ART

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 the 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.

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?

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. 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. 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?

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. 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. 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 litter 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.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The

best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 alms-house 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.

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.