Chapter 12

The Graceful Effort; or, The Oneness of
Ease & Difficulty in Art

The terms of art are all concerned in some fashion with ease and difficulty. The words used in judging art have been concerned with ease and difficulty.

In the same way as there can be a glib abstraction, there was once a glib watercolor of flowers. When something is done too easily—and shows it—it is seen as not good. Facility is a word that has often been used in disparagement of a drawing, a poem, an essay, a play, a sonata. There must be enough obstruction, resistance, somehow in a work to make that work likable deeply.

And then, there is the other collection of adverse words. Chief of these is labored. Rather surprisingly, a work should not be labored. Then there are words like contrived, artificial, unspontaneous, plodding.

I think, then, that because art should not be glib, and art should not be labored, it is likely that while being neither, it should be both. This means that art should be easy and difficult at once. Moreover, it is.

Art is like lots of things. It is like a flower which can be seen as having a hard time coming from the earth but is easy as to color and shape and texture. If one looks at the structure of a flower in detail, some difficulty will be felt. Botany, after all, is complicated; and every flower is an instance of subtle, manifold, not-so-easy organization. An insect will give this appearance too. The presence of molecules, atoms, electrons in any object doesn’t seem so glib. Flowing water thought of in terms of its organization doesn’t seem facile.

Works of art are supposed to have inevitability; and inevitability is a conjunction of the easy and difficult. And existence, like inevitability, is also ease and difficulty.

Art & the Taken-for-Granted

There is not a thing that cannot be seen as difficult. The taken-for-granted is by art shown to be difficult. To feel the points in a line following each other, one by one, two by two, three by three; to feel them pushing each other; to feel them perhaps trying to get out of the line—all this is to make a taken-for-granted line look like a struggling abstract city. The relation of lines, planes, and volumes can be seen as a relation of struggle. The more fight is seen in a surface, the more interesting it is.

Reality resists as it beckons. Consequently, there are love and struggle wherever there is anything.

To see a painting in terms of all its amiability and bellicosity is to see a painting. Details in a painting don’t just bow to each other and take their seats. They glower profoundly at each other even as they abide with each other.

The war among shapes has been an eternal war. There is a war among parts of speech in a sentence. There is a war among lines in a poem. The notes of a musical composition are at war. And if the war is not also a friendliness—that is, if the difficulty is not ease—so much, the work is not successful.

A Classic Exemplification

A classic exemplification of art as difficulty is Théophile Gautier’s “L’Art” (1857). The first stanza tells the aesthetic story:

This implies that the material of art must be in some way resistant for art to happen rightly. Still, what is in the artist to make him want to tackle “une forme au travail rebelle” (“a form which, while being worked with, is rebellious”)? What makes the artist tackle difficulty in his “inspiration,” his impulsion, his aesthetic desire? And this aesthetic desire is an aspect of Ease, for desire, when one has it, is easy to have; it is so easy to have, it is hard to get rid of it; that is, it is hard not to have it. The artistic desire, then, really had, is hard not to have. Sincerity is hard not to have, once it is sincerity. What all this comes to is that, in art, a way of mind ever so easy to have, because it is ever so hard not to have, joins gladly with resistant material, difficult object. The simultaneous existence of clear, strong, confident aesthetic impulsion and material makes for a combination of ease and difficulty present in all art.

Within the artist’s mind may be a fight, too, between the insistence of sincerity and the invitingness of insincerity or sloppiness or smooth arrangement. When the artist’s mind is entire, this fight is easy and difficult, subtly, deeply so.

Art can be compared to the joy of a mountain climber meeting a mountain more difficult than some he has climbed.

In art, the resistance of reality is the way mind wants it. In customary life, the resistance of reality is a sad, unwelcome blow to ego-structure.

A word that stands out in the Gautier stanza I have quoted is rebelle. Color seems to be rebelling against line, and line seems to be encroaching on color, and also wanting to get away from it. The artist manages the war of boundary and mass. It is a phase of his private war.

