Where smile the hills of Palestine,
Ich bin dein!
Where rise the mosques and minarets,—
Where every breath brings flowery balms,—
Where souls forget their dark regrets
Beneath the strange, mysterious palms,—
Where the banana builds her shrine,—
Ich bin dein!
Too many clusters break the vine:
Ich bin dein!
The tree whose strength and life outpour
In one exultant blossom-gush
Must flowerless be forevermore:
We walk this way but once, friend;—hush!
Our feet have left no trodden line:
Ich bin dein!
Who heaps his goblet wastes his wine:
Ich bin dein!
The boat is moving from the land;—
I have no chiding and no tears;—
Now give me back my empty hand
To battle with the cruel years,—
Behold, the triumph shall be mine!
Ich bin dein!
* * * * *
THE REPRESENTATIVE ART.
No art is worth anything that does not embody an idea,—that is not representative: otherwise, it is like a body without a soul, or the image of some divinity that never had existence. Art needs, indeed, to be individualized, to betray the characteristics of the artist, to be himself infused into his work; but more than this, it needs to typify, to illustrate the character of the age,—to be of a piece with other expressions of the sentiment that animates other men at the time. It must be one note in the concert, and that not discordant,—neither behind time nor ahead of it,—neither in the wrong key nor the other mode: you don't want Verdi in one of Beethoven's symphonies; you don't want Mozart in Rossini's operas. No art ever has lived that was not the genuine product of the era in which it appeared; no art ever can live that is not such a product: it may, perchance, have a temporary or fictitious success, but it can neither really and truly exert an influence at the moment of its highest triumph, nor afterwards remain a power among men, unless it reflect the spirit of the epoch, unless it show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
All greatness consists in this: in being alive to what is going on around one; in living actually; in giving voice to the thought of humanity; in saying to one's fellows what they want to hear or need to hear at that moment; in being the concretion, the result, of the influences of the present world. In no other way can one affect the world than in responding thus to its needs, in embodying thus its ideas. You will see, in looking to history, that all great men have been a piece of their time; take them out and set them elsewhere, they will not fit so well; they were made for their day and generation. The literature which has left any mark, which has been worthy of the name, has always mirrored what was doing around it; not necessarily daguerreotyping the mere outside, but at least reflecting the inside,—the thoughts, if not the actions of men,—their feelings and sentiments, even if it treated of apparently far-off themes. You may discuss the Greek republics in the spirit of the modern one; you may sing idyls of King Arthur in the very mood of the nineteenth century. Art, too, will be seen always to have felt this necessity, to have submitted to this law. The great dramatists of Greece, like those of England, all flourished in a single period, blossomed in one soil; the sculptures of antiquity represented the classic spirit, and have never been equalled since, because they were the legitimate product of that classic spirit. You cannot have another Phidias till man again believes in Jupiter. The Gothic architecture, how meanly is it imitated now! What cathedrals built in this century rival those of Milan or Strasbourg or Notre Dame? Ah! there is no such Catholicism to inspire the builders; the very men who reared them would not be architects, if they lived to-day. And the Italian painters, the Angelos and Raphaels and Da Vincis and Titians, who were geniuses of such universal power that they builded and carved and went on embassies and worked in mathematics only with less splendid success than they painted,—they painted because the age demanded it; they painted as the age demanded; they were religious, yet sensuous, like their nation; they felt the influence of the Italian sun and soil. Their faith and their history were compressed into The Last Judgment and the Cartoons; their passion as well as their power may be recognized in The Last Supper and The Venus of the Bath.
There is always a necessity for this expression of the character of the age. This spirit of our age, this mixed materialistic and imaginative spirit,—this that abroad prompts Russian and Italian wars, and at home discovers California mines,—that realizes gorgeous dreams of hidden gold, and Napoleonic ideas of almost universal sway,—that bridges Niagara, and under-lays the sea with wire, and, forgetful of the Titan fate, essays to penetrate the clouds,—this spirit, so practical that those who choose to look on one side only of the shield can see only perjured monarchs trampling on deceived or decaying peoples, and backwoodsmen hewing forests, and begrimed laborers setting up telegraph-poles or working at printing-presses,—this spirit also so full of imagination,—which has produced an outburst of music (that most intangible and subtile and imaginative of arts) such as the earth never heard before,—which is developing in the splendid, showy life, in the reviving taste for pageantry that some supposed extinct, in the hurried, crowded incidents that will fill up the historic page that treats of the nineteenth century,—this spirit is sure to get expression in art.
The American people, cosmopolitan, concrete, the union, the result rather of a union of so many nationalities, ought surely to do its share towards this expression. The American people surely represents the century,—has much of its spirit: is full of unrest; is eminently practical, but practical only in embodying poetical or lofty ideas; is demonstrative and excitable; resembles the French much and in many things,—the French, who are at the head of modern and European civilization,—who think and feel deeply, but do not keep their feelings hidden. The Americans, too, like expression: when they admire a Kossuth or a Jenny Lind, a patriot exile or a foreign singer, all the world is sure to know of their admiration; when they are delighted at some great achievement in science, like the laying of an Atlantic Cable, they demonstrate their delight. They make their successful generals Presidents; they give dinners to Morphy and banquets to Cyrus Field. They are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the age. Therefore they are artistic.
How amazed some will be at the proposition,—amazed that the age should be called an artistic one,—amazed that Americans should be considered an artistic nation! Yet art is only the expression in outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace,—the sacrament of the imagination. Art is an incarnation in colors or stone or music or words of some subtile essence which requires the embodiment. We all have delicate fancies, lofty imaginings, profound sentiments; the artist expresses them for us. If, then, this age be one that requires expression for its ideas, that is practical, that insists on accomplishing its designs, on creating its children, on producing its results, it is an artistic age. For art works; a poet is a maker, according to the Greeks: and all artists are poets; they all produce; they all do; they all make. They do just what all the practical men of this practical age are doing, what even the Gradgrinds are doing: they embody ideas; they put thoughts into facts. A quiet, contemplative age is not an artistic one; art has ever flourished in stirring times: Grecian wars and Guelphic strife have been its fostering influences. An artist is very far from being an idle dreamer; he works as hard as the merchant or the mechanic,—works, too, physically as well as mentally, with his hand as well as his head.