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Christopher Diller
Berry College

Aestheticism Avant La Lettre: Emerson and the Gymnastic of the Eye

And here it is that our Sovereign Remedy and Gymnastik Method of Soliloquy takes its Rise: when by a certain powerful figure of inward Rhetorick, the Mind apostrophizes its own Fancy's.
Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671-1713), n.d.

When I have seen fine statues, and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand well what he meant who said, 'When I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants.' I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Useful art is the birth of necessity; and may, perhaps, come forth, like its mythological patron, in perfect maturity at first. Imaginative, aesthetic art, has an Apollo's experience. It grows up under trial and hardship. Its imperfections must receive the unrelenting blows of a stern criticism; and its shape be perfected by the rough rubbings, as well as by the unguents of the gymnast.
Henry Noble Day, 1847

From ancient Greece through the seventeenth century, a series of carefully graduated rhetorical exercises known as the progymnasmata and gymnasmata-literally, "(pre) exercises"-were the backbone of Western liberal arts education. As its prefix suggests, the progymnasmata were preparatory in nature and designed to move students (almost always boys) from initial competencies in speaking and writing to the more argumentative and agonistic declamations of the gymnasmata. Initially, students learned how to read, retell, and amplify fables, proverbs, and historical or fictional narratives. Later, they incorporated the common or special topics of refutation, confirmation, praise and blame, personification, comparison, and contrast to develop arguments about past persons, events, or issues. The progymnasmata culminated in an argument for or against a general proposal or law that anticipated the declamations of the gymnasmata which prepared students for the courtroom or political assembly. The progymnasmata were thus "structured so that the student moved from strict imitation to a more artistic melding of the often disparate concerns of speaker, subject, and audience" (O'Rourke 562).

These exercises apparently endured until the classical division of discourse according to mode of speaking-judicial, deliberative, or ceremonial-and pedagogies of imitation and amplification began to lose favor in the late sixteenth century (O'Rourke 563; Clark 263). Yet existing histories of rhetoric only speculate upon the precise reasons for the decline of the progymnasmata, and new research suggests that the exercises may have persisted in both formal and informal educational settings into the nineteenth century. The progymnasmata may not have simply disappeared, that is, so much as they were gradually displaced by or assimilated to other emerging pedagogical and cultural practices-a process I propose to chart in this paper through the metaphor of gymnastics itself. As part of a broader educational plan for self-culturing, for instance, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury in the first epigraph above describes a new form of rhetorical education: he rejects the didactic purposes of the progymnasmata by asking himself to apostrophize-that is, to turn away from an audience to address a single person-his own thoughts and passions in order to view them more critically. To take oneself as a worthy object of rhetorical work and performance as Shaftesbury does is to replace the traditional ethos of a rhetor (a person who engaged and exploited the existing values of his society for some more or less worthy end) with what Ian Hunter has called the new "'critical outlook'" (356) of aesthetics (in which the rhetor removes himself from society to better represent what that society might become).

In an aesthetic key, Shaftesbury's "inward rhetoric" corroborates Donald Clark's suggestion that the progymnasmata fell out of favor as pedagogies of imitation and amplification fell under suspicion: in the wake of the emerging empirical and aesthetic sciences, these pedagogies were perceived as being incapable of producing original knowledge. Kant, for example, explicitly opposed the new aesthetic category of genius to imitation: "Everyone is agreed that genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation. Now since learning is nothing but imitation, it follows that the greatest ability and teachableness (capacity) regarded qua teachableness cannot avail for genius" (151). Although he subsequently admits that "models of beautiful art are the only means of handing down these [aesthetic] ideas to posterity" (152; my emphasis), Kant yet insists that fine art is ultimately irreducible to pedagogical precept and utilitarian interest. He thereby effectively reverses the progymnasmata's careful development from imitation to "more artistic melding[s]" of discourse and defines two distinct yet hierarchically related spheres: genius and its ideal cultural expression (fine art); and imitative practices such as the useful (or mechanical) arts.

