Simple Beauty

Some might protest, in the name of aesthetics, against organizing life on simple lines, or set against us the theory of useful luxury: the providence of business, the great nourisher of the arts, the ornament of civilized societies. We wish to answer them in advance with a few brief remarks.

It will no doubt have been noticed that the spirit animating these pages is not the utilitarian spirit. It would be a mistake to think that the simplicity we seek has anything in common with the kind that misers impose on themselves out of stinginess, and narrow minds out of false austerity. For the former, the simple life is the cheap life. For the latter, it is a dull, vegetative existence in which merit consists in depriving oneself of everything that smiles, shines, and charms.

We are not in the least displeased when those with ample means put their fortune into circulation instead of hoarding it, keeping trade alive and the fine arts flourishing. After all, they are making excellent use of their privileged position. What we oppose is senseless prodigality, the selfish use of wealth, and above all the pursuit of the superfluous by those who need, before anything else, to attend to the necessary. The luxury of a Maecenas cannot have the same influence on a society as that of some vulgar pleasure-seeker who astonishes his contemporaries with the pomp of his life and the folly of his squandering. Here one word designates very different things. Scattering money is not everything; there are ways of scattering it that ennoble people and others that degrade them. Besides, scattering money presupposes that one has plenty of it. When the love of sumptuous living takes hold of those with limited means, the question changes remarkably. And what strikes us in these times is the frenzy for spending their means among people who ought to be sparing with them. That munificence is a social benefit, we readily grant. That it may even, at a stretch, be maintained that the prodigality of certain rich people is a kind of safety valve for letting the overflow escape, we will not attempt to dispute. We merely observe that too many people are playing with the valve when it would be in their interest and their duty to practice economy: their luxury and their love of luxury are a private misfortune and a public danger.

So much for useful luxury.

We would now like to explain ourselves on the question of aesthetics, oh, very modestly, and without trespassing on the specialists' ground. Through an all too common illusion, simplicity and beauty are regarded as rivals. But simple is no more a synonym for ugly than luxurious, overloaded, elaborate, or costly is a synonym for beautiful. Our eyes are wounded by the garish spectacle of loud beauty, venal art, and luxury without grace or spirit. Wealth allied with bad taste sometimes makes us regret that so much money was ever in anyone's hands to call into being such a prodigious quantity of shoddy works. Our contemporary art suffers from a lack of simplicity, just as our literature does: too many added ornaments, convoluted flourishes, tormented fancies. Rarely, in lines, forms, and colors, are we granted the sight of that simplicity allied with perfection which compels the eye as the self-evident compels the mind. We need to steep ourselves anew in the ideal purity of immortal beauty, which sets its seal on masterpieces and a single ray of which is worth more than all pompous displays.

What lies closest to our heart here, however, is to speak of the everyday aesthetics of life: the care we should take in adorning the home and the human person, so as to give existence that luster without which it has no charm. For it is not a matter of indifference whether or not people care about this necessary superfluity. By this we can tell whether they put soul into their lives. Far from regarding as a useless preoccupation the concern that makes us embellish, tend, and lend poetry to forms, I think we should cultivate it as much as possible. Nature herself gives us the example, and anyone who affected contempt for that fragile gleam of beauty with which we adorn our fleeting days would be straying from the intentions of Him who put the same care and the same love into painting the flower of a day as into the eternal mountains.

But we must not yield to the crude temptation of confusing true beauty with what bears only its name. The beauty and poetry of existence depend on the meaning we give it. Our houses, our table, and our dress should express intentions. To put intentions into them, we must first have them. Whoever has them knows how to make them felt by the simplest means. You do not need to be rich to give grace and charm to your home and your clothes. For that, taste and goodness are enough. Here we touch on a point that matters greatly to everyone, but that perhaps concerns women to a greater degree than men.

Those who urge women to dress in coarse fabrics and to shut their bodies up in garments whose flat uniformity recalls sacks do violence to what is most sacred in nature and wholly misunderstand the spirit of things. If clothing were only a precaution against cold or rain, a piece of sacking or an animal's hide would suffice. But it is much more than that. Human beings put their whole selves into everything they do: they turn the things they use into signs. A garment is not a mere covering; it is a symbol. I call to witness the whole rich flora of national and provincial costumes, and of those worn by our old guilds. Dress, too, has something to tell us. The more meaning it holds, the better it is. For it to be truly beautiful, then, it must announce good things to us, things personal and true. Put all the money in the world into it: if it is commonplace, unrelated to the woman who wears it, it is nothing but a mask and a masquerade. Fashion carried to excess, by making the woman herself disappear completely beneath ornaments of pure convention, strips her of her chief attraction. The result of this abuse is that many things women find very pretty do as much harm to their beauty as to the purses of their husbands or parents.

What would you say of a young girl who, to express her thoughts, used very choice, even exquisite expressions, but reproduced word for word the sentences of a conversation manual? What charm could such borrowed language have for you? The effect of dresses that are well made in themselves but turn up indiscriminately on everyone is exactly the same.

I cannot resist the temptation to quote here a passage from Camille Lemonnier that bears on my idea:

"Nature has placed in a woman's fingers a charming art that she knows by instinct, an art all her own, as silk belongs to the silkworm, or lace to the nimble, delicate spider... She is the poet, the artist of her own grace and innocence; she is the spinner of the mystery in which her wish to please is clothed. All the talent she spends on resembling man in the other arts will never be worth the wit and happy invention of a mere scrap of fabric that she gathers into folds.

"Well, I would like that art to be held in far higher honor. Just as education ought to consist in thinking with one's own mind, feeling with one's own heart, and expressing the small personal thing, the intimate, latent self that is instead repressed and leveled for the sake of conformity, so I would like the young woman in her apprenticeship, the future mother, to become early on the little aesthete of this aesthetic of dress, her own dresser, she who will one day dress her children... But with taste and the gift of improvising, of putting her own personality into that masterpiece of feminine skill and individuality: a dress... Otherwise, a woman is nothing but a bundle of rags."

The dress you have made yourself is almost always the one that suits you best and, in any case, the one that gives you the most pleasure. That is what our women too often forget. The working woman and the peasant woman make the same mistake. Ever since both have taken to having their clothes made by dressmakers and milliners who sell them highly doubtful imitations of high fashion, grace has almost disappeared from the dress of the common people. And yet is there anything in the world with a greater gift for pleasing than the fresh appearance of a young working woman or a country girl dressed in the fashion of her own region and beautiful in her simplicity alone?

These same reflections may be applied to the way we arrange and decorate our homes. If there are dresses that reveal a whole conception of life, hats that are poems, bows that are cockades, there are also arrangements of a house that, in their own way, speak to the mind. Why, on the pretext of embellishing our dwellings, should we strip them of that personal character which always has its value? Why make our bedrooms look like hotel rooms, or our drawing rooms like station waiting rooms, by letting one uniform type of official beauty prevail in them?

What a misfortune it is to walk through the houses of a town, the towns of a country, the countries of a whole vast continent, and to meet everywhere certain identical, inevitable forms, irritating in their endless repetition! How much aesthetics would gain from more simplicity! Instead of this tawdry luxury, all these ornaments, pretentious yet insipid in their banality, we would have infinite variety. Happy discoveries would catch our eye. The unexpected in its thousand forms would delight us, and we would recover the secret of stamping on a tapestry, a piece of furniture, or the roof of a house that mark of human personality which gives certain old odds and ends a priceless value.

Let us go on and, to finish, turn to things simpler still: I mean the small details of housekeeping that a number of young women today find so unpoetic. Their contempt for material occupations, for the modest cares a home requires, comes from a very common but no less harmful confusion. This confusion consists in thinking that poetry and beauty either are in things or are not. There are distinguished, graceful occupations, such as literary pursuits or playing the harp, and coarse, ungraceful ones, such as polishing shoes, sweeping one's room, or watching over the pot-au-feu. Childish error! Neither the harp nor the broom has anything to do with it; everything depends on the hand that holds them and the spirit that moves that hand. Poetry is not in things: it is in us. We must impose it on objects as the sculptor imposes his dream on the marble. If our lives and occupations too often remain without charm despite their outward distinction, it is because we have not known how to put anything into them. The height of art is to bring the inert to life and to tame what is wild. I would like our young girls to apply themselves to developing in themselves the truly feminine art of giving a soul to things that have none. The triumph of grace in a woman lies in that work. Woman alone knows how to put into a house that indefinable something whose virtue made the poet say: "The roof grows merry and laughs." They say there are no fairies, or that there are none anymore, but they do not know what they are saying. As for the original model for the fairies sung by the poets, the poets found it, and still find it, among those charming mortals who know how to knead dough with vigor, mend rips with kindness, tend the sick with a smile, put grace into a ribbon and wit into the frying pan.

It is quite certain that the cultivation of the fine arts has a morally elevating influence, and that our thoughts and actions become steeped, in the long run, in whatever strikes our eyes. But practicing the arts and contemplating their works are a privilege reserved for a few. It is not given to everyone to possess, understand, or create beautiful things. Yet there is a kind of human beauty that can find its way everywhere: the beauty that is born in the hands of our wives and daughters. Without this beauty, what is the most richly adorned house? A cold dwelling. With it, the barest home comes alive and fills with light. Among the forces capable of ennobling and transforming wills and of increasing happiness, there is perhaps none of more universal use. It knows how to show its worth with the poorest of tools, amid the worst of difficulties. When the room is small, the budget tight, and the table modest, a woman who has the gift finds a way to make order, cleanliness, and seemliness reign there. She puts care and art into everything she undertakes. In her eyes, doing well whatever one does is not the privilege of the rich but the right of all. That is why she exercises it, and why she can give her home a dignity and a charm never reached by wealthy houses where everything is left to hirelings.

Life understood in this way soon reveals itself to be rich in unsuspected beauties, in delights, in inner satisfactions. To be oneself, and to realize in one's natural surroundings the kind of beauty they allow: that is the ideal. How the mission of woman grows in depth and meaning when it comes down to this: putting soul into things, and giving that soul of goodness, as its outward sign, those pleasant and delicate attentions to which even the roughest of beings is sensitive! Is that not better than envying what one does not have and spending one's desire on the clumsy imitation of an ornament that is not one's own?

Translator's notes

Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913): Belgian novelist and art critic.