Art is both creation and recreation. I am for amateurs in all fields. I like amateur philosophers, amateur poets,
amateur photographers, amateur magicians, amateur architects who build their
own houses, amateur musicians and amateur botanists and amateur aviators. It is spontaneous and in spontaneity alone
lies the true spirit of art.
Beauty is something that cannot be
accounted for by the struggle for existence and there are forms of beauty that
are destructive even to the animals, like the over developed horns of a deer.
Darwin saw that he could never account for the beauties of plant and animal
life by natural selection, and he had to introduce the great secondary
principle of sexual selection.
You cannot produce art by the force of the
bay not any more than you can buy real love from a prostitute. To understand essence of art at all, we have
to go back to the physical basis of arts as an overflow of energy. This is known as an artistic or creature
impulse. The use of the very word
“inspiration” shows that the artist himself hardly knows where the impulse
comes from. It is merely a matter of
inner urge, like the scientist’s impulse for the discovery of truth, or the
explorer’s impulse for discovering a new island. There is no accounting for it. We are beginning to see today, with the help
of biological knowledge, that the whole organization of our mental life is
regulated by the increase or decrease and distribution of hormones in the blood
acting on the various organs. Even anger
or fear is merely a matter of the supply of adrenalin. Genius itself, it seems
to me, is but an overly supply of glandular secretions.
Adultery is a matter of worms growing our
intestine and impelling the man to satisfy his desire. Ambitions and aggressiveness and love of fame
or power are also due to certain other worms giving the person no rest until he
has achieved the object of his ambition.
The writing of a book, say a novel, is again due to species of worms
which impel and urge the author to create for no reason whatsoever? Between
hormones and worms, I prefer to believe in the latter. The term is more vivid.
Every human activity has a form and
expression, and all forms of expression lie within the definition of art. It is therefore impossible to relegate the
art of expression to the few fields of music and dancing and painting. With this broader interpretation of art,
therefore, good form in conduct and good personality in art are closely related
and are equally important.
Given that oversupply of energy, there is
an ease and gracefulness and attendance to form in whatever we do. Now ease and gracefulness comes from a
feeling of physical competence, a feeling of ability to do a thing more than
well to do it beautifully. The impulse
to do a nice job or a neat job is essentially an aesthetic impulse. Even a neat murder, a neat conspiracy neatly
carried out is beautiful to look at, however condemnable that act may be.
Englishman’s monocle was part of style
conversation, as a cane is a part of the style of walking. Art has a
relationship to morals only in so far as the peculiar quality of a work of art
is an expression of the artist’s personality.
An artist with a great personality produces grand art, an artist with a
trivial personality produces trivial art, and an artist of delicacy produces
delicate art. These we have relationship of art and morality in a
nutshell. Morality, therefore, is not a
thing that can be superimposed from the outside. It must grow from the inside as the natural
expressions of the artist’s soul. The
mean hearted artist cannot produce a great painting and a big hearted artist
cannot produce a mean picture, even if his life were at stake. An artist’s work is strictly determined by
his personality.
All good forms has a swing, and it is the
swing that is beautiful to look at, whether it is the swing of a champion golf
players club, or of a man of rocketing to success, or of a football player
carrying the ball down the field. There
must be flow of expression, and that power of expression must not be hampered
by the technique, but must be able to move freely and happily in it. There is that swing so beautifully to look in
a train going around a curve, or a yatch going at full speed with straight
sails. There is that swing in the flight
of a swallow, or of a hawk dashing down on its prey, or of a champion horse
racing to the finish “in good form” as we say.
Without that character or personality, a
work of art is dead and no amount of virtuosity or mere perfection of technique
can save it from lifelessness or lack of vitality. Without that highly individual thing called
personality, beauty itself becomes banal. All art is once and based on the same
principle of expression or personality, whether it is acting in a movie picture
or painting or literacy authorship. To
cultivate the charm of hat personality is the important basis for all art, for
no matter what an artist does, his character shows in his work. The cultivation of personality is both moral
and aesthetic and it requires both scholarship and refinement.
No comments:
Post a Comment