.THE 
 
 Ideal Life 
 
 BY 
 ELLA F. MOSBY. 
 
 CINCINNATI, O. : 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR. 
 
 -1S77.- 
 
e>? 
 
 
 .e 
 
 48 65 5 5 
 
 AUG 1 3 1942 
 
 Press of Wrightson & Co. 
 

 dedicated 
 
 TO MY LITTLE NAMESAKE 
 
 ELLA MOSBY SMITH 
 
 A brow with sunny hair : 
 
 Looks, such as child-angels wear 
 
 When they judge you through and through 
 
 With a brave and sweet regard ; 
 
 Lips, that kisses might award 
 
 If your soul did shine out true. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I.-TIIE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 
 Chap. Pago. 
 
 I. Unconscious Growth 7 
 
 II. "After his Kind" 21 
 
 III. The Human Body 35 
 
 IV. The New Inheritance 49 
 
 PART II.— IDEALS AND MYTHS OF THE RACES. 
 
 I. True History. 57 
 
 II. The Hebraic Spirit of Pilgrimage 75 
 
 III. The Greek Ideal, or the Feast 85 
 
 IV. The Germanic Spirit of Conflict 101 
 
 V. Ideal Forms of Government 121 
 
 PART III.— THE ARTISTIC LIFE. 
 
 I. The Uses of Art ICO 
 
 II. The Materials of Art— I. Landscape 155 
 
 III. The Materials of Art— II. Folk-lore 16G 
 
 IV. Suggestions of Architecture 180 
 
 V. Sculpture 397 
 
 VI. Pictures, and the Painter 21U 
 
 VII. The Music of Life 226 
 
 V11I. Poetry 237 
 
Ideal Life 
 
 PART I.— CHAPTER I. 
 
 INDIVIDUAL LIFE. 
 UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. 
 
 #T is Spring, and the whole world is green ; 
 & green overhead, where the wind and the 
 tree-tops talk together as it "bloweth zvhejr it 
 UstetJi ;" green lower down where the nests hang 
 between floating lights and shadows in the leafy- 
 boughs, and unseen winged things twitter and 
 stir in the verdant silence; green under foot 
 where the lush meadow grasses grow thick by 
 every pool and limpid stream. The Spring is 
 abroad ; in the air, which is resonant and vibrant 
 with all clear, sweet sounds ; in the orchards, 
 where the fruit-trees stand by night with a white 
 spray and mist of blossoms in the silvery moon- 
 shine ; and, in the long pastures, green and 
 fresh and sweet, where the herds of cattle 
 wander at their will. 
 
8 J DEAL LIFE. 
 
 This is a thought from the divine mind, 
 wrought out through cheery hail, flakey snow- 
 storms and beating rains, even as the full, rich 
 harvest-tide will be brought forth out of the hot 
 silent noons and swift nights of summer. The 
 divine artist does not weary, nor grow impatient 
 because this exquisite picture needs long pro- 
 cesses of heat and moisture ; though the seed 
 must sleep, the pale buds awaken slowly and 
 the petals fall again to dust before the final 
 ripening. 
 
 Every human life is also a divine thought. I 
 think it lives forever in the divine mind, lovely, 
 whole, full of the blood of life, and is the vital 
 soul of that restless, marred and half obliterated 
 image which we see in these troubled waters. 
 He seeks always to give us its full realization, 
 its lost symmetry and serenity. With infinite 
 peace it is done, for He builds for our long im- 
 mortality, and sees with divine insight in every 
 life, however crippled, or poor, or weak, some- 
 what of the infinite and eternal which survives. 
 
 So day after day comes the new beginning ; 
 so night after night, the rest. I believe there 
 are beautiful meanings in the pause of the dark- 
 ness, as well as in the active work of the light. 
 In the day we often forget what manner of men 
 we might be. Only in the quiet shadows do we 
 dare look into the face of our ideal life, and see 
 
UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. C; 
 
 its loveliness. For then we have laid aside, if 
 but for a little while, our resistance, our world- 
 liness, our self-consciousness. As the parable 
 says of the higher kingdom, it is "as if a man 
 should cast seed into the ground, and should 
 sleep, and the seed should spring and grow up, 
 lie knoweth not how." So unconscious is the 
 soul's growth ; through the long winter nights 
 when the snow falls soft and noiseless on the 
 roof, and we remember those we love with tears 
 that do not hurt as they flow; in the short nights 
 of Summer, when the windows are all open to 
 the moon, and sometimes a bird sings out, loud 
 and clear, from the orchard trees, or the bells 
 of the cattle ring down by the meadow brook. 
 Ringing and singing into the very heart of slum- 
 ber and dreams ; the song and the bell sound on, 
 so sweet, so distinct, and yet so far away, and a 
 vision of g^een summer lands, a vision of peace, 
 seems to arise and float before our sleeping eyes, 
 and does not quite fade when we awaken. 
 
 The colors of memory, as McDonald says, 
 shine out clearest and fairest m the dark. In 
 our sleep we grow back into our childhood, and 
 doubtless it is so that humanity keeps alive in 
 its innermost heart the eternal child. It is not 
 yesterday or to-day that we remember in our 
 dreams; it is the foolish trouble of our early 
 years, and their innocent and small delights. 
 
10 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 When the eyes of the man, old and tired, close 
 at night, he sees the yellow harvest fields and 
 the pastures where the sheep were feeding on 
 their knees, the gabled roof of the old home, 
 and the shy, brown bird, and her brood, which 
 the boy watched. He hears her tiny piping 
 and the nestlings chirp, and the children laugh 
 out again in the narrow lane. So the old years 
 are woven through our present hours in one 
 seamless and imperishable fabric. For ' ' the 
 divine providence of the Lord is in all and single 
 things, yea, in the very least of all, and regards 
 that which is eternal." 
 
 It is only our own littleness, our own limita- 
 tions, which dwarf our earth and lower our 
 horizon. The great patience of God brings 
 forth one blade of grass after another, one 
 thought of truth after another for the certain 
 harvest-time. All things minister to the new 
 creation and birth. There is nothing more won- 
 derful to me than the divine patience in its slow 
 and silent use of these ministries. It is so 
 strongly contrasted with our burden of unrest, 
 our solicitude and burning impatience, our un- 
 fruitful haste, or our listless and cold waiting. 
 The author, whom I have before quoted, beau- 
 tifully says of the divine providence, that in its 
 still and stately following it is like a stream, by 
 which whoso trusts himself and his life unto its 
 
UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. I I 
 
 current, is " bourne on to continual felicities, 
 whatever may be the appearance of the means. " 
 Only this faith, fully absorbed with one's love, can 
 give that serene atmosphere of peace in which 
 the ideal, or heavenly life can be attained, for 
 we are most often led by experiences which 
 appear untoward or opposed, by long delays, 
 suspense and disappointments. These are re- 
 peated, more or less, in each day's round, and 
 they seem to make our life bare, ugly and im- 
 perfect, but they are, in truth, the greatest aids 
 to sure and well-balanced spiritual growth. Our 
 interruptions are sometimes the truer work, be- 
 cause they have less of self-will and vanity than 
 our own plans. 
 
 Could we be brought into an ideal household, 
 that is, an angelic one, and see there with close 
 look, its daily and familiar work and amuse- 
 ments — you remember St. Bernard, of Clung, 
 says : — 
 
 " For there they live in such delight, 
 Such pleasures and such play, 
 That unto them a thousand years 
 Does seem as yesterday!" 
 
 Could we witness their common moods of 
 thought and feeling, I think the first trait which 
 would strike us as most unlike an earthly home, 
 would be their peace, which is, after all, but a 
 
12 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 glorified patience. When the angels teach an 
 ignorant and blinded mind, they are not im- 
 patient with its blunders, for their insight per- 
 ceives the winged soul, beautiful even in the 
 sleep of the chrysalis, and they give it the 
 warmth and light of loving truth, without which 
 it cannot awaken. If they themselves do not 
 fully comprehend one of those truths, " which 
 they desire to look into," they see before them a 
 joyous and unfolding eternity, and are best 
 pleased to await God's time of revelation. 
 
 When they watch even beside the death-bed 
 of the evil, they are in no haste to go on to a 
 higher work of love. They do not ask of what 
 use is this, if he should not enter heaven at 
 last. They keep all silently some thought of 
 eternal life in the weak and darkening mind, 
 and look tenderly upon the wasted face until 
 the white peace of their faces is reflected even 
 there. This comfort, this rest, seems to them, 
 and to the dear Lord who sends them, enough 
 for all their desires and efforts so long as they 
 are needed. When the soul afterwards awakens 
 into his own conscious and deformed life, he will 
 leave them, they will not leave him. And with 
 the sorrowful and innocent who die, oh, how 
 tender is their vigil. We scarcely realize, we 
 who see so much of the bodily pain before, what 
 dying may become. A pathetic writer of our 
 
UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. 13 
 
 day, tells us of a poor, neglected, maltreated 
 boy, and his peaceful end among friends who at 
 last found him. "Now, he murmured, I am 
 happy ! He fell into a light slumber, and waking, 
 smiled as before ; then spoke of beautiful gar- 
 dens, which he said stretched out before him, 
 and were filled with figures of men, women and 
 many children, all with light upon their faces, 
 then whispered that it was Eden — and so died." 
 
 But if this last work of all is done so lovingly, 
 how gently, and with what infinite care, are the 
 beginnings of life dealt with ? No harsh thought 
 jars upon the little children in such a home, no 
 untender word, no troubled look. The tinted 
 scroll-like flower buds do not unfold themselves 
 more freely to the sun of May than these inno- 
 cent souls to the light of love. 
 
 There are such homes in heaven, there might 
 be such homes on earth if we would. In this 
 life, if any, we must find our rest, and that un- 
 conscious and spontaneous growth which is true 
 vitality. Do we understand after all what it 
 means to say "our life." Not the day's routine 
 that comes and goes, not something that is shuf- 
 fled off at last, but that which lives in us, and 
 abides always. In that there must be rest to- 
 day, or you will not find it hereafter, for your 
 life is yourself, you cannot exorcise it, or put it 
 down, you cannot disintegrate yourself from its 
 
14 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 elements. Yet it needs but patience to grow 
 into the heavenly image, for the heavens wait 
 longingly upon man to give him of their light 
 and love and bloom as he will receive. Open your 
 soul earnestly and with desire, put aside the ob- 
 stacles of the false, and the evil ; and against all 
 inborn antagonisms you will change and grow, 
 not of yourself, but of God. Only be not too has- 
 tily discouraged, or drawn aside. Michael Angelo 
 L once said that genius was eternal patience, for 
 < he saw how freely it was given to every soul that 
 unswervingly waited and worked. But there is yet 
 more. For truth is eternal patience with diffi- 
 culties and mistakes and blindness ; love is (with 
 each other) eternal patience in bearing the in- 
 constancies and weakness of human hearts. 
 Patience and passion (in its truest sense,) spring 
 from the same root, and indeed the same prin- 
 ciple of force and fire is in both applied diversely 
 in action or in endurance. Above all is God 
 eternal patience with our failures and murmurs. 
 I could almost say that to learn this is to learn 
 the chief lesson in life; certainly without it you 
 learn nothing. 
 
 By its aid you will at last know that no life is 
 incapable of ideal form ; and that a failure in act 
 is not irreparable, if the desire for the brightest 
 and best survives, and keeps unbroken the image 
 of the manhood, within. The whole upheaval 
 
UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. I 5 
 
 and up-breathing of the world comes from in- 
 dividual desires and efforts. It is like the scene 
 between Mephistopheles and Valentine in Gou- 
 nod's Faust, our deeds may shiver to pieces like 
 the sword before the enemy's power, but even 
 though despairingly we lift up the cross-shaped 
 hill of aspiration before him, he pauses, trembles 
 and succumbs. For it is the love, rather than 
 the act ; the spirit, not the word, which conquers 
 all things. 
 
 There are two ideals in the heart of every man 
 who strives for a better life, the heavenly home, 
 the possible angel, and toward these his long- 
 ing shapes all outer event and circumstance. 
 These two thoughts of the "new earth," the 
 higher man, are the inspirations of humanity, 
 and . stir in all revolutions, emancipations and 
 social reforms. They are the mediums of the 
 new birth of the individual and the race, and 
 make of all earnest labor everywhere, of the 
 brain or body, of the heart or tongue, one sym- 
 metrical and living form. Its growth has been 
 surely, though by slow degrees, through all re- 
 corded ages, creeping on from point to point 
 against mistakes and treacheries, but steadily 
 casting aside as refuse all work that has not this 
 living end, the regeneration of the world, hu- 
 man and inanimate. You see a vast army of 
 workers abroad, digging the Suez canal, sinking 
 
l6 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 artesian wells, draining foul marshes, cultivat- 
 ing waste places, exploring strange lands, pour- 
 ing forth life as water to touch these ends, You 
 see them in the cities and inhabited countries, 
 enunciating hard truths, toiling over dark prob- 
 lems, saving little children from the mire, hold- 
 ing out hands of help to the fallen men and 
 women, comforting the sick and destitute, mak- 
 ing the bond free, telling of Christ the One Di- 
 vine Man, to those who know Him not. It is the 
 heart beating, and the lungs breathing through 
 one body, and the life is one and from heaven. 
 The living picture of the home you would so 
 ]ov<t ? comes without doubt from the angelic 
 households. And your human ideal, that in- 
 visible counselor and judge of the earnest soul, 
 is the form which the grand Humanity of the 
 heavens impresses on all human thought and 
 love. For you must see Truth incarnated before 
 you follow it, you will not desire to reform un- 
 til you behold living features, aglow with strong 
 and generous thoughts, a human face, kindled 
 with all pure and lovely impulses. You can- 
 not go out from such a presence, and straight- 
 way do an ignoble or cruel act. It holds you 
 with invisible bonds. Nor will the cheerless 
 and disorderly dwelling be changed unless one 
 sees in his mind the bright fire on the well-swept 
 hearth, the dewy garden fragrant with flowers, 
 
UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH, 17 
 
 which a pure and strong human life brings 
 around it. For the spiritual life in you seems 
 always to realize things on the outer and visible 
 side. When there is no such effort, existence 
 is like a glove from which the living hand has 
 been withdrawn, limp, helpless, and empty, a 
 mere form and covering of vacuity. 
 
 A thing rejected, 
 Which life thrusts by, all imperfected. 
 
 How easily we recognize those in whom the 
 spiritual life is a moving force! We find a 
 stimulus, a moral strength in their companion- 
 ship, a light and warmth in their atmosphere. 
 We all know the sense of quiet friendliness 
 which we draw unconsciously from the sight of 
 a bright fire. It seems to rest one to come 
 within its charmed circle, the low murmuring 
 of the flames hushes our cares, a thousand cheer- 
 ful fancies kindle in its glow. What sunshine is 
 to a landscape, what the fire is to a chamber, 
 attracting, instinctively, the first look, the first 
 smile from all w r ho enter, so is a life, lighted 
 from within, to its own neighborhood. Almost 
 without knowing it, we utter our best thoughts 
 to such a friend, we tell him our dreams of what 
 we would feign achieve, not for ourselves, but 
 others. We feel strong beside him, his life 
 incites us to unselfish deeds, to sincere words, 
 
I 8 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 to warm feelings. He is the living and personal 
 form of a spiritual force acting upon us. 
 
 One, who is so thoroughly "to heaven accli- 
 mated," whose soul lives in that unseen world, 
 does not quickly grow old and tired, as men do 
 so early in our feverish and over-tasked life. 
 For we are economists with our soil, our fuel, 
 our metals, our stones, — we call them precious, 
 — but we waste fearfully the one wonderful and 
 irrevocable motive force — life. We fritter it 
 away, we wear it out, we break its vitality, we 
 weary of it, we desperately or causelessly thrust 
 it off, this one unknown and priceless possession 
 whereby we attain the celestial eternity. We 
 use it so recklessly that we are old in the years 
 of our prime ; and this spiritual youth, which 
 only the higher life ensures, is one of the rarest 
 and strongest graces of our age. But sympathy 
 with all things good and pure, loyalty to the 
 heavenly kingdom does keep fresh the bloom 
 of the heart. There is a breeziness, a "sea- 
 tingle," a flavor about the thoughts of such a 
 one, which more intellectual minds may wholly 
 lack. It is the old story of the clod and its 
 fragrance sometimes, for this grace may exist 
 apart from culture and talent. 
 
 "One day 
 A wanderer found a lump of clay ; 
 So redolent of rare perfume, 
 Its odor sweetened all the room. 
 
UNCONSCIOUS GROWTH. 1 9 
 
 ' What art thou ?' was his quick demand. 
 'Art thou some gum from Samarcand, 
 
 Or Spikenard in this rude disguise, 
 
 Or other costly merchandise.' 
 
 ' Nay ; if my secret I disclose, 
 I have been dwelling near the Rose'." 
 
 This is the power that lies within the true 
 communion of saints. The rose of eternal 
 and spiritual beauty — the bloom of ideal good — 
 sheds such fragrance that even those who come 
 into outer association and contact gain some- 
 thing of its ineffable aroma. All the world are 
 heirs of heroic and true souls. 
 
 "Who rowing hard against the stream, 
 See distant gates of Eden gleam, 
 And did not dream it was a dream." 
 
 The open vision and realization are indeed 
 only won so, — by combats and temptations, — 
 by " rowing hard against the stream." Many 
 things must be given up, — ambitions, vanities, 
 forms of self-will and pride, — when renunciation 
 is like the tearing of the beating heart from the 
 still living and suffering body. Many things 
 also are to be deferred in this incomplete earthly 
 life, — many special opportunities,, outside ad- 
 vantages, — for sometimes the victor must run 
 without weights to touch the goal. And so we 
 often work on with eyes so blinded by tears, 
 
20 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 with such weary hands, such discouraged, 
 doubting hearts, that we do not see the great 
 design unfolding itself in and through us. 
 
 But the outlines grow, the colors deepen. It 
 is as M. Saintine said of music: "if you look 
 outwardly you will be troubled by the grating 
 sounds with which they make accord, the con- 
 tracted faces of the musicians, the whimsical 
 and ungraceful forms of the instruments; you 
 must listen with your soul to feel the full and 
 gracious harmonies that flow from this same 
 orchestra." So put away your personal loss and 
 disappointment, and make the great longing for 
 unity, coincident impulses, quickening tides of 
 sympathy in this world of humanity ; and against 
 all cowardice and denial, you will cry, as G«|liieo 
 cried of the rolling earth : 
 
 ' ' E pur si muove /' ' ' 'And still it moves. ' ' 
 
AFTER HIS KIND. 21 
 
 • 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 AFTER HIS KIND. 
 
 ■eXIT E ' belong to one body of humanity. The 
 «*3-* same spiritual life-blood courses through 
 every vein, and the same nervous strength 
 tingles in the branching fibres. But every man 
 recognizes in himself a separate individuality, a 
 subtle sense of identity rounding the sphere 
 which sets him apart from his brethren. The 
 rythmeric systole and diastole do not rise and 
 fall alike in any two hearts. We see the strong- 
 est manifestation of this separating force in the 
 faculty which wc call genius. 
 
 A certain family for generation after genera- 
 tion may lead quiet and unnoticed lives, — buy- 
 ing, selling, working, marrying and giving in 
 marriage, after the common way of their neigh- 
 bors, — ruled by the superstitions and faiths of 
 their time, dying at last without visible impress 
 on their race. But all at once the type changes. 
 One of their blood arises, who does not feel 
 
22 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 with them nor think their thoughts, — to whom 
 life means more and differently, — who hears "a 
 voice speaking," and sees a vision, who talks in 
 strange phrases of virtues, and truths, and 
 powers. At first, his country-people, his neigh- 
 bors, his kinsmen, do not understand, or worse 
 still, ////^understand him ; he is regarded by all 
 with doubt, by many with dislike and derision. 
 In after years mankind will acknowledge him as 
 a Dante, an Ang'elo, a Beethoven, or on a 
 higher and more spiritual plane, a Paul, a Sa- 
 vonarola, a Luther, but many valleys of isolation 
 and shadow must be passed through first. 
 
 It is thus our poets, our teachers, our pro- 
 phets arise from the masses around them, and 
 with vast leaps of thought bridge over the chasm 
 that lies between the dreams of their own age 
 and the attainments of the next. And the 
 spiritual loveliness that is shown forth in them, 
 shines on, and rules the minds of succeeding 
 generations, as the moon sways the turbulent 
 sea-tides below her. He, who gives to his race 
 a new thought of truth, a new ideal of virtue, 
 moves the world so far forward on the road that 
 winds higher and nearer heaven. 
 
 These larger orbits of light are traced visibly 
 before us, but could we read unwritten history, 
 we would find each one of the common multi- 
 tude as far apart from his fellows ; as I have 
 
AFTER HIS KIND. 23 
 
 said, individual in love, influence and life. — 
 Though we are indeed but fractional parts of 
 the integral age now, we are as truly separate 
 integers in which long lines of ancestry culmi- 
 nate. We cannot excuse ourselves from exertion 
 by saying that we have no power, for the power 
 of all these is in us. We may not urge that 
 our age is not heroic, and therefore we cannot 
 be so, for it is the heroic part to strive against 
 an unheroic age. It is ours to see that we make 
 it one whit fairer, not to reproach or accuse it 
 with hands idly folded before us. There is need 
 for us to show to this busy, jostling world why 
 we are here at all, to prove ourselves called. 
 The phraseology which the old Calvinists de- 
 lighted in, of the " calling and election " to be 
 made sure, means this, if it mean anything good 
 or true ; for we are all called to form the new 
 heavens and earth, towards which the creation 
 groans and strains. And in the great temple 
 of humanity, no stone, where such is significant, 
 can be thrown aside, or hewn and chiseled after 
 another's likeness. 
 
 There is possible symmetry for all when joined 
 together in their right places. When it is done — 
 that is heaven ; our part is only the preparation 
 of our stones, — the ''joining together," — the 
 "right places," are the work of the Master 
 builder. 
 
24 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 Our life is often so false, so unshapely, that 
 we have to go back to the beginning- to see the 
 elements of good at all. When we reach the 
 harder adult years, it is by faith only, we aver 
 that the folded wings of love, the sleeping 
 infancy, are there. But what, after all, is genius 
 or greatness of soul, if it be not a return to 
 childlike simplicity and directness, to the child- 
 like freshness of vision ? This is marked in all 
 our truly great men ; it is only the keeping their 
 individuality, as children must, but as grown 
 people rarely do. I do not think we do justice 
 to the profound perceptions of childhood, for 
 we forget our own, and others are unexpressed. 
 I remember once having two play-mates. One 
 I loved ardently, and our time passed in perfect 
 harmony and pleasure, but with the other I had 
 misunderstandings and little troubles as all chil- 
 dren have, and I do not think I was ever very 
 fond of her. But I parted from the first with 
 perfect content, while the going of the other 
 was greeted with passionate grief and bitter 
 tears. It was the perfect satisfaction I had felt 
 in the one case that comforted me ; it was to me 
 an unmarred enjoyment laid aside to be taken 
 up again, and certainly my own ; but the other 
 had all the sting of an unfinished, incomplete 
 and spoiled possession. It never would be any- 
 thing but a pleasure that might have been so 
 
AFT£R HIS KIND. 2$ 
 
 much greater; and I cried, not for the loss of 
 the personal presence, which I do not think I 
 regretted, but the pang of incompleteness. I 
 have often felt the same since with a dimmer 
 apprehension. Love holds its own, to its breast, 
 surely, closely, without loss. But the things we 
 do not love, the things that are always jarring 
 because the melody is never quite touched, are 
 those that hurt us. It is our incompetence, our 
 disloyalty, that pierces so deep, and with such 
 sharp thrusts into the soul. 
 
 Such swift, flashing conceptions as we find in 
 these childish experiences, flying straight to the 
 centre of the thing aimed at, are, as we shall 
 hereafter see, those of poetry and the arts. But 
 believe that somewhat of this same nature lives, 
 though unseen, in every one; even as no fea- 
 tures are so uncouth or base that they do not 
 sometimes wear to the mother's sight, — that 
 earthly vision most akin to the divine, — the 
 child-look of her nursling. That exquisite truth 
 was touched when Christ, surrounded by his 
 followers, chose a little child, and with the sig- 
 nificant action of the east, ' ' set him in the midst 
 of them." "In the midst," mark that, for it 
 means much ; the midst or center always relat- 
 ing to the purest vitality and clearest light. 
 
 The universal application of this is illustrated 
 by the inanimate world, for in every material — 
 
 3 
 
26 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 iron, bronze, wood or stone — there sleeps, as the 
 artist well knows, some beautiful form, or 
 thought of art, which may be wrought out after 
 its kind. But only "after its kind." The ideal 
 forms of stone are not coincident with those of 
 the softer and more flexible wood, nor does the 
 bronze, whose rich coloring still seems to settle 
 and glow with golden fervors of heat, contain 
 the same ideal forms of the colder iron. So 
 there is but one man — or one woman — who 
 could or should live out your ideal — you your- 
 self. To believe and accept this, saves us from 
 many disappointments, mistakes and failures. 
 Each soul has his own "life-kingdom ;" let him 
 conquer and rule therein, but let his neighbor's 
 boundaries be held sacred. A riddle is given to 
 each mind to solve for itself, and the ' ' familiar 
 spirit" whispers in each heart in its dark hours. 
 But concern yourself not with other men's con- 
 flicts over- much ; exorcise your own evil, and 
 then the meagre form of duty will be changed 
 into the radiant presence of love, and you can 
 aid them. 
 
 Yet it is not strange that we lose sight of 
 our individuality at times, when we move in 
 such a world ol shadows and masques. Even 
 our bodies are borrowed. Who knows how 
 many before us have used this same lime, phos- 
 phorous, nitrogen, and these essential earthly 
 
AFTJER HIS KIND. 2J 
 
 salts ? In our traits, habits and even tricks of 
 gesture, old ancestries survive ; the manners with 
 which we conceal our moods are old clothes 
 worn by many others. The words with which 
 we woo, and fondle our babes, nay, which die 
 on our dying lips are not our own. Even our 
 sins are imitative ; you remember what George 
 Eliot says of the ''insipid misdoing" of servile 
 characters, who do not originate a fault. Know- 
 ing all these things, it is wonderful that we do 
 not wholly lose the sense of reality. But now 
 and then comes a moment of vision, and as the 
 old stories say, we are "aware of a presence." 
 It may be only the sensitive quiver of thought 
 which lights up a well-known face, a footstep that 
 pauses silently and lovingly beside you, a tender 
 and pleading touch from trembling fingers, but it 
 is enough. The dear soul you love reveals itself 
 in its own likeness, or perhaps the voice to which 
 you are listening, half inattentive, suddenly 
 breaks into low, soft adagio tones, — it is as if a 
 hand had thrust itself into the dark of your soul 
 and felt for the hidden keys, — and lo, all the 
 sweet harmonies flowed forth! Strangely obe- 
 dient now, you will follow whither the impulse 
 leads you, for you know the voice, it is that of 
 the true king. 
 
 "Not Lancelot's, no, another's." 
 
28 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 This indefinable sphere of man's individual 
 life seems, when once recognized, to haunt all 
 inhabited places. Have you not noticed how 
 something of a human presence lingers around 
 all houses that have been also homes ? The 
 door never quite loses the sense of entrance to 
 you ; and in the silence the conscious floor hears 
 and strains with echoes and faint footfalls that 
 are gone. You fancy sometimes, after your 
 friends leave you, that you still hear them 
 opening the wicket gate, and coming down the 
 long graveled walk, as perhaps they often do in 
 imagination, or remembrance. It is a pleasant 
 thought after all to haunt a place with love, as 
 the white rose of summer fills the place of its 
 blooming with its disembodied spirit of fragrance. 
 
 I once had a negro nurse, who, like all of her 
 sable race, was very fond of hymns. I can 
 almost imagine now the dusky outlines of the 
 figure, sitting over the dying coals and embers 
 in the twilight, and singing low to herself of — 
 
 "Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, 
 Where our possessions lie." 
 
 Until the dark around her seemed to glimmer 
 with their verdure and flowers. And thinking 
 of "our possessions" which shall remain our 
 own, this same line, "the phantom of a silent 
 song," sings itself again in my mind. I trust 
 
AFTER HIS KIND. 2g 
 
 that the sweet fields of our father's country will 
 not be utterly strange, for I dare to believe that 
 our landscapes and dwellings and even types of 
 face will be rather transfigured and glorified 
 than wholly destroyed. All these weave them- 
 selves into our separate individuality which is a 
 divine gift. Fidelity to one's country, love of 
 kindred, the tender remembrance of beloved 
 things and scenes, are the broken lights from an 
 infinite love shining on our troubled lives, and 
 shall not be extinguished but exalted hereafter. 
 Could the Egyptian forget the swelling of his 
 sacred river, or the still unfolding of the lotus 
 flower, leaf after leaf? These have been to him 
 perhaps symbols of the highest power, and the 
 most perfect tranquillity he has known, and in- 
 struct him of better things. The eternal world, 
 which is given for ever, is full of such imagery, 
 of the lifting up of floods, of the rejoicing of 
 green trees, of the lily's royal blossom. 
 
 I doubt whether we ever lose anything that 
 was truly our own, of our life. The tender 
 grace of a day that is dead, returns in the next 
 Spring-time. Does not the earth look lifeless, 
 the woods all bare,, dry, skeleton-like, the ground 
 brown and hard? But lock out again, hear the 
 rustle of the springing boughs through which 
 the ''fountain of sap "* is sending up its unseen 
 
 *Tyrwhit. 
 
30 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 spray, and see the dancing sunshine, and the 
 golden green lights sifting betwixt the leaves! 
 Mark how each tree grows after its own laws and 
 loving desire, each alike, but differing from its 
 fellows. Nothing is lacking ; and is the resur- 
 rection of the soul's desire less certain ? All 
 these might teach us many a truth, of assured 
 faith and certain restitution and freedom in the 
 appointed way. Note the caprices of the grasses 
 and heather— and the wild will of the winds— 
 the clouds and flying spray — all following some 
 hidden law however — and see how freely their 
 life is fulfilled, and they go down into the dust 
 to be again surely renewed as in the first, sweet, 
 individual fullness of existence. 
 
 While we are longing to bring back the "days 
 that are not" — the lost years — they are still with 
 us, and have never been parted from our essen- 
 tial life. The past is "unforgetable, " as a cer- 
 tain strong writer says, and lives in present 
 work and present pleasure, in business on Wall 
 street, in political elections, in house-building 
 and in merry-making. Night and its dreams 
 talk of it, and as we lie awake in the late hours, 
 the darkness will seem to grow alive,, peopled 
 with faces and movements and gestures of the 
 past. Our experiences, practical and poetic, 
 are the many thresholds which we must cross 
 before entering the last household of love, but 
 
AFTER HIS KIND. 31 
 
 » 
 
 there "our possessions" await us to be ours 
 forever. 
 
 I have already spoken of the distinctness of 
 the characters of little children. This baby girl 
 is full of caprices and fancies, while that one is 
 as flexible as soft clay in the hands of one she 
 loves. This child is robust and lively, and de- 
 lights in whips and guns and dogs, while another, 
 more tender, rejoices over the little kitten, cries 
 out with rapture at the sight of another baby 
 face, and will run after the young brood of yel- 
 low, downy chickens all the day long. A third 
 will put on a sweet mimicry of maturity with 
 her unshapely doll, and rule with zeal over her 
 miniature household. 
 
 It is noticeable how true the art of the re- 
 naissance is to the individuality of childhood, 
 not only the period of dawning youth, audacious, 
 joyful and free, in which the Greeks delighted, 
 but also the more helpless phases of babyhood. 
 There are Correggio's Infants, tender andsmiling, 
 who play with palms ; the Children who sing in 
 angelic choirs, each face kindled into brighter 
 life by the sweet melody; the Assumption of the 
 Virgin, with the child angels brightening all 
 the air, and the sea of upturned faces from the 
 earth ; the Holy Child, who plays wonderingly 
 with the fingers of a woman near him. There 
 are Raphael's beautiful babes, happy and at 
 
32 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 rest in their mother's arms. Raphael so loves 
 childhood that even in his School of Athens, 
 he has introduced an old man who bears a 
 child in his arms, consulting one of the philoso- 
 phers concerning the formation of his character ; 
 and the child, like Raphael himself on the 
 right, does not look at all at the wise men 
 present, but at you, the spectator, and plays 
 and laughs unabashed. For the child is royal 
 in his own unconscious power, and is not 
 bent by humanity, but bends humanity into a 
 gracious likeness for the while of its own sweet 
 ways. 
 
 Fra Angelico's angels are all childlike ; Leon- 
 ardo Da Vinci peculiarly excels in his lovely 
 rendering of that touching and exquisite solem- 
 nity which one sees on the faces of very young 
 children ; Michael Angelo's children are strong 
 and sad with that look that is marked on the faces 
 of a conquered race that was once free, but are 
 true to childhood in their silent innocence. But 
 above all was Giotto first to give in his paintings 
 of the legends of the church, the sanctity of the 
 human household, and its centre of love and 
 peace — the baby life. As the colors are bright- 
 est and the texture softest in that part of the 
 flower nearest its germ, or seed, so in the home 
 every voice is hushed into softer tones, and every 
 face drops its harsher looks when we come into 
 
AFT£R HIS KIND. 33 
 
 the presence of the child. In our own age our 
 first portrait-painters are those who delight most 
 in pictures of childhood, as for instance Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. 
 No one who has ever seen can forget the sweet 
 face of Sir Joshua Reynolds' little strawberry 
 girl, that looks as if it had bloomed out in 
 some far off country lane, white with blooming 
 vines, or his picture of the infant princess with 
 the soft white innocent face close beside the 
 angry little terrier, or sweetest of all, his picture 
 of Penelope Boothby, the four-year-old child 
 who used to run to greet her father at his coming, 
 and whose death is written, darkest of all, in his 
 "Book of sorrows." That little face, under the 
 quaint old-fashioned cap, is not like any other 
 child; those innocent dark eyes, that tender 
 wistful small mouth, were painted for a father's 
 eyes, which saw but this one little child — but 
 one — in all this wide world. 
 
 I suppose that the deepest insight into the 
 distinctive likeness of each soul could only be 
 gained in the heaven of little children, for these 
 have never passed through our states of doubt, 
 deceit and mechanical, lifeless work, but have 
 kept fresh and whole the first images of their 
 lives. Do you remember Raphael's ideal con- 
 ception of an angelic childhood. In his Madon- 
 na Di San Sisto are two child-angels, both ador- 
 
 4 
 
34 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 ing, both loving, joyous and without fear, but 
 utterly distinct from each other. The one rests 
 his chin on his soft palm, musing, with the pro- 
 found thoughts of infancy, on this strange glory of 
 incarnation. The other, with tender cheek lean- 
 ing on the little arm, only feels the love and 
 light, and rejoices restfully in its shining, with 
 eyes full up-raised to the Child Christ. 
 
 When a child dies, the only shadow of his 
 death falls behind him. He is ' 'gathered to his 
 own." Be you sure that the angels who receive 
 him wear his mother's look and likeness. They 
 never seem strange or far-off to a little child 
 even here. It is very sad for us always when 
 the ''little body grows a weary of the great 
 world" when the sun ray that trembled on our 
 earth awhile is drawn back in light. But heaven 
 is for them, more than for older souls who have 
 been weaned from its life, a native country 
 whose landscapes, white with bloom and dew, 
 wear a home sweetness, and whose presence are 
 beloved and familiar. Surely at their going 
 
 " Some smiling angel close shall stand 
 In old Correggio's fashion, 
 Holding a lily in his hand 
 For deaths' annunciation." 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 35 
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE HUMAN BODY. 
 
 "teOU touch heaven," says Novalis, "when 
 $3) you lay your hands on a human body." 
 There is indeed nothing more exquisite on earth 
 than this in its full loveliness, so tender, so 
 beautiful, so living, that its touch or look seems 
 to melt your heart with wonder and love. Some 
 faces are like poems ; the soft, moonlit smile 
 around the child-like mouth, the long, silken 
 lashes, the pathetic and musing eyes, fill you 
 with thoughts which no words can tell. The 
 swelling curves and fine outlines, the color of 
 cheek and lip, and the lighted gloss of the hair, 
 have their meaning. Browning writes a poem 
 of a lover, who sat by the beloved and motion- 
 less figure, and placed in the dead fingers a 
 flower, with his troth. He speaks to her still, 
 though she cannot hear. 
 