My initial point, then, is that an early form of aestheticism had always been latent in the classical rhetorical tradition and that this prototype at one time involved a certain intertwining of the rhetorical and the aesthetic, the utilitarian and the transcendental well before the rise of aestheticism per se. I want to focus this line of pedagogical and cultural transformation further, and suggest some of its conflicts and consequences for our discussion, by turning to a pivotal but often overlooked essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Art" (1841). Emerson is a likely suspect for my purposes of exemplification for several reasons: he attended the Boston Latin School from 1812-1817; he studied rhetoric under the tutelage of Edward T. Channing at Harvard; he wrote several themes and lectures on "Eloquence;" and at one point he even professed the desire to be a teacher of rhetoric. Emerson himself seems not to have experienced the progymnasmata at the Boston Latin School, however, and his rhetorical education under Edward T. Channing was largely belletristic in nature. Nevertheless, in "Art" Emerson recalls the pedagogical and implied cultural ideals of the progymnasmata to critique a nascent aestheticism in American society even as the essay itself both enacts a more artistic and flexible mode of invention (argument) than could the boys drilled in the progymnasamata.

Emerson begins by citing the now "popular" aesthetic division of the arts: "Because The Soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of works according to their aim, either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim" (201). The last sentence here seems to acknowledge Kant's authoritative identification of genius and artistic creation, but Emerson's definition of the Soul radically qualifies this view: because the Soul is an entity ever striving toward greater and greater wholeness-in a form of divine amplification, so to speak-fine and useful art are each "creative" to the degree that they contribute to this process. Indeed, Emerson asserts that "As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, and the Divine. No man can quite exclude this element of Necessity from his labor" (201-202). The artist produces art of a "certain grandeur," that is, not through the mysterious processes of "genius" but through his (doomed) struggle to "emancipate himself from his age and country" (202). Because "The very avoidance betrays the usage [influence] he avoids," Emerson writes, the artist's attempt to circumvent Necessity gives art "a higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist's pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the human race" (202). Appropriating Adam Smith's famous metaphor, Emerson therefore argues pace Kant that the artist's individual labor and interest, and the forces of historical and spiritual necessity, produce transhistorical if not strictly transcendental qualities in art.

Emerson struggles to preserve this view, however, as he moves from his initial definition of art as an unfolding of the Soul to the fact that art itself can be cultivated as a refuge or "asylum" from "the evils of life" (209). Specifically, Emerson struggles to reconcile how art can both profitably "detach" an object from the flux and variety of experience and yet itself be cultivated in isolation from life. This is the essay's central and ultimately unresolved paradox, and Emerson first engages it when he turns suddenly from the transhistorical view of art outlined above to what he calls the "mystery of Form" (202). For Emerson, the historical "office" of art is to "educate the perception of beauty" and "to assist and lead the dormant taste" (202). Because "We are immersed in beauty" and "our eyes have no clear vision," he suggests, art is a kind of pedagogical prosthetic because it supplements our vision and helps us to distinguish "one object from the embarrassing variety" (202):
The power to detach, and to magnify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object,--so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,--the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The power depends on the depth of the artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore, each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour, and concentrates attention on itself (203).

Here, Emerson defines a "rhetoric of art" apparently held in common by the fine and useful, plastic and representational arts: through the depth the artist's insight, a "work of genius" detaches and isolates an object from its surroundings and yet reveals that object's "roots" in "central nature." Once the artist has performed this labor, the art object "concentrates attention" upon itself and commands the viewer so imperiously that it becomes "the tyrant of the hour."

It is important to note Emerson's concern for temporality in this passage for at least two reasons. First, it qualifies the cult of the Romantic "genius" implicit in his definition of the artist: the artist invests his insight or genius into an art object but then withdraws (supposedly to produce new works of art); second, the criterion of temporality undercuts an art object's ability to sequester an individual from experience. An art object is only momentarily the "tyrant of the hour" before the viewer passes "to some other object, which rounds itself into a whole, as did the first" (203). With this rhetorical rather than strictly aesthetic definition of art in hand, Emerson suggests that objects of genteel culture (sonnets, opera, epics) and objects or experiences of everyday life (gardening, military campaigns, animals) can serve equally well as templates for genius: "A good ballad draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies, and is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo" (203). Art is distinctive, then, not because of the artist who produced it, or even because of the formal properties in which genius is glimpsed, but because it articulates the identity of the one and the many-"that excellence of all things is one" (203).

