Theory of beauty.

Is beauty something conventional and relative to each type? Might what, for certain peoples, constitutes beauty be, for others, hideous ugliness? Black people consider themselves more beautiful than white people, 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 with them and bears upon the very future of Humanity. It was suggested to us, together with 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 Charles Richard. n The author combats the opinion of those who maintain the physical degeneration of man since 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 that of stature, the men of today are equal to the ancients, if indeed they do not surpass them.

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

“As regards beauty of the face, grace of the countenance, the ensemble that constitutes the aesthetics of the body, the improvement that has taken place is still easier to verify.

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

“Visconti’s iconography 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 coarseness of the features, the animality of the expression, the rawness of the gaze. The observer feels, with an involuntary shudder, that he has before him people who would cut him to pieces, to give them as food to their morays, as did Pollio, a wealthy connoisseur of fine delicacies, citizen of Rome and intimate of Augustus.

“The first Brutus (Lucius Junius), the one who had 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 these 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 would he 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 that sinister beauty which the artist often discovers, that extreme energy which impels to crime.

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

“Julius Caesar, the great, the incomparable conqueror, the hero of massacres, who entered the kingdom of shadows with a cortege of two million souls previously dispatched there by him, was as ugly as his predecessor, but of another kind. His lean and bony face, set upon a long neck made ugly by a protruding “Adam’s apple,” resembled a great Gilles more 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, nevertheless, regular and of agreeable aspect.

“The women are not better treated than the men and give rise to the same remarks: 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 servant girl, fonder of succulent soups than of anything else.

“The Greeks, it must be said, are, in general, less ill-formed 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 our Lauzuns, whose gallant exploits, by themselves 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 jurist clinging to a text of law than for the audacious conqueror that he was, of women, who had himself exiled in Sparta solely to deceive poor King Agis and, afterward, to boast of having been the lover of a queen. “Notwithstanding the slight advantage that, on this point, may be conceded to the Greeks over the Romans, whoever takes the trouble to compare those 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 well 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 to be set against the ancient ones must be chosen in the salons and not in the hovels. For poverty, alas! in all times and under all aspects, has never been beautiful and is not so, precisely in order to shame us and force us one day to free ourselves from it. “I do not, then, mean to say, far from it, 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 is limited 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 a manner already perceptible. “I believe, besides, that the most beautiful figures of antiquity are inferior to those we can daily admire in our public assemblies, in our festivals, and even in the passage 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 very Venus strolls every Sunday along the avenues of Arles, in more than fifty exemplars, and few will be our cities, especially in the South, that do not possess some of them…

“…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 farther through the ages, penetrating into the terrestrial strata where the remains of the first races that inhabited our globe sleep, the advantage in our favor will become so perceptible that any denial on this score 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, taken literally, in the strictest sense, seemed to have said the last word about our origin and the centuries that separate us from it. But truth, pitiless in its accretions, ended by breaking the iron garment in which it was sought to imprison it forever, and laying bare forms until then hidden. “The man who lived, before the deluge, in the company of the mastodons, of the cave bear and of other great mammals today vanished—fossil man, in a word, for so long a time 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 one to appreciate the physical characteristics of this venerable ancestor of the human race. Now, in spite of the tales imagined by the poets about original beauty; despite the respect due to him, as the 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, wide 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 there not been found at his side the flint axes he had fashioned and, in some cases, animals that still showed traces of the wounds caused by these formless weapons, one would have doubted the role he played in our terrestrial filiation. Not only did he know how to fashion flint axes, but also clubs and dart-points, of the same material. “Antediluvian gallantry even went so far as to make bracelets and necklaces of little rounded 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 shield myself from a profound emotion, on thinking of that first effort which 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! 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 formless 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 alluvia that cover them, measure, as with a compass, the physical progress that our species has realized, since its appearance on the 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 of failing to recognize and proclaim it. “A few thousand years could permit doubts; a few hundred centuries dissipate them irrevocably…

“…How young and recent we are in all things! We still are ignorant of our place and our path in the immensity of the Universe and we dare to deny progress which, for lack of time, could not yet 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 it, 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 perfectings, an infinite end, because only the infinite, in every case, 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; finally, that, as the material instincts are purified and give place to moral sentiments, the material envelope, which is no longer destined to 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 it may be concluded that the ideal of the form must be that which Spirits in a state of purity assume, the one of which the poets and the true artists dream, because they penetrate, through thought, into the higher worlds. It has long been said that the countenance is the mirror of the soul. This truth, which has become an axiom, explains the common fact of certain ugliness disappearing beneath the reflection of the moral qualities of the Spirit, and that of, very often, a homely person, endowed with eminent qualities, being preferred 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 to the expression of delicate sentiments. From the foregoing it may be concluded that real beauty consists in the form which presents itself as most removed from animality and which 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 elevates himself morally, his envelope will draw nearer to the ideal of beauty, which is angelic beauty. The black person may be beautiful for the black person, as a cat is beautiful for a cat; but he is not beautiful in an absolute sense, because his coarse features, his thick lips, betray the materiality of the instincts; they can express violent passions, but they cannot lend themselves to evidencing the delicate nuances of sentiment, nor the modulations of a fine spirit. n Hence our being able, without fatuity, I believe, to call ourselves more beautiful than the black people and the Hottentots. But it may also be that, for future generations, improved, we will 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 will transcribe only the two following, as being the most developed:

I.

