COMPOSITION IN FINE ART
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COMPOSITION IN FINE ART
not fall merely anywhere, but only in such ways that tone and tone and interest and interest shall be fairly held at pleasing intervals. Consistency of character, which has been called harmony, consistency of attractions, which has been called balance, and consistency of movement, which has been called rhythm shall keep all elements of the work together in an integral whole. Here again the artist in forming his work must exercise his aesthetic judgment, varying from nature's appearances, if need be, to bring finer proportion into his work, to give it more perfect unity.
The beauty of a picture or a piece of music does not lie in a pleasing of the sense alone. Perhaps it is impossible for the sense to be engaged at all without the mind receiving some deeper message through it. It is this fact which causes us to observe in another place that art is a sort of language. But the message which that language has to deliver is not an intellectual one. It is not primarily for the rehearsing of facts that art exists. The message which a picture has to give, like the message which music has to give, comes to us in the form of an experience, a mood which the work awakens within us—not a story which the thing can tell us. A Bokhara rug may be of "sleepy coloring" and give us the repose of twilight as we contemplate it; a clear melody may give us the same feelings as a view from a mountain-top; a dash of thrilling color may be to us like a battle-hymn. Such are the messages we may receive from pictures and music if we but will, instead of the story that " here is a man and he is doing so and so." These are the feelings which come to us straight from the heart of the artist himself, even though he be centuries in his grave; the tree, the figure and the incident which the work involves are merely the words by which the message is conveyed.
For some reason music in a minor key is apt to make us sigh. For some like reason certain kinds of lines or movements in a picture give us certain emotions. Perhaps it is because these lines or movements recall associations which stamped themselves upon the impressionable childhood of the race. The ridges of the sea which we call waves and the grander ridges of the continents which we call mountains have had their common origin in the war or play of the elements—in activity rather than in quiet. The risings and fallings of the waves and the mountain-ranges, the high, straight stems of those still forests amid which generations of our primitive ancestors spent the long days and the mysterious nights, the long flat reaches of the sea when it is calm and of the desert and of the clouds in a quiet sky—all these things have been seen and watched for ages; nor is. it to be wondered that the
lines which we see in them, the movements which we feel in them, have come to call up the same feelings which these things themselves called up.
Let us look at Corot's landscape Morning. It has come to be called The Dance of the Nymphs. Is this because there is a group of tiny figures at the bottom—who in truth are scarcely dancing and who may hardly be called nymphs? Or is it because of the witchery of that great movement which takes us from the bottom up into the picture, across the top and down the other side, lastly circling round and round the bit of sky in the center, leading us, before we know it, in an airy dance through the tree-tops? The little figures give the keynote—they form a statement of the theme, Morning, Happiness, Dancing, but even if they were suddenly to whisk themselves out and disappear on the other side of the tangled shrubbery, the movement of the picture would still go on, and it would still be a dance of the nymphs.
For a contrasting mood see Turner's great picture, The Fight-ing Temeraire. What is there about this picture to show us that this ship is the old hero of England's battles that she is,—or to tell us that she is being towed away for breaking up? And yet Ruskin says that, of all pictures not visibly involving human pain, this is the saddest. What has the artist done to make us feel the solemnity of this occasion? We see a sheet of still water under a great, bending, sunset sky. On the other side a tall ship is coming up, towed by a black tugboat. Long ripples are thrown to left and right, and thin smoke pours back from the funnel of the tug. Shadows are gathering from all sides, and there are the buildings of a great city beyond in the gloom. Study the use of lines. Are they like those merry ones that circle round the canvas of Corot's Morningt Or are they the lines which we see in the solemn groves pf pine or cypress, in the desert and in the great cathedrals? Are they not like figures in a funeral march? Has the artist accepted nature only as he found her?
We have shown the three principal considerations which compel an artist always to turn away more or less from the copying of nature. Of all these, doubtless the last one which we have touched is the deepest, the one determining the trend of the whole work,—the consideration of expression. Intimately related to that one is the second— the consideration of absolute beauty, and the third is that one which deals with the translation of the three-djjnensional aspect of nature into the two-dimensional limits of a picture. We have spoken of the lines and colors and objects of nature as the artist's alphabet and vocabulary. Were he to devote his time merely to copying the things which nature sets before him, he
