Right Living as a Fine Art: A Study of Channing's Symphony as an Outline of the Ideal Life and Character — John Shaqi
Right Living as a Fine Art: A Study of Channing's Symphony as an Outline of the Ideal Life and CharacterHillis, Newell Dwight
Religion
Right Living as a Fine Art: A Study of Channing's Symphony as an Outline of the Ideal Life and Character
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Character; Conduct of life
But his ideas of beauty would measure man's progress quite as accurately.
In that first rude age beauty was external. Man twisted gay feathers into
his hair, painted his cheeks red or yellow, wore rings of bright shells
about his neck. But our age is high because beauty has ceased to be mere
personal adornment. Man now seeks to make his books beautiful for the
intellect, his library and gallery beautiful for taste and imagination, his
temple beautiful for worship, his home beautiful in the interest of the
heart, his song and prayer not simply true, but beautiful with praise to
the unseen God. If in rude ages beauty was associated with physical
elements, the glory of our era is that beauty, unfolding from century to
century, is now increasingly associated with those moral qualities that
lend remembrance to mother and martyr, to hero and patriot and saint.
To-day, fortunately for society, this world-wide interest in art is
becoming spiritualized. From beautiful objects men are passing to beautiful
thoughts and deeds. We begin to hear much of the art of right living and
the science of character building. Having lent charm and value to column
and canvas, to marble and masterpiece, beauty now moves on to lend
loveliness to mind and heart. For it seems an incongruous thing for man to
adorn his cottage, lend charm to its walls and windows, make its ceilings
to be like the floor of heaven for beauty, while within his heart he
cherishes groveling littleness, slimy sin, light-winged evasions, brutal
passions. He whose body rides in a palace car must not carry a soul that is
like unto a savage. Having lingered long before the portrait of Antigone or
Cordelia, the young girl finds herself pledged to turn that ideal into life
and character. The copy of the Sistine Madonna hanging upon the wall asks
the woman who placed it there to realize in herself this glorious type of
motherhood.
When the admirers of Shakespeare bought the house in which their hero was
born, they planted in the garden the flowers which the poet loved. Passing
through the little wicket gate the pilgrim finds himself moving along a
perfumed path, while to his garments clings the odor of violets and roses,
sweet peas and buttercups, the columbine and honeysuckle--flowers these,
whose roots are in earth indeed, but whose beauty is borrowed from heaven.
From these grounds men have expelled the poison ivy, the deadly nightshade,
all burdocks and thistles. And the soul is a garden in which truth, purity,
patience, love, long suffering are qualities whiter than any lily and
sweeter than any rose, whose perfume never passes, whose beauty does not
fade. And having succeeded in transforming waste places into centers of
radiant beauty, man encourages the hope that he can carry his own reason,
judgment and ambition up to full symmetry and perfection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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