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 The Testimony of the History of Painting The Aesthetic Element in Painting The Aesthetic Experience in Painting Poor Art and Rich Art Poetry	PURE ART AND RICH ART   The experience of beauty in painting, as is sufficiently indicated by the foregoing pronouncements, is the experience of beauty in music. The beauty of tonal structure is also the beauty of the structure of line and color. Both are intrinsic, self-sufficient, inherent experiences, differing only in the sensuous material from which the experience is derived. It is therefore true, and not, as Pater maintains, a mistake, to regard poetry, music, painting, and all arts, "as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colors, in painting--of sound in music--of rhythmical words, in poetry." The one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought of all the arts is beauty, a disinterested, intrinsically significant experience. But this does not mean that the sensuous material of the arts is irrelevant to the experience, and produces no effect upon it. An art work, we found, is the translation, or transformation of the commonplace, the old, into the uniquely personal new. The old is the sensuous material of the new, and since the sensuous material of each art differs, the new will have in it the flavor of the old. Now an intellectual idea may be translated or put into different languages without changing its structure, but each language will impose upon the idea a quality of its own. In substance the idea remains the same, but it differs in taste, in flavor. Some flavors are purer than others, while some are richer. Sweetness varies from the cloying to the sweet-sour, due to the ingredients of the sweet substance. Now beauty has varied ingredients in the sensuous material of the arts, but it remains beauty in all the arts, differing however in flavor. In music the flavor of beauty is purest, but because it is purest it is also least rich, while in the other arts it is less pure, but for that reason more rich. We may therefore classify the arts not only in accordance with their purity, with music at the top, but also as to their richness, with music at the bottom. Dürer To see clearly what this means let us remind ourselves once again of the nature of the art work. Art is not detached from life, but arises out of life. Nor is art but a skillful representation of life, but a transformation of life. The nature of this transformation is a transubstantiation, a change in substance, a transference of significance from one level of being to another level of being. In art the actual and the ideal change places on the level of reality. An art work is the transformation of the actual into the ideal, where the two fuse so that the ideal becomes the actual and the actual becomes the ideal, matter and idea fuse, by matter becoming the vehicle for idea, and thereby suffused with idea. Now it follows necessarily from the nature of the art work as a transformation of the actual into the ideal, that an art work whose subjectmatter or material is most actual, that has its roots most deeply imbedded in life, has therefore a richer significance as a transformation, while the art work whose material is least actual, or farthest removed from practical life, will also have least value as a transformation. Such an art work will be purer, since the actual most resembles the ideal, but for that very reason it will also be the poorer. Now it is the material of music that presents to the creative imagination the purest subject-matter for its operations. Tones have in them the least admixture of practical life. A tonal sound has least survival value. A noise will put an animal on its guard. It will frighten it. A tone will only please it or displease it by its quality. Tones belong to the realm of pure feeling. They are valued for themselves as tones, not for any symbolic meaning that they convey. The material of music is thus in itself aesthetic, hence music is the purest of all the arts. A tone represents nothing but itself, and has least connection with anything practical or utilitarian. All the composer does is combine this already pure material into artistically significant forms, and hence matter and form in music are most identical. A melody is a pure form. Its content is its form and its form is its content. A change in one means a change in the other. We can, of course, force a content upon it, read into it stories or pictures. But when we do so we know that they are extraneous and not inherent in the music. Music suggests no more than a mood, but even the mood is inherent, intrinsic in the form, for any change in the form brings about a change in the mood. But the case is quite different with the plastic and verbal arts. Their material is of the earth. In a painting it is always possible to distinguish between the subject-matter and the handling, for the handling may even be changed yet the subjectmatter, the object painted, remains more or less the same. The painter deals with familiar material, and whatever he puts on canvas, no matter how artistically, carries a suggestion of utility, namely, what it is apart from how it is. The composer has never been accused of being untrue to nature, or of distorting nature, as has been the recurrent case with the painter. From the composer we do not expect realism, but rather condone it in him as an affectation when he tries it, as in program music. But because the painter comes close to that with which we are in daily contact we are disappointed if his painting presents us with anything more than a prettified reproduction of our familiar surroundings. Hence, when the painter does succeed in detaching us from our utilitarian attitude and presents us with a product that becomes significant to us as idealized form, he has accomplished a feat of imagination superior to that of the composer. He has given us a richer experience than the composer in that he has opened our eyes to the beauty inherent in our common experience. The artist in the verbal arts goes even beyond the painter in richness of his art, for his material is of the most intimate personal, realistic nature. Words, actions, thoughts, feelings, personal contacts, and relations, are the very stuff of our being. We are they and they are we. A disinterested attitude towards these means a detachment from ourselves, the rarest of rare occurrences. The dramatic and epic poem, the novel and drama, arise from the very stuff of human existence, and when an art work in these spheres does succeed in creating in us an experience of beauty, it is of the richest quality, for we have been taken out of our very selves for the time being and have caught a glimpse of the realm of life in its pure cosmic significance. No music or painting can rock our deep-most being as can a great poem, novel, or drama. When we are touched by one of these aesthetically, the experience is of the nature of a rebirth, a regeneration, a rediscovery of the self of selves in our being. It is of such experiences that Browning wrote: Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! But not quite so sunk that moments, Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, When the spirit's true endowments Stand out plainly from its false ones, And apprise it if pursuing Or the right way or the wrong way, To its triumph or undoing. There are flashes struck from midnights, There are fire-flames noondays kindle, Whereby piled-up honors perish, Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, While just this or that poor impulse Which for once had play unstifled Seems the sole work of a lifetime That away the rest have trifled. So, although music is the measure of the arts, in that all the arts seek to transform the material into the ideal, and music is the purest of the arts because the material and ideal in it are most identical, the other arts are the richer, in that their ideal is built upon a material that touches human life at the very foundation of biological existence, in that they tap the very sources of the stream of life which they cleanse of débris, muck, and pollution poured into it by the exigencies of physical survival.