The Artistry of Art
When we speak of an artist we do not think of a day-laborer. Somehow there is a connotation of long fingers and delicate features, an implication as of flowers, a suggestion of the super-fine. About him as a halo is the word beauty.
Whatever materials he lays hold of, he plucks out of it beauty: out of the dung-hill the flower, out of the chill moon passion, out of the night light, out of the noon-tide shade. If he is found lying in the gutter, as Oscar Wilde has remarked, he will at least be looking at the stars.
The artist is primarily a temperament. He is a point of view. Life may be a dome of many-colored glass, and the white radiance of eternity thrown through it to our minds in varying colors, but the artist sees them all, and so sees white, or sees none of them and sees black. He looks at life comprehensively, and seeks a unity. Where another is content with detail, the artist demands structure. The general are genial enough to take life as it comes, and are not concerned that it is chaos. The artist either goes forth to meet life, or evades it utterly in both cases for the purpose of making it cosmos. While others are content with a moderate dividend of experience, the artist must have all of experience, or none of it. He must be either a Pan or a Narcissus, a universalist, or an egoist.
The Philistine world talk of artists as something not undesirable certainly as past events, but undesired as present calamities. There is in the air a sense of anxiety concerning them. They make the complacent so uncomfortable. So has the world damned them as unique, apart from the majority, being fearful of their destiny, and has evolved, because of this fear, the false dogma of spontaneous creation in art. A Dante is born the author of the Divine Comedy; a Shelley rises a child from the womb the inevitable father of the Prometheus and the Cenci; a George Meredith is given a somewhat humbler birth in a fashionabletailor’s shop the fated creator of the “Egoist” and Modern Love.
At any play, novel or poem in which destiny played such an omnipotent part the world would turn up its nose, and say: “Absurd! That’s not real, that’s not life.” But in the case of the world’s artists it pleases the general to say: “Well, well, life is stranger than fiction, is it not?”
A modern philosopher has written, and it seems to me most wisely, “Our temperaments are in some sort our destinies”. Now let me admit thus far the world’s conclusion. The true artist is born like the rest of us with a certain temperament, which is in some sort his destiny. But it is at this point we must leave the world. For if it were only this birthright that was required, certainly there would be in this present day a plethora of geniuses.
The artist is primarily a temperament, but secondarily he is an artist. The importance I attach to this secondary cause of creative ability is the importance of the unknown, or at best the unrecognized. For it is in the world’s tradition to ignore this fact. Only the geniuses themselves have spoken for the artistry of art.
Let us consider this paradox for a moment. The world’s idea of an artist as born the child of destiny, conceived in the womb of Fate, fore-doomed a priori; and the world’s idea of all other men as free, at least in part, to form and fashion their own daily lives.
When we speak of an artist we do not think of a day-laborer, nor of labor. We are amused at Whistler’s famous repartee to Ruskin’s lawyer when he asked him how he dared charge so much for an hour’s work, and Whistler replied, “Not for an hour’s work, but for the knowledge of a lifetime,” but as a jury we are not convinced by it. And yet in following the development of certain great poets I am more and more capable of imagining what I know to be true, that, granted the temperament, genius is made by intense industry; and that it is labor which causes the difference between the great man and the unhappy dilettante.
Dante’s “Vita Nuova” is merely a promise of the Divine Comedy. His greatness consists not in his having made, but in his having kept that promise. You have in this little book a beautiful example of the artistic temperament, and a brilliantstatement of the methods of greatness: “Then it came to pass that, walking on a road alongside of which was flowing a very clear stream, so great a desire to say somewhat in verse came upon me, that I began to consider the method I should observe.... Then I say that my tongue spoke as if it moved of its own accord, and said, ‘Ladies that have intelligence of Love.’ These words I laid up in my mind with great joy, thinking to take them for my beginning; wherefore then, having returned to the above-mentioned city, after some days of thought I began a canzone with this beginning.”
Now I do not think that walking along a road by a river and thinking of a girl one loves, and speaking, as if one’s tongue moved of its own accord, a line of verse concerning her is an unusual performance. In fact, given the temperament, it seems a very natural one. I venture to say that no one who has ever written poetry has not done the same. And Dante’s resulting poem is not extraordinary. It certainly could not at the time have suggested by itself its author as a compeer of ὁ ποιήτη. It exemplifies the artistic temperament, and is indicative of it. By it we know Dante to be a poet. Of his greatness as yet we know nothing.
It is fortunate that at the close of this book of his youth this young and intense Italian mentions a vision by which was disclosed to him a secret: “After this sonnet, a wonderful vision appeared to me, in which I saw things which made me resolve to speak no more of this blessed one, until I could more worthily treat of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knows. So that, if it shall please him through whom all things live that my life be prolonged for some years, I hope to say of her what was never said of any woman.”
Dante was born a poet, but only after seeing this vision of Beatrice which revealed to him the necessity of artistry did he enter upon his new life of greatness in the middle of the way of which he wrote the Divine Comedy. His method was as simple as truth. He studied to the utmost of his power, as she truly knows. You will remember the creation of the Divine Comedy made him lean for many years.
So Dante, so Shelley; Shelley who is the example par excellenceof the genius born to make his life an infancy, and sing his fill, pouring forth his soul in profuse strains of unpremeditated art. For when we read critically Queen Mab, we are forced to admit that it is at best a mediocre creation of little weight in the scales of beauty or of truth. The development to the Prometheus is swift, but it is achieved by the method of industry.
