TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY,
On turning one down with the plough, in April, 1786.
Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r,
Thou's met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem;
To spare thee now is past my power,
Thou bonnie gem!
Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet,
The bonnie Lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet,
Wi' speckl'd breast,
When upward springing, blithe, to greet
The purpling east.
Cauld blew the bitter biting north
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm
Scarce reared above the parent earth
Thy tender form.
The flaunting flowers our gardens yield,
High sheltering woods and wa's maun shield
But thou, beneath the random bield
O' clod or stane,
Adorns the histie stibble field,
Unseen, alane!
There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head,
In humble guise;
But now the share uptears thy bed,
And low thou lies!
Such is the fate of artless Maid,
Sweet floweret of the rural shade!
By love's simplicity betrayed,
And guileless trust,
Till she, like thee, all soiled, is laid
Low i' the dust.
Such is the fate of simple Bard,
On life's rough ocean; luckless starr'd,
Unskilful he to note the card
Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o'er!
Such fate to suffering worth is given,
Who long with wants and woes has striven,
By human pride or cunning driven
To mis'ry's brink,
Till, wrench'd of every stay but Heaven,
He, ruin'd, sink!
Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate,
That fate is thine—no distant date:
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight
Shall be thy doom!
With our hearts full of love and tender sympathy with the author of this exquisite poem, let us now look among the botanists for a description of the Daisy. We will find: 'Perenuius (Daisy, E.W. & P. 21), leaves obovate, crenate; scape naked, 1 flowered; or, Leucanthemum (Ox-eyed Daisy), leaves clasping, lanceolate, serrate, cut-toothed at the base; stem erect, branching.' (See Eaton's Botany.)
All honor to the savant! Untiring in his investigations, ardent in his researches, the men of the senses are scarcely worthy to untie the latchet of his shoe, but he is slow in acknowledging the science of art, and apt to look down upon the artist from his throne of power! Because the artist deals with a different order of truths, unseen and belonging principally to the world of feeling, the savant rarely does justice to the intense study requisite for the mastery of the mere form of art; the long, unrequited, and patient toil requisite for its practice, or the soaring and loving genius required to fill the form when mastered with glowing life. All honor to the savant! but let him not fail to acknowledge the artist-brother at his side, who labors on for humanity with no hope of learned professorships to crown his career, nor venerable diplomas to assure him of social honor and position. Let him not be regarded as an idler by the wayside, nor let 'La Bohème' be any longer considered as his especial type and insignia! The useful and the beautiful should stand banded in the closest fellowship, since Truth must be the soul of both! Honor then the pure artist, while he still lives, nor keep the laurel only for his tomb!
In order to examine scientifically, the mind is generally forced to consider its object as deprived of life; indeed, the functions of living creatures cannot be fully analyzed without being first deprived of life. Science gives us its subject with the most rigorous exactitude, with the most scrupulous fidelity; but, alas! often without that magical kindler of love and sympathy, life. Art gives us its subject with vivid coloring, motion, palpitating life—often, indeed, by associative moral symbolism adding a still higher life to simple being, filling it, as in Burns's lines to the Daisy, with a purer flame.
Science daguerreotypes, art paints its objects. Science is necessarily abstract, discrete; art necessarily concrete. So true is this, that when art begins to decline, it manifests a tendency to pass from the concrete to the discrete, abstract; it becomes self-conscious, reflective, scientific. Body, form, is mistaken for soul, spirit. A discrete idea fails to move us, because it gives us only successively the relations subsisting between it and the First Cause, as its facts must be isolated, its elements decomposed, and presented to us in an inverse order to that in which they reveal themselves to the mind in the spontaneous and natural use of its powers. Science never appeals to our emotional faculties spontaneously; when it does speak to the heart, it is because the mind, linking together the successive ideas given by science, at last seizes upon the UNITY of the whole, supplying by its own conceptions the voids of science. When the savant possesses the creative power in a high degree, as did Kepler, he becomes prophet and artist. The concrete ideas of art appeal immediately to our feelings; emotions excited by them are spontaneous, because they aim at presenting their objects in all the splendor of their living light. Only life produces life; all our emotions and sympathies pertain to the suffering, the acting, the living—and thus an artistic conception appeals to our entire being. What psychological analysis of youthful and feminine loveliness could move us as a Juliet?
