Chapter III: The Infinite (1)

The Divine Attributes are the base of all true Art.

No work of art can be considered truly beautiful unless it recalls or reproduces, even in its finite form, some of the divine attributes; not that the work must treat of them, or consciously suggest them to the intellect, but that they must enter into the creation of the artist, that the immediate and intuitive perception of beauty, always attached to their manifestation, may appeal to those faculties or instincts which ever answer in delight when these attributes are suggested to the human spirit; for, consciously or unconsciously, the soul yearns for a clearer view of the beauty of God.

Whatever good there may be desirable by man, more especially good belonging to his moral nature, there will be a corresponding agreeableness in whatever external object reminds him of such good, whether it remind him by arbitrary association, by typical resemblance, or by awakening intuitions of the divine attributes, which he was created to glorify and to enjoy eternally. Leibnitz says:

'The perfections of God are those of our own souls, but He
possesses them without limit; He is the exhaustless ocean from
which we have received but a drop; we have some power, some wisdom,
some love; but God is all power, all wisdom, all love. Order,
unity, proportion, harmony, enchant us; painting, sculpture, music,
poetry, charm us in the degree in which, in their appropriate
spheres, they have succeeded in manifesting fragments of the above:
but God is all order, all proportion, all unity, all harmony; and
all beauty visible here is but a dim reflex of the eternal rays.'

The fact of our deriving constant pleasure from whatever is a type or semblance of the divine attributes, and from nothing enduringly but that which is, is the most ennobling of all that can be said of human nature, not only setting a great gulf of specific separation between us and the brutes that perish, but it seems a promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious with the Being in whose darkened manifestations we here unconsciously and instinctively delight. It is at least probable that the higher the order of intelligences, the more of the divine image becomes palpable in all around them, and the redeemed spirits and angels may have perceptions as much more full and rapturous than ours, as ours than those of the beasts and creeping things. It may be received almost as an axiom that no natural instinct or desire can be entirely frustrated, and as these desires for the beautiful are so unfailing that they have not escaped the thinkers of any age, but were held divine of old, and even in heathen countries, it must be admitted that in these visionary pleasures, lightly as we may now be disposed to regard them, there are causes of gratitude, grounds of hope, anchors of faith, more than in all the manifold material gifts with which God mercifully crowns the years and hedges the path of men.

We turn to Plato to show how clearly such ideas were held by the thinkers of antiquity:

'Eternal beauty, not created, not made; exempt from increase or
decay; not beautiful in one part and deformed in another, beautiful
in such a time, such a place, such a relation; not beauty which
hath any sensible parts or anything corporeal, or which may be
found comprised in any one thought or science, or residing in any
creation different from itself, as in an animal, the earth, or the
heavens;--but absolute beauty, identical and invariable in itself;
beauty in which, would they please the spirit of men, other things
must participate, but their creation or destruction brings IT
neither diminution, increase, nor the slightest change.'

Plotinus writes in the same spirit:

'Let him who has closed his eyes upon mere sensuous beauty, advance
boldly into the depths of the sanctuary. Let him reverently gaze
upon the true beauty, the original type of those pale and fleeting
images to which he may have hitherto applied the holy name of
beautiful.'

We propose to consider reverently and with a humble sense of the limited sphere from which we must regard the infinite, some of the divine attributes, which must, in the finite mode, enter into every creation of artistic excellence. We begin our reflections with the infinite itself.

Infinite--this word is by no means the expression of a clear idea: it is merely the expression of an effort to attain one. It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. Man needed a term by which to point out the direction of this effort--the cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt. The fact is, that upon the enunciation of any one of that class of terms to which 'infinite' belongs--the class representing thoughts of thought--he who has a right to say he thinks at all, feels himself called upon, not to entertain a conception, but simply to direct his mental vision toward some given point, in the intellectual firmament, where lies a nebula never to be resolved. And yet to this very point, which the intellect cannot define, are our spirits forever tending. No artistic creation ever fully pleases unless there is given in it some suggestion of this mystic attribute, underlying and permeating all other attributes of Deity. It is the dim unconscious feeling after this attribute which causes the forever recurring dissatisfaction with the finite, which so ruthlessly pursues us through life. It is the source of that vague but tender longing, that restless but dreamy yearning, that haunting melancholy, which characterize human souls created for the enjoyment of the infinite; divining and insatiably thirsting for the absolute.

Let us now attempt to trace some of the various ways in which this feeling after the infinite manifests itself. Plato and his school tried to explain the existence of absolute ideas in the soul by the hypothesis of its preëxistence to that of the body in the bosom of the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal; and, consequently, that such ideas are but reminiscences of a more perfect life. We find the following passage in an ode of Wordsworth's:

'Our birth is but a sleep, and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

'Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.'

