No art is worth anything that does not embody an idea,--that is not
representative: otherwise, it is like a body without a soul, or the image
of some divinity that never had existence. Art needs, indeed, to be
individualized, to betray the characteristics of the artist, to be himself
infused into his work; but more than this, it needs to typify, to
illustrate the character of the age,--to be of a piece with other
expressions of the sentiment that animates other men at the time. It must
be one note in the concert, and that not discordant,--neither behind time
nor ahead of it,--neither in the wrong key nor the other mode: you don't
want Verdi in one of Beethoven's symphonies; you don't want Mozart in
Rossini's operas. No art ever has lived that was not the genuine product of
the era in which it appeared; no art ever can live that is not such a
product: it may, perchance, have a temporary or fictitious success, but it
can neither really and truly exert an influence at the moment of its
highest triumph, nor afterwards remain a power among men, unless it reflect
the spirit of the epoch, unless it show the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure.
All greatness consists in this: in being alive to what is going on around
one; in living actually; in giving voice to the thought of humanity; in
saying to one's fellows what they want to hear or need to hear at that
moment; in being the concretion, the result, of the influences of the
present world. In no other way can one affect the world than in responding
thus to its needs, in embodying thus its ideas. You will see, in looking to
history, that all great men have been a piece of their time; take them out
and set them elsewhere, they will not fit so well; they were made for their
day and generation. The literature which has left any mark, which has been
worthy of the name, has always mirrored what was doing around it; not
necessarily daguerreotyping the mere outside, but at least reflecting the
inside,--the thoughts, if not the actions of men,--their feelings and
sentiments, even if it treated of apparently far-off themes. You may
discuss the Greek republics in the spirit of the modern one; you may sing
idyls of King Arthur in the very mood of the nineteenth century. Art, too,
will be seen always to have felt this necessity, to have submitted to this
law. The great dramatists of Greece, like those of England, all flourished
in a single period, blossomed in one soil; the sculptures of antiquity
represented the classic spirit, and have never been equalled since, because
they were the legitimate product of that classic spirit. You cannot have
another Phidias till man again believes in Jupiter. The Gothic
architecture, how meanly is it imitated now! What cathedrals built in this
century rival those of Milan or Strasbourg or Notre Dame? Ah! there is no
such Catholicism to inspire the builders; the very men who reared them
would not be architects, if they lived to-day. And the Italian painters,
the Angelos and Raphaels and Da Vincis and Titians, who were geniuses of
such universal power that they builded and carved and went on embassies and
worked in mathematics only with less splendid success than they
painted,--they painted because the age demanded it; they painted as the age
demanded; they were religious, yet sensuous, like their nation; they felt
the influence of the Italian sun and soil. Their faith and their history
were compressed into The Last Judgment and the Cartoons; their passion as
well as their power may be recognized in The Last Supper and The Venus of
the Bath.
There is always a necessity for this expression of the character of the
age. This spirit of our age, this mixed materialistic and imaginative
spirit,--this that abroad prompts Russian and Italian wars, and at home
discovers California mines,--that realizes gorgeous dreams of hidden gold,
and Napoleonic ideas of almost universal sway,--that bridges Niagara, and
under-lays the sea with wire, and, forgetful of the Titan fate, essays to
penetrate the clouds,--this spirit, so practical that those who choose to
look on one side only of the shield can see only perjured monarchs
trampling on deceived or decaying peoples, and backwoodsmen hewing forests,
and begrimed laborers setting up telegraph-poles or working at
printing-presses,--this spirit also so full of imagination,--which has
produced an outburst of music (that most intangible and subtile and
imaginative of arts) such as the earth never heard before,--which is
developing in the splendid, showy life, in the reviving taste for pageantry
that some supposed extinct, in the hurried, crowded incidents that will
fill up the historic page that treats of the nineteenth century,--this
spirit is sure to get expression in art.
