ll beautiful intention, and quick to see
any faintest beckoning of the divine quality; and indeed I would not
have most people aim at too critical an attitude, for I believe it is
more important to enjoy than to appraise; still we must keep the
principle in sight, and not degenerate into mere collectors of
beautiful impressions. If we simply try to wallow in beauty, we are
using it sensually; while if on the other hand we aim at correctness
of taste, which is but the faculty of sincere concurrence with the
artistic standards of the day, we come to a sterile connoisseurship
which has no living inspiration about it. It is the temperate use of
beauty which we must aim at, and a certain candour of observation,
looking at all things, neither that we may condemn if we can, nor that
we may luxuriously abandon ourselves to sensation, but that we may
draw from contemplation something of the inner light of life.

I have not here said much about the arts--music, sculpture, painting,
architecture--because I do not want to recommend any specialisation in
beauty. I know, indeed, several high-minded people, diligent,
unoriginal, faithful, who have begun by recognising in a philosophical
way the worth and force of beauty, but who, having no direct instinct
for it, have bemused themselves by conventional and conscientious
study, into the belief that they are on the track of beauty in art,
when they have no real appreciation of it at all, no appetite for it,
but are only bent on perfecting temperament, and whose unconscious
motive has been but a fear of not being in sympathy with men whose
ardour they admire, but whose love of beauty they do not really share.
Such people tend to gravitate to early Italian painting, because of
its historical associations, and because it can be categorically
studied. They become what is called 'purists,' which means little more
than a learned submissiveness. In literature they are found to admire
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning, not because of their method of treating
thought, but because of the ethical maxims imbedded--as though one
were to love a conserve of plums for the sake of the stones!

One should love great writers and great artists not because of their
great thoughts--there are plenty of inferior writers who traffic in
great thoughts--but because great artists and writers are the people
who can irradiate with a heavenly sort of light common thoughts and
motives, so as to show the beauty which unde