THE PERSONAL ESTIMATE

ART starts from life and in the end comes back to it. Art is born out of the stirring of the artist’s spirit in response to his need of expression, and it reaches its fulfillment in the spirit of the appreciator as it answers his need of wider and deeper experience. Midway on its course from spirit to spirit it traverses devious paths. The emotion out of which art springs and of which it is the expression is controlled and directed by the shaping force of mind, and it embodies itself in material form. This material form, by virtue of its qualities, has the power to delight our senses; the skill which went into the fashioning of it, so far as we can recognize the processes of execution, gives us pleasure; the harmony which the work of art must manifest satisfies the mind and makes it possible for us to link the emotion with our own experience.

These paths which a work of art traverses in its course from its origin to its fulfillment I have tried to follow in their ramifications, and I have tried to trace them to their issue in appreciation. Some lovers of art may linger on the way and rest content with the distance they have come, without pressing forward to the end. A work of art is complex in its appeal; and it is possible to stop with one or another of its elements. Thus we may receive the work intellectually, recognizing its subject, and turning the artist’s emotion into our thought and translating it from his medium of color and form or sound into our own medium of words. Here is a portrait of Carlyle; and Carlyle we know as an author and as a man. This landscape is from the Palisades, where we have roamed in leisure hours. Before us is a statue of Zeus, whom our classical reading has made a reality to us. This symphony gathers about a day in the country, suggesting an incident in our own experience of which we have pleasant remembrances. Intellectually, also, we enjoy the evidence of the artist’s skill which the work exhibits. Or we may pass beyond the simple exercise of the intellect, and with a refinement of perception we may take a sensuous delight in the qualities of the material in which the work is embodied. This portrait is a subtle harmony of color and exquisite adjustment of line and mass. The luminous night which enwraps the Palisades is a solemn mighty chord. The white rhythm of this statue caresses the eye that follows it. This symphony is an intricate and wonderful wave-pattern upon a sea of billowing sound in which the listener immerses himself voluptuously. The essential significance of a work of art is not to be received apart from its form, but the form is more than merely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, therefore, the color and the composition of the portrait are but the point of meeting where we touch in energizing contact a powerful personality. Our spirit goes out into the night of these Palisades and dilates into immensity. This statue is Olympian majesty made visible, and in its presence we feel that we too are august. The symphony is a resolution of the struggle of our own tangled lives, a purification, and the experience of joy.

Art is the expression of experience, whether the experience enacts itself within the spirit of the artist or derives from his contact with the external world. So by the same token, art is finally to be received as experience. The ultimate meaning of a work of art to the appreciator is what it wakens in him of emotion. It is the artist’s business, by the manipulation of his materials and his elements, by the choice of motive and the rendering, by the note and pitch of his color, the ordering of his line, the disposition of his masses, to compel the direction of the emotion; he must not allow the solemnity and awe with which his night invests the Palisades to be mistaken by the beholder for terror or for mere obscurity. But the quality and the intensity of the emotion depend upon the temper of the appreciator’s sensibilities and the depth and range of his experience of life. Art is not fixed and invariable in its effect. “Vanity Fair” is a great novel. One man may read it for the sake of the story, and in his amusement and interest in following the succession of incident, he may for a while forget himself. A possible use to put one’s reading to; yet for that man the book is not art. Another may be entertained by the spectacle of the persons as they exhibit themselves in Thackeray’s pages, much as he might stop a moment on the curbstone and watch a group of children at play in the street. Here he is a looker-on, holding himself aloof; and for him, again, the book is not art. Still a third may find in “Vanity Fair” a record of the customs and manners of English people at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and he adds this much to his stock of information. Still for him the book is not art. Not one of the three has touched in vital contact the essential meaning of “Vanity Fair.” But the man who sees in the incidents of the book a situation possible in his own life, who identifies himself with the personages and acts out with them their adventures, who feels that he actually knows Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp, Jo Sedley, Dobbin, and Amelia, and understands their character and personality better here than in the actual world about him by force of Thackeray’s greater insight and power of portraiture, who sees in English manners here represented the interpretation of his own surroundings, so that as a result of it all, his own experience becomes richer for his having lived out the life of the fictitious persons, his own acquaintances have revealed themselves more fully, his own life becomes more intelligible, for him at last the book is a work of art. So any work may be a mirror which simply reflects the world as we know it; it may be a point of departure, from which tangentially we construct an experience of our own: it is truly art only in the degree that it is revelation.

