THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART THE MEANING AND RELATIONS OF SCULPTURE, PAINTING, POETRY AND MUSIC BY EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH 1913 Copyright, 1913, by EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS PRINTED IN U. S. A. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION ... 7 CHAPTER I. THE EXPRESSION OF HUMAN LIFE IN ART .... 21 II. THE INTERPRETATION OF HUMAN LIFE IN ART . . 41 III. PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 57 IV. DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE ARTIST ... 81 V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARTIST AS REVEALED IN ART 103 VI. DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE EPOCH . . 115 . DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE RACE . . . 109 VIII. THE UNIQUE FUNCTION OF EACH FINE ART . . 141 IX. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF SCULPTURE . . 151 X. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF PAINTING . . .171 XI. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF Music .... 189 XII. MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 213 XIII. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF POETRY: THE RELATION OF POETRY TO SCULPTURE AND PAINTING 229 XIV. THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF POETRY: THE RELATION OF POETRY TO Music 247 5 281669 6 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XV. THE UNITY or THE ARTS 267 XVI. THE DANGERS OF ART 277 XVII. BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION .... 287 XVIII. THE STUDY OF BEAUTY IN NATURE AND ART . . . 301 XIX. ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE 321 BOOK LIST 331 INDEX . . 341 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART INTRODUCTION aim of this study is to show what art is, how it comes out of the life of man, and what specific function each of the great ideal arts fulfills in relation to the human spirit. There is great need of such study to-day. We in America have been turn- ing with remarkable interest and enthusiasm to all fields of art and intellect. It would seem that the splendid energy which has built up our wonderful material civilization is now to find expression in the life of the spirit, with the promise of equally great achievement there. There is scarcely an important city in the land that has not at least the beginnings of a mu- seum of sculpture and painting. Opportuni- ties for hearing great music have been multi- plied several times within a few decades. Gifts to education and to all aspects of culture have increased enormously ; while even more signifi- cant of our spirit is the extent to which we send 7 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART our students abroad. In any European school of fine art at least half the students not native to the country in question are American. In other words, we send to foreign schools more students than all the other nations taken to- gether. Of course, we ought to do so, for we are a youthful people and need to learn from the accumulated culture of the older world; but the significance of our action is no less great. All these signs, with the increasing pat- ronage of the arts by wealth and power, mean much for our happiness, our culture as a peo- ple and our contribution to the world. Unfortunately this great movement is sadly hampered by ignorance and, worse, by fla- grant misconceptions as to the meaning and function of the arts. Turn to the literature of the subject: there is admirable material on the technical aspects of the arts, and excellent his- tory and criticism; but where is any adequate study of the specific power and limitations of each of the arts in expressing and interpreting the human spirit? Lessing's Laokoon is still the best book we have on the subject; while it is far behind the experience and what ought to be the thinking of our time, and attempted at INTRODUCTION 9 most only to define the mutual limits of the plastic arts and poetry. Really the great books in the field we are attempting include hardly more besides Lessing's than Leonardo's Note Books, Wagner's writings and Schiller's ^Esthetic Essays. Worse than the ignorance and lack of thought are the prevailing misconceptions. The most widely accepted of these is in the mind of the general public. It is the notion that art is a dispensable luxury, a polite adorn- ment of life, pleasant enough where there is ample wealth and leisure, but of no value until the serious business of life is fulfilled. Utterly wrong as this notion is, it is nevertheless taken for granted by the multitude, not only in the unthinking mass, but in circles of wealth, so- cial prominence and even of supposed culture. Indeed, the fault is old and long enduring, for the cry of the artist in all epochs has been that his work is not taken as the serious aim of life it is, but as an adventitious adornment of the more or less superficial amenities of so- cial existence. Carlyle voices this in Teufels- drockh who resents being made polite fringe on Lady Somebody's "^Esthetic Tea;" while 10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Goethe's study of the behavior of the emperor and court toward Helena in the Second Part of Faust is the most scathing portrayal I know in literature of the whimsical reaction of the world of polite society on the miraculous crea- tion of beauty which should inspire silent awe. How prevalent the same attitude is to-day ! Consider the behavior of persons wandering through a gallery of painting, saying, "I like this" or "dislike that," as if they had the right to like or dislike until they have appreciated and understood what of human thought and feeling is given, and with what measure of adequacy and harmony. Go to the Metropoli- tan Opera House in New York, when some masterpiece of Wagner is given. Where do you find the true music lovers ? Oh, everywhere, of course one wants to be fair but many of them are standing up in the top gallery ; while, of the high-priced boxes in the great oval, many are empty the first hour and empty the last half hour society displaying itself and its clothes as at any other function, with no no- tion of the attitude necessary to the creation and appreciation of true art. There is, of course, another side to this which INTRODUCTION 11 all great artists have understood: art can have no higher function than in transfiguring the life of this moment. What is posterity if not men and women such as we, and why should the artist work for some future time and not for the living world about him? Leonardo da Vinci, painter of perhaps the greatest picture the world has seen the ruined masterpiece on Milan monastery wall was willing to use his unparalleled genius to prepare some masque or other artistic pleasure for the court circle at Milan, given once and never repeated; and Goethe himself was glad to employ the genius that created Faust in some like service for the group at Weimar. When, however, art is made a mere pleasant fringe and polite decora- tion to the more or less superficial and often frivolous activities of social life, the wrong thing is taken for the center and art is pros- tituted. A second error, only less harmful than the first, prevails also in the mind of the public, though not so widely* It is very good persons who make this mistake, often with fanatical earnestness. Their error is in holding that art is justified by some obvious didactic moral 12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART teaching. They accept the drama or novel if it preaches some sermon, the painting if it carries a moral lesson. Goethe has sufficiently characterized this point of view. He says: "A good work of art can, and will indeed, have moral consequences ; but to require moral ends of the artist, is to destroy his profession."* "To destroy his profession": the phrase is not too strong. In so far as the artist becomes preacher he is apt to cease to be artist, since his didactic moral is so much more limited than the aim of art, which is the presentation of the whole truth of life in a form of beauty. JTlie artist must strive for the abiding truth rather than its changing application. If he deals with the issue of the hour, it must be in no narrow partisan spirit, but with the vision of the eter- nal through the transient. Compare Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke with Goethe's Wit- helm Meister to see the difference between the literature of propagandism, even of superior excellence, and art. A certain withdrawal from life and its feverish conflicts is always * Denn ein gutes Kunstwerk kann und wird zwar moral- ische Folgen haben, aber moralische Zwecke vom Kunstler fordern, heiszt ihm sein Handwerk verderben." Dichtung und Wahrheit, book XII, Bohn Library translation, p. 469. INTRODUCTION 13 necessary for the artist that he may have per- spectiye. To create art one must have lived, but to create art one must also have withdrawn from life to the mountain height of spiritual isolation. Thus always the loneliness and pain of the great artist: sometimes it finds tender and sad expression as in Shelley and Chopin; sometimes it causes the despairing reaction of a Leopardi or a Schopenhauer; sometimes it produces the grave irony of a Goethe or a Wagner; but always it is present, and the vision of the artist is bought with the pain of being consciously apart. Thus the true moral value of a work of art is in the nature of the work itself, not in an JQsop Fables' moral appended at the end. Suppose Shakespeare had affixed to Othello a statement that he had meant to teach us the ugliness of jealousy: what a pitiful anti-climax it would have been! If the moral meaning is not involved in the very nature of a work of art, then it is bad art. No, art is not for preach- ing's sake, any more than it is for adornment's sake; and many of the "good" people are as far wrong as the frivolous. These two errors in the public mind have 14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART helped breed a third, prevailing among artists themselves the notion that art exists for the sake of exhibiting technical skill in the mas- tery of difficulties. The great men have never made this mistake : they invariably have recog- nized that technical skill is never an end at all, but always a means a glorious one to some- thing beyond itself; but among lesser artists the superstition is widely prevalent. It is easy to see how it arises; Probably there never was an earnest student beginning to learn a particular art who did not look for- ward to creating his masterpiece. The young poet dreams of his Divine Comedy or Faust, the painter, of the ceiling of some new Sistine Chapel, the musician, of compositions that shall rival Beethoven, the sculptor, of his new Per- iclean marbles and his brooding figures on fresh Medicean tombs. With such aspirations invariably the student begins; but what hap- pens? Soon he discovers that the road he must travel is painfully long and beset with hard obstacles. The embryonic painter, for exam- ple, finds he must wholly subordinate his own ideas, draw for years from the antique before he is allowed even to begin to copy nature. INTRODUCTION 15 Only after long discipline in drawing may he add color, and how long is the road before any self-expression is permitted. Thus he is apt to forget all about the end which originally he had in view, and become absorbed wholly in conquering the difficulties in the path. To acquire and exhibit such skill comes more and more to seem itself the aim. The just reaction against seeking an adven- titious end for art accentuates this tendency. I have always sympathized with the painters' protest against such a view of their art as Ruskin preached. Ruskin's work was strong and permanently helpful ; but in all his study of painting he sought some definitely moral or religious end in the effect of the art ; yet beauty is its own sufficient justification; art need seek no end outside itself; and thus arises the cry "art for art's sake." On a high plane this is right ; but when art for art's sake is interpreted to mean art for technique's sake for the sake of exhibiting technical skill in mastering diffi- culties then art is reduced to the level of a juggler's tricks or refined gymnastic. To walk a tight rope without a balancing pole shows admirable technical skill, but surely it is not 16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART fine art in the same sense as painting or musie. Technical skill, excellent and desirable as it i, is always a means and never an end in it > and the exhibition of it merely evidences power which is vain unless used for some aim worth while. The third error is thus as far from the truth as either of the others ; yet one would scarcely believe how prevalent it is among the rank and file of artists. Listen to a group of painters commenting upon the pictures of a gallery. Of what do they speak: of the way that land- scape rests and calms the spirit; of the sweep of humanity in this portrayal of common life? No; but of the skill with which the lighting is handled here; the fault in the composition there; the method of putting on his colors which this painter has employed. It is natural : they are constantly working with these tech- nical problems, and thus they look for the handling of them in the work of others. The result, however, is the focussing of their atten- tion almost wholly on the means employed. Sit behind a group of musical artists during the rendering of a Beethoven symphony or a Wagner opera. Do they speak of the power INTRODUCTION 17 if the music to sweep one cut on to the bosom of the sea of emotion, to refresh the spirit and \we the vision of the ideal? No, but of the skill with which that high note was struck; the admirable rendering of this difficult pas- sage by the violins; the fault in the conductor's reading of that other passage. Indeed, it is even possible for the mind to become so ab- sorbed in the analysis of technique as actually to lose in power of appreciation. One finds cases where a student has worked ten years in mastering the technique of an art, and at the end of the time has really less power to appre- ciate spontaneously the art than when he be- gan his study. This need not happen and ought not to happen, but the fact that it does occur shows how far the mastery and exhibition of technical skill is from the true aim of art. No, art is not for technique's sake, any more than it is for adornment's sake, or preaching's sake. / These three misconceptions stand in the way of our right use of art to-day, and we must overcome them to make our contribution as a people and to give art the place it should occupy in our culture. Art is serious business ; beauty is the most useful thing we know; the 18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART ideal is no less real than the coarsest material /end. Art is for life's sake. I There are thus three underlying questions / in the study here undertaken: first, What is Art? Second, What does Art do to the artist who creates? Third, What does Art do to the student who appreciates? The study deals primarily with the four great ideal types of art sculpture, painting, music and poetry. Architecture, so largely conditioned by utility, will be considered in comparison, as will the composite arts song, opera, dramatic por- trayal. The method employed is not a review of philosophy and criticism of art, but a study of selected masterpieces in each field, asking what these do to our senses, emotions, imagination and intellect. This is merely applying to the realm of art the method universally insisted upon in all natural science, namely, first find- ing the facts and then seeking to discover what these mean. In art, as in science, a little direct, first-hand study is worth more than much read- ing of theory. In this work, if I may speak personally, what I have to offer is at least my own not a restatement of criticism and philos- INTRODUCTION 19 ophy, but the condensed result of twenty-five years' study of works of art in each of the four fields, recording and interpreting what these masterpieces have done to my senses, emotions, imagination and intellect. The same method must be employed by each student if he would arrive at clear conceptions of the meaning and function of these several fine arts ; and the re- flections and conclusions tentatively offered in the following chapters should be used as a chal- lenge to the reader's own mind, on the basis of his own first-hand study of masterpieces in the respective fields. "I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven, and in their disciples and apostles; I believe in the Holy Ghost and the truth of Art one and indivisible; I believe that this art proceeds from God and dwells in the hearts of all enlight- ened men; I believe that whoever has revelled in the glori- ous joys of this high art must be forever devoted to it and can never repudiate it; I believe that all may become blessed through this art, and that therefore it is permitted to any one to die of hunger for its sake; I believe that I shall become most happy through death; I believe that I have been on earth a discordant chord, that shall be made harmonious and clear by death. I believe in a last judgment, that shall fear- fully damn all those who have dared on this earth to make profit out of this chaste and holy art who have disgraced it and dishonored it through badness of heart and the coarse instincts of sensuality; I believe that such men will be con- demned to hear their own music through all eternity. I be- lieve, on the other hand, that the true disciples of pure art will be glorified in a divine atmosphere of sun-illumined, fra- grant concords, and united eternally with the divine source of all harmony. And may a merciful lot be granted me! Amen !" Wagner, in "An End in Paris," Art Life and The- ories, p. 90. 20 CHAPTER I THE EXPRESSION OF HUMAN LIFE IN ART WHEN we consider what has been ac- complished in the field of art our first impression is of so overwhelming a wealth and variety that it seems impossible to gather it all in a single statement. How shall we define art so as to include works as re- mote from each other as the Ramayana and the songs of Burns, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the music of Chopin, the Poem of Job and the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto? Can it be possible to find a unifying principle for all these? The problem is bewildering; yet we individually may respond to oil these types of art ; they all are our heritage. Thus, there must be some element common to them all to make possible the universal human appeal. To find this element, turn for a moment to a brief poem coming from a time as remote as 21 22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART possible from our own, a Hymn to the Dawn from the ancient Vedic literature: To THE DAWN * "She shines upon us like a young wife, rousing every living being to go to his work. The fire had to be kindled by men ; she brought light by striking down darkness. She rose up, spreading far and wide, and moving toward every one. She -grew in brightness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows (of the morning clouds), the leader of the days, she shone gold-colored, lovely to behold. She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of the god, who leads the white and lovely steed (of the sun), the Dawn was seen, revealed by her rays, with bril- liant treasures she follows every one. Thou, who art a blessing where thou art near, drive away the unfriendly; make the pastures wide, give us safety ! Remove the haters, bring treasures ! Raise up wealth to the worshiper, thou mighty Dawn. Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright Dawn, thou who lengthenest our life, thou the love of all, who givest us food, who givest us wealth in cows, horses and chariots. * F. M. Mueller, A History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 551 and 552. Williams & Norgate, London, 1860. THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 23 Thou, daughter of the sky, thou high-born Dawn, whom the Vasishthas magnify with songs, give us riches high and wide: all ye gods, protect us always with your blessings !" Our first impression from this old song is one of strangeness. Far as it is from us in time, it is still farther from our way of thought and life. We do not worship the Dawn, it is not a goddess to us. Moreover, with our way of life, we rarely see the Dawn; yet read more closely, and the feeling of re- moteness vanishes. After all, the old poet is merely recording, under different expres- sions, universal experience. Light is always a miracle to a fresh mind. It is not that "God said, Let there be light, and there was light;" God says, Let there be light, and there is light, with each morning. The spreading of the rosy fingers of the Dawn over the sky, the "grow- ing in brightness," the "bringing the eye of the god," the sun is it not an ever fresh miracle? The fire on the hearth "had to be kindled by men" by hard labor in primitive times, striking one stone upon another or rub- bing two sticks together; "she brought light by 24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART striking down darkness." The housewife of the home moves toward this person or that one; this housewife of the sky "moves toward every one," "rousing every living being to go to his work," this "mother of the cows" the light morning clouds that promise the life- giving milk of the rain. The earthly woman is revealed by light shining upon her; this god- dess of the sky is "revealed by her rays," "lovely to behold." Is it not just what any unspoiled nature, with fresh awakened senses, sees in the Dawn? Then, changing the key, the universal mean- ing of light to the spirit of man is given. Light has always been the symbol of safety and goodness, darkness of evil and danger. Little children still cry in the dark; and men, children of a larger growth, still tremble be- fore the darkness that shrouds the unknown. So the eternal prayer: "Drive away the un- friendly," "give us safety," "thou who art a blessing where thou art near;" and, as the day gives opportunity for work, "raise up wealth to the worshiper, thou mighty Dawn." Thus, in other language, the poem gives simply and in the metaphor of strong, direct appreciation, THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 25 the two permanent aspects of man's relation to the everlasting miracle of light. Thus it is everywhere: art is always an ex- \ pression of some phase of man's life or rela- tion to nature; and it is this universal human j basis that makes possible our appreciation of works so varied, coming from such different sources in place and time. You turn to the Antigone of Sophocles: how strange it is, this story of a sister who brings herself to suffer death in cruel fashion merely that she may give the rites of the dead to the body of her brother. How foolish you say : his soul would not have suffered had the rites been omitted; but hear what she says. The tyrant asks : "And thou didst dare to disobey these laws?" Antigone responds: "Yes, for it was not Zeus who gave them forth, Nor Justice, dwelling with the gods below, Who traced these laws for all the sons of men; Nor did I deem thy edicts strong enough, That thou, a mortal man, shouldst overpass The unwritten laws of God, that know not change. They are not of to-day nor yesterday, But live forever, nor can man assign 26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART When first they sprang to being. Not through fear Of any man's resolve was I prepared Before the gods to bear the penalty Of sinning against these." * Then we understand: while we, with our dif- ferent belief and training, might have chosen a different particular action, she was doing only what all noble souls have ever done giv- ing up her own lesser good for the greater good of one she loved. So the strangeness dis- appears, and the common human experience thank God it is common comes home to us through a form which seems so far away. Thus always art is an expression of some aspect of the common basis of human life. This is evidenced also by the fact that the different fine arts actually spring from one his- torical source an act of worship in the early Greek world, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter. Further, reversing the problem, mas- terpieces in widely different arts may produce the same dominant impression upon us, thus proving the unity in the basis from which they * The Tragedies of Sophocles, translated by E. H. Plump- tre, p. 145. Routledge & Co., New York. THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 27 spring. This likeness among masterpieces in different fields is indeed so strong that there are great artists working in totally different spheres who, nevertheless, are brothers across the centuries. The particular avenue of their artistic expression seems relatively incidental; they sound the same deeps and produce the same type of effect. Compare, in poetry, JEiS- chylus, in sculpture and painting, Michael Angelo, in music, Beethoven: these men are truly brothers across the centuries. They are the titanic dreamers, thinkers who sheer down to the very heart of life. Their brooding is so vast that any artistic form is too small to em- body it. Thus, much as they give, their su- preme power lies in stimulating the imagina- tion to go on beyond what is given to a still vaster world. It is of small consequence that one was poet, another painter and sculptor, and the third musical artist. ^Eschylus is closer to Michael Angelo than to his contem- porary, Sophocles, in the same field of poetry ; while Michael Angelo is nearer Beethoven than to his fellow-painter, Raphael, working in the same place and time. Take as a second group, similarly related, 28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Sophocles in poetry, Raphael in painting, and Mozart in music. These, too, are brothers across the centuries; for they are the finished artists, not brooding upon vast, unconquerable dreams, not peering awe-struck into the abyss, but clothing a wisely limited content in ex- quisitely harmonious form. They rest us, more than they stimulate, satisfy with perfect beauty, rather than exalt with irregular reaches of sublime power. Thus their kinship in the spirit: Mozart, modern German, is closer to the Greek poet, Sophocles, than to his fellow- musician, Beethoven, and Raphael is more akin to Mozart than to his Italian contempo- rary and brother in painting, Michael Angelo. To clinch the argument consider a third group: Andrea del Sarto in painting, Chopin in music, Heine in poetry. Do you see why these three are classed together as in their own way brothers across the centuries ? With mar- vellous technical skill and astonishing ease of execution, these men are neither titanic think- ers nor, characteristically, the artists who rest us with balanced harmony. They are rather the personal revealers; we long to grope behind their work to some deep of experience explain- THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE 1M ART 29 ing its character. They sing in minor key and paint with a subtle mingling of light and shadow. In the elusive paintings of Andrea, in the sobbing harmonies of Chopin pushed almost to the point of discord, in the haunting melodies of Heine, alike is voiced a strange sadness the hunger and pain of a spirit too delicately sensitive and too keenly responsive to every appeal of beauty and desire to find life easy or comfortable in such a world as ours. Thus these three are closer together than each was to his fellow artists in the same field, of the same place and time. This unity of spirit and impression among works of art so remote from each other suffi- ciently proves the unity of human experience in and behind all art. One person is like all; that is why we can understand each other. Life is made of a few simple, common ele- ments. As the physical life is made of fresh air, sunshine, nourishing food and exercise, so the spiritual life is made of love and work, hunger to know truth and appreciate beauty, aspiration toward the ideal. "One is like all." The novels and dramas of the world's litera- ture focus upon two or three problems half 30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART of them on personal love ; and in this unity of common experience is the basis of all appre- ciation of art, since every work of art is the expression of some aspect of this common life. Even when art attempts the merest imitation of objective nature it is still expression, since it embodies the human love of reality and de- sire of incarnating it in artistic form. Since life is made of so few and simple ele- ments, and art is always an expression of this common basis, what makes possible the fresh appeal in a new work of art? The answer is found first in the fact that art expresses the common basis of human life only through the medium of personality. Now each personality is unique and unparalleled. If one is like all, each is also different from all others. Life is, in each individual, a fresh equation of old forces : the basis is universal, the form unique.