It is the connecting link in the triple chain.
It serves to sustain a mutual intelligence between the extremes.
It appertains, in strict appreciation, to the former, but is
distinguished from the latter by so faint a difference that
Aristotle has not hesitated to class some of its operations among
the Virtues themselves. But the offices of the trio are broadly
marked. Just as conscience, or the moral sense, recognises duty;
just as the intellect deals with truth; so is it the part of taste
alone to inform us BEAUTY. And Poesy is the handmaiden but of Taste.
Yet we would not be misunderstood. This handmaiden is not forbidden to
moralise- in her own fashion. She is not forbidden to depict- but to
reason and preach of virtue. As of this latter. conscience
recognises the obligation, so intellect teaches the expediency,
while taste contents herself with displaying the beauty; waging war
with vice merely on the ground of its inconsistency with fitness,
harmony, proportion- in a word with- 'to kalon.'
An important condition of man's immortal nature is thus, plainly,
the sense of the Beautiful. This it is which ministers to his
delight in the manifold forms and colours and sounds and sentiments
amid which he exists. And, just as the eyes of Amaryllis are
repeated in the mirror, or the living lily in the lake, so is the mere
record of these forms and colours and sounds and sentiments- so is
their mere oral or written repetition a duplicate source of delight.
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