Lecture VII

THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS.

Refutation of different theories on the nature of the beautiful: the beautiful cannot be reduced to what is useful.--Nor to convenience.--Nor to proportion.--Essential characters of the beautiful.--Different kinds of beauties. The beautiful and the sublime. Physical beauty. Intellectual beauty. Moral beauty.--Ideal beauty: it is especially moral beauty.--God, the first principle of the beautiful.--Theory of Plato.

We have made known the beautiful in ourselves, in the faculties that perceive it and appreciate it, in reason, sentiment, imagination, taste; we come, according to the order determined by the method, to other questions: What is the beautiful in objects? What is the beautiful taken in itself? What are its characters and different species? What, in fine, is its first and last principle? All these questions must be treated, and, if possible, solved. Philosophy has its point of departure in psychology; but, in order to attain also its legitimate termination, it must set out from man, and reach things themselves.

The history of philosophy offers many theories on the nature of the beautiful: we do not wish to enumerate nor discuss them all; we will designate the most important.

There is one very gross, which defines the beautiful as that which pleases the senses, that which procures an agreeable impression. We will not stop at this opinion. We have sufficiently refuted it in showing that it is impossible to reduce the beautiful to the agreeable.

A sensualism a little more wise puts the useful in the place of the agreeable, that is to say, changes the form of the same principle. Neither is the beautiful the object which procures for us in the present moment an agreeable but fugitive sensation, it is the object which can often procure for us this same sensation or others similar. No great effort of observation or reasoning is necessary to convince us that utility has nothing to do with beauty. What is useful is not always beautiful. What is beautiful is not always useful, and what is at once useful and beautiful is beautiful for some other reason than its utility. Observe a lever or a pulley: surely nothing is more useful. Nevertheless, you are not tempted to say that this is beautiful. Have you discovered an antique vase admirably worked? You exclaim that this vase is beautiful, without thinking to seek of what use it may be to you. Finally, symmetry and order are beautiful things, and at the same time, are useful things, because they economize space, because objects symmetrically disposed are easier to find when one wants them; but that is not what makes for us the beauty of symmetry, for we immediately seize this kind of beauty, and it is often late enough before we recognize the utility that is found in it. It even sometimes happens, that after having admired the beauty of an object, we are not able to divine its use, although it may have one. The useful is, then, entirely different from the beautiful, far from being its foundation.

A celebrated and very ancient theory makes the beautiful consist in the perfect suitableness of means to their end. Here the beautiful is no longer the useful, it is the suitable; these two ideas must be distinguished. A machine produces excellent effects, economy of time, work, etc.; it is therefore useful. If, moreover, examining its construction, I find that each piece is in its place, and that all are skilfully disposed for the result which they should produce; even without regarding the utility of this result, as the means are well adapted to their end, I judge that there is suitableness in it. We are already approaching the idea of the beautiful; for we are no longer considering what is useful, but what is proper. Now, we have not yet attained the true character of beauty; there are, in fact, objects very well adapted to their end, which we do not call beautiful. A bench without ornament and without elegance, provided it be solid, provided all the parts are firmly connected, provided one may sit down on it with safety, provided it may be for this purpose suitable, agreeable even, may give an example of the most perfect adaptation of means to an end; it will not, therefore, be said that this bench is beautiful. There is here always this difference between suitableness and utility, that an object to be beautiful has no need of being useful, but that it is not beautiful if it does not possess suitableness, if there is in it a disagreement between the end and the means.

Some have thought to find the beautiful in proportion, and this is, in fact, one of the conditions of beauty, but it is not the only one. It is very certain, that an object ill-proportioned cannot be beautiful. There is in all beautiful objects, however far they may be from geometric form, a sort of living geometry. But, I ask, is it proportion that is dominant in this slender tree, with flexible and graceful branches, with rich and shady foliage? What makes the terrible beauty of a storm, what makes that of a great picture, of an isolated verse, or a sublime ode? It is not, I know, wanting in law and rule, neither is it law and rule: often, even what at first strikes us is an apparent irregularity. It is absurd to pretend that what makes us admire all these things and many more, is the same quality that makes us admire a geometric figure, that is to say, the exact correspondence of parts.

What we say of proportion may be said of order, which is something less mathematical than proportion, but scarcely explains better what is free, varied, and negligent in certain beauties.

All these theories which refer beauty to order, harmony, and proportion, are at foundation only one and the same theory which in the beautiful sees unity before all. And surely unity is beautiful; it is an important part of beauty, but it is not the whole of beauty.

