And as my habit was, I philosophised over what I saw and had made my
own, and I strove to understand in what beauty consisted. I considered
the relations between beauty and life; why was it that artificial
flowers and the imitation of a nightingale's song were so far behind
their originals in beauty? What was the difference between the beauty of
the real, the artificial and the painted flower? Might not Herbart's
Aesthetics be wrong, in their theory of form? The form itself might be
the same in Nature and the imitation, in the rose made of velvet and the
rose growing in the garden. And I reflected on the connection between
the beauty of the species and that of the individual. Whether a lily be
a beautiful flower, I can say without ever having seen lilies before,
but whether it be a beautiful lily, I cannot. The individual can only be
termed beautiful when more like than unlike to the ideal of the species.
And I mused over the translation of the idea of beauty into actions and
intellectual conditions. Was not the death of Socrates more beautiful
than his preservation of Alcibiades' life in battle?--though this was
none the less a beautiful act.
XXI.
In the month of July I started on a walking tour through Jutland, with
the scenery of which province I had not hitherto been acquainted;
travelled also occasionally by the old stage-coaches, found myself at
Skanderborg, which, for me, was surrounded by the halo of mediaeval
romance; wandered to Silkeborg, entering into conversation with no end
of people, peasants, peasant boys, and pretty little peasant girls,
whose speech was not always easy to understand.
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