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Of human sense doth overfill.
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 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.
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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?
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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. 3 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. 4 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?
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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?
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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. 3 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. 4 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?
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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. 5 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. 6 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 littler 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.
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The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely
initial. The best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best
pictures can 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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
almshouse 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.
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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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http://www.bartleby.com/90/0212.html
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 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.
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