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 Beauty and the Beast
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 C. F. CLAY, Manager 
 
 LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.G. 4 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. 
 
 BOMBAY ) 
 
 CALCUTTA [ MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 
 
 MADRAS ) 
 
 TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. 
 
 OF CANADA, LTD. 
 TOKYO : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 Beauty and the Beast 
 
 AN ESSAY 
 
 IN 
 
 EVOLUTIONARY AESTHETIC 
 
 BY 
 
 STEWART A. McDOWALL, B.D. 
 
 Chaplain and Assistant Master at Winchester College 
 Author of E'volution and the Need of Atonement, 
 E'volution and Spiritual Life, E'volution and 
 the Doctrine of the Trinity, etc. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1920
 
 For verily all men by nature were but vain who had no perception 
 of God, and from the good things that are seen they gained not 
 power to know him that is, neither by giving heed to the works 
 did they recognise the artificer ; but either fire, or wind, or swift air, 
 or circling stars, or raging water, or luminaries of heaven, they 
 thought to be gods that rule the world. And if it was through 
 delight in their beauty that they took them to be gods, let them 
 know how much better than these is their Sovereign Lord ; for the 
 first author of beauty created them: but if it was through astonish- 
 ment at their power and influence, let them understand from them 
 how much more powerful is he that formed them ; for from the 
 greatness of the beauty even of created things in like proportion 
 does man form the image of their first maker. But yet for these men 
 there is but small blame, for they too peradventure do but go astray 
 while they are seeking God and desiring to find him. For living 
 among his works they make diligent search, and they yield themselves 
 up to sight, because the things that they look upon are beautiful. 
 But again even they are not to be excused. For if they had power 
 to know so much, that they should be able to explore the course of 
 things, how is it that they did not sooner find the Sovereign Lord 
 
 of these his works .■' 
 
 Wisdom xiii. 1-9.
 
 SRLF 
 
 ^^■/ini^H^ 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 T WISH to take this opportunity of expressing 
 my gratitude to Mrs R. B. Goodden and 
 Mr R. M. Y. Gleadowe for the help they have 
 given me in writing this book. With Mrs 
 Goodden the theory was discussed point by 
 point, and her criticisms and suggestions are 
 largely responsible for the final shaping of the 
 argument, as well as for an important devel(^p- 
 ment of the theory. To Mr Gleadowe I am 
 indebted for some useful hints, which led to a 
 partial rearrangement of the material, by which 
 the form of the book has been greatly improved. 
 
 S. A. McD. 
 
 WiNTON, 
 
 October 1919.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION i 
 
 PART I. THE THEORY . . . . .17 
 PART II. BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION . . 51 
 
 CONCLUSION 65 
 
 APPENDIX. ART FORMS IN DEVELOPMENT 71
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 A RE we to look at the Beautiful with our feet 
 jl\ firmly planted on the Natural, or are we to 
 look at the Natural from the apparently pre- 
 carious height of the Beautiful? This, after all, 
 is the dilemma of aesthetic, slow though men 
 have been to realise it. As we read the history 
 of Aesthetic Theory we are puzzled by the tenta- 
 tiveness and the uncertainty even of those philo- 
 sophers who played the greatest part in moulding 
 human thought, until it dawns on us that, idealist 
 though they might be in all else, in this they 
 were unconsciously disloyal to their own systems, 
 being in some measure materialist. 
 
 An attempt to form a philosophy of religion 
 which should start from the generally accepted 
 facts of biological science and pass, through the 
 common experiences of personal relationship, to 
 the ultimate problems of Godhead and manhood, 
 left at the close a keen sense of something lacking 
 — something more than the lack of unity and 
 balance inevitable in work written and published 
 step by step. I had tried to find in Love, which 
 is the very nature of Godhead, an essential 
 impulse towards creation. It was clear that this 
 creation must be the creation of something new, 
 if it were to be justified; and the conclusion 
 which forced itself upon me was that the creation 
 of personal beings fulfilled this demand. 
 
 M.
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 Yet an unsatisfied sense remained either that 
 even the experience of love reciprocated by fresh 
 personal beings could not be new for God with 
 that utter newness which belief in Him as Trans- 
 cendent and Perfect required, or else that His 
 experience was not always perfect. At any rate 
 something that would make this newness self- 
 evident was missing. Something vital had clearly 
 been left out. The one thing of which no accoimt 
 had been taken was Beauty; and I began to con- 
 sider whether this missing something, all-per- 
 vading yet intangible, was not Beauty itself. And 
 in Beauty I seemed to find what I had missed. 
 
 To Aesthetic has generally been assigned the 
 fate of Cinderella. Her uglier sisters, Epistemo- 
 logy and Metaphysic, have monopolised the court 
 invitations, for the most part. Might she not, 
 after all, be destined to marry the Prince? A Httle 
 thought made it clear that, properly arrayed, 
 she would bid fair to outshine the others. This 
 book is not an effort to dress her in a new fashion. 
 Fairy godmother I cannot claim to be, nor have 
 I a magic wand. I shall only try to strip off some 
 of the rags, leaving her, like Psyche, to proclaim 
 her own loveliness. 
 
 It is not my intention to give a systematic 
 account of the development of aesthetic theory. 
 Such books as Dr Bosanquet's History of Aes- 
 thetic, and the historical portion of Croce's 
 Aesthetic, from which works the following sum- 
 mary is chiefly derived, fortunately make the
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 task unnecessary. Nor does any detailed criti- 
 cism of the work of others fall within the scope 
 of the present essay. My aim is merely to 
 suggest an idea, avoiding technicalities as far as 
 I may, and then to link it up with the Christian 
 idea of God on the one hand, and with the 
 development of the human soul on the other. 
 The very briefest note on the course of specu- 
 lation concerning Art and Beauty will suffice to 
 introduce the point of view that I wish to suggest, 
 which is that Beauty must be a first and not a 
 last consideration for metaphysic. To advocate 
 this is to turn his own weapon against Croce; 
 but that is inevitable. Croce claims that Beauty 
 is the expression of that intuition of Reality 
 which constitutes the first stage of knowledge; 
 but the philosophy of Croce is anti-metaphysical. 
 Since many, while agreeing with the great and 
 original discovery involved in his affirmation, 
 must disagree profoundly with his negation, it 
 follows of necessity that sooner or later they will 
 endeavour to hoist him with his own petard. 
 
 Aesthetic theories show a steady and yet very 
 remarkable change in the views of philosophers 
 concerning Art and even Beauty itself. The 
 Greeks tended, on the whole, to regard Art as mere 
 imitation. Thus, at best, the beauty produced by 
 artistic creation was inferior, because second- 
 hand; in fact, as Plato argued, the artist's 
 representation was really third-hand, for there is 
 first the idea, then the concrete individual object.
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 then the representation. Stress was laid on 
 harmony, rhythm^ order, as being indicative of 
 the homogeneity of an ideal world and therefore 
 admirable. But, being an incomplete reproduc- 
 tion of nature^, art could have no primary 
 importance. It might be evil or good, in its own 
 degree; and from the moral standpoint it might 
 be judged, for the beautiful and the good are not 
 completely distinguished. Being so judged, it 
 was found wanting. It is one of the tragedies of 
 thought that the beauty-loving Plato should have 
 been driven to formulate a theory which is the 
 negation of art, because it seemed to him that 
 art was simply the false endeavouring to mas- 
 querade as the true. In Aristotle we find the 
 beginnings of a freer idea. Symbolism in art is 
 implicitly recognised, and there is some escape, 
 though not much, from the moralistic bond; 
 some dawning conception, though not much, of 
 the concrete expressiveness of artistic creation. 
 In the Middle Ages the mystical symbolic con- 
 ception, characteristic of Plotinus, was developed. 
 Symmetry and rhythm are beautiful because they 
 symbolise reason and divinity, and relate the 
 human soul, through the perception of order, to 
 the divine which created diat order. St Thomas 
 Aquinas even goes so far as to say that in beauty 
 desire is quieted ^ — presumably because satisfied. 
 We shall be led to disagree profoundly with this 
 statement. 
 
 ^ Bosanquet, Hist. Aesth. p. i8. ^ /jf^. p. i^g. 
 
 4
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Of Vico ( 1 725 ), to whom Croce acknowledges so 
 great a debt, we will only here say that he was the 
 discoverer of the creative intuition, and this dis- 
 covery entitles him to the honourable position of 
 first founder of a coherent theory of aesthetic. 
 Vico was primarily concerned with the nature of 
 poetry. He showed that poetry was a 'moment' 
 of the spiritual consciousness, by which a man 
 was brought into contact with reality — that it 
 represented a stage of knowledge before reflec- 
 tion (and was therefore an intuition) and that it 
 expressed this knowledge (and was therefore 
 creative) ; while it was distinct from feeling, and 
 therefore free from the stigma which Plato 
 attached to it, and which led to his banishing it 
 from his Republic, 
 
 Men ^xsl feel without being aware; they then become aware 
 with troubled and affected soul; finally they reflect with 
 pure mind. This dignity is the Principle of the poetical 
 feelings^ which are formed by the senses of passions and of 
 affections, as distinct from the philosophical feelings, which 
 are formed from reflection by reasoning. Hence the philo- 
 sophical feeUngs approach more to truth, the more they rise 
 to univer sals', the poetical feelings are more certain the more 
 they approach to particulars^. 
 
 Poetry is thus placed on the imaginative plane, 
 says Professor Wildon Carr, as distinct from the 
 intellective, and this imaginative plane, or as 
 Croce calls it, degree, is furnished with positive 
 value. 
 
 "^ G. Vico, Scienza nuova seconda, Elementi liii, quoted in 
 Croce's Aesthetic.
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 By Kant we first find the problem of aesthetic 
 faced boldly and at close quarters. Kant's 
 thought had led him to the formulation of two 
 Critiques, the one dealing with the world of 
 abstract reason, the other with the world of con- 
 crete, practical experience; and no systematic 
 bond yet existed between them. The unity of 
 life itself made such a dualism intolerable, and 
 Kant sought the unifying medium in aesthetic 
 judgment, for judgment is pre-eminently a syn- 
 thesis. The domain of aesthetic consciousness, if 
 purely subjective by Kant's interpretation, is yet 
 clearly determined. It furnishes decisions on the 
 quality, the quantity and the relation of those 
 objects with which practical experience makes us 
 acquainted, and with whose existence the intellect 
 is occupied. Yet beauty is for Kant subjective, 
 devoid of abstract conceptions, pleasing without 
 interest, destitute of content; though he fails in 
 achieving more than a verbal consistency in this 
 matter^. Subjective or not, however, it is symbolic 
 of the moral order, and owes its apparent 
 rationality to the Order which it symbolises. No 
 doubt it is through the doctrine of symbolism 
 that Kant is led on to his discussion of the sublime 
 as another species of the aesthetic judgment, yet 
 more subjective, yet more abstract. 
 
 With Schelling we reach the stage of philo- 
 sophical appreciation of the objectivity of beauty; 
 and, with this objectivity, of the relation of beauty 
 
 1 Bosanquet, Hist. Aesth. p. 267, seq. 
 
 6
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 to historical continuity, both in its own expres- 
 sion in the mind of man, and in the sequence 
 of objective episodes. The artist recognises the 
 eternal idea in an individual, and expresses it 
 outwardly, transforming the individual into a 
 world apart, into a species, into an eternal idea^. 
 The divine, successively expressing itself through 
 man, gives a unity and absoluteness to all reality; 
 and reality is the object of the aesthetic judgment. 
 We have not stayed to discuss, or even state, 
 the many definitions of the Beautiful that have 
 been given. Neither have we attempted to repre- 
 sent the contribution of countless writers to the 
 problem. Our only object in this brief page of 
 sunmiary has been to indicate the changing trend 
 of thought. 
 
 The Greeks reared their philosophic system on 
 an unstable foundation, because they looked on 
 Beauty as mere imitation. For them Art mimics 
 life as crudely as a company of strolling players 
 at a country fair mimics the doings of the great. 
 Art is dramatic rather than true. 
 
 But with less rigorous and honest minds than 
 Plato's the instinctive love of beauty weighed 
 more strongly. Beauty was, at highest, too 
 ennobling to be wholly false; it must at least 
 symboUse the true. And when a more disciplined 
 thought was once more turned upon Reality, 
 without beauty the world seemed dual — hard and 
 cold, with theory and practice divorced. The 
 
 1 Croce, Aesthetic, trs. Ainslie, p. 303.
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 only bond appeared to lie in the region of the 
 judgment of values, itself essentially aesthetic. 
 Men bom out of due time there were who 
 showed here and there flashes of deeper insight 
 before Kant's systematisation was effected, but 
 to them came only sporadic glimpses of the 
 truth. These for the most part were men deeply 
 versed in the life and soul of man — the Dantes, 
 the Shakespeares, the Goethes. Only one was 
 pre-eminent in the realm of pure thought — 
 Giambattista Vico. With other thinkers the tide 
 rose and fell alternately, yet always moved from 
 the neap of Platonism towards the spring. 
 
 Then, at the end, in our own time, Benedetto 
 Croce set himself to formulate the first adequate 
 theory of the Aesthetic. 
 
 The importance of Beauty to any system of 
 philosophy that could pretend to completeness 
 had been more and more recognised. It was left 
 for Croce to grasp the truth that Beauty is not 
 judgment, but expression : the expression of the 
 intuition which is our first contact with Reahty; 
 and that Aesthetic is the science of expressive 
 activity. Given this first movement of the spirit, 
 the other modes of approach to Reahty follow — 
 or rather are involved, since no temporal series 
 is concerned. 
 
 Croce's philosophy as a whole, and especially 
 his extension of the logical a priori synthesis on 
 which it is founded, is difficult to grasp; and for 
 the sake of those who may not have made 
 
 8
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 acquaintance with his own exposition or with 
 Professor Wildon Carr's summary, a brief dis- 
 cussion of one or two saHent points may be 
 forgiven. It is only fair to state, however, that 
 it is not possible to give a really short and clear 
 resume that will do justice to the most interesting 
 and elusive of modern philosophies. 
 
 We may begin by explaining what Croce 
 means by an intuition, what he means by the 
 a priori synthesis, and what part the relation of 
 the double degree plays in his system. 
 
 When you perceive an object, already you are 
 using two mental processes, which cannot in fact 
 be separated, or exist the one without the other. 
 In the first place there is simple awareness of a 
 reality. You objectify an impression without 
 arguing as to its reality at all, or relating it to 
 yourself or anything else. You merely charac- 
 terise the thing, and are aware of it as concrete 
 and individual. This is the Pure Intuition. It has 
 no admixture of intellectual process. And its 
 salient characteristic is that it is made or expressed 
 by the mind, and is indeed identical with this 
 expression. You cannot separate the intuition 
 from its expression. Moreover it is aesthetic in 
 nature. Its character is identical with the 
 character of the mind-process which makes the 
 vision of the artist and the poet. 
 
 But this intuition is at once generalised, and 
 related. The process of generalisation is the 
 formation of the Concept, and is characteristic of
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 the logical or intellectual activity. Moreover the 
 Pure Concept is universal, and expressive, 
 belonging to all individuals; concrete, and there- 
 fore real. Pseudo-concepts, which fail either in 
 universality, expressiveness or concreteness, do 
 exist and are of great value, but this value belongs 
 not to the theoretical, but to the practical, activity. 
 * Evolution' is a pure concept, 'chair' a pseudo- 
 concept. For our purpose it is not necessary to 
 elaborate this point. 
 
 What does interest us is the relation between 
 the two theoretical activities of the spirit — 
 Intuition and Concept. They are 'moments in 
 the unity of a single process.' Neither takes a 
 prior place. "We cannot think without uni- 
 versalising, and we cannot have an intuition 
 without thinking^." In other words, they are 
 related in a synthesis that is a priori. This means 
 that the intellectual activity which relates and 
 generalises the intuitions or presentations does 
 not depend upon them, but is as much a con- 
 dition of experience as are the presentations 
 themselves. Each of the two things, the intuition 
 and the concept, is essential to knowledge; the 
 concept is empty of content without the intuition, 
 but you cannot have an intuition without thinking 
 it. The two form an indivisible, organic unity; 
 neither able to exist without the other. You 
 cannot think without universalising, nor intuit 
 without thinking. This is the logical a priori 
 
 ^ Wildon Carr, The Philosophy oj Croce, p. 97. 
 10
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 synthesis discovered by Kant. But Croce pro- 
 ceeds to use it in a wider sense, as we shall see. 
 
 These two elements then, the intuitional and 
 the conceptual, together constitute the whole 
 theoretic activity of knowing. 
 
 Now the first of these elements, the intuition, 
 is expression of a reality to the self. It is 
 essentially aesthetic, for aesthetic is the science 
 of expressive activity. In forming an intuition, 
 and expressing it, we compass Beauty, for 
 Beauty is expression. 
 
 But there is another side to the activity of the 
 spirit. Thinking and doing, willing and acting, 
 go hand in hand. 
 
 The Practical Activity begins as Economic, 
 directed towards particular ends. There is 
 individual action; but there is also action uni- 
 versalised: directed to general ends: and this 
 action is Ethical. Utility passes over into good- 
 ness: there is no good action which is not in 
 some way useful, there is no useful action which 
 is not in some way good. 
 
