Is Polite Society Polite? and Other Essays

by Julia Ward Howe

I think this attainment the first, fundamental to all the others. We console the child with a simple word about heaven. He is satisfied, and feels its truth. How to attain this deathlessness is the next problem whose solution he will ask of us. We point him to the plane on which he will roll; for our life is a series of revolutions,—no straight-forward sledding, but an acceleration by ideal weight and propulsion, through which our line becomes a circle, and our circle itself a living wheel of action, creating out of its mobile necessity a past and a future.

The halfness of the individual is literally shown in the division of sex. The Platonic fancy runs into an anterior process, by which what was originally one has been made two. We will say that the two halves were never historically, though always ideally, one. Here Art comes to the assistance of Nature. The mere contrast of sex does not lift society out of what is animal and slavish. The integrity of sex relation is not to be found in a succession or simultaneity of mates, easily taken and as easily discarded. This great value of a perfected life is to be had only through an abiding and complete investment,—the relations of sex lifted up to the communion of the divine, unified by the good faith of a lifetime, enriched by a true sharing of all experience. This august partnership is Marriage, one of the most difficult and delicate achievements of society. Too sadly does its mockery afflict us in these and other days. Either party, striving to dwarf the other, dwarfs itself. This mystic selfhood, inexpressible in literal phrases, is at once the supreme of Nature and the sublime of institutions. The ideal human being is man and woman united on the ideal plane. The church long presented and represented this plane. The state is hereafter to second and carry out its suggestions. The ideal assembly, which we figure by the communion of the saints, is a coming together of men and women in the highest aims and views to which Humanity can be a party.

Passing from immediate to projected consciousness, I can imagine expression itself to spring from want. The sense of the incompleteness of life in itself and in each of its acts calls for this effort to show, at least, what life should be,—to vindicate the shortcoming of action out of the fulness of speech. This that eats and sleeps is so little of the man! These processes are so little what he understands by life! Listen; let him tell you what life means to him.

And so sound is differentiated into speech, and hammered into grammar, and built up into literature—all of whose creations are acoustic palaces of imagination. For the eye in reading is only the secondary sense: the written images the spoken word.

How the rhythm of the blood comes to be embodied in verse is more difficult to trace. But the justification of Poetry is obvious. When you have told the thing in prose, you have made it false by making it literal. Poesy lies a little to complete the truth which Honesty lacks skill to embody. Her artifices are subtle and wonderful. You glance sideways at the image, and you see it. You look it full in the face, and it disappears.

The plastic arts, too. This beautiful face commands me to paint from it a picture twice as beautiful. Its charm of Nature I cannot attain. My painting must not try for the edge of its flesh and blood forms, the evanescence of its color, the light and shadow of its play of feature. But something which the beautiful face could not know of itself the artist knows of it. That deep interpretation of its ideal significance marks the true master, who is never a Chinese copyist. Some of the portraits that look down upon you from the walls of Rome and of Florence calmly explain to you a whole eternity. Their eyes seem to have seized it all, and to hold it beyond decay. This is what Art gives in the picture,—not simply what appears and disappears, but that which, being interpreted, abides with us.

Who shall say by what responsive depths the heights of architecture measure themselves? The uplifted arches mirror the introspective soul. So profoundly did I think, and plot, and contrive! So loftily must my stone climax balance my cogitations! To such an amount of prayer allow so many aisles and altars. The pillars of cloisters image the brotherhood who walked in the narrow passages; straight, slender, paired in steadfastness and beauty, there they stand, fair records of amity. Columns of retrospect, let us hope that the souls they image did not look back with longing upon the scenes which they were called upon to forsake.

Critical belief asks roomy enclosures and windows unmasked by artificial impediments. It comes also to desire limits within which the voice of the speaker can reach all present. Men must look each other in the face, and construct prayer or sermon with the human alphabet. We are glad to see the noble structures of older times maintained and renewed; but we regret to see them imitated in our later day. (St. Peter's is, in all save dimension, a church of Protestant architecture—so is St. Paul's, of London.) The present has its own trials and agonies, its martyrdoms and deliverances. With it, the old litanies must sink to sleep; the more Christian of to-day efface the most Christian of yesterday. The very attitude of saintship is changed. The practical piety of our time looks neither up nor down, but straight before it, at the men and women to be relieved, at the work to be done. Religion to-day is not "height nor depth nor any other creature," but God with us.

There is a mystic birth and Providence in the succession of the Arts; yet are they designed to dwell together, each needing the aid of all. People often speak of sculpture as of an art purely and distinctively Grecian. But the Greeks possessed all the Arts, and more, too,—the substratum of democracy and the sublime of philosophy. No natural jealousy prevails in this happy household. The Arts are not wives, of whom one must die before another has proper place. They are sisters, whose close communion heightens the charm of all by the excellence of each. The Christian unanimity is as favorable to Art as to human society.

We may say that the Greeks attained a great perfection in sculpture, and have continued in this art to offer the models of the world.