Young William James Thinking
Page 26
the pinnacle of civilization even then, and the Romans actively stocked their
cities and homes with Greek artifacts. In fact, most Greek sculptures that
have endured are Roman marble copies of original Greek works in bronze.
The artful copies, using the meticulous pointing pro cess with repeated cali-
per mea sure ments throughout the sculpture, retained the intent, style, and
spirit of the Greek originals with extreme fidelity. The Victorians had a
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace 143
general awareness of this history, but paid little attention to the ancient
copying as they engaged in another form of copy trade. 16
Demand from museums and even private homes spurred a sizable market
in imports of antiquities, especially of plaster or terra cotta casts and painted
scenes of famous sites. James Fenimore Cooper reported from Livorno, Italy,
that he happened on “a shop filled with statuary” serving as “a ware house
that sent its goods principally to En glish and American markets.” Having
seen dramatic marble ruins on location, he dismissively wondered “if any
man would have the impudence to display such objects in the immediate
vicinity of the collections that contain the originals.” He was, however, im-
pressed with the sheer “quantity of the stuff,” but added dryly, “I dare say,
the Medicean beauty has lost many a charm for the want of more marble.” 17
Cooper and the Medici rulers of Re nais sance Florence could afford such
proximity to original ancient artifacts, but most could not. In the 1860s,
James both viewed the casts in Boston and traveled to Eu rope.
For museums noticing the public’s appetite for Greek culture and eager
to promote these tastes, the casts served admirably. At midcentury, muse-
ums bought the plaster casts in abundance, and teachers and lecturers used
them to illustrate Greek refinement. They were quite inexpensive. At about
twenty- five dollars for a life- size statue, they were readily available from a
number of Eu ro pean “moulding establishments,” and in the words of Henry
Frieze, who in 1856 was building up the classics collection at the University
of Michigan, they were “quite as valuable as the originals”— and they were
most valuable when purchased in sets to display a whole canon of quality
creations. This practice had begun a century earlier when John Smibert, a
painter and a colleague of Bishop George Berkeley, had brought the first
casts to Amer i ca in 1728, including a Medici Venus, whose image would be-
come an icon of female beauty, including for James. The cast alone caused
such a stir that newspapers throughout the British North American colo-
nies and even in England published admiring verse about the “the charm-
ing Maid.” New York’s Acad emy of Fine Arts announced in 1803 that it was
“introducing casts from the antique,” twenty- six of them purchased by the
minister to France Robert Livingston, “with a view to raising the character
of their countrymen, by increasing their knowledge and taste.” After mid-
century, museums and colleges began buying large numbers of casts sys-
tematically to set up didactic displays of Greek beauty and refinement.
While many Americans were buying and settling on new lands west, shops
like the one in Livorno that Cooper sniffed at were doing their own “land
144 Young William James Thinking
office” business, selling refinement in frontier country. The eco nom ical cast
collections also suited the educational missions of museums. Within a few
de cades, however, museum goals would change; by the end of the nine-
teenth century, corporate and philanthropic wealth, paying for the grand
luster of absolute authenticity, spurred museums to dispose of casts and
seek the display of inimitable beauty in its original and expensive splendor.
As William’s brother Henry said in 1907, “ There was money in the air, ever
so much money . . . [and] imitation . . . would have been detestable. ”18 But in
the 1860s, when William James repeatedly visited cast collections, imita-
tion was precisely the point; the relatively inexpensive casts could fill out a
museum’s scanty collection, and when accompanied by maps, photo graphs,
and written descriptions, they would encourage the viewer to immerse in a
refined version of ancient Greece.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the urge to have tangible things to
see—at museums with casts or originals, on public stages for actors and pol-
iticians, at shows of P. T. Barnum’s spectacles and of landmark works of
art— was part of a trend toward demand for visual repre sen ta tion. Frederick
Church’s dramatic display of The Heart of the Andes (1859), which also en-
couraged enthusiasm for Louis Agassiz’s South American expedition, offers
a vivid example. The painting was displayed in U.S. and Eu ro pean cities
with a dark and recessed wooden frame and surrounded by curtains to gen-
erate the feeling of gazing through a win dow to another world; viewers
brought opera glasses to see its precise rendering of natu ral facts in exuber-
ant detail. Such artistic spectacles paralleled developments in the sciences
for trust in empiricism from visual displays. James’s humanistic excursions
did not stray as far from his vocational work as later divisions of the disci-
plines would suggest; in fact, a well- stocked museum was likened to a scien-
tific laboratory where actual specimens gave students a sense of the living
real ity of their objects of study. These classical displays became an informal
setting for a demo cratic rendering of a liberal arts education, with idealized
Greece now widely available at the center of study.19
Greek Harmony versus Modern Unity
James shared the enthusiasms that pervaded the culture, even though he
had not formally participated in any institutional program for moral im-
provement and spiritual uplift that was based on the Greek ideal. He admired
the ancients and detected in them a spirit that could benefit the modern
world, but James went beyond the popu lar didactic messages. While study-
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace 145
ing German science remained his central task in 1867–68, his museum vis-
its, correspondence with friends and family, and diary reflections provided
a grand if personal canvas for setting out broad questions about the implica-
tions of modern science, including his searching inquiries about the rela-
tion of material and immaterial parts of life, about humanity’s relations to
nature, about the super natural, and about personal choice in relation to fate.
