The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 44, June, 1861. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
the school of sad experience the mortal agony of Love without Skill,—the power of perception, without the power of utterance. We know how dumb are the sweet melodies of our souls,—how fleeting their opulent and dreamy pageantries. But we have not fully learned the utter emptiness and desolation of Skill without Love. We accept its sounding brass and tinkling cymbals for immortal harmonies. We look reverently upon its tortured marbles and its canvases stained with academic knowledge as revelations of higher intelligence; forgetting, that, if we go down to the quiet places of our own souls, we shall find there the universe reflected, like a microcosm, in the dark well-springs, and that out of these well-springs in the deep silence rises the beautiful Ideal, Anadyomene, to compensate and comfort us for the vacancy of Life. If we know ourselves, it is not to the dogmas of critics, the artificial rules of aesthetics, that we most wisely resort for judgments concerning works of Art. Though technical externals and the address of manipulation naturally take possession of our senses and warp our opinions, there are depths of immortal Truth within us, rarely sounded, indeed, but which can afford a standard and a criterion far nobler than the schools can give us.
The broken statues and columns and traditions and fragmentary classics which Greece has left us are so still and tranquil to the eye and ear, that we search in vain for the Delphic wisdom they contain, till we find it echoed in the sympathetic depths of our souls, and repeated in the half-impalpable Ideals there. It is to Greece that we must look for the external type of these Ideals, whose existence we but half suspect within us. It is not pleasant, perhaps, to think that we were nearly unconscious of the highest capacities of our humanity, till we recognized their full expression in the ashes of a distant and dead civilization,—that we did not know ourselves, till
"The airy tongues that syllable men's names
In pathless wildernesses"
uttered knowledge to us among the ghastly ruins of Hellas. It is good for us to lend a spiritual ear to these ancient whisperings, and hear nymph calling to nymph and faun to faun, as they caper merrily with the god Pan through the silence. It is good for us to listen to that "inextinguishable laughter" of the happy immortals of Olympus, ever mingling with all the voices of Nature and setting them to the still sweet music of humanity,—good, because so we are reminded how close we are to the outward world, and how all its developments are figurative expressions of our near relationships with the visible Beauty of things. Thus it is that the poetic truths of old religions exquisitely vindicate themselves; thus we find, even we moderns, with our downward eyes and our wrinkled brows, that we still worship at the mythological altars of childlike divinities; and when we can get away from the distracting Bedlam of steam-shrieks and machinery, we behold the secrets of our own hearts, the Lares and Penates of our own households, reflected in the "white ideals" on antique vases and medallions.
Abstract lines are the most concentrated expressions of human ideas, and, as such, are peculiarly sensitive to the critical tests of all theories of the Beautiful. Distinguished from the more usual and direct means by which artists express their inspirations and appeal to the sympathies of men, distinct from the common language of Art, which contents itself with conveying merely local and individual ideas, abstract lines are recognized as the grand hieroglyphic symbolism of the aggregate of human thought, the artistic manifestations of the great human Cosmos. The natural world, passing through the mind of man, is immediately interpreted and humanized by his creative power, and assumes the colors, forms, and harmonies of Painting, Sculpture, and Music. But abstract lines, as we find them in Architecture and in the ceramic arts, are the independent developments of this creative power, coming directly from humanity itself, and obtaining from the outward world only the most distant motives of composition. Thus it is an inevitable deduction that Architecture is the most human of all arts, and its lines the most human of all lines.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever";
and the affectionate devotion with which this gift is received by finite intelligences from the hand of God is expressed in Art, when its infinite depth can be so expressed at all, in a twofold language,– the one objective, the other subjective; the one recalling the immediate source of the emotion, and presenting it palpably to the senses, arrayed in all the ineffable tenderness of Art, which is Love,—the other, portraying rather the emotion than the cause of it, and by an instinctive and universal symbolism expressing the deep and serious joy with which the "thing of beauty" is welcomed to the heart. Hence come those lines which aesthetic writers term "Lines of Beauty," so eloquent to us with an uncomprehended meaning,—so near, and yet so far,—so simple, and yet so mysterious,—so animated with life and thought and musical motion, and yet so still and serene and spiritual. Links which bind us fraternally to old intelligences, tendrils by which the soul climbs up to a wider view of the glimmering landscape, they are grateful and consoling to us. We look with cognizant eyes at their subtile affinities with some unexpressed part of human life, and, turning one to another, are apt to murmur,
"We cannot understand: we love."
The mysteries of orb and cycle, with which old astrologers girded human life, and sought to define from celestial phenomena the horoscope of man, have been brought down to modern applications by learned philosophers and mathematicians. These have labored with a godlike energy and skill to trace the interior relationships existing between the recondite revelations of their Geometry, their wonderful laws of mathematical harmonies and unities, and those lines which by common consent are understood to be exponential of certain phases of our own existence. No well-organized intellect can fail to perceive that a sublime and immortal Truth underlies these speculations. Undoubtedly, in the straight line, in the conic sections, in the innumerable composite curves of the mathematician, lie the germs of all these symbolic expressions. But the artist, whose lines of Beauty vary continually with the emotions which produce them, who feels in his own human heart the irresistible impulse which gives an exquisite balance and poise to those lines, cannot allow that the spirit of his compositions is governed by the exact and rigid formula; of the philosopher to any greater extent or in any other manner than as the numbers of the poet are ruled by the grammar of his language. These formulae may be applied as a curious test to ascertain what strange sympathies there may be between such lines and the vast organic harmonies of Nature and the Universe; but they do not enter into the soul of their creation any more than the limitations of counterpoint and rhythm laid their incubus on the lyre of Apollo. The porches where Callicrates, Hermogenes, and Callimachus walked were guarded by no such Cerberus as the disciples of Plato encountered at the entrance of the groves of the Academy,—
"[Greek: Oudeis ageometraetos eisito],"
"Let no one ignorant of Geometry enter here";
but the divine Aphrodite welcomed all mankind to the tender teachings of the Wild Acanthus, the Honeysuckle, and the Sea-Shell, and all the deep utterances of boundless Beauty.
Truly, it is sad and dispiriting to the artist to find that all modern aesthetical writings limit and straiten the free walks of highest Art with strict laws deduced from rigid science, with mathematical proportions and the formal restrictions of fixed lines and curves, nicely adapted from the frigidities of Euclid. The line A B must equal the line C D; somewhere in space must be found the centre or the focus of every curve; and every angle must subtend a certain arc, to be easily found on reference to the tables of the text-books. "The melancholy days have come" for Art, when the meditative student finds his early footsteps loud among these dry, withered, and sapless leaves, instead of brushing away the dews by the fountains of perpetual youth. I am aware of no extant English work on Greek Lines which does not aim to reduce that magnificent old Hellenic poetry to the cold, hard limitations of Geometry. Modern Pharisees nail that antique Ideal of loveliness and purity to a mathematical cross.
Now it is capable of distinct proof, that abstract Lines of Beauty, even in a greater degree than any other expressions of Art, are born and baptized in Love. Because parabolic curves frequently coincide with these lines, it is no proof that they created them.
The Water-Lily, or Lotus, perpetually occurs in Oriental mythology as the sublime and hallowed symbol of the productive power in Nature,—the emblem of that great life-giving principle which the Hindu and the Egyptian and all early nations instinctively elevated