It is after the lover of music has traversed these passages of
musical expression and has proved their imitations that he comes to
seek in music new ranges of experience, unguessed-at possibilities
of feeling, which the composer has himself sounded and which he
would communicate to others. He is truly the artist only as he leads
his auditors into regions of beautiful living which they alone and of
themselves had not penetrated. For it is then that his work reveals.
Only such pictures, too, will have a vital meaning as reveal. The
imitative and the iterative alike, that which adds nothing to the
object and that which adds nothing to the experience of the beholder,
though once pleasing, now fail to satisfy. The appreciator calls for
something fuller. He wants to pass beyond the object, beyond his
experience of it, into the realm of illumination whither the true artist
would lead him. The development of appreciation, as the amateur
has come to realize in his own person, is only the enlargement of
demand. The appreciator requires ever fresh revelations of beauty.
He discovers, too, that in practice the tendency of his development is
in the direction of exclusion. As he goes on, he cares for fewer and
fewer things, because those works which can minister to his
ever-expanding desire of beauty must needs be less numerous. But these
make up in largeness of utterance, in the intensity of their message,
what they lack in numbers. Nor does this outcome make against a
fancied catholicity of taste. The true appreciator still sees in his
earlier loves something that is good, and he values the good the
more justly that he sees it now in its right relation and apprehends its
real significance. As each in its turn led him to seek further, each
became an instrument in his development. For himself he has need
of them no longer. But far from contemning them, he is rightly
grateful for the solace they have afforded, as by them he has made
his way up into the fuller meaning of art.
II
THE WORK OF ART AS SYMBOL
In the experience of the man who feels himself attracted to pictures
and who studies them intelligently and with sympathy, there comes
a day when suddenly a canvas reveals to him a new beauty in nature
or in life. Much seeing and much thinking, much bewilderment and
some disappointment, have taught him that in the appreciation of
pictures the question at issue is not, how cleverly has the painter
imitated his object, is not, how suggestive is the subject of pleasing
associations; he need simply ask himself, "What has the artist
conceived or felt in the presence of this landscape, this arrangement
of line and color, this human face, that I have not seen and felt, and
that he wants to communicate to me?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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