Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860




So in higher matters. We are conscious of pain and pleasure only through
the predominance of some feeling. There must be degrees and differences
again, and some part more relieved than another, to catch an expression
on. Entire pain or an equal degree of physical suffering in every part
of the body would be a perfect blank, complete numbness; and entire
pleasure we could not be conscious of, and for the same reason. How
could there be any contrast, any determining hue, any darker or brighter
side? If the waters of the earth were all at the same altitude, how
could there be any motion among the parts? Hence the fullest experience
is never defined, and cannot be spoken. It is like the sphere, which, as
it merges all possible form in itself, is properly of no form, as white
is no color, and cannot be grasped and used as parts and fragments can;
there are no angles and outlines to define and give emphasis.

Hence the pain or pleasure that is definitely shaped in the
consciousness and that can be spoken is necessarily partial, and does
not go the full circle of our being. We are not conscious of our health
and growth, because they are general and not local, and are not rendered
prominent by contrast.

The dictionary and the sciences, in fact the whole province of human
knowledge, hinge upon this principle. To know a thing is but to
separate and distinguish it from something else; and classifying and
systematizing are carrying the same law from the particular to the
general. We cannot know one thing alone; two ideas enter into every
distinct act of the understanding,--one latent and virtual, the
other active and at the surface. To use familiar examples, we cannot
distinguish white without having known black, nor evil without having
known good, nor beauty without having known deformity. Thus every
principle has two sides, like a penny, and one presupposes the other,
which it covers.

When we come to the intellect and the expression of thought, the
same law of detachment and separation prevails. In contemplation and
enjoyment there are unity and wholeness; but in thinking, never. Our
thoughts lie in us, like the granite rock in the earth, whole and
continuous, without break or rupture, and shaped by a law of the
spheres; but when they come to the surface in utterance, and can be
grasped and defined, they lose their entireness and become partial and
fragmentary, and hint a local and not a general law. We cannot speak
entire and unmixed truth, because utterance separates a part from the
whole, and consequently in a measure distorts and exaggerates and does
injustice to other truths. The moment we speak, we are one-sided and
liable to be assailed by the reverse side of the fact. Hence the
hostility that exists between different sects and religions; their
founders were each possessed of some measure of truth, and consequently
stood near to a common ground of agreement, but in the statement it
became vitiated and partial; and the more their disciples have expounded
and sought to lodge their principles in a logical system, the more they
have diverged from the primitive sentiment. If the sects would let logic
alone and appeal only to the consciousness of men, there would be no
very steep difference between them, and each would promote the good of
the other. But the moment we rest with the reason and the understanding
there must be opposition and divergence, for they apprehend things by
parts, and not by the mass; they deal with facts, and not with laws.

The fullest truth, as we have already hinted, never shapes itself into
words on our lips. What we can speak is generally only foam from the
surface, with more or less sediment in it; while the pure current flows
untouched beneath. The deepest depths in a man have no tongue. He is
like the sea, which finds expression only on its shoals and rocks; the
great heart of it has no voice, no utterance.

The religious creeds will never be reconciled by logic; the more
emphatically they are expressed, the more they differ. Ideas, in this
respect, resemble the trees, which branch and diverge more and more
widely as they proceed from the root and the germinal state. Men
are radically the same in their feelings and sentiments, but widely
different in their logic. Argument is reaction, and drives us farther
and farther apart.