* Thus as art expresses the common basis of human life only through the medium of per- * For a fuller exposition of the two correlative principle the unity of human life and the uniqueness of each person- ality consult chapters II and III in the author's Moral Ed- ucation, B. W. Huebsch, New York, 1904. THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 31 sonality, the old elements are stamped with the fresh quality of the transmuting medium. How the wealth of old northern mythology is transformed as it is passed through the spec- trum of Wagner's genius. Dante gathers up the world of mediaeval experience, but stamps it all with the color of his own character. The common tendencies of the renaissance receive widely different form through such contrasting personalities as Raphael and Michael Angelo. Art, moreover, expresses the basis of human experience always in definitely limited form, and herein lies the further reason for its ever new appeal. The altar at which every artist must perpetually bow is the shrine of the god- dess of limits. The undefined is never the ar- tistic, and the more rigid the limitation, the more perfect may be the art. Vague, brooding emotions and thoughts become art only as they receive this rigid definition in form. While Faust dwells with "The Mothers" he is in the presence of the vast, uncreate energies from which all beauty springs; but it is only when out of them the one perfectly limited form of Helena is called into being that art is born. Thus it is that each new expression of art, 32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART because it is born through the medium of per- sonality into definitely limited form, may have its fresh appeal. A poet of the day, not of the highest power, has dared to take a subject- matter as old as Europe, which received ar- tistic expression for all time through the genius of the father of western poetry, Homer, in the song of world- wandering Ulysses; yet when we take Stephen Phillips's Ulysses^ and listen to his hero as, standing on the shore of Ca- lypso's island, he voices his hunger to see "Gaunt Ithaca stand up out of the surge," or hear him murmur "little Telemachus," the tears come to our eyes and we are moved anew with the eternal hunger for wife and child and home. Fortunately for our illustration there are available two little poems brief enough to quote, both written by gifted lyric poets and dealing with the same theme. On the 16th of April, 1746, Charles Edward Stuart, with the Scotch highlanders, fought at Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, near Inverness, his last unavailing battle for the English crown. He and his highlanders were utterly cut to pieces by the Duke of Cumberland with the English THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 33 troops. Early in the year 1746, Collins a poet of great lyrical power wrote the follow- ing Ode in memory of the English who fell in the war against the Pretender: "How sleep the Brave, who sink to rest By all their country's wishes blest ! When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallow'd mold, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than Fancy's feet have ever trod. By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung: There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay ; And Freedom shall awhile repair To dwell a weeping hermit there !" Robert Burns also wrote a Lament for Cul- loden, for the Scotch highlanders who fell in defeat. It is also a little lyric of two stanzas: "The lovely lass o' Inverness, Nae joy nor pleasure can she see; For e'en and morn she cries, Alas! And aye the saut tear blin's her ee: Drumossie moor Drumossie day A waefu' day it was to me ! 34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART For there I lost my father dear, My father dear, and brethren three. Their winding-sheet the bluidy clay, Their graves are growing green to see: And by them lies the dearest lad That ever blest a woman's ee! Now wae to thee, thou cruel lord, A bluidy man I trow thou be; For mony a heart thou hast made sair That ne'er did wrong to thine or thee." Both these are exquisite lyrics : which makes the stronger appeal? Well, a small fraction of readers those who are peculiarly respon- sive to stately, allegorical imagery, who rank Spenser beside Shakespeare and have the ear rather than the eye memory would prefer the Ode of Collins; but all the rest of us respond more deeply to the appeal of Burns. The reason is not difficult to state : one man is more than a multitude of men. The grief of one Scotch lassie appeals more powerfully than the statement that so many thousand men fell in a certain battle. It is only through the in- dividual that we appreciate humanity. You read in the newspaper that a factory has been THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 35 shut down and six hundred men are out of work; and then you pass on to the next item about Mrs. Somebody's dinner party, and the one statement makes almost as much impres- sion as the other; but if it has ever been your lot to live next door to a family in which the husband and father was out of work, you understand. If you have seen the man's face, day after day, as he kissed his wife good-bye and went on the unavailing search for work; if you have seen the tears in her eyes as she turned into the house ; if you have watched the children grow paler and more hungry-looking day by day, you know what it means that six hundred men are out of work. One man is more than a multitude of men; the individual is the key to the whole; and it is because art always expresses the common basis of human experience only through the medium of per- sonality and in definitely limited form that its appeal may be eternally fresh and new. All art is thus expression; but, I need scarcely add, not all expression is art. To be art, the expression must be adequate and har- monious. This does not mean that art should produce only what is pleasing to the senses: 36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART the notion that art must always do this is one of the further unwarranted superstitions prev- alent in our time. The principle is that the body of expression should be appropriately married to the soul of meaning. Gloom, for example, is not sensuously pleasing, but the gloom that broods upon the recumbent figures from the hand of Michael Angelo, on the Medicean tombs, is beautiful, because it per- fectly expresses the mood Michael Angelo wished to embody. Tennyson is one of the most consistently, almost monotonously melodious poets in the English language; yet there are harshly dis- cordant lines in Tennyson, and they are artis- tic because they are harsh. When Tennyson represents himself as returning in In Memo- riam to the street before the house from which his friend had gone out never to return, he paints the scene as in the early morning, with the day breaking in dismal rain. The whole brief canto of three stanzas is masterly, and the closing two lines are: "And ghastly through the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day."* * In Memoriam. canto VII. THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 37 Note the harsh sound and painful association of the words. Moreover, the last line is all monosyllabic, and Pope showed long ago what happens when " ten low words oft creep in one dull line." 11 It is impossible to make poetry out of monosyl- lables, for the regular metrical stress will too rarely correspond to the natural emphasis to make music. Further, in Tennyson's line the metrical stress falls just where it ought not in ordinarily good poetry on the unimportant words. Thus, scanned conventionally, the line reads : *'0n th'e bald street breaks tne blank day." Read the two lines, however, just as they are, or let them read themselves through you: "And ghastly thro'ugh the drizzling rain, Qh the bald street breaks the blank daj ;" and you are left with the same clutch at your throat and the same sob in your heart that Ten- * Essay on Criticism. 38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART nyson felt. \That is art: adequately and har- moniously marrying the body of expression to the soul of thought, feeling and imagination. \ How far art should go in portraying the physically horrible and the morally depraved is an open question. My own feeling is that there are deeps so terrible that art would bet- ter draw the curtain and leave them unsound- ed ; but one thing is certain : whatever art does venture to portray must be given in form ap- propriate to the. content expressed. If that is painful and discordant, so must be the body of true artistic expression. Thus as Dante comes to the lowest pit of hell we find him saying : "If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous, As were appropriate to the dismal hole Down upon which thrust all the other rocks, I would press out the juice of my conception More fully ; but because I have them not, Not without fear I bring myself to speak ; For 'tis no enterprise to take in jest, To sketch the bottom of all the universe, Nor for a tongue that cries Mamma and Babbo." * * Dante, Inferno, canto XXXII, Longfellow's translation. THE EXPRESSION OF LIFE IN ART 39 That is, he would deliberately use harsher music, if he could find it, to express harmoni- ously the moral horror of the nether hell. 'Let us sum up our work to this point : art is \ the adequate and harmonious expression of some aspect of man's life or relation to nature, through the medium of personality, in defin- itely limited form. "When imagination incessantly escapes from reality, and does not abandon the simplicity of nature in its wanderings: then and then only the mind and the senses, the receptive force and the plastic force, are developed in that happy equili- brium which is the soul of the beautiful and the condition of humanity." Schiller, Essays JSsthetical and Philosophical, p. 106. "The law of simplicity and naivety holds good of all fine art; for it is quite possible to be at once simple and sublime." Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, p. 31. "To speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only com- pletely a man when he plays." Schiller, Essays ^Esthetical and Philosophical, p. 71. 40 CHAPTER II THE INTERPRETATION OF HUMAN LIFE IN ART ART is always, as we have seen, an ex- pression of some aspect of life ; but this expression is inevitably at the same time interpretation. Art never merely echoes na- ture ; it gives nature as the artist sees it, thus putting it through the transmuting spectrum of the artist's personality. \ This is true even of semi-mechanical imitation of nature, as in ama- teur photography. Suppose you wish to take for a friend a photograph of a little wooded glen that seems to you particularly beautiful: What do you do : set up your camera and take the view? Not at all; you wait for the hour "when the light is right;" go about from one point of view to another until you find the one that best pleases you ; and then take your pic- ture. That is, of the almost innumerable views you might have taken, you choose this one, and in so doing say what this bit of nature means 41 42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART to you. Thus, even when copying with a me- chanical instrument, through selecting the par- ticular aspect and point of view, you interpret the phase of the objective world in terms of its relation to your own spirit. So with the most realistic of novels: the ar- tist must select his material from the bewil- dering detail of life, and choose his point of view in portraying it, thus interpreting the life he copies. Suppose one were to attempt a realistic narration of one's own life: of what would one write? Why, everything, of course. Yes, and fill a library with the record of a month. It would be impossible to write out the life of one week, with no selection, record- ing every incident, every thought, every in- fluence. That is not what is meant, of course, but the recording only of what is important. Ah, but who shall say what is important? Is it not evident that the most realistic narration of a week's life would bring certain facts strongly into the foreground, since they would seem most essential to the narrator ; other facts, appearing to him as less significant, would be subordinated in the background; while a mul- titude of other facts would be suppressed alto- INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 43 gether, since they would seem to have no value, and in many instances might not even be re- called? Yet of the facts so suppressed or for- gotten might not one easily be the critical element of the life seen from God's point of view in the perspective of the whole? Thus the most realistic narrator chooses his point of view, exercises a high degree of selection upon his material, and thus interprets life in terms of his own personality, in copying or recording it. The pity of the worse type of realistic novel is that it selects its material from moral disease instead of health, as if disease were truer than health! That notion is one of the strange anomalies of our time. Men exclaim: "We will see life;" and then proceed to smear themselves with the slime of its diseases ! The truth is, disease can never be understood aright except from the point of view of the health of which it is the perversion. Still, even in the wrong kind of realism, dedicated to the ex- ploitation of moral disease, art selects and ar- ranges its material, treats it from a specific point of view, and thus interprets in attempt- ing to copy. Art is thus always, at the same time, real 44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART and ideal. It is real, for it must grip reality somewhere to be art; it is ideal, for it never merely copies reality. The great artists have always been aware of this, consciously or in- stinctively; and it is noteworthy that the con- troversy concerning realism and idealism in art has been carried on, not chiefly by creative ar- tists, but by critics and theorists on the outside. Selection of material and point of view is, however, only the initial principle of idealism. y In all art is, further, the tendency to lift nature to more adequate expression. Perhaps I can best illustrate this second principle by giving my own experience with Shakespeare. It had long puzzled me that Shakespeare is called the great realist, loyally holding the mirror up to human nature; yet all his characters speak beautiful poetry. Even Caliban upon his island talks of the "quick freshies" and the "bigger light and less" in language exquisitely poetical. For a time it seemed the explanation must be that actual men and women do not express themselves ordinarily in beautiful poetry; art must be beautiful, hence the dis- crepancy. The explanation did not satisfy, however. Then I began to see that, while all INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 45 Shakespeare's characters speak poetry, no two of them speak alike. Caliban does not speak as Miranda, nor Miranda like Prospero. Hamlet and Horatio are as different in ex- pression as in character. Then I saw that what Shakespeare had done was to lift each charac- ter to a plane of adequate expression, causing each to speak not as the person does speak in life, but as, in the given situation actual men and women would speak if they could say just what they meant and say it perfectly. Take the supreme example: no Roman lion brought to bay, squandering half the world for a great passion, ever used the wealth of overwhelming imagery and vocabulary that comes from the lips of Shakespeare's Mark Antony; and no sensuous queen of Egypt, daughter of a hun- dred Ptolemies, fitting lioness mate for this Roman lion, ever spoke with the audacious sweep of language and imagery that comes from Cleopatra in the play; yet Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra speak just what those two characters, in the given circumstances of their lives, would have spoken, could they have said exactly what they felt and said it per- fectly. 46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART So it is with the artistic expression of deep meditation. Let one walk in the countryside some quiet autumn afternoon, when the winds are still and the leaves quietly falling, red and brown, from the boughs of the trees, the sky gray and still above; let one be alone or with one friend who understands and knows when not to speak; the breath comes slowly and regularly, and so does the heart beat. One moves with slow and measured step. In such a mood one does not usually speak in poetry; but if it were possible to express perfectly what one thinks and feels in such a mood, one would speak in just such measured, slow-mov- ing, musical lines as those in the greatest of Wordsworth's sonnets: "The world is too much with us ; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours ; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 47 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." This element of idealism is present in all the arts. Where in the French nature world can you find Corot's landscapes? Well, every- where, and here,, too, after you have seen and loved them in Corot's paintings; but nowhere before. It is almost as if that French nature world had been brooding for untold centuries, waiting to voice the meaning of its beauty; but only when Corot came and grasped its se- cret could it rise to full and free expression. So the dumb, half-wakened hunger of the French peasant, on the background of majes- tic nature, waited for the genius of Millet to understand it and express it in art. Thus the Venus de Milo bodies forth, not what any Greek woman was, but what all Greek women wanted to be, womanhood achieving its highest expression, not in nature, but in the interpre- tation of art. Even more fully is this element of idealism present in music, the art capable of voicing 48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART emotions that lie far too deep for words ever to express them. As we shall see in our study of music, its peculiar method and function bring this phase of idealism to its highest form. This element in all the arts is balanced by a third principle of idealism the law of re- straint. This demands that the artist shall not express all he feels : he must express a part and suggest the rest, stimulating the imagina- tion to go on beyond the limits of what is given. If an actor, for example, were to express all the passion of Lear or Othello, you would say he ranted, and the verdict would be just. Were music to embody all the composer feels, it would fail to move deeply. If a speaker expresses all he has to give, the effect is cheap. Behind what is given, must be a great reserve power unexpressed. Thus when art attempts to do everything for its audience the effect is tawdry. That is one trouble with the theater to-day. The effort by skilful scene painting and other sensational effects to accomplish everything for the jaded senses and sluggish imagination of the spec- tator, tends to make him sit back in a semi- somnolent fashion merely to be played upon INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 49 from without ; while the challenge to the actor is almost equally wanting. The result is that, with no active cooperation between artist and audience, the characters fail to impress them- selves. Better the bare, unadorned stage of Shakespeare's time, with a sign-board to in- dicate Rome or London, where the situation challenged the actor to the vigorous effort to interpret life, than, in the attempt to accom- plish everything for the senses and imagina- tion, to fail wholly of the vital portrayal of character. The principle is thus universal. The land- scape artist dare not paint all he sees, but must creatively interpret his vision instead of imi- tating nature. In music it is the deep wealth of emotion unexpressed that gives to the mel- ody its power to sweep one on to the bosom of the sea of feeling. With all art that portrays life in relation to law there is a further element of idealism in carrying the laws to greater fulfillment than appears normally in life. Literature especially does this. In our life .tendencies are evident, but incomplete. The threads are spun a little way and then pitiless Atropos cuts them off, 50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART and how those tangled threads may be woven into the complete garment of life behind the veil, we cannot see ; but the true artist sees. In- deed, he is artist partly because he is prophet, with a vision of life brought full circle. In life, the curtain may fall on any one of the scenes of the never-finished drama; in the play, it may not fall until the five full acts are com- plete. In life, any one who is growing dies too soon: there are always incomplete tenden- cies, potentialities broken off; but in art, the ethical motive, laid down in the beginning, must be completed in the end. In our world, not all mad ambition brings the tragedy of Macbeth, not all unfounded jealousy the piti- ful eclipse at the end of Othello, not all intro- spective absorption, with the will balanced be- tween opposing motives, the black disaster of Hamlet; but in Shakespeare these conclusions inexorably follow. Thus art interprets life by bringing its actual tendencies of good and evil to that more complete fulfillment toward which religion and philosophy have always groped. Further, in all the arts is an element of idealism which may be called atmosphere. It INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 51 is this that unifies a masterpiece and gives the key to the spirit of the whole. Nowhere is there a better illustration than in the paintings of Titian. What is it that makes his pictures so wonderful an interpretation of Venice? Not the nude figures, the bit of mountain, the sea or the radiant sky; but the luxuriant wealth of warm golden light poured over the whole, transfiguring the landscape, lifting the nude bodies away from all possible association with illness or death, giving unity and interpreting the whole. So the subtle "light that never was on sea or land" is more than anything else the key to Corot's impression. In the Inferno of Dante there is one dominant atmosphere, made of darkness deepened into darkness, set off by vermilion flame; in the Purgatorio another, made up of all the beauty of the natural world ; in the Paradiso a third, with light multiplied into light, till the radiant shining is all but un- endurable. Similarly there is one unifying and interpretative atmosphere in a fugue of Bach's, a nocturne of Chopin's, or in the third move- ment of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. Besides these five elements of idealism in 52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART art, there is a final principle, in that art, to be sound, must present the phase of life it por- trays in true relation to the whole. This ap- plies particularly to the portrayal of evil. This is dangerous in its effect only when evil is pictured out of relation to the whole of life, as for instance, in the worse sort of the so- called French novel (which is not produced, by the way, exclusively in France) where a moral evil is dressed in such beautiful garments that it is mistaken for the good, and so be- comes seductively misleading. The great mas- ters never make this mistake : in their portrayal evil is as repulsive in form as it is offensive in meaning. No daughter was ever led to un- filial conduct by the example of Goneril and Regan in King Lear; no one was ever tempted to a career of deception by the example of lago. We despise these characters, and they in no way seduce us to imitation of their behavior. Thus Dante uses coarse epithets and imag- ery increasingly painful to the senses, to clothe the darker sins as he descends the pit of hell. That the principle is not confined to moral evil, however, is evident in the work of such INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 53 painters as Millet and Bastien-Lepage, the wonder of whose portrayal of peasant life is that the phase studied is given in such sound relation to the whole of life as to interpret its very soul. Let me give an illustration of this principle in the field of the novel. Some years ago Upton Sinclair studied the notorious packing- house district of Chicago and portrayed its horrors in the novel, The Jungle, widely read here and abroad, which helped vitally to the reform of the evil conditions it exploited. Now I have no doubt that every incident given in the novel could be paralleled in the packing- house district of Chicago, and that the mass of these facts had come under the direct observa- tion of the author; yet I have no hesitation in saying that the story as a whole is untrue to the life it presents. What the author did, after exhaustive investigation of the horrors of that district of Chicago, was to gather them all together and heap them upon the head of one devoted woman and family. The result was a more or less effective reform document, but a novel with a loss of sound perspective, thus artistically, and hence ethically, untrue to the 54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART life it portrayed. The same criticism may be passed upon a more recent social document, exploiting the evils of the "white slave traffic" Kauffman's House of Bondage. It is on the basis of this principle, little as it is understood, that the work of Ibsen, Mae- terlinck, Shaw, Wilde and Sudermann must ultimately be judged, as also the didactic dramas, such as The Passing of the Third Floor Back, The Servant in the House, Everywoman, The Terrible Meek, which have enjoyed such vogue recently. Much second- rate work, that is widely popular for the mo- ment, is weeded out and forgotten after a little time, just because the artist lacked the greatness to see the part in true perspective and sound relation to the whole, and so be- came the partisan rather than the true creator. Let us sum up our work to this point, formu- lating the answer to our first question: Art is then the adequate and harmonious expres- sion and interpretation, through the medium of personality and in definitely limited form, of some phase of man's life or relation to nature in true relation to the whole. This statement is not intended as a definition in the ordinary INTERPRETATION OF LIFE IN ART 55 sense, but as a thesis, gathering together all the elements studied as forming art. Simplifying the statement, retaining the most definitive ele- ments: Art is the adequate and harmonious expression and interpretation of some phase of mans life in true relation to the whole. ^ "Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion." Goethe, Maxims and Reflec- tions, p. 174. "The secret, mysterious relations of the human heart to the strange nature around it, have not yet come to an end. In its eloquent silence, this latter still speaks to the heart just as it did a thousand years ago; and what was told in the very gray of antiquity is understood to-day as easily as then. For this reason it is that the legend of nature ever remains the inexhaustible resource of the poet in his intercourse with his people." Wagner, in "Der Freischiitz in Paris," Art Life and Theories, p. 99. "The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all pagan mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of nature; sincere communion of man with the mysterious in- visible powers visibly seen at work in the world round him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scandinavian than in any mythology I know. Sincerity is the great char- acter of it. Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that these old northmen were look- ing into nature with open eye and soul most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, un- fearing way." Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, p. 30. 56 CHAPTER III PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART THAT alljhe arts spring trpm a j ~mon historic basisjias already been in- ~^cat^''.'Tffi^Ja^of_evrfutiMLJrom the homogeneous to the differentiated and special- cer traced logical world, is evident in the history of art. Alljthe fine arts are present in germ in an act. of religious worship in the early Greek world, when a hymn was sung in honor of the god, and accompanied with orchestric dancing. The interpretative dancing was the basis of sculp- ture, and from sculpture, with scarcely a line of demarcation, sprang painting. The sing- ing was the basis of music ; while the hymn it- self represented poetry, from which, by the way, science and philosophy were later de- jrelopepL J^iujM^hjofJ^ _prjtisjed jto-day^has been differentiated and _s^eciaJJzejdJn_f unction out of a simple unified historical source^ 67 58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Note, further, the intimate connection of all early art with religion. j[ndeed,jwhile the im- pulse of love and the desire to record action and event cooperated_in the birth of art, the jnain inspiration came from religion ^ and. i > thejiistor^of the arts the _ssociation ,_ wife religion continues intimate. Architecture builds temples, sculpture and painting adorn, them,, music and poetry are chiefly_concerned with_ worship.. Even to-day jail these arts find an irnppjtajr^funct ion in s^vin^religwn^^a^.djwhiLe that Js__no longer , their main purpose, the^road was long the arts were compelled to travel before they could free themselves from being merely the hand- maidens of religion, and attain their independ- ent functions as ideal expressions of the spirit of man. Rjemember the J[pjrig__^ejnturies--of .By^antinejajnting when ^.aj_jas- merely _re- jigipus^ symbolisni, its pictures^ pegs -on which to hang the teachings of faith; or consider at how late a period the secular drama freed itself from the conventions.. of ihejnediaeval mystery _and morality jlays With the homogeneous simplicity of primi- PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 59 tive life, religion was not separated from other aspects of existence, but permeated them all j in ja prof pundl^jtrue sense life itself was re- ligion. Born under this . dominant religious inspiration, early art was deeply serious. It was concerned with the universal questions of man's existence, and had a unity and compre- hensiveness not present equally in later differ- entiated forms of art. Indeed, long before conscious art is born, there is accumulated a great storehouse of popular thought, feeling and imagination. It springs directly out of life, deajling with^the two universal aspects of existence Man and Nature. The legends slowly grew, told over by the agedjtp the young befojre the hearthstone, sung by wandering minstrels at the halls of chieftains, molded and remolded from age to age, until, when finally written down, they represent the re- fined, condensed result of generations upon generations of early life. The power of primitive men, with memories unaided and uncrippled by note-books, to pre- serve and hand on such a body of material, is beyond all that we, with our mechanical de- 60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART vices and printed books, can understand.