apparent instantaneousness with which the emotion seems to arise when a
beautiful object is presented. But this is not a conclusive objection,
because emotions which can arise only from association seem to come in
the same way. How instantaneous, for instance, are the emotions that
throng up when he who has been long on a foreign shore sees, for the
first time, the stars and stripes of his country's flag as it enters the
port where he is;--and yet, these emotions can be awakened by it only as
a link of association with scenes that are past, or as a sign of his
country's presence and protection. I have heard the rainbow adduced as
an instance of an object which produces the emotion of beauty without a
reference to any thing beyond itself. But what was the impression made
by it more than two thousand years ago, upon the mind of one who had no
theory to maintain?--"Look upon the rainbow," says he, "and praise Him
that made it: very beautiful it is in the brightness thereof. It
compasseth the heavens about with a glorious circle, and _the hands of
the Most High have bended it_." How apparently instantaneous, yet how
different, are our emotions when looking at the cheek flushed by the
bloom of health, or suffused by the blush of shame, or reddened by
anger, or wearing that hectic flush which is the flag of distress held
out by nature when she is sinking in consumption!--And yet no one can
doubt, if these indications were reversed, that the emotions would be
reversed also. It is conceded by all, that it is the expression, the
indication of mental and moral qualities, that gives its highest beauty
to the human countenance. There are no features which may not be so
lighted up with noble or tender emotion as to be beautiful. But is
there, it will be asked, _no_ beauty in any combination of features, or
of matter, except as connected with expression? I am inclined to think
there is what may be called an instinctive beauty on the perception of
certain colors and forms; but it is of little value compared with that
of which a rational and reflective being can give an account to himself.
Even this, however, presupposes the action of mind upon matter, though
that action is not recognized by us as the cause of our emotion. It is
therefore still true that, as the beauty of the early morning is
produced solely by a reflexion from the sun while he is still below the
horizon, so the beauty of matter is wholly a reflexion from that great
central orb of mind which has never yet beamed upon the eye of man in
its direct effulgence--that, to him who views it aright, the beauty of
this world is but the morning twilight of heaven.
But, however this question may be decided, the fact that it can be made
a question at all, shows how largely moral ideas and emotions enter into
the province of taste, and the intimate connexion there is between taste
and morals. What is called moral taste is, in fact, discriminated from
taste in general, only as it has the moral actions of free and
intelligent agents for its object. When we look at a moral action, there
is a plain difference between our perception of it as right, and our
perception of it as beautiful. In one case there arises the feeling of
_approbation_, in the other of _admiration_, which are entirely
distinct, and may exist in very different proportions.
It is, indeed, not always easy to distinguish the point at which
approbation and admiration run into each other; and in treating of this
subject, I shall first say a few words of that border-ground between
taste and morals where the dividing line seems to be unsettled. Where,
for example, shall we place that feeling which we have in view of the
manner of doing a thing, in distinction from the thing done? Is that
feeling merely the result of taste, or are there mingled with it some
elements of moral approbation or disapprobation? Where will you place a
mean action in distinction from a dishonest one? I have heard it
disputed whether neatness is a virtue, a matter of moral obligation, or
merely a requisition of taste. Is a man under moral obligation to be
neat in his person? It is along this dividing line that all those
actions lie which relate to the proprieties and courtesies of life--all
those smaller attentions to the convenience and comfort of others, and
that delicate regard to their feelings, which have been designated by
the French as the smaller morals.
In regard to this very extensive, and therefore important department of
human conduct, there seem to be two common mistakes. The first consists
in disregarding it altogether. There are many men whose characters, in
their sketching and outline, are fine, and which, seen at a distance,
appear well; but on approaching them, they seem coarse and very
imperfect. In all the great duties of life they appear to advantage; but
through negligence, or some greater failing, the minor duties, and
especially the department of manners, is entirely neglected. They seem
like stately trees, in the trunk and main branches of which the sap
circulates vigorously, but does not reach and animate the smaller twigs,
and give to the leaves their perfect green.