You will remember how Shelley read all day every day, how he read on long walks in the country-places, how he read in London streets walking down Piccadilly, crossing Pall Mall. You will remember how Trelawny describes him in Italy standing all day leaning against the mantelpiece of his living-room, not moving, intensely reading, and not stopping to eat, not even when Trelawny left a plate of food by him, and went out. You will remember how he worked on the Revolt of Islam, leaving Mary, and going off to a little island, and writing all day without food or distraction, undisturbed by the attractions of nature, being part of them, and as them lost in the existence of his art.
Queen Mab was the work of a young untutored artistic mind. The Prometheus, the Cenci, the Defence of Poetry are the creations of a genius. The change is unusual, but not miraculous. His industry was more intense than most, for he accomplished in less than ten years that for which most geniuses require a lifetime. From the stage in 1811 when “Reason is all in all”, and “poetical beauty ought to be subordinated to the inculcated moral” to the stage in 1820 in the “Defence of Poetry” where “There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government and political economy.... But we want the creative faculty to imagine what we know,” and to the contemporaneous Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, where Reason is no longer all in all and “the awful shadow of some unseen power” is
“Like aught that for its grace may beDear, and yet dearer for its mystery.”
“Like aught that for its grace may beDear, and yet dearer for its mystery.”
“Like aught that for its grace may beDear, and yet dearer for its mystery.”
“Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.”
From the early stage to the late there is a long road of intense labor over which Shelley in his mad and impetuous way ran like Pheidippides at top-speed the race of death and immortality.
“No doubt Shelley’s bad health in the autumn of 1817,” writes one of his biographers, “was partly caused by overwork, for in that year he had written as much poetry as would take ten years in the life of a less impetuous writer.”
All his life Shelley spent in piling up knowledge from forbidden mines of lore. With more energy than any other poet Shelley performed the Herculean labors of greatness, and so swiftly was it done that the world has fallen into the error of considering him as a bird who sang inevitable songs.
In these two cases I have shown what seems to me to be powerful evidence of the fact that, although artists are born, geniuses are made. I have shown the methods of greatness as applied to the lives of two great men. Actually, perhaps, I have been talking about the artistry of the artist.
Let us turn for a moment to evidence of this same method of industry as applied to an individual work, more strictly, perhaps, the artistry of art.
“Love in the Valley” is unquestionably one of the great lyrics of English literature. As unquestionably, I think, in its first published form, it was a very mediocre, if not an utterly bad poem. Let me quote you the first verse as it stood in the early edition:
“Under yonder beech-tree standing on the greensward,Crouch’d with her arms behind her little head,Her knees folded up, and her tresses on her bosom,Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.Had I the heart to slide one arm beneath her,Press her dreaming lips as her waist I folded slow.Waking on the instant she could not but embrace me,Ah! would she hold me and never let me go?”
“Under yonder beech-tree standing on the greensward,Crouch’d with her arms behind her little head,Her knees folded up, and her tresses on her bosom,Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.Had I the heart to slide one arm beneath her,Press her dreaming lips as her waist I folded slow.Waking on the instant she could not but embrace me,Ah! would she hold me and never let me go?”
“Under yonder beech-tree standing on the greensward,Crouch’d with her arms behind her little head,Her knees folded up, and her tresses on her bosom,Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.Had I the heart to slide one arm beneath her,Press her dreaming lips as her waist I folded slow.Waking on the instant she could not but embrace me,Ah! would she hold me and never let me go?”
“Under yonder beech-tree standing on the greensward,
Crouch’d with her arms behind her little head,
Her knees folded up, and her tresses on her bosom,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide one arm beneath her,
Press her dreaming lips as her waist I folded slow.
Waking on the instant she could not but embrace me,
Ah! would she hold me and never let me go?”
This is indeed a supple young lady. Consider that she is standing, and crouching with her knees folded up, while she lies asleep in the shade. I fancy it is a troubled sleep. Consider, too, that in this verse there is an unhappy repetition of the word folded,—the last mention of that word being in the wrong tense. Consider that this is the first version of the first verse of one of the few great lyrics. It is a poor thing, at best. There are flashes of talent, but so are there in a thousand lyrics of young poets, nothing of whose work is counted immortal.
But George Meredith was great. With the industry of the great he came back to this poem. Lo! it has arisen from the grave.
“Under yonder beech-tree, single on the greenswardCouch’d with her arms behind her golden head,Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,Press her parting lips, as her waist I gather slow,Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me,Then would she hold me and never let me go?”
“Under yonder beech-tree, single on the greenswardCouch’d with her arms behind her golden head,Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,Press her parting lips, as her waist I gather slow,Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me,Then would she hold me and never let me go?”
“Under yonder beech-tree, single on the greenswardCouch’d with her arms behind her golden head,Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,Press her parting lips, as her waist I gather slow,Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me,Then would she hold me and never let me go?”
“Under yonder beech-tree, single on the greensward
Couch’d with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips, as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me,
Then would she hold me and never let me go?”
The artist is primarily a temperament, but secondarily he is an artist, and his artistry, and the artistry of his art are what determine his greatness. Geniuses are born, and are made? But many are born, while few are made.
I think it is our duty to encourage greatness, even, if we, ourselves, have not the creative ability to imagine what we know.
MAXWELL E. FOSTER.