During the war Douglass delivered at least four lectures on photography. “Pictures and Progress” is his fullest encapsulation of the links between art and reform, and the importance of photography in ending slavery and uprooting racism.
SOURCE: Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress
In view of the stupendous contest of which this country is now the theatre, this fierce and sanguinary debate between freedom and slavery, between republican institutions and a remorseless oligarchy, upon the decision of which depends for weal or for woe the destiny of this great nation, it may seem almost an impertinence to ask your attention to a lecture on pictures; and yet in this very fact of the all-engrossing character of the war may be found the needed apology for this seeming transgression.
The American people are not remarkable for moderation. They despise halfness. They will go with him who goes farthest and stay with him who stays longest. What the country thinks of half men and half measures is seen by the last election. We repudiate all such men and all such measures. The people said to the Chickahominy hero,1 “We do abhor and spurn you, and all whose sympathies are like yours”; and to Abraham Lincoln, they say, “Go forward, don’t stop where you are, but onward.”
This wholeness of American character may be seen in our attention to the war. Intent upon suppressing the rebellion, we have refused to be diverted from that one great object for any cause whatever.
Does Napoleon plant a prince of a detestable family in Mexico?2 We have but one answer, and that is down with the Rebellion! Does England take advantage of our misfortunes?3 Our answer is down with the rebellion. Does Brazil assume an unbecoming haughtiness?4 Our answer is, down with the slaveholding rebellion. Does the tempter at home plead for compromise?5 Our answer is, sternly, down with the accursed rebellion.
The fact is that the whole thought of the nation during the last four years has been closely and strongly riveted to this one object. Every fact and every phase of this mighty struggle has been made the subject of exhausting discussion. The pulpit, the press, and the platform—political and literary—the street and the fireside, have thought of little else and spoken of little else during all these four long years of battle and blood.
It were easy to commend this almost universal and unceasing thought for the safety of the nation. It is in this deep and heartfelt solicitude that the safety of the country is assured.
It may be laid down as an axiom that no man was ever yet lost who seriously thought himself worth saving—and what is true of an individual man the same is true, equally true, of a great nation.
It is said that Nero fiddled when Rome was on fire,6 and some amongst us have manifested a levity quite as disgraceful and shocking; but the heart of the nation is sound. Those who thought the country not worth saving have found the country entertaining a similar opinion respecting themselves. They are not worth saving, yet we mean to save them by saving the country they would ruin.
It may be assumed, moreover, that this war is now rapidly drawing to its close. The combustible material which caused the explosion is nearly exhausted. It is now seen, even at the South, that cotton is not king, because it has not raised the blockade and given the Confederacy foreign recognition. It is seen too, that slavery, hitherto paramount and priceless, may be less valuable than an army—that the Negro can be more useful as a soldier than as a slave. In all this we see that the rebellion is perishing, not only for the want of men and for the materials and munitions of war, but from a more radical exhaustion—one which touches the vital sources out of which the rebellion sprang.
The people can afford, therefore, to listen for a moment to some other topic. There is no danger of being injuriously diverted from the one grand fact of the hour.
The bow must be unbent occasionally in order to retain its elastic spring and effective power, and the same is true of the mind: A brief excursion in the woods, a change of scene, however trifling, a transient communion with the silent and recuperative forces of nature—the secret sources of pure thought and feeling—constitute an elementary worship, impart tone and vigor to the mind and heart, and enable men to grapple more effectively with the sterner duties and dangers of practical life.
Thoughts that rise from the horrors of the battlefield, like the gloomy exhalations from the dampness and death of the grave, are depressing to the spirit and impair the health. One hour’s relief from this intense, oppressive, and heart-aching attention to the issues involved in the war may be of service to all.
• • •
The title of my lecture is a very convenient one. It leaves me perfectly free to travel where I list in the realms of thought and experience and to avail myself of any facts and features—any groups or combinations of sentiments, thoughts and ideas from which may be derived either instruction, gratification, or amusement.
The narrowest and shallowest stream from the mountainside may conduct us to the open sea; we have but to go forward to go round the world. No one truth stands alone. Any one truth leads to the boundless realms of all truth: So under the somewhat indefinite title of pictures7 and by means of pictures, we may be led to the contemplation of great truths—interesting to man in every stage of the journey of life.
