Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV DEFINING FORCES BEHIND ART: THE ARTIST SO far we have been considering the common nature of the arts and the generic sources from which they all spring. Now we are to study those influences which determine the specific characteristics of a masterpiece. It has been shown that the first cause of the unique appeal of each work of art is that the common basis of human experience finds expression only through the medium of the artist's personality; thus inevitably his character and experience must in some measure stamp themselves upon all that he produces. This is true even of the most objective and imitative work. Let an accident occur and be witnessed by a hundred persons; let each of these write out faithfully an account of what he saw: there would be a hundred varying stories, no two identical. Moreover, a good reader of character could tell something of the quality of the different personalities from the accounts written. To narrate an incident is to give something of the narrator as well as the incident. How much more then when the work is bodied forth from the creative personality of the artist. Take, for illustration, what may be regarded as a purely objective dramatic study--a play that has come to wide fame through musical setting and stage portrayal--Oscar Wilde's Salome. Here is a study of a phase of human perversity, the type of fascinatingly repulsive woman who represents the most subtle and refined form of depravity in modern life; yet, objective as it is, who would have been interested and able to portray it except the sensitive, strangely gifted, morbid genius, Oscar Wilde? Is it an accident that his thought brooded for many years over the seductively repellent theme before the play was written? No music lover can...