Since he was writing letters and diary entries rather than a planned essay
on the significance of the Greeks, he did not compose a systematic exposi-
tion, but his words have the urgency of “notes struck off with the animal
heat of the fever upon them,” as he said of his private writings on art and
the ancients. As with his evaluation of the health effects of temperature in
water cure and for his medical thesis, these experiences and ideas would
contribute to his physiological assessments of “ce re bral thermometry”; he
repo
rted in his Princi ples of Psy chol ogy (1890) that there is a marked “rise of
temperature” accompanying the seemingly immaterial dynamics of “emo-
tional excitement” and “intellectual effort.” The intensity of his diary entries
suggests an utter authenticity in expression of his temperamental leanings.
Feeling “at home with [ancient] ideas,” he was already expressing his own
example of a “feeling of sufficiency” that he would explain in “The Senti-
ment of Rationality” a few years later. 20
The first entries in the diary were not even words but sketches, including
portraits of faces, one carefully drawn naked torso, and his own initials
elaborately scrolled. The drawings harked back to his vocational interest in
art, and may have included his own renditions of paintings and sculptures
he saw in museums, or even sketches he did of people around him after he
had become inspired by works in the museum. The appeal of art, his own
and the museum works, ran deep for James and further show the intensity
of his reflections. Like the visitors to ancient ruins, he felt moved beyond
words, as he noted in his diary, “Perhaps the attempt to translate into lan-
guage is absurd— for if that could be done what w[oul]d. be the use of the art
itself? ”21 He did indeed find words for the art he was viewing, and as he did,
he enlisted his training as a painter to read the museum pieces for the an-
cient worldviews they expressed.
Most of the diary entries begin with a simple account of his reading or
activities, and they often continue with observations about his mood or vo-
cational prospects. He was often pessimistic, noting in April 1868 that he
“still [felt] the same Apathy and restlessness which for a month and more
have weighed on me.” He turned to a decidedly nonintellectual strategy;
146 Young William James Thinking
rather than wallow in these gloomy feelings, he noted that “against them”
he would indulge in a “cup of coffee and 2 cigars.” But he admitted that this
was a “short sighted practice”— words that coincide with the alternative
medical emphasis on prevention through healthy living and that also antici-
pate his comments on the importance of developing good habits during
youth in his psy chol ogy. 22 His deepening reflections on the ideas embodied
in the works around him offered still more substantial ways to deal with his
bleak moods.
Instead of continually referring to his own darkened spirits, James de-
scribes how the Greeks dealt with disappointment. Any difficulty, however
harsh, did not seem to make the Greeks discouraged, and that even included
the “horrors in Homer,” which he was reading as Odysee, a German transla-
tion. One of the scenes he cited was indeed particularly gruesome: King
Echetus made threats, “ He’ll lop your nose and ears with his ruthless blade,
he’ll rip your privates out by the roots, he will, and serve them up to his dogs
to bolt down raw!” But even such cruelty was “only transient, and to those
whose lot it was to suffer by it,” and he observed, “they accepted it as part of
their inevitable bad luck.” So James observes that the ancients insisted, “a
man should . . . take what ever the gods give him with humility.” He was
most impressed that the Greeks “ were not moved to a disinterested hatred
of [any bleak turn of fate] in se [in itself] & denial of its right to darken the
world.” By contrast, the modern temper would include an attitude of striv-
ing against the wrongs of the world. The ancient outlook produced a simple
and appealing directness: “To the Greek[,] existence was its own justifica-
tion.” He then observed the profound equanimity in this worldview: “Any
thing that could assert itself was as good as anything else. ”23 James was finding another platform for mediation of contrasting differences.