 Here again, then, we have two inseparable 
 activities, related, as are the theoretic activities, 
 as a first and second degree, yet each involving 
 the other. The relation is identical with that of 
 the a priori synthesis, and the term may be 
 extended to cover this relation also. 
 
 Finally, the two sides of the activity of the 
 spirit, the theoretic and the practical, are them- 
 selves related in this same double degree by a 
 
 II
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 relation of synthesis that we may again term 
 a priori. The theoretic activity cannot exist 
 apart from the practical, nor the practical apart 
 from the theoretic. The relation is again the 
 same as that which obtains for the relation of 
 the elements constituting each pair of the four 
 * moments/ and for the pairs themselves. The 
 a priori sjnithesis is extended to cover all these 
 relations. 
 
 With Croce's theory of Beauty we have already 
 made acquaintance. As we have seen, Kant laid 
 the foundations by his discussion of the judg- 
 ment of taste; Vico, by distinguishing the 
 imaginative from the intellectual plane, had 
 supplied the basal idea; but it was left to Croce 
 to see that Beauty is expression, or the form 
 given by the spirit to its intuitions, through 
 which it makes contact with Reality. It must, 
 however, be borne in mind that Croce draws an 
 absolutely definite line between the expression, 
 which belongs to the Theoretic Activity, and the 
 technical embodiment of that expression, which 
 belongs to the domain of the Practical. The work 
 of art affords simply the stimulus which enables 
 us to recreate the artist's expression; and it is 
 the expression, not the work of art, that is 
 beautiful. The Beautiful is a distinct concept; 
 the Ugly is ugly in so far as it fails in distinctness, 
 through failure to express. Beauty is simply 
 aesthetic value — the value of the expressed 
 intuition; ugliness the lack of aesthetic value, 
 
 12
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 through lack of clarity in intuition and expres- 
 sion. 
 
 It is needless for us to follow out the rest of 
 Croce's system. The chief point that remains is 
 his identification of Philosophy with History — 
 the thought about the presentation of Reality 
 (Philosophy) with that presentation itself as an 
 unfolding of immanent life (History). This 
 identification really follows from the relation of 
 the double degree between the theoretic and the 
 practical. In thinking past history you bring it 
 into the present as a practical issue; and you 
 introduce the logical element in thinking it, but 
 you could not do so if there were not an intuitive 
 element in it intrinsically. Philosophy is historic- 
 ally conditioned; without philosophy there could 
 be no history. With this line of argument, whose 
 affinities with the philosophy of Bergson are 
 obvious, Croce rounds off his system, completing 
 his demonstration that the only Reality is living 
 Spirit, immanent and unfolding. 
 
 Thus, according to Croce, the expressive 
 nature of the Intuition, as it objectifies itself, 
 and so differentiates itself from mere sensation, 
 is appreciated by the mind, and serves as the 
 first step in the formation of the Concept or 
 judgment of definition. For the Concept is ex- 
 pressive, universal, and concrete. Through the 
 Concept we arrive at knowledge of Reality; and 
 this Concept reacts upon the Intuition, giving 
 rise to the individual judgment. Croce shows, 
 
 13
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 by demonstrating that analysis apart frcJm syn- 
 thesis, and equally synthesis apart from analysis, 
 in any act of thought, is inconceivable, that one 
 must, by an extension of the logical a priori 
 synthesis, identify the judgment of definition and 
 the individual judgment. You cannot, like the 
 idealists, separate the concept from the facts, 
 nor, like the empiricists, the facts from the 
 concept. But neither in the realm of aesthetic 
 interest can you separate the fact from its 
 expressive intuition, or vice versa. The whole of 
 Croce's system is, as he says, a philosophy of the 
 spirit, which is itself all Reality. The activity of 
 the spirit is twofold. In its theoretic activity 
 there are two stages. Aesthetic and Logic, each 
 involving the other, yet the first in a sense 
 independent because primary, the second depen- 
 dent on the first. In its practical activity there 
 are also two degrees, the Economic and the Ethic, 
 related to each other in the same way. Yet of 
 these two activities, theoretic and practical, each 
 involves the other, and in an a priori synthesis 
 each substantiates the other. 
 
 It is not our purpose to examine the philosophy 
 of Croce as a whole. Some points of disagree- 
 ment with him will become manifest as we 
 proceed to develop our discussion of the nature 
 of beauty. Notably, we shall disagree with his 
 rejection of a metaphysic and his denial of a 
 God; since their inclusion is not really so inimical 
 to his system as he supposes, their rejection by 
 
 14
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 him would seem to be in a measure an accident 
 of his circumstances, while their omission leaves 
 the why? of spiritual and personal being un- 
 answered. For the moment all we need is his 
 discovery that Beauty is Expression, Aesthetic 
 the Science of Expression; that to appreciate a 
 work of art is to create it yourself by entering into 
 the mind, and following the same path, as the 
 original creator of it; and, first and most im- 
 portant of all, that our knowledge of the Real 
 owes its possibility and its first beginnings to the 
 movement of aesthetic intuition. It is a far cry 
 from Plato to Croce. 
 
 If the fine arts be utterly distinct, having 
 nothing in common save a background of emo- 
 tion, this Essay is a meaningless attempt to 
 express something which does not exist. It 
 stands condemned; and this condemnation it 
 shares with many nobler works. But if, as Croce 
 urges, each art aims at presenting, through the 
 practise of its own conventions, aspects of Truth 
 which are suitable to that special medium, no 
 effort to find a highest common factor of all arts 
 is necessarily doomed to failure. 
 
 15
 
 PART I 
 THE THEORY 
 
 WHAT is Beauty? Many have asked it, and 
 could find no answer because they under- 
 stood their question no more than jesting Pilate 
 understood his 'What is Truth?' But many 
 beside have asked it with at least a real desire to 
 understand. It was already in the mind of the 
 prehistoric artist who was the first to draw a 
 pattern or to sketch the mammoth, though no 
 doubt he did not put the question to himself. 
 It has been there, expressed or unexpressed, 
 wherever a man has had vision enough to find 
 his spirit stirred by a flower or a cathedral; a 
 fabric or the low October sun upon a sheet of 
 gossamer; wherever a man has tried to reproduce 
 nature on canvas or pour out his longing and 
 triumph in sound or written words. He has 
 cried out that beauty dwells only in his own 
 spirit, for there have been moods and days when 
 he could see no beauty in that which at other 
 times moved him deeply. Yet the agreement of 
 civilised mankind, at all events, that this or that 
 particular is beautiful is so widely diffused that 
 he cannot but admit that something in the object 
 itself must suggest the idea of beauty. Taste may 
 change, but the sunset andthe rose are universally 
 
 M. ly 2
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 acclaimed by all who have any aesthetic percep- 
 tion at all. On the other hand, faced with the 
 vagaries of artistic fashion a man finds no 
 absolute beauty, and is driven to a subjective 
 theory, for he cannot admire the protruding, 
 distorted lip so persuasive to certain savages. 
 But no sooner is this theory constructed than 
 he is brought up once more against the difficulty 
 that an object is required before the sense of 
 beauty is aroused, and that men do agree in 
 attributing beauty to many things. 
 
 Because the perception of beauty involves a 
 judgment (which really belongs to the intellec- 
 tual process, and not properly to the aesthetic), 
 beauty itself seems too elusive for definition. It 
 has been left, as we have said, for Croce to formu- 
 late the first satisfactory concept of beauty. He 
 saw what no one else had seen — that man's first 
 contact with the Real, the first movement of the 
 spirit that stretched beyond a mere sensation, 
 was a creative act, an intuition not a judgment, 
 expressing the reality to himself. Beauty, says 
 Croce, is expression. Afterwards the man might 
 give his expression objective form through some 
 technique. Hence derive pictures, sculpture, 
 music, dancing, poetry, drama, architecture, 
 language itself; all the arts. Or the expression 
 of his intuition may remain simply as a formative 
 agent of his spirit. There are many mute in- 
 glorious Miltons. But he has expressed his 
 intuition to himself, and it has formed a new 
 
 i8
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 material for his conceptual activity, whether or 
 no he brings it far into the domain of the practical, 
 through technique, in order that it may subserve 
 some economic or moral function for himself and 
 other men. That he must bring it into the 
 practical in some measure, whether he does or 
 does not give it technical form, is clear to anyone 
 who has grasped Croce's main thought. The 
 aesthetic intuition is for the individual, but he is 
 driven to universaHse it by thought {i.e. logic). 
 It is of practical value to himself (economic 
 motive) and it is capable of being made of use 
 to others (ethical motive). Theoretic and practical 
 cannot be isolated from one another. 
 
 As aesthetic is to logic, so is economic to ethic, 
 and so is theoretic to practical; it is the relation 
 of the double degree. 
 
 A priori synthesis unites each of the theoretic 
 and of the practical activities with the other, and 
 the same a priori synthesis unites the theoretic 
 and the practical themselves, of which neither 
 exclusively precedes the other in the circle of 
 Real Being. This is the life of the spirit. 
 
 Now in considering this theory of Croce's we 
 notice at once that mind or spirit is for him a 
 datum, and that he assumes ftirther that spirit 
 is active and is definable only by its activity. 
 He gives no reason for this activity. The cause 
 of this is not far to seek, for his whole system 
 is confessedly anti-metaphysical, and so, of 
 necessity, stops short of ultimate things. Life, 
 
 19 2—2
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 spirit, is for him the true mystery, and this is 
 immanent. There is no room for transcendence. 
 All he can say is that no philosophical system is 
 definite because Life itself is never definite^. 
 Truth is always surrounded with mystery, an ascending to 
 ever higher heights, which are without a summit, as Life is 
 without a summit^. 
 
 The spirit, which is infinite possibility passing into 
 infinite actuality, has drawn and draws at every moment the 
 cosmos from chaos, has collected diffused life into the con- 
 centrated life of the organ, has achieved the passage from 
 animal to human life, has created and creates modes of life 
 ever more lofty. The work of the spirit is not finished and 
 never will be finished. Our yearning for something higher is 
 not vain. The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof 
 of the infinity of that process. The plant dreams of the 
 animal, the animal of man, man of superman; for this, too, 
 is a reality, if it be reality that with every historical move- 
 ment man surpasses himself. The time will come when the 
 great deeds and the great works now our memory and our 
 boast will be forgotten, as we have forgotten the works and 
 the deeds, no less great, of those beings of supreme genius 
 who created what we call himian Hfe and seem to us now 
 to have been savages of the lowest grade, almost men- 
 monkeys. They will be forgotten for the document of 
 progress is \n forgetting', that is, in the fact being entirely 
 absorbed in the new fact, in which, and not in itself, it has 
 value. But we cannot know what the future states of Reality 
 will be, in their determined physiognomy and succession, 
 owing to the 'dignity' estabhshed in the Philosophy of the 
 
 1 The clearest summary of Croce's position is to be found 
 in the brief third section of the first part of his Philosophy of 
 the Practical. Prof. Wildon Carr also has given a very clear 
 account of Croce's philosophy as a whole in his book on 
 The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce. 
 
 2 Philosophy of the Practical, p. 591. 
 
 20
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 Practical, by which the knowledge of the action and of the 
 deed follows and does not precede the action and the deed. 
 Mystery is just the infinity of evolution; were this not so, 
 that concept would not arise in the mind of man, nor would 
 it be possible to abuse it, as it has been abused by being 
 transported out of its place, that is to say, into the conscious- 
 ness of itself, which the spiritual activity should have and 
 has to the fullest degree, that is, the consciousness of its 
 eternal categories. 
 
 The neglect of the moment of mystery is the true reason 
 of the error known as the Philosophy of History, which 
 undertakes to portray the plan of Providence and to deter- 
 mine the formula of progress. In this attempt (when it does 
 not affirm mere philosophemes, as has very often happened), 
 it makes the effort to enclose the infinite in the finite and 
 capriciously to decree concluded that evolution which the 
 universal spirit itself cannot conclude, for it would thus 
 come to deny itself. In logic that error has been gnoseo- 
 logically defined as the pretension of treating the individual 
 as though it were the universal, making the universal 
 individual; here it is to be defined in other words as the 
 pretension of treating the finite as though it were the infinite, 
 of making the infinite finite. 
 
 But the unjustified transportation of the concept of 
 mystery from history, where it indicates the future that the 
 past prepares and does not know, into philosophy, causes 
 to be pointed as mysteries which give rise to probabilities 
 and conjectures, problems that consist of philosophical 
 terms, and should therefore be philosophically solved. But 
 if the infinite progress and the infinite perfectibility of man 
 is to be affirmed, although we do not know the concrete 
 forms that progress and perfectibility will assume (not 
 knowing them, because now it imports not to know, but to 
 do them), then there is no meaning in positing as a mystery 
 the immortahty of the individual soul, or the existence of 
 God; for these are not facts that may or may not happen 
 
 21
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 sooner or later, but concepts that must be proved to be in 
 themselves thinkable and not contradictory. Their think- 
 ability will indeed be a mystery, but of the kind that it is 
 a duty to make clear, because synonymous with obscurity 
 or mental confusion. What has so far been demonstrated 
 has been their unthinkability in the traditional form. Nor 
 is it true that they correspond to profound demands of the 
 human soul. Man does not seek a god external to himself 
 and almost a despot, who commands and benefits him 
 capriciously, nor does he aspire to an immortality of in- 
 sipid ease; but he seeks for that God which he has in 
 himself, and aspires to that activity which is both Life and 
 Deaths 
 
 Thus Croce affirms that evolution, develop- 
 ment, is demanded by the very nature of spirit. 
 In spirit the problem of the one and the many is 
 solved. The yearnings of man towards some- 
 thing higher, and towards a unity that shall lie 
 behind and stabilise all thought, are but expres- 
 sions of the nature of Life. The dissatisfaction 
 of such a thought is due to psychological illusion, 
 comparable to a "dream of an art so sublime that 
 every work of art really existing would by com- 
 parison appear contemptible." There is no in- 
 tuition that cannot be clearly expressed; vague 
 dreams of the Madonna of the Future end 
 inevitably in an empty canvas. So too, according 
 to Croce, is a dream of transcendence empty of 
 content, because inexpressible; based on no clear 
 intuition, but on a confusion between the 
 historical judgment and some vague conception 
 
 * Philosophy of the Practical, pp. 258-261. 
 22
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 of the transcendental. And thus the life of the 
 spirit is left a mystery. 
 
 We will not attempt any discussion of Croce's 
 fimdamental pantheism, neither will we as yet 
 criticise his definition of Beauty. Instead, we will 
 begin our constructive work by considering the 
 psychological accompaniment of a perception of 
 beauty and from that starting-point try to reach 
 a conception and a definition that will carry us 
 beyond Croce's into a region less empty of love, 
 a region that shines with a light of its own. Dead 
 moons are lovely, but they owe their loveliness 
 to living light. Cold philosophies too are only 
 beautiful when a beautiful spirit makes them 
 seem to live. 
 
 Let us, then, turn to the psychological effects 
 of that which appeals as beautiful to some 
 individual mind, leaving on one side, for the 
 time, all consideration of the reason why a par- 
 ticular object should rouse a sense of beauty in 
 a particular mind. 
 
 Now unquestionably the beauty we perceive 
 is never satisfying, or if it satisfies at all it does 
 so but for a moment. Almost at once dissatisfac- 
 tion follows, or rather unsatisfaction. 
 
 There is a yearning for something, a sense of 
 something lacking. It is vague — so vague that 
 the only representation of it that has ever 
 adequately expressed at once its aspirations, its 
 lack and its indeterminateness, is Blake's drawing 
 "I want — I want." Of these three things it is 
 
 23
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 compounded, of lack, of aspiration, and of self- 
 ignorance that knows neither what it lacks nor 
 what it desires; and these three determine its 
 salient character — that of an impulse. That it is 
 really an impulse becomes clear directly we 
 examine its effects. It produces a desire to 
 create. In the yoimg, the uncontrolled, the 
 illiterate, the creative impulse may be definitely 
 sexual. Passion is undoubtedly stimulated in 
 simple natures by the beautiful, and we shall see 
 when we come to discuss the evolution of 
 aesthetic sensibility that this fact is of the pro- 
 foundest spiritual import. For the moment we 
 need only note that this sex-impulse is creative. 
 In natures artistically more developed yet not 
 truly originative, the creative impulse is a desire 
 to repeat the thing that has given this sense of 
 beauty — to paint the sunset, to play the sonata, 
 to declaim the poem. Yet even here we must 
 note the germ of originality. The repetition is no 
 mere reproduction. Elimination and emphasis 
 make it in some measure a new creation. This is 
 obvious in the less rigid arts, painting and music; 
 but it is present even where the form is definite. 
 Hear two different people, or the same person in 
 two different moods, read the same poem, and 
 see how different a thing it can be! In more 
 artistic natures still, truly original, the desire to 
 create is conscious, the desire to reproduce less. 
 The thing created need not, probably will not, 
 be of the same kind. The moon-glade on the sea 
 
 24
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 enriching by contrast the blackness of the rocky 
 headland, will inspire the musician to write, not 
 a moonlight sonata, for true music is free from 
 sensuous s5mibolism, but a pure rhythm of sound. 
 To suggest visual symbols in sound is to pros- 
 titute music, to drive it back into the sensa- 
 tionalism from which it has freed itself. It is, 
 further, to confuse the mind by attempting to 
 combine two incompatible media of technical 
 expression. As animal passion is to love, so is 
 Cartier's "La Chasse" to a Bach prelude^. 
 
