SEVENTH MEETING
The Meaning of Beauty
I. Beauty is the Symbol of Completeness and Harmony:
a. This is the reason beauty delights us:
1. It pictures the aim and desire of our whole life.
b. The smallest thing can be as a universe in itself, if it be complete and harmonious, i.e., perfect:
1. A drop as well as a planet; a dog, in his way, as well as a man; a day as well as a century.
II. The Good, the True and the Beautiful Have the Same End, and Are Sought, Respectively, by Philosophy, Science and Art:
a. Philosophy seeks the whole at once, therefore can never reach that completeness.
b. Science seeks individual truths, not the moral truth, or aim:
1. Darwin, the philosophical scientist.
c. Art gives us that completeness, our aim, symbolized in a small and definite shape.
III. Genius is the Common Human Quality, Distinct from Talent:
a. The Genius differs not in kind, but in degree, from his fellows.
b. The desire for understanding and completeness, present in some measure in all, is genius.
c. The understanding in the spectator is akin to the genius in the artist.
IV. Talent is the Power of Expression:
a. To see all things as distinct wholes, impersonally.
b. The skill to portray, and to handle material.
c. Genius and talent vary in degrees of relation in different artists’ work:
1. The great idea, imperfectly executed.
2. The small idea in perfect form.
V. Art as the Symbol of Completeness and Creative Expression:
a. The sublime lie of the Symbol, truer than fact:
1. The effect of removal from life, of unreality, in relation to beauty. It seems more self-sufficient.
b. A complete vision must not take sides:
1. When art is partisan, for something, it is also against something. Complete representation.
c. Creative art gives us the joy of play, of creation:
1. Play—interplay—is the progress and will of life, and work but a name for the disagreeable but necessary part of the game.