country without aristocracy; which a little reminds one of the pity
of the Swiss mountaineers when shown a handsome Englishman: “What
a pity he has no goitre!” The future historian will regard the
detachment of the Puritans without aristocracy the supreme fortune
of the colony; as great a gain to mankind as the opening of this
continent.
There is a little formula, couched in pure Saxon, which you may hear
in the corners of streets and in the yard of the dame’s school, from
very little republicans: “I’m as good as you be,” which contains
the essence of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights and of the American
Declaration of Independence. And this was at the bottom of Plymouth
Rock and of Boston Stone; and this could be heard (by an acute ear)
in the Petitions to the King, and the platforms of churches, and was
said and sung in every tone of the psalmody of the Puritans; in every
note of Old Hundred and Hallelujah and Short Particular Metre.
What is very conspicuous is the saucy independence which shines in
all their eyes. They could say to themselves, Well, at least this
yoke of man, of bishops, of courtiers, of dukes, is off my neck. We
are a little too close to wolf and famine than that anybody should
give himself airs here in the swamp.
London is a long way off, with beadles and pursuivants and
horse-guards. Here in the clam-banks and the beech and chestnut
forest, I shall take leave to breathe and think freely. If you do
not like it, if you molest me, I can cross the brook and plant a new
state out of reach of anything but squirrels and wild pigeons.
Bonaparte sighed for his republicans of 1789. The soul of a political
party is by no means usually the officers and pets of the party, who
wear the honors and fill the high seats and spend the salaries. No,
but the theorists and extremists, the men who are never contented
and never to be contented with the work actually accomplished, but
who from conscience are engaged to what that party professes,—these
men will work and watch and rally and never tire in carrying their
point. The theology and the instinct of freedom that grew here in
the dark in serious men furnished a certain rancor which consumed
all opposition, fed the party and carried it, over every rampart and
obstacle, to victory.
Boston never wanted a good principle of rebellion in it, from
the planting until now; there is always a minority unconvinced,
always a heresiarch, whom the governor and deputies labor with but
cannot silence. Some new light, some new doctrinaire who makes an
unnecessary ado to establish his dogma; some Wheelwright or defender
of Wheelwright; some protester against the cruelty of the magistrates
to the Quakers; some tender minister hospitable to Whitefield against
the counsel of all the ministers; some John Adams and Josiah Quincy
and Governor Andrew to undertake and carry the defence of patriots
in the courts against the uproar of all the province; some defender
of the slave against the politician and the merchant; some champion
of first principles of humanity against the rich and luxurious; some
adversary of the death penalty; some pleader for peace; some noble
protestant, who will not stoop to infamy when all are gone mad, but
will stand for liberty and justice, if alone, until all come back to
him.
* * * * *
I confess I do not find in our people, with all their education, a
fair share of originality of thought;—not any remarkable book of
wisdom; not any broad generalization, any equal power of imagination.
No Novum Organon; no Mécanique Céleste; no Principia; no Paradise
Lost; no Hamlet; no Wealth of Nations; no National Anthem; have we
yet contributed.
Nature is a frugal mother and never gives without measure. When she
has work to do she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped
for that. In Massachusetts she did not want epic poems and dramas
yet, but first, planters of towns, fellers of the forest, builders of
mills and forges, builders of roads, and farmers to till and harvest
corn for the world. Corn, yes, but honest corn; corn with thanks to
the Giver of corn; and the best thanks, namely, obedience to his law;
this was the office imposed on our Founders and people; liberty,
clean and wise. It was to be built on Religion, the Emancipator;
Religion which teaches equality of all men in view of the spirit
which created man.
The seed of prosperity was planted. The people did not gather where
they had not sown. They did not try to unlock the treasure of the
world except by honest keys of labor and skill. They knew, as God
knew, that command of nature comes by obedience to nature; that
reward comes by faithful service; that the most noble motto was that
of the Prince of Wales,—“I serve,”—and that he is greatest who serves
best. There was no secret of labor which they disdained.
