Essays — First Series
days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that made the
minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient
reason.
The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some
men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of
appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause
and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of
causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the
philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all
events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is
fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical
substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity
of cause, the variety of appearance.
Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and
fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and
magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of
magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying
its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with
graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that
diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad
through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the
grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless
individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through
all genera the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized
life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and
never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a
poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and
toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will.
The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I
look at it its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so
fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still
trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in
the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as
Io, in Æschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how
changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman
with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the
splendid ornament of her brows!
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally
obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the
centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man
in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our
information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the _civil history_
of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have
given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were
and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us
again in their _literature_, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and
philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their
_architecture_, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the
straight line and the square,—a builded geometry. Then we have it once
again in _sculpture_, the “tongue on the balance of expression,” a
multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action and never
transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some
religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or
mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their
dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold
representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of
Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last
actions of Phocion?
Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any
resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A
particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same
train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild
mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the
senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature
is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums
the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, and
delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected
quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at
once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the
brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have
the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the
friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And
there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of
all ages. What is Guido’s Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as
the horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any one will but take
pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined
in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see
how deep is the chain of affinity.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort
becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form
merely,—but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter
enters into his nature and can then draw him at will in every attitude.
So Roos “entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.” I knew a
draughtsman employed in a public survey who found that he could not
sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first explained
to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very
diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By
a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of
many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other
souls to a given activity.
It has been said that “common souls pay with what they do, nobler souls
with that which they are.” And why? Because a profound nature awakens
in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same
power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses.
Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must
be explained from individual history, or must remain words. There is
nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest
us,—kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,—the roots of all
things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter’s are lame
copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material
counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the
poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we
lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and
tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexists
in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of
chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your
name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.
The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old
prediction to us and converting into things the words and signs which
we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in
the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as
if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer
had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance
of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man
who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has
been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the
world. I remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out
to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to
the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over
churches,—a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate
with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched
symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear
often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament.
I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed
to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the
thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the
sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common
architectural scroll to abut a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew
the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people
merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the
semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese
pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still
betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. “The
custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock,” says Heeren in
his Researches on the Ethiopians, “determined very naturally the
principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal
form which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by nature,
the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when
art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale
without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat
porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls
before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars
of the interior?”
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest
trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as the
bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied
them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being
struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in
winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of
the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily
the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic
cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through
the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of
nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals,
without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder,
and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its
spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable
demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an
eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the
aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private
facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and
true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the
slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of
the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never
gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from
Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer and to Babylon
for the winter.
In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are
the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa
necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all
those whom the soil or the advantages of a market had induced to build