A Plea for Art [pp. 624-626]

626 A Plea for Art. [SEPTEMBER,
befit us about as well as the armour and battleaxe of Richard Coeur-de-Leon would have suited Captain Walker or Pierce Butler in the Mexican War-toryism, feudalism, medievalism, all
manners of retrogradism and rottenness in opinion, all manners and moods of contempt for ourselves and for each other, all variations of desire
for false and ruinous conservatism. We calmly
acquiesce in such a state of literary dependence
as would become only an infant or subject position. We must pass beyond the Atlantic wave
to find gratification for some of the noblest and
strongest of our natural aspirations. Even our
own authors must often seek foreign scenes, and
personages, to bring naturally into their works
that brightness and glory of art which is, at the
same time, the very vital warmth of polite letters. To us the rule of the sage does not apply,
as it does to nations in which the arts are cultivated, that that most interests us which comes
home to " our business and our bosoms." We
have a singular amaurosis hiding from us only
things at hand. Yet we have a noble continent
where nature has wrought no "journey-work
with prenticed hand;" we have glorious skies
-forests-rivers-cataracts-lakes-savansahs.
We have unfettered limbs, unfettered minds, an
unfettered faith. These all have their own departments in our nature; and most nobly, or it is
our own fault, may those departments be filled.
Yet we ourselves prove to ourselves by the books
and journals we most read, that there is yet another department which none nor all of these can
fill. We still pine for Parthenon, and Coliseum,
and dome, and statue, and glorious visions on
Italian walls. Our longings for heroes, orators
and sages are more than satisfied with the memories of Washington, of Franklin, of Henry, of
Marshall and their like. We have had the heroes. We pine for the Beautifiers of life. We
have been freed from the wounding chains of
civil oppression; but we stretch out our hands
after the silken cords of captivity to the ennobling, the exalting, the gladdening influences of
social life. Where are our Phidias, our Zeuxis,
our Raffaele, our Michael Angelo? We wait for
them.
Many persons consider all this to be mere romance, because it will not tell in the ledger or
the pursee It is a sailing through the sky in
chase of some impalpable charm; a vain pining
after an impracticable El Dorado of sentiment.
With them, man is merely a being who eats bread,
wears clothes, and casts up accounts. We desire
no argument with any of that family. But a respectful word or two about practicability. "No
prophet is so infallible as he who fulfills his own
predictions." No dungeon is deeper, no doors
made faster, than the dungeon and the doors of
that Doubting Castle of which we have a master-key and free egress, as soon as we awake to
the consciousness that we have them. We can
dig canals, build rail-roads, stretch out speaking
wires, erect lunatic, orphan, deif, dumb and blind
asylums:
"The mountain's giant crags that prop the sky
Are hurled asunder; and the brazen steed
The fiery rail-car sweeps exulting by.
The word goes forth, and dreary fens are dry
Wide blooms the arid desert as the rose;
The frowning forest lifts its boughs on high
The advancing giant's footsteps to oppose
And strives, but strives in vain, and sinks before its foes."
Whenever we shall see then, the clear absolute necessity of providing for the nobler and yet
unsupplied wants of coming generations, there
will not be a want of ability. Possent quia se
posse putant. Having done so much to connect
city with city in commerce, to sweep over and
laugh at distance in the flight of news, we can,
when we shall become aware that we can, do
much to ennoble man's imagination and bind him
to the homes and graves of his fathom Without
this, civilization must ever be imperfect. Such
is the law under which man is created. He who
made him and kindled within him the love of the
beautiful, the pure and the sublime, made also
the natural objects in the world around, which
evoke and gratify those feelings. As man hungers and thirsts, the munificence of the planethome to which he is now bound, gives food and
drink; and thereby shows that it is now his appropriate and adapted home. As his spirit also
hungers and thirsts, both for higher things, and
for the grand, the sublime and the beautiful, so
also the munificence of his home provides the
thousand-fold grandeurs of sky and cloud, and
the earthly beauties of spring and summer, and
the thunder and the cataract anIthe roar of the
ocean, and thereby proves itselftdapted to, and
not contemptuous of, the wants even of his imagination. That only is a complete civilization
which patterns in this respect after nature and
the Author of Nature; which in its schemes for
the education of the whole man, embraces intellect, conscience, passions, emotions, reverence,
love of beauty, love of pure, high, ennobling nature, and pure, high, ennobling art.
B.
COLERIDGE'S ESTIMATE OF THE FRENCH.
Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder,each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass
them together and they are terrible indeed.
626
A Plea for Art.
[ SEPTEMBER,