36 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 " The time will come — at last it will, 
 
 When, Evelyn Hope, what meant 1 shall say, 
 In the lower earth, in the years long still, 
 That body and soul so pure and gay ? 
 Why your hair was amber, [ shall divine, 
 And your mouth of your own geranium's red; 
 And what you will do with me in fine, 
 In the new life come in the old one's stead." 
 
 All the laws of which we know, act upon the 
 human body. It seems to stand as a centre 
 between the outer and inner worlds, and the 
 lungs of life, breathing out and in, through the 
 great processes of incarnation and resurrection, 
 have their fullest respiration here. The Hindoo 
 avatars, the Greek myths, show how strongly 
 the minds of different races had grasped the 
 thought of incarnation. Ourselves indeed all 
 our life long are incarnating idea and desire into 
 fleshy lineament, into form and color. The 
 spiritual influences of the high and good are 
 continually taking shape and substance around 
 them. All these material and solid things about 
 us are but some intangible thought in form. So 
 also is the great process of resurrection per- 
 petually in action, bringing up from the dead 
 the vanished good of man's nature, out of lost 
 art or science, new inspirations; out of buried 
 nationalities, new citizenships ; out of dust and 
 stone, cities and gardens of flowers. And we 
 believe that man is born into the body, a living 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 37 
 
 soul, and arises out of it an immortal spirit. 
 The incarnation and resurrection of the divine 
 life move the valves of all derived existence, 
 and breathe into it the rising and falling breath 
 of life. 
 
 By inheritance the spirit of our lives is incar- 
 nated in our children. No rare palimpsest, no 
 old parchment, over whose strange characters 
 the antiquarian lingers, noting the slightest jot 
 or curve of the cypher, has so many records of 
 old races and years as the fresh, fair child whose 
 days seem to have the dew of the morning upon 
 them. Our shadows may fall far along this line, 
 and our natures are more surely inherited than 
 our lands. What is mere habit, custom, man- 
 ner in one generation, becomes impulse and 
 instinct, or fixed trait, in the next. All 
 culture and discipline of character, however 
 hard and uneasily borne by the first, are trans- 
 muted into facility and special talent in those 
 who succeed them. The perfection of handi- 
 craft, as of scholarship, is attained only in that 
 lineage, where heir after heir assumes the father's 
 work, and excellence is a family tradition. All 
 intellectual skill and ease, the one gift of genius 
 excepted, are transmitted from sire to son, as 
 are also all moral graces, save the divine change 
 and regeneration. It is thus a race and age 
 grows, by little achievements of the individual 
 
38 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 life, a fault conquered, a good impulse carried 
 into act, a beautiful thing seen or heard. 
 
 We find some curious traces of habits at times 
 in the inherited looks and ways of a child, some 
 old grandsire's musing in the soft, knitted baby 
 brow, and the eyes opened with so puzzled and 
 wide a look into the sunlight, some old sorrow 
 in the yearning, wistful face of the infant, some 
 distorted soul in the distant lineage, disturbing 
 those boyish features from their right clearness. 
 You see quickly where the mental nourishment 
 has been rich and pure, and where the blood oi 
 life has run sluggishly. Those lonesome chil- 
 dren, who give you a sense of cold somewhere, 
 come of adverse or undeveloped natures, nar- 
 row and restrained. They are 
 
 "Like sweet bells, jangled out of tune, and harsh." 
 
 Also through the body we are placed in sym- 
 pathy with inanimate nature ; our pulses and 
 breathings and heart throbs, "beating time and 
 keeping time with all the auras and airs of the 
 universe." In the Spring our limbs feel the 
 stirring of new life, as the trees feel the fresh 
 sap flowing through every veined fibre, and our 
 fancies seem to follow the winds in their going. 
 
 " For the boy's will is the wind's will, 
 And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts," 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 39 
 
 says the old Northland song. As far away are 
 their desires and dreams, as the long sweep of 
 this rushing* wind, which goes, no man knoweth 
 whither. The phlegmatic faces of peasants in a 
 rural district hold something of the slow, stolid 
 life of herbs and grasses. Some characters in- 
 deed have a woody growth, full of knots and 
 nots, and their experiences are excrescences 
 rather than inward transformation and increase. 
 While man sets his mark of dominion on the 
 earth, he gains some likeness also to the things 
 among which he lives, and the inhabitants of 
 mountain and plain are as unlike as their locali- 
 ties. * 
 
 So nature has power to move us, 
 Because of the kinship known; 
 
 For the tree and the river live in us, 
 And not in their life alone. 
 
 We see in man, whose automatic life is gov- 
 erned by the sun — resting at his setting and aris- 
 ing at his appearance — a higher life, also, which 
 looks upward, and builds for eternity, and 
 stands as a central point to many lower lives 
 which look downward, which build only for a 
 day or a few weeks at most, and whose natural 
 pursuits of feeding or hunting are carried on 
 
 *See the feuds between the Highlands and Lowlands in 
 
 Scotland. 
 
40 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 with most ardor during the hours of darkness. 
 The human and animal natures are inverse to 
 each other, and yet by our bodily instincts and 
 desires we are also akin to them, when innocent, 
 to the happy, careless lives of bright woodland 
 creatures; when ignoble, to ravening- beasts and 
 things that creep and crawl. If the animal is 
 introduced into the household life, he seems to 
 feel this bond, and even to catch some shadowy 
 resemblance to man. This is especially true of 
 the sympathetic and faithful dog. We not un- 
 frequently notice a master and dog that are 
 excellent companion pieces, so truthfully does 
 the humbler comrade reproduce his owner's air 
 and bearing. If the man is mortified or de- 
 pressed, how quickly the poor dog hangs his 
 head as if the trouble were his own, but if the 
 master is elate, the creature beside him rejoices 
 in his pleasures, and even regards all his fellow- 
 dogs, whom he chances to meet on the street, 
 with an air of genteel and superior complacency 
 which it is comical to observe. Landseer, 
 above all other artists, most admirably depicts 
 these moods and "society airs" in the canine 
 pet, as well as his greater traits of devotion 
 and loyalty. 
 
 Art has indeed always recognized in these 
 lives, which attend like shadows our own fuller 
 existence, a significance, as symbolic, and ex- 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 4 1 
 
 pressivc of the principles within us. The old 
 Greek artists rarely give you a God or a Goddess 
 without its accompanying bird or beast,- or even 
 flower. Very often the Christian artist uses con- 
 trast as well as sympathy ; but either in one way 
 or another, the lower creature is used to tell you 
 again the thought which the human figures ex- 
 press, forming, as it were, a full and complete 
 chord. Albert Diirer adds to the divine inno- 
 cence of the Holy Child, the sportive and inno- 
 cent ignorance of the dumb creature ; in Titian's 
 Holy Family, at the Louvre, the idea of infancy 
 and brooding fate are sustained by the tender 
 white rabbit and the black lamb lying in the 
 darkness of the shadow. Veronese introduces 
 a spaniel in his interview between Solomon and 
 the Queen of Sheba, as if purposely to contrast 
 the petulance of the lower nature with the 
 stately converse of the higher. The white dove, 
 the lamb and the lily, are continually used in 
 Christian art to heighten the ideas of purity and 
 innocence, so especially characteristic of its 
 conceptions. In the pictures of the Adoration, 
 the horned and still cattle at the manger, are 
 not without meaning ; they signify by their 
 mute presence, the full rounding of the circle 
 of worship, which the wise men of the East offer 
 to the Infant King of Heaven, and earth and all 
 earth's creatures unite in. 
 
42 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 But the superior significance of the human 
 form, its priority of place, its fullness of mean- 
 ing by itself, are never lost sight of in a worthy 
 conception. Leonardo da Vinci, in his treatise 
 on painting, makes every line and attitude of 
 importance, the proud or subdued pose of the 
 head, the forward or backward inclination of the 
 body, the softness of rounded and childish 
 limbs, or the dry and sharp outlines of age, the 
 swelling breast of the virgin or the muscular 
 arm of the hero. Nothing is too slight to be 
 noted, the wrinkle of care, the dimple of youth, 
 the shadow beneath the eyes, the proud and 
 dilating nostril, the full veins in the throat, the 
 delicate and flexible lines of the mouth, are 
 each, in its turn, indicative and characteristic, 
 to the painter even more than the poet. I have 
 told you Robert Browning's beautiful dream of 
 Evelyn Hope's fair and girlish face ; going back 
 a little farther, we find Rembrandt's etchings of 
 human hands, which are full of human history. 
 "A master's rapid facility, " says a modern re- 
 viewer, "and a master's power are in every 
 hand which Rembrandt has drawn prominently. 
 Note the fat hands of Renier, Ansloo, — that 
 stolid, Anabaptist minister, — and the fine, dis- 
 criminating hand of Clement de Jonghe, the 
 print-seller, a man accustomed to the deft fin- 
 gering of delicate papers. Note too, the nervous 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 43 
 
 hand of that brooding student, Haaring, the 
 younger, whom one knows to have been some- 
 thing finer than a common auctioneer. And for 
 physical feebleness seen in an old man's hand, 
 mark the wavering hand of Haaring, the elder. 
 For physical strength in an old man's hand, — a 
 tenacious hand for sure, yet subtle uses, — see 
 the sinewy craftman's hand of Lutma." 
 
 There is indeed scarcely a thought or desire 
 which does not instantaneously thrill from the 
 soul throughout all the nerves and fibres of our 
 hands. When warm palm meets palm in the 
 grasp of friendship, or touch of love, it is as it 
 one spirit had felt the spirit of another. Swe- 
 denborg says that the Angels read our ruling 
 lives in our hands — written there with unerring 
 palmistry — at the judgment of the soul. The 
 hands are always true to the life, and change 
 with its growth and quality and decay. What 
 a difference there is between the little, innocent 
 baby-fingers, rosy and clinging — the quick, eager 
 hands of the child — the dainty palm of the wo- 
 man, with its fluttering pulsations, or the firm 
 hand of the man, strong to hold or strike — the 
 wasted, groping fingers of the aged — and last 
 of all, the cold white hands folded to rest. They 
 are all full of significance, for the daily life has 
 incarnated itself in them. 
 
 Believe me that the very life of true art is 
 the deep acknowledgment of the ' ' awful soul 
 
44 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 which dwells in clay," and which cannot be 
 ignored or denied without fatal loss. You can- 
 not remember this too often. It is because of 
 this indwelling presence that love may stretch 
 its hand from one world to another, and does 
 not know division. You have a friend in India 
 perhaps, and one in the next room. You think of 
 the one so far off, and the smile — the uplook — 
 his little trick or gesture — every mole and scar, 
 even, are as familiar, and as fully present as 
 the other. This power which the soul holds of 
 inward companionship is wonderful. It is not 
 limited either by space or time. I suppose that 
 we never passed a figure on the street, or spoke 
 a forgotten word, or did some trifling act of 
 kindness or unkindness, but it w 7 ill arise again 
 some day, clear and distinct, within our remem- 
 brance. 
 
 "Es kann die spur von unsern Erdentagen 
 Nicht in /Eonem untergehn." 
 
 That same law of resurrections which brings 
 up the dawn out of the night — the lily from its 
 bulb — the chrysalis from the silken cocoon — the 
 winged bird from the white oval of the egg — 
 the embryo from the womb, and the spirit from 
 its dead body, brings to every man, however 
 unbelieving and materialistic in theory, a sense 
 of living presence when his heart turns to his 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 45 
 
 » 
 
 departed. It is like the wonderful resurrection 
 morning, this memory of love, in whose dark 
 stirs * f life and life and life." 
 The father need only see 
 
 "The little shoe in the corner, 
 
 All worn and crumpled and brown, 
 Its motionless hollow confutes him, 
 And argues his logic down." 
 
 For the tears start, and the little form which he 
 misses, flashes back into distinctness and near- 
 ness. 
 
 And this soul, which overleaps time and death 
 and pain, can it perish in dust? Here again is 
 the brute nature inverse from the human. The 
 faithful creature pines away, and cannot be com- 
 forted, when it no longer sees the face, nor hears 
 the voice that it loves, for spiritual vision and 
 nearness are impossible to it. The dog howls 
 and whines when he is shut out from his master, 
 because bodily presence is his all. It is only the 
 human heart that " dreams of the absent face 
 all day ;" its loss alone is known to the animal. 
 
 The whole personality — soul and body — must 
 be comprehended in your love, if you would be 
 satisfied. When beauty, or talent, or special 
 virtue — rather than the full individual and spirit- 
 ual life — is sought for, the regard is incomplete, 
 incompetent to accomplish the great work of 
 
 L. 
 
46 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 love. You cannot adequately help men if you 
 accustom yourself to think of any class as simply 
 "hands" or operatives, or if you know them, 
 as most men do know each other, only as faces 
 and voices. You must go farther than this ; 
 — above all, you must see the angel within the 
 man or woman — must believe in it, and appeal to 
 it above the lower natures. This alone gives 
 completeness. If you have not this tender in- 
 sight into the hidden humanity you will stumble 
 and be hurt, you will be continually disappointed, 
 vexed and chilled by the stripping away of illu- 
 sions, which is too often the result of daily con- 
 tact and intercourse with ideal and enthusiastic 
 temperaments. Do not doubt your first vision — 
 the lovely image is there — only keep patience and 
 love. By such exercise you yourself will grow 
 also, and may give new graces of life — the 
 highest gifts of all — to the beloved. The high- 
 est pleasure that ever comes to one, is to do 
 something for those we love, and in this way we 
 may give every act and word of our loneliest 
 hours to them. When they next see us, they 
 will feel the added warmth and light, and our 
 most solitary struggles will not have been in 
 vain. Far more powerful than persuasion or 
 reason, far stronger than physical beauty, is this 
 spiritual sphere from a beautiful life. You can- 
 not wander to such a distance that it will not 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 47 
 
 recall you, and touch you with a thrilling sense 
 of its tenderness. 
 
 The commonest things on earth teach us a 
 parable of faith in the hidden nature which de- 
 sires to grow in others and ourselves. You see 
 a knot of gnarled and bare trees, twisted and un- 
 comely — for what is so bare as a fruit-tree in 
 winter? Cedars keep their greenness, oaks their 
 branching symmetry, but these look denuded and 
 dead. Wandering back that way in spring, 
 you are suddenly surprised, enveloped in a cloud 
 of fragrance and bloom. All around you snowy 
 and rosy petals drift to the grass, in the air the 
 bees are humming, and clusters of buds and 
 blossoms touch softly your cheek and brow. 
 Your scorn at its former meagreness, is confuted 
 and tossed away in sight of this exceeding 
 fairness, for you were foolishly blind — all this 
 blossoming tree, even then existed potentially 
 in the naked and gnarled trunk. 
 
 Such a revelation, and higher, will heaven give 
 us of the personality which we misjudge here. 
 For we shall all be changed. And against such 
 false judgments here the ideal and spiritual 
 vision alone guards you. It is very important 
 that it should be so, for in these latter days, 
 a man's deepest experiences often come through 
 personal loves and pains. His oracles of life are 
 found in his own household ; and an apocalypse of 
 
48 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 love looks out of familiar eyes or touches him 
 with a child's lips; and spirit is revealed to spirit 
 in the orderly way of common love. A thou- 
 sand-fold more blessed than any isolated ex- 
 perience is the life that is warm with ties of pa- 
 rentage and kindred and friendship. For God 
 is the sole possible integer of the whole universe, 
 and each human life is only fractional, incomplete 
 and imperfect, needing continually other lives 
 by which it may more nearly attain unity and 
 symmetry. No more hopeless thing can be said 
 of any soul than that it is '"left to itself." 
 
THE NEW INHERITANCE. 49 
 
 t 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE NEW INHERITANCE. 
 
 SpHE strange law of transmission by which our 
 bi ideals and characters are incarnated in our 
 children is the grand pivotal force which lifts or 
 lowers the world. Spiritual forces and laws lie 
 behind this, but so far as our merely natural sight 
 may go, this is the law of growth or decay in the 
 species. All the instinctive and automatic 
 movements, even of our moral life, seem to come 
 through inheritance. It is thus that the influences 
 of a great crisis, or character, are not idly scatter- 
 ed abroad and lost, but germinate surely into 
 result and purpose. 
 
 A great separation between the new and old 
 ages took place in the first century of our era. 
 The life of Christ was an open space of burning 
 light, in which old ignorances and traditions and 
 false glories were utterly shriveled away, and 
 
 5 
 
5<D IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 strange and luminous forms revealed themselves 
 as they moved here and there. In this new at- 
 mosphere of intense emotion and wonder, not 
 only seers, but many of the common people — 
 women and men — the unbelieving- and the faith- 
 ful — heard voices and saw visions, as in the 
 scenes preceding the birth of Christ. His bap- 
 tism and crucifixion, and also the conversion of 
 St. Paul* and the day of Pentecost. It is but 
 reasonable to believe that new thoughts and 
 ideals were evolved from this fervid crisis of heat 
 and flame, and so inwrought into the souls of suc- 
 ceeding generations by the after period of per- 
 secution and struggle, that the whole world was 
 visibly uplifted by them. Foremost amongst 
 these I discern the new thoughts of human 
 unity and forgiveness of injuries. 
 
 From the divine humanity of Christ flowed a 
 power,, an enthusiasm, which raised up the face 
 of all humanity from the dust, and turned it 
 upwards. The early Christians were of many 
 races. In Arabia and Parthia and Mesopotamia 
 and Judaea and Cappadocia, Phrygia and Pam- 
 phylia, in Egypt, in the parts, of Libya about 
 Cyrene, at Rome and Corinth, Ephesus and 
 Philippi, Smyrna and Sardis, were men and 
 women, who, differing in all other things, were 
 
 *Even the men who "journeyed with " St. Paul, heard the 
 
THE NEW INHERITANCE. 5 I 
 
 as one in the love of their Lord, and in the ex- 
 pectation of His return. It is hard for us, in 
 these comparatively indifferent and cold days, to 
 realize what a strength and comfort in their 
 troubles was this mistaken faith in His immediate 
 coming. Most of these were people of little 
 knowledge, and of altogether earthly conceptions, 
 and their yearning pictured to them the sound 
 of His voice as awaking them at midnight, or at 
 cock-crow, when the dim light first stole into 
 their narrow rooms ; or in the long twilights, the 
 footsteps on the street might be His ; at noon, 
 when the voices of their children sounded from 
 the gardens, He might come. At their feasts 
 and worship, by the death-beds of their beloved, 
 they looked still, seeking to be ready for His 
 revealing. Doubless He was always with them ; 
 but this thought was a comfort and a stimulus, 
 and so permitted to remain with them. All 
 who held this faith were naturally drawn close 
 to each other. The old distinctions of race and 
 class, Greek or Barbarian, bond or free, were 
 interfused in this common fire of love, and 
 melted away by its fervor. 
 
 Paul speaks of all as ' ' one body, " and I would 
 call your attention to this language more espe- 
 cially, as closely connected with what I have 
 before said of the wonderful significance of the 
 human body. After a most beautiful and sym- 
 
52 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 metrical declaration of the human oneness in this 
 perfect form, he ends with tender persuasion, 
 saying "the members should have the same 
 care one for another, and whether one. member 
 suffer, all the members suffer with it, or one 
 member be honored, all the members rejoice 
 with it." The spirit of these words, slowly 
 leavening- the whole mass, is seen now in all 
 noble aspirations and deeds of our century. It 
 echoes in the words of Hawthorne, as he de- 
 scribes the English poor in Liverpool, "No man 
 or woman is clean until the w r hole w r orld is 
 clean." There is not one great measure, or 
 reform of our day, through which the fibres of 
 this root, thought does not strike. We know 
 that no soul has received its perfect fulness of 
 life and grace and joy, while any soul hungers 
 and has need, for we do all receive one of 
 another. It is the law of our life that "no man 
 liveth to himself" alone; and the whole world 
 breathes through every individual aspiring and 
 inspiration. In our life; — education, nothing — not 
 even sorrow and disappointment arid pain — is 
 purposeless ; no human intercourse, even the 
 most trivial, is unprofitable or vain. No one 
 can be set aside with "I have no need of thee," 
 for we all have need, one of another. And our 
 growing knowledge of this, is one of the in- 
 herited blessings of Christianity. 
 
THE NEW INHERITANCE. 53 
 
 The other, I have said, is the forgiveness of 
 injuries. This is not an impulse of the soul in 
 the primitive life of man. Not only is it alien, 
 but also utterly antagonistic to all the first wild 
 instincts of retaliation — that rude justice, which 
 knows no action but punishment — and of ex- 
 ultation over a fallen foe. The savage demands, 
 like the old Semitic race, an eye for an eye, a 
 life for a life ; like Achilles with the body of 
 Hector, he rejoices over his dead enemy ; like 
 Shylock, he pleads for the pound of flesh from 
 the man who derided and mocked him. Among 
 all the folk-lore you find the hero is true to his 
 friend, tender to the woman who loves him, but 
 stern and dreadful to those who hate him. When 
 the natural man receives an injury or an insult, 
 the hot blood thrills passionately through the 
 veins, and the first impulse which the swift brain 
 sends along the nerves of action, is the one 
 which clenches the hand and braces the arm for 
 a blow. Man can, of himself, as soon raise the 
 dead to life, raise him out of the cold dust, to 
 walk abroad as a living man in the sweet and 
 fresh light, as he can pardon and love the foe 
 who thwarts him. So true it is, even in the 
 human soul and its dealings with other men, that 
 "none can forgive sins, save God only." 
 
 So this virtue, as the one act that raises us 
 from the natural to the spiritual life, was made 
 
54 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 an axis, on which the power of the new age 
 turned, and the crucial test of the reception of 
 the new and heavenly influence. 
 
 "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our 
 debtors." Without this, men rest forever on 
 the same dull level of animosity, where wrong 
 begets wrong, and feud engenders feud. When 
 the disciple is told to forgive seventy times seven 
 "his brother," who had offended him, (mark 
 how the tender name of kinnship is always 
 brought in to aid the feeling of relenting love), 
 we see this new power of forgiveness dealt with 
 as a weak and untried muscle, which needs con- 
 tinual exercise to give it strength and endurance. 
 Throughout the long line of the old Gods of the 
 Greeks and Romans, you may find wrath, power, 
 remorse and cunning, even sensual pleasure, 
 deified, for all these things their worshippers 
 knew, but you nowhere find the tender presence 
 of forgiveness. Even long afterward, ' ' the 
 angel of their ideal stretched forth his hands in 
 vain," for the barbarian element that smouldered 
 in the Church, broke forth again and again in 
 anathema and excommunications, persecutions 
 and wars against all opposition for many long 
 centuries. Men may see the shining truth at 
 once, but slowly do they move towards it. 
 
 But we have arisen into a more spiritual plane 
 of life and thought. Already have the hearts 
 
THE NEW INHERITANCE. 55 
 
 and minds of men been somewhat changed by 
 the new influx from the heavens. Generation 
 after generation have been born of Christian 
 parents, and taught these lovely and tender feel- 
 ings of the Christian life, and have tried, although 
 perhaps feebly, to embody them in their lives, 
 and by teaching and inheritance to transmit to 
 their children an even stronger tendency toward 
 good, Culture and art and philosophy have 
 received the light of divine revelation, and hold 
 up before the eyes of men exquisite thoughts of 
 tenderness and pity and love, which were un- 
 known before. 
 
 So that now, when men ask coldly, what 
 benefits the influences of Christian thought and 
 feeling have conferred upon the world, we can 
 point them to this as one, that is palpable and 
 visible before the sight of all, that there are thou- 
 sands of gentle and generous hearts to-day, not 
 only women and idealists, but men, full of the 
 vigor of life and practical thought, ' 'so born with 
 the influence of centuries of Christian culture in 
 their veins, that forgiveness is to them a first im- 
 pulse" — a natural and necessary virtue — as it 
 Avas not in the old world days. And for whom it 
 would be harder to refuse the word of love, to re- 
 press the rapture of reconciliation, to turn aside 
 from the repentant friend, or the sorrowing 
 enemy, than for the old Greek to forgive them. 
 
56 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 We begin to feel dimly how imperfect and un- 
 symmetrical is that apprehension of justice which 
 relegates the evil in Dante's hells, and in the old 
 tragedies and romances, to final torture and 
 anguish. Wherever a human foot-print goes, 
 divine love is there, and forgiveness. The 
 warmth of this beautiful ideal of pardon inter- 
 penetrates all states and conditions with its sun- 
 shine. The true thought of government is no 
 longer to the highest minds, the punishment of 
 the criminal, but his change, and restoration to 
 the society he has wronged. Every man owes 
 somewhat to his race and country, which no 
 other life can so fully give, and blessed is he 
 who restores the fallen to his work and place. 
 
 By gradual steps we have moved from the 
 unconscious growth of the individual life "after 
 its kind" to its organic connection with all 
 nature and all ages, to its share in the human 
 unity. History succeeds biographies, and in- 
 dividual ideals by long inheritance assume 
 stamina and substance as the characteristic 
 traits and works of the races. 
 
TRUE HISTORY. S7 
 
 9 
 
 PART II. — CHAPTER I 
 
 IDEALS AND MYTHS OF THE RACES. 
 
 TRUE HISTORY. 
 
 "Out of the oleic felcles, as men saythe 
 Cometh all this ne we corn, from yere to yere." 
 
 Have you not seen, on a summer evening, 
 the whole horizon line alive with the crimson 
 and fiery gold of sunset, and all the mountains 
 lifted into an aerial and transparent glory ? Or 
 perhaps you have watched the vision of dawn 
 lie along the waters like a revelation of rosy 
 light and splendor? It is along this line "where 
 earth and heaven meet" that the purest white 
 lights, the rarest colors shine and glow ; and 
 here it is that every object, whether dark pine, 
 or mountain crag, or sail of far off ship, grows 
 in clearness and distinctness of outline upon the 
 delighted eye. This boundary-line exists in all 
 life and wisdom ; in history it is the "love line" 
 
 6 
 
58 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 of the race, which you must cross in order to 
 read its records truly. As a certain earnest 
 thinker says, the Ancient are only secret, be- 
 cause we are estranged from them in spirit. If 
 one were thoroughly a Hindoo in all the ele- 
 ments of will and character, he would find no 
 difficulty in the Sancrit, for the possession of a 
 nation's ideal is closely followed by accuracy in 
 the details of historic facts.* 
 
 If you first feel as a Greek felt, you will soon 
 think as a Greek thought, and your language will 
 have the true classic grace. To speak a brute's 
 tongue, to snarl and hiss, it is necessary that the 
 brute's nature with its rending and tearing pro- 
 pensities should exist in you. As an artist once 
 said, "to paint even a tree, you must become a 
 tree yourself," that is, feel with the tree, by 
 sympathy excite in yourself the woody and 
 fibrous and leaf-growing powers. You have 
 those that are analogous, for you are a micro- 
 cosm, with a net-work of perhaps hidden sym- 
 pathies which should touch all things. 
 
 And you can only see what you have in your 
 own nature; if you are passing your brother by 
 as a common man, blind to the angel which, I 
 have told you, exists in all, it must be because 
 
 *In regard to this question of insight, I owe much to Rus- 
 kin's n^ost suggestive lecture on Light and the faculty of 
 vision. 
 
TRUE HISTORY. 59 
 
 your own angelic nature is undeveloped. The 
 eagle, with his keen glances, never sees the 
 white softness and gentleness of the little lamb 
 in his rapid swoop ; it is only a meal to him. 
 Thus you should feel and love a thought to un- 
 derstand it fully ; and in order to comprehend a 
 heroic emotion, you must live it in action, for 
 there is no other way. When we apprehend 
 this law there will be a great day of judgment 
 among our books, and only those illuminated 
 by love, will remain. 
 
 We see now that the life of an individual can 
 only be truly written, by the "next of kin" 
 spiritually. And this veritable inside heraldry 
 asserts itself, for no one has insight or power to 
 write the experience of a great mind, but his 
 heir, on the soul side. Imagine how a practical 
 unimaginative pen would fail in telling of Palissy 
 who, with the ideal of exquisite color and deli- 
 cate relief ever haunting his mind's eye, sought 
 so many years in vain for the white enamel, 
 until his clothes, food and furniture were gone, 
 and even the planks and boards were torn from 
 his house to feed the fires of the furnace. There 
 is a passage in the recent biographical sketch of 
 Sir Edwin Landseer, by Miss Thackeray,, which 
 very happily illustrates my meaning. She tells 
 us that " in one of the notices upon his pictures 
 it is said that, as a boy and a youth, Landseer 
 
60 J DEAL LJFE. 
 
 haunted shows of wild animals and matches of 
 rat-killing by terriers, with his sketch-book. 
 Cannot one picture the scene ? — the cruel sport, 
 the crowd looking on, stupid or vulgarly excited, 
 and there, among coarse and heavy glances, and 
 dull, scowling looks, shines the bright, young 
 face, not seeing the things that the dull eyes 
 are watching, but discerning the something be- 
 yond, the world within the world, the life within 
 common life, that genius makes clear to us." It 
 is just such a shortness of sight as dulled those 
 heavy eyes, that so often makes outside facts 
 the veriest falsehoods, because wrenched from 
 their spiritual connection. So, except by spe- 
 cial sympathy of character, it is hard for us to 
 understand even the human lives, with which we 
 are in close association. For we cannot see the 
 true "finis" of the volume; no, nor the begin- 
 ning, since each life is a sequel to another in 
 rotation, too infinite for us to follow. Very 
 often it seems fragmentary and incomplete to 
 us ; and even the lower forms of life, the sea- 
 weed and the flower, appear to our blinded 
 vision more joyous and symmetrical, for we see 
 the whole of the life of the rose, but so little of 
 man's. 
 
 As for the lives of races, we gain the truest 
 insight from the works of men who did not know 
 they were forming the rich mosaic materials of 
 
TRUE III3T0I V. 6 1 
 
 t 
 
 history ; from the artists, who have given us the 
 men and the women of their ages, strong and 
 warm with the real life-blood of existence, who 
 have shown us unconsciously the influences that 
 moulded their lineaments, and softened or 
 quickened the play of expression. 
 
 For instance, the monastic ideal is more 
 vividly seen in the paintings of early Christian 
 artists, as in the Byzantine Madonnas, than in 
 any writings descriptive of the cloister. There 
 is often little beauty of feature about the faces, 
 the designs are hard, stiff, angular, the draperies 
 ungraceful Nothing is flowing or free ; all is 
 repressed, strict and severe. But undoubtedly 
 there is an attraction in them, their truthfulness, 
 for the artists express therein, without reserve 
 or exaggeration, the kind of life which they 
 themselves know. It is one of austerity and 
 self-denial, limited and restrictive, it is true, but 
 with a sense of inner purity, and of freedom for 
 the higher spiritual nature. If a sensitive char- 
 acter, acutely alive to moral impressions, has 
 once committed a wrong act, he will long for 
 penance and atonement, and feel undeserved joy 
 as a pain. This phase of individual experience 
 gives insight into both the self-inflicted penalties 
 and privations of the mediaeval saints, and the 
 severe mediaeval art of the Byzantine designs. 
 In each case it was a reaction against the purely 
 
62 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 natural life of the senses and their delights, in 
 which the old Greeks rejoiced — a striving after 
 the higher spiritual life which is the sign of the 
 Christian spirit in all art and achievement. There 
 is no face which so fully expresses this, as the 
 Delphic Sibyl of Michael Angelo. Here is the 
 old Greek thought of the priestess upon whom 
 the inspiration of Apollo descends like a mighty 
 rushing wind, but in the half averted face, the 
 dilated eyes, you see such wonder, such wor- 
 ship, such mingled terror and rejoicing, such 
 full desire, straining after the glory to be re- 
 vealed, as witness that a greater Lord than 
 Apollo is here. 
 
 The same thought which prompted the severe 
 outlines of Byzantine art, gave to its conceptions 
 of Heaven, all the color and delight denied to 
 its representations of earth. The ideal of the 
 age was concentrated in the ecclesiastic form, 
 and everything lovely and rich was used to 
 adorn religious thought. The Catholic Church, 
 during the seventh century, did not dwell upon 
 judgment or the passion of our Lord, or any 
 thought of pain, except as connected with sin. 
 If this necessitated suffering and penance in the 
 earthly life, all on the heavenly side was repose 
 and light. The cross at Ravenna was always 
 richly and brightly decorated, symbolic, as 
 Tyrwhitt says, of our Lord's humanity, rather 
 
TRUE HISTORY. 63 
 
 t 
 
 than His death. The signs used by the early- 
 Christians in the catacombs, many of which 
 were adopted from the Greek art, were always 
 cheerful and bright, as the Vine, the good Shep- 
 herd. The colors of the Byzantine school, in 
 their portrayal of angels and saints, were ex- 
 quisitely vivid, azure, green, purple, gold, — the 
 golden backgrounds of old paintings belonged 
 especially to this school — and their colors were 
 lighted up by rare crimsons and scarlets. The 
 illuminated texts and missals of monastic artists, 
 glow with color. You see them bordered with 
 golden scrolls and radiant devices of birds, 
 flowers and sporting butterflies, ^all child-like 
 and joyous in spirit, for it is of heavenly things 
 that they treat. You find also in these pictures 
 saints with child-angels, lambs or lilies, placed 
 beside them as heavenly symbols, golden haired 
 women with quiet lips of peace, men with level 
 eyes which front the oncoming years with un- 
 disturbed serenity, faces of holy infancy, and 
 you recognize the influences of the purer catholic 
 ideals of womanhood and childhood ; and look 
 into the tranquillity of the true priest's life, and 
 of his flock who dwelt in simple good. These 
 countenances have nothing of the complex ex- 
 pression of the faces we see around us, over- 
 charged by a quivering electricity of emotion, 
 and kept astir by the too highly wrought and 
 
6\ IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 feverish intellectual atmosphere and conditions 
 of our modern life. 
 
 There are many ways in which history may 
 be studied, and no one method is complete 
 without aid' from the others. You may gain the 
 facts of outward chronicles, and take it in 
 mosaic, land by land, king after king, with the 
 small details of each reign and country and 
 class, until you see it as a picture, brilliantly 
 colored and moving, in the costume and after 
 the manner of the age. You may study history 
 in cycles, according to the plan of Buckle and 
 Humboldt, measuring the outlines of the grandly 
 flowing curves of progress in which the ages roll 
 on. Or you may study it in groups of contempo- 
 raries, linking country to country, and watching 
 the strange electric touch which starts kindred 
 movements and desires into life under antago- 
 nistic circumstances. Such, for instance, were 
 the coincident currents of the Renaissance in 
 Italy and the Reformation in Germany ; and 
 such also, were the perpetually recurring up- 
 heavals of the Republican form of thought all 
 over the face of Europe in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. You can form no thorough conception of 
 any age if the country or the man, which you 
 study, stands alone in your thought. 
 
 You cannot learn adequately the story of the 
 first — and highest — school of Greek art. that in 
 
TRUE HISTORY. 65 
 
 which lived traces of spiritual motive,* without 
 knowing that when Phidias w r as a sculptor in 
 Greece, marking out with swift and sure strokes 
 the outlines of hero and God, Pericles and 
 Aspasia ruled at Athens, and it was the age of 
 Aristophanes, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and 
 /Eschylus, and greatest of all, Socrates, whose 
 endurance, faith and patient courage approaches 
 the highest ideal of humanity. Not one of these 
 was possible in all his perfection without the 
 mingled influences of the others, and the age, 
 the Greek race, the common Athenian, received 
 of them all in some measure. 
 
 Looking down the path of modern culture, 
 you pause at one luminous era, and there you 
 see how each star seems to kindle another into 
 greater glory. In Germany there are Diirer 
 and Holbein and Quentin Matys, Erasmus and 
 Luther, and you see the spirit of the last re- 
 former and believer, at work in the profound 
 spiritual significance of such paintings as the 
 hands of Diirer and Holbein wrought. In Spain 
 there is the grave, patient, knightly figure of 
 Columbus, seeking for liberty to explore the 
 unknown seas, and realize his haunting visions 
 of the unseen southern lands. Savonarola, in 
 Florence, is acknowledging Christ as king upon 
 earth, master of his own city and people, and 
 
 *Tyfwhitt's " Christian Symbolism." 
 
