The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to Life

by Carleton Eldredge Noyes

BEFORE me is a little bowl of old Satsuma. As I look at it there wakens in me a responsive rhythm, and involuntarily my fingers move as if to caress its suave and lovely lines. The rich gold and mingled mellow browns of its surface pattern intricately woven are a gracious harmony and a delight. Gradually, as I continue to look on it, a feeling is communicated to me of the maker's own joy in his work; and the bowl, its harmonies and rhythms, and all that it expresses, become part of me. There it is, complete in itself, gathering up and containing within itself the entire experience. My thoughts, sensations, feelings do not go beyond the bowl.

Another time I am standing in the hall of the Academy in Florence. At the end of the corridor towers a superb form. I see that it is the figure of a youth. His left hand holds a sling drawn across his shoulder; his right arm hangs by his side, his hand grasping a pebble close to his thigh; calm and confident, his head erect, his strength held in leash waiting to be loosed, he fronts the oncoming of the foe. The statue is the presentation of noble form, and it wakens in me an accordant rhythm; I feel in myself something of what youthful courage, life, and conscious power mean. But my experience does not stop there. The statue is not only presentation but representation. It figures forth a youth, David, the Hebrew shepherd-boy, and he stands awaiting the Philistine. I have read his story, I have my own mental image of him, and about his personality cluster many thoughts. To what Michelangelo shows me I add what I already know. Recognition, memory, knowledge, facts and ideas, a whole store of associations allied with my previous experience, mingle with my instant emotion in its presence. The sculptor, unlike the potter, has not created his own form; the subject of his work exists outside of him in nature. He uses the subject for his own ends, but in his treatment of it he is bound by certain responsibilities to external truth. His work as it stands is not completely self-contained, but is linked with the outer world; and my appreciation of it is affected by this reference to extrinsic fact.

An artist is interested in some scene in nature or a personality or situation in human life; it moves him. As the object external to him is the stimulus of his emotion and is associated with it, so he uses the object as the symbol of his experience and means of expression of his emotion. Here, then, the feeling, to express which the work is created, gathers about a subject, which can be recognized intellectually, and the fact of the subject is received as in a measure separate from the feeling which flows from it. In a painting of a landscape, we recognize as the basis of the total experience the fact that it is a landscape, so much water and field and sky; and then we yield ourselves to the beauty of the landscape, the emotion with which the artist suffuses the material objects and so transfigures them. Into representative art, therefore, there enters an element not shared by the arts of pure form, the element of the subject, carrying with it considerations of objective truth and of likeness to external fact. Toward the understanding of the total scope of a picture or a statue, and by inference and application of the principles, toward the understanding of literature as well, it may help us if we determine the relation of beauty to truth and the function and value of the subject in representative art.

The final significance of a work of art is beauty, received as emotional experience. Nature becomes beautiful to us at the point where it manifests a harmony to which we feel ourselves attuned. At the moment of enjoyment we unconsciously project our personality into this harmony outside of us, identifying ourselves with it and finding it at that instant the expression of something toward which we reach and aspire. When we come consciously to reason about our experience, we see that the harmony external to us which we feel as the extension of ourselves does not stop with the actual material itself of nature, but emanates from it as the expression of nature's spirit. The harmony is a harmony of relations, made visible through material, and significant to us and beautiful in the measure that we respond to it.

It is the beauty of the object, its significance for the spirit, that primarily moves the artist to expression. Why one landscape and not another impels him to render it upon his canvas is not to be explained. This impulse to immediate and concrete utterance is inspiration. And inspiration would seem to be a confluence of forces outside of the individual consciousness or will, focused at the instant into desire, which becomes the urge to creation. "The mind in creation," says Shelley, "is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power rises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure." The artist does not say, "Lo, I will paint a landscape; let me find my subject!" The subject presents itself. There it is, by chance almost,—a sudden harmony before him, long low meadows stretching away to the dark hills, the late sun striking on the water, gold and green melting into a suffusing flush of purple light, a harmony of color and line and mass which his spirit leaps out to meet and with which it fuses in a larger unity. In the moment of contact all consciousness of self as a separate individuality is lost. Out of the union of the two principles, the spirit of man and the beauty of the object, is born the idea, which is to come to expression as a work of art.

