Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/123

108 them, due, so to speak, to their single-heartedness, which may make their form a single harmonious expression. On the other hand, any attempt to confer upon them mere decorative beauty inconsistent with their purpose would at once make them positively ugly.

This gives us the clue to a reasonable estimate of the current idea that ugliness is all of man’s making and not of nature’s. It seems in principle to rest upon the fact we have noted, that man alone has in him the capacity for the attempt to achieve pure expression for its own sake, in other words, beauty, and therefore he is much more likely to produce the appearance of the combined attempt and failure which we have seen to be the essence of the ugly.

One further ambiguity in a common phrase seems worth clearing up. Is beauty the aim of art? Is “art for art’s sake” a watchword that conveys a truth?

I hope that the line we have taken shows its value by making it easy to deal with these ideas. Beauty, we have seen,