THE FACT OF BEAUTY 277 



The main part of the answer which we would suggest 

 is simple. Keeping to those combinations and arrangements 

 of lines and colours which are the expression of development, 

 growth, and activity, what strikes us as characteristic is their 

 harmony. The expert in these matters is of course the artist, 

 the producer of the beautiful and of more than beauty, and 

 his verdict almost without exception is that every one of 

 these wild creatures is an artistic unity. The simple reason 

 for this is that the lines and the colours, in their arrange- 

 ments and combinations, are the expression of unified viable 

 individualities which have stood the test of time. Perhaps 

 this is in agreement with Signor Croce's definition of beauty 

 as " successful expression ". In the age-long struggle for 

 existence the unharmonious, the ' impossible ', have been 

 always weeded out before they took firm root and multiplied. 

 The monster is a contradiction in terms. Meredith put it 

 all in a nutshell when he said " Ugly is only half way to a 

 thing ". Nature pronounces her verdict on ugliness by 

 eliminating it. Beauty is Nature's stamp of approval on 

 harmonious viable individuality, and just as, objectively, 

 the ugly is only halfway to a thing, a too incomplete ex- 

 pression, so is it subjectively. As Professor Bosanquet puts 

 it (1915), the imagination is " at once excited in a particular 

 direction and thwarted in it ". 



But there is another side to it. In the course of hundreds 

 of thousands of years our senses have become attuned to the 

 natural. We have unconscious or conscious standards of 

 line and colour, of sound and movement. Just as a discord 

 may break a precious glass vessel by setting up contradictory 

 vibrations, so there are colour-schemes that almost literally 

 jar, and muddy colours that are as painful as noises. The 

 big result remains, that the combinations of lines and colours 



