The Course of Empire

New Zealand Tablet, 27 October 1921, Page 19

The Course of Empire

(By Joseph Husslein, S.J., in America.') In the Gallery of Art of the New York Historical Society is a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole depicting "The Course of Empire." On each canvas the same landscape is pictured, though seen from different angles, while the changes wrought by the hand of man pass over the successive scenes. The lesson of the artist is well worth careful study in our day. # • Conformably with our popular sociological notion, the first picture bears the legend, "Savage State," though we know historically that no civilisation has ever evolved from savagery unaided, while in countless instances the clear evidence still remains of the descent of savage tribes from higher stages. But overlooking this we come to the picture itself. In the distance is a hill that ends abruptly at the dark waters of a bay which are faintly seen beyond a wild and rocky landscape, with gorges, thickets, and stormbeaten trees. On the crest of the hill an isolated rock is balanced, left there by the erosion of the waters in the earth's prime. The clouds that roll about it, sullen and black as night, are slowly being dispelled by the breaking dawn. Over a brook that whitens into foam a roe is leaping, pursued by a huntsman clad in skins and holding in his outstretched arm a long and sinuous bow. Dimly seen afar, a troop of his fellows dance in the misty light, while on a high plateau a circle of wigwams stands, with a great column of fire and smoke ascending. It is, let us say, the morning sacrifice. Man is man precisely as now we know him. In his song and dance we behold the beginnings of art. His arrow overtakes the prey and his mind is keen, alert, and resourceful. The morning holocaust was "offered to the one true God, and the first art did Him worthy service in song and rhythmic dance. Our economic preconceptions, indeed, make primitive man look to the chase for his sole support. While this is true of the savage fallen from a higher state into the lowest decline, it does not follow that husbandry and the pastoral life were not soon developed by the firsthuman beings, as Scripture, indeed, tells us that they were.

"The Arcadian State" "The Arcadian" or "Pastoral State" is the title of the second painting. Ages passed before man had risen to the material comfort portrayed. In the distance is the familiar hill with its mighty boulder. The flocks are grazing on a green slope, and on an upland tract of soil a ploughman traces his furrow, plodding after the laboring kine. Quite to the front of the picture sits .a primitive Euclid marking geometric figures with a rod in the soft earth. The rivulet is crossed by a bridge of stone slabs on which a "little boy blue" is drawing with red ochre a human figure, just such as may be seen to-day on the paved sidewalks of Manhattan. Another child is gathering flowers, while the mother stands near, a dignified matronly figure with spindle in hand. Beneath a shady tree ft a rustic Tityrus is playing on his oaten pipe to the dancing girts. Religion, : too, occupies its ; proper place, for set conspicu-

ously upon an eminence overlooking the little village by the bay, a stately temple rises. Plain shafts support-the roof. In its early simplicity was manifest a purer worship / than that which existed when all the hills were crowned with temples, and fgjse gods and goddesses were numberless as the vices of the men who conceived them. Thus polytheism was to take the place of the first true monotheistic .religion, yet this was never to be wholly lost at any period.

Consummation of Empire

- But a transformation passes over the scene. "The Consummation of Empire" is the new theme. There to the right we recognise the distant hill, with its balanced boulder untouched by the hand of men. Through the landscape flows the broad water of the.bay, and on both sides monuments,, palaces, temples, and public edifices, Doric, lonic, Corinthian, crowd upward from the blue waters. Galleys of war throng the harbor and graceful barges spread their silken sails of varied colors, that glow reflected in the tide. To the left is a massive Doric temple, with its carved pediment. Long colonnades stretch upward to some spacious administrative hall, with its serried columns and its crowning dome. On the opposite shore magnificent palaces rise, with rich statuary, huge vases and luxurious draperies, Tyrean purple flashing against silks of white and gold. Wealth and art have here their home. Lifted aloft on clustered pillars stands a white-robed goddess holding out in her hand a Winged Victory. A wall with stately caryatids leads to a massive bridge over which a triumphal procession moves. On his exalted throne the victor is borne along, proud in imperial scarlet, while below him throng the horsemen and white-vested councellors follow in solemn ranks. Before him rises the triumphal arch; surmounted with glittering armor and arms. Widespread, lavish drapery hangs in gorgeous folds from bridge and monuments. Large' in foreground, prodigally designed, a fountain fills its marble basin with the waters of the selfsame spring over which, in that misty morning, far" away in the past, the roe had leaped pursued by the eager huntsman clad in the skins of tho chase. Human glory and material development are here at their apogee. Man could do no more than this. Art, architecture, music, sculpture; the fruit of the loom whatever wealth can purchase and the human mind design in outward magnificence and brilliancy; ease and opulence culturo and luxury; empire and victory—all are combined in one narrow canvas. ' It is material evolution at its height; and yet it marks a decline, a supreme failure at its height of triumph. In place of a simple and pure religion, with its one-true God, there is a decadent polytheism. In place of freedom, contentment, and true happiness that wait on toil and virtue, there are a cringing spirit and a worlddominating ambition. Wealth, vice, and corruption have replaced the pure joys of the domestic hearth. ,We still continue in our mistaken theories falsely to gauge man by his surroundings. Yet even in early Rome there was more hardy virtue, more genuine liberty, more true manhood and pure womanly virtue, than in the full noon-day of the Empire's glory, when St. Paul could see in it nothing but cruelty, lust, and greed; a gilded sepulchre.

