"Tranquillity! the sovereign aim wert thou
In heathen schools of philosophic lore;
Heart-stricken by stern destiny of yore,
The Tragic Muse thee serv'd with thoughtful vow;
And what of hope Elysium could allow
Was fondly seiz'd by Sculpture, to restore
Peace to the Mourner. But when He who wore
The crown of thorns around His bleeding brow
Warm'd our sad being with celestial light,
_Then_ Arts which still had drawn a softening grace
From shadowy fountains of the Infinite,
Commun'd with that Idea face to face;
And move around it now as planets run,
Each in its orbit round the central Sun."--WORDSWORTH.
Art is in its proper character the solidest and sincerest expression
of human thought and feeling. To be much within and little without, to
do all for truth, nothing for show, and to express the largest
possible meaning with the least possible stress of expression,--this
is its first law.
Thus artistic virtue runs down into one and the same root with moral
righteousness. Both must first of all be genuine and sincere, richer
and better at the heart than on the surface; as always having it for
their leading aim to recommend themselves to the perfect Judge; that
is, they must seek the praise of God rather than of men: for, indeed,
whatsoever studies chiefly to please men will not please them long,
but will soon be openly or secretly repudiated by them; whereas, "when
a man's ways are pleasing unto the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to
be at peace with him."
Such is the right form, such the normal process, of what may be
called intellectual and artistic righteousness. A soul of perfect
veracity lies at the bottom of the thing, and is the source and the
life of all that is good and beautiful in it. And the work, like
Nature herself, does not strike excitingly, but "melts into the
heart"; it therefore wears well, and don't wear out. Every thing is
done "in simple and pure soul," and without any thought, on the doer's
part, of the figure he is making; and when he turns from the beauty he
should express to his own beauty of expression, his work becomes
false. And it may be justly affirmed that perfection of workmanship in
Art is where the senses are touched just enough, and in just the right
way, to kindle the mind; and this too without making the mind
distinctly conscious of being kindled; for when the soul is moved
perfectly both in kind and degree, self-consciousness is lost in the
interest of that which moves it.
Hence it is that all deep and earnest feeling, all high and noble
thought so naturally puts on a style of modesty and reserve. It
communicates itself, not by verbal emphasis or volume, but by a sort
of blessed infection too subtile and too potent for words to convey.
Volubility strangles it; and it is felt to be insincere when it grows
loquacious. A wordy grief is merely a grief from the throat outwards;
"the grief that does not speak," this it is that "whispers the
o'erfraught heart, and bids it break." And the truly eloquent speaker
or writer is not he who says a multitude of fine things in finely
turned language and figures, which is very easily done, but he who
says just the right things, and says them in the fewest, simplest, and
aptest words. As for the speaker who lives, not in the inspiration of
his theme, but in the display of his eloquence, we may rest assured
that he will never say any thing worth hearing: his work will
naturally turn all to mere elocution; which may be described as the
art of pronouncing nothing in such a way as to make it pass for
something grand.
Thus there appears to be a profound natural sympathy or affinity
between the forces of religion and the forms of Art. Therefore it is
that the higher efficacies of Christian culture and the deeper
workings of religious thought and emotion have instinctively sought to
organize and enshrine themselves in artistic creations; no other mode
or power of expression being strong enough to hold them, or inclusive
enough to contain them. It is in such works as the ancient marvels of
ecclesiastical building that the Christian mind has found its most
fitting and most operative eloquence.
What was the motive-principle, what the inspiring power, of those
architectural wonders that transport the impress of mediaeval piety
across the ocean of so many centuries? Wordsworth, referring to some
of the English cathedrals, says,--
"They dreamt not of a perishable home,
Who thus could build."
And, sure enough, we may well deem that nothing less than the most
intense and burning conceptions of eternity could have inspired the
souls of men and made them strong enough to project and accomplish
those stupendous structures which, in their silent majesty and
awe-inspiring suggestiveness, are the most persuasive and the most
unanswerable preachers of Christianity that the Church of two thousand
years has produced. "They builded better than they knew." And what are
all the sermons and theologies of that time in comparison with those
great old monuments of Christian Art? "The immortal mind craves
objects that endure." And immortality itself, the spirit of celestial
order, a beauty that awes while it charms, and chastens while it
kindles, are imaged in the aspect and countenance of those structures.
And it is remarkable that nothing has come down to us touching the
persons of those grand old builders, not even their names. It seems
indeed as if their great souls had been so possessed by the genius
that stirred within them, so entranced in the contemplation of their
religious ideals, as to leave no room, for any self-regarding
thoughts; so that we know them only as a band of anonymous immortals.
"They were pedants who could speak:
Grander souls have passed unheard;
Such as found all language weak;
Choosing rather to record
Secrets before Heaven, than break
Faith with Angels by a word."
Now it is the nature of Christian meaning thus embodied to penetrate
and pervade the depths of the mind without agitating its surface; and
when the effect is greatest, then it is that the mind is least
conscious of it: it is a silent efficacy that "sweetly creeps into the
study of imagination," and charms its way into "the eye and prospect
of the soul" by delicacy of touch and smoothness of operation. Such
art is of course in no sort an intellectual gymnastic. It is as
complex and many-sided as our nature itself; and the frame of mind
from which it proceeds, and which it aims to inspire, is that calmness
wherein is involved a free and harmonious exercise of the whole man;
sense, intellect, and heart moving together in sympathy and unison: in
a word, it is the fitting expression of
"That monumental grace
Of Faith, which doth all passions tame
That reason _should_ control;
And shows in the untrembling frame
A statue of the soul."
