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Such an answer as this, of course, merely shifts the difficulty; but it shifts it to a subject upon which men's ideas are usually more determined. The art theorist is not always a practical artist, modifying his views by the great test of experience. But he is always a man living a life among men; and if his views as to why he lives and what he seeks in the world are not explicitly reasoned out in his mind, they are at any rate, contained implicitly in his character and conduct.

The question then becomes one of a philosophy of life. It is obvious that if a man be an Epicurean, a Utilitarian, or a Hedonist under any other name, he will hold that the end of Art is to give pleasure, and so will wear the "Art for Art's Sake" cockade; if he hold that the end of life is moral perfection in sharp contrast to pleasure, he is certain to prefer the banner of Tolstoi and Carlyle; if he tries to reconcile the two philosophies he will also reconcile the two theories of Art.

In the production of every ideal Art-work (and by art-work is meant, of course, either picture, statue, poem, or symphony,) there may be traced two essential processes of mind-discovery and representation. The first is the reaching out for truth, the observing of the facts of life and character and the searching for their inner meaning. The second is the embodying of this meaning in the concrete. The one is the work of intellectual insight, the other of creative imagination. I do not mean to say that in practice the artist selects a law or a type and then strives to illustrate it. That is the moralist's way of working. The creative artist does his thinking in terms of his art; or at any rate every thought brings its host of colors, or forms, or metaphors, or sounds, and translates itself. So the exploring faculty and the embodying faculty work together, and the result of the fusing of the two is that essential unity of abstract and concrete, of type and individual, found in every ideal artproduct. The separation, as it is made here, is made merely for the purpose of analyzing this dual aspect of the artistic nature.

The intellectual phase is shared with all other types of thinkers. This is the generalizing faculty, man's weapon for piercing the veil of fact and seeing "into the life of things." "Grant me," said Hegel, "a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to ex

pand infinitely while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the whole world of intelligences, with the whole system of their representations, to rise up before you." These two "forces," which are the powers of analysis and synthesis, in art manifest themselves as realism and idealism. Both are necessary in every step of progress, in the case of the artist as of other This does not mean that the idealist begins by studying the products of the Zola school of novelists and the painters of tin-pans. But it does mean that he begins by studying life-raw fact, in all its phases, individual traits of character, and particularly as facts of nature. Otherwise his synthesis is a synthesis of nothing, a pyramid without a base.

men.

The function of this intellectual activity is obviously enough the discovery of law. The task of man, “a creature moving about in worlds not realized," is the reducing of a chaos of infinite complexity to an order comprehensible to the mind. The struggle is for unity, for form a fact whose bearing upon art is obviously important. It will be noticed after a few words have been said about the other faculty of the artistic mind, which I have called the representative. This characteristic the creative artist shares with no other type of thinker. The penetrative intellect is the weapon of Descartes and Newton as well as of Angelo and Dante, but the philosopher and the scientist rest satisfied with formulating the law, with discovering the unity. They never seek to incorporate it in the concrete. On the other hand the artist seldom even deduces the discoveries of his imagination from the abstract, at all. And never does he stop there: for the abstract is contrary to the very essence of art. When he has reached the height, seen the order, and pierced to the unity, he faces fairly about. He now no longer looks at the world from the standpoint of man, but from the standpoint of Deity. He is spirit robing itself in a garb of flesh, which becomes, so to speak, a metaphor. Thus Genius ceases to be man "thinking God's thoughts after him," and becomes God manifesting thought to man. art-work is a microcosm, and has to be approached precisely as part of the actual universe, the only difference being that it is a fragment of the universe ordered for finite comprehension.

Every

It is to be noticed that the artist's need under this second aspect of his work is precisely the opposite, or rather the complement of what we saw before. His strength then was his ability to discover unity; he has now to coördinate with that his passionate sense of reality, his powerful grip upon the world of fact. This latter quality the philosopher is apt to lose, from his continual moving among abstractions: its possession is the sine qua non of the poetic, as opposed to the metaphysical mind. Creative genius is the rare combination of breadth of view with depth and intensity of feeling, the ability to grasp a mass of reality under an exalted ideal conception. We are not inclined to venture into abstruse metaphysics, but it should be evident from the above that Genius thus viewed may be considered as an adumbration of the Divine nature, that Universality which is at once both Unity and Infinity. This is the goal not only of art, but of all intellectual progress. This it is that the restless spirit of humanity is seeking. It is unsatisfied with either Unity or Infinity alone, for Infinity without Unity is chaos, and Unity without Infinity is triviality. All progress in any sphere is but a fresher blending of the two.

