the beauty of life is involved very largely with the outline of its scenery. there are many other things which make up the joy of our world for us, but this is one of the most salient of its charms. the stretch of a level valley, the graceful rise of a hill, water running, a clump or a forest of trees—these add to the majesty of our being and show us how great a thing our world really is.
the significance of scenes in general which hold and bind our lives for us, making them sweet or grim according to the sharpness of our perceptions, is a wonderful thing. we are passing among them every moment. a new arrangement is had with every move we make. if we but lift our eyes we see a variation which is forever interesting and forever new.
the fact significant is that every scene possesses that vital instability which is the charm of existence. it is forever changing. the waters are running, the winds blowing, the light waxing and waning, and in the very ground such currents are at work as produce and modify all the visible life and color that we know. great forces are at work, strong ones, and our own little lives are but a shadow of something that wills activity and enjoys it, that wills beauty and is beauty. the scenes that we see are purely representative of that.
the beauty of life
but how, in the picturing of itself to itself, is the spirit171 of the universe revealed to us? here are forces which at bottom might be supposed to be anything—grim, deadly, terrible—but on the surface how fair is their face. the trees are beautiful—you would not suppose there was anything deadly at work to create them. the water is mellifluent, sweet—you could hardly assume that it was grim in purpose or design. every aspect of the scene reveals something pleasing which could scarcely have been the result of a cruel tendency, and yet we know that cruelty exists, or if not cruelty at least a tendency to contention—one thing striving with another and wearing it away, feeding upon it, destroying it which is productive of pain. and this element of contention represents all the cruelty there is. and this is not what is generally revealed in any scene.
before such a picture of combined beauty and contentiousness—however graceful—life living upon life, in order to produce at least a part of this beauty—the mind pauses, wondering. it is so useless to quarrel with an order which is compulsory and produces all that we know of either joy or pain. this scene, as we look at it, is one of the joys, one of the compensations, of our existence which we must take whether we will or no, and which satisfies us whether or not we are aware of the contentiousness beneath. even the contentiousness cannot be wholly sneered at or regretted, for at worst it produces the change which produces the other scenes and variations of which our world is full, and at worst it gives our life the edge of drama and tragedy, to say nothing of those phases of our moods which make our world seem beautiful.
172 pity the mind for whom the immediate scene, involved as it is with change and decay and contentiousness, has no direct appeal, for whom the clouds hanging in the heavens, the wind stirring in the trees, the genial face of the earth, spread before the eye, has no meaning. here are the birds daily circling in the air; here are the waters running in a thousand varied forms; here are the houses, the churches, the factories, and all their curious array of lines, angles, circles, cones, or towers, shafts and pinnacles which form ever new and pleasing combinations to which the mind, confused by other phases of life, can still turn for both solace and delight. for one not so mentally equipped a world of imagery is closed, with all that that implies: poetry, art, literature—one might almost say religion, for upon so much that is beautiful in nature does religion depend. to be dull to the finer beauties of line and curve that are forever beating upon the heart and mind—in earth, in air, in water, in sky or space—how deadly! the dark places of the world are full of that. its slums and depths reek with the misery that knows no response to the physical beauty of nature, the wonder of its forms. to perceive these, to see the physical face of life as beautiful, to respond in feeling to the magnificent panoramas from which the eye cannot escape, is to be at once strong and wise mentally and physically, to have in the very blood and brain the beauty, glory and power of all that ever was or will be here on this earth.
