Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/artideasculptureOOjarv THE SCULPTURE, PAINTING, AND ARCHI- TECTURE IN AMERICA. BY yjMES JACKSON JARFES. THIRD EDITION. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY KURD AND HOUGHTON, 459 BKOOMli Stkeet. 1866. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by James Jackson Jarves, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massa- chusetts. RIVERSIDE, Cambridge: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. 0- HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. I INSCRIBE 3rM35 Itttle ITolume TO HER WHOSE TRUTH AND LOVE COMPLETE MY HAPPINESS IN LIFE, MY WIFE. Boston, April, 1864 CONTENTS. CHAPTER 1. PAGB Life a Self-enlarging Sphere. — The Mental Relationship of Men 1 CHAPTER n. Art-Queries. — Origin and Nature of Art. — What has it done for us ? — What are its Possibilities ? — What Re- lation does it bear to Science ? — Vagueness of Words. — Definition of Art , 4 CHAPTER HI. The Importance of Art as a Teacher. — Liability of over- estimating it. — Liability of under-estimating it. — How it affects the Uncultivated Mind. — To be cultivated. — Its Importance as a Vehicle of Knowledge. — Its Utility in Elementary Education. — Relative Nature and Func- tions of Science and Art. — The Dangers of Art. — The Chief Obstacles to Science. — Character of Inspiration. — Knowledge essential to Art - Understanding. — In what manner Art becomes efficacious 10 CHAPTER IV. Art addresses every Mind. — Nature one Form of God*s Teaching, Art another. — Nature is God's Art. — Art as the Divine Creative Faculty bestowed on Man. — Few Artists, — many Critics. — Art has a Message to every Soul. — What is it? — Why Art-Feeling is dor- mant in America. — Its Effects upon first awakening in vi CONTENTS, the Individual. — Effect of Nature upon Susceptible Temperaments. — The Way to approach True Art. — A Mistake. — A Confession. — A Request 17 CHAPTER V. Primary Relation of Art to Religion. — Priestcraft appro- priates Art. — Origin of Sculpture. Painting at tirst Subordinate. — Primary Significance of Color. — The Rainbow as a Symbol. — Object of Art in Egypt, — India, — China. — Definition of Spirit and Spiritual. — Want of Art among the Hebrews. — Its Development in Greece. — Gradual Divorce from Sacerdotalism. — Final Freedom of the Artist. — Result 22 CHAPTER VI. Origin of Mythology. — Effect on Grecian Art. — Its Emancipation from Egj^ptian Art. — Examples. — The Egyptian Apollo. — The great Law of Change as ap- plied to Art. — Antagonistic Qualities of Greek and Egyptian Art. — How we are to judge of Past Art. — Analysis of the Causes of the Perfection of Grecian Art. — Reaction of Philosophy vs. Polytheism. — Gre- cian Faith and Art perish together. — Rise of Mono- theism. — Effect upon Art. — Christianity repeats the Practice of Paganism. — Better Seed. — New Unfold- ings of Faith, followed by Relapse to Primitive Igno- rance in Art. — Laws and Examples of Grecian Art . . 23 CHAPTER VII. Christian Art-Motive. — The Three Phases of Christian Art. — Objections to Generalization. — Necessity for. — The Protestants of the Dark Ages. — The Dawning Phase. — Comparison between Grecian and Christian Art, in Character and Execution. — Examples. — The Laokoon. — Dying Gladiator. — Sensualism of Chris- tian Art. — Whence derived. — Art-Aspect of Oriental Symbolism. — Dante. — Milton. — Orgagna. — Michel CONTENTS. vii Angelo. — Their Works as Art and Illustrations of Chris- tian Ideas. — Phidias. — Apollo de Belvedere. — Flora of Naples. — Torso de Belvedere. — Elgin Marbles. — Perfect Art. — Bad Art. — The Demand of the Present Age. — Ideal in Art a Comparative Term. — Pieta of Michel Angelo. — Domenichino's St. Jerome. — Ra- phael's Transfiguration. — God and Christ as Art-Ob- jects. — Christ of Michel Angelo. — Tenerani: Saviour, Angel, and Descent from the Cross. — Pagan Ascetic Art. — The Diogenes of Naples. — Christian Ascetic Art.— The St. Jerome of Agostino Carracci. — Heathen and Christian Grotesque compared. — II Penseroso. ... 46 CHAPTER Vm. The Comparison of Classical and Christian Art continued. — Different Treatment and Love of Landscape. — Christian Art excels in Idea and Comprehensiveness. — Mythology and God the " Father" as Art-Inspirations. — Roman Catholic Art tends to Polytheism, — Classical Philosophical Art to Monotheism. — Art-Deities of the Roman Church. — Causes of Image- Worship 77 CHAPTER IX. Architecture, the Culmination of Art, is to Man what Nature is to God. — Nature not Perfect, but Progres- sive. — Definition of Perfection CHAPTER X. Analogy between Nature and Architecture, as the Respec- tive Creations of God and Man. — Life-Motives of Na- tions to be read in their Architecture. — Relation of Art-Monuments to the Religious or Governing Thoughts in Central America, Mexico, Peru, China, Hindostan, Egypt, Assyria. — The Peculiar Inspiration of the Earliest Architecture. — Pelasgic. — Etruscan. — Gre- cian. — Roman. —Romanesque, Lombard, Byzantine.— viii CONTENTS, PAGA Gothic. — Meaning and Aim. — Defects and Causes. — Influence of the Roman Church over it. — Renaissant and Palatial Styles 93 CHAPTER XI. Classical and Christian Domestic Art compared. — Influ- ence of Climate upon Art, — of Race. — Why Chris- tianity prefers Painting to Sculpture.— -Respective Mer- its of the Two. — Classical Taste delights in Human Figure, — Modern Taste, in Landscape. — The Refor- mation and Northern Schools. — Protestantism and Romanism as Art-Motives 132 CHAPTER XH. What Protestantism offers to Art. — Its Scope of Idea, — Identification with the People, — Fashion, — Prom- ise. — Dutch School. — English School. — Turner. — Blake. — Pre-Raphaelitism. — The German, Belgian, and French Schools, and their Chief Artists 152 CHAPTER XIII. An Inquiry into the Art-Conditions and Prospects of America. — Art-Criticism. — Press, People, and Cler- gy. — Needs of Artists and Public. — American Know- nothingism in Art. — Eclecticism. — The True Path . . 171 CHAPTER XIV. Painting and the Early Painters of America. — Benja- min West; Copley; Leslie; Trumbull; Sully; Peale; Stuart; Mount; Vanderlyn; Cole; Washington All- ston 200 CHAPTER XV. The New School of American Painting contrasted with the Old. — The Dusseldorf Element. — Edwin White; Leutze. — American Pre-Raphaelites. — Italian Influ- CONTENTS. ix ence. — Tilten; Page; Wight; C. G. Thompson.-— The French-American Element. — Genre Artists. — Eastman Johnson; Hinckley; Beard; Thorndike; Dana; Cole; Hunt; La Farge; Babcock. — The Acad- emicians. — Gray ; Huntington; Wier. — Portraiture. — Elliot ; Healey ; Ames. — Landscapists. — Church ; Bierstadt; Kensett; Gifford; Cropsey; Sontag; Gi- noux; Heade; G. L. Brown; Bradford; Inness; Dar- ley; Billings; Nast; Vedder. — Naturalism, Realism, and Idealism compared and illustrated. — Summary. . 211 CHAPTER XVI. The American School of Sculpture. Its Origin. — Greenough. — Modern Motives. — Sculpture as a Trade. — Clark Mills ; Powers ; Crawford ; Dexter ; King. — Chantrey's Washington. — Our Portrait - Statues. — Those of the Ancients. — Randolf Rogers. — The Gates of Paradise, — of the Capitol. — Ball ; Brown ; Harriet Hosmer; Miss Stebbins; John Rogers; Dr. Rimmer; Paul Akers; Palmer; William Story; Ward. — Conclusion 260 CHAPTER XVII. Review of American Architecture, Past and Present. — The Prospect before it. — Summary of Fundamental Principles 286 CHAPTER XVIII. The Art-Idea is the Beautifier of Civilization. — Duty of Individuals. — Central Park vs. Harvard College. — The Institutions America needs. — Selfishness of the American " Home." — The Abuse of the " Family '* Spirit. — New York. — Boston. — Mount Auburn. — Puritan Love of Beauty. — How Exhibited. — Street- Cars. — Shop - Windows. — Manners. — What Boston enjoys. — What she has thrown away. — Conclusion. . 315 337 X CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIX. Art-Institutions and Art-Education in Europe and Amer- ica CHAPTER XX. Review of the Art-Phase of Civilization, as derived from Greece and Judea. — The Future of Art based upon Protestant Freedom. — Quality of the Artistic Mind. — Of the Scientific Need of Art. — Radical Difference be- tween Science and Art. — The Intellectual Repose of the Scientific Mind, — the Passional Unrest of the Ar- tistic. — Anal^^sis of Causes and Results. — What Sci- ence can do. — Legitimate Sources. — Highest Art. — What Cultivation requires 354 Appendix 375 THE AET-IDEA. CHAPTER L Life a Self-enlarging Sphere. — The Mental Eelationship of Men. IFE may be likened to a sphere wliich includes an inexhaustible series of circles of knowledge. In the beginning we are but a simple point. But mind having the power of self-increase, each successive experience en- larges its circumference. Ultimately it may in- clude within its grasp all love and wisdom short of Divinity. The mental processes by which we thus en- large our circles are worthy of attentive observa- tion, partly from the satisfaction of analyzing and appreciating the mind's growth, but chiefly as indicative of the illimitable future of knowledge which they gradually open to our view, in the degree that we humbly, earnestly, and continuedly demand to know the secrets of Immortality. If it were not for this ever-expanding Future to tempt us on, we should speedily despair of the Present, and pronounce it only vanity and vex- ation. But the farther we advance, the more power we comprehend within ourselves ; so that 1 2 ME. the pleasure of learning rests not so mucli on that which we have attained to, as with what remains for us to know. Each fact, thought, and acquire- ment is but so much oil added to our lamp, whereby to diffuse greater light to our intellect- ual vision. Knowledge becomes teachable and humble in proportion to its advancement, be- cause it measures all things in an increasing light; while ignorance, believing its farthing candle to be the sun, ever shows itself vain, contradictory, and headstrong. Wherever there is a sincere disposition to know, wisdom responds ; but the dirty work, the wick-trimming and lamp-cleaning, is wisely left to ourselves. We must with our own fingers keep our cans open and dur torches burning. In doing this we receive, as of our own right, a never-failing supply of the divine fuel, whose heat expands our souls, filling the universe with their presence and desire. The several phases of knowledge are as clearly distinguishable in the advancement of the mind, with their relative effects thereon, as are the varied experiences of the affections in the growth of the heart. But our progress is necessa- rily a mixed one. Body and mind by turns coerce one another. Now soul is uppermost; then undermost. This busy, idle, capricious, rest- less, doubting, believing, struggling, despairing, hoping, praying Me, with its entanglement of sense and spirit, in shadow and sunshine, ever strives to present to the world a self-balanced, imposing I; but the superficial glance only can MENTAL RELATIONSHIP, 5 be deceived by it. The clairvoyant eye of expe- rience sees within the alternate victory or defeat. Indeed, so cognate are our natures, that the real life, or outer sham, of a fellow-being may prove to be the counterpart of one's self Without the universal tie of humanity, the artist's or author's appeal would be as responseless as a stringless harp. In some form or other, happiness is Hfe's common object. Whatever bewilderments beset its pursuit, all men instinctively seek it ; the wise in the garb of divine truth, the foolish in the delusions of a selfish and sensual life. If, reader, you are of the former class, bear, we pray, with the abstract character of our remarks for a while, until we have shown the connection between the art-idea and divine truth, in the great design of civilizing and making glad the earth. But if the other path charm you most, pause here, for we do not wish to invite an unappreciating mind into the sanctuary of Art. " What ho ! What tidings have you for us ? " Such is our constant cry to brother and sister more advanced in the search. Cheerfully, lovingly, comfortingly, have many responded, holding out their hands to aid us to reach their point of view. When there, though not always seeing as they did, still we have seen farther and clearer than before. Thanks ! many, many thanks ! What we have received it is a duty as freely to give. If, therefore, we can aid toiling spirits, even as ours has often been helped, like harvest-seed cast upon the Egyptian waters, this labor, in due time, will be returned to us in the true bread of life. CHAPTER IT. Art-Queries. — Origin and Nature of Art. — What has it done for us ? — What are its Possibilities V — What Relation does it bear to Science? — Vagueness of Words. — Definition of ^HAT is the origin and nature of the art- are its possibilities ? What relation does it bear to science ? Such are some of the points we wish to suggest thought upon, rather than hope to entirely elucidate. But a serious difficulty arises, in the outset, from the uncertainty of words. Goethe aptly observes, " To speak is to begin to err." Unless we can first make clear the exact meaning we attach to the terms applied to art, any attempt to discuss its nature would be futile, because we should have no fixed ideas to reason from. Words, unfortunately, are vague in the ratio of their generalization. Thus art, science, religion, philosophy, God, and all other comprehensive nouns, convey to different minds conceptions as various as their several moral and intellectual at- tainments. Truth must indeed remain the same, for it is eternal and immutable ; but it is always relative in degree to the individual, being propor- Art. What has it done for us ? What DEFINITION OF ART, 5 tioned to his intelligence and capacity. Languago is the more perplexing because every grade of knowledge, and even temperament, has its own formula of expression. As minds grow, words also change their significance to them. It is im- possible, therefore, to fix upon a definition of general terms so exact as to convey precisely the same import to all individuals. The most any one can do is to explain as clearly as possible what is meant by himself in the use of an am- biguous or controvertible word. Without undertaking here to define art pre- cisely, we may generalize it as the love of the soul in the sense that science can be considered its law. Each is requisite to the proper action of the other, as its counter-weight or balance. Art adorns science. Science is the helpmeet of art. Their action and interaction are close and inti- mate. Apart, the one is erratic, mystic, and un- equal in its expression, the other cold, severe, and formal ; because Beauty is the main prin- ciple of the former, as Utility is of the latter ; while Truth, of mind or matter, and consequent enjoyment or benefit therefrom, is their common aim. A more popular definition would be simply to call Art the ornamental side of life, as Science is its useful. That is, whatever is produced by man in which beauty is the predominant feature, may be considered as having its origin in the art-idea ; while things primarily necessary or useful, although in a common sense classified as of the arts, may be viewed as the distinctive 6 ART-FORMS. expression of the scientific faculty. We build, manufacture, classify, investigate, and theorize, under the first-named power. It clothes, warms, feeds, protects, and instructs man, and is the prime agent of his comfort, material progress, and general knowledge. But our pleasure is more intimately related to art as the producer of what delights the eye and ear and adminis- ters to sensuous enjoyment. This is, however, merely an external or super- ficial view of art and science, and has reference simply to mundane objects. The final definition is based upon their connection with the unseen, — that subtile and diviner sense, which, as it makes Science the material expression or image of Wisdom, so it renders Art the spiritual repre- sentative of Love. By its inspiration, art aims to convey or suggest ideas and feelings, which, by appealing more directly to the imagination, lift us above the ordinary laws of matter, into the world of spirit, and, as it were, lets its light shine through upon our physical senses, so veiled by material beauty that we can endure its efful- gence ; or, we may say, like pictorial language to children, it brings down the mcomprehensible, by a species of incarnation, to the range of finite faculties. Art-forms are, first, the expression of man's attempt at a portraiture of nature, in its mani- fold variety, according to his individual under- standing thereof ; and, secondly, a reaching-forth after the possibilities of his faith and imagina- tion. In this latter sense it is the instrument AR T-EXPRESSION. 7. of the spiritual and intellectual creative faculty, and its mission is to foreshadow in matter the thoughts of man in his search of the beautiful or infinite. This is its Idealistic bias, as the former is its Naturalistic. The one is based upon the perceptive and imitative faculties, the other upon the inventive and creative. For the first, God has written a plain copy in the mate- rial creation; and for the second, he has let into the soul, as a window, imagination, through which reason catches glimpses of a nature more perfect than that seen only by the external eye. Although we consider Art-expression as dual- istic, from the fact that nature itself is divisible in relation to art into two great divisions, name- ly, that which is the fruit of the external senses alone, and that which is more particularly the product of idea, yet, generically, art-motives are threefold : — First : Decoration, or that which has for its object ornament and pleasure, and is addressed chiefly to the sensuous faculties. This is the most common, and enters largely into food, cloth- ing, building, manufacture, and polite manners, in ^nort, everything which, over and above abso- lute necessity, gratifies the aesthetic sense. Secondly : Illustration, or that which has main- ly reference to the intellect; teaching, preser- vation, and reminiscence being its chief aims. This includes historical, descriptive, and portray- ing art, and is based directly on facts and natural truths. Tliirdly : Revelation, or the imaginative side 8 ART A TjEST of CULTURE. of art, expressing the inner life and its subtile element, as inspired by the rehgious or poetical faculties, or, under the control of a debased will and the inferior passions, revealing the pos- sibilities of the spirit for the base and sensual. Art, consequently, has varied aspects, accord- ing as it is inspired by the perceptive, rational- istic, or imaginative faculties. Although we find in different ages and artists an intermingling of these three characteristics, yet in general there exists a predominance of one insph-ation above the others sufficient to particularize an epoch, and permit us to speak of it as the rul- ing motive. In any of its phases art is simply a medium by which the thought or feeling of the time and artist is spread open like a book, to be read and judged of all men. Of itself it is neither good nor evil, but speaks equally or mixedly the language of sense, intellect, or spirit, as the will dictates. From its passivity it is a delicate test of the moral and intellectual culture and inmost life of all who employ it ; because, being the result, in material expression, of man's aspirations, feelings, and faith, it dis- closes, with the exactness of the daguerreotype, the precise condition of the individual mind, and the general characteristics of the era in which it has its being. Poetry, music, and the drama, as well as paint- ing and sculpture, must be included in the generic term Art, because, in each, truths of beauty and harmony of form, color, sound, action, or thought, are sought to be expressed under combinations WHAT ART IS. 9 the most pleasing and incentive alike to our sen- suous, emotional, and mental faculties ; and we are in consequence more or less let out of our- selves into general nature or particular humanity, or made to penetrate deeper into the mysteries of our own being, rather tlirough the force of sympathetic feeling than of logical analysis. Therefore whatever has the power to thus affect men, and is neither directly derived from innate or pure reason and science, nor is the manifest lan- guage of nature itself, but suggests the spirit, power, or presence, alike of the seen and unseen, and yet is only their artificial expression, — that is Art, CHAPTEE in. The Importance of Art as a Teacher. — Liability of over- estimating it. — Liability of under-estimating it. — How it affects the Uncultivated Mind. — To be cultivated. — Its Importance as a Vehicle of Knowledge. — Its Utility in Elementary Education. — Relative Nature and Functions of Science and Art. — The Dangers of Art. — The Chief Obstacles to Science. — Character of Inspiration. — Knowl- edge essential to Art-Understanding. — In what Manner Art becomes Efficacious. |^S)INCE art bears so close a relationship '^^^^^ be of vital importance to our civilization. In the enthusiasm of a favorite pursuit or sudden mental illumination we are liable to overrate its instrument, as, later, when having entered upon new and more exalted reaches of knowledge, a tendency to underrate the previous agencies of our progress is apt to occur. Art is peculiarly liable to misconception in either of these particu- lars, on account of the difficulty of defining its limits, and from its alliance with feeling, by whose impulses judgment is so often overborne and justice obscured. The simple rule by which art affects the unin- structed mind is that of natiu*al affinity. To whatever we are most inclined inwardly, we turn faculties, it follows that it must ART-FEELING INNATE. 11 with most satisfaction in its external expression. Thus the simple, tender, and true appreciate most keenly the works of art in which those senti- ments are best manifested. Some turn directly to the merely intellectual, in which art is made secondary to scientific or historical truth; they see, with undisguised delight, that the natm^al and positive fact is skilfully represented, and the external object or scene familiarized to their eye ; this is their greatness of art. A few only are primarily and spontaneously touched by evidences of the highest motives : the struggling as of cap- tive spirit to escape into a celestial atmosphere, where emotion forgets rule and becomes sublime in its very ignorance of mechanical execution by its suggestiveness of noble effort. There are minds, however, that see in such work only mat- ter for ridicule or antipathy ; they turn with zest to vulgar imitation, by which the things or pas- sions which please them most in the possession or exercise are made obvious to their sight and desire. A correct appreciation of art is of gradual mental growth and study. Shakspeare's plays would be a sealed book to a savage, and Beetho- ven's music an unmeaning noise. But the feeling for art is innate in men, although widely differing in extent and purity. With all, early contact with art is like the primary experiences of infancy with the persons about it. A disposition to man- ifest the natural bias of the character is the result. This tendency, as we have previously remarked, necessarily implies a disclosure of the 12 AET AS A VEHICLE OF KNOWLEDGE. inmost likings of heart and mind. It is therefore interesting to accompany intelhgent and impres- sible individuals on their first introductions to the art-world. Their proclivities often are as ingenu- ously and naively developed as are those of un- sophisticated savages on seeing for the first time the gewgaws of the white man. The importance of art as a vehicle of knowl- edge is but imperfectly appreciated, because its results are so common. But, were all the picto- rial, engraved, or sculptured representations of scenery, costumes, natural objects, deeds, and men, in short, all that, being of the past, we necessarily could not see, and which, of the present, is out of the range of our immediate vision, taken from us, the greater part of history and of the surface of the globe would cease to have to us a tangible, vi- talized existence. In the mind's childhood, words are but an imperfect means, as compared with form and color, of conveying accurate impressions of actions and objects. Art, therefore, in its pri- mary stage, is the elementary education of indi- viduals and nations. By pictures and toys we give to children their first ideas of things not un- der their own immediate observation. Infancy, in education, reverses the rule of the mature mind. It seeks to know the outside of objects, asks first what a thing looks like, and but slowly learns that the external, with all its infinite vari- ety, is but the changeable and transitory image of a few simple principles of mind and matter, into wliich God has breathed the breath of life. • WHEN ART IS INFERIOR TO SCIENCE, 13 In reference to education, art, therefore, is ini- tial. The earliest alphabets were but rude pic- tures, or symbols of objects and ideas. Before man acquires the faculty of mental sight, by which the artificial signs we call letters convey to him impressions adequate to the things they represent or to the thoughts they embody, he must have first learned his lesson of the outer world, both from nature and art, or otherwise words would be to him meaningless. Even in its higher, not highest degree, art performs but an inferior function, compared with abstract science. It is to that what the body is to the spirit ; for it exists only as an appeal to our soul, through thought or beauty embodied in matter, and therefore, in this aspect, cannot go beyond suggestion. Science, apart from its material mission, by which it seconds art and descends to be a servant of man, has still a nobler purpose, and talks face to face with spirit, disclosing its knowledge direct to mind itself. By unfolding the laws of being it carries thought into the infinite, and creates an inward art, so perfect and expanded in its concep- tions that material objects fashioned by the ar- tist's hand become eloquent only as the feeling which dictated them is found to be impregnated with, and expressive of, the truths of science. The mind indignantly rejects as false all that the imagination would impose upon it not consistent with the great principles by which God manifests himself in harmony with creation. As nature is His art, so science is the progressive disclosure 14 AET AS A SNAEE. of His soul, or tliat divine philosophy wliich, in comprehending all knowledge, must include art as one of its forms. Hence, in order that art be effectual as a teacher, it must be consistent with that which teaches it. Otherwise it falls into isolated or inferior truths, and, by being detached from those great principles which alone give it moral value, it perverts knowledge and corrupts the heart. "While art, therefore, is valuable as an elemen- tary teacher by reason of its alliance with sci- ence, it particularly exposes man to seductive influences, through the medium of his senses, from its greater affinity for feeling. In the de- gree that the soul's vision is obscured by carnal instincts, sensation and reason develop themselves in the direction of external life, seizing upon that as their chief object of pleasure and investigation, and thus, by ignoring the divine origin and pur- pose of matter, come to view it as the ultimate good of existence. This sensuous proclivity of art is its chief snare, but its force depends upon the tendency of human will. The chief obstacle to science is its inexorable demand upon pure reason, which implies the labor of thought ; for the exercise of the mind is as necessary for its growth as is that of the hands for the cultivation of the field. If art or science recognize the spirit's integuments as the sole objective reality of life, corruption and falsehood are certain to ensue. We cannot know or possess unless we work, not in pride or despair, but in faith that as w^e plant so shall we reap. On the other THE OFFICE OF WILL, 15 hand, in viewing forms simply as the incrustation of spirit, and in subjecting the outer to the imier life, we more nearly approach the sources of beauty and truth. In one sense, all truth comes of suggestion; so, in the same sense, does all falsehood. In the one instance we call it inspiration ; in the other, temptation. But whence and how thoughts and ideas come and go, no man can tell. There is an impenetrable barrier to finite faculties. Yet those laws of being which to earthly senses are obscure and indefinable, will, in the greater light of future life, become as clear and intelli- gible as gravitation or numbers are now. It is in vain, therefore, to seek to define how we think, or become conscious. We can hope to discover the principles and laws of all thmgs connected with our present being, except the cause of being itself, which all mankind spon- taneously resolve into the indefinable proposi- tion, God. On this all must rest. But, while the essence of life is so mysterious that even Jesus compared it to the wind, — whence it Cometh, and whither it goeth, no man being able to tell, — yet it is palpable to the humblest understanding that the quality and direction of its thoughts depend upon the will. God does not force himself upon reluctant minds, or over- charge their faculties with ideas disproportioned to their powers ; but, as they labor for good or evil, so come thoughts and feelings correspond- ing to their desires ; as one flower attracts from the atmosphere the sweetest of odors, while an- 16 ROW MIND IS INSPIRED. other collects the foulest. Thus it is that we are inspired. Our minds receive from the unseen a spiritual nutriment, which strengthens them in the direction they would grow. With some in- dividuals, cultivation regulates its pace ; thought comes orderly, and is systematically progressive. These are our sages and men of science. With others, it springs up in strange exuberance, flash- ing tropical colors from way-side seeds, burning, scintillating, and startling by its sudden and un- equal fires ; great truths amid rank weeds ; a wilderness of chaotic beauty and noble forms. Out of such inspiration speaks the artist, poet, and seer. While art should partake of the character of inspiration, free, earnest, and high-toned, embody- ing the feeling which gives it birth, its forms should exhibit a scientific correctness in every particular, and, as a unity, be expressive of the general principle at its centre of being. In this manner feeling and reason are reconciled, and a complete and harmonious whole is obtained. In the degree that this union obtains in art its works become efficacious, because embodying, under the garb of beauty, the most of truth. CHAPTER lY. Art addresses every Mind. — Nature one Form of God's Teaching, Art another. — Nature is God's Art. — Art as the Divine Creative Faculty bestowed on Man. — Few Ar- tists, — many Critics. — Art has a Message to every Soul. — What is it ? — Why Art-Feeling is dormant in America. — Its Effects upon first awakening in the Individual. — Effect of Nature upon Susceptible Temperaments. — The Way to approach True Art. — A Mistake. — A Confession. — A Request. ^^i^RT being so important an element in edu- ^ cation, it must necessarily exercise a cor- ^^^^ responding influence over a mind in con- tact with it. The natural world presents one form of divine teaching, and art another. Both, we repeat, are the incarnation of spirit in form. The first is the direct sculpture, painting, music, and poetry of God himself; the second is the material given to man, with the power of commu- nicating, through the agency of his hands, sugges- tions of his own nature, the universe, and their joint Creator. By the exercise of this indirect creative faculty the artist partakes of a divine function, insomuch as Divinity delegates to him the infinite talent by which he represents the creative principle, and, by its stimulus, is trained ibr a loftier being. 2 18 GREAT ARTISTS RARE. But few men possess the ability to communi- cate manually the evidence of a divine embassy. All, however, have more or less discerning pow- er, and hence are correspondingly able to re- ceive, and sit in judgment upon, its credentials. Great artists are, of consequence, rare, while competent critics are not infrequent. As art- feeling is innate in all men, though widely differ- ing in degree, art must have a message for every one brought witliin its reach. What has been that message to you ? to us ? The first picture that we can recall was a " Coronation of Napoleon I., " which we saw when eight years of age. Our first impression was of wonder how a flat surface could be made to present such an appearance of projected fig- ures, and the impulse was to approach the can- vas to detect the mechanical means by which it was produced. When satisfied that it was veri- table painting, the story absorbed our attention, and we took our first vivid lesson in history. In America the art-feeling necessarily remains in a great degree dormant, from lack of its objects. Hence, when Americans are first introduced into the world of art of Europe, their feeling being suddenly aroused without the counterpoise of a ripened judgment, they are blinded by excess of light, and manifest their tastes and predilections much after the capricious manner in wliich chil- dren express their wonder and desire upon their earliest entrance into a toy-shop. But their in- discriminate rapture or aversion gradually sub- sides into an intelligent perception of art-motives, FIRST EXPERIENCE. 19 and an earnest inquisition into its principles ; for no people are more eager in the exploration of the unknown, as its horizon bursts upon their vision. Our first great experience was the Louvre gal- lery. Wandering through its interminable ranges of pictures, or lost in its vast halls of statuary, we became oppressed, confused, uncertain, and feverish ; filled with unaccountable likes and dis- likes ; , passing, in a convulsive effort to main- tain mental equilibrium, sweeping censures upon whole schools, and eulogizing others as foolishly ; hurrying from one object to another with de- lirious rapidity, as if the whole were a bubble, ready to burst at any moment; until, with a weary, addled brain, but unmoved heart, we gladly escaped into the outer air for breath. Our puny self was crushed by the weight and variety of the intellect incarnated within those walls. With nature on every scale we had long been at home in various quarters of the globe. Her scenes had always brought delight and repose. If new and overwhelming, they indeed crowd emo- tion into a thrill of joy, or a gush of tearful pas- sion ; but it is an excitement that soothes, and leaves the beholder wiser, happier, and better, if there be in him any affinity with the great soul of the universe. Mrs. Browning once told us, that, upon reaching the summit of Mount Saint Gothard, she was constrained, by the force of the mountain gloom and glory, instantly to weep. All persons whose hearts are not made callous by ignorance, vice, or familiarity, are keenly suscep- tible to the eloquence of nature. 