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 The preceding examination of the nature of art and the service it renders life points to the fact that he who would receive in full measure what an art work has to offer him must come to it with a state of mind that is well disciplined along two lines.
One discipline is a clear understanding of the relationship that exists between the creative worker and the fruit of his work. What the relationship is has been well described by W. Somerset Maugham. "It is not for nothing," he wrote from his own personal experience, "that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth. It is something like an organic thing that develops, not of course only in their brains, but in their heart, their nerves and their viscera, something that their creative instinct evolves out of the experience of their brain and their body and that at last becomes so oppressive that they must rid themselves of it."
If this is a true account of the creative process, and if the fruit of the process is in truth what Milton called it, "the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit," it must be granted that the person who would judge the value of such a manifestation of the human spirit entirely by its effect on himself is doing a grave injustice to its creator. The art product is a reflection of its maker. It is more than a part of him. It is himself at his best; and whereas all those who are not pleased with his best are entitled to ignore him, they have no right to judge him. All that is to be expected of a human being is that he do his utmost to be honest with himself. This is a virtue in which the creative worker is supreme; and it is a virtue that is easily recognizable in his work. The first requisite for the aesthetic enjoyment of an art work is, then, a proper respect for it, which is cultivated by an honest effort to understand its significance as a striving for the utmost sincerity of expression.
The habit of judging art works instead of trying to understand them also renders the judge a great disservice by erecting a wall between him and the object judged. It does this in more than one way. Even good habits become liabilities when permitted to control instead of being controlled. Many art critics are a case in point. They follow the easy path of faultfinding to the point when they become blinded to all merit. One can always find what he is looking for if he looks only for what he is out to find. This is one reason why the layman in art should be wary of professional critics. But the layman himself can become a victim of his own critical tendencies.
The number of persons is legion who are attracted to the concert hall, theatre, or art exhibition mainly by the opportunity it affords them to judge the merits of what they see and hear and thus make a display of their superior tastes or knowledge. Their pitiful condition is so much the greater, that they are unaware of their blindness; that instead of yielding themselves freely, eagerly, and hopefully to the delights that may be in store for them, they enclose themselves in a wall of self-complacency and a smugness that even the brightest of aesthetic lights may not be able to penetrate.
The condition of the person who would reject a work of art after a single unfavorable contact with it is no happier than is that of the habitual critic. First impressions are not to be trusted for they are superficial. It is a fact of everyday observation that a person one dislikes after a single encounter often becomes one's cherished life-long friend as a result of further acquaintance. It is only the superficial that can be superficially grapsed. The simple, the easy to comprehend, has no lasting qualities, having no depth, no promise for the future. Popular art owes its vogue to its obviousness, and for that reason it is here today and gone tomorrow. A rich idea comes from a rich mind; and spiritual wealth never comes all of a sudden, as material wealth sometimes does. The seed is planted in the soul where, if it takes root at all, it grows slowly by imperceptible steps into the fullness of its powers, but only with careful and patient cultivation.
The case is indeed as Plato described it, that "after long intercourse with the thing itself, and after it has been lived with, suddenly, as when the fire leaps up and the light kindles, it is found in the soul and feeds itself there." So out of fairness to the creative idea, as well as for one's own sake, it is best to cling to the initially elusive, for its very elusiveness may contain the promise of its worthiness, and therefore how can one know but that his reward for persistence may not be out of all proportion to the effort expended in vistas of hitherto unsuspected depths of experience. And if the hoped for reward does not come there is still satisfaction in knowing that the failure to receive was not due to the unwillingness to give.
What leads a person to mistake his response to an art work for a judgment of its worth as art is not only his failure to respect it for its expressive significance to its maker, but also his neglect to ascertain his own aesthetic needs. The virtue of self-knowledge is equally effective on all fronts of human experience, for wherever it operates there it introduces order and harmony by outlawing misunderstanding. One cannot have traveled far along the road to self-knowledge without having discovered the fundamental principle, already spoken of in a previous connection, that whereas all human beings are motivated by the same needs, the motivation for any one need is not equally strong in everyone. In what they need, men are alike; in how much they need there are differences from person to person.
