Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must
be explained from individual history, or must remain words, There is
nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us;
kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,--the roots of all things
are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter's are lame copies
after a divine model. Strassburg Cathedral is a material counterpart
of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind;
the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open,
we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his
work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell pre-exists in the
secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is
in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all
the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.
The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old
prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs which
we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in
the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her _to wait_,
as if the genii who inhabited them suspended their deeds until the
wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in
the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human
feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at
midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light
and of the world. I remember one summer day in the fields, my
companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a
quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the
form of a cherub as painted over churches,--a round block in the
centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on
either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in
the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype
of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of summer
lightning which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature
when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a
snowdrift along the sides of the stone wall, which obviously gave the
idea of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower.
By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent
anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each
people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple
preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt.
The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian
temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their
forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs in the living
rock," says Heeren in his 'Researches on the Ethiopians,' "determined
very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian
architecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns
already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge
shapes and masses, so that when art came to the assistance of nature
it could not move on a small scale without degrading itself. What
would statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings, have been,
associated with those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could
sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?"
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the
forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as
the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that
tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods without
being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,
especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the
low arch of the Saxons. In the woods, in a winter afternoon one will
see as readily the origin of the stained-glass window, with which the
Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen
through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any
lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English
cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the
builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its
ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and
spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the
insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms
into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well
as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private
facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and
true, and Biography deep and sublime.