To the action of every other faculty this one gives vividness and grace. It indues each with privilege of insight into the soul of the object which it is its special office to master. By help of sensibility to the beautiful we have inklings of the essence of things, we sympathize with the inward life that molds the outward form. Hence men highly gifted with this sensibility become creative, in whatever province of work they strive; and no man in any province is truly creative except through the subtle energy imparted to him by this sensibility, this competence to feel the invisible in the visible.
The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible. Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces, represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springs the object it illuminates: it brilliantly enrobes a germinal essence. It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and it leads us thither whence it has come.
Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind, illuminating its labors. Without it we work in the dark, and therefore feebly, defectively. Infer thence the immensity of its function. Hereby it becomes the chief educator of men and of man; and where its teaching has not been conspicuous, there no elevation has been reached. The Greeks and the Hebrews would not have been so deeply, so greatly, so feelingly known to us, would not have been the pioneers and inspirers of European civilization, would not have lived on through thousands of years in the minds of the highest men, had they not, along with their other rare endowments, possessed, in superior, in unique quality, this priceless gift of sensibility to the beautiful. Through this gift Shakespeare is the foremost man of England, and through it has done more than any other man to educate and elevate England. Because the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were so rich in this gift, therefore it is that Italy is still a shrine to which the civilized world makes annual pilgrimage.
The supreme function of this sensibility is to develop, to educate, to chasten the highest faculties, our vast discourse of reason, our unselfish aspiration, our deep instinct of truth, our capacious love. To educate these is its cardinal duty, and lacking this they remain uneducated. But its beneficent influence is felt likewise in the less elevated of our efforts. The man who makes shoes, as well as he who makes laws and he who makes poems; the builder of houses, with the builder of theologies or cosmogonies; the engineer, as well as the artist, all work under the rays of this illuminator; and, other things being equal, he excels all others on whose work those rays shine with the most sustained and penetrative force.
“’T is the eternal law,
That first in beauty shall be first in might.”[2]
In short, whatever the mental gift, in order to get from that gift its best fruit, the possessor must be incited, upborne, enlightened, inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame in his mind, and throws thence its joyful light with every blow of his hand.
All good work is more or less creative, that is, a co-working with the eternal mind; and work is good and productive in proportion to the intensity of this coöperation. Why is it that we so prize a fragment of Phidias, a few lines traced by Raphael? Because the minds of those workers were, more than the minds of most others, in sympathy with the Infinite mind. While at work their hands were more distinctly guided by the Almighty hand; they felt and embodied more of the spirit which makes, which is, life.
Here is a frame of canvas, a block of marble, a pile of stones, a vocabulary. Of the canvas you make a screen, you build a dwelling with the pile of stones, chisel a door-sill out of the block, with the vocabulary you write an essay. And in each case you work well and creatively, if your work be in harmony with God’s laws, if your screen be light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful and commodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judicious and sound. But if on the canvas you have a Christ’s head by Leonardo, out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators, that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our best treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they spiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whence they issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power to conceive the beautiful.
But what is ideal power? the reader may ask. He might likewise ask, What is moral power? And unless he has in his own mind some faculty of moral estimation, no answer will help him. That which comes to us through feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only be appreciated through feeling. By describing its effects and accompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is. By means of a foot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is the height of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue’s face; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of your statement. But not with a like distinctness and vivacity of assent can you get the crowd to go along with you as to the Apollo’s beauty. Acknowledgment of the beautiful in art implies a degree of culture and a native susceptibility not to be found in every accidental gathering. Full and sincere assent to your declaration that the statue is very beautiful presupposes a high ideal in the mind; that is, a lofty pre-attained idea of what is manly beauty. But after all, the want of unanimity of assent to a moral or an æsthetic position, does it not come from the difficulty and subtlety of the idea to be pre-attained? Assent even to an intellectual proposition, does not it too presuppose an ideal in the mind of him who assents? When you show by visible measurement that the statue is eight feet high, whoever understands what you mean must have already in his head the idea of what one foot is; that is, he must carry within him an ideal. No tittle of information, not the slightest accession of knowledge, will you derive from the measurement even of the area of a hall or of the cubic contents of a block, unless you bring with you in your mind an idea, an ideal, of what is a superficial or a cubic square foot.