For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
      For ever panting and for ever young;
  All breathing human passion far above,
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
      A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

“Well,” said Parry, when I had done, “that’s very pretty; but I don’t see how it bears on the argument.”

“I think,” I replied, “that it illustrates the point I wanted to make.  Part, I mean, of the peculiar charm of works of Art consists in the fact that they arrest a fleeting moment of delight, lift it from our sphere of corruption and change, and fix it like a star in the eighth heaven.”

“Yes,” said Ellis, “we grant you that”

“Or at least,” added Parry, “we don’t care to dispute it”

“And the other point which I want to make is, I think, clearer still—­that the Good of works of Art, that is to say their Beauty, results from the very principle of their nature, and is not a mere accident of circumstances.”

“Of course,” said Leslie, “their Beauty is their only raison d’etre?”

“And yet,” I went on, “they are still Goods of sense, and so far resemble the other Goods of which we were speaking before.”

“Yes,” said Dennis, “but with what a difference!  That is the point I have been waiting to come to.”

“What point?” I asked.

“Why,” he said, “in the case of what you call Goods of sense, in their simplest and purest form, making abstraction from all aesthetic and other elements—­as in the example you gave of a cold bath—­the relation of the object to the sense is so simple and direct, that really, if we were to speak accurately, we should have, I think, to say, that so far as the perception of Good is concerned the object is merged in the subject, and what you get is simply a good sensation.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed, “that is how we ought to put it.  But at the time I did not think it necessary to be so precise.”

“But it has become necessary now, I think,” he replied, “if we are to bring out a characteristic of works of Art which will throw light, I believe, on the general nature of Good.”

“What characteristic is that?”

“Why,” he replied, “when we come to works of Art, the important thing is the object, not the subject; if there is any merging of the one in the other, it is the subject that is merged in the object, not vice versa.  We have to contemplate the object, anyhow, as having a character of its own; and it is to this character that I want to draw attention.”

“In what respect?”

“In respect that every work of Art, and, for that matter, every work of nature—­so far as it can be viewed aesthetically—­comprises a number of elements necessarily connected in a whole; and this necessary connection is the point on which we ought to insist”

“But necessary how?” asked Wilson.  “Do you mean logically necessary?”