It seems useless here to enter upon the vexed subject of 'innate ideas,' or to attempt to convince the reader, metaphysically, that the very negation contained in the word finite, necessarily suggests its affirmation in the word infinite. Enough that the idea of the infinite is certainly found in the mind of man, that he seeks it in the material world, in himself, in God. High gifts may have been wrought into the dim soul, which are destined to be gradually awakened through the growing perceptions of the mind. Every spiritual being created by eternal love may have had imparted to him a ray from the sun of eternal love, which, in its due time and place, is to manifest itself in his consciousness. Such participation in God as the primary source of all that is to abide eternally with the redeemed, has, in the present state of our vague consciousness, been described by men who felt its stirrings in their soul as the memory of eternal love. It might more properly be called an intuition of eternal love; such an instinct as leads the chrysalis to prepare for the change which it certainly does not understand. Life, such as the beat of the heart, the action of the lungs, is not manifested to the consciousness--neither is the source of this intuition, which, however, gives evidence of itself by an intuitive feeling of incessant longing. It reveals its presence constantly; sometimes in an undefinable feeling of profound desire, satisfied with no earthly object, yet but vaguely directed to the eternal or divine; sometimes in a profound and absorbing religiosity. This longing exists in an inchoate state; it is a love yet to be developed. From this mystic root springs much that is intellectually great, even the love of scientific certainty. Philosophy may, indeed, almost be termed the science of longing.

Developing in its normal growth, it gives us our true saints; those who live but to love God, and to serve man. But like all human gifts, it may be perverted. It is some such perverted apprehension or illusory longing for the infinite, which causes a man to surrender himself, heart and soul, to the despotic tyranny of some ruling habit, some favorite and engrossing pursuit. Alas! it often leads the most gifted of our race to devote all their energies, thoughts, feelings, to one faulty, fading, changing object, vainly pouring that worship upon the creature, which should be rendered only to the Creator.

'He that sits above
In His calm glory, will forgive the love
His creatures bear each other, even if blent
With a vain worship, for its close is dim
Ever with grief, which leads the wrung soul back to Him.'

The despair which this feeling sometimes occasions in the perverted soul of one intent upon feeding it with the gross aliments of the debased senses, is, without doubt, a very frequent cause of suicide. It may lead, in the soul of the infidel or sensualist, to the idolatry of art. It is a feeling, and requires direction. When enlightened by revelation and purified by faith, it manifests itself in the sublime abnegation and ardent love of the faithful follower of Jesus Christ.

This instinctive longing for the infinite, existing in the soul itself, cannot be satisfied by any earthly longing, sensual gratification, or external possession. Made 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,' man is ruined and eternally miserable if he refuse to fulfil the destiny for which he was created. His misery springs from the root of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot succeed in burying under the finite. This is a pregnant subject; under this strange caption might be written the psychological history of most human despair.

'The Fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature
Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the Perfect
His eyes seek in vain.'

Thus is faith a necessity of the soul, 'the evidence of things not seen.'

The idea of eternity is necessarily evolved from the negation contained in the limited meaning of the word time. Eternity is the all embracing, completely complete time; eternity, which is infinite not only _a parte externa_, that is everpassing yet everlasting, without beginning and without end; but also infinite _a parte interna_--so that in the endlessly living, thoroughly luminous present, the whole past, also the whole future, are equally actual, equally clear, and equally present to us, as the very present itself. Can we indeed form any other conception of a state of _perfect_ bliss? Is the idea of a state of entire happiness at all compatible with the regret that must be felt for a blissful past; the consciousness of a flying present; and the fear of an uncertain future? Yet the idea of time does not seem necessarily excluded from a conception of the essence and operations of God. Does there in very reality exist such an absolute opposition between time and eternity, that it is quite impossible for them to subsist in any mutual contact or relation? Is there no transition from the one to the other conceivable? Is eternity anything more than time vitally full, blissfully complete? If eternity is nothing more than the living, full, essential time, and if our earthly, fettered, and fragmentary time is, as the great poet says, 'out of joint,' fallen with man's disobedience to his God into a state of strange disorder--it is easily conceivable that the two do not stand apart so as to have no mutual contact. Those who have seen a holy death leave a calm and beautiful smile upon the face of a dying Christian, can scarcely help believing that the beginning of a blissful eternity has impressed itself upon the rapt features, actually breaking through the shackles of time before the prisoner was emancipated from its fetters. And those brief intervals of rapture which are sometimes experienced in the midst of earnest and ardent devotion--what are they but eternity thus manifesting itself through time in the soul? Those who have been rescued from the very jaws of death, frequently tell us that the moment preceding insensibility was crowded and filled with vivid recollections of the whole apparently forgotten past--thus bringing into the soul in the midst of time, a foretaste and interval of eternity! and those prophetic intimations of things yet to be, which frequently break in with startling power upon the human spirit, what indeed are they but sudden contacts between our fettered time, 'so out of joint,' and the fulness of eternity? Men rave against the justice of eternal punishment, as if its duration were not essentially part of their own immortality! Ah! if the memories of the deeds done in the body are essentially undying, were it not well for us that the writing traced against us by our own hands should be nailed to the cross, obliterated in the blood of the Immaculate Victim? that mystic blood which has bathed the universe!

