SANTAYANA 323 



and impressive manner, excites most laughter and 

 interest in the others: and soon he discovers that 

 he can make the interest greater by exaggerating 

 and inventing. Hence the actor's and the story- 

 teller's arts, and our Homer, Apuleius, Boccaccio, 

 Cervantes, Swift and the regiment of fictionists of 

 the present time. 



And thus it is with all the arts: they spring from 

 one root, one impulse, the sense of beauty in any 

 mortal, which is not an overflow of the sexual instinct 

 as some of our philosophers imagine. And if we look 

 closely enough we find it in the animals as well — 

 bird and beast and fish and insect. 



Santayana in his Sense of Beauty says: "The arts 

 must study their occasions : they must stand modestly 

 aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices 

 of life." It is well said, but I can't follow him when 

 he describes this sense of beauty and its outcome in 

 its relation to the realities of life as the wild straw- 

 berry and other small decorative growths which 

 spring from the crevices of a granite mountain. The 

 mountain represents the realities of life. And he 

 adds: "This" (the insignificant results) "is the 

 consequence of the superficial structure in which 

 they flourish: the roots, we have seen, are not 

 deep in the world, and they appear as only un- 

 stable superadded activities and employments of 

 our freedom, after the work of life is done and 

 the terror of it allayed." 



This, whether intentional or not, produces the idea 

 that the sense of beauty is a late development of the 



