Here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which
is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man
we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine,
which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient
to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and
solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing
loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty
was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence
makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his
attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out
her own being into somewhat impersonal, large mundane, so that the
maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and
virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in
his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a
likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her
blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and
diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze
the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form?
We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we
cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points.
It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to
organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love
known and described in society; but as it seems to me, to a quite
other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy
and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot
approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline dove's-neck lustres,
hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent
things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at
appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify when he
said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all
my endless life I have not found and shall not find." The same fluency
may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then
beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing
out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and
measuring wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to
say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is
always represented in a transition _from_ that which is representable
to the senses, _to_ that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a
stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is
not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and
fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it
Landor inquires "whether it is not to be referred to some purer state
of sensation and existence."
In like manner personal beauty is then first charming and itself when
it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an
end; when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly
satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when
he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel
more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.
Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say
so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above
it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in
yourself and can never know.
This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient
writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied
here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world
of its own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by
the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than
those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore
the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail
itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the
celestial good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the
female sex runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the
form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests
to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and the
cause of the beauty.
If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul
was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped
nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfill the promise which
beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and
suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through
the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers
contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then
they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their
love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the
sun puts out fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and
hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent,
magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of
these nobilities and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes
from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one
beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of
all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he
attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has
contracted from this world, and is able to point it out; and this with
mutual joy that they are now able without offense to indicate
blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and
comfort in curing the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of
the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine
from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends
to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by
steps on this ladder of created souls.