The American people, cosmopolitan, concrete, the union, the result rather
of a union of so many nationalities, ought surely to do its share towards
this expression. The American people surely represents the century,--has
much of its spirit: is full of unrest; is eminently practical, but
practical only in embodying poetical or lofty ideas; is demonstrative and
excitable; resembles the French much and in many things,--the French, who
are at the head of modern and European civilization,--who think and feel
deeply, but do not keep their feelings hidden. The Americans, too, like
expression: when they admire a Kossuth or a Jenny Lind, a patriot exile or
a foreign singer, all the world is sure to know of their admiration; when
they are delighted at some great achievement in science, like the laying of
an Atlantic Cable, they demonstrate their delight. They make their
successful generals Presidents; they give dinners to Morphy and banquets to
Cyrus Field. They are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the
age. Therefore they are artistic.
How amazed some will be at the proposition,--amazed that the age should be
called an artistic one,--amazed that Americans should be considered an
artistic nation! Yet art is only the expression in outward and visible form
of an inward and spiritual grace,--the sacrament of the imagination. Art is
an incarnation in colors or stone or music or words of some subtile essence
which requires the embodiment. We all have delicate fancies, lofty
imaginings, profound sentiments; the artist expresses them for us. If,
then, this age be one that requires expression for its ideas, that is
practical, that insists on accomplishing its designs, on creating its
children, on producing its results, it is an artistic age. For art works; a
poet is a maker, according to the Greeks: and all artists are poets; they
all produce; they all do; they all make. They do just what all the
practical men of this practical age are doing, what even the Gradgrinds are
doing: they embody ideas; they put thoughts into facts. A quiet,
contemplative age is not an artistic one; art has ever flourished in
stirring times: Grecian wars and Guelphic strife have been its fostering
influences. An artist is very far from being an idle dreamer; he works as
hard as the merchant or the mechanic,--works, too, physically as well as
mentally, with his hand as well as his head.
This is all statement: let us have some facts; let us embody our ideas. Do
you not call Meyerbeer, with his years of study and effort and application,
a worker? Do you not call Verdi, who has produced thirty operas, a worker?
Do you not imagine that Turner labored on his splendid pictures? Do you not
know how Crawford toiled and spun away his nerves and brain? Have you not
heard of the incessant and tremendous attention that for many months Church
bestowed on the canvas that of late attracted the admiration of English
critics and their Queen? Was Rachel idle? Have these artists not spent the
substance of themselves as truly as any of your politicians or your
soldiers or your traders? Can you not trace in them the same energy, the
same effort, the same determination as in Louis Napoleon, as in Zachary
Taylor, as in Stephen Girard? Are not they also representative?
And their works,--for by these shall ye know them,--do they reflect in
nothing this fitful, uneasy, yet splendid intensity of to-day? Can you not
read in the colors on Turner's canvas, can you not see in the rush of
Church's Niagara, can you not hear in the strains of the Traviata, can you
not perceive in the tones and looks of Ristori, just what you find in the
successful men in other spheres of life? Rothschild's fortune speaks no
more plainly than the Robert le Diable; George Sand's novels and Carlyle's
histories tell the same story as Kossuth's eloquence and Garibaldi's
deeds. The artists are as alive to-day as any in the the world. For, again
and again, art is not an outside thing; its professors, its lovers, are not
placed outside the world; they are in it and of it as absolutely as the
rest. You who think otherwise, remember that Verdi's name six months ago
was the watchword of the Italian revolutionists; remember that certain
operas are forbidden now to be played in Naples, lest they should arouse
the countrymen of Masaniello; remember, or learn, if you did not know, how
in New York, last June, all the singers in town offered their services for
a benefit to the Italian cause, and all the _habitués_, late though the
season was, crowded to their places to see an opera whose attractiveness
had been worn out and whose novelty was nearly gone. You who think that art
is an interest unworthy of men who live in the world, that it is a thing
apart, what say you to the French, the most actual, the most practical, the
most worldly of peoples, and yet the fondest of art in all its phases,--the
French, who remembered the statues in the Tuileries amid the massacres of
the First Revolution, and spared the architecture of antiquity when they
bombarded the city of the Caesars?
