Kitabı oku: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No.394, August, 1848», sayfa 3
There are also certain creeks where the Indians resort to lay in a store of kinnik-kinnik, (the inner bark of the red, willow,) which they use as a substitute for tobacco, and which has an aromatic and very pungent flavour. It is prepared for smoking by being scraped in thin curly flakes from the slender saplings, and crisped before the fire, after which it is rubbed between the hands into a form resembling leaf-tobacco, and stored in skin bags for use. It has a highly narcotic effect on those not habituated to its use, and produces a heaviness sometimes approaching stupefaction, altogether different from the soothing effects of tobacco.
Every year, owing to the disappearance of the buffalo from their former haunts, the Indians are necessitated to encroach upon each other's hunting-grounds, which is a fruitful cause of war between the different tribes. It is a curious fact, that the buffalo retire before the whites, while the presence of Indians in their pastures appears in no degree to disturb them. Wherever a few white hunters are congregated in a trading port, or elsewhere, so sure it is that, if they remain in the same locality, the buffalo will desert the vicinity, and seek pasture elsewhere; and in this, the Indians affirm the wah-keitcha, or "bad medicine," of the pale-faces is very apparent; and ground their well-founded complaints of the encroachments made upon their hunting-grounds by the white hunters.
In the winter, many of the tribes are reduced to the very verge of starvation – the buffalo having passed from their country into that of their enemies, when no other alternative is offered them, but to remain where they are and starve, or follow the game into a hostile region, entailing a war and all its horrors upon them.
Reckless, moreover, of the future, in order to prepare robes for the traders, and procure the pernicious fire-water, they wantonly slaughter vast numbers of buffalo cows every year, (the skins of which sex only are dressed,) and thus add to the evils in store for them. When questioned on this subject, and such want of foresight being pointed out to them, they answer, that however quickly the buffalo disappears, the Red man "goes under" in greater proportion; and that the Great Spirit has ordained that both shall be "rubbed out" from the face of nature at one and the same time, – "that arrows and bullets are not more fatal to the buffalo than the small-pox and fire-water to them, and that before many winters' snows have disappeared, the buffalo and the Red man will only be remembered by their bones, which will strew the plains." – "They look forward, however, to a future state, when, after a long journey, they will reach the happy hunting-grounds, where buffalo will once more blacken the prairies; where the pale-faces daren't come to disturb them; where no winter snows cover the ground, and the buffalo are always plentiful and fat."
As soon as the streams opened, La Bonté, now reduced to but two animals and four traps, sallied forth again, this time seeking the dangerous country of the Blackfeet, on the head waters of the Yellow Stone and Upper Missouri. He was accompanied by three others, a man named Wheeler, and one Cross-Eagle, a Swede, who had been many years in the western country. Reaching the fork of a small creek, on both of which appeared plenty of beaver sign, La Bonté followed the left-hand one alone, whilst the others trapped the right in company, the former leaving his squaw in the company of a Sioux woman, who followed the fortunes of Cross-Eagle, the party agreeing to rendezvous at the junction of the two forks as soon as they had trapped to their heads and again descended them. The larger party were the first to reach the rendezvous, and camped on the banks of the main stream to await the arrival of La Bonté.
The morning after their return, they had just risen from their blankets, and were lazily stretching themselves before the fire, when a volley of firearms rattled from the bank of the creek, and two of their number fell dead to the ground, at the same moment that the deafening yells of Indians broke upon the ears of the frightened squaws. Cross-Eagle seized his rifle, and, though severely wounded, rushed to the cover of a hollow tree which stood near, and crawling into it, defended himself the whole day with the greatest obstinacy, killing five Indians outright, and wounding several more. Unable to drive the gallant trapper from his retreat, the savages took advantage of a favourable wind which sprang up suddenly, and fired the long and dried-up grass which surrounded the tree. The rotten log catching fire at length compelled the hunter to leave his retreat, and, clubbing his rifle, he charged amongst the Indians, and fell at last pierced through and through with wounds, but not before two more of his assailants had fallen by his hand.
