Essays — First Series
of imparting himself the adamant will be wax in his hands, and will
allow an adequate communication of himself, in his full stature and
proportion. He need not cumber himself with a conventional nature and
culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house
and weather and manner of living which poverty and the fate of birth
have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted wood
cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the
backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the
constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any
other condition as the symbol of a thought which pours itself
indifferently through all.
I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of
Italian painting, I fancied the great pictures would be great
strangers; some surprising combination of color and form; a foreign
wonder, barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and standards of
the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes and imaginations of
school-boys. I was to see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at
last to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left
to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced
directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that
it was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms,—unto
which I lived; that it was the plain _you and me_ I knew so well,—had
left at home in so many conversations. I had the same experience
already in a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was changed
with me but the place, and said to myself—‘Thou foolish child, hast
thou come out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to find
that which was perfect to thee there at home?’ That fact I saw again in
the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again
when I came to Rome and to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi,
Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. “What, old mole! workest thou in the
earth so fast?” It had travelled by my side; that which I fancied I had
left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and again at Milan and at
Paris, and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require
this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle
me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so
much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been
simple, and all great pictures are.
The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar
merit. A calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes
directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet
and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all
florid expectations! This familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance
is as if one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture-dealers has
its value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched
by genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you; for
such as had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty
emotions.
Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end
with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but
initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man,
who believes that the best age of production is past. The real value of
the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or
ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of the everlasting
effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art
has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with
the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and
moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do
not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a
voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They
are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the
need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is
impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples
and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than
the creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it an
outlet for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he
can do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of
circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of
universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and
its highest effect is to make new artists.
Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance
of particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any
real effect. It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a
savage’s record of gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed
of a wonderful perception of form this childish carving was refined to
the utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and
youthful people, and not the manly labor of a wise and spiritual
nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full
of eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our
plastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a
corner. I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of
paltriness, as of toys and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture.
Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do not
yet find. But the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there
is a moment when it becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton,
with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of planets and suns,
should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke found to admire in
“stone dolls.” Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil how deep is the
secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate its meanings into
that eloquent dialect. But the statue will look cold and false before
that new activity which needs to roll through all things, and is
impatient of counterfeits and things not alive. Picture and sculpture
are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true art is never
fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest music is not in the oratorio,
but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of
tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already lost its
relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading
voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not be detached,
but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every
attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all
beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a
romance.
A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy
to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and
destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of
invention and beauty in modern society are all but dried up. A popular
novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers
in the alms-house of this world, without dignity, without skill or
industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity, which
lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique,
and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous
figures into nature,—namely, that they were inevitable; that the artist
was drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which
vented itself in these fine extravagances,—no longer dignifies the
chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in
art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of
life. Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own
imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in an
oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which a
sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from the
useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to
enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty
from use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is
sought, not from religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the
seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in
stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent,
sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the
hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire.
The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be
a superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do
not see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which
shall be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and
console themselves with color-bags and blocks of marble. They reject
life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic. They
despatch the day’s weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They
eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art
vilified; the name conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses; it
stands in the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck
with death from the first. Would it not be better to begin higher
up,—to serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in
eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of
life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction
between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were
truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or
possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is
useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful because it is
alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is
symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a
legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in
Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the
feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to
reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find
beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and
road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it
will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the
joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the
galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s
retort; in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish
and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to
mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses
which these works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a
steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England and
arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of
man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies
along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When
science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they
will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
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