They accepted the divine ordination that man is for use; that
intelligent being exists to the utmost use; and that his ruin is
to live for pleasure and for show. And when within our memory some
flippant senator wished to taunt the people of this country by
calling them “the mudsills of society,” he paid them ignorantly a
true praise; for good men are as the green plain of the earth is, as
the rocks, and the beds of rivers are, the foundation and flooring
and sills of the State.
The power of labor which belongs to the English race fell here into
a climate which befriended it, and into a maritime country made for
trade, where was no rival and no envious lawgiver. The sailor and the
merchant made the law to suit themselves, so that there was never,
I suppose, a more rapid expansion in population, wealth and all the
elements of power, and in the citizens, consciousness of power and
sustained assertion of it, than was exhibited here.
Moral values become also money values. When men saw that these
people, besides their industry and thrift, had a heart and soul and
would stand by each other at all hazards, they desired to come and
live here. A house in Boston was worth as much again as a house just
as good in a town of timorous people, because here the neighbors
would defend each other against bad governors and against troops;
quite naturally house-rents rose in Boston.
Besides, youth and health like a stirring town, above a torpid place
where nothing is doing. In Boston they were sure to see something
going forward before the year was out. For here was the moving
principle itself, the _primum mobile_, a living mind agitating the
mass and always afflicting the conservative class with some odious
novelty or other; a new religious sect, a political point, a point of
honor, a reform in education, a philanthropy.
From Roger Williams and Eliot and Robinson and the Quaker women who
for a testimony walked naked into the streets, and as the record
tells us “were arrested and publicly whipped,—the baggages that
they were;” from Wheelwright the Antinomian and Ann Hutchinson and
Whitefield and Mother Ann the first Shaker, down to Abner Kneeland
and Father Lamson and William Garrison, there never was wanting some
thorn of dissent and innovation and heresy to prick the sides of
conservatism.
With all their love of his person, they took immense pleasure in
turning out the governor and deputy and assistants, and contravening
the counsel of the clergy; as they had come so far for the sweet
satisfaction of resisting the Bishops and the King.
* * * * *
The Massachusetts colony grew and filled its own borders with a
denser population than any other American State (Kossuth called it
the City State), all the while sending out colonies to every part of
New England; then South and West, until it has infused all the Union
with its blood.
We are willing to see our sons emigrate, as to see our hives swarm.
That is what they were made to do, and what the land wants and
invites. The towns or countries in which the man lives and dies where
he was born, and his son and son’s son live and die where he did, are
of no great account.
I know that this history contains many black lines of cruel
injustice; murder, persecution, and execution of women for witchcraft.
I am afraid there are anecdotes of poverty and disease in Broad
Street that match the dismal statistics of New York and London. No
doubt all manner of vices can be found in this, as in every city;
infinite meanness, scarlet crime. Granted. But there is yet in
every city a certain permanent tone; a tendency to be in the right
or in the wrong; audacity or slowness; labor or luxury; giving or
parsimony; which side is it on? And I hold that a community, as a
man, is entitled to be judged by his best.
We are often praised for what is least ours. Boston too is sometimes
pushed into a theatrical attitude of virtue, to which she is not
entitled and which she cannot keep. But the genius of Boston is seen
in her real independence, productive power and northern acuteness of
mind,—which is in nature hostile to oppression. It is a good city
as cities go; Nature is good. The climate is electric, good for wit
and good for character. What public souls have lived here, what
social benefactors, what eloquent preachers, skilful workmen, stout
captains, wise merchants; what fine artists, what gifted conversers,
what mathematicians, what lawyers, what wits; and where is the middle
class so able, virtuous and instructed?
And thus our little city thrives and enlarges, striking deep roots,
and sending out boughs and buds, and propagating itself like a banyan
over the continent. Greater cities there are that sprung from it,
full of its blood and names and traditions. It is very willing to
be outnumbered and outgrown, so long as they carry forward its life
of civil and religious freedom, of education, of social order, and
of loyalty to law. It is very willing to be outrun in numbers, and
in wealth; but it is very jealous of any superiority in these, its
natural instinct and privilege. You cannot conquer it by numbers,
or by square miles, or by counted millions of wealth. For it owes
its existence and its power to principles not of yesterday, and
the deeper principle will always prevail over whatever material
accumulations.