Consider, too, the growing love for art in practical America; remark the
crowds of newly rich who deck their houses with pictures and busts, even
though they cannot always appreciate them; remember that nearly every
prominent town in the country has its theatre; that the opera, the most
refined luxury of European civilization, considered for long an affectation
beyond every other, is relished here as decidedly as in Italy or France. In
New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, there are
buildings exclusively appropriated to this new form of art, this exotic,
expensive amusement. These opera-houses, too, illustrate most aptly the
progress of other arts. They are adorned with painting and gilding and
carving; they are as sumptuous in accommodation as the palaces of European
potentates; they are lighted with a brilliancy that Aladdin's garden never
rivalled; they are thronged, with crowds as gayly dressed as those that
fill the saloons of Parisian belles; and the singers and actors who
interpret the thoughts of mighty foreign masters are the same who delight
the Emperor of the French when he pays a visit to the Queen of Great
Britain and Ireland. Orchestras of many instruments discourse most eloquent
music, and involuted strains are criticized in learned style, in capitals
thousands of miles from the seashore. And there is no appreciation of art
in all this! there is no embodiment of the love of the age for material
magnificence, there is no poetry incarnated into form, in this combination
of splendors rivalling the opium-eater's visions! The Americans are a dull,
stupid people, immersed in business; art has no effect upon them; it is
despised among them; it can never prosper here!
The stage, indeed, in its various forms, seems more fully to manifest and
illustrate the artistic influence among Americans than any other art. It
often addresses those whom more refined solicitations might never
reach. Those who would turn from Church's or Page's pictures with
indifference are frequently attracted by the representations in a theatre.
The pictures there are more alive, more real, more intense, and fascinate
many unable to appreciate the recondite charms of the canvas. The grace of
attitude, the splendid expression, the intellectual art of Ristori or
Rachel may impress those who fail to discover the same merits in colder
stone, in Crawford's marble or the statues of Palmer; and they may
sometimes learn to relish even the delicate beauties of Shakspeare's text,
from hearing it fitly declaimed, who would never spell out its meaning by
themselves. The drama is certainly superior to other arts while its reign
lasts, because of its veriness, its actuality. He must be dull of
imagination, indeed, who cannot give himself up for a while to its
illusions; he must be stupid who cannot open his senses to its delights or
waken his intellect to receive its influences.
Neither can a taste for the stage be declared one which only the ignorant
or vulgar share. Though away in the wilds of California a theatre was often
erected next after a hotel, the second building in a town, and the
strolling player would summon the miners by his trumpet when not one was in
sight, and instantly a swarm peeped forth from the earth, like the armed
men who sprang from the furrows that Cadmus ploughed,--though the wildest
and rudest of Western cities and the wildest and rudest inhabitants of
Western towns are quick to acknowledge the charms of the stage,--yet also
the most highly cultured and the most intellectual Americans pay the same
tribute to this art. We have all seen, within a few years, one of the most
profound scholars and most prominent divines in the country proclaiming his
approbation of the drama. We may find, to-day, in any Eastern city, members
of the liberal clergy at an opera, and sometimes at a play. The scholars
and writers and artists and thinkers, as well as the people of leisure and
of fashion, frequent places of amusement, not only for amusement, but to
cultivate their tastes, to exercise their intellects, ay, and oftentimes to
refine their hearts. The splendid homage paid in England not long ago to
the drama, when the highest nobility and the first statesmen in the land
were present at a banquet in honor of Charles Kean, is evidence enough that
no puerile or uncultivated taste is this which relishes the theatre. Goethe
presiding over the playhouse at Weimar, Euripides and Sophocles writing
tragedies, the greatest genius of the English language acting in his own
productions at the Globe Theatre, people like Siddons and Kean and Cushman
and Macready illustrating this art with the resources of their fine
intellects and great attainments,--surely these need scarcely be mentioned,
to relieve the drama from the reproach that some would put upon it, of
puerility.
New York is, perhaps, more of a representative city than any other in the
land. It is an aggregation from all the other portions of the country; it
is the result, the precipitate, of the whole. It has no distinctive,
individual character of its own; it is a condensation of all the rest, a
focus. Thither all the country goes at times. Restless, fitful, changing,
yet still the same in its change; like the waves of the sea, that toss and
roll and move away, and still the mighty mass is ever there. New York, in
its various phases and developments, its crowded and cosmopolitan
population, its out-door kaleidoscopic splendor, is indeed a representative
of the entire country. It has not the purely literary life of Boston, nor
so distinctive an intellectual character; it is not so stamped by the
impress of olden times as Philadelphia; but it has an outside garb
significant of the inward nature. It is like the face of a great actor,
splendid in expression, full of character, changing with a thousand
changing emotions, but betraying a great soul beneath them all. New York is
artistic just as America is artistic, just as the age is artistic: not,
perhaps, in the loftiest or most refined sense, but in the sense that art
is an expression, in tangible form, of ideas. New York is a great thought
uttered. It is like those fruits or seeds which germinate by turning
themselves inside out; the soul is on the outside, crusted all over it, but
none the less soul for all that.
