unprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein do
we exceed all other peoples. By subjective elevation I mean,
liberation from the outward, downward pressure of dogmatic
prescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded tradition, of
irresponsible authority. The despotic objectivity of Asia--where
religion is submissiveness, and manhood is crushed by obedience--has
been partially withstood in Europe. The emancipation therefrom of the
Indo-Germanic race is completed in Anglo-America. Through this
manifold emancipation we are to be, in all the high departments of
human achievement, preeminently creative, because, while equipped with
the best of the past, we are at the same time preeminently subjective;
and, therefore, high literature will, with us, necessarily take the
lyrical, and especially the dramatic, form.
More than our European ancestors, we mold, each one of us, our
own destiny; we have a stronger inward sense of power to unfold and
elevate ourselves; we are more ready and more capable to withstand the
assaults of circumstance. Here is more thoroughly embodied the true
Christian principle, that out of himself is to come every man's
redemption; that the favor and help of God are only to be obtained
through resolute self-help, and honest, earnest struggle. In
Christendom we stand alone as having above us neither the objectivity
of politics nor that of the church. The light of the past we have,
without its darkness. We carry little weight from the exacting past.
Hence, our unexampled freedom and ease of movement which, wanting the
old conventional ballast, to Europeans seems lawless and reckless.
Even among ourselves, many tremble for our future, because they have
little faith in humanity, and because they cannot grasp the new, grand
historic phenomenon of a people possessing all the principles,
practices, and trophies of civilization without its paralyzing
incumbrances.
But think not, because we are less passive to destiny, we are
rebellious against Deity; because we are boldly self-reliant, we are,
therefore, irreligiously defiant. The freer a people is, the
nearer it is to God. The more subjective it is, through acquired
self-rule, the more will it harmonize with the high objectivity of
absolute truth and justice. For having thrown off the capricious
secondary rule of man, we shall not be the less, but the more, under
the steadfast, primary rule of God; for having broken the force of
human, fallible prescription, we shall the more feel and acknowledge
the supremacy of flawless, divine law; for having rejected the tyranny
of man's willfulness, we shall submit the more fully to the beneficent
power of principle.
Our birth, growth, and continued weal, depending on large, deep
principles--principles deliberately elaborated and adopted by reason,
and generously embracing the whole--our life must be interpenetrated
by principle, and thence our literature must embrace the widest and
most human wants and aspirations of man. And thus, it will be our
privilege and our glory to be then the most national in our books when
we are the most universal.
IX.
USEFULNESS OF ART.
ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE RHODE ISLAND ART
ASSOCIATION IN PROVIDENCE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1854.
_Gentlemen of the Rhode Island Art Association:_--
We are met to inaugurate an Association whose aim and end shall be the
encouragement and culture of Art. A most high end--among the highest
that men can attempt; an end that never can be entertained except by
men of the best breed. There is no art among savages, none among
barbarians. Barbarism and art are adversary terms. When men capable of
civilization ascend into it, art manifests itself an inevitable
accompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development. I will say
further, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves the
capacity, nay, the necessity of art. And still further, that those
nations that have been or are preeminent on the earth, are preeminent
in art. Nay, more, that a nation cannot attain to and maintain
eminence without being proficient in art; and that to abstract from a
people its artists were not merely to pluck the flowers from its
branches; it were to cut off its-deep roots.
Who is the artist?
He who embodies, in whatever mode,--so that they be visible or
audible, and thus find entrance to the mind,--conceptions of the
beautiful, is an artist. The test and characteristic of the artistic
nature are superior sensibility to the beautiful. Unite to this the
faculties and the will to give form to the impressions and emotions
that are the fruit of this susceptibility, and you have the artist.
Whether he shall embody his conception in written verse, in marble, in
stone, in sound, on the canvas, that will depend on each one's
individual aptitudes. Generic, common, indispensable to all is the
superior sensibility to the beautiful. In this lies the essence of the
artist.
The beautiful and the perfect being, if not identical, in closest
consanguinity, the artist's is an important, a great function. The
artist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind's native
richness, conceptions of what is most high, most perfect, most
beautiful in shape or sound, in thought or feeling; and producing it
before his fellow-men, appeal to their sensibility to the beautiful,
to their deepest sympathies, to their capacity of being moved by the
grandest and the noblest there is in man and nature. Truly, a mighty
part is that of the artist.
Artists are the educators of humanity. Tutors and professors instruct
princes and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets)
educate nations. Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles and
Scopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece from
history. Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece that
we know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervous
vitality, to have continued to live in a remote posterity, immortal in
the culture, the memories, and the gratitude of men.
So great, so far-stretching, so undying is the power of this exalted
class of men, that it were hardly too much to say that had Homer and
Phidias never lived, we should not be here today. If this be deemed
extravagant, with confidence I affirm that but for the existence of
the greatest artist the world has ever known,--of him who may
be called the chief educator of England,--but for Shakespeare, we
assuredly should not be here to-day doing the good work we are doing.
There are probably some of this company who, like myself, having had
the good fortune to be in London at the time of the world's fair,
stood under that magnificent, transparent roof, trod that immense area
whereon fifty thousand people moved at ease. It was a privilege,--the
memory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into that
gigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusion
and variety the product of man's labor, intellect, and genius,
gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeous
pile,--a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and from
its moral significance absolutely sublime.
On entering by the chief portal into the transept,--covering in the
huge oaks of Hyde Park,--the American, after wondering for a moment in
the glare of the first aspect, will, with the eagerness and perhaps
the vanity of his nation,--have hastened through the compartments of
France, Belgium, Germany, gorgeous with color, glistening with gold.