Analysis and reflection suppose the suspension of spontaneity, that is, of the free activity of the soul. Spontaneity and reflection are the two modes in which the spirit manifests its activity. Spontaneity is the living power which it possesses of acting without premeditation, without contingent ideas, of being influenced or determined by some power from without, the action thus produced blending the two primary elements of feeling and thought. This is the distinctive mode of woman's being. Reflection is that operation of the mind by which it turns its gaze in upon itself, and considers its own operations; it compares, analyzes, and constructs logical processes of thought. This is as natural to man, as spontaneity to woman. Now both of these modes are essentially necessary to the well-being of the individual, the one is the complement of the other; the cultivation of the one should never be sacrificed to that of the other. Teach woman to reason; develop spontaneity in man. But as the whole course of our education is solely addressed to the reflective faculties, intended chiefly for their culture, how is spontaneity to be developed? Certainly not through abstract science; for it, with its formulas, occupied only with contingent and relative ideas, addressing itself solely to the faculties concerned with the elaboration of the relative, that is, to the reflective faculties—how can it avail for the cultivation of spontaneity? It can be cultivated only through the due direction of the emotional nature; but how is that to be approached? In the first place through the joys and sorrows, the events of daily life; a training of such importance that the Great Creator, for the most part, retains it in His own hands: humanly speaking, only through the arts, which contain, at the same time, the scientific form of the finite, and the blissful intuition of the Infinite. As wisdom and love mark the works of the Creator, so thought and feeling meet in the creations of the artist, in the arts—but thought alone is concerned with the formulas of science. Now, if spontaneity be more conducive to man's happiness than reflection, then poetry, literature, and the arts are of more importance to him than abstract science. If, in appealing to spontaneous emotions, they give the legitimate influence to the heart which it should possess, because under their influence thought and feeling move in the proper unity of their divinely linked being, then must pure, creative, loving, and devout art at last take its rank, when spontaneity shall be regarded as the generatrix of reflection, above the cold and haughty pile reared by the reflective faculties alone, abstract science.
The aspirations of man constantly sigh for the limitless; his soul contains depths which his reason cannot fathom. How rapidly his surging ideas come and go! What flashes of supernatural light—what fearful obscurity! Heaven and Hell war in his soul! Strange visions traverse his intellect, throwing their lurid light into the vague depths of his heart. His power to love and feel seems boundless—his power to know almost at zero. What can he predicate even of himself, with his boundless desires for he knows not what—his fleeting emotions and insatiable wishes! Ah! if the language of poetry, of music, of the arts, came not to gift these passing images with external life, to fix them in the wildered consciousness, they would surge away almost unmarked, like lovely dreams, scarcely leaving their dim traces in the memory. For, with the generality of common minds, the actual is death to the ideal! But art speaks; spontaneity is justified; our inner being, so vague before, stands revealed before us; the beautiful must be the true, the chaos of the moral world is dispelled; we were created to enjoy the attributes of God, which, finitely manifested, are Truth and Beauty; and His light moves over the perturbed chaos of our dim being! What can abstract science, with its cold and finite language, do for a soul athirst for an infinite happiness? Nothing, unless its first postulate be God! Young people, generally, and women, in whom the love of Beauty is strongly developed, have almost a repulsion to the study of science. Wherefore? Because it often seems to exile God from His own creation. Let Him desert Paradise, and it becomes at once a desert. The Infinite is the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley! Besides, the reflective reasoning faculties awaken late with those in whom the intuitive faculties and sensibilities attain an early development. Let woman not despair. What use will there be for the reflective reason, when 'we shall know even as we are known,' and the vision in God shall make the spontaneous bliss of immortality?
