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TO become sensitive to the meaning of color and form and sound as the artist employs them for expression, to feel a work of art in its relation to its background, to find in criticism enlightenment and guidance but not a substitute for one's own experience, these are methods of approach to art. But the appreciator has yet to penetrate art's inmost secret.
I wanted a fuller appreciator, perhaps, rather than another lover She could get no further then for very exhaustion; and she went off in sudden collapse a few hours later, without having said anything more to her husband on the subject of her love for the poet.
The final meaning of art to the appreciator lies in just this sense of its relation to his own experience. The greatest works are those which express reality and life, not limited and temporary conditions, but life universal and for all time. Without commentary these carry their message, appealing to the wisest and the humblest.
The artist receives nature's revelation of herself with emotion. The deeper he penetrates into her hidden ways, the greater becomes her power to stir him. The artist values his "subject," therefore, as the stimulus of emotion and as the symbol by means of which he expresses his emotion and communicates it. The value of the subject to the appreciator, however, is not immediately clear.
ART starts from life and in the end comes back to it. Art is born out of the stirring of the artist's spirit in response to his need of expression, and it reaches its fulfillment in the spirit of the appreciator as it answers his need of wider and deeper experience. Midway on its course from spirit to spirit it traverses devious paths.
The true meaning is not obvious when it first occurs: Sachs seems simply to be the appreciator of true art and to be standing up for the true artist Walther against the barren pedant Beckmesser. And I beg leave here to make a digression.
But before the appreciator can have brought himself to the point of perception where he is able to respond directly to the significance of art and to make the artist's emotion a part of his own emotional experience, he must needs have traveled a long and rather devious way.
Yet I had an appreciator. One afternoon, as I was busy on my geographical operations, a good-looking middle-aged lady, with a soft pink cheek and a sparkling hazel eye, paused and asked me if my name was not what it was. I had seen her before; a stranger to our parts, with a voice without a trace in it of the Devonshire drawl.
For the æsthetic life does not consist merely in the perception of the beautiful object, not merely in the emotion of that spiritual contact between the beautiful product of art or of nature and the soul of the appreciator: it is continued in the emotions and images and thoughts which are awakened by that perception; and the æsthetic life is life, is something continuous and organic, just because new forms, however obscure and evanescent, are continually born, in their turn continually to give birth, of that marriage between the beautiful thing outside and the beautiful soul within.
The processes which enter into the actual fashioning of the work are both intellectual and physical, requiring the exercise of the artist's mind in the planning of the work and in the directing of his hand; so far as the appreciator concerns himself with them, they address themselves to his intellect.
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