Part 3

The great difficulty which this theory has to encounter arises from the apparent instantaneousness with which the emotion seems to arise when a beautiful object is presented. But this is not a conclusive objection, because emotions which can arise only from association seem to come in the same way. How instantaneous, for instance, are the emotions that throng up when he who has been long on a foreign shore sees, for the first time, the stars and stripes of his country's flag as it enters the port where he is;--and yet, these emotions can be awakened by it only as a link of association with scenes that are past, or as a sign of his country's presence and protection. I have heard the rainbow adduced as an instance of an object which produces the emotion of beauty without a reference to any thing beyond itself. But what was the impression made by it more than two thousand years ago, upon the mind of one who had no theory to maintain?--"Look upon the rainbow," says he, "and praise Him that made it: very beautiful it is in the brightness thereof. It compasseth the heavens about with a glorious circle, and _the hands of the Most High have bended it_." How apparently instantaneous, yet how different, are our emotions when looking at the cheek flushed by the bloom of health, or suffused by the blush of shame, or reddened by anger, or wearing that hectic flush which is the flag of distress held out by nature when she is sinking in consumption!--And yet no one can doubt, if these indications were reversed, that the emotions would be reversed also. It is conceded by all, that it is the expression, the indication of mental and moral qualities, that gives its highest beauty to the human countenance. There are no features which may not be so lighted up with noble or tender emotion as to be beautiful. But is there, it will be asked, _no_ beauty in any combination of features, or of matter, except as connected with expression? I am inclined to think there is what may be called an instinctive beauty on the perception of certain colors and forms; but it is of little value compared with that of which a rational and reflective being can give an account to himself. Even this, however, presupposes the action of mind upon matter, though that action is not recognized by us as the cause of our emotion. It is therefore still true that, as the beauty of the early morning is produced solely by a reflexion from the sun while he is still below the horizon, so the beauty of matter is wholly a reflexion from that great central orb of mind which has never yet beamed upon the eye of man in its direct effulgence--that, to him who views it aright, the beauty of this world is but the morning twilight of heaven.

But, however this question may be decided, the fact that it can be made a question at all, shows how largely moral ideas and emotions enter into the province of taste, and the intimate connexion there is between taste and morals. What is called moral taste is, in fact, discriminated from taste in general, only as it has the moral actions of free and intelligent agents for its object. When we look at a moral action, there is a plain difference between our perception of it as right, and our perception of it as beautiful. In one case there arises the feeling of _approbation_, in the other of _admiration_, which are entirely distinct, and may exist in very different proportions.

It is, indeed, not always easy to distinguish the point at which approbation and admiration run into each other; and in treating of this subject, I shall first say a few words of that border-ground between taste and morals where the dividing line seems to be unsettled. Where, for example, shall we place that feeling which we have in view of the manner of doing a thing, in distinction from the thing done? Is that feeling merely the result of taste, or are there mingled with it some elements of moral approbation or disapprobation? Where will you place a mean action in distinction from a dishonest one? I have heard it disputed whether neatness is a virtue, a matter of moral obligation, or merely a requisition of taste. Is a man under moral obligation to be neat in his person? It is along this dividing line that all those actions lie which relate to the proprieties and courtesies of life--all those smaller attentions to the convenience and comfort of others, and that delicate regard to their feelings, which have been designated by the French as the smaller morals.

In regard to this very extensive, and therefore important department of human conduct, there seem to be two common mistakes. The first consists in disregarding it altogether. There are many men whose characters, in their sketching and outline, are fine, and which, seen at a distance, appear well; but on approaching them, they seem coarse and very imperfect. In all the great duties of life they appear to advantage; but through negligence, or some greater failing, the minor duties, and especially the department of manners, is entirely neglected. They seem like stately trees, in the trunk and main branches of which the sap circulates vigorously, but does not reach and animate the smaller twigs, and give to the leaves their perfect green.

A second, and more common mistake, is the giving up of this department to the control of taste under the guidance of selfishness. The manners are polished, and all the forms of politeness adopted, not for the purpose of making others happy, but of securing to ourselves their esteem, and of effecting our own ends in life. This is the school of manners recommended by Chesterfield, and young persons are often exhorted to pay attention to their manners on this ground. In this case the sap does not circulate at all, and the leaves are painted.

