ART. Art is higher than nations, older than many centuries. Men of genius are more apt to feel art than to understand George S. Hillard: Six Months in Italy. Ch. 29. Art has its fanatics and even its monomaniacs. 210 Victor Hugo: Ninety-three. Pt. ii. Bk. iii. Ch. 6. Every work of art has also a certain end or purpose for which it is calculated. 211 Hume: Essays. XXII. Of the Standard of Taste. There is certainly something accidental in the first rise and the progress of the arts of any nation. 212 Hume Essays. XII. Of Eloquence. Nature only furnishes Art does not lie in copying nature. the artist with the material by means of which to express a He beholds in nature beauty still unexpressed in nature. Lect. iii. Lect. iii. more than nature herself holds or is conscious of. 213 Henry James: Lectures and Miscellanies. The Principle of Universality in Art. Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity. 214 Henry James: Lectures and Miscellanies. The Principle of Universality in Art. Art is positive, claiming a substantive majesty, and beggaring all adjectives to set forth its praise. 215 Henry James: Lectures and Miscellanies. The Principle of Universality in Art. Lect. iii. Why does no painter, no poet, no sculptor, succeed in snatching the inmost secret of art, and so making his name immortal? 216 Henry James: Lectures and Miscellanies. Lect. iii. The Principle of Universality in Art. Piety in art, poetry in art, puseyism in art, let us be careful how we confound them. 217 Mrs. Jameson: Memoirs and Essays. The House of Titian. The beautiful is the most useful in art; but the sublime in art is the most helpful to morals, for it elevates the mind. 218 Joubert: Pensées. No. 326. (Attwell, Translator.) The youth of art is handsome, its manhood pompous, its old age rich, but overcharged with ornaments which disfigure it and hasten its decay. 219 Joubert: Pensées. No. 276. (Attwell, Translator.) Art Art is the revelation of man; and not merely that, but likewise the revelation of nature, speaking through man. pre-exists in nature, and nature is reproduced in art. As vapors from the ocean, floating landward and dissolved in rain, are carried back in rivers to the ocean, so thoughts and the semblances of things that fall upon the soul of man in showers flow out again in living streams of art, and lose themselves in the great ocean, which is nature. Art and nature are not, then, discordant, but ever harmoniously working in each other. 220 Longfellow: Hyperion. Bk. iii. Ch. 5. Art signifies no more than this. Art is power. 221 Longfellow: Hyperion. Bk. iii. Ch. 5. Life is the one great fact which art is always endeavoring to express and illustrate and interpret, and art is the supreme and final form in which life is always striving to utter itself. Hamilton W. Mabie: Robert Browning. Andover Review, August, 1887. 222 Art necessarily presupposes knowledge. Art, in any but its infant state, presupposes scientific knowledge; and if every art does not bear the name of a science, it is only because several sciences are often necessary to form the groundwork of a single art. 223 John Stuart Mill: System of Logic. Introduction. It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power. 224 Jean-François Millet: MS. Note accompanying Art is, after nature, the only consolation that one has at all for living. 225 Ouida: Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos. Ariadne. Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged. 226 Ouida: Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos. Pascarel. Nature is always mysterious and secret in the use of her means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable. 227 Ruskin Modern Painters. Pt. i. Sec. 2, Ch. 2. All art is great, and good, and true, only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its entire and highest sense; that is to say, not the work of limbs and fingers, but of the soul, aided, according to her necessities, by the inferior powers, and therefore distinguished in essence from all products of those inferior powers unhelped by the soul. 228 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fall. Ch. 4. Art does not represent things falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind. 229 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fall. Ch. 2. All the forms of art which result from the comparatively recreative exertion of minds more or less blunted or encumbered with other cares and toils, the art which we may call generally the art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, grotesque. 230 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. Great art is nothing else than the type of life. 231 The Fall. Ch. 3. strong and noble Ruskin: The Two Paths. Lect. i. Great art is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul. 232 Ruskin: The Queen of the Air. Lect. iii. I say fearlessly respecting repose, that no work of art can be great without it, and that all art is great in proportion to the appearance of it. It is the most unfailing test of beauty, whether of matter or of motion, nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not, and in strict proportion to its appearance in the work is the majesty of mind to be inferred to the artificer. 