CHAPTER VII.—THE ARTIST AND HIS REALM.
The Divine Attributes the base of all true Art.
Aristotle teaches that: 'The object of the poet is not to conceive or treat the True as it really happened, but as it should have happened. The essential difference between the poet and historian is not that the one speaks in verse, the other in prose, for the work of Herodotus in verse would still be a history; that is, it would still relate what had actually occurred, while it is the province of a poem to detail that which should have taken place.' Thus the human soul exacts in the finite creations of the poet that justice which it ever divines, but cannot always see, because the end passes beyond its present vision, in the varying dramas of human destiny written in the Book of the Infinite God.
Carefully keeping in mind that the end of such divine dramas is not here, we see that, in accordance with the above views of Aristotle, the true is not that which really occurs, but that which our feelings and intellect tell us ought to occur. The actually occurring, the Real, has always been confounded with the abstractly true, but they are very different things. Virtue, morality, such as revealed by Christianity, and confirmed by reason, are certainly true; but in relation to that which is, to the real, the actual, what man has ever yet succeeded in realizing the pure, high model set forth in the Gospel? In accordance with the theory that the Actual is the true, the nature of a saintly hero, a self-abnegating martyr, would not be a true nature; while the fact is, it alone is true to the purposes of its creation.
Sophocles, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Fra Angelico, etc., etc., did not mean by truth in the arts, the pure and simple expression of that which really is, but the expression of that which is rarely found in the actual, but is suggested by it. Aquinas makes an acute distinction between the intellect passive, which merely receives impressions from without, and the intellect active, which reasons upon and draws inferences from them. The senses can only give or know the individual; the active intellect alone conceives the universal. Our eyes perceive a triangle; but as we have this perception in common with the brutes, it cannot raise us above their level; and to take our rank as intelligences, as men, we must rise from the mere perception of the individual triangle to the general idea of triangularity. Thus it is the power of generalizing which marks us as men; and the senses have in reality nothing to do with the internal operation; they but receive the impressions, and convey them to the active intellect. Thus to the impressions given by the senses of finite things to the passive mind, the active intellect adds the idea of infinity. The eager soul, always longing for the infinite, the absolute, then seeks to invest all with that perfection which it divines in the Maker of all; the possibility of which conception of perfection is added or attached by the Creator to the Real, as a supersensuous gift to those made in His own image. Such conceptions live ever firm and fair in the charmed world of the artist, for his world is the Realm of pure Ideas.
Much may be quoted in proof of this view. Cicero says:
'When Phidias formed his Jupiter, he had no living model before his eyes, but having conceived an idea of perfect beauty in his soul, he labored only to imitate it, to produce it in the marble without change.'
Raphael says:
'Having found no model sufficiently beautiful for my Galatea, I worked from a certain Idea which I found in my own mind.'
Fra Angelico furnishes a striking example of working from images found in the soul. He was an artist of very devout character, early devoting himself and his art to God, saying: Those who work for Christ, must dwell in Christ. Always, before commencing a picture which was to be consecrated to the honor of God, he prepared himself with fervent prayer and meditation, and then began in humble trust that 'it would be put into his mind what he ought to delineate;' he would never deviate from the first idea, for, as he said, 'that was the will of God.' This he said not in presumption, but in faith and simplicity of heart. So he passed his life in imaging his own ideas, which were sent to his meek soul by no fabled muse, but by that Spirit 'that doth prefer before all temples the upright heart and pure;' and never before or since was earthly material worked up into soul, nor earthly forms refined into spirit, as under the hands of this devout painter. He became sublime through trusting goodness and humility. It was as if Paradise had opened upon him—a Paradise of rest and joy, of purity and love, where no trouble, no guile, no change could enter; and if his celestial creations lack force, we feel that before these ethereal beings, power itself would be powerless; his angels are resistless in their soft serenity; his virgins are pure from all earthly stain; his redeemed spirits in meek rapture glide into Paradise; his martyrs and confessors are absorbed in devout ecstasy. Well has he been named Il Beato e Angelico, whose life was participate with the angels even in this world. Is it not clear that Fra Angelico had found the Realm of the Artist; the fair and happy clime of the Ideal?
Our readers must not confound the ideal with the imaginary: the ideal is rather that which the real requires to invest it with that beauty which it would have possessed had the spirits of Death and sin never thrown their dark shadows over God's perfect work. Let not the poet fear the reproach that his characters are too ideal; if harmoniously constructed, but true in the higher sense, such reproach is praise.
Man rises spontaneously from the perception of the finite beauty of creatures to the conception of the sovereign beauty of the Creator, which idea has indeed its first condition in the perception of the senses; but it passes on until it extends its sphere through all our faculties, all our moral life, until the distant vision of Absolute Beauty attracts us from the limited sphere of the senses to the realm of the ideal. Thus the artist, that he may appease the insatiate thirst for Absolute Beauty, which ever pursues him, strives to bring down upon earth the divine but veiled images, which he beholds in that fair clime.
