uld seek to come
into "original relation" with the universe, freshly for ourselves. So
we must return upon our individual consciousness, and thus
determine what is vitally significant to us. For the man who would
appreciate beauty, it is not a question between this or that "school"
in art, whether the truth lies with the classicists or the romanticists; it
is not a question of this or that subject or method to the exclusion of
all others. Beauty may be anywhere or everywhere. It is our task and
joy to find it, wherever it may be. And we shall find it, if we are able
to recognize it and we hold ourselves responsive to its multitudinous
appeal.

The conception of beauty which limits its manifestation to one kind
of experience is so far false and leads to mischievous acceptances
and narrowing rejections. We mistake the pretty for the beautiful
and so fail of the true value of beauty; we are blind to the
significance which all nature and all life, in the lowest and
commonest as in the highest and rarest, hold within them. "If
beauty," says Hamerton, "were the only province of art, neither
painters nor etchers would find anything to occupy them in the foul
stream that washes the London wharfs." By beauty here is meant the
merely agreeable. Pleasing the river may not be, to the ordinary man;
but for the poet and the painter, those to whom it is given to see with
the inner eye, the "foul stream" and its wharfs may be lighted with
mysterious and tender beauty.

"Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning.

. . . . .

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!"

And Whistler, by the witchery of his brush and his needle, has
transmuted the confusion and sordidness and filth of this
Thames-side into exquisite emotion. The essence of beauty is harmony, but
that harmony is not to be reduced to rule and measure. In the very
chaos of the Locomotive Works we may feel beauty; in the thrill
which they communicate we receive access of power and we _are,_
more largely, more universally. The harmony which is beauty is that
unity