Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
debts and private debts outside of the State are repudiated,--where
liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life,--where
the position of the white woman is injuriously affected by the
outlawry of the black woman,--where the arts, such as they have, are
all imported, having no indigenous life,--where the laborer is not
secured in the earnings of his own hands,--where suffrage is not free
or equal,--that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but
barbarous; and no advantages of soil, climate, or coast can resist
these suicidal mischiefs.
Morality and all the incidents of morality are essential; as, justice
to the citizen, and personal liberty. Montesquieu says: “Countries are
well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free”; and
the remark holds not less but more true of the culture of men, than of
the tillage of land. And the highest proof of civility is, that the
whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest
good of the greatest number.
ART.
ART.
All departments of life at the present day,--Trade, Politics, Letters,
Science, or Religion,--seem to feel, and to labor to express, the
identity of their law. They are rays of one sun; they translate each
into a new language the sense of the other. They are sublime when seen
as emanations of a Necessity contradistinguished from the vulgar Fate,
by being instant and alive, and dissolving man, as well as his works,
in its flowing beneficence. This influence is conspicuously visible in
the principles and history of Art.
On one side in primary communication with absolute truth through
thought and instinct, the human mind on the other side tends, by an
equal necessity, to the publication and embodiment of its thought,
modified and dwarfed by the impurity and untruth which, in all our
experience, injure the individuality through which it passes. The
child not only suffers, but cries; not only hungers, but eats. The
man not only thinks, but speaks and acts. Every thought that arises
in the mind, in its rising aims to pass out of the mind into act;
just as every plant, in the moment of germination, struggles up to
light. Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second
form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that
it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more
burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it
knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
What is in, will out. It struggles to the birth. Speech is a great
pleasure, and action a great pleasure; they cannot be foreborne.
The utterance of thought and emotion in speech and action may be
conscious or unconscious. The sucking child is an unconscious actor.
The man in an ecstasy of fear or anger is an unconscious actor. A large
part of our habitual actions are unconsciously done, and most of our
necessary words are unconsciously said.
The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end,
is Art. From the first imitative babble of a child to the despotism of
eloquence, from his first pile of toys or chip bridge to the masonry
of Minot Rock Light-house or the Pacific Railroad, from the tattooing
of the Owhyhees to the Vatican Gallery, from the simplest expedient
of private prudence to the American Constitution, from its first to
its last works, Art is the spirit’s voluntary use and combination
of things to serve its end. The Will distinguishes it as spiritual
action. Relatively to themselves, the bee, the bird, the beaver, have
no art; for what they do, they do instinctively; but relatively to
the Supreme Being, they have. And the same is true of all unconscious
action: relatively to the doer, it is instinct; relatively to the First
Cause, it is Art. In this sense, recognizing the Spirit which informs
Nature, Plato rightly said, “Those things which are said to be done
by Nature are indeed done by Divine Art.” Art, universally, is the
spirit creative. It was defined by Aristotle, “The reason of the thing,
without the matter.”
If we follow the popular distinction of works according to their aim,
we should say, the Spirit, in its creation, aims at use or at beauty,
and hence Art divides itself into the Useful and the Fine Arts.
The useful arts comprehend not only those that lie next to instinct,
as agriculture, building, weaving, &c., but also navigation, practical
chemistry, and the construction of all the grand and delicate tools and
instruments by which man serves himself: as language, the watch, the
ship, the decimal cipher; and also the sciences, so far as they are
made serviceable to political economy.
When we reflect on the pleasure we receive from a ship, a railroad,
a dry-dock; or from a picture, a dramatic representation, a statue,
a poem, we find that these have not a quite simple, but a blended
origin. We find that the question, What is Art? leads us directly to
another,--Who is the artist? and the solution of this is the key to the
history of Art.
I hasten to state the principle which prescribes, through different
means, its firm law to the useful and the beautiful arts. The law
is this. The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and
the beautiful; therefore, to make anything useful or beautiful, the
individual must be submitted to the universal mind.
In the first place, let us consider this in reference to the useful
arts. Here the omnipotent agent is Nature; all human acts are
satellites to her orb. Nature is the representative of the universal
mind, and the law becomes this,--that Art must be a complement to
nature, strictly subsidiary. It was said, in allusion to the great
structures of the ancient Romans,--the aqueducts and bridges,--that
“their Art was a Nature working to municipal ends.” That is a true
account of all just works of useful art. Smeaton built Eddystone
Light-house on the model of an oak-tree, as being the form in nature
best designed to resist a constant assailing force. Dollond formed his
achromatic telescope on the model of the human eye. Duhamel built a
bridge by letting in a piece of stronger timber for the middle of the
under surface, getting his hint from the structure of the shin-bone.
