LITERATURE AND ART.
THE MINISTER’S WOOING.
[Sidenote: Romance.]
All prosaic and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets and
novelists _made_ romances. They do, just as much as craters make
volcanoes, no more. What is romance? Whence comes it? Plato spoke to
the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago,
when he said, “Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared
among the gods: and so it comes to pass that, in this life, when the
soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath
her remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling and a
pricking pain, as of wings trying to come forth, even as children in
teething.” And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed
thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that
in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the
whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?
Let us look up in fear and reverence, and say, “God is the great
maker of romance; He, from whose hand came man and woman,—He, who
strung the great harp of existence,—He is the great poet of life.”
Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer
love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being, than that
which closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of
life, is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that
there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained....
The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it for more
smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were written
in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the romance
is the second-hand recorder.
OLDTOWN FOLKS.
[Sidenote: Hebrew literature.]
But it is a most remarkable property of this old Hebrew literature
that it seems to be enchanted with a divine and living power, which
strikes the nerve of individual consciousness in every desolate
and suffering soul. It may have been Judah or Jerusalem ages ago
to whom these words first came, but as they have traveled on for
thousands of years, they have seemed to tens of thousands of sinking
and desolate souls the voice of God to them individually. They have
raised the burden from thousands of crushed spirits; they have been
as the day-spring to thousands of perplexed wanderers. Oh! let us
treasure these old words, for as of old Jehovah chose to dwell in a
tabernacle in the wilderness, and between the cherubim in the temple,
so now He dwells in them; and to the simple soul that seeks for Him
here, He will look forth as of old from the pillar of cloud and fire.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Influence of the Bible.]
For my part, I am impatient of the theory of those who think that
nothing that is not understood makes any valuable impression on
the mind of a child. I am certain that the constant contact of the
Bible with my childish mind was a very great mental stimulant, as it
certainly was a cause of a singular and vague pleasure. The wild,
poetic parts of the prophecies, with their bold figures, vivid
exclamations, and strange Oriental names and images, filled me with
a quaint and solemn delight. Just as a child brought up under the
shadow of the great cathedrals of the Old World, wandering into
them daily, at morning, or at eventide, beholding the many-colored
windows, flamboyant with strange legends of saints and angels,
and neither understanding the legends, nor comprehending the
architecture, is yet stilled and impressed, till the old minster
grows into his growth and fashions his nature, so this wonderful old
cathedral book insensibly wrought a sort of mystical poetry into
the otherwise hard and sterile life of New England. Its passionate
Oriental phrases, its quaint, pathetic stories, its wild transcendent
bursts of imagery, fixed an indelible mark in my imagination.... I
think no New Englander, brought up under the _régime_ established by
the Puritans, could really estimate how much of himself had actually
been formed by this constant, face-to-face intimacy with Hebrew
literature.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The study of a new language.]
I recommend everybody who wishes to try the waters of Lethe to study
a new language, and learn to think in new forms; it is like going out
of one sphere of existence into another.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Greek.]
Greek is the morning land of languages, and has the freshness of
early dew in it which will never exhale.
THE PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND.
[Sidenote: The Bible.]
“This ’ere old Bible,—why it’s jest like yer mother—ye rove and
ramble and cut up round the world without her a spell, and mebbe
think the old woman ain’t so fashionable as some; but when sickness
and sorrow comes, why there ain’t nothin’ else to go back to. Is
there, now?”
HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
[Sidenote: Reading only for amusement.]
“But don’t you think,” said Marianne, “that there is danger in too
much fiction?”
“Yes,” said I. “But the chief danger of all that class of reading is
its _easiness_, and the indolent, careless mental habit it induces.
A great deal of the reading of young people on all days is really
reading to no purpose, its object being merely present amusement.
