The most conspicuous faculty of an artist which arrests our attention when we direct it expressly upon the capacities implied in artistic productivity is the imagination. And we must be careful here not to confuse it with a visionary fancy which is wholly passive. The imagination creates.
(α) And, in the first place, we shall find that this creative activity carries with it in possession and endowment a peculiar power of grasping reality and the forms it presents, all that through the channels of alert eyes and ears imprints pictures of infinite variety caught from the external world upon the mind, and further implies an exceptionally retentive memory wherein to store up this varied world of innumerable reflections. The artist, therefore, in this initial stage of our analysis is not merely thrown back upon images of his own creation, but is rather compelled to turn aside from the dull level of ideals falsely so called and to boldly enter the fields of Nature and Life. To attempt art or poetry merely with fanciful ideas of our own is always a suspicious way of starting on our journey; for the artist must mould his creations from the abundance of his life and by no means from the overplus of abstract generalities. It is not, as in philosophy, thoughts, but the real external forms of what actually exists which furnishes the material for artistic production. In contact with this raw material to work upon the artist must feel thoroughly at home. He must have seen much, heard much, and stored away a great deal as well; and in illustration of this we almost invariably find that a great personality is distinguished by a capacious memory. All that interests mankind he will lay hold of, and the more profound his spirit the more it will enlarge the field of its interests in countless directions. This was the way in which we find the genius of Goethe first opened its wings, and throughout his life the circle of his spirit's restless horizon broadened and broadened. This peculiar gift of receptiveness, this interest in the comprehension of facts after their true definitions and colour, their steadfast adherence to the truth of experience is the first thing we look for in a great artist. And this accurate knowledge of the truth of form must be accompanied in equal measure by a proved acquaintance with the souls of men, the passions that rise in the heart, and everything that it yearns and strives for. And, in addition to this twofold armory of knowledge, he must understand yet further all the various ways that this world of the human soul expresses itself on the face of the reality which confronts his senses, transpiercing thus the outer veil.
(β) But, in the second place, this imaginative power is not exhausted with merely receiving that which is presented to the senses, or is inferred as the content of the human soul. The ideal work of art does not merely embrace the outward semblance of the inward spirit as clothed in the forms of its actual existence, but should rather succeed in manifesting the essential truth and reason of the real itself. This element of reason, as determined in the particular object the artist has selected, must not merely be pressed in his own consciousness, as an active influence, but must already have been reflected upon in that essential and rich significance which brings it into relation with the entire breadth and depth of reality. Without reflection no man can grasp fully the wealth that is in him, and it is consequently an inseparable feature of any great work of art that everything which attaches to it both as a whole and in its detail has been long and deeply weighed and thought out. No artistic work of real sterling value can be thrown off with any mere imaginative tour de force.[412] We do not, of course, suggest that the artist must therefore comprehend in the form of philosophical thought this essential core of reason in his experience; albeit such is the fundamental rock upon which religion no less than philosophy and art is based. Philosophy is by no means essential to his outfit; and, in fact, if he once begins to think about things as a philosopher, he busies himself with modes of thought which are diametrically opposed to that which should engage an artist's attention. For what the imagination undertakes to do and only to do is not to bring to consciousness this inner core of reason in the form of general propositions and conceptions, but to apprehend it clothed in the concrete form of actual existence and individuality. All that ferments within his life the artist must reproduce in the body and envisagement, whose connected picture and general outlines he has already assimilated from the world outside, making such so far subservient to his creative effort that they in their turn may participate in the truth of his own substance and enable him to crown it with complete expression. In this interfusion of an intelligible content with an embodiment received from actual existence the artist will avail himself of the ever wakeful circumspection of his reflective faculties no less than the deep resources of emotional life which leave the stamp of vitality on his work. It is consequently but one more sample of critical aberration to imagine that poems such as the Homeric were introduced to our poet in his sleep. Without intelligent alertness, division, and distinctions of each part as related to the whole, an artist will be unable to assert his mastery over any form whatsoever that he may wish for; only fools are of the opinion that the genuine artist does not in the least know what his hands and senses are about.
