ART AND THE ARTIST   We should now be in a position to make a deduction regarding the specific nature of the art work from the standpoint of its creator. It is very probable, however, that we lost the thread of our investigation in the mass of details, so we had better first make a brief review of our findings. We started out by asking the art work to tell us what it was as a finished product. From several definitions of art by artists we deduced an hypothesis that a product is not an art work just because it is a literal reproduction of some object or occurrence, no matter how perfectly executed, nor is a product an art work simply in that it presents us with something completely opposed to what we know to be actually true in the form of a fantastic, rhapsodic dream. This hypothesis we proceeded to test out by the evidences of personal experience and historical perspective. The question then arose: If the art work is neither skillful representation of ordinary experience, nor its reversal, what is it? Ayetullah Sümer The examination of this question revealed to us that there are certain minds whose unique trait is a mental power of sensing in the ordinary, familiar, and impersonal aspect of the world, the presence of something highly distinctive and personal, an ideal, perfect something, of which the actual is an imperfect and incomplete manifestation, and the art work is the result of the striving of such a mind to evoke the ideal dormant in the actual by using the actual as its medium. The actual is thus but the raw material for the ideal, into which it becomes transformed in the finished art work. From these considerations we formulated a definition of an art work as a unique presentation, or expression, of a unique experience by a unique mind. This very general, and therefore vague, definition stimulated the further and crucial question as to the nature of the unique experience, the unique expression and the unique mind. This question led us to an analysis of the creative process and the creative mind. It is in the nature of the creative process and what it tells us about the creative mind that the specific nature and significance of the art work is revealed. The creative process tells us that the mental impulse for the art work is not a set plan or scheme to produce something. The creator is not primarily engaged in producing or acquiring something. He is principally engrossed in living, and what he produces or acquires is the by-product of this pre-occupation. Such living is on a level other than that of ordinary existence. The ordinary man lives by producing and acquiring. Production and acquisition are his objectives, and the more that he produces and acquires the more satisfactorily does he live. His life is a scheme of begetting and getting. For him life is a business, a transaction. He buys himself by selling himself. He gives in order to get. Whatever life means for him depends on what he can acquire through that which he produces. His product is not the result of living, but the condition for living. Such is the man on the practical level of life, the man of the world, calculating, scheming, planning to gain life by the deliberate conquest of his environment. The life of the creative mind is the reverse of the practical mind, and the values of the creative product are also the reverse of the values of practical goods. The imaginative life finds its satisfactions within itself. It does not depend for its life upon external things, but it uses the external as the raw stuff, the food for the nourishment of its internal being. It seeks not the possession of goods, but the discovery of itself, the finding of the self in the nonself. It therefore does not calculate or scheme how to overcome its environment, but lends itself fully, completely, and spontaneously, to experience in an attitude of disinterested interest. Being disinterested in its interest, it is not aggressive towards that which promotes or hinders its practical welfare, nor indifferent to that which offers neither aid nor obstruction. It neither selects nor rejects. It lives. Everything about and around it is food for the enrichment of its inner life. It digests what is suitable, and rejects what is unsuitable. But both digestion and rejection are spontaneous, so that genius, by losing itself in experience, finds itself therein. By standing over the world, questioning it, prying into it, one may discover principles and laws. By yielding oneself to the world, permitting it to enter into one, one discovers one's being. We find our identity by finding the identity of others. By standing off from things we shut the very doors that would give us entrance to the essential nature of the thing we would know. When we gain entrance into the essential being of one thing we obtain a glimpse of the unity of all things, and it is only by partaking of the life of the whole that we can know our own life. But such a vision can not be caught by standing off from the world and calculating its meaning in terms of some immediate or prospective need, but by standing in with the world and partaking of its intimate life. The mystery of the imaginative life is the mystery of selfhood--the mystery of all true growth. It is a development from inside out, an unfolding, a revealing. The seed sprouts, sends its roots into the soil for nourishment, and in due time its bloom, flowers, and fruit reveal in the actual that which it contained potentially in its dormant original state. All true being is an unfolding of the inner in and through the outer. The imaginative life explores its soil, its external world, feeds and grows upon it, and reveals the stages of its growth in its fruits, the art work. That is the meaning of the whole creative process from preparation to execution. It is a continuous process of self-searching, self-discovery, and selfrevelation--the seed of selfhood