But to me it seems, that this whole class of actions falls within the province of morality. Wherever human happiness is concerned, there is room for principle to operate, and the constitution of society will never be sound, and its beauty will never be perfect, till the sap of principle circulates to the extremities of human action. The true polish and beauty of society can result only from the principle of benevolence showing itself in a graceful and practical attention to the minor wants and to the feelings of others. But whatever we may decide in regard to their respective limits in this department, it is obvious that taste, so far as it goes, must be favorable to morals.

We now pass to what is indisputably the province of morals. And here our first inquiry will be, what are the circumstances under which the emotions of taste are awakened by moral actions? In reply to this inquiry I observe, that the emotion of beauty, leaving sublimity for the present out of the question, is awakened by a moral action chiefly, and perhaps solely, when it springs from the principle of duty acting in coincidence with the desires, the affections, or some other natural and inferior principle of action. This point is of practical importance, and requires illustration. Man, as we all know, has various principles of action,--such as instincts, desires, affections, passions. These may impel him to a course of action directly opposed to that indicated by a sense of duty, and they may also lead him to perform the same actions as are dictated by it; and the position is, that moral beauty arises when there is a partial or entire coincidence between the principle of duty and these inferior powers.

That this is so is evident, because there are many actions which are right, which are imperatively required by duty, which yet do not awaken in the mind of the impartial spectator any admiration--for we must here keep in mind the distinction already made between admiration and approbation. The simple payment of a debt, for example, does not awaken any admiration, though we approve the act and should strongly condemn him who should not do it when it was in his power. In this case, there can be mingled with the performance of duty no play of the generous emotions. He who performs all his actions solely from a sense of duty, has our approbation, our respect; but he who, in addition to this, is possessed of warm affections, which always coincide in their promptings with what is right, has also our admiration and love. Duty is to the affections, in the conduct of life, what logic is to rhetoric in a discourse. Logic forms an excellent body for a discourse; we assent to it, we approve it, it is good, all good, but it awakens no admiration. It is not till rhetoric sends its warm life-blood to mantle on the cold cheek of logic, and clothes its angular form in the garments of taste, that we begin to admire the discourse. And so it is with duty. It is an excellent body to the course of our conduct in life; nothing else will do, but it may be so performed as to appear unamiable and even repulsive. In order to be beautiful, there must be connected with it some manifestation of natural affection or graceful emotion.

And here I may remark, that though we have a right to expect of every man that he will do his duty, yet the display of this beauty is not equally within the power of all, since the existence and manifestation of emotion depend, to some extent, upon the temperament. As there are some who have naturally a meagre intellect, so there are others whose minds seem to be barren of those finer sympathies and affections of our nature which are the verdure of the soul, and upon which the eye always rests with pleasure. The characters of some good men are dry and unattractive. They are harsh, and hard-visaged, and seem too much like wooden men, moved by rule and calculation. Such persons often seem better, and worse, than they really are. Their freedom from extravagancies on the one hand, and on the other, that want of feeling which is wrongly termed by many hardness of heart, is equally the result of temperament.

That the doctrine which I now advocate is correct, appears also from the effect produced upon our feelings when we observe habit taking the place of sentiment in the performance of duty. We have all seen persons enter upon a course of virtuous activity, and continue it for a time from a sense of duty, sustained by ardent feeling; but after a time the feeling has died away, and there has come in its stead habit, or a regard to consistency, to sustain the sense of duty in keeping up the same course of external action. When this change has taken place, we are all conscious that the beauty of the conduct is greatly diminished;--its spirit has vanished; the dew of its youth is exhaled.