Besides, it matters very little what may be the text in these days—man is sure to be the sermon. He is the incarnate wonder of all the ages: and the contemplation of Him is boundless in range and endless in fascination. He is before all books a study—for he is the maker of all books—the essence of all books—the [text] of all books.8 On earth there is nothing higher than the Human Soul.
Again the books that we write and the speeches that we make—what are they but the extensions, amplifications and shadows of ourselves, the peculiar elements of our individual manhood? Though we read and listen during forty years—it is the same old book and the same old speech, native to the writer’s or speaker’s heart, and co-extensive with his life—a little shaded by time and events, perhaps, but it is the same old book and speech over again—the pear tree is always a pear tree—and never apple.
Now the speech I was sent into the world to make was an abolition speech. Gough9 says, whatever may be the subject announced for him the lecture itself is sure to be upon temperance. Sojourner Truth says that she does not speak to tell people what they don’t know—but to tell them what she herself knows.
I am somewhat in the condition of Gough—and perhaps also in that of Sojourner Truth.10 When I come upon the platform the Negro is very apt to come with me. I cannot forget him: and you would not if I did.
Men have an inconvenient habit of reminding each other of the very things they would have them forget.
Wishing to convince me of his entire freedom from the low and vulgar prejudice of color which prevails in this country, a friend of mine once took my arm in New York, saying as he did so—“Frederick, I am not ashamed to walk with you down Broadway.” It never once occurred to him that I might for any reason be ashamed to walk with him down Broadway. He managed to remind me that mine was a despised and hated color—and his the orthodox and constitutional one—at the same time he seemed endeavoring to make me forget both. Pardon me if I shall be betrayed into a similar blunder tonight—and shall be found discoursing of Negroes when I should be speaking of pictures.
The saying that happiness depends upon little, not less than upon large things has often encouraged me to speak when otherwise I might have remained silent. And such is the case now. As I cannot bring before you the fruits of deep and thorough culture—which the more favored lecturers are able to do—I am encouraged to present such small things—large to me, small to you, as I have in store such facts, such fancies, such flowers, per chance such reveries—such dreams, images, ideas, and pictures—such earnest outlook into the ever-tempting invisible, unfathomable, and unknown—as have touched my spirit in passing along the mysterious journey of life—may occasionally show themselves in what I have here to say of pictures.
In doing this, hold me to no logical arrangement. I shall probably leave my picture base of supplies about as far in the rear as Sherman left his when he turned his back upon Atlanta for the Atlantic.11 The most I can promise is that you shall in case of need subsist upon the country through which we pass.
Movement is sometimes the chief end of movement. A trip down the Hudson pays better than a sight of New York. A view from the mountain is more than the mountain. It is not the apex upon which we stand, but the vast and glorious expanse that awes and thrills us.
Our age gets very little credit for poetry or music or indeed for art in any of its branches. It is commonly and often scornfully denominated the age of money, merchandise, and politics, a metallic, utilitarian, dollar-worshipping age; insensible to the song of birds and perfume of flowers: An age which can see nothing in the grand old woods, but timber for ships and cities—nothing in the waterfall but mill power, nothing in the landscape but cotton, corn and cattle; dead alike to the poetic charms both of nature and of art.
That there is much in the tendency of the times to justify this sweeping condemnation, it is needless to deny, and yet, for nothing is this age more remarkable than for the multitude, variety, perfection, and cheapness of its pictures. Indeed the passion for art was never more active and never more productive. The art of today differs from that of other ages, however, only as the education of today differs from that of other ages; only as the printing press of modern times, turning off ten thousand sheets an hour, differs from the tedious and laborious processes by which the earlier thoughts of men were saved from oblivion.
The great discoverer of modern times, to whom coming generations will award special homage, will be Daguerre. Morse has brought the ends of the earth together and Daguerre has made it a picture gallery.12 We have pictures, true pictures, of every object which can interest us. The aspiration of Burns is now realized. Men of all conditions and classes can now see themselves as others see them, and as they will be seen by those [who] shall come after them.13 What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago.14
The progress of science has not been more logical than that of art. Both have grown with the increasing wants of men. Franklin brought down the lightning, Morse made it a bearer of dispatches, and in answer to the increasing human demands of progressive human nature, Daguerre has taught the god of day to deck the world with pictures far beyond the art of ancient masters.
