presented in music,
and thus glorified and adorned, showing at least that it can readily
be made to appear beautiful if it does not in itself possess beauty.
Those who think of war as related to play also connect it with art.
Nicolai (79), who condemns war, says that it is when war as an
instinctive action is no longer useful, but is performed for its own
sake that it becomes beautiful.

We cannot undertake to enumerate all the aesthetic qualities of war,
or to show all the relations of the aesthetic aspects to other motives
of war in detail, since to do so would mean to work out some of the
fundamental principles of aesthetics. We may begin, however, by saying
that war as a whole, as a movement in which there is complete
organization of social forces shows already the marks of aesthetic
experience and of art. As such a unification of interest in a strong
and uninhibited movement, as a cooerdinated expression of deep desires,
a multiplicity of action with a unity of purpose, so to speak, war is
aesthetic in form although to mention such very general qualities does
not go very far toward characterizing an object.

In its meaning as _tragedy_ war contains and exerts a strong aesthetic
appeal. With all its horrors, war fascinates the mind. As fate, death,
history it inspires awe, and creates a sense of the inevitableness of
events and of the play of transcendental and inexorable forces in
human life. When, under any influence, these feelings appear as an
accepting and willing of evil, we have the tragic movement as we find
it in art. The death _motif_ in war is the center of a variety of
states which are ecstatic and have aesthetic quality. The religion of
valor, the passion that is aroused by abandoning oneself to fate, the
absolute devotion of service are aesthetic in form as experience,
whatever else they may be. The relation of these motives to love and
to the reproductive impulses has often been noticed. Devotion and
death appear as beautiful; their representation in art is in part a
recognition of this fact; in part it is an effort to transform them
into the forms of the aesthetic. Art celebrates, but also creates,
this luxury of feeling, and war also in its own dramatic movement
transforms ugly and plain facts of life by including them in ecstatic
states, and surrounding them with glory.

The ideal of glorified death plays a large part in the spirit of war.
In war the fear of death is not only in great part still