It is evident that what we have thus been considering, is exactly paralleled in the actual art-product, by the distinction between Form and Content, Form being the principle of unity made apparent to the It can also be shown, I believe, that the excess of one of these principles over the other, is what constitutes the difference between the Beautiful and the Sublime.

senses.

The feeling of Beauty in an ordered art-product is now generally said to arise with the discovery of unity in variety. Its essence is perfect comprehensibility, the flash of instantaneous recognition and the resultant thrill of delight. A thing of beauty is a portion of the universe completely grasped: its enjoyment is, so to speak, the mind's cry of triumph. Sublimity, on the other hand, is represented by a mind awe-stricken before new thought. It is Unity in Variety imperfectly comprehended; an excess of Content over Form, arising when the Artist's thought is greater than his imagination can subdue. Borrowing Ruskin's terminology we might describe the Beautiful as the Type of the Divine Unity, and the Sublime as the Type of the

Divine Infinity-or better, from a human standpoint, the Type of the Divine Incomprehensibility.

As illustrative of this, it will be sufficient to call attention to the obvious difference between the beauty of the Parthenon and the grandeur of the Gothic cathedral, or between the art of Phidias and of Michael Angelo. The following comparison, taken from the Journal of Amiel, illustrates the same difference in music:-"Mozartgrace, liberty, certainty, freedom and precision of style-an exquisite and aristocratic beauty-serenity of soul: Beethoven-more pathetic, more passionate, more torn with feeling, more intricate, more profound, less perfect-more moving and more sublime than Mozart." And again:-"The work of Mozart-represents a solved problem, a balance struck between aspiration and executive capacity-marvelous harmony and perfect unity. In Beethoven's on the other hand a spirit of magic irony paints for you the mad tumult of existence as it dances forever above the threatening abyss of the infinite. more unity, no more serenity!"

No

This is a perfect illustration of the difference between beauty and sublimity, form and content. The tendency of development is ever toward including yet more of the "mad tumult of existence"; and the resultant complexity of form, or sometimes even neglect of it, is what makes high culture necessary to the appreciation of such an artproduct. This fact has proved a stumbling-block in the way of writers like Tolstoi: the need of culture seems to him a sign of artificiality and exclusiveness, and accordingly he seeks to restrict art to the expression of the primary emotions, which is a virtual negation of the possibility of intellectual and spiritual progress. But the sea refused to obey Canute, and there is fortunately no more likelihood that evolution will obey Tolstoi. The spirit and will continue to subdue all experience to its laws, bursting through every limitation of precedent and rule. Art, the standard-bearer, will always lead the advance.

In each period of expansion and growth three distinct stages have been frequently pointed out. The first is that in which the art has not progressed on its technical side enough to enable the artist to express his new message: the work produced is rude and chaotic but

full of meaning.

Thus if we may believe the Browning Societies we have just seen such an epoch, and poetry has been introduced to the subject of the future-the facts of psychology and personality. The second period is the "Classical" where the artist has mastered both his craft and his new thought and succeeded in ordering the latter into forms of beauty. This is the stage of the perfect art-product. The third stage comes when the spiritual impulse subsides; we have then academic criticism, clever imitation, and feats of technic. Such a period was the popularly abused eighteenth century. At this stage Art has form without content, beauty without sublimity, unity without infinity, and so triviality. It is then that the new prophet is needed; and so far he has never failed to arrive. His motto is, "Build thee more stately mansions, oh, my soul!" and he is always misunderstood. Jeffry's eternally quoted "This will never do" is the orthodox instance. And similarly we have Weber after hearing the great Seventh Symphony remarking that "Beethoven is now. ripe for the mad-house." From the Wagner earthquake we still hear

occasional rumbles.

The protest against the new master is ever the same, that he has no sense of form, that his works are incomprehensible. He knows, however, that he has mastered the old methods and passed them; so he pushes on in grim silence, there being a merciful provision of Providence, that his silence shall be heard above all the cries of critics and partisans of "form" and “beauty.”

"One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world has never lost."

This may seem to be a view not very favorable to the permanence of the beautiful in Art; in one sense it is not, if by the beautiful is meant any beautiful object. That "a thing of beauty is a joy forever" seems true only by poetic license.

We are accustomed to hear the statement that such examples of pure beauty as the Greek statues will never again be produced. This may be true: but I think we can bear the privation with equanimity. Excepting sculptors and painters, Greek sculpture to-day exerts very little influence upon men, certainly little as compared to what it must have exerted upon the Greeks.

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