As knowledge has left the cloister, pouring itself through the iron gates of the printing press, so art has left the studio for new instruments of expression and multiplication.
Steam has shortened the distance across the ocean, but a voyage is unnecessary to look at Europe. We can see Paris without the steamship, and St. Peters without visiting Rome. You have but to cross the parlor to see both, and with them all the wonders of European architecture, which by the way is about all that the traveler sees abroad that he could not see at home.
That Daguerre has supplied a deep-seated want of human nature is seen less in the eulogies bestowed upon his name than in the universal appropriation of his discovery. The smallest town now has its picture gallery, and even where the roads cross, where stands but a solitary blacksmith shop and a deserted country tavern, there also stands the inevitable gallery—painted yellow, perched upon gutta percha springs, ready to move in any direction, wherever men have the face to have their pictures taken. The farmer boy can get a picture for himself and a shoe for his horse at the same time, and for the same price. The facilities for travelling has sent the world abroad, and the ease with which we get our pictures has brought us all within range of the daguerreian apparatus.
Among the good things growing out of this pictorial abundance, modest distrust of our personal appearance is not greatly distinguished. No one hesitates on account of this sentiment to commit himself to posterity: for a man’s picture, however homely, will, like himself, find somebody to admire it. No man contemplates his face in a glass without seeing something to admire. But for this natural self-complacency, the stern severity of the photographic art would repel rather than attract.
A man is ashamed of seeming to be vain of his personal appearance, and yet who ever stood before a glass preparing to sit or stand for a picture without a consciousness of some such vanity?
A man who peddles a patent medicine, writes a book, or does anything out of the common way, may, if he does not give his picture to the public, lay claim to singular modesty. But it so happens that nobody thinks of such an omission.
It is not, however, of such pictures as already intimated that I am here to speak. A wider and grander field of thought lies open before us.
The nature of my discourse is already indicated. What I have said in respect to the character of lectures generally will apply to my own: namely, whatever may be the text, man is sure to be the sermon.
Man, however, is a many-sided being, and the subject I have chosen treats of his best and most interesting side; it is his dreamy, clairvoyant, poetic, intellectual, and shadowy side; the side of religion, music, mystery and passion, wherein illusions take the form of solid reality and shadows get themselves recognized as substance: the side which is better pleased with feeling than reason, with fancies than with facts, with things as they seem, than things as they are, with contemplation rather than action, with thought rather than work.
I have no learned theory of art to present, no rules of wise criticism to explain or enforce, no great pictures to admire, no distinguished artists, ancient or modern, to commend. I bring to the work before me only the eye and thought of a lay man.
It is objected that the crowd, of which I am one, knows nothing of art. The objection is well taken. It however should have only the same weight and application to pictures, where applied, as to poetry and music, for to the eye and spirit, pictures are just what poetry and music are to the ear and heart. One may enjoy all the pleasant sensations arising from the concord of sweet sounds without understanding the subtle principles of music, and the skillful arrangement by which those delightful sensations are produced.
But my discourse has more to do with the philosophy of art than with art itself, with its source, range and influence than with its facts and perfections—with the soul, rather than the body, with the silence of music, rather than sound, and with the ideal forms of excellence floating before the eye of the spirit, rather than with those displayed upon dull canvass.
Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of earth has the capacity and passion for pictures.
Reason is exalted and called Godlike, and sometimes accorded the highest place among human faculties; but grand and wonderful as is this attribute of our species, still more grand and wonderful are the resources and achievements of that power out of which come our pictures and other creations of art.
Reason is said to be not the exclusive possession of men. Dogs and elephants are said to possess it. Ingenious arguments have been framed in support of this claim for the brutes. But no such claim, I believe, has been set up for imagination: This sublime, prophetic, and all-creative power of the human soul—proving its kinship with the eternal sources of life and creation—is the peculiar possession and glory of man.
For man, and for man alone, all nature is richly studded with the material of art. Not only the outside world, but the inside soul may be described as a picture gallery, a magnificent panorama in which things of time and things of eternity are silently portrayed. Within as without there are beautiful thought valleys, varied and far-reaching landscapes, abounding in all the interesting and striking forms and features of external nature. Mountains, plains, rivers, lakes, oceans, woods, waterfalls, outstanding headlands and precipitous rocks have their delightful shadows painted in the soul.
