Then comes in the painter, who copies the bed of the carpenter, and who is thus at two removes from Reality; art, in Plato’s view, being simply imitation, and therefore somewhat despicable.[176]
There are some minor, yet by no means trivial, reasons which might be given in answer to this objection; as, for instance, that art enables one to assemble together in small compass the expressions of a great variety of life not to be directly enjoyed, save at wide intervals of time and place. But the primary and fundamental reasons are our main concern here.
In the first place, the material world around us, or such portion of it as we are able to perceive, is not, as it stands, a pure expression of life. Holding as we do with Cleanthes in his majestic Hymn to Zeus that all things redundant have their place in the Whole, and that in it all things ugly have their beauty and all things hateful their share of love,[177] it is still true that the world as we see it presents us with a pell-mell of varied forms—some mature and beautiful, some in process of transition, some in decay, some stationary, unchanging, dead. The inner harmony which holds them together is rarely perceptible in any one fragment of actual life. But the artist adds this harmony, this completeness; his work, within its own limits, is a whole. He gives us something which nature cannot give. Taking some aspect of life which he wishes to convey by means of line, colour, or tone, he suppresses, alters, composes, emphasizes, till he has expressed his feeling in its purity, with everything immaterial left out and with the things essential to his conception lifted clearly into view. His work is therefore greater and more vital than nature, that is to say than any fragment of nature, for he is looking at the part he renders sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of the Whole. And living in the conception of a great work of art, we live in the Whole; the individual has sunk from view.
Zola has finely said, “Art is a bit of Nature seen through the medium of a temperament.” This temperament means the artist’s personal way of seeing life; it means all that makes his art different from a mere record. And the audience who see or hear his work become acquainted with this temperament—there is no other way in which the artist can express it so well. The artist, then, is giving us himself along with his subject, and this is the greatest thing he can give. Whether the wars of Troy ever happened is of very little consequence compared with Homer’s way of imagining them. And when we have learned Homer’s way we can and do apply it for ourselves, for has he not ‘infected’ us with it? The artist opens our eyes, and leaves us in a world infinitely more significant and beautiful than without his aid we should ever have known it to be. His function is thus the liberation within us of faculties, of powers of living, which otherwise might never have risen into consciousness. We commonly call this ‘idealizing the facts of life.’ It would be nearer the mark to say that it makes them real. Art turns our formal, sensible, external perceptions of things into real and vital perceptions, and thus enormously increases the range and volume of life of which those who apprehend it are capable. The glory of light, the music of winds and waters, the dignity of man’s common occupations, the wonder and sweetness of the love of men and women, all these have been revealed to us by the artist, “a man speaking to men ... pleased with his own passions and volitions, who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is within him.”[178]
The essential purpose of any art-work, then, is to be expressive of life—more expressive than the raw facts of life ever can be. The practical problem for every artist in every kind of material is how to make his work expressive; only thus can it be what Tolstoy calls “infectious.” To do this, besides the acquirement of technique, he must clearly have something to express. Let us not imagine, however, as the “plain honest man” is apt to do, that this must necessarily be something capable of being put into terms of the intellect—a fact, a story, a “criticism of life.” Art is rather an exploration than a criticism of life.[179] And life is very great and manifold. Primarily the painter is a man who likes to apprehend life in colour, the sculptor one who apprehends it in the form of masses, the musician in sound, the poet in actions, emotions, ideas. Each may, and probably must, have some of the gifts and faculties of the others, but as painter, musician, or whatever he may be, he thinks and feels in the material of his own art, and he uses that material to express its own virtues, not to imitate those of another.
The question of the relation of art to beauty, and the meaning of beauty itself, may now be considered. What is this mysterious element about the nature of which such a torrent of opinion has been poured out since man first began to reflect on his own states of mind? Between the view which holds it to be an absolute and ultimate principle, recognized in, rather than arising from, experience, and that which denies it any right to be called a principle at all, referring it simply to the effect of habit, and refusing to see any essential difference between the Hottentot conception of beauty and the Greek, we can find, I think, a position in strict accordance both with the historical facts of the evolution of the conception and with the claims of the Idealists.
Let us look back a moment to the analysis of moral action which we made in the preceding chapters. We found then that while all healthy action tends to maintain and promote life, there are circumstances under which this life-promoting quality comes more saliently into view than is usual. This happens in general when mere personal desires are subjected to the larger life of the Whole, or when a lower form of living is subjected to a higher. This heightening and intensification of life-promoting action we called moral action. And we drew no sharp and distinct line between it and ordinary healthy action, for nature knows no such distinctions, and the philosophy which tries to establish them is stamped with unreality.
In regard to Beauty we have only to take up the same point of view as we did in regard to Ethics, and the mystery lies clear before us at once. All nature is in some sense expressive of life, even when it seems most desolate or most degraded; for life as we know it means change, variety, contrast, and, under the conditions of space and time, one can no more have life without death and decay than one can have height without depth. But all nature does not equally express life, and much of it, as we have seen, does not express it at all to our perceptions. Beauty arises, then, when we find a certain heightening, a saliency, an intensity in the expression or vitality, whether by external nature or, in art, by man. Thus Life, not Beauty, is the mark of art, but beauty is the signal that the mark has been hit.
As with the moral, so with the æsthetic sense—we find it in all stages of development. A man or a race whose range of life is contracted to a few physical enjoyments and pains will set the idea of beauty in whatever expresses or is associated with these enjoyments. A wider, loftier, subtler conception of life will bring forth a nobler beauty. We are not, on this theory, abandoned to a mere subjective and arbitrary preference, according as we are trained and accustomed to this type or to that. There is a perfectly valid and objective criterion in the question, Which represents the fullest and strongest life? The Greek ideal surpasses the Hottentot—to take two extremes—because the Greek is capable of all that the Hottentot can do or feel—he takes it all up into his larger life; but the Hottentot can only live in a small sector of the sphere occupied by the Greek. Instead, therefore, of the two opposing battlecries of ‘Art for Morals’ and ‘Art for Art,’ let us set that of ‘Art for Life.’ For Life is greater than either art or morals; it includes and justifies them both.