WASHINGTON ALLSTON

(1779-1843)

NE of the first painters of assured genius developed in the United States, Washington Allston lacks nothing except the quantity of his literary work to give him, as an essayist on art, the same high rank he attained by expressing his intellect with his brush. He is governed by the same reverence for nature, the same belief in its supernatural origin and in the possibility of learning more from it than can be expressed in words, which governed Sir Joshua Reynolds and Ruskin.

He was born near Georgetown, South Carolina, November 5th, 1779. After graduating at Harvard, he sold his estate in South Carolina and went to Europe that he might devote himself wholly to art. He spent nearly eighteen years in London, Paris, and Rome, and, on his return to America, took up his residence in Massachusetts, where he painted many of his best pictures, notably "The Angel Uriel in the Sun" and the unfinished "Belshazzar's Feast." Besides his essays

and lectures on art, he published a volume of poems which were included in the collection edited after his death by Richard H. Dana, Junior. He died July 9th, 1843, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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HUMAN ART AND INFINITE TRUTH

S TO what some have called our creative powers,' we take it for granted that no correct thinker has ever applied such expressions literally. Strictly speaking, we can make nothing; we can only construct. But how vast a theatre is here laid open to the constructive powers of the finite creature; where the physical eye is permitted to travel for millions and millions of miles, while that of the mind, swifter than light, may follow out the journey, from star to star, till it falls back on itself with the humbling conviction that the measureless journey is then but begun! It is needless to dwell on the immeasurable mass of materials which a world like this may supply to the Artist. The very thought of its vastness darkens into wonder. how much deeper the wonder, when the created mind looks into

itself, and contemplates the power of impressing its thoughts on all things visible; nay, of giving the likeness of life to things inanimate; and, still more marvelous, by the mere combination of words or colors, of evolving into shape its own Idea, till some unknown form, having no type in the actual, is made to seem to us an organized being. When such is the result of any unknown combination, then it is that we achieve the Possible. And here the realizing principle may strictly be said to prove itself.

That such an effect should follow a cause which we know to be purely imaginary, suppose, as we have said, something in ourselves which holds, of necessity, a predetermined relation to every object either outwardly existing or projected from the mind, which we thus recognize as true. If so, then the Possible and the Ideal are convertible terms, having their existence, ab initio, in the nature of the mind. The soundness of this inference is also supported negatively, as just observed, by the opposite result, as in the case of those fantastic combinations, which we sometimes meet with both in Poetry and Painting, and which we do not hesitate to pronounce unnatural, that is, false.

And here we would not be understood as implying the preexistence of all possible forms, as so many patterns, but only of that constructive Power which imparts its own Truth to the unseen real, and under certain conditions reflects the image or semblance of its truth on all things imagined, and which must be assumed in order to account for the phenomena presented in the frequent coincidence of effect between the real and the feigned. Nor does the absence of consciousness in particular individuals, as to this Power in themselves, fairly affect its universality, at least potentially; since by the same rule there would be equal ground for denying the existence of any faculty of the mind which is of slow or gradual development. All that we may reasonably infer in such cases is that the whole mind is not yet revealed to itself. In some of the greatest artists the inventive powers have been of late development; as in Claude, and the sculptor Falconet. And can any one believe that while the latter was hewing his master's marble, and the former making pastry, either of them was conscious of the sublime Ideas which afterwards took form for the admiration of the world? When Raphael, then a youth, was selected to execute the noble works which now live on the walls of the Vatican, "he had done little or nothing," says Reynolds, "to justify so high a trust." Nor

could he have been certain, from what he knew of himself, that he was equal to the task. He could only hope to succeed; and his hope was no doubt founded on his experience of the progressive development of his mind in former efforts, rationally concluding that the originally seeming blank from which had arisen so many admirable forms was still teeming with others that only wanted the occasion, or excitement, to come forth at his bidding.

To return to that which, as the interpreting medium of his thoughts and conceptions, connects the artist with his fellowmen, we remark that only on the ground of some self-realizing power, like what we have termed Poetic Truth, could what we call the Ideal ever be intelligible.

That some such power is inherent and fundamental in our nature, though differenced in individuals by more or less activity, seems more confirmed in this latter branch of the subject, where the phenomena presented are exclusively of the Possible. Indeed, we cannot conceive how without it there could ever be such a thing as true Art; for what might be received as such in one age might also be overruled in the next,—as we know to be the case with most things depending on opinion. But, happily for Art, if once established on this immutable base, there it must rest, and rest unchanged, amidst the endless fluctuations of manners, habits, and opinions; for its truth of a thousand years is as the truth of yesterday. Hence the beings described by Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton are as true to us now as the recent characters of Scott. Nor is it the least characteristic of this important Truth, that the only thing needed for its full reception is simply its presence,- being its own evidence.

