LETTER ON THE CHANTING CHERUBS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW-ENGLAND MAGAZINE.

You may marvel at my boldness in selecting the subject I have, for I know about as much of sculpture as Lucius Mummius did of painting; and if you have any friends who are connoisseurs in such maters, I beg of you, on no account, to let them see this letter; but, being an admirer of beauty in all its forms, and wishing to encourage native production, whether it come in the shape of a statue or an improved toasting-fork, I took an early opportunity of paying my respects to the group of Chanting Cherubs, not only to feed my eyes with a beautiful sight, but to indulge an honest (I trust the word will not be quarreled with) pride, in viewing the work of a Bostonian. The celestial yet infantile beauty of these exquisite statues made a deep impression on me, and led me into a train of reflections, which I must needs put upon paper; for if a man be not often visited with ideas, he must make the most of them when they do come. That group is the point I start from in my remarks, and if I should wander to what appears an unreasonable distance, I can only say that my letter shall have as much connexion with its subject, as many a good sermon has with its text.

I have always been an admirer of sculpture. It seems to me a higher art than painting, one in which it is more difficult to produce a perfect specimen, and which, in its most successful results, fills the mind with thoughts of sublimer power and more subduing beauty. The contrast is so great between the inflexibility of the material, and the rounded outlines, the delicate blendings, the undulating grace of life and the airy flow of drapery, that nothing short of a magician's wand would seem to be capable of combining them both. How a "dull cold" block of marble is ever converted into a statue, that makes generations "drunk with beauty," is a mystery beyond even the imagination of the uninitiated. In the sister art, there appears to be a regular and perceptible gradation of excellence, from the boy, who draws figures on his slate, which it would not be literal idolatry to worship, since they are not the likenesses of any thing in heaven, earth or sea, up to the great historical painter; but a great sculptor "dwells apart like a star," in solitary and isolated glory. He floats above us like a cloud, which rests upon no mountain's breast, but is borne up by the lightness of its ethereal beauty. It is easy enough to conceive the unborn image stamped upon the heated brain of the artist, and even projected, so as to be visible to his outward senses, like Macbeth's air-drawn dagger; but to give shape and consistence to the haunting shadow, to make visible to the outward eye, what he sees so clearly with the inner, this is the rub. Let us step into the artist's study and seat ourselves by his side, as, with eyes sparkling and hands trembling with the vividness of his emotions, he takes up his hammer and chisel and begins to chip off the edges of the shapeless mass, that lies cold and hard before him. How little does he seem to us to be approaching the perfect result, and we imagine that the material has a resisting power that mocks his painful efforts. By degrees, we begin to discern a rude approach to the human form, a sort of twilight glimmering of the

bright dawn of beauty. Here a new source of anxiety arises. In our ignorance, we tremble lest some untoward accident should blast the artist's hopes; lest, in his impatience, he should spoil all by a rash sliver; or, by devoting too much labor to one portion, destroy the symmetry and proportion of the whole. At last we witness the triumph of art in the unspeakable beauty of the completed work, with its perfect proportions, with the light of life hovering over it like a veil, with a breast, that almost visibly heaves, and lips, that look as if they must speak. And with all this, how little do we know of the state of the artist's mind-the anxious vigils and the haunted slumbers, each o'ermastered by the fiery rule of his tyrant idea; and then, his sad forebodings, his aching fears, his thrilling hopes, his disappointment as he compares what is with what ought to be, his efforts still baffled and still renewed-how little does the crowd, that sees only the result, dream of all this! And as little can they realize the deep and full tide of delight, with which he contemplates his intellectual offspring, dearer to him for the mingled joy and suffering, with which he had watched its growth.

I have said that Sculpture was a higher art than Painting; facts show it to be a more difficult one. Since the revival of the arts, how few works of great merit have been executed in that art, compared with the great number of paintings, which are allowed to be perfect in their kinds. There is hardly a great name from Michael Angelo to Canova. The reason of this is, not that the imagination of the sculptor teems less with beautiful forms, but because the poetic power is so seldom found combined with the manual dexterity and accuracy of eye which the execution requires. There is hardly a great work of sculpture in our country; (for busts and statues of individuals, however excellent in their kind, do not belong to the highest department of the art;) but there are in every city several specimens of painting of great merit. We are obliged to form our ideas of a statue from its cast, which is about the same as forming an idea of a living flower by a dried specimen in an herbarium, or of a handsome man by his shadow on the wall. But let any man walk into the Athenæum and seat himself before the cast of the Apollo and obverve its divine beauty, the airy grace of its perfect limbs, the uprising lightness of the whole figure, the sunshine that seems twined around its brow, and the wonderful expression of the nostril and upper lip, and if he have an ounce of honest blood in his body, it will rush to his heart in a hurry of delight. If there be a man who can contemplate this cast unmoved, he deserves to hear nothing but anti-masonic orations and read nothing but Cabinet correspondence, for the rest of his life.

