BEAUTY.
A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of
Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world kosmos, beauty. Such is
the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human
eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the
animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure
arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly
owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual
action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is
produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character
soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the
particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they
compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer,
so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that
intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to
the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time,
make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides
this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual
forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations
of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear,
the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the
serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and
the forms of many trees, as the palm.
For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in
a threefold manner.
1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The
influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to man,
that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of
commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by
noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.
The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the
street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their
eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a
horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without
any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from
the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with
emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud
float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a
shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid
transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate
and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few
and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp
of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and
moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon
shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night
shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.
Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the
afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The
western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes
modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much
life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. What was
it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of
the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not
reform for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in
the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and the stars of
the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed
with frost, contribute something to the mute music.
The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is
pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the
winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the
genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the
year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour,
a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen
again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or
gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding
farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The
succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes
the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even
the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of
birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each
other, and the year has room for all. By water-courses, the variety is
greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large
beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow
butterflies in continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple
and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a
new ornament.
But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the
least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains,
orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the
like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with
their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere
tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary
journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October,
who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is
only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.
2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is
essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be
loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with
the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural
action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the
place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that
the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational
creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he
will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and
abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world
by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and
will, he takes up the world into himself. “All those things for which
men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;” said Sallust. “The winds and
waves,” said Gibbon, “are always on the side of the ablest navigators.”
So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act
is done,—perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas
and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and
moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of
Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow
of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to
break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add
the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of
Columbus nears the shore of America;—before it, the beach lined with
savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the
purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the
man from the living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form
with her palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural
beauty steal in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry
Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death,
as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to
him, “You never sate on so glorious a seat.” Charles II., to intimidate
the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in
an open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to
the scaffold. “But,” his biographer says, “the multitude imagined they
saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side.” In private places, among
sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to
itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretcheth
out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal
greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the
violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of
her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the
frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her
works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer,
Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory
with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth
sympathize with Jesus. And in common life, whosoever has seen a person
of powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how easily
he took all things along with him,—the persons, the opinions, and the
day, and nature became ancillary to a man.
3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world
may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside
the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The
intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in
the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual
and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive
activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other.
There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like
the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares
and will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in
relation to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because
it is unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the
intellect; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing
divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature
reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for
new creation.
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some
men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same
love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to
embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.
The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of
humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is
the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the
works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the
expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms
radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the
ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them
all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty
is the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature; which
the Italians expressed by defining beauty “il piu nell' uno.” Nothing
is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A
single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal
grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the
architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one
point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which
stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the
alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man
filled with the beauty of her first works.
The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty.
This element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given
why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest
sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth,
and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But
beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and
eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must
stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the
final cause of Nature.