The Beautiful and the Poetical33
(From Poetry of the Future.)
The relation between the Beautiful and Beauty on the one hand, and the Poetical and Poetry on the other, has generally been seen, when seen at all, vaguely; that is to say, seen as the Beautiful and the Poetical themselves have been seen—“in a mirror darkly.” This indistinctness seems to have grown out of the faulty views of nature taken by the speculators.......... In brief, then, Nature is an effect—a product—of a Power lying behind or above it; and it stands, accordingly, to that Power in the relation of an effect to a cause. That cause we shall describe as Spiritual; the effect, as Natural. The Natural, or Nature, is the material Universe embracing the three kingdoms, known as mineral, vegetable, and animal.....
Such being the case, everything in nature is a correspondent of some thing—is expressive of and consequently representative and exponential of something—above it or behind it; and that something is an idea—a thing not material. It follows, then, that every object in nature has real character in itself as a representative of an idea; just as, say, an anchor is representative of hope, a heart, of love, an olive branch, of peace, and a ring, of marriage...
We next come to consider the percipient mind. Men’s minds have limited and imperfect faculties and capabilities. That which is good, or true, or beautiful, to one mind can hardly be the same in the same way and degree to any other mind. It is true—as some writers have stated, but none seems willing to push the propositions to their legitimate conclusions—that the Good and the Beautiful are true, the Beautiful and the True are good, and the True and the Good are beautiful. We wish to accept the propositions in their most comprehensive scope and with all their legitimate consequences.
Let us note, at this point, the fact, obvious enough but generally overlooked, that in perception the result depends far more upon the percipient mind than upon the object perceived. To a ploughboy, a pebble is an insignificant thing, suggestive possibly of some discomfort in walking, and fit only to shy at a bird, may be; but to the geologist it appears worthy a volume, and speaks to him of strata may be a million of years old, of glacial attrition, of volcanic action, of chemical constituents, of mineralogical principles, and crystallogenic attraction, of mathematical laws and geometric angles, and of future geognostic changes. That is to say, the pebble contracts and expands, as it were, with the faculties and the prejudices of the person—of the mind—that sees it.
Or, again: The crescent moon is visible in the clear sky. A sees a bright convenience which enables him to walk better—not so good a light as the full moon would be, but valuable as far as it goes. B sees a lovely luminary to light him to his lady-love, a hallowed eye half shut that watches with protecting radiance over her slumbers. C reckons the intervening 238,000 miles, its diameter of 2,162.3 miles, and his mind busies itself with orbits, radii, ellipses, eclipses, azimuth, parallax, sidereal periods, satellitic inclinations, and synodic revolutions. D, with a turn for symbols and history, sees in it something of the “ornaments like the moon” that Gideon captured from the Sheikhs Zebah and Zalmunna, something of Byzantine siege, Ottoman ensign, the Crusades, the Knighthood of Selim, the battle of Tours, and the city of New Orleans.........
The Beautiful.... is a relation between the man that sees and the object seen. A perfectly harmonious relation brings perfect beauty.
The Poetical.... is the beautiful; and this may be expressed either in prose or in poetry..........
Poetry, more closely defined, is the poetical expressed in rhythmical language.
Footnote
33 By permission of the author.