This full identity of man with nature, this affinity for, and this relation to all forms, colors, sounds and movements of external nature that finds music in the slightest whisper of the zephyr-stirred leaf, and in the roaring torrent deep and wild; this all embracing and all sympathizing quality, which everywhere matches the real with the artificial—which endears substances because of its shadow—is our chief distinction from all other beings on earth and the source of our greatest achievements.
A certain class of ethnologists and archeologists, more numerous in our country a few years ago than now and more numerous now than they ought to be and will be when slavery shall have no further need of them, profess some difficulty in finding a fixed, unvarying, and definite line separating what they are pleased to call the lowest variety of our species, always meaning the Negro, from the highest animal.15
To all such scientific cavilers, I commend the fact that man is everywhere a picture-making animal, and the only picture-making animal in the world.16 The rudest and remotest tribes of men manifest this great human power—and thus vindicate the brotherhood of man. All have some idea of tracing definite lines and imitating the forms and colors of things as they appear about them.
Hand in hand, this picture-making power accompanies religion, supplying man with his God, peopling the silent continents of eternity with saints, angels, and fallen spirits, the blest and the blasted, making manifest the invisible, and giving form and body to all that the soul can hope and fear in life and in death.
Humboldt tells of savage tribes of men, remote from commerce and civilization, who nevertheless had coats and other garments, after European patterns, painted on their skin.17 They no doubt thought themselves very comfortably and very elegantly dressed. The painted coat was a real coat to the savage, and will be ’til latitude and temperature, or some other source of knowledge, shall make him wiser. Until then, let him enjoy his delightful illusion, even as more enlightened men enjoy theirs.
The savage is not the only man nor is savage society the only society dressed out in a painted coat and other habiliments. Examples are all around us. Church and state, religion and patriotism, refinement and learning, manners and morals, all have their counterfeit presentments in paint. You often meet coarse and vulgar persons dressed in the painted appearance of ladies and gentlemen—a slight touch removes the paint and discloses their true character and the class to which they belong. But this is [a] digression.
The unalloyed creations of imagination, conscious of no contradiction, no deception, are solid and flinty realities to the soul. Granite and iron are not more real supports to things material than are those to the subtle architecture of the mind.
“Among eminent persons,” says Emerson, “those who are most dear to men are not of the class which the economist calls producers: they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out a colony nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the estimation of this city-building, market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and pictures.”18
This statement of the Concord philosopher is but the repetition or amplification of that of Scripture: “Men do not live by bread alone.”19 It affirms that to be happy is more than to be rich—and that happiness results less from external conditions than from internal exercises. Leaning upon this inner staff of the soul, John Brown went to the gallows as serenely as other men go to church on Sunday morning. He [endured by] seeing the angel with his crown of glory—saying come up higher.20 With the same support too, the martyr John Huss could shout amid the blazing faggots.21
In youth this unreal, apparent, unlimited and shadowy side of our nature, full of faith and poetry—so insubstantial and yet so strong—gilds all our earthly future with bright and glorious visions, and in age and in sickness and in death paves the streets of our paradise with gold and sets all its opening gates with pearls.22
It is from this side of his nature that man derives his chief and most lasting happiness. There is no measure for the depth and purity of the happiness that childhood feels in [the] presence of pictures, symbol and song! Among all the soul-awakening powers to which our nature is susceptible, there are none greater than these. A little child in rapt contemplation of a work of art is itself a delightful picture—full of promise both to the child and to the world.
What is the secret of this childhood pleasure in pictures? What power is it that rivets attention to the speechless paint? The great poet explains for us. In certain conditions of the mind, men may
find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.23
This truth childhood realizes in all its fullness and beauty. Could the joy imparted by the contemplation of pictures be analyzed, it would be found to consist mainly in [the] self tenfold much, a gratification of the innate desire for self-knowledge with which every human soul is more or less largely endowed. Art is a special revelation of the higher powers of the human soul. There is in the contemplation of it an unconscious comparison constantly going on in the mind, of the pure forms of beauty and excellence, which are without to those which are within, and native to the human heart.24
It is a process of soul-awakening self-revelation, a species of new birth, for a new life springs up in the soul with every newly discovered agency, by which the soul is brought into a more intimate knowledge of its own Divine powers and perfections, and is lifted to a higher level of wisdom, goodness, and joy.