The innate longing for the infinite, with its accompanying intuitions of the eternal love, and the yearnings for that fulness of time when the past and future shall live with us as really as the present itself, are ever vivid within us, and are two of the great vital arteries of all true art. This burning human thirst for the fulness of eternity in opposition to our fragmentary time manifests itself in our agonizing efforts to bring back the past, to which sad efforts we have given the melancholy name of memory; shows itself in our restless longing for the future, which we call hope; and frequently reveals itself in an insane seizing upon something in the imperfect and fleeting present, which it insists upon worshipping, in regarding as divine. Upon this last phase is dependent all that excited, exaggerated, but frequently beautiful passion of language which marks our poems of love. Ah! it is the merciful will of the Creator that we should worship only the divine, and so the human passion ends in sobs and wails of anguish, for the finite idol can never fill the shrine of the Absolute, the infinite God!

As the intuition of eternal love in the past, we find this longing for the infinite breathing through poetry in the form of elegy; in sad recollections of a faded world of demigods and heroes; and in the plaints for the loss of man's native home in Paradise, in the faint and dying echoes of the happy innocence of creation before the first outbreak of evil, and the consequent misery of nature. Poetry is indeed so full of haunting, melancholy memories, that it might almost be called the 'mind's supersensuous recollection of the eternal.' And what else can be said of music? Is it not an art eminently addressed to this intuition of eternal love, this constant longing for the infinite? Do not its giddy flights and dying falls at once arouse this mystic yearning, seeking, feeling, which may appropriately be termed the passion of the soul? That music holds some deep relation to the soul not yet clearly developed, may be inferred, not only from the magic power it sways over our spirits, but from the fact that the inspired writers picture it among the joys of heaven. It is now the language of our 'divine despair;' it is yet to be the speech of our eternal beatitude!

'God is love:' through all the hidden veins of ever-germing life beats this divine pulse of universal being. Hope, faith, and charity spring from the revelation and answering intuitions of this blissful love: from the hope, faith, and love of men sprang all the really noble works of art. All this is full of consolation, 'though inward far we be'--even the mournful memory of a past of celestial innocence becomes the harbinger of a divine hope. Let the poet then still sing of the past; like the glories of the setting sun flushing down the golden west, it but whispers of a more glorious rise in the mythic east. The root of art springs from the intuitions of eternal love; its leaves, flowers, and fruit, are faith, hope, and charity. May the rapt artist ever remember that the beauty of this earth was not intended to satisfy the requisitions of his longing soul, but to awaken and nourish in it the love of eternal beauty!

A golden thread of glories yet to be, twines through the woof of this our mortal life, and by tracing its wavy lines of glittering brilliancy, shining even through the dim symbolism of matter, many secrets of the life to come may be divined. The arts may be regarded as significant hieroglyphics of delights yet to be fulfilled in other spheres of being. The living pulse of omnipotence, the heart of God, beats sensibly in the beauty of the boundless universe; it is the fountain at which the young immortal is to imbibe his first draught for eternity. Not that, as erroneously held by the Pantheists, nature is God, no more than Raphael is the pictures he paints; but assuming the existence of a God as the creator of the worlds, what else can nature be but a revelation of God and divine love, a visible and symbolic representation thereof in matter; living, because His breath is life?

The following remarkable passage on the religious origin and consecutive order of the arts occurs in De La Mennais' 'Sketch of Philosophy:'

'The temple of art is an emanation from that Divine Spirit who
fills it with Himself. It is the plastic evolution of the idea
which man has of Him, of His nature, of His ways, as manifested in
the universe. From its central sanctuary in which He, the unseen,
dwells, this temple projects, extending itself in space in every
direction; but by an opposite movement all its parts, closely
united, converge to the sanctuary, gravitating toward the central
point where their Head, their essential and primordial Reason,
dwells; they struggle to penetrate its mystic veil, to mingle with
it, to have their being in it, in order to accomplish the perfect
union of variety with unity, of the finite with the infinite.

'The art temple struggles to develop itself by a process analogous
to that of creation. The surface of the earth was first clothed
with vegetation, from the lowly moss and creeping lichen to the
lofty cedar, whose solemn branches mingle with the floating clouds.
When the earth was ready for their habitation, came the animals,
gifted with higher life, with spontaneous motion, with instinct and
sensibility. At last came man, endowed with the incomparable
faculties of love and reason.

'The art temple has also its vegetation. Its walls are covered with
varied plants, which wind along its cornices and wreathe its
plinths; they blossom round the oriels, brightening or deepening in
the light; they twine through the nerves of the vaulted arch; like
the liane of the cedars, they embrace the tall minarets of the
heaven-seeking spire, mounting into the blue depths of ether; they
bind the clustering shafts of the columns in heavy sheaves, and
crown their capitals with flowers and foliage. The stone grows more
and more animated, puts forth in more luxuriant growth; multitudes
of new forms spring up in the bosom of this magnificent creation;
when lo! at length man completes and embodies them all--his own
noble image stands revealed--the rude, but white and glittering
stone glows almost into life under the passion of his forming hand.

