive hearers have moments, whose frequency
and duration depend both on general musical habits and on the famili-
arity of the particular piece or style of music, of active listening;
for they constantly allude to their ability to follow or grasp, as they
express it, the whole or only part of what they happen to hear. But
instead of constituting the whole bulk of their musical experience
(in such a way that any other thought is recognized as irrelevant
these moments of concentrated and active attention to the musical)
shapes are like islands continually washed over by a shallow tide
of other thoughts, memories, associations, suggestions, visual images
and emotional states, ebbing and flowing round the more or less clearly
emergent musical perceptions, in such a way that each participates of
the quality of the other, till they coalesce, and into the blend of musical
thoughts there enters nothing which the hearer can recognize as inat-
tention, as the concentrated musical listener recognizes the lapses and
divagations of which he complains.'
The answer to the question as to what constitutes the
esthetic attitude in music stands out clearly and insistently.
The beautiful in music lies in “‘listening to music,” and not
in “‘hearing music”; not in the associations, images, reflec-
tions, emotions, that it may arouse, as secondary or derived
effects, but in the experiencing of the “thing itself” the
musical form. And even this experiencing of the ‘‘thing
1 Vorieties of Musical Experience.
173
Art and Beauty
itself’? must be direct, spontaneous, detached, and not arbi-
trary, critical, or analytical. That is, it must be ‘‘listening to
music’? not “‘listening about music.”? Myers rightly insists
that ‘‘to treat the art material as a mere inanimate object
having a certain value in reference to the person’s standard
is . . . merely a last resource in the case of the untrained;
while in the case of the technician it is a consequence of his
absorption in the material. It is the refuge of the untrained
in the absence of the potentially esthetic aspects of character,
associations, and intra-subjective experience. It is the re-
source of the artist, in his endeavor by repression to escape
from the influence of the other aspects, in order, it may be,
to obtain the highest appreciable beauty of music, the beauty
of musical meaning which is inexpressible in any other terms.”’
The conscious critical attitude is destructive of the exsthetic
experience, since a process of analysis destroys the very sub-
stance of the object that is being analyzed.
174
CHAPTER VIII
PAINTING
Music, we find, substantiates our conclusion on the nature
of the experience of beauty. Is this conclusion also supported
by the other arts? Pater claims that all art aspires to the con-
dition of music; hence, if Pater is right, what is true of music
also holds for the other arts. Our problem is therefore to see
why Pater places music in that supreme position among the
arts, and then examine his contention in the light of whatever
evidence is available, but particularly from that of painting.
1
Music AS THE MEASURE OF THE ARTS
Pater advances his theory in the essay on “ The School of
Giorgione”’ in the volume on The Renaissance. Each art, he
states, has its own unique, distinctive quality which is untrans-
latable into any other art. This distinctive quality of each art
is derived from its sensuous material, as sounds in music,
colors in painting, rhythmical words in poetry. Pater does not
maintain that the skillful handling of this sensuous material
is all there is to art, but only that this material gives the art
its peculiar flavor. The material imposes a responsibility upon
the artist to be true to its inherent nature and not to force it
into moulds for which it is intrinsically unsuited. A painting
may be poetical, and a poem pictorial, but there is in the paint-
ing a true pictorial charm and in the poem a true poetical
quality in which lies their essential artistic significance.
But each art also steps over its own boundary lines into that
of another art, “‘not indeed to supply the place of each other,
but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.””’ What these
forces are that are obtained by one art from another Pater
does not indicate. Nevertheless, the implication is that a
painting does not lose by trespassing upon poetry nor a poem
by stepping over into painting, but as a poem or a painting
175
Art and Beauty
each has its untranslatable charm. A “tone poem,”’’ if great
as an art work, is not such for its poetic quality, but for its
music, nor is the greatness of a ‘“‘musical poem” due to its
music, but ‘‘comes of an inventive handling of rhythmical
language—the element of song in the singing; . . .”
But there is even a wider striving than that of each art to
the condition of some other art, namely, the aspiring of all
art “towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or
ideally consummate art, the object of the great Andersstreben
of all art, of all that is artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.”
What is this artistic quality of music towards which all art
aspires but only music fully attains? It is the complete identity
of form and content.
For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the
matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this
distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That
the mere matter of a poem, for instance—its subject, its given inci-
dents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture—the actual cir-
cumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—
should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling; that
this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself,
should penetrate every part of the matter:—this is what all art con-
stantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.!
Now music achieves this end of all artistic striving to which
the other arts only aspire and approximate because of its
independence of subject-matter as compared with its sister
arts. Music does not depend for its raw stuff on any matenal
other than that of its own making, while painting begins with
objects, and poetry works with words which are but symbols
for meanings and objects, and both deal with definite subjects
or situations or even with moral or political affairs. “In such
instances it is easy enough for the understanding to distin-
guish between the matter and the form, however much the
matter, the subject, the element which is addressed to the
mere intelligence, has been penetrated by the informing,
artistic spirit.” But art is ‘‘always striving to be independent
1 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, copyright 1903 by The Macmillan Company, p. 140.
Reprinted by permission.
176
Painting
of mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception,
to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material;”’ and
it is music “‘which most completely realizes this artistic ideal,
this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal,
. consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means,
the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they
inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, there-
fore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may
be supposed constantly to tend and aspire.”
2
THe TESTIMONY OF THE HISTORY OF PAINTING
That this point of view of art and its esthetic quality falls
in well with our own deductions on the nature of the art
work as a transformation of the actual by the ideal, so that
the two become identical, is a matter of interest rather than
a vindication or substantiation of Pater, whose doctrine has
met criticism from several quarters. We must go elsewhere
for a test of the theory, and we can do no better than resort
to the testimony of history.
That the history of the progress of art, in at least one of its
anifold aspects, is a recurring battle between the individ-
uality of genius and some arbitrary authoritarianism, is
attested to more or less by all the arts, but particularly so
by painting. The creative mind in art, as well as in science,
has always been hampered or interfered with in its work by
some self-appointed guardians of alleged public welfare, who
arrogate to themselves some divinely appointed power over
their fellow-beings. The scientist has been persecuted as a blas-
phemer, while the artist has been ordered and dictated to
until quite recent days as to the choice of his subject-matter
and its handling. The free and spontaneous development
of art has been hampered not only by its servitude to priest,
prince, magistrate, general, and even the schoolmaster, but
also by art academies and ‘‘schools” of art. The effect
upon art of the first kind of interference was that it became
177
Art and Beauty
subservient to religious, moralistic, and political objectives,
which not only placed a limit upon what material the artist
was to deal with, but also how he was to deal with it. He was
ordered what to do and how to do it. He had to choose his
subject from a field that appealed to those he was dependent
upon for his living, and he had to present it In a manner within
the comprehension of his patron. The power of the acad-
emies and schools, with their political and traditional au-
thority, added to the woes of the artist by their insistence upon
craftsmanship and manual dexterity, the products of which
were readily marketable. The creative artist whose work
deviated from the accepted standard was hounded and per-
secuted. If the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth
centuries produced art works it was because genius will have
its way in spite of obstructions of poverty, insult, denuncia-
tion, and even persecution. Music happened to be most free
of this hampering influence due to the nature of its subject-
matter. The priest and the prince could use music, could even
order a requiem or an oratorio, but could do nothing more,
and the composer was left free to do as his genius dictated.
With painting it was quite a different story. The painter
begins his work with actual objects or situations and readily
attracts the attention of the public censor or of the mob when-
ever his work falls out of line with traditional morality or
existing art standards. It is only within comparatively recent
years that artists, other than composers, have begun to enjoy
a degree of freedom, with the result that so-called modernis-
tic art shows an increasing tendency to purge itself of non-
artistic accretions and impositions. And as it becomes
purer art, pure perception, as Pater calls it, it approximates
more and more to the condition of music.
3
THE A‘STHETIC ELEMENT IN PAINTING
Let us see what this means.
Pater calls music the supreme art because of the complete
identity of matter and form. Now, the more literal an art,
178
Painting
the more obvious is the distinction between its subject and
the handling of it. And literalness of art objects was pre-
cisely what the servitude of the artist to religion, morality,
and politics implied, for the more realistic his work the better
it served the purpose of adorning a tale or pointing out a pre-
cept. But the artist is not a mere craftsman, but a creator.
He does not take pride or find joy in manual dexterity and
skillfulness, or perfect pictorial reproduction. He labors for
adequate expression of significant personal experience. Hence,
with the gradual breakdown of ecclesiastical and political dic-
tation the creative artist could follow his own creative bent
in the choice of subject and treatment, so that the tone of
art began to change from faithful duplication of set themes to
free treatment of whatever was artistically significant to the
creative mind.
Let us consider some instances.
All modern art is marked by its limitless variety of subject-
matter and its freedom from any moralistic implications.
Poetry has expanded beyond the traditionally prescribed
“nice” subjects of birds, flowers, spring, lovely ladies, moon-
light, and nppling brooks, while the free-verse movement is
making successful inroads upon the stultifying academic laws
of metrical construction, and the novel is becoming progres-
sively naturalistic in spite of the outcries of the humanists
that writers have lost all sense of restraint and decorum, and
no longer point the moral in their works of virtue rewarded and
vice punished. The novelist finds his material wherever he is
inclined to do so and paints life with free, broad strokes, being
limited only in what he produces by his own creative power.
But it is in the plastic arts that the advancing cause of free
creative expression is most discernible, with Ingres, Cézanne,
and Seurat as the precursors of a renaissance of painting as a
pure creative effort, reaching fruition in the lyricism of Picasso
and Braque. How did the transformation of painting from
the literalism imposed upon it by priest, prince, magistrate,
general, and schoolmaster, to pure lyrical, musical expression
come about?
179
Art and Beauty
It is traceable, according to adequate authority, to the
advent of the camera and the machine, which redeemed paint-
ing from its base and accessory functions. Prior to the nine-
teenth century artisanship was not only an honorable and
lucrative occupation, but it was upon the artisan that society
depended for the production of goods whose quality was in
any manner or shape above that of base utility. The artisan
was not an artist, but a primitive machine. And a machine
has nothing to do with art. Occasionally there would, of course,
arise among the artisans some exceptional fellow with an
artistic urge to go beyond the demands of mechanical per-
fection, but he was a curiosity and treated as such. Hence,
we find that in the art preceding that of our own epoch the
delimitation between industrial goods and artistic products
is not at all clear. True artistic touches, even when present,
were covered up by the multifarious utilitarian services
demanded of the artist as manufacturer, historian, or political
henchman. With the advent of mechanical devices the artisan
has largely disappeared, and even when he operates he is not
confused with the artist, who could now obey his creative
impulse due to his emancipation from the stifling influence of
commercialism. Thus the modern artist became a free agent
and could turn his attention from court, church, and market
place, to nature that offered him an endless array of material
for his creative purposes.
What did the modern artist do with his new opportunities?
What turn did painting take just so soon as the painter came
into his own? In the answer to this question lies the test of
Pater’s claim for music. Is modern painting musical in quality?
Let authorities answer this question.
In his book, The Modern Movement in Art, Mr. Wilenski
points out that for the Renaissance criterion of art in the
service of religion, modern art has substituted that of the
nature of art itself. This intrinsic criterion was operative
no doubt, in all the great artists of Western Europe for the
last five hundred years, but it is the modern artist who can
follow it completely, unhampered. He writes:
180
Painting
Medieval art in Western Europe was a complex cord composed of
many strands. Justified fundamentally in the artist’s mind by the
idea of service to religion it embraced a number of activities within
itself. As Emile Male has pointed out, the art of the early Gothic
Cathedrals, which represented the culmination of medieval art in
Western Europe, was the mirror not only of the religion, but also the
mirror of the scientific and the moral concepts of the medieval Chris-
tian world, of that world’s experience of past and contemporary his-
tory, and of its perception of architectural form.