As the intellect expresses by detachment and contrast, it follows,
that, the more emphatically an idea is expressed, the more it will be
disencumbered of other ideas and stand relieved like a bust chiselled
from a rock. It is suggestive and prospective, and, by being detached
itself, will relieve others and still others. It makes a breach in
the blank wall, and the whole is now pregnable. New possibilities are
opened, a new outlook into the universe. Nothing, so to speak, has
become something; one base metal has been transmuted into gold, and so
given us a purchase on every other. When one thought is spoken, all
others become speakable. After one atom was created, the universe would
grow of its own accord. The difficulty in writing is to utter the
first thought, to break the heavy silence, to overcome the settled
equilibrium, and disentangle one idea from the embarrassing many. It is
a struggle for life. There is no place to begin at. We are burdened with
unuttered and unutterable truth, but cannot, for the life of us, grasp
it. It is a battle with Chaos. We plant shaft after shaft, but to no
purpose. We get an idea half-defined, when it slips from us, and all is
blank again in that direction. We seem to be struggling with the force
of gravity, and to come not so near conquering as to being conquered.
But at last, when we are driven almost to despair, and in a semi-passive
state inwardly settling and composing ourselves, the thought comes. How
much is then revealed and becomes possible! New facts and forces are
commanded by it; much of our experience, that was before meaningless
and unavailable, assumes order and comes to our use; and as long as the
breach can be kept open and the detachment perfect, how easily we write!
But if we drop the thread of our idea without knotting it, or looping it
to some fact,--if we stop our work without leaving something inserted
to keep the breach open, how soon all becomes a blank! the wound heals
instantly; the equilibrium which we had for a moment arrested again
asserts itself, and our work is a fragment and must always remain so.
Neither wife nor friends nor fortune nor appetite should call one from
his work, when he is possessed by this spirit and can utter his thought.
We are caught up into these regions rarely enough; let us not come down
till we are obliged.

The fullest development of this law, as it appears in the intellect,
is Analogy. Analogy is the highest form of expression, the poetry of
speech; and is detachment carried so far that it goes full circle and
gives a sense of unity and wholeness again. It is the spheral form
appearing in thought. The idea is not only detached, but is wedded to
some outward object, so that spirit and matter mutually interpret each
other. Nothing can be explained by itself, or, in the economy of
Nature, is explained by itself. The night explains the day, and the day
interprets the night. Summer gives character to winter, and in winter we
best understand the spirit of summer. The shore defines and emphasizes
the sea, and the sea gives form and meaning to the shore.

To measure grain, we must have a bushel; and to confine water and air,
we must have other than water and air to do it with. The bird flies by
balancing itself against something else; the mountain is emphasized by
the valley; and one color is brought out and individualized by another.
Our mood of yesterday is understood and rendered available by our mood
of to-day; and what we now experience will be read aright only when seen
from the grounds of an opposite experience. Our life here will not be
duly appreciated and its meaning made clear till seen from the life
beyond.

The spiritual canopies the material as the sky canopies the earth, and
is reached and expressed only by its aid. And this is Analogy,--the
marrying of opposite facts, the perception of the same law breaking out
in a thousand different forms,--the completing of the circle when only
a segment is given. The visible and the invisible make up one sphere of
which each is a part. We are related to both; our root is in one, our
top in the other. Our ideas date from spirit and appear in fact. The
ideal informs the actual. This is the way the intellect detaches and
gets expressed. It is not its own interpreter, and, like everything
else, is only one side of a law which is explained by the other side.
The mind is the cope and the world the draw, to use the language of the
moulder. The intellect uses the outward, as the sculptor uses marble, to
embody and speak its thought. It seizes upon a fact as upon a lever, to
separate and lift up some fraction of its meaning. From Nature, from
science, from experience, it traces laws, till they appear in itself,
and thus finds a thread to string its thought on.

Without Analogy, without this marrying of the inward and the outward,
there can be no speech, no expression. It is a necessity of our
condition. Spirit is cognizable by us only when endowed with a material
body; so an idea or a feeling can be stated only when it puts on the
form and definiteness of the sensuous, the empirical. Hence the highest
utterance is a perpetual marrying of thought with things, as in
poetry,--a lifting up of the actual and a bringing down of the
ideal,--giving a soul to the one and a body to the other. This takes
place more or less in all speech, but only with genius is it natural and
complete. Ordinary minds inherit their language and form of expression;
but with the poet, or natural sayer, a new step is taken, and new
analogies, new likenesses must be disclosed. He is distinguished from
the second-hand man by the fulness and completeness of his expression;
his words are round and embrace the two hemispheres, the actual and the
ideal. He points out analogies under our feet, and presents the near and
the remote wedded in every act of his mind. Nothing is old with him,
but Nature is forever new like the day, and gives him pure and fresh
thoughts as she gives him pure and fresh water. Hence the expressiveness
of poetry and its power over the human heart. It differs from prose only
in degree, not in essence. It goes farther and accomplishes more. It
is the blossom of which prose is the bud, and comes with sincerity,
simplicity, purity of motive, and a vital relation to Nature.