At this point, Emerson seems to revert to the aesthetic division of the arts and asserts: "The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial" (203). After introducing temporality as a criterion for aesthetic judgment, he suddenly seems to recall the aesthetic codification of the arts and begins to think of them in terms of whether these arts adequately represent-better, enact-the essentially temporal reality of experience. The fine arts of painting and sculpture are merely "initial," Emerson proposes, because they isolate and truthfully present only a few of the manifold and transitory relations of life. Even "The best pictures," he writes, "are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up the ever-changing 'landscape with figures' amidst which we dwell" (204). And sculptures are so reductive that Emerson recalls Newton's question to the Earl of Pembroke of why one would admire "'stone dolls'" (208). Like painting, statues looks "cold and false before that new activity which needs to roll through all things, and is impatient of counterfeits, and things not alive" (208). Emerson's criticism of the plastic arts thereby qualifies his earlier views that great art of all kinds can "represent the world" and that "the virtue of [great] art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety" (202). Indeed, Emerson now attests that "true art is never fixed, but always flowing" and that "All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action" (208).

How can we explain this sudden reversal and Emerson's apparently non-contradictory endorsement of the seemingly antithetical virtues of detachment and engagement? One way, I suggest, is to note how these virtues define a pedagogical process-a gymnastic-rather than a strictly logical proposition or ontological condition. For Emerson, painting and sculpture are "festivities of form" (208) that teach "the coloring" and "anatomy of form" (204), respectively. Paintings and sculptures by themselves, that is, do not constitute "Art" except, of course, for the artist who once felt compelled to create them. Instead, Emerson's essential definition of art is found in art's pedagogical and pragmatic effects; the proper function of art is to educate the viewer's perceptions and thereby to prepare the viewer to create rather than just consume art. "When I have seen fine statues," Emerson writes, "and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand well what he meant who said, 'When I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants.' I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety (204).

Up to this point, then, "Art" began with the aesthetic difference between the fine (creative) and useful (mechanical) arts and circumvented this popular distinction by developing two alternative rationales for aesthetic judgment: a transhistorical and quasi-Romantic view of art; and, to adapt Emerson's term, a formalist/pragmatic "rhetoric of art" in which the momentary abstraction of aesthetic form from function subsequently reveals the commonality of all things. Emerson then adjudicated the relative strengths of the various arts according to criterion of temporality rather than, say, utility. Thus, once Emerson locates "fine statues" in the passage above, they begin to train his eye "to the niceties and curiosities of its function" much as a gymnast trains other parts of the body. With this artful but also, I think, quite corporeal education, Emerson finds that he sees more clearly and has a renewed sense of "that excellence of all things is one" (203). Thus, fine art is both "ideal" and "initial:" it is ideal because it abstracts aesthetic form from function; but more importantly for Emerson, fine art is also "initial" precisely because this abstraction is part of an educational process that prepares the viewer to become an artist himself in everyday life. In his definition of a "gymnastics of the eye," Emerson defines a two step process-formal abstraction (idealization) and pragmatic integration-that is warranted by the assumption that the best art is simply the most representative art: some art is more static-less in relation-with life and therefore less able to encompass its complex and ever-changing relations. "Nature transcends all our moods of thought," Emerson writes, "and its secret we do not yet find. But the gallery [of art] stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivolous" (208).

Toward the end of "Art," however, Emerson realizes that the problem of the plastic arts has become the more general problem of aestheticism in American society. Precisely because art does detach aesthetic form from function, if only momentarily, art can be cultivated as "a separate and contrasted existence" (208). Emerson asserts that the artist and the connoisseur now seek in art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely, to detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty and use, the laws of nature do not permit (209).

Shaftesbury had declared that by "a certain powerful figure of inward Rhetorick, the Mind apostrophizes its own Fancy's" and can thereby clarify itself without regard for rhetorical exigencies. But Emerson diagnoses a fundamental disharmony or reversal in Shaftesbury's ideal of distinctly public (rhetorical) and private (aesthetic) selves. When art is cultivated as an individual pleasure rather than as a creative expression of general human experience, he asserts, "art that thus separates is itself first separated." Those who value art in this way "reject life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic" (209).
In this description of a death some call poetic, Emerson concludes his essay with a powerful critique of aestheticism in American society. To cultivate art for personal pleasure, or as an escape from the exigencies of life, destroys art as a creative endeavor and an exemplary representation of the divinity that underlies everyday experience. For Emerson, the very "laws of nature do not permit" the aestheticist "division of beauty from use" whereas this distinction is fundamental to both the philosophical discourse of aesthetics and the emergent phenomenon of aestheticism if only because aestheticism ideally erases the difference between "art as the world and art in the world" (Dowling 90). Emerson consequently demands that "Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten [. . .]. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair" (209-10).

