The philosophy of art, the meaning and relations of sculpture, painting, poetry and music
by Edward Howard Griggs
1913
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 7
CHAPTER
I. THE EXPRESSIOK OF HUMAN LIFE IN ABT .... 21
II. THE INTERPRETATION OF HUMAN LIFE IN ART . . 41
III. PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 57
IV. DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE ARTIST ... 81
V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARTIST AS REVEALED
IN ART 103
VI. DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE EPOCH . . 115 VII. DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE RACE . . . 129 VIII. THE UNIQUE FUNCTION OF EACH FINE ART . . 141
IX. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF SCULPTURE . . 151 X. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF PAINTING . . .171
XI. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF Music .... 189
XII. MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 213
XIII. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF POETRY: THE
RELATION OF POETRY TO SCULPTURE AND PAINTING 229
XIV. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF POETRY: THE
RELATION OF POETRY TO Music 247
6
6 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XV. THE UKITY OF THE ARTS 267
XVI. THE DAKGERS or AET 277
XVII. BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION .... 287 XVIII. THE STUDT OF BEAUTT IN NATURE AND ART . . . 301
XIX. ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE 321
BOOK LIST 331
INDEX . , 341
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
THE aim of this study is to show what art is, how it comes out of the life of man, and what specific function each of the great ideal arts fulfills in relation to the human spirit. There is great need of such study to-day. We in America have been turn ing with remarkable interest and enthusiasm to all fields of art and intellect. It would seem that the splendid energy which has built up our wonderful material civilization is now to find expression in the life of the spirit, with the promise of equally great achievement there. There is scarcely an important city in the land that has not at least the beginnings of a mu seum of sculpture and painting. Opportuni ties for hearing great music have been multi plied several times within a few decades. Gifts to education and to all aspects of culture have increased enormously ; while even more signifi cant of our spirit is the extent to which we senc{
7
8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
our students abroad. In any European school of fine art at least half the students not native to the country in question are American. In other words, we send to foreign schools more students than all the other nations taken to gether. Of course, we ought to do so, for we are a youthful people and need to learn from the accumulated culture of the older world; but the significance of our action is no less great. All these signs, with the increasing pat ronage of the arts by wealth and power, mean much for our happiness, our culture as a peo ple and our contribution to the world.
Unfortunately this great movement is sadly hampered by ignorance and, worse, by fla grant misconceptions as to the meaning and function of the arts. Turn to the literature of the subject: there is admirable material on the technical aspects of the arts, and excellent his tory and criticism; but where is any adequate study of the specific power and limitations of each of the arts in expressing and interpreting the human spirit? Lessing's Laokoon is still the best book we have on the subject; while it is far behind the experience and what ought to be the thinking of our time, and attempted at
INTRODUCTION 9
most only to define the mutual limits of the plastic arts and poetry. Really the great books in the field we are attempting include hardly more besides Lessing's than Leonardo's Note Books, Wagner's writings and Schiller's ^Esthetic Essays.
Worse than the ignorance and lack of thought are the prevailing misconceptions. The most widely accepted of these is in the mind of the general public. It is the notion that art is a dispensable luxury, a polite adorn ment of life, pleasant enough where there is ample wealth and leisure, but of no value until the serious business of life is fulfilled. Utterly wrong as this notion is, it is nevertheless taken for granted by the multitude, not only in the unthinking mass, but in circles of wealth, so cial prominence and even of supposed culture. Indeed, the fault is old and long enduring, for the cry of the artist in all epochs has been that his work is not taken as the serious aim of life it is, but as an adventitious adornment of the more or less superficial amenities of so cial existence. Carlyle voices this in Teufelsdrockh who resents being made polite fringe on Lady Somebody's "Esthetic Tea;" while
10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
Goethe's study of the behavior of the emperor and court toward Helena in the Second Part of Faust is the most scathing portrayal I know in literature of the whimsical reaction of the world of polite society on the miraculous crea tion of beauty which should inspire silent awe.
How prevalent the same attitude is to-day! Consider the behavior of persons wandering through a gallery of painting, saying, "I like this" or "dislike that," as if they had the right to like or dislike until they have appreciated and understood what of human thought and feeling is given, and with what measure of adequacy and harmony. Go to the Metropoli tan Opera House in New York, when some masterpiece of Wagner is given. Where do you find the true music lovers ? Oh, everywhere, of course one wants to be fair but many of them are standing up in the top gallery ; while, of the high-priced boxes in the great oval, many are empty the first hour and empty the last half hour society displaying itself and its clothes as at any other function, with no no tion of the attitude necessary to the creation and appreciation of true art.
There is, of course, another side to this which
INTRODUCTION 11
all great artists have understood: art can have no higher function than in transfiguring the life of this moment. What is posterity if not men and women such as we, and why should the artist work for some future time and not for the living world about him? Leonardo da Vinci, painter of perhaps the greatest picture the world has seen the ruined masterpiece on Milan monastery wall was willing to use his unparalleled genius to prepare some masque or other artistic pleasure for the court circle at Milan, given once and never repeated; and Goethe himself was glad to employ the genius that created Faust in some like service for the group at Weimar. When, however, art is made a mere pleasant fringe and polite decora tion to the more or less superficial and often frivolous activities of social life, the wrong thing is taken for the center and art is pros tituted.
A second error, only less harmful than the first, prevails also in the mind of the public, though not so widely. It is very good persons who make this mistake, often with fanatical earnestness. Their error is in holding that art is justified by some obvious didactic moral
12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
teaching. They accept the drama or novel if it preaches some sermon, the painting if it carries a moral lesson. Goethe has sufficiently characterized this point of view. He says: "A good work of art can, and will indeed, have moral consequences ; but to require moral ends of the artist, is to destroy his profession."* "To destroy his profession": the phrase is not too strong. In so far as the artist becomes preacher he is apt to cease to be artist, since his didactic moral is so much more limited than the aim of art, which is the presentation of the whole truth of life in a form of beauty. The artist must strive for the abiding truth rather than its changing application. If he deals with the issue of the hour, it must be in no narrow partisan spirit, but with the vision of the eter nal through the transient. Compare Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to see the difference between the literature of propagandism, even of superior excellence, and art. A certain withdrawal from life and its feverish conflicts is always
* Denn ein gutes Kunstwerk kann und wird zwar moralische Folgen haben, aber moralische Zwecke vom Kiinstler fordern, heiszt ihm sein Handwerk verderben." Dichtung und Wahrheit, book XII, Bohn Library translation, p. 469.
INTRODUCTION 13
necessary for the artist that he may have per spective. To create art one must have lived, but to create art one must also have withdrawn from life to the mountain height of spiritual isolation. Thus always the loneliness and pain of the great artist: sometimes it finds tender and sad expression as in Shelley and Chopin; sometimes it causes the despairing reaction of a Leopardi or a Schopenhauer; sometimes it produces the grave irony of a Goethe or a Wagner; but always it is present, and the vision of the artist is bought with the pain of being consciously apart.
Thus the true moral value of a work of art is in the nature of the work itself, not in an ^Esop Fables' moral appended at the end. Suppose Shakespeare had affixed to Othello a statement that he had meant to teach us the ugliness of jealousy: what a pitiful anti-climax it would have been! If the moral meaning is not involved in the very nature of a work of art, then it is bad art. No, art is not for preach ing's sake, any more than it is for adornment's sake; and many of the "good" people are as far wrong as the frivolous.
These two errors in the public mind have
14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
helped breed a third, prevailing among artists themselves the notion that art exists for the sake of exhibiting technical skill in the mas tery of difficulties. The great men have never made this mistake : they invariably have recog nized that technical skill is never an end at all, but always a means a glorious one to some thing beyond itself; but among lesser artists the superstition is widely prevalent.
It is easy to see how it arises. Probably there never was an earnest student beginning to learn a particular art who did not look for ward to creating his masterpiece. The young poet dreams of his Divine Comedy or Faust, the painter, of the ceiling of some new Sistine Chapel, the musician, of compositions that shall rival Beethoven, the sculptor, of his new Periclean marbles and his brooding figures on fresh Medicean tombs. With such aspirations invariably the student begins; but what hap pens? Soon he discovers that the road he must travel is painfully long and beset with hard obstacles. The embryonic painter, for exam ple, finds he must wholly subordinate his own ideas, draw for years from the antique before he is allowed even to begin to copy nature.
INTRODUCTION 15
Only after long discipline in drawing may he add color, and how long is the road before any self-expression is permitted. Thus he is apt to forget all about the end which originally he had in view, and become absorbed wholly in conquering the difficulties in the path. To acquire and exhibit such skill comes more and more to seem itself the aim.
The just reaction against seeking an adven titious end for art accentuates this tendency. I have always sympathized with the painters' protest against such a view of their art as Ruskin preached. Ruskin's work was strong and permanently helpful; but in all his study of painting he sought some definitely moral or religious end in the effect of the art ; yet beauty is its own sufficient justification; art need seek no end outside itself; and thus arises the cry "art for art's sake." On a high plane this is right ; but when art for art's sake is interpreted to mean art for technique's sake for the sake of exhibiting technical skill in mastering diffi culties then art is reduced to the level of a j uggler's tricks or refined gymnastic. To walk a tight rope without a balancing pole shows admirable technical skill, but surely it is not
16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
fine art in the same sense as painting or music. Technical skill, excellent and desirable as it is, is always a means and never an end in itself; and the exhibition of it merely evidences power which is vain unless used for some aim worth while.
The third error is thus as far from the truth as either of the others ; yet one would scarcely believe how prevalent it is among the rank and file of artists. Listen to a group of painters commenting upon the pictures of a gallery. Of what do they speak: of the way that land scape rests and calms the spirit; of the sweep of humanity in this portrayal of common life ? No; but of the skill with which the lighting is handled here; the fault in the composition there; the method of putting on his colors which this painter has employed. It is natural : they are constantly working with these tech nical problems, and thus they look for the handling of them in the work of others. The result, however, is the focussing of their atten tion almost wholly on the means employed.
Sit behind a group of musical artists during the rendering of a Beethoven symphony or a Wagner opera. Do they speak of the power
INTRODUCTION 17
of the music to sweep one out on to the bosom of the sea of emotion, to refresh the spirit and give the vision of the ideal? No, but of the skill with which that high note was struck; the admirable rendering of this difficult pas sage by the violins ; the fault in the conductor's reading of that other passage. Indeed, it is even possible for the mind to become so ab sorbed in the analysis of technique as actually to lose in power of appreciation. One finds cases where a student has worked ten years in mastering the technique of an art, and at the end of the time has really less power to appre ciate spontaneously the art than when he be gan his study. This need not happen and ought not to happen, but the fact that it does occur shows how far the mastery and exhibition of technical skill is from the true aim of art. No, art is not for technique's sake, any more than it is for adornment's sake, or preaching's sake. These three misconceptions stand in the way of our right use of art to-day, and we must overcome them to make our contribution as a people and to give art the place it should occupy in our culture. Art is serious business ; beauty is the most useful thing we know; the
18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
ideal is no less real than the coarsest material end. Art is for life's sake.
There are thus three underlying questions in the study here undertaken: first, What is Art? Second, What does Art do to the artist who creates ? Third, What does Art do to the student who appreciates? The study deals primarily with the four great ideal types of art sculpture, painting, music and poetry. Architecture, so largely conditioned by utility, will be considered in comparison, as will the composite arts song, opera, dramatic por trayal.
