_ Early Letters To John S. Dwight
Chapter VII
NEW YORK,
Friday, Dec. 22, '43. A merry Christmas to you, and to all Christian souls. How brave goes the year to its setting! These calm, cold days impress me like the fine characters of history and the elder time, inspired with a generous wisdom, and prophesying what shall be the newest and best word of hope in our day. The season embraces and surpasses those old men, even the finest. To-day, as I walked, the magnificence of the closing year, so steadfast and sure, sparing no sunshine nor rain, passing quietly out to be renewed nevermore, quite reproved the solemn martyrdoms of men, upon which we hang our hopes.
Nature is great that she does not suffer us to define her influence upon ourselves. Like all greatness, she suggests to us beauty and grace, not as attributes of hers, but fair buds and flowers of the soul. Therefore, in the full presence of nature, the grandest deeds seem harmonious and the wisdom of Plato, and actions whose greatness is the centre, not the utmost compression, of our life are harmonious and symmetrical. To the Greeks and Jews the Gospel is blindness and a stumbling-block, but joy and peace to the elect.
Nothing is so stern and lofty a cordial to me as this severe inscrutability of nature. I must obey or die, and dying is no help to me, for the spirit that rules now rules evermore. How like a god sits she brooding over the world, announcing her laws by blows and knocks, by agonies and convulsions, by the mouths of wise men, affirming that as the sowing so also is the harvest. And there is no alleviation, no palliation. She heeds no prayers, no sighs; those who fall must raise themselves; the sick must of their own force recover or perish. When thus she has set us upon our legs everything works for us, and the sun and moon are great lamps for our enlightenment, and men and women leaves of a wondrous book. Then, imperceptibly to us, in these snows and blossoms and fruits annually all history is rewritten, and the honest man who knows nothing of Greece and Rome derives from the swelling trees and the bending sky the same subtle infusion of heroism and nobility that is the vitality of history. The vice of our mode of education is that we do not regard life from an eternal point. We want magnanimity and truth, not the names of those who have been magnanimous and true; and I see not why nature to-day does not offer to me all the grandeur of character that has illustrated any period. Men and nature and art all seek to say the same thing. Could we search deeply enough, I doubt not we should find all matter to be one substance; and could we appreciate the worth of every art and every landscape and man, they would be identical. As I am a better man, the more soluble is the great outspreading riddle of nature, and the more distinct and full the delicate grace of art. As an old, quaint divine said of fate and free-will, they are two converging lines which of necessity must somewhere unite, though our human vision does not see the point; so all mysteries are radii, and could we follow one implicitly, then we have found the centre of all. Therefore the best critic of art is the man whose life has been hid with God in nature; and therefore the triumph of art is complete when birds peck at the grapes.
I felt this yesterday while looking at Cole's paintings. Each picture of "The Voyage of Life" impressed me somewhat as the voyage itself does. Especially the cold, subdued tone of the last, which suggests infinity by the tone merely. Perhaps you have not seen them, and will suffer a brief account. The pictures are four. The first represents a boat of golden prow and sides wrought into the images of the hours, bearing an infant in a bed of roses, and issuing from a dim cave in a dark, indefinable mountain, and hasting down a flower-crowned stream. The second shows the babe grown to manhood, and, assuming himself the guidance, leaves the guardian spirit upon the bank, and upon a wider stream, piercing a wider prospect, sails away, allured by a dim cloud-castle which seems to hang over the river, yet from which the stream turns. The next shows him dashing along amid clouds and whirlpools and tempests, without rudder or compass, towards threatening rocks, yet serenely, with clasped hands, abiding the issue. In the last, grown to old age, he sails forth upon a fathomless, shoreless sea, leaving behind all rocks and tempests, while the guardian angel again at the helm points to regions of cloudless day. Though very beautiful of themselves, they suggested to me grander pictures of this grandest theme, and so interested me very much.
Truly there is nothing final; all is suggestive. When, entranced in summer woods, we demand that nature lend our homes somewhat of her beauty, she replies to us that beauty is so subtle, residing not in the green of this leaf nor in the curve of that branch, and not in the whole, but in the soul that contemplates it, that of herself she has none, and that we her lovers have invested her with such golden charms. The universal wish to realize is only typified by the grasping gain. Most men live to acknowledge in heart the superiority of young dreams over old possessions; and the world feels that in the unshrinking aspirations of the youth lies the hope of the world. That is the lightning that purifies the dense atmosphere, and, glancing for an instant, reveals the keenest light known to men. So the old year sings to me as it goes crowned with crystals and snow-drops to its end. Without shrinking, without sorrow, it folds its white garment around unwithered limbs, and submits gracefully to the past. Nature regards it with that calm face whereon no emotions are written, but a wise serenity forever sits. This year, too, is to many lonely hearts a redeemer; and no heavens will be darkly clouded when it is over, but still stars will shine unsurprised. Pale scholars in midnight vigils, golden gayety wreathing the hours with flowers and gems, unbending sorrow pressing heavy seals upon yielding wretchedness, it will steal surely from all these, and on the morrow be a colorless ghost in the distant past. Its constancy will secure our immortality. The grandeur of the year may be the strength of our character; and as the East receives it, we may enter the inscrutable future reverently and with folded hands.
Sunday. I am going to F. Rakemann's to pass the afternoon and give him this for you. He proposes to pass a week in Boston. I have heard Wallace during the week. He has great talent; but I had heard Ole Bull, and Wallace's violin-playing was only good. What think you of Vieuxtemps, who, I see, is in Boston? Shall you not send Knoop hither? So many things I would say! It is wiser to say nothing. Remember me to my West Roxbury friends, Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Shaw and their spouses.
Ever your friend,
G.W.C. _