as he modestly and wisely declares, "to give rules for that kind of
beauty which genius alone can produce in high art." The discovery of
Mr. Hay is curious and fascinating, and, like the announcement of
Haydon, may give practical hints to artists and others. But no
intellectual process or ingenuity can make up for the absence of
emotional warmth and refined selection. "Beauty, the foe of excess and
vacuity, blooms, like genius, in the equilibrium of all the forces,"
says Jean Paul. "Beauty," says Hemsterhuis, "is the product of the
greatest number of ideas in the shortest time," which is like the
Italian definition, _il piu nel uno_, unity in multiplicity, believed
by Coleridge to contain the principle of beauty. On another page of
the "Table Talk" Coleridge is made to say, "You are wrong in resolving
beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed, it
is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence,
between which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one and
tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed."
Hegel, in his "Æsthetic," defines natural beauty to be "the idea as
immediate unity, in so far as this unity is visible in sensuous
reality." And a few pages earlier he is more brief and distinct,
calling the beautiful "the sensuous shining forth of the idea." And
Schelling, in his profound treatise on "The Relation of the Plastic
Arts to Nature," says, "The beautiful is beyond form; it is substance,
the universal; it is the look and expression of the spirit of
Nature." Were it not better and more precise to say that it is to us
the look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering through
choicest embodiments? But we will stop with definitions. After
endeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion of
the beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when "the idea of
the Divinity" was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, "Dear
child, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can our