But the artist is a mind as well as a temperament. Experience is a swing of the pendulum between the momentary ecstasy of immediate contact and the subsequent reaction upon the moment, which is consciousness of it. In order to make his vision actual, the artist rises out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. The landscape has compelled him; it is now he who must compel the landscape. To the shaping of his work he must bring to bear all his conscious power of selection and organization and all his knowledge of the capabilities and resources of his means. Art springs out of emotion; painting is a science. The artist's command of his subject as the symbol of his idea derives from the stern and vigorous exercise of mind. The rightness of his composition is determined by a logic more flexible, perhaps, but no less exacting than the laws of geometry. By the flow of his line and the disposition of his masses, the artist must carry the eye of the beholder along the way he wants it to travel until it rests upon the point where he wants it to rest. There must be no leaks and no false directions; there must be the cosmos within the frame and nothing outside of it. The principles of perspective have been worked out with a precision that entitles them to rank as a science. Color has its laws, which, again, science is able to formulate. These processes and formulas and laws are not the whole of art, but they have their place. The power to feel, the imaginative vision, and creative insight are not to be explained. But knowledge too, acquired learning and skill, plays its part, and to recognize its function and service is to be helped to a fuller understanding of the achievement of the artist.

Gifted with a vibrant, sensitive temperament, endowed with discriminating and organizing power of mind, equipped with a knowledge of the science and the mechanics of his craft, and trained to skill in manual execution, the artist responds to the impulse of his inspiration. His subject is before him. But what is his subject? A scene in nature furnishes him the objective base of his picture, but properly his work is the expression of what he feels. A storm may convey to different men entirely different impressions. In its presence one man may feel himself overwhelmed with terror. These wild, black skies piling in upon him, the hilltops that seem to race through the clouds, the swaying, snapping trees, the earth caught up in the mad grasp of the tempest, may smite his soul with the pitilessness of nature and her inexorable blind power. Another thrills with joy in this cosmic struggle, the joy of conflict which he has known in his own life, the meeting of equal forces in fair fight, where the issue is still doubtful and victory will fall at last upon the strong, though it is not the final triumph but the present struggle that makes the joy. In rendering the "subject" upon his canvas, by the manipulation of composition and line and mass and color, he makes the storm ominous and terrible, or glorious, according as he feels. The import of his picture is not the natural fact of the storm itself, but its significance for the emotions.

A work of representative art is the rendering of a unity of impression and harmony of relations which the artist has perceived and to which he has thrilled in the world external to him. He presents not the facts themselves but their spirit, that something which endows the facts with their significance and their power to stir him. As the meaning of nature to the beholder is determined by the effect it produces on his mind and temperament, so the artist, in the expression of this meaning, aims less at a statement of objective accuracy of exterior appearance than at producing a certain effect, the effect which is the equivalent of the meaning of nature to him. Thus the painter who sees beyond the merely intellectual and sensuous appeal of his subject and enters into its spirit, tries to render on his canvas, not the actual color of nature, but the sensation of color and its value for the emotions. With the material splendor of nature,—her inexhaustible lavish wealth of color, the glory of life which throbs through creation, the mystery of actual movement,—art cannot compete. For the hues and tones of nature, infinite in number and subtlety, the painter has only the few notes within the poor gamut of his palette. How can he quicken his dull paint with the life-beat of palpitating flesh, or the sculptor animate the rigid marble with the vibrations of vivid motion? But where nature is infinite in her range she is also scattering in her effects. By the concentration of divergent forces, art gains in intensity and directness of impression what it sacrifices in the scope of its material. Michelangelo uses as his subject David, the shepherd-boy; but the person, the mere name, does not signify. What his work embodies is triumphant youth, made visible and communicable. When Millet shows us the peasant, it is not what the peasant is feeling that the artist represents, but what Millet felt about him. The same landscape will be rendered differently by different men. Each selects his details according to the interest of his eye and mind and feeling, and he brings them into a dominant harmony which stands to him for the meaning of the landscape. None of the pictures is an accurate statement of the facts as they are, off there in nature; all are true to the integrating inner vision. The superficial observer sees only the accidents, and he does not distinguish relative importance. The artist, with quicker sensibilities and a trained mind, analyzes, discovers the underlying principle, and then makes a synthesis which embodies only the essential; he seizes the distinctive aspect of the object and makes it salient. There may be, of course, purely descriptive representation, which is a faithful record of the facts of appearance as the painter sees them, without any feeling toward them; here he works as a scientist, not as an artist. Merely imitative painting falls short of artistic significance, for it embodies no meaning beyond the external fact. It is the expressiveness of the object that the true artist cares to represent; it is its expressiveness, its value for the emotions, that constitutes its beauty.

