e; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot,
it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous
order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as
a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,--the mood, the
act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man,
giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward
thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing;
what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to
plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the
chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as
fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as
fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic
unity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, so
beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the
visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived
by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of
perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our
knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and
though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and
colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause
and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in
becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external,
independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is this
outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add
in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality,
and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the
purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in
the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed,
nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its
Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon
nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there
abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into the
brook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its
general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as
abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form
and is included in it.

The eye, however, gover