The two squaws were carried off, and, shortly after, one was sold to some white men at the trading ports on the Platte; but La Bonté never recovered the "Bending Reed," nor even heard of her existence from that day. So once more was the mountaineer bereft of his better half; and when he returned to the rendezvous, a troop of wolves were feasting on the bodies of his late companions, and of the Indians killed in the affray, of which he only heard the particulars a long time after from a trapper, who had been present when one of the squaws was offered at the trading post for sale, and who had recounted the miserable fate of her husband and his companions on the forks of the creek, which, from the fact of that trapper being the leader of the party, is still called La Bonté's Creek.
Nevertheless, he continued his solitary hunt, passing through the midst of the Crow and Blackfeet country; encountering many perils, often hunted by the Indians, but escaping all; and speedily loading both his animals with beaver, he thought of bending his steps to some of the trading rendezvous on the other side of the mountains, where employés of the Great Northwest Fur Company meet the trappers with the produce of their hunts, on Lewis's fork of the Columbia, or one of its numerous affluents, and intending to pass the winter at some of the company's trading posts in Oregon, into which country he had never yet penetrated.
ART – ITS PROSPECTS. CLEGHORN'S ANCIENT AND MODERN ART
7As the age in which Shakspeare wrote, had he not been in existence, would still have been remarkable on account of its dramatic writers, so the Cinque Cento is equally distinguished as the era of the arts. Yet has no very satisfactory cause been assigned for the direction of the human mind to these particular pursuits at these precise periods; for, simultaneously in countries differing in climate, governments, and manners, have the requisite men of genius arisen.
It might be easier to account for the depression than the rise of the noblest arts. Of this we shall presently speak; aware, at the same time, how ungracious will be the words which will admit of a decadence among ourselves. When we boast of our "enlightened age," it would not be amiss that we stay for a moment our pride, look back, and consider how much we have absolutely lost; in how much we are inferior. Every age seems destined to do its own work, which it does nearly to the perfection of its given art or science. Succeeding ages are destined rather to invent new than to improve upon the old. What has been done, becomes an accumulated wealth that Time deposits ever, and passes on to continual work to add fresh materials, and stock the world with the means of general improvement and happiness. There is always progression, but it is a progression of invention; the destined works are too vast, too infinite to allow a long delay in the advancement of any one accomplishment. It is rapidly completed; we are scarcely allowed time to stand and wonder; we must pass on to perform something new. Yet, if such attained thing shall be lost, or nearly so, the power to create it again may be again given; but it works de novo, adapting itself to the new principle which has rendered the reproduction advantageous, if not necessary. Thus, for instance, in the ages which we are pleased to call dark, to what magnitude and what exactness of beauty did not architecture reach, and that in a particularly inventive style – the Gothic – borrowing not from what had before been, and which had been held perfect, a style upon which we do not now even hope to improve, but content ourselves with admiring and copying. Thus it should seem that where any thing like a practical continuance of an art has been permitted, the entirely new direction it has taken would show that invention, required for the age, was the object, and that, too, bounded by a limit. "For this purpose have I raised thee up," would appear to be the text upon which the histories of the arts, as of every thing human, may be considered the comment.
It is to the total loss of ancient art that mankind are indebted for its revival, its re-discovery, as it were; for little or nothing was left from which, as from an old stock, art was to begin.
The new Christian principle created a new mind, to which there was little consonant in what was known, however imperfectly, of ancient works. Hence what is termed revival might, with more aptitude of expression, be called the re-discovery.
