THERE are two distinct functions of the mind with regard to art: first, the creative function; second, the enjoying function. The first is the rôle of the artist, the second, the rôle of the public. The difference between these two rôles is that in the artist’s rôle the active part—the part that counts, the part that makes the beholder have sensations—is unconscious. The artist should be wholly creator, and not at all spectator. If, while he works, there is anything in him that applauds and enjoys as a spectator might do, this part will leave a touch of virtuosity, of self-consciousness, of exaggeration, in his work. If the matter be humorous, this exaggeration will perhaps appear in the form of smartness; if the matter be serious, as sentimentality or melodrama.
The artist must not try to enjoy his own work by foretaste, or he will injure it. His æsthetic sense must not be active during the hours of creation; it must be consumed in the furnace of unconscious intellectual effort. The reductio ad absurdum of the view here suggested would be somewhat as follows:—The supremely great artist would be indifferent to the fate of his own works, because he would not know they were great. The whole creature would have become so unconscious during the act of creation that there would be nothing left over which should return to mankind and say, “See this great work!” This seems to have happened in the case of Shakespeare.
It must be confessed that there are very great artists in whose work we find a self-conscious, self-appreciatory note. There is, at times, such a note in Dante, and in Goethe. And it seems to me that even here the note a little deflects our attention from the matter in hand. Not by reason of this element, but in spite of it, does their work prevail.
The practical lesson for any artist to draw from such an analysis as the present is the lesson of detachment, almost of indifference. An artist must trust his material. The stuff in hand is serious, delicate, self-determined and non-emotional. The organic, inner logic of the thing done may reach points of complexity, points of climax, which—except in the outcome—are incomprehensible. They must not be appreciated in the interim, but only obeyed. In the final review, and at a distance they are to justify themselves, but not in the making.
The question of whether or not an artist has succeeded, whether or not he has made something that speaks, is one which it is generally impossible for the artist himself to answer. He cares too much, and he stands too near the material. Sometimes a man having immense experience, and having acquired that sort of indifference which grows out of a supernal success, can make a just estimate of one of his own later works; but, in general, the artist must stand mum and bite his nails if he wishes to find out what there was in him. Let him be perfectly assured that the truth of the matter will get to him, if he will only do nothing except desire the truth. Someone will say something not intended for his ears, which will reveal the whole matter. This is the hard, heroic course which wisdom dictates to all artists, except, perhaps, to those very gifted persons who by their endowment are already among the elect. Most men are obliged to mine in their endowment and draw it to the surface through years of hard labor. The pretty good artist has need of the fortitude and self-effacement of a saint.
Thus much of the creative side of art. Our conceptions of the subject, however, are colored by the emotional view proper to the grand public. The receptive function, the enjoying function, the æsthetic sense, as it is often called, is very generally supposed to be art itself. Almost all writing on art has been done by men who knew only the æsthetic side of the matter. Now the enjoyment of art is a very common, very conscious, very intense experience; and yet it is not a very serious affair compared to the creation of art. It does not affect the recipient to any such depths of his nature, as one might expect it to do, from the vividness of his feelings during the experience. It leaves in him, as a general rule, no knowledge about the art itself, no understanding of the rod he has been lashed with, no suspicion of the intellectual nature of the vehicle.
Æsthetic appreciation gives a man the illusion that he is being spiritually made over and enlarged; and yet that appreciation is capable of an absolute divorcement from the intellect. It is—to take the extreme case—very strong in sleep. Dr. Holmes has recorded, in his own felicitous way, the experience, common to sensitive people, of writing down a dream-poem at midnight and discovering in its place at dawn a few lines of incomprehensible rubbish. The æsthetic sense is easily intensified by stimulants, by tea, coffee and tobacco. Anything that excites the heart or stimulates the emotions—praise, happiness, success, change of scene, any relief from mental tension—is apt to give a man new, and sudden entry into unexplored worlds of art. He thinks himself a new man. And yet this man stands, perhaps, in as great danger of loss as he does in hope of gain. It is not through receptivity, but through activity, that men are really changed.