I said that this was a practical point, and I now wish to show, in connexion with it, precisely how it is that mischief arises from the perversion of moral taste; as was shown, in the former Lecture, how it arises from its perversion in other things. In opposition to the hard and dry characters mentioned above, there are those whose susceptibilities are acute, whose sympathies are quick, whose feelings are generous, whose affections are ardent, who do every thing so promptly and so heartily that impulse seems almost to supply the place of principle. There is something very attractive in a character of this kind; there is an ease and freedom about it which seems to put aside all labor of calculation, and it moreover exhibits our nature in the pleasing garb of natural goodness. It is for this reason that novelists, who draw men as they wish to have them, and not as they are, have almost universally made these fine instincts of humanity the guide of their hero, and the basis of his character. This is, indeed, if I understand it, the basis of this kind of literature, and one chief source of the injury it produces. The exhibition of these instincts, and affections, and emotions, springing up at random and acting without the control of principle, holds out no stimulus to exertion; and their possession and exercise is often in fact, and often too in books, connected with great corruption of moral character.

Taking, therefore, as the main ingredient in the character of those who are to make the chief figure in this kind of writing, what Miss Martineau calls _spontaneousness_, and which she and a certain wise friend of hers in Boston thought should by all means be encouraged and _reverenced_, we may mix the other materials somewhat to our taste. An excellent and much-approved receipt for the hero of a novel is the following:--1st. Make him handsome, for beauty is to the body what spontaneousness is to the mind, a sort of physical spontaneousness. Or, if you do not make him handsome, do what amounts to much the same thing, give him an _air_; let him have something about him that is peculiar, so that those who scan him closely may observe, under those apparently indifferent features, a certain something, a sign of the fire that is slumbering within. 2d. If you find it necessary, for fashion's sake, to put him at school, or at any place for study, make him idle, generous, somewhat mischievous, a great hater of mathematics, (for, so far as my knowledge extends, no hero of a novel ever yet knew any thing about mathematics,) give him some whimsical pursuit for the hours when he chooses to do any thing, and then make him speak, as he has occasion, Italian, French and Spanish, which he learned by instinct. 3d. _Make him act from impulse, and not from principle, and get him into difficulty through the influence of these same generous impulses._ It is on difficulties thus created that the plot must turn. 4th. Get him in love. 5th. Make him run a gauntlet of difficulties a volume and a half long, furnishing a new illustration of that old adage, "the course of true love never did run smooth." 6th. Marry him, and let him live many years in perfect felicity.

We commonly hear it said, that the chief mischief of novel-reading arises from the false pictures of life which novels present. This is doubtless a source of no small mischief; but in my view, a much greater evil arises from their holding up, directly or indirectly, false principles of action, and casting contempt upon the true; from their leading young persons to admire that which they esteem graceful rather than that which is respectable and right in the conduct of life. There is in those works an unnatural separation made between the principle of virtue and that which gives to virtue its beauty; and principle is represented as formal and cold, and perhaps ridiculous. Prudence, especially, is a virtue which no heroine of a novel must ever be guilty of. In a recent work, which deserves great credit for avoiding the general fault just mentioned, we are yet told that prudence was a virtue for which the heroine was never famous, and a slight odium is cast upon the virtue itself by making it appear, in the rival of the heroine, somewhat stiff and pragmatical.

It is thus that these works awaken extensively, in the minds of the young, associations unfavorable to the sterner and sterling virtues; and in many cases, these amiable qualities are so associated with vice as to render it attractive. It is thus that we are presented by popular novelists--and in such a manner as I know carries along the sympathies of many young men, while their imaginations are rendered familiar with the haunts of vice--with gentlemen robbers who rob in style; who are so generous that they never rob the poor; who never shed human blood if people will give up their money without it; and if they are occasionally obliged to blow out the brains of some agent of the law, they are really sorry for it, though they do not see how such impertinent fellows could expect any thing better. It is thus that the impression is received, that a certain class of impulses is sufficient to secure success in life, and even to excuse the want of principle; and young men with their heads full of pictures, not perhaps so bad as this, yet fundamentally the same, rush eagerly into life without fixed principles and fixed aims.

