effect to numerous vague associations. It is obvious, moreover, that the higher and more complex preceptions involve distinct elements of memory. Thus, for example, in the appreciation of typical beauty, the mind has to recall, faintly at least, innumerable individual instances of the pleasing qualities represented. In the complex emotions called forth by a work of art, the action of memory is still more conspicuous. A landscape-painting, or a lyric poem produces its effect on the mind by means of a faint revival of numberless pulsations of emotion which have become associated with certain visible colours and scenes, or with certain tones and cadences, and forms of language. With respect to all these regions of feeling, one may see that advance in knowledge and mental culture, by adding to the number and range of the remembered or representative elements, extends the area of aesthetic enjoyment. Complex and refined aesthetic enjoyments are distinguished from simple and crude ones by being less concentrated, more extended over the mental area, and consequently, of a longer duration.

This increase of retentive power produces two effects on æsthetic pleasure which deserve special consideration. I refer to the enlarged scope afforded for emotional Comprehension and for vivid. Imagination. The proper enjoyment of a work of art depends partly, of course, on purely intellectual qualities. Also it involves as we have seen, a high degree of that refinement of feeling of which we have been speaking. In addition to this, it is limited by the number and variety of ideal or representative feelings potentially contained in the mind. With the progress of culture, a sensuous sign, such as a colour or a verbal sound, acquires an expanded emotional meaning, suggesting ideal forms of pleasurable feeling, to which the uncultivated mind is a stranger. Hence, the artist is able with a given material to convey a vastly larger number of distinct pleasurable ideas. In all the higher æsthetic enjoyments, notably those of poetry, this rapid and extended emotional inference is very conspicuous. For example, the pleasures flowing from a sympathetic reading of another's feelings involve a high degree of this emotional inference, being the results of numerous and rapid revivals of pleasurable idea corresponding to our own past experiences, and possibly to those of our progenitors.

The influence of the growth of the mind's retentive power on the Imaginative ingredients of æsthetic pleasure is scarcely less important than that which we have just considered. The uncultivated mind, owing to the paucity of its ideas, remains in a blank, wonder

ing stupor before the vast majority of natural phenomena. Culture by multiplying our recollections, increases our conceptive power, and enables us to imagine unbounded regions of possible existence and experience, where only a slender thread of certainty is attainable. Accordingly, the accumulation of ideas vastly enlarges the region of pleasurable imaginative activity. Out of its numerous emotional experiences a cultivated mind is able to fill up the most vaguely suggested regions with multitudes of grateful ideas; and this effect, like that of emotional comprehension, is one chief element in the pleasures of all the higher forms of art. The dim and vast, the hidden and remote, whether suggested in visible space or in the invisible regions of another's mind, have a peculiar value for a mind well stored with pleasurable conceptions. In this manner, a high degree of mental development, by producing a vast increase of imaginative activity, serves to widen the area of æsthetic delight, surrounding every mode of clear, pleasurable perception with an additional semi-luminous zone of pleasurable fancy.*

By help of these two criteria of feeling, namely, its degree of refinement and its depth or complexity, one could, perhaps, construct a hierarchy of the aesthetic pleasures. In the main, these two standards would afford the same result. It is obvious that the multiplication of distinct emotional elements by means of the discriminative and assimilative activities, supplies the materials for more extended groups of revived ideal feelings. At the same time, the influence of these two conditions would need to be estimated separately. Thus, for example, the growth of refinement may go on in the case of purely sensuous gratifications without any appreci able increase in the range of ideal feelings revived.

In constructing this hierarchy, one would need, first of all, to classify the several known forms of each order of æsthetic susceptibility in separate and less comprehensive scales, and secondly, to arrange the whole of these orders themselves in one comprehensive scale. The first of these series would be mainly determined by the degree

It may be remarked that this conception of the highest type of æsthetic enjoyment corresponds in a certain measure to a definition of the beautiful proposed by Hemsterhuis. "Beauty," he says, "is that which affords us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time." Culture tends to increase the number of pleasurable ideas both by differentiation and by aggregation. Hemsterhuis seems to be right in emphasizing the number of elements in the higher æsthetic appreciation, but wrong in supposing that the mere intellectual activity is the cause of the pleasure.

of refinement, the second, by the degree of complexity. Thus, for example, one might define approximately the highest type of sensibility to colour, as that which is capable of the largest number of distinct appreciations. On the other hand, one would place highest in the comprehensive scale of aesthetic susceptibilities those sentiments which are built up of the largest number of ideal elements.

In connection with this attempt to group æsthetic pleasures according to an ideal standard, it would be desirable to show that many of the higher and more complex susceptibilities tend to acquire the character of permanent æsthetic appetites, so that no object can seem to possess a high degree of beauty which does not directly satisfy them. It should be remembered that the susceptibility of an emotion of frequent gratification depends, in a large degree, on the number and variety of its elements. Hence, the more highly differentiated and the more widely aggregated a feeling, the greater its recurring power. As an example of such emotional predominance, the reader may take the sympathetic sensibilities, which tend more and more, with the progress of moral and intellectual, as well as of æsthetic culture, to become an essential ingredient in all æsthetic appreciation, only those objects appearing beautiful which minister, whether directly or indirectly, a common harmonious delight. Thus, as culture advances, one finds that such indirectly personal enjoyments as are afforded by the sight of a prize ox or even of a splendid heap of game take a lower and lower place in the aesthetic class.

