The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1. IMAGINATION, GENIUS, AND INSPIRATION
Before inquiring more closely into the meaning of the term "genius" we must obviously limit the field within which we propose to discuss it. Genius is an expression of very wide connotation, and is used not merely in its application to artists, but equally when we refer to great generals and kings, as also to the heroic captains of scientific discovery. For the sake of simplification we would once more discuss the distinctions involved under a triple division of our subject-matter. _(a) The Imagination_[411] The most conspicuous faculty of an artist which arrests our attention when we direct it expressly upon the capacities implied in artistic productivity is the _imagination._ And we must be careful here not to confuse it with a _visionary fancy_ which is wholly passive. The imagination creates.
He must have seen much, heard much, and stored away a great deal as well; and in illustration of this we almost invariably find that a great personality is distinguished by a capacious memory. All that interests mankind he will lay hold of, and the more profound his spirit the more it will enlarge the field of its interests in countless directions. This was the way in which we find the genius of Goethe first opened its wings, and throughout his life the circle of his spirit's restless horizon broadened and broadened. This peculiar gift of receptiveness, this interest in the comprehension of facts after their true definitions and colour, their steadfast adherence to the truth of experience is the first thing we look for in a great artist. And this accurate knowledge of the truth of form must be accompanied in equal measure by a proved acquaintance with the souls of men, the passions that rise in the heart, and everything that it yearns and strives for. And, in addition to this twofold armory of knowledge, he must understand yet further all the various ways that this world of the human soul expresses itself on the face of the reality which confronts his senses, transpiercing thus the outer veil.
No artistic work of real sterling value can be thrown off with any mere imaginative _tour de force._[412] We do not, of course, suggest that the artist must therefore comprehend in the form of _philosophical_ thought this essential core of reason in his experience; albeit such is the fundamental rock upon which religion no less than philosophy and art is based. Philosophy is by no means essential to his outfit; and, in fact, if he once begins to think about things as a philosopher, he busies himself with modes of thought which are diametrically opposed to that which should engage an artist's attention. For what the imagination undertakes to do and only to do is not to bring to consciousness this inner core of reason in the form of general propositions and conceptions, but to apprehend it clothed in the concrete form of actual existence and individuality. All that ferments within his life the artist must reproduce in the body and envisagement, whose connected picture and general outlines he has already assimilated from the world outside, making such so far subservient to his creative effort that they in their turn may participate in the truth of his own substance and enable him to crown it with complete expression.
In this interfusion of an intelligible content with an embodiment received from actual existence the artist will avail himself of the ever wakeful circumspection of his reflective faculties no less than the deep resources of emotional life which leave the stamp of vitality on his work. It is consequently but one more sample of critical aberration to imagine that poems such as the Homeric were introduced to our poet in his sleep. Without intelligent alertness, division, and distinctions of each part as related to the whole, an artist will be unable to assert his mastery over any form whatsoever that he may wish for; only fools are of the opinion that the genuine artist does not in the least know what his hands and senses are about.
Moreover, the concentration of the artist's emotional life on each aspect of his work is also as necessary to its success as the concentration of his mind. For it is mainly through the impression of emotion, which permeates and gives a vital colour to the entire work, that the artist asserts his claim to the substance and embodiment of his creation as a part of his own spiritual substance, as something he, a given personality, may peculiarly call his own. For the external aspect of his work, the mere picture of it as we may say, tends rather to place us outside it and apart; it is the emotional energy it expresses which primarily unites it with affinity to our very souls. Only when thus understood shall we be able to realize the truth that an artist must not merely have much looked about him in the world and assimilated a rich knowledge both of its outward show and the very substance of its life, but, further, must himself have experienced many things and great things, things that have moved him to the quick and left their life-roots in his own heart and spirit--he must, as we say, have "gone through much" and "lived abundantly"--before he will find himself able to build from his stores in the concrete types of his art something approaching Life's unsounded repletion. And this will at once explain and justify the bluster and ferment of genius in its youth, as amply reflected in the lives of Goethe and Schiller. But only the age of maturity and gray hairs will bring us the perfect work of art in all its rounded ripeness[413].
In much the same way the several arts adapt themselves as by a kind of natural affinity to particular nations. Song and melody are, we may almost say, the birth-gift of an Italian; with our northern peoples, on the contrary, music[416] and the opera, though seriously cultivated and with great success, are as far from being a real home growth as the orange trees. The Greeks are conspicuous for the native and elaborate beauty of their epic poetry, and most of all for the unique perfection of their sculpture. The Romans never possessed an art that was in any strict sense exclusively their own. All that grew into blossom on their soil was transplanted from the gardens of Greece. The art whose growth has the widest natural range is that of poetry; and the reason of this is that in it we require least to draw upon a sensuous vehicle for its expressed presentment. Within the province of poetry the folk-song is most of all native to a people and inseparably yoked with their natural conditions. For this very reason the folk-song breaks into blossom even in times of the rudest culture and for the most part retains the unconscious simplicity of Nature herself. Of this Goethe himself is an example.
