Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/537

 SUGGESTIONS ON ESTHETIC. 521 and ask what common relevance justifies the connecting of the items in this sentence Break, break, break At the foot of thy crags, Sea ! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Can never come back to me. Why the "but"? What makes the utterance rational except a reference to the inscrutable established constitution of the universe ? And a question of great moment here arises. What is the attitude of art in face of this great mystery ? For according to the attitude will be, to a large extent, the good of art as a factor in life and character. The answer, if one endeavours to catch the drift of art at its highest, seems to be that its influence in this matter tends to be salutary. The handling of pain, in art, is by the very process that art follows made indirectly significant. Art may be imagined as speaking to us in the following words : " You see these phenomena, evil and good, which occurred, or the like of which occurred, in the real world. They are samples of the whole cosmos : they bring you face to face with the great problem ; the problem of evil. But I place them before you in such a way that the evil is neu- tralised to you while you look, for it combines with the good to make a perfect whole. In my art-work you would prefer to have the presentation of evil rather than not ? You could not dispense with it? Then in this fragment of an art- cosmos the problem of evil vanishes. How it vanishes in the real cosmos I cannot tell ; I do but present a cosmos which can so deal with these phenomena, evil and good, as to leave no problem of evil." There is a certain misconception which must be guarded against, and which may be mentioned parenthetically here. I have implied that "beauty" and "cause" are alien sub- jects. It may be objected that the scientific discovery of a cause or a natural law may arouse an aesthetic feeling ; that the proof of a theorem is often called beautiful ; and the like. I would reply that such cases seem to me perfect examples of what I have said above. The theorem of Archimedes as to the sphere and the cylinder is a good instance. Assuming, though I am no mathematician, that this may be called beautiful, I would express the reason why we call it so as follows. In a region where the quality of incommensurability seemed to be paramount, viz., as be- tween the apparently incommensurable sphere and cylinder,