Prospects of America.—Art-Criticism.—Press, People, and Clergy.—Needs of Artists and Public.—American Knownothingism in Art.—Eclecticism.—The True Path.” The chapter begins with the following summary:
We have now succinctly traced the art-idea in its historical progress and aesthetic development in the civilizations of the Old World to the period of its advent in the New, showing, as we proceeded, that, though the love of beauty is a fundamental quality of the human mind, yet its manifestations in the form of art are checked, stimulated, or modified by the influences of climate, habits, and traditions of race, relative pressure of utilitarian or aesthetic ideas, the character of creeds and tone of religious feeling, and above all by the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments. (148)
Jarves’s idea of historical progress apparently eschews the idea of a single linear tradition in art history. He attributed to art changeable and historically determined stylistic traits, endemic to particular places and peoples. Each culture has its own habits, traditions, “tone of religious feeling,” or relative utilitarianism, and this determines the nature of the art it produces. He thus constructed a historicist art history, a notion of art as bound to relative conditions prevailing in a given culture. Such notions of history and art were indeed common at the time, though Jarves repeatedly claimed that this was the novel contribution that set his book apart.18 One important and widely read exponent of the historicist approach to art was the French thinker Hippolyte Taine, whose philosophy was translated into English by John Durand in 1864 as Philosophy of Art. Jarves would have heard its echoes, even if he did not read it himself—which he must have done at least by 1875, when he wrote briefly about it.19
To refine his approach a bit further, Jarves relied on an idea of absolute truth with universal quests for beauty, and of fixed poles of spirit and matter between which such beauty is expressed. But the nearness to one or the other of these poles is relative, based on the varying cultural characteristics. Jarves’s overall approach to art criticism thus gave structure to the criteria he used for evaluating American art, and it systematized his judgments and opinions about it. Though his approach consisted of an assertion that art was fundamentally an expression of the indigenous conditions particular to a time and place, he routinely emphasized that art responded “above all” to “the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments.” For Jarves, the prevailing religion established the aesthetic tone and expressive intent of any epoch’s artwork. Government itself, as he implied here with the formula “Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments,” is likewise central, but it is hardly distinct from (literally modified by) these broad religious types. To this basic armature are added corresponding attitudes and tastes of the people in given times and places.
These ideas, too, are rather broad and reductive and conform to then-prevalent notions of types.20 In particular, Jarves repeatedly linked sensual excess and despotism to papal religion and rule, while crediting the Catholic countries where such rule dominated—and he referred predominantly to Italy and Spain—with a true passion for art and beauty. Correspondingly, he summarized Protestant people and art as possessing an inherent distaste for all that is not democratic. Such people, however, were hampered by an overly pragmatic and abstemious attitude toward art, with a preference for the mundane in content and form. Here is one example of many:
Catholicism, first in its ignorance, and afterward by selfish policy, aimed at its restriction to a defined, dogmatic, religious expression. But while itself under the impetus of growth and expansion, its art partook of the same partial freedom and noble energy, and to the extent of its liberty strove to be true and spiritual. Unfortunately for its final perfection in this direction, that art, whose varied progress and lofty genius were represented by Giotto, Niccola Pisano, Orgagna … , was degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury. (135)
By contrast,
as soon as Protestant art freed itself from the control of rulers sensual and papal at heart, like the English Stuarts, it identified itself by degrees with the people, assuming their level of thought, and their liking for the homely and common. …Aesthetic feeling [does not] assume the dignity of a passion. …Yet it is slowly making its way to the heart of the multitude … without any need of church or state to interpret or dictate. Catholicism exalted the art-motive, but Protestantism gave it liberty. (137)
Jarves has thus also borrowed heavily from Ruskinian notions of periodizing and classifying Italian art. This is not our main concern, however. Rather, Jarves coupled Catholicism and Protestantism with respective tendencies in aesthetic taste and disparate levels of popular will—qualities, it ought to be stressed, that he discusses as inevitably or automatically bound to each other, to the exclusion of myriad others that might equally be used to explain or define a religion’s (or an aesthetic’s) constellation of attitudes, characteristics, and manifestations. Catholicism is linked with “selfish policy” and dogma, under which art was eventually “degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury.” Its moment of being “true and spiritual” coincided with a brief time of “partial freedom.” On the other hand, liberty is the great contribution of Protestantism. Its art, while “homely and common,” has “freed itself,” and it communicates without “church or state to interpret or dictate.”
However loose, generic, and current his links may have been, they represent a desire to explain artistic differences by means of cultural factors. Or, were these supposed cultural influences a set of predetermined ideas that Jarves sought to solidify with the putative objectivity of his historicist method? In particular, we should wonder whether his oppositions between generalized religious and political structures, so rigidly reduced and systematized, were employed foremost as value-laden types meant to classify aesthetic form. This question might alternately be posed as which of these came first: Did his aesthetic opinions follow from the conclusions of his theory of cultural influence, or did this theory rationalize his preformed artistic judgments? I suggest that the latter might be the more accurate reading. Indeed, it seems that his historicist method rationalized both the predetermined ideas about political and religious systems and even more fundamentally the formal types he sought to associate with them.
Here the other essential element of Jarves’s art theory, the classificatory scheme of the real versus the ideal, becomes integral. This structure forms Jarves’s bridge between broad cultural character and individual formal assessments and provides him with ostensibly objective grounds on which to criticize American art and American taste. It is perhaps closest to his actual agenda, to the primary set of opinions that he sought to propagate and justify and to which the rest of his historicist approach was subsequently adapted. The following is a very representative instance of this method of classification. It also demonstrates those opinions that the structure helped stabilize as the most salient for the evaluation of art. In the chapter “Art-Conditions and Prospects of America,” Jarves directs his readers by stating, “Certain works of man are a perpetual joy,—the same yesterday, to-day, and forever,—because they are a revelation from the unseen, and an assertion of the eternal supremacy of spirit over matter. Genius creates, talent constructs. The power of the one is instinctive, a gift from above; of the other, receptive, accumulating by example and training. Hence genius alone gives birth to great, new, or noble work; while simple talent, however clever in execution, often fails from want of intuitive discernment and original thought” (161).
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