The habit of only seeing, only studying, only analyzing the finite, is very apt to inspire the savant with a peculiar distrust of all spontaneous emotion. Ceasing to open his heart to that light from the Absolute, which ought to quicken it into bloom, it learns to dwell only in the sterile world of abstract formulas. If he could find algebraic signs for its expression, he would willingly believe in the immortality of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are precisely those in which dwell the intuitions of the infinite. He piques himself upon the precision of his language, not perceiving it has gained this boasted prim exactitude at the expense of breadth and depth. All honor to the savant! but let him keep the lamp of spontaneity ever burning in his soul. By its light the savage and the woman divine God; without it, he may weigh creation—and 'find Him not!'
Nothing can be more superficial than the intellects of men given over to formulas. They always imagine they can explore the depths of truth, if they can succeed in detecting an inch of its surface. When they arrive at the term of their own ideas, they believe they have exhausted the absolute. They frequently want feeling, because they have, in some way, destroyed their own spontaneity—that inexhaustible source of living and original thought, individualized and yet universal, of ever-thronging and vivid emotions.
The most spontaneous writer of the present day is a woman; fresh, rugged, rich, and natural, as the wayside gold of the Dandelion above described by Lowell—hence her sudden and great popularity with the people. She feels strongly, and thinks justly, and fears not to say what the great God gives her. May she continue to pour her 'wayside gold' through the literary waves of the 'Atlantic'—and still keep the molten treasure bright and burnished for the service of our altar. Let her not fly too near the candles of the clergy, and thus sear her Psyche wings. Need I name Gail Hamilton? Pardon the digression, courteous reader, and let a woman greet a gifted sister as she passes on.
Let me not be misunderstood in my estimate of the spontaneous and reflective faculties: they must combine in any man truly great. If I have dwelt on spontaneity, it is because it has not been sufficiently prized or cultivated. The savant must have the faculties of the artist, as had Kepler; the artist those of the savant, as had Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Study, reflective power, logical ability, erudition, are absolutely necessary; but one of their principal functions is to be able to analyze aright the products of spontaneity; to give the soul the consciousness and comprehension of the innumerable phenomena which arise in it, in its varied relations with the world of ideas. The man who is at the same time spontaneous and reflective, is alone complete, be he artist or savant; he lives, yet is able to analyze life. Of such mental character are indeed all men of true genius, whether mechanicians, architects, philosophers, savants, or artists.
The truths surging dimly through the universal consciousness, find interpreters in the men of genius; through them the moral and religious ideas of an epoch take form, and crystallize themselves in poetry and the arts—as the laws of the divine geometry are realized in the crystallizations of minerals. Poetry and the arts may be regarded as the sum of the absolute truths to the conception of which the masses have risen at any given period in the life of a people.
Lamartine says:
'If humanity were forced to lose entirely one of the two orders of truth—either all the mathematical or all the moral truths—it should not hesitate to sacrifice the mathematical, for though it is true if these were lost the world would suffer immense detriment, yet if we should lose a single one of the moral truths, where would man himself be? Humanity would be decomposed and perish!'
