The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 44, June, 1861. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
symmetry, assuming a strict and chaste propriety, a formal elegance, which render it at once monumental and dignified. The harmonious succession and repetition of parts, the graceful contrasts of curves and the strict poise and balance of them, their unity in variety, their entire subjection to aesthetic laws, their serious and emphatic earnestness of purpose,—these qualities combine in the creation of one of the purest works of Art ever conceived by the human mind. It is called the Ionic Anthemion, and suggests in its composition all the creative powers of Greece. Its value is not alone in the sensuous gratification of the eye, as with the Arabesque tangles of the Alhambra, but it is more especially in its complete intellectual expression, the evidence there is in it of thoughtfulness and judgment and deliberate care. The inventor studied not alone the plant, but his own spiritual relationships with it; and ere he made his interpretation, he considered how, in mythological traditions, each flower once bore a human shape, and how Daphne and Syrinx, Narcissus and Philemon, and those other idyllic beings, were eased of the stress of human emotions by becoming Laurels and Reeds and Daffodils and sturdy Oaks, and how human nature was thus diffused through all created things and was epigrammatically expressed in them.
"And he, with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meanings in the forms of Nature."
Like Faustus, he was permitted to look into her deep bosom, as into the bosom of a friend,—to find his brothers in the still wood, in the air, and in the water,—to see himself and the mysterious wonders of his own breast in the movements of the elements. And so he took Nature as a figurative exponent of humanity, and extracted the symbolic truths from her productions, and used them nobly in his Art.
Garbett, an English aesthetical writer, assures us that the Anthemion bears not the slightest resemblance to the Honeysuckle or any other plant, "being no representation of anything in Nature, but simply the necessary result of the complete and systematic attempt to combine unity and variety by the principle of gradation." But here he speaks like a geometer, and not like an artist. He seeks rather for the resemblance of form than the resemblance of spirit, and, failing to realize the object of his search, he endeavors to find a cause for this exquisite effect in pure reason. With equal perversity, Poe endeavored to persuade the public that his "Raven" was the result of mere aesthetical deductions!
And here the old burden of our song must once again be heard: If we would know the golden secret of the Greek Ideal, we must ourselves first learn how to love with the wisdom and chastity of old Hellenic passion. We must sacrifice Taste and Fancy and Prejudice, whose specious superficialities are embodied in the errors of modern Art,—we must sacrifice these at the shrine of the true Aphrodite; else the modern Procrustes will continue to stretch and torture Greek Lines on geometrical beds, and the aesthetic Pharisees around us will still crucify the Greek Ideal.
[To be continued.]
THE ROSE ENTHRONED
It melts and seethes, the chaos that shall grow
To adamant beneath the house of life:
In hissing hatred atoms clash, and go
To meet intenser strife.
And ere that fever leaves the granite veins,
Down thunders o'er the waste a torrid sea:
Now Flood, now Fire, alternate despot reigns,—
Immortal foes to be.
Built by the warring elements, they rise,
The massive earth-foundations, tier on tier,
Where slimy monsters with unhuman eyes
Their hideous heads uprear.
The building of the world is not for you
That glare upon each other, and devour:
Race floating after race fades out of view,
Till beauty springs from power
Meanwhile from crumbling rocks and shoals of death
Shoots up rank verdure to the hidden sun;
The gulfs are eddying to the vague, sweet breath
Of richer life begun,—
Richer and sweeter far than aught before,
Though rooted in the grave of what has been.
Unnumbered burials yet must heap Earth's floor,
Ere she her heir shall win;
And ever nobler lives and deaths more grand
For nourishment of that which is to come:
While 'mid the ruins of the work she planned
Sits Nature, blind and dumb.
For whom or what she plans, she knows no more
Than any mother of her unborn child;
Yet beautiful forewarnings murmur o'er
Her desolations wild.
Slowly the clamor and the clash subside:
Earth's restlessness her patient hopes subdue:
Mild oceans shoreward heave a pulse-like tide:
The skies are veined with blue.
And life works through the growing quietness
To bring some darling mystery into form:
Beauty her fairest Possible would dress
In colors pure and warm.
Within the depths of palpitating seas
A tender tint;—anon a line of grace
Some lovely thought from its dull atom frees,
The coming joy to trace;—
A pencilled moss on tablets of the sand,
Such as shall veil the unbudded maiden-blush
Of beauty yet to gladden the green land;—
A breathing, through the hush,
Of some sealed perfume longing to burst out
And give its prisoned rapture to the air;—
A brooding hope, a promise through a doubt
Is whispered everywhere.
And, every dawn a shade more clear, the skies
A flush as from the heart of heaven disclose:
Through earth and sea and air a message flies,
Prophetic of the Rose.
At last a morning comes of sunshine still,
When not a dew-drop trembles on the grass;
When all winds sleep, and every pool and rill
Is like a burnished glass
Where a long-looked-for guest may lean to gaze;
When day on earth rests royally,—a crown
Of molten glory, flashing diamond rays,
From heaven let lightly down.
In golden silence, breathless, all things stand.
What answer meets this questioning repose?
A sudden gush of light and odors bland,
And, lo! the Rose! the Rose!
The birds break into canticles around;
The winds lift Jubilate to the skies:
For, twin-born with the rose on Eden-ground,
Love blooms in human eyes.
Life's marvellous queen-flower blossoms only so,
In dust of low ideals rooted fast.
Ever