Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/194

174 just there, Nature, being amative, becomes playful, exuberant and ornamental.

There are some birds which, in this connection, carry upon their persons adornments so extravagant that one wonders how for so many generations they have been able to live and move and multiply, bearing such edifices upon their backs, their heads, their tails—that they were not a crushing hindrance to the necessary affairs of life. They certainly cannot have been a help; and yet—they still persist in them!

Taking, then, these natural embryonic beginnings as our starting point, I would be inclined to trace out the living value of art and ornament somewhat upon these lines: Exuberance—the emergence of beauty and adornment, in addition to the mere functional grace arising out of fitness for use—has always been going on through the whole process of creation among animate nature. We see it established in a thousand forms, not only in bird, beast and reptile, but in the vegetable world as well. The tendency of all life that has found a fair field for its development, is to play with its material—to show that it has something over and above the straight needs imposed on it by the struggle for existence, which it can spare for self-expression.

It has been lured on to these manifestations mainly by that "will to live" which underlies the attractions of sex. That exuberance is an essential feature of the evolutionary process