berless new varieties of sweetness and bloom. The Voice that evoked the earth continually and silently declares, “Let the earth bring forth more abundantly through created intelligence"; and the commission lies upon all the sons of the first gardener, to make the world an Eden, and to dress it and keep it. Arable land prophesied grain-crops, and these predicted reaping-machines. Axes were foretold by trees, mills by cascades, railroads by levels and chasms, and steam-ships by oceans. The extreme malleability of gold was a promise of gold-leaf and gilding, and the ductility of iron and copper, together with the swiftness of electricity and its partiality to certain conductors, was creation's certificate of telegraphs. Why should gold have been made susceptible of being beaten into leaves the thousandth of an inch in thickness, and of being drawn into a fineness that seems fabulous? Nature's hints — none of them, perhaps, half understood and applied as yet are decrees. Modern invention furnishes the most striking examples in point. Man puts into a machine something of the intelligence which the All-Wise has put in him. Proverbially, the powerpress appears to be gifted with reason. And nowhere in nature, except it be in the human body, do we find mechanical principles so admirably combined as in the steam-engine. It was left for man to find one principle here, another there, and to bring together many divinely-appointed laws of matter, by his invention. Art elicits, likewise, the powerful elements and forces of nature. What was the palpable use of magnetism, before it pointed its finger to the north, or of electro-magnetism, before it thought and spoke telegraphically? the manifest benefit of steam, until it was harnessed? the apparent work of sunlight, before it turned artist? Human genius summons forth the elements which, in their unseen, omnipresent energy, represent to us the Almighty Spirit, and thus doubly reveal God in art; it shows the amazing force of ethereal, impalpable forms of matter over those which are gross, the supremacy of the invisible above the visible. And, in the exercise of his derived creatorship, man further represents his Maker, by giving to such forces a body of mechanism. Metals, water, acid, are the flesh and blood of the What What genii of nature, electricity and steam; they wait for their incarnation in muscles of iron and sinews of steel. The World's Fairs, of the last three years, need only to be mentioned, to flash before the mind all examples of the glory and divinity of art in one bewildering view. The Crystal Palaces are the topmost, magnificent flowers of the sturdy tree of industry, the aloes of many centuries, grandly blooming at last, the icy crowns that glorify the mountain of the world's accumulated labors. These scenes of wonder and splendor can be best glanced at through the eyes of Elizabeth Browning; in her description, we see that poetry brings to art, as to inanimate nature, its own vitality, and finds no mere manufacture, but only natural growth and life. Her poetry identifies nature and art, and is good philosophy and theology. Gold is not woven into brocade; it swims to the surface of the silk, she says, and curdles to fair patterns. The steamship-a small model suggesting it is not propelled; it crushes down the brine, like a blind Jove, who feels his way with thunder. And the vases and carvings, these are not moulded and cut; Nature herself has brought them forth. "You will not match. . . . this porcelain! One might think the clay Retained in it the larvæ of the flowers, Above all, she affirms, in defending recent artists from the exclusive claims set up for the old, that "nature includes Raffael, as we know, not Raffael nature." Yes, the true artist is a brother of the invisible laws which portray silver forests on the frosted pane, finely touch the tinted flower, and blend pure colors in a sweet, living face. In the scheme of creation there were painters, as well as objects to be painted, -ploughs, no less than soil to be ploughed. The Author of all things supplied the material, strength, instinct, and genius. David calls on men to praise Him with stringed instruments and organs; we might reverently add, Praise Him with pictures, spades, and looms. Sir Godfrey Kneller declared: "When I paint, I consider it as one way at least of offering devotions to my Maker, by exercising the talent his goodness has graciously blessed me with." Francis I., rebuked by his courtiers for his agitation at the death of Leonardo da Vinci, exclaimed: "I can make a nobleman, but God Almighty alone can make an artist." We come thus to the other division of the subject, namely, the powers and impulses of created mind, in connection with the properties of matter now adverted to. The latter would have been enough to make art divine, though man had been constituted and guided by some spontaneous force, co-working with the Creator; for still the quality of a thing would have pointed out its use. And though man be Heaven's crowning work, yet the argument for the Divine existence and perfections drawn from his amazing physical constitution is not so strong as that which may be grounded in the endless capabilities of improved reconstruction to be found in every form of matter. The evidences of design and contrivance are far more numerous and exalted in a handful of mere earth susceptible as its ingredients are of a thousand chemical or artificial transformations to as many uses than in a human hand itself, endowed with