20 MISTAKES OF JUDGMENT, The first interview with true art produces a movement of the soul scarcely less spontaneous and deep, when we abandon ourselves with equal confidence to its influence. But if, in mental pride, we refuse to test its power over our hearts before we have canvassed its claims in the light of an uneducated understanding, confusion and folly are sure to follow. In beginning with art let us walk humbly. Like nature, it primarily addresses itself to the emotions. Set aside criti- cism, therefore, until we have learned something of ourselves through the language that moves us. To be a critic before we are a scholar is both rash and silly. And, indeed, in learning to judge of art, it is better to seek for beauties and recog- nize merits before aiming to discover defects and shortcomings. The foundation of art-apprecia- tion must be developed from within. After that comes the time to inquire, analyze, and theorize. We rushed too self-confidently into an unknown sphere, and got well brain-pummelled for our conceit. A series of mistakes gradually led us towards the right road. "We have begun to get more correct views of art. They are not its highest or deepest ; but they are our highest and deepest of to-day, and, in comparison with earlier ones, wise. We offer them, because there are some minds treading the paths that we have trod, to whom our experience may shorten the way ; while to those in advance beseechingly do we cry. Give, give ! even as we seek to give ! Stoop your flight to ours, even as by these confessions GIVE, GIVE! 21 we try to measure for others the first weary steps of progress with sometimes sad, often disappoint- ing, and yet never wholly joyless, mile-stones. So shall wisdom, from its unselfish use, be largely meted out to you again by the great Giver ! CHAPTER Y. Primary Relation of Art to Religion. — Priestcraft appropri- ates Art. — Origin of Sculpture. — Painting at first Subor- dinate. — Primary Significance of Color. — The Rainbow as a Symbol. — Object of Art in Egypt, — India, — China. — Definition of Spirit and Spiritual. — Want of Art among the Hebrews. — Its Development in Greece. — Gradual Di- vorce from Sacerdotalism. — Final Freedom of the Artist. — Result. ^^"©IGHTLY to understand art, we must (il^s^ ascertain its governing notions, in its several phases of national or individual development. So intimately associated is it with religion, in all incipient civilization, that it be- comes difficult to speak of it otherwise than under that head. Both sentiments are innate in the human mind, and each, in its beginning, develops itself chiefly through feeling. But the latter, being the more powerful and comprehensive, makes at first of the former a mere instrument to express its ideas, in the form either of symbols, or images of the celestial powers that the untutored imagination conceives as presiding over the des- tinies of men. Hence early art is always found subordinate to the religious sentiment, which it seeks to typify with but little regard to the aes- thetic principle of its own bemg. Only as it RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION, 23 escapes from vassalage to priestcraft does it assert its proper dignity and beauty. By priestcraft we refer to those crude notions of divinity which obtain among all men in their first essays to comprehend God, and which be- come more obscure or material through the mis- taken and selfish policy of priests, in invariably clothing their superior knowledge in the guise of sacred mysteries. To perpetuate their influ- ence, they deem it necessary to present to the peo- ple some visible embodiment of their doctrines. Among the first symbols of Deity were the most common natural objects, such as trees and stones. A desire to personify in material form the unseen life or intelligence which governs the world, combined with the feeling for the beautiful, un- doubtedly gave rise to sculpture. Painting was at first a mere accessory to it. Indeed, color had for ages a greater typical than ornamental signifi- cance ; and even now, in many minds, it finds noblest appreciation from a lovely chord of sym- bolism of the glories and virtues of the celestial world, and its letting down for finite enjoyment a portion of the infinite, subdued to the standard of our feeling and comprehension, which, as in the rainbow, remains to earth in all time a living hope and joy. In those earliest seats of civilization, Egypt and India, the sacerdotal influence was long the governing one. Consequently, the artistic feel- ing was overborne by the theological, and their art was soon petrified into a rigid and fixed ex- pression of metaphysical ideas, giving to their 24 ART A REVELATION OF SPIRIT. idols forms as unchangeable and enigmatical as their enigmatical conceptions of nature. India still retains her elaborate, symbolical art, — a personification of her religious philosophy to the initiated, but to the masses presenting a worship scarcely one degree removed from gross feti- chism. In China the spiritual life is still more absorbed in the material. In these countries, embracing nearly one half the human race, art, having been made a slave, has avenged its degra- dation by presenting falsehood for truth, perpet- uating error, and barring progress. The art of a nation is at once its creed and catechism. We need no other literature to reveal its mental con- dition than the objects of its religious belief or sensuous delight. With this key to the soul in hand, the comparative intelligence and progress of races are easily unlocked. Without the aid of a false and immovable art, as the easily under- stood substitute of printing, it is scarcely conceiv- able that the popular mind should have remained as immovable as it has in the East. Wherever art is thus circumscribed we find a similar result. The object itself takes precedence of the idea, and becomes an idol. Worship is replaced by superstition, so that art is presented either as a mummified dogma, or in grotesque, mystical, and unnatural shapes, and barbarous displays of color, corresponding to the false and sensual theology which inspires it. The Hebrew legislators fell into the opposite extreme to the Hindoos, and, from their reluc- tance to attempt to embody their notions of divine GRECIAN SYMBOLISM, 25 things, quenched the artistic spirit of their peo- ple so completely that even for the decorations and symbols of the temple Solomon was obliged to apply to the Tyrians, — who were themselves by no means an artistic people, — as did, later, Herod to the Greeks, when he adorned it to its utmost magnificence. Yet the Jews allowed a certain scope for art in their religious architec- ture, and the objects used in their ritual, which was in later times wholly repudiated by the fa- natical excess to which the Puritans and Quakers carried the proscription of idolatry by Moses, making it to apply to all art. By them life itself was deprived of half its legitimate happi- ness, while among the idolatrous Orientals art became a perverter of the soul on account of its divorce from intellectual freedom. It is to Greece that we must look for the first development of true art. That country was, in- deed, not without its symbolical creations which resembled nothing on the earth, whatever the theological imagination might conceive as exist- ing in the heavens, or as necessary to represent metaphysical mysteries. Many of its figures were as strange and graceless as the extraordinary emblematic art of India. Diana of Ephesus was a female monster. Grecian chimeras, and three- eyed, double-headed, and hundred-armed statues, were analogous to Oriental image - mysticism. But in its fauns, satyrs, nereids, and kindred imaginative beings, originating out of the pan- theistic element of its faith, we find the growing ascendency of the natural and beautiful holding 26 THE AIM OF GREEK ART, the symbolical in subjection, until, in the best examples of the Grecian chisel which have de- scended to our day, we perceive art not only to be wholly emancipated from priestly servi- tude, but, through its inherent intellectual force, or, more strictly speaking, genius, to have won for itself the position of teacher. Art and religion were indeed, in one sense, identical ; but the mind was unshackled, and left to its normal action. Thus the poets and artists of Greece, instead of being made the mouth-pieces and artisans of a formal faith, became the creators of a more beautiful, refined, and natural mythology, by which the sculptured gods, while emblematic to the philosophic mind of the high- est possibilities of nature and humanity, were brought home to the sympathies and thoughts of the people. The word was indeed made flesh, though in a sensuous, sesthetic sense, inferior by far to the Christ-love which descended later upon men, to elevate them to a still higher phase of life, but superior to the religious notions which had heretofore governed the world. Gre- cian art became, therefore, a joint revelation of the emancipated intellect and imagination, in- spired by the beautiful to deify the natural man by making him the pivot upon which God and nature turned. An exaggerated standard of the intellectual and physical powers and passions, aiming at the god like in expression by the elimi- nation of material weakness and all signs of im- perfection, or a personification of natural phe- nomena and of the thought and feeling suggested THE RESULT. 27 by their action, taking the guise of poetry and embodied by art, — not, as in India, in a gro- tesque accumulation of the unnatural and purely symbolical, but in shapes drawn from the visible creation, idealized into the highest beauty of form and meaning the imagination could con- ceive, and approved by science, because analogous to and founded upon the visible examples of na- ture ; — such were the mythology and art of Greece. Origin of Mythology. — Effect on Grecian Art. — Its Emanci- pation from Egyptian Art. — Examples. — The Egyptian Apollo. — The great Law of Change as applied to Art. — Antagonistic Qualities of Greek and Egyptian Art. — How we are to judge of Past Art. — Analysis of the Causes of the Perfection of Grecian Art. — Reaction of Philosophy vs. Potytheism. — Grecian Faith and Art perish together. — Rise of Monotheism. — Effect upon Art. — Christianity re- peats the Practice of Paganism. — Better Seed. — New Un- foldings of Faith, followed by Relapse to Primitive Igno- rance in Art. — Laws and Examples of Grecian Art. HE foundation of the earliest religions was either in external nature, the effect suggesting a cause, or in the mind of man himself, repeating, as it were, his own sensuous- ness or intellectual force in superhuman shapes. Both these causes tended to the development of a prolific mythology. So fixed in a mental child- hood is the disposition to personify the objects of belief, that even the Jews themselves were very far from reposing in absolute monotheism. They were the Puritans of antiquity ; as the Egyptians may be said to have shown, in their priestly as- sumption, flexibility of action, and unchangeable- ness of dogma, the likeness of Romanism ; while BEAUTY THE INSPIRER. 29 the Greeks more resembled those modern nations wliich have thrown off priestcraft. Inspired by love of philosophy, they opened up their minds to the widest ranges of thought and poetry, and, borrowing from the learning and experience of all nations, culminated their wisdom in Aristotle and Plato, and their art in Phidias and Apelles. Although beauty was the inspiration of Greek art, it was not left to the dubious direction of mere feeling, but subjected so skilfully to the acutest rules of science, that their best sculpture makes us forget art by its seeming naturalness. Whether their painting was equally advanced with their statuary still remains a mooted ques- tion ; but we may be assured, that, so far as it went, it was subjected to similar rules. That the beauty and freedom of Greek art were emphatically due to the genius of the nation itself is amply proved by the earliest spe- cimens of their sculpture. One of the most re- markable of these is the bas-relief of Leucotea, Bacchus and Ninfe, of the Villa Albani, at Kome. In it we see the dawning emancipation of Greek from Egyptian art, showing, by the greater freedom of treatment, an attempt to adapt the still rigid attitudes, bound limbs, mas- sive and imposmg formalism of the latter, — which can be properly expressed only by the kindred qualities of granite, porphyry, and other adaman- tine rocks, and owes its character as much to their color as to form, — to the more perfect uses of marble, and the natural suggestiveness of that more flexible material for greater liberty, a nicer 30 EGYPTIAN FORMALISM, sense of beauty, and a more refined expression. In striking contrast with this beginning of Greek art upon the rules and practice of the Egyptian, thus declaring its derivative origin, is the exam- ple of the later reflex influence of the former upon the latter in the Egyptian Apollo of the Vatican, which combines, in the most harmoni- ous degree, while retaining the main characteris- tics of each, the motives and excellence of either school. The god now walks, — or, rather, can, if he see fit, — for his legs are at liberty, and yet retains the severe majesty, grandem*, and sim- plicity of his Egyptian temperament, exhibiting a superhuman strength and firmness of body and character, united to the Grecian purity and re- finement of form, material, and expression. By the force of his artistic liberty and more correct appreciation of man as his highest type, the Greek artist had thoroughly freed himself from the dogmatic formalism and rigidity of Egyp- tian art. In taking away its prominent charac- teristics of painful endurance, passivity of inert strength, preponderance of matter in size and weight, stereotyped posture and expression, he not only emancipated art from prescribed forms and the dictation of priests, but also endowed it with individual liberty of thought and workman- ship. Egyptian artists were accounted as arti- sans or image-cutters of the lowest castes, and their craft by law descended from father to son. Yet, as a whole, the art of Egypt atoned in large degree for its want of freedom of progress by the mysterious sublimity of character arising from the SPIRIT OF EGYPTIAN ART, 81 nature of the material and its broad and majestic treatment. Doubtless the Egyptian idol was shorn, in the popular national mind, of the strength of its divinity by the innovations of Grecian origin ; but, to the more cultivated race, Apollo had emerged from the bondage of the land of Egypt, and walked forth truly a god. The spirit of Egyptian art was from theologi- cal necessity formal and unvaried ; of the Greek, free and changeable. Consequently, while the one allowed no motion to its artistic creations, but rested hope and faith on the passive and pet- rified sublimity of its sacred images, the other delighted in joyous, sensuous life, and brooked no restraint upon the will or actions of its divin- ities, for what was happiness and possibility to them was likewise joy and possibility for human- ity, only in an inferior degree. It is therefore instructive to compare, in their respective sculp- ture, the antagonistic qualities of their religions, and to trace the mutual influence of parent and child, — for much of the civilization of Greece may be said, in its incipiency, to bear that rela- tion to Egypt, — and then to contrast both with early Etruscan sculpture, and note how distinct and independent in its origin and feeling the last seems from the other two, aiming at the natural and vigorous, but lacking the more beautiful in- spiration of the Greek mind, although finally overborne by it. Every phase of existence contains within itself its seeds of destruction, or, more strictly speak- ing, change, by which a higher condition of life 32 SPIRIT OF GREEK ART. is ultimately evolved out of the lower. Ideas and manners go through as natural a process of growth, decay, and renewal in new forms, as does the vegetable creation. Nature, having done with one class of thoughts or things, never recalls their existence. Their uses perish with their non-necessity. We could/as successfully re- vive a race of behemoths or ichthyosauri as a defunct faith, or arrest the course of a star as easily as summon back an obsolete feeling. This inexorable law should be kept in view in judging of past art. It is impossible for the moderns to look upon it with the same tone of mind as its contemporaries. To them it was both belief and beauty. The former we can ap- preciate only as we disinter fossils, to inform our intellect of past facts as the predecessors of pres- ent; but of the degree of the latter, its rules being unchangeable, all time is qualified to judge, if it but ascertain them. Hence it is that an- cient, and indeed all art not based on our own plane of feeling and faith, necessarily loses its primary significance, and reaches us only at sec- ond-hand. Our understanding, either under the persuasion of conventional taste or sound culti- vation, must first approve before we praise it ; while all art that lives to us first influences us through our sympathies or desires. Greek art is in so great a degree an aesthetic idealization of the higher faculties of man as the climax of nature and seed of divinity, every man having latent within him the capacity of a god, that even its fragments continue to be viewed as ITS PRINCIPLE PANTHEISM, 33 the noblest specimens of true art yet produced. By this we mean art as divested of other motive than its own laws of being. The religion out of which it sprung is forever dead. Consequently, ours is not a front, but a back view. We prize it not so much in relation to the embodied idea, which only scholars can correctly appreciate, as from its broader relation to common humanity and the universal laws of nature. Tried by this standard, we find it complete and consistent, so far as it goes. And, further, as we come to un- derstand its latent religious motive, it appears so harmonious and beautiful that its witchery well- nigh carries us mentally back to the era when it peopled the earth with its sacred images. If we cannot believe with those subtile imaginations which divided nature into numberless divinities, or raise our own to that poetical height which, through ingenious and often sublime fables and myths, recognized in its phenomena, or brought home to their hearts, great moral as well as phys- ical laws, still we can sympathize with the feel- ing that led them to see divinity in nature, and devote their wealth of mind and substance to making the Unseen appreciable and effectual to all men. The Greek artist wrought in accordance with pantheism, stimulated by religious fervor and intellectual activity of aesthetic desire. In the progress of mind there sprung up a reaction of philosophy, which, by reversing the popular sight, saw in symbols and dogmas only the particular livery of transitory ideas, and sought by the path 3 34 JUDEA OVERCOMES GREECE, of infidelity to gradually find its way to higher truths. But the philosophic mind in no age rep- resents the common actual ; it simply announces its possibilities and future proclivities. There- fore, in generalizing epochs, we must take the common mind as the great fact, however often exceptional minds shine forth like light-houses over the benighted ocean of popular opinion. The religious and civil life of Greece was the ultimate of progress which it was possible to evolve from merely sensuous and pantheistic principles. But the development of its free thought has contributed largely to the new phase of civilization, which, springing out of the com- paratively insignificant and barbarous Jewish protestantism, basing itself on monotheism, under the name of Christianity, has virtually supplanted polytheism as the dominant power over the en- tire globe. One God, instead of legion, is therefore the great rehgious notion of the present cycle, in contradistinction to the preceding. Judea has succeeded Greece as the religious teacher of ci^dlized peoples. In the struggle between the opposing thoughts, Greek art perished with the civilization on which it was founded. As its faith died out, so its forms partook of a corre- sponding moral decay. The inherent vice of polytheism, or the deification of the natural, after it had passed its climax of progress, hastened its final dissolution by the corruption bred out of the exaltation of the sensual over the intellectual ; base ornament becoming the primary motive, in- MONOTHEISM CONQUERS POLYTUEISM. 35 stead of true beauty, while the pure taste that was born of assthetic law was lost in low desire and gross ignorance. The victory of monotheism over polytheism not only overthrcAV temple and statue, but mind itself relapsed into its primitive barbarism as regards art. It had to begin a new career from a fresh starting-point ; and as, in the departed civilization, paganism at first had made art a mere instrument to symbolize its faith, so Chris- tianity did the same. Everywhere it was sub- ordinated to the new motive-power of progress. Apart it had no real existence. Byzantine thought became entirely theological. Wars and politics hinged upon articles of faith. Even when art was used as ornament, it was made to partake of a mystical and sacred character, illustrative of the dominant ideas. Indeed, the new creed was so little understood in the spirit of its founder, that it tended rather to provoke subtle speculation and controversial passions than to regenerate the heart. Nothing narrows the understanding faster than the polemics of controversial theology, when made the basis of sectarian strife for political power, or of ecclesiastical tyranny. In the civil wars that accompanied the gradual dissolution of the Roman empire, all art worthy of its Grecian par- entage rapidly declined. Its decay, however, was hastened by its own innate tendency towards sen- suality. Apart from the noble specimens which have survived as a legacy of knowledge and ex- ample to modern art, there are, it must be con- 36 THE PHALLUS— ITS MEANING AND USE. fessed, chiefly disinterred from the buried cities of Campania, but characteristic of classical civiliza- tion everywhere, numberless examples of a pru- rient taste for the low and base, which modern propriety will not even permit to be seen as relics, but on discovery consigns at once to a new darkness as complete as the old in which the lava had buried them. We must not con- sider, however, that these objects were simply the results of a licentious art. To the early ancient mind, generation had a sacred significance. The worship of Yenus was by no means intended, in its primitive point of view, as a scandalous ex- hibition of sensual passions ; on the contrary, acts and objects which Christianity rightly puts out of sight were then held in public esteem, as emblem- atical of divine mysteries. These emblems have, in many instances, survived their original mean- ing, and yet within themselves silently perpetuate its spirit. Thus, the obelisk is rich in symbol- ism. It was the sacred phallus, the sun's pro- lific ray, a pole and spindle of the sky. Even the Christian cross is but the union of the most ancient signs of the male and female organs of generation, formerly signifying human life, and now risen to the still loftier significance of the regeneration of the soul. These examples, which might be indefinitely multiplied, should teach us, before condemning them, to inquire into their origin and meaning, and then to judge them from the mental point of view from which they arise. The obsolete of to-day is the vital truth of yesterday. The WffAT THE PAST TEACHES. 37 phallus of antiquity was seen and also worn by refined women without any of those sensations which would now attend its exposure, even in the lowest of the sex. Catholicism replaced it by that cross which the Puritan cannot regard with- out a holy shudder, as an emblem of idolatry, although the Papist esteems it as his priceless symbol of salvation. While, however, investigation into the past teaches us that everything, whatever its present appearance, has its origin in some legitimate sen- timent or necessity, yet it equally discloses the fact, that, by long use and continued familiarity, the most sacred rites and images may in time lose their spiritual efficacy, and become instru- mental in sensual degradation. That this was the natural revolution of mythology, history am- ply confirms ; but its very corruption prepared the way for reformation, by the tendency of the undisciplined mind to counterbalance one extreme by another. Hence, the purity of Christianity, and its doctrines of immortal life, took deep root and spread rapidly at that era of the world's his- tory when the so-called heathenism was most rife, and all reformation seemed most hopeless. In reality, the world had never been in a better con- dition for its reception. Polytheism, as a faith, had everywhere died out or been shaken in the philosophic mind, which was honestly infidel, and inquiring what to believe. The masses saw in their condition all that the popular religion had to offer them, — sensualized and brutalized lives on earth, and vague shadows or nothingness in 88 THE CLERGY ENSLAVE ART. the future. To them, therefore. Christianity, with its spiritual hopes and promises, was a priceless offering. They grasped it at random, as a life- buoy floated to them on the sea of time. Two thousand years have nearly elapsed, and the unfolding of Christianity to its ultimate has scarcely been comprehended, much less practised. As yet we are in its very incipiency in our own moral condition ; consequently, we should look leniently on the errors of our ' predecessors in faith. Christianity was the antithesis of pagan- ism ; therefore it should not surprise us, that, in the primary reaction, when mind went back to the impulses and ignorance of childhood, because put into a new phase of development, the misun- derstandings and untutored emotions consequent upon juvenescence should have been manifested. Whatever was of the old religion was looked on with suspicion. Art, in common with other knowledge, shared this disgrace. As it was ne- cessary, however, to address the public mind through a pictorial literature, the new priestcraft, after it became confirmed in power, did as its heathen predecessor had done : seized upon art as its bondsman, and put it to work to rudely - illustrate the dogmas with which it strove to rule mankind. For nearly one thousand years the clergy controlled art, and kept it in a state of barbarous rigidity or undeveloped expression, analogous to its present condition among the sta- tionary Orientals. In architecture there were re- peated and partially successful attempts to escape this bondage ; but the chief features of art were ART BECOMES IDOLATRY, 39 immobility and ignorance ; its object, to delineate the legends and doctrines of the new church, in designs of childish and almost savage rudeness and simplicity ; and its tendency in a certain degree mythological, because it multiplied objects of worship, and perpetuated, in a sense the most intelligible and convincing to the common mind, old superstitions, disguised under new names and forms. The dark ages are indeed a lamentable epoch in human history, if we* view them only through their falsity, selfishness, and intolerance ; but when, amid all these tares, we see the seed, as planted by Christ in humanity, constantly grow- ing upwards and struggling successfully towards greater light, we feel assured that the human mind, as in the slow changes in the geological world, was preparing the way for the higher spiritual growth whose dawn is now perceptible on our moral horizon. It was thus, that, while purer and nobler mo- tives of life were gradually unfolded to humanity through Christianity, art, by being violently sev- ered from the intellectual freedom which had made it so estimable in Greece, was thrown back to its infancy, in point of science. The human mind was swayed by it less as art than as idol- atry or symbolism. No doubt, in either of these functions its influence is far greater than in its own right, because it becomes, through them, the exponent of the most powerful motives that can affect humanity. But this influence is conse- quent upon the absolute degradation, or the im- pe-fect enlightenment, both of art itself and the 40 THE LAW OF GREEK TASTE, being to whom it is addressed. Li its grosser and most prevalent form, it partakes of fetichism ; in its milder and more intellectual, it perpetuates superstition, substituting external rites and forms for inward godliness ; and in both, it successfully appeals only to the lowest sentiments and intelli- gence. Worse than all, in the degree of its ac- tual repulsiveness and positive coarseness is its power to control the mind that reverences it. As we see among savages stones and rude idols possessing divine authority, so, among the more cultivated races, on the same principle that fal- sity and superstition, being in themselves morally hideous, seek an external manifestation in corre- sponding appearances, minds, however intelligent they may be in some respects, if in religion they are governed by fear or bigotry, devote them- selves, either in language or art, to such expres- sions of mere ugliness or gross materiality as most fittingly embody their motives and feelings. By keeping closely in view this art-law we shall be better able to appreciate the difference between Greek art and that which took its place. In Greece the artist was restricted, by a refined natural taste, founded upon his intellectual code and sensuous creed, to the expression of the highest degree of beauty conceivable. Nay, more. Not only must his execution be beautiful, but his choice of subject must be such as would sesthetically please. In form, posture, costume, or color ; in the employment of passion, and even pain ; in short, in whatever he undertook, he was required, not only by the popular will, THE LAW OF GREEK TASTE. 41 but, as in the instance of Thebes, by statute law, to avoid the ugly and depraved, and constant- ly to aim at the ennoblement of humanity by the suggestion of . its most graceful and exalted moods. To such an extent was the devotion to the beautiful carried, that prizes were given to the handsome men or women who won the suffrages of the judges at public competition. Beauty actually conferred historic fame, because, at least in theory, it was associated with corre- sponding mental and physical gifts. They also believed in the influence of beautiful objects about them to foster and elevate the national standard of beauty, and to impart its magnetism to unborn children, through the impressible fac- ulties of their mothers. Their games, also, were of a joyous, sensuous character, incentive to manly strength, womanly grace, and general ele- gance ; while those of the Romans served to inculcate brutality and thirst of blood. The Greeks, in consequence, grew refined and hu- mane, the Romans rude and fierce in deport- ment. Next to the moral discipline of Chris- tianity we can cite the Grecian passion for the beautiful as the most cogent refiner of nations. Winckelmann tells us that the Arcadians were obliged to learn music, to counteract their mo- rose and fierce manners, and, from being the worst, became the most honest and best-man- nered people of Greece. It is true there were exceptions to these exalted notions of the beauti- ful, forming a subordinate school, corresponding in character, but with lower motives, to the ordi- 42 ARTISTS OF FILTH. nary genre artists of modern times. Those who delighted in base, common, or morbid sub- jects were nicknamed " artists of filth." In the case of Pyrecius, cited by Lessing, parents were advised by Aristotle not to exhibit his pictures to their children, lest their imagina- tions should be soiled by ugly images. Above all faults, Greek taste condemned exaggeration and caricature, or any artifice which could not plead law for its use, as necessary for the aesthet- ic object in view. By artifice we here mean simply imitation in the degree of deception legiti- mate to art, but foreign to any appearance or em- ployment of trickery, by which the senses are vulgarly deceived. Indeed, Grecian good taste was the ripe product of a slow and steady growth of gesthetic knowledge. Their early statues were rudely built up of different materials, wood and marble for instance, the extremities being made of the more precious article. Sometimes they were painted to imitate dress, and even actually clothed, — puerilities of art, which are paralleled by the practice of the Catholic priesthood of to- day. As fast as the Grecian intellect outgrew priestly domination, it advanced in taste and knowledge. Antiquity is, however, by no means without plentiful examples of false art. It had its freaks of effect, in the employment of color in statuary, as we perceive in the remains of tints from which Gibson borrows his reprehensible practice and theory, endeavoring to amalgamate hues and forms under conditions not recognized by nature her- FALSE ART OF ANTIQUITY, 43 self, and therefore not to be sanctioned by sound taste, — and in the combination of differently colored materials in the same statue, as in the fine Apollo at Naples, whose head, hands, and lyre are of white marble, while the voluminous drapery with which the body is clothed is of black porphyry ; thus destroying the unity so requisite in sculpture between the pure and simple charac- ter of the material and the singleness and purity of expression demanded solely through form, any attempt to heighten which, by the addition of colored eyes of glass or ivory, or by paint, as we find in some antique bronze and marble busts, naturally shocks, because they are not only ghast- ly, like rouge on the cheeks of a corpse, but they lie to our senses. Vulgar attempts at deception arouse only disgust and indignation. It is evi- dent they met with no permanent favor in Greece. The Apollo, in the same hall, entirely of dark green basalt, disappoints in statuesque effect as contrasted with the pure white marble ; but it is not objectionable on the score of low artifice or lack of unity. We find fault simply with the choice of material to the use of which, in such a character, no treatment, however successful, can wholly reconcile the spectator. The ability with which the Greek artist, by the rigor of his education and the exactions of his judges, was able to dignify even the commonest act, is prominently shovv^n in the noble statue of Lysippus, or the Athlete of the Vatican. The action is simply scraping the sweat from his arm, than which in idea no subject can well be more 44 REALISM IN GREEK ART. vulgar ; but the attitude and expression, indepen- dent of its pure anatomical detail and superior execution, are such as to suggest, in the classical sense, the " godlike." In the statue of Modesty, in the same hall, notice how much its value de- pends upon its simplicity, repose, and the chaste management of drapery, — the seemingly easiest and secondary efforts of the artist being made to give the highest character to his work ! So, in the figure of Silence, of the Capitol, we see how successfully it speaks, simply through the nice discrimination of its author in its attitude, every line proclaiming the art-motive and affect- ing the spectator with a like feeling. In the multitude of ancient statues we find but few examples of intentional variation from the aesthetic law of Greek art. Of these per- haps the most conspicuous is an Old Hag, (Hec- uba ?) of the Capitol, admirably done, if one delights in the exhibition of a decrepit female form, and a countenance of care, misery, and possible crime. It is disgustingly correct realism. Once it may have had value as a portrait, like the well-known bust of ^sop,^ in the Villa Albani, but now can conduce to no other end than to justify the refinement of the antique taste in inexorably condemning such a choice and treat- ment of sculpture. The Drunken Woman, in the same museum, is of a similar character. It repels the feelings from the sex by its opposition to that we hold loveliest and best in it. There are, however, among the bas-reliefs in the Borbo- * See Appendix, Note A. THE BLIND MAN AND THE BACCHUS. 