"The true poets are not followers of beauty, but the august masters of beauty." And Whitman's own verse is a notable example of a new technique forged in response to a new need of expression. Dealing as he did with the big basic impulses of common experience accessible to all men, Whitman needed a largeness and freedom of expression which he did not find in the accepted and current poetic forms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people, occupations, and aspirations of "these States," as yet undeveloped but vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tally the fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and a new world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope and flexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation and variety. Finding none ready to his hand, he created it. Not that Whitman did not draw for his resources on the great treasury of world-literature; and he profited by the efforts and achievement of predecessors. But the form in his hands and as he uses it is new. Whatever we may think of the success of his total accomplishment, there are very many passages to which we cannot deny the name of poetry. Nor did Whitman work without conscious skill and deliberate regard for technical processes. His note-books and papers reveal the extreme calculation and pains with which he wrote, beginning with the collection of synonyms applying to his idea and mood, and so building them up gradually, with many erasures, corrections, and substitutions, into the finished poem. Much of the vigor of his style is due to his escape from conventional literary phrase-making and his return to the racy idiom of common life. His verse, apparently inchoate and so different from classical poetic forms, is shaped with a cunning incredible skill. And more than that, it is art, in that it is not a bare statement of fact, but communicates to us the poet's emotion, so that we realize the emotion in ourselves. When his purpose is considered, it is seen that no other technique was possible. His achievement proves that a new need creates its own means of expression.

What is true of Whitman in respect to his technique is true in greater or less degree of every artist, working in any form. It is true of Pheidias, of Giotto and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Monet, of Rodin, in fine, from the beginnings of art to the day that now is. All have created out of existing forms of expression their own idiom and way of working. Every artist owes something to his predecessors, but language is re-created in the hands of each master and becomes a new instrument. There can be then no single formula for technical method nor any fixed and final standard of judgment.

An artist himself is justified from his own point of view in his concern with technique, for upon his technique depends his effectiveness of expression. His practice serves to keep alive the language and to develop its resources. Art in its concrete manifestations is an evolution. From Velasquez through Goya to Manet and Whistler is a line of inheritance. But a true artist recognizes that technique is only a means. As an artist he is seeking to body forth in external form the vision within, and he tries to make his medium "faithful to the coloring of his own spirit." Every artist works out his characteristic manner; but the progress must be from within outwards. Toward the shaping of his own style he is helped by the practice of others, but he is helped and not hindered only in so far as the manner of others can be made genuinely the expression of his own feeling. Direct borrowing of a trick of execution and servile imitation of a style have no place in true art. A painter who would learn of Velasquez should study the master's technique, not that in the end he may paint like Velasquez, but that he may discover just what it was that the master, by means of his individual style, was endeavoring to express, and so bring to bear on his own environment here in America to-day the same ability to see and the same power of sympathetic and imaginative penetration that Velasquez brought to his environment at the court of seventeenth-century Spain. The way to paint like Velasquez is to be Velasquez. No man is a genius by imitation. Every man may seek to be a master in his own right. Technique does not lead; it follows. Style is the man.

From within outwards. Art is the expression of sincere and vital feeling; the material thing, picture, statue, poem, which the artist conjures into being is only a means. The moment art is worshiped for its own sake, that moment decadence begins. "No one," says Leonardo, "will ever be a great painter who takes as his guide the paintings of other men." In general the history of art exhibits this course. In the beginning arises a man of deep and genuine feeling, the language at whose command, however, has not been developed to the point where it is able to carry the full burden of his meaning. Such a man is Giotto; and we have the "burning messages of prophecy delivered by the stammering lips of infants." In the generations which supervene, artists with less fervor of spirit but with growing skill of hand, increased with each inheritance, turn their efforts to the development of their means. The names of this period of experiment and research are Masaccio, Uccello, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio. At length, when the fullness of time is come, emerges the master-mind, of original insight and creative power. Heir to the technical achievements of his predecessors, he is able to give his transcendent idea its supremely adequate expression. Content is perfectly matched by form. On this summit stand Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo. Then follow the Carracci, Domenichino, Guercino, Guido Reni, Carlo Dolci, men who mistake the master's manner for his meaning. The idea, the vital principle, has spent itself. The form only is left, and that is elaborated into the exuberance of decay. Painters find their impulse no longer in nature and life but in paint. Technique is made an end in itself. And art is dead, to be reborn in another shape and guise.

The relation of technique to appreciation in the experience of the layman begins now to define itself. Technique serves the artist for efficient expression; an understanding of it is of value to the layman in so far as the knowledge helps him to read the artist's language and thus to receive his message. Both for artist and for layman technique is only a means. Out of his own intelligent and patient experience the layman can win his way to an understanding of methods; and his standard of judgment, good enough for his own purposes, is the degree of expressiveness which the work of art, by virtue of its qualities of execution, is able to achieve. Skill may be enjoyed intellectually for its own sake as skill; in itself it is not art. Technique is most successful when it is least perceived. Ars celare artem: art reveals life and conceals technique. We must understand something of technique and then forget it in appreciation. When we thrill to the splendor and glory of a sunset we are not thinking of the laws of refraction. Appreciation is not knowledge, but emotion.



IV

THE VALUE OF THE MEDIUM

AS I swing through the wide country in the freshness and fullness of a blossoming, sun-steeped morning in May, breathing the breath of the fields and the taller by inches for the sweep of the hills and the reaches of sky above my head, every nerve in my body is alive with sensation and delight. My joy is in the fragrance of earth, the ingratiating warmth of the fresh morning, the spacious, inclosing air. My pleasure in this direct contact with the landscape is a physical reaction, to be enjoyed only by the actual experience of it; it cannot be reproduced by any other means; it can be recalled by memory but faintly and as the echo of sensation. There is, however, something else in the landscape which can be reproduced; and this recall may seem more glorious than the original in nature. There are elements in the scene which a painter can render for me more intensely and vividly than I perceived them for myself. These elements embody the value that the landscape has for my emotions. The scene appeals to something within me which lies beyond my actual physical contact with it and the mere sense of touch. The harmony that the eye perceives in these open fields, the gracious line of trees along the stream's edge, the tossing hills beyond, and the arch of the blue sky above impregnating the earth with light, is communicated to my spirit, and I feel that this reach of radiant country is an extension of my own personality. A painter, by the manipulation of his color and line and mass, concentrates and intensifies the harmony of it and so heightens its emotional value. The meaning of the scene for the spirit is conveyed in terms of color and mass.

Color and mass are the painter's medium, his language. The final import of art is the idea, the emotional content of the work. On his way to the expression of his idea the artist avails himself of material to give his feeling concrete actuality and visible or audible realization. He paints a picture, glorious in color and compelling in the concentration of its massing; he carves a statue, noble in form or subtly rhythmic; he weaves a pattern of harmonious sounds. He values objects not for their own sake but for the energies they possess,—their power to rouse his whole being into heightened activity. And they have this power by virtue of their material qualities, as color and form or sound. A landscape is gay in springtime or sad in autumn. The difference in its effect upon us is not due to our knowledge that it is spring or autumn and our consciousness of the associations appropriate to each season. The emotional quality of the scene is largely a matter of its color. Let the spring landscape be shrouded in gray mist sifting down out of gray skies, and we are sad. Let the autumn fields and woodland sparkle and dance in the crisp golden sunlight, and our blood dances with them and we want to shout from full lungs. In music the major key wakens a different emotion from the minor. The note of a violin is virgin in quality; the voice of the 'cello is the voice of experience. The distinctive emotional value of each instrument inheres in the character of its sound. These qualities of objects art uses as its language.