Had art been uninterruptedly continued from the days of Apelles, it would probably have degenerated to its lowest state. The destruction, the altogether vanishing away of the former glory, was essential to the rise of the new. All was nearly obliterated. Of the innumerable statues of which Greece was plundered by the Romans, but six were to be found – five of marble, and one of brass – in the city of Rome, at the beginning of the fifteenth century; so that art may be said to have been defunct. The decadence of architecture seems also to have been required for the originating the Gothic, for the inventing altogether a new style, which had no prototype. It was necessary to the establishing the Christian principle operatively, that the mind should be wrested powerfully from former and antagonistic ideas. And this could scarcely have been effected had any thing like a continual, an important succession of vigorous life in these arts been allowed.
It seems to have been the work of a great guiding will, that the way should be prepared for renovation, by the almost entire loss or mutilation of the greatest works of former periods, and by the veil of ignorance which victorious barbarism spread before all eyes, that they should not distinguish through that cloud the remnant of a glory which was too great to be altogether destroyed. The very language which spoke of it was a buried charm, that the oblivion might be more perfect. And not until the now grown Christian mind required the re-discovery of art, was that tongue loosened. The revival of ancient literature and the birth of new art were simultaneous. With the latter, at least, it was more than a sleep from which it arose – it was from a death, with all the marks of its corruption.
We do not mean to assert that art rose at once full-grown, as Pallas from the head of Jove. It had undoubtedly its progression; but it did not grow from an old stock; and hence it did grow and arose unimpeded and unchoked by an unwholesome exuberance, to the greatest splendour and glory. Whether there can be again any new principle which will require new inventions, it would be almost presumptuous to consider; but we do feel assured that should it be so, there will not be an adaptation of present means to it, but that the wing of oblivion must have to sweep over, overshadow, and obliterate the present multifarious form and body of art. The fine arts are not like the exact sciences, always progressing from accumulative knowledge towards their final and sure establishment of truth; on the contrary, their great truths recede further from view, as knowledge is accumulated, and practice, deteriorates by example. Science is truth to be dug out of the earth, as it were; a precious ore, not strictly ours, but by and for our use. The fine arts are in a far greater degree ours, for they are of the mind's creation; they are the product of a faculty given, indeed, but given to create and not to gather, and dig up ready-made for our purpose; they are of that faculty which has given the name to the poet, as altogether the maker. They give that to the world which it never could have received by any accumulation of fact and knowledge. Take away the individual genius, the inventive, the creating mind of the one man, the Homer, the Dante, the Shakspeare, the Michael Angelo, the Raffaelle, and the whole product is annihilated; we cannot even conceive of its existence, know of no mine wherein to dig, no facts, no knowledge out of which it can grow. That creating power may, indeed, turn all existing things to its use, all facts and all knowledge; but it commands and is not governed by them – is a power in no degree dependant on them, which would still be, though they existed not – a power which, if it exhausted worlds, would invent new for its purpose. To whom, then, are such powers given? for what purpose? – and are they of a gift deteriorated in its use and abuse? Alas! they are still of the "corruptible," and cannot, in our present state, "put on incorruption." They are, however, of the mind, which may be purified and strengthened, or corrupted and degraded.