As long as she cleaves to her liberty, her education and to her
spiritual faith as the foundation of these, she will teach the
teachers and rule the rulers of America. Her mechanics, her farmers
will toil better; she will repair mischief; she will furnish what is
wanted in the hour of need; her sailors will man the Constitution;
her mechanics repair the broken rail; her troops will be the first in
the field to vindicate the majesty of a free nation, and remain last
on the field to secure it. Her genius will write the laws and her
historians record the fate of nations.
* * * * *
In an age of trade and material prosperity, we have stood a little
stupefied by the elevation of our ancestors. We praised the Puritans
because we did not find in ourselves the spirit to do the like.
We praised with a certain adulation the invariable valor of the
old war-gods and war-councillors of the Revolution. Washington
has seemed an exceptional virtue. This praise was a concession of
unworthiness in those who had so much to say of it. The heroes only
shared this power of a sentiment, which, if it now breathes into us,
will make it easy to us to understand them, and we shall not longer
flatter them. Let us shame the fathers, by superior virtue in the
sons.
It is almost a proverb that a great man has not a great son. Bacon,
Newton and Washington were childless. But, in Boston, Nature is
more indulgent, and has given good sons to good sires, or at least
continued merit in the same blood. The elder President Adams has to
divide voices of fame with the younger President Adams. The elder
Otis could hardly excel the popular eloquence of the younger Otis;
and the Quincy of the Revolution seems compensated for the shortness
of his bright career in the son who so long lingers among the last of
those bright clouds,
“That on the steady breeze of honor sail
In long succession calm and beautiful.”
Here stands to-day as of yore our little city of the rocks; here
let it stand forever, on the man-bearing granite of the North! Let
her stand fast by herself! She has grown great. She is filled with
strangers, but she can only prosper by adhering to her faith. Let
every child that is born of her and every child of her adoption see
to it to keep the name of Boston as clean as the sun; and in distant
ages her motto shall be the prayer of millions on all the hills
that gird the town, “As with our Fathers, so God be with us!” SICUT
PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIS!
FOOTNOTES:
[2]
“Come dal fuoco il caldo, esser diviso,
Non puo’l bel dall’ eterno.”
MICHEL ANGELO.
[As from fire heat cannot be separated,—neither can beauty from the
eternal.]
MICHAEL ANGELO.
Never did sculptor’s dream unfold
A form which marble doth not hold
In its white block; yet it therein shall find
Only the hand secure and bold
Which still obeys the mind.
MICHAEL ANGELO’S _Sonnets_.
Non ha l’ ottimo artista alcun concetto,
Ch’un marmo solo in sè non circoscriva
Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva
La man che obbedisce all’ intelletto.
M. ANGELO, _Sonnetto primo_.
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
MICHAEL ANGELO.[3]
Few lives of eminent men are harmonious; few that furnish, in all
the facts, an image corresponding with their fame. But all things
recorded of Michael Angelo Buonarotti agree together. He lived one
life; he pursued one career. He accomplished extraordinary works;
he uttered extraordinary words; and in this greatness was so little
eccentricity, so true was he to the laws of the human mind, that his
character and his works, like Sir Isaac Newton’s, seem rather a part
of nature than arbitrary productions of the human will. Especially we
venerate his moral fame. Whilst his name belongs to the highest class
of genius, his life contains in it no injurious influence. Every
line in his biography might be read to the human race with wholesome
effect. The means, the materials of his activity, were coarse enough
to be appreciated, being addressed for the most part to the eye; the
results, sublime and all innocent. A purity severe and even terrible
goes out from the lofty productions of his pencil and his chisel, and
again from the more perfect sculpture of his own life, which heals
and exalts. “He nothing common did, or mean,” and dying at the end
of near ninety years, had not yet become old, but was engaged in
executing his grand conceptions in the ineffaceable architecture of
St. Peter’s.