To achieve beauty the representative artist bases his work upon the truth of nature. It is nature that supplies him with his motive,—some glimpse, some fragment, which reveals within itself a harmony. It may be a form, as a tree, a man, a mountain range, the race of clouds across the sky; it may be a color-harmony or "arrangement," in which color rather than form is the dominant interest, as with a landscape or an interior; it may be the effects of light, as the sunshine playing over golden haystacks, or the glint of light on metal, or the sheen of lovely fabrics. Out of the complex of interests and appeals which an object offers, what is the truth of the object? The truth of nature resides not in the accidents of surface but in the essential relations, of which the surface is the manifestation. A birch tree and an apple tree are growing side by side. Their roots strike down into the same soil, their branches are warmed by the same sun, wet by the same rains, and swept by the same winds. The birch tree is always lithe and gracious and feminine; the apple tree is always bent and sternly gnarled like the hand of an old man. The life-force which impels the tree to growth is distinctive to each kind. Within all natural objects, then, a crystal, a tree, a man, there is a shaping principle which determines their essential form. But no two individual apple trees are precisely alike; from the essential form of the tree there are divergences in the single manifestations. Though subject to accident and variation, however, every tree exhibits a characteristic, inviolate tendency, and remains true to the inner life-principle of its being. The "truth" of the apple tree is this distinctive, essential form, by virtue of which it is an apple tree and not some other kind, the form which underlies and allows for all individual variations. What the painter renders on his canvas is not the superficial accidents of some single tree, but by means of that, he seeks to image forth in color and form the tendency of all trees. The truth of an object presents itself to the imagination as design, for this organic, shaping principle of things, expressed in colored myriad forms throughout the endless pageantry of nature, is apprehended by the spirit of man as a harmony; and in the experience of the artist truth identifies itself with beauty.

The distinction between the accidental surface of things and the significance that may be drawn out of them is exemplified by the difference between accuracy and truth in representation. Accurate drawing is the faithful record of the facts of appearance as offered to the eye. Truth of drawing is the rendering in visible terms of the meaning and spirit of the object, the form which the object takes not simply for the eye but for the mind. A pencil sketch by Millet shows a man carrying in each hand a pail of water. The arms are drawn inaccurately, in that they are made too long. What Millet wanted to express, however, was not the physical shape of the arms, but the feeling of the burden under which the man was bending; and by lengthening the arms he has succeeded in conveying, as mere accuracy could not express it, the sensation of weight and muscular strain. In Hals' picture of the "Jester" the left hand is sketched in with a few swift strokes of the brush. But so, it "keeps its place" in relation to the whole; and it is more nearly right than if it had been made the centre of attention and had been drawn with the most meticulous precision. The hand is not accurate, but it is true. Similarly, size is an affair not of physical extent but of proportion. A figure six inches high may convey the same value as a figure six feet high, if the same proportions are observed. A statue is the presentation, not of the human body, but of the human form, and more than that, of what the form expresses. When I am talking with my friend I am aware of his physical presence detaching itself from the background of the room in which we are. But I feel in him something more. And that something more goes behind the details of his physical aspect. His eyes might be blue instead of brown, his nose crooked rather than straight; he might be maimed and disfigured by some mishap. These accidents would not change for me what is the reality. My friend is not his body, though it is by his body that he exists; the reality of my friend is what he essentially is, what he is of the spirit. A photograph of a man registers certain facts of his appearance at that moment. The eye and the mind of the artist discern the truth which underlies the surface; the artist feels his sitter not as a face and a figure, a mere body, but as a personality; and the portrait expresses a man.