THEORY OF BEAUTY.

Is beauty a conventional thing, relative to each type? What, for certain peoples, constitutes beauty, will it not be, for others, hideous ugliness? Blacks consider themselves more beautiful than whites and vice versa. In this conflict of tastes, is there an absolute beauty? In what does it consist? Are we, really, more beautiful than the Hottentots and the Kaffirs? Why?

This question which, at first sight, seems foreign to the object of our studies, is nevertheless directly connected to them and bears upon the very future of Humanity. It was suggested to us, as was its solution, by the following passage from a very interesting and very instructive book, entitled: The Inevitable Revolutions in the Globe and in Humanity, by Carlos Richard. n The author combats the opinion of those who maintain the physical degeneration of man from primitive times; he victoriously refutes the belief in the existence of a primitive race of giants and undertakes to prove that, from the physical point of view and of stature, the men of today are worth as much as the ancients, if indeed they do not surpass them.

Treating of the beauty of forms, he expresses himself thus, on pages 41 and following:

“With regard to the beauty of the face, to the grace of the physiognomy, to the whole that constitutes the aesthetics of the body, the improvement that has taken place is even easier to verify.

“For this, it suffices to cast a glance upon the types that the ancient medals and statues have transmitted to us intact through the centuries.

“The iconography of Visconti and the museum of the Count of Clarol are, among many others, two sources from which one can easily draw varied elements for this interesting study.

“What most solicits attention in this assemblage of figures is the rudeness of the features, the animality of the expression, the crudity of the gaze. The observer feels, with an involuntary shudder, that he has before him people who would cut him into pieces, to give them to be eaten by their morays, as did Pollio, a wealthy connoisseur of good delicacies, citizen of Rome and intimate of Augustus.

“The first Brutus (Lucius Junius), the one who ordered his sons’ heads cut off and witnessed in cold blood the torture of both, resembles a wild beast. His sinister profile has of the eagle and of the owl what those two carnivores of the air present as most ferocious. Seeing him, no one can doubt that he merited the ignominious honor that History conferred upon him. Just as he killed his two sons, so too he would have strangled his own mother, for the same motive. “The second Brutus (Marcus), who stabbed Caesar, his adoptive father, precisely at the hour when the latter most counted on his gratitude and his love, recalls, by his features, a fanatical ass; he does not even show the sinister beauty that the artist often discovers, that extreme energy which impels to crime.

“Cicero, the brilliant orator, the profound and witty writer, who left so great a memory of his passage through this world, has a flattened and vulgar face, which certainly made it much less agreeable to see him than to hear him.

“Julius Caesar, the great, the incomparable victor, the hero of massacres, who made his entrance into the kingdom of shades with a cortege of two million souls previously dispatched there by him, was as ugly as his predecessor, but of another kind. His thin and bony face, set upon a long neck and disfigured by a prominent Adam’s apple, resembled more a great Gilles than a great warrior.

“Galba, Vespasian, Nerva, Caracalla, Alexander Severus, Balbinus, were not merely ugly, but hideous. It is with difficulty that, in this museum of the ancient types of our species, the observer manages to discover, here or there, a few figures that may merit a glance of sympathy.

“Those of Scipio Africanus, of Pompey, of Commodus, of Heliogabalus, of Antinous the favorite of Hadrian, are of that reduced number. Without being beautiful, in the modern sense of the word, these figures are, however, regular and of agreeable aspect.

“The women are no better treated than the men and give occasion to the same notes; Livia, daughter of Augustus, has the pointed profile of a weasel; Agrippina inspires fear and Messalina, as if to disconcert Cabanis and Lavater, seems a plump serving-maid, fonder of succulent soups than of anything else.

