Biblia

259. Divine Mission of Art

259. Divine Mission of Art

Divine Mission of Art

Isa_2:12; Isa_2:16 : ’93The day of the Lord, of hosts shall be upon all pleasant pictures.’94

Pictures are by some relegated to the realm of the trivial, accidental, sentimental, or worldly, but my text shows that God scrutinizes pictures and whether they are good or bad, whether used for right or wrong purposes, is a matter of Divine observation and arraignment. The divine mission of pictures is my subject. That the artists’92 pencil and the engravers’92 knife have sometimes been made subservient to the kingdom of the bad is frankly admitted. After the ashes and scoria were removed from Herculaneum and Pompeii, the walls of those cities discovered to the explorers a degradation in art which cannot be exaggerated. Satan and all his imps have always wanted the fingering of the easel; they would rather have possession of that than the art of printing, for types are not so potent and quick for evil as pictures. The powers of darkness think they have gained a triumph, and they have, when in some respectable parlor or public art gallery they can hang a canvas embarrassing to the good but fascinating to the evil.

It is not in a spirit of prudery, but backed up by God’92s eternal truth, when I say that you have no right to hang in your art-rooms or your dwelling-houses that which would be offensive to good people if the figures pictured were alive in your parlor and the guests of your household. A picture that you have to hang in a somewhat secluded place, or that in a public hall you cannot with a group of friends deliberately stand before and discuss, ought to have a knife stabbed into it at the top and cut clear through to the bottom, and a stout finger thrust in on the right side ripping clear through to the left. Pliny the elder lost his life by going near enough to see the inside of Vesuvius, and the further you can stand off from the burning crater of sin the better. Never till the books of the Last Day are opened shall we know what has been the dire harvest of evil pictorials and unbecoming art-galleries. Despoil a man’92s imagination and he becomes a mere carcass. The show windows of English and American cities, in which the low theaters have sometimes hung long lines of brazen actors and actresses in style insulting to all propriety, have made a broad path to death for multitudes of people. But so have all the other arts been at times suborned of evil. How has music been bedraggled? Is there any place so low down in dissoluteness that into it has not been carried David’92s harp and Handel’92s organ and Gottschalk’92s piano and Ole Bull’92s violin? and the flute’97which though named after so insignificant a thing as the Sicilian eel, which has seven spots on the side like flute holes, yet for thousands of years has had an exalted mission? Architecture, born in the heart of him who made the worlds, under its arches and across its floors, what bacchanalian revelries have been enacted! It is not against any of these arts that they have been so led into captivity.

What a poor world this would be if it were not for what my text calls ’93pleasant pictures!’94 I refer to your memory and mine when I ask if your knowledge of the Holy Scriptures has not been mightily augmented by the woodcuts or engravings in the old family Bible, which father and mother read out of, and laid on the table in the old homestead when you were boys and girls. The Bible scenes which we all carry in our minds were not gotten from the Bible typography, but from the Bible pictures. To prove the truth of it in my own case, the other day I took up the old family Bible which I inherited. Sure enough, what I have carried in my mind of Jacob’92s ladder was exactly the Bible engraving of Jacob’92s ladder; and so with Samson carrying off the gates of Gaza; Elisha restoring the Shunammite’92s son; the massacre of the innocents; Christ blessing little children; the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment. My idea of all these is that of the old Bible engravings, which I scanned before I could read a word. That is true with nine-tenths of you. If I could swing open the door of your foreheads I would find that you are walking picture-galleries. The great intelligence abroad about the Bible did not come from the general reading of the book, for the majority of the people read it but little, if they read it at all; but all the sacred scenes have been put before the great masses, and not printers’92 ink, but the pictorial art, must have the credit of the achievement. First, painters’92 pencil for the favored few, and then engravers’92 plate or woodcut for millions on millions!

