Chapter II: The Work of Art as Symbol

In the experience of the man who feels himself attracted to pictures and who studies them intelligently and with sympathy, there comes a day when suddenly a canvas reveals to him a new beauty in nature or in life. Much seeing and much thinking, much bewilderment and some disappointment, have taught him that in the appreciation of pictures the question at issue is not, how cleverly has the painter imitated his object, is not, how suggestive is the subject of pleasing associations; he need simply ask himself, "What has the artist conceived or felt in the presence of this landscape, this arrangement of line and color, this human face, that I have not seen and felt, and that he wants to communicate to me?"

The incident of the single canvas, which by its illuminating revealment first discloses to the observer the true significance of pictures, is typical of the whole scope of art. The mission of art is to reveal. It is the prophet's message to his fellow men, the apocalypse of the seer. The artist is he to whom is vouchsafed a special apprehension of beauty. He has the eye to see, the temperament to feel, the imagination to interpret; it is by virtue of these capacities, this high, transfiguring vision, that he is an artist; and his skill of hand, his equipment with the means of expression, is incidental to the great fact that he has somewhat to express that the common man has not. To his work, the manifestation of his spirit in material form, his perception made sensible, is accorded the name of art.

Art is expression. It is not a display of skill; it is not the reproduction of external forms or appearances; it does not even, as some say, exist for itself: it is a message, a means. To cry "Art for Art's sake!" is to converse with the echo. Such a definition but moves in a circle, and doubles upon itself. No; art is for the artist's sake. The artist is the agent or human instrument whereby the supreme harmony, which is beauty, is manifested to men. Art is the medium by which the artist communicates himself to his fellows; and the individual work is the expression of what the artist felt or thought, as at the moment some new aspect of the universal harmony was revealed to his apprehension. Art is emotion objectified, but the object is subordinated to the emotion as means is to an end. The material result is not the final significance, but what of spiritual meaning or beauty the artist desired to convey. Not what is painted, as the layman thinks, not how it is painted, as the technician considers, but why did the artist paint it, is the question which sums up the truth about art. The appreciator need simply ask, What is the beauty, what the idea, which the artist is striving to reveal by these symbols of color and form? He understands that the import of the work is the _idea,_ and that the work itself is beautiful because it symbolizes a beautiful idea; its significance is spiritual. The function of art, then, is through the medium of concrete, material symbols to reveal to men whatever of beauty has been disclosed to the artist's more penetrating vision.

In order to seize the real meaning of art it is necessary to strip the word beauty of all the wrappings of customary associations and the accretions of tradition and habit. As the word is current in ordinary parlance, the attribute of beauty is ascribed to that which is pleasing, pretty, graceful, comely; in fine, to that which is purely agreeable. But surely such is not the beauty which Rembrandt saw in the filthy, loathsome beggar. To Rembrandt the beggar was expressive of some force or manifestation of the supreme universal life, wherein all things work together to a perfect harmony. Beauty is the essential quality belonging to energy, character, significance. A merely agreeable object is not beautiful unless it is expressive of a meaning; whatever, on the other hand, is expressive of a meaning, however shocking it may be in itself, however much it may fail to conform to conventional standards, is beautiful. Beauty does not reside in the object. No; it is the artist's sense of the great meaning of things; and in proportion as he finds that meaning--the qualities of energy, force, aspiration, life--manifest and expressed in objects do those objects become beautiful. Such was the conception of beauty Keats had when he wrote in a letter: "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty." And similarly; "I can never feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse he sings:--

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

When it is said here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the phrase may be understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as when one says the sun rises or the sun sets. Beauty is in the landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for the artist an idea he has conceived of some aspect of the universal life.

The artist is impelled to embody concretely his perception of beauty, and so to communicate his emotion, because the emotion wakened by the perception of new harmony in things is most fully possessed and enjoyed as it comes to expression. Thus to make real his ideal and find the expression of himself is the artist's supreme Happiness. A familiar illustration of the twin need and delight of expression may be found in the handiwork produced in the old days when every artisan was an artist. It may be, perhaps, a key which some craftsman of Nuremberg fashioned. In the making of it he was not content to stop with the key which would unlock the door or the chest It was his key, the work of his hands; and he wrought upon it lovingly, devotedly, and made it beautiful, finding in his work the expression of his thought or feeling; it was the realization for that moment of his ideal. His sense of pleasure in the making of it prompted the care he bestowed upon it; his delight was in creation, in rendering actual a new beau which it was given him to conceive.