The savage, accustomed only to the wild and discordant war whoop of his tribe, whose only music comes to him from winds, waterfalls, and the weird sounds of the pathless forest, discovers a new place in his heart, a purer and deeper depth in his soul, the first time his ear is saluted by the divine harmonies of scientific music.
To know man civilized we must study him as a savage.
We are all savages in childhood. And men, we are told, are only children of a larger growth. The life of society is analogous to the life of individual men. It passes through the same gradations of progress. California was not Massachusetts at the first and is not now. She was savage even in the manifestation of her justice. Not that which is spiritual is first, but that which is natural. After that, that which is spiritual.
The sound of a common hand organ in the new streets of San Francisco caused tears to roll down the cheeks of the sun-burnt miners. As are songs to the savage, so are pictures to the boy. They are his earliest and most effective teachers. All the pictures in the book are known before a single lesson is learned. The great teacher of Galilee only uttered a truth deep down in nature, when he opened the Kingdom of heaven only to those who came as little children.
To the flinty-hearted materialists, insensible to ought but dull facts, to the miser, whose every thought is gold, to the [weak], whose every impulse is sensual, pictures like flowers have no voice and impart no joy. Theirs is the ministry of youth and self-forgetfulness. They come oftenest and stay longest when the morning sun is just disclosing the mountain peaks leaning against the distant sky.
In the valley, on the hillside, in distant groves, where cloud-flung shadows sweep the green fields in noiseless majesty, far away from the hum and din of town and city, the boy of ten, yet unconscious of spot or blemish, forgetful of time and place, indifferent alike to books and sport, looks up with silence and awe to the blue overhanging sky, and views with dreamy wonder its ever-drifting drapery, tracing in the clouds themselves and in their ever-changing forms and colors colossal figures, mighty men of war, great cities dotted about with vast temples of justice and religion, adorned with domes and steeples, towers and turrets, and sees mighty ships sailing in grandeur around the hollow firmament: break in if you must upon the prayers of monks or nuns, or upon any of the pomp and show of fashionable worship—but here is a devotion which it were sacrilege to disturb.
At this altar man unfolds to himself the divinest of human faculties—for such is the picture-conceiving and the picture-producing faculty or power of the human soul. This devotion is the prelude to the vision and transfiguration, qualifying men and women for the sacred ministry of life. He who has not borne some such fruits—[has not] had some such experiences in child[hood], gives us only barrenness in age.
I have said that man is a picture-making and a picture-appreciating animal, and have cited that fact as the most important line of distinction between him and all others. The point will bear additional emphasis.
The process by which man is able to posit his own subjective nature outside of himself, giving it form, color, space, and all the attributes of distinct personality, so that it becomes the subject of distinct observation and contemplation, is at [the] bottom of all effort and the germinating principles of all reform and all progress. But for this, the history of the beast of the field would be the history of man. It is the picture of life contrasted with the fact of life, the ideal contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible. Where there is no criticism there is no progress, for the want of progress is not felt where such want is not made visible by criticism. It is by looking upon this picture and upon that which enables us to point out the defects of the one and the perfections of the other.
Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.25
We can criticize the characters and actions of men about us because we can see them outside of ourselves, and [can] compare them one with another. But self-criticism, out of which comes the highest attainments of human excellence, arises out of the power we possess of making ourselves objective to ourselves—[we] can see our interior selves as distinct personalities, as though looking in a glass.
Men drunk have been heard addressing themselves—as if speaking to a second person—exposing their faults and exhorting themselves to a higher and better life.
It is said that the best gifts are most abused and this among the rest. Be it so. Conscience itself is often misdirected—shocked at delightful sounds, beautiful colors, and graceful movements, yet smiles at persecution, sleeps amid the agonies of war and slavery, hangs a witch, burns an heretic, and drenches a continent in blood!
This picture-making faculty is flung out into the world like all others, capable of being harnessed to the car of truth or error: It is a vast power to whatever cause it is coupled. For the habit we adopt, the master we obey, in making our subjective nature objective, giving it form, color, space, action and utterance, is the one important thing to ourselves and our surroundings. It will either lift us to the highest heaven or sink us to the lowest depths, for good and evil know no limits.
