III. THE RACE, THE EPOCH AND THE
INDIVIDUAL IN ART
“We live in this world only that we may go onward without ceasing, a peculiar help in this direction being that one enlightens the other by communicating his ideas; in the sciences and fine arts there is always more to learn.”
—Mozart, in Kerst, Mozart: The Man and the Artist, p. 89.
Determining forces behind art.—So far we have considered the great common sources of art; now to turn to the causes giving unique characteristics to each work of art.
The personal element.—In art the great common basis of human life expressed only through the medium of personality; thus the character and experience of the artist always revealed in the work, and molding it. Compare Mozart and Beethoven in music; Fra Angelico and Fra Lippo Lippi in painting.
Compare Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar and Browning’s Epilogue to Asolando. Differences in imagery, music, type of thought and feeling, general view of life. Yet these two poems coming from the same time and race. Complete revelation of Tennyson and Browning in these fragments.
Relation of the material given in biography to the self-confession in art. Compare the revelation of Andrea del Sarto in the traditional biography and in his painting. The expression of Chopin’s personality and experience in his music. Revelation of the artist even when the work is most objective and dramatic in character. Compare how it is possible to find Shakespeare behind his dramas.
The development of the artist revealed where works come from different periods of his life. Illustrations in Goethe, Wagner, Shakespeare; in the early and late Pietà of Michael Angelo.
The epoch.—The forces of the time always molding the spirit of the individual artist. The epoch a complex of many forces, yet out of them a true “time-spirit” created. Effect of internal changes in a land; of the reception of foreign stimulus; of the natural growth and decay of the forces of life.
Different types of epoch: in production and preparation, faith and doubt, creation and criticism. The artist inevitably influenced by the spirit of the age, whether conscious of the fact or not. The two contrasting types of relation the artist may sustain to his time. Compare Emerson in relation to America’s civilization; Fra Angelico as an expression of the Renaissance. So compare Dante as a voice of the middle ages; Leonardo da Vinci in relation to the Renaissance. The common spirit in the Elizabethan dramatists. Wagner’s operas as an embodiment of modern life. Significance of the two dominant motives in modern painting.
Possible further to trace the development of an epoch through the art in which it is expressed. The half-circle through which every productive epoch tends to pass. This due to the birth, maturing and decay of the forces influencing life. Contrasting tendencies in the artists appearing on the upward and on the downward slope. Illustrations in Elizabethan drama and Renaissance painting.
The race.—The epoch but a moment in the life of a people. As the time-spirit finds varying expression in the different artists in which it is clothed, so the deeper, organic life of a race as beneath all the epochs characterizing its unfolding. Evidence in the fact that each race is apt to find its highest expression in one art. Compare sculpture in Greece; painting in Italy; music in Germany; the drama in England. Similarly every expression of a race revealing its spirit. Compare the coloring in Dutch and Italian painting; nature-imagery in English and Italian poetry.
Possible also to trace the development of a race through its artistic expression. The life of a race as comparable to a great on-flowing stream with rise and fall, ever deepening and enlarging as the race develops. Compare in the development of English literature. Elements which persist under all the changes. Compare Tennyson’s Passing of Arthur and the closing portion of Beowulf.
Thus the least fragment of art embodying the spirit of the artist, the deeper life of the epoch, the still more fundamental characteristics of the race, while beneath all are the great, universal tendencies of humanity.
ILLUSTRATIONS
“The most profound erudition is no more akin to genius than a collection of dried plants is like Nature, with its constant flow of new life, ever fresh, ever young, ever changing. There are no two things more opposed than the childish naïvety of an ancient author and the learning of his commentator.”
—Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, p. 52.
“At a distance we only hear of the first artists, and then we are often contented with names only; but when we draw nearer to this starry sky, and the luminaries of the second and third magnitude also begin to twinkle, each one coming forward and occupying his proper place in the whole constellation, then the world becomes wide, and art becomes rich.”
—Goethe, Travels in Italy, p. 36.
