The artist is impelled to embody concretely his perception of beauty,
and so to communicate his emotion, because the emotion wakened
by the perception of new harmony in things is most fully possessed
and enjoyed as it comes to expression. Thus to make real his ideal
and find the expression of himself is the artist's supreme Happiness.
A familiar illustration of the twin need and delight of expression
may be found in the handiwork produced in the old days when every
artisan was an artist. It may be, perhaps, a key which some
craftsman of Nuremberg fashioned. In the making of it he was not
content to stop with the key which would unlock the door or the
chest It was his key, the work of his hands; and he wrought upon it
lovingly, devotedly, and made it beautiful, finding in his work the
expression of his thought or feeling; it was the realization for that
moment of his ideal. His sense of pleasure in the making of it
prompted the care he bestowed upon it; his delight was in creation,
in rendering actual a new beau which it was given him to conceive.
In its origin as a work of art the key does not differ from a landscape
by Inness, an "arrangement" by Whistler, a portrait by Sargent. The
artist, whether craftsman or painter, is deeply stirred by some
passage in his experience, a fair object or a true thought: it is the
imperious demand of his nature, as it is his supreme pleasure, to
give his feeling expression. The form which his expression takes--it
may be key or carpet, it may be statue, picture, poem, symphony, or
cathedral--is that which most closely responds to his idea, the form
which most truly manifests and represents it.
All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite
sense representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality,
as it is said that painting or literature represents and music does not;
but every work of art, in painting, poetry, music, or in the handiwork
of the craftsman, _represents_ in that it is the symbol of the creator's
ideal. To be sure, the painter or sculptor or dramatist draws his
symbols from already existing material forms, and these symbols are
like objects in a sense in which music is not But line and color and
the life of man, apart from this resemblance to external reality, are
representative or symbolic of the artist's idea precisely as the
craftsman's key, the designer's pattern, or the musician's symphony.
The beautifully wrought key, the geometric pattern of oriental rug or
hanging, the embroidered foliation on priestly vestment, are works
of art equally with the landscape, the statue, the drama, or the
symphony, in that they are one and all the sensuous manifestation of
some new beauty spiritually conceived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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