'Sculpture is but an immediate development of architecture,
proceeding naturally and organically from it. In proof of this, we
have only to examine it in its first efforts. Forms, unfinished and
embryonic, at first closely attached to the stone, growing by
degrees in accordance with their own fixed laws until able to
detach themselves from the medium through which they were
originated, after having acquired the conditions necessary for
their individual life, spring to actual life, to independent life,
almost as the organized being springs from the womb of its mother.

'Sculpture, however, represents but imperfectly the marvellous
glories of God's creation. It can give but faint ideas of the
various effects of light and shade, the constantly shifting play of
colors; it cannot offer that full harmony of beauty which nature is
ever spreading before us in the complicated scenes of life. To
satisfy this want, a new art is created! Closely linked with all
those which have preceded it, its development is but their
legitimate expansion. The gray and stern arches, the hitherto
colorless sky of the art temple, now take the azure hue of the
heavens, while hovering cherubs look down from their cerulean
depths; the relievos glow, and color defines, as it etherealizes,
the works of man. Painting, at first absorbed in the plastic arts,
scarcely begins to show symptoms of life until she is fully born,
and living in her own distinctive form! As that power which
develops the almost infinite variety of forms is to the universe,
so is painting with its ever ready and vivid canvas to the temple
of art.

'Meanwhile the art temple has not remained wrapped in gloomy
silence; and another series of developments, bearing the same
relation to sound and hearing as the first did to light and sight,
have commenced. As beings ascend in the scale of life, the forms
appealing to sight alone, become less capable of expressing their
nature. If the universe had been without voice, the highest which
it contains had been shrouded in the pall of an eternal silence;
but creation has a voice which is specific in every genus, in every
species, in every individual. Transport yourself in thought to one
of the vast solitudes of the New World--listen to the rustling of
the myriad-leafed forests as they forever murmur on the banks of
the thousands of nameless and unknown streams which ripple through
them; to the clash of the impetuous torrents as they rush down the
precipitous sides of the mountains to glide on from their feet
through beds of soft moss or sedgy grass; to the booming thunder,
driving, scattering, and tearing the flying clouds; to the
intermingling sounds arising from the myriads of creatures which
are roaring, bellowing, humming, buzzing, hissing, singing, upon
the bosom of this primeval world--listen! this is the voice of
nature, indistinct and confused, but majestic, solemn,
multitudinous, full of mystery and palpitating with vague emotions.

'As the art temple symbolizes the creation, is the plastic image of
it, a voice is also heard from its depths, which rides upon the
winds, and pierces afar off. The echo of an invisible world, it is
solemn, mysterious, and multiform, appealing to the inmost
feelings, rousing the sleeping powers, awakening the internal life
of the soul, which without it might lie forever benumbed and
silent. Corresponding to the voice of nature, it, too, is
specifically marked, is individualized in every medium through
which it is produced. Developing in unceasing variety, yet ever
bound in the closest unity, language syllables air into thought,
love. As soon as man mingles his voice, his speech, with that of
inferior beings, the whole creation is enlarged, dilates and throbs
with new and glowing life. A closer tie unites the two worlds--the
world of phenomena and the world of ideas. Rising from the bosom of
organic nature, pressing up like a bud closely wrapped in its sheaf
of clustering and sheltering leaves, destined to indefinite
development, the human word is born; it is named: Oratory, Poetry,
Music! The art temple is now complete. Symbol of the universe, it
represents all that is contained therein under the glittering veil
of art.'

It is strange how, in the middle ages, the temple of art almost grew into one with the temple of faith; to this fact may be traced the elevated and devout character of the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of those dim centuries. Thus the church became a sublime poem, where the glowing imagination of a tender faith lavished all its glories. That the Christian church then satisfied the heart with its mystic dogmas and symbolic representations, is proved by the fact that the masses did not care how obscure and squalid their own hovels might be, provided the temple was great and magnificent. It was the temple of simple, unreasoning, unquestioning faith, but decorated with the highest marvels of art; it was always thrown open to the people, and in it they passed nearly half their days. Man brought what he held to be his best to the temple in which he came to worship God, and in it was concentrated all the world knew of beauty. Its light but ornate steeples seemed to pierce the very clouds; its columns rivalled the shafts of the forest; its balustrades were exquisitely chiselled; its tapestry inwrought with the finest needle work;--all gave evidence that the hand of love had lingered tenderly over every line in the house dedicated by man to his Maker. The pictured saints and angels seemed to smile upon the kneeling people, while the majestic chants and requiems sounded to them like the very voices of the angels, heard from within the 'jasper gates' of the heavenly city. The white-robed and entoning priests were their joy and pride; they, as well as the cherished artists, were most frequently from their own oppressed ranks. Religion and art were alone then democratic; alone expounded to them the original equality of man. Thus they looked upon these temples, which art beautified for faith, as peculiarly their own, their refuge, their solace, their ark of safety in those times of war and trouble. They earnestly and devoutly believed them to be the sanctuaries of the risen God, in which dwelt his glorified Body. With the first rays of the sun flushing with roseate hues the mystic beauty of the temple, they congregated there to receive, in the glorious unity of a common humanity, Him whom the heavens cannot contain--the Son of God. They did not think, they felt; they could not reason, but they heard the church. Naive, simple, and trusting souls, with the Virgin to smile upon them, and the saints to pray for them.

