he whole. And relation carries with it the
possibilities of harmony or discord, of unity or disorder. Before an
object can be regarded as beautiful it must give out a unity of
impression. This unity does not reside in the object itself, but is
effected by the mind which perceives it. In looking at a
checkerboard I may see it as an aggregation of white squares set off
by black, or as black squares relieved by white. I may read it as a
series of horizontals, or of verticals, or of diagonals, according as I
_attend_ to it. The design of the checker-board is not an absolute
and fixed quantity inherent in the object itself, but is capable of a
various interpretation according to the relative emphasis given to the
parts by the perceiving mind. So with all objects in nature. The
twilight landscape which stirred me may have been quite without
interest or meaning to the man at my side; or, if he responded to it at
all, his feelings may have been of a different order and quality than
mine. Where I felt a deep and intimate solemnity in the landscape,
he might have received the twilight as chill and forbidding. Beauty,
then, which consists in harmonious relation, does not lie in nature
objectively, but is constituted by the perception in man's
constructive imagination of a harmony and consequent significance
drawn out of natural forms. It is, in Emerson's phrase, "the integrity
of impression made by manifold natural objects." And Emerson says
further, "The charming landscape which I saw this morning is
indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns
this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none
of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon
which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that
is, the poet." The mere pleasurable excitement of the senses is hardly
to be called beauty. An object to be beautiful must express a
harmony of relations and hence a meaning,--a meaning which goes
beyond sense-perception and does not stop with the intellect, but
reaches the spirit. Psychologists tell us that "a curved line is pleasing
because the eye is so hung as best to move in it." Pleasing, yes; but
not beautiful. And precisely herein is illustrated the distinction. A
life wearied with an undulating uniformity of days will find beauty
less in the curve than in the zigzag, because the sight of the broken
line brings to the spirit suggestions of change and adventure. A
supi