* Thus the human mind was the tablet upon which the primitive artist wrote; but just for that reason his creation was less crys- tallized and more subject to change. While primitive men regarded their inherited legends with religious veneration, still the plastic mind, receiving and transmitting them, improved and refined them as time went on. Thus the expression of early life has cor- relative strength and weakness as compared with later artistic masterpieces. In such a lit- erary creation as the Divine Comedy or Faust there is the advantage of unified and complete art in the work as a whole. We get the per- sonal reaction on life of one great mind and the statement of one man's philosophy. Mythology lacks this unity resulting from the world-view of a single great mind, but it has condensed vitality and deals with universal material. It is of two main types determined * "There are thousands of Brahmans even now, when sc little inducement exists for Vedic studies, who know the whole of the Rig-Veda by heart and can repeat it; and what applies to the Rig-Veda applies to many other books." F. Max Miiller, India: What Can It Teach Us, p. 81. Long- mans, Green, & Co., London, 1883. PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 61 by its two subjects Man and Nature. These are of course interwoven, but now one, now the other, is dominant. The contrasting types will be evident if we compare the main body of Aryan legend with that produced by the Semites. As far back as we can trace the Aryans they lived in settled habitations, in vil- lage communities. As cultivators of the soil they depended for their existence upon the regular recurrence of the seasons, the shining of the sun and the falling of the rain. De- pending thus upon Nature, with their atten- tion constantly drawn to her activities, their mythology was naturally in the main a poetic interpretation of those activities and their in- fluence on man. The all-enfolding sky, mar- ried to the earth-mother through the life-giving rain, the storm gods driving their spotted deer or f ull-uddered cows across the heaven, the life- giving sun, the dawn housewife of the sky: these_ were the objects of Aryan worship and the subjects of Aryan mythology. In the earliest period this mythology is re- markably fluid, the life-giving principle of Nature being worshiped easily under any of its manifold forms; but as various races de- 62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART veloped out of the parent stem, more definite mythologies were differentiated under the in- fluence of new conditions of life. One branch of the race, migrating to what became Persia, where the strong contrast is of day and night, light and darkness, developed a nature dual- ism, opposing Ormuzd, the bright god, to Ahriman, the spirit of darkness. Another branch, entering the beautiful peninsula of Hellas, with the sea and the mountains everywhere, each valley with its dis- tinguishing individuality and the radiant sky over all, evolved the most beautiful nature polytheism the world has seen. Every river, dell and tree in the forest had its presiding spirit, while all these divine powers were gath- ered in the pantheon of gods upon Olympus. Still nother portion of the mother race, settling upon the northern shores of Europe and upon the peninsulas that are now Den- mark, Norway and Sweden, found a nature world of forbidding majesty, where life was a perpetual struggle against destructive forces the forest and its wild beasts, the giants of ice, cold and snow, and the demon of destruc- tive fire. Thus these men developed a dualism PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 63 in which man's will and intelligence, incarnate in the bright gods Odin, Thor, Balder, Freya and the rest were opposed to the Jotuns of the north, the Fenrir wolf and the Midgard Serpent, Loki, the demon of fire. The Semitic peoples, on the other hand, as far back as we can trace them, were nomads. Living upon flocks and herds, climbing the mountains when the valleys were dry, crossing to fertile plains beyond, adding to their sus- tenance by marauding raids upon weaker and more settled tribes, their existence depended less upon nature than upon human courage, intelligence and leadership, with close social or- ganization* It was the strong, patriarchal chieftain, the brave warrior, the unified war- fare against common foes that guaranteed their existence. Thus the mythology they devel- oped centered upon human character and ac- tion rather than upon nature. They wor- shiped at first the dead chieftain, lifted to that mysterious other world but supposed still to have some power upon this. As their religion developed, they came to worship the god of the tribe, the race, and finally the king and ruler of the universe. In the whole process it was 64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART human power, justice, benevolence and, in the end, love, upon which the mind of the Sem- ites was focused, and not mainly the forces and activities of the nature world. Thus their accumulated body of legend concerned mainly the history of human action, of brave deeds, persecutions endured, tribal and racial victories. Of course the two tendencies overlap. Among all the Indo-European races a wealth of human legend gets grafted on the older and more characteristic body of nature myths. The origin of the latter is, in the end, quite forgotten, and elements from human tradition get associated with even the oldest nature stories. Similarly, we find the Elohim beside Jehovah in the Old Testament, and the genii of Mohammedan lore. Still the striking dif- ferentiation in type, springing from original differences in racial activity and environment, remains. The importance of the two themes of all primitive art is evident if one remembers that all forces of human progress reduce to two the action of man and the reaction of nature. Moreover, the two great aspects of the devel- PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 65 opment of world religion have been the pro- gressive discovery of the Divine, if I may so express it, through the two chapters of revela- tion Man and Nature, ending in a union of the two in a conception of God as at once in the world, as the immanent life of all life "in whom we live and move and have our being," and above the world, as the loving Father of spirits in whose image we are made. Thus pro- found and universal are the two themes of primitive art. The vitality of treatment in early art is as impressive as its universality in subject* Take, for instance, the old JBrynhild- Sigurd story as it is given in the Elder Edda and the Song of the Folsungs. Here, even more than in Wag- ner's rendering, is it universally human in elements and vital in treatment. The frag- mentary songs of the Elder Edda, wild but majestic in irregular alliterative verse, date perhaps from the eighth to the tenth centuries. The Volsung's Saga, a prose epic of somewhat later date (probably the thirteenth century), follows closely the older material, but gives the story in more complete form. Thus both represent the early working over of the body 66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART of legend handed down through generations. Two elements of Fate are in the story from the beginning. The first is the hoard of treas- ure, guarded by the dragon Fafnir. The other is the doom of Brynhild, the battle may, who, for breaking the will of Odin, is pierced with the sleep-thorn and confined in the castle sur- rounded by fire. Sigurd, fated and fearless, having slain the dragon, comes to the flame- girt castle : "By long roads rides Sigurd, till he comes at the last up on to Hindfell, . . . and he sees before him on the fell a great light, as of fire burning, and flam- ing up even unto the heavens; and when he came thereto, lo, a shield-hung castle before him, and a banner on the topmost thereof: into the castle went Sigurd, and saw one lying there asleep, and all-armed. Therewith he takes the helm from off the head of him, and sees that it is no man, but a woman ; and she was clad in a byrny as closely set on her as though it had grown to her flesh ; so he rent it from the collar downwards ; and then the sleeves thereof, and ever the sword bit on it as if it were cloth. Then said Sigurd that over-long had she lain asleep; but she asked 'What thing of great might is it that has pre- PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 67 vailed to rend my byrny, and draw me from my sleep? . . . Ah, is it so, that here is come Sigurd Sigmundson, bearing Fafnir's helm on his head and Fafnir's bane in his hand? ' Then answered Sigurd . . . 'Of the Volsung's kin is he who has done the deed ; but now I have heard that thou art daughter of a mighty king, and folk have told us that thou wert lovely and full of lore, and now will I try the same.' Then Brynhild sang 'Long have I slept And slumbered long, Many and long are the woes of mankind, By the might of Odin Must I bide helpless To shake from off me the spells of slumber. Hail to the day come back! Hail, sons of the daylight! Hail to thee, dark night, and thy daughter! Look with kind eyes a-down, On us sitting here lonely, And give unto us the gain that we long for.' Then said Sigurd, 'Teach us the lore of mighty matters !' She said, 'Belike thou cannest more skill in all 68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART than I; yet will I teach thee; yea, and with thanks, if there be aught of my cunning that will in anywise pleasure thee, either of runes or of other matters that are the root of things ; but let us now drink together, and may the Gods give to us twain a good day, that thou mayst win good help and fame from my wisdom, and that thou mayst hereafter mind thee of that which we twain speak together.' ' So she gives him the drink of love, and then with childlike simplicity yet with mature love of wisdom, these two sit down together, with the flames all round about, while she sings him the sacred runes runes of war and of pity, of safety and thought "wise words, sweet words, speech of great game." It is significant of this old Norse land that the woman, repository of wisdom, teaches, while the man learns. "Sigurd spake now, 'Sure no wiser woman than thou art one may be found in the wide world; yea, yea, teach me more yet of thy wisdom !' . . . She spake withal 'Be kindly to friend and kin, and reward not their * The Story of the Volsungs, edited by H. Halliday Spar- ling, pp. 68-70. Walter Scott, London/ PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 69 trespasses against thee; bear and forbear, and win for thee thereby long enduring praise of men. Take good heed of evil things : a may's love, and a man's wife; full oft thereof doth ill befall! Let not thy mind be overmuch crossed by unwise men at thronged meetings of folk; for oft these speak worse than they wot of; lest thou be called a dastard, and art minded to think that thou art even as is said; slay such an one on another day, and so reward his ugly talk. * Let not fair women beguile thee, such as thou mayst meet at the feast, so that the thought thereof stand thee in stead of sleep, and a quiet mind; yea, draw them not to thee with kisses and other sweet things of love. If thou hearest the fool's word of a drunken man, strive not with him being drunk with drink and wit- less ; many a grief, yea, and the very death, groweth from out such things. Fight thy foes in the field, nor be burnt in thine own house. Look thou with good heed to the wiles of thy friends ; but little skill is given to me, that I should foresee the ways of thy life; yet good it were that hate fell not on thee from those of thy wife's house.' 70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Sigurd spake, 'None among the sons of men can be found wiser than thou; and thereby swear I, that thee will I have as my own, for near to my heart thou liest.' She answers, 'Thee would I fainest choose, though I had all men's sons to choose from.' And thereto they plighted troth both of them." * It is so far away, yet so near this Sigurd- Brynhild story. What universality of human emotions, what majestic simplicity of expres- sion, what strength and beauty of character, what permanent wisdom it contains. To read it is like a draught from some pure mountain spring in the midst of a primeval forest. Had Sigurd been able to follow the wise teachings of Brynhild, all would have been well, but Fate willed otherwise. So Sigurd, riding to King Guild's palace, is given the magic drink by Queen Grimhild and married to her daughter, Gudrun. In his bewildered state, he lends himself to the scheme of Gun- nar, Gudrun's brother, to deceiving Brynhild into marrying Gunnar as the one who had freed her from the fire. Through the taunt- ing of Brynhild by Gudrun the deceptions are * The Story of the Volsungs, pp. 76, 77. PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 71 discovered. Sigurd comes to his senses, urges Brynhild to accept him even now ; but she : " 'Such words may nowise be spoken, nor will I have two kings in one hall; I will lay my life down rather than beguile Gunnar the King. ... I swore an oath to wed the man who should ride my naming fire, and that oath will I hold to, or die.' " * So woe is heaped on woe. Sigurd is mur- dered through Gunnar's scheming, at Bryn- hild's demand. Brynhild, slaying herself, prophesies the woes to come, and prays as a last boon to be burned on the funeral pyre with Sigurd " 'And lay there betwixt us a drawn sword, as in the other days when we twain stepped into one bed to- gether ; and then may we have the name of man and wife, nor shall the door swing to at the heel of him as I go behind him.' " f How big it is with the elemental forces of life. Here is no low intrigue, no finesse of modern deception, the very wrong is on the scale of majesty, inextricably interwoven with * The Story of the Volsungs, p. 107. t Ibid., p. 124. 72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART the fate of life. How wild, loyal, fierce in hate, strong in love, true in instinct, this splendid Brynhild is : a type of glorious and tragic wom- anhood for all time. How the pessimism of a Schopenhauer, the wail of a modern Leopardi pale beside this elemental tragedy! Gudrun, overshadowed by Brynhild, lend- ing herself to her mother's deception to win Sigurd, has her own majesty and suffers her own bitterness. I know nothing else in primi- tive literature more profoundly moving in spirit, more tensely impressive in form than the stanzas of the Elder Edda giving the woe of Gudrun over Sigurd dead: "Gudrun of old days Drew near to dying As she sat in sorrow Over Sigurd; Yet she sighed not Nor smote hand on hand, Nor wailed she aught As other women. Then went earls to her, Full of all wisdom, Fain help to deal To her dreadful heart : PRIMITIVE SOURCES OF ART 73 Hushed was Gudrun Of wail, or greeting, But with a heavy woe Was her heart a-breaking. Then spake Giaflaug, Guiki's sister: the feeling of the bed of pine needles all blend in one impression; and indeed it is, as we shall see, this fusing of many elements appealing through different senses, that gives the beauty of nature its wondrous charm. Let us try, however, to isolate the impres- sion of the music. There is direct sensuous pleasure given. Deeper than this, the music puts the hearer into a definite type of mood, which may perhaps be described as one of calm, exalted joy. The train of reflection accompanying this mood will, however, vary with every hearer. Next to the pine music, the most impress- THE MEANING OF MUSIC 195 ive form of natural music is the beating of the surf upon the sand or rocks of the shore. Here, also, the impressions through the sense of sight complicate and make difficult the abstraction of the effect of sound. More, however, than in the music of the pines, the ele- ment of rhythm is here, strongly and regularly accentuated. The melody is also more defi- nite, if less moving, than in the other in- stance. Harmony, in some degree, is present in the union of sounds made by the wash of the long rolling waves on the irregular con- tour of the shore. Thus here, too, something of all these elements of the art of music is present. Every lover of the sea will recognize at once the direct sensuous pleasure given by the sound of the surf. It tends, too, to produce one of several moods, influenced by the spirit in which we come. There is something pecul- iarly soothing, indeed almost benumbing, to the tired or grieving spirit in this music, and thus we tend to pass into a general mood of subdued meditation. What do we think about? Ah, to that question only a personal answer can be given. The emotional state is 196 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART generic, the train of reflections is associated by the individual mind, and depends upon what it brings. Another form of natural music which really rises to the plane of instinctive art is bird- song. Here rhythm is definitely used, and the element of simple, brief melody is highly developed. Technical harmony is absent. Perhaps for that very reason bird-song shows clearly the type of sensuous and emotional appeal made by music. I need not dwell on the pure sensuous delight we have in such music, nor upon the fact that bird-song lifts us generally to an emotional state of glad joy. Still, different bird songs produce moods widely apart, as is evident if one will compare the weirdly somber feeling with which one hears at night the reiterated three melodic notes of the whip-poor-will, with the tender mood wakened by the song of the hermit thrush. It is a further clue to the nature of music that bird songs spring from specific states of feeling, as particularly that of love-making, in the birds themselves. Finally, a high kind of natural music is evident in the tones of the speaking voice. THE MEANING OF MUSIC 197 Rhythm and melody are always present in the speech of deep feeling, with the flow, inflec- tions and modulations of the words; while voices differ from each other in quality (tim- bre) as much as do musical instruments. One hears voices with the moving, almost stri- dent sonorousness of the violoncello; others that have the clear, stimulating call of the flute; others suggest the liquid melting ten- derness of the harp. There are voices which, even speaking in a language one does not un- derstand, have power not only to give keen sensuous pleasure, but to move one, by the tones alone, to tenderness and almost to tears. Thus there are many forms of natural mu- sic in which are found all the sound-forms the art uses; yet the main business of music is not directly to copy these sounds, as sculp- ture and painting imitate the forms of the natural world. At times, it is true, music does this, as in imitating the sound of falling water, the rustling of the forest, or the twit- tering of birds. Beethoven's Pastoral Sym- phony gives excellent examples of the use of such imitation in great art, and others are found in Wagner's Nibelungen Tetralogy. 198 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART This is but a minor device in music, however, and may easily be carried too far. Then it be- comes a mere trick, as in those show pieces, such as the Wakening of the Lion or the Falling of the Waters, which graduates of what, without intentional irony, we used to call "finishing schools," played to display their skill on Commencement Day to admiring audiences of parents and friends. Instead of imitating natural music as its main function, what the art of music really does is to resolve: the sound forms, given in nature, into their abstract elements, and then deliberately recombine these in harmony with human sensibility and intelligence. It is thus that we get the scale, which is a conventionally accepted order of intervals among these ab- stract sound forms. This is illustrated by the fact that widely different scales have been in use at times, as for instance, among the Greeks. So, too, in Chinese music an order of sounds is used which is sensuously painful to western ears; while our music is said to sound no less discordant to the Chinese, habituated to their own convention. Music thus differs widely from sculpture THE MEANING OF MUSIC 199 andjpainting in being less imitative and more creatively expressive. It is interesting that architecture, of all the arts dealing with forms in space-relations, is the one most closely com- parable in method with music. I can still recall the sense of elation in a fresh discovery when I saw this identity between the two arts the one dealing with spatial, the other with time forms, the one appealing to the sense of sight, the other to hearing for it was a dis- covery to my own mind. Architecture also finds all its forms ultimately in nature. The tree trunk gave the column, its leaves the first capital ; the Roman arch goes back to the cave- roof, the Gothic, to the aisles of a northern forest ; yet the main function of architecture is not to copy these forms. It does so, if at all, only incidentally. Its method is to take these forms and reduce them to their abstract ele- ments of line and proportion, and then to recombine these in harmony with the de- mands of the human senses and intelligence. So in architecture, as in music, mathematics finds severe and exact application. Thus ar- chitecture, though limited by conditions of utility, accomplishes in dealing with space- 200 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART relations something similar to what music ac- complishes in time-relations, and the centuries- old comparison of architecture to music is seen to be no extravagant metaphor, but rather to rest upon an illuminating scientific basis. The characterization of architecture as "fro- zen music" goes back to Goethe and beyond. How significant it is! Who can stand before such a temple as the Cathedral of Milan, with its spires of aspiration, its countless adornments, its vast aisles, gothic roof, min- gled light, forest of columns and great open spaces, and not feel as if a symphony of Beethoven had been caught in an instant and frozen into stone. Browning, with his delight in giving a fresh turn to an old thought, reverses the comparison, and to him, in Abt Vogler, music is liquid architecture, flowing forth into its many-domed, myriad-spired temple of sound as inevitably as the legendary palace of Solo- mon, built magically "to pleasure the prin- cess he loved." The comparison either way is illuminating because it rests in a profound truth. Thus the characteristic difference in appeal between the arts portraying statical THE MEANING OF MUSIC 201 forms in space, and those dealing with dynamic forms in time, will best appear if first we com- pare architecture and music in their respective effects. Consider first the noblest temple the Greeks achieved the ruined glory of the Parthenon supreme symbol of Athenian greatness in the wonder of the Periclean age. Mutilated as it is by the vandalism of blind races and dark ages, it is still alive with the immortality the Greeks gave to all they created. How small it seems in con- trast to the vast temples of Christian and Oriental art, but how perfect! The simple row of columns surrounds it, each planned to rest the eye with harmony. The roof rests easily upon these. In the entire structure is no mathematically straight line. Instinctively or consciously, the Greek master gave the slight or definite curve that charms with ease and beauty. The decorations pediment, frieze and metope are all planned in re- strained subordination to the dominant idea inspiring the whole. The temple gives sensuous pleasure with its beauty of line, proportion and color, but 202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART through this it gives the pure architectonic conception for the intellect of man, with the deep aesthetic delight in the adequacy and harmony with which the idea is expressed. The further emotions one experiences in its presence depend upon its setting and associa- tions and one's familiarity with these, as fully as is true of the marble groups in the British Museum, ravished from its decorations. Turn to a representative example of me- diaeval Christian art from the same field. Notre Dame broods somberly over the surg- ing city of Paris, as it has brooded for cen- turies of time; vast, multiform, with its two towers and numerous spires; the rose win- dows blending forms and light; its countless decorations portraying scenes from Christian and Hebraic history, teaching through the eye the religious story, blending the grotesque with the somber and terrible in those strange gargoyles wild children of the northern imagination, leering down from eaves and < towers. Within, the wealth of stately columns stretches bewilderingly away, the Gothic arches multiplying the impression of space in THE MEANING OF MUSIC 203 aisles and nave, the mingled light lending mystery and awe to the whole. What a masterly blending it is of a bewildering mul- titude of forms, fused through the unity of appreciation in the spirit creating them all. Sensuous and artistic pleasure in what full measure they are given! Deeper, a wealth of conceptions, not united in one ar-J chitectonic idea as in the Greek, but asso- ciated and blent through the unity of the human spirit, is expressed for the beholder. A somewhat definite mood is also awakened by the temple, its setting and associations; but the deeper range of emotions experienced in its presence must vary with the individual and depend upon what he brings as com- pletely as with painting and sculpture. To make clear the effect of music we must, of course, exclude for the present, song, which is a composite art uniting poetry with music in a new appeal. Let us take as a first ex- ample in music, a relatively slight composi- tion such as Schumann's Arabesque (opus 18) or Chopin's Impromptu (opus 29). Each of the titles is suggestive: the "Im- promptu" is a brief expression of a mood 204 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART and spontaneous musical conception; the "Arabesque" calls up at once those cognate delicate traceries in the adornment of Mo- hammedan architecture. Each of these brief compositions is made of a series of sound forms, differing in length, pitch and loudness, and arranged by the principles of rhythm, melody and harmony. Please note that the series is not made of statical forms, but is dynamic, one form or group of forms dying as the next is born, so that the composition must be recreated every time it is enjoyed. Thus the striking contrast in method between music and the arts presenting forms in space is evident. The sounds and their arrangement give direct sensuous pleasure, while their order and combination, beautifully expressing a musical concept, give aesthetic satisfaction. Further, all the hearers of either of these brief pieces would feel much the same general mood awakened by the composition, ' and would even experience in common the slight succession of emotional states, corresponding to the series of melodic forms. The train of reflections, however, associated with the THE MEANING OF MUSIC 205 emotions, would be wholly individual and in no way determined or indicated by the com- position. Suppose the most appealing of Chopin's nocturnes to be played sympathetically for a roomful of listeners. All appreciative hear- ers would experience, in different degrees, the sensuous and aesthetic pleasure given by the composition. All would tend to ex- perience the same general series of states of feeling, being lifted, melted to tenderness, made to feel the pathos and the pain, sub- dued to the solution at the end; yet there would be as many different trains of medita- tion as there were persons in the room. You would think of the poem you know and which you associate with the music; I would think perhaps of Shelley's lyric To the Night. You would meditate upon a phase of your own experience, the music recalls to you; I would brood over a chapter of my life, un- known to you. In the appeal of music the series of emotional states is given, the train of reflections is brought by the hearer, and is dependent upon his character, knowledge and experience. 