I.

ONE afternoon, in Rome, on the way back from the Aventine, the roadmender climbed on to the tram as it trotted slowly along, and fastened on to its front, alongside of the place of the driver, a big bough of budding bay. Might one not search long for a better symbol of what we may all do by our life? Bleakness, wind, squalid streets, a car full of heterogeneous people, some very dull, most very common; a laborious jogtrot all the way. But to redeem it all with the pleasantness of beauty and the charin of significance, this laurel branch.

Our language does not possess any single word where with to sum up the various categories of things (made by Nature or made by man, intended solely for the purpose of subserving by mere coincidence) which minister to our organic and many-sided æsthetic instincts, the things which affect us in that absolutely special, unmistakable, and hitherto mysterious manner expressed in the fact of our finding them beautiful. It is of the part which such things whether actually present or merely shadowed in our mind-can play in our life, of the influence of the instinct for beauty on the other instincts making up our nature, that I wish to speak in NEW SERIES-VOL. LXIV., No. 1.

these pages. And for this reason I have been glad to accept from the hands of chance, and of that roadmender of the tramway, the bay laurel as a symbol of what we have no word to express the aggregate of all art, all poetry, and particularly of all poetic and artistic vision and emotion.

For the bay laurel-laurus nobilis of botanists-happens not merely to be the evergreen, unfading plant into which Apollo metamorphosed, while pursuing, the maiden whom he loved, even as the poet, the artist, turns into immortal shapes his own quite personal and transitory moods; it is a plant of noblest utility, averting, as the ancients thought, lightning from the dwellings it surrounded, even as disinterested love for beauty averts from our minds the dangers which fall on the vain and the covetous; and curing many aches and fevers, even as the contemplation of beauty refreshes and invigorates our spirit. Indeed, we seem to be reading a description no longer of the virtues of the bay laurel, but of the virtues of all beautiful sights and sounds, of all beautiful thoughts and emotions, in reading the following quaint and charming words of an old herbal :

"The bay leaves are of as necessary use as any other in garden or orchard, for they serve both for pleasure and profit, both for orna

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ment and use, both for honest civil uses and for physic; yea, both for the sick and for the sound, both for the living and for the dead. The bay serveth to adorn the house of God as well as of man, to procure warmth, comfort, and strength to the limbs of men and women ; . . to season vessels wherein are preserved our meats as well as our drinks; to crown or encircle as a garland the heads of the living, and to stick and deck forth the bodies of the dead; so that, from the cradle to the grave, we have still use of it, we have still need of it."

The symbol is too perfect to require any commentary. Let me therefore pass on without additional delay to explain, in as few words as possible, why the Beautiful should possess such power for good, and to point out before entering into a detailed account of any of them in especial what the three principal moral functions of aesthetic emotion and contemplation may be said to be. And, first, for the why. Beauty, save by a metaphorical application of the word, is not in the least the same thing as goodness, any more than beauty (despite Keats's famous assertion) is the same thing as truth. These three objects of the soul's eternal pursuit have different objects, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit-energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival-have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been perpetually working in concert, meeting, crossing, and strengthening one another, until they have become indissolubly woven together by a number of great and organic coincidences.

It is these coincidences which all higher philosophy, from Plato downward, has forever strained to expound; these coincidences, which all religion and all poetry have taken for granted; and to three of which I desire to call attention, persuaded as I am that the scientific progress of our day will make short work of all the spurious æstheticism and all the shortsighted utilita ianism which have cast doubts upon the intimate and vital connection between beauty and every other noble object of our living. The three coincidences I have chosen are: that between

development of the aesthetic faculties and the development of the altruistic instincts; that between development of a sense of æsthetic harmony and a sense of the higher harmonies of universal life; and, before everything else, the coincidence between the preference for æsthetic pleasures and the nobler growth of the individual.

