Beauty

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Title:     Beauty
Author: Arthur C. Benson [More Titles by Benson]

I was visited, as I sate in my room to-day, by one of those sudden impressions of rare beauty that come and go like flashes, and which leave one desiring a similar experience. The materials of the impression were simple and familiar enough. My room looks out into a little court; there is a plot of grass, and to the right of it an old stone-built wall, close against which stands a row of aged lime-trees. Straight opposite, at right angles to the wall, is the east side of the Hall, with its big plain traceried window enlivened with a few heraldic shields of stained glass. While I was looking out to-day there came a flying burst of sun, and the little corner became a sudden feast of delicate colour; the fresh green of the grass, the foliage of the lime-trees, their brown wrinkled stems, the pale moss on the walls, the bright points of colour in the emblazonries of the window, made a sudden delicate harmony of tints. I had seen the place a hundred times before without ever guessing what a perfect picture it made.

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health or disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sits itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift. Then again come seasons when all is well with us, when we are prosperous and contented, interested in life and all its concerns, when no perception of beauty comes near us; when we are tranquil and content, and take no heed of the delicate visions of the day; when music has no inner voice, and poetry seems a mere cheerful jingling of ordered phrases. Then again we have a time of gloom and dreariness; work has no interest, pleasure no savour; we go about our business and our delight alike in a leaden mood of dulness; and yet again, when we are surrounded with care and trouble, perhaps in pain or weakness of body, there flashes into the darkened life an exquisite perception of things beautiful and rare; the vision of a spring copse with all its tapestry of flowers, bright points of radiant colour, fills us with a strange yearning, a delightful pain; in such a mood a few chords of music, the haunting melody of some familiar line of verse, the song of a bird at dawn, the light of sunset on lonely fields, thrill us with an inexpressible rapture. Perhaps some of those who read these words will say that it is all an unreal, a fantastic experience of which I speak. Of course there are many tranquil, wholesome, equable natures to whom such an experience is unknown; but it is to me one of the truest and commonest things of my life to be visited by this strange perception and appreciation of beauty, which gives the days in which I am conscious of it a memorable quality, that seems to make them the momentous days of my life; and yet again the mood is so utterly withdrawn at intervals, that the despondent spirit feels that it can never return; and then a new day dawns, and the sense comes back again to bless me.

If the emotion which I describe followed the variations of bodily health; if it came when all was prosperous and joyful, and was withdrawn when the light was low; if it deserted me in seasons of robust vigour, and came when the bodily vitality was depressed, I could refer it to some physical basis. But it contradicts all material laws, and seems to come and go with a whimsical determination of its own. When it is with me, nothing can banish it; it pulls insistently at my elbow; it diverts my attention in the midst of the gravest business; and, on the other hand, no extremity of sorrow or gloom can suspend it. I have stood beside the grave of one I loved, with the shadow of urgent business, of hard detailed arrangements of a practical kind, hanging over me, with the light gone out of life, and the prospect unutterably dreary; and yet the strange spirit has been with me, so that a strain of music should have power to affect me to tears, and the delicate petals of the very funeral wreaths should draw me into a rapturous contemplation of their fresh curves, their lovely intricacy, their penetrating fragrance. In such a moment one could find it in one's heart to believe that some ethereal soulless creature, like Ariel of the "Tempest," was floating at one's side, directing one's attention, like a petulant child, to the things that touched its light-hearted fancy, and constraining one into an unsought enjoyment.

Neither does it seem to be an intellectual process; because it comes in the same self-willed way, alike when one's mind is deeply engrossed in congenial work, as well as when one is busy and distracted; one raises one's head for an instant, and the sunlight on a flowing water or on an ancient wall, the sound of the wind among trees, the calling of birds, take one captive with the mysterious spell; or on another day when I am working, under apparently the same conditions, the sun may fall golden on the old garden, the dove may murmur in the high elm, the daffodils may hang their sweet heads among the meadow-grass, and yet the scene, may be dark to me and silent, with no charm and no significance.

It all seems to enact itself in a separate region of the spirit, neither in the physical nor in the mental region. It may come for a few moments in a day, and then it may depart in an instant. I was taking a week ago what, for the sake of the associations, I call my holiday. I walked with a cheerful companion among spring woods, lying nestled in the folds and dingles of the Sussex hills; the sky was full of flying gleams; the distant ridges, clothed in wood, lay blue and remote in the warm air; but I cared for none of these things. Then, when we stood for a moment in a place where I have stood a hundred times before, where a full stream spills itself over a pair of broken lock-gates into a deserted lock, where the stonecrop grows among the masonry, and the alders root themselves among the mouldering brickwork, the mood came upon me, and I felt like a thirsty soul that has found a bubbling spring coming out cool from its hidden caverns on the hot hillside. The sight, the sound, fed and satisfied my spirit; and yet I had not known that I had needed anything.