What overwhelming commentary on the Bible, what re-enforcement for patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and Christ, what distribution of Scriptural knowledge of all nations, in the paintings and engravings therefrom of Holman Hunt’92s ’93Christ in the Temple;’94 Paul Veronese’92s ’93Magdalen Washing the Feet of Christ;’94 Raphael’92s ’93Michael the Archangel;’94 Albert Durer’92s ’93Dragon of the Apocalypse;’94 Michael Angelo’92s ’93Plague of the Fiery Serpents;’94 Tintoretto’92s ’93Flight into Egypt;’94 Rubens’92 ’93Descent from the Cross;’94 Leonardo Da Vinci’92s ’93Last Supper;’94 Claude’92s ’93Queen of Sheba;’94 Bellini’92s ’93Madonna’94 at Milan; Orcagna’92s ’93Last Judgment,’94 and hundreds of miles of pictures, if they were put in line, illustrating, displaying, dramatizing, irradiating Bible truths until the Scriptures are not today so much on paper as on canvas, not so much in ink as in all the colors of the spectrum. In 1833, forth from Strasburg, Germany, there came a child that was to eclipse in speed and boldness anything and everything that the world had ever seen since the first color appeared on the sky at the creation, Paul Gustave Dor’e9. At eleven years of age he published marvelous lithographs of his own. Saying nothing of what he did for Milton’92s Paradise Lost, emblazoning it on the attention of the world, he takes up the Book of Books, the monarch of literature, the Bible, and in his pictures, ’93The Creation of Light,’94 ’93The Trial of Abraham’92s Faith,’94 ’93The Burial of Sarah,’94 ’93Joseph Sold by His Brethren,’94 ’93The Brazen Serpent,’94 ’93Boaz and Ruth,’94 ’93David and Goliath,’94 ’93The Transfiguration,’94 ’93The Marriage in Cana,’94 ’93Babylon Fallen,’94 and two hundred and five Scriptural scenes in all, with a boldness and a grasp and almost supernatural afflatus that make the heart throb and the brain reel and the tears start and the cheeks blanch and the entire nature quake with the tremendous things of God and eternity and the dead. I actually staggered down the steps of the London Art Gallery under the power of Dor’e9’92s ’93Christ Leaving the Pr’e6torium.’94 Profess you to be a Christian man or woman, and see no divine mission in art, and acknowledge you no obligation either in thanks to God or man?

It is no more the word of God when put before us in printers’92 ink, than by skilful laying on of colors, or designs on metal through incision or corrosion. What a lesson in morals was presented by Hogarth, the painter, in his two pictures, ’93The Rake’92s Progress’94 and ’93The Miser’92s Feast,’94 and by Thomas Cole’92s engravings of the ’93Voyage of Human Life,’94 and the ’93Course of Empire,’94 and by Turner’92s ’93Slave Ship.’94 God in art! Christ in art! Patriarchs, prophets and apostles in art! Angels in art! Heaven in art!

The world and the church ought to come to the higher appreciation of the divine mission of pictures, yet the authors of them have generally been left to semi-starvation. West, the great painter, toiled in unappreciation till, being a great skater, while on the ice he formed the acquaintance of General Howe, of the English army, who through coming to admire West as a clever skater, gradually came to appreciate as much that which he accomplished by his hand as by his heel. Pouissin, the mighty painter, was pursued and had nothing with which to defend himself against the mob but the artists’92 portfolio, which he held over his head to keep off the stones hurled at him. The pictures of Richard Wilson, of England, were sold for fabulous sums of money after his death, but the living painter was glad to get for his ’93Alcyone’94 a piece of Stilton cheese. From 1640 to 1643 there were four thousand six hundred pictures wilfully destroyed. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth it was the habit of some people to spend much of their time in knocking pictures to pieces. In the reign of Charles the First it was ordered by Parliament that all pictures of Christ be burned. Painters were so badly treated and humiliated in the beginning of the eighteenth century that they were lowered clear down out of the sublimity of their art, and obliged to give accounts of what they did with their colors. The oldest picture in England, a portrait of Chaucer, though now of great value, was picked out of a lumber garret. Great were the trials of Quentin Matsys, who toiled on from blacksmith’92s anvil till, as a painter, he won wide recognition. The first missionaries to Mexico made the fatal mistake of destroying pictures, for the loss of which art and religion must ever lament. But why go so far back when in this year of our Lord, to be a painter, except in rare exceptions, means poverty and neglect; poorly fed, poorly clad, poorly housed, because poorly appreciated! When I hear a man is a painter, I have two feelings’97one of admiration for the greatness of his soul, and the other of commiseration for the needs of his body. But so it has been in all departments of noble work. Some of the mightiest have been hardly bested. Oliver Goldsmith had such a big patch on the coat over his left breast that when he went anywhere he kept his hat in his hand closely pressed over the patch. The world-renowned Bishop Asbury had a salary of sixty-four dollars a year. Painters are not the only ones who have endured the lack of appreciation. Let men of wealth take under their patronage the suffering men of art. They lift no complaint; they make no strike for higher wages. But with a keenness of nervous organization which almost always characterizes genius, these artists suffer more than any one, but God can realize. There needs to be a concerted effort for the suffering artists of America, not sentimental discourse about what we owe to artists, but contracts that will give them a livelihood; for I am in full sympathy with the Christian, farmer who was very busy gathering his fall apples, and some one asked him to pray for a poor family, the father of which had broken his leg, and the busy farmer said: ’93I cannot stop now to pray, but you can go down into the cellar and get some corned beef and butter and eggs and potatoes; that is all I can do now.’94 Artists may wish for our prayers, but they also want practical help from men who can give them work. You have heard scores of sermons for all other kinds of suffering men and women, but we need sermons that make pleas for the suffering men and women of American art. Their work is more true to nature and life than some of the masterpieces that have become immortal on the other side of the sea, but it is the fashion of Americans to mention foreign artists, and to know little or nothing about our own Copley and Allston and Inman and Greenough and Kensett. Let the affluent fling out of their windows and into the backyard valueless daubs on canvas, and call in these splendid but unrewarded men, and tell them to adorn your walls, not only with that which shall please the taste, but enlarge the minds and improve the morals and save the souls of those who gaze upon them. All American cities need great galleries of art, not only open annually for a few days on exhibition, but which shall stand open all the year round, and from early morning until ten o’92clock at night, and free to all who would come and go.

