Sometimes the artist achieves his emphasis by means not wholly agreeable to the medium which he is using. Many artists of great technical ability link human sympathies with an admirably interpretative mise-en-scène which carries out their vision. Nevertheless the picture that tells a story calls in adventitious aid. It is like the illustrated reading book of a child; by the child mind it is created, and to the child mind it appeals. It cannot express a clear intuition by a simple representation in a single medium, but uses two, appealing not only in pictorial symbols, but in dramatic as well, and the intuition itself is obscured by the process. Owing to this confusion of media and of intuition the result is unsatisfactory to minds more developed aesthetically, for reasons that we shall adduce later, while yet the double appeal makes the meaning more evident to the beginner. Again certain landscape artists of the second rank by insistence on simple elements of natural beauty, by emphasis, and by elimination of distracting ideas, open a new vision to minds hardly prepared yet for such intuition in face of the natural object. Add to this the half conscious yet acutely pleasurable process of following out the technical means by which the artist has impressed his intuition upon canvas, and we can understand the joy of looking at their pictures.
But where the artist’s vision goes deeper, where the reality is more clearly seen, and where in order to express this intuition, to represent it, and to bring out its less obvious harmony and order, a more sweeping process of elimination and abstraction is needed, the simple mind is unable to follow. Not everyone is at the stage to appreciate the subtle symphonies of Whistler, the bare simplicity of D. Y. Cameron, the rigorous certainty of Botticelli. The conventions and purposeful line of an early Japanese print; the vibrant light of the post-impressionist landscape artists; the wilful, obtrusive, almost harsh insistence of the cubist that you shall turn your mind away from curves that hitherto you have deemed essential, in order to grasp other truths, not only seem ugly—that is to say, meaningless—to the mind whose artistic perception is little developed, but may even distract it, in rebellious protest, from the truth the artist wishes to proclaim, though others further advanced find in some of their work a very high type of beauty. And, be it added, the artist himself fails in his expression if he overdoes the emphasis in such a way that his representation of the Reality becomes lopsided and inharmonious, as is too often the case. Further where he is not a creative artist at all, but a slavish imitator of a method not really his own, we are presented with the meaningless monstrosities that here and there defile the Salon des Indépendants—and other less catholic exhibitions! In some, too, the animal basis is the only intuition expressed, and art gobbles greedily at its mess of pottage.
Yet as a whole we have moved a long way from the animal expression of a need of its complementary animal. The whole world is related to us, and in that relation we find beauty. And beautiful as it is we find it very lovable, even though we cannot but feel that our love can never be satisfied since we can give nothing back.
Yet something we can give, though not to it—something that makes things clearer. In our minds we can give to this world a meaning, as itself subordinate, yet the necessary means of our self-realisation, and we can share this meaning with others. We find a meaning in life, and that meaning is fellowship. We find a meaning in nature, and that meaning dwells in the Creative Being of the God who is Love. Beauty, more clearly day by day, becomes for us the expression of Reality, and that Reality is the reciprocal relationship of persons. Religion gives one pathway of approach, Beauty another, but both join to form the highway of our God. There is more than room for beauty in religion; there is more than room for aesthetic in theology; there is an absolute need, if they are not to be in a measure inexpressive, lopsided, and therefore ugly. Our concept of Reality must be symmetrical, or fail of adequacy.
What is true of pictorial art is equally true of other forms. Style—the higher art of language—demands education before it can be appreciated. In literature again, the general public prefers Longfellow to Keats, The Passing of Arthur to A Death in the Desert, Ella Wheeler Willcox to the Divina Commedia. Henry James demands a more intimate appreciation of the spirit of man than does Dickens. In all these there is beauty—the expression of an intuition—but those who see furthest and most clearly have the smallest public. Most men cannot even follow where they lead, and few indeed are the pioneers.