206 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART The same truth holds with reference to all musical compositions from the least to the greatest. Consider such a world-masterpiece as the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, worthy to rank with Hamlet, the Divine Comedy, the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the Last Supper of Leonardo as a supreme achieve- ment of human genius. This complex work the crowning expression of Beethoven's mind presents a succession of movements, differing each from the others in rhythm, melody and harmony, and thus comparable to a series of works of art, yet all strongly united by common themes and elements of melody in one masterpiece. Throughout, the work gives sensuous pleasure through its sound forms, and profound artistic joy in the beauty and harmony with which its basal ideas and moods find expression. Each movement, moreover, tends to waken in the hearer a dominant emotional state, and below that a succession of emotions, rising to the supreme exaltation of the concluding passage. The accompanying trains of reflection are, however, as completely individual as in the case of the little Schumann Arabesque first THE MEANING OF MUSIC 207 studied. Do not misunderstand me: I do not mean that music is "not intellectual," as is often wrongly said. There is a profound and exact intellectual basis in all music; and to the construction of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven went surely as great intellectual power as is shown in the creation of Faust or Macbeth. I do mean that music does not give a series of definite ideas for the intellect, as is .true of the arts dealing with forms in space, but that its dynamic series of sound- forms tends to waken in the hearer a some- what definite series of emotional states, while the associated ideas or meditations are unique in each person. The contrast with the spatial arts is then evident. Sculpture, painting and architecture present, through statical forms, definite con- ceptions for the intellect and the imagination, while the emotions we experience vary with each individual and depend upon what he brings. Music, on the other hand, through a dynamic succession of forms in time, tends to arouse a common series of emotions, while the associated trains of reflection vary with each person and depend upon his knowledge 208 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART and experience. Thus each of these two con- trasting types has the strength wanting in the other, or each makes emphatic what is subordinate in the other. To make it clear, compare the treatment of the same material in the two contrasting types of art. Take the Margaret story from Goethe's Faust, as given in Gounod's music and in the numerous paintings of it by Ger- man artists. Suppose you were quite ig- norant of the Faust story, and heard the orchestral music of Gounod's opera with the songs given in a language you did not un- derstand: what would you get? You would receive first a large measure of sensuous and artistic delight. Beyond that, would be wak- ened in you, in succession, the great emotions associated with the story the passionate long- ing of Faust, the melting tenderness of Sie- bel's love song, the blind hunger of Margaret at the spinning-wheel, her sorrow and de- spair all these would be given. These moods, however, could be associated with a thousand different love stories, and your re- flections, in listening to the music under the THE MEANING OF MUSIC 209 conditions assumed, would in no way touch Faust and Margaret. The painter, as we have seen, is limited to a single moment of the story in each work, and can interpret the whole only through significant moments. He can paint Faust bargaining with Mephistopheles. He can portray Margaret before the Cathedral door, in all the blushing charm of her young maid- enhood, Faust gazing upon her in ruthless desire, and Mephistopheles with sinister sneer behind. He can picture Margaret at the spinning-wheel, with far-dreaming, tear- dimmed eyes, and the look of love-longing in her face. He can represent Margaret upon the straw of her prison, with the wild- staring look of remorse and madness. Thus he can give, beyond the sensuous and aesthetic pleasure, clear conceptions of the characters and situations for our imagination and intel- lect. What we feel, however, is not neces- sarily the series of emotions aroused by Gou- nod's music. Our feelings depend upon our attitude toward the characters and the story, upon what we have lived and know of love and pain. 310 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART A northern artist has painted two pictures dealing with the Brunhild story. One repre- sents the Valkyr carrying, across her cloud- riding horse, a dead warrior to the hall of Valhalla. The other pictures Brunhild at the moment of her enchanted imprisonment. Odin imprints a kiss upon her brow as she stands there a symbol of woe and resolution, while the flames spring up from the ground round about. Thus each of these paintings represents a single instant of the story, the second a pe- culiarly interpretative moment, which to one who knows the legend carries something of the whole. The concept of the cloud maiden is definitely given with the clear idea of the situation of her life. Our emotions in the presence of these paintings depend upon our knowledge of northern mythology and its treatment in various arts, and upon our own life experience. Compare with this the mu- sic of Wagner's Walkure, without the libretto and the stage portrayal. The pure, clear motif of the Valkyr maiden awakens a mood of exultant freedom. It is the call of the wilderness of untamed Nature, of the wild THE MEANING OF MUSIC 211 hungers of the strong, free life. With this motive dominant, through what a wealth of emotions the music carries us; yet these could be associated with many other stories besides that of Brunhild, while our thoughts, as we listen to the music, depend upon what of life and knowledge we bring. Thus the strength of the one type of art is the limitation of the other; each makes explicit in its appeal what the other sub- ordinates. "In its ideal feature music keeps within its natural boun- daries, so long as it does not undertake to go beyond its expressional capacity that is, so long as the poetical thought of the composer becomes intelligible from the moods called forth by his work and the train of ideas stimulated thereby, that is, from the composition itself, and so long as nothing foreign, not organically connected with the music itself, must be dragged in, in order to assist comprehension." Ambros, The Boundaries of Music and Poetry, pp. 181, 182. "That which so strongly attracted our great poets towards music was the fact that it was at the same time the purest form and the most sensuous realization of that form. The abstract arithmetical number, the mathematical figure, meets us here as a creation having an irresistible influence upon the emotions that is, it appears as melody; and this can be as unerringly established, so as to produce sensuous effect, as the poetic diction of written language, on the contrary, is aban- doned to every whim in the personal character of the person reciting it. What was not practically possible for Shake- speare to be himself the actor of each one of his roles is practicable for the musical composer, and this with great definiteness, since he speaks to us directly through each one of the musicians who execute his works. In this case the transmigration of the poet's soul into the body of the per- former takes place according to the infallible laws of the most positive technique; and the composer who gives the cor- rect measure for a technically right performance of his work, becomes completely one with the musician who performs it, to an extent that can at most only be affirmed of the con- structive artist in regard to a work which he had himself produced in color or stone, if, indeed, a transmigration of his soul into lifeless matter is a supposable case." Wagner, in "The Purpose of the Opera," Art Lift and Theories, pp. 226, 227. 212 CHAPTER XII MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT ONE aspect of distinctly intellectual re- sponse to music lies in the analytical study of its compositions. To work out the combination of motives in a Wagner opera, or analyze the complicated harmonies of a Beethoven symphony, is an intellectual process which may give delight. This process, however, is comparable to the theoretic anal- ysis of line and proportion in architecture, or of design, composition and color in sculpture and painting, and is totally different from the direct response in appreciation to the appeal of the work of art. The intellectual pleasure in such a process is, in fact, exactly the same in kind with that we experience in working a difficult problem in calculus. It is keen pleasure we experience, but so different from the direct response to the appeal of the art that the analytical process may even stand in 213 214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART the way of the latter. This need not be, for rightly conducted analytical study increases the power to appreciate; but where the anal- ysis is made an end in itself, it may hamper rather than help the synthetic response. Have you ever heard some art critic analyze the principles of design in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper?. It is an interesting process, showing how the painting is composed of mathematical triangles, each linked to the next ; yet one may carry such study so far that one sees the triangles and not the painting. Similarly, one may carry the analysis of the structure of a Wagner opera so far that one hears the motifs and not the music. Such study in any art is a valuable help to appre- ciation, but is always a means and never an end, and should not be confused with the di- rect response to the appeal of art. An example came under my own observa- tion, where a man of fine talents and superior education seemed to be quite without "an ear for music." Having every opportunity for cultivation, living for years in the art centers of Europe, associating constantly with musi- cal people, he came to resent increasingly the MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 215 fact that they found such joy in what to him was a sealed book. So he set to work to master music. He employed the best teachers, mas- tered the difficult subject of harmony, advanc- ing so far that he could analyze an opera or symphony into its elements and recompose them. He attended musical concerts and greatly enjoyed his processes of analysis; yet he remained as deaf to music in the true sense as when he began his study. His case is ex- ceptional, but it illustrates the principle that intellectual understanding of the technique by ; which a work of art is produced, is a totally dif- ferent thing from the appreciation, spontane- ous or cultivated, of the created work. One may be quite ignorant of the principles of de- ! sign and composition, and yet appreciate a painting; and one may know nothing intel- lectually of motifs and technical harmony, and yet respond deeply to the appeal of music.} There are various ways by which a train of intellectual associations may be suggested in connection with the direct musical appeal. The simplest of these, frequently employed by com- posers, is in skillfully naming a work. This device is legitimate, and is occasionally used 216 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART even by great masters, as in Beethoven's Pas- toral Symphony, which at once suggests vari- ous sounds and activities of the Nature world, or the Heroic Symphony., in hearing which we are expected to reflect upon the career of Na- poleon. So Mendelssohn's Spring Song or Schumann's Kinderscenen suggests immedi- ately a specific train of reflection. This de- vice, however, must be used wisely and with restraint, or it easily degenerates into a trick, as in the "show pieces" referred to in the pre- ceding chapter; and the great composers have usually preferred merely to number their works, with a general title indicating the type of structure, as sonata, fugue, symphony, nocturne. Another and far more definite and exten- sive plan for suggesting a range of intellec- tual associations is realized in modern "pro- gram" music, as in various works of Liszt, Berlioz and Dvorak. Here a poem or other literary composition is first selected, and the music composed in harmony with it. This is entirely legitimate work, and the result is often deeply interesting and suggestive, par- ticularly to those persons who do not easily respond to music alone; yet such a method MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 217 makes music really illustrate literature. Now no art fulfills its own function most completely when it is used to illustrate another art. Such work has its place and is helpful; but if you wished to understand painting and sculpture, you would turn to independent masterpieces in those fields, rather than to Flaxman's draw- ings for Homer, Botticelli's illustrations of the Divine Comedy or the German paintings illus- trating Faust. So music is best understood when the art is working independently; and the development of modern program music, with a range of definite literary associations, only proves that such intellectual reflections are not given by the music alone, and accen- tuates the conclusions we have reached regard- ing the function of music. A further method of associating definite trains of reflection with musical compositions has been developed in so-called "interpreta- tion" of music, where a lecturer goes through a composition, associating the intellectual con- ceptions which to him seem appropriate with the changing appeal of the work. This is often a great help in opening the door to the appre- ciation of music, especially for the uninitiated. 218 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART I recall a remarkable instance of such an inter- pretation of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata given by no less a philosopher than Dr. Wm. T. Harris. The sonata was played over by a masterly artist, and then Dr. Harris took it up, passage by passage, and interpreted its development. Its central conflicts, he said, represented the struggle of the Titans with the gods. We could see Pelion heaped on Ossa as he proceeded, and followed with him the story until the Titans were cast into Tar- tarus and the gods calmly conquered in the end. It was all deeply interesting; yet if the hearer supposed Beethoven wrote the sonata to illustrate that story he would utterly mis- understand the music. A dozen other stories furnish equally good associations, as, for ex- ample, the conflict of the gods of Asgard with the Jotuns, or the struggle of Napoleon and his veterans with the snow and ice of Russia and the hosts of her barbaric popula- tion. The "interpretation" may thus suggest an interesting train of intellectual ideas to as- sociate with the music, thus aiding especially those who find the art somewhat intangible; but if it is supposed to give the meaning of MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 219 the music, it is worse than useless, positively hampering a sound response to music, by sub- stituting something else for it. Thus it should be evident why it is so much more difficult to put music into terms of the intellect than is true of the other arts. At best we can sug- gest intellectual associations to accompany the direct appeal of the music, but it is always a mistake to push the attempt far. There is a further refinement in the function of music owing to the fact, already noted, that its forms are dynamic, contrasting with the statical forms of sculpture, painting and archi- tecture. As a composition is rendered, each sound- form is freshly created, annulling those preceding and giving way to those following. Thus these forms impress the sense only mo- mentarily, and cannot be held fixedly as in the case of the other arts. In consequence, music peculiarly sublimates its form, the spiritual content being freed from sensuous association more than is true of the other arts. This makes it possible for music to fulfill a unique func- tion in relation to the life of the spirit. This is the more significant, in that emotion, to which music appeals, is more generic and 220 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART elemental than the understanding, transcend- ing in scope the activity of the imagination. It is possible to conceive what we can never imagine, because the imagination works wholly within the limits of the sensible world. We can, for example, conceive a world in space of two or four dimensions, and can readily construct a mathematics for such a world ; but it is impossible to imagine life under such con- ditions. The reason is that our minds are built on the plan of space of three dimensions, and the moment we try to picture anything for the imagination, we give it length, breadth and thickness. So it is possible to conceive the ex- istence of an immaterial soul; but when we imagine it, we usually represent it as an at- tentuated transparent body in space of three dimensions. This leads inevitably to absurd contradictions, as when Dante represents the immaterial soul of Virgil holding Dante and his physical body on the back of the mon- ster Geryon. Similarly we can think the idea of an omnipresent, omniscient God, but we cannot imagine Him, and every attempt to do so ends in absurdity. That is why paint- ing and sculpture fail so universally in their MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 221 attempts to portray the Divine. The Greek gods are satisfying because they are so human. They represent phases and attributes of man lifted to the skies. Take in contrast, one of the most wonderful of all efforts to paint God Michael Angelo's Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Twice God said, "Let there be light" : once when physical light came, and again the greater wonder when the human soul was born. The figure of the Divine, in this fresco, appears above, sur- rounded by angels, with one strange feminine figure under the arm. The right hand is stretched out, and one finger touches the finger of Adam, who lies recumbent upon the ground. Now we know what Michael Angelo meant in the portrayal of the Most High ; but what has he really given for the senses and the imag- ination? A large, old, bearded man. That, to represent God? It is merely an absurd caricature compared to our conception of the Divine. The Adam, on the other hand, is en- tirely satisfying. As you look upon him, you realize that a moment ago he was the dust of the earth. The finger of God touches him, and you can almost see dawning in his face the 222 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART look of wonder, heartache, world-hunger, tragedy, that was to be human life ever after. The point is, Michael Angelo knew man, he had lived man, he could paint man; but when he wanted to represent God, the best he could do was to portray a man's face and body, and omit the elements more definitely human. Poetry fails in the same way. Milton at- tempts in Paradise Lost to represent an om- nipotent, omniscient God at war with part of his subjects. How impossible to imagine! You understand his conception, but the God he has painted is, for the imagination, a jealous ty- rant whom you cannot respect. Milton's Adam and Eve are not vitally moving; but the great, strong, marred, Anglo-Saxon rebel Satan, who would rather "reign in hell than serve in heaven," takes powerful hold of the imagination, if you allow yourself to respond directly to the poetry, (The reason is that Milton himself was a good deal like his hero, Satan; he understood that character, and hence could portray it with satisfying reality?) What is impossible to the arts picturing for the imagination is, in a different way, accom- plished by music, since music can waken in us MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 223 the emotions we feel when we think the tran- scendent, the supernatural, the Divine. Think, for example, your own conception of God: you could not imagine it ; no artist could paint it ; but have you not heard strains of music, as for instance, in the third movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, that awaken in you the emotion you feel when you think your conception of God? So it is possible to conceive a transcendent heaven, perfectly satisfying. No artist could paint or describe it; and the heaven of golden streets and pearly gates never can appeal to the imagination as satisfyingly as green grass, blue skies and gray seas. Have you not, how- ever, heard music, as in the most moving por- tion of the love-music of Tristan und Isolde, that put you into just the emotional state you are in when you think your conception of a transcendent heaven of joy? Music is thus rightly said to be "the one art capable of revealing the infinite." It does not, strictly speaking, reveal the infinite, but it can awaken in us the emotions associated with the conception of it. That is what Browning's Abt Vogler means in speaking of the miracle 224 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART achieved by music, as compared with the other arts: "But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are ! And I know not if, save in this, such gift be al- lowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught ; It is everywhere in the world loud, soft, and all is said: Give it to me to use ! I mix it with two in my thought : And, there ! Ye have heard and seen : consider and bow the head !" The wonder is that a series of forms in the physical world, born and dying in quick succession, can produce another series in the psychical world a series of emotional states which we experience. How did the first series produce the second? To answer this question would be to touch the heart of the mystery of all life. Thus music stands in unique rela- MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 225 tion to the life of the spirit; the response to music is the best symbol for the deepest phases of the inner life ; and Browning is right, in Abt Vogler, in passing from the highest experience of music to the philosophy of the soul. From what has been said it will be evident that music is the most personal of the arts, ( searching down into the spirit and bringing to expression feelings that lie far too deep for words ever to embody them. Did you ever sit through an evening of great music, and at the end turn unconsciously to those near you, won- dering if your soul had been laid bare to them as it had been to yourself? One realizes then how deeply personal are the emotions which music wakens in the appreciative hearer. Take for illustration a typical modern com- position Wagner's Overture to Tannhduser. Other arts could present the different motives. Sculpture could carve its golden Venus, paint- ing portray its maiden Elizabeth, poetry could describe the pilgrims returning from the south ; but in the music all these are given at once. In the shrill cry of passion that echoes from the vibrant strings of the violin, in the noble motif of Elizabeth, the deep tones of the pilgrim 226 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART chorus, it is as if a cross-section had been taken at a single instant of the human spirit. Man is not led now by one desire and now by an- other, but a thousand desires play upon the body and spirit all the time; and, until one of them has been affirmed and made a motive, the individual might move in any direction. Thus the music can take the wealth of desires and aspirations and fuse them in one great billowy ocean of sound which, as in this Over- ture,, sweeps over us and seems almost to draw the breath from the body. If music is thus the most personal of the arts, it is at the same time the most social. It is an art we enjoy together; and if all the listeners appreciate, the more there are present, the greater joy should there be for each. 'Music, moreover, makes its appeal to that aspect of life which unifies us. The intellect isolates, the emotions unite. Men are sepa- rated by intellectual opinion and conviction, they are united in feeling whether it be the passion of the mob or the aspiration of hu- Smanity. Thus the spatial arts define, isolate, clarify; music fuses, sweeps, unites. This should make clear why music is at once a primi- MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 227 tive and universal art, and one expressing the utmost refinement of civilization. Thus it is easy to see why music lends itself so readily to combination with other arts, since they may give the definite conceptions with which music associates its emotional appeal. The composite arts, which form so remarkable an expression of modern life, are reserved for discussion in a subsequent chapter (XV) ; meantime, let us note that their development has been made possible by the wonderful cul- tivation of the art of music in modern times. Alone or in combination, music does its work, cultivating and refining the sensuous and emotional susceptibility, and thus rendering one more finely and deeply responsive to all beauty, to love, the moral ideal and religion. It may exalt one to a plane where, for a time, the ideal seems possible, and is more possible. Thus the marvelous, fluid, ever-growing tem- ple of sound, surviving across the centuries in a few black marks upon a page, recreated in a liquid wonder of flowing forms by each artist anew, fulfills a wondrous function for the spirit of man, and has therefore won its place as a leading expression of modern life. "If it is true that painting and poetry in their imitations make use of entirely different means or symbols the first, namely, of form and color in space, the second of articulated sounds in time if these symbols indisputably require a suit- able relation to the thing symbolized, then it is clear that sym- bols arranged in juxtaposition can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition; while con- secutive symbols can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts are themselves consecutive. Subjects whose wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition are called bodies. Consequently, bodies with their visible proper- ties are the peculiar subjects of painting. Subjects whose wholes or parts are consecutive are called actions. Consequently, actions are the peculiar subject of poetry. Still, all bodies do not exist in space only, but also in time. They endure, and in each moment of their duration may assume a different appearance, or stand in a different combination. Each of these momentary appearances and com- binations is the effect of a preceding one, may be the cause of a subsequent one, and is therefore, as it were, the centre of an action. Consequently, painting too can imitate actions, but only indicatively, by means of bodies. On the other hand, actions cannot exist by themselves, they must depend on certain beings. So far, 'therefore, as these beings are bodies, or are regarded as such, poetry paints bodies, but only indicatively, by means of actions. In its coexisting compositions painting can only make use of a single instant of the action, and must therefore choose the one which is most pregnant, and from which what pre- cedes and what follows can be most easily gathered. In like manner, poetry, in its progressive imitations, is confined to the use of a single property of bodies, and must therefore choose that which calls up the most sensible image of the body in the aspect in which she makes use of it." Lessing, Laokoon, pp. 91, 92. 228 CHAPTER XIII THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF PO- ETRY: THE RELATION OF POETRY TO SCULPTURE AND PAINTING WE have found Music, presenting its dynamic series of sound forms in time relation, strikingly contrasting in function with sculpture and painting, the arts portraying forms in space relations. We turn now to the third great type of ideal art, literature, studied in its highest aspect, poetry. There is a more bewildering wealth of material in this art than in all the others, and, as we shall see, the widest range of functions. Per- haps these can be made evident most quickly if we begin by comparing poetry with the arts previously studied, and first with sculpture. Let it be noted that poetry can carve its marble statues, though with less power and by other methods than sculpture. It can express definite conceptions for the intellect, through spatial forms given for the imagination. Let 229 230 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART us take a great example in one of Shelley's most powerful sonnets: OZYMANDIAS OF E&YPT "I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed ; And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away." Let us omit, for the present, the element of music in the poem, and consider only what is ^carved and painted for the imagination. The ; ruined statue is given here, no less truly than in sculpture, though for the inner vision, and with less smiting impressiveness than if one stood in the desolate sand-waste beside the legs of stone, with the shattered head lying near. THE MEANING OF POETRY 231 It is given, however, not by the combination of the forms in space for the eye, but through the enumeration of a series of characteristic traits in time succession. Thus the imagina- tion of the reader must cooperate actively in fusing these traits in one, in order to see the statue and its setting with the inner vision. That is why the success of the descriptive poem depends upon the wise choice of characteristic traits and suggestive epithets and images, which enable the reader to see the picture as a whole with the imagination. Wise restraint on the poet's part is necessary, since too many traits and images confuse and obscure the vis- ion. Thus Shelley's genius is evident in the choice here: "vast" and "trunkless" "legs of stone"; a "shattered" visage, with "frown" and "wrinkled lip" and "sneer of cold com- mand": these most significant traits and sug- gestive epithets are just enough powerfully to stimulate the imagination to the vision of the ruined statue. So in portraying the setting: "boundless" and "bare," the "lone" and "level" sands "stretch far away": one seems really to stand in the sand waste and look out over the majestic desolation, 232 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Poetry must therefore depend upon associa- . / tion and suggestion for its carrying power in * description; and one mark of a great poet is the ability to choose powerfully visualizing V epithets and images. Homer's traditional greatness, for example, results in no small measure from his preeminent possession of this quality "ox-eyed Juno," "rosy-fingered Dawn," "blue-eyed Pallas," "earth-shaking Neptune," "swift-footed Iris," "cloud-com- pelling Zeus," "far-darting Apollo," "golden Aphrodite": the atmosphere of the Iliad de- pends much upon these wonderfully suggestive epithets. It was this fact that poetry must present its traits of form in time succession, while sculp- ture and painting combine them in space rela- tions, that Lessing hit upon in the Laokoon, though his interpretation was faulty. He con- cluded, from this contrast, that the business of sculpture and painting was to portray bodies in space, while poetry should present actions in time. The view is illuminating, and was especially so to that fresh awakening of Ger- man art in which Lessing was so great an in- spiration; yet the conclusion goes beyond the THE MEANING OF POETRY 233 mark. The spatial arts can represent action, sometimes most powerfully, as in Meissonier's great painting previously studied ; but only by portraying bodies in space at a significant mo- ment of action. So poetry can present bodies, but only through a series of suggestive traits given in time succession. Thus Lessing was right as to the main business of the two types of art; but each reaches over into the field of the other far more than he was aware; and while description, or the portrayal of bodies in space, is not the chief function of poetry, it is a most significant element, accomplished by the method we have shown. We experience sensuous pleasure in seeing, with the inner vision, what Shelley has carved and painted for us; but this pleasure is less direct and strong than with sculpture, where the forms and colors are given for the actual physical vision. On the other hand, just be- cause the sensuous response is more subtle and indirect, the spiritual content in poetry is less bound to sensuous associations than is the case in sculpture and painting, while the aesthetic satisfaction in the adequacy and harmony with 234 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART which the conceptions are expressed, is as great certainly as in the case of the other arts. With the limitation in its power to present forms in space, as compared with sculpture, poetry has a complementary greatness in dir- ectly associating with these forms a wide range of thoughts and emotions, thus interpreting them in terms of the human spirit. Sculpture gives us the statue, and we make of it what we can. Poetry, less powerfully and directly, gives us the statue, and associates its interpre- tation in terms of human thought and feeling. When Shelley says of the shattered face : "Whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed," we know fully the impression made by the fallen statue on Shelley's mind and heart, and we share his experience. So with the irony of the inscription in relation to the fallen statue and desolate sand waste: we are made to feel the tragic vanity of the great king's arrogance in imagining that his works would be the de- THE MEANING OF POETRY 235 spair of subsequent tyrants, while only the ruin of his own statue faintly records his otherwise forgotten name. As indicated in this study of Shelley's son- net, poetry can paint its picture as well as carve its statue. Let us take an example of pure descriptive poetry at its best one of Wordsworth's finest sonnets: UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE Sept. 3, 1802. "Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky, All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill ; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; And all that mighty heart is lying still ! " 236 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART To make clear the comparison with paint- ing, think what Corot would have done with this scene. He would have given us in one painting the whole sleeping city, with the sun- light and atmosphere over it, seen from a single view-point, in one moment of time^ the different elements being combined in a unity in space relations. He would have burned the scene in on the imagination, through the physical vision, with a power greater even than Wordsworth's; yet the poet succeeds in painting the picture, through the J succession of forms suggested for the imagina- tion, which must fuse these in one scene. In- deed, Wordsworth even ventures upon a cata- logue a dangerous device in poetry even Homer nods when he attempts to catalogue the ships for Ilium; yet here the enumeration of "ships, towers, domes, theatres and tem- ples," gives just those big elements of the pic- ture necessary to visualizing it as a whole. If less pregnant than Shelley's in giving vital concrete traits, Wordsworth's sonnet is wider in its use of suggestive association. Com- pare the city wearing "like a garment" the "beauty of the morning"; the various aspects THE MEANING OF POETRY 237 of the city "silent, bare" "open unto the fields, and to the sky," "all bright and glittering in the smokeless air." How these descriptive words and phrases carry the atmosphere of the scene and stimulate the imagination to realize it as a whole. So with the river gliding "at his own sweet will," in implied contrast with the week days, when the river is dominated by human traffic; and the "very houses" asleep, with the "mighty heart" of the city "lying still," in strange contrast to the usual restless activity of the city: one gets the very mood of its impression on this beautiful Sunday morning. The beauty of the picture, painted by the poem with the cooperation of the reader's inner vision, gives keen sensuous pleasure, as well as aesthetic delight, which springs also from the harmony in the expression of the thought and mood. More than in Shelley's sonnet, there is here direct expression of both thought and emotion, through the interpretation of the scene in its impression on Wordsworth's own senses, mind and heart. "Dull would he be who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty," 238 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART gives the poet's own view as to what man's re- lations to such a scene should be. Then the contrast, suggested in a few brief touches, with the nature world, to which we usually turn for the beauty of calm repose; affirming the sleeping city as equally beautiful in the radiance of the sunlight, and even more peace- ful, in ironic opposition to its usual mood: all this is interpretation of the given picture in terms of the human spirit. Let me take, as a third illustration, a bit of my own work that happens to contain ele- ments of both sculpture and painting. On the bold front of a mountain in the Franconia notch, in New Hampshire, looks out the stern profile of a human face not a mere freak of nature, but majestic beyond what one could be- lieve beforehand, and worthy to have been chiseled by the hand of God. It and its set- ting form the theme in the following : THE GREAT STONE FACE Stern, grave and silent, majestically he broods Above the lake and forests stretched below; Not answering to the call of human voices That, shallow in laughter, or deep in awestruck tones, THE MEANING OF POETRY 239 Sound o'er the lake and wake the echoing hills; Projecting from the mountain's naked front, As reaching out to meet on equal terms And with a calmer strength the onrushing storms. Harsh as the granite of the mountain heights, Yet smoothed as by the flow of living waters That round the boulders on the eternal slopes; Gigantic in the strength of even brow And long, firm nose above the hard, rude chin ; Yet open lips, just parted, wonderingly, As with the eternal question, ever asked But never answered by the mind of man ; The suppressed tenderness but gathering force From the hard strength that drives all feeling back : Inexorable Nature in the pitiless calm, Human in depth and might of life reserved, As hungering to break the eternal silence In one great, wild, all-voicing human cry. Such is the face ! Gaze and be silent, Man, And learn that in this mystic sculpturing Of the Almighty Hand, are fused in one The two supreme, unanswered mysteries Nature and Man, revealed but unexplained. The face is chiseled, but less directly and impressively than in sculpture. The environ- ing nature world is pictured, but less power- fully than in painting. Instead of giving the 240 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART different forms fused in space relations, in one moment of time, the poem must carve the face and paint the picture by a succession of forms given in time relation. The descriptive epithets and phrases not only aid the imagina- tion to visualize the objects portrayed, but add the association of human thought and emotion. Finally, the poem gives the direct interpreta- tion of the face and its surroundings in terms of the spirit of man. Turning again for a moment to Lessing's view of the relation of poetry to sculpture and painting, we should now be able to see clearly at once its value and faults. In sculpture and painting the aim is, as Lessing saw, to por- tray objective forms and colors directly for the eye, and through these to give concepts for the intellect; while (though in larger measure than Lessing realized) action and the development of a story can be represented only by choosing a significant moment of the action. In poetry the description of objects is not an end, and so far Lessing was right ; it is, however, a legiti- mate means, the aim being to give and inter- pret the object or scene, in terms of human thought and feeling, and by the less direct THE MEANING OF POETRY 241 method of a succession of traits and associa- tions given in time relation. Thus without in any degree taking the place of sculpture and painting, or fulfilling their specific functions, poetry does reach over into the field of those arts, combining something of their functions with purposes of its own. Let us compare the treatment of the same theme in the two contrasting types of art. In the modern gallery at Florence is a painting by Castagnola representing Fra Lippo Lippi making love to the novice, Lucrezia Buti, who served as his model for the frescoes at Prato. The girl, in convent garb, is seated in a chair. The painter has turned toward her from his easel and half-finished picture. She draws back half -frightened, yet fascinated; in her face is portrayed the struggle between the old life, with its vows, habits and training, and the flood of new life that surges up into consciousness and takes possession of her above her will. No poem could give that one psychological mo- ment, with all it carries of past and future, so powerfully as does this painting. Browning's dramatic monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi cannot bring home the one situa- 242 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART tion to the physical vision, and through it to the intellect, with the same reality; yet in the poem, the painter, surprised by the night watch as he is sneaking home from some merry ren- dezvous to the hospitable prison of the Medi- cean palace, tells the whole story of his life. He narrates the main incidents of his career from childhood onward, giving his relation to the cloister, his view of art, a suggestive de- scription of certain of his paintings, and the heart of his character and attitude toward life. Thus, with far less smiting power in giving di- rectly for the physical sense, and through it for the intellect, one moment of the painter's life, the poem gives a vastly wider view of Fra Lippo, of his epoch and his relation to art and life in all time. In the Metropolitan gallery in New York, among other beautiful landscape paintings, is an October Afternoon by J. Francis Murphy. It is all in soft yellows. The trees are still; the leaves are golden upon them and upon the ground. The moment chosen is the one when Nature flames forth in her loveliest garment before the gray white sleep of the winter time. One dreams of the summer that is gone and THE MEANING OF POETRY 243 anticipates the chill that is soon coming. That moment, with the conceptions it involves, is given perfectly in the painting, and the mood one brings is naturally associated. Compare with this the following sonnet of Shakespeare's to my mind the most beauti- ful ever written in the freer English form : "That time of year thou may'st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang: In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest: In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by: This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long." Three pictures are painted in the three quatrains severally. Each is beautiful, clear 244 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART to the inner vision, done through a few most skillfully suggested traits. How far short each of these pictures falls of the actual painting for the outer eye; yet the traits given carry a definite thought and mood, and interpret what they give to the imagination. Finally, the last two lines interpret the autumn, the twilight, the dying fire upon the hearth, in terms of the deepest experiences of the human heart, thus making the three pictures a symbolic language for life and love. "Form without substance is a shadow of riches, and all possible cleverness in expression is of no use to him who has nothing to express." Schiller, Essays jEsthetical and Philo- sophical, p. 239. "Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity, I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simpli- city which is only an euphuism for folly." Plato, Republic, book III, section 400. "In instruments, the primal organs of creation and nature find their representation; they cannot be sharply determined and defined, for they but repeat primal feelings as they came forth from the chaos of the first creation, when there were perhaps no human beings in existence to receive them in their hearts. With the genius of the human voice it is en- tirely otherwise; this represents the human heart, and its iso- lated, individual emotion. Its character is therefore limited, but fixed and defined. Let these two elements be brought to- gether, then; let them be united! Let those wild primal emo- tions that stretch out into the infinite, that are represented by instruments, be contrasted with the clear, definite emotions of the human heart, represented by the human voice. The addition of the second element will work beneficently and soothingly upon the conflict of the elemental emotions, and give to their course a well-defined and united channel; and the human heart itself, in receiving these elemental emotions, will be immeasurably strengthened and broadened; and made capable of feeling clearly what was before an uncertain pres- age of the highest ideal, now changed into a divine*knowledge." Wagner, in "A Pilgrimage to Beethoven,"^ rt Life and The- ories, p. 63. 246 CHAPTER XIV THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF POETRY: THE RELATION OF POETRY TO MUSIC SO far we have been studying poetry in comparison with sculpture and painting; let us turn now to its relation to the other great type of art music. All the poems studied in the preceding chapter have a direct musical appeal; in fact, the direct sensuous effect of poetry is to the physical hearing. All poetry is meant to be read aloud, and must be so read to have its full effect; yet, even when read silently, we get the music for the inner hearing, just as we get the vision by the imag- ination. Read either way, silently or aloud, we must first get the words as sound forms before we can see the images with the inner vision. Thus the kinship of poetry to music is even closer than to the spatial arts. In fact, all the elements of music are present in each of the poems studied. Rhythm is evident in carefully measured meter; melody is clearly 247 i 248 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART present in the ordered rise and fall of accented and unaccented syllables, in the diction, the variations of movement, and the modulations of the voice; while even technical harmony, if rightly defined as the consonance or concord of sounds occurring simultaneously or in quick succession, is evident in rhyme, phases of meter and stanza-form, to the extent to which it is used in the singing of a single voice. Even timbre is present in the general quality of the music in a poem as a whole. In Shelley's Ozymandias of Egypt the dic- tion is strong, sonorous, masculine, harmoniz- ing with the majesty of the description. The meter is iambic as we have seen, the simplest form in English, with only an occasional vari- ation of accent at the beginning of a line and a few three-syllable feet in the whole. The rhyme is somewhat irregular as compared with the strict sonnet form, but close enough to unify the whole in thought. The five-foot lines flow regularly, in stately harmony with the conceptions given. There is direct sensuous pleasure in the re- sponse to the musical appeal, though less than with an equally great composition of music. POETRY AND MUSIC 249 Keen aesthetic satisfaction is given by the har- mony between the music and the spiritual con- tent it embodies. A generic mood is awakened in the reader; but with this the poem directly associates a range of forms and pictures for the imagination, and of definite conceptions and reflections for the intellect, thus passing beyond the scope and function of the art of music. All the elements of musical appeal, studied in Shelley's sonnet, are present equally in Wordsworth's Upon Westminster Bridge. Here the strict Italian sonnet form is observed, the thought being divided in harmony with it the first eight lines describing the city, while the last six compare it with nature and give the interpretation of the whole. The meter, again iambic, moves with stately regularity, the variations at the beginning of certain lines (as the first, second and ninth) serving to em- phasize important words. The diction is less severely majestic and more softly melodious than in Shelley's sonnet, thus appropriately carrying the mood of peace which the poem contains. The rhyme-sounds, closely inte- grated, are especially melodious. 250 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART With the sensuous and sesthetic pleasure, given by the music and its harmony with the content, the poem expresses a definite mood of peace, and awakes the corresponding emotional state in the hearer or reader. Thus the poem goes over into the field of music and fulfills directly something of the function of that art ; but with the emotional appeal of the music, how vital is the range of associated images and reflections, interpreted in terms of the spirit of man. The direct musical appeal of poetry is suffi- ciently strong to give some emotional effect when a poem is read aloud in a language we do not understand. Let Sappho's Ode to Aphro- dite be read to one ignorant of Greek: could the hearer fail to respond to the beauty of the liquid music, and could he fail to get, from the music alone, something of the general mood of the poem? Would not the dirge-like lines of Freiligrath's O lieb*, so lang du lieben kannst* awaken the mood of tender sadness even in one ignorant of German? So when Dante's Francesca sobs, "Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona," * For an English translation see the author's Book of Meditations, pp. 64, 65. POETRY AND MUSIC 251 it is "like the murmuring of doves in immemo- rial elms," as a critic has said, trying to echo in his harsher English the moaning melody of the original. No one could listen to Fran- cesca's lines without some emotional response, even if the Italian words meant nothing to him. The musical element in poetry is so signifi- cant that there are many poems in which it makes the primary and stronger appeal, as for instance in the following burst of Elizabethan love song: DlAPHENIA "Diapheriia like the daffadowndilly, White as the sun, fair as the lily, Heigh ho, how I do love thee ! I do love thee as my lambs Are beloved of their dams ; How blest were I if thou wouldst prove me. Diaphenia like the spreading roses, That in thy sweets all sweets encloses, Fair sweet, how I do love thee ! I do love thee as each flower Loves the sun's life-giving power ; For dead, thy breath to life might move me. 252 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Diaphenia like to all things blessed When all thy praises are expressed, Dear joy, how I do love thee! As the birds do love the spring, Or the bees their careful king: Then in requite, sweet virgin, love me ! " * This is an outpouring of pure melody com- parable to a bird song. The emotion is so exultant and exuberant that it breaks out in most exquisitely irregular metrical form. Try to scan a stanza, and you find dactyls, trochees, spondees and even iambic feet in the measure, poured out with an abandon; yet every varia- tion in the measure quickening the movement, emphasizing pregnant words, or otherwise adding to the beautiful artistry by which the mood of the poem finds expression. As we have seen, classic scansion applies poorly to English verse ; but the names of the feet are of no consequence: the significance is in the de- termination of the melody by the relation of accented to unaccented syllables. * Constable, Palgrave's Golden Treasury, pp. 9, 10, Mac- millan & Co., New York, 1888. POETRY AND MUSIC 253 Diapne / nia / iFke tfie / daffa'down / dTlly, White as tfre / suit/ fair as tKe / lily, Heigh ho, / how I do / love thee ! I do / love thee / as my / lambs Are be / lew*! / of tReir / dams ; How blest / were T/ if thou / would'st prove / inc. Is not the poem just a burst of song; and does not its music waken in the hearer the very mood of springtime, early morning sunlight and the awakening of youthful love? A greater example of poetry that is pri- marily music, is given in Shelley's wonderful, melodious lyric, To THE NIGHT "Swiftly walk over the western wave, Spirit of Night ! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear Which make thee terrible and dear, Swift be thy flight ! Wrap thy form in a mantle gray Star-inwrought ; Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day, 254 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Kiss her until she be wearied out : Then wander o'er city and sea and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand Come, long-sought ! When I arose and saw the dawn, I sigh'd for thee; When light rode high, and the dew was gone, And noon lay heavy on flower and tree, And the weary Day turn'd to his rest Lingering like an unloved guest, I sigh'd for thee. Thy brother Death came, and cried Wouldst thou me? Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Murmur'd like a noon-tide bee Shall I nestle near thy side? Wouldst thou me? and I replied No, not thee ! Death will come when thou art dead, Soon, too soon Sleep will come when thou art fled ; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, beloved night Swift be thine approaching flight, Come soon, soon ! " POETRY AND MUSIC 255 Here the dominant appeal of Shelley is through music to the emotions, as in his Ozymandias of Egypt it is through imagery to the inner vision and the intellect. Is it not significant that one poet should have written both? In the lyric To the Night the imagery is vague, dreamy, suggestive, not intended to produce clear pictures for the imagination. If one attempts definitely to visualize it, the effect is almost ludicrous. Try it with the first two stanzas. Note, too, that "Day" is made feminine in the second stanza, masculine in the third! This produces no jar, however, be- cause the Day is so vaguely personified. The point is that the value of the imagery is, here, not in giving definite pictures for the inner vision, but in suggestion and color associated with the dominant mood. On the other hand, what liquid, limpid music the poem is ! The diction is full of open vowel sounds: noon, soon, boon, sweet, sleep, mur- mured such words give the key to the music. Two-syllable and three-syllable feet are used varyingly in the poem, with many dactyls the most musical foot in English. Note the liquid flow of the first three dactylic lines in 256 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART stanza one, and then the slowing down of the movement in the regular iambic lines, four, five and six, with the peculiar impressiveness of the two short lines, two and seven, made each of a dactyl and an accented syllable. In several of the following stanzas these two lines are still briefer, consisting of three syllables, two of which are accented. The student will find it worth while to go through the poem line by line, noting the musical effects and how they are produced ; and let him remember that there are no accidents in art. Finally, the long seven line stanza is closely integrated by the almost monotonous music of the rhyme, the scheme of which is ab ab c cb. Thus the music returns back into itself, closing the passage of melody at the end of each stanza. Since the appeal of this lyric is so domi- nately musical, let us compare its effect with that of a cognate work in the art of music, such ajs a nocturne of Chopin's. Both compositions present a series of sound forms in time succes- sion, based on the principles of rhythm, melody and harmony; but the nocturne is pure sound forms, while the lyric associates with these plastic forms for the inner vision. The sound POETRY AND MUSIC 257 forms in both compositions give direct sensu- ous pleasure; but this is more powerful and unmixed in the music, while the poem adds the less direct sensuous delight in the forms molded for the imagination. In both, is the same type of aesthetic satisfaction in the adequacy and harmony with which the spiritual content is expressed. The lyric, like the nocturne, tends to waken a dominant mood in the hearer and, beneath this, to carry him through a series of vaguely defined emotional states. The music does this far more powerfully, however, with more clearly defined emotions; but the poem associates, with the feelings awakened, a range of ideas and reflections for the intellect, and in- terprets both the thought and the emotion in terms of Shelley's experience and, therefore, of the life of man. Thus the poem unites some- thing of the function of sculpture and painting with something of the function of music in a new unity, more complex and many-sided in its expression of the human spirit. This is so true that we can find characteristic painter poets and singer poets the one ap- pealing primarily through imagery to the inner vision, the other through music to the ear. All 258 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART poetry uses, of course, both appeals, and in the greatest poetry they are combined in har- mony; but now one, now the other, may be dominant. Thus, with all his melody, Dante visualizes first and sings afterward; Milton dominantly makes sonorous music, and sub- ordinately paints for the imagination. So Browning is of the seers, Tennyson of the singers ; Shakespeare primarily creates for the imagination and intellect, Spenser molds har- monious melodies for the ear. To note how far the contrast may go, take a characteristic passage from the Faerie Queene, describing the descent of a spirit to the house of Morpheus to bring up a dream. Please note how difficult the situation itself is to imagine, while the description of the house of Morpheus is even ludicrous if you try, as you should not, to visualize it: "He, making speedy way through spersed ayre, And through the world of waters wide and deepe, To Morpheus house doth hastily repaire. Amid the bowels of the earth full steepe, And low, where dawning day doth never peepe, His dwelling is ; there Tethys his wet bed Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steepe POETRY AND MUSIC 259 In silver deaw his ever-drouping hed, Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spred. And unto Morpheus comes, whom drowned deepe In drowsie fit he findes ; of nothing he takes keepe. And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, And ever-drizling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne Of swarming bees, did caste him in a swowne. No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes, As still are wont t'annoy the walled towne, Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes, Wrapt in eternall silence far re from enimyes." * Try to realize the imagery, and note its utter inconsistency. The dwelling is in the bowels of the earth, where day never dawns; yet the dew is falling, the sea washes the bed of Mor- pheus; apparently the moon is shining while the rain is falling, a stream is tumbling down, a murmuring wind is making a sound like that of swarming bees! The effect is ludicrous if * Spenser, Faerie Queene, book I, Canto I. 260 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART one attempts to fuse the different images in a single picture; yet, here, that is just what one should not do. Spenser has gathered together all the images suggestive of sleep, woven them loosely together, and subordinated the whole to the wonderful slumbrous music of the pas- sage. Note the sound of the words : lull, slum- ber, streame, down, rain, murmuring, swarm- ing, sowne, swowne, towne they are all char- acteristic of the melody achieved through the regular, peacefully moving lines and the long, close, harmonious rhyme scheme. Poetry is thus the widest of the fine arts in function, combining in a new union something of the work of the two great contrasting types of art, without usurping the place of either. Hence poetry is the most universal and many- sided of the arts, in relation to the human spirit and in the interpretation of life. Lyric poetry can give a series of connected emotions and reflections revealing the life of the per- sonal spirit. The epic may portray a varied range of characters and narrate a succession of actions, interpreting both in relation to the whole life of man. The drama presents human beings in action and relation, on the stage of POETRY AND MUSIC 261 time, in the whole working out of character and conduct in relation to the laws of life. Prose, too, set in a lower key and there- fore with less restraint, can accomplish the same ends. If less exalted in artistic form than poetry, it is therefore often wider in scope. The novel is an epic-drama, lowered in key, but more complex in relation to life. Prose has, too, its rhythms and melodies: to realize this, one need but compare the organ-like music of De Quincey where passage after passage, by changing an occasional word, can be scanned as iambic blank verse with the music of a North Sea storm one hears in Carlyle's prose, with three accented monosyllables fre- quently occurring together. The contrast of seer and singer holds with prose writers as with poets : compare the constant picture making of Victor Hugo, with the subtly tender melody the ximagery constantly subordinated in the exquisite prose of Pierre Loti. Thus all the functions of poetry are fulfilled in prose as well; and our study has dealt chiefly with poetry only because it is the highest form of literature, in which the functions of the art can be most clearly seen. 262 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART It may help to clarify and fix our view of the respective functions of the great types of art if we take a few closing comparisons, con- sidering first the treatment of the same theme in the different arts. In Fitzgerald's render- ing of Omar Khayyam occur the following stanzas : "I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered 'I Myself am Heaven and Hell:' Heaven but the Vision of fulfilled Desire, And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves, So late emerged from, shall so soon expire." * Vedder has illustrated these on one page. Above, at the left, he has drawn a radiant face on a background of light; below, at the right, a face of agony on a background of flame and darkness; between them is a figure represent- ing the soul, with the symbolic swirl of life. The conceptions of the faces of joy and pain * Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald's translation, stanzas LXVI and LXVII. POETRY AND MUSIC 263 are given directly through the sense of sight and burned in on the imagination with a vital intensity poetry cannot equal. What could music give of the same theme? The answer is found in Liza Lehmann's In a Persian Garden not to look further. Music can give the mood of heaven and the mood of hell, awakening the emotional state we asso- ciate with the one and the other conception, with a power unequaled in any other art. The two stanzas of the poem give the con- ceptions, less powerfully and directly for the eye than in the drawing; unite with these the direct sensuous and emotional appeal of the grave music of the poem, less impressively than in the art of music; and add the interpretation of the whole in terms of human thought and feeling. Compare the fifth canto of Dante's Inferno with Watts's painting of Paolo and Francesca, and with the love music of Tristan und Isolde. Watts paints the lovers clinging together, swirling onward on the black air of hell. The two faces and bodies, in the eternal instant, are given with a direct smiting power no other art can equal; yet our feelings in the presence of 264 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART the painting are not determined by its concep- tions, but by our experience and knowledge of life. The love music of Tristan und Isolde sweeps us on to the bosom of the sea of emotion, melts us with the tenderness of love and longing, clutches us with the mood of Fate, with a com- manding power no other art can equal; yet many love-stories besides Isolde's and Fran- cesca's might be associated with the music. In Dante's canto the tw r o lovers are painted sweeping toward him on the purple air. They stop at the call of love, and Francesca moans out her story. The whole narration is given. The verse first pains with discordant words and bitter images, and then sobs with the music of Francesca's sighed-out story, as though with a moan of the universe over the bitterness of fate. The whole life story is given, the music of the verse is associated with it ; while, through the effect upon Dante's thought and feeling, the meaning of the whole in relation to human life is interpreted. If the student cares to go further, let him compare Michael Angelo's frescoes in the Sis- tine Chapel with Dante's Divine Comedy, and these with a fugue of Bach's and a symphony POETRY AND MUSIC 265 of Beethoven's; or let him compare Cormon's Cain with Wagner's music to the Gotterddm- merung, and these with Shakespeare's King Lear. In each instance the spatial arts are most powerful in rendering conceptions in statical form for the eye and the imagination; music excels all other arts in the sweeping appeal through dynamic forms to the ear and the emo- tions; while poetry unites something of both types of appeal in a new complex whole, in- terpreted in terms of human thought and feeling. With this differentiation in function it is impossible to say that any one art is the high- est: each is supreme in its own way and in its own service to the spirit of man. One may prefer roses to lilies, or violets to roses, but one cannot say that any one of these is the most beautiful of flowers. So one may be drawn most deeply by a particular art, but one must recognize that this means only a special respon- siveness to the function of that art, and not at all that the art is to be ranked above the others objectively. Each is highest in its own field, and all are needed to express and interpret fully the life of man. "We leave a grand musical performance with our feelings excited, the reading of a noble poem with a quickened imagina- tion, a beautiful statue or building with an awakened under- standing; but a man would not choose an opportune moment who attempted to invite us to abstract thinking after a high musical enjoyment, or to attend to a prosaic affair of common life after a high poetical enjoyment, or to kindle our imagina- tion and astonish our feelings directly after inspecting a fine statue or edifice. The reason of this is, that music, by its matter, even when most spiritual, presents a greater affinity with the senses than is permitted by aesthetic liberty; it is because even the most happy poetry, having for its medium, the arbitrary and contingent play of the imagination, always shares in it more than the intimate necessity of the really beautiful allows; it is because the best sculpture touches on severe science by what is determinate in its conception. How- ever, these particular affinities are lost in proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise to a greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of their per- fection, that, without confounding their objective limits, the different arts come to resemble each other more and more, in the action which they exercise on the mind. At its highest degree of ennobling, music ought to become a form, and act on us with the calm power of an antique statue; in its most elevated perfection, the plastic art ought to become music and move us by the immediate action exercised on the mind by the senses; in its most complete development, poetry ought both to stir us powerfully like music and like plastic art to surround us with a peaceful light. In each art, the perfect style consists exactly in knowing how to remove specific limits, while sacrificing at the same time the particular advantages of the art, and to give it by a wise use of what belongs to it specially a more general character." Schiller, Essays ^Estheti- cal and Philosophical, pp. 90, 91. 