He will have hastened, hard as it was to hurry through such a
show, in order to reach at once the far eastern end of the palace
where a broad area had been allotted to the United States,--Jonathan,
as is his wont, having helped himself largely. Great was the
American's disappointment, cutting was the rebuke to his vanity; his
country made no _show_ at all. The samples of her industry were
not outwardly brilliant. Their excellence lay in their inward power,
in their wide usefulness. They were not ornaments and luxuries for the
dwellings of the few, they were inventions that diffuse comforts and
blessings among the many,--labor-saving machines and cheap newspapers.
By the thoughtful visitor the merit of these was appreciated, as it
was acknowledged in the final awards of the judges. And even in this
high department where we are so eminent, owing to distance and
misunderstandings, we were not adequately represented. But even if we
had been, the European would have said, "This has a high value and
interest; but still I find not here enough to justify the expectations
entertained by this people, and by many in Europe, of the future
greatness of the American Republic. These things, significant as they
are, are yet not an alphabet that can be so compounded as to
write the richest page of man's history. In this present display I
find not prefigured that splendid future the Americans are fond of
predicting for themselves." And the American, acknowledging the force
of the comment, would have turned away mortified, humbled. But he was
saved any such humiliation. In the midst of that area, under that
beautiful flag, day after day, week after week, month after month,
from morn till night, go when he would, he beheld there a circle ever
full, its vacancies supplied as soon as they were made, a circle
silent with admiration, hushed by emotion, gazing at a master-piece of
American art, the Greek Slave of Powers. And from that contemplation
hundreds of thousands of Europeans carried away an impression of
American capacity, a conviction that truly a great page is to be
written by the young republic in the book of history,--a sense of
American power which they could have gotten from no other source.
Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry.
The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of us
together to found an institution for the encouragement of art in Rhode
Island, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave the
beautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and delaines;
to melt the beautiful into iron and brass, and copper, as well as into
silver and gold; so that our manufacturers and artisans may hold their
own against the competition of England and France and Germany, whereof
in the two latter countries especially, schools of design have long
existed, and high artists find their account in furnishing the
beautiful to manufacturers.
"A low origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be without
flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered," will say some travelled
dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders
of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches
a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely,
but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded
canopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has He made
beautiful. He surrounds us with beauty; He envelops us in beauty.
Beauty is spread out on the familiar grass, glows in the daily flower,
glistens in the dew, waves in the commonest leafy branch. All about
us, in infinite variety, beauty is lavished by God in sights
and sounds, and odors. Now, in using the countless and multifarious
substances that are put within our reach, to be by our ingenuity and
contrivance wrought into materials for our protection and comfort, and
pleasure, it becomes us to--it is part of his design that we
shall--follow the divine example, so that in all our handiwork, as in
his, there shall be beauty, so much as the nature of each product is
susceptible of. That it is the final purpose of Providence that our
whole life, inward and outward, shall be beautiful, and be steeped in
beauty, we have evidence, in the yearnings of the best natures for the
perfect, in the delight we take in the most resplendent objects of art
and nature, in the ennobling thrill we feel on witnessing a beautiful
deed.
By culture we can so create and multiply beauty, that all our
surroundings shall be beautiful.
Can you not imagine a city of the size of this, or vastly larger, the
structure of whose streets and buildings shall be made under the
control of the best architectural ideas, being of various stones and
marbles, and various in style and color, so that each and every one
shall be either light, or graceful, or simple, or ornate, or solid,
or grand, according to its purpose, and the conception of the
builder; and in the midst and on the borders of the city, squares, and
parks, planted with trees and flowers and freshened by streams and
fountains. And when you recall the agreeable, the elevating sensation
you have experienced in front of a perfect piece of architecture
(still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edifice
should be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but through
streets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the whole
population of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be to
refine, to expand, to elevate. When we look at the architectural
improvements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in New
York, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation.
But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about in
unison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life,
and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses.
It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has been
founded. Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in all
things; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist;
to make universally visible and active the harmony,--I almost might
say the identity,--there is between the useful and the beautiful.
Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of the
useful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon the
fructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends,--aye,
absolutely depends,--the development of the practical. But for the
expansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor the
printing-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine. To that we owe
silver forks as well as the electric telegraph. In no province of work
or human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but by
the action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted when
standing before a masterpiece of Raphael. This ceaseless seeking for a
better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the
English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from
the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this
wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of
life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our
present as that is to the times of Alfred.
In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are
radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often
the measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a field of
golden wheat--whereby our bodies live--and the more beautiful the
closer it stands and the fuller are its heads. The oak and the pine
owe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of their
usefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks. The proportions which
give the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetness
and endurance and strength. And thus, too, with man,--his works, when
best, sparkle most with this fire of the beautiful. We profit by
history in proportion as it registers beautiful sayings and beautiful
doings. We profit one another in everyday life in proportion as our
acts, the minor as well as the greater, are vitalized by this divine
essence of beauty. To the speeches of Webster, even to the most
technical, this essence gives their completeness and their grandeur of
proportion; while it is this which illuminates with undying splendor
the creations of Allston. Thus, gentlemen, the aim of our Association
is most noble and useful, drawing its nobleness from its high
usefulness. May it so prosper, that a generation hence, thousands and
tens of thousands shall look back to this the day of its inauguration
with praise and thankfulness.