BEAUTY.
A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world κοσμος, 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 re-form 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 ’tis 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; ’tis 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 Thermopylæ; 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 cradle. Nature stretches 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.