Those who have witnessed the disintegration of a world can no longer find satisfaction in objective painting. What has the art of Messonier to say to a man who has lived in a trench? What has the art of Watteau to offer to men who have experienced shrapnel or the submarine? We know that Veronese worked amidst the voluptuous realities which he depicted; we know that Watteau phantasied the shepherd and shepherdess exquisitely, but to us this type of painting is merely interesting because of its historic value. Intrinsically, it has no message to offer us.
It is at this point in art that symbolism reveals itself as the interrelating principle between the life of the soul and objective life; that is to say that just as the symbol of the word is the interchanging coin between ancient and modern concepts, so in art, the symbolic meaning is the interchanging medium between the modern and the antique. Yet before we apply the word “symbolic” to an artist we must first come to a clear conception of its value, for it is a word which one approaches with hesitancy as its meaning has become so clouded by misusage that our mind flashes instantly to that group who were thus classified and then to the satirical lyric of the man “walking down Piccadilly with a lily in his mediaeval hand.”
We can get no clearer picture of symbolism in Art than by recalling that period and school which gave every appearance of it and yet never possessed its essence. The pre-Raphaelites for instance, attempted to recreate in their mode and manner, that which was for ever past just as certain modernists attempt a crude simplicity which was only characteristic of primitive humanity. The true symbolist is concerned with the life of the inner world. To his eyes the changing cultures of man are merely transformations upon which he focusses his attention. Whereas, to the ideationist—the objective artist—each epoch, each strata in the history of man is a separate and distinct reality and he occupies himself depicting the surfaces and planes of the outer expression of life. He is in constant relation to the present; he has no personal affiliation with the vast spiritual life of the past and possesses no embryonic conception of the future.
But to the true symbolist life is a perpetual recreation and he moves in a world freed from traditions and confines. He need not attempt to escape from the limitations of the present by seeking the mannerisms of an enigmatical past. He is in direct contact with that past and hence the future is an ever fluid and ever luminous atmosphere; he is at one with fundamentals.
If we examine the work of the early Primitives we see at once how deeply imbued they were with the essence of symbolism. In fact, they cared so deeply for the spirit of the idea that the manner of its presentation caused them little concern. They covered the walls of Assisi because they wished to tell the story of Jesus that others might know and profit by it. To them, Jesus was a reality, not a story about which to make a painting, and consequently it was a matter of indifference to Ghirlandaio whether the women attending the Virgin wore the dresses of his own age or those of antiquity. They were the women attending the Virgin and that which has given the Santa Maria Novella its lustre, is the power of a feeling, visioned, experienced, grasped—and then put forth again.
However, in the minds of the pre-Raphaelites, the vision was most assiduously cultivated. Their very pre-occupation proves them to have been objective artists diverted from their proper functioning. They did not seek the vision of England, which would have been their true expression, the sentimental Victorian England of their day, but they turned their eyes towards the Italy of the past and became blinded by the dust of the centuries which lay upon it. The result was narrative art, a beautiful and ingenious affectation of the source of inspiration, but the symbols of love and sorrow, of joy and pain became involved in confused mysticism. For the pre-Raphaelites sought not their own spirit but that of another, not the meaning within but that lying as far away as possible—in fact the more remote it was, the more they sought it. They reproduced instead of creating, and they have given us beautiful stories, beautiful pictures, beautiful ideas—everything except that which can never be reproduced, and that is the spirit of their own age.
In the separation of the symbolist from the ideationist, the art of the East is most concisely divided from the art of the West. To the East the lotus is a flower, but also a symbol of divinity; to the West it is a flower developing into the acanthus design and completing the circle, it becomes a decoration, and so again only a flower. Again the earth, the sun, the sea, that which is above, and that which lies beneath, are to the Western mind, materials of study to be touched, represented, understood and grasped. But to the East, it suffices that these things are and will be eternally, and that behind these realities which we visualize and know, lie other and again other forces and experiences, other suns, other seas, melting mysteriously into one another as the leaves of the lotus.
It is at this dividing line of East and West, of the symbolist and the ideationist, that the work of Kahlil Gibran presents itself as an arresting type in our conception of painting. He has accepted both the traditions of form and the inner meaning of the idea, and he exhibits both a new type of work and another method of approach to fundamental truths.
The qualities of the East and the West are blended in him with a singular felicity of expression, so that while he is the symbolist in the true sense of the word, he is not affixed to traditional expression, as he would be if he were creating in the manner of the East, and though he narrates a story as definitely as any pre-Raphaelite, it is without any fan-fare of historical circumstances or any of the accompaniment of symbolic accessories. In his art there is no conflict whether the idea shall prevail over the emotion, or whether emotion shall sway the thought, because both are so equally established that we are not conscious of one or the other as dominant. They co-exist in harmony and the result is an expression of sheer beauty in which thought and feeling are equally blended. In this fusion of two opposing tendencies the art of Gibran transcends the conflicts of schools and is beyond the fixed conceptions of the classic or romantic traditions.
An illuminating beauty informs his work; to him the idea becomes beautiful if it is true; the emotion becomes truth if it is real. He possesses a singular power of dividing what is essential from what is extraneous in the presentation of beauty and truth. And he keeps to a simplicity of manner in the portrayal of an idea which is closely akin to the spirit of the Primitives, albeit the art of the centuries has gone into the moulding of his powers; but in his statements he is simple, almost instinctively simple. In fact, he may be described as an intuitive artist—as that type of artist whose feeling is like the divining rod which leads down to shafts of golden values and who does not obfuscate his mind with intellectual conceptions of what or how he should create. And having followed his instinctive flair for truth, he now applies his conscious powers to perfect his finding and to create his embryonic expressions into paintings of beauty and value.