Moreover, the concentration of the artist's emotional life on each aspect of his work is also as necessary to its success as the concentration of his mind. For it is mainly through the impression of emotion, which permeates and gives a vital colour to the entire work, that the artist asserts his claim to the substance and embodiment of his creation as a part of his own spiritual substance, as something he, a given personality, may peculiarly call his own. For the external aspect of his work, the mere picture of it as we may say, tends rather to place us outside it and apart; it is the emotional energy it expresses which primarily unites it with affinity to our very souls. Only when thus understood shall we be able to realize the truth that an artist must not merely have much looked about him in the world and assimilated a rich knowledge both of its outward show and the very substance of its life, but, further, must himself have experienced many things and great things, things that have moved him to the quick and left their life-roots in his own heart and spirit—he must, as we say, have "gone through much" and "lived abundantly"—before he will find himself able to build from his stores in the concrete types of his art something approaching Life's unsounded repletion. And this will at once explain and justify the bluster and ferment of genius in its youth, as amply reflected in the lives of Goethe and Schiller. But only the age of maturity and gray hairs will bring us the perfect work of art in all its rounded ripeness[413].
(b) Talent and Genius
This productive activity of the imagination by means of which the artist gives, by a process of elaboration to that which is essentially rational in its nature, a real embodiment, a creation more his own than anything else—this is what is usually summarized as genius and talent.
(α) We have already drawn attention to those characteristics which are most obviously referable to genius. Genius is the general capacity of creating a genuine example of fine art no less than the energy implied in the execution and elaboration of the same. Moreover, this capability and the power which goes with it is essentially the property of a human soul; that is to say, self-conscious individuality alone is able to create in this sense that a spiritual creation of this quality is just what it sets before itself to produce. Critics, intent on closer definition, are wont to distinguish sharply between genius and talent. And, in fact, they are not absolutely the same things, although it is necessary to find them united in the artist who would give us artistic work of the highest class. To be more exact, Art, in so far as it generally becomes a particular art, and is exemplified for us in the real and definite appearance of its products, requires various accomplishments appropriate to the peculiar modes of its realization. Such forms of executive versatility we may call with propriety talent, as we may say that anyone possesses a talent for perfect playing on the violin, or anyone else for singing. But a mere talent for this or that can only effect for us anything really good in the, so to speak, insulated nooks and corners of art[414]; it moreover itself requires for its true perfection something of more universal art-capacity as also that soul-animation, something more which is essentially the hall-mark of genius. Talent, in short, without the vital spark of genius, never gets much beyond a purely mechanical facility.
(β) It is also an opinion very commonly held that superior talent and genius are inborn. Here again we must distinguish; for if there is a sense in which this is true, from another point of view it is equally mistaken. No doubt every man, by virtue of his humanity, receives at his birth the potential gifts of religion, thought, and science. In other words he would not strictly be a man if he did not already possess a capacity to grasp the idea of a Supreme Being, and generally to become the subject of a thinking consciousness. All that he requires to gain these things, in addition to the fact of his human birth, are education, culture, and perseverance. With art, however, the matter stands differently. Art requires specific aptitude[415], in which unquestionably natural endowment plays an essential part. As, that is to say, beauty is itself the Idea realized in that which is apprehended as real by the senses, and a work of art embodies the workings of Spirit in a form of existence immediately cognized by the eye and the ear, in the same way the artist must discover and embody the content of his art not in the exclusively spiritual form of thought, but within the sphere of sensuous perception and feeling, and indeed as creator in actual relation to a given sensuous material and within the limits of the same. This artistic creativeness consequently encloses within itself, as art does throughout, the aspect of immediacy envisaged with the directness of Nature's own creations, and it is this appearance, which the individual is unable to evolve from himself, but has to find it, if he finds it at all, as immediately presented to him. Herein lies the significance of the statement, and herein alone, that genius and talent are innate.