unfolding, finding itself through the non-self. Genius grows as does the oak from the acorn. All true growth is spontaneous, unconscious; all forced growth distorts, stunts, and stultifies potentialities by arbitrary, external impositions, a process of clogging up instead of letting out. The truth, the genuineness, the reality, the authority, we feel in some art works is the truth of selfhood developing in a normal, natural manner. The lack of these qualities in other art products, their artificiality, often their freakishness, their immaturity, their one-sidedness, the feeling they give us of something lacking, is a lack of genuine selfhood in their creator. The true artist, the full, natural self, dwells in the art work as does the seed in its flowering. "The author," wrote Flaubert, "should be in his work as God is in the Universe, present everywhere, and visible nowhere." It is not so much that the author should be in his work, as that if he is true and genuine, he is in his work, for his work is himself. And since his work is himself, because he is present everywhere in it, he is visible nowhere. The visible is always the partial, the incomplete, the whole is always experiential. With the eye we see only the parts of a painting, with the ear we hear no more than the single successive tones of a melody. The whole, the unit, is neither visible nor audible. Thus the tones of a melody are present everywhere, but audible nowhere, for let one fix his attention on the single tones and the melody disappears. Since the art work is the consummation of the vital growth of its creator, presenting him in what he was as a whole, as a personality, when he executed it, he is visible in it nowhere, just because he is present in it everywhere. "The less one feels a thing," wrote Flaubert, "the more fitted one is to express it as it is--as it is always in itself, in its general aspect, and freed from all contingencies of the moment." What Flaubert should have said is that the less one feels, not the things, but one's own personal, conscious interests of the moment, the more one is free to feel, to experience, the thing, and therefore one is the more fitted to express the thing as it is in itself. Commonly, as practical beings, we do not express a thing, but ourselves through the thing. Our needs interpose themselves between us and things as they are in their essential nature. As Bergson puts it: "We do not see the actual things themselves, in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them. This tendency, the result of need, has become even more pronounced under the influence of speech; for words--with the exception of proper nouns--all denote genera. The word, which only takes note of the most ordinary function and commonplace aspect of the thing, intervenes between it and ourselves, and would conceal its form from our eyes, were that form not already marked beneath the necessities that brought the word into existence. Not only external objects, but even our own mental states, are screened from us in their inmost, their personal aspect, in the original life they possess." We do not feel things, as much as ourselves through the things, the degree to which things aid or hamper the fulfillment of the needs we seek to satisfy. And the more we feel our needs the less we can feel the things as they are in themselves, their inherent truth and vitality. Things can not enter into us and we into things in this attitude, for it is a war, a battle, in which the issue is to conquer or be conquered. In this battle of necessity we never are, we only do. The life of biological survival is an ever becoming and a never being. In attaining and reaching we never attain or reach. Hence we are never complete, fulfilled, for we are constantly engaged in completing and fulfilling. In striving to overcome for the sake of ourselves we lose the self we are striving for. But there is a striving which is at the same time an attaining. As the seed is growing, striving, it is also attaining. In becoming it is also being. In reaching it is also grasping. And what it is grasping is not external to itself, but internal to itself. In striving for the self we are also attaining the self. We are as we become. Being is realizing itself in becoming, so that there is being in becoming. All inner growth is a being in becoming. Such growth is spontaneous, natural. Instead of holding itself in, it lets itself go. And because it lets itself go it finds nourishment in all it touches. It becomes what it touches, and what touches it is absorbed into itself. Because it yields it also conquers. Because it gives it also is given. Yielding itself freely and wholly to experience, experience yields itself freely and wholly. Life thus feeds life in mutual coöperation. Such is the imaginative life in contrast with the practical life. Because the imaginative life does not strain to conquer the outer, it is free to attain the inner. In its emancipation from the non-self it reaches the self. Slavery to the outer kills the inner. In trying to save our soul we lose it. In gaining the world one loses the very values the world has to bestow. By forcing one drives away the very thing one would possess. By pursuing one misses what is being pursued, mistaking the means for the end. Life's treasures can not be whipped into line, but fall into line by mutual attraction. To him that gives is also given, while from him who would only be given even that which he has is taken away. The way of the imagination is that of spontaneous giving and spontaneous finding. The creative process is not a conscious search. The creator is not out to find anything or prove anything. What develops in the process of preparation--incubation--and comes to fruition in inspiration is no different from the bud bursting into blossom, presaging the fruit to be harvested. The fruit of the creative process, the art work, is then no arbitrary product, planned in accordance with some preconceived purpose. It is rather a milestone in the growth of a significant personality, a record of an attainment in living. Much of what has been said and written about genius and inspiration, both in praise and disparagement, is part truth and part falsehood just because it is praise or disparagement. What is needed is understanding. The art work is supposed, on the one hand, to come like a lightning bolt from a clear sky, as a sudden inspiration, a divine ordination, on the other, to be the result of labor and perspiration. Genius, at one extreme, is a charmer for the daemon, at another, a capacity for taking pains, ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration. But neither perspiration nor inspiration account for the art work. There are any number of individuals who feel inspired and perspire, but what they produce--when they do produce--resembles nothing more than the mountain that labored and brought forth a mouse. The rôle of inspiration and perspiration in the creative activity is worthy of careful scrutiny for the sake of an understanding of the art work. An art work comes into being neither by inspiration alone nor perspiration alone, but by sustained, hard effort, initiated and directed by a compelling idea. The crucial test of an idea is its driving power, while its driving power depends on the background of experiences that have given rise to it. The life span of an idea or inspiration is in proportion to its period of gestation. Fancies, whims, caprices, and fads die as quickly as they are born. There is no life to them because there is no life in them. Their immature birth presages a premature death. The sudden bloom dies a-borning. Of such stuff are the fancies of the mind, and they are easily and eagerly mistaken for imagination. But there is nothing fanciful or spasmodic about the imagination. The mill of the creative mind grinds slowly, and because it grinds slowly it also grinds fine. The imagination does not blow hot and cold. It gathers heat slowly, and when the heat bursts into flame, it burns with a steady and lasting light, fed by the rich sources that have given it life. Such is the mind of genius. What its imagination bodies forth in the stage of inspiration is not a phantom, or fancy, but an idea of substance and significance, a fruit emerging by a long process of growth and maturation out of a rich variety of warm personal experiences. There is nothing sudden or flash-like in inspiration. It is rather a discovery following a long period of arduous adventuring and exploring in the wilderness of selfhood. Each inspiration is a landmark in the journey of self-discovery as well as a beacon light for the next stage of the journey towards self-fulfillment. It contains both joy and sorrow, the joy of reaching and the sorrow of not grasping, of fulfilling, yet falling short of fulfillment. "The raptures of creative activity," exclaims one writer, "empty words invented by men who never had an opportunity of judging from their own experience. At the best, the maker finds himself confronted with a formless, meaningless, usually obstinate and stiff matter, which yields reluctantly to form. . . . Creative activity is a continual progressing from failure to failure, and the condition of the creator is usually one of uncertainty, mistrust, and shattered nerves. For that reason even men of genius can not keep up the creative activity to the last. As soon as they have acquired their technique, they begin to repeat themselves, well aware that the public willingly endures the monotony of a favorite, even finds virtue in it. . . . He who has once been through the creative rapture is not easily tempted to try again." But is this a true account of creative activity? The maker does find himself confronted with obstinate material, but what about the joy of the victory in conquering it? Can there be any real joy unless derived from the conquest of obstructions? And is not every failure of creative effort an accomplishment, a triumph in progress towards greater perfection and a spur, an invitation, for the next step in higher attainment? Can there be recognition of accomplishment without the realization of failure? Each art work is a failure, but is it not also therefore a triumph, for he who does not realize failure has ceased growing. Each art work is therefore a record of a triumphant failure, triumphant as an actual achievement, a failure as a potential achievement. The true artist is ever disappointed with what he has done, for his reach always exceeds his grasp, the ideal is ever beyond the actual. But the actual is ever striving towards the ideal, and it is precisely the mark of men of genius that they do keep up creative activity to the last, each of their works being a unique product instead of a duplication. Genius never acquires a set technique. It is not interested in manual dexterity, nor has it any direct concern with the public. It is not producing marketable goods. There is no repetition of technique in Shakespeare, Goethe, or Beethoven. Each work stands on its own feet, and is a law unto itself. Its technique is its own, evolved by the necessity of its own being. No preconceived formula is recognizable in it. Each bears the stamp of creative rapture, of the conquest of a new world of experience, of an adventure and discovery in self-realization. The herculean labors of genius--that stage of the creative process that has given rise to the consoling idea that genius is a minimum of inspiration and a maximum of perspiration --arises at the demand of the raptures of creative activity. The new-born mental child demands an appropriate habitation and a name. Its demands are exacting. The specifications for its abode are finely drawn and minute in detail. It is the severest of taskmasters and strictest of disciplinarians. The parent may protest, revolt, threaten, revile, and even disclaim or abandon his offspring. But if he would rear it he must do so at its own terms, even at the cost of anguished days, sleepless nights, and shattered nerves. It will be neither forced nor driven, but must lead and direct. It issues commands for its own rearing, and unless obeyed, prefers destruction to distortion. Genius therefore labors. But its labors are for the sake of giving material form to the substance of imagination. Imagination stirs genius to labor by setting a goal that can be attained only by intensive and prolonged physical and mental effort. The imagination is the driving power of the labor, while the intensity and persistency of the effort is the test of the authenticity of the imagination. The imagination is authentic only when that which is bodied forth in inspiration is demonstrated to be a truth and not a phantom by the results of the labor of execution. On the other hand, the labor is creative only when the hand and head of the worker are urged along by a creative idea. Without such an urge labor is a deadly routine. The creative element in labor is directly derived from the creative idea. In the process of execution the creative worker becomes familiar with his brain-children. In their original form, as ideas, they are strangers to him. He gets to know them only as he watches them develop under his hand. Some of them he discovers to be imposters or weaklings, to be discarded, others genuine visitations to be carefully nourished into maturity, still others to be more promising than they originally appeared to be. It is through labor that the creative worker learns to know himself as a creator by becoming intimately acquainted with the real nature of his mental offspring. Furthermore, since each brain-child requires its own mode of handling, an environment suited for its own particular needs, the creative worker also becomes familiar in the course of his labors with his growing powers as a craftsman, how well he can cope with the continuous demands of creative effort. This is the ultimate test of the artist as a creator. If he stops growing as a craftsman and settles down to a routine execution, he is through as an artist, and becomes an artisan. The art work is then a product of neither inspiration nor perspiration, but of inspired labor. Inspiration without labor is self-deception, a delusion. Nothing of more than transitory significance for mankind has ever been produced by labor alone, while armies of individuals have been clogging up the machinery of progress with loud claims of divinely inspired utterances, but whose very loudness is an indication of the sources of emptiness from which it emanates. All true inspiration is of the nature of self-discovery following upon the unconscious but severe labor of imaginative adventure in living, and resulting in the conscious toil of testing the truth of the discovery in the act of execution. Every art work is a measure of a man as artist and craftsman. It is a revelation of himself to himself. Through it he finds out what he is and who he is. It is the objective evidence of his past being and a forecast of his future becoming. It is told of Robert Browning that on receiving an inquiry from a club regarding the meaning of one of his poems he replied that when he wrote it he and God knew what it meant, but that now only God knew. The artist can no more give a reason for his works than he could for his life. His work is his life and his reason for living. He presents his reason for living, the meaning of his life, in what he produces. All that can be said about an art work is that here a man has lived. And that is saying everything, for life is its own reason for being. When we say that a value is non-rational we are labeling it as fundamental, basic, vital. In their essential nature things are what they are for no other reason than that they are what they are. By reason we can establish what they are, but not why they are what they are. When reason attempts more than an answer to the what of things, it is no longer reason but rationalization. Reason does not establish the truth of anything, for the truth is already there. What it can do is reveal whether or not we possess the truth of things. By rationalization we hide the truth. By reason we draw it forth, reveal it unto ourselves. And that is what the artist does. In his art work he reveals the truth that is in him. And his revelation is rational, in that it is orderly, systematic, a harmonious whole. By reason he assures himself of the truth of his imagination. But the truth that is in him, the truth bodied forth by his imagination, is non-rational. The rational is ever but the means for presenting, expressing, giving utterance to, the non-rational. There is no such thing as giving reasons. We never give reasons for anything. We only seek for justifications. And whatever is in need of justification is already condemned by that very need. The so-called proofs for the existence of God are no proofs at all, but substitutes for the absence of a personal experience of God. That is left to the theologian. But the religious genius does present in a rational manner the God that dwells in him. He is rational because he is non-rational. His rationality grows out of his non-rationality. The truth that is in him drives him to seek adequate expression of it, and the adequate expression is his assurance of the truth that is in him. The art work is the rational presentation of the non-rational, which means that it is a truthful expression of an experience that is of the very stuff of life itself. The creative impulse has been traced by many writers to have a social origin, as arising from the desire to communicate to others what the artist experiences. Without a public for his works, we are told, the artist would have no urge to create. In accordance with this view, the artist is a showman, and art a means for exhibitionism and self-display. There is no doubt but that much of what passes for art at any given time is motivated by nothing more than a craving for public favor. But to attribute the herculean labors and sufferings of the creative minds of the ages to such a trite purpose indicates a most naïve conception of the nature of human experience and a disregard, to say the least, of the records of artistic history. The activities of living organisms are anything but arbitrary, and that of human beings the least so. The motives of human experience are ever internal in origin, with the external as the medium through which they operate and seek satisfaction. An organism uses its environment for its own inherent purposes. It is never used by it. Its activities have no purpose other than the expression of itself and for the sake of itself. Every act of a living body, from amœba to man, begins internally, with an urge for living, and is completed internally with the urge pacified. Its reach for the outer is initiated, directed, and controlled, by the inner. Life is not the adjustment of inner to outer, but rather the utilization of the outer by the inner in the interest of the inner. An organism never reacts twice to the same situation in precisely the same way, indicating that the situation, though exerting an influence on experience, is not its determining factor. The organism seeks stimuli, makes different selections from among them at different times, and reacts to them in a manner suited to the needs of a particular occasion. The creative genius, above all living forms, is imbued with the urge to live. Mentally and temperamentally his is an enhanced existence. He is relentlessly driven by the life within him to seek profounder experiences by penetrating more and more deeply into the substance of the world about him, for the greater enrichment of his own life. What he gives to the public, and what the public most often rejects, at least temporarily, is the consequence, the evidence, the record, of his development in self-discovery. He does not produce in order to live. He produces because he lives. He is not a tradesman. He does not have his eye on the market, nor does he seek the favor or goodwill of the populace. Whatever public favor his works attract is accidental and welcome. But public disfavor, even condemnation, never swerves him from his purpose. The records of artistic endeavor throughout the ages tell a continuous story of genius bearing with magnificent fortitude not only public indifference and neglect, but braving savage criticism. If art were actuated by a desire to please, if the creative impulse depended on social approval, if art were no more than communication, then artistic mediocrity would be triumphant and genius eradicated. But history bears certain witness that what is most popular at any epoch is also most subject to the ravages of time, and what is most savagely denounced is often also most permanent. Genius is denounced precisely because it will not pander to popular tastes. And it will not do so simply because it can not do so. Its very life is to create, not to reproduce. Reproduction is the province of talent, not of genius. What the public wants is what it has become accustomed to. Hence, what genius produces at any time the public gets to accept in due time as it becomes adapted to it. The rejected of today becomes the accepted of tomorrow. Genius does not flaunt the public nor truckle to the public. It does what its nature compels it to do, irrespective of consequences. Public favor is welcome, if it comes, but it will not be bought at the price of selfprostitution. "Public neglect," writes Mr. Galsworthy, "lack of appreciation or even the suffering of condemnation, eccentricity, poverty, are certainly no signs or indications of greatness. But the great are usually neglected, poor, and often eccentric to their contemporaries and familiars, just because they are great, namely, above and beyond their time and place, and it takes centuries for the rest of us to begin to understand or even catch a glimpse of their heights. That which is superficial and flamboyant is readily and quite immediately grasped, because it is on level ground, and he who runs may see." Just as artistic genius labors for no extrinsic reason, so its product, the art work, is inherent in value, needing no justification other than that it is a record of vital experience. Its effect on the public is altogether irrelevant to its genuine worth as an art work. No art work is great just because it pleases, nor is it lacking in greatness because it displeases. Its significance or lack of significance is derived from no sources other than itself. To genuinely appreciate an art work is an achievement to the appreciator, for he has risen to the heights of its creator. But to judge it is an impertinence. As a product of genius, the art work judges us; we judge it only at the risk of displaying our limitations to rise to its level. The art work loses nothing of its inherent value by being judged. But by judging it we lose the opportunity of dwelling with it long enough to permit its significance to dawn upon us. What a Keats, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven lived, labored over, and poured his life's blood into is no matter for judgment, but for reverence, hope, and gratitude if its power penetrates into us and revives us. The sole judge of the art work, the only one who can judge and has a right to judge, is the artist himself of his own work. But what the artist judges is not his experience, but his success in giving that experience adequate expression. His divine discontent is not so much with what he has lived, but with his powers as a craftsman to execute what his imagination commands. Here his reach invariably exceeds his grasp, and what stands before him in bodily form