The most probable theory of the beautiful is that which composes it of two contrary and equally necessary elements, unity and variety. Behold a beautiful flower. Without doubt, unity, order, proportion, symmetry even, are in it; for, without these qualities, reason would be absent from it, and all things are made with a marvellous reason. But, at the same time, what a diversity! How many shades in the color, what richness in the least details! Even in mathematics, what is beautiful is not an abstract principle, it is a principle carrying with itself a long chain of consequences. There is no beauty without life, and life is movement, is diversity.

Unity and variety are applied to all orders of beauty. Let us rapidly run over these different orders.

In the first place, there are beautiful objects, to speak properly, and sublime objects. A beautiful object, we have seen, is something completed, circumscribed, limited, which all our faculties easily embrace, because the different parts are on a somewhat narrow scale. A sublime object is that which, by forms not in themselves disproportionate, but less definite and more difficult to seize, awakens in us the sentiment of the infinite.

There are two very distinct species of beauty. But reality is inexhaustible, and in all the degrees of reality there is beauty.

Among sensible objects, colors, sounds, figures, movements, are capable of producing the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful. All these beauties are arranged under that species of beauty which, right or wrong, is called physical beauty.

If from the world of sense we elevate ourselves to that of mind, truth, and science, we shall find there beauties more severe, but not less real. The universal laws that govern bodies, those that govern intelligences, the great principles that contain and produce long deductions, the genius that creates, in the artist, poet, or philosopher,--all these are beautiful, as well as nature herself: this is what is called intellectual beauty.

Finally, if we consider the moral world and its laws, the idea of liberty, virtue, and devotedness, here the austere justice of an Aristides, there the heroism of a Leonidas, the prodigies of charity or patriotism, we shall certainly find a third order of beauty that still surpasses the other two, to wit, moral beauty.

Neither let us forget to apply to all these beauties the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. There are, then, the beautiful and the sublime at once in nature, in ideas, in sentiments, in actions. What an almost infinite variety in beauty!

After having enumerated all these differences, could we not reduce them? They are incontestable; but, in this diversity is there not unity? Is there not a single beauty of which all particular beauties are only reflections, shades, degrees, or degradations?

Plotinus, in his treatise On the Beautiful, proposed to himself this question. He asks--What is the beautiful in itself? I see clearly that such or such a form is beautiful, that such or such an action is also beautiful; but why and how are these two objects, so dissimilar, beautiful? What is the common quality which, being found in these two objects, ranges them under the general idea of the beautiful?

It is necessary to answer this question, or the theory of beauty is a maze without issue; one applies the same name to the most diverse things, without understanding the real unity that authorizes this unity of name.

Either the diversities which we have designated in beauty are such that it is impossible to discover their relation, or these diversities are especially apparent, and have their harmony, their concealed unity.

Is it pretended that this unity is a chimera? Then physical beauty, moral beauty, and intellectual beauty, are strangers to each other. What, then, will the artist do? He is surrounded by different beauties, and he must make a work; for such is the recognized law of art. But if this unity that is imposed upon him is a factitious unity, if there are in nature only essentially dissimilar beauties, art deceives and lies to us. Let it be explained, then, how falsehood is the law of art. That cannot be; the unity that art expresses, it must have somewhere caught a glimpse of, in order to transport it into its works.

We neither retract the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, nor the other distinctions just now indicated; but it is necessary to re-unite after having distinguished them. These distinctions and these re-unions are not contradictory: the great law of beauty, like that of truth, is unity as well as variety. All is one, and all is diverse. We have divided beauty into three great classes--physical beauty, intellectual beauty, and moral beauty. We must now seek the unity of these three sorts of beauty. Now, we think that they resolve themselves into one and the same beauty, moral beauty, meaning by that, with moral beauty properly so called, all spiritual beauty.

Let us put this opinion to the proof of facts.

Place yourself before that statue of Apollo which is called Apollo Belvidere, and observe attentively what strikes you in that master-piece. Winkelmann, who was not a metaphysician, but a learned antiquarian, a man of taste without system, made a celebrated analysis of the Apollo. It is curious to study it. What Winkelmann extols before all, is the character of divinity stamped upon the immortal youth that invests that beautiful body, upon the height, a little above that of man, upon the majestic altitude, upon the imperious movement, upon the ensemble, and all the details of the person. The forehead is indeed that of a god,--an unalterable placidity dwells upon it. Lower down, humanity reappears somewhat; and that is very necessary, in order to interest humanity in the works of art. In that satisfied look, in the distension of the nostrils, in the elevation of the under lip, are at once felt anger mingled with disdain, pride of victory, and the little fatigue which it has cost. Weigh well each word of Winkelmann: you will find there a moral impression. The tone of the learned antiquary is elevated, little by little, to enthusiasm, and his analysis becomes a hymn to spiritual beauty.