The method employed is not a review of philosophy and criticism of art, but a study of selected masterpieces in each field, asking what these do to our senses, emotions, imagination and intellect. This is merely applying to the realm of art the method universally insisted upon in all natural science, namely, first find ing the facts and then seeking to discover what these mean. In art, as in science, a little direct, first-hand study is worth more than much read ing of theory. In this work, if I may speak personally, what I have to offer is at least my own not a restatement of criticism and philos-
INTRODUCTION 19
ophy, but the condensed result of twenty-five years' study of works of art in each of the four fields, recording and interpreting what these masterpieces have done to my senses, emotions, imagination and intellect. The same method must be employed by each student if he would arrive at clear conceptions of the meaning and function of these several fine arts; and the re flections and conclusions tentatively offered in the following chapters should be used as a chal lenge to the reader's own mind, on the basis of his own first-hand study of masterpieces in the respective fields.
"I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven, and in their disciples and apostles; I believe in the Holy Ghost and the truth of Art one and indivisible; I believe that this art proceeds from God and dwells in the hearts of all enlight ened men; I believe that whoever has revelled in the glori ous joys of this high art must be forever devoted to it and can never repudiate it; I believe that all may become blessed through this art, and that therefore it is permitted to any one to die of hunger for its sake; I believe that I shall become most happy through death; I believe that I have been on earth a discordant chord, that shall be made harmonious and clear by death. I believe in a last judgment, that shall fear fully damn all those who have dared on this earth to make profit out of this chaste and holy art who have disgraced it and dishonored it through badness of heart and the coarse instincts of sensuality; I believe that such men will be con demned to hear their own music through all eternity. I be lieve, on the other hand, that the true disciples of pure art will be glorified in a divine atmosphere of sun-illumined, fra grant concords, and united eternally with the divine source of all harmony. And may a merciful lot be granted me! Amen!" Wagner, in "An End in Paris," Art Life and The ories, p. 90.
20
CHAPTER I
THE EXPRESSION OF HUMAN LIFE IN ART
WHEN we consider what has been ac complished in the field of art our first impression is of so overwhelming a wealth and variety that it seems impossible to gather it all in a single statement. How shall we define art so as to include works as re mote from each other as the Ramayana and the songs of Burns, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the music of Chopin, the Poem of Job and the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto? Can it be possible to find a unifying principle for all these? The problem is bewildering; yet we individually may respond to all these types of art ; they all are our heritage. [Thus, there must be some element common to them all to make possible the universal human appeal.
To find this element, turn for a moment to a brief poem coming from a time as remote as
21
2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
possible from our own, a Hymn to the Dawn from the ancient Vedic literature:
To THE DAWN *
"She shines upon us like a young wife, rousing every living being to go to his work. The fire had to be kindled by men ; she brought light by striking down darkness.
She rose up, spreading far and wide, and moving toward every one. She grew in brightness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows (of the morning clouds), the leader of the days, she shone gold-colored, lovely to behold.
She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of the god, who leads the white and lovely steed (of the sun), the Dawn was seen, revealed by her rays, with bril liant treasures she follows every one.
Thou, who art a blessing where thou art near, drive away the unfriendly; make the pastures wide, give us safety ! Remove the haters, bring treasures ! Raise up wealth to the worshiper, thou mighty Dawn.
Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright Dawn, thou who lengthenest our life, thou the love of all, who givest us food, who givest us wealth in cows, horses and chariots.
* F. M. Mueller, A History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 551 and 552. Williams & Norgate, London, 1860.
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 23
Thou, daughter of the sky, thou high-born Dawn, whom the Vasishthas magnify with songs, give us riches high and wide : all ye gods, protect us always with your blessings !"
Our first impression from this old song is one of strangeness. Far as it is from us in time, it is still farther from our way of thought and life. We do not worship the Dawn, it is not a goddess to us. Moreover, with our way of life, we rarely see the Dawn; yet read more closely, and the feeling of re moteness vanishes. After all, the old poet is merely recording, under different expres sions, universal experience. Light is always a miracle to a fresh mind. It is not that "God said, Let there be light, and there was light;" God says, Let there be light, and there is light, with each morning. The spreading of the rosy fingers of the Dawn over the sky, the "grow ing in brightness," the "bringing the eye of the god," the sun is it not an ever fresh miracle? The fire on the hearth "had to be kindled by men" by hard labor in primitive times, striking one stone upon another or rub bing two sticks together ; "she brought light by
24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
striking down darkness." The housewife of the home moves toward this person or that one; this housewife of the sky "moves toward every one," "rousing every living being to go to his work," this "mother of the cows" the light morning clouds that promise the lifegiving milk of the rain. The earthly woman is revealed by light shining upon her; this god dess of the sky is "revealed by her rays," "lovely to behold." Is it not just what any unspoiled nature, with fresh awakened senses, sees in the Dawn?
Then, changing the key, the universal mean ing of light to the spirit of man is given. Light has always been the symbol of safety and goodness, darkness of evil and danger. Little children still cry in the dark; and men, children of a larger growth, still tremble be fore the darkness that shrouds the unknown. So the eternal prayer: "Drive away the un friendly," "give us safety," "thou who art a blessing where thou art near ;" and, as the day gives opportunity for work, "raise up wealth to the worshiper, thou mighty Dawn." Thus, in other language, the poem gives simply and in the metaphor of strong, Direct appreciation,
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 25
the two permanent aspects of man's relation to the everlasting miracle of light.
Thus it is everywhere: art is always an ex pression of some phase of man's life or rela tion to nature; and it is this universal human basis that makes possible our appreciation of works so varied, coming from such different sources in place and time. You turn to the Antigone of Sophocles: how strange it is, this story of a sister who brings herself to suffer death in cruel fashion merely that she may give the rites of the dead to the body of her brother. How foolish you say : his soul would not have suffered had the rites been omitted; but hear what she says. The tyrant asks :
"And thou didst dare to disobey these laws?"
Antigone responds:
"Yes, for it was not Zeus who gave them forth, Nor Justice, dwelling with the gods below, Who traced these laws for all the sons of men; Nor did I deem thy edicts strong enough, That thou, a mortal man, shouldst overpass The unwritten laws of God, that know not change, They are not of to-day nor yesterday, But live forever, nor can man assign
26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
When first they sprang to being. Not through
fear
Of any man's resolve was I prepared Before the gods to bear the penalty Of sinning against these." *
Then we understand: while we, with our dif ferent belief and training, might have chosen a different particular action, she was doing only what all noble souls have ever done giv ing up her own lesser good for the greater good of one she loved. So the strangeness dis appears, and the common human experience thank God it is common comes home to us through a form which seems so far away. Thus always art is an expression of some aspect of the common basis of human life.
This is evidenced also by the fact that the different fine arts actually spring from one his torical source an act of worship in the early Greek world, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter. Further, reversing the problem, mas terpieces in widely different arts may produce the same dominant impression upon us, thus proving the unity in the basis from which they
* The Tragedies of Sophocles, translated by E. H. Plumptre, p. 145. Routledge & Co., New York.
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 27
spring. This likeness among masterpieces in different fields is indeed so strong that there are great artists working in totally different spheres who, nevertheless, are brothers across the centuries. The particular avenue of their artistic expression seems relatively incidental; they sound the same deeps and produce the same type of effect. Compare, in poetry, 2&schylus, in sculpture and painting, Michael Angelo, in music, Beethoven: these men are truly brothers across the centuries. They are the titanic dreamers, thinkers who sheer down to the very heart of life. Their brooding is so vast that any artistic form is too small to em body it. Thus, much as they give, their su preme power lies in stimulating the imagina tion to go on beyond what is given to a still vaster world. It is of small consequence that one was poet, another painter and sculptor, and the third musical artist, ^schylus is closer to Michael Angelo than to his contem porary, Sophocles, in the same field of poetry ; while Michael Angelo is nearer Beethoven than to his fellow-painter, Raphael, working in the same place and time.
Take as a second group, similarly related,
28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
Sophocles in poetry, Raphael in painting, and Mozart in music. These, too, are brothers across the centuries; for they are the finished artists, not brooding upon vast, unconquerable dreams, not peering awe-struck into the abyss, but clothing a wisely limited content in ex quisitely harmonious form. They rest us, more than they stimulate, satisfy with perfect beauty, rather than exalt with irregular reaches of sublime power. Thus their kinship in the spirit: Mozart, modern German, is closer to the Greek poet, Sophocles, than to his fellowmusician, Beethoven, and Raphael is more akin to Mozart than to his Italian contempo rary and brother in painting, Michael Angelo. To clinch the argument consider a third group: Andrea del Sarto in painting, Chopin in music, Heine in poetry. Do you see why these three are classed together as in their own way brothers across the centuries? With mar vellous technical skill and astonishing ease of execution, these men are neither titanic think ers nor, characteristically, the artists who rest us with balanced harmony. They are rather the personal revealers; we long to grope behind their work to some deep of experience explain-
THE EXPRESSION OJK LIFE IN ART 29
ing its character. They sing in minor key and paint with a subtle mingling of light and shadow. In the elusive paintings of Andrea, in the sobbing harmonies of Chopin pushed almost to the point of discord, in the haunting melodies of Heine, alike is voiced a strange sadness the hunger and pain of a spirit too delicately sensitive and too keenly responsive to every appeal of beauty and desire to find life easy or comfortable in such a world as ours. Thus these three are closer together than each was to his fellow artists in the same field, of the same place and time.
This unity of spirit and impression among works of art so remote from each other suffi ciently proves the unity of human experience in and behind all art. One person is like all; that is why we can understand each other. Life is made of a few simple, common ele ments. As the physical life is made of fresh air, sunshine, nourishing food and exercise, so the spiritual life is made of love and work, hunger to know truth and appreciate beauty, aspiration toward the ideal. "One is like all." The novels and dramas of the world's litera ture focus upon two or three problems half
BO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
of them on personal love ; and in this unity of common experience is the basis of all appre ciation of art, since every work of art is the expression of some aspect of this common life. Even when art attempts the merest imitation of objective nature it is still expression, since it embodies the human love of reality and de sire of incarnating it in artistic form.
Since life is made of so few and simple ele ments, and art is always an expression of this common basis, what makes possible the fresh appeal in a new work of art? The answer is found first in the fact that art expresses the common basis of human life only through the medium of personality. Now each personality is unique and unparalleled. If one is like all, each is also different from all others. Life is, in each individual, a fresh equation of old forces : the basis is universal, the form unique.*
Thus as art expresses the common basis of human life only through the medium of per-
* For a fuller exposition of the two correlative principles the unity of human life and the uniqueness of each person ality consult chapters II and III in the author's Moral Ed ucation, B. W. Huebsch, New York, 1904-.
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 31
sonality, the old elements are stamped with the fresh quality of the transmuting medium. How the wealth of old northern mythology is transformed as it is passed through the spec trum of Wagner's genius. Dante gathers up the world of medieval experience, but stamps it all with the color of his own character. The common tendencies of the renaissance receive widely different form through such contrasting personalities as Raphael and Michael Angelo.
