"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.' the run. But few writers have said anything better to this point than Hafiz, who indicates this relation as the test of mental health: "Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters." Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair, like a royal presence, or a religion, and not a postilion's dinner to be eaten on There is a pudency about friendship, as about love, and though fine souls never lose sight of it, yet they do not name it. With the first class of men our friendship or good understanding goes quite behind all accidents of estrangement, of condition, of reputation. And yet we do not provide for the greatest good of life. We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all,-friends? We know that all our training is to fit us for this, and we do not take the step towards it. How long shall we sit and wait for these benefactors? preconcert, when one goes to buy house and land. But we live with people on other platforms; we live with dependants, not only with the young whom we are to teach all we know, and clothe with the advantages we have earned, but also with those who serve us directly, and for money. Yet the old rules hold good. Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured by money. Make yourselves necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. This point is acquiring new importance in American social life. Our domestic service is usually a foolish fracas of unreasonable demand on one side, and shirking on the other. A man of wit was asked, in the train, what was his errand in the city. He replied, "I have been sent to procure an angel to do cooking." A lady complained to me, that, of her two maidens, one was absent-minded, and the other was absentbodied. And the evil increases from the ignorance and hostility of every ship-load of the immigrant population swarming into houses and farms. Few people discern that it rests with the master or the mistress what service comes from the man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a tutelar spirit in one house, and a haridan in the other. All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. If you are proposing only your own, the other party must deal a little hardly by you. If you deal generously, the other, though selfish and unjust, will make an exception in your favour, and deal truly with you. When I asked an ironmaster about the slag and cinder in railroad iron,"O," he said, "there's always good iron to be had: if there's cinder in the iron, 'tis because there was cinder in the pay." It makes no difference, in looking back five years, how you have been dieted or dressed; whether you have been lodged on the first floor or the attic; whether you have had gardens and baths, good cattle and horses, have been carried in a neat equipage, or in a ridiculous truck these things are forgotten so quickly, and leave no effect. But it counts much whether we have had good companions, in that time,-almost as much as what we have been doing. And see the overpowering importance of neighbourhood in all association. As it is marriage, fit or unfit, that makes our home, so it is who But why multiply these topics, and their lives near us of equal social degree,—a few illustrations, which are endless? Life brings people at convenient distance, no matter how to each his task, and, whatever art you bad company,-these, and these only, shall select, algebra, painting, architecture, poems, be your life's companions and all those who commerce, politics,-all are attainable, even are native, congenial, and by many an oath to the miraculous triumphs, on the same of the heart, sacramented to you, are gradu- terms, of selecting that for which you are ally and totally lost. You cannot deal sys- apt; begin at the beginning, proceed in tematically with this fine element of society, order, step by step. 'Tis as easy to twist and one may take a good deal of pains to iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid bring people together, and to organize clubs straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you and debating societies, and yet no result take all the steps in order. Wherever there come of it. But it is certain that there is a is failure, there is some giddiness, some great deal of good in us that does not know superstition about luck, some step omitted, itself, and that a habit of union and com- which Nature never pardons. The happy petition brings people up and keeps them conditions of life may be had on the same up to their highest point; that life would terms. Their attraction for you is the pledge be twice or ten times life, if spent with wise that they are within your reach. Our prayers and fruitful companions. The obvious in-are prophets. There must be fidelity, and ference is, a little useful deliberation and there must be adherence. How respectable the life that clings to its objects! Youthful aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of life are fair and commendable :but will you stick? Not one, I fear, in that Common full of people, or, in a thousand, but one: and when you tax them with treachery, and remind them of their high resolutions, they have forgotten that they made a vow. The individuals are fugitive, and in the act of becoming something else, and irresponsible. The race is great, the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure. The hero is he who is immovably centred. The main difference between people seems to be, that one man can come under obligations on which you can rely, is obligable; and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there's nothing to tie him to. 'Tis inevitable to name particulars of virtue, and of condition, and to exaggerate them. But all rests at last on that integrity which dwarfs talent, and can spare it. Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to the grand interests, superficial success is of no account. The man,-it is his attitude,-not feats, but forces,-not on set days and public occasions, but at all hours, and in repose alike as in energy, still formidable, and not to be disposed of. The populace says, with Horne Tooke, "If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful." I prefer to say, with the old prophet, "Seekest thou great things? seek them not "-or, what was said of a Spanish prince, "The more you took from him, the greater he looked." Plus on lui ôte, plus il est grand. The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded, -the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation, these are the essentials,-these, and the wish to serve, to add somewhat to the well-being of men. VIII. BEAUTY. Was never form and never face In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. With the beryl beam of the broken wave; The moment's music which they gave. To die for Beauty, than live for bread. THE spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also.. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium? The We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and admit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer. We are just so frivolous and sceptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunder-bolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system. 'Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his money value, his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music, and wine. The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention is of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is. The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humour. He has got all snakes and lizards in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle. Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual health. Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. "See how happy," he said, "these browsing elks are! Why should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?" Returning home, he imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this empire for seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death." At the end of the seventh day, the king inquired, "From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?" He answered, "From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined, Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, In seven days I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?" But the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the chicane? No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities; and though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post-mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form, and our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts of a science which we study without book, whose teachers and subjects are always near us. The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe said: "The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been for ever concealed from us." And the working of this deep instinct makes all the excitement So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers; but they all prove the transparency. Every spirit-much of it superficial and absurd enough— makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,—we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us. Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul. The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the death of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows people who appear bedridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him is the friendly fire which expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him. about works of art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value. I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the most ascending quality. We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind: yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was all limbs, and the other all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul. Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colours of Nature have a new charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament was added for ornament, but each is a sign of some better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end, is an increase of beauty. The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and of PreRaphaelite painting, was worth all the research, namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye. 'Tis equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but the adjustment of the size and of the joining by gradual and curving movements. I have of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives been told by persons of experience in matters grace of outline and the finer grace of move-of taste, that the fashions follow a law of ment. The cat and the deer cannot move gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can mode is always only a step onward in the never teach a badly built man to walk well. same direction as the last mode; and a culThe tint of the flower proceeds from its root, tivated eye is prepared for and predicts the and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its new fashion. This fact suggests the reason existence. Hence our taste in building re- of all mistakes and offence in our own modes. jects paint, and all shifts, and shows the It is necessary in music, when you strike a original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters discord, to let down the ear by an intermeand columns that support nothing, and diate note or two to the accord again and allows the real supporters of the house hon- many a good experiment, born of good estly to show themselves. Every necessary sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only or organic action pleases the beholder. Á because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, man leading a horse to water, a farmer sow- the Parisian milliner who dresses the world ing seed, the labours of haymakers in the from her imperious boudoir, will know how field, the carpenter building a ship, the smith to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye at his forge, or, whatever useful labour, is of mankind, and make it triumphant over becoming to the wise eye. But if it is done Punch himself, by interposing the just grato be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are dations. I need not say how wide the same ships on the sea! but ships in the theatre, law ranges; and how much it can be hoped -or ships kept for picturesque effect on to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed Virginia Water, by George IV., and men by progressive parties may easily come to hired to stand in fitting costumes at a penny be conceded without question, if this rule be an hour!--What a difference in effect be- observed. Thus the circumstances may be tween a battalion of troops marching to easily imagined, in which woman may speak, action, and one of our independent com- vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a panies on a holiday! In the midst of a coach, and all the most naturally in the military show, and a festal procession gay world, if only it come by degrees. To this with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that pan that lay resting under a wall, and poising all circular movement has; as, the circulait on the top of a stick, he set it turning, and tion of waters, the circulation of the blood, made it describe the most elegant imaginable the periodical motion of planets, the annual curves, and drew away attention from the wave of vegetation, the action and reaction decorated procession by this startling beauty. of Nature; and, if we follow it out, this Another text from the mythologists. The demand in our thought for an ever-onward Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the action is the argument for the immortality. foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavour to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature,-a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back,-is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, seawaves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in changes the lost One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose,-Beauty rides on a lion. Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength with the least weight. "It is the purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of colour or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way. Veracity first of all, and for ever. Rien de beau que le vrai. In all design, art lies |