It cannot surely be denied that art is full of indefinite and instinctive longing for the infinite.

Poetry is full of its pining voice. Chateaubriand says:

'When we are alone with nature, the feeling of the infinite forces
itself irresistibly upon us. When the universe with its
inexhaustible variety opens before us, when we contemplate the
myriads of stars moving in ever-mystic harmony through the
limitless immensity of space, when we gaze upon the ocean mingling
with the sky in the boundless distance of the far horizon, when the
earth and sea are rocked into profound calm, and creation itself
seems wrapped in mystic contemplation--an undefinable feeling of
melancholy seizes upon us, unknown desires awaken in the soul, they
seem to call us into other countries far beyond the limits of the
known--must it not then be the vague feeling after, the dim longing
for, the infinite, which at such moments we feel strangely stirring
in the calm depths of the divining soul?'

We find the same yearning breathing through the following beautiful poem of Mrs. Osgood's:

'As plains the home-sick ocean shell
Far from its own remembered sea,
Repeating, like a fairy spell,
Of love, the charmed melody
It learned within that whispering wave,
Whose wondrous and mysterious tone
Still wildly haunts its winding cave
Of pearl, with softest music-moan--

'So asks my home-sick soul below,
For something loved, yet undefined;
So mourns to mingle with the flow
Of music from the Eternal Mind;
So murmurs, with its childlike sigh,
The melody it learned above,
To which no echo may reply
Save from thy voice, Eternal Love!'

It is to his fervent and fiery expression of this longing for the infinite, characterizing, whether pure or perverted, almost the whole of Byron's poetry, breaking out sometimes in imprecations and despair, and not to his immorality, that his great popularity is to be attributed. Even in the midst of the most unhappy scepticism, it was the haunting passion of his soul. Alas! that this longing for the food of heaven should have been fed on husks until the lower rungs of the heaven ladder became so covered with the corruption of matter and fiery sparks of evil, that it seemed rather meant for the foul feet of demons, than for the elastic tread of the redeemed human soul to God! We quote from him in proof:

'Blue rolls the water, blue the sky
Spreads like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light,
So wildly, spiritually bright;
Who ever gazed upon them shining
Nor turned to earth without repining,
Nor wished for wings to flee away,
And mix with their eternal ray?'

'Oh, thou beautiful
And unimaginable ether! and
Ye multiplying masses of increased
And still increasing lights! what are ye?
What
Is this blue wilderness of interminable
Air, wherein ye roll along as I have seen
The leaves along the limpid streams of
Eden?

Is your course measured for ye? or do ye
Sweep on in your unbounded revelry
Through an aerial universe of endless
Expansion, at which my soul aches to think--
Intoxicated with eternity?'

'All heaven and earth are still--though not in sleep,
And breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep;--
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain coast,
All is concentred in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and Defence.

'Then stirs the _feeling infinite_, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone;
A truth, which through our being then doth melt,
And purify from self: it is a tone
The soul and source of music, which makes known
Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm,
Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,
Binding all things with beauty; 'twould disarm
The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.'

In some of the most forcible lines ever penned, Byron has given us the whole psychological analysis of the effects of human passion, when, in its insane perversion, and misdirected thirst for the infinite, it pours upon the dust that love and worship which is due to God alone. No one who has thus sinned, will refuse to acknowledge their force and truth. Fearful in their Medusa-like beauty, they fascinate the heart, only to turn its warm pulses into ice. They are actually withering in their despair. Poor Byron! did he never, never cry with the repentant but happy St. Augustin: 'Oh, eternal beauty! too late have I known thee!'

'Alas! our young affections run to waste,
Or water but the desert; whence arise
But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste,
Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes,
Flowers whose wild odors breathe but agonies,
And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants
Which spring beneath her steps, as Passion flies
O'er the world's wilderness, and vainly pants
For some _celestial fruit_ forbidden to our wants.

'O Love! no habitant of earth thou art--
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee;
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,
But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see
The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquenched soul--parched--wearied--wrung and riven.

'Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
And fevers into false creation:--where,
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?
In him alone. Can Nature show so fair?
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,
The unreached Paradise of our despair,
Which o'er informs the pencil and the pen,
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again?

