the world if you could take clean out of history the lives of Milton, Shakespeare, and Plato,--these three,--and cause them not to be.”
Are we tender, loving, self-denying, and honest, trying to fashion our frail lives after that of the model man of Nazareth? Then, though our pockets are often empty, we have an inheritance which is as overwhelmingly precious as it is eternally incorruptible.
“What constitutes a state?
Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;
Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crowned;
Not bays, and broad-armed ports,
Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
Not starred and spangled courts,
Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.
No: men, high-minded men.
Chapter VIII.
The Apollo Belvidere and the Venus di Milo
These statues stand for symmetry—for an ideal. Is not every character to be formed upon a unique personal ideal? And is not every man a law unto himself, in making for himself a well-proportioned character?
“I wonder if ever a song was sung
But the singer’s heart sang sweeter!
I wonder if ever a hymn was rung,
But the thought surpassed the meter!
I wonder if ever a sculptor wrought,
Till the cold stone echoed his ardent thought!
Or if ever a painter, with light and shade,
The dream of his inmost heart portrayed!”
“Yet the aim of every man,” said Humboldt, “should be to secure the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.”
In every painting of the masters there is one idea or figure which stands out boldly; everything else is subordinate, and finds its real significance not in itself, but in pointing to the central idea. So, in the universe of God, every object of creation is but a guideboard with an index finger pointing to the central figure—Man. Man is the only great thing in the universe; all the ages have been trying to produce a perfect model. Only one complete human life, one ideal life, has yet evolved. Is not life itself a fine art, and more difficult than sculpture, painting, music, architecture, or the creations of poetry? Do we not need to learn how to live?
Apelles hunted over Greece for many years, studying the fairest points of beautiful women, getting here an eye, there a forehead, there a nose, here a grace, and there a turn of beauty, for his famous portrait of a perfect woman which enchanted the world. So the coming man will be composite—many in one. He will absorb into himself not the weakness, not the follies, but the strength and the virtues of other types of men. He will be a man raised to the highest power. He will be self- centered, equipoised, and ever master of himself. His sensibility will not be blunted by violation of nature’s laws. His whole character will be impressible, and will respond to the most delicate touches of nature.
“Did you ever watch a sculptor slowly fashioning a human countenance?” asks a modern teacher. “It is not molded at once. It is not struck out at a single blow. It is painfully and laboriously wrought. It is a work of time; but at last the full likeness comes out and stands fixed and unchanging in the solid marble. So does a man carve out his own moral likeness. Every day he adds something to the work.”
“I cannot see that you have made any progress since my last visit,” said a critic to Michael Angelo. “But,” said the sculptor, “I have retouched this part, polished that, softened this feature, brought out that muscle, given some expression to this lip, more energy to that limb.” “But these are trifles!” “It may be so, but trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
“That infinite patience which made Michael Angelo spend a week in bringing out a muscle in a statue with more fidelity to truth, or Gerhard Douw a day in giving the right effect to a dewdrop on a cabbage leaf,” makes all the difference between success and failure.
A man took a large, beautiful onyx to a noted artist to see what he could do to cover up a tinge of iron rust, which seemed to make the stone almost worthless. The artist engraved out of the blemish the figure of a lovely goddess. So the successful man turns the commonest events, the homeliest of things, into that which is beautiful in his life. And if he does it by a law of symmetrical development, then love, charity, contentment, benignity, and cheerfulness will look out from the marble he works upon. Let youth be taught to look for beauty in all they see, and to embody beauty in all they do, and the imagination will be active and healthy. If one loves beauty and looks for it, he will see it everywhere. If there is music in his soul, he will hear it everywhere; every object in nature will sing to him. Life will be neither a drudgery nor a dream, but will become full of God’s life and love.
If you infuse into the purpose with which you follow the various employments and professions of life, no matter how humble they may be, the sense of beauty, pleasure, and harmony, you are transformed at once from an artisan to an artist. Any discontent you feel with the work you are compelled to do comes from your doing it in the spirit of a drudge. Do it in the spirit of a master, with a perception of the beauty which inheres in all honest work, and the drudgery will disappear in delight. “It is the spirit in which we work, not the work itself, which lends dignity to labor; and many a field has been ploughed, many a house built, in a grander spirit than has sometimes attended the government of empires or the creation of epics.” How few, even in this magnificent life-gallery, where nature holds perpetual carnival of harmony and beauty, see anything of value except dollars and merchandise! As Emerson says, the farmer sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of the man on the farm.
Life is not mean, it is grand; if it is mean to any, he makes it so. God made it glorious. It is paved with diamonds; its banks He fringed with flowers. He overarched it with stars. Around it He spread the glory of the physical universe—suns, moons, worlds, constellations, systems—all that is magnificent is in motion, sublime in magnitude, and grand in order and obedience. God would not have attended life with this broad march of grandeur if it did not mean something.
Ruskin tells us that the earth we tread beneath our feet is composed of clay and sand and soot and water; and he tells us that, if Nature has her perfect work (in these things), the clay will become porcelain, and may be painted upon and placed in the king’s palace; then, again, it may become clear and hard and white, and have the power of drawing to itself the blue and the red, the green and the purple rays of the sunlight, and become an opal. The sand will become very hard and white, and have the power of drawing to itself the blue rays of the sunlight, and become a sapphire. The soot will become the hardest and whitest substance known, and be changed into a diamond. The water in the summer is a dewdrop, and in the winter crystallizes into a star. Even so the homeliest lives, by drawing to themselves the coloring of truth, sincerity, charity, and faith, may become crystals and gems “of purest ray serene.”
Every thought which enters the