(Paris, February 4, 1869. – Medium: Mme. Malet.)

You pondered with accuracy that the primary source of all goodness and of all intelligence is also the source of all beauty. – Love engenders the beauty of all things, being, itself, perfection. – The Spirit has the duty of acquiring that perfection, which is its essence and its destiny. It must approach, by its labor, the sovereign intelligence and the infinite goodness; it must, then, also assume the form ever more perfect, which characterizes perfect beings. If, in your unhappy societies, on your globe still ill-balanced, 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 the soul, already in this world, 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 him the most sympathetic features and are painfully impressed when you find that reality belies your expectations. What to conclude from this, save that, like all the things that 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 grow base; upon you the infirmities fall before old age; even infancy suffers the maladies that habitually manifest themselves only in another age of life. This, however, is a simple transition. Your epoch is bad; it ends and engenders: 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 put itself in harmony with the riches of Creation that your race, careless and fatigued, disdains or ignores. You will have made for them great things, of which it will profit, advancing along the road of discoveries and perfectings, 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. Already dawns the aurora of these ideas; their clarity reaches us, at moments.

Friends, here at last is the day on which the light will shine on the obscure and miserable Earth, on which the race will be good and beautiful, in accordance with the degree of advancement it has attained, on which the sign placed on the brow of man will no longer be that of reprobation, but a sign of joy and of hope. Then, the advanced Spirits will come, in multitudes, to take their place among the colonists of this globe; they will be in the majority and all will yield them passage. The renewal will be made 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 need to study it as a disinterested amateur. He who is under the enchantment cannot have a voice in the matter. Each one’s taste also enters into account, in the appreciations that are made.

Beautiful, really beautiful, is only what is so always and for all; and that eternal, infinite beauty is the divine manifestation in its incessantly varied aspects; it is God in his works and in his laws! Behold there 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 be considered only as a thing 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 but a pale reflection of the unique beauty, 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 ways. – 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 can possess them all or separately and be differently beautiful, but it will only be beautiful when the harmonies that concur in its creation find themselves harmonically fused. – Two types of beauty can produce, by fusion, a hybrid being, formless, of repulsive aspect. – Then there is cacophony! All the vibrations, separately, 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 rise to the same observations and ferocity, cunning, even envy, may give origin to special beauties, if the principle that determines the form is without mixture. 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 to say, not that we are more beautiful, but that we draw ever nearer to real beauty, as we elevate ourselves 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 Allan Kardec.

[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: Of antediluvian man and of his works, pamphlet in-4, 2 fr. 25 [De l’Homme antédiluvien et de ses œuvres – Google books.] and Of stone implements, pamphlet in-8, 1 fr. 50; postpaid, 1 fr.

Paris, Spiritist Bookshop [Des Outils de pierre – Google books.]

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

“Allan Kardec, in his time, was very much imbued with the phrenological ideas of Gall and 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 these so-called sciences.

“The belief that the features of the physiognomy reveal the character of the person is very ancient, claiming that there are apparent relations between the physical and the moral. Of black people, Kardec knew only what various authors recounted concerning the African savages, always reduced by them to almost total brutishness. Hence it seemed to the Codifier that “Nature appropriated the 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 savage of black skin will never be a member of the Institute.” [see the Publisher’s Note in: Explanatory note.] “In those times, the black brothers were not granted the means and the opportunity to evolve, to grow mentally, any attempt in this direction being even considered 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 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 black people will always be the same; as Spirits, it is without doubt an inferior race, that is, primitive; they are veritable 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 handed over, 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 that the Spirits gave to question 217 of The Spirits’ Book. In that answer it is said that “a person excessively ugly, when a good, judicious, humanitarian Spirit dwells in him, 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 some 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 “certain theories that must be considered simple personal opinions, until they are confirmed or contradicted, in order that the doctrine not bear the responsibility for them.”

“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, then, up to the reader to accept or not the ideas emitted by the person of Kardec concerning the black person in his work on the Theory of Beauty.”

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

[4] [see Pamphile.]

[5]

[see Lavater.]