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3 - Edith Wharton and the Artist as Connoisseur

Sigrid Anderson Cordell
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Summary

[N]either the uneducated judgment nor the instincts of the uneducated can ever come to have more than the very slightest value in the determination of what is true or false in art … In material matters, even … has the labourer ever been able to understand a machine … until it has been laboriously explained to him …? How, then, is he to understand a poem, which must always continue to seem to him a useless thing …?

Arthur Symons

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, & ignorant of the treasures of art & history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, & bring to it all a mind & eye unblunted by custom.

Edith Wharton to Margaret Terry Chanler, 8 March [1903]

In an 1898 review of Tolstoy's What is Art?, the aesthetic poet and critic Arthur Symons refutes the idea that great art should universally inspire ‘feeling’ in its viewers. The impossibility of this universal standard, he argues, reflects a distinct hierarchy in taste: those with intelligence and discrimination will always and naturally recognize the beauty in art, whereas there is a separate class of people who will never appreciate, or even understand, objects that do not have an obviously utilitarian value.

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Fictions of Dissent
Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women's Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century
 , pp. 69 - 92
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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