"The stretchèd metre of an antique song,"
they flow from our grateful lips in ready words. But we do not suspect
how these manifestations of material Beauty are received by the
mysterious alembic of the soul,--how they are worked up there by
exquisite and subtile processes of moral chemistry, humanized,
spiritualized, and appropriated unconsciously to sweet uses of piety and
affection. We do not know how the star, the flower, the dear human face,
the movement of a wave, the song of a bird,--we do not know how these
things enter into the heart, become ideal, mingle with human emotions,
consecrate and are consecrated, and come forth once more into light, but
transfigured into tenderest sympathies and the gentle offices of charity
and grace. There was Wordsworth,--he knew something of this still
machinery, this "kiss of toothèd wheels" within the soul of man. Listen
to him,--he had been to Tintern Abbey and heard once more the "soft
inland murmur" of the Wye;--
"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--_feelings, too,
Of unremembered pleasure:_ such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love."
And then who that has ever read it can forget his exquisite picture in
the "Education of a little Child"?--
"And she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place,
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
_And beauty burn of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face!_"
The material Beauty of the world, as exhibited in the manifold objects,
sounds, perfumes, motions of Nature, is created for a nobler purpose
than only to delight the senses and please the aesthetic faculties.
I believe it is the distant source whence flow all our dear daily
affections. We know, that, according to the suggestions of our merely
human passions and instincts, we ease our hearts of Love by heaping
treasures and the choicest gifts of fancy in the laps of those whom we
most dearly cherish. We take no credit to ourselves for such precious
prodigalities; for they are the inevitable and disinterested outpourings
of affection. They are received as such. And when we cast our eyes
abroad and behold the loving prodigality of a divine hand, we accept the
manifestation, are made happy in the consciousness of being beloved,
and, constituted as we are in the image and likeness of God, express our
instinctive gratitude in those fine human sympathies which impress the
seal of Truth on the primary idea of our creation.
And so, blessed are the shadows of porches and cloisters! Blessed the
hours of serene meditation, when the "tender grace of days that are
dead," of flowers that have faded, of scenes "gone glimmering through
the dream of things that were," comes back to us with a new meaning,
softening and refining the heart to unexpected capacities of affection.
But how they fade away, these ghostly and unsubstantial pageants, when
they "scent the morning air"! How they leave in our hearts nought but
the dim consciousness that we are capable of an existence ineffably
deeper and vaster than that which we lead in the visible world! Nought
but this? Alas, poor human nature! do we leave the casket of Pandora
open in wanton carelessness, and let all escape but the mere scent of
the roses? Or does there not remain, behind an indefinable presence to
comfort and console us,--the precious _Ideal of Beauty_,--
"The light that never was on sea or land,
The inspiration and the poet's dream"?
The human heart forever yearns _to create_,--this is the pure antique
word for it,--to give expression and life to an evasive loveliness that
haunts the soul in those moments when the body is laid asleep and the
spirit walks. There is a continual and godlike longing to embody these
elusive phantoms of Beauty. But the immortal songs which remain unsung,
the exquisite idyls which gasp for words, the bewildering and restless
imagery which seeks in vain the eternal repose of marble or of
canvas,--while these confess the affectionate and divine desires of
humanity, they prove how few there are to whom it is given to learn the
great lesson of Creation. When one arises among us, who, like Pygmalion,
makes no useless appeal to the Goddess of Beauty for the gift of life
for his Ideal, and who creates as he was created, we cherish him as a
great interpreter of human love. We call him poet, composer, artist, and
speak of him reverently as _Master_. We say that his lips have been wet
with dews of Hybla,--that, like the sage of Crotona, he has heard the
music of the spheres,--that he comes to us, another Numa, radiant and
inspired from the kisses of Egeria.
Thus, as infinite Love begets infinite Beauty, so does infinite Beauty
reflect into finite perceptions that image of its divine parentage which
the antique world worshipped under the personification of Astarte,
Aphrodite, Venus, and recognized as the _great creative principle_ lying
at the root of all high Art.
There is a curious passage in Boehme, which relates how Satan, when
asked the cause of the enmity of God and his own consequent downfall,
replied,--"I wished to be an Artist." So, according to antique
tradition, Prometheus manufactured a man and woman of clay, animated
them with fire stolen from the chariot of the Sun, and was punished for
the crime of Creation; Titans chained him to the rocks of the Indian
Caucasus for thirty thousand years!
