“Why,” asked Garsted, “do you fail to divorce the sense of beauty from even the vilest thing you saw?”
“That I can’t understand,” said Quincy.
“You don’t seem to know what the sense of beauty means.”
“Let me see if I can figure it out.” Quincy knit his brow, and his blue eyes softened. It was as if he had spiritually relaxed, instinctively aware that in this way one can receive.
“Perhaps,” he groped on, “perhaps, when I feel beauty, I am really feeling a sense of welcome. A welcome of the spirit.”
“Good!” cried Garsted. “And when do we welcome? Now, look out for your answer! No sentimentalism. Hypothetically, we welcome when we are charitable, altruistic, Christian. But actually—”
“When we want, I guess.”
“We feel a sense of welcome, when we feel a sense of one-ness. Is that not so? Well—now we’re at the kernel. Beauty is nothing but a sense of welcome within, that we transfer onto an object, because the impulse of life is to transfer. A sense of harmony, in other words.”
“A sense of harmony with filthy hovels and cruel skyscrapers!”
“Absolutely. Something in them is in you,—is truth. You feel that vaguely, through the filth and the stolen decoration. And you call all of it beautiful.”