Above all men whose history we know, Michael Angelo presents us with
the perfect image of the artist. He is an eminent master in the four
fine arts, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Poetry. In three of
them by visible means, and in poetry by words, he strove to express
the Idea of Beauty. This idea possessed him and determined all his
activity. Beauty in the largest sense, beauty inward and outward,
comprehending grandeur as a part, and reaching to goodness as its
soul,—this to receive and this to impart, was his genius.
It is a happiness to find, amid the falsehood and griefs of the
human race, a soul at intervals born to behold and create only
beauty. So shall not the indescribable charm of the natural world,
the great spectacle of morn and evening which shut and open the most
disastrous day, want observers. The ancient Greeks called the world
Κόσμος, _Beauty_; a name which, in our artificial state of society,
sounds fanciful and impertinent. Yet, in proportion as man rises
above the servitude to wealth and a pursuit of mean pleasures, he
perceives that what is most real is most beautiful, and that, by the
contemplation of such objects, he is taught and exalted. This truth,
that perfect beauty and perfect goodness are one, was made known to
Michael Angelo; and we shall endeavor by sketches from his life to
show the direction and limitations of his search after this element.
In considering a life dedicated to the study of Beauty, it is
natural to inquire, what is Beauty? Can this charming element be so
abstracted by the human mind, as to become a distinct and permanent
object? Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate
aim of the human being. It does not lie within the limits of the
understanding. “The nature of the beautiful,”—we gladly borrow the
language of Moritz, a German critic,—“consists herein, that because
the understanding in the presence of the beautiful cannot ask, ‘Why
is it beautiful?’ for that reason is it so. There is no standard
whereby the understanding can determine whether objects are beautiful
or otherwise. What other standard of the beautiful exists, than the
entire circuit of all harmonious proportions of the great system of
nature? All particular beauties scattered up and down in nature are
only so far beautiful, as they suggest more or less in themselves
this entire circuit of harmonious proportions.” This great Whole, the
understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt. It may be produced.
But it cannot be defined.
The Italian artists sanction this view of beauty by describing it
as _il più nell’ uno_, “the many in one,” or multitude in unity,
intimating that what is truly beautiful seems related to all nature.
A beautiful person has a kind of universality, and appears to have
truer conformity to all pleasing objects in external nature than
another. Every great work of art seems to take up into itself the
excellencies of all works, and to present, as it were, a miniature of
nature.
In relation to this element of Beauty, the minds of men divide
themselves into two classes. In the first place, all men have an
organization corresponding more or less to the entire system of
nature, and therefore a power of deriving pleasure from Beauty. This
is Taste. In the second place, certain minds, more closely harmonized
with nature, possess the power of abstracting Beauty from things,
and reproducing it in new forms, on any object to which accident may
determine their activity; as stone, canvas, song, history. This is
Art.
Since Beauty is thus an abstraction of the harmony and proportion
that reigns in all nature, it is therefore studied in nature, and
not in what does not exist. Hence the celebrated French maxim of
Rhetoric, _Rien de beau que le vrai_; “Nothing is beautiful but
what is true.” It has a much wider application than to Rhetoric; as
wide, namely, as the terms of the proposition admit. In art, Michael
Angelo is himself but a document or verification of this maxim. He
labored to express the beautiful, in the entire conviction that it
was only to be attained unto by knowledge of the true. The common eye
is satisfied with the surface on which it rests. The wise eye knows
that it is surface, and, if beautiful, only the result of interior
harmonies, which, to him who knows them, compose the image of higher
beauty. Moreover, he knew well that only by an understanding of
the internal mechanism can the outside be faithfully delineated.