It cannot be denied that art has an incontestable superiority over science in appealing to all, in addressing the masses in the language they most readily understand, the language of feeling, imagination, and enthusiasm. It is not intended only for men of culture, of leisure; all classes are to be benefited by its exalting influence. Men whose lives are almost entirely absorbed by occupations necessary for the comfort of their families, can scarcely be contented with the monotonous and wearisome spectacle of actual every-day life. Their cares are very exhausting, agitating the heart and mind with harassing emotions; while the immortal soul thirsts for eternal happiness. Can it be doubted that such dim, vague, unsatisfied longings are the source of much immorality? Mechanical operations, business speculations, commercial transactions, important as they may appear to the utilitarian, are far from responding to the requirements of the intellect, the imperious exactions of the heart. Such men pine unconsciously for a draught of higher life, they grow weary of existence. Literature and the arts may come to their aid, creating for them an ideal world in the midst of the actual, in the bosom of which they may find other emotions, interests, and images. They may open, even in the desert of the most conventional life, an unfailing spring of ideas and emotions, at which the poor world-wearied spirits may slake their mental and moral thirst. The wonders of commercial industry cannot quite chain the minds of men to the material world—it is certain that the thirst for the ideal ever increases in exact proportion with the development of the race. The true and high task of the artist, the poet, is to divine these wants of humanity, to cultivate these inchoate aspirations for the infinite, to hold its nectar to the toil-worn, weary lips, to soothe and elevate the restless spirits, to cultivate, in accordance with the essence of Christianity, this excess of moral and intellectual being, which the occupations of this weary earth-life cannot exhaust.
Besides, is it not true that the very character natural to the artist is peculiarly fitted to exert a beneficial influence on a material and commercial society? The pursuits of commerce are very apt to engender a spirit of utter indifference to everything except material well-being—a spirit of competition and mutual distrust most injurious to the happiness of society; but the artist is proverbially careless of mere pecuniary gain, and is always full of trust in his fellow men. In the various phases of excitement which are constantly agitating society, he looks only for the manifestation of noble passions and great thoughts. In the base smiles wreathing so many false lips, he sees but the natural expression of kindness; when lips vow fidelity, he dreams of an affection based upon esteem, not upon a passing instinct, a sordid or sensual interest—he believes in a union of hearts. Breathing everywhere around him the high enthusiasm of his own truthful and loving soul, he knows nothing of those perfidious jealousies and bitter enmities which creep and twist in the shade, always hiding under some fair mask; of those coarse intellects opposed to every noble impulse, or of that proud and obstinate egotism which repels every generous emotion of the heart, because it knows that feeling creates an equality which is wounding to its haughty estimation of its own supposed merit.
It is certain that the soul was not created for the accumulation of money, but to enjoy God. It is a free and living power, whose true condition upon earth is the voluntary fulfilment of duty. It was made for this by the God of love. Duty, love to God and man, is the Ideal of human life; and as art and poetry should be the expression of the highest and most universal ideas of the human race, duty should not only be the Pole star of the artist's own life, but its chastening purity should preside over all his conceptions. A profane or unchaste work of art is a sacrilege against the most High; an insult to those divine attributes in whose image that artist himself was made, and which he must constantly struggle to suggest or typify, that the work of his hand prove not a golden calf, an offence both to God and man. The moral ideal always advances as we approach it. 'Be ye perfect as I am perfect,' is the precept of the Master. This is the justification of the poet when he portrays men in advance of the common level of life. The moral Beautiful is the realization of Duty, which the poet should picture in its most sublime form. He may and should sing of the passions, but Duty is the eternal pole star of the soul! The susceptible heart of the artist must respect the majesty of virtue. Unless his escutcheon glitter with the brilliancy of purity, he is not worthy to be one of the Illustrious Band whose high mission upon earth (with lowly reverence be it said) is the manifestation of the Divine Attributes. O Holy Banner, borne through the streets of the Heavenly City by saints and angels, will the artist suffer thy snowy folds to be dragged through the mire of crime? Shame to him when he dallies in the Circean Hall of the senses! Infamy when he wallows in the sty of sensuality!
The effort to apprehend and reproduce the Supernal Loveliness on the part of souls fittingly constituted so to do, has given to our race all the marvels, the softening and elevating influences of the Ideal Realm. The purest, the most exciting, the most intense pleasure is to be found in the pure contemplation of Beauty. We may indulge in it without fear—no Hock and soda are required after its safe excitements! In this contemplation alone do we find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, that excitement of the soul, which we recognize as always dependent upon our introduction into the Realm of the Ideal. This excitement of the soul is easily distinguished from the excitement of the mind consequent upon the perception of logical truths, the satisfaction of the reason; or from passion, the excitement of the heart. The excitement of the soul is strictly and simply the temporary satisfaction of the human aspiration for the Supernal Beauty; and is quite independent of the search for finite truths for the gratification of the intellect; or of that of passion, which is the intoxication of the heart. For in regard to passion of the heart, its home lies too near the senses to be entirely safe, and its tendency may be to degrade;—while there may be high and useful truths which do not move the soul in the least.
