Various
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
THE IDEAL TENDENCY
We are all interested in Art; yet few of us have taken pains to justify the delight we feel in it. No philosophy can win us away from Shakspeare, Plato, Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, Phidias,from the masters of sculpture, painting, music, and metaphor. Their truth is larger than any other,too large to be stated directly and lodged in systems, theories, definitions, or formulas. They suggest and assure to us what cannot be spoken. They communicate life, because they do not endeavor to measure life. Philosophy will present the definite; Art refers always to the vast,to that which cannot be comprehended, but only enjoyed and adored. Art is the largest expression. It is not, like Science, a basket in which meat and drink may be carried, but a hand which points toward the sky. Our eyes follow its direction, and our souls follow our eyes. Man needs only to be shown an open space. He will rise into it with instant expansion. We are made partakers of that illimitable energy. Only poetry can give account of poetry, only Art can justify Art; and we cannot hope to speak finally of this elastic Truth, to draw a circle around that which is vital, because it has in it something of infinity,but we may hope to remove a doubt growing out of the very largeness which exalts and refreshes us. Art is not practical. It offers no precept, but lies abroad like Nature, not to be grasped and exhausted. Neither is it anxious about its own reception, as though any man could long escape the benefit which it brings. Every principle of science, every deduction of philosophy, is a tool. Our very religion, as we dare to name it, is a key which opens the heavens to admit myself and family. Art offers only life; but perhaps that will appear worth taking without looking beyond. Can we look beyond? Life is an end in itself, and so better than any tool.
What is that which underlies all arts as their essence, the thing to be expressed and celebrated? What is poetry, the creation from which the artist is named? We shall answer boldly: it is no shaping of forms, but a making of man. Nature is a plenum, is finished, and the Divine account with her is closed; but man is only yet a chick in the egg. With him it is still the first day of creation, and he has not received the benediction of a completed work. And yet the completion is involved and promised in our daily experience. Man is a perpetual seeker. He sees always just before him his own power, which he must hasten to overtake. He weighs himself often in thought; yet it is not his present, but a presumptive value, of which he is taking account. We are continually entering into our future, and it is so near us, we are already in every hour so full of it, that we draw without fraud on the credit of to-morrow. The student who has bought his first law-book is already a great counsellor. With the Commentaries he carries home consideration and the judicial habit. Some wisdom he imbibes through his pores and those of the sheepskin cover. Now he is grave and prudent, a man of the world and of authority; but if he had chosen differently, and brought home the first book of Theology, his day would have been tinted with other colors. For every choice carries a future involved in itself, and we begin to taste that when we take our course toward it. The habit of leaning forward and living in advance of himself has made its mark upon every man. We look not at the history or performance of the stranger, but at his pretensions. These are written in his dress, his air and attitude, his tone and occupation. The past is already nothing, the present is sliding away; to know any man, we must keep our eyes out in advance on the road he is following. For man is an involuntary, if not a willing traveller. Time does not roll from under his feet, but he is carried along with the current, and can never again be where or what he was. Nothing in his experience can ever be quite repeated. If you see the same trees and hills, they do not appear the same from year to year. Yesterday they were new and strange; you and they were young together. To-day they are familiar and disregarded. Soon they will be old friends, prattling to gray hairs of the brown locks and bounding breath of youth.
The pioneer of our growth is Imagination. Desire and Hope go on before into the wilderness of the unknown; they open paths; they make a clearing; they build and settle firmly before we ourselves in will and power arrive at this opening, but they never await our coming. They are the "Fore-runners," off again deeper into the vast possibility of being. The boy walks in a dream of to-morrow. Two bushels of hickory-nuts in his bag are no nuts to him, but silver shillings; yet neither are the shillings shillings, but shining skates, into which they will presently be transmuted. Already he is on the great pond by the roaring fire, or ringing away into distant starry darkness with a sparkling brand. Already, before his first skates are bought, before he has seen the coin that buys them, he is dashing and wheeling with his fellows, a leader of the flying train.
That early fore-reaching is a picture of our entire activity. "Care is taken," said Goethe, "that the trees do not grow into the sky"; but man is that tree which must outgrow the sky and lift its top into finer air and sunshine. The essential seed is Growth; not shell and bark, nor kernel, but a germ which pierces the soil and lifts the stone. Spirit is such a germ, and perpetual reinforcement is its quality; so that the great Being is known to us as a becoming Creator, adding himself to himself, and life to life, in perpetual emanation.
