Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic emotion “Beauty,” it would be misleading to call by the same name the quality that does.  To make “beauty” the object of the aesthetic emotion, we must give to the word an over-strict and unfamiliar definition.  Everyone sometimes uses “beauty” in an unaesthetic sense; most people habitually do so.  To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic.  Of its grosser abuse, patent in our chatter about “beautiful huntin’” and “beautiful shootin’,” I need not take account; it would be open to the precious to reply that they never do so abuse it.  Besides, here there is no danger of confusion between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic use; but when we speak of a beautiful woman there is.  When an ordinary man speaks of a beautiful woman he certainly does not mean only that she moves him aesthetically; but when an artist calls a withered old hag beautiful he may sometimes mean what he means when he calls a battered torso beautiful.  The ordinary man, if he be also a man of taste, will call the battered torso beautiful, but he will not call a withered hag beautiful because, in the matter of women, it is not to the aesthetic quality that the hag may possess, but to some other quality that he assigns the epithet.  Indeed, most of us never dream of going for aesthetic emotions to human beings, from whom we ask something very different.  This “something,” when we find it in a young woman, we are apt to call “beauty.”  We live in a nice age.  With the man-in-the-street “beautiful” is more often than not synonymous with “desirable”; the word does not necessarily connote any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I am tempted to believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word is stronger than the aesthetic.  I have noticed a consistency in those to whom the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful woman, and the next most beautiful thing a picture of one.  The confusion between aesthetic and sensual beauty is not in their case so great as might be supposed.  Perhaps there is none; for perhaps they have never had an aesthetic emotion to confuse with their other emotions.  The art that they call “beautiful” is generally closely related to the women.  A beautiful picture is a photograph of a pretty girl; beautiful music, the music that provokes emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls the same emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector’s daughter.  Clearly the word “beauty” is used to connote the objects of quite distinguishable emotions, and that is a reason for not employing a term which would land me inevitably in confusions and misunderstandings with my readers.

On the other hand, with those who judge it more exact to call these combinations and arrangements of form that provoke our aesthetic emotions, not “significant form,” but “significant relations of form,” and then try to make the best of two worlds, the aesthetic and the metaphysical, by calling these relations “rhythm,” I have no quarrel whatever.  Having made it clear that by “significant form” I mean arrangements and combinations that move us in a particular way, I willingly join hands with those who prefer to give a different name to the same thing.