House <y Garden 
POLARITY IN NATURE AND ART. 1 
ELM HOLTZ says, “No doubt is now 
entertained that beauty is subject to laws 
and rules dependent on the nature of human 
intelligence. The difficulty consists in the 
fact that these laws and rules, on whose 
fulfilment beauty depends, are not consciously 
present in the mind of the artist who creates 
the work, or of the observer who contemplates 
it.” The aim of the present author is to 
set forth a few of these laws of beauty in 
the belief that 
a better knowl¬ 
edge on the 
partof the artist 
concerning that 
“ Beautiful Ne¬ 
cessity ” whose 
instrument he 
is (and which 
is equally his 
instrument), 
may enable him 
to approach 
nearer to that 
ideal beauty 
which is the end of every artist’s quest: 
and that such knowledge on the part of the 
observer may quicken his interest in and ap¬ 
preciation of every kind of esthetic endeavor. 
The first law of beauty, alike in nature and 
in art, is that of polarity. All things have 
sex,—are either masculine or feminine. This 
is a truth so fertile that one might almost 
say of it, in the language of Oriental imagery, 
“ If you were to tell this to a dry stick, 
branches would grow, and leaves sprout 
from it.” In the words of Emerson, 
“ Balance-loving Nature made all things in 
pairs.” In the language of mysticism, 
“ Brahma, that the world might be born, fell 
asunder into man and wife.” Using the 
terminology of science, “Polarity, or the 
sundering of a force into two quantitively 
different and opposed activities striving after 
reunion, which also shows itself for the 
most part in space as a dispersion in opposite 
directions, is a fundamental type of almost 
all phenomena of nature, from the magnet 
and crystal to man himself.” 
Of these two activities the world is filled 
with symbols. They are typified in sun and 
moon, in fire and water,—man and woman. 
They are action and reaction, the positive 
and the negative magnetic poles,—power and 
weight. In music they are the major and 
the minor modes: the typical, or representative 
chords of the tonic and the dominant 
seventh,—a consonance and a dissonance, 
a chord of satisfaction preceded by a chord 
of suspense. In painting and the arts of 
design they are lines vertical and horizontal, 
straight and curved : masses light and dark. 
They are the cold colors, which have their 
pole in blue 
(the color of 
water) which 
calms : and the 
warm colors, 
which have 
their pole in 
red (the color 
of fire) which 
excites. In 
speech they 
are consonant 
and vowel 
sounds, th e 
type of the first 
being m , a sound of satisfaction made with 
the mouth closed, and of the second a , a 
sound of suspense made with the mouth 
open. In architecture they are support and 
weight: the vertical member, which resists 
the force of gravity, and the horizontal 
member which succumbs to it. 
A close interrelation is discovered to 
subsist between the corresponding members 
of such pairs of opposites, since they are 
all only symbols and semblances of that 
unknown reality which forever hides itself 
behind phenomena—that great hermaphro¬ 
ditic being which is the world, its two sexes 
being repeated in every great and every 
minute thing. In whatever form the two 
occur they exhibit certain constant character¬ 
istics which distinguish one from the other; 
those which are allied to and partake of 
the nature of time being masculine : and 
those which are allied to and partake of the 
nature of space being feminine,—such as 
motion and matter, mind and body, etc. 
i The third of Mr. Bragdon’s series of articles entitled :—“ The 
Beautiful Necessity : being Essays upon Architectural Esthetics,” begun 
in the January number of House and Garden. 
9 1 