The first and last lesson of the useful arts is, that Nature tyrannizes
over our works. They must be conformed to her law, or they will be
ground to powder by her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, nothing
whimsical will endure. Nature is ever interfering with Art. You cannot
build your house or pagoda as you will, but as you must. There is a
quick bound set to your caprice. The leaning tower can only lean so
far. The verandah or pagoda roof can curve upward only to a certain
point. The slope of your roof is determined by the weight of snow. It
is only within narrow limits that the discretion of the architect may
range: gravity, wind, sun, rain, the size of men and animals, and such
like, have more to say than he. It is the law of fluids that prescribes
the shape of the boat,--keel, rudder, and bows,--and, in the finer
fluid above, the form and tackle of the sails. Man seems to have no
option about his tools, but merely the necessity to learn from Nature
what will fit best, as if he were fitting a screw or a door. Beneath
a necessity thus almighty, what is artificial in man’s life seems
insignificant. He seems to take his task so minutely from intimations
of Nature, that his works become as it were hers, and he is no longer
free.
But if we work within this limit, she yields us all her strength. All
powerful action is performed by bringing the forces of nature to bear
upon our objects. We do not grind corn or lift the loom by our own
strength, but we build a mill in such position as to set the north wind
to play upon our instrument, or the elastic force of steam, or the ebb
and flow of the sea. So in our handiwork, we do few things by muscular
force, but we place ourselves in such attitudes as to bring the force
of gravity, that is, the weight of the planet, to bear upon the spade
or the axe we wield. In short, in all our operations we seek not to use
our own, but to bring a quite infinite force to bear.
Let us now consider this law as it affects the works that have beauty
for their end, that is, the productions of the Fine Arts. Here again
the prominent fact is subordination of man. His art is the least part
of his work of art. A great deduction is to be made before we can know
his proper contribution to it.
Music, Eloquence, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. This is
a rough enumeration of the Fine Arts. I omit Rhetoric, which only
respects the form of eloquence and poetry. Architecture and eloquence
are mixed arts, whose end is sometimes beauty and sometimes use.
It will be seen that in each of these arts there is much which is
not spiritual. Each has a material basis, and in each the creating
intellect is crippled in some degree by the stuff on which it works.
The basis of poetry is language, which is material only on one side.
It is a demi-god. But being applied primarily to the common necessities
of man, it is not new-created by the poet for his own ends.
The basis of music is the qualities of the air and the vibrations of
sonorous bodies. The pulsation of a stretched string or wire gives the
ear the pleasure of sweet sound, before yet the musician has enhanced
this pleasure by concords and combinations.
Eloquence, as far as it is a fine art, is modified how much by the
material organization of the orator, the tone of the voice, the
physical strength, the play of the eye and countenance. All this is
so much deduction from the purely spiritual pleasure,--as so much
deduction from the merit of Art,--and is the attribute of Nature.
In painting, bright colors stimulate the eye, before yet they are
harmonized into a landscape. In sculpture and in architecture the
material, as marble or granite, and in architecture the mass, are
sources of great pleasure, quite independent of the artificial
arrangement. The art resides in the model, in the plan; for it is on
that the genius of the artist is expended, not on the statue or the
temple. Just as much better as is the polished statue of dazzling
marble than the clay model, or as much more impressive as is the
granite cathedral or pyramid than the ground-plan or profile of them
on paper, so much more beauty owe they to Nature than to Art.
There is a still larger deduction to be made from the genius of the
artist in favor of Nature than I have yet specified.
A jumble of musical sounds on a viol or a flute, in which the rhythm of
the tune is played without one of the notes being right, gives pleasure
to the unskilful ear. A very coarse imitation of the human form on
canvas, or in wax-work,--a coarse sketch in colors of a landscape,
in which imitation is all that is attempted,--these things give to
unpractised eyes, to the uncultured, who do not ask a fine spiritual
delight, almost as much pleasure as a statue of Canova or a picture of
Titian.
And in the statue of Canova, or the picture of Titian, these give the
great part of the pleasure; they are the basis on which the fine spirit
rears a higher delight, but to which these are indispensable.
Another deduction from the genius of the artist is what is conventional
in his art, of which there is much in every work of art. Thus how
much is there that is not original in every particular building, in
every statue, in every tune, painting, poem, or harangue!--whatever is
national or usual; as the usage of building all Roman churches in the
form of a cross, the prescribed distribution of parts of a theatre, the
custom of draping a statue in classical costume. Yet who will deny