The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Enjoyment of Art, by Carleton Noyes

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Title: The Enjoyment of Art

Author: Carleton Noyes

Release Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #27194]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENJOYMENT OF ART ***

Produced by Ruth Hart

[Note: for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents to
the beginning of the text.]

THE ENJOYMENT OF ART

BY

CARLETON NOYES

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CARLETON NOYES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published, March, 1903_

To
ROBERT HENRI
AND
VAN D. PERRINE

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at
the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit _When we become the enfolders of
those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every
thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?_
And my spirit said _No, we but level that lift to pass and
continue beyond._

WALT WHITMAN

CONTENTS

Preface
I. The Picture and the Man i
II. The Work of Art as Symbol 19
III. The Work of Art as Beautiful 41
IV. Art and Appreciation 67
V. The Artist 86

PREFACE

The following pages are the answer to questions which a young man
asked himself when, fresh from the university, he found himself
adrift in the great galleries of Europe. As he stood helpless and
confused in the presence of the visible expressions of the spirit of
man in so many ages and so many lands, one question recurred
insistently: _Why_ are these pictures? What is the meaning of all
this striving after expression? What was the aim of these men who
have left their record here? What was their moving impulse? Why,
why does the human spirit seek to manifest itself in forms which we
call beautiful?

He turned to histories of art and to biographies of artists, but he
found no answer! to the "Why?" The philosophers with their
theories of aesthetics helped him little to understand the dignity and
force of this portrait or the beauty of that landscape. In the
conversation of his artist fr