_Kalon._ Welcome, my friends:--this day above all others; to-day is
the first day of spring. May it be the herald of a bountiful
year,--not alone in harvests of seeds. Great impulses are moving
through man; swift as the steam-shot shuttle, weaving some mighty
pattern, goes the new birth of mind. As yet, hidden from eyes is the
design: whether it be poetry, or painting, or music, or architecture,
or whether it be a divine harmony of all, no manner of mind can tell;
but that it is mighty, all manners of minds, moved to involuntary
utterance, affirm. The intellect has at last again got to work upon
thought: too long fascinated by matter and prisoned to motive
geometry, genius--wisdom seem once more to have become human, to have
put on man, and to speak with divine simplicity. Kosmon, Sophon,
again welcome! your journey is well-timed; Christian, my young
friend, of whom I have often written to you, this morning tells me by
letter that to-day he will pay me his long-promised visit. You, I
know, must rejoice to meet him: this interchange of knowledge cannot
fail to improve us, both by knocking down and building up: what is
true we shall hold in common; what is false not less in common
detest. The debateable ground, if at last equally debateable as it
was at first, is yet ploughed; and some after-comer may sow it with
seed, and reap therefrom a plentiful harvest.
_Sophon._ Kalon, you speak wisely. Truth hath many sides like a
diamond with innumerable facets, each one alike brilliant and
piercing. Your information respecting your friend Christian has not a
little interested me, and made me desirous of knowing him.
_Kosmon._ And I, no less than Sophon, am delighted to hear that we
shall both see and taste your friend.
_Sophon._ Kalon, by what you just now said, you would seem to think a
dearth of original thought in the world, at any time, was an evil:
perhaps it is not so; nay, perhaps, it is a good! Is not an
interregnum of genius necessary somewhere? A great genius, sun-like,
compels lesser suns to gravitate with and to him; and this is
subversive of originality. Age is as visible in thought as it is in
man. Death is indispensably requisite for a _new_ life. Genius is
like a tree, sheltering and affording support to numberless creepers
and climbers, which latter die and live many times before their
protecting tree does; flourishing even whilst that decays, and thus,
lending to it a greenness not its own; but no new life can come out
of that expiring tree; it must die: and it is not until it is dead,
and fallen, and _rotted into compost_, that another tree can grow
there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase
and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with
a greenness all its own. This on one side. On another; genius is
essentially imitative, or rather, as I just now said, gravitative; it
gravitates towards that point peculiarly important at the moment of
its existence; as air, more rarified in some places than in others,
causes the winds to rush towards _them_ as toward a centre: so that
if poetry, painting, or music slumbers, oratory may ravish the world,
or chemistry, or steam-power may seduce and rule, or the sciences sit
enthroned. Thus, nature ever compensates one art with another; her
balance alone is the always just one; for, like her course of the
seasons, she grows, ripens, and lies fallow, only that stronger,
larger and better food may be reared.
_Kalon._ By your speaking of chemistry, and the mechanical arts and
sciences, as periodically ruling the world along with poetry,
painting, and music,--am I to understand that you deem them powers
intellectually equal, and to require of their respective professors
as mighty, original, and _human_ a genius for their successful
practice?
_Kosmon._ Human genius! why not? Are they not equally human?--nay,
are they not--especially steam-power, chemistry and the electric
telegraph--more--eminently more--useful to man, more radically
civilizers, than music, poetry, painting, sculpture, or architecture?
_Kalon._ Stay, Kosmon! whither do you hurry? Between chemistry and
the mechanical arts and sciences, and between poetry, painting, and
music, there exists the whole totality of genius--of genius as
distinguished from talent and industry. To be useful alone is not to
be great: _plus_ only is _plus_, and the sum is _minus_ something and
_plus_ in nothing if the most unimaginable particle only be absent.
The fine arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture,
as thought, or idea, Athene-like, are complete, finished, revelations
of wisdom at once. Not so the mechanical arts and sciences: they are
arts of growth; they are shaped and formed gradually, (and that, more
by a blind sort of guessing than by intuition,) and take many men's
lives to win even to one true principle. On all sides they are the
exact opposites of each other; for, in the former, the principles
from the first are mature, and only the manipulation immature; in the
latter, it is the principles that are almost always immature, and the
manipulation as constantly mature. The fine arts are always grounded
upon truth; the mechanical arts and sciences almost always upon
hypothesis; the first are unconfined, infinite, immaterial,
impossible of reduction into formulas, or of conversion into
machines; the last are limited, finite, material, can be uttered
through formulas, worked by arithmetic, tabulated and seen in
machines.
_Sophon._ Kosmon, you see that Kalon, true to his nature, prefers the
beautiful and good, to the good without the beautiful; and you, who
love nature, and regard all that she, and what man from her, can
produce, with equal delight,--true to your's,--cannot perceive
wherefore he limits genius to the fine arts. Let me show you why
Kalon's ideas are truer than yours. You say that chemistry,
steam-power, and the electric telegraph, are more radically
civilizers than poetry, painting, or music: but bethink you: what
emotions beyond the common and selfish ones of wonder and fear do the
mechanical arts or sciences excite, or communicate? what pity, or
love, or other holy and unselfish desires and aspirations, do they
elicit? Inert of themselves in all teachable things, they are the
agents only whereby teachable things,--the charities, sympathies and
love,--may be more swiftly and more certainly conveyed and diffused:
and beyond diffusing media the mechanical arts or sciences cannot
get; for they are merely simple facts; nothing more: they cannot
induct; for they, in or of themselves, have no inductive powers, and
their office is confined to that of carrying and spreading abroad the
powers which do induct; which powers make a full, complete, and
visible existence only in the fine arts. In FACT and THOUGHT we have
the whole question of superiority decided. Fact is merely physical
record: Thought is the application of that record to something
_human_. Without application, the fact is only fact, and nothing
more; the application, thought, then, certainly must be superior to
the record, fact. Also in thought man gets the clearest glimpse he
will ever have of soul, and sees the incorporeal make the nearest
approach to the corporeal that it is possible for it to do here upon
earth. And hence, these noble acts of wisdom are--far--far above the
mechanical arts and sciences, and are properly called fine arts,
because their high and peculiar office is to refine.