233 Ruskin: Modern Painters. Pt. iii. Sec. 1, Ch. 7. Noble art is nothing less than the expression of a great soul; and great souls are not common things. 234 Ruskin: Political Economy of Art. Nothing can be done well in art except by vision. Addenda. 235 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fall. Ch. 2. The art is wrong which either realizes its subject completely or fails in giving such definite aid as shall enable it to be realized by the beholding imagination. 236 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fall. Ch. 4. Over the doors of every school of art I would have this one word, relieved out in deep letters of pure gold, - Moderation. 237 Ruskin: Modern Painters. Pt. iii. Sec. 1, Ch. 10. Respect for the ancients is the salvation of art, though it sometimes blinds us to its ends. 238 Ruskin: Modern Painters. Preface. (Second edition.) The art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas, and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received. 239 Ruskin: Modern Painters. Pt. i. Sec. 1, Ch. 2. No work of any art, in which this expression of infinity is possible, can be perfect, or supremely elevated without it, and that, in proportion to its presence, it will exalt and render impressive even the most tame and trivial themes. 240 Ruskin: Modern Painters. Pt. iii. Sec. 1, Ch. 5. Art alone supplies an enjoyment which requires no appreciable effort, which costs no sacrifice, and which we need not repay with repentance. 241 Schiller Essays, Esthetical and Philosophical. Art is intended to make us contemplate the true and the infinite in forms of sense. Yet even art does not fully satisfy the deepest need of the soul. The soul wants to contemplate truth in its inmost consciousness. Religion is placed above the dominion of art. 242 Schiller: Essays, Esthetical and Philosophical. Introduction. (Bohn's Edition.) Art is the right hand of nature. The latter only gave us being, but 'twas the former made us men. 243 Schiller: Fiesco. II. 17. (Bohn's Edition.) As all sublimity and beauty consists in the appearance and not in the value of the object, it follows that art has all the advantages of nature without her shackles. 244 Schiller Essays, Esthetical and Philosophical. the Sublime. (Bohn's Edition.) On There is one thing that survives all the changes that come over men's modes of thought, and that is art. 245 Horace E. Scudder: Men and Letters. Historical Work. Aspects of Practical success in art must come from every-day ambition and experiment. 246 Stedman: Poets of America. Ch. 9. James Russell Lowell. No good art is unbeautiful, but much able and effective work may be and is. 247 Swinburne: Essays and Studies. Notes on some Oh wit and art, what power you have when joined ! Vanbrugh: The Provoked Wife. Act ii. Sc. 2. ARTISTS - see Art, Individuality, Musicians, Pictures. Washington Allston: Lectures on Art and Poems. Art reveals nature by interpreting its intentions and formulating its desires. Every ideal is the key of a long enigma. The great artist is the simplifier. 250 Amiel: Journal. Nov. 25, 1861. (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Translator.) Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. 251 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. Art is a manly business, if ever any human occupation could be called manly, for the utmost efforts of the strongest men are needed for success in it. 252 Women and Mar Hamerton: Intellectual Life. The artist must look to his own industry and not to the criticisms of others for the true revelation of his own powers. 253 Hamerton: Modern Frenchmen. François Rude. The simple privilege of doing art work is in itself the artist's sufficient reward, his only real misfortune being whatever interrupts his studies. 254 Hamerton: Modern Frenchmen. You cannot put an artist's day into the life an artist. 255 Hamerton: The Intellectual Life. François Rude. of any one but Pt. x. Letter i. A great name in art goes but a little way it is chilled as it creeps along the surface of the world, without something to revive and make it blaze out with fresh splendor. 256 Hazlitt: Table Talk. Second series. Pt. ii. Essay xxxi. On Patronage and Puffing. The artist is the fabled child of popular legend, whose tears are all pearls. Alas! his wicked step-mother, the world, beats the poor child the more unmercifully in order that he may weep plenty of pearls. 257 Heine: Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos. Musical Notes from Paris. The one thing that marks the true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone. 258 Holmes: The Professor at the Breakfast- The greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art, even although he may lack the qualities necessary for the adequate execution of some minor details. 259 George Henry Lewes: On Actors and the Art of Acting. Ch. 1. Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor. 260 Longfellow: Kavanagh. Ch. 20. |