our clothes and houses and furniture, and poetry and
fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it may
be from an instinctive or a reasoned sense of this
that some of the extreme naturalists have refused
to make the old discrimination against it, or to regard
the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than
the beautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard
it as rather more worthy, if anything. Possibly
there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutely beautiful;
or possibly the ugly contains always an element of
the beautiful better adapted to the general appreciation
than the more perfectly beautiful. This is a
somewhat discouraging conjecture, but I offer it for
no more than it is worth; and I do not pin my faith
to the saying of one whom I heard denying, the other
day, that a thing of beauty was a joy forever.
He contended that Keats’s line should have read,
“Some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever,”
and that any assertion beyond this was too hazardous.
I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats’s,
if I were to profess any formulated creed, and should
feel much safer with his “Beauty is Truth, Truth
Beauty,” than even with my friend’s reformation
of the more quoted verse. It brings us back to
the solid ground taken by Mr. Symonds, which is not
essentially different from that taken in the great
Mr. Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful—a
singularly modern book, considering how long ago it
was wrote (as the great Mr. Steele would have written
the participle a little longer ago), and full of a
certain well-mannered and agreeable instruction.
In some things it is of that droll little eighteenth-century
world, when philosophy had got the neat little universe
into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what it
was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance.
“As for those called critics,” the author
says, “they have generally sought the rule of
the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among
poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings;
but art can never give the rules that make an art.
This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general,
and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow
a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another
than of nature. Critics follow them, and therefore
can do little as guides. I can judge but poorly
of anything while I measure it by no other standard
than itself. The true standard of the arts is
in every man’s power; and an easy observation
of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things,
in nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest
sagacity and industry that slights such observation
must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse
and mislead us by false lights.”
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