Influence of Art in Daily Life, Part IV [pp. 415-420]

THE IVNFL UENCE OF AR T IN DAIL Y LIFE.
but still the search goes on, hoping that every
joint and member may at length be molded " into
an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection."
Now, the function and mission of the artist has
ever been to collect the dispersed beauties of na ture into a consistent composition and a concen trated whole. And these the finer essences of
created things, sculptors, painters, and art-work men help to infuse into our daily life, mitigating
its severity and ruggedness, and rarefying its
denseness and grossness.
Let us recur for a moment to the practical
question of how the beauties of nature may be
assimilated. The main difficulty is that the ma jority of persons are not rightly attuned. The
mind nowadays hankers after novelty and excite ment, it becomes dissipated and distracted by
vain shows, life is discolored and taste tortured
by frivolous fashion, wild invention, and caprice,
till at length the modesty, the law, and the order
beloved by Nature are ignored by society. A
wholesome mode of escape from "the busy dance
of things that pass away" may be found in an
excursion to the country with a volume of Words worth in hand. " The presences of nature in the
sky and on the earth, the visions of the hills, and
souls of lonely places" bring healing to the
fevered pulse. Still better restorative is sketch ing among silent woods or babbling streams, for
their beauty speaks as it were personally to the
mind, and seems to enter at pencil-point and permeate through nerve and fiber till the artist or
amateur grows into the life of nature.
When thus the mind, "by interchange of
peace and excitation, finds in Nature its best
and purest friend," the thoughts become attuned
to beauty, and intuition is a sure guide. The
perfections of nature find, so to say, replicas within the mind, and a thrill of delight announces the
sense of the beautiful. But this rarer essence in
created things is not left to the testimony of intuition only, Nature usually affixes some stamp as
a visible sign. It will be found that the most
highly developed forms, the perfected types, are
usually beautiful, while ugliness attaches as a
stigma to what is physically sickly or abortive.
The observance of Nature's laws tends to the
perfecting of animal and vegetative structures, in
other words to the embodiment of beauty. And
Nature appears in perpetual struggle to cast aside
and obliterate what is faulty or unsound, and to
strengthen and mature the higher germs of life,
and so through successive stages to insure a progressive beauty. It would seem for us a profitable pastime in our daily walks to seek out diligently the latent beauties in the landscape and
its living tenantry, so as to observe and inwardly
muse over whatever is lovely in the forms and
colors of animated nature, birds of the air, fore VOL. IX.-27
ground flowers, mountain distances, and sunset
skies. The memory well stored with such images
becomes a perpetual feast.
Beauty as placed in the world is not free from
perplexities. Lord Bacon, with his usual breadth
of vision, writes in view of these anomalies:
"That is the best part of beauty which a picture
can not express; no, nor the first sight of the
life. There is no excellent beauty that hath not
some strangeness in the proportion." The fact
is, such strangeness perpetually crops up, owing
to the presence of ugliness, which, as tares among
wheat, grows up in the fields of beauty. It is
not very easy to tell why all things were not
created beautiful; it is not, for example, quite
evident why some few women should be made
ugly. But as we have the best authority for
suffering the foolish gladly, so we shall not be
far wrong in receiving the ugly with resignation.
And Nature certainly makes kindly effort to rec ompense for occasional shortcomings; accord ingly it is proverbial that she endows persons
lacking in beauty with compensating goodness.
Thus much it seems necessary to say, otherwise
the objection might hold that the picture here
drawn of beauty is wanting in truthful shadow
and relief. And I think the contrast which na ture and even art obtains in a certain small per centage of ugliness is not without a lesson.
Beauty is apt to cloy; furthermore it may enervate; therefore the sweet is spiced with the bitter.
Beauty has received varying treatment from
art. Unhappily some painters, such as Brauwer
and Jan Steen, instead of striving to express "the
best part of beauty," have groveled in the mire,
while others have glossed art with tinsel-show,
ribbon, star, and belted rank. But the painter
who works as Nature works will cast aside whatever in man is ignoble, and, seeking to carry out
the general scheme of development, will improve
upon the actual model and by felicity of invention push onward to the perfect type. And thus
beauty in art as in nature becomes progressivea beauty which rises in the scale of existence according to the worth of the idea it embodies.
Yet Sir Joshua Reynolds deplores that the
artist must be content to suffer the sublime distress which a great mind alone' can feel, "that,
having dedicated his life to the attainment of an
ideal beauty, he will die at last without having
reached it." And Hogarth, in a more comic
strain, relates how a certain "dancing-master
once declared that, after much study and successive improvements, he still despaired of being
able during the rest of his life to do complete
justice to, or to bring out fully the capabilities
of, his favorite dance." Whatever be a man's
calling, singleness of devotion can not fail of re
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