a hundred barely mechanical motions. The whole argument from design is somewhat out of fashion, as we are well aware. Many affect to despise, or are taught to despise, the Bridgewater style of reasoning. The peerless author of " In Memoriam " writes: "I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; Nor through the questions men may try, In truth, the thoughts now presented are intended not so much to corroborate the Divine existence as to enhance our conception of the Divine glory, and to set forth the true glory of all art. Doubtless it is necessary to reason from our moral nature to establish the being of a personal First Cause. But the common conviction, founded on sensible evidences of supreme skill, is enough for common sense. The transcendental notion that man's soul contains everything,—that the traveller finds only what he brings, that he must carry Naples with him if he would see Naples,-may be applied to Atheism and to Pantheism itself; we must carry God with us if we would see him in his works and in art. ishes not the Presence in his heart, will not writing of a Heavenly Father in anything. He who cher see the hand The human mind, and the human body, that engine of living steel and throbbing marble, alike the workshop and the palace of the soul, are the highest known examples of creative wisdom. These, with the mysterious principle of life, are infinitely beyond the reach of man's skill. Their wonderful constitution is often made a subject of discourse. Invariably, however, the whole man is taken in pieces, to show his amazing nature; the mind alone, or the body alone, is selected, and then one or another separate part or function thereof. Much is said of the eye and hand, the internal mechanism and outward beauty of the body, nothing of its entire, complex, harmonious fitness for the production of useful and beautiful things. Much is said of powers of reason, calculation, imagination, nothing of the grand, combined action of intellect and soul, as in the sphere of art. In all thinking, the whole mind is brought into play, although one faculty be chiefly exercised; in all practical art, much, if not all, of the body and mind is called into activity. The complete interdependence of the spiritual and physical natures, and of every part of each, the united working of the total man, is the greatest perfection of his being; for it is the sum of all his perfections. What knowledge, reason, imagination, heart, educated senses, manipulation, various energies, are employed, unconsciously and simultaneously, in working out a picture or a machine; for a great heart even has been sometimes expended in a painting or an invention! And this crowning wonder of man, his thousand creative resources directed to one end, his numberless activities conspiring together, this can only be seen in the product, not by any dissection of the soul and of its corporeal instrument. One may hunt through flesh and spirit, yet never find this final, creative energy, which grows out of the oneness of all energies. Thus it is not so much in the worker as in his work that we best discover his perfection, and that of his Maker. "Tell me what the man can do, not what he is," said Napoleon. The answer to such a demand concerning the human consti tution most truly decides what it is. Phrenology has given to the world a symbolical chart, with representations of each organ inclosed in the several compartments of the head;-in one, a painter at his easel; in another, two hungry men at dinner; in another, a bridal party at the altar; and so, a singer with a harp, a chemist with his crucibles. And, not unlike this amusing chart, a human figure, painted from head to foot with pictures of all the arts, would be a better dissection than any anatomical drawings can bring to the illustration of evidences of creative design. Man himself is more fully laid open in the study of a steam-ship than in the examination of any bones, literal or metaphysical,-just as the powers of mind are better seen in a canto of Milton than in any classification of mental philosophy. Throwing out of view our moral nature, and making a syllogism of the argument:- Man is best comprehended in his works; the Creator best in man; therefore the Creator best in the works of man. Moreover, the Supreme Wisdom is thus set forth more worthily, as well as more clearly. It is worthier to have made a maker, than simply a mind, or a body, a plant, a jewel, or a world. It is a purposing of myriad designs through a designer. It is diviner to create a honey-bee than honey, though it be making honey by means of bees. To adopt Paley's illustration, let it be supposed that Ericsson had invented a machine which would itself have invented caloric engines and a thousand other novelties of genius and ingenuity; all the glory of every piece of mechanism so contrived or made would fitly belong to him. A certain necessity in man's work, as will yet be seen, renders the illustration complete. And here may be noticed the familiar sense in which the Creator is both more worthily and more clearly reflected in art than in his own immediate products. Man, as a finite creator, images the Infinite one; he has, in his poor degree, the same reason, imagination, perception of beauty and fitness, and the same power of choice. As one who can originate and execute a design, who can appreciate and apply the eternal rules of order, proportion, and excellence by which the worlds were made, he is a "dim miniature" of the great Originator. |