The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

What is the use of beauty? Like truth and law, it looks beyond itself. It is to help realize the purpose for which the earth was created, the purpose which finds its consummation in a perfect man.

Beauty comes to man, bearing intimations of his high origin and also of his glorious destiny. Under the magic spell which beauty throws around him, he forgets for the time being his limitations, his fears, his doubts. He is lifted into a realm of universal freedom, where all difficulties disappear, where all conflicts are eliminated. The æsthetic nature is not at all seclusive and aristocratic. It receives the melody, and symmetry, and harmony which reason finds in the tones, and forms, and colors of the outside world, and turns over to it. These rich gifts are then shared with all other human powers and faculties. Hunger is served with food set in painted china. Around the table, where man satisfies his appetite, pictures are hung, and the beef market and the mill are built and arranged in accordance with the dictates of symmetry and taste. The college, where truth is taught, and the courthouse, where law is administered, are invested with all the beauty of the architect’s genius. Thus beauty, high, heaven-born, and refreshing, is drawn into all the relations, and thrown around all the institutions of life. It reduces friction, redresses littleness, and adds to life good cheer and depth. It smoothes the rough places, rounds the sharp corners, and hangs the bow of hope on the dark cloud of coming trial.

The æsthetic sense, nurtured on beauty, keeps before the minds of men and nations a proper ideal of life. When the ideal held before the mind at one period of advancement is reached, the æsthetic sense has already lifted another and a nobler, as far ahead of the actual as the first. In presenting to the living spirit ideals always in advance of actual attainment, the æsthetic nature opens the unending path of progress. It is incorrect to suppose that the ideal is worked out only in painting, symphony, or cathedral. Its presence is manifest in the useful, as well as the fine arts. The ideal often gets itself translated into the heel of a shoe, into the crown of a hat, into the wheel of a wagon, into the fence around the field, and into the structure of the mower and the reaper. It curves in the arches of bridges, echoes in the sound of the hammer, and breaks over the hills in the whistle of the engine.

The progress of beauty in modern times has not been in the direction of form or coloring or symmetry, simply, but toward wider distribution. In early times, its ministry was to kings and scholars; it has advanced by expanding. The pyramid of Gizeh, the most expensive monument ever seen, was reared to perpetuate the memory of a great Egyptian king. A country was drained of revenue and of life to regale the pride of one man. The Parthenon ministered to a few great men in Greece. The cathedrals of the middle ages blest and helped a wider circle. But it was left to the time which is ours to build churches and chapels, as broad in their aims and ministry as the life of humanity. The early poetry concerned itself about the wars of gods and the contentions of kings. But as the sacredness of human life came to be seen more and more, did it tend to catch within the sweep of its rhythm the incidents and traditions and loves of the common people. The ideal in our day is being worked out in fields of waving grain, into the cattle upon the hills, into the homes of the people. It is being turned into orchards and vineyards. It is being traced in vines and flowers over the poor man’s cottage. The ideals were once housed and confined in the museums; now they are being turned out into the street. It was once the custom to bring Venus and Diana, by the aid of the chisel, from rough marble. The tendency now is to put the beauty of Venus and the enterprise of Diana into the spirits of our women. Sublime conceptions were once mainly realized in temples and cathedrals, but now we would see them distributed into dwellings for families, into schools for children, and into churches for the true worship of God. We would see them in bridges spanning all the rivers, in mills grinding the people’s bread, in factories spinning their clothes, and in railroads transporting their products. We would see them lifted into an asylum for the blind, a shelter for the orphan, and a home for the aged and infirm. We would hear them in the whirl of the spindle, in the ring of the hammer, in the splash of the paddle, and in the sound of the flying train. We would hear them in the steady march of progress, and in the pulse-beats of the happy plowman. Beauty is to be used to stimulate human courage, to embellish human spirit, and to enlarge human thought. Life’s shadows are to be chased by the light of eternity’s day, and its tumult hushed by the repose of eternity’s harmony. The æsthetic element in man’s nature was appointed to receive the beauty provided for it. But it was to be God’s almoner; having received it, also freely to give it. Thus it was to be the power whose function should be to put the whole of life into terms of harmony. Bernard Palissy put his ideal into a white enamel for his pottery; Columbus worked his ideal into a new world; Morse left his in the electric telegraph; Cyrus W. Field turned his into the submarine cable; and Thomas A. Edison has given his to the world in the telephone. It is not to be inferred, however, that those who work their ideals out in the useful arts contribute more to the making of men than those who express their ideals in poetry, painting, sculpture, or music. The tendency of beauty to get down into the ordinary work and relations of life is an intimation that all life should be beautiful in itself, and in all expressions which it makes of itself. The æsthetic sense is the badge of man’s royalty. A tutor was once employed to teach the son of a king. The young prince was sometimes disobedient. But in the esteem of the tutor, it was not quite proper to whip the son of a king with a common switch. So to the lapel of the boy’s coat the teacher pinned a piece of purple ribbon. When the young prince manifested a disposition to defy authority, the instructor pointed with the end of the rod to the purple ribbon on his coat. This was an appeal to his royal blood.

Not a flower gathers on the limbs of a rose bush but addresses the high and purple nature of everyone who beholds it. In Mexico, where the average of life is so low, the flowers which grow in such profusion are about all that is left to keep the people reminded that they are the children of God, the author of all beauty. The highest evidence of the remaining worth of the Mexican people is found in the fact that they love flowers with a deep and unfailing passion.

VI.

Beauty is to feed enthusiasm. Tones and colors are to be used to jostle the elements of mind, and will, and emotion into harmony with the high and holy life of our Father who art in Heaven. Beauty is to nerve the soldier for the battle, the martyr for the stake, and the hero for his work. There is a height of development to which the human spirit aspires, that the logical understanding is unable to reach. Here, then, where truth in logical form fails, beauty comes, and helps the human spirit to disentangle itself from the sphere of contradictions and antagonisms.

Truth and right command the spirit by an external necessity; beauty moves it by an internal necessity and starts it to vibrating in the very centers of its being, in consonance with itself. Beauty lifts it to a pinnacle where the horizon quadrates with its irrepressible longings; and where the whole of life is rounded into an orb from which all strife is eliminated, and all discord extracted. Men seek artificial stimulants and narcotics, because of the abiding conviction they have, that their lives were keyed to some ideal realm of unity and freedom.

What intoxicants do to the detriment of the spirit, beauty accomplishes to its health and vigor. It is carried by beauty into no land of vague dream, and unreal delirium, but into a radiant region where the environing conditions exactly match its undying hopes.