ck were to put on canvas his idea of
peasants at prayer and if Millet had phrased in pictorial terms his
feeling about war, there is little doubt that Millet's painting would be
the more telling and beautiful. The degree of beauty is fixed by the
depth of the man's insight into life and the corresponding intensity of
his emotion.

Beauty is not limited to one class of object or experience and
excluded from another. A chair may be beautiful, although turned to
common use; a picture is not beautiful necessarily because it is a
picture. "Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is
bad," says Whitman, Whistler speaks of art as "seeking and finding
the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest,
Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in
the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its
inhabitants were not Greeks." The beautiful must exhibit an integrity
of relations within itself, and it must be in integral relation with its
surroundings. The standard of beauty varies with every age, with
every nation, indeed with every individual. As beauty is not in the
object itself, but is in the mind which integrates the relations which
the object manifests, so our appreciation of beauty is determined by
our individuality. And individuality is the resultant of many forces.
The self, inexplicable in essence, is the product of inheritance, and is
modified by environment and training. More than we realize, our
judgment is qualified by tradition and habit and even fashion.
Because men have been familiar for so many centuries with the idea
that sculpture should find its vehicle in white marble, the knowledge
that Greek marbles originally were painted comes with something of
a shock; and for the moment they have difficulty in persuading
themselves that a Parthenon frieze _colored_ could possibly be
beautiful. Until within comparatively recent years the French have
regarded Shakespeare as a barbarian. The heroic couplet, which was
the last word in poetical expression in the age of Queen Anne, we
consider to-day as little more than a mechanical jingle. Last year's
fashions in dress, which seemed at the time to have their merits, are
this year amusingly grotesque. In our judgment of beauty, therefore,
allowance must be made for standards which merely are imposed
upon us from without. It is necessary to distinguish between a
formula and the reality. As far as possible we sho