The Beautiful Necessity | Page 8

art, and upon the art of architecture in
particular.
One of the things which theosophy teaches is that those transcendent
glimpses of a divine order and harmony throughout the universe
vouchsafed the poet and the mystic in their moments of vision are not
the paradoxes--the paronomasia as it were--of an intoxicated state of
consciousness, but glimpses of reality. We are all of us participators in
a world of concrete music, geometry and number--a world of sounds,
odors, forms, motions, colors, so mathematically related and
coordinated that our pigmy bodies, equally with the farthest star,
vibrate to the music of the spheres. There is a Beautiful Necessity
which rules the world, which is a law of nature and equally a law of art,
for art is idealized creation: nature carried to a higher power by reason
of its passage through a human consciousness. Thought and emotion
tend to crystallize into forms of beauty as inevitably as does the frost
on a window pane. Art therefore in one of its aspects is the weaving of
a pattern, the communication of an order and a method to the material
or medium employed. Although no masterpiece was ever created by the
conscious following to set rules, for the true artist works unconsciously,
instinctively, as the bird sings or as the bee builds its honey-cell, yet an
analysis of any masterpiece reveals the fact that its author (like the bird
and the bee) has "followed the rules without knowing them."
Helmholtz says, "No doubt is now entertained that beauty is subject to
laws and rules dependent on the nature of human intelligence. The
difficulty consists in the fact that these laws and rules, on whose
fulfilment beauty depends, are not consciously present in the mind of
the artist who creates the work, or of the observer who contemplates it."
Nevertheless they are discoverable, and can be formulated, after a
fashion. We have only to read aright the lessons everywhere portrayed
in the vast picture-books of nature and of art.

The first truth therein published is the law of _Unity_--oneness; for
there is one Self, one Life, which, myriad in manifestation, is yet in
essence ever one. Atom and universe, man and the world--each is a unit,
an organic and coherent whole. The application of this law to art is so
obvious as to be almost unnecessary of elucidation, for to say that a
work of art must possess unity, must seem to proceed from a single
impulse and be the embodiment of one dominant idea, is to state a
truism. In a work of architecture the coördination of its various parts
with one another is almost the measure of its success. We remember
any masterpiece--the cathedral of Paris no less than the pyramids of
Egypt--by the singleness of its appeal; complex it may be, but it is a
coordinated complexity; variety it may possess, but it is a variety in an
all-embracing unity.
The second law, not contradicting but supplementing the first is the law
of Polarity, i.e., duality. All things have sex, are either masculine or
feminine. This too is the reflection on a lower plane of one of those
transcendental truths taught by the Ancient Wisdom, namely that the
Logos, in his voluntarily circumscribing his infinite life in order that he
may manifest, encloses himself within his limiting veil, maya, and that
his life appears as spirit (male), and his maya as matter (female), the
two being never disjoined during manifestation. The two terms of this
polarity are endlessly repeated throughout nature: in sun and moon, day
and night, fire and water, man and woman--and so on. A close
inter-relation is always seen to subsist between corresponding members
of such pairs of opposites: sun, day, fire, man express and embody the
primal and active aspect of the manifesting deity; moon, night, water,
woman, its secondary and passive aspect. Moreover, each implies or
brings to mind the others of its class: man, like the sun, is lord of day;
he is like fire, a devastating force; woman is subject to the lunar rhythm;
like water, she is soft, sinuous, fecund.
The part which this polarity plays in the arts is important, and the
constant and characteristic distinction between the two terms is a thing
far beyond mere contrast.
In music they are the major and minor modes: the typical, or
representative chords of the dominant seventh, and of the tonic (the two
chords into which Schopenhauer says all music can be resolved): a
partial dissonance, and a consonance: a chord of suspense, and a chord

of satisfaction. In speech the two are vowel, and consonant sounds: the
type of the first being a, a sound of suspense, made with the mouth
open; and of the second m, a sound of satisfaction, made by closing the
mouth;