| The Use of Beauty | |
| "Nisi Citharam" | |
| Higher Harmonies | |
| Beauty and Sanity | |
| The Art and the Country | |
| Art and Usefulness | |
| Wasteful Pleasures |
Die Realität der Dinge ist der Dinge Werk;
der Schein der Dinge ist der Menschen Werk;
und ein Gemüt, das sich am Scheine weidet,
ergötzt sich schon nicht mehr an dem, was es
empfängt, sondern an dem, was es tut.Schiller, Briefe über Ästhetik.
One afternoon, in Rome, on the way back from the Aventine, theroad-mender climbed onto the tram as it trotted slowly along, andfastened to its front, alongside of the place of the driver, a boughof budding bay.
Might one not search long for a better symbol of what we may all do byour life? Bleakness, wind, squalid streets, a car full ofheterogeneous people, some very dull, most very common; a laboriousjog-trot all the way. But to redeem it all with the pleasantness ofbeauty and the charm of significance, this laurel branch.
Our language does not possess any single word wherewith to sum up thevarious categories of things (made by nature or made by man, intendedsolely for the purpose of subserving by mere coincidence) whichminister to our organic and many-sided æsthetic instincts: the thingsaffecting us in that absolutely special, unmistakable, and hithertomysterious manner expressed in our finding them beautiful. It is ofthe part which such things—whether actually present or merelyshadowed in our mind—can play in our life; and of the influence ofthe instinct for beauty on the other instincts making up our nature,that I would treat in these pages. And for this reason I have beenglad to accept from the hands of chance, and of that road-mender ofthe tram-way, the bay laurel as a symbol of what we have no word toexpress: the aggregate of all art, all poetry, and particularly of allpoetic and artistic vision and emotion.
For the Bay Laurel—Laurus Nobilis of botanists—happens to be notmerely the evergreen, unfading pl