THE IDEAL OF BEAUTY. 



127 



sesthetic temperament is naturally Impelled to avoid 

 what Is coarse and ugly, low and common-place, and 

 so loses sympathy with nine-tenths of human life. 

 It Is not merely that duties and functions like 

 those of hospital nurses or butchers, however necess- 

 ary and morally admirable they may be, must 

 continue to be aesthetically repulsive, but that the 

 meanness and ugliness of the greater part of life 

 seems too irremediable to admit of the hope of 

 improvement. It Is not from the resignation and 

 retirement of the aesthetically-minded that the great 

 '' reforms " of history have received their Impulse, 

 but from the moral enthusiasm or party spirit of 

 men whose every step was marked by brutal utilit- 

 arianism or unbeautlful fanaticism.^ It is well, then, 

 that the world is still so Philistine ; for if once the 

 hideous and unalterable sordidness of life were fully 

 realized. It might come to pass that few would care 

 to survive to feel it lon^: 



Thus the enthusiasm for beauty does but com- 

 plicate our already all too complex lives, does but 

 add one more warring aim which we can never 

 realize. 



1 The history of the Renaissance may seem to refute the view 

 that culture and artistic sense have not been the moving forces 

 of the world. But the Renaissance was a revival of learning 

 quite as much as of art, prompted as much by the desire for 

 knowledge as for beauty. And, after all, in the end it effected 

 little. It was soon absorbed or swept away by the Reformation, 

 and it is well known that, after a little hesitation, most of the 

 chiefs of the Renaissance condoned the abuses of the old order 

 of things and remained Catholics. The intellectual liberty (such 

 as it is) we have since attained, we owe, not to the Renaissance, 

 but rather to the conflict of equally intolerant and equally power- 

 ful orthodoxies, and the progress of science has been stimulated 

 far more by the hope of its material advantages than by the 

 desire of pure knowledge. 