One by one, since those cathedrals were built, these constituents
have been separated and made distinct in Western European thought.
The religious fundament was the first constituent to be withdrawn.
Religion first began to be thought of as a thing distinct from art; and
the service of religion became an activity of a separate kind. Science,
morals, social history, as time passed, followed the path taken by
religion. Today each is in a separate compartment withdrawn from
art. Specialists who make a living by specialization have attained to
a detailed and elaborate experience in each and all these fields that is
quite outside the artist’s range. We do not look to the artist today for
our science, our ethics, or our history any more than for our religion.
Today, moreover, we have the camera, the cinematograph, and camera-
sculpture developed by specialists into instruments of such recording
skill that we have learned to look to them for records of our mechanical
vision.!
What is the idea of art that has been substituted for art
in the service of religion? Mr. Wilenski answers that it is the
idea of architecture as the typical art, and it is of germane
interest here that architecture has been called frozen music.
The art of architecture, as distinct from mere utilitarian build-
ing, is the expression of formal experience. The modern
artist’s ideal is to create architectural pictorial form:
A basic idea of the modern movement is . . . that the business of
the architectural artist is fundamentally the same as that of the ar-
chitect. It is held as a first principle that the artist must be free, as the
architect is free, to introduce representational details or not; that
representational details are no more a necessary part of a picture or
a piece of sculpture than they are a necessary part of a cathedral. It
is also held that if the painter or sculptor decides to introduce such
details he must do so by the architect’s procedure; that he cannot
achieve an architectural construction by degrading his perception to
1R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art, Frederick A. Stokes Co., p. 7.
181
Art and Beauty
mechanical vision and imitating the momentary appearance of some
fragment at some point of time and space. It is held that he must not
copy fragments in photographically naturalistic technique, but must
(a) reinforce his vision to actual or imagined perception; (b) perceive
not fragments, but formal relations; and (c) force his perception to
the point of creating a definite, organized, and complete formal symbol
compounded of smaller symbols homogeneous and consistent one
with another and with the symbol as a whole.!
But what is this artistic perception? The artist, says Mr.
Wilenski, does not paint what he sees, but what he perceives.
Perception is personal, individual; seeing is impersonal, gen-
eral. We all see a tree, but the tree does not look the same to
all of us; it does not look to the lumberman as it does to the
painter, nor to any one painter as to another. So the archi-
tectural form that the painter creates of the tree, landscape, or
human face, is the unique perception of the artist. The artist
is simply the man who possesses a higher degree of artistic
perception than the normal man, and ‘who has the power to
realize his actual or imagined perception (of any calibre)
to the point of inventing symbolic concrete form to express
it.”
Let us turn to another authority on the modern movement
in painting. Mr. Bell discusses modern art with the bias of
his theory of significant form, yet, his account of its salient
quality as art is not unlike that of Mr. Wilenski. Of Post-
Impressionism he writes:
There is no mystery about Post-Impressionism; a good Post-Impres-
sionist picture is good for precisely the same reasons that any other
picture is good. The essential quality in art is permanent. Post-
Impressionism, therefore, implies no violent break with the past. It is
merely a deliberate rejection of certain hampering traditions of modern
growth. It does deny that art need ever take orders from the past;
but that is not a badge of Post-Impressionism; it is the commonest
mark of vitality. Even to speak of Post-Impressionism as a movement
may lead to misconceptions; the habit of speaking of movements at
all is rather misleading. The stream of art has never run utterly dry:
it flows through the ages, now broad now narrow, now deep now shallow,
now rapid now sluggish: its color is changing always. But who can
1 Ibid., pp. 127-128.
182
Painting
set a mark against the exact point of change? In the earlier nineteenth
century the stream ran very low. In the days of the Impressionists,
against whom the contemporary movement is in some ways a reaction,
it had already become copious. Any attempt to dam and imprison
this river, to choose out a particular school or movement and say:
‘Here art begins and there it ends,” is a pernicious absurdity. That
way Academization lies. At this moment there are not above half
a dozen good painters alive who do not derive, to some extent, from
Cézanne. Superficially, I say, because, essentially, all good art is of
the same movement: there are only two kinds of art, good and bad.
Nevertheless, the division of the stream into reaches, distinguished
by differences of manner, is intelligible and, to historians at any rate,
useful. The reaches also differ from each other in volume; one period
of art is distinguished from another by its fertility. For a few for-
tunate years or decades the output of considerable art is great. Sud-
denly it ceases; or slowly it dwindles: a movement has exhausted
itself. How far a movement is made by the fortuitous synchroniza-
tion of a number of good artists, and how far the artists are helped
to the creation of significant form by the pervasion of some under-
lying spirit of the age, is a question that can never be decided beyond
cavil. But however the credit is to be apportioned—and I suspect
it should be divided about equally—we are justified, I think, looking at
the history of art as a whole, in regarding such periods of fertility as
distinct parts of that whole. Primarily, it is as a period of fertility in
good art and artists that I admire the Post-Impressionist movement.
Also, I believe that the principles which underlie and inspire that
movement are more likely to encourage artists to give of their best,
and to foster a good tradition, than any of which modern history bears
record. But my interest in this movement, and my admiration for
much of the art it has produced, does not blind me to the greatness
of the products of other movements; neither, I hope, will it blind
me to the greatness of any new creation of form even though that
novelty may seem to imply a reaction against the tradition of Cézanne.
Like all sound revolutions, Post-Impressionism is nothing more
than a return to first principles. Into a world where the painter was
expected to be either a photographer or an acrobat burst the Post-
Impressionist, claiming that, above all things, he should be an artist.
Never mind, said he, about representation or accomplishment—mind
about creating significant form, mind about art. Creating a work of
art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching
a likeness or displaying address. Every sacrifice made to represen-
tation is something stolen from art. Far from being the insolent kind
of revolution it is vulgarly supposed to be, Post-Impressionism is,
in fact, a return, not indeed to any particular tradition of painting,
183
Art and Beauty
but to the great tradition of visual art. It sets before every artist
the ideal set before themselves by the primitives, an ideal which, since
the twelfth century, has been cherished only by exceptional men of
genius. Post-Impressionism is nothing but the reassertion of the first
commandment of art—Thou shalt create form. By this assertion it
shakes hands across the ages with the byzantine primitives and with
every vital movement that has struggled into existence since the arts
began.!
Mr. Roger Fry, in summarizing the modern movement as
“the re-establishment of purely esthetic criteria in place of
the criterion of conformity to appearance—the rediscovery
of the principles of structural design and harmony,” writes
further that:
So long as representation was regarded as the end of art, the skill
of the artist and his proficiency in this particular feat of representa-
tion were regarded with an admiration which was in fact mainly non-
westhetic. With the new indifference to representation we have become
much less interested in skill and not at all interested in knowledge.
We are thus no longer cut off from a great deal of barbaric and primi-
tive art the very meaning of which escaped the understanding of
those who demanded a certain standard of skill in representation
before they could give serious consideration to a work of art. In gen-
eral the effect of the movement has been to render the artist intensively
conscious of the esthetic unity of the work of art, but singularly naive
and simple as regards other considerations.*
The foregoing accounts of the nature of the modern move-
ment in painting speak one language, and that language is
not much unlike that of Pater in designating music as being
the measure of the arts, since the result of the substitution
of the idea of art as the painter’s objective for that of service
to religion is that, irrespective of its label as Impressionism,
Post-Impressionism, or whatever else, modern painting tends
strongly towards the complete identification of matter and
form. Any painting executed in the spirit of the modern move-
ment fits in well with Pater’s contention that its significance is
neither literary nor poetical, but lies in “‘that pictorial quality
which lies between (unique pledge of the possession of the
1 Art, Stokes, pp. 41-44.
2 Vision ond Design, Brentano's, p. 12.
184
Painting
pictorial gift) the inventive or creative handling of pure line
and color, which, ... is quite independent of anything
definitely poetical in the subject it accompanies.”” When a
painting is neither romantic, nor descriptive, nor representa-
tional, it is reduced to pure form, drawing, and coloring, in
which, “‘the mere matter of a picture—the actual arcum-
stances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—”
is “nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling;”
and in which this form, this mode of handling, therefore,
becomes the end, and penetrates every part of the matter.
Such a painting is, of course, not music, due to its sensuous
material, from which it receives its distinctive esthetic quality,
but it parallels music in its identity of form and matter.
4.
THE AUSTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN PAINTING
If the artistic quality in painting is parallel to that of music,
does the same hold for the zsthetic experience in plastic
art? In answer to this question we find that artists who have
expressed themselves on this point whether directly or indi-
rectly speak of the esthetic attitude towards a painting as do
Gurney and Hanslick about music. Pater expresses himself
very definitely that ‘‘In its primary aspect, a great picture
has no more definite message for us than an accidental play
of sunlight and shadow for a moment, on the wall or floor:”
while Bell, in distinguishing between the esthetic and non-
esthetic spectator, writes that ‘“‘people who can not feel pure
zesthetic emotion remember pictures by their subjects; whereas
people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the sub-
ject of a painting is. They have never noticed the represent-
ative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk
about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities
of colors. ... They are concerned only with lines and colors,
their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these
they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than
any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas.”
185
Art and Beauty
Roger Fry gives us a very clear-cut account of the differ-
ence between the purely ezsthetic feeling and “the whole
complex of feelings which may and generally do accompany
the xsthetic feeling when we regard a work of art,” by taking
an example of what he means from Raphael’s Transfiguration.
He writes:
It is at once apparent that this picture makes a very complex ap-
peal to the mind and feelings. To those who are familiar with the Gos-
pel story of Christ it brings together in a single composition two
different events which occurred simultaneously at different places,
the Transfiguration of Christ and the unsuccessful attempt of the
Disciples during His absence to heal the lunatic boy. This at once
arouses a number of complex ideas about which the intellect and
feelings may occupy themselves. Goethe’s remark on the picture is
instructive from this point of view. “It is remarkable,” he says, “that
any one has ever ventured to query the essential unity of such a
composition. How can the upper part be separated from the lower?
The two form one whole. Below the suffering and the needy, above
the powerful and helpful—mutually dependent, mutually illustra-
tive.”
It will be seen at once what an immense complex of feelings inter-
penetrating and mutually affecting one another such a work sets up
in the mind of a Christian spectator, and all this merely by the content
of the picture, its subject, the dramatic story it tells.
Now if our Christian spectator has also a knowledge of human
nature he will be struck by the fact that these figures, especially in the
lower group, are all extremely incongruous with any idea he is likely
to have formed of the people who surrounded Christ in the Gospel
narrative. And according to his prepossessions he is likely to be shocked
or pleased to find instead of the poor and unsophisticated peasants and
fisher-folk who followed Christ, a number of noble, dignified, and
academic gentlemen in improbable garments and purely theatrical
poses. Again the representation merely as representation, will set
up a number of feelings and perhaps of critical thoughts dependent
upon innumerable associated ideas in the spectator’s mind.
Now all these reactions to the picture are open to any one who has
enough understanding of natural form to recognize it when represented
adequately. There is no need for him to have any particular sensibility
to form as such.