 We see, then, that the psychological eifect of 
 the beautiful is to produce a creative impulse, 
 based on the lack and the aspiration which give 
 rise to a sense of yearning desire. We see that it 
 is indeterminate, for it attempts to satisfy itself 
 in very various ways. We see that in so far as it 
 creates successfully, it finds some satisfaction. 
 
 Now all this fits admirably with Croce's theory 
 of beauty. Beauty is for us the expression of 
 that of which we have intuition. In realising the 
 beauty of a symphony or picture we have our- 
 selves re-created the intuition of the artist. In 
 realising the beauty of a natural scene we have 
 expressed an intuition of the reality that Hes 
 behind that scene; a creative act. We shall later 
 go beyond Croce in this matter, referring our 
 
 ^ This is not to condemn programme music altogether, 
 for much of the best programme music does not attempt to 
 paint a scene in such a way as to call up visual images. 
 Vide infra. 
 
 25
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 creative act to a re-creation of the intuition of 
 God, and this will lead us to consider the 
 aesthetic meaning of God's creation; but for the 
 time we need not pursue this thought. 
 
 Our next business is, clearly, to analyse the 
 yearning which precedes the creative act. We 
 have said that this originates in dissatisfaction. 
 What is this dissatisfaction? One other thing 
 produces a feeling that is not merely analogous, 
 but absolutely identical. When you love a 
 person intensely and are uncertain if it is re- 
 ciprocated, because no sign, or no sufficient sign, 
 is given, you experience the same dissatisfaction, 
 the same yearning and the same creative impulse. 
 In primitive natures the impulse may fulfil 
 itself in sexual excitement; in higher ones it is 
 expressed in art. It is a commonplace to say 
 that some of the world's greatest creative work 
 is done under the stimulus of love. The poems 
 of lovers furnish the most prominent example, 
 not only their love poems, but the poems inspired 
 by their love, like the Divina Commedia ; but we 
 need not seek far for examples in the other arts. 
 Beethoven's Fourth Symphony was inspired by 
 his love for the Countess Theresa von Bnmswick. 
 Tchaikovsky found inspiration in his Platonic 
 love for Nadejda von Meek, whom he had never 
 seen. His sad, abnormal friendships were an 
 inspiration to Michael Angelo. 
 
 Now in both cases, paradoxical as it may seem, 
 the dissatisfaction is due to receiving without 
 
 26
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 giving. At first sight this seems to be exactly the 
 opposite of the truth. Surely a man is pouring 
 out his love, and receiving no return, one is 
 inclined to say. But a moment's thought will 
 convince us that the first statement is the true 
 one. All the beauty, all the grace, all the interest 
 and the charms of the loved one are given to us 
 in unstinted measure, and we can give nothing 
 in return. We may not even express our love, 
 our desire to serve, but in the trivial services that 
 convention allows. Yet how we prize these little 
 services that we can render ! How we seek out 
 opportunity of rendering them ! We receive; we 
 can give no adequate return. It is that which 
 determines our dissatisfaction. If the gift of our 
 love is refused, dissatisfaction is most poignant. 
 Commonly we say that the beloved refuses to 
 give anything in such a case. Exactly the reverse 
 is true. The beloved gives, and cannot avoid 
 giving, but will receive nothing from us. 
 
 Now think of a perfect marriage or a perfect 
 friendship. There is little trace of dissatisfaction 
 there; only rest and happiness. We receive, but 
 we give again, and our gift may be given without 
 measure; may equal, or nearly equal what we 
 receive; may at least be all that we can give. 
 There is perfect reciprocity, and in reciprocity 
 we find rest. 
 
 The creative impulse does not cease, service 
 and gifts do not cease, but the spirit is free from 
 longing dissatisfaction. 
 
 27
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 Turn now to the dissatisfaction produced by 
 appreciation of the beautiful. We receive every- 
 thing, we can give nothing at all (to the beautifiil 
 thing); and so dissatisfaction is at its highest. 
 We love the thing in which we find beauty, but 
 the love is one-sided. The cases are identical. It 
 is no mere phrase when we speak of the love of 
 beauty and the beauty of love. Unwittingly we 
 express the truth of an absolute interdependence. 
 Love is relationship, beauty the expression of 
 relationship. In this sentence lies our thesis. 
 Croce calls Beauty the expression of an Intuition; 
 we shall define that intuition as the intuition of 
 Relationship, Love being the relationship itself, 
 intuitively known; known, that is, as Reality — as 
 the fundamental quality of Personal Being, which 
 is the only ultimate Reality. Because the intui- 
 tion of Love is expressed, it enters immediately 
 the domain of Aesthetic. Doubtless it is con- 
 ceptualised; and hand in hand with this theoretic 
 activity of the spirit goes the practical. Love is 
 essentially practical, and, as Croce says, you can 
 never separate or give priority to either the 
 theoretic or the practical activity. The difference, 
 then, between beauty and love that is returned 
 lies in the fact that in the second there is reci- 
 procity. You give, as well as receiving. In all 
 love there is some reciprocity; the loved one 
 cannot help being conscious of, and receiving, 
 something of the spirit that moves out in such 
 wise. The love of a being seen but once is 
 
 28
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 purely aesthetic. Only this corresponds to the 
 aesthetic appreciation of a scene, and even this 
 not exactly; for the being is potentially capable 
 of receiving, the scene is not. 
 
 It is worth noticing at this point that, though 
 Greek thought arrived at no adequate idea of 
 beauty, Greek Mythology did arrive at complete 
 understanding. And this gives Httle cause for 
 wonder, considering to what a level the love of 
 the beautiful developed in ancient Greece, and 
 considering too how myth represents the un- 
 reasoned, intuitive wishes and ideas of an 
 infantile age^. We often wonder at the depths 
 which mythology plumbs. Accepting Croce's 
 scheme, it is the more easy to understand. The 
 myth of Pygmalion is subtly suggestive. Pyg- 
 malion created beauty, and longed for it to re- 
 ciprocate his love, and out of his longing life and 
 love were bom. Beauty was for him one-sided 
 love; hence his yearning and his dissatisfaction. 
 
 But we are not Pygmalions. Our Galatea 
 never comes to life. Why then should we strive 
 still to create? Why like the man in the old play, 
 should we proceed with an endless task: "When 
 will you finish Campaspe?" "Never finish, for 
 always in absolute beauty there is somewhat 
 above art^." Croce simply takes activity as the 
 
 1 Cf. the work of the psychoanalytic school, especially 
 Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious and Rivers' Dreams 
 and Primitive Culture. 
 
 2 Lyly's Campaspe . 
 
 29
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 character of spirit and leaves it at that, admitting, 
 but not really explaining, the fact that men are 
 dissatisfied with the mystery of it all. We, 
 approaching with a different presupposition, 
 accepting God and not rejecting metaphysic, 
 may hope to find some fuller explanation. We 
 do in fact go on creating something that cannot 
 reciprocate. Why? First of all, by our creative 
 act we learn more of the meaning of the Reality 
 that is aroimd us, and the Reality that is ourself . 
 We find the creative godhead of our personality, 
 we exercise our self in its true function of god- 
 head. Moreover, we create a gift to other men, 
 whether technically or otherwise. If we cannot 
 give to nature, we can at least give our under- 
 standing of nature to our fellows : 
 
 Better to sit at the water's birth 
 Than a sea of waves to win, 
 To hve in the love that floweth forth 
 Than the love that floweth in. 
 
 Be thy heart a well of love, my child. 
 Flowing, and free, and sure. 
 For a cistern of love, though undefiled 
 Keeps not the spirit pure^. 
 
 And neither does the spirit that is a cistern of 
 beauty fulfil itself, nor remain pure. 
 
 Our aesthetic activity is, then, our first contact 
 with Reality, paving the way to an understanding 
 of the meaning of that Reality. In spite of Croce, 
 we cannot agree that a full appreciation of this 
 
 ^ G. Macdonald, Phantasies. 
 30
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 meaning could be considered as achieved if the 
 end is simply longing — dissatisfaction. In the 
 very fact that beauty produces in us a yearning, 
 that issues in a creative activity which does not, 
 and cannot, satisfy the yearning, we have 
 evidence that the solution is not found. In the 
 identity of psychological content produced by 
 beauty and by unrequited love we find the clue 
 we seek. In the restfulness of a perfect friend- 
 ship, of an intercourse which knows no subject 
 that must not be touched upon, fears no jarring 
 note, whatever matter comes upon the scene, 
 can give all the keys in perfect trust, knowing 
 that trust will never be regretted, and hold the 
 other's keys knowing there is the same confidence 
 on that side; that can see with the other's eyes, 
 and never fear to be itself misunderstood; in that 
 restfulness the problems of beauty, of life, of 
 Reality itself find answer. 
 
 Let us repeat. The unsatisfyingness of beauty 
 is due to the fact that you are taking and not 
 giving. In order to give something, to others, 
 though not to the object that roused in you the 
 sense of beauty, you create by some technique. 
 What is it you are receiving? An intuition, which 
 you express to yourself creatively and to others 
 through its effect on your character; — to which 
 further, if you are an artist, you give external, 
 technical expression. This intuition which you 
 receive is the first stage of knowledge — of the 
 knowledge of Reality. So far, agreeing with 
 
 31
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 Croce, we agree with Bergson; and moreover we 
 leave room for mysticism, since mysticism be- 
 comes the appreciation of relationship, and logic 
 paves the way for suitable activity to develop our 
 side of the relationship. The meaning of this 
 becomes clearer when we consider Croce's ex- 
 planation of the process of perceiving beauty in 
 the work of an artist, be it picture, s5miphony, 
 or poem. He points out that in appreciating a 
 work of art you enter into the mind of the 
 creator, follow his intuition, and create the 
 expression afresh for yourself. On the degree in 
 which you can do this depends the fullness of 
 your appreciation of the work. 
 
 But when you see beauty in a natural object 
 the matter is less clear. Croce would say that 
 you are in the first stage of knowing that object, 
 and he is unquestionably right so far. But can 
 we not, using the analogy of the picture or the 
 poem, go on to say that you are following out 
 the idea of the creator of the natural object — that 
 you are in touch with the Cosmic Idea, which is 
 the Idea of a Personal God? If so, there is indeed 
 room for mysticism, for mysticism becomes 
 simply the realisation that you are in fact doing 
 this. Moreover, Beauty and Love at once fall 
 into relation. Beauty is not simply expression, 
 but the expression of a relation, and it is in- 
 complete because the relation is not yet reciprocal. 
 Love is that relation itself. 
 
 In another aspect, beauty is seen as the meeting- 
 
 32
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 place for love, since it is the expression of an 
 intuition of Reality, and Reality is rooted and 
 grounded in love. Where there is limitation 
 either of one or both of two persons, expression 
 is needed to provide a meeting-place — speech or 
 sign for the lesser artist, music, poetry, or picture 
 for the greater. Each expression is a symbol of 
 the reality it incarnates; in so far as it reaches 
 out beyond its own immediate apprehension of 
 that reality. All expression, all art, is symbolic 
 and has a mystical aspect, else it would be either 
 complete and all-embracing or devoid of real 
 content. So far the symbolists are right. 
 
 But this opens up a wide problem. If Beauty 
 be the formulated intuition of Reality, which, be- 
 cause of its incompleteness, represents in symbols 
 things that are beyond its immediate purview, 
 and if Reality be, as we have elsewhere argued^, 
 grounded on Personal Relationship, the self- 
 expression of Love, does beauty cease when 
 personal relations become perfect? For we have 
 argued that a symbol belongs to the domain of 
 the imperfect, not the perfect^. If so, has beauty 
 any meaning for God? At this point we clearly 
 come into contact with the problem of God's 
 creative activity. We have said^ that the creation 
 of God must be the creation of something new. 
 We have said that Love, of its own nature, 
 
 1 Evolution and Spiritual Life and Evolution and the- 
 Doctrine of the Trinity. 
 
 2 Evolution and Spiritual Life. ^ 0pp. citt. passim^ 
 
 33 3
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 demands expansion, is centrifugal as well as 
 centripetal, and in this centrifugality of love we 
 sought the Divine Impulse to create new per- 
 sonalities. But behind lurked always the question 
 "How could a God whose experience was perfect 
 and embraced already all Reality, create anything 
 that was new?" The reciprocity of perfected 
 love would be new for the personal beings He 
 had created; but His self-limitation which the 
 freedom of those beings necessitated would not 
 be new for Him, for self-abnegation is an eternal 
 part of love, since love is substantiated as itself 
 by creative self-surrender, transcendence by im- 
 manence. Would the result of His self-limitation 
 be new for Him, implicit as it is in His Being as 
 Love? Would the experience of the reciprocal 
 love of His children be a new thing for Him? 
 
 No doubt the problem, as belonging to the 
 domain of the Transcendent, is not soluble for 
 us, whose transcendence, whose intuition of the 
 Real, is so incomplete. But because in such 
 measure as we do know the Real we are ourselves 
 transcendent, we can at least hope to touch the 
 fringe of His garment; and Croce's proof that 
 pure intuition — which Bergson also urges to be 
 our point d'appui with the Real — belongs to the 
 domain of aesthetic, gives us a fresh clue in our 
 investigation. 
 
 Beauty is expression. This is Croce's state- 
 ment; and in it we find what we need, provided 
 that we expand the definition into ' the expression 
 
 34
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 of Relation.' If there be a Personal God as we 
 believe, whose experience is Reality, He must 
 always be expressing that Reality. There is no 
 consciousness without expression. But the ex- 
 pression of knowledge of the Real is Beauty. 
 God's Being must be full of an overwhelming 
 Beauty. But part of His Nature, as Love, is 
 centrifugal. That centrifugal part must also be 
 expressed. The artist follows his expression by 
 technical application; he paints for eye or ear, 
 to satisfy himself and to communicate his 
 intuition. In so far as he fails in his expression, 
 the result is ugly. In so far, also, as God's 
 creation fails, through its own inevitable con- 
 dition of the freedom of man, the result is ugly. 
 Ugliness is the aesthetic, or theoretical aspect 
 of sin; in its practical aspect sin is uneconomic, 
 un-moral. 
 
 Now if one thing is more certain than another, 
 it is that Beauty is for ever new. Each sense of 
 beauty is a new creation, a fresh activity of the 
 spirit, be it inspired never so often by the same 
 object. And this means that to know the Real 
 is for ever a new thing. God's love is always new 
 for Himself. His self-knowledge is creation per- 
 petually renewed. It follows, a fortiori, that His 
 knowledge of the beings He creates and is 
 creating is each moment new. Because know- 
 ledge is in its first movement Beauty, there can 
 be no stagnancy in Eternal Being, no dead level 
 of satiety in Eternal Life. 
 
 35 3-2
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 Beauty is expression. For God it is the expres- 
 sion of His relation to Himself as transcendent, 
 and of the substantiation of His transcendence 
 through His relation to others as immanent, in 
 the first stage of the movement of that relation 
 towards and into transcendence. Beauty is the 
 expression of a relation, and is ever new. But the 
 relation itself is Love. God is Love; that love is 
 expressed as Beauty; and Beauty is necessarily 
 eternal, because it is the knowledge of Reality. 
 God is Love. This is to say that God IS because 
 He is a relation, to Himself and to others. Here 
 is the inmost heart of Trinitarian Doctrine, as 
 we have seen^. Because He is Love, He expresses 
 that Reality in activity. But activity has two 
 sides, the theoretical and the practical. His 
 expression is, on the theoretic side. Beauty, and 
 is hence for ever new for Him. He is for Him- 
 self a Relation, known intuitively and expressed 
 as Beauty, and His intuition of this Reality is 
 ever new. On the practical side it is Creation, 
 full of purpose (economic aspect) and of good- 
 ness (moral aspect); new for us. His creatures, 
 but only achieving, for us even, its full newness 
 as we come to know the Reality which is the 
 experience of the Love that is perfect in Him 
 alone ; only achieving its full newness as we begin 
 ourselves to know, to express, and to create : as 
 we become gods ourselves. And what He 
 creates is real, beautiful, and new. 
 
 1 Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity. 
 
 36
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 Beauty is eternal. It is the meeting-place of 
 personal beings for ever; but it is a symbol only 
 so long as these personal beings are imperfect, 
 and their knowledge incomplete. Beauty and 
 knowledge become coextensive as immediate in- 
 tuition extends its boundaries till logic has no 
 more a place, or rather till logic and intuition 
 cover the same ground. So too with the prac- 
 tical; the useful extends its boundaries till 
 it is coextensive with the good, and the two 
 become one and the same. The activity that 
 remains is as God's activity. Love is itself 
 because it is both knowing and doing; absolute 
 Being is the circle of these two inseparables. 
 
