2.10. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT.
What stupendous constructive mental and physical possibilities are there
to which I feel I am contributing, you may ask, when I feel that I
contribute to this greater Being; and at once I confess I become vague
and mystical. I do not wish to pass glibly over this point. I call your
attention to the fact that here I am mystical and arbitrary. I am what I
am, an individual in this present phase. I can see nothing of these
possibilities except that they will be in the nature of those
indefinable and overpowering gleams of promise in our world that we call
Beauty. Elsewhere (in my "Food of the Gods") I have tried to render my
sense of our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of
those who will "stand on this earth as on a footstool and reach out
their hands among the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a
straining image of unimaginable things. Things move to Power and Beauty;
I say that much and I have said all that I can say.
But what is Beauty, you ask, and what will Power do? And here I reach my
utmost point in the direction of what you are free to call the
rhapsodical and the incomprehensible. I will not even attempt to define
Beauty. I will not because I cannot. To me it is a final, quite
indefinable thing. Either you understand it or you do not. Every true
artist and many who are not artists know--they know there is something
that shows suddenly--it may be in music, it may be in painting, it may
be in the sunlight on a glacier or a shadow cast by a furnace or the
scent of a flower, it may be in the person or act of some fellow
creature, but it is right, it is commanding, it is, to use theological
language, the revelation of God.
To the mystery of Power and Beauty, out of the earth that mothered us,
we move.
I do not attempt to define Beauty nor even to distinguish it from Power.
I do not think indeed that one can effectually distinguish these aspects
of life. I do not know how far Beauty may not be simply fulness and
clearness of sensation, a momentary unveiling of things hitherto seen
but dully and darkly. As I have already said, there may be beauty in the
feeling of beer in the throat, in the taste of cheese in the mouth;
there may be beauty in the scent of the earth, in the warmth of a body,
in the sensation of waking from sleep. I use the word Beauty therefore
in its widest possible sense, ranging far beyond the special beauties
that art discovers and develops. Perhaps as we pass from death to life
all things become beautiful. The utmost I can do in conveying what I
mean by Beauty is to tell of things that I have perceived to be
beautiful as beautifully as I can tell of them. It may be, as I suggest
elsewhere, that Beauty is a thing synthetic and not simple; it is a
common effect produced by a great medley of causes, a larger aspect of
harmony.
But the question of what Beauty is does not very greatly concern me
since I have known it when I met it and since almost every day in life I
seem to apprehend it more and to find it more sufficient and satisfying.
Objectively it may be altogether complex and various and synthetic,
subjectively it is altogether simple. All analysis, all definition, must
in the end rest upon and arrive at unanalyzable and indefinable things.
Beauty is light--I fall back upon that image--it is all things that
light can be, beacon, elucidation, pleasure, comfort and consolation,
promise, warning, the vision of reality.