Every work of art implies three acts of the intellect: an act, by which the artist conceives the pure idea, the soul of his creation; an act, by which he conceives or invents the form in which he is to incarnate this idea, the body of his creation; and, lastly, a conception of the relations between the pure idea and its material form, the rendering of the body a fit vehicle and indwelling-place for the soul. Three acts—but an artist of genius produces the three simultaneously; consequently a marvellous life and unity mark all his works: an artist of mere talent must be contented simply with the production of new combinations of form, since Genius alone can create artistic soul; while the assiduous student, without any peculiar natural gift, is capable of the third act, as it is only an intellectual exercise in which the scientific principles of art are skilfully applied to given forms.
Artists are frequently considered as deficient in the faculty of Reason, whereas no one was ever a great artist without possessing it in a high degree, and mankind are rapidly becoming aware of this fact. It is true they often jump the middle terms of their syllogisms, and assume premises to which the world has not yet arrived; but time stamps their rapid deductions as invincible, for genius dwells in the Realm of the Ideal: the realm, not of contingent and phenomenal actualities, but of eternal truths. 'For the ideal is destined to transform man and the world entire into its own image; and in this gradual and successive transformation consists the whole progressive history of humanity.'
Genius discerns the true and beautiful in itself, in the world of ideas, in God.
Talent lies on a lower level. It is the power of manifesting to men, whether by words, sounds, or plastic signs, the ideas already suggested by genius, or found by the reasoning faculties.
Genius is intuitive and creative—talent, reflective and acute.
Shakespeare was a poet of unequalled genius—Milton, of unrivalled talent.
Chopin is a composer of profound genius—Mendelssohn, of highly cultivated talent.
Madame de Stäel was a woman of genius—Miss Edgeworth, one of talent.
Elizabeth Barrett is a poet of genius—Tennyson, of talent.
Genius descends from the Idea to the Form—from the invisible to the visible: talent mounts from the visible to the invisible.
Genius holds its objects with and by the heart; talent seizes and masters them through the understanding. Genius creates body, soul, and fitness; talent combines new forms for the immortal souls already created by genius.
Taste, in its highest grade, ranks above talent, and stands next to genius; nay, it is sometimes known as receptive genius. It is the faculty of recognizing the Beautiful in the world of thought, art, and nature; in words, tones, forms, and colors. Taste is a higher faculty than is generally supposed. Genius and Taste are the Eros and Anteros of art. Without his brother, the first would remain ever a child. Taste is that innate and God-given faculty which at once perceives and hails as true, ideas, which it, however, has not the power to discover for itself. It should be educated and carefully fostered; but no amount of cultivation will give it where not already in existence, for it is as truly innate as genius itself.
In its lowest form, it is the comprehension of the scientific principles of art, and the judging of artistic works in accordance with scientific rules.
What is known as tact, is a curious social development of the same faculty. Taste is the child of the mind and soul; tact, of the soul and heart. Both are incommunicable.
The word taste is frequently misapplied. Thus a man, with what is blunderingly called a classical taste, is incapable of aught but the classic; that is to say, he recognizes in a new work that which makes the charm of an old one, and pronounces it worthy of admiration. Put the right foot of an Apollo forward, instead of the left, and call it Philip of Pokanoket, and he will fall into ecstasies over a work at once so truly national and classic. He would have stood dumb and with an untouched heart, before the Apollo, fresh from the chisel of the sculptor. Such men have graduated at Vanity Fair, and are the old-clothesmen of art.
Thus the men of talent are almost invariably recognized and crowned in their own days; because they always deal with ideas in a measure already familiar to the multitude. But, alas for the sensitive child of genius! The bold explorer of untrodden paths must cut away the underbrush that others may follow him; he must himself create the taste in the masses, by which he is afterward to be judged. His bold, daring, and original conceptions serve only to dazzle, confuse, and blind the multitude; and as it requires time to understand them, to read their living characters of glowing light, the laurel wreaths of appreciation and sympathy, which should have graced his brow and cheered his heart, too often trail their deathless green in vain luxuriance round the chill marble covering the early grave of a broken heart. Ah, friends! Genius demands sympathy in its impassioned creations; loving and laboring for humanity, it exacts comprehension, at least, in return. Yet how very difficult it is for an artist to win such comprehension! And, by a strange fatality, the more original his compositions, the greater the difficulty. He must amuse the men of the senses; satisfy the precision of the men of the schools; and succeed in rendering intelligible to the uncultured masses the subtile links of ethereal connection which chain the finite, the relative of his compositions, to the Infinite, the Absolute.