_Kosmon._ But, certainly thought is as much exercised in deducting
from physical facts the sciences and mechanical arts as ever it is in
poetry, painting, or music. The act of inventing print, or of
applying steam, is quite as soul-like as the inventing of a picture,
poem, or statue.
_Kalon._ Quite. The chemist, poet, engineer, or painter, alike,
think. But the things upon which they exercise their several
faculties are very widely unlike each other; the chemist or engineer
cogitates only the physical; the poet or painter joins to the
physical the human, and investigates soul--scans the world in man
added to the world without him--takes in universal creation, its
sights, sounds, aspects, and ideas. Sophon says that the fine arts
are thoughts; but I think I know a more comprehensive word; for they
are something more than thoughts; they are things also; that word is
NATURE--Nature fully--thorough nature--the world of creation. All
that is _in_ man, his mysteries of soul, his thoughts and
emotions--deep, wise, holy, loving, touching, and fearful,--or in the
world, beautiful, vast, ponderous, gloomy, and awful, moved with
rhythmic harmonious utterance--_that_ is Poetry. All that is _of_
man--his triumphs, glory, power, and passions; or of the world--its
sunshine and clouds, its plains, hills or valleys, its wind-swept
mountains and snowy Alps, river and ocean--silent, lonely, severe,
and sublime--mocked with living colours, hue and tone,--_that_ is
Painting. Man--heroic man, his acts, emotions, loves,--aspirative,
tender, deep, and calm,--intensified, purified, colourless,--exhibited
peculiarly and directly through his own form;_that_ is sculpture.
All the voices of nature--of man--his bursts of rage, pity, and
fear--his cries of joy--his sighs of love; of the winds and the
waters--tumultuous, hurrying, surging, tremulous, or gently
falling--married to melodious numbers;_that_ is music. And, the music
of proportions--of nature and man, and the harmony and opposition of
light and shadow, set forth in the ponderous; _that_ is Architecture.
_Christian._ [_as he enters_] Forbear, Kalon! These I know for your
dear fiends, Kosmon and Sophon. The moment of discoursing with them
has at last arrived: May I profit by it! Kalon, fearful of checking
your current of thought, I stood without, and heard that which you
said: and, though I agree with you in all your definitions of poetry,
painting, sculpture, music, and architecture; yet certainly all
things in or of man, or the world, are not, however equally
beautiful, equally worthy of being used by the artist. Fine art
absolutely rejects all impurities of form; not less absolutely does
it reject all impurities of passion and expression. Everything
throughout a poem, picture, or statue, or in music, may be sensuously
beautiful; but nothing must be sensually so. Sins are only paid for
in virtues; thus, every sin found is a virtue lost--lost--not only to
the artist, but a cause of loss to others--to all who look upon what
he does. He should deem his art a sacred treasure, intrusted to him
for the common good; and over it he should build, of the most
precious materials, in the simplest, chastest, and truest
proportions, a temple fit for universal worship: instead of which, it
is too often the case that he raises above it an edifice of clay;
which, as mortal as his life, falls, burying both it and himself
under a heap of dirt. To preserve him from this corruption of his
art, let him erect for his guidance a standard awfully high above
himself. Let him think of Christ; and what he would not show to as
pure a nature as His, let him never be seduced to work on, or expose
to the world.
_Kosmon._ Oh, Kalon, whither do we go! Greek art is condemned, and
Satire hath got its death-stroke. The beautiful is not the beautiful
unless it is fettered to the moral; and Virtue rejects the physical
perfections, lest she should fall in love with herself, and sin and
cause sin.
_Christian._ Nay, Kosmon. Nothing pure,--nothing that is innocent,
chaste, unsensual,--whether Greek or satirical, is condemned: but
everything--every picture, poem, statue, or piece of music--which
elicits the sensual, viceful, and unholy desires of our nature--is,
and that utterly. The beautiful was created the true, morally as well
as physically; vice is a deformment of virtue,--not of form, to which
it is a parasitical addition--an accretion which can and must be
excised before the beautiful can show itself as it was originally
made, morally as well as formally perfect. How we all wish the
sensual, indecent, and brutal, away from Hogarth, so that we might
show him to the purest virgin without fear or blushing.
_Sophon._ And as well from Shakspere. Rotten members, though small in
themselves, are yet large enough to taint the whole body. And those
impurities, like rank growths of vine, may be lopped away without
injuring any vital principle. In perfect art the utmost purity of
intention, design, and execution, alone is wisdom. Every tree--every
flower, in defiance of adverse contingencies, grows with perfect will
to be perfect: and, shall man, who hath what they have not, a soul
wherewith he may defy all ill, do less?
_Kosmon._ But how may this purity be attained? I see every where
close round the pricks; not a single step may be taken in advance
without wounding something vital. Corruption strews thick both earth
and ocean; it is only the heavens that are pure, and man cannot live
upon manna alone.
_Christian._ Kosmon, you would seem to mistake what Sophon and I
mean. Neither he nor I wish nature to be used less, or otherwise than
as it appears; on the contrary, we wish it used more--more directly.
Nature itself is comparatively pure; all that we desire is the
removal of the factitious matter that the vice of fashion, evil
hearts, and infamous desires, graft upon it. It is not simple
innocent nature that we would exile, but the devilish and libidinous
corruptions that sully nature.
_Kalon._ But, if your ideas were strictly carried out, there would be
but little of worth left in the world for the artist to use; for, if
I understand you rightly, you object to his making use of any
passion, whether heroic, patriotic, or loving, that is not rigidly
virtuous.
