both canonized saints and proscribed heretics. We are at liberty to follow our own mental and moral bent, and are in good company whichever view we prefer.

Now to those who think of God as Creator, the worship of the beautiful is only redeemed from idolatry by the belief that God made and loves beauty, so that in worshipping beauty we are approving what He approves, and, in a certain indirect manner, worshipping Him. The other, or mystic view, affords a simpler and more direct justification. For those who have received it have generally held that beauty, in its real and essential being, is part of the divine nature, that the archetype of beauty is to be sought in God Himself, and that the worship of it is a divine worship. As the early Christian mystics would have said, Beauty is one of the names by which man may address the Nameless One. And most of the greatest poets have a vein of mysticism which is most evident in those whose feeling for beauty is most intense, whether they be marked by the sober piety of Wordsworth or the defiant enthusiasm of Shelley.

But the question must be met: how are we to identify that beauty, or its characteristics, to which such high honour is attributed? The question has been asked and has received very various answers for centuries. Some philosophers have sought to discriminate between our idea of the beautiful and that of the good. Others have tried to find links between the various sensible or

intellectual impressions excited in us by things that we agree in calling beautiful. The science of æsthetics belongs partly to metaphysics, partly to psychology. But without being either metaphysicians or psychologists (except in so far as any person who thinks at all must at times assume the character of both), we may, I think, profitably keep the question before our minds, and ask ourselves from time to time why we think this or that to be beautiful, and how we can both widen our experience and purify our taste in these matters. One point may be noticed in passing: the question as to the elements in our conception of beauty is quite distinct from the inquiry into the origin of that conception. It is quite possible that in the development of living organisms, including that of man, there has been a certain attraction to bright colours and sweet odours which may be regarded as a very rudimentary form of our love of beauty. Such attraction is distinctly advantageous, in the struggle for existence, to the living things that exercise it—as the brightly coloured flower draws to it the insects which disperse the pollen, and the gay feathers of a cock-bird are presumably pleasing to the hen. And even among developed human creatures, the qualities which have a purely physical attractiveness are of a distinct use in encouraging the maintenance and increase of the finer physical types. But the mere animal gratification in what is pleasing falls far below the satisfaction which we derive from the contemplation of the beautiful,

in so much that, while marking a possible beginning, it has little interest for those who want to understand what we actually intend when we speak of beauty as something to be loved and worshipped.

If we read what has been written on the subject, we shall not find much agreement as to the sensual, the intellectual, and the moral elements in our perception and enjoyment of beauty. There are certain combinations of colours, of linear forms, of musical notes, taken in succession or simultaneously, which seem to give the raw material for our æsthetic' faculty to work upon. And that faculty in its constructive work is helped by the constant action of the mind, especially in the regions of memory and imagination, which enriches the field of sensible experience with a multitude of associations and suggestions. Further, in order to grasp and to delight in the world of beauty which by a complex growth has come to form part of our environment, we need to put forth some energies of the soul which belong to us not only as sentient, or as intellectual, but as moral and spiritual beings.

Perhaps no one has ever written on the subject with more suggestiveness and profundity than John Ruskin, though many other writers may

1 I find myself unable to dispense with this word, so abhorrent to Ruskin and his followers. But in using it I would (a) repudiate the associations which belong to it as suggestive of a particular school, and (b) extend its meaning beyond that which primarily belongs to it. Words, like things, are often better than their origins.

I

have been more consistent and methodical. am referring especially to the second volume of Modern Painters "On Ideas of Beauty," which he wrote in youth and republished, with severe selfcriticisms, in his mature age. Especially is he lucid and helpful in pointing out what beauty is not that it is not to be identified with the true or with the useful, or with the familiar or with whatever has pleasant and interesting associations. Yet when he comes to consider what beauty is, he seems in some respects to confuse the issues by bringing in ideas of a heterogeneous kind. Thus when he is treating of human beauty, the spiritual expression both of face and of attitude seems to him the main thing. His religious feeling would make him regard the early Tuscan painters not only as occupying a higher plane, morally and spiritually, than Pheidias and Praxiteles, but as being actually better artists. This fault comes partly from his early want of familiarity with ancient art-though he seems to me occasionally to make very true remarks in writing about the Greeks-and partly from the curious inconsistencies of his own nature, in that he was a puritan by education and mental discipline, a worshipper of the beautiful by temperament and by spiritual insight.

But his inconsistencies render him, perhaps, all the more suggestive. He divides all beauty under two heads, the typical and the vital. When he treats of "those qualities or types on whose combination is dependent the power of mere

material loveliness," he does not attempt to be exhaustive. But he selects some ideas which are presented to our consciousness in such sights, whether of nature or art, as we call beautiful, and in each of them he would recognize a divine attribute. There is the idea of infinity, suggested by glimpses of luminous background and hints of endless space; that of unity; which is "essential to the perfection of beauty in lines, colours, or forms," seen in the midst of difference and variety; that of repose or permanence, of purity, and of moderation. It may seem to be a straining of the use of logic to argue that anything which seems to conform to these types owes its beauty to the fact that God is infinite, is one, is ever working and ever at rest, and the like. Yet the distinction of the types and of what they suggest is a helpful one, in enabling us to see, not that art is dependent on religion or religion on art, but that a correlation of the two ought to be brought about in the human consciousness.

Perhaps we should not all go with Ruskin in making a hard-and-fast line between typical and vital beauty. As to vital beauty as shown in man, I do not, as I have said, consider him a safe guide, and in dealing with vegetable life he seems to bring in moral considerations which are purely fanciful. But we may feel inclined to follow him in the main when he says that vital beauty consists in "the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living things." Of course there is such felicitous fulfilment which does not strike us