BEFORE BEAUTY 153 



— and one may add of beauty, too. It charms as 

 color, or flowers, or jewels, or perfume, charms — 

 and that is the end of it. 



It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt 

 to report nature, that every object as it stands in 

 the circuit of cause and effect has a history which 

 involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the 

 interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as 

 its integrity in this respect is preserved. In nature 

 we are prepared for any opulence of color, or vegeta- 

 tion, or freak of form, or display of any kind by its 

 preponderance of the common, ever-present feature 

 of the earth. The foil is always at hand. In like 

 manner in the master poems we are never surfeited 

 with mere beauty. 



Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the 

 wide background of rudeness, darkness, and strength, 

 - — and disengages her from absolute nature! The 

 mild and beneficent aspects of nature, — what gulfs 

 and abysses of power underlie them! The great 

 shaggy, barbaric earth, yet the summing-up, the 

 plenum, of all we know or can know of beauty ! So 

 the orbic poems of the world have a foundation as 

 of the earth itself, and are beautiful because they 

 are something else first. Homer chose for his 

 groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; 

 in Dante, it is Hell; in Milton, Satan and the Fall; 

 in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world, with 

 its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it 

 is Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to 

 Tennyson the lion is a good deal tamed, but he is 



