“Truths of sound,” in the sense that Ruskin speaks of “truths of form” and “truths of color,” are not tolerated in music. To attain certain effects, dramatic in character, imitations of sounds in nature are sometimes introduced, but sparingly, and unless with great skill the effect is disagreeable to even the uneducated ear, and if pressed too far it becomes grotesque.
One art is like unto another, and what are really “truths” in one are “truths” in another. It is immaterial whether the sense of hearing, sight, or touch is appealed to; it does not matter whether it is a composition of sound, of color, of line, or of form that is under consideration, the fundamental principles of the art are the same; and one of the fundamental propositions is: imitation is fatal to pure art.
It is the business of art to improve on nature, to take the raw materials nature furnishes—her forces, her forms, her lines, her colors, her lights and shadows, her sounds, her odors, her flavors—and produce from them harmonious and agreeable effects unknown to nature.
Whistler has said:
“The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree or flower or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait-painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day,—to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colors to treat a flower as his key, not as his model.”[42]
Art begins with “truths,” in the Ruskin sense, and flowers in “harmonies,” in the Whistler sense. It begins with the concrete, with imitation, with fidelity to natural effects, and it develops by a process of abstraction until it attains the chaste perfection of a Greek temple or a Beethoven symphony.
Nature is never left entirely behind, and some arts are more dependent upon her than others; but, generally speaking, the more abstract the art the higher it is; the purer and freer it is from imitation or suggestion of natural effects, the nobler its attainment. Because poetry and music are almost entirely independent of nature and natural effects, do they as arts, from one point of view, outrank sculpture and painting.
Ruskin, of course, was by no means blind to these considerations, and when he talked of “truths of form” and “truths of color” he did not mean literal imitation, but he did mean the fidelity of a draughtsman, of a man whose eye and mind were on the thing or effect before him; and his great work is one long attempt to show that Turner in his brilliant and fanciful compositions was still clinging close to nature, that he painted rocks and trees and clouds and sunlight as they really were, and more beautifully than any man before or since.
All of which goes to show that Turner was not a colorist in the sense Whistler was.
The one used color as a means, the other as an end. To the one color, like line, or like black and white, was incidental to his composition—the composition, the conception, the dream, the fancy,—in short, the subject, being all important. To the other harmonies in color was the end in view, almost to the exclusion in some of the nocturnes of line and of form.