45 nico Museum of Naples, instances of this treat- ment which, from their spirit and feeling, reconcile one to its occasional use. They are the Blind Man, who touches our emotions rightly, and the Bacchus, who with his gay revellers is so jollily tipsy that it is impossible not to sympathize in their merriment, despite the sage axioms of tem- perance. In the representation of animal life the Greek artist was almost equally successful as with the human. In fine, beauty, as evolved from unity, harmony, and the highest truths of form, color, and expression, to the intent to produce intellec- tual and sensuous satisfaction, was inexorably required of him. CHAPTER Vn. Christian Art-Motive. — The Three Phases of Christian Art. — Objections to Generalization. — Necessity for. — The Pif)testants of the Dark Ages. — The Dawning Phase. — Comparison between Grecian and Christian Art, in Charac- ter and Execution. — Examples. — The Laokoon. — Dying Gladiator. — Sensualism of Christian Art. — Whence de- rived. — Art-Aspect of Oriental Symbolism. — Dante. — Milton. — Orgagna. — Michel Angelo. — Their Works as Art and Illustrations of Christian Ideas. — Phidias. — Apollo de Belvedere. — Flora of Naples. — Torso de Belvedere. — Elgin Marbles. — Perfect Art. — Bad Art. — The Demand of the Present Age. — Ideal in Art a Comparative Term. — Pieta of Michel Angelo. — Domenichino's St. Jerome. — Kaphael's Transfiguration. — God and Christ as Art-Ob- jects. — Christ of Michel Angelo. — Tenerani: Saviour, Angel, and Descent from the Cross. — Pagan Ascetic Art. — The Diogenes of Naples. — Christian Ascetic Art. — The St. Jerome of Agostino Carracci. — Heathen and Christian Grotesque compared. — II Penseroso. EFORE proceeding to a more particular analysis of Christian art as a whole, we must enlarge upon the radical difference between it and that of antiquity, arising from their antagonistic primary principles of sensuous pleasure and self-sacrifice ; the one aiming at heightening every enjoyment, whether of body or intellect, on the plane of present happiness, and the other of subduing the natural desires, as THE CHRISTIAN MOTIVE. Al in themselves sinful, and seeking to win a future good, and to escape a future retribution, by the purifying processes of self-denial and expiation. In both cases, through the excessive culture of these opposite principles, the body became the sufferer, and by the inevitable workings of sen- sualism or asceticism avenged outraged morality. But it was as natural for one extreme to be suc- ceeded by the other, as for the tide of the ocean to rise and fall. The generous culture of the Greek produced more pleasing effects, because his scope was normal humanity and his aim nat- ural beauty. The Christian attempted a more difficult task, and with a loftier purpose. He sought to portray the triumphs of the spirit over the body. Instead of seeking sensuous beauty, he sought rather to manifest his contempt of it. No longer was the body a cherished friend of life, but its direct foe. Studiously depreciating it, he destroyed the harmony which should exist between holy feeling and beautiful form. His motive was indeed noble ; but ignorance and fanaticism too often turned his art into burlesque or horror. Even the person of Christ, his God, was subjected to this coarse treatment, on the ground that his earthly life was a prolonged humiliation, and his death an expiation of the sins of the world. To him he was a literal man of sorrows and the chief of martyrs. For a time, that sacred figure, to portray which under the most lovely human type art now considers its highest triumph, was designedly represented as ignoble and vulgar. It was only when the Christian 48 CHRISTIAN ART DISAPPOINTS. artist began to appreciate the rules of Greek taste, that he emerged from his error, and suc- ceeded, though imperfectly, in connecting his spir- itual aspirations with a more congenial outward expression. Unfortunately, before he had per- fected his style, he was seduced from his purer motive into a love of the external, and learned to prefer workmanship or mere scientific skill and force to idea ; so that, without surpassing, accord- ing to the inspiration of his faith, the best works of the plastic art of Greece as inspired by its religion, he has simply hinted the superior excel- lence of his motive. The Greek perfected his work, and rested awhile upon the high stand- ard he had created. His Christian brother, on the contrary, has never fully reached his aim. Within one generation — that of Raphael — he passed rapidly from those art-motives, which, if conscientiously persevered in, by the aid of sci- ence might have long ago carried Christian art to a corresponding degree of perfection with the Grecian, into a stage that marked the decline, rather than the advance, of his new-found teacher. Mankind was not yet ripe for the per- fect development of art. It preferred for a while longer dead bones to new soul-forms. It is evi- dent to every student of human progress that Christian art, thus far, has been but a series of attempts, as fluctuating and as disappointing as the expression of Christianity itself. Hence, we have still to look for its complete advent. This will not be until the heart of man, more fully warmed by Christ's love, prepares his under- THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN ART. 49 standing to receive a larger measure of divine wisdom than has yet been given to it. No just comparison, therefore, at this period, can be instituted between the completed classical and immatured Christian art. The one attained its full growth and passed away ; while the other, founded upon deeper and more enduring revela- tion, is but in its childhood. Indeed, it is but reawakening from the lethargy to which the look- ing back of the past three centuries to the forms and ideas of its predecessor, rather than to its spirit and knowledge, doomed it, after it attained its first genuine expression in the Pre-Raphaelite efforts that succeeded its primary dogmatic for- malism. • Christian art has had thus far three phases of being. First, the theological, when the church dictated its laws. This lasted from the time of Constantine to the thirteenth century. Secondly, the religious, which began in the awakening of the European mind at the termina- tion of the preceding epoch, and continued until the sixteenth century. The first period was the reign of superstition ; the second, of devotion. Interwoven with the latter, and fostered by mediaeval enterprise, was that intellectual freedom which, however imper- fect in action, helped to vindicate the rights of mind, and leavened the new schools with the principles of growth. Two grand streams flowed from this union : the one, true and earnest, look- ing to nature as a guide, while continuing to find in the religious faculty its chief aliment, welcom- 4 50 OBJECTIONS TO GENERALIZATION. ing such aid as the then partial knowledge and sparse examples of pure classicalism afforded it; the other disinterring ancient art as a model, accepting its forms without its spirit, and devot- ing it to pride and pleasure. Out of this last grew that anomalous, mongrel, semi-sensual phase, which, taking the precedence of the first, formed the third, and is known as the Renaissance. It was a fusion of pagan philosophy with modern unbelief, at a time when the heads of the Eoman church, setting an example of skepticism and licentiousness, saw only in art an instrument of self-glory or sensual gratification. From such a soil what other harvest could be garnered than decline and corruption?"^ There are grave objections to generalization. In condensing the mental characteristics of indi- viduals or epochs a degree of misapprehension or injustice can scarcely be avoided. Yet, in looking back over the stream of time, certain lights and shadows are so conspicuous as to give a general tone to the view. Doubtless a nearer sight would disclose the brighter or darker spots, now lost in the far distance. It is sufficient, how- ever, for common distinctions to faithfully report the view as a whole. There is perhaps as much art-superstition in the world now as in the ages succeeding Con- stantme. Scores of millions of Roman and Greek Catholics still worship the rudest and * We have, in a previous work, devoted to the Itah'an schools, examined in detail and given the history of mediae- val painting. See Art-Studies^ Chap. III. et seq. MEDIEVAL REVIVAL. 51 tawdriest pictures and images. Their ideas of religion are derived from them. Protestants in art and faith spoke in former days as now, but their voices were drowned in the great tide of ignorance and credulity. The mediaeval revival of learning scattered somewhat the mental dark- ness that brooded over Europe. Mind began, in all directions, to light up the horizon. Art felt the impulse, and most gloriously did it shine forth for a while ; less, perhaps, under the inspiration of a more enlightened piety, than of a higher spir- itual consciousness. But its illumination was too partial. Being exclusively devotional, it failed to satisfy the varied desires of a freed and grow- ing understanding. The naturalistic schools gave it another impetus. Then came the fatal imita- tion of departed classical art, prostituted to the lusts of power and sense, in its uses pregnant with evil, but, in the spirit of investigation it awakened, filled with eventual promise of wis- dom from out of the experience of the past. Thus the evil and good of all these eras are con- temporaneous. Each contained the elements of the other, gradually unfolding their respective properties, as one extreme excited another ; the truth, meanwhile, through all its checkered ex- pressions, grovdng apace, and preparing the world for a fourth phase of Christian art, now arising, and which, from its broad scope and recognition of all nature and humanity as its inspiration and science as its co-worker, may be called the Catholic or Universal. To better illustrate the essential differences in 52 LAOKOOJSr. the character and execution of classical and Chris- tian art, a few of the best-known examples of each may be put in contrast. The comparison is unequal in respect that, while the former can now only be represented by detached and more or less mutilated sculpture, the latter has the ad- vantage of painting still existing in the localities for which it was designed, and, to a certain extent, the continued existence of the feeling in which it was conceived. Its disadvantage con- sists, as we have before remarked, in its being but an imperfect expression of the religious thought out of which it has sprung, while Greek art is the ripe fruit both of pagan faith and knowledge. A philosophic mind may, however, sufficiently elevate itself to view each by the light of aesthetic judgment. In which, as a whole, are the spirit and pur- pose of art best manifested ? Rightly to answer this, we must first ascer- tain the relative superiority and inferiority of the underlying idea. Next, we have to get at the degree of identification between the object and the idea. As this is complete and exact, and the inspiration pure and lofty, so is the art in degree perfect. Infants are called artless, because body and mind correspond so naturally and harmoni- ously. Art is artless in the same sense when its outward form as well expresses its governing idea. The Greeks rarely sought to represent phys- ical suffering. They deprecated any depart- ure from the strictly beautiful and pleasurable. LA OK ON. 53 Whenever, as in the Laokoon, the exhibition of bodily pain became necessary, it was made subor- dinate to aesthetic taste. In this group, under- going a death of the utmost anguish and horror, there is, in the father's silent appeal to heaven for his sons' escape from an inexorable fate, and the pitiful look of the children directed to him whose sins are thus visited upon them, a moral beauty which overpowers the sense of physical agony. We perceive the awful fate impending, and are spared the absolute rack of flesh and blood. This the artist would not give. He does not permit Laokoon to cry aloud, though one can anticipate his convulsive sighs. Hence our feelings are moved to pity and admiration by his endurance, without being disturbed by vehe- ment action, or the sense of the beautiful and grand being marred by the writhings of bodily an- guish. As a whole, the conception is simple and lofty. There are errors of detail in execution, par- ticularly in the unchildlike faces of the sons, and a misconception of the instincts of the anaconda species of serpent in biting, that prevent this group from ranking among the highest specimens of ancient art. Still, we feel that a great soul is expiring in awful torment, and teaching the world a great lesson, particularly if we view the group in its symbolical sense of " sin," or the throttler, which Max Miiller says is the original mean- ing or root of its name. Spirit predominates. Idea and object are identical, and true art is attained. Much of the character of this group depends 54 THE DYING GLADIATOR. upon that subtile principle of repose wliicli dis- tinguishes the best antique art from most of modern work. Although violent and convulsive action is suggested by the nature of the scene, the artist has so skilfully chosen the moment of execution, that we feel, above all else, its deep quiet. We are placed upon the very brink of the final catastrophe, when the breath is sus- pended, every muscle is prepared to exert itself to its utmost opposition, and each nerve is vital with agonizing anticipation ; the victims see their doom, and instinctively prepare to resist it, even though the utter inutility of resistance is mani- fest ; but the artist leaves us, in their joint strug- gle, a moral suggestion of hope^ the angel-sister of sin, to lighten the otherwise too painful im- pression upon the spectator; and the conscious- ness of all this is given by the skilful seizing of the exact instant in which the stillness of instinct- ive preparation precedes the last fearful effort of tortured nature to escape its doom. The Dying Gladiator is another specimen of ever-living art. It is an incarnation of the spirit of the universal brotherhood of men in their common heritage of suffering and death. A man dying by blood-drops from a stab ! A simple and common subject ; yet how beautiful and sugges- tive the treatment ! Upon nothing of ancient pathetic art have we lingered with more grati- fication. Criticism is absorbed in sympathy, and the fear or pain of death in the spirit's retrospec- tion of life and inquiring gaze into futurity. Behold a fellow-being prematurely sent by a vio- THE CHRISTIAN HELL. 55 lent death to the mysterious confines of eternity, and about to solve the common problem of life, whose evils have been to him so prolific a heri- tage. God aid him ! Is any St. Sebastian, St. Lawrence, or other martyr of Christian art, more truthfully and pa- thetically represented than this dying Pagan ? Suppose the artist had left the sword stuck into his side, and his limbs violently disturbed by the muscular distortion of gaping wounds. What then would have been the effect ? Yet the com- mon fashion of Christian art is to appeal to the coarser sympathies, by exaggeration of physi- cal sufferings, emaciation, or the tokens of pov- erty and asceticism. The idea is no less iden- tified with the object than in Grecian art ; but, while the latter sought to dignify humanity, Christianity, on the contrary, sought a develop- ment of spiritual growth by means of fleshly penance and suffering. Its art indeed essayed to illustrate its thoughts ; but, having mistaken the intention of Christ, who came " eating and drink- ing " to the intent to reconcile the twofold nature of man and direct its harmonized energies towards heaven, it need not surprise us that it fell into a gross materialism, whose effects on spiritual edu- cation were scarcely less lamentable than were those of pagan sensualism. Out of it grew that terrible imagery of fiery torment which it harrows the mind even to think of for one moment, — - the Christian hell, whose pangs were likened to a serpent's ever-gnawing envenomed tooth, — a per- petual lake of flaming brimstone, dense with lewd 56 THE CHRISTIAN HELL. and blood-lusting demons, of indescribable and monstrous shapes and insatiable appetites, gloat- ing in the foulest wickedness and quivering with unmentionable horrors, whose sole occupation was to torture, throughout eternity, the unab- solved of the church, finding in their agonized flesh and mangled bodies the most savory morsels of their quenchless appetites, — in short, a future more prolific of material horror than the maddest Pagan imagination had ever conceived, under the authority of a supreme devil, in whom, as Satan, was incarnated all evil, and who, through fear, was made the rival and antagonist of the Chris- tian's God. Such was the fearful conception by which the new art sought to reform mankind. But, while so base a conception was made a primary agent of conversion, the artistic allure- ments of heaven, outside of its architectural magnificence and supersensuous materialistic im- agery, were singularly ambiguous and uninviting. With all the accumulated wealth of its precious stones, brilliant colors, and walls of alabaster, it was but a sort of purified Olympus, swept clean of its sensuous enjoyments, and given over to stifi* rows of the redeemed, in quaint, uncomfortable cos- tumes, with musical instruments monotonously chanting and singing evermore around thrones filled with a triumphant hierarchy of the churcli. This was the commonly received imagery, both in art and literature, of future bliss. We speak of it irrespective of its language of symbolism, or the genius of those artists who so spiritualized their art as to lift it above all material signifi- CHRISTIAN MATERIALISM. 57 cance, and invested it with a truly celestial beauty and meaning.^ With such crude ideas of the life to come, joined to rank errors in the uses and purposes of present existence, arising from view- ing its means and pleasures as so many fatal snares for the soul, it is no wonder that Christian art, so long as it continued exclusively under this bondage, became the opposite, in aesthetic charac- ter and meaning, of Greek art. The Greek artist avoided sensualism as long as he preserved his strict intellectuality. His Christian successor inadvertently plunged into the meanest and most cowardly materialism, in his unwise abhorrence of sense. The motives to gain that spiritual life which he so illy comprehended were based upon the lowest principles of human nature. Men were to be frightened into good morals, or coaxed into acquiescence to pet dog- mas, and heaven itself bribed by atoning priva- tions, a renunciation of social duties, or perver- sion of humanity's gifts. In short, the Creator was to be made pitiful and humane by the self- degradation of the being he had created in his own image. In India and Egypt, art, being purely symbol- ical, was originally interpreted in the sense of the mysteries, often sublime and pure in conception, it was intended to illustrate. As art, however, its significance, or, more properly speaking, its influence, was but secondary. Still, it had its rules ; and the subtlest scale of human propor- * See Art-Studies^ Chap. VIII.: Fra Angelico, Sano di Pietro, and their school. 58 ORIENTALS CHAINED THOUGHT, tions, making of the little the colossal, and giving all statuary to which it was applied beauty and grandeur of form, is said to be traced back to Egypt. Science, however, never there attained sufficient ascendency over priestly dictation to un- fetter their statues and bid them walk. Even the early Greeks chained theirs, lest they should escape. Oriental nations chained thought, and kept their art in hopeless slavery. But, how- ever monstrous, puerile, and false their concep- tions of nature and divinity might be, they con- veyed them to the popular mind in an emblem- atic art, so unlike natural objects that the sacred truths thus published through obscure, fanciful, and extraordinary mediums were without that di- rect shock to blood and nerves consequent upon the pictorial damnations of Christianity. Yet the doctrine of a material retribution had its origin in the East, from Chaldea and Persia finding its way into Judea, and thence into Christendom, in its present form. Dante's " Inferno " embodies the common notion of hell of Christian sects. By his far-seeing mind, and those of kindred perceptions in any age, it would be received only in a typical sense. But to the mass it was and is a material truth, — a place of torment, where even divine love is pow- erless to give a drop of water to cool the burning tongue. In this respect Dante is the great pro- totype of mediaeval plastic art, just as Milton's poetical legends of heaven's wars, derived though they be from Roman Catholic art and traditions, have become the unquestioned traditionary lore DANTE AND MICHEL ANGEL 0. 59 of Protestant Christianity, and as Homer's " Iliad " was the bible of classical art. In either case, art simply embodied the popular notions of the times, and, by the force of its genius, conveyed them to coming generations with the authority of law. Orgagna, Michel Angelo, and their compeers are the culminations, in painting and sculpture, of Dante's poem. They translated its horrors into form and color, in so earnest and terrible a manner that even an enlightened un- derstanding cannot view their works without sick- ening dismay. The latter borrowed of antiquity its peculiar notions of doomed souls to heighten the malignity of his day of judgment. But how feeble is the Greek hades compared with the Christian hell ! A grosser plagiarism and less inventive great art-composition does not exist, than the famed Sistine Judgment. It is Dante's idea, with the principal figures borrowed in composition from the earlier masters, made anomalous by the intro- duction of pagan thought, foreign in feeling to the main subject. In posture and anatomy Michel Angelo here burlesques himself, although there is not a stroke of his brush which does not show the power of a great master. Still, as a whole, the weightiest judgment it conveys to the critical mind is upon the artist who could thus fetter his lofty genius to so ignoble an end. We see by this fres- co how much Michel Angelo fails in comparison with Phidias, on account of the restraint put upon aesthetic taste by the severity of his creed, lUid its development, in him, of a morbid humor 60 SCULPTURES OF THE PARTHENON, in matters of religion, which one, however, re- spects for its earnestness and as a rebuke to the licentiousness of infidelity around him. Even when he asserted his independence in the nude figure, ecclesiastical authority subsequently added draperies, on the ground of scandalous impro- prieties ; so that we do not now see his work as he would have had it seen ; and this should be remembered to his favor."^ The range of Greek art, in comparison with its successor, was indeed limited ; but, so far as it went, it was loyal to its own laws. Hence the choice of its subjects and their treatment were in the main rigidly confined to an exposition of its purest principles. The sculptures of the Par- thenon are the purest specimens of Greek taste now known. One cannot gaze upon their broken fragments without a swelling sensation of life. Theseus is sublime in his simple, godlike truth, — a man on his way to divinity. So, in an inferior degree, are the Apollo of the Vatican and the so- called Flora at Naples. The latter would be improved by knocking off its modern head, and leaving the imagination, inspired by its delicate and graceful flow of drapery, suggesting, rather than showing, its exquisite though colossal pro- portions, and its chaste, majestic attitude, to invest it with its original perfection. Notwithstanding its great size, we feel the fascination of the charming woman ; and though a goddess, the delicacy and tenderness of the sexual nature compel our love. * For a more complete view of Michel Angelo, see Art- Studies, Chap. XIV. AIM OF CLASSICAL ART. 61 Examples of female loveliness, of manly strength, of heroic action, and of the faculties of head and heart, and beauty of form, that most worthily represent man or woman under the guise of a Juno, Minerva, or Venus, a Hercules, Jupiter, Mars, or Bacchus, and other personages of a populous Olympus, are too familiar to readers to require to be more particularly pointed out. In their virtues and vices these gods are alike human, and, in consequence, upon our own level of mo- tive and action, or within the range of our own capacities. Added to this strong ground of a common inter- est growing out of sensuous sympathy and a cer- tain affinity of mutual possibihties of life, are the naturalness and refined taste exacted by the clas- sical conception of beauty. Not only our feelings are moved, but our judgment is won. Even if, as in the Torso de Belvedere, we see only a mu- tilated trunk, it is instinctive with life. Like the Elgin marbles, it reveals to us an art that com- prised an harmonious union of majesty, grandeur, and breadth of composition, united to exactness of detail so truthful in the minutest particulars, and so full of ease, grace, and vitality, as to seem more like the divine inspirations of the creative power itself than the result, as it was, of a labo- rious and conscientious application of the laws of matter to the representation of spirit. In art of this character we realize that the artist has pene- trated the great mystery of nature, namely, that organic form, being the concrete of spirit, is spon- taneously evolved and exfoliated, as it were, in 62 SUCCESS OF CLASSICAL ART, sympathy with the action and necessities of the inward principle or soul. His aim has therefore been to give a beautiful exhibition of their unity, from his artistic standard of the exaltation of sensuous humanity, and the personification of his poetical pantheism. The success of his art de- pended upon its being alike comprehensible by reason and feeling, and approved by taste. Christian art, as we have shown, was on a less correct scientific foundation. It abandoned itself more to feeling based upon faith, without at first comprehending that true wisdom in all things con- sists in discovering law, and obeying it. As, however, the Greek artist had passed through this phase of progress, it was equally necessary for the Christian to do the same in the pursuit of his ideal. Two distinct stages of growth mark his course : first, the one in which he sought, as his primary object, to symbolize his faith ; secondly, when, the religious impulse having exhausted it- self, the reverential feeling lost its connection with prescribed forms, and reason began to inquire if there were no further development for art. Out of this inquiry has sprung, it is true, a host of e^dls, — classical imitation, materialism, mamier- ism, skepticism, and the usual reactions attendant upon individual mind suddenly freed to follow its own bias. But every success or failure may be regarded as so much useful experience for future generations. Art, in our day, has the accumu- lated knowledge of ancient and modern civiliza- tion to teach it wisdom. The best art is that which at once most en- THE BEST ART. 63 lightens our intellect, soothes and elevates our feelings, and awakens refined pleasure. In pro- portion as there is a want of harmony in these relations, it fails in its mission. Bad art, like that of the ascetic school of Romanism, prompts the mind to a love of ugliness and horror for their own sake, and is a stimulus to superstition. In Greece and Rome it took the direction of sensual- ity and infidelity, and finally ended in corruption and debasement. All bad art acts after the in- stinct of a poisonous reptile. It seeks to fasci- nate its victims before injecting its venom. Our own day is saved from the evil of the Renais- sant school by the vital power of free Christianity as a progressive force to regenerate mankind. We have now arrived at that period in which reason is more imperative than faith. It is the transition-age between feeling and wisdom. In- quiry is its motto. As we investigate, we detect an afiinity between the two, suggestive of their perfect union, when our mental vision shall be sufiiciently enlightened to comprehend the entire motive of being, and our senses harmonized to its loftiest aims. In the present stage of art-growth we cannot look upon its earlier productions with other than a critical judgment, though still retaining a sym- pathy with their motives. The ideal in art is a comparative term of excellence. One man's in- sight or knowledge is the farthermost horizon of his brother ; just as, in the imaginative or thought faculty, the remote possibility of an inferior in- dividuality, even in its super-creative sense, is 64 THE IDEAL. simply the actual or natural of a superior. By keeping this psychological fact in view, we get hold of a perfect clue to critical inquiry, and are the better enabled to enjoy all things after their degree and kind. Although cultivation sinks the ideal of one person to the level of the natural of another, the imagination continues to hold up before ixie mind's eye the mirror of a still supe- rior nature, to tempt men onward in the never- ending pursuit of beauty. Unrealization is the true motive-power of progress. The innate curi- osity of mind impels it to constant inquiry after truth, led on by persistent hope of final repose in perfect work, — a perfection which always seems to be, but never is, within its grasp. In the search for the divine no two minds are precisely parallel. Still, although the focus of vision dif- fers in all, there are general principles applicable to every subject. Any work which suggests the loftiest capabili- ties of its motive, or demands an active imagina- tion or sympathy to interpret it, possesses the germs of excellence ; but that which forces the feelings to apologize to reason for violations of probabilities and possibilities, and of other rules of a refined taste, is in itself false art, and should have no influence outside of the motives which originated it. Of such productions we have a notable in- stance in the Pieta of Michel Angelo, at St. Peter's, Rome, a common art-motive of the Ro- man Church. This group is simply a mutilated, naked corpse of a man in an impossible position, DOMENICHINO'S ST. JEROME. 65 ill the lap of a woman already overburdened with drapery. Nature does not recognize such scenes. No mother sits holding the dead body of her son, disfigured with ghastly wounds, in her arms, for the plain reason that she could not if she would, and what she cannot do nature does not impul- sively suggest. As art, therefore, this group fails. If, however, the religious faculty can find in it any aid to its piety by its symbolism, it is not without its use ; nor need the subject-matter blind us in this or in kindred topics by great masters to the merits of details or general treat- ment. Domenichino's St. Jerome, of the Vatican, is a similar violation of artistic rule, instigated by the ascetic side of religion. A naked, attenuated, disgusting exhibition of worn-out humanity, sug- gesting a long and painful life amid dirt and pri- vation ; the very dregs of a man, so emaciated that even the grave-worms must feel cheated of their lawful banquet, with posture and expression corresponding to such an ending of life, its for- lorn misery heightened by the contrast of plump youth, and the rich attire of an attending priest ; by his side, a subdued, spiritless lion, emasculated of his forest nature ; overhe?td, a group of frohc- some, vulgar boy-angels ; the entire painting sen- suous in color and feeling, and rich in natural and architectural beauty : such is the extraordinary composition of an artist who has by it won the applause of Cln-istendom. In reality, his choice of subject is as faulty in regard to the canons of high art as his treatment of it is irreconcilable 5 66 RAPHAEDS TRANSFIGURATION. to aestlietic taste and a proper understanding of Cliristianity. Raphael's celebrated Transfiguration, in the same room, violates, though in a less conspicuous degree, the rules of art. In composition it forms two distinct paintings, with no connection beyond a forced meaning. Although designed in the prin- ciples of naturalistic truth, as a picture, its per- spective is as impossible as is its entire grouping of personages, monk with Jew, false to the real scene. The grace and vigor of Raphael are in- deed there ; but the color is harsh and brown ; his early simplicity and correct feeling are gone ; and this is due to the interference of ecclesiastical power and patronage with his taste aud knowl- edge, causing him, as it caused all other artists similarly positioned, to subject the laws of art to the dogmas of a creed, by which bondage art has always suffered and true religion has never gained. The highest effort of Christian art must neces- sarily be to represent the person of Cln-ist, and the thrones and powers of his celestial kingdom. Therefore, the respective idealisms of the Clas- sical and Christian artist — the one as shown in mythological creations, and the other in the at- tempt to prefigure the divine in the shape of the Father, Son, Virgin, or angelic host — are fair subjects of comparison. In our present analysis we refer not to motive^ but simply to execution. Which has been most successful in the treat- ment of their subjects ? Sculpture has never, to our knowledge, aspired, MICHEL ANGELO'S CHRIST. 67 as has not unfrequently painting, to portray the first person of the Trinity, except in a minor way, as we see in Luca della Robbia, and works of his school. Why the impossibility of the one should have been considered as the possibility of the other, especially in an inferior medium, considered in relation to the majesty, power, and awe of the divine presence, — for the expression of which, pure marble, or, as in Egyptian art, granites, por- phyries, jaspers, and other adamantine rocks are far more fitting than the glass of the mosaicist or the frail material of the painter, — we are at a loss to know. But so it is ! Consequently, we are obliged, in this comparison, to ignore the coarse representations of the Almighty of the early Byzantine mosaics, and the later and more painful failures, because sinning in the light of more knowledge, of the great masters in fresco and oil, who, from the time of Cimabue to Ca- muccini, of our day, have attempted to define, in form and color, the undefinable and illimitable, and pass on to those incarnations in sculpture of divine attributes, which are within the legitimate scope of art. Michel Angelo's Christ, of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, at Rome, is less successful than his awe-inspiring Moses. Instead of the man of sorrows, submitting to earthly authority, yet of surpassing strength and beauty by virtue of his divine spirituality, chastely clothed in a seamless garment, misled by his passion for ana- tomical expression, the sculptor has made a nude, bound athlete, whose muscular proportions and 68 TENERANPS ANGEL. strained attitude neutralize a somewhat lovely and appropriate countenance. Of our own times, Tenerani, who ranks at the head of Italian sculptors, in his colossal Christ, for St. Peter's, has succeeded no better. The drapery is well managed, but he has represented the Saviour in the act of blessing, with uplifted hands, and tumbling forward from his seat, ap- parently to the imminent risk of the spectators being crushed ; while the sensual lines of the mouth and the vulgar treatment of the hair de- stroy what divinity of character the statue might otherwise possess, and make it appear very much like many of the prosaic figures of the popes, in whose company it is destined to sit while papacy endures. Tenerani has, however, in the Torlonia chapel of the Lateran church, more successfully treated the Descent from the Cross. The Virgin's face is particularly fine, and the feeling and compo- sition of the group are excellent. His Angel, in the church of the Minerva, is a successful sug- gestion, in sculpture, of a spiritualized presence. Were we to descend to the lesser orders of heaven's hierarchy, we should find, as with Nic- cola Pisano, Ghiberti, Mino da Fiesole, Dona- tello, Leonardo da Vinci, Thorwaldsen, and oth- ers, instances in which prophets, apostles, and saints have been worthily rendered, and may be favorably compared, as far as such objects admit of comparison, with the productions of classical art of corresponding dignity of position or eleva- tion of sentiment, in the light of their respective THE ANGELIC HOST OF HEATHENDOM. 69 faiths. But even their dignity and holiness are subjected to trammels of tradition or of symbol, by which the artist is never left wholly free to work out the entire power or purity of his imag- ination. In this respect he is not on an equal footing with his Greek brother, who looked not so much to history or creed for his inspiration, as to his own conception of what a god or incarna- tion of any particular attribute of nature or di- vinity should be ; and thus in his Genii, Parcse, Furies, Gorgons, Muses, Nymphs, Graces, Heroes, Fames, and kindred creations of his fancy, — the angelic host of heathendom, — or his higher celestial beings and men deified, knowing no other rule than the promptmgs of his own genius, sub- jected to the established laws of aesthetic taste, he wrought in greater freedom, and attained to a higher and more varied ideality. Sufficient evidence of this fact is to be found in the average productions which either epoch has bequeathed to us. In the vast amount of classical sculpture now extant there is, indeed, a large mass of the poor and commonplace, — the product, not merely of its decline, but of the feeble efforts of feeble men in its best era. Let us con- tinue, however, the comparison of the general character and spirit of all, not vnth the imita- tive results of revived classicaHsm, which must, of necessity, be inferior to its teacher, but with that which, being genuine Christian sculpture, in motive and direction, can be fairly brought into comparison with Pagan work, and submitted, equally with it, to the test of criticism. 