Art, moreover, expresses the basis of human experience always in definitely limited form, and herein lies the further reason for its ever new appeal. The altar at which every artist must perpetually bow is the shrine of the god dess of limits. The undefined is never the ar tistic, and the more rigid the limitation, the more perfect may be the art. Vague, brooding emotions and thoughts become art only as they receive this rigid definition in form. While Faust dwells with "The Mothers" he is in the presence of the vast, uncreate energies from which all beauty springs; but it is only when out of them the one perfectly limited form of Helena is called into being that art is born.
Thus it is that each new expression of art,
32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
because it is born through the medium of per sonality into definitely limited form, may have its fresh appeal. A poet of the day, not of the highest power, has dared to take a subjectmatter as old as Europe, which received ar tistic expression for all time through the genius of the father of western poetry, Homer, in the song of world- wandering Ulysses; yet when we take Stephen Phillips's Ulysses, and listen to his hero as, standing on the shore of Ca lypso's island, he voices his hunger to see "Gaunt Ithaca stand up out of the surge," or hear him murmur "little Telemachus," the tears come to our eyes and we are moved anew with the eternal hunger for wife and child and home.
Fortunately for our illustration there are available two little poems brief enough to quote, both written by gifted lyric poets and dealing with the same theme. On the 16th of April, 1746, Charles Edward Stuart, with the Scotch highlanders, fought at Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, near Inverness, his last unavailing battle for the English crown. He and his highlanders were utterly cut to pieces by the Duke of Cumberland with the English
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 33
troops. Early in the year 1746, Collins a poet of great lyrical power wrote the follow ing Ode in memory of the English who fell in the war against the Pretender:
"How sleep the Brave, who sink to rest By all their country's wishes blest ! When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallow'd mold, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.
By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung: There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay ; And Freedom shall awhile repair To dwell a weeping hermit there !"
Robert Burns also wrote a Lament for Culloden, for the Scotch highlanders who fell in defeat. It is also a little lyric of two stanzas:
"The lovely lass o* Inverness, Nae joy nor pleasure can she see; For e'en and morn she cries, Alas! And aye the saut tear blin's her ee: Drumossie moor Drumossie day A waefu' day it was to me !
34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
For there I lost my father dear, My father dear, and brethren three.
Their winding-sheet the bluidy clay, Their graves are growing green to see: And by them lies the dearest lad That ever blest a woman's ee! Now wae to thee, thou cruel lord, A bluidy man I trow thou be; For mony a heart thou hast made sair That ne'er did wrong to thine or thee."
Both these are exquisite lyrics : which makes the stronger appeal? Well, a small fraction of readers those who are peculiarly respon sive to stately, allegorical imagery, who rank Spenser beside Shakespeare and have the ear rather than the eye memory would prefer the Ode of Collins; but all the rest of us respond more deeply to the appeal of Burns. The reason is not difficult to state : one man is more than a multitude of men. The grief of one Scotch lassie appeals more powerfully than the statement that so many thousand men fell in a certain battle. It is only through the in dividual that we appreciate humanity. You read in the newspaper that a factory has been
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 35
shut down and six hundred men are out of work; and then you pass on to the next item about Mrs. Somebody's dinner party, and the one statement makes almost as much impres sion as the other; but if it has ever been your lot to live next door to a family in which the husband and father was out of work, you understand. If you have seen the man's face, day after day, as he kissed his wife good-bye and went on the unavailing search for work; if you have seen the tears in her eyes as she turned into the house ; if you have watched the children grow paler and more hungry-looking day by day, you know what it means that six hundred men are out of work. One man is more than a multitude of men; the individual is the key to the whole; and it is because art always expresses the common basis of human experience only through the medium of per sonality and in definitely limited form that its appeal may be eternally fresh and new.
All art is thus expression; but, I need scarcely add, not all expression is art. To be art, the expression must be adequate and har monious. This does not mean that art should produce only what is pleasing to the senses:
36 tTHE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
the notion that art must always do this is one of the further unwarranted superstitions prev alent in our time. The principle is that the body of expression should be appropriately married to the soul of meaning. Gloom, for example, is not sensuously pleasing, but the gloom that broods upon the recumbent figures from the hand of Michael Angelo, on the Medicean tombs, is beautiful, because it per fectly expresses the mood Michael Angelo wished to embody.
Tennyson is one of the most consistently, almost monotonously melodious poets in the English language; yet there are harshly dis cordant lines in Tennyson, and they are artis tic because they are harsh. When Tennyson represents himself as returning in In Memoriam to the street before the house from which his friend had gone out never to return, he paints the scene as in the early morning, with the day breaking in dismal rain. The whole brief canto of three stanzas is masterly, and the closing two lines are:
"And ghastly through the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day."* * In Memoriam, canto VII.
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 37
Note the harsh sound and painful association of the words. Moreover, the last line is all monosyllabic, and Pope showed long ago what happens when
" ten low words oft creep in one dull line."*
It is impossible to make poetry out of monosyl lables, for the regular metrical stress will too rarely correspond to the natural emphasis to make music. Further, in Tennyson's line the metrical stress falls just where it ought not in ordinarily good poetry on the unimportant words. Thus, scanned conventionally, the line reads:
**0n th'e bald street breaks tne blank day."
Read the two lines, however, just as they are, or let them read themselves through you:
"And ghastly through the drizzling ra'in, On the bald street breaks the bla'nk day ; v
and you are left with the same clutch at your throat and the same sob in your heart that Ten-
* Essay on Criticism,
88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
nyson felt. That is art: adequately and har moniously marrying the body of expression to the soul of thought, feeling and imagination. How far art should go in portraying the physically horrible and the morally depraved is an open question. My own feeling is that there are deeps so terrible that art would bet ter draw the curtain and leave them unsound ed ; but one thing is certain : whatever art does venture to portray must be given in form ap propriate to the content expressed. If that is painful and discordant, so must be the body of true artistic expression. Thus as Dante comes to the lowest pit of hell we find him saying:
"If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous, As were appropriate to the dismal hole Down upon which thrust all the other rocks,
I would press out the juice of my conception More fully ; but because I have them not, Not without fear I bring myself to speak ;
For 'tis no enterprise to take in jest, To sketch the bottom of all the universe, Nor for a tongue that cries Mamma and Babbo." *
* Dante, Inferno, canto XXXII, Longfellow's translation.
THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 39
That is, he would deliberately use harsher music, if he could find it, to express harmoni ously the moral horror of the nether hell.
Let us sum up our work to this point : art is the adequate and harmonious expression of some aspect of man's life or relation to nature, through the medium of personality, in defin itely limited form.
"When imagination incessantly escapes from reality, and does not abandon the simplicity of nature in its wanderings: then and then only the mind and the senses, the receptive force and the plastic force, are developed in that happy equili brium which is the soul of the beautiful and the condition of humanity." Schiller, Essays dUsthetical and Philosophical, p. 106.
"The law of simplicity and naivety holds good of all fine art; for it is quite possible to be at once simple and sublime." Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, p. 31.
"To speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only com pletely a man when he plays" Schiller, Essays JEsthetical and Philosophical, p. 71.
40
CHAPTER II
THE INTERPRETATION OF HUMAN LIFE
IN ART
ART is always, as we have seen, an ex pression of some aspect of life ; but this expression is inevitably at the same time interpretation. Art never merely echoes na ture; it gives nature as the artist sees it, thus putting it through the transmuting spectrum of the artist's personality. This is true even of semi-mechanical imitation of nature, as in ama teur photography. Suppose you wish to take for a friend a photograph of a little wooded glen that seems to you particularly beautiful: What do you do : set up your camera and take the view? Not at all; you wait for the hour "when the light is right;" go about from one point of view to another until you find the one that best pleases you ; and then take your pic ture. That is, of the almost innumerable views you might have taken, you choose this one, and in so doing say what this bit of nature means
41
42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
to you. Thus, even when copying with a me chanical instrument, through selecting the par ticular aspect and point of view, you interpret the phase of the objective world in terms of its relation to your own spirit. ;= >So with the most realistic of novels: the ar tist must select his material from the bewil dering detail of life, and choose his point of view in portraying it, thus interpreting the life he copies. Suppose one were to attempt a realistic narration of one's own life: of what would one write ? Why, everything, of course. Yes, and fill a library with the record of a month. It would be impossible to write out the life of one week, with no selection, record ing every incident, every thought, every in fluence. That is not what is meant, of course, but the recording only of what is important. Ah, but who shall say what is important? Is it not evident that the most realistic narration of a week's life would bring certain facts strongly into the foreground, since they would seem most essential to the narrator ; other facts, appearing to him as less significant, would be subordinated in the background; while a mul titude of other facts would be suppressed alto-
INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 43
gether, since they would seem to have no value, and in many instances might not even be re called? Yet of the facts so suppressed or for gotten might not one easily be the critical element of the life seen from God's point of view in the perspective of the whole? Thus the most realistic narrator chooses his point of view, exercises a high degree of selection upon his material, and thus interprets life in terms of his own personality, in copying or recording it. The pity of the worse type of realistic novel is that it selects its material from moral disease instead of health, as if disease were truer than health! That notion is one of the strange anomalies of our time. Men exclaim : "We will see life;" and then proceed to smear themselves with the slime of its diseases! The truth is, disease can never be understood aright except from the point of view of the health of which it is the perversion. Still, even in the wrong kind of realism, dedicated to the ex ploitation of moral disease, art selects and ar ranges its material, treats it from a specific point of view, and thus interprets in attempt ing to copy.
Art is thus always, at the same time, real
44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
and ideal. It is real, for it must grip reality somewhere to be art; it is ideal, for it never merely copies reality. The great artists have always been aware of this, consciously or in stinctively; and it is noteworthy that the con troversy concerning realism and idealism in art has been carried on, not chiefly by creative ar tists, but by critics and theorists on the outside. Selection of material and point of view is, however, only the initial principle of idealism. In all art is, further, the tendency to lift nature to more adequate expression. Perhaps I can best illustrate this second principle by giving my own experience with Shakespeare. It had long puzzled me that Shakespeare is called the great realist, loyally holding the mirror up to human nature; yet all his characters speak beautiful poetry. Even Caliban upon his island talks of the "quick freshies" and the "bigger light and less" in language exquisitely poetical. For a time it seemed the explanation must be that actual men and women do not express themselves ordinarily in beautiful poetry; art must be beautiful, hence the dis crepancy. The explanation did not satisfy, however. Then I began to see that, while all
INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 45
Shakespeare's characters speak poetry, no two of them speak alike. Caliban does not speak as Miranda, nor Miranda like Prospero. Hamlet and Horatio are as different in ex pression as in character. Then I saw that what Shakespeare had done was to lift each charac ter to a plane of adequate expression, causing each to speak not as the person does speak in life, but as, in the given situation actual men and women would speak if they could say just what they meant and say it perfectly. Take the supreme example : no Roman lion brought to bay, squandering half the world for a great passion, ever used the wealth of overwhelming imagery and vocabulary that comes from the lips of Shakespeare's Mark Antony; and no sensuous queen of Egypt, daughter of a hun dred Ptolemies, fitting lioness mate for this Roman lion, ever spoke with the audacious sweep of language and imagery that comes from Cleopatra in the play; yet Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra speak just what those two characters, in the given circumstances of their lives, would have spoken, could they have said exactly what they felt and said it per fectly.