To him who is without experience, there is no sight more beautiful than that of a young man of an ingenuous nature entering upon life, and resting upon his own good impulses to keep him from evil. But such a sight, even when there has been no corruption like that just spoken of, now causes apprehension in me; for I have seen him who had every thing, in his person and in his sensibilities, to excite admiration and love, tarrying long at the wine, and seeking mixed wine; I have seen him going to that "house" which "is the way to hell;" and therefore it is that I would utter a solemn protest against any thing which would divorce the beauty of virtue from the principle of virtue, or which would give an impression that there is security without fixed principle. Even "genius," with all these amiable qualities--

"Yet may lack the aid Implored by humble minds and hearts afraid, May leave to timid souls the shield and sword Of the tried faith and the resistless word; Amid a world of dangers venturing forth, Frail but yet fearless, proud in conscious worth, Till strong temptation, in some fatal time, Assails the heart and wins the soul to crime."

Then,

"All that honor brings against the force Of headlong passion, aids its rapid course; Its slight resistance but provokes the fire, As wood-work stops the flame, and then conveys it higher."

With such a basis to the characters presented, it will follow of course, that the emotions and the sensibilities will be chiefly addressed in these works, and thus they become the principal means of promoting that false and selfish sensibility which is so often cultivated in refined society. This is a more refined species of intemperance, and is to the mind what intemperance in strong drink is to the body. It causes excitement for the mere selfish enjoyment produced by it, without leading to any exertion. And as the grosser species of intemperance is more common among one sex, so it is to be feared, that this more refined species is more common among the other; and that for both, circulating libraries, and other libraries, instead of furnishing wholesome entertainment, are too often converted into mere intellectual dram-shops. There are many who seek chiefly for excitement, who have a constant craving for it, whose emotions and mental sensibilities have become accustomed to a set of artificial stimulants till they are sensible to no other, and they become as remorselessly selfish as the drunkard himself. I would sooner apply for an act of genuine kindness, one which should reach actual want, to a woman in a log-house, upon the side of a mountain, surrounded by hungry children, than to the daintiest young lady whose sensibilities have spindled up and wilted in the artificial heat of novel-reading. In order to perform the duties of benevolence and philanthropy, it is indispensable that the sensibilities should be kept alive to the impressions of misery as it actually presents itself in all its squalid accompaniments.

"Sweet are the tears that from a Howard's eye Drop on the cheek of one he lifts from earth; And he who works me good with unmoved face, Does it but half; he chills me while he aids, My benefactor, not my fellow-man. But even this, this cold benevolence, Seems worth, seems manhood, when there rise before me The sluggard Pity's vision-weaving tribe, Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched, Nursing, in some delicious solitude, Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies!"

It was this esteem in which mankind hold the sensibilities and impulses, this preference of spontaneousness without its connexion with principle, which gave its popularity to what has been called the sentimental school--the results of which ought to teach society a lesson not soon to be forgotten. Concerning this school, it is justly remarked by Coleridge, that "all the mischief achieved by Hobbes, and the whole school of materialists, will appear inconsiderable if it be compared with the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental philosophy of Sterne and his numerous imitators. The vilest appetites, and the most remorseless inconstancy towards their objects, acquired the title of the _heart_--the irresistible feelings--the too tender sensibility: and if the frosts of prudence, the icy chains of human law, thawed and vanished at the genial warmth of human nature, who _could_ help it? It was an amiable weakness."

I would here remark, that I have no objection to fictitious writings as such. There are those to which I do not object. Let them cease, first, to present false pictures of life: secondly, to array the sensibilities and associations of the mind against principle: and, thirdly, let them cease to create and feed a morbid craving for excitement, and to destroy the balance between the feelings and the judgment: and I shall not object to them. The mass of these writings, however, do produce each and all of these effects, and are, so far, indisputably pernicious.

I have been thus particular in pointing out the evils which arise from arraying what is beautiful and graceful in morals and in conduct against that which is right, because I do not believe that the community are sufficiently warned against the mischief it is working, and in many cases are not perhaps aware of the manner in which it is wrought. Evil gains advantage over man by dividing him against himself, by bringing into collision faculties that were intended to work harmoniously together; and we may regard it as settled, that whoever or whatever would set up mere impulses, or sensibilities, or emotions, in the place of the reason and conscience of man, is thus dividing him against himself. It is with the conscience of man as it is with a king. He may have his prime minister, who is his chief favorite, and next to himself, but he must never abandon his power, or suffer the highest subject to depose him from the throne. The desires and affections are then only truly beautiful, when they are in ready attendance at the court of their rightful sovereign.