The arts, then, always occupied with the reproduction of Beauty, gain their power over the soul of man by reminding him of the Divine Attributes. His thirst for the beautiful belongs to his immortality, for it never rests in the appreciation of mere finite beauty, but struggles wildly to obtain the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to attain a portion of that loveliness whose elements pertain to Eternity alone; and thus, when by poetry or music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we are not moved through any excess of pleasure, but through an impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem or through the music, we obtain but brief and indeterminate glimpses:
'Tears, idle tears, we know not whence they're flowing,
Tears from the depths of some divine despair.'
Tears of the created, the finite, for the Creator, the Infinite!
Every phenomenon of the material world is not a sign of the divine thought, when considered apart from its relations with other things, as every isolated word in a language is not, in itself, a sign of our thought. There is something in the nature of things which constitutes the visible sign the symbol of the Invisible. To reveal or suggest the Absolute, it is not sufficient for the artist to combine fortuitously mere natural phenomena; he must be able to select those in which God has incarnated His Idea. Where is he to find a guide through this labyrinth of sounds, forms, tones, and colors?
He must strive to realize the ideas given him by the Creator; he must surround us here with the memories of our lost Paradise; he must repeat to us the mysterious words and tones which God confides to his heart in his lonely walks to the holy temple, in his solitary musings in the dim forests, or in his prayerful hours under the starlit heavens of the solemn midnight.
'With whose beauty (of created things) if they being delighted took them to be gods, let them know how much the Lord of them is more beautiful than they: for the first Author of Beauty made all those things.'—Book of Wisdom.
'And they shall strengthen the state of the world; and their prayer shall be in the work of their craft, applying their soul, and searching in the law of the Most High.'—Ecclesiasticus.
Here, then, is the secret—gratitude and love are to be the teachers of the artist. Naught save love will enable him to read the wondrous runes of God's creation; nothing but sympathy can catch the strange tones of mythic music; there is nothing pure, which can be painted, save by the pure in heart. The foul or blunt feeling will see itself in everything, and set down blasphemies; it will see Beelzebub in the casting out of devils; it will find its God of flies in every alabaster box of precious ointment; in faith and zeal toward God it will not believe; charity it will regard as lust; compassion as pride; every virtue it will misinterpret, every faithfulness malign. But the mind of the devout artist will find its own image wherever it exists; it will seek for what it loves, and draw it out of dens and caves; it will believe in its being, often where it cannot see it, and always turn away its eyes from beholding vanity; it will lie lovingly over all the foul and rough places of the human heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard and broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, yet catching light from heaven for them to make them fair—and that must be a steep and unkindly crag, indeed, which it cannot cover.
The artist must direct his eyes to the spheres of Sovereign Beauty; he must lend his ears to the harmonies of the Eternal World, that he may be able to decipher the symbolic signs which manifest the Being of beings, and recognize the voices which murmur His Name; for in humble reverence, yet joyful gratitude, it may be said that God Himself is the First, True, and Last Master of the Artist.