'Who loves, raves--'tis youth's frenzy--but the cure
Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see too sure
Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's
Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,
Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;
The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prize--wealthiest when most undone.

'We wither from our youth, we gasp away--
Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first--
But all too late, so are we doubly cursed.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same,
Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst--
For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

'Few--none--find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies--but to recur, ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust--the dust we all have trod.

'Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless Upas, this all blasting tree.
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew--
Disease--death--bondage--all the woes we see--
And worse--the woes we see not--which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heartaches ever new.'

Again:

'What is the worst? Nay, do not ask--
In pity from the search forbear:
Smile on--nor venture to unmask
Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!'

Merciful God! how men suffer when they fly from Thee. When they refuse to listen to the sublime voice implanted within, which calls them to Thee, forever reminding them that they were made for things infinite, eternal! O ye men of pleasure, it is the very greatness of your nature which torments you: there is nothing save God capable of filling the immeasurable depths of your longing! How different the language of Klopstock, as already quoted: 'What recompense could I ask? I have tasted the cup of angels in singing of my Redeemer!'

One of the most dangerous, yet most brilliant among the novelists of the present day, says:

'Properly speaking, love is not a violent aspiration of every
faculty toward a created being; it is rather a holy thirst of the
most ethereal part of our being for the unknown. Tormented with
intuitions of an eternal love, filled with torturing and insatiate
desires for the infinite, we vainly seek their gratification in the
dying forms which surround us, and obstinately adorn our perishable
idols with that immaterial beauty which haunts our dreams. The
emotions of the senses do not suffice us; in the treasure house of
the simple joys of nature there is nothing sufficiently exquisite
to fill our high demands; we would fain grasp heaven, and it is not
within our reach. Then we seek it in a creature fallible as
ourselves; we expend upon it all the high energies given us for far
nobler ends. We refuse to worship God, and kneel before a worm like
ourselves! But when the veil falls, when we see behind the clouds
of incense and the halos woven by love, only a miserable and
imperfect creature--we blush for our delusion, overturn our idol in
our despair, and trample it rudely under foot. But as we must love,
and will not give our hearts to God, for whom they were created, we
seek another idol--and are again deceived! Through this bitter,
bitter school we are purified and enlightened, until, abandoning
all hope of finding perfection on earth, we are at last ready to
offer God that pure, but now broken-hearted worship, which should
never have been given save to Him alone.'--GEORGE SAND.

Thus is it that 'love's best interpreter is still a sigh.'

Let him who would in safety delight his soul with mystic intuitions of the infinite, turn to that most exquisite of all poems, the Apocalypse, for 'blessed is he that readeth and heareth the words of this prophecy, and keepeth those things which are written in it.' St. Jerome says 'it contains as many mysteries as words'--as many truths as mysteries--and these truths are all revelations of the infinite. 'Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life,' says He who can bring thee into that heavenly city which needeth no temple: 'For the Lord God Almighty is the temple thereof, and the Lamb! And the city hath no need of the sun, nor of the moon to shine in it. For the glory of God hath enlightened it, and the Lamb is the lamp of it.' There shall we feed upon the infinite!

The pantheistic _feeling_ into which the imaginative mind so readily falls, is thus sketched by a poet of our own times:

'I seated myself, after sunset, by the water's side; nothing was to
be heard save the dash of the waves as they broke upon the lonely
shore; and I gradually fell into that state so well known among
solitary travellers:--no distinct remembrance of my own separate
being remained to me: I seemed to be but a part of some great
whole, to undulate with the lake, to vegetate with the trees, to
sigh with the winds, to blossom with the flowers.'

This feeling of the infinite so pervaded antiquity, that man almost lost the consciousness of his own personality in the immensity of the universe, regarding himself but as an element of the absolute unity of the world. His imagination fell into profound reverie, he felt himself but as an integral part of a universal movement drawing all things to a single centre, confounding all beings with one sole substance. We have only to open the Vedas to convince ourselves how deeply this feeling pervaded the early philosophy of the Hindoos. For example:

'Brahma is eternal, the only substantial being, revealing himself
in happiness and joy. The universe is his name, his image; this
primal existence, containing all in itself, is the only one
substantially existing. All phenomena have their cause in Brahma:
he is not subjected to the conditions of time and space. He is
imperishable; he is the soul of the world; the soul of every
individual being. The universe is Brahma--it comes from Brahma--it
subsists in Brahma--Bramah, or the sole self-existing being, is the
form of all science, the form of systems of worlds, without end
forever. The universes of stars are one with him; they have no
being but as they exist in the supremacy of his will. This eternal
will is the central heart of all that is. It reveals itself in
creation, in preservation, in destruction, in motion, in rest, in
space, in time.'

Such an absorption of all things in the infinite, with the consequent loss of personality, individuality, and all moral responsibility, had a most depressing effect upon the character of the people who embraced this strange system. This is so manifest that it may be plainly read in the sombre character of their architectural remains.