A work of art, therefore, is to be received by the individual appreciator as an added emotional experience. It appeals to him at all because in some way it relates itself to his own life; and its value to him is determined by the measure in which it carries him out into wider ranges of feeling. There are works whose absolute greatness he recognizes but yet which do not happen at the moment to find him. Constable comes to him as immensely satisfying; Turner, though an object of great intellectual interest, leaves him cold. He knows Velasquez to be supreme among painters, but he turns away to stand before Frans Hals, whose quick, sure strokes call such very human beings into actuality and rouse his spirit to the fullest response. Why is it that of two works of equal depth of insight into life, of equal scope of feeling, of the same excellence of technical accomplishment, one has an appeal and a message for him and not the other? What is the bridge of transition between the work and the spirit of the appreciator by which the subtle connection is established?

It comes back to a matter of harmony. Experience presents itself to us in fragments; and in so far as the parts are scattering and unrelated, it is not easy for us to guess the purpose of our being here. But so soon as details, which by virtue of some selecting principle are related to one another, gather themselves into a whole, chaos is resolved into order, and this whole becomes significant, intelligible, and beautiful. Instinctively we are seeking, each in his own way, to bring the fragments of experience into order; and that order stands to each of us for what we are, for our individual personality, the self. We define thus our selecting principle, by which we receive some incidents of experience as related to our development and we reject others as not related to it. Thus the individual life achieves its integrity, its unity and significance. This, too, is the process of art. A landscape in nature is capable of a various, interpretation. By bringing its details into order and unity, the artist creates its beauty. His perception of the harmony which his imagination compels out of the landscape is attended with emotion, and the emotion flows outward to expression in a form which is itself harmonious. This form is a work of art. Art, therefore, is the harmonizing of experience. Appreciation is an act of fusion and identification. In spirit we become the thing presented by the work of art and we merge with it in a larger unity. The individual harmony which a work of art manifests becomes significant to us as we can make it an harmonious part of our own experience and as it carries us in the direction of our development.

But how to determine, each man for himself, what is the direction of our development? A life becomes significant to itself so soon as it is conscious of its purpose, and it becomes harmonious as it makes all the details of experience subserve that purpose. The purpose of the individual life, so far as we can guess it, seems to be that the life shall be as complete as possible, that it shall fulfill itself and provide through its offspring for its continuance. It is true that no life is isolated; as every atom throughout the universe is bound to every other atom by subtlest filaments of influence, so each human life stands related to all other lives. But the man best pays his debt of service to others who makes the most of that which is given him to work with; and that is his own personality. We must begin at the centre and work outwards. My concern is with my own justice. If I worry because my friend or another is not just, I not only do not make him more just, but I also fail of the highest justice I can achieve, which is my own. We must be true to ourselves. We help one another not by precept but by being; and what we are communicates itself. As physical life propagates and thus continues itself, so personality is transmitted in unconscious innumerable ways. The step and carriage of the body, the glance of the eye, the work of our hands, our silences no less than our speech, all express what we are. As everything follows upon what we are, so our responsibility is to be, to be ourselves completely, perfectly.