And New York illustrates this idea of the drama being the representative
art of to-day. The theatre there, including the opera, is a great
established fact,--as important nearly as it was in the palmiest days of
the Athenian republic, or on the road to be of as much consequence as it is
in Paris, the representative city of the world. Fifty thousand people
nightly crowd twenty different theatres in New York. From the splendid
halls where Grisi and Gazzaniga and La Borde and La Grange have by turns
translated into sound the ideas of Meyerbeer and Bellini and Donizetti and
Mozart, to the little rooms where sixpenny tickets procure lager-beer as
well as music for the purchaser, the drama is worshipped. And this not only
by New-Yorkers: not only do those who lead the busy, excited life of the
metropolis acquire a taste, as some might say, for a factitious excitement,
but all strangers hasten to the theatres. The sober farmer, the citizens
from plodding interior towns, the gay Southerners, accustomed almost
exclusively to social amusements, the denizens of rival Bostons and
Philadelphias all frequent the operas and playhouses of New York. When the
richer portion of its inhabitants have left the hot and sultry town, or, in
mid-winter, are immersed in the more exclusive pleasures of fashionable
life, even then the theatres are thronged; and in September and October you
shall find all parts of the country represented in their boxes and
parquets,--proving that this is not an exclusively metropolitan taste, that
it is shared by the whole nation, that in this also New York is truly
representative.
Boston typifies a peculiar phase of American life; it is the illustration,
the exponent, of the cultivated side of our nationality; its thought, its
action, its character are taken abroad as symbols of the national thought
and action and character, in whatever relates to literature or art. The
Professor said truly, Boston does really in some sort stand for the brain
of America. Well the brain of America appreciates the stage. It is but a
few months since the culture and distinction of Boston nightly crowded a
small and inferior theatre, to witness the personations of the young genius
who is destined at no distant day to rival the proudest names of the drama.
The most brilliant successes Edwin Booth has yet achieved have been
achieved in Boston; scholars and wits and poets and professors crowd the
boxes when he plays; women of talent write poems in his praise and publish
them in the "Atlantic Monthly"; professors of Harvard College send him
congratulatory letters; artists paint and carve his intellectual beauty;
and fashion follows in the wake of intellect, alike acknowledging his
merits. Boston recognized those merits, too, when they were first presented
to its appreciation; and now that they verge nearer upon maturity, her
appreciation is quickened and her applause redoubled. It cannot be said
that the taste or culture of the nation is indifferent to histrionic
excellence, when absolute excellence is found.
No other art is yet on such a footing among us. Neither is this because of
our partially developed civilization. It is equally so abroad; where the
nations are oldest and best established in culture, there, too, a similar
state of things exists. No school in painting, no style of sculpture, no
kind of architecture has made such an impression on the age as its music,
as its dramatic music, its opera. This speaks to all nations, in all
languages. No writer, though he write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
Lamartine, or Dudevant, can hope for such an audience as Verdi or
Meyerbeer. No orator speaks to such crowds as Rossini; no Everett or
Kossuth, or Gavazzi or Spurgeon, has so many listeners as Donizetti. For
the stage is the art of to-day,--perhaps more especially, but still not,
exclusively, the operatic stage; the theatre in its various forms
represents the feeling of the time so as Grecian and Gothic architecture
and Italian painting have in their time done for their time,--so as no
pictures, no architecture, no statuary can now do. Painting and statuary,
when they do anything towards representing this age, incarnate the dramatic
spirit; the literature that has most influence today is journalism,--the
effective, present, actual, short-lived, dramatic newspaper, where all the
actors speak for themselves: other literature has its listeners, but it
lags behind; other art has its appreciators, but it cannot keep pace with
the march of armies, with the rush to California, with the swarm to
Australia; there is no art on these outskirts but the dramatic. That
travels with the advancing mass in every exodus; that went with Dr. Kane to
the North Pole (he had private theatricals aboard the Resolute); that alone
gave utterance immediately to the latest cry of humanity in the Italian
War.
