Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry. The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of us together to found an institution for the encouragement of art in Rhode Island, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave the beautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and delaines; to melt the beautiful into iron and brass, and copper, as well as into silver and gold; so that our manufacturers and artisans may hold their own against the competition of England and France and Germany, whereof in the two latter countries especially, schools of design have long existed, and high artists find their account in furnishing the beautiful to manufacturers.

“A low origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be without flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered,” will say some travelled dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely, but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded canopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has He made beautiful. He surrounds us with beauty; He envelops us in beauty. Beauty is spread out on the familiar grass, glows in the daily flower, glistens in the dew, waves in the commonest leafy branch. All about us, in infinite variety, beauty is lavished by God in sights and sounds, and odors. Now, in using the countless and multifarious substances that are put within our reach, to be by our ingenuity and contrivance wrought into materials for our protection and comfort, and pleasure, it becomes us to—it is part of his design that we shall—follow the divine example, so that in all our handiwork, as in his, there shall be beauty, so much as the nature of each product is susceptible of. That it is the final purpose of Providence that our whole life, inward and outward, shall be beautiful, and be steeped in beauty, we have evidence, in the yearnings of the best natures for the perfect, in the delight we take in the most resplendent objects of art and nature, in the ennobling thrill we feel on witnessing a beautiful deed.

By culture we can so create and multiply beauty, that all our surroundings shall be beautiful.

Can you not imagine a city of the size of this, or vastly larger, the structure of whose streets and buildings shall be made under the control of the best architectural ideas, being of various stones and marbles, and various in style and color, so that each and every one shall be either light, or graceful, or simple, or ornate, or solid, or grand, according to its purpose, and the conception of the builder; and in the midst and on the borders of the city, squares, and parks, planted with trees and flowers and freshened by streams and fountains. And when you recall the agreeable, the elevating sensation you have experienced in front of a perfect piece of architecture (still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edifice should be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but through streets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the whole population of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be to refine, to expand, to elevate. When we look at the architectural improvements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in New York, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation. But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about in unison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life, and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses.

It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has been founded. Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in all things; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist; to make universally visible and active the harmony,—I almost might say the identity,—there is between the useful and the beautiful.

Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of the useful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon the fructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends,—aye, absolutely depends,—the development of the practical. But for the expansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor the printing-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine. To that we owe silver forks as well as the electric telegraph. In no province of work or human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but by the action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted when standing before a masterpiece of Raphael. This ceaseless seeking for a better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our present as that is to the times of Alfred.

In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often the measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a field of golden wheat—whereby our bodies live—and the more beautiful the closer it stands and the fuller are its heads. The oak and the pine owe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of their usefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks. The proportions which give the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetness and endurance and strength. And thus, too, with man,—his works, when best, sparkle most with this fire of the beautiful. We profit by history in proportion as it registers beautiful sayings and beautiful doings. We profit one another in everyday life in proportion as our acts, the minor as well as the greater, are vitalized by this divine essence of beauty. To the speeches of Webster, even to the most technical, this essence gives their completeness and their grandeur of proportion; while it is this which illuminates with undying splendor the creations of Allston. Thus, gentlemen, the aim of our Association is most noble and useful, drawing its nobleness from its high usefulness. May it so prosper, that a generation hence, thousands and tens of thousands shall look back to this the day of its inauguration with praise and thankfulness.

Footnotes

  1. Wordsworth. [(return)]
  2. Keats. [(return)]
  3. See [preceding Essay]. [(return)]
  4. Wordsworth. [(return)]
  5. Putnam’s Magazine, 1868. [(return)]
  6. Trissotin, Vadius, and Philaminte, are personages in Molière’s comedy of Les Femmes Savantes (The Blue-Stockings). [(return)]
  7. From Lippincott’s Magazine, 1870. [(return)]
  8. From Putnam’s Monthly, 1857. [(return)]