Chapter XIX
PICTURES AND PERSONALITIES
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“O Lord, Thou art our
Father; we are the clay, and thou our
potter, and we all are the work of Thy
hand.”
--Isaiah 64:8
[223] The
poem from which I wish to draw the lesson
which is to follow is that of Browning
entitled, “Old Pictures in
Florence.” In the first place
Browning emphasizes the statement made by
Jesus that, “A prophet is not
without honor save in his own country,
and among his own people.” He does
so by pointing out the neglect and
misunderstanding of those great painters
of Italy by the Italians themselves, who
were so close to the great masters that
they could not perceive their greatness.
He seems to feel that the artists
themselves have, in many cases, painted
as Jesus spoke, in parables, without
leaving any key to the parables in art by
which men who came after them might
penetrate the divine mystery.
As so many
have done since his time, Browning
haunted the old churches of Florence
where he loved to gaze on the works of
his beloved [224] Giotto and others, and
it grieved him to see tourists give but a
passing glance to the old masters’
works and regard them as so much peeling
paint on wrinkling canvas. He fancied he
could see the ghosts of the old masters
watching in agony the stupid eyes of
those who came, merely to say they had
been to see, and he likens their state of
soul to a great thing wronged by a small
one, “A lion who dies of an
ass’s kick.” The souls of the
dead artists seem to call upon him to
defend them from the praise of the
witless ones who “hum and
buzz” today, but who, if they had
lived in the masters’ times, would
have passed them by with never a word of
praise or encouragement.
He compares
the artist with the laborer whose sleep
is sweet and who is not troubled as to
whether or not posterity will appreciate
his efforts, even if his contemporaries
do not, and he shows how the artist
suffers, as Jesus suffered, when he cried
out as he looked back over Jerusalem,
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how oft
would I have gathered thee together as a
hen doth her chickens, but ye would
not.” Artists die in despair over
the inability of the rest of us to
perceive what they are trying to tell us
of the things which can never be
understood save by symbols, but Art lives
on, as Browning proves, when he traces
art from the statues of the Greeks to the
paintings of the Italians and then shows
how the Italians improved on their own
masters.
All of this
points, it seems to me, to the idea [225]
in Browning’s mind which is back of
all art, as we know it, to that which we
are just beginning to understand, which
is the fine art of creating for
ourselves, out of that plastic substance
called Thought, the things we desire.
When art has served it purpose it has
revealed to man his own potentialities;
and it has not served its purpose until
it has done this, for art is not the mere
creation of something in stone or on
canvas for the purpose of attracting the
eye and delighting the aesthetic sense.
The religion of art, for there is a
religion of art, as there is one of the
soul, is to portray man’s
perfectness and to suggest the
possibility of attaining that perfection,
and through this suggestion to stimulate
endeavor.
Browning
sees in Greek statuary a suggestion of
the human form as it ought to be, and as
it was originally. He shows by comparison
how far short we fall of physical
perfection, not to speak of spiritual
development. We would be more kingly than
our fellows, yet we cannot sit with the
same dignity as did Theseus. We would be
a model for an artist, but we lack the
use of arms and knees as The Son of Priam
used them. We cannot show our emotions of
indignation at social injustices, nor our
superiority in hours of danger as Apollo
did, nor can we express our grief as did
Niobe over the loss of her children. The
office of art is not to carve in marble
nor paint on canvas the impossible in
human experience, but so to elevate the
souls of men that what is portrayed may
be performed.
[226] It is
for this reason, when we have viewed all
there is in the world of art, that we are
to look within and ask if in ourselves
there is not something waiting for
expression. Comparing statues in stone
with latent capacities in soul, and
looking from one to the other as from
suggestion to demonstration, Browning
says:
Growth came when, looking your last
on them all,
You turned your eyes inwardly one fine
day
And cried with a start--What if we so
small
Be greater and grander the while than
they?
Are they perfect of lineament, perfect
of stature?
In both, of such types are we
Precisely because of our wider
nature;
For time, theirs--ours, for
eternity.
Today’s brief passion
limits their range;
It seethes with the morrow for us and
more.
They are perfect--how else? they shall
never change:
We are faulty--why not? we have time in
store.
The Artificer’s hand is not
arrested
With us; we are rough-hewn, no wise
polished.
They stand for our copy, and, once
invested
With all they can teach, we shall see
them abolished.
The human
artist has done all that he can for his
statue when, out of shapeless marble, he
fashions the form which entrances, but
which cannot speak. Anatomically perfect,
but mentally deficient, finished in
construction but lacking in
consciousness, it is a mute revelation of
what man might be as a talking animal if
only he knew how to fashion himself in
healthy tissue by the renewal of his
mind. When statues and paintings have
[227] done all they can for us in
revealing perfectness of form, they have
lifted thought up to the contemplation of
something better and more enduring than
deformity and decrepitude; for they have
introduced us to the Ideal.
But a mere
introduction to the Ideal, while it is
gratifying to the senses, is not
sufficient. It is not enough that we
appreciate art if we remain forever on
the plane of the aesthetic, for the
aesthetic is itself nothing more than a
beautiful symbol of the spiritual,
without which spiritual, the aesthetic is
a shadow without substance. It is for
this reason that the artistic
temperament, or the aesthetic nature
devoid of divine understanding, is so
frequently at the mercy of its emotions.
