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textfiles/Emerson_Beauty.txt

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+BEAUTY.
+
+A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of
+Beauty.
+
+The ancient Greeks called the world _kosmos_, beauty. Such is the
+constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye,
+that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal,
+give us a delight _in and for themselves_; a pleasure arising from
+outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the
+eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its
+structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which
+integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a
+well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects
+are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is
+round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light
+is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light
+will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and
+a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all
+matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this
+general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms
+are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of
+some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear,
+the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the
+serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and
+the forms of many trees, as the palm.
+
+For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in
+a threefold manner.
+
+1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The
+influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to man,
+that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of
+commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been
+cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and
+restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din
+and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man
+again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye
+seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can
+see far enough.
+
+But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any
+mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the
+hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with
+emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of
+cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as
+a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid
+transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I
+dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify
+us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I
+will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria;
+the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of
+faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the
+understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy
+and dreams.
+
+Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon,
+was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds
+divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with
+tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and
+sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that
+nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the
+valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not
+reform for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in
+the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and the stars of
+the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble
+rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.
+
+The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is
+pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the
+winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by
+the genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment
+of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds,
+every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall
+never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect
+their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in
+the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week
+to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and
+roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the
+summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a
+keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants
+punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for
+all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue
+pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow
+parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in
+continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold.
+Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new
+ornament.
+
+But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the
+least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow,
+mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still
+water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and
+mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon,
+and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon
+your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow
+afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it,
+and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of
+diligence.
+
+2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is
+essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be
+loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination
+with the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every
+natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes
+the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions
+that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every
+rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if
+he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and
+abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world
+by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and
+will, he takes up the world into himself. "All those things for which
+men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;" said Sallust. "The winds
+and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest
+navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven.
+When a noble act is done,--perchance in a scene of great natural
+beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one
+day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them
+once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried,
+in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his
+side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are
+not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty
+of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of
+America;--before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all
+their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the
+Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living
+picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her
+palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal
+in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was
+dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the
+champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him,
+"You never sate on so glorious a seat." Charles II., to intimidate the
+citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an
+open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to
+the scaffold. "But," his biographer says, "the multitude imagined
+they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side." In private places,
+among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to
+draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature
+stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of
+equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose
+and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the
+decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal
+scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in
+unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible
+sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly
+in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The
+visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common
+life, whosoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy
+genius, will have remarked how easily he took all things along with
+him,--the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became
+ancillary to a man.
+
+3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world
+may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect.
+Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought.
+The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand
+in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The
+intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and
+the exclusive activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of
+the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but
+they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals;
+each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does
+beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, comes
+unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the
+apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in its turn,
+of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally
+reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and
+not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
+
+All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world;
+some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have
+the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they
+seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.
+
+The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of
+humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is
+the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the
+works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the
+expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms
+radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the
+ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common
+to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard
+of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,--the totality of nature;
+which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno."
+Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the
+whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this
+universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the
+architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one
+point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty
+which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed
+through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through
+the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.
+
+The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This
+element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why
+the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is
+one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and
+goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But
+beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal
+beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand
+as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final
+cause of Nature.

textfiles/Emerson_Commodity.txt

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+COMMODITY.
+
+WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a
+multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one
+of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and
+Discipline.
+
+Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages
+which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is
+temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet
+although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature
+which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish
+petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that
+has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which
+floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid
+ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this
+ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac
+of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates,
+this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him.
+The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his
+garden, and his bed.
+
+     "More servants wait on man
+     Than he'll take notice of."--
+
+Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the
+process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each
+other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun
+evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on
+the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the
+plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of
+the divine charity nourish man.
+
+The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of
+man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for
+favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of
+Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his
+boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars,
+and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and
+merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to
+town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of
+these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of
+Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships,
+canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the
+human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human
+race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house,
+and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and
+the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow,
+and cut a path for him.
+
+But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses.
+The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall
+leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that
+this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A
+man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.