“The Greeks, it must be said, are, in general, less ill-shaped than the Romans. The figures of Themistocles and of Miltiades, among others, may be compared to the most beautiful modern types. But Alcibiades, the distant ancestor of our Richelieus and of our Lauzuns, whose gallant exploits alone fill the chronicle of Athens, had, like Messalina, very little of the physique that would correspond to his activities. On seeing his solemn features and his grave brow, anyone whatsoever would take him rather for a jurisconsult clinging to a text of law than for the audacious conqueror of women that he was, who had himself exiled to Sparta solely to deceive the poor king Agis and then to boast of having been the lover of a queen. “Notwithstanding the small advantage that, on this point, may be conceded to the Greeks over the Romans, whoever takes the trouble to compare these old types with those of our time will recognize without effort that in this respect, as in all others, there has been progress. Only, it is fitting not to forget, in this comparison, that here we are dealing with privileged classes, always more beautiful than the others, and that, consequently, the modern types that are to be set against the ancients must be chosen in the salons and not in the pigsties. For poverty, ah! in all times and under all aspects, was never beautiful and is not so, precisely in order to shame us and force us one day to free ourselves from it. “I do not wish, then, far from it, to say that ugliness has entirely disappeared from our brows and that the divine mark is at last set upon all the masks that veil a soul. Far be it from me to advance an affirmation that could very easily be contested by everyone. My pretension limits itself to verifying that, in a period of two thousand years, so little a thing for a humanity that has so much yet to live, the physiognomy of the species has improved in an already perceptible manner. “I believe, moreover, that the most beautiful figures of antiquity are inferior to those we can daily admire in our public gatherings, in our festivals and even in the traffic of the streets. Were it not for the fear of offending certain modesties and also of exciting certain jealousies, I would confirm the evidence of the fact with some hundreds of examples known to all, in the contemporary world.

“The orators of the past constantly fill their mouths with the famous Venus de’ Medici, who seems to them the ideal of feminine beauty, without perceiving that this same Venus strolls every Sunday along the avenues of Arles, in more than fifty copies, and few will be our cities, especially in the South, that do not possess some…

“…In all that we have just said, we have limited ourselves to comparing our present type with that of the peoples who preceded us by only a few thousand years. If, however, we go back further through the ages, penetrating the terrestrial strata where sleep the remains of the first races that inhabited our globe, the advantage in our favor will become so perceptible that any denial on this subject will vanish of itself.

“Under that theological influence which detained Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, which persecuted Galileo and which, in these more recent times, obscured for an instant the genius of Cuvier himself, Science hesitated to sound the mysteries of the antediluvian epochs. The biblical narrative, admitted to the letter, in the strictest sense, seemed to have said the last word concerning our origin and the centuries that separate us from it. But truth, pitiless in its accretions, ended by breaking the iron garment in which they wished to imprison it forever and by laying bare forms until then hidden. “The man who lived, before the flood, in company with the mastodons, the cave bear and other great mammals today disappeared, fossil man, in a word, so long denied, was at last found, his existence being placed beyond doubt. The recent works of the geologists, particularly those of Boucher de Perthes, n of Filippi and of Lyell, allow the physical characters of this venerable ancestor of the human race to be appreciated. Now, in spite of the tales imagined by the poets about original beauty; despite the respect due to him, as ancient chief of our race, Science is obliged to attest that he was of prodigious ugliness. “His facial angle did not exceed 70°; his jaws, of considerable volume, were armed with long and protruding teeth; he had a receding brow and flattened temples, a flattened nose, broad nostrils. In short, this venerable father must have resembled an orangutan far more than his distant children of today; to such a point that, had they not found beside him the flint hatchets he had fabricated and, in some cases, animals that still presented traces of the wounds caused by those crude weapons, one might have doubted the role he played in our terrestrial filiation. Not only did he know how to fabricate flint hatchets, but also clubs and dart points, of the same material. “Antediluvian gallantry went so far even as to fashion bracelets and necklaces of rounded little stones for the adornment, in those distant times, of the arms and necks of the enchanting sex, which afterward became much more demanding, as all can testify.