'In their subterranean, vast, and dim excavations; in the gigantic
proportions of their colossal architecture, always impressing us
with sadness and with the nothingness of man; in their long, still,
damp, dreary cities of sepulchres; in their half-shrouded and
mummy-like statues, which, in their corpse-like immobility, seem
struck with eternal death, or in slowly detaching themselves in
their vast and unfinished forms from primeval and gigantic rocks,
grow into a kind of dull, embryonic, and stagnant life, far more
abhorrent than death itself--do we not clearly recognize the idea
of the infinite absorbing all things into itself, crushing the
soaring spirit of man under a blind fatalism, robbing him of all
hope and aim in life, of the dignity of personal effort and moral
responsibility, presenting as the only aim of all his glowing
desires, the utter absorption of his own individuality in the bosom
of the limitless whole--thus reducing the vivid action of his
varied life to the stillness of the grave, without its repose?'

It is a strange fact, which we will view more closely when we treat of Unity, that the quest for variety which led men into polytheism, or the fractioning of the Deity into false and wicked gods and goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the pantheistic absorption of the East.

What a step from the vague yet crushing, abstract yet deadening dreaming of a fearful and misinterpreted infinite; from the cruel rigors of an unreasoning and implacable fate--to that full revelation that the Infinite is a _personal_ God, cognizant of the human, gifting it with a free will to choose good or evil, and united with it in mercy and love through the mystic life and still more mystic death of the Divine Redeemer!

In sculpture, the thirst for the infinite is manifest in the various statues of the gods which it has given us; in painting, an art more closely related to Christianity, in the numberless figures of angels and heads of cherubs, in the countless pictures upon holy subjects with which it has presented us. The marble speaks, the canvas glows with human aspirations toward the infinite.

It is certainly a very significant fact, too, that there must be a point of escape in every picture, a window to let in the light, a glimpse of the sky: an idea of _distance_ must in some way be given, or the painting will oppress us like a prison. No amount of beauty in a nearer form will make us content to remain with it, so long as we are shut down to it alone, nor is any form so cold but that we may look upon it with kindness, so that it rise against the infinite light of hope beyond. Gaze into Vernet's pictures: always sunrises or sunsets, calms or tempests, nights of moonlight, misty horizons in which it is quite impossible to distinguish the limiting lines--the infinite is always suggested in them: hence their hold upon the popular imagination.

It is really wonderful in how many ways this feeling appeals to us; it seems to be the background of our whole finite being. Saint Pierre says:

'The reason of the pleasure we experience in the sight of an
immense tree, springs from the feeling of the infinite which is
excited in us by its pyramidal form. The decrease in the different
tiers of its branches; the infinitesimal gradations in its shades
of green, always lighter at the extremity of the tree than in the
rest of its foliage--give it an elevation apparently without limit.
We experience the same sensations in the horizontal lines of
landscapes, where we see row after row of hills unrolling one
behind the other, until the last appears to melt into the blue of
the distant heavens. Nature seems to love to produce the same
effect upon extended plains or rolling prairies through the means
of the mists and vapors so frequently rising from the bosoms of
lakes and rivers. Sometimes these mists hang like curtains along
the skirts of isolated forests, sometimes they rise like armed
columns, and move in serried ranks along the beds of rivers;
sometimes they are gray, gloomy, and motionless, sometimes moving
with startling rapidity; their sombre hues changing into glowing
rose, or penetrated and permeated with the glittering and golden
light of the sun. Under all these shifting aspects they open for us
perspective after perspective of the infinite into the infinite
itself.'

Indeed nature seems never wearied in her varied suggestions of the infinite. Ruskin says, Is not the pleasure we receive from the effects of calm and luminous distance at the hour of sunset and sunrise among the most memorable and singular of which we are conscious; and is not all that is dazzling in color, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, of evanescent and shallow appealing when compared with the still small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scarlet arch of dawn over the dark and troublous edged sea? Almost all poets and painters have depicted sunrises and sunsets; every heart responds--there must then be something in them of a peculiar character, which must be one of the primal and most earnest motives of beauty to human sensation. Do they show us finer characters of form than can be developed by the broader daylight? Not so--for their power is almost independent of the forms they assume or display; it matters little whether the bright clouds be simple or manifold, whether the mountain line be subdued or majestic; the fairer forms of earthly things are by them subdued and disguised, the round and muscular growth of the forest trunks is sunk into skeleton lines of quiet shade, the purple clefts of the hillside are labyrinthed in the darkness, the orbed spring and whirling wave of the torrent have given place to a white, ghastly, interrupted gleaming. Have they more perfection or fulness of color? Not so--for their effect is often deeper when their hues are dim than when they are blazoned with crimson and pale gold; and assuredly in the blue of the rainy sky, in the many tints of morning flowers, in the sunlight on summer foliage and field, there are more sources of mere sensuous color-pleasure than in the single streak of the wan and dying light of sunset. It is not then by nobler form, it is not by positiveness of hue, it is not by intensity of light, that this strange distant apace possesses its attractive power. But there is one thing which it has or suggests, which no other object of sight suggests in an equal degree, and that is--infinity. It is of all visible things the least material, the least finite, the farthest withdrawn from the earth prison-house, the most typical of the nature of God, the most suggestive of the glory of His dwelling place. For the sky of the night, though we may know it is boundless, is dark; it is a studded vault, a roof that shuts us in and down; but the transparent distance of sunrise and sunset has no limit; we feel its infinity as we rejoice in its purity of light. That this has been deeply felt by artists, is evident in their works.