As men grow earnest and impassioned, and speak from their inmost heart,
and without any secondary ends, their language rises to the dignity of
poetry and employs tropes and figures. The more emphatic the statement,
the more the thought is linked with things. The ideas of men in their
ordinary mood are only half-expressed, like a stone propped up, but
still sod-bound; but when they are fired and glowing with the heat of
some great passion, the operation of the mind is more complete and the
detachment more perfect. The thought is not only evolved, but is thrown
into the air,--disencumbered from the understanding, and set off against
the clear blue of the imagination. Hence the direct and unequivocal
statement of a man writing under the impulse of some strong feeling, or
speaking to a thrilled and an excited audience. Nature, the world, his
experience, is no longer hard and flinty, but plastic and yielding, and
takes whatever impress his mind gives it. Facts float through his head
like half-pressed grapes in the wine-press, steeped and saturated with
meaning, and his expression becomes so round and complete as to astonish
himself in his calmer moments.

People differ not so much in material as in this power of expressing it.
The secret of the best writer lies in his art. He is not so much above
the common stature; his experience is no richer than ours; but he knows
how to put handles to his ideas, and we do not. Give a peasant his power
of expression, or of welding the world within to the world without, and
there would be no very precipitous inequality between them. The great
writer says what we feel, but could not utter. We have pearls that
lie no deeper than his, but have not his art of bringing them to the
surface. We are mostly like an inland lake that has no visible outlet;
while he is the same lake gifted with a copious channel.

The secret seems to lie in the temperament and in the transmuting and
modifying medium. More or less of filtration does it all. Nature makes
the poet, not by adding to, but by taking from; she takes all blur and
opacity out of him; condenses, intensifies; lifts his nerves nearer the
surface, sharpens his senses, and brings his whole organization to an
edge. Sufficient filtration would convert charcoal into diamonds; and we
shall everywhere find that the purest, most precious substances are the
result of a refining, sorting, condensing process.

Our expression is clogged by the rubbish in our minds, the foolish
personal matters we load the memory with. Ideas are not clearly defined,
as the drift-wood in the river spoils the reflected image. We feel
nothing intensely; our experience is a blur without distinct form and
outline; in short we are incumbered with too much clay. Hence, when
a slow disease burns the dross and earth out of one, how keen and
susceptible his organization becomes! The mud-wall grows transparent.
Our senses lose their obtuseness, our capacity both for experience and
expression is enlarged, and we not only live deeper, but nearer the
surface.

It appears, then, that, as a general rule, our ability to express
ourselves is in proportion to the fineness of our organization. Women,
for this reason, are more adequate in expressing themselves than men;
they stand removed one degree farther from the earth, and are conscious
of feelings and sentiments that are never defined in our minds; the
detachment is more perfect; shades and boundaries are more clearly
brought out, and consequently the statement is more round and full.

One's capacity for expression is also affected by his experience,--not
experience in time and space, but soul-experience,--joy, sorrow,
pleasure, pain, love, hope, aspiration, and all intense feeling by which
the genesis of the inward man unfolded. What one has lived, that alone
can he adequately say. The outward is the measure of the inward; it is
as the earth and sky: so much earth as we see, so much sky takes form
and outline. The spiritual, it is true, is illimitable, but the actual
is the measure of that part of which we are made conscious. Experience
furnishes the handle, but the intellect must supply the blade.

Intense feeling of any kind afterward gives us more entire command over
some thought or power within us. Every inundation of passion enriches
and gives us a deeper soil. The most painful experiences are generally
the most productive. Cutting teeth is by no means a pleasant operation,
yet it increases our tools. Our lives are not thoroughly shaped out and
individualized till we have lived and suffered in every part of us. A
great feeling reveals new powers in the soul, as a deep breath fills
air-cells in the lungs that are not reached by an ordinary inhalation.
Love first revealed the poetic gift in Novalis; and in reading the
Autobiography of Goethe, one can but notice the quickening of his powers
after every new experience: a new love was a new push given the shuttle,
and a new thread was added.

