The Master in Arts
— We have been wrestling with a big problem in our corner of the wide club-room, and since “ the like events may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things,”— as hath been said, through Jowett’s lips, by grave Thucydides, — our struggle may interest other coteries no less. of Arts
The chief portico for our Museum of Arts and Sciences is to have six columns, and, ergo, five intercolumniations, which it is desired to surmount with five supreme names; perhaps, also, with the statues of their immortal bearers. (The general problem, whether lists of names are fittingly placed upon exterior walls at all, was regarded as settled affirmatively beforehand. Our own feeling is, that all external detail should be architectural in its effect, subsidiary to the main design and purpose; ornamental, indeed, but with a certain austere simplicity and unity in the complete impression made, even upon the casual visitor at his first approach. The place for exhaustive and scholarly catalogues is provided within the edifice.) So arose the old question, What and how many are the creative and beneficent arts which glorify human life, and who are their typical masters ?
Since speech is, on the one hand, our decisive mark of superiority over the brute, and imagination, on the other, our link upward toward the Divine, it was generally agreed that Shakespeare the poet claimed the central space.
Architecture might well demand especial recognition above the other arts of design, here, above all, at the entrance she herself supplies. But, fortunately, Angelo was sculptor, too, as well as the shaper who
while Phidias was not alone the creator of Olympian Zeus and Athenian Pallas, but master of construction in the Periclean city at the same time. So these two — again with no dissent — supply the stalwart corner figures, adequately representing the arts of design united, in their two supreme epochs ; and the relative dignity of these two arts need not be argued. Our own belief is that, in her ideal aim, in her material, in her loftiest triumphs, Sculpture is at least the equal and twin sister of Architecture.
If the seated Zeus of Phidias in the Olympian shrine had chosen to stand erect, he would without effort have thrust his royal head and shoulders through the frail temple roof the architect had woven over him. The Athenian Acropolis may well have been regarded as the true pedestal of the imperial Athenè Promachos, whose glimmering helmet-crest was seen from Sounion, or as a graded approach to that holiest place in whose dim recess the chryselephantine marvel of Phidian art received her votaries, the Parthenon, or Maiden’s Bower. The Memnon statue in Egypt and the Rhodian Colossus, Michelangelo’s Moses and David, the Hermann monument and our own Liberty Enlightening the World, may remind us that there is no limit for the heroic dimensions of sculpture, if only the adequate pedestal, a sufficiently remote point of view, can also be assured.
As all architecture finds its first suggestion in the hut, in the mere necessity of shelter, so sculpture first arose, doubtless, from a desire to preserve the outlines of the perishable human frame. As that divinely fashioned and divinely inhabited frame is nobler than its purely material protection, so the colossal statue, if worthily conceived and placed, is at least as fitting, as independent, as imperishable, as the lordliest edifice. Indeed, the most lasting monuments of man, the pyramids, are perhaps in the borderland between the arts of architect and sculptor.
Finally, the positions on either side the master were assigned to the two more perishable arts, or those, at least, whose antique masterpieces have almost vanished from the world. That Beethoven is the Shakespeare of music was not questioned. The prevailing cry, however, which gave Raphael, and painting, the final niche, overbore many and persistent doubts in one mind ; doubts, indeed, for whose allaying (or confirmation) the present appeal is chiefly taken.
A previous embassy had been sent to a certain oracle of high and deserved repute. In true oracular fashion, the response failed to meet our chief doubts ; but it was declared that poetry, the supreme art of expression, must be recognized in all its three unrivaled masters. The sides of the projecting (and projected) portico afforded one intercolumniafion each, and therewith an opportunity to obey the mandate. So Dante will support his fellow-Florentines on the one side; and on the other, Homer, adequately distinguished beside Phidias, happily marks also the transition to the classical wing proper, and indeed counts as one of the twelve greatest Hellenes, who are to be named, if not figured, upon the architrave of this Grecian section. The latter list is in itself a very pretty problem, but we may leave it to the Hellenists, while we return to Raphael and to the doubts hinted at already.
First, then, a bold paradox after the manner of the Platonic Socrates : Is painting one of the great creative arts at all ? In origin it was ancillary to architecture, and, as we now know, to sculpture no less. Even on the great Stoa at Athens, and in the Delphian Leschè, it merely furnished a masterly adornment for structures which architecture had left essentially completed. So Rubens’s Descent from the Cross was hut a splendid ornament added to the cathedral of Antwerp. No cathedral was ever built around a picture merely or chiefly to enshrine it ; no Rospigliosi palace ever crystallized its blocks of stone about a painted Aurora.
Moreover, alone of artists, the painter sets before himself, as his chief aim, deception ! With ignoble materials, mere pigments and stains, upon a petty rectangular cloth, or at best upon a stretch of crumbling plaster, he, like the Indian magician, bids us see what our own prosaic senses will never suffer us to believe actually present. Again, the Theseum if not the Parthenon, the Hermes though not the chryselephantine triumphs of Phidian art, have crossed the centuries essentially intact, as imperishable as Homeric epic,
If they are lonely on the earth, it is the hand of man, not time, that has overthrown their kindred. The colors of Polygnotos, on the other hand, are more utterly vanished than the notes of Terpander’s lyre ! Is this art, petty in its materials, aiming to deceive, unable to preserve its own memorials, one which can give its votary the immortality denied to his work ?
Even if painting deserves the equal rank which, by the general voice, is undoubtedly accorded to it, yet its peculiar province and potency lie in coloring. Therefore, its true home is not Florence nor Rome, but Venice ; and Titian, master of color, is, ipso facto, foremost and typical among painters. We hold no brief, however, even for him.
The question we wish rather to raise, perhaps a hydra-headed cluster of questions, is this : Does not artistic prose in general, or history, or oratory, or ethics, deserve one of these five seats ? In particular, is not Plato, or Socrates, or the Platonic Socrates, as the creator of a lofty ethic, both scientific and ideal, more conspicuous (even in absence) than any colorist can be ? If the dominant ethical belief of the modern civilized world denies Plato’s orthodoxy, the Hebrew Paul would offer one further advantage ; for no single race would then be laid under contribution for two among our five monarchs. The name of Paul’s master could probably not be inscribed, even in the central position, in any list, without raising the question over which a disunited Christendom has merely ceased to fight and persecute to the death, —the question on which no agreement or compromise is possible, whether that be the name of a man at all.
But on all the lesser problems here raised this is but an echo of Ajax’s cry, a prayer for light. Bacon and Hawthorne, doubtless a host beside, ordered well and impressively the great classes of benefactors to men ; but our problem is set afresh by the peculiar environment and occasion.