46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
So it is with the artistic expression of deep meditation. Let one walk in the countryside some quiet autumn afternoon, when the winds are still and the leaves quietly falling, red and brown, from the boughs of the trees, the sky gray and still above; let one be alone or with one friend who understands and knows when not to speak; the breath comes slowly and regularly, and so does the heart beat. One moves with slow and measured step. In such a mood one does not usually speak in poetry; but if it were possible to express perfectly what one thinks and feels in such a mood, one would speak in just such measured, slow-mov ing, musical lines as those in the greatest of Wordsworth's sonnets:
"The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours ; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 47
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
This element of idealism is present in all the arts. Where in the French nature world can you find Corot's landscapes? Well, every where, and here, too, after you have seen and loved them in Corot's paintings; but nowhere before. It is almost as if that French nature world had been brooding for untold centuries, waiting to voice the meaning of its beauty; but only when Corot came and grasped its se cret could it rise to full and free expression. So the dumb, half-wakened hunger of the French peasant, on the background of majes tic nature, waited for the genius of Millet to understand it and express it in art. Thus the Venus de Milo bodies forth, not what any Greek woman was, but what all Greek women wanted to be, womanhood achieving its highest expression, not in nature, but in the interpre tation of art.
Even more fully is this element of idealism present in music, the art capable of voicing
48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
emotions that lie far too deep for words ever to express them. As we shall see in our study of music, its peculiar method and function bring this phase of idealism to its highest form.
This element in all the arts is balanced by a third principle of idealism the law of restrcdnt. This demands that the artist shall not express all he feels : he must express a part and suggest the rest, stimulating the imagina tion to go on beyond the limits of what is given. If an actor, for example, were to express all the passion of Lear or Othello, you would say he ranted, and the verdict would be just. Were music to embody all the composer feels, it would fail to move deeply. If a speaker expresses all he has to give, the effect is cheap. Behind what is given, must be a great reserve power unexpressed.
Thus when art attempts to do everything for its audience the effect is tawdry. That is one trouble with the theater to-day. The effort by skilful scene painting and other sensational effects to accomplish everything for the jaded senses and sluggish imagination of the spec tator, tends to make him sit back in a semisomnolent fashion merely to be played upon
INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 49
from without; while the challenge to the actor is almost equally wanting. The result is that, with no active cooperation between artist and audience, the characters fail to impress them selves. Better the bare, unadorned stage of Shakespeare's time, with a sign-board to in dicate Rome or London, where the situation challenged the actor to the vigorous effort to interpret life, than, in the attempt to accom plish everything for the senses and imagina tion, to fail wholly of the vital portrayal of character.
The principle is thus universal. The land scape artist dare not paint all he sees, but must creatively interpret his vision instead of imi tating nature. In music it is the deep wealth of emotion unexpressed that gives to the mel ody its power to sweep one on to the bosom of the sea of feeling.
With all art that portrays life in relation to law there is a further element of idealism in carrying the laws to greater fulfillment than appears normally in life. Literature especially^ does this. In our life tendencies are evident, but incomplete. The threads are spun a little way and then pitiless Atropos cuts them off,
50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
and how those tangled threads may be woven into the complete garment of life behind the veil, we cannot see ; but the true artist sees. In deed, he is artist partly because he is prophet, with a vision of life brought full circle. In life, the curtain may fall on any one of the scenes of the never-finished drama ; in the play, it may not fall until the five full acts are com plete. In life, any one who is growing dies too soon: there are always incomplete tenden cies, potentialities broken off; but in art, the ethical motive, laid down in the beginning, must be completed in the end. In our world, not all mad ambition brings the tragedy of Macbeth,, not all unfounded jealousy the piti ful eclipse at the end of Othello, not all intro spective absorption, with the will balanced be tween opposing motives, the black disaster of Hamlet; but in Shakespeare these conclusions inexorably follow. Thus art interprets life by bringing its actual tendencies of good and evil to that more complete fulfillment toward which religion and philosophy have always groped.
Further, in all the arts is an element of idealism which may be called atmosphere. It
INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 51
is this that unifies a masterpiece and gives the key to the spirit of the whole. Nowhere is there a better illustration than in the paintings of Titian. What is it that makes his pictures so wonderful an interpretation of Venice? Not the nude figures, the bit of mountain, the sea or the radiant sky; but the luxuriant wealth of warm golden light poured over the whole, transfiguring the landscape, lifting the nude bodies away from all possible association with illness or death, giving unity and interpreting the whole.
So the subtle "light that never was on sea or land" is more than anything else the key to Corot's impression. In the Inferno of Dante there is one dominant atmosphere, made of darkness deepened into darkness, set off by vermilion flame ; in the Purgatorio another, made up of all the beauty of the natural world ; in the Paradiso a third, with light multiplied into light, till the radiant shining is all but un endurable. Similarly there is one unifying and interpretative atmosphere in a fugue of Bach's, a nocturne of Chopin's, or in the third move ment of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.
Besides these five elements of idealism in
52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
art, there is a final principle, in that^art, to be sound, must present the phase of life it por trays in true relation to the whole. ) This ap plies particularly to the portrayal of evil. This is dangerous in its effect only when evil is pictured out of relation to the whole of life, as for instance, in the worse sort of the socalled French novel (which is not produced, by the way, exclusively in France) where a moral evil is dressed in such beautiful garments that it is mistaken for the good, and so be comes seductively misleading. The great mas ters never make this mistake : in their portrayal evil is as repulsive in form as it is offensive in meaning. No daughter was ever led to unfilial conduct by the example of Goneril and Regan in King Lear; no one was ever tempted to a career of deception by the example of lago. We despise these characters, and they in no way seduce us to imitation of their behavior.
Thus Dante uses coarse epithets and imag ery increasingly painful to the senses, to clothe the darker sins as he descends the pit of hell. That the principle is not confined to moral evil, however, is evident in the work of such
INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 53
painters as Millet and Bastien-Lepage, the wonder of whose portrayal of peasant life is that the phase studied is given in such sound relation to the whole of life as to interpret its very soul.
Let me give an illustration of this principle in the field of the novel. Some years ago Upton Sinclair studied the notorious packing house district of Chicago and portrayed its horrors in the novel, The Jungle, widely read here and abroad, which helped vitally to the reform of the evil conditions it exploited. Now I have no doubt that every incident given in the novel could be paralleled in the packing house district of Chicago, and that the mass of these facts had come under the direct observa tion of the author; yet I have no hesitation in saying that the story as a whole is untrue to the life it presents. What the author did, after exhaustive investigation of the horrors of that district of Chicago, was to gather them all together and heap them upon the head of one devoted woman and family. The result was a more or less effective reform document, but a novel with a loss of sound perspective, thus artistically, and hence ethically, untrue to the
54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
life it portrayed. The same criticism may be passed upon a more recent social document, exploiting the evils of the "white slave traffic" Kauffman's House of Bondage.
It is on the basis of this principle, little as it is understood, that the work of Ibsen, Mae terlinck, Shaw, Wilde and Sudermann must ultimately be judged, as also the didactic dramas, such as The Passing of the Third Floor Back, The Servant in the House, Everywoman, The Terrible Meek, which have enjoyed such vogue recently. Much secondrate work, that is widely popular for the mo ment, is weeded out and forgotten after a little time, just because the artist lacked the greatness to see the part in true perspective and sound relation to the whole, and so be came the partisan rather than the true creator.
Let us sum up our work to this point, formu lating the answer to our first question :(Art is then the adequate and harmonious expres sion and interpretation, through the medium of personality and in definitely limited form, of some phase of man's life or relation to nature in true relation to the whole?) This statement is not intended as a definition in the ordinary
INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 55
sense, but as a thesis, gathering together all the elements studied as forming art. Simplifying the statement, retaining the most definitive ele ments: Art is the adequate and harmonious expression and interpretation of some phase of mans life in true relation to the whole.
"Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion." Goethe, Maxims and Reflec tions, p. 174.
"The secret, mysterious relations of the human heart to the strange nature around it, have not yet come to an end. In its eloquent silence, this latter still speaks to the heart just as it did a thousand years ago; and what was told in the very gray of antiquity is understood to-day as easily as then. For this reason it is that the legend of nature ever remains the inexhaustible resource of the poet in his intercourse with his people." Wagner, in "Der Freischiitz in Paris," Art Life and Theories, p. 99.
"The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all pagan mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of nature; sincere communion of man with the mysterious in visible powers visibly seen at work in the world round him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scandinavian than in any mythology I know. Sincerity is the great char acter of it. Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that these old northmen were look ing into nature with open eye and soul most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unf earing way." Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, p. 30.
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CHAPTER III PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART
THAT all the arts spring from a com mon historic basis has already been in dicated. The law of evolution from the homogeneous to the differentiated and special ized, that Spencer traced throughout the bio logical world, is evident in the history of art. All the fine arts are present in germ in an act of religious worship in the early Greek world, when a hymn was sung in honor of the god, and accompanied with orchestric dancing. The interpretative dancing was the basis of sculp ture, and from sculpture, with scarcely a line of demarcation, sprang painting. The sing ing was the basis of music ; while the hymn it self represented poetry, from which, by the way, science and philosophy were later de veloped. Thus each of the typical fine arts practised to-day has been differentiated and specialized in function out of a simple unified historical source.
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Note, further, the intimate connection of all early art with religion. Indeed, while the im pulse of love and the desire to record action and event cooperated in the birth of art, the main inspiration came from religion; and through much of the history of the arts the association with religion continues intimate. Architecture builds temples, sculpture and painting adorn them, music and poetry are chiefly concerned with worship. Even to-day all these arts find an important function in serving religion; and while that is no longer their main purpose, the road was long the arts were compelled to travel before they could free themselves from being merely the hand maidens of religion, and attain their independ ent functions as ideal expressions of the spirit of man. Remember the long centuries of Byzantine painting when art was merely re ligious symbolism, its pictures, pegs on which to hang the teachings of faith; or consider at how late a period the secular drama freed itself from the conventions of the mediaeval mystery and morality plays.
With the homogeneous simplicity of primi-
PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 59
tive life, religion was not separated from other aspects of existence, but permeated them all; in a profoundly true sense life itself was re ligion. Born under this dominant religious inspiration, early art was deeply serious. It was concerned with the universal questions of man's existence, and had a unity and compre hensiveness not present equally in later differ entiated forms of art. Indeed, long before conscious art is born, there is accumulated a great storehouse of popular thought, feeling and imagination. It springs directly out of life, dealing with the two universal aspects of existence Man and Nature. The legends slowly grew, told over by the aged to the young before the hearthstone, sung by wandering minstrels at the halls of chieftains, molded and remolded from age to age, until, when finally written down, they represent the re fined, condensed result of generations upon generations of early life.
The power of primitive men, with memories unaided and uncrippled by note-books, to pre serve and hand on such a body of material, is beyond all that we, with our mechanical de-
60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART
vices and printed books, can understand.* Thus the human mind was the tablet upon which the primitive artist wrote; but just for that reason his creation was less crys tallized and more subject to change. While primitive men regarded their inherited legends with religious veneration, still the plastic mind, receiving and transmitting them, improved and refined them as time went on.
Thus the expression of early life has cor relative strength and weakness as compared with later artistic masterpieces. In such a lit erary creation as the Divine Comedy or Faust there is the advantage of unified and complete art in the work as a whole. We get the per sonal reaction on life of one great mind and the statement of one man's philosophy.