266 CHAPTER XV THE UNITY OF THE ARTS IN striving to see clearly the specific func- tion of each of the arts, we must beware of forgetting that the human spirit is, after all, a unity, and therefore every expression of it is a unity. Thus whatever element may be dominant in a work of art, the appeal is to the whole human spirit, so that what is explicit and definite in one type of art will be found to be implicit and subordinate in the contrast- ing type. In sculpture and painting we have found the conceptions given, the emotions asso- ciated by the observer; in music, the direct appeal is to the emotions, while the intellectual reflections are associated by the hearer; in poetry, both conceptions and emotions are ex- pressed in harmony. In the spatial arts, form is statical and relatively permanent ; in music, the sound forms are given in a dynamic and evanescent series; in poetry, the forms occur in a dynamic but permanent series. All the 267 268 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART arts give sensuous pleasure: in sculpture and painting this is through the physical vision ; in music, by the sense of hearing; poetry appeals to both sight and hearing, but less immediately, and, with vision at least, only through the imagination. All the arts give aesthetic satis- faction and from the same cause the adequate and harmonious expression, in different ways, of the spiritual content in appropriate form. Thus the same elements are present in some measure in all the arts. Form in sculpture and painting is represented in music by rhythm and harmony, in poetry, by the meter, the stanza-form and the organization of thought. Color in the spatial arts may be compared to melody and timbre in music, to modulations of the voice, accent, rhyme and the melody of words in poetry. Such comparisons are se- ductive and may easily be carried too far to the point of obscuring the unique function of each art. They help us to see, however, that while each art fulfills its own function, un- equaled by any other, there is great unity among the arts, and all alike appeal to the whole spirit of man. There is deep significance in the fact that THE UNITY OF THE ARTS 269 / all the arts are alike expressions of the human ^ spirit. Plato, toward the close of the Repub- lic, in one of those errors, as illuminating as his insights, argues that art is but "an imita- tion of an imitation." * The abstract idea, he holds, is the reality. The form in nature is but an imperfect copy of this ; while the artist's imitation of nature is doubly removed from reality. So Homer and similar artists, Plato holds, apparently with some reluctance, must be excluded from the ideal state. Sound enough the view is if art be merely imitation ; but how if we recognize it to be creative expression through which alone the idea can be realized? The intellect must strive for abstract concep- tions, in the effort to discover the unifying type behind the individuals given in nature; but the abstract concept is barren until it is given creative expression in some concrete form. We strive to go beyond men and arrive at the ab- stract conception, man; but this idea is vitally realized only when it is incarnated in a Faust, a Hamlet or an Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Plato's own artistic portrayal of the one good man, Socrates, in the Apology, Crito * Plato, Republic, book X. 270 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART and Plicedo, is vastly more effective than his relatively barren "pure idea of the Good." So Goethe's Helena means far more than any abstract conception of beauty; Browning's Caponsacchi, than any idea of manhood; the women of Shakespeare, than any theoretic ideal of womanhood. There is a fundamental quar- rel here between the metaphysicians and the artists: the one seeking truth in intellectual abstractions from life, the other striving to attain it in creative expression in living form. I am with the artists in this conflict. The only road to the infinite is the finite ; the ideal is real only when the effort is made to express it in some concrete action. Thus the glory of art is that it is not imitation, but creative expres- sion in concrete form, through which alone great ideals and conceptions can be achieved for the mind and spirit of man. The paradox is that Plato the poet among philosophers fulfills in the Dialogues the very function of the art he discredits and fails to understand, in that he presents truth in the form and color of life, from the view-points of the minds be- holding it. The unity of the arts is evident, not only in THE UNITY OF THE ARTS 271 the elements eemmeff to them all, but in the way they can be combined into composite arts, more complex in appeal. Let it be noted that, wherever such combination occurs, each art must concede something, now one sacrificing more, now another. Song is an excellent ex- ample of composite art, where music and poetry are united in a new appeal. Usually poetry makes the sacrifice in current singing, for the words are so mumbled that they might as well be given in a foreign language as is frequently done. In certain forms of church music, on the other hand, the words are chant- ed with reasonable clearness, while the music is subordinated. Where song is at its best, both poetry and music are given so that the ideas of the poem are definitely associated with the series of emo- tional states aroused by the music. One of the most perfect examples of this composite art is Schumann's wonderful song-cycle, Frauen- liebe und Leben, written to the poem of Chamisso. Here the critical moments of the woman's life the courtship, betrothal, wedding, the child's coming, the separation through death are taken, beautifully ren- 272 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART dered in the poetry, while the interpretation by the music is in simply perfect harmony. Such a composite art goes beyond either of its components in appeal, yet the attention is divided, so that even here each art must sacri- fice something of its independent effect. Song, let it be noted, is peculiarly adapted to the pur- poses of religion, since the emotional appeal of music may put the hearer into an earnestly receptive mood, while the poem or words sung may, at the same time, give definite ethical and religious conceptions. The acted drama is a still more composite art. Poetry is present in the lines spoken, painting in the scenic background, while sculp- ture is carried into living action in the poses and movements of the actors. The result is a most absorbing complex appeal. The need of the modern spirit has carried us one step fur- ther. The most remarkable of all composite arts is the music drama as developed by Wagner. Here are present all the arts com- bined in the drama, with music in addition, making the most powerful appeal of all. Thus sculpture, painting, poetry, dramatic action, orchestric dancing and music all unite in this THE UNITY OF THE ARTS 273 complex art in one manifold appeal to the whole spirit of man. Perhaps the study we have made may help us to solve a long-continued controversy re- garding the music drama. Wagner held that in it poetry and dramatic action constituted the center, while music was associated; most of his enthusiastic disciples have held, and still hold, that music is the center, with the other arts subordinated to it. Now, chronologically, vague states of feeling precede clear intelli- gence; but, logically, perception or conception always precedes emotion. Dante and Spinoza were right in alike holding this. Definitely to love or hate anything, we must first perceive or conceive it. On the other hand, while the emotional "affect" follows the perception or conception, it is far more deeply moving. Thus while poetry and dramatic action are logically prior in the music drama, and therefore cen- tral, as Wagner taught, the musical effect is vastly more powerful. This is so true that when one is intimately familiar with a Wag- nerian opera, one often prefers to close one's eyes, and hear the music, undistracted by ap- peals to the vision. 274 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Just because the emotional appeal is the most moving, music generally loses less than the other arts when in combination with them. Does this not mean that, whatever art is cen- tral in the combination, music will be dom- inant? If so, it is not difficult to see what will be possible in "the music of the future," or rather, the composite art of the future. It is certain that each art must sacrifice some- thing when in combination % with others, but when music is constantly present, there must probably be a greater subordination of the other arts to music than Wagner thought necessary. Let me add that the music drama is an in- teresting illustration of the law of evolution from a homogeneous basis, through differentia- tion, to unity on a higher plane. Out of the generic basis in a single act of early Greek wor- ship the fine arts have been severally devel- oped, to be brought again into composite union in the music drama the art peculiarly expres- sive of the complex needs of modern civiliza- tion. There is ample room for all the arts and for all possible combinations of them, in answering the manifold needs of the human spirit. "You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not rightly understand." Leonardo da Vinci, Leo- nardo da Vinci's Note-Books, arranged by Edward McCurdy, p. 58. "It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the understanding only deserves respect when it re- acts on the character; to a certain extent it is from the character that this light proceeds; for the road that termi- nates in the head must pass through the heart. Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time is to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to render effica- cious in practice the improvement of ideas, but to call this improvement into existence." Schiller, Essays ffisthetical and Philosophical, p. 48. "It is our actors, singers, and musicians upon whose own instincts all hope for the attainment of artistic objects must rest, even when these objects themselves may be incompre- hensible to them. For they must be the ones to whom these objects will most speedily become clear, as soon as their own artistic instincts are put upon the right path toward their recognition." Wagner, Art Life and Theories, p. 231. 276 CHAPTER XVI THE DANGERS OF ART ART can readily be misused, and there are certain dangers even in great art, in- separable from its very nature and the methods it employs. Throughout our dis- cussion the element of sensuous beauty has been emphasized; it is deeply significant, but as a means rather than an end. The appeal of all art is to the senses, but through the senses to the souL If then the artist forgets the soul and appeals only to the senses, the danger is that the sensuous may pass over into the sensual, art degenerating into a mere pan- dering to the caprices of the sense life. Sy- monds recognized this in a pregnant passage in his discussion of the Italian renaissance: "On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages the Jews, the iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors were jus- 277 278 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART tified in their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are op- posed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations." * The only fault here is in limiting the state- ment to plastic art, but the danger is clearly evident there. It is possible to make of a painting a mere debauch of color, of a partially draped statue, a wholly sensual appeal. Goethe has given a most illuminating study of the problem in the Witches' Kitchen scene in Faust. The Vision in the Mirror, beheld by Faust, is the representation of what Goethe regards as the most beautiful form in nature the ideal woman body and face. It appears in the Witches' Kitchen because it is the sub- limation of that of which the apish mummery of the scene is the degeneration, art appealing only through the medium of the senses to the soul. Faust can see the Vision only as he stands reverently away from the mirror; when he steps forward and attempts to grasp the form, the Vision fades. The same truth is expressed in a frank saying often heard in the Paris *Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, The Fine Arts, p. 24, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1888. THE DANGERS OF ART 279 studios: "If you want to be an artist, you must hang up your passions with your hat and coat before you enter the studio." That is, if you want to be an artist, you must have such impersonal reverence for beauty for its own sake as to inhibit the desire for egoistic pos- session. Thus the purity of a statue, or of the figures of a painting, is not a question of dra- pery, but of the purity of the artist's mind. It is just here that the discussion of the nude in art has gone wrong. A partially draped figure may be far more sensually seductive than one entirely nude, as purveyors of vice well understand. There are two kinds of prudery the one of vice, and the other of ignorance; and the latter is only less harmful than the former. It is the prudery of igno- rance, rampant in mediocrity, that mutilates the classic statues of a museum, excludes Longfellow's Building of the Ship from the public schools of a great city, closes the doors of the theater to Bernard Shaw's Widowers' Houses, while opening them wide to salacious vaudeville, and sends a "breeches-painter" up to deface the figures in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. A pure-minded artist cannot 280 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART make an unchaste statue, a sensually degraded artist cannot carve a pure one. What is true of the artist is true, only in lesser measure, of the student. His mind must be clean; he, too, must have impersonal rever- ence for beauty, to respond aright to art, other- wise he may take a mere swinish pleasure in even noble productions. These dangers are, however, only the inevitable corollary of the peculiar greatness of sculpture and painting the power to appeal directly to the physical vision, and through this to bring home concep- tions to the imagination and the intellect with a concrete effectiveness unequaled in other types of art. Like sculpture and painting, music makes its appeal to the soul only through the medium of the senses, and like them it may forget the soul and appeal only to the sense, in which case it degenerates. There is a type of merely sensuous music that is not much above the plane of the beer drinking and gormandizing to which it is often subordinated. Do not mis- understand me: sensuous pleasure, in right relation, is itself worth while; properly con- trolled beer drinking may be a sound relaxa- THE DANGERS OF ART 281 tion; still, music on that plane is scarcely the highest art, and indulged in to excess may in- toxicate like the beer. Even music that is sound and true art in- volves a special danger, owing to the fact that it appeals so powerfully to the emotions. Emotion is the energy of life; the function of reason is regulative among desires, giving direction and control. Emotion is steam in the hoiler of life that sends the engine over the road of progress; reason is the controll- ing engineer with his hand upon the throttle. No matter how well-trained the engineer and how perfect the machinery, if there is no steam in the boiler the engine goes nowhere. Thus no man ever accomplished anything who did not love something, hate something or desire something. On the other hand, uncontrolled emotion means a wild riot of loosened ener- gies, as a runaway locomotive goes to smash. Music constantly stimulates and refines the emotional sensibility, and this is good or bad according as it is, or is not, balanced by strong self-direction and self-control. Where there is this strong directive center of character, the greater the emotional sensitiveness, the wider 282 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART and deeper is the response to nature and life. Where that center is wanting, the refining of the sensibilities makes one an ^Eolian harp, vibrating to every wind of beauty and breath of desire, until in the end one becomes a bundle of jaded nerves, giving no longer music but discord in response to the appeal of life. Con- sider the fate of that strangely gifted poet who wrote : "To drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control ? " * The sonnet beginning with these lines reads like the cry of a lost soul lost, if the state- ment be personal, because emotion was devel- oped without reason, and sensitiveness was re- fined without balancing self-control. This form of degeneration comes only in the most highly developed civilization. Art is not to blame for it, but the wrong use of any one of the arts may lead to it ; while, for the reasons given, the danger is more subtle in music than * Oscar Wilde, Sonnet prefixed to the volume of lyric poems. THE DANGERS OF ART 283 elsewhere. It finds occasional pathetic illus- tration in the lives of musicians of a certain type. Great execution in music is creation; but below that plane a high degree of good execution is possible through technical skill combined with sensitive receptivity. In such a case the musician may lend himself, as a fine instrument, to the genius of the composer, so that the music is recreated through the artist executing. The result is a continual refining of the sensuous and emotional life, and, where the personality is of the receptive type indi- cated, unless there is a balancing cultivation of strong self-direction, grave danger is pres- ent of a subtle but terrible form of moral de- terioration. Instances of it are too numerous to require specific mention. The same truth holds for the one who appre- ciates. He, too, needs to balance the sensuous and emotional appeal of music by deliberately cultivating self-control and by seeking oppor- tunities for vigorous, self-expressive action. It is well, also, to choose with some care one's companions in hearing even great music; for the effect of it is to render one, for the time being, more sensitive to any emotional appeal, 284 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART whether for good or evil. Instances can be given of those who have gone down as a result, indirectly, of the sensuous and emotional in- toxication produced by Wagner operas; but the blame is not upon Wagner or his music. These dangers, however, are but the inevitable corollary of the supreme power music possesses the power to appeal through the sense of hearing to the emotional life, and to sweep one on to the sea of feeling as can no other art. Like the other arts, poetry, too, has the dan- gers correlative to its functions. Since the sensuous appeal to the eye is less direct than in sculpture and painting, and to the ear less powerful than in music, there is not so much danger of appealing only to the senses in poetry. This happens, however, as in the merely sensuous beauty of certain poems of Oscar Wilde and Paul Verlaine. The vicious effect here is not so great as in the other arts; but just because poetry has more complex re- lation to the human spirit, and goes further in the interpretation of life, it involves deeper dangers. Literature* may pander to decadent taste in lyric, drama or novel; it may dress vice in attractive garments so that it becomes THE DANGERS OF ART 285 dangerously seductive; it may portray dis- eased phases of life out of sound relation to the whole. Thus upon the whole personality, in- cluding both the emotions and the intellect, the vicious effect may be produced. Even when literature is itself sane, it may still be misused. It is possible to shed so many tears over the imaginary characters of the drama or novel that one's eyes are dry toward the same tragedy in the street behind us or the house next door. The need is always to re- turn from the symbol of art to the life sym- bolized; then only does art become a doorway to the deeper appreciation of life. Here, as with the other arts, the danger is merely the other side of the supreme power of the art in expressing and interpreting life. "It is important, at the present time, to bear in mind that the human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. Would you realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives." Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, p. 295. "Beauty results from the harmony between spirit and sense; it addresses all the faculties of man, and can only be appre- ciated if a man employs fully all his strength. He must bring to it an open sense, a broad heart, a spirit full of freshness. All a man's nature must be on the alert, and this is not the case with those divided by abstraction, narrowed by formulas, enervated by application." Schiller, Essays ^Esthetical and Philosophical, p. 330. "That which distinguishes genius, and should be the stand- ard for judging it, is the height to which it is able to soar when it is in the proper mood and finds a fitting occasion a height always out of the reach of ordinary talent." Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, p. 88. "The capacity of the sublime is one of the noblest apti- tudes of man. Beauty is useful, but does not go beyond man. The sublime applies to the pure spirit. The sublime must be joined to the beautiful to complete the (esthetic education, and to enlarge man's heart beyond the sensuous world." Schiller, Essays synthetical and Philosophical) p. 141. 286 CHAPTER XVII BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF APPRE- CIATION IT is because art appeals to the whole hu- man spirit senses, imagination, emotions, intellect, that it is so difficult to translate into terms of the understanding, as has been evident in all our discussion. We appreciate much that we never understand. It is possible to respond deeply to the appeal of music, and yet be quite in ignorance of principles of mel- ody and harmony. One may enjoy the beauty of a painting, with no knowledge of the tech- nique by which it is produced. So one may appreciate a friend, without having an intellec- tual judgment of his conduct and character. Indeed, as our previous studies have shown, too much analysis with the intellect may even stand in the way of appreciation, as criticism and creation rarely go together. Much of our happiness is in appreciation; imagine life denuded of it: how intolerably 287 288 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART barren our existence would be! Thus life is always in advance of the understanding: in a profoundly true sense we are better than we know. First we live, and then we think about it, haltingly translating our experience into a theory of the world. Thus the major develop- ment of Greek poetry came before any one had scanned a foot or named a measure ; and Greek character had reached its fruition and begun to decline, before Aristotle analyzed it into its elements and constructed them into his theory of ethics. Faith is thus "the substance of things hoped for," that is, their realization in life, before we can put them into our philoso- phy. Many persons, caught in some eddy of thought, feel compelled to reject all belief in the things of the spirit, and yet go on serenely living to them all the time. Thomas Hill Green, whose philosophy re- ceived popular exposition some time ago through Mrs. Ward's Robert Elsmere, point- ed this paradox.* He spoke of the fact that many earnest men these days feel compelled to accept the philosophy of naturalism, as the * Introduction to Prolegomena to Ethics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1890. THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION 289 whole truth of things, and yet go on finding personal consolation in the poetry of Brown- ing and Tennyson poetry based on the very ideas, the philosophy of naturalism wholly re- jects. Obviously we must give up the poetry, abandon the theory, or else come to a plane of thought where the seemingly opposed ele- ments can be united. This life of appreciation, let it be noted, is just as real as the life of the understanding. Wordsworth, who stands beside the lake, watching the wealth of golden daffodils nod- ding in the breeze, is just as truly related to that aspect of nature, as the scientist who picks the flowers to pieces, counts their petals and tells us their physical structure and history. So when we look up to an ideal, love it and seek to realize it, we actually produce changes in the material world, and are as truly related to reality as is possible in the life of the under- standing. Similarly the relation to another life in love is even deeper than the intellectual judgment of character. In a sense the loftiest truth is appreciated in wisdom rather than understood in knowledge. Knowledge and wisdom are upon different 290 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART planes ; knowledge is of facts, wisdom of truth. Facts are the root from which the flower of truth may or may not blossom. Truth is the soul of fact, is fact interpreted; and for right interpretation, wise vision of life in relation is required. Thus one may know much and not be wise at all ; and, on the other hand, one may be deeply wise and quite without ordinary learning. That is what Jesus meant when he said: "I thank thee, O Father, . . . that thou hast hid these things from the wise and pru- dent, and hast revealed them unto babes." * To enter the kingdom of truth one must have the simple openness of the child. To see true one must be true ; and moral sincerity or reality is the deepest basis of wisdom. That is why persons who always ring true are found almost as often among the unlearned as among the highly educated. Art has thus a closer relation to reality than philosophy. "Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be ;" f *Luke, Chapter X, verse 21. t In Memoriam, Prelude. THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION 291 because in our "little systems" we take the arc we have found of God's truth and twist it into a completed theory of the world. The theory helps for a time, as a basis of life, but inevit- ably passes. Art, on the other hand, may pre- sent the arc of truth with its curve scarcely changed, since the artist is often inconsistent for the sake of truth, presenting, in all the form and color of life, what experience has taught him. This was Victor Hugo's meaning in hold- ing that the scientists build, one on the labors of another, but the great artist breaks out through the finite into the infinite, and his work therefore has eternal value.* Hence an artistic masterpiece has power to grow with our growth, fresh truth being evident in it as we bring to unlock it the key of deeper experi- ence. There is in every true work of art some- thing of that inexhaustible residuum that is in life itself, giving dignity to the humblest per- sonality. Life is the text all philosophy has sought to interpret, and there is more in the * Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, translated by M. B. Anderson, Book III, Chapters III-V. A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1899. 