That it is, I will not say, a wholly capricious thing, but a thing that depends upon a certain harmony of mood, is best proved by the fact that the same poem or piece of music which can at one time evoke the sensation most intensely, will at another time fail to convey the slightest hint of charm, so that one can even wonder in a dreary way what it could be that one had ever admired and loved. But it is this very evanescent quality which gives me a certain sense of security. If one reads the lives of people with strong aesthetic perceptions, such as Rossetti, Pater, J. A. Symonds, one feels that these natures ran a certain risk of being absorbed in delicate perception. One feels that a sensation of beauty was to them so rapturous a thing that they ran the risk of making the pursuit of such sensations the one object and business of their existence; of sweeping the waters of life with busy nets, in the hope of entangling some creature "of bright hue and sharp fin"; of considering the days and hours that were unvisited by such perceptions barren and dreary. This is, I cannot help feeling, a dangerous business; it is to make of the soul nothing but a delicate instrument for registering aesthetic perceptions; and the result is a loss of balance and proportion, an excess of sentiment. The peril is that, as life goes on, and as the perceptive faculty gets blunted and jaded, a mood of pessimism creeps over the mind.

From this I am personally saved by the fact that the sense of beauty is, as I have said, so whimsical in its movements. I should never think of setting out deliberately to capture these sensations, because it would be so futile a task. No kind of occupation, however prosaic, however absorbing, seems to be either favourable to this perception, or the reverse. It is not even like bodily health, which has its variations, but is on the whole likely to result from a certain defined regime of diet, exercise, and habits; and what would still more preserve me from making a deliberate attempt to capture it would be that it comes perhaps most poignantly and insistently of all when I am uneasy, overstrained, and melancholy. No! the only thing to do is to live one's life without reference to it, to be thankful when it comes, and to be contented when it is withdrawn.

I sometimes think that a great deal of stuff is both written and talked about the beauties of nature. By this I do not mean for a moment that nature is less beautiful than is supposed, but that many of the rapturous expressions one hears and sees used about the enjoyment of nature are very insincere; though it is equally true on the other hand that a great deal of genuine admiration of natural beauty is not expressed, perhaps hardly consciously felt. To have a true and deep appreciation of nature demands a certain poetical force, which is rare; and a great many people who have a considerable power of expression, but little originality, feel bound to expend a portion of this upon expressing an admiration for nature which they do not so much actually feel as think themselves bound to feel, because they believe that people in general expect it of them.

But on the other hand there is, I am sure, in the hearts of many quiet people a real love for and delight in the beauty of the kindly earth, the silent and exquisite changes, the influx and efflux of life, which we call the seasons, the rich transfiguring influences of sunrise and sunset, the slow or swift lapse of clear streams, the march and plunge of sea-billows, the bewildering beauty and aromatic scents of those delicate toys of God which we call flowers, the large air and the sun, the star-strewn spaces of the night.

Those who are fortunate enough to spend their lives in the quiet country-side have much of this tranquil and unuttered love of nature; and others again, who are condemned by circumstances to spend their days in toilsome towns, and yet have the instinct, derived perhaps from long generations of country forefathers, feel this beauty, in the short weeks when they are enabled to approach it, more poignantly still.

FitzGerald tells a story of how he went to see Thomas Carlyle in London, and sate with him in a room at the top of his house, with a wide prospect of house-backs and chimney-pots; and how the sage reviled and vituperated the horrors of city life, and yet left on FitzGerald's mind the impression that perhaps after all he did not really wish to leave it.

The fact remains, however, that a love of nature is part of the panoply of cultivation which at the present time people above a certain social standing feel bound to assume. Very few ordinary persons would care to avow that they took no interest in national politics, in games and sport, in literature, in appreciation of nature, or in religion. As a matter of fact the vital interest that is taken in these subjects, except perhaps in games and sport, is far below the interest that is expressed in them. A person who said frankly that he thought that any of these subjects were uninteresting, tiresome or absurd, would be thought stupid or affected, even brutal. Probably most of the people who express a deep concern for these things believe that they are giving utterance to a sincere feeling; but not to expatiate on the emotions which they mistake for the real emotion in the other departments, there are probably a good many people who mistake for a love of nature the pleasure of fresh air, physical movement, and change of scene. Many worthy golfers, for instance, who do not know that they are speaking insincerely, attribute, in conversation, the pleasure they feel in pursuing their game to the agreeable surroundings in which it is pursued; but my secret belief is that they pay more attention to the lie of the little white ball, and the character of bunkers, than to the pageantry of sea and sky.