Though all art is one in essence, yet each art employs a medium of its own. In order to understand a work in its scope and true significance we must recognize that an artist thinks and feels in terms of his special medium. His impulse to create comes with his vision, actual or imaginative, of color or form, and his thought is transmitted to his hand, which shapes the work, without the intervention of words. The nature of his vehicle and the conditions in which he works determine in large measure the details of the form which his idea ultimately assumes. Thus a potter designs his vessel first with reference to its use and then with regard to his material, its character and possibilities. As he models his plastic clay upon a wheel, he naturally makes his bowl or jug round rather than sharply angular. A pattern for a carpet, to be woven by a system of little squares into the fabric, will have regard for the conditions in which it is to be rendered, and it will differ in the character of its lines and masses from a pattern for a wall-paper, which may be printed from blocks. The designer in stained glass will try less to make a picture in the spirit of graphic representation than to produce an harmonious color-pattern whose outlines will be guided and controlled by the possibilities of the "leading" of the window. The true artist uses the conditions and very limitations of his material as his opportunity. The restraint imposed by the sonnet form is welcomed by the poet as compelling a collectedness of thought and an intensity of expression which his idea might not achieve if allowed to flow in freer channels. The worker in iron has his triumphs; the goldsmith has his. The limitations of each craft open to it effects which are denied to the other. There is an art of confectionery and an art of sculpture. The designer of frostings who has a right feeling for his art will not emulate the sculptor and strive to model in the grand style; the sculptor who tries to reproduce imitatively the textures of lace or other fabrics and who exuberates in filigrees and fussinesses so far departs from his art as to rival the confectioner. In the degree that a painter tries to wrench his medium from its right use and function and attempts to make his picture tell a story, which can better be told in words, to that extent he is unfaithful to his art. Painting, working as it does with color and form, should confine itself to the expression of emotion and idea that can be rendered visible. On the part of the appreciator, likewise, the emotion expressed in one kind of medium is not to be translated into any other terms without a difference. Every kind of material has its special value for expression. The meaning of pictures, accordingly, is limited precisely to the expressive power of color and form. The impression which a picture makes upon the beholder maybe phrased by him in words, which are his own means of expression; but he suggests the import of the picture only incompletely. If I describe in words Millet's painting of the "Sower" according to my understanding of it, I am telling in my own terms what the picture means to me. What it meant to Millet, the full and true significance of the situation as the painter felt it, is there expressed upon his canvas in terms of visible aspect; and correspondingly, Millet's meaning is fully and truly received in the measure that we feel in ourselves the emotion roused by the sight of his color and form.

The essential content of a work of art, therefore, is modified in its effect upon us by the kind of medium in which it is presented. If an idea phrased originally in one medium is translated into the terms of another, we have illustration. Turning the pages of an "illustrated" novel, we come upon a plate showing a man and a woman against the background of a divan, a chair, and a tea-table. The man, in a frock coat, holding a top hat in his left hand, extends his right hand to the woman, who has just risen from the table. The legend under the picture reads, "Taking his hat, he said good-by." Here the illustrator has simply supplied a visible image of what was suggested in the text; the drawing has no interest beyond helping the reader to that image. It is a statement of the bare fact in other terms. In the hands of an artist, however, the translation may take on a value of its own, changing the original idea, adding to it, and becoming in itself an independent work of art. This value derives from the form into which the idea is translated. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are only sublime illustration; but how little of their power attaches to the subject they illustrate, and how much of their sublimity lies in the painter's rendering! Conversely, an example of the literary interpretation of a picture is Walter Pater's description of Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

It is Leonardo's conception, yet with a difference. Here the critic has woven about the subject an exquisite tissue of associations, a whole wide background of knowledge and thought and feeling which it lay beyond the painter's range to evoke; but the critic is denied the vividness, the immediateness and intimate warmth of vital contact, which the painter was able to achieve. The Lisa whom Leonardo shows us and the Lisa whom Pater interprets for us are the same in essence yet different in their power to affect us. The difference resulting from the kind of medium employed is well exemplified by Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel." The fundamental concept of both poem and picture is identical, but picture and poem have each its distinctive range and limitations and its own peculiar appeal. If we cancel the common element in the two, the difference remaining makes it possible for us to realize how much of the effect of a work of art inheres in the medium itself. Painting may be an aid to literature in that it helps us to more vivid images; the literary interpretation of pictures or music gives to the works with which it deals an intellectual definiteness. But the functions peculiar to each art are not to be confounded nor the distinctions obscured.

Pictures are not a substitute for literature, and their true meaning is finally not to be translated into words. Their beauty is a visible beauty; the emotions they rouse are such as can be conveyed through the sense of sight. In the end they carry their message sufficingly as color and mass. Midway, however, our enjoyment may be complicated by other elements which have their place in our total appreciation. Thus a painting of a landscape may appeal to us over and above its inherent beauty because we are already, out of actual experience, familiar with the scene it represents, and the sight of it wakens in our memory a train of pleasant allied associations. A ruined tower, in itself an exquisite composition in color and line and mass, may gather about it suggestions of romance, elemental passions and wild life, and may epitomize for the beholder the whole Middle Age. Associated interest, therefore, may be sentimental or intellectual. It may be sensuous also, appealing to other senses than those of sight. The sense of touch plays a large part in our enjoyment of the world. We like the "feel" of objects, the catch of raw silk, the chill smoothness of burnished brass, the thick softness of mists, the "amorous wet" of green depths of sea. The senses of taste and smell may be excited imaginatively and contribute to our pleasure. Winslow Homer's breakers bring back to us the salt fragrance of the ocean, and in the presence of these white mad surges we feel the stinging spray in our faces and we taste the cosmic exhilaration of the sea-wind. But the final meaning of a picture resides in the total harmony of color and form, a harmony into which we can project our whole personality and which itself constitutes the emotional experience.

All language in its material aspect has a sensuous value, as the wealth of color of Venetian painting, the sumptuousness of Renaissance architecture, the melody of Mr. Swinburne's verse, the gem-like brilliance of Stevenson's prose, the all-inclusive sensuousness, touched with sensuality, of Wagner's music-dramas. Because of the charm of beautiful language there are many art-lovers who regard the sensuous qualities of the work itself as making up the entire experience. Apart from any consideration of intention or expressiveness, the material thing which the artist's touch summons into form is held to be "its own excuse for being."

This order of enjoyment, valid as far as it goes, falls short of complete appreciation. It does not pass the delight one has in the radiance of gems or the glowing tincture of some fabric. The element of meaning does not enter in. There is a beauty for the eye and a beauty for the mind. The qualities of material may give pleasure to the senses; the object embodying these qualities becomes beautiful only as it is endowed with a significance wakened in the human spirit. A landscape, says Walter Crane, "owes a great part of its beauty to the harmonious relation of its leading lines, or to certain pleasant contrasts, or a certain impressiveness of form and mass, and at the same time we shall perceive that this linear expression is inseparable from the sentiment or emotion suggested by that particular scene." In the appreciation of art, to stop with the sensuous appeal of the medium is to mistake means for an end. "Rhyme," says the author of "Intentions," "in the hands of a real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also." An artist's color, glorious or tender, is only a symbol and manifestation to sense of his emotion. At first glance Titian's portrait of the "Man with the Glove" is an ineffable color-harmony. But truly seen it is infinitely more. By means of color and formal design Titian has embodied here his vision of superb young manhood; by the expressive power of his material symbols he has rendered visible his sense of dignity, of fineness, of strength in reserve. The color is beautiful because his idea was beautiful. Through the character of this young man as revealed and interpreted by the artist, the beholder is brought into contact with a vital personality, whose influence is communicated to him; in the appreciation of Titian's message he sees and feels and lives.

