e decoration which truly adorns, and everything adorns which enriches
the impression and pleasantly entertains the eye. There is a decorative
impulse as well as a sense for decoration. As I sit idle my stick makes
meaningless marks upon the sand; or (what is nearer to the usual origin
of ornament) I make a design out of somebody's initials, or symbolise
fantastically something lying in my thoughts. We place also one thing
upon another, the better to see and to think of two things at once.

[Sidenote: Appeal made by decoration.]

To love decoration is to enjoy synthesis: in other words, it is to have
hungry senses and unused powers of attention. This hunger, when it
cannot well be fed by recollecting things past, relishes a profusion of
things simultaneous. Nothing is so much respected by unintelligent
people as elaboration and complexity. They are simply dazed and overawed
at seeing at once so much more than they can master. To overwhelm the
senses is, for them, the only way of filling the mind. It takes
cultivation to appreciate in art, as in philosophy, the consummate value
of what is simple and finite, because it has found its pure function and
ultimate import in the world. What is just, what is delicately and
silently adjusted to its special office, and thereby in truth to all
ultimate issues, seems to the vulgar something obvious and poor. What
astonishes them is the crude and paradoxical jumble of a thousand
suggestions in a single view. As the mystic yearns for an infinitely
glutted consciousness that feels everything at once and is not put to
the inconvenience of any longer thinking or imagining, so the barbarian
craves the assault of a myriad sensations together, and feels replete
and comfortable when a sort of infinite is poured into him without ideal
mediation. As ideal mediation is another name for intelligence, so it is
the condition of elegance. Intelligence and elegance naturally exist
together, since they both spring from a subtle sense for absent and
eventual processes. They are sustained by experience, by nicety in
foretaste and selection. Before ideality, however, is developed, volume
and variety must be given bodily or they cannot be given at all. At that
earlier stage a furious ornamentation is the chief vehicle for beauty.

[Sidenote: Its natural rights.]

That the ornate may be very beautiful, that in fact what is to be
completely beautiful needs to be somehow rich, is a fact of experience
whic