Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/529

Rh a group of pairs, etc.). But it is also the fact at an early stage, both with races and individuals, that they incline to accept pairs of items which do not completely match, as though they did match, and to feel them as beautiful. I do not attempt to say which mode of beauty, the perfectly or the imperfectly symmetrical, is historically prior.

Given this capacity to accept incomplete equivalents as though they were complete, the sense of beauty has endless possibilities open to it ; and the so-called beauty of individual expressiveness, as I understand it, is simply beauty of this developed kind.

The question at once suggests itself, how this willing acceptance of the unsymmetrical arises. The question is perhaps the most profound and perplexing in all Æsthetic. Instead of attempting to answer it here, I will for the present merely give examples of the fact; instances of the contented acceptance of inadequate equivalents, trying in each case to detect what it is that persuades the mind to act as it does. A careful examination of particular examples might perhaps be employed with advantage more frequently in dealing with aesthetic problems.

The beauty of any imitative art, say statuary, is essentially illustrative of what has been said. It is in the first place a true case of sameness in difference; to put the matter crudely, the two items that are the same are the real man and the stone statue: their difference lies in the fact that one is living flesh and the other lifeless stone. To express the matter less crudely, we have, in the case of a statue that deserves admiration, two items: the first is the quality of humanness, so far as we have previously learnt to know it (the artist can only reveal to us what we have previously, even if unawares, learnt); and the second is the statue, which, though nothing but stone, faithfully represents this quality. And the point of importance is this: to be what we call a good work of art the statue must be visibly an insufficient equivalent for a human being; it must not deceive us into thinking that a real man is there. The subtle human quality must persist onwards into the antagonistic medium of stone. There lies the secret of the welcomeness of imitative art: it must display resemblance through antagonistic difference; and Théophile Gautier hit the philosophic nail on the head in his lines on Art, beginning:—