By this route, then, one might hope to arrive at another and more precise standard of artistic value. According to this conception, a work of art is to be ranked as of a high quality when its several features correspond to sentiments which are refined and complex, which involve a large number of distinct intellectual and emotional activities, and which are the product of numberless, far-reaching, and oft-repeated emotional influences. It may be well to add, however, that this criterion of aesthetic value must always be supplemented by that which is supplied by permanence and universality. A style of art which aims uniformly and exclusively at gratifying the most refined elements of taste and at awakening the most complex sentiments would, no doubt, rank very high; yet it would be lacking in the valuable qualities of simplicity and natural force. Such emotions as the joyous elation which is begotten of morning light, dewy air, and odorous field, or the pulsations of tender affection excited by beautiful youth, have a high æsthetic value as old, widely-diffused, and permanent attributes of

human nature. Moreover, these simple and universal feelings have an intensity, if not a volume, greatly superior to that of the more elaborate sentiments. Hence a due admixture of these primitive and universal gratifications has always been recognized as a valuable ingredient in art. The tendency of refinement of feeling is to produce the thin and meagre enjoyment of a fastidious taste; and this loss should be compensated for, as much as possible, by the retention of those more elementary sensibilities, the satisfaction of which has a peculiar intensity of its own.

Thus we appear to have gathered materials for a fairly complete definition of art. A work is artistic which, through impressions of the eye or of the ear, gratifies some pleasurable susceptibility, and satisfies some universal laws of pleasurable impression; highly artistic, when it affords a large number of such pleasurable impressions, further, when these feelings are either permanent emotional needs of the human heart, or refined and complex products of mental development.

Such, then, is our first rough estimate of the objective value of art. It may, perhaps, be objected that this conception has no practical worth, since each successive development of art concerns itself, not with the tendencies of things in the past or future, but with the actual needs of the present, or at most, of the proximate generation. To this it may be answered that the mode of measuring pleasure thus faintly outlined is only intended to be an ultimate principle, a final appeal in all questions of æsthetic value. The artist must of course be guided also by considerations of relative and subjective value; that is to say, he will have to study what orders of feeling and idea make up the artistic temperament of his nation, and the reigning spirit of the age. Nevertheless, the recognition of such a final standard of worth will be a great immediate assistance even to the productive artist. For has not every artist, whether poet, painter, or musical composer, to confront a vast array of conflicting tastes even among his countrymen? and how is he to select the most worthy of existing sentiments without some such ideal measure? Moreover,. it may be said that even if the artist does not labour for posterity - which would not necessarily be irrational-he can at least try to modify existing taste in the best possible manner, so as to enlarge the area of the highest and purest mode of delight. Thus, while a study of the relative conditions of art is undoubtedly valuable to the artist, that of the absolute and permanent conditions is of a far higher value.

In the preceding suggestions we have concerned ourselves only with the first part of æsthetic theory, namely, that which discusses the fund of natural emotional susceptibility, from which all art must draw its treasure. These capacities have been regarded as existing, to some extent, independently of art, being nurtured largely by natural objects, including our fellow-beings, though dependent in their highest forms on the discipline of art. A very brief glance may now be taken at the second great branch of æsthetics, that which deals with artistic effect as something distinct from natural pleasure, that is, as a higher transformation of it through certain inherent capabilities of art itself. In other words, art has been spoken of hitherto as though it were simply a number of gratifications supplied by natural objects, re-shuffled, so to speak, in new ways, like a heap of coloured fragments of glass, which are capable only of being recombined by a single manual impulse. Now we shall have to regard it as a transformation of these natural elements by processes distinctly artistic, and akin to the action of the kaleidoscope, which, besides re-shuffling a definite number of colours, arranges them in a symmetrical order.

By means, again, of a careful review of the history of the Fine Arts from their earliest germs, one might ascertain the elements of artistic transformation, as they become conspicuous with the growth of art. Without attempting here a complete analysis of these properties, it may be said roughly, that they appear to fall into two main groups: (1) qualities of art due to its renewal of a preartistic pleasure; (2) qualities of art involved in its spontaneity, and in its independence of the limited and fixed arrangements of nature.

First of all, then, art may be viewed as a restoration by human device of a natural delight. Since this delight was originally given by some natural object, whether through the eye or through the ear, the simplest mode of restoring an absent effect would seem to be the imitative reproduction of the pleasing object. Accordingly, one finds in the crudest stages of childish and savage art this element of imitation as a conspicuous source of artistic effect; further, all thinkers upon art, from Aristotle downwards, have recognized in this faculty of piunois one chief, if not essential, attribute of artistic production.

The briefest reflection on the nature of artistic imitation shows, however, that it takes its rise in many springs of human impulse, some of which are quite independent of proper artistic intention.