Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/792

674 could have been made beautiful, especially if—in the truest sense—it had been made more intense. But it would have been the intensity, and not the fact, which was beautiful. The accurate definition of an idea is beautiful—as in Spinoza. The accurate solution of a problem is beautiful-—which doubtless explains why Euclid was included among the humanities. And which obviously suggests defining beauty as the shortest distance between two points. But there is also the functional side to beauty, and fortunately Mr Murry has given a very fine instance of it, which I quote from Still Life to illustrate the psychology of form:

"Above them Anne began to sing, low enough to be singing to herself. She could hear that they were not talking, and she crooned. But the house was so still, beneath the regular beat of the rain between the gusts, that they could hear her when her voice rose above a low humming. Neither knew what she was singing.

Does Anne often sing like that?' said Dennis, almost whispering.

How do you mean, "like that"?' Maurice [Anne's lover] hardly understood the question. Then something familiar in the sound came vaguely into his memory. 'I don't know. Yes, she does sometimes. But not often At least, I don't think so I don't know.

It is, quite plainly, the functional value which counts here. Mr Murry has given us a mechanism of beauty. A programme is officially announced; a blare of trumpets has been sounded. Similarly in Macbeth when the porter scene follows the murder scene this is no documentary coup, but a purely functional one. Writing in the Dostoevsky tradition, however, one underrates this really primary quality of art, and—in Mr Murry's case, at least—attains it too seldom.

The making of this lengthy distinction, I feel, is justified in that it attempts to get at the exact quality of diffuseness which makes Mr Murry's books a bit dissatisfying.