. Of course it is not absolute. There is
nothing absolute in this world. But the relation exists. Whoever can
comprehend the highest form of one kind of beauty must be able to
comprehend something of the other. I know very well that the ideal of the
love-season is an illusion; in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of
the thousand the beauty of the woman is only imagined. But does that make
any possible difference? I do not think that it does. To imagine beauty is
really to see it--not objectively, perhaps, but subjectively beyond all
possibility of doubt. Though you see the beauty only in your mind, in your
mind it is; and in your mind its ethical influence must operate. During
the time that a man worships even imaginary bodily beauty, he receives
some secret glimpse of a higher kind of beauty--beauty of heart and mind.
Was there ever in this world a real lover who did not believe the woman of
his choice to be not only the most beautiful of mortals, but also the best
in a moral sense? I do not think that there ever was.

The moral and the ethical sentiments of a being thus aroused call into
sudden action all the finer energies of the man--the capacities for
effort, for heroism, for high-pressure work of any sort, mental or
physical, for all that requires quickness in thought and exactitude in
act. There is for the time being a sense of new power. Anything that makes
strong appeal to the best exercise of one's faculties is beneficent and,
in most cases, worthy of reverence. Indeed, it is in the short season of
which I am speaking that we always discover the best of everything in the
character of woman or of man. In that period the evil qualities, the
ungenerous side, is usually kept as much out of sight as possible.

Now for all these suggested reasons, as for many others which might be
suggested, the period of illusion in love is really the period which poets
and writers of romance are naturally justified in describing. Can they go
beyond it with safety, with propriety? That depends very much upon whether
they go up or down. By going up I mean keeping within the region of moral
idealism. By going down I mean descending to the level of merely animal
realism. In this realism there is nothing deserving the highest effort of
art of any sort.

What is the object of art? Is it not, or should it not be, to make us
imagine better conditions than that which at present exist in the world,
and by so imagining to prepare the w