A Study of Poetry | Page 8

poetry in order to attempt that valiant

enterprise of saving a soul.
4. The Man in the Work of Art
Though there is much in this matter of content and form which is
baffling to the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one
aspect of the question which the student of poetry must grasp clearly. It
is this: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has
put there. What he has put in_ is our content question; what shape he
has put it into_ is our form question. In Bosanquet's more technical
language: "A man is the middle term between content and expression."
There is doubtless some element of mystery in what we call creative
power, but this is a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the
artist's material as such: he is working in pigments or clay or vibrating
sound or whatever other medium he has chosen. The qualities and
possibilities of this particular medium fascinate him, preoccupy him.
He comes, as we say, to think in terms of color or line or sound. He
learns or may learn in time, as Whistler bade him, "never to push a
medium further than it will go." The chief value of Lessing's
epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and "space-arts" in his Laokoon
consisted in the emphasis laid upon the specific material of the
different arts, and hence upon the varying opportunities which one
medium or another affords to the artist. But though human curiosity
never wearies of examining the inexhaustible possibilities of this or that
material, it is chiefly concerned, after all, in the use of material as it has
been moulded by the fingers and the brain of a particular artist. The
material becomes transformed as it passes through his "shop," in some
such way as iron is transformed into steel in a blast furnace. An
apparatus called a "transformer" alters the wave-length of an electrical
current and reduces high pressure to low pressure, or the reverse. The
brain of the artist seems to function in a somewhat similar manner as it
reshapes the material furnished it by the senses, and expresses it in new
forms. Poetry furnishes striking illustrations of the transformations
wrought in the crucible of the imagination, and we must look at these in
detail in a subsequent chapter. But it may be helpful here to quote the
testimony of two or three artists and then to examine the psychological
basis of this central function of the artist's mind.

"Painting is the expression of certain sensations," said Carolus Duran.
"You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before
you, but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon
the mind.... Take careful account of the substances that you must
render--wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce
nature as you feel it_, then you falsify it. Painting is not done with the
eyes, but with the brain_."
W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: "Art is art because it is not nature....
The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. _It must pass
through the mind of the artist and be changed_. Art is nature reflected
through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling,
passion of the spirit that reflects it."
In John La Farge's Considerations on Painting, a little book which is
full of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are many
passages illustrating the conception of art as "the representation of the
artist's view of the world." La Farge points out that "drawing from life
is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment
is merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former
likings, former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared
for, and through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the
entire educated part of our nature."
One of La Farge's concrete examples must be quoted at length:
[Footnote: Considerations on Painting, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]
"I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men,
artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all the
time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely different in the
texture of their minds and in the result that they wished to obtain, so far
as the pictures and drawings by which they were well known to the
public are concerned.
"What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was
merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay before
us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in any way
the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention to note this

affair rapidly,