Neither can it be said that the theatre has no more consequence now than it
has always enjoyed. At the time when Gothic architects and Italian painters
expressed the meaning of their own ages, there was nothing like a real
drama in existence, and the Roman theatre was never comparable with
ours. The Greeks, indeed, had a stage which was an important element of
their civilization, and which took the character of their time, giving and
receiving influence; but their stage was essentially different from that of
the moderns. Its success did not depend upon the individual performer; its
pageantry was perhaps as splendid as what we now see; but the play of the
countenance, that great intellectual opportunity offered an actor by our
drama, was not known. In this see also a characteristic of the present
age. Individuality is a distinctive peculiarity of the nineteenth century;
it has been for centuries gradually becoming more possible; but every man
now works his own way, acts himself, more completely than ever
before. Therefore appropriate is it that the drama should give importance
to the individual, and allow a great actor to incarnate and illustrate in
his own form and face feelings and passions that formerly were only hinted
at; for remember that the Greek players usually wore masks, while their
amphitheatres were so large that in any event the expression of the
features was lost.
With this individuality, this opportunity for each to develop his own
identity and intensity, the nineteenth century strangely combines another
peculiarity, that of association. All these units, these atoms, so
marvellously distinct, are incorporated into one grand whole; though each
be more, by and of himself, than ever before, yet the great power, the
great motor, is the mass. The mass is made powerful by the added importance
given to each individual. And you may trace without conceit a state of
things behind the scenes very similar to this in front of the
footlights. In the theatre, also, the many workers contribute to a grand
result. The manager would be as powerless in his little empire, without
important assistants, as a monarch without ministers and people. What makes
the French army and the American so irresistible is the thought that each
private is more than a machine, is an intellectual being, understands what
his general wants, fights with his bayonet at Solferino or his musket at
Monterey on his own account, yet subject to the supreme control. And the
theatre, with all its actors and scene-painters and costumers and
carpenters and musicians, is only an army on a different scale. The forces
of the stage answer to the generals and colonels, the marshals and
privates, all marching and working and fighting for the same end. Those
splendid dramatic triumphs of Charles Kean were only illustrations of the
principle of association,--only illustrations of the readiness of the stage
to adapt itself to the times, to seize hold of whatever is suggested by the
outside world, to appropriate the discoveries of Layard and the revelations
of Science to its own uses,--illustrations, too, of the importance of the
individual Kean, as well as of the crowd of clever subordinates.
That the theatre feels this reflex influence, that it appreciates all that
is going on around it, that it is not asleep, that it is penetrated with
the spirit of the century, whether that spirit be good or evil, the
selection of plays now popular is another proof. In France, where the
success of the histrionic art now culminates, a contemporaneous drama is
flourishing, the absolute society of the day is represented. That society
has faults, and the stage mirrors them. "La Dame aux Camélias," "Les Filles
de Marbre," "Le Demi-Monde" reflect exactly the peculiarities of the life
they aim to imitate. And these very plays, whose influence is so often
condemned, would never have had the popularity they have attained in nearly
every city of the civilized world, had there not been Marguerite Gautiers
and Traviatas outside of Paris as well as in it. Another attempt, perhaps
not an entirely successful one, but still a significant attempt, has been
made in this country to produce a contemporaneous drama. "Jessie Brown" and
"The Poor of New York," and other plays directly daguerreotyping ordinary
incidents, at any rate show that the drama is an art that responds
instantly to the pulses of the time.
But it ia not necessary for the stage to daguerreotype; it mirrors more
truly when it embodies the spirit. And never before was there an age whose
spirit was more theatrical, in the best sense of the term; full of outside
expression, but also full of inside feeling; working, accomplishing,
putting into actual form its ideas; incarnating its passions; intellectual,
yet passionate; lofty in imagination, yet practical in exemplification;
showy, but significantly showy,--theatrical. An art, then, that is all
this, surely expresses as no other art does or can the character of the
nineteenth century,--surely is the representative art.
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