This Ideal, this Aphrodite of old mythologies, still reigns over the
world of Art, and every truly noble effort of the artist is saturated
with her spirit, as with a religion. It is impossible for a true work of
Art to exist, unless this great creative principle of Love be present in
its inception, in its execution, in its detail. It must be pervaded with
the warmth of human, passionate affection. The skill which we are so apt
to worship is but the instrument in the hands of Love. It is the means
by which this humanity is transferred to the work, and there idealized
in the forms of Nature. Thus the test of Art is in our own hearts. It
is not something far away from us, throwing into our presence gleaming
reflections from some supernal source of Light and Beauty; but it is
very near to us,--so near, that, like the other blessings which lie
at our feet, we overlook it in our far-reaching searches after the
imaginary good. We, poor underlings, have been taught in the school of
sad experience the mortal agony of Love without Skill,--the power of
perception, without the power of utterance. We know how dumb are the
sweet melodies of our souls,--how fleeting their opulent and dreamy
pageantries. But we have not fully learned the utter emptiness and
desolation of Skill without Love. We accept its sounding brass and
tinkling cymbals for immortal harmonies. We look reverently upon its
tortured marbles and its canvases stained with academic knowledge as
revelations of higher intelligence; forgetting, that, if we go down to
the quiet places of our own souls, we shall find there the universe
reflected, like a microcosm, in the dark well-springs, and that out
of these well-springs in the deep silence rises the beautiful Ideal,
Anadyomene, to compensate and comfort us for the vacancy of Life. If we
know ourselves, it is not to the dogmas of critics, the artificial rules
of aesthetics, that we most wisely resort for judgments concerning works
of Art. Though technical externals and the address of manipulation
naturally take possession of our senses and warp our opinions, there are
depths of immortal Truth within us, rarely sounded, indeed, but which
can afford a standard and a criterion far nobler than the schools can
give us.
The broken statues and columns and traditions and fragmentary classics
which Greece has left us are so still and tranquil to the eye and ear,
that we search in vain for the Delphic wisdom they contain, till we find
it echoed in the sympathetic depths of our souls, and repeated in the
half-impalpable Ideals there. It is to Greece that we must look for
the external type of these Ideals, whose existence we but half suspect
within us. It is not pleasant, perhaps, to think that we were nearly
unconscious of the highest capacities of our humanity, till we
recognized their full expression in the ashes of a distant and dead
civilization,--that we did not know ourselves, till
"The airy tongues that syllable men's names
In pathless wildernesses"
uttered knowledge to us among the ghastly ruins of Hellas. It is good
for us to lend a spiritual ear to these ancient whisperings, and hear
nymph calling to nymph and faun to faun, as they caper merrily with
the god Pan through the silence. It is good for us to listen to that
"inextinguishable laughter" of the happy immortals of Olympus, ever
mingling with all the voices of Nature and setting them to the still
sweet music of humanity,--good, because so we are reminded how close we
are to the outward world, and how all its developments are figurative
expressions of our near relationships with the visible Beauty of things.
Thus it is that the poetic truths of old religions exquisitely vindicate
themselves; thus we find, even we moderns, with our downward eyes and
our wrinkled brows, that we still worship at the mythological altars
of childlike divinities; and when we can get away from the distracting
Bedlam of steam-shrieks and machinery, we behold the secrets of our own
hearts, the Lares and Penates of our own households, reflected in the
"white ideals" on antique vases and medallions.
Abstract lines are the most concentrated expressions of human ideas,
and, as such, are peculiarly sensitive to the critical tests of all
theories of the Beautiful. Distinguished from the more usual and direct
means by which artists express their inspirations and appeal to the
sympathies of men, distinct from the common language of Art, which
contents itself with conveying merely local and individual ideas,
abstract lines are recognized as the grand hieroglyphic symbolism of the
aggregate of human thought, the artistic manifestations of the great
human Cosmos. The natural world, passing through the mind of man, is
immediately interpreted and humanized by his creative power, and assumes
the colors, forms, and harmonies of Painting, Sculpture, and Music. But
abstract lines, as we find them in Architecture and in the ceramic arts,
are the independent developments of this creative power, coming directly
from humanity itself, and obtaining from the outward world only the most
distant motives of composition. Thus it is an inevitable deduction that
Architecture is the most _human_ of all arts, and its lines the most
_human_ of all lines.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever";
and the affectionate devotion with which this gift is received by
finite intelligences from the hand of God is expressed in Art, when its
infinite depth _can_ be so expressed at all, in a twofold language,--
the one objective, the other subjective; the one recalling the immediate
source of the emotion, and presenting it palpably to the senses, arrayed
in all the ineffable tenderness of Art, which is Love,--the other,
portraying rather the emotion than the cause of it, and by an
instinctive and universal symbolism expressing the deep and serious joy
with which the "thing of beauty" is welcomed to the heart. Hence come
those lines which aesthetic writers term "Lines of Beauty," so eloquent
to us with an uncomprehended meaning,--so near, and yet so far,--so
simple, and yet so mysterious,--so animated with life and thought and
musical motion, and yet so still and serene and spiritual. Links which
bind us fraternally to old intelligences, tendrils by which the soul
climbs up to a wider view of the glimmering landscape, they are grateful
and consoling to us. We look with cognizant eyes at their subtile
affinities with some unexpressed part of human life, and, turning one to
another, are apt to murmur,
"We cannot understand: we love."
