Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/572

554 day is not art at all, since it is designed merely for the amusement of a few, and is altogether beyond the comprehension of the many. Moreover, if the many could comprehend it it would do them as little good as it does to the exclusive circles for whose special gratification it is produced.

Whatever may be said of this definition of art, there is little doubt in our mind that it furnishes a basis for a fruitful consideration of the whole subject. We incline, indeed, strongly to the opinion that for the average man the most profitable point of view is that which the author has indicated. Let it be granted that the purpose of art is to convey emotion from one mind to another and we have at once a criterion that can be usefully applied both to alleged works of art and to alleged artists. We can ask the latter: What emotion personal to yourself have you that you wish to convey? If you have none, then, whatever your technical ability, you are not an artist. If the emotion is one the propagation of which will do harm, then you are using your art to do injury to your fellow-men, simply to earn from the unthinking or the vicious the praise of having done a bad thing well. If the emotion is one which all men will be the better for sharing, then in proportion to the strength with which you experience it and the power you possess of communicating it to others, you are an artist and a benefactor of mankind. Or we can deal directly with works tendered for our admiration as artistic. What emotion do they convey? To what sentiments do they appeal? Does the message which they bring come direct from the heart of the author, or is it the repetition of another man's message—an echo of tones and a mimicry of methods elsewhere found successful?

If these works give pleasure, what is the nature of the pleasure they give? Is it such as accompanies an enlargement of our sympathies and the raising of our hopes for the future of mankind? Or is it the pleasure of gratified vanity or cynicism? Is it a pleasure which makes our hands "swifter unto good," or one that makes us more self-centered, more self-sufficient, more self-enthralled?

It is much to be desired that men in general would criticise works of art from this point of view. They might occasional!}' err in doing so; but their errors would be rare in direct proportion to their own sincerity, and the effect in strengthening their powers of judgment would be very marked.

Our author furnishes in the following passage a familiar example of what we are frequently called upon to admire as "art":

"A musician of renown seats himself before you at the piano, and plays for you what he says is a new composition of his own or of some present-day musician. You hear him produce strange and noisy sound.s, you admire the gymnastic exercises accomplished by his fingers, and you also see clearly that his intention is to make you believe that the sounds which he produces express different poetical moods of the soul. His intention, I say, is clear; but the only feeling he communicates to you is one of mortal weariness. The performance lasts a long time, or at least seems to you to last a long time, owing to your utter failure to receive any distinct impression; and the idea comes to you that perhaps the whole business is a mystification—that the artist is trying an experiment on you, and is just flinging his hands at random over the keys in the hope that you will be taken in, and that he will have a good laugh afterward at your