"The cherry trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume.
The cherry trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)
And there they say, when dawn is high, and all the world's a blaze of sky,
The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song for London."
Apart from all considerations of meaning, set the easy fluent grace of this lyric over against the march and majesty of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
"He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on."
Expression. The objects of art, as we have seen, are interesting and attractive in themselves, for the material of which they are formed, and for the form which the artist has given them. But they are interesting in another and possibly as important a way: they are instruments of expression. That is, a painting is something more than an intrinsically interesting disposition of line and color, a statue something more than an exquisite or sublime chiseling of marble, a poem more than a rhythmic combination of the music of words. All of these are expressive. Something in their form is associated with something in our past experience. Thus, as James somewhere suggests, "a bare figure by Michelangelo, with unduly flexed joints, may come somehow to suggest the moral tragedy of life." Something in the face of an old man painted by Rembrandt may recall to us a similar outward evidence of inner seriousness, wistfulness, and resignation which we have ourselves beheld in living people. And we clearly value the poems of a Wordsworth, a Milton, a Matthew Arnold, not solely for the magnificent form and music of their words, but also for the sober beauty of their meaning. We may come to appreciate even the highly immediate sensuous and formal pleasure of music for the reverie or rapture into which by suggestion it throws us. "Expression may, therefore, make beautiful by suggestion, things in themselves indifferent, or it may come to heighten the beauty which they already possess."
The objects of art may be appreciated chiefly either for their material and form, or for the values which they express. In some cases the actual object may be beautiful; sometimes the beauty may lie almost wholly in the image, emotion, or idea evoked. "Home, Sweet Home," for example, may be plausibly held to win admiration rather for the sentimental associations which it evokes in the singer or hearer than for its verbal or melodic beauty. The enjoyment which people without any musical gifts, out on a camping or canoeing trip, experience from singing a rather cheap and frayed repertory is obviously for sentimental rather than for æsthetic satisfaction. Similarly, we may cherish the mementos of a lost friend or child, not for their intrinsic worth, but for the tenderness of the memories they arouse. The situation is delicately described in Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue":
"The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands,
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair,
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there."
Some objects of art may indeed become beautiful almost completely through their expressiveness. There are certain poets whose music is raucous and who make little appeal through clarity of form. These survive almost completely by virtue of the persistent strength and enduring sublimity of the ideas which they express. Much of Whitman may be put in this class, and also much of Browning. Similarly a sculptor may not captivate us by the fluent beauty of his marble, but by the power and passion which his crude mighty figures express. In such cases we may even come to regard what, from a purely formal point of view, is unlovely, as a thing of the most extreme beauty. Even the roughness in such direct revelations of strength, may come to be regarded as elements of the beautiful. And where massiveness of effect does not suffice to retrieve a work of art from its essential crudities, we may still come to accept it as beautiful, as it were, in intention, and for what comes to be regarded as its essence, namely, the idea or emotion it expresses. We forgive the imperfections of form as we forgive the stammerings and stutterings of persons whose broken sayings are yet full of wisdom.
Usually even where the object, emotion, or idea expressed is beautiful, we demand certain formal and material elements of beauty. A telegram may convey the very apex of felicity, yet be not at all felicitous in its form or in the music of its words. If in such cases, we speak of beauty, the term is altogether metaphorical and imputed; we are using it in the same analogical sense as when we speak of a "beautiful operation" or a "beautiful deed"; it is a moral rather than an æsthetic term. We may find the letter of a friend expressive of the gentleness, fidelity, and charm that have endeared him to us, but unless these have attained sufficiently clear and explicit form and determinate unmistakable music, the letter will have a meaningful beauty only in the light of the peculiar relation existing between us and the writer. From an impartial æsthetic point of view, the epistle can only by affectionate exaggeration be called beautiful.
But the arts, through their beauty of form, may present pleasingly objects, emotions, ideas, not in themselves beautiful or pleasing. The clearest case of this kind is tragedy, where we may enjoy at arm's length and through the medium of art, experiences which would in the near actualities of life be only unmitigated horror. Refracted through the medium of poetry and drama, they may appear beautiful pervasively and long.