What a preparation for the wear and tear of the day a five-minute look in the morning at some picture that will open a door into some larger realm than that in which our population daily drudge! Or what a good thing the half-hour of artistic opportunity on the way home in the evening, from exhaustion that demands recuperation for mind and soul as well as body! Who will do for the city where you live what W. W. Corcoran did for Washington, and what others have done for Philadelphia and Boston and New York? Men of wealth, if you are too modest to build and endow such a place during your lifetime, why not go to your iron safe and take out your last will and testament, and make a codicil that shall build for the city of your residence a throne for American art? Take some of that money that would otherwise spoil your children, and build an art-gallery that shall associate your name forever, not only with the great masters of painting, who are gone, but with the great masters who are trying to live; and also win the admiration and love of tens of thousands of people, who, unable to have fine pictures of their own, would be advantaged. By your benefactions build your own monuments, and not leave it to the whim of others. Some of the best people sleeping in Greenwood have no monuments at all, or some crumbling stones that in a few years will let the rain wash out name and epitaph; while some men whose death was the abatement of a nuisance have a pile of Aberdeen granite high enough for a king, and elogium enough to embarrass a seraph. Oh, man of large wealth! instead of leaving to the whim of others your monumental commemoration and epitaphiology, to be looked at when people are going to-and-fro at the burial of others, build right down in the heart of our great city, or the city where you live, an immense free reading-room, or a free musical conservatory, or a free art-gallery, the niches for sculpture and the walls abloom with the rise and fall of nations, and lessons of courage for the disheartened, and rest for the weary, and life for the dead; and one hundred and fifty years from now you will be wielding influences in this world for good. How much better than white marble, that chills you if you put your hand on it when you touch it in the cemetery, would be a monument in colors, in beaming eyes, in living possession, in splendors which under the chandelier would be glowing and warm, and looked at by strolling groups with catalogue in hand, on the January night when the necropolis where the body sleeps is all snowed under. The tower of David was hung with one thousand dented shields of battle; but you, oh, man of wealth! may have a grander tower named after you, one that shall be hung not with the symbols of carnage, but with the victories of that art which was so long ago recognized in my text as ’93pleasant pictures.’94 Oh, the power of pictures! I cannot deride, as some have done, Cardinal Mazarin, who, when told that he must die, took his last walk through the art-gallery of his palace, saying: ’93Must I quit all this? Look at that Titian! Look at that Correggio! Look at that ’93Deluge’94 of Caracci! Farewell, dear pictures!’94

As the day of the Lord of hosts, according to this text, will scrutinize the pictures, I implore all parents to see that in their households they have neither in book or newspaper nor on canvas anything that will deprave. Pictures are no longer the exclusive possession of the affluent. There is not a respectable home in these cities that has not specimens of woodcut or steel engraving, if not of painting, and your whole family will feel the moral uplifting or depression. Have nothing on your wall or in books that will familiarize the young with scenes of cruelty and wassail; have only those sketches made by artists in elevated moods, and none of those scenes that seem the product of artistic delirium tremens. Pictures are not only a strong but a universal language. The human race is divided into almost as many languages as there are nations, but the pictures may speak of people of all tongues. Volapuk many have hoped, with little reason, would become a world-wide language; but the pictorial is always a world-wide language, and printers’92 types have no emphasis compared with it. We say that children are fond of pictures; but notice any man when he takes up a book, and you will see that the first thing that he looks at is the pictures. Have only those in your house that appeal to the better nature. One engraving has sometimes decided an eternal destiny. Under the title of fine arts there have come here from France a class of pictures which elaborate argument has tried to prove irreproachable. They would disgrace a barroom, and they need to be confiscated. Your children will carry the pictures of their father’92s house with them clear on to the grave, and, passing that marble pillar, will take them through eternity.

