Originally published in The Poet's Magazine (Leonard Lloyd) vol.1 #1 (Aug 1876).
Part I.
Imagination is the creative faculty of the soul, and the very word poet signifies a creator. As speculation anticipates experiment, thought precedes action, so to the poet is ascribed the origin of all those arts, sciences, and discoveries which are the offspring of the imagination. The poet is ever in advance of his generation, he is the pioneer of progress, he is the guide through the labyrinths of ignorance and superstition: rapt in the ardour of prophetic ecstasy, he forecasts events, and in the present he realizes the future.
Thus the poetic element was predominant in Alexander, when, a yet untried soldier, he saw himself the founder of a universal monarchy; in Columbus, when he described, as with a painter's eye, the undiscovered continent of America; in Newton, when he conceived the law of attraction, albeit he could not at first support this sublime theory by positive demonstration.
The poet conceives the unembodied thought, he strikes out a vague generalization, and from the unexplored, the undiscovered, the unknown, he deduces some mighty truth, which he leaves to lesser minds to develop and apply. His philosophy is deductive, not inductive, his arguments are based on no definite data, but he depends on that intuitive faculty of the soul which accepts truth as well as announces truth—as if for a moment the ethereal element which animates the human soul acted independently of the senses, and asserting a superior existence, confessed the divine original. It is this vastness and expansion of thought which Shakespeare has so wonderfully brought home to our comprehension, when he represents Prospero breaking his magic wand, and uttering that sad yet triumphant soliloquy upon earth and all her finite and unsubstantial creations.
Passing from the poetic element in its intellectual ideal, the subject next to be considered is the method of its expression. Without subordinate agents the soul would be mute and silent. It might illuminate the mind of the individual, but diffusion there would be none. The soul and the external world require some medium through which the electric spark may pass and repass, and bring them into relation the one with the other. And the senses supply this necessity, and are the connecting links between the world without and the world within. Unlike the soul, they have no independent action, but are subordinate to the dictates of intelligence. As speech is the earliest acquired and the most in requisition, so we find that this sense is made the chief medium of connection between the soul and the world. And as a natural consequence, poetry taken as rhythmical composition was among the earliest cultivated of the liberal arts. Painting, sculpture, and architecture, sweet sisters of the parent Muse, found the early world ill-prepared for their beneficent influence. It took ages before they exercised any permanent sway, and nation differed from nation in the expression of their homage. For while Poetry (in the common acceptation of the word) is altogether intellectual, the Fine Arts require material agency for their development, and they are pure or debased in accordance with the skill, cultivation, and national characteristics of their exponents. Poetry ever aims at ideal beauty (which is but another name for perfection); art is the material expression of this intellectual desire. As perfection can only exist in God, so we find that the Fine Arts were early consecrated to deity.
It may be well to take a rapid glance at the national expression of this universal passion.
Egypt has been named the cradle of the liberal arts. But while the monuments of her skill remain, but little has come down to us of her literature. With the Egyptians all art was consecrated to deity. The human element was kept in abeyance, and a system of symbolism was encouraged which shadowed out to the unlettered a mystery too deep for them to penetrate. Who can stand within the pillared halls of Karnac, or amid the ruins of Thebes, without being filled with mysterious awe? Realize if you can the avenue of lions which led up to the temple, surrounded by colossal forms, in which calmness, power and impassiveness are the prevailing characteristics. The Egyptian mind sought perfection but found it not. Her imagination could not reach ideal beauty and she accepted a counterfeit—a colossal humanity—divested indeed of human passions; but only a void remained, and no divine afflatus infused life into the inert yet shapely material, As the most subtle combination of sounds, the most perfect rhythm, and the finest alliteration does not constitute poetry, unless thought animates the composition; so in like manner the perfect mechanism of art is nothing without a soul—informing power to vivify the creation. Art was transported to Greece, and it lived. Yet Egypt achieved an excellence to which no other nation has ever attained—that of impressing on the mind of the beholder the feelings of awe and reverence by the majesty of repose. The Egyptians knew the superiority of rest over action in representing the sublime, and in the personation of this attribute they specially excelled.
The Greek school was founded on the Egyptian. Pythagoras, who sojourned for many years among the white-robed priesthood of the Nile, is supposed to have introduced into Greece the key to the system of harmonious proportion. Prior to his time, music and poetry had already attained to excellence; but painting, sculpture and architecture reached their zenith in the succeeding generation. To return to the well-known axiom, that thought ever precedes action: Poetry had prepared the way for the acceptance of the Fine Arts, but their development required material agency. The eye and hand as well as the taste had to be educated. Homer, the tragic poets, and all their bardic brethren, together with the great philosophers, had infused, as it were, into the Grecian mind that divine yearning after beauty which burst into material expression in the age succeeding that of Pythagoras. It was then that Ictinus designed the Parthenon, and that Phidias wrought the matchless bas-reliefs which adorned the pediment. The Apollo sprang to life, the ideal of manly beauty; while all that constitutes feminine loveliness was perfected in the Venus.
