Ariel (4 page)

spices o’er his castle; the very spume of the sea sought to besprinkle its feet; and the freedom of Paradise, a mighty sharing of trust, kept up about its walls continual holy
day...
.

But within—far within, isolated from the noisy castle by covered passageways, hidden from the vulgar eye like the lost chapel of Uhland in the heart of the forest, at the end of unknown pathways, there was a hall of mystery, a home where no one ventured to set foot save only the king himself, where even his hospitality seemed changed to an ascetic egoism. Not an echo of that external gaiety, not a note of all that nature-concert, not a word from the lips of men e’er ventured past the thickness of those porphyrine sills to move an air within that forbidden hold. A religious silence brooded on the chastity of its sleeping air; the light itself gleamed pale through painted glass, measured into tint, to fall like a cup of snow in a warm
nest, in heavenly calm. Sometimes, when the night was clear and still, opening apart as a shell of pearl, one might see a vision of the serene shadow. The perfume that prevailed was that of nenuphar, pure essence suggestive but of serenity and thought. Grave caryatides alone guarded the marble doors, in tranquil pose, the faces sculptured into profiles grave in introspection. And the old king would assure his people that though no one of them might accompany him there, his hospitality prevailed there just as generous, as great, in that mysterious retreat as ever; only that his guests there bidden were invisible, impalpable. There he dreamed, there he freed himself of the actual, this legendary king; there he turned his vision inward, smoothed and refined his thought in meditation like the pebbles all polished by the wave; there he bound to the noble forehead the youthful wings of Psyche.... And then, at last,
when Death came to remind him that he himself had been but a guest in that palace, the impenetrable house was locked and mute forever; forever sunken into infinite repose. No one e’er profaned it, no one e’er dared to set irreverent foot within, where the old king had willed to be alone with his dreams, in the solitude of that Thule of his soul.

To this story I liken your inmost kingdom. Open with healthy generosity to all the currents of the world, there exists at the same time, like the secret chamber of that king, an inner forum hidden from all, closed to the common guests, ruled by serene reason alone. Only when you enter within this inviolable sanctuary may you call yourselves free men. They are not free who give up their self-dominion to inordinate affection or selfish interest, forgetting Montaigne’s wise precept that our souls may indeed be lent, but never surrendered. To think, to dream, to admire
—
these are the ministrants that haunt my cell. The ancients ranked them under the word
otium,
well-employed leisure, which they deemed the highest use of a being truly rational; liberty of thought emancipated of all ignoble chains. Such leisure meant that use of time which they opposed to mere economic activity as the expression of a higher life. Their conception of the dignity of life was linked closely to this lofty conception of leisure; the classical attitude finds its correction and its complement in our modem belief in the dignity of labour; and both employments of one’s spirit shall make up a rhythm of individual life whose necessary maintenance needs no insistence on my part. The school of the Stoics which illumined the sunset of antiquity as if with an anticipation of the dawn of Christianity, has left to us a simple but touching image of the salvation of one’s inner liberty even in the midst of serfdom in that figure of Cleanto.

Compelled to use his brawny arms in sinking the stones of a fountain or moving a mill wheel, he yet found time to devote the breathing spells of his hard labour to tracing with roughened hand the maxims of Zeno upon the stones. All rational education, all perfect cultivation, of our natures, will take as a starting-point this possibility of rousing in every one of us the double activity which Cleanto’s story symbolizes.

Once more; the basic principle of your development, your motto for life, should be to maintain the integrity of your humanity. No one function should ever prevail over that final end. No isolated force can satisfy all reasonable objects of individual existence, as it cannot alone produce the ordered concert of collective existence. And like deformity or dwarfing to the body, is, to the soul, the result of an exclusive object imposed on individual action and a single manner of culture. The falsity of

what is artificial makes ephemeral the glamour of those societies which have sacrificed the free development of their feeling or thought, whether to mercantile activity as in Phoenicia, to wars as in Sparta, to mysticism as in the terror of the millennium, or to the life of the salon and the court as in eighteenth century France. Keep yourselves clear of any mutilation of your moral nature. Shape the harmonious growth of your spirit for every noble way; remembering that the most easy, usual mutilation is that which in human life as it stands compels a man to forego this sort of inner life; where all things high and noble have their being, but, at the harsh breath of reality, bum in the fires of an impure passion or wither in the
furnace
of utilitarianism the life of which disinterested meditation is part, and part the thinking of ideals; that ancient
otium,
the impenetrable chamber of my story!

And just as the first impulse of
profanation
will be directed to what is most sacred in the sanctuary, so the common deterioration I would warn you against will begin by your despising what is beautiful. Of all things of the spirit this sense is the most delicate, clear vision of the loveliness of things; and the one which most quickly withers in a life limited to the invariable round of a vulgar circle, leaving it but a treasured relic abandoned to the care of the few. The emotion for beauty is to the sentiment of other idealities as the jewel to the ring. The effect of a rude touch is as a blow and soon works its fatal work; and an absolute indifference comes to be in the average soul, where should be perfect love. No stupor of a savage in the presence of the complicated machines of civilization is more intense than the dazed wonder with which too many educated men regard acts which show the intention or the habit of conceding a serious reality to what is beautiful in life.

The argument of the traitor apostle before the jar of ointment, spilled to no practical purpose on the Saviour’s head, is still one of the formulae of common sense. The superfluity of art is not, for the nameless crowd, worth three hundred denarii. If perchance they respect it, it is as an esoteric cult. And yet of all the elements of education that go to make up a full and noble view of life, surely none more than Art can justify our interest; for none more than it includes, as Schiller in eloquent pages sang, a culture more extensive, more complete, more fully lending itself to a concerted stimulus of all the soul's faculties. Even if the love and admiration of beauty did not answer of themselves to a lofty impulse in the rational being, had not also worth enough to be cultivated for themselves alone, it would be a motive highly moral which proposed the culture of the aesthetic sentiment as a matter of high interest for all. If to no one it is
given to be without moral sentiment, its education carries with it the duty of preparing the mind for a clear vision also of what is beautiful. Believe me, an educated sense of what is beautiful is the most efficacious collaborator in the forming of a delicate sense of justice. No better instrument exists to dignify, to ennoble the mind. Never does a man more surely fulfil his duty than when he feels it, not as an imposition, but as part of a beautiful harmony. Never will he be a good
man
more completely than when he knows how to respect in his own work the sentiment of beauty in the others.

Certain it is that the sanctity of goodness purifies and exalts even things of gross exterior. A man may doubtless realize his work without giving it the outward charm of beauty; charity, affection, can become sublime with means that are common, unlovely, even coarse. But it is not only more beautiful, it is greater, that
charity which seeks to transmit itself in shapes that are delicate and choice, for then it adds another to its gifts, that sweet, indescribable lovingness which nothing can replace and which enhances the gift with an added light.

To make men see the beautiful is a work of mercy. Those who demand that goodness, truth, should ever be shown in forms that are gloomy and severe, seem to me to be treasonable to truth and goodness. Virtue itself is an art, a sort of art divine; smiling, as a mother, on the Graces. The teacher who would fix in his scholar’s mind the idea that duty is the most earnest of realities, must at the same time make him see that it is the highest poetry. So Guyau, master of lovely comparisons, uses an incomparable one here: that of the sculptured saints in some Gothic choir, each panel matched by one of flowers, so that for every figure of a saint that shows his piety or perchance his martyrdom, for each look divine, each attitude, there corresponds the corolla or the petal of some flower; to go with the symbolic representation of good deeds there blossoms, now a lily, now a rose. So Guyau thinks our souls should be sculptured; and was not he himself, the gentle master, in the lovely evangel of beauty that his genius made, a living example of that harmony?

I hold it certain that he who has learned to distinguish the delicate from the common, the ugly from the beautiful, has gone half the way to knowing the evil from the good,
jit
is true that mere good taste is not, as the dilettante might wish, the only criterion of human actions; yet one should not, with the narrow ascetic, consider it a lure to error, a deceitful guide. We would not indicate it as a certain path to the right; but as a parallel and near-by road which keeps near to itself the step and vision of the wayfarer. In the measure that humanity progresses it sees that the moral law is but beauty of conduct; it shows evil and error like a discord ; and will seek for the good as a restored harmony. When the Stoic’s severity in Kant inspired the austere words that symbolized his ethics, “He dreamt and thought that life was beauty,—he woke and saw that life was duty,” he was not mindful that, although duty may be the supreme reality, in it may also lie the vision of that dream; for consciousness of one’s duty, with clear sight of the right, may give it the glamour of beauty too.

In the soul of the redeemer, missionary, or lover of man, must also be required the
understandment of beauty;
there must collaborate with him some elements of the artist’s genius. The part played in the efficacy of moral revolutions by the gift of seeing and making known the inner beauty of ideas, is very great. Speaking of the highest of all, it was Renan who said, profoundly: “The poetry of the lesson which makes it loved is more significant than the precept itself, abstractly taken. The originality of the work of Jesus lies not indeed in the literal acceptation of his doctrine—since that might be found entirely without leaving the teachings of the Synagogue, searching for it from the book of Deuteronomy to the Talmud — but in having, by his preaching, made felt the poetry of his precept, that is, its inner beauty.”

Dim will be the glory of those epochs or communions which despise the aesthetic bearing of their life or teaching. The Christian asceticism, which only knew how to picture one face of the ideal, excluded from its concept of perfection all which makes life pleasant, refined, beautiful. Its narrow spirit brought it about that man's untamable instinct for liberty, coming back in one of those irresistible reactions of the human spirit, gave birth,

in the Italy of the Renaissance, to a type of civilization which considered moral worth a delusion and put faith only in the virtue of a strong or gracious exterior. That Puritanism which persecuted all beauty and all that is select or choice; that shuddered at the chaste nudity of statues; that made a very affectation of what is ugly in its manners, in its dress, in its speech; that sad sect, which, from the English Parliament imposed its will to prohibit all festivities that showed gaiety, and cut any tree that bore flowers—tended, when joined with virtue, to divorce virtue from all thought of beauty. It was a shadow of the tomb of which England has not yet entirely rid itself, which still lasts in the least amiable manifestations of its customs and its religion. Macaulay declared that he preferred the coarse “casket of lead” in which the Puritans guarded their treasure of liberty to the elegant box of carving in which the court of Charles II stored its
refinements. But as neither liberty nor virtue need be guarded in a casket of lead, much more for the education of humanity than all Puritan asceticisms will remain the grace of the antique ideal, the harmonious teachings of Plato, and that movement, free and charming, with which Athens took and lifted to its lips the cup of life.