Anima mundi

“ They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. The pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand years ago, as they are at present; the face of nature and ‘the human face divine,’ shone as bright then as they have ever done. It is this light, reflected by true genius on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses’ feet, like that which ‘circled Una’s angel face,
‘And made a sunshine in the shady place.’ Nature is the soul of art. ”

“ Why is Nature in the Golden Age so ethereal? Because the Attribute of Illumination is predominant in that cycle. All is Illumination, within and without. Through this illumination the Golden Age people see the Steady, Changeless substance which is the Life and Light of which the outer universe is but the shadow. And with the spirit of this Changeless Love and Life and Light in One before their mind's vision, they cannot but feel that its distorted, changeful manifestations called objects are made of fabrics of which dreams are made of. ”

“ When we turn from books to living nature we begin to understand the ancient wisdom, and it is no longer an abstraction, for the Great Spirit whose home is in the vast becomes for us a moving glamour in the heavens, a dropping tenderness at twilight, a visionary light in the hills, a voice in the heart, the Earth underfoot becomes sacred, and the air we breathe is like wine poured out for us by some heavenly cupbearer. ”

“ If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe. The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. ”

“ The bending heavens arching so grandly over us, so studded with sparkling joy-lights, and animated with the eternal cotillion of the skies, invites to no such irreverent repining. Creation's wide field of animated existence inspires no such moodiness and fretfulness of spirit. ”

“ Once more my spirit meets and mingles with the spirit of the landscape. By the harmony of nature's forms and twilight tones I am brought into a larger harmony within myself and with the world around.
All experience offers to us at any moment just such possibilities of living. The infinite and ever-changing expressiveness of nature at every instant of day and night is ours to read if we will but look upon it with the inner vision. ”

“ Ever more beautifully this magic circle encompasses the charmed soul, and that which it forms or speaks sounds like a wonderful romance of childhood's beautiful and mysterious divinities—a romantic tale, accompanied by the bewitching music of the feelings, and adorned with the fairest flowers of lovely life. ”

“ Which of us have not had such moments of despondency in the face of a great task? In such moments I have often called to mind one of those parables of Nature which are everywhere around us, unseen and unheeded, like those exquisite fresco angels of the old masters, in dim corners of ancient churches, blowing silent trumpets of praise and adoration and touching mute viols into mystic melodies which are lost to us. ”

“ The sense of beauty both animates and refines his domestic tendencies; the love of art is a powerful instrument for raising him above the mere cravings and satisfactions of his animal nature; the expansion of mind which rises in us at the sight of the starry sky, the cloud-capt mountain, the boundless ocean, seems intended to direct our thoughts by an impressive though indefinite feeling, to the Infinite Author of All. ”

“ As the Graces round the throne of Venus, so music, painting, sculpture, wait as handmaids round the throne of Poetry. "They from her [76] golden urn draw light," as planets drink the sunbeams; and in return they array the divinity which created and inspired them, in those sounds, and hues, and forms, through which she is revealed to our mortal senses. The pleasure, the illusion, produced by music, when it is the voice of poetry, is, for the moment, by far the most complete and intoxicating, but also the most transient. ”

“ The air is so clear that the eye seems to have new power of vision to reach to the uttermost end of the earth; the eye imparts to the soul its larger horizon, and a great leap of joy carries the spirit into the infinite room of creation, into the infinite grandeur of created things, and the spirit grows and feels its small estimate of God’s earth expanding into a newer, grander conception of creation. ”

“ Heaven and Hell; the height and depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny before the throne of God: into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid and solemn, transcending the region of sense and corporeity, carrying the mind away to an ideal world, where the things of this earth obtained a new reality by virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite Beyond, the modern arts in their infancy were thrust. ”

“ I look upon a realm celestial in its beauty, unprofaned by earthly sign or sound. A strange, supernal stillness fills the air; and save where some unseen spirit-wing tips the slender twig and lets fall the scintillating shower, no slightest movement mars the enchanted vision. ”

“ Such are the great forces of Nature gathered up in what we call the æsthetic phenomenon, and it is these forces of Nature which, stolen from heaven by the man of genius or the nation of genius, and welded together in music, or architecture, in the arts of visible design or of written thoughts, give to the great work of art its power to quicken the life of our soul. ”

“ Even the darkest spots are glistening by the surrounding beauty. All appears as an enchanted dream; a glimpse of fairyland, or as a primeval paradise modernized, and rendered suitable in every part to gratify the desires of the mind. ”

“ Whilst faith and experience are possible without an artistic elevation of the mind, art must combine the elements of religion and science, and form through beauty a visible link between these elements.
The sublime, as we have said, rules in the universe. Clouds chase one another and are subject to everlasting changes. Trees cover the surface of our globe, forming woods at random. Mountains are towered up, as if hurled together by chance. ”

“ At his voice the whole earth assumes a poetical form, its objects, ideas, laws and phenomena, seem a new Olympus of new deities; but this mythology of the imagination is annihilated, like paganism, at the aspect of paradise, of that ocean of light, sparkling with rays and with stars, with virtues and with love. ”

“ Accustomed to personify the forces of nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a train of gods and goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the shifting panorama of the seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and sorrow, which found their natural expression in alternate rites of rejoicing and lamentation, of revelry and mourning. ”