Destruction. And now, as we would expect, comes "Destruction." A gloomy pall overspreads the sky. Faintly through the darkness, as of a world crumbling to ruin, can be seen the distant hill with its solitary, isolated boulder. Red flames are bursting forth in a mighty conflagration from the palaces to our right. The pall of cloud is a pall of smoke from the city doomed to destruction. Men and women, clamoring and falling beneath the swords of a barbarian soldiery fill the foreground of the scene, where the splashing fountain is clogged with the bodies of tho dead and dying. Dense multitudes, with agonised faces, are rushing to the water's side, where the massive bridge has been broken away and a meagre structure spans the stream, over which the struggling masses pour falling precipitous into the engulfing -waters. The black waves are faintly lit by the ghastly conflagrations of the sinking ships filled with despairing fugitives. Loot, murder, butchery; death and horror: everywhere;, while blazing firebrands are carried through the streets. ' •"••■•; * . By the fountain-side a gigantic warrior-figure had been

erected, dominating all the scene. With shield advanced, body tensely stretching, forward, and the unvanquished sword in his sinewy right hand, it was the true embodiment of the nation's ideals of force and might. By these, and/ by the skill and craft of statesmanship had the great empire been created.- Written over all was the motto of the modern superman, the same in business as in politics and war: "Let him take who can." But now the sword-hand of that soldier-image was broken at the wrist the head, with cold, relentless, and imperious eyes, lay shattered on the pavement; and the edge of the protecting shield was broken by the missiles of a crushing defeat. Human power, glory, art, and riches had over-reached themselves. A purely materialistic development, losing sight of the things of the spirit, . defying the restraints of religion, creating its own gods after the conceits of its own heart: Mars, Mammon, Venus, had produced the authentic superman, the apex, as we are proudly told in our own material days, of materialistic evolution. But the day of vengeance was not far off, as it must come to' every nation that sinks to this decline, no matter what may be its material triumphs in war, in commerce, or in art. Desolation / And then, last scene of all "Desolation." A solitude far other than that of jprimal wildernesses, the solitude of Babylon, and Nineveh and Tyre. The moon is silently looking down, half veiled in clouds. Its light falls on the jutting hill with its lone boulder, still resting firmly balanced as when man first v looked on it. Masses of carved stones show where the proud palaces had once stood and the white city lay sunk in luxury, vice, and greed, and in all that this same pagan materialism has taught anew in our day, as if it were some unheard of acquisition, that is proudly conned in schools and universities, practised in high places and made the common argument among the masses. It matters not whether we call it by the name of Dagon or Astarte worship, a monist creed or a humanitarian cult, eugenism or birth-control, a proletarian dictatorship or an orgy of profiteering. It is always the same dull thing, under different names, and adapted to different times, which' the Scripture calls "the world," that world for which Christ said that he would not pray, the world of the three concupiscence**., which must first be idolised, under the title ,of some godhead or some science, that it can thus be suitably dignified before it is proposed for our worship. But the pride of "the world" passes while the Word of God remains. Merely' an arch, is left as we turn to our picture, to show where stood the massive bridge across which poured the mighty pageant in the day of triumph when all ambitions had jbeen achieved. Stray pillars, here and there, stand out from the bare landscape and white stones project from the brown earth; In a broken basin the fountain gurgles, as it flowed of old at the dawn of human life, and close before us, in desolate magnificence, a solitary column stands, last mournful token of the vanished splendors. On its broken capital a black heron broods over her nest of straws, while amid the fragments at its base wild shrubs and ferns are growing, and the venturous ivy climbs .up to the broken acanthus leaves that crowned it in the day of glory that has passed away. And what of the descendants of those men and women who had once populated this solitude, of the few who in that night of horrors sought safety in the hills or were dragged away into barbarian slavery Who knows but some archeologist may discover them. in our day and class them with the "primitives," the supposed original undeveloped savages.

Redemporist Order in New Zealand The. following appointments among the Missioners of the Redemptorist Order in New Zealand have recently been made: —Very Rev. Father "Whelan, has been Te-appOirtted Rector of St. Gerard's. The other members of the'community, are . Rev. Father Thomas Walsh, > Rev. Father Campbell, Rev. Father Mitchell, Rev. 'i Father < Duffy. Fathers Mangan and Hannigan leave for Australia; -the former is transferred to Ballarat and the latter to Waratah.