DISSECTING A DAISY. 



337 



among such peoples as the negroes and Malays. 

 But there are considerable traces of a love for 

 familiar flowers in the verse of the Hindoos, the 

 Japanese, and the Greeks ; while the feeling is 

 easily recognized in our own unlettered peasantry. 

 Among all the literary class it reaches a very 

 highly-evolved and conspicuous form. 



The next element to be developed is that of 

 sentimental attachment to a flower as such. This 

 takes its rise out of the preceding stages, coupled 

 with that intellectual advance which makes the 

 distinction between natural and artificial products 

 wider and more impassable. 



Still later the poetical and literary associations 

 come in to complicate our simple aesthetic feel- 

 ing. While last of all to appear upon the field 

 are those purely scientific elements which result 

 from a physical analysis of the flower into its 

 component parts. But these two final sources of 

 festhetic pleasure, though late in order of time, 

 belong to portions of our nature, every day in- 

 creasing in depth and power. Just as in the kin- 

 dred region of the sublime every fresh enlarge- 

 ment of our gaze into the surrounding infinities 

 of space and time increases and deepens our sense 

 of sublimity for all our after-life, so in this other 

 region of the beautiful, every fresh enlargement 

 of our acquaintance with Nature lays open before 

 us newer and yet newer sources of pleasurable 

 aesthetic feeling. The geologist, the botanist, and 

 the naturalist, are forever exercising their eyes 

 and their intellects on unseen or unobserved feat- 

 ures of crystals, and minerals, and ferns, and 

 flowers, and butterflies, and birds, which quicken 

 their appetite for the beautiful in Nature, and will 

 doubtless lead the way hereafter to further de- 

 velopments of aesthetic expression in art. 



It has been the error of all systematizers, how- 

 ever, to begin with these highest and most evolved 

 factors of aesthetic emotion, instead of beginning 

 with the simplest and most primordial. Being 

 themselves educated and cultivated men, they 

 have thought only of feelings shared by them with 

 the educated and cultivated classes generally. 

 Perhaps they have considered the simpler and 

 commoner feelings participated in by the child 

 the savage, and the animal, as too trivial and vul- 

 gar to be worthy of their exalted notice. If they 

 wish to account for the beauty of a daisy, they 

 do not refer to its color and its shape, but talk only 

 of its humility, its modesty, its simplicity, and its 

 poetical associations. These are certainly factors 

 in their own complex and imaginative mental 

 state, but do they constitute the primitive ele- 



ments of beauty as understood by ninety-nine out 

 of a hundred human beings everywhere ? If you 

 ask any intelligent child, he will give you a truer 

 and more philosophic answer : " I like a daisy be- 

 cause it's a pretty flower, and pink, and white, 

 and round, and yellow ; and you can string them 

 on a straw, and they look beautiful." The tran- 

 scendentalists who try to account for all beauty 

 on a theory of typical infinity, unity, repose, sym- 

 metry, purity, and moderation, will find no echo 

 in the heart of the child or the savage. My little 

 friends in the meadow here can readily agree with 

 me that a pink daisy is a very pretty thing, but 

 they seem to be somewhat uncertain on the ques- 

 tion whether it is a type of Divine incomprehensi- 

 bility. Perhaps they enjoy the even arrangement 

 of its radial florets, but I doubt whether they see 

 in its symmetry a type of Divine justice. 



We might venture to go further, I think, and 

 to assert that those higher emotional feelings 

 which the Associationists make the basis of the 

 aesthetic property are really and truly not aesthetic 

 at all. The modesty, humility, and familiarity, of 

 the daisy make us say, " How touching and how 

 dear it is!" which are expressions proper to our 

 affections ; but its pinkness, whiteness, and reg- 

 ularity, make us say, " How pretty or how beauti- 

 ful it is ! " which are expressions proper to our 

 aesthetic sentiment. The sensuous pleasures 

 which Alison rejected are, in reality, the prime 

 elements of beauty, and to the vast majority of 

 persons the only ones ever perceived. Perfume, 

 softness, color, form, symmetry, musical tone, 

 rhythm, these are the main and primordial com- 

 ponents of all aesthetic objects ; and if we add 

 to them harmony, variety, and decorative detail 

 of a sort which testifies to or recalls human work- 

 manship, we have summed up all the properties 

 which in strictness entitle any natural or artificial 

 product to the name of beautiful. The higher 

 intellectual and emotional feelings come in to 

 supplement and intensify the original pleasures 

 thus defined ; but they yield us rather the sense 

 of pathos, of sublimity, of tenderness, of scien- 

 tific interest, than that of beauty in the strictest 

 sense. 



^Esthetics is the last of the sciences in which 

 vague declamation is still permitted to usurp the 

 place of ascertained fact. The pretty imagina- 

 tive theories of Alison, of Jeffrey, and of Prof. 

 Ruskin, are still allowed to hold the field against 

 scientific research. People think them beautiful 

 and harmless, forgetting that everything is fraught 

 with evil if it "warps us from the living truth." 



58 