Having no scientific, spiritually
scientific, background, the artist is a
sensitive plant which blooms in the
sunshine of success and fades in the
gloom which misunderstanding casts about
those who see beauty without perceiving
Truth.
The artist
of the future will be he who sees the
Ideal in Spirit and externalizes his
vision in the flesh. Art, like the
religious sentiment in the human soul, is
ever in a state of ascending development.
From the first crude attempts on the part
of man to fashion things out of wood and
stone, to the exquisite statuary of the
Greeks, countless ages passed. It was not
because human skill was constantly
improving, so that hands which before
were clumsy now became dexterous, but
because man’s perception of the
Perfect unfolded as man advanced in
spiritual consciousness [228] and,
because of this, art could not remain in
the wood and stone age of expression.
Beautiful as
statuary is, it nevertheless lacks that
warmth which color lends, and so an
advance is made from cold stone to warm
paint. If, at first, beautiful eyes
stared out from their stony sockets, now
art decrees that they shall speak to us
in tones of brown or blue, gray or hazel.
If, before, lips were hard and cold, now
art affirms they must be red and potent,
inviting the kisses of children. The hair
must not forever continue to maintain a
perpetual stoniness, but it must now
bespeak the hue of the model in all the
requisite delicacy of wave and beauty.
Art in paint has not come to destroy art
in stone; rather has it come to fulfill
promises to the race that the best of
today shall be included in the best of
tomorrow, which will be better, because
man is ever improving.
It is
because of the steady ascent of art from
the crude to the refined that we can, in
fancy at least, see the approach of that
new conception which will not remain
content to make inanimate matter look
more life-like, but which will work in
the very flesh itself, so that the body
will become transformed according to a
law as fixed as the law back of science
by which a block of marble becomes a
Venus or an Apollo. We can easily accept
the truth embodied in the scriptures
which says that we are the clay in the
hand of the Potter, and that God can make
of us whatsoever He wills; but it is a
New Thought which [229] assures us that
by the exercise of our reflected Creative
Intelligence we can make of ourselves the
thing we desire to be. This idea must
have been in the mind of Browning when he
asked:
Shall Man, such step within his
endeavor,
Man’s face, have no more play and
action
Than joy which is crystallized
forever,
Or grief, and eternal petrifaction?
On which I conclude, that the
early painters,
To cries of “Greek Art and what
more wish you?”--
Replied, “To become now
self-acquainters,
And paint man, man, whatever the
issue!
Make new hopes shine thro’ the
flesh they fray,
New fears aggrandize the rags and
tatters:
To bring the invisible full into
play!
Let the visible go to the dogs--what
matters?
Always
non-progressiveness says to
progressiveness, “Greek Art, and
what more wish you?” But this
question is asked in different words with
each succeeding generation. The
non-progressive mentality does not
believe it can improve on existing
conditions, and so it falls from
mediocrity to inferiority and finally
goes out “unwept, unhonored and
unsung.” Not realizing the power of
spiritualized Thought to carve a glorious
present out of an ugly past or a happy
future out of a disturbing present, the
average man allows thought to circle
about himself and his troubles much as a
foolish cow walks around and around the
stake to which she is tethered, until the
rope becomes so short and unstretching
that she has nothing to nibble but dust.
By the proper use of [230] Thought, man
becomes an artist with the “pattern
showed to him on the Mount” for his
model.
I am
reminded of a story which a well-known
evangelist told me in company with some
friends who had been gathered together at
the house of an associate to entertain
him. In a large city in the middle west,
where he was engaged at his work of
leading souls to the better life, he was
the guest of a few public spirited men
who regarded his work as most important,
and who felt that it would be a good idea
to show him the city’s best sights
at such times as he was not engaged in
preaching. One of these was a pottery
shop where some of the most artistic
pottery in America was made. After seeing
all the simpler forms of constructed
pottery with all that preceded these in
the clay mixtures and adapting machinery,
he was taken into the shop where the
finest products of the potter’s art
were produced.
The potter
in charge was asked to make a Corinthian
vase. He began by taking from the vat a
lump of clay which he at once commenced
to model according to a pattern which
stood before him. In a very little while
the vase was complete and was placed on a
board next to the workman’s table.
But presently the workman seized it and,
as he did so, the bystanders observed
that it was failing in its narrow part.
The shank was not strong enough to
support the upper portion, and hence the
bending which the workman was quick to
observe. It would never do to allow it
[231] to harden in that position and so
he began at once to manipulate it into
another form, and presently the
bystanders beheld in the transformed clay
a shapely cuspidor, but a cuspidor,
nevertheless.
If we accept
Thought as the substance, or clay, out of
which we are to construct our Corinthian
vases, let us so use it that our product
will stand upright and beautiful, fit to
receive the Water of Life. It is Thought
by which man falls or rises, fails or
succeeds.
The
dominating factor of the coming ages is
the art of dwelling upon the Divine--that
of depicting man as man, and not
as a weak, finite, feeble creature of the
earth, the art of seeing the great idea
which is in the mind of God. This is
greater than all other art and is that to
which all art from its dawn to the
present moment has been progressing. It
has been gradually, but truly pressing
and rising to the point where today we
stand, carving our lives in Thought,
bringing perfection out of imperfection,
for the great Art is the Art of Right
Thinking.
Chapter
20
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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