 Before we proceed it will be as well to remind 
 ourselves once more of the psychological fact 
 that has caused us to modify Croce's definition 
 of beauty by introducing the idea of relation. 
 This characteristic consequence of a vision of the 
 beautiful is the sense of longing, akin to the 
 longing of unreciprocated love, which issues in 
 some creative act. This act may be a conscious 
 attempt to produce something of aesthetic value 
 — a work of art — or it may simply be an attempt 
 to make our milieu harmonious. The housewife 
 may be stimulated to re-cover the cushions, to 
 tidy the house, or to re-arrange the room; the 
 mother may try to make her children happier; 
 the selfish man or the fractious child may try 
 to make life more complete and harmonious by 
 loving deeds, however short-lived. The most 
 
 37
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 commonplace mind may feel a religious impulse; 
 a sense of wonder and reverence. Men have 
 always been perplexed by the apparently close 
 connection between the beautiful and the good, 
 between the beautiful and the sublime. This 
 connection becomes clear in the light of our 
 definition. Beauty is seen as the first step 
 towards an understanding of Reality, and that 
 Reality is Love, personal relationship, reciprocity. 
 Relationship between finite persons first (yet not 
 transient even here, because personality is essen- 
 tially infinite, and persons are only limited in so 
 far as they have failed as yet to achieve person- 
 ality), but relationship that finds its origin and 
 explanation in the personal, creative. Triune 
 Being of God^. The perception of beauty is 
 accompanied by emotion; free, as emotion is in 
 itself, though aroused by external conditioning^; 
 yet unsatisfied, thwarted, and so with a vein of 
 sadness in its joy. Its joy is the joy of beginning 
 to understand. All understanding is pleasure. 
 One smiled with pleasure when one first grasped 
 Euclid's forty-seventh proposition, even. But 
 here we understand the beauty as a symbol and 
 a meeting-place. It makes us feel less lonely and 
 less isolated. Its sadness is the sadness of an 
 
 ^ I make no apology for not entering here on any dis- 
 cussion of how God can be Love. I have endeavoured to 
 offer suggestions on this matter in my earlier books, and 
 especially in Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity. 
 
 2 Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity, ch. iii. 
 
 38
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 incomplete understanding. We see in a beautiful 
 thing a thing that can receive nothing from us, 
 while it gives much to us. Yet the very fact that 
 beauty does make us *feel religious' shows that 
 somehow we do realise that we can give some- 
 thing to God, and find a little satisfaction in 
 doing so; that even nature is not so impersonal 
 as we were inclined to think. Our desire to 
 create beautiful things is a sign that we under- 
 stand our self also, our destined godhead, and 
 that we too wish to reveal our self by creating 
 for others, and giving to others. It is a sign that 
 we understand that our relations with God and 
 with our fellows are reciprocal. 
 
 Croce gives the clue when he shows that 
 aesthetic is the first stage of the spirit's activity. 
 Bergson strikes a note that wakes an answering 
 harmony when he urges that intuition brings us 
 nearer to Reality than does intellect directed 
 toward practical aims, even though some of his 
 deductions displease; Kant and Hegel indicate 
 the eternal value of aesthetic when they urge 
 that it belongs to the highest and last stage. But 
 Croce gives no reason for the longing that beauty 
 forces upon us; nor indeed for the activity of 
 spirit at all; he merely assumes spirit as a datum, 
 and is defined by its activity. 
 
 But if we regard beaut}^ as the expression of a 
 perceived relationship, almost as one-sided love, 
 the whole falls into place. Through beauty we 
 get into touch with Reality, which Reality is, 
 
 39
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 in its completeness, the mutual activity of Love. 
 The basis of Love's activity is Love's freedom, 
 even its freedom to limit itself. Mankind is 
 winning freedom out of determined conditions; 
 which conditions are the creation, the expression, 
 of God's love, through self-limitation. Because 
 they are the expression of God's knowledge of 
 the ReaUty of Love, they are beautiful. The 
 winning of freedom by man is achieved through 
 adaptative relation to the environment. As this 
 adaptation becomes conscious — as we gain in- 
 tuitive knowledge of the environment — the sense 
 of beauty is born, for we express our knowledge 
 of this relation to ourselves; and make efforts 
 towards further adaptation. These efforts are 
 creative; and as we progress our creation becomes 
 more and more altruistic; a creation for others 
 with our relationship to them held consciously 
 before us. These few words will suffice to show 
 how perfectly our thesis fits in with the evolu- 
 tionary views we have previously enunciated. 
 The development of this side of the argument 
 may be left for the present. 
 
 One other matter requires a brief considera- 
 tion, and then we can leave the general outline 
 of our theory and proceed to a more detailed 
 treatment of certain parts of it. This is the old, 
 unsolved problem whether beauty is subjective 
 or objective; whether a thing is beautiful in itself, 
 or whether it is only our thinking that makes it 
 so. Croce has made it perfectly clear that the 
 
 40
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 thing or the scene which we erroneously call 
 beautiful, meaning that it is beautiful in itself, 
 physically beautiful, is simply the "stimulus to 
 aesthetic reproduction, which presupposes pre- 
 vious production. Without preceding aesthetic 
 intuitions of the imagination, nature cannot 
 arouse any at all." Perhaps Croce's own thesis 
 would gain in clearness and coherence if, starting 
 from the sense of beauty aroused by a work of 
 art as the re-creation of the artist's intuition 
 by the spectator, he had accepted the religious 
 impHcation, and argued that appreciation of so- 
 called natural beauty, was the re-creation by man 
 of God's intuition. But, with his prejudice against 
 religion, he naturally could not boldly accept God 
 as the Primal Artist, even though to do so would 
 have made his theory far more complete, and 
 would have saved him from relegating the chief 
 factor of man's life to the realm of psychological 
 illusion. 
 
 To return to the immediate question, there can, 
 of course, be no doubt that since beauty is an 
 activity of the spirit, the expression of an in- 
 tuition, beauty itself must be purely subjective. 
 Equally, there can be no doubt that without the 
 objective Reahty the intuition could never be 
 called into being. (We call it definitely objective 
 for man, since all our argument in previous 
 works has driven us to the conclusion that there 
 is a necessary dualism for man as long as freedom 
 
 41
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 is incomplete, love imperfect; as long, that is, as 
 man is becoming.) 
 
 This grows more and more clear as one analyses 
 the things that have roused in oneself the k^jpnest 
 sense of beauty. I think of a copse starred with 
 snowdrops and aconite amid bare trunks under 
 a steel-grey sky — a day in late autumn in water- 
 meadows; emerald peacock- tails of weed in the 
 river, and lights of madder and old gold — blue 
 sea covered with pearly Portuguese men-o'-war 
 and white surf breaking on black lava rocks — 
 perhaps a dozen such landmarks, to me a priceless 
 possession, to another about as interesting as an 
 album of picture-postcards from somebody else's 
 travels. In mercy partly, partly in self-defence, 
 one withholds these things from all but the few 
 who care to imderstand. Let each fill in his own; 
 for there are in every life such moments, when 
 one is in touch with a larger life, and it is these 
 moments which make a man, as Masefield has 
 wonderfully shown in his poem Biography. 
 Then there are the hours when human triumphs 
 rouse in us the same ecstasy. Bach preludes and 
 fugues, with their palaces reared by perfect stone 
 added architecturally to perfect stone; the dainty 
 certainties of Mozart; the sad gaiety and fore- 
 boding meditations of Chopin; the delicate 
 cadences of Swinburne; the lusty, open-air 
 searchings of Masefield, saddened by the obses- 
 sion of sunset transience; the gentle longing of 
 
 42
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 the refrain of the Earthly Paradise', the massive 
 synthesis of the Dynasts ', the sorrow of Deirdre 
 and Violaine; the ethereal atmosphere of ^ Mid- 
 summer Night^s Dream; pictures — architecture — 
 it is all endless. Now the first thing we notice is 
 that if we are in the wrong mood these things 
 may have little or no appeal. I may walk in 
 Water-meads and feel nothing of their charm. 
 Bach may be mere noise, if I want to think of 
 something else. Again the Madonna of the 
 Magnificat may leave me unmoved, if my atten- 
 tion is on other matters. Those whose sense of 
 beauty is really keen can never be unstirred by 
 the beautiful, unless their attention is so rivetted 
 on other things that they do not observe it at all, 
 but most of us are of commoner clay; we can 
 notice a thing yet hardly be aware of its beauty. 
 Here, in either case, our ordinary speech hits 
 the nail exacdy on the head: "I am not in a 
 receptive mood," we say. I do not receive what 
 these things have to give. In an appreciative 
 mood I take something from the thing that 
 seems to me beautiful — this act is my intuition — 
 and use it as the basis of my creative work — my 
 expression. I need the presentation of an external 
 object, or its memory, for that creation. Now, as 
 we have just seen, a host of very different objects 
 excite in an individual emotion of beauty in a 
 pre-eminent degree, while if we reckon the 
 objects which excite it in a less acute form, the 
 tale is endless; yet the emotion all excite is 
 
 43
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 sufficiently the same in content, in spite of its 
 multiplicity of form, to be expressed by the 
 single term beauty. One is tempted to speak 
 loosely of this effect of the beautiftil on us as an 
 emotion, though clearly it is not one, since it is 
 expression. An emotion may be beautiful im- 
 mediately it is known and expressed in this act 
 of knowing, but the emotion is not beautiful any 
 more than any other object is beautiful. Never- 
 theless, this loose usage of the term has one 
 advantage. It draws our attention to the close 
 relationship that binds together beauty and 
 emotion. We have seen elsewhere that in the 
 realm of emotion exists the freedom that lies 
 between the incoming perception and the out- 
 going activity, forming the bond between the 
 first and last, and determining the form of the 
 response to the stimulus^. In the recognition of 
 beauty there is freedom and emotion, as there is 
 in every creative act. But the activity is depen- 
 dent on stimulus, and every stimulus is primarily 
 perceptual, though not necessarily in the strict 
 sense of being perceived by an organ of sense. 
 The perception may be wholly internal, the self 
 being its own object in introspection^; the 
 intuition may be the intuition of love itself. Here 
 we see the origin of the common, yet I believe 
 erroneous, statement that "beauty, as we under- 
 stand it, is only for sense and for sensuous 
 
 ^ Evolution and the Doctrine of the Trinity, ch. iii. 
 2 Ihid. See also Strong, The Origin of Consciousness. 
 
 44
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 imagination ^" If Beauty be the expression of an 
 intuition of Reality, as Croce says, and Reality 
 be ultimately the activity of Personal Being, 
 which activity is relationship, as we have seen 
 reason to claim". Beauty is not dependent on 
 sense perception alone. Further, because the 
 activity of personal relation is Love, we see in 
 Beauty the creative knowledge of love, which is 
 necessarily linked in closest intimacy with 
 freedom and emotion. Love is not beautiful; it 
 is simply the activity of relationship. The know- 
 ledge of love is Beauty's very self. The world is 
 not beautiful, but knowledge of the world as the 
 expression of a part of Reality — of that portion 
 of Reality which is limited and determined by 
 the self-abnegation of God's love — is Beauty. In 
 so far as we merely perceive matter the aesthetic 
 side is in abeyance. At this moment we know, 
 not Reality, but Appearance. Our unaesthetic 
 moods are determined by our more or less com- 
 plete practical concern with Appearance, our 
 more or less complete blindness to Reality. We 
 have gone back to a lower, more primitive stage. 
 In our limited and still largely determined 
 existence we are bound to be occupied in a great 
 measure with appearance. The practical must 
 dominate the theoretic activity; the spirit must 
 be unbalanced, asymmetrical. Even in our 
 moments of greatest symmetry our apprehension 
 
 1 Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, p. 37. 
 
 2 McDowall, opp. citi. 
 
 45
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 of the Real is largely at second hand. Pace, 
 Croce, we would say — as we have said already^ — 
 that the Immanent cannot have immediate con- 
 tact with the Real; man's intuitions belong to his 
 transcendence where they deal with the absolutely 
 Real. Man immanent and limited is immediately 
 in contact with God immanent and self-limited; 
 only in so far as man is transcendent is he in 
 contact with God Transcendent, and so in touch 
 with the Whole. In his immanence man lives 
 by symbols, which are sacraments; and here 
 we find the symbolic aspect of Beauty. It is the 
 material basis of this symbolic side of Beauty, 
 rather than Beauty absolute, that has of neces- 
 sity received most attention hitherto; and the 
 puzzles of rival theories have arisen through 
 failure to realise that a symbol is a partial expres- 
 sion of a reality, and that it can only be fully 
 grasped when the reaUty which it symbolises is 
 understood. A symbol has something of the 
 reality itself, or it would not be a symbol, but it 
 does not represent that reality adequately, or it 
 would be co-extensive with it; would he the 
 reahty itself. Beauty is thus subjective, in so 
 far as it is necessarily the work of the spirit. 
 But it is objective in so far as the reality of which 
 it is the knowledge is personal and external to 
 the self, and will always remain external, how- 
 ever complete the interpenetration of person- 
 alities, since personalities cannot be merged and 
 
 ^ Evolution and Spiritual Life. 
 
 46
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 lost in each other, but remain eternally in their 
 self-identity^. 
 
 A natural object per se is not beautiful; only 
 so far as it is understood as a partial representa- 
 tion of Reality, a symbol, is it beautiful. 
 
 Naturally, this statement arouses the objection 
 that to most people the music of Grieg, if not of 
 Bach, the pictures of Leighton, if not of Utamaro, 
 are beautiful; and that there is a general con- 
 sensus of opinion that the view over the Severn 
 from the Windcliff, or the view of Lisbon from 
 the harbour is more beautiful than Wormwood 
 Scrubbs. The answer to the first part of this 
 objection is obvious. In music, painting, verse, 
 we are re-creating for ourselves the artist's in- 
 tuition. We know that he found beauty, and he 
 has abstracted in his art in such a way as to 
 render the beauty more easily recaptured. The 
 artist is then our guide. He was an artist because 
 his spirit was more sensitive to the reality than 
 ours, and we follow him. 
 
 But in natural beauty, too, is not this true? 
 Primitive peoples who live amid the most lovely 
 scenery have litde or no perception of it. But 
 there are places and scenes where nature seems 
 to have performed a sort of process of abstrac- 
 tion for us. The elements are simplified and 
 harmonious, and there is little to distract the 
 attention from certain main features. A com- 
 
 ^ Evolution and Spiritual Life, ch. vi, and Evolution and 
 the Doctrine of the Trinity, ch. vi. 
 
 47
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 paratively large number of people will have a 
 sufficiently developed spirit to get into touch 
 with something beyond the mere object at such 
 places. More education in abstraction and in- 
 tuition is required to perceive some kinds of 
 beauty; we see the same thing even in the artistic 
 creation of men. Mendelssohn appeals to far 
 more than Bach; Leader to far more than 
 Botticelli. Moreover, die more obvious kinds 
 of natural beauty, as we may loosely term them, 
 will appeal to many lesser artists, who will give 
 technical expression to them. We shall be thus 
 familiarised with these representations, through 
 pianolas and art-magazines and penny readings, 
 or through concerts and picture galleries and 
 study; and shall be the more prepared to intuit 
 for ourselves when we meet with objective 
 elements of a somewhat similar type. And we 
 have further argued that even in natural beauty 
 we are really following the intuition of Creative 
 Mind. 
 
 One other point is perhaps worthy of remark. 
 Natural science appears to compass a very large 
 achievement in knowledge, and to express this 
 knowledge with singular felicity; yet in science 
 there is littie that can be called beautiful, except 
 in a highly metaphorical sense. The explanation 
 of this anomaly is clear and incontrovertible. 
 The work of theoretical science is essentially ab- 
 stract, and is concerned wholly with Appearance, 
 not Reality, except where it impinges upon the 
 
 48 
 
 i
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 domain of philosophy. The intuition of Beauty 
 is an intuition of Reality. 
 
 We may now put down our conclusions in a 
 brief and more regular form : 
 
 (i) External things are required to rouse in 
 me a sense of beauty, but they are not in them- 
 selves beautiful. 
 
 (2) I create their beauty, by understanding 
 them as parts of a Whole which is Reality. 
 
 (3) Beauty is expression; I must therefore 
 form a clear intuition and express it to myself. 
 This is my creative act; to which I may, or may 
 not, give a technical embodiment. 
 
 (4) But I am not merely creating a photo- 
 graphic image, an imitation. I am getting into 
 a certain receptive condition in which I can 
 abstract from what I see its essence and fit this 
 into my knowledge of Reality. I cannot see a 
 thing as beautiful unless in some degree it gives 
 me this impression of relatedness to Reality and 
 to myself — linking me with the Reality of which 
 I am a part. Beauty thus comes to be a felt 
 relationship. My creation is the creation of a 
 fuller understanding of relatedness. 
 
 (5) I am always dissatisfied with Beauty, 
 which wakes in me a sense of longing exactly 
 the same as the longing of an imreciprocated 
 love. I receive and cannot give. Yet in this 
 beauty and this love there is joy as well as 
 sorrow. 
 
 (6) My life is part of an organic Whole whose 
 M. 49 4
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 ultimate meaning and purpose is personal rela- 
 tionship — interpenetration. The dissatisfaction is 
 due to a sense of imperfect interpenetration. 
 What is needed, and is felt to be needed, is equal 
 give and take — reciprocal creative activity. Dis- 
 satisfaction comes when giving and taking are 
 not balanced. 
 
