Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, August 1899Various
General
Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, August 1899
Various
American periodicals
Nor, of course, can the end of art be untruth. Teachings like those of
Mr. Ruskin, far more common than they should be (because of our natural
want of humility and charity, and the narrowness of the fields into which
accident forces us), divide absolutely our art into two kinds—those
that give images of things just as they are, and those that give images
of things just as they are not; such a dilemma as worries the child's
mind.
"Things as they are" may mean so much as to be meaningless. If we mean
things as they are in themselves, only God can so see them as to enclose
them and leave nothing outside but falsehood. For us, we see but as in a
mirror darkly. We have a few imperfect senses, and such moral faculties
as we manage to distinguish the one from the other, and which we have
to complete by making one act upon the others.
So that for us there exist many truths. We have truths of smell, before
which all things are absorbed in one or more impressions of odor. We have
the truths of the eyes, for which all is appearance. We have the truths
of intelligence, for which there are ideas; truths of feeling for which
there are impressions; and many others in a long list perhaps exhaustless;
and I only use these definitions for our momentary convenience.
Now, in connection with which of these truths must the painter represent
the manner of existence of objects?
That is the question the painter must ask himself—that must be his
canon of æsthetics. He cannot exile the truths that affect his specialty,
however much he may care for the others. It is possible for him to let
the truths of one kind affect his own, but his own must predominate, or
the work of art will not exist.
Persons like Mr. Ruskin think that they are fighting the cause of truth
against falsehood. In fact, they are making one truth fight another,
with injury to both.
It is not possible that a work of art should define like science and
still move like poetry.
It is precisely that point of which I spoke first, that tendency of the
artist which makes him not a reasoner but a seer, which gives him the
unexplainable power of impressing us in a way that we can only analyze
afterward. It is because he can escape from the rule of his intelligence,
can become a being that does not judge, can become as a little child,
no longer see things through ideas, but merely feel the agitation of a
love, an unexplainable passion. As if he felt the breath that animates
the world behind a covering of what we call realities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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