Poetry and the arts have an end, ordained by Providence, with respect to the extension of social intercourse; a sacred duty to fulfil to humanity at large. The signs of the times are startling; religions and governments seem driven by a whirlwind, and it is of vital importance that everything should be cultivated which has any tendency to bring men together, to link multiform variety to unity; the national variety to its distinctive unity; the variety of these distinctive unities, these national governments of all races and peoples, to one great Unity of government, freedom, development, justice, and love. There seems to be but little doubt that our own country is destined to become the central heart of this marvellous unity. Is not the very war, now raging over her fair fields, a war for Union? A false element allowed to exist in our code of universal freedom, we mean slavery, like all Satanic elements, has struggled to bring division, faction, disintegration, death, in its train. It has convulsed, but awakened our country. Its reign is almost over; its powers to dissever and destroy are now being rapidly eliminated from a Constitution whose basic meaning is justice, equality, and love. The battle is waging in this vast area of freedom, not for spoil, dominion, vengeance, or ambition, but simply for Union even with our enemies! Liberty, union, life, are parts and portions of God's own law; slavery, dismemberment, death, belong of old to Lucifer. Where God and Demon combat, can the strife be doubtful?
We suffer that we may be purified; but a Union broader, juster, and more beneficent than any the world has yet seen, is to bud, bourgeon, and bloom from this bloody contest. The rose of love is yet to grow upon this crimson soil, and brother yet to stand with brother to insure the union of the world. The glory of our present struggle for the happiness of humanity, will yet be hailed by every living soul!
This is the unity sung by prophets, felt by poets, and foreshadowed in the writings of statesmen, historians, and metaphysicians. Industry, politics, commerce, science, and the arts, are the means which God has placed at man's disposal to aid him in the accomplishment of this mighty work. Man is one in the fall of Adam; one in the redemption of Christ. Individuality and solidarity are but man's variety and unity.
It is certain, however, that a mere combination of commercial interests does but little for the heart; science, with its exact formulas, is almost equally powerless; they form together but the bony skeleton of a lifeless union; poetry and the arts must clothe it with the soft and clinging flesh, quicken it with the throbbing heart, and warm it with the loving soul of an all-embracing humanity; and it is, to say the least, very remarkable how exactly this important task is in keeping with the nature of the arts, because they alone express the feelings, the distinctive individualities of men and nations, while the sciences reveal only the 'impersonal' of the intellect. That a man may demonstrate mathematical problems tells us nothing of his heart; if he paint a single violet rightly, it tells of truth, sympathy, and love. Men never leave in their scientific researches the traces of the different phases of the soul, the imprint of their own personality; the sciences have everywhere the same character, because they contain discrete and abstract ideas, necessarily the same in all minds.
In the creations of art, on the contrary, feeling, the spirit of life, is added to the pure idea, and this new element of individual character introduced into the thought is, in its infinite subtlety, sufficient to produce the immense variety which exists in the poetic and artistic creations of different men, of different ages, and of different nations. And the reason of this is very simple; it is because the heart is the seat of distinctive personality. We never love men for what they know; we love them for what they feel and are. It is consequently feeling which is the principle of union among men.
Thus it is through art and literature alone that national individualities really communicate with each other; it is through them that what is characteristic in each is made known to all; it is through them that embittered, long-seated, and deeply-rooted national prejudices must be dissipated; through them that the fusion of minds, violently hostile to each other only because of their mutual ignorance and misconception of character, must eventually be effected. Before the means of constant intercommunication, daily becoming more rapid and perfect, shall have compassed the whole earth with their lines of lightning, before all nations shall be known to one another as inhabitants of the same city—the artists, through art and literature, will have confided to the human heart of their brethren their own most sacred feelings, the hidden beatings of their life-pulse, so that when the material barriers separating souls shall fall, when steam and iron shall subdue space and time, men of distant climes will no longer stand as strangers to one another, but meet with all the enthusiasm of near and dear friends long since initiated in all the holy and tender secrets of the home hearth; the due place of affection, honor, and gratitude ready for all true souls at the sacred fireside of appreciative fraternal love.
