Essays — First Series
’Tis the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man in Earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate,
And, moulded of one element
With the days and firmament,
Teach him on these as stairs to climb
And live on even terms with Time;
Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill.
ART
Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in
every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This
appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the
popular distinction of works according to their aim either at use or
beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation but creation is the aim.
In landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer
creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit
and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the
landscape has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought which
is to him good; and this because the same power which sees through his
eyes is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the
expression of nature and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy
the features that please him. He will give the gloom of gloom and the
sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait he must inscribe the character and
not the features, and must esteem the man who sits to him as himself
only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within.
What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual
activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that
higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler
symbols. What is a man but nature’s finer success in self-explication?
What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon
figures,—nature’s eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of
painting, love of nature, but a still finer success,—all the weary
miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of
it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the
pencil?
But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to
convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is
always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his
ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an inexpressible charm for
the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period
overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far it will
retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the
Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this
element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate
himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the
education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times
shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful
and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the
thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he
avoids. Above his will and out of his sight he is necessitated by the
air he breathes and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live
and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing what that
manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm
than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist’s pen or
chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to
inscribe a line in the history of the human race. This circumstance
gives a value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and
Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. They denote the height of
the human soul in that hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung from a
necessity as deep as the world. Shall I now add that the whole extant
product of the plastic arts has herein its highest value, _as history;_
as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful,
according to whose ordinations all beings advance to their beatitude?
Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the
perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no
clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist
and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is
carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of
art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the
embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of
things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our
happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a
pleasing trance, but his individual character and his practical power
depend on his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing
with one at a time. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence
around a single form. It is the habit of certain minds to give an
all-excluding fulness to the object, the thought, the word, they alight
upon, and to make that for the time the deputy of the world. These are
the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach
and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of
the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary
eminency of an object,—so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in
Carlyle,—the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The
power depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he
contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may
of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore
each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour and concentrates
attention on itself. For the time, it is the only thing worth naming to
do that,—be it a sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration,
the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of discovery.
Presently we pass to some other object, which rounds itself into a
whole as did the first; for example a well-laid garden; and nothing
seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I should think fire
the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and
water, and earth. For it is the right and property of all natural
objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties whatsoever,
to be for their moment the top of the world. A squirrel leaping from
bough to bough and making the Wood but one wide tree for his pleasure,
fills the eye not less than a lion,—is beautiful, self-sufficing, and
stands then and there for nature. A good ballad draws my ear and heart
whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. A dog, drawn by a
master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is a reality not less than
the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of excellent objects we
learn at last the immensity of the world, the opulence of human nature,
which can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also learn that
what astonished and fascinated me in the first work astonished me in
the second work also; that excellence of all things is one.
The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The
best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures
are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes
which make up the ever-changing “landscape with figures” amidst which
we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs.
When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to
grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so
painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form,
and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the
boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist
stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw every
thing, why draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternal
picture which nature paints in the street, with moving men and
children, beggars and fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and
gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant,
dwarf, expanded, elfish,—capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.
A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As
picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When I
have seen fine statues and afterwards enter a public assembly, I
understand well what he meant who said, “When I have been reading
Homer, all men look like giants.” I too see that painting and sculpture
are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities
of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his
infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What
a gallery of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and
diverse original single figures. Here is the artist himself
improvising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him,
now another, and with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and
expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of
marble and chisels; except to open your eyes to the masteries of
eternal art, they are hypocritical rubbish.
The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains
the traits common to all works of the highest art,—that they are
universally intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states
of mind, and are religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the
reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it should
produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy
hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected,—the work of
genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to
all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and
special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world
over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it
not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in
outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the
work of art of human character,—a wonderful expression through stone,
or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of
our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls
which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the
masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian
masters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A
confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from
them all. That which we carry to them, the same we bring back more
fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican,
and passes from chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases,
sarcophagi and candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the
richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the
principles out of which they all sprung, and that they had their origin
from thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies the technical
rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets that these works were not
always thus constellated; that they are the contributions of many ages
and many countries; that each came out of the solitary workshop of one
artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the existence of other
sculpture, created his work without other model save life, household
life, and the sweet and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts,
and meeting eyes; of poverty and necessity and hope and fear. These
were his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries home to
your heart and mind. In proportion to his force, the artist will find
in his work an outlet for his proper character. He must not be in any
manner pinched or hindered by his material, but through his necessity