Charles Wyllys Elliott

“ They see a vase, or a ewer, or a candlestick, of fantastic shape, covered with a thin, greenish-yellow glaze, the coloring not by any means brilliant, and the surface seemingly inlaid and incrusted with the innumerable details of a most elaborate ornamentation, made out in quiet browns, blacks, and sad neutral tints. Nothing is less striking to a casual or an ignorant observer—nothing in the whole range of decorative art so absolutely exquisite in design and effect to the cultivated appreciation of a connoisseur in Renaissance-work. ”

“ Events, which no man could have foreseen or controlled, had gathered for judgment, and at last a great nation had decreed freedom to a poor, debauched and servile race. But who should lead them, who should now defend them against themselves—give shape and system to their undisciplined wishes—carry them safely through the anarchy of unbounded liberty, and crystallize them into a STATE, whose only sure basis is the Rights and Duties of Labor, Thought, Speech and Worship, the Rights and Duties of Manhood? ”

“ The blacks were headed by Jean François and Biassou, generals not to be despised. Brave, rapid, unscrupulous, vain of grandeur, greedy of plunder, they were not far from the marshals of France.
This, then, was not a revolt, but a revolution! [23] Success would decide. Never could the whites believe that the blacks were men. Ogé had revealed a wide-spread conspiracy, headed by well-known slaves. The whites concealed this. They did not believe him; they believed only that the blacks were their born slaves, fit for the whip, incapable of courage, or honor, or martyrdom. ”

“ The art and the maiolica which she now produces are but copies, and too often bad copies, of that past. The manufactories of Ginori at Florence, and of Giustiniani at Naples, make much good work; but, so far as I have seen, they blindly copy the shapes, the colors, and the decoration, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and attempt nothing more. And the pity is that we, who buy to-day, seem to want only those!
In our pursuit of art it may be well to remember that no nation can be created by “art,” and none can be saved by it. ”

“ He who has done so much for his own race and for the whites, who has shown mercy, when others were blood-thirsty, who has steadily looked to a great end, and has had faith that, in all his good purposes and hopes, he should be sustained by that generous nation, which had poured out its blood like water for freedom—he now hears, with dismay, that that great nation had resolved on something, and the whites said to restore him and his race to slavery ”

“ The florid and foolish taste of the perruquier prevails everywhere, in architecture, in painting, in sculpture, in dress; all is tainted with the showy and the shallow. The flowing scroll appears in all its splendor, decoration is piled in meaningless profusion, and talent and taste, heart, mind, hand, and gold, are lavished in folly and vice, which finally culminated in the social and political Revolution of Louis XVI., when king and noble, lord and lady, went under in a sanguinary flood of anarchy and ruin. ”

“ Luxury and sloth do not beguile him, for he knows that stability alone is success. His activity is untiring—his correspondence exhausts five secretaries—he trusts to the eye of the master and his vigilance is everywhere. He works! for his soul is steel and his body iron. Relays of fast-pacing horses are stationed at proper points; on these he rides, outstripping all but his two trumpeters. Fifty leagues, without stopping, it is said he rode. [51] The whole energies of his life are devoted to the realizing of a great idea—the liberty and elevation of the blacks. ”

“ The history of pottery is in a good degree the history of man. All nations have done something in this way, from the rude clay pots of the barbarians, through the gayly-painted dishes of the incipient civilization, up to the culmination of the art, when perfection seems to have been reached in China through the centuries extending up to the sixteenth. This manufacture, which reached in China and Japan to the point of finest art, has not been surpassed by any civilized race, if equaled. ”

“ We do not give the workman half his due when we fail to feel how much we owe to him. An eye to see the beautiful, the good, the true, is to be prayed for.
When the turner and modeler has perfected his pot, it has to go through its firings, glazings, paintings, until it comes to us a perfected work, which we too often hardly look at. It is only a jug!
There is more than the money’s worth in every good piece of cabinet-work, iron-work, woven fabric, etc.; for with every honest workman’s hand goes a part of his soul: he gives it willingly, gladly. ”

