The part played in the efficacy of moral revolutions by the gift of seeing and making known the inner beauty of ideas, is very great. Speaking of the highest of all, it was Renan who said, profoundly: “The poetry of the lesson which makes it loved is more significant than the precept itself, abstractly taken. The originality of the work of Jesus lies not indeed in the literal acceptation of his doctrine—since that might be found entirely without leaving the teachings of the Synagogue, searching for it from the book of Deuteronomy to the Talmud — but in having, by his preaching, made felt the poetry of his precept, that is, its inner beauty.”

Dim will be the glory of those epochs or communions which despise the aesthetic bearing of their life or teaching. The Christian asceticism, which only knew how to picture one face of the ideal, excluded from its concept of perfection all which makes life pleasant, refined, beautiful. Its narrow spirit brought it about that man's untamable instinct for liberty, coming back in one of those irresistible reactions of the human spirit, gave birth,

in the Italy of the Renaissance, to a type of civilization which considered moral worth a delusion and put faith only in the virtue of a strong or gracious exterior. That Puritanism which persecuted all beauty and all that is select or choice; that shuddered at the chaste nudity of statues; that made a very affectation of what is ugly in its manners, in its dress, in its speech; that sad sect, which, from the English Parliament imposed its will to prohibit all festivities that showed gaiety, and cut any tree that bore flowers—tended, when joined with virtue, to divorce virtue from all thought of beauty. It was a shadow of the tomb of which England has not yet entirely rid itself, which still lasts in the least amiable manifestations of its customs and its religion. Macaulay declared that he preferred the coarse “casket of lead” in which the Puritans guarded their treasure of liberty to the elegant box of carving in which the court of Charles II stored its refinements. But as neither liberty nor virtue need be guarded in a casket of lead, much more for the education of humanity than all Puritan asceticisms will remain the grace of the antique ideal, the harmonious teachings of Plato, and that movement, free and charming, with which Athens took and lifted to its lips the cup of life.

The perfection of human morality would be to cast the spirit of charity in the moulds of Grecian elegance. And that sweet harmony had once in the world a passing realization. It was when the word of newborn Christianity came to Greek colonies in Macedonia with Saint Paul; to Thessaly and Philippi the Evangel, still pure, informed the soul of those refined and spiritual communities, in whom the seal of Hellenic culture maintained an enchanting native distinction. One might have hoped then that the two ideals most lofty that the world had known were going now to be united for all time. In the epistolary style of Saint Paul lingers a trace of that moment when charity was being Hellenized. But that sweet union did not last. The harmony and serenity of the Pagan conception of life was left each day more distant by the new idea which was already marching to the conquest of the world. But to conceive of a way in which once more a step in advance might be shown for the moral perfectionment of humanity, one would have to dream that the Christian ideal again were reconciled with the serene and luminous joy of ancient times, and that again the Evangel was being spread in Philippi and Thessaly.

To cultivate good taste should mean not only to perfect the external form of culture, to develop an artistic attitude, and with exquisite superfluity some elegance of civilization. Good taste “is the strong check-rein of the critical judgment.” Martha was able to call it like a second conscience, which sees us right and brings us back to the light when the first grows obscure or hesitating; and a delicate sense of beauty is for Bagehot as a helpmate of unerring tact in life and of perfect dignity in manners. “The education of good taste,” said he, “favours the growth of good sense, which is our necessary viewpoint for the complexities of civilized life. If ever you see such education united in the mind of individuals or societies with any extravagance either of moral or of sentiment, it will be because in such cases it has been cultivated as an isolated, exclusive quality, so rendering impossible the effect of moral perfectionment which it might have brought about in a manner of culture in which no faculty of the mind is developed out of relation to the others.” In a soul which has been the object of harmonious and perfect culture, the inner grace and fineness of the sentiment of the beautiful will be the same thing with strength and straightness of the reason. Thus Taine points out that in the grand works of ancient architecture, beauty is but sensible manifestation of strength, and elegance the outer appearance of solidity: “The same lines of the Parthenon which delight the view with harmonious proportions, content the intelligence with their promise of durability.”

There is some organic relation, some natural and close sympathy, which connects the perversions of the will and feeling with the falsities and crudities of bad taste. If it were given to us to penetrate into the mysterious labyrinth of the soul, to reconstruct the intimate story of souls in the past, in order to discover the formula of their definite moral natures, it would be an interesting object of study to determine what, in the refined perversity of a Nero, corresponds to the germ of a monstrous histrionism left in the soul of that sanguinary comedian by the affected rhetoric of Seneca. And when one calls to mind the oratory of the French Convention and detects a rhetorical perversion everywhere apparent like the feline fur of Jacobinism, it is impossible not to connect like the radii that part from one centre, like the signs of an identical insanity, the extravagance of taste, the vertigo of all moral sentiment, and the fanatical limitation of the reason.

Undoubtedly there is no more certain result of the aesthetic sense than that which teaches us to distinguish as relative the good and the true and the beautiful, and accept some possibility of beauty in evil and error. Yet one need not neglect this truth, definitively true, by believing in some sympathetic connection between all these lofty objects of the soul and considering each one of them as but the starting- point, not the only one, but still one, whence it is possible to go to a meeting with the others.

The notion, then, of a higher accord between good taste and the moral sense is therefore true, as well in the spirit of individuals as of societies. For what concerns these last, that accord may have its example in the relation affirmed by Rosenkranz to exist between liberty and the moral order, on the one hand, and the beauty of the human form which results from the development of races, on the other. That typical beauty reflects, for the Hegelian thinker, the ennobling effect of liberty; for slavery makes ugly at the same time that it degrades, while the consciousness of their harmonious development impresses the outward seal of beauty on races that are free.

In the characters of peoples, the gifts derived from fine taste, the mastery of gracious form, the delicate power to interest, the virtue of making ideas likeable, go with the genius of propaganda—that is to say, the mighty gift of universality.

Certain it is that to the possession of these chosen attributes may be referred the meaning of the word human, which the French spirit is quick to apply to all it chooses out and commends. Ideas grow strong and speedy wings, not in the cold bosom of abstractions, but in the warm and luminous air of actual shape. Their superior diffusion, their greater prevalence at times, result because the Graces have bathed them in their light. And just so, in the evolution of life itself, those enchanting outward signs of nature which in seeming represent only the gift of superfluous caprice—music, the painted plumage of birds, the corolla of flowers, their perfume —are as advertisement to the insect that bears the fecund pollen. They have played, amid the elements of the struggle for life, a function of great realism, in that, showing a superior motive, a reason for preference, to the love instinct, they have caused to survive in every species those beings that are best endowed with beauty over all the others.

For one who has instinctive love of beauty, there is indeed a certain kind of mortification in stooping to defend it by arguments that are based on any other reason or principle than that impossible and disinterested love for it which satisfies a fundamental impulse of any rational being. But unfortunately this motive has lost its empire over a vast number of men, to whom it is necessary to teach a due respect for a love they do not share by showing them what are the relations which connect it with other classes of human interest.