From such workmanship, every thing specially stimulant of any one part
of the mind, every thing that ministers to the process of
self-excitation, every thing that fosters an unhealthy consciousness
by untuning the inward harmonies of our being, every thing that
appeals to the springs of vanity and self-applause, or invites us to
any sort of glass-gazing pleasure,--every such thing is, by an innate
law of the work, excluded. So that here we have the right school of
moral healthiness, a moral digestion so perfect as to be a secret unto
itself. The intelligence, the virtue, the piety, that grows by such
methods, is never seen putting on airs, or feeding on the reflection
of its own beauty; but evermore breathes freely and naturally, as in
communion with the proper sources of its life.
Works of Art, then, above all other productions of the mind, must have
solidity and inwardness, that essential retiring grace which seems to
shrink from the attention it wins, that style of power held in reserve
which grows upon acquaintance, that suggestive beauty, "part seen,
imagined part," which does not permit the beholder to leave without a
silent invitation to return. And in proportion as the interest of such
works depends on novelty, or stress of manner, or any strikingness of
effect, as if they were ambitious to make themselves felt, and
apprehensive of not being prized at their worth; in the same
proportion their tenure of interest is naturally short, because they
leave the real springs of thought untouched.
This, to be sure, holds more or less true of all the forms of mental
production; but its truth is more evident and more self-approving in
the sphere of Art than in the others. Hence the common saying, that
poetry, for instance, must be very good indeed, else it is good for
nothing. And men of culture and judgment in that line naturally feel,
in general, that a work of art which is not worth seeing many times is
not worth seeing at all; and if they are at first taken with such a
work, they are apt to be ashamed of it afterwards, and to resent the
transient pleasure they found in it, as a sort of fraud upon them. In
other words, Art aspires to interest _permanently_, and even to be
more interesting the more it is seen; and when it does not proceed in
the order of this "modest charm of not too much," this remoteness of
meaning where far more is inferred than is directly shown, there we
may be sure the vital principle of the thing is wanting.
Allston, the distinguished painter-artist, is said to have had an
intense aversion to all "eccentricity in Art." He might well do so;
and, being a philosopher of Art as well as an artist, he had no
difficulty in knowing that his aversion was founded in truth, and was
fully justified by the reason of the thing. For the prime law of Art,
as is implied in what I have been saying, is to produce the utmost
possible of _silent_ effect; and to secure this end _truth_ must be
the all-in-all of the artist's purpose,--a purpose too inward and
vital, perhaps, for the subject to be distinctly conscious of it;
which is the right meaning of _artistic inspiration_. But eccentricity
in Art aims, first and last, at _sensible_ effect; to appease an
eager, prurient curiosity is its proper motive-spring; and it is
radically touched with some disease, perhaps an itch of moral or
intellectual or emotional demonstrativeness; and so it naturally
issues in a certain _plurisy_ of style, or some self-pleasing crotchet
or specialty of expression,--something which is striking and emphatic,
and which is therefore essentially disproportionate and false. In a
word, there is a fatal root of insincerity in the thing. For instance,
if one were to paint a tree in the brilliancy of full-bloom, or a
human face in the liveliest play of soul, I suppose the painting might
be set down as a work of eccentricity; for, though such things are
natural in themselves, they are but transient or evanescent moods of
Nature; and a painting of them has not that calmness and purity of
truth and art on which the mind can repose:
"Soft is the music that would charm for ever."
Moreover a work of art, as such, is not a thing to be learnt or
acquired, as formal knowledge is acquired: it is rather a presence for
the mind to commune with, and drink in the efficacy of, with an "eye
made quiet by the power of Beauty." Nor is such communion by any means
unfruitful of mental good: on the contrary, it is the right force and
food of the soundest and healthiest inward growth; and to be silent
and secret is the character of every process that is truly vital and
creative. It is on this principle that Nature, when conversed with in
the spirit of her works, acts "as a teacher of truth through joy and
through gladness, and as a creatress of the faculties by a process of
smoothness and delight"; and we gather in the richer intellectual
harvest from such converse when the mind is too intent on Nature's
forms to take any thought of its gatherings. We cannot truly live with
her without being built up in the best virtues of her life. It is a
mighty poor way of growing wise, when one loves to see
"Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart."
And so the conversing rightly with works of art may not indeed be very
available for showing off in recitation: it is all the better for
that, inasmuch as its best effect must needs be too deep for the
intellectual consciousness to grasp: because the right virtue of Art
lies in a certain self-withdrawing power which catches the mind as
from a distance, and cheats the forces of self-applause into
abdication through intentness of soul. All which infers, moreover,
that a full appreciation of any true work of art cannot be
extemporized; for such a work has a thousand meanings, which open out
upon the eye gradually, as the eye feeds and grows and kindles up to
them: its virtue has to _soak_ into the mind insensibly; and to this
end there needs a long, smooth, quiet fellowship.