express, the personality which shines in the face and radiates from it
This effluence of the soul within is the essential man; people call it
the "expression." As with human life, so with the many aspects of
nature. External traits are merged in the spiritual meaning. The
material forms have the power of affecting the spirit thus or so; and
in man's reaction on his universe they come to take on a symbolic
emotional significance. Each manifestation of nature arouses in the
artist, more or less consciously on his part, some feeling toward it:
he cares, then, to represent these external material forms, whether a
flower, a landscape, a human face, only because there is in them
something in which he delights; he fashions the work of art in praise
of the thing he loves. To the clever technician who imitatively paints
the flower as he knows it to be,
"A primrose on the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him
And it is nothing more."
But to the artist
"The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
And it is these thoughts that he cares to express and not the visible
truth about the flower. A writer was walking along the streets of
Paris on a day in early March.
"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I
had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon
a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of
desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness
destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of
the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great
or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what
secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless
beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this
immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will
contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it
would seem that nature has not made."
And if Senancour had set himself to paint his jonquil as he has
written about it, how that tender flower would have been
transfigured and glorified!
What the artist aims to render is not the rose but the beauty of the
rose, his sense of one chord in the universal harmony which the rose
sounds for him, not that only, but the beauty of all roses that ever
were or ever shall be; and inevitably he will select such colors and
such lines as bring that special and interpreted beauty into relief, and
so make manifest to the beholder what was revealed to his own
higher vision, by virtue of which, and not because of any
exceptional technical skill, he is an artist.
IV
ART AND APPRECIATION
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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