As with all other refined pleasures, there is no doubt that the pleasure derived from the observation of nature can be, if not acquired, immensely increased by practice. I am not now speaking of the pursuit of natural history but the pursuit of natural emotion. The thing to aim at, as is the case with all artistic pleasures, is the perception of quality, of small effects. Many of the people Who believe themselves to have an appreciation of natural scenery cannot appreciate it except on a sensational scale. They can derive a certain pleasure from wide prospects of startling beauty, rugged mountains, steep gorges, great falls of water--all the things that are supposed to be picturesque. But though this is all very well as far as it goes, it is a very elementary kind of thing. The perception of which I speak is a perception which can be fed in the most familiar scene, in the shortest stroll, even in a momentary glance from a window. The things to look out for are little accidents of light and colour, little effects of chance grouping, the transfiguration of some well-known and even commonplace object, such as is produced by the sudden burst into greenness of the trees that peep over some suburban garden wall, or by the sunlight falling, by a happy fortune, on pool or flower. Much of course depends upon the inner mood; there are days when it seems impossible to be thrilled by anything, when a perverse dreariness holds the mind; and then all of a sudden the gentle and wistful mood flows back, and the world is full of beauty to the brim.

Here, if anywhere, in this town of ancient colleges, is abundant material of beauty for eye and mind. It is not, it is true, the simple beauty of nature; but nature has been invoked to sanctify and mellow art. These stately stone-fronted buildings have weathered like crags and precipices. They rise out of dark ancient embowered gardens. They are like bright birds of the forest dwelling contentedly in gilded cages. These great palaces of learning, beautiful when seen in the setting of sunny gardens, and with even a sterner dignity when planted, like a fortress of quiet, close to the very dust and din of the street, hold many treasures of stately loveliness and fair association; this city of palaces, thick-set with spires and towers, as rich and dim as Camelot, is invested with a romance that few cities can equal; and then the waterside pleasaunces with their trim alleys, their air of ancient security and wealthy seclusion, have an incomparable charm; day by day, as one hurries or saunters through the streets, the charm strikes across the mind with an incredible force, a newness of impression which is the test of the highest beauty. Yet these again are beauties of a sensational order which beat insistently upon the dullest mind. The true connoisseur of natural beauty acquiesces in, nay prefers, an economy, an austerity of effect. The curve of a wood seen a hundred times before, the gentle line of a fallow, a little pool among the pastures, fringed with rushes, the long blue line of the distant downs, the cloud-perspective, the still sunset glow--these will give him ever new delights, and delights that grow with observation and intuition.

I have spoken hitherto of nature as she appears; to the unruffled, the perceptive mind; but let us further consider what relation nature can bear to the burdened heart and the overshadowed mood. Is there indeed a vis medicatrix in nature which can heal our grief and console our anxieties? "The country for a wounded heart" says the old proverb. Is that indeed true? I am here inclined to part company with wise men and poets who have spoken and sung of the consoling power of nature. I think it is not so. It is true that anything which we love very deeply has a certain power of distracting the mind. But I think there is no greater agony than to be confronted with tranquil passionate beauty, when the heart and spirit are out of tune with it. In the days of one's joy, nature laughs with us; in the days of vague and fantastic melancholy, there is an air of wistfulness, of mystery, that ministers to our luxurious sadness. But when one bears about the heavy burden of a harassing anxiety of sorrow, then the smile on the face of nature has something poisonous, almost maddening about it. It breeds an emotion that is like the rage of Othello when he looks upon the face of Desdemona, and believes her false. Nature has no sympathy, no pity. She has her work to do, and the swift and bright process goes on; she casts her failures aside with merciless glee; she seems to say to men oppressed by sorrow and sickness, "This is no world for you; rejoice and make merry, or I have no need of you." In a far-off way, indeed, the gentle beauty of nature may help a sad heart, by seeming to assure one that the mind of God is set upon what is fair and sweet; but neither God nor nature seems to have any direct message to the stricken heart.