_Christian._ I do. Without he has a didactic aim; like as Hogarth
had. A picture, poem, or statue, unless it speaks some purpose, is
mere paint, paper, or stone. A work of art must have a purpose, or it
is not a work of _fine_ art: thus, then, if it be a work of fine art,
it has a purpose; and, having purpose, it has either a good or an
evil one: there is no alternative. An artist's works are his
children, his immortal heirs, to his evil as well as to his good; as
he hath trained them, so will they teach. Let him ask himself why
does a parent so tenderly rear his children. Is it not because he
knows that evil is evil, whether it take the shape of angels or
devils? And is not the parent's example worthy of the artist's
imitation? What advantage has a man over a child? Is there any
preservative peculiar to manhood that it alone may see and touch sin,
and yet be not defiled? Verily, there is none! All mere battles,
assassinations, immolations, horrible deaths, and terrible situations
used by the artist solely to excite,--every passion degrading to
man's perfect nature,--should certainly be rejected, and that
unhesitatingly.
_Sophon._--Suffer me to extend the just conclusions of Christian.
Art--true art--fine art--cannot be either coarse or low.
Innocent-like, no taint will cling to it, and a smock frock is as
pure as "virginal-chaste robes." And,--sensualism, indecency, and
brutality, excepted--sin is not sin, if not in the act; and, in
satire, with the same exceptions, even sin in the act is tolerated
when used to point forcibly a moral crime, or to warn society of a
crying shame which it can remedy.
_Kalon._ But, my dear Sophon,--and you, Christian,--you do not
condemn the oak because of its apples; and, like them, the sin in the
poem, picture, or statue, may be a wormy accretion grafted from
without. The spectator often makes sin where the artist intended
none. For instance, in the nude,--where perhaps, the poet, painter,
or sculptor, imagines he has embodied only the purest and chastest
ideas and forms, the sensualist sees--what he wills to see; and,
serpent-like, previous to devouring his prey, he covers it with his
saliva.
_Christian._ The Circean poison, whether drunk from the clearest
crystal or the coarsest clay, alike intoxicates and makes beasts of
men. Be assured that every nude figure or nudity introduced in a
poem, picture, or piece of sculpture, merely on physical grounds, and
only for effect, is vicious. And, where it is boldly introduced and
forms the central idea, it ought never to have a sense of its
condition: it is not nudity that is sinful, but the figure's
knowledge of its nudity,(too surely communicated by it to the
spectator,) that makes it so. Eve and Adam before their fall were not
more utterly shameless than the artist ought to make his inventions.
The Turk believes that, at the judgment-day, every artist will be
compelled to furnish, from his own soul, soul for every one of his
creations. This thought is a noble one, and should thoroughly awake
poet, painter, and sculptor, to the awful responsibilities they
labour under. With regard to the sensualist,--who is omnivorous, and
swine-like, assimilates indifferently pure and impure, degrading
everything he hears or sees,--little can be said beyond this; that
for him, if the artist _be_ without sin, he is not answerable. But in
this responsibility he has two rigid yet just judges, God and
himself;--let him answer there before that tribunal. God will acquit
or condemn him only as he can acquit or condemn himself.
_Kalon._ But, under any circumstance, beautiful nude flesh
beautifully painted must kindle sensuality; and, described as
beautifully in poetry, it will do the like, almost, if not quite, as
readily. Sculpture is the only form of art in which it can be used
thoroughly pure, chaste, unsullied, and unsullying. I feel,
Christian, that you mean this. And see what you do!--What a vast
domain of art you set a Solomon's seal upon! how numberless are the
poems, pictures, and statues--the most beautiful productions of their
authors--you put in limbo! To me, I confess, it appears the very top
of prudery to condemn these lovely creations, merely because they
quicken some men's pulses.
_Kosmon._ And, to me, it appears hypercriticism to object to
pictures, poems, and statues, calling them not works of art--or fine
art--because they have no higher purpose than eye or ear-delight. If
this law be held to be good, very few pictures called of the English
school--of the English school, did I say?--very few pictures at all,
of any school, are safe from condemnation: almost all the Dutch must
suffer judgment, and a very large proportion of modern sculpture,
poetry, and music, will not pass. Even "Christabel" and the "Eve of
St. Agnes" could not stand the ordeal.
_Christian._ Oh, Kalon, you hardly need an answer! What! shall the
artist spend weeks and months, nay, sometimes years, in thought and
study, contriving and perfecting some beautiful invention,--in order
only that men's pulses may be quickened? What!--can he, jesuit-like,
dwell in the house of soul, only to discover where to sap her
foundations?--Satan-like, does he turn his angel of light into a
fiend of darkness, and use his God-delegated might against its giver,
making Astartes and Molochs to draw other thousands of innocent lives
into the embrace of sin? And as for you, Kosmon, I regard purpose as
I regard soul; one is not more the light of the thought than the
other is the light of the body; and both, soul and purpose, are
necessary for a complete intellect; and intellect, of the
intellectual--of which the fine arts are the capital members--is not
more to be expected than demanded. I believe that most of the
pictures you mean are mere natural history paintings from the animal
side of man. The Dutchmen may, certainly, go Letheward; but for their
colour, and subtleties of execution, they would not be tolerated by
any man of taste.
_Sophon._ Christian here, I think, is too stringent. Though walls be
necessary round our flower gardens to keep out swine and other vile
cattle--yet I can see no reason why, with excluding beasts, we should
also exclude light and air. Purpose is purpose or not, according to
the individual capacity to assimilate it. Different plants require
different soils, and they will rather die than grow on unfriendly
ones; it is the same with animals; they endure existence only through
their natural food; and this variety of soils, plants, and
vegetables, is the world less man. But man, as well as the other
created forms, is subject to the same law: he takes only that aliment
he can digest. It is sufficient with some men that their sensoria be
delighted with pleasurable and animated grouping, colour, light, and
shade: this feeling or desire of their's is, in itself, thoroughly
innocent: it is true, it is not a great burden for them to carry; no,
but it is the lightness of the burden that is the merit; for thereby,
their step is quickened and not clogged, their intellect is
exhilarated and not oppressed. Thus, then, a purpose _is_ secured,
from a picture or poem or statue, which may not have in it the
smallest particle of what Christian and I think necessary for it to
possess; he reckons a poem, picture, or statue, to be a work of fine
art by the quality and quantity of thought it contains, by the mental
leverage it possesses wherewith to move his mind, by the honey which
he may hive, and by the heavenly manna he may gather therefrom.