The second stanza of Gautier’s poem is:

Art has always been a matter of constraint and abandon, restriction and go-ahead. We can be wrong about either or any of these. Restriction and abandon—phases of difficulty and ease—must serve each other in a work, must be of one thing.

Gautier uses the word étroit, narrow. Shapes, like thoughts, are narrow and wide. A Tanagra figurine is, among other things, a oneness of narrowness and wideness. Ceramics, as such, is an interchange of swelling and subsiding, both examples of ease and difficulty; for on the one hand, swelling looks easier than subsiding, but on the other, subsiding seems the easier.

That word of Gautier, étroit, is about so much. The idea of narrowness does seem to carry difficulty with it; but then, what can seem easier than being étroit, narrow, than contracting? How easy it is to shrivel, withdraw, retreat! Does the leaf have an easier time in summer, expanding in greenness, than in autumn, withdrawing in less greenness? Unfortunately, withdrawing seems, in a fashion, easier than emerging. The relation of difficulty and ease in nature and in man’s doings is delicate.

Gautier & a Vase

More about narrowness and Gautier’s poem. Helen Gardner in her Art through the Ages describes a Chinese celadon vase:

In the Celadon…there is quiet elegance and refined taste. It has a sturdy strength because of the careful proportioning of the parts, especially of the finely curved lip and the slightly spreading base. From this rise conventionalized lanceolate leaf forms, the severity of which emphasizes the easy grace of the peony scroll on the body; on the neck a tapering peony pattern meets a broad band of concentrated ridges. ^[3]

The fact that Helen Gardner can employ elegance and strength, severity and grace, in the description of the same vase shows that ease and difficulty are, at once, in the vase. Elegance and grace are in the Intellectual Kingdom of Ease; severity and strength are in the Intellectual Kingdom of Difficulty. In the Land of Aesthetics, the Kingdoms of Ease and Difficulty merge. (The Opposites in Art can be dealt with allegorically and fancifully if any good purpose is served thereby.)

Some words have in them ease and difficulty at once in an obvious way: all words do somewhat. One of the words obviously showing ease and difficulty is in the passage I have quoted from Helen Gardner. Tapering, insofar as it goes for narrowness, contraction, represents difficulty; but insofar as it has in it smoothness and curve, shows ease.

A word, also, that clearly shows ease and difficulty is in the last stanza of Gautier’s poem: rêve or dream. A dream seems easy; for it is unsubstantial and effortless; yet, being mysterious, often troublesome, often apparently causeless, it is hard or difficult.

The last stanza of “L’Art” is:

In art, two things have difficulty in them: the formlessness of space, the resistance of matter. These use each other to make each other easier. In the Gautier lines, the “floating dream” becomes “sealed” within the resisting block. So we have “dream” and “block,” each in its way representing the troublesomeness and sweetness of reality.

All volumes are studies in ease and difficulty. The sphere combines ease and difficulty in its spherical way—with its enclosedness and curve; the cone in a conical way—with its sharpness and roundness; the oblong volume in its way—with its confinedness and certainty; the cube in its way; the cylinder in a way that is its own, with its continuity and restriction. All lines are easy and difficult; all planes.

Hues, tints, gradations of color are studies in ease and difficulty. Notes and chords and bars are studies in the resistant and yielding.

Like Rivers

The fact that ease and difficulty should become one in art was expressed in a notable way by an ill-remembered poet of the 17th century, John Denham. The lines from Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” for decades rang through English literature—even if in a somewhat isolated way. They are still fairly often met with.

When Denham says he wants, in his poetry, to be like the Thames River, he is correct. Rivers—including the Thames—are profitable examples of the presence of difficulty and ease in one topographical field. A sluggish river has a time of it; a monotonous river has a time; and so does a swift, interfered-with river.

Art, like rivers—and so much else—shows that the graceful and arduous can say one thing; that ease and difficulty are both means—means in profound amity—of living the story of life, art, and self.