Essays Æsthetical

by

George H. Calvert

1875

Contents

ESSAYS ÆSTHETICAL.

I.

The Beautiful.

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The Beautiful is one of the immortal themes. It cannot die; it grows not old. On the same day with the sun was beauty born, and its life runs parallel with the path of that great beautifier. As a subject for exposition, it is at once easy and difficult: easy, from the affluence of its resources; difficult, from the exactions which its own spirit makes in the use of them.

Beauty—what is it? To answer this question were to solve more than one problem. Shall we attempt what has been so often attempted and never fully achieved? Such attempts are profitable. What though we reach not the very heart of the mystery, we may get near enough to hearken to the throb of its power, and our minds will be nerved by the approximation.

To him who has the gift to feel its presence, nature teems with beauty. Whithersoever the senses reach, whenever emotion kindles, wherever the mind seeks food for its finer appetites, there is beauty. It expects us at the dawn; it is about us, “an hourly neighbor,” through the day; at night it looks down on us from star-peopled immensities. Glittering on green lawns, glowing in sunsets, flashing through storm-clouds, gilding our wakeful hours, irradiating sleep, it is ever around, within us, eager to sweeten our labors, to purify our thoughts. Nature is a vast treasure-house of beauty, whereof the key is in the human heart.

But many are the hearts that have never opened far enough to disclose the precious key enfolded in their depths. Whole peoples are at this moment ignorant that they live amid such wealth. As with them now, so in the remote primitive times of our own race, before history was, nature was almost speechless to man. The earth was a waste, or but a wide hunting ground or pasturage; and human life a round of petty animal circles, scarcely sweeping beyond the field of the senses; until there gradually grew up the big-eyed Greek and the deep-souled Hebrew. Then, through creative thought,—that is, thought quickened and exalted by an inward thirst for the beautiful,—one little corner of Europe became radiant, and the valley of Tempe and the wooded glens of Parnassus shone for the first time on the vision of men; for their eyes—opened from long sleep by inward stirring—were become as mirrors, and gave back the light of nature:

And man, heated by the throbs of his swelling heart, made gods after his own image,—forms of such life and power and harmony that the fragments of them, spared by time, are still guarded as faultless models of manhood. And the vales and groves and streams were peopled with beauteous shapes. And the high places were crowned with temples which, in their majestic purity, look as though they had been posited there from above by heavenly hands. And by the teemful might of sculptors and painters and poets the dim past was made resurgent and present in glorious transfiguration. And the moral law was grasped at by far-reaching philosophies. In this affluence of genial activity so much truth was embodied in so much beauty, that by the products of the Greek mind even the newer, the deeper, the wiser Christian spirit is still instructed, still exalted.

In Asia, too, a chosen people early made a revelation of the beautiful. The Hebrews were introspective. At once ardent and thoughtful, passionate and spiritual, their vigorous natures were charged with fiery materials for inward conflicts. Out of the secret chambers of troubled souls their poets and prophets sent forth cries of despair and of exultation, of expostulation and self-reproach, that ever find an echo in the conscience-smitten, sorrow-laden bosom of man. The power and wisdom of God they saw as no other ancient people had seen them. In the grandeurs and wonders of creation they could behold the being and the might and the goodness of the Creator. The strong, rich hearts of their seers yearned for a diviner life, in the deep, true consciousness they felt that there can be peace and joy to man only through reconcilement with God. And feeling their own unworthiness and impurity, as well as that of their people, they uttered their spiritual desires, and their aspirations and disappointments and indignations and humiliations, in strains that make their great writings sound like one long, impassioned, rhythmic wail through the bars of a dungeon. Gloomy, wrathful, and intense, their utterances are grand and pathetic and sublime; but the beautiful plays through them, and gilds their highest points as the white crests do the billows of a black, tempestuous sea.

Save these two, no other nations of antiquity, except the Hindoos, seem to have had more than a superficial susceptibility to the beautiful. The Romans learnt the arts from the Greeks, whom they imitated, at a wide distance, in poetry as well as in sculpture and architecture. The remnants of art found in the valley of the Nile prove the Egyptians to have had the germ without the vitality to unfold it. In the literature of the Hindoos there are currents of pure poetry and of biblical depth. In passing down from ancient to modern times the Persians and the Arabians light the long way with scintillations from the beautiful.

The ugly semi-barbarian darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe was first broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothic cathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century the German