The mysteries of orb and cycle, with which old astrologers girded human
life, and sought to define from celestial phenomena the horoscope
of man, have been brought down to modern applications by learned
philosophers and mathematicians. These have labored with a godlike
energy and skill to trace the interior relationships existing between
the recondite revelations of their Geometry, their wonderful laws of
mathematical harmonies and unities, and those lines which by common
consent are understood to be exponential of certain phases of our own
existence. No well-organized intellect can fail to perceive that a
sublime and immortal Truth underlies these speculations. Undoubtedly, in
the straight line, in the conic sections, in the innumerable composite
curves of the mathematician, lie the germs of all these symbolic
expressions. But the artist, whose lines of Beauty vary continually with
the emotions which produce them, who feels in his own human heart the
irresistible impulse which gives an exquisite balance and poise to those
lines, cannot allow that the _spirit_ of his compositions is governed by
the exact and rigid formula; of the philosopher to any greater extent
or in any other manner than as the numbers of the poet are ruled by the
grammar of his language. These formulae may be applied as a curious test
to ascertain what strange sympathies there may be between such lines and
the vast organic harmonies of Nature and the Universe; but they do not
enter into the soul of their creation any more than the limitations of
counterpoint and rhythm laid their incubus on the lyre of Apollo. The
porches where Callicrates, Hermogenes, and Callimachus walked were
guarded by no such Cerberus as the disciples of Plato encountered at the
entrance of the groves of the Academy,--
"[Greek: Oudeis ageometraetos eisito],"
"Let no one ignorant of Geometry enter here";
but the divine Aphrodite welcomed all mankind to the tender teachings of
the Wild Acanthus, the Honeysuckle, and the Sea-Shell, and all the deep
utterances of boundless Beauty.
Truly, it is sad and dispiriting to the artist to find that all modern
aesthetical writings limit and straiten the free walks of highest
Art with strict laws deduced from rigid science, with mathematical
proportions and the formal restrictions of fixed lines and curves,
nicely adapted from the frigidities of Euclid. The line A B must equal
the line C D; somewhere in space must be found the centre or the focus
of every curve; and every angle must subtend a certain arc, to be easily
found on reference to the tables of the text-books. "The melancholy
days have come" for Art, when the meditative student finds his early
footsteps loud among these dry, withered, and sapless leaves, instead of
brushing away the dews by the fountains of perpetual youth. I am aware
of no extant English work on Greek Lines which does not aim to reduce
that magnificent old Hellenic poetry to the cold, hard limitations of
Geometry. Modern Pharisees nail that antique Ideal of loveliness and
purity to a mathematical cross.
Now it is capable of distinct proof, that abstract Lines of Beauty, even
in a greater degree than any other expressions of Art, are born and
baptized in Love. Because parabolic curves frequently _coincide_ with
these lines, it is no proof that they _created_ them.
The Water-Lily, or Lotus, perpetually occurs in Oriental mythology as
the sublime and hallowed symbol of the productive power in Nature,--the
emblem of that great life-giving principle which the Hindu and the
Egyptian and all early nations instinctively elevated to the highest and
most cherished place in their Pantheons. Payne Knight, quoted in Mr.
Squier's work on the "Antiquities of America," ingeniously attributes
the adoption of this symbol to the fact, that the Lotus, instead
of rejecting its seeds from the vessels where they are germinated,
nourishes them in its bosom till they have become perfect plants, when,
arrayed in all the irresistible panoply of grace and beauty, they spring
forth, Minerva-like, float down the current, and take root wherever
deposited. And so it was used by nearly all the early peoples to express
the creative spirit which gives life and vegetation to matter. Lacshmi,
the beautiful Hindu goddess of abundance, corresponding to the Venus
Aphrodite of the Greeks, was called "the Lotus-born," as having
ascended from the ocean in this flower. Here, again, is the inevitable
intermingling of the eternal principles of Beauty, Love, and the
Creative Power in that pure triune medallion image which the ancients so
tenderly cherished and so exquisitely worshipped with vestal fires and
continual sacrifices of Art. Old Father Nile, reflecting in his deep,
mysterious breast the monstrous temples of Nubia and Pylae, bears
eloquent witness to the earnestness and sincerity of the old votive
homage to Isis, "the Lotus-crowned" Venus of Egypt. For the symbolic
Water-Lily, _recreated_ by human Art, blooms forever in the capitals of
Karnac and Thebes, and wherever columns were reared and lintels laid
throughout the length and breadth of the "Land of Bondage." It is the
key-note of all that architecture; and a brief examination into
the principles of this, new birth of the Lotus, of the monumental
straightening and stiffening of its graceful and easy lines, will afford
some insight into the strange processes of the human mind, when it
follows the grandest impulse of Love, and out of the material beauties
of Nature creates a work of Art.
