REASON, RHYME, AND RHYTHM.
CHAPTER IV.—UNITY.
The Divine Attributes, the base of all true Art.
Having already shown that the aspirations of man, made in the image of his God, are always directed toward that wondrous background from which all life projects—the Infinite, we now propose to make a few remarks upon the manifestation of some of the remaining attributes revealed to him, and which he is forever striving to incarnate in the works of art.
Beauty, in its proper expression, must be allied to or suggest the Infinite, for in it alone can ceaseless variety be united with absolute unity. Unity is an essential characteristic of life itself; variety resolving itself into unity, and unity expanding itself into variety, mark all that God has made. As a necessary consequence of the position we have assumed, viz.: 'That art is not a servile copy, but rather a creation of man in the Spirit of Nature,' Variety and Unity must characterize every great work of art, as they mark every work of the Creator. Let us take any of the humblest things which He has made, a flower, for example: Unity, Order, Proportion, and Symmetry are in all its fragile leaves—the Great Over-Soul seems to have lingered lovingly over the elaboration of its idea, and stamped upon its fragrant leaves, perishing and trivial as they may seem, the secrets of Infinity! With what variety it is marked! How many shades in the gradations of the color! What infinitesimal changes in the direction of the gentle curvature of the rounded lines! what richness in the details! what subtle and penetrating tenderness in the perfume! Love, Infinity, Unity, Order, Proportion, Symmetry, mark all the Divine Works: Unity, Order, Proportion, Symmetry, Love, as manifested in the careful rendering of the subject in hand, with the suggestion of that mystic Infinite in which all being is cradled, and from which all art is nurtured, should, on their lower level in their finite degree, mark every work of art. But to our subject: the divine attribute of unity, and its manifestation in and through the finite.
All things, except God, receive externally some perfection from other things. We will not now consider the unity of His mystical Trinity, but rather dwell upon the necessity of His inherence in all things, without which no creature could retain existence for a moment. We speak of His comprehensive unity because it is an object of hope to men; it is that of which Christ thought when he said: 'Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word: that they may be all One, as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee.' There is no matter, no spirit, that is not capable of unity of some kind with other creatures, in which unity is found their several perfections, and which is a source of joy for all who see it. The Unity of Spirits is partly in their sympathy, partly in their giving and taking, and ever in their love, their inseparable dependency on each other and always on their Maker—not like the cold peace of undisturbed stones and solitary mountains, but the living peace of trust, the living power of confidence, of hands that hold each other and are still! Who has not felt the strength of united love? In the sudden emotion common to humanity which we all experience at the sight of suffering, and which brought tears from the Holy One on the death of Lazarus, in the strange shivering which we feel pervade our souls at the shrill cry of anguish, do we not recognize more than a simple resemblance of nature—do we not feel that the race is really One, that a common grief again unites it, that in this oneness we are all justly partakers in the sin of Adam, that in this oneness we may partake of the glory of the Brother who died to unite the finite with the Infinite?
It is to this essential unity of the race that the dramatist owes much of his power; for let him but strike the common strings of grief and love, and the crowd at once show by their words, their gestures, their looks, and often by their tears, their earnest sympathy. Even at the spectacle of an imaginary grief their hearts are moved, the sorrow thrills through every soul; if the poet has been true to nature, they feel that his imaginary characters are but part and parcel of themselves in their woe. Thus the emotion excited by dramatic representations has its source in the very root of our being, the unity of our common nature, in our common brotherhood; consequently, neither in the instincts of the body nor the caprices of the poetic fancy. If the poet would not break the bond, let him respect the unities of nature, whatever view he may take of those of convention. It is to this wonderful unity with our common nature that the greatest of all uninspired writers, Shakspeare, owes his universal acknowledgment, his unequalled power.
If, as we have labored to teach, matter always symbolizes mind, we should expect to find it also pervaded with the unity pertaining to its lower rank, and so indeed we find it. In its noblest form the unity of matter is that organization of it which builds it into living temples for the indwelling spirits, those houses not made with hands—the bodies of noble men, of fair and loving women.
In a lower form, it gives that sweet and strange affinity which adds the glory of orderly arrangement to its elements, gifting them with the fair variety of change and assimilation that turns the dust into crystal, and separates the waters above the firmament from those below. It is the walking and clinging together that gives power to the winds, weight to the waves, heat to the sunbeams, and stability to the mountains. It is the 'clinging together' which throws our syllables into words, gives metre to poetry, and melody and harmony to sound. Indeed, the clinging together of sounds, as seized by the ear in time, with the ever forming and living ebb and flow of widely different rhythms, exerting the most mysterious influences upon the soul, is not less remarkable than its more familiar history in space.
Manifold, indeed, would be the generalizations of the different species of unity, for it is the secret link of all being.