The value of the medium resided not in the material itself but in its power for expression. When language is elaborated at the expense of the meaning, we have in so far forth sham art. It should be easy to distinguish in art between what is vital and what is mechanical. The mechanical is the product of mere execution and calls attention to the manner. The vital is born out of inspiration, and the living idea transmutes its material into emotion. Too great an effort at realization defeats the intended illusion, for we think only of the skill exercised to effect the result, and the operation of the intellect inhibits feeling. In the greatest art the medium is least perceived, and the beholder stands immediately in the presence of the artist's idea. The material is necessarily fixed and finite; the idea struggles to free itself from its medium and untrammeled to reach the spirit. It is mind speaking to mind. However complete the material expression may seem, it is only a part of what the artist would say; imagination transcends the actual. In the art which goes deepest into life, the medium is necessarily inadequate. The artist fashions his work in a sublime despair as he feels how little of the mighty meaning within him he is able to convey. In the greatest works rightly seen the medium becomes transparent. Within the Sistine Chapel the visitor, when once he has yielded to the illusion, is not conscious of plaster surface and pigment; indeed, he hardly sees color and design as such at all; through them he looks into the immensity of heaven, peopled with gods and godlike men. Consummate acting is that which makes the spectator forget that it is acting. The part and the player become one. The actor, in himself and in the words he utters, is the unregarded vehicle of the dramatist's idea. In a play like Ibsen's "Ghosts," the stage, the actors, the dialogue merge and fall away, and the overwhelming meaning stands revealed in its complete intensity. As the play opens, it cuts out a segment from the chaos of human life; step by step it excludes all that is unessential, stroke by stroke with an inevitableness that is crushing, it converges to the great one-thing that the dramatist wanted to say, until at the end the spectator, conscious no longer of the medium but only of the idea and all-resolving emotion, bows down before its overmastering force with the cry, "What a mind is there!"

In the art which most completely achieves expression the medium is not perceived as distinct from the emotion of which the medium is the embodiment. In order to render expressive the material employed in its service, art seeks constantly to identify means and end, to make the form one with the content. The wayfarer out of his need of shelter built a hut, using the material which chance gave into his hand and shaping his design according to his resources; the purpose of his work was not the hut itself but shelter. So the artist in any form is impelled to creation by his need of expression; the thing which he creates is not the purpose and end of his effort, but only the means. Each art has its special medium, and each medium has its peculiar sensuous charm and its own kind of expressiveness. This power of sensuous delight is incidental to the real beauty of the work; and that beauty is the message the work is framed to convey to the spirit. In the individual work, the inspiring and shaping idea seeks so to fuse its material that we feel the idea could not have been phrased in any other way as we surrender to its ultimate appeal,—the sum of the emotional content which gave it birth and in which it reaches its fulfillment.



V

THE BACKGROUND OF ART

SCENE: The main hall of the Accademia in Venice.

Time: Noon of a July day.

Dramatis personae: A guide; two drab-colored and tired men; a group of women, of various ages, equipped with red-covered little volumes, and severally expressive of great earnestness, wide-eyed rapture, and giggles.

The guide, in strident, accentless tones: Last work of Titian. Ninety-nine years old. He died of smallpox.

A woman: Is that it?

A high voice on the outskirts: I'm going to get one for forty dollars.

Another voice: Well, I'm not going to pay more than fifty for mine.

A straggler: Eliza, look at those people. Oh, you missed it! (Stopping suddenly?) My, isn't that lovely!

Chorus: Yes, that's Paris Bordone. Which one is that? He has magnificent color.

The guide: The thing you want to look at is the five figures in front.

A voice: Oh, that's beautiful. I love that.

A man: Foreshortened; well, I should say so! But I say, you can't remember all these pictures.

The other man: Let's get out of this!

The guide, indicating a picture of the Grand Canal: This one has been restored.

A girl's voice: Why, that's the house where we are staying!

The guide: The next picture . . .

The squad shuffles out of range.

This little comedy, enacted in fact and here faithfully reported, is not without its pathos. These people are "studying art." They really want to understand, and if possible, to enjoy. They have visited galleries and seen many pictures, and they will visit other galleries and see many more pictures before their return home. They have read guide-books, noting the stars and double stars; they have dipped into histories of art and volumes of criticism. They have been told to observe the dramatic force of Giotto, the line of Botticelli, the perfect composition of Raphael, the color of Titian; all this they have done punctiliously. They know in a vague way that Giotto was much earlier than Raphael, that Botticelli was rather pagan than Christian, that Titian belonged to the Venetian school. They have come to the fountain head of art, the very works themselves as gathered in the galleries; they have tried to remember what they have read and to do what they have been told; and now they are left still perplexed and unsatisfied.

The difficulty is that these earnest seekers after knowledge of art have laid hold on partial truths, but they have failed to see these partial truths in their right relation to the whole. The period in which an artist lived means something. His way of thinking and feeling means something. The quality of his color means something. But what does his picture mean? These people have not quite found the key by which to piece the fragments of the puzzle into the complete design. They miss the central fact with regard to art; and as a consequence, the ways of approach to the full enjoyment of art, instead of bringing them nearer the centre, become for them a network of by-paths in which they enmesh themselves, and they are left to wander helplessly up and down and about in the blind-alleys of the labyrinth. The central fact with regard to art is this, that a work of art is the expression of some part of the artist's experience of life, his vision of some aspect of the world. For the appreciator, the work takes on a meaning as it becomes for him in his turn the expression of his own actual or possible experience and thus relates itself by the subtle links of feeling to his own life. This is the central fact; but there are side issues. Any single work of art is in itself necessarily finite. Because of limitations in both the artist and the appreciator the work cannot express immediately and completely of itself all that the author wished to convey; it can present but a single facet of his many-sided radiating personality. What is actually said may be reinforced by some understanding on the beholder's part of what was intended. In order to win its fullest message, therefore, the appreciator must set the work against the large background out of which it has proceeded.

A visitor in the Salon Carre of the Louvre notes that there are arrayed before him pictures by Jan van Eyck and Memling, Raphael and Leonardo, Giorgione and Titian, Rembrandt and Metsu, Rubens and Van Dyck, Fouquet and Poussin, Velasquez and Murillo. Each one bears the distinctive impress of its creator. How different some of them, one from another,—the Virgin of Van Eyck from the Virgin of Raphael, Rembrandt's "Pilgrimsat Emmaus" from the "Entombment" by Titian. Yet between others there are common elements of likeness. Raphael and Titian are distinguished by an opulence of form and a luxuriance of color which reveal supreme technical accomplishment in a fertile land under light-impregnated skies. The rigidity and restraint of Van Eyck and Memling suggest the tentative early efforts of the art of a sober northern race. To a thoughtful student of these pictures sooner or later the question comes, Whence are these likenesses and these differences?

Hitherto I have referred to the creative mind and executive hand as generically the artist. I have thought of him as a type, representative of all the great class of those who feel and express, and who by means of their expression communicate their feeling. Similarly I have spoken of the work of art, as though it were complete in itself and isolated, sprung full-formed and panoplied from the brain of its creator, able to win its way and consummate its destiny alone. The type is conceived intellectually; in actual life the type resolves itself into individuals. So there are individual artists, each with his own distinctive gifts and ideals, each with his own separate experience of life, with his personal and special vision of the world, and his characteristic manner of expression. Similarly, a single work of art is not an isolated phenomenon; it is only a part of the artist's total performance, and to these other works it must be referred. The kind of work an artist sets himself to do is determined to some extent by the period into which he was born and the country in which he lived. The artist himself, heir to the achievements of his predecessors, is a development, and his work is the product of an evolution. A work of art, therefore, to be judged aright and truly appreciated, must be seen in its relation to its background, from which it detaches itself at the moment of consideration,—the background of the artist's personality and accomplishment and of the national life and ideals of his time.

If the layman's interest in art is more than the casual touch-and-go of a picture here, a concert there, and an entertaining book of an evening, he is confronted with the important matter of the study of art as it manifests itself through the ages and in diverse lands. It is not a question of practicing an art himself, for technical skill lies outside his province. The study of art in the sense proposed has to do with the consideration of an individual work in its relation to all the factors that have entered into its production. The work of an artist is profoundly influenced by the national ideals and way of life of his race and of his age. The art of Catholic Italy is ecclesiastical; the art of the Protestant North is domestic and individual. The actual form an artist's work assumes is modified by the resources at his disposal,—resources both of material and of technical methods. Raphael may have no more to say than Giotto had, but he is able to express himself in a fuller and more finished way, because in his time the language of painting had become richer and more varied and the rhetoric of it had been carried to a farther point of development. Finally, as all art is in essence the expression of personality, a single work is to be understood in its widest intention and scope by reference to the total personality of the individual artist as manifested in his work collectively, and to be interpreted by the appreciator through his knowledge of the artist's experience of life.