James soon extended his evaluations to Greek sculpture at the Zwinger
cast museum in Dresden, and he noticed cultural patterns across genres of
art: the “Greek things there are just like Homer.” In par tic u lar, “I feel my-
self forced to inquire while standing before these Greek things what the X
is that makes the difference between them and all modern things.” The
question was big enough that he had to strug gle over it: “I clutch at straw
suggestions that the next day destroys.” James was responding in just the
thoughtful ways museum planners hoped visitors would, but just as he
learned forms of science beyond his father’s intentions, so his own thoughts
on the Greeks took him beyond convention. Before continuing his inquiries,
he defied the zeal of his times for the ethereal excellence of Greek creations.
The Ancient Art of Natu ral Grace 147
Instead, “to see them rightly we must first slough off an impression they at
first involuntarily make on us of being something very superior and con-
sciously so to their authors.” Before they had become icons of beauty, these
sculptures “ were done . . . as our most spontaneous popu lar things are
done. ”24 He was eager to understand the Greeks from their own point of
view for comparison with modern assumptions.
James declared that the Greeks felt an “unreconciledness of Fate & world,
or rather the absence of a mental need to have them reconciled.” This outlook
gave the Greeks a spirit of harmony in relation to the world. That, he sug-
gested, was “the prime difference” they have with the views since the decline
of ancient civilizations and especially in more recent times. “The harmony of
the Greeks” was still serenely on display in their artwork; by contrast, “our . . .
[world] peremptorily demands an unity of some sort.” Greek harmony ver-
sus modern unity would be a keynote of his artistic analy sis. Many of his
contemporaries chafed at this august harmony in Greek art. Presented as an
ideal of beauty since the era of German romanticism, the serene look also
suggested expressions devoid of idiosyncrasies of character and even fiery
emotions coldly dampened. American writer and sculptor William Wetmore
Story, for example, grew uneasy with the enthusiasm for the iconic beauty of
the Venus de Milo sculpture since its discovery in 1820; he complained that
“we have a thousand Venuses but no women” in ancient sculpture and in
modern works following the classical style. 25 James, however, did not make
the distinction between harmony and unity to critique the ancient artwork
but rather as a way to understand what the Greeks most deeply believed. So
he noted that their serene outlook and graceful composure flowed readily
from their ac cep tance of fate, still manifest in the spontaneous unselfcon-
scious expressions of their artistic creations.
James took this idea about classical composure back to the museum, where
he was captivated by one display that was “merely 3 standing figures” with
quiet, simple nobility. “This sobriety is the peculiar ele ment” of the ancient
works; then he elaborated on this observation by saying that the ancient
sculpted figures were “simply standing in their mellow mildness without a
point anywhere in
the whole thing.” The young art critic could have meant
diff er ent things by this emphatic statement. Artistically, his comment could
refer to the absence of an actual physical point in the sculpture, a geometric
center, a vanishing point, a vortex. This is an artistic device for directing
attention, allowing the artist literally to point out or make a point, in the
spirit of his own future psy chol ogy of mental se lection focusing attention
148 Young William James Thinking
within the wide field of consciousness. James’s phrase could also refer to
the content rather than the artistic form of the sculpture. By not making a
point, the artwork does not have a specific message for the viewer, but in-
stead the sculptor is a simple recorder. These two meanings of “making a
point” are closely related, and they tend to converge. The lack of an actual,
physical, artistic point is an emblem of the lack of theoretical point. The an-
cient art, without a par tic u lar point directing the eye, does not strug gle to
convey a par tic u lar meaning; it itself is the message, which is not therefore
confined to one part of its material form. As with art critic John Ruskin,
who admired the Greeks’ ability to capture the plain truth of nature with-
out embellishment, James reported that the figures invite “the eye and the
mind [to] slip over and over them, and they only smile within the boundary
of their form.” Beyond artistic commentary, he was also witnessing vivid
portrayals of self- containment and confidence, also valuable personal les-
sons through these years. 26
James illustrated his argument by comparing the ancient works with
Ernst Rietschel’s sculpture of the dead Christ with his grieving mother.
Rietschel had been a resident of Dresden until his death in 1861, and he had
produced several sculpted portraits that were now in the Zwinger and on
public display in the Saxon capital and in other German cities. The sculp-
ture that captured James’s attention was commissioned in 1845 and was
one of his first major works. James called it “a remarkably respectable and
successful thing”; and recalling his painting days with William Morris
Hunt, he added, “[H]ow I longed for old Hunt to be there,” to prod along his
artistic commentary. James, however, found his own words for comparing