“ The hour had come, but not the man: the world waited for him, but none knew where to look, for none believed him to be among the degraded negroes. The old custom of master and slave was broken in pieces, and a nation of men, with no cultivation, with no education in self-government, with none of the conservative strength which hangs about privileges and possessions, and long-honored habit, were now up, inspired only with a hatred of slavery and vague aspirations for that which they knew not how to name. ”

“ Through thousands of years a peculiar people have developed a peculiar social system—most striking, most distinct, and, in its way, as complete as any other, even if compared with ours, of which we loudly boast. And now this singular people—a people who have grown into a population of four hundred millions, having their barriers broken down by the guns and rams of England, so that trade should enter—are themselves coming out to do the work of the world cheaper than any others can do it. ”

“ The mulattoes wished to share in the spoil. The blacks had an indistinct but obstinate aversion to being plucked at all! This took shape in the brain of Toussaint Louverture: founded, as this idea was, upon the profoundest instincts of human nature, it could not be driven out of these men, not even by whips or bayonets. Toussaint knows what ought to be done, and he alone knows how to do it.
He declares, that no State can be prosperous, but with agriculture as its material basis.
That men of all colors must be secure in their lives, and in the enjoyment of the products of their own labor. ”

“ These figures are of value, of course, as illustrations of the possibilities, and also as historical illustrations, of the growth and development of the fictile art. No man will wish to have an Ariadne in china made by an excellent artist, if he can have the same work of the same artist in marble.
We have the same feeling in regard to a fine painting: would any one wish to exchange the Dresden Madonna of Raphael on the canvas for a perfect copy in mosaic, or in the most exquisite Gobelin tapestry? None. And yet the mosaic or the tapestry has cost ten times more of human labor. ”

“ What the keen and artistic mind wants to know is, not only what fine work was done by the Greeks, but why they did it—what, indeed, made that life more beautiful than any we find in all the earlier histories of man.
Through the wrecks and convulsions of time this crowd of delicate, perishable things still exists; what vast numbers must have been made and destroyed in the varying populations of Greece, Rome, Tyre, Carthage, and wherever Grecian civilizations and tastes made their way, it is not easy for the mind to compass. ”

“ Few knew whom it contained, few remarked upon it; for such things were common enough in Napoleon’s day, as they were before and have been since. The Castle of Joux, in the high rocks which border Switzerland, receives the prisoner. Alone with his servant, he passes the weary days in inaction,—with crushed hopes, with lacerated affections. He sees his wife, his children, no more—no more the sunny hights of St. Domingo—no more the luxuriant valleys of Ennery. He knows he is doomed; yet his soul is too strong for despair. His letters to Napoleon are manly and simple ”

“ At the period of which we write, Italy had become the leading nation of Europe in all that pertained to literature and the arts; her painters, sculptors, and poets, had thrown over her people and history a glory, or rather a glamour, which was but the iridescence which whispered of decay. Within a century all had sunk into insignificance and palsy. To-day the world visits Italy to see with curious eyes what she has been, not what she is. ”

“ He who retires from men, and dreams in the serene solitude of his hermitage, may solace himself with great thoughts, and poetic ideas and vague hopes—he may be a philosopher.
But such is not the fullest manifestation of God. It is when Thought is crystallized into Action; for a good deed is greater than a good word. ”

“ By no possibility can war be careful of the rights of man. War is intended to hurt, to exhaust, to consume other nations. War not only takes food and munitions in the conquered country; it takes whatever it wants and can take, whether of necessaries, luxuries, gold, or art. War, we know, enabled the first and great Napoleon to enrich his palaces and the museums of Paris with the finest works of art found in the countries he overran. War, I do not doubt, brought into Sweden the beginnings of those collections which now count many of the fine pictures of Guido and Raphael, of Teniers and Douw. ”

“ Great is he who spends his blood and his life, fighting for liberty—but base is the man who kills and destroys for fame or plunder.
Toussaint sets himself to his work. The whole province of the North soon falls into his hands, and he drives the Spanish ally, Jean François, westward along La Montaigne Noire. Then he hastens into the rich valley of the Artibonite, attacks and beats back the English, and besieges the strong fortress of St. Marc; but neither forces nor ammunition are sufficient and he retires to the mountain fastnesses of Marmalade to recruit his troops. ”