Sculpture seems to bear the same relation to Painting that moonlight does to sunshine, if I may be allowed so fantastic a comparison. Its beauty is more ethereal, more dream-like, and approaches nearer to the perfect communication of thought by speaking and writing. The cold and serene loveliness of a marble statue reminds one of a disembodied spirit, which, if it have lost the flush and glow of earthly beauty is cleansed of the pollutions of humanity and made "white as snow." A statue has the repose and the dignity of death without its ghastliness. It lifts one's thoughts to heaven and fills our minds with images of joy too high and peace too deep for earth, of palm leaves and golden harps,

of snowy robes and the lustre of angelic faces. Painting is a more perfect representation of common life, and for that reason further removed from the ideal. In painting there is scope for the exhibition of all the complicated passions which make up the web of humanity. There is the flush of joy, the paleness of despair, the leer of envy and the scowl of hatred. And in the same piece there may be more than one action, and a boundless variety may be given to the expression of passion. In a few square feet of canvass may be seen a mimic world, crowded with all the grave and gay shapes that act the motley masque of life. In this respect it bears a strong analogy to comedy, which "holds the mirror up" to the visible and actual world, and draws its materials from the boundless resources presented by the common heart and the common mind. Practical jokes, the blunders of clowns, the coarse Doric of the market-place, the tricks of knavish valets, are all legitimate subjects of comedy, while at the same time, it leaves room for the display of the beautiful and the noble, for love, honor and bravery. But it is not so with sculpture; its walk, like that of tragedy, is higher and more limited. Its aim is to spiritualize and refine, to erect upon the foundation of the actual, the ideal, which shall hide what it rests upon. It arrests the floating elements of beauty and gives them that perfect form which they never assume in this " workingday" world. Its legitimate office is the delineation of life in repose, when the smooth surface of the feelings is ruffled by no storm of emotion, and the face and figure are moulded into a placid and almost expressionless calm. It may be said that the Apollo is an exception to this remark, for it represents godlike beauty flushed with the light of mortal triumph, but it is not the least merit of this wonderful statue that it combines so successfully the expression of a human passion with the serenity of ideal beauty. Nothing short of the most transcendant genius could have accomplished this. But it will be said, "There is the Laocoon, a statue of the intensest action and in which the form is swallowed up and lost in the expression of heart-dissolving fear." But let it be borne in mind that the character of that group is one of suffering, of passion, and that of the most awful kind, for the physical efforts of the main figure are the mere convulsive spasms of o'ermastered humanity. This sublime work, too, is a proof of the daring, as well as the genius of its author, and it may be considered as the extreme limit of sculpture, beyond which one cannot go without violating the true principles of the art. Sculpture also, embodies what are called abstract ideas, but in these it is confined, for the most part, to those in which the leading idea is repose, such as Night, Sleep, Death, &c. and seldom attempts those with which the tumult and animation of life are associated. The superiority of Night to Morning, in the bas-reliefs exhibited in the same room with the Chanting Cherubs, must have been obvious to every man of taste.

Sculpture is a rigid exacter of unity. There may be modifications of the same passion or action, but there cannot be two distinct ones. There may be several figures in a group, but there must be a central and presiding idea. Fault has been found with the Laocoon, because the father seems to be absorbed with the thoughts of his own agony and peril and indifferent to that of his children, while they, on their part, appear to suffer most because they are deprived of his wonted