In its origin as a work of art the key does not differ from a landscape by Inness, an "arrangement" by Whistler, a portrait by Sargent. The artist, whether craftsman or painter, is deeply stirred by some passage in his experience, a fair object or a true thought: it is the imperious demand of his nature, as it is his supreme pleasure, to give his feeling expression. The form which his expression takes--it may be key or carpet, it may be statue, picture, poem, symphony, or cathedral--is that which most closely responds to his idea, the form which most truly manifests and represents it.

All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite sense representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality, as it is said that painting or literature represents and music does not; but every work of art, in painting, poetry, music, or in the handiwork of the craftsman, _represents_ in that it is the symbol of the creator's ideal. To be sure, the painter or sculptor or dramatist draws his symbols from already existing material forms, and these symbols are like objects in a sense in which music is not But line and color and the life of man, apart from this resemblance to external reality, are representative or symbolic of the artist's idea precisely as the craftsman's key, the designer's pattern, or the musician's symphony. The beautifully wrought key, the geometric pattern of oriental rug or hanging, the embroidered foliation on priestly vestment, are works of art equally with the landscape, the statue, the drama, or the symphony, in that they are one and all the sensuous manifestation of some new beauty spiritually conceived.

The symbolic character of a work of art must not be lost from sight, for it is the clue to the interpretation of pictures, as it is of all art. The painter feels his way through the gamut of his palette to a harmony of color just as truly as the musician summons the notes of his scale and marshals them into accord. The painter is moved by some sweep of landscape; it wakens in him an emotion. When he sets himself to express his emotion in the special medium with which he works, he represents by pigment the external aspect of the landscape, yes; but not in order to imitate it or reproduce it: he represents the landscape because the colors and the forms which he registers upon the canvas express for him the emotions roused by those colors and those forms in nature. He does not try to match his grays with nature's grays, but this nuance which he gropes for on his palette, and having found it, touches upon his canvas, expresses for him what that particular gray in nature made him feel. His one compelling purpose is in all fidelity and singleness of aim to "translate the impression received." The painter's medium is just as symbolic as the notes of the musician's nocturne or the words of the poet's sonnet, equally inspired by the hour and place. Color and line and form, although they happen to be the properties of _things,_ have a value for the emotions as truly as musical sounds: they are the outward symbol of the inward thought or feeling, the visible bodying forth of the immaterial idea.

The symbolic character of the material world is not early apprehended. In superficial reaction upon life, men do not readily pass beyond the immediate actuality. That the spiritual meaning of all things is not perceived, that all things are not seen to be beautiful, or expressive of the supreme harmony, is due to men's limited powers of sight and feeling. Therefore is it that the artist is given in order that he may reveal as yet unrealized spiritual relations, or new beauty. The workaday world with its burden of exigent "realities" has need of a Carlyle to declare that things are but a wonderful metaphor and the physical universe is the garment of the living God. In the realm of thought an Emerson, seer of transcendent vision, must come to restore his fellows to their birthright, which is the life of the spirit. As in life, so in art men do not easily pass the obvious and immediate. The child reads "Gulliver's Travels" or "The Pilgrim's Progress" for the story. As his experience of life both widens and deepens, he is able to see through externals, and he penetrates to the real significance, of which the narrative is but the symbol. So it is with an insight born of experience that the lover of art sees no longer the "subject," but the beauty which the subject is meant to symbolize.

In the universal, all-embracing constitution of things, nothing is without its significance. To be aware that everything has a meaning is necessary to the understanding of art, as indeed of life itself. That meaning, which things symbolize and express, it cannot be said too often, is not necessarily to be phrased in words. It is a meaning for the spirit. A straight line affects one differently from a curve; that is, each kind of line means something. Every line in the face utters the character behind it; every movement of the body is eloquent of the man's whole being. "The expression of the face balks account," says Walt Whitman,

"But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his
face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints
of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and
broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and
shoulder-side."

Crimson rouses a feeling different from that roused by yellow, and gray wakens a mood different from either. In considering this symbolic character of colors it is necessary to distinguish between their value for the emotions and merely literary associations. That white stands for purity or blue for fidelity is a conventionalized and attached conception. But the pleasure which a man has in some colors or his dislike for others depends upon the effect each color has upon his emotions, and this effect determines for him the symbolic value of the color. In the same way sounds are symbolic in that they affect the emotions apart from associated "thoughts." Even with a person who has no technical knowledge of music, the effect of the minor key is unmistakably different from the major. The tones and modulations of the voice, quite apart from the words uttered, have an emotional value and significance. Everything, line, form, gesture, movement, color, sound, all the material world, is expressive. All objective forms have their meaning, and rightly perceived are, in the sense in which the word is used here, beautiful, in that they represent or symbolize a spiritual idea.