292 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART text than in all the commentaries. Indeed, the supreme value of the greatest thinkers, such as Plato and Spinoza, is that they have been ar- tists as well as philosophers, giving concrete insight and the wisdom of life, as well as meta- physical theory. Love, wisdom, faith and beauty thus belong to the life of appreciation, and defy complete translation into terms of the understanding. This explains why, despite the fact that almost every philosopher, from Plato down- ward, has attempted an explanation of beauty, beauty remains undefined. The most that we can do is to show its aspects and relations. For example, there is in nearly all appreciation of beauty an element of convention; we respond most readily to that to which we are habituated. Consider the different types of human face and figure that have been regarded as beautiful by various races in different times. I recall Stan- ley's remarking that, after being for a long time in Central Africa, and seeing constantly the bare, rich, brown and black bodies of the natives, the few white men with him appeared singularly washed out and unpleasing. Erasmus was perhaps the most cultivated THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION 293 man of his age. He loved the beauty of Greek manuscripts and Latin literature. In the vigor of his manhood he crossed the Alps on horse- back, on the road to Italy to take his doctor's degree. His letters note just three things as impressing him in Switzerland: the dirty and inconvenient lodgings, the intolerable smell from the stoves, and the sour wine that gave him indigestion!* Not a word of the pictur- esque beauty of that circle beyond circle of snow-clad mountains rising till their summits seem to touch the sky. The point is, the ro- mantic love of nature beauty had not yet come to consciousness in Europe, and Erasmus, with all his cultivation, was totally without it. Is a better illustration needed of the element of habit and convention entering into the appre- ciation of beauty? If so, remember that Shakespeare was regarded by the best critics of one long pseudo-classical period as an untu- tored barbarian, with great natural genius but no art! Every lover of beauty would resent, how- ever, our making too much of its conventional * Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, p. 310. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1895. 294 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART aspect. He is sure there is something deeper and more permanent in the nature of beauty; and he is right. Such a principle is the har- mony of the parts in a whole, in the appeal whether of nature or art. Emerson speaks of this in Each and All: "I thought the sparrow's note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough ; I brought him home, in his nest, at even ; He sings the song, but it cheers not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky ; He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye." So with the appeal to one sense : the beauty of the landscape is not in the lake, river, forest, hills or sky; but in all these fused together in a harmonious whole. Similarly, the beauty of a Corot painting is not in the misty group of trees, the dancing figures, the mellow dawn light or the subtle atmosphere, but in the com- position of these into a harmony. Still deeper in beauty is the harmony of an organism to its function, or of a thing made to its purpose. A beautiful body is one where every structure and organ is well adapted to THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION 295 its purpose. Thus deformity is always aestheti- cally painful because it interposes a barrier between organ and function. The running of a child in the sunshine is beautiful because the action is so natural and inevitable. The same principle holds even with things made by the hand of man. When one sees a great machine smoothly doing its work, with no friction anywhere, one's feeling is closely akin to that one experiences in the presence of the sublime. Indeed, when our mechanical age is far enough in the past to be seen in perspective, I have no doubt that our wonder- ful machinery will be recognized as romantic and almost sublime. Stand beside the railroad track at night, under the stars, and watch a brilliantly lighted passenger train sweep by; and you feel up and down your back a shiver closely akin to that you experience in the pres- ence of some masterpiece of art. Henry Tur- ner Bailey says that he hopes, before the steam locomotive completely passes, some artist will paint it, so that its romance may be recorded. I never cross on a ferry from New Jersey to New York, in the morning or evening, and 296 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART see those high buildings, outlined like watch- towers against the misty blush of the sky, without keenly responding to the scene. The "sky-scraper," born of the modern business imagination, is wonderfully adapted to its pur- pose that of lifting a vast population into the air and multiplying many times the activities possible on the little end of Manhattan is- land; and I have never been able to under- stand how artists who come back full of praises for the ragged sky line of towers and crags upon the Rhine, can show only contempt for the equally ragged and, seen in perspective, at least equally romantic sky line of Manhat- tan island. Still deeper as a principle of beauty is that harmony of soul and body, content and form, we have previously studied. This is present in both nature and art. To give beauty there must be definitely limited form; the abstract conception must attain concrete realization; and the more perfect the marrying of the body of expression to the soul of meaning, the greater is the beauty. We may go one step farther. All art, as THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION 297 we have seen, draws its forms ultimately from nature. Thus the final principle of all appre- ciation of beauty lies in the relation we sustain to the nature world, Now there is a natural rhythm between human sensibility and the forms and colors of nature, which results from the general process of evolution. Our senses have been developed on the basis of the world as it is, and there is thus the same adaptation to environment in our response to beauty, that is present in our relation to the fundamental conditions of life. We can trace the develop- ment of the eye from the simple pigment spot sensitive to light, in the body of some early animal, to the wonderful window of the soul through which we look out on the forms and colors of the world. Because our senses have been gradually developed in harmony with this world, it follows that all appreciation of beauty in nature is a coming to consciousness of a rhythm already existing between our senses and the nature world. Let me try to make this clear by a whimsi- cal and necessarily inadequate illustration. Suppose at noon to-day the world should sud- denly turn red the color of the grass, the 298 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART foliage, the sea and the sky all brilliant red: What would happen? We would all rush out doors and be strongly impressed and stimu- lated by this wonderful spectacle of a red world. Before night came, however, those of us who are consciously responsive to the beauty of nature as it is, would be tired out* Then we should have to get up day after day and face the intolerable red world. The result would be an increasing depression in spirit and action. We would have less ambition, less interest in our work, less desire to marry and have children. On the other hand, those per- sons who have never recognized consciously the blue of the sky, the green grass and gray seas, would get on very well with a red world. Do you not see that in the end Nature would select a race of men really enjoying a red world? The illustration is faulty, I know; but it is the best I can give, in reference to something so ultimate in human nature, to show what actually has occurred. Our senses have been developed in relation to this world, though not to all of it. We see certain colors of the spectrum, but when the vibration of light waves in the transmitting medium be- THE LIFE OF APPRECIATION 299 comes too rapid or too slow, we see nothing; yet may there not be whole ranges of color beyond ours, seen, for example, by those strange, many- faceted eyes of certain insects? So we can hear only certain limited ranges of the vibration we call sound; but when one looks through the microscope at the mysteri- ous, apparently auricular, organ of certain in- sects, one wonders again whether, in what we call aj^jlljun^jw^ wealth of melody and harmonyjieard by the insect, which simply does not exist for us. Thus our senses do not give us all the w r orld; but they have been developed in relation to it, and our appreciation of the beauty of nature is merely a consciousness of that already exist- ent rhythm. Since art must take its forms from nature and appeal only through the senses, the principle holds for appreciation of beauty in art as well. Thus it is possible to show the elements of beauty and the condi- tions of our appreciation "of it, but beauty itself remains undefined. "What the artist does or has done excites in us the mood in which he himself was when he did it. A free mood in the artist makes us free; a constrained one makes us uncomfort- able. We usually find this freedom of the artist where he is fully equal to his subject. It is on this account we are so pleased with Dutch pictures; the artists painted the life around them, of which they were perfect masters. If we are to feel this freedom of mind in an actor, he must, by study, imagination, and natural disposition, be perfect master of his part, must have all bodily requisites at his command, and must be upheld by a certain youthful energy. But study is not enough without imagination, and study and imagination to- gether are not enough without natural disposition. Women do the most through imagination and temperament." Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann and Soret, pp. 417, 418. "We know that the sensibility of the mind depends, as to degree, on the liveliness, and for extent on the richness, of the imagination. Now the predominance of the faculty of analysis must necessarily deprive the imagination of its warmth and energy, and a restricted sphere of objects must diminish its wealth. It is for this reason that the abstract thinker has very often a cold heart, because he analyzes impressions, which only move the mind by their combination or totality; on the other hand, the man of business, the statesman, has very often a narrow heart, because shut up in the narrow circle of his employment his imagination can neither expand nor adapt itself to another manner of viewing things." Schiller, Essays jEsthetical and Philosophical, pp. 41, 42. "Just as the sun cannot shed its light but to the eye that sees it, nor music sound but to the hearing ear, so the value of all masterly work in art and science is 'conditioned by the kinship and capacity of the mind to which it speaks. It is only such a mind as this that possesses the magic word to stir and call forth the spirits that lie hidden in great work. To the ordinary mind a masterpiece is a sealed cabinet of mystery, an unfamiliar musical instrument from which the player, however much he may flatter himself, can draw none but confused tones. How different a painting looks when seen in a good light, instead of in some dark corner! Just in the same way, the impression made by a masterpiece varies with the capacity of the mind to understand it." Schopen- hauer, The Art of Literature, p. 94. 300 CHAPTER XVIII THE STUDY OF BEAUTY IN NATURE AND ART THE life of appreciation is a unity; to touch one aspect of it is to influence the whole. An awakening in personal love deepens one's response to the beauty of nature, as is indicated even in the conven- tional allusions of poetry to the lover wander- ing pensively in wood and field. The same experience influences the religious life: it is no accident that the majority of "conversions" occur in the period of sex awakening, nor does this fact in any way discredit the religious experience. So all cultivation of response to beauty, when in right relation, deepens the capacities in love, in aspiration toward the moral and religious ideal and in recognition of truth. Herein lies the importance of edu- cating response to beauty. We can by con- scious effort cultivate this aspect of the life of appreciation and so deepen the whole. There are the two worlds of beauty 301 302 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART ture and Art ; yet we might reverse the titles : nature is God's art; and art is man's highest nature. Each of these has its own superiority. In nature the identity of content and form is so wonderful that beside it human art seems painfully stumbling and inadequate. This union of the soul of meaning with the body of expression in a flower, for example, is per- fect to the point that it may sound strange to speak of the two elements as present. So the flaming dawns and golden sunsets, the somber forest and melody of the pines all seem to be the serene flowing forth of the divine mind into harmonious expression. Even "Vague outlines of the Everlasting Thought Lie in the melting shadows as they pass." * The artist can but stand in awe-struck admira- tion before this fusing of idea and expression in the matchless art of the Eternal Hand. Even more significant is the fact that nature is alive with ever-changing beauty. The great- est of landscape paintings can fix but one mood of nature in statical form, while in the world * Richard Realf, Symbolisms, in Poems, p. 4. Funk & Wagnalls Co., New York, 1898. THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 303 without, from the flush of the dawn, through the growing splendor of the morning, on to the beauty of the late afternoon, the apoca- lypse of the sunset and the night with its calm, shining stars, the single day pours out an in- exhaustible wealth of beauty, changing each instant of time. The greatest portrait paint- er a Titian, a Rembrandt, a Raphael can paint but one of the actual or possible expres- sions of the face, fixing it permanently. The countenance of the humblest of us is alive, constantly changing, played upon by the ever- varying light and shadow, freshly revealing character in each of the manifold expressions of a single hour. Even literature, with all its power to portray life in action and relation, seems a poor echo in contrast to the vast, mul- tiform maelstrom of life. The harmony or identity of form and content in nature gives a wonderful healing power for the spirit of man. No human art, not even Greek sculpture, has this power in equal measure. Goethe shows this ministry of Nature in the scene which begins the second part of his supreme work, where Faust, before entering upon his career in the larger world, 304 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART is healed in the calm, sweet Lethe he finds on the breast of the Nature mother. This min- istry is experienced in all our response to the beauty and sublimity of nature, and it is im- possible to exaggerate its value for the mod- ern spirit. At least equally significant is the exalting power of the living beauty of nature over the spirit, lifting us away from the submerging stream of events that surges by us each day, giving calm perspective and inspiring to sane action. Wordsworth said of one of his char- acters : "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills." * Emerson exclaimed in a fragment of verse that might be taken as the motto of his life: "Teach me your mood, O patient stars ! Who climb each night the ancient sky, Leaving on space no shade, no scars, No trace of age, no fear to die." f * Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, Works, Globe edition, p. 365. f Poems, Riverside edition, from the appendix, p. 277. THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 305 To such an exalted mood the beauty of nature may lift us, giving memories that lessen the weight of many a burden and lighten the strug- gle up many a stony path. With this, how it widens our relation to the great universe that stretches away, giving steady growth in power to see and appreciate. Since the contribution to our lives may be so great, it is most important to receive it fully. The need is to put ourselves in the way of enjoying the beauty of nature. Just because it is given so lavishly and universally, we are apt to ignore it and fail of its gift; yet the inexhaustible fecundity of nature is but the measure of our opportunity. Let us enter into our heritage of beauty, given everywhere in seas and forests, gray moorlands and purple mountains, daisy-dotted meadows and brooks flowing through leafy nooks, rosy dawns and starlit nights just to enjoy it is the main requisite. Opportunities for appreciation are not enough, however. It is possible to live close to Nature, and yet be blind to her beauty. Indeed, constant utilitarian association may dull the aesthetic response. It is not always 306 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART the Swiss peasants who appreciate most con- sciously the beauty of the Alps. They love them, and usually come back to them, from keeping shops in Italy or restaurants in Lon- don; yet the cultivated traveler, who comes and goes, may respond far more keenly to the beauty of the mountains. Nature is so vast and overwhelming that we are bewildered by the very wealth of beauty poured out. We need to study consciously this beauty, to iso- late from the multitude of forms, mastering one fragment after another, for the sake of deepening subsequent spontaneous apprecia- tion. Let one get acquainted with a tree one passes every morning ; see it in the flush of the springtime, wakening to the garment of soft green ; in the full tide of the luxuriant summer with the dark green foliage and cool shadows; in the autumn when, as you pass some morn- ing, the flash of gold and crimson is across its boughs, as if some transfiguring hand had touched it with the caress of death; then watch it day by day as the color spreads, fades to dimmer hues, until the brown leaves fall in whirling gusts under the gray sky, and the THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 307 bare arms are outlined like lace-work against the somber heaven; on to the white sleeping time of the winter: and you find such loving appreciation of one aspect of nature is a door- way to the whole world of beauty. If you have walked in the fields with an artist, you were doubtless surprised, the first time, at colors to which he called your atten- tion. You did not see them, and came home feeling that these artist folk were strange persons, but to be tolerated for what they achieve. Go again and again, and you dis- cover that the colors were there all the time; it was merely that your eye had to be trained to see them. Perhaps your artist friend car- ried a little glass into which he occasionally squinted, arousing your curiosity. You in- quired what it was, and he replied, "a reducing glass," the opposite of a magnifying glass. It merely pushed the landscape away and framed it, yet how magical the effect! Such an aid is not needed by the sea or from the mountain top, where Nature sets the picture away and frames it with the sky; but when one is looking down the village lane, at the straggling buildings across the road, or through 308 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART the avenue of trees, the reducing glass shows one a wealth of colors and beautiful forms which were there all the time, but not seen consciously until one's relation to the picture was slightly changed. Some time when you are in the country, upon a slight elevation, try the experiment of bending over and looking at the world upside down. You will be amazed at the colors you see and the fresh beauty of the forms. The landscape is unchanged; it is merely that the position of your eyes in relation to it is re- versed ; and thus the blurring of the impression by habit, is replaced by the shock of a new re- lation and the consequent stimulation of the attention. The first time one goes to London one is impressed with the terrible weight of life, the sordid materialism, the ugly, utilitarian, smoke- stained buildings. Let one climb to the top of a great omnibus and go bowling down Ox- ford street, and the whole impression is trans- formed. One sees the long vista of the street softened with misty light, the structures on either hand picturesque and transfigured with the dreamy atmosphere, the whole scene lifted THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 309 to the world of ideals and dreams. Why? Merely because one has been lifted a dozen feet from the sidewalk, and a fresh point of view obtained. These devices merely indicate how one may freshen one's reaction, deepen one's appreciation, and so by conscious study enter the kingdom of beauty. Conscious reception is not enough; there is need, too, of expression. A hazy notion be- comes a clear conception only through expres- sion. When a student says that he knows but cannot tell, the statement is partly false. The fact is, he does not clearly know until he has told in some form. Intellectually and ar- tistically nothing is truly our own until we have given it away expressed it in some form; and that is why spiritual things grow by sharing them. Thus one needs to give some expression of one's response to the beauty of nature. That is the value of comradeship and conversation with a friend. That also is the value of draw- ing and painting as taught in the public schools. There are those who imagine that we hope to make artists of all the children: we neither hope nor fear that one child in a 310 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART hundred will become an artist, but we do hope that all the other ninety-nine, as well, will learn to see something more of the forms and colors of things by trying to express them. You may say, "We are not artists, and our education lacked this opportunity." There is one art, nevertheless, open to all. It is the universal art of our own language. If one will write out the impression made on one by the unusual sunset, the sweep of mountains, the peace of the forest, such a book of thoughts and impressions will be a great means of growth in appreciation, as well as an inter- esting record of one's experience. This conscious study is wholly for the sake of appreciation. Were we to stop with the conscious analysis, it would be worse than use- less; but as a means to subsequent synthetic appreciation it becomes a great help in en- abling us to enter into our heritage. If Art must lack the identity of content and form present in Nature, and if, in contrast to the living revelation of beauty in Nature, it seems fixed and inert, Art has, as we have shown, a correlative greatness of its own. The THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 311 soul in Nature is dumb and brooding. It is indeed "Vague outlines of the everlasting thought" that "lie in the melting shadows as they pass" ; and these vague outlines are trans- lated to clear expression only through human art. Contrast the inchoate, if spheric, music of the pine forest, with the ordered melody and harmony of a Beethoven symphony ; the brood- ing beauty of the French nature world, with its clear interpretation in Corot, Millet and Bastien-Lepage ; the bewildering maelstrom of human life, with Hamlet, Macbeth, Faust and the Divine Comedy. Remember that only through concrete expression is the abstract idea mastered, and that Art, by putting life and nature through the transmuting medium of the artist's spirit and appreciation, reveals their meaning. Thus, in its own ways, Art goes beyond and above Nature, with an ex- cellence of its own. Thus there is in relation to Art, as to Na- ture, at least equal need that we give our- selves daily to the enjoyment of beauty. That usually we have so little is due, not mainly to lack of opportunity, but to failure to use the opportunities that lie close at hand. I 312 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART recall an experience in going to visit for the first time the museum of art in one of our greater American cities. It was necessary to pass down a main thoroughfare, where high board-fences had been erected before some building operations. The boards were covered with flaming posters, advertising some par- ticularly sensational vaudeville, and the crowd gazing upon them was so great that one had to walk in the gutter. I came to the gallery: there was no crowd there; the hollow echo of one's footfall alone broke the stillness. Yet here was a Corot as characteristic as anything in the Louvre. On one side, the painting con- tained a dark mass of trees, in the foreground the characteristic group of dancing figures, over all the subtle depth of atmosphere, with a wealth of yellow dawn lighting coming in from behind. In the next room was Millet's Shepherd Returning with his Flock: the sheep huddled together, their backs touched with the red light of the setting sun that hung lurid, just above the horizon; before them the shepherd a tattered cloak about him, heavy wooden shoes upon his feet, the crook in his hand, and in his face that pathetic hunger, of THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 313 which Millet's social idealism made him the great interpreter; while all about the desolate moorland stretched away. Near by was Munkacsy's Bringing in the Night Rovers: an early morning street scene, with groups of common people an old wom- an selling carrots, a girl returning from mar- ket with a basket on her arm, a little child going to school; in the center the prisoners and guard in the foreground of these a rude giant, the massive figure in tattered cloak, a look of dumb hatred and rebellious gloom in the face. I need not multiply descriptions; a dozen other great paintings were there, not to mention the admirable reproductions of mas- terpieces of sculpture; yet the museum was almost vacant. The same experience can be repeated in almost any city. I have noted that even in Boston, many of the persons vis- iting the museum and the paintings in the public library have to ask their way about the city when they leave. Everywhere the same fault is evident failure to enjoy opportunities that are just at hand. So with music: each of us has friends with some proficiency in that art; and it is 314, THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART true we do ask them to play or sing when we give an evening's entertainment; yet there is not one of them who would not rather play or sing for you alone, because you love music, than be used as polite fringe on your dinner party, where the guests present are not even courteous enough to stop talking and listen to the music. Of all the fine arts, literature is the most accessible. Whatever limitations one may suf- fer under, in opportunities for the enjoyment of sculpture, painting and music, the noblest achievements in literature are everywhere available. The great books of all time lie on the table in your own room for use in that margin of life that most persons so sadly waste. Indeed, as with the beauty of nature, the very accessibility of literature blinds us to its value. Thus here, even more than with the other arts, failure to enjoy beauty is one's own fault. Still, with art as with nature, opportunities for spontaneous appreciation are not sufficient. Here, too, without training and cultivation, we often make sad work of it. How many per- sons are only confused and bored by great THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 315 music, and go to hear it merely because they think it is socially the thing to do. So with painting and sculpture: consider the average American abroad, who spends an occasional free hour "doing" a gallery a phrase as of- fensive in expression as it is pathetic in mean- ing. One sees the groups of tourists surging through the gallery, from room to room, and one wonders whether the result can be other than a confused blur of impressions, while one blushes for one's countrymen. Even with lit- erature, careless reading and whimsical re- sponse are more frequent than sound appre- ciation. No, opportunities to enjoy beauty are not enough; with art, as with nature, there must be added the conscious study of beauty for the sake of subsequent appreciation. Thus when one enters a new gallery of paintings, instead of wandering through, and blurring one impression with a hundred others, let one select two or three great works and try to master them. Ask questions of the painting. Why did Corot bring the dawn lighting in from behind? What do the dancing figures add to the impression of the whole? What is 316 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART the value of the atmosphere? Why are the trees grouped at one side? What was the artist attempting to do in this painting? What is its relation to the actual nature world? So with the Millet painting described above : What is value of the stretch of moorland? What did Millet mean by the look of weariness and dumb hunger in the shepherd's face? What is his aim in the painting? What is the relative value of nature and the human ele- ments in it? What gives it beauty? A little of such earnest, first-hand study, and the pictures begin to fall into place: one soon becomes aware of the definitive characteristics of different schools and separate artists; and one enters into one's heritage, as is impossible through the most extended reading of criticism and history of art. With music, such study is more difficult, just because music is evanescent, and thus those who do not possess the peculiar musical mem- ory find a composition difficult to recall. The more reason for hearing a great composition over and over again. Your musical friend, whom you ask to play for you, tells you he has nothing new. Tell him you are glad, that THE STUDY OF BEAUTY 317 you did not want novelty, but music; and listen again and again to a composition until you have made it your own v Study what it does to your senses and emotions, analyze its themes and motives, its harmonies, study the artist's method and purpose. Through a little of such analysis one's subsequent enjoyment of music may be immeasurably deepened. Again the accessibility of literature makes such study peculiarly possible and valuable in that art. To choose a single significant ex- ample: let one take the little volume compiled by Palgrave the Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics; let one go through it poem by poem, analyzing the structure, diction and imagery, studying at every point the relation of forms of expression to the content of thought, feeling and imagination, noting the molding influence of artist and epoch ; and one will find that the whole wealth of world litera- ture has been opened to one and given new beauty and meaning. Finally, not less than with nature, does the student need to give expression to his experi- ence with art. By recording carefully the im- pression each great work of art makes upon 318 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART him, the student learns to master his own ex- perience and fix and clarify the receptive life. Such study of beauty, carried on for a little time each day, will give one the heritage of both nature and' art beyond one's highest ex- pectation. "Continue to translate yourself to the heaven of art; there is no more undisturbed, unmixed, purer happiness than may thus be attained." Beethoven, in Kerst, Beethoven: The Man and the Artist, p. 12. "Let us remember the prompter, very delicately and geni- ally drawn by Goethe in a few touches, who is so much moved at certain places that he weeps hot tears; yet 'it is, strictly speaking, not the so-called moving places that affect him so, but the beautiful places from which the pure genius of the poet, so to speak, looks out from bright, open eyes.' In the case of persons of a predominantly tender, ardent disposi- tion we not seldom meet this phenomenon. A beautiful poem, a sublime scene in nature nay, the narration of a good deed, moves them to tears. And history tells us of the noble Saladin, who was a warlike hero, that the narration of great deeds and simple touching occurrences often moved him also to tears. It can hardly be assumed that a warlike hero is the possessor of weak nerves. What have these grayish- white threads to do at all with the eternal ideas of the Good and the Beautiful? The emotion of which we have just spoken is something better than mere nervous irritation; it is a higher kind of homesickness, which attacks us when the ideas of the Good and the Beautiful suddenly appear before us and remind us of our eternal home." Ambros, The Boundaries of Music and Poetry, pp. 42, 43. "The amphora which refuses to go to the fountain deserves the hisses of the water-pots." Victor Hugo, William Shake- speare, p. 319. "I admit that the exercises of the gymnasium form ath- letic bodies; but beauty is only developed by the free and equal play of the limbs. In the same way the tension of the isolated spiritual forces may make extraordinary men; but it is only the well-tempered equilibrium of these forces that can produce happy and accomplished men." Schiller, Essays JEsthetical and Philosophical, p 43. 