In order to wrest its fullest expressiveness from a work of art it is necessary as far as possible to regard the work from the artist's own point of view. We must try to see with his eyes and to feel with him what he was working for. To this end we must reconstruct imaginatively on a basis of the facts the conditions in which he lived and wrought. The difference between Giotto and Raphael is a difference not of individuality only. Each gives expression to the ideals and ways of thought of his age. Each is a creative mind, but each bases his performance upon what has gone before, and the form of their work is conditioned by the resources each had at his disposal. To discover the artist's purpose more completely than he was able to realize it for himself in the single work,—that is the aim and function of the historical study of art. A brief review of the achievement of Giotto and of Raphael may serve to illustrate concretely the application of the principle and to fix its value to appreciation.

In the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire art passed from Rome to Byzantium. The arts of sculpture and painting were employed in the service of the Church, imposing by its magnificence and all-powerful in its domination over the lives and minds of men. The function of art was to teach; its character was symbolic and decorative. Art had no separate and independent existence. It had no direct reference to nature; the pictorial representation of individual traits was quite outside its scope; a few signs fixed by convention sufficed. A fish—derived from the acrostic ichtbus—symbolized the Saviour; a cross was the visible token of redeeming grace. And so through several hundred years. The twelfth century saw the beginnings of a change in the direction of spiritual and intellectual emancipation. The teachings and example of Francis of Assisi brought men to the consciousness of themselves and to a realization of the worth and significance of the individual life. The work of Giotto is the expression in art of the new spirit.

Of necessity Giotto founded his work upon the accepted forms of the Byzantine tradition. But Giotto was a man of genius and a creative mind. In the expression of his fresh impulse and vital feeling, the assertion of new-found individuality, he tried to realize as convincingly and vividly as possible the situation with which he was dealing; and with this purpose he looked not back upon art but out upon nature. Where the Byzantine convention had presented but a sign and remote indication of form by means of flat color, Giotto endows his figures with life and movement and actuality by giving them a body in three dimensions; his forms exist in the round. Until his day, light and shade had not been employed; and such perspective as he was able to achieve he had to discover for himself. For the first time in Christian painting a figure has bodily existence. Giotto gives the first evidence, too, of a sense of the beauty of color, and of the value of movement as a means of added expressiveness. His power of composition shows an immense advance on his predecessors. In dealing with traditional subjects, as the Madonna and child, he follows in general the traditional arrangement. But in those subjects where his own inventiveness is given free play, as in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St. Francis, he reveals an extraordinary faculty of design and a dramatic sense which is matched by a directness and clarity of expression.

Not only in the technique of his craft was Giotto an innovator, but also in the direction of naturalness and reality of feeling. He was the first to introduce portraits into his work. His Madonnas and saints are no longer mere types; they are human and individual, vividly felt and characterized by immediate and present actuality. Giotto was the first realist, but he was a poet too. His insight into life is tempered by a deep sincerity and piety; his work is genuinely and powerfully felt. As a man Giotto was reverent and earnest, joyous and beautifully sane. As a painter, by force of the freshness of his impulse and the clarity of his vision, he created a new manner of expression. As an artist he reveals a true power of imaginative interpretation. The casual spectator of to-day finds him naive and quaint. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was anything but that; they regarded him as a marvel of reality, surpassing nature itself. When judged with reference to the conditions of life in which he worked and to the technical resources at his command, Giotto is seen to be of a very high order of creative mind.

The year 1300 divides the life of Giotto into two nearly equal parts; the year 1500 similarly divides the life of Raphael. In the two centuries that intervene, the great age of Italian painting, initiated by Giotto, reaches its flower and perfection in Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael. The years which followed the passing of these greatnesses were the years of decadence and eclipse. If we are to understand and justly appreciate the work of each man in its own kind, the painting of Giotto must be tried by other standards than those we apply to the judgment of Raphael. Giotto was a pioneer; Raphael is a consummation. The two centuries between were a period of development and change, a development in all that regards technique, a change in national ideals and in the artist's attitude toward life and toward his art. A quick survey of the period, if so hasty a generalization permits correctness of statement, will help us in the understanding of the craft and art of Raphael.

Giotto was succeeded by a host of lesser men, regarded as his followers, men who sought to apply the principles and methods of painting worked out by the master, but who lacked his inspiration and his power. Thus it was for nearly a hundred years. The turn of the fourteenth century into the fifteenth saw the emergence of new forces in the science and the mechanics of painting. The laws of perspective and foreshortening were made the object of special research and practice by men like Uccello (1397-1475), Piero dei Franceschi (1416-1492), and Mantegna (1431-1506). "Oh, what a beautiful thing this perspective is!" Uccello exclaimed, as he stood at his desk between midnight and dawn while his wife begged him to take some rest. In the first thirty years of the fifteenth century, Masaccio contributed to the knowledge of anatomy by his painting of the nude form; and the study of the nude was continued by Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli, in the second half of the century. Masaccio, also, was the first to place his figures in air, enveloping them in atmosphere. Verrocchio, a generation later than Masaccio, was one of the first of the Florentines to understand landscape and the part played in it by air and light. The realistic spirit, which suffices itself with subjects drawn from every-day actual experience, finds expression in the first half of the fifteenth century in the work of Andrea del Castagno. And so down through that century of spring and summer. Each painter in his own way carries some detail of his craft to a further point of development and prepares the path for the supreme triumphs of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael.

The growing mastery of the principles and technique of painting accompanied a change in the painter's attitude toward his art. Originally, painting, applied in subjection to architecture and employed in the service of the Church, was decorative in scope; its purpose was illustration, its function was to teach. As painters, from generation to generation, went deeper into the secrets of their craft, they became less interested in the didactic import of their work, and they concerned themselves more and more with its purely artistic significance. Religious subjects were no longer used merely as symbols for the expression of piety and as incitements to devotion; they became inherently artistic motives, valued as they furnished the artist an opportunity for the exercise of his knowledge and skill and for the exhibition of lovely color and significant form. A change in the mechanical methods of painting, also, had its influence on a change in the conception of the function of art. With a very few exceptions, the works of Giotto were executed in fresco as wall decorations. The principles of mural painting require that the composition shall be subordinated to the architectural conditions of the space it is to fill and that the color shall be kept flat. The fresco method meets these requirements admirably, but because of its flatness it has its limitations. The introduction of an oil vehicle for the pigment material, in the fifteenth century, made possible a much greater range in gradated color, and reinforcing the increased knowledge of light and shade, aided in the evolution of decoration into the "easel picture," complete in itself. Released from its subjection to architecture, increasing its technical resources, and widening its interests in the matter of subject so as to include all life, painting becomes an independent and self-sufficing art.

Coincident with the development of painting as a craft, a mighty change was working itself out in the national ideals and in men's ways of thought and feeling. Already in Giotto's time the spirit of individualism had begun to assert itself in reaction from the dominance of an all-powerful restrictive ecclesiasticism, but the age was still essentially pietistic and according to its lights, religious. The fifteenth century witnessed the emancipation from tradition. The new humanism, which took its rise with the rediscovery of Greek culture, extended the intellectual horizon and intensified the enthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowly religious, but human; their art became the expression of the new spirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of life and the mortification of the flesh. The men of the Renaissance, with something of the feeling of the elder Greeks, glorified the body and delighted in the pride of life. Pagan myths and Greek legends take their place alongside of Bible episodes and stories of saints and martyrs, as subjects of representation; all served equally as motives for the expression of the artist's sense of the beauty of this world.