It is well known that the religion of the old Egyptians led them to
regard this life as a mere temporary incident, an unimportant phase of
their progress toward that larger and grander state imaged to them with
mysterious sublimity in the idea of Death or Eternity. In accordance
with this belief, they expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of
transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their tombs the immortality of
calm repose. And so their houses have crumbled into dust ages ago, but
their tombs are eternal. In all the relations of Life the sentiment of
Death was present in some form or other. The hallowed mummies of their
ancestors were the most sacred mortgages of their debts, and to redeem
them speedily was a point of the highest honor. They had corpses at
their feasts to remind them how transitory were the glory and happiness
of the world, how eternal the tranquillity of Death.
Now, how was this prevailing idea expressed in their Art? They looked
around them and saw that all Organic Life was full of movement and wavy
lines; their much-loved Lotus undulated and bent playfully to the solemn
flow of the great Nile; the Ibis fluttered with continual motion; their
own bodies were full of ever-changing curves; and their whole visible
existence was unsteady, like the waves of the sea. But when the
temporary Life was changed, and "this mortal put on immortality," their
eyes and souls were filled with the utter stillness and repose of its
external aspects; its features became rigid and fixed, and were settled
to an everlasting and immutable calm; the vibrating grace of its lines
departed, and their ever-varying complexity became simplified, and
assumed the straightness and stiffness of Death. So the straight line,
the natural expression of eternal repose, in contradistinction to the
wavy line, which represents the animal movements of Life, became the
motive and spirit of their Art. The anomaly of Death in Life was present
in every development of the creative faculty, and no architectural
feature could be so slight and unimportant as not to be thoroughly
permeated with this sentiment. The tender and graceful lines of the
Lotus became sublime and monumental under the religious loyalty of
Egyptian chisels; and these lines, whether grouped or single, in the
severity of their fateful repose, in their stateliness and immobility,
wherever found, are awful with the presence of a grand serious humanity
long passed away from any other contact with living creatures. The
rendering of the human form, under this impulse of Art, produced results
in which the idea of mutability was so overwhelmed in this grandeur of
immortality, that we cry
"O melancholy eyes!
O vacant eyes! from which the soul has gone
To gaze in other lands,"
bend not upon us, living and loving mortals, that stony stare of
death,--lest we too, as smit with the basilisk, be turned into
monumental stone, and all the dear grace and movement of life be lost
forever!
"Solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm,"
all the lines of this lost Art thus recall the sentiment of endless
repose, and even the necessary curves of its mouldings are dead with
straightness. The Love which produced these lines was not the passionate
Love which we understand and feel; they were not the result of a
sensuous impulse; but the Egyptian artist seemed ever to be standing
alone in the midst of a trackless and limitless desert,--around him
earth and sky meeting with no kiss of affection, no palpitating embrace
of mutual sympathy; he felt himself encircled by a calm and pitiless
Destiny, the cold expression of a Fate from which he could not flee, and
in himself the centre and soul of it all. Oppressed thus with a vast
sense of spiritual loneliness, when he uttered the inspirations of Art,
the memories of playful palms and floating lilies and fluttering wings,
though they came warm to the Love of his heart, were attuned in the
outward expression to the deep, solemn, prevailing monotone of his
humanity. His Love for the Lotus and the Ibis, more profound than the
passion of the senses, dwelt serene in the bottom of his soul, and
thence came forth transfigured and dedicated to the very noblest uses of
Life. And this is the Art of Egypt.
But among all the old nations which have perished with their gods,
Greece appeals to our closest sympathies. She looks upon us with
the smile of childhood, free, contented, and happy, with no ascetic
self-denials to check her wild-flower growth, no stern religion to bind
the liberty of her actions. All her external aspects are in harmony with
the weakness and the strength of human nature. We recognize ourselves
in her, and find all the characteristics of our own humanity there
developed into a theism so divine, clothed with a personification so
exquisite and poetical, that the Hellenic mythology seems still to live
in our hearts, a silent and shadowy religion without ceremonies or
altars or sacrifices. The festive gods of the "Iliad" made man a deity
to himself, and his soul the dwelling-place of Ideal Beauty. In this
Ideal they lived, and moved and had their being, and came forth thence,
bronze, marble, chryselephantine, a statuesque and naked humanity,
chaste in uncomprehended sin and glorified in antique virtue. The Beauty
of this natural Life and the Love of it was the soul of the Greek Ideal;
and the nation continually cherished and cultivated and refined this
Ideal with impulses from groves of Arcadia, vales of Tempe, and flowery
slopes of Attica, from the manliness of Olympic Games and the loveliness
of Spartan Helens. They cherished and cultivated and refined it, because
here they set up their altars to known gods and worshipped attributes
which they could understand. The Ideal was their religion, and the Art
which came from it the expression of their highest aspiration.
Lines of Beauty, produced in such a soil, were not, as might at first
be supposed, tropic growths of wanton and luxurious curves, wild,
spontaneous utterances of superabundant Life. The finely-studied
perception of the Greek artist admitted no merely animal, vegetable,
instinctive, licentious renderings of what Nature was ever giving him
with a liberal hand in the whorls of shells, the veins of leaves, the
life of flames, the convolutions of serpents, the curly tresses of
woman, the lazy grace of clouds, the easy sway of tendrils, flowers, and
human motion. He was no literal interpreter of her whispered secrets.