Furthermore, let all reformers and all Sabbath-school teachers and all Christian workers realize that, if they would be effective for good, they must make pictures, if not by chalk on blackboards or kindergarten designs or by pencil on canvas, then by words. Arguments are soon forgotten; but pictures, whether in language or in colors, are what produce strongest effects. Christ was always telling what a thing was like, and his Sermon on the Mount was a great picture-gallery, beginning with a sketch of a ’93city on a hill that cannot be hid,’94 and ending with a tempest beating against two houses, one on the rock and the other on the sand. The parable of the prodigal son, a picture; parable of the sower, who went forth to sow, a picture; parable of the unmerciful servant, a picture; parable of the ten virgins, a picture; parable of the talents, a picture. The world wants pictures, and the appetite begins with the child, who consents to go early to bed if the mother will sit beside him and rehearse a story, which is only a picture. When we see how much has been accomplished in secular directions by pictures’97Shakespeare’92s tragedies, a picture; Victor Hugo’92s writings, all pictures; John Ruskin’92s and Tennyson’92s and Longfellow’92s works, all pictures’97why not enlist, as far as possible, for our churches and schools and reformatory work and evangelistic endeavor the power of thought that can be put into word pictures, if not pictures in color? Yea, why not all young men draw for themselves on paper, with pen or pencil, their coming career, of virtue, if they prefer that; of vice, if they prefer that. After making the picture, put it on the wall, or paste it on the flyleaf of some favorite book, that you may have it before you. I read of a man who had been executed for murder, and the jailer found afterward a picture made on the wall of the cell by the assassin’92s own hand, a picture of a flight of stairs. On the lowest step he had written: ’93Disobedience to parents;’94 on the second, ’93Sabbath-breaking;’94 on the third, ’93drunkenness and gambling;’94 on the fourth, ’93murder;’94 and on the fifth and top step, ’93a gallows.’94 If that man had made that picture before he took the first step, he never would have taken any of them! Oh, man, make another picture, a bright picture, an evangelical picture, and I will help you make it! I suggest six steps for this flight of stairs. On the first step write the words: ’93A nature changed by the Holy Ghost and washed in the blood of the Lamb;’94 on the second step: ’93Industry and good companionship;’94 on the third step: ’93A Christian home with a family altar;’94 on the fourth step: ’93Ever-widening usefulness;’94 on the fifth step: ’93A glorious departure from this world;’94 on the sixth step: ’93Heaven! heaven! heaven!’94 Write it three times, and let the letters of the one word be made up of banners, the second of coronets, and the third of thrones! Promise me that you will do that, and I will promise to meet you on the sixth step, if the Lord will, through his pardoning grace, bring me there too.

And here I am going to say a word of cheer to people who have never had a word of consolation on that subject. There are men and women in this world by hundreds of thousands who have a fine natural taste, and yet all their lives that taste has been suppressed, and although they could appreciate the galleries of Dresden and Vienna and Naples far more than nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand who visit them, they may never go, for they must support their households, and bread and schooling for their children are of more importance than pictures. Though fond of music, they are compelled to live amid discord; and though fond of architecture, they dwell in clumsy abodes; and though appreciative of all that engravings and paintings can do, they are in perpetual deprivation. You are going, after you get on the sixth step of that stairs, just spoken of, to find yourselves in the royal gallery of the universe, the concentred splendors of all worlds before your transported vision. In some way all the thrilling scenes through which we and the Church of God have passed in our earthly state will be pictured or brought to mind. At a cyclorama of Gettysburg, a blind man who lost his sight in that battle was with his child heard talking while standing before that picture. The blind man said to the daughter: ’93Are there at the right of the picture some regiments marching up a hill?’94 ’93Yes,’94 she said. ’93Well,’94 said the blind man, ’93is there a general on horseback leading them on?’94 ’93Yes,’94 she said. ’93Well, is there rushing down on these men a cavalry charge?’94 ’93Yes,’94 was the reply. ’93And do there seem to be many dying and dead?’94 ’93Yes,’94 was the answer. ’93Well, now, do you see a shell from the woods bursting near the wheel of a cannon?’94 ’93Yes,’94 she said. ’93Stop right there!’94 said the blind man. ’93That is the last thing I ever saw on earth! What a time it was, Jenny, when I lost my eyesight!’94 But when you, who have found life a hard battle, a very Gettysburg, shall stand in the Royal Gallery of Heaven, and with your new vision begin to see and understand that which in your earthly blindness you could not see at all, you will point out to your celestial comrades, perhaps to your own dear children who have gone before, the scenes of the earthly conflicts in which you participated, saying: ’93There from that hill of prosperity I was driven back; in that valley of humiliation I was wounded. There I lost my eyesight. That was the way the world looked when I last saw it. But what a grand thing to get celestial vision, and stand here before the cyclorama of all worlds while the Rider on the white horse goes on ’91conquering and to conquer,’92 the moon under his feet and the stars of heaven for his tiara!’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage