Art principles in literatureDonnelly, Francis P. (Francis Patrick)
Philosophy
Art principles in literature
Donnelly, Francis P. (Francis Patrick)
Aesthetics; Literature
Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art impulse
just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent in the
acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It requires
brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no animal
has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its nest
displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited
just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown conclusively
the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the creature
possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of the child
displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate shaping of means
to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet to the latest have
found the making or interpreting of pictures a measure of intellectual
power. They are right. Art is rationalized pigments or sounds or words
with their images or some other rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey
Robinson in _Mind in the Making_ says that we are wrong in rationalizing
the past to make up our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing
another past for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr.
Robinson should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize
correctly and should give us something better than universal skepticism
with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with the religious
tendency in being rational and intellectual.
Art and religion strive for high ideals; they are disinterested and
unselfish. LaFarge says to Saint Gaudens: “That work is not worthy of
you,” and Saint Gaudens picks up a hammer and smashes the sculpture. That
is an instance paralleling the heroic following of religious ideals with
like sacrifices. Was it fear of bogies or love of their dead which filled
so many tombs with precious articles? Believing in immortality, Egyptians
and Myceneans gave to the dead what was most precious, and what was most
precious was the finest art in the costliest material. Love keeps graves
green: fear erects a crematory.
Art and religion are personal and emotional. Each has its own proper
expression. Of religion the expression is worship and of art it is
concrete embodiment of the ideal, and in both cases the expression is
intimately personal and permeated with feeling. Art is more sensible and
so more emotional because its expression must be presented to the senses
or at least to the imagination. Religion whose primary expression is
an act of the will, need not of its nature be attended with emotion or
external display but it usually is, and feeling and expression commonly
help to the fuller expression of religion. The rapture of art and the
ecstasy of religion, though differing in much, have also much in common.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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