ECCLESIASTES iii. ii 363
L
The Sense of Beauty.
*' He hath made everything beautiful in its time."
Beauty is the most elusive and analysable thing that enters within the range of our perceptions. We have the idea of the beautiful, but we can never say just why any particular thing is to be pronounced beautiful, or wanting in beauty, as the case may be. Beauty is God's art, God's manner of working. Beauty is the necessary conception of the Creator's thought, the necessary product of His hand ; variety in beauty is the necessary expression of His infinite mind. In created things there are, of course, necessary limitations ; but the Creator seems to have im- pressed upon the things that He has made all the variety of which they are capable ; no two faces, or forms, or voices, or flowers, or blades of grass are alike. Even decay and disorganization have an iridescence of their own. Beauty is not merely the surface adornment of creation, like paint upon a house, like pictures upon its walls, like jewellery upon a woman. Beauty permeates nature through and through ; the microscope, the dissecting knife, reveal it ; there is no hidden ugliness, no mere surface beauty, in God's works. If you try to eliminate their element of beauty, you destroy them. The core of the fruit is as beautiful as its rind. Beauty is an essential part of the nature of things. Equally with substance it inheres in everything that God has made. It is part of the perfection of God's works, part of the perfection of God Himself ; like truth, like holiness, like beneficence, like graciousness.
^ Why we receive pleasure from some forms and colours, and not from others, is no more to be asked or answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood. The utmost subtlety of in- vestigations will only lead us to ultimate instincts and principles of human nature, for which no further reason can be given than the simple will of the Deity that we should be so created.^
^ The nearest approach I can make myself to an explanation of what beauty is — and even that is no explanation, but only an index finger pointing towards it — is to say that it is the witness ^ Euskin, Modern Painters.
364 ETERNITY IN THE HEART
in the soul of that which is as opposed to that which seems — the real of which this world is but the shadow ; it is a glimpse, an intimation of the Supernal, the state of being in which there is no lack, no discord, strife, or wrong, and where nothing is wanting to the ideal perfection, whatever it may be. In other words, it is the eternal truth reminding us of its presence, though unable with our limitations to do more than brush us with its wings. Keats hits the mark in his tender line :
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.*
1. The beauty of the world is something quite distinct from use; it is something superadded. It is like the chasing of a goblet which would be as useful if it had no beauty of form. Whatever may be said of the beauty of true utility it is unques- tionable that the most intense of the emotions called out in presence of the beautiful have no connexion whatever with any thought of the fitness or unfitness of the objects thus perceived for any particular purpose, or of the correctness of the relation occupied by them to any larger category or to creation as a whole. When we feel the beauty of a tree, for instance, or a jutting crag, we are not influenced in the slightest by anything in their appear- ance which suggests that they are in their right place or that in form they obey the line of development which makes in some way towards a fuller expression of life and power.
^ Ruskin has pointed out that the clouds could do all their work without their beauty. But they do not. They spread a perfect panorama of loveliness above us. Sometimes it is the feathery cirrus cloud, looking, as William Blake said, " as if the angels had gone to worship and had left their plumes lying there." Another time the cumulus cloud, with piled, heaving bosom, throbbing with anger, fills the heavens, soon to find relief in the lightning flash and the cracking thunder. Or it is the stratus clouds, placid and level, rising step behind step, looking so solid that imagination finds it easy to mount them and reach the land which is afar off, where is the King in His beauty.*
2. Beauty, however, is not without use. It is the messenger of God's love to the world, showing that all creation "means intensely and means good." It is the fringe of the Lord's own
1 R. J. Campbell. ■ G. Eayres.
ECCLESIASTES iii. ii 365
self, the outshining of His presence, the appeal of His love. Euskin says that beauty is " written on the arched sky ; it looks out from every star; it is among the hills and valleys of the earth, where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmo- sphere of eternal winter, or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind, with its dark waves of green foliage ; it is spread out like a legible language upon the broad face of the unsleeping ocean; it is the poetry of nature; it is that which uplifts within us, until it is strong enough to overlook the shadows of our place of probation, which breaks link after link of the chain that binds us to materiality and which opens to our imagination a world of spiritual beauty and holiness."