66 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 Michael Angelo hearing- him, is stirred to the 
 depths of his mighty soul, and all his art hence- 
 forward will bear the seal of the spirit of Christ, 
 and strive after the highest ideal. In Venice 
 are old Bellini, Giorgione and Titian, and before 
 the century has passed, Raphael and Correggio 
 have entered -into life. Fra Angelico, most 
 spiritual and child-like of artists, has made 
 glorious the convent walls of San Marco ; and 
 Rome glitters with procession and revelry, as 
 rich in color and light as the Venetian school of 
 art, but there are fair faces seen there, from 
 which Angelico's angels would look away sor- 
 rowing. 
 
 In England the conditions are prepared from 
 which shall spring her most heroic and gentlest 
 natures, her sweetest singers, her most learned 
 and wisest statesmen — Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, 
 Shakspeare, Jonson, Burleigh, Bacon. Every- 
 where you see the intense vitality of this cen- 
 tury, 1400-1 500 manifesting itself, in exploration 
 and reformation, art and song and life ; among 
 every people, and with every man, " after its 
 kind," He, who is spiritual, feels the presence 
 of his master, and sees His glory in inspiration 
 of religious teaching and artistic vision. The 
 earthly nature touches only the hem of His 
 garments and knows a rarer loveliness in color 
 and grace of outline, more swiftly moving pulses 
 
TRUE HISTORY. 6/ 
 
 9 
 
 of action and life. But always it is the same 
 Life, which stirred in the wonderful activity and 
 intellectual light of the Greeks, in the power of 
 the revival from the dark ages, in all freedom 
 of enslaved races, in all that is ours of the 
 beautiful and good now. 
 
 And that we may more fully apprehend the 
 operation of this life, which is the centre and 
 source of all activity, we must add to all other 
 methods of studying humanity, some knowledge 
 of the spiritual or inner life of the nations — the 
 ideals of the ages — the myths and legends of the 
 races, which indeed enfold the future as a matrix 
 does a stone. It is impossible to possess a full 
 insight into the conditions of life as Athens and 
 its mental atmosphere in the time of Phidias, — 
 which I have mentioned as the culminating 
 period of Greek art — without remembering that 
 many Athenians believed in the tales of Hero- 
 dotus of the great ghost who fought at Mara- 
 thon, delighting in conflict as in the earthly life, 
 of Apollo's presence at Delphi, and of the form 
 seen in mid-air at Salamis. These spirits and 
 Gods were like the Greeks themselves, with all 
 human instincts of scorn, vehement wrath, par- 
 tisanship, not like the visions of the Hebraic 
 seers, which, with grand angelic patience, com- 
 fort and cheer, but wholly resembling man, and 
 so, thoroughly characteristic of the Greek mode 
 of conception. 
 
68 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 All the morning dreams of the nations are 
 prophetic. You cannot neglect to explore the 
 first dim twilight, 
 
 For the dusk of the dawn is astir with the wings 
 Of invisible things ; 
 
 And the world is awakened, and throbs with a strain 
 Betwixt passion and pain. 
 
 You do not know Rome without the folk-story 
 of the twin brothers suckled by the fierce wolf, 
 for upon that is outlined in long shadow, the 
 active Roman nature with its fierce passion for 
 contest and dominion ; nor without the sylvan 
 myth of Egeria, possible only in the first glow 
 and white heat of poetic conception, for it indi- 
 cates well the capacity of the Roman mind for 
 intense and loity contemplation. The Homeric 
 legends are deeply impressed with the artistic 
 nature of the Greeks ; with few swift words 
 they paint for you. " Hector, dearest to his 
 mother's heart," " speed renowned Achilles;" 
 and the cool back-grounds of rest, "Scaman- 
 der's grassy vale," wave-worn Eionae, " and 
 " pleasant Aulis," from which the warriors come 
 to the beleaguered city. You are detained by 
 no meaningless detail of costume or circum- 
 stance. It is the pure epic treatment, in which 
 the noble and stately figures of old stand forth 
 as clear and distinct as a bas-relief, or freize. In 
 
TRUE HISTORY. 69 
 
 Hector's grand farewell, the most consummate 
 passage of the whole Iliad, you pass on, from 
 the strain, solemnly sweet as far-off music, 
 which begins- — 
 
 " Mourn not, my loved Andromache, for me 
 Too much," 
 
 to that noble aspiration 
 
 " To drink the cup 
 Of liberty before the living gods." 
 
 without a jar or break in its heroic pathos, and 
 divine self-abnegation. 
 
 Again in the old British tradition of King 
 Arthur of the Round Table, which the Anglo- 
 Saxon mind has so eagerly adopted, you find a 
 struggle between warring elements, higher and 
 more complex spiritual emotions, a heroic life 
 at conflict with lower natures, a new world of 
 thought and action, wholly alien to the unity 
 and calm of the Greek ideal, and seething with 
 a spirit of unrest and aspiration, which sins, and 
 repents and falls, and would fain expiate its fall. 
 From the distinct black and white of the classic 
 coloring we come suddenly upon grays and 
 blended shades and tints and wavering lights of 
 a new civilization. 
 
 I would like to have you pause here for one 
 moment, and remark one thought which, amid 
 
JO IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 all their differences, is common to these mythic 
 stories. Before and after, the life extends into 
 peopled and luminous regions. You know King 
 Arthur was of supernatural kinship, and after his 
 wound, was carried away to the enchanted island, 
 
 " Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly." 
 
 The white teachers of the Mexicans and 
 Indians came from an unknown land, and re- 
 turned thither. The line of ancestry with all 
 the Homeric heroes is traced back to Olympus. 
 "Sons of the Gods " are they all ; do you know 
 how much this means, and do you remember 
 the last words of that wonderful line of shep- 
 herds, kings and captives: — " Enos, which was 
 the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, 
 which was the son of God?" The divine Life 
 in all these, you see, sustains, enfolds, and re- 
 ceives again the lives to which it has given birth, 
 and this belief was not likely to have been for- 
 gotten in the troubled and dark periods in which 
 most of these legends arise. They are elabor- 
 ated in happier moments, but their first utter- 
 ances were to eager eyes and ears of listeners, 
 who knew not what to-morrow would bring forth 
 of doom, and whose yesterdays were too dark 
 to rivet their thoughts upon their meagre out- 
 lines. 
 
TRUE HISTORY. /I 
 
 It is against the dusky background of our 
 needs that we delineate the shining figures of 
 our desires. These ideals of a race are the high- 
 tide marks to which the great floods of thought 
 arise in a time of passionate surging and up- 
 heaval ; presently the waves descend to the 
 common level, but these are left behind as wit- 
 nesses of their unseen powers. And some men, 
 who have force enough to incarnate in them- 
 selves a nation's desires, become, by virtue of 
 these, representative men ; as was Bonaparte, 
 with his wonderful and magnetic sway over the 
 stormy minds of France. In the general disso- 
 lution of old bonds, social ties, ecclesiastic re- 
 straints, the power of personal will and char- 
 acter ruled without a counterbalance ; and no 
 one ever more fully expressed the force and 
 scope of an individual than this self-poised, self- 
 raised ruler of men. And this power, limited, 
 if you will, with the seeds of decay in it, was 
 for a while supereminent because it was the 
 thought of France, that every man was in him- 
 self a force, and held his rights from his person- 
 ality alone, and not from any ancestry, noble or 
 ignoble. So the call of Napoleon vibrated 
 through the French soul, and awakened a na- 
 tion, because he was, for a period, the incar- 
 nation of France. 4 ' Vous qui niaimez, suivez 
 moi. 
 
72 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 There is always a certain symmetry in history. 
 Every historic event is the meeting or concur- 
 rence of two forces, and every movement has in 
 itself certain dramatic relations. It requires 
 genius to apprehend and display the outlines 
 and colors of the times ; and an inferior mind 
 blurs both, as he sees, and as he tries to repro- 
 duce them. But the apprehension of this mean- 
 ing and symmetrical movement finds expression 
 with two classes of minds ; the first, develop it 
 in life, and are the men of action ; the second give 
 it form in winged and fiery words, and often 
 sound the key in which the whole after theme 
 is set. 
 
 For we are told that everything in nature, 
 and also life, has its own key-note. If you 
 touch it on a bridge, or in a building, the whole 
 structure is jarred from foundation to summit ; 
 sound it out in the open air, and everything 
 formed upon this note, trembles in accord. So 
 it is with a life, a soul, a nation, even an age, it 
 thrills through and through when its ideal, the 
 ideal of its dreams, its needs, its desires, is 
 uttered. Rouget de Lisle, in his wild song — 
 
 ' l E?ifans de la patrie ! Lejour de gloire est arrive!" 
 
 sounds all the passionate love and hope which 
 beheld their fulfillment as in an ecstacy of vision; 
 
TRUE HISTORY. 73 
 
 I 
 
 and if we can grasp that volcanic era of upheaval 
 at all, we can d d so by the ' ' Marseillaise " as fully 
 as by volumes of history. 
 
 As in a plant, if you go back through all the 
 different phases of growth, the fully opened 
 flower, the faintly tinted bud, stem, and sprays 
 of green leaves, back to the little seed, you may 
 find enclosed there the whole of the after de- 
 velopment of fruit and flower. Or, as some- 
 times in music, the air is played in a soft, low 
 prelude, and gradually flows off through varia- 
 tions of intricate harmony, in all of which, how- 
 ever, the same air sounds and reappears. So 
 we say, "History repeats itself," and "The 
 voice of the past is the prophecy of the future. 
 The Germans of Tacitus are easily recognized 
 by us in the Germans of the present. The 
 Franks express in their very name, as we first 
 see it, the desire for freedom, of which their 
 whole history is a struggle. The Jews, whom 
 we see in our cities and streets, are the same 
 exiles that dwelt in the far-off land of Egypt 
 under the dynasty of the Pharaohs, for historic 
 lineaments are not easily effaced, even in every 
 diversity of country and climate, outside contact 
 and influence. No footsteps are so entirely lost 
 here that the path of a race does not lie before 
 us, plainly traceable through every intersection 
 and winding curve. 
 
74 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 Modern history is far more varied in its con- 
 ditions than the old, for it includes that with 
 additional elements. We have what might be 
 called a parallax in our civilization, for it con- 
 tains three points of measurement — our own 
 history and the influences of Greek and Roman 
 modes of thought on the minds of our men of 
 culture, and everywhere the full oriental life, in 
 all its details of dress, manner, daily salutations, 
 laws, and customs of the household ; the whole 
 organization and its eastern background of city 
 and landscape, inwrought into our life through 
 the medium of the Hebraic Scriptures. 
 
 In the primitive life of man there are three 
 events which are characteristic, the journey, the 
 feast, and the battle, and none of these are with- 
 out meaning, but illustrate certain principles in- 
 herent in his nature. Each one of these is 
 predominant in one of the above races ; the 
 journey finds its fullest expression in the ever 
 wandering Shemitic tribes, the feast in the joy- 
 ous Greek life, and the battle, in the struggling, 
 warring and restless movements of the Germanic 
 races, from their earliest Scandinavian records. 
 
 First let us consider then what we shall call 
 the Hebraic Spirit of Pilgrimage, but which has 
 also existed in more restrained forms in all the 
 ages and nations of which we have record. 
 
THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 75 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 
 "Arise, and let us go hence." 
 
 SPHE journeyings of the races are full of mean- 
 bi ing, both in their out-comings and their 
 on-goings. There seems to be a certain migra- 
 tory instinct in the breasts of men, often peri- 
 odical in its manifestations, which impels, not 
 only individuals like the old Normadic heroes 
 and modern explorers, but vast masses of men 
 to roll their living tides towards the East or West 
 or South. Many such moments in history recur 
 to our remembrance. What is more pictur- 
 esque than the youthful Alexander with his 
 haughty Greeks in the richly colored land of 
 India ; or more thrilling than the invasions of 
 the infidel Saracens in Christian Europe, or the 
 fright of the Saxon households, seeing far off 
 the ships of the fierce and cruel Danes, swooping 
 
7 6 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 down upon their shores ? It is true that the 
 new races bring with them new elements of 
 thought, new germs of life, but their coming 
 augurs decay and woe to the old. 
 
 Amidst all the fanaticism of the crusades, our 
 hearts beat high as we think of the mailed 
 warriors crossing the hot desert sands to seek 
 Jerusalem, the "City of the Vision of Peace/' 
 for many were, doubtless, moved by earnest 
 and vital faith ; but there is only burning indig- 
 nation for the invasions of South America and 
 Mexico by the Spaniards, the strange white 
 warriors, who slay and drive before them the 
 simple-hearted and ignorant races of the soil. 
 Among all these ages of exploration and migra- 
 tion, there is one, far back, before which we 
 hold our breath with terror and wonder — Rome, 
 sitting careless and at ease, the face of her Fate 
 veiled before her, while horde after horde, tribe 
 after tribe, sweep down in hurried multitudes 
 from the dark forests of Germany, under Alaric, 
 Odoacer and Theodoric, to be followed after- 
 wards by the Asiatic Huns, fierce and terrible, 
 led by Attila, the "scourge of God," and cover- 
 ing the land like a thunder-cloud of doom. We 
 approach the most awful, the grandest crisis in 
 all history, when the Roman legions, a people 
 of fierce countenance and strange tongue, have 
 descended upon Jerusalem, and it is said unto her 
 
THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 7/ 
 
 t 
 
 in the most solemn of all recorded warnings, 
 "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in 
 this thy day, the things which belong unto thy 
 peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes." 
 And the Master, beholding the city, "wept 
 over it." 
 
 The same spirit of Exodus, which guided the 
 older races, has been continually alive and astir 
 in our own nations. We could not perhaps give 
 a stronger evidence of the power of faith in an 
 ideal vision, of the desire for the " new earth," 
 than the story of Columbus, bearing the cross 
 to a strange country, and cheered in his despair 
 by a vision in the night, and that other homelier, 
 but more pathetic life, of Livingston in Africa, 
 seeking to heal "the open sore of the world." 
 But the same impulse exists everywhere. In 
 every New England village, 
 
 " Each road leads downwards to the sea, 
 Or landward to the west." 
 
 and every child dreams, even in his father's 
 arms, of the strange, white fields of snow and 
 ice, or the lands of sunshine and feathery palms. 
 Among the old Shemitic tribes, however, ex- 
 istence was a perpetual journey to and fro, and 
 the whole of Hebraic history is full of the records 
 of movement and change. Abraham goes into 
 a far country, Joseph is sold among a strange 
 
7$ IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 people, Moses led the Israelites forth from 
 Egypt, after their entrance into Canaan they 
 are carried as captives into Babylon, in the days 
 of Ahasueras they are found "from India even 
 unto Ethiopia," everywhere alien and yearning 
 for their great city, Jerusalem. The words of 
 Paul are full of memories of his own people 
 through many far-back years. 
 
 "In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in 
 perils of robbers, in perils by mine own country- 
 men, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the 
 city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the 
 sea, in perils among false brethren ; in weariness 
 and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger 
 and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and naked- 
 ness," . . . "in deaths oft." 
 
 It is not strange that a man, whose life has 
 been such as this, and whose fervid temperament 
 has burned every experience in distinct charac- 
 ters upon his eager mind, should use images 
 drawn from it in his teachings of the spiritual 
 life. He says of the followers of the new light 
 that has arisen upon the world, that they "seek 
 a country" and a city "which hath founda- 
 tions;" and calls them "strangers and pilgrims 
 upon earth," unfolding before their sight the 
 long, pathetic record of the banished and exiled, 
 "who wandered about in sheep-skins and goat- 
 skins ; being destitute, afflicted, tormented ; (of 
 
THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 79 
 
 whom the world was not worthy ;) they wan- 
 dered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens 
 and caves of the earth." 
 
 Mark here the ardor and vehemence with 
 which this man, the culmination of long Hebrew 
 ancestries, and at the same time the announcer 
 of salvation to the Gentiles, speaks to his listen- 
 ers, Imagine the fire with which he heaps cir- 
 cumstance upon circumstance, the restrained 
 passion of that sudden parenthesis — -("of whom 
 the world was not worthy ") — the swift, pathetic 
 changes of tone, as in "perils by mine own coun- 
 trymen," and in his exquisite reply to Agrippa's 
 saying, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a 
 christian." I give it in full — 
 
 ' ' And Paul said, I would to God that not 
 only thou, but also all that hear me this day, 
 were both almost, and altogether such as I am, 
 except these bonds." 
 
 I know of no parallel except that plaintive 
 after-thought of Hamlet, as Polonius says to 
 him, "My honorable lord, I will most humbly 
 take my leave of you," and he replies, "You 
 cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will 
 more willingly part withal, — except my life, ex- 
 cept my life, except my life !" and this falls far 
 below the reply of Paul in dignity and pathos. 
 
 Imagine also in union with the rapidity and 
 fire of his speaking, that wonderful spirit of 
 
80 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 adaptation by which this wanderer in many 
 lands seizes the characteristic form of thought 
 among the people whom he addresses, as in his 
 beautiful speech to the Athenians, and fills it 
 with the magnetic power of a higher thought. 
 He is a poet as well as an orator, his language 
 is full of force, as in that expression, ' ' the weak 
 and beggarly elements, " how it rings with scorn ! 
 and full also of rare grace and delicacy and fiery 
 music which thrills through you like the call of 
 the trumpet. There are no poems in human 
 language more beautiful than his praise of 
 charity, and that grand summary of all heroic 
 history in Hebrews, from which I have already 
 quoted, the wonderful cry of triumph over 
 death in the discourse on the resurrection, the 
 exquisitely tender address to the Romans. — 
 "There is therefore now no condemnation," 
 when like antiphonal music, the quick, sharp 
 questioning, the sure, full responses, burst into 
 one rythmical passionate utterance of faith in 
 4 'Him that loved us." 
 
 By a strange contrast this man, — most essen- 
 tially in character and genius a Hebrew — ^has 
 been pre-eminent in influence through all the 
 centuries that witnessed the lowest degradation 
 of his people. For the after life of his race 
 verified his pathetic history of their past — "des- 
 titute, afflicted, tormented." In every land you 
 
THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 8 1 
 
 find this melancholy and alien eastern tribe, 
 existing among strange races as an unsolved 
 problem, an unsettled fact, isolated from their 
 fellows, despised and reproached. Everywhere 
 you might see the figure of the Hebrew, with 
 swarthy coloring, sharply defined lineaments, 
 bright and piercing eyes, and shoulders bowed 
 as if beneath heavy burdens. The laws and 
 enactments of each land has its separate code 
 for the "Jew," each language has expressions 
 of scorn identical with their name, the priest- 
 hood in metaphors and hyperbole borrowed from 
 the Hebrew seers, fulminate anathemas against 
 them. There are few writers on whose pages 
 this, dark, sad face does not appear. You see 
 in Dante, in Skakspeare, Byron, Lessing, and 
 Croly, the mark of their presence. Everywhere 
 they are suspected and reviled, but even the 
 common language of their oppressors is imbued 
 with the rich flavor and the strong pathos of the 
 old Hebraisms. Look at England, and see 
 these same people who so shrink from contact 
 with the Hebrew — they meet together in silence 
 and night, with the awful heavens keeping 
 watch overhead, to listen at the peril of their 
 lives to the "serious and pulsating tones" of 
 the Hebraic visions. Is not this a strange pic- 
 ture? M. Taine says, "I have before me one 
 of the old, square folios, in black letter, in which 
 8 
 
82 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 the pages, worn by bony fingers, have been 
 patched together. Hence has sprung much of 
 the language of England, and half of English 
 manners ; to this day the country is biblical ; it 
 was this big book which had transformed Shaks- 
 peare's England. To understand this change, 
 imagine these yeomen, these shop-keepers, who 
 in the evening placed the Bible before them, 
 and bareheaded, with veneration, heard or read 
 one of its chapters." 
 
 Mrs. Charles says of the Hebraic biographies 
 of scripture that they "have no ends, only 
 beginnings;" they seem to stretch, like the gol- 
 den arrows shot from the sun, far into infinite 
 regions of space and light, and are only gone 
 from our vision. 
 
 If on my narrow ledge a sunbeam falls, 
 
 Steals on from stone to stone — then glides away, 
 
 It is not lost because drawn back in light, 
 Although no more we see it." 
 
 The spirit of separation and of the new crea- 
 tion is in these lives of the Hebrew histories and 
 the gospel of the Hebrew disciples, and wher- 
 ever they come in contact with a nation's heart, 
 a new race seems to be born of them. Full of 
 divine affections, and of germinative and creative 
 forces, they are continually forming, as it were, 
 a new people, strong to resist and renew. It is 
 
THE HEBRAIC SPIRIT OF PILGRIMAGE. 83 
 
 a re-birth, more wonderful than the Renaissance 
 from the Greek life in the fifteenth century, for 
 it is not only a quickening of latent forces, but 
 a change from an old antagonistic life to a new 
 and diverse form of vitality. 
 
 Among the laughter-loving, mercurial, rest- 
 less French, we are surprised to find the grave 
 and simple Huguenots, who are kindred in blood 
 but alien in spirit. The divine afflatus is breathed 
 forth, and out of Italy and Spain, lands worldly, 
 self-indulgent, and intoxicated with sensual 
 delights, there arise Savonarola, with his stern 
 reproofs of tyranny and unfaithfulness, Loyola 
 and Xavier, terrible in self-abnegation, whose 
 arduos toils and foot-sore journeys stand isolated 
 and dark against a background °f ease an d 
 pleasure. 
 
 " Laetitiae, deliciae, 
 Et coronata vino." 
 
 Have they all left, mother and kindred, going 
 into strange and barbarous countries with words 
 of mysterious import, telling of the spiritual life 
 that lies beyond and within our earthly days. 
 The eyes of the woman who loved them best, 
 would not recognize their wan faces, marred by 
 fastings and vigils. They have cast off the 
 things that are behind, and the world knows 
 them no more, except as wonderful forces of 
 
 Cl 
 
84 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 organization and exploration. I do not say that 
 it is well that the personal life should be denied, 
 — for I believe that is also a divine gift — but I 
 would have you mark the power of this influence 
 which impels them. 
 
 Among the English, hard-fighting, deep drink- 
 ing, stolid, delighting in roistering revels, — 
 '•Shakspeare's England," as M. Taine calls it, — 
 we discover suddenly the Puritans, of sober 
 visage and speech, and grave demeanor, whose 
 longings are for eternal ends, and who count no 
 privation or toil hard, that is endured for im- 
 mortal glory. Their garments were uncouth 
 and their language strange to their very brethren 
 and country-people, — although, as Kingsley 
 points out, the England of to-day, in garb and 
 custom, is a Puritan England. But they were 
 an alien and a new people then, and it was 
 against antagonism and ridicule and bitter 
 hatred, that they established their place, and 
 became the nuclei and bases of new movements 
 in other lands. And as all these arose in an age, 
 indifferent and adverse, so will others, born of 
 the life of the eternal Word, arise in their turn, 
 to renew continually the old and decaying life 
 of the world. 
 
 " In journeyings often," . . " in deaths oft." 
 
THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 85 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 
 
 Whose soul records not the great debt of joy, 
 Is stamped forever an ignoble man." — Sophocles. 
 
 fHE life and ideal of the Greek race are 
 altogether different. From the valleys 
 come the bleating - of flocks and lowing of herds ; 
 you .hear everywhere the ' ' trickling of invisible 
 brooks," and see from mountain heights the 
 small crafts as they glance over the bright 
 waters of the inland sea. A temple stands on 
 every high promontory — as if a-tip-toe to greet 
 the sun ! — so that every mariner might see it as 
 his ship drew near, and give thanks to the Gods 
 of Greece. It rises above the mysterious gray 
 of the dim olive trees which form so lovely a 
 relief to the white outlines of the marble, — 
 glittering, not only with sunshine, but with 
 golden bucklers that gleam across the architrave, 
 
86 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 and with tints of vermillion and blue, — and 
 flashes back the rich light and color which pour 
 upon it through the pure air. Farther inland 
 are the cool, green forest shadows of oaks and 
 cork and lime trees, the glad splashing of water- 
 falls, and the subtle, uncertain fragrance of 
 citron and almond flowers. There are daffodil- 
 covered meadows where Persephone might de- 
 light to wander again ; and at Athens, as that 
 lovely fragment of a most artistic work, "A few 
 days in Athens," tells us, the Illissus glides, like 
 pale silver, through the soft, sweet twilight. 
 
 It seems to have been given to the Greeks 
 above all other races, to hear the pulses of earth 
 and sea beat with distinct meaning and life. 
 They were a people of quick vitality, vigor and 
 joyousness, delighting always in the open sun- 
 shine and the fresh sea breezes, peopling every 
 lonely and silent place with their own imaginings 
 until nature seemed nowhere mute or dead to 
 them. They threw their own life into every- 
 thing, and felt an answering thrill run through 
 even wood and stone at their touch. Taine says 
 of their architecture, that they endowed it 
 "with the grace, the diversity, the unforeseen 
 and fleeting suppleness of a living thing. " Even 
 their dreams they pictured as floating down 
 from a green twilight of tangled leaves and 
 boughs into their slumbers. 
 
THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 8? 
 
 Was a Greek moved to special gladness ! 
 Then on the mountain-tops the Bacchantes smote 
 the earth in their wild revelries of dance and 
 song-; a lively measure piped along the glades, 
 and through the low branches of the gnarled 
 oaks, shaggy and horned creatures looked out. 
 The Napaae crept up from the rustling thickets, 
 and the Naiads stirred the springs and streams 
 with a sudden ripple and splash. The lonely 
 heights, haunted by soring wings, and winds of 
 night, were alive with simple, sylvan creatures, 
 and woods and grassy fields were full of their 
 footsteps, and swift, shy motions. And when 
 the Greeks heard the twittering of new fledged 
 broods in the boughs overhead, when the young 
 calves and lambs cried in the fold, and the fruit 
 trees burst into bud, then they said that Deme- 
 ter or Pan, had visited the homes of their wor- 
 shippers. 
 
 You deny the old myths of the Gods, 
 
 And yet their life lives on. 
 It throbs in your passionate pulses, 
 
 And wakes the dream in the stone. 
 
 For the love and the thought and the power, 
 Of the human heart were these, 
 
 And the love and the thought and the power, 
 Still rule the earth and the seas. 
 
 Across the wind-swept grasses, 
 You pass with laughter and jest, 
 
 — Lo, Artemis slowly arises, 
 
 And you straightway forget the rest. 
 
88 ]DEAL LIFE. 
 
 In the wonder of still white ligh! 
 
 Which shines above the wold. 
 The mist of shadowy splendor, 
 
 The glimmer upon the fold. 
 
 The love which an imaginative young person 
 of the nineteenth century feels for Nature is 
 wholly impersonal, and without form. It reveals 
 itself to him in some radiant moments by moods 
 of ecstasy and wonder and swift delight, but all 
 the while he knows that his Artemis is a myth. 
 The spring moonshine, "the sweet, fleet, silvery 
 April showers," the soft airs, may awaken joy 
 within him, but it is because of their own glad- 
 ness, their own special loveliness and grace, not 
 as signs of the presence of Athene, queen of 
 the air. But imagine the effect upon a young 
 Greek who believed, — to whom Athene and 
 Artemis were divine persons, — whose concep- 
 tions were so full of strange vitality and hu- 
 manity, that they incarnated every power of 
 nature. The vividness of such ideas must have 
 been strongly increased by the mythical asso- 
 ciations attached to all the Greek and Roman 
 localities. As the low moon rose over Latmos. 
 and her faint gleam fell on garden pools and 
 dripping fountains, such an old story as the love 
 of Endymion would be remembered. Through 
 the ineffable glimmer and glamour of moonlight, 
 Artemis might seem to smile, and every sound 
 
THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 89 
 
 would easily appear the sweet, soft flutings of 
 Arcady, or the quivering of silver wings rustling 
 as if to take flight. Even in the winter days, 
 when earth falls asleep, the unfrozen sea beat 
 against the shore with tumultuous and joyous 
 waves, and brought dreams of the Nereids and 
 Poseidon, and the Triton, blowing his wreathed 
 shell. 
 
 This rollicking merriment of nature, this fes- 
 tival spirit of existence, is comprehended with 
 difficulty by the inhabitants of colder countries, 
 who spend so many months in the colorless and 
 monotonous occupations of in-door life. What 
 has the dark, sad Hebrew exile in common 
 with the jesting Athenian ? The Gods of the 
 northern tribes, Odin and Thor and Freya, 
 whose mighty footsteps are heard in night and 
 storm, are not like these homely and sensuous 
 deities, whose " inextinguishable laughter" rings 
 through their council halls. The Hellenic 
 thought of a God is, like the Hellenic thought 
 of nature, so akin to humanity, that both the 
 elements of divinity and nature are almost for- 
 gotten at times beneath the human likeness so 
 stamped upon them. The little children who 
 played on the streets of Athens might have 
 looked into the sweet, mocking faces of Eros 
 arid Anteros Avithout surprise. Psyche, be- 
 loved by Cupid, found no bar to Olympus, the 
 
90 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 human friendships and loves of the Gods were 
 many, and often sought in most ignoble guise. 
 In this masking of divine life under lower forms, 
 you will find not only a double, but a manifold 
 significance; not only the " picturesque super- 
 stitions of the many, but the finer intuitions of 
 the few," and these from several races. 
 
 There are the traditions of the early inhabi- 
 tants of Greece, afterwards helots or serfs, in 
 which W. H. Pater says one may trace (i some- 
 what of the quiet brooding of a subdued people" 
 — the moan of a dying nationality, — and the 
 quick, clear-cut thoughts of their masters, the 
 artistic race of later Greeks. There are also the 
 myths of the Etruscans or Romans, and the 
 Thersalians and Phrygians, on which the purer 
 Greek culture set its supreme and inimitable 
 mark. Hence we have those divine doppelgangcrs 
 of old mythology, Cybele and Demeter, Athene 
 and Artemis, Kore and Persephone, ol two-fold 
 nature and name. 
 
 The whole history of the Gods might be said 
 to be one of transformation and disguise. De- 
 meter, seeking for her lost child, sits down by 
 the wayside in the guise of an old and wrinkled 
 woman, and the four princesses of Eleusis, as in 
 our own fairy stories, which are surviving frag- 
 ments of the elder myths, come down to the 
 well, and give her water to drink, not seeing 
 her divine nature. 
 
THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 9 1 
 
 » 
 
 " For the Gods are hard for men to recognize." 
 
 {Homeric Hymn.) 
 
 Zeus comes to earth as a flame, a shower of 
 gold, a swan, a white bull, and under the human 
 form of Amphitryon. There is in these myths 
 profound spiritual significance to the spiritual 
 soul ; there is also the human likeness and 
 human sympathy of which the old religion is 
 full, — " Thou thoughtest that I was altogether 
 such an one as thyself, " — there is the intense and 
 acute delight in the life and changes of sea and 
 earth and sky, whose history is told in these 
 forms ; and lastly, the pleasure in successful 
 artifice and disguise, which the narrations of 
 the Iliad and the Odyssey show as so prominent 
 a trait of the subtle Greek mind. Ulysses, on 
 his return, goes not to his own home, or his 
 father's without disguise, and under a feigned 
 form, Minerva attends the journeyings of his 
 son. To sustain such masking with success, 
 or to penetrate it in another, was alike full of 
 delight to the Hellenic nature, so rapid in per- 
 ception, so ready in wit. 
 
 The domestic life of the Greeks was like a 
 brilliant picture, every article of household use, 
 
 '• Every robe and hanging ornament," 
 
 was full of beauty and grace. Their dwellings 
 were richly decorated, walls, ceilings and doors, 
 
92 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 but chiefly with metallic colorings of gold, silver 
 and bronze, whose glitter and shade were ex- 
 quisitely blended with the deep red of vermillion. 
 This, contrasting most finely with the gleam of 
 metals was therefore the color generally chosen, 
 although blue, light ochre, and green, as at 
 Pompeii, which was a provincial and mixed 
 town, were occasionally used. Their feasts were 
 merry with song and dance, and swift, flashing 
 jests. Indeed, every meal, although for the 
 most part frugal, and often consisting only of 
 figs and honey-cakes, salt fish and barley bread, 
 was a festival to the joyous spirit of the Greeks. 
 So too was every incident in the picturesque, 
 busy life of the laborer ; the mowing, the reap- 
 ing, the threshing of the gathered grain, the 
 binding of the ripe corn. All these were acts 
 of worship to the Gods who loved their race, 
 with a partial, petulant affection it is true, but 
 yet who looked upon them with favor and guar- 
 dianship, and who passed along their ways with 
 desire and rejoicing, and rested on their moun- 
 tain sides, "dusky with woods," or in their 
 fields, wet with dews of the summer nights. 
 
 Even Demeter Erinnys, the awful and pas- 
 sionate Mother Earth, cared for the young 
 lambs and little children ; and there was always 
 some God who would pity and help a wanderer 
 on his journey, though it were a flight from the 
 
THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 93 
 
 • 
 
 wrath of another deity ; — some flying bird or 
 rippling stream, to cheer him with a sign of 
 hope. So far as it was possible they eschewed 
 the very names of ill omen and pain, being 
 specially endowed with that cheerfullness of 
 temperament which springs from powerful vi- 
 tality and perfect health. Hope was their 
 supreme virtue, which overleaps evil, and will 
 not see it ; not faith, which may live in its per- 
 petual presence, and survive its keenest torture. 
 Any one who suffered any sorrow beyond the 
 ordinary disappointments of life, was shunned 
 by them as hated of the Gods and the prey of 
 the Erinnys. So Antigone stood almost alone 
 in her ministry to the afflicted ^Edipus, and we 
 find no consolation, no tender solace of pity, in 
 their stories of anguish, and but little of human 
 sympathy. Amidst the clashing of Olympic 
 chariot wheels, and the excitement of wars with 
 the Persians, the Grecian youth might have said 
 with Philip von Artevelde, 
 
 " We have no time to mourn." 
 
 although the wise thoughtfulness of the friar's 
 answer would have been very far from his heart. 
 
 " He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend, 
 Eternity mourns that." 
 
94 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 This deeper element of sorrow, which, under 
 the name of contrition, has so large a place in 
 our worship, is wholly absent from theirs, which 
 is almost a revelry of sacred dances and alternate 
 songs. The passion of love with them was 
 always closely united with sensuous beauty and 
 youth ; and neither infancy nor old age — so 
 touching in their very helplessness that they 
 kindle our tenderest feelings into life — are often 
 brought before our minds by their literature or 
 their art. These dwell upon the thoughts of 
 vigor, intellect and beauty, earthly skill and 
 achievement, as completing the full round of a 
 happy life. Their poets are " singers"; their 
 heroes go into conflict with jest and laughter. 
 In the flush of youthful power, which is charac- 
 teristic of this race, all things which they desire 
 seem not only possible, but easy of attainment, 
 and in illustration you may see the incredible 
 exploits and tasks they assign to their mythic 
 heroes, Hercules, Jason, Theseus, Achilles. In 
 reality they themselves displayed the most ex- 
 traordinary intellectual facility and skill com- 
 bined with great physical power; "the victor 
 in the foot-race or wrestling-match might also 
 win the prize for the ode or the trilogy ; the man 
 who wrote the Medea, received the athlete's 
 wreath at the Eleusinian games, and he who 
 discovered the ratio of the hypothenuse was 
 crowned for victory in boxing." 
 