 (7) Beauty is eternal, since the creative ex- 
 pression of Love is eternal, and Love knows 
 eternally what it is — is eternally self-conscious. 
 Love is relation, beauty the expression of the 
 immediate knowledge of that relation. 
 
 (8) This knowledge is always a new, creative 
 act. God must continually express His Being as 
 Love else He would cease to be Love and so to be 
 at all. In Creative Expression He renews Him- 
 self. He is for Himself ever new. And, because 
 Love is centrifugal as well as centripetal. He 
 must for ever express Himself outwards, so to 
 speak, in the creation of other beings, and this 
 His work of self-abnegation is new and beautiful. 
 
 (9) We have hardly touched on the problem 
 of the ugly. We have httle to add to Croce's 
 explanation of it as the failure of expression — as 
 the failure to express coherent unity — which 
 involves the failure of intuition. We shall just 
 touch upon it hereafter; at the moment all we 
 need do is to remind ourselves that the ugliest 
 thing in the world is sin, because it is the failure 
 to understand the whole, and to express the 
 fullest, greatest beauty. 
 
 50
 
 PART II 
 BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION 
 
 THEORIES of aesthetic, so far, have paid little 
 attention to the development of the sense 
 of beauty, except perhaps in the individual. This 
 was natural enough so long as the idea of evolu- 
 tion was unformulated, or, if touched upon 
 speculatively, played little part in men's general 
 attitude to life; and since the doctrine of evolu- 
 tion came to its own, little original work, beyond 
 that of Croce, has been done in this region. 
 Croce touches the evolutionary aspect but lightly, 
 though it is implicit in his identification of 
 History with Philosophy : 
 
 "Since all the characteristics assigned to Philosophy are 
 verbal variants of its unique character, which is the pure 
 concept, so all the characteristics of History can be reduced 
 to the definition and identification of History with the 
 individual judgment^." "If History is impossible without 
 the logical, that is, the philosophical, element, philosophy 
 is not possible without the intuitive, or historical element^." 
 "Philosophy, then, is neither beyond, nor at the beginning, 
 nor at the end of history, nor is it achieved in a moment or 
 in any single moment of history. It is achieved at every 
 moment and is always completely united to facts and con- 
 ditioned by historical knowledge. — The a priori synthesis, 
 which is the reahty of the individual judgment and of the 
 definition, is also the reality of philosophy and of history. 
 
 ^ Croce, Logic, p. 279. 2 md. p. 310. 
 
 51 4-2
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 It is the formula of thought which by constituting itself 
 qualifies intuition and constitutes history. History does not 
 precede philosophy, nor philosophy history; both are bom 
 at one birth^." 
 
 This view, however interesting and suggestive it 
 may be in the realm of pure thought, for the 
 simple reason that it does not boldly grapple 
 with the fact of practical dualism, is difficult of 
 application to the process of the dawn of con- 
 sciousness. Croce's whole philosophy is directed 
 to the denial of dualism; it is a new form of 
 idealistic monism. We have been led in our 
 earlier reasonings to deny an ultimate dualism^, 
 but we have also been led to affirm dualism as 
 existent in Time, through the self-limitation and 
 immanence of Eternal Spirit. On this basis, at 
 which we arrived through a detailed considera- 
 tion of the process of inorganic and organic 
 evolution, we reared our whole superstructure. 
 On this same basis, then, we will attempt to 
 reason out a view of the evolution of beauty that 
 shall be in harmony both with the facts of 
 evolution and with the theocentric system that 
 issued from our discussion as apparently the 
 only possible explanation of the universe, so far, 
 at least, as its broad oudine was concerned. 
 
 If beauty be the expression of an intuition, 
 and if, further, the intuition required involves a 
 sense of relation, there can be no true perception 
 of beauty imtil self-consciousness arises. Broadly 
 
 1 Croce, Logic, pp. 324-325. ^ McDowall, opp. citt. 
 
 52
 
 BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION 
 
 speaking, this is to say there can be no sense of 
 beauty except in man. 
 
 But here at once we are brought up against 
 the fact of sexual selection. Surely the posturings 
 of spiders, the dance of the ruff, the display of 
 the peacock and the Bird of Paradise, the song 
 of the warbler (if indeed this be a courting and 
 hymeneal song) do imply some aesthetic pre- 
 ference in the mate? Still more does the 
 elaborate performance of the Bower-bird, with 
 its love-chase through the gay parterres of its 
 carefully decked garden and in and out of the 
 double-doored bower, suggest some sense of 
 beauty. 
 
 This fact, which at first sight seems fatal to 
 our whole theory, really supplies us with the 
 clue we lacked. 
 
 Perhaps, even at this moment of courting, 
 there is no true self-consciousness. Our previous 
 discussions have led us to question whether this 
 exists at all in animals, except possibly in a few 
 of those most developed through contact with 
 man. But there is unquestionably a sense of 
 relation. The male and female are urged to love- 
 play by the sexual impulse, and this necessarily 
 involves a sense of inter-relatedness. It may not 
 be — probably is not — sufficiently conscious of 
 the self and the other to be termed love. It is 
 a mere sense of the necessity of the other for 
 fulfilling a need as urgent and as littie understood 
 as hunger. 
 
 53
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 But in the sex-impulse we find a beginning of 
 the fact of inter-relation; and this is the founda- 
 tion we require. The elaborate instances we have 
 mentioned go a step farther than the simple sex- 
 need. There is a definite attempt to make that 
 need reciprocal by stimulating the dormant 
 sense of relation in the mate through the use of 
 objects to which a meaning is given through 
 emphasis or through arrangement and juxta- 
 position. And this meaning is recognised, though 
 perhaps not as beauty exactly; that would imply 
 the expression of the meaning to the self, and it 
 is doubtful if the self yet exists. But it is very 
 hard to draw any line. At all events we can say 
 that here there is relation — and self-conscious 
 relation is love; and that here is expression of a 
 meaning and a need — and a recognised meaning, 
 or intuition, when expressed to the self is beauty. 
 We are on the confines of aesthetic. Now at first 
 sight this idea may raise a feeling of antagonism, 
 almost of disgust. We seem to have reduced 
 beauty to terms of the sexual impulse. Further 
 consideration will serve to dispel this sense of 
 a derogation of beauty, and will even give to 
 the sex-impulse itself a nobler significance, 
 making it appear as the first stage in the emer- 
 gence of Love and Beauty; rendering to it the 
 honour due from an understanding of the end 
 which it subserves. There can be little doubt 
 that in man the perception of beauty in the 
 opposite sex — not as beauty perhaps, but as 
 
 54
 
 BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION 
 
 simple attraction to a beautiful person — does 
 very generally precede that of more impersonal 
 forms of beauty. Amid savage races this is un- 
 questionably the case. The strange decoration of 
 the body and other rites in the initiation of the 
 adolescent, are undoubtedly expressions con- 
 nected with sex-relations. To us they are ugly 
 because they fail to express our fuller under- 
 standing; to the savage they are beautiful. And 
 I believe that in the children of a highly developed 
 artistic race it is true also in some measure. The 
 love-admiration of boys and girls begins at a very 
 tender age; and the psychoanalytic work of 
 Freud and Jung gives a significance, no doubt 
 often exaggerated, to acts and thoughts and 
 dreams of children which, if not strictly sexual 
 in the common sense, are yet connected with 
 the impulse — called by Jung the lihido — that 
 underlies the evolution of the race. If we employ 
 the terminology of Bergson and Driesch, we may 
 say that the elan vital, or entelechy, is the libido 
 of Jung; that, as the animal progresses along the 
 path of evolution, it becomes the sexual impulse 
 in the wider sense given to the term by Freud; 
 and that in one aspect it finally becomes the 
 sexual impulse in the sense in which the term 
 is commonly understood, while it achieves in- 
 finitely higher levels in the direction of spiritual 
 progress at the same time. But observe what this 
 implies. We have just noticed the obvious fact 
 that the sex-impulse involves a sense of relation. 
 
 55
 
 • BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 It is probable that the first dawnings of relation- 
 ship, albeit in a primitive, almost sensational 
 form, arise here. The using of inanimate objects 
 as tools is probably evolved later than conjuga- 
 tion, even in the protozoa. Dijflugia may mS^e 
 use of grains of sand to form its test, but all pro- 
 tozoa conjugate. Anyhow, this is a minor matter. 
 The important point is that in the sex-impulse 
 arises first the sense of a relation between 
 individuals, which is destined, far later, to grow 
 into the first stages of love; and in the develop- 
 ment of the child we find traces of this origin, 
 distorted and chronologically misplaced, exactly 
 as one would expect from the Law of Re- 
 capitulation. 
 
 Another point of interest arises here. Many 
 psychoanalysts, and notably Jung^, have shown 
 that mythology has an overwhelmingly sexual 
 content. Further, Rivers-, and others, have 
 extended the conception of the primitive, or 
 infantile, character of myth in relation to the 
 primitive or infantile character of dreams, 
 showing that both belong to a lower level of 
 culture than does the waking self. As time goes 
 on more and more, not only of the minor 
 activities of the individual, but of the earlier 
 activities of the race, are relegated to the un- 
 conscious. Psychologists have long recognised 
 this fact in dealing with habit-formation, but 
 
 ^ The Psychology of the Unconscious. 
 * Dreams and Primitive Culture. 
 
 56
 
 BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION 
 
 these recent writers have given it a deeper 
 significance. The spirit uses the past as some- 
 thing on which to build the future. In old days, 
 and among primitive peoples still to-day, the 
 explanation of life was sought in a very childish 
 manner. The impulse of sex was not understood, 
 its relation to procreation was largely hidden, as 
 witness the ceremonies of Intichiuma, and many 
 others that, by symboHc magic, should confer 
 fertility. It was mysterious, yet immensely 
 powerful. It had some sort of relation to the 
 birth of children and animals. The creation of 
 all things was mysterious, but since the new was 
 born these two mysteries must be connected. 
 Hence the sexual symbolism of myths that were 
 predominantly aetiological in character — that 
 were predominantly attempts to answer the 
 great Why? of the universe. 
 
 In the present connection, then, the chief 
 interest of the work of Freud and Jimg on 
 infantile phenomena associated with sex, in so 
 far as it is not exaggerated, lies in the fact that 
 here too we have an instance of the working of 
 von Baer's Law of Recapitulation. In the animal 
 the sense of relation begins with sex; in the child 
 we have strange, fragmentary primitive sex- 
 phenomena (if these psychoanalysts be right), 
 dissociated from many of their natural con- 
 comitants; phenomena suggesting some close 
 analogy with the temporary appearance in the 
 embryo of structures that disappear again, 
 
 57
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 having lost their significance. Can it be that 
 the purely animal basis on which man's great 
 structure of relationship is raised, is merely a 
 foundation, becoming gradually hidden, covered 
 up? 
 
 Love is, no doubt, in origin an impulse of sex. 
 Yet the highest love we know and experience in 
 ourselves has nothing sexual in it. When a man 
 and a maid fall in love there is no thought of 
 such things in the mind of either. Primarily, 
 true love is utterly pure from admixture with 
 animal instincts, though it may be, and is, 
 founded on them in the evolutionary sense, and 
 though they still play a vastly important part, 
 made beautiful by the love they subserve. But 
 the love that begins as conscious sex-instinct is 
 no love at all. There is love between men and 
 women, even young men and women, as well as 
 between those of the same sex, that is either 
 utterly free from all sexual content, or in which 
 that content is so trivial in amount, and so com- 
 pletely dismissed from attention, that it is 
 practically non-existent. If one is conscious of 
 it at any moment, one is so by a definite effort 
 of the mind, and for the specific purpose of 
 bringing before oneself the wonderful emergence 
 of the purest and highest activity of the spirit 
 from so lowly and physical an origin. Such love 
 is far higher than the love between husband and 
 wife often is, where the sexual side is primary 
 as well as primitive, and friendship secondary. 
 
 58
 
 BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION 
 
 Only when husband and wife are first friends, 
 and then, after that, Hve together with a full 
 realisation of the sacramental meaning of sex as 
 the foundation on which the eternal temple of 
 love has been and is being built, can their union 
 approach the highest level. Then it is indeed the 
 best of all in this life. It takes them closer to the 
 heart of things than mere friendship would, and 
 enables them to make their other friendships 
 perfect through the understanding which it 
 brings. The physical subserves the spiritual, and 
 even in the physical the two are united. The 
 physical and the spiritual are for them one — 
 parts of a whole. Their own friendship is perfect 
 as far as anything human can be perfect, and 
 by it their friendships with others are made 
 perfect. 
 
 We see, then, in the founding and develop- 
 ment of the sexual impulse the first movement 
 of the elan vital along its true path of evolution. 
 The elan vital determines progress; it is the 
 unrest, the divine discontent of spirit creating 
 itself in matter^. It progresses along various 
 roads, but the road that leads it to its own fulfil- 
 ment lies through sex. The elan vital becomes 
 lihido in an even narrower sense than that, 
 almost co-extensive with Bergson's term, which 
 Jung gives to the word. For through sex the 
 
 1 For the exact sense in which these words are used, and 
 for their implications in regard to God's creative activity, 
 see Evolution and the Need of A tonement. 
 
 59
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 sense of individual, and subsequently personal, 
 inter-relationship comes into being^. With the 
 arousing of self-consciousness we find the dawn 
 of love. This is the beginning of understanding. 
 In the intuition of love is bom the knowledge of 
 Reality. Faint, partial, obscured by the sex- 
 basis on which it is built up, it is yet the key to 
 the mystery of being. Gradually, slowly, amid 
 disappointing foulness and blind passion, it still 
 grows. In its insistence on relationship it is 
 manifested as the human aspect of religion. Side 
 by side with it grows the knowledge and love of 
 God. This is the divine aspect of religion, and 
 the two together make the world and the activity 
 of the spirit an intelligible whole. The "What is 
 Truth" of jesting Pilate finds here its answer. 
 All truth, all life, all process, in short Reahty 
 itself, is known in the knowledge of the creative 
 love which is the activity of spirit. We see sex 
 
 1 A word may be said concerning the personal relationship 
 of fear and hate. Here in self-defence the 'other' is not 
 regarded as in personal relation to the person threatened, 
 at all events in early stages of development; he is as external 
 as a flood or a precipice. Nevertheless in fear and hate, 
 when they have reached a high stage of development, there 
 is a feeling of personal relation. But only in one sense can 
 this relation be termed personal; the 'other' is recognised 
 as a person, but in concentrating our attention on the things 
 in him we fear and hate we concentrate it on his ' otherness ' 
 — on his lack of any but an external relation to us. There is 
 nothing reciprocal; we refuse to give or receive. It is this 
 externality of relation that makes hate and fear so poignant 
 and so bitter. 
 
 60
 
 BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION 
 
 growing to greater and greater importance until 
 we reach man. Theti self-consciousness inter- 
 venes; the ideas of relation and of fellowship 
 dawn; love finds a beginning, and then sex begins 
 to lose its privileged place. From pre-eminence 
 it sinks to a secondary position. Its spiritual 
 part is nearly played, and something higher 
 carries on the work. Love is more than passion. 
 Sex must continue to function, for man has 
 still a physical body; but its spiritual significance 
 is imderstood, and that is a thing far greater than 
 itself. As love grows, passion sinks and sinks 
 from its first prominence, till love is all. "They 
 neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are 
 as the angels." If this means anything at all, it 
 means that in the end the physical body will 
 have played its noble part and pass away, with 
 its passions and its failures; while the life goes 
 on, revealed in a body spiritual. 
 
 In the light of this understanding nothing is 
 left unclean. Even in the work of Freud, in so 
 far as it is true, and not coloured by the over- 
 strained interpretations of a pathologist, there is 
 nothing to shock, though much to sadden us. 
 Where in man there is over-emphasis of sex 
 there is a return to the lower, animal stage. Men 
 are regarding life in terms of what has been, and 
 not of what shall be. They are falling short of 
 their own possibilities. In what degree this 
 phenomenon is pathological, due to some neurosis 
 or psychosis, we may not judge them; in what 
 
 6i
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 degree their over-concentration on animal pas- 
 sion, to the exclusion of true spiritual activity, 
 is under the control of the will we are in presence 
 of sin. For, from the evolutionary point of 
 view, sin is the refusal to live up to the standard 
 that is at present possible, the acquiescence in a 
 standard that belongs properly to a stage out- 
 grown; lower; more animal, less divine. It is 
 content with an anachronism; the willing ac- 
 ceptance, the welcome of failure to progress — 
 and this means refusal to progress^. 
 
 But to see in the sex-impulse the explanation 
 of love is to fall into the same error as do the 
 materialists, though the error has assumed a 
 new and more subtie guise. You can no more 
 explain love by sex than you can explain mind 
 by matter. In both cases you are using terms 
 to which you can attach no meaning. Ultimately 
 I cannot think of matter and yet exclude mind; 
 I cannot think of sex and yet exclude relation, 
 and so, ultimately, love. For scientific purposes 
 no doubt I can do both, for science is a process 
 of abstraction in which we disregard everything 
 that is not relevant to an immediate and narrow 
 purpose. But philosophy may not abstract. She 
 deals with the concrete and the real. 
 