as a finished product is always but an imperfect shadow of his mental substance. But the onlooker is in no position even to evaluate the artist as an artisan, for he can have no conception of the purpose, the idea, behind the form, excepting as it is revealed to him by that form. If the form appears imperfect to him it is probably because he reads an idea into it that is foreign to the purpose of the artist. All that he can do, therefore, legitimately, is lend himself completely to the art work that it might work upon him. If it works favorably he should be grateful. If unfavorably he might bemoan his powers of perception. And if indifferently, let him hope, with Plato, that, "after long intercourse with the thing itself, and after it has been lived with, suddenly, as when the fire leaps up and light kindles, it is found in the soul and feeds itself there." If the value of an art work depended upon its effect on the spectator the artist would be in a hopeless dilemma. For whom is he to please, and who are his judges, and whose judgment is to guide him? The critics? History shows the critics to be mostly on the wrong side of the fence. Most often, what they condemned has survived, and what they praised has disappeared. Nor do the critics agree, excepting to disagree. Which critic is he then to accept? The only way the artist could please the critics is by turning himself into a chameleon. His case with the public is even more hopeless. The public may claim that it knows what it wants, but the trouble is that each of its members wants something else, and that which they want varies with their physiological state. Hence, in accordance with this criterion, any art work may be great one day and quite inferior another day. Any criterion of the value of art, therefore, other than its own intrinsic significance, reduces the whole realm of artistic creative work to an absurdity and a hopeless confusion. There is no more reason why the work of the artist should be dependent for its value on the reactions of the public than that of the scientist. But even the proposal of such a criterion for the scientist would be greeted with loud laughter, whereas it is taken for granted for the artist. But why so? The real scientist is always an artist. The motive of the scientist, to quote the words of one of the greatest of all time, Albert Einstein, is "to seek a simplified synoptic view of the world conformable to their own nature, overcoming the world by replacing it with this picture." This fits the artist, the philosopher, the saint and mystic of religion, as well as the scientific worker. The spirit of all creative endeavor is of one kind. It transforms the world of sensory perception into a universe suited to the needs of an imaginatively creative mind. All creativeness is a self-realization through the material of the environment. The commonness of the common man is his satisfaction with the common, that is, with communal experience. The superiority of the superior man is likewise precisely that the common and obvious are no more than the raw material for the building of a home suitable for his being. Both the common man and the superior one are occupied with the business of living. Everything else is an outgrowth and an accessory to the essential business of subsistence. For the common run of man subsistence means the pursuit of material health, wealth, and power, and the happiness accruing from their possession. For him the acquisition of the outer physical leads to the satisfaction of the inner self, and his activities are limited to the realm of common perception. His self-realization is dependent predominantly upon what he can acquire of the world's common goods. The self-realization of the genius is inner. He seeks the world in order to find himself, and his works, in whatever realm, are the stepping-stones towards that end. That is their intrinsic value, their inherent justification. That such works profit mankind is accidental and extrinsic to their initial or essential value. The genuine artist communicates with none but himself, and his works are the records of such self-questioning and self-answering. If others derive any benefit or good from his labor nothing is added to its inherent value, nor is anything taken away from it if others fail to be impressed with it. The absurdity resulting from the extrinsic justification of art is well illustrated by Tolstoi, who, in his insistence that the sole function of art is communication of emotion, condemns as bad or false art the whole of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Beethoven. Since the art work is inherent in value it also transcends time and place. The inherent, the intrinsic has neither chronology nor geography, but belongs to all epochs and all localities. That whose value is derived from time, is also discarded in time. What time creates it also destroys. Modes, manners, fashions, and customs serve the purpose of the period that called them forth, and pass away. Since they come into existence as means for living, they go out of existence as they become worn out by living. Life has its necessity and its conveniences. Its necessity is to live, and it invents conveniences for living. The necessity is inherent, therefore permanent, the convenience is external and transitory. The art work is not a convenience, but a necessity. It is not a means for living, but a record of a way of life. It stands as a monument to himself erected by a great man of his moments of supreme greatness. It is life incarnated, uttered, expressed, by those who drank it in spirit and substance, that those who can no more than taste, yet may look, wonder, and be refreshed. What, now, as a result of the above summary of the creative process and the nature of genius, can we conclude about the artist and art in general, and the art work in particular? We engaged in an analysis of the creative