Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then
Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century,
poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,--and who can have
no other parentage,--had established themselves in the modern European
mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves
among Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the most
advanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty is
hardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, so
deeply is it dormant.
Thus to indicate when and by whom the beautiful has been recognized
will further us in the endeavor to learn wherein consists that which,
enriching the world of man so widely and plenteously, is deeply
enjoyed by so few.
Were the beautiful, like size and shape and strength and nimbleness,
cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get to
know something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualities
of trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursive
and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or
general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the
Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have
been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific.
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