higher development of a process carried on in an elementary fashion
by all men, from the very nature of their constitution. The physical
organs of sense themselves do not retain or put on record all the
impressions made upon them. When the nerves of the eye receive
a multitude of different stimulations at once from different points in
space, the sense of eyesight, instead of being aware of all these
stimulations singly, only abstracts and retains a total impression
of them together. In like manner we are not made aware by the
sense of hearing of all the several waves of sound that strike in a
momentary succession upon the nerves of the ear; that sense only
abstracts and retains a total impression from the combined effect
of a number of such waves. And the office which each sense thus
performs singly for its own impressions, the mind performs in a
higher degree for the impressions of all the senses equally, and for
all the other parts of our experience. We are always dismissing or
neglecting a great part of our impressions, and abstracting and
combining among those which we retain. The ordinary human
consciousness works like an artist up to this point; and when we
speak of the ordinary or inartistic man as being impartial in the
retention or registry of his daily impressions, we mean, of course,
in the retention or registry of his impressions as already thus far
abstracted and assorted in consciousness. The artistic man, whose
impressions affect him much more strongly, has the faculty of
carrying much farther these same processes of abstraction, combination
and selection among his impressions.
The possession of this faculty is the artist’s most essential gift. To attempt to carry farther the psychological analysis of the gift is outside our present object; but it is worth while to consider somewhat closely its modes of practical operation. One mode is this: the artist grows up with certain innate Subjective and objective ideals. or acquired predilections which become a part of his constitution whether he will or no,—predilections, say, if he is a dramatic poet, for certain types of plot, character and situation; if he is a sculptor, for certain proportions and a certain habitual carriage and disposition of the limbs; if he is a figure painter, for certain schemes of composition and moulds of figure and airs and expressions of countenance; if a landscape painter, for a certain class of local character, sentiment and pictorial effect in natural scenery. To such predilections he cannot choose but make his representations of reality in large measure conform. This is one part of the transmuting process which the data of life and experience have to undergo at the hands of artists, and may be called the subjective or purely personal mode of idealization. But there is another part of that work which springs from an impulse in the artistic constitution not less imperious than the last named, and in a certain sense contrary to it. As an imitator or evoker of the facts of life and nature, the artist must recognize and accept the character of those facts with which he has in any given case to deal. All facts cannot be of the cast he prefers, and in so far as he undertakes to deal with those of an opposite cast he must submit to them; he must study them as they actually are, must apprehend, enforce and bring into prominence their own dominant tendencies. If he cannot find in them what is most pleasing to himself, he will still be led by the abstracting and discriminating powers of his observation to discern what is most expressive and significant in them, he will emphasize and put on record this, idealizing the facts before him not in his direction but in their own. This is the second or objective half of the artist’s task of idealization. It is this half upon which Taine dwelt almost exclusively, and on the whole with a just insight into the principles of the operation, in his well-known treatise On the Ideal in Art. Both these modes of idealization are legitimate; that which springs from inborn and overmastering personal preference in the artist for particular aspects of life and nature, and that which springs from his insight into the dominant and significant character of the phenomena actually before him, and his desire to emphasize and disengage them. But there is a third mode of idealizing which is less vital and genuine than either of these, and therefore less legitimate, though unfortunately far more common. This mode consists in making things conform to a borrowed and conventional standard of beauty and taste, which corresponds neither to any strong inward predilection of the artist nor to any vital characteristic in the objects of his representation. Since the rediscovery of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Renaissance, a great part of the efforts of artists have been spent in falsifying their natural instincts and misrepresenting the facts of nature in pursuit of a conventional ideal of abstract and generalized beauty framed on a false conception and a shallow knowledge of the antique. School after school from the 16th century downwards has been confirmed in this practice by academic criticism and theory, with resulting insipidities and insincerities of performance which have commonly been acclaimed in their day, but from which later generations have sooner or later turned away with a wholesome reaction of distaste.