"Not till the fire is dying in the grate
Look we for any kinship with the stars,"

says a subtle poet; and such comfort as nature can give is not the direct comfort of sympathy and tenderness, but only the comfort that can be resolutely distilled from the contemplation of nature by man's indomitable spirit. For nature tends to replace rather than to heal; and the sadness of life consists for most of us in the irreplaceableness of the things we love and lose. The lesson is a hard one, that "Nature tolerates, she does not need." Let us only be sure that it is a true one, for nothing but the truth can give us ultimate repose. To the youthful spirit it is different, for all that the young and ardent need is that, if the old fails them, some new delight should be substituted. They but desire that the truth should be hidden from their gaze; as in the childish stories, when the hero and heroine have been safely piloted through danger and brought into prosperity, the door is closed with a snap. "They lived happily ever afterwards." But the older spirit knows that the "ever" must be deleted, makes question of the "afterwards," and looks through to the old age of bereavement and sorrow, when the two must again be parted.

But I would have every one who cares to establish a wise economy of life and joy, cultivate, by all means in his power, a sympathy with and a delight in nature. We tend, in this age of ours, when communication is so easy and rapid, when the daily paper brings the whole course of the world into our secluded libraries, to be too busy, too much preoccupied; to value excitement, above tranquillity, and interest above peace. It is good for us all to be much alone, not to fly from society, but resolutely to determine that we will not be dependent upon it for our comfort. I would have all busy people make times in their lives when, at the cost of some amusement, and paying the price perhaps of a little melancholy, they should try to be alone with nature and their own hearts. They should try to realize the quiet unwearying life that manifests itself in field and wood. They should wander alone in solitary places, where the hazel-hidden stream makes music, and the bird sings out of the heart of the forest; in meadows where the flowers grow brightly, or through the copse, purple with bluebells or starred with anemones; or they may climb the crisp turf of the down, and see the wonderful world lie spread out beneath their feet, with some clustering town "smouldering and glittering" in the distance; or lie upon the cliff-top, with the fields of waving wheat behind, and the sea spread out like a wrinkled marble floor in front; or walk on the sand beside the falling waves. Perhaps a soi-disant sensible man may see these words and think that I am a sad sentimentalist. I cannot help it; it is what I believe; nay, I will go further, and say that a man who does not wish to do these things is shutting one of the doors of his spirit, a door through which many sweet and true things come in. "Consider the lilies of the field" said long ago One whom we profess to follow as our Guide and Master. And a quiet receptiveness, an openness of eye, a simple readiness to take in these gentle impressions is, I believe with all my heart, of the essence of true wisdom. We have all of us our work to do in the world; but we have our lesson to learn as well. The man with the muck-rake in the old parable, who raked together the straws and the dust of the street, was faithful enough if he was set to do that lowly work; but had he only cared to look up, had he only had a moment's leisure, he would have seen that the celestial crown hung close above his head, and within reach of his forgetful hand.

There is a well-known passage in a brilliant modern satire, where a trenchant satirist declares that he has tracked all human emotions to their lair, and has discovered that they all consist of some dilution of primal and degrading instincts. But the pure and passionless love of natural beauty can have nothing that is acquisitive or reproductive about it. There is no physical instinct to which it can be referred; it arouses no sense of proprietorship; it cannot be connected with any impulse for self-preservation. If it were merely aroused by tranquil, comfortable amenities of scene, it might be referable to the general sense of well-being, and of contented life under pleasant conditions. But it is aroused just as strongly by prospects that are inimical to life and comfort, lashing storms, inaccessible peaks, desolate moors, wild sunsets, foaming seas. It is a sense of wonder, of mystery; it arouses a strange and yearning desire for we know not what; very often a rich melancholy attends it, which is yet not painful or sorrowful, but heightens and intensifies the significance, the value of life. I do not know how to interpret it, but it seems to me to be a call from without, a beckoning of some large and loving power to the soul. The primal instincts of which I have spoken all tend to concentrate the mind upon itself, to strengthen it for a selfish part; but the beauty of nature seems to be a call to the spirit to come forth, like the voice which summoned Lazarus from the rock-hewn sepulchre. It bids us to believe that our small identities, our limited desires, do not say the last word for us, but that there is something larger and stronger outside, in which we may claim a share. As I write these words I look out upon a strange transfiguration of a familiar scene. The sky is full of black and inky clouds, but from the low setting sun there pours an intense pale radiance, which lights up house-roofs, trees, and fields, with a white light; a flight of pigeons, wheeling high in the air, become brilliant specks of moving light upon a background of dark rolling vapour. What is the meaning of the intense and rapturous thrill that this sends through me? It is no selfish delight, no personal profit that it gives me. It promises me nothing, it sends me nothing but a deep and mysterious satisfaction, which seems to make light of my sullen and petty moods.

