XX.

In the foregoing pages I have tried to derive the need of beauty from
the fact of attention, attention to what we do, think and feel, as
well as see and hear; and to demonstrate therefore that all
spontaneous and efficient art is _the making and doing of useful
things in such manner as shall be beautiful_. During this
demonstration I have, incidentally, though inexplicitly, pointed out
the utility of art itself and of beauty. For beauty is that mode of
existence of visible or audible or thinkable things which imposes on
our contemplating energies rhythms and patterns of unity, harmony and
completeness; and thereby gives us the foretaste and the habit of
higher and more perfect forms of life. Art is born of the utilities of
life; and art is in itself one of life's greatest utilities.

WASTEFUL PLEASURES.

"Er muss lernen edler begehren, damit er nicht noetig habe,
erhaben zu wollen."--SCHILLER, "_Aesthetische Erziehung_."

I.

A pretty, Caldecott-like moment, or rather minute, when the huntsmen
stood on the green lawn round the moving, tail-switching, dapple mass
of hounds; and the red coats trotted one by one from behind the
screens of bare trees, delicate lilac against the slowly moving grey
sky. A delightful moment, followed, as the hunt swished past, by the
sudden sense that these men and women, thus whirled off into what may
well be the sole poetry of their lives, are but noisy intruders into
these fields and spinnies, whose solemn, secret speech they drown with
clatter and yelp, whose mystery and charm stand aside on their
passage, like an interrupted, a profaned rite.

Gone; the yapping and barking, the bugle-tootling fade away in the
distance; and the trees and wind converse once more.

This West Wind, which has been whipping up the wan northern sea, and
rushing round the house all this last fortnight, singing its big
ballads in corridor and chimney, piping its dirges and lullabies in
one's back-blown hair on the sand dunes--this West Wind, with its
many chaunts, its occasional harmonies and sudden modulations mocking
familiar tunes, can tell of many things: of the different way in which
the great trunks meet its shocks and answer vibrating through
innermost fibres; the smooth, muscular boles of the beeches, shaking
their auburn boughs; the stiff, rough hornbeams and thorns isolated
among the pastures; the ashes whose leaves strew the roads with green
rushes; the creaking, shiverin