For it is a pregnant fact, with regard to the masses, that only so far as they can be made to feel the connection of things with the Absolute, can they be induced to appreciate them. For instance, tell them that the stars attract in the direct ratio of their masses, in inverse ratio to the squares of the distance, and they may almost fail to understand you; but tell them, in the words of the Divine Book, so marvellously adapted to their comprehension, that 'the stars declare the glory of God,' and you are at once understood. Tell them they ought to love one another, because 'they are members of the same spiritual body'—and, although, in this concise statement, you have declared to them the internal constitution of the moral world, revealed the inner meaning of the laws of order, of social harmony, of their own destiny, and of the progress of the race—you may utterly fail in awakening their interest. But show them a Being who lived for this truth, whose life was one of sacrifice and abnegation, who died for its manifestation—they are immediately touched, interested, because you have left the unsympathetic region of abstract formulas; you have given law a visible, palpitating, feeling, suffering, and rejoicing Body—you awaken their love, their gratitude—they adore their godlike Brother, and now feel themselves members of the one spiritual body.
It is this very possibility, on a lower plane, of thus clothing his thoughts with a visible body, which gives the artist an advantage over the man of science, who presents the formula of the law with the aid of the contingent finite idea, but without connecting it with its First Cause. Confining itself to the limits of the thing examined, science tries to explain the finite rationale of its being; while art gives its formula by the aid of a material sign, a form or body, which contains or suggests both limits of its double existence, viz.: the finite and the infinite. For the true artist always connects the relative with the Absolute, the second cause with the First; in the finite he seeks the Infinite—therefore he finds mystic and hidden truths in essential harmony with the soul of man. He is always returning to unity. The man of science, on the contrary, always beginning with the variable and contingent facts of this world, is often lost in the wildering whirl of the ever-moving and unceasing variety around him, finding it hard to link his widely severed facts with the Supreme Unity, which gives to all its reason for being, its true worth. Variety and Unity—the created and the Creator!
It is almost universally believed that there is more truth in science than in poetry—a vulgar error refuted both by reason and common sense. Poetry, being the expression of the necessary with the Absolute, must, in consequence, be nearer truth than science, which has, for the most part, its starting point in contingent, variable, and fugitive facts, and either succeeds in seizing in an uncertain manner or fails to seize at all the one Idea imbosomed in such a multitudinous array of facts. The whole creation is but the visible expression of the laws of our unseen God: the man of science mounts from the visible fact to the unseen Idea, while the poet descends from the idea to the fact, thus humbly imitating the work of creation.
It was man who introduced disorder into the finite: regenerated through the incarnation of the Divine, he must labor with all his powers to restore it to its pristine order. He must remodel the physical world by his industry, and task his intellect in the paths of science, that the truths of nature may be developed, that the well-being of his body, his material nature may be properly cared for: by his courage and endurance he must alleviate all wrongs, and set free the oppressed; he must elevate his soul and ennoble his heart by a grateful attention to his religious duties; he must increase and multiply his happy and helpful relations with his brother men by a faithful and devout culture of the fine arts.
The Beautiful does not address itself principally to the senses; but, by its exhibition of eternal laws, through them to the soul, for the manifestation of the Divine attributes is the mystic Heart of all true Beauty.'
To give an example of the different appeals made by science and by art, let us open alternately the pages of the poet and savant, let us take some familiar thing, for instance, a common flower, and see what they will tell us of its character, relations, and worth. The botanist notes the distinctions of the flower, that his herbarium may be increased—the poet, that he may make them vehicles of expression, of emotion. The savant counts the stamens, numbers the pistils, delineates the leaves, marks the manner of growth, classifies, affixes a name, and is satisfied;—the poet studies the whole character of the plant, considering each of its attributes as a vehicle of expression, an ethical lesson; he notes its color, he seizes on its lines of grace or energy, rigidity or repose, remarks the feebleness or vigor, the serenity or tremulousness of its hues, observes its local habits, its love or fear of peculiar places, associating it with the features of the situations it inhabits, and the ministering agencies necessary to its support. It becomes to him a living creature, with histories written on its leaves, and passion breathing in its tremulous stems. He associates and identifies it with the history and emotions of humanity. Feeling that even these fragile flowers are symbolic of a moral world, he crowns the bride with white roses, orange buds, or snowy myrtle wreaths, to typify that innocence and chastity are essential to a love that is to last as long as life endures. He wreathes the redeemed with undying amaranth, unfading palms, to symbolize that their meek triumph is for eternity; while he places in the hands of the angels the sculptured chalice of the snowy lily, with its breath of incense and stamens of molten gold, as an imperfect type of the perfect purity, sweet peace, and glorious golden splendor of the Heavenly City.
The pages of the poets are full of beautiful lessons and tender illustrations drawn from the fragile flowers. We cite Lowell's lines to one of our most common flowers: