Thoughts on Art

Psychologists say that the line dividing madness from sanity, or madness from genius, is a slender line that can easily be crossed from one side to the other under the influence of certain factors.

So too the line dividing art from artifice, or beauty from ugliness, is a slender line, easily crossed; but that crossing is granted only to those of sound taste.

Many a dress would be perfected in beauty if you stripped from it an ornament that weighs it down; and many a woman would become beautiful if she were more natural in her smiles or less studied in her dress, or if she refrained from chewing her words and drawing out her voice in speech.

Many a room would be called beautiful if the pictures, statuettes, vases, and dolls were removed from its walls. And a house would please the eye if it were surrounded by a few trees and trellises, or had around it an open space sufficient for the gaze to roam in ease and tranquility, without a barrier or building to strike against it.

How many a woman with beautiful legs has turned her beauty into ugliness by a strutting walk that sways now to the right, now to the left; and another has drawn the eye to the heaviness of her leg by a shoe excessively slender or gaudy in its colors.

Most people are still subject to the influence of the mistaken creed that sees beauty in embroidery and studied refinement, and art in ornament. Yet every work of art can dispense with ornament and remain, for all that, beautiful art. For ornament is nothing but additions, superfluities, and accident, whereas true beauty resides in the essence, not in the accident — in the harmony of lines and forms, and the unity of the parts despite their variety.

The enemy of art is excess: excess in emotion, excess in rigidity or in agitation, excess in adornment, extremism in the pursuit of the strange, extravagance in departing from nature, and insistence on drawing the eye.

And just as moral moderation is counted the cornerstone of virtue, so moderation in the use of the means of art is counted the cornerstone of beauty. The truly beautiful woman is she who lightens her concern for her beauty, her anxiety over her appearance, and her thinking about her movements. She is the natural woman with just so much art as stirs contentment, because of its regard for the beholder's feelings and its economy in arousing his senses.

The ancients used to say: a man is his two smallest parts, his heart and his tongue — and by the heart they meant the mind. The mind still has its value in our age; but the tongue's dominion has passed away, and other means of expression have taken its place, stronger in their effect on the soul and more closely in touch with others: writing, music, painting, acting, and the rest of the arts. The art of speech has become the cheapest of the arts, the easiest, the most readily within reach, and consequently the least attractive. It remains for the woman who seeks attractiveness by way of art to practice some of the fine arts and to study something of their principles and their common qualities; then many mistaken creeds and worn-out conventions will be swept from her mind.

She must seek dexterity of hands and limbs, and their skill in playing instruments or in drawing lines and colors. For words fly away, as the proverb says, because they seldom issue from depth of thought. The wise person is the one who is not beguiled by the magic of speech, but stands in reverence before the enduring works that speak of their maker's earnestness and intellectual labor.