A tender shoot pushes its way out of the soil into light and air, and with the years it grows into a tree. The tree bears fruit, which contains the seed of new manifestations of itself. The fruit falls to the ground and rots, providing thus the aliment for the seed out of which other trees are to spring. From seed to seed the life of the tree is a cycle, without beginning and without end. At no one point in the cycle can we say, Here is the purpose of the tree. Incidentally the tree may minister to the needs and comfort and pleasure of man. The tree delights him to look upon it; its branches shade him from the noonday sun; its trunk and limbs can be hewn down and turned to heat and shelter; its fruit is good to eat. The primary purpose of the fruit, however, is not to furnish food to man, but to provide the envelope for the transmission of its seed and the continuance of its own life. Seen in its cosmic bearing and scope, the purpose of the tree is to be a tree, as fit, as strong, as beautiful, as complete, as tree-like, as it can be. The leaf precedes the flower and may be thought on that account to be inferior to it in the scale of development. If a leaf pines and withers in regret that it is not a flower, it not only does not become a flower, but it fails of being a good leaf. Everything in its place and after its own kind. In so far as it is perfectly itself, a leaf, a blossom, a tree, a man, does it contribute to the well-being of others. Man has subdued all things under his feet and turned them to his own uses. By force of mind he is the strongest creature, but it is not to be inferred that he is therefore the aim and end of all creation. Like everything else, he has his place; like everything else he has the right to live his own life, triumphing over the weaker and in his turn going down before a mightier when the mightier shall come; like everything else he is but a part in the universal whole. Only a part; but as we recognize our relation to other parts and through them our connection with the whole, our sense of the value of the individual life becomes infinitely extended. We must get into the rhythm, keeping step with the beat of the universal life and finding there our place, our destiny, the meaning of our being here, and joy. The goods which men set before themselves as an end are but by-products after all. If we pursue happiness we overtake it not. If we do what our hands find to do, devotedly and with our might, then, some day, if we happen to stop and make question of it, we discover that happiness is already there, in us, with us, and around us. The aim of a man’s life in the world, as it would seem, is to be perfectly a man, and his end is to fulfill himself; as part of this fulfillment of himself, he provides for the continuance of his life in other lives, and transmitting his character and influence, he enriches other lives because of what he is. The purpose of seeing is that we may see more, and the eye is ever striving to increase its power; the health of the eye is growth. The purpose of life is more life, individual in the measure that it lies within a man’s power to develop it, but cosmic in its sources and its influence.

As the harmony which a work of art presents finds a place in that harmony of experience and outward-reaching desire which constitutes our personality, art becomes for us an entrance into more life. In the large, art is a means of development. But as any work embraces diverse elements and is capable of a various appeal, it may be asked in what sense the appreciation of art is related to education and culture. Before we can answer the question intelligently, we must know what we mean by our terms. By many people education is regarded as they regard any material possession, to be classed with fashionable clothes, a fine house, a carriage and pair, or touring-car, or steam yacht, as the credential and card of entree to what is called good society. Culture is a kind of ornamental furniture, maintained to impress visitors. Of course we ourselves do not think so, but we know people who do. Nor do we believe as some believe that education is simply a means of gaining a more considerable livelihood. It is pathetic to see young men in college struggling in desperate, uncomplaining sacrifice to obtain an education, and all the while mistaking the end of their effort. Not all the deeds of daring in a university course are enacted on the athletic field; the men I am thinking of do not have their pictures published in the newspapers, the unrecorded heroisms of college life are very moving to those who know. But the tragedy I have in mind is this for tragedy consists not in sacrifice itself but in needless and futile sacrifice that some of these young men suppose there is a magic virtue in education for its own sake, that it is the open-sesame to all the wealth and beauty of life. With insufficient ability to start with, they are preparing to be unfit professional men, when they might be excellent artisans. The knowledge of books is in no sense the whole story nor the only means of education. In devotion to some craft or in the intelligent conduct of some business they might find the true education, which is the conscious discipline of one’s powers. The man who can do things, whether with his hands or with his brain, provided intelligence govern the exercise of hand and brain, and who finds happiness in his work because it is the expression of himself, is an educated man. The end of education is the building of personality, the making of human power, and its fruit is wisdom.

