One recalls Darwin’s pathetic statement wherein he describes his early love for poetry and music, and the final complete loss of those “capabilities” through neglect. “The loss of these tastes,” he says, “is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
The intellect of man, in itself, is never supreme or sufficient. Feeling or instinct is half of knowledge. “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy,” says Whitman, “walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.” Of any man, American or otherwise, who lives his life unmindful of all beauty we may justly say, as Carlyle said of Diderot, “He dwelt all his days in a thin rind of the Conscious; the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious whereon the other rests and has its meaning was not under any shape surmised by him.”
Must not the education of children in beauty begin, then, with their parents? Must they not be aroused, at least, to an intellectual conviction of its value, even though they have missed its joy? Can the matter be safely left to the jurisdiction of the schools themselves whose curricula are already overcrowded with methods of escape from this very thing? Does not the school answer the general conception of education obtaining among the fathers and mothers of the school-children? Can it be expected—is it possible for it—to rise far above that conception? My object is therefore to suggest, first, that the perception of beauty is, in the highest sense, education; second, that music is especially so, because it is the purest form of beauty; and, third, that music is the only form of beauty by means of which very young children can be educated, because it is the only form accessible to them.
Need I point out that there has never been a time in the history of mankind when human beings have not paid tribute to beauty? In their attempt to escape what may be called the traffic of life and to rise above its sordid limitations, have they not always and everywhere created for themselves some sort of detached ideal by means of which they justified themselves in an otherwise unintelligible world? This ideal may have been a god of stone, but it figured for them a perfect absolution. Surrounded by brutal forces about which they knew nothing, subject to pestilence, to war, to starvation, to the fury of the elements, unable safely to shelter their bodies, they built for their souls a safe elysium. This ideal was always one of order and beauty; every civilization has possessed it, and it was to each civilization not only religion, but also what we call “art.”
I referred in the first chapter to that quality in art which consists in its “holding a mirror up to nature,” and thus focusing our attention. Browning expresses this in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” where he says,—
“For, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.”
But the highest office of art is not so much to attract our attention to beautiful objects as to make us realize through the artist’s skill what the objects signify. It is the artist who so depicts life as to make it intelligible to us; it is he who sees all those deeper relations which underlie all things; he, and he only, can so present human aspirations and human actions as to lift them out of the maze and give them order and sequence. Through all the welter of political theories, of philosophies, of dogmas insisted on at the point of excommunication; amid the discoveries of science and the tendency to make life into a mechanically operated thing, the still small voice of the poet rises always supreme—supreme in wisdom, supreme in insight, the seer, the prophet, the philosopher; when all else has passed he remains, for beauty is the only permanence. To eliminate beauty from education is to destroy its very soul.
From the law of gravity to Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” beauty is the central element. In physics, in mathematics, in astronomy, in chemistry, there is the same perfection of order and sequence, the same correlation of forces, the same attraction of matter which, operating in the fine arts, brings about what we call “painting,” “sculpture,” “poetry,” and “music.” The whole of nature is a postulate of this doctrine, and there is no subject taught from kindergarten to college which may not be taught as in accord with it. There is a rhythm of beauty in all things animate and inanimate—an endless variety around a central unity. The individuality in nature and in human life is as a rhythmic diversity to a divine and central unity. The leaves of a maple tree are all alike and all different; the difference between the mechanical arts and the fine arts is a difference of rhythmic flexibility: one is fixed in rhythm in accordance with physical laws, and acts in perfect sequence and regularity; the other is a free individualized rhythmic play around a fixed center. The painter may not dispose the objects on his canvas as he pleases—nature allows him only a certain freedom; the sculptor may distribute his weights and his rhythms around the axis with only so much freedom from the demands of nature as his particular purpose justifies; even the strain of music, which seems to wander so much at will that it is often called a “rhapsody,”—it, too, is merely a play of rhythms and contours around a fixed center, and conforms to a common purpose just as a maple leaf does. A machine acts in mechanical synthesis, a melody acts in æsthetic synthesis; neither is free. So we say there is no such thing as an isolated fact, or subject, or idea.