A second, and more common mistake, is the giving up of this department
to the control of taste under the guidance of selfishness. The manners
are polished, and all the forms of politeness adopted, not for the
purpose of making others happy, but of securing to ourselves their
esteem, and of effecting our own ends in life. This is the school of
manners recommended by Chesterfield, and young persons are often
exhorted to pay attention to their manners on this ground. In this case
the sap does not circulate at all, and the leaves are painted.
But to me it seems, that this whole class of actions falls within the
province of morality. Wherever human happiness is concerned, there is
room for principle to operate, and the constitution of society will
never be sound, and its beauty will never be perfect, till the sap of
principle circulates to the extremities of human action. The true polish
and beauty of society can result only from the principle of benevolence
showing itself in a graceful and practical attention to the minor wants
and to the feelings of others. But whatever we may decide in regard to
their respective limits in this department, it is obvious that taste, so
far as it goes, must be favorable to morals.
We now pass to what is indisputably the province of morals. And here our
first inquiry will be, what are the circumstances under which the
emotions of taste are awakened by moral actions? In reply to this
inquiry I observe, that the emotion of beauty, leaving sublimity for the
present out of the question, is awakened by a moral action chiefly,
and perhaps solely, when it springs from the principle of duty acting in
coincidence with the desires, the affections, or some other natural and
inferior principle of action. This point is of practical importance, and
requires illustration. Man, as we all know, has various principles of
action,--such as instincts, desires, affections, passions. These may
impel him to a course of action directly opposed to that indicated by a
sense of duty, and they may also lead him to perform the same actions as
are dictated by it; and the position is, that moral beauty arises when
there is a partial or entire coincidence between the principle of duty
and these inferior powers.
That this is so is evident, because there are many actions which are
right, which are imperatively required by duty, which yet do not awaken
in the mind of the impartial spectator any admiration--for we must here
keep in mind the distinction already made between admiration and
approbation. The simple payment of a debt, for example, does not awaken
any admiration, though we approve the act and should strongly condemn
him who should not do it when it was in his power. In this case, there
can be mingled with the performance of duty no play of the generous
emotions. He who performs all his actions solely from a sense of duty,
has our approbation, our respect; but he who, in addition to this, is
possessed of warm affections, which always coincide in their promptings
with what is right, has also our admiration and love. Duty is to the
affections, in the conduct of life, what logic is to rhetoric in a
discourse. Logic forms an excellent body for a discourse; we assent to
it, we approve it, it is good, all good, but it awakens no admiration.
It is not till rhetoric sends its warm life-blood to mantle on the cold
cheek of logic, and clothes its angular form in the garments of taste,
that we begin to admire the discourse. And so it is with duty. It is an
excellent body to the course of our conduct in life; nothing else will
do, but it may be so performed as to appear unamiable and even
repulsive. In order to be beautiful, there must be connected with it
some manifestation of natural affection or graceful emotion.
And here I may remark, that though we have a right to expect of every
man that he will do his duty, yet the display of this beauty is not
equally within the power of all, since the existence and manifestation
of emotion depend, to some extent, upon the temperament. As there are
some who have naturally a meagre intellect, so there are others whose
minds seem to be barren of those finer sympathies and affections of our
nature which are the verdure of the soul, and upon which the eye always
rests with pleasure. The characters of some good men are dry and
unattractive. They are harsh, and hard-visaged, and seem too much like
wooden men, moved by rule and calculation. Such persons often seem
better, and worse, than they really are. Their freedom from
extravagancies on the one hand, and on the other, that want of feeling
which is wrongly termed by many hardness of heart, is equally the result
of temperament.
That the doctrine which I now advocate is correct, appears also from the
effect produced upon our feelings when we observe habit taking the place
of sentiment in the performance of duty. We have all seen persons enter
upon a course of virtuous activity, and continue it for a time from a
sense of duty, sustained by ardent feeling; but after a time the feeling
has died away, and there has come in its stead habit, or a regard to
consistency, to sustain the sense of duty in keeping up the same course
of external action. When this change has taken place, we are all
conscious that the beauty of the conduct is greatly diminished;--its
spirit has vanished; the dew of its youth is exhaled.
