t
nature of beauty, we are in a position to understand what the spirit
of art must be, whose business it is to re-create this beauty in terms
of personality. The idea of beauty itself is profoundly personal
even before art touches it, since it is one of the three primordial
ideas with which every conscious soul sets forth.

But it is not only personal. It is also objective and impersonal. For
it is not only the reaction of a particular soul to its own universe;
it is also felt, in the rare moments when the apex-thought of the
complex vision is creating its world rhythm, to be nothing less
than the vision of the immortals.

Art, therefore, which is the representation in terms of some
particular personal temperament, of that sense of beauty which is
the inheritance of all souls born into the world, must be profoundly
penetrated by the victorious struggle of the emotion of love with
the emotion of malice. For although the human sense of the beauty
of the world, which may be called the objective sense of the
beauty of the world, since the vision of the immortals lies behind
it, is the thing which art expresses, it must be remembered that this
sense is not an actual substance or concrete entity, but is only a
principle of selection or a process of mental reaction, in regard to
life.

The thing which may be called an actual substance is that outflowing
of the soul itself in centrifugal waves of positive and
negative vibration which we have chosen to name by the name
"emotion." This may indeed be called an actual concrete extension
of the psychic-stuff of the substantial soul. None of the three
primordial ideas resemble it in this. They are all attitudes of the
soul; not conscious enlargements or lessenings of the very stuff; of
the soul.

The idea of beauty is a particular reaction to the universe. The idea
of truth is a particular reaction to the universe. The idea of
goodness is a particular act of the will with regard to our relation
to the universe. But the emotion of love, in its struggle with the
emotion of malice, is much more than this. It is the actual outflowing
of the soul itself; and it offers, as such, the very stuff and
material out of which truth and beauty and goodness are
distinguished and discerned.

Some clear hints and intimations as to the nature of art may be
arrived at from these considerations. We at any rate reach a
general criterion, applicable to all instances, as to the presence or
absence