Darwin as much as said, “Beauty has been the gleam which the instinct of the race has followed in its upward development.  Beauty has been the genius of Evolution.”  Thus science has lent its authority to philosophy.  The idea is charming.  In its power it is irresistible.  It certainly dominates modern literary art, being the principal dynamic of Ibsen and Bernard Shaw and all their followers.

It is a very important matter.  There can be nothing more important in literary art, and indeed in one’s articulate conception of the meaning of life, than the notion of what is beautiful.  What if this conception be narrow, what if it be simply a generalisation, a generalisation from too few observations?  What if the wish were father to the thought?

The only test of philosophy and art is experience.  And it is the wanderer, the life-explorer without irrelevant preoccupations, who is the true naturalist, collecting experiences and making maps for spiritual eyes.  What then does the wanderer note?

First, that the knowledge of the beautiful is an affirmation.  Something in the soul suddenly rises up and ejaculates “Yes” to some outside phenomenon, and then he is aware that he is looking at Beauty.  As he gazes he knows himself in communion with what he sees—­sometimes that communion is a great joy and sometimes a great sadness.  Thus, looking at the opening of dawn he is filled with gladness, his spirits rising with the sun; he wishes to shout and to sing.  He is one with the birds that have begun singing and with all wild Nature waking refreshed after the night.  But looking out at evening of the same day over the grey sea he is failed with unutterable sorrow.

I remember how all night long in the North region, where the light does not leave the sky, I looked out at the strange beauty of the white night and felt all the desolateness of the world, all the exiledom of man upon it.  There was no lure, no temptation in that.  The Aeolian harp of the heart does not always discourse battle music, and on this night it was as if an old sad minstrel sat before me and played unendingly one plaint, the story of a lost throne, of a lost family, lost children, a lost world.  Thus a thought came to me:  “We are all the children of kings; on our spiritual bodies are royal seals.  Sometime or other we were abandoned on this beautiful garden, the world.  We expected some one to return for us; but no one came.  We lived on, and to forget homesickness devised means of pleasure, diversions, occupations, games.  Some have entirely forgotten the lost heritage and the mystery of their abandonment; their games absorbed them, they have become gamblers, they have theories of chance, their talk is all of Progress of one sort or another.  They forget the great mystery of life.  We tramps and wanderers remember.  It is our religion to remember, to count nothing as important beside the initial mystery.  For us it is sweeter to remember than to forget.  The towns would always have us forget, but in the country we always remember again.  What is beautiful is every little rite that reminds us of our mysteries.”