But though the arts seem to us to be thus divided, each art is also threefold, and must appeal to the triune nature of man. As man only truly lives, so he only truly creates, as a threefold being, yet his life is ever one, so that soul, spirit, and body are constantly acting and reacting upon each other. When the divine wisdom shines into the spirit, it gives it the perception of intellectual truths, which truths throw their light far into the dimmer soul; and when the divine love pours into the soul, it gifts it with the almost limitless faculty of loving, which warms and quickens the colder spirit, until it germs and buds in the lovely bloom of human charities and self-abnegating good deeds.
It is not our intention here to enter into any detailed speculations upon the hidden mysteries of our being; we simply call the attention of the reader to the fact that there is a class of truths which must belong to the universal reason (such as mathematical axioms, syllogistic formulæ, logical deductions, etc., etc.), because they compel assent as soon as recognized;—thus a ray of divine wisdom itself must exist in our spirits, which cannot be perverted, and which elevates the human mind to the immediate perception of impersonal, abstract, and conviction-compelling truths. We cannot deny them, even if we would! All sound logic has its power in the light proceeding from this divine ray.
A ray of the divine love must also exist in the essence of the human soul, to enable it to perform the marvels of self-abnegating devotion, of which the most humble among us frequently seem capable. Strange Promethean fire!
As it is the allotted task of every individual to form his soul into a noble and powerful personality, to be an artist in the highest sense of the word, since he must aid in chiselling a glorious statue from the living block intrusted to his care,—is it not essentially necessary that every human being should be taught to discern and love the beautiful? And vast is the difference between the artist in the school of men and in the school of God; the first, working for and in time, must be satisfied with leaving to his fellow men some brilliant yet perishing records of his thoughts; while the latter, working for eternity, may labor forever to approach the infinite beauty set before him as his glorious ideal of perfection!
We have already asserted that poetry is no fourth art on a line with the other three. It indeed embraces and resumes them all, with added powers of its own. It cannot, however, be denied that, employed in combination with poetry, the other arts lose much of their special power and effect, for thus associated they hold a subordinate station, are forced to appear in a colder medium, and are subjected to the laws of a harmony but partially adapted to their individual interests. Undeniable as this may be, poetry still maintains its high claims to our consideration. Though its tones be colder than those of music, since they must pass through the analytic intellect instead of appealing immediately to the sympathetic heart; if its hues are less vivid than, those of painting, as they must be transmitted through the slower medium of words in lieu of impressing themselves immediately upon the delighted eye; if less palpable to the corporeal sense of touch than sculpture, with its solidity of form,—yet is its range wider, fuller, and far more comprehensive than any one of the sister arts. If any one should be inclined to doubt that it is indeed a resumé of them all, let him consider that in its prosodial flow, measured pauses, metrical lines, varied cadences, stirring or soothing rhythms, sweet or rugged rhymes,—it is music: in its metaphorical diction, descriptive imagery, succession of shifting pictures, diversified illustration, and vivid coloring,—it is painting; while in its organic development and arrangement of parts, its complicated structure, in the individualism of characters, and the sharply defined personalities of its dramatic realm,—it struggles to attain the fixed and beautiful unity of sculpture.
The arts find their essential unity in the fact that their sole object is the manifestation of the beautiful. No one knows better than the artist that beauty is not the production, of his own limited understanding, but that, after having duly made his preliminary studies of the laws of the medium through which he is to manifest it, it shines into, it reveals itself, as it were, intuitively to the divining soul. Far lower in its sphere than that infallible inspiration which speaks to us through the sacred pages of Holy Writ of the things immediately pertaining to our relations with God, true artistic power must still be considered as inspiration, since it is constantly arriving at more than the unassisted reason of man could command by the fullest exercise of its highest logical powers. The impassioned Romeo cries: 'Can philosophy make a Juliet?' That philosophy has never made a Juliet in art is positively certain! Let us then reverentially enter upon an analysis of the effect of beauty upon the human spirit, whether found in the perfect works of our God, or shining through the more humble imitations and manifestations of the fallible human artist.
