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
Because of the essential make-up of man's mind and spirit, powers
that are innate and determined by forces still beyond the scope of
analysis, the perception of a harmony of relations, which is beauty,
is attended with pleasure, a pleasure that is felt and cannot be
explained. This inborn, inexplicable delight is at once the origin of
the arts of form and the basis of our appreciation. Each art, as the
fashioning of objects of use, as decoration, architecture, and music,
is governed by its own intrinsic, inherent laws and rests its appeal
upon man's pleasure in form. There is no standard external to the
laws of the art itself by which to judge the rightness and the beauty
of the individual work. In the arts of use and in decoration and
architecture, the beauty of a work, as the beauty of a chair, as in the
ordering and appointments of a room, as the beauty of a temple, a
theatre, a dwelling, derives primarily from the fitness of the object to
its function, and finally from the rhythm of its lines and the harmony
of its masses and proportions,--its total form. A chair which cannot
be sat in may be interesting and agreeable to look at, but it is not
truly beautiful; for then it is not a chair but a curiosity, a bijou, and a
superfluity; to be beautiful it must be first of all frankly and
practically a chair. A living-room which cannot be lived in with
comfort and restfulness and peace of mind is not a living-room, but
a museum or a concentrated department store; at best it is only an
inclosed space. A beautiful building declares its function and use,
satisfies us with the logic and coherence of its parts, and delights us
with its reticence or its boldness, its simplicity or its inventiveness,
in fine, its personality, as expressed in its parts and their confluence
into an ordered, self-contained, and self-sufficing whole. Music,
using sound for its material, is a pattern-weaving in tones. The
power of music to satisfy and delight resides in the sensuous value
of its material and in the character of its pattern as form, the balance
and contrast of tonal relations, the folding and unfolding of themes,
their development and progress to the final compelling unity-in-variety
which constitutes its form and which in its own inherent and
self-sufficing way is made the expression of the composer's emotion
and musical idea. Lyric poetry is the fitting of rhythmic, melodious,
colored words to the emotion within, to the point where the very
form itself becomes the meaning, and the essence and mystery of the
song are in the singing. Beauty is harmony materialized; it is
emotion ordered and made visible, audible, tangible. If in the arts of
form we seek further a standard of truth, their truth is not found in
their relation to any external verity, but is determined by their
correspondence with inner experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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