How trivial men become who live solely in the appreciation of the fine arts all of us know. The American who lives abroad is an intensely receptive being; but he has divorced himself from the struggles of a normal social existence, from communal life and duty. His love of the fine arts does not save him, but seems rather to enfeeble him the more. No European can effect a similar divorce in his own life; for the European is living at home: his social and political obligations make a man of him. Besides this, the fine arts are an old story to the European; and he does not go mad about them, as the American Indian goes mad about whiskey. The European is immune to the æsthetic; and neither a fine wainscot nor a beautiful doorknob can have the same power over him that it may have over that zealous, high-strung, new discoverer of the old world, the American who begins to realize what good decoration really means. Let anyone who thinks that this impoverishment is a purely American disease read the description of the Stanhope family in Trollope’s “Barchester Towers.” Here is the beefiest kind of a British county family, reduced to anemia by residence in Italy. Prolonged exile, and mere receptivity have withdrawn the energy from the organs of these people.
It will be noticed that in those cases where art is an enfeebling influence there is always a hiatus between the public and the artist. Let us consider the case of the folk-song as sung by the peasants of Suabia. Such songs are written by one peasant and sung by the next. The author and the singer and the hearer are all one. To the audience the song is life and emotion, social intercourse, love, friendship, the landscape, philosophy, prayer, natural happiness. You can hardly differentiate, in this case, between the artist and the public: both are unconscious. But if you take that song and sing it in a London drawing-room, or on a ranch in Colorado, it will perform a very different function in the audience. To these foreigners the song is a pleasing opiate. They hold it like a warm animal to their breast. The Oxford pundit who raves over a Greek coin, the cold-hearted business magnate in New York who enjoys the opera—these people live in so remote a relation to the human causes, impulses, and conditions behind the arts they love, that their enjoyment is exotic: it is more purely receptive, more remote from personal experience than the enjoyment of any living and native art could be.
A certain sickness follows the indulgence in art that is remote from the admirer’s environment. This slightly morbid side of æstheticism has been caricatured to the heart’s content. The dilettante and the critic are well-known types. To a superficial view these men seem like enemies of the living artist. They are always standing ready to eat up his works as soon as they shall be born. Goethe thought criticism and satire the two natural enemies to all liberty, and to all poetry proceeding from a spontaneous impulse. And surely the massive authority of learned critics who know everything, and are yet ignorant of the first principles of their subject, hangs like an avalanche above the head of every young creator. We cannot, however, to-day proceed as if we were early Greeks, stepping forward in roseate unconsciousness. The critics and their hurdy-gurdy are a part of our life, and have been so for centuries.
The brighter side of the matter is that the æsthetic person, even when morbid, is often engaged in introducing new and valuable arts to his countrymen. The dilettante who brings home china and violins and Japanese bronzes is the precursor of the domestic artist.
We must now return to the two functions of art, and endeavor to bring them into some sort of common focus. We cannot hope to understand or to reconcile them perfectly. We cannot hope to know what art is. Art is life, and any expression of art becomes a new form of life. A merchant in Boston in 1850 travels in Italy, and brings home a Murillo. Some years later a highly educated dilettante discovers the Murillo in Boston, and writes his dithyrambs about it. Some years later still, there arises a young painter, who perhaps does not paint very well, and yet he is nearer to the mystery than the other two. All these men are parts of the same movement, and are essential to each other; though the contempt they feel for each other might conceal this from us, as it does from themselves. All of them are held together by an invisible attraction and are servants of the same force. This force it is which, in the future, may weld together a few enthusiasts into a sort of secret society, or may even single out some one man, and see and speak through him. Then, as the force passes, it will leave itself reflected in pictures, which remain as the record of its flight.