"Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself

Project Gutenberg's Essays, First Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

XII. ART.

"Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but
in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This
appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the
popular distinction of works according to their aim either at use or
beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation but creation is the aim. In
landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation
than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit and give
us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has
beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought which is to him good;
and this because the same power which sees through his eyes is seen in
that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature and
not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy the features that please
him. He will give the gloom of gloom and the sunshine of sunshine. In a
portrait he must inscribe the character and not the features, and must
esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or
likeness of the aspiring original within.

"What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual
activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that
higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler
symbols. What is a man but nature's finer success in self-explication?
What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon
figures,--nature's eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of
painting, love of nature, but a still finer success,--all the weary
miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of
it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the
pencil?

"But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation
to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art
is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his
ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an inexpressible charm
for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period
overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far it will
retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the
Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this
element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate himself
from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education,
the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times shall have no
share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic,
he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which
it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will
and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and the
idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the
manner of his times, without knowing what that manner is. Now that which
is inevitable in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can
ever give, inasmuch as the artist's pen or chisel seems to have been
held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history
of the human race. This circumstance gives a value to the Egyptian
hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and Mexican idols, however gross
and shapeless. They denote the height of the human soul in that hour,
and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as deep as the
world. Shall I now add that the whole extant product of the plastic
arts has herein its highest value, as history; as a stroke drawn in
the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, according to whose
ordinations all beings advance to their beatitude?

"Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the
perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no
clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist
and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is
carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of
art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing
variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there
can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our happiness and
unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a pleasing trance, but
his individual character and his practical power depend on his daily
progress in the separation of things, and dealing with one at a time.
Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single
form. It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness
to the object, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make
that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the
orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach and to magnify by
detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and
the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an
object,--so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,--the painter and
sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The power depends on the depth
of the artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For every object
has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us
as to represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant
of the hour And concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it is
the only thing worth naming to do that,--be it a sonnet, an opera, a
landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or
of a voyage of discovery. Presently we pass to some other object, which
rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example a well-laid
garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I
should think fire the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted
with air, and water, and earth. For it is the right and property of
all natural objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties
whatsoever, to be for their moment the top of the world. A squirrel
leaping from bough to bough and making the Wood but one wide tree
for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion,--is beautiful,
self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature. A good ballad
draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done
before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is
a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession
of excellent objects we learn at last the immensity of the world,
the opulence of human nature, which can run out to infinitude in any
direction. But I also learn that what astonished and fascinated me in
the first work astonished me in the second work also; that excellence of
all things is one.

"The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The
best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures
are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes
which make up the ever-changing "landscape with figures" amidst which
we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs.
When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to
grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting
teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as
I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless
opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free
to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw every thing, why
draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternal picture which
nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars and
fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and gray; long-haired,
grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded,
elfish,--capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.

"A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As
picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When
I have seen fine statues and afterwards enter a public assembly, I
understand well what he meant who said, "When I have been reading Homer,
all men look like giants." I too see that painting and sculpture are
gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of
its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite
advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery
of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse
original single figures. Here is the artist himself improvising, grim
and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him, now another, and
with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and expression of his
clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of marble and chisels;
except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they are
hypocritical rubbish.

"The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains
the traits common to all works of the highest art,--that they are
universally intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states
of mind, and are religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the
reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it should
produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy
hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected,--the work of
genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to
all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and
special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world
over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines,
or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the work of art
of human character,--a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or
musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature,
and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these
attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the
Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the
highest charm is the universal language they speak. A confession of
moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That
which we carry to them, the same we bring back more fairly illustrated
in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican, and passes from
chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi and
candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the richest materials,
is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the principles out of which
they all sprung, and that they had their origin from thoughts and laws
in his own breast. He studies the technical rules on these wonderful
remains, but forgets that these works were not always thus constellated;
that they are the contributions of many ages and many countries; that
each came out of the solitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps
in ignorance of the existence of other sculpture, created his work
without other model save life, household life, and the sweet and smart
of personal relations, of beating hearts, and meeting eyes; of poverty
and necessity and hope and fear. These were his inspirations, and these
are the effects he carries home to your heart and mind. In proportion
to his force, the artist will find in his work an outlet for his proper
character. He must not be in any manner pinched or hindered by his
material, but through his necessity of imparting himself the adamant
will be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication of
himself, in his full stature and proportion. He need not cumber himself
with a conventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the mode in
Rome or in Paris, but that house and weather and manner of living which
poverty and the fate of birth have made at once so odious and so dear,
in the gray unpainted wood cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm,
or in the log-hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he
has endured the constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will serve
as well as any other condition as the symbol of a thought which pours
itself indifferently through all.

