Studies in Seven Arts

STUDIES IN SEVEN ARTS STUDIES IN SEVEN ARTS BY AETHUR SYMONS in LONDON ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY, LTD. 1906 630282 : T. and Edinturgh A. COKSTABLB, Printers to His Majesty TO RHODA Do you remember the first two sentences of ' ' Pater's essay on The School of Giorgione ? I will copy them, for they make a kind of motto for my book, and sum up, I think, the way in which you and I (you always, and I since I have known you) have looked upon art and the arts. 1 ' It is the mistake,' says Pater, of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music and painting all the various products of art as but transla- tions into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supple- mented by certain technical qualities of colour in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indiffer- ence; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism.' With the art of poetry, or of literature in general, I am not here concerned : that is my main con- cern in most of my other books of criticism. In this book I have tried to deal with the other arts, as I know or them and I find seven : recognise ; VI handi- painting, sculpture, architecture, music, craft, the stage (in which I include drama, acting, pantomime, scenery, costume, and lighting), and, of these separate from these, dancing. Each arts I have tried to study from its own point of view, and (except in the case of architecture, which has almost ceased to exist as an art) in its contemporary aspects, and in those contemporary or aspects which seem to me most important most characteristic. In my endeavour to study each art from its own point of view, it is to you that I owe most in keeping me from slipping, more than I have, into tempting and easy con- fusions. You have a far clearer sense than I have of the special qualities, the special limits, of the various arts and it is from that I have learnt ; you to look on each art as of absolutely equal value. In my endeavour to master what I have called the universal science of beauty, I owe more to you than to technical books or to technical people; because in you there is some hardly conscious instinct which turns towards beauty unerringly, like the magnet, at the attraction of every vital current. You will find, then, in this book, much of own back to in this your coming you ; and, dedication, hardly more than the acknowledg- ment of a little of my debt. But I want the book to be yours, chiefly because we have lived so much of it together. ARTHUR SYMONS. WlTTERSHAM, September 26, 1906. CONTENTS PACK RODIN ..... 3 THE PAINTING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 33 GUSTAVE MOREAU . .71 WATTS . ... 89 WHISTLER . .121 CATHEDRALS . .151 THE DECAY OF CRAFTSMANSHIP IN ENGLAND . 175 BEETHOVEN . .191 THE IDEAS OF RICHARD WAGNER . 225 THE PROBLEM OF RICHARD STRAUSS . 301 ELEONORA DUSE . .331 A NEW ART OF THE STAGE . .349 A SYMBOLIST FARCE . .371 PANTOMIME AND THE POETIC DRAMA . .381 THE WORLD AS BALLET 387 vii RODIN EODIN THE art of Rodin competes with nature rather than with the art of other sculptors. Other sculptors turn life into sculpture, he turns sculpture into life. His clay is part of the substance of the earth, and the earth still clings about it as it comes up and lives. It is at once the flower and the root ; that of others is the flower only, and the plucked flower. That link with the earth, which we find in the unhewn masses of rock from which his finest creations of pure form can never quite free themselves, is the secret of his deepest force. It links his creations to nature's, in a single fashion of growth. Rodin is a visionary, to whom art has no meaning apart from truth. His first care is to assure you, as you penetrate into that bewildering world which lies about him in his studios, that every movement arrested 4 STUDIES IN SEVEN ARTS in those figures, all in violent action, is taken straight from nature. It is not copied, or I would see it it is as as you ; re-created, he sees it. How then does he see nature ? To Rodin everything that lives is beautiful, merely because it lives, and everything is equally beautiful. Eodin believes, not as a mystic, but as a mathematician, I might almost say, in that ' ' doctrine of correspondences which lies at the root of most of the mystical teaching. He spies upon every gesture, knowing that if he can seize one gesture at the turn of the wave, he has seized an essential rhythm of nature. When a woman combs her hair, he will say to you, she thinks she is only combing her hair : no, she is making a gesture which flows into the eternal rhythm, which is beautiful because it lives, because it is part of that geometrical plan which nature is always weaving for us. Change the gesture as it is, give it your own con- ception of abstract beauty, depart ever so little from the mere truth of the movement, and the rhythm is broken, what was living is dead. We speak of the rhythm of nature. What RODIN 5 is it, precisely, that we mean ? Rhythm, precisely, is a balance, a means of preserving equilibrium in moving bodies. The human body possesses so much volume, it has to its if its maintain equilibrium ; you displace contents here, they shift there : the balance is regained by an instinctive movement of self-preservation. Thus what we call har- mony is really utility, and, as always, beauty is seen to be a necessary thing, the exquisite growth of a need. And this rhythm runs through all nature, producing every grace and justifying every apparent defect. The same swing and balance of forces make the hump on a dwarfs back and the mountain in the lap of a plain. One is not more beautiful than the other, if you will take each thing simply, in its own place. And that apparent ugliness of the average, even, has its place, does not require the heightening energy of excess to make it beautiful. It, too, has the beauty of life. There was a time, Rodin will tell you, for beautiful models when he sought ; when he found himself disappointed, dissatisfied, before some body whose proportions did not 6 STUDIES IN SEVEN ARTS please him. He would go on working was there merely because the model ; and, after two hours' work, discover suddenly the beauty of this living thing which was turning into a new kind of life under his fingers. 1 Why choose any longer ? why reject this always faultless material ? He has come to trust nature so implicitly that he will never pose a model, leaving nature to find its own way of doing what he wants of it. All de- pends on the way of seeing, on the seizure of the perfect moment, on the art of render- ing, in the sculptor's relief, 'the instant made eternity.' Rodin was studying drawing, with no idea but of being a draughtsman, when the idea of modelling in clay came to him. He had been drawing the model from different points of view, as the pivot turned, presenting now this and now that profile. It occurred to him to apply this principle to the clay, in which, by a swift, almost simultaneous, series of studies after nature, a single figure might be built up which would seem to be wholly alive, to move throughout its entire surface. From that time until now, he has taken one profile after another, each separ- RODIN 7 ately, and all together, turning his work in all directions, looking upward at the model to get the arch and hollow of the eyebrows, for instance, looking down on the model, taking each angle, as if, for the time, no other existed, and pursuing the outlines of nature with a movement as constant as her own. At the end, the thing is done, there is no need of even a final point of view, of an ad- justment to some image of proportion : nature has been caught on the wing, enfolded by observation as the air enfolds the living form. If every part is right, the whole must 1 be right. But, for the living representation of nature in movement, something more is needed than the exact copy. This is a 1 This method of work is very clearly defined by M. Camille ' Mauclair, almost in Eodin's own words, in an article on La ' ' Technique de Eodin : II eut l'ide de ne point travailler a ses figures d'un seul cote" a la fois, mais de tous ensemble, tournant autour constamment et faisant des dessins successifs a meme le bloc, de tous les plans, modelant par un dessin simultane" de toutes les silhouettes et les unissant sommaire- ment de fac,on a obtenir avant tout un dessin de mouvement dans I'air, sans s'occuper de 1'harmonisation pre"conQue de son sujet.

Load more