The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to LifeNoyes, Carleton Eldredge
Philosophy
The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to Life
Noyes, Carleton Eldredge
Aesthetics; Art appreciation; Art criticism
A work of art, therefore, is to be received by the individual
appreciator as an added emotional experience. It appeals to him at
all because in some way it relates itself to his own life; and its value
to him is determined by the measure in which it carries him out into
wider ranges of feeling. There are works whose absolute greatness
he recognizes but yet which do not happen at the moment to find
him. Constable comes to him as immensely satisfying; Turner,
though an object of great intellectual interest, leaves him cold. He
knows Velasquez to be supreme among painters, but he turns away
to stand before Frans Hals, whose quick, sure strokes call such very
human beings into actuality and rouse his spirit to the fullest
response. Why is it that of two works of equal depth of insight into
life, of equal scope of feeling, of the same excellence of technical
accomplishment, one has an appeal and a message for him and not
the other? What is the bridge of transition between the work and the
spirit of the appreciator by which the subtle connection is
established?
It comes back to a matter of harmony. Experience presents itself to
us in fragments; and in so far as the parts are scattering and
unrelated, it is not easy for us to guess the purpose of our being here.
But so soon as details, which by virtue of some selecting principle
are related to one another, gather themselves into a whole, chaos is
resolved into order, and this whole becomes significant, intelligible,
and beautiful. Instinctively we are seeking, each in his own way, to
bring the fragments of experience into order; and that order stands to
each of us for what we are, for our individual personality, the self.
We define thus our selecting principle, by which we receive some
incidents of experience as related to our development and we reject
others as not related to it. Thus the individual life achieves its
integrity, its unity and significance. This, too, is the process of art. A
landscape in nature is capable of a various, interpretation. By
bringing its details into order and unity, the artist creates its beauty.
His perception of the harmony which his imagination compels out of
the landscape is attended with emotion, and the emotion flows
outward to expression in a form which is itself harmonious. This
form is a work of art. Art, therefore, is the harmonizing of
experience. Appreciation is an act of fusion and identification. In
spirit we _become_ the thing presented by the work of art and we
merge with it in a larger unity. The individual harmony which a
work of art manifests becomes significant to us as we can make it an
harmonious part of our own experience and as it carries us in the
direction of our development.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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