that which appealed to the greatest number of living human beings, raised
up the masses of mankind to be a definite new Judge or Academy, as
tyrannical and narrow as ever were those whom he had destroyed.

This, at all events--I thought is as far as I dare go in defining what
Art is. But let me try to make plain to myself what is the essential
quality that gives to Art the power of exciting this unconscious
vibration, this impersonal emotion. It has been called Beauty! An
awkward word--a perpetual begging of the question; too current in use,
too ambiguous altogether; now too narrow, now too wide--a word, in fact,
too glib to know at all what it means. And how dangerous a word--often
misleading us into slabbing with extraneous floridities what would
otherwise, on its own plane, be Art! To be decorative where decoration
is not suitable, to be lyrical where lyricism is out of place, is
assuredly to spoil Art, not to achieve it. But this essential quality of
Art has also, and more happily, been called Rhythm. And, what is Rhythm
if not that mysterious harmony between part and part, and part and whole,
which gives what is called life; that exact proportion, the mystery of
which is best grasped in observing how life leaves an animate creature
when the essential relation of part to whole has been sufficiently
disturbed. And I agree that this rhythmic relation of part to part, and
part to whole--in short, vitality--is the one quality inseparable from a
work of Art. For nothing which does not seem to a man possessed of this
rhythmic vitality, can ever steal him out of himself.

And having got thus far in my thoughts, I paused, watching the swallows;
for they seemed to me the symbol, in their swift, sure curvetting, all
daring and balance and surprise, of the delicate poise and motion of Art,
that visits no two men alike, in a world where no two things of all the
things there be, are quite the same.