So it happens that what is but a convenience to one, is a necessity for another. Beethoven lived in his music, as did Keats in his poetry; which is the reason why they were creative in their respective fields. For many persons music, poetry, or any other art, is, in the main, an occasional source of recreation. To such persons it is but to be expected that neither the music of Beethoven nor the poetry of Keats is likely to appeal, since they have no need for aesthetic products of that level of vitality. This is nothing to be deplored. It is but a law of human nature that must be recognized in order to avoid pretense, confusion, and distortion of personality. The application of this principle of individuality in art would have two salutary effects. It would lead to the conviction that the question,
What is good art? is to be answered realistically only by another question, Good for whom? And once this question is injected into any disputation about tastes the light of reason introduces sanity into the heat of emotion. It would also prevent anyone from mistaking his feeling for an art object for a judgment of its artistic value. Instead of condemning that which failed to "take him in" the person would conclude either the possibility that it is beyond his reach, or the probablity that the first impression is not to be trusted. His self-knowledge, coupled with his knowledge of the nature of art, would do justice both to himself and to the artist, by granting to each the inherent right to selfhood.
The self-knowledge needed for the right estimation of an art product is of two sorts. One of them concerns one's temperamental nature, the other one's sensory equipment.
Temperament is the quality of emotion which provides each personality with its unique color. Now whereas it cannot be said that any one color is, in itself, better than another, there are nevertheless color preferences among human beings. And so it is with human temperaments. One temperament is as good as another; but in the interaction of temperaments it is but natural that any one temperament should respond most favorably to one of its own sort.
The bearing of these considerations about personality preferences on art appreciation is that since art is an expression of feeling, the creative output of an artist is necessarily a reflection of his temperament. The art product is the personality of its maker, and though the brain children of the creator are not duplicates of each other, each of them bears the stamp of its begetter. Together they constitute one family, the members of which are quite distinct from each other, yet sufficiently like each other to indicate a common origin.
These variations in temperaments of the creators of art products correspond to the temperamental differences among those who come in touch with them; so that a show of favoritism is but to be expected. Every individual contemplates an art work through the colored glass of natural prejudice. This is inevitable. What is not inevitable is that a natural prejudice should produce the unnatural result of condemning whatever does not fit into its own framework. Once the naturalness of individual temperament of both artist and spectator becomes recognized and cherished, and once the spectator looks upon his contact with art works as an adventure in self-discovery and self-fulfillment, quarrels about differences in taste will be replaced by reports of joyful adventures in the gratification of taste.
The need to get acquainted with one's sensory equipment is prompted by the consideration that just as there are variations in temperament, so individuals differ in the way their sense organs function. All eyes and ears are not equally keen; and since each art has its own sensory material, it follows that an art can appeal to one only in proportion to his sensitivity to its medium. This is but another form of the general rule that one receives in the measure to which one gives. And one cannot give what he does not possess, or any more than he possesses. In many cases the failure to be impressed is due not so much to the spectator's inattention as to hazy perception traceable to sensory inefficiency. The profoundest of ideas is bound to be lost on him who is a stranger to its language. The most delicate of rhythms is wasted on one who does not possess a delicate sense of rhythm. This means that the person who is unaware of the state of his sensory equipment is likely to conclude that "there is nothing" to that which he has seen or heard instead of placing the blame where it truly belongs. Again, this is not something to be deplored; it is rather a fact to be recognized and to act upon.
The action called for is the discovery by each person of the art to which he is most responsive and from which he is therefore most likely to receive the highest aesthetic pleasure most frequently. No one is equally sensitive to the different artistic materials. A keen and discriminative visual sense, for instance, which makes one highly susceptible to pictorial impressions, may exist side by side with an auditory equipment so dull that to listen to music that is not of the most obviously tuneful sort becomes a torture. A master of literature like Charles Lamb, in writing of his musical adventures, reported that
"Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension. Words are something, but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long adying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mine --these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest executed pieces of this empty instrumental music.
For the same person one art can be meat and another poison. Nature is but rarely lavish with all-round endowments, and even to the few she favors most highly, she distributes her gifts unevenly. So be the case what it may, it is best to know one's best avenue to aesthetic enjoyment in order that one may make the most of it.
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