aid and protection. I reply, that it would have been impossible for the artist to have done otherwise, without violating the principles, not only of his art, but of nature. In the fearful moment the sculptor has chosen, the supernatural horror of his resistless fate has chilled to death every portion of humanity but its root, which still tenaciously clings to the soil of life. The father is swallowed up in the man. Laocoon hears nothing but the maddening hiss of the serpents and feels nothing but their cold and slimy folds. All the various passions, the yearning affections which inhabited his heart, are swept away. Nothing remains but the original and primal instinct of self-preservation, the first feeling that lives and the last that dies. Poor humanity is stripped of all its coverings and husks and stands bare and shivering, naked as it was born. But the children feel not the full bitterness of their fate, and know not that an insulted god has sent the serpents on their errand of death. They are overcome with a vague terror. Their faces and minds are turned to their father for explanation as well as aid. They cling closer to him and look up with more beseeching eyes as they feel the fatal knots drawn into a tighter and more suffocating grasp. It may be a presumptuous remark, but I will venture it nevertheless, that the group would have been unnatural, had the principal figure been the mother of the children and not the father. A mother never forgets her children while she lives; the last throb of her heart is for them and not for herself. To have engrafted upon the expression of the Laocoon, that of agonized maternal affection, it is not too much to say, would have been beyond the power of any artist. In sculpture we always crave the ideal. The representation of the the forms, the dress and the shapes of actual life in a substance of such spiritual beauty as marble, would be either shocking or laughable. A statue in a cravat and small-clothes would be as ludicrous an object as can well be imagined. A very promising young sculptor in Scotland has executed lately two statues, one of Tam o'Shanter and the other of his "drouthy crony," souter Johnny; but with the true tact of genius he has selected for his material, a fine-grained, indigenous, grayish-colored stone, which bears about the same relation to Parian marble, that Burns's hero does to Apollo. For the same reason, we do not tolerate the expression of any low, sordid or weak passion in marble. A statue, with the leer of envy or the distortion of malice upon its face, would strike us at once as unnatural and disgusting.

How little do all our speculations on the nature of the arts help us to explain the mysterious influence they exert over our minds! Why is it that, in beholding a beautiful statue or picture, we are constrained almost to hold our breath from the intensity and fullness of our emotions? Why do we feel our eyes wet with unbidden tears and our hearts beat thick and fast with the deep sense of beauty? It is but a block of marble cut into the shape of a human figure or a yard of canvass daubed over with colors. It is not alone to the universal and instinctive love of beauty that the artist appeals; the finest cords of the spirit vibrate to his touch. Beauty, breathing from the marble or burning upon the canvass, goes to the mind's core. It touches the springs of memory and lays bare its hoarded treasures, and unfolds the web of our lives with its half-forgotten figures of joy and sorrow— its sable and silver embroidery. All that we have suffered, all that we

have loved, all that we have lost, comes back to us, and the waste places of the heart again bloom. The mind is stirred up from its inmost depths and images chase each other through it, swift as the waves of a stormy night and bright as their foamy crests. Tell me, ye philosophers, who weigh thought, sensations and impulses in a balance, who lay out the inner world according to your own systems of intellectual surveying, the secret of all this? Are these emotions to be referred to the bodily organization, to sets of delicate nerves irritated by the presence of an exciting object? Can you explain it by vibrations, by sensible species, by the agitation of the animal spirits? Or is it something more than this, and must we go for an explanation, to the very centre of that inner world, whose crust ye have but penetrated? Is it the mind of the artist communing with our own, through the medium of the work of his hands, in a voiceless interchange of thought, such as we believe that spirits use? It is one of the mysteries of life, of which the infant knows as much as the gray-haired sage, and with regard to which, he is the wisest who is most ready to confess the depth of his ignorance.

But it is high time for me to say something upon that, which purports to be the subject of my letter, especially as it is a subject, upon which one may be even extravagant, with a very good conscience. As I suppose every one, who reads this letter, has seen and admired the Chanting Cherubs, a minute description of them is altogether unnecessary, and, if it were otherwise, it would make no difference, for no language (or at least none of mine) could convey any idea of them to one who had not seen them. The group consists of two infant figures, holding a scroll, towards which one of them is bending, apparently reading the words, while the other stands erect, with a calm and confident expression, as if nothing were wanting but the unclosing of his lips to give utterance to the tide of music and praise that is swelling within him. Considering that the artist was required to execute two cherubs, (where any great variety is out of the question) he has shown great skill in the different characters he has given to the figures. The attitude of the one is more firm and erect; his baby breast seems to swell with the consciousness of immortal energies, while that of the other, though inimitably graceful, has a slight expression of timidity. The hair of the former is thick and curling, his forehead broader and his cheek fuller, while the forehead of the other is higher, his face less round and his hair disposed in sunny and wavelike folds. There is also a difference of expression about the mouth, not easily described but distinctly perceptible. Most people, on entering the room, are most struck with the taller figure, but the other is generally their favorite before they leave it. He has a more intellectual face than his brother. There is an expression about his superb brow worth all the regular beauty of the other. By his position also, the light is thrown upon the upper part of his face, while the lower is thrown into shade, which is always the best view of a countenance. The direction of the head gives a lifelike expression to his eyes, as the iris is nearly concealed by the lid, and the appearance is exactly that of a person reading when viewed from before. But it is an idle task to assign the palm of beauty to one or the other, very much like that of settling which of two stars has