THE GREEK IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 95 
 
 A part of this was without doubt due to their 
 method of instruction, which did not exalt the 
 memory above the higher faculties, or extinguish 
 the sense of firmness and enjoyment. Their 
 schools of philosophy were those of the porch, 
 the grove, the garden, as well as the lyceum 
 and academy, and the very names of the first 
 are redolent of the free, glad life out of doors. 
 Their wise men uttered their thoughts in the 
 golden sunshine or green shade to young men, 
 whose eager eyes brightened as they listened, 
 and whose voices rose in swift question or re- 
 sponse, — to young men, who believed them- 
 selves of heroic ancestry, and so pledged to all 
 things great and noble. Each little island, or 
 district, had indeed its local heroic family, as 
 you remember, Ajax belonged to the ^Ecaidae, 
 of the island of ^Egina, and the sixteen statues 
 in the temple of Zeus there — afterwards restored 
 by Thorwaldsen when carried to Germany — are 
 supposed to represent the deeds and struggles 
 of Ajax during the war with Troy. They kept 
 ever in remembrance — visibly commemorated 
 by some beautiful form of art — the great acts 
 of their countrymen or ancestors; and they 
 were themselves in their tranquil power and 
 athletic grace, — their glad, quick movements as 
 unrestrained as a little child's — their exquisite 
 beauty of feature and color — the strongest 
 proofs of their noble descent. 
 
g6 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 They were a fearless race, and he who would 
 think true thoughts most also think bold ones ; 
 — fearless, not only of the " barbarians, " as 
 they haughtily termed the other races, but even 
 of the more dread and mysterious forces of 
 nature, which they perceived to be vital and full 
 of movement. They represented these to 
 themselves, when brought into contact with 
 man, under the wonderful and pathetic myth 
 of Demeter, and later, they symbolized wilder 
 nature as the God Pan, with his Fauns, Satyrs, 
 and Hamadryads; and either myth, — of the 
 earth in its motherhood — or its riot and wild 
 freedom — wore few aspects of terror to their 
 dauntless outlook. They did not hesitate to 
 level their shafts of irony at the Gods themselves, 
 and question the justice of their traditional deal- 
 ings with men. But with all their mocking wit, 
 they were by nature artistic and poetic, and 
 united to their fearless love of nature a twin 
 passion for humanity, which inspired them with 
 a noble earnestness and fire of thought in their 
 higher moods. It is interesting to watch the 
 interfusion of these two loves in all their con- 
 ceptions. If one, young and fair, must die; 
 slain, they say, by the special wrath or jealousy 
 of some God, will he not return again in some 
 blooming flower, or soaring bird? And with 
 the bitter taste of the wild mint, they inter- 
 
THE GREEK tDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 97 
 
 weave some story of human resentment, or find 
 in the plaintive cry of the sea-mew, and the 
 brooding calm of the halycon, some lingering 
 trace of human sorrow or love ; as the Oriental 
 saw in the wistful glance of his beast of burden 
 some pitiful story of a brother in bondage. 
 
 Both from their peculiar vitality of tempera- 
 ment, and the manner in which they acquired 
 knowledge, they became a race of speakers as 
 well as thinkers. Oratory was not a distinct 
 profession, requiring special training, for the 
 language of a people so devoted to music and 
 song, could not fail to grow soft, flexible and 
 rythmical ; and the Greek child inherited skill 
 in its use at its birth. The father told to chil- 
 dren and grandchildren legends of the Gods, or 
 stories of the noble and brave who fell in war. 
 Shepherds recited songs at their rural games and 
 feasts, or told with lively gestures, as they 
 watched their flock, resting from the noon-day 
 heat, some tale of Oread or Hamadryad, whose 
 rustling footsteps they themselves perchance had 
 heard ! We are told that Herodotus so recited 
 his history at the Olympic festival that Thucy- 
 dides, a boy of fifteen, was moved to tears. 
 And when the dead, who had died in defense of 
 their country, were brought back to rest in the 
 last, silent slumber, the greatest of their states- 
 men uttered their sad eulogium. 
 
 9 
 

 98 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 . But simple narrations could not long content 
 hearers, whose nerves thrilled and pulses beat 
 with such quick, warm life. I think not even the 
 recital of Homer, — although the eyes of the 
 listening mothers must have been wet with tears 
 at the sorrows of Andromache and Astyanax, 
 and the wrath of Achilles was surely reflected 
 in the knit and sullen brows of the men who 
 heard; — not even Homer's could have fully 
 sufficed them. For in their own thought, his- 
 tory simulated life ; they saw every deed with 
 the rapid movement of reality, with every 
 changing phase of look, tone or gesture. They 
 would have a story tangible and visible as well 
 as audible, alive with motion, warm with color ; 
 and from these vivid conceptions and intense 
 emotions flowered forth the drama, which was 
 at once the blossom and crown of Ionian culture. 
 With the characteristic audacity of this bold 
 race, they placed their theatres ' * with the sky 
 above, and the sea before their seats," and 
 dared to stand face to face with nature, un- 
 dwarfed by her magnitude, and unabashed. It 
 took great thoughts to keep time worthily with 
 the mighty rythms of wind and wave. You 
 must imagine-— if you would transport yourself 
 back to that day — a great multitude assembled 
 to hear these, row after row of breathless faces. 
 When the spell is broken they will pour through 
 
THE GREEK, IDEAL, OR THE FEAST. 99 
 
 the streets, a seething, tumultuous crowd, noisy 
 again with repartee and laughter. But now ! 
 you see them with heads slightly bent forward, 
 lips half apart, eager eyes fixed on the stage, as 
 silent and motionless as one great listener. The 
 personal magnetism is so strong that every feel- 
 ing which stirred the poets' words, sweeps also 
 these flexible and mobile lineaments that brighten 
 or darken at a tone. In such an audience — and 
 in no other — was it possible that the rough and 
 ignorant murderers of Ibycus, feeling a sudden 
 shadow darken the air, and seeing the cranes 
 flying overhead with harsh notes, should cry 
 out, "See there! See there! the cranes of 
 Ibycus!" and so convicted themselves of the 
 murder of the lonely traveler on the mountain 
 path, where only these winged creatures were 
 witnesses.* 
 
 In the whole of modern history only one 
 period resembles the spirit of Ionian Greece in 
 its spirit and vitality, — the period of Sydney 
 and Shakspeare and Spenser. When a subject 
 of England refused a crown because his first 
 title was the noblest, and the author of the fair, 
 
 *Note on the story of Ibycus. — Demeter might be sup- 
 posed, after her long and sorrowful journey, seeking for her 
 lost child, to look with peculiar favor and compassion upon 
 travelers, therefore the discovery of the murderers of Ibycus 
 by the cranes, birds which were sacred to her. One myth 
 thus strikes a tangled net-work of fine roots through all Greek 
 art and literature. 
 
IOO IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 quaint romance of Arcadia died the hero of 
 Zutphen, — when a vast country of untrodden 
 land was added to the little kingdom of islands, 
 and the fancies of men bloomed into rare 
 masques and sweetest madrigals. It was then 
 the English drama reached its culmination. Its 
 revival is impossible unless we could bring back 
 the conditions of the Elizabethian age, or the 
 social atmosphere of Athens, in which this in- 
 tense mental activity so ran the great circle of 
 life, that men not only thought fair thoughts as 
 they drew breath, but thought deepened into 
 feeling, and feeling quickened into action and 
 form. 
 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. 10 1 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. 
 
 "Our life was but a battle and a march." — Schiller. 
 
 tGAIN we enter a new world. The harmony 
 -^ and symmetry of the more limited Greek 
 life disappears and we find everywhere antago- 
 nism and conflict. The nature which surrounds 
 these men of the north country is cold, bare, 
 unfriendly ; the earth will not yield her harvests 
 without the hard labor of human hands; the sea 
 would soon chill to death the boldest swimmer 
 who should trust himself to its dark waves. The 
 whistling winds blow shrilly through the fir-woods, 
 snows and storms obscure the air, and the sum- 
 mer is a swift dream "between a sleep and a 
 sleep," full of sweetness, but soon gone. The 
 conditions of existence here, are endurance, 
 energy and courage ; not without toil is the fire- 
 
102 • IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 wood procured for winter, or the harvests 
 gathered into barns ; and the chase is for use 
 as well as pleasure, for the skins of wild beasts 
 serve as covering and their flesh as meat. 
 
 The marks of such earnest lives are impressed 
 upon the Scandinavian myths, — of Odin, pacing 
 along with the dark ravens, Thought and Re- 
 membrance, beside him, — Thor, with his mighty 
 hammer, — the sorrow of earth and heaven at 
 the death of Balder, who was the shadow type 
 of Christ. The idea of antagonism between 
 distinct elements, —warring powers of good and 
 evil — pervades this strong, sad runic lore. It 
 is an earnest race which receives it, which after- 
 wards sets the mark of its earnest thought on 
 all it does, so that even its grotesque designs 
 are full of seriousness and grave suggestion. 
 Such are the Knight and Death, and The Dance 
 of Death, by Diirer and Holbein, and such a 
 spirit inspires the quaint and profuse decoration 
 of gothic architecture. It is more interior, it 
 has more and deeper life than the races which 
 foreran it. When the Hebrew bows himself, 
 "earth to the earth," in those strong words 
 which our translation does not approach, it is to 
 escape exterior penalties, — poverty, disease, 
 worst of all, exile; the Greek, with all his 
 hopefulness in outward adversity, shrinks with 
 horror from the sorrow of the soul, the remorse 
 
THE GEIixM^NIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I03 
 
 for sin, which his light nature so ill compre- 
 hends that he deems it a mark of the wrath of 
 the Gods; but the Germanic mind perceives 
 suffering, not as a mere punishment, but as an 
 inherent element of higher development; "a 
 baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new 
 state. The yearning memories, the bitter regret, 
 the agonized sympathy, the struggling appeals 
 to the Invisible Right, * * can do the work 
 of years, so that one may come out from such 
 great anguish with a soul full of new awe and 
 pity." Into the Northern Valhalla entered only 
 the souls of heroes slain in conflict, and when 
 this contest and pain came within, the strange 
 element of spiritual life was awakened. Here 
 lies the impassable line which separates our 
 emotions, our thoughts, our characters from the 
 past. There is no race more external than the 
 Shemitic tribes apart from the spirit of inspira- 
 tion ; beautiful as are Greek art, culture and 
 power, it is the beauty only of man's natural 
 life, but Christianity kindled again the spiritual 
 nature. Even in the old sagas there seemed 
 to be a foreshadowing of the sorrowful, passion- 
 ate, earnest side of christian faith, so that the 
 Germanic races readily laid down their old pagan 
 idolatries for the acknowledgment of the christ- 
 hood of God. And the Germanic races have 
 become the especial exponent and representative 
 
104 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 of christian and spiritual thought, as the southern 
 races of Europe have of the forms and emotional 
 life of the christian faith. 
 
 This spirituality then, which was born of the 
 spirit of Christ, characterizes our new civiliza- 
 tion, forms the boundary line between the new 
 and the old. On the one side lies the youth, on 
 the other the adult age, of humanity. The new 
 nature seeks, not happiness, but purification 
 from unclean and base desires, as its end. Every 
 circumstance of northern life, — its struggle and 
 limitations — the isolation of many lives — even 
 the long, dark winters of its rigorous climate — 
 was well filled to foster a deeper morality, a 
 more interior development of soul. It is so 
 easy to brood over old days and the wounds 
 that ache still, to nourish our aspirations and our 
 dreams, in the silence of the cold outer world, 
 where the fall of snow hushes even a passing 
 footstep, and all of life seems to burn within. 
 In the loneliness the soul rises up as its own 
 judge and accuser, and thought after thought, 
 desire after desire, appear and disappear before 
 this secret and mysterious tribunal. Thus the 
 recognition of human responsibility, the know- 
 ledge of the subtle movements of the will, grow 
 in strength and light. The Oriental mind, with 
 its states of vision and seership on the heavenly 
 side, and its horrible obsessions on the other, 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT. OF CONFLICT. 10$ 
 
 never seems wholly to attain freedom. " Hath 
 not the potter power over the clay?" From the 
 smooth tongue of the Greek comes the story. of 
 men beguiled by the Gods, not knowing what 
 they do, as ^Edipus ; or you are told with ready 
 excuse of the Chamber of Fate, . 
 
 "Where the three blind old women sit spinning the world." 
 
 The Germanic mind alone sees man as master 
 of his fate, and knows that the snare about hi 
 feet is woven by his act and will. In Goethe's 
 great work, Faust deliberately chooses between 
 life and death with open eyes. He is not blinded 
 by Mephistopheles, he is free to summon or re~ 
 ject him. In the four supreme tragedies of the 
 Anglo-Saxon mind, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, 
 Macbeth, we see passion brooding, quickening 
 into life, wavering to and fro in the still possible 
 choice, and at the last, of its own will, plunging 
 forward to the dark end. Always is the con- 
 quest possible at the beginning, although it may 
 be attained only through contest and pain. 
 Hamlet and Macbeth, standing on the brink of 
 unseen worlds, and called by unearthly voices, 
 still recognize the freedom of their wills. To 
 such souls belong fearful combats between their 
 lower and higher natures in the hour of tempta- 
 tion, but a deep strength is theirs, which enables 
 them to endure to the end. After the throes 
 
 10 
 
106 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 of self-abnegation, a new peace is born — a 
 higher life — and they see the " new heavens " 
 arise above them. 
 
 Germanic civilization is not only more interior, 
 but also more complex than the old, because it 
 bears the impress of the fore-running ages. The 
 thoughts of Sanscrit lore send many a thread-like 
 and hidden vein through our philosophy and 
 language, and in our modern literature its He- 
 braisms lie side by side with the distinct, straight 
 conceptions of the Greek. While this wonder- 
 ful complexity nourishes a richer individuality 
 in the noble mind, it has acted unfavorably on 
 all arts which express character by color and 
 form, for characteristic figures and groups are 
 found chiefly where the conditions of life are 
 simple, and classes distinct. Music is more pe- 
 culiarly the subtle interpreter through its own 
 sweetness and pain, of our restless aspirations, 
 our sorrows and faith. It has developed into a 
 great art through the modern spirit, of which its 
 own spirituality, its interwoven harmonies of 
 two elements, its infinite longings partake. 
 Perfection of form culminated in Athens, and 
 richness of color in the strange and dream-like 
 Venetian City, but the fullest wonders of tone 
 and harmony, of rich chords and varying melody 
 have been unfolded to the Germanic mind. — 
 Because the innermost life of music vibrates with 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. IO7 
 
 our own yearnings and is full of the breath of 
 our life, it flows into our souls with sayings 
 which no words can fathom. 
 
 The restlessness and conflict of our civilization 
 affect every individual life. * The nerves quiver 
 with the flash of telegrams along the vibrating 
 wires, and upon the sensitive brain presses the 
 confusion of our multiform toil, and the hurry- 
 ing excitement of our overcrowded cities. — 
 While we have learned so many things, have we 
 not forgotten one art — of enjoyment? In the 
 onward rush of our full, swift days, we often 
 miss utterly the lovely, unconscious growth 
 which needs rest and room and quiet. 
 
 How different from the old life ! Then a man 
 was born with the unmixed blood of one race 
 in his veins, belonged to a fixed class, inherited 
 his handicraft from father and grandsire. His 
 memories and impressions were formed by 
 the sights and sounds surrounding his little ham- 
 let — the great castle in the distance, the birds 
 wheeling about its turrets at sunset, the dawn, 
 creeping up over the dark and moist fields, the 
 bells ringing for vespers or angelus, the sound 
 of greetings in his own tongue at market-place 
 or fair. His neighbors were akin to him in 
 spirit and blood, sharing the same faith and 
 local superstitions, following the same standard 
 into battle through generations, and relating 
 
108 IDEAL LIFE, 
 
 kindred legends of hero and saint. His garb 
 told his history and position — as the black gown 
 marked the friar, and the coat of mail the war- 
 rior. His life was woven of one substance and 
 pattern throughout,' and equally of one fabric 
 were the lives above and below him. Here the 
 artist who delights in the color of life finds his 
 richest field, and the picturesque side of art be- 
 gins — where in one long procession pass peas- 
 ants and armed men, fair women and humble 
 servitors, priests and traders, the pomp of princes 
 and the beggar in tatters side by side — each life 
 written in marked and visible characters. 
 
 We may see the change now in the faces 
 around us. The very type of feature is altered, 
 and instead of the straight outlines, the single 
 expression, the repose of the Greek face ; in- 
 stead of the strength and grave stateliness of 
 the Elizabethean era, we see countenances which 
 are baffling, contradictory, troubled. Every- 
 where you find these, stamped with the many- 
 sided and changing spirit of the age. Their 
 lines are deciphered with difficulty, for each 
 subtle emotion or thought which passes is com- 
 pounded of many elements, folded one after an- 
 other with the recesses of consciousness. Rob- 
 ert Browning's poetic studies are extremely 
 characteristic of this multiform and nervous na- 
 ture. In his "Book and the Ring" you will 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I O9 
 
 remark that where he gives you one act, he 
 gives you a thousand motives and influences. 
 Indeed, I believe we have a life which the an- 
 cients did not possess, and could not compre- 
 hend. All our emotions are complex ; the 
 minor notes pierce through our gayest music, a 
 strange ecstasy lifts up our pains and anguish, 
 It is like the garden and its revellers in the pic- 
 ture of Venice, when the viol hushes 
 
 " And the brown faces cease to sing, 
 Sad with the whole of pleasure." 
 
 With but few exceptions the garb and external 
 life of this age are monotonous and character- 
 less. It is from the face alone that you learn 
 man's history, and then it is the ever-changing 
 vitality of the profound spiritual life, rather than 
 fixed event or station — what he is, rather than 
 what he does — a study of character from George 
 Eliot, rather than the old romance-story of ad- 
 venture and rescue — which you see before you 
 in the groups you pass, the men or women you 
 meet. We no longer enter life in dramatic 
 fashion, as hero and heroine, courtiers, soldiers, 
 attendants, name and part assigned. Each in 
 his turn is centre in his world of life, and again 
 ministers to another, but in ever-varying rela- 
 tions and phases of mood. And with this 
 
110 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 change in our apprehension of life have followed 
 changes in the form and spirits of our arts and 
 literature. 
 
 Our greatest writers teem with characters, 
 motley and diverse figures, laughing, reasoning, 
 loving, hating, pressing towards the light. See 
 how crowded is the story of " Faust " — a chorus 
 of mighty spirits, the earth-story with the cold 
 and mocking tempter, the dreaming Faust, the 
 passionate and pathetic character of Margaret, 
 the garrulous Martha, — and then the wonderful 
 Walpurgis — night on the Herz Mountains, — 
 the world of wierd sprites and gnomes, — the 
 "eerie forge of the dwarf people," in the second 
 part, the song of the Fauns, dancing with oaken 
 crown on crispy hair, of the Sirens and of Ariel. 
 
 " Horchet ! horchet! dem sturm der Hosen. " 
 
 strike flashing scintillating images of fiery power 
 and light across your mind in rapid, vibrating 
 succession. And even behind these dazzling and 
 ineffaceable figures and tones of harmony, lies 
 another world, yet — of nature, the old woods, 
 "where bough crooks out from bough in stub- 
 born state, "<the murmuring of the brooks, or 
 their onward rush — "Bach zu Bachen " — the 
 summit glow on the old chapel, and that lovely 
 glimpse of peace and quiet, where — 
 
 " In waves of silver, drifting 
 On to harvest, rolls the corn." 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. Ill 
 
 t 
 
 The characteristic mind of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race is Shakspeare. Each character of his is 
 complex, with the imprint, wonderfully compli- 
 cated, which inheritance, temperament, educa- 
 tion, calling, the age, society, conversation, 
 habits have stamped on every man, — an incom- 
 municable and individual imprint, which once 
 stamped in a man, is not found in any other. — 
 Behind one word he conceals a picture, an atti- 
 tude, a long argument abridged, a mass of 
 swarming ideas. From amidst his complex con- 
 ceptions, and colored semi-vision, he grasps a 
 fragment, a quivering fibre, and shows it; it is 
 for you, from this fragment to divine the rest. 
 He weaves plot within plot; " Hamlet" and 
 ' 'Taming the Shrew, " and ' ' Midsummer Night's 
 Dream," contain a play within a play. In the 
 last, slight as is its texture, he draws three 
 worlds; the noble Theseus with his Amazon 
 bride, and the misled and ardent lovers in the 
 May-wood, are as distinct from the gross Athe- 
 nian workmen with their simple vanities, as the 
 aerial fairy brood which haunt the thymy banks 
 and blooming thickets. The Arcadian story of 
 Perdita and Florizel in the n Winter Tale " is a 
 complete romance apart from the statelier mea- 
 sure of the noble Hermione's history. All his 
 fools and clowns are depicted with the careful 
 and characteristic detail of the Flemish artist. 
 
112 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 Scarcely does a figure cross his stage without 
 our learning something of his life, habits, am- 
 bitions, and even ancestry. He paints for you 
 at one stroke, the past, future, and present en- 
 vironnage ; and you gain the outlook and insight 
 of vision at once. 
 
 Totally unlike this was the work of the Greek 
 artist. In architecture, he conceived a regular 
 Temple, pure, chaste, well-balanced, — in sculp- 
 ture, a symmetrical group of two or three, 
 rarely more, " a young, upright man raising an 
 arm" — in drama, " a wounded warrior who will 
 not return to camp, though they beseech him." 
 The minor characters are intentionally denuded 
 of individuality to heighten the central concep- 
 tion, which stands clear-cut as a head in cameo. 
 This is the meaning of the Greek choruses, of 
 those indistinct figures in the background, who 
 do not interfere with the single, isolated image, 
 which at one flash is imprinted upon your re- 
 membrance. 
 
 We cannot measure more definitely the great 
 chasm which divides the two types of character 
 than by looking at the different interpretations 
 of the old-world stories, which both races have 
 loved. For instance, the tale of Alcestis. The 
 Greek has told you in glad colors and simple 
 outlines, so far as he could — of the life of King 
 Admetus in Thessaly, of his strange herdsman 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I I 3 
 
 on the banks of the Amphrysus, and the beau- 
 tiful Alcestis, who gave up her life for her hus- 
 band's. This is the end for the Greek, but to 
 the Germanic mind it is the beginning", for our 
 life takes up the thread of theirs and continues 
 it. Here we wonder and muse — did Alcestis 
 indeed die? — what thoughts were hers in that 
 last strange hour ? — what memories of old 
 springs, when the wild blossoms were white 
 around her father's house ? — what insight into 
 the worthlessness- of human desires ? — what 
 vision of coming light? — what still, white peace ? 
 And so Admetus lived ! But what came after- 
 wards ? The shameful, low life, empty of honor 
 and love, — the vacant days without the quiet 
 presence in the rooms, — he seeks to bring all 
 these with their accompanying emotions and 
 images before his mind. The Greek gives only 
 what he can see, or hear ; the anger which 
 flushes the cheek, the love that shines in the 
 eye ; but the Northern mind lays bare the 
 quivering fibres of the soul, the sudden pang, 
 the swift, pathetic remembrance, the twisted 
 web of feeling and intellect and image. 
 
 Or read the story of Cupid and Psyche, so 
 wonderfully lovely and fresh and sweet. The 
 Greek tells you of the union of the two lovers. 
 Without doubt higher minds, educated partly 
 under the mystical influences from the East, 
 
I 14 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 saw a higher meaning in the myth ; but to the 
 common crowd of the Greeks the story only 
 tells how 
 
 "Satyrus 
 Did blow his pipes ; Pan touched his reed — and so 
 At last were Cupid and Psyche married." 
 
 {Metamorph Lib. VI.) 
 
 And the tale ends joyfully, as if with a glad 
 tinkling of cymbals. But the wistful German 
 heart lingers still over the old fable. Where all 
 is so sweet, is there no more behind ? In the 
 story of the poor wandering Psyche, the soul, 
 he reads somewhat of his own life and longings. 
 Like his own youth she arises before him, as 
 
 " Looking o'er the lands 
 She stood with straining eyes and clasped hands." 
 
 or when 
 
 " Like a thin dream she passed the chattering town, 
 And on the thronged quays watched the ships come in, 
 Patient, amid the strange, outlandish din." 
 
 Even so we are always watching, yearning, 
 seeking an invisible good, in a world that is 
 soon estranged from us, and forgetful of our 
 presence. And when so weary with hard tasks, 
 foot-sore with rough journeyings, full of discour- 
 aged fears, she falls asleep, all her work still 
 undone, and the cruel punishment waiting for 
 her awakening, then lo ! 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I 1 5 
 
 5 ' This Love put his hand out in a dream, 
 And straight out stretches all things." 
 
 — is not this the great work which love desires 
 to do for all souls ? This meaning throws its 
 roots deep into the essential nature of our in- 
 complete and aching lives, made whole and 
 sound only by the Highest Love, which is most 
 near us when we know it not. 
 
 Even our own love far outreaches our actions 
 or our intellect. Repeat but once more the 
 beautiful line I have just quoted, and think how 
 true it has been with the three races whom I 
 have chosen as representative. "This Love 
 just puts his hand out in a dream," and so 
 the three ideal characters, Joseph, Hector 
 and King Arthur of the round table, the im- 
 aginary hero and king, and the young shep- 
 herd of the east, strike at once as with a flash 
 of light the goal towards which our centuries, 
 with all their added growth, but slowly move. 
 In a barbarous age, and born of a barbarous 
 race, each exhibits the most consummate results 
 of christian culture ; amidst the alien elements 
 of his very household, each stands 
 
 " Like a conscience amidst the warning senses," 
 
 and each, the Trojan, with his inherited in- 
 stincts of pride and scorn ; the Hebrew, born of 
 
I 1 6 IDEAL LTFE. 
 
 a revengeful and perfidous race ; the Briton, 
 who rules a half savage people, moves among 
 secret and open foes with a spirit of tenderness, 
 forbearance and forgiveness which fills the dark 
 places of their ages with strange light. You 
 will think I am strangely confusing the poetic 
 and historic sources of knowledge in placing 
 these three together, but even as the soul parts 
 from the body, so the ideal portion of a historic 
 character is at least distinguished from the ma- 
 terial and veritable man of flesh and blood. 
 They become at last such influences as these 
 poetic conceptions which we call purely ideal. 
 They become great thoughts, august virtues, 
 images of a heavenly life, and we forget that 
 they too knew the weariness and the littleness 
 of our earth in their days that are past, if this 
 far-reaching love illumines them. The charac- 
 ters of intellect and action are soon superseded 
 and distanced by further developments, and only 
 the ideals of love remain the same. 
 
 No great thought that has ever been quick- 
 ened with action into love can be lost, whether 
 it has been embodied in the life of a man who 
 dies, or a race, whose glory perishes. The dead 
 ''hold in mortmain all their old estate," for on 
 their side lies reality and completion ; theirs, I 
 conceive, are the only whole and consummate 
 existences. The great law of the continuity of 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I I J 
 
 life is strikingly shown in the history of modern 
 thought, of the influences of the Hebraic spirit 
 and its germinative processes, and of another 
 period of conception and birth, no less marked, 
 in the renaissance of the fifteenth century, when 
 Greek letters, Greek philosophy and Greek art 
 came in contact with modern races. The artis- 
 tic side of the renaissance in Italy really dates 
 from the thirteenth century when a bas-relief, 
 the chase of Meleager, was brought from Greece 
 in a Pisan galley and placed in the Campo Santo 
 where Nicolo Pisano saw it, and studied with 
 such wonder and delight its marvels of grace 
 and beautiful form that he leaves for it all the 
 teachings of the Byzantine school. From this 
 simple beginning Art springs up with fresh vital- 
 ity, and adding to its rich gift of color the classic 
 grace of form it blooms into the fecund ages of 
 Giotto, Raphael, Angelo, Da Vinci, Bellini, 
 Giorgione Titian, putting forth shining flowers 
 that have thrown their light and fragrance far 
 over the seething and troubled waves of our 
 civilization. 
 
 Cut without the deeper significance, the spiri- 
 tual vitality, the purer faith of Christianity, no 
 such work would have been possible. Especi- 
 ally does Michael Angelo, however imbued with 
 classic thought in the beginning of his career, 
 show in his greatest works, the fire, the earnest- 
 
Il8 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 ness, the depth of this new life. In Germany 
 the result of the revival of Greek letters was 
 philosophic rather than asthetic, and we see a 
 quickening and freedom in German thoughts 
 and writings but no change in the character of 
 these. Still does the line between the interior 
 and exterior, the spiritual and natural lives run 
 distinct and broad. 
 
 The enjoyment of nature in the two races is 
 strikingly different. With the Greek there is 
 but little perception of color, of varying light, 
 and shade, but a quick delight in form, motion, 
 sound, all that speaks of life in nature, an in- 
 tense rapture that clothes this perception of 
 life with personality and visible shape, and sees 
 these images of his own fancy rejoicing, piping, 
 dancing, mating together, leading such joyous 
 lives as he beholds in all wild sylvan creatures. 
 But the mind that is touched with the christian 
 light rises higher, and sees in nature an image 
 of its spiritual life, knows in her its own moods 
 of light and joy, of darkness and storm. Hence 
 it is that we so specially delight in the more 
 complex, the more subtle and fleeting enjoy- 
 ment of color, the rich after-glow of the vanished 
 sun, the dark shadows of fir-woods, the thou- 
 sand tints and lights and flying shades on the 
 water, or on the rolling grain, the soft, rich 
 hues of autumn days ; color set to color in con- 
 
THE GERMANIC SPIRIT OF CONFLICT. I 1 9 
 
 trast or harmony like full chords and sweet 
 melodies of music. There is some suggestion 
 of humanity to us in each of these, of its inner 
 life ; there is fire and passion in the violet and 
 gold, peace and rest in the cool green shadows 
 and far blue lights, a melancholy in the brood- 
 ing storm, unsatisfied desire in the \\ ailing wind. 
 So the Christian mind, the Germanic thought, 
 found exquisite hope and joy in the spring, a 
 symbol of its highest faith — the resurrection of 
 the soul — in its Easter days when light strug- 
 gled against cold and darkness in the ceaseless 
 conflict of two elements, and the light conquer- 
 ed, and tender flowers sprang up from the 
 shadowy under-world, and the empty chrysalis, 
 the broken egg-shell spoke of life that had risen 
 higher. Everywhere in the old German verses, 
 in the earlier Anglo-Saxon poets, you find this 
 rapture at the returning breath of spring — the 
 bloom of a new paradise — the May of life. But 
 even as we see the image of the soul in the 
 lower world of nature, we behold it farther off, 
 a world apart, not interfused with humanity as 
 it seemed in the day of the joyous Greeks. 
 
 From the life of the strong Greek hero who 
 overcame his foes, who loved his friends, who 
 rejoiced in warmth and summer light, in the 
 good comradeship of green hills and the river's 
 voice at sultry noon, who did not fear Olympus 
 
120 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 greatly, being also a "son of the Gods," we 
 come into a far different world. The christian 
 nature is not einfach — one-fold ; the young 
 knight sins and suffers and repents, he fasts and 
 watches and rides forth on long and lonely 
 quests, cheered by a vision, and seeking ever an 
 ideal good. His own enemies he must forgive, 
 and be very pitiful to all weak and tender crea- 
 tures, to old age and infirmity. In battle he 
 does not conquer by his strong arm, 
 
 " His strength is as the strength often, 
 Because his heart is pure." 
 
 His life is not so bright that he should love only 
 light and summer and joyous creatures ; he sees 
 also a significance in lonely and dark places, 
 and shadows over which the dawn breaks. 
 There is ever a struggle in his own heart as in 
 the world about him ; angels and demons, low 
 desires and great loves war within him and 
 without him, and there is no reast but death. 
 Standing between two worlds, the known and 
 the unknown, he knows darker fears, more in- 
 effable dreams, and life is to him a shadow in 
 the light of eternity. 
 
IDEAL FQJR.MS OF GOVERNMENT. 121 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. 
 
 felNGSLEY ends his romance of " Hypatia '' 
 $s very beautifully by saying that all the 
 races, the Goth, the Greek, the Hebrew, live 
 still in our lives ; their ruling ideas, their char- 
 acteristic loves are not extinct, but are found 
 yet in the mixed element of our society and age. 
 Each man indeed in his youth and boyhood 
 knows the wild freedom and gaiety of the natural 
 life ; as he grows older he enters into the region 
 of doubt and temptation and sorrow and earnest 
 work, and if his life has been faithful to his per- 
 ceptions of virtue, he comes into the last years 
 when one waits and prays and rests from labor, 
 with a heart as child-like as those of the earlier 
 and simpler races of our earth. In his own life 
 is the journey, the feast, the battle, and after- 
 ward the rest. 
 
 But if a man journeys, it is towards human 
 faces which will welcome him with greetings of 
 
122 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 smiles and eager looks ; it is with his friends that 
 he rejoices at the festival ; and even in combat 
 it is for others that he fights. Man is not 
 wholly man save by his relations to others, and 
 these relations organized into form constitute 
 governments. The same vital and ideal spirit 
 which pervades all individual intercourse from 
 the highest to the lowest exists here also, and 
 the true statesman sees the ideal of his country 
 before him as the poet and the artist see their arts. 
 
 All organizations possess one thought which 
 is central and dominant, and which molds into 
 its own image and likeness whatever is brought 
 into contact with its working. So wherever 
 monarchy is the genuine choice of a people, the 
 true results of its thoughts and feelings, the so- 
 cial and domestic relations, the morality, litera- 
 ture and art will differ widely from those of a 
 country whose intellectual action is best express- 
 ed by a republic. 
 
 In the monarchic ideal the first element is 
 that of leadership, or personal greatness, which 
 is afterwards changed by traditions of heroic 
 ancestry into hereditary rights and the nobility 
 of blood. The second is continuity, or inheri- 
 tance, by which the first idea of leadership is 
 conveyed in a permanent form through the sup- 
 posed continuous transmission of inherited vir- 
 tues and powers. The third element is perma- 
 
IDEAL F<i>RMS OF GOVERNMENT. 123 
 
 nence, admitting no reactive force, so that 
 authority is absolute, and action against it, 
 rebellion ; and from this thought, leavening the 
 whole man, proceed fixed social grades, military 
 discipline, the monarchic organization. But it 
 is impossible for this monarchic ideal to attain 
 full realization. Even if such leaders as the 
 mythic kings of the old legends were given in 
 the beginning, their sons might turn aside to 
 false gods ; and other and alien blood, and lower 
 traits might be inherited at every remove, until 
 their descendants on the very ground of trans- 
 mission would be unfit to claim allegiance. Also 
 the law of growth perpetually develops new 
 forces, so that a government of absolute au- 
 thority has the new powers of the printing 
 press, telegraph and railroad, new activities ot 
 mind, and opportunities for organization and 
 union, to contend against to-day, in addition to 
 the old antagonistic forces. The principle of 
 limitation causes a large monarchy to be steadily 
 opposed by smaller kingdoms allied together, or 
 another monarchy equal in size and power. 
 This produces a " balance of power," which is 
 republican in spirit. 
 
 The monarchic influence must be regarded as 
 two-fold in power ; first, its wholly spiritual in- 
 fluence over the individual minds who love and 
 revere this ideal ; secondly, the actual working 
 
124 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 of the imperfectly realized organization on 
 masses. Both of these, acting in unison, will 
 permeate the whole of society with the same 
 thought. As the king is obeyed by his king- 
 dom, so are his governors by their provinces, 
 and his generals by their armies. So also are 
 the lords by their vassals, and a father by his 
 household. Every separate atom of the crystal 
 repeats its form. From the continual exercise 
 of this power, springs the reverence and filial 
 obedience, which are given either in form or 
 reality, as the rule is just or unjust. From this 
 also do the social forms of a monarchic court 
 proceed, a gracious courtesy on the one hand, 
 and on the other, deference and graceful regard. 
 The agreeable and delightful side of life is con- 
 tinually presented, and we see the quaint dignity 
 and grace of the Court dances. Watteau festi- 
 vals with elaborate costumes and attitudes. 
 Vandyke Portraits, compliments and ceremonial. 
 All these outward forms are beautiful or insipid, 
 as they express true feeling, or the opposite. 
 After a long interval of time, when one looks 
 back to such a society, it appears like a bloom- 
 ing garden full of gracious and stately figures, 
 who engage in the slow dances, or in smiling 
 converse, but when one is actually in the midst 
 of such scenes, he perceives much weariness and 
 formality. 
 