"I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of Italian
painting, I fancied the great pictures would be great strangers; some
surprising combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric
pearl and gold, like the spontoons and standards of the militia, which
play such pranks in the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I was to
see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to Rome and saw
with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left to novices the gay and
fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple
and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that it was the old, eternal
fact I had met already in so many forms,--unto which I lived; that it
was the plain you and me I knew so well,--had left at home in so many
conversations. I had the same experience already in a church at Naples.
There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place, and said
to myself--'Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over four
thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect to thee
there at home?' That fact I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, in
the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome and to the
paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci.
"What, old mole! workest thou in the earth so fast?" It had travelled
by my side; that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in
the Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and made all travelling
ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, that
they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too
picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain
dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

"The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar
merit. A calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes
directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet
and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all
florid expectations! This familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance is
as if one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture-dealers has its
value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched by
genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you; for such as
had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty emotions.

"Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must
end with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but
initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man,
who believes that the best age of production is past. The real value
of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or
ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of the everlasting
effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art
has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with
the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and
moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do
not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a
voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They
are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is
the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is
impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and
monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the
creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it an outlet
for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can do
that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance
on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal
relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest
effect is to make new artists.

"Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance
of particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any
real effect. It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a
savage's record of gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed
of a wonderful perception of form this childish carving was refined to
the utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and youthful
people, and not the manly labor of a wise and spiritual nation. Under an
oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes,
I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our plastic arts and
especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. I cannot hide
from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys
and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature transcends all our
moods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But the gallery
stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes
frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually
engaged on the paths of planets and suns, should have wondered what the
Earl of Pembroke found to admire in "stone dolls." Sculpture may serve
to teach the pupil how deep is the secret of form, how purely the spirit
can translate its meanings into that eloquent dialect. But the statue
will look cold and false before that new activity which needs to roll
through all things, and is impatient of counterfeits and things not
alive. Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of
form. But true art is never fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest
music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from
its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio
has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth,
but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should
not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue
in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which
drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a
poem or a romance.

"A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy
to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and
destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of
invention and beauty in modern society are all but dried up. A popular
novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers
in the alms-house of this world, without dignity, without skill or
industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity, which lowers
on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique, and
furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous figures
into nature,--namely, that they were inevitable; that the artist was
drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which
vented itself in these fine extravagances,--no longer dignifies the
chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in art
the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of life.
Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own
imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in
an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which
a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from the
useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to
enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from
use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not
from religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High
beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound,
or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which
is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute
any thing higher than the character can inspire.

"The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be
a superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do not
see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall
be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and console
themselves with color-bags and blocks of marble. They reject life as
prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic. They despatch the
day's weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink,
that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art vilified; the
name conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses; it stands in the
imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck with death from
the first. Would it not be better to begin higher up,--to serve the
ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eating and
drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty
must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine
and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life
were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish
the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It
is therefore beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it
is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will
not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or
America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and
spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that
we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its
instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the
field and road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious
heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office,
the joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce,
the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's
retort; in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish
and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to
mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses
which these works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a
steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England and arriving
at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into
harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along the
Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is
learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear
the supplements and continuations of the material creation.