Essays — First Series
which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to
man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine,
which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient
to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and
solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing
loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty
was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence
makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his
attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out
her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the
maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and
virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in
his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a
likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood.
The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond
mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the
nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are
touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find
whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is
destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to
organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love
known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite
other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy
and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot
approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves’-neck lustres,
hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things,
which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at
appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he
said to music, “Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all
my endless life I have not found, and shall not find.” The same fluency
may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then
beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out
of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and
measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to
say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is
always represented in a transition _from_ that which is representable
to the senses, _to_ that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a
stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is
not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and
fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it
Landor inquires “whether it is not to be referred to some purer state
of sensation and existence.”
In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when
it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an
end; when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions;
when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel
his right to it, though he were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it
than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.
Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is that to you?” We say so
because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It
is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in
yourself and can never know.
This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient
writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here
on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its
own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light
of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of
this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity
sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of
beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and
fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her
and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and
intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of
that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.
If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul
was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped
nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise which
beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and
suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the
body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers
contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then
they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their
love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the
sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and
hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent,
magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these
nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from
loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful
soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true
and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains a
clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted
from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy
that they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and
hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in
curing the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of the divine
beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint
which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest
beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this
ladder of created souls.
Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The
doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius
taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer
unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which
presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world,
whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest discourse
has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism
intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and
affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing
but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.
But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our
play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges
its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light
proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things
nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the
house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance,
on politics and geography and history. But things are ever grouping
themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,
size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us.
Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the
soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct,
predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower
relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of
persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it
gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at
each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual
intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this
new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in
the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances,
they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion,
to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a
perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly
ensouled:—
“Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.”
Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens
fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than
Juliet,—than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion,
are all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all
form. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in
comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with
the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star,
the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that
now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding up
costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in
discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom
for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be
harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow,
and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with
Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus
effected and which adds a new value to every atom in nature—for it
transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a
golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element—is yet a
temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations,
nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in
clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and
puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul
which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects
incongruities, defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other.
Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them
to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these
virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and
continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and
attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection.
Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and
combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the
resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of
the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they
should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the
world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the
texture of man, of woman:—
“The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”
The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that
inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes
and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue,
all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once
flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in
violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good
understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the good
offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in
time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its
object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or
absent, of each other’s designs. At last they discover that all which
at first drew them together,—those once sacred features, that magical
play of charms,—was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the