_Kosmon._ Christian wants art like Magdalen Hospitals, where the
windows are so contrived that all of earth is excluded, and only
heaven is seen. Wisdom is not only shown in the soul, but also in the
body: the bones, nerves, and muscles, are quite as wonderful in idea
as is the incorporeal essence which rules them. And the animal part
of man wants as much caring for as the spiritual: God made both, and
is equally praised through each. And men's souls are as much
touchable and teachable through their animal feelings as ever they
are through their mental aspirations; this both Orpheus and Amphion
knew when they, with their music, made towns to rise in savage woods
by savage hands. And hence, in that light, nothing is without a
purpose; and I maintain,--if they give but the least glimpse of
happiness to a single human being,--that even the Dutch masters are
useful, I believe that the thought-wrapped philosopher, who, in his
close-pent study, designs some valuable blessing for his lower and
more animal brethren, only pursues the craving of his nature; and
that his happiness is no higher than their's in their several
occupations and delights. Sight and sense are fully as powerful for
happiness as thought and ratiocination. Nature grows flowers wherever
she can; she causes sweet waters to ripple over stony beds, and
living wells to spring up in deserts, so that grass and herbs may
grow and afford nourishment to _some_ of God's creatures. Even the
granite and the lava must put forth blossoms.
_Kalon._ Oh Christian, children cannot digest strong meats! Neither
can a blind man be made to see by placing him opposite the sun. The
sound of the violin is as innocent as that of the organ. And, though
there be a wide difference in the sacredness of the occupations, yet
dance, song, and the other amusements common to society, are quite as
necessary to a healthy condition of the mind and body, as is to the
soul the pursuit and daily practice of religion. The healthy
condition of the mind and body is, after all, the happy life; and
whether that life be most mental or most animal it matters little,
even before God, so long as its delights, amusements, and
occupations, be thoroughly innocent and chaste.
_Christian._ So long as the pursuits, pastimes, and pleasures of
mankind be innocent and chaste,--with you all, heartily, I believe it
matters little how or in what form they be enjoyed. Pure water is
certainly equally pure, whether it trickle from the hill-side or flow
through crystal conduits; and equally refreshing whether drunk from
the iron bowl or the golden goblet;--only the crystal and gold will
better please some natures than the hill-side and the iron. I know
also that a star may give more light than the moon,--but that is up
in its own heavens and not here on earth. I know that it is not light
and shade which make a complete globe, but, as well, the local and
neutral tints. Thus, my friends, you perceive that I am neither for
building a wall, nor for contriving windows so as to exclude light,
air, and earth. As much as any of you, I am for every man's sitting
under his own vine, and for his training, pruning, and eating its
fruit how he pleases. Let the artist paint, write, or carve, what and
how he wills, teach the world through sense or through thought,--I
will not dissent; I have no patent to entitle me to do so; nay, I
will be thoroughly satisfied with whatsoever he does, so long as it
is pure, unsensual, and earnestly true. But, as the mental is the
peculiar feature that places man apart from and above animals,--so
ought all that he does to be apart from and above their nature;
especially in the fine arts, which are the intellectual perfection of
the intellectual. And nothing short of this intellectual
perfection,--however much they may be pictures, poems, statues, or
music,--can rank such works to be works of Fine Art. They may have
merit,--nay, be useful, and hence, in some sort, have a purpose: but
they are as much works of Fine Art as Babel was the Temple of
Solomon.
_Sophon._ And man can be made to understand these truths--can be
drawn to crave for and love the fine arts: it is only to take him in
hand as we would take some animal--tenderly using it--entreating it,
as it were, to do its best--to put forth all its powers with all its
capable force and beauty. Nor is it so very difficult a task to
raise, in the low, conceptions of things high: the mass of men have a
fine appreciation of God and his goodness: and as active, charitable,
and sympathetic a nurture in the beautiful and true as they have
given to them in religion, would as surely and swiftly raise in them
an equally high appreciation of the fine arts. But, if the artist
would essay such a labour, he must show them what fine art is: and,
in order to do this effectually, as an architect clears away from
some sacred edifice which he restores the shambles and shops, which,
like filthy toads cowering on a precious monument, have squatted
themselves round its noble proportions; so must he remove from his
art-edifice the deformities which hide--the corruptions which shame
it.
_Christian._ How truly Sophon speaks a retrospective look will show.
The disfigurements which both he and I deplore are strictly what he
compared them to; they are shambles and shops grafted on a sacred
edifice. Still, indigenous art is sacred and devoted to religious
purposes: this keeps it pure for a time; but, like a stream
travelling and gathering other streams as it goes through wide
stretches of country to the sea, it receives greater and more
numerous impurities the farther it gets from its source, until, at
last, what was, in its rise, a gentle rilling through snows and over
whitest stones, roars into the ocean a muddy and contentious river.
Men soon long to touch and taste all that they see; savage-like, him
whom to-day they deem a god and worship, they on the morrow get an
appetite for and kill, to eat and barter. And thus art is degraded,
made a thing of carnal desire--a commodity of the exchange. Yes,
Sophon, to be instructive, to become a teaching instrument, the
art-edifice must be cleansed from its abominations; and, with them,
must the artist sweep out the improvements and ruthless restorations
that hang on it like formless botches on peopled tapestry. The
multitude must be brought to stand face to face with the pious and
earnest builders, to enjoy the severely simple, beautiful, aspiring,
and solemn temple, in all its first purity, the same as they
bequeathed it to them as their posterity.