In the final paragraph of his essay, however, I would argue that, despite his circumvention of the aesthetic division of the arts, and despite his condemnation of aestheticism itself, Emerson succumbs to the logic of aesthetic culture if not its cultural hierarchies. He suggests that "genius" will appear in America not in the "old arts" but in "the instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill" (210). As he describes these facts and arts, Emerson suddenly departs from the pragmatic premises that had informed his gymnastic explication of art
Proceeding from a religious heart, it [genius] will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock company, our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's retort, in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works,-to mills, railways, and machinery,-the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey? (210).
Emerson calls for beauty to return to the useful arts, but his estimation of beauty is now quite different than the "gymnastics of the eye." Now, genius and the "instinct for beauty" will raise the economic, mechanical, and mercenary impulses of society "to a divine use." In other words, Emerson posits two discrete forms of instrumentality at the end of his essay: a lower mechanical or strictly commercial utility; and a "divine" utility that sublimates the all too obvious material preoccupations and interests of the nation.

Thus, Emerson's 1841 essay "Art" offers both a powerful pragmatic critique of aestheticism avant la lettre and a glimpse of the assimilation of aesthetic philosophy in American culture: apparently unable to wrestle the powerful warrant of utility from the antithetical yet homologous discourses of economics and aesthetics, Emerson finally defines beauty according to an aesthetic logic in which art sublimates more ordinary artistic practices and everyday experience. To put it another way, Emerson's "gymnastics of the eye" anticipates the more full-blown rationale of aesthetic culture offered by rhetoric teacher Henry Noble Day just six years later:

Useful art is the birth of necessity; and may, perhaps, come forth, like its mythological patron, in perfect maturity at first. Imaginative, aesthetic art, has an Apollo's experience. It grows up under trial and hardship. Its imperfections must receive the unrelenting blows of a stern criticism; and its shape be perfected by the rough rubbings, as well as by the unguents of the gymnast (526).

Day asserts here, somewhat counterintuitively, that useful art is characterized by perfection whereas aesthetic art must "grow up under trial and hardship." The practical arts are perfectible, that is, precisely because they are measured by the exigency of utility or fitness and can therefore meet the imperatives of (merely) material necessity. The aesthetic arts, conversely, can only approximate their transcendental auspices and thus aesthetic perfection is not entirely of this world and must be both continually pursued and deferred.

As historian Kenneth Cmiel has argued somewhat differently, then, "it became more difficult to lead a rhetorical life" in the nineteenth century as the cultural warrants for rhetoric were undermined from "above" by philosophical ideas and "below" by popular culture (267). The crucial point of Day's gymnastic, however, lies not in the open opposition between useful (popular) and aesthetic (canonical) culture. Instead, it resides in how this opposition defines aesthetic imperfection as a virtue requiring the "unrelenting blows of a stern criticism" for its correction or amelioration. What finally focuses the relation between the rhetorical and aesthetic arts for Day is a new pedagogical and cultural practice inaugurated by Shaftesbury and both resisted and elaborated by Emerson. When Emerson asserts that "There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety" (204), he is attacking the incipient aestheticization of art in American society. And yet to assert that the gymnast possess the "infinite advantage . . . of perpetual variety" over ideal art is also to suggest, and even call for, a "divine" form of aestheticism in which the gymnast takes himself (and increasingly, herself) as a potential object of art.

Works Cited

Clark, Donald. "The Rise and Fall of Progymnasmata in Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Century Grammar Schools." Speech Monographs Vol. 19 (1952): 259-263.

Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-
Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Day, Henry Noble. "Taste and Morals:--The Necessity of Aesthetic Culture to the Highest
Moral Excellence." American Biblical Repository and Classical Review. Third
Series. Vol. 3 (1847): 524-547.

Dowling, Linda. The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy.
Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Art." 1841. Essays: First and Second Series. New York:
Vintage, 1990. 201-10.

- - -. "Art." 1860. The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Wise
1929. 632-38.

Hunter, Ian. "Aesthetics and Cultural Studies." Cultural Studies. Eds. Grossberg,
Nelson, Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 347-72.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. and Intro. J. H. Bernard. New York:
Hafner Press, 1951.

O'Rourke, Sean Patrick. "Progymnasmata." Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996. 562-63.

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