But the Grace of his Art was a _deliberate grace_,--a grace of
thought and study. His lines were _creations_, and not _instincts_ or
_imitations_. They came from the depth of his Love, and it was his
religion so to nurture and educate his sensitiveness to Beauty and his
power to love and create it, that his works of Art should be deeds of
passionate worship and expressions of a godlike humanity. Unlike the
Egyptian's, there was nothing in _his_ creed to check the sweet excess
of Life, and no grim shadow, "feared of man," scared him in his walks,
or preached to him sermons of mortality in the stones and violets of the
wayside. Life was hallowed and dear to him for its own sake. He saw
it was lovable, and he made it the theme of his noblest poems, his
subtilest philosophies, and his highest Art. Hence the infinite joy and
endless laughter on Olympus, the day-long feasting, _the silver stir of
strings_ in the hollow shell of the exquisite Phoebus, "the soft song of
the Muse with voices sweetly replying."
I believe that all true Lines of Grace and Beauty, in their highest,
_intellectual, human_ significance, may be concentrated and expressed in
one; not a _precise_ and _exact_ line, like a formula of mathematics,
to which the neophyte can refer for deductions of Grace to suit any
premises or conditions. This, of course, is contrary to the spirit
of beautiful design; and the ingenious Hay,--who maintains that his
"composite ellipse" is capable of universal application in the arts
of ornamental composition, and that by its use any desirable lines in
mouldings or vases can be mechanically produced, especially Greek lines,
falls into the grave error of endeavoring to materialize and fix that
_animula vagula, blandula_, that coy and evasive spirit of Art, which
is its peculiar characteristic, and gives to its works inspiration,
harmony, and poetic sentiment. Ideal Beauty can be hatched from no
geometrical eggs. But the line which I refer to, as the expression of
most subtile Grace, pretends to be merely a type of that large language
of forms with which the most refined intellects of antiquity uttered
their Love, and their joyful worship of Aphrodite. This line, of course,
is Greek.
[Illustration]
The three great distinctive eras of Art, in a purely
psychological sense, have been the Egyptian, the Grecian, and the
Romanesque,--including in the latter term both Roman Art itself and all
subsequent Art, whether derived directly or indirectly from Rome, as the
Byzantine, the Moresque, the Mediaeval, and the Renaissance. Selecting
the most characteristic works to which these great eras respectively
gave birth, it is not difficult, by comparison, to ascertain the
master-spirit, or type, to which each of these three families may be
reduced. If we place these types side by side, the result will be as in
the diagram, presenting to the eye, at one view, the concentration
of three civilizations, DESTINY, LOVE, and LIFE;--Destiny, finding
utterance in the stern and inflexible simplicity of the tombs and
obelisks of Egypt; Love, expressing itself in the statuesque and
thoughtful grace of Grecian temples, statues, and urns; Life, in the
sensuous and impulsive change, evident in all the developments of Art,
since Greece became Achaia, a province of the Roman Empire. Here we
behold the perpetual youth, the immortal genius of Hellas, tempering the
solid repose of Egypt with the passion of Life. This intermediate Beauty
is the essence of the age of Pericles; and in it "the capable eye" may
discover the pose of the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, of the Jupiter
Olympius of Phidias, and the other lost wonders of ancient chisels, and,
more directly, the tender severity of Doric capitals, and the secret
grace of the shafts of the Parthenon.
You remember Pliny's account of the visit of Apelles to the great
painter Protogenes, at Rhodes;--how, not finding him at home, Apelles
inscribed a line upon a board, assuring the slave that this line would
signify to the master who had been to see him. Whatever the line was,
Protogenes, we hear, recognized in it the hand of the greatest limner of
Greece. It was the signature of that Ideal, known to the antique
world by its wider developments in the famous pictures of the Venus
Anadyomene, and Alexander with the Thunderbolt, hung in the temple of
Diana at Ephesus.
The gravity with which this apparently trifling anecdote is given us
from antiquity evidently proves that it was one of the household tales
of old Greece. It did not seem absurd in those times, when Art was
recognized as a great Unity, an elaborate system of infinite language
founded on the simplest elements of Life, and in its grandest and widest
flowings bearing ever in its bosom, like a great river, the memory
of the little weeping Naiad far up among the mountains with her
"impoverished urn." And so every great national Art, growing up
naturally out of the necessities of an earnest people, expressing the
grand motives of their Life, as that of the Greeks and the Egyptians and
the mediaeval nations of Europe, is founded on the simplest laws. So
long as these laws are obeyed in simplicity and Love, Art is good
and true; so long as it remembers the purity and earnestness of its
childhood, the strength that is ordained out of the mouth of babes is
present in all its expressions; but when it spreads itself abroad in the
fens and marshes of humanity, it has lost the purity of its aim, the
singleness and unity of its action,--it becomes stagnant, and sleeps in
the Death of Idleness.