The particular emotion produced in us by such things as are beautiful, works of art or of nature, recollections and thoughts as well as sights and sounds, the emotion of æsthetic pleasure has been recognized ever since the beginning of time as of a mysteriously ennobling quality. All philosophers, beginning with Plato, have told us that ; and the religious instinct of all mankind has practically proclaimed it, by employing for the worship of the highest powers, nay, by employing for the mere designation of the godhead, beautiful sights and sounds, and words by which beautiful sights and sounds are suggested. Nay, there has always lurked in men's minds, and expressed itself in the metaphors of men's speech -an intuition that the Beautiful is in some manner one of the primordial and, so to speak, cosmic powers of the world. The theories of various schools of mental science, and the practice of various schools of art, the practice particularly of the persons styled by themselves æsthetes and by others decadents, have indeed attempted to reduce man's relations with the great world-power Beauty to mere intellectual dilettantism or sensual superfineness. But the gen eral intuition has not been shaken-the general intuition which felt in Beauty a superhuman, and, in that sense, a truly divine power. And now it must become evident that the methods of modern psychology, of the great new science of body and soul, are beginning to explain the reasonableness of this intuition, or, at all events, to show very plainly in what direction we must look for the explanation thereof. This much can now be asserted, and can be indicated even to those least versed in recent psychological study, to wit, that the power of Beauty, the essential power therefore of art, is due to the relations of certain visible and audible forms with the chief nervous and vital

functions of all sensitive creatures; relations established throughout the whole process of human and, perhaps, even of animal evolution; relations seated in the depths of our activities, but radiating upward even like our vague, organic sense of comfort and discomfort; and permeating, even like our obscure relations with atmospheric conditions, into our highest and clearest consciousness, coloring and altering the whole groundwork of our thoughts and feelings. Such is the primordial and, in a sense, cosmic power of the Beautiful; a power whose very growth, whose constantly more complex nature proclaims its necessary and beneficial action in human evolution. It is the power of making human beings live, for the moment, in a more organically vigorous and harmonious fashion, as mountain air or sea-wind makes them live, but with the difference that it is not merely the bodily, but very esentially the spiritual life, the life of thought and emotion, which is thus raised to unusual harmony and vigor. I may illustrate the matter by a very individual instance, which will bring to the memory of each of my readers the vivi fying power of some beautiful sight or sound or beautiful description. I was seated working by my window, depressed by the London outlook of narrow gray sky, endless gray roofs, and rusty elm-tops, when I became conscious of a certain increase of vitality, almost as if I had drunk a glass of wine, because a band somewhere or other had begun to play. Suddenly, after various indifferent pieces, it began a certain piece, by Handel or in Handel's style, of which I have never known the name, but which I have always called for myself the Te Deum tune. And then it seemed as if my soul, and according to the sensations, in a certain degree my body even, were caught up on those notes, and were striking out as if swimming in a great breezy sea; or as if it had put forth wings and risen into a great free space of air. And, noticing my feelings, I seemed to be conscious that those notes were being played on me, my fibres becoming the strings, so that as the notes moved and soared and swelled and radiated like stars and suns, I also being identi

fied with sound, having become apparently the sound itself, must needs move and soar with them.

We can all recollect a dozen instances in which architecture, music, painting, or some sudden sight of sea or mountain, has thus affected us; and all poetry, particularly all great lyric poetry-Goethe's, Schiller's, Wordsworth's, and, above all, Browning's-is full of the record of such experience.

I have said that the difference between this æsthetic heightening of our vitality (and this that I have been describing is, I pray you to observe, the æsthetic phenomenon par excellence), and such heightening of vitality as we experience from going into fresh air and sunshine or taking fortifying food

the difference between the aesthetic and the mere physiological pleasurable excitement consists herein, that in the case of an impression, not of bodily comfort but of beauty, it is not merely our physical life but our spiritual life which is suddenly rendered more vigor

We do not merely breathe better and digest better, though that is no small gain, but we seem to know better under the vitalizing touch of the Beautiful, our consciousness seems filled with the affirmation of what life is, what is worth being, what among our many thoughts and acts and feelings are real and organic and important, what among the many possible moods is the real, eternal ourself.

Such are the great forces of Nature gathered up in what we call the aesthetic phenomenon, and it is these forces of Nature which, stolen from heaven by the man of genius or the nation of genius, and welded together in music or architecture, in visual art or written, give to the great work of art its power to quicken the life of our soul.

I hope I have been able to indicate how, by its essential nature, by the primordial power it embodies, all Beauty, and particularly Beauty in art, tends to fortify and refine the spiritual life of the individual.

But this is only half of the question, for, in order to get the full benefit of beautiful things and beautiful thoughts, in order to obtain in the highest potency those potent aesthetic emotions, the individual must undergo a course