40 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



world's history beauty, we may be sure, was only rudi- 

 mentary and potential ; it was developed from humble 

 beginnings, just as the idea of God has risen from fear 

 and utilitarianism to its modern nobility in the evolution 

 of man. " There is a grandeur," wrote Darwin, " in 

 this view of life, with its several powers having been 

 originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, 

 or into one, and that while this planet has gone circling 

 on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple 

 a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most 

 wonderful, have been and are being evolved." Beauty 

 was in fact evolved concurrently with psychological and 

 ethical factors, and that is why a really beautiful thing 

 is at the same time good, true, and individual. If Nature 

 is beautiful, that is to say, there is a religious meaning in the 

 evolutionary process. Art is religious, says Mr. Glutton 

 Brock, " because it makes us believe in the goodness of 

 God and the kindness of the universe He has made." 



The animate world as we know it has, then, been 

 evolved from an infinite number of variations, and these 

 variations originate in the germ-cells, which are not 

 simple protozoa, but " unified individualities " ; which 

 " experiment internally, not fortuitously, but artistically ; 

 not at random, nor yet inexorably, not purposefully, 

 but perhaps purposively." Change or evolution, that 

 is to say, depends upon the inborn creative power of 

 living creatures, and variations (which we might just 

 as well call inspirations) are what Professor Thomson, 

 with insight, calls " experiments in self-expression." 

 Variation is a progressive series of experiments in ideas, 

 manifested, with all its failures, all the throwing aside 

 of unfinished drafts which we call the elimination of the 

 unfit, by the growing individuality of more and more 

 complex living creatures, in that conquest of mind over 

 matter, and the freedom of personal choice harmoniously 

 embodied which make the works of art. Beauty, that 

 is to say, is not only the actual, but the inevitable 

 consequence of this process ; beauty which is " Nature's 

 stamp of approval on harmonious individuality." In 

 this sense, therefore, we can surely say that living crea- 

 tures take a hand in the creation of their own beauty. 