To this new culture and to these two centuries of growth and accomplishment in the practice of painting Raphael was heir. With a knowledge of the background out of which he emerges, we are prepared now to understand and appreciate his individual achievement. In approaching the study of his work we may ask, What is in general his ideal, his dominant motive, and in what manner and by what means has he realized his ideal?

How much was already prepared for him, what does he owe to the age and the conditions in which he worked, and what to the common store has he added that is peculiarly his own?

Whereas Giotto, the shepherd boy, was a pioneer, almost solitary, by sheer force of mind and by his sincerity and intensity of feeling breaking new paths to expression, for Raphael, on the contrary, the son of a painter and poet, the fellow-worker and well-beloved friend of many of the most powerful artistic personalities of his own or any age, the way was already prepared along which he moved in triumphant progress. The life of Raphael as an artist extends through three well-defined periods, the Umbrian, the Florentine, and the Roman, each one of which contributed a distinctive influence upon his development and witnessed a special and characteristic achievement.

To his father, who died when the boy was eleven years old, Raphael owed his poetic nature, scholarly tastes, and love of beauty, though he probably received from him no training as a painter. His first master was Timoteo Viti of Urbino, a pupil of Francia; from him he learned drawing and acquired a "certain predilection for round and opulent forms which is in itself the negation of the ascetic ideal." At the age of seventeen he went from Urbino to Perugia; there he entered the workshop of Perugino as an assistant. The ideal of the Umbrian school was tenderness and sweetness, the outward and visible rapture of pietistic feeling; something of these qualities Raphael expressed in his Madonnas throughout his career. Under the teaching of Perugino he laid hold on the principles of "space composition" which he was afterwards to carry to supreme perfection.

From Perugia the young Raphael made his way to Florence, and here he underwent many influences. At that moment Florence was the capital city of Italian culture. It was here that the new humanism had come to finest flower. Scholarship was the fashion; art was the chief interest of this beauty-loving people. It was the Florentines who had carried the scientific principles of painting to their highest point of development, particularly in their application to the rendering of the human figure. In Florence were collected the art treasures of the splendid century; here Michelangelo and Leonardo were at work; here were gathered companies of lesser men. By the study of Masaccio Raphael was led out to a fresh contact with nature. Fra Bartolomeo revealed to him further possibilities of composition and taught him some of the secrets of color. In Florence, too, he acknowledged the spell of Michelangelo and Leonardo. But though he learned from many teachers, Raphael was never merely an imitator. His scholarship and his skill he turned to his own uses; and when we have traced the sources of his motives and the influences in the moulding of his manner, there emerges out of the fusion a creative new force, which is his genius. What remains after our analysis is the essential Raphael.

Raphael's residence in Florence is the period of his Madonnas. From Florence Raphael, twenty-five years old and now a master in his own right, was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II; and here he placed his talents and his mastership at the disposal of the Church. He found time to paint Madonnas and a series of powerful and lovely portraits; but these years in Rome, which brought his brief life to a close, are preeminently the period of the great frescoes, which are his supreme achievement. But even in these mature years, and though he was himself the founder of a school, he did not cease to learn. Michelangelo was already in Rome, and now Raphael came more immediately under his influence, although not to submit to it but to use it for his own ends. In Rome were revealed to him the culture of an older and riper civilization and the glories and perfectness of an elder art. Raphael laid antiquity under contribution to the consummation of his art and the fulfillment and complete realization of his genius.

This analysis of the elements and influences of Raphael's career as an artist—inadequate as it necessarily is—may help us to define his distinctive accomplishment. A comparison of his work with that of his predecessors and contemporaries serves to disengage his essential significance. By nature he was generous and tender; the bent of his mind was scholarly; and he was impelled by a passion for restrained and formal beauty. Chiefly characteristic of his mental make-up was his power of assimilation, which allowed him to respond to many and diverse influences and in the end to dominate and use them. He gathered up in himself the achievements of two centuries of experiment and progress, and fusing the various elements, he created by force of his genius a new result and stamped it with the seal perfection. Giotto, to whom religion was a reality, was deeply in earnest about his message, and he phrased it as best he could with the means at his command; his end was expression. Raphael, under the patronage of wealthy dilettanti and in the service of a worldly and splendor-loving Church, delighted in his knowledge and his skill; he worshiped art, and his end was beauty. The genius of Giotto is a first shoot, vigorous and alive, breaking ground hardily, and tentatively pushing into freer air. The genius of Raphael is the full-blown flower and final fruit, complete, mature. The step beyond is decay.

By reference to Giotto and to Raphael I have tried to illustrate the practical application of certain principles of art study. A work of art is not absolute; both its content and its form are determined by the conditions out of which it proceeds. All judgment, therefore, must be comparative, and a work of art must be considered in its relation to its background and its conventions. Art is an interpretation of some aspect of life as the artist has felt it; and the artist is a child of his time. It is not an accident that Raphael portrayed Madonnas, serene and glorified, and Millet pictured rude peasants bent with toil. Raphael's painting is the culmination of two centuries of eager striving after the adequate expression of religious sentiment; in Millet's work the realism of his age is transfigured. As showing further how national ideals and interests may influence individual production, we may note that the characteristic art of the Italian Renaissance is painting; and Italian sculpture of the period is pictorial rather than plastic in motive and handling. Ghiberti's doors of the Florence Baptistery, in the grouping of figures and the three and four planes in perspective of the backgrounds, are essentially pictures in bronze. Conversely, in the North the characteristic art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is carving and sculpture; and "the early painters represented in their pictures what they were familiar with in wood and stone; so that not only are the figures dry and hard, but in the groups they are packed one behind another, heads above heads, without really occupying space, in imitation of the method adopted in the carved relief." Some knowledge of the origin and development of a given form of technique, a knowledge to be reached through historical study, enables us to measure the degree of expressiveness of a given work. The ideas of a child may be very well worth listening to, though his range of words is limited and his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, having acquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. In our endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or by Tennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or a symphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wanted to say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? With a sense of the artist's larger motive, whether religious sentiment, or a love of sheer beauty of color and form, or insight into human character, we are aided by a study of the history of technique to determine how far the artist with the language at his command was able to realize his intention.

But not only is art inspired and directed by the time-spirit of its age. A single work is the expression for the artist who creates it of his ideal. An artist's ideal, what he sets himself to accomplish, is the projection of his personality, and that is determined by many influences. He is first of all a child of his race and time; inheritance and training shape him to these larger conditions. Then his ideal is modified by his special individuality. A study of the artist's character as revealed in his biography leads to a fuller understanding of the intention and scope of his work. The events of his life become significant as they are seen to be the causes or the results of his total personality, that which he was in mind and temperament. What were the circumstances that moulded his character and decided his course? What events did he shape to his own purpose by the active force of his genius? What was the special angle of vision from which he looked upon the world? The answers to these questions are the clue to the full drift of his work. As style is the expression of the man, so conversely a knowledge of the man is an entrance into the wider and subtler implications of his style. We explore the personality of the man in order more amply to interpret his art, and we turn to his art as the revelation of his personality. In studying an artist we must look for his tendency and seek the unifying principle which binds his separate works into a whole. An artist has his successive periods or "manners." There is the period of apprenticeship, when the young man is influenced by his predecessors and his masters. Then he comes into his own, and he registers nature and life as he sees it freshly for himself. Finally, as he has mastered his art and won some of the secrets of nature, and as his own character develops, he tends more and more to impose his subjective vision upon the world, and he subordinates nature to the expression of his distinctive individuality. A single work, therefore, is to be considered in relation to its place in the artist's development; it is but a part, and it is to be interpreted by reference to the whole.