70 CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART, The Christian statues, as we have before re- marked, have the advantage of being whole, and in their proper places. Examine them, therefore, wherever to be seen, — whether topping the Lat- eran, surmounting the portico and colonnade of St. Peter's, densely peopling the Cathedral at Milan, guarding the bridge of St. Angelo, look- ing down from Giotto's Campanile and the Gothic niches of Orsanmichele upon the gay crowd of Florence, or as they appeal to us from the ecclesiastical edifices of papal Christendom of every age and nation, — and then go into the museums of classical sculpture, and compare, not the originating thought, but the freedom, grace, and spirit of execution, the beauty, pose^ and action, the arrangement of draperies, and the feeling and expression of each object in relation to its particular inspiration, of the Pagan with those of the Christian era, and see which as art, irrespective of idea, excels. In the comparison we purposely exclude all strictly portrait-sculpture, whether of tomb-work or not, and confine it to those objects which are either the direct inspiration of the respective faiths, or are simply the idealizations of person- ages who, having died without leaving any like- nesses of themselves, have, as it were, intrusted posterity with their recreation in art-forms, in accordance with their posthumous reputations. In this respect, the prophets and apostles of Judea and saints of Christendom may be fairly placed side by side with the demigods and other Pagan conceptions of Greece and Rome. We can, on CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART. 71 this basis, justly compare a Minerva or Jupiter of Pliidias with a Madonna or Christ of Michel Angelo ; a Venus of Scopas, that of Milo, or a Juno of Polycletus with any of the numerous St. Catherines ; St. George of Donatello with the Apollo de Belvedere ; a Hercules with a St. Christopher ; a Faun of Praxiteles with a St. Babiana of Bernini ; the Ludovisian Mars or Juno with a Christ or Virgin of Sansovino, or a Santa Susanna of Quesnoy ; the Modesty of the Vatican with the Charity of Bartolini ; and, final- ly, the entire figure-sculpture of classical Pagan- ism with that of Christendom. While awarding to the best Christian art lofty idea and great nat- uralistic vigor of treatment, and, as with Dona- tello, soul-lit expression and a burning zeal that seems to consume flesh as with the fire of a ten- fold heated furnace, it is a relief to turn from the school as a whole to the antique Isis, Minerva, Flora, and contemporaneous statues at Naples, fashioned in the principles of beauty. We shall be the less astonished at the marvellous success of the Grecian artist if we recall the fact, that, beside his intense love of the beautiful, he was often inspired by a faith, which, like that of Fra Angelico, by prayer and devotion, opened up to him celestial visions and special manifestations of the favor of his gods and their delight in his work. Hercules vouchsafed a vision of himself to Parrhasius, who painted him from his divine aspect, as in our own day Blake claims to have done of men who left earth centuries ago. Ecstatic inspiration has not been confined to the 72 CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART, Eoman Catholic artist. His Pagan and Protes- tant brethren have been likewise favored. The pious ancients had also their severe rules of pro- priety in regard to religious art, — rules as pure and spiritual, and, perhaps, in the best time of their art, as scrupulously adhered to, as were those of the mediaeval artists in all that related to theirs. They blamed those of their artists who used courtesans for models for their images of goddesses, as severely even as did the church Christian artists for like practice, and with as much effect, if we may judge from both their works. Their only entirely nude goddess was Ve- nus, — nude, not in the outset from sensual ideas, but as an idealization of female beauty. If the Christian faith pledged its artist to surround the pious in death with visions of just men and women made perfect, so the Pagan artist sought to cheer his dying brother with consoling images of the inevitable change, like those of "virgins ever young," significant of immortal youth. Even the Fates and Furies were thus represented, and not as devils to torment. So that if the Pagan failed to equal the mediaeval Christian in his hope of a heaven, neither was he tortured by equal fears of a future retribution. These contrasts of faith are plainly perceptible in their respective arts. Not a little of the symbolism of pagan- ism was so complete and perfect of its kind that Christian fancy has lovingly perpetuated it. Cupid is immortal, so is Psyche ; the two, em- bracing, denote the union of body and soul. In- deed, with all our spiritual knowledge or feeling, DIOGENES, 7S we have not surpassed the significant beauty of Greek thought in its incarnated suggestions of immortal life. The entire sentiment of Greek art was averse to asceticism. The bas-relief of Diogenes in Iiis tub at Naples comes as near being an exception as anything we know of. But how unlike the Christian feeling ! Diogenes chooses the city for the practical demonstration of his cynical max- ims. He wishes to reform his countrymen by an egotistical parade of his philosophical contempt X)f luxury. But all he asks even of a king is that he shall not stand between him and the sun. He lives Hke a dog to excite curiosity and to be a perpetual reproach to the effeminacy of his fellow-citizens, whom he despises. Whether the tale be strictly true or not, this is the classical art-motive, as indicated by the artist. Compare this with the St. Jerome of Agostino Carracci, at Naples, and measure the distance be- tween Pagan and Christian asceticism. The saint is by himself in a desolate wilderness. No hu- man eye witnesses his self-inflicted penance and the stern subjection of his body to the spiritual purification demanded, not of his reason, which condemns it, but by his faith. He has fled from man to be alone with his God. It is the salva- tion of his own soul, and not the reformation or reproach of his neighbors, that prompts him to kneel naked on the hard rock, and to beat his breast with a sharp stone, in his anguish of con- victed sin. There is no sunshine for him while his soul is in peril ; no material comfort, however 74 ST. JEROME OF A. CARRACCL lowly and common, appeals to his sensibility ; il is alive only to the eternal joys and horrors of the future life, as seen by his theological vision. Were an imperial Alexander to address him, he would not let go by the opportunity to reason with him of the life and judgment to come ; and his eloquence would the more prick the heart from the deep sincerity and earnestness of his baptism of isolation, contempt of the joys of this world, and anxiety to escape the flames of the hell he so solemnly announces to his fellow- mortals. This painting, as a composition, is one of the best efforts of this school. It shows not only a genuine feeling of the subject, but an apprecia- tion of classical rule in art not common in the treatment of kindred topics by Christian artists. The saint's head is remarkably fine ; his expres- sion and attitude, as his gaze clings fixedly to the crucifix before him, powerfully suggest the char- acter of the emotions of his stricken soul. Our sensibilities are not wounded, nor is our taste outraged by vulgar violence and coarse suffering ; but, in the action hinted at rather than directly expressed, we have the full force of the anchor- ite's dread penance ; while in his countenance may be traced a gleam of the ecstatic hope and promise in his Saviour's blood which underlies his self-abnegation. The landscape is in keep- ing with his feeling, — solemn, wild, solitary, and mystic, — a fit haunt for an anguished though not wholly despairing spirit ; while in color the picture is singularly harmonious with its ascetic motive. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN GROTESQUE. 75 Heathen and Christian grotesque are no less strikingly opposite in character. In the former^ the sensual, fanciful, and ludicrous prevail ; while, with the latter, we have more of religious mysti- cism or stern and gloomy significance. To one there is a moral ; in the other, entertainment. Nowhere in Christian art is there a more striking example of the solemn spirit of its grotesque than in the subterranean chapel of the Certosa convent near Florence, in a fresco of the Temp- tation and Fall, by an unknown artist. Eve is handing the apple to Adam. As she lifts her hand, swiftly flying towards the two from the high heavens, inclining rather toward the woman than the man, is a death's-head, with the lower portion of the jaw gone, and wings attached, like those given to seraphs and cherubs, only hideously stunted, the whole frightfully suggestive of im- pending, quick-coming, omnivorous evil. If the Christian imagination has ever suggested more of the consequences of Eve's sin in a single image, so appropriate in every respect to the moral to be conveyed, and yet so natural in its idealism of horror and warning, we have still to find it. Examples might be indefinitely multiplied, from the great masters of both eras, to illustrate still further the relative consideration, in the Classical and Christian branches of art, which the artists of each attached to the beautiful in itself, as well as the essential difierences of their motives ; but those who are familiar with their works can readily continue the comparison, if desirable. They will find that even the greatest Christian 76 IL PENSEEOSO, artists have been successful only in the degree that they have freed themselves from the restric- tions imposed upon art by its subjection, in choice and treatment, to the dogmatic ideas of the age. In that grand monument of Michel Angelo's genius, II Penseroso, in the Medici Chapel at Florence, and its kindred groups, we find his native greatness unshackled, except by the nat- ural limitations of material. Faultless, as viewed by the standard of a Phidias, these masterpieces are not ; but the grand creative sentiment of he- roic Greek art, without its complete harmony and refinement, is legibly stamped upon them. They give the spectator new conceptions of the power of art, and the imagination is stimulated to pen- etrate the fulness of meaning of a genius that suggests a breadth and depth kindred to Infinity. CHAPTER YIII. The Comparison of Classical and Christian Art continued. — Different Treatment and Love of Landscape. — Christian Art excels in Idea and Comprehensiveness. — Mythology and God the " Father " as Art - Inspirations. — Roman Catholic Art tends to Pol^^theism. — Classical Philosoph- ical Art to Monotheism. — Art - Deities of the Roman Church. — Causes of Image-Worship. must be conceded that to the Greek artist is to be awarded the palm of superiority ^ in the more perfect identification of idea and object, in accordance with the strict demands of high art, based upon his supersensuous ideal- ism. Christian art failed, as we have shown, in one phase by its contempt for and abasement of the natural body, under the mistaken notion that future happiness was to be proportioned to pres- ent misery and sacrifice. The world, instead of being a place of enjoyment and happiness, had become one of denial and martyrdom. Eternal justice was made intelligible to the common mind jhiefly by appealing to physical sensations. As Jlustrations from ordinary nature to depict the joy of heaven or the torment of hell failed to be sufiiciently emphatic to arouse seared con- sciences, the imaginations of poets, artists, and 78 THE LOVE SIDE OF CHRISTIAN ART. preachers were stimulated to the utmost to viv- idly portray supernatural degrees of each. Hence the future state of the Christian became the strongest incentive to the new and strange in art, embodying not only a greater scope for the hor- rible, but also its reverse. As Fear had given rise to a demoniacal im- agery, so at last did Love, by means of art, hint at a spiritual happiness, such as no religion had ever proffered to man. No sooner did the love side of the new faith begin to have weight, than there arose artists to make it familiar by song, sculpture, and painting. If Dante sang of a ma- terial hell, he equally opened new and more spirit- ual heavens to those that hungered and thirsted after righteousness. Contemporary with and rap- idly succeeding him were artists whose imagina- tions were purified and invigorated by this ever- renewing and exhaustless element of Christianity, Their topics were the triumphs of a pure faith, love, hope, and charity, — the exchange of earthly treasures for the golden crowns and dulcet harps of paradise, whether by martyrdom, noble use of life, or lingering suffering, it mattered not, so that the good gifts of immortality were won. In season and out of season, through perils of body and temptations to soul, a select and godly few kept alive the spirit of true Christianity. Their lives became the new inspirations of art. Spirit- ual in their aspirations and elevated in their un- derstandings, their influence lifted it into a new field, more pure, lofty, and comprehensive than had ever dawned upon Grecian intellect. Instead HEAVEN BROUGHT DOWN TO EARTH, 79 of symbolized powers of nature, or an idealized, sensuous humanity, seeking to raise itself to a level with Olympus by the force of the human will, creating a beautiful and intellectual art, there grew up a class of men, who, in the single- ness of faith in a perfect godhead, sought by prayer and purity to draw down from it into their works rays of its eternal and limitless joys. By them art was purified of its sensual dross, and suddenly arose clad in garments of promise and righteousness. The stone of the sepulchre was forever rolled away ; and men for the first time were made to feel by the medium of art that there was in store for them immortal hope, and a peace that passeth understanding. In this bringing down of heaven to earth, the artistic success was indeed more commensu- rate to feeling than knowledge. But no ingen- uous heart can view the works of Cavallini, Giotto, Laurati, Simone Martini, Orgagna, Sano di Pietro, Fra Angelico, Francia, Bellini,"^ and other mediasval artists, by whom the purest relig- ious aspects of the human heart have been most touchingly and fittingly rendered, without an in- ward confession of the superiority of their spirit- ual vision, in its revelation of the moral possibil- ities and divine hopes of man, to the mythological glories and expositions of Olympian life as re- vealed in the intellectuality of the more subtile- minded Greek. Grecian art being finite in scope and aim, it of necessity came to an end with the exhaustion * For an account of their lives and works, see Art-Studies. 80 CHRISTIAN LANDSCAPE. of its mundane power. Not so with that of the artist-prophets of Christianity. Their range was in the Infinite ; their prayers were to the Omnipotent. By them beauty was viewed in its more spiritual sense, as the means of expressing divine perfection and the perfect development of love, — not, as with the Classical artist, for the pleasure of the creature, but for the glory of the Creator ; and thus it was elevated to the high- est purposes, and made the handmaid of holi- ness. Witness the purity and simplicity of their primitive conceptions of landscape, and ignoring of all facts of the natural world which by their ugliness or horror might suggest falsehood or sin. Landscape to them had a symbolical meaning and spiritual significance. They surrounded their holy personages with all that was most lovely and en- joyable in nature, and gave them an atmosphere as bright and serene as their own countenances, which reflected, as art never had before, inward peace and joy. By their devout, untutored feeling they rent the veil which bars the sight of the natural eye, and suggested the progress that art may make when it shall unite to the faith that gave birth to their spiritual revelations as profound a wisdom, founded upon a knowledge of the prin- ciples and laws that connect the seen with the unseen. Inasmuch, therefore, as the underlying idea of Christian art, in its scope, moral purity, and spiritual significance, is so immeasurably be- yond that of Classical art, it also contains within itself the germ of a corresponding progress. As CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE, 81 yet, however, its specific superiority lies chiefly in its promise, while that of the latter rests upon its performance. But it is not in motive alone that Christian art excels the antique. Its spirit is as compre- hensive as its inspiration is holy. Greek art neglected the prolific field of landscape. Natural scenery appears never to have been studied by the ancients as a specific object of art, but was used simply as an accessory to the personified creations of their pantheistic and polytheistic thought; just as in the earliest Christian art it is employed only as a simple background, or for scenic efiect to sacred figures, without any at- tempt at representing it entirely and lovingly for its own sake. But the piety which disposed the latter to seek to express the tenderest and purest emotions of the human heart, illuminated by Christian love, in time brought the Christian artist into a more direct contemplation of the natural world, as an object worthy, in itself, of his undivided skill. Those who more immediately recognized the landscape and its objects as direct motives of art were at first termed naturalists, although the term was no more applicable to them than to the artists of the human figure who sought their models in natural forms. But the artistic love which animates modern landscape is based upon the feeling that it is not, as the ancients in gen- eral fancied, the materialistic expression or dis- guise of many gods, but the creation of the one God, — his sensuous image and revelation, through 6 82 GOD IN ALL, LITTLE AND GREAT. the investigation of which by science or its repre- sentation by art men's hearts are lifted towards him. From this feeling springs that sincere, affectionate, and devotional spirit, so faithful to the minutest fact of bird or blossom, and that grand, solemn, and pure representation of earth, sky, and water, in their elemental distinctions, which characterize more particularly Carlo Cri- velH, Benozzo GozzoH, Gentile da Fabriano, Lorenzo di Credi, Perugino, the early Raphael, and Titian, and not only them, but a host of others worthy to be kept in remembrance. They were the originators of that branch of art now so highly prized, and which, in the natural course of learning, one would expect to see precede all others, instead of being the latest to be developed, as it was both in Greece and Italy. The walls of rooms in Rome were decorated with histori- cal paintings and rehgious subjects long before landscape was employed for that purpose. In- deed, it was not used by the ancients until art was in its decadence. In art, as in feeling, we must become little children, if we would enter the kingdom of heaven. As we go back to the simple, tender, and true in nature, seeing God in his lesser as well as greater works, so we keep in closer com- munion with truth. By recognizing this princi- ple, following out all the gradations of nature, rising gradually from the inferior to superior developments, the eyes of the ai'tist are opened by the great law of analogy, so that his inner vision may, if he will, penetrate even the secrets GOD IN ART, AN IMAGE OF MAN. 83 of spiritual life. As he advances he will per- ceive a divine order and correspondence progres- sively flowing from divine wisdom, and thus, through forms, be led to purer conceptions of Him whom all forms suggest, but are powerless to embody. The feeling which seduces man into fruit- less endeavors to personify the Incommunicable, whether in art or creed, is nearly allied to weak- ness of understanding as well as corruption of heart. It originates in the desire of the unde- veloped mind to reduce Divinity to its own stand- ard of intelligence. Hence God must be mani- fested to it in some tangible image, or cramped into feeble phraseology, instead of being left, by the action of his spirit in his works, to make himself felt by the inward man. God draws the willing heart upward towards himself. Stubborn man as constantly seeks to drag Him down to his own level, by creating gods after his own likeness, — beings sensuous, falla- cious, variable, partial, weak, and passionate, hke unto himself, though still his superior in good and evil. Of such a character, in greater or less de- gree, were all the common conceptions of heathen divinities, previous to Christ's revelation of a uni- versal Father. Even the unimaged Jehovah of Israel partook, in the minds of the Jews, notwith- standing the sublime and spiritualized language of their prophets, of their own mental rudeness and bigotry. Deities swathed and cradled in the hu- man heart are possible subjects of art. Conse- quently, it has repeatedly lent itself to idolatry. 84 ROMAN CATHOLIC POLYTHEISM. by providing Baals and Astartes, golden calves and sacred bulls, in fine, any and every object of worship which was acceptable to the popular un- derstanding, or helpful to corrupt priestcraft. The Israelites, despite the laws of Sinai, bowed down, again and again, before graven images. Like Moses, the Roman lawgiver Numa forbade the manufacturing of representations of deities, either in the form of men or beasts, and with as little success. So did Persian iconoclasts, in their lofty conceptions of deity. A tendency to polythe- ism, the result of ignorance and gross material- ism, obtains, to a lamentable extent, among the masses of Greek and Eoman Catholics of the present day. They require a visible representa- tion of their gods. The doctrine of the Trinity, as commonly understood, supplies art with its means of conforming itself to this unenlightened desire of the human heart. It is true that the Mahometan, by his fanatical devotion to a simple notion, avoids this phase of religious error ; but his life is sensual and his heaven sensuous, be- cause his imagination is dogmatically closed to spiritual insight. The lower the understanding, the more it clamors for an external worship, and delights in a materialized existence. Greek philosophy was indeed able to recognize the " Great Good*' as the source of all life, but it was powerless to lift the people to the level of its own purer concep- tions. Christianity, from the greater simplicity of its revelations and the unity it maintains be- tween feeling and intellect, as it gradually comes ''FATHER'' AND ''SON'' IN ART, 85 to be understood, tends in a corresponding degree to eradicate idolatry from the earth. But until the common mind is developed up to a plane of being sufficiently elevated to find repose in per- fected spirituality of thought, art, notwithstand- ing its proneness to foster idolatry, will continue to be largely employed as the initiatory teacher of religion. To adequately represent the Christian idea of " Our Father," art thus far has shown itself to be comparatively powerless. Painting attempts it, but never as an object of worship. Wisely does it respect this sentiment ; for every endeavor has but vulgarized the conception, and caused its work to be repudiated, both as art and religion. Nowhere are pictures of the Almighty popular, even among Romanists. By the Protestants they are instinctively rejected as something worse than daring folly. Not even Michel Angelo or Ra- phael could exalt the idea above the image of an all-powerful old man, majestic, it is true, but not redeemed from the marks of time. The Grecian Jupiter is a superior thought, aesthetically consid- ered, inasmuch as he is represented as the climax of man ; humanity made perfect, and therefore incapable of change ; wise, serene, passionless, and yet containing all passion. Jehovah in art is too much an avenging deity, too little the " Father " in Christ's sense. But if modern art has been unequal to this conception, it has not been so with regard to Jesus, the " Son." His humanity is intelligible, and therefore representable, and was soon shaped into a suffering god. But even his 86 IMAGE-WORSHIP, BARRENNESS OF HEART sympathetic nature has been found insufficient to meet the cravings of the natural man for a di- vinity still nearer allied to himself. Accordingly the Roman Church has deified the woman Mary, embodying in this modern goddess the beauty, maternity, and chastity of the pagan Venus, Ho- rns, and Diana, coupled with the purer standard of female character developed by Christianity. The Immaculate Virgin is now the most popu- lar object of worship of Romanism, whose ten- dency is to still farther retrograde from a spirit- ual faith by the multiplication of other interme- diates between God and man, in the shape of saints, relics, and the numerous objects conse- crated by the Roman hierarchy to the devotion of its unenlightened disciples. In this renewed theological movement, with its consequent athe- ism on the one hand and increasing polytheistic feeling on the other, may be detected the dawn- ing decrepitude of papacy, as an effete system, unsuited to the riper requirements of the human race. It presages a mental revolution, out of which religion and art shall emerge with re- newed vigor for a fresh cycle of progress. Mind demands an inward, living faith. Externals in religion are everywhere losing their original sig- nificance and authority. The necessity of image- worship denotes barrenness of heart. Nowhere are madonnas and crucifixes more abundant than in the haunts of licentiousness and amid the homes of banditti. In proportion as the inner life is sinful and ignorant does it put faith in idols and talismans. After the same manner, the WHEN ART SUGGESTS GOD. 87 general immorality or insecurity of a country may be estimated by the abundance of its police, prisons, glass -incrus ted walls, iron bars, and thief- traps ; also by the extreme caution with which private property is guarded from the public eye. When the human mind rises above the level of image-worship, art improves by being restricted to its legitimate sphere. Animated by loftier views of God, it perceives more clearly its duties and capacities, and aspires, not to represent the Unrepresentable, but to suggest his attributes. CHAPTER IX. Architecture, the Culmination of Art, is to Man what Nature is to God. — Nature not Perfect, but Progressive. — Defini- tion of Perfection. HE culmination of plastic art is architect- ure. Comprehending all other art, it is at once its beginning and end, its primary purpose and its full knowledge. Singly, painting and sculpture address themselves to man socially. They are individual thoughts, speaking to individ- ual souls, and men find in them companionship as they accord with their particular affinities. We look at them specifically as revelations of one human being to another, in friendly speech. True, we may misapprehend, by not putting ourselves at the same point of vision as the speaker, and therefore do him injustice and ourself a wrong, because it is only by receiving truth in the sense that it is uttered that we can appreciate the in- tended instruction. To some a lamb has only the savor of mint-sauce ; with others it is incar- nated innocence ; while a few, like Swedenborg, see in its snowy fleece and dainty limbs a corre- spondence with some divine dogma or celestial joy. So a pigeon to one person symbolizes a god, and to another suggests a pie. Bread and THE CULMINATION OF ART. 89 wine are Christ's flesh and blood, to be approached only with awe and reverential worship, when held aloft by a priest ; but if shown by an inn-keeper to the same individual, they simply excite carnal appetites. The essential difference of things lies, therefore, within ourselves. Every distinction is true in itself, but all distinctions cannot be true at the same moment to ourselves. We accept each according to the predominating affinity of thought, passion, or sentiment. Art approaches us in a like way, presenting a scale ranging from the tan- gible and organic to the deep mysteries of the Godhead. As the animal, intellectual, or spirit- ual nature predominates in our faculties, so do we receive in kind ; and the same object may be stone to one, meat to another, science to a thu-d person, and spiritual sustenance to a fourth. Architecture is comprehensive in the same sense as nature. Indeed, it is to man the material ex- pression of his mind, as nature is that of the mind of God. It speaks to us, unless we study it by detached parts, as one great whole, as we view a landscape. Mere building is the anatomy or geological structure, founded on strict science ; while sculpture and painting unite to cover it, as vegetation clothes the earth, with forms and col- ors, that suggest alike the sensuous harmonies of material things, and the loftiest aspirations of the human soul. We view architecture, therefore, in its noblest efforts, as the universal art, not only because it includes all others, but, like the struct- ure of the earth itself, while exhibiting infinite variety, it refers all production to a common 90 NATVRE IS GOD' 8 ARCHITECTURE, cause. By architecture the Almighty has pro- vided for man scope for his noblest development of beauty in matter. As he uses the means given, so does he make his strength and freedom felt to the entire race. Hence it is that his greatest works have the effect of the corresponding efforts of na- ture. Like vast expanses of glorious landscape, mountain grandeur, and the solemn ocean, they thrill, lift, or subdue our spirits to their own moods. In the presence of noble architecture we are con- scious of a greater degree of spiritual life, for men recognize in architectural greatness the spirit of something akin to their own souls. In the degree that our intelligence is cultivated, are we awed or elated at its suggestiveness of power, beauty, and wisdom. Nature bears towards God another similitude with architecture to man. Both are the material evolvement of a common principle of construc- tion. Man's handicraft grows out of God's cre- ation, through analogy, and for like purposes ; namely, first, to manifest himself spiritually; and, secondly, for uses in connection with physi- cal being. God wills, and nature appears. It is his speech for man to interpret, and thereby learn. Without it, man could have no existence, for it is the germ of his being. God changes not; but his work, or material nature, does change its as- pect towards man, by man's influence upon it, and by the interaction of its own laws, in accord- ance with its revolving necessities. Nature, as we see it, is, therefore, no more the final perfec- tion of God's work than is our architecture the NATURE IS NOT GOD'S BEST WORK. 91 climax of man's ultimate capacities. Both are in a condition of development, the former adapt- ing itself gradually to the increasing and more elevated wants of man, through internal revo- lution and the stimulus of his science, and the latter varying with the several unfoldings of his hopes and knowledge. Nature does its duty in- exorably, because directly under the guidance of a divine will. Man's will being self-poised, his course fluctuates, though its general direction is onward. Yet, as all nature is a struggle, under a given organic impetus, to evolve out of the lower a higher plane of being, it follows that, alike with man's external organization, all the inferior conditions of matter are subjected to hos- tile influences, which mar their beauty, infringe their liberty, and prey upon their existence. Lions' cubs die from teething, the same as in- fants. The perfect specimen of any kind of life has yet to be consummated. By perfect, we mean free from liability of change or death, as being the ultimate, in beauty and functions, of its class. Everything that correctly responds to the mo- tive of its being may be said to be perfect in the sense of fulfilling its law. Nature is prolific of wondrous beauty, order, and health, and contains within herself all that we need, or are qualified to receive and rightly use with our present limited faculties. In calling nature imperfect, we mean, simply, that such is her condition by the divine law of progress in reference to higher purposes, for which her present are but initiatory. It ia 92 SYMBOLISM OF THINGS, heresy to talk of nature as perfect in respect to its author. What, God's work finished ! God ex- hausted ! He is the Creator. Creation as much goes on to-day as it did eternities ago, and will go on for eternities to come. Arrest creation, and God is not. The common cant which would exalt material nature so above man in finish and uses, has no other foundation than a mawkish sentiment or false ideas of the natural world. Man himself is nature, promoted to free-will. His two loves, Utility and Beauty, are, in reality, correlative terms, and each comparative. That is to say, nature, through every gradation, unites the high- est degree of the one with the highest degree of the other compatible with the object in view. Nay, more ! Her forms are so significant of an interior, vital essence, that precious stones, flowers, and all that she presents of loveliness or repug- nance, have, by universal consent, a language in harmony with their qualities, which speaks to us most eloquently, through types, symbols, and far- reaching significance. It is the conscience of things speaking to our conscience ; like spirit- wise magnetically attracted to like, as deep calleth to deep. By nothing does man more thoroughly manifest the afiinity between shape and spirit than by architecture. CHAPTER X. Analogy between Nature and Architecture, as the respective Creations of God and Man. — Life-Motives of Nations to be read in their Architecture. — Relation of Art-Monuments to the Religious or Governing Thoughts in Central Amer- ica, Mexico, Peru, China, Hindostan, Egypt, Assyria. — The Peculiar Inspiration of the Earliest Architecture. — Pelasgic. — Etruscan. — Grecian. — Roman. — Romanesque, Lombard, Byzantine. — Gothic. — Meaning and Aim. — Defects . and Causes. — Influence of the Roman Church over it. — Renaissant and Palatial Styles. ^^^HE analogy between nature and archi- ^fi^^ tecture, as the respective creations of v^^^^^^ God and man, embodying in sensuous forms and hues the characteristic thought of each as inspired by a definite purpose, should be atten- tively considered in order to arrive at a just solu- tion of the degree of free-will permitted to the latter by the common Creator of nature and man. We perceive in all matter, however rude, evi- dence of fixed design. The materials with which God has strewn the world are all instinctive with a life proportioned to a twofold end. First, that which, having nature itself only in view, illus- trates the divine science of creation, growth, and revolution, independent of man, as being wholly beyond his control, although in structural organi- 94 NATURE AND ARCHITECTURE, zation so greatly his inferior. With or without his will or observation, the plant grows, the beaver builds, the rock becomes soil ; mountains prepare their reservoirs of mud-water to fertilize the earth, and fulfil their duty as atmospherical scavengers ; volcanoes continue their fiery func- tions of safety-valves to the globe ; storm and calm, darkness and sunshine, in fixed order, suc- ceed to each other ; doves coo, wolves snarl, ser- pents gather their stores of poison as instinctively as the bees honey ; deserts and jungles form and disappear ; planets and stars move sublimely and regularly in their appointed orbits through infinite space, missing no second of their given time ; in short, all that man sees is beyond his power to create, and is both the object and subject