IDEAL FQRMS OF GOVERNMENT. I 25 
 
 If we leave this shining surface, and penetrate 
 farther down among the lower and ruder classes, 
 we will find by strange contrasts, that the heroic 
 ideal of those is, in its simpler form, merely an 
 expression of strength. The hero of the "folk- 
 songs " is a gallant leader in battle, a strong ruler 
 of men, a soldier who dies bravely. Their ballads, 
 as those of the Cid, the Douglass, and the 
 Percy, delight in the rude details of battle, and 
 the hand-to-hand conflict. ' But where the moral 
 atmosphere is higher, and the range of thought 
 broader, the sensibility is no longer satisfied 
 with this grosser characteristic, but requires 
 strength rightly and tenderly used, under the 
 names of generosity and magnanimity. Where 
 these form the heroic ideal, the ballads ripen 
 into the grander forms of the epic and the tra- 
 gedy. The Scandinavian songs grow into the 
 "Eddas," the Skaldic songs into the Icelandic 
 Sagas. As the "Iliad" is the slow crystaliza- 
 tion of floating Greek traditions and poetry into 
 a grand whole, so is the stirring epic of the 
 "Niebelungenlied " of the German folk-lore, and 
 romance. The stories of "King Lear" and the 
 " Merchant of Venice " are found in earlier 
 ballads, and the tragedies of yEschylus come, 
 by his own avowal, from the materials of Homer. 
 The same root thought, — growing, broadening, 
 blossoming into more perfect harmony and sym- 
 metry of form — is common to both. 
 
126 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 The virtues which respond to this ideal, are 
 faith, loyalty, gratitude, patience, and fidelity. 
 For the monarchic sentiment is like the feminine 
 mind in its character ; this either looks up to 
 the husband who is stronger, or down to the 
 child that is weaker, and does not often move 
 on the plane of equality and friendship ; and so 
 chivalry, which is the flowering of this form of 
 government, has much to say of generous deeds 
 done for the weak -and helpless, and of their 
 gratitude, but dwells little on reciprocal aid and 
 mutual work. A group of peasants of La 
 Vendee will best illustrate the character of a 
 people permeated by this thought as its best. 
 They will be a simple, kindly, honest race, of 
 little learning, but delighting in legends of saints 
 and their heavenly guardianship, and in tradi- 
 tions of the heroes of their own land ; and by 
 these, in the passionate fervor of a crisis, their 
 own spirits will kindle, and flash to unexpected 
 heights of valor and self-abnegation. 
 
 All the arts of a kingdom are more or less 
 colored by the monarchic feeling. Architecture, 
 influenced by this, will give us the fortress, the 
 palace, and the cathedral. The first expresses 
 strength ; the second, with its long vistas of 
 splendid rooms, repeated on every side by large 
 mirrors, — its rows of marble pillars, whereby 
 each part of the building echoes the other, — its 
 
IDEAL FpRMS OF GOVERNMENT. 1 27 
 
 wide and lengthening halls, and winding laby- 
 rinths of stately pleasure grounds, seems to 
 dwell upon the thought of continuity in endless 
 succession, while the lofty summit and wide- 
 extended wings express the ideas of eminence 
 and protection. The cathedral utters in form 
 the thought of permanence ; and the elements 
 of veneration and endurance without change 
 impart a deep sentiment of awe to the beholder. 
 With its rising dome and cross-surmounted 
 spires, it cleaves the sky, and with long-drawn 
 aisles and echoing transepts, it leads to the altar, 
 suffused with the rich-colored light from the 
 pictured windows, and adorned with marble 
 forms of Deity or Saint. In every part rests the 
 expression of serene and immutable repose. 
 You see the worshippers kneeling, and remem- 
 ber that through long successive years, genera- 
 tion after generation have knelt here to adore, 
 and have arisen, going their way to dust that 
 ends all to the earthly vision. But there is no 
 flaw in the white marble, the colors are no shade 
 less lustrous as they fall on the ashes of the 
 dead ; the sunshine still creeps forward upon 
 this silent dial of time. 
 
 The melodies which float to us from this 
 realm of thought, are emotional in their charac- 
 ter. The choiring voices pour out the full tide 
 of rapture or agony from the adoring souls, and 
 
123 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 find perfect utterance to its worship in the an- 
 guish-stricken strains of Jacopone De Todi, the 
 celestial masses of Mozart, the solemn chants 
 and jubilant chorals of the Catholic Church. 
 Or as we return to the world we hear the ravish- 
 ing and light sweetness of the Italian schools, 
 — all the soft southern melody that allures, car- 
 resses and floats upon the surface of the soul — 
 the music, of the loves and festivities of the court. 
 
 Artists, whose imaginations have been kin- 
 dled at this flame, give to our sight the rapture 
 of adoring vision, altar-pieces, the Royal Virgin 
 Mother and the Holy Child, Jesus, surrounded 
 by the saints of the earth, St. Jerome, St. Se- 
 bastian, St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and the "glori- 
 ous hierarchy of heaven," angels rejoicing like 
 Fra Angelico's in the serene blue skies, or 
 choiring like Mantcgna's singers, or standing 
 silently as Corregio's, with a white lily in the 
 hand for the annunciation of the Royal birth. 
 
 And in sculpture, mighty and majestic figures 
 in marble, like the horned Moses of Michael 
 Angelo, rise up with strange grace and dignity. 
 They all hold a princely rank, and overawe us 
 with their solemn and still brows, or smile down 
 to us with gracious pity. But their silent pres- 
 ence is not of us, or of our life. 
 
 That intellectual philosophy which owns no 
 authority but the truth ; and science, whose 
 
IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. I 2Q, 
 
 progress is of itself a succession of revolutions 
 overthrowing often time-honored hypotheses by 
 one new discovery, thrive only in that limited 
 and constitutional form of monarchy which is 
 most accurately described as a ' 'veiled repub- 
 lic. " The monarchial spirit of authority is not 
 in consonance or sympathy with the principles 
 of these ; and if science is ever protected by s 
 despotic court, it is rather from the outward 
 and material benefits which accrue from her tri- 
 umphs over the physical world, than from a 
 scientific spirit. 
 
 The schools of science group themselves 
 around the ideal republic as the elder schools of 
 art around the monarchy. Indeed, as this new 
 central influence acts upon the domain of 
 thought and feeling, all things move into differ- 
 ent positions and assume new stations. It is 
 intellectual rather than emotional; it reveres 
 law rather than miracle, conscience instead of 
 authority, justice instead of grace ; in the place 
 of war it develops commerce, and aspires to- 
 wards the realization of the great human unity.* 
 Its three elements, in contrast to leadership, 
 permanence and continuity, are equality, move- 
 ment and individuality. This equality is one 
 of certain fundamental rights, which do not re- 
 main the same but increase as the race is educa- 
 
 *See Emilio Castelar's "Republican Movement." 
 12 
 
I30 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 ted and developed, as an adult enters into new 
 powers and possessions when the age of child- 
 hood is over. It is an underlying basis to the 
 inequalities and degrees of natural genius, virtue, 
 strength and beauty by which we are distin- 
 guished from one another, and also to the 
 artificial grades of our complete modern society. 
 A perfect level is not more possible than a 
 vacuum, which nature abhors, and this equality 
 does not conflict with grades and degrees, by 
 which reciprocal aid is rendered throughout the 
 whole body politic. It is simply the equal right 
 of every individual and class to be governed for 
 its own good, and not for the good of any other 
 more privileged person or class. 
 
 The element of movement is an essential part 
 of the republican idea; and it holds law to a 
 certain extent in a state of fusion to be moulded 
 according to the new forms of events with their 
 special exigencies. But this power of altering 
 old laws, or framing new ones, must be regula- 
 ted by fundamental principles in harmony with 
 the central idea, must be limited in its use. 
 There is no element of the ideal republic more 
 frequently misinterpreted than this of change 
 and progress. It is not expressed by the dis- 
 orderly advance of a rabble, each man according 
 to his own will and in his own time, but by the 
 regular march of well-ordered masses, keeping 
 
IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. 131 
 
 step, and with unbroken ranks. It should be 
 like the growth and development of a plant, 
 whose embryo leaves pass into common leaves, 
 these into bractea, the bractea into sepals, the 
 sepals into flowering petals, which in their turn 
 are transformed into stamens, anthers and ova- 
 ries that ripen into the seed-bearing fruit, so that 
 by fine degrees the whole plant attains perfec- 
 tion, growing from seed to seed. The good 
 existing in the old state is not to be destroyed, 
 but revived in new forms suited to new needs. 
 Violent disruptions are no essential part of the 
 republican idea — which some seem to mistake 
 for the revolutionary process — but belong to a 
 state of transition where there is no stable gov- 
 ernment, and are more apt to be succeeded by 
 absolute military authority than by orderly civil 
 law. 
 
 The ideal republic is as impossible of perfect 
 realization as the ideal kingdom ; and the reason 
 is very clear — so long as men are imperfect, the 
 government which expresses their will must also 
 be imperfect. By action rather than theory, 
 we have learned that the influence of that govern- 
 ment is best, which blends in itself the two ideas, 
 as in a constitutional monarchy, or an orderly 
 republic, and which most fully develops good 
 men and restrains evil, or — since men cannot 
 be divided into distinct classes of good and evil, 
 
132 • IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 but are of mixed quality — which most perfectly 
 develops humanity and represses the brute in 
 them. The present system of law, in awarding 
 death to a criminal, does not debar from him 
 any mitigation which humanity could ask. In 
 man's moral as well as mental nature, authority 
 and freedom are found side by side, correlative 
 rather than antagonistic, and without both 
 humanity can have no perfect growth. They 
 are as necessary to each other as the masculine 
 and feminine, the emotional and intellectual 
 principles, and are found in beautiful relation in 
 every wise government. Without the invisible 
 power of law, which defines our rights, authori- 
 ty becomes oppression ; without visible authority 
 law is impotent. In the natural order of the 
 household the mild monarchy of the father 
 and mother is followed by the independence of 
 adult age, each fostering and strengthening the 
 other. 
 
 I have said that the republican ideal is in- 
 tellectual in spirit, and its chief danger lies in its 
 tendency to neglect the moral truths of love for 
 mere subtlety of knowledge. By the very 
 nature of a republic, intellect may secure its 
 highest grade, and there is apt to be a predomi- 
 nance of mental training. A serious injury is 
 inflicted upon a nation when technical skill and 
 superficial brilliancy displace the sounder and 
 
IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. 1 33 
 
 slower judgment and the domestic virtues. Our 
 knowledge of Greek character shows how their 
 moral nature was undertoned by the unhealthy 
 stimulus of their form of government, although 
 this was partially counteracted by the influence 
 of art. 
 
 The characteristic virtues of the republic are 
 sincerity, reciprocal aid, and justice. The old 
 appeal for pity and charity becomes the demand 
 of rights, inalienable and inherent in every form 
 of life — the rights of animals to adequate pro- 
 tection and care — of criminals to all possible aid 
 in reformation — of the poor to food, shelter, and 
 work — of sound labor in either trade or service 
 to respect and consideration — of children to 
 kindly development — of women to freedom of 
 thought and action. The law of individuality 
 sends a fresher life through society, and the 
 household influences tend towards freer and 
 more distinct growth. The element of youth 
 is pre-eminent, and manners are marked rather 
 by simplicity and earnestness than the old 
 courtly deference. It is not however until a 
 government has passed the first stages of its 
 establishment, that grace and beauty are attain- 
 able in social forms, for while the fiery, molten 
 tide still rushes on in impetuous action, and the 
 "men of bronze" who rule the combat, are 
 predominant, repose is impossible. 
 
134 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 The old utterances of the drama and the epic 
 die away in this new age, but a new power in 
 literature has arisen. The modern novel has 
 been developed from the old romances, and is 
 now used as a vehicle for the most profound 
 thought and severest analysis of human nature 
 and society. Without doubt it has aided in 
 forming the broader basis of the new philosophic 
 schools, which differ from the old metaphysics, 
 as physiology from anatomy. The dramatic 
 element survives in this form, and the greatest 
 perfection of a novel consists in its close union 
 of dramatic action and fire with thoughtful study 
 of character and harmony of plan. The fusion 
 of the two is shown by the ease with which one 
 form is substituted for the other — as in Dicken's 
 works, which scarcely need, altering in an adap- 
 tation to the stage. The fine dramatic concep- 
 tions of " Chesney Wold," where the two black 
 and veiled figures — the true and the fictitious 
 Lady Dedlock — advance and recede, following 
 the same pathway with such weird effect, is 
 suggested in the original story, and so are also 
 Tulkinghorn's words, which sound the jarring 
 key-note of murder through all the glory of the 
 moonlit garden. "The night is very still, it is 
 as still as death." 
 
 In a republic all the arts partake of the re- 
 publican idea. Architecture changes into house- 
 
IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. ' 1 35 
 
 hold art, used for building larger and lovelier 
 homes instead of palaces and cathedrals. In 
 music one revolution succeeds another. Bee- 
 thoven, with his full harmonies, 
 
 **■ That sweep the chords, 
 In which our heaven is set." 
 
 was as daring an innovator to the masters of 
 counterpoint and figure, as Wagner is now 
 deemed. Gluck was a reformer to the light 
 Italian school. ^Its melodies are charming," 
 he said, " but they do not draw blood," and he 
 demanded the reunion of poetic verity with 
 musical sound. Weber utters with his Volk- 
 Leider and romances the voice of the people, 
 and repeats their legends and fancies in his 
 language of harmony. Painting also is changed 
 by the new master-thought, and Lucas Kranach, 
 Holbein and Hogarth establish a new school of 
 art, whose sharp satires and rebukes fall heavily 
 on those unworthily clothed with authority. 
 The homely, every- day- life was invested with 
 new interest by the Flemish painters, who por- 
 tray the peasant's work, the simple inn and 
 kitchen with pots and pans shining in the light, 
 the old mill, the group around the beer-cask, 
 with astonishing skill and vigor. Landseer 
 opens the animal kingdom, and shows us the 
 characteristic traits, the joys and sorrows of 
 
I36 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 these dumb creatures. We arc not ashamed to 
 weep over the little fawn seeking its mother — 
 dead in the Highland snows, or the shepherd's 
 faithful mourner, or the dog who defends his 
 unconscious master from the terrible swoop of 
 the Alpine eagles. In our landscapes the pas- 
 sion and the power of the mute earth are re- 
 vealed. 
 
 "Nothing here is common or unclean." 
 
 In the Athenian republic the exquisite sim- 
 plicity and strength of sculpture were at their 
 highest, for the statue is a visible form of indi- 
 vidual grace, and stands apart as the embodiment 
 of the serenest and brightest mood of republican 
 influences. But somewhat of the kingly senti- 
 ment and hero worship was blended closely with 
 classic republicanism, and so we have also their 
 bas-reliefs, which are epics in form, and whose 
 successions of grand and stately warriors, linked 
 dancers, and long lines of laden worshippers, 
 express the full idea of continuity. 
 
 I cannot pause here without quoting for ycu 
 a beautiful paragraph, which illustrates the ten- 
 derness and closeness with which the arts group 
 themselves around the ruling life of their time 
 and country. 
 
 "I ask nothing of you, nothing, but that you 
 will deal with the republic, think of it, feel for 
 
IDEAL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. I 37 
 
 it, as art has done in all days. Ask the poet of 
 the republic, and he sings of it — as a woman. 
 Ask the sculptor, and the myth arises, and 
 stands up — a woman. Ask the artist, and you 
 behold a woman. Think of it so, in its growth 
 keep it as tenderly as you would the girl child 
 you take from your wife's knees. Love it, and 
 woo it with such pure ardour, as you would the 
 woman you have chosen out of the whole world. 
 Shield it from reproach or shame, as you would 
 the sister nursed at the same breast ; when it 
 has grown old, guard it, as you would the grave 
 of that mother who gave you birth." 
 

THE USES OF ART. 1 39 
 
 PART III.— CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE ARTISTIC LIFE. 
 THE USES OF ART. 
 
 (§pHE entire circle of the ideal life is complete 
 fc§ in art. The desires, which first kindled 
 the individual nature, become the intellectual 
 apprehensions of the races ; and nurtured by the 
 visible and tangible arts, inspire human lives 
 with fresh aspirations. Every work of genius is 
 germinal, and grows in all soil fitted to receive 
 it. It has this vitality because it is " the out- 
 ward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual 
 grace," which its colors, forms and tones strive 
 perpetually to express. 
 
 From the beginning a warfare has been waged 
 between the visible and the invisible. Every 
 life is called to choose between the angelic and 
 the earthly, the interests of to-day and the ends 
 of eternity, between spirit and matter, good and 
 
I4O IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 evil, life and death. There is but one kingdom 
 and the rule cannot be divided ; one must reign 
 and the other serve. Wherever the lower con- 
 quers, you have the deathly philosophy and 
 science which reduce men to the level of the 
 brute, and regard all intellectual and spiritual 
 life only as more subtle modifications of matter ; 
 which limit human existence — as individual and 
 human — to the fragment of three-score and ten 
 imperfect years. It has been the glory of art 
 that she has bourne witness of the invisible vir- 
 tues and powers of the soul, — of the human, 
 spiritual and divine natures. "If the best in 
 this kind are but shadows" they, like shadows, 
 attest the presence of the substances which casts 
 them. The attestation has been the source of 
 all true life in art. Wherever she has laid aside 
 the robes of her ministration to lend herself to 
 the lower service of material pleasures, she has 
 become a lifeless form, for the living and sacred 
 flame which kindled the old signs and symbols 
 into beauty, was gone. 
 
 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 
 Rome was one of the central cities of the world, 
 and Italy stood foremost among the nations in 
 her comprehension of the secrets of form and 
 color, her requisite skill of workmanship, the 
 learning of her universities, the bravery of her 
 troops, her great cities, walled, paved and ter- 
 
THE USES OF ART. I4I 
 
 raced, and full of fountains, palaces and glorious 
 churches. Many races were brought together 
 by the extensive operations of her commerce. 
 Even in the eleventh century the banners of 
 Pisa were victorious on the seas, and her streets 
 thronged with Hebrews, Arabians and traders 
 from far off lands, bringing rich fabrics and gems 
 and spices ; and here began the revival of art — 
 in the school of painting established by Nicolo 
 Pisano, and in the architecture of the Pisan 
 tower, baptistery and the Campo Santo. 
 
 The street life of Bruges, call the " Venice of 
 the North" during its connection with the In- 
 dian and Lombard trade, glows upon the canvas 
 of the Van Eycks, filled with ecclesiastics of 
 various orders, courtiers wearing the badge of 
 the Golden Fleece, peasants in quaint garbs, 
 Italians, French, English, Jews and oriental 
 merchants. And so the rich and varied life of 
 Venice itself, with its intermingled elements of 
 Greek and Eastern arts, flows into the work of 
 Bellini, Giorgione, Tintoret, Titian and Veron- 
 ese. In Etruscan Florence, inheriting the hand 
 and eye of the artist from a race centuries old 
 in art, receiving from the Romans the law of the 
 city, from the Greek vitality and grace of form, 
 energy and force from the wild races of Lom- 
 bard and Norman soldiers and hunters, and 
 from the Arabians, and other races of the east, 
 
142 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 richness of color, and the dream of the solitary 
 desert,* — in Florence we see the ripening of 
 these in Cimabue, Giotto, Angelo, Raphael, 
 Dante, Bocaccio, and many others. 
 
 But the tides of impulse and energy which 
 flowed out from these great cities carried with 
 them spiritual death and corruption, denial and 
 rejection, instead of the life, the joyful affirma- 
 tion which characterizes the religious movement 
 of the century before when the heart of Europe 
 was thrilled with conviction of love at the sound 
 of one man's earnest voice. Now fierce sin and 
 fraud, and sensual indulgence alternated with 
 deadly lethargy and coldness. The brethren of 
 the " Oratory of Divine Love " weep and mourn 
 over those who choose, with faces averted from 
 the light, the dark and miry places of sin. In 
 Germany a movement of reaction has already 
 begun, but is there no witness here? These 
 people are of such a temperament and mind 
 that they desire no abstract truth of doctrine, 
 but truth in visible fairness. It is an age of 
 restless and stained and mocking lives, but the 
 people who shouted for joy at the sight of Cim- 
 abue's virgin, are not the less touched by Giot- 
 to's pathetic telling of the Agony in the Garden, 
 by the birth of the Babe; — their hearts echo to 
 the passionate cry of Dante's vision, and from 
 
 *See Ruskin's " Mornings in Florence." 
 
THE USES OF ART. 1 43 
 
 the glowing altar and convent walls of Fra An- 
 gelico they learn somewhat of peace and purity, 
 of innocence and reverence. 
 
 Raphael shows us an exquisite humanity, 
 rather than a divinity, in his Mother and Child, 
 yet I believe no one looking thereon could will- 
 ingly deny heaven. All those artists who ren- 
 dered by word or color their insight of love and 
 faith, were witnesses of the light that shines but 
 of Infinity. The followers of Michael Angelo 
 called him "leaderand master, but not," says 
 Tyrwhitt, "until they had seen the hand and 
 power of a Divine Master working with him." 
 Among all the revelries of the evil land stood 
 true and steadfast men who endured to the end. 
 
 It is interesting and significant that in Rome, 
 (1500), two men were present, artist and monk, 
 in whom the movements of new life in south 
 and north thus came as it were in contact. 
 These men were not wholly unlike in nature, 
 though that of Angelo is higher and purer than 
 Luther's, but each affirms, earnestly, strongly, 
 indignantly, the reality of the spiritual life which 
 he himself has learned with sharp pangs and 
 throes. We do not find that they recognized 
 each other. Michael Angelo was absorbed in 
 his own message and land, and looked not be- 
 yond that. He was not a man of genial or sun- 
 shiny temperament ; the world at its fairest had 
 
144 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 never satisfied his soul, and his feet were set to 
 go on their appointed way through hard and 
 narrow, and made no pause for the world. 
 
 Nor has art ever been wholly silent in other 
 lands ; the artists in Germany, both in music 
 and painting, have shown themselves imbued 
 with the truth and freedom of their faith. In 
 the English lectures on art, delivered before the 
 University of Oxford, you will hear the full 
 utterance of faith in the Lord and Giver of Life 
 — for, ''if this were disbelieved the elements of 
 dissolution have already entered heart and soul. " 
 Another English art writer exhorts all artists to 
 return to sacred work in sacred places that the 
 brightest and most spiritual life in art may be 
 rekindled as when the life of Our Lord was the 
 centre of its inspiration. 
 
 A little passage, which I read a short time 
 since in " Old Kensington," by Miss Thackeray, 
 beautifully illustrates how the art of music affirms 
 a spiritual life, and makes more noble and ten- 
 der the listening soul. It is a modern concert 
 which she describes: — "A thousand people were 
 sitting in silent and breathless circles. An 
 andante of Haydn's was in the air. Though 
 many sat motionless and stolid, you might have 
 seen eyes dilating and shining, as mother's eyes 
 dilate and shine sometimes when they watch 
 their children at play. The childless were no 
 
THE USES OF ART. 145 
 
 t 
 
 longer childless, when that gentle, irresistible 
 music shook from the strings of the instruments. 
 The lonely and silent had found a voice, pent-up 
 longings were set free. Other strings were 
 sounding with the music, and it was not music, 
 although it was harmony that struck and shook 
 those mysterious fibres that bind men and wo- 
 men to life. The hopelessness of the lonely, 
 the mad longings of the parted, the storm 
 of life, all seemed appeased. A divine se- 
 renity was in the hall where the little tune was 
 thrilling. 
 
 In former times men and women assembled 
 in conclave to see wild beasts tearing their prey; 
 to-day it was to listen to a song of Haydn's — a 
 little song that did not last five minutes." 
 
 For this is always the sign of the highest art 
 — that it appeals to the spiritual and pure in 
 man, to the eternity within us, so that it may, 
 if need be, touch a soul five hundred years 
 hence with the same rapture and pity that 
 thrilled us to-day. The Madonnas, the St. 
 Sebastians and St. Jeromes of the early school 
 of art retain their power, because of the love, 
 the patience, the strength they express, not 
 because of their several legends and superstitions 
 which fall aside as the dry husk from the living 
 seed. The inner meaning is not of one person, 
 or time, or doctrine, but of the soul's life. So 
 
 13 
 
I46 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 the Greek Antinoces, Appollo, and Mercury 
 are beautiful now as thoughts of skill, and power 
 and grace in manhood, beautiful, so far as the 
 shadow keeps the outlines of the thought. It 
 cannot be too earnestly remembered that it is 
 the spiritual life of myth, image and sign, which 
 makes them fecund and strong. 
 
 It is of this I mean to speak. I shall not tell 
 you of the different schools of architecture, of 
 the circular and pointed arches of the Saxon 
 and Gothic styles, nor of the Doric and Ionic 
 columns, but I shall try to show you what the 
 spire and fortress hold of your own life. It is 
 not to sculptors, or musicians, or painters, that 
 I address myself, and therefore I need not use 
 the technicalities of their arts, nor dwell upon 
 their histories. I need not tell you of the Ve- 
 netian school of color, or the Flemish painters 
 of shade, but I must show to the looking eyes 
 somewhat of the glow and life which the human 
 soul has blended with the touch on the beloved 
 canvas. The theory of Wagner is not needed, 
 but we must know what is within us that is glad, 
 and rejoices through the infinitely sweet fresh- 
 ness of Handel's Postoral Symphony, as if the 
 world could never grow old. If I do not these 
 things — if I cannot show you that art has much 
 for the uncultured, the unhappy, the common- 
 place life — I shall fail indeed. 
 
THE USES OF ART. 1 47 
 
 But I think I shall not fail, for every man 
 desires something higher and fairer than his 
 actual life and surroundings, and he will seek 
 and find it in every pure form of art that is 
 given. He will seek it because of his hunger in 
 many a form thar is not pure or high, but he 
 will not find there the heavenly beauty of his 
 untrained desire. 
 
 In the old ages of the world, art appealed to 
 the common mind of the people, and thence 
 came the artistic culture of the senses which had 
 given the nations of the East and South their 
 exquisite skill and grace, their delicacy of touch 
 in all handicraft and their wonderful perception 
 of color. The worker at the Indian loom, the 
 old goldsmiths of Italy were using the culture 
 of generations before. It was not only intellec- 
 tual training, but in the self-control and patience 
 required by the work it was in some degree a 
 moral training. The subtle and clear perceptions 
 of beauty which the Grecians, Egyptians, Hin- 
 doos, Assyrians, Etruscans, Italians, possess as 
 races, were developed, and educated by the 
 daily sight of the highest art, as displayed in 
 the temple and palaces and sculptured ornaments 
 of their great cities. Day by day these forms 
 of loveliness were imperceptibly and uncon- 
 sciously refining and quickening the ideas of 
 the most stolid boor or peasant, until at last the 
 
I48 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 artistic atmosphere surrounded every detail and 
 event of common life. 
 
 No less strong is art in its attraction to the 
 ordinary mind to-day when it is once brought 
 in contact with it. During a visit to Cincinnati, 
 I often saw the beautiful Davidson Fountain, 
 which makes such a lovely oasis of freshness in 
 the dusty city. It was continually surrounded 
 by delighted groups of lookers-on. Most fre- 
 quently these were rough farmers, plain working 
 men and women, newsboys and timid country 
 girls. In watching their faces, kindled in genu- 
 ine enjoyment, upturned earnestly to the lovely 
 groups of statuary and the figures of the children, 
 which so exquisitely illustrate the uses and de- 
 lights of the living and sparkling water in all lands, 
 I could not doubt that it was already a power 
 in popular education. There was not a mind 
 there that did not carry away a new and strong, 
 although perhaps undefined perception of the 
 exquisite significance of the fresh-flowing stream ; 
 nay, higher still, an interior consciousness of the 
 loveliness of purity and truth. For these sym- 
 bols touch you, even if you do not perceive it 
 then ; they touch and move you through the 
 force of the indwelling spiritual life. I do not 
 hesitate in my belief that he who gives what is 
 beautiful in the green woods of parks, in fragrant 
 gardens or fountains, or paintings does much to 
 the development of a great people. 
 
THE USES OF ART. 1 49 
 
 The very lowest in education and culture have 
 their longing for the ideal element. I have seen 
 few things more lovely than a little negro child, 
 uncouth, untaught, wild, whom I once watched 
 playing with a white lily. She held it with 
 wonder and delight, — with an awe of its shining 
 purity, that showed how vivid and bright the 
 sense of its beauty was in her mind ; stroking 
 its soft, white, silken petals with hesitating fin- 
 gers, and eagerly guarding it from every careless 
 movement of the passers-by. After all we learn 
 goodness most interiorly from the delights and 
 loveliness of virtue, than from its moral maxims. 
 
 There are so many who need especially this 
 ideal kingdom of innocent pleasure in which one 
 may seek refuge from fretting cares and pain. 
 There are lives so ugly and meagre that they jar 
 upon you with a sense of discord. The sick, 
 the afflicted, the deformed, can find here im- 
 personal grace and vitality and sweetness ; the 
 hurt and maimed life here regains a symmetry. 
 Art may be the luxury of the rich, but it is the 
 necessity of the poor. It gives him a melody 
 of which he has not dreamed, loveliness which 
 the meagre outlines of his own days could not 
 suggest, a height and perfectness which nowhere 
 else can he find.* Its most angelic power is in 
 the loving sphere of children which gives the 
 
 *See Charles Bradlaugh's lecture on the Republic. 
 
150 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 broken toy, and bit of stone an ideal person- 
 ality and grace, and surrounds them with a dis- 
 tinct world of their own. 
 
 This counterbalances also the tendency of the 
 age to the merely intellectual training of the peo- 
 ple, and restores the healthfulness and symme- 
 try of culture. It gives back to the emotions 
 and sentiments their true power, and subdues 
 the hurtful pride of self-intelligence — for ideal 
 beauty lies ever beyond ourselves. The artist 
 himself needs the stimulus and support of the 
 common artistic atmosphere. The magnetic 
 fire of human sympathy kindles his conceptions 
 to a higher flame. Was not the Greek audience 
 an inspiration after its kind to the Greek orator ? 
 It is from those countries where the common 
 people love music that we gain our great works 
 of musical art, as from Italy and Germany. The 
 ideal temperament shrinks back, chilled and dis- 
 couraged, when it finds no answering enthusi- 
 asm. Without the sunshine in the air the flower 
 cannot unfold its bloom. 
 
 We need the influences of art for woman that 
 she may find there an impei'sonal life. If she 
 does not marry, or if she marries unhappily, 
 personal affection will not suffice for her. Nor 
 is it safe, when her feelings have the fullest play, 
 to neglect the training of her intellect, for if neg- 
 lected, its energy becomes morbid and restless, 
 
THE USES OF ART. I 5 I 
 
 its subtlety sinks into trivial and petty cares. 
 And there is in all womanhood the " root capa- 
 city fgr art," which is the love of the beautiful. 
 It will flow out upon flowers and household 
 decoration and choice of color and drapery in 
 dress, in an atmosphere that represses its higher 
 ascent, but it must have scope. The intellect 
 of a woman is not contented with cold and color- 
 less knowledge ; in the art life it finds the fullness, 
 the fire, the power it desires, with the restraint, 
 discipline and patience it needs. And as the 
 voice of a woman leads the following choir, so 
 a woman's ideal aspirations should lead men's 
 thoughts. 
 
 The perceptions of the beautiful are very 
 closely united with our emotions and our moral 
 faculties. In Raphael it is not radiance of color 
 or purity of outline that holds our heart en- 
 chanted, so much as the womanliness of the 
 Mother, the ineffable innocence of the Holy 
 Child. Art has always held the religious 
 thought, the "Church-idea" of the world; it is 
 philosophy which falls into atheism and infi- 
 delity. The Greek sculpture sets forth the visi- 
 ble faith of paganism ; the Italian painters give 
 us Catholicism, John Sebastian Bock and his son 
 utter the belief of the northern church. The 
 true artist sees first the uprightness and vigorous 
 manhood and purity of the classic forms ; not 
 
152 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 the mere fairness of limb, and muscular force. 
 The essential elements of lovliness are peace 
 and repose of soul, freedom from all evil pas- 
 sions. Even a line is full of moral significance. 
 The flexible and flowing outlines of a curve 
 suggest love and gentleness ; a long, straight 
 line speaks of chastity and self-restraint, the 
 circle holds within its oneness the grand thoughts 
 of infinity and eternity. And when the circle 
 swells upward into the cathedral dome the soul 
 seems to rise with it, impressed, it knows not 
 why, with the solemn meaning of its propor- 
 tions. 
 
 In color there is even more visible feeling and 
 significance. The very technicalities of art tell 
 us of coloring as harsh or tender, subdued or 
 violent. In the early schools of art every color 
 of the draperies of the Madonnas had its own 
 separate meaning. As some writer says to 
 change the color of the robe from violet to azure 
 would be like altering the key of a song; the 
 whole character becomes different. In the songs 
 and superstitions of the peasantry, one finds a 
 recognition of the expression of colors, as in the 
 virtues of gems, which are characterized by 
 their hues. Instinctively one feels that truth is 
 suggested by the clear, pure azure, and again 
 in the fresh coolness of green, while the deep, 
 soft crimson and vivid scarlet speak of warm and 
 
THE* USES OF ART. 153 
 
 passionate love. I never realized the full power 
 of red until I went once in December to the Tro- 
 pical Gardens at St. Louis. Outside the lawn 
 lay white and still, hushed in the soft silence 
 of snow, and the very air had a grey, cold look. 
 But within the glass buildings, the palm-trees 
 lifted up triumphant boughs against the very 
 roof, the .atmosphere was fragrant with the 
 sweet olive of China, and a crimson tropical 
 flower lit up the whole room with warmth. It 
 seemed the very color of life and love. Tenny- 
 son, you remember, says of a lover's heart, that 
 though it were long dead — " earth in earth " — 
 it would stir at the sound of the beloved feet, 
 and tremble with life. 
 
 " And blossom in purple and red." 
 
 The ideal life gives back to the earth a sym- 
 pathy with the human soul, a flower to 
 strengthen and refresh it. In its light the dumb 
 landscape is eloquent. At the hour of sunset 
 when every house-roof and spire and tree-top 
 glitters against the red horizon, you almost be- 
 lieve that you behold in the clouds shining out- 
 lines of a heavenly city.* Or when the wintry 
 frost sparkles like a veil of fine silver over all 
 things that are near, and the fields that are far 
 
 *There is in fact such a suggestion in a sunset by Innes. 
 14 
 
154 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 off lie so soft and white that they seem unreal 
 and full of dreams, you may gain exquisite sug- 
 gestions of peace and clearness of soul. In this 
 development of spiritual sight and hearing, 
 there is nothing, — not a cool spot of verdure, 
 not a stirring of the wind in the boughs, not a 
 flush of rose at dawn — that does not speak of 
 eternal truths. 
 
LANDSCAPE. 1 55 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MATERIALS OF ART. 
 
 I. LANDSCAPE. 
 
 SPHE forms of all the arts have their motifs in 
 &t the life of the earth. The vibratory and 
 pulsating tones of music are from sounds in the 
 air; in architecture it is said that the calyx of a 
 flower above its stalk suggested the form of the 
 column and capital. The earliest Egyptian 
 column was simply a lotus stalk, topped by its 
 calyx, and the "lotus is interlaced with infinite 
 grace in the volutes of the Ionic capitals," as 
 the acanthus leaves are used in the Corinthian. 
 Gothic architecture finds its first suggestions in 
 the interwoven traceries and arches of the forest 
 boughs ; and from the rich and delicate colors 
 of earth and sky, their tender shades, and pure, 
 white lights, Painting draws its wonderful effects. 
 We group around her scenes a thousand fancies, 
 
156 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 subtle, vague, yet full of delight ; but it was her 
 winter snow-shower — her moon-lit night in June 
 — that set all the keys a-playing ! 
 
 The thesaurus of all the arts of Design, of 
 color, of light and shade, and of form, is found 
 here. Paintings in fresco and on canvas, en- 
 gravings and etchings, sculpture in marble or 
 rare carving in wood-work, Faience, with its 
 brilliant tints and fine enamel, fairy-like designs 
 in mosaic and gems, the deep, full hues of 
 stained glass, and the devices of woven tapestry 
 and laces, all gain color or outline from her 
 stores. From her are drawn the quaint fancies 
 of the Lombard carvers, for Nature also has her 
 grotesque moods — hours seemingly of laughter 
 and jest, with caricatures of human shape, and 
 animals in fleeting cloud-forms, in distorted lines 
 of old trunks of trees and crooked boughs and 
 in mockeries of fantastic shadow-plays. There 
 are cliffs with outline of colossal heads, and 
 mountains which seem to trace a grand form 
 lying beneath a winding-sheet with hands folded 
 and the feet close together. The human soul 
 looks on Nature through the colored light of 
 humanity, and fancies that he sees his own 
 image among her endless devices of grace and 
 richness. 
 