It is a listless yielding of the mind to be washed over by a stream
which leaves no fertilizing properties, and carries away by constant
wear the good soil of thought. I should try to establish a barrier
against this kind of reading, not only on Sunday, but on Monday, on
Tuesday, and on all days. Instead, therefore, of objecting to any
particular class of books for Sunday reading, I should say in general
that reading merely for pastime, without any moral aim, is the thing
to be guarded against. That which inspires no thought, no purpose,
which steals away all our strength and energy, and makes the Sabbath
a day of dreams, is the reading I would object to.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sacred music.]
“So of music. I do not see the propriety of confining one’s self to
technical sacred music. Any grave, solemn, thoughtful, or pathetic
music has a proper relation to our higher spiritual nature, whether
it be printed in a church service-book or on secular sheets. On me,
for example, Beethoven’s Sonatas have a far more deeply religious
influence than much that has religious names and words. Music is to
be judged of by its effects.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A good picture.]
For a picture, painted by a real artist, who studies Nature minutely
and conscientiously, has something of the charm of the good Mother
herself,—something of her faculty of putting on different aspects
under different lights.
PINK AND WHITE TYRANNY.
[Sidenote: Letters.]
Those long letters in which thoughtful people who live in retired
situations delight; letters, not of outward events, but of sentiments
and opinions, the phases of the inner life.
AGNES OF SORRENTO.
[Sidenote: The artist’s mission.]
What higher honor or grace can befall a creature than to be called
upon to make visible to men that beauty of invisible things which is
divine and eternal?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Hymns.]
“A hymn is a singing angel, and goes walking through the earth,
scattering the devils before it. Therefore he who creates hymns
imitates the most excellent and lovely works of our Lord God, who
made the angels. These hymns watch our chamber-door, they sit upon
our pillow, they sing to us when we awake; and therefore our master
was resolved to sow the minds of his young people with them, as our
lovely Italy is sown with the seeds of all-colored flowers.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Music the language of Italy.]
There is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression
in its music.
DRED.
[Sidenote: The universal book.]
As the mind, looking on the great volume of nature, sees there a
reflection of its own internal passions, and seizes on that in it
which sympathizes with itself,—as the fierce and savage soul delights
in the roar of torrents, the thunder of avalanches, and the whirl of
ocean-storms,—so is it in the great answering volume of revelation.
There is something there for every phase of man’s nature, and hence
its endless vitality and stimulating force.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Prophecy and Revelation.]
It is remarkable that in all ages, communities and individuals who
have suffered under oppression have always fled for refuge to the
Old Testament and to the book of Revelation in the New. Even if not
definitely understood, these magnificent compositions have a wild,
inspiring power, like a wordless, yet impassioned symphony, played
by a sublime orchestra, in which deep and awful sub-bass instruments
mingle with those of ethereal softness, and wild minors twine and
interlace with marches of battles and bursts of victorious harmony.
They are much mistaken who say that nothing is efficient as a motive
that is not definitely understood. Who ever thought of understanding
the mingled wail and roar of the Marseillaise? Just this kind of
indefinite stimulating power has the Bible to the souls of the
oppressed. There is also a disposition, which has manifested itself
since the primitive times, by which the human soul, bowed down
beneath the weight of mighty oppressions, and despairing in its own
weakness, seizes with avidity the intimations of a coming judgment,
in which the Son of Man, appearing in His glory, and all His holy
angels with Him, shall right earth’s mighty wrongs.
SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS.
[Sidenote: The artist as prophet.]
But, I take it, every true painter, poet, and artist is in some sense
so far a prophet that his utterances convey more to other minds than
he himself knows; so that, doubtless, should all the old masters rise
from the dead, they might be edified by what posterity has found in
their books.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Difficulty of criticism.]
Certainly no emotions so rigidly reject critical restraint and
disdain to be bound by rule as those excited by the fine arts. A man
unimpressible and incapable of moods and tenses is for that reason
an incompetent critic; and the sensitive, excitable man, how can he
know that he does not impose his peculiar mood as a general rule?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Rembrandt and Hawthorne.]
