be comfortable and convenient. A Robinson Crusoe in his lonely island may, so far as his looks and surroundings go, be as happy as a king in the most magnificent of palaces, and a Mountain Jim1 of modern times, though with the manners and education of a gentleman, may, like Crusoe, be quite content to rough it in the rudest of huts, and with the most primitive simplicity of dress. "From towns and toil remote " we are careless comparatively of appearances. But let the world look in upon us and our ways, and then the old hereditary instinct (if such it may be called), by which birds display their feathers, and animals their strength and grace, in courtship, again asserts its power, and our taste is displayed in personal adornment, and our houses and our lawns and everything that pertains to us is made to look its best. And the more we are set free from the exigencies of labour, and the more of leisure we have for each other's company, and the more cultured and educated we become, the more intense is the desire for beauty and grace in all our movements and surroundings, and in every way in which we can express ourselves to one another. And all that would seem to indicate that beauty is for the eyes of others, and that so far its life is in its It is for looks, for appearance, for appearance. attraction and admiration; and it is expressive in final analysis perhaps of sociability and sympathy, and in a measure of beneficence. All ornamentation has a tacit reference or relation to the thoughts and likings of others. It is for pleasure—not for selfish pleasure, but for social pleasure and mutual enjoyment; and the conscious giving of pleasure aesthetically is a beneficence.

1 Jim is depicted in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, by Isabella L. Bird.

And our desire to please by beauty is in the way of obedience to natural law. It is the expression of a desire of nature through us. What then, we may ask, if all the beauty which we behold in the universe by night and by day, in colour and form, by tone and through motion, should be expressive of the essential sociability and sympathy of the Absolute Spirit, who is God, and the form in which He is seeking to draw by admiration all finite spirits into sympathy with Himself? Is it not there for pleasure and enjoyment? We do not say for our pleasure alone, observe, nor necessarily for the enjoyment of man. For then might the question be inconveniently asked, "Were the beautiful volute and cone shells of the Eocene epoch, and the gracefully-sculptured ammonites of the Secondary period, created that man might ages afterwards admire them in his cabinet?" But even from an evolutionist point of view, the beauty of flowers was an attraction to insects, and that of berries to birds long before the advent of man; and where aesthetic pleasure in the scale of creation downwards altogether ceases, we cannot tell. And then, turning to the opposite pole of perception and thought, we have had hints and dreams of a communion of Spirit within the Divine Nature everlastingly, and the Word made flesh drew attention to the lilies of the field, and spoke of God as clothing them with such beauty that "even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them. And what though "many a flower is born to blush unseen"-unseen by man, "if purer sprights," as another poet sings,

1

"By moonlight o'er their dewy bosoms lean

T'adore the Father of all gentle lights"??

1 Darwin's Origin of Species, c. 6.

2 Keble's Christian Year: Third Sunday after Trinity.

EXPRESSIVE OF SYMPATHY.

271

At any rate, and as a matter of fact, the beauty of the world gives us enjoyment, intensity of pleasure, and has a soothing, healing, and refreshing influence on the soul, and the more so in proportion to the mental development and culture of society; and why should it not be thought to have been the function and reason of beauty from the beginning that it should please? that it should be the medium of the expression of sympathy and good-will between spirit and spirit, and as a sign like the rainbow that God is in covenant with us and with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air? That may not be the only end of its existence; but can we suppose it, looking at it from a purely scientific point of view, to be without a function in nature? and is not function equivalent to expressed purpose or design, and purpose and design to thought and intelligence? And if when we find that a thing is of use in the economy of nature, we say, as scientific men are constantly saying, that its use is the purpose, or one of the purposes, of it, can we consistently refuse to admit that when a thing is found to please pleasure is its purpose, or one of its purposes? It would seem that we cannot. And so all nature, the whole universe of things around us, may in that way of it, and notwithstanding Mill's terrible indictment of it as cruel, be said to be expressive of sympathy and beneficence; and Gauckler's philosophic definition of beauty as "the true manifestation of the unity of Being by finite phenomena" may have a deeper thought in it than at first sight appears. "It is the inward revelation of this unity (the unity of Being) which raises our soul in the religious sentiment when it shoots towards the infinite; and it is this unity of life and substance in the finite world manifested by their union, by the

true expression of the invisible by the visible, of the incomprehensible by the phenomenon, which gives birth to the sentiment of the beautiful. Brother of the religious sentiment, it has always kept by its side; and, though sometimes confounded with it by ignorance, it has in all times helped human souls to rise towards the sky."

1 Le Beau et son Histoire, c. 1.

ATTEMPTS AT CLASSIFICATION.

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CHAPTER XII.

THE BEAUTIFUL, THE PICTURESQUE, AND THE SUBLIME.

VARIOUS attempts, more or less elaborate, have been made at classifying the different kinds of beauty; but, like the search for the essence of beauty in itself, and for the same reason, they have not been attended with much success. There is always a something in it which eludes the grasp, a refractory element which refuses to be boxed-to be "cabined, cribbed, and confined" by any studied set of words and phrases; and as soon as we have got, as we think, our beauties all safely ranged into classes and labelled generally as free or absolute and dependent or relative, or as physical, intellectual, and moral, or as something else, we shall find that our classes might about as well be reversed and each take the name of the other. The relative will be found, perhaps, to be the absolute, and the absolute the relative, according as you look at them; and whether any beauty in particular is physical, intellectual, or moral, or something of all the three, or nothing of any of them, might possibly be a very fair subject for discussion. And the same may be said of the customary division, or classification, at the head of this chapter. If, when thinking of the carnage of a battlefield and of the blood through which the men had to move, we should speak of the soldiers as "red wat shod," or mournfully sing of "the flowers

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