Let us now take for our spectator a person highly endowed with the
special sensibility to form, who feels the intervals and relations of
forms as a musical person feels the intervals and relations of tones,
186
Painting
and let us suppose him either completely ignorant of, or indifferent to,
the Gospel story. Such a spectator will be likely to be immensely
excited by the extraordinary power of co-ordination of many complex
masses in a single inevitable whole, by the delicate equilibrium of many
directions of line. He will at once feel that the apparent division into
two parts is only apparent, that they are co-ordinated by a quite
peculiar power of grasping the possible correlations. He will almost
certainly be immensely excited and moved, but his emotion will have
nothing to do with the emotions which we have discussed hitherto,
since in this case we have supposed our spectator to have no clue to
them.
It is evident then that we have the possibility of infinitely diverse
reactions to a work of art. We may imagine, for instance, that our
pagan spectator, though entirely unaffected by the story, is yet con-
scious that the figures represent men, and that their gestures are
indicative of certain states of mind and, in consequence, we may sup-
pose that according to an internal bias his emotion is either heightened
or hindered by the recognition of their rhetorical insincerity. Or we
may suppose him to be so absorbed in purely formal relations as to be
indifferent even to this aspect of the design as representation. We may
suppose him to be moved by the pure contemplation of the spatial
relations of plastic volumes. It is when we have got to this point that
we seem to have isolated this extremely elusive esthetic quality which
is the one constant quality of all works of art, and which seems to be
independent of all the prepossessions and associations which the spec-
tator brings with him from his past life.*
Perhaps the most lucid and vivid account of the painter’s
attitude towards the world is given by Whistler in his Ten
O’Clock. He attacks the critic or writer who brings about a
misconception of the art of painting by considering it from a
literary point of view as a hieroglyph, symbol, or story. Such
a point of view, Whistler holds, is a degradation of art, for
art is neither science nor morality, but is “selfishly occupied
with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach—
seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all
times,”’ as did Rembrandt in the Jew’s quarter of Amsterdam,
or Tintoret and Paul Veronese among the Venetians or Velas-
quez at the Court of Philip.
No reformers were these great men—no improvers of the ways of
others! Their productions alone were their occupation and, filled with
1 Vision and Design, pp. 296-299.
187
Art and Beauty
the poetry of their science, they required not to alter their surround-
ings,—for, as the Law of their Art was revealed to them, they saw,
in the development of their work, that beauty which, to them was as
much a matter of certainty and triumph as is to the astronomer the
verification of the result, foreseen with the light given to him alone. In
all this, their world was completely severed from that of their fellow-
creatures with whom sentiment is mistaken for poetry and for whom
there is no perfect work that shall not be explained by the benefit con-
ferred upon themselves.
Nor is the painter a botanist or copyist of nature, but ‘‘one
who sees in her choice selection of brilliant tones and delicate
tints, suggestions of future harmonies,’ and “‘in the long curve
of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight, tall stem, he
learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength enhances
sweetness, that elegance shall be the result,’’ who sees “in
the citron wing of the pale butterfly, with its dainty spots
of orange . . . the stately halls of fair gold, with their slender,
saffron pillars, and is taught how the delicate drawing upon
the walls shall be traced in tender tones of orpiment, and
repeated by the base in notes of graver hue.” The painter
is the artist whose work surpasses what is called nature, “and
the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far
away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos than was their
own Eve.”
The nature of the painter’s experience of the world about
him and the esthetic quality in a painting constitute the
theme of Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi. In one section of the
poem the painter and the prior are discussing the significance
of the painter’s art. The painter is speaking:
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!
—For what? do you feel thankful, aye or no,
For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What’s it all about?
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course!—you say.
188
Painting
But why not do as well as say,—paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God’s works—paint any one, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, ‘His works
Are here already—nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce her—(which you can’t)
There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.”
For, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted—better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that—
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,
Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,
And trust me but you should, though! How much more,
If I drew higher things with the same truth!
That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,
Interpret God to all of you! oh, oh,
It makes me mad to see what men shall do
And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank—it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
‘* Aye, but you don’t so instigate to prayer!”
Strikes in the Prior: ““when your meaning’s plain
It does not say to folks—remember matins,
Or, mind you fast next Friday.” Why, for this
What need of art at all? A skull and bones,
Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what’s best,
A bell to chime the hour with, does as well.
I painted a Saint Laurence six months since
At Prato, splashed the fresco in fine style:
‘How looks my painting, now the scaffold’s down?”
I ask a brother: “Hugely,” he returns—
‘‘ Already not one phiz of your three slaves
That turn the Deacon off his toasted side,
But’s scratched and prodded to our heart’s content,
The pious people have so eased their own
When coming to say prayers there in a rage:
We get on fast to see the bricks beneath.
Expect another job this time next year,
For pity and religion grow i’ the crowd—
Your painting serves its purpose!’”’ Hang the fools!
189
Art and Beauty
5
PurE ArT AND Rico ArT
The experience of beauty in painting, as is sufficiently
indicated by the foregoing pronouncements, is the experience
of beauty in music. The beauty of tonal structure is also the
beauty of the structure of line and color. Both are intrinsic,
self-sufficient, inherent experiences, differing only in the sen-
suous material from which the experience is derived. It is
therefore true, and not, as Pater maintains, a mistake, to
regard poetry, music, painting, and all arts, “‘as but transla-
tions into different languages of one and the same fixed quan-
tity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain techni-
cal qualities of colors, in painting—of sound in music—of
rhythmical words, in poetry.”’ The one and the same fixed
quantity of imaginative thought of all the arts is beauty,
a disinterested, intrinsically significant experience. But this
does not mean that the sensuous material of the arts is irrel-
evant to the experience, and produces no effect upon it. An
art work, we found, is the translation, or transformation of
the commonplace, the old, into the uniquely personal new.
The old is the sensuous material of the new, and since the
sensuous material of each art differs, the new will have in it
the flavor of the old. Now an intellectual idea may be translated
or put into different languages without changing its structure,
but each language will impose upon the idea a quality of its own.
In substance the idea remains the same, but it differs in taste,
in flavor. Some flavors are purer than others, while some are
richer. Sweetness varies from the cloying to the sweet-sour,
due to the ingredients of the sweet substance. Now beauty has
varied ingredients in the sensuous material of the arts, but it
remains beauty in all the arts, differing however in flavor.
In music the flavor of beauty is purest, but because it is purest
it is also least rich, while in the other arts it is less pure, but for
that reason more rich. We may therefore classify the arts not
only in accordance with their purity, with music at the top, but
also as to their richness, with music at the bottom.
190
Painting
To see clearly what this means let us remind ourselves
once again of the nature of the art work. Art is not detached
from life, but arises out of life. Nor is art but a skillful repre-
sentation of life, but a transformation of life. The nature of
this transformation is a transubstantiation, a change in sub-
stance, a transference of significance from one level of being
to another level of being. In art the actual and the ideal
change places on the level of reality. An art work is the trans-
formation of the actual into the ideal, where the two fuse so
that the ideal becomes the actual and the actual becomes the
ideal, matter and idea fuse, by matter becoming the vehicle
for idea, and thereby suffused with idea. Now it follows
necessarily from the nature of the art work as a transformation
of the actual into the ideal, that an art work whose subject-
matter or material is most actual, that has its roots most
deeply imbedded in life, has therefore a richer significance as
a transformation, while the art work whose material is least
actual, or farthest removed from practical life, will also have
least value as a transformation. Such an art work will be
purer, since the actual most resembles the ideal, but for that
very reason it will also be the poorer.
Now it is the material of music that presents to the creative
imagination the purest subject-matter for its operations.
Tones have in them the least admixture of practical life. A
tonal sound has least survival value. A noise will put an
animal on its guard. It will frighten it. A tone will only please
it or displease it by its quality. Tones belong to the realm
of pure feeling. They are valued for themselves as tones,
not for any symbolic meaning that they convey. The material
of music is thus in itself esthetic, hence music is the purest
of all the arts. A tone represents nothing but itself, and
has least connection with anything practical or utilitarian.
All the composer does is combine this already pure material
into artistically significant forms, and hence matter and form
in music are most identical. A melody is a pure form. Its
content is its form and its form is its content. A change in
one means a change in the other. We can, of course, force a
191
Art and Beauty
content upon it, read into it stories or pictures. But when
we do so we know that they are extraneous and not inherent
in the music. Music suggests no more than a mood, but even
the mood is inherent, intrinsic in the form, for any change in
the form brings about a change in the mood.
But the case is quite different with the plastic and verbal
arts. Their material is of the earth. In a painting it is always
possible to distinguish between the subject-matter and the han-
dling, for the handling may even be changed yet the subject-
matter, the object painted, remains more or less the same. The
painter deals with familiar material, and whatever he puts
on canvas, no matter how artistically, carries a suggestion
of utility, namely, whaé it is apart from how it is. The com-
poser has never been accused of being untrue to nature, or
of distorting nature, as has been the recurrent case with the
painter. From the composer we do not expect realism, but
rather condone it in him as an affectation when he tries it,
as in program music. But because the painter comes close to
that with which we are in daily contact we are disappointed
if his painting presents us with anything more than a pretti-
fied reproduction of our familiar surroundings. Hence, when
the painter does succeed in detaching us from our utilitarian
attitude and presents us with a product that becomes sig-
nificant to us as idealized form, he has accomplished a feat of
imagination superior to that of the composer. He has given
us a richer experience than the composer in that he has opened
our eyes to the beauty inherent in our common experience.
The artist in the verbal arts goes even beyond the painter
in richness of his art, for his material is of the most intimate
personal, realistic nature. Words, actions, thoughts, feelings,
personal contacts, and relations, are the very stuff of our being.
We are they and they are we. A disinterested attitude towards
these means a detachment from ourselves, the rarest of rare
occurrences. The dramatic and epic poem, the novel and
drama, arise from the very stuff of human existence, and when
an art work in these spheres does succeed in creating in us
an experience of beauty, it is of the richest quality, for we
192
Painting
have been taken out of our very selves for the time being and
have caught a glimpse of the realm of life in its pure cosmic
significance. No music or painting can rock our deep-most
being as can a great poem, novel, or drama. When we are
touched by one of these zsthetically, the experience is of the
nature of a rebirth, a regeneration, a rediscovery of the self of
selves in our being. It is of such experiences that Browning
wrote:
Oh, we’re sunk enough here, God knows!
But not quite so sunk that moments,
Sure tho’ seldom, are denied us,
When the spirit’s true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.
There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish,
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse
Which for once had play unstifled
Seems the sole work of a lifetime
That away the rest have trifled.
So, although music is the measure of the arts, in that all
the arts seek to transform the material into the ideal, and
music is the purest of the arts because the material and ideal
in it are most identical, the other arts are the richer, in that
their ideal is built upon a material that touches human life
at the very foundation of biological existence. in that they tap
the very sources of the stream of life which they cleanse of
débris, muck, and pollution poured into it by the exigencies
of physical survival.
193
ESTEE EELS ELE EOE
CHAPTER IX
POETRY
Poetry, fiction, and drama use a common material, language,
and therefore a study of the nature of any one of the three is
also an examination of the nature of the other two. We can
have a poem in dramatic form, a drama in poetic form, and a
novel which is either dramatic or poetic. They differ not in
substance but in garb. Since words are the material of these
arts the study of the nature of a verbal art work reduces
itself to an inquiry as to the nature of language and what the
poet, whom we shall use as the typical verbal artist, does to
it in transmuting this material into art.
