Arts and Letters

The wary writer does not venture in these days to give any positive definition of beauty. Men do many, many things in play solely because they choose to do them. In pleasing themselves they give permanent delight to many others. The elect few or many have the instinct of these, but the multitude yearns to have the matter set forth in syllogism. The average taste is not the best, somehow; the average man desires to know both why he should admire the compositions of MacDowell and the buildings of McKim. He ought to be told, he ought to hear, how the born artist or poet is further trained, to what point this training is general, where it becomes individual, and finally the secret mystery of personal liberty, the emancipation at last from tradition, rule, maxim; the portal through which genius alone may enter and bring forth for common use that which is fine and is art, the fine arts of music or architecture, of sculpture, painting, or poetry, all of which lift us into the realm of imagination. This is the work of the critic. Put flatly, it is his business to point out alike the faults and beauties of each. Long since in the fine arts, as in every other sphere of human activity, authority reigned supreme, and within the memory of man it was discarded. The critic dare no longer deal in positive standards: high and low alike flout them. He can appeal to the indefinite and negative, the cautious groping of superior minds, to the enthusiasms of one generation, to the reactions of the next.

This was the sense in which Charles Eliot Norton was preëminently a critic. In every fiber of his being he was sensitive and alive. Like McKim, he was of reforming stock, he of the English Puritan type, the other of the Scotch; both rebels born, against complacency and sham, both intense, impatient, fecund. The one was a devotee of fine art in literature, just as the other was in architecture. Norton from the beginning exhibited in his attitude the furthest degree of revolt from spiritual and intellectual authority. His Unitarian ancestry made him an ultra protester, his fine education made him exquisite in taste, his strength as a reasoner made him both a cautious and somewhat precious writer as well as a caustic and convincing critic. Nothing argues higher training in a fertile mind than the capacity for substitution and for the transubstantiation of itself. This Norton could do. He was a man of the Renaissance projected into the nineteenth century, an Italian in subtlety, a Briton of the Preraphaelite type, an American in his innate contempt for medievalism. His profession was the research and the instruction of history as revealed in the long, unsophisticated record of the human soul manifesting itself through art. Since art is the untrammeled play of the spirit, men have evolved what pleased them for the time in ornament, in drawing, in form generally, and in color. The record of the fine arts, pure or applied, is therefore truer and more legible than any other. What Norton taught about this was fascinating, his transmutation of himself at every epoch was alchemy. He was Hellenist in the Greek air when he breathed it; his Italian was impeccable; his Dante scholarship not only rich, but supreme; he was so Victorian that Ruskin and Carlyle were under his spell, and so American that he was a motive power in the Boston school of letters at its apogee. This must not be mistaken for versatility. On the contrary, the basic concept of a Puritan soul is immediacy, and to every exhibit of the man-power in action he was subtly sensitive and sensible. It was the comprehensiveness of the scholar. What he had not, and what he disdained, was spiritual feeling; for those who groped after the unknown he was intolerant; for the exercise of finite powers the finite world was quite a sufficient field, and in that field the relation of man to his environment was to him more important than the learning of theology, with which he was saturated as a boy, and against which in manhood he rebelled with the distaste of satiety. They say there are only three metropolitan cities, London, Paris, and New York, since the inhabitant of any one will gladly abuse and join in abuse of his own, so secure is he in its supremacy that he fears no attack on it, and refuses to assume the defensive. Norton was in this very high sense a patriot: as a fellow-member wrote of him recently, he became so convinced of his country's place in history that to correct its bumptiousness, prune its exuberance, and train its powers was to him a cheerful duty. Its art and its literature expressed to him the degrees of his people's civilization: to direct, to warn, to stimulate, he understood to be imperative on all who had the trained gift, and sloth in that regard he detested. He was almost an academy in himself, authoritative and fearless, a man of the academic type.