The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 44, June, 1861. Various
under the feet, mosses and pebbles and grasses,—out of the loveliness of moon and stars, their harmonies and changes,—out of sea-foam, and what sea-foam reveals to us of the rich and strange things beneath the waters far down,—out of sweet human eyes,—out of all these things creeps into our spirits the knowledge that God is Love, and His handiwork the expression of ineffable tenderness and affection. I believe, indeed, that the principle of Beauty, philosophically speaking, pervades all material objects, all motions and sounds in Nature,—that it enters intimately into the very idea of Creation. But we, poor finite beings, do not seek for it, as we do for gold and gems. We remain content with those conventional manifestations of it which are continually and instinctively touching our senses as we walk the earth. Fearfully and wonderfully as we are made, there is no quality in our being so blessed as this sensitiveness to Beauty. All the organs of our life are attuned by it to that vast universal symphony which, in spite of the warring elements of passion and prejudice, unites us in friendly sympathies with all mankind. If
"the meanest flower that blows can bring Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"—
if it can so move some of us, who have cared to open the portals of our hearts to receive and cherish the little waif,—why, verily, the simple violet that blooms alike under every sky, the passing cloud that floats changing ever over every land, gathering equal glories from the sunsets of Italy and Labrador, are more potent missionaries of peace and good-will to all the earth than the most persuasive accents of human eloquence.
These are familiar truths. Like
"The stretchèd metre of an antique song,"
they flow from our grateful lips in ready words. But we do not suspect how these manifestations of material Beauty are received by the mysterious alembic of the soul,—how they are worked up there by exquisite and subtile processes of moral chemistry, humanized, spiritualized, and appropriated unconsciously to sweet uses of piety and affection. We do not know how the star, the flower, the dear human face, the movement of a wave, the song of a bird,—we do not know how these things enter into the heart, become ideal, mingle with human emotions, consecrate and are consecrated, and come forth once more into light, but transfigured into tenderest sympathies and the gentle offices of charity and grace. There was Wordsworth,—he knew something of this still machinery, this "kiss of toothèd wheels" within the soul of man. Listen to him,—he had been to Tintern Abbey and heard once more the "soft inland murmur" of the Wye;—
"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings, too,
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love."
And then who that has ever read it can forget his exquisite picture in the "Education of a little Child"?—
"And she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place,
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty burn of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face!"
The material Beauty of the world, as exhibited in the manifold objects, sounds, perfumes, motions of Nature, is created for a nobler purpose than only to delight the senses and please the aesthetic faculties. I believe it is the distant source whence flow all our dear daily affections. We know, that, according to the suggestions of our merely human passions and instincts, we ease our hearts of Love by heaping treasures and the choicest gifts of fancy in the laps of those whom we most dearly cherish. We take no credit to ourselves for such precious prodigalities; for they are the inevitable and disinterested outpourings of affection. They are received as such. And when we cast our eyes abroad and behold the loving prodigality of a divine hand, we accept the manifestation, are made happy in the consciousness of being beloved, and, constituted as we are in the image and likeness of God, express our instinctive gratitude in those fine human sympathies which impress the seal of Truth on the primary idea of our creation.
And so, blessed are the shadows of porches and cloisters! Blessed the hours of serene meditation, when the "tender grace of days that are dead," of flowers that have faded, of scenes "gone glimmering through the dream of things that were," comes back to us with a new meaning, softening and refining the heart to unexpected capacities of affection. But how they fade away, these ghostly and unsubstantial pageants, when they "scent the morning air"! How they leave in our hearts nought but the dim consciousness that we are capable of an existence ineffably deeper and vaster than that which we lead in the visible world! Nought but this? Alas, poor human nature! do we leave the casket of Pandora open in wanton carelessness, and let all escape but the mere scent of the roses? Or does there not remain, behind an indefinable presence to comfort and console us,—the precious Ideal of Beauty,—
"The light that never was on sea or land,
The inspiration and the poet's dream"?
The human heart forever yearns to create,—this is the pure antique word for it,—to give expression and life to an evasive loveliness that haunts the soul in those moments when the body is laid asleep and the spirit walks. There is a continual and godlike longing to embody these elusive phantoms of Beauty. But the immortal songs which remain unsung, the exquisite idyls which gasp for words, the bewildering and restless imagery which seeks in vain the eternal repose of marble or of canvas,—while these confess the affectionate and divine desires of humanity, they prove how few there are to whom it is given to learn the great lesson of Creation. When one arises among us, who, like Pygmalion, makes no useless appeal to the Goddess of Beauty for the gift of life for his Ideal, and who creates as he was created, we cherish him as a great interpreter of human love. We call him poet, composer, artist, and speak of him reverently as Master. We say that his lips have been wet with dews of Hybla,—that, like the sage of Crotona, he has heard the music of the spheres,—that he comes to us, another Numa, radiant and inspired from the kisses of Egeria.
Thus, as infinite Love begets infinite Beauty, so does infinite Beauty reflect into finite perceptions that image of its divine parentage which the antique world worshipped under the personification of Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus, and recognized as the great creative principle lying at the root of all high Art.
There is a curious passage in Boehme, which relates how Satan, when asked the cause of the enmity of God and his own consequent downfall, replied,—"I wished to be an Artist." So, according to antique tradition, Prometheus manufactured a man and woman of clay, animated them with fire stolen from the chariot of the Sun, and was punished for the crime of Creation; Titans chained him to the rocks of the Indian Caucasus for thirty thousand years!
This Ideal, this Aphrodite of old mythologies, still reigns over the world of Art, and every truly noble effort of the artist is saturated with her spirit, as with a religion. It is impossible for a true work of Art to exist, unless this great creative principle of Love be present in its inception, in its execution, in its detail. It must be pervaded with the warmth of human, passionate affection. The skill which we are so apt to worship is but the instrument in the hands of Love. It is the means by which this humanity is transferred to the work, and there idealized in the forms of Nature. Thus the test of Art is in our own hearts. It is not something far away from us, throwing into our presence gleaming reflections from some supernal source of Light and Beauty; but it is very near to us,—so near, that, like the other blessings which lie at our feet, we overlook it in our far-reaching searches after the imaginary good. We, poor underlings,