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_ ART.
GIVE to barrows trays and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance,
Bring the moonlight into noon
Hid in gleaming piles of stone;
On the city's paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet,
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square.
Let statue, picture, park and hall,
Ballad, flag and festival,
The past restore, the day adorn
And make each morrow a new morn
So shall the drudge in dusty frock
Spy behind the city clock
Retinues of airy kings,
Skirts of angels, starry wings,
His fathers shining in bright fables,
His children fed at heavenly tables.
'Tis the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man in Earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate,
And, moulded of one element
With the days and firmament,
Teach him on these as stairs to climb
And live on even terms with Time;
Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill.
XII. ART.
Because the soul is progressive, it never quite
repeats itself, but in every act attempts the
production of a new and fairer whole. This appears
in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if
we employ the popular distinction of works according
to their aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our
fine arts, not imitation but creation is the aim. In
landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of
a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose
of nature he should omit and give us only the spirit
and splendor. He should know that the landscape has
beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought
which is to him good; and this because the same power
which sees through his eyes is seen in that spectacle;
and he will come to value the expression of nature and
not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy the features
that please him. He will give the gloom of gloom and the
sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait he must inscribe the
character and not the features, and must esteem the man
who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or
likeness of the aspiring original within.
What is that abridgment and selection we observe
in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative
impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher
illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense
by simpler symbols. What is a man but nature's finer
success in self-explication? What is a man but a finer
and compacter landscape than the horizon figures,--
nature's eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love
of painting, love of nature, but a still finer success,
--all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left
out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted into a
musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the pencil?
But the artist must employ the symbols in use in
his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to
his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed
out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his
ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an
inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as
the spiritual character of the period overpowers the
artist and finds expression in his work, so far it
will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent
to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the
Divine. No man can quite exclude this element of
Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate
himself from his age and country, or produce a model
in which the education, the religion, the politics,
usages and arts of his times shall have no share.
Though he were never so original, never so wilful
and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every
trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very
avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will
and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he
breathes and the idea on which he and his contemporaries
live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without
knowing what that manner is. Now that which is inevitable
in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can
ever give, inasmuch as the artist's pen or chisel seems
to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe
a line in the history of the human race. This circumstance
gives a value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian,
Chinese and Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless.
They denote the height of the human soul in that hour,
and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as
deep as the world. Shall I now add that the whole extant
product of the plastic arts has herein its highest value,
as history; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate,
perfect and beautiful, according to whose ordinations all
beings advance to their beatitude?
Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office
of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are
immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.
It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist
and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we
behold what is carved and painted, as students of the
mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment,
in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety.
Until one thing comes out from the connection of things,
there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.
Our happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The
infant lies in a pleasing trance, but his individual
character and his practical power depend on his daily
progress in the separation of things, and dealing with
one at a time. Love and all the passions concentrate
all existence around a single form. It is the habit of
certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness to the
object, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and
to make that for the time the deputy of the world.
These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of
society. The power to detach and to magnify by detaching
is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and
the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary
eminency of an object,--so remarkable in Burke, in Byron,
in Carlyle,--the painter and sculptor exhibit in color
and in stone. The power depends on the depth of the
artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For
every object has its roots in central nature, and may of
course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world.
Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour
And concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it
is the only thing worth naming to do that,--be it a
sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration,
the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of
discovery. Presently we pass to some other object, which
rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example
a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the
laying out of gardens. I should think fire the best thing
in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and water,
and earth. For it is the right and property of all natural
objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties
whatsoever, to be for their moment the top of the world.
A squirrel leaping from bough to bough and making the
Wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye
not less than a lion,--is beautiful, self-sufficing, and
stands then and there for nature. A good ballad draws my
ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has
done before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of
pigs, satisfies and is a reality not less than the
frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of excellent
objects we learn at last the immensity of the world,
the opulence of human nature, which can run out to
infinitude in any direction. But I also learn that what
astonished and fascinated me in the first work astonished
me in the second work also; that excellence of all things
is one.
