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Part II
Part II
Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai. In all
design, art lies in making your object prominent, but there is a prior art in
choosing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have nothing casual, but
spring from the instincts of the nations that created them.
Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I know, I
have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about closets and mantel-pieces,
for twenty years together, simply because the tallowman gave it the form of a
rabbit; and, I suppose, it may continue to be lugged about unchanged for a
century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter,
and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed
and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept
for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper,
and the human race take charge of them that they shall not perish.
As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beautiful
form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced without end. How
many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the
Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Vesta? These are objects of
tenderness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is soon removed, and is
never repeated, but any beautiful building is copied and improved upon, so
that all masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable
forms, whilst the ugly ones die out.
The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or
forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in the human form. All
men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and
everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in woman. "To Eve," say
the Mahometans, "God gave two-thirds of all beauty." A beautiful woman is a
practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and
eloquence, in all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must to with
it, since a certain serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and
superiorities. Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often
cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, "Yes, I
am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I
yet behold." French memoires of the fifteenth century celebrate the name of
Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the
enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of
her native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to
compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least twice a week, and, as
often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in
England, in the last century, was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth
married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says,
"the concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at
court, on Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered on
chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them
get into their chairs; and people go early to get places at the theatres, when
it is known they will be there." "Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, "flock to
see the Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all night, in
and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her get into her post-chaise next
morning."
But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of Argos, or
Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this
magic very well, or can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to look into
beautiful eyes never so long. Women stand related to beautiful Nature around
us, and the enamored youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods
and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words
and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious
student. They refine and clear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing method
into what is dry and difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to;
we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expression which passes
from conversation into habit of style.
That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of
Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly face on a handsome ground; and we
see faces every day which have a good type, but have been marred in the
casting: a proof that we all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful,
if our ancestors had kept the laws, - as every lily and every rose is well.
But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short
legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal
insult and contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at
perpetual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level of
mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose countenance resembled
the face of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi describes a schoolmaster "so
ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him would derange the ecstasies of the
orthodox." Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a record in
sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say
that most faces and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue,
and one gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another; the
hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is physically as well as
metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and
bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign
some secret favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon pride, when a woman
possesses such a figure, that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a
shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor
on the world. And yet - it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression,
tires. Abbe Menage said of the President Le Bailleul, "that he was fit for
nothing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram intimates that the force
of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but when the like desire is
inflamed for one who is ill-favored. And petulant old gentlemen, who have
chanced to suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who have
seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who see, after a world of pains have
been successfully taken for the costume, how the least mistake in sentiment
takes all the beauty out of your clothes, - affirm, that the secret of
ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If
command, eloquence, art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all
the accidents that usually displease, please and raise esteem and wonder
higher. The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but he was
all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an
ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of
Newton, "he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England." Since
I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I be bold." Sir Philip
Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, "was no pleasant man in
countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and
long." Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of
years, were not handsome men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great
kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by
canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of
mankind, can enlarge knowledge, `tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to
his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all; whether his
legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will
come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This is the
triumph of expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and
friendly and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the
thought of passing our lives with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid
with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can
hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of
lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has
appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty
rides on her lion, as before. Still, "it was for beauty that the world was
made." The lives of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius
amidst the dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men
in all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own. If a man
can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd
about it all day, but its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable meaning; - if a
man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine
palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of Nature, that all her
powers serve him; `making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a
mountain for his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the
decorations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.
The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing, is only a
burst of beauty for a few years or a few months, at the perfection of youth,
and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain lovers of it, only transferring
our interest to interior excellence. And it is not only admirable in singular
and salient talents, but also in the world of manners.
But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty,
graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination,
not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all
analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, "it
swims on the light of forms." It is properly not in the form, but in the mind.
It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I
could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is
lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For
the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth
rightly speaks of "a light that never was on sea or land,; meaning, that it
was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his country-women,
that
- "half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die."
The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical
quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the
object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, - sea, sky,
rainbow, flowers, musical tone, - has in it somewhat which is not private, but
universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and
thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form,
speech, and manners, which is not of their person and family, but of a humane,
catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a
largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur,
like time and justice.
The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every
thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark
common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and
candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts
in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal
language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What!
has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I
did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are
clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the
representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or event
can ever give. There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated
to some stroke of the imagination.
The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of
the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars
of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not
express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong.
Into every beautiful object, there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine,
and just as much into form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon,
as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret
architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now
one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more
interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of
things.
The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or
gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is
familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners, or a phrase of
poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches,
lifts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a truer line, which
the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, "vis superba
formae," which the poets praise, - under calm and precise outline, the
immeasurable and divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.
All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique
sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever in proportion to
the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem
impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled
skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the
woman who has shared with us the moral sentiment, - her locks must appear to
us sublime. Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first
agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye,
up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human
face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character in manners, up to the
ineffable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps
tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception
of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from
a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude
and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, - the first stair on the
scale to the temple of the Mind.
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