I was reading the other day, in a strange book, of the influence of magic upon the spirit, the vague dreams of the deeper mind that could be awakened by the contemplation of symbols. It seemed to me to be unreal and fantastic, a manufacturing of secrets, a playing of whimsical tricks with the mind; and yet I ought not to say that, because it was evidently written in good faith. But I have since reflected that it is true in a sense of all those who are sensitive to the influences of the spirit. Nature has a magic for many of us-- that is to say, a secret power that strikes across our lives at intervals, with a message from an unknown region. And this message is aroused too by symbols; a tree, a flash of light on lonely clouds, a flower, a stream--simple things that we have seen a thousand times--have sometimes the power to cast a spell over our spirit, and to bring something that is great and incommunicable near us. This must be called magic, for it is not a thing which can be explained by ordinary laws, or defined in precise terms; but the spell is there, real, insistent, undeniable; it seems to make a bridge for the spirit to pass into a far-off, dimly apprehended region; it gives us a sense of great issues and remote visions; it leaves us with a longing which has no mortal fulfilment.

These are of course merely idiosyncrasies of perception; but it is a far more difficult task to attempt to indicate what the perception of beauty is, and whence the mind derives the unhesitating canons with which it judges and appraises beauty. The reason, I believe, why the sense is weaker than it need be in many people, is that, instead of trusting their own instinct in the matter, they from their earliest years endeavour to correct their perception of what is beautiful by the opinions of other people, and to superimpose on their own taste the taste of others. I myself hold strongly that nothing is worth admiring which is not admired sincerely. Of course, one must not form one's opinions too early, or hold them arrogantly or self-sufficiently. If one finds a large number of people admiring or professing to admire a certain class of objects, a certain species of scene, one ought to make a resolute effort to see what it is that appeals to them. But there ought to come a time, when one has imbibed sufficient experience, when one should begin to decide and to distinguish, and to form one's own taste. And then I believe it is better to be individual than catholic, and better to attempt to feed one's own genuine sense of preference, than to continue attempting to correct it by the standard of other people.

It remains that the whole instinct for admiring beauty is one of the most mysterious experiences of the mind. There are certain things, like the curves and colours of flowers, the movements of young animals, that seem to have a perennial attraction for the human spirit. But the enjoyment of natural scenery, at all events of wild and rugged prospects, seems hardly to have existed among ancient writers, and to have originated as late as the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson spoke of mountains with disgust, and Gray seems to have been probably the first man who deliberately cultivated a delight in the sight of those "monstrous creatures of God," as he calls mountains. Till his time, the emotions that "nodding rocks" and "cascades" gave our forefathers seem mostly to have been emotions of terror; but Gray seems to have had a perception of the true quality of landscape beauty, as indeed that wonderful, chilly, unsatisfied, critical nature seems to have had of almost everything. His letters are full of beautiful vignettes, and it pleases me to think that he visited Rydal and thought it beautiful, about the time that Wordsworth first drew breath.

But the perception of beauty in art, in architecture, in music, is a far more complicated thing, for there seem to be no fixed canons here; what one needs in art, for instance, is not that things should be perfectly seen and accurately presented; a picture of hard fidelity is often entirely displeasing; but one craves for a certain sense of personality, of emotion, of inner truth; something that seizes tyrannously upon the soul, and makes one desire more of the intangible and indescribable essence.

I always feel that the instinct for beauty is perhaps the surest indication of some essence of immortality in the soul; and indeed there are moments when it gives one the sense of pre-existence, the feeling that one has loved these fair things in a region that is further back even than the beginnings of consciousness. Blake, indeed, in one of his wild half-inspired utterances, went even further, and announced that a man's hopes of immortality depended not upon virtuous conduct but upon intellectual perception. And it is hard to resist the belief, when one is brought into the presence of perfect beauty, in whatever form it may come, that the deep craving it arouses is meant to receive a satisfaction more deep and real than the act of mere contemplation can give. I have felt in such moments as if I were on the verge of grasping some momentous secret, as if only the thinnest of veils hung between me and some knowledge that would set my whole life and being on a different plane. But the moment passes, and the secret delays. Yet we are right to regard such emotions as direct messages from God; because they bring with them no desire of possession, which is the sign of mortality, but rather the divine desire to be possessed by them; that the reality, whatever it be, of which beauty is the symbol, may enter in and enthral the soul. It remains a mystery, like all the best things to which we draw near. And the joy of all mysteries is the certainty which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for the soul to open on her upward and inward way; that we are at the threshold and not near the goal; and then, like the glow of sunset, rises the hope that the grave, far from being the gate of death, may be indeed the gate of life.

[The end]
Arthur C. Benson's essay: Beauty

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