He does not say so in syllables, -- yet a
sort of conscientious feeling he had to be _up_ to the universe, is
the best account and apology for many of them. He shared also the
subjectiveness of the age, and that too in both the senses I have
discriminated. With the sharpest eye for form, color, botany,
engraving, medals, persons, and manners, he never stopped at surface,
but pierced the purpose of a thing, and studied to reconcile that
purpose with his own being. What he could so reconcile was good;
what he could not, was false. Hence a certain greatness encircles
every fact he treats; for to him it has a soul, an eternal reason why
it was so, and not otherwise. This is the secret of that deep
realism, which went about among all objects he beheld, to find the
cause why they must be what they are. It was with him a favorite
task to find a theory of every institution, custom, art, work of art,
which he observes. Witness his explanation of the Italian mode of
reckoning the hours of the day, as growing out of the Italian
climate; of the obelisk of Egypt, as growing out of a common natural
fracture in the granite parallelopiped in Upper Egypt; of the Doric
architecture, and the Gothic; of the Venetian music of the gondolier
originating in the habit of the fishers' wives of the Lido singing to
their husbands on the sea; of the Amphitheatre, which is the
enclosure of the natural cup of heads that arranges itself round
every spectacle in the street; of the coloring of Titian and Paul
Veronese, which one may verify in the common daylight in Venice every
afternoon; of the Carnival at Rome; of the domestic rural
architecture in Italy; and many the like examples.
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