“Oh, to what uses shall we put the wildweed flower that simply blows?
And is there any moral shut within the bosom of the rose?
But any man that walks the mead, in bud, or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead, a meaning suited to his mind.”
And liberal applications lie in art as nature. The Warwickshire justice
tells Shakspeare, after hearing him recite his stanzas on a sweetbriar,
“Thou mightest have added some moral about life and beauty: poets never
handle roses without one.” But then Justice Shallow is the critic. The
author of the “Citation and Examination” in which the criticism is
uttered, has an imaginary dialogue between Vittoria Colonna and Michel
Angelo—the former of whom defines the difference betwixt poetry and all
other arts, all other kinds of composition, to be this: in them, utility
comes before delight; in this, delight before utility. Buonarotti submits
that in some pleasing poems there is nothing whatsoever of the useful.
But Vittoria thinks he is mistaken: an obvious moral is indeed a heavy
protuberance, which injures the gracefulness of a poem; but there is
wisdom of one kind or other, she alleges, in every sentence of a really
good composition, and it produces its effect in various ways. “The
beautiful in itself is useful by awakening our finer sensibilities, which
it must be our own fault if we do not often carry with us into action.”
Leigh Hunt, in his “Song of the Flowers,” makes them exult in the fact,
by their mere existence demonstrated, that heaven loves colour; that
great Nature clearly joys in red and green: “What sweet thoughts she
thinks of violets, and pinks, and a thousand flashing hues, made solely
to be seen:”
“Uselessness divinest
Of a use the finest
Painteth us, the teachers of the end of use;
Travellers weary eyed
Bless us far and wide;
Unto sick and prison’d thoughts we give sudden truce;
Not a poor town window
Loves its sickliest planting,
But its wall speaks loftier truth than Babylon’s whole vaunting.”
So again Mr. Procter apostrophizes Nature in his “Song of the Snowdrop,”
as having surely sent it forth alone to the cold and sullen season, like
a thought at random thrown,—“sent it thus for some grave reason.
“If ’twere but to pierce the mind
With a single gentle thought,
Who shall deem thee hard or blind,
Who, that thou hast vainly wrought?”
Bishop Copleston, in his plea for a free cultivation of the poetic
faculty, contends that its being entirely neglected must prove an
irreparable injury to young minds—losing as they do that intellectual
charm from which life borrows its loveliest graces: hence he takes
exception to Locke’s expression, that educators should beware of making
“anything a boy’s business but downright virtue.” Surely, argues his
critic, the improvement of the faculties which God has implanted in us
is itself a virtue: our attention may be given in undue measure to one,
and so may violate that just harmony without which nothing is virtuous,
nothing lovely. The faculty itself, which the philosopher seems to
condemn, the divine claims to be one of the kindest gifts of heaven. And
why, then, it is asked, should man be niggardly where Providence has
been bountiful? “Why should he think scorn of that pleasant land, and
undervalue those fair possessions, which were not thought beneath the
care of the Almighty?” In the garden of Eden, we are reminded, was made
to grow, not only what was good for food, but every tree also that was
pleasant to the sight: and in that garden man was placed, to keep it, and
to dress it.
It is, as Isaac Taylor remarks, by her diversities,—her gay adornments,
her copious fund of forms, and her sportive freaks of shape and colour,
that Nature allures the eye of man, while she draws him on toward
the more arduous, but more noble pursuit of her hidden analogies. An
insensible process goes on, the effect of which is gradually to invest
general truths with a sort of majesty, as well as beauty; so that,
at length, this new charm is found to prevail over the graces and
attractions of the exterior diversity of things.
Even philosophy, however, has been said to teach us that nature scatters
the lavish beauties of form and colour not always with a utilitarian
purpose; or rather, that beauty—merely to display beauty—is often, as
in birds and flowers and shells and crystals, the object of material
organization. “There is no special use in the metallic lustre on the
plumage of the humming-bird, and tropical blossoms blaze for the mere
sake of being splendid.” Yet is it owned to be noticeable that only in
the lower ranks of the kingdom of being is nature lavish of beauty for
the mere sake of the beautiful; and that as we advance upward in the
scale of created things, a certain severity and reserve seem to grow upon
nature itself.
Shenstone—a now all but forgotten poet—in a now quite forgotten ode,
asserts, as in duty bound, the uses beyond use of Nature’s fancy work:
“Search but the garden or the wood,
Let yon admired carnation own
Not all was meant for raiment, or for food,
Not all for needful use alone;
There while the seeds of future blossoms dwell,
’Tis colour’d for the sight, perfumed to please the smell.
“Why knows the nightingale to sing?
Why flows the pine’s nectareous juice?
Why shines with paint the linnet’s wing?
For sustenance alone? for use?
For preservation?”...
An art-poet significantly and suggestively writes, in lines to which
the contributory reader, must, on his part, supply readings as it were
between the lines:
“This wild white rose-bud in my hand hath meanings meant for me alone,
Which no one else can understand: to you it breathes with altered tone;
How shall I class its properties for you? or its wise whisperings
Interpret? Other eyes and ears it teaches many other things.”
The dull of hearing and seeing, it teaches very little. Josiah the
curate, in Colonel Hamley’s tale, finds nothing suggestive in a rose in a
buttonhole—not that he lacks interest in the flower in what he thinks its
proper place. He never, he owns, could see any possible affinity between
flowers and broadcloth; and why people should pluck blossoms from the
stems and leaves that harmonize so well with them, to stick them into a
dingy produce of the loom, he holds to be one of the puzzles of humanity.
But Josiah is indulgent to that sister Rosa of his, who confessedly
resembles the lilies in so far that she toils not, neither does she spin;
and who, idle child, seems to think human beings ought to be content with
merely blooming.
We like our churches to be beautiful, and our temples, and our whole
symbolic creations, Mr. Hannay somewhere observes; their beauty
represents the general beauty of the universe, and that is one of the
modes by which God is pleased to appeal to our faculties of love and
wonder and admiration. “The Romanists call the Virgin Mary a ‘mystical
rose,’ and a beautiful woman is a mystical rose; attractive, and yet, at
the same time, a religious symbol—an object which keeps alive in you the
sense of wonder and love of beauty, and thankfulness to the Supreme for
the glories of His creation.”
It has been said by an art-poet already quoted, that “the girl who twines
in her soft hair the orange-flower, with love’s devotion, by the mere
act of being fair, sets countless laws of life in motion.” Dr. Croly, in
his “Salathiel,” pleading for the _right_ of beauty to have a natural
power over the heart, urges, for instance, that all that overcomes
selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good; and
goes on to say that beauty is but melody of a higher kind—both alike
softening the troubled and hard nature of man. “Even if we looked on a
lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer
hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even
those summer hours sweeter.” We may apply the suggestion in one of Mrs.
Browning’s last poems—
“What if God has set her here
Less for action than for Being?—
For the eye and for the ear.
“Just to show what beauty may,
Just to prove what music can.”
_A HISTRIONIC ASPECT OF LIFE._