Mythology lacks this unity resulting from the world-view of a single great mind, but it has condensed vitality and deals with universal material. It is of two main types determined
* "There are thousands of Brahmans even now, when sc little inducement exists for Vedic studies, who know the whole of the Rig-Veda by heart and can repeat it; and what applies to the Rig-Veda applies to many other books." F. Max Miiller, India: What Can It Teach Us, p. 81. Long mans, Green, & Co., London, 1883.
PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 61
by its two subjects Man and Nature. These are of course interwoven, but now one, now the other, is dominant. The contrasting types will be evident if we compare the main body of Aryan legend with that produced by the Semites. As far back as we can trace the Aryans they lived in settled habitations, in vil lage communities. As cultivators of the soil they depended for their existence upon the regular recurrence of the seasons, the shining of the sun and the falling of the rain. De pending thus upon Nature, with their atten tion constantly drawn to her activities, their mythology was naturally in the main a poetic interpretation of those activities and their in fluence on man. The all-enfolding sky, mar ried to the earth-mother through the life-giving rain, the storm gods driving their spotted deer or f ull-uddered cows across the heaven, the lifegiving sun, the dawn housewife of the sky: these were the objects of Aryan worship and the subjects of Aryan mythology.
In the earliest period this mythology is re markably fluid, the life-giving principle of Nature being worshiped easily under any of its manifold forms; but as various races de-
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veloped out of the parent stem, more definite mythologies were differentiated under the in fluence of new conditions of life. One branch of the race, migrating to what became Persia, where the strong contrast is of day and night, light and darkness, developed a nature dual ism, opposing Ormuzd, the bright god, to Ahriman, the spirit of darkness.
Another branch, entering the beautiful peninsula of Hellas, with the sea and the mountains everywhere, each valley with its dis tinguishing individuality and the radiant sky over all, evolved the most beautiful nature polytheism the world has seen. Every river, dell and tree in the forest had its presiding spirit, while all these divine powers were gath ered in the pantheon of gods upon Olympus.
Still nother portion of the mother race, settling upon the northern shores of Europe and upon the peninsulas that are now Den mark, Norway and Sweden, found a nature world of forbidding majesty, where life was a perpetual struggle against destructive forces the forest and its wild beasts, the giants of ice, cold and snow, and the demon of destruc tive fire. Thus these men developed a dualism
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in which man's will and intelligence, incarnate in the bright gods Odin, Thor, Balder, Freya and the rest were opposed to the Jotuns of the north, the Fenrir wolf and the Midgard Serpent, Loki, the demon of fire.
The Semitic peoples, on the other hand, as far back as we can trace them, were nomads. Living upon flocks and herds, climbing the mountains when the valleys were dry, crossing to fertile plains beyond, adding to their sus tenance by marauding raids upon weaker and more settled tribes, their existence depended less upon nature than upon human courage, intelligence and leadership, with close social or ganization. It was the strong, patriarchal chieftain, the brave warrior, the unified war fare against common foes that guaranteed their existence. Thus the mythology they devel oped centered upon human character and ac tion rather than upon nature. They wor shiped at first the dead chieftain, lifted to that mysterious other world but supposed still to have some power upon this. As their religion developed, they came to worship the god of the tribe, the race, and finally the king and ruler of the universe. In the whole process it was
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human power, justice, benevolence and, in the end, love, upon which the mind of the Sem ites was focused, and not mainly the forces and activities of the nature world. Thus their accumulated body of legend concerned mainly the history of human action, of brave deeds, persecutions endured, tribal and racial victories.
Of course the two tendencies overlap. Among all the Indo-European races a wealth of human legend gets grafted on the older and more characteristic body of nature myths. The origin of the latter is, in the end, quite forgotten, and elements from human tradition get associated with even the oldest nature stories. Similarly, we find the Elohim beside Jehovah in the Old Testament, and the genii of Mohammedan lore. Still the striking dif ferentiation in type, springing from original differences in racial activity and environment, remains.
The importance of the two themes of all primitive art is evident if one remembers that all forces of human progress reduce to two the action of man and the reaction of nature. Moreover, the two great aspects of the devel-
PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 65
opment of world religion have been the pro gressive discovery of the Divine, if I may so express it, through the two chapters of revela tion Man and Nature, ending in a union of the two in a conception of God as at once in the world, as the immanent life of all life "in whom we live and move and have our being," and above the world, as the loving Father of spirits in whose image we are made. Thus pro found and universal are the two themes of primitive art.
The vitality of treatment in early art is as impressive as its universality in subject. Take, for instance, the old Brynhild- Sigurd story as it is given in the Elder Edda and the Song of the Volsungs. Here, even more than in Wag ner's rendering, is it universally human in elements and vital in treatment. The frag mentary songs of the Elder Edda, wild but majestic in irregular alliterative verse, date perhaps from the eighth to the tenth centuries. The Volsung's Saga, a prose epic of somewhat later date (probably the thirteenth century), follows closely the older material, but gives the story in more complete form. Thus both represent the early working over of the body
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of legend handed down through generations. Two elements of Fate are in the story from the beginning. The first is the hoard of treas ure, guarded by the dragon Fafnir. The other is the doom of Brynhild, the battle may, who, for breaking the will of Odin, is pierced with the sleep-thorn and confined in the castle sur rounded by fire. Sigurd, fated and fearless, having slain the dragon, comes to the flamegirt castle:
"By long roads rides Sigurd, till he comes at the last up on to Hindfell, . . . and he sees before him on the fell a great light, as of fire burning, and flam ing up even unto the heavens ; and when he came thereto, lo, a shield-hung castle before him, and a banner on the topmost thereof: into the castle went Sigurd, and saw one lying there asleep, and all-armed. Therewith he takes the helm from off the head of him, and sees that it is no man, but a woman ; and she was clad in a byrny as closely set on her as though it had grown to her flesh ; so he rent it from the collar downwards; and then the sleeves thereof, and ever the sword bit on it as if it were cloth. Then said Sigurd that over-long had she lain asleep; but she asked
'What thing of great might is it that has pre-
PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 67
vailed to rend my byrny, and draw me from my sleep? . . . Ah, is it so, that here is come Sigurd Sigmundson, bearing Fafnir's helm on his head and Fafnir's bane in his hand? '
Then answered Sigurd . . .
'Of the Volsung's kin is he who has done the deed ; but now I have heard that thou art daughter of a mighty king, and folk have told us that thou wert lovely and full of lore, and now will I try the same.'
Then Brynhild sang
'Long have I slept
And slumbered long, Many and long are the woes of mankind,
By the might of Odin
Must I bide helpless To shake from off me the spells of slumber.
Hail to the day come back!
Hail, sons of the daylight! Hail to thee, dark night, and thy daughter!
Look with kind eyes a-down,
On us sitting here lonely, And give unto us the gain that we long for.'
Then said Sigurd, 'Teach us the lore of mighty matters !'
She said, 'Belike thou cannest more skill in all
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than I ; yet will I teach thee ; yea, and with thanks, if there be aught of my cunning that will in anywise pleasure thee, either of runes or of other matters that are the root of things ; but let us now drink together, and may the Gods give to us twain a good day, that thou mayst win good help and fame from my wisdom, and that thou mayst hereafter mind thee of that which we twain speak together.' " *
So she gives him the drink of love, and then with childlike simplicity yet with mature love of wisdom, these two sit down together, with the flames all round about, while she sings him the sacred runes runes of war and of pity, of safety and thought "wise words, sweet words, speech of great game."
It is significant of this old Norse land that the woman, repository of wisdom, teaches, while the man learns.
"Sigurd spake now, 'Sure no wiser woman than thou art one may be found in the wide world; yea, yea, teach me more yet of thy wisdom !' . . .
She spake withal
'Be kindly to friend and kin, and reward not their
* The Story of the Volsungs, edited by H. Halliday Spar ling, pp. 68-70. Walter Scott, London.
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trespasses against thee; bear and forbear, and win for thee thereby long enduring praise of men.
Take good heed of evil things : a may's love, and a man's wife; full oft thereof doth ill befall!
Let not thy mind be overmuch crossed by unwise men at thronged meetings of folk; for oft these speak worse than they wot of; lest thou be called a dastard, and art minded to think that thou art even as is said; slay such an one on another day, and so reward his ugly talk.
**
Let not fair women beguile thee, such as thou mayst meet at the feast, so that the thought thereof stand thee in stead of sleep, and a quiet mind ; yea, draw them not to thee with kisses and other sweet things of love.
If thou hearest the fool's word of a drunken, man, strive not with him being drunk with drink and wit less ; many a grief, yea, and the very death, groweth from out such things.
Fight thy foes in the field, nor be burnt in thine own house.
Look thou with good heed to the wiles of thy friends ; but little skill is given to me, that I should foresee the ways of thy life; yet good it were that hate fell not on thee from those of thy wife's house.'
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Sigurd spake, 'None among the sons of men can be found wiser than thou; and thereby swear I, that thee will I have as my own, for near to my heart thou liest.'
She answers, 'Thee would I fainest choose, though I had all men's sons to choose from.'
And thereto they plighted troth both of them." *
It is so far away, yet so near this SigurdBrynhild story. What universality of human emotions, what majestic simplicity of expres sion, what strength and beauty of character, what permanent wisdom it contains. To read it is like a draught from some pure mountain spring in the midst of a primeval forest.
Had Sigurd been able to follow the wise teachings of Brynhild, all would have been well, but Fate willed otherwise. So Sigurd, riding to King Guiki's palace, is given the magic drink by Queen Grimhild and married to her daughter, Gudrun. In his bewildered state, he lends himself to the scheme of Gunnar, Gudrun's brother, to deceiving Brynhild into marrying Gunnar as the one who had freed her from the fire. Through the taunt ing of Brynhild by Gudrun the deceptions are
* The Story of the Volsungs, pp. 76, 77.
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discovered. Sigurd comes to his senses, urges Brynhild to accept him even now ; but she :
" 'Such words may nowise be spoken, nor will I have two kings in one hall; I will lay my life down rather than beguile Gunnar the King. ... I swore an oath to wed the man who should ride my naming fire, and that oath will I hold to, or die.' " *
So woe is heaped on woe. Sigurd is mur dered through Gunnar's scheming, at Brynhild's demand. Brynhild, slaying herself, prophesies the woes to come, and prays as a last boon to be burned on the funeral pyre with Sigurd
" 'And lay there betwixt us a drawn sword, as in the other days when we twain stepped into one bed to gether ; and then may we have the name of man and wife, nor shall the door swing to at the heel of him as I go behind him.' " f
How big it is with the elemental forces of life. Here is no low intrigue, no finesse of modern deception, the very wrong is on the scale of majesty, inextricably interwoven with
* The Story of the Volsungs, p. 107. t Ibid., p. 124.
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the fate of life. How wild, loyal, fierce in hate, strong in love, true in instinct, this splendid Brynhild is : a type of glorious and tragic wom anhood for all time. How the pessimism of a Schopenhauer, the wail of a modern Leopardi pale beside this elemental tragedy!
Gudrun, overshadowed by Brynhild, lend ing herself to her mother's deception to win Sigurd, has her own majesty and suffers her own bitterness. I know nothing else in primi tive literature more profoundly moving in spirit, more tensely impressive in form than the stanzas of the Elder Edda giving the woe of Gudrun over Sigurd dead:
"Gudrun of old days Drew near to dying As she sat in sorrow Over Sigurd; Yet she sighed not Nor smote hand on hand, Nor wailed she aught As other women.
