The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863Various
History
The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; United States -- Politics and government -- 19th century -- Periodicals
Science daguerreotypes, art paints its objects. Science is necessarily
abstract, discrete; art necessarily concrete. So true is this, that when
art begins to decline, it manifests a tendency to pass from the concrete
to the discrete, abstract; it becomes self-conscious, reflective,
scientific. Body, form, is mistaken for soul, spirit. A discrete idea
fails to move us, because it gives us only _successively_ the relations
subsisting between it and the First Cause, as its facts must be
isolated, its elements decomposed, and presented to us in an inverse
order to that in which they reveal themselves to the mind in the
spontaneous and natural use of its powers. Science never appeals to our
emotional faculties spontaneously; when it does speak to the heart, it
is because the mind, linking together the successive ideas given by
science, at last seizes upon the UNITY of the whole, supplying by its
own conceptions the voids of science. When the savant possesses the
creative power in a high degree, as did Kepler, he becomes prophet and
artist. The concrete ideas of art appeal immediately to our feelings;
emotions excited by them are spontaneous, because they aim at presenting
their objects in all the splendor of their _living_ light. Only life
produces life; all our emotions and sympathies pertain to the suffering,
the acting, the living--and thus an artistic conception appeals to our
entire being. What psychological analysis of youthful and feminine
loveliness could move us as a Juliet?
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