his
second volume.

IX. THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT. {272}

The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdrockh, was
disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and creating
a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great things are
being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness from our streets
and our homes, and to make both the outside and inside of our dwellings
worthy of a world where there are forests and flower-tressed meadows, and
the plumage of birds; where the insects carry lessons of color on their
wings, and even the surface of a stagnant pool will show us the wonders
of iridescence and the most delicate forms of leafage? They, too, are
modifying opinions, for they are modifying men's moods and habits, which
are the mothers of opinions, having quite as much to do with their
formation as the responsible father--Reason. Think of certain hideous
manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious
perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall
pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings,
carpets, brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an
effect akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such
surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and
that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external
senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is
taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle
relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids that
bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our
intellectual discernment; and--more than that--as it is probable that
fine musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily
organization, it is also probable that just coloring and lovely
combinations of lines may be necessary to the complete well-being of our
systems apart from any conscious delight in them. A savage may indulge
in discordant chuckles and shrieks and gutturals, and think that they
please the gods, but it does not follow that his frame would not be
favorably wrought upon by the vibrations of a grand church organ. One
sees a person capable of choosing the worst style of wall-paper become
suddenly afflicted by its ugliness under an attack of illness. And if an
evil state of blood and lymph usually goes along with an evil state of