DOI article:
Dallett Fuguet, On Art and Originality Again
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.30574#0032
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know half what they stand for in the world. Many good makers consider
such theories as those developed in this article to be mainly impractical
rainbow-chasing. They have fenced their minds about with working
formulae; an instinctive feeling restrains them from expeditions into that
domain of philosophy whence they have intuitively derived all in their
processes not due to the observation and imitation of others. They smile
at philosophical criticism, general theories, and inductive reasoning (except in
a few classical authorities). That accomplished artist, John La Farge, gives
the attitude of the painters in his suggestive little volume, “ Considerations
on Painting," when he says: “The difficulty for the artist who works in
things to put his thoughts into words is a natural difficulty....All
efforts made in any direction are made at the expense of our being able
equally well to carry out others of a different kind; the artist’s nature has
warned him of the loss, and his usual willingness to be satisfied without
words is not misplaced.” How different from the critic’spoint of view! I
never had this more beautifully illustrated than lately. A noted New York
critic gave a most instructive address on the growth and construction of
music. But a successful musician took issue with him, saying that he was
misleading; that he had shown us merely the empty forms, the dead bones
of music, and not its living spirit. Then the musician went over part of the
same ground; played things that the critic had had played, and explained their
ideas in construction and feeling from his utterly different point of view —
and the hearers learned from both!
The acme of the critical attitude is well given in an essay by the
paradox-lover, the “artist in attitudes,” who has been quoted a while back.
He argued that pure criticism was in reality creative work, a form of
literature in which the art treated of was merely material which the critical
essayist used for his own artistic ends. And surely this suggestive essay is
more than just a brilliant tour de force. Whatever thinker we study, we find
that if he be more than a half-cultured or a mechanical reasoner, from
whatsoever point of view he has regarded the ways of man in the creation of
the beautiful, all conclusions center at the one goal. Art is to him the skill,
of every kind, that man uses: (1) to select from nature what pleases his
taste, to express his idea; (2) to correct faults in nature, so as to unify his
selections; and (3) to embody the results in appropriate form. All these
operations he does more or less simultaneously; originality is the result of
power to do them well and to do them sincerely. We call it genius when
the organism is in all respects “functioning freely," as Chapman put it, or,
as La Farge said, when man possesses in high degree “the power of
organizing ideas, images, signs, without employing the slow processes of
apparently consecutive thought.” Dallett Fuguet.
28
such theories as those developed in this article to be mainly impractical
rainbow-chasing. They have fenced their minds about with working
formulae; an instinctive feeling restrains them from expeditions into that
domain of philosophy whence they have intuitively derived all in their
processes not due to the observation and imitation of others. They smile
at philosophical criticism, general theories, and inductive reasoning (except in
a few classical authorities). That accomplished artist, John La Farge, gives
the attitude of the painters in his suggestive little volume, “ Considerations
on Painting," when he says: “The difficulty for the artist who works in
things to put his thoughts into words is a natural difficulty....All
efforts made in any direction are made at the expense of our being able
equally well to carry out others of a different kind; the artist’s nature has
warned him of the loss, and his usual willingness to be satisfied without
words is not misplaced.” How different from the critic’spoint of view! I
never had this more beautifully illustrated than lately. A noted New York
critic gave a most instructive address on the growth and construction of
music. But a successful musician took issue with him, saying that he was
misleading; that he had shown us merely the empty forms, the dead bones
of music, and not its living spirit. Then the musician went over part of the
same ground; played things that the critic had had played, and explained their
ideas in construction and feeling from his utterly different point of view —
and the hearers learned from both!
The acme of the critical attitude is well given in an essay by the
paradox-lover, the “artist in attitudes,” who has been quoted a while back.
He argued that pure criticism was in reality creative work, a form of
literature in which the art treated of was merely material which the critical
essayist used for his own artistic ends. And surely this suggestive essay is
more than just a brilliant tour de force. Whatever thinker we study, we find
that if he be more than a half-cultured or a mechanical reasoner, from
whatsoever point of view he has regarded the ways of man in the creation of
the beautiful, all conclusions center at the one goal. Art is to him the skill,
of every kind, that man uses: (1) to select from nature what pleases his
taste, to express his idea; (2) to correct faults in nature, so as to unify his
selections; and (3) to embody the results in appropriate form. All these
operations he does more or less simultaneously; originality is the result of
power to do them well and to do them sincerely. We call it genius when
the organism is in all respects “functioning freely," as Chapman put it, or,
as La Farge said, when man possesses in high degree “the power of
organizing ideas, images, signs, without employing the slow processes of
apparently consecutive thought.” Dallett Fuguet.
28
