If some one had said to Mendelssohn, “I have just been in the woods and heard sounds that were just like some of your “Songs without Words,” Mendelssohn would have been surprised, and might well have replied, “Then, the birds are doing better.”
Concerning nature, Whistler said:
“That nature is always right is an assertion artistically as untrue as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent, even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong. That is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.
“This would seem, to even the most intelligent, a doctrine almost blasphemous. So incorporated with our education has the supposed aphorism become, that its belief is held to be part of our moral being; and the words themselves have, in our ear, the ring of religion. Still, seldom does nature succeed in producing a picture.”[44]
One should never confound art with nature; they are antithetical terms. There is no art in nature; there should be no nature in art. And what is art is not nature, and what is nature is not art.
Nature is the raw material, art is the finished product; and art should no more resemble nature than a cave resembles a house. And to the extent that art slavishly imitates nature is it of the cave-dwelling variety.
There is no color that is not found in nature. There is no combination of colors a hint of which cannot be found in nature. But it is the business of art to take the colors, accept the hints, and produce combinations and effects not found in nature.
It is not the business of the artist to paint anything as it is, but everything as he sees it.
Yet the public demand that a tree shall be reproduced as they see it,—that the picture shall be a substitute for the reality. Why not go to the window and look at the tree? For, as a tree, with its quivering leaves and the infinite play of light and shadow, it is more beautiful than any realistic photograph, drawing, or painting possibly could be. But to see the reflection of the tree in the depths of a human soul one must turn to art, to poetry, to music, or to painting. The reflection may not at all resemble the reality any more than Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” resembles the bird or the song of the bird; but it will be far more interesting and far more beautiful because a human expression.
The child’s mud-house and the boy’s snow-man are of greater concern to humankind than all the plains and mountains of the earth.