BEAUTY BELONGS TO ALL 333 



of the world I lived in so enchanted me, that life 

 without the power which such art confers on its 

 followers seemed hardly life at all. The effect of 

 this picture of a scene familiar to me was more 

 powerful than I can describe in words. To be a 

 painter of landscape was my thought, all day and 

 every day. It seemed that what I had to do was 

 to express all that was in me; by this alone life was 

 worth living. It haunted me and was as fierce a 

 pain as I had suffered from when I first heard music. 



When Santayana in his Sense of Beauty states that 

 it is a small thing in our lives, and its outcome no 

 more than the wild and pretty herbs that root them- 

 selves in granite mountains which represent the 

 realities of our nature, I disagree with him and his 

 simile. Beauty is not a casual growth, the result 

 of a seed fallen from goodness knows where into a 

 man's life; it is inherent in the granite itself, and 

 another result from it is the development of a sense 

 and impulse in the whole of life. It is in us all from 

 birth to death — from the ant to the race of men: 

 in the lowest and meanest of us. And it is in the 

 animals, as we see from their games and music. All 

 my long, close observation convinces me that such 

 a sense is well developed in the bird — especially in 

 the crow and parrot families — and in our domestic dog. 



It will doubtless be said by anyone who has followed 

 the argument so far that I cannot be free to criticise 

 others on this point, seeing that I have called myself 

 a field naturalist all through this book and, conse- 

 quently, see like all others through a vocation, a 