1
Tae NATURE OF LANGUAGE
The nature of language is the nature of human thought
and human action, for language is no more nor less than the
tool of both of these aspects of human nature. A word is
either the shadow of an act or of an idea. Verbal sounds have
nod meaning in themselves. They are the channels, the media
for the expression or communication of that which lies outside
of themselves. Plato has made clear to us how easy it is to
deceive ourselves with words, to labor under an impression
that just because we can utter a sound we also necessarily
know what we are talking about. Words may be empty
vessels and pour out no more than hollow sounds. We find
it simple to define some words and extremely difficult to
define others. The reason is that the definition of a word is
the experience it records. Hence the definiteness of a defini-
tion of a word is in proportion to the vividness of the experi-
ence, its meaning. We readily define chair because of our
frequent experience with the object of which the sound is a
symbol. We define it in terms of our experience, as an object
194
Poetry
to sit in. But a definition of terms like truth, or virtue, or
honesty, or beauty is a most severe trial because of the hazi-
ness or complete lack of experiences of this nature.
What, then, is the source of the meaning of words? What is
the relationship between words, things, and actions?
Meaning begins as behavior and culminates as language.
There is meaning as behavior and meaning as language. And
meaning as language is the consequence of meaning as behav-
ior. There can be behavior without language, but there
could be no meaning as language without behavior. The
source of the meaning of words is thus behavior. The relation-
ship between behavior and things gives rise to the meaning of
words. Meaning is inherent neither in things nor in words,
but both things and words obtain their meaning from
behavior.
What is the meaning of a thing or a situation? The cat
sees the dog and it runs away. It sees a saucer of milk and
it runs towards it. I see one person approaching me and I
smile. I see another coming towards me and I frown. The
meaning of the dog to the cat is to run away. The meaning
of the saucer of milk is to run towards it. The meaning of
one person to me is to smile, of another person to frown.
If the dog or milk aroused no action in the cat they would
have no meaning, as dog or milk. If the two persons aroused
no action in me they would have no meaning as persons. From
these simple illustrations we conclude that whenever a thing
or situation becomes a cue, a signal, for a definite reaction,
that thing or situation becomes meaningful, and the meaning
of the thing or situation is the behavior it provokes. The
thing or situation may have different meanings on different
occasions, but on each occasion its meaning is the behavior.
The behavior may be outer or inner, muscular or mental, an
act or a thought. But things or situations that cause neither
inner nor outer behavior possess no meaning.
Now what about the relationship between sounds and
things?
The cat hears the bark of the dog and it runs away from the
195
Art and Beauty
source of the sound. It hears some one utter the sound ‘‘ milk”
and it runs to the place where it usually finds the saucer. I
hear the voice of one person and I smile. I hear that of another
and I frown. What is the meaning of the sounds? Again, the
behavior provoked by them. The sounds have become sub-
stitutes for the thing or situation, and the meaning of the
sounds is that of the thing or situation. A word is thus a
sound that has become a substitute for a thing or a situation.
Language is a substitute stimulus for behavior, its meaning
being the behavior produced by the original stimulus. When
the world does not stimulate mental or muscular activity,
when it does not recall past experience of some sort, it has no
meaning. A foreign language with which we are unfamiliar
has no meaning because the sounds do not serve as clues for
past events.
Language is therefore, in its basic nature, a utility, an
instrument, a tool of the business of living. It is one with
things and situations of the everyday world of life. We could
get along without it, but it is a great convenience to which
we have become so accustomed that we deem it a necessity.
The business of mere existence could readily go on, as it does
among animals, without language. We would even save our-
selves a great deal of trouble in not deceiving ourselves and
others by the use of empty sounds.
2
THE NATURE OF POETRY
This is the nature of the material of the verbal arts. It is no
different from the nature of the material of the painter or
composer, excepting that it deals more directly and intimately
with life than do colors or tones. But for that very reason
poetry, drama, and fiction are also the richest of the arts.
Now what does the poet do with this commonplace material?
How do art works arise from it?
Let us ask of poetry itself. We will take two poems and
agree for the purpose of our inquiry that they are both beau-
196
Poetry
tiful. We will ask the poems to tell us wherein lies their beauty.
Our first sample is the famous lyric that forms the opening
lines of Byron’s The Bride of Abydos.
Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime,
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?
Know ye the land of the cedar and vine
Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress’d with perfume,
Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gul in their bloom;
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute—
Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,
And all, save the spirit of man is divine?
*Tis the land of the East; ’tis the clime of the Sun—
Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?
Oh! wild as the accents of lovers’ farewell
Are the hearts that they bear, and the tales that they tell.
Wherein lies the beauty of these lines? What does it do to us?
Does it tell us anything? Does it convey any meaning to
us? Does it communicate any ideas? If we tried to tell
some one about it what could we say? The answer is, we
could say extremely little about its ideational meaning. But it
does have a meaning in that it grips us, it affects us. In what
way does it affect us? It informs us of nothing. It does not
lead us to think. We carry no idea away from it. There is
nothing in it we could translate into our own words. It could
not be translated into another language without ruining it.
But what then does it do, for it does grip us? It plays on our
ears, eyes, tastes, and odors. We hear it, taste it, see it, and
smell it. It is a melody, a painting of a landscape, an odor,
a flavor. It ravishes us like a melody, a pastoral scene, a
perfume, a delicate wine. In the ordinary sense of telling,
it tells nothing. It just rouses us to a heightened conscious-
ness of living. And it does so principally through its melodic
quality, its meter, rhyme, and rhythm. If its melodic quality
197
Art and Beauty
were eliminated, all its visual, olfactory, and gustatory effects
would vanish. In a word, then, its esthetic quality, its beauty,
is its music. It is no more nor less than the music of verbal
sounds. There is then poetry whose esthetic substance lies
predominantly in the musical potentialities of the pure rhyth-
mic sound of words. This is the lyric.
Our second example is from Browning:
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue,
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
These lines are also musical, and we may find their esthetic
quality in their music. But they are more than that. We are
impressed with something more than the meter, rhyme, and
rhythm of the language. The language conveys something
to us, and the poet is giving expression through the musical
lines to an idea, an experience. We can talk about this poem.
We can discuss its idea in words of our own. The idea could
be translated into a different language, and perfectly so.
The beauty of the lines might be lost, but the idea would
remain. The poet tells us of a great, vital personal experience.
He tells us of an ineffable, life-transforming vision that is
entirely his own, that is uniquely significant. The words are
the medium for the idea. The idea is the matter of which
the words are the form, the two blending into one whole.
The substance of the poem is the idea. This is poetry as
dramatic, epic, narrative.
Poetry, as art, is then either predominantly verbal melody
or predominantly poetic idea.
198
Poetry
3
PoETRY AS VERBAL Music
As verbal music, a poem is a sequence of words so arranged
in meter, rhythm, rhyme, and versification as to produce an
organic form of sound that becomes significantly effective as
such. Words lend themselves to melodic sequences in that in-
herently they are pure sound, possessing, as sounds, all the ma-
terial resources of tones: pitch, intensity, duration, quality, or
color, and the orchestral effects of assonance and alliteration.
When treated artistically they can therefore parallel a pure
melody in creating a mood. The poet of verbal music con-
structs a musical pattern of words that becomes a source of
delight, that moves us as a melody does. It is thus verbal
music that Pater calls “‘at least artistically, the highest and
most complete form of poetry,” just because its effect of per-
fection, of completeness, does not depend on an idea expressed,
but rather ‘‘on a certain suffusion or vagueness of mere sub-
ject, so that the definite meaning almost expires, or reaches us
through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding.”
The poet, as pure artist, is thus the architect of verbal
sounds. He is a composer in words, making use of all possible
resources that words possess as tonal material. Some words
or verbal combinations have greater poetic possibilities than
others. Technical terms or technical phrases which are arbi-
trarily invented for definite purposes are not only non-poetic,
but anti-poetic. Similarly with colloquialisms and words with
established ludicrous or trivial associations. On the other
hand, there are words whose very fringe of associations en-
hances their poetic value, in that they suggest images, feelings,
or meanings which are in themselves beautiful. They possess
imaginative significance. In the words of Tennyson:
All the charm of all the Music often flowering in a lovely word.
Then there are phrases rich in imaginative, contemplative
value, as these lines from Shakespeare’s xxxth sonnet:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past.
199
Art and Beauty
The beauty of the Psalms lies chiefly in this magic of words
and phrases creative of moods of repose and assurance:
Then they are glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto
their desired haven.
The lines speak to us as does a serene or joyful melody.
Why art thou cast down, O my Soul?
And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope thou in God:
For I shall yet praise him
Who is the health of my countenance.
And my God.
The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament sheweth his handiwork.
Day unto day uttereth speech,
And night unto night sheweth knowledge:
Their voice cannot be heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth.
And their words to the end of the world.
“Forlorn!” Keats cries, “the very word is like a bell.” But
its beauty is not its mere tonal quality, but more so the rem-
iniscent mood of forlornness. The sensuous quality of words
is different from that of tones, and the lyric poem, although
a melody, is yet more and less than a melody. It has the
melodic effect of a melody, but it is less than a melody. It
has the mood effect of a melody, but more so. There is a
definiteness in the verbal melody that is lacking in the tonal
melody. This definiteness is due to the greater tangibility of
words as compared with tones. Words, being principally a
tool of action, even their sensuous quality comes to closer
grips with life than that of tones. So that although the lyric
poem approaches music in its identity of matter and form,
it effect is more solid, substantial, just because its matter is
its form, while in a melody the form is its matter.
The musical element of a poem, giving it its sensuous
beauty, thus bringing it close to music, is due to the rhythmic
quality inherent in speech. There is a natural tendency in us
200
Poetry
for the rhythmic organization of sounds. If we repeat a
series of haphazard sounds several times they will inevitably
arrange themselves into a rhythmic pattern of some sort, to
which a time-signature could be affixed. This is the basis of
meter. A meter is to verse what a measure is to music. Meter
again arranges itself into larger units, like musical measures
into phrases. These larger units form the rhythm of the poem.
The rhythm has a tempo which is derived from the predomi-
nance of long or short vowels of the syllables. In Browning’s
lines:
Marching along,
Fifty score strong,
Great-hearted gentlemen,
Singing this song.
the tempo is slow as compared with the following:
Out of the dust
Soaring alone
In composure of flight
Skylark of stone.
The meter in both is the same. In musical notation their
time-signature would be 2/4. Dividing them into measures
they look alike:
/Mar-ching a-/long/
/Fif-ty score/strong/
/Great-hearted/gentlemen/
/Singing this/song/
/Out of the/dust/
/Soa-ring a-/lone/
/In composure of/flight/
/Sky-lark of/stone/
The number of “‘notes”’ is the same in each case, only that in
the fifth ‘“‘measure’”’ of the second there are four eighth notes,
while in the same measure of the first there is one quarter
note and two eighth notes. But the tempo of the first is slower
than that of the second. The tempo influences the mood
effect of the melody in both verse and music, the slow move-
201
Art and Beauty
ment being more serene, the faster more gay. There is also
a ‘‘major” and a ‘‘minor’”’ key in verse as in music. The
meter of the opening stanza of Gray’s Elegy and Wordsworth’s
My Heart Leaps Up is the same. Musically, the time-signature
of both would be 3/4. But the mood effect of the first is that of
a grave, lingering melody in a minor key, while the effect
of the second is more in keeping with the mood of a major key.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began:
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Poets have always experimented with the melodic possibili-
ties of words, but particularly so within recent years with
the advent of the free-verse movement. The movement is,
in fact, an attempt to expand the musical resources of lan-
guage beyond the confines of classical versification. The
advocates of free verse are aiming at pure poetry, or poetry
in which form is all and subject-matter nothing. The modern-
istic poet adjures themes, meanings, ideas, or preachments as
a function or even ingredient of poetry. Poetry is not a
‘‘criticism of life’? as Matthew Arnold called it, which would
limit its scope of subject-matter, but the bringing of ‘“‘a new
and heightened consciousness to life,”’ an ‘“‘added conscious-
ness and increased perception.” Such is also the effect of the
traditional lyric. But the modernists would limit themselves
neither to the “‘pretty” themes of the lyric nor to its form.