Wisdom, however, does not consist in the most extensive knowledge of facts. Oftentimes information overweights a man and snuffs out what personal force there might otherwise have been. On the futility of mere learning there is abundant testimony. Walt Whitman, as we might expect from his passion for the vital and the human, has said: “You must not know too much and be too precise and scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft. A certain free margin, perhaps ignorance, credulity, helps your enjoyment of these things and of the sentiment of feather’d, wooded, river or marine nature generally. I repeat it don’t want to know too exactly or the reasons why.” Even Ruskin, whose learning was extensive and various, bears witness to the same effect. He notes “the diminution which my knowledge of the Alps had made in my impression of them, and the way in which investigation of strata and structure reduces all mountain sublimity to mere debris and wall-building.” In the same spirit he planned an essay on the Uses of Ignorance. From the midst of his labors in Venice he wrote: “I am sure that people who work out subjects thoroughly are disagreeable wretches. One only feels as one should when one doesn’t know much about the matter.” In other words, we are not to let our knowledge come between us and our power to feel. In thus seeming to assail education I am not seeking to subvert or destroy; I want simply to adjust the emphasis. The really wise man is he who knows how to make life yield him its utmost of true satisfaction and furnish him the largest scope for the use of his powers and the expression of himself. In this sense a newsboy in the streets may be wiser than a university professor, in that one may be the master of his life and the other may be the servant of his information. Education should have for its end the training of capacities and powers, the discipline and control of the intelligence, the quickening of the sympathies, the development of the ability to live. No man is superior to his fellows because of the fact of his education. His education profits him only in so far as it makes him more of a man, more responsive because his own emotions have been more deeply stirred, more tolerant because his wider range has revealed more that is good, more generous to give of his own life and service because he has more generously received. It is not what we know nor what we have that marks our worth, but what we are. No man, however fortunate and well-circumstanced he may be, can afford to thank God that he is not as other men are. In so far as his education tends to withdraw him from life and from contact with his fellows of whatever station, in so far as it fosters in him the consciousness of class, so far it is an evil. Education should lead us not to judge lives different from our own, but to try to understand and, to appreciate. The educated man, above all others, should thank God that there are diversity of gifts and so many kinds of good.

Art is a means of culture, but art rightly understood and received. Art does not aim to teach. It may teach incidentally, tangentially to its circle, but instruction, either intellectual or ethical, is not its purpose. It fulfills itself in the spirit of the appreciator as it enables him in its presence to become something that otherwise he had not been. It is not enough to be told things; we must make trial of them and live them out in our own experience before they become true for us. As appreciation is not knowledge but feeling, so we must live our art. It is well to have near us some work that we want to be like. We get its fullest message only as we identify ourselves with it. If we are willing to be thought ignorant and to live our lives as seems good to us, I believe it is better to go the whole way with a few things that can minister to us abundantly and so come to the end of them, than to touch in superficial contact a great many lesser works. The lesser works have their place; and so far as they can carry us beyond the point where we are, they can serve us. In a hurried touch-and-go, however, there is danger of scattering; whereas true appreciation takes time, for it is less an act than a whole attitude of mind. This is an age of handbooks and short cuts. But there is no substitute for life. If for one reason or another the opportunity to realize art in terms of life is not accorded us, it is better to accept the situation quite frankly and happily, and not try to cheat ourselves with the semblance. But if it is indeed the reality, then we maybe content with the minutes of experience, though we are denied the hours or the years. The messages of great poems, says Whitman, to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms; only then can you understand us. The power of response must be in us, and that power is the fruit of experience. The only mystery of art is the mystery of all life itself. In nature the artist finds the manifestation of a larger self toward which he aspires, and this is what his work expresses. Alone with his spirit, he cries to us for that intimate mystic companionship which is appreciation, and our response gives back the echo of his cry. He reaches out across the distance to touch other and kindred spirits and draw them to himself. Says the poet,

“Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.”

We appreciate the artist’s work as in it we live again and doubly.

Thus art links itself with life. The message of art to the individual defines itself according to his individual needs. Life rises with each man, to him a new opportunity and a new destiny. We create our own world; and life means to us what we are in ourselves. In art we are seeking to find ourselves expressed more fully. The works that we care for, if we consider it a moment, are the works we understand; and we understand them because they phrase for us our own experience. Life and the truth of life are relative. Truth is not in the object but in our relation to it. What is true for me may or may not be true for another. This much is true for me, namely, whatever tallies with my experience and reveals to me more of the underlying purpose of the universe. We are all, each in his own way, seeking the meaning of life; and that meaning is special and personal to the individual, each man deciding for himself. By selection here, by rejection there, we are trying to work toward harmony. The details of life become increasingly complex with the years, but living grows simpler because we gradually fix a selecting and unifying principle. When we have truly found ourselves, we come to feel that the external incidents do not signify; which chance happens, whether this or that, is indifferent. It is the spirit in which the life is lived that determines its quality and value. The perception of purpose in the parts brings them into order and gives them meaning. A man’s life is an expanding circle, the circumference of which is drawn around an order or interplay and adjustment of part with part. Whatever lies without the circle does not pertain to the individual as yet. So soon as any experience reveals its meaning to us and we feel that it takes its place in our life, then it belongs to us. Whatever serves to bring details, before scattering and unrelated, into order, is for that moment true. Art has a message for us as it tallies with what we already know about life; and, quickening our perceptions, disclosing depths of feeling, it carries us into new ranges of experience.

