“But why stand afar off, trusting to human and fallible interpreters, when it is your privilege to draw near and dwell in the essence of the only real and divine beauty?”
“Better reverence it behind a veil, than suffer like Semele. I know my needs, and satisfy them fully. Once my heart was as bare of adoration as Egypt’s tawny sands of crystal rain-pools; but looking into the realm of nature and of art, I chose the religion of the beautiful, and said to my famished soul,
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‘From every channel thro’ which Beauty runs, To fertilize the world with lovely things, I will draw freely, and be satisfied.’” |
“This morbid sentimentality, this sickly gasping system of æsthetics, soi-disant ‘Religion of the Beautiful,’ is the curse of the age,—is a vast, universal vampire sucking the life from humanity. Like other idolatries it may arrogate the name of ‘Religion,’ but it is simply downright pagan materialism, and its votaries of the nineteenth century should look back two thousand years, and renew the Panathenœa. The ancient Greek worship of æsthetics was a proud and pardonable system, replete with sublime images; but the idols of your emasculated creed are yellow-haired women with straight noses,—are purple clouds and moon-silvered seas,—and physical beauty constitutes their sole excellence. Lovely 346 landscapes and perfect faces are certainly entitled to a liberal quota of earnest admiration; but a religion that contents itself with merely material beauty, differs in nothing but nomenclature from the pagan worship of Cybele, Venus, and Astarte.”
A chill smile momentarily brightened Mrs. Gerome’s features, and turning towards her visitor, she answered slowly,—
“Be thankful, sir, that even the worship of beauty lingers in this world of sin and hate; and instead of defiling and demolishing its altars, go to work zealously and erect new ones at every cross-roads. Lessing spoke for me when he said, ‘Only a misapprehended religion can remove us from the beautiful, and it is proof that a religion is true and rightly understood when it everywhere brings us back to the Beautiful.’”
“Pardon me. I accept Lessing’s words, but cavil at your interpretation of them. His reverence for Beauty embraced not merely physical and material types, but that nobler, grander beauty which centres in pure ethics and ontology; and a religion that seeks no higher forms than those of clay,—whether Himalayas or ‘Greek Slave,’—whether emerald icebergs, flashing under polar auroras, or the myosotis that nods there on the mantelpiece,—a religion that substitutes beauty for duty, and Nature for Nature’s God, is a shameful sham, and a curse to its devotees. There is a beauty worthy of all adoration, a beauty far above Antinous, or Gula or Greek æsthetics,—a beauty that is not the disjecta membra that modern maudlin sentimentality has left it,—but that perfect and immortal ‘Beauty of Holiness,’ that outlives marble and silver, pigment, stylus, and pagan poems that deify dust.”
He leaned towards her, watching eagerly for some symptom of interest in the face before him, and bent his head until he inhaled the fragrance of the violets which clustered on one side of the coil of hair.
“‘Beauty of Holiness.’ Show it to me, Dr. Grey. Is it at La Trappe, or the Hospice of St. Bernard? Where are its 347 temples? Where are its worshippers? Who is its Hierophant?”
“Jesus Christ.”