 •' Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
 Her infinite variety." 
 
LANDSCAPE. 157 
 
 t 
 
 Every artist, whatever his craft may be, must 
 learn of her teaching. Those who work in 
 gems, the rare intaglio, the pure white designs 
 in cameo, or in metals, the rich gold, the frosted 
 silver, the fiery bronze, iron, which may be cast 
 in strange lightness and intricate grace of shape, 
 must study her forms as closely as the higher 
 artists. Work in these metallic substances, 
 which suggest color without distinctly possess- 
 ing it, — for the reality of color is lost beside their 
 peculiar characteristic of undulating light and 
 shade, — is a separate Art. Their linked vibra- 
 tions from bright to dark, their polished surfaces 
 on which the flashing and shimmering rays play 
 as on glancing waves, are won from nature, and 
 are surpassed by her. The darting coils of the 
 serpent, and the burnished scales of the fish, 
 are swifter and more shining than the work of 
 silver or gold-smith. 
 
 In Nature also is sounded the key-note of the 
 innumerable myths of sun and moon and stars, 
 of the mother earth in her sorrow and her joy, of 
 the winds and the clouds — (the long-haired 
 swan-maidens and the cattle of Geryon are the 
 rain-clouds,) — the struggle between Night and 
 Dawn, which we find again and again in the 
 stories of the simpler and earlier races. And 
 farther on stories of dark woods and enchanted 
 forests ; of dryads and mountain gnomes, songs 
 
I58 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 and legends alike interlace in another group of 
 sympathetic relations around the thought of the 
 river. There are the boat-songs with the ripple 
 of the waves and the dash of oars ; and the 
 river myths, which would form almost a dis- 
 tinct literature, full of suggestions of cool and 
 shining waters, of rythmical flow, and sudden 
 dark places, as in the sad stories of the Northern 
 Neckar and the Kelpie. 
 
 There you find the human story interwoven 
 with the art-form of nature, as you must find it 
 indeed in every high and noble work of art. 
 Unconsciously sometimes the human history 
 traces itself line by line in the workman's daily 
 work, as in the old carved cabinet of ebony. 
 
 "Some old Venetian wrought his life 
 In its quaint, countless vagaries; 
 Its ebon fronts with hints are rife 
 Of friends, of foes, of children, wife, 
 A Satyr's face — and now a Mary's," 
 
 The higher thought always rules the mechani- 
 cal work of the practiced hands ; just as when 
 a musician plays his mood sways the almost un- 
 noticed motion of his fingers upon the ivory 
 keys, and mars or increases the delicacy and 
 pathos of his touch. The divine hunger and 
 thirst of the soul cannot be satisfied with out- 
 ward form and color. Everywhere it seeks a 
 higher thought. 
 
LANDSCAPE. 1 59 
 
 Even in Nature* the human mind desires and 
 beholds something of the spiritual and eternal. 
 You look away to the grand mountains which 
 arise between the earth and the heavens, and 
 the cares and anxieties of your little day insensi- 
 bly lessen and recede like yonder dwarfed figures. 
 They say unto you, " wait — all things wait for 
 the final perfection." Involuntarily your hands 
 fold themselves in deep tranquillity, and your 
 soul comforts itself in peace. 
 
 Or you stand upon their jutting slope, and 
 look down. There sleep the green fields, there 
 winds the river with the bridge and its reflec- 
 tion, — a shining circle in the red sunset, through 
 which a little boat drifts, while the rowers lean 
 idly on their oars, — there rise cool woods, hid- 
 ing deep in shadowy places their still pools and 
 banks of ferns, there wanders a sheep-path over 
 the distant hills. Each has some hint, some 
 half-open scene, some scarce-spoken word. And 
 they say to you " Hope : — life has for you such 
 unseen gifts." And your pulses quicken; with 
 a half sigh the depression is gone from your 
 spirit and you hope. 
 
 But Nature has also its separate life, its indi- 
 viduality, its caprice and its mockeries, its deep 
 emotions. It is a different life from the life 
 which is you. Its thrilling chords echo yours, 
 but are distinct. It is a thought on the outside 
 
l6o IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 of humanity. Beirstadt tells us in the "Black 
 Hills " of one of its phases of passionate life. 
 You look at the painting, and you see first a 
 lonely pool of water in the prairie, gleaming 
 white lights on its surface, which first seem cold, 
 but afterward the red fires of the sunset glow 
 visibly through them. A large buffalo stands 
 near it. A storm is rising; you notice now that 
 the dark clouds are tossing up; you watch and 
 wait, and then you see the wind shivering in the 
 long, thin grasses, and stirring the boughs of 
 expectant trees. The storm comes into the 
 picture apparently while you look. You see its 
 coming, its movement, its sweep, its growth, 
 — a living storm ! There are artists who give 
 you other pictures, where you see a different 
 mood, in which the earth seems to rest and be 
 quiet. These will be quiet, sunny landscapes, 
 lighted by flushed morning airs ; the foregrounds, 
 meadows, or tranquil slopes with cattle feeding 
 upon them. You fancy the far-off tinkling of 
 sheep bells, and a wanderer who dreams of 
 home as he walks. 
 
 The separate life of the earth gives us one of 
 the greatest sources of pleasure, — one which avc 
 cannot find in the human conception, where the 
 beauty is associated with longprocesses of thought 
 and irksome and minute labor, — its spontanc- 
 ousness. If you are tired, you have but to turn 
 
LANDSCAPE. l6l 
 
 your footsteps to the green woods, and lo, all 
 its leaves are glad for you ! You look at the 
 stream, and behold at a glance its smooth flow, 
 and then the headlong leap and rising spray ! 
 All the winds and fragrance are there at once. 
 It is living that is complete, whole, spontaneous, 
 — and so like heaven ! 
 
 Our love for Nature is very different now from 
 the love of past ages ; and equally different is 
 our understanding of her beauty. Nature sug- 
 gests all art-forms, but landscape painting is com- 
 paratively a modern art. With all the quick 
 pleasure which the Greeks derived from the 
 outer life, their literature gives us but a narrow 
 outlook into its beauty. Their pictures of it 
 are very beautiful, sunshiny, fresh, full of move- 
 ment and joyous life, echoing with happy 
 sounds, but not so many, or of so wide a scope 
 as we might find in the pages of one of our 
 modern poets. They are always backgrounds 
 to human figures ; we will 'not find there dark 
 crags, the unending sands of the lonely desert, 
 the gloomy twilight of the woods. The very dif- 
 ferent life of the ancients rendered this inevitable. 
 Their circumstances and surroundings often re- 
 mained the same throughout a lifetime and af- 
 forded none of the strong contrasts, or the 
 deeper insight into wilder and more solitary na- 
 ture which our increased facilities for travel have 
 
1 62 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 given us. And the classic was utterly different 
 from the romantic taste, and loved only bright and 
 social scenes. Even the ' ' rough country " where 
 Heracles goes to die, looks out on blue waters., 
 dimpling in the sunlight, and the cliffs are alive 
 with the glancing wings of sea-birds. In the 
 old journeying — the gliding of a boat on a broad 
 river, — ^he slow windings of an Eastern caravan, 
 the scenery does not change in character for 
 days, or sometimes even weeks ; and in the 
 first case, it rarely leaves the haunts of men 
 behind. 
 
 Our habit of traveling by railroad has doubt- 
 less had its effect — and often an injurious effect, 
 — on the productions of our brains. We are 
 swiftly whirled by rivers, whose green waves 
 flash and foam before you, through mountain- 
 gorges, sombre with yew-trees, by busy towns, 
 and streets peopled by animated, moving figures, 
 on again at night by cone-shaped hills with 
 brown shadows from the cedar trees lying dis- 
 tinct upon the snow, and a phantom-like vision 
 of higher peaks beyond ; then the moon rises, 
 and you sweep on, with white clouds overhead, 
 snowy mountains below, and white moonshine 
 everywhere, until the dawn breaks, and you 
 are whirled into the busy life of a waking world 
 again. It is impossible that these often re- 
 peated physical sensations, the rush and whirl 
 
LANDSCAPE. 1 63 
 
 of motion, the flying visions, and the tension 
 and whirr of machinery, should not have left 
 their traces on our mental states. As one strik- 
 ing illustration in our literature, mark how re- 
 plete are the writings of Charles Dickens with 
 the images and cadences which such a strain, 
 such an abnormal excitement of the nervous 
 forces produces. His descriptions, even of 
 the most quiet English landscapes, give you al- 
 ways the sensation of being whirled rapidly by 
 them. 
 
 But in our restless lives there are some places 
 where we have lived and rested, and which sink 
 deeply into our hearts. I shall only express a 
 common feeling when I say that the banks of a 
 certain river have been such a place to me, for 
 a river has somewhat more of human individu- 
 ality and human nearness, than any other object 
 in nature. It has its own vitality, and charac- 
 teristic color and flow, and peculiar shore-line. 
 The Thames is not like the Dee, nor the Mo- 
 nongahela like the Red river. And it gives a 
 living character to landscapes which would be 
 tame and uninteresting without the freshness of 
 its banks and the shining course of its waters. 
 
 A strange net-work of affinities may always 
 be found closely encircling the river-life. The 
 boatsmen and raftsmen are as distinct a class as 
 the sailors, and looking off against the horizon 
 
164 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 you will see that the hills seem to curve in uni- 
 son with this flowing current of vitality, and the 
 trees to droop their boughs towards it. When 
 the waters are at a low ebb, as is the case with 
 some rivers that grow more and more shallow, 
 and at last sink away into the earth, the trees 
 will seem to have a thirsty and anxious expres- 
 sion, as they stretch their broad limbs over it, 
 and their trunks bend nearer, and the little 
 green leaves rustle and glance above its waves. 
 Those farthest off turn, as if absolutely drawn 
 along every woody fibre and root by the secret 
 attraction of the running stream. I noticed an 
 old root, tossed out upon a sand-bank which, 
 by some caprice of nature, wore the semblance 
 of a long-necked water-bird, and had, I fancied, 
 a look as if it were peering into the receding 
 waters. 
 
 There are very close associations between a 
 river and our life ; and in its swift passing, its 
 windings, its fretting against obstacles, and its 
 repose man sees an image of his flowing days. 
 You better understand the yearning instincts of 
 journeying races, when you ascend a high knoll 
 and see the silvery streams hastening towards 
 the river, as it too goes on — " olme hast, olme 
 rast" — to the great sea. If you live near the 
 river, you will not forget it ; you will think of it 
 at night with the crescent moon and the stars 
 
t LANDSCAPE. 1 65 
 
 on its swaying breast, and the cool, dark 
 shadows along its banks ; the noises of its rapids 
 will interweave themselves with the whole un- 
 derflowing consciousness of your life, until you 
 feel the loveliness and significance of the vision 
 — "in the midst of it a river." 
 
1 66 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 MATERIALS OF ART. 
 
 II. FOLK-LORE. 
 
 fOLK-LORE has an interest which extends 
 greatly beyond its legitimate province, 
 because it contains within itself the germinal 
 life of many of the arts, The music of Scan- 
 dinavian and German composers is closely united 
 with the wild legends which the Northern pea- 
 sants delight to tell and hear. " Der Frei- 
 schutz" of Weber, reproduces what he himself 
 saw and heard at the target matches and zither 
 playing of the Tyrolese. Wagner's themes are 
 all drawn from old German traditions. "Lohen- 
 grin," the "Flying Dutchman," "Hans Sachs 
 von Nuremberg," "Die Walkiire," " Rhein- 
 gold," "The Dusk of the Gods," "Tanhauser," 
 with its wild Vinusberg, and the lovely miracle 
 of the blooming almond-staff; all these, in their 
 
• FOLK-LORE. 1 67 
 
 very names, show where the fountains lie, of 
 which the musician has drunk deep. Oratorio, 
 motet and mass are formed from the simple and 
 strong Hebraic themes which have long brooded 
 at the heart of the common people. 
 
 If you would comprehend fully the Italian 
 schools of painting, you must study the legends 
 of the Church as they exist among the Italian 
 people. The myths of the early Christian faith 
 are very lovely. There is St. Dorothea and the 
 roses gathered in Paradise, St. Christopher 
 bearing across the swelling flood the Infant 
 Christ, St. George conquering the Dragon, and 
 again St. Margaret, before whose childlike face 
 and lifted palm-branch, the Dragon lies pros- 
 trate. There is always conflict, labor and dark- 
 ness of death, but over all rises the light of a 
 child's innocence, and faith in the supreme love. 
 
 The seeds of the epic, the drama, the romance 
 are found also in the ballads and stories of the 
 peasants ; and to understand sculpture and its 
 forms, you must seek the Grecian folk-stories, 
 for there you will see the origin of its concep- 
 tions, among a people who have lain so near the 
 breasts of the Mother Earth that they have 
 drunk in her vitality and power. 
 
 Folk-lore, for the most part, consists of the 
 thoughts of ignorant, but kindly country men 
 and women, and its colors, when vivid, are often 
 
1 68 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 set, mosaic-wise, in lives which would be other- 
 wise tedious and trivial. In the first place, it 
 has the advantage of being so earnestly believed 
 in that its stories come to us as if still warm 
 with the flesh and blood contact of human 
 hands. The imagination and the faith of the 
 homely working people are here fused in one, 
 and crystallize into lovely and poetic forms, as in 
 the Greek fables of the beings who lived in the 
 woods and waters around them. Some of these 
 myths are full of a strong, out-of-door, freedom. 
 There is one figure, for instance, whose gambols 
 and freaks are depicted continually in sculpture 
 and bas-relief, — the Faun. The long-eared 
 Faun of Praxiteles, the Dancing Faun, the Faun 
 and Child, the Satyr who sits down to eat with 
 the astonished peasants ; everywhere you meet 
 this familiar, shaggy, and not unfriendly crea- 
 ture, with his hoofs and long ears, rejoicing in a 
 wild, free life of forest and mountain, and seem- 
 ing not very unlike the primitive man in whose 
 nature the animal desires and instincts are still 
 strong and keen. From the folk-lore of the 
 Greeks also, Art takes another strange race of 
 dual vitality, half beastly, half human, the 
 Centaurs, — savage and violent — forever longing 
 for, and yet forever held aloof from, the sweet- 
 ness of human companionship and the greatness 
 of human interests. 
 
FOLK-LORE. 1 69 
 
 The metamorphoses of the Gods, and their 
 human loves and semblance, are from the tradi- 
 tions of the masses, and perpetuated by Art in 
 the still repose of the marble and the stone. I 
 do not believe that these myths possessed an 
 interior meaning from the purely Greek mind. 
 All things, — and therefore all words, which are 
 the shadows of things, — possess at the core an 
 ideal life ; and if, therefore, you strike upon 
 beautiful and concealed meanings in a work of 
 Art, it does not follow that there is a conscious 
 and symmetrical intention on the part of the 
 artist, or poet, to weave these throughout. You 
 may find those of which he has known nothing, 
 for there is a latent symmetry in thought because 
 of its Divine o?igin. Y( a man tells faithfully 
 the ideas and intuitions which come to him in 
 moods of inspiration, it cannot but result that 
 there will be depths therein beyond his fathom- 
 ing, and a loveliness larger than the scope of 
 his own vision. 
 
 The belief iftthis latent symmetry is entirely 
 different from the esoteric interpretations of the 
 later Platonists on the one hand, and the more 
 modern theory of "unconscious cerebration" 
 on the other, for I do not consider it a product 
 of the thinker's brain, acting consciously or 
 otherwise. A thought comes into the mind, 
 how or whence we cannot tell ; the same thought 
 
 IK 
 
I70 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 to many, as we may prove by the coincidence 
 of discoveries, inventions, and even poetic con- 
 ceptions, but more or less of its symmetry is 
 perceived according to the largeness of grasp 
 and delicacy of perception, more or less ex- 
 pressed, in proportion to the facility of language 
 and distinctness of imagination, I think our 
 undefined repugnance to a story with a moral 
 arises partly from this, — we feel that every truth 
 should hold materials for all, — that the artist 
 should find there something of his art, the work- 
 man of his work, the lover of his love, — but the 
 narrow line of the moral finites the meaning 
 and rudely breaks off its symmetrical develop- 
 ment, and dwarfs its fulness. 
 
 There is a very interesting passage in Ecker- 
 mann's conversations of Goethe, which illustrates 
 how a thought may contain in itself much be- 
 yond the apprehension of the thinkers. Eckcr- 
 mann says: — 
 
 "Goethe presented me with a lithograph 
 representing the scene where Faust and Mephis- 
 topheles, to deliver Margarite from prison, ride 
 through the night mounted on two horses, and 
 pass near a gibbet. Faust rides a black horse, 
 at full gallop, which seems, like his rider to be 
 frightened at the spectres that pass beneath the 
 gibbet. They ride so fast that Faust finds it 
 difficult to keep his seat. They are facing a 
 
i;i 
 
 high wind, which has blown off Faust's cap, 
 that is held to his neck by a string, and floats 
 at a distance behind him. He turns towards 
 Mephistopheles a face full of anxiety, and seems 
 to wait his reply. Mephistopheles is tranquil, 
 evinces no fear, and demeans himself as a su- 
 perior being. He is not mounted on a living 
 horse — he dislikes living things. And then he 
 has no need of them — his will suffices to trans- 
 port him through space as rapidly as the wind. 
 He has a horse only because it is necessary that 
 he should seem to have one. It was sufficient 
 therefore for him to find the skeleton of a horse 
 that still had its skin. This carcass is of alight 
 color, and seems in the darkness, to emit phos- 
 phorescent rays. It has neither saddle nor 
 reins, but gallops on without either. The super- 
 terrestial rider turns towards Faust with a care- 
 less mien ; the wind they are facing does not 
 exist for him or his horse — not a hair of either 
 does it disturb. I confess" said Goethe, "that ^ 
 this conception of the scene (by Delacroix, the 
 artist,) surpasses my own." 
 
 It was not in consonance with the Greek spirit 
 to conceive a spiritual or interior meaning, but 
 it was eminently characteristic of Greek percep- 
 tion and facility to see it when presented by 
 others, and to incorporate it in their own 
 philosophies and religion. There were always 
 
172 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 two classes in Greece. The first, superstitious, 
 but quick and graceful in fancy, listened to 
 recitals of the acts and decrees of Zeus, Poseidon, 
 Aphrodite and Apollo, and believed them living 
 and powerful beings, moved by anger, passion 
 and desire like themselves. But not so with the 
 more distinctively intellectual class, to which 
 many of the priesthood belonged. They were 
 men of culture and travel, and as intense light 
 either brightens or blinds the vision according 
 to the strength of the eye, so we find both 
 doubt and denial, and a deeper faith, resulting 
 from their consummate intellectual training. 
 As evidences of the last we have ^Eschylus, 
 Pindar, Plato and Socrates; and of the first, 
 Sophocles, and Euripides who inveighs with all 
 the force and fire of his ' ' winged words " against 
 the lust and cruelty of the mythical deities of 
 the Pagan world. Euripides indeed boldly says 
 in the "Hecuba," "Aphrodite is mortal's folly," 
 "The Venus that compelled you was your own 
 desire;" and in "Helena," 
 
 "Burnt offerings never filled the idler's store ; 
 Knowledge and insight are the best diviners — ask no more." 
 
 This last was written at a time when the com- 
 mon people of Athens still profoundly believed 
 in divination and oracles; and shows the vast 
 chasm between the thoughts of the two classes. 
 
i?3 
 
 The priests, and many of the young men ot 
 Greece were accustomed to travel in the east 
 and in foreign lands to learn new wisdom ; and 
 their wisest men received much from the land, 
 where the inner life shone with transfiguring 
 flame, fusing all outward things into symbols of 
 its presence. The change from " the capricious, 
 elemental Zeus of the Iliad " into the venerable 
 God of the "Oresteia" of ^Eschylus is attribu- 
 ted to the action of Persian thought on Greek 
 culture, and the Persians themselves had been 
 brought in contact with the inspiration of the 
 Hebrew seers. The idea of voluntary sacrifice, 
 which marks the later story of Iphigenia, of 
 Hecuba, of Alcestis, of the Phcenissae, and the 
 Heraclidae, or the children of Heracles, is, as 
 Froude points out, of Semitic, and not of Greek 
 origin. It was not native to the age of Homer. 
 Iphigenia, he says, is probably Jephthagenia, a 
 Grecized version of Jephthah's daughter. In all 
 these we find the higher life, treading under foot 
 the lower ; love conquering the pangs and throes 
 of death for the beloved, a wonderful and beauti- 
 ful foreshadowing of the Infinite Love of Christ, 
 who was to lay down his life for his enemies 
 also. It is always the fairest, the noblest nature 
 — nearest the Highest — that chooses to go upon 
 this dark and thorny path. Such a thought 
 springs only from a divine revelation ; and going 
 
174 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 back among all the old myths and religions of 
 the pagan races we find everywhere the thoughts 
 of incarnation and self-sacrifice kept alive so 
 that all lands and people, however dark might 
 be their shadows, held a dream and a prophecy 
 of Christ. 
 
 Heracles, the noblest of the Greek characters, 
 is the Hebraic hero, Samson, transmuted into 
 Greek form. Here we find for the first time in 
 classic Art, a thought which sounds in accord 
 with the Germanic spirit, — the Farnese Hercules, 
 " with its aspect of touching and unsatisfied mel- 
 ancholy " breathes the very mood of Diirer's 
 Melancholia, — the sorrow that lies in all com- 
 pleted work, the weariness of human attain- 
 ment. It is the cry of Ecclesiastes, i ' I looked 
 on all the works that my hand had wrought, 
 and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of 
 spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." 
 This is the prison-house where the mightiest 
 / must grind; the unsatisfied longing for the 
 higher, the pang of all fulfilled desire which 
 sees the life of its dream ever beyond its grasp, 
 the moan of the son of the Gods to whom the 
 things of time are given. It is the witness of 
 our immortality. 
 
 We have spoken before of the myths of the 
 sun, and myths of the storm, but only a race in 
 its infancy is content with these. As man grows, 
 he pierces through this covering of symbols to 
 
FOLK-LORE. 1 75 
 
 the sun of Life, the storm of the Soul. So it was 
 with the Greeks over whose minds the Hebraic 
 visions had brooded. Athene was queen of the 
 Air; true, but she is also the goddess of wisdom. 
 Apollo is the Sun-God, and again the inspirer 
 of the inner vision of prophecy. Different types 
 of mind chose the old myths as centres, around 
 which they wove countless meanings and tradi- 
 tions. 
 
 Not to all were the metamorphoses of the 
 God sensual masquerades. When Zeus or Jove, 
 the Ruler and Life of the world, revealed himself 
 to man, each form of manifestation seems to me 
 significant. Semele beheld him in awful flame 
 and fire which consumed the mortal frame. Are 
 we not conscious of thoughts which we dare not 
 dwell upon — of a vitality we dare not closely 
 analyze? Far down in the innermost of every 
 human existence we shall find the fiery and un- 
 approachable presence of life itself, where God 
 dwells, and whoso looks thereon must die. No 
 one who has ever studied his own nature can 
 fail to know, that underneath all action, all con- 
 scious thought, all feeling, there is still a life and 
 power which he cannot reach, or influence, or 
 comprehend, and that all the springs of his being 
 flow from thence. The finest processes of our 
 spiritual changes and growth are wholly imper- 
 ceptible, and sustained by the inner heart of 
 life, which burns within us. 
 
I76 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 Again, to Alemena does Zeus approach, and 
 he assumes the likeness of a beloved human 
 form. Our revelations of the higher Life come 
 to us also in the heroic lives, the patience, the 
 love of other men and women. Every day, 
 every hour, the power which is above humanity 
 takes up the guise of human lives, and teaches 
 us, — by their forbearance with wrong, by their 
 forgiveness, by their fidelity, — to believe that 
 what is higher than all these will be more loving 
 also. It is through the father and the mother 
 that we first learn of Heaven. 
 
 Lower down descends the Life and the Power, 
 
 "Counts nothing that it meets with, base, 
 But lives and loves in every place." 
 
 — in the White Bull and the swan of Europa and 
 Leda, — for the world of beasts and winged crea- 
 tures holds also somewhat of our ideal and in- 
 terior life. Else what means the human-headed 
 and winged bulls of Assyrian Art, which sym- 
 bolize the human wisdom, the swift thought, the 
 mighty strength of their Deities ? Or the won- 
 derful creatures, "living natures," full of ex- 
 haustless energy and fire, in the visions and 
 trances of the Hebrew seers ? Eor these saw in 
 ecstatic illumination the inner and living forms 
 of earthly things, which are full of spiritual life 
 and meaning. 
 
F^LK-LORE. I yj 
 
 Even the inanimate earth and its metals are 
 not devoid of the presence of the " soul of all 
 things/' and the shower of living gold descends 
 upon the imprisoned Danae, full of the power 
 of Zeus, 
 
 " And looking round about, could she behold 
 The chamber scattered o'er with shining gold, 
 That grew, till ankle-deep she stood in it." 
 
 " But when again she lifted up her head, 
 While midmost of the room a taper shone, 
 A gold robed man there stood." 
 
 Without this interior and greater life nothing 
 is created, nothing sustained in being, "for 
 preservation is continual creation ; " and there 
 is no form of existence so low that it does not 
 tell somewhat of this to the human soul. By 
 its insight into this deep truth has art used all 
 living creatures, all inanimate things, all colors 
 and lines and lights to repeat its great thoughts 
 of the ideal. 
 
 The same process goes on in the traditions of 
 the people. When they think of evil, they 
 picture it as a living form, and give to it the 
 hoofs that trample, and the claws and horns 
 that rend and tear to pieces, and the tail, that 
 marks it as low and brutal. And so we have 
 the dragons of mediaeval legends, which fight 
 against the saints, and the monsters of classic 
 
 16 
 
I78 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 fables, which devour the young men and virgins 
 of the afflicted cities. The Greek mind per- 
 ceived also the subtle and interior evil, not 
 wholly unfair in outward semblance, which turns 
 into cold and hard lifelessness all the warm and 
 innocent love of human nature, and so we have 
 the head of the Medusa. It appears again and 
 again in the gems and bas-reliefs of the Greeks, 
 and Leonardo da Vinci has given it to us in 
 painting. For he, like Michael Angelo also, 
 was fired by the antique spirit at the first. 
 
 There is no representation of a depraved 
 nature more wonderful than this conception of 
 the Medusa, which is so clothed to us with 
 classic grace that we are apt to forget its real 
 origin in the wild stories of the superstitious 
 country-folk of Greece. It is the consummate 
 expression of evil, for in the Laocoon, the man 
 still is distinct from his foe, still struggling 
 against the deadly coil ; but here every tress of 
 hair is a moving serpent, stirring with the same 
 life that breaths in the cold and marble-like face. 
 Near the Pitti Palace, at Florence, is one of its 
 most striking portrayals. It is supernatural, 
 womanly, beastly. There is a siren-like and 
 deadly power about the strong stillness of the 
 features; a strange and horrible beauty about 
 its faultless lineaments, the winged and graceful 
 head. But the life of the serpent is incarnated 
 
FpLK-LORE. 179 
 
 with the life of the woman, and at one with it. 
 It is the symbol of a soul wholly lost and un- 
 clean. 
 
 The fairy stories of the German and Anglo- 
 Saxon peasantry are often only surviving frag- 
 ments of the old Greek myths. The story of 
 Proserpine is transmuted into the tale of the 
 Sleeping Beauty ; we find some of the traits of 
 her mother in the bogey which haunts the 
 country side, and the wrinkled fairy godmother 
 who watches over a child at its birth. There is 
 a striking coincidence between the first part of 
 "Beauty and the Beast" and the story cf 
 Psyche, — the ill-tempered sisters, the disguise 
 of the beast, and the lonely mansion. The 
 forms of the stories, it is true, change entirely. 
 They are not so artistic or lovely, but they are 
 full of a bright and homely fancy ; and their ca- 
 pricious outlines are like those traced on wall 
 and floor by an old-time wood-fire, which kin- 
 dles the poor and narrow room into a flush of 
 rosy light, and then dies out in mocking, flitting 
 shadows, moving restlessly up and down like 
 things of life. The tiny " gude neibors " with 
 their queer freaks and moonlit merriment, 
 abound in these traditions. We can fancy as 
 we read over the dramatis persona of the 
 "Midsummer Night's Dream" that we have a 
 genuine tavern scene of Shakspeare's own ex- 
 
ISO IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 perience, where the common workmen of the 
 village, the carpenter, the joiner, the bellows- 
 mender, the tailor, the tinker and one Bottom, 
 a weaver, met to drink and gossip, and tell 
 strange stories of Puck, "that frights the maids" 
 and all the fantastic elfin train, Peaseblossom, 
 Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed. 
 
 You see well that those who told these stories 
 and those who listened and believed, were of 
 the rural districts and provinces, simple country 
 folk, like the Grecian peasants, but rougher, 
 more uncouth, and material. Yet they know 
 well all the beautiful ' l permutations and com- 
 binations " by which Dame Nature works out 
 her processes in the sweet-scented spring weather. 
 They know the "fairy favors" on the gold 
 leaves of the tall cow-slips ; and the 
 
 " Bank whereon the wild thyme blows, 
 Where oxlips, and the nodding violet grows," 
 
 as well as the fairy wanderers. They have often 
 seen the faint primrose buds appear on the bare 
 and thorny twigs, and the leaves thrust them- 
 selves through the brown earth. And the world 
 of fairy spells is always like the Spring, — it is a 
 time of births and transformations and surprises, 
 
 "Nothing of it that doth fade, 
 But doth suffer a. sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange." 
 
FOLK-LORE. l8l 
 
 * 
 
 It is a plastic, liquid world, easily moved by the 
 spirit into form, like Prospero's island, and its 
 fair visions. And the stories of its wonders 
 seem to be always told with a smile, so merry 
 are these little ones in their ways and doings. 
 
 " Lass uns sehen, wie froh die Gotter sind. — (Goethe.) 
 
 When the tired laborer falls asleep by the road- 
 side, or the unswept hearth, how they delight 
 in surprising him with the finished task, or the 
 granted wish. The dreaming house-maid need 
 not fear, for they troop in through the ' ' glim- 
 mering light" of the house, 
 
 " By the dead and drowsy fire, 
 Every elf and fairy sprite, 
 Hops as light as bird from brier." 
 
 And straightway the rooms are cleaned, and the 
 bread baked. Very willful too are these tiny 
 godmothers. They are like our pleasures; they 
 will come to us, but we must not seek for them. 
 And here again, you think of a day in early 
 Spring, you have grown so tired of watching 
 bare boughs and flowerless meadows, and vou 
 forget it all impatiently, then suddenly, before 
 you can open your eyes, the thrush is singing, 
 every little brook is trickling, the buds burst 
 open in the wet garden beds, the sunshine falls 
 on your hands with a touch that can be felt — 
 
 " And whether you look, or whether you listen, 
 You hear life move, or you see it glisten." 
 
I 82 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 In these stories you will find no records of 
 civilization and discoveries and inventions. — 
 These are all a nation of child-folk, the annals 
 of the garden era, in the first dynasty of lovers. 
 You may hear the "eternal child-heart" beat- 
 ing under the old and wrinkled form, or the 
 growling beast, that disfigures the enchanted 
 life. There is a deep truth in such stories. 
 There are such disguises all around us. Some- 
 times it is a cold and unlovely soul with an 
 exquisite mask of flesh and blood, — with eyes 
 that seem so tender, and yet never see you, or 
 your need at all. Then again there are sweet 
 and noble creatures, hidden from sight and 
 touch, and waiting for their time of transforma- 
 tion, like the poor princes and princesses of the 
 fairy tales. 
 
 There was a narrow, brown house across the 
 way, where few visitors ever paused, for the 
 place was poor and still, with nothing bright 
 about it but the box of scarlet geraniums that 
 made a spot of burning color on the window-sill, 
 and the grey cat that laid beside it. Here was 
 a poor, little, disfigured child, with features all 
 blurred and scarred, but with a patient heart 
 looking out of the brown eyes, that were so 
 glad at any little word of kindness. This too 
 was a mask, but the enchanter, Death, came 
 at last to her relief with his magic spell of sleep. 
 
FOLK-LORE. 1 83 
 
 Then the angel awoke, and she was so ready to 
 love all, that I think she must have felt an inno- 
 cent surprise and joy to find herself lovely and 
 beloved. 
 
 There is a strange kinship hinted at beneath 
 these histories of change, when it is from the 
 human form to the likeness of the beast. There 
 are other Bottoms with their asses' ears than 
 the weaver on whom the elfin witchery worked 
 its powers. And within us all there is a little 
 world with the plant and brute phases of growth. 
 I suppose in every nature the fox of cunning 
 creeps, the birds, our winged fancies, rise and 
 fly, the serpent of evil desires glides, and the 
 white lamb of innocence cuddles close and warm 
 to its mother's side. Art and the legends of 
 the people tell the same story, the animal na- 
 tures portray a part of the human life. 
 
 In these early myths of the races there is a 
 far closer likeness than in the more elaborate 
 and complex results of the mind. It is here 
 that men are seen most plainly as brothers. 
 From the daffodil-covered meadows by Lake 
 Pergos, to the fields of England that bloom 
 thick with cowslips, does not seem so far. It is 
 the same thought that runs through the witch- 
 eries of Circe, the enchantment of Oberon, the 
 wehr-wolves of Sweden, the metempsychosis of 
 India. It is the same yearning of the human 
 
I84 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 desire for its kind that tells of Tithonus, cold in 
 the gleaming halls of Dawn, and of the change- 
 ling who cannot be happy amidst the unhome- 
 •like merriment of the elfin kingdom.. But every 
 truth is told many times and of diverse tongues. 
 Like King Arthur it does not die of any hurt, 
 but is kept alive, — in some blooming and mys- 
 tical fancy, — until the full time of its recog- 
 nition. The great law of "like unto like" 
 reigns; fairy lore is like fairy gold ; the soul 
 that is akin to the airy, sunshiny sprites will 
 find the yellow gold and the sparkling gems, 
 while to doubt, or anxiety, or cunning, they 
 are only withered leaves and dry sticks. 
 
 For we always know our own. It was no 
 native's ear that heard the pibroch at Lucknow, 
 but one that had listened -to it from infancy. 
 As in the old tale of "Beauty and the Beast" 
 the loving heart will always find its roses bloom- 
 ing even in the midst of winter snows. This 
 story is one of the most picturesque and poetic 
 of all the child-legends. Even now, as I sit 
 watching the great storm of snow in the air, 
 whirling wildly across ships at offing and forest 
 trees inland, drifting so fast, that with shut eyes 
 I still seem to see it whirling past me in the 
 dark, — even now I can fancy that lonely and 
 benighted journey. Across the moors, for 
 nothing is so desolate as a long, level stretch 
 
FOLK-LORE. 1 85 
 
 of barren land in the dusk, and after the weary 
 traveler cries the wind. He sees the lighted 
 house, and enters half afraid at the silence and 
 light which hold in twin state the vacant room. 
 No shadow fails on the wall, no step echos on 
 the stair, and yet there is a table spread, the 
 fire, the bed made ready. And when dawn 
 breaks across the snowy waste, there is the gar- 
 den with its fragrant roses, greeting him like a 
 vision. Ah, we cannot do without the child- 
 like wisdom of these old stories of fairy-land ! 
 
 He who comes in sympathy with the woods, 
 will find in their silences and rustling boughs — 
 the swift start of birds from their nests — the 
 splash and drip of the water— a truer Egeria 
 than Numa saw. At early dawn the grey shad- 
 ows seem like fawns or homadryads- startled 
 from their lair as they steal away into the twi- 
 light of thicker trees. The dark, quiet stream 
 that slowly flows and winds by banks of ferns, 
 w T ill all at once fall with fresh trickling — as if 
 singing low to itself — and glance out of sight in 
 a thousand netted lights and shadows, is sweeter 
 than any water-nymph of Arcady. For even a 
 forest is not dumb when a human heart asks, 
 and the revelation waits only for the eyes of the 
 seer. 
 