They effect in a great degree, and suitably to the age's requirement, their purpose. Corrupted from the ardour and sincerity of their first passion, and by the admission, little by little, of what is vicious, and yet which, we must confess, has its beauty; their very aim becomes changed, less large by subdivision, and less sure by confusion and uncertainty of aim, until all purpose be lost, in a low satisfaction in mere dexterity and mindless imitation. And what shall stay art in such downward way of decadence? Can a strong impulse be given to it – for there is no strength but the mind's strength? It is not patronage, but purpose, which is wanted. What shall revivify the passion that gave it earnestness, – the sincerity, the trust in itself, the confidence in its own high-mindedness, the sense of the importance of its objects, and the true glory of their pursuit? We have our fears that we are doing much to multiply artists, and degrade art. We distribute patronage in so many streams, by our art-unions, that no full fertilising current is visible. We make a pauperism, and stamp it with the disgrace of the beggarly contribution; we, pauperise the mind too, by the demand for mean productions, and by circulating, as the choicest specimens of British art, engravings which tend utterly to the deterioration of the public taste. Perhaps there is nothing more frightfully injurious in the present state of art, than this ever putting before the public eye things in themselves bad, and mostly bad, where badness is more surely fatal, in purpose. It is far easier for good taste and for good art, in practice, to arise out of a blank, out of nothing, than out of an exuberance of bad examples. These things tend to vitiate the pure. The great daily accumulation of inferior works, low in character, and deficient in artistic knowledge and skill, that are ever thrust before the public eye, are doing much mischief. They are poisoning and vitiating the ground from which taste should spring. We are not educating in art, but against art. We are teaching to admire things which, were it possible to keep what is bad from the public eye, would disgust as soon as seen. And even where the exhibition is in no other respect vicious, it is too often vicious from the total absence of any high purpose. For lack of object, we look to some mere mechanical prettinesses; and by habit learn first to look for, and then to work for, nothing more. When the great men of other days, whose names we have now so constantly in our mouths, dedicated themselves to art, they did it with all their soul. They had the earnestness of a passion; and what they did not, as we should now say, well, technically viewing some of their early works, they did to express some strong and some worthy feeling. And as they advanced in technical skill, still they ever thought a certain dignity and importance were essential to their works. The public mind had not yet felt satiety. But in time the progeny of art multiplied. The trading multitude had to entice purchasers, and to persuade them that their novelties were at least more pleasing, if the aim was not so high. The new lamps were cried up above the old. Thus they first created a bad taste, and then pandered to it. Cold conventionalities took the place of feeling; even beauty was studied more for low sense, than for its moral, and intellectual expression. Art was smothered by her own children. The brood has been too numerous, and the productions as variable as the brood. They who would do great things were they allowed, are not allowed. The lower fascinations have taken possession of the public mind. Patronage runs to the little, and the greatest encouragement is to those who will provide the market with the cheapest, if not the best wares. Artists must live as well as other people. They cannot, if they would, sacrifice themselves to work out great and noble ideas, for which there is no demand; and for this state of things they are themselves in no small degree to blame. It is their own cry for patronage that has raised these art-unions: the patronage has been raised, but who gets it? They (like the national guard in Paris) have been superseded by their own inferior workmen. And what shall remedy all this superfœtation? First, let pains be taken properly to educate in art the public eye, and the public mind. We rejoice to know that, while we are writing, a society is forming, similar to the Cambden Society, for the publication of all important works on art, whether old or original, and for having the finest productions of art engraved, in whatever country they are to be found. As good taste is the object, so care will be taken that nothing of a deteriorating character will be admitted; and works will be produced which, in the present state of general feeling, private speculation would scarcely venture upon. The works will, we are given to understand, chiefly be distributable among the members of the society; but some, thought to be particularly well adapted to give a better direction to the public taste, will be generally purchasable.
This society is of great promise – if it succeeds at all, it will succeed eminently, and we believe it must succeed. It will, we have some hope drive the low, the meaningless things of the day out of the field. We are, as a nation, really ignorant of art. We know it not, as it has been. We want to see the public eye acquainted, through good engravings, with the numerous fine frescos that cannot be generally known in any other way. Whatever tends to the real advancement of art will obtain the solicitous attention of this society.