Though he produced works in every type of poetical expression his first songs still go deepest and carry least dust from the study. In them, too, there is least the flavour of culture. The latter-day Greek is still a living witness to a people whose native gift it is both to write poetry and sing. Fauriel has published a collection of modern Greek songs, taken for the most part just as women, nurses, and school-girls were heard singing them, who could not for the world understand what he found so wonderful in them. And this is a good illustration of the way that we find Art and its specific appearance associate itself with a particular national type. In the same way the art of improvization is more than anywhere else the native growth of Italy and exemplified there with quite extraordinary talent. An Italian will even to-day improvize for you a five-act drama, and not a word of it is committed to memory; all grows up out of his experience of human passions and situations and the deeply-excited inspiration of the moment. As an example we mention the fact that a certain poor improvizer after rhapsodizing in this way for a considerable time, and then finally trudging off on his round to collect his pence from the bystanders in a battered hat, was still in such a fume of poetic frenzy that he could not bring his declamations to a stop, waved about in fact so lustily with his arms and hands that in the end all the money he had begged was shaken to the winds.
His emotional life and his ideas irresistibly run into this artistic mould; he finds as it were the instrument already within him made to the hand, so fitted to express his soul-life that all the pains it takes him to learn it are as nothing. A musician can thus unfold to us in his melodies the depths of all that stirs and moves his soul and only by this means. What he feels is at once wafted into melody, just as the life of a painter is impressed upon form and colour, or that of a poet is transmuted into the creations of his imagination, that poetry which clothes his ideas in the beauty and music of the written word. And this gift of vital form the artist does not merely possess as an imaginative power, a phantasy, an emotional impulse "that leaves not a wrack behind," but as a direct stimulus of feeling to active enterprise, as a gift, that is, of real executive accomplishment. Both of these aspects are united in the real artist.
What springs to life in his imagination is immediately alert upon his mobile fingers, precisely as the sudden thought of our mind breaks into word from the tips, or as our most intimate thoughts, ideas, and emotions are reflected on the outward man and his demeanour. Genius of the real stamp, whenever and wherever found, is easily quit of the difficulties presented by the technical workshop; and indeed has found the most beggarly and apparently impracticable material to accept and embody as it pleased the inward shapes of imagination. No doubt the endowment which the artist finds as a direct gift to himself must be kept alive and alert by indefatigable recourse to it, but he must also possess naturally a practical power of immediate execution. Without this all the facility he may have acquired in imaginative conception will never produce an essentially creative work of art. The very notion of art demands of us that both things should go together hand in hand, the productive energy of the soul and its technical realization in the forms of art. _(c) Inspiration_ The activity of the imagination, then, and the power of technical execution, taking both together as the inseparable antecedents of a real artist, are commonly understood as _inspiration._[420] (_α_) The first question that presents itself to us for solution with regard to it is under what conditions it arises, as to which many different views have been held.
But quite as often, however, the greatest works of art are created from the suggestion of objects wholly external to himself. The odes of Pindar were frequently the result of direct commissions; and, in the same way, the object and subject has times without number been given to artists both for buildings and pictures, and they have been able to arouse in themselves an enthusiasm for such. Indeed, it is only too frequently the express complaint of artists that they have not the subject-matter on which to work. Such a reference to things outside, and its stimulus to artistic production, presents just that relation of the artist to Nature and her immediacy which is essential to the notion of superior executive gifts[423], and is at the same time a condition to the appearance of genuine inspiration. If we consider the artist from this point of view, we shall find that it is here that this natural endowment relates itself immediately to a material already found for him, and through the incentive thereby offered him, through the inspiration of actual fact, or as, for example, was the case with Shakespeare, through that which was presented by old tales, ballads, romances, and chronicles, proceeds to embody such material in artistic form, and thereby generally to express his own personality.
The impulse to production can therefore be given by something entirely outside the artist's life, and the only condition essential to a successful result is that the interest, which fixes the artist's attention should be of real artistic significance, and that he is able to reproduce the same in all its vitality. Such conditions virtually imply the presence of rare inspiration. And an artist who is really alive and awake himself, by reason of this very vitality of his own powers, discovers endless opportunities for actively asserting the same, and feeling inspired while doing so, opportunities which pass over other people without similarly affecting them. (_β_) If we ask further, viz., of what precisely this artistic inspiration consists, we may perhaps best describe it by saying that it is the capacity of being entirely absorbed in a given subject, a capacity not merely wholly to realize it, but incapable of resting until the same is completely minted anew, and rounded off in its artistic form. (_γ_) Moreover, when an artist has thus entirely appropriated his subject, it is but saying the same thing the other way to affirm that he must know how to forget his own individual idiosyncrasies, and all that accidentally attaches to them; he must, in short, on his part lose himself in the matter on hand. He must make his artistic personality the pure form under which the content he has assimilated is clothed and embodied. An inspiration in which the particular individual receives too emphatic a predominance and assertion, rather than being the vitally active instrument which displays the ideal significance of the material worked upon, is an inferior type of inspiration. This truth opens the way to a fuller consideration of what is generally understood as the objective character of artistic production.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.