This tendency, of which the demand for chickens is a rudimentary
manifestation, is the basis of all appreciation. The artist's revelation
of the import of life we can receive and understand only as we have
felt a little of that import for ourselves. Color is meaningless to a
blind man, music does not exist for the deaf. To him who has never
opened his eyes to behold the beauty of field and hill and trees and
sky, to him whose spirit has not dimly apprehended something of
that eternal significance of which these things are the material
visible bodying forth, to such a the work of the master is only so
much paint and canvas. The task of the appreciator, then, is to
develop his capacity to receive and enjoy.
That capacity is to be trained by the exercise of itself. Each new
harmony which he is enabled to perceive intensifies his power to
feel and widens the range of his vision. The more beauty he
apprehends in the world, so much the more of universal forces he
brings into unity with his own personality. By this extension of his
spirit he reaches out and becomes merged in the all-embracing life.
If the conception be true that a supreme unity, linking all seemingly
chaotic details, ultimately brings them into order, and that this unity,
which is spiritual, penetrates every atom of matter, fusing everything
and making all things one; then the appreciator will realize that the
significance of art is for the spirit The beauty which the artist reveals
is but the harmony which underlies the universal order; and he in his
turn must apprehend that beauty spiritually.
From this truth it follows that the condition of aesthetic enjoyment,
or in other words the appreciation of beauty, is detachment of spirit
and remoteness from practical consequences. The classic illustration
of the truth is the saying of Lucretius, that it is sublime to stand on
the shore and behold a shipwreck. It is sublime only as one's
personal interests and feelings are not engaged. It would not be
sublime if it were possible for the spectator to aid in averting the
catastrophe; it would not be sublime if one's friends were aboard the
ship. One is able to appreciate beauty only as one is able to detach
one's self from what is immediate and practical, and by virtue of this
detachment, to apprehend the spiritual significance. The sublimity of
the shipwreck lies in what it expresses of the impersonal might of
elemental forces and man's impotence in the struggle against nature.
That sublimity, which is one manifestation of beauty, is of the spirit,
and by the spirit it must be apprehended.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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