The Fine Arts Commission affords another means of remedying the evils that are besetting the profession, and through them the public taste. We do not like the Government competition system. We go further – we do not like the Government, we mean the Commission, constituting themselves judges and purveyors. This is not the way to make great men. The man of genius shrinks from the competition system; nay, he fears or doubts the judgment of his judges. Perhaps he feels that he is himself the best judge; and if he has a just confidence in himself, he ought to feel this. He will not like the check of too much dictation as to subjects, composition, or any of the detail. We are persuaded that it would be far wiser, both for the public and for art, that the commissioners should studiously select their man, without competition, not for some one or more pictures, but for a far wider range. There will be still competition enough for proper ambition in the number still to be employed. Raffaelle had the Vatican assigned to him, and that at an early age; so would we gladly see a large portion given to one man, and let the whole be of his one mind, and let him have his assistants if he please. Let him be dominant, and if he has within him a power, it will come out; and it cannot be difficult to find a few men of sense and vigour; and even though they have not as yet shown great powers, it does not follow that they have them not – trust to what they have, and more will grow. But we have some even now capable of performing beautiful works to do honour to the nation. We should rejoice to see their secretary released from the clerkship of his office, and set to work seriously with his hand and his superintending mind. We would impress this upon the consideration of the commissioners as an indisputable truth, that if they select a man of genius, they select one superior to themselves – one who is to teach, not to be taught by them – and one with whose arrangements, after their selection, they should by no means interfere. And supposing the worst, that they have actually made an unfortunate choice – what then? They have made an experiment at no very great cost, and may obliterate whatever is a disgrace. The works of other painters were obliterated in the Sistine Chapel to make room for Michael Angelo. Nor was there any hesitation in destroying the labours of previous artists, and even the suspended operations of his old master, Perugino, that the whole space might be open to the genius of the youth Raffaelle. It is whole, entire responsibility that makes great men. Throw upon the persons you select the whole weight, and thereby give them the benefit of all the glory; and whatever be their powers, you tax them to the utmost. We would have them by no means interfered with, any more than we would cripple the commander of our armies abroad with the petty counsels and restrictions of bureau-manufacture. Nor should they be too strictly limited as to time, nor subjected to the continual questionings of an ungenerous impatience. Let the trust be conferred upon them as an honour which they are to wear and enjoy, not as a notice of their servility, but of their freedom. That trust is less likely to be abused the more generously it is given. To fulfil it then, becomes an ambition; and the daily habit of this higher feeling, by making the given work the all in all of life, renders the men more fit for it. Let the nation, expecting liberality from the "Liberal Arts," bestow it – hold out high rewards, leave the artists in all respects unshackled; and, the intention of a work being approved of, let not the time it is to occupy be in the stipulation. And it would be well to look to the promise of the young as well as actual performances; for the power to do will grow. Of thirty-eight competitors convened at Florence, Lorenzo Ghiberti, only twenty-three years of age, was chosen to execute the celebrated doors; the work occupied forty years of his life. The work is immortal, if human work can be; and obtained this eulogium from Michael Angelo, that "they were worthy of being the gates of Paradise." He conferred honour upon his city, and received such as was worthy the city to bestow. "His labours were justly appreciated, and ably rewarded by his fellow citizens, who, besides granting him whatever he demanded, assigned him a portion of land, and elected him Gonfaloniere, or chief magistrate of the state. His bust was afterwards placed in the baptistery." Was the confidence, the full trust, in the power of the young Raffaelle misplaced? What wonders did he not perform in his too short life! Had he lived longer, he would without question have reached the highest honours his country had to bestow.
