No: the particular meaning I use to-day is that which artists use when they talk of painting or of music. To see things, near or far, in their true perspective and proportions; to judge them through distance; and fetching them back, to reproduce them in art so proportioned comparatively, so rightly adjusted, that they combine to make a particular and just perspective: that is to give things their true Values.
Suppose yourself reclining on a bank on a clear day, looking up into the sky and watching the ascent of a skylark while you listen to his song. That is a posture in which several poets of repute have placed themselves from time to time: so we need not be ashamed of it. Well, you see the atmosphere reaching up and up, mile upon mile. There are no milestones planted there. But, wave on wave perceptible, the atmosphere stretches up through indeterminate distances; and according as your painter of the sky can translate these distances, he gives his sky what is called Value.
You listen to the skylark's note rising, spiral by spiral, on 'the very jet of earth':
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardour, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day:
and you long for the musical gift to follow up and up the delicate degrees of distance and thread the notes back as the bird ascending drops them—on a thread, as it were, of graduated beads, half music and half dew:
That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew,
The farther going more to dwell
And wing our green to wed our blue;
But whether note of joy, or knell,
Not his own Father-singer knew;
Nor yet can any mortal tell,
Save only how it shivers through;
The breast of us a sounded shell,
The blood of us a lighted dew.
Well in music, in painting, this graduating which gives right proportion and, with proportion, a sense of distance, of atmosphere, is called Value. Let us, for a minute or two, assay this particular meaning of Value upon life and literature, and first upon life, or, rather upon one not negligible facet of life.
I suppose that if an ordinary man of my age were asked which has better helped him to bear the burs of life—religion or a sense of humour—he would, were he quite honest, be gravelled for an answer. Now the best part of a sense of humour, as you know without my telling you, consists in a sense of proportion; a habit, abiding and prompt at command, of seeing all human, affairs in their just perspective, so that its happy possessor at once perceives anything odd or distorted or overblown to be an excrescence, a protuberance, a swelling, literally a humour: and the function of Thalia, the Comic Spirit, as you may read in Meredith's "Essay on Comedy," is just to prick these humours. I will but refer you to Meredith's "Essay," and here cite you the words of an old schoolmaster:
It would seem to be characteristic of the same mind to appreciate the beauty of ideas in just proportion and harmonious relation to each other, and the absurdity of the same ideas when distorted or brought into incongruous juxtaposition. The exercise of this sense of humour … compels the mind to form a picture to itself, accompanied by pleasurable emotion; and what is this but setting the imagination to work, though in topsy-turvy fashion? Nay, in such a case, imagination plays a double part, since it is only by instantaneous comparison with ideal fitness and proportion that it can grasp at full force the grotesqueness of their contraries[2].
Let us play with an example for one moment. A child sees such an excrescence, such an offence upon proportion, in an immoderately long nose. He is apt to call attention to it on the visage of a visitor: it intrigues him in Perrault's 'Prince Charming' and many a fairy tale: it amuses him in Lear's "Book of Nonsense":