his
was not only a musical devotion. I believe that he now conceived, or
rather perhaps developed, a sense of the symbolical poetry of religious
rites and ceremonies which remained with him to the end. It is true to
say that the force and quality of ritual, as a province of art, has been
greatly neglected and overlooked. It is not for a moment to be regarded
as a purely artistic thing; but it most undoubtedly has an attraction
and a fascination as clear and as sharply defined as the attraction of
music, poetry, painting or drama. All art is an attempt to express a
sense of the overwhelming power of beauty. It is hard to say what beauty
is, but it seems to be one of the inherent qualities of the Unknown, an
essential part of the Divine mind. In England we are so stupid and so
concrete that we are apt to think of a musician as one who arranges
chords, and of a painter as one who copies natural effects. It is not
really that at all. The artist is in reality struggling with an idea,
which idea is a consciousness of an amazing and adorable quality in
things, which affects him passionately and to which he must give
expression. The form which his expression takes is conditioned by the
sharpness of his perception in some direction or other. To the musician,
notes and intervals and vibrations are just the fairy flights and dances
of forms audible to the ear; to the painter, it is a question of shapes
and colours perceptible to the eye. The dramatist sees the same beauty
in the interplay of human emotion; while it may be maintained that
holiness itself is a passionate perception of moral beauty, and that the
saint is attracted by purity and compassion, and repelled by sin,
disorder, and selfishness, in the same way as the artist is attracted
and repelled by visible charm and ugliness.

Ritual has been as a rule so closely annexed to religion--though all
spectacular delights and ceremonies have the same quality--that it has
never been reckoned among artistic predilections. The aim of ritual is,
I believe, a high poetry of which the essence is symbolism and mystery.
The movement of forms solemnly vested, and with a background of
architecture and music, produces an emotion quite distinct from other
artistic emotions. It is a method, like all other arts, through which a
human being arrives at a sense of mysterious beauty, and it evokes in
mystical minds a passion to express themselves in just that way and no
other, and to celebrate t