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Part I
Part I
The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books
approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of
our science, and how far off, and at arm`s length, it is from its objects! Our
botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace
and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The
geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does
he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? What
effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of
marl and of alluvium?
We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach
us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking
together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull
dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and
inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me,
is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his
body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the
road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views
when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable
to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature.
Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated
beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and
however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and
divine, the soul`s avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century,
remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to
pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one
element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, - that was in the
right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than
the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are
not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature
along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns
us more than the pouring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured
by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and
vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through
his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the
antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his
personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and
perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system. `Tis curious
that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any
more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep man believes
in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will
decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the
heart`s blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds.
From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events.
But we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a
citizen, and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his
money value, his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange,
easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music and wine.
The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into
Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth,
his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind;
and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is
not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise,
but they leave us where they found us. The invention is of use to the
inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like
the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science in
England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral
purpose. There`s a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does
science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a
kind of man as my professor is. The collector has dried all the plants in his
herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. He has got all snakes and lizards in
his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a
bottle. Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The
clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual health.
Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince,
Tisso, one day riding in the forest saw a herd of elk sporting. "See how
happy," he said, "these browsing elks are! Why should not priests, lodged and
fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?" Returning home, he
imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the
sovereignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this empire for seven days: at
the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death." At the end of the
seventh day, the king inquired "From what cause hast thou become so
emaciated?" He answered, "From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined:
"Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to
thyself, in seven days I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple
incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?"
But the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their
pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant, dedicate
themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have
they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any
event, which we demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the
wares, of the chicane?
No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities;
and, though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us
only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the
birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side with this
arid, departmental, post mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of
Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the
other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form, and our
sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts of
a science which we study without book, whose teachers and subjects are always
near us.
So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in
this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street
oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers: but they all prove
the transparency. Every spirit makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess
from the house to the inhabitant. But not less does Nature furnish us with
every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty
of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of
well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manner of
youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company
that escort us through life, - we know how these forms thrill, paralyze,
provoke, inspire and enlarge us.
Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world.
All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general
nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral
beauty, or beauty of the soul.
The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of
each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of
fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed; - on an evil man,
resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They thought the
same genius, at the death of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they
pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship. We recognize
obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that every
man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We
know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the
reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side,
everybody knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of
ability, never impress us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and
peep with their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we
pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the
little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they would regain their
freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first step into
thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which
can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him, is the
friendly fire which expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that
liberty and power await him.
The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the
foundations of things. Goethe said, "The beautiful is a manifestation of
secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever
concealed from us." And the working of this deep instinct makes all the
excitement - much of it superficial and absurd enough - about works of art,
which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece and Egypt.
Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above
his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only
commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees
beauty, life acquires a very high value.
I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a
definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities. We
ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which
exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean
of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the most ascending
quality. We say, love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a
bandage round his eyes. Blind: - yes, because he does not see what he does not
like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding
what he seeks, and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was
painted Jame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was all
limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an immortal
child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than
when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature have a new
charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament was added for ornament,
but is a sign of some better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of
form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of
structure: or beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to us. `Tis a law
of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a
rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in
the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to
its end is an increase of beauty.
The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and
of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research, - namely, that all
beauty must be organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the
soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion:
health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye. `Tis
the adjustment of the size and of the joining of the sockets of the skeleton,
that gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the
deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can never teach a
badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds from its root,
and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence. Hence our taste
in building rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain of the
wood: refuses pilasters and columns that support nothing, and allows the real
supporters of the house honestly to show themselves. Every necessary or
organic action pleases the beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a farmer
sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the carpenter building a
ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is becoming to the
wise eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on
the sea! but ships in the theatre, - or ships kept for picturesque effect on
Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to stand in fitting costumes at a
penny an hour! - What a difference in effect between a battalion of troops
marching to action, and one of our independent companies on a holiday! In the
midst of a military show, and a festal procession gay with banners, I saw a
boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and poising it on the
top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe the most elegant
imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the decorated procession by
this startling beauty.
Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born
of the foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but
only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat
beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and
method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize,
become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition,
as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness,
heaping, or concentration on one feature, - a long nose, a sharp chin, a
hump-back, - is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful
as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent
symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the
restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained.
This is the charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the
locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually
in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and
curving movements. I have been told by persons of experience in matters of
taste, that the fashions follow a law of graduation, and are never arbitrary.
The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last
mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This
fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes. It is
necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by an
intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born
of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is offensively
sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world from her
imperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of
mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just
gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how much it can
be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive
parties, may easily come to be conceded without question, if this rule be
observed. Thus the circumstances may be easily imagined, in which woman may
speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most
naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or
flowing belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation
of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the
annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we
follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward action, is the
argument for the immortality.
One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, - Beauty
rides on a lion. Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result
of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the
most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the
most alar strength with the least weight. "It is the purgation of
superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in
natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for
every novelty of color or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful
arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous once that can be
spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of column. In
rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it
is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
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