The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863. Various
that excited, exaggerated, but frequently beautiful passion of language which marks our poems of love. Ah! it is the merciful will of the Creator that we should worship only the divine, and so the human passion ends in sobs and wails of anguish, for the finite idol can never fill the shrine of the Absolute, the infinite God!
As the intuition of eternal love in the past, we find this longing for the infinite breathing through poetry in the form of elegy; in sad recollections of a faded world of demigods and heroes; and in the plaints for the loss of man's native home in Paradise, in the faint and dying echoes of the happy innocence of creation before the first outbreak of evil, and the consequent misery of nature. Poetry is indeed so full of haunting, melancholy memories, that it might almost be called the 'mind's supersensuous recollection of the eternal.' And what else can be said of music? Is it not an art eminently addressed to this intuition of eternal love, this constant longing for the infinite? Do not its giddy flights and dying falls at once arouse this mystic yearning, seeking, feeling, which may appropriately be termed the passion of the soul? That music holds some deep relation to the soul not yet clearly developed, may be inferred, not only from the magic power it sways over our spirits, but from the fact that the inspired writers picture it among the joys of heaven. It is now the language of our 'divine despair;' it is yet to be the speech of our eternal beatitude!
'God is love:' through all the hidden veins of ever-germing life beats this divine pulse of universal being. Hope, faith, and charity spring from the revelation and answering intuitions of this blissful love: from the hope, faith, and love of men sprang all the really noble works of art. All this is full of consolation, 'though inward far we be'—even the mournful memory of a past of celestial innocence becomes the harbinger of a divine hope. Let the poet then still sing of the past; like the glories of the setting sun flushing down the golden west, it but whispers of a more glorious rise in the mythic east. The root of art springs from the intuitions of eternal love; its leaves, flowers, and fruit, are faith, hope, and charity. May the rapt artist ever remember that the beauty of this earth was not intended to satisfy the requisitions of his longing soul, but to awaken and nourish in it the love of eternal beauty!
A golden thread of glories yet to be, twines through the woof of this our mortal life, and by tracing its wavy lines of glittering brilliancy, shining even through the dim symbolism of matter, many secrets of the life to come may be divined. The arts may be regarded as significant hieroglyphics of delights yet to be fulfilled in other spheres of being. The living pulse of omnipotence, the heart of God, beats sensibly in the beauty of the boundless universe; it is the fountain at which the young immortal is to imbibe his first draught for eternity. Not that, as erroneously held by the Pantheists, nature is God, no more than Raphael is the pictures he paints; but assuming the existence of a God as the creator of the worlds, what else can nature be but a revelation of God and divine love, a visible and symbolic representation thereof in matter; living, because His breath is life?
The following remarkable passage on the religious origin and consecutive order of the arts occurs in De La Mennais' 'Sketch of Philosophy:'
'The temple of art is an emanation from that Divine Spirit who fills it with Himself. It is the plastic evolution of the idea which man has of Him, of His nature, of His ways, as manifested in the universe. From its central sanctuary in which He, the unseen, dwells, this temple projects, extending itself in space in every direction; but by an opposite movement all its parts, closely united, converge to the sanctuary, gravitating toward the central point where their Head, their essential and primordial Reason, dwells; they struggle to penetrate its mystic veil, to mingle with it, to have their being in it, in order to accomplish the perfect union of variety with unity, of the finite with the infinite.
'The art temple struggles to develop itself by a process analogous to that of creation. The surface of the earth was first clothed with vegetation, from the lowly moss and creeping lichen to the lofty cedar, whose solemn branches mingle with the floating clouds. When the earth was ready for their habitation, came the animals, gifted with higher life, with spontaneous motion, with instinct and sensibility. At last came man, endowed with the incomparable faculties of love and reason.
'The art temple has also its vegetation. Its walls are covered with varied plants, which wind along its cornices and wreathe its plinths; they blossom round the oriels, brightening or deepening in the light; they twine through the nerves of the vaulted arch; like the liane of the cedars, they embrace the tall minarets of the heaven-seeking spire, mounting into the blue depths of ether; they bind the clustering shafts of the columns in heavy sheaves, and crown their capitals with flowers and foliage. The stone grows more and more animated, puts forth in more luxuriant growth; multitudes of new forms spring up in the bosom of this magnificent creation; when lo! at length man completes and embodies them all—his own noble image stands revealed—the rude, but white and glittering stone glows almost into life under the passion of his forming hand.
'Sculpture is but an immediate development of architecture, proceeding naturally and organically from it. In proof of this, we have only to examine it in its first efforts. Forms, unfinished and embryonic, at first closely attached to the stone, growing by degrees in accordance with their own fixed laws until able to detach themselves from the medium through which they were originated, after having acquired the conditions necessary for their individual life, spring to actual life, to independent life, almost as the organized being springs from the womb of its mother.
'Sculpture, however, represents but imperfectly the marvellous glories of God's creation. It can give but faint ideas of the various effects of light and shade, the constantly shifting play of colors; it cannot offer that full harmony of beauty which nature is ever spreading before us in the complicated scenes of life. To satisfy this want, a new art is created! Closely linked with all those which have preceded it, its development is but their legitimate expansion. The gray and stern arches, the hitherto colorless sky of the art temple, now take the azure hue of the heavens, while hovering cherubs look down from their cerulean depths; the relievos glow, and color defines, as it etherealizes, the works of man. Painting, at first absorbed in the plastic arts, scarcely begins to show symptoms of life until she is fully born, and living in her own distinctive form! As that power which develops the almost infinite variety of forms is to the universe, so is painting with its ever ready and vivid canvas to the temple of art.
'Meanwhile the art temple has not remained wrapped in gloomy silence; and another series of developments, bearing the same relation to sound and hearing as the first did to light and sight, have commenced. As beings ascend in the scale of life, the forms appealing to sight alone, become less capable of expressing their nature. If the universe had been without voice, the highest which it contains had been shrouded in the pall of an eternal silence; but creation has a voice which is specific in every genus, in every species, in every individual. Transport yourself in thought to one of the vast solitudes of the New World—listen to the rustling of the myriad-leafed forests as they forever murmur on the banks of the thousands of nameless and unknown streams which ripple through them; to the clash of the impetuous torrents as they rush down the precipitous sides of the mountains to glide on from their feet through beds of soft moss or sedgy grass; to the booming thunder, driving, scattering, and tearing the flying clouds; to the intermingling sounds arising from the myriads of creatures which are roaring, bellowing, humming, buzzing, hissing, singing, upon the bosom of this primeval world—listen! this is the voice of nature, indistinct and confused, but majestic, solemn, multitudinous, full of mystery and palpitating with vague emotions.
'As the art temple symbolizes the creation, is the plastic image of it, a voice is also heard from its depths, which rides upon the winds, and pierces afar off. The echo of an invisible world, it is solemn, mysterious, and multiform, appealing to the inmost feelings, rousing the sleeping powers, awakening the internal life of the soul, which without it might lie forever benumbed and silent. Corresponding to the voice of nature, it, too, is specifically marked, is individualized in every medium through which it is produced. Developing in unceasing variety, yet ever bound in the closest unity, language syllables air into thought, love. As soon as man mingles his voice, his speech, with that of inferior beings, the whole creation is enlarged, dilates and throbs with new and glowing life. A closer tie unites the two worlds—the world of phenomena and the world of ideas. Rising from the bosom of organic nature, pressing up like a bud closely wrapped in its sheaf of clustering and sheltering leaves, destined to indefinite