_Kalon._ The peasant, upon acquaintance, quickly prefers wheaten
bread to the black and sour mass that formerly served him: and when
true jewels are placed before him, counterfeit ones in his eyes soon
lose their lustre, and become things which he scorns. The multitude
are teachable--teachable as a child; but, like a child, they are
self-willed and obstinate, and will learn in their own way, or not at
all. And, if the artist wishes to raise them unto a fit audience, he
must consult their very waywardness, or his work will be a Penelope's
web of done and undone: he must be to them not only cords of support
staying their every weakness against sin and temptation, but also,
tendrils of delight winding around them. But I cannot understand why
regeneration can flow to them through sacred art alone. All pure art
is sacred art. And the artist having soul as well as nature--the
lodestar as well as the lodestone--to steer his path by--and seeing
that he must circle earth--it matters little from what quarter he
first points his course; all that is necessary is that he go as
direct as possible, his knowledge keeping him from quicksands and
sunken rocks.
_Christian._ Yes, Kalon;--and, to compare things humble--though
conceived in the same spirit of love--with things mighty, the artist,
if he desires to inform the people thoroughly, must imitate Christ,
and, like him, stoop down to earth and become flesh of their flesh;
and his work should be wrought out with all his soul and strength in
the same world-broad charity, and truth, and virtue, and be, for
himself as well as for them, a justification for his teaching. But
all art, simply because it is pure and perfect, cannot, for those
grounds alone, be called sacred: Christian, it may, and that justly;
for only since Christ taught have morals been considered a religion.
Christian and sacred art bear that relation to each other that the
circle bears to its generating point; the first is only volume, the
last is power: and though the first--as the world includes
God--includes with it the last, still, the last is the greatest, for
it makes that which includes it: thus all pure art is Christian, but
not all is sacred. Christian art comprises the earth and its
humanities, and, by implication, God and Christ also; and sacred art
is the emanating idea--the central causating power--the jasper
throne, whereon sits Christ, surrounded by the prophets, apostles,
and saints, administering judgement, wisdom, and holiness. In this
sense, then, the art you would call sacred is not sacred, but
Christian: and, as _all perfect art is Christian_, regeneration
necessarily can only flow thence; and thus it is, as you say, that,
from whatever quarter the artist steers his course, he steers aright.
_Kosmon._ And, Christian, is a return to this sacred or Christian art
by you deemed possible? I question it. How can you get the art of one
age to reflect that of another, when the image to be reflected is
without the angle of reflection? The sun cannot be seen of us when it
is night! and that class of art has got its golden age too
remote--its night too long set--for it to hope ever to grasp rule
again, or again to see its day break upon it. You have likened art to
a river rising pure, and rolling a turbid volume into the ocean. I
have a comparison equally just. The career of one artist contains in
itself the whole of art-history; its every phase is presented by him
in the course of his life. Savage art is beheld in his childish
scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian
art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose;
Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid
darings, his unripe fancies oscillating between earth and heaven;
there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want
little, much is given--now a blank eyed riddle,--dark with excess of
self,--now a giant thought--vast but repulsive,--and now angel
visitors startling us with wisdom and touches of heavenly beauty.
Every where is seen exactness; but it is the exactness of hesitation,
and not of knowledge--the line of doubt, and not of power: all the
promises for ripeness are there; but, as yet, all are immature. And
mature art is presented when all these rude scaffoldings are thrown
down--when the man steps out of the chrysalis a complete idea--both
Psyche and Eros--free-thoughted, free-tongued, and free-handed;--a
being whose soul moves through the heavens and the earth--now
choiring it with angels--and now enthroning it, bay-crowned, among
the men-kings;--whose hand passes over all earth, spreading forth its
beauties unerring as the seasons--stretches through cloudland,
revealing its delectable glories, or, eagle-like, soars right up
against the sun;--or seaward goes seizing the cresting foam as it
leaps--the ships and their crews as they wallow in the watery
valleys, or climb their steeps, or hang over their flying
ridges:--daring and doing all whatsoever it shall dare to do, with
boundless fruitfulness of idea, and power, and line; that is mature
art--art of the time of Phidias, of Raffaelle, and of Shakspere. And,
Christian, in preferring the art of the period previous to Raffaelle
to the art of his time, you set up the worse for the better, elevate
youth above manhood, and tell us that the half-formed and unripe
berry is wholesomer than the perfect and ripened fruit.
_Christian._ Kosmon, your thoughts seduce you; or rather, your nature
prefers the full and rich to the exact and simple: you do not go deep
enough--do not penetrate beneath the image's gilt overlay, and see
that it covers only worm-devoured wood. Your very comparison tells
against you. What you call ripeness, others, with as much truth, may
call over-ripeness, nay, even rottenness; when all the juices are
drunk with their lusciousness, sick with over-sweetness. And the art
which you call youthful and immature--may be, most likely is, mature
and wholesome in the same degree that it is tasteful, a perfect round
of beautiful, pure, and good. You call youth immature; but in what
does it come short of manhood. Has it not all that man can
have,--free, happy, noble, and spiritual thoughts? And are not those
thoughts newer, purer, and more unselfish in the youth than in the
man? What eye has the man, that the youth's is not as comprehensive,
keen, rapid, and penetrating? or what hand, that the youth's is not
as swift, forceful, cunning, and true? And what does the youth gain
in becoming man? Is it freshness, or deepness, or power, or wisdom?
nay rather--is it not languor--the languor of satiety--of
indifferentism? And thus soul-rusted and earth-charmed, what mate is
he for his former youth? Drunken with the world-lees, what can he do
but pourtray nature drunken as well, and consumed with the same fever
or stupor that consumes himself, making up with gilding and filigree
what he lacks in truth and sincerity? and what comparison shall exist
here and between what his youth might or could have done, with a soul
innocent and untroubled as heaven's deep calm of blue, gazing on
earth with seraph eyes--looking, but not longing--or, in the spirit
rapt away before the emerald-like rainbow-crowned throne, witnessing
"things that shall be hereafter," and drawing them down almost as
stainless as he beheld them? What an array of deep, earnest, and
noble thinkers, like angels armed with a brightness that withers,
stand between Giotto and Raffaelle; to mention only Orcagna,
Ghiberti, Masaccio, Lippi, Fra Beato Angelico, and Francia. Parallel
_them_ with post-Raffaelle artists? If you think you can, you have
dared a labour of which the fruit shall be to you as Dead Sea apples,
golden and sweet to the eye, but, in the mouth, ashes and bitterness.
