BEAUTY.
A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of
Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world _kosmos_, 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
reform 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 't is 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: 't is 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 Thermopylae; 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 candle. Nature
stretcheth 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.