'And can the sun so rise,
So bright, so rolling back the clouds into
Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky,
With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains,
And billows purpler than the ocean's, making
In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth,
So like, we almost deem it permanent,
So fleeting, we can scarcely call it aught
Beyond a vision, 'tis so transiently
Scattered along the eternal vault; and yet
It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul,
And blends itself into the soul, until
Sunset and sunrise form the haunted epoch
Of sorrow and of love; which they who mark not
Know not the realm where these twin genii
(Who chasten and who purify our hearts,
So that we would not change their sweet rebukes
For all the boisterous joys that ever shook
The air with clamor) build the palaces
Where their fond votaries repose and breathe
Briefly;--but in that brief cool calm inhale
Enough of heaven to enable them to bear
The rest of common, heavy, human hours,
And dream them through in placid sufferance.'

BYRON.

No work of art in which this expression of infinity is possible, can be very elevated without it; and in proportion to its presence it will exalt and render impressive themes in themselves tame and trivial. If we will but think of it, it is very strange in how many unexpected places we shall find it lurking: for example, the painter of portraits is unhappy without his conventional _white_ stroke under the sleeve or beside the armchair; the painter of interiors feels like a caged bird unless he can throw a window open or set a door ajar; the landscapist dare not lose himself in the forest without a gleam of light under its farthest branches, nor ventures out in the rain unless he may somewhere pierce to a better promise in the distance, or cling to some closing gap of variable blue above--escape from the finite--hope--infinity--by whatever conventionalism sought--the _desire_ is the same in all.

Our ideas of beauty are intuitive, and it is only in a dim way that we read the types, the powers for whose _immediate_ cognition we lost in the fall; but it is certain that a _curve_ of any kind is far more agreeable to us than a right line; may not the reason of this fact be: every curve divides itself infinitely by its changes of direction?

What curvature is to lines, gradation is to shade and color; it is their infinity--dividing them into an infinite number of degrees.

Such examples might be indefinitely multiplied, but having placed the _key_ in the hands of the reader, we leave him to unlock the treasure houses of suggestive thought, which he will find profusely lying in his daily paths. This key will not only open for him many of the rarest caskets in which art stores her gems, but will also unclose some of the ineffable wonders of God's mystically tender creation. 'My son, give me thy heart!' is written in God's own hand on everything He hath made.

'To me, the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'

The absence of that mental vision which unites the visible to the invisible is not only ruinous to the art of the present age, but also to its faith, and, consequently, to its happiness. Thousands, feeling themselves in a narrow world while they unceasingly long for the infinite, rush into rash and wicked suicide, that they may thus escape from the contradictions and complicated pangs of the finite. The rays of light from the everlasting sun of wisdom and love are indeed forever falling round us, but we no longer bear the prism of faith which would decompose them for us, giving them such direction as they fall upon the symbolic, the relative, that we might read in their three-fold splendor the symbolized, the Absolute. The human soul was created for the enjoyment of God, and, consequently, touches the infinite at every point, and the health and well being of the spirit are far more concerned in its exploration than in any of the vaunted discoveries which it is at present making for the comfort of the body in the material world.

As the limits of the horizon are constantly enlarging before the eyes of one who ascends a mountain, so does the moral world, of which the physical is but the symbol, unroll its immense perspectives of light and love before the gaze of the rapt seeker of truth.

'Deep love lieth under
These secrets of time;
They fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime.'

The infinite is the vast background from which all life projects; upon whose unity the immense variety of the world is sketched. As understood or sought by the finite, it is the central fire, the burning heart of art; it is the _last_ line in all our horizons; the _last_ shade in all our colors; the _last_ note in all our concerts; the alpha and omega of all true genius. It aspires in the last sigh of the mortal as he lingeringly leaves its dim manifestations upon earth: it lightens in the first smile of the immortal as its full fruition greets him in the presence of his God!

'I am alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. To him that thirsteth, I will give of the water of life freely.'

MRS. RABOTHEM'S PARTY.

AN EPISODE FROM FASHIONABLE LIFE.

There dwelleth in sumptuous state and in Gotham
A merchant of character surnamed Rabothem.
His wife, once a letterless rustic in Needham,
Now leadeth the circles of great Upper-Threedom.[12]