I said that this was a practical point, and I now wish to show, in
connexion with it, precisely how it is that mischief arises from the
perversion of moral taste; as was shown, in the former Lecture, how it
arises from its perversion in other things. In opposition to the hard
and dry characters mentioned above, there are those whose
susceptibilities are acute, whose sympathies are quick, whose feelings
are generous, whose affections are ardent, who do every thing so
promptly and so heartily that impulse seems almost to supply the place
of principle. There is something very attractive in a character of this
kind; there is an ease and freedom about it which seems to put aside all
labor of calculation, and it moreover exhibits our nature in the
pleasing garb of natural goodness. It is for this reason that novelists,
who draw men as they wish to have them, and not as they are, have
almost universally made these fine instincts of humanity the guide of
their hero, and the basis of his character. This is, indeed, if I
understand it, the basis of this kind of literature, and one chief
source of the injury it produces. The exhibition of these instincts, and
affections, and emotions, springing up at random and acting without the
control of principle, holds out no stimulus to exertion; and their
possession and exercise is often in fact, and often too in books,
connected with great corruption of moral character.
Taking, therefore, as the main ingredient in the character of those who
are to make the chief figure in this kind of writing, what Miss
Martineau calls _spontaneousness_, and which she and a certain wise
friend of hers in Boston thought should by all means be encouraged and
_reverenced_, we may mix the other materials somewhat to our taste. An
excellent and much-approved receipt for the hero of a novel is the
following:--1st. Make him handsome, for beauty is to the body what
spontaneousness is to the mind, a sort of physical spontaneousness. Or,
if you do not make him handsome, do what amounts to much the same thing,
give him an _air_; let him have something about him that is peculiar, so
that those who scan him closely may observe, under those apparently
indifferent features, a certain something, a sign of the fire that is
slumbering within. 2d. If you find it necessary, for fashion's sake, to
put him at school, or at any place for study, make him idle, generous,
somewhat mischievous, a great hater of mathematics, (for, so far as my
knowledge extends, no hero of a novel ever yet knew any thing about
mathematics,) give him some whimsical pursuit for the hours when he
chooses to do any thing, and then make him speak, as he has occasion,
Italian, French and Spanish, which he learned by instinct. 3d. _Make him
act from impulse, and not from principle, and get him into difficulty
through the influence of these same generous impulses._ It is on
difficulties thus created that the plot must turn. 4th. Get him in love.
5th. Make him run a gauntlet of difficulties a volume and a half long,
furnishing a new illustration of that old adage, "the course of true
love never did run smooth." 6th. Marry him, and let him live many years
in perfect felicity.
We commonly hear it said, that the chief mischief of novel-reading
arises from the false pictures of life which novels present. This is
doubtless a source of no small mischief; but in my view, a much greater
evil arises from their holding up, directly or indirectly, false
principles of action, and casting contempt upon the true; from their
leading young persons to admire that which they esteem graceful rather
than that which is respectable and right in the conduct of life. There
is in those works an unnatural separation made between the principle of
virtue and that which gives to virtue its beauty; and principle is
represented as formal and cold, and perhaps ridiculous. Prudence,
especially, is a virtue which no heroine of a novel must ever be guilty
of. In a recent work, which deserves great credit for avoiding the
general fault just mentioned, we are yet told that prudence was a
virtue for which the heroine was never famous, and a slight odium is
cast upon the virtue itself by making it appear, in the rival of the
heroine, somewhat stiff and pragmatical.
It is thus that these works awaken extensively, in the minds of the
young, associations unfavorable to the sterner and sterling virtues; and
in many cases, these amiable qualities are so associated with vice as to
render it attractive. It is thus that we are presented by popular
novelists--and in such a manner as I know carries along the sympathies
of many young men, while their imaginations are rendered familiar with
the haunts of vice--with gentlemen robbers who rob in style; who are so
generous that they never rob the poor; who never shed human blood if
people will give up their money without it; and if they are occasionally
obliged to blow out the brains of some agent of the law, they are really
sorry for it, though they do not see how such impertinent fellows could
expect any thing better. It is thus that the impression is received,
that a certain class of impulses is sufficient to secure success in
life, and even to excuse the want of principle; and young men with their
heads full of pictures, not perhaps so bad as this, yet fundamentally
the same, rush eagerly into life without fixed principles and fixed
aims.
To him who is without experience, there is no sight more beautiful than
that of a young man of an ingenuous nature entering upon life, and
resting upon his own good impulses to keep him from evil. But such a
sight, even when there has been no corruption like that just spoken of,
now causes apprehension in me; for I have seen him who had every thing,
in his person and in his sensibilities, to excite admiration and love,
tarrying long at the wine, and seeking mixed wine; I have seen him going
to that "house" which "is the way to hell;" and therefore it is that I
would utter a solemn protest against any thing which would divorce the
beauty of virtue from the principle of virtue, or which would give an
impression that there is security without fixed principle. Even
"genius," with all these amiable qualities--
"Yet may lack the aid
Implored by humble minds and hearts afraid,
May leave to timid souls the shield and sword
Of the tried faith and the resistless word;
Amid a world of dangers venturing forth,
Frail but yet fearless, proud in conscious worth,
Till strong temptation, in some fatal time,
Assails the heart and wins the soul to crime."
Then,
"All that honor brings against the force
Of headlong passion, aids its rapid course;
Its slight resistance but provokes the fire,
As wood-work stops the flame, and then conveys it higher."
With such a basis to the characters presented, it will follow of course,
that the emotions and the sensibilities will be chiefly addressed in
these works, and thus they become the principal means of promoting that
false and selfish sensibility which is so often cultivated in refined
society. This is a more refined species of intemperance, and is to the
mind what intemperance in strong drink is to the body. It causes
excitement for the mere selfish enjoyment produced by it, without
leading to any exertion. And as the grosser species of intemperance is
more common among one sex, so it is to be feared, that this more refined
species is more common among the other; and that for both, circulating
libraries, and other libraries, instead of furnishing wholesome
entertainment, are too often converted into mere intellectual
dram-shops. There are many who seek chiefly for excitement, who have a
constant craving for it, whose emotions and mental sensibilities have
become accustomed to a set of artificial stimulants till they are
sensible to no other, and they become as remorselessly selfish as the
drunkard himself. I would sooner apply for an act of genuine kindness,
one which should reach actual want, to a woman in a log-house, upon the
side of a mountain, surrounded by hungry children, than to the daintiest
young lady whose sensibilities have spindled up and wilted in the
artificial heat of novel-reading. In order to perform the duties of
benevolence and philanthropy, it is indispensable that the sensibilities
should be kept alive to the impressions of misery as it actually
presents itself in all its squalid accompaniments.
"Sweet are the tears that from a Howard's eye
Drop on the cheek of one he lifts from earth;
And he who works me good with unmoved face,
Does it but half; he chills me while he aids,
My benefactor, not my fellow-man.
But even this, this cold benevolence,
Seems worth, seems manhood, when there rise before me
The sluggard Pity's vision-weaving tribe,
Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched,
Nursing, in some delicious solitude,
Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies!"
It was this esteem in which mankind hold the sensibilities and impulses,
this preference of spontaneousness without its connexion with principle,
which gave its popularity to what has been called the sentimental
school--the results of which ought to teach society a lesson not soon to
be forgotten. Concerning this school, it is justly remarked by
Coleridge, that "all the mischief achieved by Hobbes, and the whole
school of materialists, will appear inconsiderable if it be compared
with the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental philosophy
of Sterne and his numerous imitators. The vilest appetites, and the most
remorseless inconstancy towards their objects, acquired the title of the
_heart_--the irresistible feelings--the too tender sensibility: and if
the frosts of prudence, the icy chains of human law, thawed and vanished
at the genial warmth of human nature, who _could_ help it? It was an
amiable weakness."
I would here remark, that I have no objection to fictitious writings as
such. There are those to which I do not object. Let them cease, first,
to present false pictures of life: secondly, to array the sensibilities
and associations of the mind against principle: and, thirdly, let them
cease to create and feed a morbid craving for excitement, and to destroy
the balance between the feelings and the judgment: and I shall not
object to them. The mass of these writings, however, do produce each
and all of these effects, and are, so far, indisputably pernicious.
I have been thus particular in pointing out the evils which arise from
arraying what is beautiful and graceful in morals and in conduct against
that which is right, because I do not believe that the community are
sufficiently warned against the mischief it is working, and in many
cases are not perhaps aware of the manner in which it is wrought. Evil
gains advantage over man by dividing him against himself, by bringing
into collision faculties that were intended to work harmoniously
together; and we may regard it as settled, that whoever or whatever
would set up mere impulses, or sensibilities, or emotions, in the place
of the reason and conscience of man, is thus dividing him against
himself. It is with the conscience of man as it is with a king. He may
have his prime minister, who is his chief favorite, and next to himself,
but he must never abandon his power, or suffer the highest subject to
depose him from the throne. The desires and affections are then only
truly beautiful, when they are in ready attendance at the court of their
rightful sovereign.
Having now spoken of the manner in which evil is done by those who care
to please rather than to improve mankind, I cannot leave this part of
the subject without suggesting, to the friends of principle and of
religion, how much, if what has been said is correct, they may do to
counteract this evil by a free, a hearty, a joyful, and therefore an
attractive, mode of doing that which is right. Whence have arisen those
associations of coldness and formality and gloom, as connected with
duty, which haunt the imaginations of many young persons, and which have
just as little existence in reality as other spectres of the night? Is
it not in part from an unnatural austerity, or from a cowardly and
faltering step, a want of freedom and power and beauty in the
exhibitions of virtue and principle on the part of those who profess to
adhere to them? It is not as it should be, when the glad and the
graceful emotions readily spring up by the side of every path that we
walk in except the path of duty. He who marches under the banner of
principle is not only to feel that he is engaged in a good cause, but is
also to see in that cause a beauty which shall be to him what music is
to the soldier, giving cheerfulness to his countenance and alacrity to
his step. His is not indeed to be the unchastened, and reckless, and
merely animal joy that is unconscious of the evil that exists, and that
is to be met; but it is to be the joy of him who, though he is
travelling in a difficult and obscure path, yet sees before him the
bright and steady light of his own happy home. The more those who act
from principle are able to combine, with the most perfect rectitude and
uncompromising faithfulness, the cultivation and play of all the
graceful and tender emotions, the more will they do to promote the cause
in which they labor. I know, and here is the difficulty, that most
virtue is too feeble for this; and I would not that there should be put
on any affectation of freedom or ease. Virtue should move easily and
gracefully only as it is strong, but it should become strong that it
may move easily and gracefully, and thus become to all men as beautiful
as it is obligatory.
It is not a little that the Christian religion has suffered from the
mistakes of its adherents on this point. It had been better if they had
more regarded the spirit of its Founder when He commanded his disciples,
even when they fasted, not to be of a sad countenance, as the hypocrites
were. The impression we get of Paul, notwithstanding his labors and
sufferings, is that he was a happy man. If he was sometimes "sorrowful,"
he was yet "always rejoicing." The movements of his spirit were so ready
and free, in view of the great subjects that filled his mind, that he
reminds us more than any other man of the "rapt seraph that adores and
burns." What is it, indeed, that gives its perfect beauty to our
conception of the worship of heaven? Is it not, that the most perfect
law is there fully obeyed, and is yet no restraint upon the highest and
freest expansion of feeling? It is when this is so, and then only, that
moral beauty is perfect.