 We have apparentiy lost sight of the question 
 of beauty; but those who have followed the 
 thought of the first chapter will reaUse that we 
 have not in fact gone far afield. Upon the founda- 
 
 ^ Cf. Evolution and the Need of Atonement, ch. iv. et passim. 
 
 6z
 
 BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION 
 
 tion of sex, as we have seen, the sexless activity 
 of love is being slowly reared; and love is 
 relation — relation is the reciprocal, creative 
 activity which is spirit, and spirit is Reahty. God 
 is Love; men perfected are, or will be, love. The 
 being of God and men alike is the activity of 
 personal relationship, made perfect in union 
 while yet each retains his self-identity^. The 
 knowledge of this relation, the expression of it, 
 is Beauty; and in Beauty the whole theoretic 
 activity is comprehended in the ultimate resort, 
 when intuition, the immediate contact, and logic, 
 the mediate contact, are made one through 
 perfect knowledge. 
 
 Since then, the first origin of the realisation of 
 relationship is bom in the sex-impulse, here the 
 beginnings of beauty must be sought. But to 
 search for them in any developed form — to 
 search for what we understand by beauty — in 
 the animal consciousness is vain. There can 
 exist in it only some dim fore-shadowing, some 
 preference. Not until true self-consciousness 
 arises can there be any real sense of beauty, if 
 beauty be the intuition of a relation expressed to 
 the self and to others. And arguing from the 
 psychological effect of beauty upon ourselves — 
 the longing it produces, and the creative im- 
 pulse — we have been driven to define beauty 
 as the expression of a relation. The germ from 
 which love and beauty will spring is already 
 
 ^ McDowall, opp. citt. passim. 
 
 63
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 there in the relation between animals, but who 
 would guess that from the least of seeds should 
 be born so great and noble a tree? 
 
 Many have sought the origin of the sense of 
 beauty in the attraction of sex, and have then 
 hanged Beauty under this bad name. To do this 
 is to proclaim oneself a materialist. Our idea is 
 far different. Reasoning from the standpoint to 
 which we are driven by an examination of 
 evolution that does not neglect the phenomenon 
 of personaUty; finding the only explanation of 
 evolution itself in free personal relationship; we 
 see in sex the primitive ground-work of that 
 relationship. Physically, the sex relation sub- 
 serves many purposes; it provides a chief mode 
 of introducing variation, it blindly helps on the 
 evolutionary process through selective mating, 
 it provides the chemical stimulus to the develop- 
 ment of a new organism from the gamete or sex 
 cell. But it does more. In the light of the end 
 we see in sex a far nobler function; of a signifi- 
 cance not transient but abiding. In the great 
 adventure of Creative Love, to sex is given the 
 task of bringing about those relations which 
 constitute the ground-work of the personal 
 union which is Love. Of the understanding and 
 the expression of this relation is bom the sense 
 of beauty, destined gradually to transfigure the 
 world for man, as he learns to see order and 
 purpose and significant relation in the whole, and 
 to endure eternal and yet always new. 
 
 64
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 THROUGHOUT this essay, in our quest for the 
 meaning of Beauty we have been driven to 
 reject the ground of the Natural as the proper 
 standpoint for viewing the Beautiful. Rather, in 
 Nature regarded from the point of view of 
 ultimate Reality, we have found a value only 
 through relation; and it is the intuition of this 
 relation, expressed to conscious mind, that con- 
 stitutes Beauty. No relation is, however, satis- 
 fying but one which is mutual. There is beauty 
 in all expressed relations, even those of mathe- 
 matics and physics, but because these relations 
 are primarily expressed for the purpose of the 
 science as between thing and thing, and their 
 relation to the perceiving mind is relegated to 
 the backgroimd, the sense of beauty is not 
 roused in any great degree. By scenery a far 
 more vivid sense of beauty is kindled, and hand 
 in hand with this goes a keener sense of dis- 
 satisfaction and creative longing. By pictures 
 and the like we are brought into touch with the 
 mind of the artist; he has felt a relation and given 
 to it technical expression, and we follow anew 
 his creative intuition. In doing so we get in 
 some degree into relation with his mind as well 
 as with the thing in which he saw beauty; and 
 we derive additional joy from this personal 
 
 M. 65 5
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 relation, mediate though it be. But still there is 
 dissatisfaction, as well as creative desire. This 
 longing is identical with the longing of one-sided 
 love. We receive and cannot give. Only in per- 
 fectly reciprocal love is the longing absent, while 
 yet the creative aspect is most vividly present. 
 
 The study of Philosophy irradiates the world 
 for us, increasing our sense of the beauty that 
 is in it. We understand more; the world's re- 
 lation to us is more real, deeper, wider. Religion 
 has the same effect, though in so far as it some- 
 times belitties the world it tends also to deaden 
 our understanding of the world's beauty. But 
 if our philosophy coincides with our religion and 
 our scientific theory is a part of both. Beauty has 
 a chance of winning her proper position. If this 
 philosophy and this religion find their ultimate 
 Reality in the personal relationship we call love; 
 if in their 'science' the creative process of that 
 love's activity in self-limitation stands revealed; 
 Beauty indeed comes to her own. In our in- 
 tuition of the world's beauty we are in touch 
 with the creative idea of the Master Mind. Only 
 a philosophy and a religion that are rooted and 
 grounded in the God who is Love, yet take the 
 fullest account of the time-processes of love 
 which we call evolution, can reveal the fulness 
 of Beauty. Then Beauty is seen as Spirit's grasp 
 upon the relation between all the parts of the 
 whole — a relation that is not yet complete, and 
 can only be complete when the sole relation is 
 
 66
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 that of love between personal beings, of whom 
 God is the first in timeless Being. Then, when 
 matter is seen as the expression of God's self- 
 limitation for the sake of His people's freedom, 
 realisation dawns that matter is instinct with 
 beauty for the understanding mind. Aesthetic 
 becomes the link that binds all our theoretic 
 knowledge together, making it one — serviceable 
 as an equal partner with the practical activity. 
 In this partoership the activity of the spirit is 
 perfected^. The beauty of relationship is always 
 new, just as love is always new. Our creation 
 is our expression of our personal being in 
 relationship, which is ultimately love. God's 
 creation is the expression of His Personal Being 
 in relationship. Without relationship He would 
 not be personal; but more is implied in this 
 statement than merely internal relations. Per- 
 sonality, the SvvafjLL<; of KOLvo)VLa, is centrifugally 
 creative, as we have seen elsewhere, and the 
 thing created, because it is a relationship, is 
 beautiful, and is new. In the perennial newness 
 of beauty we find the key to God's creative 
 activity. He creates new persons, because His 
 relation to them is new and beautiful. Just 
 because His experience is the experience of 
 Perfect Personality new things are perpetually 
 
 ^ For detailed consideration of the nature of evolutionary 
 process in material conditions reference may be made to my 
 earlier works, to which the present essay constitutes a 
 postscript. 
 
 67 5—2
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 added. Without this activity His Being would 
 not be perfect. Its perfection is substantiated 
 by its power of findmg beauty new. Only the 
 inactive dullard fails to see beauty and is bored, 
 and in his very dulness he loses the prerogative 
 of personality. 
 
 From the height of such a conception, 
 standing upon ultimate Reality, we have looked 
 down upon the humble beginnings of the 
 intuition of relation, or of beauty. These we 
 found pre-eminently in sex, and so far we were 
 in accord with the psychoanalytic schools of 
 Vienna and of Zurich. But we saw sex trans- 
 formed and made beautiful, because our eyes 
 were fixed, not on low, immediate purposes, 
 but on the wonderful things that were to come. 
 Mainly out of the relationship of sex spring 
 music, art, literature — all the beauty that is so 
 far removed from its physical origin — and it is 
 in these things of eternal value that we find the 
 true purpose of sex, as opposed to its immediate 
 physical meaning. In music, art, literature we 
 see the expression of growing understanding. 
 The Reality is brought nearer and nearer to man. 
 
 Could Philosophy but bring our thought in 
 closer contact with Aesthetic, as Croce has nobly 
 endeavoured to bring it, understanding would 
 quicken marvellously. Could religion embrace 
 the arts and use them, the world would move 
 Godward with fresh inspiration; the arts them- 
 selves would be enriched, coming into their true 
 
 68
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 heritage. Croce has paved the way to under- 
 standing, but he missed the goal because he 
 did not perceive that the content of ReaUty 
 is relationship. This essay attempts to indi- 
 cate how much is lost by his omission. God 
 is Love; Reality is Love. Love is relationship. 
 Beauty is the expression of our understanding 
 of that relationship. The Good, the True, the 
 Beautiful are seen as different aspects of the 
 same Reality; each definable only in terms of 
 another; each involving, and indeed being, 
 the same system of relations seen from a 
 different angle. Goodness is the relation of 
 spirit to spirit. Truth the relation of part to part 
 and part to whole. Beauty the expression of the 
 spirit's knowledge of the relations that make 
 up Reality. Our understanding of these relations 
 — yes, and God's understanding — is perpetually 
 creative, and its creation is a new thing for 
 Perfect Being; for the Perfection of Being is 
 only substantiated by its power to create the 
 new, the beautiful, the related. Matter is 
 beautiful because it is understood as the expres- 
 sion of the infinite activity of the spirit of love. 
 As Personal Being is the one thing that lasts 
 beyond Time, and carries in itself the character 
 of absoluteness, so it appears that Beauty, the 
 knowledge and expression of the relationship of 
 Personal Being, is also eternal. Beauty can never 
 cease, for it is a necessary part of God's experience 
 and ours. 
 
 69
 
 n 
 
 '^
 
 APPENDIX 
 ART FORMS IN DEVELOPMENT 
 
 A LTHOUGH any detailed treatment of the concrete forms 
 iV of art is entirely foreign to the intention of this essay, 
 it is desirable that we should devote a little consideration to 
 the way in which these technical expressions arise and to 
 the psychological effects they produce. In doing this we 
 shall refer to the work of various artists, but only for purposes 
 of illustration. The part of the art critic is as unnecessary 
 to our purpose as it is beyond our powers. 
 
 To omit all reference to concrete matters seemed un- 
 desirable, as leaving the theory rather in the air. On the 
 other hand any detailed discussion of the theory as applied 
 to the development of concrete art-forms must necessarily 
 introduce debatable propositions, and must be tentative. It 
 therefore seemed desirable to relegate the discussion of 
 concrete matters to an Appendix, and to state clearly that 
 what was there said was meant rather to suggest ideas than 
 to lay down definite principles. Applications that may be 
 open to question do not invalidate a theory, while they do 
 make for clear understanding of it. 
 
 The question whether beauty itself is a universal or a 
 particular has already found implicit answer. Since beauty 
 is the expression of a relation that is understood as an 
 essential determination of Reality, the concept of beauty is a 
 pure concept. It is expressive, it is concrete, it is universal. 
 It is clearly expressed to the self as a cognitive product, 
 expressible in words (definition) and symbols (technique). 
 It answers to Croce's test that though "universal and 
 transcendent in relation to the single representation, it is 
 yet immanent in the single, and therefore in all representa- 
 tions," and is -therefore concrete. It also transcends the 
 
 71
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 single representations, "so that no single representation, and 
 no number of them can be equivalent to the concept" and so 
 is universal. 
 
 But the foundation of every universal concept exists in 
 an intuition of the particular. The intuition and its expres- 
 sion to the self come first, then follows the extension of the 
 theoretic activity in logic. The concept of beauty must, then, 
 have arisen, and at every fresh realisation must still arise, 
 like all concepts, from an intuition of Reahty as existent in 
 a particular; and we must therefore seek its origin in specific 
 individual cases. 
 
 Now we have argued that beauty is most probably 
 associated initially with sex, since with sex the idea of 
 personal relationship first arises. Our main thesis would 
 not however be invaHdated if it could be shown that a 
 vague intuition of relation with inorganic or non-personal 
 objects arose first. The intuition of relation may well have 
 several separate starting points. Only, in this case, the 
 reciprocal element would be absent (though its lack might 
 not be felt except as a vague dissatisfaction) and could only 
 arise when the sex-relation was the subject of a similar 
 intuition. But most likely the intuition of relation did arise 
 with sex, and, since our argument is concerned to show 
 that ultimately the intuition of beauty leads to the expression 
 of mutual relationship — love — and finds there the explana- 
 tion both of its peculiar quality, and of the creative longing it 
 produces, we will confine our argument mainly to this aspect. 
 Now if this be so, the sense of beauty is likely to be 
 associated in its earliest stages with sight, and only in a 
 secondary degree with sound, in the mating-call and in the 
 beginnings of language. This is borne out by the fact that 
 music usually lags behind, and is more primitive in expres- 
 sion than the visual arts — personal ornamentation and even 
 decoration of objects. True, the first formal expression is 
 likely to be in soimd — in the beginnings of language. The 
 dynamic relation between persons maybe accompanied and 
 
 72
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 expressed throughout by speech. But at this primitive level 
 it will be a very limited intuition or understanding that is 
 expressed, and moreover, an intuition that is based on 
 visual stimuli. We may therefore leave the question of 
 language for the present. Its importance in the earlier 
 stages is mainly practical. Through sight (when the stage of 
 simple chemiotaxis is passed) arises the perception of 
 desirabihty in the opposite sex^ which is the animal starting- 
 point from which love is evolved. This desirability and 
 this relation are expressed to the self, and this expression 
 is beauty in its humblest beginning. Then, later, the 
 creative aspect enters into consciousness. At first it was 
 satisfied, unconsciously, in mating; but soon this imcon- 
 scious satisfaction is felt to be inadequate. The representa- 
 tive process begins. 
 
 Now here we find a difficulty. According to our theory, 
 the earhest attempts at the pictorial art should be pictures 
 of men and women, but this is not, I believe, the case 2. 
 We must, however, remember that the idea of symbohc 
 magic arises very early. This is natural. The representation 
 of a thing is that thing in some degree. You have power 
 over your representations, therefore you have power over 
 the thing. The use of such power has an anti-social aspect, 
 which forbids its common or public use except in the form, 
 of a magico-rehgious ceremony. It is unlikely, therefore, 
 that if such representations were made, they should have 
 come down to us. Moreover, it is unnecessary that the 
 magic object should bear any superficial resemblance to the 
 thing it symboUses; indeed it is undesirable that it should 
 
 1 Even though there may be a mating-call. 
 
 2 I believe that I am right in saying that it is not until 
 the Neolithic period that human (female) images are found, 
 and some of these are probably divinities, though Dr A. C. 
 Haddon informs me that there are Neolithic paintings of 
 human beings on rocks in Spain which presumably do not 
 represent divinities. 
 
 73
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 be recognisable by others, since the practice for which it is 
 destined is nefarious and Uhcit. An esoteric significance is 
 enough. There is a very close connection between primitive 
 art and religion. Thus the Palaeolithic drawings of animals 
 in the dark caves of Perigord and Altamira, are undoubtedly 
 connected with magico-religious ceremonies to give power 
 over the beasts. For this reason then — the acquiring of a 
 prise over the object represented — we should hardly expect 
 to find many early drawings of men and women, other than 
 divinities. Even to-day many savages evince the greatest 
 fear of having their likeness drawn. Nevertheless, these 
 NeoHthic drawings do exist, proving that there was no 
 universal tabu on such representations. Moreover such 
 drawings as those of the Bushmen show that primitive art 
 at times uses drawings to record historical events, such as 
 raids by other tribes. The comparative scarcity of primitive 
 drawings is, however, easily explicable when we take the 
 fact of magical beliefs into account. And there are sufficiently 
 numerous examples of drawings of animals — bear, rhino- 
 ceros, Hon, mammoth, bison, reindeer, to show that pre- 
 historic man did have an intuition of his relation to other 
 creatures. Furthermore, since the creative impulse does 
 receive some, if unconscious, satisfaction in sex-relationship, 
 expressed in word and action, there is the less need for 
 technical expression in the early stages. We find at all events 
 enough prehistoric drawings to show the recognition of 
 relation, and the expressive activity, and these are the 
 desiderata for an aesthetic fact. 
 
 Leaving the most primitive level, we find the develop- 
 ment of decoration. Pottery is shaped with some regard to 
 form and symmetry, and simple ornament of a geometric 
 character makes its appearance^. Much might be said on 
 
 1 Really, geometric art seems to have arisen nearly con- 
 temporaneously with representative art, for patterns of 
 considerable complexity and symmetry are found in the 
 later palaeolithic period. 
 
 74
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 this subject, but we will confine ourselves to a few funda- 
 mental considerations. 
 
 In the first place we notice that here man's art is practically 
 imfettered by religious and magical inhibitions. Geometric 
 forms do not generally represent any person or power ^ 
 Artistic creation therefore can move freely. Next, we observe 
 that the art is reaching a higher level, and that consciously. 
 There is conscious elimination and abstraction at work in 
 the construction of patterns made of simple lines and 
 curves. We find also the rudiments of an endeavour to find 
 a harmony and rhythm that may give a sense of satisfied 
 understanding. Men are beginning to feel the need of unity 
 and harmony and order, and in so far as geometric ornament 
 gives the feeling of these and of purpose, it is beautiful, for 
 it expresses their intuition of an ordered reality. 
 