Therefore I believe in the expressiveness of single lines as symbols of
the grandest phases of human Life. And when one studies Greek Art, the
whole motive of it seems so childlike and so simple that the impulse to
seek for that little Naiad which is the fountain and source of it all is
irresistible. Look at the line I have traced, and see if there is not a
curious humanity about it. It is impossible to produce it with a wanton
flourish of the pencil, as I have done in that wavy, licentious curve,
which Hogarth, in his quaint "Analysis of Beauty," assumes as the line
of true Grace; nor yet are its infinite motions governed by any cold
mathematical laws. In it is the earnest and deliberate labor of Love.
There are thought and tenderness in every instant of it; but this
thought is grave and almost solemn, and this tenderness is chastened and
purified by wise reserve. Measure it by time, and you will find it
no momentary delight, no voluptuous excess which comes and goes in a
breath; but there is a whole cycle of deep human feeling in it. It is
the serene joy of a nation, and not the passionate impulse of a man.
Observe, from beginning to end, its intention is to give expression by
the serpentine line to that sentiment of beautiful Life which was the
worship of the Greeks; but they did not toss it off, like a wine-cup at
a feast. They prolonged it through all the varied emotions of a lifetime
with exquisite art, making it the path of their education in childhood
and of their wider experience as men. All the impulses of humanity they
bent to a kindly parallelism with it. This is that famous principle of
Variety in Unity which St. Augustine and hosts of other philosophers
considered the true Ideal of Beauty. Start with this line from the top
upon its journeying: look at the hesitation of it, ere it launches into
action; how it cherishes its resources, and gathers up its strength!--
with a confidence in its beautiful Destiny, and yet a chaste shrinking
from the full enjoyment of it, how inevitably, but how purely, it yields
itself up to the sudden curve! It does not embrace this curve with
a sensuous sweep, nor does it, like Sappho, throw itself with quick
passion into the tide. It enters with maidenly and dignified reserve
into its new Life; and then how is this new Life spent? As you glance at
it, it seems almost ascetic, and reminds you of the rigid fatalism of
Egypt. Its grace is almost strangled, as those other serpents were in
the grasp of the child Hercules. But if you watch it attentively, you
will find it ever changing, though with subtilest refinement, ever
human, and true to the great laws of emotion. There is no straight
line here,--no Death in Life,--but the severity and composure of
intellectual meditation,--meditation, moving with serious pleasure
along the grooves of happy change,--
"As all the motions of its
Were governed by a strain
Of music, audible to it alone!"
As the eye is cheated out of its rectitude, following this grave
delight, and seems to dilate and grow dreamy in the cool shade of
imaginative cloisters and groves, the wanton joyousness of Life, with
its long waving lily-stems and the luscious pending of vines, comes with
dim recollections into the mind, but modified by a certain habitual
chastity of thought. Follow the line still farther, and you will find
it grateful to the sight, neither fatiguing with excess of monotony nor
cloying the appetite with change. And when the round hour is full and
the end comes, this end is met by a Fate, which does not clip with
the shears of Atropos and leave an aching void, but fulfils itself in
gentleness and peace. The line bends quietly and unconsciously towards
the beautiful consummation, and then dies, because its work is done.
This is the way the Greeks made that Line which represents to "the
capable eye" the true Attic civilization. And when we examine the
innumerable lines of Grecian architecture, we find that they never
for an instant lost sight of this Ideal. The fine humanity of it was
everywhere present, and mingled not only with such grand and heroic
lines as those of the sloping pediments and long-drawn entablatures
of the Parthenon and Theseion, bending them into curves so subtilely
modulated that our coarse perceptions did not perceive the variations
from the dead straight lines till the careful admeasurements of
Penrose and Cockerel and their _confrères_ of France assured us of the
fact,--not only did it make these enormous harp-strings vibrate with
deep human soul-music, but there is not an abstract line in moulding,
column, or vase, belonging to old Greece or the islands of the Aegean or
Ionia or the colonies of Italy, which does not have the same intensity
of meaning, the same statuesque Life of thought. Besides, I very much
doubt if the same line, in all its parts and proportions, is ever
repeated twice,--certainly not with any emphasis; and this is following
out the great law of our existence, which varies the emotion infinitely
with the occasion which produced it. Let us suppose, for example, that a
moulding was needed to crown a column with fitting glory and grace.
Now the capital of a column may fairly be called the throne of Ideal
expression; it is the _cour d'honneur_ of Art. The architect in
this emergency did not set himself at "the antique," and seek for
authorities, and reproduce and copy; for he desired not only an abstract
line of Beauty there, but a line which in every respect should answer
all the requirements of its peculiar position, a line which should have
its individual and essential relationships with the other lines around
it, those of shaft, architrave, frieze, and cornice, should swell its
fitting melody into the great _fugue_. And so, between the summit of the
long shaft and that square block, the abacus, on which reposes the dead
weight of the lintel of Greece, the Doric _echinus_ was fashioned,
crowning the serene Atlas-labor of the column with exquisite glory, and
uniting the upright and horizontal masses of the order with a marriage
ring, whose beauty is its perfect fitness. The profile of this moulding
may be rudely likened to the upper and middle parts of the line assumed
as the representative of the Greek Ideal. But it varied ever with the
exigency of circumstances. Over the short and solid shafts of Paestum,
it became flat and almost horizontal; they needed there an expression
of emphatic and sudden grace; they meet the _abacus_ with a moulding of
passionate energy, in which the soft undulations of Beauty are nearly
lost in a masculine earnestness of purpose. On the other hand, the more
slender and feminine columns of the Parthenon glide into the _echinus_
with gentleness and sweetness, crown themselves with a diadem of
chastity, as if it grew there by Fate, preordained from the base of the
shaft, like a flower from the root. It was created as with "the Dorian
mood of soft recorders." Between these two extremes there is an
infinity of change, everywhere modified and governed by "the study of
imagination."
The same characteristics of nervous grace and severe intellectual
restraint are found wherever the true Greek artist put his hand and his
heart to work. Every moulding bears the impress of utter refinement, and
modulates the light which falls upon it with exquisite and harmonious
gradations of shade. The sun, as it touches it, makes visible music
there, as if it were the harp of Memnon,--now giving us a shadow-line
sharp, strict, and defined, now drawing along a beam of quick and
dazzling light, and now dying away softly and insensibly into cool shade
again. All the phenomena of reflected lights, half lights, and broken
lights are brought in and attuned to the great daedal melody of
the edifice. The antiquities of Attica afford nothing frivolous or
capricious or merely fanciful, no playful extravagances or wanton
meanderings of line; but ever loyal to the purity of a high Ideal, they
present to us, even from their ruins, a wonderful and very evident Unity
of expression, pervading and governing every possible mood and manner of
thought. No phase of Art that ever existed gives us a line so very human
and simple in itself as this Greek type, and so pliable to all the uses
of monumental language. If this type were a mere mathematical type, its
applicability to the expression of human emotions would be limited to a
formalism absolutely fatal to the freedom of thought in Art. But because
it has its birth in intense Love, in refined appreciation of all the
movements of Life and all the utterances of Creation, because it is the
humanized essence of these motions and developments, it becomes thus an
inestimable Unity, containing within itself the germs of a new world of
ever new delight.
When this type in Greek Art was brought to bear on the interpretation of
natural forms into architectural language, we shall curiously discover
that the creative pride of the artist and his reverence for the
integrity of his Ideal were so great, that he not only subjected these
forms to a rigid subservience to the abstract line till Nature was
nearly lost in Art, but the immediate adoption of these forms under any
circumstances was limited to some three or four of the most ordinary
vegetable productions of Greece and to one sea-shell. This wise reserve
and self-restraint, among the boundless riches of a delicious climate
and a soil teeming with fertility, present to us the best proof of the
fastidious purity of artistic intentions. Nature poured out at the feet
of the Greek artist a most plenteous offering, and the lap of Flora
overflowed for him with tempting garlands of Beauty; but he did not
gather these up with any greedy and indiscriminate hand, he did not
intoxicate himself at the harvest of the vineyard. Full of the divinity
of high purpose, and intent upon the nobler aim of creating a pure work
of Art, he considered serenely what were his needs for decoration, took
lovingly a few of the most ordinary forms, and, studying the creative
sentiment of them, breathed a new and immortal life into them, and
tenderly and hesitatingly applied them to the work of illustrating his
grand Ideal. These leaves and flowers were selected not for their own
sake, though he felt them to be beautiful, but for the decorative motive
they suggested, the humanity there was in them, and the harmony they
had with the emergencies of his design. The design was not bent to
accommodate them, but they were translated and lifted up into the sphere
of Art.
A drawing of the Ionic capitals of the temple of Minerva Polias in the
Erechtheum is accessible to nearly everybody. It is well to turn to
it and see what use the Greeks, under such impulses, made of the Wild
Honeysuckle and of Sea-Shells. Perhaps this capital affords one of the
most instructive epitomes of Greek Art, inasmuch as in its composition
use is made of so much that Nature gave, and those gifts are so tenderly
modelled and wrought into such exquisite harmony and eloquent repose.
