Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The General Nature of the Art Work Art and Fact 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	ART AND FACT   But if art is neither mere fact nor sheer fantasy, what is it? What else is left? Every art work gives us a peculiar experience, an experience that we can get from no other source. Our ordinary responses to stimuli we readily classify into real and unreal, true or false, tangible or intangible, our criterion being the objectivity of the stimulus. An image of a table is unreal in comparison with the table itself. The unreal is the subjective, the real is the objective. But in an art work this condition seems to be reversed. The unreal not only appears to be the real, but even more real than the objective fact. A character in a novel or play, if he interests us at all, is more real, true, living, to us, at the time than any actual person we have ever encountered, although we know that he is only an idea, a fiction, a mental construction of the author, and has never really existed as flesh and blood. During the time that we are immersed in that fictitious character, it is the people we know exist as actualities that appear to us as illusory, as unreal, while the fictitious one is the truly, the really real. A person of whom we read in a newspaper we know to be real, that he exists somewhere, yet he is not as real as the person in the novel or play. Jean-Baptiste Chardin By the objective test he is unreal; by the subjective test, he is intrinsically real. The test of the art reality, then, seems to be the reverse of that of daily, ordinary experience. Yet the art reality is not divorced from the ordinary reality, but seems to grow out of it, for we feel that the truth of the fictitious character holds for every actual person we know. It is in all of us. But it is not apparent, manifest, while here in the novel or drama it is the very thing, clear, precise, tangible, apparent, and manifest. Thus the truth of history or science, capable of objective verification, is the untruth of art, while the truth of art, incapable of objective verification, is the untruth of science or history, and yet the truth of art is inherent in the truth of science or history. The fiction dwells in fact, lies hidden, potential in it, and is brought forth, made actual in the art work. Here then we have the proof of our hypothesis that art is not mere literal transcription of fact, nor mere reversal of fact. We may therefore define an art work in a preliminary manner as fact transformed by fiction. If we give the name of realism to fact, to that which is real externally, and reality to fiction, to that which is true internally, our definition reads as follows: An art work is reality evolved out of and expressed through realism, thus transforming realism into reality. This definition does no more than establish a relationship between art and life, telling us that art begins where life ends, that art lifts life into a new level of being, of existence, a sort of revaluation of values, that it is a creation, not an imitation. But in telling us this much it tells us a great deal, in that it enables us to deduce some general characteristics of the art work and of the creator, from which we may begin an inquiry into its specific nature. To get at these general characteristics let us supplement and fortify our definition by a quotation for a creative mind: All art consists of the stuff of experience. The question is: Into what, without being contorted, has that stuff been transformed or transmuted? Not changed! Character, incident, shape, color, landscape--all may be strictly those of reality, and indeed the artist need have had little consciousness but that of precisely rendering reality. But if he is an artist his inner feeling of what constitutes precision will raise his mimesis, his imitation of life into a region above life. His product will be, in a definite sense, more like life than life itself--this is neither jest nor paradox--in that it will shape completely where life's hand slipped and bring out hidden meanings missed by the hot hour of experience and add to incident and character the fruit of meditation and later insight. The artistic process does more: it conceives this clarified and completed substance in terms of form--form which is, in this sense next to impossible to define, for it is an unanalyzable building of structure toward an identity of significance and rhythm, of meaning and music. . . . The artist works at this form; this and this alone is the substance of his labor. He regards the stuff of experience which he is using, though it was once the beating of his very heart, the rending of his very nerves, with cold objectivity and uses it calmly to build the structure of form that is some day, he hopes, to stand against the sky. . . . The passion that he feels during the creative process is not the echo or the shadow of the passions that he uses in his work: as passions they are dead to him. What shakes him now is the passion of his form, the tremor of eternity. Upon him blows a cold, yet ardent wind from other spheres. Hence, though not hence only, the mean absurdity of the strutting manikins out in the world of the perishable who say to the artist: You have used me as material: that is I and I will not have it. Is it indeed "you?" Then it is a "you" to which you have no right, which you could never have seen or created, a transcendent "you," a "you" wrought into an eternal substance unimaginable to the "you" that, in humble fact, you are. . . . If we examine the quotation in the light of our definition a number of points emerge, an examination of which will bring us more closely to the substance of the art work. What do we find in this pronouncement? It tells us, in the first place, that all art consists of the stuff of experience, but is more than that stuff. But what is the stuff of experience? Of what does it consist? What is a true experience, under ordinary, everyday, normal circumstances? There are at least four criteria for the truth of ordinary experience. Ordinarily an experience is true, real, if it is common, if all normally constituted persons give similar reports of it. It is apparent, obvious, requiring no more for its apprehension and comprehension than the mere utterance of it to be accepted. For all normal persons grass is green, the sky is blue, two and two make four. Ordinarily an experience is true, real, if the mental occurrence can be referred to some physical, objective phenomenon as its cause. The sight of a tree is real when the cause of the vision can be verified by other sense organs as being due to an objective stimulus. Ordinarily that is true, real, which works, which can be tried and found not wanting; or which is useful, in that it furthers and satisfies some commonly recognized need like hunger, shelter, sex, play, power, control. Ordinarily an experience is real if it involves mental or physical effort, as some problem to be solved or some obstruction to be overcome. Such is ordinary experience, which constitutes the stuff of art, but which the above pronouncement, as well as our preliminary definition, tell us is not art, no matter how well imitated by artistic means. It becomes art only when it is transformed, transmuted into something else, a something above life, and yet more like life than life itself. This something does not consist of a change of the stuff, but of its transformation into something that is different from it in appearance and significance. In a transformation the presence of that which has been transformed is felt in the new product. There is a consciousness that something new has been evolved from something old, that the old has been transcended, raised to a new level, that something that existed in the old potentially, innerly, has been made manifest, brought forth, built out into an actual. There is a unique power of mind, possessed by a few rare individuals, of penetrating beyond the surface of experience to the presence of something that is neither apparent to sense nor can be deduced by reason alone, and which is not consciously, deliberately sought after, but appears to come rather as a sudden revelation. The painter does not arbitrarily set out to find something in a human face or in a bit of nature to paint. What he is painting is not the result of cold calculated premeditation. Were he to do this he would produce something mechanical, arbitrary. He is not even aware that what he is painting is in any manner different from what he sees. But by the very virtue of his being an artist, possessing a certain unique mentality, he sees beyond the powers of the eye, so that what he puts on canvas is at once like and also unlike that which is present objectively. Hence the uniqueness of what he produces. His product is real, yet also unreal. It is like, yet also unlike that which is given in visual experience. He therefore does not imitate, he creates. A creation is not a delusion, a deception, but a revelation, an unfolding. That which is revealed, unfolded, has its existence in dormant form in that from which it is revealed, and through which it is revealed. An art work does not delude or deceive. It unveils. The poet, wrote Shelley, "strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its form." Our poesy is as a gem, which oozes From whence 'tis nourished; the fire Shows not till it is struck; lo the flint over gentle flame Provokes itself and like the current flies Each bound it chafes. This is the mind of the creative artist. The world is its flint, which it strikes for the fire within it. It is the mind that feels, in the words of Whitman, that Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed of perfection. "The poet," writes Edwin Markham, "comes to behold and to express the hidden loveliness of the world, to point out the ideal that is ever seeking to push through the husk of things and to reveal the inner spiritual reality. So all of life is material for his seeing eye and his thinking heart, and he makes the wonderful familiar and makes the familiar wonderful." What else does the pronouncement tell us? It tells us further that this unique experience of the creative mind, this something that is life, yet more than life itself, leads to a fully conscious, rational activity, to labor, in the course of which the experience is given bodily form, is materially incarnated, that there is a stage at which the artist regards the stuff of experience "with cold objectivity and uses it calmly to build the structure of form that is some day, he hopes, to stand against the sky." But what is it that stands against the sky, what is the significance of the "structure of form"? It is that the structure is a carefully, laboriously worked out record, adequate to the point of perfection, of the unique creative experience. The creative experience is the stimulus for the form giving. The passion of the experience gives rise to the passion of work, but a passion that is rationally guided, that selects, discriminates between possible means for the accomplishment of an urgent end. Thus cold reason is warmed by the passion of creative experience. Herein lies the expressive element of art. Art, it is true, is expression. But expression of what and how? All life is expression. We express ourselves in all we do. But all expression is not art, beauty. Most of it is anything but that. Expression becomes art only when it is the expression of a unique experience in a unique manner, a creative experience creatively uttered. Art is not mere passion. It is not mere labor. It is not mere inspiration. It is passionate labor, inspired by, and therefore guided by a passionate experience, so that the product of the labor becomes a permanent monument of the experience. What, now, is an art work, in general? An art work is the expression of a unique experience by a unique mind, the expression resulting in a product which is a perfect record of the experience. But what is the nature of the unique experience and the unique mind? How does the experience come into being, wherein lies its uniqueness and its significance, what is the nature of the expressive activity, and in what manner does the creative mind differ from other minds? It is the answers to these crucial questions that will reveal to us the substance of art and beauty.