When we come nearer the surface of our subject and speak of language,
we remark that pure English, so far as such is possible, is the most
convenient and expressive. Saxon words cannot be used too plentifully.
They abridge and condense and smack of life and experience, and form the
nerve and sinew of the best writing of our day; while the Latin is the
fat. The Saxon puts small and convenient handles to things, handles that
are easy to grasp; while your ponderous Johnsonian phraseology distends
and exaggerates, and never peels the chaff from the wheat. Johnson's
periods act like a lever of the third kind,--the power applied always
exceeds the weight raised; while the terse, laconic style of later
writers is eminently a lever on the first principle, and gives the mind
the utmost purchase on the subject in hand.

The language of life, and of men who speak to be understood, should be
used more in our books. A great principle anchored to a common word or
a familiar illustration never looses its hold upon the mind; it is like
seeing the laws of Astronomy in the swing of a pendulum, or in the
motion of the boy's ball,--or the law of the tides and the seasons
appearing in the beating of the pulse, or in inspiring and expiring the
breath. The near and the remote are head and tail of the same law, and
good writing unites them, giving wholeness and continuity. The language
of the actual and the practical applied to the ideal brings it at once
within everybody's reach, tames it, and familiarizes it to the mind. If
the writers on metaphysics would deal more in our every-day speech, use
commoner illustrations, seek to find some interpreter of the feelings
and affections of the mind in Nature, out of the mind itself, and thus
keep the life-principle and the thought-principle constantly wedded,
making them mutually elucidate and explain each other, they would be far
more fruitful and satisfying. Cousin is the only writer we know of
who has made any attempt at this, and we believe him to be the most
consistent and intelligent metaphysician that has yet appeared. Surely,
one cannot reasonably object to the height in the heavens from which a
man steals his fire, if he can feed it with his own fuel and cook meat
with it. Though the genealogy of our ideas be traceable to Jove and
Olympus, they must marry their human sisters, the facts of common life
and experience, before they can be productive of anything positive and
valuable.

Proverbs give us the best lessons in the art of expression. See what
vast truths and principles informing such simple and common facts! It
reminds one of suns and stars engraved on buttons and knife-handles.
Proverbs come from the character, and are alive and vascular. There
is blood and marrow in them. They give us pocket-editions of the most
voluminous truths. Theirs is a felicity of expression that comes only at
rare moments, and that is bought by long years of experience.

There is no waste material in a good proverb; it is clear meat, like an
egg,--a happy result of logic, with the logic left out; and the writer
who shall thus condense his wisdom, and as far as possible give the two
poles of thought in every expression, will most thoroughly reach men's
minds and hearts.




ITALIAN EXPERIENCES IN COLLECTING "OLD MASTERS."


As the taste for collecting objects of art is rapidly developing in
America, it may be not without profit to point out some of the pitfalls
which attend the amateur in this pursuit, especially in Italy, that
exhaustless quarry of "originals" and "old masters"; though it should be
remembered that a work of art may be both original and old and very bad
too,--its intrinsic worth being a separate question from its age and
authenticity. The results given are drawn from an actual experience of
many years.

The most obvious risk is from the counterfeiter,--not from the
vulgar shams distributed so widely over the world from the well-known
_manufactories_ of paintings in France, England, and other parts, which
can deceive only the most ignorant or credulous, but from talent itself
debased to forgery and trickery.

Many of the antique bronzes, terra-cottas, vases, classical and medieval
relics, so jealously cared for in the collections of Europe, are the
clever imitations of a poor and honest artist in one of the Italian
cities, whose miniature studio might almost be put inside one of our
old-fashioned omnibuses. His designs, taken from genuine antiques,
are reproduced with fidelity, and the coatings and marks of time
counterfeited by chemical means and skilful manipulation. He sells his
productions as imitations, at prices that barely provide him with daily
bread, eking out his subsistence by repairs and restorations, in which
he is equally happy. Living in obscurity, without the capital or
sagacity to make himself known to the public, he is at the mercy of
those who are interested in keeping him in privacy and buying his
artistic labors at the wages of a clodhopper. His own responsibility
goes not beyond fulfilling orders for the imitation of certain objects,
the process of which he frankly explains to the inquisitive visitor.
But, once in dishonest hands, antiquity and authenticity replace
modernism and imitation.

There are two ways of seduction and deceit. The one and safer for
the operator is the _suggestive,_ in which appearances are made by
consummate tact and artful flattery to excite the imagination of the
buyer so that he is led to believe what he desires without compromising
the agent. The other is positive intrigue and absolute lying, so nicely
done that the wealthy amateur is fleeced often in a fashion that confers
a pleasure, and which, though he may subsequently detect it, gives him
but a lame chance at redress. In most instances he deserves none. For,
stimulated by vanity or fashion, without any true regard for art, he
has offered so large a premium for a name, that it would indeed be
wonderful, if a corresponding supply were not created. The living artist
is sometimes sorely tempted to pander to illusions to secure that
appreciation which the world gives more lavishly to fashion than to
merit. Michel Angelo tested this disposition, even more current in
his time than now; though some say it was done unknown to him. At all
events, having finished the statue of a Cupid, after breaking off an
arm, it was buried, and in due time discovered, disinterred, and brought
to the notice of a distinguished Roman dignitary, who pronounced it to
be a genuine antique and paid a large price for it, well pleased, as he
had reason to be, with his prize. But afterwards, the deception being
exposed, and the proof by means of the missing arm given that it was
the work of the then unknown Florentine sculptor, the disenchanted
connoisseur was furiously indignant, and disposed to take prompt
vengeance upon the parties concerned.

To come back to our own day. Let us suppose a rich collector to have
arrived in some well-known Italian market for art,--picture-jockeying is
much the same everywhere,--in pursuit of "originals."

Great is the commotion among dealers and their _sensali_ or jackals.
These latter are versed in intrigue and mystification, with enough
intelligence to tell a good picture from a bad one, and a parrot-like
acquaintance with names and schools. They are of all classes, from the
decayed gentleman and artist, to shopkeepers, cobblers, cooks, and
tailors, who find in the large commissions gained a temptation to
forsake their petty legitimate callings for the lottery-like excitements
and _finesse_ of picture-dealing. No sooner has the stranger gone to his
hotel than a watch is put upon his movements, and bribery and cajolery
used to get access to him. It is the _sensale's_ business to discover
and offer pictures. He is supposed to know the locality of every one,
good or bad, in his neighborhood. However jealous of each other, all
are loyally pledged together to take in the stranger. Leagued with the
dealer, artist, owner, courier, or servant, with any one, in fact, that
by any possibility can stand between the buyer and his object, it has
become almost an impossibility, especially for transient visitors, to
purchase anything whatever without paying a heavy toll to intermediates.
When the conspiracy is widely extended, the augmentation of price above
what would be required in direct dealing with the owner is sometimes
double or even quadruple. Occasionally, however, by way of compensation
for their general evil, the _sensali,_ having scented a prize, offer it
first to the amateur, in view of their own increase of gain over what
the dealer would allow. In this way, good pictures not unfrequently
escape the merchant, and reach the collector at a lower price than if
they had gone directly to the former.

The _sensali_ are not without their use in another respect. So indirect
and underhand is the Italian's mode of dealing in these matters, and
so eccentric his notions as to value, that a foreigner is apt to be
speedily disgusted or driven away by the magnitude of demands which in
reality the seller never expects to realize. Hence the negotiation is
best done through an agent, the buyer having fixed his price, leaving
the _sensale_ to make what he can for himself. No purchaser, however,
should give heed to any statement about the history or authenticity of
the works offered to him through such channels, but rely both for value
and facts upon his own resources; otherwise he will be deceived to an
extent that would appear almost fabulous to the uninitiated.

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