 It is unnecessary for us to discuss the intrinsic beauty of 
 curves, or the mental satisfaction afforded by the golden 
 section. The Greeks, and later writers such as Fechner, 
 have expended much ingenuity in doing this. But their 
 conclusions amounted to little more than that the aesthetic 
 pleasure given by geometric form was due to the sense of 
 symmetry and order and unity that were brought about by 
 elaborate differentiation of detail subordinated to a single 
 idea. As we have just said. Geometric ornament expresses 
 man's intuition of an ordered relation and interdependence 
 in Reality. 
 
 We have introduced the ideas of elimination and abstrac- 
 tion. These are present in all artistic representation, and 
 probably in all artistic perception. Because the power is 
 rare in any high degree of development, artistic genius is 
 rare. Moreover it frequently happens in ordinary people 
 
 ^ Though the representation of an eye is frequently in- 
 cluded in the pattern as a counter-charm, and indeed many 
 of the patterns may originally have had a magical significance, 
 though most seem to be merely inspired by woven basket- 
 work and the like. 
 
 75
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 that the perception of beauty is first aroused consciously 
 by pictures rather than by natural scenes. A flower is 
 simple enough for a child to understand, and we find that 
 in many children, especially artistic ones, the perception 
 of beauty is first awakened by flowers. The elements of a 
 sunset, or a moonhght scene with clear tones and silhouetted 
 outHnes, are simple enough for the untrained mind to 
 appreciate. But it requires an artistic genius to see the 
 beauty of a complex landscape. In representing this 
 technically he simphfies, emphasises, eliminates and 
 abstracts. The man who looks at his picture follows the 
 creative process of his mind, and, the elimination being 
 already done for him, is able to appreciate. Moreover he 
 receives training in the process, and is the more ready to 
 eliminate for himself; to appreciate natural beauty of a 
 complex order. Even if our artistic development is not 
 high, we love pictures because in looking at them and 
 understanding them we perform a creative act ourselves; 
 but it is the artist who has made it possible for us to perform 
 the act by his simphfication of the problem. Browning 
 clearly understood this, for he wrote: 
 
 We're made so that we love 
 
 First, when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 
 Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see^. 
 
 Sometimes the artist achieves his emphasis by means not 
 wholly agreeable to the medium which he is using. Many 
 artists of great technical abUity hnk human sympathies with 
 an admirably interpretative mise-en-scene which carries out 
 their vision. Nevertheless the picture that tells a story calls 
 in adventitious aid. It is like the illustrated reading book 
 of a child; by the child mind it is created, and to the child 
 mind it appeals. It cannot express a clear intuition by a 
 simple representation in a single medium, but uses two, 
 appealing not only in pictorial symbols, but in dramatic 
 
 ^ Fra Lippo Lippi. 
 
 76
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 as well, and the intuition itself is obscured by the process. 
 Owing to this confusion of media and of intuition the result 
 is unsatisfactory to minds more developed aesthetically, for 
 reasons that we shall adduce later, while yet the double 
 appeal makes the meaning more evident to the beginner. 
 Again certain landscape artists of the second rank by in- 
 sistence on simple elements of natural beauty, by emphasis, 
 and by elimination of distracting ideas, open a new vision 
 to minds hardly prepared yet for such intuition in face of 
 the natural object. Add to this the half conscious yet 
 acutely pleasurable process of following out the technical 
 means by which the artist has impressed his intuition upon 
 canvas, and we can understand the joy of looking at their 
 pictures. 
 
 But where the artist's vision goes deeper, where the reality 
 is more clearly seen, and where in order to express this 
 intuition, to represent it, and to bring out its less obvious 
 harmony and order, a more sweeping process of elimination 
 and abstraction is needed, the simple mind is unable to 
 follow. Not everyone is at the stage to appreciate the subtie 
 symphonies of Whistler, the bare simphcity of D. Y. 
 Cameron, the rigorous certainty of Botticelli. The conven- 
 tions and purposeful Hne of an early Japanese print; the 
 vibrant light of the post-impressionist landscape artists; the 
 wilful, obtrusive, almost harsh insistence of the cubist that 
 you shall turn your mind away from curves that hitherto you 
 have deemed essential, in order to grasp other truths, not 
 only seem ugly — that is to say, meaningless — to the mind 
 whose artistic perception is little developed, but may even 
 distract it, in rebellious protest, from the truth the artist 
 wishes to proclaim, though others further advanced find 
 in some of their work a very high type of beauty. And, be it 
 added, the artist himself fails in his expression if he over- 
 does the emphasis in such a way that his representation of 
 the Reality becomes lopsided and inharmonious, as is too 
 often the case. Further where he is not a creative artist at 
 
 77
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 all, but a slavish imitator of a method not really his own, 
 we are presented with the meaningless monstrosities that 
 here and there defile the Salon des Independants — and 
 other less catholic exhibitions! In some, too, the animal 
 basis is the only intuition expressed, and art gobbles greedily 
 at its mess of pottage. 
 
 Yet as a whole we have moved a long way from the 
 animal expression of a need of its complementary animal. 
 The whole world is related to us, and in that relation we find 
 beauty. And beautiful as it is we find it very lovable, even 
 though we cannot but feel that our love can never be 
 satisfied since we can give nothing back. 
 
 Yet something we can give, though not to it — something 
 that makes things clearer. In our minds we can give to 
 this world a meaning, as itself subordinate, yet the necessary 
 means of our self-realisation, and we can share this meaning 
 with others. We find a meaning in fife, and that meaning is 
 fellowship. We find a meaning in nature, and that meaning 
 dwells in the Creative Being of the God who is Love. Beauty, 
 more clearly day by day, becomes for us the expression of 
 ReaHty, and that Reality is the reciprocal relationship of 
 persons. Religion gives one pathway of approach. Beauty 
 another, but both join to form the highway of our God. 
 There is more than room for beauty in religion; there is 
 more than room for aesthetic in theology; there is an 
 absolute need, if they are not to be in a measure inexpressive, 
 lopsided, and therefore ugly. Our concept of Reality must 
 be symmetrical, or fail of adequacy. 
 
 What is true of pictorial art is equally true of other 
 forms. Style — the higher art of language — demands educa- 
 tion before it can be appreciated. In hterature again, the 
 general pubhc prefers Longfellow to Keats, The Passing of 
 Arthur to A Death in the Desert, Ella Wheeler Willcox to 
 the Divina Commedia. Henry James demands a more 
 intimate appreciation of the spirit of man than does Dickens. 
 In all these there is beauty — the expression of an inttiition — 
 
 78
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 but those who see furthest and most clearly have the smallest 
 public. Most men cannot even follow where they lead, and 
 few indeed are the pioneers. 
 
 Before we leave the question of hterature and language, 
 we may just glance at its development. This is comparatively 
 an easy matter to understand. The warning, the expression 
 of satisfaction, the ma ting-call are common among animals. 
 The powers of communication and of speech develop with 
 the development of self-consciousness. They are expressions 
 of the relation between the self and its 'others,' and 
 especially of the relation between the self and other selves. 
 They carry the germs of understanding, and as they lead 
 from the particular to the more general they bear in them 
 the quahty of the beautiful. The relations between the self 
 and the other selves, and between the self and the environ- 
 ment, become more and more universalised. In speech 
 they are conmiunicated, but speech is transient. A more 
 permanent record is required, and here again resort is had 
 to symbolism, less generally intelligible, more esoteric, than 
 the pictorial symbol, since there is no one universal language ; 
 the symbohsm of written speech. Speech, however, is 
 episodic and dramatic. It moves along with the march of 
 events. So too with hterature, for the most part. The Pic- 
 torial and Plastic arts represent beauty as static; yet they are 
 not lifeless. Activity, movement, is imphcit in them, while 
 yet the beauty they express is restful, and has in it something 
 of the quahty of absoluteness and transcendence. Language, 
 hterature, drama are dynamic. In them beauty moves; 
 immanent and unquiet at first sight; yet here too there is 
 something that expresses the eternal meaning. Purpose 
 moves to its fulfilment, and, while it moves, the end is in 
 view. Nevertheless in pictorial art the static side is the most 
 prominent, in linguistic the dynamic side. We may observe, 
 however, that in order to counteract the transitoriness of 
 purely episodic speech, recourse is had to visual symbohsm 
 as well. The graphic art aims at perpetuating the episode, 
 
 79
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 and by doing so renders possible the development to which 
 we shall immediately draw attention. 
 
 Now the untrained mind appreciates the dynamic aspect 
 of Uterature, whether it be the originative mind or the mind 
 of the reader. This explains the output and the popiilarity of 
 the thrilling tale of adventure. At its lowest we find the 
 Penny Dreadful. Through Stanley Weyman and Dumas we 
 move towards Conrad and Meredith and Hardy, where the 
 dynamic element is thrillingly present (as present it must 
 be indeed even in the most quiet essays) but where it is 
 subordinated to a clear vision of the permanent and eternal 
 which we have mis-termed static. In poetry this truth is 
 obvious. Even in drama, though our attention is distracted 
 by the action, it is the chief quaUty if the drama is really 
 great. In Sophocles, in Euripides, in Shakespeare ; perhaps 
 almost too consciously in Galsworthy, and Paul Claudel 
 and Synge, for conscious art loses the sincerity of a first 
 vision; it is not the episodic sequence that interests us, 
 except from the point of view of technique. Our attention 
 is focussed upon the motive, the fundamental intuition to 
 which the dramatist is trying to give technical expression. 
 Moreover in all the infinite variety of Hterary art the motive 
 is the same. One definite intuition is expressed — that of 
 relationship; relation between person and person, relation 
 between person and machine, relation between person and 
 some ever-ruling Order, be it Fate, Chance, or God also 
 personal. It is the reality of personal inter-relationship that 
 underHes all literature, be it love-poerri, novel, or some drama 
 of Fate in which personal relationship is overshadowed by 
 the impersonal, or at least the unsympathetic; or else it is 
 the one-sided relation of a person to a thing, as in descriptive 
 science, which has only the beauty of order. But can we 
 say that the intuition which the pictorial artist represents 
 is the same as this? Hardly, imless the picture tells a story; 
 and in so far as it does this we feel that the realm of pictorial 
 art is invaded by an alien influence. It may at first sight 
 
 80
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 seem surprising that art should not gain by the introduction 
 of various intuitions of relation; that it does not, as a rule, 
 is certain. All the arts overlap; we shall see the most marked 
 example of this when we come to consider music and deal 
 further with this point; but intrinsically each is pecuhar in 
 its scope and method. 
 
 Now it is worth while to observe that the longing aroused 
 by the beauty of hterature is rather different from that 
 induced by pictures. It is less vague. Because hterature 
 deals with the relation between persons our attention is 
 directed towards the persons we know — our longings and 
 aspirations reach out consciously towards them and towards 
 God. We think of particular people and our relation to 
 them. Our creative longing is directed towards them, in 
 active relation, or towards creative literary work of which, 
 more or less consciously to ourselves they are the back- 
 ground. Moreover we always identify ourselves, in a greater 
 or less degree, with one or more of the protagonists of the 
 story; in them we suffer, we love, we adventure at second- 
 hand. This phenomenon of identification, closely allied as 
 it is to day-dreaming, has of late come much under the 
 attention of psychoanalysts under the title of phantasy; 
 a term covering all attempts to achieve through the imagina- 
 tion the satisfaction denied to us in actual life. For our 
 present purpose this is only noteworthy as confirming the 
 truth of our observation that in hterary creation, whether 
 at first or second hand, it is human relation — the relation of 
 ourselves and others — that lies behind our intuition and its 
 expression. 
 
 In some pictorial art this relation between persons, this 
 personal touch, does not obtain. In landscape the artist's 
 intuition obviously deals with the relation of things to 
 men — a relation much more onesided. Correspondent to 
 this, we find our intuition and our longing far more vague, 
 far more dissatisfied. There needs a higher knowledge of 
 Reality to understand how man has relation to things. The 
 
 M. 8l 6
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 intuition of this relation is generally expressed with far 
 less understanding. Human relations may intrude, and we 
 get the story-picture and the problem-picture. Moral 
 relations may intrude, and we get the symbohc picture, 
 such as those of Watts and Blake. Drama, myth and legend 
 may intrude and we get the Ladies of Shallot, the Ledas, 
 and the Calumnies of Apelles. 
 
 But pictorial art reaches its highest plane in the religious 
 picture and the portrait. Have we not, here, the intrusion 
 of the story in the first case: and in the second have we not 
 the purely himian relations between artist and sitter? 
 
 I think it is just to say that the rehgious picture is not 
 episodic. It represents what, for want of a better word, we 
 have termed a static intuition. In the greatest Madonnas, 
 even those of the beginning of the decadence, such as 
 Raphael's, all the birth-pangs, all the pain, and all the 
 achievement of life at its highest go to make up the intuition 
 of the artist. I venture to think that in one picture at least, 
 the Madonna of the Magnificat, the artist even hints subtiy 
 that he is expressing in an image the whole meaning of 
 the world, by distorting his figtires and modifying his lights 
 as they would be distorted and modified when reflected in a 
 convex mirror. 8iA KaroTrrpov is for all art, but the fact is 
 not evident to him who only glances. The artist's intuition 
 must be understood, by a mind that follows it creatively; 
 even if its creation be at times over-ingenious. 
 
 The religious picture, no doubt, could not have been 
 painted but for the historic episode which it represents. 
 But there is a strong presumption that it does not owe its 
 intuition to one episode, nor even to the whole history of 
 a life; though a Crucifixion, an Entombment, and indeed a 
 Madonna, would only be intelhgible in their fulness to one 
 who knew the life of Christ. It is the relation of a whole 
 Life, Divine yet Human, to the life of each one of us that 
 lies at the bottom of the artist's vision. Only a great 
 Christian can paint a great Madonna, however sin-stained 
 
 82
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 he may be. Magdalene, who loved much, could see deeper 
 than jesting Pilate, deeper than the self-righteous Pharisee. 
 
 There is here no intrusion of an alien element; a vision of 
 ReaUty is represented in one medium. The episode no doubt 
 is there, but it is incidental, and does not constitute the 
 vision. Episode is always there, even in a landscape; the 
 question is whether the appeal — the original intuition — is 
 episodic or universal. But no doubt the human relation is 
 emphasised; and in this respect we have moved far away 
 from landscape. The relation of man to inanimate nature is 
 however included and interpreted in the artist's vision. 
 I think that the half-conscious perception of this lies behind 
 the frequent introduction of landscape in such pictures. It 
 may be said that these simply help to complete the com- 
 position, but to say this is to beg the question. Why do they 
 complete the composition? Why do they satisfy us? Is it 
 not that they form an intrinsic part of the artist's intuition; 
 that in the harmony of figures and landscape he symbohses, 
 and we after him, the universal harmony which he has seen? 
 
 In a portrait, too, we read not only the relation between 
 sitter and artist, which must be a relation of deep sympathy 
 and vmderstanding if the portrait is to be anything but an 
 imitation, but also the relation of the sitter to all the events 
 of his Ufe, Think of Raeburn's portrait of James Wardrop. 
 The strength, the kindliness, the rugged purpose, the 
 humour with which the old man faced his life all through 
 are there. It is the face of a man who has fought and won, and 
 in fighting and winning has learned much wisdom. Think 
 of Giorgione's Portrait of a Gentieman, with its wealth of 
 refinement; with its conviction that "manners makyth 
 man," sustained with gentieness already many times when 
 courtesy and calm were not easy. Yet here too there is no 
 representation of episode. The painter's art is faithful to 
 itself and allows no alien intrusion. The harmony, the 
 unity of a man's life, compounded though that life be of 
 sequent episodes, makes the artist's intuition. History has 
 
 83 6—2
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 become philosophy. An absolute thing, an aspect of Reality, 
 is presented, and we feel somehow that it is not set against 
 the world but includes the world. 
 
 The same kind of thing may be said of lapidary art, and 
 we will not dwell on it in detail. The sculptor sees beauty 
 in the himian or animal form and in three dimensional 
 representation generahses from it, whether his work re- 
 present an individual or an ideal; for the individual is used 
 to express an ideal, the ideal is localised in an individual. 
 The problem of the architect is somewhat different, being 
 on the theoretic side the attempt to portray in three 
 dimensions that which the designer of geometric patterns 
 expresses in two — rhythm and order; multipHcity that 
 estabhshes a unity; unity that interprets a multiplicity. 
 But here, more than in other arts, the practical has to be 
 kept in mind, and a harmony preserved between the 
 economic and the theoretic activities. Generally one or 
 other predominates, no one clear idea is expressed, and in 
 consequence, much modern architecture, especially domestic 
 and civic architecture, is unpleasing. To buHd a house is 
 harder than to paint a picture, because men have to live in 
 a house; and in a contention between two ideas the artistic 
 side is overbalanced by the practical. Moreover the idea of 
 relationship is comparatively subordinate here just because 
 two ideas are set over against one another. The relationship 
 of a thing to a man is in view. The aim is primarily economic, 
 and beauty takes a second place because the intuition of 
 harmony is vague and its expression imperfect. 
 