In the study of biography, however, the man must not be mistaken for the artist; his acts are not to be confounded with his message. "A man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he became." We must summon forth the spirit of the man from within the wrappages of material and accident. In our preoccupation with the external details of a man's familiar and daily life it is easy to lose sight of his spiritual experience, which only is of significance. Whistler, vain, aggressive, quarrelsome, and yet so exquisite and so subtle in extreme refinement, is a notable example of a great spirit and a little man. Wagner wrote to Liszt: "As I have never felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of my dreams, in which from beginning to end that love shall be thoroughly satiated." Not the Wagner of fact, but the Wagner of dreams. Life lived in the spirit and imagination may be different from the life of daily act. So we should transcend the material, trying through that to penetrate to the spiritual. It is not a visit to the artist's birthplace that signifies, it is not to do reverence before his likeness or cherish a bit of his handwriting. All this may have a value to the disciple as a matter of loyalty and fine piety. But in the end we must go beyond these externals that we may enter intelligently and sympathetically into the temper of his mind and mood and there find disclosed what he thought and felt and was able only in part to express. It is not the man his neighbors knew that is important. His work is the essential thing, what that work has to tell us about life in terms of emotional experience.

Studies in the history of art and in biography are avenues of approach to the understanding of a work of art; they do not in themselves constitute appreciation. Historical importance must not be mistaken for artistic significance. In reading about pictures we may forget to look at them. The historical study of art in its various divisions reduces itself to an exercise in analysis, resolving a given work into its elements. But art is a synthesis. In order to appreciate a work the elements must be gathered together and fused into a whole. A statue or a picture is meant not to be read about, but to be looked at; and its final message must be received through vision. Our knowledge will serve us little if we are not sensitive to the appeal of color and form. There is danger that preoccupation with the history of art may betray us if we are not careful to keep it in its place. The study of art should follow and not lead appreciation. We are apt to see what we are looking for. So we ought to come to each work freshly without prejudice or bias; it is only afterwards that we should bring to bear on it our knowledge about the facts of its production. Connoisseurship is a science and may hold within itself no element of aesthetic enjoyment. Appreciation is an art, and the quality of it depends upon the appreciator himself. The end of historical study is not a knowledge of facts for their own sake, but through those facts a deeper penetration and fuller true enjoyment. By the aid of such knowledge we are enabled to recognize in any work more certainly and abundantly the expression of an emotional experience which relates itself to our own life.

The final meaning of art to the appreciator lies in just this sense of its relation to his own experience. The greatest works are those which express reality and life, not limited and temporary conditions, but life universal and for all time. Without commentary these carry their message, appealing to the wisest and the humblest. Gather into a single room a fragment of the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo's "Day and Night," Botticelli's "Spring," the sprites and children of Donatello and Delia Robbia, Velasquez's "Pope Innocent," Rembrandt's "Cloth-weavers," Frans Hals' "Musician," Millet's "Sower," Whistler's "Carlyle." There is here no thought of period or of school. These living, present, eternal verities are all one company.



VI

THE SERVICE OF CRITICISM

THE greatest art is universal. It transcends the merely local conditions in which it is produced. It sweeps beyond the individual personality of its creator, and links itself with the common experience of all men. The Parthenon, so far as it can be reconstructed in imagination, appeals to a man of any race or any period, whatever his habit of mind or degree of culture, as a perfect utterance. The narrow vault of the Sistine Chapel opens into immensity, and every one who looks upon it is lifted out of himself into new worlds. Shakespeare's plays were enjoyed by the apprentices in the pit and royalty in the boxes, and so all the way between. The man Shakespeare, of such and such birth and training, and of this or that experience in life, is entirely merged in his creations; he becomes the impersonal channel of expression of the profoundest, widest interpretation of life the world has known. Such art as this comes closest to the earth and extends farthest into infinity, "beyond the reaches of our souls."

But there is another order of art, more immediately the product of local conditions, the personal expression of a distinctive individuality, phrased in a language of less scope and currency, and limited as to its content in the range of its appeal. These lesser works have their place; they can minister to us in some moment of need and at some point in our development. Because of their limitations, however, their effectiveness can be furthered by interpretation. A man more sensitive than we to the special kind of beauty which they embody and better versed in their language, can discover to us a significance and a charm in them to which we have not penetrated. To help us to the fullest enjoyment of the great things and to a more enlightened and juster appreciation of the lesser works is the service of criticism.

We do not wholly possess an experience until, having merged ourselves in it, we then react upon it and become conscious of its significance. A novel, a play, a picture interests us, and we surrender to the enjoyment of the moment. Afterwards we think about our pleasure, defining the nature of the experience and analyzing the means by which it was produced, the subject of the work and the artist's method of treating it. It may be that we tell our pleasure to a friend, glad also perhaps to hear his opinion of the matter. The impulse is natural; the practice is helpful. And herein lies the origin of criticism. In so far as an appreciator does not rest in his immediate enjoyment of a work of art, but seeks to account for his pleasure, to trace the sources of it, to establish the reasons for it, and to define its quality, so far he becomes a critic. As every man who perceives beauty in nature and takes it up into his own life is potentially an artist, so every man is a critic in the measure that he reasons about his enjoyment. The critical processes, therefore, are an essential part of our total experience of art, and criticism may be an aid to appreciation.

The function of criticism has been variously understood through the centuries of its practice. Early modern criticism, harking back to the method of Aristotle, concerned itself with the form of a work of art. From the usage of classic writers it deduced certain "rules" of composition; these formulas were applied to the work under examination, and that was adjudged good or bad in the degree that it conformed or failed to conform to the established rules. It was a criticism of law-giving and of judgment. In the eighteenth century criticism extended its scope by the admission of a new consideration, passing beyond the mere form of the work and reckoning with its power to give pleasure. Addison, in his critique of "Paradise Lost," still applies the formal tests of the Aristotelian canons, but he discovers further that a work of art exists not only for the sake of its form, but also for the expression of beautiful ideas. This power of "affecting the imagination" he declares is the "very life and highest perfection" of poetry. This is a long step in the right direction. With the nineteenth century, criticism conceives its aims and procedure in new and larger ways. A work of art is now seen to be an evolution; and criticism adapts to its own uses the principles of historical study and the methods of scientific investigation. Recognizing that art is organic, that an art-form, as religious painting or Gothic architecture or the novel, is born, develops, comes to maturity, lapses, and dies, that an individual work is the product of "race, environment, and the moment," that it is the expression also of the personality of the artist himself, criticism no longer regards the single work as an isolated phenomenon, but tries to see it in its relation to its total background.

Present-day criticism avails itself of this larger outlook upon art. But the ends to be reached are understood differently by different critics. With M. Brunetiere, to cite now a few representative names, criticism is authoritative and dogmatic: he looks at the work objectively, refusing to be the dupe of his pleasure, if he has any; and approaching the work in the spirit of dispassionate impersonal inquiry as an object of historical importance and scientific interest, he decrees that it is good or bad. Matthew Arnold considers literature a "criticism of life," and he values a work with reference to the moral significance of its ideas. Ruskin's criticism is didactic; he wishes to educate his public, and by force of his torrential eloquence he succeeds in persuading his disciples into acceptance of his teaching, though he may not always convince. Impressionistic criticism, as with M. Anatole France or M. Jules Lemaitre, does not even try to see the work "as in itself it really is," but is an account of the critic's own subjective reaction on it, a narrative of what he thought and felt in this chance corner of experience. With Walter Pater criticism becomes appreciation. A given work of art produces a distinctive impression and communicates a special and unique pleasure; this active power constitutes its beauty. So the function of the critic as Pater conceives it is "to distinguish, analyze, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced." The interpretative critic—represented in the practice of Pater—stands between a work of art and the appreciator as mediator and revealer.

Each kind of criticism performs a certain office, and is of use within its own chosen sphere. To the layman, for his purposes of appreciation, that order of criticism will be most helpful which responds most closely and amply to his peculiar needs. A work of art may be regarded under several aspects, its quality of technical execution, its power of sensuous appeal, its historical importance; and to each one of these aspects some kind of criticism applies. The layman's reception of art includes all these considerations, but subordinates them to the total experience. His concern, therefore, is to define the service of criticism to appreciation.