The Grecian artist learnt how to produce beauty without the affectation of ornament, grace and delicacy without conceit, strength without coarseness, and action without loss of balance. The Egyptians may have discovered the law of proportion, but the Grecians raised the law into a principle—the principle of symmetry. This was observable in all their works. The expression of the passions, pain, joy, love, sorrow, was made subordinate to this regard for symmetrical propriety, and never exceeded the limits of positive beauty. Even in the Laocoöon the expression of physical suffering is mitigated, and the mental quality of the individual is intensified. In actual nature the limbs of the two youths (sons of the priest of Jupiter) would be compressed and distorted by the contracting convolutions of the serpents; but distortion is opposed to beauty, reality is therefore sacrificed to the ideal. To delight and satisfy the mind was the great aim of Grecian art. There was a saying among the Greeks that "there is nothing noble in nature but man, and nothing noble in man but mind." This principle ran throughout the whole of their philosophy. It was the mainspring of their religion: for what was their whole Pantheon but humanity deified? It prompted the contemplations of Plato, it made Socrates indifferent to life, and placed the Stoics above feeling. It fostered the ideal. And the constant straining after an ideal perfection must elevate the soul, and impose upon the imperfect some relative perfection.
The next grand epoch in art is the Roman. This again was based upon the Greek; but it was influenced by the national character. The religion of the Romans was more corrupt, more sensual, more debased. than that of the Greeks. Their literature partook of the same qualities No pure and single-minded modern can rise without a sense of loathing from the perusal of the master-pieces of Latin composition. Alike in poetry as in prose; Horace and Virgil, Livy and Tacitus, are more familiar with the dark and deadly passions of humanity than with those gentler emotions of the soul which raise and elevate mankind. And so with art. Disdaining the simplicity and purity of the Grecian schools, the Romans sought by exaggerated action, positive colour, and complicated ornament to supply the want of originality and beauty. In architecture they fostered the Corinthian orders to the neglect of the plain and elegant Doric and Ionic. For the frieze embellished with sculpture they substituted florid ornaments and repeated terminations. Their sculpture was less exquisite in form, and their renderings of allegories were less refined. Of their painting little is known. Their mosaics do not lead to the idea that they were proficient in the art.
After the long interregnum during which barbarism prevailed, art once more revived. And to the northern medieval nations we owe the last original school, that of the Gothic. While Greek art has been styled "the beauty of symmetry," Gothic art may be termed "the beauty of emotion." Mind predominated in the one, heart in the other. Nay, was it not so in literature? Go back to mediæval times, to runic song, to legend, roundelay and romance; from the wild chants of the Scalds to the softer singing of the Troubadours. Whether in field or in bower, in court or in cottage, the emotions, not the intellect, swayed the heart of Christendom. And with reverence be it spoken—was not this a necessity? Man indeed had not (in the vain ideal of the ancients) risen to Deity, but Deity had stooped down to man. "Manifested in the flesh;" man might now acknowledge a personal God, participating in all the feelings of humanity, hallowing all the relationships of life, and purifying the world by infusing into its putrefying elements the salt of purity, holiness, and immortality. The Grecian idea of Deity was sublime. Grant it. They represented Him as a being without passion, feeling or emotion, indifferent to the puny affairs of this world, wrapped in the seclusion of a Divine Majesty. And in order to resemble this conception of the Deity, they endeavoured to divest themselves of all the attributes of humanity; or when indeed the yearnings after sympathy made the isolation too overpowering for the soul to endure, they instituted a subordinate order of divine intelligences, whose inherent qualities chiefly consisted in their appreciation of the lower and baser elements of man's nature. Dimly, darkly, it may be, but the spirit of revealed religion animated the heart of humanity. It was no longer considered unmanly to feel, and the emotional, whether in literature or in art, was opposed to the classic symmetry and calm idealism of the philosophic schools.
Space forbids minute inquiry into the varied forms in which Gothic art has been developed, and the countless phases of thought and expression through which it has passed, but in a succeeding article it is intended to take a rapid glance at the effect produced by the modern poetic school, and the influence it has exercised upon art since the commencement of the Christian era.
A. E. G.