Then went earls to her, Full of all wisdom, Fain help to deal To her dreadful heart :
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Hushed was Gudrun Of wail, or greeting, But with a heavy woe Was her heart a-breaking.
Then spake Giaflaug,
Guiki's sister:
*Lo upon earth
I live most loveless
Who of five mates
Must see the ending,
Of daughters twain
And three sisters,
Of brethren eight,
And abide behind lonely.'
Naught gat Gudrun
Of wail and greeting,
So heavy was she
For her dead husband,
So dreadful-hearted
For the King laid dead there.
Then spake Gullrond, Guiki's daughter 'O foster-mother, Wise as thou mayst be,
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Naught canst thou better The young wife's bale.' And she bade uncover The dead King's corpse.
She swept the sheet Away from Sigurd, And turned his cheek Towards his wife's knees 'Look on thy loved one Lay lips to his lips, E'en as thou wert clinging To thy king alive yet !'
Once looked Gudrun One look only, And saw her lord's locks Lying all bloody, The great man's eyes Glazed and deadly, And his heart's bulwark Broken by sword-edge.
Back then sank Gudrun, Back on the bolster, Loosed was her head array, Red did her cheeks grow, And the rain-drops ran Down over her knees.
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Then wept Gudrun,
Guild's daughter,
So that the tears flowed
Through the pillow;
As the geese withal
That were in the homefield,
The fair fowls the may owned,
Fell a-screaming." *
The tragedy seems cosmic in the sweep of its impressiveness ; the very weeping of Gu drun is like a storm rending some northern forest. What a depth and reach there is in it all of the simple universal elements that make life in all time! Love, hate, struggle, death, pride, grief all are here, and with what wondrous vitality. If the passions seem more ruthless and the woe more overwhelming than in life to-day, that is only because primitive men stood closer to the great realities of life, with no barrier of convention between. Their senses were un jaded, their emotions fresh and violent. They lived closer to the dawn and the sunshine, the rain and the cold. Night and its stars arched over them, and they met the world with untired wonder. This is em-
* Tht Story of the Volsungs, pp. 114-118.
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bodied in their very language which was nat ural metaphor. What our poetry accom plishes in a phrase or a made figure, they ex pressed in a word, since every word we use for a spiritual concept was once a natural meta phor, carrying physical association. "Ghost" and "spirit" were alike the "breath"; to be "corrupted" was to be crumbled up in charac ter as rocks or earth crumble with the spring frost.* So in all primitive description meta phor precedes simile, the wild outpourings of Beowulf come at an earlier racial epoch than the smooth comparisons of Homer.
So primitive art is true, with a simple ethical earnestness coming from a sound direct reac tion upon life. In form it is artistic, with a natural spontaneity equalled only in the high est achievements of the conscious artist of later times. With what unconscious skill it uses just the word, the image that carries the thought, repeating the vital phrase at the recurring
* "He who spake first of a 'dilapidated' fortune, what an image must have risen up before his mind's eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin." Suplee's Trench on Words, p. 20. A. C. Armstrong & Son, New York, 1887.
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crisis of its dramatic situation. With what fugue-like solemnity the song of Gudrun's lament repeats the dirge of its refrain:
"Naught gat Gudnm Of wail or greeting;"
the repetition being given with just change enough to grip the imagination. Thus all great qualities of art are here, with the inevitable naturalness of deep child-like appreciation.
As in this Norse literature, so everywhere, the earliest art is the working over and writing down of the store of primitive legends ac cumulated through centuries of racial life. The mythology and religion of those ages pre ceding the dawn of recorded history are thus the great source from which the arts spring. So, too, these form the permanent storehouse of material and of vital inspiration to which the arts must perpetually return. As Antasus was renewed in strength when he touched again his mother, the earth, so the late-born artist, surrounded by a conventional civiliza tion, with jaded senses and tired heart, is born anew when he bathes in these fountains that flow at the dawn of civilization. Compare the
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use of Greek mythology in classic sculpture, renaissance painting and Elizabethan poetry. Remember the wealth of Christian and He braic story in Italian painting and English poetry. Tennyson's use of Celtic legend and Wagner's of the Norse are but two of the multitude of illustrations of this turning back ward to the springs of racial life for material and inspiration.
"It is precisely minds of the first order that will never be specialists. For their very nature is to make the whole of existence their problem; and this is a subject upon which they will every one of them in some form provide mankind with a new revelation." Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, p. 55.
"People always fancy that we must become old to be come wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves as wise as we were. Man becomes, indeed, in the different stages of his life, a different being; but he cannot say that he is a better one, and, in certain matters, he is as likely to be right in his twentieth, as in his sixtieth year.
We see the world one way from a plain, another way from the heights of a promontory, another from the glacier fields of the primary mountains. We see, from one of these points, a larger piece of the world than from the other; but that is all, and we cannot say that we see more truly from any one than from the rest. When a writer leaves monuments on the different steps of his life, it is chiefly im portant that he should have an innate foundation and good will; that he should, at each step, have seen and felt clearly, and that, without any secondary aims, he should have said distinctly and truly what has passed in his mind. Then will his writings, if they were right at the step where they origi nated, remain always right, however the writer may develop or alter himself in after times." Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann and Soret, p. 512.
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CHAPTER IV
DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE ARTIST
SO far we have been considering the com mon nature of the arts and the generic sources from which they all spring. Now we are to study those influences which deter mine the specific characteristics of a master piece. It has been shown that the first cause of the unique appeal of ^ach work of art is that the common basis of human experience finds expression only through the medium of the artist's personality; thus inevitably his character and experience must in some meas ure stamp themselves upon all that he pro duces./ This is true even of the most objective and imitative work. Let an accident occur and be witnessed by a hundred persons; let each of these write out faithfully an account of what he saw: there would be a hundred vary ing stories, no two identical. Moreover, a good reader of character could tell something
81
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of the quality of the different personalities from the accounts written. To narrate an in cident is to give something of the narrator as well as the incident. How much more then when the work is bodied forth from the creative personality of the artist. Take, for illustra tion, what may be regarded as a purely ob jective dramatic study a play that has come to wide fame through musical setting and stage portrayal Oscar Wilde's Salome. Here is a study of a phase of human perversity, the type of fascinatingly repulsive woman who repre sents the most subtle and refined form of de pravity in modern life; yet, objective as it is, who would have been interested and able to portray it except the sensitive, strangely gift ed, morbid genius, Oscar Wilde? Is it an accident that his thought brooded for many years over the seductively repellent theme be fore the play was written ?
No music lover can mistake the characteris tic work of Beethoven for that of Mozart. What makes the difference? To answer, one must turn to the lives and temperaments of the two men. In Mozart's case one must re member the sweet, open disposition, the happy
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home and sunny temper, the genial friendliness and delight in social play, the amazing youth ful genius, resulting in an astounding range of compositions in childhood, and concert tours in which his fame as child prodigy was univer sal, without spoiling his modest and fine char acter. Absorbed wholly in music, he enjoyed regular and admirable education in his art under the excellent discipline of his gifted father. Struggles and disappointments in the period of young manhood he had to endure, it is true, with difficult financial circumstances (accentuated by his cheerful carelessness) re curring to the end of his brief life. Yet these shadows could not permanently cloud his viva cious spirit ; and he continued to compose with a celerity, sureness and consistent beauty, such as can result only from the highest natural gifts existing in the happiest combination. Can one not then understand why his works uniformly delight and rest us with entrancing melodies, smooth harmonies and a perfect unity of idea and execution?
With Beethoven, on the other hand, one must recall the sad childhood, the tragic home with a drunken father, the early contact with
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the sordid miseries of life, the temperamental intensity, pride and isolation. His develop ment was slow and painful, carried out by hard effort, and in the face of halting and inadequate public response. Then, when his wonderful genius had overcome the obstacles in his path and arrived at full expression, de scended upon him at thirty that frightful curse, the destruction of the very sense of hearing through which he could enjoy his own art. Thus shut off from his kind, proud and soli tary as Prometheus upon Caucasus, gnawed ever by the vulture of suffering, going forward in his lonely silence by sheer indomitable will to the creation of his masterpieces composi tions which he, alas ! could not hear except with the inner ear of the soul, Beethoven achieved that music, smiting in titanic majesty, un paralleled in compelling power and sombre grandeur, born of will and intellect striving with fate. Thus the difference in the music of Mozart and Beethoven is but the expression of the contrast in character and experience of the two men.
Fra Angelico and Fra Lippo Lippi both worked in Florence in the same period the
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happy forenoon of renaissance art. They grew up alike under the same general influences in painting ; yet their works are opposite in char acter. Fra Angelico's are purely spiritual, lifted away from the earth, each painting being an act of worship ; while Fra Lippo Lippi's are sweetly natural, all of the earth with its sen suous charm, the subjects nominally religious but with really no spiritual significance. What explains the contrast?
Let one recall Fra Angelico's saintly char acter and natural call to the monastic life, his early retired years in Tuscany, the removal to Umbria in the fresh responsiveness of young manhood, where he came under the spell of St. Francis and the spiritual aspiration of the middle age, the return to Florence and the eighteen years of brooding in the monastery on the height of Fiesole, overlooking the beau tiful Arno valley. Is it any wonder that, when the Medici called him down from Fiesole to Florence to adorn the newly rebuilt monas tery of San Marco, he covered its walls with those exquisitely spiritual frescoes: painting in the lunette over a door in the cloister arcade that Christ, welcomed, with human tenderness,
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as guest by two Dominican brothers, that halflength mystic Christ rising from the tomb ; or, in the corridor above, Mary and the Angel of the Annunciation, lifted above the human, the supreme moment given on the background of a bit of monastery garden ? Nearly every cell is frescoed with paintings of similar spiritual character. Here a Christ on the cross, with a group of mourning women and saints of the church gathered about; there a sweet, deepeyed Jesus child, on the mother's lap, looking out and beyond. One readily believes that Fra Angelico knelt in prayer before daring to paint a picture, so entirely is each of his paintings an act of worship, expressing his implicit faith and unworldly aspiration.
With Fra Lippo one must remember the orphaned and vagabond childhood, his early abandonment to the monastic life (for which he had no call) by the surviving relative whose only wish apparently was to be rid of the child's support, the stories of his romantic adventures, which, even if the wildest of them be disbe lieved, sufficiently indicate his character and experience. Let one recall the legend, ac cepted evidently without question by those who
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regarded themselves as his descendants, of his carrying away to his home the novice, Lucrezia Buti, who served as his model while painting the frescoes at Prato, of his union with her from which Filippino Lippi was born. Can not one then understand why Fra Lippo's angels are sweet girls from Prato and Flor ence, why he paints the charm of nature, the faces of monks and worldlings just as they were, why there is no spiritual appeal in all his work, while his demure madonnas seem ever about to break into a laugh as if they too ap preciated the absurdity of Fra Lippo Lippi's attempting to paint madonnas?
Let us take a brief concrete illustration from a field of art, poetry, that may be introduced here. The two masters who divided the leader ship of English poetry during the middle of the nineteenth century, each left, fortunately for our purpose, a brief confession of faith in beautiful poetic form, written toward the close of life. Tennyson asked that Crossing the Bar be placed at the end of every complete edition of his works, while Browning's Epilogue to Asolando appeared as the concluding poem of the little book which was published on the
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day of the author's death. Thus we are war ranted in taking these as final confessions of the two masters. Both artists were English men, contemporaries, subject to much the same influences; yet compare the two expressions, turning first to Tennyson.