1 86 IDEAL LIFE, 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 
 
 (C^LTHEN once the earth and man are given, 
 d >-» we must have homes, so architecture, 
 which is at once an art and a necessity, arises. 
 It also has its ideal and inner meaning. Apart 
 from the artistic delight in symmetrical propor- 
 tion and elaborate workmanship, there is a cer- 
 tain expression in every building which uncon- 
 sciously acts upon the sensibility. Some houses 
 have a frowning exterior, while others seem to 
 love and welcome us, and bid us come farther 
 and farther on, through open doors and wide 
 halls, and sunny suites of rooms. For the 
 builders have built after the form of their own 
 souls, — although indeed both the recognition 
 and the expression of the thought may be un- 
 defined and unconscious. We feci rather than 
 think, that a certain arrangement of wood and 
 
SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 87 
 
 stone, — that curve, that swelling arch, that soft 
 grey hue, — says something that is lovely to our 
 souls, while the same materials,, lines and colors, 
 disposed by another master, jar upon our per- 
 ceptions as disonant and false. 
 
 The architectures of all races tell their histories 
 and capacities; and the human types of thought 
 and desire are wrought out in rafter and beam, 
 architrave and cornice. Climatic necessities 
 indeed induce form, — as the peaked roof of the 
 Swiss chalet, and the Gothic buttress and gable, 
 used for protection against the snow, — and 
 modify the use of color and ornament, but they 
 do not effect its expression except as they act 
 upon the characters of the architects through 
 the subtle power of circumstance and routine. 
 The same severe and rigorous climate which 
 necessitates the darker and heavier buildings of 
 the north, renders the northern races men of 
 contest and endurance, as we have found them 
 in our study of the Germanic ideal. Every 
 building, whether it be cathedral or temple, 
 mosque or parthenon, university or warehouse, 
 palace or hut, is some human thought of reli- 
 gion, government, culture, trade or domestic 
 life, expressed in form, and this form will be 
 grand, graceful and pure, or grovelling, meagre 
 and uncouth, according to the conceptions of 
 the designer and architects. 
 
1 88 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 Let us return, for instance, to the middle 
 ages. It is the period of feudalism, and the ideal 
 of leadership is force. The Ajax and Achilles 
 of the Homeric epic, with their muscular strength 
 and activity, and their strong animal spirits, 
 would have been first among the free-booters of 
 the middle ages as they were among the com- 
 batants of the Trojan siege. For the men of 
 brute force and energy who, under the complex 
 conditions of modern civilization fall into the 
 rear ranks as pugilists, draymen, blacksmiths, 
 are the leaders and heroes of the rougher and 
 more primitive life. As the exponent of such 
 a society, arises the castle, which was the char- 
 acteristic form of architecture in the middle 
 ages. It has its watch-tower, looking abroad 
 for the foe ; instead of windows are narrow loop 
 holes, and slits in the walls, through which an 
 arrow may be sent on its deadly errand, its 
 thick and barred doors for resistance, its postern 
 for a sally amidst a besieging force, and its draw- 
 bridge to cover a retreat. Its whole dark struc- 
 ture is thrown into fierce projections and angles 
 and "buttressed by threatening towers, half 
 emerging from and half incorporated into the 
 mass." It is guarded by outworks, moat and 
 barbican. Afar off crouches the village at its 
 foot. "Small, black, scared-looking houses, 
 huddled together like frightened children in the 
 
SUGGESTlpNS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 89 
 
 dark, with warped, crooked roofs, and low walls, 
 leaning and bulging under some enormous 
 pressure. It seems as if the very shadow of the 
 castle, which lies black and solid upon them, 
 and stretches far beyond, was flattening and 
 crushing them to the earth." Dark banners 
 hang from the towers, the gate is surmounted 
 with the heads of wild boars and wolves. Even 
 the localities chosen for these buildings are the 
 wildest that nature could offer ; hills, bristling 
 with crags and seamed with ravines or harsh 
 precipices. 
 
 Does not this background tell us all ? Do we 
 not read the rough, fierce life of the men who 
 dwell here, their deeds of violence and oppres- 
 sion, their lack of all mental sweetness and 
 light ? The old chronicles are full of their 
 exploits and their struggles with each other for 
 precedence and booty. It is true that even in 
 this dark and unquiet period there were still 
 good and beautiful lives and high ideals, but 
 this was its dark side, and it has left its traces 
 in wood and stone and the work of man's hands. 
 The religious idea alone rose up against it, as a 
 shelter and a defense for those who were op- 
 pressed and forsaken, — like the visible heavens 
 which stretch themselves, with all their sunny 
 and azure light unchanged, pityingly over earth's 
 wintriest landscapes. The thoughts of faith 
 
I9O IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 and worship are embodied in the cathedrals of 
 Southern Europe most beautifully. Some 
 writer, speaking of the symbolism of form, says 
 that "an instinctive taste teaches men to build 
 their churches with spires and steeples, which, as 
 they cannot be referred to any other object, 
 point as with silent fingers to the sky and stars, 
 and sometimes, when they reflect the brazen 
 light of a rich, but rainy sunset, appear like 
 pyramids of flame burning heavenwards." 
 
 On the wide plains of Lombardy, when the 
 daylight first broke, the Italian peasant saw the 
 far-off pinnacles rise in swift ascent, and the 
 great cathedral roof shine in mid-air like a visi- 
 ble glory. Matins and Vespers floated down to 
 the wayfarer with all the sweet sayings of eter- 
 nal blessedness, and as evening came on, and 
 the homes of men were everywhere hidden 
 away in purple mists and vapors, this gleamed 
 with the last rays of the golden sunset. How- 
 ever monotonous and hard and meagre might 
 be the personal life, here was set a sign which 
 lifted the soul up silently to a higher region 
 where there was peace. 
 
 Nor is there any detail of the Milan cathedral 
 without significance. Workman after workman 
 wrought out with patience and love his best for 
 its adornment. Every carved flower is different, 
 every scroll, or line, shows infinite attention and 
 
SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. I9I 
 
 care. 'Master after master consecrated his fairest 
 conceptions to the grand symmetry and richness 
 of the whole. Here is the work of Raphael, 
 these Michael Angelo wrought, this is the mark 
 of Canova's hand, and that is Bernini's. There 
 are three thousand statues in all, — a great mul- 
 titude. They stand with spear or sword, cross 
 or palm-branch, but the combat and suffering is 
 over, and the victory won. They are of infinite 
 variety, angel and archangel, and the earthly 
 ranks of prophets and martyrs, patriarchs, saints, 
 monks, nuns, hermits and soldiers, — a glorious 
 army. ' ' Wherever there is foothold for a statue, 
 there the statue stands. They look up, they 
 look down, their arms are extended in benedic- 
 tion, or their hands are folded in prayer, but 
 they are of one heart and soul ; century after 
 century has placed them here, always with the 
 same instincts of sacrifice and thanksgiving." 
 
 But the thoughts which were expressed in the 
 old cathedral work were not always fair ; close 
 beside the saints we find grinning gargoyles and 
 grotesque forms of fiend or brute, carefully 
 wrought out, because it is no one mood of exal- 
 tation, or hour of rapture which is dedicated to 
 the Lord's service, but the whole life with its 
 sins and weaknesses, every day and hour, 
 whether beautiful or tedious. And indeed these 
 uncouth forms seem sometimes to quicken the 
 
I92 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 sense of beauty and love in this supreme and 
 entire consecration, as the dissonant cries of the 
 furies in Gluck's Orpheus heighten the pure and 
 lovely melodies which succeed them. 
 
 When you have reached the full height of 
 the grand cathedral roofs, and looked down — 
 on powerful and stirring cities — on the busy life 
 of field and plain, spread out before you here 
 as your past shall be in the hereafter ; when you 
 gaze on glistening rivers and winding roads 
 stretching far off into the distance, and look 
 up to the white -mists and the alps that rise 
 on alps, higher and higher, into the stainless 
 sky, how your heart thrills with the scope of 
 the vision ! Strange thoughts come and go, 
 far beyond your power to hold or control, new 
 feelings of wonder and delight sweep, billow- 
 like, over your spirit. Here the artistic and the 
 uncultured nature must equally acknowledge 
 the power of this great thought in form, and its 
 call for faith, sacrifice, and worship to the Most 
 High. 
 
 The scope of this work will not leave me 
 space to do more than suggest to you how truth- 
 fully architecture presents the capacities and 
 history of a race. The temples of the Greeks 
 breathe the classic spirit ; the Moorish palaces 
 of Grenada — now, alas, empty and forsaken — 
 tell the story of the Moors. You sec what 
 
SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 93 
 
 
 
 manner of men they were ; supreme in all arts 
 of grace and pleasure, of subtle intellect, of 
 chivalry and refinement, but possessing neither 
 strength nor endurance enough to cope with 
 their more barbarous enemies. You can read 
 their natures in their dwellings, so light and 
 graceful, with such intricacy of ornament, such 
 vividness of color. The creamy arabesques, 
 like the richest lace-work, the brilliant red and 
 azure and gold, the many-pillared arcade and 
 corridor, speak of enjoyment, not of conquest 
 or lingering defense. 
 
 No less full of meaning in every part are the 
 houses of modern life. It is from the door and 
 the windows — the incoming and the outlook — 
 that our houses gain their most characteristic 
 expression ; and in these we find typified the 
 broader liberality and larger perceptions of our 
 age. Our doors are no longer barred defenses 
 against assailants, but entrances for friend and 
 guest. Instead of the narrow and dispropor- 
 tioned loop-holes — literally meurtrieres — of the 
 feudal castle, we have broad and high windows, 
 full of the blessed light of heaven, and opening 
 upon all the loveliness of sky and landscape. 
 Bunyan, you remember, makes an exquisite use 
 of the significance of gates and doors in his 
 quaint and beautiful allegory. There is one 
 passage in his description of the Palace Beautiful 
 
 17 
 
194 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 which made a deep impression on me even in 
 childhood. He says, "the pilgrim they laid in 
 a large upper chamber, whose windows opened 
 towards the sunrising ; the name of the chamber 
 was Peace. ' ' 
 
 A German artist gives us a picture of the 
 Infant Child and his Mother, standing in the 
 middle of an open door ; and by this simple 
 image a grand and lovely conception of the In- 
 carnation is attained, for it was the out-coming 
 of divine life, the opening between earth and 
 heaven. 
 
 The roof, and the hearth-stone around which 
 the ancients wove the supernatural and sacred 
 guardianship of the Lares are full of innermost 
 and beautiful meanings. All the sanctity of 
 hospitality, faithfulness, charity, filial piety, the 
 love of offspring, cluster around these, and make 
 their very names the signs of all the virtues and 
 powers of household life. The roof that shel- 
 tered you — the hearths of your fathers, are 
 words that touch all loyal natures deeply, and 
 would nerve the weakest arm into strength for 
 their defense. This religion of the household is 
 as old as life ; it begins with the beloved touch 
 of the mother's breast, and ends only with the 
 faithful bosom upon which we die. 
 
 A very natural and lovely symbolism is asso- 
 ciated with the stairway as the communication 
 
SUGGESTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE. 1 95 
 
 t 
 
 between the higher and the lower. Some author 
 writes of the stairs of the unforgetable past, by 
 which we return into old states of sympathy, or 
 gather again into our keeping the treasures of 
 vanished years. And I think some dim under- 
 perception of a meaning — a half-pathetic hint 
 of growth — comes to the most imaginative of 
 us all as we watch some little creature of two 
 years old, climbing slowly with the aid of its 
 dimpled hands from stair to stair. 
 
 There is a .little poem by Browning in which 
 he speaks of our life itself "as the house we in- 
 habit together, " and with fanciful grace describes 
 the seeking of human nature for its full comple- 
 tion, which continually eludes the seeker, al- 
 thouge he range 
 
 "The wide house from the wing to the center." 
 
 Only the vague sense of a presence that has just 
 escaped — the lingering of a perfume — the flut- 
 tering fold of a robe as it disappears — is seen, 
 and even while he importunately explores alcove 
 and corridor, the twilight descends in disappoint- 
 ment and failure. 
 
 The image of a stately palace seized by riot- 
 ous revelers, who sack its noble rooms of their 
 treasures by the fitful light of torches, has been 
 finely used by Poe to depict the state of a dis- 
 eased mind beset with wild fancies. In the di- 
 
I C)5 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 vine word indeed the temple — the house not 
 made with hands, eternal in the heavens — is 
 used to express the spiritual life of man in glory ; 
 as the ruined palaces of the prophecies describe 
 the ruins wrought by evils and falses. There 
 are in truth very few symbols which possess 
 more pathos than the deserted house — the body 
 from which life and thought have gone away, 
 leaving behind them only loneliness, silence and 
 decay. 
 
 Architecture has a close kinship with music 
 — a fact which the Greeks seized with their 
 usual quick perception, and expressed by the 
 story of Amphion's lyre, whose music moved 
 the walls of hundred-gated Thebes, and the 
 rising of Troy into towers at the wild, sweet 
 song of Apollo. When the rolling sounds of 
 the grand mass swell upward, the dome and 
 spreading aisles seem only their crystallization 
 in form, for by some subtle connection music, 
 in its returning spirals and long-flowing curves 
 and ascent, always suggests form. In some dim 
 mental region far down these two arts inter- 
 mingle, and sound floats into vision, and vision 
 breaths of sound in that harmony, which is the 
 soul of each. 
 
SCULPTURE. I97 
 
 • 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SCULPTURE. 
 
 §|3JUT if the cathedral is " frozen music," no 
 W less truly is the statue, silence. We find 
 this expression especially strong in one of the 
 earliest periods of sculpture — in the old land of 
 the Nile, where the grand temples of Luxor 
 and Karnac rose, and where the sphinx keeps 
 watch and ward forever over the desert sands. 
 The Egyptian statue more closely approaches 
 the immobile contour of the stone than the un- 
 resting life in whose image it is carved. Always 
 of great size, and at times — as in Memnon — 
 grandly tranquil and beautiful in expression, the 
 figure seems to sit as one of a mighty conclave 
 of alien Gods, wholly disregardful of the little 
 Earth on which he deigns to rest. The attitude 
 is unvarying; behind rises a pilaster inscribed 
 with hieroglyphic characters, the head looks 
 straight forward, the lower limbs are perpen- 
 
I98 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 dicular and apart, the arms are close to the side, 
 and on either knee rests an open hand. Life 
 is not upon the face — nor even death, which 
 implys a life that has existed — but rather the 
 lifelessness of still mountains, the waiting of the 
 dumb earth, the deification of a material and 
 inanimate nature. We feel their strange power 
 with awe-stricken wonder, but there is no delight 
 or tenderness in our gaze. 
 
 In strong contrast with this fixed imagery is 
 the Greek world of sculpture, where every 
 theme is full of vigor, movement, life, yet, here 
 too is the pause, the silence ; it is movement 
 that is arrested, it is life that is hushed. You 
 find among the Greek statues wrestlers and 
 gladiators, athletic and upright youths preparing 
 for exercise — the wild revelries of Centaurs and 
 Bacchantes — Fauns, who blow on their pipes, 
 or talking amicably with nymphs and men — 
 a charming little Faun, who stoops down to 
 draw a thorn from his foot — a drunken Silenus, 
 who reels as he walks — Hercules as the strong 
 hero with his club and the skin of a wild beast 
 fastened around his neck by the claws. Here 
 too are the Gods ; the arch and child-like figure 
 of the young Mercury — the loves of Cupid and 
 Pscyhe — Ganymede and Jove's eagle. You see 
 Venus crouching down as one who stoops to 
 conquer, the Venus Victrix, queenly, triumphant, 
 
SCULPTURE. I99 
 
 beautiful with all the charms of earthly beauty, 
 but always self-centred, self-regarding, always 
 with a calm scorn upon her lovely lips. There 
 are gentler themes than this ; there is Hebe, 
 bearing the cup of the Gods with light step and 
 swift grace ; there are the child-like and sportive 
 Cupids, who ride on the backs of the lion and 
 centaur, and playfully compel the fierce lioness 
 to drink. Above all, Apollo is pre-eminent, 
 not the inspirer of vision and prophecy, but the 
 immortally strong and beautiful youth, full of 
 nerve and fire, the fullest embodiment of the 
 Hellenic ideal. He is represented in many 
 forms ; Apollo Saurocthonus, slaying the lizard; 
 Apollo Belvidere, who discharges his dart at the 
 foe; the young Apollo, playing upon his pipe 
 by the teaching of the old God, Pan ; Apollo, 
 resting one arm carelessly about the neck of 
 the fiery and unruly steed which he subdues to 
 his will; — but always in one mood of proud 
 delight in vitality and power. 
 
 One can almost imagine the fine and subtle 
 smile with which the Greek sculptor chose such 
 subjects for the silent stone. Their freedom, 
 their sense of joyous life, cannot be too highly 
 praised. Mr?. Browning says of some designs 
 in Faience — 
 
 " One might dream the clay 
 
 Retained the larvae of the flowers, 
 They hud so round,- the cup, the old Spring way." 
 
200 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 So you feel as if the image had started up spon- 
 taneously from the marble, as if the ductile 
 metal had naturally assumed these lovely forms. 
 For you find the same spirit of active life breath- 
 ing even in the lesser decorations of armor, and 
 of the vases, on which long lines of worshippers 
 move, dancing, bearing ears of corn and fruits, 
 and playing on the flute in honor of Ceres and 
 Bacchus. Homer, in his description of the shield 
 of Achilles, speaks of the "whirling dancers," 
 the nuptial pomp, the torch-bearers, " the 
 rank on rank that backward falls." Every 
 form suggests hurrying footsteps, sound and 
 revelry. 
 
 And yet when the distinct and accurate work 
 of the master is over, these stand without 
 breath — without motion — without desire. Beau- 
 tiful, but still forms — the shadow falls on their 
 patient limbs, the sunshine strikes upon their 
 level brows, storm and lightning, war and civil 
 tumult rage about the sanctuaries of the Gods, 
 and they alone are silent. How strong is the 
 contrast between this immovable art, and the 
 subject it embodies! Mark the strong vigor of 
 the group of the Minotaur, and the torture of 
 Laocoon, who strives to repress a cry, the life in 
 the writhing serpents of the Medusa. All, 
 though they be very Gods and heroes in the 
 eyes of the worshippers, stop, stand transfixed 
 
SCULPTURE. 20 1 
 
 I 
 
 forever by the bold hand of the artist. Venus, 
 with all her beguiling grace of swelling breasts 
 and clinging arms, is cold and still ; the winged 
 Mercury, a-tip-toe, with the wreathed caduceus 
 in his hand, must pause, though his message be 
 from Olympus, and hushed is the indignant 
 wrath of Apollo. The audacious sense of 
 power, the keen satire, which underlie the tran- 
 quillity of the Greek mind, and its unbroken 
 symmetry of purpose, show themselves most 
 strongly in this art, which is the culmination of 
 Hellenic grace. 
 
 There is reverence and a noble conception in 
 some of these Greek forms, especially in the 
 works of Phidias, in the statues of the great 
 Zeus, of Pallas Athene. Theseus is a manly 
 and heroic figure ; Hercules is wonderful in his 
 great strength and melancholy ; the fragment of 
 the Psyche, and the Diana of the Louvre have 
 an exquisite virginity of expression. But the 
 prevailing mood of Greek sculpture is neither 
 reverent nor noble. There were vices which 
 debased Greek civilization, there was no strong 
 moral purpose in their religion, none of the ten- 
 derness and sorrow of pity. Their highest ap- 
 prehensions only grasp human wisdom and 
 power and color ; they have no conception of a 
 spiritual life or of a divine character. Their 
 Apollo is base, who turns with bitter words and 
 
 iS 
 
202 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 rapid footsteps away from the enemy whom his 
 arrow has pierced. 
 
 "The true Gods sigh for the cost and the pain — 
 For the reed that grows never more again 
 Asa reed with the reeds in the river."'* 
 
 But these are haughty, cruel, hard; their ''fair 
 calm faces" look unmoved on the sufferings of 
 the human race. As Herodotus mournfully 
 says, the most characteristic trait of the Gods 
 seems to be their jealousy of human happiness, 
 or attainment. 
 
 So Greek art at its best spoke to the people 
 only of humanity and earthly life, gave them 
 strong men rejoicing in their pride and vigor, 
 young girls and glad children, such forms as 
 they might see in Doric Sparta, or Ionic Athens. 
 You may find such faces and looks now in the 
 procession of the Parthenon, the relievo which 
 extends along the frize of the calla for more 
 than iooo feet. Here you meet all Athens 
 hurrying to the^ celebration of the Panathenean 
 festival. You are transported into the midst of 
 the innumerable multitude which advances in 
 two parallel columns along the flanks of the 
 calla. You are jostled as it were, by the crowd, 
 
 *Mrs. Browning's poem of "A Musical Instrument," con- 
 taining the story of the God Pan, and his making the musi- 
 cal pipe from the broken reed. 
 
t SCULPTURE. 203 
 
 by priests and victims, by virgins, by young men 
 and old, on foot, on horseback and in chariots. 
 You look to the east entrance, for there are the 
 principal actors ; or glance behind you to the 
 rear, and see various parties, moving to the 
 right hand or to the left to fall into the ranks of 
 the long procession. 
 
 Where will you see such rapidity of line, such 
 grace of contour, such brightness of design, as 
 this art affords you ? Despite its grave wants, 
 — wants which underlie all the dark places of 
 Greek life and mythology — it has undying 
 charms of outward beauty. It does not satisfy, 
 but it allures, it does not rest, but it excites, it 
 quickens your powers into new activity. It does 
 not give you the highest life, but opens to you 
 the beauty of the lower in all its richness and 
 fullness. It is no wonder then that it has taken 
 such strong hold upon the minds of men ; that 
 Flaxman and Canova were so inspired by this 
 wonderful antique grace, that the Greek bas- 
 relief filled Nicolo Pisano with such rapture, 
 that Thorwaldsen of far-off Copenhagen de- 
 clares that he was born when he first saw 
 Rome, — "before then," he says, "I did not 
 exist," — that even Michael Angelo learned of 
 the Torso. 
 
 But the antique and modern worlds lie far 
 apart. In the sculpture of christian civilization 
 
204 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 spirit rises above form ; and it is in the expres- 
 sion of the face especially, the new life and 
 meaning of the features, that christian art excels. 
 Here again the difference between Greek and 
 Christian thought re-appears. Modern art is 
 distinct from the old, it belongs to a new world 
 and is under new laws. In reaching after higher 
 ideals than the Greek sought, it often disregards 
 the ends which he attained and believed pre- 
 eminent. The Greek never forgets the out- 
 ward and visible form of the myth; nor the 
 Christian its inner and vital meaning. Sun, 
 moon and sea — art and wisdom and love, — 
 nature and spirit are portrayed by the antique 
 mind as persons; modern thought, using the 
 same personal outlines, transforms them again 
 into spirit and fulness of meaning. The thought 
 of the one is concrete, symmetrical, but limited ; 
 of the other, unequal, sometimes harsh in its 
 very passion and strength, but always partaking 
 of the nature of the infinite. The Greek art is 
 the incarnation of all ideas of beauty and grace 
 in form ; the Christian is the resurrection of the 
 living soul of meaning out of visible line and 
 substance. The Greek Aphrodite was a beau- 
 tiful woman ; the Venus of later conceptions is 
 the mythic spirit of beauty. The younger 
 Shadoff's Filatrice is not, as the Greek artist 
 would have carved her, simply a lovely girl who 
 
SCULPTURE. 205 
 
 is spinning ; it is rather the image of womanhood 
 with her quiet and dreamy work and household 
 life. 
 
 Thorwaldsen, the Dane, is steeped to the lips 
 in all thoughts and forms of antique art, but his 
 figures of night and morning are carved poems, 
 full of meanings, too tender and loving to be- 
 long to any people save those who have heard 
 that the Lord Christ called the little children 
 unto Him and blessed them. 
 
 The Lion of Thorwaldsen — erected to the 
 memory of the Swiss Guard — is not only a 
 noble creature in the pangs of death, but a sign 
 of mighty fidelity, of loyalty that is undying. 
 In the drooping head you behold the renuncia- 
 tion of a noble nature which will not defile itself 
 with loud cries, which, though touched by infi- 
 nite pains from the pathetic death-stupour that 
 creeps upon him, remains ever reticent, unde- 
 based, royal. 
 
 Although you cannot perhaps define the dif- 
 ference to yourself in words, yet you always feel 
 how unlike are the impulses and influences of 
 the two arts. The Greek art delights, the Chris- 
 tian art exalts. Before the Apollo Belvidere, it 
 is said that one involuntarily draws a freer 
 breath, and lifts himself to his full height ; but 
 when you enter into the presence of Angelo's 
 work — if you see there what the master con- 
 
206 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 ceived — your spirit bows within you, you forget 
 that you are. Its greatness dwarfs all outer 
 fairness, and you behold it with the vision of 
 the spirit rather than the eyes of the flesh. The 
 mighty and prophetic fragment of the Brutus, 
 the grand and incomplete figures of Night and 
 Day, Twilight and Dawn, Moses, the incarnated 
 law, with the unearthly horns, symbolic of 
 power, upon his awful brow, are thoughts which 
 could only have been born in the uplifted isola- 
 tion and stillness of that great soul, which 
 "soared to seek ideal form" above all worldly 
 ambitions and phantasies. His Pieta, or the 
 Virgin with the dead Saviour, passes the bounds 
 of human emotion, — as there is a point at which 
 the dying shed no tears, so this is beyond all 
 pathos — it is death which has put on immor- 
 tality. 
 
 You hear amid all the conceptions and ima- 
 gery of sculpture, the faint, slow minor of the 
 thought of death. This is necessarily so, from 
 the cold, white, rigid stone in which the idea is 
 wrought, and the unmoving silence of the iso- 
 lated group, or figure. We are accustomed to 
 associate the absence of vital color, and the de- 
 tachment from all back-ground or accessories, — 
 the being cut off, as it were from all other forms 
 — very closely with the cessation of life. But 
 here there is again an immeasurable growth in 
 
 c 
 
SCULPTURE. 207 
 
 the christian thought. We have left behind us 
 Acheron and Cocytus, the river of fire, the dark 
 Lethe, which rolled their sullen waves through 
 Erebus, or the vague shadows of the more 
 peaceful Elysium. Homer's awful vision of the 
 ghosts which crowd down to the brink of the 
 river of blood, of which they must drink ere 
 they speak with a human being, is no longer 
 possible ; and even the gentler images of the 
 later phrase of Hellenic thought are past. The 
 sleep, the broken flowers, the extinguished 
 flame of the inverted torch, do not tell us all. 
 The child, in Charles Dickens' beautiful story, 
 who goes up on the high roof, far above the 
 working and the crying of the people in the 
 close dark streets, and sees the clouds rushing 
 on overhead, and the golden arrows pointing at 
 the mountains in the sky from which the wind 
 comes, feels it as an expression of the final 
 change — -a sign of what this may bring to the 
 hurt, maimed and unlovely lives which the 
 Greek thought so carelessly thrusts out of sight 
 and hope. 
 
 All growth is indeed through perpetual pro- 
 cesses of death, which at last merge themselves 
 in life. This rising out of the hard crust or shell, 
 this casting off the useless slough of worn out 
 matter, is an inherent element of vitality, the 
 fuel of death which feeds the burning flame. 
 
208 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 The ear of corn, says the parable, could not put 
 forth its blade and harvest, except first it die, 
 for the very thought of development contains 
 an idea of something that is left behind — that is 
 put aside. The very introduction of the chris- 
 tian faith among the proud, willful, insouciant 
 lives of the Pagan world, was like a perpetual 
 dying, through which the soul grew with pangs 
 that seemed to rend it in twain. But after the 
 hard renunciation and humility and pain came 
 at last the new life of peace. 
 
 In all nature, in all human lives, under some 
 form or other, we find this thought of death 
 which sculpture expresses. It is in the cold 
 silence of winter when the earth rests — swathed, 
 and bound hand and foot like Lazarus in his 
 cerements — while the flakes drift white and fast 
 over the moor and pleasance, "lying equal 
 in one snow." It is seen in the gradual dying 
 of old age, when the man and woman fold their 
 hands at last in still patience, and humbly wait- 
 ing, behold at last the boundaries of the earth 
 touch the heavens, that used to seem so far. It 
 is a great consecration, it lifts up our best loved 
 out of all reach of injury, of change or falsehood. 
 And within the center of each household life 
 lies the remembrance of some little child which 
 has been taken away in the innocence of its 
 early morning. About that affection cling the 
 
SCULPTURE. 209 
 
 innermost conceptions of human peace and ten- 
 derness and undefiled truth. If we have done 
 wrong, if we have judged any harshly, if we 
 have disquieted our day with restless ambitions, 
 we have only to return into the presence of that 
 stainless memory ; — there we believe and love, 
 there we are sorry — thinking of the fair dead 
 child, tears wash all our stains out of sight, and 
 we humbly pray that we may be kept back 
 from the sins which would bar us from the sight 
 of its face in Paradise. 
 
2IO IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PICTURES, AND THE PAINTER. 
 
 vT^LL things hold a picture for eyes that have 
 ( ^s the power to see. The merest chance, or 
 incident, — the light that falls on a young girl's 
 head framed in by the dark — an opening between 
 thick oak-boughs — two beggars who eat their 
 noon-day meal by the roadside-anything suffices 
 to reveal it. 
 
 For no one ever makes a picture, or a poem. 
 The symmetry and beauty are there, and our 
 part is only to train the eyes to see and the ears 
 to hear, and the hands to reproduce the vision 
 and the word. The great central wisdom within 
 all — the Divine Mind — quickens the thoughts 
 of humanity, working by faint perceptions, by 
 clearer apprehensions, or glowing visions, accor- 
 ding to the degree of its reception. It is the 
 same in different ages, and in different races — as 
 we see in the conceptions of Joseph — Hector — 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 211 
 
 and King Arthur — lest man should dare to say 
 that it grew with his growth. Man attains to a 
 nearer brightness, and falls away, like his own 
 earth ; but the Infinite Sun shines on, vivifying 
 all, bringing forth form and color from the dark, 
 arranging all in order. The artist and philoso- 
 pher do not originate at their will ; they can but 
 study their themes, bring together their mate- 
 rials, and wait ; and suddenly out of the brood- 
 ing shadow leaps a conception, beautiful and 
 strong. The inspiration comes in many ways to 
 many minds ; to some a grand thought, a pic- 
 ture, a statue, a dome, a symphony — to others, 
 not the least noble, a just act, a strong faith, an 
 ardent love — a life. 
 
 But none who attain, ever dream that it is of 
 themselves ; they know it as inspiration, a re- 
 vealed glory. There is a ' ' power that worketh 
 in us to will and to do," as is testified by the 
 vivid experience of all brave and pure lives. 
 Artists and thinkers wait for the moment and 
 the mood — the moving of the spirit — the afflatus. 
 Beethoven wrote from the harmonies within ; 
 when Haydn heard his wonderful passage in the 
 1 ' Creation " — And there was light — rendered for 
 the last time, he lifted up his tremulous hand, 
 and exclaimed, "It comes from Heaven." 
 
 But all of us, whether great or small, have 
 known some moments of light and perception. 
 
212 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 The chief difference between the Artist and 
 the common man is, that one obtains whole and 
 symmetrical compositions, while the other sees 
 only in parts and fragments. There are few 
 who do not perceive glimpses of the pictures 
 which we, and all things about us, continually 
 form, but this power of vision is so transient, so 
 partial, that we need the intuition of the true 
 artist, he, to whom every face is a study, because 
 he can go back of the common lineaments, and 
 penetrating into mood after mood, into likeness 
 after likeness, find the real man — see the whole 
 Life with its divinest centre. 
 
 " Look long enough 
 On any peasant's face here, coarse and lined, 
 You'll catch Antinous somewhere in that day, 
 
 * * * Then persist, 
 
 And if your apprehensions competent, 
 You'll find some fairer Angel at his back, 
 As much exceeding him as he the boor." 
 
 /- 
 
 We sit, as it were, in our own dark of com- 
 mon and unbeautiful things, until- other hands 
 L strike a light, and the whole place starts up 
 before us into right proportion and semblance. 
 Yet these were always there. 
 
 Millet, the peasant painter of Normandy, is a 
 noble instance of this faculty of vision in a 
 strong and true artistic nature. He gives you 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 213 
 
 • 
 
 simple and homely figures, — Shearers with their 
 sheep — a sower, who sows his seed — two 
 laborers praying in a tilled field, — and his land- 
 scapes are a fitting background for such as these. 
 The trees that he paints, struggle with a sharp 
 wind, and his land is furrowed and cut through 
 by the ploughshare. But what noble simplicity, 
 what dignity and patience, what unconscious 
 pathos, he reveals to us in this silent daily life 
 of the worker! He opens to us the deep and 
 steadfast forces that move beneath the surface 
 of governments, arts, and creeds, and sustain 
 them. 
 
 The true artist does not wait for striking 
 situations, unusual effects of light and shade, for 
 he knows that Art is cognizant of the small 
 as well as the great, that he need only open 
 his eyes to behold what she delights in and 
 seeks. 
 
 Study Albrecht Diirer's sketches, -his sketches 
 rather than his completed paintings, — because 
 in them you may see more fully the spontaneous 
 movement in work and play of the artistic spirit. 
 Among the Diirer designs of Angels, Holy 
 Families, noble and beautiful heads, come the 
 following : 
 
 Nos. 79, 82. Water-color sketches of flasks 
 and fountains. 
 
 No. '72. A bird's wing, carefully finished. 
 
214 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 No. 166. A study of sandstone rocks, — 6 
 inches by 8 — with minute details. 
 
 Nos. 149, 165. A cock's head, two sturgeons 
 in color, a delicate pen and ink sketch of an old 
 tree-trunk. 
 
 No. 168. A study of three carrots and a 
 bulrush, faithfully delineated. (Print-room of 
 the British Museum.) 
 
 He finds worthy subject in every form of life, 
 in plant or animal, in every human gesture or 
 motion. His No. 180 is only a crayon drawing 
 of two hands clasped, but it tells a story of loyal 
 faith and rest. He sees always, — as the true 
 artist should — what is behind and within. If 
 he had not, do you not think he would have 
 wearied in painting No. 6 in water-color with 
 such minute care and patience ? It is only a 
 dead bird, but the shades, tints and colors are 
 rendered with finest truthfulness ; even the slight 
 ruffling of the feathers on the throat is given, 
 while you can almost feel the smoothness of the 
 breast. And the life of the bird, — its free spirit 
 and wild haunts are suggested, — else no finish 
 or technical skill, would constitute him a great 
 Artist. 
 
 At first, it is simply such a reproduction of 
 single objects, or of one object after another, 
 with associated ideas, which was attempted 
 either in the early stages of art, or in the begin- 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 215 
 
 ning of the individual artist's career. After- 
 wards we have groups, more elaborate compo- 
 sitions which require new laws — of form, 
 balance, harmony. In the early Italian paint- 
 ings the precise following of these gives an 
 altogether quaint stiffness to the orderly arrange- 
 ment. Some of these artists delighted in ranks 
 and companies, like Bunyan's "shining ones" 
 whom he saw by the river. The balance is 
 evenly adjusted, as in Perugino's Virgin in the 
 National Gallery, with the Angel Michael on 
 the one side, and Raphael on the other. The 
 form terminates in a kind of apex, the central 
 point of interest, the culmination of all, as in 
 Michael Angelo's wierd Atropos, with a Fate 
 on the right and on the left hand. Or Leon- 
 ardo Da Vinci's Last Supper, with the six and 
 six disciples, and the Lord himself as Head 
 of all in Raphael's heavenly Transfiguration. 
 Judgment days, with divided throngs of good 
 and evil, a divine person between angels and 
 men, such were the favorite themes of this 
 school. Opposing forces, with a central point 
 of victory, or loss — there is the dramatic spirit 
 with its antagonism and crisis ! Opposition of 
 light and shadow — of curvature and straightness 
 — of differing tones of color, with a chief figure, 
 or light, which decides all. Do you not see 
 that this art also is part of our life, and more 
 
2l6 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 than accurate drawing and vivid color— that 
 these too mean somewhat of us — and that there- 
 fore the artist gives up himself for his art ? 
 
 Vivid color, — I pause here almost with low- 
 ered breath, it seems so hard to place before 
 you — having only the interpretation of words 
 in black and white — what this is and means. 
 So hard to tell you anything when others have 
 said so much, and when the words of the great- 
 est fail so utterly by the rich gold and velvety 
 purple leaves of the heart's ease under our feet, 
 or the flash of a white sail on the distant sea ! 
 But one thing you must mark, that colors are 
 not in nature, and so not in high art, ever 
 given without discrimination and equilibrium, 
 without what Jean Corot so faithfully studied 
 and depicted in his scenes from the woods around 
 Ville d'Avray — their true values and relations. 
 Black we may leave out entirely, for as Ruskin 
 tells us, all shadows are colored ; and then our 
 opposing tones, or perhaps more truly equations, 
 are of the red and gray colors ; these suggestive 
 of ardor and movement and flame, the others 
 of coolness, freshness, repose ; these grouping 
 themselves in scarlets, and crimsons and violets 
 and golden bronze, the others in silvery white 
 lights, and azure, green and bluish purples. 
 These octaves of color run through our world ; 
 as for instance our beechwoods in autumn, 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 217 
 
 bronze at noon and shaded into purple at twi- 
 light, or our maples, with one member of the 
 group placed over against the other in the con- 
 trast of their gold and scarlet leaves. 
 
 I saw this principle very beautifully illustrated 
 during a visit to Dayton, Ohio, in October. 
 Dayton is a cool, gray looking town, spotlessly 
 clean, with wide side-walks, edged with beauti- 
 fully colored maple trees, and handsome houses 
 built with fronts of the white Dayton marble, 
 and tapestried from balcony to column by hang- 
 ing masses of scarlet-leaved vines. There is in- 
 deed a secret affinity, a kinship between colors, 
 which delights us when brought together in re- 
 ciprocal interchange and influence. This is the 
 secret of the beauty of the blended mosaic, or 
 the perfect setting of rare gems. Instinctively 
 the artist will light up some heavy and dark 
 drapery with a gleam or border of lighter, but 
 still correlative color. There is also a certain 
 equation which exists between shadows, as well 
 as more distinct colors. On the one side are the 
 brown shadows, deep and rich and dark, which 
 we see under rocks or in close, thick set woods ; 
 and on the other the hazy, indistinct, mysteri- 
 ous grays, the effects of fogs and mists and va- 
 por on low lands, or along winding river-shores. 
 
 Colors however, are greatly affected by the 
 various media through which we see them. 
 
 *9 
 
2l8 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 So far I have spoken only of the solid and dis- 
 tinct earth-colors, which are in a measure per- 
 manent and within our reach. But there are 
 also the translucent water-tints of landscapes, 
 reflected from surrounding shores or islands, 
 which the lake and the river hold within their 
 hearts. You know how different is the verdure 
 of the one from the wavering, ineffable verdure 
 of the other, with the shimmering veil of moving 
 waters drawn between. There are also the in- 
 tense changing, rapturous colors of the skies, 
 with clouds that grow like the walls of the New 
 Jerusalem, under the sunset glow and flame, 
 when the colors of our lower life seem to wake 
 up again, — " secure, inviolate, kindled, living, 
 in the great resurrection of the watching 
 heavens." 
 
 Besides these, there are the colors which be- 
 long only to the powers of the air ; the ghostly 
 white light of the moon's rays on long stretches 
 of ice ; the pale, flickering, dying blue of light- 
 ning ; the brooding and revengeful red light of 
 a destroying fire. 
 
 There are also certain associations which effect 
 our perception of color, and therefore to some 
 extent the varieties of color used in depicting 
 an event, or grouped around a leading figure. 
 They must share the general tone of thought or 
 passion, or the impression will not be one of 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 2 I 9 
 
 harmony. Red means t>lood to the criminal, 
 but a blush to the lover, and a change in the 
 ruling emotion at once sets both color and form 
 in a different key. The soft, pliant tree-boughs 
 under which the two lovers ride in Dore's illus- 
 trations to- the "Idyls of the King" are totally 
 unlike the drenched and tormented limbs of the 
 woods in the same artists delineations of Dante's 
 strange worlds. Contrast the colors in Turner's 
 11 Burning of the Slave Ship," and in his "Do- 
 ver Cliffs." In the one they are full of passion 
 and pain, in the other of peace. 
 
 You see then that color and form cannot be 
 separated from the spirit and life of a picture — 
 or we learn as little as we should by parting the 
 thought of a poem from its grammatical con- 
 struction and measure, and retaining only the 
 latter. It is well to understand these, and the 
 different dialects which the Artist uses — speak- 
 ing sometimes by spaces of light and shade, as 
 in mezzotinting, sometimes only by lines, as did 
 the four great etchers, Vandyke, Rembrandt, 
 Ostade and Claude, or if he chooses rather the 
 richer and fuller language of color, working 
 either in water-colors, or oils, on glass or can- 
 vass, or plaster, as in the grand frescoes of 
 Angelo. For each of these means something, 
 and with every translation the design assumes a 
 new attitude, new relations, and groups its colors 
 
220 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 afresh. But this meaning is the real and essen- 
 tial Art, and above its technique. ''The melan- 
 choly of the unreturning river" — the tranquillity 
 of green hills, lying fold on fold, — the simplicity 
 of little breaks of the netted stream 
 
 " Which with its own self, like an infant plays," 
 
 are more than their accurate likeness and form. 
 
 For, as you know that no delineation with 
 Pre-Raphaelite fidelity, of skin, hair, lineaments 
 and wrinkles will form a portrait of a man, un- 
 less there is given also the " incessant presence " 
 of the soul, — so you must show the life of a 
 landscape, or a city, — the spirit which fills its 
 curves and colors, or you are no artist. You 
 must feel these as you look, or else it will be 
 more manly and honest to go with avowed pre- 
 ference to your wharves and storehouses and 
 acres, if you understand the busy, active life of 
 these. For Art is here, is indeed everywhere, 
 only one should not falsely force himself into 
 the presence of any one alien form of it. If 
 you honestly delight in any glimpse of \the ideal 
 or spiritual, vouchsafed you anywhere, the 
 faculty of vision will grow. 
 
 I wish especially to make you remark the 
 childlike conceptions of Art, that you may see 
 how truly it belongs to our life, — how far it is 
 from beino- the distant and cold culture which 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 221 
 
 | 
 
 some imagine it. With the Artists who lived 
 under the shelter of the Catholic Church in 
 Rome, Florence and Milan, you feel as if you 
 had entered among grown-up children, rather 
 than adult men. Naturally so, perhaps you 
 will think since they painted according to the 
 legends of the peasant worshippers and the 
 thoughts of men shut out and cloistered from 
 the atmosphere of the world. But this same 
 child-likeness is found in the arts of other 
 nations. It begins among the Greeks. As a 
 child says, — There is such a person, we know 
 him by his mark, — so they, with their Gods, — 
 Diana and the fawn, — Juno and her peacock, — 
 Jove and his eagle. So too do these who come 
 afterwards ; there is St. Agnes, we know her by 
 the lamb, — St. Sebastian, by the cruel arrows, 
 — and that is Our Lady of the mountain hamlet, 
 for has not the artist, a native of this place, like- 
 wise painted right cunningly into the picture the 
 wild wood strawberries? For we dedicate to 
 Divine service all, our lowest herbs, our fairest 
 places. Then look at the occupations, the atti- 
 tudes, the faces of these ! In Albrecht Diirer's 
 design of the Virgin with the child at the breast, 
 the two cherubs play with her mantle, — some- 
 times they sport with kittens and rabbits ; in 
 Cimabue's sad Madonna of the Borgo Alegri, 
 the mother, unmindful of adoring angels, gazes 
 
222 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 intently on the infant upon her knee as any 
 young Tuscan peasant with her babe; the Child 
 Jesus, in Raphael's early design, is with his little 
 playmate, St. John. Could you have simpler, 
 more child-like ideas than these ? 
 
 Fra Angelico's Angel with the trumpet, — an 
 altar piece — delights himself in the sound as he 
 floats through the air. The Psyche, with the 
 butterfly poised on her outstretched arm — is not 
 that the wonder of the child at the chrysalis ? 
 Only we have learned its meaning. Often a 
 childish remembrance or imagination will unlock 
 for us many a dark saying and symbol. The 
 old Northern proverb of the slow grinding of 
 the mills of the Gods, — the wheel of Michael 
 Angelo's wild Fortune, scattering crowns, — 
 distoff and wheel of the three grim, fixed Fates, 
 — the wheels within wheels, running swiftly, of 
 the Hebraic vision, — you best understand these 
 by returning into the days of your childhood. 
 Do you not recollect the terror, the shrinking 
 back, when your Nurse carried you down to the 
 old mill, and you saw with awed fascination the 
 rush, like a driven thing, of the waters into the 
 deep, dark places underneath, — and the great, 
 black wheel, — inexorably turning, and grinding 
 out the grain ? So impossible to change or stop, 
 — so great and strong and dark, — it became to 
 the dilated, frightened eyes of the child, hence- 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 22 3 
 
 forth a sign and symbol of immutable, inexora- 
 ble Force. The conceptions of adult humanity 
 rarely endure ; but the symbols which the 
 nations take up, and Art makes fast, are invari- 
 ably the thoughts of the child. See for instance 
 how differently the two types of mind deal with 
 personality. To his acquaintances a man is too 
 often only a Burgomaster, a Violin-player, a 
 Money-changer, a sign of his office or his work ; 
 but to the artist and the child he is more, — the 
 man with the sphere of individual life and love 
 and moods and distates and desires, ever about 
 him, blindly but instinctively perceived, like an 
 odour, — he is a wonder, a mystery, a power. 
 Study Rembrandt's portraits in etching of Jan 
 Six, the Burgomaster of Amsterdam, Uyten- 
 bogaert, the Gold-weigher, and Raphael's Violin- 
 player, a portrait of himself, and you will under- 
 stand what I mean. The busy, active work, 
 the dreamy music, are the bases, but far above 
 these arises the impalpable Life of each. The 
 utmost growth man can attain is spiral, back 
 towards the thoughts, — the enlarged, compre- 
 hended, and fully realized thoughts of his child- 
 hood, which are the deepest and the fairest he 
 will ever come to know. Botticellis' Paradise is 
 a true image, — for the little children are ever 
 nearest the Throne and the Light, — farther off 
 are the old and great in earthly honors. 
 
Ir 
 
 224 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 Because of this very spirit of innocence there 
 is among all the artists of whom we read no 
 life more ideal or beautiful than that of Fra 
 Angelico, of San Marco. Many were greater 
 artists: Michael Angelo, unutterably sad and 
 alone, whose work was "a segment of an infin- 
 ite art;" Raphael and Di Vinci, Titian, Tin- 
 toret, Giorgione, Veronese, with wonderful 
 gifts of colors, brought from dreamy Venice, 
 whose billowy streets flow everywhere, where 
 you hear the tinkling of bells, and your sight is 
 confused by its burning and vivid hues, and the 
 golden sunshine glowing on rich facades of old 
 palaces, all these were surely greater in art, but 
 his life was a fair ideal, purely and beautifully 
 realized. His days were childlike, rounded, 
 joyous ; and it is good to rest and look awhile 
 upon such green pastures and still waters in the 
 midst of an evil age. His uneventful life was 
 located in the City of Flowers, through which 
 glances the ' ' arrowy undertide of golden Arno, " 
 and he was sheltered by the simple routine of 
 the convent from any outside cares or uncon- 
 genial labor. So his pictures bear little impress 
 of the world of secular thought ; the face of 
 his St. Dominic — the Inquisitor and teacher of 
 doctrine — is filled only with ecstasy under this 
 mild hand ; his angels are like the infant mar- 
 tyrs, who before the heavenly altar — 
 
 " Day with the palm and crown," 
 
PICTURES AND THE PAINTER. 225 
 
 and Our Lord enters the guest-chamber as a 
 golden-haired, beautiful youth. 
 
 One chief beauty of his work was that his art 
 lighted the working-room, the refectory, the 
 cells in which the brotherhood slept, with its 
 images; — for beauty is meant to feed and restore 
 our life. Our days should not be bare of orna- \^ 
 ment, but like texts from the Word, illuminated 
 with gold and crimson traceries, or church win- £ 
 dows, whose rich and rare colors the sunlight 
 throws 'Mike a libation" on the rude paving 
 stones beneath. 
 
 20 
 
226 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 
 
 M?HERE is a fine gradation in our growth. In 
 £ji the dim, sweet days of childhood, Life 
 seems like the musing organist, who beginning 
 
 " Doubtfully and far away, 
 First lets his fingers wander as they list.' 
 
 Sudden impulses stir our blood, bright thoughts 
 come and go, contradictory natures reveal them- 
 selves strangely at variance, and we discern no 
 complete theme. But as years roll on, we hear 
 the thrilling andante movements, the strong 
 chords of will, the swift and flying notes of de- 
 light, and the long fuque of continuous purpose, 
 and know they blend into accord. 
 
 Without haste — with rests and pauses and 
 changing measures — the music of life beats on ; 
 and the art of music is antiphonal to this, and 
 
THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 227 
 
 t 
 
 interprets its melodies. The whole of human 
 life has been shattered from its unity, and lies 
 rent and fragmentary, — deep in the dust and 
 dark," but with sudden perceptions of color and 
 clearness ; — dead, but with faint stirrings of 
 possible birth and life. Thence are all the dis- 
 contents and yearnings with which our days are 
 pierced, and of which music is the longing and 
 pathetic voice. 
 
 The very key-note of the art is struck in sor- 
 row. It does not eliminate from its ideal either 
 struggle or temptation, or even the meagreness, 
 which is one of the hardest pains of life, but 
 takes all these into its very nature, and shows 
 the uses of suffering. It is true that at times 
 the soul springs up from the darkness and pain 
 that flow on forever on this earth, and we have 
 such music as Mendelssohn's Spring-songs, the 
 exultation of the chorus, — singing in Haydn's 
 Creations, or the uncontrollable joy of Beetho- 
 ven's Scherzo movements, but these are only the 
 faint breathing of awakening morning airs in 
 comparison with the mighty wind, "largo e 
 mesto," of passion and sorrow. Oratorio, Sym- 
 phony, Sonata, Motet and Nocturne utter the 
 same language, and even the dance-music has 
 somewhat of pathos and regret. All the songs 
 of the people, negro melodies, "Volksleider, " 
 Scotch airs, are wistful, interrogatory, plaintive. 
 
228 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 The epic compositions of Bach and Beethoven, 
 the lyric thoughts of Weber and Schubert and 
 Schumann, the weird, analytic music of Chopin 
 have alike a nameless burden of unrest. 
 
 But the highest music does not utter unre- 
 lieved sadness, it lifts up the soul, and cleanses 
 it from low desires, breathing into it the breath 
 of its own infinite and eternal life. The deep 
 and tender regret, which such music as Beetho- 
 ven's lovely Kreutzer or Moonlight Sonatas 
 awaken, is never hopeless or quiescent. The 
 soul, thrilling through every quickened fibre 
 with their celestial sweetness, knows as if by 
 vision, what may yet be possible — the arising of 
 the angelic nature which now sleeps — and fore- 
 tells through every pang of deathly pain, the 
 last "fine rapture of a spirit delivered from 
 bondage." Our days may be commonplace 
 and narrow, our work and surroundings of the 
 earth, earthly, but when we hear a grand har- 
 mony, straightway all is changed. The spirit 
 casts aside those things which are behind, press- 
 ing forward to those that are before — all the 
 incompleteness of the finite life longing for and 
 rejoicing in the fuller and more beautiful com- 
 pleteness, born of temptation and combat, for 
 which we know no higher name than Peace. 
 
 We learn the outer form, the science, the art, 
 of music, and beyond all these is still an inner- 
 
THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 229 
 
 most thought, a revelation to the few souls who 
 wait and listen. Do you not recognize in the 
 grand Eroica symphony that there is a point at 
 which music grows beyond its place as Art, and 
 reveals itself as passion and life? — as the quiver- 
 ing, eager, passionate aspiration after great deeds 
 and thoughts,— as the invisible and palpable life 
 that stirs in all heroic souls? As Beethoven 
 himself said, "The spirit spake to me, and I 
 wrote." 
 
 You remember - the music which shudders and 
 shivers along the nerves in the diabolical part of 
 Mephistophelesin " Faust," — how it mocks, how 
 it taunts at human pain, how it despairs of heaven ? 
 At the very altar, as Margaret prays in anguish, 
 comes the faint, flickering light in which the old 
 days of innocence start up — "Recollect the days 
 before," and the unearthly notes cause the half- 
 uttered words of supplication to die away. This 
 is the dark agony through which some souls are 
 called to pass in their spiritual descent into 
 Hades. A man has perhaps lived on the surface 
 of life, content with outward forms, satisfied 
 with bodily pleasures, never once lifting his eyes 
 to the grand and silent heavens, which witness 
 against so poor and narrow a life. Suddenly a 
 sharp temptation overcomes him ; he slips and 
 falls. Familiar faces turn away from him, 
 familiar voices grow cold, and delight has gone 
 
23O IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 from his days. In the bitter pain of his dark- 
 ness and woe, his imaginary earth reels to its 
 foundations beneath his uncertain feet, and the 
 false heavens are darkened over him. For the 
 first time he looks upon the face of his own 
 spirit, and sees himself naked and blind and 
 miserable. 
 
 But then the theme changes. The angelic 
 melody, at first low and trembling, begins to 
 thrill along the keys in a sweet and quivering 
 prelude, growing ever more distinct, more beau- 
 tiful. Then he looks back upon the old self 
 with pity and wonder, as on one lying asleep or 
 dead. And he knows that only thus could his 
 life-music have been evoked ; for not without 
 sorrow, not without harsh dissonance, can the 
 highest forms of melody ever be fully revealed 
 to us. The sounds of pure and tender harmo- 
 nies are most exquisitely felt against the tones 
 of pain, like the perfect fairness of light shining 
 through shadows. 
 
 There is in music the delicate and subtle 
 quality of sex,: — readily felt, but hard to define. 
 There are songs which are purely womanly, 
 symphonies which are manlike, heroic. Even 
 musical instruments partake of one nature rather 
 than the other. And the violin, above all 
 others in its peculiar flexibility and tenderness, 
 fills the place of a woman's voice in an orchestra. 
 
THE MUSIC OF LIFE. 23 1 
 
 • 
 
 It inspires more love than all other instruments, 
 it has more pathos and individuality. A con- 
 noisseur who possesses a genuine Stradivarices 
 or Guanerius will not allow a profane hand to 
 touch it, and only with reluctance will he allow 
 it to be seen. It is not to the violinist so much 
 as if he played at his own will, but as if there 
 were a soul in the woody fibres which awoke at 
 his touch, and breathed an answer to his 
 thoughts. It is full of its own memories of 
 winds and forests, delicious tones swell suddenly 
 on the enchanted ear, melody seems to float 
 from it as fragrance from an opening rose. 
 Though its owner knows it well, it has no per- 
 ceptible limitations ; there is ever in it an un- 
 known. 
 
 The woman's nature and the violin's are alike 
 vibratory, and indeed all parts on stringed in- 
 struments seem written to express the feminine 
 soul. Listen to those long vibrations and lovely 
 resonances of the quivering strings, — do they 
 not interpret to you the delicate nature of 
 womanhood! It is full of swaying moods and 
 impulses and prone to changes which no reason 
 can solve. At a breath their light goes out, 
 and the spirit walks alone under grey skies, — or 
 again in an instant the air is full of soft spring 
 sunshine, in which flowers unfold their leaves. 
 The moon of dreams full of glamour, shines 
 
232 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 oftenest in their spiritual atmosphere. They 
 hear the sounds of wings, and know not whence 
 they are. 
 
 All songs written in a minor key with its 
 pathetic suggestions and sorrowful cadences are 
 feminine, and this fine element even character- 
 izes certain times and measures. You hear it in 
 the rhyme of the waltz. A friend of mine says 
 that all waltzes are either fairy stories or roman- 
 ces, and the changes of their strains are the 
 alternating voices of the man and woman— the 
 lover and beloved — who plead and softly reproach 
 and reply to one another. Indeed, all dance- 
 music has the element of romance, which is the 
 intermingling of the life of man and woman. 
 Only listen, and you will hear the story, or you 
 will see it, for here again, as in the case of 
 architecture, another art strikes deep under- 
 ground roots into this, and all music has its 
 picture. The waltz is like a summer night in 
 the Southern States, with the winds blowing 
 softly on dark and fragrant gardens, and the far- 
 off noise of waves that beat and beat upon the 
 shore. Through the half-opened windows bars 
 of light stretch out into the dusk, and you catch 
 glimpses of the man and woman as they move; 
 or fragmentary phrases and little snatches of 
 song float out to you. 
 
 The Polonaise of Chopin recalls to you rather 
 a scene at Court, where the tessellated marble 
 
THE* MUSIC OF LIFE. 233 
 
 floors echo faintly with the tread of the stately 
 dancers in the old court dresses of Poland. 
 And when the strange electric Tarantella sounds, 
 you see the white sands glitter and burn in the 
 intense noon, and the little peasants dancing to 
 the feverish and potent sorceries of its music. 
 
 In strange contrast with these is another group 
 of melodies with the tremulous monotone of the 
 spinning-wheel running under them all. These 
 are in gray, neutral tints, with faint lights like 
 those in a November sky before the first fall of 
 snow. A great many composers have delighted 
 in the curiously recurring measure. We have 
 Mendelssohn's Spinnlied, La Tilense; Liszt's love- 
 ly arrangement of Wagner's spinning-wheel song 
 in the Flying Dutchman ; Schubert's Gretchen 
 am Spinnenrade, full of trembling passion and 
 woe; the old Thuringian air of " There was a 
 King in Thule " in Gounod's Faust, and the 
 spinning-wheel quartette in the opera of Martha. 
 
 There seems to be a peculiar charm about these 
 airs with the slow monotonous whirr and click of 
 their measure, and the murmuring undertone of 
 regret. There is an old Scotch ballad which has 
 this refrain, telling of a young girl's quiet life: 
 
 " And aye I turned my spinning-wheel," 
 
 As the wheel turned with the ceaseless hum and 
 purr, a thousand vague fancies came and went 
 21 
 
234 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 in the maiden's heart, in which love had awaken- 
 ed. The yielding of her whole nature to this 
 new emotion is told with quaint terseness and 
 simplicity. 
 
 " I turned no more my spinning-wheel." 
 
 A certain melancholy ring is discernable in all 
 music of this class. It is not the restless fitful 
 despair which "Auld Robin Grey" expresses, 
 
 " I gang like a ghaist, I care na to spin, 
 I dare na think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin," 
 
 It is rather the quiet, but hopeless repetition of 
 a want that has become a part of our nature. 
 
 There are many lives like these airs, especially 
 the lives of women in provincial towns and rural 
 districts. So busied with little unnoticed duties, 
 so colorless of outward excitement and hope, so 
 uneventful year after year, winter and summer, 
 that you do not perceive until their silent pres- 
 ence is gone, the full harmony of such a patient, 
 self-denying, gentle existence. While they are 
 here, their lives seem so level and still that you 
 never suspect the swaying and ebbing of the in- 
 visible tides within, or the blooming of pure 
 , dreams which rough needs perhaps tread daily 
 } underfoot. We see only ' ' the dull, set life, and 
 apathetic days," but they weave themselves at 
 last into sweet, sad dreamy music, full of rests 
 and slow melody. 
 
THJ£ MUSIC OF LIFE. 235 
 
 We would not be so surprised at suffering, 
 says Ballanche, if we knew how much better 
 sorrow was adapted to our nature than pleasure. 
 
 But as you cannot thoroughly understand any 
 class of musical compositions unless you under- 
 stand what part of life it expresses, so neither 
 can you comprehend the works of a great com- 
 poser, without some knowledge of his life-history. 
 Stradella's passionate love ; Chopins' long sus- 
 pense and unsatisfied desire, the warm friend- 
 ships, the bright and loving household life of 
 Mendelssohn ; the simplicity and unworldliness 
 of Haydn, are all told in their own language of 
 harmony. There we hear the grand faith and 
 sorrow of Beethoven, struggling with a world 
 that understood him not, suffering from deser- 
 tion and isolation, and the bitterness of the loss 
 of all outer sound and melody, but still so truly 
 the ' ' great master, " that even the ignorant peas- 
 ants and charcoal burners would stand aside, 
 heavily burdened, from his path to let him pass 
 undisturbed. Schumann's wild, sweet, fanciful 
 music, reveals his bliss and his anguish, the 
 brooding thought that merged itself in mad- 
 ness ; and the music of Handel is worship. 
 
 The later part of Handel's life was darkened 
 by the shadow of blindness, an acute grief to a 
 nature of such sensibility and tenderness. It is 
 said that he often wept as he wrote, and that he 
 
236 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 composed the accompaniment to " He was de- 
 spised," with uncontrollable sobs and tears. An- 
 gelic harmonies came to him as a sound and a 
 vision; he says of the Hallelujah Chorus " I 
 thought I saw all heaven before me, and the 
 great God himself," and its grand rhymes echo 
 still with the exultation and the rapture. 
 
 Music breathes with all the pangs and ecsta- 
 sies of such souls, it tells of their faith and their 
 desires ; it speaks unto souls again ; it reconciles 
 us to the falling short of life ; it spreads our days 
 before us as an open scroll. It may be more 
 truly said of this than all other arts that man 
 " has gazed long and wistfully at the heavens ; he 
 hears in this the murmur of the wings which 
 can bear him thither." 
 
POETRY. 237 
 
 CHAPTER VII I. 
 
 POETRY. 
 
 THE HEBRAIC PASTORAL THE GREEK EPIC — THE 
 
 GERMAN DRAMA. 
 
 >!pOETRY is no less a passion than an art, and 
 \J its quick tides of life flow through every 
 vein of the artistic creation. Thackeray says 
 of the figure of St. Michael on the castle of St. 
 Angelo, that it is a great sonnet, " set, rhymic, 
 grandiose. Milton wrote in bronze ; Virgil pol- 
 ished off his Georgics in marble — sweet, calm 
 shapes ! exquisite harmonies in line ! As for 
 the JEneid, that I consider to be so many bas- 
 reliefs, mural ornaments, which affect me not 
 much." Poetry is so fecund with all the germs 
 of beauty that, like the fabled towers of the old 
 city, the statue rises into form, and the picture 
 flashes into color, at the sound of its sweet sing- 
 ing. But as we might divine from its infinite 
 
238 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 scope, its own loveliness lies chiefly on the spiri- 
 tual side ; in all ages have the visions of the poet 
 stretched far on, like sweet sounds cleaving the 
 silence, into spiritual worlds, and summoned 
 before us the august presences of the dead. 
 Pindar and Virgil and Dante wander into a land 
 whereon the earthly sun shines no more ; and 
 every true singer shows to us all things as allied 
 " by issue and by symbol " to the spiritual life 
 beyond our ken. 
 
 Poetry draws its life-blood from the passions 
 and desires, the pangs and raptures of humanity, 
 and, therefore, the highest poets are always 
 found closely united with the life of the great 
 central cities of the world. They kindle with 
 this strange luminous atmosphere of thought 
 and influence, which encompasses them like the 
 heat and light thrown out from a large city in 
 the darkness of the night. What is Dante, or 
 his kingdoms of the dead, without his Florence? 
 The grief of exile withered all his days like a 
 fresh branch cut off from its vital root. 
 
 " The tall green poplars grew no longer straight, 
 Whose tops not looked to Troy." 
 
 The power of a great city is a wonderful thing ; 
 all vital movements originate here, and flow out 
 more slowly into the rural provinces, retarded 
 there by lingering superstitions and worn-out 
 
* POETRY, 239 
 
 faiths. In Germany, while the imperial free 
 towns of the fifteenth century were beginning to 
 stir with the reaction against Rome which Luther 
 embodied, and the arts and sciences in the Ital- 
 ian cities had reached their most fruitful epoch, 
 the country districts were still observing the old 
 Teutonic rites, the remnants of son-worship and 
 fire-worship, in the flames that blazed on every 
 mountain height at midsummer, and the passing 
 of animals through the smoking weedfire. 
 Rome and Florence were the centres of the Re- 
 naissance ; Paris the heart of the Republics 
 which quickened Nantes, Marseilles, Bordeaux, 
 and Lyons. For fifteen centuries Jerusalem was 
 the City of the Vision of Peace, which lay deep- 
 est in the soul of all christian civilization, and 
 made the West strong against the East. Henry 
 the Fourth, of England, died ' ' desiring to go 
 unto Jerusalem ;" and her walls and towers were 
 sacred for a hundred alien and hostile races. 
 Wherever the thoughts of humanity strike root, 
 man also builds, and forms a group, a congeries, 
 a society, which makes them enduring powers 
 that grow and ripen through ages. 
 
 The scene of one of the earliest and tenderest 
 pastorals — the Hebraic story of Ruth — is laid at 
 the village of Bethlehem, near Jerusalem. This 
 village, afterwards the birthplace of the Shep- 
 herd-King and poet, is built on a hill, surrounded 
 
24O IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 by the dark green fig and gray olive trees, and 
 overlooks a long, narrow valley, through which 
 doubtless the two wanderers came wearily from 
 the land of Moab. It was " in the beginning 
 of barley harvest, " and you see in the whole 
 narrative the most primitive form of village life, 
 blended still with the simple and picturesque de- 
 tails of pastoral occupations. The drawing of 
 the water, the threshing floor, the gleaning, the 
 reapers, the kindly and eager interest of the 
 people — " all the city was moved" about the 
 return — the ceremony with the kinsman at the 
 gate, all speak of an early age. The excessive 
 simplicity of the story marks it strongly ; the 
 theme is denuded, and the characters are not of 
 heroic type, nor have they, with one exception, 
 either the freshness or joy of youth. The 
 eagerness and grace of love as a passion is not 
 here ; it is only a friendship between woman and 
 woman, but so tender, so true, so earnest, that 
 Ruth's '■' Entreat me not to leave thee " touches 
 still our inmost soul, for there is no greater sin 
 than unfaithfulness. 
 
 The Greek life was at one with its cities 
 and the epochs of its history are marked by the 
 fall of the cities of its enemies. When Tyre 
 fell, the East lay open to them ; at the fall of 
 Alexandria, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, 
 the three great races of old civilization, met to- 
 
POETRV. 24I 
 
 gether ; while with the fall of Troy, the Greek 
 world began, evolved by a common cause out 
 of a multitude of petty kings and chiefs, with 
 their armed followers. The tale of Troy is the 
 one unapproachable epic of all ages, and its 
 characters still move us with their wonderful 
 force and fire. The gathering of the troops, 
 the sailing of the ships, is at Aulis. The Achaian 
 chiefs, of noble form and stature, are men of 
 fierce characters, but capable of generous and 
 unselfish deeds and strong friendships. First is 
 Achilles, beautiful and glorious, whose prowess 
 is described in colossal outlines, at whose ap- 
 proach an army trembles, and whom at last 
 Apollo himself slays, he having chosen a brave 
 death before Troy rather than a long and inglo- 
 rious life in Phthia, With him comes Patroclus, 
 his friend ; Ajax, noblest in form after Achilles, 
 and his brother Teucer, the venerable Nestor 
 with his two sons, the two friends, Diomedes 
 and Sthenelus ; the crafty and eloquent Ulysses; 
 Agememnon the leader, and a long line of allies 
 and companions in arms. 
 
 Ten years is Troy besieged, for it is rather a 
 walled fortress for defense than a great city. It 
 is sacred Troy, the handiwork of primitive build- 
 ers,* placed upon a height whence the hamlets 
 around which furnish soldiers at its call, lie in 
 
 *See Gladstone's articles on Homer. 
 22 
 
242 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 full view. Its beetling site and " wind-swept " 
 towers, are plainly seen by the allies as they 
 journey towards it from Thrace, Mysia, Lycia 
 and Phrygia, and the thousand watch-fires blaz- 
 ing on the Trojan heights, shine upon the Ama- 
 zons and upon Memnon the beautiful sun of the 
 Dawn, as they wend their way hither. The life 
 of Troy is like that of the German Freiherren, 
 or free Barons of the fifteenth century ; but with 
 the addition of Asiatic traits, for the spacious 
 palace of Priam — necessarily spacious — contains 
 his fifty sons and their families, and his wives 
 and daughters unmentioned save Hecuba and 
 Cassandra, who, with wild eyes and dilated nos- 
 trils presages woe to the unlistening city. Across 
 this barbarous and sensual life, the tender idyls 
 of Denone, and of Hector, and Andromache, 
 true married lovers, come like the soft breathing 
 of a flute across the clangor of trumpets. 
 
 Around the marvelous old beleaguered city 
 the k>ng siege ebbed and flowed with all the 
 changes of war, and there was dissension on its 
 behalf in the council halls of the Gods. Zeus 
 and Appollo fight for the besieged but fitfully ; 
 while Juno or Here, jealous and strong-willed, 
 ' ' on whose inner heart is written in deep char- 
 acters the Achaian name," works with untiring 
 energy and unfailing sympathy, and wins the 
 conflict. Troy is no more ! 
 
POETRY. 243 
 
 The Homeric poets feel strongly the life of a 
 great city, of men working together, and this 
 influence tingles through every line and phrase. 
 
 They were probably Achaians, who do not 
 seem to have felt the same pleasure in nature 
 which marked the Ionians and other Greeks. 
 The sea lay before them and the sky above, but 
 the tumultous beating of the waves, and drifting 
 clouds, were disregarded for the human beings 
 on the plain below the city, who fought, suffered, 
 rejoiced — and alas ! died beneath some sudden 
 and sharp stroke of the foeman ! They cared 
 for humanity ; not for nature, or the Gods over- 
 much in comparison with Hector and Achilles, 
 for the stature of their heroes, dwarfs, even their 
 deities. 
 
 The village of Bethlehem, the fortress of Troy, 
 were rather different periods of the city's growth 
 than the city itself. That we might have seen 
 in the mediaeval towns of Germany, with high 
 walls, through whose loopholes the river gleams 
 and steeple-like gate towers, guarding the heavy 
 bridge, and domes and spires rising into the sky, 
 from which come the reverberations of deep-toned 
 bells. Outside on the dark mountains lie the 
 fabled Walpureis-Nacht world, with gnomes and 
 witches, and unhallowed things, but here is the 
 broad noon of every-day thought. The streets 
 are crowded with peasants, soldiers, students, 
 
244 IDEAL LIFE. 
 
 lovers singing before the windows of their chosen 
 maidens, men drinking and carousing in taverns, 
 and from the open cathedral doors break across 
 the din the awful notes of the " Dies Irae," 
 
 " Quaerens me sedisti lassus; 
 Redemisti crucem passus ; 
 Tantus labor non sit cassus." 
 
 In such a town Goethe lived, and he places 
 here the scene of his mighty drama " Faust," 
 which vibrates with the spell of these familiar 
 and closely blended lives, that form the warp 
 and woof of the web the Pargcs weave. Like 
 ** Job," like " Hamlet," it deals with humanity 
 rather than man, and like them also is pro- 
 foundly sad. Faust perpetually broods over the 
 problem of life, its inner freedom and " encom- 
 passing necessity," which no philosophy can 
 touch, a problem full of antagonisms and desires, 
 of unfulfillment and satiety ; and by his side 
 walks Mephistopheles, the false spirit of doubt, 
 jeering and deriding all. The simple and touch- 
 ing character of Margaret is seldom brought into 
 contact with him, for in her we see the force of 
 love, which has no affinity with doubt, but 
 works out its deliverance with agony, and is 
 brought at last into light and peace. 
 
 Our life returns ever upon itself as it grows, 
 and our first states of innocence nourish all the 
 
POETRY. 245 
 
 nobility we afterwards achieve. All poetic fire 
 and loveliness of line, color and melody, all 
 national attainments and governments, are only 
 good as they minister to the growth of character, 
 and it is individual character in which they find 
 their mainspring, — in household life and service. 
 We gather our fairest and most complete inter- 
 pretations of the ideal life from the lives of those 
 we love, and the memories of our dead ; and 
 these, forever mingling their sweet waters and 
 dark waves, are the fountains from which all 
 human thoughts and deeds flow. 
 
 THE END.