Instead of a statue, observe a real and living man. Regard that man who, solicited by the strongest motives to sacrifice duty to fortune, triumphs over interest, after an heroic struggle, and sacrifices fortune to virtue. Regard him at the moment when he is about to take this magnanimous resolution; his face will appear to you beautiful, because it expresses the beauty of his soul. Perhaps, under all other circumstances, the face of the man is common, even trivial; here, illuminated by the soul which it manifests, it is ennobled, and takes an imposing character of beauty. So, the natural face of Socrates contrasts strongly with the type of Grecian beauty; but look at him on his death-bed, at the moment of drinking the hemlock, convening with his disciples on the immortality of the soul, and his face will appear to you sublime.

At the highest point of moral grandeur, Socrates expires:--you have before your eyes no longer any thing but his dead body; the dead face preserves its beauty, as long as it preserves traces of the mind that animated it; but little by little the expression is extinguished or disappears; the face then becomes vulgar and ugly. The expression of death is hideous or sublime,--hideous at the aspect of the decomposition of the matter that no longer retains the spirit,--sublime when it awakens in us the idea of eternity.

Consider the figure of man in repose: it is more beautiful than that of an animal, the figure of an animal is more beautiful than the form of any inanimate object. It is because the human figure, even in the absence of virtue and genius, always reflects an intelligent and moral nature, it is because the figure of an animal reflects sentiment at least, and something of soul, if not the soul entire. If from man and the animal we descend to purely physical nature, we shall still find beauty there, as long as we find there some shade of intelligence, I know not what, that awakens in us some thought, some sentiment. Do we arrive at some piece of matter that expresses nothing, that signifies nothing, neither is the idea of beauty applied to it. But every thing that exists is animated. Matter is shaped and penetrated by forces that are not material, and it obeys laws that attest an intelligence everywhere present. The most subtile chemical analysis does not reach a dead and inert nature, but a nature that is organized in its own way, that is neither deprived of forces nor laws. In the depths of the earth, as in the heights of the heavens, in a grain of sand as in a gigantic mountain, an immortal spirit shines through the thickest coverings. Let us contemplate nature with the eye of the soul as well as with the eye of the body:--everywhere a moral expression will strike us, and the forms of things will impress us as symbols of thought. We have said that with man, and with the animal even, the figure is beautiful on account of the expression. But, when you are on the summit of the Alps, or before the immense Ocean, when you behold the rising or setting of the sun, at the beginning or the close of the day, do not these imposing pictures produce on you a moral effect? Do all these grand spectacles appear only for the sake of appearing? Do we not regard them as manifestations of an admirable power, intelligence, and wisdom? And, thus to speak, is not the face of nature expressive like that of man?

Form cannot be simply a form, it must be the form of something. Physical beauty is, then, the sign of an internal beauty, which is spiritual and moral beauty; and this is the foundation, the principle, the unity of the beautiful.

All the beauties that we have just enumerated and reduced compose what is called the really beautiful. But, above real beauty, is a beauty of another order--ideal beauty. The ideal resides neither in an individual, nor in a collection of individuals. Nature or experience furnishes us the occasion of conceiving it, but it is essentially distinct. Let it once be conceived, and all natural figures, though never so beautiful, are only images of a superior beauty which they do not realize. Give me a beautiful action, and I will imagine one still more beautiful. The Apollo itself is open to criticism in more than one respect. The ideal continually recedes as we approach it. Its last termination is in the infinite, that is to say, in God; or, to speak more correctly, the true and absolute ideal is nothing else than God himself.

God, being the principle of all things, must for this reason be that of perfect beauty, and, consequently, of all natural beauties that express it more or less imperfectly; he is the principle of beauty, both as author of the physical world and as father of the intellectual and moral world.

Is it not necessary to be a slave of the senses and of appearances in order to stop at movements, at forms, at sounds, at colors, whose harmonious combinations produce the beauty of this visible world, and not to conceive behind this scene so magnificent and well regulated, the orderer, the geometer, the supreme artist?

Physical beauty serves as an envelope to intellectual and moral beauty.

What can be the principle of intellectual beauty, that splendor of the true, except the principle of all truth?

