The drawings were examined by the best critics and pronounced excellent, and a ticket of admission was immediately issued together with a highly complimentary reference to her work.
The next day my friend, congratulating her country and herself that at least in the republic of art no caste existed, presented her ticket of admission in propria persona. There was a little preliminary side play in Delsarte pantomime—aghast—incredulity—wonder; then the superintendent told her in plain unartistic English that of course he had not dreamed a colored person could do such work, and had he suspected the truth he would never have issued the ticket of admission; that, to be right frank, the ticket would have to be cancelled—she could under no condition be admitted to the studio.
Can it be possible that even art in America is to be tainted by this shrivelling caste spirit? If so, what are we coming to? Can anyone conceive a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, or a Beethoven putting away any fact of simple merit because the thought, or the suggestion, or the creation emanated from a soul with an unpleasing exterior?
What is it that makes the great English bard preeminent as the photographer of the human soul? Where did he learn the universal language, so that Parthians, Medes and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Egypt and Libya, in Crete and Arabia do hear every one in our own tongue the wonderful revelations of this myriad mind? How did he learn our language? Is it not that his own soul was infinitely receptive to Nature, the dear old nurse, in all her protean forms? Did he not catch and reveal her own secret by his sympathetic listening as she “would constantly sing a more wonderful song or tell a more marvellous tale” in the souls he met around him?
“Stand off! I am better than thou!” has never yet painted a true picture, nor written a thrilling song, nor given a pulsing, a soul-burning sermon. ’Tis only sympathy, another name for love—that one poor word which, as George Eliot says, “expresses so much of human insight”—that can interpret either man or matter.
It was Shakespeare’s own all-embracing sympathy, that infinite receptivity of his, and native, all-comprehending appreciation, which proved a key to unlock and open every soul that came within his radius. And he received as much as he gave. His own stores were infinitely enriched thereby. For it is decreed
Man like the vine supported lives,
The strength he gains is from th’ embrace he gives.
It is only through clearing the eyes from bias and prejudice, and becoming one with the great all pervading soul of the universe that either art or science can
“Read what is still unread
In the manuscripts of God.”
No true artist can allow himself to be narrowed and provincialized by deliberately shutting out any class of facts or subjects through prejudice against externals. And American art, American science, American literature can never be founded in truth, the universal beauty; can never learn to speak a language intelligible in all climes and for all ages, till this paralyzing grip of caste prejudice is loosened from its vitals, and the healthy sympathetic eye is taught to look out on the great universe as holding no favorites and no black beasts, but bearing in each plainest or loveliest feature the handwriting of its God.
And this is why, as it appears to me, woman in her lately acquired vantage ground for speaking an earnest helpful word, can do this country no deeper and truer and more lasting good than by bending all her energies to thus broadening, humanizing, and civilizing her native land.
“Except ye become as little children” is not a pious precept, but an inexorable law of the universe. God’s kingdoms are all sealed to the seedy, moss-grown mind of self-satisfied maturity. Only the little child in spirit, the simple, receptive, educable mind can enter. Preconceived notions, blinding prejudices, and shrivelling antipathies must be wiped out, and the cultivable soul made a tabula rasa for whatever lesson great Nature has to teach.
This, too, is why I conceive the subject to have been unfortunately worded which was chosen by Miss Shaw at the Woman’s Council and which stands at the head of this chapter.
Miss Shaw is one of the most powerful of our leaders, and we feel her voice should give no uncertain note. Woman should not, even by inference, or for the sake of argument, seem to disparage what is weak. For woman’s cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will have her “rights,” and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and our fair land will have been taught the secret of universal courtesy which is after all nothing but the art, the science, and the religion of regarding one’s neighbor as one’s self, and to do for him as we would, were conditions swapped, that he do for us.
It cannot seem less than a blunder, whenever the exponents of a great reform or the harbingers of a noble advance in thought and effort allow themselves to seem distorted by a narrow view of their own aims and principles. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.
The philosophic mind sees that its own “rights” are the rights of humanity. That in the universe of God nothing trivial is or mean; and the recognition it seeks is not through the robber and wild beast adjustment of the
