winkling of an
eye; but the bridge is still there and, retracing our steps more
leisurely, we shall find that, viewed from within, Beauty is no less the
province of the calm reasoner and analyst. What the poet and the artist
seize upon intuitionally, he elaborates gradually, but the result is the
same in both cases; for no intuition is true which does not admit of
being expanded into a rational sequence of intelligible factors, and no
argument is true which does not admit of being condensed into that rapid
suggestion which is intuition.

Thus the impassioned artist and the calm thinker both find that the only
true Beauty proceeds naturally from the actual construction of that
which it expresses. It is not something added on as an afterthought, but
something pre-existing in the original idea, something to which that
idea naturally leads up, and which presupposes that idea as affording it
any _raison d'etre_. The test of Beauty is, What does it express? Is it
merely a veneer, a coat of paint laid on from without? Then it is indeed
nothing but a whited sepulchre, a covering to hide the vacuity or
deformity which needs to be removed. But is it the true and natural
outcome of what is beneath the surface? Then it is the index to
superabounding Life and Love and Intelligence, which is not content with
mere utilitarianism hasting to escape at the earliest possible point
from the labour of construction, as though from an enforced and
unwelcome task, but rejoicing over its work and unwilling to quit it
until it has expressed this rejoicing in every fittest touch of form and
colour and exquisite proportion that the material will admit of, and
this without departing by a hairbreadth from the original purpose of the
design.

Wherever, therefore, we find Beauty, we may infer an enormous reserve of
Power behind it; in fact, we may look upon it as the visible expression
of the great truth that Life-Power is infinite. And when the inner
meaning of Beauty is thus revealed to us, and we learn to know it as the
very fulness and overflowing of Power, we shall find that we have
gained a new standard for the guidance of our own lives. We must begin
to use this wonderful process which we have learnt from Nature. Having
learnt how Nature works--how God works--we must begin to work in like
manner, and never consider any work complete until we have carried it to
some final outcome of Beauty, whether material, intellectual, or
spiritual. Is my i