Beauty Culture (Browning)/Chapter 1

The science of beauty—but, is there such a thing? Undoubtedly. The more closely we study the laws that hold sway throughout the universe, the more deeply we are able to realise this fact, and the better we are able to comprehend that the whole science of beauty has been embodied for us ​in its creation. Beauty has so many forms, so many phases. We are so constantly seeing it all around us in what, for want of a better name, we call Nature, that we have forgotten to seek out its source in order to classify it and call it a science. Still, it is there, whatever we may choose to call it. Beauty of tone, of colour, of form, of movement, are each and all of them the result of certain fixed scientific laws, the principles of which are beyond us. We are all so ignorant when it comes to any real knowledge—even the wisest amongst us—we can only gather up a crumb of knowledge here or there, and try to utilise it for the benefit of ourselves and others. From the sublime harmonies of the ever-restless ocean, the glorious colour-schemes of the Aurora Borealis, the awesome majesty of snow-capped heights and black bottomless abysses to the weird clammy mystery of a London fog, we may range up and down the gamut of our daily experiences and find that this same science of beauty pervades them all, if we do but possess the eyes that see and the ears that hear and the spirit that understandeth.

​In his two "Dialogues on Beauty," Plato tells us that it consists in proportion and symmetry; Cicero thought that the science of beauty was uniformity and agreement; St. Augustine resolves the question of beauty into truth and unity; Crouzas expands it into variety, unity, regularity, order and proportion; Hogarth, in his celebrated "Analysis of Beauty," refers it all to waving lines and intricacy of design; Hutcheson explains it as utility, uniformity, and variety; Burke considered it as being something that is little, smooth, delicate, and easily-injured; and Sir Joshua Reynolds decided that it lay in "ordinary, everyday, commonplace life;" Akenside and Addison, on the contrary, referred it to a special internal sense which discovered beauty as the eye sees light; and in our own day Richard Jefferies seems to have held the same tenets, for he says: "He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are. Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham."

"Ah! the pity of it, the pity of it!" we are led to exclaim involuntarily, as we gaze upon the great mass of human beings, for the majority of whom ​this sublime science has neither voice nor meaning, whose eyes are blinded, whose ears are deafened, whose hearts are narrowed, whose souls are wingless.

For long, long ages, the forces of Nature have been vainly trying to teach every one of us the greatness and grandeur of this science. We are always asking for the reason of Creation. We do not seem able to realise that the answer is there, and an all-sufficient answer, too.

"And God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good."

God, the Creator, Nature, the First Cause,—let us call it what you will,—the fact remains the same, the whole universe was created, not spasmodically, or casually, but according to certain fixed scientific principles recognised to-day. The result of this system was perfect beauty; and the latest, the very latest, link in this chain of evolution was woman.

Is it not a passion for the beautiful that fills the artist-soul with wondrous conceptions, exquisite harmonies of sound, marvellous pictures, stupendous sculptures, poems in wood and stone?—concep​tions, too, that are rarely capable of portrayal as they were conceived. We are so unable to express ourselves adequately, because the science of beauty is still so much in its infancy. We can only muse with a feeling that is half despair, even upon our best efforts, and hope that sympathetic souls may find there the beauty we have humbly tried our little best to embody for them.

Is it not equally a nameless, instinctive love of beauty, a longing for the ethical perfection of goodness and purity, that gives us our saints, our martyrs, our reformers; our General Gordons and our Florence Nightingales, our Joan of Arcs and our Bishop Pattersons?

The "beauty of holiness" is no mere phrase. It is part of the original science that created the world, and it is as much a reality as is the manly form of a Greek god, or the superb tenderness in the face of a Venus Genetrix.

Moreover, it is this same instinctive feeling for the science of creation that has evolved for us every great poet, every great writer, in every language and in every clime, so that "the beauty of intellect," too, is an actual factor in the history ​of the world. Indeed, we need only glance cursorily back to the very earliest times in order to see that it is just this faith in the beautiful that has always lain at the base of all that is noble, true, and happy. It has been sung, and preached, and painted, and sculptured, and thought, and felt, and dreamt of, and longed for, and striven after, ever since the world began, and it is only when we have at last attained to a perfect and complete knowledge of this science of beauty that the millennium of bliss will ever break upon us, either here or—there.

This end-of-a-century is a period of decadence, we are being told continually. If this be so, there must be a reason for it. Every effect must naturally have its cause, and that cause is not far to seek, it lies primarily in the degenerate health of the world at large. When the national taste in art and literature becomes debased, it becomes so because the physical condition of the nation is declining, because the healthful instincts of the mind are being obliterated by the morbid action of a vitiated nervous system. It has always been so, as a matter of fact, and facts are stubborn things to deal with. Browning puts this close union of ​the moral and physical frequently before us in many of his poems. "Body and soul are one thing with two names," he cries, in "Red Cotton Nightcap." We need only glance backwards over the history of the world to see this. The gradual loss of physical health, moral rectitude, artistic preeminence and political supremacy have almost always been co-incident. The degeneration of muscular perfection and nervous strength went on side by side with the fall of lofty ideals and the decadence of art, leaving behind them inertness, self-indulgence, and a taste for sensuality,—ruin, moral, mental, and physical, being the natural result. "Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms," one section of the world seems to say. They deny strenuously that unison of the dual personality of the human being (particularly feminine human beings), and explain to us that "body is not soul, but just soul's servant." Then there is, on the contrary, another section, who assert quite as hotly, and quite as strenuously, the sentiment expressed so forcibly by the same poet in another of his works—"Soul"—accept a word which vaguely means—

To this class of thinkers I am tempted to reply in the words of a prose poet: "The pebble-stone (in my palm) tells me that I am a soul because I am not that, that touches the nerves of my hand." But is not the just mean to be found between these two opinions? Until we have freed the body from weakness and weariness, can we ever expect the soul to drink in the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of the sun, which the same Richard Jefferies, that great apostle of the beautiful, speaks of? I am beginning to feel as he felt. "There is so much to unlearn in life. It wastes so much time to take off peel after peel, and so get by degrees slowly towards the truth."

"The health and well-being of a nation lies altogether in the hands of its women," is the stock-phrase of many nineteenth-century Adams. This is a great truth, but scarcely a whole truth, for are not the men of a nation the fathers of their daughters as well as the fathers of their sons? Does not Nature bestow inherited tendencies upon the girl-child as often as upon the boy-child? We ​cannot gather grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles.

Neither by flood nor field, by forest or fell, by mountain or valley, by town or village, in man or bird, or beast, or fruit, or flower, do we ever find imperfection bringing forth perfection. Vice begets disease and pessimism, who, in their turn, become the parents of other vices, and so the ball rolls on for ever, further and further away from that noble standard of healthful beauty, the science of which lurks behind those words, penned years ago, by our late laureate. It is only a sound mind in a sound body that has power to develop amongst us: