Grant Allen

“ So far we have treated little of beauty in nature: beauty in art has occupied almost our whole attention. The latter prepared the human mind for the appreciation of the former. Of the manner in which the love for art passes into the love for smaller natural objects, which exhibit minute beauty of workmanship, I have already treated elsewhere: but the taste for scenery demands a few words here. Children and early races care little for nature: it is only among the most cultivated classes of the most advanced types that the aesthetic faculty reaches this its highest and most disinterested stage. ”

“ When professors of fine art discuss the principles of beauty, they are too fond of confining themselves to the very highest feelings of the most cultivated classes in the most civilized nations. The mere childish love of colors, the mere savage taste for bone necklets and carved calabashes, seem beneath their exalted notice. Nay, more, we constantly find them accusing one another of having no feeling for beauty, or at least very little. ”

“ But it does not seem likely that primitive man took much notice of scenery, of organic beauty as a whole, or even very largely of beauty in flowers, berries, butterflies, and shells. Yet there was an obvious link, a simple stepping-stone, by which nascent aesthetic feeling might easily pass from the one stage to the other. That link is given us in the love for personal decoration.
Not only does every unsophisticated man wish to find a pretty mate, but he also wishes to look to advantage in her eyes and those of his rivals. Similarly, every woman wishes to look pleasing toward all men. ”

“ Ninety-nine people out of a hundred, put in Lyell's place, would have been nothing better than masters of fox-hounds or slaughterers of tame pheasants. When one thinks of the life-work performed by such men as Lyell and the great band of thinkers to which he belonged, one sees only the best side of wealth and position: one feels for a moment half inclined to thank the constitution of things as they are here in England for the chance it offers to such broad-minded and comprehensive workers as these. ”

“ Attaching itself at first merely to the human face and figure, it has gone on to embrace the works of man's primitive art, and then the higher products of his decorative and imitative skill. Next, seizing on the likeness between human handicraft and the works of nature, envisaged as the productions of an anthropomorphic creator, it has proceeded to the admiration for the lace-work tracery of a fern or a club-moss, the sculptured surface of an ammonite, the embossed and studded covering of a sea-urchin, the delicate fluting of a tiny shell. ”

“ We must congratulate ourselves if now and then, at rare intervals, we get a single Lyell out of all this mass of wasted humanity. After all, that result is in itself a great thing. We have always enough of narrow specialists in science, men valuable and important in their own way, though that is not the highest way; but we have never too many of the great coordinating and organizing intelligences, who take the scattered strands of scientific thought, and weave them together into one consistent and harmonious whole. ”

“ Animals never seem to admire scenery, or foliage, or beautiful creatures of other species. They do not appear for the most part to care greatly for human music, or for any sounds other than those uttered by their own kind. They do not even show any marked aesthetic enjoyment of the lovely flowers and fruits whose tints, as Mr. Darwin teaches us, are mainly due to their own selective action. But, if our great biologist is correct in his reasonings, [1] they do very distinctly display their admiration for the beautiful forms, colors, and songs of their own highly decorated or musical mates. ”

“ The firstborn of a wealthy and cultivated family, with ample means and ample leisure, endowed by nature with literary and scientific potentialities, brought up in the stimulating atmosphere of his own home, of Oxford, and of the London literary world, surrounded from his childhood upward by men of science and men of letters, it would have been strange if Charles Lyell had not turned out exactly such a man as we all know him to have been. ”

“ What is the center from which the widening circle of æsthetic sensibility takes its departure? In other words, what is the primitive source of the appreciation of beauty? Putting the question into a concrete form, what objects did man, as a whole, and does each man in particular, first find beautiful? If we look at a cultivated European, we see that he derives great æsthetic enjoyment from contemplating the sunset clouds, the green trees, the lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, the flowers, birds, and insects around him. ”

“ The gods, indeed, have done almost more for the expansion of the aesthetic faculty than even the kings. If the savage decorates the living chief and his house, how much more must he decorate and beautify the image and the house of that greater dead chief, the god—that ancestral ghost whom even the living chief dreads and venerates exceedingly! Hence, from the very first, while the ornaments of the king and the god are the same in kind, those of the god are the finest in degree. ”