process and the creative mind for the sole purpose of getting at the spirit and substance of art. For our data we have utilized the most reliable evidences available, namely, the utterances and pronouncements of those who know, the creators themselves. Their voices are unanimous in proclaiming that they are driven to their labors by a force, a power, that is beyond their control, that will not be denied, that knows no obstacles, and that neither seeks nor asks for any rewards other than its own satisfaction. This force, this power, is the imaginative consciousness which opposes itself to the practical consciousness and asserts, in the face of the biological demands of existence, that the law of life is the revelation of self to self and not the capitulation of self to the non-self. Every art work is a declaration and proclamation of this law of the imaginative consciousness, a law enunciated in ringing terms by the greatest artist of all time: what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? The artist is the champion, the torch-bearer through the ages, of the claims of life as a self-subsistent, self-revealing process, with art works for his witnesses. The artist creates out of no motive other than this inner necessity, and his creation has no end besides the expression of that necessity. The artist seeks nothing but the clarification of the life that is in him, while the sole purpose and function of art is to him that of a verification of his life to himself. The artist is a self-searcher, and art a self-revealer. "I feel assured," wrote Keats, "I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon them." Thoreau wrote in his diary upon the return of the greater portion of the first edition of his book as unsaleable: "Nevertheless, in spite of the result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen tonight, to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever." What, now, can we tell about the art work from our analysis? It tells us that the art work is an adequate, perfect record of an achievement in significant living. The record is adequate, perfect, in that it is the result or product of a highly conscious process of choice, selection and rejection, examination and re-examination, so that the local habitation is a perfect reflection of the inhabitant, the inhabitant prompting, even dictating, the planning and erection of the structure. The building is not merely constructed around the inhabitant, but out of him. It is of him, by him, and for him. It reflects him and he reflects it. It is empty without him, while without it he is but a shadow. The two are so fused and blended that a change in one is a change in the other, the destruction of one means the destruction of the other. They are eternally wedded to each other, and not even death can tear them asunder without material destruction. And the record is significant in that it is not merely a record of a commonplace, routine, habitual event, but of an achievement in living, of a growth, a development in personality, a transformation of life from a lower to a higher level. The life of habit is the life of stagnation, of blind routine, life in the valleys and plains of existence. The creative life is the growing life, the life that climbs from peak to peak towards the sun. In the life of habit reach and grasp are one, for there is nothing to reach for that has not already been grasped. For the creative life the reach exceeds the grasp, but the grasp ever strains for the reach. The art work is the perfect record of one attainment in this yearning of the reach for the grasp. The art work is thus an expression of a unique experience, a living, vital experience, on the part of a unique, vital, living mind, in a unique, vital, living manner. In the process of the growth of the art work impersonal, cold, objective experience is translated, transformed, and transmuted into a personal, subjective innerly created world. That is, the impersonal world comes to us, bidden or unbidden, reports itself to us unannounced. The personal world happens to us, reveals itself to us gradually from within ourselves, using the impersonal for its raw stuff. The impersonal becomes personal in that so soon as the fiction, the living idea, is sensed in the fact, the fact becomes fiction, the objective is transmuted into the subjective, matter becomes idea, but incarnated in matter. The art work thus is a re-creation of the world, a cold, distant world becomes an intimate world aglow with the fire of personal experience, the re-creation of the world involving a rebirth of the creator, a new insight into the universe, giving a new vision of self. It therefore has a warmth, a glow, an intensity of feeling that welcomes and greets a great discovery. Objective experience is the accumulation of knowledge. Personal experience is an achievement in living, an adventure and discovery in self-realization. Each art work represents therefore an epoch in the development of the personality of its creator. It is a landmark in the progress of self-discovery, a monument to a coming into being, into a higher consciousness of life, of a mind that is ever being reborn, reincarnated. For, as has been well said: "The mark of our passion is to wander without rest in the search for ourselves. The mark of our power is not to discover ourselves. Whoever has penetrated the mystery of himself no longer has to resolve the drama by projecting it into his work, with that heroic force which intoxicates the spectator." The art work, in short, is adequate, hence successful expression of creative, hence, vital, experience. "All the works . . . that have been published by me," wrote Goethe, "are only fragments of one great confession." An art work is a permanent and an adequate record of an adventure and discovery in significant, creative living.		Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry