SOMETHING ON AN OLD SUBJECT, WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SAID BEFORE
Although Lionel was prepared to see a very handsome woman in Lady
Montfort, the beauty of her countenance took him by surprise. No
preparation by the eulogies of description can lessen the effect that
the first sight of a beautiful object produces upon a mind to which
refinement of idea gives an accurate and quick comprehension of beauty.
Be it a work of art, a scene in nature, or, rarest of all, a human face
divine, a beauty never before beheld strikes us with hidden pleasure,
like a burst of light. And it is a pleasure that elevates; the
imagination feels itself richer by a new idea of excellence; for not
only is real beauty wholly original, having no prototype, but its
immediate influence is spiritual. It may seem strange--I appeal to every
observant artist if the assertion be not true--but the first sight of
the most perfect order of female beauty, rather than courting, rebukes
and strikes back, every grosser instinct that would alloy admiration.
There must be some meanness and blemish in the beauty which the
sensualist no sooner beholds than he covets. In the higher incarnation
of the abstract idea which runs through all our notions of moral good
and celestial purity--even if the moment the eye sees the heart loves
the image--the love has in it something of the reverence which it was
said the charms of Virtue would produce could her form be made visible;
nor could mere human love obtrude itself till the sweet awe of the
first effect had been familiarised away. And I apprehend that it is this
exalting or etherealising attribute of beauty to which all poets, all
writers who would poetise the realities of life, have unconsciously
rendered homage, in the rank to which they elevate what, stripped of
such attribute, would be but a gaudy idol of painted clay. If, from the
loftiest epic to the tritest novel, a heroine is often little more than
a name to which we are called upon to bow, as to a symbol representing
beauty, and if we ourselves (be we ever so indifferent in our common
life to fair faces) feel that, in art at least, imagination needs an
image of the Beautiful--if, in a word, both poet and reader here would
not be left excuseless, it is because in our inmost hearts there is a
sentiment which links the ideal of beauty with the Supersensual. Wouldst
thou, for instance, form some vague conception of the shape worn by a
pure soul released? wouldst thou give to it the likeness of an ugly
hag? or wouldst thou not ransack all thy remembrances and conceptions of
forms most beauteous to clothe the holy image? Do so: now bring it thus
robed with the richest graces before thy mind’s eye. Well, seest thou
now the excuse for poets in the rank they give to BEAUTY? Seest thou now
how high from the realm of the senses soars the mysterious Archetype?
Without the idea of beauty, couldst thou conceive a form in which to
clothe a soul that has entered heaven?