In much the same way the several arts adapt themselves as by a kind of natural affinity to particular nations. Song and melody are, we may almost say, the birth-gift of an Italian; with our northern peoples, on the contrary, music[416] and the opera, though seriously cultivated and with great success, are as far from being a real home growth as the orange trees. The Greeks are conspicuous for the native and elaborate beauty of their epic poetry, and most of all for the unique perfection of their sculpture. The Romans never possessed an art that was in any strict sense exclusively their own. All that grew into blossom on their soil was transplanted from the gardens of Greece. The art whose growth has the widest natural range is that of poetry; and the reason of this is that in it we require least to draw upon a sensuous vehicle for its expressed presentment. Within the province of poetry the folk-song is most of all native to a people and inseparably yoked with their natural conditions. For this very reason the folk-song breaks into blossom even in times of the rudest culture and for the most part retains the unconscious simplicity of Nature herself. Of this Goethe himself is an example. Though he produced works in every type of poetical expression his first songs still go deepest and carry least dust from the study. In them, too, there is least the flavour of culture. The latter-day Greek is still a living witness to a people whose native gift it is both to write poetry and sing. Fauriel has published a collection of modern Greek songs, taken for the most part just as women, nurses, and school-girls were heard singing them, who could not for the world understand what he found so wonderful in them. And this is a good illustration of the way that we find Art and its specific appearance associate itself with a particular national type. In the same way the art of improvization is more than anywhere else the native growth of Italy and exemplified there with quite extraordinary talent. An Italian will even to-day improvize for you a five-act drama, and not a word of it is committed to memory; all grows up out of his experience of human passions and situations and the deeply-excited inspiration of the moment. As an example we mention the fact that a certain poor improvizer after rhapsodizing in this way for a considerable time, and then finally trudging off on his round to collect his pence from the bystanders in a battered hat, was still in such a fume of poetic frenzy that he could not bring his declamations to a stop, waved about in fact so lustily with his arms and hands that in the end all the money he had begged was shaken to the winds.
(γ) It is, thirdly[417], a characteristic of genius that it should possess, and indeed it is a part of this natural endowment[418], facility in creating that which it is impelled to create, and in adapting itself to the technical requirements of all the subsidiary aspects of artistic work. We talk, for instance, of the fetters with which the verse, measure, and rhyme shackle a poet; or, when referring to a painter, of the endless difficulties that draughtsmanship, knowledge of tints, chiaroscuro, and the rest fling in the way of invention and execution. Unquestionably a long course of study is a necessary condition of success in all the arts, a perseverance that never tires, a facility that is continually assisted by repetition; the greater the native strength, however, of the genius or superior gift, and the richer its resources the less it will feel the weight of its effort in securing all the necessary accomplishments involved in creative excellence[419]. A really first-rate artist has the lust of work born in him and an imperative impulse akin to any other natural want to give artistic form to his emotional and imaginative life that is in him. His emotional life and his ideas irresistibly run into this artistic mould; he finds as it were the instrument already within him made to the hand, so fitted to express his soul-life that all the pains it takes him to learn it are as nothing. A musician can thus unfold to us in his melodies the depths of all that stirs and moves his soul and only by this means. What he feels is at once wafted into melody, just as the life of a painter is impressed upon form and colour, or that of a poet is transmuted into the creations of his imagination, that poetry which clothes his ideas in the beauty and music of the written word. And this gift of vital form the artist does not merely possess as an imaginative power, a phantasy, an emotional impulse "that leaves not a wrack behind," but as a direct stimulus of feeling to active enterprise, as a gift, that is, of real executive accomplishment. Both of these aspects are united in the real artist. What springs to life in his imagination is immediately alert upon his mobile fingers, precisely as the sudden thought of our mind breaks into word from the tips, or as our most intimate thoughts, ideas, and emotions are reflected on the outward man and his demeanour. Genius of the real stamp, whenever and wherever found, is easily quit of the difficulties presented by the technical workshop; and indeed has found the most beggarly and apparently impracticable material to accept and embody as it pleased the inward shapes of imagination. No doubt the endowment which the artist finds as a direct gift to himself must be kept alive and alert by indefatigable recourse to it, but he must also possess naturally a practical power of immediate execution. Without this all the facility he may have acquired in imaginative conception will never produce an essentially creative work of art. The very notion of art demands of us that both things should go together hand in hand, the productive energy of the soul and its technical realization in the forms of art.