BEFORE BEAUTY.

BEFORE genius is manliness, and before beauty is power. The Russian novelist and poet, Turgeneiff, scattered all through whose works you will find unmistakable traits of greatness, makes one of his characters say, speaking of beauty, "The old mastersthey never hunted after it; it comes of itself into their compositions, God knows whence, from heaven or elsewhere. The whole world belonged to them, but we are unable to clasp its broad spaces; our arms are too short."

From the same depth of insight come these lines from "Leaves of Grass," apropos of true poems:

"They do not seek beauty-they are sought;

Forever touching them, or close upon them, follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick."

The Roman was perhaps the first to separate beauty from use, and pursue it as ornament merely. He built his grand edifice—its piers, its vaults, its walls of brick and concrete — and then gave it a marble envelope copied from the Greek architecture. The latter could be stripped away, as in many cases it was by the hand of time, and leave the essentials of the

structure nearly complete. Not so with the Greek: he did not seek the beautiful; he was beauty; his building had no ornament, it was all structure; in its beauty was the flower of necessity, the charm of inborn fitness and proportion. In other words, "his art was structure refined into beautiful forms, not beautiful forms superimposed upon structure," as with the Roman. And it is in Greek mythology, is it not, that beauty is represented as riding upon the back of a lion? as she assuredly always does in their poetry and art - rides upon power, or terror, or savage fate; not only rides upon but is wedded and incorporated with; hence the athletic desire and refreshment her coming imparts.

This is the invariable order of Nature. Beauty without a rank material basis enfeebles. The world is not thus made; man is not thus begotten and nourished.

It comes to me there is something implied or understood when we look upon a beautiful object, that has quite as much to do with the impression made upon the mind as anything in the object itself; perhaps more. There is somehow an immense and undefined background of vast and unconscionable energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean storms, and cleft mountains, across which things of beauty play, and to which they constantly defer; and when this background is wanting, as it is in much current poetry, beauty sickens and dies, or at most has only a feeble existence.

Nature does nothing merely for beauty; beauty follows as the inevitable result; and the final impression of health and finish which her works make upon the mind is owing as much to these things which are not technically called beautiful, as to those which are. The former give identity to the latter. The one is to the other what substance is to form, or bone to flesh. The beauty of Nature includes all that is called beautiful, as its flower; and all that is not called beautiful as its stalk and roots.

Indeed, when I go to the woods or fields, or ascend to the hill-top, I do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be breathing it like the air. I am not dazzled or astonished; I am in no hurry to look lest it be gone. I would not have the litter and débris removed, or the banks trimmed, or the ground painted. What I enjoy is commensurate with the earth and sky itself. It clings to the rocks and trees; it is kindred to the roughness and savagery; it rises from every tangle and chasm; it perches on the dry oak-stubs with the hawks and buzzards; the crows shed it from their wings and weave it into their nests of coarse sticks; the fox barks it, the cattle low it, and every mountain path leads to its haunts. I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it. It is not an adornment; its roots strike to the centre of the earth.

All true beauty in Nature or in art is like the irridescent hue of mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result of the arrangement of the particles the flowering of the mechanism of the

shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace of strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm, delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit,"

says Heine, and the same thing is true of beauty, "isolated, is worthless. It is only endurable when it rests on a solid basis."

In fact, beauty as a separate and distinct thing does not exist. Neither can it be reached by any sorting or sifting or clarifying process. It is an experience of the mind, and must be preceded by the conditions, just as light is an experience of the eye, and sound of the ear.

To attempt to manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to manufacture truth; and to give it us in poems, or any form of art without a lion of some sort, a lion of truth, or fitness, or power, is to emasculate it and destroy its volition.

But current poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to do this very thing, to give us beauty without beauty's antecedents and foil. The poets want to spare us the annoyance of the beast. Since beauty is the chief attraction, why not have this part alone, pure and unadulterated—why not pluck the plumage from the bird, the flower from its stalk, the moss from the rock, the shell from the shore, the honey-bag from the bee, and thus have in brief what pleases us? Hence, with rare exceptions, one feels on opening the latest book of poems, like exclaiming, Well, here is the