Their aim is this heightened consciousness of the whole possible
range of experience in whatever manner it can be brought
about, even to the disregard of grammatic form.
202
Poetry
Here’s a little mouse) and
What does he think about, i
wonder as over this
floor (quietly with
bright eyes) drifts (nobody
can tell because
Nobody knows, or why
jerks Here I, here,
gr)oo) ving the room’s Silence) this like
a littlest
a
(with wee ears and see?
tail frisks)
MOUSE” 6 60 655.6. ek See
The metrical basis of free verse is, in the words of Amy
Lowell, ‘“‘unrhymed cadence.” It has discarded a strict met-
rical system for the “organic rhythm” of the speaking voice,
made necessary by breathing. Free verse differs from ordinary
prose rhythms “by being more curved, and containing more
stress.” The unrhymed cadence does not consist in a mere
chopping of prose lines into certain lengths, but ‘‘is constructed
upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time.”
The objective is to ‘‘heat up an emotion until it burns white-
hot,” and unrhymed cadence is most effective in doing this.
Since it is this heating up of an emotion to white-hot that
poetry strives after, the subject or theme is irrelevant, the
treatment the all-essential. There is no such thing as a poetical
subject. There is only poetical form, for whatever the sub-
ject, its poetic significance is the heightened perception, the
white-hot emotion that it generates. From the point of view
of the modernistic poet, this heating up of emotion has been
the substance of all poetry through the ages, its channels only
being changed from age to age. Wordsworth was blamed for
poetizing about commonplace things. Today the poet is con-
demned for resorting to kitchen utensils:
203
Art and Beauty
Now the old copper Basin suddenly
Rattled and tumbled from the shelf,
Bumping and crying, ‘‘I can fall by myself.”
But whether a primrose or a pot for theme, the poet is the
architect of words, and can evolve a verbal form whose effect
will be an enhanced experience of living, whether the form be
the traditional lyric or the modernistic unrhymed cadence.
4
PoETRY AS POETIC IDEA
Such is poetry as music. But the utmost that poetry as
music can accomplish is in being a lesser music. And as lesser
music it is also a lesser art. Yet poetry must be more than a
lesser art. The poet is not merely the imitator, in words, of
the composer. He is a creator using verbal material with all
of its living implications of action and thought for his raw
stuff. Poetry is an art in its own mghts and stands on its
own feet. Its merits are not borrowed from any other art.
Poetry can not do what music does, nor does the poet prima-
rily aim at musical effects. His music is a by-product, a con-
sequence, of an objective that is purely poetical. If the lyric
were no more than music it would be but imitation music.
But a lyric is more than that. It has a quality that can never
be attributed to music, a quality that is due to and derived
from its sensuous material, language. And language, although
it lends itself to tonal treatment, is yet more than tones. The
poetic element of poetry then, its substance, must lie in that
which is unique to language and lacking in tones.
What is this substance?
The appeal of tonal art is primarily, if not purely, sensuous.
A tone has no more than a sensuous appeal. It has no effect
other than affection, as pleasant or unpleasant. Its ideational
connotation is nil. We have seen that this is the reason why
music is the purest of the arts, but for that reason also the
poorest. Even in the most dramatic musical composition the
ideational element is at most vague, a mood rather than an
idea. Any verbal interpretation of music is, at its best, but
204
Poetry
eloquence, at its worst, gibberish. The alleged “fate knocking
at the door” motive or theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
is irrelevant to the significance of the symphony as music. It
is, at best, a mere fancy. People unfamiliar with that legend
could never obtain it from the music, and those for whom the
music is significant as music have nothing added to their
enjoyment from learning its supposed story. The idea of fate is
not inherent in the music, is not conveyed by the music, but
is read into it, forced upon it from the outside. That is true
of all music. Any ideational element is an imposition upon it.
Even in program music the story is something apart from the
music itself. The composer may be planning his music in
accordance with some story, but he is writing music, not a
story. And if his music has significance it is as music and not
as story or idea. Richard Straus’s Zarathustra has value as
music, not as philosophy.
But, on the other hand, even in the most melodic poem,
the lyric, an idea is inherent, due to the ideational nature of
language. Apart from idea language is gibberish, no matter
how rhythmical in arrangement and structure. Even the
purest of lyric poems, therefore, has more ideational content
than the most dramatic or poetic music. Herein lies the unique-
ness of language as artistic material and the distinguishing
point between music and poetry. In some poetry melody
predominates over idea, and we call such poetry lyrical. In
some poetry idea predominates over melody, and we have
dramatic, epic, or narrative poetry. The sonnet, for instance,
is more idea than melody. The lyric is more melody than idea.
But idea is the meeting ground of both, and constitutes the
poetic element of poetry. Melody is essential to both, as is
setting to substance. Without melody the sonnet would be
prose, while without idea the lyric would be but imitation
music. The substance of poetry is, therefore, idea that ap-
proaches melody, that is, pure form, as idea, to distinguish it
from prosaic idea. The substance of poetry is the poetic idea,
and an examination of the nature of the poetic idea is an exam-
ination of the nature of poetry.
205
Art and Beauty
5
Tse Poetic IDEA
Prosaic language, we have concluded, is a series of sounds
utilized for the expression and conveyance of prosaic, com-
monplace meaning, the meaning of the sounds being the be-
havior evoked by a situation calling for action in the interest of
the physical welfare of the individual. This is meaning as
perception and memory. But there is meaning expressed and
conveyed by language that supersedes perception and memory, ~
although built upon and evolved out of perception and mem-
ory, by the mental process of imaginative or creative thought
which is unique in that it is not common property, shared by
all normally constituted persons, but exists only for the person
who has evolved it. When such a creative thought is uttered
in language adequate for it, and becomes effectively significant
as such, in and for itself, it is called a poetic thought or idea,
and its utterance in adequate language is a poem.
This definition of the poetic idea calls for examination.
We will do so by questioning some poetic ideas as to their
substance, how they differ from non-poetic ideas.
Let us take the statement: ‘‘There are clouds gathering in
the sky, the atmosphere is sultry, and it will probably rain.”
What are the characteristics of this statement? First of all,
it refers to a particular event. It tells something about one
aspect of nature, one occurrence, and this occurrence is tran-
sient, ephemeral; it comes and goes. The statement is also
commonplace. We are thoroughly familiar with it, and it is
as true for one person of normal perceptions as for another.
It is true not only in that it can be seen as clouds or lightning,
heard as thunder, felt as rain, in a word, demonstrated and
made manifest by the sense organs, but it is also verified by
past experience. It is therefore a factual truth. The state-
ment is furthermore significant, meaningful, in that it is a
signal for staying indoors, or getting wet, or seeking shelter,
or interfering with plans for a walk, or good for the crops, or
breaking a drought. It is a significant factual truth. But no
206
Poetry
one would call this statement either poetic or beautiful. The
sky may be beautiful. The rain may be beautiful. The thunder-
storm may be beautiful. But none of these is poetical. No
one would speak of a poetical sky, rain, or thunderstorm.
But the statement is neither beautiful nor poetical. What then
makes a verbal statement both poetical and beautiful?
Let us take another kind of statement, one from a poem
and another from prose.
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven—
All’s right with the world.
Therefore I say unto you, be not anxious for your life, what shall ye
eat, or what shall ye drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put
on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment?
Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap,
nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are
not ye of much more value than they? And which of you by being
anxious can add one cubit unto his stature? And why are ye anxious
concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
These statements are, by universal consent, both poetic and
beautiful. They utter a poetic idea and the idea is beautiful.
Wherein lies their poetic quality and why are they beautiful?
The contrast between these utterances and the previous
statement about clouds and rain is obvious. Browning and
Jesus do not speak of a particular event. Their utterances are
universal. Nor are they commonplace. They are neither
obvious nor familiar. And they are not true by all the usual
criteria of truth. They are not factually true, but rather false.
Applied to the business of daily living it is not true that all
is well with the world, although God may be in his heaven.
Jesus’ statement is even more false factually than that of
207
Art and Beauty
Browning, for, put into practice, it would mean starvation and
annihilation of life. Nor are these statements demonstrable by
sense or verifiable by experience. Both sense and experience
prove their falsity. And yet they are true because they are
felt to be so. They have a tremendous human appeal, and as
such they are true. And their truth is at the same time per-
sonal and universal. They are true for me, and I feel that they
are also true for all other me’s. All the me’s become one in
them and through them. All the other me’s become me, and
my me becomes all other me’s. The particular becomes the
universal and the universal the particular. The words utter
a universal truth, which therefore is not true as a fact, but as
an ideal. And it is as an ideal that it is true and as such is its
appeal. Now it is such an idea, such an ideal idea, that is at
once poetic and beautiful, poetic because of its appeal and
beautiful because of its intrinsic worth.
What is the nature of the appeal, and why the beauty?
For an answer to the first question we go to the poet of poetry,
Keats, and for an answer to the second to the exponent of
idea as beauty, Plato.
The key to Keats’ conception of the nature of poetry is
found in his famous pronouncement about the identity of
truth and beauty, that
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
while its function is the theme of his Endymion.
That the truth which is also beauty is the ideal truth of
poetic idea is manifest from Keats’ identification of this truth
with the imagination. Both in his poetry and letters Keats
dwells constantly on the imagination as the source of all sig-
nificant experience. In a letter to Bailey, written in November,
1817, he affirms that:
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and
the truth of Imagination! What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must
be Truth—whether it existed before or not,—for I have the same idea
of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of
essential Beauty.
208
Poetry
Imagination is for him the activating power of poetry, and
poetry is the truth seized by the imagination. The truth of the
imagination is the supreme reality, all that we need to know
or can know. Of such truth the poet, rather than the philos-
opher, is the seeker and prophet. Keats had little faith in the
deductions of reason. Reason is cold and detached. Its conclu-
sions are not vital personal experiences. But the poet, the man of
intuition, comes in close personal contact with his world, lends
himself freely to experience and thereby becomes the experience.
The poet Keats describes as possessing no identity apart from
nature. The poetic character has no separate self. In a letter
to Richard Woodhouse, written October 27, 1818, the poet
writes:
1st. As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if
I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Words-
worthian, or egotistical Sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands
alone), it is not itself—it has no self—It is everything and nothing. It
has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it
foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.—It has as
much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the
virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm
from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste
for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the
most unpoctical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity—
he is continually in for and filling some other body. The Sun,—the
Moon,—the Sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse,
are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the
poet has none, no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all
God’s creatures.—If then he has no sclf, and if I am a poet, where is
the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at
that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and
Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that not
one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing
out of my identical Nature—How can it, when I have no Nature?
When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating
on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself,
but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so
that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among men; it
would be the same in a nursery of Children.
The imagination frees the poet from the chains of earth and
209
Art and Beauty
permits him to depart into realms of pure being. In imagina-
tion he is free and unfettered.
Is there so smal] a range
In the present strength of manhood, that the high
Imagination can not freely fly
As she was wont of old? ...
. . - Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove’s large eye-brow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows? Here her altar shone,
E’en in this isle; and who could paragon
The fervid choir that lifted up a noise
Of harmony, to which it aye will poise
Its mighty self of convoluting sound
Huge as a planet, and like that roll round,
Eternally around a dizzy void.