“ It was the mission of ancient art to express states of being and individuals, and it may be said to be in a general way the mission of our modern art to express the beautiful in endless change, the movement of masses, coming to its sublimity and immortality at last by revealing the beauty of the things that move and that have to do with motion, the bringing of all things and of all souls together on the earth. ”

“ In such scenes and with such accompaniments, the mind wanders from the real to the ideal, the larger and brighter lamps of heaven lead us to imagine that we have risen from the surface of our globe and are floating through the regions of space, and that the ceaseless murmur of the waters is the Music of the Spheres. ”

“ The Animation of Art.—Art raises its head where creeds relax. It takes over many feelings and moods engendered by religion, lays them to its heart, and itself becomes deeper, more full of soul, so that it is capable of transmitting exultation and enthusiasm, which it previously was not able to do. ”

“ It perceives in life and nature those indefinable relations of one thing to another which to the religious thinker suggest a master mind in nature—a magician of the beautiful at work from hour to hour, from moment to moment, in a never-ceasing and solemn chariot motion in the heavens, in the perpetual and marvelous breathing forth of winds, in the motion of waters, and in the unending evolution of gay and delicate forms of leaf and wing. ”

“ In the perspective of a lifetime the fragments flow together into order, and we dimly see the purpose of our being here; in moments of illumination and deeper insight a glimpse may disclose a sudden harmony, and the brief segment of nature's circle becomes beautiful. For then is revealed the shaping principle. Within the fact, behind the surface, are apprehended the relations of which the fact and the surface are the expression. The rhythm thus discovered wakens an accordant rhythm in the spirit of man. The moment gives out its meaning as man and nature merge together in the inclusive harmony. ”

“ No exercise of the poetic faculty, far less that metaphysical mood of the reflective consciousness which 'leads from nature up to nature's God,' can now supply this need. From sea and earth 261 and sky, in those creative ages when the world was young, there leaned to greet the men whose fancy made them, forms imagined and yet real—human, divine—the archetypes and everlasting patterns of man's deepest sense of what is wonderful in nature. ”

“ The happiest and most fruitful moments for our aesthetic sense, those in which our mind expands most and grows most, hence is most active in aesthetic “action” (though not “activity”) are those in which we are unforcedly and massively absorbed in drinking in, with a quiet intentness, the contrasts and harmonies, the grand unity in variety, the very presence and spirit of an alpine upland, or of a river’s flowing, or of the ocean’s outspread, or of the Parthenon sculptures or of Rafael’s madonnas. ”

“ Nature, as will be shown, is a manifestation of immanent ideas which touch life at every point. Ugliness, for example, has its place as well as beauty, and will be dealt with in due course. So with ideas of life and death, of power and weakness, of hope and despondency—these and a thousand others, immanent in external phenomena, have stimulated the powerful imaginations of the infant race, and still maintain their magic to move the sensitive soul. The wonderful mythological systems of the past enshrine science, philosophy, and poetry—and they were prompted by physical phenomena. ”

“ A magic world—a pure creation of the imagination in its search for beauty! This convention in the drawing of the faces has much to do with the unreal quality we find there. Something in the repetition and uniformity of the heads produces a delicate visionary impression, a trance-like mood—as does the rhythm of poetry or music. Under its spell{45} the emotion of the spectator comes forth free from its daily bonds and preoccupations, in the liberation that only art can give. ”

“ And in that state of celestial existence which attends the redeemed Soul disenthralled from ‘the body of this death,’ is it to be doubted, that among the joys that ‘the eye hath never seen, nor the heart conceived,’ there exist colours beautiful beyond all earthly wealth of imagination; beyond the poet’s fancy and the painter’s dream? ”

“ It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the contingent material of Nature's workshop, and gives unfettered play to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. ”

“ We become at length satiated, and perceive the vanity of earthly science and its impotence to afford happiness. We again see the apparition of Deity, and return to the altar of beauty and holiness. The unchanged and unchangeable face of nature, its sun and moon, its stars, its mountains, its rivers, the unfathomable sea, again present themselves, and we dwell over them, regarding them as associates of our first love. We are led to examine our own fashion and being, and we discover assimilations of contour and shape which yield pleasing emotions. ”

“ Through them you enter into a dim and golden fairyland full of wistful music and haunting memories, where fair ladies, courteous knights, delicate-winged angels, aureoled saints in blazing dalmatics pass like dreams through far countries, “where it is always afternoon” and where the land is always lovely, the skies serene, the flowers and birds and little beasts friendly and well beloved. ”

“ Their charms, the joy and pleasure derived from nature, spring not from ourselves. What attracts us in creation is the traces of God's beauty, and in contemplating these the soul is drawn nearer to God, and its joy increased. It is God in nature who dilates the soul.
Why do men love poetry, music, architecture, painting, and sculpture? ”

“ Normally we close our eyes on a cloudy gloom through which vague forms struggle sometimes into definiteness. But the luminous quality gradually became normal in me, and at times in meditation there broke in on me an almost intolerable lustre of light, pure and shining faces, dazzling processions of figures, most ancient, ancient places and peoples, and landscapes lovely as the lost Eden. ”