The perception of beauty first excites a sensation of pleasure, then a feeling of interest in the beautiful object, then a perception of kindness in a superior intelligence, from which it is at once seen it must ultimately flow, then a feeling of grateful veneration toward that beneficent Intelligence. Unless the perception of beauty be accompanied with these emotions, we have no more correct idea of beauty than we can be said to have an idea of a letter of which we perceive the fine handwriting and fair lines, without understanding the contents. The emotions consequent upon the due perception of beauty are not given by the senses, nor do they arise entirely from the intellect, but, proceeding from the entire man, must be accompanied by a right and open state of the heart. A true perception and acknowledgment of beauty is then certainly elevating; exalting and purifying the mind in accordance with its degree. And it would indeed seem, from the lavish profusion with which the Deity has seen fit to scatter it around us, that it was His beneficent intention we should be constantly under its influence. Now the artist is one gifted by his Creator to discern that ineffable beauty which is everywhere present, to live in the realm of the ideal, and to reveal it to men through words, forms, colors, sounds, and, would he insure the salvation of his own soul, through good deeds. Thus it can be proved that 'religion is the soul of art,' and essentially necessary to the artist, because it gives him, simultaneously, the ideas and feelings of the Absolute, without which he must lose his way, falling into sterile and ignoble copies of the real, like the Dutch painters, and thus be able to produce nothing but detailed and accurate copies of low subjects, of factitious emotions, or of vulgar sensations. Without faith, the artist prefers the body itself to the feelings which animate it—the polished limbs of a Venus to the brow of a Madonna! The intellect alone can never soar to the regions of eternal truth, to the Absolute; it must be aided by the heart in its daring flight. Faith and love are the snowy and glittering wings of true artistic excellence. When the soul is full of the bliss of beauty, the feeling of its happiness urges the artist on to the necessity of imparting it,—while his heart is wrapt in the vision of the Absolute, he would fain build for his joyous thoughts an eternal abode with his fellow men, that they too might see the steppings of the All Fair, and so be cheered and stimulated in these their gloomy days of evil.
Thus it cannot be denied that religion alone gives depth and sublimity to the creations of art, because it alone gives faith and hope in the Infinite. If we are often astonished to see the springs of artistic inspiration so rapidly exhausted in many men of genius of our own epoch, it is because of their overwhelming egotism and limited subjectivity, because the worship of the finite replaces that of the infinite, because religion has become for them a mere memory of childhood. To recover their blighted fertility of imagination, they must again become as little children, again betake themselves to the shady and lonely way leading to the temple of God.
In proof of this position, we constantly find that men gifted, sensuously, with acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet who do not receive it with a pure heart, never comprehend it aright; but making it a mere minister to their desires, a mere seasoning of sensual pleasures, sink until all their creations take the same earthly stamp, and it is seen and felt that the heavenly sense of beauty has been degraded into a servant of lust. But as the spirit of prophecy consisted with the avarice of Balaam and the disobedience of Saul, so God knows all the stops of the heaven-gifted but self-corrupted artists, and, in spite of themselves, has often made them discourse high harmonies, and give the most eloquent and earnest enunciations of the very sentiments and principles in which their own condemnation could be found clearly and vividly written. The good seed, although divine, if there be no blessing upon it, may indeed bring forth wild grapes, but these grapes are well discerned, for there is, in the works of bad men, a taint, stain, and jarring discord, blacker and louder exactly in proportion to their moral deficiency. At best it is no part of our duty to examine into and pronounce upon the frail characters of men, but rather to hold fast to that which we can prove good, and feel to be ordained for our own benefit.
It can, moreover, be fully proved that the artists, as a class, have never been false to religion. From the poets of the dark ages sprang a literature strange and marvellous, but full of naive faith, and bearing striking witness to the activity of the human spirit even in those dim centuries: I mean the literature of 'visions and legends.' And to estimate the importance of these consolatory creations aright, we must remember how precarious and miserable life then was, passed in constant privation and poverty, menaced with increasing perils; and then consider the fact that these legends kept constantly before the mind of the oppressed people the consoling idea of a superintending Providence, who numbers all our tears and hears our lightest sighs. The legend indeed never confined itself wholly to this earth as the theatre of its wild drama; immortality was always its groundwork, and its last scene always opened in the invisible world, where the saints were surrounded with undying halos of glory, and from whence they watched over men with increasing love, while in their midst reigned a gentle figure full of grace and majesty, uniting, in a mysterious and ineffable manner, the holy virginity and sacred maternity of woman; a gentle, humble being, through whose innocent meekness the two worlds, finite and infinite, had been forever linked in the person of the infant God, whom she forever bore upon her virgin bosom. What a tender lesson for barbaric life!