“ Again, only highly cultivated minds can thoroughly enjoy the beauty of places which have been always familiar from childhood: and we can hardly expect a taste for scenery to develop among people who necessarily live (like all but the most civilized) in one narrow place for all their days. Under such circumstances, the perception of its beauty can never arise. The habit of making tours, at first confined to the very wealthy, but gradually spreading down to the middle classes and the mass, has undoubtedly had an immense effect in strengthening the love of nature. ”

“ Beginning with the regal hut, it goes on to the frail and gilded palaces of China and Burmah, the house of cedar which King Solomon builded, the vast piles of brick erected by Assyrians and Babylonians in the alluvial valley of the Euphrates, the solid granite colonnades of Thebes and Memphis, the huge marble domes of Agra and Delhi, the stucco monstrosities of Mohammedan Lucknow. Sculpture first grows up as the handmaid of architecture, and begins its modern form with the bas-reliefs of Egypt and Assyria, or the rock-hewn colossi of Elephanta. ”

“ Architecture is indeed a specially regal and religious art. All early buildings of any pretensions are either palaces or shrines: only at a comparatively late stage of evolution, and under an industrial régime, do handsome mansions of commoners begin to exist. Even in our own day, if we see an exceptionally large and pretentious house, we take it for granted that it is, if not a palace, at least a public building. In India, all the great architectural works are either mosques and temples or palaces and mausoleums of native or foreign rulers. ”

“ IF we were not so familiar with the fact, we would think there were few queerer things in nature than the mode of growth followed by this sprouting hyacinth-bulb on my mantel-piece here. It is simply stuck in a glass stand filled with water, and there, with little aid from light or sunshine, it goes through its whole development like a piece of organic clock-work, as it is, running down slowly in its own appointed course. For a bulb does not grow as an ordinary plant grows, solely by means of carbon derived from the air under the influence of sun-light. ”

“ I notice in many works of travel that, even where the men almost or entirely monopolize the ornaments, the women are always described as displaying great admiration for the beads, red cloth, and other finery taken about by travelers. I may add that I am often struck by the extraordinary folly of missionaries, who habitually preach down the love of ornament on the part of savages or of emancipated slaves (especially the women) , when in reality this love is the first step in aesthetic progress, and the one possible civilizing element in their otherwise purely animal lives. ”

“ On the other hand, when traveling becomes easier, a taste for scenery naturally arises. All the mental elements of the taste are already present; only their combination is wanted to complete the aesthetic growth. Tastes educated and refined by the arts of the city must find beauty ready to hand in much of the country. The garden and park, the Italian terrace and the Versailles avenues, the ornamental grounds and artificial lakes of the last century, formal as they seem to us now, show the gradual growth of the taste. ”

“ The question is, then, how can the hyacinth thus live and grow without the apparent aid of sunlight, on which all vegetation is ultimately based?
Of course, an ordinary plant, as everybody knows, derives all its energy or motive-power from the sun. The green leaf is the organ upon which the rays act. In its cells the waves of light propagated from the sun fall upon the carbonic acid which the leaves drink in from the air, and, by their disintegrating power, liberate the oxygen while setting free the carbon, to form the fuel and food-stuff of the plant. ”

“ The more every individual shares the healthiest tastes of its kind, and puts them in practice in the choice of a mate, the more is he or she insuring for descendants a healthy and a successful life whereby it hands on its own sound taste to future generations. But, besides this fundamental typical beauty—the beauty which consists in full realization of the normal specific form—there is another source of personal beauty on which sexual selection may act, and through which it has produced the greater number of its most striking effects. ”

“ By the common consent of poets, painters, sculptors, and the world at large, the standard of beauty for mankind is still to be found in the features and figure of a lovely woman.
Probably primitive man admired his pre-glacial Phyllis or Neæra, admired himself, and perhaps also admired his fellow-man. So far as I can learn, there are no savages so low that they do not discriminate between pretty squaws or gins and plain ones, between handsome men and ugly ones. Our own children appear to me to make the distinction among their playmates from a very early age. ”