The walls of houses are transparent to the architect. The symptoms
disclose the constitution to the physician; and to the artist it
belongs by a better knowledge of anatomy, and, within anatomy, of
life and thought, to acquire the power of true drawing. “The human
form,” says Goethe, “cannot be comprehended through seeing its
surface. It must be stripped of the muscles, its parts separated, its
joints observed, its divisions marked, its action and counter action
learned; the hidden, the reposing, the foundation of the apparent,
must be searched, if one would really see and imitate what moves
as a beautiful inseparable whole in living waves before the eye.”
Michael Angelo dedicated himself, from his childhood to his death,
to a toilsome observation of nature. The first anecdote recorded of
him shows him to be already on the right road. Granacci, a painter’s
apprentice, having lent him, when a boy, a print of St. Antony beaten
by devils, together with some colors and pencils, he went to the
fish-market to observe the form and color of fins and of the eyes of
fish. Cardinal Farnese one day found him, when an old man, walking
alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him
solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, “I go yet to school
that I may continue to learn.” And one of the last drawings in his
portfolio is a sublime hint of his own feeling; for it is a sketch of
an old man with a long beard, in a go-cart, with an hour-glass before
him; and the motto, _Ancora imparo_, “I still learn.”
In this spirit he devoted himself to the study of anatomy for twelve
years; we ought to say rather, as long as he lived. The depth of his
knowledge in anatomy has no parallel among the artists of modern
times. Most of his designs, his contemporaries inform us, were made
with a pen, and in the style of an engraving on copper or wood; a
manner more expressive but not admitting of correction. When Michael
Angelo would begin a statue, he made first on paper the _skeleton_;
afterwards, upon another paper, the same figure clothed with muscles.
The studies of the statue of Christ in the Church of Minerva at Rome,
made in this manner, were long preserved.
Those who have never given attention to the arts of design, are
surprised that the artist should find so much to study in a fabric of
such limited parts and dimensions as the human body. But reflection
discloses evermore a closer analogy between the finite form and
the infinite inhabitant. Man is the highest, and indeed the only
proper object of plastic art. There needs no better proof of our
instinctive feeling of the immense expression of which the human
figure is capable, than the uniform tendency which the religion of
every country has betrayed towards Anthropomorphism, or attributing
to the Deity the human form. And behold the effect of this familiar
object every day! No acquaintance with the secrets of its mechanism,
no degrading views of human nature, not the most swinish compost of
mud and blood that was ever misnamed philosophy, can avail to hinder
us from doing involuntary reverence to any exhibition of majesty or
surpassing beauty in human clay.
Our knowledge of its highest expression we owe to the Fine Arts. Not
easily in this age will any man acquire by himself such perceptions
of the dignity or grace of the human frame, as the student of
art owes to the remains of Phidias, to the Apollo, the Jove, the
paintings and statues of Michael Angelo, and the works of Canova.
There are now in Italy, both on canvas and in marble, forms and faces
which the imagination is enriched by contemplating. Goethe says that
he is but half himself who has never seen the Juno in the Rondanini
palace at Rome. Seeing these works true to human nature and yet
superhuman, “we feel that we are greater than we know.” Seeing these
works, we appreciate the taste which led Michael Angelo, against the
taste and against the admonition of his patrons, to cover the walls
of churches with unclothed figures, “improper,” says his biographer,
“for the place, but proper for the exhibition of all the pomp of his
profound knowledge.”
The love of beauty which never passes beyond outline and color, was
too slight an object to occupy the powers of his genius. There is
a closer relation than is commonly thought between the fine arts
and the useful arts; and it is an essential fact in the history of
Michael Angelo, that his love of beauty is made solid and perfect
by his deep understanding of the mechanic arts. Architecture is
the bond that unites the elegant and the economical arts, and his
skill in this is a pledge of his capacity in both kinds. His Titanic
handwriting in marble and travertine is to be found in every part of
Rome and Florence; and even at Venice, on defective evidence, he is
said to have given the plan of the bridge of the Rialto. Nor was his
a skill in ornament, or confined to the outline and designs of towers
and façades, but a thorough acquaintance with all the secrets of the
art, with all the details of economy and strength.