Examine the volute: this is the nearest approach to a mathematical
result that can be found in Grecian architecture; yet this very
approximation is one of the greatest triumphs of Art. No geometrical
rule has been discovered which can exactly produce the spirals of the
Erechtheum, nor can they be found in shells. In avoiding the exuberance
of the latter and the rigid formalism of the former, a work of human
thought and Love has been evolved. Follow one of these volutes with your
eye from its centre outwards, taking all its congeries of lines into
companionship; you find your sympathies at once strangely engaged. There
is an intoxication in the gradual and melodious expansion of these
curves. They seem to be full of destiny, bearing you along, as upon an
inevitable tide, towards some larger sphere of action. Ere you have
grown weary with the monotony of the spiral, you find that the system
of lines which compose it gradually leave their obedience to the
centrifugal forces of the volute, and, assuming new relationships of
parts, sweep gracefully across the summit of the shaft, and become
presently entangled in the reversed motion of the other volute, at whose
centre Ariadne seems to stand, gathering together all the clues of this
labyrinth of Beauty. This may seem fanciful to one who regards these
things as matters of formalism. But inasmuch as, to the studious eye of
affection, they suggest human action and human sympathies, this is a
proof that they had their birth in some corresponding affection. It is
the inanimate body of Geometry made spiritual and living by the Love of
the human heart. And when a later generation reduced the Ionic volutes
to rule, and endeavored to inscribe them with the gyrations of the
compass, they have no further interest for us, save as a mathematical
problem with an unknown value equal to a mysterious symbol _x_, in which
the soul takes no comfort. But true Art, using the volute, inevitably
makes it eloquent with an intensity of meaning, a delicacy of
expression, which awaken certain very inward and very poetic sentiments,
akin to those from which it was evolved in the process of creation. When
we reasonably regard the printed words of an author, we not only behold
an ingenious collection of alphabetical symbols, but are placed by them
in direct contact with the mind which brought them together, and, for
the moment, our train of thought so entirely coincides with that of the
writer, that, though perhaps he died centuries ago, he may be said to
live again in us. This great work of architectural Art has the same
immortal life; and though it may not so often find a heart capable of
discerning the sentiment and intention of it under the outward lines,
yet that heart, when found, is touched very deeply and very tenderly. We
imbibe the creative impulse of the artist, and the beautiful thing has a
new life in our affections. Studying it, we become artists and poets ere
we are aware. The alphabet becomes a living soul.
Under the volutes of this capital, and belting the top of the shaft, is
a broad band of ornamentation, so happy and effectual in its uses, and
so pure and perfect in its details, that a careful examination of it
will, perhaps, afford us some knowledge of that spiritual essence in the
antique Ideal out of which arose the silent and motionless Beauty of
Greek marbles.
Here are brought together the _sentiments_ of certain vegetable
productions of Greece, but sentiments so entirely subordinated to the
flexure of the abstract line, that their natural significance is almost
lost in a new and more human meaning. Here is the Honeysuckle, the
wildest, the most elastic and undulating of plants, under the severe
discipline of order and artistic symmetry, assuming a strict and chaste
propriety, a formal elegance, which render it at once monumental and
dignified. The harmonious succession and repetition of parts, the
graceful contrasts of curves and the strict poise and balance of them,
their unity in variety, their entire subjection to aesthetic laws, their
serious and emphatic earnestness of purpose,--these qualities combine
in the creation of one of the purest works of Art ever conceived by the
human mind. It is called the Ionic _Anthemion_, and suggests in its
composition all the creative powers of Greece. Its value is not alone in
the sensuous gratification of the eye, as with the Arabesque tangles of
the Alhambra, but it is more especially in its complete intellectual
expression, the evidence there is in it of thoughtfulness and judgment
and deliberate care. The inventor studied not alone the plant, but his
own spiritual relationships with it; and ere he made his interpretation,
he considered how, in mythological traditions, each flower once bore
a human shape, and how Daphne and Syrinx, Narcissus and Philemon, and
those other idyllic beings, were eased of the stress of human emotions
by becoming Laurels and Reeds and Daffodils and sturdy Oaks, and how
human nature was thus diffused through all created things and was
epigrammatically expressed in them.
"And he, with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meanings in the forms of Nature."
Like Faustus, he was permitted to look into her deep bosom, as into the
bosom of a friend,--to find his brothers in the still wood, in the air,
and in the water,--to see himself and the mysterious wonders of his own
breast in the movements of the elements. And so he took Nature as a
figurative exponent of humanity, and extracted the symbolic truths from
her productions, and used them nobly in his Art.
Garbett, an English aesthetical writer, assures us that the _Anthemion_
bears not the slightest resemblance to the Honeysuckle or any other
plant, "being no representation of anything in Nature, but simply the
necessary result of the complete and systematic attempt to combine unity
and variety by the principle of _gradation_." But here he speaks like a
geometer, and not like an artist. He seeks rather for the resemblance of
form than the resemblance of spirit, and, failing to realize the object
of his search, he endeavors to find a cause for this exquisite effect
in pure reason. With equal perversity, Poe endeavored to persuade the
public that his "Raven" was the result of mere aesthetical deductions!
And here the old burden of our song must once again be heard: If we
would know the golden secret of the Greek Ideal, we must ourselves
first learn how to _love_ with the wisdom and chastity of old Hellenic
passion. We must sacrifice Taste and Fancy and Prejudice, whose specious
superficialities are embodied in the errors of modern Art,--we must
sacrifice these at the shrine of the true Aphrodite; else the modern
Procrustes will continue to stretch and torture Greek Lines on
geometrical beds, and the aesthetic Pharisees around us will still
crucify the Greek Ideal.
[To be continued.]