“I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my memory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me. I change many things, discard, and try again until I am satisfied. Then, however, there begins in my head the development in every direction, and, inasmuch as I know exactly what I want, the fundamental idea never deserts me,—it arises before me, grows,—I see and hear the picture in all its extent and dimensions stand before my mind like a cast, and there remains for me nothing but the labor of writing it down, which is quickly accomplished when I have the time, for I sometimes take up other work, but never to the confusion of one with the other. You will ask me where I get my ideas. That I can not tell you with certainty; they come unsummoned, directly, indirectly,—I could seize them with my hands,—out in the open air; in the woods; while walking; in the silence of the nights; early in the morning; incited by moods, which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.”
—Beethoven, in Kerst, Beethoven: The Man and the Artist, p. 29.
“Art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself boldly above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are enlarged.”
—Schiller, Essays Æsthetical and Philosophical, pp. 27, 28.
“People always fancy that we must become old to become wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves as wise as we were. Man becomes, indeed, in the different stages of his life, a different being; but he cannot say that he is a better one, and, in certain matters, he is as likely to be right in his twentieth, as in his sixtieth year.
“We see the world one way from a plain, another way from the heights of a promontory, another from the glacier fields of the primary mountains. We see, from one of these points, a larger piece of the world than from the other; but that is all, and we cannot say that we see more truly from any one than from the rest. When a writer leaves monuments on the different steps of his life, it is chiefly important that he should have an innate foundation and goodwill; that he should, at each step, have seen and felt clearly, and that, without any secondary aims, he should have said distinctly and truly what has passed in his mind. Then will his writings, if they were right at the step where they originated, remain always right, however the writer may develop or alter himself in after times.”
—Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann and Soret, p. 512.
“That which distinguishes genius, and should be the standard for judging it, is the height to which it is able to soar when it is in the proper mood and finds a fitting occasion—a height always out of the reach of ordinary talent.”
—Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, p. 88.
“It seems as though purely human feeling, grown stronger by its very repression on the side of conventional civilization, had sought out a means of bringing into use some laws of language peculiar to itself, by means of which it could express itself intelligibly, freed from the trammels of logical rules of thought. The extraordinary popularity of music in our age, the ever-increasing participation (extending through all classes of society) in the production of music of the deepest character, the growing desire to make of musical culture a necessary part of every education,—all these things which are certainly obvious and undeniable, distinctly prove the justice of the assumption that a deep-rooted and earnest need of humanity finds expression in modern musical development; and that music, unintelligible as its language is when tried by the laws of logic, must bear within it a more convincing means of making itself understood, than even those laws contain.”
—Wagner, in “The Music of the Future,” Art Life and Theories, p. 159.
TOPICS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION
1. What different types of relationship may artists sustain to the world in which they live?
2. Show how Tennyson and Browning are revealed respectively in Crossing the Bar and the Epilogue to Asolando.
3. Compare Michael Angelo’s two interpretations of the same theme at opposite ends of his artistic career: the Pietà of St. Peter’s in Rome, and the Pietà of the Cathedral in Florence.
4. Compare English and Italian poetry in nature-imagery.
5. What relation does landscape painting sustain to the spirit of our time?
6. In what ways are the tendencies of modern civilization expressed in Wagner’s operas?
7. Through what type of movement does a creative period tend to pass, and why?
8. What relation does sculpture sustain to the other arts in Greece?
9. What makes the Elizabethan drama the best expression of Anglo-Saxon genius?
10. Show how the development of a race may be traced through its artistic expressions.
11. Show the common racial tendencies in Tennyson’s Passing of Arthur and the closing portion of Beowulf.
REFERENCES
Bascom, Philosophy of English Literature. Carlyle, The Hero as Divinity. Carpenter, Angels’ Wings. Crawshaw, Literary Interpretation of Life. Engel, Introduction to the Study of National Music. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann; Travels in Italy. Hugo, William Shakespeare. Kerst, Beethoven; Mozart. Lanier, Music and Poetry. Leighton, Addresses. Mabie, Books and Culture; Short Studies in Literature. Mach, Greek Sculpture. Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art. Palgrave, Golden Treasury. Partridge, Art for America. Posnett, Comparative Literature. Ruskin, The Two Paths. Schiller, Essays. Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature. Sturgis, The Appreciation of Pictures; The Appreciation of Sculpture. Taine, Lectures on Art. Van Dyke, The Meaning of Pictures. Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-Books. Wagner, Art Life and Theories of; Beethoven. Warner, The Relation of Literature to Life. Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism. Witt, How to Look at Pictures.