“I do not know what the elegant women of our days will think on the subject, whose shoulders glitter with diamonds; as for me, I confess it, I cannot ward off a profound emotion, in thinking of that first effort that man, scarcely differentiated from the brute, made to please his companion, poor and naked like himself, in the bosom of an inhospitable nature, over which his race is one day to reign. Oh! far-distant ancestors! if you already knew how to love, with your rudimentary faces, how could we doubt your paternity, before that divine sign of our species? “It is, then, manifest that those misshapen humans are our fathers, since they left us traces of their intelligence and of their love, essential attributes that separate us from the beast. We can, then, examining them attentively, stripped of the alluvial deposits that cover them, measure, as with a compass, the physical progress that our species has accomplished, since its appearance on Earth. Now, this progress, which, a short while ago, could be contested by the spirit of system and by the prejudices of education, assumes such evidence that there is no longer any way to refrain from recognizing and proclaiming it. “A few thousand years could permit doubts; some hundreds of centuries dissipate them irrevocably…

“…How young and recent we are in all things! We still ignore our place and our path in the immensity of the Universe and we dare to deny progress that, for want of time, has not yet been able to be recognized. Children that we are, let us have a little patience and the centuries, bringing us nearer to the goal, will reveal to us splendors which, in their remoteness, escape our scarcely half-opened eyes.

“But, from now on, let us proclaim in loud voices, since Science permits us to, the capital and consoling fact of the slow but sure progress of our physical type, toward that ideal which the great artists glimpsed, thanks to the inspirations that heaven sends them, revealing to them its secrets. The ideal is not an illusory product of the imagination, a fugitive dream destined to give, from time to time, compensation for our miseries. It is an end assigned by God to our perfectionings, an infinite end, because only the infinite, in all cases, can satisfy our spirit and offer it a career worthy of it.” From these judicious observations, it results that the form of bodies has been modified in a determined direction and according to a law, as the moral being developed; that the exterior form is in constant relation with the instinct and the appetites of the moral being; that, the more its instincts approach animality, the more the form likewise approaches it; in short, that, as the material instincts are purified and give place to moral sentiments, the material envelope, which is no longer destined for the satisfaction of coarse needs, takes forms ever less heavy, more delicate, in harmony with the elevation and the delicacy of the ideas. The perfection of the form is, thus, a consequence of the perfection of the Spirit: whence one can conclude that the ideal of form must be that which Spirits in a state of purity assume, that of which the poets and the true artists dream, because they penetrate, by thought, the higher worlds. It has been said for a long time that the countenance is the mirror of the soul. This truth, which has become an axiom, explains the common fact that certain instances of ugliness disappear beneath the reflection of the moral qualities of the Spirit, and that, very often, one prefers a person who is ugly, endowed with eminent qualities, to another who possesses only plastic beauty. For such ugliness consists solely in irregularities of form, but without excluding the fineness of the features, necessary for the expression of delicate sentiments. From the foregoing one can conclude that real beauty consists in the form that presents itself as most removed from animality and that best reflects the intellectual and moral superiority of the Spirit, which is the principal being. The moral influencing, as it does, the physical, which it appropriates to its physical and moral needs, it follows: 1st, that the type of beauty consists in the form most proper to the expression of the highest moral and intellectual qualities; 2nd, that, as man rises morally, his envelope will approach the ideal of beauty, which is angelic beauty. The black man can be beautiful to the black man, as a cat is beautiful to a cat; but he is not beautiful in the absolute sense, because his coarse features, his thick lips accuse the materiality of the instincts; they can express violent passions, but they cannot lend themselves to evincing the delicate shades of sentiment, nor the modulations of a refined spirit. n Hence our being able, without conceit, I believe, to call ourselves more beautiful than the blacks and the Hottentots. But it may also be that, for future generations, improved, we shall be what the Hottentots are in relation to us. And who knows whether, when they find our fossils, they will not take them for those of some species of animals.

Having been read at the Society of Paris, this article became the object of a great number of communications, all presenting the same conclusions. We shall transcribe only the two following ones, as being the most developed:

I.

Paris, February 4, 1869. — (Medium: Mrs. Malet.)

