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If, on his way to the Art Museum, he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.
But ancient art, as a proud creation of the genius of man, demands additional notice. We wish to know to what heights the Romans soared in that great realm of beauty and grace and majesty. The aesthetic glories of art are among the grandest triumphs of civilization, and attest as well as demand no ordinary force of genius.
It also has the purpose of creating an effect in the mind of the soldier himself. The art in military life is, indeed, to give the impression of power to all who must be affected by the exhibition of force. All social life contains elements that appeal to the aesthetic sense, and these aesthetic elements are by no means solely ornamental.
The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.
Hence it falls within the circle of life where questions of prudence, justice, and good-will are paramount. But, because moral considerations must thus in the nature of the case take precedence over purely aesthetic considerations, this proves nothing whatsoever concerning the way in which this precedence should be established.
If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but self-subsisting feelings, each knowing itself, they would be insulated for ever; no spirit could ever survey, recognise, or compare them; and mind would have disappeared in the analysis of mind. These considerations might enable us, I think, to mark the just frontier of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology.
Finlay a place amongst men of letters, and I would do as much for Hobbes, Mommsen, Sainte-Beuve, Samuel Johnson, and Aristotle. Great thinking without great feeling will make great literature. It is not for their emotional qualities that we value many of our most valued books. And when it is for an emotional quality, to what extent is that emotion aesthetic?
Not that we ever find a systematic idolizing of all that is classic merely. Far from it. Modern writers are not neglected. In this particular a genuine service is done to critical literature. It often seems as if literary lecturers and historians were attacked by an aesthetic presbyopy. For them the present age never produces anything worth even a passing remark.
Teresa, "The soul, in thus searching for its God, feels with a very lively and very sweet pleasure that is is fainting almost quiet away." Still more striking is the language of aesthetic emotion. Philosopher and poet have but one expression for the universal experience. Says Keats in the "Ode to a Nightingale:"
At last the need for coarser aesthetic satisfactions arose in him. "Provinder," he whispered, drawing near to the Inn. "Cold sirlion for choice. And nut-brown brew and wheaten bread." The nearer he came to the place the more he liked it. The windows on the ground floor were long and low, and they had pleasing red blinds.
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