The office of painting and sculpture seems to be
merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell
us their last secret. The best pictures are rude
draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines
and dyes which make up the ever-changing "landscape
with figures" amidst which we dwell. Painting seems
to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When
that has educated the frame to self-possession, to
nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master
are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the
splendor of color and the expression of form, and as
I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I
see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the
indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose
out of the possible forms. If he can draw every thing,
why draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the
eternal picture which nature paints in the street, with
moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies, draped
in red and green and blue and gray; long-haired, grizzled,
white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded,
elfish,--capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.
A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the
same lesson. As picture teaches the coloring, so
sculpture the anatomy of form. When I have seen
fine statues and afterwards enter a public assembly,
I understand well what he meant who said, "When I
have been reading Homer, all men look like giants."
I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics
of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities
of its function. There is no statue like this living
man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture,
of perpetual variety. What a gallery of art have I here!
No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse original
single figures. Here is the artist himself improvising,
grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him,
now another, and with each moment he alters the whole air,
attitude and expression of his clay. Away with your
nonsense of oil and easels, of marble and chisels; except
to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they
are hypocritical rubbish.
The reference of all production at last to an
aboriginal Power explains the traits common to all
works of the highest art,--that they are universally
intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest
states of mind, and are religious. Since what skill
is therein shown is the reappearance of the original
soul, a jet of pure light, it should produce a similar
impression to that made by natural objects. In happy
hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected,
--the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple
tastes and susceptibility to all the great human
influences overpower the accidents of a local and special
culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the
world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with
us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer
charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of
art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the work of
art of human character,--a wonderful expression through
stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and
simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most
intelligible at last to those souls which have these
attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the
masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan
and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universal
language they speak. A confession of moral nature, of
purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That
which we carry to them, the same we bring back more
fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who
visits the Vatican, and passes from chamber to chamber
through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi and
candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the
richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the
simplicity of the principles out of which they all
sprung, and that they had their origin from thoughts
and laws in his own breast. He studies the technical
rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets that
these works were not always thus constellated; that
they are the contributions of many ages and many
countries; that each came out of the solitary workshop
of one artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the
existence of other sculpture, created his work without
other model save life, household life, and the sweet
and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts, and
meeting eyes; of poverty and necessity and hope and fear.
These were his inspirations, and these are the effects
he carries home to your heart and mind. In proportion to
his force, the artist will find in his work an outlet for
his proper character. He must not be in any manner pinched
or hindered by his material, but through his necessity
of imparting himself the adamant will be wax in his hands,
and will allow an adequate communication of himself, in
his full stature and proportion. He need not cumber himself
with a conventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the
mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house and weather and
manner of living which poverty and the fate of birth have
made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted
wood cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in
the log-hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging
where he has endured the constraints and seeming of a city
poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as the
symbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently
through all.
I remember when in my younger days I had heard of
the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great
pictures would be great strangers; some surprising
combination of color and form; a foreign wonder,
barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and
standards of the militia, which play such pranks in
the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I was to
see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at last
to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that
genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and
ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the
simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere;
that it was the old, eternal fact I had met already
in so many forms,--unto which I lived; that it was
the plain you and me I knew so well,--had left at home
in so many conversations. I had the same experience
already in a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing
was changed with me but the place, and said to myself--
'Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over
four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which
was perfect to thee there at home?' That fact I saw
again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of
sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome and to
the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and
Leonardo da Vinci. "What, old mole! workest thou in
the earth so fast?" It had travelled by my side; that
which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in the
Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and made all
travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require
this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not
that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and
plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and
all great pictures are.
The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent
example of this peculiar merit. A calm benignant
beauty shines over all this picture, and goes
directly to the heart. It seems almost to call
you by name. The sweet and sublime face of Jesus
is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all florid
expectations! This familiar, simple, home-speaking
countenance is as if one should meet a friend. The
knowledge of picture-dealers has its value, but
listen not to their criticism when your heart is
touched by genius. It was not painted for them, it
was painted for you; for such as had eyes capable
of being touched by simplicity and lofty emotions.