of an unconscious science, so lofty and far-reaching that during his long sojourn upon earth he has but detected the simplest of its laws. The relation man has to this side of nature is limited to discovery. He can neither add to, sub- tract from, nor vary in the smallest degree, that which God directly cares for. Unequal in organic spirit to man, matter by itself is not susceptible of choice, and consequently must obey the im- pulsive force of its being. Secondly, as subservient to the higher purposes unfolded in the creation of man, matter is made subject to the impressions of his mind. Its king- dom is given to him for the expansion of his creative faculties, and to receive the stamp of his ideas. In endowing man with superior mental attributes, God was virtually bound to leave him LIFE-MOTIVES OF ARCHITECTURE, 95 liberty of choice, and a medium of expression for his self-development. By the secondary law and plastic character of nature, man, the soul, is con- stituted the master. Being akin to matter, he is himself subjected to her general laws ; yet she is compelled, by the superiority on his side of the divine agencies that regulate their common ex- istence, to become the instrument by which he manifests his own progress. At his bidding, light and heat burst forth from the cold, opaque rock, melody issues from the dumb ore, rich color from the brown earth, and each dumb or living thing obeys his creative will. To get at the prevailing life-motive of any epoch, we must read its architecture, as well as its literature. The former is the monumental expression of the latter. In either case, we have to do with its superior minds. A nation soon recognizes in the creative intellect of its most gifted sons the quality and extent of its own feelings and aspirations, and finds in individual genius the possible standard and direction of the race. As the great mind sings, talks, paints, or builds, so the common mind follows in its wake, finally adopting as its own the truths that are first stamped with its master's effigy. Several races have left no other literature than their architecture ; showing that, in the usual course of development, the artistic expression of mind precedes the written or abstract. Men carve, paint, and build before they invent letters, and, as we perceive in Greece and mediseval Eu- rope, attain a lofty standard in art previous to 96 CENTRAL AMERICA, discovering, as by printing, how to easily and cheaply preserve and disseminate thought. Amid the forests of Central America we find the architectural debris of Indian races that had made a considerable advance towards civilization, . without other inspiration than their own inborn energies, for they were without the advantage of intercourse with other progressive peoples. Of their religion we know scarcely anything ; but, judging from their uncouth sculpture, crude paintings, and barbarous ornamentation, inter- mingled with an architecture that survives only in rude forms or abortive attempts at beauty, strange and defying curiosity as to practical uses, without evidence of refined taste or culti- vated intellect, we must conclude that, mentally and morally, they were but upon a par with their semi-barbarous monuments. Mexico and Peru, whose civilizations were so lauded by the unlettered soldiers of Cortez and Pizarro, have left scarcely higher indications of themselves. Judging from the European stand- ard of intellectual growth, the aborigines of these countries were, at the best, but superior races of savages, with no intellectual cohesion or advanced notions of religion. The consequence was that their institutions vanished like wax in a furnace, before the vigorous assault of a few civilized white adventurers. The native superi- ority of one race over another has never been more emphatically shown than in these conquests. Of the art of the subdued Americans nothing has survived, except a few grotesque specimens of a MEXICO AND PERU. 97 pictorial language of almost infantile simplicity of design and complexity of arrangement, a few roads, some stone buildings or walls, without other pretensions than rude strength, and coarse, ugly carvings and sculptures, or pottery, the hid- eous character of which in the one nation, and the abortive attempts at the representation of natural objects in the other, aptly illustrate in both their respectively sanguinary or despotic faiths and governments, and the nature of the abstract ideas upon which they were based. The material objects of our love or veneration have, by a law of affinity from which we cannot escape if we would, a definite correspondence to our ideals of beauty and truth. It requires, therefore, but a glance at the images and sculp- ture these peoples loved and adored, to perceive how erroneous were their conce];^tions of art and divinity. A few rays of light had indeed pene- trated their minds, as may be gathered from their moral maxims, and as may be seen in their im- perfectly developed feeling for beauty in some of their designs for architectural ornamentation and domestic purposes ; but these were exceptional, and served only to make the prevailing darkness more gloomy. The world has lost nothing in religious knowledge by the disappearance of their faiths ; nor has art anything to regret in the ruin of their architecture and the melting into coin of their sacred vessels. Had there been in either any vahie beyond the material, the age in which they were made known to Europeans, being quickened by art, would have recognized their 7 98 CHINA, claims and sacredly preserved them. We need no fact more demonstrative of the absence of ar- tistic value in the immense quantities of wrought gold and silver sent to Europe from these coun- tries after their conquest, than that all went di- rectly to the crucible, while the contemporary art of Cellini and his scholars is still sacredly guarded as the heirloom of nations. The indigenous art and civilization of America, having taken a wrong direction, succumbed as soon as they came in con- tact with more powerful truths and greater crea- tive energies. China presents a more elevated artistic devel- opment, and consequently a riper civilization ; but its standard is so inferior to the Christian, that nothing but its remoteness preserves it from the fate of the native American races. Its condition is as unvarying as its fantastic grotesque art, which so graphically represents its intellectual and religious ideas, — an arbitrary compound of sensualism and empty maxims, based, like its pagoda architecture, broadly and firmly upon the earth, and, like it, ever narrowing and growing lighter and curling downward, as if reluctant to mount heavenward. The indigenous Hindoo architecture is a gro- tesque and capricious interblending of massive strength, feminine delicacy, and demoniacal ugli- ness, — a rude jumble of truth and error, in every conceivable form of grandeur, inspiration, elabo- rate and symbolical ornamentation, that Oriental imaginations, steeped in mysticism and revolving within sacredly prescribed circles of thought, HIND ST AN, 99 could create. It addresses itself to the sensuous religious idea, and is allied to the Egyptian in its metaphysical characteristics. The latter is, how- ever, more grandly spiritual. Like its rigid, limb-bound statuary, it hints at great hidden truths, struggling towards more perfect utterance. The symbolism of Egyptian architecture is deep and grand, its tendency lofty and soul-elevating ; but its speech, like its creative faith, is enigmat- ical, and its spirit, as its intellect, kept studiously veiled, as if more inclined to doubt than to be- lieve, yet striving to impose itself as absolute truth upon the people. Like the older Hindoo, it is mysterious and sepulchral, delighting in caves and dark passages, gloomily torch or sun lighted, reflecting from bright colors and quaint, stiff, gigantesque sculptures, gleams of art-visions which must have puzzled and awed the common mind, without inspiring it with intellectual light or divine hope. The oldest art-monuments are those of Egypt, dating back we know not how many centuries before Abraham. Egyptian art, like that of Oriental nations in general, is chiefly character- ized by immutability. Its character remains essentially the same through its long life of more than thirty centuries. Details vary in different epochs, but never sufficiently to impart to it the progressive spirit of Greek art. Freedom and poetical imagination never lent it soul-light. It never aspired to be the exponent or personifica- tion of a heroic mythology, nor did it ever ally itself to sensuous beauty, but ever maintained its 100 EGYPT. dry, dogmatical, practical, domestic aspect, dealing in metaphysical abstractions, grand stereotyped personifications, or the homely details of common life and ordinary portraiture. Both painting and sculpture were strictly subordinated to architect- ure. Neither enjoyed a distinct, independent existence, nor were they permitted to express ac- tive passions or emotions, but confined, in paint- ing, to a system of crude, strong, positive color- ing, not inharmonious in its prismatic contrasts, telhng stories after the manner of a child's book of tales, and in sculpture to rigid symmetry and an unvarying repetition of stiff postures and a mystical aspect of features. Of statuesque groups there are but two known, each of them of a do- mestic character : one, a husband and wife, sit- ting affectionately together on the same seat ; in the other, the father alone sits, while his family stand around him. In fine, Egyptian art is barren of individual freedom of thought or variety of expression. It had innate capacity for better things ; but inasmuch as the Egyptian mind ig- nored freedom and beauty, and isolated itself, so far as it could, from all foreign and progressive influences, it became, like an embalmed corpse, of value only as a record of the dead past. Assyrian architecture was in spirit the Eenais- sant or Palatial of Oriental antiquity, sensual, lordly, glorifying the ruler, and surrounding him with the pomp and luxury of state. Its chief characteristic was man-worship, with its concom- itant principle of arbitrary power. It had more freedom and grace than that of Egypt, although PURITAN ART-HATERS. 101 confining painting and sculpture exclusively to architectural purposes. In its grotesque we no- tice purer design and more legitimate use than are apparent in its modern successor. Those nations which, from a rigid principle of faith, refused to embody their conceptions of di- vinity in art, in general may be said to have had no distinguishing architecture, if we except the Saracens, whose active intellects for a while over- came the prevailing sensual stupor of their creed, and gave play to their imaginations in the crea- tion of styles which, while they protested against image-worship, contained within themselves a lux- uriance of beauty that has made them a delight and wonder even to the Christian world. But the fanatic protestants against graven images of all epochs, the Jews of old, the Turks of the Middle Ages, and the Puritans and Quakers of our day, have invariably either contemned art outright, or, when driven to it by the necessity of localizing worship, have restrained themselves to architect- ural plagiarisms, or the rudest and most unsightly of edifices. Painting and sculpture were forbid- den the Jews, because they might lead to idol- atry. The Turks invent nothing, but take to themselves the remains of Christian and Sara- cenic art ; while most Protestant sects, in their ignorance or disregard of the aesthetic sentiment, have been content to worship in whitewashed " meeting-houses," from which all sensuous sym- bols of divine beauty are rigorously banished, lest they should debase the purely spiritual con- ception of God; or else they plagiarize incon- 102 ARAB MONOTHEISM. gruous bits of architecture from their Roman Catholic or Pagan ancestors, uniting them into buildings which exhibit a medley of shop, bank, cafe, storehouse, and lecture-room, or whatever proclaims the predominance of trade, with only now and then a gleam of spiritual significance in some isolated form or feature, sufficient to show that the germ of worship is not wholly dead in the builders. Undoubtedly, independent of religious faith, there is an innate artistic inequilibrium of race, which greatly modifies both the quality and quan- tity of art-development among difierent peoples. The old Arab or Shemitic tribes, the Jews, Syrians, and Phoenicians, added nothing to the world's art, nor have they left original monuments of any kind. Such art as they needed they bor- rowed from surrounding nations. Their artistic feeling vented itself in sensuous, spiritualized poetry, in abstract ideas and lofty conceptions of divinity, based upon monotheism. Notwithstand- ing their frequent relapses into idolatry, — during which they worshipped idols, through the prin- ciple of fear, of the ugliest description and the most demoniacal character, — a belief in one Supreme Being, not to be represented by human agency, was their ruling thought, and the one that has survived all apostasies, gradually extend- ing its domain over neighboring races. Governed chiefly by feeling, of narrow intellects, and pos- sessing firm and positive religious intuitions, which in general connected art with idolatry, fanatical from isolation and faith, it is no matter of surprise ARCHITECTURE AS FORCE. 103 that the Arab tribes, having no aptitude of race for plastic art, should have remained stationary in their civilization and indifferent to the example of European peoples. Through individuals of this spiritually impressible race mankind has, however, received its divinest truths ; so that from them, as selected instruments of the Great Will, constantly proceeds an ever-increasing in- fluence for moral good over the destinies of all men ; and thus they have been made to bear the most important part thus far unfolded in the history of humanity. Architecture first manifests itself in pure strength or force. Its earliest forms are rude and ponderous, as if the builders sought to eter- nize themselves in matter. Of this character are the Pyramids and the oldest temples of Egypt and India, the equally ambitious but less intelli- gible sacred structures of the aboriginal races of the warm regions of the Americas, and the Cy- clopean and Pelasgic remains of Europe. So successful have been the authors of these works, that, although they precede all other architectural types of civilization, the lapse of ages leaves upon them a freshness and structural perfection which the later and lighter efforts of subsequent peoples have failed to retain. The principle of durability has been fully secured, and these monuments exist as literally the sepulchres of their erectors ; for the little we know of them is due to the disinter- ment and explorations to which they have been subjected. _It seems to have been a common propensity 104 ALATRI AND ARPINO. among all early races to undertake enormously laborious and massive works, more from a bar- barous ambition or senseless pride than from any necessity of protection which even the iron age of brute force and incipient civilization might have required. Such structures as the citadels of Alatri and Arpino, in Central Italy, indicate, by their solidity and size, something beyond mere defence. The sentiment of defiance is legible all over them. Doubtless they were erected in that daring spirit which led the first men, in their ma- terial conceptions of life and instinctive aspira- tions, to try for something more durable and better than the promise of their earth-habitation, and, as is expressed in the myths of the building of the Tower of Babel and the war of the Titans, to seek to scale heaven, aiming to grasp through physical force what their intellects were too un- developed to comprehend. The earliest temples everywhere partake more or less of the character of fortifications, and these were in turn invested with a religious aspect. This age is also the era of obelisks. Man, rejoicing greatly in his sensuous existence, de- lighted in worshipping the cause of his being. He found in the exercise of his new-born facul- ties a pleasant satisfaction proportioned to their freshness and vigor. That which gave him most happiness he bhndly adored, mistaking the gift for the cause. Thus, he deified sensual objects, and, with semi-savage freedom, worshipped what- ever his undisciplined will or dominant passions most inclined him to love, covet, or fear. Hence GRECIAN ARCHITECTURE. 105 the architectural expression of this epoch of the world is bold, grand, and vague. We perceive huge masses, erected with but little regard for any apparent necessity or utility, barren of other beauty than their grandeur, but full of faith in matter, yet indicating an earnestness and sincerity of purpose in groping or feeling, as it were, after God, and, although mistaking his nature and blind to their own spiritual possibilities, still seeking to honor him and exalt themselves by lavish, fruitless toil, and vast uprearings of stone over stone. It is evident, theref6:'e, that the religious idea invariably assumes to itself a definite form in arcliitecture, which depends for the degree and direction of its development upon the compara- tive influence of intellect or feeling, being per- fect of its kind as they are found to harmonize, and mystic or barren in the degree that the men- tal and moral faculties are subjected to a selfish or ignorant will. The purest example in the ancient world of its unrestrained self-development is to be found in Greece. Here it took in architecture, as in other art, strictly the form of intellectual beauty. The feeling which inspired it was critically subjected to the rules of science before it was allowed free- dom of expression. Hence its unity and har- mony, so peculiarly representative of the artistic ideality of the race that originated it. Grecian architecture not only elates the mind from the consciousness of its intellectual greatness, but gives it repose from the purity of its material, 106 PJSSTUM, the perfect correspondence of its spirit and form, and the harmony between its principles and uses. The last having disappeared with their contem- porary faith, moderns, in their love for its beauty, have perverted it to purposes for which it was not intended, and thus, by divorcing spirit from form, have in a like degree impaired its charac- ter. We do not go to Parisian bourses and nineteenth - century churches, to London shop- colonnades, nor to American banks, colleges, or custom-houses, to know its beauty and worth; but our lessons are learned, and admiration won, from broken columns and dismantled temples, still lingering on their natal soil, so lovely in outline and so correct in proportions that out of their scattered fragments more perfect wholes arise to our mind's eye than from all the incongruous imi- tations of the present age, upon which so much time and money have been wasted. The early Doric, in its massiveness and strength, partakes of the Egyptian type ; but the simple beauty of its proportions, as in the Temple of Neptune at Paestum, its out-door liberty, yet per- fect repose, show its entire emancipation from the sepulchral spirit of the former into a thing of life delighting in open space and sunshine, lovely in color as the sky about it, severely grand in char- acter, but free, noble, and instinctive with loftier aspiration. The Greeks, indeed, elevated archi- tecture from a tomb into a fitting abode for their gods. Their temples were, in fact, embryo pal- aces ; but the spirit both of their mythology and their religious rites was averse to confinement GREEK FEELING IN ARCHITECTURE, 107 within walls. The beauty of their architecture was on the outside ; their games, ritual, and plays were for the open air ; their deities lived in the waters, forests, or mountains ; so that the in- terior of their buildings was, unlike the Gothic, less attractive than the exterior. Still, it must be acknowledged that too frequent repetition of the columnal style, confined to a single order in the same locality, must have had the effect of monot- ony. Much of its peculiar attraction depends upon its isolation ; as will be noticed at Paestum, by looking at the ruins either as a group, or, singly, at the Temple of Neptune, which stands out so grandly and firmly against the lovely sky of Campania, purplish with its atmospherical painting of twenty-five hundred years, a mega- lonyx of architecture, reminding the present gen- eration that there were "giants on the earth in those days." The gradations by which this style passed through the intermediate stages into the per- fected Corintliian were easy and natural, show- ing the progress in intellectual spirituality of the Greek taste, and how it finally succeeded in unit- ing the essence of all that gave value to the pre- ceding types of architecture with higher ideas of beauty. Grecian architecture is, however, like the my- thology of the land, strictly human in feeling. It is an intellectual aspiration, based firmly upon the earth, rising columnward towards heaven in beautiful symmetry and proportions, and then suddenly checking itself by entablature and cor- 108 THE ROMAN FEELING. nice, as having attained its full flight. We best look at it externally, upon a level with ourselves. Its interior is cold, dark, and unsatisfying. The inmost soul is not reached ; the eye comprehends at once its entire scope. It tells us of sensuous and scientific harmonies, stimulates thought, de- velops in its art the most beautiful of natural objects, but keeps us moderns strictly to earth, and admitted the ancients only into an earth- heaven. Its Olympus was around and over it, scarcely soaring to a greater height than its walls ; while its gods were simply heroic men, or nature's phenomena put into human shapes. It perished because its spirit was too finite. The early Romans cherished no real love for art. With them a sculptor was but indifierently well regarded. Useful and practical works, such as sewers, citadels, bridges, roads, and whatever tended to increase and consolidate their power, were the primary objects of interest to the Ro- man people. This resulted from the large Etrus- can element of their population. Unlike the Greeks, temples and their ornamentation were of secondary consideration to whatever promoted the material power and wealth of the nation. Grad- ually, however, art, owing to the increase of lux- ury, became fashionable. Rome then borrowed from Greece its art, its philosophy, and its religion, adding to each. Her lust was of universal power, but there was no bigotry in her faith. Jew, Egyp- tian, Greek, and Scythian could worship freely beneath the swoop of her eagle's wings, so long as they bowed to her civil sway. She added to ROME. 109 Grecian architecture a miniature world, — that glorious symbol of strength and dominion, the arch. Everywhere Kome is seen in the arch, — ■ in amphitheatre, aqueduct, temple, palace, basilica, and sewer, — arch over arch, the Greek column being but its footstool. Now, the inclination is to view architecture internally. We are im- pressed by physical force and firmness and great- ness of will-power. The eye is lifted up through vast and graceful sweeps, until it ranges along whole firmaments of noble masonry; but the sight is limited to marble ceilings and adamantine vaults."^ There is no escape for thought through their massive impenetrability. A sense of power and magnificence overshadows men and things with imperial might. Rome exhausted the vital- ity of the Greek principle. The sensuous intel- lectual was wedded to material grandeur, but without any new spiritual revealment. The practical significance of the Roman architecture proper was compass and dominion. Gradually it died out, beneath the combined influences of the active hostility of more vigorous animal natures and the purer aspirations of Christianity. Out of this combination there immediately sprang up another style of architecture, swayed by the enthusiasm of a new-born faith, and unit- * If architectural forms are, as some suppose, in the main derived from the vegetable kingdom, it is possible that the liomans borrowed their idea of the dome — especially the flat one, like that of the Pantheon — from the Italian pine. The tops of some pines are loftily rounded, like the dome even of St. Peter's. 110 ROMANESQUE AND LOMBARD STYLES, iiig the classical fragments of the past to the rude productions of unskilled hands. Semi-sav- age but devout hearts brought the treasures of their imaginations and their fortunes to the ser- vice of their new Lord. Whatever was dear to them must be equally dear to him. Without science, moved by deep feeling, they wrought into forms the fancies of their minds, scarcely half- weaned from heathenism, or redeemed from bar- barism, and in earnest faith devoted them to the uses and adornment of the new sanctuaries. This was the Lombard era, so prolific in rough actions and rude art ; when nondescript wolves, lions, and ferocious animals of all kinds were carved to support the columns and porticos of temples of peace and love, and capital, door, roof, and wall were alike eloquent with strange fancies, legends, and symbols, — living evidences of the enlarged scope Christianity offered to art. Those children in mental acquirements, the unlet- tered architects and artists of that day, repudi- ating or having lost all knowledge of the rules of Greek art, gave themselves wholly up to the impulse of their age, and wrote out their thoughts in stone and color, according to their needs, with- out other rule than their feeling, giving freely their best to express their faith and win heaven. Fish, bird, or brute, leaflet, vine, or flower, demon or an- gel, saint or ruffian, the grotesque or grave, what- ever pleased them, or had in their eyes a symbolic significance, was added to their architecture, in- side or outside, wherever space could be found to record their inspiration. A wider contrast than ROMANESQUE AND LOMBARD STYLES. Ill between the beauty and severe rule of pure clas- sical architecture, and the wild freedom, random adornment, and savage earnestness of the early Lombard, cannot be conceived. Passing modestly and almost imperceptibly, at first, from the Pagan basilica, which required to be but slightly modified to meet the primary dem- ocratic exigencies of the new worship. Christian arcliitecture in the more civilized regions of Europe and Asia grew into the Romanesque and Byzantine styles, retaining many traces in orna- mentation of classic art, but noted chiefly for its mosaics and frescos, by the help of which, in place of heathen statuary, it sought to reveal to the common mind the facts and doctrines of the new religion. At this epoch, extending from the reign of Constantine to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we find in the houses of worship, as in the religious heart of the time, a strange medley of truth and error ; undeveloped knowledge and crude thoughts, childish materialism and infantile sincerity, fierce bigotry and noble devotion, the lust of asceticism and the glow of true piety, barbarian fancy and gleams of refinement, noble devotion and vile superstition. Pagan relic and Christ's cross, side by side ; unity and consist- ency in nothing, but struggle, fear, and furious selfishness everywhere ; yet a gradually increas- ing horizon of life and hope, — progress amid chaos : such was the state of mind and architect- ure during this long period. In nothing is it more aptly represented than in the rehgious character and artistic value of its 112 MATERIALISM IN ARCHITECTURE. mosaics and paintings. When these were rightly employed as decorative art, they were found highly efficacious in investing the interiors of churches with vital warmth and beauty ; but as teachers of spiritual doctrines, except when viewed as simple sacred histories, by the grossness of their materialism, the rudeness of their designs, and their ambitious materialistic attempts at repre- senting the Almighty and heavenly host, with equally graphic illustrations of his rival, Satan, and the horrors of his sulphurous kingdom, — in short, by aspiring to the impossible in art, — they signally failed. Indeed, it may reason- ably be doubted whether it is possible for such gross art to exercise a wholesome influence over mind, however ignorant ; since, from fa- miliarity with images of terror or physical evil, it speedily learns to regard them as either the natural and inevitable, or as the false machinery of religious despotism, and, therefore, as not de- pending in any degree upon its own state of affec- tions. Pure materialism is a hydra-headed mon- ster, and delights in begetting sin. The utter neglect or ridicule, in a religious point of view, to which all illustrative art founded in base fear is finally consigned, justifies us in regarding it as worse than useless. But out of Lombard freedom and its inade- quate exposition of Christianity, silently and al- most untraceably, so gradual was the change, grew purer rule and more scientific execution, though still inspired by an equal depth of feeling. The Gothic, in its various branches, began to ap- THE GOTHIC. 113 pear, leavened in Italy and Spain with the Ori- ental and Saracenic types, and borrowing from Kome and Greece the arch and other forms of ancient art, which kept it from perfect freedom, and finally led to its passing out of the mixed or adulterated Gothic into the equally mixed and adulterated classical or composite style introduced by Brunelleschi and his compeers, on the revival of pagan learning and philosophy. In Northern Europe it developed into a more spiritual expres- sion of the devotion of the times. The root of its spiritual symbolism lies in the freedom of its lines upward. They are the infinite perpendicu- lar, without horizontal restraint of entablature or confinement by those elemental features of Gre- cian architecture which cut short aspiration heavenward, and bound it firm and solid to the ground. Height as opposed to breadth, the col- umn to the spire, architrave to the pointed arch, — such are some of their essential contrasts of con- structive spirit. Repetition of a few forms and a limited scope of adornment, noble and beautiful, it is true, and full of aesthetic repose, characterized the one almost to a monotony, especially in the sky- line, and long ranges of columns, and general same- ness of outline of masses, until the Romans, in adapting it to their needs, diversified it, sometimes nobly, more often with questionable taste, by domes, arches, and orders, piled one above another. In- exhaustible movement or Hfe, freedom of orna- mentation, ranging from rude license to refined fancy and elevated symbolism, were the birth- right of the architecture born under the Northern 8 114 THE GOTHIC. sky, as imaginative, wild, and daring as the tem- per of its sons. Fettered by no narrow system of 83sthetic science, seeking mainly to give ex- pression to their newly aroused notions of beauty, they lifted up their graceful shafts and flying-but- tresses until their forms were almost lost in the welcoming heaven above them, and broke up their vaults and roofs into stone-spray as light- some and joyous as ocean- waves, or as varied and beautiful as the witchery of the frost-work of their winters. Everywhere the true Gotliic is characterized by ethereal delicacy and the up- lifting of the soul to God. Internally and ex- ternally, by pointed arch and sky-aspiring dome, — not St. Peter's of Kome, but that of Santa Maria del Fiore of Florence, — by spire and shaft, by flying-buttress and lofty window, whose lights gave out celestial colors, and suggestions of " good men made perfect ; " by lavish painting and sculpture, as well in the particular as in the general, it led the eye and thought upward. As the tower proclaims watch and ward, so do the spire and shaft, which so emphatically belong to this style, suggest spiritual hope. And this is its grand religious distinction over all other archi- tecture, just as its principles of building illustrate or are taken from the growth and variety of the natural world, and in consequence admit of infi- nite adaptability of use and flexibility of beauty. In its religious form, and to a certain extent in its domestic, it is the embodiment of the spiritual and imaginative faculties. Mind exhausts itself in penetrating its lofty significance, as does the THE GOTHIC. 115 eye in deciphering its infinity of artistic adorn- ment. There is nothing sensual or coldly intel lectual in true Gothic. It images the mys- teries of the whole soul in its heavenward gaze and earth - progress : now obscure, now clear ; bright with rays of colored light, like angel's hints, then serious ; hoping and doubting ; certain and uncertain ; heart and intellect harmoniously moved by its silent music, or awed by its inscru- table designs ; the human self annihilated, and the spirit-self awakened to a growing conscious- ness of its future. If the Greek satisfied the intellect, the Gothic equally responds to the spiritual faculty. Up, up, still up the vision is ever drawn, finding no limit, but, like the mar- tyred Stephen, seeing in the negation of body a heaven open to view ; and so, self-annihilated, the individual is gradually absorbed into the sanctuary. The architecture that can effect this — and there are still many cathedrals scattered over Europe that can — is truly sublime. Too much attention is paid by moderns to the mere form of the Gothic, to the neglect of its chief characteristic feature, that which gives it a value, for spiritual purposes, beyond any other system of architecture. We refer to its stained-glass windows, and general manage- ment of color, light, and shade. Its later and best styles of windows were those which were carried out in the cathedrals of France and Eng- land to their ripest expression ; the one marked by richness and lightness, and the other by rich- ness and solidity ; each beautiful, though neither 116 THE GOTHIC, of them was fully perfected before senseless in- novations led the Gothic astray from its orig- inal intentions. The fulness of the religious character perhaps depended even more upon the aerial harmonies of stained windows than upon beauteous tracery or profuse sculpture. Unfor- tunately, but few specimens of either art exist in their original excellence. Enough, however, re- mains to prove that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals gave their whole souls to their work, for the double purpose of honoring God and, by means of plastic art, of creating an encyclopaedia of instruction for man, speaking to his entire un- derstanding, either by direct knowledge, moral significance, or spiritual beauty. Accordingly, we find, as in St. Mark's of Venice, of the By- zantine school, and the Kheims, Chartres, St. Denis, and many other mediaeval cathedrals, and imitated in our day in the little church of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, outside of Rouen, Bible histories and sacred traditions written in letters of stone all over their walls ; and not religion only, but the biographies of royal families, noble ancestral deeds, flaming in purple and gold and stamped in adamant, not dumb in their storied sepulchres, but looking down from generation to generation, a perpetual legacy of glory, faith, and example to all men; amid them, standing forth for warning, encouragement, or intellect- ual stimulus, science, philosophy, and the virtues and vices of humanity, in burning and eloquent allegory or stern symbol ; and, above all, the artist's imagination, soaring still higher, daringly THE GOTHIC, 117 brought down from heaven, to complete his thought, its hosts and hierarchy, that they might sit in everlasting judgment alike over crowned or beggared worshipper, uttering to the heart of each, law, hope, or mercy, according to its need. But we have not yet completed our re- view of the architect's work. To all this, over and above the solemn shadows of column and vault, so full of religious repose, the light spring of pointed arch, heaven-climbing shaft, and sky- tipped spire, the enduring lessons of carved stone and brilliant fresco, — to all these spiritual delights he added rays of heaven-tinted light, streaming through rainbow-hued windows alive with saintly and angelic forms, and filling the whole interior of the sanctuary with a soft effulgence that soothed the soul, and by its magnetic harmony lifted thought and feeling through all their earthly gra- dations up to their God. Such were the full object and meaning of this architecture, internally and externally. It had its highest manifestation, as if anticipating its coming doom with a melody like the fabled notes of the dying swan, just preceding the invention of printing. Then book-thought, that abstract expression of the spiritual and intellectual facul- ties, so superseded the necessity of sensuous lan- guage, that the palsy of neglect came over it be- fore its possibilities were exhausted, or its spirit wholly comprehended. To us, therefore, it rarely appears other than with the fatal beauty of the consumptive patient, — lovely and inviting even in its decay, shadowing forth not alone the vigor 118 THE GOTHIC. and charm of its uncompleted earthly existence, but suggesting the spiritual glories that are des- tined, as we would fain believe, yet to be unfolded out of its now dormant power. Unfortunately for true art and religion, this picture has its reverse. Cathedral architecture scarcely anywhere has been left free to speak the full lesson of its creators. Born of Christianity, if completed consistently with its motive, and kept in strict accordance with its art-principles, it is the purest and most eloquent sensuous expo- nent of the doctrine of immortality that has yet been developed. We do not assert that its build- ers were better men than those of our day; but they knew far better what they were about than do our architects. Their buildings were not the plagiarized designs of one man, but the fruition of the minds and hands of many, giving their talents with harmonious concert to works embody- ing the greatest ideas and deepest feelings that exist in man, concentrated on the most patriotic and sacred purposes. They lived, too, at a time when the feeling for form and color was, even in an aesthetic sense, as active as ever it was among the Greeks, though under the inspiration of a wholly different sentiment. This is how the artists and architects of the Middle Ages came to give free rein to their love of the beautiful, alike in ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, costume, armor, and furniture. In fine, in every- thing they undertook, whether for the altar, field, or the hearth-stone^ they wrought out their free and complete sense of beauty, from a passionate THE GOTHIC. 