FullReads

Emerson says, “A little more or a little less does not signify anything.” But it does signify in this world of material things. Is one man as impressive as an army, one tree as impressive as a forest? “Scoop a little water in the hollow of your palm; take up a handful of shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but acres of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? A little more or a little less signifies nothing.” It is the mass that does impress us, as Niagara does, as the midnight sky does. It is not as parts of this “astonishing astronomy,” or as a “part of the round globe under the optical sky”–we do not think of that, but the imagination is moved by the vast sweep of the ocean and its abysmal depths, and its ceaseless rocking. In some cases we see the All in the little; the law that spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is seen in leasts is an old Latin maxim. The soap bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam engine; but a tumbler of water throws no light on the sea, though its sweating may help explain the rain.

Emerson quotes Goethe as saying, “The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.” As if beauty were an objective reality instead of a subjective experience! As if it were something out there in the landscape that you may gather your arms full of and bring in! If you are an artist, you may bring in your vision of it, pass it through your own mind, and thus embalm and preserve the beauty. Or if you are a poet, you may have a similar experience and reproduce it, humanized, in a poem. But the beauty is always a distilled and re-created, or, shall we say, an incarnated beauty–a tangible and measurable something, like moisture in the air, or sugar in the trees, or quartz in the rocks. There is, and can be, no “science of beauty.” Beauty, like truth, is an experience of the mind. It is the emotion you feel when in health you look from your door or window of a May morning. If you are ill, or oppressed with grief, or worried, you will hardly experience the emotion of the beautiful.

Emerson said he was warned by the fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of beauty. But in trying to describe it and characterize it he ran the same risk. “We ascribe beauty to that which is simple,” he said; “which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.” Is a boot-jack beautiful? Is a crow-bar? Yet these are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their ends, they stand related to all things through the laws of chemistry and physics. A flower is beautiful, a shell on the beach is beautiful, a tree in full leaf, or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these things are not very simple. Complex things may be beautiful also. A village church may be beautiful no less than a Gothic cathedral. Emerson was himself a beautiful writer, a beautiful character, and his works are a priceless addition to literature.

“Go out of the house to see the moon,” says Emerson, “and it is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.” This is not true in my experience. The stars do not become mere tinsel, do they, when we go out to look at the overwhelming spectacle? Neither does the moon. Is it not a delight in itself to look at the full moon–

“The vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue,”