The two genuine modes of idealization, the subjective and the objective, are not always easy to be reconciled. The greatest artist is no doubt he who can combine the strongest personal instincts of preference with the keenest power of observing characteristics as they are, yet in fact we find few in whom both these elements of the Examples of the two modes and of their reconciliation. ideal faculty have been equally developed. To take an example among Florentine painters, Sandro Botticelli is usually thought of as one who could never escape from the dictation of his own personal ideals, in obedience to which he is supposed to have invested all the creations of his art with nearly the same conformation of brows, lips, cheeks and chin, nearly the same looks of wistful yearning and dejection. There is some truth in this impression, though it is largely based on the works not of the master himself, but of pupils who exaggerated his mannerisms. Leonardo da Vinci was strong in both directions; haunted in much of his work by a particular human ideal of intellectual sweetness and alluring mystery, he has yet left us a vast number of exercises which show him as an indefatigable student of objective characteristics and psychological expressions of an order the most opposed to this. And in this case again followers have over-emphasized the master’s predilections, Luini, Sodoma and the rest borrowing and repeating the mysterious smile of Leonardo till it becomes in their work an affectation cloying however lovely. Among latter-day painters, Burne-Jones will occur to every reader as the type of an artist always haunted and dominated by ideals of an intensely personal cast partly engendered in his imagination by sympathy with the early Florentines. If we seek for examples of the opposite principle, of that idealism which idealizes above all things objectively, and seeks to disengage the very inmost and individual characters of the thing or person before it, we think naturally of certain great masters of the northern schools, as Dürer, Holbein and Rembrandt. Dürer’s endeavour to express such characters by the most searching intensity of linear definition was, however, hampered and conditioned by his inherited national and Gothic predilection for the strained in gesture and the knotted and the gnarled in structure, against which his deliberate scholarly ambition to establish a canon of ideal proportion contended for the most part in vain. And Rembrandt’s profound spiritual insight into human character and personality did not prevent him from plunging his subjects, ever deeper and deeper as his life advanced, into a mysterious shadow-world of his own imagination, where all local colours were broken up and crumbled, and where amid the struggle of gloom and gleam he could make his intensely individualized men and women breathe more livingly than in plain human daylight.
It is by the second mode of operation chiefly, that is by imaginatively
discerning, disengaging and forcing into prominence their
inherent significance, that the idealizing faculty brings
into the sphere of fine art deformities and degeneracies
to which the name beautiful or sublime can by no stretch
Caricature and the grotesque
as modes of
the ideal.
of usage be applied. Hence arise creations like the Stryge
of Notre-Dame and a thousand other grotesques of Gothic
architectural carving. Hence, although on a lower plane
and interpreted with a less transmuting intensity of insight
and emphasis, the snarling or jovial grossness of the
peasants of Adrian Brauwer and the best of his Dutch compeers.
Hence Shakespeare’s Caliban and figures like those of Quilp and
Quasimodo in the romances of Dickens and Hugo; hence the cynic
grimness of Goya’s Caprices and the profound and bitter impressiveness
of Daumier’s caricatures of Parisian bourgeois life; or
again, in an angrier and more insulting and therefore less understanding
temper, the brutal energy of the political drawings of
Gilray.
Sculpture, painting and poetry, then, are among the greater fine
arts those which express and arouse emotion by imitating or evoking
real and known things, either for their own sakes literally,
or for the sake of shadowing forth things not known but
imagined. In either case they represent their originals,
Unidealized imitation not
fine art.
not indiscriminately as they are, but sifted, simplified,
enforced and enhanced to our apprehensions partly by
the artist’s power of making things conform to his own instincts
and preferences, partly by his other power of interpreting
and emphasizing the significant characters of the facts before him.
Any imitation that does not do one or other or both of these things
in full measure fails in the quality of emotional expression and
emotional appeal, and in so failing falls short, taken merely as
imitation, of the standard of fine art.
But we must remember that idealized imitation, as such, is not the whole task of these arts nor their only means of appeal. There is another part of their task, logically though not practically independent of the relations borne by their imitations to the original phenomena of nature, and dependent on The appeal of the imitative arts depends partly on non-imitative elements. the appeal made through the eye and ear to our primal organic sensibilities by the properties of rhythm, pattern and regulated design in the arrangement of sounds, lines, masses, colours and light-and-shade. That appeal we noted as lying at the root of the art impulse in its most elementary stage. In its most developed stage every fine art is bound still to play upon the same sensibilities. In a work of sculpture the contours and interchanges of light and shadow are bound to be such as would please the eye, whether the statue or relief represented the figure of anything real in the world or not. The flow and balance of line, and the distribution of colours and light-and-shade, in a picture are bound to be such as would make an agreeable pattern although they bore no resemblance to natural fact (as, indeed, many subordinate applications of this art, in decorative painting and geometrical and other ornaments, do, we know, give pleasure though they represent nothing). The