But the poet does not flee tangible reality in fancy. He
mentally penetrates its surface, freeing it of the débris of
perception, and thus comes in touch with its purity of being
which is its beauty. To see things as they are, in their naked
purity, their absolute truth, is to see them as beauty, and as
absolute truth they are pure forms, pure ideas. This is Keats’
view of the world, as it is of all poets of idea, whether as poet
or as poetic philosopher, like Plato.
But what is the significance of this imaginative conception
of the world? Wherein lies its great unusual appeal? Keats
attempts an answer in Endymion and Hyperion, where he
contrasts the realm of the tangible, the particular, the per-
ceptual, with that of the intangible, universal, or imaginative.
Endymion is a parable of the struggle and striving of the
poet after the Beauty that is also Truth. The poem is the
spiritual autobiography of Keats, with the Greek shepherd-
prince being Keats’ poetic self. Of the actual existence of this
beauty seized by the imagination, Keats was as convinced
as Plato. The imagination did not so much create it, as the
mind seized it, attained to it, through the power of imagina-
tion. It is created, however, in the sense that, before the
210
Poetry
imagination seizes it, it exists only potentially, and not actu-
ally. Creation is the process of turning the potential into the
actual. In Endymion Keats gives an account of the travail
in this creative process. It begins with the mind dwelling in
the realm of the tangible commonplace, but in which it senses
the intangible unique and pure, for which it longs. The mind
wishes to dwell below in perception, in the familiar, yet is
drawn upwards by the vision of the imagination. To dismiss
the imaginative for the perceptual is to cast off a pure for an
impure love, because the impure is more readily attainable
than the pure. But this is treachery, faithlessness, deception.
Endymion has his Indian Maid, and she was irresistible. But
there was the Moon-Goddess whom he was betraying by his
surrender to the earthly love. The Indian Maid was his Heart’s
Affection, but the Moon-Goddess was the Beauty of Imagi-
nation: the actual real and the potentially real side by side,
the one possessed, the other beckoning. He is in travail of
perplexity. How can he attain the higher and also retain the
lower, or retain the lower without betraying the higher? Yet,
could the one exist without the other? Can the higher be
attained excepting through the lower, or could the lower be
recognized as being lower without the vision of the higher?
But if the two are related as means are to ends, how can the
means become ends? The answer is by transforming the
actual real into the potentially real, so that the lower is lost in
the higher by becoming incorporated in it and thus transmuted
by it. In this manner peace arises out of conflict, calm out of
despair, and perplexity becomes assurance. But the one is a
condition of the other. As Endymion sleeps by the side of the
Indian Maid, the Moon-Goddess bends towards him. When
he awakes from his dream to the presence of the sleeping Maid
beside him, he is perplexed and pained. But as the winged
horse takes him upwards—as imagination increases in vivid-
ness—the Maid fades, and with her the conflict. The Maid
becomes the Goddess, and the prince is at peace. But the
peace was gained through the despair. Through hell heaven
is attained, the heaven being potentially present in the hell.
211
Art and Beauty
The man is yet to come
Who hath not journeyed in this native hell.
But few have ever felt how calm and well
Sleep may be had in that deep den of all.
But it is also true that the man who has had no vision of the
‘deep den of all,” who catches no glimpse of the universal
and ultimate and pure, can not be aware of the hell of the
particular and impure.
However, Endymion does not remain in the quietude of
that ‘“‘deep den of all.”” Illumination is flash-like. He returns
to earth, and to the Maid. And although the “first touch .. .
went nigh to kill,”’ although the contrast between the vision
and the reality is a shock that well nigh kills, there is security
in the tangible and Endymion vows to remain with his earthly
love. He dismisses the dream as a dream, not realizing at
first that the dream is now the reality and the reality the
dream. He realizes this only after the Indian Maid informs
him that she can not be his love—for the vision will tolerate
naught that is not of its own nature—when he discovers, on
his next visit, that the earthly love has been transfigured into
the Goddess of the Moon. So Endymion attains perfect
repose. The poet attains his culmination when he has evolved
his poetic idea from prosaic experience. The poet is alter-
nately despondent and in ecstasy. Endymion is torn between
two loves. He is upon the earth, yet not of it. He journeys
between hell and heaven. There is no repose in hell because
of the vision of heaven, and no peace in heaven because of the
memory of hell. But there is the promise of peace in the heaven
of idea, and the longing for it turns it into a Truth that is more
real than even the reality of fact. When we know this we know
all that we need know on earth or ever can know. The poetic
idea is the peace-giving idea, and for that reason it is also
Truth. Herein lies its significance.
But why is it also Beauty?
Keats’ parable of Maid and Goddess is one with Plato’s
figure in The Phedrus of the charioteer driving two winged
horses. One of the horses is ‘‘noble and of noble breed, and
212
Poetry
the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of
them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.”” The
ignoble horse is the mortal creature, ‘‘a crooked lumbering
animal, put together anyhow; he has a short, thick neck; he
is flat-faced and of a dark color, with gray eyes and blood-
red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared
and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.” The noble
steed is the immortal creature, “upright and cleanly made;
he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his color is white,
and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor and modesty and
temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch
of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only.”
The two horses struggle each to be true to its nature, one
pulling downwards to earth, the other upwards to heaven,
giving the charioteer much difficulty in handling them. The
noble steed draws the charioteer to its own abode of purity,
the immortal, the ignoble to its haven of impurity, the mortal.
Hence the troubles of the charioteer.
When Plato leaves the figure he tells in psychological terms
what he implies by the noble steed, the immortal, and why
it is pure, and what he symbolizes by the ignoble animal as
mortal and impure, as well as the relationship between them
and their relative significance.
Plato conceives of two realms of being or experience. One
is the realm of Idea, “‘visible only to mind, the pilot of the
soul,’’ or in the words of Keats, ‘‘seized by Imagination,” the
other the realm of fact, apparent to sense. Throughout his
writings he refers to the Idea as the one, the general, the whole,
the perfect, the pure, the absolute, and calls this truth, or
true reality, while perceptual experience he designates as the
many, the particular, the partial, the imperfect, the impure,
the relative, constituting not truth, but opinion, not true
reality, but its shadow or appearance. What Plato does is
reverse our world of values. What we ordinarily call real he
calls unreal, and what is for us unreal is for him real. Now on
what grounds does he do so? Obviously his criterion for reality
is different from the commonly accepted one. The common
213
Art and Beauty
test of reality is tangibility. That of Plato is intangibility.
But why so? Because, he contends, it is the intangible, the
abstract, the ideational, that gives real significance, real value
to the tangible, the concrete, the factual. Let us see in his
own words what he means by this.
In a passage in The Republic Plato engages in demonstrating
to his audience the principle that he who, having a sense of
beautiful things, but no sense of absolute beauty, is in a
dream state, in that he puts the copy in place of the real object,
while he, “who recognizes the existence of absolute beauty
and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which
participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the
place of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects”’ is
awake.
This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion
that there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty—in whose
opinion the beautiful is the manifold—he, I say, your lover of beautiful
sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the
just is one, or that anything is one—to him I would appeal, saying, Will
you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these beautiful
things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the just, which
will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not also be unholy?
No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found
ugly; and the same is true of the rest.
And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?—doubles,
that is, of one thing, and halves of another?
Quite true.
And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will
not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?
True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all
of them.
And can any one of those many things which are called by particular
names be said to be this rather than not to be this?
He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at
feasts or the children’s puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat,
with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat
was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a
riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind,
either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.
Then what will you do with them? I said. Can they have a better
place than between being and not-being? For they are clearly not in
214
Poetry
greater darkness or negation than not-being, or more full of light and
existence than being.
That is quite true, he said.
Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the
multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are
tossing about in some region which is half-way between pure being and
pure not-being?
We have.
Yes; and we had before agreed that anything of this kind which we
might find was to be described as matter of opinion, and not as matter
of knowledge; being the intermediate flux which is caught and detained
by the intermediate faculty.
Quite true.
Then those who see the many beautiful, and who yet neither see
absolute beauty, nor can follow any guide who points the way thither;
who see the many just, and not absolute justice, and the like,—such
persons may be said to have opinion but not knowledge?
That is certain.
But those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be
said to know, and not to have opinion only?
Neither can that be denied.
The one love and embrace the subjects the knowledge, the other
those of opinion? The latter are the same, as I dare say you will
remember, who listened to sweet sounds and gazed upon fair colors, but
would not tolerate the existence of absolute beauty.
Yes, I remember.
Shall we then be guilty of any impropriety in calling them lovers of
opinion rather than lovers of wisdom, and will they be very angry with
us for thus describing them?
I shall tell them not to be angry; no man should be angry at what is
true.
But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of
wisdom and not lovers of opinion.
Assuredly.
The Idea is thus the true reality, in that it is the unity
that operates behind multiplicity, the essence of the attri-
butes of sensory experience, the substance of which the things
of this world are the predicates. The Idea is being, in that it
always is, while temporal and spatial things are in a constant
state of becoming, but never are. The Idea is the archetype
of which the factual phenomena are the temporary, transi-
tory reflections or shadows. They are not true reality, but
215
Art and Beauty
copies of reality. Since the Idea is being, it also gives being
to him whose imagination seizes it and dwells in it, while for
him whose abode is the perceptual world there is no bezng,
only a becoming. In being there is completion, a coming to
rest, hence repose. In becoming there is a passing from one
stage of completion to another, and therefore a striving, a
stress, strain, and travail.
It is such an attitude towards the world of phenomenal
experience that is characterized as the poetic conception of
the universe. And the Platonic Idea is the poetic idea. Car-
lyle utters a Platonism and a poetic idea when he states that
‘‘what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken
is not there at all. Matter exists only spiritually and to repre-
sent some idea, and body it forth.”” Keats speaks of this idea
variously as “‘the chief intensity,” as ‘love immortal,” as
‘“‘a one far off event” towards which all of creation moves.
Its peace-giving power lies in that:
Melting into its radiance, we blend,
Mingle and so become a part of it.
It means a union of mortal with immortal, a merging with it,
and therefore identical with it.
. . . if this earthly love has power to make
Men’s being mortal, immortal; to shake
Ambition from their memories, and bring
Their measure of content: what merest whim
Seems all this endeavor after fame, :
To one, who keeps within his steadfast aim
A love immortal, an immortal too.
This then is Truth immortal, everlasting, being true for all
men for all time. The love of the earthly comes and goes,
but the idea of love and its life-giving and life-propelling
power remains. But why is this Truth also Beauty? Why is
the poetic idea also an idea of beauty? The beauty is the
consequence of the attitude towards the idea, and Keats would
have been more correct had he interchanged the words Truth
and Beauty and stated that what the Imagination seizes as
Beauty is also Truth, for the imagination does not seize beauty
216
Poetry
but truth, and the truth becomes beauty just because it is a
truth of the imagination, a truth of idea and not of fact. Truth
is also beauty only when it is the truth created by the imagina-
tion. It is not beauty when evolved by perception. Factual
truths are not beauty. They become beauty only when the
imagination has seized idea through them. Why is this so?
The imagination operates on the material supplied by per-
ception. The general is built out of the particular, the abso-
lute from the relative, the whole from the parts, the intan-
gible, the idea, from the tangible, the fact. The imagination
operates in perception and generates the ideational out of the
perceptual. In doing so it also transforms the perceptual into
the ideational, in that the means partake of the nature of the
end. The means are the parts of which the end is the whole.
