That nudity which is divine, which is the abstract of beauty
absolute, gives to the beholder a shock of astonishment and
delight,--not unmixed with melancholy. Very few works of art give
this, because very few approach perfection. But there are marbles
and gems which give it, and certain fine studies of them, such as
the engravings published by the Society of Dilettanti. The longer
one looks, the more the wonder grows, since there appears no
line, or part of a line, whose beauty does not surpass all
remembrance. So the secret of such art was long thought
supernatural; and, in very truth, the sense of beauty it
communicates is more than human,--is superhuman, in the meaning
of that which is outside of existing life,--is therefore
supernatural as any sensation known to man can be.
What is the shock?
It resembles strangely, and is certainly akin to, that psychical
shock which comes with the first experience of love. Plato
explained the shock of beauty as being the Soul's sudden
half-remembrance of the World of Divine Ideas. "They who see here
any image or resemblance of the things which are there receive a
shock like a thunderbolt, and are, after a manner, taken out of
themselves." Schopenhauer explained, the shock of first love as
the Willpower of the Soul of the Race. The positive psychology of
Spencer declares in our own day that the most powerful of human
passions, when it makes its first appearance, is absolutely
antecedent to all individual experience. Thus do ancient thought
and modern--metaphysics and science--accord in recognizing that
the first deep sensation of human beauty known to the individual
is not individual at all.
Must not the same truth hold of that shock which supreme art
gives? The human ideal expressed in such art appeals surely to
the experience of all that Past enshrined in the emotional life
of the beholder,--to something inherited from innumerable
ancestors.
Innumerable indeed!
Allowing three generations to a century, and presupposing no
consanguineous marriages, a French mathematician estimates that
each existing individual of his nation would have in his veins
the blood of twenty millions of contemporaries of the year 1000.
Or calculating from the first year of our own era, the ancestry
of a man of to-day would represent a total of eighteen
quintillions. Yet what are twenty centuries to the time of the
life of man!
Well, the emotion of beauty, like all of our emotions, is
certainly the inherited product of unimaginably countless
experiences in an immeasurable past. In every aesthetic sensation
is the stirring of trillions of trillions of ghostly memories
buried in the magical soil of the brain. And each man carries
within him an ideal of beauty which is but an infinite composite
of dead perceptions of form, color, grace, once dear to look
upon. It is dormant, this ideal,--potential in essence,--cannot
be evoked at will before the imagination; but it may light up
electrically at any perception by the living outer senses of some
vague affinity. Then is felt that weird, sad, delicious thrill,
which accompanies the sudden backward-flowing of the tides of
life and time; then are the sensations of a million years and of
myriad generations summed into the emotional feeling of a moment.
Now, the artists of one civilization only--the Greeks--were able
to perform the miracle of disengaging the Race-Ideal of beauty
from their own souls, and fixing its wavering out-line in jewel
and stone. Nudity, they made divine; and they still compel us to
feel its divinity almost as they felt it themselves. Perhaps they
could do this because, as Emerson suggested, they possessed
all-perfect senses. Certainly it was not because they were as
beautiful as their own statues. No man and no woman could be
that. This only is sure,--that they discerned and clearly fixed
their ideal,--composite of countless million remembrances of dead
grace in eyes and eyelids, throat and cheek, mouth and chin, body
and limbs.
The Greek marble itself gives proof that there is no absolute
individuality,--that the mind is as much a composite of souls as
the body is of cells.