119 love of it for its own sake, and with but a sec- ondary regard for convenience or utility. This was the heroic and picturesque period of modern art. In its relation to sensuous effects, under the guidance of a vital and self-sacrificing, aesthetic principle, founded in Christian faith, in- structive, impulsive, and joyous, it stands forth in bold relief as contrasted with the more prosaic and scientific aspect of this century, which, in its gen- eral indifference to beauty as a primary element of life, and its devotion in preference to that which promotes not so much the enjoyment of man as his wealth and power, may be likened to the early Roman ages. In our social amusements, when we try to re- vive in fancy ball or fete a momentary satisfac- tion in graceful and beautiful costume, we are at once obliged to go back to the Middle Ages for our fashions. But will any future generation ever repeat ours, except as examples of ugliness ? So, the ornamental portions of our dwellings, domestic utensils, and whatever we have that is tolerable in religious architecture, are drawn either from classical antiquity or the prolific me- dioeval genius ; showing that thus far we are imitators only, and not creators, of art. However, it must not be lost sight of that we judge the Middle Ages not so much from the un- derstanding and condition of the masses, as from the feeling and knowledge of their ablest minds. It was the feudal age, and aristocracy of rank or talent swayed the popular will, and stamped its effigy upon it. Hence it comes down to us with 120 THE GOTHIC, greater refinement and artistic beauty than if, as in our own, the superior cultivation of the few had been hidden or absorbed by the more mate- rial exigencies of the many, and the prosaic stand- ard of knowledge and comfort so raised as to re- duce the poetical heights and picturesque varieties of the former wellnigh to the monotonous level of the latter. But, notwithstanding our superi- ority in the mere power of civilization, we have much to learn and enjoy from the mediaevalists, whose excess of life was of so opposite a charac- ter to ours. Every age has its chronic weakness, or special strength. The revealers of new truths of all ages, whether poets, artists, philosophers, or saints, have a standard of feeling and a degree of spirit- ual insight far above those of the multitude. Being the pioneers of progress in science, art, and relig- ion, their works, however differently shaped by time and circumstance, are nevertheless inspired by the common desire to elevate humanity in the measure and direction of their own enlarged fac- ulties. Although we discover in all great works progressive revealments of truth, they are partial and comparative, because no mind in human form can wholly escape the influences of our common imperfection. But there is also a downward tendency of mind, arising from the earthward gravitation of ignorance and selfishness. No class of men have more persecuted the prophets than the priests ; because the one foretells change and progress, while the other clings with the intensity of selfishness to established power. The Church PRIESTS PERSECUTE PROPHETS. 121 of Rome owes her existence to the spirit of lib- erty and reform she now repudiates. Having established her authority, her constant endeavor is to perpetuate it by the plea of heaven-derived infallibility. Individual freedom must succumb to her hierarchal rule. There is no truth except such as is sanctioned by the church, and nothing is true that questions her policy or power. She is a self-instituted shepherdess, and her flock are silly sheep by themselves incompetent to find their pastures. This is the principle of all absolute power, whether in church or state. To a certain extent, direction and instruction are needed by all. The absolute in government is necessary to repress the tendency of evil and uninformed minds towards anarchy, and also to fuse and discipline diversified races and interests into orderly social life. This done, then it is due to human liberty to remove the pressure of absolutism, and permit the indi- vidual to develop himself according to his incli- nation, provided there is nothing in it that in- fringes the security and freedom of his neighbor. Not only the Roman Church, but all other gov- ernments founded upon a selfish perversion of authority, ignore Christ's love of neighbor, from fear of inquiry and progress. In the outset this was not so much the case ; for the church had her sheep to collect, and went into the wilderness to look after them, moving with and taking the lead of the general impulse that led all to hunger and thirst after better things. It is the unanim- ity of feeling or interest between the rulers and 122 POLICY OF ROMANISM, ruled, that, in the commencement of authority, makes it so powerful. Christianity united in one movement all who were desirous of reforms, and animated with a hopeful faith in eternal life. The artists, borne along on this spiritual tide, topped the mighty wave with the lofty sweep of their own inspirations, glorious and sparkling in the new sunlight, and filled with music for the soul, until priestcraft, the self-constituted agent that arro- gated to itself authority over them and the people, said, " Thus far shalt thou go, but no farther ; henceforth your art is to us, and not to God." Then superstition and blind faith, like a blight, passed over the people. They were to be kept children forever, instructed only by nursery tales, and edified by toys. Religion was transformed into a splendid show. Its practical teachings of love, charity, hope, faith, freedom, God the Fa- ther, God the Word, and God the Spirit, became mysteries too great for the common mind. They were only to be symbolized in vestments, images, and ceremonies, eloquent to attract and mystify, but dumb to the soul, except as the banners of unqualified obedience. Heaven itself was paro- died by papacy, which assumed to itself the posi- tion of almighty Judge. All spiritual truth grew to be grossly materialized. Emblazoned altar, shrine, and relic ; worship in a dead tongue ; the mass and confessional ; penance, gifts, and multiplied sacraments ; pompous rites and gor^ geous apparel ; rank upon rank of priests and parasites ; churches vulgarized by tawdry dolls, gewgaws, and upholstery, crammed with the tro- A STONE. 123 pliies of ignorance and the bequests of supersti- tious fear, and filled with dead men's bones become as gods ; the altar degraded into a manufactory of miracles and a golgotha of decayed mortality ; the ministers of the High and Mighty One clad in scarlet, lace, and gold ; throughout, the false, glittering, and coarse, obscuring true art and faith ; men's bodies held in pawn for their souls : such became the guise of the religion the church proffered to the people, — a lie for truth ; instead of the bread they clamored for, a stone. This is indeed the extreme of its degradation. Amid all lives the Christ-love, silently working the cure. But he who would now seek out the pearls of Christian architecture must not only go to the Roman Catholic church for them, but pre- pare his mind for contrasts as great as those we have described between its architectural spiritu- ality and its spontaneous adoption of tinsel and falsehood wherewith to cheat mankind. This principle of its sway is aptly illustrated in the Santo Spirito church, at Florence, where the visitor will see, in a mediaeval painting of the Nativity, the figure of the Virgin covered with a brocade robe, and a tin crown upon her head. Near by is a copy of Michel Angelo's Pieta, wearing a sham necklace and crown. Candle- sticks, mock jewelry, and millinery are preferred to painting and sculpture. Architecture is ob- scured by the low cunning of vanity or avarice, and gifts to the church are more sought for than the salvation of souls. Knowledge, even, is sep- ulchred, as may be seen in the miscalled Library 124 THE SHAM OF ST. PETER'S, of the Vatican, in which neither books nor manu- scripts are for the public, but, in their stead, the gaudy decorations and marble floors of a cafe only are shown. St. Peter's itself is a mingled pain and pleasure. We admire its vastness, and sympathize with the spirit that would honor God with man's all of art and wealth. But its pre- tensions outdo its reality ; and it is with indignant mortification that its sham and deceit, bastard architecture, absurd proportions of statuary, idol- worship, vain pomp, and lying relics are disclosed to us, after the first surprise at its immensity and richness has worn off. It is the embodiment of the pride, ambition, error, worldly policy, and re- ligious arrogance of the papacy itself : not with- out its striking merits and large admixture of truth ; but, like papacy itself, ever sacrificing the spirituality and independence of art to selfishness and superstition, under the pretext of caring for men's souls, while it lusts only for dominion over them. It must not be forgotten, however, that Chris- tian architecture never was more pure and spiritual than when the Roman Church was most absolute over civil power. This was owing to her being herself in a condition of progress. She was con- tending for universal supremacy, on the grounds of her moral and religious superiority. The age of the crusades, cathedrals, and monastic institu- tions was that of her primal vigor and greatest virtue. It was emphatically the triumph of her faith and feeling. But the people, seeing light, demanded more. This could not be given with- ST. PETERS. 125 out imperilling her principle of absolute authority over conscience. Hence the subtle and enslaving mode of her resistance, which has gradually begot- ten the corruption alluded to. Although victorious in the main over the peo- ple, she shortly found more formidable antago- nists in kings, who were rapidly rising in the political scale, as the representatives of secular, in opposition to ecclesiastical, governments. Neither could be successful without the support of those they governed. Coalitions for the common pur- pose of tyranny and spoil ended in rivalries and contests, in which kings generally grew stronger because they could bring more positive interests to bear upon the hopes and fears of their subjects. Their cause, too, embodied material progress, and, to a certain extent, a latitude of knowl- edge and enterprise which papacy repudiated. It was the germ of large civil growth, and the uni- versal supremacy of statute law. But in its be- ginnings it was simply the selfish struggle of am- bitious men for sovereignty. Rapidly the strictly papal feeling gave way before the newer current of the age. The pope sank the priest in the prince. Hildebrands and Gregories were suc- ceeded by Sextuses, Borgias, and Medici ; crafty, warlike, pompous, unbelieving, sensualized sover- eigns, whose ambition was to play a deep game in base state-craft. With this we have nothing further to do ex- cept to point out its effect upon architecture. Wliile the ecclesiastical sentiment predominated, the Gothic was the prevalent mode. In the North 126 SPIRIT OF THE GOTHIC. of Europe, in its domestic type, it assumed the quaint, picturesque, and fanciful ; in the South there was engrafted upon it a less odd luxuriance of form, but more of color. Everywhere it pre- sented the same fascinating, varying aspect, a combination of devotion, rudeness, external beau- ty and grandeur, internal discomfort and feudal pride. Castle, palace, and cottage, each repre- sented a perilous social condition, in which the passions and ideas of men were in the transi- tion state between family lawlessness and civil order. Whatever is significant of wild struggle for happiness, or untamed aspiration towards the beautiful, and is sincere and earnest of spirit, how- ever rude its expression, that has the power to charm. When to this we add the originality of their architecture in comparison with modern, its exuberance of symbol, sculpture, and painting, ex- pressive of an age in which the mind of a people runs more into ar.t than letters, the captivating chivalry of peoples, semi-savage in their loyalty to pomp and display, — when we consider these qualities of mediaeval life, we need not be sur- prised that its art so seizes upon our senses. Writers like Ruskin, with more subtlety of anal- ysis and glow of word-painting than breadth of judgment, would persuade us to return to this style for domestic purposes ; but, with all their zeal for its revival, we believe few would be will- ing to exchange the refinements and conveniences of a modern British home, with its capacity for beauty, if the taste be rightly cultivated, for the damp, ill-ventilated, dark, and tortuous interiors RENAISSANT AND PALATIAL STYLES. 127 of the fourteentli-century domestic architecture, which as aptly represents the social condition of its oriofinators as does ours the moral results of the several subsequent centuries of progressive Christianity ."^ Priest having succumbed to prince, with the increasing knowledge and intercourse of the times wealth and civilization spread among the aristoc- racy of either class, and with them a new style of domestic architecture, combining greater com- fort and luxury, but wholly divested of the relig- ious feeling of its predecessor. Its early inspira- tion was pride of state, and its tendency was directly the reverse of the Gothic. With the revival of classical learning there came a reaction in the Christian sentiment of art. In the exag- gerated spirit of a new love, artists for a while went blindly over to classicalism, as well for sub- jects as law. But as it was impossible to revive the feeling of antiquity, the result was that its forms alone became fashionable. They were used more as fragments than as wholes, and with but little regard to their original meaning or purpose, in the formation of what is generally known as the Renaissant style. However diversified is this architecture in various countries by its odd blend- ing of antique ornament and rule with modern national characteristics, tastes, and necessities, everywhere proclaiming a bastard or transition * This opinion does not refer to the question of the feasi- bility of uniting to Gothic architecture the domestic require- ments of the modern home, but only to the average conditioia of houses of the Middle Ages. 128 RENAISSANT SHAMS, art, yet it still maintains one universal tone of secular, in opposition to religious, feeling, and might with more propriety be termed the Palatial style. Its prevailing essence is far from being the intellection of Greek art, from which it sought its learning. Created as it was to meet the wants and refinements of the aristocratic classes, at a time when the deep, vigorous, and devotional Gothic sentiment had been succeeded by skepti- cism or inquiry, both in church and state, and the latter, having overborne the former as the govern- ing power, was elate with pride and sensual de- sire, it necessarily embodied in full the predomi- nating character of the new phase of civil life. Unhappily, it was ambitious, arrogant, haughty, corrupt, and deceitful. Equally with church- craft it sought to keep mankind in a perpetual condition of caste for its own aggrandizement. Wherever we find notable examples of its archi- tecture we perceive this sentiment, as much in oligarchal Venice as in despotic Spain or abso- lute France. Under its influence God's houses of prayer became temples to the pride and glory of man. Their long vistas of slender shafts and colored windows were set aside for a pedantic style of ornamentation made up of pilfered clas- sical pilasters and columns ; for barren walls, broken by graceless windows and stiff, proud doors ; for pagan devices and ornaments, divested of their natural significance and appropriateness, or changed into nothingness of expression by a debased taste or ignorant thought, and added, in empty meaning, to Christian churches ; for a cold SPIRIT OF TEE PALATIAL. 129 magnificence of polished marbles and precious stones ; for curtains of bronze and draperies of marble, monstrosities of art, valued solely on ac- count of manual difficulties overcome ; for vast areas, surmounted by huge domes, the emblems of man's earthly dominion, but suggesting no outlet to heaven ; for a palace counterfeiting the sanctuary, the lie to God as plain upon its walls as lust and pride in the human heart ; for sepulchres of rulers and mausoleums to warriors ; for St. Peter's of Rome, St. Paul's of London, the Pantheon and Invalides of Paris, and the Kazan of St. Petersburg ; — for these and their like were discarded the York and Salisbury Min- sters, the Strasbourg, Rheims, and Amiens Cathe- drals, the St. Stephen's of Venice, Notre Dame and St. Denis of France, the Duomos of Florence, Siena, Pisa, and many others, which, thank God, still exist, though shorn of their perfect glory, to rebuke the sensuality and arrogance of mere state religion. We do not wish to be understood as utterly condemning Palatial architecture, except as ap- plied to religion. For state or domestic purposes, when chastened in the true spirit of art, it is peculiarly applicable. But the supremacy it so rapidly attained in the outset of its career was almost fatal to religious architecture, which it completely harlotized, and turned into a magazine of stolen goods. Its inherent spirit is hostile to devout thought, for it savors of luxury, magnifi- cence, elegance, and those qualities which more directly spring from the pride of civil wealth, 130 SPIRIT OF THE PALATIAL, power, and rank. It has easier scope and adapt- ability to modern utilitarian and asstlietic ideas than the Gothic. It is a composite of pilferings of antiquity and modern barrenness of inventive idea, the chief merit of the architect being in composing, not in creating, a building. Forced into the service of domestic life, few architects have been successful in concealing or dignifying the common material necessities of the new uses it is put to. And yet the Palatial has its good as well as its evil side, according to our applica- tion of its capacities. As it promises to be mod- ified and expanded by the present century, and as adopted by the people, subjected throughout to the ordeal of good taste and perfected knowl- edge, it proclaims a superiority in morals and domestic habits over those shown in mediaeval home architecture and urban life. In this respect, we must admit its value as evidence of social prog- ress. It betokens, also, intellectual growth. We now require that external conditions should be mated to loftier and purer internal perceptions. Refinement, cleanliness, the intercourse of the sex- es, and domestic convenience, are differently under- stood in the nineteenth century from the four- teenth, or even the seventeenth. Consequently, the primary demands are now not, as formerly, foi colors and forms to gratify the lust of the eye, but for raiment, habitations, and amusements suitable to a superior standard of living. The science of life is being more closely investigated and better understood ; higher purposes are unfolding them- selves. Meanwhile, though architecture loses in SPIRIT OF THE PALATIAL. 131 the wild picturesque, and life is divested of much that is seductive and beautiful, and art is robbed of its spirituality, we may be certain that the loss is only for a season. Life and art are pre- paring for higher flights, out of which will be evolved a union of those qualities of heart and mind most conducive to the progress and happi- ness of mankind. CHAPTER XL Classical and Christian Domestic Art compared. — Influence of Climate upon Art, — of Race. — Why Christianity^ pre- fers Painting to Sculpture. — Respective Merits of the Two. — Classical Taste delights in Human P'igure, — Modern Taste, in Landscape. — The Reformation and Northern Schools. — Protestantism and Romanism as Art-Motives. T will aid our estimate of the effect of Christianity upon art to note one fact of the domestic life of antiquity, as com- pared with the modern. Fortunately for this purpose, we have Pompeii and Herculaneum to furnish an authentic illustration of the former. In both towns Greek and Roman art were inti- mately blended, and neither was overwhelmed until classical civilization was in its prime. With the beauty, ingenuity, and religious significance of much of their household art we are as familiar as with our own. Indeed, their designs enter largely into modern work, solely on account of their value as ornament. The faith from which they borrowed their feeling having become a fable, the only interest it has to the Christian mind is that of philosophical inquiry as to its effects upon our race. We have before alluded to the different moral IMPURITY OF PAGAN ART. 133 estimation, based upon religious ideas, in which sexual intercourse and the mystery of generation were held by the ancients and moderns. The license which the sensual views of the former admitted in social habits and fashions was such as Christianity, in no age, would tolerate ; and yet, almost the first and weightiest charge brought against the infant Christian communities by pa- gan authorities was that of promiscuous debauch- ery. That Paganism countenanced and even en- forced licentiousness, the erotic rites of temple- worship at Babylon and Corinth, and the popular opinion held of the goddess Venus, sufficiently prove. It can, therefore, be no matter of sur- prise that the standard of chastity was far lower under the influence of heathen mythology than it is under the soul-cleansing precepts of Jesus. Purity of manner and speech, as now under- stood, proceeding from a spiritual cleanness of heart, was, in the general, unknown. Conse- quently, language, emblems, and pictorial and sculptured representations, which are now deserv- edly considered as obscene, and in their spirit corrupting, were then complacently or indiffer- ently viewed by all classes, and even entered largely into domestic life. While a portion of these art-objects were, doubtless, free from in- tentional immorality, being simply upon the level of feeling of the age,- and therefore provocative of no excess in it, there were numberless others too evidently the base and disgusting craft of impure imaginations, and hearts steeped in the 134 PURITY OF CHRISTIAN ART, lowest dregs of profligacy. No one who has not seen specimens of these vile creations, the more poisonous because attractive from their ar- tistic beauty and spirit, can conceive the depth of degradation of the heathen mind in this re- spect. The simple fact, that, in disinterring pagan art, it becomes necessary to remove from public sight a certain proportion of its works, exemplifies the essential difference between it and Christianity, in the publicly recognized degrees of purity of mind and chastity of conduct. However immoral in thought and action may be the moderns, there is nothing in their public or private household art, of any age, which would require, on the score of morality, a similar obUv- ion. Such of their art as is exceptional is chiefly based upon classical example and taste. In gen- eral, especially when its unenlightened feeling was most active, during the early and middle ages, we find, alike in church, house, and tomb, an art-motive suggestive of purity and self-disci- pline. Faith, hope, charity, redemption, and sac- rifice, the ascetic extinguishment of carnal de- sires, the certain future misery of the wicked and the eternal joy of the devout, martyrs' suf- ferings and triumphs, the holy " Virgin's " immac- ulate purity, God incarnated in man, a crucified Redeemer, the solemn scenes of the final atone- ment, and similar imagery, were depicted every- where, on wall, furniture, or jewel. Opposed to the sensuous pleasures and sensual gratifications of the mythological sentiment, was, conspicuous above all, the body-subduing and reverential awe EFFECT OF CLIMATES. 135 of the newer faith, far in advance of the actual practice of its confessors, it is true, but always kept artistically in view as their possible stand- ard. A certain tendency to sensuous and sensual extremes, the exaltation of the physical over the spiritual, and of the grotesque and vulgar above the pure, natural, and refined, does, however, ob- tain in that branch of Christian art which, imitat- ing antiquity, under the guidance of the corrupt taste and pride of power of its princely patrons, partook in feeling of the base and low. But the Christian idea has now become so firmly rooted in the public mind that these are looked upon as the warnings of a perverted knowledge and will, and exercise no influence except as examples of pernicious art. Although religion everywhere has been the chief inspiration of art, climate has also had an influence too important to be overlooked. It has contributed greatly to the quantity of art-develop- ment among certain races, in comparison with the mechanical, or that more particularly belonging to the needs of the body. In those latitudes where nature, by her luxuriance and beauty, sug- gests primarily sensuous enjoyment as the object of life, where her bounties are prolific and her stimulus to pleasure active, arf becomes a pre- dominating expression of civilization. To feel, see, taste, and breathe the beautiful ; to indulge largely in ornament ; to polish, carve, mould, paint, and build, wholly for its sake ; to spontaneously express the ruling sentiment, passion, and thought 136 EFFECT OF CLIMATES, in song, music, sculpture, painting, and architecture, exalting in all things beauty of form and color above absolute convenience and utility, feeling above reason, — this is the prevailing tendency of those climates which possess the warm and genial skies of the South, without the extremes of heat and luxuriant vegetation of the tropics. Southern Asia, Egypt, Italy, Greece, Spain, Central America, Polynesia, in short, all countries whose inhabitants live under favorable out-door condi- tions of climate, develop their civilization mainly in the art-direction. Northward, the English and kindred races of America and Europe, stimulated by rigors of cli- mate, turn their attention first towards absolute use. Nature tends to in-door life. Protection of body becomes a primary care. While in Southern Europe the love of beauty supersedes utility, producing in abundance artists skilled in ornamentation, it provides but a poor class of household mechanics. The populace are indiffer- ent to ill-contrived windows, doors, latches, and locks, — accessible easily to thief or wind, — un- even floors, and furniture and domestic and agri- cultural utensils of awkward shape and coarse workmanship, though even in these latter there is large attempt at mere adornment, as we often see in the ox-carts and carriages of the Italian peas- antry, which, although heavy and clumsy in the extreme, are profusely covered with artistic de- signs in paint, while the trappings of their ani- mals are brilliant with gilt and feathers. Fres- cos, statuary, carving, moulding, and painting re- EFFECT OF CLIMATES. 137 joice the eye in all quarters, and seemingly com pensate for the numerous defects in manufacture and building. Their chiefest enjoyment lies out- side their thresholds. Far otherwise is it at the North. Doors and windows must be nicely adjusted, or disease en- ters. Amusement centres at the fireside. Hence all that can render that comfortable, as a compen- sation for an unsmiling atmosphere outside, is of primary consequence. Art is mainly of exotic growth in such countries. To succeed at all it must first be nursed under its new-found skies. A taste for the beautiful, for its own sake, requires to be cultivated by the importation of its objects and the study of its principles. It does not spring up spontaneously, and equally with the indigenous mechanical talent, which looks to com- fort, luxury, and facility in all that relates to matter, either as the servant or tyrant of mind. As out-door life leads to action and expression, so in-door life tends to repose and reflection. Freedom, which from analogy one would suppose to lean more to the former, on the contrary finds its home chiefly with the latter, and with it those agents of science that most contribute to national growth, namely, steam, electricity, manufacture, coal, iron, education, inquiry, free trade, and liberty of speech, faith, and press ; in short, scope for hu- manity to indefinitely expand through individual development. These agents of rationalistic and material progress have a tendency to move south- ward to meet the wants of the Southern races, just as their aesthetic development constantly 138 TO FEEL: TO INQUIRE. gravitates northward, to counterbalance our too prosaic civilization. In some countries, like France and portions of Germany, the sensuous absolutism of the one form of civilization in its present phase, church and state mutually conspiring to keep their sub- jects mentally stationary through seduction or force, meets the wave of popular thought and freedom from the North, and by it is tempered into some respect for the rights of the people to inquire into the origin and nature of the art, law, science, and religion, developed among or imposed upon them. Thus, it would seem, there are now two counterbalancing streams of mind, having their fountain-heads in widely apart latitudes, but from the attraction of mutual wants flowing to- wards each other, although diverse in their pres- ent political associations, — the one more directly the offspring of feeling, and the other of reason ; both in equalized proportions and perfect free- dom being necessary to a complete civilization. While, therefore, the art-impulse is common to mankind, it is evident that climate stimulates the aesthetic development more in some nations than in others. To feel, is the primary tendency of the Southern temperament ; of the Northern, to inquire ; the one developing greater grace of manner, and the other superior knowledge ; but both, through the common infirmity of human nature, having a leaning towards the sensual and material, and confounding the inspiration which stirs them, with the pleasures of mere sense. Of the old races, the Greeks best united sen- CHRISTIANITY PURIFIES ART, 139 suous and philosophical culture, resulting in the highest degree of mythological civilization, and which failed from no sufficient standard of ethics. The world is indebted to Jesus for the highest revelation of future life and the purest standard of morality. From his example and precepts has been evolved the present doctrine of divine spir- ituality seeking ever to incarnate itself in flesh. Christianity offers to humanity an untold prog- ress, even on earth. All shortcomings of human nature are directly traceable to an insufficiency of its spirit in the heart of man. Empire and individual go down as they neglect its inspiration. Yet so vital is it with divinity, and so fitted to the necessities of our race as teacher and com- forter, that, through every experiment and failure, men cling to it with renewed hope and energy, and with a clearer understanding of its require- ments. We have seen that its immediate effect was to purify art of its pagan-sensual element. Subse- quently, it enlarged its scope so as not only to embrace all nature, as the image of the one God, and therefore worthy of the notice of man, but also gradually led it to condescend to every ob- ject, however humble, which was dear to his re- newed heart. Eightly viewed. Christian taste exacts a much higher standard of excellence in the choice of subjects, because it requires every- thing it touches to be spiritually pure ; and at the same time it is so meek and discerning that it calls nothing unclean that God has made. As yet we ha^ e seen simply suggestions, rather than 140 PAINTING DOMINATES SCULPTURE, proofs, of its art - capacity. Consequently, in treating of its art as it is and has been, we speak of it only as in an imperfect or partially devel- oped condition, arising from the counteraction of earthly forces, and the inadequacy of present knowledge of material to control and adequately represent its idea. Christianity introduced another change into art. It secured the predominance of painting over sculpture, particularly in those countries which, embracing Greek Catholicism, regard graven im- ages as idolatrous. Having loftier emotions and grander thoughts to express than paganism, it required a more facile medium for its art than stone. Sculpture appeals for recognition more directly to spirit, because under no conditions, however clever, can it be mistaken for the thing itself. It resembles its subject only in form and feeling, and suggests life rather than represents it. From the qualities of its material, it is neces- sarily limited in motive and treatment by subtle and rigorous rules. Painting, on the contrary, aspires to produce relief, perspective, and space on a flat surface, and to depict soul under all conditions of passion, sentiment, or thought. It has a wider range of ideas or motives, and a larger scope of expression and execution. Hence its modern universality in art. If some critics are disposed to exalt sculpture above painting, as an art-vehicle, it is because the former has attained, through the inspiration of mythology, a degree of perfection which the latter has not yet arrived at. But ANCIENTS PREFERRED SCULPTURE, 141 the degrees and qualities of enjoyment arising from the two forms of art are so distinct that we may enjoy each after its kind without a hint of rivalry, as we do music and poetry. The partiality of the ancients for sculpture was founded, no doubt, in part upon their peculiar views of the natural world. Failing to develop the modern theory, that all nature is the result of certain general laws under the guidance of one divine will, to their perceptions each of its phe- nomena or aspects suggested a special agency or ruling spirit, having more or less the appear- ance of man, or arbitrarily compounded of lower forms, familiar to their sight. As this system was the child of poetry, and not of science, while it recognized in a deeper degree than the modern the vital or spiritual essence of natural things, it was in practice vague, fanciful, and often conflicting. Although its personifications were not always in harmony with each other, still they were deities possessing a tangible ex- istence to heathen imaginations. All nature was animated with them. They saw not, as we see, sky, earth, vegetation, and water, in their simple elementary distinctions ; but, in their impatience to get at the hving secret of these glorious ob- jects, and to identify their uses and beauty more directly and familiarly with themselves, they either overlooked the great truth of truths, divine unity, or, obeying the dim intuitions of a few philoso- phers, erected ambiguous altars to the " Unknown God," thus filling their world with countless di- vinities of every kind. Consequently, their art, 142 STATUARY OF THE ANCIENTS. having to deal mainly with idealized forms, took more particularly the direction of sculpture. So strong was their bias for it, that they frequently sought to give to it the scope and power of paint- ing. A number of antique bas-reliefs still exist, possessing much of the feeling of the sister-art. In bronze sculpture, there are fine examples em- bodying so much of the peculiar force of painting that we feel its sensuousness and hardly miss the color. Of this character are the Mercury, Leap- ing and Dancing Fauns, and drunken Bacchus, of the Museo Borbonico. In fact, classical paint- ing, as we know it, seems to be a branch of sculpt- ure. This appears by the predominance of figure- drawing, to which is given the vigor, grace, and purity of outline and expression of statuary. If we examine the numerous frescos rescued from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabise, we find a genuine love for color and a manifest delight in its charms ; but it is wholly subordinate to the display of human and deified form and action. Compared with modern art, the knowledge of the ancients of its capacities seems crude and impul- sive. We have not, however, their best speci- mens of painting to judge from, and in conse- quence may undeservedly depreciate their skill. Between ancient and modern times, the two phases of love and knowledge respectively of landscape and figure-drawing are reversed. Mod- ern artists have much to learn of the human figure from classical sculpture and painting. In return, our time could teach a valuable lesson to the antique world of the meaning and value of PAPAL ART ARISTOCRATIC. 