You pondered rightly that the primary source of all goodness and all intelligence is also the source of all beauty. — Love generates the beauty of all things, being itself perfection. — The Spirit has the duty to acquire that perfection, which is its essence and its destiny. It must approach, by its labor, sovereign intelligence and infinite goodness; it must, then, also assume the ever more perfect form that characterizes perfect beings. If, in your unhappy societies, on your still poorly balanced globe, the human species is so far from that physical beauty, it is because moral beauty is still at the beginning of its development. The connection between these two beauties is a certain, logical fact, of which even in this world the soul has the intuition. Indeed, you all know how painful is the aspect of a charming physiognomy whose charm, however, the character belies. If you hear tell of a person of proven merit, you at once attribute to that person the most sympathetic features and you are painfully impressed when you verify that reality belies your expectations. What to conclude from this, except that, like all the things the future holds in reserve, the soul has the prescience of beauty, as Humanity progresses and approaches its divine type. Do not seek to draw, from the apparent decadence in which the most advanced race of this globe finds itself, arguments contrary to that affirmation. Yes, it is true that the species seems to degenerate, to become debased; infirmities fall upon you before old age; even infancy suffers the ailments that habitually manifest themselves only at another age of life. This is, however, a simple transition. Your epoch is bad; it is ending and engendering: it ends a painful period and engenders an epoch of physical regeneration, of moral advancement, of intellectual progress. The new race, of which I have already spoken, will have more faculties, more resources for the services of the spirit; it will be larger, stronger, more beautiful. From the beginning, it will place itself in harmony with the riches of Creation which your race, careless and fatigued, disdains or ignores. You will have done great things for it, of which it will take advantage, advancing along the road of discoveries and perfectionings, with a feverish ardor whose power you do not know. More advanced also in goodness, your descendants will make of this unhappy earth what you have not known how to make: a happy world, where the poor will not be repelled, nor despised, but succored by vast and liberal institutions. The dawn of these ideas is already breaking; their brightness reaches us, at moments.

Friends, behold at last the day when the light will shine on the dark and miserable Earth, when the race will be good and beautiful, in accordance with the degree of advancement it shall have attained, when the sign set upon the brow of man will no longer be that of reprobation, but a sign of joy and of hope. Then, advanced Spirits will come, in multitudes, to take their place among the colonists of this globe; they will be in the majority and everything will yield them passage. Renewal will take place and the face of the globe will be changed, for that race will be great and powerful and the moment when it comes will mark the beginning of the happy times. Pamphile. n II.

(Paris, February 4, 1869.)

Beauty, from the purely human point of view, is a very debatable and much-debated question. To appreciate it well, we must study it as a disinterested amateur; he who is under the enchantment cannot have a voice in the matter. The taste of each one also enters into the reckoning, in the appreciations that are made.

Beautiful, truly beautiful, is only that which is so always and for all; it is that eternal, infinite beauty, it is the divine manifestation in its incessantly varied aspects; it is God in his works and in his laws! There is the only absolute beauty. It is the harmony of harmonies and has a right to the title of absolute, because nothing more beautiful can be conceived.

As for what it has been agreed to call beautiful and which is truly worthy of that title, it must not be considered otherwise than as something essentially relative, since one can always conceive something more beautiful, more perfect.

Only one beauty exists and one single perfection: God. Outside of him, all that we adorn with those attributes is no more than a pale reflection of the unique beauty, of a harmonious aspect of the thousand and one harmonies of Creation.

There are as many harmonies as there are created objects, as many typical beauties, consequently, determining the culminating point of perfection that any of the subdivisions of the animate element can attain. — The stone is beautiful and beautiful in diverse manners. — Each mineral species has its harmonies and the element that unites all the harmonies of the species possesses the greatest sum of beauty that the species can attain. The flower has its harmonies; it too may possess them all or singly and be differently beautiful, but it will be beautiful only when the harmonies that concur in its creation find themselves harmonically fused. — Two types of beauty can produce, by fusion, a hybrid, misshapen being, of repulsive aspect. — There is then cacophony! All the vibrations, singly, were harmonic, but the difference of tonality among them produced a discord, when the vibrating waves met; hence the monster! Descending the created scale, each animal type gives occasion to the same observations and ferocity, cunning, even envy may give rise to special beauties, if the principle that determines the form be without admixture. Harmony, even in evil, produces the beautiful. There is the satanic beautiful and the angelic beautiful; energetic beauty and resigned beauty.