Moral beauty comprises, as we shall subsequently see, two distinct elements, equally but diversely beautiful, justice and charity, respect and love of men. He who expresses in his conduct justice and charity, accomplishes the most beautiful of all works; the good man is, in his way, the greatest of all artists. But what shall we say of him who is the very substance of justice and the exhaustless source of love? If our moral nature is beautiful, what must be the beauty of its author! His justice and goodness are everywhere, both in us and out of us. His justice is the moral order that no human law makes, that all human laws are forced to express, that is preserved and perpetuated in the world by its own force. Let us descend into ourselves, and consciousness will attest the divine justice in the peace and contentment that accompany virtue, in the troubles and tortures that are the invariable punishments of vice and crime. How many times, and with what eloquence, have men celebrated the indefatigable solicitude of Providence, its benefits everywhere manifest in the smallest as well as in the greatest phenomena of nature, which we forget so easily because they have become so familiar to us, but which, on reflection, call forth our mingled admiration and gratitude, and proclaim a good God, full of love for his creatures!

Thus, God is the principle of the three orders of beauty that we have distinguished, physical beauty, intellectual beauty, moral beauty.

In him also are reunited the two great forms of the beautiful distributed in each of these three orders, to wit, the beautiful and the sublime. God is, par excellence, the beautiful--for what object satisfies more all our faculties, our reason, our imagination, our heart! He offers to reason the highest idea, beyond which it has nothing more to seek; to imagination the most ravishing contemplation; to the heart a sovereign object of love. He is, then, perfectly beautiful; but is he not sublime also in other ways? If he extends the horizon of thought, it is to confound it in the abyss of his greatness. If the soul blooms at the spectacle of his goodness, has it not also reason to be affrighted at the idea of his justice, which is not less present to it? God is at once mild and terrible. At the same time that he is the life, the light, the movement, the ineffable grace of visible and finite nature, he is also called the Eternal, the Invisible, the Infinite, the Absolute Unity, and the Being of beings. Do not these awful attributes, as certain as the first, produce in the highest degree in the imagination and the soul that melancholy emotion excited by the sublime? Yes, God is for us the type and source of the two great forms of beauty, because he is to us at once an impenetrable enigma and still the clearest word that we are able to find for all enigmas. Limited beings as we are, we comprehend nothing in comparison with that which is without limits, and we are able to explain nothing without that same thing which is without limits. By the being that we possess, we have some idea of the infinite being of God; by the nothingness that is in us, we lose ourselves in the being of God; and thus always forced to recur to him in order to explain any thing, and always thrown back within ourselves under the weight of his infinitude, we experience by turns, or rather at the same time, for this God who raises and casts us down, a sentiment of irresistible attraction and astonishment, not to say insurmountable terror, which he alone can cause and allay, because he alone is the unity of the sublime and the beautiful.

Thus absolute being, which is both absolute unity and infinite variety,--God, is necessarily the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the completed ideal of all beauty. This is the marvellous beauty that Diotimus had caught a glimpse of, and thus paints to Socrates in the Banquet:

"Eternal beauty, unbegotten and imperishable, exempt from decay as well as increase, which is not beautiful in such a part and ugly in such another, beautiful only, at such a time, in such a place, in such a relation, beautiful for some, ugly for others, beauty that has no sensible form, no visage, no hands, nothing corporeal, which is not such a thought or such a particular science, which resides not in any being different from itself, as an animal, the earth, or the heavens, or any other thing, which is absolutely identical and invariable by itself, in which all other beauties participate, in such a way, nevertheless, that their birth or their destruction neither diminishes nor increases, nor in the least changes it!... In order to arrive at this perfect beauty, it is necessary to commence with the beauties of this lower world, and, the eyes being fixed upon the supreme beauty, to elevate ourselves unceasingly towards it, by passing, thus to speak, through all the degrees of the scale, from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others, from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until from thought to thought we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the beautiful itself, until we end by knowing it as it is in itself.

"O my dear Socrates," continued the stranger of Mantinea, "that which can give value to this life is the spectacle of the eternal beauty.... What would be the destiny of a mortal to whom it should be granted to contemplate the beautiful without alloy, in its purity and simplicity, no longer clothed with the flesh and hues of humanity, and with all those vain charms that are condemned to perish, to whom it should be given to see face to face, under its sole form, the divine beauty!"

FOOTNOTES:

If one would make himself acquainted with a simple and piquant refutation, written two thousand years ago, of false theories of beauty, he may read the Hippias of Plato, vol. iv. of our translation. The Phaedrus, vol. vi., contains the veiled exposition of Plato's own theory; but it is in the Banquet (Ibid.), and particularly in the discourse of Diotimus, that we must look for the thought of Plato carried to its highest degree of development, and clothed with all the beauty of human language.

See the Hippias.

First Ennead, book vi., in the work of M. B. Saint-Hillaire, on the School of Alexandria, the translation of this morsel of Plotinus, p. 197.

Winkelmann has twice described the Apollo, History of Art among the Ancients, Paris, 1802, 3 vols., in 4to. Vol. i., book iv., chap. iii., Art among the Greeks:--"The Apollo of the Vatican offers us that God in a movement of indignation against the serpent Python, which he has just killed with arrow-shots, and in a sentiment of contempt for a victory so little worthy of a divinity. The wise artist, who proposed to represent the most beautiful of the gods, placed the anger in the nose, which, according to the ancients, was its seat; and the disdain on the lips. He expressed the anger by the inflation of the nostrils, and the disdain by the elevation of the under lip, which causes the same movement in the chin."--Ibid., vol. ii., book iv., chap. vi., Art under the Emperors:--"Of all the antique statues that have escaped the fury of barbarians and the destructive hand of time, the statue of Apollo is, without contradiction, the most sublime. One would say that the artist composed a figure purely ideal, and employed matter only because it was necessary for him to execute and represent his idea. As much as Homer's description of Apollo surpasses the descriptions which other poets have undertaken after him, so much this statue excels all the figures of this god. Its height is above that of man, and its attitude proclaims the divine grandeur with which it is filled. A perennial spring-time, like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, clothes with lovable youth the beautiful body, and shines with sweetness over the noble structure of the limbs. In order to feel the merit of this chef-d'oeuvre of art, we must be penetrated with intellectual beauty, and become, if possible, the creatures of a celestial nature; for there is nothing mortal in it, nothing subject to the wants of humanity. That body, whose forms are not interrupted by a vein, which is not agitated by a nerve, seems animated with a celestial spirit, which circulates like a sweet vapor in all the parts of that admirable figure. The god has just been pursuing Python, against which he has bent, for the first time, his formidable bow; in his rapid course, he has overtaken him, and given him a mortal wound. Penetrated with the conviction of his power, and lost in a concentrated joy, his august look penetrates far into the infinite, and is extended far beyond his victory. Disdain sits upon his lips; the indignation that he breathes distends his nostrils, and ascends to his eyebrows; but an unchangeable serenity is painted on his brow, and his eye is full of sweetness, as though the Muses were caressing him. Among all the figures that remain to us of Jupiter, there is none in which the father of the gods approaches the grandeur with which he manifested himself to the intelligence of Homer; but in the traits of the Apollo Belvidere, we find the individual beauties of all the other divinities united, as in that of Pandora. The forehead is the forehead of Jupiter, inclosing the goddess of wisdom; the eyebrows, by their movement, announce his supreme will; the large eyes are those of the queen of the gods, orbed with dignity, and the mouth is an image of that of Bacchus, where breathed voluptuousness. Like the tender branches of the vine, his beautiful locks flow around his head, as if they were lightly agitated by the zephyr's breath. They seem perfumed with the essence of the gods, and are charmingly arranged over his head by the hand of the Graces. At the sight of this marvel of art, I forget every thing else, and my mind takes a supernatural disposition, fitted to judge of it with dignity; from admiration I pass to ecstasy; I feel my breast dilating and rising, like those who are filled with the spirit of prophecy; I am transported to Delos, and the sacred groves of Syria,--places which Apollo honored with his presence:--the statue seems to be animated as it were with the beauty that sprung of old from the hands of Pygmalion. How can I describe thee, O inimitable master-piece? For this it would be necessary that art itself should deign to inspire my pen. The traits that I have just sketched, I lay before thee, as those who came to crown the gods, put their crowns at their feet, not being able to reach their heads."

See the last part of the Banquet, the discourse of Alcibiades, p. 326 of vol. vi. of our translation.

We here have in mind, and we avow it, the Socrates of David, which appears to us, the theatrical character being admitted, above its reputation. Besides Socrates, it is impossible not to admire Plato listening to his master, as it were from the bottom of his soul, without looking at him, with his back turned upon the scene that is passing, and lost in the contemplation of the intelligible world.

We are fortunate in finding this theory, which is so dear to us, confirmed by the authority of one of the severest and most circumspect minds:--it may be seen in Reid, 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 23. The Scotch philosopher terminates his Essay on Taste with these words, which happily remind us of the thought and manner of Plato himself:--"Whether the reasons that I have given to prove that sensible beauty is only the image of moral beauty appear sufficient or not, I hope that my doctrine, in attempting to unite the terrestrial Venus more closely to the celestial Venus, will not seem to have for its object to abase the first, and render her less worthy of the homage that mankind has always paid her."

Part iii., lecture 15.

Vol. vi. of our translation, p. 816-818