And the Phidian era was a youthful one--the highest and purest period
of Hellenic art: after that time they added no more gods or heroes,
but took for models instead--the Alcibiadeses and Phyrnes, and made
Bacchuses and Aphrodites; not as Phidias would have--clothed with the
greatness of thought, or girded with valour, or veiled with modesty;
but dissolved with the voluptuousness of the bath, naked, wanton, and
shameless.
_Sophon._ You hear, Kosmon, that Christian prefers ripe youth to ripe
manhood: and he is right. Early summer is nobler than early autumn;
the head is wiser than the hand. You take the hand to mean too much:
you should not judge by quantity, or luxuriance, or dexterity, but by
quality, chastity, and fidelity. And colour and tone are only a fair
setting to thought and virtue. Perhaps it is the fate, or rather the
duty, of mortals to make a sacrifice for all things, withheld as well
as given. Hand sometimes succumbs to head, and head in its turn
succumbs to hand; the first is the lot of youth, the last of manhood.
The question is--which of the two we can best afford to do without.
Narrowed down to this, I think but very few men would be found who
would not sacrifice in the loss of hand in preference to its gain at
the loss of head.
_Kosmon._ But, Christian, in advocating a return to this
pre-Raffaelle art, are you not--you yourself--urging the committal
of "ruthless restorations" and "improvements," new and vile as any
that you have denounced? You tell the artist, that he should restore
the sacred edifice to its first purity--the same as it was bequeathed
by its pious and earnest builders. But can he do this and be himself
original? For myself, I would above all things urge him to study how
to _reproduce_, and not how to represent--to imitate no past
perfection, but to create for himself another, as beautiful, wise,
and true. I would say to him, "build not on old ground, profaned,
polluted, trod into slough by filthy animals; but break new
ground--virgin ground--ground that thought has never imagined or eye
seen, and dig into our hearts a foundation, deep and broad as our
humanity. Let it not be a temple formed of hands only, but built up
of _us_--us of the present--body of our body, soul of our soul."
_Christian._ When men wish to raise a piece of stone, or to move it
along, they seek for a fulcrum to use their lever from; and, this
obtained, they can place the stone wheresoever they please. And
world-perfections come into existence too slowly for men to reject
all the teaching and experience of their predecessors: the labour of
learning is trifling compared to the labour of finding out; the first
implies only days, the last, hundreds of years. The discovery of the
new world without the compass would have been sheer chance; but with
it, it became an absolute certainty. So, and in such manner, the
modern artist seeks to use early mediaeval art, as a fulcrum to raise
through, but only as a fulcrum; for he himself holds the lever,
whereby he shall both guide and fix the stones of his art temple; as
experience, which shall be to him a rudder directing the motion of
his ship, but in subordination to his control; and as a compass,
which shall regulate his journey, but which, so far from taking away
his liberty, shall even add to it, because through it his course is
set so fast in the ways of truth as to allow him, undividedly, to
give up his whole soul to the purpose of his voyage, and to steer a
wider and freer path over the trackless, but to him, with his rudder
and compass, no longer the trackless or waste ocean; for, God and his
endeavours prospering him, that shall yield up unto his hands
discoveries as man-worthy as any hitherto beheld by men, or conceived
by poets.
_Kalon._ But, Christian, another artist with equal justness might use
Hellenic art as a means toward making happy discoveries; formatively,
there is nothing in it that is not both beautiful and perfect; and
beautiful things, rainbow-like, are once and for ever beautiful; and
the contemplation and study of its dignified, graceful, and truthful
embodiments--which, by common consent, it only is allowed to possess
in an eminent and universal degree--is full as likely to awaken in
the mind of its student as high revelations of wisdom, and cause him
to bear to earth as many perfections for man, as ever the study of
pre-Raffaelle art can reveal or give, through its votary.
_Christian._ But beautiful things, to be beautiful in the highest
degree, like the rainbow, must have a spiritual as well as a physical
voice. Lovely as it is, it is not the arch of colours that glows in
the heavens of our hearts; what does, is the inner and invisible
sense for which it was set up of old by God, and of which its
many-hued form is only the outward and visible sign. Thus, beautiful
things alone, of themselves, are not sufficient for this task; to be
sufficient they must be as vital with soul as they are with shape. To
be formatively perfect is not enough; they must also be spiritually
perfect, and this not _locally_ but universally. The art of the
Greeks was a local art; and hence, now, it has no spiritual. Their
gods speak to us no longer as gods, or teach us divinely: they have
become mere images of stone--profane embodiments. False to our
spiritual, Hellenic art wants every thing that Christian art is full
of. Sacred and universal, this clasps us, as Abraham's bosom did
Lazarus, within its infinite embraces, causing every fibre of our
being to quicken under its heavenly truths. Ithuriel's golden spear
was not more antagonistic to Satan's loathly transformation--than is
Christian opposed to pagan art. The wide, the awful gulf, separating
one from the other, will be felt instantly in its true force by first
thinking ZEUS, and then thinking CHRIST. How pale, shadowy, and
shapeless the vision of lust, revenge, and impotence, that rises at
the thought of Zeus; but at the thought of Christ, how overwhelming
the inrush of sublime and touching realities; what height and depth
of love and power; what humility, and beauty, and immaculate purity
are made ours at the mention of his name; the Saviour, the
Intercessor, the Judge, the Resurrection and the Life. These--these
are the divinely awful truths taught by our faith; and which should
also be taught by our art. Hellenic art, like the fig tree that only
bore leaves, withered at Christ's coming; and thus no "happy
discoveries" can flow thence, or "revelations of wisdom," or other
perfections be borne to earth for man.
