Essays, First Series | Page 6

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.
Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply
ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the
place and state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the
first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as
the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to wood by
carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a
cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto
the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints' days
and image- worship, we have as it were been the man that made the
minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient
reason.
The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some
men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of
appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and
effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes,
which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to
the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all
days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights
the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal
in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.
Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and
fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and
magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of
magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying
its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with
graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that
diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad
through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub,
through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals

the fixed species; through many species the genus; through all genera
the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life the
eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the
same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes
twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of
matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant
streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I look at it its
outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form;
yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or
hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in
him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus,
transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed when
as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing
of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament
of her brows!
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious.
There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the centre there is
simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we
recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our information
in respect to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of that people,
as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a
very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what
they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in
their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very
complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a
beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the
square, --a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture,
the "tongue on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the
utmost freedom of action and never transgressing the ideal serenity;
like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and,
though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the
figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one
remarkable people we have a fourfold representation: and to the senses
what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle
of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every