Before we leave the question of literature and language, we may just glance at its development. This is comparatively an easy matter to understand. The warning, the expression of satisfaction, the mating-call are common among animals. The powers of communication and of speech develop with the development of self-consciousness. They are expressions of the relation between the self and its ‘others,’ and especially of the relation between the self and other selves. They carry the germs of understanding, and as they lead from the particular to the more general they bear in them the quality of the beautiful. The relations between the self and the other selves, and between the self and the environment, become more and more universalised. In speech they are communicated, but speech is transient. A more permanent record is required, and here again resort is had to symbolism, less generally intelligible, more esoteric, than the pictorial symbol, since there is no one universal language; the symbolism of written speech. Speech, however, is episodic and dramatic. It moves along with the march of events. So too with literature, for the most part. The Pictorial and Plastic arts represent beauty as static; yet they are not lifeless. Activity, movement, is implicit in them, while yet the beauty they express is restful, and has in it something of the quality of absoluteness and transcendence. Language, literature, drama are dynamic. In them beauty moves; immanent and unquiet at first sight; yet here too there is something that expresses the eternal meaning. Purpose moves to its fulfilment, and, while it moves, the end is in view. Nevertheless in pictorial art the static side is the most prominent, in linguistic the dynamic side. We may observe, however, that in order to counteract the transitoriness of purely episodic speech, recourse is had to visual symbolism as well. The graphic art aims at perpetuating the episode, and by doing so renders possible the development to which we shall immediately draw attention.
Now the untrained mind appreciates the dynamic aspect of literature, whether it be the originative mind or the mind of the reader. This explains the output and the popularity of the thrilling tale of adventure. At its lowest we find the Penny Dreadful. Through Stanley Weyman and Dumas we move towards Conrad and Meredith and Hardy, where the dynamic element is thrillingly present (as present it must be indeed even in the most quiet essays) but where it is subordinated to a clear vision of the permanent and eternal which we have mis-termed static. In poetry this truth is obvious. Even in drama, though our attention is distracted by the action, it is the chief quality if the drama is really great. In Sophocles, in Euripides, in Shakespeare; perhaps almost too consciously in Galsworthy, and Paul Claudel and Synge, for conscious art loses the sincerity of a first vision; it is not the episodic sequence that interests us, except from the point of view of technique. Our attention is focussed upon the motive, the fundamental intuition to which the dramatist is trying to give technical expression. Moreover in all the infinite variety of literary art the motive is the same. One definite intuition is expressed—that of relationship; relation between person and person, relation between person and machine, relation between person and some ever-ruling Order, be it Fate, Chance, or God also personal. It is the reality of personal inter-relationship that underlies all literature, be it love-poem, novel, or some drama of Fate in which personal relationship is overshadowed by the impersonal, or at least the unsympathetic; or else it is the one-sided relation of a person to a thing, as in descriptive science, which has only the beauty of order. But can we say that the intuition which the pictorial artist represents is the same as this? Hardly, unless the picture tells a story; and in so far as it does this we feel that the realm of pictorial art is invaded by an alien influence. It may at first sight seem surprising that art should not gain by the introduction of various intuitions of relation; that it does not, as a rule, is certain. All the arts overlap; we shall see the most marked example of this when we come to consider music and deal further with this point; but intrinsically each is peculiar in its scope and method.
Now it is worth while to observe that the longing aroused by the beauty of literature is rather different from that induced by pictures. It is less vague. Because literature deals with the relation between persons our attention is directed towards the persons we know—our longings and aspirations reach out consciously towards them and towards God. We think of particular people and our relation to them. Our creative longing is directed towards them, in active relation, or towards creative literary work of which, more or less consciously to ourselves they are the background. Moreover we always identify ourselves, in a greater or less degree, with one or more of the protagonists of the story; in them we suffer, we love, we adventure at second-hand. This phenomenon of identification, closely allied as it is to day-dreaming, has of late come much under the attention of psychoanalysts under the title of phantasy; a term covering all attempts to achieve through the imagination the satisfaction denied to us in actual life. For our present purpose this is only noteworthy as confirming the truth of our observation that in literary creation, whether at first or second hand, it is human relation—the relation of ourselves and others—that lies behind our intuition and its expression.
In some pictorial art this relation between persons, this personal touch, does not obtain. In landscape the artist’s intuition obviously deals with the relation of things to men—a relation much more onesided. Correspondent to this, we find our intuition and our longing far more vague, far more dissatisfied. There needs a higher knowledge of Reality to understand how man has relation to things. The intuition of this relation is generally expressed with far less understanding. Human relations may intrude, and we get the story-picture and the problem-picture. Moral relations may intrude, and we get the symbolic picture, such as those of Watts and Blake. Drama, myth and legend may intrude and we get the Ladies of Shallot, the Ledas, and the Calumnies of Apelles.
But pictorial art reaches its highest plane in the religious picture and the portrait. Have we not, here, the intrusion of the story in the first case; and in the second have we not the purely human relations between artist and sitter?