"A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face;
a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form;
it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures;
it is the finest of the fine arts."
EMERSON'S Essays, Second Series, iv., p. 162.
A few days since I was walking with a friend, who, unfortunately for
himself, seldom meets with anything in the world of realities worthy of
comparison with the ideal of his fancy, which, like the bird in the
Arabian tale, glides perpetually before him, always near yet never
overtaken. He was half humorously, half seriously, complaining of the
lack of beauty in the faces and forms that passed us on the crowded
sidewalk. Some defect was noticeable in all: one was too heavy, another
too angular; here a nose was at fault, there a mouth put a set of
otherwise fine features out of countenance; the fair complexions had red
hair, and glossy black locks were wasted upon dingy ones. In one way or
another all fell below his impossible standard.
The beauty which my friend seemed in search of was that of proportion
and coloring; mechanical exactness; a due combination of soft curves and
obtuse angles, of warm carnation and marble purity. Such a man, for
aught I can see, might love a graven image, like the girl of Florence
who pined into a shadow for the Apollo Belvidere, looking coldly on her
with stony eyes from his niche in the Vatican. One thing is certain,--
he will never find his faultless piece of artistical perfection by
searching for it amidst flesh-and-blood realities. Nature does not,
as far as I can perceive, work with square and compass, or lay on her
colors by the rules of royal artists or the dunces of the academies.
She eschews regular outlines. She does not shape her forms by a common
model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her
who first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety and
picturesque inequality of Nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying
beauty. Look at her primitive woods; scattered trees, with moist sward
and bright mosses at their roots; great clumps of green shadow, where
limb intwists with limb and the rustle of one leaf stirs a hundred
others,--stretching up steep hillsides, flooding with green beauty the
valleys, or arching over with leaves the sharp ravines, every tree and
shrub unlike its neighbor in size and proportion,--the old and storm-
broken leaning on the young and vigorous,--intricate and confused,
without order or method. Who would exchange this for artificial French
gardens, where every tree stands stiff and regular, clipped and trimmed
into unvarying conformity, like so many grenadiers under review? Who
wants eternal sunshine or shadow? Who would fix forever the loveliest
cloudwork of an autumn sunset, or hang over him an everlasting
moonlight? If the stream had no quiet eddying place, could we so admire
its cascade over the rocks? Were there no clouds, could we so hail the
sky shining through them in its still, calm purity? Who shall venture
to ask our kind Mother Nature to remove from our sight any one of her
forms or colors? Who shall decide which is beautiful, or otherwise, in
itself considered?
There are too many, like my fastidious friend, who go through the world
"from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"--who have always some fault
or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider
themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide
with their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personal
convenience. In one of his early poems, Coleridge has well expressed a
truth, which is not the less important because it is not generally
admitted. The idea is briefly this: that the mind gives to all things
their coloring, their gloom, or gladness; that the pleasure we derive
from external nature is primarily from ourselves:--
"from the mind itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist,
Enveloping the earth."
The real difficulty of these lifelong hunters after the beautiful exists
in their own spirits. They set up certain models of perfection in their
imaginations, and then go about the world in the vain expectation of
finding them actually wrought out according to pattern; very
unreasonably calculating that Nature will suspend her everlasting laws
for the purpose of creating faultless prodigies for their especial
gratification.
The authors of Gayeties and Gravities give it as their opinion that no
object of sight is regarded by us as a simple disconnected form, but
that--an instantaneous reflection as to its history, purpose, or
associations converts it into a concrete one,--a process, they shrewdly
remark, which no thinking being can prevent, and which can only be
avoided by the unmeaning and stolid stare of "a goose on the common or a
cow on the green." The senses and the faculties of the understanding
are so blended with and dependent upon each other that not one of them
can exercise its office alone and without the modification of some
extrinsic interference or suggestion. Grateful or unpleasant
associations cluster around all which sense takes cognizance of; the
beauty which we discern in an external object is often but the
reflection of our own minds.
What is beauty, after all? Ask the lover who kneels in homage to one
who has no attractions for others. The cold onlooker wonders that he
can call that unclassic combination of features and that awkward form
beautiful. Yet so it is. He sees, like Desdemona, her "visage in her
mind," or her affections. A light from within shines through the
external uncomeliness,--softens, irradiates, and glorifies it. That
which to others seems commonplace and unworthy of note is to him, in the
words of Spenser,--
"A sweet, attractive kind of grace;
A full assurance given by looks;
Continual comfort in a face;
The lineaments of Gospel books."
"Handsome is that handsome does,--hold up your heads, girls!" was the
language of Primrose in the play when addressing her daughters. The
worthy matron was right. Would that all my female readers who are
sorrowing foolishly because they are not in all respects like Dubufe's
Eve, or that statue of the Venus "which enchants the world," could be
persuaded to listen to her. What is good looking, as Horace Smith
remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,--generous in
your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my
word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration. Loving and
pleasant associations will gather about you. Never mind the ugly
reflection which your glass may give you. That mirror has no heart.
But quite another picture is yours on the retina of human sympathy.
There the beauty of holiness, of purity, of that inward grace which
passeth show, rests over it, softening and mellowing its features just
as the full calm moonlight melts those of a rough landscape into
harmonious loveliness. "Hold up your heads, girls!" I repeat after
Primrose. Why should you not? Every mother's daughter of you can be
beautiful. You can envelop yourselves in an atmosphere of moral and
intellectual beauty, through which your otherwise plain faces will look
forth like those of angels. Beautiful to Ledyard, stiffening in the
cold of a northern winter, seemed the diminutive, smokestained women of
Lapland, who wrapped him in their furs and ministered to his necessities
with kindness and gentle words of compassion. Lovely to the homesick
heart of Park seemed the dark maids of Sego, as they sung their low and
simple song of welcome beside his bed, and sought to comfort the white
stranger, who had "no mother to bring him milk and no wife to grind him
corn." Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from
marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and
outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The
heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward
environment, it discovers a deeper and more real loveliness.
This was well understood by the old painters. In their pictures of
Mary, the virgin mother, the beauty which melts and subdues the gazer is
that of the soul and the affections, uniting the awe and mystery of that
mother's miraculous allotment with the irrepressible love, the
unutterable tenderness, of young maternity,--Heaven's crowning miracle
with Nature's holiest and sweetest instinct. And their pale Magdalens,
holy with the look of sins forgiven,--how the divine beauty of their
penitence sinks into the heart! Do we not feel that the only real
deformity is sin, and that goodness evermore hallows and sanctifies its
dwelling-place? When the soul is at rest, when the passions and desires
are all attuned to the divine harmony,--
"Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-ordered law,"
The Haunted Palace, by Edgar A. Poe.
do we not read the placid significance thereof in the human countenance?
"I have seen," said Charles Lamb, "faces upon which the dove of peace
sat brooding." In that simple and beautiful record of a holy life, the
Journal of John Woolman, there is a passage of which I have been more
than once reminded in my intercourse with my fellow-beings: "Some
glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true
meekness. There is a harmony in the sound of that voice to which divine
love gives utterance."
Quite the ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the world
calls beautiful. Through its "silver veil" the evil and ungentle
passions looked out hideous and hateful. On the other hand, there are
faces which the multitude at the first glance pronounce homely,
unattractive, and such as "Nature fashions by the gross," which I always
recognize with a warm heart-thrill; not for the world would I have one
feature changed; they please me as they are; they are hallowed by kind
memories; they are beautiful through their associations; nor are they
any the less welcome that with my admiration of them "the stranger
intermeddleth not."
|