It is remarkable that the art marked and conditioned by the necessity of the most perfect unity, the art almost exclusively intended for the expression of and appeal to the feelings of the soul, the art without material model of any kind, and consequently the most ideal and original of all, in which the pulse of time itself marshals the tones in order, symmetry, and proportion, coloring them with the joys and woes, hopes and fears of humanity—should now be undoubtedly entering upon a new era of far higher and wider development. This fact contains a germ which is to blossom in the most brilliant bloom; the crowning flower in that living unity, which is, indeed, the 'manifest Destiny' of our race.
There is certainly something exceedingly remarkable in the unitive powers of music. In the first place, its present popularization cannot fail to multiply the relations of men with one another, as each separate instrument, like an arithmetical figure, has an absolute, as well as a relative value. It may not be sufficient in itself to produce harmony; but when placed in UNION with others, it gains a double or triple value, according to the part assigned it in a musical Whole. A single jar in time or tune spoils the entire effect of the marvellous variety and order, attained in the utter oneness of any good musical work. The desire to increase the limits of art, to multiply its delicious emotions, will infallibly lead those who cultivate this ethereal study to frequent reunions, in order that they may produce the Beautiful in more fulness, obtain a greater variety of effect and tone, cradled, as it must ever be in music, in the bosom of the strictest unity.
Music has its own trinity, composed of Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony. Rhythm is the pulse of time; the tones register its heart beats and manifest its soul, its melody; harmony is the concurrent sympathy or antagonism elicited by its annunciation in the invisible realm in which it moves. Unity is first manifested in the rhythm; then, as the tones consecutively follow each other, the succeeding one always born and growing immediately from the one just expiring, in the consequent melody; and lastly, as the tones progress simultaneously, hand to hand, and heart to heart, with the single line or passion of the melody, conditioned and responding to it in all its varied phases—(the individual and collective, the soul and its surroundings)—the grand diapason of harmony rolls on—and the magic unity of music is complete! Hence, part of its power over men. But like all organic, basic life-principles, its relations with the human spirit defy analysis. Its unitive influence cannot be denied, even by those who do not feel its charm. Let them but consider that no public act of humanity implying the primeval unity of the race, is considered complete without it, and they must be convinced that it is pre-eminently the art of social union. When an entire nation collects as a band of brothers to resist aggression, to repel invasion, it is music, the unitive art, which animates them to seek death itself to resist wrongs which would burden all, its very rhythm keeping in massive unison, together, the tread of thousands, causing all hearts to throb in one measure, and so regulating the most heterogenous masses that they move as it were as one mighty man. And in all public acknowledgments of our collective dependence as one race upon the one God, music alone is considered sufficiently symbolic and tender to express the universal sense of helplessness, of generic trust in His marvellous mercy.
Music blesses the innocent bride with the first chant of forever united, and consequently holy love. It hallows at the baptismal font the introduction of the infant into the mystical oneness of the children of Christ. Even at the grave it softens human sorrow by its heavenly whisperings of eternal union in the bosom of Infinite love.
France is ever ready to receive Italian, Sclavonic, and German artists with characteristic and appreciative enthusiasm; and America applauds with naïve rapture that skill, as yet, alas! foreign to her native soil.
'I pant for the music which is divine,
My heart in its thirst is a dying flower;
Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine;
Loosen the notes in a silver shower;
Like an herbless plain, for the gentle rain,
I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.
'Let me drink of the spirit of that sweet sound—
More—oh, more—I am thirsting yet!
It loosens the serpent which care has bound
Upon my heart to stifle it;
The dissolving strain, in every vein,
Passes into my heart and brain.'
Shelley.
Artists and litterateurs are the true representatives of the countries in which they live; because they alone reveal to us the secret throbbings of the great national heart; and the warm and sympathetic feelings which they excite in foreign climes, are golden links drawing more closely the ties of mutual understanding and affection, welding them together in that generous reciprocal esteem and comprehension, which is destined to unite all climes and tongues.
'A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.'