143 natural scenery. The love of the comic, gro- tesque, and fanciful, is common to both. But the appreciation of the ancients is chiefly bestowed on ornamentation and the ridiculous. The Boy with the Mask in the Villa Albani at Rome is a notable instance in sculpture. In general, the moderns display more wit and humor, though the antique Cupid entangled in the Folds of a Dol- phin, in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, conveys a quiet sense of intellectual drollery inimitable in its way. The current of Christian art lay, very gener- ally, in the direction of the popular religious feel- ing, until the Reformation, when it separated into two distinct streams, flowing from opposite foun- tain-heads, and which may, with propriety, be termed Papal and Protestant, from the character of mind animating each, or Aristocratic and Dem- ocratic, as respects the comparative considera- tion given to individual freedom under the polit- ical auspices of one or the other. The art of the former corresponded to its architecture. It was palatial, princely, hierarchical, academic, con- ventional ; a thing of out-door grandeur and am- bition ; a contribution to galleries, churches, state pride, and ecclesiastical pomp. Like antique art, it has no genuine delight in rural scenes. It pre- fers the architecture of man to the architecture of God. The love of the country and common life is foreign to its taste. Its most finished land- scape is represented by Domenichino, Claude, Salvator, and the Poussins, — beautiful in certain qualities, elevated in idea, refined or forcible in 144 PROTESTANT ART DEMOCRATIC. execution, but cold, pretentious, artificial, chiefly classical in motive, and in no sense of the peo- ple. Indeed, this type of art finds no charm in simple nature. Neither has it a domestic senti- ment, but is exhibited to the people as something too exalted to be intrusted to their keeping, and jealously preserved, in motive, from other inspi- ration than that of established religion, classical learning, or princely rank. Emphatically, it sub- sisted upon the patronage of rulers, eking out a precarious existence, and in Italy, France, and Spain gradually declining with their decline from the intellectual superiority which first won them power, until it scarcely existed in name ; and, like its upas friends, it now survives in public esteem only through the influence of its olden prestige. The Northern stream, drifting with the Refor- mation, which restored to the individual a portion of his natural liberty, went home to the people, and became an in-door art, something in topic and treatment to enliven their firesides, appeal- ing to their common sentiments and feelings, and failings, too, for it was essentially human, and loved the earthly natural, and spoke out, in ear- nest sincerity, what the people believed and liked, good or bad, just as their hearts dictated. There was but little high art in this ; but it was a right beginning, leaving the popular mind to choose its own loves, and, through its own experience, to advance gradually from lower thoughts and feel- ings to higher. Compared with Southern art- choice, the expression of the Northern is low. In the outset it represents humanity too exclusively DUTCH ART. 145 in boorish, sensual, and little aspects. It loves beer and tobacco ; boar-liunts and rough games ; bar-rooms, pipes, brooms, and kettles ; jewelry and satins ; civic rank and commercial pride ; scenes of avarice, lust, and fierce brawling ; a flat, monotonous, unspiritual landscape, redolent with the fat of kine and herbage ; foul kitchens and dirty maids ; parrots and puppies, the pets of pampered wealth ; houses of picturesque ugli- ness ; manners offensively blunt, and intellects as heavy and methodical as their cash-books and ledgers ; — in short, whatever a thrifty, vulgar- minded race of fighters and traders, proud of their ingots, their tables, and their freedom, de- lighted in, their artists presented with a fidelity, spirit, and richness of tone that no future art may expect to excel ; for no subsequent people, it is to be devoutly hoped, will have the same hearty esteem for these things as did the Dutch in their early manhood. No artist has ever depicted the avarice of the Jew like Kembrandt. So his fel- low-artists have, with equal success, pictured the characters of their countrymen, by emptying upon their canvas the feelings that consumed them, rising, in their highest elevation, to con- vivial or stately domesticity, a love of the past- ures, canals, and seas so closely associated with their riches, and but rarely, as if it were an un- popular theme, giving indications of a spiritual faith or life.* English painting rises above this level, without aspiring to high art. Fine art, technically con- * See Appendix, Note B. 10 146 CHARACTER OF PROTESTANT ART. sidered, is its principal aim. Its chief character- istics are a wholesome love of nature and home- life, delighting in portraiture, landscape, animals, the sea, and whatever is connected with the ma- terial grandeur or prosperity of the nation, or the social importance or actions of the individual. Like their civilization, it first plants itself firmly upon the earth, associating with whatever is sig- nificant of wealth, power, family, and station, — - at heart affectionate and moral, in appearance coldly decorous, thoroughly realistic, sometimes humorous, seldom religious, and not often at- tempting the spiritual or imaginative. Protestantism ignores its saints, but deifies its military and civic heroes, and showers its honors upon the tamers of men and nature, the sup- porters of order, and stimulators of freedom and civilization. Its chief virtue is in human de- velopment on the side of morality and worldly prosperity. Hell is indeed a place of positive torment ; but heaven is a vague, undefinable happiness, with no definite period of realization for the soul. Both doctrinally vibrate between the hour of death and an unfixed day of judg- ment. There is no settled condition between burial and the deferred resurrection of the dead. Church government is an affair of state patron- age or popular suffrage, and is either extremely aristocratic or democratic. Strictly speaking, it has no absolute, independent existence, and rec- ognizes neither traditions, martyrs, nor a celestial court. There are no personal intermediates be- tween God and man. Face to face he would ITS FINAL DESTINY. 147 speak to Him, or not at all. Consequently, rec- ognizing in its most literal sense the second com- mandment of Sinai, the Protestant confines liis art to the earthly range of humanity, leaving in the main untouched its spiritual capacities, and de- picting only those scenes and feelings that are on a level with the popular material apprehension. Protestantism reasons more than it feels. It is the logic of liberty and progress. As yet it is imperfectly understood, and, narrowed by politi- cal, social, and commercial interests, it shows it- self selfish, monopolizing, and ambitious ; never- theless, under the impulse of the growing demo- cratic mind, it is a mighty, self-expanding power, destined to conquer the world, and ultimately open to mankind new heavens and a new earth, before whose radiance, error, superstition, and tyranny shall pass away in the smoke of their own torment. This we conceive to be the ultimate destiny of Protestantism. But, viewing it simply in its re- lation with art-motive and execution, as com- pared with the matured results of its antagonistic element, the Papal, or Conservative, which rep- resents the general principle of retention of power and religious stagnation, and is frequently as self- ishly and fanatically displayed under Protestant as Catholic forms, the latter is vastly its superior. To art it ofiers the infinite range of religious im- agination, inspired by its saints and martyrs, a glorious host that no man may number ; legends golden with supernatural love, faith, and charity ; traditions that bring angels down among men; relics more potent in miracles than nature in law ; 148 WHAT CATHOLICISM OFFERS, a heavenly and an earthly hierarchy ; orders and ranks of celestial beings ; spiritual presences ever about living men ; a purgatory in which to expiate the unrepented sin of life ; a hell if possible more vast and suggestive than enters into the concep- tion of the Protestant mind ; a heaven more attrac- tive in individual joys and associations of heart ; a goddess-mother, of virgin purity and maternal con- sciousness, to love and intercede for men ; a hu- man god, tempted and suffering like one of us and for us ; a Father of all, the omniscient ruler of the universe, yet not wholly beyond the ambition of the human faculty to seek to personify ; an easy forgiveness of sins ; deeds before faith ; all pen- ance, discipline, and donation to the church to be repaid a thousand-fold in the heaven of which it holds the keys: such is the boundless field the Papal element of Christianity offers to art. Under such inspirations, and fifteen hundred years of watchful experience, of patronage of priest and king, and devotion of subject, what matter of surprise that Papal art should excel the humble beginnings of its new-born rival ? But its triumphs are of the past. Its life-blood is oozing away from self-inflicted wounds. Decadence is everywhere written on it. Architecture will not again employ itself in erecting cathedrals in the likeness of the old, nor state-temples of worship patterned after St. Peter's. The unfinished remain as the medi- aeval spirit left them. It is with difiiculty that many of them are kept in repair, and even these more as archaeological monuments than places of worship. Restoration, indeed, revives old forms JESUITISM IN RELIGIOUS ART. 149 and many ancient churches, in Italy and France particularly, by the antiquarian zeal of communi- ties and governments, have been made in their main points to look in the nineteenth century pretty much as they did in the twelfth and thir- teenth. They have become, however, in the main, mere sanctuaries of artists and sight-seers, emp- ty shells of an exiled faith, which only great cere- monials can fill. The places of worship of mod- ern fashion, if worship it can be called, are those churches whose style is represented by the mere- tricious Madeleines and Notre Dame de Lorettes of Paris, Annunciata of Florence, and the gaud and foolery of the " Company of Jesus " every- where, and, in its best estate, by that haughty Renaissant cathedral belonging to the Benedictine convent at Monte Casino, near San Germano, in the kingdom of Naples, whose lavish wealth, and profuse adornment of precious stones, sculptured marbles, frescos, and wood-carving, as it stands in its solitary eyry on that bleak mountain-peak, contrast so strongly with the desolation about it, — a church that sinks St. Peter's glory into dimness in comparison with its fulness and reality of orna- ment ; for there is no cheating the eye here, but all is solid wealth and marvellous magnificence. Each and all of these edifices, replete with attrac- tions for the senses, are powerless to touch the heart. Nor is fashionable Protestantism more devout of spirit. It builds miniature cathedrals and pretty churches, borrowing the architectural forms of the obsolete feeling of its rival in sheer empti- 150 FASHION IN RELIGIOUS ART, ness of its own artistic heart, parodying an art which can never be its own. Nowhere are there more comfortable lounges for sermon- hearing, re- ligious essays, or melancholic psalmody, than among the diverse sects of England and America ; but they are the sanctuaries of riches and fine raiment. Poverty erects its humble altars apart. The style and thought of the palace have everywhere corrupted the temple of God, meretricious orna- ment being the object among Catholics, and lux- ury with Protestants : both exalting the material above the spiritual in art and religion. In fact, we are now almost destitute of religious art, though not without symptoms of its renewed dawn. Yet the religious sentiment was never deeper in the heart of men than now ; only they cease to have hope in their spiritual and civil guides, and are slowly learning to lean more on themselves. Their prayers are now oftener ut- tered in houses not made with hands. Religion is beginning to find its way from church and state to the people. It will soon pass out of the chrysa- lis form into the winged soul. Prince and priest have long tried its keeping. Both have done much to advance humanity. The history of the church is full of glorious triumphs. Its works speak to us through a thousand channels, which we fail to appreciate in the sacrifice and energy which created them, because, like sunlight, they have now become common property. So, too, of state governments. Civil order, security, increase of wealth, fusion of races, and extinguishment of sectarian passions and national hatreds, are slowly NO GOING BACK, 151 but surely preparing the way for the universal government based directly upon the enlightened will of the entire people. There is vitality in Protestantism, because it permits the gradual unfoldmg of the higher truths which Romanism resolutely opposes. It repre- sents the new progress in art, science, and relig- ion. Catholicism can no more revive its medi- aeval ecclesiastical power by Jesuitical principles than it can its early religious art through the efforts of the German Pre-Raphaelites. Both attempts are futile, because not in harmony with the needs of the age. The hope of art now lies in the free principles of Protestantism. CHAPTER XIL What Protestantism offers to Art. — Its Scope of Idea, — Identification with the People, — Fashion, — Promise. — Dutch School. — English School. — Turner. — Blake. — Pre-Eaphaelitism. — The German, Belgian, and French Schools, and their Chief Artists. ^S^HAT is the new liberty in relation to art? WolWl ^™P^y unlimited self - development. ^f^^^ Catholicism, first in its ignorance, and afterwards by selfish policy, aimed at its restric- tion to a defined, dogmatic, religious expression. But while itself under the impetus of growth and expansion, its art partook of the same partial freedom and noble energy, and to the extent of its liberty strove to be true and spiritual. Unfor- tunately for its final perfection in this direction, that art, whose varied progress and lofty genius were represented by Giotto, Niccola Pisano, Or- gagna, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, culminating in a Raphael, Titian, and Buonarotti, with them passed under princely patronage, and shortly, in the hands of Vasari and contemporary artists, was degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury. Although Protestantism was the offspring of freedom of thought, in its infancy it was nursed PROTESTANT BREADTH OF IDEA, 153 in a theological despotism more severe than even that of Rome. Emerging from error, corruption, and ecclesiastical assumption, its career has been a checkered one : now verging upon wild infidel- ity, and, as in the first French Revolution, disown- ing its Christian parentage ; then fanatical and destructive from religious bigotry, as with the Scottish Covenanters and German Anabaptists : by turns philosophical, skeptical, anarchical, and conservative, uniting the ritual extremes of Pu- seyite and Quaker, and the theological antago- nisms of Calvin, Voltaire, Fichte, Kant, and Chan- ning, in its comprehensiveness of idea, yet always protesting against error, and essaying to prove all things. The question of art is so intimately inter- woven with that of civil and intellectual progress, that a synopsis of the one implies a succinct view of the other. Having portrayed its various as- pects and principles, tracing them from the Clas- sical, through the Catholic, up to the semi-devel- oped Protestant phase, as shown in the material- istic art of England and Holland, we will now glance at the various schools of the present cen- tury. In all ages there exist true men, laboring, in humble sincerity and with apostolic forethought, to sustain and illumine art. We find such artists even now in Italy, and perhaps in Spain, coun*- tries in which its decay is the more conspicuous from contrast with former excellence, and its re- vival the more difficult from the general stagna- tion of thought under the blighting influence of 154 TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD INTERMINGLE, but half-strangled ecclesiastical despotisms. Truth and falsehood so intermmgle that it is only at a certain distance we can distinctly distinguish the lines of each. With individuals, also, art equally varies as in epochs, its condition depending upon the varying conditions of mind. So, in speaking of art-distinctions of various nations, times, or persons, we mean simply to state the prevailing feature or motive, premising that in all particular degrees of excellence are to be found, and special indications of genius, proving that no age is with- out its lights. The spiritual superiority of Catholic art has been traced to its claim, from the outset, to rep- resent the supernal element of religion, and the loftiest teachings of faith. There were, it is true, in the mediaeval democracies of Italy, exceptions to its exclusive religious or aristocratic bias ; and, in proportion as it sprang from and was nurtured by the people, it prospered and grew still more lovely. But the democratic sentiment of that age was mainly one of castes, and too often a promoter of anarchy by party violence, instead of an orderly principle of civic liberty. Conse- quently, its influence was unsteady. With the disciples of Savonarola it was stringently ascetic, and tended to reaction from excess in the direc- tion of pietism. Finally, in Italy, art was de- based into a mere courtier and state lackey, on the one hand, and on the other, an instrument of church pageantry and artifice. Every drop of democratic blood was drained from it. Its vices were those of princes ; its absurdities, those of priests. I ENGLISH SCHOOL. 155 • As soon as Protestant art freed itself from the control of rulers sensual and papal at heart, like the English Stuarts, it identified itself by degrees with the people, assuming their level of thought, and their liking for the homely and common. Mark ! — liking^ not love, in England, any more than in America ; for in neither country does aesthetic feeling assume the dignity of a passion. In both. Fashion is still its protecting deity. A few minds only receive it as a conviction or sen- timent ; perhaps none as a portion of the true bread of life. Yet it is slowly making its way to the heart of the multitude, by bringing into the homes of the people that which is intelligible, dear, and pleasurable to them, without any need of church or state to interpret or dictate. Cathol- icism exalted the art-motive, but Protestantism gave it liberty. The Dutch school, as we have shown, was the base of the democratic revolution of art growing out of Protestant freedom. England also caught up the new life, founding her art upon a similar taste for genre subjects, — e very-day humanity, fat pastures, animal life, and rural scenery ; the instincts of the masses, and their loyalty and homage to aristocracy; in fine, every feature, good or bad, which makes up the stolid, insular Englishman. Hogarth is their first great master of realism, tempered by allegory and caricature. His art is that of a censor or moralist ; but he painted actual life from a point of view and for an elevated purpose that makes his pictures of value to all time. 156 TURNER. England may be said to have developed in the present century two distinct styles of painting, each serving to counteract the extremes of the other. One of them is founded upon the broad, naturalistic, imaginative treatment of nature by Turner, wherein he shows how thoroughly and deeply he has penetrated into her spirit, felt her poetry, understood her forms, and comprehended her sesthetic laws. Turner is the father of the modern landscape art in its broadest sense. The old men, Claude, Salvator Rosa, the Poussins, the Carracci and their school, all pale before him. Titian alone resembles him in the strong sweep of his brush and lofty use of the landscape as a whole, in subordination to the higher aims of his genius. Turner could be as greatly true in de- tails as in principals. Capricious he was, auda- cious, arbitrary, and eccentric, but also intensely earnest, diligent, daring, and experimentive, orig- inal ever, studying great masters to rival or sub- due them, the world of nature to master its distinctive features and qualities, and then fling- ing himself upon a skeptical, unsympathetic pub- lic, a strong, new, prolific, omnific artist, who sees and paints in his own way, founds a new school, and bequeaths to his country a priceless legacy of landscape, redeemed from the conventional, lit- tle, superficial, and unmeaning, and endowed with a living soul. Rare Turner ! He has exalted forever the landscape into the range of high ideal- istic art. The technical strength of Turner is mainly shown in his masterly rendering of the phenom- TURNER, 157 sua or emphatic features of nature, wonderful power of suggestiveness of forms and moods and the essential differences and relations of things by color. His canvases speak, have souls; pictures form within pictures ; ideas thrill us ; feelings quick- en ; and figures come and go like ghosts. Not only nature reflects humanity, but her own mysterious selfhood is seen and felt. Color flashes, blazes, melts, interblends, riots, and slumbers, at his magic touch, with alternated magnificence, repose, or gloom. He recalls to us the everlasting variety and splendor of the elements themselves. To heighten the eloquence of color he never hesitates to sacrifice the little and literal in design, but it is always done in the intent of great thought or sub- tile meaning. The power to perfect is manifested ; the idea passes from him to us ; a moment's pause in the side-speech, and we pass on to the great fact he interprets. Receptive of the beautiful, sublime, and mysterious in nature, perceptive of her miraculous variety to a degree no other artist has equalled, his imagination was as competent to high creative art as his knowledge to naturalistic truth. In audacity of original thought, splendid and gorgeous painting, what equals Ulysses derid- ing Polyphemus ; for terrible imaginative power, his Dragon of the Hesperides ; for weird, supernal invention, the Angel standing in the Sun; for tender sweetness and poetic aspect of landscape, Crossing the Brook ; for sublime pathos. Old Temeraire ; and for poetic feeling, the Burial of Wilkie ? Once beginning to point out the versa- tility of Turner's genius, we know not where to 158 FRITH. pause. He has established his fame in the Eng- lish school as its great master, as Titian stands in that of Venice ; each reversing the prominent art-motive of the other, but with much that is char- acteristic in an aesthetic view in common. Titian centred the delicacy and splendor of his brush on the human figure, Turner on the landscape : the accessory of the one artist being the principal of the other. In assigning so high a rank to Turner we are not unmindful of what Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilson, and their contemporaries have done to dignify the English school of painting. They are idealists in color, and imbued with true senti- ment. None of these, however, were great orig- inal men, creating an era. They painted well, formed individual styles of much merit and beauty, elevated the tone of English art, but based their ideas and knowledge on existing schools or pre- vious example. A vigorous, unideal, thoroughly British class of painters succeeded them, insular in type and tone, inferior in color, realistic in expression, naturalis- tic in aim, low, common, external in motive, aca- demic in training, intelligible and popular because of the delight of the nation at large in their topics and materialistic treatment. Men of talent, cer- tainly, and of local fame ; but not of genius and uni- versal reputation. Frith's Derby Day, embody- ing the lower traits of English national life, and his Railway Station, the external commonplace of that confused spectacle, are graphic results of the style and taste of English reahsts. In oppo- BLAKE. 159 sition to similar notions of art, and as a counter- acting power to their externalisnij we find " mad Blake," as his contemporaries called him, but who is now more justly viewed as one of the great lights and warnings of the school. He essayed to lift it out of the commonplace and material into the sublime, spiritual, and supernal, giving, as with a clairvoyant sense, hints of the life not of the earth ; a solemn, original thinker, powerful and inventive in design, in idea transcendent, " mad " only because in soaring so high he went far above the range of his brethren. Blake's inspiration is Miltonic ; like the poet, he creates, but also, like Ezekiel, sees visions. He paints or draws the Almighty with the same reverent freedom as Ti- tian the human figure. Hierarchies, thrones, an- gels, and satans, the powers and dominions of light and darkness, were as familiar to his imagination as were the voluptuous beauties of the court of Charles H. to the sensual eyes of Sir Peter Lely. They are real, palpable, visible. He gazes into the unseen infinite with the mingled glances of artist and seer, not hesitating to paint portraits of the olden dead. Men of quality, who once strutted and vexed awhile the earth, reveal their ghastly lineaments to his interpenetrative look. He draws for us efiigies of the Builder of the great Pyramid, Richard Coeur de Leon, and others, whose mortal integuments have long ago rejoined their mother-dust. But in this visionary art he suggests more than he realizes ; so that, fully to understand it, or enter into its spirit, we must draw largely on the mysticism of our own imaginations. 160 PRE-RAPIIAELITISM. Nevertheless, Blake stands forth in the prosaic English school, grand and lovely in his solitude ; its John the Baptist, preaching in a wilderness, without the multitudes that flocked to the prophet to hear the truth, but none the less an inspiration to those who believe in the highest destinies of art. We quote Frith and Blake, the opposite poles of English painting, to show its wide range of idea. Although Turner creates a school, like Michel Angelo, he is intrinsically of too great an artistic calibre to have successful disciples. Imi- tators and pupils abound, but his mantle is not to be worn on narrow shoulders. Indeed, view- ing him as the standard, landscape art has not ad- vanced since his death. It is easier to parody his exaggerations or denounce his experiments than to demonstrate equal power and intuition. Even his imperfect experimentive work, scraps and stud- ies, assert the depth and abundance of his reserved power, and the quality of his ambition. They are like the fragments thrown off the sculpture of Titans. Smaller minds may profit much by studying him ; but to attempt to rival him in his own manner would be to waste ability and pro- duce inchoate, wild work. The legitimate chan- nels of study are the proper schools for them. They are to be found in that newly arisen, ear- nest, laborious class of English artists, which on ac- count of the sincere spirit which animates it, rather than from any very obvious points of technical similarity, has come to be called the Pre-Raphael- ite, after the predecessors of Raphael, unmindful of the fact that the system of finish of detail in PRE-RAPHAELITISM. 161 accordance with the externalism of nature is as old as the early painters of Greece, and has never been peculiar to any time or people. The name, however, is used to cover up so much dry medi- ocrity, and barren imitation of the natural and common by a class of painters whom the Greeks in the scorn of their idealism would have called mere dirt-painters, that it ought to be redeemed from its ambiguousness to that definition, which, in justice to the really able men who adopt it, it should alone bear. We understand its underlying principle to be that which infused vitality into classical art and made the mediaeval so true and high-toned. The inner life, or idea, is its profoundest recognition. This it seeks to incarnate with scrupulous techni- cal skill into appropriate forms, giving to each its due. It is pure, wise, and true in aim. Instructed by nature, it seeks to combine science with feeling and wisdom. Universal in range, it is both hum- ble and exalted in tone. Recognizing the divine in the material, uniting form and idea into a har- monious whole, truthful that it may be beautiful, simple yet erudite, natural yet dignified, inquiring yet believing, prone to prove all things, disowning conventionalism and the bondage of societies yet faithful to fact, elaborate, a hard worker and pa- tient student, surcharged with enthusiasm for the faith that sustams it, a regenerating power in art : such is our conception of the real intent and mean- ing of Pre-Raphaelitism. This precious germ in little hands degenerates, as we too often see, into trite pettiness and weari- 11 162 PRE-RAPHAELITISM. some literalness, from a tendency to subordinate great laws to lesser, and to exalt the common and integumental above the intellectual and spiritual. They also forget that nature, their teacher, inva- riably in the landscape hints at more than she dis- closes, leaving in the mystery of her forms in masses a delightful scope of suggestiveness to the natural eye, which is to it as is hope to the relig- ious faculties, or as is imagination to the intellect, an angel of promise to draw one onward in pur- suit of the ideal. The painter, Hke the moralist, should accept the spiritual law that the naked fact is not always to be given in its absolute ex- actness of matter ; otherwise it would obscure or detract from more important facts, and arrest at- tention as it were on the threshold of the temple of art. Neither memory nor sight can cope with the infinite and ever-changing panorama of life. At the best, at any one time, we get only a partial view. The unseen and undetected must in any stage of progress outnumber the seen and known. Nature is not to be exliausted by the utmost diligence of exploration ; nor can we hope by the finite to ren- der her infinite. The higher law of art is inter- pretation ; imitation is secondary. Those artists who exalt the latter above the former of necessity fail, because life or spirit is something more than color and form. These are the mediums only, as words are, of ideas and feelings, and if made para- mount, represent death or inanimation rather than life. That for which they were created being withheld from them, they may exhibit labor, skill, and marvellous memory and dexterity, but ajQTord PRE-RAPHAELITISM, 163 no clue to the soul of things. So far, therefore, as Pre-Eaphaelitism robs art of her poetry in order to give the literal facts of nature, it may subserve exact science by way of illustration, but it sub- verts noble art. And, then, nature will not dis- close herself with microscopic realism to the naked eye. We do not see things as the majority of self-styled Pre-Raphaelites put them in their work. Any training that would make us so see nature would exchange half of its beauteous mystery as a whole, with its proper emphases of parts and its lovely gradation of distances, for a photographic, unideaHstic rendition of the forms, hues, and ap- pearances of things great and small on one mo- notonous standard of mechanical exactness. The average men of the Pre-Raphaelites also, to a great degree, lose their own individuality or con- sciousness in their zeal for rigid representation, and in this are the opposite of Turner, who largely endowed his works with his own life. But Pre-Raphaehtism in the keeping of genius, uniting Turnerian breadth and freedom to its le- gitimate spirituality of vision and scientific accu- racy, offers a possibility of progress as exhaustless as the pure principles and noble aspirations which are or should be the basis of its theory of paint- ing. We estimate it not so much by what it has accomplished, even in the hands of Millais, Hunt, or Dante Rossetti, as by what it professes to be. For although emancipated from the bondage of effete ideas and paralyzing formalism, and having already won brilliant distinction, it still has much to acquire in the science and methods of painting, 164 DUSSELDORF SCHOOL. something yet to learn of the logic and rhetoric of art, whose rules as a complete, harmonious whole do not seem to be fully observed. But, born of the resurrection of aesthetic feeling and of the knowledge of our own time, cradled in freedom of thought and execution, nursed by faithful study, the art-child of Protestant liberty of progress, Pre-Raphaelitism indicates a solid foundation for a fresh and vigorous school of painting. Germany affords examples of laborious study and clever manual results. Her schools in gen- eral, of the Dryasdust order, are the ballast of modern art, keeping it from premature flights, or being too much swayed by imagination and im- pulse. They serve, therefore, as the conservative element of art, advancing heavily through steady application, producing respectable pictures, chiefly of the furniture or decorative style, without much evidence of lofty intellectual inspiration or creative genius. The most popular of these schools is the Dus- seldorf : in its best men, of whom Achenbacli and Lessing are favorable examples, dramatic, ar- tistic, and graphic ; in its little men, formal, pedan- tic, and artificial. Versed in art-trickery, spec- tacular, it gives everything to the eye, nothing to the mind or heart. America is inundated with its works, which are useful so far as they help edu- cate our people in the rudiments of design and composition ; but in other respects the Dusseldorf school is a millstone about our necks. But Germany is not wholly given over to the CORNELIUS AND OVERBECK. 