Each sentiment, each bundle of sentiments, provided it be harmonic, produces a particular type of beauty whose human aspects are all, not degenerations, but sketches. It is, then, correct for us to say, not that we are more beautiful, but that we approach ever more the real beauty, as we rise toward perfection.

All the types unite harmonically in the perfect. Hence its being the absolute beautiful. — We who progress possess only a relative beauty, weakened and combated by the disharmonious elements of our nature.

Lavater. n [1]

One vol. in-12, Paris Pagnerre; price: 2 fr. 50; postpaid 2 fr. 75, Spiritist Bookshop, 7, rue de Lille. — Les révolutions inévitables dans le globe et l’humanité - Google Books.

[2]

See the two learned works of Boucher de Perthes: On antediluvian man and his works, in-4 pamphlet, 2 fr. 25 [De l’Homme antédiluvien et de ses œuvres - Google Books.] and On stone implements, in-8 pamphlet, 1 fr. 50; postpaid, 1 fr.

Paris, Spiritist Bookshop [Des Outils de pierre - Google Books.]

[3] Translator’s Note: This passage of Posthumous Works merited, in 2004, the following comments by Zêus Wantuil:

“Allan Kardec, in his time, was much imbued with the phrenological ideas of Gall and with those of the physiognomy of Lavater, then accepted by eminent men of Science, although the Codifier himself did not agree with various aspects presented by those so-called sciences.

“The belief that the features of the physiognomy reveal the character of the person is very ancient, it being claimed that there are apparent relations between the physical and the moral. Of blacks, Kardec knew only what various authors recounted regarding the African savages, always reduced by those authors to almost total brutishness. Hence it seemed to the Codifier that ‘Nature appropriated bodies to the degree of advancement of the Spirits who are to incarnate in them,’ considering ‘that Arago, for example, in the body of a black-skinned savage would never be a member of the Institute.’ [see Publisher’s Note in: Explanatory Note.] “In those times, to the black brethren the means and the opportunity to evolve, to grow mentally, were not granted, any attempt in that direction being considered even a waste of time. Kardec reproduces in the Spiritist Review of April 1862, on page 150 (FEB edition), what, at the time, was said of the black slaves, in these terms: ‘They are beings so brutish, so little intelligent, that it would be wasted labor to wish to instruct them. It is an inferior race, incorrigible and profoundly incapable.’ “It is based on these ‘scientific’ reports of the time that the Codifier repeats, in other words, what the European researchers wrote upon returning from the voyages they made to black Africa: ‘Thus, as physical organization, the blacks will always be the same; as Spirits, it is without doubt an inferior race, that is, primitive; they are true children to whom very little can be taught.’ (Spiritist Review, April 1862, pp. 150-151, FEB edition.)” “As we know, Posthumous Works was organized by P.-G. Leymarie from writings left by Allan Kardec and delivered, after his disincarnation, to Leymarie himself by the Codifier’s wife. Among the papers was that study on the ‘Theory of Beauty’ sketched by Kardec and which had not yet been published, possibly because the author intended to modify it, principally in view of the answer the Spirits gave to question 217 of The Spirits’ Book. In that answer it is stated that ‘an excessively ugly person, when a good Spirit, judicious, humane, dwells within, has something that pleases, whereas there are most beautiful faces that cause you no impression, that even come to inspire repulsion in you. You might suppose that only well-molded bodies serve as envelopes for the most perfect Spirits, when it is certain that every day you come upon men of worth, beneath a deformed exterior.’ “Kardec had personal opinions on certain subjects, and did not deny it. In the introduction to Genesis, he declares without reserve and with the honesty peculiar to him, that he presents ‘some theories that must be considered simple personal opinions, until they are confirmed or contradicted, so that the responsibility for them does not weigh upon the doctrine.’ “As we see, Allan Kardec himself gave us the liberty to accept or to refuse his personal opinions, in an openness worthy of a true missionary. It is fitting, then, for the reader to accept or not the ideas emitted by the person of Kardec regarding the black man in his work on the Theory of Beauty.”

Finally, it is fitting to recall that Posthumous Works is not a fundamental book of the Spiritist Doctrine.

[4] [see Pamphile.]

[5] [see Lavater.]