A Delsartean Scrap-book: Health, Personality, Beauty, House-decoration ...

of harmony, the sense of art, the language of line and curve, in the expression of beauty are only slowly recovered, if at all, by careful and conscious study.

With the gradual, and in some cases complete, removal of life from the beauty of wild nature in big cities, the loss of the daily countless impressions of beauty-of harmony of colors and stimulus to the imagination, common to a life in the woods and fields, is hardly, perhaps, appreciated in its full meaning, especially in the effect of its absence in early life when impressions of all kinds are strong. All these causes, daily and hourly at work, with habits of mind and body, cramping and mechanical conditions of work, indoor life, a restricted space and movement—all these causes can only be counteracted or mitigated in any degree by a study of the laws and expression of beauty. And therefore a work such as that of Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Russell should be especially valuable.

Few indeed are more constant and devoted exponents of this gospel of beauty of which I have spoken, and as lecturers they have done much to elucidate, and to simplify by familiar illustrations in common life, in speech, bearing, and action, and domestic decoration those principles of beauty which underlie all varieties of its manifestation in life as in art. Indeed as exponents of the system of Delsarte, they aim, I believe, to reduce the laws

of graceful movement and appropriate dramatic expression and action to almost scientific precision and definiteness.

Now, while I do not believe that the faculty for art in its positive, or creative and inventive sense, can be taught, yet on its negative side, certain principles can be laid down which would prevent at least mistakes being made.

Preaching, alone, will not save a world; and if the world insists on the adoption of conditions of life and habit, law and custom, which tell against external beauty and its enjoyment, its votaries can but wear out their lives in protest, until the arts become extinct.

But since the arts are human, and since the apple was given to Aphrodite, humanity all the world over, in all sorts and conditions own her power; and I believe the appeal to the eye is too potent, and art too involved in life itself for the satisfaction of the one in the perfection of the other ever to cease to be ardently desired.

This awakening of the sense of art, this increased sensibility to beauty-this new Renaissance-shall we call it-that we are witnessing in our time, that has been slowly and silently growing these last ten or twenty years-what is its meaning? Can it be merely owing to the increase of riches? The uninformed possession of riches generally results in the smothering of the sense of art in luxury and vulgarity. No! I be

lieve this awakening search for beauty to be but a part of another movement-a rising wave on the earth of aspiration for a fuller, freer, more humane, sympathetic and beautiful, if simple, life. A life now for the first time coming within the bounds of possibility for the many, as more and more knowledge of art and of nature and refinement becomes diffused, and, united in community of interests a command of the resources of material of life, the peoples of the earth become one kindred together.