But the whole is more than any one or all of its parts. It is built
out of the parts, but is not of them in its nature. It has a
nature of its own which is independent of the parts, although a
result of them. Yet the parts, as parts, partake of the nature
of the whole, but only partially so. They are the incomplete
whole, therefore the imperfect whole, being at the same time
the whole and also not the whole. They reflect the whole,
are the shadows of it, but not its reality. If the parts have a
meaning it is derived from the whole of which they are the
parts. Their meaning is therefore extrinsic, and hence does
not possess the quality of beauty. But the whole does not
derive its meaning from any source other than itself. It is
meaningful in itself. Its significance is what it is as a whole.
Hence its value is inherent, intrinsic, and therefore beautiful.
Now such is the nature of the truth seized by the imagina-
tion in contrast with the truth derived by perception. The
idea is evolved out of percepts, but its significance is inde-
pendent of the percepts. The poetic idea, as the idea seized
by imagination, is therefore, also beauty. Beauty may occur
apart from poetic idea. But poetic idea is beauty by virtue
of being what it is. The poetic idea is truth because of its
universal human appeal. It is beauty because it is significant
as idea, for what it is in itself. We prize our own ideals not for
217
Art and Beauty
what they lead to or result in, but for what they lead from.
They are not an achieving, but an achievement. They are
their own justifications. They are prized for what they are
in, by, and for themselves. This is their quality of beauty.
The products of perception are never valued as such. ‘Those
of imagination always are. What the imagination then seizes
as truth is also beauty. The truth of perception is extrinsic.
That of imagination is intrinsic. When the truth of perception
is transfigured by the truth of imagination, when fact becomes
idea, there is beauty.
Such is poetry as idea. When extrinsic words become a
medium for intrinsic idea, in a manner such that idea trans-
forms and interpenetrates them to such an extent that the
words have no significance excepting that cast upon them by
idea, resulting in the identification of matter and form, an
art work is the result which we call a poem because of its
sensuous material, language. Poetry is thus the musical ex-
pression of pure idea; it is intrinsic idea in intrinsic form.
Whenever such a combination occurs we have poetry. All
expression of significant, imaginative experience in adequate
language is poetry. The line of demarcation between prose and
poetry is so thin as to be vanishing. There is much prose that is
poetry, while a good deal of poetry is not even good prose. The
mechanical spacing of lines on a page does not make a poem,
nor does writing lack poetic quality just because it appears
in the form of prose. There are dramas, novels, and essays that
are far more poetic than much that passes for poetry. Plato
is more of a poet than many officially designated poets. All
of Shakespeare is poetry. Turgeniev is a poet. There is more
poetry in the prose writings of George Santayana than in most
of the literary output of Wordsworth or Byron. A lyric poem
is poetry only in the degree to which its melody is the me-
lodic utterance of poetic idea. An epic, dramatic, or narrative
poem is poetry only in those parts where poetic idea is wedded
inseparably to melodic language. The great poem is the com-
plete balancing of poetic idea and musical language, a crea-
tive attainment of which Shakespeare is the supreme model.
218 :
SRR SeSeeSaaenessanas
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE NATURE AND OBJECTIVE OF SXSTHETICS
Fraccus, L. W., The Spirit and Substance of Art, 1926, Part One. F. S.
Crofts & Co., New York.
LANGFELD, H. S., The Esthetic Attitude, 1920, Chapters I, II. Harcourt
Brace & Co., New York.
Parker, D. H., The Principles of Esthetics, 1920, Chapter I. Silver,
Burdett & Co., New York.
Purrer, ETHEL, The Psychology of Beauty, 1905, Chapter I: Houghton
Mifflin Co., Boston.
SANTAYANA, GEORGE, The Sense of Beauty, 1897, Chapter I. Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York.
Munro, THOMAS, Scientific Method in Aisthetics, 1928. W. W. Norton
& Co., New York.
ART, THE CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE CREATIVE MIND
EpMan, IRwIn, The World, The Arts and The Artist, 1928. W. W. Norton
& Co., New York.
CABELL, J. B., Straws and Prayer-Books, 1924. Robert McBride & Co.,
New York.
McManon, A. P., The Meaning of Art, 1930. W. W. Norton & Co.,
New York.
ParxkuHurstT, H. H., Beauty: An Interpretation of Art and the Imaginative
Life, 1930. Harcourt Brace & Co., New York.
MACHEN, ARTHUR, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
ParRKER, D. H., The Principles of Esthetics, 1920, Chapters II, I.
Silver, Burdett & Co., New York.
LANGFELD, H. S., The Aesthetic Attitude, 1920, Chapter XI. Harcourt
Brace & Co., New York.
Fraccus, L. W., The Spirit and Substance of Art, 1926, Part Six. F. S.
Crofts & Co., New York.
WILEINSON, MARGUERITE, The Way of the Makers, 1925. The Macmillan
Co., New York.
Tuorre, C. D., The Mind of John Keats, 1926. Oxford Univ. Press,
London.
Morry, J. M., Studtes in Keats, 1930. Oxford Univ. Press, London.
219
Bibliography
SCHOEN, Max, Human Nature, 1930, Chapter XI. Harper & Bros.,
New York.
Prato, The Symposium. Oxford Univ. Press, London.
SPEARMAN, C., Creative Mind, 1931. D. Appleton & Co., New York.
WALLAS, GRAHAM, The Art of Thought, 1926. Harcourt Brace & Co.,
New York.
Downey, J. E., Creative Imagination, 1929. Harcourt Brace & Co.,
New York.
Ricuarps, I. A., Princtples of Literary Criticism, 1926, Chapters IV,
XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXXII, XXXII, XXXII. Harcourt Brace
& Co., New York.
SANTAYANA, GEORGE, Reason in Art, 1906. Charles Scribner’s Sons,
New York.
KRETSCHMER, ERNEST, The Psychology of Men of Genius, 1931. Harcourt
Brace & Co., New York.
Révfsz, G., The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy, 1925. Harcourt Brace
& Co., New York.
SEASHORE, C. E., The Psychology of Musical Talent, 1919. Silver, Burdett
& Co., New York.
Lupwic, Eat, Goethe: The History of a Man, 1928. G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, New York.
ZWEIG, STEFAN, Adepts in Self-Portratture, 1928. Viking Press, Inc.,
New York.
SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR, The World as Will and Idea, sections on genius.
Kegan Paul & Co., London.
DuRANT, WILL, Studies in Genius, 1931. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Jacosson, A. C., Genius: Some Revaluations, 1926. Greenberg Publisher,
Inc., New York.
MARKS, JEANNETTE, Genius and Disaster. Greenberg Publisher, Inc.,
New York.
Prato, The Phedrus. Oxford Univ. Press, London.
THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY
Parker, D. H., The Principles of Aisthetics, 1920, Chapters IV, V.
Silver, Burdett & Co., New York.
PUFFER, ETHEL, The Psychology of Beauty, 1905, Chapters II, Il.
Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.
SANTAYANA, GEORGE, The Sense of Beauty, 1897, Chapter II. Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York.
LANGFELD, H. S., The Aesthetic Attitude, 1920, Chapters II, V. Harcourt
Brace & Co., New York.
220
Bibliography
Fraccvus, L. W., The Spirit and Substance of Art, 1926, Part Two. F. S.
Crofts & Co., New York.
Ricuarps, I. A., Princtples of Literary Critictsm, Chapters I, II. Har-
court Brace & Co., New York.
BELL, CuivE, Art, Chapters I, IT. Frederick A. Stokes & Co., New York.
Croce, RENEDETTO, 4ésthetic, 1922, Chapters I-IV. The Macmillan
Co., New York.
BOSANQUET, BERNARD, History of Afsthetic, 1904. The Macmillan Co.,
New York.
Carnitt, E. F., The Theory of Beauty, 1914. The Macmillan Co., New
York.
PRaLL, D. W., Esthetic Judgment, 1929. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.,
New York.
BUERMEYER, LAURENCE, The Zsthetic Experience, 1924. Barnes Founda-
tion, Merion, Pa.
OcpEN, C. K., Ricuarps, I. A., Woop, James, The Foundations of
A:sthetics, 1925. International Press, New York.
Batrour, A. J., Criticism and Beauty, 1910. Oxford Univ. Press, London.
CLuTTON-Brock, A., ‘‘Escape From Banality,” in The Necessity of Art,
1924. Student Christian Movement, London.
SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR, The World as Will and Idea, sections on art.
Kegan Paul & Co., London.
MUSIC
PATER, WALTER, The Renaissance, 1903; The School of Giorgione. Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York.
HAnsLick, E., The Beautiful in Music, 1891. Novello, London.
Gurney, E., The Power of Sound, 1880. Smith, Elder & Co., London.
GEHRING, A., The Basis of Musical Pleasure, 1910. Charles Scribner’s
Sons, New York.
SCHOEN, Max, The Beautiful in Music, 1928. Kegan Paul & Co., London.
SCHAUFFLER, R. H., The Musical Amateur, 1911. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Boston.
PUFFER, ETHEL, The Psychology of Beauty, 1905, Chapter V. Houghton
Mifflin Co., Boston.
ParkER, D. H., The Principles of Esthetics, 1920, Chapter VIII. Silver,
Burdett & Co., New York.
PAINTING
BELL, CLIvE, Art, and Landmarks in Nineteenth Century Painting, 1927.
Chatto & Windus, London.
221
Bibliography
PATER, WALTER, The Renatssance, 1903. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New
York.
ALLEN, M. C., The Mirror of the Passing World, 1928. W. W. Norton &
Co., New York.
WreEnskI, R. H., The Modern Movement in Art. Frederick A. Stokes &
Co., New York.
Pacu, WALTER, The Masters of Modern Art, 1924. Huebsch, New York.
Cox, KENnyon, Concerning Painting, 1917. Charles Scribner’s Sons,
New York.
Barnes, A. C., The Art in Painting, 1928. Harcourt Brace & Co.,
New York.
Fry, ROGER, Vision and Design. Brentano’s, New York.
Wricat, W. H., Modern Painting, 1915. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.
BopkIn, THOMAS, The Approach to Painting, 1927. Harcourt Brace &
Co., New York.
LITERATURE
BRADLEY, A. C., Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 1909. Oxford Univ. Press,
London.
SANTAYANA, GEORGE, “Elements of Poetry,” in Poery and Religion,
1900. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.
LowELL, Amy, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 1917. The
Macmillan Co., New York.
MACKAIL, J. W., Lectures on Poetry, 1911. Oxford Univ. Press,
London.
Pog, E. A., The Philosophy of Composition. The Poetic Principle, 1904,
Funk & Wagnalls, New York.
ABERCROMBIE, LASCELLES, The Theory of Poetry, 1926. Harcourt Brace
& Co., New York.
EASTMAN, Max, The Enjoyment of Poetry, 1921. Charles Scribner’s Sons,
New York.
Hotmes, EpMonp, What Is Poetry, 1900. John Lane (The Bodley Head),
London.
Ker, W. P., The Art of Poetry, 1923. Oxford Univ. Press, London.
Squire, J. C., Essays on Poetry. Doubleday, Doran & Co., New York.
SITWELL, EDITH, Poetry and Criticism. Henry Holt & Co., New York.
RIcHARDS, I. A., Science and Poetry, 1926. W. W. Norton & Co., New
York.
The Prelude to Poetry. Essays and Comments by the Poets on Their
Own Art, 1927. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.
222
Bibliography
Eusor, T. S., The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Drama, 1930.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
SANTAYANA, GEORGE, Three Philosophical Poets, 1910. Harvard Univ.
Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Butcaer, S. H., Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 1923. The
Macmillan Co., New York.
Lucas, F. L., Tragedy, 1928. Harcourt Brace & Co., New York.
Dukes, ASHLEY, Drama, 1927. Henry Holt & Co., New York.
Drxon, F. M., Tragedy, 1925. Longmans, Green & Co., New York.
WELLS, HENRY, The Judgment of Literature, 1928. W. W. Norton & Co.,
New York.
- Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel, 1927. Harcourt Brace & Co.,
New York.
Ames, V. M., 4sthetics of the Novel, 1928. Univ. of Chicago Press,
Chicago, Illinois.
Crutton-Brock, A., Essays on Literature and Life, 1926. E. P. Dutton
& Co., New York.
Murry, J. M., Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism, 1924. Wm. Col-
lin’s Sons & Co., London.
Criticism in America, 1924. (Various authors.) Harcourt Brace & Co.,
New York.
an ——— _—— _
SEE EE ETO E CELE TEE ETE TOTO OT OTOL
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Abstraction, as form of imagination, Art Work, The,—Continued
61-62 fancy and, 27-28
Adventure, as creative process, 53-66 generalization in, 62-63
Zsthetics, general nature of, 24-33
criticism of, 1-2 integration in, 59
material of, 14-20
objective of, 6-8
Architecture, as typical art, 181
and reproduction, 26-27
as release, 153-157
beauty and, 5-6
creation of, 38-73
creative mind and, 128-130
definition of, 2-8
distinctive quality of, 175-177
expression in, 33
fact and, 26-32
factual material of, 28-32
fancy and, 27-28
for few or for all, 10-11
history of, 177-178
life and, 30
literature on, 14-20
modern, 179-184
morality and, 12
problems of, 10-13
pure, 190-193
realism and, 30
responses to, 9
rich, 190-193
service of, 149-152
standard in, 11-12
stuff of, 30, 38
subject-matter of, 26-28
verbal, 194
Art Work, The,
abstraction in, 61-62
approach to, 23-24
definition of, 23-24, 25-28
experience and, 30-34
expression in, 33
fact and, 28-33
factual material of, 26-33
225
intuition in, 59-61
layman and, 133
mentality behind, 74
nature of, 113, 117, 121, 124-130
process of adventure in, 53-66
process of discovery in, 66-70
realism and, 30
reality and, 30
reconstruction in, 58-59
stage of elaboration in, 55-66
stage of execution in, 70-73
stage of inspiration in, 67-70
stage of preparation in, 54-55
stuff of, 30, 38
subject-matter of, 26-28
substance of, 64
the making of, 38-73
transmutation in, 63-64
value of, 124-127
Beauty,
esthetic repose as theory of, 144—
146
art and, 5-6
catharsis as theory of, 146-147
definition of, 2-8
disinterestedness as theory of, 135-
136
emotion in experience of, 153-155
empathy as theory of, 143-144
in music, 165-174
intrinsicality as theory of, 134-135
intuition as theory of, 142-143
material for definition of, 14-20
objectification as theory of, 139-142
object of, 7
psychical distance as theory of, 138-
139
response of, 9
Index of Subjects
Beauty,—Continued
service of, 133
significant form as theory of, 136-
138
substance of, 147-149
theories of, 134-147
thought in experience of, 153-155
value of definition of, 8-10
Catharsis, as theory of beauty, 146-147
Creative Impulse, nature of, 122-124
Creative Mind, The,
child and, 107-109
disease and, 99-101
drink and, 104-106
drugs and, 104-106
examination of, 74
imagery of, 87
intelligence of, 89-92
inspiration and, 117-120
labor and, 120-122
madness and, 96-98
memory of, 87
nature of, 74
perception in, 81-87
personality of, 88-89
poverty and, 101-104
practicality of, 113-117
sensation in, 80
temperament of, 92-96
woman and, 109-111
Creative Process, The,
abstraction in, 61-62
adventure in, 53-66
analysis of, 38-53
discovery in, 66-70
elaboration in, 55-66
execution in, 70-73
integration in, 59
inspiration in, 67-70
intuition in, 59-61
preparation in, 54-55
reconstruction in, 58-59
transmutation in, 63-64
Discovery, stage in creative process,
66-70
Disinterestedness, as theory of beauty, —
135-136
Elaboration, stage in creative process,
55-66
Emotion, in esthetic experience, 153-
155
Empathy, as theory of beauty, 143-
144
Execution, stage in creative process,
70-73
Experience,
wsthetic, 133-149
artistic, 31-33
criteria for, 31
disinterested, 135-136
intuitive, 142-143
intrinsic, 134-135
meaning in, 36-37
musical, 158-163
nature of practical, 35-38
objectified, 139-142
of esthetic repose, 144-146
of beauty, 133, 147-149
of catharsis, 146-147
of empathy, 143-144
of psychical distance, 138-139
of significant form, 136-138
perception in, 36-37
realms of, 213
recognition in, 36-37
retention in, 36-37
sensation in, 36
Expression, artistic, 25, 33, 54-73
Free Verse, metrical basis of, 203
Generalization, as form of imagina-
tion, 62-63
Genius,
artistic, 74-75
child and, 107-109
disease and, 99-101
drink and, 104-106
drugs and, 104-106
examination of, 74
imagery of, 87
inspiration and, 117-120
intelligence of, 89-92
labor of, 120-122
life of, 114-117
madness and, 96-98
226
Genius,—Continued
memory of, 87
mind of, 80-88
musical, 75-80
neural organization of, 87
perception of, 81-87
personality of, 88-89
poverty and, 101-104
reactions of, 94-96
sensation of, 80
temperament of, 92-96
will to live of, 81, 123
woman and, 109-111
ation
as abstraction, 61-62
as escape, 157
as generalization, 62-63
as integration, 59
as intuition, 59-61
as reconstruction, 58-59
as transmutation, 63-64
perception and, 217
the life of, 113-117
truth and, 208, 217
Intelligence,
genius and, 89-92
normal, 89-90
sub-normal, 90
super-normal, 90-91
Integration, as form of imagination,
59
Intonation, factors in musical, 78
Inspiration, stage in creative process,
66-70
Intrinsicality, as theory of beauty,
134-135
Intuition,
as form of imagination, 59-61
as theory of beauty, 142-143
Language,
as artistic material, 205
nature of, 194-196
prosaic, 206
Music,
esthetic attitude in, 165-174
as measure of the arts, 175-177,
193
Index of Subjects
Music,—Continued
as pure art, 190-193
as rich art, 190-193
experience of beauty in, 165-174
extrinsic listening to, 169
hearing, 173
ideational element in, 204
intrinsic listening to, 169
listening to, 173
varieties of experiences in, 158-163
Objectification, as theory of beauty,
139-142
Painting,
zsthetic element in, 178-185
zsthetic experience in, 185-189
modern, 179-184
subject-matter in, 192
Perception, artistic, 182
Personality,
creative, 74
of genius, 88-89, 98
Phrasing, factors in musical, 79-80
Poet,
and imagination, 209-210
as man of intuition, 209
as pure artist, 199
Poetic Idea,
appeal of, 208, 210
beauty of, 212
definition of, 206
truth of, 208, 215, 216-217
Poetry,
as poetic idea, 204-205
as verbal music, 199-204
dramatic, 198
epic, 198
lyrical, 196, 200, 205
material of, 194
meter in, 201
musical element in, 200
narrative, 198
nature of, 196-218
Psalms as, 200
rhythm in, 201
substance of, 198, 205
Preparation, as stage in creative proc-
ess, 54-55
227
Index of Subjects
Psalms, as poetry, 200
Psychical Distance, as theory of
beauty, 138-139
Release,
art as, 153-157
need for, 152
Significant Form, as theory of beauty,
136-138
Sonnet, as poetry, 205
Talent, nature of musical, 75-80
Temperament,
artistic, 74
Temperament,—Contsnued
genius and, 92-96
nature of, 93-94
Thought, in xsthetic experience, 153-
155
Tone Inflection, factors in, 79
Tone Production, factors in, 78-79
Tone Quality, factors in, 79
Tones, appeal of, 204
Verbal Arts,
material of, 196
richness of, 192
Words, melodic sequence in, 199, 202
EE SesTE ESTE ESTe es esta eStores ese ese ectene®
INDEX OF AUTHORS QUOTED
Aiken, Conrad, 2
Anderson, Sherwood, 85-87
Amold, Matthew, 202
Auer, Leopold, 75, 77, 78
Balfour, A. J., 148
Balzac, Honoré de, 60-61
Barrie, J. M., 64, 67-68
Beadle, R. C., 25
Bell, Clive, 1, 136, 182-183
Bent, Silas, 25
Bingham, W. V., 43-44
Browning, Robert, 57, 63, 188-189,
193, 198, 201, 207
Bullough, Edward, 138
Burns, Robert, 83-84
Butcher, S. H., 146, 147
Byron, G. G. N. Lord, 197
Carlyle, Thomas, 83, 158
Coleridge, S. T., 59
Corley, Don, 25
Craven, Thomas, 1-2
Croce, Benedetto, 142
Davidson, John, 96
Dell, Floyd, 24
Dickerman, Don, 24
Einstein, Albert, 126
Elman, Mischa, 77
Emerson, Ralph W., 105-106
Fauré, Elie, 102-104
Flaubert, Gustave, 115
Fletcher, John G., 42-43
Fry, Roger, 92-93, 184, 186-187
Galsworthy, John, 124
Gibran, Kahlil, 95
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6/7,
105, 130
Graves, Robert, 66
Gray, Thomas, 202
Grillparzer, Franz, 41-42
Gumey, Edmund, 160-161, 168, 169
Hanslick, Eduard, 162, 167, 168
Heine, Heinrich, 95
Henley, W. E., 64
Jacobson, Arthur C., 99-100
James, William, 164
Jobnson, Samuel, 158
Keats, John, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56-57,
129, 200, 208, 209, 210, 212, 216
Lamb, Charles, 158
Lawrence, D. H., 82
Lee, Vernon, 158-159, 172, 173
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 30
Lipps, Theodor, 143
Longfellow, Henry W., 97
Lowell, Amy, 44-45
Lowes, J. L., 16, 54, 55
Ludwig, Emil, 94
Markham, Edwin, 32-33
Masefield, John, 72
Mill, J. S., 16
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 64
Milton, John, 106
Murry, J. M., 46, 47, 48, 49, 50-52
Myers, C. S., 170, 171-172, 174
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 69-70
Ortmann, Otto, 161, 162, 169
Pater, Walter, 2, 147, 176, 184, 185
Phelps, Phelps, 25
Plato, 99, 125, 212, 214-215
Poe, Edgar A., 39
Pope, Alexander, 66
Puffer, Ethel, 145
Reed, L. C. M., 25
Rolland, Romain, 149-150
Russell, Bertrand, 151
Russell, George, 69
Santayana, George, 139
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 107-109, 148,
155
229
Index of Authors Quoted
Shakespeare, William, 43, 140, 199 Whistler, James M., 187-188
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 32 Whitman, Walt, 32
Sloan, Mrs. John, 24 Wilenski, R. H., 181, 182
Stevenson, R. L., 16 Wordsworth, William, 57, 68-69, 150,
Stout, Rex, 25 202
Sutherland, B. B., 25
Sydney, Sir Philip, 56 Yeats, William B., 68
Young, Art, 24
Tennyson, Alfred, 199 Ysaye, Eugene, 78
Thoreau, Henry D., 156
Twain, Mark, 4 Zweig, Stefan, 84
454 230
71 13 AA A 30 :
_-
—