How otherwise could such a being as Caliban ever be true to us? We have never seen his race; nay, we knew not that such a creature could exist, until he started upon us from the mind of Shakespeare. Yet who ever stopped to ask if he were a real being? His existence to the mind is instantly felt; not as a matter of faith, but of fact, and a fact, too, which the imagination cannot get rid of if it would, but which must ever remain there, verifying itself, from the first to the last moment of consciousness. From whatever point we view this singular creature, his reality is felt. His very language, his habits, his feelings, whenever they recur to us, are all issues from a living thing, acting upon us, nay, forcing the mind, in some instances, even to speculate on his nature, till it finds itself classing him in the chain of

being as the intermediate link between man and the brute. And this we do, not by an ingenious effort, but almost by involuntary induction; for we perceive speech and intellect, and yet without a soul. What but an intellectual brute could have uttered the imprecations of Caliban? They would not be natural in man, whether savage or civilized. Hear him in his wrath against Prospero and Miranda:

"A wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed

With raven's feather from unwholesome fen,
Light on you both!»

The wild malignity of this curse, fierce as it is, yet wants the moral venom, the devilish leaven, of a consenting spirit; it is all but human.

In this we may add a similar example, from our own art, in the "Puck," or "Robin Goodfellow," of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Who can look at this exquisite little creature, seated on its toadstool cushion, and not acknowledge its prerogative of life,- that mysterious influence which in spite of the stubborn understanding masters the mind,- sending it back to days long past, when care was but a dream, and its most serious business a childish frolic? But we no longer think of childhood as the past, still less as an abstraction; we see it embodied before us in all its mirth and fun and glee; and the grave man becomes again a child, to feel as a child, and to follow the little enchanter through all his wiles and never-ending labyrinth of pranks. What can be real, if that is not which so takes us out of our present selves, that the weight of years falls from us as a garment,- that the freshness of life seems to begin anew, and the heart and the fancy, resuming their first joyous consciousness, to launch again into this moving world, as on a sunny sea whose pliant waves yield to the touch, yet, sparkling and buoyant, carry them onward in their merry gambols? Where all the purposes of reality are answered, if there be no philosophy in admitting, we see no wisdom in disputing it.

Of the immutable nature of this peculiar Truth we have a like instance in the "Farnese Hercules," the work of the Grecian sculptor Glycon,- we had almost said his immortal offspring. Since the time of its birth, cities and empires, even whole nations, have disappeared, giving place to others more or less barbarous or civilized; yet these are as nothing to the countless

revolutions which have marked the interval in the manners, habits, and opinions of men. Is it reasonable, then, to suppose that anything not immutable in its nature could possibly have withstood such continual fluctuation? But how have all these changes affected this visible image of Truth? In no wise; not a jot; and because what is true is independent of opinion: it is the same to us now as it was to the men of the dust of antiquity. The unlearned spectator of the present day may not, indeed, see in it the demigod of Greece, but he can never mistake it for a mere exaggeration of the human form; though of mortal mold, he cannot doubt its possession of more than mortal powers; he feels its essential life, for he feels before it as in the stirring presence of a superior being.

Perhaps the attempt to give form and substance to a pure Idea was never so perfectly accomplished as in this wonderful figure. Who has ever seen the ocean in repose, in its awful sleep, that smooths it like glass, yet cannot level its unfathomed swell? So seems to us the repose of this tremendous personification of strength: the laboring eye heaves on its slumbering sea of muscles, and trembles like a skiff as it passes over them; but the silent intimations of the spirit beneath at length become audible; the startled imagination hears it in its rage, sees it in motion, and sees its resistless might in the passive wrecks that follow the uproar. And this from a piece of marble, cold, immovable, lifeless! Surely there is that in man, which the senses cannot reach, nor the plumb of the understanding sound.

Let us turn now to the Apollo called "Belvedere." In this supernal being, the human form seems to have been assumed as if to make visible the harmonious confluence of the pure ideas of grace, fleetness, and majesty; nor do we think it too fanciful to add celestial splendor; for such, in effect, are the thoughts which crowd, or rather rush, into the mind on first beholding it. Who that saw it in what may be called the place of its glory, the Gallery of Napoleon, ever thought of it as a man, much less as a statue; but did not feel rather as if the vision before him were of another world,- of one who had just lighted on the earth, and with a step so ethereal, that the next instant he would vault into the air? If I may be permitted to recall the impression which it made on myself, I know not that I could better describe it than as a sudden intellectual flash, filling the whole mind with light,—and light in motion. It seemed to the mind