“But there is abundant beauty and grandeur in modern American life,” said the millionaire, “quite apart, I mean, from that of the natural scenery.  A fine steam-engine, for instance—­I call that a beautiful thing, perfectly adapted to its end.  Is its beauty really so antagonistic to that of your civilization?”

“I know that some excellent persons have been writing lately about the beauty of a swift-gliding motor-car and things of that kind.  They are right, in one sense of the word.  For there is a beauty to mechanical fitness which no art can enhance.  But it is not the beauty of which I spoke.”

“And therefore,” observed the bishop, “we ought to have another word for it.”

“Precisely, my dear sir!  We ought to have another word.  All values are continually being revised, and tested anew.  Are they not?  We have been restating moral values within the last half-century; it is the same with artistic ones.  New canons of taste, new standards, are continually being evolved; there is a general widening and multiplying of notions.  This, I think, ought to make us careful as to the words we employ, and ready to coin new ones whenever a new idea is to be expressed.  If we enlarge our concepts, we should likewise enlarge our vocabulary.  When I spoke of beauty, I used the word in its narrow classical meaning, a meaning which may be out of fashion, but which has the great advantage that it happens to be irrevocably fixed and defined for us by what the ancients themselves have handed down in the way of art and criticism.  This particular beauty, I say, is irreconcilable with that other beauty of which you spoke.”

“How so?” asked the millionaire.

“There resides, for example, in Hellenic sculpture a certain ingredient—­what shall we call it?  Let us call it the factor of strangeness, of mystery!  It is a vague emanation which radiates from such works of art, and gives us a sense of their universal applicability to all our changing moods and passions.  That, I suppose, is why we call them ever young.  They beckon to all of us familiarly and yet, as it were, from an unexplored world.  They speak to us at all seasons in some loving and yet enigmatical language, such language as we may read, at times, in the eyes of a child that wakes from sleep.  Now the swiftest and fairest steam-engine in the world is not for ever young; it grows obsolete and ends, after a short life, on the scrap-heap.  That is to say, where usefulness enters, this spirit of mystery, of eternal youth, is put to flight.  And there is yet another element of classical beauty which is equally at variance with your modern conception of it:  the element of authority.  Beholding the Praxitelean Eros, the veriest ruffian feels compelled to reverence the creator and his work.  ‘Who was the man?’ he asks; for he acknowledges that such things impose themselves upon his untutored mind.  Now a certain Monsieur Cadillac builds the most beautiful