165 mechanical and decorative in painting. It pos- sesses idealism of a high order. The chief pro- test against its externalism comes from the school of Cornelius and Overbeck. This is correct in principle, lofty in purpose, and great in intellectual motive ; but in execution incorrect so far as it seeks to revive or imitate mediaeval work. Although more spiritual in aim and religious in expression than English Pre-Raphaelitism, it lacks the healthful freedom and versatility of the latter. The Past clings heavily to its garments, and weighs it down. It is the fourteenth century trying to sway or push aside the nineteenth. The ascetic Umbrians are not at ease in our atmosphere. Belgian art is too much a cross between Ger- man and French to call for a special analysis. Personally, we delight in Leys, its great Pre- Raphaelite, a lineal successor of the Van Eycks, to their spirit and style adding the advantages of modern science. He paints ideas as well as forms, with an individuality of expression, though some- what uniform in type, a vigorous, deep-toned, admirably subdued, and harmonious coloring, and a picturesqueness of composition, , which distin- guish him as a great modern master, deeply im- bued with the sincerity and earnestness of the old men, and ambitious to rival their solid and faithful painting. France bears the palm to-day in modern art. In painting she presents a wider range of styles and motives, a greater knowledge, and more eminent names than any other country. This 166 FRENCH SCHOOL, she owes to her artistic and scientific liberty, intellectual culture, the national love of beauty^ and widely diffused aesthetic taste, helped as they are by admirable systems of instruction, accumu- lations of objects of art of all eras and races free to her people, while her own traditions cre- ate a universal art-atmosphere, and make every Frenchman a lover and critic of art ; and, above all, to the subordination of the ecclesiastical to civil authority. The French are the Greeks of modern life. Leavened with the Protestant spirit of civil liberty and progression, they unite in them- selves the extreme of philosophical skepticism with the spiritual exaltation and material superstition of Catholicism. Amid such elements, art exhib- its every aspect, from a refined, ecstatic, symboli- cal, or naturalistic Pre-Eaphaelitism, to a sensu- alism delighting in lust and horror, a vanity that is ridiculous and deteriorating, and a flimsiness and exaggeration that defy every rule of good taste. Great lights, however, shine throughout this medley, gradually extending correct ideas, and educating the public to a purer standard of aes- thetic judgment. A few names out of the many that now so rapidly rise and succeed one another in the rivalry of progress, vidll suffice to illustrate the varied brilHancy, excellence, and wide reach of French painting. Their sculpture is too common in inspiration, low in aspiration, and indifferent in execution, to require us to break silence in its behalf in this connection. The best painters of France in their motives CALAME, 167 and styles include the elements of the classical, mediseval, Renaissant, and modem schools, devoid of servile imitation and inane reproduction. They develop a large degree of individualism in inven- tion and manner, based upon keen aesthetic sus- ceptibility, great executive skill, and well-digested knowledge. These virtues are, however, mainly of recent growth. The academic pseudo-classi- calism, disgusting materialism, and empty senti- mentalism of the Empire, equally with the phari- saic religionism, wanton prettinesses, lying Arca- diaism, mean pride, and aristocratic folly of the previous Bourbon phase of art, have given place to a more wholesome taste and truer appreciation of aesthetic aims, far from perfect, but in contrast with preceding art as is the invigorating break of day to smoke of the bottomless pit. Although Calame is Swiss, he comes within the pale of the French school, and we quote him as illustrating more through design than color, which is positive and cold, those qualities of the landscape that give it a deep, poetical signifi- cance, almost pantheistic in sentiment, but truth- ful in forms. He recreates in forest, field, or flood, the same tone of mind which led the Greek artist to impersonify nature. In Calame it is deep, solemn, mystical, a brooding of the super- natural, begetting awe and silence, as of a terrible expectation. Rosa Bonheur and Troyon are to be thanked for leading their art out of mock pastoralism and classical puerilities into a healthful love of agri- culture and animals. Lambinet, Auguste Bon- 168 FRME. MEISSONNIER. heur, and Rousseau are working in a similar spirit in behalf of the much-abused and long-suf- fering landscape, aiming at truth of color and generalization. Frere consecrates his captivating brush to domestic life. With a subtile, tender in- stinct, he brings out of the common and humble the delicate, pathetic, and natural, elevating hu- manity in the masses, and showing how much above the atmosphere of fashion are the emotions and actions of genuine manhood, womanhood, and childhood, and what there is of real poetry in low- ly life. His is the true democracy of the heart. Merle is equally true and tender. Millet favorably represents the Pre-Raphaelit- ism of his country, which is superior in its scientific execution and has more breadth of idea and man- ner than the English, as we see in the realistic Gerome, particularly in the subordmation of infe- rior parts and lesser motives to the principal, and a more correct understanding of the philosophy of art. Haman, after another style, is classical in feeling, with a delicious delicacy of sentiment and play of fancy. Meissonnier is the painter of the salons. Fashion is his stimulus. His vigorous design, tasteful composition, exquisite finish, mi- nuteness without littleness, manual skill, his force and spirit, despite the inferiority of his motives and want of sympathy for noble work, almost elevate him to the level of a great master. In- deed, in so far as doing what he attempts super- latively well, he is one. Couture develops alto- gether another style of painting. He is among the foremost in skill and science, not a great DELAROCHE. 169 creative mind, but one of striking talents and pro- found knowledge, to which are superadded orig- inal conception and individual force. The Ko- mains de la Decadence is his masterpiece. Horace Vernet's mastery of pencil is chiefly di- rected to illustration and history. His hand is ready and quick, full of dash and spirit, most clever in those realistic qualities which captivate the multitude. He has an indifferent feeling for color, finds no sentiment in it. Scenic and sen- sational, he is not a great master, although pass- ing for one. Delaroche surpasses him in imagi- nation, feeling for color, lofty motives, and graceful conceptions. He is also a painter of history, but his naturalism is tempered with idealism. Vernet is the artist of the field and camp, Delaroche of the academy and studio ; the one observes, the other studies. Delaroche appeals to ideas and sympathies, and has a lofty intellectual estimate of art. Yernet carries away the spectator by the vigor of his action and dramatic effect. Daring, original, powerful men. Decamps and M. Robert Fleury display subtile thought and feeling. In their specialities they are artists of the first order. Of opposite tendencies, cold and weak in color, but pure in sentiment, poetical in conception, and spiritual in feeling, is Ary Schef- fer, who represents the French progress in this direction. Dore in design is master of the terrific, grotesque, and diabolic. As a poet of Dantesque power of imagery, profundity, and inventive in- sight, he presents the shadow side of the imagi- nation, peopling the earth and air with wondrous 170 DELACROIX. frightful creations, solemn and mystic in tone and of unlimited force and variety. Delacroix closes this reference to the breadth, variety, and range of French painting. He is grand, fearless, powerful, and profoundly imbued v^ith the sentiment of color, an enthusiast in art, sombre in temperament, a master of the tragic, founding his power on those sympathies and con- victions that stir the impressible spectator most deeply and lift him most mightily. His is an art that ennobles and dignifies human nature. It is not faultless, for positive criticism would find much in him to cavil at. His vigor of experi- ment and power of invention may appall the timid conventionalist. But above all his shortcomings — short only through the inability of hand to match the will — rises up the imagination of a great genius, overmastering him and his age, as Michel Angelo's overmastered himself and his. CHAPTER Xin. An Inquiry into the Art-Conditions and Prospects of Ameri- ca. — Art-Criticism. — Press, People, and Clergy. — Needs of Artists and Public. — American Knownothingism in Art. — Eclecticism. — The True Path. ppE have now succinctly traced the art-idea W\ in its historical progress and aesthetic de- ^ velopment in the civilizations of the Old World to the period of its advent in the New, show- ing, as we proceeded, that, though the love of beau- ty is a fundamental quality of the human mind, yet its manifestations in the form of art are checked, stimulated, or modified by the influences of climate, habits, and traditions of race, relative pressure of utilitarian or aesthetic ideas, the character of creeds and tone of religious feeling, and above all by the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments. American soil, but half rescued from the wild embrace of the wilderness, is a virgin field of art. By America we mean that agglomerate of Euro- pean civilizations welded by Anglo-Saxon institu- tions into the Federal Union. The other portions of the continent are simply offshoots of their par- ent countries, without national life in art or lit- 172 AN INQUIRY. erature. Consequently, our inquiries belong to that people which, in virtue of their power and progress, have taken to themselves the designa- tion of Americans, sanctioned by the tacit con- sent of the world, prophetically foreshadowing a period in their destiny, when, by the noble con- quest of ideas, the entire continent shall of right be theirs. An inquiry of this nature, under the circum- stances of newness and inexperience which every- where present themselves, is, in many respects, embarrassing. At the same time, it is interesting, involving as it does not only the previous points of our investigations, whether by inheritance, transmission, or imitation, but new forms, rooted in novel conditions of national being ; in short, the future of the art of the interminghng races of a new world, fused into a democracy which is now passing through its gravest struggle for existence, to reissue, as we believe, the most powerful be- cause the most enlightened, the most peaceful because the most free, and the most influential people of the globe, because having sacrificed the most for justice and liberty. But the dark cloud of civil strife still lowers over us. The timid quake ; skeptics jeer. We have scarcely begun to sow the fields of art. The critic has more difiiculties in his way than even the artist. A harvest is to be reaped, however, and that sooner than many think. Let us care- fully sift the seed as it is sown, and not wait until the tares are big and strong before trying to up- root them. A bright vision of national growth in MORE LIGHT. 173 art does indeed come before our mental sight, but that must not tempt us to overlook the fallow Now. He who would hasten the realization of that vis- ion is under bonds to apply to the art of to-day those strict rules by which alone it may be sped joyfully on its way. It is a duty to vindicate art, not to foster national conceit, stimulate personal vanity, or pander to individual interests. " More Light,'' says Goethe; "More Light." Pre- cisely our public and private want ! Those read- ers who have kept us company thus far, know that the aesthetic taste advocated is based upon pure examples ; and that the principles which un- derlie it are drawn from deep and lofty aspirations, so far as long and conscientious study has enabled us to detect them. Believing, therefore, that the BEST is none too good for America to aspire to, we shall speak plainly of our deficiencies, and cheer- ingly of whatever justifies hope or praise. And the more emphatically at this particular juncture of our national affairs, because the experience of the world shows that great artists and a corresponding advance in art are almost always contemporane- ous with the cessation of great wars and decisive crises in historical periods. For the present, America, like England, prefers the knowledge w^hich makes her rich and strong, to the art that implied cultivation as well as feel- ing rightly to enjoy it. In either country, cli- mate, race, and religion are adverse, as compared with Southern lands, to its spontaneous and gen- eral growth. Americans calculate, interrogate, accumulate, debate. They yet find their chief i74 FRANKLIN. success in getting, rather than enjoying ; in hav- ing, rather than being: hence, material wealth is the great prize of life. Their character tends to thrift, comfort, and means, rather than final aims. It clings earthward, from faith in the substantial advantages of things of sense. We are laying up a capital for great achievements by and by. Our world is still of the flesh, with bounteous loyalty to the devil. Eeligion, on the side either of heaven or hell, has but little of the fervid, poetical, affectionate sentiment of the Roman creed and ritual. In divorcing it from the su- persensuous and superstitious. Protestantism has gone to the other extreme, making it too much a dogma. Franklin most rules the common mind. He was eminently great and wise. But his great- ness and wisdom was unspiritual, exhibiting the advantages that spring from intellectual foresight and homely virtue ; in short, the practical craft of the scientist, politician, and merchant. His max- ims have fallen upon understandings but too well disposed by will and temperament to go beyond his meaning, so that we need the counteracting ele- ment which is to be found in the art-sentiment. What progress has it made in America ? To get at this there are three points of view : the individual, national, and universal. American art must be submitted to each, to get a correct idea of it as a whole. Yet it can scarcely be said to have fairly begun its existence, because, in ad- dition to the disadvantages art is subjected to in America in common with England, it has others more distinctively its own. WHAT ART LACKS. 175 The popular faith is more rigidly puritanical in tone. This not only deprives art of the lofty stimulus of religious feeling, but subjects it to suspicion, as of doubtful morality. Art also is choked by the stern cares and homely necessities of an incipient civilization. Men must work to live, before they can live to enjoy the beautiful. It has no antecedent art : no abbeys in pictu- resque ruins ; no stately cathedrals, the legacies of another faith and generation ; no mediaeval ar- chitecture, rich in crimson and gold, eloquent with sculpture and color, and venerable with age ; no aristocratic mansions, in which art enshrines it- self in a selfish and unappreciating era, to come forth to the people in more auspicious times ; no state collections to guide a growing taste ; no caste of persons of whom fashion demands en- couragement to art-growth ; no ancestral homes, replete with a storied portraiture of the past ; no legendary lore more dignified than forest or sav- age life ; no history more poetical or fabulous than the deeds of men almost of our own gen- eration, too like ourselves in virtues and vices to seem heroic, — men noble, good, and wise, but not yet arrived to be gods ; and, the greatest loss of all, no lofty and sublime poetry. Involuntarily, the European public is trained to love and know art. The most stolid brain cannot wholly evade or be insensible to the sub- tile influences of so many means constantly about it calculated to attract the senses into sympathy with the Beautiful. The eye of the laborer is 176 WHAT ART LACKS, trained and his understanding enlightened as he goes to and fro the streets to his daily labor ; so, too, the perceptions and sentiments of the idle and fashionable throng in their pursuit of pleasure. A vast school of art equally surrounds the stu- dent and non-student. None can remain entirely unconscious of its presence, any more than of the invigorating sensations of fine weather. Hence the individual aptness of Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen to appreciate and pronounce upon art, independent of the press and academic axioms, thus creating for their artists an outside school, which perhaps is of more real benefit to them than the one within doors in which they acquired their elementary knowledge and skill. Of these incentives to art-progress America is still desti- tute. To this loss of what may be termed a floating aesthetic capital must be added the almost equal destitution of institutions for instruction in the science of art, except in a crude and elementary way. Academies and schools of design are few, and but imperfectly established. Public galleries exist only in idea. Private collections are lim- ited in range, destitute of masterpieces, inacces- sible to the multitude. Studios would effect much for the development of taste and knowl- edge, were they freely visited, by bringing our public into more cordial relations with artists, who do not yet exercise their legitimate influ- ence. In a nation of lyceums and lecturers, every topic except art is heard. Indeed, outside of occasional didactic teaching and a few works FALSE CRITICISM, 111 not much read, we are without other resources of aesthetic education on a public scale than meagre exhibitions of pictures on private speculation in some of the chief cities. This leads us to enlarge on the special disad- vantages to American art arising from false criti- cism. The ordinary productions of men who handle brush or chisel are spoken of in public prints as " works of consummate taste and abil- ity/' " perfect gems," proofs of " astonishing gen- ius," and with similar puffery. These vague, swelling words would be received at their real value, did not so many of our people, just awaken- ing to aesthetic sensations, have such a mistaken estimate of art. They view it as an undefined something above and apart from themselves and their daily lives, an Eleusinian mystery of a sa- cred priesthood, to be seen only through the veil of the imagination, not amenable to the laws of science or the results of experience, nor to be spok- en of except in high-sounding phrases and wanton praise. Feeding artists on this diet is like cram- ming children with colored candies. Every true artist shrinks from it, and yearns for a remedy. This will appear as soon as the public comprehend that it is as feasible to teach the young to draw, paint, and model, presupposing average intellec- tual faculties, as much else they are required to learn ; and that the result would equal much tlmt now passes for fine art. We can educate clever external artists asjreadily as clever arti- sans ; a certain knack of hand, and development of taste and of the perceptive faculties being suf- 12 178 FALSE CRITICISM. ficient. When the pubHc see this^ they will east aside their nonsense and mummery about art, and judge its mechanical qualities with the same in- telligent freedom and decision that they do the manual arts with which they are acquainted. In fact, design and the science of color should be made an elementary branch of instruction in our system of common education, precisely as we are now training the ear to music, and the muscles to strength and suppleness. Genius is not essential to mere painting and modelling, certainly not to a knowledge of principles, and a respectable degree of skill or dexterity in their manifestation. These qualities can be acquired by study and applica- tion. Genius is the exception, talent the rule, of art and literature. It is as fatal an error to postpone the acquisition of knowledge, or the de- velopment of a faculty, from the want of genius, as to fancy that genius exists because we have a facility of doing certain things. Unless we con- form our language to truth, we shall lose sight of the right distinction of words. An artisan who makes a good coat is more useful and re- spectable than a painter who makes bad pictures. Even a child would laugh at the absurdity of call- ing " dime-novels " or " Eollo story-books " works of astonishing genius, or of applying to them any of the hyperbolical expressions of admiration which are so lavishly showered by excited friend- ship or an indiscriminating press upon almost every effort of an j^erican artist. Yet the larger portion of productions are no more match- less or divine than the common run of books, nor FALSE CRITICISM, 179 imply any more intellect to produce them. If we should begin with exhausting the capacity for praise of our tongue on penny-a-line writers, what would be left for Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Bryant, or Poe ? And could we invent words suitable to their merits, which would be doubtful on the scale applied to art, imagination would ut- terly fail us in coining terms to measure the gen- ius of the absolutely great lights of literature, the Dantes, Homers, Goethes, and Shakspeares. Com- mon sense must stop this debasing flattery by ex- posing its fallacy. It will be a fortunate day, when our public and our artists meet understandingly face to face, having put out of sight the present perni- cious system of befogging and befooling. The re- form lies more with the artists than the public, for they are its teachers. Eschewing clap-trap, let them recognize only that sort of criticism which justifies its faith by reason and honest likings. The daily journal of New York most devoted to art thus sums up a notice of the last Artist Fund Exhibition : " All the pictures possess more or less merits and defects. Perhaps the merits pre- ponderate." Sagacious on-the-fence critic ! At the opening of this exhibition, at which the elite of the artists and literati of the city were pres- ent, they listened complacently to the following nonsense, which we find in the " Evening Post : " " He [the speaker] referred to Cole's picture, hanging before him, as embodying the chief re- quirement of art^ namely, shadows" We will not pursue this ungracious portion of our subject f ir- ther. Enough has been said to indicate the dis- 180 FALSE CRITICISM. advantage of American art in lacking a discrim- inating public, and in the present habit of sense* less praise ; the poorer the art, the more words used to inflate public opinion relative to it. Before the establishment of the " Round Table " of New York, there was scarcely a newspaper or journal in America sufficiently independent to admit a free discussion of artists and art. An article calculated to provoke discussion was ta- booed, for fear of wounding the sensibilities or harming the interests of some one. Few writers ventured to assert the cause of art itself, because of the artists or their friends. This false system has fostered a deceitful ambition in numbers who might usefully fill other positions ; so that we are inundated with bad, mechanical work, exulted over by the press at large as proof of American genius, when in reality it is so much sad evidence of pretence and folly. Art has another drawback, in the superficial remarks of writers who are tempted to wander into a field which they have not taken pains pre- viously to explore. The sugary platitudes of the author of " Our Artists " ^ are a fair specimen of this sort of writing. Its patronizing pat-on-the- back tone is an affair of the artists themselves, so we pass it over. Some of the sentiments ex- pressed are trite and true ; but for an article in- tended to inform the million, it gives them little beside pretty writing and mistaken history or in- ference. We quote a few sentences. The writer, who tells us he is a clergyman, says to the artists, * Harpers' New Monthly Magazine^ Jan. 1864. MISTAKES OF OUR CLERGY. 181 that he likes to " chat with them over the social table about pictures ; " talks of " the sparkling glass soon empty in the hand, but when shall that brimming cup of beauty be exhausted in the grasp of high art ? " and adds that he " who sips the dew from a maiden's lip may take away some of its freshness," etc. We submit to those who honor beauty whether this is the sort of talk to dignify it, or whether " the occasion of unusual enjoyment," in which punch and sensuous similes flow freely, is the best method of diffusing intel- ligent ideas of art. In every age, "the social table " has proved the bane of spiritual growth in any direction. Instances of living genius, half- ruined by its seductions, are already too common. Certainly, no true friend of art, least of all the clergy, should advocate festivals of this character as a means of good to it. Other remarks of the same writer prove that cultivation in one profession is not necessarily a passport to intelligence in another. Speaking of introducing pictures into churches, he re- marks : " We should hope to be saved the inflic- tion of worshipping in constant presence of many of the customary ecclesiastical monstrosities that cover cathedral walls. Broiling saints, pinched and starved hermits, grim inquisitors, ghostly monks and nuns, are not to us the best imper- sonations of the Christian religion." The only broiling saint that we can recall, after ten years' travel and study of art in Europe, was not on a cathedral wall. It was St. Lawrence, a mar- tyr-hero of the early Church, painted as only 182 MISTAKES OF OUR CLERGY. Titian could paint. Would not such a " monstros- ity " be welcomed even by American artists, on any wall, civil or sacred, — a picture which ranks among the masterpieces of the world's greatest painter? The saints, nuns, and monks that he sneers at were in their days the " humanity which God made, redeemed, and consecrated ; " and their " impersonations " are chiefly by artists like Fra Angelico, Francia, Bellini, and Raphael, men wor- thy to paint those who consecrated their lives to a piety which was often tested by martyrdom. It may be bad taste, but really we have the weakness to see in them a vital energy of self- sacrifice for truth, as they saw it, which calls for, at the least, as much respect as the nineteenth- century life of the pastor of a fashionable Prot- estant congregation. If the writer, in exploring " cathedral walls," which nowadays are 7iot cov- ered with " broiling saints " and " grim inquisi- tors," saw only bad pictures, he was unfortunate in his discrimination. While defending the pious dead from the as- saults of the unsympathetic living, and trying to uphold the truth and dignity of high art, we can- not pass over a mistaken notion widely dissemi- nated by the eloquence of the Kev. Henry Ward Beecher, at heart a true champion of liberty, but who nevertheless has been inadvertently led into publishing some singular conclusions in regard to Italian mediasval art. It is not an easy task to rectify errors that harmonize with popular prejudices, and are sanctioned by eminent sec- taiian authority. Mr. Beecher, in his lecture be- HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 183 fore the Sons of New England, Dec. 21, 1860 says : — " In all the Italian schools, not a picture had ever probably been painted that carried a welcome to the common people. To be sure, there were angels end- less, and Madonnas and Holy Families without num- ber; there were monkish legends turned into color. Then there were heathen divinities enough to bring back the court of Olympia, and put Jupiter again in place of J ehovah. But in this immense fertility, — in this prodigious wealth of pictures, statues, canvas, and fresco, — I know of nothing that served the common people. In art, as in literature, government, govern- ment^ GOVERNMENT, was all, and people nothing 1 I know not that the Eomanic world of art ever pro- duced a democratic picture." "We understand this to mean, that before the seventeenth century there was no art the common people cared for ; that, up to that period, art was " silently fascinating and poisoning the soul through its most potent faculty, the imagina- tion," and that it was wholly an instrument of pride, superstition, and oppression on the part of the rulers, lay and clerical. At the same time, he asserts his predilection for the Germanic schools, because their pictures teem '^with nat- ural objects, with birds and cattle, with husband- ry, with domestic scenes and interiors." We make no issue with those whose tastes prefer a boor's pipe or gin-flagon to a martyr's palm or saint's nimbus, a Flemish villager's carousal to an Italian tournament, a kitchen-scrub to a Madon- na, the ditch and dike to the valley or mountain. 184 EEPLY TO H. TT. BEE CHER. Such taste is as free to enjoy after its kind as any other. But it is not free to condemn on unsound premises, and to jumble historical truth and per- sonal liking into a medley of falsity and injustice. It is quite true that the Italians never did have that taste in art which seems to make Mr. Beech- er's highest {3esthetic enjoyment. Neither did the Greeks. They preferred the more dignified, hero- ic, refined, and ideal aspects of humanity. As he rightly observes, " Art is a language ; " and in their conversations they took more satisfaction in the poetical and imaginative than in the familiar and common. Teniers vs. Raphael, — the sabot-footed, beer-swilling boor opposed to the angels that Abra- ham entertained. Besides, democratic institutions had the upper hand in Italy, especially in Tuscany, at the epoch which Mr. Beecher denounces. Art decayed as soon as its patronage fell into aristocratic keeping. To be a noble in Florence in the days of the Giotteschi was as uncomfortable as to be a Se- cessionist at the North now. The art of Italy, from its revival in the twelfth century to its prime in the sixteenth, was emphatically the offspring of the feeling and taste of all classes of the people. They created the demand for it, and paid for it most liberally out of their profits in trade. Gi- otto's Campanile, the shrine of Orsanmichele, Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, and miles of large- hearted frescos, all came from the people. They carried Cimabue's noble picture in triumph to its final resting-place, — Duccio's, too, with songs and music and banners ; they crowded to the opening REPLY TO E. W, BEECHER. 185 of the Carmine chapel to see Masaccio's work, and took as lively and intelligent an interest in the rivalry between Leonardo's and Michel An- gelo's cartoons as we now do in the question of iron-clad ships. We ask Mr. Beecher to point out a single great work of one of the great mas- ters whom he anathematizes, which is, as he as- serts of the entire art of this period, " the minion of monarchy, the servant of corrupted religion, or the mistress of lust." Protestants and Catholics who are privileged to see the works of Fra An- gelico and his school have but one opinion of their purity and spirituality. Do not the " Script- ures " of Raphael in the Vatican furnish the very designs used by Protestants to illustrate their Bibles and religious works ? Do we not daily recognize Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and their con- temporaries, in manifold ways, in our illustrated books ? Do not the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa tell the entire story of revealed religion, from the creation to the crucifixion ? Have not Orgagna, Martini, Gozzoli, and a hundred others scattered far and wide throughout Italy, in church, chapel, council-hall, and private dwelling, on the streets and by the road-side, the Scriptural story of the fall and redemption ? Are these notliing to the common people ? Does the identical relig- ious fact or dogma which is " poison " to the soul if put into a pictorial form before printing was in- vented, become a means of grace, in the shape of a tract or sermon, in the year 1860 ? Was it " nothing " that the hope of immortality, the les- sons of faith, the fear of hell, and the bliss of 186 REPLY TO H. W. BEECHER. heaven were brought vividly home to the feelings of an imaginative, demonstrative people, in a more efficacious way than by the Puritan machinery of lectures and colporteurs ? Their taste demanded instruction and entertainment in this way, and it continues to do so to this day. They find refresh- ment and sympathy in the pictured and sculptured representations of maternal and filial love and sacrifice, in the pure sentiments and holy aspira- tions and self-denials set forth in those sacred pict- ures which Mr. Beecher condemns. They touch their hearts, and we have had occasion to know that they are quite as potent an influence for good as are the spoken appeals of Puritan preachers. Italian artists of the best periods, with but few exceptions, sprang from the people, were trained among them, were democratic in principle ; but they also had elevated tastes and aims, and much devout feeling, and they embodied in their works that which the people, apart from and indepen- dent of the government, most desired. Emphat- ically we pronounce their art to have been the art of the common people. It is a cause of thank- fulness that the Italian schools kept alive the high- est instincts of art, elevating its mission above the sordid, sensual, common, or material aspects of humanity. Not that we value the motives which inspire the better efforts of the Northern schools the less, for each is excellent and enjoyable in its way, but because we believe the higher the mo- tive, the more it elevates the taste. Italian art was chiefly devoted to religion. Mr. Beecher says " every altar-piece was a golden lie, every REPLY TO H. W. BEECIIER, 187 carved statue beckoned the superstitious soul to some pernicious error." Surely it is not unchar- itable to retort that every word which he has uttered in this connection is a " pernicious error ; " for altar-piece, statue, and truth alike refute his statement. We censure that Oriental egotism which holds all but the flowery land to be only as the dust of the earth. How much better is it in one of us, with the means of information almost at our door, to pass such wholesale condemnation, unjustified by any adequate study ? If there be no element or phase of humanity wholly good, so there is none wholly bad. We have had a long experience in the study of altar-pieces and sacred sculpture, and, although not a Roman Catholic, have discovered in them quite as much Scriptural truth, as pure motive, as exciting incentive to holi- ness, and as convincing arguments for a spiritual life, as we have found in the prolific productions of tract societies, and the average quality of Prot- estant discourses. Let us be just even to the "scarlet lady." There is no gain to humanity in falsifying the record of history. The Bible is as much the inspiration of Catholic religious art as it is the basis of Protestant religious liter- ature ; and whenever art borrowed its motives from the traditions of the Church, the men and women it glorified were those who have honored humanity by self-denying lives and unflinching martyrdoms, — men and women whose counter- parts in good deeds Protestants find in the How- ards, Frys, and Nightingales of to-day. Be- cause the aesthetic Italian chooses to perpetuate 188 REPLY TO H. W. BEE CHER. the memories of his martyrs and saints in stained glass, stainless marble, and luminous canvas, is a preacher of the gospel common to all Christians, though he be of a different temperament and rit- ual, authorized to assert that " every window suborned the sun, and sent history to bear on a painted lie or a legendary superstition ? " But " legendary superstition " did not monopo- lize Italian art. The Pre-Raphaelite period af- fords some of the purest examples of certain qualities of landscape-art which we know. Cor- reggio and Titian, later, are as truly great in tl\