320 CHAPTER XIX ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE SINCE art has its own aspects of superi- ority, as compared with nature, it fulfills its own service for the spirit. Something of the same healing power, exercised by the beauty of nature is in its influence, while it is at least equally exalting, lifting the spirit and stimulating to great action. Art is fur- ther a wonderful source of power to see and appreciate the world as it is, and life as it ought to be. When Raphael achieves a Sistine Madonna, it is not merely one more beautiful picture to hang in Dresden gallery, but that an ideal over which ten centuries brooded and prayed is made real for all time, or until the canvas rots and the figures fade from it. So when Shakespeare carves in Pentelic marble the beauty of his Desdemona or shapes the bronze majesty of Cleopatra, or when Dante wakens from the dark fugue of the Inferno the tender melody of his Francesca da Rimini, the result is not merely three more literary 322 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART paintings for the galleries of the past, but three windows opened into the woman's soul and hence into the life of the human spirit; and to look reverently through these windows is to come back to the every-day world of men and women with deepened power to appreciate the wonder, pathos, comedy, romance, tragedy of common life. So with our appreciation of nature. Every great landscape painting not only makes its own contribution, but enables us to look out on the world with unsealed eyes. How won- derfully a gallery of sculpture trains us to see the beauty of the forms life molds; how sen- sitive the music lover becomes to the inarticu- late melody of nature; while poetry is forever revealing to us the beauty of common things. The daisy bloomed unnoticed in the grass for uncounted centuries; it was when Robert Burns called it "Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower" that we saw how beautiful it was, and we have been talking about it ever since. Of all the hours of the day or night, perhaps the most moving is that just after the sunset, when the sky lights with red and gold sinking into the gray of the evening, the work of the ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE 323 day is behind and the rest of the night not yet come; when, if we are wise, we pause in our tasks to meditate and dream. That hour has found interpretation everywhere in noble art in painting, in music, above all in poetry. From pagan Sappho to Byron who, standing on Ravenna's shore beside the pine forest with its flood of memories, paraphrasing Dante and Sappho and uniting the mood of religion with the beauty of the world about him, sings: "Ave Maria ! blessed be the hour ! The time, the clime, the spot, where I so oft Have felt that moment in its fullest power Sink o'er the earth so beautiful and soft While swung the deep bell in the distant tower, Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft, And not a breath crept through the rosy air, And yet the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer. Ave Maria ! 'tis the hour of prayer ! Ave Maria ! 'tis the hour of love ! Ave Maria ! may our spirits dare Look up to thine and to thy Son's above ! Ave Maria ! oh that face so fair ! Those downcast eyes beneath the Almighty Dove 324 iTHE PHILOSOPHY OF ART What though 'tis but a pictured image strike? That painting is no idol, 'tis too like. Oh, Hesperus ! thou bringest all good things Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer, To the young bird the parents' brooding wings, The welcome stall to the o'erlabored steer ; Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings, Whate'er our household gods protect of dear, Are gathered round us by thy look of rest ; Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast. Soft Hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart Of those who sail the seas, on the first day When they from their sweet friends are torn apart ; Or fills with love the pilgrim on his way As the far bell of Vesper makes him start, Seeming to weep the dying day's decay; Is this a fancy which our reason scorns? Ah ! surely Nothing dies but Something mourns !" * Who can respond to this, perhaps the most beautiful passage in all Byron, and not find, ever after, deeper beauty in the evening hour and deeper meaning in the meditations it brings ? * Byron, Don Juan, canto III, stanzas CII CVIII. ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE 325 Equally does art reveal to us the world of ideals. In form and spirit, conduct and char- acter, it portrays concretely types lifted above the world, toward which we must ever aspire. Further, it raises us to the circle and company of the elect. We learn to live in daily com- munion with the great masters, until Dante and Beethoven, Goethe and Michael Angelo seem closer to us than persons we meet in the street. Thus supremely for the appreciative student art is for life's sake. Its end is not adorn- ment or didactic teaching, it is not to impress us with technical skill and the mastery of dif- ficulties, it is not to give sensuous pleasure or aesthetic satisfaction ; it is for life's sake =that we may possess our heritage, grow in love and wisdom, ever toward the fuller achievement of life. If this is the end for the appreciative stu- dent, how much more so is it for the creative artist. All the phases of the ministry of art he experiences in even higher measure. The healing and exalting influences of beauty are his to the full. If appreciation of beauty clarifies the mind and gives mastery of concep- 326 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART tions, how much more does its creation. If the student is inspired to action, the artist grows in the immediate field of his expression. Each achievement is but the vantage-ground to a new effort, and there is no limit to the possible growth in power to achieve and to appreciate the work of others. When Michael Angelo, taking the seventeen feet of marble injured and rejected by other sculptors, glad as a youth to work with so splendid a piece, la- bored so faithfully that his heroic statue of David issued, faultlessly posed, from the stone, it was not merely one more beautiful statue for the square or hall of Florence; it was that Michael Angelo, through the one achieve- ment, had grown, not only in mastery of his art, but in his power to enter into the work of the Greeks and Romans, and of his Italian contemporaries and predecessors. Further, how the artist's eyes are unsealed to the beauty of the world, his ears set in tune with the music of things. What must he not see of the spec- tacle of life and of its ideals, after years of effort to express and interpret its phases?) For every great artist, therefore, art has been a way of life, a means of realizing his ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE 327 own potential humanity. Dante, with life tragically cut off in love and vocation, exiled from the city he loved so well and criticised so harshly, learning all the bitterness of "climbing other people's stairs" and eating the "too salt" bread of patronage, wandering homeless from city to city, settling in the late years at Ra- venna even then stagnant in its marshes be- side the Adriatic Sea wandering with bent head and slow step under her pine forest, lis- tening to the whisper of God in the music of the moving boughs, and brooding over all that life had failed to give him Dante turns to art and makes of it another way of life, finding, in his own creation of the Divine Comedy, the truth, beauty, love, moral harmony and peace the world had failed to give him. Michael Angelo, too vast in genius for the age in which he lived, bruised by a succession of artistic tragedies, loving late and knowing the pain of separation through death, lofty and alone, writhing his soul out in Dantesque son- nets Michael Angelo, through all his strug- gles and sufferings, found in art to use his own image the means of shaping from the marble of experience the statue of character. 328 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART Beethoven, shadowed, as we have seen, by a somber childhood, saddened by bitter strug- gles and long-delayed recognition, thwarted in opportunity, cursed at the moment of achievement with the loss of the very sense through which his art could be enjoyed Beet- hoven found in the creation of music, even when he could no longer hear it with the outer ear, a way of life through which his own ideal self might be realized. Goethe said that all his works were but "fragments of a great confession,"* and rec- ognized that, more than all his poetry, his life was his greatest work of art. Browning, per- haps more fully than any one else, developed in The Ring and the Book the view that the artist, taking the elements of God's world, remolds them into his own world, thus grow- ing up toward that image of God in which he is potentially rather than actually made; and Browning lived his philosophy. Thus while the lesser men have often dedicated themselves to art, subordinating life to its expressions, the great masters have always found in art a way * Dichlung und Wahrheit, Bohn Library translation, vol. I, p. 240. ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE 329 of life, a means of growing up toward their own ideal of manhood, becoming the men God meant them to be. For them, supremely, art has always been for life's sake. Must this crowning value of art be reserved for those alone whom the world calls artists? Fortunately not ; for there is one supreme fine art to which all are called the art of living. There is no aspect of life that cannot be made in some measure fine art. Take the simplest forms of hand labor: it has been the cry of all leaders in the Arts and Crafts movement, from Emerson and Ruskin, through William Morris, to the teachers of our own day, that beauty should not be added to utility after- ward, but identified with it in the making, that there should be no artificial combination of use and beauty, but the useful should be created as art. If that is possible in artisan work, how much more is it in the deepest aspects of life. As there is no honest vocation that cannot be made a fine art, so every aspect of personal re- lationship is a problem of ever fresh artistic adjustment of one personality to others. If art is, as we have seen, the adequate and har- monious expression and interpretation of some 330 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART phase of mans life in true relation to the whole, what aspect of life is there that may not be made a fine art? Thus the service of art to the human spirit is not limited to the few, but is universal for all. Every one may be and ought to be, not only a loving and appreciative student of the fine arts, but a creative artist in the form and color, the melody and harmony of life; and for stu- dent and artist alike, art is not for adornment's sake, or preaching's sake, or pleasure's sake, not for the sake of gratifying the senses or ex- hibiting technical skill, not for art's sake, but for life's sake. BOOK LIST The following list is not intended to furnish a general bibliog- raphy, but merely to suggest to the student a selection of im- portant works bearing on the problems considered in this volume. Ambros, Wilhelm August, The Boundaries of Music and Poetry, translated by J. H. Cornell. Pp. xiii+187. G. Schirmer, New York, 1893. Anderson, Rasmus B., Norse Mythology. Pp. 473. S. C. Griggs & Co., Chicago, 1875. Anderson, Rasmus B. (translator), The Younger Edda. Pp. 302. S. C. Griggs & Co., Chicago, 1880. Aristotle, The Poetic, translated by Theodore Buckley, pp. 405-500 in volume with Aristotle's Rhetoric. Bohn Library, George Bell & Sons, London, 1890. Arnold, Matthew, The Study of Poetry, pp. 1-55 in Essays in Criticism, second series. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1906. Babbitt, Irving, The New Laokoon. Pp. xiv-f 259. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1910. Baldwin, James, The Book-Lover. Pp. 201. Jansen, McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1885. Bascom John, Philosophy of English Literature. Pp. xii+318. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1886. Bates, Arlo, Talks on the Study of Literature. Pp. 260. Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1898. Beeching, H. C., The Study of Poetry. Pp. 57. University Press, Cambridge, 1901. Bradley, A. C., Poetry for Poetry 1 s Sake. Pp. 32. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1901. 331 332 BOOK LIST Briton, Halbert Hains, The Philosophy of Music. Pp. xiv+252. Longmans, Green, & Co., London, 1911. Brown, G. Baldwin, The Fine Arts. Pp. xii+321. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1906. Browning, Robert, Abt Vogler; With Charles Avison (in Par- leyings with Certain People); Master Hugues of Saxe^Gotha; Saul, in Works. Camberwell edition, T. Y. Crowell & Co., New York, 1898. Bulfinch, Thomas, The Age of Chivalry. Pp. viii+414. Crosby, Nichols & Co., Boston, 1859. Bulfinch, Thomas, The Age of Fable, edited by E. E. Hale. New edition. Pp. xxi+568. S. W. Tilton & Co., Boston, 1894. Cafifin, Charles H., How to Study Pictures. Pp. xv+513. The Century Co., New York, 1906. Carlyle, Thomas, The Hero as Divinity, pp. 1-41 in Heroes and Hero-Worship. Centenary edition. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1897. Carpenter, Edward, Angels' Wings: A Series of Essays on Art and Its Relation to Life. Pp. 248. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1898. Collins, John Churton, The True Functions of Poetry, pp. 263- 291 in Studies in Poetry and Criticism. George Bell & Sons, London, 1905. Combarieu, Jules, Music: Its Laws and Evolution. Pp. viii +334. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1910. Corson, Hiram, The Aims of Literary Study. Pp. 153. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1895. Cox, George W., An Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and F oik-Lore. Pp. xvi+380. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1881. Cox, George W., The Mythology of the Aryan Nations. 2 vols., pp. xx+460 and xv+397. Longmans, Green, & Co., London, 1870. Crawshaw, W. H., The Interpretation of Literature. Pp. x+235. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1902. BOOK LIST 333 Crawshaw, W. H., Literary Interpretation of Life. Pp. viii+266. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1900. Dabney, J. P., The Musical Basis of Verse. Pp. x+269. Long- mans, Green, & Co., London, 1901. Davies, Henry M., The Musical Consciousness. (In Music, vol. XII, pp. 25-38, 171-180, 329-341, 462-472.) Donaldson, John William, The Theatre of the Greeks. Pp. xii+ 435. George Bell & Sons, London, 1891. D wight, John S., Intellectual Influence of Music. (In The Atlantic Monthly, vol. XXVI, pp. 614-625.) Boston, Nov., 1870. Dwight, John S., Music as a Means of Culture. (In The Atlantic Monthly, vol. XXVL, pp. 321-331.) Boston, Sept., 1870. Eastman, Edith V., Musical Education and Musical Art. Pp. 171. Damrell & Upham, Boston, 1893. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Art, pp. 325-343 in Essays, first series. Houghton, Miffiin & Co., Boston, 1883. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Art, pp. 39-59 in Society and Solitude. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1898. Engel, Carl, Introduction to the Study of National Music. Pp. x+435. Longmans, Green, & Co., London, 1886. Fairbanks, Arthur, The Mythology of Greece and Rome, with Special Reference to its Influence on Literature. Pp. xvii+408. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1907. Gayley, C. M. (editor), Classic Myths in English Literature. Pp. xlv+540. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1894. Goddard, Joseph, Reflections upon Musical Art Considered in its Wider Relations. Pp. viii+87. Goddard & Co., London, 1893. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann and Soret, translated by John Oxenford. Pp. xxvii+583. Bohn Library, George Bell & Sons, London, 1901. Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of, translated by T. Bailey Saunders. Pp. 223. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1893. 334, BOOK LIST Goethe, Travels in Italy, translated by A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nesbit. Pp. 589. Bohn Library, George Bell & Sons, London, 1892. Goldziher, Ignaz, Mythology among the Hebrews and its His- torical Development, translated by Russell Martineau. Pp. xxxv +457. Longmans, Green, & Co., London, 1877. Grosse, Ernest, The Beginnings of Art. Pp. xiv+327. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1897. Guerber, H, A., Myths of Greece and Rome. Pp.428. American Book Co., New York, 1893. Guerber, H. A., Myths of Northern Lands. Pp. 319. American Book Co., New York, 1895. Gummere, Francis B., The Beginnings of Poetry. Pp. x+483. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1901. Gummere, Francis B., A Handbook of Poetics. Pp. vi+250. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1885. Gurney, Edmund, The Power of Sound. Pp. xi+559. Smith, Elder, & Co., London, 1880. Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, The Intellectual Life. Pp. xix+455. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1891. Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, Thoughts About Art. Pp. xxiv+383. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1878. Hanchett, Henry G., The Art of the Musician: A Guide to the Intellectual Appreciation of Music. Pp. viii+327. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1905. Hand, Ferdinand, ^Esthetics of Musical Art; or, the Beautiful in Music, translated from the German by Walter E. Lawson. Pp. xviii+187. London, 1880. Hanslick, Dr. Eduard, The Beautiful in Music, translated by Gustav Cohen. Novello, Ewer & Co., New York, 1891. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Introduction to the Philosophy of Fine Art, translated by B. Bosanquet. Pp. xxxiii+175. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, 1886. Helmholtz, Hermann L. F., On the Sensations of Tone as a Physio- logical Basis for the Theory of Music, translated by Alexander J. Ellis. Pp. xix+576. Longmans, Green, & Co., London, 1885. BOOK LIST SS5 Henderson, W. J., What is Good Music? Pp. xiii +205. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1905. Holden, Florence P., Audiences: A Few Suggestions to Those Who Look and Listen. A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1896. Holmes, Edmond, What is Poetry? Pp. 98. John Lane, New York, 1900. Hugo, Victor, William Shakespeare, translated by Melville B. Anderson. Pp. 24+424. A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1899. Kerst, Friedrich (compiler and annotator), Beethoven: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words, translated and edited by Henry Edward Krehbiel. Pp. 1 10. B. W. Huebsch, New York, 1905. Kerst, Friedrich (compiler and annotator), Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words, translated and edited by Henry Edward Krehbiel. Pp. 143. B. W. Huebsch, New York, 1905. Knight, William, The Philosophy of the Beautiful. 2 vols. Pp. xv+288 and xii+281. John Murray, London, 1891-3. Kobbe, Gustav, How to Appreciate Music. Pp. 275. Moffat, Yard & Co., New York, 1906. Krehbiel, Henry Edward, How to Listen to Music. Pp. xv+361. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1897. Kufferath, M., Rhythm, Melody and Harmony. (In Music, vol. XVII, pp. 31-39, 155-163.) Chicago, 1899, 1900. LaFarge, J., Considerations on Painting. Pp. vi+270. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1901. Lanier, Sidney, Music and Poetry. Pp. viii+248. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1899. Lanier, Sidney, The Science of English Verse. Pp. 315. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1901. Leighton, Lord, Addresses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy. Pp. 310. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, 1896. Lessing, G. E., Laokoon, pp. 1-169 in Laokoon, etc., translated by E. C. Beasley and Helen Zimmern. Bohn Library, George Bell & Sons, London, 1900. 336 BOOK LIST Lewes, George Henry, The Principles of Success in Literature. Pp. xv +235. Walter Scott, London, n. d. Mabie, Hamilton Wright, Books and Culture. Pp. 279. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1896. Mabie, Hamilton Wright, Essays on Nature and Culture. Pp. 326. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1896. Mabie, Hamilton Wright, Short Studies in Literature. Pp. vi +201. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1892. Mach, Edmund von, Greek Sculpture; Its Spirit and Principles. Pp. xviii+359+xl. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1903. Malory, Sir Thomas, Le Morte Darthur, edited with introduc- tion by Sir Edward Strachey. Pp. lvi+509. The Mac- millan Co., New York, 1901. Mathews, W. S. B., How to Understand Music. 2 vols., pp. 216+87 and viii+208. Theodore Presser, Philadelphia, 1886, 1888. Mathews, W. S. B., Music: Its Ideals and Methods. Pp. iii +225. Theodore Presser, Philadelphia, 1897. Matthews, Brander, A Study of Versification. Pp. vii+275. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., Boston, 1911. Morison, John H., The Great Poets as Religious Teachers. Pp. 200. Harper & Bros., New York, 1886. Morris, William, Hopes and Fears for Art. Pp. 217. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1882. Moyse, Charles E., Poetry as a Fine Art. Pp. 79. Elliot Stock, London, 1883. Miinsterberg, Hugo, The Principles of Art Education. Pp. 114. The Prang Educational Co., New York, 1905. Newman, John Henry, Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics. Pp. x+36. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1891. Norton, Edwin Lee, The Intellectual Element in Music, pp. 167- 201 in Studies in Philosophy and Psychology. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1906. Noyes, Carleton, The Enjoyment of Art. Pp. xiii+101. Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1903. BOOK LIST 337 Palgrave, Francis Turner (editor), The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Series I, pp. 381; series II, pp. xii+275. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1896, 1897. Palgrave, Francis Turner, Poetry Compared with the Other Fine Arts. (In Littell's Living Age, vol. CLXXI, pp. 259-267; vol. CLXXIII, pp. 579-589.) Boston, 1886, 1887. Parry, C. Hubert H., The Evolution of the Art of Music. Pp. x+342. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1906. Parry, T. Gambier, The Ministry of Fine Art to the Happiness of Life. Pp. viii+368. John Murray, London, 1886. Partridge, William Ordway, Art for America. Pp. 192. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1894. Plato, The Republic, translated by B. Jowett. Books II and III. Oxford University Press, 1892. Poe, Edgar Allan, The Rationale of Verse and The Poetic Prin- ciple, pp. 209-292 in vol. XIV of Works, edited by James A. Harrison. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., New York, 1902. Posnett, Hutcheson Macauley, Comparative Literature. Pp. x+402. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1886. Pryde, David, Highways of Literature. Pp. 156. Funk & Wag- nails, New York, n. d. Puffer, Ethel D., The Psychology of Beauty. Pp. vii+286. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1906. Raymond, George Lansing, Art in Theory. Pp. xviii-f-266. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1894. Raymond, George Lansing, The Essentials of ^Esthetics. Pp. xix+404. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1906. Raymond, George Lansing, The Genesis of Art-Form. Pp. xxii+311. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1893. Raymond, George Lansing, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture as Representative Arts. Pp. xxxv+431. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1895. Raymond, George Lansing, Poetry as a Representative Art. Pp. xv +346. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1886. 338 BOOK LIST Raymond, George Lansing, Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music. Pp. xxxvi-f-344. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1904. Ritter, Frederic Louis, Music in Its Relation to Intellectual Life; Romanticism in Music. Pp. 98. Edward Schuberth & Co., New York, 1891. Rodin, Auguste, Venus: To the Venus of Melos, translated by Dorothy Dudley. Pp. 26. B. W. Huebsch, New York, 1913. Ruskin, John, Aratra Pentelici; Elements of Sculpture. Pp. xi-|- 181. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1886. Ruskin, John, Lectures on Art. Pp. 202. Merrill & Baker, New York, n. d. Ruskin, John, Modern Painters. 5 vols., pp. lxxiii+429, xiii-f- 230, xii+341, 403, and xiv+390. Merrill & Baker, New York, n. d. Ruskin, John, The Two Paths: Lectures on Art. Pp. xvii +270. Maynard, Merrill & Co., New York, 1893. Saint-Saens, Camille, The Nature and Object of Music. (In Music, vol. V, pp. 557-572.) Chicago, March, 1894. Santayana, George, The Elements and Function of Poetry, pp. 251-290 in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1900. Schiller, Friedrich, Essays dEsthetical and Philosophical, trans- lated from the German. Pp. 435. Bohn Library, George Bell & Sons, London, 1905. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The Art of Literature, translated by T Bailey Saunders. Pp. xiv+149. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1891. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The Metaphysics of Fine Art, pp. 125- 140 in Religion and Other Essays, translated by T. Bailey Saunders. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1891. Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Metaphysics of Music, pp. 155- 177 in Wagner's Beethoven. William Reeves, London, 1880. Shairp, John Campbell, Aspects of Poetry. Pp. x+401. Hough- ton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1882. BOOK LIST 339 Shairp, John Campbell, Poetic Interpretation of Nature. Pp. x+279. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1882. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, A Defence of Poetry. Pp. 1-41 in Essays and Letters, edited by Ernest Rhys. Walter Scott, London, 1886. Sidney, Philip, Defense of Poesy, edited by Albert S. Cook. Pp. xlv+143. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1890. Spencer, Herbert, The Origin and Function of Music. Pp. 401- 451 in Essays, vol. II. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1892. Stedman, Edmund Clarence, The Nature and Elements of Poetry. Pp. xx +338. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., Boston, 1892. Sturgis, Russell, The Appreciation of Pictures. Pp. 308. The Baker & Taylor Co., New York, 1905. Sturgis, Russell, The Appreciation of Sculpture. Pp. 235. The Baker & Taylor Co., New York, 1904. Surette, Thomas Whitney, and Mason, Daniel Gregory, The Appreciation of Music. Pp. xi+222. The Baker & Taylor Co., New York, 1906. Taine, H., Lectures on Art, translated by John Durand. 2 voLs., pp. 354 and 540. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1889. Tolstoy, L. N., What is Art? translated by Charles Johnston. Pp. iii+298. Henry Altemus, Philadelphia, 1898. Van Dyke, John C., Art for Art's Sake. Pp. xii+249. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893. Van Dyke, John C., How to Judge of a Picture. Pp. 168. Chau- tauqua Press, Chautauqua, N. Y., 1888. Van Dyke, John C., The Meaning of Pictures. Pp. xiv+161. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1903. Van Dyke, John C., Principles of Art. Pp. 291. Fords, Howard & Hulbert, New York, 1887. Vinci, Leonardo da, Leonardo da Vinci's Note-Books, arranged and rendered into English with introductions by Bdward McCurdy. Pp. xiv+289. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1908. Vinci, Leonardo da, A Treatise on Painting, translated by J. F. Rigand. Pp. lxvii+238. George BeU & Sons, London, 1906. 340 BOOK LIST Wagner, Richard, Art Life and Theories of, selected from his writings and translated by Edward L. Burlingame. Pp. xiii+305. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1904. Wagner, Richard, Beethoven, translated by Edward Dannreuther. Pp. viii + 177. William Reeves, London, 1880. Warner, Charles Dudley, The Relation of Literature to Life. Pp. 320. Harper & Bros., New York, 1897. Waterhouse, C. H., The Signification and Principles of Art. Pp. 154. J. S. Virtue