From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain record of a Pleasant Journey

by Julia Ward Howe

WORKS OF ART.

Enough of shows. Galleries and studios are better. Rome is rich in both, and with a sort of studious contentment, one embraces one's Murray, picks out the palace that unfolds its art treasures to-day, and travels up the stairs, and along the marble corridors, to wonderful suites of apartments, in which the pasteboard programmes lie about waiting for you, while the still drama of the pictures acts itself upon the thronged wall, yourself their small public, and they giving their color-eloquence, whether any one gives heed or not.

They are precious, the Colonna, Doria, Sciarra, Borghese, and we have seen them. We have picked out our old favorites, and have carried the neophytes before them, saying, "I saw this, dear, before you were born." But this past, whose reflex fold inwraps us, does not exist for the neophytes, who look at it as out of a moment's puzzle, and then conclude to begin their own business on their own responsibility, without any reference to these outstanding credits of ours.

Of the pictures it is little useful to speak. Your description enables no one to see them, and the narration of the feelings they excite in you is as likely to be tedious as interesting to those who cultivate feelings of their own. Copies and engravings have done here what you cannot do, and the best subjects are familiar to art students and lovers in all countries. A little sigh of pleasure may be allowed you at this, your third sight of the Francias, the Raphaels, Titian's Bella, Claude's landscapes, and the scientific Leonardo's heavily-labored heads and groups. But do not therefore put the trumpet to your lips, and blow that sigh across the ocean, to claim the attention of ears that invite the lesson for the day. The lesson for this day is not written on canvas, and though it may be read everywhere in the world, you will scarcely find its clearest type in Rome.

And here, perhaps, I may as well carry further the philosophizing which I began a week ago with regard to the objects and resources of Roman life, and their compatibility with the thoughts and pursuits most dear and valuable to Americans.

Art is, of course, the only solid object which an American can bring forward to justify a prolonged residence in Rome. Art, health, and official duty, are among the valid reasons which bring our countrymen abroad. Two of these admit of no argument. The sick have a right, other things permitting, to go where they can be bettered; a duty perhaps, to go where the sum of their waning years and wasting activities admits of multiplication. Those who live abroad as ministers and consuls have a twofold opportunity of benefiting their country. If honest and able, they may benefit her by their presence in foreign lands; if unworthy and incompetent, by their absence from home. But our artists are those whose expatriation gives us most to think about. They take leave of us either in the first bloom or in the full maturity of their powers. The ease of living in Southern Europe, the abundance of models and of works of art, the picturesque charms of nature and of scenery, detain them forever from us, and, save for an abstract sentiment, which itself weakens with every year, the sacred tie of country is severed. Its sensibilities play no part in these lives devoted to painting and modelling.

Now, an eminent gift for art is an exceptional circumstance. He who has it weds his profession, leaves father and mother, and goes where his slowly-unfolding destiny seems to call him. Against such a course we have no word to say. It presents itself as a necessary conclusion to earnest and noble men, who love not their native country less, but their votive country more. Of the first and its customs they would still say,—

"I cannot but remember such things were

That were most precious to me."

Yet of this career, so often coveted by those to whom its attainment does not open, I cannot speak in terms of supreme recognition. The office of art is always as precious as its true ministers are rare. But the relative importance of sculptural and pictorial art is not to-day what it was in days of less thought, of smaller culture. Every one who likes the Bible to-day, likes it best without illustrations. Were Christ here to speak anew, he would speak without parables. In ruder times, heavenly fancies could only be illustrated on the one hand, received on the other, through the mediation of a personal embodiment. Only through human sympathy was the assent to divine truth obtained. The necessity which added a feminine personality to the worship of Christ, and completed the divided Godhead by making it female as well as male, was a philosophical one, but not recognized as such. The device of the Virgin was its practical result, counterbalancing the partiality of the one-sided personal culte of the Savior. Modern religious thought gets far beyond this, makes in spiritual things no distinction of male and female, and does not apply sex to the Divine, save in the most vague and poetic sense. The inner convictions of heart and conscience may now be spoken in plain prose, or sung in ringing verse. The vates, prophet or reformer, may proclaim his system and publish his belief; and his audience will best apprehend it in its simplest and most direct form. The wide spaces of the new continent allow room for the most precious practical experimentation; and speculative and theoretical liberty keep pace with liberty of action. The only absolute restraint, the best one, is a moral one. "Thou shalt not" applies only to what is intrinsically inhuman and profane. And now, there is no need to puzzle simple souls with a marble gospel. Faith needs not to digest whole side-walls of saints and madonnas, who once stood for something, no one now knows what. The Italian school was to art what the Greek school was to literature—an original creation and beginning. But life has surpassed Plato and Aristotle. We are forced to piece their short experiences, and to say to both, "You are matchless, but insufficient." And so, though Raphael's art remains immortal and unsurpassed, we are forced to say of his thought, "It is too small." No one can settle, govern, or moralize a country by it. It will not even suffice to reform Italy. The golden transfigurations hang quiet on the walls, and let pope and cardinal do their worst. We want a world peopled with faithful and intelligent men and women. The Prometheus of the present day is needed rather to animate statues than to make them.