The sympathies of life are widening and increasing. Societies are constantly arising devoting themselves to the solacing of human misery; eager sympathies are evinced by different countries in the sufferings of distant lands; ready and substantial aid is gladly tendered in cases of pestilence and famine; and religious intolerance and bigotry are raving themselves to rest. Christ is more and creeds are less than of old. The fact that a free government is now in successful operation, in which (when one false element, slavery, shall be forever eliminated) the voluntary annexation of new states and new countries would be but new ties of strength, with the consentaneous and related facts above quoted, tend to prove that humanity is entering upon a new era; that it is not destined to trail its passionate and quivering wings much longer through the mire of mere materialism; but that newer and higher life is spreading simultaneously through all its members; that the elevating love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, is hourly penetrating it more deeply; that after its intellect shall have been trained by the sciences—its force increased by industry, commerce, and statesmanship—its inmost heart will be developed by the Charities, now, as with the subtile Greeks, one with the Graces—the arts for the manifestation of the Beautiful. Everything tends to prove, even the wars now waging for national entities, that the human race is approaching that promised phase of civilization, in which all the elements are to combine in glorious unity, sound in witching harmony, and men, full of love to God and man, are to become living stones in the vast temple of the redeemed, one through the loving heart of the Brother who died for them all; one through Him with the Infinite God, since in Him finite and Infinite are forever one!
A few words in the cause of those in advance of their times, and we attain the close of our first volume.
It is a startling fact, in the history of humanity, that the benefactors of the race have always been its martyrs and victims; dyeing every glorious gift which they have won for their brethren in the royal purple of the kingly blood of their own hearts. Is this, brethren, to last forever? Shall we never requite the dauntless Columbus, in the wide sea of Beauty? Of all men living, the artist most requires the boon of sympathy. The most susceptible of them all, the musician, plunging into the unseen depths of the time-ocean to wrestle for his gems, feels his heart die within him, when he sees his fellow men turn coldly away from the pure and priceless pearls which he has won for them from the stormy waves and whirlpools of chaotic and compassless sound.
As the artists must be considered as the standard-bearers of that blissful banner of progress to be effected through the culture of the sympathies of the race, unrolling that great Oriflamme of humanity, on which bloom the Heavenly Lilies of that chaste Passion of the Soul—the longing for the infinite—let us acknowledge that we have failed to render happy the great spirits no longer among us; and let us strive, for the future, not to chill with our mistrust and coldness, not to drive into the sickness of despair with our want of intelligent sympathy, the gifted living, who, as angels of a better covenant, still lovingly linger among us! Let us strive to learn the lesson set before us with such tenderness in the following eloquent words of Ruskin, fitting close as they are to the many which we have already collated and combined with our work from his glowing pages.
'He who has once stood beside the grave to look back upon the companionship now forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love and keen sorrow to give one moment's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust. But the lessons which men receive as individuals, they never learn as nations. Again and again they have seen their noblest descend into the grave, and have thought it enough to garland the tombstone when they have not crowned the brow, and to pay the honor to the ashes which they had denied to the spirit. Let it not displease them that they are bidden, amidst the tumult and glitter of their busy life, to listen for the few voices and watch for the few lamps which God has toned and lighted to charm and guide them, that they may not learn their sweetness by their silence, nor their light by their decay.'
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the highest poet of our own century, has thus given us the artist's creed of resignation, closing her chant with his sublime Te Deum:
Voice of the Creator.
''And, O ye gifted givers, ye
Who give your liberal hearts to me,
To make the world this harmony,—
''Are ye resigned that they be spent
To such world's help?' The spirits bent
Their awful brows, and said—'Content!
''We ask no wages—seek no fame!
Sew us for shroud round face and name,
God's banner of the oriflamme.
''We are content to be so bare
Before the archers! everywhere
Our wounds being stroked by heavenly air.
''We lay our souls before thy feet,
That Images of fair and sweet
Should walk to other men on it.
''We are content to feel the step
Of each pure Image!—let those keep
To mandragore, who care to sleep:
''For though we must have, and have had
Right reason to be earthly sad—
Thou Poet-God, art great and glad!''