I
Before genius is manliness, and before beauty is power. The Russian
novelist and poet, Turgenieff, scattered all through whose works you
will find unmistakable traits of greatness, makes one of his characters
say, speaking of beauty, "The old masters,--they never hunted after
it; it comes of itself into their compositions, God knows whence, from
heaven or elsewhere. The whole world belonged to them, but we are unable
to clasp its broad spaces; our arms are too short."
From the same depth of insight come these lines from "Leaves of Grass,"
apropos of true poems:--
"They do not seek beauty--they are sought; Forever touching them, or
close upon them, follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick."
The Roman was perhaps the first to separate beauty from use, and to
pursue it as ornament merely. He built his grand edifice,--its piers,
its vaults, its walls of brick and concrete,--and then gave it a
marble envelope copied from the Greek architecture. The latter could be
stripped away, as in many cases it was by the hand of time, and leave
the essentials of the structure nearly complete. Not so with the Greek:
he did not seek the beautiful, he was beauty; his building had no
ornament, it was all structure; in its beauty was the flower of
necessity, the charm of inborn fitness and proportion. In other words,
"his art was structure refined into beautiful forms, not beautiful forms
superimposed upon structure," as with the Roman. And it is in Greek
mythology, is it not, that Beauty is represented as riding upon the back
of a lion? as she assuredly always does in their poetry and art,--rides
upon power, or terror, or savage fate; not only rides upon, but
is wedded and incorporated with it; hence the athletic desire and
refreshment her coming imparts.
This is the invariable order of nature. Beauty without a rank material
basis enfeebles. The world is not thus made; man is not thus begotten
and nourished.
It comes to me there is something implied or understood when we
look upon a beautiful object, that has quite as much to do with the
impression made upon the mind as anything in the object itself; perhaps
more. There is somehow an immense and undefined background of vast and
unconscionable energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean storms, and cleft
mountains, across which things of beauty play, and to which they
constantly defer; and when this background is wanting, as it is in much
current poetry, beauty sickens and dies, or at most has only a feeble
existence.
Nature does nothing merely for beauty; beauty follows as the inevitable
result; and the final impression of health and finish which her works
make upon the mind is owing as much to those things which are not
technically called beautiful as to those which are. The former give
identity to the latter. The one is to the other what substance is to
form, or bone to flesh. The beauty of nature includes all that is called
beautiful, as its flower; and all that is not called beautiful, as its
stalk and roots.
Indeed, when I go to the woods or the fields, or ascend to the hilltop,
I do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be breathing it
like the air. I am not dazzled or astonished; I am in no hurry to look
lest it be gone. I would not have the litter and debris removed, or the
banks trimmed, or the ground painted. What I enjoy is commensurate
with the earth and sky itself. It clings to the rocks and trees; it is
kindred to the roughness and savagery; it rises from every tangle and
chasm; it perches on the dry oak-stubs with the hawks and buzzards; the
crows shed it from their wings and weave it into their nests of coarse
sticks; the fox barks it, the cattle low it, and every mountain path
leads to its haunts. I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it.
It is not an adornment; its roots strike to the centre of the earth.
All true beauty in nature or in art is like the iridescent hue of
mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result of
the arrangement of the particles,--the flowering of the mechanism of the
shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back
again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace
of strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm,
delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit," says Heine,--and the same
thing is true of beauty,--"isolated, is worthless. It is only endurable
when it rests on a solid basis."
In fact, beauty as a separate and distinct thing does not exist. Neither
can it be reached by any sorting or sifting or clarifying process. It is
an experience of the mind, and must be preceded by certain conditions,
just as light is an experience of the eye, and sound of the ear.
To attempt to manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to manufacture
truth; and to give it to us in poems or any form of art, without a lion
of some sort, a lion of truth or fitness or power, is to emasculate it
and destroy its volition.
But current poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to do this very
thing, to give us beauty without beauty's antecedents and foil. The
poets want to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since beauty is
the chief attraction, why not have this part alone, pure and
unadulterated,--why not pluck the plumage from the bird, the flower
from its stalk, the moss from the rock, the shell from the shore, the
honey-bag from the bee, and thus have in brief what pleases us? Hence,
with rare exceptions, one feels, on opening the latest book of poems,
like exclaiming, Well, here is the beautiful at last divested of
everything else,--of truth, of power, of utility,--and one may add of
beauty, too. It charms as color, or flowers, or jewels, or perfume
charms--and that is the end of it.
It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt to report nature,
that every object as it stands in the circuit of cause and effect has
a history which involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the
interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as its integrity in
this respect is preserved. In nature we are prepared for any opulence
of color or of vegetation, or freak of form, or display of any kind,
because of the preponderance of the common, ever-present feature of the
earth. The foil is always at hand. In like manner in the master poems we
are never surfeited with mere beauty.
Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the wide background of
rudeness, darkness, and strength,--and disengages her from absolute
nature! The mild and beneficent aspects of nature,--what gulfs and
abysses of power underlie them! The great shaggy, barbaric earth,--yet
the summing-up, the plenum, of all we know or can know of beauty! So the
orbic poems of the world have a foundation as of the earth itself, and
are beautiful because they are something else first. Homer chose for his
groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell;
in Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal
world, with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is
Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good
deal tamed, but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty,
and manly Norman, and in many forms yet stimulates the mind.
The perception of cosmical beauty comes by a vital original process.
It is in some measure a creative act, and those works that rest upon
it make demands--perhaps extraordinary ones--upon the reader or the
beholder. We regard mere surface glitter, or mere verbal sweetness, in
a mood entirely passive, and with a pleasure entirely profitless. The
beauty of excellent stage scenery seems much more obvious and easy of
apprehension than the beauty of trees and hills themselves, inasmuch as
the act of association in the mind is much easier and cheaper than the
act of original perception.
Only the greatest works in any department afford any explanation of this
wonder we call nature, or aid the mind in arriving at correct
notions concerning it. To copy here and there a line or a trait is no
explanation; but to translate nature into another language--to bridge
it to us, to repeat in some sort the act of creation itself--is the
crowning triumph of poetic art.