The analysis of a work of art resolves it into these elements. There is first of all the emotion which gives birth to the work and which the work is designed to express. The emotion, to become definite, gathers about an idea, conceived in the terms of its own medium, as form, or color and mass, or musical relations; and this artistic idea presents itself as the subject or motive of the work. The emotion and artistic idea, in order that they may be expressed and become communicable, embody themselves in material, as the marble of a statue, the pigment of a picture, the audible tones of a musical composition. This material form has the power to satisfy the mind and delight the senses. Through the channel of the senses and the mind the work reaches the feelings; and the aesthetic experience is complete.

As art springs out of emotion, so it is to be received as emotion; and a work to be appreciated in its true spirit must be enjoyed. But to be completely enjoyed it must be understood. We must know what the artist was trying to express, and we must be able to read his language; then we are prepared to take delight in the form and to respond to the emotion.

To help us to understand a work of art in all the components that entered into the making of it is the function of historical study. Such study enables us to see the work from the artist's own point of view. A knowledge of its background, the conditions in which the artist wrought and his own attitude toward life, is the clue to his ideal; and by an understanding of the language it was possible for him to employ, we can measure the degree of expressiveness he was able to achieve. This study of the artist's purpose and of his methods is an exercise in explanation.

The interpretation of art, for which we look to criticism, deals with the picture, the statue, the book, specifically in its relation to the appreciator. What is the special nature of the experience which the work communicates to us in terms of feeling? In so far as the medium itself is a source of pleasure, by what qualities of form has the work realized the conditions of beauty proper to it, delighting thus the senses and satisfying the mind? These are the questions which the critic, interpreting the work through the medium of his own temperament, seeks to answer.

Theoretically, the best critic of art would be the artist himself. He above all other men should understand the subtle play of emotion and thought in which a work of art is conceived; and the artist rather than another should trace the intricacies and know the cunning of the magician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself into visible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out by the fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings of his spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and not analytic. From his contact with nature and from his experience of life, out of which rises his generative emotion, he moves directly to the fashioning of expressive forms, without pausing on the way to scan too closely the "meaning" of his work. Mr. Bernard Shaw remarks that Ibsen, giving the rein to the creative impulse of his poetic nature, produced in "Brand" and "Peer Gynt" a "great puzzle for his intellect." Wagner, he says, "has expressly described how the intellectual activity which he brought to the analysis of his music dramas was in abeyance during their creation. Just so do we find Ibsen, after composing his two great dramatic poems, entering on a struggle to become intellectually conscious of what he had done." Moreover, the artist is in the very nature of things committed to one way of seeing. His view of life is limited by the trend of his own dominant and creative personality; what he gains in intensity and penetration of insight he loses in breadth. He is less quick to see beauty in another guise than that which his own imagination weaves for him; he is less receptive of other ways of envisaging the world.

The ideal critic, on the contrary, is above everything else catholic and tolerant. It is his task to discover beauty in whatever form and to affirm it. By nature he is more sensitive than the ordinary man, by training he has directed the exercise of his powers toward their fullest scope, and by experience of art in its diverse manifestations he has certified his judgment and deepened his capacity to enjoy. The qualifications of an authentic critic are both temperament and scholarship. Mere temperament uncorrected by knowledge may vibrate exquisitely when swept by the touch of a thing of beauty, but its music may be in a quite different key from the original motive. Criticism must relate itself to the objective fact; it should interpret and not transpose. Mere scholarship without temperament misses art at its centre, that art is the expression and communication of emotional experience; and the scholar in criticism may wander his leaden way down the by-paths of a sterile learning. To mediate between the artist and the appreciator, the critic must understand the artist and he must feel with the appreciator. He is at once the artist translated into simpler terms and the appreciator raised to a higher power of perception and response.

The service of criticism to the layman is to furnish him a clue to the meaning of the work in hand, and by the critic's own response to its beauty to reveal its potency and charm. With technique as such the critic is not concerned. Technique is the business of the artist; only those who themselves practice an art are qualified to judge in matters of practice. The form is significant to the appreciator only so far as regards its expressiveness and beauty. It is not the function of the critic to tell the artist what his work should be; it is the critic's mission to reveal to the appreciator what the work is. That revelation will be accomplished in terms of the critic's own experience of the beauty of the work, an experience imaged forth in such phrases that the pleasure the work communicates is conveyed to his readers in its true quality and foil intensity. It is not enough to dogmatize as Ruskin dogmatizes, to bully the reader into a terrified acceptance. It is not enough to determine absolute values as Matthew Arnold seeks to do, to fix certain canons of intellectual judgment, and by the application of a formula as a touchstone, to decide that this work is excellent and that another is less good. Really serviceable criticism is that which notes the special and distinguishing quality of beauty in any work and helps the reader to live out that beauty in his own experience.

These generalizations may be made more immediate and practical by examples. In illustration of the didactic manner in criticism I may cite a typical paragraph of Ruskin, chosen from his "Mornings in Florence."

First, look at the two sepulchral slabs by which you are standing. That farther of the two from the west end is one of the most beautiful pieces of fourteenth-century sculpture in this world. . . . And now, here is a simple but most useful test of your capacity for understanding Florentine sculpture or painting. If you can see that the lines of that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of the folds is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that the softness and ease of them is complete,—though only sketched with a few dark touches,—then you can understand Giotto's drawing, and Botticelli's;—Donatello's carving, and Luca's. But if you see nothing in this sculpture, you will see nothing in theirs, of theirs. Where they choose to imitate flesh, or silk, or to play any vulgar modern trick with marble—(and they often do)—whatever, in a word, is French, or American, or Cockney, in their work, you can see; but what is Florentine, and for ever great—unless you can see also the beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap,—you will see never.

The earnest and docile though bewildered layman is intimidated into thinking that he sees it, whether he really does or not. But it is a question if the contemplation of the "beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap," however eager and serious the contemplation may be, adds much to his experience; it may be doubted whether as a result of his effort toward the understanding of the rightness and loveliness of the lines of the cap and the exquisiteness of the choice of folds, which the critic has pointed out to him with threatening finger, he feels that life is a fuller and finer thing to live.

An example of the intellectual estimate, the valuation by formulas, and the assignment of abstract rank, is this paragraph from Matthew Arnold's essay on Wordsworth.

Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he is unique. His best poems are those which most perfectly exhibit this balance. I have a warm admiration for "Laodameia" and for the great "Ode;" but if I am to tell the very truth, I find "Laodameia" not wholly free from something artificial, and the great "Ode" not wholly free from something declamatory. If I had to pick out poems of a kind most perfectly to show Wordsworth's unique power, I should rather choose poems such as "Michael," "The Fountain," "The Highland Reaper." And poems with the peculiar and unique beauty which distinguishes these, Wordsworth produced in considerable number; besides very many other poems of which the worth, although not so rare as the worth of these, is still exceedingly high.

Thus does the judicial critic mete out his estimate by scale and measuring-rod. We are told dogmatically what is good and what is less good; but of distinctive quality and energizing life-giving virtues, not a word. The critic does not succeed in communicating to us anything of Wordsworth's special charm and power. We are informed, but we are left cold and unresponding.

The didactic critic imposes his standard upon the layman. The judicial critic measures and awards. The appreciative critic does not attempt to teach or to judge; he makes possible to his reader an appreciation of the work of art simply by recreating in his own terms the complex of his emotions in its presence. Instead of declaring the work to be beautiful or excellent, he makes it beautiful in the very telling of what it means to him. As the artist interprets life, disclosing its depths and harmonies, so the appreciative critic in his turn interprets art, reconstituting the beauty of it in his own terms. Through his interpretation, the layman is enabled to enter more fully into the true spirit of the work and to share its beauty in his own experience.

In contrast to the passage from Arnold is this paragraph from an essay on Wordsworth by Walter Pater.

