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.