One word more on this subject of generosity – of national generosity. We seem to think it a great thing to bestow a knighthood upon an artist of eminence here and there, yet give not the means of keeping the dignity from conspicuous shame, of maintaining a decent hospitality among his brethren artists, by which much general improvement might evidently arise. All our real substantial honours are conferred upon soldiers and lawyers. They have estates publicly given, and are raised to the peerage; yet it is doubtful if one man of genius, in literature and the arts, does not deserve better of his country, and confer upon it more glory, than any ten of the other more favoured professions: and more than this, the name of one such genius will be remembered, perhaps with some sense of the disgrace of neglect, when all the others are forgotten. Let a lawyer be but a short period of his life upon the woolsack, he will find means to raise to himself a fortune, and retire back upon private life with an annual pension of thousands; while the man of genius in arts and literature is too often left in old age uncheered by any acknowledgment, and perhaps weighed down to death by embarrassments, from which a delighted, improved, and at the same time an ungrateful country will not relieve him. A government should know that it is for the crown to honour a profession, and thereby to make it worthy the honour. We live in a country where distinctions do much, and are worse than profitless without adequate means to sustain them. It would be well if sometimes selections were made in other directions than the law and army, and if our peerage were not unfrequently radiated with the glory of genius. Why should a barren baronetcy have been conferred on the author of Waverley? Had he been a conqueror in fifty battles, could he have conferred more benefit than he has conferred upon his country? Why is it that there is always in our government a jealousy of literature and the arts? There has not been a decent honour bestowed on either since the reign of the unfortunate Charles. Poets, painters, and sculptors, it is vulgarly thought, are scarcely "alendi," and certainly "non saginandi." The arts might at least be given a position in our universities. This, as a first step, would do much, – it would tend, too, mainly to raise the public taste, which is daily sinking lower and lower. We should be glad to see Mr Eastlake made professor of painting at Oxford, with an adequate establishment there to enable him not only to lecture, but to teach more practically by design, in the very place of all others in the kingdom where there is most in feeling congenial with art. We mention Mr Eastlake, not making an invidious distinction, but because his acquirements in literature, and his valuable contributions to it, seem most readily to point to him as a fit occupant for the professor's chair. We have repeatedly, in the pages of Maga, insisted upon the importance of establishing the fine arts in our universities, and at one time entertained a hope that the Taylor Legacy would have taken this direction. We are not, however, sorry altogether that it did not do so, for it would surely be more advantageous that such a movement should begin with the Government. It would remedy, too, more evils than one; it would give an occupation of mind, congenial with their academic studies, to our youth, and preserve them from a dangerous extravagance both of purse and of opinions. The hopes, however, of any thing really advantageous to the fine arts arising from our Government, unless very strongly urged to it, are small. They do not seem inclined at all to favour the profession; they would look upon it as solely addicted to the labour of the hand with a view to small profits – a portion of which profits, too, upon some strange principles of the political economists, they would appropriate to the nation as a fine, the penalty of genius. One would imagine, from the proposition of the Board of Trade to take 10 per cent from subscriptions to art-unions for the purchasing pictures for the National Gallery, that they considered the epithet "fine" so appropriated to the arts as intended originally to suggest a tax. They would not allow the profession a free trade. Whatever is obtained by exhibiting works of artists, should be as much their property as would the product of any other manufacture be the property of the respective adventurers, and the art-union subscriptions are undoubtedly a portion of these profits. What, in common justice, have the public to do with them? The proposed scheme is a step towards communism, and may have been borrowed from the French provisional seizure of their railroads. With equal justice might they require that every butcher and baker and tailor should give a portion of his meat, his bread, and his cloth to feed and clothe our army and navy; and this not as of a common taxation, but as an extra compliment and advantage to these trades. There is a great deal too much here of the beggarly utilitarian view. We advocate not the cause of art-unions – we think them perfectly mischievous, and would gladly see them suppressed; but surely to invite and tempt the poor artists to paint their twenty and five-and-twenty pound pictures, and coolly to take 10 per cent out of their pockets to purchase to yourself a gallery of art, is not very consonant to our general ideas of what is due to the liberal arts. The liberality is certainly not reciprocal.
Nor, indeed, when we view the state of our National Gallery, considering the building as well as what it contains, can we be induced to think that the Government are very much in earnest in their profession of a desire to raise its importance. The National Gallery has its committee, and there is the Commission of Fine Arts. The former like not a questioning Parliament, and have not sufficient confidence in themselves to disregard the uncomplimentary animadversions of a critical press; and so the National Gallery advances not. The latter appear to treat art too much as a taxable commodity, and as having a right to levy specimens, and take for the public the profit of them, when they are required to cater for any national works. We do not, however, doubt their sincere desire to promote the arts; but we do doubt if they are perfectly alive to the real importance of the work they have to do, and fear their efforts are rendered less useful by the number and conflicting tastes of the members. Divisions and subdivisions of responsibility terminate too frequently in many little things which, put together, do not make one great one.