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great elementary feelings, lifting and solemnizing their language and giving it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to Michael by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls. In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. With a penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that pastoral world—the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures, even—their home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang by a ruined farm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged—their pathetic wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the stormy seas;" the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;—all the pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their yearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their early toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised the image, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has caught from him.

Here is the clue to Wordsworth's meaning; and the special quality and power of his work, gathering amplitude and intensity as it plays across the critic's temperament, is reconstituted in other and illuminating images which communicate the emotion to us. The critic has felt more intimately than we the appeal of this poetry, and he kindles in us something of his own enthusiasm. So we return to Wordsworth for ourselves, more alert to divine his message, more susceptible to his spell, that he may work in us the magic of evocation.

Criticism is of value to us as appreciators in so far as it serves to recreate in us the experience which the work was designed to convey. But criticism is not a short cut to enjoyment. We cannot take our pleasure at second hand. We must first come to the work freshly and realize our own impression of it; then afterwards we may turn to the critic for a further revelation. Criticism should not shape our opinion, but should stimulate appreciation, carrying us farther than we could go ourselves, but always in the same direction with our original impression. There is a kind of literary exercise, calling itself criticism, which takes a picture or a book as its point of departure and proceeds to create a work of art in its own right, attaching itself only in name to the work which it purports to criticise. "Who cares," exclaims a clever maker of epigrams, "whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery." A very good appreciation of Ruskin, this. But the answer is that such writing as is here attributed to Ruskin is magnificent: it may be art; but it is not true criticism. A work of art is not "impressive" merely, but "expressive" too. Criticism in its relation to the work itself has an objective base, and it must be steadied and authenticated by constant reference to the original feet. Criticism is not the source of our enjoyment but a medium of interpretation.

Before we turn to criticism, therefore, we must first, as Pater suggests, know our own impression as it really is, discriminate it, and realize it distinctly. Only so shall we escape becoming the dupe of some more aggressive personality. In our mental life suggestion plays an important and perhaps unrecognized part. In a certain frame of mind we can be persuaded into believing anything and into liking anything. When, under the influence of authority or fashion, we think we care for that which has no vital and consciously realized relation to our own experience, we are the victims of a kind of hypnotism, and there is little hope of our ultimate adjustment over against art. It is far better honestly to like an inferior work and know why we like it than to pretend to like a good one. In the latter case no real progress or development is possible, for we have no standards that can be regarded as final; we are swayed by the authority or influence which happens at that moment to be most powerful. In the former case we are at least started in the right direction. Year by year, according to the law of natural growth, we come to the end of the inferior work which up to that time has been able to minister to us, and we pass on to new and greater works that satisfy the demands of our deepening experience. It is sometimes asked if we ought not to try to like the best things in art. I should answer, the very greatest things we do not have to try to like; the accent of greatness is unmistakable, and greatness has a message for every one. As regards the lesser works, we ought to be willing to grow up. There was a time when I enjoyed "Robinson Crusoe" in words of one syllable. If I had tried then to like Mr. George Meredith, I should not really have enjoyed him, and I should have missed the fun of "Robinson Crusoe." Everything in its time and place. The lesser works have their use: they may be a starting-point for our entrance into life; and they furnish a basis of comparison by which we are enabled to realize the greatness of the truly great. We must value everything in its own kind, affirming what it is, and not regretting what it is not. But the prerequisite of all appreciation, without which our contact with art is a pastime or a pretense, is that we be honest with ourselves. In playing solitaire at least we ought not to cheat.

So the layman must face the situation squarely and accept the responsibility of deciding finally for himself. On the way we may look to criticism to guide us to those works which are meant for us. In art as in the complex details of living, there is need of selection; and criticism helps toward that. In literature alone, to name but a single art, there is so much to be left unread which the length of our life would not otherwise permit us to escape, that we are grateful to the critic who aids us to omit gracefully and with success. But the most serviceable criticism is positive and not destructive. The lesser works may have a message for us, and it is that message in its distinctive quality which the critic should affirm. In the end, however, the use we make of criticism should not reduce itself to an unquestioning acceptance of authority. In the ceremonial of the Roman service, at the moment preceding the elevation of the Host, two acolytes enter the chancel, bearing candles, and kneel between the congregation and the ministrants at the altar; the tapers, suffusing the altar in their golden radiance, throw the dim figures of the priests into a greater gloom and mystery. So it happens that art often is enshrouded by the off-giving of those who would seem to illuminate it; and "dark with excess of light," the obscurity is intensified. The layman is told of the virginal poetry of early Italian painting; he is bidden to sit at the homely, substantial feast of the frank actuality of Dutch art; he listens in puzzled wonder to the glorification of Velasquez and Goya; he reads in eloquent, glowing language of the splendor of Turner. He is more than half persuaded; but he does not quite understand. From this tangle of contending interests there seems for the moment to be no way out. It is assumed that the layman has no standard of his own; and he yields himself to the appeal which comes to him immediately at the instant. The next day, perhaps, brings a new interest or another judgment which runs counter to the old. Back and forth and back again, without purpose and without reason; it is only an endless recurrence of the conflict instead of development and progress. Taking all his estimates at second hand, so for his opinion even of a concert or a play he is at the mercy of a critic who may have dined badly. Some boy, caught young at the university and broken to miscellaneous tasks on a big newspaper, is sent to "do" a picture-exhibition, a concert, and the theatre in the same day. He is expected to "criticise" in an hour the work of a lifetime of struggle and effort and knowledge and thought and feeling. This is the guide of opinion and the foundation of artistic creed. I have stated the reduction to absurdity of the case for authority in criticism. If the layman who leans too heavily upon criticism comes to realize the hopelessness of his position and thinks the situation through to its necessary conclusion, he sees that the authority of criticism is not absolute, but varies with the powers and range of the individual critic, and that at the last he must find his standard within himself.

There are, of course, certain standards of excellence recognized universally and certain principles of taste of universal validity; and to these standards and these principles must be referred our individual estimates for comparison and correction. Given a native sensibility to the worth of life and to the appeal of beauty, the justice of our estimate will be in proportion to the extent of our knowledge of life and of our contact with art. Our individual judgment, therefore, must be controlled by experience,—our momentary judgments by the sum of our own experience, and our total judgment by universal experience. In all sound criticism and right appreciation there must be a basis of disciplined taste. We must guard ourselves against whims and caprice, even our own. So the individual may not cut loose altogether from external standards. But these must be brought into relation to his personal needs and applied with reference to his own standard. Finally, for his own uses, the individual has the right to determine the meaning and value to him of any work of art in the measure that it links itself with his own actual or possible experience and becomes for him a revelation of fuller life. For beauty is the power possessed by objects to quicken us with a sense of larger personality; and art, whether the arts of form or of representation, is the material bodying forth of beauty as the artist has perceived it and the means by which his emotion in its presence is communicated. Upon this conception of beauty and this interpretation of the scope and function of art rests the justice of the personal estimate.



VII

BEAUTY AND COMMON LIFE

TO become sensitive to the meaning of color and form and sound as the artist employs them for expression, to feel a work of art in its relation to its background, to find in criticism enlightenment and guidance but not a substitute for one's own experience,—these are methods of approach to art. But the appreciator has yet to penetrate art's inmost secret. At the centre, as the motive of all his efforts to understand the language of art and the processes of technique, as the goal of historical study and the purpose of his recourse to criticism, stands the work itself with its power to attract and charm. Here is Millet's painting of the "Sower." In the actual presence of the picture the appreciator's experience is complex. Analysis resolves it into considerations of the material form of the work, involving its sensuous qualities and the processes of execution, considerations also of the subject of the picture, which gathers about itself many associations out of the beholder's own previous knowledge of life. But the clue to the final meaning of the work, its meaning both to the artist and to the appreciator, is contained in the answer to the question, Why did Millet paint this picture? And just what is it designed to express?