Thus it is that beauty is not in the object but in man's sense of the object's symbolic expressiveness. The amateur may be rapt by some artist's "quality of color." But it is probable that in the act of laying on his pigment, the artist was not thinking of his "quality" at all, but, rapt himself by the perception of the supreme harmony at that moment newly revealed to his sense, he was striving sincerely and directly to give his feeling its faithfullest expression. His color is beautiful because his idea was beautiful. The expression is of the very essence of the thought; it _is_ the thought, but the thought embodied. "Coleridge," says Carlyle, "remarks very pertinently somewhere that whenever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning, too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere." Not to look beyond the material is to miss the meaning of the work.

In an art such as music, in which form and content are one and inextricable, it is not difficult to understand that the medium of expression which the art employs is necessarily symbolic, for here the form cannot exist apart from the meaning to be conveyed. In the art of literature, however, the case is not so clear, for the material with which the poet, the novelist, the dramatist works, material made up of the facts of the world about us, we are accustomed to regard as objective realities. An incident is an incident, the inevitable issue of precedent circumstances, and that's all there is to it Character is the result of heredity, environment, training, plus the inexplicable _Ego._ To regard these facts of life which are so actual and immediate as a kind of animate algebraic formulae seems absurd, but absurd only as one is unable to penetrate to the inner meaning of things. "Madame Bovary," to take an example quite at random, is called a triumph of realism. Now realism, of all literary methods, should register the fact as it is, and least of all should concern itself with symbols. But this great novel is more than the record of one woman's life. Any one who has come to understand the character and temperament of Flaubert as revealed in his Letters must feel that "Madame Bovary" is no arbitrary recital of tragic incident, but those people who move through his pages, what they do and what goes on about them, expressed for Flaubert his own dreary, baffled rebellion against life. That the artist may consciously employ the facts of life, not for the sake of the fact, but to communicate his feeling by thus bodying it forth in concrete symbols, there is explicit testimony. In an essay dealing with his own method of composition, Poe writes: "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an _effect._ Keeping originality _always_ in view . . . I say to myself, in the first place, 'of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?' Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone . . . afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect." Yes, physical circumstances, the succession of incident, shifting momentary grouping of persons, traits of character in varied combination and contrast,--all these are significant for the literary artist of spiritual relations.

As the symbol of what the artist feels and strives to express, the individual work of art is necessarily more than any mere transcript of fact. It is the meeting and mingling of nature and the spirit of man; the result of their union is fraught with the inheritance of the past and holds within it the limitless promise of the future. The work of art is a focus, gathering into itself all the stored experience of the artist, and radiating in turn so much to the beholder as he is able at the moment to receive. A painter is starting out to sketch. Through underbrush and across the open he pushes his way, beset by beauty on every side, and storing impressions, sensations, thoughts. At last his eye lights upon some clump of brush, some meadow or hill, which seems at the instant to sum up and express his accumulated experience. In rendering this bit of nature, he pours out upon his canvas his store of feeling. It is the single case which typifies his entire course. "The man's whole life preludes the single deed." His way through the world has been just such a gathering up of experience, and each new work which he produces is charged with the collected wealth of years.

The special work is the momentary epitome of the artist's total meaning. He finds this brief passage in nature beautiful then and there because it expresses what he feels and means. He does not try to reproduce the thing, but uses the thing for what it signifies. The thing is but for that moment: it signifies all that has gone before. As he watches, a cloud passes over the sun and the face of nature is darkened. Suddenly the scene bursts into light again. In itself the landscape is no brighter than before the sun was darkened. The painter feels it brighter for the contrast, and inevitably his rendering of its aspect is heightened and intensified.

Art is nature heightened and intensified as nature is interpreted through the transfiguring medium of the human spirit To the object is added

"The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."

After an early morning in the fields, Corot withdraws to his house to rest. "I dream of the morning landscape," he writes; "I dream my picture, and presently I will paint my dream." But not only does the artist render the beauty which this landscape happens to express for him: he charges these colors and forms with the beauty of all landscape. Corot painted _at_ Ville d'Avray; _what_ he painted was God's twilight or dawn enwrapping tree and pool. In gratitude and worship he revealed to men the tender, ineffable poetry of gray dawns in all places and for all time. Millet's peasants were called John and Peter and Charles, and they tilled the soil of France; but on their bowed shoulders rests the universal burden; these dumb figures are eloquent of the uncomplaining, hopeless "peasanthood" of the world. In the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal the spiritual,--this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his achievement is art.