CROSSING THE BAR.*
"Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark ;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar."
Tennyson, Works, p. 837. Macmillan & Co., New York, 1893.
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Tennyson's lyric makes its full impression at a single reading. There is no doubt as to its meaning, and this is given with the direct simplicity of the highest art. The imagery is majestic, restrained and entirely clear. The music is so liquid and pellucid that to attempt to set the lyric to music is usually to lower the moving beauty of its melody. The whole poem is an example of art so perfect as to seem spontaneous nature, yet consciously molded in every detail of its construction. This is par ticularly evident in the music, which depends not only upon the open, liquid sound of the words, but still more on the handling of the meter. The stanzas are all simple quatrains, dominately in iambic measure the simplest foot in English ;* yet with subtle changes pro-
* It should be noted that methods of scansion drawn from Greek and Latin poetry do not strictly apply to English. Classic poetry depended mainly upon time measurement, so that it is possible to measure the syllables with the accuracy of notes of music. Our poetry depends mainly upon accent. Where the classic said long and short syllables, we must say strong and weak, or accented and unaccented. It is true we use the principle of time measurement, since we inevitably give more time to the accented syllables, but with nothing of the exactness of classic poetry. Thus when we use the terms of classic scansion we must recognize that they have different meaning in application to our poetry. An iambus is a foot with one unaccented and one accented
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ducing the most artistic effect. The first line, for example, scanned prosaically would read:
I* U .\
Sunset and evening star; but it is not that at all. It is :
Sunset and evening star;
really two dactyls and a strong syllable. Note how the change brings out the hinging words, "sunset" and "star," on which the imagery and meaning of the poem alike depend.
The second line is a regular three-foot iam bic ; the third a long swinging line of five feet, which we tend to read more rapidly; while the movement slows down again in the closing three-foot, monosyllabic line.
The second stanza begins with the long sweeping five-foot line, followed by a slower three-foot line, again monosyllabic; then once
syllable, represented ^ . It is the simplest foot in Eng lish, because our language moves naturally in that order of syllables. It is possible to take whole passages of the prose of deep feeling (as from De Quincey) and scan them as iambic verse by changing an occasional word or syllable.
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more the five feet ; while the last line is irregu lar in meter like the first in the poem. Scanned as regular iambic, it would be:
Turns again home. On the contrary it reads:
Turns again home.
making really one dactyl and one strong syl lable. With what inexpressible tenderness and impressiveness that hinging word of the whole poem, "home," is borne in upon us by the melody, through the slight irregularity of the meter.
Once more the same irregularity occurs at the beginning of stanza three :
Twilight and evening bell.
Again it is the definitive, image-carrying words of the poem which receive the impressive ac cent. Don't think these variations accidental: there are no accidents in art. Often the artist
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may not be conscious of certain details of his technique; but he is poet just because he chooses instinctively the melodiously appropri ate word and the inevitable meter. With Ten nyson, however, preeminently conscious artist, working deliberately for effects after a life time of technical training, it is hard not to be lieve that results such as those cited above were planned and consciously molded.
In content the poem expresses the matured faith of Tennyson's life, attained after battling with doubt in the arena of his century, facing and accepting, if reluctantly, the last general izations of science, and journeying through the "Divine Comedy" of In Memoriam. It is sim ply the generic heart of Christianity, freed from limitations of sect and eccentricities of dogma, lifted and voiced in its essential mean ing for the soul of man. From the question ings of his own mind and the feverish and clouded struggles of his time, Tennyson turns to rest on the bosom of this faith of so many generations of humanity, and in so doing finds peace.
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Now turn to Browning:
EPILOGUE TO ASOLANDO.*
"At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free, Will they pass to where by death, fools think,
imprisoned
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, Pity me?
Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken !
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel
Being who ?
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong
would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.
* Browning, Works, Camberwell edition, vol. XII, pp. 267, 268. Crowell & Co., New York, 1898.
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No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer ! Bid him forward, breast and back as either should
be, 'Strive and thrive !' cry 'Speed, fight on, fare ever
There as here !' "
One is first of all impressed with the diffi culty in reading the poem. It does not yield up its heart at once : one must know in advance something of the situation implied even to un derstand its meaning. One must think of Browning as speaking to some intimate friend with reference to that friend's thought of him when death has taken him. Will you pity me, I being who? In the latter half of the poem Browning answers splendidly the question, af firming who he is, and proclaiming what should be the sound attitude toward one who, after fighting straightforwardly, with unfaltering courage and faith, the battle here, has passed on to the next chapter in the unseen.
The imagery is strong and fresh, but in volved, passing quickly from one suggested picture to another, with nothing of the calm re strained vision of Tennyson. The music is any thing but pellucid, yet music undoubtedly there
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is. The verse is trochaic ( - ^ ) , further away from common speech than iambic and more difficult to write. The lines are most irregular in length, varying from the dominant long sixfoot line, opening each stanza, to the incisive, short, truncated two-foot line with which each closes. In the entire five-line stanza there are but two lines rhymed the second and last, both short lines; and the single rhyme thus brings the music of the stanza back into itself, thus clinching the effect. All these elements of fresh, irregular music unite with the virile but often unmelodious words in a strong, in spiring trumpet call. If Tennyson's music is like the melodious wash of the slow-moving waves of a summer sea upon the sand, this music is like the music of a North Sea storm.
Equally striking is the contrast with Tenny son in thought. Browning's faith is also in a deep sense Christian, but it does not depend upon the centuries of historic belief and the record of what happened in the past, as Ten nyson's. On the contrary, it springs directly from life. Because life has justified itself in so far as one has struggled toward the best, each chapter of pain or joy, failure or achieve-
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ment, finding its significance in the growing man who is at each point the net resultant of all his yesterdays, Browning dares to believe that the untried will justify itself also, even in the dark shadow of death at the end of the path, and the unseen that lies past its mystery. His unquestioning faith in immortality springs from his life itself, in his simply daring to be lieve that the little arc of his experience some how gives the curve of the infinite circle of God's truth.
Hence the function of the two men in rela tion to the modern spirit. Tennyson voiced the weight of despair that came with the dis coveries and generalizations of modern science, the stumbling
"Upon the great world's altar stairs That slope through darkness up to God," *
the wail of the child in the dark and the serene answer of historic faith, achieved through his own struggles in the Gethsemane of suffering. Browning, on the other hand, voiced a range of ideas still beyond us, shining like stars in the
* In Memoriam, canto LV.
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heaven of the spirit to guide our path. No wonder Tennyson was the most popular poet of his time; while Browning, losing any large public response for the middle twenty years of his creative life, has still to wait for his full audience.
Thus behind each of these lyric confessions is the whole personality and experience of the artist. It is no accident that Tennyson post poned his personal happiness in marriage for twenty years for the sake of his art; while Browning's marriage practically an elope ment, under circumstances to which every bio logical and prudential counsel would have been opposed, but which in this instance was right was a splendid masculine response to a great call of personal life. Tennyson was sensitive, shy, aristocratic and retiring, looking out from the seclusion of his watch-tower on the world of humanity, and solacing himself with a won derland of chivalric dreams. Browning was forceful, impetuous, masculine, democratic in sympathy, interested in every phase of man and woman, and living vigorously in the world. Tennyson lived to write ; in a profoundly true sense Browning wrote to live. Thus all that
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the man was, in each instance, is incarnate in the two perfect bits of art.
It will be said that it is the biographies of these men that help us to understand the art. Yes, the principle works both ways; but con trast the revelation of personality in a work of art with what is given in the usual biography. The tendency of biography is to give chiefly external incident, which gossip may seize upon and which is truly interpreted only in relation to the character. "By their fruits ye shall know them," if you know all the fruit; but to judge the tree by one accidentally rotten apple at the end of the bough is surely unfair ; yet that is what we do constantly in estimating human beings. Art, on the other hand, con fesses, not the incident of the life, but the soul of the character, so that we get the confession only when we rise to the plane on which it is given. Thus such an expression of the heart of life can scarcely be misunderstood. We either get it, or fail to get it.
Of Andrea del Sarto, for instance, we have a gossipy biography by Vasari. We know his facile genius, early successes, his timid spirit and the insignificant returns he received for
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his work. We have the more or less trust worthy story of his apparently unworthy love affair and marriage, and sad personal life. Vasari ought to have known the incidents with reasonable accuracy, since he worked for a time as pupil in Andrea's studio.
Put it all aside, and stand in the presence of those strangely elusive paintings that are everywhere in Florence: that Madonna of the Harpies with the sensuously molded body and beautiful oval face, but with no touch of con scious motherhood toward the child in her arms; that young St* John with the wonder fully lucent eyes, promising to be the master piece the masculine counterpart of the Sis tine Madonna , but which, after your hour before it, you sadly acknowledge just misses its aim; that Deposition from the Cross with its play of light and shadow, the wonderful white body of the dead Christ, the restrained sorrowing of the mother and passionate out pouring of human grief in Mary Magdalen. Go out to San Salvi and study his marvelous Last Supper, strong yet delicate in color, sub tle in its psychology, interpreting the inner life with a sensitiveness and appreciation worthy
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of modern times. Almost every one of the dis ciples seems asking himself the question, "Could I do it?"; while of all the faces the most powerfully moving is the Judas, who sits at the right hand of Christ. Leaning forward on the balls of his feet, one hand pressed against his breast, the other stretched out in a hopelessly appealing gesture, the face wan and sensitive under the tangled mass of hair: it is the one possible Judas I have seen in a paint ing. Return to the galleries of Florence and stand once more before the numerous selfportraits of Andrea, painted in profile or halfshadow, the face sensitive and hungry almost that of his own Judas the face of a man who, if he loved aright, could be lifted to great heights of achievement, while if his love were misplaced he might be led on and down to ruin. Then at last we understand and may even come to say: I know you, Andrea del Sarto, across the centuries I know your soul. It is something to be understood, is it not even late when one is filled with the sense of despairing loneliness and the bitter ache of failure gnaws at the heart? They did not un derstand you the people about you, Lucrezia
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and the rest; but for any man who has put his soul into forms of beauty the day of ap preciation will dawn. It is they who, despair ing alone, have never been able to sing the song or paint the picture, whose lot is most hard.
Similarly we have a record of Chopin's outer life. We know his sensitive, melancholy tem perament, his struggles and disappointments, something of his love-affairs and the story of his social and artistic success; but how much deeper is the revelation of the man through his music. When we listen to those strangely moving melodies, those harmonies pushed al most to discord, those appeals to sad and ten der sentiment till the very heart strings ache, we come to know the soul of Chopin with all its burden of revelation, its painful struggles, far-reaching hungers and aspirations.
"We live in this world only that we may go onward with out ceasing, a peculiar help in this direction being that one enlightens the other by communicating his ideas; in the sciences and fine arts there is always more to learn." Mozart, in Kerst, Mozart: The Man and the Artist, p. 89.