 If, however, a house is built, as some Tudor and Georgian 
 houses were, with an eye to simple proportion which must 
 not be violated, but otherwise with the reaHsation that it 
 had to be lived in, and that it must be designed solely with 
 this end in view, the result is eminently pleasing. There is 
 no falsity, no attempt to mingle irreconcileables, no striving 
 after a beauty that cannot be achieved because it is without 
 meaning in such a connection. 
 
 84
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 We may now turn to music, in some ways the most 
 difficult of all. Beginning with the evolutionary aspect, as 
 with linguistic art we find its origin in the relation of beasts 
 to each other and to the world. The mating-call,the crooning 
 of passion and of satisfied well-being, the warning of danger, 
 the hunting call, the sound of the wind, the sea, the river, 
 the "going in the tops of the trees," provide the ground- 
 work of both, expressing the relation of beast to beast, and 
 beast to thing. But, as we have seen, such calls, such sounds, 
 and the language to which they give rise, are episodic. The 
 sense of unity and endurance is lost. Just as, over against 
 the visual symbols of episode which constitute the beginnings 
 of literature we find the visual symbols of unity and static 
 endurance which characterise pictorial art, so too we find 
 the auditory symbols of episode that make speech, and 
 the auditory s5mibols of unity that make music. We saw 
 that, to preserve the episode of speech, visual sjrmbolism 
 is eventually called in. Even to-day the untrained reader 
 has to form the sound with his Ups as he reads; for the more 
 expert the visual symbol definitely represents the sound : 
 the written symbols have their own timbre. So too with 
 music. To preserve the unity from being lost, it comes at 
 last to be sjrmbolised visually, and there are many who can 
 hear the music as they read the score. Both the letter on 
 the page and the notes on the stave are s5anbols of the 
 second degree — symbols of symbols — for what they 
 symbolise is in itself the symbol of the artist's intuition of 
 a unity in multiplicity. This in parenthesis. 
 
 We have said that in purely episodic sound such as the 
 danger-call and the mating-call the sense of unity is absent. 
 Doubtless no call is really and wholly episodic, in man at 
 any rate, but it cannot be questioned that the episode is 
 predominant. The sense of relation is transient; the 
 economic need is all important. 
 
 But the theoretic activity cannot be left out of account 
 for long. The man of to-day, when he feels his whole being 
 
 85
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 in harmony, his body tinghng from the cold bath, sings 
 lustily. When we are well and cheerful we sing. So too 
 when a bird is well and cheerful, with all his bodily needs 
 satisfied or soon to be satisfied — so readily satisfied as to be 
 themselves a pleasure of anticipation — he sings. No doubt 
 the cave-mother sang to her baby in quiet murmurs; no 
 doubt the cave-father htmimed as he lolled in the cave- 
 mouth after dinner, idly binding an arrow-head upon the 
 shaft. Somehow, in a rhythmic sequence of sound the 
 satisfaction of a body in harmonious rhythm with itself 
 and its surroundings is expressed. Then, we may imagine, 
 the singer becomes aware of his song, and begins to think 
 about it. The beauty of the song as a whole, the beauty of a 
 sequence in sound that makes a unity, is consciously per- 
 ceived, and a new art dawns. It is an art very similar to that 
 of the designer of geometric patterns. Unity is established 
 through infinite multiphcity of details, in forming no one of 
 which is the unity forgotten. The music mirrors an intuition 
 of harmony in a Reality that owes its unity to its multiphcity 
 and its multiplicity to its unity; a Reality that is based on 
 relationship of parts. 
 
 In music, then, we find rhjT:hm, order, sequence. It is 
 both episodic and static, though episode and unity are in 
 symbolic form. In the individual sequences, the internal 
 multiplicity, the episode is given; in the whole, the unity 
 of Reahty, the static, or better, the absolute element. 
 
 Because in good music these two aspects must of necessity 
 be perfectly balanced, music can rouse the keenest, highest 
 sense of beauty in a greater degree than any other of the arts. 
 
 But often music falls short of this. Mendelssohn for 
 instance, too often sacrifices everything to prettiness. The 
 individual sequences are trivial and empty. Multiphcity of 
 episode is lost sight of in a rather petty unity; the two are 
 not balanced. The fourth sound is simply a fourth note, 
 not a star. Not only is the intuition limited, but the balance 
 is not preserved between the notes and the whole in its 
 
 86
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 expression. Bach owes his pre-eminence to the perfect 
 balance between attention to detailed sequence and expres- 
 sion of a great intuition. Future musicians may see further 
 than he did, but unless they can achieve his perfect balance 
 they will fail to express what they see, and in so far as they 
 fail they will be rewarded with ugliness. 
 
 The music-hall tune has but a very paltry vision to 
 express; generally the relationship it portrays is one of 
 vulgar intrigue or animal desire, at best one of elementary 
 aspiration; and its notes have a purely subordinate and 
 utilitarian role. If it is pretty or ingenious it has got far 
 beyond the average. Generally, moreover, it is constrained 
 by considerations ahen to music. The words are written, and 
 the tune has to illustrate them. In this it differs from folk- 
 tunes, where words and music grow together, each shaping, 
 moulding, modifying the other, till the song is one thing. 
 
 This brings us back to a question which we have several 
 times touched upon, and as often shelved — the question 
 of the overlapping of different arts. Opera, oratorio, and 
 ballet give us excellent examples, and from them we will 
 draw the material of our brief discussion. 
 
 In Opera we have drama, episode expressed in language, 
 set in a more or less accordant scene with histrionic 
 accompaniment, and woven in with a musical interpretation. 
 In Oratorio we have the same thing without the scenery 
 and the histrionics. In Ballet — and of this art the Russian 
 Ballet is especially in my mind — we have the drama, the 
 scene, the histrionic accompaniment in choregraphic form, 
 and the music. 
 
 Let us take Opera first. There are two appeals to the ear 
 and two to the eye. The music and the words ; the acting and 
 the scenery. The scenery, if subdued and perfectly in accord 
 with the action, does not much distract the attention, for it 
 is purely a pictorial setting. Nevertheless a sense is growing 
 that in drama it ought to be so much subordinated that it 
 does not distract the attention at all, being confined to a 
 
 87
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 few patterns that help in our understanding of the motive, 
 or to simple draperies. As far as I am aware this has not 
 yet been attempted inopera^, but opera is such a jumble of 
 incongruities that it can never be an artistic whole, much 
 as we may rejoice in individual parts of it. The words, 
 however, do constrain the music in a manner thoroughly 
 unjustifiable: "In composing an opera the stage should be 
 the musician's first thought, he must not abuse the con- 
 fidence of the theatre-goer who comes to see as well as to 
 hear. . . . The stage often paralyses a composer's inspiration, 
 that is why S5anphonic and chamber music are so far 
 superior to opera. A symphony or a sonata imposes no 
 limitations, but in opera, the first necessity is to speak the 
 musical language of the great public ^." Moreover the action 
 and the music are so incompatible that we are forced to 
 leave our sense of humour outside the theatre door. When 
 the hero explains for ten minutes that the heroine is in 
 acute danger and that therefore he must hurry away; when 
 Tristan and Isolde sing their passion with complete detach- 
 ment for more than half an hour; we cannot feel that the 
 action helps the music or the music the action. In Oratorio, 
 since action is absent, we feel this particular incongruity 
 less, for we manage mentally to eliminate time; but few 
 will be found to defend the oratorio as a form of aesthetic 
 expression. It is the anthem prolonged into a "useless 
 Alexandrine," "which Uke a wounded snake drags its slow 
 length along." The fatal fact about opera and oratorio is 
 that the music is constrained to do something that is ahen 
 to itself. It is interpretive of episode, and the episode 
 forces it into shape. It is not free. This is the root trouble 
 always when two arts overlap. Art must be completely free 
 to express its intuition technically, subject only to the 
 inevitable restrictions of the technique proper to it. From 
 
 ^ I understand that Purcell's Fairy Queen has just been 
 played at Cambridge with draped scenes only. 
 
 2 Tchaikovsky, letter to N. F. von Meek, Nov. 27th, 1879. 
 
 88
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 these restrictions it even gains, since the lines of simplifica- 
 tion are to some extent determined, and this very determina- 
 tion helps the artist tovi^ards clear expression of a clear 
 intuition. It would, of course, be absurd to say that music 
 does not express definite intuitions that are expressible 
 through other media as well. "I do not in the least agree 
 with you that music cannot interpret the universal nature 
 of love," v^rites Tchaikovsky to Nadejda von Meek. "On 
 the contrary, I think only music is capable of doing so. 
 You say words are necessary. O no! This is just where 
 words are not needed, and where they have no power; a 
 more eloquent language comes in, which is music. Look 
 at the poetical forms to which poets have recourse in order 
 to sing of love; they simply usurp the spheres which belong 
 inseparably to music. Words clothed in poetical forms cease 
 to be mere words; they become partly music^." But if there 
 is a restriction alien to the art and imposed from without, 
 which prevents full expression in that mediimi, the result 
 is bound to be more or less a failure. The dramatic episode 
 and the verbal form in opera constitute such a restriction, 
 introducing a vein of unreality that is fatal to aesthetic 
 expression. In oratorio, where the words demand a repre- 
 sentation they do not get, and where yet the music is bound 
 by the words, we feel the same thing. Even to take a poem 
 and set it to music is almost bound to lead to aesthetic 
 disappointment. The intuition of the artist is not single nor 
 free. The writer of the melody may recreate the intuition 
 of the poet, he may try to express the same intuition in his 
 setting, but the setting is none the less constrained by the 
 words. The musician is not at hberty to form one clear 
 intuition and give it free play 2. The form of the expression 
 
 1 Tchaikovsky, letter to N. F. von Meek, Feb. 9th, 1878. 
 
 2 Tchaikovsky's letters to N. F. von Meek give an interest- 
 ing insight into the process by which the intuition comes to 
 the composer, and his method of working it out. See especi- 
 ally the letters of Feb. 17th. March 5th, and June 24th, 1878. 
 
 89
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 is already fixed in part, and the knowledge of this fixation 
 forms a second intiiition which generally obscures and 
 confuses the main one. Moreover both expressions appeal 
 to the same sense, that of hearing, and this, apparently, pro- 
 duces greater confusion, more lack of clarity, in the auditor. 
 The same fact accounts for the unsatisfactoriness of music 
 which moves out of its proper sphere and endeavours to tell 
 a definite story or paint a definite scene. The 1812 Overture, 
 fine though it is, can never be said to be pre-eminent as 
 music; nor can Haydn's Creation, nor any of the music 
 that, intentionally or unintentionally, is not single-hearted, 
 but calls up visual images as well as depending on them. This 
 statement does not constitute an indictment of programme- 
 music. The Adagio of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony cannot 
 be thus Ughtly dismissed^. In Tchaikovsky's introspective 
 letters we find most interesting accounts of the inspiration 
 from which he worked, and an eloquent defence of pro- 
 gramme-music in general, and his own Fourth Symphony 
 in particular 2. To N. F. von Meek he writes^: "Laroche is 
 entirely opposed to a programme. He thinks the composer 
 should leave the hearer to interpret the meaning of the work 
 as he pleases; that the programme limits his freedom; that 
 music is incapable of expressing the concrete phenomena 
 of the physical and mental world .... If you care to hear 
 
 my opinion on the subject, I will give it in a few words 
 
 I think the inspiration of a symphonic work can be of two 
 kinds: subjective or objective. In the first instance it 
 expresses the personal emotion of joy or sorrow, as when a 
 lyric poet lets his soul flow out in verse. Here a programme 
 is not only imnecessary, but impossible. It is very different 
 when the composer's inspiration is stirred by the perusal 
 of some poem, or by the sight of a fine landscape, and he 
 
 1 If one can say that it has a programme and not simply 
 an inspiration. 
 
 2 Letter to Taneiev, March 27th, 1878. 
 
 3 Dec. 5th, 1878. 
 
 90
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 endeavours to express his impressions in musical forms. In 
 
 this case a programme is indispensable To my mind, 
 
 both kinds of music have their raison d'etre, and I cannot 
 understand those who will only admit one of these styles. 
 Of course every subject is not equally suitable for a sym- 
 phony, any more than for an opera; but, all the same, 
 programme-music can and must exist. Who would insist, 
 in Uterature, upon ignoring the epic and admitting only the 
 lyric element?" 
 
 Tchaikovsky seems to me to ignore the deepest side of 
 music, however; that intuition of an ordered, universal 
 harmony which gives to Bach his pre-eminence. Programme- 
 music, then, is not necessarily limited to any great extent 
 by that which it represents, provided the representation is 
 sufficiently generaUsed to allow the music free scope. But 
 it is always in danger of losing touch with the universal in 
 over-emphasis of the particular, becoming constrained by 
 its subject. Moreover it loses something of the freedom, and 
 independence of phenomenal existence, which is the peculiar 
 privilege of music and its unique prerogative among the arts, 
 taking on something that belongs to painting or language. 
 In so far as the wrong technical medium is used, just so 
 far aesthetic expression fails. 
 
 These strictures do not apparently apply, at any rate in 
 the same degree, where two media appealing to two different 
 senses are used simultaneously. We are accustomed to 
 correlate sight and hearing and to form through them a 
 single intuition. This may explain the extraordinary satis- 
 fyingness of the Russian Ballet, in spite of its frequent 
 artificiality and the perverted themes and imagery that pass 
 unnoticed by the more healthy-minded public of England. 
 The episodic side, made rhythmical and ordered in its 
 choregraphic presentation, parallels, but does not constrain 
 in any great degree, the musical side. In Les Sylphides 
 especially the same intuition is expressed in two media. 
 The choregraphic artist has studied and followed out the 
 
 91
 
 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 
 
 intuition of Chopin, and has expressed it in a different 
 medium. But music and dancing have much ground in 
 common, and consequendy both are capable of serving as 
 the technical medium for one or the same intuition. There- 
 fore Les Sylphides^ is more of an artistic whole than 
 almost any other compound aesthetic expression. Art must 
 be free, and if it use two media, both must express the same 
 intviition — this is the root of the matter. You may appeal 
 simultaneously to two senses, but you must do so in the 
 medium proper to each sense and the intuition must be 
 capable of expression in those media. To appeal to one sense 
 through the medium proper to another is to court disaster. 
 We see that this must be so if, as is the case, the aesthetic 
 intuition has to be founded on the particular before it can 
 move out to discover the universal; and the particular 
 cannot be faithfully represented if the representation is not 
 as clear-cut as the intuition and the reaUty intuited. Art 
 must be free, for it is the intuition of a relation free on one 
 side at least, and not finally satisfied till it finds rest in 
 mutuahty, love, free on both sides. It is the expression of 
 our growing understanding of the meaning of ReaUty. 
 
 No doubt music, like all other arts, has been transformed 
 from its original character. It is no longer imitative, though 
 it may have been first roused by imitative attempts; it is 
 no longer dependent on the harmony of bodily well-being, 
 though it may first have expressed such harmony. In it 
 spirit calls to spirit, no longer body to body. But this need 
 not surprise us. The foundations contribute nothing to the 
 beauty of a building, though upon them the building is 
 reared. All that is greatest in man had a very humble 
 beginning. Even his limbs and lungs had a plebeian 
 ancestry. 
 
 We have said nothing of the aesthetic problem of simple 
 tone and colour. Though Plato, and even Hegel, discussed 
 
 ^ Petrouchka is said to be equally homogeneous, but I 
 have not seen it, and Camaval approaches this level. 
 
 92
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 these, it is generally accepted to-day that they do not in 
 fact exist in isolation from other suggestions. They always 
 derive a value from their suggested relations and cannot be 
 conceived apart from these. Such aesthetic value as clear 
 tones and colours have is due to the fact that the elements 
 they suggest and imply are few, like a sunset sky, and there- 
 fore they do not demand any great degree of elimination in 
 the mind of the observer. 
 
 Neither have we dealt with the problem of the relative 
 importance of colour and form, except imphcitly. The 
 essential factor here is, of course, that colour does not exist 
 per se. You cannot isolate a thing from its colour, in 
 aesthetic intuition. To begin with, colour is the basis of 
 visual perception, for the light by means of which the eye 
 perceives an object must be of some definite series of wave- 
 lengths of certain amplitudes balanced against one another 
 in some definite manner through the selective absorption 
 of that object, and wave-length is the physical basis of 
 colour. Then, secondly, colour belongs to, and is an integral 
 part of form. Form is not mere shape; it is determined by 
 tone (or wave-amplitude) and colour (or wave-frequency) 
 as well as by outline; and these are essential factors in the 
 unity and order of the whole, and so are essential factors of 
 the intuition. 
 
 What we have said, then, of symmetry and geometric 
 form, and of clearness of expression, together with what we 
 have said of the elimination that is involved in aesthetic 
 intuition, really covers the problem. 
 
 Together, yet each in its own way, colour and form arouse 
 in us the sense of unity and appeal to us as being in harmony 
 with the intuition derived from other particulars; that in 
 the world, under all its apparent multiplicity, there subsists 
 a unity which relates all things together. 
 
 CAMBBIDGE : PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE T7NIVEESITT PRESS.
 
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