time, and many for nearly a whole lifetime, are thus unconsciously familiarising themselves with the Art of Literature, in which all men are, at least, adventurers, if not experts, ere ever they begin to form anything more than a mere casual acquaintance with the other arts. Little wonder, then, if so many hastily conclude that the highest possibilities of thought are for Literature alone.
The various Arts might rather be likened to the sides of a great pyramid, all springing from the broad base that is as wide as humanity, nearing each other the higher they rise, until at the apex they meet in heaven. Our modern industrial civilisation has merely regarded that side which happened to be within its view, but has not sought to know of those other sides it could not see.
While in no way disposed to detract from, or, indeed, to do other than delight in the noble aims and achievements of Poetry, and of Literature generally, we cannot for one moment concede that the specific limitations of the graphic and plastic arts are such as to prevent them from embodying the loftiest ideals of which the human soul is capable. There is a certain convenience in the using of words as the instrument of thought and expression; but it by no means follows that all ideas must, or even can, be formulated in words. Indeed, it may well be doubted whether the noblest of all our ideas, our highest spiritual aspirations, can be formulated in words, any more than can our most subtle and pregnant emotions, such as love, grief, or despair. These declare themselves at their greatest intensity in what we habitually speak of as 'unutterable' looks, when the invisible soul moulds the material body to express and promulge by a vivid flash, in one intense moment, what volumes were powerless to describe with equal potency, but which Painting or Sculpture could well convey.
This sense of the inadequacy of words is expressed by Goethe, himself one of the greatest masters in Literature that the modern world has known. He says, referring to man's sense of God's existence:—
'Fill thy whole heart with it—
And when thou art
Lost in the consciousness of happiness—
Then call it what thou wilt,
Happiness!—heart!—love!—God!
I have no name for it—Feeling is all;
Name, sound, and smoke.
Dimming the glow of heaven!'—Faust.
Goethe thus declares his sense of the impossibility of conveying the most exalted feeling by words, and indeed only succeeds in suggesting by a negation what he would have us know—
'I have no name for it—Feeling is all.'
But here, where words fail, Painting and Sculpture succeed, using, as they do, a language based upon the primal expressions of Nature, wherein the Creator has not deemed it unworthy of His perfect thought to write that thought, not merely in words, but to embody it in material forms; in man, whose face, illumed by noble thought, is as the face of God, and in every flower that blows, and in every tree that draws its bodily sustenance from earth and lifts its face to heaven.
Indeed, so far from it being the case that man's noblest thoughts cannot be embodied in actual material by those arts, such as Painting and Sculpture, which use material as a basis, it would rather appear that man is singularly deficient in a sense of his high calling and destiny till he thus emulates his Maker's example—till he realises that, endued with the Divine Spirit, he is himself a creator, and, looking out upon all life and nature, and recognising there the elemental expression of the Divine thought, the Godhood in him makes him delight to mould inert matter with Divine purpose, informing it with his spirit and vitalising it, till even the dead rock is made to live in the majesty and loveliness of Beauty, and declare to time, and almost to eternity, man's exultant joy in the Divine Spirit within him, that has produced the glorious Work of Art, which, expressive of the triumph of the living soul over dead matter, is thus the continual answer to all doubt and all pessimism, an irrefragable proof of the existence of God, and a sure ground for unconquerable and eternal hope.
Religion, led from the great main track of life by the unconscious misdirection of Theology and Philosophy, has travelled from dissent to doubt, and from doubt well-nigh to despair; and she has need of the restoring, and consoling, and ever-joyous fellowship of Art, to revivify her for the conquest of the new world that is now expectant of the New Revelation which it so sorely needs. It is with a profound sense of this need that a few earnest men, here and there throughout the land, are being constrained sometimes to turn from the arts that are the work of their lives, and, by spoken and written words, to help forward this New Renascence.