I always did admire the gorgeous and solemn mysteries of his
coloring. Rembrandt is like Hawthorne. He chooses simple and
every-day objects, and so arranges light and shadow as to give them a
sombre richness and mysterious gloom. “The House of the Seven Gables”
is a succession of Rembrandt pictures, done in words instead of oils.
Now, this pleases us, because our life really is a haunted one, the
simplest thing in it _is_ a mystery, the invisible world always lies
around us like a shadow, and therefore this dreamy, golden gleam
of Rembrandt meets somewhat in our inner consciousness to which it
corresponds....
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Rubens and Shakespeare.]
I should compare Rubens to Shakespeare, for the wonderful variety and
vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly
resembles. Like Shakespeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a
thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords,
only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some
use, even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects
rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellence.
Some of Shakespeare’s finest passages explode all grammar and
rhetoric like sky-rockets—the thought blows the language to shivers.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Language of the Bible.]
I rejoice every hour that I am among these scenes in my familiarity
with the language of the Bible. In it alone can I find vocabulary and
images to express what this world of wonder excites.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The effect of Christianity.]
As to Christianity not making men happier, methinks M. Belloc forgets
that the old Greek tragedies are filled with despair and gloom, as
their prevailing characteristic, and that nearly all the music of
the world before Christ was in the minor scale, as since Christ it
has come to be in the major. The whole creation has, indeed, groaned
and travailed in pain together until now, but the mighty anthem has
modulated since the Cross, and the requiem of Jesus has been the
world’s birth-song of approaching jubilee.
Music is a far better test, moreover, on such a point, than painting,
for just where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the
highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is most sublimely
strong.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Real music.]
To me, all music is sacred. Is it not so? All _real_ music, in its
passionate earnest, its blendings, its wild, heart-searching tones,
is the language of aspiration. So it may not be meant; yet, when we
know God, so we translate it.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Power of inward emotion.]
What is done from a genuine, strong, inward emotion, whether in
writing or painting, always mesmerizes the paper or the canvas, and
gives it a power which everybody must feel, though few know why.
The reason why the Bible has been omnipotent, in all ages, has been
because there were the emotions of God in it.
POGANUC PEOPLE.
[Sidenote: Puritan music.]
As there is a place for all things in this great world of ours, so
there was in its time and day a place and a style for Puritan music.
If there were pathos and power and solemn splendor in the rhythmic
movement of the churchly chants, there was a grand, wild freedom and
energy of motion in the old “fuguing tunes” of that day that well
expressed the heart of a people courageous in combat and unshaken
in endurance. The church chant is like the measured motion of the
mighty sea in calm weather, but those old fuguing tunes were like
that same ocean aroused by stormy winds, when deep calleth unto deep
in tempestuous confusion, out of which, at last, is evolved union and
harmony. It was a music suggestive of the strife, the commotion, the
battle-cries of a transition period of society, struggling onward
toward dimly seen ideals of peace and order.
LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW.
[Sidenote: Books.]
No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant
company in a room, even when you are not reading them.
MY WIFE AND I.
[Sidenote: Our thoughts in others’ words.]
The only drawback when one reads poems that exactly express what
one would like to say is that it makes us envious; one thinks, why
couldn’t I have said it thus?
WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS.
[Sidenote: Books of meditation.]
St. John was seated in his study, with a book of meditations before
him, on which he was endeavoring to fix his mind. In the hot, dusty,
vulgar atmosphere of modern life, it was his daily effort to bring
around himself the shady coolness, the calm, conventual stillness,
that breathes through such writers as St. Francis de Sales and Thomas
à Kempis, men with a genius for devotion, who have left to mankind
records of the milestones and road-marks by which they traveled
towards the highest things. Nor should the most stringent Protestant
fail to honor that rich and grand treasury of the experience of
devout spirits of which the Romish Church has been the custodian.
The hymns and prayers and pious meditations which come to us through
this channel are particularly worthy of a cherishing remembrance in
this dusty, materialistic age.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Hymns.]
Words of piety, allied to a catching tune, are like seeds with
wings—they float out in the air, and drop in the odd corners of the
heart, to spring up in good purposes.