Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/218

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204 w. E. SCOTT : singularly inconsistent in that, while they jealously cherish the capacity, they suffer it to be overlaid by lower and fictitious pleasures which, in time, destroy it altogether. Further, while the so-called pleasures of sense are individual and exclusive, the " pleasures " of Beauty are open to all, and in the truest sense universal negatively because they cannot be monopolised, and positively because they are infinite in number. 2. The Beauty of Living and Social Beings. The joy or "rational delight " due to Personal Beauty is most obvious in the human form (and especially under the influence of what has happily been called Shaftesbury's " Weiber- Cultus " l in woman's beauty) " in man's erect position, his majestic looks and the expressive disposition of his features". 2 In a thoroughly Greek sense 3 he interprets these as indices of a beautiful Soul, for which the body is a flexible mask that takes its shape and form. " When we trace in a man's Person, his countenance, or his behaviour, the Lineaments of an heroic undaunted soul, of a kind and generous temper, or of strong sense and reflexion, we cannot forbear a very sudden approbation and esteem." 4 Thus personal beauty becomes the symbol of beauty of the soul or moral beauty, and this is described, after Shaftes- bury, as being concerned with the social and benevolent affections, though Arbuckle is careful to state that he is not prepared to determine the respective positions of Benevolence and Self-Love. In fact, from his strictly aesthetic point of 1 Gizycki, Philosophic Shaftesbury's, p. 15. Arbuckle gives rather a humorous turn to this idea by saying that " The Ladies, if they would preserve then* charms, must, at least, take as much care to adjust their minds as their dress and look into their bosoms as often as their glass " adding that this might furnish material for an amusing advertisement " The only true royal beautifying fluid for the face " ! Letters, i., pj 24-5. This would have given Swift a good example of " bathos ". 2 Ibid., i., p. 49. 3 Shaftesbury is sometimes called a modern Greek, and that, in the analogy between Virtue and the Arts, he reproduces Plato (Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, p. 98). The analogy between Plato and Shaftesbury (including his followers) may be pushed too far. Plato was a consummate literary artist, who distrusted his artistic impulses in Philosophy. Shaftesbury and his followers, on the contrary, far from distrusting their artistic impulses, excited them as much as possible, sometimes to the exclusion of reason (cf. Mr. Leslie Stephen on Shaftes- bury's style, Fraser's Magazine, vol. vii., p. 78). Mackintosh (Disserta- tion, p. 108) unconsciously hits off Shaftesbury's reproduction of the Greek spirit by calling it modern antique which is strictly true but in the sense of the " virtuoso " of the present day. 4 Hibernicus's Letters, i., p. 21.