Observe the bearing of another consideration upon the truth of this conclusion. The earth has evidently not changed in scenery since ancient times, and yet it is admitted by all competent judges that love, and therefore presumably knowledge, of the picturesque belongs only to the moderns. The view is doubtless correct, although there is a tendency to exaggerate it. It is difficult to believe that the Greeks, a race which peopled every lakelet and stream and wood with nymphs; which had its grottoes, groves, fountains, and mysterious caves; the race in whose contests the gods themselves took part, the canopy of heaven, the earth, and the Plutonian regions the scene of their exploits, should not have been gifted with some love for the picturesque, as we know them to have been supremely for the beautiful. And coming closely in their footsteps on earth were a people who are seen in the sunburst of art which shone from Christianity to be so highly gifted with the sense of the picturesque, that we cannot suppose them to have been suddenly endowed with it as a concomitant of the new faith. All that can be said with certainty is that the love of the picturesque, to the degree in which we now perceive it to be manifested, is an essentially modern development. Whence comes the fact, nature having remained essentially the same, that nature must contain the beautiful independent of the seeing eye. Certain grand expressions in nature have been, as the record shows, appreciated from the earliest times, when men left their impress in literature. Yet it remained until quite modern times for men fully to perceive the picturesque,-one of the phases of the beautiful.

What constitutes the picturesque has long been fruitful matter of discussion. Ruskin ascribes it to ruggedness of line and surface, and some other writers to perception of decay. That neither of these views is tenable can easily be settled by any reader for himself by many illustrations that can be summoned from his own experience. That the picturesque is often

associated with broken lines and surface, and also with ruins, taking decay in that sense only, is undeniable; but that these elements are essential to it can be disproved by the commonest observation. A pretty girl may be highly picturesque, and surely she has nothing about her like broken lines and surfaces, or ruin and decay. We have ourselves seen, in an old orange grove planted by the early Spanish settlers in Florida, and grown wild with arching and interlacing boughs, a high exemplification of the picturesque, when surely the lines and surfaces were not markedly broken, and the luxuriance forbade the idea of ruin or decay.

In fact, despite what Ruskin says of himself,—that he never enjoys nature so much as when perfectly wild, remote from suggestion of the presence of man,-it is not clear that he does not deceive himself when we recall that scenes in which the idea of the picturesque plays the greatest part are suggestive of the presence of life. It is to the point of the picturesque as a phase of the beautiful that reference is made. Undoubtedly, there are many scenes on earth in which soaring, snow-clad mountain-peaks blend with the sky in amethystine tint, where the beautiful is engendered in association with the grand, the awful, or the sublime. But it is not of the beautiful or of blended effects that we are speaking, but strictly of the picturesque. It would be well, in passing, however, to note that even in these it is still life that is summoned before the mind, only that, in this case, it is not life animal but life spiritual that rises into view.

The picturesque, on the contrary, relates only to earthly life, the pleasant highways and byways of human existence. One could not extract a sentiment of the picturesque out of a landscape on the moon. Wide expanse of plain would set off craggy escarpments of mountain ranges in the portentous light and shadow of a region without atmosphere. Over the whole waste, blasted by alternate heat and cold, would be no sign of

life, nor blade of grass, nor smallest living thing. But suppose, instead of that, we choose for our scene the Rhine. Project into it a bold promontory, rising high above the stream. It presents form and color, light and shade, and yet something is wanting to the completely picturesque. Crown it with a castle, a monastery, or with a simple hut, and it becomes more picturesque, because the association with life becomes more extended. And so it will be found true of the whole sphere of the picturesque. Why should the Rhine be more picturesque than the Hudson, but that its shores have been associated with the life of barbaric and civilized man for centuries?

If the picturesque has now been satisfactorily demonstrated to exist, from having been shown to be a discovery of comparatively modern times, no one will be prepared to deny the real existence of that which must include it-the beautiful.

The beautiful, being an ideal, excludes the presence of criticism. But as, of course, there is, in reality, so far as human experience goes, nothing ideally beautiful, we are constrained to speak of that which we know as the nearest approach to our ideal as the beautiful. With this understanding we may define the beautiful as that which gives to contemplation unalloyed pleasure.

The average human being, adult or child, has far greater capacity for synthesis than for analysis, and hence it follows that he is constantly mistaken as to the character of his emotions. In point of fact, so difficult is it from the complexity of feelings to analyze them, that the majority of the world is constantly deceiving itself about what it imagines itself to know best. Pictures of weirdness, power, awfulness, or sublimity are constantly supposed to be revelations of beauty pure and simple, whereas the emotion experienced is often shown by its source to be highly complex, compounded, on some occasions, far less of beauty than of other elements. The imagination is excited by

many things besides beauty, and the mind often experiences under the stimulus an exaltation derived from sources in which beauty is quite subordinated. Nowhere is this error of judg ment so palpable as when shown in expression of admiration for the beauty of the dead. Death is so repugnant to life, that the dead cannot be beautiful. The emotion excited in the mind, especially by the dead who have been loved, clouds the judgment as to the character of the emotion experienced. With the lost lines of petty care, the face sometimes assumes an expression of nobility, nay of majesty itself. But the satisfaction thence derived is not from the perception of the beautiful; it is because the sublime has entered upon the scene. Needless it ought to be to say that this awful sublimity is incompatible with expression of the purely beautiful. The real character of the sentiment awakened by the presence of death was never better expressed than in the lines of Burton :

Here lies a common man. His horny hands,
Crossed meekly as a maid's upon his breast,
Show marks of toil, and by his general dress
You judge him to have been an artisan.
Doubtless, could all his life be written out,
The story would not thrill nor start a tear;
He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time,
And now rests peacefully, with upturned face,
Whose look belies all struggles in the past.
A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seen
The greatest of the earth go stately by,
While shouting multitudes beset the way,
With less of awe. The gap between a king
And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd,

Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now
Betwixt us two, this dead one and myself.
Untitled, dumb and deedless, yet he is
Transfigured by a touch from out the skies,
Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace,
The strange and sudden Dignity of Death.

In short, the beautiful is that which, whether in nature or art, possesses perfection of parts harmonized by unity. The picturesque, on the other hand, is that lower degree of beauty

which, although lacking unity, still possesses such pleasuregiving elements as to gratify the eye. Is it not undeniable that the picturesque is more soft and tender in its action upon the sensibilities than is the purely beautiful? Is not the beautiful, as nearly ideal as we know it, still a thing so cold and lofty that it does not affect to tenderness as does the picturesque? Painless perception must be, as little complex as is possible, for them to represent truly the beautiful and the picturesque.

Having now discussed the principal traits of the beautiful and the picturesque, it will be the most gallant thing to reserve for the following chapter the subject of the beauty of the fair sex.