The boy's thought never stops short of some personal prowess. It is ability that charms him. To be a man, as he understands manliness, is to have the whole planet for a gymnasium and play-ground. He would like to have been on the other side of Hydaspes when Alexander came to that stream. But he soon discovers that wit is the sword of sharpness,that he is the ruler who can reach the deepest desire of man and satisfy that. If there is power in him, he becomes a careful student, examines everything, examines his own enthusiasm, examines his last examination, tries every estimate again and again. He distrusts his tools, and then distrusts his own distrust, lifting himself by the very boot-straps in his metaphysics, to get at some foundation which will not move. He will know what he is about and what is great. He puts Cæsar, Milton, and Whitfield into his crucible; but that which went in Cæsar comes out a part of himself. The bold yet modest young chemist is egotistical. He cannot be anybody else but John Smith. Why should he? Who knows yet what it is to be John Smith? Napoleon and Washington are only playing his own game for him, since he so easily understands and accepts their play. A boy reads history as girls cut flowers from old embroidery to sew them on a new foundation. They are interested in the new, and in the old only for what they can make of it. So he sucks the blood of kings and captains to help him fight his own battles. He reads of Bunker's Hill and the Declaration of Independence with constant reference to the part he shall take in the politics of the world. His motto is, Sic semper tyrannis! Benjamin Franklin, and after him John Smith,perhaps a better man than he. We live on that perhaps. Every great man departed has played out his last card, has taken all his chances. We are glad to see his power limited and scaled up. Shakspeare, we say, did not know everything; and here am I alone with the universe, nothing but a little sleepiness between me and all that Shakspeare and Plato knew or did not know. If I should be jostled out of my drowsiness, who can tell what may be given me to see, to say, or to do? Let us make ready and get upon some high ground from which we may overlook the work of the world; for the secret of all mastery is dormant, yet breathing and stirring in you and me.
Out of such material as we can gather we make a world in which we walk continually up and down. In it we find friends and enemies, we love and are loved, we travel and build. In it we are kings; we ordain and arrange everything, and never come away worsted from any encounter. For this sphere arises in answer to the practical question, What can I be and do? It is an embodiment of the force that is in me. Every dreamer, therefore, goes on to see himself among men and things which he can understand and master, with which he can deal securely. The stable-boy has hid an old volume among the straw, and he walks with Portia and Desdemona while he grooms the horses. Already in his smock-frock he is a companion for princes and queens. But the rich man's son, well born, as we say, in the great house yonder, has one only ambition in life,to turn stable-boy, to own a fast team and a trotting-wagon, to vie with gamesters upon the road. That is an activity to which he is equal, in which his value will appear. Both boys, and all boys, are looking upward, only from widely different levels and to different heights.
The young blasphemer does not love blasphemy, but to have his head and be let alone by Old Aunty, who combs his hair as if he were a girl. So always there is some ideal aim in the mixed motive. Out of six gay young men who drive and drink together, only one cares for the meat and the bottle. With the rest this feasting gallantly on the best, regardless of expense, is part of a system. It is in good style, is convivial. For these green-horns of society to live together, to be convivæ, is not to think and labor together, as wise men use, but to laugh and be drunken in company.
Into the lowest courses there enters something to keep the filth from overwhelming self-respect. The advocates of slavery have not, as it appears, lost all pretence of honor and honesty. Thieves are sustained by a sense of the injustice of society. They do but right an old wrong, taking bravely what was accumulated by cautious cunning. They cultivate many virtues, and, like the best of us, make much of these, identify themselves with these. If a man is harsh and tyrannical, he regrets that he has too much force of character. And it is not safe to accuse a harlot of stealing and lying. She has her ideal also, and strives to keep the ulcer of sin within bounds,to save a sweet side from corruption.
Is this stooping very low to look for the Ideal Tendency? The greater gain, if we find it prevailing in these depths. We may doubt whether thieves and harlots are subject to the same law which irresistibly lifts us, for we know that our own sin is not quite like other sin. But I must not offer all the cheerful hope I feel for the worst offenders, because too much faith passes for levity or impiety; and men thank God only for deliverance from great dangers, not for preservation from all danger. For gratitude we must not escape too easily and clean, but with some smell of fire upon us.
