THE MEANING OF THE ESTHETIC IMPULSE. 



231 



yourself involved in terms of another of them, so you cannot 

 practise one without practising another. Croce points out 

 that the theoretic and the practical activities are not in fact 

 separable. 



Now for a brief word of practical suggestion — which cannot 

 be separated from the theoretical. The importance of educating 

 the sense of the beautiful becomes even more obvious than 

 before. Men must learn to understand the beauty that is all 

 around them. Because most of us are not artists we must 

 make use of the eyes of those who have had more of the aesthetic 

 intuition than we have, and who have given permanence to their 

 intuition through technique. It is fundamental to Croce's 

 view that when we look at a picture, listen to a symphony, 

 read a book or poem, we are really re-creating for ourselves the 

 artist's intuition. He has made it easy for us to do this because 

 he has eliminated, selected, emphasized, in order to give his 

 intuition full play, free from distracting complexities that 

 bewilder the untrained mind. We must, therefore, teach men 

 to see beauty first, and then try to make them understand what 

 beauty is, and why we find a thing beautiful because it has 

 a meaning to us. An attitude of contempt for the beautiful is 

 as irreligious as one of contempt for the good or the true. 



The Beautiful should play a large part in our religious teaching. 

 If Croce is right in saying that ugliness is failure to express an 

 intuition, what a torrent of ugliness must flow from our pulpits ! 

 But one could forgive mere failure to express, perhaps, if there 

 was an attempt to express anything at all there in the way of 

 teaching about the nexus between beauty and truth and goodness, 

 and the Love in which they are made one. I firmly believe 

 we shall never get the average man who has a real but undeveloped 

 aesthetic and logical and moral faculty, and who cannot go very 

 far along the one or other road for lack of power or opportunity, 

 to understand much about the Christian idea of God without 

 some teaching about beauty and truth as well as goodness. 

 At present he does get so deadly sick of being told to be good. 

 But if he learns something about God as the Supreme Artist, 

 and why it is sensible to call Him so ; if he begins to understand 

 that, just as you follow the intuition of an artist in his pictures, 

 so you can follow the intuition of God — His knowledge of Reality 

 as Love, in His creation ; then he is likely to take a good deal 

 more interest in religion in general, and in the teaching of 

 Christianity in particular. Specially will he realize that as the 



