The essential significance of art, that art is revelation, is illustrated not only by painting but by the other arts as well. In music, to take but a single example, are present the same elements that constitute the appeal of pictures,—skill in the rendering, a certain correspondence with experience, and the power of imaginative interpretation of the facts of life. The music-hall performer who wins the loudest and heartiest applause is he who does the greatest number of pyrotechnic, wonderful things on the piano, or holds a high note on the cornet for the longest time. His success, as with the painter whose aim is to create illusion, rests upon men's instinctive admiration for the exhibition of skill. Again, as the imitative picture involves not only the display of dexterity, but also likeness to the thing represented and the consequent possibility of recognizing it immediately, so in the domain of music there is an order of composition which seems to aim at imitation,—the so-called "descriptive" music. A popular audience is delighted with the "Cats' Serenade," executed on the violins with overwhelming likeness to the reality, or with, the "Day in the Country," in which the sun rises in the high notes, cocks crow, horses rattle down the road, merrymakers frolic on the green, clouds come up in the horns, lightning plays in the violins, thunder crashes in the drums and cymbals, the merrymakers scatter in the whole orchestra, the storm passes diminuendo, and in the muted violins the full moon rises serenely into a twilight sky. Here the intention is easily understood; the layman cannot fail to recognize what the composer wanted to say. And as in the case of pictures which interest the beholder because he can translate their subject into the terms which are his own medium of expression, that is, words, so with descriptive music, broadly speaking, the interest and significance is literary and not musical. Still another parallel is presented. Just as those pictures are popular whose subjects lie within the range of familiar experience, such as cows by the shaded pool, or children playing, or whose subjects touch the feelings; so, that music is popular which is phrased in obvious and familiar rhythms such as the march and the waltz, or which appeals readily and unmistakably to sentiment and emotion. It is after the lover of music has traversed these passages of musical expression and has proved their imitations that he comes to seek in music new ranges of experience, unguessed-at possibilities of feeling, which the composer has himself sounded and which he would communicate to others. He is truly the artist only as he leads his auditors into regions of beautiful living which they alone and of themselves had not penetrated. For it is then that his work reveals.
Only such pictures, too, will have a vital meaning as reveal. The imitative and the iterative alike, that which adds nothing to the object and that which adds nothing to the experience of the beholder, though once pleasing, now fail to satisfy. The appreciator calls for something fuller. He wants to pass beyond the object, beyond his experience of it, into the realm of illumination whither the true artist would lead him. The development of appreciation, as the amateur has come to realize in his own person, is only the enlargement of demand. The appreciator requires ever fresh revelations of beauty. He discovers, too, that in practice the tendency of his development is in the direction of exclusion. As he goes on, he cares for fewer and fewer things, because those works which can minister to his ever-expanding desire of beauty must needs be less numerous. But these make up in largeness of utterance, in the intensity of their message, what they lack in numbers. Nor does this outcome make against a fancied catholicity of taste. The true appreciator still sees in his earlier loves something that is good, and he values the good the more justly that he sees it now in its right relation and apprehends its real significance. As each in its turn led him to seek further, each became an instrument in his development. For himself he has need of them no longer. But far from contemning them, he is rightly grateful for the solace they have afforded, as by them he has made his way up into the fuller meaning of art.
II
THE WORK OF ART AS SYMBOL
In the experience of the man who feels himself attracted to pictures and who studies them intelligently and with sympathy, there comes a day when suddenly a canvas reveals to him a new beauty in nature or in life. Much seeing and much thinking, much bewilderment and some disappointment, have taught him that in the appreciation of pictures the question at issue is not, how cleverly has the painter imitated his object, is not, how suggestive is the subject of pleasing associations; he need simply ask himself, "What has the artist conceived or felt in the presence of this landscape, this arrangement of line and color, this human face, that I have not seen and felt, and that he wants to communicate to me?"
The incident of the single canvas, which by its illuminating revealment first discloses to the observer the true significance of pictures, is typical of the whole scope of art. The mission of art is to reveal. It is the prophet's message to his fellow men, the apocalypse of the seer. The artist is he to whom is vouchsafed a special apprehension of beauty. He has the eye to see, the temperament to feel, the imagination to interpret; it is by virtue of these capacities, this high, transfiguring vision, that he is an artist; and his skill of hand, his equipment with the means of expression, is incidental to the great fact that he has somewhat to express that the common man has not. To his work, the manifestation of his spirit in material form, his perception made sensible, is accorded the name of art.
Art is expression. It is not a display of skill; it is not the reproduction of external forms or appearances; it does not even, as some say, exist for itself: it is a message, a means. To cry "Art for Art's sake!" is to converse with the echo. Such a definition but moves in a circle, and doubles upon itself. No; art is for the artist's sake. The artist is the agent or human instrument whereby the supreme harmony, which is beauty, is manifested to men. Art is the medium by which the artist communicates himself to his fellows; and the individual work is the expression of what the artist felt or thought, as at the moment some new aspect of the universal harmony was revealed to his apprehension. Art is emotion objectified, but the object is subordinated to the emotion as means is to an end. The material result is not the final significance, but what of spiritual meaning or beauty the artist desired to convey. Not what is painted, as the layman thinks, not how it is painted, as the technician considers, but why did the artist paint it, is the question which sums up the truth about art. The appreciator need simply ask, What is the beauty, what the idea, which the artist is striving to reveal by these symbols of color and form? He understands that the import of the work is the idea, and that the work itself is beautiful because it symbolizes a beautiful idea; its significance is spiritual. The function of art, then, is through the medium of concrete, material symbols to reveal to men whatever of beauty has been disclosed to the artist's more penetrating vision.
In order to seize the real meaning of art it is necessary to strip the word beauty of all the wrappings of customary associations and the accretions of tradition and habit. As the word is current in ordinary parlance, the attribute of beauty is ascribed to that which is pleasing, pretty, graceful, comely; in fine, to that which is purely agreeable. But surely such is not the beauty which Rembrandt saw in the filthy, loathsome beggar. To Rembrandt the beggar was expressive of some force or manifestation of the supreme universal life, wherein all things work together to a perfect harmony. Beauty is the essential quality belonging to energy, character, significance. A merely agreeable object is not beautiful unless it is expressive of a meaning; whatever, on the other hand, is expressive of a meaning, however shocking it may be in itself, however much it may fail to conform to conventional standards, is beautiful. Beauty does not reside in the object. No; it is the artist's sense of the great meaning of things; and in proportion as he finds that meaning—the qualities of energy, force, aspiration, life—manifest and expressed in objects do those objects become beautiful. Such was the conception of beauty Keats had when he wrote in a letter: "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." And similarly; "I can never feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse he sings:—
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."