Thus it is that beauty is not in the object but in man's sense of the object's symbolic expressiveness. The amateur may be rapt by some artist's "quality of color." But it is probable that in the act of laying on his pigment, the artist was not thinking of his "quality" at all, but, rapt himself by the perception of the supreme harmony at that moment newly revealed to his sense, he was striving sincerely and directly to give his feeling its faithfullest expression. His color is beautiful because his idea was beautiful. The expression is of the very essence of the thought; it _is_ the thought, but the thought embodied. "Coleridge," says Carlyle, "remarks very pertinently somewhere that whenever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning, too. For body and soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere." Not to look beyond the material is to miss the meaning of the work. In an art such as music, in which form and content are one and inextricable, it is not difficult to understand that the medium of expression which the art employs is necessarily symbolic, for here the form cannot exist apart from the meaning to be conveyed. In the art of literature, however, the case is not so clear, for the material with which the poet, the novelist, the dramatist works, material made up of the facts of the world about us, we are accustomed to regard as objective realities. An incident is an incident, the inevitable issue of precedent circumstances, and that's all there is to it Character is the result of heredity, environment, training, plus the inexplicable _Ego._ To regard these facts of life which are so actual and immediate as a kind of animate algebraic formulae seems absurd, but absurd only as one is unable to penetrate to the inner meaning of things. "Madame Bovary," to take an example quite at random, is called a triumph of realism. Now realism, of all literary methods, should register the fact as it is, and least of all should concern itself with symbols. But this great novel is more than the record of one woman's life. Any one who has come to understand the character and temperament of Flaubert as revealed in his Letters must feel that "Madame Bovary" is no arbitrary recital of tragic incident, but those people who move through his pages, what they do and what goes on about them, expressed for Flaubert his own dreary, baffled rebellion against life. That the artist may consciously employ the facts of life, not for the sake of the fact, but to communicate his feeling by thus bodying it forth in concrete symbols, there is explicit testimony. In an essay dealing with his own method of composition, Poe writes: "I prefer commencing with the consideration of an _effect._ Keeping originality _always_ in view . . . I say to myself, in the first place, 'of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more