Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/220

 210 FINE ARTS Nature of the idealiz ing pro cess. Subject ive and objective ideals. upon every reality before him in conformity with some poignant and sensitive principle of preference or selection in his mind. He instinctively adds something to nature in one direction and takes away something in another, over looking this kind of fact and insisting on that, suppressing many particulars which he holds irrelevant in order to insist on and bring into prominence others by which he is attracted and arrested. To do this is called to idealize, and the faculty by which an artist prefers, selects, and brings into the light one order of facts or aspects in the thing before him rather than the rest, is called the idealizing or ideal faculty. To the definitions of the imitative arts above given, in which we said that their business was to imitate natural facts, one by solid form, another by line, light- and-shade, and colour, a third by words in regulated com bination, to these definitions, then, we must now add that the imitation of natural fact in question is not an imitation pure and simple, but an idealized imitation, in which the mind acts upon the facts of nature, and sifts and sorts them at its choice, before it represents or puts them on record. This idealizing faculty is also one of that great cluster of faculties or powers within us for mentally making the most of the world we live in, which are commonly associated together under the comprehensive name imagination. Interminable discussion has been spent on the questions, What is the ideal, and how do we idealize ] The answer lias been put in the most sensible form by those thinkers (e.y., Vischer andiLotze), who have pointed out that the process of aesthetic idealization carried on by the artist is only the higher development of a process carried on in an elementary fashion by all men, from the very nature of their constitution. The physical organs of sense themselves do not retain or put on record all the impressions made upon them. When the nerves of the eye receive a multi tude of different stimulations at once from different points in space, the sense of eyesight, instead of being aware of all these stimulations singly, only abstracts and retains a total impression of them together. In like manner we are not made aware by the sense of hearing of all the several waves of sound that strike in a momentary succes sion upon the nerves of the ear ; that sense only abstracts and retains a total impression from the combined effect of a number of such waves. And the office which each sense thus performs singly for its own impressions, the mind per forms in a higher degree for the impressions of all the senses equally, and for all the other parts of our experience. We are always dismissing or neglecting a great part of our impressions, and abstracting and combining among those which we retain. The ordinary human consciousness works like an artist up to this point ; and when we speak of the ordinary or inartistic man as being impartial in the retention or registry of his daily impressions, we mean, of course, in the retention or registry of his impressions as already thus far abstracted [and assorted in consciousness. The artistic man, whose impressions affect him much more strongly, carries much farther these same processes of abstraction and combination among his impressions, and according to the complexion of his feelings imparts a colour from his own mind both to the literal record of his experiences and to the imaginary constructions which he builds upon them. It will further help our understanding of what is meant by the ideal in art, if we observe that into the framing of every ideal there enter two parts or elements. These are, a subjective and an objective part or element or so we may for convenience call them. The artist, affected more than other men by his daily impressions, grows up with certain innate or acquired predilections which become a part of his &amp;lt; onstitution whether he will or no, predilections, say, if he i i a dramatic poet, for certain types of character and situa tion ; if he is a sculptor, for certain proportions and a certain habitual carriage and disposition of the limbs; if he is a figure painter, for certain moulds of figure and airs and expressions of countenance ; if a landscape painter, for a certain class of character, configuration, and sentiment in natural scenery. This is the subjective or purely personal part of the artistic ideal. But on the other hand, as an imitator of fact, the artist has to recognize and accept the character of the facts which he finds at any given moment before him. All facts cannot be of the cast which he prefers, and in so far as he undertakes to deal with facts of an opposite cast he must submit to them ; he must study them as they actually are, must abstract, retain, bring into prominence, and carry out their own dominant tendencies. If he cannnot find in them what is most pleasing to himself, he will still be led by the abstracting and discriminating powers of his observation to discern what is most significant in them, he will emphasize and put on record this, idealizing the facts before him not in his direction but in their own. This, the disengaging and bringing forward of the characteristics actually domin ant in any object as he finds it, is the second or objective half of the artist s task of idealization. It is this half upon which M. Taine has dwelt almost exclusively, and on the whole with a just insight into the principles of the operation, in his well-known treatise On the Ideal in Art. These two modes of idealization, the subjective and the objective, are not always easy to be reconciled. Though the perfect artist would no doubt be he who should combine the strongest personal instincts of preference with the keenest power of observing characteristics as they are, yet in fact we find few artists in whom both these elements of the ideal faculty have been equally developed. To take some familiar instances among painters : Leonardo da Vinci, haunted as he was above all men by a particular human ideal of intel lectual sweetness and alluring mystery, which perpetually recurs in the faces of his women and young men, lias yet left us a vast number of exercises which show him as an indefatigable student of objective characteristics and psycho logical expressions of an order the most opposed to this. An older painter of the same period, Sandro Botticelli, is on the other hand as good an example as can be named of an artist who could never escape from the dictation of his own personal ideals, in obedience to which he invested all the creations of his art with nearly the same conformation of brows, lips, cheeks, and chin, nearly the same looks of wistful yearning and dejection. If, again, we desire an example of the opposite principle, of that idealism which idealizes above all things objectively, and disengages the very inmost and individual characters, however unattractive or unseemly, of the thing or person before it, we must turn to the northern schools, and especially to the work of Rembrandt ; though, indeed, that master s profound sense of human sympathy and commiseration, and his predilec tion for a certain class of light-and-shade effects, throw in this case, too, a veil of distinct personal feeling over Ids representations. Sculpture, painting, and poetry, then, are arts which re- present things known and real, either for their own sakes literally, or for the sake of shadowing forth things not known but imagined. In either case they represent their originals, not indiscriminately as they are, but bettered, com- pleted, or at the least simplified and enforced to our appro- hensions, partly by the transmuting power of the artist s own instincts and partly by his discriminating, selecting, and rejecting power among the facts before him. But before we dismiss these arts, we must remember that imitation is not the whole of their task. Just as music and architecture, we saw, though non-imitative arts in the main, admitted occasional and partial elements of imitation, so sculpture, painting, and poetry include non-imitative elements in their The imi tativc on non- iniitativ ek ineii