In this attitude toward life lies the justice of the personal estimate. The individual is finally his own authority. To find truth we return upon our own consciousness, and we seek thus to define our “original relation” to the universal order. So as one stands before the works of the Italian painters and sculptors, for example, in the endeavor rightly to appreciate what they have achieved, one may ask: How much of life has this artist to express to me, of life as I know it or can know it? Has the painter through these forms, however crude or however accomplished, uttered what he genuinely and for himself thought and felt? The measure of these pictures for me is the degree of reality, of vital feeling, which they transmit. Whether it be spring or divine maternity or the beauty of a pagan idea, which Botticelli renders, the same power is there, the same sense of gracious life. Whether it be Credi’s naïve womanhood, or Titian’s abounding, glorious women and calm and forceful men, or Delia Robbia’s joyous children and Donatello’s sprites, the same great meaning is expressed, the same appreciation of the goodness and beauty of all life. This beauty is for me, here, to-day. In the experience of a man who thinks and feels, there is a time when his imagination turns toward the past. At the moment, as the world closes in about him, his spirit, dulled by the attrition of daily use and wont, is unable to discern the beauty and significance of the present life around him. For a time his imagination finds abundant nourishment in the mighty past. Many spirits are content there to remain. But life is of the present. To live greatly is to live now, inspired by the past, corrected and encouraged by it, impelled by “forward-looking thoughts’” and providing for the future, but living in to-day. Life is neither remembrance nor anticipation, neither regret nor deferment, but present realization. Often one feels in a gallery that the people are more significant than the pictures. Two lovers furtively holding hands and stopping before a canvas to press closer together, shoulder to shoulder; a young girl erect and firm, conscious of her young womanhood and rejoicing in it, radiating youth and life; an old man, whose years are behind him yet whose interest reveals his eager welcome of new experience, unconsciously rebuking the jaded and indifferent: here is reality. Before it the pictures seem to recede and become dimmed. Our appreciation of these things makes the significance of it all. Only in so far as art can communicate this sensation, this same impression of the beauty and present reality of life, has it a meaning for us. The painter must have registered his appreciation of immediate reality and must impart that to us until it becomes, heightened and intensified, our own. The secret of successful living lies in compelling the details of our surroundings to our own ends. Michelangelo lived his life; Leonardo lived his; neither could be the other. A man must paint the life that he knows, the experience into which he enters. So we must live our lives immediately and newly. We have penetrated the ultimate mystery of art when we realize the inseparable oneness of art with life.

Art is a call to fuller living. Its real service is to increase our capacity for experience. The pictures, the music, the books, which profit us are those which, when we have done with them, make us feel that we have lived by just so much. Often we purchase experience with enthusiasm; we become wise at the expense of our power to enjoy. What we need in relation to art is not more knowledge but greater capability of feeling, not the acquisition of more facts but the increased power to interpret facts and to apply them to life. In appreciation it is not what we know about a work of art, it is not even what we actually see before us, that constitutes its significance, but what in its presence we are able to feel. The paradox that nature imitates art has in it this much of truth, that art is the revelation of the possibilities of life, and we try to make these possibilities actual in our own experience. Art is not an escape from life and a refuge; it is a challenge and reenforcement. Its action is not to make us less conscious but more; in it we are not to lose ourselves but to find ourselves more truly and more fully. Its effect is to help us to a larger and juster appreciation of the beauty and worth of nature and of life.

Art is within the range of every man who holds himself open to its appeal. But art is not the final thing. It is a means to an end; its end is personality. There are exalted moments in the experience of us all which we feel to be finer than any art. Then we do not need to turn to painting, music, literature, for our satisfaction. We are living. Art is aid and inspiration, but its fulfillment and end is life.

“We live,” says Wordsworth, “by admiration, hope, and love.” Admiration is wonder and worship, a sense of the mystery and the beauty of life as we know it now, and thankfulness for it, and joy. Hope is the vision of things to be. And love is the supreme enfolding unity that makes all one. Art is life at its best, but life is the greatest of the arts, life harmonious, deep in feeling, big in sympathy, the life that is appreciation, responsiveness, and love.