“ But we must never forget that the taste for scenery on a large scale is confined to comparatively few races, and comparatively few persons among them. Thus, to the Chinese, according to Captain Gill, in spite of their high artistic skill, "the beauties of nature have no charm, and in the most lovely scenery the houses are so placed that no enjoyment can be derived from it." The Hindoos, "though devoted to art, care but little, if at all, for landscape or natural beauty." ”

“ This close restriction of the æsthetic feeling to those objects which most nearly concern the individual, and through him the species, is only what we should naturally expect among the lower animals. We could hardly fancy them interesting themselves in anything so remote from their own personal wants as the rainbow or the sunset, the blue hills and the belted sea. They and their ancestors before them could not have gained any advantage by turning aside their attention from the practical pursuit of food or mates, to the otiose contemplation of that which profiteth nothing. ”

“ I am glad he has been courageous enough, and logical enough, to admit that his argument, if pushed as far as it must go, would prove that men may have come from the orang-outang. But, after all, what changes species may really undergo! How impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line beyond which some of the so-called extinct species have never passed into recent ones! The last two sentences show how, even then, Lyell was trembling upon the brink of the truth. ”

“ To look out upon fresh green fields and trees rather than upon the walls and narrow streets of a city must always have been pleasant to all but the most restrictedly anthropinistic minds—though even in our own day there are many townsmen who would find more to interest them in a crowd of people than in the loveliest scenery on earth. ”

“ The reason for this slow development may be briefly traced. The minor component elements of scenery must always have been to a great extent beautiful on their own account even to children and savages. Thus, the same bright color which gave attractiveness to flowers and gems must also have given it, though more vaguely, to the rainbow and the sunset clouds, which could not similarly be utilized for purposes of ornament. Color must also always have formed an element of beauty in blue sky and sea, red-sandstone cliffs, white chalk, green meadows, and golden corn-fields. ”

“ With the recession of the middle ages, when men were again confined to the narrow limits of towns, aesthetic feeling went back once more to the naïve anthropinism of an earlier age; but, since the Renaissance, the love of scenery has grown perpetually, and it now probably reaches the farthest development that it has ever yet attained. ”

“ That such a man as Cuvier should have given a sanction to such an accusation was felt by all as a deep wound to the whole body. And what on earth was Cuvier to gain by intermeddling with politics?. . . You well know with what contempt the old aristocracy of all countries are apt to regard all new men of whatever abilities. We feel that but too much in Germany; but here it is a principle of party to carry such prejudices to the utmost length. Cuvier's situation was a proud one while he stood in the very foremost rank of men of science in France ”

“ What feeds a plant will feed a squirrel, a mouse, a pig, or a man, just as well. Each requires just the same free elements, whose combination with oxygen may yield it heat and movement. Thus it happens that the parts of plants which we human beings mainly use as food-stuffs are just the organs where starch has been laid by for the plant's own domestic economy—seeds, as in the pea, bean, wheat, maize, barley, rice, or millet ”

“ Yarmouth and Romney, the two great modern districts of England, the exact places to see geology now at work under one's very eyes! Here comes one of the jarring passages again: "The back door, opening into the farm-yard, betrays [his friend's father] to have been the farmer turned gentleman, not the gentleman turned farmer. How short and direct is the road through Eton and Oxford from the grazier on Romney Marsh to the fine gentleman!" But even here the better nature comes out on second thoughts—"or, to speak plainly, to the real gentleman in ideas, manners, and information." ”

“ Indeed, one is often inclined to fancy that the truest lovers of beauty in nature, or in the works of man, are not always those who can talk most glibly the technical dialect of art-criticism.
If we wish to hit upon the primitive germ of æsthetic sensibility in man, we can not begin better than by looking at its foreshadowing in the lower animals. There are two modes of aesthetic feeling which seem to exist among vertebrates and insects at least: the first is the sense of visual beauty in form, color, or brilliancy ”

“ But, if we look at a savage or a child, we see that for the most part they care for none of these things. We might almost conclude, on a hurried glance, that they had no sense of beauty whatsoever. Yet, when we examine them a little more closely, we find that there are many objects to which they do apply some such word as pretty, the symbol of the simplest æsthetic appreciation. If we can discover the limitations of these earliest æsthetic objects, we shall have solved one of the most important fundamental problems in the theory of beauty. ”