Yet in our own experience this planning what we shall do and become is constant, and always we escape from the present into larger air. The boy will not be content with that skill in skating which occupies his mind to-day. That belongs to the day and place, but next year he goes to the academy and fresh exploits engage him. He works gallantly in this new field and harness, because his thought has gone forward again, and he sees through these studies the man of thought. Already as a student he is a philosopher, a poet, a servant of the Muse. Bacon and Milton look kindly on him in invitation, he is walking to their company and in their company. The young hero-worshipper cannot remain satisfied with mere physical or warlike prowess. He soon sees the superiority of mental and moral mastery, of creation of good counsel. He will reverence the valiant reformer who brings justice in his train, the saint in whom goodness is enamored of goodness, the gentleman whose heart-beat is courtesy, the prophet in whom a religion is born, all who have been inspired with liberal, not dragged by sordid aims.
How beautiful to him is the society of poets! He reads with idolatry the letters and anecdotes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Raphael. Look at the private thought of these men in familiar intercourse: no plotting for lucre, but a conspiracy to reach the best in life. The saints are even more ardent in aspiration, for their tender hearts were pressed and saddened by fear. They are now set on fire by a sense of great redemption. They are prisoners pardoned.
For scholars the world is peopled only with saints, philosophers, and poets, and the studious boy seeks his own amid their large activity. So much of it meets his want, yet the whole does not meet all his want. He must combine and balance and embrace conflicting qualities. Every day his view enlarges. What was noble last year will now by no means content his conscience. Duty and beauty have risen.
The Ideal Tendency characterizes man, affords the only definition of him; and it is a perpetual, irresistible expansion. No matter on what it fastens, it will not stay, but spreads and soars like light in the morning sky.
To-day we are charmed with our partners, and think we can never tire of Alfred and Emily. To-morrow we discover without shame, after all our protestations and engagements, that their future seems incommensurate with our own. To our surprise, they also feel their paths diverging from ours. We part with a show of regret, but real joy to be free.
Both parties have gained from their intercourse a certainty of power and promise of greater power. Silly people fill the world with lamentation over human inconstancy; but if we follow love, we cannot cling to the beloved. We must love onward, and only when our friends go before us can we be true both to friendship and to them.
How eager and tremulous his excitement when at last the youth encounters all beauty in a maiden! Now he is on his trial. Can he move her? for he must be to her nothing or all. How stately and far-removed she seems in her crystal sphere! All her relations are fair and poetic. Her book is not like another book. Her soft and fragrant attire, can it be woven of ribbons and silk? She, too, has dreamed of the coming man, heroic, lyrical, impassioned; the beat of his blood a pæan and triumphal march; a man able to cut paths for her and lead her to all that is worthiest in life. Her day is an expectation; her demand looks out of proud eyes. Can he move this stately creature, pure and high above him as the clear moon yonder, never turning from her course,this Diana, who will love upward and stoop to no Endymion? Now it will appear whether he can pass with another for all he is to himself. This will be the victory for which he was born, or blackest defeat. If she could love him! If he should, after all, be to her only such another as her cousin Thomas, who comes and goes with all his pretensions as unregarded as Rover the house-dog! Between these ifs he vacillates, swung like a ship on stormy waters, touching heaven and hell.
Meanwhile the maiden dares hardly look toward this generous new-comer, whose destiny lies broad open in his courage and desire. Others she could conciliate and gently allure, but she will not play with the lion. She will throw no web around his strength to tear her heart away, if it does not hold him. For the first time she guards her fancy. She will not think of the career that awaits him, of the help there is in him for men, and the honor that will follow him from them,of the high studies, tasks, and companionship to which he is hastening. What avails this avoidance, this turning-away of the head? A fancy that must be kept is already lost. She read his quality in the first glance of deep-meaning eyes. When at last he speaks, she sees suddenly how beyond all recovery he had carried away her soul in that glance. They marry each the expectation of the other. It was a promise in either that shone so fair. Happy lovers, if only as wife and husband they can go on to fulfil the promise! For love cannot be repeated; every day it must have fresh food in a new object; and unless character is renewed, love must leave it behind and wander on.