_Sophon._ Christian thinks and says, that if the spiritual be not
_in_ a thing, it cannot be put upon it; and hence, if a work of art
be not a god, it must be a man, or a mere image of one; and that the
faith of the Pagan is the foolishness of the Christian. Nor does he
utter unreason; for, notwithstanding their perfect forms, their gods
are not gods to us, but only perfect forms: Apollo, Theseus, the
Ilissus, Aphrodite, Artemis, Psyche, and Eros, are only shapeful
manhood, womanhood, virginhood, and youth, and move us only by the
exact amount of humanity they possess in common with ourselves.
_Homer and aeschylus, and Sophocles, and Phidias, live not by the
sacred in them, but by the human:_ and, but for this common bond,
Hellenic art would have been submerged in the same Lethe that has
drowned the Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian Theogonies and arts. And,
if we except form, what other thing does Hellenic art offer to the
modern artist, that is not thoroughly opposed to his faith, wants,
and practice? And thought--thought in accordance with all the lines
of his knowledge, temperament, and habits--thought through which he
makes and shapes for men, and is understood by them--it is as
destitute of, as inorganic matter of soul and reason. But Christian
art, because of the faith upon which it is built, suffers under no
such drawbacks, for that faith is as personal and vigorous now as
ever it was at its origin--every motion and principle of our being
moves to it like a singing harmony;--it is the breath which brings
out of us, aeolian-harp-like, our most penetrating and heavenly
music--the river of the water of life, which searches all our dry
parts and nourishes them, causing them to spring up and bear
abundantly the happy seed which shall enrich and make fat the earth
to the uttermost parts thereof.
_Kalon._ With you both I believe, that faith is necessary to a man,
and that without faith sight even is feeble: but I also believe that
a man is as much a part of the religious, moral, and social system in
which he lives, as is a plant of the soil, situation, and climate in
which it exists: and that external applications have just as much
power to change the belief of the man, as they have to alter the
structure of the plant. A faith once in a man, it is there always;
and, though unfelt even by himself, works actively: and Hellenic art,
so far from being an impediment to the Christian belief, is the exact
reverse; for, it is the privilege of that belief, through its sublime
alchymy, to be able to transmute all it touches into itself: and the
perfect forms of Hellenic art, so touched, move our souls only the
more energetically upwards, because of their transcendent beauty; for
through them alone can we see how wonderfully and divinely God
wrought--how majestic, powerful, and vigorous he made man--how
lovely, soft, and winning, he made woman: and in beholding these
things, we are thankful to him that we are permitted to see them--not
as Pagans, but altogether as Christians. Whether Christian or Pagan,
the highest beauty is still the highest beauty; and the highest
beauty alone, to the total exclusion of gods and their myths, compels
our admiration.
_Kosmon._ Another thing we ought to remember, when judging Hellenic
Art, is, but for its existence, all other kinds--pre-Raffaelle as
well--could not have had being. The Greeks were, by far, more
inclined to worship nature as contained in themselves, than the
gods,--if the gods are not reflexes of themselves, which is most
likely. And, thus impelled, they broke through the monstrous
symbolism of Egypt, and made them gods after their own hearts; that
is, fashioned them out of themselves. And herein, I think we may
discern something of providence; for, suppose their natures had not
been so powerfully antagonistic to the traditions and conventions of
their religion, what other people in the world could or would have
done their work? Cast about a brief while in your memories, and
endeavor to find whether there has ever existed a people who in their
nature, nationality, and religion, have been so eminently fitted to
perform such a task as the Hellenic? You will then feel that we have
reason to be thankful that they were allowed to do what else had
never been done; and, which not done, all posterity would have
suffered to the last throe of time. And, if they have not made a
thorough perfection--a spiritual as well as a physical one--forget
not that, at least, they have made this physical representation a
finished one. They took it from the Egyptians, rude, clumsy, and
seated; its head stony--pinned to its chest; its hands tied to its
side, and its legs joined; they shaped it, beautiful, majestic, and
erect; elevated its head; breathed into it animal fire; gave movement
and action to its arms and hands; opened its legs and made it
walk--made it human at all points--the radical impersonation of
physical and sensuous beauty. And, if the god has receded into the
past and become a "pale, shadowy, and shapeless vision of lust,
revenge, and impotence," the human lives on graceful, vigorous, and
deathless, as at first, and excites in us admiration as unbounded as
ever followed it of old in Greece or Italy.
_Christian._ Yes, Kosmon, yes! they are flourished all over with the
rhetoric of the body; but nowhere is to be seen in them that diviner
poetry, the oratory of the soul! Truly they are a splendid casket
enclosing nothing--at least nothing now of importance to us; for what
they once contained, the world, when stirred with nobler matter,
disregarded, and left to perish. But, Kosmon, we cannot discuss
probabilities. Our question is--not whether the Greeks only could
have made such masterpieces of nature and art; but whether their
works are of that kind the _most fitted_ to carry forward to a more
ultimate perfection that idea which is peculiarly our's. All art,
more or less, is a species of symbolism; and the Hellenic,
notwithstanding its more universal method of typification, was fully
as symbolic as the Egyptian; and hence its language is not only dead,
but forgotten, and is now past recovery: and, if it were not, what
purpose would be served by its republication? For, for whom does the
artist work? The inevitable answer is, "For his nation!" His statue,
or picture, poem, or music, must be made up and out of them; they are
at once his exemplars, his audience, and his worshippers; and he is
their mirror in which they behold themselves as they are: he breathes
them vitally as an atmosphere, and they breathe him. Zeus, Athene,
Heracles, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Orestes, the House of Oedipus,
Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and Antigone, spoke something to the
Hellenic nations; woke their piety, pity, or horror,--thrilled,
soothed, or delighted them; but they have no charm for our ears; for
us, they are literally disembodied ghosts, and voiceless as
shapeless. But not so are Christ, and the holy Apostles and saints,
and the Blessed Virgin; and not so is Hamlet, or Richard the Third,
or Macbeth, or Shylock, or the House of Lear, Ophelia, Desdemona,
Grisildis, or Una, or Genevieve. No: _they_ all speak and move real
and palpable before our eyes, and are felt deep down in the heart's
core of every thinking soul among us:--they all grapple to us with
holds that only life will loose. Of all this I feel assured, because,
a brief while since, we agreed together that man could only be raised
through an incarnation of himself. Tacitly, we would also seem to
have limited the uses of Hellenic art to the serving as models of
proportion, or as a gradus for form: and, though I cannot deny them
any merit they may have in this respect, still, I would wish to deal
cautiously with them: the artist,--most especially the young one, and
who is and would be most subject to them and open to their
influence,--should never have his soul asleep when his hand is awake;
but, like voice and instrument, one should always accompany the other
harmoniously.