Once fully started in the direction of evil, man runs with ever-increasing speed, a child in the darkness, frightened onward by the distant echoes of his own footfalls.
The work of the revivalist is more than half done when he has once got a man to stand up in the congregation as evidence of his need of religion. The strength of an iron halter was needed for this first act, but now like Rarey’s horse he may be led by a straw.26
All wishes, all aspirations, all hopes, all fears, all doubts, all determinations grow stronger by action and utterance, by being rendered objective.
Of all our religious denominations, the Roman Catholic understand this picture passion of man’s nature best. It addresses the religious consciousness in its own language: the child language of the soul.
Pictures, images, and other symbolical representations speak the language of religion. The mighty fortress of the human heart silently withstands the rifled cannon of reason, but its walls tremble when brought under the magic power of mystery.
Remove from the church of Rome her cunning illusions, her sacred altars, her glowing pictures, her speaking images, her tapers, miters, incense, her solemn pomp and gorgeous ceremonies, the mere outward shows and signs of things fancied or real, and her magical and entrancing power over men would disappear. Take the cross from before the name of the archbishop, and he will stand before the world as James or John like the rest of us.
Protestantism pays less deference to this natural language of religion. It relies more upon words and actions than upon paints and chisels to give form and body to its sentiments and ideas. Nevertheless, her most successful teachers and preachers are painters, and succeed because they are such. Dry logic and elaborate arguments, though knitted as a coat of mail, linked and interlinked, perfect in all their appointments, lay down the law as empty benches.
But he who speaks to the feelings, who enters the soul’s deepest meditations, holding the mirror up to nature, revealing the profoundest mysteries of the heart by the magic power of action and utterance to the eye and ear, will be sure of an audience.
The few think, the many feel. The few comprehend a principle, the many require illustration. The few lead, the many follow. The dignified few are shocked by Mr. Lincoln’s homely comparisons and quaint stories, but the many like them and elect him president.
There is our national flag: a grand national picture: the glorious red white and blue: nothing of itself but everything for what it represents. We search the woods and bring out the tallest spar: raise our banner, give it ample folds to the breeze, its glorious stars to the sky, and hail with a shout that general who orders to be shot the first man who pulls down that flag. When the hands of Joshua were held up Israel prevailed, when the horns were blown the walls of Jericho fell, and when the flag of the union is borne aloft the country is safe from its foes. The ancient and modern emblems serve the same purpose: nothing in themselves, but everything in what they signify. They speak to the feeling by every mystic fascination.
But feeling and mystery are not the only elements of successful painting, whether of the voice, pen, or brush. Truth is the soul of art, as of all things else. No man can have [a] permanent hold upon his fellows by means of falsehood. “Paint me as I am,” said Cromwell,27 and such is the voice of nature everywhere, when nature is allowed to be natural. Better remain dumb than letter a falsehood—better repeat the old truth forever, than to spin out a pure fiction.
Nevertheless, with the clear perception of things as they are, must stand the faithful rendering of things as they seem. The dead fact is nothing without the living expression. Niagara is not fitly described when said to be a river of this or that volume falling two hundred feet over a ledge of rocks; nor is thunder when simply called a loud noise or a jarring sound. This is truth but truth disrobed of its sublimity and glory: a kind of frozen truth, destitute of motion itself and incapable of exciting emotion in others.
But on the other hand, to give us the glory without some glimpse of the glorified object is a still greater transgression, and makes those who do it as him who beateth the air. The looker and the listener are alike repelled by any straining after effect.
We have learned nothing higher in the art of speech since Shakspeare wrote, “Suit the action to the word, and overstep not the modesty of nature.”28
Whether we read Shakspeare or look at Hogarth’s pictures, we commune alike with nature and have human beings for society.29 They are of the earth and speak to us in a known tongue. They are neither angels nor demons, but in their possibilities both. We see in them not only men and women, but ourselves.
The great philosophical truth now to be learned and applied is that man is limited by manhood. He cannot get higher than human nature, even in his conceptions. Laws, religion, morals, manners, and art are but the expressions of manhood, and begin and end in man. As he is enlightened or ignorant, as he is rude or refined, as he is exalted or degraded, so are his laws, religion, morals, manners—and everything else pertaining to him.