"I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my mem ory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me. I change many things, discard, and try again until I am satisfied. Then, however, there begins in my head the development in every direction, and, inasmuch as I know exactly what I want, the fundamental idea never deserts me, it arises before me, grows, I see and hear the picture in all its extent and dimen sions stand before my mind like a cast, and there remains for me nothing but the labor of writing it down, which is quickly accomplished when I have the time, for I sometimes take up other work, but never to the confusion of one with the other. You will ask me where I get my ideas. That I can not tell you with certainty; they come unsummoned, di rectly, indirectly, I could seize them with my hands, out in the open air; in the woods; while walking; in the silence of the nights; early in the morning; incited by moods, which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes." Beethoven, in Kerst, Beethoven: The Man and the Artist, p. 29.
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CHAPTER V
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARTIST AS REVEALED IN ART
IT is not only that the personality and ex perience of the artist mold all details of his art, while that in turn reveals his es sential character. When an artist has worked through a long period of time, the different aspects of his development find full expres sion in the works coming in successive periods. If, then, his works are studied in the chrono logical order in which they were produced, they reveal intimately the development of the artist's mind, character and philosophy. With such a master as Goethe, for example, passing through many phases of life, experiencing a succession of intellectual, as of personal, loveaffairs, this becomes deeply important. From the sentimental romanticism of Weriher, the wild outpourings of Gotz, and the early pas sionate scenes of Faust, through the classical restraint of Tasso and Iphigenia to Wilhelm
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Meister and the noblest portions of Faust, on to the profundities and obscurities of the last written scenes of the Second Part of Faust how wonderfully the achievement of Goethe's greatest work of art, his personality and char acter, is revealed.
The many-sided modern genius, Wagner, creator of music first, but poet, dramatic art ist and impresario in only lesser degree, is equally revealed in the development of his character and life through struggles, adven tures, miseries and achievements, in the suc cession of his works. From his early brilliant, but often bombastic, compositions, through the Flying Dutchman to Tannhauser and Lo hengrin,, in which he found himself, on through the Nibelungen Ring and Tristan und Isolde to Parsifal,, what development of genius, free dom, power and of fundamental philosophy of life is evidenced.
This holds even with so purely and consist ently objective a dramatist as Shakespeare. The tradition of his outer life is dim; indeed, there are serious scholars who question whether the man who was born at Stratford-on-theAvon in 1564 and died there in 1616 really
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wrote the dramas that bear his name; yet we know Shakespeare, not only in the essentials of his spirit, but in all the unfolding of his art and philosophy of life, merely through the dramas themselves. Modern scholarship, ex hausting all evidence internal and external, has given us substantially the chronology of the plays; and the changing spirit of these through the successive periods of the master's life reveals the master. Not that Shakespeare ever surely expresses himself in the words of any character : no other dramatist ever worked with such consistent objectivity as he. It is never Shakespeare who speaks, but always the dramatic character. Twice we long to identify him with his creation ; but even in Hamlet and Prospero we cannot be sure; and if Shake speare does express himself through the words spoken by these two, it is due to the agree ment of the dramatic situation with the cir cumstances and mood in Shakespeare's own life at the time. Nevertheless, in each of the dramas the entire moral background reveals the master. How does the play focus as a whole in relation to life? What elements are brought into the foreground, what subordi-
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nated or suppressed? What is the dominant mood of the whole? The answers to these questions give Shakespeare.
In the first play independently from his hand Love's Labor's Lost, produced prob ably when he was twenty-six, there is nothing of the ethical depth and profound grasp of the laws of life that mark his later plays. It is full of a young man's exuberant delight in the beauty of nature and the amazing variety of human character and action. With tiresome quibbles and adolescent punning, its mood is one of pure joy in just being able to look out on the world. There is the same warm interest in every absurdity and eccentricity of human nature, as in the nobilities and beauties of life. The pleasant little moral with which the play closes where Biron is told to make his jokes in a hospital for one year and cause the poor sufferers to laugh, and then, when the sting is gone from his humor, he may hope to win Rosaline's hand is characteristic of the slight ethical interest of the play.
The same mood is in all the early comedies, while the one tragedy of the period, even though rewritten later on, is closely akin. In
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Romeo and Juliet the love is wholly on the plane of the senses, with the fresh awakening of youth. Juliet, with all her charm, is still an adolescent heroine. Suddenly, among these dramas, appears one, called a comedy, but which involves deeply tragic elements, with a hero who outgrows his plot and setting; and in The Merchant of Venice we think we find Shakespeare's first deep awakening to the ethi cal problems and laws of life ; but an awaken ing not yet complete. Unique among the greater dramas of Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice closes with its ethical tendencies un finished. We see Shylock grow from what we thought was to be a caricature of the Jew, into a great many-sided character, with all the no bility and baseness of human nature in him. It was right that he should be balked of his revenge ; but what of the humanity that sobbed for the ring that Jessica bartered for a mon key in a night's debauch? That remains un fulfilled. It was right that Antonio should be freed and Portia and Bassanio happy; but what of the mean Jew-baiting on the part of those who reach up and take a name that does not belong to them the name of Christ? That
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remains all unpunished. Shakespeare himself seems to have felt this ; for the play really ends at the close of the fourth act, where Shylock, bowed and broken, balked of the one passion into which persecution had turned his human ity, goes out alone into the night; while the "Christians," who have beautifully preached mercy and callously performed the opposite, go merrily home to Belmont. To stop there would be too bitter; and so Shakespeare has added the beautiful anticlimax of the fifth act, where the moonlight sleeps upon the bank, music sounds out its calming charm and we share the happy reunion of the wedded lovers.
Passing over the history plays, in which Shakespeare not only expressed his patriotism but studied the vices and perfidies of courts and kings, we find him, at thirty-five, turning aside to rest himself and us with that lovely poetic interlude, which well deserves its name because in it everything goes As You Like It. Here Shakespeare turns from the big but marred life of human society to the sincere reality of Nature with the expression of sim ple human instincts on this background. With
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all its charm, however, a strain of pessimism runs through As You Like It. It shows in the half -humorous cynicism of Jaques, in the mood of reaction on the world in other characters. Had some shadow fallen across Shakespeare's inner life, fitting him to deal with the darker problems of his great tragedies? If so, his reaction was still youthful. While the char acters of As You Like It talk finely about "the sweet uses of adversity," like most of the world, they abandon those sweet uses at the earliest opportunity ; and as they return at the end of the play to the larger life of the world again, so Shakespeare makes his return in that unrivaled series of great tragedies marking the middle period of his creative life.
How great the development of his mind and spirit evidenced in these! Grappling with the relation of men to the world-forces that strug gle in the arena of time in Julius Ccesar, fac ing the deepest mystery of personality in Hamlet, portraying the destructive sweep of fierce passions in Othello, Lear and Macbeth, unleashing the great biological energies of man in Antony and Cleopatra, with the world as the stake for which they contend there is no
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deep Shakespeare fails to sound, no conflict he does not seem to understand.
He did not stop here. The late plays we call romances, since they include tragedy and comedy in one. They end happily, but include deeply tragic elements. There is far less use of dramatic power, but a new ethical spirit of forgiveness, reconciliation and magnanimity in CymbeUne, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Their mood is one of serene accept ance of life, with light and shadow, pain and joy mingled. When we read through such a fireside story of human life as The Winter's Tale, enjoy its fairy-like adventures, respond to its pain, and come in the end to the be trothal of the young lovers and the reunion of the long estranged husband and wife, we can almost see Shakespeare lay down his pen with that sad, grave smile that mingles in one the laughter and tears that with divided sway rule over our common human heart. What a road he had traveled, and how intimately we come to know all the significant phases in the development of his mind and heart, through the succession of the plays!
As a closing illustration of the revelation
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of an artist's development through his works, consider for a moment two masterpieces of Michael Angelo, both presenting the same theme the dead body of Christ in the arms of the Madonna, and coming, the one from near the beginning, the other at the end, of the master's working life.
The first of these is in the chapel on your right hand as you enter St. Peter's in Rome. After Michael Angelo had left Florence at the crisis of the struggle between his patrons, the Medici, and the great preacher, Savona rola, who had wakened him, he journeyed about northern Italy and thence to Rome, where, not long after the execution of Savonarola, he carved this marble group the Madonna supporting on her splendid knees the dead body of her son. The center of the work is not the dead Christ, but the Madonna, who sustains easily the limp figure across her lap. She is like a Venus de Milo made human and Christian by centuries of suffering. She looks across her dead son be yond and beyond, in restrained, understand ing grief, as if she knew that, in spite of the bitter agony of the present, the issue would be
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well. There is hope through the gloom of the moment chosen, strong, courageous acceptance of life with all its pain.
Behind the high altar of the Cathedral of Florence stands the other work, found unfin ished in Michael Angelo's workshop after his death at the age of nearly eighty-nine. Vasari tells how day after day the master drove his chisel fiercely into the stone, seeking strength, as well as relief from the thoughts that brood ed over him. Here the Madonna is not the center, but the limp Christ. He hangs heavily on the arms of his mother, with Mary Mag dalen coldly supporting from one side, while Joseph assists in upholding the body from be hind. "The man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" this Christ is the one who prayed that the cup might pass from him. The hang ing figure, with the mood of seeming failure on the worn face and wearied body, wrings our heart-strings with all the weight of tragedy that is human life.
The beginning and the end; between the two lies the career of Michael Angelo: the dreams too vast for the world about him to make attainable; the succession of artistic
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tragedies; the plan of a tomb for Julius Sec ond that should outrival the temples of an tiquity, the year long labor in the mountains to bring out the marble, the Pope changing his mind, his successors indifferent, the few scattered statues and the shrunken echo in St. Peter's in Chains, the only issue. Another pope, interested in Florence, sends Michael Angelo into the papal quarries to bring mar ble for the fa9ade of San Lorenzo. Months of quarrying and road-building follow; while a marble block on the square before San Lo renzo and a few others beside the sea are the only evidence of the gigantic labors, and San Lorenzo remains without its fa9ade to-day. Then the days of building fortifications to pro tect Florence from Medicean enemies, with nights of "working stealthily" at the figures to adorn the Medicean tombs: it is all here the whole life-history of Michael Angelo in those two masterpieces that bound his creative life.
"At a distance we only hear of the first artists, and then we are often contented with names only; but when we draw nearer to this starry sky, and the luminaries of the second and third magnitude also begin to twinkle, each one coming forward and occupying his proper place in the whole constellation, then the world becomes wide, and art becomes rich." Goethe, Travels in Italy, p. 36.
"Art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself boldly above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a de graded humanity under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all sub jects are subservient. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are enlarged." Schiller, Essays Msihetical and Philosophical, pp. 27, 28.
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CHAPTER VI
DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE EPOCH
WE have seen how art and the per sonality of the artist explain each other in the changing aspects of a man's development. That personality, how ever, which is always a molding force behind art, is itself in part the expression of still deeper causes. Every artist is in some meas ure always the embodiment of an epoch, of that Zeitgeist or time spirit that tends to ex press itself in every aspect of his character and attitude.
The spirit of the epoch is, it is true, a com plex of many forces. Nature and life know nothing of our dates and periods. History is a ceaselessly onflowing stream, with ebb and flow in its tides, but with nothing of that sharp demarcation of period from period that we have made. We put signposts into the long road of the past, saying, for example, "Go to,
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let us regard the crowning epoch of the renais sance as dating from 1450 to 1525." As a matter of fact the forces molding it began under the surface afar back in the middle ages, and are still active to-day. Such divisions are always to some extent arbitrary; yet it is wise to make them, since they help us to understand the past and the great movements which are undoubtedly present in it.
Th