_Kosmon._ But surely you will deal no less cautiously with early
mediaeval art. Archaisms are not more tolerable in pictures than they
are in statues, poems, or music; and the archaisms of this kind of
art are so numerous as to be at first sight the most striking feature
belonging to it. Most remarkable among these unnatural peculiarities
are gilded backgrounds, gilded hair, gilded ornaments and borders to
draperies and dresses, the latter's excessive verticalism of lines
and tedious involution of folds, and the childlike passivity of
countenance and expression: all of which are very prominent, and
operate as serious drawbacks to their merits; which--as I have freely
admitted--are in truth not a few, nor mean.
_Christian._ The artist is only a man, and living with other men in a
state of being called society; and,--though perhaps in a lesser
degree--he is as subject to its influences--its fashions and
customs--as they are. But in this respect his failings may be likened
to the dross which the purest metal in its molten state continually
throws up to its surface, but which is mere excrement, and so little
essential that it can be skimmed away: and, as the dross to the
metal, just so little essential are the archaisms you speak of to the
early art, and just so easily can they be cast aside. But bethink
you, Kosmon. Is Hellenic art without archaisms? And that feature of
it held to be its crowning perfection--its head--is not that a very
marked one? And, is it not so completely opposed to the artist's
experience in the forms of nature that--except in subjects from Greek
history and mythology--he dares not use it--at least without
modifying it so as to destroy its Hellenism?
_Sophon._ Then Hellenic Art is like a musical bell with a flaw in it;
before it can be serviceable it must be broken up and recast. If its
sum of beauty--its line of lines, the facial angle, must be
destroyed--as it undoubtedly must,--before it can be used for the
general purposes of art, then its claims over early mediaeval art, in
respect of form, are small indeed. But is it not altogether a great
archaism?
_Kalon._ Oh, Sophon! weighty as are the reasons urged against
Hellenic art by Christian and yourself, they are not weighty enough
to outbalance its beauty, at least to me: at present they may have
set its sun in gloom; yet I know that that obscuration, like a dark
foreground to a bright distance, will make its rising again only the
more surpassingly glorious. I admire its exquisite creations, because
they are beautiful, and noble, and perfect, and they elevate me
because I think them so; and their silent capabilities, like the
stardust of heaven before the intellectual insight, resolve
themselves into new worlds of thoughts and things so ever as I
contemplate their perfections: like a prolonged music, full of sweet
yet melancholy cadences, they have sunk into my heart--my brain--my
soul--never, never to cease while life shall hold with me. But, for
all that, my hands are not full; and, whithersoever the happy seed
shall require me, I am not for withholding plough or spade, planting
or watering; and that which I am called in the spirit to do--will I
do manfully and with my whole strength.
_Sophon._ Kalon, the conclusion of your speech is better than the
commencement. It is better to sacrifice myrrh and frankincense than
virtue and wisdom, thoughts than deeds. Would that all men were as
ready as yourself to dispark their little selfish enclosures, and
burn out all their hedges of prickly briers and brambles--turning the
evil into the good--the seed-catching into the seed-nourishing. Of
the too consumptions let us prefer the active, benevolent, and
purifying one of fire, to the passive, self-eating, and corrupting
one of rust: one half minute's clear shining may touch some watching
and waiting soul, and through him kindle whole ages of light.
_Christian._ Men do not stumble over what they know; and the day
fades so imperceptibly into night that were it not for experience,
darkness would surprise us long before we believed the day done: and,
in relation to art, its revolutions are still more imperceptible in
their gradations; and, in fulfilling themselves, they spread over
such an extent of time, that in their knowledge the experience of one
artist is next to nothing; and its twilight is so lengthy, that those
who never saw other, believe its gloom to be day; nor are their
successors more aware that the deepening darkness is the contrary,
until night drops big like a great clap of thunder, and awakes them
staringly to a pitiable sense of their condition. But, if we cannot
have this experience through ourselves, we can through others; and
that will show us that Pagan art has once--nay twice--already brought
over Christian art a "darkness which might be felt;" from a little
handful cloud out of the studio of Squarcione, it gathered density
and volume through his scholar Mantegna--made itself a nucleus in the
Academy of the Medici, and thence it issued in such a flood of
"heathenesse" that Italy finally became covered with one vast deep
and thick night of Pagandom. But in every deep there is a lower deep;
and, through the same gods-worship, a night intenser still fell upon
art when the pantomime of David made its appearance. With these two
fearful lessons before his eyes, the modern artist can have no other
than a settled conviction that Pagan art, Devil-like, glozes but to
seduce--tempts but to betray; and hence, he chooses to avoid that
which he believes to be bad, and to follow that which he holds to be
good, and blots out from his eye and memory all art between the
present and its first taint of heathenism, and ascends to the art
previous to Raffaelle; and he ascends thither, not so much for its
forms as he does for its THOUGHT and NATURE--the root and trunk of
the art-tree, of whose numerous branches form is only one--though the
most important one: and he goes to pre-Raffaelle art for those two
things, because the stream at that point is clearer and deeper, and
less polluted with animal impurities, than at any other in its
course. And, Kalon and Kosmon, had you remembered this, and at the
same time recollected that the words, "Nature" and "Thought" express
very peculiar ideas to modern eyes and ears--ideas which are totally
unknown to Hellenic Art--you would have instantly felt, that the
artist cannot study from it things chiefest in importance to him--of
which it is destitute, even as is a shore-driven boulder of life and
verdure.