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	THE GENERAL NATURE OF THE ART WORK   We begin our search with several definitions of an art work given by some creative workers, from which we may deduce a plausible hypothesis as to its general nature, and which we shall then examine in the light of the data from literary, psychological, and philosophical sources. "Art is that beauty which the imagination has created, and which wakes in the observer an emotion of pleasure similar to that of the artist." (Mrs. John Sloan) "Art may be almost any form of beauty, created or expressed in such form that it may be enjoyed and which thereby makes living a more delightful experience." ( Don Dickerman) "This is all I know of art--unhappy men of other days distilled the poison of the heart and sealed it in a perfect phrase." ( Floyd Dell) "It certainly is not mere craftsmanship. More important is the mystical power of feeling and of communicating that feeling to others." ( Art Young) Henry Moore "Art is the perfection of expression." (Phelps Phelps) "Art is yearning done in matter." ( L. C. M. Reed) "Art is the material expression of unconscious ideas and emotions, passed through consciousness and handed on as a torch to others." ( Silas Bent) "Art is the outpouring of the creative flood of life in terms of a personality." ( Beth Benton Sutherland) "Art is essence as distinguished from the husk." ( Don Corley) "Art is man's attempt to conquer nature, either by improving upon her or by condemning her." ( Rex Stout) "The most beautiful presentation of whatever is." ( Robert C. Beadle) All these definitions are vague, and to the layman quite meaningless. The first definition states one unknown in terms of another, in saying that art is beauty--for what is beauty? The second speaks of the creative urge--but what is that? The third refers to interpretation--but what is the nature of the interpretation and why? The last mentions beautiful presentation--but what is beautiful presentation? Apparently these definitions do no more than raise questions. They are principally definitions that need defining. But they are nevertheless valuable, in that we can glean from each and every one of them several suggestive ideas. All of them either state directly or imply that art is expression. They also state or imply that the expression is not any expression, but something that partakes of the nature of perfection. And then, what is most important, they state or imply that the something that is expressed perfectly is not merely commonplace ordinary experience, but something unique, and of unusual significance and vitality, which was evolved from common experience. The definitions yield us therefore the following hypothesis about the art work: A product is not an art work just because it is a skillful, perfect reproduction of something that already exists, nor is it an art work merely because it has no connection with, or relationship to anything which already exists. The art work is something evolved from ordinary experience and given perfect form, and not the mere perfect literal transcription of ordinary experience, no matter how interesting or exciting. Let us put this hypothesis to the test of experience. The first thought that comes to mind when we question an art work is that we are never much concerned with its mere factual material. We never ask whether the incidents, characters, and events in a novel or drama did or did not occur, nor whether the person in a portrait ever did or did not exist. It is a matter of indifference to us, aesthetically, as to whether Hamlet was an actual person who was born at this or that time, who lived in this or that place, or whether the incidents of Romeo and Juliet or Othello are historically true. If we were to read two biographies of Julius Caesar that were different in some details, we would feel that there was something wrong. But two dramas on Julius Caesar that differed completely from each other would not trouble us in the least, provided both were good dramas. One drama might picture him as a martyr, the other as a tyrant who deserved his fate, yet, as drama, one could be as significant as the other, despite the differences in historical, chronological, or biographical details. Historical novels, like Dickens' Tale of Two Cities or Tolstoi War and Peace, or historical dramas like those of Shakespeare, do not owe their artistic quality to their being historical, while the artistic quality of histories like Carlyle French Revolution, or Green Short History of the English People, or Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not due to their being history. We might even go farther and say that if a novel like Dickens' Oliver Twist or a social play like Ibsen Doll's House remains an art work today, it is not because of its subject-matter, but in spite of it, for the conditions pictured in each of them are no longer true. If art consisted in no more than skillful reproduction of fact we would have to admit into the realm everything that we now exclude, like books on science, history, psychology, and exclude everything that we now accept as real art. To the above we may add the further apparent fact that to reduce a play, novel, or poem to its mere subject-matter, namely, the plot of the play, the story of the novel, the idea of the poem, destroys its very substance as art, irrespective of how skillful and interesting the narrative of this subject-matter may be. Any one familiar with Shakespeare revolts at Lamb's stories of the plays, well told as they are. On the other hand, all subject-matter, all factual material, has within it the germ, the possibility of art, for there is hardly a human interest or activity, or an aspect of nature, that has not been used by some creator as a basis for drama, novel, story, poem, essay, painting, or sculpture. Thus we find that fact, as such, is not art. Nevertheless, if the factual material of an artistic product seems to us to be distorted, fantastic, freakish, untrue, we do not accept it as art. Unless there is natural, factual truth, there is no artistic, aesthetic truth. For instance, there is a significance, a truth, a vitality, a livingness, in the characters of Dreiser's novels in comparison with which those of Sinclair Lewis are lifeless puppets. Lewis' characters give the impression of having been manufactured to suit some arbitrary purpose of their maker. They are means to fit an end, as expressions of the prejudices of Mr. Lewis. He does not paint life; he approves and disapproves of particular individuals, social classes, or professions. He is a master technician, but he exaggerates, distorts. His characters are either all virtue or all vice, all wisdom or all ignorance, and in either case, false, untrue to life. There is no Elmer Gantry in life, nor a Dodsworth, nor an Arrowsmith. We do not know of human beings who are either all strength or all weakness. We know them only as both strong and weak, some of them more one than the other. The only all-perfect or all-imperfect individuals are those deluded, and we usually put such in asylums. Mr. Lewis' novels are the social tracts of a strongly prejudiced master craftsman. They are interesting, exciting, entertaining, but when we have read them once we are through with them. They are excellent showmanship, but not art. We exhaust them at one reading. They have no depth which invites repeated probing. They have no universality, because they do not touch those aspects of life that are independent of the accidents of time and place. In Dreiser we touch the undercurrents of life, life in its universal truth. His characters are symbols of human existence in its totality, its hopes, desires, urges, aspirations, groping in the dark, but striving for light. They are real, we know them, we touch elbows with them daily, they are ourselves. We differ from them on the surface, but we are they and they are we at the core of being. Lewis' characters we judge. We approve or disapprove of them. We moralize about them. They arouse indignation or praise. Our response to them is not aesthetic, but moralistic, ethical. Those of Dreiser we accept as revelations of ourselves; we accept them as we accept life, as we accept our own existence. We know we are not Elmer Gantrys or Dodsworths. We may have a touch of them, but we are not they. But all of us are at one and the same time all the characters of the The Genius, An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie, The Plutocrat, and Jennie Gerhardt. We are not only one of them, but all of them. At best, Elmer Gantry arouses a temporary and local issue, or he amuses or riles us, after which we dismiss him. But Eugene Witla is ever with us, and we are ever with him.