What Will He Do with It? — Complete

CHAPTER XXIII.

   SOMETHING ON AN OLD SUBJECT, WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SAID BEFORE

Although Lionel was prepared to see a very handsome woman in Lady Montfort, the beauty of her countenance took him by surprise. No preparation by the eulogies of description can lessen the effect that the first sight of a beautiful object produces upon a mind to which refinement of idea gives an accurate and quick comprehension of beauty. Be it a work of art, a scene in nature, or, rarest of all, a human face divine, a beauty never before beheld strikes us with hidden pleasure, like a burst of light. And it is a pleasure that elevates; the imagination feels itself richer by a new idea of excellence; for not only is real beauty wholly original, having no prototype, but its immediate influence is spiritual. It may seem strange—I appeal to every observant artist if the assertion be not true—but the first sight of the most perfect order of female beauty, rather than courting, rebukes and strikes back, every grosser instinct that would alloy admiration. There must be some meanness and blemish in the beauty which the sensualist no sooner beholds than he covets. In the higher incarnation of the abstract idea which runs through all our notions of moral good and celestial purity—even if the moment the eye sees the heart loves the image—the love has in it something of the reverence which it was said the charms of Virtue would produce could her form be made visible; nor could mere human love obtrude itself till the sweet awe of the first effect had been familiarised away. And I apprehend that it is this exalting or etherealising attribute of beauty to which all poets, all writers who would poetise the realities of life, have unconsciously rendered homage, in the rank to which they elevate what, stripped of such attribute, would be but a gaudy idol of painted clay. If, from the loftiest epic to the tritest novel, a heroine is often little more than a name to which we are called upon to bow, as to a symbol representing beauty, and if we ourselves (be we ever so indifferent in our common life to fair faces) feel that, in art at least, imagination needs an image of the Beautiful—if, in a word, both poet and reader here would not be left excuseless, it is because in our inmost hearts there is a sentiment which links the ideal of beauty with the Supersensual. Wouldst thou, for instance, form some vague conception of the shape worn by a pure soul released? wouldst thou give to it the likeness of an ugly hag? or wouldst thou not ransack all thy remembrances and conceptions of forms most beauteous to clothe the holy image? Do so: now bring it thus robed with the richest graces before thy mind’s eye. Well, seest thou now the excuse for poets in the rank they give to BEAUTY? Seest thou now how high from the realm of the senses soars the mysterious Archetype? Without the idea of beauty, couldst thou conceive a form in which to clothe a soul that has entered heaven?