Yet when we have said all our fine things about
the arts, we must end with a frank confession, that
the arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best
praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the
resources of man, who believes that the best age of
production is past. The real value of the Iliad or
the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or
ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of
the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its
worst estate the soul betrays. Art has not yet come
to its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with
the most potent influences of the world, if it is not
practical and moral, if it do not stand in connection
with the conscience, if it do not make the poor and
uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a voice
of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the
arts. They are abortive births of an imperfect or
vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create; but in
its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of
working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples
and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are.
Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its
end. A man should find in it an outlet for his whole
energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can
do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the
walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the
beholder the same sense of universal relation and power
which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest
effect is to make new artists.
Already History is old enough to witness the old
age and disappearance of particular arts. The art
of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect.
It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a
savage's record of gratitude or devotion, and among
a people possessed of a wonderful perception of form
this childish carving was refined to the utmost
splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and
youthful people, and not the manly labor of a wise
and spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with
leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I
stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our
plastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation
is driven into a corner. I cannot hide from myself
that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as
of toys and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture.
Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its
secret we do not yet find. But the gallery stands at
the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when
it becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton,
with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of
planets and suns, should have wondered what the Earl
of Pembroke found to admire in "stone dolls." Sculpture
may serve to teach the pupil how deep is the secret of
form, how purely the spirit can translate its meanings
into that eloquent dialect. But the statue will look
cold and false before that new activity which needs
to roll through all things, and is impatient of
counterfeits and things not alive. Picture and sculpture
are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true
art is never fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest music
is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it
speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth,
or courage. The oratorio has already lost its relation to
the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading
voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not
be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is
a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful
woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.
Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a romance.
A true announcement of the law of creation, if a
man were found worthy to declare it, would carry
art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its
separate and contrasted existence. The fountains
of invention and beauty in modern society are all
but dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a
ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers in
the alms-house of this world, without dignity,
without skill or industry. Art is as poor and low.
The old tragic Necessity, which lowers on the brows
even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique,
and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of
such anomalous figures into nature,--namely, that
they were inevitable; that the artist was drunk with
a passion for form which he could not resist, and
which vented itself in these fine extravagances,--no
longer dignifies the chisel or the pencil. But the
artist and the connoisseur now seek in art the
exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the
evils of life. Men are not well pleased with the
figure they make in their own imaginations, and they
flee to art, and convey their better sense in an
oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same
effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely to
detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the
work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to
enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this
division of beauty from use, the laws of nature do
not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not from
religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the
seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in
canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction;
an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not
beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can
never execute any thing higher than the character can
inspire.
The art that thus separates is itself first separated.
Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin
farther back in man. Now men do not see nature to be
beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall
be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible,
and console themselves with color-bags and blocks of
marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create a death
which they call poetic. They despatch the day's weary
chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They eat and
drink, that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus
is art vilified; the name conveys to the mind its
secondary and bad senses; it stands in the imagination
as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck with death
from the first. Would it not be better to begin higher
up,--to serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to
serve the ideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the
breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty must come
back to the useful arts, and the distinction between
the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history
were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be
no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from
the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful.
It is therefore beautiful because it is alive, moving,
reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is
symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call
of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or
America its history in Greece. It will come, as always,
unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave
and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius
to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its
instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary
facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill.
Proceeding from a religious heart it will raise to a
divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-
stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our
commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the
prism, and the chemist's retort; in which we seek now
only an economical use. Is not the selfish and even cruel
aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to
mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary
impulses which these works obey? When its errands are noble
and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old
and New England and arriving at its ports with the
punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with
nature. The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along the
Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When
science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by
love, they will appear the supplements and continuations
of the material creation.
THE END.
Essays, 1st Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. _
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